Remember when Schapelle Corby famously dodged the media pack using decoy cars when she returned to Australia from Bali in 2018?
Turns out Gladys Berejiklian used a getaway strategy right out of the Corby playbook, after her dramatic resignation 10 days ago.
Diary can reveal that, like Corby, Berejiklian used a decoy car to lead the media on a wild-goose chase after her seismic announcement, in a strategy masterminded by her former media director Sean Berry.
Rolling coverage on all major networks showed Berejiklian’s white Jeep heading over the Harbour Bridge from the NSW Government offices at 52 Martin Place.
But when the Jeep arrived in the driveway of the now ex-Premier’s home on Sydney’s lower north shore, no Berejiklian emerged, and the car soon headed back over the Bridge to the city.
It prompted the Daily Mail headline: “Bizarre moment Gladys Berejiklian parks in her driveway but refuses to get out of her car and flees after media crews surrounded her home.”
Er, not quite, Daily Mail. Turns out Gladys delayed her departure before heading off elsewhere from 52 Martin Place in a totally different car, having blissfully shaken off the hunting media pack.
Nicely played, Gladys. We’re told Berry, now footloose and fancy free, is available for other covert operations.
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Koch slams Cassidy’s ‘sense of superiority’
The departure of Gladys Berejiklian has divided not only the general public, but two of Australia’s best-known TV personalities: Sunrise host David Koch and former Insiders host Barrie Cassidy.
Cassidy took a sledgehammer to a Sunrise interview with Scott Morrison last Tuesday, asserting Koch had helped to “spread false claims” against the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. But Koch returned fire when Diary reached him at the weekend, claiming Cassidy seemed to have “a sense of superiority” in passing judgment on the interview.
The stoush began when Koch noted in his chat with Morrison members of the general public had been asking him, in relation to ICAC: “Who reviews them?” He went on to ask Morrison, in relation to Berejiklian’s resignation: “Does ICAC need to be reformed?”
Morrison responded in part that there were “millions of people who’ve seen what’s happened to Gladys Berejiklian who’ll understand it’s a pretty good call not to follow (the ICAC) model”.
Cassidy tweeted to lash the interview. “David Koch obviously has no idea how ICAC works but the PM knows how the media works. If you want to spread false claims about ICAC assuming guilt before innocence and not get picked up, call Sunrise.”
David Koch obviously has no idea how ICAC works but the PM knows how the media works. If you want to spread false claims about ICAC assuming guilt before innocence and not get picked up call Sunrise. https://t.co/FIWERpDlrQ
— Barrie Cassidy (@barriecassidy) October 5, 2021
But when we reached Koch, he wasn’t amused. “Look, I respect Barrie Cassidy and his role in the media. But what I don’t agree with is people in the media criticising the approach of other journalists who work on completely different shows and appeal to completely different audiences. It shows a sense of superiority that doesn’t understand the role of everyone else in the media.”
Koch said he brought up ICAC because it was a water cooler issue. “It was an issue that Australians were talking about, and it wasn’t an unreasonable question to put to the PM. It’s what the person in the street was talking about: ‘What is ICAC?’ and ‘Who’s it accountable to?’
“It was one of the issues of the week: a popular premier leaves at a critical time in dealing with the pandemic because of an inquiry that not many people know about. The point is I’m not a fan of people in the media criticising other parts of the media.”
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Pauline podcast backflip after secret Pyne texts
It’s amazing what a week of controversy and some advertiser pressure will do. Southern Cross Austereo now appears to be furiously back-pedalling from its headline-making decision to delete Jessica Rowe’s podcast interview with Pauline Hanson — after new claims the radio giant is now “happy” to air a similar chat with the One Nation leader.
Diary can reveal that days after the interview with Rowe vanished, former defence minister Christopher Pyne has made new representations on Austereo’s behalf for Hanson to appear again on Austereo’s LiSTNR podcasting network. As with the canned Rowe podcast, Pyne has told Hanson he now wants a “relaxed” on-air chat to show her human side on Pyne Time.
Text messages from Pyne — obtained by this column — have distanced Austereo from the podcast controversy, and put to bed any fears that a second Hanson podcast could be dumped by the radio giant.
In the texts, Pyne has told the Hanson camp it wasn’t the radio giant that got “cold feet” about the controversial podcast, but Rowe herself.
