The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  Men and women wept as he spoke about how much the job had meant to him, the honour and the privilege of leading the country for so long. He ended by assuming responsibility for the devastating election loss, but as a captain who goes down with his ship, not as the man whose inability to let go of the leadership had cost his party so dearly. As he stepped down the chanting started, ‘How-ard, Howard.’ He circled the room for nearly an hour accepting accolades, consolation and homage. One senior Liberal woman appeared to kiss his hand. His supporters comforted and embraced each other, as if they were at a funeral. There were trays of champagne and I took a glass, but quickly and awkwardly put it back. There were pointed hostile looks, as if to say, ‘You think there is something to celebrate?’ Some people were drunk by now and getting aggressive. Several were looking at the journalists around and muttering, ‘You’re to blame.’ It was unclear whether this was directed at the media generally, the ABC or Four Corners.

  Postscript: John Howard and I did meet again when I interviewed him for a Four Corners profile of new Liberal leader Tony Abbott. Howard, private citizen, was still wary. I always found him so. He treated the interview as before — like an innings of cricket, where controlling the play, holding your ground and winning is what it’s about. I remain of the view that accountability is what it’s really all about, and that no one ever died from being asked a question, even five times.

  12

  ‘THAT AWFUL BLOODY PROGRAM’

  by Sally Neighbour

  It was early 1996 when I fronted up at the ABC’s rambling Sydney headquarters for my first day at Four Corners. Paul Keating was in his last few weeks as Prime Minister, John Howard was storming towards the Lodge, and I was just back from a three-year posting in Hong Kong and Beijing as ABC TV’s Asia correspondent. I would have been feeling fairly pleased with myself as I announced my arrival to the ABC’s commissionaire, as the guy on the front desk was grandly known, accompanied by my partner, journalist Michael Doyle. I figured I had come a long way since my first TV job as a news reporter at GLV8 in Traralgon, Victoria, and a subsequent stint at Channel 10’s Good Morning Australia, where my assignments included a live cross to an attempt to make the world’s longest sausage and a report on a new pet boutique, where I paraded my friend’s bull terrier in and out of the dressing room in a succession of ridiculous outfits.

  ‘We’re starting today at Four Corners and Lateline,’ I announced to the commissionaire.

  ‘Are you here for work experience?’ he enquired.

  I might as well have been. As an ABC TV foreign correspondent, I was already accustomed to relentless deadlines, gruelling hours and Third World working conditions. But the work ethic at Four Corners was something else again. Executive Producer John Budd had a sofa in his office which doubled as a bed for whichever reporter, producer or editor needed to snatch the odd hour’s sleep as they worked, sometimes around the clock, to get their programs to air on a Monday night. ‘You’re only as good as your last story’ was a phrase I heard very soon after I arrived, and often over the years.

  The legendary programs of the 1980s — like Chris Masters’ ‘The Big League’, Tony Jones’s ‘Horses for Courses’ and Paul Barry’s ‘Bondy’s Bounty’ — had set the bar so high it was almost impossible to reach. But reaching it was what we were there for; if you couldn’t, there was no guarantee you would last at the program. Two reporters — both fine journalists and popular, hard-working, dedicated staff members — had just been sacked; another two would be dismissed later that year.

  The social documentaries which had been Four Corners’ specialty in its early years were now out of fashion (to the program’s cost, some would argue); hard-hitting investigative exposés were expected. There wasn’t time for much office camaraderie, except for the occasional post-program Tuesday lunch (and, as I would later learn, the Christmas party, which generally wound up in some grimy pub in Oxford Street at about 4am). The pressure to find a story and then get it to air to meet the preset deadline was intense. I was horrified to learn that reporters were assigned air dates before they even had topics to fill them. Once you had a story, the working title would appear on Budd’s whiteboard next to your name and date; if you hadn’t found one, there would instead be the initials FBH, which stood for ‘fucking black hole’.

