Bailed-out icare proves snap happy with staff; Peter V’landys’ mystery air miles
There’s no greater bastion of awful decision-making in the NSW public service than Insurance and Care NSW, the compensation insurer that required a $1.9bn bailout last year to stave off collapse.
Attacked relentlessly by NSW Labor’s Daniel Mookhey while he was in opposition, icare clings barnacle-like to the government even with Mookhey now running the show as treasurer.
It’s his agency to kill, if he wants, and Mookhey’s professed disdain for icare is well-documented. Amazingly, CEO Richard Harding is still running the place even though he was rumoured to be looking for alternative employment last year. Fair enough, he was only reading the tea leaves.
Even after recording substantial losses last year, icare still managed to find a heap of cash to reward 116 executives and board appointees with pay increases. That’s after management put the kybosh on bonuses. And why were those bonuses scratched? Because icare had done such a lousy job of looking after the injured workers it was established to service.
Now we hear of a further oddity: an icare executive’s bizarre insistence that employee ID cards be shot by a professional photographer. These, to be sure, are the security cards used by staff to swipe themselves into the office and, at most, clip to a lanyard. They’re intended to satisfy guards at the front desk, not the readers of Vogue.
Snapping portraits of 1600-odd staff across icare sites in Sydney, Gosford, Newcastle and Wollongong is quite an expense to justify when there are facilities in government that can achieve the same outcome for a fraction of the cost. It’s also time-consuming, having chewed up something like a week’s worth of time and resources.
Worst of all is that management’s instructions to the photographer were to take simple, basic headshots of each employee, with no editing or styling required. Seriously? If you’re paying for it anyway, why not have the neck-mole and the buccal fat cut out with Photoshop?
Plenty of reasons not to proceed with such a silly, expensive venture, and yet it was rammed through in November by icare general manager Beth Armstrong and Michelle Taylor, group executive for strategy.
The total cost? A spokesman for icare told us it was in the neighbourhood of $30,000, which means it didn’t need to go out to tender. Again, thirty large for security passes? One would think the agency is swimming in dosh.
A spokesman said: “In addition to the security passes, these images are being used for broader employee engagement and marketing activity, allowing us to feature and highlight our people without relying on stock imagery and ongoing licensing costs.”
Sounds reasonable on paper, but we’re hearing the photos haven’t gone much further than the turnstile scanner.
Take-off and V’landys
Rugby league jefe Peter V’landys probably wasn’t watching Wednesday’s press conference when Clint Newton, chief executive of the players’ association, announced limited strike action against the NRL in the form of a ruthless media boycott.
For now, that means no pre-match interviews, no halftime interviews, and no post-match interviews. That’s a solemn calling of time on beefy footballers lining up to mumble beloved cliches (“We gave it our all”) into a reporter’s microphone.
V’landys is currently aboard a cruise in Europe with patchy internet coverage, so it’s unlikely he tuned in for the spectacle. He was happy, however, to keep us guessing on another matter of interest relating to his recent air mileage.
Last Wednesday, V’landys took a red special economy flight to Brisbane for Origin II, where he was overheard telling people in attendance that he was heading back to Sydney once the game was through.
The match ended at 10:01pm and, for the sake of homeowners in Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler, and anyone else covered by the flyover path, Sydney Airport imposes a curfew on arrivals from 11pm. Plainly, V’landys wasn’t going to make it back from Suncorp, not without some help.
Thus our attention was drawn to a Dassault Falcon 900 that departed Brisbane at 10.30pm and landed at Bankstown Airport, where there is no curfew, at 11.46pm. At a $6968 hourly operating cost, our humble calculations set the ticket price at just shy of $9000, which the NRL insisted it did not pay.
V’landys told us that Racing NSW, which he also runs as its chief executive, wasn’t involved in paying either, and that the trip was organised as a “private arrangement with friends”, whom he didn’t name. Margin Call loves a mystery!
We name-checked a few possibilities, including Roosters chairman Nick Politis, Star CEO Robbie Cooke, and we jokingly suggested billionaire Jonathan Munz, all to no avail (Munz is apparently in Europe, too).
So was it Gerry Harvey, perhaps? Unlikely, V’landys replied. “Gerry still has his first dollar and would have sent me on a Fokker Friendship.” Sadly, the mystery endures.
Brumby links
Margin Call revealed on Tuesday that former Victorian premier John Brumby was in advanced negotiations to chair the fledgling board of Scyne Partners, an invention of PwC Australia to rebrand its bedevilled government consulting arm.
Funnily enough, Brumby has a couple of his own embedded links to the accounting giant, via his daughter Georgia Brumby and her husband Patrick Lane, both former media advisers for Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.
We note that Georgia is the director of advocacy, strategy and corporate affairs at Industry Super Australia, where her father was a director until 2016 (although she only joined the ISA three years later).
Lane, however, has just been promoted to head of media relations at PwC Australia, having worked at the firm for almost three years.
Certainly could make for some awkward dinner chatter, no?
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