“My agent spoke to SCA (Southern Cross Austereo) last week,” one of Pyne’s texts reads. “They are happy to publish Pauline … on Pyne Time. It wasn’t them that got cold feet, it was Jess. She gave in to the social media Zeitgeist.”
Pyne told the Hanson camp that if she agreed to the podcast, he would air it as far away as possible from the Rowe controversy. “For your knowledge, Season III won’t go to air until January 2022, so the dust will have settled by then on the Jessica Rowe imbroglio,” he wrote in the texts.
Pyne’s comments come days after this column revealed the Hanson camp had fired off correspondence to SCA, in which it threatened to withdraw a One Nation ad campaign from the media company’s regional TV stations in NSW, Victoria and Queensland over the dropped podcast controversy.
Meanwhile, the fallout continues from the events that led up to the axing of the Rowe podcast.
One of the key reasons the podcast was ditched was criticism from Australian of the Year Grace Tame, who attacked it on Twitter by claiming Rowe had “valorised” Hanson: “This is how discrimination and hate is subtly enabled and normalised.”
Tame’s tweet triggered plenty of attacks on Hanson and Rowe. But the Australian of the Year said in an Instagram chat with Marque Lawyers managing partner Michael Bradley that it also prompted “a lot of hatred” for her, despite claiming she had behaved in “a really measured way” in her commentary on the Rowe interview.
“It wasn’t designed to incite hatred against anyone, not even Pauline Hanson. But naturally it was misinterpreted by a lot of people and I’ve copped a lot of hatred. I’ve been called the C-word more times than I can count … I was just baffled. I thought I was being really quite reasonable.”
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Morris: ‘I’m not going to the BBC’
It was the hot rumour circulating around the ABC’s Ultimo studios late last week: Aunty’s departing news director Gaven Morris was about to take over his equivalent role at the BBC in London.
Coincidentally, just as Morris leaves one of the Australian media’s toughest jobs, another even more challenging public broadcasting role is up for grabs — that of the BBC’s director of news, after Fran Unsworth announced last month she was departing the role early in 2022.
While the “Morris to BBC” move makes perfect theoretical sense, there’s just one minor problem: he doesn’t want the gig.
When Diary reached Morris on the weekend, he admitted he’d already received several calls about the BBC job. But he appears to view it as a case of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’.
“Both here and over there, people have been asking me: ‘Are you going to be the new BBC person?,’” he told us. “But while I’m a British citizen from my time with CNN in London, it’s not for me.
“For six years, I’ve led a newsroom with 1200 people and a $200m budget. But I don’t want to run $200m a year budgets anymore. I’ve made my contribution.”
Meanwhile, on Twitter, a platform Morris has made no secret of his disdain for, the speculation about his future is running even wilder. One bizarre Twitter rumour Diary noticed last week was the suggestion Morris was being preselected to replace Craig Kelly as the Liberal candidate for Hughes. “The Twitter questions are ‘Which Liberal Party seat is he running for?’ or ‘Is he returning to News Corp?’ — where, incidentally, I’ve never worked.” Tongue firmly planted in cheek, Morris quickly added: “So between the Liberal Party and News Corp, it sounds like I’m all set!”
For the record, Morris says he has lined nothing up yet, but needs a “change of pace” from a role that took in the tenures of three ABC managing directors.
“I turn 50 next year, and I need something to get the neurons in my brain firing again,” he said.
“I like launching things. I launched Al Jazeera English, I was on the launch team of cnn.com in Europe, and I launched the ABC news channel. I’m looking for the next wave that I can be a part of. That’s the thing that lights my fire.”
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Who will become the ABC’s news boss?
It’s been four days since he announced his departure – but already, the race is well and truly on for a replacement for Gaven Morris as ABC news director.
Diary hears there are two early internal frontrunners: Genevieve Hussey, the ABC’s Brisbane-based head of state coverage, and Gavin Fang, ABC News’s head of network and newsgathering.
Hussey has worked closely with Morris for several years, most recently leading the transformation of local ABC newsrooms in the digital era. But Fang is considered a live chance, particularly because of his leadership role on ABC gender diversity initiatives like its “50/50” program.
