What to make of the sudden departure of more top female talent from Australia Post’s executive team, in the very months after CEO Paul Graham called in consultants to slice fat across the organisation and slim the headcount in the C-suite?
A confluence of events that, if one is to believe Australia Post, is entirely coincidental. But the unavoidable truth is that women, once equal in number to the men on the executive, are back to a vanishing small minority. There’s only one left.
Cast the mind back to the closing months of 2022 and they were evenly split among the eight-member posse of EGMs. And now? It’s an embarrassment of Windsor knots and bad haircuts. It’s guys named Mike and Paul and Gary and Rod.
Leonie Valentine was the first to disappear from the company website, in February 2023, ending her time at Australia Post after a startlingly short 13 months.
Valentine had been tasked with leading Australia Post’s Gender Action Plan which, at this point, looks to have been set on fire and thrown from a high window. It’s getting tougher to keep count of the senior women who’ve left in her wake – chief marketing officer Amber Collins, general manager Fiona da Silva, government relations head Sally Mackenzie.
Now add to that the very quiet departure of executive general manager Tanny Mangos. She resigned last month (no word of the departure from Australia Post) in a shrewd decision that should spare her another grilling before the nail-tough Sarah Henderson at senate estimates.
Mangos – two years in the role – flagged her exit on LinkedIn with a feting of CEO Graham (“a transformative and fearless leader”) and telling everyone she would take time off before her next career move.
Also suddenly missing from the Australia Post executive team is Catriona Noble, EGM for Retail, one of the highest paid women at the organisation. She left the business in January after a two-year stint.
Neither was her exit announced by the mail service, as is their way, both exits having left Susan Davies as the last woman standing among the six fellas at the table. It’s a terrible look, and only Mangos’s position is vacant.
Much better numbers on the Siobhan McKenna-led board of Australia Post, by the way, where the men (four of them; five women) only hold some of the cards.
Sudden exits like those of Mangos, Noble and Valentine don’t bode well for female longevity at the organisation. And weird, too, how Valentine and Noble were swiftly replaced by men. Noble’s deputy, Josh Bannister, was appointed internally last month, while Valentine’s replacement, Michael McNamara, started in July.
There was a brief chance to appoint a female CFO but that was missed when Michael Bradburn was awarded the role, starting in November.
Need it be pointed out that this is all going down while Australia Post lurches forth groping into a great modernisation of its business? Services might be lumbering ahead into the 21st century, but female representation is apparently blazing a path all the way back to … the fifties?
Tennis trauma
Anyone have a spare Richter scale to measure the great heavings of tumult at Melbourne’s Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club? Chaos has ensued ever since the club’s accounts were handed down late last year revealing a $2.4m loss from its dining operations.
It’s a number that defies the nearly fourfold increase to the membership base, which alone should have delivered another year of dazzling profit. Particularly when these are all patrons who see themselves as Rockefellers at the exclusive venue and throw their money ’round accordingly. They’re nobody’s fools, either, these refined members of the sporting and business communities.
Josh Frydenberg is a foundation member. So is Evonne Goolagong Cawley, Sally Peers and Wayne Arthurs. As one well-heeled club member told the Herald Sun last month: “We want to know what’s happened. That’s our f..king money.”
So disgruntled were some with the accounts that they nearly called in the cops to unravel the mystery of the outrageous dining losses. That appears to be at rest now, with audit firm Grant Thornton concluding the missing millions boiled down to poor financial management and not, in fact, anything criminal.
Still, it hasn’t been enough to save the shirt of club president Adam Cossar, who resigned over the weekend, according to a note distributed to members on Sunday and obtained by Margin Call.
The board cited the pressure facing Cossar in juggling the presidency with his nine-to-five at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Nothing to do, it seems, with the financial losses and accompanying hooha transpiring on his watch.
“Adam has recently embarked on a new professional role and believes he no longer has the capacity to fully devote the time and energy required in the role of president,” the note said. “Adam feels the time is appropriate for new leadership to take the club into the next phase of its development.”
And who should be plucked to replace Cossar for the interim? Vice-president James Macmillan, who sits on the governance, finance and audit subcommittees, all of which are clearly in the gun among the membership at the moment.
Hard to say if this is the last of the scalps, but something tells Margin Call that Cossar’s alone won’t go far enough to quell the discontent. May the CEO be next?
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