Neville Owen

"Since Stokes had arrived in Perth, there had been only two commercial television channels there — Seven and Nine. For the past few years the rumour mill had been whispering that the market was ripe for a third. The key to Stokes’s bid for this third licence would be his ‘principal solicitor’ Neville Owen, who also became a trusted commercial advisor, friend and executor — ‘more than just a lawyer to him,’ says Owen. In 1983 Stokes had persuaded Owen, a partner at Robinson Cox (later Clayton Utz), to devote most of his time to Stokes’s expanding affairs while remaining with the firm. Owen would spend the rest of the decade at Stokes’s elbow, often working alongside Anthony Kiernan, a lawyer with radio and television experience. Owen had shown his natural ability and amiable nature while doing legal work on earlier media deals involving South Western Telecasters and the new radio station, 96FM. Now Stokes asked him to help draft a formal application to the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal to be granted the third commercial licence. He knew plenty of others would want it and was determined to go into the battle better equipped than anyone else. ‘I was preparing from 1983 for the [licence] inquiry in 1984,’ Owen recalls. ‘I was principal solicitor, led by Daryl Williams QC, later Commonwealth Attorney General. The junior was Michael Slattery, later a Supreme Court judge in Sydney. It really was a combined effort of lawyers and commercial people. A full-time commitment.’"

"‘It’s the best business since the shopping centres,’ Bill Rayner would say later. Neville Owen agrees. ‘Caterpillar is one of the world’s great survivor US brands — better than Boeing, Harley or Levis,’ he declares. Stokes had picked up what would become one of the best Cat franchises in the world, and would eventually add two more. He would be far better known for media ventures, but the union with Caterpillar would be his greatest business move."