Opinion from Brad Smart

 
For ABC News and Current Affairs, it must be Christmas in Paris with new and juicy details of the Ray Hadley bullying scandal being revealed day by day.
 
The national broadcaster never seems to miss an opportunity to take 2GB’s right-wing commentators, Ray Hadley and Alan Jones, out to the woodshed for a good thrashing. 
 
This time, however, Ray Hadley seems to have called down the reign of hell-fire on himself with his alleged hair-trigger temper and serial bullying.
 
In doing so, he’s played right into the hands of those who would gladly hand him his head on a platter, and the story has taken on ‘legs’ with commercial TV and newspapers elevating it to a national story, as fresh allegations continue to surface.
 
However, while this may be a lot of fun for those of us watching from the sidelines, I think almost everybody seems to have been missing the big picture.
 
Hadley’s bullying allegations are only a side-show.
 
The main event is all about the governance of a listed public company.
 
Most people probably haven’t even heard of governance, and even fewer know what it means.
 
Governance isn’t a sexy word like bullying, intimidation or sexual harassment, but to my mind, it’s what makes this whole Ray Hadley business so serious.
 
In any company, governance is the Board’s primary responsibility.
 
The board of directors is responsible for setting the limits of how a company operates, in everything from risk to morale.
 
When you go to work, as an employee, you should always have a good understanding of what behaviour is acceptable and what’s not within your workplace.
 
The directors set these rules and expectations, and then handball them to the management team, who implements them.
 
Today, those expectations are called ‘corporate culture’.
 
Now, with all the complaints and leaks about what’s been going on inside Macquarie Media, from both past and present employees, you can only deduce that the corporate cultureof the company has become little short of toxic.
 
This seems at odds with an organisation that holds itself up, at least in its very public on-air image, as the arbiter of what’s right and what’s wrong with Australian governments, business and society.
 
As the company’s culture and morale is a Board responsibility, the big question is “why hasn’t the Chairman and his fellow directors cleaned up this ongoing mess over Ray Hadley’s behaviour well before now?”
 
It’s not like these bullying allegations have just emerged out of the blue and the Board has been caught by surprise.
 
At 2GB, these allegations have been known about for many years, dating back well before the 2015 merger, and the majority of them seem to centre around one man.
 
Apologists keep saying that 2GB’s morning presenter, Ray Hadley, has come from a era when brash and arrogant behaviour, intimidation and bullying were the way things were done; as though a Man’s not a Man unless he rules his team with an Iron Fist.
 
That’s all fanciful rubbish.
 
Bullying and intimidation have never been acceptable as ways of getting things done, nor as legitimate management practices within any media company in the past 50 years.
 
There have always been bullies and thugs in the media, and those who would try it on, and it’s true that they may not have been reigned in as tightly as they should have been, nor fully brought to account, back in the days when Hadley was starting out. But, that has never meant that this type of behaviour was ever encouraged nor that it should be emulated at any time, particularly in modern times.
 
I came through metro radio and television in about the same era as Ray Hadley.
 
Sure, I worked with a couple of bullies, but I also worked with highly talented men and women, who were big names in news, but never raised their voices or intimidated their colleagues.
 
They were professionals, who just got on with the job.
 
Bullying behaviour is the property of the individual; it never has been a symptom of the times, then or now.
 
Certain people elect to bully and intimidate because they think it makes them look strong and in control.
 
Ray Hadley is not the first talkback presenter to unload on his support team, and I think it would be safe to say, he won’t be the last, although maybe some lessons will be learned by others from the current furore.
 
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when I worked, at various times, with legendary radio and television people, like Mike Willesee, Ian Cook, Steve Leibmann, Don Angel, Frank Avis and many others, you’d never hear a voice raised in anger, because they didn’t have to.
 
Without exception, they were all real leaders, who knew what they were doing. They led their teams, made decisions and took personal responsibility for the outcomes – good or bad.
 
Berating others and allocating blame was never part of their agenda.
 
You see, bullies generally vent their rage on subordinates. The bully knows those people can’t fight back, because they’re not in a position of power, so they’re easily intimidated.
 
According to the allegations leveled against Hadley by Andrew Moore, Jesse Perez and Chris Bowen, the bullying and intimidation went unchecked for more than 15 years allowing him to vent on a host of commentators, panel operators and producers. 
 
Successive managements have been aware of Hadley’s temper tantrums, if not through direct complaints, then certainly through the company’s internal rumour mill.
 
As Chairman of Macquarie Media, a publicly listed company, it was Russell Tate’s responsibility to ensure these allegations were addressed promptly, and the management team was directed to take appropriate action, if it hadn’t already done so.
 
