[With apologies to Shakespeare's Macbeth.]
It may be that political news abhors a (Christmas/New Year) vacuum, but hasn’t Evan Thornley’s departure from politics at the point when the Victorian ALP caucus was about to elevate him to a Ministry set the cat among the pigeons? Writing in Crikey today, Andrew Crook thinks there’s more to all this than meets the eye – the story is reproduced with permission over the fold.
[Disclosure: I met Evan Thornley in Melbourne in 1988, when as a young NOLS kiddie, I had a proxy for the NUS executive meeting which considered how to respond to the introduction of HECS by the Hawke government. It was a memorable trip, particularly for the chance to see the incredible spectacle of Sophie Panopoulos in full flight, allied of course with the token Trot on the exec. Oh, and for a party at Julia Gillard's place. But any discussion of Comrade Thornley is of course precluded by the iron law of caucus solidarity. See - I kept the faith!]
Andrew Crook writes:
The speculation that recently-resigned Victorian ALP Evan Thornley is planning to join Israeli spruiker Shai Agassi’s ambitious ‘Better Place’ electric car project is looking like the Christmas gift that keeps on giving for the Victorian opposition. Thornley’s coy party room pronouncement that he was about to go to a ‘better place’, without naming the firm, now looks more than a little churlish and threatens to call time on a stellar career that began in the cesspit of Melbourne Uni student politics.
‘Better Place’ has plans to replicate an Israeli network of car battery swapping stations here, a scheme that could easily fail, despite promises of millions of dollars in state and federal largesse. As parliamentary secretary for innovation, Thornley would have been intimately involved in the October launch of Better Place’s local operations attended by innovation minister Gavin Jennings. Better Place also stands to emerge a significant winner from Kim Carr’s $1.3 billion green car fund.
This exclusive interview given to Go Auto magazine in December by Marshall Towe, Better Place’s global development manager, now makes for interesting reading:
“For the next six to eight months, the most important thing to do is government relations policy.”
To that end, the company is urgently searching for “a high-end CEO with vision, who knows government and business, and can champion the cause” before assembling the rest of the Australian team required to achieve the $1 billion roll-out.
Who does that sound like?
The Australian CEO would be expected to earn up to $700,000 a year, many times Thornley’s parliamentary salary, and could possibly include a multi-million dollar equity stake. Ironically, with Thornley’s name now mud in Labor circles, any promised Better Place subsidy could be under serious threat.
Stuart Rintoul added some more intrigue in today’s Australian, recounting a trip Thornley took to Israel in March last year on behalf of Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. At Better Place’s October press conference in Melbourne, Agassi fingered the AICC as a crucial factor in shoring up his Australian plans. In Thornley’s tour diary published on the AICC website, Thornley recounts a meeting with Zohar Zisapel of the RAD Group, who went to uni with Agassi and who together make up the fraternity at the core of Israeli business.
It’s also worth re-examining the timeline that led to Thornley’s resignation. After Theo Theophanous was charged with rape on Christmas Eve, Thornley was immediately tapped to ascend to the Ministry. As late as 27 December, Thornley was still hitting the phones to secure support for his tilt. He announced his resignation just one day later on 28 December.
The sudden about-face doesn’t seem to gel with the narrative that Thornley had been weighing the pros and cons of public life over many months. Instead, Crikey understands Thornley may have been engaged in a stand-off with the Premier, who while backing him for the Ministry, failed to guarantee him Theophanous’ coveted number one position in Northern Metropolitan or, alternatively, a safe lower house seat. Thornley only just squeaked home in 2006 from second position in Southern Metro and given the ALP vote will almost certainly slump in 2010, he could have found himself out of a job.
There’s now massive pressure on Thornley to explain, from his hideaway in the south of France, the full extent of his talks in Israel and Melbourne and the circumstances in which a Better Place job offer may have been made. The outcome could be devastating; both for his storied reputation and a Brumby government unused to the stench of cronyism that has engulfed the other Labor states.
NB: Please visit the Crikey website to see all the hyperlinks in the piece.
Update: More on the Thornley saga in today’s Crikey.
Some mediocrities made a pile in the net-bubble…so what?
Crikey loves these gossipy little beat-ups doesn’t it… but then , like Mal Turdbull, some goose who started Crikey made a pile in the net-bubble too.
I’m seeing a pattern emerge here like Jesus on a roll.
But really if these people want to organize a ‘circle-jerk’ then may I suggest they get a private room?
Tis a far, far better thing I have now done here than I have ever done.
Update: More on the Thornley saga in today’s Crikey.
I voted for Thornley in his upper house district; it’s now guaranteed the ALP will be reduced to one-out-of-five in Southern Metro precisely because Labor has to run someone like a tycoon (E. Thornley) in order to win enough votes in the leafy east for that second quota. Bracksy couldn’t even pick up Box Hill in his ’02 landslide!
(BTW, some winger thinktank twitt wrote a column in the Age about how Thornley obviously left politics because there’s too much unpleasantness in Spring Street, because you know a man worth $200,000,000 is as pure as the driven snow and public office is so vile. Now there’s a ‘intellectual’ without a subscription to Crikey.)
I could imagine that the upper house of Victorian parliament might be a come down – in terms of both salary and immediate can-do influence – for a CEO of an internet bubble company. But Evan chose it knowingly and surely did his due diligence such that he didn’t walk into it blind.
It’s funny that one person who defended his decision to pike it midway through his term was Cheryl Kernot who seemed to feel she was hard done by once entering the ALP as a “star recruit”. But she was a senator who had to go and win/defend a House of Reps seat – and, really, I suspect most senators have no idea of what it means to win an electorate. Evan got in on a proportional vote; could he win an electorate? Did he want to? Did it matter? Could he, as a potential cabinet minister, deal with the public service? etc ect
Thornley began his political career by allying himself with the non-Labor left (as the ‘Labour Club’) to break the ALP left (‘the ALP Club) hegemony in the Melbourne University SRC.
One of the stranger motifs in the discussion of all this is that as a business person, Thornley was some sort of innocent abroad among the machinations of Labor internal politics. Given his own background within the ALP in the 80s and 90s, I doubt that. Like a lot of commentary and journalism, it’s probably just a template taken off a shelf – search for appropriate theme when high profile ALP member’s career doesn’t quite pan out. I think a better case could be made that Thornley wasn’t even really a lateral recruit to politics, though no doubt it would have suited him for that perception to gain ground.