Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There have been some stinging contributions in the Financial Review over the last week exposing Qantas chairman Richard Goyder for his involvement in Qantas's woeful performance and overall poor management; his questionable history at the AFL due to the messy response to the Hawthorn Indigenous players' scandal, the drawn-out search for a new CEO, a lack of football knowledge on his board and the failure to fill vacancies; and the time he massively overpaid for the supermarket giant Coles, when he was chair of Wesfarmers. Wesfarmers' return on equity over the cycle never recovered, while he walked out after 10 years with over $90 million in his pocket.

Joe Aston wrote:

The highlight of Goyder's stewardship of Coles was its Queensland pubs allowing children in its poker machine rooms and luring punters to those pokies with advertising for their free kids' clubs.

In 2009, anti-pokies campaigner Paul Bendat took out a full-page ad in the Post, the community newspaper in Goyder's leafy suburb of Peppermint Grove, with a photo of Goyder and the headline "Have you seen this man?" Coles overhauled its practices within days.

This is from Joe Aston: '

Bendat understood what is most important to Richard Goyder …

And for those listening out there, it's not the workers who he steals from to give himself his pay packet, it's not the customers he's slugging with the price of airfares going through the roof and phantom flights and it's certainly not football players in the AFL. As Joe Aston writes and as Paul Bendat concluded, what is most important to Richard Goyder is the myth of Richard Goyder as a professional good bloke—spew. But who is he really? Aston writes, 'He is every man to everybody, whoever you want him to be. He's usually unflappable, but his feathers are plainly ruffled now that he's spruiking his turnaround bona fides,' in order to divert much-earnt criticism following the woeful behaviour and management at Qantas. He cannot keep getting away with this. Today I call for his resignation and his whole crooked board at Qantas.