Mathias Corman owes his big break to Tony Abbott

I’ve known Mathias Cormann the better part of twenty years.  When I was a senior adviser to Tony Abbott as health minister, Cormann was an executive at WA health fund HBF, brimming with ideas to make that much-derided grudge purchase, private health insurance, more attractive and affordable, and his fund more competitive in an overcrowded and over-regulated market.  I connected him with Abbott — who had previously met Cormann in Liberal party circles but didn’t really know him — about those ideas.

A few years later, when Cormann became a senator, he had a ready-made friend in cabinet in Abbott. And when a few years after that, Abbott did what Malcolm Turnbull hadn’t: he put Cormann on his frontbench where, for the…