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April 8, 2026 — 5:00am
Clive Palmer’s $110 million Victorian senator Ralph Babet is already laying the groundwork for life after politics. The guy perhaps best known for his love of US President Donald Trump has simply had enough.
In his own telling, Babet, a former real estate agent turned right-wing populist, got into politics with hopes to convince members of the Liberal Party to focus on the values espoused by Menzies, to get the government to “leave people alone” and to protect “free speech”.
“I have failed,” Babet told CBD when we reached him on Tuesday. “I have failed in that task. I don’t want to stick around in politics beyond my one term. I’m walking away, I’m going back to the private sector. I’ll leave them to ruin the country.”
Babet, who describes his parliamentary colleagues as “Marxists”, has now turned his attention to his political off-ramp, which he reckons will come at the next federal election in 2028. If documents lodged with the register of senators’ interests and the corporate regulator are anything to go by, Babet is plotting a return to real estate.
In February, Babet set up a new company called Buildvest, in which he’s the sole shareholder. The company triggered one of three disclosures made to the senator’s register of interests late last month, along with a trust, of which he’s a joint beneficiary, and a Melbourne property. But it would appear that it’s still early days for Buildvest, which Babet said doesn’t even have a website.
Regular readers of this column will no doubt recall it has, at times, been difficult to determine whether Babet ever really walked away from the real estate business.
In early 2023, the United Australia Party senator was forced to defend his appearances in promotional material for a real estate business he owned with his brother Bertrand. He was not being paid, Babet said at the time. Just dabbling over the weekends.
“I enjoy working. Sitting around on the weekend doing nothing feels like a waste of time,” Babet posted to X in 2023. “So I would rather work. However, if someone asks me to come and speak at their event or there’s some Senate-related duty on the weekend or something of that nature, then that will take priority.”
But maybe not for long. Babet has long insisted he’d serve only one term in the Senate. Now it sounds like he’s had enough of his constituents, too. “The Australian public has proven to me that they don’t value freedom,” he told CBD. “They don’t value limited government.”
Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales get nod from Michelle Obama
When we last wrote about Michelle Obama’s looming Australian tour, one of the questions we were unable to get answered was who would get the nod for moderating duties with the former first lady.
Well, now we have the answer: Two of the ABC’s biggest names, Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales, have been tapped to moderate Obama’s appearances next month.
Crabb, the high-profile ABC host of Civic Duty and Kitchen Cabinet, will moderate Obama’s Melbourne shows on May 19 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. In a statement, Crabb said Obama has become a “global cultural icon” beyond politics.
Sales, meanwhile, will host the Sydney shows at the ICC on May 20 and 21 – demand ran so hot that organisers had to book a second night. Sales described Obama as being at the “peak of her powers” as a storyteller and leader.
Crabb and Sales also host the podcast Chat 10 Looks 3 together.
Last we checked in on Obama’s Australian tour, we were baffled to hear the events would go ahead “off the record”. At the time, it seemed that not even the event’s organisers at Growth Faculty knew why. Turns out the policy stands, but still no word on why.
“We kindly ask all attendees to observe the venue’s standard conditions of entry, which include restrictions on taking and/or publishing video footage,” a spokeswoman for the organisers told CBD on Tuesday.
Atlassian brings in hired guns after axing policy boss
It was only a couple of weeks ago CBD brought word that among some 1600 jobs to be culled at Atlassian was one of its most senior figures, global policy boss David Masters.
Well, it hasn’t taken long for the productivity software giant to try and maintain ties with policymakers in Australia. Atlassian has since brought in the boutique lobby shop Radburn Partners to do its bidding in Canberra, according to a disclosure to the lobbyist register lodged on April 1.
Radburn is led by partners Ben Taylor, a former corporate affairs boss at Rabobank, and Clare Gunning, a former deputy commissioner corporate at the Australian Tax Office. Atlassian declined to comment.
It may be too soon to get a sense of the firm’s marching orders, but we’d guess Atlassian will take all the help it can get.
The company’s billionaire chief executive, Mike Cannon-Brookes, was left to swing the axe on roughly 10 per cent of his global workforce in response to the rise of AI, which has rattled software companies amid investor fears that AI giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic could end up eating Atlassian’s lunch.
Masters was the second senior figure to depart the business in the past month, after Cannon-Brookes told the Nasdaq Atlassian’s chief technology officer, Rajeev Rajan, would leave the company.
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