Which part of the word public do these women not get?
Public office Gladys. Public service Christine. Public company Helen.
They all come with different duties, responsibilities, and God forbid, accountability, than is often expected in unlisted companies.
In the private sector it’s no problem to spend hundreds of thousands on pot plants and chauffeurs during an economic crisis: you don’t have pesky shareholders to which you must answer, while you can ignore government regulations, media investigations and corruption allegations.
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Actually, not so much.
This past week has not been a glorious one for some high-profile women who are making a mockery of the myth that putting females in power will universally lift overall the standards of everything from boards to politics.
In these cases they are in danger of behaving just as badly as of the worst of the blokes. They are looking every bit as greedy and desperate to hang onto their titles and perks; the word “governance” is just a nice piece of corporate jargon, apparently.
Let’s start with the latest scandal du jour.
Almost former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate’s list of alleged atrocities is long. Cutting back postal services while crying poor in the pandemic, then asking low-paid workers to use their own vehicles on their own time to help the backlog. Cosying up to Pauline Hanson. Spending $700,000 on office greenery and some $300,000 on her own personal expenses including chauffeur-driven cars.
She racked up that litany of bad press in only a few months.
And last month there was the embarrassing media interview where she tried to ignore government advice against paying executive bonuses this year. She was quickly overruled.
Learning nothing, she fronted Senate estimates yesterday with the bizarre and totally incorrect defence that she wasn’t wasting taxpayers’ money when handing out Cartier watches to select managers.
What takes the cake is not the Marie Antoinette flourishes, nor her seeming inability to grasp the basics of the ownership of the entity she leads. Nor is it her ability to prompt swift action from a PM who usually can’t recognise the word accountability and only then after months of pressure.
What is incredible is that she makes her arrogant, overpaid predecessor Ahmed Fahour look good.
When it was finally revealed in 2017 that the former NAB banker was being paid a secret $5.6 million salary, Fahour became a pariah in Canberra and with the rest of Australia.
So when Holgate, the former Blackmores chief, was appointed to replace him on a much reduced salary of “only” $2.5 million, she was hailed for that as well as being the first woman CEO.
Normally Holgate’s train-wreck appearance before the Senate this week would win the Tone Deaf award, but she has some stiff competition from Crown chair Helen Coonan.
There were numerous damaging admissions to the NSW casino licence inquiry this week, best summed up with one of her many excuses for failure: it was only “ineptitude”.
Thank goodness — at least it wasn’t wilful negligence or criminal incompetence then.
Yesterday saw three Crown directors voted back onto the board thanks to the support of discredited major shareholder James Packer who even himself conceded during the inquiry that they could do with some new blood. As did Coonan, but apparently just not when the other shareholders might think it’s time.
No wonder Gladys Berejiklian is still playing the female card. Thanks to Holgate and Coonan, she managed to not look the worst woman in the news this week. Just.
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Why mention that they’re women?
Oh..that’s right…..your gender ID headline would be shot…….yaaaaawn.
Isn’t this part of the point of the story – that putting females into positions of power will universally lift overall standards, as Perrett says. Obviously, this is not always the case …
Your point re putting women into these positions will lift standards is risible…. as are the comments below..
This is gender ID dross….which no successful women would agree with.
In my many years working to Board level in Oz & international companies I never met an executive who was judged by their genitalia.
This kind of story line is passé in the real corporate world in 2020.
Did you actually read the article, get the point?!
I read it…..it’s feminzero doctrinaire dross….of the king you get on The Drum.
No, it makes clear that incompetent, arrogant, corrupt and ignorant people can be male or female.
Which is exactly my point…
Are you for real?….or are you taking the piss?
Hey Kev, are you a liberal party hack?
Hey Tony….grow up little guy…..you sound inexperienced in corporate affairs.
…and you sound like you wouldn’t pass a simple comprehension test. Read the article again. Or maybe you can’t assimilate the content…
It’s gender ID dross. Eos.
It seems to have been missed that some women e.g. the likes of Bronnie Bishop (aka helicopter user extraordinaire), Sophie (the unelectable) Mirabella and others including the ‘handmaidens’ who serve the chump in charge in Washington have been giving ‘powerful’ men a run for their money for a long time. Perhaps the ‘gender’ debate would be a lot more interesting if the attempts to paint ‘women’ as some homogeneous group of talented, caring people was based on a little more reality and recognised that the actions of some women are theirs and theirs alone to own. That might mean acknowledging that some women are making dumb, corrupt, self-serving but definitely not ‘data driven’ decisions for themselves just like some men.
When that happens we might have a discussion that can address the root cause of these behaviours instead of having to ignore gender based dog whistles.
The contemporary examples are all very well but a survey of the management journal literature identified the farce of (so called) ‘affirmative action’ – damned idiotic phrase – 25 years ago.
There is NO correlation between company performance and the gender of the CEO or the composition of the board. In fact, there is a some degree of increased dissatisfaction among female low-paid workers when the company (or organisation) has senior female staff.
