Randwick rugby legend Col Thornley used to drill it into us at every training session.
Attack, he’d say, is the best form of defence. And a concerted attack from a team united, is unstoppable.
As a group of unruly 16-year-olds back in the early seventies with a waning interest in organised sport, it came as a revelation, a profound bit of wisdom that not only spurred us on to victory that season but would resonate for a lifetime.
A quiet and thoughtful giant of a man, it’s unlikely Col ever was a student of 18th Century American military history, where the proverb is thought to have originated but it crossed into sports lexicon a few decades ago, long after Col had espoused it, and now is a tried and tested political strategy.
For much of the past two years, our corporate leaders have adopted the strategy with gusto to run an aggressive campaign aimed at winding back the powers of those who own the businesses they’re employed to run.
And it’s working. In the past 18 months, after furious lobbying, Canberra has endorsed two critical changes that could dilute the power of shareholders and their say in the way our companies are managed.
The first, announced a few months ago, aims to reduce the legal obligations on company directors to keep shareholders fully informed.
Those disclosure laws have long provided the ammunition for aggrieved shareholders to launch class actions against companies when things go awry. Watering them down would make it much more difficult for shareholders to sue.
Then, out of the blue a fortnight ago, the government announced a plan that could nobble the power of industry super funds in how they vote at annual meetings, particularly around issues on the environment, society and governance.
The cosy club under threat
For generations, our big companies have been run by an exclusive club.
It’s not easy to be admitted. In times past, you got there after serving as a senior executive, usually chief executive or managing director. Once installed, you became a member for life, serving on company boards and taking home a decent sinecure for each.
Often, it rarely mattered how you performed. Our corporate history is littered with King Midas-in-reverse characters who presided over a series of ongoing disasters that barely hindered their careers. For decades, directors were reappointed with an average of more than 90 per cent shareholder support.
That’s because they also tended to be directors of the big institutional shareholders; insurance and investment companies like AMP, the since defunct National Mutual and more recently, our big banks. That…