Media Diary: ABC splurged $45,000 on David Anderson’s farewell as managing director
David Anderson’s farewell party must have been a doozy, given the final bill. New boss Hugh Marks may have shrugged off the expense when it was revealed in Senate estimates, but it has to be asked: what the hell was on the menu?
Former ABC managing director David Anderson’s farewell party at Aunty’s inner-Sydney headquarters earlier this year must have been a doozy, with the final bill blowing out to $45,000.
When the outrageous cost was revealed in a Senate estimates hearing last Tuesday, managing director Hugh Marks – Anderson’s successor – shrugged off the expense, mumbling something about the inclusion of fringe benefits tax in the final sum. Huh?
Here’s the bottom line: the ABC, a taxpayer-funded institution, spent $45k on a glorified piss-up to farewell an executive who was walking away from a $1m-a-year gig.
It sounds excessive, purely because it is.
We’re suitably angry that taxpayers had to foot the bill, but what we really want to know is … What The Hell Was On The Menu?
This was no lavish sit-down dinner – it was a canapes-and-champagne affair. But ABC chairman Kim Williams is well-known to have expensive tastes, so it’s fair to assume the booze wasn’t sourced from the specials bin at Dan Murphy’s, nor did the food originate from the freezer at Coles.
Despite our best efforts, Diary has been unable to discover exactly what was served to guests, and whether any entertainment – say, a one-off appearance by Taylor Swift or Elton John – contributed to the whopping total.
We even asked Ita Buttrose, the former chair of the ABC who spent five years in the trenches at Aunty alongside Anderson, what went down at the shindig but it turns out she wasn’t invited!
Buttrose told Diary she “wasn’t at all offended” by the apparent snub. “But after reading last week about how it cost $45,000, I thought to myself, ‘That sounds like a party worth going to’,” Ita wryly observed.
By way of contrast, when Buttrose bade farewell to the ABC in March 2024, it was with sandwiches and a few drinks in the media organisation’s fairly modest boardroom.
Nine’s 60 Minutes free-for-all: stars to scrap for airtime
An almighty battle of the blondes is set to erupt behind the scenes of Nine’s 60 Minutes as network interloper Samantha Armytage dukes it out with fellow heavy-hitters Tara Brown, Tracy Grimshaw and Amelia Adams for airtime and the show’s biggest yarns.
Diary can reveal Armytage has been quietly assured she will be given ample opportunity to front a series of stories on the weekly news and current affairs staple in the new year as Nine scrambles to work up exciting new projects to keep its star signing busy.
The walking headline has been vastly under-utilised by the station since being convinced to change channels and desert her home of more than two decades, Seven, last year, with her duties so-far limited to fronting senior citizen reality love contest The Golden Bachelor and a few fill-in spots presenting the Today show.
Network executives were last month forced to scrap secret plans to parachute her into a permanent co-hosting role alongside Karl Stefanovic on the perennially second-placed breakfast program after we went ahead and spoiled the surprise by telling everyone about the audacious plot. Whoops.
The pair had been seen as the key to finally usurping Seven’s rival, top-rating Sunrise show, with Natalie Barr and Matt Shirvington, after Stefanovic clocked up an unenviable two-decade run in the hot seat without claiming a single national ratings victory.
However, it’s understood the veteran showman managed to almost single-handedly save his incumbent co-host, Sarah Abo, by convincing network bosses to give them one last shot at toppling Sunrise in the fiercely competitive timeslot in 2026 (yeah, good luck with that).
While Armytage will still have the chance to host Today – and go up against her former Sunrise colleagues – this month when she presents the program alongside fellow fill-in Michael “Wippa” Wipfli while the regular team is off on holiday, the news veteran has already started turning her attention to longer-form projects at the broadcaster.
On Sunday night, she was entrusted with a plum role presenting Nine’s retrospective special 2025: The Year That Was, across 90 minutes in prime-time, with plans for her to become a regular feature in the timeslot once 60 Minutes returns to the airwaves next February.