  When I joined, Four Corners was fighting to keep its coveted 45 minutes and its Monday night slot from 8.30 to 9.15, which it had occupied since the early ’80s. Ratings were in the doldrums; some media commentator had written an article headlined, as I recall it, ‘Has Four Corners lost its edge?’, a perennial question asked about the ABC’s much-vaunted flagship. A show like Four Corners will inevitably have its quiet patches, but too many months without making front-page headlines, snaring awards or prompting government inquiries, and the questioning starts again. Has Four Corners passed its use-by date? Should it be cut back, dumped or relegated to a late-night time slot?

  Also at play were long-running tensions between the powerful News and Current Affairs department (known as NewsCaff), and the omnipotent Television department, which controls scheduling. Often throughout the ABC’s history, Television has felt NewsCaff has had too much influence, resources and air time, and has pushed to shift the balance to more impoverished program departments such as Drama, Comedy and Documentaries. Budd had resisted the move to encroach on his turf, but the message was clear: perform or lose your prime-time slot and your precious 45 minutes. The tensions were further exacerbated by the knowledge that John Howard’s Liberal–National coalition was on its way into government, intent on bringing the recalcitrant national broadcaster into line, and budget cuts loomed.

  In truth, none of this bothered me much. Like the rest of the journalistic staff I was fixated on filling the dreaded FBH next to my name on the whiteboard, and content to let management deal with loftier concerns like budgets, scheduling and the future of the program.

  I quickly figured out what I wanted to do as my first story. Returning from abroad to my hometown Melbourne, I’d been struck by the inexorable growth of the city’s new landmark, Crown Casino, which now dominated the skyline, and by the cosy relationship between Premier Jeff Kennett’s Liberal government and the casino’s proprietors, Hudson Conway, run by Kennett’s friends: businessman Lloyd Williams and his partner, Ron Walker, who was also federal treasurer of the Liberal Party. Championed by Kennett as ‘a beacon of light in this state’s revival’, the casino had been exempted from normal planning laws and had doubled in size since being approved. The casino contract had proven a veritable licence to print money; Walker, Williams and their partner Kerry Packer had already made a combined profit of more than $500 million on their casino shares.

  There were questions being asked about whether the casino tender had been independent, fair and free of political influence. Rival tenderers were claiming information about their bids had been leaked to Crown. There were also questions about whether Hudson Conway was ‘of good repute’ as required under the Casino Control Act, having recently been found liable in the Federal Court for deceptive and misleading conduct over an earlier property transaction, and being subject to an ongoing investigation by the Victoria Police Fraud Squad over yet another deal.

  Embarking on the story brought us into immediate conflict with Kennett, who, since his landslide election win in 1992, had adopted a policy of unbridled contempt towards the media outlets he considered most inimical to his government: the Age newspaper — which had lampooned him as a ‘buffoon’ 13 days into his premiership and which he in turn had reviled as ‘absolute crap’ — and the ABC. Kennett’s policy, from a journalist’s perspective, was to deflect scrutiny by attacking the media, discrediting individual journalists, continually claiming political bias and boycotting the outlets he considered hostile while favouring those that gave him an easy run. It seemed to me that through sheer tactical aggression, Kennett had succeeded in cowing elements of the media into submission.

  ‘The Crown Deals’ was
a typical Four Corners ‘big dig’. Producer Mark Maley and I spent weeks reading everything we could find that had been written about Crown, including hundreds of pages of court transcripts and company records, and ringing everyone who knew anything about the casino, which meant speaking to about 200 people. It’s a laborious and tedious task: ringing dozens of wrong phone numbers before finding the right one; knocking, after hours, on the doors of strangers who, not surprisingly, often close them in your face; trying to persuade people that it’s in some amorphous ‘public interest’ for them to give you information, when they could face punishment for doing so. As is so often the case, there were plenty of people prepared to talk off the record but none willing to go public, given the powerful connections of the casino operators. The other obstacle we faced was the sweeping secrecy provisions in the Casino Control Act, which made it a criminal offence to divulge any information about ‘the establishment or development’ of the casino. Some of the insiders we spoke to had been explicitly warned they would face criminal sanctions if they spoke out.

