In March 1991, Trevor Kennedy dropped by the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT) for a ‘friendly fireside chat’, as he put it. It was time for some free speaking, frank exchanges of views, a few words of wisdom and counsel. It was the way the Sydney network liked to work problems out—no protocol or fuss, just a quiet little heart to heart. Trevor could always be depended upon to straighten out misunderstandings with a helpful, paternal word.
Kennedy had come to the ABT offices to talk about Sydney radio station 2UE. A little misunderstanding had arisen about who ran it. Kerry Packer had said previously that he had no control at all over the station—which was just as well because, under the cross-media laws, owning 2UE in addition to the Nine television network would have been illegal. It might be argued that, technically, Packer owned it. His Consolidated Press group would receive 99 per cent of any dividends paid. But Packer had sold 85 per cent of the voting shares to his accountant for $1, which meant Packer had no control. At least that is what his lawyers said. So it was a bit puzzling when former Test wicketkeeper Rod Marsh, who was one of 2UE’s cricket commentators, made some unkind remarks on air about Channel Nine’s coverage of the cricket and found himself out of a job shortly afterwards. As Kennedy was able to point out, this merely demonstrated a pleasing like-mindedness between 2UE management and the Packers. It certainly did not indicate that Packer was calling the shots at 2UE, which was the line of inquiry that the ABT had perversely decided to follow.
The House of Packer was no longer as close as it had once been to the ABT, in the days when Bruce Gyngell, the Tribunal’s founding chairman, asked Kerry Packer to be godfather to his son David. The present chairman, Peter Westerway, was positively distant. As NSW general secretary of the Labor Party in the early 1970s, Westerway had tried unsuccessfully to block the appointment of Graham Richardson as a state organiser and his politics were more left than anything that Richo had time for. When the ABT persisted in wasting time on the 2UE inquiry, Cons Press sold its interest in the station on the day hearings were to begin.
Actually, the House of Packer by now wasn’t as close to Kennedy as it had been either. Kennedy didn’t seem too worried about that; his personal finances were going along quite smartly. At the end of 1990, new share disclosure laws had forced Kennedy to reveal that he owned 9.9 per cent of a Sam Gazal company called Sunshine Broadcasting. Kennedy also had some ambitious redevelopment plans for Horse Island, the property on the South Coast that he had received from Gazal for his help in the Bodalla Dairy takeover and asset strip. It’s not clear whether Kerry Packer knew about the Horse Island deal but, if he did, it is unlikely he would have been overjoyed about it. While there was technically nothing wrong with Kennedy doing a deal with his mate Sam, Packer could hardly help focusing on the fact that he had already bought Trev a house—the harbourside pile at Elamang Avenue, Kirribilli. Kennedy had persuaded Packer to buy the house in 1984, several weeks after he discovered Packer had bought Rivkin’s house as a favour when Rene went to London in 1983, before reselling it back to him. There was a world of significance in the Elamang Avenue purchase.
The North Shore, of course, is a marvellous place, full of wonderful boulevards and often quite nice people. The prime minister lives there; the governor-general has a house there as well. And Mosman is the heartland of the upper-middle class establishment that forged Sydney’s cultural character. But, to be frank, it isn’t the locale for serious money. At least it isn’t any longer. For real wealth and power—an entry level of at least $50 million personal net worth—one buys in Bellevue Hill, Point Piper, Vaucluse or elsewhere in that sweep of harbour suburbs towards South Head. In Sydney, that is where the owners live.
The North Shore is populated by people who work for the owners. And a wonderful job they do of it too, as lawyers, accountants, merchant bankers and minor property developers—that class of superior employee who contributes so much to res publica and works so tirelessly in the interests of those who actually run society. Beyond them are the Upper North Shore suburbs, which are ground zero for Sydney’s uppity middle class, solid burghers who are so not part of the network. South of the bridge, the power zone is quite contained. Bondi and Coogee are holiday homes for social climbers. Of the suburbs west of Paddington we shall not speak.
It’s a simple rule: geography is destiny. The divine chain of being is codified by the street directory. According to one anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, Lachlan Murdoch wanted to buy Foxtel chief Mark Booth’s house in Birchgrove after News Corp transferred Booth to Star TV in Hong Kong. Rupert Murdoch took his son aside and told him bluntly, ‘People like us don’t live in suburbs like that.’
