Jayne Hrdlicka holds court at Australian Open tennis

Illustration: Rod Clement

Tennis Australia’s newish chair Jayne Hrdlicka is putting Roger Federer to good use as she looks to ace the sport’s expiring $200 million broadcasting agreement.

Watching on as Hrdlicka’s guest on Wednesday night, as the Swiss Federer masterfully disposed of Czech Tomas Berdych,was none other than Ten’s boss Paul Anderson and his wife Hilary. Are Anderson and his new deep-pocketed overlords at American broadcasting behemoth CBS thinking about poaching the tennis from Kerry Stokes’s Seven West?

The ambitious Hrdlicka — who last month left an executive job at Alan Joyce’s Qantas to run dairy group A2 Milk Company only months after taking over as Tennis Australia’s chairman — is certainly doing her bit courtside to nurture the idea.

Seven’s five-year, $200m free-to-air and digital rights contract with Tennis Australia expires right after next year’s Australian Open. It is expected to be sorted out well before then.

The negotiations over the rights to the tennis — which Seven has long used as a ­platform to set up its first-half programming schedule — will be a key indicator of CBS’s appetite for spending Down Under.

Before they battle over the tennis, Australia’s commercial broadcasters will tussle over Cricket Australia’s broadcasting rights. Presently, Ten has the ­expiring rights to the Big Bash League. Nine has Test cricket.

CBS international boss Armando Nunez

We gather CBS’s international boss Armando Nunez — as of late last year the man with the chequebook at Ten — will fly in from Los Angeles to set the scene for those negotiations.

It wasn’t only Federer helping out Hrdlicka as she pitched the greatness of tennis and its fans to Anderson. Sitting right beside the Tennis Australia chairman as her other guest on Wednesday night was the Turnbull cabinet’s leading tennis tragic Josh Frydenberg — just the sort of character a TV boss would want to have watching their feed.

Super omission

It’s been dubbed “the missing $1 trillion”. That’s the enormous amount of money in Australia’s almost $2.5 trillion superannuation sector that appears to have been omitted from Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission — or which at least has so far not caught the interest of the former High Court judge.

And it’s further reason that the industry superannuation sector, not at all unreasonably, believes it has been set up as the target of the Turnbull government’s reluctant royal commission.

Hayne won’t be poking around the self-managed super fund sector.

That $700 billion-$750bn falls outside the terms of reference, although some of the financial products in which it is invested will surely make embarrassing cameos.

More peculiar is the apparent neglect of the state super system, the roughly $250bn of combined funds managed on behalf of Australia’s state bureaucrats.

They are some of the giants of the industry. NSW’s Neil Cochrane-chaired First State Super, for example, manages towards $60bn.

And like their peers in industry super, their boards include members from the union movement — red meat to the Coalition government. First State Super counts former Unions NSW secretary Mark Lennon as a director.

But Margin Call understands for now the state super funds — unlike many of their industry fund peers — have not been asked to send in any confessional homework to Hayne.

Government sources suggest that an absence of a letter from Hayne should not be taken as a sign of a lack of interest.

And it sounds as if members of the government would be quite surprised if South Australia’s super fund Super SA isn’t examined at some point during the year.

Kelly O’Dwyer and James Shipton. Picture: Kym Smith

That outfit is chaired by former Labor senator Annette Hurley and has been told off by Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer for being an ALP-infected compulsory fund for South Australian public servants. But ultimately, it will be up to Hayne to decide if he thinks that’s an issue worth exploring.

It’s his show now.

Help for Hayne

The soon-to-be James Shipton-chaired ASIC is busily assisting Kenneth Hayne with databases of financial misconduct to help guide his banking royal commission.

Rod Sims’s ACCC is also helping out as asked.

And, promisingly, we hear Wayne Byres’ APRA has been asked by Hayne to provide targeted material, which indicates the former High Court judge has some interesting lines of inquiry in mind.

But what about the king of the local financial system, Philip Lowe’s Reserve Bank? Has it also been assigned homework from Hayne.

“I won’t confirm or deny,” was the Nixonian response from the RBA’s spokeswoman after a thorough consideration of the subject.

Seems a bit haughty.

It’s enough to make us hope that Hayne puts the Martin Place posse through their paces — if only to show them who’s boss.

Briggs’s promotion

After the stormy December-January of 2015, it’s a happy change to report that Jamie Briggs is having a great summer.

The former minister for cities left parliament two years ago with the ultimate Hong Kong hangover.

A year later, he re-emerged as a consultant at professional services big four PwC.

And clearly the Adelaide-based Briggs made a good impression in his first 12 months. As of January 1, he is a PwC partner.

We hear after the initial adjustment, the 40-year-old is relishing his better remunerated, less scrutinised life outside of parliament.

Perhaps he could have a chat to his former leader and prime minister office partier, Tony Abbott?