Michael Malone used the stage to dramatic effect in accepting his award as the WA Business News 40under40 1st Amongst Equals last week, lashing out at telecommunications regulation before revealing a heartfelt story about his son’s autism.
It was an emotional setting as almost 900 guests at the Fremantle Passenger Terminal hushed to hear Mr Malone, the founder and CEO of iiNet, “drift” from taking issue with uncertainty in his sector onto the confronting subject of dealing with his youngest child’s disability.
Before this, Mr Malone had highlighted the flight of capital from the telecommunications sector as investors worried about the uncertainty created by federal government.
He said regulation of the sector should be left to watchdogs such as the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission in which he had confidence.
“The government has not yet stuck by the ACCC,” Mr Malone said after the event.
The spirited attack on the uncertainty that had crept into the telecommunications business in the past year due to Telstra’s role as both a competitor and supplier – one that had cost Mr Malone half his stock’s value – was followed by a very personal tale.
In a rare moment of insight into how hard the past two years have been behind the scenes for one of Perth’s most successful businesspeople, he spoke of how autism had crept up on his family unexpectedly and afflicted his youngest son.
In an emotional analogy, he said it was like always wanting to go Paris and, having headed there for a long-planned visit with friends, find yourself, instead, in Amsterdam, separated from your mates as they party in France.
You can sit around or get angry, or you can just go out and “see Amsterdam”, which is special in its own way, he told the crowd.
After the event, Mr Malone said that going public was very much about thanking his wife, Beata, for bearing the burden of this surprise turn of events.
Mr Malone also told WA Business News it was not just the difficulty of this personal journey that he was trying to convey but the fact that he had learned the value of achievements in his son that may be overlooked in other children.
“We now treasure those moments. Why is that we don’t recognise those things in all our children? We only value those things when they are taken away,” he said.
Mr Malone said he had considerable contact from people in business who were in similar situations, and he believed there was the potential to get some momentum behind research and development into autism, which did not attract the funding or have the profile of other disabilities.
