ABC’s Fine Cotton ring-in scandal podcast trite trash rehashed

An ABC podcast rehashing one of the worst scandals in Australian sports history — and cost the price of a Rolls Royce — reeks of horse manure.

Racehorse Bold Personality (inside), racing as Fine Cotton defeated Harbour Gold before being disqualified during race in Brisbane in 1984, in what is known as the Fine Cotton ring-in scandal.

Our ABC has done it again. It has just spent a barrowload of taxpayers’ money on an embarrassing farrago of fact, fiction and fluff that deliberately muddies inconvenient facts linking the Waterhouse family to the worst scandals in Australian sports history.

Its new eight-part podcast series, The Ring In, could and should have been a fearless forensic re-examination of the facts surrounding the Fine Cotton ring-in scandal in early 1984.

But the podcast isn’t fearless or forensic. It tries to be funny, and misses there, too.

Instead, its makers have played fast and loose with witnesses misled into thinking they were telling the definitive true story behind the scandals.

The podcast (which has three “fact checkers” among the 40 names listed on its credits) sidesteps the chance to kill off myths and misinformation.

Despite the huge expense and long lead time, the fact checkers, chief reporter and hired “expert” allow basic errors — such as the colour of the substitute horse, Bold Personality. (One narrator describes the bay ring-in as “a chestnut”, which is like mistaking Penelope Cruz for Nicole Kidman.)

David Waterhouse, brother of banned bookmaker Robbie.

Worse than mere errors, though, the makers trash the contribution of well-meaning people, doing an about-face in the last two episodes that undermines the credibility of those whose frank testimony made the first six episodes look better than the juvenile jokiness imposed by tone deaf producers.

Handed the tools to do a proper job, the national broadcaster has nobbled the truth by playing it for cheap laughs. Who knew that millennials thought the three stooges trope was still funny? They’ll be doing mother-in-law jokes next.

Bad jokes and trite dialogue apart, The Ring In is cowardly. It ends with a lame giggle instead of a bang. Its biggest fault is to elevate the lies of repeatedly discredited people to a false equivalence with far more reliable witnesses.

For instance, it promotes longtime prison inmate Bertie Kidd, a career criminal who has lied all his life, as a quotable source, despite the uncontested fact he worked for previously suspended and “warned off” bookie Bill Waterhouse.

Similarly, Kidd’s longtime associate Robbie Waterhouse is treated as if credible when the opposite seems the case, having been disqualified from racing for life, and criminally convicted of false swearing, for gross dishonesty over the ring in.

The podcast compounds this slant by undermining the credibility of witnesses who have willingly repeated sworn and tested testimony. It treats such strong evidence as having the same weight as unsworn allegations and downright fabrications from Robbie Waterhouse, Kidd and others peddling misinformation to muddy the truth.

This marked bias in the last two episodes is shown especially in the deliberate — and legally risky — gambit of cherry picking a few words of criticism out of context from a judge’s summing up of a civil action in which David Waterhouse was ultimately vindicated. And after which the plaintiff’s partner, notorious swindler Joe Talia, was later sentenced to a long jail term for a massive fraud.

Banned bookmaker Robbie Waterhouse and racehorse trainer wife Gai leaving Australian Jockey's Club hearing which reserved a decision on the lifetime ban imposed in 1984 for his involvement in Fine Cotton scam.

The podcast, released last month, is the second time the ABC has embarrassed itself by confusing heavy criminal activities with light entertainment in its oddly sycophantic coverage of the Waterhouses.

Despite an award-winning 4 Corners report (“Horses For Courses”) in 1986 that nailed Bill and Robbie Waterhouse as liars and cheats, or perhaps because of the fallout from it, the ABC has trod warily around the family.

In late 2010, it broadcast a piece of puffery masquerading as a factual documentary in the Family Confidential series.

This episode was about the Waterhouse “dynasty” and it stank. To be banal and shallow is one thing. But if this was not actually corrupt, it was breathtakingly lazy and stupid.

The subject was the family of the “Mr Big” of Australian bookmakers, Bill Waterhouse. Bill was up to his chins in arguably the three worst disgraces in Australian sport — the criminal nobbling of 1969 Melbourne Cup favourite Big Philou (defrauding the public of millions), and the Fine Cotton conspiracy.

Amazingly, hardly a hint of scandal made its way into the episode.

It was as gutless and toothless as the tame media that let the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Jimmy Saville get away with so much for so long.

No one wants to be first to say the unsayable. The likes of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Waterhouse are too big to take down — right up until someone does it.

Last Sunday, Channel 7 aired a brave documentary on the Fine Cotton ring-in. It took the sort of grit, tenacity and research that ABC management should demand from its once mighty but now rudderless flagship current affairs show, 4 Corners.

Seven’s Crime Investigation Australia’s special, Murder & Mayhem, was pieced together over 10 years, a legally fraught ordeal motivated by respect for truth.

Its makers don’t have the luxury of ABC budgets and in-house staff. But it ran powerful interviews with Bill Waterhouse’s estranged son, David, with Sydney’s former chief racing steward John Schreck, with former Waterhouse form analyst Arthur Harris and with one of the Fine Cotton “stooges”, Robert North, who served time with conman John Gillespie, puppet of the thinly-veiled Sydney mastermind calling the shots.

