Terry McCrann: Why Peter Costello is our 99 per cent man

In corporate life, former federal treasurer Peter Costello is notching up a remarkable record that is probably unrivalled in the developed world, says Terry McCrann.

Former federal treasurer Peter Costello. Picture: Josie Hayden.

PETER Costello continued the most extraordinary voting record we have ever seen in Australian corporate history — and in all probability in the entire developed world — at the Nine Entertainment AGM Thursday.

He gets the sort of overwhelming — and even that word is a gross understatement — “yes” votes that you usually only see in places like Stalin’s Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and certain necessary Democrat precincts in the early hours of the morning after last week’s presidential.

Since Costello became chairman of Nine in 2016, almost every motion put to an AGM has got a “yes” not just above 90 per cent but most of those indeed above 99 per cent.

This year, all five votes comfortably topped 90 per cent.

Two of them — including most amazingly for the remuneration report, usually, and increasingly often in these days of narky shareholders, the vehicle for a protest “no” vote — topped 99 per cent.

The two lowest were around 92 per cent in support of CEO performance rights; while the vote for Costello’s own re-election was “only” 98.7 per cent.

This means that of the 27 votes in total at the five AGMs of his chairmanship so far, fully 25 have got above 90 per cent and an extraordinary 18 of them above 99 per cent!

Only two have fallen short, so to speak — the worst being the 78 per cent recorded for the rem report in Costello’s first year as chairman, which he was only nominally responsible for.

Now, I doubt that he would have wanted quite this level of endorsement as a politician but he would certainly have liked another 1 or 2 per cent — not for himself in his own electorate but for the party — at that certain election in 2007.

Originally published as Terry McCrann: Why Peter Costello is our 99 per cent man