Make no mistake. There were generous and inappropriate gifts handed out at Australia Post, but they weren’t the Cartier watches awarded to senior executives by Christine Holgate.

Instead, they were the Australia Post directorships handed to the federal government’s friends. In a governance sense, making politically motivated board appointments is a recipe for disaster.

When you look at this Australian government enterprise through a governance lens - like the one that applies to privately listed companies - it’s clearly dysfunctional.

There are factions within the board, there was an obvious discord between the chief executive Holgate and the chairman, Lucio Di Bartolomeo.

Holgate’s biggest mistake was taking the job without a proper appreciation that having only one shareholder, the government (in the style of an absent landlord), meant the normal rules of corporate governance wouldn’t protect her.

You would have thought the demise of her predecessor, Ahmed Fahour, would have been a sufficient portent of the dangers of the post. He was dispatched by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull after concerns he was overpaid.

The rule of thumb in corporate governance circles is that those companies with a large controlling shareholder are the least likely to adhere to the conventions around governance or, for that matter, culture.

For example, Gerry Harvey’s Harvey Norman, James Packer’s Crown Resorts and Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media are organisations regularly criticised as examples of worst practice on governance.

All have a controlling shareholder who is able to make unilateral decisions without accountability to a wider shareholder base.