McCloy steps down as chair of family business to focus on health
ONE of Hunter’s most influential businessmen of the past half century, Jeff McCloy, has stepped down as chairman of the company that bears his name. Mr McCloy, who has motor neurone disease, advised staff of his decision at the opening of the company’s new headquarters at Kurri Kurri last Friday.
“It has been on and off in my mind for some time. With the opening of the new office and the deterioration in my health, I knew it was time to step aside,” Mr McCloy said.
“I assured everybody that I will continue to annoy them now and again.”
While his formal MND diagnosis came seven months ago, Mr McCloy, 75, said, in retrospect, his symptoms began appearing several years ago.
“I didn’t understand what they [the early symptoms] were,” he said.
“I used to walk out to the breakwater but it became increasingly hard. After a while, I found it difficult to get to Nobbys and my walks kept getting shorter.
“These days, with some difficulty, I get from the bedroom to the lounge room.”
Mr McCloy will remain the largest shareholder of the company, which he estimated was worth about $230 million.
Former Hunter Development Corporation head Paul Broad will become company chair. Shane Boslem and James Goode will be joint managing directors.
“We have a great balance of incredible people; I’m lucky to have them,” Mr McCloy said. “With the structure I have put in place the company should be able to go on for another 30 to 40 years with the land it owns.”
Mr McCloy took over his father’s Belmont building business in the late 1970s. Over five decades, the self-confessed ‘shy man’, has become one the most prominent business leaders in the region’s modern history.
Mr McCloy nominated the construction of the $102 million John Hunter Hospital in the late 1980s, the project that put the McCloy Group on the map, as his proudest professional achievement.
“We were told we were too small to build it. We were told we had to get a partner and they introduced us to KB Hutchinson,” Mr McCloy said.
The joint venture partner went broke mid-way through the project leaving the McCloy Group to finish the hospital after buying out KB Hutchinson.
“It was a special project that was ordered very quickly,” Mr McCloy said.
“It was commercially very successful for us, largely because we ran it out of Newcastle will all Newcastle people.”
On the flip side, Mr McCloy said the Green Point housing project in Lake Macquarie had been his most frustrating experience.
While ultimately a commercial success, he still shakes his head at the obstacles that he faced.
“The council staff were against it and there were more action groups than you could poke a stick at,” he said.
“The lesson I took away was don’t give up. Use the laws of development as they should be used and don’t bow to activists.”
In recent decades the company has constructed thousands of homes across the region and beyond.
It’s no surprise that its new headquarters, which is jointly owned by the Stevens Group, is at Kurri Kurri.
The former coalfields town is at the epicentre of one of the state’s fastest-growing population centres.
“The answer to our housing problem, in my view, is the regions and Kurri is central to that,” Mr McCloy said.
While building new estates is undoubtedly lucrative, Mr McCloy said he and the company’s leadership team were most interested in creating new communities.
“After you make your first $10 million you don’t really need much else,” he said.
“What has given me the greatest satisfaction and enjoyment is when you drive into one of these subdivisions and you see kids playing in the parks with their grandparents. You see the houses and the people who live there building a community and supporting the local economy.”
In a similar way, he also reflects on the hundreds of contractors presently working for the company across the Hunter.
“Before anything else you have to pay your bills. It’s a lesson I learnt from my dad very early on,” he said.
“It’s because of that our subcontractors have survived and prospered. Very few ever went broke doing a job for us.”
Mr McCloy has been a significant presence in the region’s political and sporting spheres for many years, as well as making many cultural and philanthropic contributions. Outside of business, Mr McCloy is best known for his stint as Newcastle lord mayor between 2012 and 2014.
A polarising figure, Mr McCloy is unapologetic for applying business principles to local government.
“My reason for running for mayor, quite frankly, is because I used to drive up and down Hunter Street and around the suburbs and there wasn’t one commercial project getting built, not one,” he said.
“I said to myself, ‘We have to be able to do better than this’.
“I also sensed the people of Newcastle wanted change so I decided to run and somehow got over the line.”
Along with driving a programto achieve greater council efficiency, Mr
McCloy spent considerable time encouraging Sydney-based developers to finally take Newcastle seriously.
“I encouraged them to come to Newcastle rather than fighting over every little scrap of land in Sydney.
Honeysuckle had the land, and slowly, they started to come,” he said.
Mr McCloy’s time as lord mayor ended abruptly in 2014 due to revelations made during ICAC’s infamous Operation Spicer hearings relating to $10,000 cash donations he made to Liberal Party candidates in the 2011 state election campaign.
“The reason for making those donations was because Newcastle had always been taken for granted by the Labor Party, whether it
was the federal government, the state government or the councils. I wanted to make a change,” he said.
“I was never charged with anything because I never sought anything or attempted to seek everything. I donated to people I didn’t even know.”
It still frustrates him that ICAC made much of his donations to Liberal Party candidates, but it was not interested in his long history of contributing to the Labor Party.
“In truth, if I look back over the history, I’ve been asked to donate and have donated more money to Labor than I either did to the Liberals,” he said.
“I had to go for lunch two or three times at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to have all the ministers sitting in front of me because they didn’t understand their own endangered species legislation.”
A decade on and with a High Court battle behind him, Mr McCloy has mostly moved on from the ICAC saga.
But he acknowledges its lasting impact on many others who were caught up in the “blood bath”.
“I don’t think about me as the individual, but so many other individuals are improperly accused of being corrupt who were not
corrupt,” he said.
“As soon as you associate the word corrupt with someone it sticks.”
NEWCASTLE HERALD
28th January 2025
WORDS BY: Matthew Kelly
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