Harold Mitchell takes pride in dispensing with the niceties. When The Power Index visited his South Melbourne private office before Christmas, fresh remains were scattered all over the boardroom table. The victim of his latest salvo is Paul Keating’s 640-page tome After Words, chronicling the former PM’s post-politics public waffling. But Mitchell, who flies to London every three […]

When The Power Index sat down with Melbourne’s business, media and political elite to ask them how power works in the southern city, all shifted uneasily on the subject of Premier Ted Baillieu. “We’re different people, I wouldn’t want to compare myself with Ted at all,” said Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, before moving quickly on to other […]

Perched at the top of the biggest game in Australia’s most sports mad city, the chief of the AFL is always going to demand fealty. But over the last 12 months, Andrew Demetriou, the North Melbourne wingman turned fake teeth manufacturer turned $2.2 million salary man, has achieved something approaching full-spectrum control. On the surface, […]

When former Herald Sun editor-in-chief Peter Blunden celebrated 10 years in the hot seat in April 2006, so many Melbourne power players paid homage that an ill-timed terrorist attack would have ground the city to a halt. Peter Costello, Steve Bracks, Robert Doyle, John So, Christine Nixon, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Janet and John […]

When Ted Baillieu makes his pitch for re-election at the Victorian ballot box in 2014, the brains behind most of his infrastructure plans probably won’t get much of a mention. But Sir Roderick Ian Eddington, Infrastructure Australia chair, Victorian Major Events tsar, JP Morgan chairman and News Corporation director, sits very high indeed in Melbourne’s […]

At 5.30am each weekday for the past quarter century, Neil Mitchell has bowled up to the 3AW studios, three hours before airtime, to decide what Melbourne should be thinking. For 1000 minutes a week it’s Mitchell the city hears talking in its ear, starting with an 8.30am gee up and ending — after countless phone-ins and blow […]

Who holds the real power inside the Victorian government’s imposing headquarters at 1 Treasury Place? It’s definitely not Kim Wells, the Baillieu government’s bumbling treasurer. And it probably isn’t Michael Kapel, the shadowy svengali buried deep inside the premier’s private office. Some reckon it’s not even Ted Baillieu himself. In the 14 months since the Liberals […]

No-one is more despised by Melbourne’s property tycoons than Bill Oliver. In Victoria’s $25 billion construction game, the stubbled Scotsman can shut down rogue building sites in a flash and, builders say, hold their projects to ransom. Each working day in bleak city, Oliver guides his 30,000-strong army of Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union […]

Food culture is embedded in how power operates in Melbourne. You only have to observe the scenes any early evening at the eastern end of Flinders Lane, one of the city’s foodie sacred sites, to understand the importance of high-end food to powerful and wannabe powerful Melburnians. It’s there the city’s cabal of knife-wielding men — yes, […]

Power in Melbourne, as interviewee after interviewee tried to convince The Power Index, is quiet and amorphous, lurking behind every deal and decision but never fully revealing itself. “It’s a bit like Chinese Guanxi,” reckoned Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, in reference to the Sino approach to business reciprocity. Infrastructure and major events tsar Sir Rod […]

Who are the people shaping Australia’s cultural heartland? In January, we start counting down the Top 10 Most Powerful People in Melbourne. Here, Andrew Crook presents the shortlist … Andrew Demetriou As the intimidating head of the most powerful sport in the nation’s most sports mad city, Demetriou drives a hard bargain — whether its player payments, […]