Sam Hawley: It was all captured on camera, the former treasurer, Peter Costello, barging into a reporter at the Canberra airport. Now he’s resigned as chairman of the Nine Network. It’s not been a great time at Nine, with its former news boss, Darren Wick, reportedly departing with a million dollar payout, despite sexual harassment accusations against him. Today, Media Watch host, Paul Barry, on how it’s all unfolded. I’m Sam Hawley, on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Liam Mendes: Mr Costello, were you aware of the allegations against Mr Wick before he left Nine? Were you aware of those allegations, Mr Costello? Don’t, don’t. You’ve just assaulted me.
Sam Hawley: Paul, we’re going to unpack this Peter Costello thing, because we haven’t actually heard his name for a while, but all of a sudden, well, you know, he’s back, right? Right. So tell me about this incident at Canberra airport.
Paul Barry: Well, he, as you know, the, or was, the chair of the Nine Network, Nine Entertainment as it’s now called. He was arriving at Canberra airport and clearly on the same plane, or waiting for him, was a reporter from the Australian called Liam Mendes, who has a form in chasing people through airports.
Liam Mendes: Mr Costello, my name is Liam Mendes from the Australian. Do you support Mr Sneesby as CEO and his handling of the Darren Wick saga?
Paul Barry: And he rocked up to him and asked him about the allegations at Nine involving sexual harassment, misbehaviour by their head of news and current affairs, Darren Wick, who was recently left the network with a massive payout and there have been a lot of allegations about his behaviour in the past and how Nine has covered it up. Mendes was trying to ask Costello about this, with a smirk on his face, Costello marched ahead and basically barged into him and pushed him over.
Liam Mendes: You’ve just pushed me. It’s all on camera. Mr Costello, Mr Costello, you can’t, you can’t do that. That’s all captured on camera.
Paul Barry: He then tried to persuade the media by giving a press conference that he had not laid a hand on him, not struck him.
Peter Costello: …backed into an advertising placard and he fell over. I did not strike him. If he’s upset about that, I’m sorry.
Paul Barry: Which was kind of semantic because he’d quite clearly pushed him, if you looked at the video, and not surprisingly, as a result of that, the Nine board met and decided that his position as chair was no longer tenable and he resigned.
Sam Hawley: And Liam Mendes, of course, he didn’t have a traditional camera crew with him, right? He was just filming this on his phone.
Paul Barry: That’s right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he used to be a pap once upon a time. He now writes articles as well, but he certainly had his phone with him and that’s where the footage comes from.
Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Paul, just remind me, before we go on, what Nine Entertainment owns. I mean, how big a stake in the Australian media landscape does it have?
Paul Barry: Look, it’s massive. Up there with the ABC and News Corp. It owns, obviously, the Nine television network. It owns Stan, which is a streaming service, and it owns the Fairfax metro newspapers, as was. So that’s the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. That is a block of very powerful print properties. Nine also owns radio, a big radio network, 3AW and 2GB, so it has power in radio as well. And it has been one of the major commercial networks for years and years and years.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, so it’s a huge, huge. It used to be owned, of course, by the Packers. That’s right. And when you think of Nine, I don’t know why, but you always still think of the Packers, right, because of their long history with Nine, they don’t own it anymore. But James Packer had a few choice words, didn’t he, about Mr Costello’s chairmanship before that incident at the Canberra airport?
Paul Barry: Yes, Packer had a crack at Costello, which was a strange thing, I thought. He used to be a very good friend of Peter Costello. I remember when I first started on Media Watch back in 2000, I did a year back then, and he described him as my very good friend, Peter Costello. And, you know, he’s had a long history of association with the Packer family, Peter Costello. So that was a real surprise for James Packer to come out and say that. I’m not sure what the motivation was there.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, right, okay. Well, he did say he hasn’t been good for investors, Peter Costello. I guess so. But broadly, I mean, do we have any sense, actually, of how Peter Costello, you know, the former treasurer, performed as chairman?
Paul Barry: Who knows how much he was behind the strategy of buying out Fairfax, which is what Nine Network did, or they merged with Fairfax. I mean, that was, in terms of a business move, fantastic. Also picking up the radio network. So in forming this media conglomerate, that’s been an excellent thing for Nine to do as a business. So if Costello was responsible for that, then he’s done a good job. But in terms of the culture of the network and in terms of a lot of people think also in terms of the politics of the Nine newspapers, he’s not done a very good job at all, and particularly in terms of culture.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, all right, well, yeah, let’s get to that now. So let’s talk more about that questioning, I guess, from the journalist from The Australian at the Canberra airport toPeter Costello, about these allegations of bullying and sexual harassment. They related in part to former senior news boss there, Darren Wick. Just tell me a bit more about that and the allegations against him.
