How to Choose a Crisis Management Consultant in Australia

Bruce Mathieson Jnr became The Star Entertainment Group’s third chief executive in eighteen months in late 2025, taking over from Steve McCann, who had lasted barely a year and a half in the role. Frank Krile, the chief financial officer, resigned with immediate effect days later. Group chief operating officer Jeannie Mok followed him out the door within weeks. Chairman Anne Ward and non-executive director Deborah Page had already resigned after a $300 million rescue package handed control to Bally’s Corporation and the Mathieson family.

None of this happened in a single afternoon. Star’s crisis traces back to 2021, when the first Bell inquiry examined its links to organised crime through Asian junket operators. AUSTRAC is still pursuing a fine that could reach $400 million for anti-money laundering failures. In March 2026, the Federal Court found former chief executive Matt Bekier and former chief legal and risk officer Paula Martin had breached their statutory duty under the Corporations Act. Star’s Sydney casino licence has been suspended since 2022, and the company posted a $471.5 million loss for the 2025 financial year.

That is not a crisis. It is a business that has been managing one continuously for four years, cycling through chief executives, chairs, and advisers along the way. Every organisation that faces something like it eventually asks the same question: who actually manages a crisis like this, and how do you choose the right person to help.

Most boards only ask that question once a story has already broken. By then, the search for a crisis management consultant tends to happen under the worst possible conditions, with a regulator on the phone and a journalist on deadline. The organisations that fare better are the ones that worked out the answer in advance.

A crisis management consultant is the senior adviser a board brings in to manage the media, stakeholder, and reputational layer of a crisis, working alongside legal counsel, the board, and often a regulator, rather than replacing any of them. That is the plain answer to a question a lot of searches never quite resolve, because the phrase gets used loosely to cover everything from software platforms to law firms to communications agencies.

Crisis management and crisis communications are related but distinct disciplines. See how Wilkinson Group draws that line for the full explanation. This page focuses specifically on choosing and evaluating a crisis management consultant.”

Whether an organisation searches for a crisis management consultant, a crisis management service provider, or a crisis communications consultant, the underlying test is identical. It comes down to who takes the call at 11pm, and whether that person already understands the business or is meeting it for the first time.

A growing number of businesses now confuse this question with a software purchase. Monitoring platforms can flag a spike in mentions or a regulatory filing within minutes, and that speed is genuinely useful. What none of them can do is judge what the spike actually means, or decide what a chief executive should say about it in the next hour.

Star’s four-year run through the Bell inquiry, the AUSTRAC action, and three chief executives illustrates the gap. The organisation was not short on information. Regulators, journalists, and its own board papers had flagged the underlying issues for years before any of it became an existential threat. What it lacked, across successive leadership teams, was a consistent adviser applying judgment to that information early enough to change the outcome.

Any organisation can subscribe to monitoring software. Few can buy twenty-four years of pattern recognition applied to the exact moment a warning sign needs to become a board decision. That is the actual service a crisis management consultant sells.

Project counsel, brought in only once a crisis has broken, is the most expensive way to buy this expertise, because the adviser is learning the organisation at the exact moment it needs to already understand it. A properly briefed adviser, already familiar with the business through an arrangement such as Wilkinson Confidante, reads a developing pattern the way Star’s board eventually had to learn to, except before the pattern reaches a Senate estimates hearing rather than during one.

Boards evaluating a crisis management consultant rarely have a reliable way to compare candidates, because most of the differentiating language sounds identical in a pitch meeting. Five tests separate a genuine adviser from a name on a slide.

That fifth test rests on a formula Peter Wilkinson has used for years, and the AI era has only sharpened it:

Truth. The facts, stated plainly, without spin.

Transparency. What changed, shown, not just claimed.

Traceability. A record, timestamped and searchable, that a regulator, journalist, or board can check against what the organisation actually did.

An adviser who cannot explain how a recovery plan holds up against all three, not just the first, is offering reassurance rather than judgment.

Star’s leadership changes were never only about the company. Steve McCann, Matt Bekier, and the directors named in the AUSTRAC and ASIC proceedings each carried a personal reputation into and out of the crisis, separate from whatever the corporate statement said on their behalf. CEO reputation management increasingly sits inside the same conversation as organisational crisis response, not beside it, because a chief executive’s judgment is now scrutinised as closely as the company’s.

The court’s own findings underline the point. The Federal Court held Bekier and Martin personally responsible for a failure of judgment, while dismissing ASIC’s case against seven other directors, including former chairman John O’Neill, for want of proof. That is not a technicality. It shows a regulator and a court willing to draw a precise line between individuals, not treat an entire board as interchangeable.

A board hiring a crisis management consultant should therefore ask a second, quieter question alongside the obvious one. Can this adviser separate the organisation’s reputation from each individual leader’s, and manage both at once without one undermining the other. That is a different skill from managing a single incident well, and it is the skill boards discover they needed only after the wrong adviser has already been engaged.

The Bell inquiry first examined Star’s conduct in 2021. AUSTRAC opened its case the following year. By the time three chief executives had cycled through the business, the organisation was managing a crisis that had been visible, in some form, for the better part of half a decade.

This is the argument for treating issues management as a standing discipline rather than a reactive scramble. Continuous monitoring of media, regulatory, and stakeholder signals identifies emerging risk while a board still has room to act on it, rather than after a parliamentary or regulatory process has taken the decision out of its hands. A crisis management consultant engaged only once the story breaks is, by definition, arriving after the cheapest and most effective moment to intervene has already passed.

Spokespeople also need to be ready before the moment arrives, not during it. Media training for executives and boards is not a separate service bolted onto crisis response. It is the same discipline applied in calm conditions, so that whoever eventually faces a hostile question has already faced one in rehearsal.

Wilkinson Group is not a crisis PR agency in the traditional sense, and the same distinction that separates it from a large agency also separates a genuine crisis management consultant from a software subscription or a generalist communications firm. Continuity of judgment, not headcount and not a monitoring dashboard, is the actual product. For a closer look at how that distinction plays out when boards compare a boutique adviser against a larger firm, our guide to choosing a crisis PR agency in Australia covers the same test from a different angle.

Star Entertainment’s board will spend years, not months, proving that its remediation plan is more than a document. That is the pattern every organisation facing sustained scrutiny eventually confronts, whether the trigger is a regulatory finding, a data breach, or a leadership failure. The organisations that recover fastest are rarely the ones with the most sophisticated monitoring software. They are the ones with an adviser who already understood the business before the crisis started, and who is still there once the headlines move on.

If in doubt about hiring a crisis management consultant before you need one, don’t wait. By the time the need is obvious, the best version of that decision has already passed.