We might have lost the plot, but this year Senate hearings have become compulsory viewing.
If you like to watch corporate Australia squirm, this is the place to see it.
In a climate where shareholder meetings and media briefings have become tightly controlled, Senate hearings have become one of the few public forums where the feet of the corporate elite are held to the fire.
Just ask corporate heavy hitters including PwC Australia CEO Kevin Burrowes, its former chief Luke Sayers, Qantas boss Vanessa Hudson, her predecessor Alan Joyce, and their chair Richard Goyder, who have all spent time in the blast furnace this year.
Only problem is, it’s all framed within each senator’s personal and party political agenda, which can be dangerous – their agendas and the points they seek to score might not always line up with other stakeholders.
Still, the process has seen standout performances this year from the likes of the Greens’ Barbara Pocock, Labor’s Deborah O’Neill and the Nationals’ Bridget McKenzie.
It was the turn of McKenzie’s party colleague Ross Cadell to land the blows on Friday as an initially shaky Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin and her network chief Lambo Kanagaratnam took their turns in the Canberra hot seats over the telco’s catastrophic network outage on November 8.
Cadell was the best-informed of his peers, landed the most blows on the telco and extracted the most actual information rather than pre-prepared answers. In contrast, Liberal senator for NSW Hollie Hughes wouldn’t even have a crack at pronouncing Kanagaratnam’s surname.
Has she heard of the military’s ‘Seven Ps’? Proper Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss Poor Performance.
As for Bayer Rosmarin, she was, as we predicted, well prepped, revealing to the Senate Committee her “vision” for Optus to be “Australia’s most loved everyday brand”.
After two disastrous scenarios having befallen the Singapore Telecommunications-owned subsidiary in just over a year – good luck with that.
As for reports that she wasn’t long for the Optus top office post repeated crises, KBR declared she hadn’t read them. Seriously?!
She’d been too busy, you see, preparing for her close-up in Canberra on Friday morning. “It has not been a time to think about myself,” she insisted.
Cadell had another crack as the two-hour proceedings drew to a close: “Isn’t it time for new leadership at Optus?”
“Thank you senator,” KBR politely replied, “I will take that on board.”
Hot mail is she could be out as early as next week.
Quote of the day also came from KBR, who openly declared: “I don’t like to use the word compensation.” For a mass outage? What a terrible precedent that would set.
But the question we still don’t know the answer to relates to the physical Vodafone SIM card that KBR revealed to the committee she had as a back-up just in case a contingency unfolded on the Optus network like that was experienced on November 8.
No one asked her why she didn’t switch SIMs to allow her to better communicate as the crap was hitting the fan, so on Friday afternoon we did. By deadline, there had been no response.
KBR now has a back-up Telstra SIM too, which like last time will be of no use to anyone untouched in her handbag.
Bank bashing
Never ceases to amaze how quickly and conveniently folks can forget their past and how they managed to get to where they are.
Having just come out the other side of the four pillars’ reporting season, multibillion-dollar profits have been front and centre.
Bank bashing has always been a way to gain some attention and curry favour with the masses, and Rachel Merton, a Liberal in the NSW Legislative Council, has taken in recent times to doing just that.
We all have to try to stay relevant.
“The continued closure of bank branches across NSW – with little regard for the interests of the local communities they have served for generations – is a dreadful situation,” Merton, a one-time Canberra staffer and then long-time government relations exec at KPMG, declares on her LinkedIn.
“Taking an axe to a branch network that has been an institution in local communities, at the same time as reporting multibillion-dollar profits, is the wrong approach by the big banks.”
Merton has also been active in slagging off all the bank holidays that our financial institutions enjoy.
Maybe she’s forgotten what helped fund the multimillion-dollar Mosman lifestyle (picture historic $4m-plus home with a pool) that Merton and her husband Justin Owen, the deputy president of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, enjoy.
Owen is a former staffer to ex-Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop and was appointed by Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal government to the AAT in 2017. But before that Owen was a government affairs executive at NAB – one of those evil banks – for seven years.
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