Karl Stefanovic has been looking for ways to hang on to his current $2.5m-a-year salary, and his status as Australia’s highest-paid TV star, once his current contract is up at the end of 2020. But at a time when the media world has changed dramatically, is such a huge pay cheque realistic any more?
Diary is reliably informed Stefanovic’s agent, Mark Morrissey, who also manages Chris “Thor” Hemsworth, had been innovative in his efforts to ensure his client’s pay packet holds up as close to $2.5m a year as possible. Stefanovic, after all, needs the dough after multiple cash drains: a costly divorce in the not-so-distant past, a new baby and a famously high-maintenance lifestyle.
Until last week, Diary understands the salary breakdown proposed by the Stefanovic camp was about $1.5m a year for hosting Today, plus the sweetener of an extra $1m a year or so to fill Ben Fordham’s vacated drive slot on 2GB.
But in the immortal words of Daryl Kerrigan from The Castle, it seems Stefanovic may be dreaming.
We’re told Morrissey’s pay-boosting efforts for his charge were bluntly rebuffed by Nine, which thinks Stefanovic has enough on his plate with his day job alone.
They may have a point: while Today is slowly improving, Nine thinks the show needs to have his undivided focus, given that the show’s finished third behind Sunrise and ABC News Breakfast for nine of the last 12 weeks, admittedly with the anomaly that News Breakfast runs on two channels.
So Diary hears Nine has made Stefanovic a counter offer, with no radio gig, that would see Stefanovic earn between $1.2m and $1.5m a year for hosting Today, with the upper end hit if he reaches performance targets.
We’re told Nine is comfortable with where their offer is at. It was made after Nine was irritated by yet another Karl circus a fortnight ago.
Photos mysteriously appeared in The Sunday Telegraph, featuring strategically placed shots of Stefanovic with his hip “new crew” on a luxury yacht. Gone were old buddies Richard Wilkins and Anthony Bell, replaced by Wentworth MP Dave Sharma and celebrity chef Guillaume Brahimi.
Yet again, Stefanovic had become the story, rather than covering it. For executives weary of the Karl circus, the new photos were just the latest public pratfall.
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Big changes for Hadley
Big changes are coming on all fronts for Sydney and Brisbane’s radio ratings boss Ray Hadley, involving work, wedding dates and even a new home, Diary can reveal. And, ironically, it is one of Hadley’s favourite talkback targets, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who will be crucial to their timing.
Hadley tells Diary he is about to become less Sydney-centric, and make the Gold Coast his second workplace. But that can’t happen until Palaszczuk reopens Queensland’s borders.
“When I can get into Queensland, (Nine radio boss) Tom Malone has asked me to broadcast regularly from there,” he says. “They’re building me a studio inside the Nine studios on the Gold Coast. I want to be there in time for the Queensland election in October so I can watch it closely.”
The 2GB and 4BC host plans to spend a week each month on the GC, where he has an apartment on Main Beach.
But Hadley’s workplace isn’t the only thing moving. Hadley also reveals to Diary further coronavirus-driven date changes to his marriage to his partner, Sophie Baird. November is now shaping as the most likely date for the pair’s nuptials, although September is still possible.
“At this stage, our marriage has been put back from June to September, then November, depending on the virus,” Hadley says.
And other changes for the $4m-a-year broadcaster are also imminent, including departing the acreage in Sydney’s northwest that he has owned for 26 years (and where his four kids were brought up). Since COVID, Hadley has been broadcasting in isolation from the property. But he’s now bought a new “town home” currently being built in nearby Bella Vista, just walking distance from his beloved Castle Hill Country Club. “Once it’s built early next year, bit-by-bit we’ll move from Dural to there,” he tells Diary.
“Dural has six bedrooms and is on six acres. It’s called downsizing! We’ll stay on the acreage until sometime in 2021 — then downsize.”
Until then, his fiancee and golf are top of his personal priorities. “If people are saying I’m happy it’s because I am,” he says. “Sophie is a wonderful person and very calm. We play golf together every Sunday and my handicap has this year got as low as nine.”
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Nine’s radio short-list
Two of Nine’s big radio mysteries have been solved, with Nine’s trophy poaching of Seven’s sports editor Jim Wilson to 2GB’s plum drive slot, and Russel Howcroft’s move to join Ross Stevenson on 3AW’s top-rating breakfast show.
But one mystery remains: who will fill 4BC’s Brisbane drive slot?
We’re told ex-PM and proud Brisbane boy Kevin Rudd is out because he’s “too left”. But Diary hears other ex-pollies are on the list. Former Newman government transport minister Scott Emerson and ex-federal multicultural affairs minister Gary Hardgrave are under consideration. Both are current contributors to Sky News.
Diary understands Emerson has already had talks with senior Nine radio management, and they have now compiled a short-list. Expect a decision in weeks.
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Aunty’s redundancy calculator
Redundancies seem to be the word of the moment for the entire media sector.
At the ABC, 250 job cuts are aimed at saving Aunty the $41m that its boss David Anderson needs to meet his budget, because of a funding freeze.
