The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  Although I could see the financial rationale, I was appalled by this decision. I had a strong urge to resign in protest, but was pacified when these crucial lines were included in the ABC’s statement: ‘The ABC continues to stand by the program, which was an important investigation into casino licensing and business transactions involving companies associated with Mr Packer. The ABC makes no apology for the broadcast and does not retract any of its content.’

  All this was yet to play out back in 1997 when the lawyers were vetting our exposé on the Kennetts’ share dealings ahead of its broadcast. But with one major defamation case looming, they were loathe to risk another. Hence their advice that we should not run this.

  I was shocked. The fact that a piece of journalism is defamatory doesn’t automatically mean it can’t run. Investigative journalists publish stories that damage people’s reputations all the time. The decision on whether to publish is a calculated risk which takes into account the truth of the allegations, the level of public interest, the likelihood of the person suing and whether they will persist, the strength of the evidence obtained by the journalists, and their efforts to corroborate it. The burden of proof can be extremely high because what journalists end up having to defend, at least in some jurisdictions, is not what they actually report but the imputations that arise from it. The lawyers’ view in this case was that the Kennett shares story would be simply too hard to defend.

  But Mark Maley and I weren’t willing to accept that as the final word, and nor was our EP, John Budd. So we set out to re-make the program, switching the focus from Kennett’s personal behaviour to the style of governance in Victoria. We called it ‘Kennett’s Culture’, and summarised it in the program précis: ‘We examine the political culture that’s grown under his rule and a state that is run like a business [and] investigate questions over the Kennett family’s share dealings, intimidation of the media and the growing reputation of Victoria as a “mate’s state”, where favourable deals are made with businessmen close to the government.’ We got it to air in September 1997. No one sued.

  My run-ins with Jeff Kennett in Victoria were trifling compared with the battles being fought between the ABC and the new Howard government in Canberra. Three weeks after Howard became Prime Minister in March 1996, the government announced a restructure of the ABC board, abolishing the role of staff-elected director (later reinstated) ‘in line with modern principles of corporate governance’. A few months later, it slashed about $60 million from the ABC budget.

  In July, Howard appointed his friend the Liberal Party loyalist and Opera Australia CEO Donald McDonald as Chairman of the ABC. Staff were horrified; their apprehension borne out when McDonald gave a personal public endorsement of Howard during the 1998 federal election campaign. Over the years, however, McDonald would emerge as a staunch champion of the national broadcaster, lauded by some as the most independent Chairman the ABC has had.

  There was much less affection for the succession of ABC directors appointed during the Howard years, such as arch-conservative historian and cultural warrior Keith Windschuttle, News Limited columnist and vociferous ABC detractor Janet Albrechtsen, Liberal Party powerbroker Michael Kroger and Queensland anthropologist and ‘ideological zealot’ (in the words of then Shadow Communications Minister Lindsay Tanner) Ron Brunton. Political stacking of the ABC board was by no means new; the Whitlam government had replaced the entire board, and governments before and since then have sought to mould the board to suit their own ideological bent. Seldom, however, have new appointees been so palpably hostile to the organisation they are being tasked with helping to run.

  But the most controversial appointment in the Howard era was that of a little-known Australian-born former Baltic TV executive, Jonathan Shier, to the role of Managing Director in January 1999. Shier’s ascension — famously marked by an address to staff in which he pranced about with a microphone crowing, ‘I’ve got the gig’ — ushered in three years of chaotic management, indiscriminate hiring and firing, falling ratings, and the dumping of popular shows such as Quantum and Media Watch, later restored by popular demand.

  For Four Corners, the nadir of Shier’s reign came with his intervention in the broadcast of the program ‘Party Tricks’, made by reporter Andrew Fowler, producer Quentin McDermott and researcher Peter Cronau in 2001. The program documented how a disgruntled businessman with a grudge against the Commonwealth Bank worked with senior Liberal Party figures to unearth bank documents of dodgy provenance that were used to attack former Prime Minister Paul Keating over his investment in a Hunter Valley piggery. The show was potentially damaging for the Howard government as it named the NSW Cabinet Secretary, Senator Bill Heffernan, and former Liberal Party president Tony Staley and reported that $18,000 had been laundered through Indonesia to pay for allegedly stolen Supreme Court documents used to discredit Keating.

  Like all Four Corners programs with potential legal ramifications, ‘Party Tricks’ had been scrupulously vetted by the ABC lawyers and independent counsel and approved for broadcast on 16 July 2001. But Shier, himself a former Liberal Party staffer, pulled the plug, announcing he wanted yet another legal opinion before the program could air. The decision caused uproar. Staff were outraged and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley declared, ‘The political independence of the ABC is on trial.’ The lobby group Friends of the ABC said it was more evidence the board had become politicised. Donald McDonald retorted that the only political pressure was coming from the Opposition, the Friends and the unions, and insisted ‘these decisions are made free of political pressure’. Three days later, after getting another legal opinion, Shier announced that ‘Party Tricks’ would go to air the following week, stating, ‘I am satisfied that all the relevant issues have been addressed [and] that all reasonable steps have been taken by Four Corners to verify the accuracy of information contained in the program and to corroborate every allegation.’ The director of News and Current Affairs, Max Uechtritz, added, ‘The story has not been diluted or diminished in any way.’

