There were some big resignations in Sydney on Friday, not only in politics — but in the media as well.
The shock departures of Wendy Harmer and Robbie Buck from the plum ABC Radio Sydney breakfast came just weeks after they finished second only to Ben Fordham in the Sydney ratings, after recording their highest-ever share of 14 per cent.
But contrary to that other high-profile Sydney resignation on Friday, there’ll be no ICAC investigation – although we’re told the pair had been contemplating the move for more than a year.
Still, plenty of intrigue remains. Diary’s first juicy piece of intel is quirky ABC afternoons host James Valentine is a warm favourite to take over the plum gig.
Our mail is even before last week, Valentine had already held talks with senior ABC radio executives, and is willing to brave 3.30am wake-up calls to make the switch if the job is offered. Diary is told the ABC’s thinking is Valentine would bring a “Clive Robertson-like” vibe back to Sydney breakfast radio.
Others in the mix include respected ABC radio fill-in host Josh Szeps and weekend breakfast host Simon Marnie. Meanwhile, ex-Q+A host Hamish Macdonald would have been in the mix but for his much-trumpeted defection to Ten’s The Project.
Another big revelation is the departure of Harmer and Buck will be the trigger for a major overhaul of how ABC Radio in Sydney will sound in 2022.
Previously, Harmer and Buck stewarded ABC Radio Sydney through most of the morning, from 6am to 10am. But Diary has learnt the station is planning to split the slot into dedicated breakfast and morning programming.
One outcome under consideration is for the breakfast slot to run from 5.30-8am, followed by the AM program, and then a morning show that runs from 8.30-11am. Under that scenario, the morning show would be likely to be hosted by a high-profile ABC woman.
Those in contention include Cassie McCullagh, already the host of ABC Radio’s daily 10am show Focus, ABC Radio Sydney evenings presenter Sarah Macdonald and ABC Radio Weekend Nightlife host Indira Naidoo.
But don’t rule out a couple of other news-focused ABC women with plenty of radio pedigree: RN Breakfast host Fran Kelly and The Drum’s Ellen Fanning.
ABC Radio Melbourne adopted a similar combination this year of a lighthearted male breakfast host (Sammy J) and a strongly news-focused female mornings host (Virginia Trioli), whose jump in the latest radio ratings was noticed in Sydney.
Expect announcements as early as this week, as the ABC looks to halt the rumour mill.
Wilkinson fears Karl over Today tell-all
It may be four years since Lisa Wilkinson ended her on-air partnership with Karl Stefanovic to join Ten’s The Project. But it is now clear Stefanovic is once more very much in Wilkinson’s thoughts.
Diary is reliably told Wilkinson has been anxiously seeking out close friends and ex-colleagues about her portrayal of Stefanovic in her upcoming autobiography, It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This.
The keenly-awaited memoir is due out later this month, but we’re told Wilkinson was still agonising over the manuscript until well into August – largely, it seems, because of the delicacy of some of her revelations about Stefanovic.
Apart from fact-checking with multiple sources the smallest details of what she’s written about Stefanovic, Wilkinson has confided to friends she is concerned about how her former Today co-host views the memoir. Her worry, we’re told, is Karl – with his considerable media platform – may not love how he is depicted.
As one confidant puts it: “Lisa knows that Karl is a big part of the story and that he will be a drawcard for the book. But she has also agonised over how he is portrayed, because he’s a complex character to get down in writing.”
No dispute there. Wilkinson’s wicked dilemma is most people buying the book will want a warts-and-all depiction of her relationship with Stefanovic, leading up to and after her acrimonious parting from Nine and Today in 2017.
But that’s a touchy subject. Front-page coverage at the time pointed to a gender pay gap between Stefanovic and Wilkinson as a direct motivation for her departure.
Wilkinson has told confidants writing the book has stressed her, and she’s now also concerned the inevitable focus of media columns (like this one) will be on what she thinks of Stefanovic. Wilkinson has previously confirmed the pair haven’t kept in touch since their on-air parting in 2017.
But as she has privately pointed out to friends, her time working with him on-air only occupies about a quarter of the book, with most of the weighty tome dealing with her pre-Karl life.
