Gloves off as unions target ABC’s ‘bonus bunch’
Gloves are off in pay talks between the ABC and its unions now staff have rejected 1.7 per cent pay offer.
Ita Buttrose and David Anderson, look out. The gloves are off in pay talks between the ABC and its unions now its workers have overwhelmingly rejected Aunty’s 1.7 per cent pay offer.
Diary hears things could become very personal for ABC’s board and senior management, with the unions likely to step up a campaign to target the splashing around of cash to executives. Nothing will be off limits, with everything from millions in executive bonuses to last year’s $1.7 million termination payout to Michelle Guthrie and even, we hear, business class flights for ABC directors in the unions’ crosshairs.
Based on the ABC’s total $525m wage bill, there’s a $1.6m difference between the 1.7 per cent pay rise the ABC unsuccessfully offered and the 2 per cent rise unions want.
With this in mind, there will now be a concerted campaign by the unions against the $2m-plus in bonuses paid to more than 100 senior ABC staff in the past year — an amount that would more than fund the $1.6m difference between the management offer and union demands.
Posters imitating 1960s TV classic The Brady Bunch have popped up around the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters in Sydney, with photos of the ABC executive leadership team dubbed as the “The Bonus Bunch”.
The key ABC union delegate, Sinddy Ealy from the Community and Public Sector Union, has told Diary: “What KPI hoops did some of these executives have to go through to get their bonuses, in the worst year for the ABC in living memory? If a 2 per cent pay rise is good enough for most of our public service leaders, that’s the least ABC workers should get. It’s not their fault the ABC paid a big termination payout to Michelle Guthrie.”
An ABC spokesman said Aunty didn’t “shy away” from paying bonuses when executives “meet performance targets”.
Shorten camp’s poll hubris
The old adage goes that “pride comes before the fall”.
That saying seems to have summed up the pre-election cockiness of Bill Shorten’s Labor team.
Who could forget the now-deleted photo on social media featuring Shorten with his would-be inner sanctum — Chris Bowen, Tanya Plibersek, Jim Chalmers and Penny Wong — posing like the Royal Family, captioned “We’re ready”?
Now Diary is reliably informed of another glaring pre-poll episode of arrogance: ominous warnings issued in May by members of Shorten’s entourage to Facebook executives on what was about to happen to the social media giant under a Labor government.
The story goes that less than a fortnight out from the May 18 federal election, polling indicated Labor was on track for a clear victory but for one big worry: a huge spike in interest in both sponsored and non-sponsored posts on Facebook claiming death taxes would be introduced under a Shorten government. Some Facebook posts had even compared Shorten’s angry denials on death taxes with ex-PM Julia Gillard’s promise that there would be “no carbon tax under a government I lead”.
At such a critical campaign juncture, Diary understands that Labor’s team dialled up the pressure in a phone hook-up with Facebook in the campaign’s penultimate week. There’s no suggestion that Shorten was on the call. But insiders have confirmed one staffer representing him on the hook-up with Facebook behaved as if Shorten was already PM, telling the social media giant’s executives: “Remember: after the war, there’s the war crimes tribunal.”
The implication of that less-than-subtle warning was unmistakeable: Facebook would face a world of pain post-election unless it played ball with Labor to immediately remove the offending ads. Clearly a threat calculated to scare Facebook into action under a seemingly inevitable Labor regime, given it was already in the crosshairs of Rod Sims and the ACCC’s high-profile inquiry into internet giants.
When Diary contacted Facebook last week, the social media giant had no official comment on campaign interactions with Shorten’s team. However, a spokesman confirmed Facebook had taken action by giving “reduced distribution” to posts that claimed Labor wanted to bring in death duties after fact-checking found them to be “false”.
His own worst enemy
A clear picture is emerging that Bill Shorten’s unique brand of winning friends and influencing people as opposition leader wasn’t conducive to positive relations with reporters assigned to cover him.
One anecdote from Niki Savva’s book Plots and Prayers relates to Shorten’s relationship with Ten political journalist Jonathan Lea (who, Diary revealed last week, has now departed Ten).
Lea, of course, was responsible for one of the campaign’s key “gotcha” moments, when Shorten was unable to answer his repeated questions about how much Labor’s climate change policies would cost.
But that incident wasn’t the first example of tensions involving the pair. Savva recounts that after Shorten was told Lea had been assigned to cover him for the election campaign, the then-Labor leader was unable to hide his dislike of Lea. The book states: “Shorten unwisely whispered in the ear of another journalist that Lea was a ‘c..t’.”
Plots and Prayers also reveals that Shorten had also previously asked one of Lea’s bosses at Ten “when he was going to get rid of that ‘dickhead’ ”. Charming.
Contrast that with Shorten’s victorious opponent Scott Morrison’s open engagement with the travelling reporters during the campaign, featuring games of mini-golf and off-the-record campaign drinks sessions. ScoMo’s electoral triumph certainly suggests Shorten’s strategy of declaring war on some parts of the media was not a winning campaign strategy.
A Savva savaging
Niki Savva, incidentally, wasn’t mincing her words about Bill Shorten a few days back at a special live episode of the ABC’s Insiders, hosted by Fran Kelly, for the Canberra Writers Festival.
Asked by Kelly what went wrong for Labor at the federal election, Savva called a spade a shovel: “They had a dud leader, dud policies and they ran a dud campaign.”
Fordham’s friends
Ben Fordham copped the full Twitter pile-on following his interview with Gladys Berejiklian on his 2GB drive show 10 days ago, after he asked the NSW Premier whether she would have an abortion.
This question, of course, came against the background of the abortion debate that has engulfed Berejiklian in the NSW parliament in recent weeks.
