There’s been claim and counterclaim in the media in recent weeks about the alleged “gender pay gap” between Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson that led to Wilkinson’s acrimonious departure from the Today show in 2017. When Hamish Macdonald asked Wilkinson on The Project a couple of weeks back about the size of the pay gap between Stefanovic and herself at Nine, she didn’t mince words: “Doesn’t get much bigger … I was very expendable.”
But privately, the Wilkinson camp has also frequently been talking up the impressive pay deal she managed to negotiate when she defected to The Project – which was said to dwarf the package of Carrie Bickmore, Waleed Aly, et al, and rumoured to be in the vicinity of $2m a year.
So as Wilkinson’s memoir is released this week, how would her co-hosts on the Ten panel show feel about that particular pay gap?
Interestingly, comedian Dave Hughes broached that very subject three years ago in his opening monologue of the 2018 Logies.
Addressing Wilkinson in the audience directly, Hughes riffed: “You left for pay parity. I know you weren’t getting pay parity, were you Lisa? No. And you’re not getting pay parity at The Project either. Now you’re earning double!”
He ended the joke: “Don’t blame me for that joke. Blame it on Carrie and Waleed!”
The awkward laughter after the gag, while Wilkinson was seated at the same table as some of her co-hosts at The Project, may have pointed to a deeper tension over the new arrival’s pay and status on the show.
Insiders say Bickmore was previously seen as the one true female star of The Project, and the installation of Wilkinson – amid all the talk of her lucrative pay – muddied the waters on her true status at the show. So it’s probably little wonder Hughes’ gag created such awkwardness.
Meanwhile, Wilkinson’s co-host Hamish Macdonald was a no-show on The Project on Friday, on the day of Gladys Berejiklian’s explosive evidence to ICAC.
But instead of turning to Ten political editor Peter van Onselen, Wilkinson’s previous co-host on the show – who would no doubt have had strong views on the day’s events – as stand-in, The Project instead installed network’s resident vet Chris Brown.
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ABC executive bonus bonanza worth ‘30 Cartiers’
Christine Holgate famously lost her job as CEO of Australia Post last year for rewarding four of her executives with $5000 watches as a thankyou for landing a lucrative contract.
But in 2021, that sort of reward program is chicken feed at the ABC. Diary has learnt one lucky executive at Aunty received a bonus that knocks Holgate’s paltry Cartier-based rewards out of the park.
Tucked away in the fine print of the ABC’s mammoth 250-page annual report, way back in the “appendices”, is a smoking gun that has insiders at the national broadcaster talking. The disclosure shows one lucky executive received $144,000 – a remarkable 30 or so Cartier watches – as a bonus for the financial year just passed.
What makes the payment stand out even more is that the mystery executive was on a base salary of $198,000 a year – but nearly doubled their total package to just under $360,000 once the huge bonus was taken into account.
News of the bonus comes little more than a year after the ABC announced an executive pay austerity program that banned such sweeteners in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. ABC managing director David Anderson in May last year temporarily outlawed bonuses, apparently to demonstrate to the federal government Aunty was pulling its weight with belt-tightening during the uncertain first months of the pandemic.
Apart from cutting his own pay by five per cent for six months, Anderson also announced in an all-staff email it was “not appropriate in the current environment to pay bonuses to senior executives or any salary at-risk payments this financial year”.
As a result, not a single member of Anderson’s senior executive team received a bonus for the 2019-20 financial year.
But a year later, there’s happy news for ABC executives: the bonuses are back!
We may still be in a pandemic, but it turns out the ABC’s much-trumpeted bonus austerity plan lasted exactly one year. While Anderson’s own $1.1m a year package doesn’t include any one-off sweetener, plenty of his senior colleagues are back in clover when it comes to bonuses. The ABC’s departing news director, Gaven Morris, received $80,750 in bonuses for 2020-21, leaving him in a solid second place across the organisation.
Other members of the ABC executive, including director of regional and local Judith Whelan ($43,180), chief financial officer Melanie Kleyn ($34,425) and television boss Michael Carrington ($19,450) all bounced back from their bonus gap year in 2020.
