The irony of Andrews having an opinion on his attitudes lmaoThe appointment of former National Australia Bank boss Andrew Thorburn as the CEO of Essendon Football Club landed like a turd in the punch bowl.
The fierce indignation centred on Thorburn’s extracurricular role as the chairman of a church that espouses Old Testament views of homosexuality as a “sexual immorality” and compares abortion to the Holocaust. “Absolutely appalling” is how Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews described these attitudes on Tuesday, and himself as a “disappointed Essendon supporter”.
Andrew Thorburn’s appointment as Essendon chief executive was not well received by Victorian Premier and Bombers supporter Daniel Andrews. Eddie Jim, Alex Ellinghausen
That’s low-hanging fruit, to be sure, but Thorburn’s fire and brimstone side hustle has completely overshadowed two other preposterous ingredients of this story: first, the way in which Thorburn finagled the gig; and second, the Essendon board’s collective delusion in believing him “a man of great integrity and exceptional vision”.
Late on Tuesday, Thorburn resigned just 24 hours into his commission. Earlier in the day, he was defending how “my faith has helped me become a better leader”.
“That’s really what I want people to look at, look at my actions, look at my words as a leader and the organisations I’ve created…”
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His last organisation charged customers – including dead ones – more than $650 million in fees for no service, then in the witness stand he tried to dismiss it as carelessness.
This man of great integrity was so soundly flayed by the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry that he was forced to resign immediately upon the release of its final report.
It caused commissioner Kenneth Hayne some umbrage that “Mr Thorburn sought to assert that no one knew this was happening. The money just kept ‘falling into NAB’s pocket’… He sought to portray the charging of fees for no service as a product of poor systems and carelessness. It was, in his words, ‘just professional negligence’… I cannot and do not accept this.”
‘Rotten culture’
Hayne found that “NAB also stands apart from the other three major banks. Having heard from both the CEO, Mr Thorburn, and the chair, Dr [Ken] Henry… I was not persuaded that NAB is willing to accept the necessary responsibility for deciding, for itself, what is the right thing to do, and then having its staff act accordingly … Overall, my fear – that there may be a wide gap between the public face NAB seeks to show and what it does in practice – remains.”
This is unequivocally the description of an unethical organisation whose rotten culture flowed down from the very top.
On Monday, Essendon president David Barham boasted that, “to my knowledge, no other AFL club has ever secured the services of an ASX-listed top 10 company CEO to run its club”.
Barham omitted a key adjective here. Thorburn is a disgraced former ASX 10 company CEO. No other AFL club has ever secured the services of a disgraced former ASX 10 company CEO for the very good reason that no other AFL club has ever sought to.
How was it, precisely, that Essendon secured Thorburn’s services? Melbourne’s Herald Sun reported on August 27 that Thorburn had been engaged by Essendon to “conduct an independent review … which will focus on”, among other things, “the appointment of a new CEO”.
That’s right, Thorburn did at Essendon Football Club in 2022 precisely what David Gonski did at the Future Fund in 2012 and what Dick Cheney did in 2000 as chairman of George W. Bush’s vice-presidential search committee: he used his position as the headhunter to win the job for himself.
Thorburn even interviewed other (unsuspecting) candidates for the role – memorising the best parts of their pitches, no doubt! – before declaring himself a candidate. How is that ethical?!
Essendon is obviously sensitive about the dreadful optics here, given its torturous explanation of how Thorburn went from refereeing the race to raising the trophy.
You also couldn’t expect Thorburn to fix Essendon’s historically scandalous culture. This is the same guy whose chief of staff defrauded NAB of $5 million without him having a clue. The judge said he found it “absolutely staggering that those frauds were not detected by some appropriate system of internal auditing”.
It is a striking reality that in football today, being on the wrong side of diversity and inclusion issues is considered a far bigger black mark on a person than their questionable integrity or their record of ripping people off.
Barham is quite clearly out of his depth. His first press conference as president – defending the sacking of coach Ben Rutten – goes down as one of the worst in AFL history.
But Essendon is a weird club full of deeply weird people. Thorburn would’ve fit right in.