When Packer bought Kennedy a house in Kirribilli in 1983, he was no doubt recognising him as a prince among men, a wonderful fellow and, really, an excellent employee. But what was Packer to make of an employee who owned his own island? In any case, why should Kennedy be getting another house, as reward for extramural work, when he was supposed to be working full time and being paid handsomely ($1.24 million in 1991) to spend twenty-four hours of each day looking after the interests of Consolidated Press?
The second coming of the institutions in the late 1990s blurred some of these social boundaries, creating a new wave of wealthy business figures who are employees and not players. One can only guess at Packer’s feelings when he appointed Macquarie investment banker Peter Yates as head of Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL) in March 2001, only to see him buy a house virtually next to the Packer compound in Bellevue Hill. It’s said that when Al Dunlap, the abrasive American who succeeded Kennedy as head of Consolidated Press Holdings, expressed a desire to live in Bellevue Hill he was told in no uncertain terms where to go. Dunlap shuffled disconsolately off to the wilds of Woolwich. Sam Chisholm, that master of the small gesture, knew exactly what he was doing when he returned to Australia in the late 1990s after turning around Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB in Britain: he bought a place next door to the Packers at Palm Beach, and a country property near Canberra, not that far from Murdoch’s Cavan property. The employee rule, incidentally, didn’t work for everybody: Ita Buttrose had a company house near the Packers during her ACP heyday, and the current Cons Press chief, Ashok Jacob, lives just up the street—Jacob always had a deft touch with upward relations.
In 1991, Kennedy’s difficulties at Cons Press went beyond housing. On the surface, everything Packer touched turned to gold. Packer’s business acumen was legendary. But behind the scenes the picture wasn’t as bright. For one thing, the business of being Kerry Packer had become incredibly expensive. There were the polo ponies, the Douglas DC8 to fly him around the world, the multiple residences, the casino jaunts, and Packer’s readiness on any day to buy anything that caught his eye on any continent. In the mid-1990s, Sam Gazal was talking to Packer about the meaning of life and how little money either of them really needed.
He confided, ‘I could be happy earning just $300 000 a year.’
‘Me too,’ said Packer senior. ‘I could be perfectly happy on that.’
At least, that’s the way James Packer told the story. James couldn’t believe it. ‘$300 000 a year?’ he said. ‘Try $100 million a year.’ Or so the story goes.
In 1991, Packer’s property developments were also looking rocky. In the middle of a recession Packer was stuck with problematic developments with the Grollos in Melbourne and Warren Anderson in Perth. He was not in financial difficulties, but it wouldn’t take a lot of bad news on the property front to put him under pressure. And this was just the moment when an opportunity arose that Packer had been awaiting for decades.
On 10 December 1990, the banks appointed receivers to the Fairfax newspaper group. Investment banker Mark Burrows, who would supervise the sale of the business for the banks, laid out the ground rules for the great Fairfax auction. While publicly playing down his interest, Packer had already made his plans. On 28 November, just seven weeks after Packer’s heart attack, Canadian newspaperman Conrad Black wrote to him about a joint bid for Fairfax: ‘Could you bear in mind what I said at our meeting at Jimmy Goldsmith’s house that I would be happy in principle if you were to participate in our deal?’
Packer faxed back the next day: ‘I would be delighted to take an interest with you in Fairfaxes, but I do not believe the time has yet come to make our move. I will keep you fully informed and will consider you my partner in looking at Fairfaxes, so if at some stage you have a change of heart for some reason, kindly let me know.’
On 3 June 1991, Packer met with Black at the Savoy Hotel in London to finalise a joint bid for Fairfax through a consortium called Tourang. In the intervening six months, Malcolm Turnbull, who had been appointed representative of Fairfax’s junk bondholders, had put a deal together that virtually ensured Tourang would win. He had signed an agreement for the bondholders to deal exclusively with Tourang for a six-month period. Turnbull would sit on the Tourang board as the bondholders’ representative. On paper the alliance looked unbeatable. However, Tourang faced two difficulties.
First, if its bid were successful, it would raise the foreign ownership of Fairfax to between 35 and 40 per cent. This was above the accepted government guidelines, and it would require careful lobbying in Canberra. The best chance lay with Packer’s close links with the right wing of the Labor Party in NSW—which was to say, Tourang’s hopes were founded on Graham Richardson. Unfortunately for Tourang, Richardson already had his hands full. On 3 June, while Packer was meeting with Black in London, Treasurer Paul Keating mounted his first leadership challenge to the prime minister, Bob Hawke. Keating lost and went to the backbench. As Keating’s campaign manager, Richardson was now also on the outer.
