Seven West Media grapples with underpayment scandal

Well, it looks like we can reset the old “days since embarrassing screw-up at Seven West Media” dial back to zero. Just when its torrid 2024 began disappearing in the rearview mirror, Seven has been quietly working through a staff underpayments controversy.

One staff member told us the company had quietly organised Zoom meetings with affected journalists, sometimes trying to spin the fact as “good news” that it had discovered some staff were owed upwards of $25,000.

Okaaay.

Seven West Media have underpaid staff by as much as $25,000.Credit: Bloomberg News

We know that many TV viewers think free-to-air TV exists in a time warp but, really Seven, underpayment dramas are so five years ago.

Not that anyone is in a position to cast the first stone: the ABC paid staff $12 million and Nine (publisher of this column) in 2022 dealt with underpayments to staff over a six-year period.

In not paying its staff what they are due Seven joins other good corporate citizens including, er, Woolworths and, er, Qantas.

As for how much it does owe the 30-odd staff affected, the network wouldn’t say.

“Through regular payroll checking processes, we identified a small number of journalists who had incorrect classifications for their roles input into our payroll system,” the network said in a statement.

“As soon as we became aware, we notified impacted employees and payments are expected to be made to them by the end of the month. The classifications have been corrected, and we have apologised to those impacted.”

So much for Seven West Media boss Jeff Howard promising in these pages to institute a “clean slate” after “a few bad apples” tarred the company in the wake of a string of executive departures after a series of well-publicised incidents that engulfed Seven News.

Maintain your vigilance, Jeff, these apples don’t look too good.

Palmer army

Who says the federal election campaign was boring? (Us, many times, to whomever would listen).

But while the major party leaders continue with their tradie cosplay, real fun is happening with mining magnate and frequent newspaper advertiser Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots, which continues the billionaire’s tried-and-tested preselection tactic of picking weird units.

Palmer is headed back to a now largely empty Parliament House to reveal his how-to-vote cards on Thursday. Stop the presses.

Meanwhile, a few familiar names have popped up on his party’s ballot. In NSW, the senate ticket is being led by Silvana Nile, the second wife of former veteran state MP and Christian soldier Fred Nile.

She’s there to fight for the real issues animating Australians.

“While Labor and the Liberals are for THEY/THEM, we are for YOU,” Nile said in her candidate statement, sounding decidedly more Trumpian than Trumpet to our ears.

Over in South Australia, the Palmies have former Family First Senator Bob Day on the upper house ticket. Day was elected in 2013, thanks to the preference whispering of microparty magician Glenn Druery who is now chief of staff to Labor defector Fatima Payman. His time in Canberra came to an end in 2017, when the High Court found the leasing arrangements for his electorate office breached Section 44 of the Constitution.

But Bob is only number two on the ticket, behind Nicole Smeltz, a former real estate agent, flight attendant, and wife of A-League star Shane Smeltz. She’s been with Palmer’s operation for years.

No such firepower in the great state of Victoria, where the lead candidate is one James Unkles, who describes himself as “A military lawyer. Trying to overturn the convictions of ‘Breaker’ Morant.”

Thank you for your service James, but we feel the Breaker Morant ship well and truly sailed. Unkles also reveals in his social media bio that he “enjoy chillies and spicy food, curries, playing drums / vocals” pointing to the fact that Team Palmer is a considerably broad church indeed.

Pokie Scamps

We’re old enough to remember when Sophie Scamps, teal independent MP for Mackellar, called poker machines “a scourge on our society”.

It was January 2023, right around the time then-premier Dom Perrottet was seriously thinking of taking a sledgehammer to that particular scourge on our great state. Scamps too was doing her bit. A day earlier, she’d divested from the Waratah Hotel Group Trust, which owns a bunch of pokie pubs.

Anyway, since then, despite campaigning hard for a crackdown on gambling advertising, Scamps has changed her tune a little, at least as far as pokie dens are concerned.

The teal has been drawing big crowds at a series of events held at the Dee Why RSL, which last year took home a cool $43 million in pokie revenue. That included a recent event with Warringah MP and OG teal Zali Steggall and former Liberal leader turned Climate 200 advisory council member John Hewson.

But we hear Scamps hasn’t exactly had a Damascene conversion on pokies, but has instead focused her attention on campaigning for a ban on gambling advertising, shelved until after the election by a Labor government too toothless to fight the combined lobbying muscle of the major sporting codes and big betting.

As for the choice of Dee Why RSL, it’s apparently one of the few venues in the northern beaches big enough to hold the crowds Scamps is drawing, with the Hewson and Steggall event over-subscribed within days. Looks like someone, somewhere, is excited about the election after all.

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