Australian Dictionary of Biography

Emil Herbert Peter Abeles (1924–1999), transport industry magnate, was born on 25 April 1924 in Vienna, the only son of Hungarian Jewish parents Alexander Abel, metal merchant, and his wife Anna Diamant, later Deakin, pianist. After his family moved to Hungary, Peter matriculated from the Protestant High School in Budapest in 1942, set on becoming a doctor, but anti-Semitic quotas on university entry, and his father’s desire that he continue the family trade, saw him instead apprenticed as a welder. Following the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944, he was conscripted into a Jewish labour battalion. He lost family members to the extermination camps and friends to war, but insisted later that he never doubted he would survive and ‘make it’ (Ostrow 1987, 192). As Nazi control faltered in Hungary, he escaped with members of his family into the relative safety of Romania as it fell under Soviet influence. He met there Clara (known as Claire) Dan, a Budapest-born cabaret singer, and they married in that city on 4 March 1947; they would later adopt two daughters in Sydney.

Abeles’s father insisted he leave Hungary—where he had returned after the war—before Communist rule was consolidated, and the younger man did ‘all sort of work’ (Abeles 1985) in France and Italy. Among his enterprises was the purchase of a truck to transport passengers around war-damaged Rome. Deciding to emigrate, and with four thousand pounds from his father, he and Claire embarked in the Italian migrant ship Ugolino Vivaldi, arriving in Sydney in August 1949 and joining maternal relatives engaged in the Australian wool trade. He sold paperbacks and knitwear before meeting a Hungarian friend, George Rockey, with whom he bought two trucks and, in December 1950, founded a road freight business, Alltrans Pty Ltd. Hungry for work, their first contract was with the politically contentious and deeply indebted Metropolitan Portland Cement Ltd. Abeles later claimed not to have known it was in trouble. Metropolitan’s chairman, lawyer (Sir) Arthur George, provided a character reference for Abeles’s 1954 application for Australian citizenship, and the two would become well-known, and occasionally controversial, property developers in the 1960s and 1970s. Alltrans narrowly survived when, trucking coal from Newcastle, Abeles and Rockey discovered that a competitor controlled by the shipping businessman (Sir) Roderick Miller had bought the colliery, depriving them of supplies. More than ten years later Abeles staged a share market raid on Miller’s company but denied he was seeking revenge.

Alltrans’s fleet grew rapidly, contracting owner-drivers and painting their trucks in company livery. By the mid-1960s it was carrying freight by road and rail throughout Australia and New Zealand. In 1964 it formed a joint venture with a larger competitor, Thomas Nationwide Transport Ltd (TNT), and three years later agreed on a complete merger. Abeles became managing director, and in a series of opportunistic deals embarked on rapid international expansion and diversification in pursuit of a ‘total transport’ (Bajkowski 1972, 45) vision. Having divorced his wife in 1968, on 29 December 1970 in Brussels he married a childhood acquaintance, Katalin Ottilia (known as Kitty) Frank, née Fischer, with whom he had reconnected in Brazil while establishing TNT’s business there. Claire would found the Sydney International Piano Competition in 1977; she was appointed AM in 1986.

An early TNT goal was to containerise trans-Tasman shipping, dominated by the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand Ltd, a company Abeles regarded as ‘so old fashioned … it was like out of [a] Dickens novel’ (Abeles 1985). Union Steamship, and its British parent, rebuffed TNT’s approaches but after protracted negotiations involving the New Zealand government, TNT was permitted to acquire half of the company. Abeles became chairman and managing director in January 1972 and integrated its operations into the TNT network. He later recalled this as among his ‘most interesting and possibly most outstanding achievements’ (Abeles 1985). By 1975 TNT owned road, rail, shipping, and air freight operations in Europe, Canada, the United States of America, Brazil, and South-East Asia. A magazine profile in 1977 ranked him as ‘one of the greatest success stories in Australian business’ (Sykes 1977, 102).

