Who gets to call themselves chairman would be the first one, with Andrews never quite able to shake that “Chairman Dan” moniker used by unkind souls over his hard line on public health during the COVID pandemic and the Labor man’s enthusiasm for closer trade links with China.
There’s this too; with both the former premier and the mining boss well-known for having a certain, well, let’s call it a single-minded management style, what happens if differences emerge on strategy or tactics?
Oh, and you’d think that Andrews’ new gig would mean spending a lot of time away from his beloved Mulgrave, in China and of course at Fortescue’s HQ way out west.
It’d be a shame if someone closed the borders.
TAYLOR MADE
Looks like Taylor Auerbach, the former producer with Seven’s Spotlight program, whose jaw-dropping star turn in the witness box at Bruce Lehrmann’s recent high-profile case matter took some processing, is not yet ready to put the matter of Lehrmann and Brittany Higgins behind him.
Auerbach announced on the weekend that he’s been “writing a book!”
Well, “just having a crack, to see if I can do it. It might never be read by anybody but me. And I’m only an each-way bet.”
Now, Tay-Tay the second reckons it’d be “crass”, at this stage, to reveal if the tome will be fiction or non-fiction – and we’ll defer in matters of crassness to the expertise of anybody who’s worked a few shifts at Spotlight.
But what of the book’s subject matter? Well, it says here that the plot revolves around a group of people working in media and politics and features an accusation of rape against a controversial figure, so maybe we shouldn’t be holding our breath for a powerful work of the imagination.
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The initial signs are promising, with Auerbach running his first chapter past an artificial intelligence program – you can do that these days – which gave the former print journalist’s literary efforts as warm a review as you could expect from a machine.
But litigation-obsessed CBD worries that Taylor might be entering legally fraught territory, what with all the defo cases launched in the wake of Higgins’ allegation – sustained on the balance of probabilities by the Federal Court last month – that Lehrmann raped her in Parliament House in 2019.
Maybe Taylor enjoyed his days in court so much that he fancies another go.
WORLD SECORD
Former state Labor MP Walt Secord, who quit politics in 2022 after bullying allegations were made against him, seems to be living his best life in comfortable semi-retirement.
CBD reported last year that Secord, who converted to Judaism in 2020, took on a new gig as director of public affairs for the Australia-Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. Secord left that job last December, and is now doing the more relaxing work of a full-time book promoter for his wife Julia Levitina, who released her debut novel, The Girl From Moscow earlier this year.
Moscow-born Levitina’s novel, which is partially set in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, has garnered some positive reviews locally, and the manuscript for her next book, Beyond The Pale was recently shortlisted for the UK Historical Novel Society’s First Chapters Competition.
Still, Walt hasn’t completely left the world of Macquarie Street behind, and his old party connections have come in handy on the promotional front. NSW Premier Chris Minns even stepped in to launch Levitina’s first novel at a Bondi Beach bookshop in March.
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