Labor MP Marielle Smith's many Sealink ties

Clint Feuerherdt is the CEO of transport and tourism operator Sealink, which in FY20 banked $8 million in JobKeeper subsidies while paying him a $500,000 bonus. This caught the eye of Labor MP Andrew Leigh, who slammed Sealink and other companies doing the same in parliament. And Leigh's censure wasn't tempered by the fact that Feuerherdt is married to newly minted SA Labor Senator Marielle Smith.

Asked about the broadside, Smith told The Australian she and her husband were "separate people with separate careers". Despite his bonus presumably going into their joint account. "He was a working-class kid from public housing who grew up to become a CEO and I’m proud of him", she added. Too cute.

We don't doubt the Sealink chief is an impressive guy. But what wasn't mentioned is where he first became a CEO. It was at Transit Systems, a company founded by the man who would become his father-in-law.

Feuerherdt was a Brisbane-based banker at JPMorgan Chase and Investec before accepting the Transit Systems job in 2009. Until earlier this year, Adelaide-based businessman Neil Smith was its chairman. And from 2014 until mid-2018, Marielle Smith was one of its directors. A former staffer to Julia Gillard and Kate Ellis, ASIC filings show Smith resigned her Transit Systems positions about the time news broke that she was a potential candidate for one of Labor's South Australian vacancies.

Transit Systems was sold to Sealink in a $635 million deal earlier this year. Feuerherdt smoothly jumped from one CEO role to the other in the process, under the watch of Sealink's then-chairman, Andrew McEvoy (the ex-Tourism Australia chief and ex-Fairfax exec).

But that didn't mark the end of the Smith family's involvement in Feuerherdt's career. After the merger, Neil Smith joined the Sealink board. And was paid for his Transit Systems stake partly in Sealink scrip (worth $168.2 million), making him Sealink's largest shareholder by a considerable margin. Feuerherdt got plenty of scrip too, issued to a company called Smith Feuerherdt Holdings.

Funnily enough, when Smith's marriage to the Sealink chief was pointed out to Leigh, he dissembled by saying remuneration decisions were made "by company boards, not executives themselves". So you see, his righteous critique wasn't aimed at Smith's husband — just her father!

The point is that "separate people and separate careers" rather undercooks the matter. When we called that dismissal "too cute" in this piece's opening, we didn't mean adorable.

Transit Systems didn't begin in Adelaide, but has banked a fair bit of coin from the South Australian government's privatisation of the bus and tram system. Those contracts, recently extended for eight years, are now Sealink's.

The South Australian Labor Party is staking its 2022 election campaign on ending or reversing the privatisation of the state's public transport networks, having done nothing to move things in that direction during its own recently concluded and very long reign. Either way, given Smith's Labor connections, we're sure it won't be the last time her family's interests are noted.