Shareholders

Ok I have thought more about it.

If government seriously wants to do something about equal opportunities in senior roles in our listed companies then the way to go about it is through empowering shareholders.

Now that’s an easy thing to write but goddam awfully difficult to implement. With compulsory superannuation in Australia there are a zillion layers of aggregation and management between the shareholders and the boards. Its hard to know where to put in the big stick.

As a result the boards rarely truly represent shareholders interests other than in a vague undefined share-value way and it takes a share price disaster for a board to get removed. Which is why they can all pay themselves so much to do so little. And this is why every wannabee running around the edges of the finance sector desperately wants to get onto a public listed company board, a.k.a. a junket.

The issue is bigger than equal opportunities. Back to an earlier comment – the only reason this works is that most of these companies work in an quasi-cartel environment serving the Australian domestic market. You could put a bunch of poodles on a board and not much would happen. A management team at least has to be competent and not fuck up.

I fall back to my earlier statement – it doesn’t matter who is on these boards. So I don’t care if they are all men or all women. A pox on them all for wanting to be there in the first place.