By Gemma Grant and Kishor Napier-Raman
Melbourne’s Celtic Club is no stranger to internal governance issues. And it appears there might be more instability ahead for the country’s oldest Irish club.
President Patrick McGorry, a celebrated psychiatrist and 2010 Australian of the Year, has decided not to recontest the top job at the upcoming elections on October 28.
Celtic Club president Patrick McGorry.Credit: Jason South
Didn’t Freud say something about the Irish being impervious to psychoanalysis? Actually – that was just Matt Damon’s character in The Departed.
When contacted by CBD, McGorry said he still intended to sit on the board, and hoped that his stepping down would make way for the new guard.
“Our whole plan has been to regenerate and rejuvenate the club. I’m probably one of the older members. It’s time to pass the baton onto a younger president,” he said.
Back in 2016, the club sold its long-held Queen Street headquarters to Malaysian-backed developer Belulah for $25.6 million. Since then, they’ve bought a South Melbourne venue which they’re now also looking to offload, and settled into a rental on Sydney Road in Brunswick.
“There are still some people grieving for Queen Street, but honestly, it’s a very small minority,” McGorry said, pointing to a failed attempt to overthrow the board earlier this year.
Names on ballot for the upcoming election, according to papers seen by CBD, include University of Melbourne professor Ronan McDonald, ex-Age journalist Seamus Bradley and former Merri-bek mayor John Kavanagh.
But as one member pointed out to us, there’s some dissatisfaction with the current election processes. With voting scheduled to take place before the release of financial results and subsequent annual general meeting, people are relying on “speculation, Chinese Whispers and vague rumours”, they said. Watch this space.
Optus’ outsourcing woes
We turn now to Optus, currently top of the table for Australia’s most embattled company, that is until Qantas finds a new way to screw over customers.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue and the company’s communications chief, Felicity Ross.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
The troubled telco suffered a Triple Zero outage last month which was linked to three deaths. Somehow, chief executive Stephen Rue is still standing, despite a similar outage just weeks later. Rue is relatively new in the job, and is surely all too aware that his predecessor, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, departed after presiding over a cyberattack and nationwide outage in successive years.
As Rue dodged calls for his head, and Optus began an all-too-familiar campaign of public self-flagellation, the blame shifted toward the telco’s habit of outsourcing call centre jobs to India and the Philippines.
While the company insisted that “human error,” rather than outsourcing was to blame, a call centre in Chennai, India was involved in handling the fallout from the botched firewall update that caused the September outage.
Everyone from the union to former competition czar Allan Fels has argued that Optus’ culture of cutting costs by shifting jobs to foreign call centres has been responsible for the telco’s woes. The Chennai centre came out of a 2018 deal with Finnish company Nokia (remember them?) and led to the axing of local jobs.
All this makes an August “Ask us Anything” article on the telco’s website, in which outsourcing expert Josh Walther provided advice to businesses looking to offshore jobs, all the more awkward.
“Buyer beware. Just like anything in life, if it sounds too cheap to be true, it probably is,” was among the pearls of wisdom Walther offered up.
An Optus spokesperson told CBD the company provided insights on a range of matters of importance to businesses it partnered with.
“Josh Walther is an external, independent expert on outsourcing who has provided his views as part of a series Optus launched to provide insights to business owners who have asked questions about a particular issue,” an Optus spokesperson told CBD.
“The experts consulted are not Optus employees, and their views are their own.”
Ta ta Tarascio
After more than five decades at the helm of one of Australia’s biggest private property companies, Salta founder Sam Tarascio snr is hanging up the hard hat.
And at the ripe old age of 81. We at CBD think that’s a pretty solid innings.
Salta founder Sam Tarascio snr (left) and his son, Sam Tarascio jnr.
Salta – which has built everything from apartment buildings to shopping centres to sprawling industrial complexes and docks – was established in the 1970s by Italian-born Tarascio. More recently, they’ve dedicated millions to the burgeoning build-to-rent sector.
Tarascio snr will stay with the company and take on the role of non-executive founding director, with his son Sam Tarascio jnr already acting as managing director. But the lineage doesn’t stop there. One of Sam snr’s grandkids is even working at the company – which Salta proudly spruiked in an Instagram post from August.
We wonder what retirement plans will be on the horizon? Currently ranked 93rd on the AFR Rich List with an estimated wealth of $1.75 billion, we’re sure Tarascio will be having a fine time indeed.
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