Australia Post ties itself in knots over gender

Australia Post chief executive Paul Graham.

Paul Graham’s appearance at a senate estimates hearing last week seemed to play out as a masterclass in misdirection while he attempted to shrug off and explain away some very real concerns over the flight of women from the Australia Post Executive Team.

Or, profuse apologies, should that be the Leadership Team, as Graham kept insisting on calling it? The two appear to be strangely interchangeable in the mind of this quirky CEO.

Graham appears often in this column and he is no fool. By all accounts, he is an honest, accomplished leader accustomed to handling difficult examinations. That said, his performance in front of senators last Tuesday was no frolic in the glade.

Quite literally the first question thrust upon him right out of his opening statement concerned a rude item published that morning, in this column, drawing attention to the exodus of top female talent from the aforementioned executive branch. Let the numbers tell the story. Gender representation at this most senior level was split 50-50 in 2022; it’s now dropped to 16 per cent, as of this month, from four women on the team to one.

But that’s not the full picture, Graham insisted. “The current make-up of my executive team is 46 per cent female,” he said, quoting a percentage wildly at odds with the available facts.

“In the current executive team I have, we have four women reporting directly to me. We have a head of communications, our head of community, my chief of staff and the head of people and culture.”

Whaaat? Best believe that no one was frowning harder than Liberal senator Sarah Henderson, who was fact-checking Graham live as he spoke.

“Hang on a minute,” she said. “I am looking at your Executive Team on your website. You say that 46 per cent of the people on your executive team are women yet when I look at the executive team on your website, there are six men and one woman.”

Senator Sarah Henderson fact-checked the Australia Post claims. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

But, as Graham explained, that’s just a minor error of terminology. Yes, while the mail service has termed those seven folks the ‘Executive Team’ for nigh on years, it’s actually a misnomer – they’re actually the Leadership Team. The REAL executive team, he said, is a smattering of direct reports not limited to the C-suite – and, as Margin Call notes, these are people listed nowhere online or inside the annual report with accompanying portrait and plastic smile.

It’s certainly one way to solve a gender representation crisis in a hurry – rename the old team, start a new one, and broaden the criteria way out past the executive general managers!

Graham again, dialling up the semantics.

“Maybe I should have clarified whether she (Greens senator Larissa Waters, who asked the opening question) meant direct reports or executive team. If you meant the executive team that appears on our website, you are correct. In terms of the executive team that currently reports to me, 46 per cent of that team is women.”

Henderson, sensing topspin: “I have to say, Mr Graham, that you need to do better than that. You gave us a very inaccurate answer. That is very disappointing.”

Waters, speaking for everyone: “I am still confused as to what the answer actually is.”

To be sure, Australia Post has since amended its website to make the problem go away, sort of.

“The website was updated as there was some confusion about the make-up of the Executive and Leadership Teams,” a spokeswoman said. “Australia Post apologised for the confusion during the Estimates hearing.”

Thing is, of course, you call the team whatever you like. There’s still only one woman at the table.

High and mighty

The Australian Institute of Applied Ethics is the name given to a nascent think tank requiring $30m in taxpayer funds to begin putting out policy papers. As the Fin Review reported last week, prominent Australians have signed their names to an open letter calling for Treasurer Jim Chalmers to fund this caper out of whatever’s left in the May budget, as though this is some kind of national priority.

The business case appears to depend in part on a report from Deloitte Access Economics, the wager being that a 10 per cent improvement in Australian ethical standards would lift yearly GDP by $45bn. Is that even true? Who knows. Two economists, three opinions. Still, it’s the basis for all this hoohaa around an Ethics Institute, as they’re calling it, “the first of its kind in the world”.

“When we build on our ethical capacity we deliver better results for Australians,” read the letter. “The cost of inaction is immense and can be measured in the devastation caused by ethical failures experienced in so many aspects of Australian commercial, political, professional and institutional life.”

And who better to discuss ethical failures than the signatories themselves! We’ll get to that in a minute.

Some may also query whether it’s ethically sound to buy a full-page ad in a national newspaper just to rattle the tin at the Treasurer and publicly pressure him to fund this pet project. A question best left to the brains trust at the institute, perhaps, if it ever gets its start.

For now, Margin Call does wonder about the high-horsing of certain figures clearly eager to sign their names and have them featured in print alongside reputable chaps like David Gonski, Ken Henry and former NSW chief justice James “Jim” Spigelman, all of whom clearly believe in this jolly.

Like ACTU secretary Sally McManus, who memorably blurred the ethical demarcation lines in a 2017 ABC interview where she condoned some forms of illegality. “I believe in the rule of law where the law is fair and the law is right but when it is unjust I don’t think there’s a problem with breaking it,” she said.

There’s passionate grudge-holder Ian Chappell, the former cricketer, who by his own admission threatened to beat the crap out of Ian Botham over a minor slight in a Melbourne bar in 1977, and which, amazingly, rages with the same intensity nearly four decades later.

Gordon Cairns is certainly one to lecture us all. The former chair of Woolworths delivered an unreserved apology on behalf of the company in 2020 after thousands of staff were found to have been underpaid to the tune of $500m.

Or what about Mick Dodson, the former Northern Territory Treaty Commissioner who resigned in 2021. That was after being accused of verbally abusing an Aboriginal woman during a football match in Darwin, an allegation that led to a loss of confidence from the territory’s chief minister, Michael Gunner.

And a bit rich of Michael Chaney to be signing his name to an ethics sheet when he, after all, chaired the NAB board in 2015, at a time when the bank paid a $40m fine to Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority. That was after a subsidiary had figured in an insurance scandal.