One Nation circus flops into Angus Taylor’s electorate

One Nation may have spent the better part of this year riding high in the polls. But that sentiment clearly hasn’t translated into bums on seats at the party’s campaign and fundraising events.

For the latest piece of evidence, we give you the flop that was NSW One Nation’s fundraiser at the Oran Park Hotel near Camden in Sydney’s south-west on Saturday night.

The party’s renewable energy-loving state leader Mike Newman played host and worked the room. He was joined by Stuart Bonds, who’s running at the top of One Nation’s upper house ticket in NSW, despite seeming to have suffered the type of brain injury that leads one to reference replacement theory, as he did at an anti-“mass migration” rally the following day. (On Monday, Premier Chris Minns called Bonds’ comments “outrageous and racist”.)

But if photos of the fundraiser are any indicator, Newman and his upper house sidekick still have some work to do in south-west Sydney.

Images of the event (courtesy of Bonds himself) show only a trickle of guests sparsely filling the room, some of them captured trading forlorn glances at one another, others staring into the middle distance. There was, bizarrely, what appeared to be a trapeze artist sitting in a hoop beside the bar. All in federal Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s electorate, no less.

When we asked One Nation about the event, we were assured these images were taken a few minutes before some 40 extra guests rolled in. A spokeswoman for the party also confirmed a local trapeze artist was there.

“We were pleased to support a local business, Avion Aerial Entertainment Co, which provided a trapeze artist for the three-hour event,” the One Nation spokeswoman told CBD.

“Seating was available throughout, though many guests preferred to network while standing, as is common at cocktail functions.”

Nvidia affair reaches Australia

It turns out the international spy story that has captured the attention of US intelligence officials and rattled global capital markets has its tentacles on Australian shores as well.

CBD can reveal Chinese tech company Megaspeed, whose executive Alice Huang is alleged by US intelligence agencies to be a spy who lured married Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang into her espionage web, has an outpost in the heart of Sydney.

Megaspeed established its Australian operation at the end of 2024, according to documents filed with the corporate regulator. Its sole director is 29-year-old Kai Kang (who is not caught up in Alice’s alleged spying hijinks). He was born in Shanghai and, bizarrely, lists his address at what is a newsagency and lotto shop in the Victorian country town of Seymour. Alas, no answer to our call there on Tuesday.

A visit to Megaspeed Australia’s office on level 10 of a high-rise building in Martin Place was similarly perplexing. When we went to the company’s empty Sydney office on Tuesday morning, a receptionist told CBD nobody from Megaspeed was in. What’s more: the company doesn’t have a physical space at the premises, we were told, and only uses the address for administrative purposes.

To make matters more curious, Megaspeed Australia’s corporate record reveals that correspondence from ASIC to the company’s Sydney office has been returned to sender since January this year. The record shows the local outpost is owned by Singapore-based Megaspeed International, which rents out high-performance data centres powered by Nvidia chips.

Rest assured, though, because as far as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is concerned, Australia isn’t “directly” a party to the Nvidia honeypot saga. Or at least that was his response when asked if he had concerns about Huang’s admitted affair with a suspected Chinese spy.

We checked in with our nation’s own spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, to see how they felt about Megaspeed’s footprint in Sydney and whether they were looking into its operations in light of the US revelations.

“ASIO does not comment on intelligence or investigations,” a spokesperson for the spook agency told us. “This should not be taken as confirmation of an investigation.”

Will the real Phillip Lowe please stand up?

Imagine our surprise to see the name Phillip Lowe appear among the cast members of a new musical called Bad Company.

Sadly, though, the Lowe in the musical was not the same one now famous for promising borrowers that interest rates wouldn’t move for years. But when the musical staged a work-in-progress showcase at The Rebel Theatre in Walsh Bay on Monday night, rest assured the former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe was sitting in the audience.

The musical was staged by a creative team led by former ASIC deputy chairman Lynn Ralph, the corporate regulator’s former chairman, Alan Cameron, and the regulator’s erstwhile Victorian commissioner Phil Khoury. (The trio also run a boardroom consultancy.)

The logline reads thus: “Bad Company the Musical is an original Australian musical in development. It takes a satirical look at the boardroom and how good people talk themselves into doing very bad things, one reasonable-sounding excuse at a time.”

The showcase got a warm reception, we’re told, and Lowe wasn’t the only recognisable face in the room. Also there, according to our sources, was independent MP Allegra Spender, as was National Living Treasure Graeme Murphy, Macquarie director Jillian Broadbent, and one of the nation’s highest profile directors, Meredith Hellicar, of James Hardie fame.

Word is the show tells the story of a woman being elected to a board in a male-dominated society. But when it all goes wrong, she’s the one left to deal with the fallout. One former female board member was overheard by a CBD spy saying it was giving her PTSD.

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