“But wait, there’s more!” That’s about all you need for a daily headline at the moment.
It’s hard to remember a time when we’ve had such an avalanche of shocking scandals damaging the top echelons of government and the corporate elite in such a short space of time. Even the media is finding it difficult to keep up with the daily — no, hourly — litany of atrocities.
On Thursday we heard all about Christine Holgate, the AusPost CEO who had been stood aside over handing out an armful of Cartier watches to her managers in the government-owned entity. Then, just 24 hours later, Friday was another red letter day.
It was hard to top but Senate estimates managed it with another bombshell revelation: our top corporate cop, ASIC chair James Shipton, was also standing aside after taxpayers footed the $118,000 tab for handling his tax affairs.
This wasn’t his tax bill — God knows what that must be — but just the bill to accounting firm KPMG for organising his financials after his move from his previous Harvard job in the US. The original approved amount was a mere $4000.
As if that wasn’t enough we also found out that his deputy, Daniel Crennan, had received $70,000 in excess relocation expenses when he moved from Melbourne to Sydney back in 2018.
Perhaps we should be grateful he was only moving interstate to the same tax jurisdiction.
In the time-honoured tradition of pollies who repay the offending funds, so too did our two guardians of corporate behaviour — although there will be another inquiry to add to the Holgate one.
Jumping the gun, Crennan announced his resignation this morning, stating he was already planning to retire in July next year but would leave effective immediately “in the best interests of ASIC” so this would “not disrupt its important work”. Will Shipton be next? Stay tuned.
Not surprisingly the ASIC debacle overshadowed another story later on Friday from the current AusPost chair: he could find no board minutes of approval for the Holgate watch purchases. And for good measure, the total cost of the watches was actually $20,000 — not the $12,000 she claimed in the previous day’s evidence.
That didn’t stop some commentators jumping to her defence, starting with Eddie McGuire of all people.
In a lengthy rant about his “superstar” Collingwood board colleague, he attacked “hacks and dullards” and wasteful government members who engaged in the “politics of envy”. Given McGuire’s controversial and lengthy 22-year tenure as president of the football club, he is hardly one to lecture on good governance.
Meanwhile the rest of the media was doing contortions trying to work out which side they should be on in the fast-rising tide of muck. Right-wing business commentator Terry McCrann attacked the Liberal PM’s treatment of Holgate as being “peak stupid”, “hysteria on steroids” and worse, and said it proved Morrison did not understand how businesses work.
He was backed up by another veteran business writer and stablemate Bob Gottliebsen, while the AFR went full conspiracy mode with the headline “Did someone have it in for Christine Holgate?”
Morrison meantime continued frothing about Holgate — “appalled, shocked, outraged” — which only inflamed debate over degrees of disgrace. He was attacked for his selective attitude to accountability and hypocrisy over his different treatment of recent scandals.
Shipton was far worse than Holgate, the argument (rightly) goes. But neither were apparently as bad as giving $30 million to Lib donors for a $3 million parcel of land, which is currently being investigated by the AFP. And what about those sports rorts?
Speaking of which, there was another damaging story overshadowed by the others on this Black Friday of news. It was at yet another parliamentary inquiry: this time a NSW one into Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s involvement in her own version of sports rorts.
In staggering evidence, two of her key staffers admitted they destroyed key documents shown to the premier to approve a controversial council grants program favouring Coalition-held seats.
“Poor Gladys” is now “Shredder Gladys”.
So it was no surprise that Premier Investments chose late Friday to drop the news that CEO Mark McInnes had pocketed a $5.4 million salary and Solly Lew some $24 million in dividends when the company was raking in $67 million from JobKeeper.
There were no “appalled, shocked, outraged” comments from Solly’s close personal friend Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. (It’s hard not to do the degrees of disgrace thing).
Thank goodness the Crown inquiry wasn’t sitting on Friday. Or did I miss something?
