Another Packer purchase, delusional McCrann, Cossie, Chris Anderson, Crikey Rich List

3. Have the Packers snared Carsales.com.au?



By Sophie Vorrath and Stephen Mayne

If an anonymous tip sent to Crikey is right, theAustralian internet landscape saw a seismic shift last week: Australia's leading motor vehicle advertising website carsales.com.au has sealed a deal to merge with the Packer family's Publishing and Broadcasting Limited's classified websites, carpoint.ninemsn.com.au, boatpoint.ninemsn.com.au and bikepoint.ninemsn.com.au and several other industrial and farming online publications, giving PBL a 41% stake in carsales.

According to Alan Kohler in The Age in August, the largest shareholder in the carsales goldmine – – an unlisted public company largely owned by car dealers which last year earned $3 million profit – is chairman Wal Pisciotta, with a bit more than 20%. Fairfax is next, with a 12% stake it bought this year from Yahoo. But, said Kohler, Fairfax is regarded by carsales as a hostile shareholder because it's also a competitor through drive.com.au: "but it will surely not be long before either Fairfax, News, PBL – or perhaps all three – attempt to take it over."

Carsales chief Greg Roebuck was unable to get back to Crikey today to confirm or deny the rumour and the folk at PBL's Sydney HQ are enjoying a public holiday. But according to our tipster, the deal was signed last Thursday night by PBL chairman James Packer, and Pisciotta and shareholders will vote in 21 days. If this all checks out, the vote will be interesting, because our source tells us Fairfax is not happy about the deal.

Fairfax is already feeling embarrassed about missing out on Seek (seek.com.au), so another strategic loss to the Packers would not be a good look. Paying more than $40 million for dating service RSVP is small consolation when you consider that cars, homes and jobs are the three big classified categories under attack from the internet.

PBL has already got 25% of Seek, which has 58% of the Australian internet advertising market for jobs, and News Ltd is busily trying to mop up the rest of realestate.com.au, the biggest independent Australian site for property advertising online.

If PBL also gets hold of carsales.com.au, that will leave Fairfax without a major marriage partner in the three big categories. Sure, Fairfax has its organically developed sites, but with Telstra also rampaging away after beating Fred Hilmer's team to the Trading Post in 2003, the beleagured Fairfax is finding itself increasingly under attack from all sides.



6. McCrann's mogul conspiracy delusions



By Stephen Mayne

Rupert Murdoch's most loyal editorial booster in Australia, Terry McCrann, was at it again last week trying to deny that his boss and Kerry Packer would stand to gain even more power if Australia's media ownership laws are deregulated. Indeed, his column on Friday opened as follows:

The claim that John Howard is Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch's poodle – that he will change media policy to their order and to their benefit – is not just offensive, but much worse: exactly wrong.

McCrann goes on to deny the undeniable and even makes a reference to "the fantasy of former Herald & Weekly Times executives that they were the last and great bastion of media freedom."

Surely McCrann could have been big enough to mention John D'Arcy by name. D'Arcy was the CEO of the HWT when Murdoch bought it in 1987 and has just produced an illuminating book, Media Mayhem: Playing With The Big Boys In Media, which has yet to be mentioned in a News Ltd outlet anywhere. That's what you call a conspiracy of silence, because Rupert and his various lackeys such as McCrann get quite a spray. Try this for size on page 131:

Despite the fact that the bidding was over and most shareholders had accepted the News Ltd offer for their HWT shares, there was still continuous criticism from The Age and Fairfax papers. This was mainly led by Terry McCrann in his comments column in The Age, where he found reason to doubt the veracity of HWT and Queensland Press directors and all the decisions they had made. This was ironic, because an indecently short time later, McCrann became, unquestionably, Rupert's greatest editorial supporter in this country.

Why McCrann even tries to blatantly push the Murdoch line when these sorts of claims are already circulating is hard to understand. Doesn't he realise that every fawning column he writes just further damages his credibility?

The recent sequence of events was that Murdoch's Australian boss, John Hartigan, went public in The Australian 10 days ago warning the government not to hurt Foxtel and, lo and behold, The Australian splashes with the policy backdown five days later.

On the same day that McCrann produced his deluded column, The AFR's annual power issue came out declaring Rupert Murdoch to be the second most powerful person in Australia after John Howard. Influencing media policy is just one example.

Does McCrann really think that Howard would dare upset Murdoch after the huge support his papers gave for the Iraq war and the PM's re-election last year? Those fawning Murdoch comments in Washington in July were the final piece of evidence any rational analyst needed to conclude that the fix is in.

Can anyone name another industry which gets to come up with its own regulations and present them to government? What about the public or consumer interest, which is often very different from the mogul interest as represented by McCrann?



