Frensham boarding school for girls gets green light for bush campus

“Frensham looks forward to focusing on the implementation stage of the project when the time is right for us to do so.”

Notable old girls include former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull, writers Nancy Keesing and Rosemary Dobson, obstetrician Catherine Hamlin and interior designer Marion Hall Best.

Looking forward, looking back

You know you’ve made it when your opposition name-checks you in their marketing.

So our former stablemate Joe Aston – who quit writing his Rear Window column last year after a celebrated period where his flaying of Qantas and its then chief executive Alan Joyce catapulted his musings to an altogether higher altitude – might be having a quiet chuckle today.

The latest media venture from Channel Seven boss Kerry Stokes – with some financial backing from Australia’s richest woman Gina Rinehart – The Nightly online newspaper has launched its own regular columny thing, written by one of the publication’s high-profile recruits, Chris Dore, who left his job as editor of The Australian in 2022 amid not-quite-favourable circumstances.

So, the column is being spruiked on The Nightly’s front page with this line: Rear Window (crossed out and replaced with) Front Dore. Bah-boom!

Advance Australia where?

The much-hyped intervention by US-style conservative political action outfit Advance – which is reported to have spent up to $300,000 campaigning for the Liberals in Dunkley before last weekend’s byelection – has landed the group back in familiar territory: on the losing side.

A lot has been made of Advance’s efforts in helping defeat Anthony Albanese’s Voice to parliament referendum last year and that’s fair enough, but it’s an island of victory for Advance in a sea of defeat.

The lobby group was set up in 2018 to rid the nation of the scourge of those “woke politicians and elitist activist groups [who] were taking Aussies for a ride with their radical agenda”.

Its first major foray into the electoral fray was dressing a bloke up in a superhero suit to follow independent candidate for Warringah Zali Steggall around Sydney’s northern beaches in an effort to stymie her campaign in the 2019 federal election to unseat sitting member Tony Abbott, who sits on Advance’s advisory board. Abbott lost the seat.

At the 2022 national election an Advance campaign featuring ads claiming Chinese Communist Party strongman Xi Jinping would vote Labor – if he could – attracted the attention of electoral authorities. It did not keep Albanese out of the Lodge.

During that campaign, independent Senate candidate for the ACT David Pocock was aggrieved by Advance’s campaigning tactics as it threw everything at saving the political skin of junior Liberal minister Zed Seselja – who also has close links to Advance. Spoiler alert: Pocock won.

Maybe Advance’s aggressive campaigning tactics just aren’t right for the Australian market. It’s a question that we wanted to chew over with the group on Monday, but they didn’t respond to our request for an interview.

Counselling the council

Staying with the byelection, as the political punderati continued to pick over the entrails, unwary internet users were being hit with campaign ads on Monday morning from Liberal runner-up Nathan Conroy.

Maybe the affable Irishman doesn’t want the campaign feeling to end, or there may be a few awkward conversations with his colleagues at Frankston Council when Conroy gets back to his political day job as mayor of the shire.

The acting mayor arrangements were a little untidy with Conroy’s offsider and deputy mayor – and Frankston’s youngest ever councillor – Liam Hughes thrust unexpectedly into the top job for the duration of the campaign.

Hughes had a study trip to the UK planned and his absence, depriving the council of a mayor during the busy late January period, prompted fellow councillors to pass a vote of no-confidence in their acting leader.

Here’s what he told the Frankston Standard Leader last month: “The mayor’s unexpected decision to run for a higher political office is the reason for this disruption to council, not my decision to take annual leave over the summer break,” he said. “If I had been given any warning at all, alternative plans could have been made.”

Then there is the matter of some of the claims made by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton on behalf of Conroy to the local rag last week which left independent councillor Sue Baker “incensed”. Not least of these was Dutton’s claim that Conroy’s three straight terms as mayor were “unprecedented”, which overlooks the three consecutive terms won by Cathy Wilson back in the noughties.

Baker’s lengthy retort to what she described as Dutton’s “misinformation” about Conroy was attracting much interest on the Frankston Community noticeboard Facebook group with the page’s administrators wondering if Conroy’s position as mayor was tenable, alleging that the candidate had repeatedly claimed credit for himself for the achievements of the council as a whole and had made dubious claims about local women sleeping with baseball bats for fear of crime.