The second problem was that the presence of Packer in the consortium would trigger widespread fears that he was secretly running the show. Packer could be a highly interventionist proprietor. There was still sensitivity over the David Dale affair the previous year. In March 1990, Dale as editor of the Bulletin had published an issue titled ‘The Great Australian Balance Sheet’. The magazine listed forty-five Australian public figures who were assets to the culture, and another forty-five who were liabilities. A year before, Dale had produced a list of the country’s ‘Most Appalling People’. That issue had prompted an edict from Kerry Packer, whose friends had complained about making the cut, that there should be no more ‘Appalling People’ lists. ‘The Great Australian Balance Sheet’ was a neat way around the ban. Alan Jones and John Laws were both prominent entries in the liabilities section, but they largely ignored it. John Singleton, on the other hand, had taken exception to the original list that rated his social appeal somewhere around that of the meningococcal disease. He made the traditional Sydney response to bad press, which was to call his very good friend, the publisher. Kerry Packer sacked Dale for breaking his ban on ‘Appalling People’ lists and ordered security guards to escort him from the building. Dale’s timing could have been better.
Days earlier Packer had learned that American antitrust regulators were about to block Operation Happy, the $27 billion takeover bid he was making with Sir James Goldsmith and Rothschild for British American Tobacco. Packer could now say goodbye to the $1.5 billion profit that he had planned to make from Operation Happy. It was just the sort of disappointment to make Packer a little snippy, even before Singleton called to complain. The Dale sacking caused a flurry of publicity, which the Packers ignored (‘Keep your nose out of other people’s business,’ Kennedy told the Sydney Morning Herald).
Despite the problems, in the winter of 1991, Turnbull had no doubts that Tourang could win approval from Canberra. On Monday 15 July, he took Steven Ezzes, the head of the Fairfax junk bondholders committee, to Canberra for lunch with Graham Richardson. Richo brought along the communications minister, Kim Beazley, so that Turnbull could put the case for Tourang directly. The next day, Tourang went public with its bid for Fairfax. The biggest news was that Trevor Kennedy was leaving Consolidated Press at the end of the month to head Tourang. ‘I am personally very sad at this event but Trevor has chosen to pursue an opportunity as chief executive of a group which will try to acquire the Fairfax newspapers,’ Packer announced to staff.
Conrad Black flew in on the Wednesday, ready to dispel any suggestion that Kerry Packer was calling the shots. ‘Kerry will be very much a minority shareholder,’ Black told the Bulletin. ‘He will be a shareholder at the kind of level that normally gets you a free lunch and a tour of the plant. Kerry is not going to be controlling anything in that company . . .’ Black then launched into the wildest account of how Kennedy happened to be working for him.
‘Kerry’s involvement arose out of me seeking to hire Trevor Kennedy as the prospective managing director of the Fairfax Group, were we to gain control of it.’ It would have been a ‘breach of protocol’ if Black didn’t first check this with Packer. ‘When I did, he said he wouldn’t stand in the way of any man’s career, but if I did go ahead, he would like a piece of the deal.’
It was wonderful. In a town that values insincerity and narcissistic self-display, Black was a natural. How would he like to be seen? ‘As the Samaritanly philanthropist that I am. I’m just here to help you, you know,’ he admitted diffidently. The Samaritan would later tell US magazine Vanity Fair that journalists were ‘swarming, grunting masses of jackals’, ‘a very degenerate group’ with ‘a terrible incidence of alcoholism and drug abuse’ who were often ‘ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest and inadequately supervised’. As he told Quentin Dempster on the 7.30 Report, he meant this in a nice way.
Two days later, Kennedy flew to Canberra with Black. He demonstrated his political connections by arranging for Black to meet with Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer John Kerin for an hour, and then to lunch with Beazley. There was a little hiccup when Beazley told Black the biggest obstacle to Tourang winning approval was ‘the fellow sitting next to you’. Without a blink Black turned to Kennedy, ‘Okay, Trevor, you’re fired.’ Everyone laughed. What a card that Conrad was. Despite these antics, unrest among the backbenchers forced the government to announce a senate inquiry into the print media.
