Expresso Redundum!
One of the few perks of watching a media exec crash and burn after a short, brutal reign is finding out what nickname the traumatised staff gave them.
So farewell, then, Anthony De Ceglie – the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him 7News boss whose redundancy spree earned him the nickname Voldemort among junior staff in the newsroom.
Partly for the pasty resemblance, mostly because everyone was terrified they’d be next on the cost-cutting chopping block.
Still, De Ceglie was only doing the bidding of his own Dark Lord, Seven West Media Chairman Kerry Stokes.
Question mark hangs over De Ceglie appointments
Sorry, Tony. You’re not off the hook yet.
With De Ceglie out on his arse – sorry, we mean joining the NRL – the focus is now on what will happen to his various ‘captain’s pick’ hires during his 13 months in the job.
There’s Gemma Williams, who was poached from Nine’s A Current Affair to run Spotlight; Sean Power, promoted from running Sunrise to director of news for Seven Sydney; Hugh Whitfeld, the high-profile international reporter brought home and made national newsdesk director; and Natalie Wolfe, who was appointed editor of 7News.com.au after serving as deputy editor of The West n newspaper.
At least two seem to be safe.
Two weeks before De Ceglie jumped, Wolfe updated her job title on LinkedIn from 7News.com.au editor to ‘director of digital news’. This would seem to suggest she is in the clear, despite 7News’ website traffic taking a hit due to declining Facebook and search referrals impacting the whole digital news media industry.
And we hear Power continues to impress as Sydney news director and his job will expand to oversee the soon-to-launch 3pm news bulletin.
If we were placing bets, we’d say Whitfeld will probably be just fine.
A question mark hangs over Williams, who was always a curious hire.
The daughter of former A Current Affair exec producer Grant Williams, she had spent just seven years in the business when she was tapped to run Spotlight at age 25. Her appointment came two months after De Ceglie told Seven staff at a town hall meeting they shouldn’t be ‘too focused on the daily ratings’.
Which is lucky, as Spotlight has had just one ratings win against Nine’s 60 Minutes – for its admittedly excellent scoop on the deadly reality of the ‘clean’ EV industry – since Williams took over as EP last July.
For what it’s worth, a senior source at Seven insisted De Ceglie’s successor Ray Kuka had worked with all the news executives and assured them none would be leaving the business.
New love for the former Mrs Stevie Jacobs
The extremely messy break-up of former Today show weatherman Stevie Jacobs and his producer ex-wife Rose Kelly is practically a canon event in TV land.
It had everything. Rumours of strife, a ‘last-ditch’ move to Vanuatu to save the marriage… then came the split, followed by Rosie’s fling with a strapping ex-commando and reports of a brouhaha at the local gym.
Rosie’s subsequent on-again-off-again relationship with former footy player Matt Shir was another disaster.
Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. Several years on and Rose is thriving, sober and, by all accounts, has found Mr Right.
The former travel presenter recently started posing on her friends-only Facebook account with a new man by the name of Jason ‘JJ’ Lal.
We reached Rose for comment while she was on holiday in Rome, and she told us: ‘Jason and I met late last year through friends and we are really enjoying getting to know each other.
‘I’ve been so grateful for the things that have been happening in my life over the past few years. I wasn’t looking for love, but everyone says that’s when it comes along!
‘We’re taking it slowly but I do absolutely adore him. Our kids get along so well and we laugh a lot. He’s just a gorgeous person and I feel really lucky.’
As for her ex-husband Stevie, with whom she shares daughters Isabella and Francesca, he recently joined streaming platform LeadStory as a presenter and brand ambassador after his Newtown restaurant Bonditony’s shuttered earlier this year.
The ‘big four’ bank on delays
Tuesday’s interest rate cut will be welcome relief for mortgage holders. It will be less welcomed by savers, of course, who will see interest on term deposits fall.
All four of the big banks quickly announced they would pass on the full 0.25 per cent cut to the cash rate the RBA announced, but all is not what it seems.
Timing matters when it comes to these decisions. The banks were very swift with cutting interest for savings accounts, but the cuts to mortgage payments will take more time to be applied.
ANZ, Commonwealth Bank and NAB are all cutting their variable mortgage rates on May 30, meaning they will earn millions of extra dollars in profits between now and then by not cutting their rates sooner.
Westpac – serial offenders on this issue, by the way – are waiting a few extra days, only cutting their mortgage rate on June 3.
Those few extra days will add millions to the bank’s balance sheet – and Inside Mail can reveal it’s a sneaky, deliberate strategy.
We heard this from a very senior figure who has a seat at the table whenever Westpac’s top brass make the decision to ever so slightly delay passing on a rate cut.
No wonder banking isn’t seen as a particularly virtuous profession.
Liberal Party priorities in a nutshell
Chris Stone, state director for the Liberal Party’s NSW division, has elevated pettiness to an art form.
