Clearer view through the glass ceiling for female CEOs; Jason Falinski’s new gig

Former AGL boss Christine Corbett. Picture: Liam Kidston

The latest Chief Executive Women report, released last week, provided for unsurprising reading – despite years of work, women remain depressingly underpresented in senior roles.

Among the ASX 300, 6 per cent of companies have female chief executives, it found. Only 26 per cent of executive leadership team figures are women.

But then there’s Christine Corbett, in line for the top job at AGL Australia before the demerger of the energy giant’s retailing and generation business was scuttled by climate activist Mike Cannon-Brookes.

Now she is leaving the company – after contributing to a review of the company’s strategic direction this year.

On Wednesday, Corbett, who was to run the retail operations if the split went ahead, was at a QUT Business Leaders Forum in Brisbane discussing the issue of gender quotas to address the dire lack of female CEOs.

Illustration: Rod Clement

Corbett, who joined AGL Energy in 2019 as chief customer officer from her previous role at Australia Post, told her audience that if her new role had proceeded as planned, she would have been the only new female CEO at an ASX 100 company.

That might be news to Vicki Brady, who in about five weeks will take over from Andy Penn as the boss of Telstra.

“At the moment, it is quite dire to be honest. Last year, there were 23 new CEO appointments of which only one was female,” Corbett continued.

A shock, presumably, for Meg O’Neill, who was made acting chief executive of Woodside in April and permanently given the role (and made managing ­director of the oil and gas giant) in August.

With shamefully few women in the ASX 100, it would pay to at least remember the few who have broken the glass ceiling.

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Falinski cleans up

Spare a thought for former Liberal MP Jason Falinski, recently turfed from the Sydney seat of Mackellar by Simon Holmes a Court-backed Sophie Scamps. On Thursday, one of his parliamentary colleagues, Josh Frydenberg, landed as an advisory at Goldman Sachs in Melbourne.

Former Liberal MP Jason Falinski. Picture: AAP

Once run by ex-PM Malcolm Turnbull, Goldmans appears not to have been the recipient of significant government largesse – except the $5.7bn privatisation of Medibank Private in 2014 while Tony Abbott was in The Lodge.

No such prestigious appointment for Falinski, however, who first entered parliament in 2016 and later chaired the house tax and revenue committee and economics committee.

He’s landed at Airtrip, a Brisbane-based firm which “offers a five-star cleaning service”, where he is now the chairman. Airtrip, to be fair, does more than provide cleaning. It is an Airbnb and property management outfit, according to its LinkedIn.

As it happens, Falinski, as the chair of the tax committee, was a key part of a report into housing unaffordability in the country – something professional Airbnb’s help to exacerbate.

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Regal gets it wrong

Earlier this year Phil King, founder of Regal Funds Management, was clucking with satisfaction over the strong performance of his Atlantic Absolute Return Fund, an outcome largely attributable to a decision to play long on mining companies.

Bold predictions were offered for the future that seemed to miss a couple of macro trends: growing inflationary pressures, the concomitant threat of rising interest rates, and the grotesque panicking which could clam up investor sentiment.

The June accounts provide the outcome to these hazy forecasts, with the $173m fund experiencing falls of -33 per cent for the month (its worst result since March 2020) and -43.4 per cent for the year.

Regal Funds Management founder Phil King. Picture: Jane Dempster

The only time the performance was any worse stretched back to 2016 – and the result was only a smidgen lower at -44.5 per cent.

Explaining away the problem, the fund’s investor briefing for the month heaped much of the blame upon the resources sector, with the fund allegedly falling prey to reversals in the prices of copper, nickel and Brent crude oil.

“While this positioning has generated positive absolute returns in recent months, the short-term pricing reversal in a number of spot commodity markets weighed heavily on the equity of companies engaged in their extraction,” the fund’s June briefing said.

Additional disappointments were recorded in the small cap growth stocks, which were impacted by “seasonal tax loss selling and reduced on market liquidity”.

Haven’t we been here before with Regal? King himself admitted in 2020 that the fund had underestimated the initial impact of the pandemic, causing wipe-outs to its small and mid-cap investments that were among the first to be sold off.

As usual, however, investors were reminded that the fund has generated annual returns of 23.8 per cent net of fees since its inception in 2005.

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Behind the times

The organisers of the Noosa Mining Conference achieved the remarkable feat this week of scheduling a program that completely ignored the women of the resources sector and appeared to forget that they even exist or matter.

The conference, held at the local Peppers, contained a schedule of 66 speakers over the course of its three-day program, which ends today with a “final analysis” at the Noosa Surf Club, where we note the availability of 30 different beers on tap.

One would imagine that among such a large cohort of speakers there would be space for at least a nod to modernity and, perhaps, a couple of female presenters, maybe even a session chair.

But according to the program it was wall-to-wall Craigs and Johns and Ians and Robs, with the only exception being the (brief) appearance of Michelle McAllister, ASX’s manager of listed company services, who held a five-minute talk to open Wednesday’s session.

Granted, the event was pay-to present, meaning that the speakers were self-selecting.

And yes, it’s always been a male-dominated industry.

But it takes a special brand of apathy to put on a conference so utterly blind to the times and that doesn’t even bother to try to balance the ledger.