Anthony Miller was the man of the moment at the lunch before Jim Chalmers’ National Press Club address, with the former Westpac chief executive seated between the Treasurer and the prime minister as Labor’s budget-week festivities played out at Parliament House.
Miller sat to Chalmers’ left with the Treasurer’s wife, Laura, while Anthony Albanese was on his right. As lunch was being carried out, Miller was also seen holding court with Treasury Secretary Jenny Wilkinson. The Westpac-hosted contingent included Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and Agriculture Minister Julie Collins, while Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, Labor MP Patrick Gorman, Ryan Liddell and Tim Gartrell were also at the table. Chalmers’ staffers sat up front at a table courtesy of Telstra.
The lunch formed part of the social circuit around Chalmers’ address in the Great Hall of Parliament House, where Westpac was the principal sponsor. With as many as four tables occupied by the bank’s guests, Miller was placed squarely in the middle of a week that mixed policy, politics and access. Labor had already held two separate fundraisers after Chalmers handed down the budget on Tuesday night, including a $5000-a-head event at Hotel Realm and another at the National Press Club that was described as a flop.
The guest list suggested the usual budget-week choreography was in full swing. The Pharmacy Guild of Australia was out in force under Trent Twomey, with close to 10 of its signature black-and-yellow striped schoolboy ties counted in the room. Anthony Albanese’s campaign mastermind and Labor national secretary Paul Erickson was invited and probably showed. Even the National Press Club dinner had its own slip-ups: Attorney-General Michelle Rowland was twice introduced by CEO Maurice Reilly with the wrong title.
Against that backdrop, the business presence around Miller mattered because it showed how closely Labor’s budget week and its private fundraising calendar were intertwined. The setting also came as the Australian National University’s 15-person board was said to be imploding after the announcement of chancellor Julie Bishop’s departure the week before, with the university set to host a governance forum on June 5. In the same political week that brought together ministers, donors and advisers at Parliament House, the pressure facing universities was not academic. It was already on the table.
That makes Miller’s placement more than a social detail. Westpac’s sponsorship of Chalmers’ address put him in one of the most visible seats in the room, beside the Treasurer and under the gaze of a government that is still courting support while managing the politics of budget week. The larger story is not just who attended. It is how directly power, money and policy access are being staged in the same building, on the same day, while another public institution, ANU, wrestles with its own governance crisis.