Fang has a low profile outside of the ABC, but insiders say Morris also wasn’t particularly well known when he took the role in 2015.
Outside that pair, we’re told Judith Whelan, the ABC’s most senior female programming executive as its head of regional and local, and John Lyons, Morris’s No.2 in news and current affairs, are very much in the race.
For some years, Whelan has been a live chance to take over as ABC news boss in the event Morris left, given her extensive editorial experience previously as editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, the boss of Radio National, and now as head of the ABC’s capital city radio stations.
Lyons won plaudits for doggedly following the Federal Police around the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters for eight hours during the infamous 2019 ABC raids – live-tweeting every minute of the AFP’s moves.
Meanwhile, don’t rule out external candidates, or ex-ABC types who have made it overseas. One wildcard attracting chatter is long-time former Lateline executive producer Peter Charley.
Charley has followed Morris’s route through Al Jazeera, where he’s currently the Washington-based executive producer of its investigative unit – and still has plenty of ties to Australia.
Given ABC chair Ita Buttrose’s decades of editorial leadership, Diary tips she will play a critical role in choosing Morris’s replacement.
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Andrew Olle Lecture called off
The Andrew Olle Lecture, one of the key events on the media calendar named in honour of the late ABC presenter, is off for a third year, Diary has learnt.
It had been pencilled in to proceed at Sydney’s Ivy Ballroom on November 13. But we’re told the ABC couldn’t commit to the event without a guaranteed minimum crowd of 400 people.
The Lecture has now been tentatively rescheduled for June 17, 2022 at the same venue.
But just to be safe, it won’t be opened for ticket bookings until after the summer holidays, when a new Olle lecturer will be announced.
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Hawke’s mistresses fess up for Bramston biog
Anyone thinking Troy Bramston’s upcoming biography of Bob Hawke will be a purely sympathetic portrayal of his prime ministerial career is in for a shock.
Diary hears the book, Bob Hawke: Demons and Destiny, will go big on his “demons”.
There will still, of course, be plenty of pages on Hawke’s achievements in power, through his last interviews and newly-uncovered archival documents.
But the salacious news is a swag of Hawke’s lovers and ex-Labor colleagues have all spoken candidly for the book, about his infamous affairs and drinking. There will even be a rare admission from Hawke himself about the toll his behaviour took on his wife of 38 years, Hazel Hawke.
Separately, there’ll be interviews with second wife Blanche d’Alpuget, son Steve Hawke and daughter Sue Pieters-Hawke.
One surprise is an unexpectedly positive take by Hawke on Paul Keating, the man who seized his job through a party-room coup.
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Seven to unveil new Rules show
There’s headline news in Seven’s announcement of its 2022 program line-up this week: its Rules series of shows (that have included My Kitchen Rules and House Rules) will be back.
Diary hears a new renovation show, called Apartment Rules, will take on Nine’s The Block. And My Kitchen Rules, canned after Pete Evans’s final year in 2020, is set to return with new judges. But will Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan be part of it?
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Hadley’s ex-boss: ‘You’re not a talkback host’
In 1981, a skinny 26-year old ex-Bulli greyhounds caller named Raymond Hadley made his shaky first radio broadcast as a traffic reporter with 2UE’s then-breakfast host Gary O’Callaghan.
Last Thursday, exactly 40 years later, the same Hadley reached a new level of dominance in the Sydney morning radio market on 2GB by bursting through the 20 per cent ratings mark – a record 7.4 per cent ahead of his nearest competition.
In between those two milestones, it hasn’t been a saloon passage. “After my first traffic report, I did whatever 2UE asked me to do. I’d go out to Sydney airport at 5am and put the 2UE-branded mic under the chin of some visiting celebrity, just so we’d get some free publicity on the TV news,” Hadley tells Diary. “I was the station shitkicker.”
Eventually, Hadley got a gig calling the Sydney races with Des Hoysted and later Johnny Tapp, a move that led on to his career as 2UE’s rugby league caller.
But when he asked to make the switch from sports calling to talkback radio at 2UE in 2000, a very well-known ex-radio executive gave Hadley a brutal assessment: “I regard you as a competent sports commentator – but not a talkback host.” A year later, Hadley defected to 2GB to host its morning show – and to prove a point to that radio executive. The rest, as they say, is history.
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