In the last year, she’s zealously built her reputation as the red carpet queen of Australian politics. But it seems Annastacia Palaszczuk’s glitzy reputation for attending even the opening of an envelope appears to be under threat from an unlikely source: NSW Premier and red carpet novice Dominic Perrottet.
Queensland media types are convinced that Perrottet is making a concerted pitch to steal TV’s night of nights, the Logies, from under Palaszczuk’s nose.
Nine’s Tim Arvier belled the cat in a press conference last week when he told the Queensland Premier he’d heard the Logies “might be moving to Sydney”.
The question seemed to blindside Palaszczuk, who looked flustered as she replied: “Look, I’ve only, I’ve only heard, only heard rumours about that, um … I’ll find out more information.”
Clearly not great news for the Premier, who has made such a splash at big Queensland events this year as she has rubbed shoulders with celebrities at everything from last month’s Hamilton Island Race Week, to global movie premieres with the likes of Tom Hanks, VIP enclosures at top race meetings, French champagne gala balls and her big coup, the Logies.
The Premier may not be thrilled that Queensland’s deal with the Logies is already up, after Covid saw much of the Gold Coast’s deal to host the event evaporate amid the state’s lockdowns during 2020 and 2021.
Additionally, the new media rights holder for the Logies, Seven, has most of its stars located in the southern cities, and would likely be happy to see the event move from the Gold Coast to either Sydney or Melbourne.
Meanwhile, Diary hears that some in Queensland Labor wouldn’t exactly be devastated to see the Logies depart the state. As we revealed last month, secret internal polling has showed that the Premier’s red carpet reputation has started to eat into her personal popularity. The word is that some ALP hardheads in the state think it may be a good thing if the Logies moved to Sydney or Melbourne – because every snap of Palaszczuk on the red carpet provides an unwelcome distraction and renewed claims in the media that she has ‘checked out’.
Courier Mail columnist Peter Gleeson even ran a recent poll cheekily asking readers to vote on who would be the best alternative candidate, in the event that Palaszczuk left politics.
Among the 1900 or so respondents to the poll, Queensland Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman attracted a whopping 70 per cent of the vote, while the two most talked-about candidates to succeed Palaszczuk, Treasurer Cameron Dick and Deputy Premier Steven Miles, polled a paltry 17 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.
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The irony of ten sending Wilkinson to the Queen’s funeral
For one of the biggest royal occasions in history, it seemed a bold choice. Lisa Wilkinson – the wife of Peter FitzSimons, Australia’s most vocal republican – was dispatched to the UK to spearhead Ten and The Project’s coverage of the Queen’s funeral.
The irony of Wilkinson’s royal deployment was lost on few TV people. While FitzSimons, the chair of the Australian Republic Movement has shown admirable restraint since the Queen’s death – suspending the ARM’s campaign for a republic until after the funeral – he has long advocated the removal of the royal family from Australia’s orbit. Over the years, he has thrown in a number of brutal assessments of King Charles.
But Ten insiders insist Wilkinson was always a logical choice to send to the funeral, given she had covered the weddings of both Prince William and Kate Middleton for Nine’s Today show in 2011, and of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for The Project in 2018.
They also cite Wilkinson’s extensive experience as a women’s magazine editor prior to her TV career.
When Diary reached The Project’s executive producer, Chris Bendall, in between production meetings on Friday, we asked whether (unlike her husband), Wilkinson was a closet monarchist.
Bendall, for his part, claimed not to know.
Meanwhile, FitzSimons copped some friendly fire about his republican role last week from one of his colleagues at the Nine newspapers: Osman Faruqi, the culture news editor of the SMH and The Age.
Faruqi pointed to FitzSimons and former PM Malcolm Turnbull as being problematic for the cause of Australia becoming a republic, because as the “most prominent faces of the movement”, they were “difficult to relate” to.
“While the two men’s dedication to the movement can’t be faulted, both are part of an elite media and political class,” Faruqi wrote.
“It shouldn’t be a shock that younger Australians find it difficult to relate to these champions of the cause.”
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Nine CEO’s private lunch with frenemy
It’s the high-powered Sydney power lunch encounter that has got tongues wagging in the media.
