Over the past few years Westpac CEO Gail Kelly has been the lucky beneficiary of some of the mushiest anti-journalism in the land.
Going back through the clipping files is, to use a cliché, a veritable orgy of cliché. Kelly has been hailed as the supermum, the platinum-haired beauty, a woman of steely resolve, who is always immaculately turned-out, a passionate advocate of work-life balance, someone who is quietly reinventing the way business is done with a more compassionate, family-minded approach to corporate conduct.
When she was appointed as CEO in August 2007, one female journalist shouted excitedly at the press conference: “There’s hope for us yet!”. There is hope you yet, girls, if your idea of equality is seeing female chief executives demonstrate that they can be every bit as foolish and as flint-hearted as their overwhelmingly male equivalents.
Given her efforts this past week Gail Kelly might as well ditch the Escada suits and buy some chinos and RMs and a Herringbone shirt and take her place down at the Verandah Bar in Martin Place this Friday to scull Stellas and talk about the Super 14s.
This is most definitely not written as a call to abandon the push to get more women onto boards and into the most senior positions of our companies, and the most senior positions of public life. Far from it. The few women who hold senior positions are generally doing a terrific or adequate job. There should be many more of them. And 50 per cent seems a realistic kind of target, given that every second person I see around the place appears to be a woman.
But the performance of Gail Kelly has exposed the gulf between the argument for encouraging more women into senior corporate and public positions, and the soppy rhetorical presumption that they will automatically bring some heartwarming feminine otherness to the role.
As a few hundred thousand put-upon mortgagees now know, it was Westpac which thumbed its nose at the Reserve Bank, at Canberra, and most importantly at families by jacking up its variable interest rate a full 45 points, almost double the increase in the official cash rate of just 25 basis points.
It was a monstrous rate hike, well above the Commbank’s 37 point increase and ANZ’s 35 point increase, and way beyond the NAB’s thoroughly decent 25 point shift exactly matching the RBA’s hike (which, rightly or wrongly, is what the public expects the banks to do.)
Kelly’s conduct was foolish for several reasons. She did massive damage to her own brand, and the brand of her bank. The decision looked like rank opportunism, with the bank using the cover of the Liberal Party’s federal leadership implosion to sneak out its announcement that it was going almost twice as hard as the RBA had in terms of clobbering its loyal customers. The decision also came just weeks after Westpac launched its effective (but now, it would seem, misleading) round of advertisements profiling individual bank managers staring deadpan into the eye of the camera and talking about how totally committed they are – “I’m a dog with a bone” – to doing the right thing by customers and families.
Quite obviously this decision was totally the wrong thing to do by customers and families. It was flint-hearted. It sits oddly with the kind of rhetoric we saw from Gail Kelly upon her appointment as CEO, where she talked at length about her family-minded approach to work.
“I’m a big believer in work-life balance,” she said. “Practices of flexibility and practices of encouraging people to live whole lives are principles which I have believed in my whole life.”
That has largely been true of Ms Kelly’s workplace – Westpac does seem a happy and stable environment, it has suffered no industrial tensions under her tenure, and it has led the way with commendably generous parenting leave and flexible hours and work practices.
But through her actions Ms Kelly has now shown that she doesn’t want to extend to her customers the same compassionate approach that she shows to her staff. Families have lost flexibility as a result of her decision. There will be mums who are working extra shifts or dads who are putting in for overtime to cover the cost of this over-the-odds whack.
Over the past two days, as the extent of this public relations nightmare has become apparent, Westpac has done a shocking job trying to spin its way out of the mire.
There was the flippant remark yesterday from Peter Hanlon, the outgoing group executive for Westpac’s retail and business banking, who made the plainly obvious observation Westpac wasn’t trying to be the cheapest bank.
“We don’t have a price leading strategy,” he told analysts at a strategy presentation. “We’re not the Jetstar of banking.”
Kelly weighed in with the casual reassurance that she did not think anyone would lose their homes as a result of the hike to 6.76 per cent and then gave the punters a bit of Harold McMillan-style “you’ve never had it so good” to cheer them up a bit.
“Look, interest rates remain very low, so no customer will lose their house as a result of this,” Ms Kelly said.
“We encourage customers to ring us directly, to communicate with us directly through our branches, through our bank managers, through our contact centres and through our senior leadership directly,” she said.
“And we will talk to our customers, explain the basis of the decisions we make and actually provide additional assistance should that be required.”
You have to pity the poor buggers who are featured in the Westpac advertisements as they brace themselves for customers to take up Ms Kelly’s kind offer.
All in all, it’s been shocking and ill-conceived corporate gluttony. It was a nice coincidence that it came in the same week as another superficial win for girl power with the elevation of Kristina Keneally as our first female premier.
Anyone who thinks this is a win for the sisterhood needs their head examined. Keneally has been installed by a deeply unpopular bunch of male spivs at the arse end of a useless government. She’s almost been offered up as a sacrifice – whatever valid, longer-term dreams she had of being premier have been jeopardised by a pack of male opportunists who have jammed her in there now, hoping only that she can stem the damage at the next poll.
Keneally for her part is trying to position herself as a factional Florence Nightingale, blathering on about how it’s time to heal the party. She can kid herself that this is her role but it will not wash with a single voter.
As with the motherhood treatment of Gail Kelly on her elevation, the public has a well-tuned radar for fatuous sentiment which is not backed by actions, and we have seen plenty of that this past week where the women have shown themselves to be no better than the blokes on a bad day.
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