Cossie, Good Weekend, Press council

4. Full marks to Cossie for ending the termination rort

By Stephen Mayne

Sometimes it takes days for interesting Budget stories to emerge and so it was with this one that The AFR published on Saturday:

High-paid executives face sharply higher tax bills on their termination payments under changes in the budget that spell the end of the controversial golden handshake. As part of Treasurer Peter Costello's reforms to superannuation, termination payments above $140,000 will be taxed at the top 45% tax rate, instead of the current rate of 30%.

Executives will also be banned from rolling over their payouts into superannuation, a strategy that traditionally allows them to cut to 15% or less the tax they pay. The changes, which will take effect on July 1, 2007, are expected to trigger a wave of resignations and contract renegotiations as they could cost top executives hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now without wishing to gloat, Crikey has been a lone voice in the media banging on about this rort over the past year. CEOs who either retire or come to the end of their contracts remarkably end up with "termination" payments in the annual report because it is hugely advantageous from a tax perspective.

The three worst examples were as follows:

Ted Kunkel: ran Fosters for 12 years but still managed a $3.4 million "termination" payment despite supposedly retiring on good terms.
Paul Anderson: left BHP after engineering the Billiton merger, but scored a $3.2 million "termination" payment and is now back as a director.
Rob Turner: didn't have his contract at IOOF renewed when it expired but still managed a $2 million "termination" payout.

Now that Cossie has closed the loophole, it would be interesting to know what the tax treatment of Fred Hilmer's $4.5 million "retirement benefit" from Fairfax was all about. And soon-to-depart CEOs such as Roger Corbett at Woolworths and David Morgan at Westpac might have some quick footwork to do if they want to cash in before the loophole closes. Former Colonial First State CEO Chris Cuffe must also be relieved he pocketed his $26.5 million termination payout under the old system.

Having ended this rort, Cossie should not turn his mind to option valuations and the 50% discount on capital gains tax for equity schemes as these are also being widely abused by the CEOs of some of our biggest companies.


5. Did Good Weekend go soft on Harold Mitchell?

By Stephen Mayne, subject of a Good Weekend cover story hatchet job in 2002

The gold medal winner for hatchet jobs in the Australian media remains the cover of Fairfax's Good Weekend. Sure, A Current Affair and Today Tonight fix up plenty of small-time con-artists and dodgy builders, but they get nowhere near Good Weekend's record for seriously pounding high profile people.

With the biggest and best print audience in the country – 1.8 million readers in NSW and Victoria each Saturday – the magazine has enormous reach and chooses to exercise that power with authoritative and entertaining stitch-ups.

The magazine's most successful editor, Fenella Souter, once gloated: "You haven't been done until you've been done by Good Weekend." She was presumably referring to "done" as in profiled, but many of its victims would regard it as being "done over".

So just who has copped it in the neck over the years? How's this for a list? Malcolm Turnbull, Richard Carleton, Alan Jones, Mike Willesee, Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter, Lloyd Williams (sued), Rene Rivkin, Philip Nitschke, News Ltd's celebrity chef Donna Hay, stockbroker Ian Story (committed suicide that day), Troy Dann and celebrity profiler Antonella Gambotto, the last two being good examples of people who disappeared from public view after being skewered.

All of this provides interesting background for the latest cover story on media buying powerhouse Harold Mitchell. Jane Cadzow is one of Good Weekend's toughest profilers, but would she be able to stitch up the man who decides where about $700 million of advertising is spent each year? Such is the Mitchell power, a negative profile could literally cost Fairfax tens of millions in revenue, as it did when the Lowy family took him on back in the late 1980s for supposedly not delivering enough advertising to Network Ten.

Well, Cadzow and Good Weekend have passed the test because Saturday's interesting profile certainly wasn't a hagiography, although Mitchell has no reason to be calling in the lawyers. There were some fascinating insights into his tough background and personality, but he certainly didn't get as easy a ride as Eddie McGuire in The Australian Magazine. The two issues which Cadzow needed to broach in any credible profile are Mitchell's bullying tactics and his financial troubles in the 1990s and both were as follows:

"There's a saying in Melbourne: 'Don't cross the fat man,'" says one industry observer, while another says Mitchell is "basically a bully boy who has ruled by fear and intimidation all his life."

His worst nightmare came true in the early 1990s, when several big property investments went bad, wiping him out financially. "I lost everything," he says, but, rather than file for bankruptcy ("I would never do that. That's the easy way out"), he went back to working seven days a week at the agency: "I settled every major debt. It took me five years."

