The damned are hard at work:
It sounds like Anna Bligh is putting her stamp on the Australian Bankers’ Association’s poky Secretariat on Sydney’s Pitt Street.
The former Queensland Premier (and now Medibank Private director) is hedging her own ALP roots with her latest hire: former Coalition staffer Nathalie Samia.
Samia begins next week as the ABA’s executive director of corporate affairs. Returning from a three year stint in New York, she was previously Woolworths’ head of public affairs and before that a lobbyist for Insurance Australia Group.
What’s more, Bligh has just engaged (recently) ex-Rio Tinto spinner Ben Mitchell to run the Big Four’s campaign against the Weatherill Government’s planned bank tax in South Australia. John Howard’s former press secretary ran – with the late ad man Neil Lawrence – the Minerals Council’s campaign against Kevin Rudd’s mining tax, before making light work of WA Nationals leader Brendan Grylls (and his iron ore levy) at this year’s state election.
And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
