Spotlight on: Michael Roddan
“This was a story that resonated around the biggest companies in Australia and they all stood up and took notice of it.” The 2020 Walkley winner for Business Journalism.
Winner of Business Journalism at the 2020 Walkley Awards
Michael Roddan, The Australian Financial Review, “#AMPToo — sexual harassment at AMP”
Michael Roddan’s exclusive investigation into the culture of the 170-year-old wealth management company AMP directly resulted in the resignations of some of the most powerful men in corporate Australia and bought the #MeToo movement into the boardroom.
Roddan’s series of investigations into sexual harassment at AMP included 17 front-page stories for The Financial Review between July 1 and August 24, 2020. He achieved unprecedented reporting of the internal backlash surrounding Boe Pahari’s promotion, including highly detailed arguments between executive-level women in closed-door meetings. This relentless reporting meant the board could not ignore pressure from employees, shareholders and clients amid sustained coverage of the culture of harassment and cover-up at the company.
We interviewed Michael after his Walkley win about how he found and pursued the story, its fallout, and why all journalists should have to learn how to read a profit and loss statement.
What does it mean to you to be recognised by your peers for this particular piece set of work?
The piece was important because although there had been instances of sexual harassment in the business community reported before, this one really crystallised the Me Too movement in corporate Australia. Especially around how it deals with previous instances of harassment when you’re considering elevating executives to more senior positions. And the nature of non-disclosure agreements and how they actually affect people working under those executives.
I think that it did start an important conversation locally. One that’s probably been a bit more advanced in the US. This was a story that resonated around the biggest companies in Australia and they all stood up and took notice of it. There’s been a lot of internal policy work done in corporations around how to deal with this in the future.
Often business stories don’t really flow through to the rest of the general public as much as, you know, politics stories or, stories of this nature in the celebrity world. So it was nice to know that this story did leave an impression on the broader public.
What were some of the most significant impacts of the story?
Not only is AMP one of Australia’s most recognisable companies, it’s one of our oldest. It’s 170 years old. It attracts people of a calibre that few other companies do. The chairman at the time, David Murray, was the former Commonwealth Bank CEO. He was the former chairman of The Future Fund. He led the government’s financial system inquiry. Another Board member, John Fraser, was the former Treasury Secretary.It has a unique ability to attract very powerful people and both those men resigned following the reports that I wrote.
Another executive resigned amid allegations that he was sending inappropriate photos to colleagues. And the man at the centre of the reporting, Boe Pahari, who was the Chief Executive of AMP Capital, was demoted from the position after he’d been promoted to it just six weeks earlier.
So we’ve already seen it filter out. A month or two after I started writing, Australia’s biggest insurer QBE sacked their Chief Executive in very unusual circumstances. And it was tied to communications that he had had with a female subordinate. It has meant that corporations can’t really just ignore these issues that their workforce takes much more seriously than they have in the past.
And that the protective veil of secrecy is not as impenetrable as it perhaps once was.
I hadn’t really seen it before where management makes a decision and a large degree of the workforce complains very loudly, both internally and publicly, about that.
It’s indicative that now company management has to not only wonder about financial performance, shareholders, government stakeholders, but they’re also at the mercy of their workforce. So that’s a big shift in the power dynamics of a company. And corporate Australia has long been able to ignore the mood of its workforce, quite easily. So I think this does show that there is more power in the workers’ hands than there had been previously about the direction of a company.
When did you first get the thread of this story and start teasing it out? And how long did it take to get to the finish point?
The story of AMP’s demise has been written for the last half decade. They had all this trouble in the Royal Commission, fees for no service, charging life insurance fees to dead people. Really just gouging superannuation fund members for everything. So the business was in a pretty hard state financially. They announced that Boe Pahari would be taking over as the Chief Executive of AMP Capital in mid June. That was the most important executive position arguably at the company. It was the one part of the business that hadn’t been negatively tarred by any reputational scandals.
A day or two after that announcement was made I got a tip that suggested that he’d had a lot of skeletons in his closet. Normally they do a big lead-up before these changes are made. You know, six months out they’ll do an external, global search. So it was quite unusual that they only gave a two week lead up between when they announced that he was taking over from the previous CEO to when he’d actually be in the position.
So after haranguing a dozen contacts over the next couple of days, I got a handle on what had happened. Over the next two weeks, I built up the story, contacted everyone I could. I was working over three time zones: in Australia and in Britain where he was based, and then in the US where Julia Szlakowski resided, the woman at the centre of these allegations.
I was working the phones, getting to the real dark corners of my contact book, in order to establish a range of facts.
On July 1 we hit publish, which was the day that he formally took over the position. And so he’d flown into Sydney to greet all his new employees and he had to deal with the fact that we had essentially outed him as having this historic sexua harassment claim against him made in 2017, which wasn’t settled until 2018, after they had to bring in external lawyers to deal with it. Because the company just tried to sweep it under the carpet.
