Simons November 07

The Packer toll

Margaret Simons

Paul Barry
The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer Uncut
Bantam, $34.95 pb, 616 pp, 9781863253314

Gerald Stone
Who Killed Channel 9? The Death of Kerry Packer’s Mighty TV Dream Machine
Pan Macmillan, $45 hb, 292 pp, 9781405038157

Until recently, more Australians got their news and information from Channel Nine than from any other single source. For nearly thirty years, what Gerald Stone describes as ‘Kerry Packer’s mighty tv dream machine’ was the dominant force in Australian media and popular culture. Channel Nine was, as its promos used to say, ‘The One’.

Kerry Packer, for all his many faults, was an instinctive television man, who understood what Australians wanted to watch because he shared their tastes, liking nothing better after a hard day bawling out his employees than to sit down in front of Charlie’s Angels. Packer wanted to win the ratings game for the sake of winning, and he cared about content for its own sake – or at least for the prestige and power that it brought him. In his wake, though, came the money-men, the lawyers and Packer’s son, James. It is they who Packer thought ‘stuffed the place up’, accord-ing to Stone, and brought the network to its knees.

Stone worked for Packer as founding executive producer of Sixty Minutes and editor in chief of the Bulletin. His book is imbued with nostalgia for the glory days. He acknowledges that they were ‘tinged with a degree of extravagance that’s almost embarrassing to look back upon from today’s perspective’, but they also had ‘spirit, morale, verve, zest, esprit’ that all ‘boiled down to fun. The place was pervaded by a cheery togetherness that gave it the feel of an extended family.’

Stone follows this account with a string of anecdotes about Packer’s management style or ‘presence’. Without the rose-tinted glasses, the anecdotes constitute appalling evidence of bullying. But at least, says Stone, everyone working on his programmes knew that Packer cared, which is more than can be said for the present private equity owners for whom the bottom line is really all that matters.

When Packer died in December 2005, the fun ended, Stone suggests. He believes the answer to the question ‘Who Killed Channel Nine?’ is the succession of cold-hearted managers and lawyers who failed to understand the ‘magic’ of television. Chief among these was Packer’s lieutenant John Alexander and his cronies. Stone relates a compelling story of an organisation full of creative people that manages to systematically alienate the talent on which it relies. Waves of executives both live and die by the sword. Much of the talent leaves to work for the rival Channel Seven, which is one of the main reasons why Channel Seven, rather than Channel Nine, is now winning the ratings battle. All this makes for entertaining reading. The story is like a soap opera, without the neat resolution. Stone illuminates just how difficult it will be for Channel Nine to turn itself around, even though David Gyngell, who at least understands television, has in the last few weeks returned to run the place for its new owners. Yet one of the culprits in Channel Nine’s fall was surely Packer himself. He was an awful bully. Any organisation driven by a top-down demeaning and enslavement of company talent is hardly likely to be able to change, adapt or function properly once the chief bully has departed. Reading Stone’s book alongside the new edition of Paul Barry’s study of Packer induces a sense of horror and wonderment that such a flawed man could so dominate the landscape in media and politics, and for so long. What does it say about the rest of us that his bullying worked so well? The depressing thing is how few people stood up to him. These volumes could stand as a case study in bullying and the damage it can do – to individuals, to organisations and even to nations.

Paul Barry’s book is a reworked and extended edition of his ground-breaking investigative work, The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer (1993). Like Stone’s book, Barry’s shows the merits of a journalistic background when it comes to building a compelling story and telling it in crisp prose. Now that Packer is dead and can no longer sue, Barry has been able to add some material that was cut for legal reasons from the original book, which was published in the face of heavy-handed threats from Packer and his lawyers.

The most important new material concerns Packer’s long-term relationship with Carol Lopes, who was first his lover and then his madam, running a ‘summer house’ of high-class prostitutes in which Packer entertained – and rewarded – those who had done him a favour. Among these people were politicians and businessmen. Barry does not name names – not all the people who might sue are dead – but, as he points out, Lopes’s role in Packer’s life was ‘not just a private and personal matter between the two of them’, but ‘a matter of legitimate public interest’ and a fitting topic for investigation. Whom did Packer take to his private bordello, and what favours did his guests do for him in return?

Lopes herself benefited for a while, but not indefinitely. She loved Packer, whom she regarded as a father figure. When he abandoned her, she became depressed and killed herself, leaving a long suicide note which, Barry informs us, remains on file at the New South Wales Coroner’s Court, though publication of its contents is prohibited.

Barry’s book is a fine piece of investigative work, never descending into spleen or vitriol, but devastating in its forensic picking apart of the record and character of one of Australia’s most powerful and unscrupulous men.

What would Channel Nine, and Australia, have been like without Kerry Packer? Channel Nine would barely have existed. Australia would also be different, even though it is clear that Packer picked political winners at least as much as making them. Certainly, media policy would be very different. We are still living with the consequences of Packer’s domination of the field, including the hobbling of digital television and Foxtel’s near monopoly of pay television.

Packer emerges from Barry’s book as a damaged and damaging man. He had charm, determination and wit, but his incapacities defined him more than his capacities. He was a compulsive gambler and womaniser. His friendship was usually contingent on slavish loyalty. In business, his record was mixed – as Barry suggests, a mixture of daring and decisiveness that sometimes paid off (e.g. World Series Cricket), together with brave failures and others where petulance and misjudgment were clearly to blame. Packer’s capacity for shrewdness was matched by an incapacity when it came to judgment and forbearance.

Packer liked to associate with people from the wrong side of the tracks, which was at least part of the reason why he came to the attention of the Costigan Royal Commission. Barry unpicks the Costigan allegations, absolving Packer of the worst that was said about him, while making it clear that Packer was certainly involved with dodgy characters, tax minimisation and other weird transactions.

Packer could act like a spoiled child, which is ironic, since he was anything but, having been brutalised by his father and neglected by his mother, which may have led to his most tragic incapacity. It appears that, with the possible exception of his children, Kerry Packer was incapable of love. His friends were soon dropped when it came to matters of money, or when they failed to show sufficient obsequiousness. Packer was faithless to his wife, shouted at her in public, bullied and abused anyone who frustrated him. Certainly, there were acts of generosity to people whom he didn’t know, and to his employees, and considerable unpublicised philan-thropy; but this cuts less ice when one reads of his multi-million dollar gambling losses, of his peeling off hundred dollar notes like confetti on the assumption that most people could be bought, and his appalling treatment of people who had good reason to expect better of him.

In business, Packer was occasionally brilliant, but he had no vision, no overarching strategy and little purpose in life other than further enrichment – and winning. He was smart and ruthless, but also lucky (most of all in meeting Alan Bond). He was born rich and deeply privileged.

Packer ended his life friendless and isolated. Once he was gone, his son backed away from his legacy and sold the ‘dream machine’ his father had loved. On his death, politicians lined up to say that Packer was a great Australian. If he was, then greatness is a sad thing.

One of the main lessons of the Packer story, as told by Stone and Barry, must surely be aimed at the gifted and the talented. It is about the dangers of allowing oneself to be owned by people such as Kerry Packer, though in a nation where influence and money concentrate around too few individuals, refusing to be owned can mean choosing comparative impotence over contingent power.

Margaret Simon's most recent book, The Content Makers, was reviewed in the October issue.