Last Friday week, the very day the death of the Queen first started dominating headlines, Nine CEO Mike Sneesby was spied having a cosy lunch with the group’s deputy chair Nick Falloon at an inner-Sydney eatery.
Why was this noteworthy? Because things haven’t always been so cosy between Sneesby and Falloon. The Nine board was famously divided before the appointment of Sneesby in April 2021, with Falloon understood to have been the board cheerleader for another candidate, ex-publishing boss Chris Janz, who was Sneesby’s chief competitor to become CEO.
Falloon had led a faction of directors of the former Fairfax (which had been taken over by Nine four years ago) who were supporting Janz to get the role – in stark opposition to Nine chair Peter Costello, who led the dominant faction who ultimately got Sneesby over the line.
But despite Sneesby now being having been in the role of Nine chief for 18 months on the back of Costello’s support, it seems there are no hard feelings between him and Falloon, with the pair looking cosy when our spies spotted them lunching. Interestingly, the venue was nowhere near Sneesby’s natural habitat of Nine’s North Sydney bunker. Instead, it was in Falloon’s residential neighbourhood at boutique Italian institution Fratelli Paradiso, in Potts Point.
The eatery is a leisurely 60m away from Falloon’s newly renovated two-storey penthouse in Potts Point’s landmark Villard Building (for which the Nine deputy chair paid $16m in 2019, and has reputedly spent many millions more in renovating over the last three years).
For all the convivial chat at the Potts Point lunch, Sneesby should bear in mind that his predecessor as Nine CEO, Hugh Marks, had a famously fractious relationship with Falloon.
The undisputed highlight of the Marks/Falloon relationship was the encounter, revealed by Diary two years ago, in which Marks gave Falloon his marching orders from an office he had been occupying at the Nine newspapers’ one time inner-Sydney headquarters at One Darling Island in Pyrmont.
“We don’t allow board members to have an office,” were Marks’s memorable reputed words to Falloon, as he personally evicted him from the office in early 2019.
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TV’s ‘blackout’ for Queen sparks run on ties
The last week hasn’t been the best time for the average person to be hunting down a black suit or tie.
Diary hears that TV reporters across the country – male and female – have been raiding stocks of black outerwear at seemingly every available department store and specialist clothing shop, with many already sold out of black ties. Prospective grooms, beware!
It’s all down to the push by TV news divisions to show proper respect to the mourning period for the Queen. Seven has the strictest rule, with even on-air reporters covering events like rail strikes, gas leaks and premiers’ press conferences told to deck themselves out predominantly in black outfits until after the Queen’s funeral.
At Nine, the protocol is for newsreaders and anyone covering the Queen’s passing to be decked out all in black, while reporters on general non-royal stories are required to wear “muted colours” during the mourning period.
And it seems some viewers have already become sticklers for the rules. Spare a thought, for example, for Allison Langdon and Charles Croucher on the Today show. Diary hears that early last Monday morning, as the pair co-hosted live from in front of Buckingham Palace, they happened to briefly not observe the all-black rule for royal presenters at Nine.
Croucher was wearing a navy suit with a red tie, while Langdon was wearing a muted dark green outfit. But Nine insiders tell us that given the pair were directly covering the Queen’s death, some more traditional viewers rang in to note the absence of black in the pair’s outfits.
Suffice to say, Croucher and Langdon have been decked out in black ever since.
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ABC’s team for funeral not the biggest
The ABC has copped its share of flak in recent days over news that it sent 27 staff to the UK to cover the Queen’s death, across radio, TV and online.
But Aunty as been relatively modest when compared with commercial TV operations when it comes to covering the momentous events of the last 10 days or so.
Nine’s newest addition to the 60 Minutes team, Amelia Adams, said from London at one point that it felt like “there’s about 100” Nine staff over there at present.
Turns out that Adams’s estimate was a bit of an overstatement. Nine insiders tell us that the real number is about 40 staff who’ve been sent from the TV operations – not quite as high as Adams estimated, but still more than the ABC is sending. Nine’s Australian on-air team for Monday includes Karl Stefanovic and Allison Langdon for Today, departing ACA host Tracy Grimshaw and Sydney newsreader Peter Overton.