  Midway through our research we got the break we were looking for when we found a former staffer of a key government agency who, amazingly, was willing to talk. And her account was explosive. ‘M’ (I am still bound by my promise to protect her identity) told us that during the tender for the casino, government ministers had been given regular briefings on the rival bids. She described how she had personally on several occasions placed this information in sealed envelopes to be sent to the members of a certain Cabinet subcommittee. The revelation was a bombshell, directly contradicting Premier Kennett’s insistence in parliament that ‘the government [had] no knowledge of the content of the bids, nor [did] it seek that information’. Even better, M was willing to go on camera.

  But our jubilation quickly evaporated when we consulted the ABC lawyers about the forthcoming interview, in one of the numerous legal sessions that always precede such a contentious program. The head of the legal department, the eminent Judith Walker, believed we were ethically bound to advise M of the clause in the Casino Control Act which exposed her to a possible criminal conviction and a fine of up to $5000 if she breached the secrecy clause. I admit now with some embarrassment that I was aghast at having to let ethics get in the way of such a great story. I knew without having asked that M must not be aware of the criminal sanction and that if we told her she wouldn’t go ahead with the interview. Surely we were not obliged to tell her, I argued. Surely it was up to her to weigh up the implications of talking to us. To her credit, not mine, Judith prevailed. I informed M of the risk, and she pulled out of the interview. She did, however, allow us to use her as an anonymous ‘inside source’. And she also agreed — again at the request of the lawyers — that in the event of legal action being taken over our report, she would appear in court as a witness to support us. Without this assurance, the lawyers indicated they would not allow the information to be aired.

  The pre-show legal dramas took a new turn at 4pm on Monday 18 March 1996, a few hours before ‘The Crown Deals’ was due to go to air, when a fax arrived at the Four Corners office from the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP was seeking an injunction to prevent the show being broadcast because it contained a 30-second reference to a person associated with the casino who was due to stand trial on unrelated charges in Victoria. At 5pm, three and a half hours before air time, the ABC lawyers were in court fighting to get the program approved. When Four Corners agreed to delete the offending 30 seconds, the injunction bid was dropped.

  Kennett’s response to ‘The Crown Deals’ was colourful even by his own rhetorical standards. He blasted Four Corners as ‘a great leech sucking the blood out of society’, asserting that our program was the result of ‘months’ of work by ‘dozens’ of people, at a cost of ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ to the taxpayer. (We calculated it cost about $15,000 excluding staff wages and the use of ABC production facilities.) The program prompted a senate inquiry into Crown. The Kennett government, however, refused to cooperate with the inquiry, which caused the senate committee to eventually abandon its public hearings and recommend a full judicial inquiry or Royal Commission, ‘enabling issues relating to probity and the confidentiality of the tendering process to be investigated’. No such inquiry was ever held. Apparently Victorian voters were unfazed; on 30 March 1996 Kennett was re-elected with a 32-seat majority.

  The following year we took on Premier Kennett again to examine his family’s share dealings in a company called Guangdong Corporation, which had been the first Chinese firm to list on the Australian Stock Exchange. Majority-owned by China’s richest provincial government and spruiked as ‘an investment vehicle for you to share in the growth of China’, it had been one of the hottest floats of the year in 1993. Kennett and his wife, Felicity, had snapped up 50,000 shares, several days after an announcement to the market that due to overwhelming demand the company was ‘unlikely to accept any further application for shares’. The investment had been revealed by Channel 7’s Today Tonight in a report which was temporarily — and sensationally — pulled from going to air in May 1996 after Kennett phoned the station in a rage just before it was due to be broadcast.

  When Four Corners asked the Premier for an interview and then submitted a series of written questions, Kennett’s office responded in characteristic style: ‘We do not wish to be interviewed by the Four Corners program, or answer the inane questions you supplied, as the ABC continues to justify its appalling bias and waste of public money.’

