Does corporate Australia have a 100th birthday curse? Evidence suggests it does, with Woolworths – which booked its century of selling on Thursday – the latest example.
It’s been something of a low-key affair for the venerable retailer, with little public fanfare to celebrate the anniversary of the opening of the Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement store in Sydney on December 5, 1924.
Woolies held a staff event in Sydney in October, to which each store across Australia was allowed to send only one staff member. Plus their store managers, of course. But the actual centenary has seen little celebration.
Hardly surprising, given the retailer’s annus horribilis. Rather than a telegram from King Charles, Woolies boss Amanda Bardwell has been delivered summons from Senate committees, writs from the ACCC, and a crippling strike from the United Workers Union that has emptied supermarket and bottle shop shelves.
And, to be fair, if you’re struggling to supply the masses with toilet paper and beer it’s probably not a great look to be plastering the (empty) aisles with fluff about your 100 years of history – although you could probably argue that the UWU’s Christmas beer strike is a hat tip to one of Australia’s most venerable retailing traditions.
It’s all rather reminiscent of the 100th birthday of that other great Australian corporate icon, Qantas, which had its centennial celebrations upset by the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of a massive party, Qantas instead celebrated a $3bn birthday bailout from taxpayers by illegally sacking 1700 baggage handlers.
There are, perhaps, some pointers in this for Woolworths.
Then Qantas boss Alan Joyce managed to make up for the loss of the 2020 birthday party by throwing another one in 2023, to celebrate Qantas’s 100 years as a passenger airline.
No expenses were spared for the 1000 guests, with the party held under the wing of an A380 at a Sydney airport hangar, and a long list of luminaries in attendance – headlined by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (of course).
Woolworths opened its second store in 1927, in Brisbane, with the Great Depression playing a major part in the rapid spread of its discount store empire from there. Amid another cost-of-living crisis, could Woolworths, perhaps, pick 2027 for its major celebration?
Perhaps Bardwell could host the party surrounded by empty shelves in Melbourne’s Dandenong South distribution centre. Assuming the picket lines have packed up by then, of course.
Mind you, Qantas’s belated birthday bash didn’t do much to restore its reputation among the travelling public. Perhaps that’s also a lesson for Woolies.
Lucas holds court
Spotted! A host of Melbourne’s great and good (mostly) at Chris Lucas’s newly opened Maison Batard restaurant on Bourke Street. As pre-Christmas openings go, it couldn’t get much better than the 350-strong lunch crowd, as Lucas walked the tables and held court in his flagship restaurant.
Margin Call is told the restaurant’s terrace hosted Melbourne fashionista Vicky Zaparas’s 40th birthday, and intimates of property heavyweight Lorenz Grollo dined in a semi-private room (though in full view of the rest of the place, of course).
Fellow property development heavyweight Jonathan Deague was also hosting, as was Melbourne real estate veteran Scott Patterson.
But it wasn’t just the property set testing out the rock lobster and pomme de terre (with caviar), with mining millionaire Tolga Kumova indulging in some public plotting with spin doctor Mark Hawthorne.
Former Swisse vitamins boss Adem Karafili was also spotted having a quiet lunch. We’re guessing Karafili needs a bit of Christmas cheer this year, preferably without running into any of the fellow rich-listers he took into flailing ASX-listed whisky distiller Top Shelf International, which recently postponed its annual shareholder meeting until February.
Top Shelf’s auditor hasn’t yet signed off on its annual accounts, shareholders were told. With the tax office chasing the company for $4.7m in unpaid excise, Top Shelf shares are sitting very much on the tax-loss list.
Margin Call’s operative couldn’t spot what Karafili picked to sip with his lunch, but we’re reasonably confident Top Shelf doesn’t sell a lot of its NED whisky and cola mix into the rarefied atmosphere of Lucas’s establishment.
Milking moneypot
Good intentions, as it’s said, pave the road to ruin. And nowhere is that coming more true than for any poor sap who invested in a business premised on milking the moneypot of the NDIS.
Even leaving aside the blatant frauds against the public purse that have been uncovered (or not) as an investment premise, the entire sector is getting the kind of reputation once reserved for the kind of companies raising money to find Spanish treasure ships sunk by pirates in the Caribbean.
There’s Saorsa Health, where some 200 investors collectively sank $45m or so into NDIS housing developments on the promise of 45 per cent returns, only to see the companies behind them collapse last week. Then there’s David McWilliams’ ALAMMC group, where ASIC stepped in after Queensland gaming regulators told them McWilliams had allegedly punted a lazy $39m over Star casino tables in 15 months.
ASX-listed Domacom has problems with its NDIS housing developments, and there are undoubtedly dozens of others yet to come to light.
The latest NDIS player to fall is a service provider, however. ASX-listed Freedom Care Group Holdings called in administrators on Thursday, after the NDIS cut off its payments and threatened to revoke its licences after an audit found “inconsistencies in claiming behaviours”, and potential breaches of the NDIS Act.
There’s no indication of what, if anything, Freedom did wrong – but only a few months ago chief executive Jama Sabsabi was out in the press saying the federal government’s NDIS fraud crackdown represented an opportunity rather than a threat.
If there’s a common thread through most of these company collapses, though – whatever the cause – it’s the pitch to would-be investors.
Make money and feel good about it because you’re also helping people who need the support. And it’s a government-backed scheme so the money is guaranteed – or the closest thing to it. Except when it isn’t.
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