  Shier’s intervention ensured that ‘Party Tricks’ was the highest rating Four Corners of the year. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the alleged theft of Supreme Court documents revealed in the program had been referred to the NSW Police and the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

  Three weeks later, on the night of Sunday 12 August, 600 people — including pioneers Bob Raymond, Michael Charlton and John Penlington — crammed into a cavernous TV studio at Gore Hill to commemorate Four Corners’ 40th anniversary. It was the closest the ABC gets to putting on a glittering occasion, and it felt like high time for a celebration after a year and a half of internal ructions under Shier. (I had missed part of it, having taken maternity leave in 1999 for the birth of my son, Oscar, then moved to Lateline for a brief stint as a presenter before returning to Four Corners in 2000.) Executive Producer Bruce Belsham, who steered the program through that whole fraught era, employed his best diplomatic skills in the speech he delivered to an audience that included Chairman Donald McDonald and MD Shier:

  Four Corners is a program that will always throw up stories that embarrass influential people and institutions. It’s the nature of the beast … And our kind of program can never be comfortable for senior managers or the ABC board … But the hallmark of any good public broadcaster has to be courage and a willingness to be disliked from time to time, and a willingness to fight for good journalism.

  Later in the evening, Four Corners researcher Linda Larsen and producer Quentin McDermott, who produced ‘Party Tricks’, introduced themselves to Shier. An Englishman whose exquisite manners can be deceptive, McDermott asked Shier what he had thought of the program. Shier responded that he thought it had been a ‘non-event’ in which the Australian public wasn’t interested (despite the high ratings) and that ‘heads would roll’ if the allegations in it didn’t stand up. The encounter became heated when Shier called McDermott, according to the latter’s record of the conversation, ‘the stupidest produ
cer he had ever come across in his entire career’ and said he would be speaking to his boss. Before storming off, Shier rebuked Larsen for having introduced them and told them, ‘You have ruined my evening.’

  But Shier’s evening wasn’t quite over. Liz Jackson, who had witnessed the encounter, decided to find out what was going on. So she confronted the rattled MD, introduced herself, and announced that ‘as a journalist’ she felt obliged to ask him what the argument had been about. Still angry, Shier fumed that he would ‘not stand for’ the likes of McDermott contradicting him ‘just to impress the blonde’ (a reference to Larsen), that McDermott’s rudeness was not acceptable, and ‘he would not be around the ABC corridors for much longer’.

  In fact, it was Shier’s days that were numbered. Two months later, to the enormous relief of ABC staff and supporters, his departure was announced in a statement from ABC Corporate Affairs. He had finally lost the support of the board, although in the ABC’s time-honoured tradition of giving face to people it is sacking, the statement announced: ‘The Chairman of the ABC, Mr Donald McDonald AO, thanked Mr Shier for his services to the Corporation’ and so on. The Australian’s media writer, Amanda Meade, was much closer to the mark when she wrote, ‘Personal style aside, Shier’s restructure was chaotic and wasteful, and produced little of broadcasting quality and a historic slide in ratings.’ For years afterwards when people would ask, ‘How are things at the ABC?’ my standard reply was, ‘Compared with the Shier era, things are just fine.’

  Towards the end of 2001, an event occurred that eclipsed the ABC’s internal tumult and re-focused our attention on events further afield. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were followed a year later by the Bali bombings of 12 October 2002, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians. For me personally it was the latter atrocity that proved more momentous, sending me on a personal journey that would occupy much of the next nine years, taking me from Bali through Southeast Asia on the trail of the Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), to the torture prisons of Egypt and the dusty streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, where it had all, in a sense, begun.

  On the morning of 13 October 2002, I was preparing to board a plane in Kuala Lumpur with Four Corners producer Morag Ramsay, cameraman Neale Maude and sound recordist Jerry Rickard, when the phone rang. It was the Four Corners office in Sydney. There had been an explosion in Bali, I was told, and two nightclubs had been destroyed; the cause was unclear, it might have been a gas main. The Department of Foreign Affairs was saying two Australians were confirmed dead, about 40 injured and ‘a large number’ remained missing.

  As it happened, we were on the trail already. My friend Margot O’Neill, a reporter at Lateline, had been at me to investigate a mysterious Indonesian group, JI, which was led by a little-known cleric, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. The previous December, two months after 9/11, authorities in Singapore had uncovered a plot by the group to conduct a series of bombings aimed at targets that were said to include the Australian High Commission. Detained suspects had named Ba’asyir as their ringleader, and there was talk of connections to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. At first I was sceptical. Police and intelligence agencies in the highly policed island state were notorious for exaggerating security threats to help justify draconian laws which allowed for indefinite detention without trial. But I needed a subject to fill my looming ‘FBH’, and this one seemed worth investigating.