Wilkinson has noted privately (and correctly) she had a big career well before joining Today in 2007, firstly at Australian Consolidated Press, where she became the youngest editor of Dolly, and later the editor of Cleo.
Her memoir is understood to feature colourful anecdotes about her boss at the time, media mogul Kerry Packer.
The book is set to go on to discuss her TV career at length, including her time at Foxtel and Ten’s Beauty and the Beast, and her graduation to hosting roles at Seven (which ultimately included becoming host of Weekend Sunrise in 2005), before her big break at Nine’s Today show in 2007.
There will also be, we’re told, anecdotes about her meeting of minds with future husband Peter FitzSimons, from their first encounter in Nine’s make-up department in the early 1990s to later matchmaking by Liz Hayes.
Wilkinson is hoping her considerable pre-Nine career gets the run it deserves in the media.
But unluckily for The Project host, while the early mail is the book will fly off shelves, colourful anecdotes about her formidable time in magazines will have stiff competition from her take on more recent headline-grabbing events.
Those lining up on October 27 to part with their hard-earned cash (including, we’re told, some very interested past and present Nine executives!) will have Wilkinson’s salacious take on two key issues at the top of their list: the circumstances of her departure to Ten in 2017, and the soap opera that is her up-and-down relationship with Stefanovic.
Lisa’s last shot at departing NSW Premier
Political opponents such as Dan Andrews, Annastacia Palaszczuk and even Tanya Plibersek offered bouquets for Gladys Berejiklian on her way out of the NSW top job on Friday.
Not so Berejiklian’s chief media adversary Lisa Wilkinson. Through Ten’s The Project, Wilkinson has been perhaps the media’s most vocal critic of Berejiklian ever since the Delta outbreak caused the lengthy Sydney lockdown. And she had one last shot at Gladys on her way out.
“After resigning as Premier over the many questions Gladys B is yet to answer over her previously secret relationship with Daryl Maguire, it takes a certain kind of politician to take a swipe at ICAC on the way out,” Wilkinson tweeted on Friday. “She would do well in the Morrison government.”
For months, Wilkinson has left viewers of The Project in no doubt that she isn’t a fan of the NSW Premier. Most famously, she apologised to Victoria on behalf of all Sydneysiders in August for the Berejiklian government’s handling of the Delta outbreak.
“There‘s a lot of us in Sydney who feel like we need to apologise to you guys,” she told viewers back then. “The problem was the messaging from the very beginning.”
Pauline punishes radio giant for axed podcast
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and her chief of staff, James Ashby, are still deeply unhappy about last week’s binning of a podcast she conducted with Jessica Rowe.
Diary has learnt that the pair have written to Southern Cross Austereo, the radio and regional television giant that aired the podcast, to announce they have canned an expensive TV campaign in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.
Ashby sent urgent messages on Wednesday to Southern Cross CEO Grant Blackley and senior sales executives, saying he was “suspending” the campaign “until further notice”.
The podcast with Hanson was part of an interview series conducted by Rowe, called “The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show”, on Southern Cross’s LiSTNR app.
However, as soon as Rowe promoted the podcast as Hanson talking about “love, raising kids and why she keeps going” last Wednesday, Twitter unleashed. Leading the charge was Australian of the Year Grace Tame, claiming Rowe had “subtly enabled”, normalised”, and “valorised” Hanson: sentiments echoed by her followers.
Within hours, Rowe revealed she had asked LiSTNR “to take down the Pauline Hanson interview”.
After LiSTNR’s executive producer of original podcasts, Nic McClure, confirmed the bad news with him late on Wednesday, Ashby immediately looked to punish Southern Cross in the hip pocket.
One Nation had planned to pay for a series of ads on the Southern Cross regional TV network starting last Friday to promote Hanson and her team ahead of next year’s federal election. But Ashby messaged Austereo’s sales team on Wednesday night that all bets were off, ending “our advertising commitment with your network”.
He also sent a late-night text to Blackley: “Cancel culture is a scourge on modern media and if we continue to allow it to permeate through society, SCA…will forever be beholden to these minority groups.”
When Diary reached Ashby on the weekend about dropping the ads, he defended Rowe and blamed Southern Cross for setting a dangerous precedent.
“The network needs to readdress the way it deals with issues like this,” he said.
