The Packers: three generations of Australian power, money and gamble

There is a particular kind of Australian business dynasty that doesn't so much build wealth as accumulate gravitational pull. The Packers were that kind. For the better part of a century, three generations of the same family bent Australian media, politics and capital toward themselves with a consistency that no amount of inheritance tax or corporate governance reform could fully interrupt. They were not always admirable. They were rarely boring.

I've been picking through the Packer archive for years now, and the thing that still surprises me is how nearly it never happened at all.

Frank Packer: the original tabloid brawler

Robert Clyde Packer — Frank's father — had a crack at newspaper publishing in the early twentieth century and didn't much distinguish himself financially. Frank, born in 1906, watched that and drew the obvious lesson: you needed to be harder, faster and less scrupulous than the other fellow. He spent his early career learning the newspaper game from the inside, and by the 1930s he had manoeuvred himself into control of the Australian Women's Weekly, launched in 1933 as a weekly magazine at a price point deliberately set to reach Depression-era households.

It worked. The Weekly became, and for a long time remained, the highest-circulation magazine in the country. That cash flow gave Frank the base to build Consolidated Press Holdings, and from there he acquired newspapers including the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. He was by all contemporaneous accounts a physically imposing, belligerent operator who treated editorial as a weapon and journalists as instruments. He boxed seriously as a young man and seems never entirely to have left the ring.

His politics were those of a man who had built something and intended to keep it. He was consistently conservative, personally close to a succession of Liberal governments, and not above using his mastheads accordingly. None of that was unusual for proprietors of his era. What distinguished Frank was the sheer institutional tenacity — he fought off rivals, absorbed competitors and kept the whole structure intact through decades of upheaval.

He also produced Kerry.

Kerry Packer: the television empire and the tax hearing

The relationship between Frank and Kerry Packer was, by the accounts of people who were around them, not warm. Frank was withering about his younger son's intelligence, at least in Kerry's youth. Kerry is widely reported to have described the day his father died as the greatest of his life. Whatever the emotional texture of that inheritance, what Kerry received in 1974 was a substantial but not dominant media company. What he built from it was something else.

Television was the mechanism. The Nine Network, which Consolidated Press controlled, became under Kerry's direction the dominant commercial broadcaster in the country through the late 1970s and 1980s. He understood the economics of free-to-air television with a clarity his competitors lacked: the key was programming, and the key to programming was sport. The cricket rights battles of the late 1970s — World Series Cricket, the rebel tour he bankrolled in direct defiance of the cricket establishment — are well documented and remain one of the bolder corporate gambles in Australian business history. He won. The established order capitulated. Nine got the cricket.

From that position, Nine under Kerry produced the highest-rating news, current affairs and entertainment content in the country through the 1980s. Programs like 60 Minutes, A Current Affair and eventually the dominant morning and evening news bulletins gave Nine a cultural reach that was almost without precedent for a private broadcaster. Advertisers had limited choices if they wanted to reach mass audiences, and Kerry knew it.

His 1991 appearance before a Parliamentary committee examining print media was the moment Kerry Packer became a figure of genuine public mythology. His responses — blunt, often contemptuous, occasionally very funny — entered the national memory in a way that corporate testimony rarely does. The exchange about tax minimisation, in which he essentially told the committee that only a fool pays more tax than the law requires, was reported approvingly in his own papers and quoted admiringly in others. It encapsulated something about the way a certain Australian public had come to regard him: as someone who played the game with unusual honesty about what the game actually was.

He also survived a cardiac arrest in 1990 that, according to widespread reporting at the time, left him clinically dead for several minutes. He later remarked, with characteristic bluntness, that there was nothing on the other side. It did not appear to alter his appetite for risk.

The other famous transaction of Kerry's career was the sale of Nine to Alan Bond in 1987 for around $1 billion, and the subsequent repurchase of the same asset a few years later when Bond's empire collapsed, for a fraction of that price. Kerry's reported summary — that you only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime — became perhaps the most quoted line in Australian business history. Honestly, it deserved to be.

Casinos and the shape of the next generation

By the mid-1990s, Kerry had identified gambling — specifically, high-end casino gaming targeting wealthy Asian visitors — as the next large opportunity in Australian leisure. The logic was straightforward: Sydney lacked the kind of VIP gaming facility that was drawing discretionary wealth to Macau and Las Vegas. A well-capitalised casino with the right regulatory relationships could capture significant revenue from a clientele that was underserved in the Australian market.

