Hello Martin: Pakula takes off with Helloworld

Helloworld boss Andrew Burnes likes to be besties with the politically-well connected.

Burnes’ good pal, former federal treasurer Joe Hockey told staff at the Australian embassy in Washington – while Hockey was serving as ambassador there in 2017 – to meet with one of Burnes’ executives.

At the time Helloworld, in which Hockey held $1.3 million worth of shares, was pitching for lucrative diplomatic travel contracts.

Martin Pakula is now a non-executive director at Helloworld.Credit: Simon Schluter

Another former Liberal luminary, Matthias Cormann, admitted to taking thousands of dollars in freebies from the company just weeks before Helloworld was announced as the winner of a tender by Cormann’s department, finance, for $1 billion in federal government flight and accommodation spending.

But with Joe and Matthias very much yesterday’s men, politically speaking, Burnes’ changing taste in friends hints that the former Liberal Party treasurer reckons Labor is here to stay for at least the next little while.

Former Victorian Labor state minister Martin Pakula, part of post-pandemic exodus of talent and experience from Dan Andrews’ frontbench, is to join Helloworld as a non-executive director as the travel outfit – itself knocked around badly by the COVID crisis, tries to recover.

Company chairman Garry Hounsell was talking a big game on Wednesday as he announced the new recruit, a horse racing tragic who is well liked in both state and federal Labor circles, but more importantly who was the state’s tourism minister until very recently.

“Mr Pakula … has served the people of Victoria faultlessly for many years, and we are looking forward to his input to the ongoing development of Helloworld Travel,” Hounsell said.

Now, Pakula was far from the worst performer among the many to have inhabited Andrews’ cabinet over the years, and it certainly took talent for him to skip away unscathed from the hotel quarantine debacle in which his department was up to its whatsits, but we reckon “faultlessly” is pushing it a bit.

We’ll be intrigued at what investors make of all this. Helloworld shares, which traded for more than a fiver before the pandemic are still languishing around the $1.50 mark.

That shouldn’t bother Pakula too much. He doesn’t have any.

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