It would be interesting to know which properties were involved, who the creditors were and whether everyone was paid 100 cents in the dollar, plus penalty interest, as Paul Keating insists he did with the Commonwealth Bank over his piggery. Harold has such media buying power that he could certainly confer an advertising benefit on a financial client who happened to double up as a creditor. However, knowing how generous a philanthropist Harold has become, he probably did fix up every last dollar of penalty interest.



13. The Age skewers Labor's worst rorter in Victoria

By Stephen Mayne

The Age poached Michael Bachelard from The Australian last month and the investment appears to have paid some handsome early dividends with an exquisite skewering of the ALP's alleged worst rorter and branch stacker in Victoria, Keilor MP George Seitz.

Saturday's paper featured the page one splash, the break out, the full page feature and the editorial which, if Labor had any sense of decency, would see Seitz disendorsed and sitting as a discredited independent by the end of the week. Alas, Premier Steve Bracks is showing no such inclination, even claiming Seitz is a good MP:

These are allegations, unproven, opposed by the member. Vigorously opposed. Legal action has been taken and obviously if any matters need to be investigated they will be. He (George Seitz) has been a long serving member. He has served his community well and I think that if you talked to people in the Keilor area they will say he has stood up for that area over a long period of time.

So much for open and accountable government under nice guy Bracks. Why on earth would he want to lie down with dogs and catch fleas like that?

While it was Steve Bracks who publicly launched the proposed writ against The Age for defamation, the 65-year-old veteran who has amassed six properties over the years clearly has no other option. The scale of the allegations is so comprehensive that a failure to sue would surely lead the ALP immediately to disown him.

It's in these sorts of situations that rival media outlets really need to back each other up, and it was good to hear Jon Faine giving the issue a burst on ABC 774 Melbourne this morning. The oft-used tactic of immediately declaring an intention to sue in the face of an embarrassing story has long been used to fob off other media attempting to follow up the story or seek a response. In fact, this might make an interesting list. Send your suggestions to smayne@crikey.com.au.

Not only has Seitz been caught red-handed branch stacking, rorting ALP memberships and producing patently false accounting in his various community groups and bingo fundraising operations, the bloke appears to have been economical with the truth when confronted with the evidence about his connection to the various schemes.

The colourful Labor figure who sat next to me at last year's fiery ALP state conference described Seitz as "a cockroach who would prosper in any environment". Indeed, it would be funny if he weren't so influential: the Seitz stacks were pivotal in getting Bill Shorten preselected in the safe seat of Maribyrnong, which is not the sort of baggage the self-declared prime ministerial wannabe would want to take to Canberra.



19. Piers Akerman, Crikey and the Press Council

By Stephen Mayne

Piers Akerman may have just had his greatest moment in the sun with yesterday's speculative Sunday Telegraph column predicting the PM will make a dignified exit in December, but on Thursday one of his bosses will have the tedious task of sitting down at a Press Council mediation session in Sydney with yours truly.

Jack Herman, the executive officer of the Press Council, will personally run the mediation which will be attended by The Daily Telegraph's associate editor Roger Coombs.

At issue is the paper's refusal to run a brief letter from me responding to the following in an Akerman column last December: "it can be argued that almost anyone can call themselves a journalist these days, as evidenced by the nonsense published by people claiming to be journalists on websites such as Eric Beecher and Stephen Mayne's Crikey".

The brief letter simply pointed out that I am a journalist by profession and was in fact business editor and chief of staff of the very paper Akerman's sledge appeared in.

It is interesting experiencing the Press Council process and the Roger Coombs letter defending the non-publication of my letter contained some amusing lines, including that Crikey regularly refuses to apologise.

Truth be known I can't recall a single occasion that someone from News Corp has requested a right of reply in Crikey and not been given it. In fact, 20 examples have been produced and emailed through ahead of Thursday's mediation, including contributions from Akerman himself, Andrew Bolt, Peter Blunden, Terry McCrann, Mark Day, David Fagan and Michael Stutchbury, just to name a few.

By way of contrast, about half a dozen letters of mine to News Ltd publications over the years have never been published, so it's time to check out the power of the watchdog to see if any redress is available.

Akerman even sent the following indignant email less than 24 hours after submitting one of his letters for publication: "Hey, stupid: You haven't run the letter I sent about your latest idiotic attack on me. Piers"

We were about to hit the button on an edition with the letter at the time, yet it's now been almost six months and The Daily Telegraph still hasn't published my polite 96-word letter, instead choosing to fight it through the Press Council. Such hypocrites.

I'll let you know how things progress although there may be some constraints on reporting what actually happens at the mediation.

Copyright © 2022 The Mayne Report. All rights reserved

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