Berejiklian took it all in her stride, both during and post-interview.
But not everyone else did. Labor’s Tanya Plibersek and the Coalition’s Marise Payne were soon leading the outrage brigade, saying it was “not OK” to ask such a personal question.
But in recent days, Fordham has won vocal support from the most unlikeliest of allies: social commentator Jane Caro and journalism academic Jenna Price. Remember, the pair have been about as adversarial towards 2GB as you can get, having co-founded the 2012 “Destroy the Joint” campaign against the station and Alan Jones, which cost 2GB $1 million-plus in ads.
It was Jenna Price who spelt out in an SMH comment piece last Tuesday that Berejiklian, not Fordham, had first brought the issue of her personal choices up, 20 minutes into the 2GB interview. Price argued that the interview should have been applauded, not criticised. Caro soon tweeted: “Love this Jenna.”
A grateful Fordham tells Diary: “When an angry mob is coming for you on Twitter, you accept support from anyone who’s offering it … I assumed Jenna was joining the pile-on, but I was dead wrong.”
The Drum’s pounding
Diary has learned more details of the ABC’s unprecedented decision 12 days ago to pull The Drum off the ABC’s main channel.
A panellist on the night, barrister Richard Beasley SC, has now fessed up to delivering the comments about US President Donald Trump cut out of a heavily edited version of The Drum now running online. He said his remarks referred to Trump’s viral “Grab her by the pussy” quote that emerged on a tape released just before the 2016 presidential election.
“I was basically saying, ‘Why would we want to be normalising a president who is so abnormal?’ ” Beasley reveals of his comments on The Drum.
But Beasley’s words weren’t the main reason The Drum was pulled. That decision was down to remarks made by another panellist on the George Pell case.
Without going into details, Beasley says the ABC quickly realised the comments couldn’t possibly go to air. “They might have resulted in the ABC being owned by the Vatican (if they’d aired),” the barrister jokes.
Fact-checking Q&A
Throwaway comments made by Q&A host Tony Jones on the show about the ratings of Sky News After Dark are now the subject of a two-page correction request made by Sky to the ABC.
The letter follows remarks made by Jones on last Monday’s Q&A in response to a comment made by opposition immigration spokeswoman Kristina Keneally that the Sky After Dark platform was “growing in Australia”.
Jones interjected: “It’s growing to a very small audience, to be fair. You’re probably talking about 5000 people watching at that time … They can correct me on that. That’s a fact check you can do, Sky.”
It will be no surprise to learn that Sky indeed fact-checked Jones’s comments, on Friday firing off a letter to the Q&A host that CC’d four of the ABC’s top brass, including chairwoman Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson.
Sky News boss Paul Whittaker says in the letter that Jones was wrong: Sky’s average viewership between 6om and 10pm on Foxtel alone, Whittaker says, was 43,921, “more than eight times higher than the number referenced on the Q&A program”. It also receives a further 20,906 viewer average on its regional Sky News on WIN service, Whittaker says, making it a total of “12 times” Jones’s estimate.
Whittaker has called on Jones to personally make an on-air correction on tonight’s show, citing the ABC’s stated commitment to “accuracy” and a “willingness to correct errors and clarify ambiguous or otherwise misleading information”.
The Sky boss even offers a proposed script that invites Jones to utter three words: “I was wrong.”
Will Jones take Whittaker up on his invitation? All will be revealed tonight.
$20m press campaign
Remember the mining industry’s $20 million ad campaign against a “super-profits tax” back in 2010, which helped to end Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership?
Now Diary can reveal that some of Australia’s biggest media organisations, including the ABC, Nine, News Corp (which owns this paper) and SBS are planning a similarly large campaign to send a message to the government on the importance of press freedom.
It follows the June raids on the ABC and the home of News Corp political reporter Annika Smethurst. The latter was unnerved enough by the raids to feel she had no choice but to move out of her Kingston home in Canberra for good.
Diary is told TV and print ads will commence in mid-October, with campaign agency Visibility landing the plum brief to run them.
Research work on the campaign is already well advanced and the creative is currently being workshopped among the media companies to work out what messages will best cut through.
What will $20m worth of ads buy the media companies? Apparently a shot at informing ScoMo’s quiet Australians about why a free press is so important to their everyday lives.
As one campaign insider puts it: “Think of the royal commissions in areas like banking. They might never have happened if we had the restrictions on press freedom that other countries have.”
Owzat, Tom?
The Australian Ashes team may have crashed to a devastating defeat to England in the epic Headingley Test last Monday morning, triggering the inevitable media post-mortems for much of last week. But Diary reckons executives at one media group must have secretly been high-fiving.
Nine, which has the rights to the Ashes, now gets the benefit of a series that is well and truly alive at 1-1. If Australia had won, the last two tests would have been largely academic, as Australia, with a 2-0 lead, would have kept the Ashes no matter what.
So Diary last week hit up Nine sports boss Tom Malone direct with the killer question: was he death-riding the Aussies during the Headingley Test?
Malone reacted with mock outrage: “I take strong exception to that! I’m a patriotic Australian. I was cheering them on every ball!”
We believe you, Tom, though thousands wouldn’t!
BBC apologises to staff over Russell Brand sex complaints
Some employees had stayed silent about the behaviour of the comedian and actor because they believed he ‘would always get his way’, a BBC director said.
Questions about ABC platforming ‘radical fringe Jewish voice’
Jewish groups have questioned why the national broadcaster has chosen to platform and ‘mainstream’ a Jewish ‘radical fringe voice’, in its coverage of anti-Semitic events in Sydney.