Too early, happily, to write Kerry Stokes’ obituary, but in the past 24 hours, most of the nation’s media have given it a red-hot go, following the punctuation mark that is the Southern Cross “merger”.
Stokes – no longer under the “little Kerry” shadow of his Packer namesake – is to step down as chair of Seven West Media – formed in 2011 from the merger of Seven and West Australian Newspapers – after a total of 16 years on the board, all but three months as chairman.
It’s been an amazing term. For my money, it’s hard not to still see him as one of a very small band of proprietors committed to the power of print, and of course willing to use it. That commitment, incidentally, demonstrated through the major investment at Osborne Park in Perth, and much earlier in Canberra, where a manroland press was installed back in 1996.
Stokes had progressively taken control of WAN, and – with the 2016 acquisition from News of the local annoyance of the Sunday Times – effectively of the west coast.
To listen to the ABC last night, you’d think that broadcasting was history, and the Southern Cross deal symptomatic of its demise – a curious line from an organisation for which broadcasting remains its primary purpose. If it’s truly dying, explain Saturday’s AFL Grand Final, which drew the country’s biggest TV audience since 2016, six million viewers joining Seven, “live and free”, many of them now on targeted BVOD.
Industry statistics – which show the 81.1 per cent share Seven held of the day’s commercial TV audience between 6am and 6pm – miss a detail… that News has inserted itself into an audience for which Nine, Seven and Ten were previously the only licensed players (Seven, incidentally, was a founder shareholder in Sky News Australia).
So yes, things have changed, and Seven West/Southern Cross – or whatever they’ll call it – continues to be part of that change.
Kerry Stokes, who turned 85 on September 14, is stepping back, handing over the chair of the combined company by next February.
He’s entitled to that: Coming “from nowhere”, Stokes famously installed TV aerials and made his first million from the real estate boom, and married four times including to actress Peta Toppano (1992-95) and former Channel 10 newsreader Christine Simpson (1996-present). He owns the country’s dominant Caterpillar dealership and through it Coates Hire and 20,000 head of Red Brahman cattle. With fewer demands from SGH, we’ll watch what follows.
Peter Coleman
Picture Tim Levy, The Nightly