Good timing.
Yeah. They didn’t necessarily do anything at first. It took about two months rigorous reporting, internal meetings, internal and external backlash. I had about 17 front pages over the next eight weeks going to this issue and the fallout from it. Until they couldn’t sit there and do nothing because their shareholders were upset. Their clients were pulling money, and their employees were starting to move elsewhere and take their clients with them.
Two months after I first broke the story, then the capitulated chairman David Murray resigned, AMP Capital chairman John Fraser resigned, and Boe Pahari was demoted from the position that he’d just been promoted to. And then the company was put up for sale about two weeks later.
Once the story had broken, did people start coming to you with information?
Yeah. The first story was quiet. It was very difficult to stand up from a legal point of view. The lawyers nearly killed it because it was such a risky story to run in terms of defamation. So it was a real struggle to get that first bit of information in the paper. And then it was just quiet for about 24 hours. And then my inbox was just flooded with lots of people reaching out, similar stories, further tips.
An unusual thing about this happening during COVID lockdown was that all of these meetings were taking place where they’d usually just gather in a big room and hash it out. But a lot of it was the executives in front of a camera on Zoom to each other. So it meant that it was much easier for sources to relay what was going on. (I) got these unvarnished comments from very senior people in all these different meetings, just really complaining and opening up the fact that there was much more to this story. It just unraveled from there. And when a company’s dealing with a huge degree of their workforce in revolt, it’s very hard for them to actually do whatever their business is there to do.
What made you wanna go into journalism in the first place, and was business always the beat that you had in mind?
It’s interesting because no one, when they go into university really has a desire to go into business journalism. And I think that’s a real shame because it’s where all the interesting stories are. Everyone’s attracted to Canberra or to social policy, but business journalism is where you hone your investigative skills. There’s a wealth of resources out there and the quality of the stories is higher.
It was a bit of a tactical move, with how many students there are trying to get into the industry, not many people were attracted to business journalism. So I just took it as the easiest way in.
It was a lot of dry mechanical work at first, but you really do get a bigger sense of how the world operates when you understand the business world. Business stories are not just about numbers going up and down, there’s a lot of human drama. Dreams are made and crushed, there’s all sorts of scandals.
You look under any rock and there’s a story that will tell you more about society, more about politics, more about the social world than there is in a press release issued by a government minister.
So I think more people should be forced to do it, it’d be nice if journalism schools focused a bit more on it. And if cadets and the industry were made to learn how to read a profit and loss statement!
Do you have a message about why it is particularly important now for the Australian public and government to support strong, independent public interest journalism?
I think policy settings can only do so much for the media. We ask for a lot in terms of legislative ease of doing business. The one thing that would make a huge difference is reforming defamation law. It’s a muzzle on the press, and it completely silences many great public interest stories.
The other thing is that we’re competing with eyeballs 100% of the time now. We’ve not only got to compete against other media outlets, but people have YouTube, Netflix, Stan gaming… Their eyeballs are flowing to anything else but public interest journalism. And that’s understandable because a lot of the time public interest journalism is really boring. It’s a great conundrum. And I think that the government can only do so much and it’s beholden on the industry to really take on itself to establish higher standards. Find out who our market is, and really write for our readers and not for anyone else. We’re not there to be cheerleaders for any government or any company or any vested interest. People disengage with the news because they see it as biased or untrustworthy.
We have to recognise that the government can and should only give us the legislative framework that we need to function as long as we show that we can function in a way that understands that responsibility that we have. And that’s not only to be impartial and fair and unbiased, but to do our job to the best of our abilities.
Is there anything else that you would like to add or any people that you’d like to give a shout out to to thank for their assistance, um, in pulling together the AMP true story?
The story couldn’t have come to the conclusion that it did without Julia Szlakowski, the woman who initially lodged the sexual harassment complaint against Boe Pahari, ultimately coming forward. She ultimately put a face to the claims and revealed the true extent of what happened. And that ultimately clinched the changes that were made. Of course there are dozens and dozens of other sources, internal and external to AMP. that assisted me with the story, who were feeding me information even though it could put them in jeopardy.
And thanks to my editors for absolutely backing me in on the story. It was a real team effort.
Michael Roddan is a senior companies reporter with The Australian Financial Review. He was previously a journalist with The Australian newspaper covering economics, politics, regulation, public policy and financial services from Parliament House in Canberra, and Sydney and Melbourne covering the financial system, and with the now-defunct Business Spectator. He was named the Citi Young Business Journalist of the Year in 2020. His book The People vs The Banks, published by Melbourne University Publishing in 2019, was nominated for a Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Interview by Nick Jarvis