With all the media attention focused on Tourang, no one noticed that Consolidated Press had quietly stopped furnishing financial information to Australian Ratings, which provides company debt ratings for creditors. Stopping the flow of financial information to your creditors is often a sign of trouble. Its 30 June accounts, when they later appeared, suggested that money was tight at this time. Packer’s contribution to Tourang was to be only $75 million. Then within days of Kennedy leaving at the end of July, Cons Press was hit by bank demands for $650 million. The joint venture property deals set up on Kennedy’s watch had hit the wall.
It was so avoidable. Warren Anderson had a joint venture development in Perth with Shimizu and C Itoh. It was in trouble, but everyone knew the Japanese did not let their partners fall over. Yet in October 1990, Anderson, who can be annoying at the best of times, managed to escalate into a major confrontation a minor difference over who was to pay land tax owing on the site. His partners appointed receivers to several Anderson companies on 9 August 1991. While this was bad enough for Anderson, it was pretty horrific for Kerry Packer.
Three years before, Packer and Anderson had ponied up $90 million as a down payment to buy the Westralia Square site in Perth. The rest of the sale price and the loan for construction didn’t fall due until 1995. There was one proviso. If any of the Packer or Anderson companies in the deal went into administration, the bank debt fell due immediately. The moment the Japanese receivers walked into Anderson’s companies chasing the money for land tax, the entire $360 million owing on Westralia Square became instantly due. And, because both Packer and Anderson were co-guarantors, the banks could now demand all of that money from Packer.
The bad news didn’t stop. In Melbourne, the banks financing 120 Collins Street wanted their money back. Packer had sold down almost all his interest in the project to the Grollo brothers and now held only 1 per cent. But Cons Press was still liable for three quarters of the debt. That amounted to $288 million that Packer suddenly had to come up with.
Packer didn’t go broke, of course. He had been playing with the idea of hiring Brian Powers, the American from US investment bank Hellman and Friedman who was working on the Tourang deal, as Kennedy’s replacement at Cons Press (Stephen Mulholland, the South African later appointed to run Fairfax, described Powers in an Internet chat room in 2005 as a ‘pushy, avaricious San Franciscan from whose scalp there grew mysterious and scrofulous tufts’). But instead of Powers, Kerry Packer called on Al Dunlap, the abrasive American cost-cutter known as Chainsaw (his reputation for turning around companies took a dive in 1998 when Sunbeam sacked him for fabricating profits—four years later Dunlap paid US$15 million to settle a class action by Sunbeam shareholders and US$500 000 to the US Securities & Exchange Commission to settle a civil fraud case without admitting liability). By late 1992, Dunlap would raise $2.8 billion in cash for Packer in a massive sell-off, but meanwhile in late 1991 Cons Press was stalling for time.
Anderson once described to journalist Mark Drummond a physical struggle he had with Kerry Packer over the Westralia Square debacle, actually wrestling with him on the floor of his Park Street office. It’s a wonderful image, the two men thrashing about on the floor, arms and legs flailing. I think there must have been some grunting. At some point they knocked over a cast-iron stand holding a glass bowl of sweets, which exploded across the room. ‘This bloody thing, I remember, it hit the deck and lollies went everywhere,’ Anderson told Drummond. The episode was triggered when Packer first learnt in 1988 that he was tied to the Westralia Square debacle. That was when it merely looked as if Packer might be at risk in the project. One can only imagine Packer’s feelings three years later when the banks actually came looking for their $360 million. This unhappy discovery marked the first of a series of magical moments that might be filed under the heading, ‘Handling Adversity Badly’.
The next magical moment was at the Regent Hotel on 13 October, after the Tourang consortium members began a corporate game of Man Overboard. Conrad Black’s lieutenant, Dan Colson, and Brian Powers had decided that Trevor Kennedy wasn’t pulling his weight and he needed to be informed of their concerns. This would be no fireside chat. Their worry was that Kennedy could turn violent. ‘Perhaps he will start throwing punches,’ Colson quipped waggishly as they sat awaiting the arrival of their managing director in one of the hotel’s rooms. Just to show how amusing this line was, Colson proceeded to hide various loose objects in a cupboard. There was a heavy ashtray, a letter opener, a pair of scissors—all much too dangerous to have around a snitty Trevor Kennedy. A less courageous man than Colson would have taken no chances with the television remote, the bar fridge, and some of the more lethal soft furnishings. Regrettably, the heated exchanges that followed were only verbal. Kennedy resigned from Tourang two days later.
