Journalist: This morning [Liberal] Senator Alston has accused you of running an anti-Packer vendetta since he appeared on Channel Nine and endorsed Howard, do you have any comment? Keating: Only to make the obvious comments that they are crawling to Kerry Packer. Not a good strategy for anybody I wouldn't recommend. Journalist: They [the Liberal Opposition] are denying any deal with Packer. Keating: Of course they will, but they have signed up. I mean, work out who is the Packer candidate: the man who walks in and says he will remove the cross-media rules or the man who says he won't? Journalist: So, you still think there is a deal...

Keating: Absolutely. It was an astonishing transgression of protocol to hijack a foreign host’s press conference with a distant domestic dust-up, but it underlined the depth of Keating’s loathing for Packer, and, of course, for Howard. The detestation for Kerry Packer had been there for years. Keating detested media mogul Kerry Packer. Credit:AAP In the 1980s, Keating as Treasurer had overseen new media rules that prevented media owners from owning both TV stations and newspapers. They had to choose, as he said, whether to be ”queens of the screen or princes of print”.

Packer thus was ring-fenced into being a queen of the screen, while Rupert Murdoch gained more and more of the nation’s print outlets. Packer, from a newspaper-owning family, wasn't suitably gratified. He wanted to get his hands on Fairfax and what he called its “rivers of gold” — massive income from classified advertisements in its newspapers. And so, a feud grew. Packer used his TV network to say he thought John Howard would make a good PM. Credit:Kieran Doherty Keating had no particular love of Fairfax — indeed, he and much of the Labor Party for many years saw Fairfax papers as servants of the Liberal Party.

But Keating’s greater dislike of Packer caused him to protect Fairfax against Packer’s ambitions, refining his argument that any take-over would erode media diversity. Kerry Packer has been gone for years now — he died in December, 2005 — but Keating’s hatred for him and the TV empire he once owned has never abated. It took no more than the announcement on Thursday of Nine’s proposed merger with Fairfax to fire up the former PM. Channel Nine, he said in a written statement, had "never other than displayed the opportunism and ethics of an alley cat". And then he went on the ABC’s 7.30 program to expand.

“I have fought more television and radio companies than anyone in the business, and my fight — a series of issues I have had with Nine — were about one thing and one thing only: Kerry Packer trying to get hold of control of John Fairfax and sons,” he said. Loading “Because as prime minister I prevented Kerry Packer lifting his share of John Fairfax to 14.9 per cent control.” And then he was asked about an infamous 60 Minutes program on Packer’s Nine Network in the late 1990s that falsely alleged Keating had been involved in dodgy dealings during his ownership of a piggery, later sold on to Indonesian interests. Keating revealed his old penchant for doing over his enemies slowly.

“Kerry Packer had the Nine Network chase me in private life,” he said. “But I’m a big boy, I know how to punch. People said to me after a whole series of things on 60 Minutes. They said, ‘Mr Keating, are you going to take Mr Packer to court for defamation?’ I said, ‘No, I have more expensive remedies in mind for Mr Packer’. “That was taking Fairfax from him, which I had [Senator] Brian Harradine do in 1997 to 1998. In other words, I made sure he didn’t allow Howard to get a majority to let Turnbull do what he did today.” In fact, the 60 Minutes program was in 1999, so Harradine, a tough and wily independent senator from Tasmania, previously expelled by the ALP, could hardly have been doing Keating’s bidding in retaliation for it a year or two earlier. Keating says he enlisted Tasmanian independent senator Brian Harradine to thwart cross-media ownership. Credit:AFR