Unfortunately, history shows that 2GB management’s hands have often been tied when it comes to dealing with Ray Hadley.
 
One of the main problems is that Hadley has been treated by 2GB managers with an extraordinary amount of reverence for an employee, as though to offend him, even in the slightest, would call down nothing less than the Apocalypse.
 
Perhaps, that’s why so many people in the industry often quip that at 2GB ‘the inmates run the asylum’.
 
Even experienced Board members appear to be intimidated by Hadley and the prospect of losing him, given the morning ratings he commands.
 
For someone, who reportedly grew up in modest circumstances in western Sydney, to now be treated with that sort of adulation can be almost too much to handle.
 
When you have federal and state government ministers sucking up to you on a daily basis, it can be hard to keep that ego in check. However, most of us, who have worked in the media for decades, and like to think we still have some grasp on reality, know just how fleeting fame can be.
 
If Ray Hadley or Alan Jones exited 2GB tomorrow and couldn’t find another on-air role, within 12 months, it’s highly likely nobody would even take their calls.
 
Russell Tate was also Chairman of Macquarie Radio Network Ltd (now Macquarie Media), before the Fairfax merger, during the time that John Singleton was its largest shareholder.
 
As Chairman, it was and still is Russell Tate’s job to establish what sort of behaviour his Board is prepared to tolerate within the workplace and convey those sentiments to management to enforce.
 
I suspect that neither Russell Tate personally, nor his Board would ever accept bullying from ordinary staff members, but Ray Hadley appears to have been protected from ‘on high’ for many years.
 
In 2013, the station’s digital content director, Richard Palmer, recorded Hadley berating him during a meeting in Hadley’s office at 2GB. Palmer, rightly, took the recording of that meeting to the-then Managing Director, Rob Loewenthal.
 
Lowenthal was said to have been appalled at what he heard and as the head of MRN’s management team, it’s believed he verbally disciplined Hadley over the incident.
 
I can only imagine how humiliating that was to a man like Ray Hadley.
 
By the following Monday morning, Rob Loewenthal had decided to ‘resign’ and was packing up his desk.
 
Prior to this, Loewenthal had apparently never shown any dissatisfaction with the role, to which he had been promoted just two years earlier. In fact, from my observations at the time, he revelled in it.
 
Who voluntarily leaves a $400,000+ job to go off to ‘work on their surfing’?
 
So what happened between the previous Thursday and that Monday morning?
 
Ray Hadley and John Singleton were known to have become close pals after Singleton persuaded Hadley to jump ship from 2UE to 2GB in December 2001. By 2013, Singleton had elected not to serve as a director of MRN Ltd. However, insiders say it was not unusual for Hadley to take his grievances directly to Singleton, bypassing the management team and the Board.
 
Of course, John Singleton would never use his majority shareholding to direct the Board to do his will, because he’d be fully aware of the dim view that ASIC would take for someone acting as a shadow director.
 
However, it would be very interesting to know what prompted Rob Lowenthal to resign and depart the company immediately, when most senior executives can’t break their contracts, let alone leave without notice. Was Rob Lowenthal’s resignation purely coincidental?
 
I’m sure a large part of the ‘shoot from the hip’ culture, that once operated inside the old Macquarie Radio, changed once the Fairfax merger was finalised in 2015; but not everything.
 
Russell Tate stayed on as Executive Chairman and also became CEO, but Singleton’s percentage of shareholding was diluted by the merger, and so presumably was a lot of his influence.
 
So, what has really been stopping the Board taking decisive action on Hadley’s alleged behaviour since the merger? 
 
Tate has obviously been concerned about Hadley and his treatment of Macquarie staff for many years. He was quoted in court documents from the Palmer case in 2013 describing Hadley as ‘a psychotic bully’.
 
Following that 2013 court case, Hadley admitted to a 2GB staff meeting that his behaviour was poor and gave a commitment that he would change his ways. In an interview shortly after that meeting, John Singleton publicly acknowledged Hadley’s admission and his commitment to improve his behaviour.
 
From the time of that public admission, and if not well before, the Board and senior management of Macquarie were well aware of Hadley’s propensity for bullying staff and colleagues.
 
Certainly, Hadley’s grasp on the morning ratings in Sydney and his predicted key role in the station’s succession plan post-Alan Jones, would definitely give any director significant pause for thought, before directing management to reign in the presenter’s intimidating behaviour, particularly given Hadley’s reputation for volatility. 
 
History shows just how well Ray Hadley would be likely to accept that sort of admonishment.
 
