For good and ill, Bond left his mark on State
In death, there is a tendency to either deify or demonise a person. But Alan Bond, an archetypal larger than life figure, was far too complex to be categorised like that. He was a man who brought great pride to WA with the America’s Cup victory.
But he brought an equal measure of disgrace to the State with the unscrupulous business activities that led to his financial and personal downfall.
It would be unfair to the memory of Mr Bond and to the history of this State if we were to simply recount the good and the bad of this man and leave it at that. From his life and times, there are lessons to be learnt about how things should and should not be done.
If we were to condemn the risk-taking approach of Mr Bond, we would be denying the good that can come from taking a big punt, from daring to dream. He was the sort of man who thought big and backed his ideas with actions. It was this sort of against-the-odds bravado that propelled him to the forefront of a group of 1980s movers and shakers who transformed Perth from a sleepy town to the corporate epicentre of Australia.
He gambled on land deals, city-changing developments such as the office tower which bore his name and Observation City, the purchase of the Swan Brewery and Channel 9 and, perhaps the biggest punt of all, investing many millions of dollars into wresting the America’s Cup from the New York Yacht Club.
It was heady stuff and Mr Bond’s sheer audacity captivated the State. The 1983 America’s Cup win, in particular, put Perth on the global map, and the cup defence in Fremantle in 1987 revived the dilapidated port city.
But anyone with this level of ambition and drive is bound to leave wreckage along the way. Mr Bond’s massive corporate fraud in shifting $1.2 billion from Bell Resources into his ailing Bond Corporation, which ultimately collapsed, cost investors dearly and resulted in him being jailed.
His unprincipled actions can’t be airbrushed from history but beyond the big buildings and sporting triumphs, part of Mr Bond’s legacy is the tightening of laws surrounding corporate governance that may prevent future rogues from leaving such financial damage in their wake.
