Barnaby Joyce is hardly the first person to profit from a paid interview in Australia. The $150,000 (reportedly to be held in a trust for his six-week-old son Sebastian) isn’t the highest we’ve seen, and his circumstances (a working politician cashing in on his private life) aren’t the grubbiest.
Nevertheless, we’re marking this story by taking a look back at some of the most memorable Australian cases of chequebook journalism.
Stuart Diver
The sole survivor of the Thredbo disaster in 1997, Stuart Diver’s story was highly sought-after by the networks. Seven won the television rights to tell his story, for a rumoured $250,000, and the Australian Women’s Weekly mopped up the rights for a print interview. He was also made a commentator for Seven’s coverage of the 1998 Winter Olympics.
Todd Russell and Brant Webb
One of the biggest payouts for an interview, the Beaconsfield mining disaster survivors Todd Russell and Brant Webb were paid $2.6 million by Seven for a two-hour special interview called The Great Escape.
Bob Hawke and Blanche D’Alpuget
The former PM and his now-wife told the story of their affair to Woman’s Day in a memorable interview and photoshoot (in their bathrobes) for a reported $200,000 in 1995.
Sally Faulkner
Even before the millions of dollars Nine spent on legal fees when its 60 Minutes team was arrested in Lebanon while covering (and conspiring in) a botched child-snatching, the current affairs program was forking out. Rather than paying the children’s mother Sally Faulkner directly, the program had paid $69,000 and promised a total of $115,000 to the agency planning to bring her children back to Australia.
Lindy Chamberlain
After Lindy Chamberlain was acquitted of her baby Azaria’s 1980 murder at Uluru, she was reportedly paid $250,000 by Nine for the rights to her story. Twenty years on, in 2000 she again spoke to Nine (60 Minutes) for another reported $250,000, and she went back to the same network’s A Current Affair in 2012 after the most recent coronial findings into Azaria’s death. ACA shared a 2004 exclusive with Woman’s Day, paying Chamberlain between $75,000 and $150,000 for a story about allegations Azaria was buried in a Melbourne backyard.
Schapelle Corby
The family of Australia’s favourite drug-runner Schapelle Corby has raked it in since Corby’s arrest in Bali in 2004. As well as the proceeds of her book (some of which was seized by authorities under proceeds of crime legislation), Corby and her family have sold various parts of their stories over the years, including magazine and television interviews. Mercedes appeared on the cover of men’s magazine Ralph magazine in 2008 for an undisclosed sum. In just the first year after Corby’s arrest, it was reported that her mother and sister were paid $130,000 for exclusive interviews. Rumours of a $2 million deal with Seven on her 2014 release were scuppered when the interview was canned and replaced with her sister Mercedes.
Michelle Leslie
In 2006, Nine reportedly again forked out for an Australian facing drugs charges — $600,000 for an interview with model Michelle Leslie, who was arrested and convicted on drugs charges in Indonesia. While she was still in prison, New Idea paid more than $50,000 for an interview and photoshoot.
Gordon Wood
Nine’s 60 Minutes paid $200,000 for an interview in 2012 with Gordon Wood, the man acquitted of killing his girlfriend Caroline Byrne. That interview followed an infamous exchange with the current Media Watch host Paul Barry in another paid interview on Seven’s now-defunct Witness program in 1998, where Wood asks: “Do you think I did it?”. Wood also gave a paid interview to The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Wayne Carey
In an especially grubby effort, New Idea paid footballer Wayne Carey and his then-girlfriend Kate Neilsen $180,000 to speak about him assaulting her — cutting her face with a wine glass he threw at her. Quotes included: “Wayne isn’t violent — not at all… That’s not to say our relationship hasn’t been volatile, but that’s (only) at times.”
Douglas Wood
In 2005 and better days for the Ten Network, it paid a reported $400,000 for an interview with Douglas Wood, an Australian engineer held hostage in Iraq for 47 days who saw his Iraqi assistants executed in front of him.
NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the date of Bob Hawke and Blanche d’Alpuget’s appearance in Woman’s Day.
Emily, do you know if the payment would be taxable? This page from the ATO suggests that it would be, but it may depend on who is earning the income – a career politician without much of a career left, a really ineffective but still highly paid social media adviser or (I would not put it past them) an infant.
http://law.ato.gov.au/atolaw/view.htm?docid=AID/AID2001206/00001&PiT=99991231235958
Just noticed that the decision was withdrawn!
It’s income for someone.
I don’t know precisely how it would work if you paid the money into a trust in the infant’s name but it seems unlikely that would get the money tax free or we’d all have part of our salary paid into trusts in our kids’ names to pay for kid-related expenses.
Crackerjack.
Let’s not forget – what with all the noise just now about the outrageous notion that a politician ‘still on the public payroll’ might flog himself about the commercial Meeja, too – that Hawkey was then (still is now) very much a taxpayer tit-sucker, in the form of his stupendous, totally unfunded Super sinecure. So’s Richo, Vanstone, Hewson, Carr etc etc etc…pretty much every post-elected Rep (Fed and State) of that generation who’ve since gone on to coin it up in the commercial media, in one form or another. The sound of Richo – arguably the biggest Commercial Media Whore of the vast lot of ex-pollies who are still quietly pulling down their six figures annually of my tax dollar year in year out – sticking it to Joyce, as a ‘hypocrite’ besmirching the holy sanctity of a taxpayer salary on Slimeback Radio, was particularly amusing.
All the hysterical shrieking at Joyce is, of course, just the usual distracting projected guilt, to deflect our attention away from just how incestuously interbred, morally corrupted and untenably dysfunctional, the supposedly ‘respectable’ main branches of the dying Polly-Press family tree have also become. Joyce’s true sin, of course, is simply rooting his sibling unashamedly and unapologetically in the living room, for all of us to see.
Great, acute piece EW. Joining the dots, Crikey, joining the dots…
PS: …tweak your typo EW, the bathrobe shoot was 1995 not ‘85…my, what a stir THAT would made then…:-)
..err, speaking of typos. “Joyce… rooting his sibling“?
Shome mishtake shorely?
But, with these interbred bumpkins, who knows – I think we should be told.
It’s a metaphor, y’nong..you know, ‘the politician’ incestuously laying down illicitly and gene-disastrously with his sister ‘the free press’ – for mutual pleasure, as per like forever – only…out in the open in Joyce’s case, without the saving grace of a discreet back bedroom. Hence, every other incestuous member of the two interbred clans shrieking ‘Shame!’…
You know, AR: a metaphor. Was a wee bit chuffed with it, m’self, tbh…:-)
..okayyy, raps knuckles on forehead, that consanguinity.
The government has argued many times for the repayment of salary and entitlements of MPs sitting while ineligible. Ludlam, Day and Culleton cases are precedents. The debts have eventually been waived by the Commonwealth (yes, taxpayers, your money) on the grounds that enforcing the repayment may impose hardship.
On behalf of taxpayers, I will accept this $150k from Barnaby in part-payment of his debt.
I feel no remorse for Sebatian. If he were to grow up with this silver spoon, he might turn out just like Barnaby.
How very progressive of you to simply presume the money all belongs to the man, Admin!
Oh, this story. The gift it just keeps on giving…the gift of all-at-sea moral pomposities upended and shat back into the faces of Teh Righteous…
I await the Jenna Price firey-fem op ed demanding the poor little mummy be banned by Country Masculine Fiat from appearing on their joint $150k-gig at all, on account of her poor fragile baby brain…:-)
Chortle…oh, chortle…more popcorn!
Jack,
I presume the opposite. I presume Rubble is merely the payeee and the rightful owner of the $150k is not Barnaby, not Sebastian, but is the taxpayer.
Like I said: how very progressive.
