Parker

"Knox says the joke at Australian Capital Equity head office was that he became the ‘Minister for Crap Incorporated’. It was a backhanded compliment: he was called in to help patch up stray business ventures so they could be saved and sold or, if hopeless, quietly strangled. At Stokes’s behest, he and Parker would later also work behind the scenes to help Stokes’s oldest children, Raelene and Russell."

"WHEN PETER GAMMELL paid a visit from Scotland to see his ‘godfathers’ Stokes and Parker in mid-1987, he was impressed. Australian Capital Television had flourished to become what Gammell calls ‘an engine for growth’: its operating profits had paid off the $13 million purchase price so rapidly that only $4 million was owing on an asset now valued in tens of millions. With the golden goose 96FM and Jack Bendat’s Golden West Network (as South Western Telecasters had become), Stokes and his…"

"STOKES’S INSTINCT TO avoid the mob turned out to be strong. So did his misgivings about whether the boom would last. But the itch to join the big league of media players niggled at him. It was a make-or-break moment. If staying in the market was a test of nerve, as so many of the 1980s big shots implied, would selling out brand him as some sort of failure? Even (or especially) with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, the politics of it was as primitive as playground push-and-shove. Nobody wanted to blink first. But Parker advised Stokes to follow his instinct and step off the train in case it crashed. Parker had got it wrong with PGF and Stokes had got it wrong with Pacific Film, waving aside Bill Rayner’s gentle protests that film processing was…"