Future forum, Eddie, Hawkie and Rupert
July 16, 2008
Here are Stephen Mayne's four stories from the Crikey edition on Thursday, February 9, 2006.
1. Top thinkers reveal Australia's top priority – and it's not security, climate change or education
By Stephen Mayne
The 90 "future leaders" (yes, yes, it sounds awfully pretentious) who met in the Yarra Valley over the past four days at the Australian Future Directions Forum voted to make “ending Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage” the top priority for Australia over the next 15 years.
Yes, that's more important than economic development, security, climate change, health, education and everything else.
It's an absolutely amazing result if you consider that the PM was forum patron, former NAB chairman Graeme Kraehe was chairman and the participants list was incredibly diverse, spanning from Crazy John Ihlan to the campaigns director for Greenpeace and an RAAF fighter pilot.
The conference was primarily backed by NAB along with four other corporate sponsors – Telstra, Australia Post, BHP Billiton and Qantas – who together must have spent more than $500,000 putting it on. Given the strong support for a carbon tax and commentary about bank and credit regulation, this is the best example I've ever seen of corporate sponsorship money coming with no strings attached.
And while the majority did clearly skew to the left, the remarkable thing about the decision to put Indigenous disadvantage front and centre is that the argument on the floor was passionately carried by the most unlikely trio of nominal right wingers, who can't be named due to Chatham House rules.
Check out the full outcomes statements. There was plenty of good stuff but I particularly liked what the education and environment teams did in throwing up sensible structural and institutional suggestions, rather than the usual wish-list of ideological dreams.
Amid a welter of recommendations, the four that I directly got up in the governance and leadership group were a Federal ICAC, quarterly disclosure of political donations and balance sheets, more cash and less benefits for politicians and an NGO Commission, similar to the New Zealand Charities Commission. Unfortunately, I was narrowly rolled by the economics sub-committee on an inheritance tax, but that's life.
2. Fast Eddie won't stop at the CEO's office
By Stephen Mayne
Over the past six years, Crikey has been the biggest critic of Eddie McGuire, but that hasn't stopped us from predicting and endorsing his ascension to the top job at Channel Nine – tipped to be announced officially during Nine's 6pm news tonight.
Eddie has been a shocker on things like conflict of interest over the years, but he is still the perfect choice to run the network and not only because James Packer wants to rein in Channel Nine and Eddie is a close mate. While Eddie was both a MoJ (mate of James) and a MoK (mate of Kerry), the more important consideration is that he'll also do a good job as CEO.
At its core, television is about producing compelling content, attracting mass audiences and persuading corporates to pay large sums to share those eye-balls. Eddie knows all about that. At Collingwood, he took the level of corporate sponsorship and fundraising to a new high for any sporting club in Australia.
Television networks crave publicity and public attention and Eddie is already demonstrating that his appointment is putting the network front and centre in the public consciousness.
The cult of Eddie's celebrity will attract talent and advertisers to Nine. Faceless corporate types will pay even more advertising dollars if they get to schmooze with Eddie in the corporate box at the Grand Prix. And Eddie is the master schmoozer who has the biggest network in Melbourne, dwarfing the likes of Peter Costello and Dick Pratt.
The question of Eddie lacking management experience is also rubbish. If being President of Collingwood doesn't give you management experience, what does? He has also been in business for years with his brother Frank running McGuire Media and has made numerous other investments with the likes of Steve Vizard in companies like Sportsview.
Running Channel Nine is all about negotiating big contracts with high profile people and companies. For instance, Nine has taken a bath on its Commonwealth Games contract and someone like Eddie would be well placed to kick Melbourne 2006 chairman Ron Walker around for a renegotiation.
Finally, don't think Eddie will stop his ascension once he's CEO of Nine. His brother Frank was best man at his wedding and is a highly ambitious political operator who was a press secretary for John Cain in the 1980s and was Natasha Stott Despoja's senior adviser during most of her time as leader of the Democrats.
It was Frank who drove Eddie's successful election to the 1998 Constitutional Convention and it will be Frank who dreams the dream of Eddie one day residing in The Lodge as a Labor prime minister. Don't laugh. You heard it here first folks.
16. Bob Hawke's colourful mates
By Stephen Mayne
The AFR ran a front page story a couple of weeks back saying that former Prime Minister Bob Hawke was associated as an Australian representative of a major American con man who is facing criminal charges.
