Holgate and Coonan and chairs behaving badly

The chairs of Crown Resorts and Australia Post have both behaved badly. One could be gone by the end of the month and the other should have resigned 11 months ago.

Former Australia Post boss Christine Holgate. Pictured: John Feder/The Australian

Christine Holgate and Helen Coonan: two stories of chairmen behaving badly. Very, very – he should long ago have been sacked – badly in the case of one.

Tuesday, the Victorian Royal Commission into the sorry saga of the once-was-luminous lush property sprawling south of the Yarra was told by Crown’s senior counsel Michael Borsky that Crown expected to have a new chairman by the end of the month and that current chairman Coonan would be gone.

Funny about that; it was an “expectation” that Crown hasn’t bothered to share directly with either its shareholders or the ASX more formally – and which prompts me to once again ask, lamenting for something like the 721st time: why do they do it?

Why do companies seem to quite deliberately set out to keep their shareholders not informed; to only tell them what’s the barest minimum they think they can get away with?

Coonan is supposed to have indicated she planned to step down as soon as the group selected a new chairman. Oh indeed? I can find no statement to anything remotely like that effect by Crown to the ASX.

Former Australia Post boss Christine Holgate. Picture: John Feder/The Australian

It was not in her address to the AGM last October. Not in the interim profit statement. Not when she became temporary executive chairman in February. And certainly not in the statement Tuesday announcing the departure of Crown’s Melbourne CEO.

Indeed every statement she and Crown have made has so far suggested she was there, as chairman, for the long term.

Do you think, do you indeed really thunk, that the chairman should actually tell shareholders that had changed and she planned to leave? Almost immediately, like this month?

I know damn well, I’ll be lamenting - at least - another 721 times the way companies treat their shareholders like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them shite.

Now I’m certainly glad that Holgate has received some justice for her appalling treatment at the hands of two men: a prime minister behaving utterly disgracefully and a chairman behaving even more disgracefully.

Although it goes without saying that $1m - or ‘250 Cartiers’ under the PM’s waste measurement metric – doesn’t come close to what she should have got. More like ‘2500 Cartiers”.

Crown Resorts chair Helen Coonan. Picture: Adam Yip

So PM, if ‘Four Cartiers’ was such a terrible waste of taxpayer money, what about the, at least, “750 Cartiers’, adding all then direct costs, your crazed panicked rant has cost?

What made the behaviour of then – and, incredibly, still now - AusPost chairman Lucio Di Bartolomeo so much worse than the PM’s was his duty to his CEO and the best interests of AusPost.

Instead, he supinely bent to the PM’s outrageous and utterly improper, and so damaging to AusPost, demand that Holgate effectively be sacked.

Indeed. How could a chairman sign off on a statement like the one ‘agreed’ yesterday by Holgate and AusPost and not have accompanied it with their immediate resignation.

The key sentence is: “Australia Post acknowledges that it has lost an effective CEO following the events on the morning of 22 October 2020”.

So Di Bartolomeo is all-but stating he allowed the PM to bully him into effectively sacking a CEO that in the best interests of AusPost should not have been sacked – and would leave AusPost without a permanent successor CEO for what is now eleven months! Further, it wasn’t the events on the morning of that infamous day that “lost” the CEO, but what happened in the afternoon and early evening.

First came the PM’s “she can go” rant in Question Time, then secondly the Minister Fletcher’s call to Di Bartolomeo demanding Holgate be stood down; and then chairman and board supinely bending and effectively sacking her.

The chairman not Holgate should have gone 11 months ago, he must go now.

Originally published as Holgate and Coonan and chairs behaving badly