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Like many a $46,000-a-year all-boys school, Shore in North Sydney has struggled to avoid troubling headlines. The latest was a report in this masthead that former teacher Clare Walker is lodging a complaint against the school with the Human Rights Commission, regarding headmaster John Collier’s characterisation of the murder of young Sydney woman Lilie James by her former boyfriend.
Collier, a former headmaster at St Andrews, had taught the killer, Paul Thijssen, whom he described to staff at Shore as a “fantastic young man”. He later issued an apology buried in a school newsletter.
The Sydney Church of England Grammar School in North Sydney.
Collier isn’t sticking around. He’s set to finish up at the end of the year, after being brought out of retirement three years ago to help the school through a rather turbulent period.
His predecessor, Tim Petterson, is suing Shore for breach of contract. He is seeking damages and reinstatement as headmaster. Over 90 staff have left since his appointment in 2020, and his tenure included the ‘Triwizard Shorenament’ scandal, where year 12s planned a crime-filled rampage to celebrate muck-up day, with challenges including “spit on a homeless person”.
Collier, meanwhile, is set for quite the send-off. Last week, staff and students were urged to send in their messages of support, to be added to a photo book that will be presented to Collier at the end of his term.
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Collier will also get a farewell at the school’s council and staff dinner, to be held at Ivy Ballroom, owned by billionaire pub baron Justin Hemmes, whose Merivale hospitality empire has lurched through a series of its own cultural scandals.
“This event is the bi-annual Shore council and staff dinner, a night to thank staff and, this year, to farewell Dr John Collier, who has served as headmaster since 2022,” a Shore spokesman told CBD.
“More than 250 guests will attend the dinner, which has been planned for over 12 months.
“The venue selection was based on guest numbers, costs and date availability, and was secured after the initial event venue choice became unavailable.”
As a back-up, the Ivy ain’t too bad.
Optus’ outsourcing woes
We turn now to Optus, still top of the table for Australia’s most embattled company, that is, until Qantas finds a new way to screw over customers.
The troubled telco suffered a Triple Zero outage last month that was linked to three deaths. Somehow, chief executive Stephen Rue is still standing, despite a similar outage just weeks later. Rue is relatively new in the job, and is surely all too aware that his predecessor, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, had departed after presiding over a cyberattack and a nationwide outage in successive years.
As Rue dodged calls for his head, and Optus began an all-too-familiar campaign of public self-flagellation, the blame shifted towards the telco’s habit of outsourcing call centre jobs to India and the Philippines.
Optus CEO Stephen Rue with comms chief Felicity Ross.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
While the company said “human error” rather than outsourcing was to blame, a call centre in Chennai, India had been involved in handling the fallout from the botched firewall update that had caused the September outage.
Everyone from the union to former competition czar Allan Fels has said Optus’ culture of cutting costs by shifting jobs to foreign call centres has been responsible for the telco’s woes. The Chennai centre came out of a 2018 deal with Finnish company Nokia (remember them?) and led to the axing of local jobs.
All this makes an August “Ask us Anything” article on the telco’s website, in which outsourcing expert Josh Walther provided advice to businesses looking to offshore jobs, all the more awkward.
“Buyer beware. Just like anything in life, if it sounds too cheap to be true, it probably is,” was among the pearls of wisdom Walther offered up.
An Optus spokesman told CBD the company had provided insights on a range of matters of importance to businesses it partnered with.
“Josh Walther is an external, independent expert on outsourcing who has provided his views as part of a series Optus launched to provide insights to business owners who have asked questions about a particular issue,” an Optus spokesman told CBD.
“The experts consulted are not Optus employees, and their views are their own.”
Ta ta Tarascio
After more than five decades at the helm of one of Australia’s biggest private property companies, Salta founder Sam Tarascio Snr is hanging up the hard hat.
Salta founder Sam Tarascio snr and his son, Sam Tarascio jnr.
And at the ripe old age of 81? We at CBD think that’s a pretty solid innings.
Salta – which has built everything from apartment buildings to shopping centres to sprawling industrial complexes and docks – was established in the 1970s by Italian-born Tarascio. More recently, it has dedicated millions to the burgeoning build-to-rent sector.
Tarascio snr will stay with the company in a role of non-executive founding director.His son Sam Tarascio jnr is acting as managing director. But the lineage doesn’t stop there. One of Sam snr’s grandkids is working at the company – which Salta proudly spruiked in an Instagram post from August.
We wonder what retirement plans will be on the horizon? Currently ranked 93rd on the AFR Rich List with an estimated wealth of $1.75b, we’re sure Tarascio will be having a fine time indeed.
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