Top postie Christine Holgate pushes the envelope

Christine Holgate and her new wheels, complete with personalised plates.

Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate’s new wheels — decked in vanity plates — look like something that drove straight out of the garage of her predecessor Ahmed Fahour.

An electric blue Range Rover four-wheel drive, proudly sporting a bespoke “POSTY1” number plate. Where does the government-owned enterprise find these people?

Margin Call yesterday evening had the pleasure of informing Holgate’s employees at the postal service’s Melbourne headquarters about the new vehicle, which the boss keeps at her Mosman base.

Christine Holgate’s new Range Rover

It’s undoubtedly a head-turning way for the former Blackmores boss to get around Sydney’s lower north shore or to travel up to the Pearl Beach weekender she bought for $5 million from retail billionaire Brett Blundy.

But it does seem a bit tone-deaf. And it demonstrates an extraordinary lack of corporate memory.

Only four years ago, Holgate’s predecessor Ahmed Fahour created a mini-scandal when he started commuting to Australia Post’s Bourke Street HQ in a new Maserati.

That vehicle — and its now infamous “AMAZZN” vanity number plate — was a gift to the $5.6 million man from his wife Dionnie, from whom Fahour has since separated.

Holgate’s camp say there’s a similar story for “POSTY1”: the Rover and its brash plates were a gift from her husband Michael Harding, the chair of Downer EDI and rare earths business Lynas, and consequently a man who has been in the media a bit himself.

You have to wonder, though, do these two senior figures of corporate Australia read the papers — or at least any of the bits that aren’t about them?

It might be a habit worth picking up if Holgate wants to keep commuting to Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt for the circa-$2.86m-a-year gig.

Might be another thing to put on the “to do” list of Australia Post’s incoming corporate affairs boss Philip Dalidakis when his new danger assignment begins in July.

Illustration: Rod Clement

Down to earth

Here’s an addition to Scott Morrison’s Prime Minister’s Office to excite Richard Di Natale, Bob Brown and fellow travellers on the anti-Adani convoy.

Margin Call can reveal former Minerals Council of Australia CEO Brendan Pearson has just received a tick from Tony Nutt and the staffing “Star Chamber” to join the ScoMo PMO as a senior adviser.

The addition makes for a bit of an extractive industry reunion at the heart of the Morrison government.

Pearson will join his former Minerals Council deputy John Kunkel, who has been Morrison’s chief of staff since Phil Gaetjens — now Josh Frydenberg’s Treasury secretary — departed last June.

Before joining ScoMo’s office, Kunkel headed government relations for the iron ore giant Rio Tinto.

Pearson — who before the election was an adviser in Finance Minister Mathias Cormann’s office and earlier in his career worked for American coal behemoth Peabody Energy — left the mining lobby in late 2017 after a civil war broke out among its membership over coal and climate policy.

Andrew Mackenzie’s BHP and Jean-Sebastien Jacques’ Rio Tinto won that tussle. Pearson lost.

But now he’s back in the thick of it.

A fun fact to finish: Pearson was running the mining lobby back in early 2017 when Morrison, then Malcolm Turnbull’s treasurer, brought that lump of coal along to question time in the green house.

The source of that sooty lump?

None other than Pearson’s Minerals Council, whose bunker sits just down the road from Capital Hill on Sydney Avenue.

Manus moolah

The music hasn’t quite stopped for PNG detention centre operator Paladin Holdings, but the tax-effective Singapore-domiciled outfit isn’t waiting for news on the future of its $333 million contract.

Adelaide-based businessmen Ian Stewart and Craig Thrupp for months have been planning how to keep the millions flowing after they are done with refugees.

Paladin’s $20m-a-month contract to run Australia’s transit centres on the island nation expires in 12 days, as we revealed at the start of this month.

But original contract documentation seen by Margin Call reveals that any extension to Paladin’s life-changing contract requires no less than six weeks’ written notice from Peter Dutton’s Department of Home Affairs advising if the feds want to extend.

That means — now less than two weeks out from the contract’s end — Dutton’s department must have weeks ago told Paladin if the deal was rolling on.

And that would have been before PNG PM Peter O’Neill was ousted in the last week of May, the event that has endangered the business arrangement.

Of course we asked Home Affairs whether any such letter had been sent to Paladin, but we didn’t hear back before deadline.

Peter O’Neill, Papua New Guinea’s former prime minister. Picture: Bloomberg

Ahead of June 30, Stewart and Thrupp have undertaken all sorts of restructuring, with old corporate vehicles struck off and new ones created to hopefully spin fresh cash.

Paladin Solutions PNG, which was the original vehicle the pair contracted with the government through, has been shut down.

Thrupp and Stewart have also sold out of a Canberra consulting firm Dreamtime Indigenous Services, through which they offered security and risk assessment services that targeted the Australian indigenous community. The entrepreneurial pair are now looking towards what’s next.

As revealed by Margin Call earlier this year, there’s already been consideration of buying a flash resort on Kangaroo Island. (Paladin was not too long ago registered to a holiday house on the South Australian island)

Now the duo appear to be turning their attention to service provision for major infrastructure projects in Australia — think the likes of former PM Malcolm Turnbull’s pet project Snowy Hydro 2.0.

In March, the businessmen created a vehicle, Greater Monaro Development, and have also reserved the business name Greater Monaro ECM, with the enterprise now boasting its own website that showcases the “electrical construction and management company (which) provides support to major projects across Australia”. In May, they also elevated former Qube exec David Saul to the role of “group” managing director.

Life after Manus?

Maybe for some.