A defiant Hadley has rubbished the criticisms: “I wasn’t bullying him at all,” he tells Diary. “It was just a tough interview that should be part of the job for any politician seeking to become PM. From his first mistakes in the first week, he got away with blue murder by disappearing whenever someone started to ask him hard questions in the press conferences. So I thought I’d ask the questions he’d been refusing to answer.”
Hadley – who has delivered some searing on-air assessments of Albanese’s performance throughout the campaign – has also revealed a bizarre fact: that it was not him, but Albo who requested the interview late on Anzac Day. Hadley tells Diary that after recovering from his initial shock, he agreed to the request, but reserved the right to ask the Labor leader whatever questions he liked.
“They rang me – I didn’t ring them – to ask for the interview,” Hadley says. “So given that, I did what I’m supposed to do as a broadcaster: I asked him the questions he had failed to answer in the campaign, particularly on temporary protection visas.”
Earlier in the campaign, the 2GB host had told his radio audience that it was a “waste of time” for him to try and score a chat with the Labor leader, because Albo was no longer interested in coming on the show of one of his loudest critics.
How wrong he was. During the memorably tense half-hour stoush, Hadley repeatedly interjected to attack the Labor leader’s stance on asylum-seeker boat turnbacks as “fanciful”. He also confronted Albo on everything from China’s latest security deal with the Solomon Islands to the Kimberley Kitching “mean girls” affair and climate change. He also noted that he thought Albo was a “good fella”, but he knew “a lot of good fellas who shouldn’t be the next Prime Minister”.
Hadley’s confrontational approach earned him a pasting on Twitter, where plenty of Labor supporters piped up to accuse him of bullying Albanese.
But the 2GB host says he cares “not one iota” about Twitter’s opinion. “If the Twittersphere who don’t listen to me think that was bullying and rude, they’d better listen to the last 21 years of my show,” he says. “When his office asked my producer John Redman, I said for Albo to come on and fasten his seatbelt. Put it this way, I made sure I did plenty of homework on Monday night. But no one seemed to offer an explanation on why he wanted to do it. I think he was worried others had been making all the running while he had Covid.”
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Revealed: ABC chief’s plea to leaders
With the prospects of a debate on the ABC featuring Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese dwindling by the day, the public broadcaster has decided to wheel out the big guns.
Diary has obtained a copy of a private two-page letter sent as an apparent last-ditch plea by ABC managing director David Anderson to the campaign offices of both Morrison and Albanese for an ABC debate.
The ABC chief’s rare intervention into editorial affairs, dated last Tuesday April 26 and tagged simply: “Correspondence from David Anderson, ABC Managing Director”, implored Morrison and Albanese that an 8pm face-off next Monday on the public broadcaster with David Speers as moderator was the one debate the campaign couldn’t do without.
“The ABC is the most trusted source of news and information and given its accessibility to Australians everywhere, is the most appropriate home for (a) debate between the two leaders,” Anderson wrote in the identical letters.
In an apparent attempt to create some urgency, the letter has also seen Anderson warn the two parties that “in the interest of transparency, the ABC intends to make this debate proposal public in coming days”.
Anderson proposes that Morrison and Albanese be seated “at a large circular table, with David Speers sitting between them”.
The Speers debate would be split into four categories: “the economy (employment, wages, climate policy and Budget management)”; “foreign policy and national security”; “service delivery (health; aged care, NDIS and education)”; and “governance, transparency and integrity”.
As an olive branch to Morrison and his lack of popularity with the progressive Twitter crowd, Anderson stressed that “no banner with tweets will be displayed during the broadcast”.
Anderson’s intervention came after a People’s Forum debate that screened on Sky News last month, and ahead of a second debate now agreed for next Sunday on Nine’s 60 Minutes featuring Sarah Abo as moderator with Chris Uhlmann, David Crowe and Deb Knight, as revealed by your columnist last week. But the absence of an ABC debate had been brought up by some senior Aunty types, including Radio National Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas.
Morrison, for his part, has so far only lobbied for debates on commercial television, but has remained conspicuously silent about agreeing to a debate on the ABC.