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Didn’t Holgate come from Blackmores the company that has made donations to political parties and whose owner has also? Doesn’t Shipton have some family connection to the Liberal Party? Do Solly and Joshie go to the same Church?
Shipton’s father, Roger, was Liberal MHR for Higgins until 1990, when he was rolled by P Costello in pre-selection. However, I very much doubt that Solomn Lew and Josh Frydenberg go to any CHURCH (unless in an official capacity in the case of Josh), let alone the same one.
PaulM – just to add a little more detail about how the swings and roundabouts work. Shipton was replaced by Costello. Kelly O’Dwyer was a Costello staffer. She then replaced Costello in Higgins and, as Minister for Revenue and Financial Services (thus responsible for ASIC), she oversaw the recruitment process of the son of Costello’s predecessor.
There’s a clear principle to all this:
scandal with $20,000 – total, unrestrained outrage from Morrison
scandal with $100,000 or so – best resign now, or soon
scandal with $30,000,000 – it’s a bargain, you’ll see
scandal with a few $100,000,000 – nothing to see, all ok, everything’s fine
Morrison and his pals have no respect for those who only dip their hands in for small change. If you want to play with the big boys you have to grab a tens or hundreds of millions.
We should be careful not to condemn Scotty from Tourism Marketing for his outraged commentary regarding the management of taxpayer-owned enterprises. He does have some experience and expertise in such matters, having been CEO of Tourism Australia, which he left because … because… because…. actually did anyone ever find out why he left that agency so suddenly?
Wasn’t he sacked by then Liberal Tourism Minister, Fran Bailey, with the support of John Howard?
Yes, for reasons never explained. Karen Middleton had a go at it in The Saturday Paper on 8 June last year. Herewith an excerpt:
“Documents obtained by The Saturday Paper under freedom of information laws show Morrison received a pay rise less than a month before he was sacked, taking his annual base salary from $318,031 to $332,030, with discretion for his employer to add up to 2.5 percent on top.
Around the time of Morrison’s dismissal, it was suggested he was paid out after having his contract terminated more than a year early. Sources have since confirmed this.
It was long speculated that the sacking was the result of a personality clash between Morrison and Bailey or differences over her plans to restructure the agency.
But late last year, The Saturday Paper uncovered an auditor-general’s report from 2008 examining the handling of three major contracts, which had delivered a scathing assessment of Tourism Australia’s management.
The report provided the first indication as to the real reason Morrison was removed.
The contracts were worth $184 million, and the auditor focused most on the two biggest – those with companies M&C Saatchi for global creative services or advertising campaigns, and Carat for media placement.
The audit report revealed that information had been kept from the board, procurement guidelines breached and private companies engaged before paperwork was signed and without appropriate value-for-money assessments.“
exactly how he is operating now and, it seems, with more impunity
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/oct/26/scott-morrison-sent-additional-500000-worth-of-publicly-funded-covid-market-research
So what’s your takeaway on this data?
I can’t not think that Holgate is a Morrison dead cat to distract from NSW and Morrison’s rorts of hundreds of millions in Morrison’s ‘crony capitalism’ as Bernard phrased it. And Ratty, the public can sort of understand the quantum of $10,000 to $100,000 being ripped off; perhaps even a million here and there. Hundreds of millions is just too big to imagine, so it can’t be true, or so it would seem.
It is generally true that a crime cease to be a crime when carried out on a sufficiently large scale. Kill once for profit and you may well go down for murder. Run a corporation that kills many thousands for profit and you will probably get medals and national celebrity.
Thanks for the tariff schedule. Why dose it remind me of the old principle “if y’gonna lay on the B/S, use a trowel” ™ ® PJK.
