What the cat dragged in

Update 25 September 2012

When I read yesterday yet another media snippet from a “source close to the board” (i.e. presumably a board member, speaking off-the-record), I was confused by its tone:

“However, a source close to the board saidthe money in dispute related to after 2002, when Ms Storelli signed a new contract that superseded the agreement with Ms Kilpatrick [re increasingly heavily-subsidised rent on an on-school residence occupied by Ms Storelli between 1997 and 2004]. ‘Why would the school pay for her house to be cleaned? How does that relate to her job, particularly when it wasn’t in her contract? I  find that wrong.’’’

On one hand, the anonymous board member invokes the parol evidence rule as confidently as a know-it-all first year commerce student, but on the other hand there is something disconcertingly personal about “Why would the school pay for her house to be cleaned”.  Apart from its vagueness as to which house is meant (Ms Storelli has apparently lived in off-school residences since 2004), there is the odd focus on cleaning as an apparently dubious element of Ms Storelli’s salary package.  Out of all the expense items that might, in the court of public opinion, scream that Ms Storelli was living the high life of the expense of “the school” (= school fee-payers and taxpayers), house-cleaning doesn’t seem to be up there (especially as Ms Storelli has not, so far, been accused of overpaying and/or sending off her cleaner on “professional development” courses overseas).        

My first strong hunch is that this anonymous board member was a woman (who generally have much more of a “thing” about cleaning than men), and more specifically, a woman with a bee in her bonnet about cleaning.   More specifically still, my profile suspect is of a formerly high-flying woman who is currently “reduced” (as she sees it) to doing her own cleaning.  Enter Belinda Probert.

The MLC board’s official website (as accessed today), and most of the non-Fairfax media coverage in the last week have referred to Ms Probert as “the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University”.  In fact, she left this position more than a year ago, in July 2011,“to do more policy and research work”. 

Judging by Ms Probert’s subsequent appearances on Google – but more importantly, her plain desperate reluctance to give up an old job-title that has long been someone else’s – she has spent the last 15 months with plenty of time on her hands, and with much less money that she has long enjoyed.  I therefore suspect that Ms Storelli’s cleaner – and much of the fuel in the current fire more generally – boils down to a matter of concentrated, venomous jealousy – as magnified by Ms Probert’s current under-employment. 

It would appear that sitting on various corporate/school boards is Ms Probert’s only paid current role – it is unclear whether MLC board members are paid (most corporate boards, of course, pay generous “honorariums”) but judging from KPMG partner and etiquette-columnist Bernard Salt’s carefully worded We-are-saints-doing-a-thankless-task column in today’s Herald Sun***, which notably doesn’t invoke the “and we’re not even paid for it!” angle, I would guess that the MLC board members are paid – and quite well – for doing their jobs.  For most, this honorarium would be merely the second/third/fourth layer of icing on their nice main-job package, but for Ms Probert, who AFAICT currently lives on this “icing” alone, the task of demolishing Ms Storelli’s cake – admittedly, it’s a bit rich – is her main job.  This task has even, it seems, involved Ms Probert going back to her first year commerce notes on the parol evidence rule.

And so far, you’d have to say, it’s been a job well done.  The cake has gone, and its eaters (not just Ms Probert) are loudly proclaiming what a thankless task it was, too.    

Belinda Probert wrote a column published yesterday (which I didn’t see until today) in which she seems to claim that the MLC board are all unpaid.

Personally, I have trouble swallowing many things said by Ms Probert.   Her prose in this snippet:  “the discovery by a completely independent and highly regarded firm such as Deloitte” (same URL) seems out of the “completely unique and highly acclaimed” Bali villa-rental (or whatever) web-ad songbook.

Then again (and granted I probably should have made this disclosure earlier), I have taught and marked w-a-y too many contract-law-for-first-year-commerce-students to not have my own “thing” about such students’ textual follies and legal over-simplifications.  What’s worse, Ms Probert seems to show that they don’t ever grow out of this.

* Herald Sun journo James Campbell (“Sacking of MLC principal Rosa Storelli is rich drama” 23 September 2012) is oblivious to the messy complications of salary packaging. “[T]hanks to the generosity of the Federal Government, Ms Storelli was able to pay for a lot of things including her mortgage, her car, her private credit card bills and her nanny from her pre-tax income”.  The fact that Ms Storelli apparently owes a large bill for FBT indicates that the “generosity of the Federal Government” does rather come with strings attached.  Even more dubiously, Campbell waxes on about the good old days, “[b]ack in the 1980s . . . being the headmaster or headmistress of an elite private school was a prestigious, but not especially well-paid, position. This is why they and [the school] staff were given free housing and discounted school fees for their children”.  FBT was introduced in the mid-1980s, and it seems to me to be precisely Ms Storelli’s “free” housing (etc) that has got her into her present predicament in the FBT minefield.  She was clearly well-paid (over $500k annually), but if she had, say, the present-day benefit of a “free”, executive-standard house around Domain Road South Yarra (where Campbell went to school in the good old days), the imputed market rent for this would be at least a quarter of her total package.  And the possible FBT headache with this – priceless.

Stuart Rintoul “Sacked principal faces demand for $700,000 following 'overpayments'”

Australian 21 September 2012 (Reference added 5pm 23 September 2012)