Are family ties a little taxing at ATO? Postal wars as Holgate pitches in
Jeremy Hirschhorn has been a fixture alongside Australian Taxation Office commissioner Chris Jordan during recent Senate estimates hearings, with both charting their careers quite a way back to their days at KPMG.
Jordan, of course, was KPMG’s chair, while Hirschhorn spent two decades climbing the firm’s greasy pole to eventually make lead partner, joining Jordan at the ATO about one year after he left the firm in 2013.
Hirschhorn’s wife, Michelle, is also a KPMG alumnus; she left KPMG as a senior manager some years ago to sit the bar exam and specialise in taxation law. That’s proved rather useful to the tax office, which has hired the Selbourne Chambers barrister on at least 21 occasions over the past decade and more.
The most recent contract was awarded just this month, a $135,000 engagement for 22 days of work starting June 9 and concluding on June 30. That’s the largest contract awarded since 2014, when her husband first joined the ATO; a further seven contracts were given to Hirschhorn prior to her husband joining the tax office.
Since then, the contracts have steadily increased in value, ranging from a $23,000 engagement that year (one month after he started) to a $46,000 contract in 2015 and a $56,000 contract in 2019, notwithstanding the trove of others in between. On our calculations the barrister has received in the order of $736,000 from ATO legal work while her husband has been on staff.
Our questions to the tax office about any conflict arising from this arrangement received a lengthy, defensive response. It said conflicts at the ATO were actively managed and decisions relating to legal work were made by an assistant commissioner reporting to an even higher-ranking commissioner, Kirsten Fish.
As for the Hirschhorn couple, it would appear the relationship was disclosed as far back as 2014 and again once the ATO second commissioner joined the executive in 2020.
Still, we can’t help but note that the legal work has been useful for the upwardly mobile couple.
Last year they settled on a $5.61m home in Sydney’s lower north shore while retaining their old pad in Chatswood worth about $3m.
Networking powerhouse
Australia Post CEO Paul Graham flew into Canberra for a board meeting this week accompanied by executive Tanny Mangos and government affairs adviser Lachlan Hunter, the trio posing for a selfie that ended up posted on LinkedIn.
“We have been at Parliament House engaging with MPs and senators from all sides of politics, about future (sic) and importance of Australia Post in our communities,” Hunter wrote.
But whatever handful of meetings Graham and Mangos lined up didn’t even come close to matching the full-court press of their arch nemesis, Christine Holgate, who was in Canberra as well, briefing anyone who would listen about all the ways Australia Post is failing at the moment.
Not that she needed to make much of an argument. Graham himself is agitating for reforms to the postal sector because, as he’s said quite publicly, the business is no longer profitable and is en route for its first full-year financial loss since 2015.
Having resigned as CEO of Australia Post in 2020, Holgate has recast herself as the boss of Team Global Express, a private equity-owned logistics competitor that’s been lobbying hard for access to the mail service’s last mile infrastructure.
Accompanied by economist Nicholas Gruen, adviser Ben Taylor and Angela Cramp, leader of the Licensed Post Office Group, Holgate went around making her usual pitch for access to Post’s architecture.
The first stop was the halitosis of the Nationals party room where the reception was warm and MPs beseeched Holgate for photographs. Later came sessions with government MPs, the opposition and members of the crossbench, too. The schtick was the same each time. Australia Post has a parcel delivery problem, it should open access to competitors, the cost is minimal, or zero, the benefits are surfeit, and Post’s intransigence is hurting the good people of the bush. The most obvious question, which no one bothered to ask, is why she didn’t do the same while she was in charge back in 2017.
The only remaining point of curiosity was Holgate’s disclosure to the Nationals, and others, that her next meeting for the day would be with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
Apparently she’s in its ear about Australia’s Post’s alleged monopoly on infrastructure, its advantages in the parcel market, and its lack of competitive neutrality.
But whether the ACCC agrees is another matter.
Waislitz’s shindig
We’re a couple of days late, but still worth noting who made the cut for billionaire Alex Waislitz’s King’s Birthday afterparty once he’d been awarded a medal of the Order of Australia. Apparently the festivities were kept tight in the residents bar of Tim Gurner’s Saint Moritz development, where Waislitz and close associate Antony Catalano have bought apartments.
As
Margin Call has already reported, the sale of these piles hasn’t been smooth. Catalano settled on his purchase in recent weeks but Waislitz hasn’t been happy with the finished product so money hasn’t changed hands. For a while it seemed the whole deal might end up in court, but let’s not jump that gun.
In any case, it’s no surprise that Gurner didn’t crack an invite, nor did Waislitz’s future sister-in-law Venus Behbahani, a former Real Housewives of Melbourne personality who’s suing him over a real estate misunderstanding worth a few million dollars.
Catalano was there, of course, as was Mesoblast CEO Silviu Itescu, an old mate of Waislitz and a substantial investor in his Thorney Investment business. Waislitz adviser Martin Casey (ex-Credit Suisse) made the cut along with Waislitz’s lawyer, Jeremy Leibler.
