Final three Tas NBN Company board members named

Stuart Corner
Friday, 21 August 2009 10:25

IT Industry - Strategy

Communications minister Stephen Conroy has named the final three directors to the board of the Tasmania NBN Company: senior Tasmanian public servant Mark Kelleher, Hobart academic Dr Daniel Norton and senior business executive Sean Woellner.

They join the previously appointed directors Doug Campbell (executive chairman), Alison Terry, Jody Fassina and Greg McCann. The newly appointed Board members all have strong connections to Tasmania, unlike those appointed earlier.

Kelleher was recently appointed secretary of Tasmania's Department of Economic Development, Tourism and the Arts, and chief executive of the Tasmanian Development Board. He is also on the board of the Clean Energy Council, and is the chairman of Tasmania’s contemporary dance company, TasDance. He has also held a number of senior positions with Telstra in the financial and strategy areas.

Norton has academic qualifications in economics, business and agricultural science and, according to the Government, is an experienced chairman and CEO who has worked in the electricity industry, central government agencies and in international commodity marketing. He is currently chairman of the Tasmanian Ports Corporation, chairman of the Menzies Research Institute and chairman of Capital P&O Logistics and a director of Tasmania's water and sewerage corporations and two private consulting companies.

He is a former chief executive of both Hydro Tasmania and Aurora Energy, former chairman of the National Electricity Market Management Company, and former secretary of the Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet.

Woellner was CEO of Tenix Alliance, a company delivering infrastructure services to major utilities in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, from October 2006 to December 2008. Before that he was executive general manager telecommunications of Downer EDI-Downer Engineering from July 2000 to May 2006.

This role would have given him direct experience of Tasmanian telecommunications. Downer EDI owned Tas-21 a company that laid fibre along a trunk Tasmanian gas network in the early part of this decade. The Government of the time promised that this would be extended along with the gas reticulation network to take fibre to thousands of Tasmanian homes and businesses. However the promised gas network never eventuated - a much more limited network was built. This left Tas 21 as a stranded asset and it was bought by the Government. It will now for a key component of the Tasmanian NBN.