Chasing Headlines, Missing Marks: Hamish McLennan can’t remain as Rugby Australia Chairman

The Wallabies’ season is on life-support a month before the World Cup final, relying on a Portuguese miracle to give them an undeserved quarter-final berth. Two wins from eight. Winless against Tier One nations. Sadly, the Wallabies’ carcass will smell before the semi-finals even kick off.

At the centre of it all, the most powerful man at Rugby Australia remains unremorseful. Former adman, Hamish ‘The Hammer’ McLennan, chairman of the RA board, has become best known for his big mouth since taking the leadership role in 2020.

With the smugness of a man convinced of his own brilliance, and a marketer’s yearning for media attention, he has waxed lyrical in countless ‘profile pieces’ on the transformative effect of his leadership at Rugby Australia. Despite McLennan’s cult of personality, the Wallabies have spent 2023 sounding strong but playing poorly as RA’s premier brand. Being three years into the job, and producing the worst result imaginable for the Wallabies, McLennan has identified the problem - all those who went before him. This is a failure “20 years in the making” he proclaims. Never mind his own destabilising decisions for the Wallabies just nine-months before a World Cup.

McLennan is a man who views the world through the lenses of acquisition and divestment. We see this in his business plans for our sport - the acquisition of Super Rugby teams through centralisation, and the acquisition of talents from better businesses, such as the NRL, or the divestment of part of Australian rugby to a private equity firm. The public was told these are all necessary steps to success. McLennan proudly said in the wake of the Wales defeat that “I have some history of turning organisations around when the going gets tough.”.

Yet his experience paints a vastly different picture. His two years as Channel Ten’s CEO and Exec Chairman between 2013 and 2015 weren’t enough to keep the station from going into voluntary administration just two years later. ‘My work here is done’ was the vibe at the time. It was the same spin at Magellan Financial, where McLennan denounced reports of his demotion from chair to deputy chair, saying it was always his plan simply ‘to step up during a crisis’.  McLennan apparently used his time wisely while at the helm of Magellan, seeking shareholder support for board pay rises at a time when the company’s market capitalisation had been shredded. Not exactly the turnaround king.

Staying true to his media roots, McLennan is armed with talking points about how he will save Australian rugby. In explaining this plan of market conquest, he has outlined an impossible paradox to drive Australian rugby success. The three steps are so intertwined that they can be presented in any order to produce upward trajectory in which McLennan’s business acumen and cutting one-liners swamp the NRL and spearhead rugby’s golden era:

• Sign a private equity deal of $250 million on the basis of incoming broadcast revenue

• Sign NRL players with new income to create media attention and interest

• Sign a larger broadcast deal because of new attention

Each of these actions are carefully balanced on each other, creating a house of cards that is starting to fall over. Rugby Australia has been told they have overvalued their future broadcast deal. As a result, they have been laughed at by private equity firms. Now, the solution is taking out loans to sign NRL players to inflated contracts while being laughed at by the NRL. Not exactly the story McLennan sold. These Rugby Australia failures now require new ideas and bold leadership to remedy, yet McLennan chooses to double down. 'Imagine if we had five more Joseph Suaaliis in the squad.', That’s McLennan’s solution to the Wallabies’ failures in France. Fans can only hope one of these Suaaliis can be the attack coach for a team that scored just 21 combined points in their two most important matches in four years.

McLennan’s successes in rugby have too often been simple headline grabs with little substance. Rugby Australia’s surplus in 2022 of $8.2 million was a promising sign for our embattled code. Yet in reality, this was made possible by cutting funding to the Super Rugby teams and breaking promises to the Wallaroos regarding full-time coaching and pay increases. Worse, McLennan has used these funding cuts to try to strangle Australia’s Super Rugby teams into centralisation. McLennan’s nautical turn of phrase would tell you this is ‘stripping their sails and then bidding on their boat’.

Rugby Australia have suddenly ramped up messaging around the need for centralisation, with their main selling point being its success for Ireland and New Zealand. Dan Palmer, one of the best young coaches in Australia and a man who may one day be the Wallabies head coach, when asked about centralisation said, “the devil is in the detail”. Palmer is right, centralisation may be the best course of action, but it is in implementation, not its concept where it will be successful. McLennan’s issue throughout his RA tenure has been in the detail. Superficial successes and overzealous laurel-taking won’t save Australian rugby. Snap actions and media spin won’t either.

The decision to fire Dave Rennie will forever be the defining moment of McLennan’s reign. Reporting suggests the decision was made by the chairman and subsequently cleared with the board. Worse, his public insult: “I would rather we have somebody who’s really tough and we win World Cups, than we have a Kumbaya session, everyone holds hands, and we fail” may well turned out to be the 2023 Wallabies’ epitaph.

Since becoming chairman in 2020, McLennan has wanted the world to believe he can speak success into existence. His tenure has been defined by his ability to grab a headline and then move on before he can be probed or held accountable for mistakes. Perversely, he takes pride in that fact he irritates New Zealand Rugby and the NRL. Never mind that his schtick irritates Wallabies fans more. He speaks simultaneously as the fearless leader in a tumultuous time: “I’m not one to abandon the ship when you hit choppy waters.”, yet, when it comes time to accept responsibility he speaks as though he is just another spectator along for the ride.

The next four years may well be the most pivotal in Australian rugby’s history. This terrible situation calls for leadership, not vanity. Australian rugby deserves better than Hamish McLennan.