10. Why Costello falls short of Keating's record



By Stephen Mayne

There is no doubt that Paul Keating and Peter Costello have both been very successful Treasurers, but a few extra points should be made about their respective records after Christian Kerr's interesting commentary last week.

Keating's reforms of the financial services sector were profound and this is where Costello has really let himself down. The Latham Diaries reveal that Keating would be tempted to return to Parliament if he could "f*ck the banks."

Indeed, Keating did keep the banking cartel in check, firstly by introducing foreign competitors and then by keeping the pressure on them to deliver good and cost-effective services for consumers.

Banking is an essential service, yet in this area, Costello has tolerated a series of major mergers, then sat back and done nothing while a rampaging cartel has gouged consumers mercilessly. Costello is now responsible for the sector which generates more consumer complaints and hatred than any other. But he does absolutely nothing to pull the big banks into line, instead allowing them to dominate funds management and become a ridiculous 30% of the entire stockmarket.

While Keating has to be held responsible for "the recession we had to have" and 17% official interest rates, it is very easy to forget that Australian interest rates have been comparatively higher than its major competitors during the Costello years. World interest rates were high in the 1980s and early 1990s and they've been much lower across the board globally since Keating's defeat in 1996.

Just as Hawke and Keating benefited from the drought breaking in the early 1980s, Howard and Costello have also been phenomenally lucky that the emergence of China as an economic powerhouse has given us the best terms of trade in 30 years. That Costello is still running a $57 billion annual current account deficit – equivalent to the 6% of GDP when Keating made his famous banana republic comment – with such favourable prices for our goods does him no credit whatsoever.

Costello is also partly responsible for Australia's booming imports and consumer debt after triggering a ridiculous housing bubble with the halving of capital gains tax and all those first home owner grants.

That said, Costello should be congratulated for finally tackling unfunded superannuation, something Keating never did. And the GST reforms were welcome, although these were largely the work of John Howard.

Similarly, the budget surpluses have been bigger and more sustainable than Keating's efforts as Treasurer, although former Treasurer Howard did hand Paul Keating an appalling deficit blowout in 1983 which was even worse than the one handed over by Prime Minister Keating in 1996.



15. Colleen Egan puts it on the Canberra press gallery



By Stephen Mayne

The Canberra press gallery is still yet to offer up anyone who has seriously examined The Latham Diaries and also dealt properly in their own outlets with specific claims made about their performance.

Cameron Stewart and Christopher Pearson both laid into Iron Mark in The Weekend Australian with superficial pieces that gallery types would have enjoyed. You had to pick up News Ltd's Sunday Times in Perth yesterday to finally get some sensible mainstream analysis about the press gallery's collective failure. Amazingly, News Ltd Latham victims such as Paul Kelly, Matt Price and Glenn Milne, are singled out for some special attention from within.

Here are some of the highlights in a surprising column by the Perth-based Murdoch political journalist Colleen Egan which is not available online:

The Canberra press gallery is sometimes described as an exclusive club that's as out of touch as the politicians it covers. They'd hate to admit it, but the collective response to The Latham Diaries will probably bolster that view. Mark Latham's flawed but valuable memoirs are almost as much a criticism of Australia's media as they are of the Labor Party. A healthy press is, after all, an essential player in a true democracy.

Much of Latham's sniping is probably a mixture of revenge and bitterness about his failure to win government and the pastings he has received by commentators. But that doesn't mean his evaluation of the media's role in Australian politics should be dismissed outright.

While his diaries seem paranoid in parts, is he wrong to portray these journalists as a bunch of mates who look after their own interests? Unfortunately, the lack of introspection and transparency in the coverage so far has done more to prove Latham right than wrong.

His "bucket of bile,'' as it's been called, is littered with specific allegations of bias, unethical conduct and personal indiscretions about many of the country's most credible journalists. But almost to a person, the Canberra gallery has declined to address the claims. Politicians and others have been required to answer Latham's charges, but the journos seem to be above such treatment.

Take The Australian's editor-at-large Paul Kelly, one of the nation's most decorated scribes. Kelly's integrity was seriously questioned when Latham accused him of changing his opinion on the Iraq troops-out-by-Christmas policy simply to satisfy his boss (and mine), Rupert Murdoch.

Many years ago, I worked under Kelly. I don't believe he would argue against something he truly believed and his published position on this policy is consistent. But it surprises me that he has written reams of copy on the Latham book, including the Iraq issue, but not addressed or even acknowledged the personal slight.

Similarly, my fellow opinion writers at The Sunday Times, Glenn Milne and Matt Price, have not used their columns to address Latham's criticisms of them and their colleagues. Their opponents at other newspapers haven't either. Perhaps they think it would be self-indulgent and pointless to do so, but would the reader agree?

