Kerry Packer: cricket, casinos and the tax line he never quite lived down

There's a clip that still does the rounds on Australian television whenever tax reform comes up, and it's now approaching four decades old. A big man in a dark suit, jaw set, leaning towards a microphone at a 1991 parliamentary inquiry into printed media, telling the assembled senators something to the effect that anybody who doesn't minimise their tax needs their head read, because as a government, he said, "you're not spending it that well that we should be donating extra." He didn't say it quite that neatly on the day — the exact phrasing has been quoted slightly differently across various reports over the years — but the sentiment was unmistakable, and it landed exactly as Kerry Packer intended it to. He wasn't asking permission. He was explaining the facts of life to people he didn't think understood them.

That single exchange, more than any balance sheet, is probably why Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer remains the most instantly recognisable of Australia's three generations of media Packers — a dynasty I've covered in full elsewhere, from Frank's founding years through to James's very different reign (see The Packers: three generations of Australian power, money and gamble). But Kerry was never just the middle chapter. He was the one who took a family publishing business and turned it into something closer to a national force of nature — governments courted him, cricket administrators feared him, and casino pit bosses, by all accounts, watched him arrive with something between excitement and dread.

Inheriting an empire, and rebuilding it his way

Kerry Packer took control of Australian Consolidated Press and the Nine Network in the mid-1970s, following the death of his father Sir Frank Packer, and he did it in the shadow of an older brother, Clyde, who had been expected by many to take the reins and instead stepped away from the business. Frank had built Consolidated Press into a formidable magazine and newspaper stable; Kerry's contribution was to pour the empire's centre of gravity into television, and specifically into the Nine Network, which under his stewardship became the dominant commercial broadcaster in the country for the better part of two decades. He ran it the way he ran most things — decisively, sometimes brutally, with little patience for board process and even less for journalists who thought their independence was a given rather than a privilege he happened to extend.

Consolidated Press under Kerry Packer wasn't a diversified conglomerate in the modern private-equity sense. It was closer to a personal instrument, deployed according to his own reading of where the money and the leverage sat. That instinct is what produced the single most consequential fight of his career, and it had nothing to do with newspapers at all.

World Series Cricket and the war with the establishment

By the mid-1970s Kerry Packer wanted the television rights to Australian international cricket, and the Australian Cricket Board wouldn't sell them to him on terms he found remotely acceptable. So he built his own competition. World Series Cricket, launched in 1977, signed the best players in the world — including a substantial number of the Australian Test side — away from the established boards, and ran a rival, professionalised cricket circuit under lights, in coloured clothing, with a white ball, none of which existed in the sport at the time.

The cricket establishment reacted with something close to horror. Players who signed with Packer were frozen out of official Test selection; commentators and administrators across the cricketing world lined up to denounce the venture as a circus that would cheapen the game. Packer, for his part, was unrepentant in public. He wasn't running a charity for the Australian Cricket Board, and he made that plain in the courts as well as the press — Channel Nine and World Series Cricket successfully fought off legal challenges from the cricketing authorities in the English High Court, a case that effectively confirmed the players' right to sign with a rival competition.

The financial toll on Packer's side was, by most accounts, heavy in the short term; the reconciliation with the established boards came within a couple of years, once it became clear neither side could afford to keep fighting, and Packer's Channel Nine walked away with the free-to-air cricket rights he'd wanted in the first place. The innovations — day-night matches, coloured kit, multiple camera angles, the stump microphone — didn't just survive World Series Cricket. They became the sport's standard grammar, adopted eventually by the very administrators who'd condemned them. It's one of the clearer examples in Australian business history of someone losing the argument and winning the war anyway, and I don't think that gets stated often enough: Packer wasn't vindicated because he was right about the ethics of it, he was vindicated because the audience, and eventually the money, agreed with him.

