Kerry O’Brien

August 20, 2020

From Keating (2015) – 2

In his 2015 interviews with Kerry O’Brien, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating describes being approached by Canadian newspaperman Conrad Black, who told him in 1992 that Kerry Packer had acquired 23.5 per cent of the Fairfax Media organisation, owners of the Sydney Morning Herald, despite being restricted by media ownership rules to 14.9 per cent:

PJK: When I checked, Black was correct. Packer’s organisation had taken advice from some barrister specialising in media law who found what they thought was a loophole. From memory, Packer was in Argentina playing polo, so I spoke to one of his representatives and said ‘Conrad Black’s been to see me and I understand Consolidated Press has 23.5 per cent of Fairfax.’

The answer came back immediately. ‘That’s right.’

I said, ‘You understand what the law says? The prescribed limit is 14.9.’

He said, ‘Everything we are doing is legal.’

I said, ‘You may think so but I made the law so I have a particular interest in its maintenance, which means your interest in Fairfax must return to 14.9 per cent.’

He replied, ‘Well, as long as you understand that will mean war, I’ll relay the message.’

…I said, ‘Well, conflict is what I do.’

KOB: This was actually reported at the time in the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘I told Packer yesterday I was in the conflict business. I don’t take the troubles. I give them to people like that.’

PJK: Yes, I said ‘conflict is what I do.’ I then asked Michael Lee, who had become Communications Minister, to get an amendment together and I saw Cheryl Kernot and the Democrats and pushed it very quickly through both Houses, which meant the loophole Packer was using was shut off.

I came to understand that Kerry wanted to control Fairfax to get square with the journalists he believed had gone after him maliciously over the references to him in the National Times under a code name in the Costigan Royal Commission. I understood his anger but we had a media diversity policy that he was not entitled to break…

Paul Keating and Kerry Packer (AAP/Reuters)

 

I’m the only person in public life who ever took Packer on. Ever. This was a person who wielded great influence over a succession of governments, and not one single individual in the polity ever crossed swords with him. I not only crossed swords with him, I gave him a number of beltings. I wanted to make it clear to Packer, you may think we are a bunch of toadies there to do your bidding, but not me.

But Packer came after me after I’d left politics. If you read Niki Savva’s account in her book of how Paul Lyneham volunteered to do Packer’s bidding on the piggery claims against me, aided and abetted by the former Liberal Party President Tony Staley, you’ll see this was all payback for stopping his attempts to control Fairfax…I then lobbied Brian Harradine and a number of other senators to stop the cross-media rule change in the Senate.

A journalist said to me at the time, ‘Mr Keating, are you going to take a defamation action against Channel Nine and Mr Packer?’

I said, ‘No, I have much more expensive remedies in mind for him.’

The remedy I had in mind was to beat the cross-rule amendments in the Senate, which I succeeded in doing…

All those Sydney Morning Herald journalists who went on and on about my delinquency as far as the Herald’s interests were concerned forget the fact that I stopped two major proprietors getting hold of Fairfax. One was Rupert Murdoch, who sought my support in 1995 to take control of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Financial Review, and the second was Packer’s creeping ownership with a view to controlling the whole organisation, at which point I have no doubt he would have wrought vengeance on some of those same journalists.

KOB: When you knocked Murdoch back, how did he react?

PJK:…I said, ‘Rupert, the thing is, you own the current stable of newspapers. No one else is going to buy them from you, and while ever you own them, whether they’re in trust or not, we can never think of you owning any of the other mastheads.’

KOB: Did he accept that with equanimity?

PJK:  He didn’t remonstrate about it at the time but I think Ken Cowley [head of his Australian operation] had conditioned him that that was the answer he would likely get.

KOB: Was there a difference between Murdoch and Packer in that regard, as personalities? There was always that bullying side to Packer that he was notorious for. He could be charming one minute and verbally ripping your head off the next.

PJK: Rupert was always polite and, in the main, charming, even when you said no. You may pay a price later, but he was always polite.

-Paul Keating, Australian, 1944-

-Kerry O’Brien, Australian, 1945-

August 13, 2020

From Keating (2015) – 1

In a series of 2015 television interviews, veteran ABC journalist Kerry O’Brien probed former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating – who had always insisted he would never write an autobiography – on what made him and how he governed. Born in Darlinghurst in 1944 and growing up in Bankstown, he left school at 14 and joined the Australian Labor Party as soon as he was eligible. Here he recalls one of his earliest mentors, the tempestuous Jack Lang, who had been Premier of New South Wales before his 1932 dismissal by Governor Sir Phillip Game, and was later expelled from the mainstream Labor Party:

PJK: I used to see him twice a week for about seven years. Strangely he used to call me Mr Keating and I was only eighteen in those days. He was very formal. I used to address him as Mr Lang. Among other things, I asked him whether I should go and do a university degree, and he thought for a while before saying, ‘Mr Keating, you have too much to learn for a university degree, about the getting of power and the using of it. There are no courses in this’…

Paul Keating sponsors Jack Lang’s readmission into the Australian Labor Party, July 1971

He and I disagreed on a lot of policy fronts like protection and tariffs, and I’d say on much of the world debate I would probably have been on the other side to him. I didn’t want that from him. I wanted the dynamics, and how the game was played.

What I particularly picked up from Lang was his use of language, the force of his language. He had hugely long arms, as if they were concertinaed. They’d come out at you as he talked. He had the celluloid collar and the gold chain, and that big jaw, and he’d say, ‘Mr Keating, I’m telling you this’, and he’d lean across the table with a look that would bore a hole in you. He was then 87 or 88. There was no one like him then.

He used to say to me, ‘Always put your money on self-interest, son. He’s the best horse in the race; always a trier.’

KOB: I did an interview with you in 1986 where you described how you learned from Lang to be hard in your judgements. What did you mean by that?

PJK: Lang once said to me, ‘One of your problems, Mr Keating, is you take people at their word. This is a business where duplicity is the order of the day. Look for the best in people by all means, but keep a sceptical eye peeled for what they are saying to you and what they really mean. What you should look for is the support of the earnest people. There will be a lot whose support you will never have. But you will never be anyone until you have a reasonable stock of enemies.’ It’s the issues that sort people out. It’s just so true, because having enemies worries some people. For me, it’s a badge of honour. It’s never worried me that a group of people would not have a bar of me. And that’s the way Lang conducted his life.

Even so, I never really took that kind of almost morbid cynicism on board as an operating principle. I always found better in people in public life, and if you go through a caucus like I did for nearly 30 years, you’ve got to build coalitions and friendships with people. So there are people you trust. I never subscribed to the solitary school, that you’re on your own and only on your own, but I did subscribe to the fact that you’ve got to look at what is said to you and look behind it. You have to end up being a good judge of character and a good judge of what is really being said to you, as well as a good listener.

People may be members of a political party, but they get to Parliament in their own right. It’s like a team with a captain but the members of a team earn their place independently, so to stitch together majorities in Parliament continually, you’ve got to look at people to see what their interests are, what things they have in common, what natural point of agreement you have with them, or points of disagreement.

  -Paul Keating, Australian, 1944-

-Kerry O’Brien, Australian, 1945-