Kerry Packer

Australian media mogul and investor

• Born: December 17, 1937
• Birthplace: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
• Died: December 26, 2005
• Place of death: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Packer inherited a sizable estate from his father, including newspapers, magazines, and television stations. Before Packer died in 2005, he had become the richest person in Australia, with his wealth estimated at more than $6 billion in Australian ($5 billion in U.S. dollars).

Sources of wealth: Inheritance; media; real estate

Bequeathal of wealth: Spouse; children

Early Life

Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer was born in Sydney, Australia, on December 17, 1937. His father, Sir Frank Packer, was a businessman whose investments were primarily in newspapers and magazines. Ambitious and ruthless, Frank was not an ideal father to his two sons, Clyde and Kerry. He verbally and publicly abused and criticized them, as he did his employees. With their parents often absent, the brothers were raised by nannies. In 1945, Kerry was struck down by infantile paralysis and was confined in an iron lung. Enrolled in several schools, he was an indifferent student, and it was eventually discovered that he suffered from dyslexia. A loner with few friends, he excelled in sports. However, in his father’s eyes, Kerry was “the idiot son.”

First Ventures

After leaving school, Packer worked in his father’s newspaper business, starting at the bottom in menial jobs that he attempted to avoid. His older brother, seemingly brighter and more suitable, was groomed to take over Frank’s many businesses. Kerry was the black sheep. In 1956, Frank acquired Channel Nine, one of Australia’s first television stations, which would later prove to be the key to Kerry’s financial success. By the early 1970’s, Clyde had become estranged from his father, and Kerry was the heir to the family fortune.

Mature Wealth

When Frank died in 1974, his financial interests were estimated at about $100 million (Australian dollars), although probate proceedings indicated that the estate was worth only $1.3 million. Kerry inherited two television stations, five radio stations, nine newspapers, magazines, considerable property, shares in a gold mine, racehorses, and other investments. Initially, he saw his duty as merely to husband his father’s fortune, but over the next thirty years his moneymaking abilities enabled him to vastly increase his wealth and become Australia’s richest person.

Ironically, his father’s verbal abuse taught him lessons about being tough and caring little about what others thought of him. Packer’s temper was legendary, and although he had a quick wit, he seems to have suffered from a siege mentality, convinced that the world was out to get him and his money. Given the opportunity, he showed that he had his father’s talent for business.

By 1976, he had bought out his brother’s share of Consolidated Press, the newspaper corporation founded by his father. He had already proved himself at the Sydney Bulletin and with the new magazine Cleo (loosely modeled on Cosmopolitan), which was more titillating than Frank’s more conservative women’s magazines. Circulation of Women’s Weekly, long the flagship of Consolidated Press, also increased significantly. Employees at Channel Nine were initially concerned that Packer had neither much knowledge nor much interest in the television business, but they were proved wrong. Packer made a fortune from his television station, in large part because his tastes were those of most Australians, who liked films and sports and cared little for intellectual or artistic programs. Channel Nine focused on sports, news, and game shows that were cheap to produce but were extremely rewarding financially.

The Packers, father and son, were very well known in Australia but had a lower profile outside the country. Kerry Packer became famous, or infamous, in the wider world because of the quintessential English game of cricket, which was a legacy to Great Britain’s former colonies, including Australia. For much of its history, cricket was largely a “gentleman’s” game, where amateur gentlemen players took precedence over professional or working-class athletes who played the sport for money, although not much money. Packer challenged cricket’s status quo by staging World Series Cricket for his television network, which aired these games from 1977 through 1979. Cricketers were seriously underpaid in comparison to athletes in many other sports, and when Packer in 1977 secretly offered cricketers $25,000 (Australian dollars) for twelve weeks of work, many players eagerly seized it, including a majority of Australia’s Test team and several of England’s premier players. England’s cricket establishment and the British press ridiculed “Packer’s circus.” Packer was ready to compromise in exchange for gaining a monopoly on televising Australian cricket. When his offer was rejected and he was refused access to Australia’s major cricket grounds, he found other venues in which to stage cricket matches. When various cricket organizations, including the International Cricket Conference, banned anyone who played in Packer’s supertests, he took the conference to court and won. Political pressure forced the opening of the traditional cricket grounds in Sydney and other sporting venues for Packer’s matches, and when he instituted night cricket by adding electric lights to the field, the fans came in great numbers. In 1979, the traditionalists conceded. In exchange for Packer abandoning his World Series Cricket, he received a ten-year monopoly on televising, merchandizing, and marketing cricket in Australia, including the exclusive right to televise Australian matches played overseas. The agreement proved to be a financial bonanza for Packer.

