Nine redundancies

Texts dripping with dread have been coming in thick and fast from 1 Denison Street.

Nine Entertainment top brass have made it clear the latest target in the company’s $100million cost-cutting goal is news website Nine.com.au.

We’re told it’s a ‘complete restructure’ with many redundancies. ‘The writing is on the wall,’ was how one former staffer put it.

The first out the door is Nine.com.au director Kerri Elstub, who had been with Nine for 26 years when she was given her pink slip on Tuesday morning.

‘We are shocked. It was such a small announcement – she was treated like one of the girls on the social desk leaving,’ said one network insider.

‘She was honestly the absolute best.’ 

With many more exits predicted, it doesn’t take a genius to work out how Nine is going to restructure things.

Even those loyal to Team Blue tell us the digital side of things is a complete mess, and this restructuring has been a long time coming.

One issue is the lack of a unified, centralized website. Their editorial content spreads across 9honey.com.au, nine.com.au, 9news.com.au, WWOS.com.au, and various special sites for shows like The Block.

Unifying this suite of websites is inevitably going to see duplicate roles eliminated.

Additionally, a glowing corporate profile of Elstub remains on the ‘Nine for Brands’ website, although it’s expected to be removed shortly.

‘Kerri Elstub is one of the rarest types of employees that can be found in 21st Century Australia: the loyal kind,’ it begins.

Elstub is then quoted as saying: ‘I’m a Nine person through and through.’ Never forget: in today’s media, loyalty is a one-way street.

The Ironic 

Skipping the likes of Paris or Portofino, The Iconic’s co-founder Adam Jacobs surprised Guardian Australia journalist Tamsin Rose with a marriage proposal in a place that left colleagues wondering, ‘Really? There?’

The rag trade king got down on one knee at none other than… the Waverley Vinnies.

Choosing a second-hand store for a proposal is certainly a quirky pick for a man known for encouraging Australians to shop online at full price.

A bystander felt like they were in an alternate universe. ‘Someone just proposed here. They had champagne, it was very strange.

‘Some guy picked up a didgeridoo for sale and started playing it.’

When we contacted the happy couple, they confirmed that the engagement – while unorthodox – was perfect for them.

‘Adam knows me very well. I’ve always loved op-shopping and and spend lots of time at Vinnies. He wanted to propose somewhere I would have never suspected,’ Rose told Inside Mail.

‘It was super special, and very funny.’

Jacobs added: ‘I wanted to do something really fun and personal for Tamsin.

‘Ngaiire’s band was there playing Fall Into My Arms and they were amazing. The whole Vinnies team was so supportive and helped create a really special surprise.’

Rose is no stranger to high-flying suitors. She was previously linked to Jack Toohey, the charismatic son of former Macquarie Bank heavyweight Glenn Toohey.

You may remember Jack for his viral TikToks from 2023 about the housing crisis – in which he advocated for a one per cent ‘housing levy’, scrapping capital gains, and making 60 per cent of Aussies live in affordable public housing – only for it to emerge that he went to an exclusive high school, and lived in his parents’ $2.5million home.

(For his part, Jack said he had always acknowledged his ‘privileged’ upbringing and never pretended to be anything else.)

Meanwhile, Rose, the Guardian’s NSW state correspondent, is taking a year-long sabbatical after becoming burnt out by the unrelenting news cycle. We get it…

During her break from journalism, she is working with her new fiancé at the jobs website Hatch.

The lads are back 

Maxim Australia is dead. The final issue of the lads’ mag hit newsstands last month featuring, er, Narelle Maree (Ed-who?) as its cover girl.

The magazine launched Down Under in 2011, but recently the relationship between the New York-based parent company Maxim Inc. and local publisher Nuclear Enterprises soured.

Last October, lawyers from the U.S. sought to stop publication amid a licensing dispute, according to Capital Brief.

Michael Downs, the founder and CEO of Nuclear Media, would not comment on that matter, but told Daily Mail’s Ali Daher that ‘it was time for a reset’.

‘…So I bought FHM.’

