Groucho Marx famously said he’d never be a member of any club that would have him, but why are so many people so desperate to join clubs that don’t want them? And why are the same people just as determined to keep people out of their own little clubs?
How often, for example, have you heard women clamouring to admit men to women’s-only gyms, or women’s-only business clubs? Where are the screeching demands to enrol boys in the prestigious Methodist Ladies’ College or St Cuthbert’s in Auckland?
Yet, like spoiled toddlers, they not only want what they have, they want what anyone else has, too.
Their latest target is ultra-prestigious Melbourne Club.
This is the granddaddy of all Melbourne’s private clubs. When people complain about the exclusivity and privilege of clubland, it’s this all-male, old-world institution that first comes to mind.
Based in an imposing, purpose-built clubhouse on the Paris end of Collins Street, the Melbourne Club has existed since 1838 and at its current location since 1859 […]
For the squattocracy of western Victoria, in town to trade in their pastoral riches, the Melbourne Club offered (and still does) a respite from commerce. Talk of business is not permitted inside.
If some rich toff wants to pay a few thousand a year for the privilege of paying for all his meals, drinks and accommodation, in what admittedly sounds like a pretty cool, if rather stuffily olde-worlde clubhouse, well, good for them. Whose nose is it any skin off?
Well, the out-of-joint noses of the sort of busybodying ninnies who apparently can’t bear for other people to have nice things.
In 2009, then Labor attorney-general Rob Hulls took aim at all this exclusivity but mainly at the club’s refusal to admit women as members. Ladies are allowed into the club as guests for dinner, but not for lunch. Hulls said 15 years ago that male-only clubs were “fast becoming an amusing relic”.
Hulls was full of this sort of champagne socialist guff. He also campaigned to ban robes and wigs for senior legal professionals, claiming it was ‘outdated and elitist’. The Victorian Bar Association told him to get stuffed. Hulls had a minor victory, in banning formal attire for some courts. Like all lefties, he was a dab hand at running to the gubmint when he couldn’t get his way. But when he tried to legislate to force clubs like the Melbourne Club to admit women, he was humiliated.
By the following year, he’d been forced to back down. A concerted campaign by the clubs was followed by a parliamentary committee that found it would be hard to regulate clubs’ memberships because they were allowed freedom of association.
He’s still whining, of course.
“They think they’re captains of business,” he told the Age recently, “but they’re really a bunch of old fogeys who sit around contemplating their own importance.”
Like a certain long-departed state attorney-general? In any case, if that’s all they are, why would anyone care? To quote the Melbourne Club itself, “The competition is vicious because the stakes are so small.”
But the whiners will try and have their way, by hook or by crook. The latest assault is to wheel out the biggest bogey-man of the left: ‘racism’.
One of the club’s best-known and best-connected members, Allan Myers, KC – barrister, academic, businessman, landowner and philanthropist, and the previous chancellor of the University of Melbourne – quit his membership in spectacular style, firing broadsides on the way out the door.
Myers had hoped to see a friend, Jason Yeap – a property developer, lawyer, resident of Toorak, Liberal fundraiser and philanthropist – elected to membership. Yeap, though, is of Chinese-Malaysian background […]
Yeap’s bid for admission fell at the first hurdle: the membership committee. The committee has never explained its reasons, even to those who proposed him.
Cue screeching about ‘raaaacism!’
The only problem with that claim is that, firstly, the committee never does explain its reasons. Like the entirety of the Melbourne Club, it exists behind a wall of studied anonymity. The building doesn’t even have any signage to mark it out.
It also seems like the committee had reasons that were nothing to do with race.
According to the internal scuttlebutt, Yeap’s high-profile backers had breached the club’s norms by being too pushy, trying to fast-track their candidate and not exposing him sufficiently to scrutiny by the other members.
Also, Myers had once done business with Yeap. It’s unclear if Myers was a proposer, or simply a supporter of Yeap. None of them has commented publicly. Under the club’s numerous rules, a nominated candidate is not permitted to have done business with any of his proposers.
So, they broke the rules. End of story.
Their little club: their little rules. Who cares what they do?
Some curtain-twitching types apparently care very much.
