REAR$WINDOW! May!10!2018!! Joe Gersh appointed to ABC board by Turnbull Government

Melbourne!businessman!Joseph!Gersh!has!been!appointed!to!the!ABC!board!by!the! Turnbull!government.!Jesse$Marlow! ! by#Joe$Aston$#

Our stablemate The$Sydney$Morning$Herald had a whiff!of!it!first, to be sure. And now its official: Melbourne businessman Joseph$Gersh has been appointed by the Turnbull government to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

After the recent retirements of Luminis Partners' Simon$Mordant and Deutsche's Steven$Skala, Aunty's board was briefly short of its requisite Jewish investment banker. All is again right with the world! Well, at least Colin$ Rubenstein's…

Arnold Bloch Leibler's former office managing partner is no stranger to Commonwealth directorships, serving for nine years as chair of the $10 billion Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation (riveting stuff – a hospital pass only eclipse-able for trouble and strife, presumably, by an AMP directorship) and 15 years on the Reserve Bank's Payment Systems Board under Treasurer Peter$ Costello and Wayne$Swan. Gersh was also the Australia Council's deputy chair. Gersh went!to!university with Costello, this week's Liberal kamikaze, who, ironically, self-detonated on the budget eve edition of 7:30.

The ABC's top brass is now wailing indiscriminately about an $83.7 million funding cut over three years (a regular sounding triennial here at Fairfax Media), as if trimming the Reflex paper budget will spell the end of all national interest reporting as we know it. Listening to that entitled garbage every month would be enough to leave a sane person pining for the glamour of sovereign risk spreads. Yawn…