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Westpac chief executive Anthony Miller may once again have been the most prominent corporate chief to grace the halls of Parliament House for Labor’s budget week festivities this year.
And even then, maybe Miller would’ve rather joined the many other business leaders who opted to stay home, if his bank wasn’t the principal sponsor of Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ National Press Club address in the Great Hall of Parliament House.
Miller, as he was last year, emerged as the man of the moment at the customary lunch ahead of Chalmers’ arrival. The Westpac boss could be seen holding court with Treasury Secretary Jenny Wilkinson as lunch was being carried out. The Australian Banking Association’s everywhere man, CEO Simon Birmingham, also managed to squeeze in some face time with the big man.
Then came the royal treatment of a grip-and-grin with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who sat to his right at the table for lunch, flanked on the other side by Chalmers and wife Laura to his left.
The bank hosted a contingent of Labor ministers and advisers across as many as four tables. Among them were Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and Agriculture Minister Julie Collins, who were joined by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary, Dr Steven Kennedy.
Also there were Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Labor MP Patrick Gorman and Ryan Liddell, a former chief of staff to Bill Shorten, who now peddles the interests of Facebook owner Meta and others in Canberra, and Albanese’s chief of staff Tim Gartrell. Chalmers’ staffers, meanwhile, sat down at the front on a table courtesy of Telstra.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia was out in force, led by the powerful lobby group’s boss, Trent Twomey. We counted close to 10 of the group’s signature schoolboy black-and-yellow striped ties.
Others we hear were invited and probably showed, but who we didn’t clock with our own eyes, were Albanese’s campaign mastermind and Australian Labor Party national secretary, Paul Erickson, and Attorney-General Michelle Rowland, who was twice introduced by National Press Club CEO Maurice Reilly with the wrong title. No doubt he knows she’s the nation’s top law officer now.
The lunch rounded out the big events of the week, at least as far as the government is concerned, after Labor played host to two separate fundraisers after Chalmers handed the budget down on Tuesday night.
There was the one at Hotel Realm, where the cost of entry was $5000 a head, and another at the National Press Club, which we hear was a flop. Word is the food was rubbish and that everyone talked over the speakers. All the action seemed to be happening at Ostani Bar, anyway, as we wrote on budget night.
Embattled ANU to host … governance forum?
It was only on Tuesday that this masthead reported the 15-person board of the Australian National University was imploding following the announcement of chancellor Julie Bishop’s departure from the university the week before.
So we were curious to see ANU, which has spent the last few years in the throes of a rolling governance crisis, is set to play host to none other than a university governance forum on June 5.
“Australia’s universities are under pressure,” reads the event overview. “Recent parliamentary inquiries, growing public scrutiny, and the establishment of Federal Education Minister Jason Clare’s Expert Panel on University Governance have created a rare opportunity to rethink how our universities are governed.”
The ANU Governance Project, which is co-hosting the forum with UTS, didn’t respond to a request for comment. But those who do make the trip to Canberra for the function can look forward to a jam-packed day of what appears to be existential dread.
What a duo! Of course, UTS’ governance is also suffering a bout of negative publicity, with an interim report from a powerful NSW parliamentary committee recommending an audit of the university’s finance, governance and staff management.
There will be a session called “the view from campus”, where the UTS and ANU governance projects offer up their findings and open the floor to other academics to give their two cents.
Then a “state of the nation” panel featuring unnamed elected representatives, policymakers and analysts to talk about reform. Later in the afternoon, a tantalising talk on “What can we change? How?” followed by a “next steps” panel.
Wonder what Bishop would have to say about it all? The former foreign minister resigned about eight months before her term was set to expire at the end of this year. On the way out, she said the higher education sector was at a “crossroads of regulatory overreach”, after the university regulator took the extraordinary step of intervening in ANU’s hunt for her replacement.
But it looks like the university needs all the help it can get. After issuing a statement announcing Bishop’s departure, the ANU communications shop was forced to issue a correction on the details of her tenure, which they thought had lasted longer than it had.
John Buckley is a CBD columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.From our partners
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