Great Scots! The case of the $60 million castle and a vanishing camel

Just months after Scots College finally opened its $60 million castle following years of delays and mirthful updates in this column, the John Cunningham Student Centre has lost its star attraction.

Recently, this masthead reported that Scots, for reasons perhaps only known to headmaster Ian Lambert, purchased a $13,000 life-sized taxidermy camel to display in the new library which, for all its faux-Scottish baronial elegance, still didn’t have any books in the shelves when this column last checked in.

The camel, known as Michelle, had for many years intrigued shoppers at beloved Alexandria’s Mitchell Road Antiques until she was snapped up by Scots.

“Nobody with a sane mind would buy something [like this],” Michelle’s taxidermist George Hangay told The Herald in August.

Perhaps somebody at Scots has gotten a case of buyer’s remorse because we hear Lambert of Arabia’s idiosyncratic piece of interior decor has since vanished from the castle. That has sent rumours tumbling down Bellevue Hill about Michelle containing toxic chemicals and being evicted from the castle to remove any health risks to students.

At $51,000 a year, you’d expect a Scots education not to come with a side dose of cyanide exposure. Happily, CBD can put those rumours to bed and report that Michelle is not toxic. While she was briefly on display for the castle’s grand opening, she is now in storage, awaiting a display case. As for her permanent display, details about that remain in doubt.

Perhaps it’s the strapping young lads Michelle needs protection from, not the other way around.

Mr Worldwide

In Australia, former prime ministers have made a habit of leaving office and then registering as foreign agents.

This is all Malcolm Turnbull’s fault. In 2018, his government created the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, designed as a means of halting the Chinese Communist Party’s sinister attempts to create a network of Manchurian candidates committed to the overthrow of Australian democracy, by forcing anyone undertaking activities on behalf of a foreign entity to disclose the details.

A win for transparency and snooping columnists, but a nuisance for former leaders suddenly forced to make public their speaking engagements, book deals and consulting gigs with foreign organisations.

Both Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd were among the first to be asked to join the register, with both expressing considerable disgruntlement. Even Turnbull himself registered, thanks to a couple of keynote addresses he gave in South Korea and Taiwan in 2022.

Now, Scott Morrison has joined them, registering a flurry of recent, and not-so-recent gigs. That includes a “strategic presentation on global affairs” he gave to Saudi Aramco, the autocratic Kingdom’s state-owned oil company, in August. There’s also a guest speech he gave at a human capital summit in Sri Lanka last year, and details of speeches he gave in Taiwan two years ago.

Morrison also registered advisory board positions with US-based think tanks the Hudson Institute, the Centre for a New American Security and German centre-right political alliance the International Democracy Union. Why did Morrison only just register all those jobs? That’s a mystery which his people wouldn’t resolve.

CBD regulars would recall that Morrison has amassed more part-time jobs than secret ministries he held during his prime ministership, and is now regularly travelling around the United States as part of his duties as chairman of Space Centre Australia, the company with grandiose dreams of building a spaceport on the Cape York peninsula.

Morrison would probably rather have kept the details of some of those engagements a secret, as he is wont to do. Thanks to the man he deposed, they’re all out in the open.

Access granted

ACT independent senator David Pocock isn’t looking to make friends with lobbyists.

Weeks after the former Wallabies captain was unceremoniously booted from a Parliamentary Sports Club for asking questions about its links to the gambling industry, Pocock has launched a website for MPs to disclose who they have sponsored for security pass access to Parliament House.

Individuals with passes sponsored by a parliamentarian get orange-coloured lanyards which grant them virtually unfettered access to the building. Unsurprisingly, only a handful of MPs have made disclosures on Pocock’s new website.

But among those who did was teal independent Wentworth MP Allegra Spender, who revealed that she’d sponsored a pass for billionaire Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar. Turns out even one of the country’s richest men needs a permission slip to get into parliament.

Justice league

Last weekend, some NSW Liberals actually had a good time.

Deputy leader Natalie Ward hosted the Northern Province Convention at Manly golf club, drawing more than 140 VIPs in a result that was probably a decent showing for deep teal country. Expectations are low these days.

Among the guests were federal opposition leader Sussan Ley and her state counterpart Mark Speakman, who no doubt had plenty to bond over with all the chatter about knives hovering dangerously close to their respective backs.

Other guests included former Victorian Liberal strategist turned pollster Tony Barry and clean energy lobbyist Chris O’Keefe. On sale were bespoke tea towels featuring the slogan “cleaning up Labor’s mess since 1944″, and we hear there was a raffle where first prize was a beer with Ward and Nationals leader Dugald Saunders.

But CBD was most impressed by the bizarre, possibly AI-generated thank you video played at the event, featuring organisers rendered as cartoon superheroes, including Ward’s husband David Begg, who was described as a “registration whisperer [and] diehard freedom fighter”.

The whole thing was soundtracked by a catchy ditty that culminated in a rousing chorus:

“We’re the league of Liberal justice ... built on coffee and a purpose.”

The song also opened with a “thank you to the true believers”. Didn’t anybody tell them that’s the name usually reserved for Labor voters?

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