On May 2, the day before his party suffered electoral Armageddon, Stone found the time to write a stern letter to the parents of independent member for Calare, Andrew Gee, who had left the Nationals over their opposition to the Voice referendum.
His parents, both in their 80s, had committed the unforgivable sin of volunteering for their son, despite both being members of the Liberal Party.
In truly Kafkaesque language and with an accompanying photo as evidence of their treachery, Stone told both octogenarians they were no longer welcome in the party because they had ’caused embarrassment’ to it.
The embarrassment is all Stone’s.
‘Leaving aside the pettiness and vindictiveness, I just shake my head that the party of [Robert] Menzies could have such warped priorities,’ a baffled Gee said of his parents’ expulsion.
And Stone had the time to send this missive the day before the election. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!
But, for all his bureaucratic pettiness, Stone has also been guilty of a unhealthy dose of hypocrisy.
Steve Kamper, the NSW Labor MP for Rockdale in southern Sydney was also lent a hand by family members, his brother Bill and his wife Georgina.
Like Gee’s parents, William and Georgina are Liberal Party members. And yet they both donated $1,500 to Kamper’s state election campaign in 2023 and Bill even had the audacity to pose alongside his brother in a bright red Labor T-shirt.
Were Bill and Georgina also booted out the Liberals for their disloyalty? We hear not.
If you’re going to be petty, at least be consistent.
Today newcomer’s mystery dash
Daily Mail’s own Mr Everywhere, senior showbiz reporter Ali Daher, was left puzzled by the evasive behaviour of newly appointed Today sports presenter Danika Mason at a launch party for Jaecoo earlier this month.
It was shine and champagne galore at The Homestead in Centennial Park on May 5 as celebs arrived to preview the Chinese car brand’s new J7 and J8 models.
But not everyone was in the mood to smile for the cameras – including those who are literally paid to smile for the cameras.
Several guests noted Danika’s rather frosty entrance as she dashed past photographers like a scandal-plagued footy player barging through the press pack. The event’s PR was eventually able to grab one picture of her, although it was taken far from the media wall.
As she kept her distance from the reporters and snappers, several were left wondering whether she had mistaken the luxury car launch for a red carpet sprint.
In contrast, Nine veterans Sylvia Jeffreys and Belinda Russell were the picture of professionalism – warm, chatty and doing the rounds – although they both made an Irish exit fairly early in the evening (those 3am alarms don’t wait for goodie bags).
While Daher wasn’t able to ask Danika why she was so determined to speed-run the shindig, we do have our suspicions.
The sportscaster has been a source of tabloid intrigue ever since she abruptly called off her wedding to ex-fiancé Todd Liubinskas in September 2023.
The pair had been three weeks away from walking down the aisle when it all went kaput. Besides cryptically saying there had been a breakdown in trust, we don’t really know what happened.
Adding further intrigue to her already enigmatic personal life, she debuted her new romance with NRL star Liam Knight last year – only for the lovebirds to suffer a blow when Knight signed with Hull FC in the UK Super League while she stayed behind in to replace ousted Alex Cullen on the Today show sports desk.
So, with all that considered, we do understand why she didn’t want to be buttonholed by nosy reporters. Still, there’s nothing wrong with a polite ‘no comment’.
Meanwhile, spare a thought for Sylvia, who found herself politely fending off attention from a handful of overzealous Married At First Sight grooms in attendance.
She’s interviewed them before on Today Extra and now, like the rest of us, she’s figuring out how to forget them.
One guest quipped, ‘You could see it in her eyes – she’s smiled through worse.’
Agency cools on trial of the year
There was much head-scratching in newsrooms this week when press agency AAP indicated they wouldn’t be attending the verdict in the Erin Patterson trial.
You’d think a partially taxpayer-funded wire service would be demanding a front-row seat at Latrobe Valley Law Courts for the biggest show in town.
But they’re not sold on the idea.
One theory is they don’t want to fork out for accommodation, what with the influx of hacks and snappers to the Gippsland town of Morwell jacking up the price of a room, coupled with the uncertainty of how long it could take the jury to reach a verdict.
In their defence, AAP reporters have spent a fair chunk of time there throughout the so-called mushroom trial, and we understand they will be tuning into the livestream once media is alerted the jury has come to a decision.
But the benefit of being in the room is you get all the colour, detail and reactions from the court in the moment the verdict is read out. A video link simply can’t compare.
Here’s hoping they may still change their mind.
Albo’s ‘new media’ whisperers
Here at Inside Mail we enjoy the satirical articles of the Betoota Advocate. Even when you are the subject of their satire, it’s still funny – that’s how good they are.
But are they also self-reflective?
If we, for example, had a side hustle offering paid strategic advice to one of the major political parties, would that be a conflict of interest? Would it at least look a bit bad? Surely the latter, right?
Well, did you know that Diamantina Media is co-owned by Antony Stockdale (its CEO), Charles Single and Archer Hamilton? The triumvirate are the founders of the one and only Betoota Advocate.
