The ensuing altercation left Truthwright requiring a dozen stitches in his right buttock and the relationship between both men never recovered.  Even today, Keating remains the only living Australian prime minister not to have membership in the prestigious Harold Holt Disappearance Reenactment Society, his many applications repeatedly blackballed by Truthwright.  Moreover, to this day QANTAS prohibits both men being in the same club lounge at the same time.

Truthwright found it much easier to deal with other members of the Hawke government, striking an especially close relationship with Finance Minister Peter Walsh but especially with the Minister for Education John Dawkins. 

Truthwright had been deeply impressed by Dawkins’ reforms to higher education, particularly his rejection of the ideal of education as a human right and his introduction of fee-based degrees.  To be sure, Truthwright was frustrated at Dawkins’ refusal to sell the universities to a consortium of tobacco companies and US-based investment firms, but he was assuaged by the knowledge that once implemented the Dawkins reforms would generate an irresistible momentum that would lead eventually to the full privatisation of the university sector.  Not for the first time, when Dawkins was around Truthwright smelled money.

At the same time Truthwright set about building links with the corporate world, receiving a spectacular boost when he was invited by Alan Bond to serve as the foundation Dean of the School of Upward Social Mobility at the recently established Bond University, the nation’s first fully private tertiary institution located on the Gold Coast.

Truthwright distinguished his time as a leading academic through some highly innovative administrative and teaching initiatives, pioneering a new curriculum that replaced books and reading with on-the-job experience. Students enrolled in his faculty earned their degrees by working in a series of non-paying positions at his off-campus corporate initiatives. 

These included a battery chicken farm at Ingham (a joint venture with a son of Indonesian President Suharto), a medical research facility at Caboolture, a lead foundry at Ipswich, an armaments factory at Gympie and a chain of kebab outlets trading under the name ‘Sheik T’s’. 

Students’ results were calibrated according to the extent to which profits rose during their secondment. Marks were deducted for absentee days and industrial accidents while any fines imposed because of surprise inspections by immigration officers or health and safety investigators led to an immediate fail and the forfeiture of fees.  During his subsequent trial he justified this harsh pedagogic regimen by telling the judge,

“I knew from first-hand experience that the higher education system was a Marxist-inspired shambles. I wanted to liberate the kids from humanism.  I wanted to free them from the narcotic effects of cultural Marxism.  That’s why the only textbooks I prescribed were Ayn Rand’s masterpiece, Altas Shrugged and The Turner Diaries, the only good history book ever written.  I had to weed out the feeble minded and ethically weak.  I wanted to create a new breed of capitalist mercenaries, a new generation of corporate warriors who would drag this country into the post-conscience age.  And if in the process I made a bit on the side then that’s my democratic right.”

The judge assessed Truthwright as clinically insane and ordered the jury to disregard his testimony. But, more importantly for Truthwright’s ambitions, the trial triggered a series of parallel investigations that eventually landed his benefactor Alan Bond in prison. Yet Truthwright wasn’t perturbed because new and exciting opportunities had arisen in his hometown of Melbourne.

In October 1992 Jeffrey Kennett was elected the forty third Premier of Victoria.  Truthwright led the toast at the celebratory party held at Southern Cross Hotel and a framed photograph of the festivities, which appeared on the front page of the next morning’s edition of the Herald Sun, still adorns his office wall.

In the years that followed Truthwright played a critically important behind-the-scenes role in Kennett’s Victoria.  He was one of the very few Victorians who seemed to understand how the new premier’s mind worked. 

Kennett’s behaviour had confounded Melbourne’s leading psychiatrists for over a decade – most are still bewildered by his incessant public utterances. But Truthwright had an almost psychic ability to read Kennett’s mind. In fact, the two men often communicated through a series of visceral grunts, twitches and wild gesticulations that mystified other members of the government, the media and the public.

Although never holding a formal position, Truthwright was instrumental in a number of the Kennett government’s most important initiatives. These included the closure of dozens of government schools and the sale of the land to property developers, the privatisation of the state’s power and water utilities and their transfer to Singaporean and French holding companies, all of which had Truthwright as a board member.

However, the three Kennett era initiatives of which Truthwright is most proud include the installation of bud lighting on all fixed structures in the CBD, the Albert Park Formula One Grand Prix, and thwarting several attempted assassinations.  In fact, it was the last of these, a 1999 assault by the terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, which along with the unexpected election of the Bracks Labor government in 1999 which finally drove Truthwright to take up full-time residence at the now completed mansion in Portsea.

These assassination attempts are pivotal to understanding Truthwright’s next steps.  Kennett and Truthwright offer entirely different accounts.  Speaking of the incident for the first time in late 2010, Kennett recalled how he was attacked by bin Laden while leaving Camberwell’s Rivoli cinema after a special screening of The Mummy. 

He recounted how the maniacal Saudi leapt on to his back after hiding in a garbage skip and drew a long dagger.  Kennett describes fighting off bin Laden and chasing him along Riversdale Road and across Camberwell Junction before losing him in the tram depot as the terrorist threw hand grenades over his shoulder. Kennett has said that he only raised the incident recently because he was worried about homosexuals in the Australian Football League. 

Truthwright, however, who had remained silent on the episode until Kennett’s revelations, remembers things differently. He said that Bin Laden sprang from the doorway of a carpet emporium and that Kennett’s first response was to offer the terrorist his wife and the directorship of a state government agency in return for his life. 

Truthwright claims that it was he, and not Kennett, who fought off the Saudi and that while they struggled the premier cheered for whichever man appeared to have the upper hand.

The disputed account of the events of that day led to a falling out between the two men. To this day Truthwright insists it was he who was the target of bin Laden’s attack because of the danger Holtism – his vision of a bold new Australian society – posed to vested interests and the status quo.  In Truthwright’s view of the world, it is his ideas that pose the biggest danger to the atrophy of mainstream political parties and institutions and as a result he believes that terrorists, republicans, vegans, the Australian Taxation Office and the medical profession view him as a threat. He believes he is a marked man.