The next moment was in the Botanic Gardens five weeks later, on Friday 23 November, where Colson had arranged a one-on-one session with an unhappy Malcolm Turnbull. Colson wanted Turnbull to resign from the Tourang board. Though neither of them had a letter opener or ashtray within reach, the prospect of Colson and Turnbull wrestling on the ground in $1000 suits amongst the bushes was jokingly entertained by the rest of the Tourang team as they waited at the Ritz-Carlton for Colson to return. However, while Turnbull had often described himself as a bomb thrower, he baulked at shrubbery. After a full and frank exchange of views, Turnbull told Colson he would resign. But by the next day, Saturday, he had changed his mind. Talks continued through the weekend.
Then came the most magical moment of all, on the Sunday night, when Peter Westerway found himself in a car in a darkened street in North Sydney, feeling so not like the head of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal. He had been called late at night by someone he later described as ‘a prominent public figure, who was also a principal in a major ownership and control case’. The caller wanted an urgent meeting because he had vital evidence that must be handed over in secret because he believed ‘he, his wife and his family were all at risk’. So there was Westerway, feeling a little silly in the driver’s seat, when the mystery figure climbed into the passenger seat beside him, ‘where he passed across the material in a brown paper bag, like a character from a Len Deighton novel’. Westerway refused to identify the man in the car publicly, other than to say it wasn’t Trevor Kennedy. And given the number of players in the Fairfax saga, it’s impossible to say who the mystery man was. His claims about being afraid for his safety should probably be taken as a histrionic gesture, which ensured he had Westerway’s complete attention.
Whatever the source, the papers inside the bag were dynamite. They were copies of diary notes that Trevor Kennedy had made around the time of his appointment in July to head Tourang, in which he gave his understanding of Packer’s role in the consortium. Packer, Black and even Kennedy had, under oath at the print inquiry, been keen to stress that Packer would not control or influence the management of Tourang once it had secured the Fairfax newspaper group. Now it turned out that, privately, Kennedy had the exact opposite idea of Packer’s plans. No doubt he had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, but dear old Trevor had written it all down in his diary. Now, by a stroke of luck, Westerway had a copy of these notes. This was not the same as getting hold of them officially, but it meant that the next morning he was able to draft a detailed order for Kennedy to produce the relevant diary notes. The Broadcasting Tribunal had the original diary notes in its possession by Monday afternoon. They were a showstopper. Westerway announced on Tuesday that he was opening an official inquiry into the Tourang bid—a lengthy process that would effectively put Tourang out of the hunt for Fairfax. Two days later, Packer announced he was withdrawing from Tourang. Packer, along with most of the Tourang camp, was convinced that Kennedy had leaked the documents to Westerway. Kennedy was now persona non grata anywhere near the Consolidated Press circle.
Packer’s departure left Conrad Black alone in the ‘Big Brother’ house. First Kennedy, then Turnbull, then Packer had been voted off the show. Then a week later, Conrad Black was told to pack his bags. On Thursday 5 December, the Federal Treasurer John Kerin, as head of the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), decided to approve Tony O’Reilly’s independent bid for Fairfax and reject Tourang’s on the grounds that the level of foreign investment in Conrad Black’s bid was too high. It was all over. Kerin’s decision represented a complete defeat for Packer’s and Black’s plans, though the FIRB office would not inform Tourang of Kerin’s decision until the following Sunday.
‘It is sleazy, venal and despicable, I’m sure the Australian public are shocked and appalled by these tactics,’ Conrad Black spluttered in London when he heard the news. Despite these brave words, Kerin’s decision seemed to signal the end of the road for Tourang. But the battle wasn’t quite over. One factor remained in play—that trusty friend of troubled media barons, Graham Richardson.
The major political events of that December—the battle for Fairfax and the climax of the Labor leadership challenge—could be written as two separate narratives, with only an incidental connection between the two. That connection would be Richo. Among his many other talents, Richardson would go down in history as a self-professed liar. He admitted as much in his 1994 autobiography, Whatever It Takes. It’s part of the Richo legend. What is less well known is that when Richardson made this confession, he was talking about the events of late 1991.
In September, with Paul Keating on the backbench and his failed challenge to Bob Hawke going nowhere, Richardson decided it was time to damp down leadership speculation. He saw himself as the key figure in the challenge, because of the votes he could deliver from the NSW right. He announced unilaterally that the challenge was over and went on radio with Hawke to talk about how matey they all were now. As he wrote later:
This did not indicate treachery to Keating, but the difficulty I was having in helping him become Prime Minister without destroying the party. This sounds uncharacteristically noble, but having said that I have to add that to achieve that goal successfully I had to lie from time to time—which I did.