Diamantina Media was hired by Labor ahead of the last election to help with its ‘new media’ strategy. The deal was done shortly after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appeared on podcasts associated with the Betoota Advocate.
Perhaps ironically, it was on one of these podcasts that Foreign Minister Penny Wong stuffed up towards the end of the campaign, when she suggested the Voice might be pursued post-election even though the PM had explicitly ruled that out.
To be fair, the Betoota Advocate is published by a separate company, Diamantina Consolidated Holdings. So technically it’s separate from the consultancy arm. Technically.
No disclosures were made about these links, and Stockdale has said they were under no obligation to disclose anything either.
While that is legally true, what about ethically? Especially when your satirical outlet likes to stand on its high horse and judge others for precisely this sort of splitting of hairs.
Zoe Denial
You have to admire the pluck of outgoing teal MP Zoe Daniel.
Having danced in celebration at her ‘victory’ that never was, she henceforth refused to concede defeat when every election analyst called her seat as a win for returning Liberal Tim Wilson.
Now, with every vote counted and Daniel behind by more than the 100 votes that triggers an automatic recount, the teal is still refusing to concede she has lost.
‘We’ve come this far,’ she says.
Presumably she is going to demand a recount, even though she didn’t get within the threshold to have one, so let’s see what the AEC does in response.
Perhaps she sees herself akin to the great Winston Churchill during his ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’ speech.
In our view, Comical Ali, the Iraqi information minister during the 2003 war who declared ‘we are beating them!’ as American troops took over the capital, feels more appropriate.
Super tax won’t just ping the super-rich
New assistant treasurer Dan Mulino has belled the cat on the government’s new tax on superannuation, admitting that, in time, more than one million ns will have to pay it. Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Mulino’s boss, has regularly said the tax will only hit the hip pockets of 80,000 ns.
So much for that!
They came to different outcomes because Chalmers means who will pay it right now. But because the new tax isn’t indexed, over time more of us will be forced to pay it.
Mulino’s maths says anyone 37 years or younger has a good chance of being part of that club by the time they retire. And let’s not forget, his PhD is in economics, unlike Dr Chalmers, who did an arts degree in politics, before doing more politics in his honours year, before doing more politics in his PhD… before becoming a political staffer then a politician.
Labor campaigned at the 2022 election promising not to put new taxes on superannuation, before trying – and failing – to do so after they won. Go figure.
This time they admitted that, if victorious, they would again pursue the tax increase, and with the help of the Greens, the re-elected government now has the numbers to make it happen.
But let’s cut the spin that it’s a tax few will ever pay. North of one million people forced to pay it isn’t exactly nobody.
Ley’s spy father’s anti-Israel tweets resurface
Sussan Ley‘s first press conference as new Liberal leader was praised by many, not least because she revealed her mother Angela Braybrooks was on her deathbed.
Shortly after sharing her vision for the party, the new Opposition Leader dashed back to Albury to be by her mother’s side. She died just days later.
Angela lived a remarkable life – but it was her husband Edgar Braybrooks, a British Intelligence officer, whose story was the stuff of spy novels.
Braybrooks’ espionage career, for which he was awarded an MBE from the Queen, took him as far afield as India, Singapore, Indonesia, Austria, Malaysia and Qatar. But it was his earlier experiences in the Middle East that had the greatest impact on his political views.
At 19, he was accepted to become a police officer in British-mandated Palestine. With almost comical English understatement, he later said keeping the peace during this time, 1936-42, was ‘not an easy matter’.
The period saw a popular uprising by Palestinian Arabs who opposed the British administration and its support for Zionism. At one stage, Braybrooks was ambushed and exchanged fire with Arab rebels.
But his experience there instilled a lifelong sympathy for the Palestinian cause, according social media posts unearthed by Inside Mail.
In May 2019, when Ley was a minister in the Morrison government, her father took aim at Airbnb, which had backtracked on a decision to delist properties in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank after backlash from the Israeli government.
‘You’re either for equality or not,’ Braybrooks wrote.
‘You announced a delisting of illegal Israeli settlement rentals and have now backpedalled, allowing rentals on the ruins of Palestinian lives and land. I will #deactivateAirbnb on May 15, Nakba Day.’
Ley once had similar views to her father as a former co-chair of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine group.
She famously said in parliament in 2008: ‘Israel has many friends in this country and in this parliament. The Palestinians, by comparison, have few.
‘Theirs is not a popular cause. But it is one I support in part out of knowledge that the victors of World War II, including , wrote a ‘homeland’ cheque to cover the sins of the holocaust and centuries of antisemitism in Europe, but it was the Palestinians who had to cash it.’
During her first press conference, Ley walked back these comments, claiming the massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, had changed her views.
However, she hastened to add: ‘I remain a steadfast friend of the Palestinian people and I wish that we had right now, a partner in this peace process.’