Latham, saving The SMH, heats on Babcock, Box Hill town hall
July 31, 2008
Here are Stephen Mayne's four stories from the Crikey edition on Friday, 30 September, 2005
2. Iron Mark on the power of the moguls
Stephen Mayne writes:
The Latham Diaries are littered with references to the subservient positions that Labor has taken over the years with Australia's two richest and most powerful families, the Murdochs and Packers. Here are just two to consider as John Howard attempts to change the media ownership laws to benefit the big boys who backed him so strongly at the last election:
Tuesday, 6 June, 1995
The Super League controversy has broken out and Steve Martin organises a meeting in his office to sort out a Labor position with Michael Lee. Footy fans Paul Elliott, Gary Punch, Michael Forshaw, Arch Bevis and I also attend. Basically, Lee is as weak as water.
The anti-siphon laws were supposed to provide an assurance of free-to-air rubgy league, but Lee reckons they are vulnerable to court challenge, putting the blame on their author, Graham Richardson. Lee's goal is to "Keep the number of communications laws to a minimum – the Government loses a minister for every piece of communications legislation in the Senate."
He is too weak to take on the big media players, saying that, "In the lead-up to an election, we would be mad to touch Murdoch or Packer." So Murdoch can screw over the great working-class game of rugby league and there is nothing a Labor Government will do to stop it. Lee is afraid of putting a foot forward for fear of putting a foot wrong. Throughout the meeting he looks like a rabbit in the headlights.
Monday, 1 November, 2003
Arbib reckons that Oakes was consistently against us during the campaign: "He was the worst every night, so you must have a problem with Packer. You need to go and see the big media people every now and then and kiss their a*ses. Carr does it all the time, it works wonders." Yes, if you don't mind having sh*t on your lips.
15. Can Alan Oakley save The SMH?
By Stephen Mayne
Alan Oakley's appointment as the new editor of The SMH has received a mixed response. Errol Simper was very complimentary in The Australian yesterday and Mark Day was in there offering gratuitous advice on what an old tabloid bloke like him would do to the paper.
One grumpy Fairfax veteran yesterday told Crikey that Oakley sounded like "another tabloid pommy import from News Ltd," just like his close mate Alan Revell, who is being quoted in support of Oakley after they came out from England together to join News Ltd as sub-editors 20 years ago.
Oakley's star certainly rose very quickly, despite not being the sort of big drinking knockabout character who thrived under Col Allan and John Hartigan on Rupert's Sydney tabloids. Col once told me the softly spoken Oakley was "a lovely bloke and a good operator."
When Oakley was sent down from Sydney to help save the Herald Sun from a rampaging Piers Akerman in 1991, the big toad was derisory, telling colleagues "Sydney said they were sending an editor, but instead they've given me a layout sub."
I was hired as Herald Sun business editor in June 1994 by Oakley and the man who replaced Akerman as editor-in-chief in 1992, Steve Harris. Despite sitting in news conference every day with Oakley for 18 months, it wasn't that easy to tell how good he was because he was a fairly introspective character. However, the paper did thrive over that period.
Some people used to call Oakley "Black Al," because he wouldn't say much as he sat at his desk stroking his eye-brows and reading the copy as the pressure mounted in the late afternoon and early evening.
However, from my point of view he was a good editor because he didn't interfere too much and would back his staff. He wasn't like so many other Murdoch editors who are always looking out to push the company's commercial interests. A good story was a good story, no matter who was complaining.
Oakley was actually replaced as editor against his wishes by Peter Blunden at the beginning of 1996. After much resistance, Steve Harris called the staff together and told them Oakley would be taking up another senior editorial position at News Ltd, but it was only a matter of weeks before he'd resigned and joined PR firm Buchan Communications.
To go from being eased out by Rupert from the Herald Sun in Melbourne to the editor of Australia's most prestigious newspaper in Sydney is a hell of a rise in less than 10 years and there aren't too many editors who have gone to the dark side of PR and made such a stunning comeback.
The SMH does have a fairly feral staff culture and AFR editor Glenn Burge, with all his Machiavellian games and conflict, would have fitted in quite well. People like Alan Kennedy, Ruth Ritchie and David Marr can be very feral against anyone they consider to be a right wing News Ltd blow-in, as Miranda Devine would probably attest.
However, Oakley won't go storming into The SMH uprooting sacred trees. He showed at The Sunday Age that he could get talented but sometimes tricky-to-manage characters such as Peter Ellingsen, Claire Miller and John Elder to perform.
He's now got the best editorial resource in the country and the challenge will be to let them blossom whilst also dealing with the inevitable cost cutting that will come with the migration of classified advertising revenue to the internet.
Having worked with both Burge and Oakley, I think Fairfax made the right choice. Oakley won't set the world on fire with his breathtaking intellect and creative brilliance, but he will harness the team and steady the ship at a time when The SMH is listing badly.
19. Michael West puts the heat on Babcock
By Stephen Mayne
The Australian's Michael West is one of the few financial journalists out there having a go at some of the business practices employed by the likes of Macquarie Bank and Babcock & Brown and today he's come up with this fascinating story.
