Real perception

DEBORAH Thomas might be one of the most experienced publishers in Australia but it appears she lacks an essential tool of the journalistic craft. That is, an ability to understand how an issue will be perceived by the public.

Deborah Thomas is now the issue. So, too, is her company, Ardent Leisure, the owner of Dreamworld.

And my guess is that there are many in the public who will regard this company as bereft of judgment at best, flint-hearted and money-hungry at worst.

The former editor-in-chief of The Australian Women’s Weekly is now the CEO of Ardent Leisure, the parent company of Dreamworld, on the Gold Coast, where four people died on Tuesday afternoon.

Less than 48 hours after that tragedy, Thomas turned up at the Ardent Leisure annual general meeting in Sydney, where she was scheduled to pocket a cool $843,000 bonus for her performance in that role, on top of her $670,000 salary.

In a belated attempt to defuse criticism over that payment, the bonus was wound back, with Thomas announcing on Thursday night that $167,500 would now be donated to the families of the victims.

If you are prepared to set aside the death of four of her customers just two days prior, you might say that Thomas deserves every cent. The company attempted to argue that the bonus applied to the past financial year, not this financial year.

The problem with the corporate logic of trying to quarantine Thomas’s performance to the 2015-2016 financial year is that it invites the offensive sentence structure used above.

Setting aside the death of the four people just two days prior, she deserves every cent.

None of what was said or done at the Ardent Leisure AGM passes the front bar test.

I doubt there is a person in Australia who felt an iota of sympathy for Thomas as she fought back tears.

She is not the victim here. Her turning on the waterworks was made less convincing by the company’s deeply suspect assertion that it had been unable to contact the families of the dead, arguing they didn’t have their phone numbers.

Perhaps they could ask one of the 20 detectives working this shocking case to get in touch with the next of kin, or almost any of the journalists covering the case, including the Channel 10 reporter who of- fered to hand over a phone number there and then.

Perhaps the company received legal advice not to get in touch with the families to say sorry at all, lest a statement of condolence be construed as an admission of liability.

There are also many people in the community who regard Dreamworld’s attempt to reopen its theme park just four days after Tuesday’s disaster as deeply disrespectful, regardless of the reason.

It really stretched the outer limits of that old showbiz adage, the show must go on.

It reflected poorly on the company that the job fell to the Queensland cops to order the cancellation of Friday’s hamfisted “Memorial Day” and yesterday’s reopening.

The place is a crime scene, for God’s sake.

Thursday’s AGM represents a low point in the concept of corporate accountability. It was like the company was determined to identify every public relations bungle in the business playbook and methodically tick them off, one by one.

The language used by the outgoing chairman of Ardent Leisure, Neil Balnaves, to defend the payment of Thomas’s bonus would have felt it was surely repellent in its evasiveness.

“The tragedy is only 48 hours old,” he said. “It is inappropriate to comment on commercial matters at this time.”

It is amazing that people who are ostensibly so smart can sound so ignorant. Of course the tragedy was only 48 hours old. That’s why the payment of a performance bonus to Thomas was so misguided. That’s why any attempt to use that tragedy to shut down valid scrutiny of so-called “commercial matters” was inevitably going to be viewed as rank and opportunistic.

It’s not the first time this company has employed some questionable PR techniques.

When Thomas was appointed chief executive officer in February of last year, the company’s share price immediately fell 28 per cent – a loss of more than $300 million of $1.1 billion in shareholder value.

That fall was attributed to nothing other than her appointment, reflecting market surprise at the fact that someone with a background in women’s publishing was now the boss of a diverse international entertainment conglomerate. The company decided, instead, to blame the shareholders for the share price fall, with Balnaves accusing them of “lacking respect”. Cop that, shareholders. I am a pro-business person. Business – be it big business, small business, foreign-owned companies or local firms – is absolutely the engine room of our economy.

I instinctively regard things like Labor’s push for a banking royal commission as poll-driven crap. We should be relieved that, unlike other countries, we have a robust banking sector; a sector that makes big profits.

It is one of the reasons we weathered the GFC better than the rest of the world. Yet, when you hear the head of the CommBank say that not a single head rolled over the CommInsure scandal, you wonder whether big business,

“It is amazing that people who are ostensibly so smart can sound so ignorant”