It’s camp season at schools across the country right now, and if there’s a cohort of stakeholders hot to every tremor and every rumour in the playground then it’s the jumpy parent group at Cranbrook – the richest, bossiest, most entitled and elitist, over-educated bunch of nudniks you will ever encounter. Mon dieu!
And, boy, have they been busy making a fuss in their WhatsApp groups, fuming with righteous indignation as the prestigious school – scandal-prone as always – lumbers through yet another crisis.
No need to catalogue the precise details of what happened this time, other than to say it involved students away at camp and some “inappropriate behaviour”, as the school termed it in the official correspondence.
Those involved were spoken to by senior staff, with external advice sought on how to handle the matter from the Association of Independent Schools of NSW.
Police were consulted, too, as a matter of procedure, but the cops shrugged off what happened because, well, it just wasn’t a police matter. Nothing remotely criminal occurred.
Every corporate relations specialist in the country will shudder at the nightmare implications of this PR calamity, the delicacy of every word and every sensitivity to be managed by Cranbrook’s executive management team, led by acting head of school Michele Marquet.
She’s not even going to be there much longer, the plan being to swap her out with former deputy headmaster Stuart Meade in term two, who’ll in turn be gone by term three when the school’s first female leader, Anne Johnstone, recruited from Ravenswood at the close of last year, starts her contract.
So how did Cranbrook communicate the uncomfortable details of what happened to its anxiety-ridden parents?
Very badly. Firstly, it sent an email with clipped, narrow language that alarmed everyone who read it.
Then it sent a second email to calm everyone’s nerves after the disaster of the first email. And then it sent a third email, much longer in its explanations of what sort of happened, but equally vague, which sent everyone absolutely bonkers.
Parents remain out for blood in the sober light of a fresh week, unable as they are to determine what actually happened.
As usual, everyone is convinced of a cover-up, everyone suspecting much ass-covering on the eve of Cranbrook’s co-educational revamp, which will see a ton of girls admitted to the school for the first time next year.
And you would think Cranbrook might have taken many, many spoonfuls of advice before issuing its remarks in three useless batches, kicked about so thoroughly as it has been by competing embarrassments over the past 24 months.
Did the lessons of Nicholas Sampson’s departure as headmaster last year teach the school nothing?
Apparently not, or so we can surmise from the one-line response issued to us when we asked the school about the adequacy of its messaging.
“Cranbrook School updates parents on a regular basis about a range of matters,” the school said.
Yes, a range of matters, as though this were just routine as the adjustments to the tuckshop menu.
Which, by the way, doesn’t look half that bad on a close examination. The term one specials include pulled lamb tacos, pork banh mi, panko crumbed chicken baguette … Perfect, as Giles Coren might observe, for anyone looking for a nosh.
The missing Link
We’re assuming the publicity-shy Japanese owners of Link Group were none too pleased at reading about its shoddy role in superannuation’s shameful handling of death benefit claims.
League tables laying this out were published by corporate regulator ASIC on Monday, delving deep into payouts granted by superannuation trustees and the “devastating impacts that poor industry practices can have on grieving Australians”.
A dip test found that the trustees which processed claims using a third-party provider – Link Group – fared worst among the 10 entities chosen. Those who outsourced the work closed just 15 per cent of claims in 90 days compared with the 36 per cent closed when the claims were handled internally. ASIC commissioner Simone Constant said these systemic failures – 78 per cent of claims were delayed by issues within the trustee’s control – “exposed grieving Australians to added and unnecessary distress after the death of a loved one”.
HESTA, Hostplus and the Retail Employees Superannuation Trust all were found to have outsourced their claims-handling processes to Australian Administration Services, formerly owned by Link Group, which was acquired last year by Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.
No small coincidence that Michael Carapiet, Link’s chair until the Japanese buyout, and its current CEO, Vivek Bhatia, were the long-time leaders of Insurance and Care NSW, the dogs-vomit government insurer that required a clean-out of its board plus a governance overhaul once Carapiet and Bhatia were done with the place, in 2020 and 2018, respectively. No surprise, either, that icare, as it’s known, found similar trouble processing workers compensation claims in a timely manner, perhaps because it also outsourced the work to a third-party insurance agent.
And who made that call? Bhatia, of course.
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