Opinion
Was there ever a more cloth-eared PM than Anthony Albanese? From swanning around on endless overseas trips and lounging in the corporate boxes at major events while Australians battle a cost-of-living crisis, to watching in helpless panic as hundreds of foreign-born rapists and paedophiles are given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, Albanese’s term has been one PR disaster after another.
You’d have certainly thought Albo would have learned from the Voice debacle just how perilously out of step with mainstream Australia Wokeism really is. You’d also have thought that, after Kristina Keneally was emphatically rejected by voters, yet again, that he’d have clued in that DEI Quota Queens are as despised as they are useless.
But, no.
I guess some women will be celebrating Sam Mostyn’s appointment as governor-general as a clenched-fist moment of empowerment. Just quietly, women of that ilk will also be celebrating that someone called Samuel Mostyn would not have had a snowball’s chance in hell of even being short-listed.
“Sam Mostyn is an exceptional leader who represents the best of modern Australia,” Anthony Albanese said when announcing her new role.
The Australian
In fact, she represents the worst of the Canberra bubble and its cliques of diversity hires.
Ms Mostyn completed Arts and Law degrees at the Australian National University.
In her early career, she was a senior communications adviser to former Prime Minister Paul Keating from 1995 and 1996 before becoming director of corporate affairs for Optus and then group director, human resources for Cable and Wireless and then for IAG.
The Australian
Note that each of those roles never involve actually doing or making anything. Mostyn’s entire career has been dedicated to ticking off diversity KPIs on an endless series of little clipboards.
Mostyn is no business heavyweight. She had a modestly successful career as a lawyer and then as a corporate communications, HR and government relations executive, rising as high as group executive, culture and reputation at IAG.
As far as one can tell from her public profile, she has no track record running an actual business or taking P&L responsibility […]
Her main skills appear to be gender advocacy, networking and being a quota queen, with a helpful side order of ALP connections.
The Australian
And being very, very, very woke.
Company directors were now under increasing pressure to consider climate change risks as a key issue, according to Citibank Australia’s consumer bank chair Sam Mostyn […]
She said the challenge of the COVID pandemic over the past year for business was a “dress rehearsal” for the challenge of managing climate change issues
The Australian
She is also a drearily typical Twitter wokester, endlessly chattering about “Invasion Day” and “Always was, always will be”. Such is the person Albanese has appointed to supposedly preside over national Australia Day events.
Her CV reads like a Disney movie about Ms Woke, winning climate awards, popping up in university sustainability programs, deputy chair of Diversity Australia, presiding over the CEW, chairing the Women’s Equality Taskforce, and sitting on multiple corporate boards and commissions.
The problem with all these appointments is that many will wonder if Mostyn, one the loudest voices for gender-based promotions, secured her gigs because she’s a woman.
There’s no “wonder” about it. We know.
Mostyn reflects the worst of modern woke Australia. The same woke corporate Australia in which our biggest companies threw many millions of shareholder dollars into a referendum that sought to divide the country, using the Constitution, on the basis of race. The same woke corporate Australia that had no read on the country given the referendum failed so spectacularly.
The Australian
And the same ALP which hands out plum jobs like governor-general to connected Labor mates. It was Kevin Rudd who appointed Bill Shorten’s mother-in-law as g-g, back in ‘08. Before that, Bob Hawke made it up to the guy he knifed for the top job, Bill Hayden, in 1987.
But even Labor insiders are appalled at Albanese’s hamfisted effort. Labor powerbroker Cameron Milner blasted it as an “appallingly bad appointment”. “Albanese has given a middle finger salute to every single Australian who voted no to his Voice, 60 per cent of people, he’s given the middle finger salute by appointing the most woke person, with actually a terrible record.”
He’s staying true to form, then.