Whilst the link was relatively tenuous and Hawkie professed ignorance, the revelations in a new book, The Accidental Gangster, by Sydney crime figure Bela Csidei are more startling. The Bulletin has this week carried an extract which lays out more of the late Sir Peter Abeles' notorious network. How's this for a big claim:
My access to the seats of power was building by the day. I was still doing a lot of physical work to make a living, but by sticking closely by Papa (Sir Peter) I was within the small, tight circles of Australia's power elite. Hawke, meanwhile, was continuing to strengthen his ties with Murdoch, helped by Abeles' support. Murdoch was confident a Hawke Labor government would be good for business, but without Abeles' assurances, there was no way the ALP could have enjoyed such powerful media backing.
I remember Abeles' elation the day Hawke was elected. Although Abeles was an influential player in the Hawke ascendancy, there could be no doubt Murdoch was the kingmaker. All three men were key players in the infamous pilots' strike. Backing Abeles and Murdoch, Hawke outraged the pilots by bringing in the air force. Hawke said later: “We had a situation where the pilots would have wrecked the Australian economy. They wanted a 30% increase and we all knew that if that was done, the accord would be smashed and wages would break out. I wasn't looking after the airlines, I was looking after Australia and so was Sir Peter.”
The whole airline dispute was contrived. Ansett was in financial strife. By antagonising the pilots to the point where they walked off the job, the markets had a feasible explanation for the airline's poor performance. All its deficiencies could be disguised by the horrendous economic impact of crippling industrial action. This way the unions would wear the blame the shareholders would perceive Ansett as the hapless victim.
Hmmm, what would Rupert say of this claim? It was just over 20 years ago that Rupert engineered the famous Wapping dispute to revolutionise the British newspaper industry and it sounds like he was emboldened by this to take on the pilots, just before his 1990-91 debt crisis. TNT also almost went broke in a similar debt trap around the same time.
The other interesting connection to all this is this week's death of controversial Gold Coast developer Eddie Kornhauser. Eddie started out in Melbourne and after Sir Peter, was regarded as the other colourful Jewish businessman closest to Bob Hawke.
Law firm Holding Redlich has acted for Bob Hawke over the past 30 years after an introduction by Eddie before he moved to the Gold Coast to wheel and deal with Sir Joh and Russ Hinze and well and truly earn his membership of the white shoe brigade. His funeral is in Melbourne today.
24. Rupert struggles to control the internet
By Stephen Mayne
For a control-freak like Rupert Murdoch, who has instilled an entrenched culture of editorial subservience at his media outlets over 53 years, ploughing billions of dollars on the internet is surely a cultural shock.
As Crikey has demonstrated, Rupert can't stop people from sledging him on the internet to tens of thousands of people. However, he now has to deal with the phenomenon of getting sledged on his own websites.
News Corp's MySpace.com is the world's biggest internet community with more than 50 million members, but some of them object to the corporate takeover. The Bulletin has Rupert on the cover this week with a relatively pedestrian Newsweek interview about the internet. The most interesting exchanges were as follows:
Reporter: Can we find any postings from you on Myspace?
Rupert: There are about 60 Rupert Murdochs up there. People post me there. Some aren't polite. They feel they own MySpace and that the big corporation was going to come in and change it. Well, we haven't.
Reporter: Even as we speak, police are investigating claims that sexual predators have trolled MySpace for young victims. What are you doing about this?
Rupert: We're being very proactive. We plan to reach out further to school principals, church groups and community organisations to educate them on safety measures we've developed. For example, no one under 14 is allowed to register on the site, and there are strict limits on who can access profiles of users under 16. We've also got a third of our workforce monitoring the site to prevent inappropriate material being posted.
Check out the first Rupert profile that comes up in a MySpace search. He's single and has three friends, one of whom is Buddha. So Rupert's not stopping jokers pretending to be him, but if they make him out to be a sexual predator, it will be pulled by one of his growing army of censors.
The whole question of anonymity on the web was raised by The SMH's Andrew Stevenson in this interesting piece last week. Whilst former Eisa CEO Damien Brady complains about inaccurate material dragged up by Google hurting his employment prospects, it should be remembered that Brady did lie about his MBA in the prospectus and Eisa did fail spectacularly.
Finally, Rupert has been more active in the media than usual lately, as this illuminating recent BBC interview demonstrates.
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