As the departing CEO’s long farewell drags on, there remain existential issues to resolve that may be beyond his control
ast September, in a function room at the MCG, Delta Goodrem performed her hit song Sitting on Top of the World. Halfway through, she was joined on the dance floor by Gil McLachlan. The outgoingCEO was at the top of his game. He’d just signed off on a $4.5bn broadcast rights deal. The previous weekend had seen some of the best finals football ever played. McLachlan stooped, twirled and dipped. Delta blushed. The room gurgled.
McLachlan flew back early. There was so much back home that was still hanging. “The Hawthorn thing”, as he called it last week, was ongoing. There was no new CEO. There was no new general manager of football. There was a collective bargaining agreement to negotiate. There was a Tasmanian team to get off the ground. There were concussion class actions looming.
At first, the Hawthorn allegations seemed to play to his strengths. They were something to get to the bottom of, and to move on from. “There will be learnings from this,” he said. But the complainants refused to play by the AFL’s rules. One of their lawyers said the process should focus on “minimising power differentials” and “undertaking the process of decolonisation”. McLachlan, in his final days as CEO, probably didn’t have “undertaking decolonisation” on his to-do list.
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