Inside Hannah Wootton’s Nepo-Baby Path to AFR’s Rear Window Column

PVO turns the tables on a Nine columnist—and explains why this week presents a golden opportunity for everyone in politics whose name isn’t Pauline Hanson.

A bit rich 

There is an obvious irony in a journalist mocking someone else’s home while her own expensive residence was transferred to her name—without a registered mortgage—by a company owned by her parents.

That journalist is Hannah Wootton, the Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window gossip columnist. She has criticised other people’s salaries and positioned herself as an advocate for journalists facing cost-of-living pressures. Her parents, however, were estimated to be worth $315 million two decades ago.

Wootton is not her parents’ only child and would presumably share any family inheritance with her siblings. Readers may therefore wish to hold off before launching a GoFundMe campaign on her behalf.

Last weekend, Wootton brought me and my family’s home into a story about KPMG that focused on my wife, Ainslie, the chief executive of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand.

Her account was inaccurate on several points: it misstated facts about me, our property and the review at the centre of her story.

After inviting readers to examine our household finances, Wootton can hardly object if attention now turns to the financial arrangements surrounding her own home.

Land registry records show that Surrowee Pty Ltd purchased a property on one of Carlton’s most sought-after residential streets in November 2012. In August 2020, the property was transferred into the sole name of Hannah Kantor Wootton.

ASIC records list her parents, Eve Kantor and Mark Wootton, as the company’s equal shareholders and directors.

It is unclear from the available records whether Wootton paid for the property or received it as a gift. The title documents show no registered mortgage, either while the company owned the property or after it was transferred to her. They do not reveal whether any private repayment arrangement existed.

Wootton was enrolled to vote at the address. Whatever the precise financial arrangement, the absence of a registered mortgage represents an enviable starting point for someone who takes a keen interest in other people’s money.

Passing judgment on others may be easier when you begin life with the advantages associated with being a nepo baby.

She also described my wife as “publicity-happy”—an interesting assessment from someone whose daily contribution to public life is published alongside her own photograph. Though, in fairness, I may not be entirely impartial.

Wootton’s parents have also spoken publicly about financial restraint. In a 2022 ABC radio interview, they joined the program from their 35-square-kilometre farm in Victoria’s fertile agricultural region.

Her father said their adult children worked, presenting it as evidence of independence. He also said they had always been told that “there’s not a lot coming your way”.

When a family’s wealth is measured in the hundreds of millions, however, the phrase “not a lot” can carry a very different meaning.

As for my family’s alleged “$3.4 million Vaucluse mansion”, that figure was the property’s purchase price before renovations in 2011. We bought the home with a mortgage.

If Wootton knows where Vaucluse “mansions” can still be bought for that price, I would welcome the tip.

Then there was her grasp of my litigation. The case title, and the many media articles written at the time, were an excellent clue, if getting her facts right was even remotely the goal.

She wrote that I ‘unsuccessfully sued Channel Ten’. In fact, Ten sued me. I was the defendant. They asked for a court order; the judge didn’t grant it. I was found to have breached the deed and ordered to pay costs, which she gleefully pointed out.

Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

Her column, Rear Window, then took longer to publish its one-sentence correction than the two hours it had allowed Chartered Accountants to answer a plethora of detailed questions, on a public holiday weekend, no less.

It’s not my job to defend the Chartered Accountants review of KPMG. But it was a systems review of what was happening at the Big Four firm in the aftermath of the scandal, not during it. Separate reviews into what happened during the scandal are apparently still under way.

A review of remedial action can’t be, by definition, an exoneration of the original misconduct. Yet ‘exoneration’ and ‘whitewash’ were the descriptions Hannah stuck to.

The print version of the error-riddled piece also credited Mark Di Stefano, but online only Wootton was named as the author. In case you forgot, Di Stefano resigned from the Financial Times in 2020 after accessing a rival organisation’s private Zoom meetings without authorisation.

An impressive pairing for a column so comfortable passing judgment on everyone else’s professional standards.

During the journalists’ pay dispute two years ago, publicity-happy Hannah – who is the great-niece of Rupert Murdoch, by the way – appeared on television wearing a ‘Don’t torch journalism’ T-shirt and arguing for wages to keep pace with living costs.

