Doyle denies review, Commonwealth Games fiascos, CSL backflip
July 28, 2008
Here are Stephen Mayne's three stories from the Crikey edition on Monday, 12 December, 2005.
4. Doyle rejects Robb review, tempts fate
By Stephen Mayne
Robert Doyle's leadership of the Victorian Liberal Party appears in grave danger after he brazenly ignored the recommendations of a review into his office by Andrew Robb, the widely respected campaign director behind John Howard's 1996 victory.
Crikey can reveal that Robb, now a Federal Liberal backbencher tipped to land a ministry shortly, was called in by party president Helen Kroger to do a review of Doyle's office in June, after qualitative research showed that a consistent message was not getting through to the public.
Robb interviewed more than 10 people and provided a detailed report with about 15 recommendations, but two months later Doyle has only implemented two of them. The relationship between Doyle's office and the party administration has become severely strained since the leader vetoed proposed changes to his advisory team.
Acting on Robb's recommendations to find new staff with significant campaigning experience, state director Julian Sheezel and the party's administrative wing persuaded four people to join Doyle's office:
- Tony Barry, Sheezel's deputy and a former Christopher Pyne staffer would become chief of staff, replacing Ron Wilson who has indicated he is moving on.
- Tony Preston, who has experience with the Tories in the UK and on a federal campaign, would also move from 104 Exhibition Street to Doyle's office at Parliament House.
- An unnamed staffer with five years experience working for the prime minister pledged to take the plunge.
- Another unnamed staffer who has worked for three federal cabinet ministers also agreed to sign up.
Helen Kroger's public language supporting Doyle has become considerably looser in recent weeks and Doyle's ill-considered frolic into the abortion debate from his Noosa holiday unit on December 6 is considered by some to be the last straw and another classic case of sending a confused message.
Any notion that Doyle is supported by the so-called Kroger-Costello camp is now gone. He isn't, and the last straw has been the adoption of a siege mentality amid claims that the federal division is attempting to take over his office and run the state branch.
However, this is not to say that rival Ted Baillieu is being embraced by the Kroger-Costello forces, but they might be able to tolerate him as an alternative to Doyle who has become very difficult to work with. Something will clearly have to give because Doyle can't go into next year's campaign without a co-operative and cohesive relationship with the party's administrative wing.
5. Will the Commonwealth Games fiascos be exposed?
By Stephen Mayne
Because The Age and the Herald Sun are both Commonwealth Games sponsors, neither paper has got serious about holding the Victorian government or Ron Walker's Melbourne 2006 organising committee to account for a series of budget blowouts and boardroom squabbles.
Hopefully this will change with the appointment of Rick Wallace as The Australian's Commonwealth Games reporter. Wallace and the paper provided a clue of what is to come with this page three lead on Saturday which began as follows:
The Bracks Government secretly compensated the developers of the Commonwealth Games athletes' village after insisting that unionised labour be used to build the project, industry sources have told The Weekend Australian.
With the Victorian Auditor-General poised to release a report on the $150million project, sources claim a $55million premium was paid to the Village Park Consortium for the added costs of using the union workforce. The sources say the costs were incurred because 155 houses had to be built using building union members, rather than non-union housing subcontractors, under a government-brokered memorandum of understanding.
Rather than secretly compensating the Singapore-Government controlled Australand and its partner Citta Properties, it sounds more like a case of the bidders adding $55 million to their tender once the government caved in to union demands and insisted on a closed shop.
I spent three hours touring the four Commonwealth Games facilities that were opened to the public for tours yesterday. How timely that this story about Leighton subsidiary John Holland suing the state for $10.3 million over the $52 million extension of the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre appeared on the day it was open for inspection.
John Holland certainly didn't seem to have tried too hard to make the swimming centre look ready and there were big CFMEU signs erected declaring the site was "100% union." Isn't that illegal? It certainly might explain the $10 million claim in the state which is most notorious for blowout-inducing militancy by its construction unions.
The other Commonwealth Games skirmish in the weekend papers related to the Queen's Baton Relay. Ron Walker was rolled at Friday's board meeting when the other four Melbourne 2006 directors, Peter Bartels, Sam Coffa, Perry Crosswhite and Don Stockins, insisted they would run, as is their right given their records as Commonwealth Games athletes and administrators.
So much for Ron's claim that there was a board policy against running. Games Minister Justin Madden confirmed the policy didn't exist, so it sounds like another classic exaggeration from the new chairman of John Fairfax, a media company which prides itself on the accuracy and insight of its journalism.
22. CSL and Q fever – anatomy of a corporate backflip
By Stephen Mayne
Dr Brian McNamee has done a great job with blood products giant CSL since it was privatised in 1994, but there have been a couple of recent skirmishes which highlight its history as a division of the Federal Government.
First, there was the announcement last month to stop making Q fever vaccines in 2007. Q fever has acute influenza-style symptoms in farmers of cattle, sheep and goats, and can lead to serious liver and heart problems in the longer term.
Bad move boys. A coalition including the National Party, Bill Shorten's Australian Workers' Union and the Australian Veterinary Association quickly formed and extracted a backflip, as this story in The Age explains.
Dr McNamee is something of a golden boy who is usually lauded for creating a $7 billion empire while saving lives around the globe. He clearly didn't enjoy seeing CSL described as "a pack of greedy, corporate bottom feeders" by Bill Shorten on The 7.30 Report on 30 November .
The backflip was announced within 48 hours, but Shorten had also written to CSL's largest shareholders a couple of days earlier in what was a quick and effective campaign. So is CSL really going to spend $40 million updating the process for such an uncommercial vaccine as this exchange explains?:
HEATHER EWART: The Q Fever vaccine has been available for about 20 years. At the height of the vaccination campaign in 2003, CSL estimates around 50,000 Australians received the vaccine. That's now dwindled to 5,000. As well, the sole producer of the only Q Fever vaccine in the world claims it's been using an old-fashioned process that needs updating.
CSL'S DR RACHEL DAVID: We've realised that would cost us about $40 million to do for a product which sells about 5,000 doses a year, which is a very small number, and we probably put through one batch of that product every two years. So for CSL as a major commercial vaccine provider, that is not a viable situation.
All of this drama could well have passed CSL shareholders by as the company has not seen fit to announce any of the information to the ASX. Clearly it is not material, so what was the problem in the first place?
CSL is potentially facing another PR challenge as some vets speak out about the dwindling supplies of anti-venom treatment, which once again was pioneered by the blood products giant in its days as a government-owned business. However, the company's website explains how it still produces anti-venoms for the likes of Tiger, Black, Brown and Tiger snakes, along with red-back spiders, funnelweb spiders and even ticks.
Given that CSL floated at $2.40 a share and is now above $40, the company might have to keep producing uneconomic vaccines and treatments for some time yet. Can you imagine the outrage if they stopped producing the red-back spider anti-venom?
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