Here are some highlights from this 2013 book:
* Then they turned the conversation — as they had so many times before — to Fairfax, the hallowed newspaper company and third force on Australia’s media scene. Fairfax was in free fall. Media companies across the globe were in trouble, caught in the teeth of a new-media juggernaut that had brought once proud companies to their knees. It was an industrial revolution. The old guard was sagging under the double bind of high costs and the remorseless onslaught of social media, while the internet was cutting a sharp path through the classified advertising that had once been the monopoly of newspaper firms. Fairfax had fallen fast and far.
‘They lost the classifieds to the internet,’ said Packer scornfully. ‘They just didn’t see it and didn’t understand it, and now they’re finished…
‘Lachlan, how much did realestate.com cost you?’ Packer demanded, leaning forward and slapping the table.
Murdoch put down his fork. ‘Well, I think it was $10 million. But don’t forget, $7 million was in comp. And it’s worth nearly $2 billion now.’
‘Fairfax just didn’t see any of this coming. They thought it was all beneath them. They thought we were idiots. You know, I think we killed Fairfax,’ James Packer said.
* Packer told them about his father. Kerry had always wanted to buy Fairfax, he said. It was a company the family hated: its pioneering investigative journalism had targeted Kerry Packer over many years, with exposés of his business dealings and the private world of the very rich. James Packer himself had a visceral loathing of Fairfax for more than a few reasons, but a Fairfax takeover was not on his mind. He planned to take a different form of revenge. ‘I think there’s a better way: by being involved with the players who are going to take their business off them,’ he told his three astonished listeners. Packer was convinced the Fairfax classified print advertising business was going over a cliff. And that was something he wanted to be part of.
* The Fairfax papers, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, were so physically huge on the weekends — stuffed with classifieds — that they had the capacity to damage a front door if thrown hard enough by the paperboy. The classifieds were not known as Rivers of Gold for nothing. This was the revenue that paid for the journalism, and Fairfax seemed impregnable.
* Pay television was late arriving in Australia by contrast with America and the United Kingdom, where cable and satellite subscription broadcasting was well entrenched. But with the allocation of a second Australian telecommunications licence to Optus in 1991 to compete with the national carrier, Telecom (later known as Telstra), the die was cast. Subscription television was permitted from 1992 and with that the gates were open.
* Kerry Packer, with his adored free-to-air Nine Network, was possibly the most antagonistic individual in Australia to the idea of pay TV and he would fight over it from inside and outside the tent for the rest of his life. Packer’s son James, however, had no such one-eyed affection for traditional broadcast media as the old man. For the Murdochs, whose News Corp had sold the Ten Network to shopping centre mogul Frank Lowy in 1985, pay TV in Australia offered a chance to re-enter the broadcasting industry, but also to consolidate what had become a roaring financial success for News in the UK with its big stake in the subscription service BSkyB, overseen by Sam Chisholm.
* Fairfax no longer had any members of the Fairfax family on its board. Its days as a family dynasty were gone, although pride in the company’s 150-year history remained rooted in the heart of its newspaper operations. The robust Fairfax corporate identity, expressed through its quality newspapers, was regarded by the Packer and Murdoch media dynasties as arrogant hubris. Conrad Black had appointed South African media executive Stephen Mulholland as chief executive; he was widely expected to kick the company into shape and with it, kick some of the stuffing out of the famous Fairfax culture.
* For Foxtel, however, it was just the beginning. The service commenced broadcasting on 23 October 1995. Three months later on 19 February 1996, Sky News was launched to run on Foxtel. Sky was a 24-hour news channel with a former Network Ten journalist, Juanita Phillips, as the first newsreader. It was owned in equal thirds by BSkyB, the Nine Network and the Seven Network, bringing together content from the two leading Australian broadcasters and BSkyB’s 24-hour UK service. The ownership structure behind Sky might have been confusing to outsiders riveted by the sniping between warring pay TV operators supported by either the Murdochs or the Packers. But Sky was a channel seeking the widest possible distribution. Pay TV in Australia had become big business, attracting all the most powerful media players in the nation, but it was far from profitable. Millions of dollars drained from the wallets of the key investors.
* With the election of John Howard’s Liberal Government in 1996, Packer had anticipated changes to the laws preventing cross-holdings in newspapers and television, something Howard had publicly made it clear he was willing to consider. In 1997, Packer commenced a high-pressure public and private lobbying campaign. It would eventually collapse in the face of widespread political opposition in parliament. Howard was prepared to introduce new laws, but he was unable to garner the support, including in his own party, to push it through. He was caught, too, in the most uncomfortable of positions for a Prime Minister — between the demands of a media mogul controlling the leading television network with its influential nightly news, and another media mogul controlling the largest share of the national newspaper market, including the killer metropolitan tabloids. By assuaging the demands of one giant, Howard could fall victim to the fury of another. Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited might benefit from a change that allowed it to buy into television, but it would still be restrained by the limits on foreign ownership. To allow everyone a piece of the pie, Howard would be forced to amend the foreign ownership laws too. By eventually dropping the planned reforms, Howard restored order in the jungle.
* One day Kerry [Packer] phoned me and I [Kim Williams] quite politely said, ‘Good morning, Kerry, how are you?’ He replied, ‘Stop being such a smart arse.’