Laurie Oakes, the political guru of the Nine Network and The Bulletin, was the target of several broadsides. In his column, he launched a diatribe against the book, but did not respond to – or even note – the accusations against him. Did the readers have a right to know that Oakes's caustic dismissal of the diaries' validity ("narcissism and nastiness'' from a "weird and ugly mind'') may have been tinged, even slightly by Latham's nasty treatment of him?

With his tell-all diaries, Latham has turned the tables. The long-held conventions of off-the-record and no-name anecdotes have gone out of the window. He has told secrets (and possibly untruths) about gallery stalwarts and they don't seem to know how to respond. Despite its imperfections, the Latham book is one of the few contemporary insider critiques of a system that most Australians feel is disillusioning and out of touch. Canberra journalists will tell you, quite rightly, that the media plays a crucial role in this democracy. It's a shame they've shunned this opportunity to candidly examine that role.

CRIKEY: We couldn't have put it any better. If anyone mentioned in The Latham Diaries is worried about responding through their own outlet, you can always follow the lead of Seven's Mark Riley and send your response straight to Crikey. Just email smayne@crikey.com.au and we'll get your response into more than 29,000 inboxes.



17. Chris Anderson and the media empire wreckers



By Stephen Mayne

Former Fairfax and Optus CEO and current PBL director Chris Anderson made some very interesting comments during The AFR's annual panel discussion about the most powerful people in Australia, which was released in the monthly magazine inside Friday's paper.

After voting the anonymous woman who was allegedly pack-raped by those Canterbury Bulldogs players in Coffs Harbour as the most important cultural figure in Australia last year, the panel this year elected to give the cultural significance prize to, wait for it, "digitalised communications technology."

Anderson, who is a very important figure on the PBL board overseeing investments such as Seek and Foxtel, was quoted as follows about this cultural phenomenon:

"It's a huge cultural change. It's destroying the mass media, no doubt about that and it's changing the way anyone probably under 35 now gets their information. Look at what Google and Yahoo and MSN are do the media, at how important blogging really is whether we like it or not. It's wrecking empires."

Hmmm, don't expect this particular PBL director to vote in favour of a $5 billion bid for Fairfax once the great media free-for-all arrives.

Whilst Graham Morris was talking up his old bosses at News Ltd, Anderson was having none of it. "I'm a huge admirer of Murdoch and he may well be in the top 10, but if he is the second most important person to the average Australian, then I'm a Dutchman."

The average Australian might not realise it Chris, but Australia's support for the Iraq war and George Bush was very much a Murdoch-backed event. If Murdoch's media outlets around the world had taken an anti-war line similar to The Daily Mirror in the UK, Australian troops would probably not be in Iraq today. The invasion would probably not have happened at all, because Tony Blair would have been under huge pressure from The Sun not to support the war and it is unlikely Bush would have completely gone it alone.

Similarly, if Australia's foreign policy position was like New Zealand's, as Mark Latham would have liked it to be, Saturday night's second Bali bombings are less likely to have happened. Australians are the most populous tourists in Bali, although we'll probably now go through another round of political semantics about whether our involvement in Iraq increases the risks of such bombings. Of course it does. You can never know for sure, but the probability of Australians being killed rose with the support of the Iraq invasion.

For some strange reason, Chris Anderson doesn't seem to be able to comprehend all of this as he assesses Rupert Murdoch's power in Australia.



21. CRW cracks the magical 100



By Stephen Mayne

The Crikey Revised Wealth (CRW) list has finally cracked the magical 100 mark after these two new entries today:

Inge Family: Macquarie Bank has recently bought 49% of the Zig Inge retirement village group for $100 million which would suggest they do pass the $110 million cut-off that BRW imposes.

Barry Lambert: founder and managing director of Count Financial Limited which is the third biggest group distributing financial products (after AMP and PIS) in Australia. This is done predominately through accountants. Barry and his wife own 89 million shares, which at today's market price of $1.75, gives them a stake worth $155 million. The three children and mother own nearly 20 million shares independently of Barry. Last year's dividend was 4.5 cents a share and the guidance for this year is 5.5 cents. Count are the masters of commissions and effectively the biggest client of BT and Colonial so the company tends to be able get deals that other financial planning/advice organisations can't even attempt.