Paul Barry: I used to work there briefly, and he was the boss of Current Affair when I was there, so I know him reasonably well. He had an incident when he was caught at the wheel of his car. I think he went up onto the pavement in his four-wheel drive on the way home from a Nine party, and he ran into something, and he was way massively, extraordinarily over the limit. And I think at the time everyone felt that he might have to go and retire, and there wasn’t at the time rumours about his alleged groping of female employees at Nine. It emerged when he left the network and was given this payout, and gradually the rumours started to surface or to get into the media. Sharri Markson on Sky did the hard yards on it and got the first few interviews, and then Kate McClymont put a bit more meat into it and had a front-page story on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, which is owned by Nine Entertainment, which really made it much more serious. It’s worth saying that Nine hasn’t denied any of the things that have been said in terms of the rampant sexual misbehaviour, nor has Darren Wick, so there’s no defamation actions, there’s no disputing the allegations that have been made, although we don’t know whether they’re true. We also don’t really know much detail because no one’s come on the record and said, yes, it happened to me, he did this to me. So at the moment we’re a little bit in the dark about the extent of it and the nature of it, but clearly there is a lot of smoke there, more than smoke, and it appears that it’s been known about for a long time, and there are allegations made by News Corp that the company has used non-disclosure agreements to shut women up so they don’t go out and talk about it, so it’s paid people off. Again, we don’t know whether that’s true, but that’s an allegation that’s been made.
Sam Hawley: And of course it’s those allegations that put Peter Costello and Nine’s chief executive, Mike Sneesby, of course, under huge pressure, these allegations of a sort of toxic culture at Nine Entertainment. Nine has now established a wide-ranging internal review, but what else is it doing about this?
Paul Barry: Well, who knows? Again, we don’t know very much, but it’s worth saying that Costello has been a director of Nine since 2013 and chair since 2016, so it’s very unlikely that this stuff hasn’t come across his desk in some shape or form, you would have thought. The CEO at Nine, Mike Sneesby, has only been there a couple of years. It’s conceivable that he doesn’t know or didn’t know about it, probably not very likely, but certainly conceivable. The question is who at Nine did know about it and what they did about it, and I think the problem is that looking back at the history of Nine, you’ve only got to go back to 2017 and find the ABC investigation into Don Burke.
ABC News: 7.30 has spoken to many women for this story who all describe a man who talked obsessively about sex, who used his power to belittle and harass them, behaviour that was tolerated by those who employed him.
Paul Barry: And that showed all sorts of tolerance of sexual peccadillo and sexual harassment by Burke over the years, which had been going on since the 1980s, which Nine had done nothing about. Now, that again, that emerged on Costello’s watch in 2017, and the idea that it’s still going on seven years later, nothing like as bad as Burke, I’m sure, but it’s still going on seven years later, really is, I think, quite shocking.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, right. So it’s been what allowed to fester.
Paul Barry: Well, clearly they’ve not cleaned the place up. They’ve not cleaned their act up, obviously, if this stuff is true. It seems to be likely to be true. I mean, I think the main concern is the culture of the media and employment in the media, and Nine is, I think, by far the worst. But we’ve had a survey here at the ABC recently, and a lot of women saying that they felt bullied and had been sexually harassed. So you’ve just got, across the media, you’ve got this sort of terrible culture in the way in which women are treated. And the way… To be fair, it’s not just women. It is… The media is a bullying culture.
Sam Hawley: So how does that culture actually change then, Paul? Probably not with a million-dollar payout, which is what media reports say Wick got, right?
Paul Barry: Wick has kept that payout so far. I think there are questions about whether he will be able to keep it, because Nine… There are some people at Nine who are clearly unhappy about him getting it, and I think if the investigation turns up a whole lot of allegations against him that can be substantiated, I would be very surprised if he does keep it. So that might be one way in which progress could be made and a signal could be given that this is not going to be tolerated in the future. I think another positive step is that the person now in charge of Nine, or at least the chair of the Nine board… Not exactly in charge, but in charge of the board, is a woman, Catherine West, who’s a lawyer from Sky News in Britain, who’s been on the board for eight years, I think, as a non-executive director. So I think that, again, will help. You would hope that as a result of this investigation there will be some guidelines come out, some statements, some changes in the culture at Nine, and that other media companies will then follow suit.
Sam Hawley: So why should people out there actually care about this, though, Paul, given, I suppose, they don’t have a great deal of trust in media organisations anyway?
Paul Barry: Well, I think they care because I think they care about the behaviour of people like Peter Costello. I mean, he’s a former treasurer. He’s a man who’s in charge of a company where these allegations are being made, and he has no… appears to feel that he has no need to answer the questions put to him by the media, however rudely and intemperately those may be put. I think people care about that. They care that the people who run this country or run the big institutions in this country don’t give a toss. So I think that’s one reason. I think women as a whole would certainly care about the way that women in the media are treated, and I think rightly so. I think we also do care about the way in which the media that we are supposed to trust is itself running its business. So I think there’s a number of reasons.
Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Paul, I wonder what now for Peter Costello then?
Paul Barry: Well, I can’t imagine there’s going to be many people wanting to sign him up as a director this week, and I would imagine that it’s going to take some time for the memories of that video to fade. And it’s a sad end, really. I mean, it’s a stupid way to end your career, especially when you have a whole bunch of people in your own media company who do that every day of the week and who chose people down the street and get in their face. You’d have thought he would be smart enough not to turn round and refuse to answer questions and then push the guy over. I mean, that really is a very, very stupid way to end your career.
Sam Hawley: Paul Barry is the host of Media Watch, which goes to air at 9.15 on ABC TV on Monday nights, and you can also catch it on iview. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald, Jess O’Callaghan and Anna John. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.