BRW doesn't reckon retired Sydney anaesthetist Joe Ross makes the $110 million cut for its Rich List, but he's certainly on the Crikey Revised Wealth (CRW) list. West has today revealed the scale of some of his investments and the curious raiding relationship he seems to have with hard-driving investment bankers Babcock & Brown. As all corporate players know, if associated parties acquire more than 20% of a company they must make a full takeover bid and after reading West's story today, in my opinion Ross and Babcocks look pretty associated.
Together, the co-operative duo picked up more than 20% of both Prime Life and Commander Communications, which are headquartered across the road from each other and an earlier Crikey bunker in South Melbourne, but a full bid was never made to all shareholders. The relationship is believed to go even deeper than West revealed this morning, with some joint New Zealand players as well.
It was the NCSC's pressure on John Elliott to make a full bid for Elders IXL in 1989-90 that eventually led to his corporate demise and it will be very interesting to see how far ASIC takes the amazing coincidences of Babcock and Ross in their investing.
Well done to Michael West for breaking this one open today. The former Margin Call columnist is under a little bit of pressure after Macquarie Bank sued the paper over a feature he wrote about its controversial dealings with Tasmanian gold miner Allstate Exploration.
After initially going quiet for a couple of months, The Australian's editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell has clearly decided to fight fire with fire as Macquarie Bank has had to deal with a flurry of stories about Allstate over the following six weeks as follows:
Sept 24: MacBank mine deal wasn't cleared
Sept 23: Macquarie accused of `monstering' creditors
Sept 21: Macquarie misses out on lucrative Tasmania deal
Sept 15: Mine profits banked
Sept 10: MacBank facing gold deal backlash
Aug 26: Blunder leads miners to court
Aug 25: Bank in defence of mine scheme
Aug 20: Macquarie `pressured' mine company on administrator
Aug 20: ASIC quiet on debt sale
Aug 20: All that glitters not gold
Aug 15: Macquarie wins lien's share
That's called cranking up the pressure. Macquarie Bank might just be regretting taking on Rupert in this way.
25. Chess, John Howard and the Box Hill town hall
By Stephen Mayne, former President of the Doncaster Chess Club
Crikey was back inside the Box Hill town hall in Melbourne this morning for the first time since wagging school and riding the bike to John Howard's ill-fated tax policy launch during the 1987 federal election. Political junkies will remember that then Treasurer Paul Keating exposed a major accounting blunder in the document and John Howard's credibility as the man to deliver smaller government and huge tax cuts never recovered.
There was a huge press pack and only a handful of punters at the launch. Howard came outside and a couple of local school girls with fish and chips all over their fingers shook his hand and declared their support for Bob Hawke, after which I grabbed the great man's hand and said, "Don't worry John, I'm with you mate."
Today's event was an address to 30 of Australia's best junior chess players after an invitation from grandmaster and Crikey subscriber Ian Rogers, not to be confused with the publisher of banking ezine www.thesheet.com.
Rogers, 45, is the son of June Factor, who used to lead Friends of the ABC in Melbourne, and his career record includes 5 draws with Russian legend Boris Spassky, 3 draws with former world champion Anatoly Karpov and a very near victory over the recently retired Garry Kasparov before time beat him in 2001. He rates his two wins over that other Russian champion Victor Korchnoi as the highlight of his career but in June this year he lost to 12-year- old Japanese Australian Junta Ikeda, who was strutting her stuff this morning.
Rogers estimates that about 15 chess professionals make a reasonable living on the global chess tour and another 500 get by, 200 of whom are Russian.
After chatting to a few of the participants and organisers today, it really becomes clear that chess gets a poor deal in Australia. Why the hell do we pump more than $100 million into the Australian Institute of Sport yet chess gets diddly squat from government?
Chess is the second most popular junior participant sport in Sydney after soccer with an estimated 150,000 players, yet only two of the 500 global grandmasters are Australian; Rogers, who achieved the rank in 1985 and Darryl Johansen, who got there in 1995.
So much for the clever country! We haven't got a university ranked in the top 100 and we punch well below our weight in brain sports like chess, even though we have huge participation at school level.
The lack of support for chess permeates all tiers of government. Can you believe that Box Hill Chess Club, the largest in Australia with 250 active members, is being evicted from its home of the last eight years in Carrington Rd, Box Hill, by the local Senior Citizens Club?
The seniors lease the building from the City of Whitehorse which, unbelievably, has lost a copy of the contract and therefore doesn't know its rights. As of January 1 next year, they won't have a home even though they currently pay $150 a week in rent.
What hope is there for chess when a local council can't get its act together to tell the senior cits to do the decent thing and let our biggest club continue using the facility three nights a week so the greatest brain sport of them all can prosper in supposedly cerebral Melbourne?
If anyone has a solution to save the grand old Box Hill Chess Club, or would like to banter on about the wonders of chess, drop us a line to smayne@crikey.com.au.
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