This thinking led eventually to the creation of Publishing and Broadcasting Limited's stake in Crown Casino in Melbourne, which had opened in the mid-1990s, and to broader ambitions for a Sydney facility. The casino thread would prove to be the dominant storyline of the next generation.

James Packer inherited the empire on Kerry's death in December 2005. Kerry died at his Ellerston property in the Hunter Valley; he was seventy-seven. The estate was, according to widely reported estimates, worth several billion dollars. James was thirty-eight.

James Packer: the casino bet and the unravelling

James had been positioned as heir for years, brought into the business gradually and somewhat painfully through the 1990s and early 2000s. He co-ran the family company alongside his father's long-time lieutenant, and the transition, while not seamless, was managed. The early years of his stewardship involved significant diversification — technology investments, media, international expansion — some of which did not go well.

The pivot that defined James's tenure was the decision to exit media and concentrate almost entirely on casinos. PBL sold its television assets, including the Nine Network, to CVC Capital Partners in 2006. The logic James articulated publicly was that free-to-air television was a structurally declining business and that capital was better deployed in gaming. He was not wrong about television's trajectory. Whether the casino bet was the right alternative remains genuinely contested.

Crown Resorts, as the gaming arm was restructured and rebranded, expanded aggressively. Crown Melbourne and Crown Perth were substantial operations. The crown jewel of the strategy was meant to be Crown Sydney — Barangaroo — a tower on the harbour foreshore that would finally deliver the Sydney VIP gaming market Kerry had identified years earlier.

That project brought the whole structure to a public reckoning it could not easily survive.

The royal commissions and the accountability question

The New South Wales Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority's inquiry — effectively a royal commission in its scope and powers, chaired by Patricia Bergin SC — reported in February 2021. Its findings were damning. The Bergin Inquiry found that Crown Sydney was not suitable to hold a casino licence at that time, based on evidence about the company's facilitation of money laundering through its Melbourne and Perth operations, its relationships with junket operators connected to organised crime, and failures of corporate governance that ran from the floor up to the board.

Subsequent royal commissions in Victoria and Western Australia, conducted by Commissioner Ray Finkelstein and Commissioner Neville Owen respectively, reached broadly similar conclusions about conduct in those states. The Victorian commission found that Crown Melbourne had engaged in conduct that was, in various respects, variously dishonest, and that the company's culture had prioritised revenue over compliance for an extended period.

James Packer was not a director of Crown at the time of the key events under scrutiny, having resigned from the board in 2018 following a period of very public personal difficulties. His company, Consolidated Press Holdings, remained the major shareholder. He gave evidence to the Bergin Inquiry by video link from his superyacht, which was itself reported with a degree of public and media interest that probably understated the symbolic weight of the image.

Crown Resorts was ultimately acquired by Blackstone Inc., the American private equity group, in a transaction that completed in 2022 and valued the company at around $8.9 billion. The Packer family's long stake in Australian media and gaming had been, in effect, cashed out — not in triumph, but under regulatory compulsion and at the end of an extended period of reputational attrition.

What three generations actually built

The standard dynastic narrative wants a clean arc: founding generation builds, second generation consolidates and expands, third generation squanders. The Packers don't quite fit. Frank built something real. Kerry transformed it into something genuinely dominant and did so with a tactical intelligence that his father never matched. James made a large and defensible strategic bet, executed it with considerable capital, and then watched it destroyed — not by market forces but by the accumulated weight of compliance failures that occurred on the company's watch.

The uncomfortable question the royal commissions implicitly raised, though none of them could answer it directly, is how much a controlling shareholder can be insulated from the culture of a company they effectively control. That question has no clean answer in Australian corporate law as it currently stands, and I'd argue the Packer case should have prompted more serious legislative attention to it than it actually received.

What remains is the money, dispersed and private, and a name that still carries weight in Australian business conversation even now that the operating assets are gone. That's a particular kind of legacy — more atmospheric than institutional. Whether James's children, should they choose a public role, will do anything with it is genuinely unknowable.

Three generations of Packers made Australia's business landscape stranger, more concentrated and occasionally more interesting than it would otherwise have been. The dynasty is over. The stories aren't.

More on Australian business dynasties at the Tycoons & Dynasties hub.

— Margaret Fenwick, Tycoons & Dynasties