The voting irony in Costello’s fall

Peter Costello has enjoyed the sort of support from shareholders he could have only dreamt about as a politician. Too bad no one’s asking them what they think.

Former Nine chair Peter Costello.

A question that has not been asked in the frenzy of the last few days over the now former chairman of the Nine media group, Peter Costello.

Yes, but did shareholders of Nine – who after all, elect directors and so indirectly the chairman, just as voters do MPs and PMs – want him gone?

I pose that question not to make any counter-judgment on the outcome of ‘that event’.

An event that took place at the most ironic of locations for a man who had to accept the second prize of chairmanships in lieu of the prime ministership he had long lusted after.

Indeed, I suggest, from the look on Costello’s face - captured via the camera on the chest of The Australian’s reporter, sprawled on the floor – that he knew, that he really knew, there was only one exit from this story. His.

I pose the question precisely because, as the chairman of Nine, he had totted up the sort of support from shareholders that he wouldn’t have dreamt in his most exaggerated fantasies he could ever have got in politics.

Indeed, as I have written before, Costello would get the 99 per cent-plus votes, year after year; the sort of level that a Fidel Castro or an ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin would have blushed at securing via their, ahem, ballot boxes.

This is the highest and most sustained level of support for a chairman from shareholders, voting at the annual meetings, that I have ever seen at an Australian public company.

At the Nine AGM just last November, the four motions got between 97.93 per cent and 99.96 per cent endorsement.

Costello might have been a tad miffed he got only the 97.93; the other director standing for election, Mandy Pattinson, got the 99.96.

In three of the eight years he presided over Nine AGMs as chairman, he and his board scored 99 per cent-plus votes on every motion at those meetings.

Over the last seven years, the lowest ‘yes’ vote on any motion at a Nine AGM was 92 per cent.

And that was to grant the then-CEO additional payments: an easy target for opposition.

And remember, every year shareholders would be voting on the ‘rem report’ –

the remuneration report – which offers them a ‘free kick’ to, well, boot the board up the collective backside.

Yet in his eight years as chairman, Costello got over 99 per cent of endorsement of the rem report four times, and two other times it was over 98 per cent.

Only his first rem report vote as chairman, in 2016, saw something like a shareholder protest.

The ‘yes’ vote that year was 78 per cent, still above the 74.9 per cent that would have a triggered (an entirely symbolic) ‘first strike’.

But that was as much a vote on the previous chairman.

Costello only became chairman in February, seven months through the 2015-16 year.

The all-encompassing irony.

He spent the great bulk of his life where 50.1 per cent spelt success and fame if not quite fortune; yet a decade of near flawless 99 percenters couldn’t save him, at the final count.

Originally published as The voting irony in Costello’s fall