Kerry Packer

"The regulation that first confronted Heatley, Jarvis and Green was daunting. Just to try to replicate the Australian situation of showing live racing in pubs meant first penetrating a dense thicket of bureaucracy and government-mandated monopoly. Technically, putting a satellite dish in a pub car park was not difficult. Nor was leasing transponder space—there was a satellite with a transponder capable of rebroadcasting from Australia to New Zealand, which potentially allowed Australian horse racing to be shown live across the Tasman. Jarvis had already talked with Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine about getting access to its racing channel’s content. But even if you owned your own pub—owned the land, owned the buildings—and bought your own satellite dish, paid yourself to have it installed and paid for the satellite space to receive the signal and the coverage, you would still need a licence from Telecom to set up the dishes and allow the telecommunications to go ahead."

"There were dilemmas everywhere the novice Sky team looked. What if the government changed its mind and the frequencies were never tendered? What if they were tendered but Sky lost the bid? Or won it but had nothing to broadcast? But if they signed up pay TV rights, then lost the bid, the money they had paid for content would be wasted. Would their chances of signing up rights, and winning frequencies, be enhanced if they had a demonstrable physical base? But what if they paid for a base, then did not win the frequencies or could not obtain the rights or both? However they looked at it, there was no way of escaping significant financial risk. On top of that, apart from Jarvis’s early discussions with Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine in Australia about televised horse racing, none of them knew how to go about signing international broadcasting rights for a TV company, let alone one that was not yet on air. The one outcome they did not consider was what might happen if they set up pay TV and not enough New Zealanders were willing to pay for it to make it viable. But as David Grieve observes, Heatley has an ability to look past problems. Grieve remembers that in the post-crash environment when people were being much more cautious in their spending, Heatley paid $2 million for a property at O’Neills Avenue in Takapuna. ‘He always seemed prepared to move forward, rather than move backwards.’"

"Heatley and Jarvis were introduced to Sam Chisholm, the Kiwi then-chief executive of Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine. Sky paid around $350,000 to Chisholm and some of his people to act as consultants—effectively to broker the introductions Sky needed to set up meetings. It felt like a lot of money to pay for not much but it was the price of opening doors."

"By now Heatley was very anxious. Even with TVNZ as a shareholder, the company was costing him and Jarvis far more than they had expected and Heatley was increasingly carrying more of the financial burden. They needed to find another investor. The attempt to bring in Kerry Packer had been a dismal though memorable failure, leaving them with nothing more than a good dinner-party story. It was time for Heatley to try tapping his own business contacts."

"On his way up, Gonski would become a corporate confidant of Kerry Packer, Rupert Murdoch and Frank Lowy, among others. But only one of his tycoon patrons ever personally picked him up from the airport, and that was Kerry Stokes. It was the late 1970s, soon after they’d met, and Gonski had been asked to Perth to work on a project he has forgotten but which was almost certainly the controversial CPI buy-back. What he has never forgotten is the sight of Stokes waiting for him in a blue Rolls-Royce convertible, as casually and quietly as if Gonski were family. ‘That never happens,’ says Gonski of the gesture. Tycoons will spend money on good help, but rarely their own time. Yet Stokes goes out of his way to include relative strangers, to make them feel wanted and ‘on the team’. Some can’t help thinking he means it."

"In January 1987 Stokes was moored off Rottnest Island when the time came to call Kerry Packer and bid on Nine. He paddled a dinghy to shore and queued in his shorts and thongs to use a telephone box to ring Packer in Sydney. He didn’t have any change, so had to make a reverse-charge call. He knew what Alan Bond was offering. ‘I’ll offer 50 cents more than Alan Bond if I can get some support from you,’ he recalls telling Packer. By ‘support’ he meant a break on programming costs, which Packer could control because he had long-standing deals with American production houses. Stokes also suggested he would be a more stable owner for Nine than Bond. Packer grudgingly agreed, but it didn’t help. That night the news broke that Bond had offered another $1 a share, putting his total bid above the billion-dollar mark. It was an offer Packer could not refuse and Stokes would not match, especially the extra $50 million of borrowed money he says Bond grafted on top of the agreed price, like a cherry on a cake. The two Kerrys sat back to wait for Bond to implode. Watchers weren’t sure where the extra $50 million went but some speculated most of it would find its way back to Bond. He was clever like that."

"For Lowy, the BDC deal wrapped up a national network of television and radio stations that Stokes estimates cost a total of $1.2 billion. Kerry Packer had said you get only ‘one Alan Bond in a lifetime’, but getting a temporarily dazzled Lowy wasn’t bad."

"Kerry Packer: ‘I should have crushed you when I had the chance.’ Kerry Stokes: ‘But I never gave you the chance.’"