By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
At Newington College, where tuition costs up to $40,000 a year, the decision to admit girls has triggered plenty of apocalyptic thundering: the school’s council chair Tony McDonald has become a lightning rod for the outrage of a certain type of deeply triggered Old Boy.
But we think it’s a little unfair to accuse McDonald, a lawyer and professional director type, of being a Trojan Horse for wokeism.
Newington College is in the middle of a co-ed fight.Credit: Steven Siewert
After all, of the four ASX-listed company boards McDonald has graced, three – Diverger, Snowball Group and 8IP Emerging Companies Ltd – were entirely male, according to their most recent annual reports. Coincidentally, those three have all since been delisted.
Nonetheless, McDonald seems to have learned a few things about running listed companies. Last year, he proudly told the college’s magazine that he ran the council just like an ASX board.
“We follow an ASX public company equivalent skills and people diversity matrix,” he said.
McDonald, who has been on the college council for 17 years, and chair for nine, might therefore be aware that the ASX is a little sceptical of tenures as long as his own. In its most recent corporate governance council guidance principles, the ASX says a board should regularly assess whether any director with over 10 years of service was too close to management.
Indeed, following the royal commission into institutional response to child sexual abuse, Newington’s fellow Uniting Church schools, including MLC, Pymble Ladies College and Knox adopted new constitutions which, reflecting those ASX principles, limited a council member’s tenure to three successive terms. Newington, meanwhile, is still governed by an Act of NSW Parliament (from 1922), which sets no such limits on tenure.
Anyway, Newington is clearly reeling from all the bitterness about going co-ed, because the response to our thorny questions about governance and succession planning was quite defensive.
“We can tell by the content of your questions that this is part of a campaign by a small group whose intention is to destabilise the college because of the decision by college council to move to co-education,” a college spokesperson told CBD.
“As with all their other accusations, which have been purely designed to generate negative publicity, this is a deliberate twisting of the facts.”
Now CBD reckons any move that drags a joint like Newington into the 21st century is a good one. But to do that effectively, you may need to follow 21st-century corporate governance standards, too.
IN DA CLUB
Sometimes, even Young Liberals grow up and get a real job.
In the case of Harry Hughes, former NSW Liberal staffer and more importantly, the nephew of Lucy Turnbull, that means leaving the sordid world of party politics behind and opening up a bar-cum-nightclub.
Hughes, described to this column as both a Young Liberal about town and a regular of the Hemmes-sphere, has taken over the old Bridge Lane Bar across the road from Merivale’s cantonese fine-diner Mr Wong in Sydney’s CBD.
Song of Eve, as Hughes’ new joint is named, hosted its grand opening on Friday night, sponsored by Grey Goose vodka.
The bar’s opening is a bit of a redemption arc for Hughes, who in 2017 was dumped as a staffer by then NSW planning minister Anthony Roberts after then-premier Gladys Berejiklian wanted him to lose a few staff.
And while Harry comes from true blue Liberal Party royalty (outside the obvious Turnbull connection, his grandfather Tom Hughes is a former attorney-general and his dad Michael Hughes briefly ran the party’s finances), we hear there was nary a Macquarie St spiv in sight on Friday night.
FAKE NEWS
Red faces at another newspaper group on Monday morning after several news sites including The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun fed the insatiable reader interest in all things Donald Trump by posting a video titled “Donald Trump back on golf course after shooting”.
The short video, posted by US republican senator Mike Lee, was shot through a rainy window and showed Trump wearing a MAGA cap and walking over to a golf buggy before climbing onboard and driving away.
Pure internet catnip, but totally untrue.
In reality, the presidential candidate was heading for Milwaukee to attend the Republican National Convention one day after he was shot at during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.