Not
So Tickety Boo
Bridget Griffen-Foley
Paul
Barry
Rich Kids
Bantam Books, $45hb, 408 pp, 1863253386
IN
2000, in response to catchy advertisements in the
Murdoch press, I rang One.Tel to enquire about rates
for telephone calls. When I finally managed to get through, it
was suggested I leave my name and number and someone would call
me back. I never heard another word. Since the episode hardly
inspired confidence, I did not try to make contact with the company
again.
It soon emerged that I had had a lucky escape. Thousands of people
— individuals and companies — had telephone or Internet
contracts with One.Tel. The firm expanded rapidly from its origins
as a mobile service reseller for Optus, offering cheap fixed-line
calls (at a loss) and an Internet service, and setting out to
construct its own mobile phone network across Australia. As One.Tel
grew exponentially, the call centre and the billing system were
unable to cope with demand. In an effort to hide the waiting time
for calls, callers were ‘dumped’ or assured they would
be rung back. Customers received wrong SIM cards and poor mobile
phone coverage; some were signed up with One.Tel, switched between
carriers or disconnected without their knowledge. The staff attrition
rate was massive, a ‘Free Time’ promotion for mobile
phone users proved an expensive farce, credit checks were abandoned,
bad debts skyrocketed, and some revenue and profit results that
did not meet wildly ambitious targets were deferred, manipulated
or concealed. Three thousand employees lost their jobs, creditors
did not receive the money owed to them, and small and large investors,
including the Packer and Murdoch families, found their shareholdings
worthless in mid-2001, when the administrators were called in.
Paul Barry’s Rich Kids tells the story of both One.Tel,
the telecommunications company launched by Jodee Rich and Brad
Keeling in 1995, and Imagineering, a software company, which was
founded by Rich in 1981 and also collapsed.
Despite the widespread heartache, Rich, Keeling and some key executives
emerged from One.Tel with millions of dollars from bonuses, royalties
and selling shares. Rich Kids is a tale of breathtaking greed,
self-aggrandisement, mismanagement, ineptitude and duplicity.
The One.Tel debacle was bound to be of interest to Paul Barry,
an investigative journalist and author of books about the businessmen
Alan Bond and Kerry Packer. The links between the Packer family
and One.Tel are obvious, and at least one of Bond’s former
associates bobs up in Rich Kids. But the book is not really,
as Barry claims in his Prologue, ‘the story of an era when
huge fortunes were made and lost
in the mad dot-com and telco boom’.
Rich Kids is a book produced in a hurry. It has been conceived,
written and published within about ten months, presumably with
the intention of hitting the streets before the current liquidators’
inquiry into One.Tel revealed too much, and then benefiting from
the associated publicity. I imagine an updated paperback edition
will be rushed out when the inquiry and other legal processes
are complete. This is not a book designed to last. There is little
perspective in Rich Kids, and no discussion of Australia’s
love affair with the mobile phone and Australians’ propensity
to embrace new communications technologies, let alone any attempt
to situate this within Australian communications history. Businessmen,
such as David Lowy and George Soros and the film star ‘Mel’
(Gibson), appear in passing, with no explanation of who they are
to aid the reader.
The book is handsomely produced, but there is a sense that some
sections have been padded out. While the tale of ‘missing
revenue’ (around $30 million) says something about the way
One.Tel kept financial records and drew up budget forecasts, it
makes for a very slight chapter. Rich Kids could have benefited
from a fuller discussion of the firm’s overseas operations.
These overseas ventures are periodically addressed, but not in
great detail. One.Tel’s foray into the mobile phone market
in the United Kingdom is generally depicted as too risky and too
costly, so it comes as something of a shock late in the book to
learn that the British operations ‘fetched a reasonable price
and are still going strong’.
There is also a fundamental problem with sources. In attempting
to unravel the very recent rise and fall of a company that had
close ties with prominent Australian families, Barry has naturally
been constrained by defamation laws. His informants have also
had to consider their future employment prospects. In his Acknowledgments,
the author notes that he could not individually name many One.Tel
employees who spoke to him. However, there needs to be a much
fuller explanation of sources than this. I would not expect endnotes
in a book like Rich Kids, but a list of references that
cites a handful of newspaper and magazine articles for little
more than half the chapters, and nothing for the others, is barely
sufficient. Barry writes about ‘One.Man’ (Jodee Rich,
whom he interviewed), ‘One.Happy Family’ and ‘None.Tel’;
as I read the book, I kept thinking ‘One.Source’ as
paragraph after paragraph quoted the recollections of ‘one
senior manager’, ‘one accountant’, ‘one analyst’,
‘one insider’, and so on.
It is apparent from the text that some financial records lodged
under statutory requirements and affidavits have been consulted.
Nevertheless, there does seem to have been an over-reliance on
oral testimony. Barry complains that there is virtually nothing
in the public domain about Brad Keeling.
He writes that, as Keeling declined to be interviewed for the
book, it has not even been possible to ascertain his date of birth
or verify speculation that he grew up in Sydney’s northern
suburbs and attended the Sydney Church of England Grammar School.
A cursory glance at the Sydney Church of England Grammar School
Centenary Register, 1889–1989 would have revealed that Bradley
William Keeling was born on 20 January 1956, lived in Seaforth
and went to ‘Shore’ from 1968 to 1971. The school’s
magazine and archives may well have yielded more about the co-founder
of One.Tel.
To say that Barry has adopted a colloquial style is an understatement.
He tells us that the Daily Telegraph adopts a ‘golly-gosh
approach to Great Aussie Success Stories’; James Packer and
Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch were ‘hot
to trot’ to invest in One.Tel; people at Optus were ‘caught
with their pants down’; Jodee Rich assured market watchers
that everything was ‘tickety-boo’ at One.Tel; Rodney
Adler resigned from the board just before ‘the shit hit the
fan’.
Rich Kids is a lively, colourful, often grimly amusing
account of a spectacular corporate collapse. It does not, however,
stand up well when compared with another book about how Australian
big business was conducted during one decade (the 1980s). In Heralds
and Angels: The House of Fairfax (1991), Gavin Souter showed
that it was possible to write a sophisticated, elegant but still
riveting account of how one company was brought to its knees,
and, in doing so, produced a classic work of Australian business
history.
