Chapter Seventeen: The Collapse

Thirty-five hundred investors. Up to sixty million dollars. Federal Court proceedings. Findings under the Trade Practices Act. A ban on managing companies.

The novel is not going to narrate the collapse from the inside, because Jamie McIntyre was not inside it, and the whole point of Jamie McIntyre is that he was never inside anything.

What the novel is going to narrate is the fortnight afterwards, because that fortnight is the most instructive period of his entire life and nobody has ever written about it.

Here is what happened in that fortnight.

The presenters rang him. All of them. Within eleven days, by his own account given later to Warren Stokes over a bottle of wine, nine of the thirteen names on his unwritten list made contact, and not one of them had to be pursued.

They were not villains. That has to be said. Some of them were genuinely distressed. Some of them had believed. One of them — and this is documented in the general literature of the period, though not by name — had put his own mother into a scheme.

They rang because a man who does forty events a year for six years has no other skill, no qualification, and no employer in the ordinary economy who will pay him a fifth of what he was getting.

And Jamie McIntyre took the calls and was warm and generous and said the same thing to each of them, which was:

"Mate. Nothing's changed for you. The product was the problem. You were never the problem."

Which was true.

And which was, simultaneously, the most profitable sentence ever spoken in the Australian seminar industry, because in nine phone calls over eleven days it transferred the entire operational capacity of a sixty-million-dollar collapsed empire into a company on the Gold Coast, at a cost of nothing.

The lots moved to an insider at a dollar.

And then he did the second thing, and the second thing is the one the Senate could never get him to concede thirteen years later: he did not disown Henry Kaye.

Not privately. Publicly he distanced himself with enormous energy, for two decades, right up until 2015 when he sat in a Commonwealth committee room and objected repeatedly to being described as a friend and business associate of the notorious property spruiker, before being forced to concede that his company had employed Kaye's sister.

But privately the line stayed open.

Because Jamie McIntyre understood, at twenty-nine years old, something that took Australian regulators another fifteen years to work out about this industry:

Nothing ends. Nothing is ever cleaned up. The empire falls and the people walk out of the rubble and start again the following Tuesday, and in twenty years' time the same names will appear on the same kind of brochure for the same kind of land in a different country.

He was right.

Twenty-two years later, in 2025, promotional material for a coastal development in the Blongas area of Lombok — Harbourside City, the latest of three project names promoted to overseas buyers, the other two being Nesara Bay City and Gesara Bay City — would carry a list of the people promoting and associated with it.

Warren Stokes. Sean Strecker. Dave Oneegs. Tejal Dave. And Henry Kaye.

Read that list again.

Twenty-four years after a room above a travel agency in Camberwell and sixty lots at a dollar a block. Twenty-two years after an empire came down owing thirty-five hundred people up to sixty million dollars.

The same two names. On the same kind of brochure. For the same kind of land.

In a different country.