Getting back into the Hawke camp didn’t just take attention away from the Keating campaign, which continued anyway, it also brought Richardson back into the counsels close to Hawke, who were debating what to do about Fairfax. But the whispering campaign against Hawke’s leadership had quickened after Liberal leader John Hewson revealed his ‘Fightback!’ package for a goods and services tax on 22 November. Hawke’s finance team of Treasurer Kerin and Finance Minister Ralph Willis were also not performing well.
The two dramas—Fairfax and the leadership challenge—both came to a head on 5 December. Kerin’s historic, but as yet unannounced, decision to dump Tourang that day was entirely overshadowed by his disastrous performance at a press conference to release the September national accounts. The figures confirmed that Australia was in the middle of its worst slump in sixty years. In the course of his presentation, Kerin referred to the GOS figures:
As you know, all of this is two to five months in the past. The Gross Operating, sorry the Gross, aah . . . [pause] share rose, Gross, aah . . . [pause] What’s GOS?
At this stage in the self-disintegration of Kerin’s career, a large sign up the back of the room that said ‘Gross Operating Surplus, Stupid’ could have changed history. Instead, Kerin’s harmless but embarrassing gaffe became a sound bite that was played and replayed on television screens across the country. It was the final straw. Richardson advised Hawke, who still thought that Richo was on his side, to replace Kerin as Treasurer and to make a sweeping Cabinet reshuffle.
That private advice from Richardson, which was echoed by Victorian right-wing powerbroker Robert Ray, appeared on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald the next day, Friday. By 11.30 that morning, Hawke had moved to appoint Ralph Willis to replace Kerin as treasurer as of the following Monday. (Kerin, his political career effectively over, resigned from parliament two years later, leaving his seat of Werriwa to the ambitious mayor of Liverpool, Mark Latham.) Richardson headed off for lunch in Rivkin’s boardroom, where he was able to tell Laurie Brereton, Peter Barron and Rivkin that his advice to Hawke the previous day would destroy Hawke. Richardson had known, he later claimed, that even as he pressed Hawke for a full cabinet reshuffle the PM would jump the other way and only replace Kerin, an inadequate response that would not be sufficient to head off the Keating challenge. But Barron, who by now was Kerry Packer’s chief lobbyist, and Rivkin, as Packer’s sometime broker, would have seen much wider repercussions from Richardson’s move.
It was quite the strategic masterstroke. Hawke’s downfall would recharge Richardson’s career and, whether or not Richo really was the deciding factor in Hawke’s decision to sack Kerin, he would tell the story so many times that it became accepted history that he was. At the time he was advising Hawke, as a senior government minister Richardson would have known which way Kerin was leaning on the Fairfax decision. It seems inconceivable that he didn’t know that Kerin had already formally rejected the Tourang bid. Of course, whether he actually knew or not doesn’t make a lot of difference. In politics, it’s how you tell the story.
The Fairfax auction had not yet closed when Kerin’s decision was made public over the weekend. With Kerin now out of the picture, Tourang was free to submit a new, revised bid, and start the whole FIRB approval process all over again. By the following Wednesday, Tourang had restructured its bid for Fairfax to reduce foreign ownership to 25 per cent. The new Treasurer, Ralph Willis, only forty-eight hours into the job, had a month to make a response. He took just two days. On Friday 13 December, Willis approved the new bid without further inquiry. Three days later, the banks had sold Fairfax to Tourang, leaving the newspaper group at the mercy of Conrad Black’s split infinitives and appalling syntax as the group’s controlling shareholder for the next five years. Packer, meanwhile, was left to scheme endless ways, with all the relentless persistence of Wile E. Coyote, of getting Fairfax back.
Conrad Black had won Fairfax because Kerin was no longer treasurer. And the chief reason Kerin was no longer treasurer was that old wag, Graham Richardson. Even if Kerry Packer was no longer a shareholder in Tourang, as a payout for his departure he had negotiated a package of Tourang options, which he later cashed out for $60 million. Richardson had done many favours for Packer in his career. But this surely must have been one of the sweetest.
On 19 December, Keating defeated Hawke for the leadership. The next day he called around to Richardson’s office to ask him what portfolio he wanted. And so Graham Richardson, the man who had already shown himself to be the Most Valuable Player for Team Packer, the politician to whom Kerry Packer owed the most, became the new communications minister.