But don’t expect dairy and land baron Tony Perich to brag about his wealth. Or talk much at all publicly for that matter. He’s never seen the need.
As for moving into the city of Sydney any time soon, forget it.
“Why would I want to move into Sydney when I have the Blue Mountains out there?” the 72-year-old Perich tells The Weekend Australian in the first wide-ranging major media interview of his life. “I’ve made my money out there, the people have been good to us. I will never move to Sydney. Ever. Ever. I don’t believe in it.’’
The Perich family is best known for its property development empire, which controls thousands of housing lots in western Sydney, a 50 per cent stake in the Narellan Town Centre, and the 1100-hectare Oran Park Town project in southwest Sydney. He and his brother Ron’s Greenfields Development Company has formed landmark joint-ventures with state government developer Landcom at Oran Park and worked jointly on other sites with partners.
The family’s Oran Park Podium shopping centre, boasting the largest Woolworths supermarket in Australia, opened its doors last month and Tony Perich has just been named the Urban Taskforce Property Person of the Year.
He and Ron are extremely close and have worked together in business for half a century.
“It is very important to stay together,” Mr Perich says. “Our success comes from the fact that everything we earn, we put back into the business.”
Each has his personal diary complete with epithets and sayings that have shaped their lives. So do they clash? “Yes, everyone has that. The biggest clashes are when we expand too much and one of us says, ‘we don’t need to do any more’,’’ he says. “We sit in the office. His desk is there, and mine is here. We have always sat side by side. We aren’t in the office much, mind you,’’ he adds, before giving a big bellow of laughter.
Tony and Ron Perich still live at Bringelly on the same tract of land the family purchased in 1963 for its first dairy farm after their parents, Kolombo and Julia, emigrated to Australia from Croatia and started making their living as market gardeners. Their parents later lived between them.
“We built our houses and put our father in the middle so we could keep an eye on him,’’ Tony Perich says with a wide smile.
The Perich sons later persuaded their father to move into the dairy industry and they set about building a state-of-the-art dairy at Bringelly, which now milks thousands of cows each day under the umbrella of the company’s Leppington Pastoral Company. The dairy is of a scale that rivals operations in the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
“I really have a passion for western Sydney,’’ says Perich, who successfully fought the federal government through the courts during the 1990s after it compulsorily acquired part of his farm holdings for Badgerys Creek Airport.
“Before my father passed away, we made a fair bit of money. And my father said to me: ‘This west out here has been really good to us. We should start giving back to the community.’ And we have ever since.’’
The family’s wealth in this year’s BRW Rich List topped $1 billion for the first time, putting it among 40 billionaires in the nation.
Yet as with other so-called tycoons of western Sydney such as chicken king Bob Ingham and housing pioneer Jim Masterton, the Periches stay under the radar and refuse to flaunt their wealth.
They are part of a breed of salt-of-the-earth billionaires who would rather be out in the field than sitting in a private jet or a luxury cruiser.
“The west is different, that is the answer to it,’’ Perich says. “No one is selfish out there. We all help each other.’’
Source: The Australian