  In the absence of an interview, broadcaster Neil Mitchell allowed us to film in his studio at 3AW during his weekly session with the Premier. Kennett walked in with an airy greeting to Mitchell’s crew — ‘Good morning, team; are you all well?’ — then spotted our camera. ‘We have an intruder. Do we not have an intruder?’ he demanded. Mitchell told him it was the ABC, then Kennett turned on the hapless ABC cameraman who’d been seconded for the job.

  KENNETT: ABC? Is this for local ABC, or is it for that awful bloody program? Who are you working for?

  CAMERAMAN: [deliberately mumbles] ABC.

  KENNETT: Yeah, which part of the ABC?

  CAMERAMAN: [almost incoherent] 4 Cs.

  KENNETT: Who?

  CAMERAMAN: 4 Cs.

  KENNETT: Four Corners. This is this what’s-her-name’s program …

  As the camera rolled, Kennett fumed, ‘I think I’d close the bloody ABC; it’s a waste of time,’ then sat down at the microphone with Mitchell and continued his attack on air:

  It’s come to my attention in the last few weeks that Sally Neighbour, who runs a lot of what I call distasteful programs on the ABC, inasmuch as they’re all negative and they’re very personal, is putting together a program on our five years in office, which comes in October. You can expect from Sally Neighbour an hour of slime.

  Kennett’s ‘hour of slime’ punchline (notwithstanding my protestations that it was only 45 minutes) was incorporated into a promo, aired ahead of the program, which director Janie Lalor reckoned was one of the best Four Corners ever had. It certainly didn’t hurt the ratings.

  Kennett’s campaign against us continued with a letter to the ABC’s Managing Director in which he accused us of ‘stalking’ the boss of the underwriter Sino Securities, Richard Li, who had approved his shares. The complaint followed our visit to Mr Li’s home in suburban Melbourne, where we had set up our camera on the footpath outside, and producer Janine Cohen had gone to the door and told him we were there to get footage of him for Four Corners and would stay as long as it took. What Kennett considered ‘stalking’, we thought was a reasonable approach to getting the pictures we required.

  The big break came this time when Kennett’s former press secretary, Stephen Mayne (later of Crikey fame), agreed to go on camera and reveal the inside account of how Kennett had obtained his shares.

  MAYNE: Jeff came around and asked if I’d heard about this Chinese company that was floating [and] he said, ‘Oh, I want to get
into this Chinese company, I think it’s gonna be a good investment … The shares are hard to get,’ and you know, all the signs were, he was saying, that, it was going to be a good thing to get into.

  Mayne described how he was with Kennett in his office when the Premier rang Richard Li to ask about the float and request 100,000 shares. He ended up with 50,000, issued to his wife.

  MAYNE: He came around three or four days later, I think, and he was very excited, and he told me that as it turned out he got an extra 30,000, or Felicity got an extra 30,000 shares.

  When the company debuted a week later, almost a million shares changed hands and the price climbed from 78 cents to $1.15, giving the Kennetts a paper profit of $18,000 after a single day’s trading. Kennett hosted an official reception for the company’s directors at Parliament House and joined them at a fancy Melbourne restaurant that night to toast their success.

  Mayne’s revelations were dynamite. We were sure we had a great story. But the ABC’s lawyers were not so impressed. After we screened the ‘rough cut’ of the program, their verdict was, ‘You can’t run this. It’s defamatory.’

  The lawyers were understandably jumpy. A few months earlier we had aired a show called ‘Packer’s Power’, about Australia’s richest man, Kerry Packer, focusing on his successful push to win control of the Sydney casino and his bid to take over the Fairfax newspaper group. Packer had sued for defamation, with what was widely seen as a ‘stop writ’ to prevent other media reporting on his activities. The case would drag on for six years, until it was settled at Packer’s instigation in 2003, when the ABC released a statement saying, ‘The ABC has accepted a proposal put forward by Mr Kerry Packer to settle his defamation action over a 1997 Four Corners program, Packer’s Power. After six years, this legal action is now concluded.’ In the end, the ABC decided to pay Packer a token sum in order to end a case that had already cost it a small fortune and would cost very much more if it continued to trial.