Rituals, rights, red wine and redemption

Spring is in the air — and if you’re a follower of AFL football, you will have realised that despite 100 years of attempting to rig the competition, the bloody Victorians are staring down the barrel of a final with no Victorian sides in the competition. It’s not often that you laugh so hard your diaphragm gets sunburnt but I can’t help myself.

In this delirious state of mirth (carn the Dockers!), and suitably impregnated with some of Margaret River’s finest, I have decided to reveal everything.

Yes, this is the boots ’n all on all that’s happened on theFPAboard since I came on four years ago.

Tragically, this is the end of my stint. According to the FPA constitution, you can only serve two terms. Don’t believe it, boys and girls, the constitution’s got nothing to do with it. It’s simply because with my input, the FPA had to register for Wine Equalisation Tax (WET) on their business activity statement and it just became too expensive.

They told me: “Nick, financially we’d be better off paying the fine for the importation of 23 tonnes of crack cocaine than cop the WET again.”

My campaign for election started when, with the help of ‘ZoNe SHifTER’, from a nondescript Belgian web site, I hacked the FPA database and accessed all the information on every planner.

Tony in Balmoral — we know what you did with the worms, and Wendy in Wollongong — your photos have been the highlight of 28 Christmas parties at last count.

As the original FPA spammer, I managed to e-mail every member and include their credit card details to show I meant business. Accessing the database also meant that I could alter a few minor details and as a result, every member in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania had a postal address of PO Box 1620 Midland WA.

The Federal Police were so impressed with the quantity of mail being addressed to a suburban financial planning firm, it took me three weeks to convince them that my name was not Retired Colonel Nick Mugabwe and that I was not a Nigerian national.

I offered 18 work experience places to the local high school that September and had them all marking ballot papers for a week.

The kiddies learned bugger all about financial planning but one of them is now tipped to become the next state president of the New South Wales Liberal Party, having a ‘deep and sound understanding of the electoral process’. The others have achieved the enviable result of being the youngest recipients of a Centrelink Disability Support Pension based on repetitive strain injury.

Having been successfully elected, Colin Scully promptly resigned. He assured me this was purely coincidental but I have heard the board felt that had we both been on the same plane together, there was a real risk of us sinking into the tarmac on a hot day.

Board meetings are always fun and start with the ritualistic FPA hymn, which we learn on director’s induction day. This is done with us all holding hands, our left feet in the air and is sung to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen’.

God save our precious butts,

Long live our precious butts,

Keep it all quiet.

We all love M E Rs

And we like late night bars

Long as we’re not pay…ay…ing

We love (...insert fund manager name here)”

We substitute the name of the fund manager each meeting, dependent on the following:

All directors are required to reveal what fund managers have paid them in cash since the last meeting. Dinners, trips, knick-knacks and cars don’t count.

It goes into a big pot in the middle and the fund manager that’s paid the most gets its name substituted in the hymn next time. The pot is divided equally into 10 and we get a share, except for the Big Kahuna who picks up an extra tenth.

From here things get interesting and for first timers, I admit it might appear a little weird.

We all sit at a round board table. The lights are dimmed and the room fills with a kind of eerie green smoke. There are argon and neon lasers (we got the idea from the Brisbane convention), and from the end of the boardroom table, a bright light appears.

The chief executive comes in wearing a dark purple cape and a mask, which looks a little like John Freedricks (of National Safety Council fame).

At this stage, there’s a bright blue flash and lightning comes out of each of our heads, which connects with the director sitting next to us. This explains why a good number of the FPA board is going or has gone bald.

The women are allowed to wear an aluminium tea cosy to protect their hair. John Hewison’s lightning bolt once connected to the three phase power outlet which explains his hair and Ray Griffin’s accidentally hooked up to a rather bizarre looking dried flower arrangement.

At this stage the chief executive calls out “hail the mother ship, hail the mother ship”. The light at the end of the table begins to oscillate and it replies, “connecting at 44.6 kilobits per second”. There’s another blue flash and then we hear a rushing sound.

I’m not actually sure what happens after that but at exactly 4pm, we awake and find ourselves at the Qantas club. We feel a strange desire to turn the little plates of cheese into Devils’ Tower Wyoming and believe that all fund managers should be protected at all costs.

Yes indeed, just another day at an FPA board meeting.