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Che Guevara styling. Rather less revolutionary property arrangements.

My wife is a self-made public school girl from the small WA town of Donnybrook. She hardly needs lectures on household finances from someone with Hannah’s family advantages.

Hannah was at it again on Thursday, having a go at the new Greens deputy leader over her family trust arrangements. Oh, the irony.

There is nothing wrong with a privileged upbringing. But family wealth is no substitute for doing your homework before sneering at someone else’s. The lack of self-reflection is utterly breathtaking.

As for the errors in her piece, an AFR journalist I’ve known for many years summed it up perfectly to me: ‘Not good enough.’

Time to panic for Albo and Angus Taylor?  

Now, after digging into the pot, kettle, black hypocrisy of the Fourth Estate, we need to discuss the return of federal Parliament tomorrow. 

While Labor’s grip on the electorate is slipping, the Coalition is discovering that simply not being the ALP is no longer enough to win back disillusioned voters. 

Pauline Hanson is the beneficiary of such discontent. You would assume Angus Taylor has some inkling of that, given the frenzy that Hanson whipped up from the right-wing crowd from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brisbane on Saturday. 

The reaction to the Leader of the Opposition, the conference’s alleged keynote speaker: far more muted. 

But the Parliament House seating plan hasn’t caught up with the polls (or the vibes), yet, meaning that this week is a chance for Taylor to develop much needed relevancy.

The Tax Office credit card debacle is a gift to an opposition trying to paint the government as hopelessly out of touch with small business. A surcharge ban celebrated as cost-of-living relief resulted in a decision to stop accepting credit cards for tax payments. Businesses relying on those cards to manage cash flows were understandably unimpressed. 

On Friday, Treasurer Jim Chalmers belatedly announced taxpayers will cover the cost of delaying the ban until the end of the financial year. Apparently, small businesses were expected to absorb costs the tax office itself wasn’t prepared to wear. Instead, taxpayers will now fund the temporary escape hatch. Labor’s ‘cost-of-living victory’ has become just another bill adding to the national debt. 

Yet the broader economic opportunity to hold the government to account reaches well beyond the ATO. The Reserve Bank’s latest increase took the cash rate to 4.6 per cent, a 15 year high. 

Mortgage holders don’t need another minister explaining how difficult the international environment has become to explain away responsibility for what’s transpired. 

They need government to do anything it can to help put downward pressure on inflation and rates. That means less spending, which really shouldn’t be that hard when government spending is at record highs. 

Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock has made it clear that domestic demand and weak productivity are central to the problem, with overseas pressures adding to it too. 

Her commentary contradicted the likes of Finance Minister Katy Gallagher who point blank claimed government spending has had nothing to do with inflation. 

But Taylor will also want to use the sitting week to spruik his new immigration policy announced last week. It gives him a substantial policy difference to prosecute: net overseas migration of 100,000-a-year for the first two years before it slowly rising to 160,000. He ties the lower intake to housing shortages and overstretched services to sharpen the political focus. 

The harder task will be persuading voters that he can actually deliver it, while explaining how Australia finds the workers it needs to build those very homes. There is also a credibility problem for the opposition when it comes to the whole immigration debate. 

The Coalition helped build the migration system it now promises to overhaul. It’s been in power for most of the past 30 years, not Labor. Pauline Hanson benefits from the bipartisan failures. 

The latest RedBridge poll put One Nation on 29 per cent, Labor on 28 and the Coalition way back on just 21 per cent. When will panic finally start to set in within the major parties, especially within the Coalition? 

The Greens also return with a new leader this sitting week. 

David Shoebridge is hoping to prise away Labor voters on the left as Team Albo tries to stem the bleeding towards One Nation on its right flank. 

Housing costs and frustration with the major parties just might give Shoebridge an opening. 

Albo faces competitors fishing for disillusioned voters on both sides, but in the end, preference voting might be his saviour. 

Labor’s greatest political comfort remains the fact that while voters are tired of the government, they still aren’t sold on the opposition, and voting One Nation is a bridge too far for many in the sensible centre.