Former racehorse Fine Cotton. Picture: Hanson Jamie

Front page of the Sunday Press newspaper in 1984.

Tellingly, the documentary included Melbourne builder and businessman Robbie Sayers (brother of the late gangster Michael Sayers) who categorically rebuts retrospective lies spread by the Bill Waterhouse camp that Mick Sayers bankrolled the ring-in.

That Sayers was the Fine Cotton mastermind was never seriously suggested until after he was killed five months after the ring-in. Once dead, he made a wonderful scapegoat.

The Murder & Mayhem documentary won’t win gongs at Cannes but its makers (and the Seven network) showed a courage and commitment missing from ABC productions ruled by timid lawyers and mediocre managers cowed by wall-to-wall wokeness, perceived legal fears and an apparent reluctance to hurt the feelings of people that some ABC insiders might know socially.

The limp wristed Waterhouse Family Confidential episode might be an early example of what happens when the ABC, despite its charter to be impartial, dilutes its obligations by outsourcing programs to third party “content providers” whose loyalties lie in profit, not the public interest.

At the time, I wrote: “Perhaps the doco-makers had amnesia. Perhaps they arrived back from 30 years in Outer Mongolia with nothing but a camera and one name and address: Robbie Waterhouse’s. Or, more likely, they struck a deal with one side of the family that discouraged any contact with dissenting voices from the other side. Such as with David, Robbie’s younger brother. Or Martin, their first cousin.”

David and cousin Martin were mentioned in that show — but only in their absence, and in disparaging terms by people estranged from them. There was no serious effort to produce an even-handed overview.

“Having ostensibly set out to document a family at war, the filmmakers aired only one side: the one with most to gain from positive publicity.”

It was a tough critique — but not a word was repudiated. In fact, a red-faced ABC executive producer privately offered a stumbling apology, but that was no comfort to viewers who had been played for fools.

Taxpayers might hope the ABC wouldn’t repeat such a mistake. But this fresh podcast, which cost the price of a Rolls Royce, reeks of horse manure.

Former bookmaker Bill Waterhouse.

Trainer Hayden Haitana.

The eight-part series has taken a year to make. Its chief reporter contacted me in January last year, asking for help to find key witnesses to provide free and (I hoped) balanced content for the series.

This person seemed genuinely to want to know who to interview to get closer to the truth than some previous coverage, notably a trashy book which had further muddied already cloudy waters.

Sadly, the same producer glossed over, then later downplayed, the fact the ABC had bought the rights to the book that made a joke of the Fine Cotton debacle, peddling the same rank misinformation (about Michael Sayers’ supposed involvement) that had been peddled by the Waterhouse camp for decades.

Worse, the producer conceded, the ABC had contracted a co-author of the book to write dialogue for actors hired to do “funny” character voices. There’s no law against publishing trashy books — a lot of us hacks do — but the ABC shouldn’t be paying public money for junk journalism then try to justify the expense by passing it off as valid material.

The Fine Cotton Fiasco book is to investigative journalism what stubby drinking contests are to Test cricket. Yes, of course the ring-in was a fiasco, as we’ve all known within days of the race. But to say so all over again, across eight episodes 38 years later, is like revealing the Vietnam War wasn’t a great success.

Repetition certainly doesn’t make it funnier.

The real story lies behind the fiasco. The real story is who did what and when and why. The real story, which the ABC team should have delivered after a year, needed tough truths told, not trite trash rehashed.

Robert North in 1986.

The podcast narrator, a sometime comedian, does her best with a clunky script. The result is as if she’s trying to entertain adolescents, something between Playschool and improv comedy. It’s not her fault this is offensive to anyone who knows the truth behind the shambolic caper.

This is a failure of nerve and judgment at the ABC. After criticism, some of it justified, of previous current affairs stories and documentaries, ABC executives and lawyers decided it was better to downplay and undermine witnesses who’d put themselves on the line in the belief they were telling truths that mattered. Instead, their material was misused as something to make fun of.

For those witnesses, there was nothing in it except the sense they were setting the record straight. This was especially so for Robert North, who had been jailed after being conned into taking part in the rort but has since married and had a family.

North is one of the podcast “witness list” outraged by what they see as a cynical manoeuvre to misuse them to push the scenario that Michael Sayers was the ring-in mastermind.

North, Arthur Harris and form analyst Roger Crofts are so furious at the selective treatment of their evidence they have gathered sworn statements from people who played a part in the conspiracy — or know details hidden until now.

The most powerful statement is one North made last week. He has sworn a Statutory Declaration that conclusively identifies the “middle man” who relayed orders to the Brisbane ring-in crew (Gillespie, North, John Dixon and horse trainer Hayden Haitana) from the not-so-mysterious Sydney connection.

Unlike Michael Sayers, this middle man is still alive. He knows that North’s sworn statement has been lodged with the Sunday Herald Sun’s lawyers and that if legal proceedings ever arise, his name may eventually become public.

If that happens, other witnesses will be called, too, to give evidence on oath. Including a bookmaker and his wife who were once very close to Robbie Waterhouse but are no longer.