One hearing, one cigarette, one quote

In 1991 the Australian House of Representatives set up a Select Committee on the Print Media, chaired by Labor MP Michael Lee. Its job was to look at how concentrated newspaper ownership had become in Australia — a country where, by then, a handful of families controlled almost every masthead in every capital city.

One of those families was the Packers. Kerry Packer, son of Sir Frank, ran Australian Consolidated Press and the Nine Network. He was the country’s wealthiest man and famously uninterested in being told what to do with his time. The committee called him as a witness anyway.

He arrived on 4 November 1991 and proceeded to do something parliamentary inquiries do not normally experience. He smoked. He cut the chair off mid-question. He lectured the committee on government waste, on bad legislation, on the foolishness of asking businesspeople to plan around rules that kept changing. When MPs pressed him on tax, he leaned in:

I am not evading tax in any way, shape or form. Of course I am minimising my tax. Anybody in this country who does not minimise their tax wants their head read — because as a government, I can tell you, you’re not spending it that well that we should be donating extra.

That single answer is why people still pull the clip up thirty years later. It captured, in about fifteen seconds, a line that tax lawyers, accountants and business owners had been trying to draw quietly for decades: avoidance is legal, evasion is not, and there is no moral duty to pay more than the law requires. Packer said it on camera, to the people who write the laws, with a cigarette in his hand.

The committee’s actual report, released the following year, made recommendations about cross-media ownership that governments would argue over for the rest of the decade. Almost nobody remembers it. What survived was the testimony — Packer, impatient and unimpressed, telling a room full of MPs that they were the ones who needed to do better.

Kerry Packer died in 2005. The clip is still on YouTube. People still send it to each other every time a new tax debate flares up. This site is a small tribute to that moment, and to the man who, asked to defend himself, decided to go on offence instead.