But, I now believe, that given the depth and seriousness of the allegations being levelled against him, many of which he conceded were true when he addressed them on-air just a fortnight ago, the situation has gone beyond discipline and rehabilitiation.
 
We all know how quickly reputations can be destroyed in this world of political correctness in 2019, once momentum takes over.
 
The Me Too movement and other pressure groups have made short work of far more significant characters than Ray Hadley, like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey and Bill O’Reilly.
 
O’Reilly was to Fox Cable News what Ray Hadley is to Macquarie Media, only a far, far more valuable asset.
 
You may recall that Bill O’Reilly was the host of ‘The O’Reilly Factor’, the highest rating cable television program in the U.S. for 14 years.
 
He attracted potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue for News Corporation each year.
 
But, the clock was ticking on Bill O’Reilly over his persistent sexual harassment of female staff in the workplace.
 
At one stage, O’Reilly was given a second chance to redeem himself, after paying massive compensation to one of his victims, but allegedly he didn’t heed the warning and failed to change his behaviour.
 
In the end, in a bold move, Rupert Murdoch personally stepped in and fired O’Reilly, at that time Fox’s major advertising and ratings asset.
 
Murdoch’s action was News Corp protecting its corporate culture in today’s politically correct environment.
 
If an organisation, like News Corp, can bite the bullet and show one of its major personalities the door, then, given the flood of allegations and complaints, isn’t it time that Macquarie Media did likewise?
 
 

Hadley’s bullying is not acceptable behaviour by any yardstick in 2019: Not in Radio. Not anywhere.
 
He may be an appealing broadcaster to his devoted audience, but that doesn’t give him any right to let loose his temper on his subordinates and support staff at any time he feels frustrated.
 
Some 20 years ago, Grant Broadcasters was taken to court when its General Manager in Ballarat was accused of bullying a staff member.
 
That was the first case in the radio industry, when bullying and intimidation was taken seriously.
 
As Chairman of Grant Broadcasters at the time, Janet Cameron acted quickly and decisively and went to great lengths to ensure there’d be no repetition of that sort of behaviour within her company.
 
A culture of bullying isn’t just unpleasant.
 
It creates an unsafe workplace, leaving people exposed to potential mental health issues.
 
Ray Hadley apparently hasn’t learned over the years that this type of behaviour isn’t acceptable.
 
After Chris Bowen’s allegations surfaced several weeks ago, Hadley apologised for his behaviour on-air, presumably realising that the ‘cat was out of the bag’ and it could all turn very nasty very quickly, which it has.
 
Macquarie Media’s CEO Adam Lang ‘circled the wagons’, thanking staff for their support of Hadley in a memo, but it is unlikely many will have any sympathy for Hadley or be placated by words alone.
 
Lang appears to argue that because there hadn’t been any complaints against Hadley at that time, there wasn’t a problem.
 
However, every company has a legal requirement to provide a safe workplace for all their employees.
 
When someone has a history of ‘poor behaviour’ and has previously admitted engaging in what Safework NSW describe as ‘unsafe practices’, it’s not enough to say ‘well, nobody complained’.
 
Given his history, senior management should have been regularly monitoring and policing Ray Hadley’s treatment of the employees he worked with.
 
They should never have let themselves be compromised by simply relying on complaints.
 
Not only is it now time for the Board to direct management to terminate Ray Hadley, to show that they are serious about workplace bullying, but they now need to consider their own failings and whether they may have let their company employees down.
 
The ultimate responsibility always rests with the directors.
 
By failing to intercede in the Hadley allegations in a timely manner, the Board may not have fulfilled its corporate governance role, and possibly, may have even contributed to the company violating workplace safety laws.
 
For Macquarie Media’s new majority shareholder, Nine Entertainment, it’s not too late to start off its ownership of the network by restoring a degree of respectability and credibility.
 
The entire Board should now resign or be dismissed for presiding over an unsafe workplace during their watch, and any senior managers, who were aware of any bullying from any staff during their tenure and failed to take appropriate action, should also be told ‘Don’t Come Monday’.
 
I see this current scandal potentially becoming one of the most serious corporate governance issues to affect the radio industry, and one that needs immediate attention.
 
According to the latest allegations, even well after 2013, various 2GB staff have been subjected to inappropriate behaviour that simply can’t be dismissed by saying ‘That’s just Ray’. 
 
 

About the Author

Brad Smart previously owned and operated the Smart Radio Network through regional Queensland.

He sold his stations to Macquarie Radio Network, now Macquarie Media Limited.

He has been a journalist, broadcaster and film producer for over 30 years.

Brad’s articles and podcasts are also available through his website www.bradsmart.com.au