Also, we were the first to outline the wealth of Sydney doctor Joe Ross with this CRW entry:

Dr Joseph Ross: A major provider of joint-venture funds for the Gold Coast property industry, this Sydney-based investor owned 50% of the Chevron Renaissance building in Surfers Paradise, which we understand was sold for $60m-plus last year. Owns 8.9 million shares in CVC Ltd (which had the other 50% of the Renaissance – and they booked a $10m profit on their share of the sale). Also uses a company called LJK Nominees to hold shares, and has been or is a top 20 shareholder in Computershare, Commander Communications, Prime Infastructure, Macquarie Leisure, Gazal and Powerlan. Through LJK Nominees he was one of the Babcock & Brown “foundation” shareholders, with some 2.8 million shares now worth $30 million.

The lad has been receiving some unwanted attention from The Australian's Michael West, who produced this fascinating story about his links with Babcock & Brown on Saturday. Surely ASIC is taking more than a passing interest.

If you've got any other names for the CRW that BRW has missed, drop us a line on smayne@crikey.com.au.



22. RACV incumbents nervous about Mr and Mrs Crikey



By Stephen Mayne, candidate for the RACV board

Nothing about the current RACV election has appeared in Crikey since the 1.3 million ballot papers went out in the latest edition of Royal Auto two weeks ago, but the directors being challenged by Mr and Mrs Crikey seem to be very nervous about losing. How else do you explain the appearance of advertisements in local papers urging members to vote for the incumbents, John Rawlins and Suzanna Sheed?

Similarly, a snout has advised that Rawlins has sent the following letter to the entire mailing list of Riding for the Disabled, a charity that he chairs:

Dear passionate fellow member of Riding for the Disabled

A friend in need is a friend indeed!

It has come round to that time of year when the RACV elections are on again. I am one of the two RACV directors seeking re-election. It seems to be my luck, but this time as it was 3 years ago, it looks as if it will be a very close fight. This year the sitting directors are being challenged by Stephen Mayne of Crikey.com notoriety and his wife running as a team which is not stated on the ballot papers.

Most of the analysts of this election (including myself) believe that I am the most likely not to be re-elected, so I am writing to say I really need your support and would greatly appreciate your vote. If you felt that you could mention my predicament to any of your friends or pass this on to them it would be truly wonderful support.

All members of the RACV, both Club and Roadside Service, are eligible to vote. The ballot papers are attached to this month's Royal Auto. So please don't just toss it in the bin. Voting closes on 13^th October, which seems a long time away, but don't leave it too late. Below are a few details of my “platform”, if you want to know more about what I stand for. Suzanna is my fellow retiring director and we are standing as a team.

Many thanks, John Rawlins

Is that really appropriate? Well, two can play at that game. This is what Oscar winning Harvey Crumpet producer Melanie Coombs (granddaughter of Nugget) sent to a group of her friends:

Hello All,

Now I know that like me you probably never even open the Royal Auto magazine that the RACV send out to us Roadside Assist members but I am urging you to do so! This month's edition – which hopefully you haven't tossed out yet – includes a ballot paper to vote for the RACV board.

Now is your chance to be part of changing the culture of the RACV. Like many I think that over the years the RACV has changed from doing things that help all members to slowly but surely giving ‘Club' members more and more.....But, never fear, Stephen Mayne and Paula Piccinini of Crikey fame are standing and you can vote for them! Be part of making the RACV accountable to all members and give the Melbourne Club boys on the board a bit of a shake up. All you have to do is tick the box and pop your ballot in the reply paid envelope and post it off. Voting closes on 13 October 2005. If you've thrown out your Royal Auto and want a ballot paper I suggest calling the RACV election hotline on 1300 365 699

Best, Melanie Coombs

It is also surprising that the largest contested election in Victoria this year can pass unremarked by the mainstream media. Do a Google search and you only get this Wikipedia entry, plus this package of Crikey Daily material on our website. Surely after the dramatic election of Will Fowles to the MCC Committee, a contested election at the next stuffiest Victorian institution is worth a mention. There is a genuine chance that either Paula or I can knock off Rawlins, as his plaintive plea for votes above attests.

Check out the RACV information sheet about the four candidates here. As you can see, we haven't gone out of our way to identify ourselves as husband and wife, but it's not actually that easy to do when no candidate statement is allowed. Paula would have had to drop her maiden name, which she still uses, and use her old Crikey email address. If the RACV old guard are complaining that our married status should have been disclosed, what about Rawlins not revealing he was a director of failed Victorian merchant bank Tricontinental for five years during his "distinguished" banking career.

Finally, it is quite outrageous that the other incumbent candidate, Suzanna Sheed, was allowed to include the following in her director profile in the annual report:

She has a strong interest in the future of rural Australia and as a director is keen to represent the the interests of rural Victoria. A rural advocate, Ms Sheed is actively involved in committees associated with land and water management and the environment and local community issues.

That goes way above the qualifications and work experience details that we were limited to and given that more than 20% of RACV members live outside Melbourne, it will no doubt boost her vote by several thousand.

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