Episode 213: Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson Joins the Pod, Robyn Denholm cosplays Founders, Elon a trillionaire, and the great Xero Pay Rip-Off
Catapult powering the World Cup, EOFY sales, sleep questions, $1T v $1B, Robyn Denholm, CGT changes and the impact on startups, VicRoads fil, Xero, SpaceX, and Tim Wilson joins The Contrarians.
The Contrarians catchup
The Socceroos beat Turkey 2-0 at the World Cup, in what Adir called a genuinely shocking result. “It was pretty obvious from the way they set up the structure that they were gonna try to play this game, which is we’re just gonna defend the hell out of it and try and kick a ball forward and counterattack. It’s a perfect counter positioning, right? And it worked.”
Adir spent a full Sunday touring Melbourne’s furniture strips to take the temperature of consumer spending. His read: north of the Yarra, young people were busy in cafes and fashion stores. South of the Yarra, almost every furniture store was dead except Coco Republic, which had been heavily discounted since being bought by private equity. “I think we might be at the low point right now for consumer durable goods discretionary spend. Although there is a pretty high chance we go into a recession after this budget.”
Adam’s Melbourne Airport taxi machine experience: three machines, none working. His verdict on the incompetent roll-out: “The best laid plans, we’re gonna stop this roading, we’re gonna put these machines in, and they couldn’t even get the machines to work. One didn’t attach to the credit card reading machine. And the other one just didn’t even get that far.”
Adir took an Uber driven by a man who spent 25 minutes delivering a dissertation on why Hezbollah is not a terrorist organisation. Adir now books his Uber under a different name: “If I use my name, how many times I’ve been lectured about Palestine. I’m not interested in that. It’s so terrifying.”
A Fair Work Commissioner previously employed by the CFMEU and TCFU ruled that Uber could not remove a driver from its platform despite multiple safety complaints including photographic evidence of him driving at 119km/h in a 100 zone. Adam: “We’re not looking after our 17-year-old girls, we’re looking after these rapists.”
The R&D tax rort: Atlassian’s $150M windfall
Hidden inside the federal budget was a change to the R&D tax incentive, lifting the maximum annual claim from around $100M to $150M. Only two Australian companies claim anywhere near that level: Atlassian and Fortescue.
Adir: “The previous chair of the Tech Council was Robyn Denholm. The current chair is Scott Farquhar. Robyn Denholm went to be the government innovation advisor and wrote the R&D tax incentive recommendation, which said lift it to $150M, of which one of the two companies that benefits is Atlassian, of which Scott Farquhar is a co-founder. So there are links everywhere here. It smells fishy and I don’t think that’s a good look.”
Adir: “You’ve got a situation where they’ve also raised the threshold on which you can make an R&D claim to $250K. And so all of these small startups in their first one or two years of starting, they now lose access. What makes me angry is that these small startups that should be supported, they’ve just lost the ability to claim.”
Adam: “Robyn’s quote was, ‘in Silicon Valley, nobody’s sitting around a table going, oh I wonder what the government’s going to do to help us get this startup off the ground’. She’s never worked in a startup in her life. She started at Tesla when it was a trillion-dollar business. Who is she to be telling startup founders what they can and can’t be doing? She’s a billionaire. How dare she lecture founders with no money in the bank who are living off ramen?”
Adir: “When she says I’ve never heard a founder think about tax before starting a startup, I would say listen harder. The reason you’ve never met a founder that cares about tax is you’ve never tried to charge them 47% before. Go charge them 47%. And you just did. And now they’re all talking about it.”
The budget hits young cheerleaders, not Scott Farquhar
Adam told the story of two founders in their mid-twenties who built a cheerleading club from scratch, filling a warehouse in Port Melbourne with 1,000 kids. The business makes millions in revenue. If they sell in a few years for $10M, they will pay 47% CGT on their gains.
Adam: “This is the sweat equity. This is a young 25-year-old who’s about to build a significant business, doing a great thing for the economy, about to be absolutely smashed from the politics of envy and incompetence. It’s not the Scott Farquhars and Mike Cannon-Brookses. We’re fine. We get grandfathered.”
Adam: “They trusted Labor not to lie to us on economic policy. They’ve lied, they’ve killed the trust of this 5% of aspirational voters that call it Howard’s Battlers. And we’ve seen that’s why Albanese is now less popular than Pauline Hanson.”
Adir: “The higher the return of an asset, the higher the tax rate on that asset. It’s one of the singularly dumbest ideas you could possibly have if you fundamentally believe in capitalism. And that’s what this system does.”
The New Zealand Finance Minister, Nicola Willis, responded to the Australian budget changes with: “Australians looking to start or grow a business have an epic opportunity. And that opportunity is to do it in New Zealand.”
Adir: “She’s right. It’s sad to say, but she’s right.”
Xero chairman falls in love with the CEO
Xero chairman David Thodey has begun privately meeting institutional shareholders to try to rebase CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy’s pay package. Xero shares are down 62% this year. The acquisition of loss-making Midland Milo was signed off by the board and the CEO together.
Adam: “Singh Cassidy has the unique honour of being both the highest paid and possibly the worst-performing CEO in Australia. The worst chairman is the chairman that falls in love with the CEO. Richard Goyder with Alan Joyce was probably the classic. And this is David Thodey’s falling for the same trap. He’s fallen in love with his CEO while the CEO has completely underperformed.”