  By the time I got the phone call on the morning after the Bali bombings, we were on our way from KL to Jakarta to interview Sidney Jones, an analyst from the International Crisis Group, who knew more than anyone about JI. She believed the group was the most likely suspect behind the bombings, although it would take months for Australian and Indonesian police to gather the evidence to prove it. Suddenly our assignment took on a new urgency. We took the next available flight to Denpasar and drove straight to Kuta Beach, the site of the demolished Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar.

  Sometimes, years later, when so much has been written and said about an event, it can be hard to summon an authentic memory of it. What I do recall strongly is the deathly silence as the four of us tramped down Jalan Legian towards the bomb site, the road having been closed to traffic. Barely 24 hours after such a catastrophe, I had expected there would still be wailing sirens, earth-movers digging through rubble under searchlights, weeping relatives waiting for news of loved ones. But there was nothing; just blackness (the lights were out) and the sound of glass and rubble being trodden under our feet. The streets were strewn with smashed glass — it seemed every pane for hundreds of metres around had shattered — and, as we got closer, splintered bits of timber, corrugated iron, discarded thongs and sandals. The other thing I remember is the smell, the foul stench of burned remains. The bomb site was deserted. The structures of thatch, timber and corrugated iron had been so flimsy they had crumpled and burned to cinders. The bodies and the charred survivors had already been removed.

  Next we headed to Denpasar’s Sanglah Hospital, where the scene could not have been more different: open-air corridors with rows of bodies, dozens of them, covered in sheets; a room which one of my colleagues glimpsed briefly, containing a pile of limbs; wards like those in a war zone, with burned survivors hooked up to drips, comforted by friends clearly in shock. A footy player from the Coogee Dolphins, Eric de Haart, was searching for his mates, six of whom he would soon learn had died. Another enduring memory is of a nurses’ station filled with apparently ill-trained young women in starched white uniforms, who stood or sat idle, sometimes giggling, utterly at a loss over what to do, while volunteers from Australia and other foreign countries tended the wards.

  From the hospital we drove to Denpasar airport, where a fleet of Australian Defence Force Hercules had begun ferrying injured Australians to burns units in Darwin and Perth. Dozens of people were lined up on gurneys on the airstrip awaiting evacuation. We managed to talk our way into the airport, only to be bailed up by Indonesian soldiers who stopped us filming and escorted us off the tarmac, ignoring my furious protests.

  It was 3 or 4am by the time we finished filming and returned to our hotel to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before heading off the next day to Solo in Central Java, to track down the JI leader Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, now suspect number one.

  People often ask how journalists are affected by the scenes they witness, such as those we saw that night. It seems inadequate now, but all I remember feeling was dazed from tiredness and sensorial overload, and emotionally anaesthetised by the adrenalin that keeps you going on an assignment like this.

  Our report, ‘The Network’, which aired on 28 October 2002, was the first of a series on the terrorists who had set their sights on Australia. We returned the following January to make ‘The Bali Confessions’, a forensic reconstruction based on the accounts of the bombers. Other programs followed: ‘The Australian Connections’ in June 2003 and ‘Still at Large’, on the bombers who had evaded capture, in November 2003.

  Terrorism would remain an enduring preoccupation for the world, Australia, Four Corners and me, for the decade that followed. But as the years passed and the abuses perpetrated in the name of the ‘war on terror’ became ever more apparent, the story and our approach to it changed. I became less fixated on the terrorists and more intrigued by the personal stories of those who had joined their cause, like Australians Jack Thomas and Mamdouh Habib, who were both arrested in Pakistan after 9/11 over their links to Al Qaeda. While sharing the horror felt by most Australians at the atrocities, I came to admire the profound conviction of some of the people attracted to the Islamist cause. The fact that Jack Thomas was re-tried on terrorism charges as a result of the interviews he gave to me and Four Corners in 2005 and 2006 caused me deep distress. I had got to know Thomas, his wife and children quite well in the year we spent filming with them on and off, and felt personally responsible, having prevailed upon him to do the interview, for the fact that it resulted in him facing trial. Thankfully he was acquitted of the terrorism charg
es, which were always flimsy.

  By 2008 I was reporting on the growing revulsion over the United States’ use of torture against terror suspects, and the Australian government’s complicity in Mamdouh Habib’s incommunicado detention and torture in Egypt and so-called ‘rendition’ to Guantanamo Bay. It was stories like these that eventually persuaded me that the tactics used by the supposed good guys in the war on terror were as evil in their own way as those used by the terrorists. My last report for Four Corners was ‘Good Cop Bad Cop’ in October 2008, which documented the excesses of Australia’s leading counterterrorism agency, the Federal Police.

  Well, not quite last. You see, leaving Four Corners is one of the hardest things a journalist can do — apart from working for it — simply because there is no better job in journalism in Australia. I personally know nowhere else where journalists are given the time, resources and support to produce tough, consistent, incisive, investigative public affairs reporting, week after week.

  After three years as a freelance print journalist, I returned to Four Corners in 2011 to work with producer Peter Cronau, researcher Anne Worthington and reporter Nick McKenzie from the Age on an exposé of human trafficking and sexual servitude in Australia. ‘Sex Slavery’ went to air on 6 October 2011.