Why is Siobhan McKenna the new chair of Australia Post?

For the past 17 years, one of Lachlan Murdoch’s closest confidantes and chief sidekicks in Australia has been former McKinsey partner Siobhan McKenna. Last Thursday the Albanese government hand-picked her to be chair of Australia Post for the next three years.

From the day Murdoch spectacularly quit News Corp in July 2005 and announced he was returning to Australia to pursue his media career, McKenna has been by his side. They met when she was the flatmate of his girlfriend at the time, Kate Harbin Clammer, way back in the early ’90s.

McKenna has been the long-term CEO or “managing partner” of Murdoch’s private investment company Ilyria, owner of the Nova radio business, and joined him on the board of Ten Network Holdings during that troubled investment from 2010 until it collapsed in 2017.

And when Murdoch quit as Ten chair in 2014 to return to his father’s business as co-chair of both News Corp and 21st Century Fox, the key recruit he made in Australia was McKenna, who was installed to run News Corp’s broadcasting business Down Under.

Six years later and McKenna has a busy News Corp workload as chair of Foxtel, Fox Sports and Australian News Channel, which owns Sky News. As stated by this profile on the website of Woolworths Group (where she previously served as a non-executive director): “Siobhan is currently CEO broadcasting, News Corp.”

While the Sky News association was not mentioned by Albanese government ministers Katy Gallagher and Michelle Rowland in their joint announcement last week, former Daily Telegraph police reporter Stephen Gibbs detailed in this recent Daily Mail Australia piece that McKenna attended some of the three days of Sky News festivities in Sydney when presenter Chris Smith imploded.

McKenna has been known to avail herself of cross-promotion opportunities at News Corp. Its book division HarperCollins happily published her debut novel, Man in Armour, in 2020, and its launch was given soft publicity across the tabloids and on Sky News. Indeed, Sky News even ran ads promoting the book in 2020, which was promoted by HarperCollins in the following terms:

How much money is enough? How powerful do you want to be? And what price will it extract from you? An intriguing, powerful and hard-hitting novel set in the world of big money and big deals, written by a leading business insider.

These are all questions that could be asked of both Murdoch and McKenna.

However, the bigger question is precisely what the Albanese government is hoping to achieve with this appointment and how it came to pass. Is it a peace offering to the Murdochs in an attempt to win more favourable coverage?

Back in 2015-16, City of Melbourne CEO Ben Rimmer produced a long list of business figures who could potentially serve as future Melbourne ambassadors for a long-term council planning exercise.

As one of 11 councillors at the time, I used the veto card on McKenna on the grounds that Ten Network Holdings had been a disaster for investors and she was too closely associated with all the climate denialism served up by Sky News. It wasn’t a straight anti-Murdoch thing, considering REA Group CEO Tracey Fellows was then appointed, as can be seen in this video.

This raises the question about why no one in the Albanese cabinet successfully ran the argument that appointing the chair of Sky News’ parent company to the most plum commercial board open to the government was not a good look. Even some of the comments published under this glowing piece in The Australian last week point out that Australia Post is essentially a logistics business and McKenna’s background is more in the media.

There are a number of other questions that deserve to be asked, but the political duopoly won’t be doing it as Labor has made the appointment and the Coalition is unlikely to pick a fight with the Murdochs. This leaves it to the Greens and teals come Senate estimates time.

First up, it would be good to know if a professional search firm was involved and what the brief was from the government. After a string of male chairs, presumably a female chair was preferred and ideally someone with government and commercial experience.

McKenna satisfies those requirements, having served on both the Productivity Commission and as chair of the NBN, a gig she got under former Labor communications minister Stephen Conroy but was then prematurely removed from by Conroy’s successor, Malcolm Turnbull, in 2013. Conroy left office and became a paid Sky News contributor, although this was totally unrelated to his selection of McKenna.

The next question is precisely how McKenna will manage her workload to make room for this important government gig, which paid $213,000 last year.

While she did quit the Woolworths board on October 26 after a six-year run, she remains a director of Melbourne-listed investment company Amcil. Murdoch would no doubt have approved McKenna taking this gig, but it is unknown if the deal involves relinquishing some of her Murdoch-associated gigs or cutting her pay.

I’ve attempted to ask McKenna questions at numerous public company AGMs over the years, but she’s always been protected by her chair and reluctant to engage. It will be interesting to see if she lasts longer than her seven months in the chair at NBN Co where she reportedly made a name for herself by canvassing board members about ousting then CEO Mike Quigley and meeting on a weekly basis with Quigley and Conroy.