By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
Rugby Australia boss Hamish McLennan seemed unfazed by the Wallabies’ French humiliation, continuing to host glitzy soirees in Paris well after the lads made their early flight home.
McLennan finally returned to Sydney on Wednesday morning determined to stay on, despite bearing responsibility for the disastrous decision to hire recently departed Wallabies coach Eddie Jones.
Pack your bags – Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan arrives at Sydney Airport on Wednesday.Credit: Nine
And while the RA boss has vanishingly few supporters among the dwindling ranks of local rugby fans, at least one person was willing to get on Instagram and crash-tackle the haters.
In response to a comment on a Wallabies post about Jones’ departure, which questioned why McLennan remained in the job, our brave punter explained the chairman must stay on “because there is no better person for the impossible job. You try.”
That account appears to belong to one Lucinda McLennan, which just happens to be the name of Hamish’s wife. And the account’s bio just happens to contain a link to a real estate listing for the South Coast estate the McLennans are currently out to sell. Plus an account for Mrs McLennan’s now-defunct lifestyle website.
Lucinda wasn’t finished, claiming that Jones had a “work ethic like no other and nothing but the best intentions”.
“He came into a dire situation and at the very least improved the winning spirit of the Wallabies. The coach doesn’t make the players. Good luck with whatever you decide to do next Eddie I hope you enjoyed the Portuguese chicken!” she said, referencing a top secret dinner at the McLennans’ former Lavender Bay mansion where they tried, successfully, to woo Eddie away from England.
“Don’t listen to the boos [sic] and the haters. It’s so wrong,” she continued.
When other punters chuckled at an apparent family connection between our keyboard warrior and Hamish, McLennan hit back.
“What’s so funny. Knowledge is power. You have none,” she wrote.
“And you say cringe. Your profile is the biggest cringe,” she replied to another poster, before telling them to “go back to ‘drinking your beer’“.
Lucinda didn’t appear alongside Hamish (who ignored CBD’s messages) when he arrived at Sydney Airport Wednesday morning with the world’s largest Longchamp bag in tow. Perhaps she was busy posting.
PHARM BOYS
As well as being one of the most relentless lobby groups in Canberra, the Pharmacy Guild also presides over a sprawling network of businesses under the Guild Group.
This week, the Guild made a bit of dough – around $20 million all up – after farming off its superannuation arm (yes it has one of those, plus a law firm, and an insurance outfit) to Future Super, one of those woke funds that doesn’t invest in fossil fuels.
All business as usual if not for some of the behind-the-scenes protagonists involved. As CBD recently reported, the Guild’s new chief executive is Gerard Benedet, the co-founder of conservative rabble rousers Advance Australia.
Future Super, meanwhile, was co-founded by Simon Sheikh, who came to prominence as national director of Get Up, the very group Advance was created to take on. What’s more, teal financier Simon Holmes à Court is one of Future Super’s major investors.
And while such political tribalism always fades away when there’s a deal to be struck, we’re still not quite over Sheikh’s evolution from the face of leftie activism to the boss of a greenwashing super fund.
Meanwhile, the money from the sale will go straight into the Guild’s fighting fund, which does exactly what it says on the tin.
SAFE TRAVELS
Qantas industrial relations boss Nathan Safe caused some ripples in Canberra on Tuesday when he told a Senate inquiry into the government’s proposed industrial relations changes that the airline had to cut wages and conditions for its workers or go under.
The name and face rings a bell. It’s the same Nathan Safe who led the Australian and International Pilots Association as president back in the early days of IR hardliner Alan Joyce’s tenure in the cockpit, battling Joyce’s slash-and-burn approach to turning the carrier’s fortunes around.
Now, that is a turnaround for Safe, we thought, although not as dramatic as we’d hoped.
Turns out that Nathan never left his job as a Qantas pilot when he was leading the union – which prefers to be known as a professional association, while we’re on the subject.
Safe then moved into pilot management in 2018 and ascended through the altitudes of the airline’s HR set-up over the next few years, before landing in the acting role of executive manager of industrial relations.
Of course, with a name like that, he was always destined to go far in the aviation game.
MAKING HIS MARK
In his past life as emperor of Western Australia, mining industry consultant Mark McGowan had little love for Sydney and NSW, frequently lashing the Premier State for its handling of COVID-19.
Now departed from the premiership, the man Dom Perrottet once called the “gollum of Australian politics” has no qualms heading east. He was spotted at the annual dinner for Gerard and Anne Henderson’s conservative talk shop The Sydney Institute, along with a cast of business and political heavies. A few guys from the Pharmacy Guild even got selfies with Mark at the afters.
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