Abeles was assiduous in securing bipartisan political patronage of his business interests. Alltrans had the former New South Wales Labor premier and governor-general, Sir William McKell, on its board. Abeles played cards with the New South Wales Liberal premier (Sir) Robert Askin; on Askin’s recommendation he was knighted in 1972; he hosted a party for Askin when he retired from politics; and Askin joined the TNT board. As Sir Peter established ties with the New South Wales Labor premier Neville Wran, the journalist George Munster profiled him as ‘the man who collects premiers’ (1977, 6). In 1970 he reached out to the newly elected president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Bob Hawke, and in 1972 agreed to fund an unusual joint venture with the ACTU, providing cheap holidays for unionists. The enterprise did not prosper, and TNT withdrew. However, Abeles and Hawke formed an enduring and intimate personal friendship. Hawke found in Abeles ‘an oasis of calm intelligence’ (d’Alpuget 2010, 265). Along with Rockey, Abeles provided financial as well as emotional support that helped enable Hawke’s burgeoning political career and his uninhibited private life.

Meanwhile Abeles had his eyes on air freight in Australia, and proposed a TNT joint venture with airline operator Ansett Transport Industries Ltd. When the managing director, Sir Reginald Ansett, rebuffed the approach, Abeles negotiated the purchase of a 23.5 per cent shareholding in Ansett in March 1972; a formal takeover offer followed, which Ansett resisted. Given the highly regulated nature of both aviation and broadcasting—Ansett operated television stations in Melbourne and Brisbane—the battle quickly became political. Sir Reginald voiced concerns about ‘foreign or other inappropriate interests’ (Canberra Times 1972, 1) controlling aviation, Victorians feared losing the Melbourne-based company to Sydney, and the Coalition-dominated Senate launched an inquiry. While Abeles was being quizzed by senators in Canberra, the Victorian Liberal premier, Sir Henry Bolte, moved to freeze the takeover, by legislating to prevent Victorian companies from being taken over by non-Victorian companies. TNT withdrew its bid, and agreed to limit its voting rights to 10 per cent in exchange for Abeles taking a seat on the Ansett board.

The defeat hurt Abeles. ‘Our pants were taken off politically,’ he told the journalist Trevor Sykes (1977, 107). He was frustrated as a director of a company he did not control, but bided his time until April 1979, when corporate raider Robert Holmes à Court mounted a market assault on Ansett. Abeles initially welcomed the opportunity to sell out TNT’s stake to the newcomer, but found common cause with media proprietor Rupert Murdoch who, seeing Ansett in play, bought a stake in September to capture its television licences. After protracted manoeuvres, TNT and Murdoch’s News Corporation Ltd emerged as co-owners of the airline business, with Abeles and Murdoch installed as co-chairs and co-managing directors in January 1980. The Murdoch connection helped TNT win distribution of Murdoch publications in Britain from his newly de-unionised Wapping plant in London. Abeles set about reinvigorating the airline, which also owned hotels and other tourism interests, and a substantial global aircraft leasing business, Ansett Worldwide Aviation Services (AWAS). By the mid-1980s, he was running ‘the world’s biggest transport empire’ (Stannard with Haselhurst 1986, 106), with fifty thousand employees, fifteen thousand trucks, sixty-eight ships, and offices in five hundred cities. International operations provided two-thirds of TNT’s $2.8 billion revenue compared to around one-third in 1972, though his effort to break into the North Atlantic shipping trade proved a costly failure.

Hawke’s election as Labor prime minister in March 1983 brought Abeles to new heights of political influence. Regarded by some union leaders as ‘the very personification of big monopoly capitalism’ (d’Alpuget 1982, 238) and distrusted by Labor’s left as a ‘spiv’ (Bramston 2022, 236), Abeles had opposed Hawke’s ambition to enter parliament for the Australian Labor Party, and offered to fund a new political grouping if Hawke would lead it. Yet he supported the new government’s financial and economic reforms, including the Prices and Incomes Accord agreed with the trade union movement. Indeed, invited by Hawke to the National Economic Summit convened in Canberra in April 1983, Abeles advocated expanding the accord to include business interests, lest business feel it was ‘play[ing] singles tennis against a championship doubles combination’ (National Economic Summit Conference 1983, 194). Abeles was appointed in 1984 to the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia. He fed Hawke insights about the domestic economy, international business, and the Liberal opposition.

