Excellent post,
TIMA9X. Nick Xenophon is unparalleled in his ability to cut through the BS, the corporate spin, and the accounting pea-and-thimble tricks, to find the real story, and to expose these corporate frauds and vastly overpaid self-promoters for what they are.
If these corporate management people actually possessed some morals and ethics, they would always take a major salary cut themselves, when times were actually tough, and profits were under pressure.
However, invariably without fail, when large numbers of layoffs and attacks on wages and conditions of the staff at the coalface are carried out - the regular end result is much back-slapping at boardroom level, and increased salaries for senior management, due to their "highly successful, corporate cost-reduction efforts".
These unconscionable corporate greed merchants at boardroom level, who thrive on the ability to shift costs, profits and losses, depreciation - as well as a hundred other business inputs - effortlessly between jurisdictions, between countries and between corporate regulation regimes - do so to defeat any attempt to get to the nitty-gritty of the real situation, and the fact that they lack any real leadership and management ability.
I suspect that Nick, as a lawyer, has regularly encountered the truthful summation of the flawed character traits of many of these so-called "corporate leaders" during lawsuits.
Personally, I quite enjoy reading judges summaries on AUSTLII records - with regard to high-flying corporate witnesses, defendants, and litigants major personality flaws - and cutting observations of their regular inability to produce anything in court, that resembles the truth.