Armytage’s latest career trajectory at Nine will put her on a collision course with a 60 Minutes line-up already inundated with big name blondes, and create something of a logistical nightmare for the show’s executive producer, Kirsty Thomson, who will have to contend with the competing demands of her increasingly unwieldy roster of high-profile reporters.
Fittingly, Thomson gave Brown, who is 60 Minutes’ longest-serving presenter and will celebrate her 25th anniversary with the show next year, the most hit-outs on the program this season, with 15 of her stories going to air.
Young gun Sixty star, Dimity Clancey, wasn’t far behind, and was the show’s second busiest reporter, with 14 outings, just ahead of Adams with 12 appearances and Christine Ahern, who managed to clock up an impressive six stories even though she was only on a short-term secondment from her regular role on Today, while the program’s solitary full-time male reporter, Whosamjig Hegarty, fronted just nine times.
Although that all seems relatively well-balanced, Thomson’s juggling act will become exceedingly more challenging in 2026.
Not only will Armytage be lobbed into the fray and vying for stories, Ahern has also been promised she can continue to file for 60 Minutes while Grimshaw – who presented just three pieces for the show this year – will also be looking to up her story count.
Talk about being spoiled for choice.
Many of those who have previously worked with Armytage expected her to make an immediate impact on the program as its stars jostle to take carriage of its biggest exclusives.
The former executive producer of Seven’s now defunct Sixty clone Sunday Night, Mark Llewellyn, said he was massively impressed by Armytage’s “X-factor” after commissioning her to present a profile on controversial Outback croc wrangler Matt Wright for his program back in the day and believed she would fast become be a standout star on 60 Minutes despite the overabundance of lookalike presenters now appearing on the show.
“There are plenty of bland identikit reporters play-acting at being charismatic and oh-so-important. They all look and sound the same and no one remembers them,” he told Diary.
“Samantha ain’t that. Think early days of 60 Minutes, and the individualistic spark those reporters brought to their stories and to the audience. You remembered them and the stories. It’s a rare quality.
“Sam comes from a solid reporting background, so she has the ‘bones’ – importantly, she has that X-factor that audiences love and the people she interviews instantly respond to. You can’t fake that.”
Ten’s top secret
There are fears Ten will be forced to revisit a dramatic plan to completely shut down its news and current affairs division – and outsource production of its news bulletins to a rival network – as it continues to haemorrhage vast amounts of viewers and money.
Diary can reveal Australian television’s forgotten child held secret talks with both Seven and Nine about taking on responsibility for producing the network’s news coverage a few years back.
As part of the proposal, Ten would have closed all of its nation-wide newsrooms and instead had every single one of its bulletins produced by one of its fellow free-to-air broadcasters.
Although some of Ten’s best-known names – such as Sandra Sully and Hugh Riminton – would have been retained under the plan and used to front key news bulletins in a bid to retain Ten’s “sense of ownership” of the programming, pretty much all of the stories presented in them would have been filed by reporters who were actually working for rival outlets.
Network sources said the outsource deal, which was expected to cost Ten as little as $15m a year, was based on a successful British model, which sees Independent Television News produce the news content for ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.
The discussions were ultimately scuppered in the middle of the coronavirus lockdown but insiders said there was speculation the idea could be revived as the ailing network again desperately tried to rein in costs.
Ten chief Beverley McGarvey has already taken the axe to Ten’s news and current affairs budget this year, cutting woke nightly gibberfest The Project, which was made by Rove McManus and Craig Campbell’s independent production house Roving Enterprises at great expense, in June and replaced it with a cut-price in-house production ironically named 10 News+.
The move, which saw Ten’s only star, Sarah Harris, and her former co-host Waleed Aly part ways with the network, is understood to have shaved millions off the channel’s bottom line as the cheap and cheerful successor was stretched to plaster over an hour of prime-time programming.