But after being questioned about debates by ABC News Breakfast’s Michael Rowland, Albanese went into bat for the ABC: “I do think the idea that the ABC would be excluded from any participation is rather extraordinary, and that is the suggestion being made by Scott Morrison. I’m not quite sure what he’s got against the ABC.”
Albanese’s support for the ABC went up a notch over the weekend, with Speers revealing that this Thursday (the very same night Seven had been proposing another national debate between the two leaders) the Labor leader would instead be appearing with him “in a one-on-one” on Q+A. Senior Seven sources said late on Sunday they were “dumbfounded” by the decision.
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Kmart slashes Lisa’s book price to $6
As Lisa Wilkinson’s book-flogging tour of Australia continues over the next week or so – with another two power business breakfasts in Sydney and Melbourne – she wouldn’t be thrilled that major retailers are slashing the price of her memoir to clear them.
Diary noted last week that Wilkinson belatedly started her tour last Tuesday – six months after the autobiography, It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This, was released.
The primary purpose of her tour was, of course, to breathe some new life into book sales. But as she made clear in pre-tour publicity on Instagram, she was also very keen to contradict a series of media stories late year that questioned her claims over a huge “gender pay gap” between Karl Stefanovic and herself at Nine.
Wilkinson remains upset at what she saw as a media pile-on aimed at tearing down key elements of the book.
But it appears she may already be facing an uphill battle to convince the reading public to be curious enough to fork out their hard-earned cash to see what she actually wrote.
Kmart has placed the paperback version of Wilkinson’s book – triumphantly billed as “the story of how a young girl from Campbelltown came to be such a force in Australian cultural life” – in its bargain bins. They have put the book on “clearance” for a paltry $6, a 75 per cent discount on the original price of $24.
The story is equally bleak at Big W, which has just heavily discounted the price of the more expensive hardback edition of her book. Big W is offering a very special “online only” price of $12, which is “73 per cent off” the recommended retail price for the hardback of $45.
And in recent days, book retailing giant Amazon has also matched Big W on the hardback, also offering it for $12, $33 off its RRP.
Wilkinson will be relieved that at least some major book retailers are holding the line on the book’s price. Dymocks is continuing to offer the hardcover at its full recommended price of $45, while Booktopia is offering a mere 20 per cent off at $36.
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Ten’s US masters throw cash at AFL
It has long been the bridesmaid of Australian commercial television. But the long-suffering Ten Network, now owned by international media giant Paramount, last week set about finally ditching its runner-up image once and for all by commencing an audacious, big money bid to snatch the rights to the AFL from Seven for the next five years.
Ten’s joint Australian bosses, Beverley McGarvey and Jarrod Villani, jetted out along with AFL chief Gillon McLachlan to Paramount’s Avenue of the Americas headquarters in New York to introduce McLachlan to Paramount’s global boss Bob Bakish ahead of a lunch meeting at 12.30pm on Thursday (New York time).
Diary has received word out of the high-powered summit that the message to McLachlan from the three media executives couldn’t have been clearer: that the perennial bridesmaid of Australian commercial free-to-air TV is willing to do “whatever it takes” to splash out the big bucks required to win the AFL rights. As one key insider colourfully put it last week: “Ten and Paramount are sitting at (New York dining institution) Harry’s Steakhouse with Gil McLachlan, pouring copious amounts of Napa Valley wine down his gullet to convince him that this time they are serious about the rights.”
But Ten will have to call on all the resources of its US parent if it wants to win the deal. The AFL is said to be looking for at least $500m a year, or $2.5bn over five years, as McLachlan looks to leave a massive financial legacy at the governing body before he departs at the end of the year.
The talk of that huge number hasn’t scared off Paramount, which we’re told has decided that Ten can never compete on level terms with Nine or Seven until it wins a big winter sport during the heart of the ratings year. Ten may be backed by the US megabucks of one of the world’s biggest media companies, but it currently doesn’t boast a single top-tier winter or summer sport.
The biggest Australian sporting events that Ten screens are single-day affairs: the Australian Grand Prix and the Melbourne Cup. It also has the local rights to soccer, but with the Socceroos floundering and A-League having its own ratings struggles, it’s little more than a niche sport now.
It is understood the Paramount executives were last week also giving McLachlan the hard sell on the ability of the conglomerate’s international streaming platform, Paramount Plus, to showcase the AFL to a global audience.
