Max takes credit for toilet humour
GOLD Coast business veteran Max Christmas was flushed to discover this week he’d unknowingly featured in the 2017 memoir of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
In a passage from KRudd’s hefty first autobiography, revived in the opinion pages of The Australian on Thursday, Mr Christmas recognised himself as the “Max” referred to in an anecdote from Rudd’s pre-PM life as a KPMG consultant.
The excerpt, from Kevin Rudd, Not for the FaintHearted, read: “One of the funniest clients I had during this period (as a 1990s China hand) was from Queensland’s Gold Coast. His business dream was to sell the Chinese government the IP for an Australian dual flush toilet; that is, a single short flush when little water was needed to do the job, and a more significant flush when industrial hoses were the only way through. My client, Max, had somehow managed to secure an appointment with the then Chinese deputy prime minister Zhu Rongji during the latter’s visit to Australia … and when (Max) later travelled to Beijing with me in tow, he miraculously succeeded in securing another appointment with Zhu, this time in the Great Hall of the People … the Chinese delegation watched on with mild levels of amusement as Max unveiled what we subsequently christened the ‘Maxi-crapper’.”
Mr Christmas, who spent 17 years doing business in China, had been working for Caroma, the Aussie company that invented the dual-flush system, which by then had been adapted by other companies in other countries.
“Kevin was with me, I took him along with me for a week to see what I was doing,” Mr Christmas said. “There were other companies there from Germany, Italy and four other countries competing (for the toilet IP deal) at the time.”
As it happened, his Caroma pitch did not end up a dunny deal – but he went on to more powerful things on behalf of the Queensland Government.
“In the next one I was successful. Queensland had the most modern power stations in Australia at the time, and I connected the government to China,” he said. “Then the Chinese copied our power stations for their power stations.”