Ageing millennials who didn’t grow up with broadband will fondly remember FHM Australia during its 14-year run from 1998 to 2012 under the ACP Magazines stable.

With Nuclear now the owners of FHM, the relaunch issue comes out in October. The website is live and you can already subscribe.

Now, anyone involved in Sydney media in the last decade will tell you Maxim was shorthand for its infamous Halloween bash – a peerless parade of D-list desperados, freelance ‘models’ and the occasional Daily Mail journo (guilty!)

FMH will be no different. The new era is being ushered in with a Halloween party on Friday, October 31. We’ll be there…

Real winner in Reynolds vs Higgins 

The costs order against Brittany Higgins in her defamation matter against Linda Reynolds – handed down this week – is almost certainly going to leave her bankrupt, unless some sort of mercy settlement can be reached.

While Higgins was awarded a compo payment of $2.4million by the Commonwealth a few years back, she has stated publicly that, after various expenses, she only pocketed $1.9million of that total.

Neither Brittany nor her husband David Sharaz worked for much of the last few years – though they are both now employed by the same PR firm. Their lifestyle involved some fairly expensive jet-setting, rentals and a wedding. Throw in the money they lost buying and selling their home in France and the bank balance kept on dwindling.

All this is prior to Higgins paying her own legal costs for the lost defamation case – an undoubtedly princely sum.

If there is anything left from her payout, the nearly $350,000 that trial judge Paul Tottle awarded in damages to Reynolds will likely push Higgins into financial despair – even before considering her former boss’s substantially larger legal bills.

Lawyers really do always seem to win when people duke it out in court, don’t they?

Justice Tottle announced that Brittany must pay 80 per cent of what Reynolds spent on lawyers, which the former minister claims ran into the millions.

Whatever you think of this whole sorry saga, Brittany looks set to be left with no money and the risk of bankruptcy on her record. That is likely to also be the case for Sharaz, who did not even contest the action against him.

And let’s not forget: if Brittany is unable to pay Reynolds’ bills, even though the former defence minister has technically won her case, she loses at the hip pocket.

What an unmitigated mess.

Brucey the dole bludger

The undefamable Bruce Lehrmann was back in the headlines this week when gun soon-to-be returning Daily Mail reporter Charlotte Karp revealed he was seeking $100,000 in unpaid legal fees after a police raid on his home.

It’s a tangled story, but in short: police raided Lehrmann’s home on June 5 last year while investigating claims he swiped secret federal documents tied to a French nuclear sub deal. Brucey denies it.

But what has gone mostly unremarked upon since the story was published is the stunning detail that Lehrmann is now living off Centrelink payments.

Let’s put that fall from grace into perspective.

This is a bloke who – in addition to receiving $104,000 from Channel Seven in free rent, plus six-figure payouts from the ABC and News Corp – used to earn $200,000 as a political staffer before he was sacked in April 2019.

He is now so unemployable that even his own lawyer said that his only chance to earn an income would be to start an OnlyFans account. Please don’t.

Knives out for Ley

The sharks are circling Liberal Opposition Leader Sussan Ley.

Inside Mail hears that some opposition MPs now think she may not even survive until the end of this year, following in the footsteps of past Liberal opposition leaders who didn’t last long enough to even celebrate their one-year anniversary in the job. Think Brendan Nelson and Alexander Downer back in the day.

Before Ley had even sacked Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from her shadow cabinet, two possible catalysts were clear – climate policy, and an unhealthy dose of internal white-anting.

Ley wants her team to back strong emissions targets culminating in the 2050 goal of net zero. That, of course, is pie in the sky – but to oppose it risks leaving the conservative side of politics looking like political dinosaurs.

Ley hopes to avoid that, but the dinosaurs in her party may well come after her if she is willing to blow up the Coalition with the Nationals in order to make it happen.

Ley only won the post-election showdown for the top job in opposition by a few votes – and since then, some Ley supporters have left parliament. Others are unimpressed with the growing lack of discipline in the party ranks.

It’s a reminder that while Peter Dutton tanked at the election earlier this year, he did at least maintain unity as the Titanic went down.