Or, as Trump might say “do it bigly”.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels
Maybe an extra addition to the ‘corporate elite’ list could also be the University of Tasmania (UTAS) and its land deals, the massive pork barrelling (scam to win over the marginal/swinging seat of Bass) based on lies by UTAS and the previous vice-chancellor and expert liar, the disgraced Peter Rathjen,) that got it $150 Million from Fed Govt and same amount from state govt and in kind promises due to cosy relationship with local councils, mainly City of Launceston, who bend over backwards to give UTAS whatever it wants no matter what the public thinks or what the local consequences are. Richard Flanagan wrote about it in the Hobart media last year. Trouble is, it’s only Tasmania, so not on the media radar as important. But $150 million Fed funding on top of the other $250 million needed to move Launceston UTAS campus 3-4 kms to a flood zone that sites below high tide levels, outshines the Sports Rort affair.
At least the media were onto the Rathjen case because it wasn’t just Tasmania, and as was New York blogger and journalism academic was onto Rathjen https://michael-balter.blogspot.com/2020/05/peter-rathjen-serial-sexual-predator.html https://michael-balter.blogspot.com/2020/05/peter-rathjen-serial-sexual-predator.html
Is that Richard Flanagan the novelist?
Kevin Herbert, yes Richard Flanagan the novelist. It was a very pointed article. 20 April 2019, Headline – Flanagan: STOP WORK UNTIL UTAS REBUILDS TRUST” : “University of Tasmania will be building into the chaos caused by lack of a planning strategy for Hobart” Also on 7 June 2019 Richard Flanagan is mentioned on same topic – the dodginess of UTas and its patchwork inner city real estate. “GIVE US A PUBLIC MEETING ON UTAS CITY MOVEJOHN LIVERMORE: Only thorough consultation can address the obvious questions”
And for some comments on the article at the time:
https://lcc63.blogspot.com/2019/04/utas-letters-to-editor.html?m=0
Unfortuately Mercury is behind a pay wall, but might have a couple of free reads for first time viewers.
https://www.themercury.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=TMWEB_WRE170_a_GGL&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.themercury.com.au%2Fnews%2Fopinion%2Ftalking-point-stop-work-until-utas-rebuilds-trust%2Fnews-story%2Ff36d189147d79c693ff09e6943954f4d&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium
May I recommend the Tasmanian Inquirer for understanding the Merkin Isle?
https://tasmanianinquirer.com.au/
Also the best way to support real, local journalism.
Just who do these people think they are? …. Politicians? Coalition mates?
No, none of those things. Aspiring Opportunists for the most part. Or, maybe the other way round. Really doesn’t matter to them.
It is very concerning – the amount of corrupt goings-on that we seem happy to ignore. Someone sent me a quote about the Holocaust – that it happened because people were apathetic, not even energetic enough to turn a blind eye.
This enrages me – I am very angry about all the rorts that emerge seemingly every day. But who can I complain to or galvanise into action to do something about this corruption? Helen Haines put a private bill to a totally empty House.
I hope this Federal Government is becoming more aware of how many people do notice their ‘jobs for mates’ and blatant rorts and gaming of the system. I hope there are enough people who think as I do.
Excuse my cynicism, but i think the neo-liberal democracies went past a tipping point a few decades ago ..and the 5th rate column of the 4th estate went along with them as a cheering squad..Even voting doesn’t seem it will fix it..Just throw a few well targeted focus group bribes, pay offs, rorts, to enough of select people who notice, and meanwhile on with the big business as usual show..The gaming of the system is a serious undermining of social democracy .A serious undermining of the social contract rule of law, which exacerbates & promotes major societal problems, leading to reactionary law & order..spin.rinse.repeat into a downward spiral(democratically), if not seriously checked & balanced. When one can only look on aghast, it’s bloody dire..
So long as the Murdoch media condone it with silence, there will be no repercussions. That’s how we judge dodgy governance these days – if the Murdoch rags don’t go on about it then it’s OK.
What about the ABC.?
Michael Pascoe goes back over the maths on government grant rorts
Anne M F, American Professor of History Timothy Snyder writes, talks (including on YouTube) and warns about that very thing – turning a blind eye – in 20th century eastern european history and its relevance for democracy now. Very concerning as you say. and depressing.