Ten said any suggestion it was again “considering outsourcing production of its news bulletins to another network is purely speculation (and) there are absolutely no plans to outsource the production of any of our news bulletins.”
And, honestly, we believe them. We really do.
Still, Ten insisted for months it was unfazed by the fact next to no one was tuning in for 10 News+ even as it performed a series of death-defying nosedives in the ratings and eventually jettisoned almost a third of its initial audience to finish the season with just 98,000 viewers on average across the country.
Indeed, the network steadfastly maintained it wasn’t intending to make any alterations to the format or line-up under hosts Denham Hitchcock and Amelia Brace, even after we revealed Ten had splashed out big bucks conducting research into what was – and, more importantly, wasn’t – working on the nightly news flop.
No way. Not happening.
Of course, that only lasted until October when Ten revealed it would cut the hour-long show in half from January … while the station’s news boss, Martin White, doggedly insisted winding it back to just 30 minutes a night actually demonstrated their commitment to “investing in the show”. Lol.
Fergo is ‘safe’
If you can’t say anything nice about anyone … you’ve probably just been on the phone to Diary.
And, hey, we’re here for it. Please keep calling.
Yet, every now and again we really do love to skerrick out some good news – ‘tis the season to be jolly after all.
So we’re pleased to reveal that everyone at Seven’s Media City headquarters in Sydney’s inner-south can calm down: the channel’s top harbour city news anchor, Mark Ferguson, isn’t going anywhere.
Even though some cheeky scallywags have been peddling the line that the longstanding prime-time presenter’s run is almost up at the station, our sources assure us that he is “100 per cent safe”.
Not only that, we hear “Fergo”, as he is affectionately known, actually has a brand, spanking new contract sitting in his inbox and that any suggestion Seven song and dance man Michael Usher was about to soft-shoe shuffle his way into the coveted role was just “plain wrong”.
Although Nine’s Sydney news anchor and the nicest man in television, Peter Overton, has managed to widen his lead against Seven to more than 54,000 on average at 6pm each night, Ferguson’s audience has still grown by 2.8 per cent year-on-year following the decision to pair him with hardworking former Sunday Night reporterAngela Cox.
So there you go.
Merry Christmas.
Double trouble
Sadly, there’s no good news for the troops toiling away in Seven’s Brisbane news bunker, with the Queensland capital proving a massive dilemma for the network when it comes to the critical battle for eyeballs at 6pm.
Nine’s fresh-faced nightly news double-act with Melissa Downes and Joel Dry has absolutely smashed Seven in the rating this year, with their prime-time bulletin recording an unprecedented 19.3 per cent year-on-year uptick under incoming news boss Brendan Hockings.
To suggest Seven has completely flatlined would be something of an understatement.
After all, Nine News has won all 200 weeknights in Brisbane so far this year and 271 out of 280 nights over all (at least, according to Diary’s maths).
What’s more, Nine claimed all 40 rating weeks for the first time in decades and now seem almost impregnable in the great southeast.
Although industry insiders blame much of the ratings bloodbath on Seven’s disastrous call to shutter its Gold Coast bulletin (hey, it’s only one of the fastest-growing audience and advertiser markets in the country) Nine’s decision to convince Dry to defect from Seven and team up with the ever-popular Downes on its newsdesk has proved to be a particularly shrewd move.
Downes had been comfortably beating her rivals at Seven by an average nightly margin of 31,600 across the first 10 weeks of the ratings year but since doubling up with Dry, the two have more than doubled that lead and widened the gap to 63,740 in the last 10 weeks of the ratings.
Can Seven solve the problem in the new year and stem the pain? Well, that’s the big question that’s surely keeping the network’s top news boss, Ray Kuka, up at night.
Yet another blow
If “bad choices make great stories”, Nine Radio shock jock Mark Levy has just about the most specular yarn in the country – unfortunately, it about himself.
The tone-deaf 2GB presenter was spotted sporting the adage on a discount T-shirt while hosting his top-rating morning show in at the network’s Pyrmont studios last week, and the threads could have hardly been more fitting.
