What, ultimately, brought down Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci? Was it, as many believe, his performance on Four Corners, which was less a PR “stumble” and more a PR “skateboard ride off a cliff“? Or was it his role at the head of a supermarket that uses its mammoth share of Australia’s market to squeeze competitors and bully suppliers on its way to surging profits during a cost of living crisis? Was it, as former ACCC chair Allan Fels posited, a combination of both, with the CEO jettisoned before he could get confused about what “on the record” means while fronting one of the many public inquiries in the company’s future?
Not a bit of it. As it always is and, thanks to our stagnating culture and the ongoing decay of conservatism as a worldview, presumably always will be, it is the amorphous concept of “woke” that brought Banducci down.
The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) issued a statement arguing Banducci’s fate was a “warning to woke corporates”, backed up with a survey it conducted in January following the news that Woolworths didn’t intend to sell Australia Day merchandise in the lead-up to January 26. The decision, the company said, was due to “declining demand” alongside a “broader discussion about 26 January and what it means to different parts of the community”, which the IPA classed as a “ban”.
“Banducci’s resignation in disgrace should be a warning to other business leaders that mainstream Australians have had a gutful of big corporates dividing our nation and denigrating our culture and history,” IPA deputy executive director Daniel Wild announced.
Former Queensland ALP state secretary and GXO Strategies director Cameron Milner concurred.
“He wants to take Woolworths woke while he’s celebrating his customers going broke,” he told Sky News host Andrew Bolt.
Also on Sky, former Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger wandered over to Peta Credlin’s studio, from the lodgings he appears to have established at the station, to blame Banducci’s departure on a year of woke, particularly the support the company showed for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
“I think the interview is nothing compared to how woke this guy has taken the board; has taken Woolworths — and they will suffer a consumer backlash,” he said. “Do not lecture people with $2 million worth of shareholders’ money about how they should vote for the Voice.”
Particularly genius is Senator Matt Canavan’s response — we agree those words look weird in the same sentence — who triumphantly announced that “the Woolies boycott” worked, displaying the same understanding of what a boycott involves as he once did regarding communism.
In related news, I’m happy to report that my tireless work warding off Gruffalo attacks in Australia is nearing its third decade of success.
Apropos of absolutely everything, the very same day as this collected analysis dropped, Woolworths released its half-year results — profits had actually increased over the second half of its year of relentless wokery, to just under $1 billion.