But…what of the ‘little lady’, Admin, she of the opening pap-ambush FP splasher that no doubt sent Rupes’ profit that day skyward? It’s her belly, her bub too, her relentlessly harassed and harvested-for-profit late-stage confinement. Are you seriously suggesting that she too must hand over to the taxpayer, say, her $75k half (at least) of that free market contractual exchange!? While the commercial media as a whole, and the taxpayer employees at the ABC, can go on mining her bodily backstory at will for their personal profit/salary…with no similar taxpayer rebate obligations??!! A Sharri Markson, a Julia Baird, a Leigh Sales…all perfectly entitled to make coin from the yarn – in Sales’ case, $400k a year (I heard), from you and me – financially exploiting Vikki Campion’s pregnancy/private affairs/motherhood, along with a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand other ‘journalists’ – the oafish and odious Peter Fitzsimon an especially obnoxious, mansplaining progressive on the subject today – and yet the subject herself…is not? Is not allowed to sell the story of her own body to whoever she wants, for however much she can get, and keep the dough? You seriously think her chunk of that $150k belongs to….you and me???
Oh ho ho ho ho! Oh, that is…hilarious. You progs! Keep our rosaries off her ovaries alright, but by jolly give us all the fiscal fruits of her free market loins, comrades!!!
Such fun. Such delicious fun.
It’s handy to remind kiddies & seniors that trough wallowing is not recent but what is special about Barnyard is that he was, and remains, our employee so the fee being paid is based solely of his egregious abuse of that position.
I’m not keen on pile-ons though tempted to make an exception is his case.
Like I said higher up AR: how many ex-polly commercial media whores are drawing six figure taxpayer Super stipends – and will until they drop – while coining it up big time on the back of their ‘public polity’ marketability, generally retrospectively demeaning the public office that got ‘em where they are?The whole point of those old obscene super schemes were supposedly so these fuckers could maintain a bit of lofty dignity in their dotage, stay above the grubbing muck. Yet Hawkey was barely a year out of the Lodge, pulling $200k plus or whatevs for life of your and my loot, when he put his bronzed bloated belly about the shitsheets for dough, like some creepy Hollywood producer and his acid-blonde doxy. Latham, Richo, Hewson, Amanda, columnists, radio shows, Fox slots, election coverage…checkers with public- stipended moonlighters. We are chucking money at these freeloading double-dippers decades after they stopped lifting a damned finger on anyone’s behalf but their own, precisely so they wouldn’t hang around like rotting political corpses, stinking the whole polity up and corroding our trust and faith in it.
Yet whore on in the meeja they do. Coining it up, rattling the righteous stick now at Joyce.
At least we can still vote him out. And we do get at least some public bang for our public buck. We are paying these other cretins to do nothing – except make yet more money for themselves – until they die.
What’s the difference, AR? Really?
…and it’s not even as if the worst of these rank double-dippers are making even a any vague half-hearted effort to ‘stay out of active public & policy politicking’, is it? Richardson has been probably the single most grubbily-influential ‘non-elected-politician-yet-still-on-a-public-payroll’ of the last two decades. Meanwhile there’s Bob Carr right as we speak, puppeteering Keneally in fucking Senate Estimates. And don’t even start me on all the Coalition side’s army of ‘ex-officio’, fully-Superannuated (tax-expensively unfunded) policy lobbyists…
I mean, come on. ‘What is special about Barnyard…’ ???
Is nuthin’. Except…well, that his double-dipping on both sides of the fence is right out there in the ugly open, for once. Personally? I’m grateful for his ‘fuck you all’ honesty. Refreshingly unpatronising, and maybe – just maybe – it might finally force both politicians and press to have a long, hard rethink about their mutually-disastrous dalliance. The current ‘Public Polity’ they have jointly inbred is a genetic abomination, and needs to be euthanised at last.
I’d also like to see those old unfunded Super schemes ruthlessly means-tested. Highway fucking robbery, in broad daylight, is what it is.
The interview with Hawke and D’Alpuget wouldn’t have been in 1985. He was just two years into his prime ministership and still needed Hazel for appearances’ sake. More likely 1995 after he was retired by Keating and had split with Hazel.