The gambler's temperament

Packer's appetite for cricket was, in its way, an extension of an appetite for risk that showed up most vividly at the casino table. He was, by the reporting of the time, one of the biggest individual gamblers the international casino industry had ever dealt with, a high-roller whose sessions at venues in London, Las Vegas and later Melbourne's own Crown complex were followed by casino operators the way sports desks follow grand finals. Contemporaneous reporting from British and Australian outlets described individual sessions in which Packer's wins or losses ran into many millions of dollars in a single sitting — the precise figures vary between accounts and were rarely confirmed on the record by Packer himself, but the scale was never in serious dispute, and several London casinos were reported to have had their annual results meaningfully affected, in one direction or the other, by his visits.

What's striking, reading back through the coverage, is how little Packer seemed to treat any of it as spectacle. He gambled the way he negotiated a television rights deal: with total focus, a flat expression, and apparently genuine indifference to whether the number on the table that night was extraordinary by the standards of everyone else in the room. Friends and associates quoted over the years described a man who could lose an amount that would ruin most businesses and be discussing something else entirely twenty minutes later. Whether that's admirable or simply what having that much money buys you is a matter of taste; I'd say it's a bit of both, and the myth-making around it has always slightly outpaced the documented facts.

The Senate committee and the line about a second tax

Which brings us back to 1991, and the Print Media inquiry, where Packer appeared before a parliamentary committee examining ownership and competition in Australian newspapers. Asked, in effect, to justify the tax minimisation strategies employed by his corporate structures, Packer gave an answer that has been quoted, paraphrased and occasionally slightly mangled ever since, but which boiled down to a plainly stated position: that anyone in Australia who wasn't minimising their tax within the law needed their head examined, because governments didn't spend the money well enough to deserve a cent more than they were legally owed.

It's frequently rendered in shorthand as "why would I want to pay a second one" — a reference, in context, to having paid tax once and seeing no obligation to pay it again through some other structure or gesture of civic goodwill. The precise wording differs slightly depending on which contemporaneous transcript or news report you go back to, which is exactly why I'm being careful about it here rather than presenting a single tidy quotation as gospel. What isn't in dispute is the substance, or the effect: it became, almost instantly, one of the most quoted lines in modern Australian public life, cited approvingly by tax minimisation advocates and disapprovingly by critics of corporate tax structuring in roughly equal measure ever since. Packer never really walked it back, and I don't think he saw any reason to.

A legacy that outlived the man

Kerry Packer died in 2005, and the empire passed, not entirely smoothly, to his son James — whose own tenure took Consolidated Press and the family's holdings in a markedly different direction, chasing casinos and international ventures rather than free-to-air dominance, with mixed results that are their own story. What Kerry left behind wasn't just a business. It was a template for how an Australian magnate could operate: aggressive, unsentimental about institutions that stood in his way, publicly unapologetic about wealth, and privately — by the accounts of people who worked closely with him — capable of considerable loyalty to those he trusted.

He's often mentioned in the same breath as Rupert Murdoch, another Australian-born media figure who built something enormous from a domestic base, though the comparison only goes so far — Murdoch internationalised and diversified his holdings across three continents in a way Packer, whose empire stayed far more concentrated on Australian television and publishing, never really attempted (a story I've told in more detail in Rupert Murdoch: how a single Adelaide newspaper became a global empire). Packer's instinct was always to dominate a smaller pond thoroughly rather than spread himself across a bigger one.

Whatever you make of the casino nights and the tax line, the cricket fight tells you the most about how he actually operated. He identified an asset the establishment undervalued, built a rival product nobody thought could work, absorbed genuinely serious losses defending it, and ended up owning the very thing he'd originally been refused. That's not a bad one-paragraph summary of Kerry Packer's entire career, cricket bat included.

For more on how this family's fortunes were built, spent and occasionally nearly lost across three generations, the fuller account sits in our Tycoons & Dynasties hub, alongside the wider Packer story and other Australian dynasties including the Hancock family's very different fight over an iron ore fortune, told in The Hancock dynasty: iron ore, the Pilbara and the fortune Gina Rinehart rebuilt.