Failure to launch? Embattled Optus pulls out of space industry roadshow

Optus’ mobile service might be back after a series of devastating recent outages that has shredded the telco’s fragile reputation and sent customers rushing into the arms of competitors.

But anyone working at the company probably wishes they could stay offline and away from the spotlight. Some Optus representatives are quite literally doing just that.

This week, the International Astronautical Federation, which calls itself the world’s leading space advocacy body, touched down Sydney for its annual congress.

Optus was meant to be among the rocket enthusiasts and industry experts converging on the International Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. The telco was initially listed as one of the exhibitors, but CBD hears it removed its exhibit. While it remains listed on the floor plan, Optus was quietly removed from the list of exhibitors on the congress’s website.

Was the company determined to follow the lead of its star executive Gladys Berejiklian and keep a low profile? Neither Optus nor the congress’s organisers got back to us.

Meanwhile, as CBD reported last week, Optus had already reached for outside counsel well before this week’s outage, after which its leadership was hauled into a meeting with rookie Communications Minister Anika Wells, herself under fire over the Albanese government’s response to the crisis.

Now, also assisting the company through its latest bin fire is veteran Labor-aligned strategist and political consultant Bruce Hawker. Not that Optus’ board and senior executive isn’t stacked with government experience. Director Andrew Parker is a former senior trade and investment commissioner with Investment NSW. Fellow board member Michaela Browning was a senior diplomat who later held a high-profile government relations position at Google.

Embattled chief executive Stephen Rue and chief corporate affairs officer Felicity Ross both came from NBN, while head of government and regulatory affairs Louisa Macphillamy is a former staffer to Liberal frontbencher Michaelia Cash. Then of course, there’s Gladys.

That’s plenty of experience working the corridors of power for a company that is going to need all the help it can get after yet another self-inflicted crisis.

Abbott heads south

Melbourne has not always treated former prime minister Tony Abbott kindly.

There was his tussle with a tram on Collins Street (he lost). And in Melbourne Airport, he lost his spectacles in the security screen (and Bermuda Triangle-like, they never reappeared). Both incidents were faithfully chronicled in CBD.

Abbott is venturing south to the centre-left paradise that predecessor John Howard called the Massachusetts of Australia (after another crushing defeat of the Liberal Party at the hands of Dan Andrews).

This time the mission is more singular: to launch his latest book. No, it is not called Battlelines II: The Two Towers, but rather Australia: A History, published by Rupert Murdoch’s Harper Collins (who else, although our friends at conservative publisher Connor Court must be crying into their cups).

Abbott politely referred our inquiries to the publishers and said in a release: “I take readers from our convict beginnings to our modern democracy; along the way covering the farmers, miners, soldiers, carers and democratic pioneers that have made us great: a unique commonwealth with an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and an immigrant character. I hope this history might foster a deeper patriotism for this special land.”

The Menzies Research Centre is launching the book on October 15 – in Melbourne.

But for those who can’t wait, PM27 has entered the 21st century of micropublishing with his own Substack, on which he describes himself as: “Former Australian Prime Minister. Secured borders, ended taxes, freed trade. Rhodes scholar, boxer, seminarian turned journalist turned politician. Occasional fire fighter and surfer.”

You can register for free, but $13 per month gets you the archive and subscriber posts. A slight discount gets you that whole shebang for $125 a year. A founder member, whatever that is, costs $380.

Articles include “Mass Immigration Across the Anglo-Sphere Must Cease” and “The Ailing of the West”. Nothing about eating raw onions, though – yet.

Already Abbott has proved himself more industrious on the ’Stack than his successor Malcolm Turnbull, whose Substack post from July, primarily trashing plans for the AUKUS alliance, remains his sole contribution on the site.

Star city

Big Hollywood movies arrive in Sydney with much less fuss these days than when Tom Cruise shot Mission: Impossible 2, George Lucas directed a couple of Star Wars episodes, and the Wachowskis made the Matrix trilogy.

Or even when Ryan Gosling shot The Fall Guy on the closed Harbour Bridge a couple of years ago.

There has been barely a public sighting since the Hollywood action movie Street Fighter started shooting around the city and at Disney Studios recently, despite a cast headed by Jason Momoa, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and former teen idol Noah Centineo of the To All The Boys films.

Directed by Kitao Sakurai, best known for the Netflix comedy Bad Trip, the Street Fighter cast also includes David Dastmalchian (Oppenheimer), country musician Orville Peck, Mel Jarnson (Mortal Kombat), Australian MMA fighter Alexander Volkanovski and Rayna Vallandingham (Cobra Kai).

NSW Arts Minister John Graham says the movie, supported by the Made in NSW Fund and shooting until late this month, is generating $80 million in expenditure for the state and creating 317 cast and crew jobs.

It’s not the first movie based on the Street Fighter video game. Back in 1994, Jean-Claude Van Damme starred in a version shot mostly in Queensland. One cruel critic noted that Kylie Minogue was hilariously miscast “as a military wench with Heidi plaits”.

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