Publicly, he blamed the “McCarthyist” campaign against Packer, but this hid the tensions inside the camp, which were the real reason for his departure. The first to go was Kennedy, who unexpectedly resigned in mid October. Packer conspicuously failed to stand up for them. The two executives from Tourang’s foreign partners, Brian Powers and Dan Colson, took command of many aspects of the bid, and sought to overturn agreements Packer had earlier reached with Kennedy and Turnbull. Ironically, despite the public perception that these two were Packer stooges, what eventually caused Packer’s failure was the internal pressure on them, and Packer’s failure to support them. Also publicly prominent was Malcolm Turnbull, who had worked many years for Packer before becoming a merchant banker. The Tourang consortium’s designated new chief of Fairfax newspapers was Trevor Kennedy, who had worked for the Packers for almost two decades. Apart from the issue of media monopoly, and the hostility based on his own record, Packer’s major political problem was the central involvement of two people perceived to be doing his bidding. In crucial ways, Packer had mismanaged his attempt. Two days after Westerway’s statement, Packer announced his withdrawal from the bid. It would look at whether, as a member of the Tourang syndicate, Packer would be in a position to exercise some control over Fairfax and so be in breach of the cross-media laws. When the chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, Peter Westerway, appeared before the same committee a few weeks later, he announced an inquiry into the takeover. Rarely mentioned, however, was the fact that just three weeks after this apparently wonderful performance, Packer had to abandon his quest for Fairfax. “As a public performer he was quite breathtaking.” Indeed, it was such a riveting performance that it was mentioned many times in the paeans of praise following Packer’s death, and surrounding his memorial service. “Packer was not just frightening, he was frighteningly smart,” writes Paul Barry. He overwhelmed the MPs’ questioning by both fair means and foul, simply ruling some areas out of bounds, for example, and sometimes treating the elected representatives with contempt. Viewed retrospectively, many of his assertions before the committee were at the least questionable, but more than the content it was the commanding tone that impressed. Packer’s appearance at one of its hearings was televised live and immediately entered Australian folklore. A House of Representatives inquiry was called, with the Labor government holding a majority of positions on the committee. Public opinion itself was insufficient to stop the bid, but it was becoming increasingly unpalatable for the government to do nothing. The following afternoon, within a matter of hours, a bipartisan petition gathered 128 signatures of the 224 federal MPs. Realising that he was losing the public relations war, Packer appeared on his channel’s A Current Affair, where he said that the idea of owning part of Fairfax “amused” him. As his biographer Paul Barry later reported, Packer “appeared to hate journalists, had a record of punching cameramen, and was ever ready to sue reporters who wrote about him.” At times, he had been an interventionist proprietor who enjoyed throwing his corporate weight around, and he had sometimes compromised journalistic professionalism. But there is no doubt personal antipathy to Packer also played a major part. With Rupert Murdoch already dominant, press ownership was more highly concentrated than anywhere else in the democratic world. Large rallies were held in Melbourne and Sydney.Īll Packer’s opponents stressed the negative consequences of the bid for Australian democracy. Both former PMs signed a protest letter organised by one-time National Party minister Peter Nixon, as did former Nationals leader Doug Anthony and a range of other former senior politicians. Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser had barely spoken to each other in the sixteen years following the vice-regal dismissal of Whitlam’s government in November 1975, but now they shared a political platform to oppose this threat of yet further media concentration. For Packer, that would be a big enough stake to exercise effective control over the newspaper group. Few if any events in Australian media history have provoked such a widespread and intense public response as Kerry Packer’s 1991 bid to buy 14.99 per cent of Fairfax as part of the Tourang syndicate he had organised with Canadian press proprietor Conrad Black and the American private equity group Hellman and Friedman.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |