Howard's version of mateship

Last week's appointment of former senior private secretary to John Howard, cabinet secretary and now company director, Paul McClintock, as chairman of Australia's biggest private health insurer, the Commonwealth Government-owned Medibank Private.

Just by-the-by, McClintock is also chairman of Symbion Health, a company with extensive interests in private health care, health centres, radiology and medical imaging, pharmaceuticals and other health products like vitamins.

The controversy over the appointment of Howard adviser and close confidant Geoff Cousins to the Telstra board late year - just ahead of its going out of majority government ownership - is another example of this increasingly common phenomenon.

This put the Government into conflict with another of its past appointees, and now Telstra chairman, Donald McGauchie. The former National Farmers Federation chief, a central player in the 1998 confrontation with the waterfront unions, was placed on the Telstra board shortly after that dispute, only a day before the 1998 election was called.

Tony Clark, a former NSW managing partner of KPMG and personal friend of John Howard, was another Telstra board appointee. Clark was also put on the Australian Tourist Commission (now Tourism Australia), of which he is now deputy chairman under former National Party leader and deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer.

Meanwhile former Liberal party NSW state director Scott Morrison was managing director of Tourism Australia from 2004 to last year, when he fell out with Minister Fran Bailey and departed. (In December he returned to a political role as campaign director for NSW Opposition Leader Peter Debnam.)

Of far wider consequence is the Reserve Bank board. The controversy around the board appointment (and subsequent resignation) of South Australian businessman and Coalition donor Robert Gerard - despite his company having been in a fight with the Tax Office, later settled for $150 million, over a Caribbean tax haven.

But there have been others, including former WMC chief executive Hugh Morgan, whose company donated heavily to the Liberal Party, as well as the ubiquitous Donald McGauchie.

Former Commonwealth bank chief David Murray, an outspoken public supporter of Government policy and the Prime Minister during the last election, was appointed to head the Future Fund, which will invest billions in retained surpluses on behalf of the taxpayer.

Professor Ian Harper, a public supporter of Government policy and former business partner of former Liberal party treasurer Ron Walker in an online banking venture, heads the Government's Fair Pay Commission, which determines the minimum wage.

Graeme Samuel, appointed head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in 2003, was treasurer of the Victorian Liberal Party in the early 1990s.

Another old Howard friend, George Weston Foods chairman John Pascoe, was in 2004 appointed Chief Federal Magistrate. George Weston had been a large donor to the coalition parties.

A more recent appointee to the federal magistracy is John O'Sullivan, formerly a senior adviser to former workplace relations minister, Kevin Andrews, and an industrial officer with the Metal Trades Industry Association and the NSW Farmers' Association

If John Howard did happen to be beaten at the end of the year, he will be leaving a network of appointees in powerful positions as a legacy that could outlast him for some time.

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