But how bad a look would it be for the Liberals to execute their first federal female leader so quickly? And would the party do any better under the leadership of Angus Taylor, who many regarded as a flop as a cabinet minister?

There are so many questions – and none of them gets the Coalition any closer to being politically competitive enough to challenge Labor for government.

The final sitting week of the year is known as the killing season. It’s been largely boring for the last few years, ever since the major parties changed their leadership rules to make it harder to dump underperforming leaders.

While these rules apply to Labor both in opposition and government, they only bind Liberals concerning a sitting prime minister. Opposition leaders remain fair game, hence the nervousness among Ley’s supporters.

Hume’s payback

Speaking of Ley, Liberal senator Jane Hume hasn’t forgotten being unceremoniously dumped from the frontbench by her – and she clearly hasn’t forgiven her either.

Revenge, as the saying goes, is a dish best served cold.

Hume plated it up with relish when she suggested that Ley should have called Jacinta Price directly rather than dispatching Alex Hawke as her ‘henchman’, after Price’s recent comments about Indian immigration drew backlash.

It was a neat barb: incisive, plausible and oozing the satisfaction only a liberated backbencher could muster.

Hume isn’t necessarily wrong, by the way. Ley looks weak, Price is now gone from the shadow ministry, and Hawke is back in the political fray.

But the pleasure Hume must have felt from saying it publicly is the real story here.

It won’t be lost on Ley that the criticism came not from a political opponent, but from someone she had sidelined.

When Hume twisted the knife, it wasn’t just Hawke she had in her sights – it was her leader. In fact, Hawke was likely just collateral damage.

Treaty talks culture wars

Victoria has tabled a statewide Treaty bill – the first of its kind anywhere in the country – and the usual suspects are already rehearsing their outrage.

The Allan government’s pitch is modest: embed truth-telling and accountability in law, and give Indigenous institutions more than a photo-op seat at the table.

The Opposition’s instinct to baulk is as predictable as it is self-wounding. If the Liberals want to keep losing inner-city seats in Victoria, opposing a framework for dialogue is a good start.

What happens next is obvious: Labor will look to take the high moral ground while Victorian Liberals will moan about the risk of unintended consequences, just like we saw during the Voice referendum.

It’s just another round in the culture wars.

But here’s an irony for you: while this may be the first statewide treaty, WA already has a regionally-based treaty in its south-west (where the good wines come from), drafted and legislated years ago by Colin Barnett‘s Liberal government.

Maybe he needs to pick up the phone and explain to his Victorian brethren why treaties can serve a purpose?

Pacific plays hard to get 

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese flew to Port Vila expecting to ink a $500million ‘Nakamal’ pact with Vanuatu. What’s that? Don’t ask us – Google is your friend.

But instead of signing anything, Albo received a polite ‘not yet’.

Beijing’s ever-present financial influence scuttled the deal, leaving the PM empty-handed upon his return. Another costly ‘Airbus Albo’ adventure that yielded nothing.

Albanese insists the deal will be finalised soon – perhaps after yet another tropical island visit at taxpayers’ expense…

In the Pacific, influence is usually measured in respect, and Albo was shown little.

Not what the doctor ordered 

Sydney GP and cosmetic specialist Dr Imaan Joshi regularly penned pieces for Mamamia, but ceased writing for them some years ago.

Her three-year absence from the Mia Freedman-founded website came to an end recently when she was interviewed for a piece entitled ‘Where have all the female GPs gone?’

The article featured on both Mamamia’s Instagram and Facebook accounts, with Dr Joshi commenting on the latter that it was ‘lovely to be featured’ again.

But both posts have since vanished, although the article about female GPs remains online.

Could it be because in December 2023, just over two months after the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, she re-posted another X user’s comment claiming that Israelis are the ‘most loathed’ people on Earth due to their ‘behaviour’?

Inside Mail asked both Mamamia and Dr Joshi if these comments had anything to do with the posts being removed. The website’s editors didn’t reply (as usual) but Dr Joshi said: ‘I don’t know as Mamamia did not approach me about it.’