How bad is James Packer’s Hangover II?

NICOLAS Cage only did it once — James Packer has now done it twice, albeit in neither case quite as terminally, writes Terry McCrann.

James Packer has been forced to fundamentally reassess the risks in China.

NICOLAS Cage only did it once — James Packer has now done it twice, albeit in neither case quite as terminally.

On a broader level, let’s hope history is not in the process of repeating itself: the last time Packer left Las Vegas was after the world had plunged over the GFC cliff. At least this time, it’s not going to cost him north of $2 billion, if indeed it costs him at all.

The two big things to be said about what is the “crowning shock” in Packer’s entrepreneurial career is that it impressively faces reality and is at the same time extremely humiliating.

After the death of his father Kerry, Packer not only moved to completely exit both the Nine Network and media more broadly — which had not only been the “Packer business” of not just father Kerry, but grandfather Sir Frank and indeed great-grandfather RC.

But he also got his exit timing exactly spectacularly right.

He sold Nine at a $5.5 billion valuation when barely a few years later it was struggling to even reach the $1 billion of Bond, Alan not James, fame some 30 years earlier.

There were good reasons he poured the proceeds into building a dominant ­Australian gaming business as the foundation of setting out to “Crownise” the world just as John Elliott had tried to “Fosterise” it, also more than 30 years earlier.

But there was also an ­unmistakable Freudian flavour in the way Kerry had also poured the profits from media into gaming — albeit, from the other side of the table.

The core validation of everything Packer was seeking to do on the global stage was the new “rivers of gold” that were flooding out not from 20th century media classified advertising but in the 21st century millions of retail and high-roller Chinese punters.

Yes, the proximate cause of Packer’s shock abandonment of a global growth strategy might be those arrests in China, but he is really working off a far more fundamental and pervasive reassessment of China, its drivers and its risks.

The move does leave a huge and awkward query. The one big play he has left might be in Australia but it is built entirely on those Chinese “rivers of gold” — the $2 billion being poured into Barangaroo.

Originally published as How bad is James Packer’s Hangover II?