Seven is the next highest TV operation in terms of the size of the party dispatched to London, with Diary told it has sent in excess of 30 on-air and support staff for the momentous period, spearheaded by inimitable royal ‘encyclopaedia’ Hugh Whitfield.
Bringing up the rear for the four main channels is 10, with just 15 staff dispatched for the funeral – intriguingly not to be shown on the main channel – including newsreaders Sandra Sully and Jennifer Keyte, and Lisa Wilkinson for The Project.
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Uhlmann hands his job to a young gun
ine political editor Chris Uhlmann made a shock revelation to this column earlier this year: that he would be quitting his role at the end of this year.
“I’m approaching retirement,” he told Diary in February. “It’s time to give someone else a crack.”
We’re told Uhlmann’s announcement prompted senior executives at the network to urgently step up efforts to talk him out of his retirement.
But they were to no avail. Uhlmann, now 62, was adamant that he wanted to step back and had long earned a lengthy European sabbatical.
Now, finally, Nine has resigned itself to the inevitability of Uhlmann’s departure in coming months from the role also famously long occupied by Laurie Oakes. Diary understands that more than seven months on from the revelation of his departure, a decision by Nine heavyweights on Uhlmann’s successor in the plum role is imminent.
Some of the best-known names in Australian political reporting have been bandied about in the TV industry in recent months as potential candidates for the plum Canberra-based role, including Sky’s chief news anchor Kieran Gilbert and AM Agenda host Laura Jayes, Seven’s political editor Mark Riley, Ten’s political editor Peter van Onselen, and even Insiders host David Speers.
But in the end, fittingly for the news of the week, someone named Charles is on the verge of being crowned king of Nine’s national political beat.
Diary is told that in recent months, the competition to be Nine’s political editor had been narrowed down to a race in two: between current Weekend Today host and former Canberra correspondent Charles Croucher, and Walkley Award-winning political reporter Chris O’Keefe.
Both are in their 30s and rising talents, who would bring generational change to Uhlmann’s role. But in the end, it seems to have come down to Croucher wanting the role more than O’Keefe. Nine insiders tell Diary that O’Keefe was approached “three or four times” to gauge his interest in the role – but ultimately, the Sydney-based reporter wasn’t keen on moving to Canberra.
Instead, O’Keefe’s long-term career goal is said to be a future in radio. Coincidentally, O’Keefe will this week be on 2GB in the drive slot, where he is standing in for regular host Jim Wilson during a week-long ratings break. However, at this point, there are no permanent slots vacant in the 2GB line-up.
Nine was also grooming Croucher for greater things in breakfast TV, with the network happy with his performance on Weekend Today in Sydney. But with one of political journalism’s most prized roles on offer in Canberra, the city where Croucher made his name, brekky TV can take a back seat – for now.
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“I’m extremely happy”: Sam Armytage hits back
Samantha Armytage wants to make one thing clear: she’s not in any hurry to return to her former heartland of TV news and current affairs.
The issue came up last week when Nine insiders told this column that the former Sunrise host wasn’t on their wishlist to take over the host’s chair of A Current Affair (which will be vacant after Tracy Grimshaw departs in November), because she wasn’t considered a “fit” at the network.
After Diary ran that item, Armytage got in touch to make it crystal clear that she was equally uninterested in being on either ACA or Nine.
“I’m under contract to Seven for another 18 months,” she told Diary. “And I’m extremely happy.”
Seven executives separately got in touch to stress to us that Armytage remains an “important network talent”. While she isn’t currently involved in news, she has moved to dating show Farmer Wants a Wife, which is currently screening, and is apparently about to take an expanded hosting role on Seven’s horse racing coverage.
Diary is told that NSW racing supremo Peter V’landys wants Seven, the Sydney racing rights holder, to raise the profile of the city’s spring carnival – headlined by the $15m Everest Stakes — as a serious competitor to the Melbourne Cup carnival, for which Ten controls the rights.
Seven insiders say Armytage will be heavily used to help Sydney racing make a splash against Ten this year – with another race, the $10m Golden Eagle Stakes, to go head-to-head against the Melbourne Cup carnival.
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