The ABC annual report gives some clue into why the bonus tap was turned back on again, saying some “highly paid staff were eligible to receive an at-risk payment for the achievement of performance targets, (and) some were eligible to be paid a performance bonus”.
But when it comes to bonuses, there was only one question being asked last week among senior ABC staff: who is the mystery executive who landed the cool $144,000 windfall?
The smart money inside Aunty is on it being a senior executive from ABC Commercial — the division which sells ABC content both in Australia and around the world – who landed the big windfall, after pulling off some lucrative sales for the public broadcaster. Nice work if you can get it.
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Leunig takes a fresh shot at The Age
Cartoonist Michael Leunig isn’t taking a backward step with The Age after this column revealed last week he had been axed from the editorial page.
In the wake of his unhappy week, Leunig, the Age’s best-known editorial cartoonist, threw an amusing jab at the paper in its own pages — as part of his remaining gig in the arts section Saturday Spectrum.
His latest cartoon featured a pointed line missed by no one: “Don’t let the mastheads grind you down”.
To its credit, The Age still published that cartoon. But the cartoonist appears to still be feeling a bit ‘ground down’ after his masthead’s cryptic announcement in its pages two weeks ago that it was “trialling new cartoonists” on the Monday editorial page.
Leunig was removed after invoking the famous Tiananmen Square image of “Tank Man” facing off with the Chinese troops in 1989, as an alleged metaphor for vaccination mandates in Victoria.
But Age editor Gay Alcorn told us that the cartoon was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back in relation to her decision on Leunig’s future on the editorial page, after she had removed multiple cartoons by him this year. Alcorn said that in nearly all cases they were removed because they expressed “an anti-vaccination sentiment”.
However, when Diary reached Leunig, he disputed that claim.
“I have no desire to discourage people from getting vaccinated against Covid-19,” he said.
“But equally, I don’t believe in bullying or coercing people into getting vaccinated either. My stance is about vaccine mandates, not vaccination itself.”
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Tensions between Liz Hayes’ two Nine shows
It started as a segment on Nine’s flagship current affairs show 60 Minutes about the disappearance of Flight MH370. But Diary hears rumblings the Monday night true crime show Under Investigation now wants to assert its full independence from the 60 Minutes empire amid internal tensions between the two Nine shows.
The big question around Nine is what implications this will have for one of the network’s biggest stars, Liz Hayes, who is both host of Under Investigation and the doyenne of 60 Minutes.
Up until now, Under Investigation – which uses a panel of experts to investigate high-profile crimes — has remained part of the 60 Minutes family. Its supervising producer Gareth Harvey has been reporting into Kirsty Thomson, the executive producer of the Nine flagship current affairs show.
But change is coming. After a successful 2021 for Under Investigation, we’re told Harvey – who has had some personal tensions with Thomson – now has already developed grand designs to secede from 60 Minutes rule. Some “full and frank” talks have already taken place between the shows.
Now we’re told Harvey’s independence push against the program he once played a key role in producing has been at least partly successful.
Harvey will be installed as Under Investigation’s executive producer, with only what has been termed as a “dotted line” to 60 Minutes during a 20-episode season of the true crime show in 2022.
Interestingly, Harvey’s LinkedIn page brands him as the “creator” of Under Investigation.
But what does all this mean for Hayes, a 60 Minutes institution for 25 years? While she has so far remained on the famous 60 Minutes clock at the start of each instalment, there have been few stories from her on the show in 2021. So will she exclusively be an Under Investigation presenter from now on?
A Nine spokesman tells Diary: “The idea of anyone being exclusive to any show is an old-fashioned concept. Everything at Nine is very collaborative. Liz is very much valued across all of Nine, including 60 Minutes.”
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Absent Cumani’s $200K for Cup carnival
Three years ago, Ten poached the TV rights to the Melbourne Cup off Seven. A few months later, it also paid big bucks to poach one of the faces of Seven’s Cup coverage, racing royalty Francesca Cumani.
