Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl (i read books .txt) 📕

Some of the allegations had bordered on comical. Then PM, Bob Hawke, described them as ‘bullshit’. Packer was formally exonerated in 1987 by the Attorney-General, Lionel Bowen, but friends and family saw that it had been the most trying and damaging episode of his life.

Neither Packer, nor his family, would find it easy to forgive. At KP’s memorial service 21 years after the episode, son James opined: ‘It made [my father] a less trusting person, and I think it had an impact on his health.’

It may have been of some consolation to Packer that the National Times closed in 1987; part of a corporate malaise that, in turn, put Packer’s ACP in the box seat to purchase Fairfax’s magazine division the following year.

By 1990, while Packer was re-embracing Nine with his pockets full of Alan Bond’s cash, John Fairfax Ltd was on its knees thanks to a brazen and bone-headed takeover attempt by 26-year-old family member, Warwick Fairfax.

The Fairfax empire of regional and major-city newspapers, including the flagship Age in Melbourne and the Sydney Morning Herald, was in the hands of receivers by December. The popular image was of Packer slavering to get at the wounded, graceful beast.

Under cross-media ownership laws that were in place at the time, however, Packer would have had to sell Nine, or be content with owning no more than 14.9 per cent of Fairfax. Having triumphantly reclaimed his beloved television stations less than six months earlier, selling Nine outright was highly unlikely. His quota of Alan Bond had been used.

Early in 1991, however, events conspired to put Packer together with Canadian media baron Conrad Black. The topic of Fairfax was evidently raised. Quite independently, frequent Packer associate Malcolm Turnbull was already circling Fairfax.

The consortium proposed by the three men, under the name Tourang, would divide the controlling share of Fairfax between Black, Packer and investment fund Hellman & Friedman—with Packer being strictly a non-executive director, with a 14.9 per cent holding.

The issue wasn’t so much Packer, but Rupert Murdoch, who at that point controlled well over half the nation’s newspaper circulation. With television-dominant Packer pitching a finger in the Fairfax pie, these two men would effectively exercise a duopoly on Australia’s media. The cross-media ownership rules had been implemented to avoid precisely this situation.

Fuelled largely by the Fairfax papers themselves, opposition to any further Packer play mounted quickly. It even included the entirely unexpected combination of former prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, who both signed a protest letter circulated by senior politicians. The Hawke government announced small, but significant changes and tighter policing of the cross-media ownership rules.

For the Tourang bid to succeed, Packer had to paint himself as a silent and disinterested investor. Not for the first time, he provided an interview to A Current Affair, which he used for his public relations pitch. ‘For 50 years of my life, Fairfax has been competition to me and my family,’ he told Jana Wendt. ‘The idea that I can end up buying 15 per cent…amuses me.’

Subsequent events would prove that Packer was being downright dishonest about his ambitions with Fairfax. The Tourang bid would eventually be withdrawn, apparently upon discovery that one of the insiders in the deal had handed over documents that proved Packer’s inevitable and innate urge to seize executive power despite his limited shareholding.

But three weeks before the bid was abandoned, it produced one of Packer’s most memorable public performances, before the House of Representatives Select Committee on Print Media on 4 November 1991.

Packer was in understandably combative mood from the off. The ABC TV’s camera crews jostled to position and ready themselves; Packer’s appearance in front of the committee, unusually, was being televised live. Packer shuffled some papers and harrumphed at the committee chairman, ‘It’d be nice if we got all the photographs done, then we can get down to action being serious about it, rather than just being a circus.’

What followed was 116 minutes of Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer at his charming, bullying, witty and withering best. Openly declaring the whole exercise ‘an intellectual wank’, he proceeded to make mincemeat of politicians (and politics), through astute observations that resonated at every level from the very Constitution of Australia, to the man in the street.

Part 2

PACKER AT PLAY

6

TOSS YOU FOR IT

‘Investing’ a six- or seven-figure sum in a game of baccarat or on the spin of a roulette wheel would seem anathema to Kerry Packer’s personality. Some may attempt to explain it as a big man who, accustomed to operating on a big scale, needed super-sized thrills.

The Big Man himself once conceded: ‘Betting is like a disease, which is not understood by those who do not have it.’

Packer once took Garry Linnell of The Bulletin on a verbal tour of Sydney’s mean streets of the 1950s and 60s. The young KP may have been the scion of a media dynasty, but in the early days he was paid miserably by his father—who, it was said, took much of it back again in board. Packer well knew these inner-Sydney alleys of illegal casinos, sly grog shops and SP (starting-price) bookmakers.

‘He inhabited that town when Sydney wasn’t all sparkling like it is today,’ Linnell says. ‘Sydney was a tough town, it was run largely by gangsters, through all these backstreet meetings and dens of iniquity. Kerry moved within it, and then he moved above it. Kerry’s greatest passion was gambling. He lost and won big money.’

From those shifty wagers with backstreet bookies and illegal casinos, Packer’s gambling career would blossom well beyond Australia. Among the casinoscenti of Las Vegas, London and elsewhere, for more than two decades Packer ranked with the Sultan of Brunei and arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi as a prince of the ‘whales’—ultra-high