Carr wrote [in The Australian]. “In fact the chair of the Trust, the amiable business blowhard Tony Shepherd, is perfectly cast. He chaired something called the Migration Council, set up by business to fight for a 40-million population, and WestConnex, the behemoth set up by Berejiklian to force through gruesome tollway opinion”.
AFR.com writes:
Shepherd [was appointed] an SCG Trustee in April 2002 [by] the Premier of the day, Bob Carr!
…there is not a single serving Trustee who you could call a banker, or were within cooee of the financial services wrongdoing we’ve all learned about over the past few years***. After his retirement from state politics in August 2005, Carr took a Martin Place office and half a million dollars a year from Macquarie Group (AKA the ‘Millionaire Factory’), whose grip on the vast riches generated by Sydney’s gruesome tollways (his words, not ours) – was established under Carr.
Source: afr.com
Macquarie on rocky road as Carr rides off
Bob Carr joined Macquarie, … in October 2005, JUST THREE MONTHS after his 10-year stint as premier of NSW. It was a time of prosperity for NSW, and far greater prosperity for Macquarie.
Under Carr’s Labor government, and the Liberals which preceded him for that matter, Macquarie put its foot on most of the toll road concessions around Sydney. These were to become the bastions of the bank’s profit-churning powerhouse.
Thanks to its stapled-security trust structures, Macquarie managed to ‘upfront’ billions in revenues and deploy that cash to expand offshore and fund its $30 million salaries.
The toll road contracts, incidentally, remain a secret. There have been efforts to obtain them under freedom of information laws from time to time. The NSW Roads and Traffic Authority once tried to charge $70,000 for one set, and it was never clear what documents might have been forthcoming anyway.
Source: AFR.com