One was briefly made famous by Rita Ora. Another is married to Margaret Court. A third inadvertently became tangled up in the affairs of the New South Wales state MP Daryl Maguire, who was later found to be corrupt.
What links them and about 260 other Australians is that they are honorary consuls – a network of volunteer diplomats representing nations from Albania to Uruguay, some as large as the UK and others as tiny as San Marino.
While some are well known, such as the former speaker of federal parliament Peter Slipper (Brazil), the consular title generally has a low profile – few have adventures as gripping as the British representative in Argentina in Graham Greene’s novel The Honorary Consul.
Recently, though, a rather large spotlight was thrown on the Kingdom of Tonga’s honorary consul general, Louise Raedler-Waterhouse.
The former NSW state MP Daryl Maguire seems to have bamboozled Waterhouse, of the horse racing dynasty, into inadvertently using her consular position to help make business contacts for his Chinese investment group.
Waterhouse’s late father, Bill Waterhouse, was the first honorary consul to Tonga, and she took over the role. The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption heard Maguire tried to help Waterhouse remove barriers to selling her family’s land near the western Sydney airport. But he first met her through her consular duties.
Perhaps the most controversial current honorary consul is Barry Court, the husband of former champion tennis player and evangelist Margaret Court. The Courts, through their Victory Life Centre church, set up Burundi’s honorary consul in Western Australia.
In Burundi, same-sex relationships are illegal and LGBTQ+ people are persecuted. In 2021, Margaret Court faced backlash against her Australia Day award because of her views on LGBTQ+ issues.
Barry Court says he went to Burundi with their church and became good friends with the first lady, Denise Bucumi Nkurunziza, and that led to the president asking him to be honorary consul.
Asked if he is worried about the horrified reaction from some about the church hosting the Burundi consulate, he says: “No, not at all.”
Does he agree with Burundi’s approach?
“Yeah, sure,” he says.
Slipper is Brazil’s honorary consul in Tasmania. He says that during his time in parliament (a sometimes turbulent period), he came to know many heads of embassies and missions.
“I got to know the Brazilian ambassador, who, some considerable amount of time afterwards, invited me to be the honorary consul,” he says. He now acts as a conduit between the Brazilian community and the embassy in Canberra.
When Guardian Australia spoke to him he had been helping a mother get expedited visas for her children so that she could take them back to Brazil.
‘I have a little flag on my desk’
Honorary consuls have few of the privileges and immunities afforded to full-time diplomatic representatives. While they are managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs (Dfat), they are the responsibility of the country that chose them. Dfat declined to say if it had dealt with any protocol breaches.
To become an honorary consul, one must be an Australian citizen of “good character”, with a good reputation, accessible at all times in case of emergency. The country that wants them at an Australian post has to sort out a police check, identity checks and a CV. Consuls cannot be Australian government employees.
Beyond that, what they do in their spare time is up to them.
In April the singer Rita Ora was blown away by the breakdancing moves of the UK’s honorary consul in South Australia, Ian Smith. Before he went viral for doing “the worm” at her gig in New York (Ora posted about him to her millions of followers) he was better known as a philanthropist and a lobbyist.
Smith was at the concert in his role with the Prince’s Trust charity.
Honorary consuls can be advocates, administratively useful to their communities, and a backstop if something goes wrong – if someone dies visiting Australia, for example, or loses their passport and there is no embassy nearby.
Prof Simon Mordant – San Marino’s honorary consul for NSW, Victoria, the Northern Territory and South Australia – wasn’t sure what he was getting into when he was asked to fill the role by a former Italian ambassador.
He had to look up San Marino online. Dfat describes it as an “enclaved microstate within central Italy [which] occupies 61 square kilometres, and is the third smallest state in Europe after the Holy See and the Principality of Monaco”.
“It’s a tiny country, like a large hill town,” Mordant says. The job didn’t seem like too much of an imposition, with only a handful of Sammarinese in Australia.
“A few people have contacted me when their passport is due for renewal,” he says.
“I’ve had no deaths, some inquiries about student visas … I have a metal plaque on my office wall and a little flag on my desk.”
‘It was a bit blurry’
So how did the heiress, Waterhouse, end up meeting Maguire?
When she met him in 2017, Maguire was chair of the NSW parliament’s Asia Pacific Friendship Group (APFG). He was also honorary chair of the Shenzhen Asia Pacific Commercial Development Association (SAPCDA), a group of Chinese investors.
Waterhouse told the corruption commission she was contacted by Maguire’s office and asked to help organise meetings in Tonga.
“I originally thought I would be organising meetings with government departments, and I started before that to set up meetings with the prime minister of Tonga and with other parties,” she said.
“But when I met with him, he said, ‘No, I am interested in the commercial people, so chamber of commerce and those people because these are investors. It’s to introduce investors to Tonga’.”
She believed, she said, that Maguire was “simply performing some public role”. “I think that his role was the chairman of the NSW parliament Friendship Association for Asia and the Pacific,” she said.
According to the Icac report, Maguire “accepted that he used his position as the chair of the APFG and the network of contacts it provided him to set up various meetings for the benefit of SAPCDA, including meetings with consuls general”.
“He never disclosed, when setting up such meetings, that he hoped to benefit financially from the activities of SAPCDA,” the report said.
Waterhouse was asked: “And that’s why he was making contact with you, because of your role within the Kingdom of Tonga, is that right?”
“That’s exactly right,” she replied. Asked whether she thought the Shenzhen group was perhaps some sort of subgroup of the parliamentary group, she said “it was a bit blurry”.
It was less blurry for Maguire at SAPCDA’s meeting in 2016. According to the minutes, Maguire told the other members that he had done “a lot of work” through the APFG, signing up South Pacific nations.
“Through the NSW parliament APFG, SAPCDA will be able to connect with the South Pacific island countries and develop extensive business cooperation in areas such as tourism, marine resources, agricultural resources, mineral resources and real estate,” he said.
“As the chairman of the NSW parliament APFG and honorary chairman of the SAPCDA, I will help expedite the work at SAPCDA by reasonably using the long-term network I have built with government officials such as the consuls general and commercial counsellors.”
He did add that “government agencies will not involve [sic] directly in non-government business events”.
Icac recommended that presiding officers amend the parliament’s friendship group policy so that members update each other on what they are up to, and clarify that the code of conduct for members applies to parliamentary friendship groups.