“The problem is the interview showed a human side of Pauline that the keyboard warriors who despise everything about her didn’t want you to see. But I feel for Jess that she was so hurt by what happened.”
Pyne’s new Sky show to scrutinise subs deal
Perhaps it’s because he’s now done with lobbying for French submarines. Diary can reveal Christopher “The Fixer” Pyne is returning to Sky News Australia after a near-three year absence, with a new show.
Global Focus with Christopher Pyne will mark the former defence minister’s first Sky show since Pyne and Marles (featuring Labor’s current deputy leader Richard Marles) was retired in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election. The show starts next Sunday, and will feature Australia’s crucial defence issues, including our place in the world, alliances and tensions, particularly in relation to China.
We’re told Pyne landed interviews with ex-UK PM Tony Blair’s own fixer, Alastair Campbell, as well as senior US officials from both NASA and the Department of Homeland Security.
But perhaps the most interesting news is that in typical fashion, Pyne’s new 5.30pm show will address the elephant in the room head-on: the new AUKUS alliance and its submarine deal.
The new deal torpedoed the 2016 $50b French submarine deal Pyne championed so vocally. Back then, The Fixer was everywhere, endlessly arguing the contract’s benefit for his home state of South Australia. But will he have the same take now the deal’s canned?
Phil Coorey: Gladys’s ‘Kiss of Death’
Political leaders be warned: if The Australian Financial Review’s political editor Phil Coorey ever approaches you to feature in a magazine cover, run!
In May, he authored a AFR Magazine special about Berejiklian, famously headlined: The Woman Who Saved Australia.
But alas, Coorey’s story ran just weeks before Berejiklian’s crown started to slip, after she was lashed in sections of the media for her indecision in response to the rapidly unfolding Delta outbreak.
And on Friday morning, it was clear poor Coorey had lost none of his touch for exquisitely unfortunate timing, as he officially retained his heavyweight crown as the political Kiss of Death.
Coorey’s latest AFR Magazine cover story, the feature essay for the “hotly anticipated” 2021 Power List (headlined “Morrison has been unseated by the Premiers”) announced Gladys Berejiklian had led a cabal of state leaders also including Dan Andrews, Mark McGowan and Annastacia Palaszczuk to knock Scott Morrison off the top spot.
As we all know now, mere hours later, Berejiklian announced she was resigning.
When Diary reached Coorey on Friday, he good-naturedly copped our ribbing. But the Kiss of Death did offer a spirited defence of his role in The Woman Who Saved Australia cover.
“I didn’t choose that headline, but because my name swings underneath it like a dunny door, I’ve copped all the shit for it. But I do stand by the article, which clearly no one has read,” he said.
“As for the Power List, what can I say? It was a collective of premiers, and these magazine features have long lead times. At least she didn’t leave a few days earlier. It was the biggest near-disaster since we were about to put Malcolm Turnbull on top of the 2018 Power List — just before he got rolled!”
Berejiklian’s boyfriend sledges politicians
The blockbuster Ben Roberts-Smith vs Nine Newspapers defamation case has had plenty of twists and turns.
But who could have predicted the latest twist being Roberts-Smith’s barrister, Arthur Moses SC – the boyfriend of Gladys Berejiklian – sledging his other half’s profession, on the very same day she resigned as NSW Premier?
In the Federal Court in Sydney on Friday, that’s exactly what transpired, mere hours before Gladys’s shock announcement.
The Nine newspapers’ barrister, Nicholas Owens, was seeking a three-month adjournment of the Roberts-Smith case (already one of the most expensive defamation cases in recent memory) because key SAS witnesses were unable to get out of Western Australia, due to WA Premier Mark McGowan’s strict border ban.
But Moses didn’t like that reasoning, telling the court even a three-month delay may not be enough, because the “media statements” of state premiers and other politicians couldn’t be relied on, and gave “no guarantee” of end-dates for lockdowns.
“I think they have to be careful to rely on what the media statements of any politician is … when this court has its own statutory obligations and we have our own professional obligations,” he said.
An instruction from the NSW Premier’s partner not to rely on politicians’ statements? You couldn’t make it up! Luckily for Moses, Gladys had a bit of other stuff going on that day.
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