Loathed - and loving it - Forbes.com

Kerry Packer is Australia's richest man, worth an estimated $2.5 billion. At a meeting in Sydney in October of the shareholders of Packer's Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd., Stephen Mayne grilled Packer on some bad investments. After several minutes Packer retorted: "Do you basically set out to be offensive, or is it just natural?"

The answer is – both. Stephen Mayne, 31, is Australia's most outspoken – and disliked – shareholder gadfly, asking impertinent questions of Australia's high and mighty. Besides Packer, he has taken on Rupert Murdoch, over his personal use of News Corp assets and the company's low dividend yield. Mayne shows up at about a hundred shareholder meetings a year, sometimes arriving on a bicycle at meetings in Melbourne, where he is based. He has also stood outside meetings dressed in a lime-green costume.

A self-promoting professional pain-in-the-neck? No doubt. But until September 1999 Mayne was a prominent columnist with the Australian Financial Review, the country's biggest business newspaper. In 1999 he won Australia's top journalism prize, the Walkley, in the business category. He left his column to run, unsuccessfully, for public office in the state of Victoria; he turned full-time shareholder activist in February of 2000. "I decided that I should become a part of the [corporate-governance] story."

Mayne broadcasts his criticisms of Australia's corporate establishment at shareholder meetings, on radio talk shows and on his two websites, Crikey.com.au and Shareowner.com.au. Together the sites get more than 20,000 hits a week, he claims; he also claims that more than 1,400 Australian political, business and media heavyweights pay to get full access to the sites and a daily e-mail newsletter (A$55 a year; US$29). As Mayne says on Crikey.com, "It is our self-appointed task to take a long, thin spike to the bloated egos of political and corporate Australia."

To be sure, Mayne has yet to score any landmark victories, such as winning a major lawsuit or getting reforms enacted. Nonetheless, he is hoping to inspire others to become more active.

Gadflies like him don't arise in vacuums. Australia's equity culture is growing rapidly. About half the adult population, 7.6 million, own shares directly or indirectly (through the spread of private pension plans since the early 1990s). Membership in the Australian Shareholders Association (ASA), founded in 1960, has shot from fewer than a hundred members in the early 1990s to 7,000 today; according to Tony McLean, its head, it's growing at a 20% annual clip.

Yet many of Australia's business elites have failed to keep up with demands from the new shareholder class for transparency and attention to building shareholder value. Boards can be stacked with insiders. There are problems, as elsewhere, of executives' getting fat paychecks though adding little to the bottom line. There are demands for better oversight in the wake of the prominent collapses recently of the telecom firm One.Tel and the insurance giant HIH.

"Mayne broke an unwritten rule that you don't challenge corporate boards," says Sandy Easterbook, head of Corporate Governance International, an investor advisor group in Sydney. "Mayne has had an impact in stirring up excitement about shareholder causes," says McLean.

Mayne's critics say he overstates his influence on corporate governance, is too sensational and plays fast and loose with facts. "He is inclined to fire from the lip,"charges Mark Day, the media columnist for The Australian. "He frequently gets his facts wrong. "[Still,] most fair-minded people would say that his heart is in the right place."

"I'm in the conflict business, [and] many people hate what I do," Mayne says. But until ordinary Australians stop buying stocks, he's not going away.

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