Politically, Packer and his father were backers of Australia’s Liberal Party, which despite its name was politically conservative. Packer, however, was willing to support any party and any politician, including those from the Labor Party, who would do business with him, and his media power found most politicians irrespective of party eager to work with him. In return for his support, Packer wanted to have few government regulations on his media activities, a policy that was popular with other media barons, such as Rupert Murdoch, a fellow Australian.

Packer also had an appreciation of when to buy and when to sell. When Frank died, the Packer family owned only 25 percent of Consolidated Press. In the early 1980’s, in a brilliant financial coup, Kerry bought the non-Packer shares at less than the price established by the auditors, giving him full control of Consolidated Press. He always desired to be in complete control and not troubled by any outsiders, be they politicians or shareholders.

In 1983, the Costigan Royal Commission accused Packer of numerous crimes, including tax evasion, money laundering, corporate fraud, the importation of drugs, pornography, and even murder. Tax fraud was the central allegation, while the other accusations were secondary. Initially, Packer was not publicly named in the investigation, but his name soon surfaced in the newspapers. Packer, like many other successful businesspeople, had sought loopholes that limited his taxes, and some of his investments were intended to lose money in order to reduce his tax burden, a practice that could be ethically problematic but not necessarily criminal. Eventually the findings of the Costigan Commission were sent to Australia’s director of prosecutions for further action, but it was not until 1987 that the government announced that the commission’s charges against Packer were groundless. The public exoneration was possibly due in part to the intervention of Australia’s prime minister, Robert Hawke, whom Packer had supported politically. However, the accusations seriously damaged Packer’s reputation not only in Australia but also in England, where his victory over the cricket establishment was of recent memory. By some accounts, Packer was nearly suicidal during the investigation. He never had much respect for journalists, and after the affair was over, he held the press in total contempt.

In 1987, Packer sold Channel Nine to another ambitious Australian entrepreneur, Alan Bond, for $1.06 billion (Australian dollars), about twice what it was worth. Although television was Packer’s mainstay, it was impossible to pass up $1 billion. After the sale, Packer, who had been consumed with the business of making money for twenty years, decided to step back from the marketplace. He was overweight and out of condition, suffering a severe heart attack in 1990, after which he made a sizable donation toward equipping all New South Wales’s ambulances with defibrillators.

The sport of polo became his new compulsion. At his estate seventy miles north of Sydney, where he owned more than sixty thousand acres of land, he built a polo field and barns for his 160 polo ponies. He also established a polo center in England, and he sponsored an international polo team, of which he was a member; it competed before Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle. In addition to polo, Packer gambled heavily in London, Las Vegas, and elsewhere, sometimes winning or losing millions of dollars in one night. While retreating from day-to-day business activities, he invested in gold mines, engineering companies, magazines, ski resorts, casinos, and other endeavors. His landholdings in Australia were larger than the entire nation of Belgium.

After Bond suffered business reversals, Packer repurchased Channel Nine and made $800 million in profit. To escape changes in Australian tax laws, he relocated his corporate headquarters to the Bahamas. He was not always successful, but over time his wealth continued to grow substantially.

Packer’s health was never good. In addition to the polio he suffered as a child and his near-fatal heart attack in 1990, he received a kidney transplant in 2000. He died at his home in Sydney of kidney disease on December 26, 2005, refusing to prolong his life with dialysis treatment. His wife Roslyn and his two children, James and Gretel, were at his side. A state memorial service was held at the Sydney Opera House, with many politicians, cricket players, and show business personalities in attendance.

Legacy

Kerry Packer’s aim was to make a great deal of money. When he died he was worth more than $6.5 billion (Australian dollars), and he was the richest person in Australia and among the top one hundred richest individuals in the world. He was brutal and overbearing to those who stood in his way, but he was loyal to his friends. While he made billions of dollars, he also spent vast amounts on gambling and his other interests, including his passion for polo. After his death, his son James became head of the many Packer enterprises.

Bibliography

Barry, Paul. The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer. Sydney: Bantam, 1993. The major biography of Packer, although it concludes several years before Packer’s death.

Haigh, Gideon. The Cricket War: The Inside War of Kerry Packer’s World Series. Melbourne, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2007. A new edition, written by one of Australia’s premier cricket writers.

Molloy, Andrew. The Wit and Wisdom of Kerry Packer. Sydney: Australia Media Property, n.d. Described as a combination of William Shakespeare and Sunzi’s The Art of War for businesspeople.

Stone, Gerald. Compulsive Viewing: The Inside Story of Packer’s Nine Network. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking, 2000. A revealing account of Channel Nine, written by a longtime Packer employee.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Who Killed Channel Nine? The Death of Kerry Packer’s Mighty TV Dream Machine. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2007. Stone, a news director at Channel Nine, was Packer’s first producer of Australia’s 60 Minutes.