Scott Morrison should apologise to Christine Holgate and sack Australia Post chairman Lucio Di Bartolomeo

Well of course he should – apologise to former AusPost CEO Christine Holgate.

Indeed, the prime minister should have long since apologised; starting right back from the very moment he sat down in Parliament after his “she will stand aside or she can go” rant on that fateful day in Question Time back last October.

But the PM should also apologise to the Australian people for:

●Driving out of their business – to remind him: AusPost is owned by the Australian people, not the particular ministers of the day, far less even the government - a very, very good CEO, doing serious damage to their business.

●Wasting a very large sum of taxpayer money – at the very minimum, well over $1 million; and indeed quite probably multiples of that and certainly many, many multiples of that $20k cost of the infamous Cartier watches.

●And just generally, subjecting everyone to the on-going – and to repeat, taxpayer money-shredding - nonsense that has ensued, culminating in this Senate inquiry and now its report.

The inquiry has ended where it was always going to end, with the Labor and minor party senators castigating the government, the PM and the relevant ministers, and the AusPost chairman and board.

Former AusPost CEO Christine Holgate. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

They did so from a combination of, duh, playing politics, but also exercising logic on the plain and undeniable facts: the PM, the ministers, the AusPost chairman and board were always and undeniably wrong, and Holgate was always and undeniably wronged.

It also ended where it was always going to end on the other hand with the government senators debasing themselves by ‘concluding’ there was nothing to see here.

That’s because opening their eyes would have left them unable not to see a thoroughly debased PM.

Clearly Holgate was never going to emerge from this by being reappointed. All the caravans had moved on, including hers: she is now the CEO of one of AusPost’s main competitors, Toll Global Express.

She has a much harder job at Toll than she had at AusPost, where she really put the runs on the board, but did so from the springboard left her by her predecessor Ahmed Fahour.

In the last six months of her time as CEO – through to December last year - AusPost doubled its profit.

But the acting CEO and board quite deliberately chose to hide the spectacular increase – from their owners: you - in their profit statement.

Let’s see what happens to AusPost’s profits now in the post-Holgate era. If she does succeed in doing at Toll what she did at AusPost, well then, the PM’s outrageous behaviour and the chairman and board’s even worse behaviour won’t merely have cost taxpayers millions of dollars, but tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison during Question Time in Parliament House, Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Now, while there’s no way that Holgate’s going back into the AusPost boardroom anytime soon – maybe one day she will get to return as chairman – there is every reason to demand, as the Senate report did, that current chairman Lucio Di Bartolomeo should leave that room immediately.

Indeed, he should have long since been sacked by the PM for being an inept chairman – and for his simple spinelessness - in acceding to the PM’s own utterly inappropriate demand he sack Holgate.

Di Bartolomeo claimed to the inquiry that he did not take the instruction from communications minister Paul Fletcher to stand Holgate aside as an “instruction”; just that he “agreed” with it. As I’ve pointed out the instruction was invalid; but just as inappropriate was Di Bartolomeo “agreeing” with it and executing it – and Holgate. It should have been blindingly obvious to anyone with an IQ greater than 50, even a company chairman, that standing Holgate aside in the so humiliatingly public circumstances of that day last October was sacking her.

The entire board must also be cleaned out.