Margin Call: Kristina Keneally reveals all in inaugural Senate disclosure

New Senator Kristina Keneally being sworn in, in the Senate Chamber, Parliament House in Canberra. (Picture Kym Smith)

Unlike Bill Shorten’s former Member for Batman, David Feeney, at least Labor women appear to have a handle on the requisite paperwork that comes with being a federal politician.

Kristina Keneally, the former premier who has replaced Kyle & Jackie O contributor Sam Dastyari as Labor’s new Senator for NSW, has left no stone unturned in her inaugural disclosure to the senators’ register of pecuniary interests.

Like her Victorian colleague Kimberley Kitching (a close Shorten ally and senator since October 2016), Keneally has been prompt and diligent in revealing her financials.

And there appears to be little ad hoc about the way the Labor star (a friend of Kaila Murnain, the powerful general secretary of the NSW Labor Party and former Keneally staffer) and her Boston Consulting Group husband and former local Labor mayor Ben Keneally have arranged their affairs.

Even our millionaire Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull might be impressed.

The couple’s Keneally Family Discretionary Trust and its obligatory trustee company has an interest in two exchange-traded funds, both high yielding vehicles managed by Larry Fink’s Blackrock and Tim Buckley’s Vanguard.

But the real action is in the new Senator’s self-managed super fund, The Czestochowa Fund (named after the city in Poland where the Keneallys first met in 1991 at the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day).

The fund has investments in no less than a dozen ETFs that target stocks across a range of sectors from all over the globe, from China to Europe and the United States and back to Oz. Again, most are managed by Blackrock and Vanguard.

Keneally stressed to Margin Call that she had no control over the underlying shareholdings or influence over which shares the funds invest in, so as to avoid a real or perceived conflict of interest. It’s an intelligent way to deal with perceived conflicts of interest for our pollies and one also employed by our wealthy PM.

And for the record, as the Labor opposition prosecutes its case for an end to franking credit cash rebates, Keneally’s office confirmed to us that “neither the discretionary trust nor the SMSF benefit from dividend imputation in the form of cash back refunds”.

Her new boss will be pleased.

There’s also disclosure of the new house that the Keneallys purchased late last year for $1.8 million on the idyllic Scotland Island in Pittwater. The home is mortgaged to ING.

But as the royal commission into the banking sector unfolds, Keneally has told the Parliament that the couple also spread their banking business around — dealing with ANZ, UBank, AMP and NAB.

With that tidy portfolio, looks like plenty of reason for Keneally to take up Dastyari’s vacated spot as an articulate member of the Senate’s economics committee.

Although the embattled local finance community will hope she has other targets in mind to make her name in Canberra to earn a spot on Shorten’s front bench.

Read the full Margin Call column tomorrow in print and online.