Mike Baird’s post-NAB future a little bit TBC

Mike Baird will have a little more time to enjoy the winter swell this year. Picture: Braden Fastier

Ross McEwan in, former NSW premier and National Australia Bank top office contender Mike Baird out.

Baird, who’d been with NAB for three years, running the consumer bank, walks away with a portfolio of fully-paid bank shares worth just under $500,000.

Unclear, however, is the status of 67,888 NAB performance rights Baird has been awarded. At the current bank trading price, they’d be worth just under $1.6 million.

Baird’s pay last year was actual cash of $1.1 million for a total of $1.7 million, about a third of which was performance-based.

The former Liberal pollie will maintain an apron string to bank, however, via an outstanding almost $4 million loan taken out towards Baird and his wife Kerryn’s purchase in 2017 of a $3.6 million clifftop home in North Curl Curl.

Margin Call hears there is no imminent retirement likely, nor any return to political life.

That rules out a run for Tony Abbott’s long-held former federal seat of Warringah to take on recently installed independent Zali Steggall, where the Libs’ new NSW Senator Andrew Bragg is starting to make his presence felt.

Baird wants to run something in his own right and is giving himself the best chance to do that rather than locking in under McEwan and his five-year strategy.

And Baird appears to need to keep working – his political career did not entitle him to a post-Parliament pension, nor any perks such as staff, an office or free travel after entitlements for former MPs were scaled back in 2007.

In the interim for Baird though, there’ll be time more time for a surf and attention to his roles on the boards of Cricket NSW and the Simon Jackman-led US Studies Centre, where Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s barrister wife Loiuse Clegg and former Macquarie chair Kevin McCann are also directors.

Plenty to go on with there.