Exploring the detail would take us too far afield but the reader is at liberty to make an exercise of it.
Christine Holgate is not a public servant, she is head of a government business enterprise: government owned and responsible to meet community service obligations, but operating like any other corporate, accountable to a board.
Those watches were given to celebrate extraordinary success. Banks now pay for banking services provided by post offices, this has given a lifeline to licenced post offices around the country. It was appropriate to recognise the leaders, and a gift can mean much more than money. The cost is small, less than 1/100th each of 4 senior salaries.
Australia post has done a great job during the coronavirus in coping with huge parcel numbers, hiring their own fleet of aeroplanes and changing vehicles for local delivery. We need more leaders like Christine – men or women.
Really, Lily? When last in Perth (a few years ago) a letter or a parcel could be sent from the outskirts to (e.g.) Fremantle for next day delivery. Recently (a month or so ago) it required four days for a letter to be sent from Bentley (Curtin University) to Inglewood – more or less inner city.
During the 80s and the 90s (yes some time ago) Oz post had no clue whatsoever as to the compositoin of articles that were being delivered via its services. I know some who were (on excellent contracts – no applause please) engaged in (excuse the pun) sorting the mess. Fifteen years latter it was little better. As to how it set tariffs could NOT have been either informed or rational.
I could look it up but a decade ago NZ had residential postal delivery on Saturdays. Having spent about 1/3 of my life living in other countries (1st to 3rd world) I can say that the service offered by Oz post compares with something like that of Syria or Egypt or Russia; less than China and much less than Hong Kong or Singapore. For what it is worth the privatisation has diminished the effectiveness of the NZ service (if it is of any consultation)
Just to add, the UK has six day a week postal delivery too.
Until it was privatised in 2013 the Royal Mail delivered twice a weekday.
Odd thing is Lily, even Mr Morrison seems supportive of the criticism of her over this, or is that just him being his usual misogynistic self? Oh, and any recognition of hard work done is owed to the staff, you know, the ones who really do the work.
There is more than meets the eye,what did she do to upset scomo?
Probably didn’t stuff it up fast enough to make it ready for privatisation.
Nothing, but she’s an easy scapegoat so Scummo can do faux outrage to distract from the far more serious, multi-faceted corruption in his own ( and GB’s) government
Gee… the election disaster of the last Federal poll remains stuck in the craw of the well beaten Greens/ALP crew.
The result signaled that there’s a new Australian electorate, free from the doctrinaire dross of left v right.
Yeah, nah.
I own the Post Office.
They paid a stupid amount to Ahmed, and to top it off now have this nonsense from Holgate.
It is incidental she is a woman.
This just looks like one more “Celebratory CEO” that believes their own hubris.
Janine makes a fair point.
I love seeing women succeed at the top, and I believe it is good for us all when they do.
It’s a shame we have 3 duds in just one week.
I am not surprised they are either the darlings of the right (Holgate) or are true-blue LNP ideologues.
Connections seem to matter more than talent.
What in fact these women do is the worst of it’s kind, disservice to all women who are seeking and/or doing an honest days work. I have long observed that to advance within the LNP ranks, women appear to have to remove from their personalities any sneaking shred of femininity. Begone any compassion. Begone any civility. Become nasty. Become underhanded. Become just another Male Bastard, or forget promotion, you’re too “weak” to do the job that your male masters expect you to be. So….What are we left with? If castration is what men would fear most, what has occured to these women of the LNP that makes them afraid, that they conform to the demands of the jobs they are allowed to aspire to, with the emphasis on the word “allowed”. Because that is how it IS in the LNP, still.
Well, women can be just as much of an asshole as men can be, no need to put them on a pedestal. Diversity is important and there are plenty good female leaders – but I do think there’s an unconscious bias towards men in many senior positions.
There is a certain amount of “catch-22”. Males, (making a generalisation : I know) typically, have the experience and their C.Vs look better; seldom breaks of service or whatever. As to how women get get the necessary experience is much less of an issue, nowadays, than it once was.
Yet, as Doug points out, there is a ‘point of inflection’ where contacts matter more than talent. I suspect that the brigadier who was examined over the suicide of a corporal had superior political connections in order to move from colonel. Such is life.
That’s right Raymond, mostly women have been promoted into big corporate positions only when they mimic the bastardry that men role modelled all those years. They do have to play that game, as a rule (with exceptions) otherwise they are considered weak. So we get more representation of women without any change to culture.
It’s commonly known as evolutionary biology, for which you’re most welcome to provide a plan to eliminate/modify it after it’s 800,000 year gestation.
What blows me away about these threads is that it appears there are no posters who’ve worked to Board level in the Aussie corporate sector – thus there is no comprehension of what constitutes ‘corporate culture’….and yet everyone has a strong opinion on what needs to change.
It’s the equivalent of never having played sport at an elite level, yet being an expert in how success may be maximised.
Are you inferring that Homo sapiens have been in existence for circa 800k years? If so you will find that 200k years is a more realistic interval of time.