Diary hears McLachlan raced directly from last Monday’s traditional Anzac Day clash between Collingwood and Essendon at the MCG straight to Tullamarine airport to jet out to the US.
But McLachlan is keen to keep Paramount and others vying for the rights on their toes to ensure his last rights deal as AFL boss hits a record level. Paramount hasn’t been the only stop on Gil’s excellent American adventure, with the AFL boss also paying visits last week to Amazon and YouTube executives on the US west coast.
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‘Boofhead’: Palaszczuk’s chief spinner cops it
He’s the man best known as Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s chief media rottweiler. For most reporters, their main interaction with Shane Doherty is being yelled at with “LAST QUESTION!”, “NO MORE” and “GOT TO GO” among his greatest hits over years of mind-numbing press conferences by the Labor leader.
But for Doherty, the ex-Nine reporter who has ruled Palaszczuk’s media unit with an iron fist for most of her seven years in power, the tide may be turning.
For years, the Brisbane media pack kept their frustrations to themselves about Doherty’s undisputed title as king of the Palaszczuk press conference wind-up.
With federal politics taking centre stage, the Premier had quietly disappeared on a three-week holiday over Easter. And on her return last week, with integrity and hospital crises still burning, Doherty tried to ensure her comeback press conference was a carefully stage-managed affair, designed to talk up the benefits of the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.
After her three-week absence, however, the Brisbane media pack were hungry to move the press conference on from Palaszczuk’s Olympic-sized distraction to other pressing topics engulfing her government – leaving the Premier and Doherty unimpressed.
When Palaszczuk was asked of public service complaints about her government, she had a well-rehearsed answer: “I’m just dealing with the Olympics today.”
At that point, a mob of journalists started to shout over each other to pose other tough questions. Doherty then quickly aborted the press conference by shouting, at the top of his voice: “TIME TO GO. THAT’S IT.”
The walkout of Palaszczuk’s five-ringed Olympic circus didn’t go down well with the pack, with Nine’s Reece D’Alessandro tweeting: “The Games are ten years away, there’ll be plenty more integrity questions before then.”
But it was 4BC breakfast host Neil Breen who really turned up the heat by calling Doherty a disrespectful “boofhead”.
After playing a full tape of the antics of Palaszczuk’s spinner-in-chief, Breen sprayed: “He (Doherty) should hang his head in shame for being a boofhead.
“You work for the people of Queensland. How dare you be so disrespectful!
“We’re not going to cop the government hiding behind the bloody Olympics for the next 10 years!”
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Overton and Loxley trump Karl and Ally
Nine has finalised its line-up to go to air on the election night of May 21, with Sydney and Melbourne 6pm newsreaders Peter Overton and Alicia Loxley winning the nod to host the coverage.
Loxley will replace 2GB’s afternoons presenter and weekend A Current Affair host Deb Knight, who appeared with Overton on the 2019 coverage.
But it is in the support cast where the real fun could begin, with the man who lost the 2019 election to Scott Morrison, Bill Shorten, and one-time prime ministerial aspirant Julie Bishop the network’s star political guests.
Shorten, in particular, could have some interesting takes on the performance of his successor as Labor leader, Anthony Albanese.
There is also another note of intrigue from Diary’s Nine spies. We’re told that Today hosts Karl Stefanovic and Allison Langdon made a pitch to host the coverage, citing their near-daily interviews with politicians on the Today show as a selling point.
But the two newsreaders ultimately prevailed.
A Nine source would only say of the pitch: “We have an abundance of talent at the network who could have done a great job.”
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Making the news
‘You owe me two beers’: Nine journo’s secret text
Ben Roberts-Smith’s lawyers say new evidence shows that Nine reporter Nick McKenzie passed on to his lawyers a ‘blatant, privileged communication’ that had been sent to the former soldier by his legal team.
Judge slaps down misconduct claim by Roberts-Smith’s lawyer
A judge hearing the VC recipient’s bid to re-open his defamation appeal has slapped down a claim by his barrister that Nine reporter Nick McKenzie ‘threw his solicitors under a bus’.
Morning radio king Ray Hadley has defended himself against claims that he “bullied” Anthony Albanese during an explosive 27-minute interview last week while the Labor leader was still in Covid isolation.