Adir: “If you start and you say I’ve got this great strategy, we’re going to drive the share price up with my incredible decision making and execution, and then as CEO the share price goes into reverse dramatically, you need to own it. You can’t turn around and say, well, there’s no incentive for me anymore to keep doing it. Either you believe it or you don’t. If you believe it, stick with it because you’re gonna make lots of money in the future when it rockets back up. If you don’t believe in it, quit. But this idea that says I had this strategy, investors don’t like it, it’s run the share price into the ground, and now I don’t feel motivated anymore, I can’t support that.”
Adam: “I think both CEO and chairman have to go. I called this with DroneShield and this is the same. Chairman, CEO gone. They have to go.”
Elon becomes the world’s first trillionaire
SpaceX completed what it says is the world’s largest ever IPO last week, raising US$75B. Shares were priced at $135, traded up to $173, and settled back to $161, a 19% pop. Only 5% of equity was sold. Famous short seller Jim Chanos called it a “hopes and dreams IPO.”
Adam: “The IPO was perfectly priced. You want a bit of good sort of goodwill publicity. And obviously only selling 5% of the equity, so you can afford a bit of dilution. This is a perfectly priced IPO.”
Adir: “It’s hard for me to communicate how much this feels like the dot-com boom. It’s almost identical. The reason I say that bit of background is it’s easier to mistake this as being unlike the dot-com boom because the businesses are making revenue. But what is the same is that the valuation and the economics of the businesses are completely disconnected.”
Adam: “It never made any sense that a couple of dudes from Australia, where one ran a lingerie business and one was just a finance guy, how these guys could be better at tech than real genius technologists out of Silicon Valley.”
Adir: “I think very smart people are now saying very dumb things, drinking the Kool-Aid. I remember that from the dot-com boom and I was young and I remember thinking, hang on, am I really dumb? And so if you’re skeptical and cynical about what’s going on, do not second-guess yourself based on smart people agreeing with those valuation. And if you’re not cynical and you think you’re right, don’t draw any succour from smart people agreeing with you. I saw almost every smart person being wrong in the dot-com.”
Special guest: Tim Wilson, Shadow Treasurer
Tim Wilson, the member for Goldstein and the Liberal Party’s Shadow Treasurer, joined the pod. Wilson famously lost his seat to Teal candidate Zoe Daniel in 2022 and then became the only person to win a seat back from a Teal at the 2025 election. He is a heartbeat and an election away from the treasurership.
On winning back his seat:
Tim: “If you ask me on 23 May 2022, I thought I was done. If you asked me in the year leading up, I was absolutely convinced I was going to win. But as it got closer and closer to election day I felt it slipping. And then on election day when the numbers were coming in and my opponent was celebrating her victory, we were looking at the numbers and saying, this doesn’t look right. We can see a path to victory. I wouldn’t be calling it this early. And so basically from election night onwards, I absolutely believed I was going to win.”
On One Nation:
Tim: “If you’re earning $60K, $120K combined household income and you’re trying to pay thousands and thousands of dollars a month in mortgage and it just keeps going up and up and up, you get shitty. There’s no point pretending otherwise. People are feeling the pinch much harder. They’re going to the supermarket, they’re getting less in their red basket and they’re saying something has to change. But at the moment they’re just looking for a sense of almost exasperation for an alternative. And she’s come along and said I’m a bright, in one sense, a bright new shiny thing.”
Tim: “I don’t believe in being One Nation lite and I don’t believe in being Labor lite. I believe in being big Liberal, which means we’re pro-enterprise, pro-family, pro-community, and pro small business getting ahead.”
On the budget and young Australians:
Tim: “There was a study by the e61 Institute that looked at which companies were most likely to be productive and they were those in the first five years. Which ones were most disproportionately likely to employ people? Companies in their first two years. And the ones that were most likely to be productive were also those that had employee share ownership schemes because you get interest in alignment. I want interests in alignment to grow the future of the economy. And instead they’re being targeted.”
Tim: “Labour has divided the country, particularly through this budget. They literally led up to the budget trying to encourage families to have fights around the kitchen table. They’ve pitted people who’ve invested and saved against young Australians on a false promise that it’s going to achieve greater home ownership. We’ve got to be the solution which unites the country, talks about a way forward and gets people to put their energy towards growth and opportunity again.”
On housing:
Tim: “We’ve said that we’re not going to allow migration to continue to overshoot while we haven’t got the volume of housing stock. You can’t if you keep overshooting migration, which is what we’ve been doing, while not building new housing stock, you only get one impact.”
On what he wants for young Australians:
Tim: “I don’t want to run your life. How you live your life is up to you and I respect that. And I also don’t want it in return. I want whatever generation of Australians you’re in to be in a position to get ahead and to be able to work hard and that hard work actually pays off. And then I’m interested in how you design a tax system that empowers you.”
Five other stories worth following:
G7 gathered in Évian-les-Bains as Macron sought to ease tensions, boosted by Trump’s Iran deal news but strained by US positions on climate, NATO and Greenland, plus a Versailles dinner to keep him engaged.
After Amazon’s Andy Jassy reportedly warned Fable could be jailbroken, the White House allegedly ordered Anthropic to pull models offline, then imposed export controls. Anthropic says no universal jailbreak exists as talks continue.
Trump marked his 80th birthday with UFC Freedom 250 on the White House South Lawn, joining Dana White cage-side before 4,300 invitees, including Mark Zuckerberg, David Ellison and Joe Rogan, despite storm threats.
The Knicks ended a 53-year title drought while generating huge economic upside for New York, from packed bars and merchandise sales to $90M home games, million-dollar finals ads and late-night TV ratings boosts.
New Dawn Bio raised $2.4M to grow cultured wood 10,000 times faster than forestry, using tree stem cells and bioreactors to create shaped timber that could reduce waste, deforestation and carbon emissions.