James Kirby

Australia’s rich list

The woman on the radio had called to complain. “I want to talk about Richard Pratt,” she said. “I don’t really understand what he did. But I don’t like it.” Nobody, it seems, likes to see very rich people behaving badly - like a double-parked …

Did you know that Woolworths now controls 14,000 poker machines? The supermarket company has followed the money down the street to the pub, where cash that some might say should be spent on groceries is instead being spent on the often fruitless activity …

Silex Systems: it sounds like the name of a computer-chip maker, or perhaps a manufacturer of silicon breast implants, but it’s actually a stock-market company in the high-stakes business of uranium enrichment. Silex is one of the few stocks in Australia’s …

Passing my local child-care centre the other day, I noticed it’s all changed: the builders have come in. Flown in, actually, because the place has been sold to ABC Learning Centres. The ABC renovation troops don’t mess around. The Brisbane-based company …