In November 1988 Abeles was one of two people—the other was ACTU secretary Bill Kelty—invited by Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating to the prime minister’s Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, to witness Hawke’s secret undertaking to hand the prime ministership to Keating after the 1990 election. The meeting lasted just ten minutes; Abeles claimed later that he had not been concentrating and only realised its significance when the agreement became public. In the meantime, in August 1989, the Australian Federation of Air Pilots lodged a claim for a 30 per cent wage increase. Hawke rejected the bid as a challenge to the accord’s principles of wage restraint, and Abeles, a major employer of the pilots, offered strong encouragement. The subsequent pilots’ strike and mass resignation severely disrupted domestic aviation for thirty weeks. Abeles received death threats. But after the union’s capitulation, Ansett enjoyed higher productivity with fewer pilots flying longer hours. Following Hawke’s re-election in 1990, Abeles successfully thwarted the appointment of the influential cabinet minister Graham Richardson to the transport and communications portfolio, for reasons that were not clear. By May 1991, it had become apparent that Hawke would not step down as promised, and the Kirribilli agreement was leaked. Amid uproar, Keating challenged Hawke for the prime ministership—unsuccessfully in June, successfully in December.

Amid looming economic recession and laden with debt, the vast TNT empire was showing signs of overstretch. Its international operations were now a drag on earnings. An ambitious and complex joint venture with the post offices of the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, France, and Canada, breaking their monopoly over courier and express parcels, struggled to turn a profit. An ill-timed investment in a troubled United States domestic airline, America West, threatened earnings of Ansett and of AWAS. TNT also built and operated a monorail in Sydney’s central business district, but it became a high-profile dud. The company reported its significant loss in 1990–91, and its share price tumbled. Fred Millar, an original Alltrans director who had risen to become TNT’s chairman, decided it was time to make a change, and in September 1992 Abeles was unseated as managing director. Two months later he stepped away from Ansett.

In August 1993, after a failed boardroom attempt to regain control, Abeles quit TNT for good and flew away to Europe. He continued to invest privately, including in Europe with businessman and Liberal Party elder John Elliott. Returning to Australia, he worked from offices in Sydney. He contracted cancer and died on 25 June 1999 at home at Vaucluse, survived by his wife; the two adopted daughters of his first marriage, Michelle and Roberta; and a stepdaughter, Yvonne. Hawke visited his bedside as he died. His funeral was held at the Jewish funeral home Chevra Kadisha Sydney, and he was buried in the Jewish section of Rookwood cemetery.

Peter Abeles’s business career exemplified the dynamic impact of postwar immigration on the Australian corporate landscape and, too, the debt-fuelled corporate exuberance of the financially deregulated 1980s. He created a Sydney-based international transport empire from scratch, ultimately eclipsing other, Australian-born, self-made transport pioneers Reginald Ansett and TNT’s founder Ken Thomas. Candid about his lack of business training, Abeles likened his entrepreneurial style to ‘a free-playing musician … playing a tune without a score’ (Stannard 1986, 108). As a result his vast empire ‘did not always fit together very well’ (Sykes 1999, 22). Some investments seemed like ill-disciplined hunches, and Millar claimed later he had thwarted several of Abeles’s ‘crazy’ (Abrahams 2004, 69) investment ideas.

Tall, overweight, effortlessly multilingual, with thick-framed glasses and a big cigar, he entranced business reporters. One described him as ‘charming, erudite, sensitive and considerate,’ combining ‘a rhinoceros-like business hide with [a] cultured, intellectual style’ (Stannard 1986, 106); another dubbed him, more simply, an ‘amiable predator’ (Sykes 1977, 102). Investigative reporters repeatedly searched his ‘empire of influence’ (Bacon et al. 1985, 25) for evidence of improprieties and criminal ties, and uncovered Mafia links to his United States trucking operations. Appointed AC in 1991, he was a significant donor to cancer and other medical research, and chaired Opera Foundation Australia. His estate was reported as $25 million, and after his death his wife and his ex-wife disputed the terms of his bequests in a bitter court case.