But Aunty’s generous redundancy framework will also cause some balance sheet pain of its own. Diary understands that the ABC’s redundancies will come under the current ABC enterprise agreement, which sees redundancy payouts of four weeks per year of service, capped at around 19 years. Staff were last week even sent a “redundancy calculator” to work out what it might be worth to them.
That means for some career ABC staffers offered redundancies, they will be entitled to 18 months of pay (77 weeks, to be exact) on the way out.
For a “lifer” on the ABC’s average salary of $87,000 a year, that would add up to a payout of about $129,000. Extend that across 250 staff, and you could be looking at an ABC redundancy bill of at least $30m.
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ABC pain-sharing
ABC divisions across the board will share in the pain of the organisation’s imminent cuts, although Diary is told one area spared will be regional newsrooms.
The word is that the increasing problems for the private sector in finding a sustainable business model in the bush means the ABC will maintain its numbers in regional areas.
The ABC’s news and current affairs division will bear a significant part of the ABC’s 250. It’s early days, but the latest word is that up to 60 staff could go in the area.
That will probably mean two outcomes: the need for more multiskilling among journalists across platforms, and potential cutbacks of some news services, with east coast newsrooms taking the brunt. Meanwhile, Diary is told extra cuts may also be on the cards at lifestyle website ABC Life.
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New Leak book to defy cancel culture
The Australian’s late cartoonist Bill Leak will be immortalised in a new book that won’t shy away from either his triumphs or controversies, Diary hears.
In the last fortnight, Fred Pawle, communications boss for Liberal Party think-tank the Menzies Research Centre, has finally won funding for the book, to be named Die Laughing, although not before some hurdles.
Pawle tells Diary it was rejected by a couple of big-name publishers, before another think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, stepped in to bankroll the project with a generous advance. We’re told other publishers may have been scared off because Leak never shied away from controversy.
Pawle will now leave his role at Menzies at month’s end to concentrate on finishing the “warts and all” book.
The timing is particularly pertinent, given last week’s sudden re-emergence of the “cancel culture” that famously plagued Leak’s last years.
Pawle, also an alumni of The Oz, says Die Laughing won’t be a hagiography and will explore all aspects of the life of Leak, a 12-time Archibald Prize finalist and nine-time Walkley Award winner.
“He was a raconteur who single-mindedly pursued the truth, whether it was in art, cartooning, politics, literature or his own troubled life,” Pawle says.
“He withstood criticism from both the left and the right, believing courage and truth were more important than popularity or consensus.”
The book will, of course, explore at great length the issue that dominated Leak’s last years: a complaint (later withdrawn) to the Human Rights Commission under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act about one of his cartoons, which sparked a heated national debate similar to the current one.
Pawle, not surprisingly, is a defender: “Social media pursued Bill with vitriol, accusing him of being a racist. But Bill was one of the least racist people I knew. His first wife was German, his second wife Thai. He judged people by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin or the status of their postcode. He was, like all great Australians, deeply egalitarian.”
The book will be published on March 10, 2021, to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the death of Leak, father of The Oz’s current cartoonist Johannes Leak. “It’s currently about one-third complete,” Pawle says. “I am hoping there will be a huge market for a book about an exemplary Australian.”
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Gone, but not in Oz
Gone with the Wind was the first movie victim of the Black Lives Matter movement when it was pulled down from HBO Max in the US last week. But the classic has avoided a similar fate down under.
Diary hears Foxtel’s Fox Classics channel has opted to air Gone with the Wind this Saturday in its original form, as part of a Bill Collins movie tribute, marking the first anniversary of his passing (the film was Collins’s favourite).
However, we’re told it will come with a caveat: a viewer warning at the movie’s start that it is “a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that, unfortunately, remain commonplace in sections of society … Scenes which depict attitudes of racism are not endorsed by Fox Classics.”
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Speers’ mea culpa
The ABC may have only just launched a “harm and offence” review of its entire programming schedule, but the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement is already very much being felt.
David Speers was on Sunday forced to confront the unusual situation of himself being at the centre of the story, after the show he hosts, Insiders, last week copped a lashing over having an entirely white panel on its previous show about the Black Lives Matter marches.
Diary hears the show copped heat both publicly and privately throughout the week. And despite having hosted for only a few months, it was Speers who, perhaps unfairly, had to take the on-air rap for 18 years of Insiders not featuring an indigenous “insider” on the show.
“Normally at this point in the program I run the ruler over the government or opposition: today, it’s a comment about our own program,” Speers said at the head of the show.
“We received plenty of valid criticism for failing to include an indigenous journalist on last week’s show, as we discussed the Black Lives Matter movement.
‘‘As a program we lacked an important perspective.
‘‘ Insiders does need to do a better job at bringing more diverse insights into the political debate, and it’s something we are committed to doing.”
He then opened the floor to ABC reporter Bridget Brennan, a fresh indigenous presence on the show, for a free kick.
Brennan said it was “important” to be honest: “It’s not good enough any more … (in) any week to have a panel of white people speaking about issues when there is very little lived experience of discrimination and racism on that panel.
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