But Diary hears Ten isn’t quite getting the value it might have hoped for out of the reported $1m it outlaid at the time, or $200,000 a year over five years, to poach Cumani. For the second consecutive year, Cumani is spending the Melbourne Cup 17,000km away in London, because our borders haven’t opened up in time for her to come to Australia.
And that means on Cup Day, viewers will see a prerecorded message from Cumani, although we’re assured she will also appear live via satellite in the wee hours of the morning (UK time) for big chunks of Ten’s coverage of the great race.
Cumani was scheduled to appear for all four days of the Melbourne Cup carnival, but this year her 2021 commentary commitment has been reduced to Derby Day and Cup Day, with no appearance on either Oaks Day on Thursday or Mackinnon Stakes Day on Saturday.
Happily for Cumani, her contract with Ten is said to be watertight. That means it looks like she’ll still receive about $200,000 for two days’ work in Ten’s racing coverage — or $100,000 a day each for her Derby and Cup Day appearances. Handy pocket money right there.
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Ita’s captain’s pick for Advisory Board
Perennial ABC board and executive candidate Anita Jacoby has just achieved the next best thing: winning the role of chair the ABC Advisory Council, which advises the board and managing director on program matters from a community perspective.
Jacoby has a long history with the ABC which began way back in 2003 with her headline job as executive producer of Andrew Denton’s talk show Enough Rope. With Denton, for several years she co-managed Zapruder’s Other Films, a production house which has made ABC shows such as The Gruen Transfer and Hungry Beast. She will take over from ex-Australia Post and News Corp executive Nicole Sheffield, who has moved on to a new high-powered role heading up data and digital development at Wesfarmers.
Jacoby’s hiring is part of a push by ABC chair Ita Buttrose for more media experience in key ABC roles. Already that experience at Aunty was beefed up earlier this year with the appointment of former Foxtel boss Peter Tonagh to the ABC board. Jacoby was a candidate in that process as well, but was pipped.
Diary hears Buttrose and Jacoby have been close for some years. Buttrose said at the weekend Jacoby had a “demonstrated understanding and application of the ABC’s core values”.
Meanwhile, Jacoby sees the new role as a chance to “enhance the ABC’s essential role and future impact in the community”. Jacoby’s new gig has an added bonus: avoiding the intense public scrutiny that goes with being on the ABC board itself.
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Niggle between Nine and NRL over $10m
A deal between the NRL and Nine for rugby league’s free-to-air TV rights looked to have been all but done in Racing NSW’s Directors Room at The Everest a fortnight ago.
But a bit of niggle between the two parties has emerged – over $10m a year.
We’re told Nine boss Mike Sneesby wants to pay $110m a year, or $550m in total, for the NRL rights from 2023 to 2027 inclusive. But NRL chair Peter V’landys and his CEO Andrew Abdo don’t want to let them go for less than $120m a year, or $600m over five years.
Diary hears Sneesby and Abdo met in person 10 days ago, but no final resolution was reached. Watch this space.
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3AW’s Mitchell loses his ‘eyes and ears’
Daniel Andrews, rejoice: your radio nemesis, Neil Mitchell, is about to lose right-hand woman, and executive producer of his top-rating 3AW Melbourne morning radio show, Heidi Murphy.
Diary has learnt Murphy – regarded as the 3AW morning king’s eyes and ears in Melbourne — is finally taking the plunge from a primarily behind the scenes role to becoming on-air talent herself.
Murphy told management she needed a new challenge to being the ying to Mitchell’s yang. As a result, she’ll now have a dual on-air role evenly divided between Nine and 3AW.
At Nine, Murphy will join the newsroom as a reporter for the Melbourne 6pm news. Meanwhile, at 3AW, she will work purely on-air – as the permanent stand-in for the station’s drive host Tom Elliott, as well as continuing to host 3AW’s 10-till-midday program on Sunday.
Luckily for Mitchell, he has a ready-made replacement in Alyssa Allen, who since 2019 has been the Melbourne chief of staff for Seven news.
When we reached Mitchell at the weekend, he was effusive in his praise for the departing Murphy: “She’s done a great job with me, and I think she’ll now make the next step as an on-air talent.”
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