News Corp and tax: it’s complicated
News Corp Australia broke its silence on Tuesday about the revelation on 11 May that Rupert Murdoch’s Australian media company is the Australian Tax Office’s “top tax risk”.
In questions on notice to the Senate committee investigating corporate tax avoidance, News Corp answered some questions but not all that the committee had asked.
“We understand that the ‘high’ categorisation given to us denotes the complexity of the company and therefore the time and resources required to monitor the complex taxation issue. What it means is that we are subject to continuous review from the ATO,” the CFO, Susan Panuccio said.
Journalist Neil Chenoweth from the Australian Financial Review has been dogged in his pursuit of this story, and is a constant thorn in Murdoch’s side, writing that News Corp’s accounts reveal that its 2013-14 tax refund was even larger than reported, at $923m. But you can always rely on the Australian’s Darren Davidson to put a positive spin on News Corp affairs.
Under the headline “News Corp Australia tax ‘complex’” Davidson wrote that News had “explained its appearance on the Australian Taxation Office’s high classification list, saying the media company’s complex corporate structure after a demerger warranted closer inspection”.
“Responding to a request for further information, chief financial officer Susan Panuccio says the company is incurring and paying substantial tax on its operations in Australia, noting the high categorisation ‘does not imply that we are not paying the correct amount of tax’,” Davidson wrote. It’s this kind of reporting that has led to a war between some AFR scribes and Davidson.
The AFR’s Rear Window gossip columnist Joe Aston has a colourful turn of phrase when it comes to describing Davidson. The only one which is clean enough to repeat here is “the male model from Marylebone”, a reference to his towering appearance in an advertising campaign for the paper.
Channel 7 delivers another blow to staff
A little over a year after Channel 7 axed its nightly current affairs show, Today Tonight, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, the network has delivered another blow to staff. As a cost-saving measure Channel 7 has disbanded its investigative and features unit supervised by former ABC and Nine news chief Max Uechtritz.
The unit was responsible for filing stories for the remaining Adelaide and Perth editions of Today Tonight as well as delivering major news specials like MH370, Rolf Harris and the Sydney Lindt cafe siege. Shocked staff were told at a meeting on Wednesday that Uechtritz had decided he didn’t want to hang around after the restructure and was leaving.
Uechtritz was behind the network’s successful Anzac specials and may return for special projects. The jobs of the remaining journos from the unit are uncertain but some staffers will be redeployed. Channel 7’s news division is under huge pressure from a resurgent Nine News.
ABC downsizes Delhi bureau
Suzy Ramesh has been a key staff member of the ABC’s south Asia bureau in Delhi for 20 years, working for a string of foreign correspondents from Edmund Roy to Jonathan Harley, Geoff Thompson, Peter Lloyd, Michael Edwards and in recent months Stephanie March.
By all accounts Ramesh has been more than a cook: she has been a translator, cultural ambassador and guide. But Ramesh will lose her position in June as the ABC downsizes its Delhi bureau to a single-person VJ model.
Delhi is one of a handful of overseas bureaus, including Tokyo and Bangkok, targeted by a restructure aimed at reducing the significant expense of employing a fully-staffed team of journalists, camera operators and producers.
While the other Delhi support staff received their redundancy entitlements after decades of service, Ramesh was classified as a household staff member which meant she missed out. The recently returned Delhi correspondent Edwards and his wife Fleur have launched a fundraising page to ensure Ramesh has some financial security after all her hard work. “Sadly, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Delhi Bureau will be downsized this year,” they wrote on the page.
“We are grateful that so many of the staff there have been given their entitlements to recognise the decades of service to the ABC and its staff. Unfortunately, Suzy’s classification as a household staff member means she misses out on these entitlements. So we are asking our family, friends and colleagues, and especially those who have enjoyed some of Suzy’s amazing hospitality over the years, to contribute to her ‘redundancy payout’.
“As you know, even $20 goes a long way in India and so we would be very grateful if you would show your appreciation with a donation through this site.”
ABC staffers have showed their appreciation and have been very generous, some donating as much as $1,000 to the fund which aims to raise $8,000 by the end of the month.
Fairfax’s Jason Koutsoukis departs Delhi
The downsizing of foreign bureaus continues. Fairfax Media’s Delhi bureau has also quietly closed. Jason Koutsoukis, the south Asia correspondent for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald based in Delhi has packed up and left. Sources told Weekly Beast that Koutsoukis won’t be replaced. The editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald, Darren Goodsir, said: “Jason’s contract finished with us recently and we are currently reviewing our plans for Delhi.”
Barangaroo lures ex-Fairfax editor
The first female editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Amanda Wilson, has been consulting and serving on boards (Crime Stoppers and the Life Changing Experiences Foundation) since she lost her position so dramatically in 2012.
Wilson was a victim of the Fairfax Media editors purge in June of that year ahead of a major restructure which saw the loss of 1,900 staff. Wilson, as well as the Herald’s publisher, Peter Fray, and the Age’s editor-in-chief, Paul Ramadge, all walked out on the same day after tearful goodbyes to staff. (Fray is now an editor at the Australian.) But now she is coming back to the cutting edge of Sydney affairs with a new position which will see her on the other side of the journalistic divide.
Wilson starts next month as the full-time community engagement and communications director for the Barangaroo Delivery Authority, the site of the development of James Packer’s $1.5bn luxury casino and hotel in Sydney. With her old paper reporting almost daily on the legal, political and environmental aspects of the project, dubbed “Packer’s palace” by opponents, Wilson will surely earn her substantial package.