We last week revealed the former Wide World of Sports radio host, who replaced rampaging Ray Hadley in the coveted timeslot last December, now owed more than $1.8m (and counting) following the collapse of his ill-fated Italian-Balkan fusion eatery south of Sydney.
Although Levy, also known for his near two-decade run co-hosting Nine Radio’s successful NRL Continuous Call team, has publicly promised creditors he will repay every last cent, the restaurant’s liquidator, Mitchell Ball, has warned them there was a “high risk” that might not happen.
Still, Ball did note that Levy was quietly refinancing his real estate property in order to cover his outstanding debts. Just one slight issue there: The Australian Business Network’s Kathleen Skene revealed Levy’s home in Sylvania, in Sydney’s south, already has two mortgages on it: one to Suncorp Bank and another to trucking boss Benjamine Yammine.
Diary regulars will recall Yammine is the bloke with historic ties to the Nomads outlaw motorcycle gang through his brother, business partner and former bikkie Norman Yammine, and who took Levy’s bare-knuckle boxing promoter mate Oliver Joseski to court over an unpaid six-figure loan … which the radio host had agreed to go guarantor for … and which has now been suddenly settled amid a stack of non-disclosure agreements (we know, we know, like a mid-naughties Facebook profile update … it’s complicated).
But it gets worse.
It turns out Yammine has a caveat on Levy’s home, while restaurant creditor Luke Ainscough, who launched the current NSW Supreme Court proceedings to have Levy’s eatery wrapped up and is owed more than $230,000 by the presenter’s business, also has one over the property too.
Now, if all that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the real rub.
Even if Levy’s home didn’t have two mortgages on it, the place would still only be worth just enough to cover his debts.
The shock jock bought the four-bedroom, three-bathroom spread, which boasts a state-of-the-art kitchen, a sunny in-ground pool area and, apparently, the ability to “fulfil all of your dreams” (at least according to real estate agents) for just shy of $1.4m six years ago; and online valuations reckon it would go for only about $1.83m if it were sold tomorrow – leaving Levy with very little change once he repaid all his creditors.
That’s if he owned the joint outright, which he doesn’t.
ABC gets shy
The idea was simple enough: stop inviting ABC news boss Justin Stevens to Senate estimates hearing and senators will eventually stop expecting to hear answers to all their pesky questions about specific ABC news stories.
Only problem? The fool-proof plan lasted all of one session in October, with managing director, Hugh Marks, repeatedly pleading ignorance when it came to queries about editorial matters, before flabbergasted senator Sarah Henderson insisted “this is exactly why Mr Stevens needs to be here”.
Little wonder we saw Stevens back in action at Senate estimates last week, though he didn’t always provide the support Marks may have wanted – particularly when Henderson asked about “the 35 interruptions by (host) Sarah Ferguson on the 7.30 program when she interviewed the leader of the opposition Susan Ley”.
“It was a very aggressive interview; I haven’t seen any other interview by Ms Ferguson that was so aggressive,” the senator, a Walkley Award-winning former ABC journalist, said before wanting to know: “Was there any counselling of Sarah Ferguson or any action taken after that interview?”
Marks assured Henderson there had been. “Mr Stevens, myself, Ms Ferguson and the team have done a review of 7.30 Report where the matter was discussed,” he said. “I think we all feel there were ways where that interview … could have been different.
“I don’t think anyone would shy away from that,” Marks added, only for Stevens to immediately shy away from that while insisting Ferguson had the ABC’s entire backing and “that specific interview has not been subject to any form of review in that sense”.
Instead, Stevens said that, on reflection, Ferguson should have simply been given more time to do the interview so she would have been less “rushed” and less inclined to interrupt her guest.
“Okay, but now you seem to be walking back from what you said earlier,” Henderson observed.
Perhaps Marks and Stevens should compare notes before they get rushed into responding at their next estimates hearing.
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