Herd on the Terrace Awards: Chris Ellison, Michele Bullock, Sanjeev Gupta and Rita Saffioti make Bull’s list

It’s The Bull’s naughty and nice list for 2025 as we reveal the Australian business names that had us laughing, applauding, and seeing red ... Album of the Year Sabrina Carpenter, Sombr and the Chainsmokers were on The Bull’s 2025 playlist but our favourite ear candy was cooked up in the kitchen of Chris Ellison. The Mineral Resources founder scored a rare headline in August when a pre-recorded audio briefing veered off course and the billionaire briefly adopted a regal accent. Spinners for the King of Kiwis attributed the bizarre glitch to editing software using artificial intelligence. Better than a glitch on a haul road causing near-monthly truck rollovers. Just goes to show Ellison remains at the forefront of Terrace business. Early AI adopter, innovator of aggressive tax strategies . . . ‘Fake it til you make it’ Award Australia’s political obsession with “making stuff” kicked into overdrive in response to US President Donald Trump’s self-harming trade taxes on American consumers. A flood of failing local businesses bussed to Canberra seeking their own largess and found no shortage of gullible idiots to greet them. Manufacturer Nyrstar threatened to close without a handout, a misdirection gleefully swallowed by politicians that chucked the business a $135 million bailout. The company never explained why it did not consider appointing administrators instead of the binary idiocy of shutting down or pick-pocketing taxpayers. The Bull knows the answer! Why would Nyrstar’s foreign owners bother when they could just play Canberra for suckers? Services to Journalism Award The manufacturing racket does not end at Nyrstar. When it comes to the dark art of siphoning cash from dopey bureaucrats, few can measure up to billionaire British industrialist Sanjeev Gupta’s corporate empire, GFG. GFG generated headlines through 2025 amid the collapse of Whyalla Steelworks and holding company Liberty Primary Metals Australia. The timing was impeccable. Whyalla floundered just ahead of a Federal Election, with more than $2 billion swiftly promised to fund a “green energy” rescue bid. That cash won’t flow to Gupta. But his businesses have shown a remarkable nose for opportunity, whether clipping the ticket on “Made in WA” or planning to move an arc furnace from South Korea to Romania in response to European Union incentives. GFG is the poster child for how government meddling delivers for savvy tycoons. Margaret Thatcher ‘Iron Lady’ Award Michele Bullock scores top marks for giving the middle finger to financial markets in July when every man and his dog, rabbit and pet gecko was predicting a rate cut. And boy, does her decision to hold interest rates that month look good in hindsight, thanks to the depressingly predictable inflation bounce. Also disappointingly predictable was the herd behaviour of so many analysts who forgot historic tales of the inflation dragon’s resilience. We wonder how many innocent borrowers took on debt amid promises rates would keep heading south. Yet Bullock’s shine was lost as winter turned to spring. Just as the Reserve Bank worked up the courage to declare plainly that more cuts would be on the way, rising inflation and stronger growth had Bullock backtracking within days. Even iron rusts. Saffioti Award for Budget Blowouts Who else but Treasurer Rita Saffioti? Total dominance in her field! Topping her enormous pile of nominations was the Byford rail extension, promised for $291m and coming in at a whopping $1.34 billion. Nearly a fivefold increase. Yet Rita — the teflon treasurer — dodged scrutiny for the mishap when the rail line opened in October. Saffioti for years blamed Metronet’s $10 billion of blowouts on COVID and Ukraine. But her defence crumbles under the slightest cross-examination. The real reason for the Byford bust was the decision to build a 1.5km viaduct through the skies above Armadale. For readers with a little more understanding of economics than the treasurer — likely most of you — the public benefit of the project was expected to be $307m. It would’ve been a better deal to incinerate $500m on a bonfire and hand every resident of Byford a $10,000 cheque. We’re not joking. Brian Burke Award for Lobbying Plans for a major business tax cut by the Productivity Commission sparked outrage at the top end of town, but none more ridiculous than the Business Council of Australia. After years urging lower company taxes to boost growth and wages, elites suddenly went arctic cold on the idea. Lobbyists hit the phones calling reporters. BHP’s spinners dished out quotes to the press gallery. Every (wo)man for themselves. Self-interest so naked even Bonnie Blue would grimace. Danielle Wood had prepared a plan to serve up exactly what the Terrace had been begging for, yet found herself seeking cover from artillery strikes. Her crime? Paying for it with a levy on super profits, rather than service cuts. You don’t need three brain cells to realise funding lower business taxes through cuts to schools and hospitals would be a non-starter. Amusingly, BCA threw together an analysis, of sorts, claiming the reform would slow the economy 0.5 per cent by 2036. The only problem — and we are not making this up — is that the report modelled “a 5 per cent increase in the company tax rate”, rather than a cut, effectively the opposite of what was actually proposed. So the assessment, undertaken by famed ChatGPT aficionados Deloitte, was basically nonsense. An innocent mistake we’re sure. Also manning the battle stations was the Chamber of Minerals and Energy, scoring a special commendation from The Bull by branding a tax cut for thousands of businesses an “attack on WA”. Fresh content! A less generous author might dub the use of political power to extract maximum economic rents from an exhaustible resource an “attack on WA”. Perhaps it’s all in the eye of the beholder!