The Kerry Packer Era in Australian Cricket

Kerry Packer never held a cricket administration post and never sat on a board. His influence came from owning the pictures. From 1979 until 2018, an Australian who wanted to watch cricket at home was watching a Packer product, framed by Packer's cameras, sold by Packer's salespeople and described by commentators Packer had chosen. That is a longer and quieter form of power than the two seasons of open warfare he is usually remembered for.

The warfare mattered because it settled who would own the pictures. But the era named after him is really the four decades that followed, in which Australian cricket learned to behave like a commercial property: scheduling around advertising, packaging its summer as continuous programming, and eventually arguing with its own players over the split of a revenue stream that had not existed before he arrived.

The meeting in 1976

The dispute began with an offer that looks trivially small now. Packer wanted exclusive rights to Australia's home Test cricket for his Nine Network and put roughly one and a half million dollars on the table for three years — a multiple of anything cricket had previously been paid for its television coverage.

The Australian Cricket Board turned him down and renewed with the Australian Broadcasting Commission instead, on a three-year agreement worth around two hundred and ten thousand dollars from the 1976-77 season. The board's reasoning was loyalty: the ABC had covered cricket for two decades when commercial networks were indifferent to it.

What Packer said in the room has never been settled. His own version was a line about there being a little bit of the whore in all of us, followed by an invitation to the officials to name their price. Ray Steele, one of the administrators present, remembered it more bluntly as "we're all harlots". The two accounts have been repeated interchangeably for fifty years and there is no way to adjudicate between them; what is not in dispute is that Packer left the meeting believing he had been patronised rather than outbid.

Why the board said no

Understanding the refusal requires taking the board's position seriously rather than treating it as snobbery.

The Australian Cricket Board of the mid-1970s was a federation of state associations run largely by unpaid volunteers, with revenue drawn mainly from gate receipts. Television was regarded as promotional rather than as a business line. A public broadcaster that covered every ball, asked for nothing and interfered with nothing suited that worldview precisely, and a commercial network offering eight times as much money was a change of relationship rather than a change of price. The board did not want a partner with opinions about scheduling.

It also had no legal or commercial apparatus for handling what followed. When Packer signed the players instead, the board discovered that it did not control the labour, could not enforce the ban it announced, and had no reserves to outlast a media proprietor. How that played out on the field is set out in the account of World Series Cricket's two rebel seasons.

What Nine did with the pictures

The most durable part of the Packer legacy is not a rule change. It is a grammar of television coverage that every broadcaster in the world subsequently copied.

Cricket had previously been shot from one end. Packer's complaint was blunt — from a single fixed position, half the coverage consists of looking at a batter's backside — and the fix was to build the coverage from both ends behind the bowler's arm, so the viewer always sees the ball coming towards them. Around eight cameras were deployed where the ABC had used a handful. Microphones went in at the base of the stumps, which turned the sound of an edge into evidence. Replays were used aggressively. On-screen information became continuous rather than occasional.

Packer also rebuilt the commentary box out of the people who had been on his side of the split. Richie Benaud fronted the coverage and advised Packer directly; Tony Greig and Ian Chappell joined him. Nine's sports brand, Wide World of Sports, made cricket the centrepiece of the Australian summer schedule rather than an item within it. The practical arrangements for viewers today — what is free to air, what sits behind a subscription, and why the anti-siphoning rules exist at all — are set out in the guide to watching cricket in Australia.

PBL Marketing, and who owned the game

The settlement announced at the end of May 1979 is usually described as Packer winning the television rights. He won considerably more than that.

Alongside the ten-year broadcast agreement, a Packer company called PBL Marketing was handed the contract to promote and market Australian cricket. That is a different order of concession. For the following fifteen years the decisions about how the game was packaged and sold — sponsorships, branding, the shape of the one-day product — sat with a commercial firm rather than with the sport's governing body. The board reclaimed its own commercial and broadcast rights in 1994, which is roughly the point at which their value began climbing steeply.

The influence showed up in the product as well as the paperwork. The board's flagship one-day tournament was called the World Series Cup — the name lifted straight from the competition it had spent two years trying to destroy — and it kept that name into the mid-1990s. The triangular format, with a touring side, a second touring side and Australia playing a long round-robin followed by a best-of-three final, was designed to generate the maximum number of televisable Australian matches in a summer, and it ran in that shape for the better part of two decades.

Laid out as a sequence, the shift in who controlled the game's income is stark.

Point in time	Who held what
1976	ABC renewed on a modest three-year deal; Packer's larger offer refused
1977 to 1979	Two competitions running in parallel, both losing money
May 1979	Nine granted exclusive rights for ten years; PBL Marketing given the commercial contract
1994	Board reclaims its own broadcast and marketing rights
2003	Australian Cricket Board renamed Cricket Australia
2018	Rights split between Seven and Foxtel; Nine's run ends

The lesson the administration drew from those fifteen years is visible in the way Australian cricket has been run ever since. It negotiates hard, it keeps its marketing in-house, and it treats the broadcast contract as the single most consequential document it signs. The current governance structure that grew out of that is described in how Cricket Australia is organised.

Paying cricketers like professionals

Before 1977 an Australian Test cricketer was paid a match fee and expected to hold a job. Sponsors' benefits and testimonials filled the gaps. Players who asked for more were told that the honour of selection was part of the compensation.

Packer's contracts destroyed that argument by demonstrating what the labour was actually worth on an open market, and the post-settlement game had to price accordingly. Everything that has followed — full-time contracts, a players' association formed in the 1990s to bargain collectively, and the revenue-sharing model that has been the central issue in every Australian pay dispute since — descends from the discovery that cricketers could be bid for.

It cuts both ways, and Australian cricket has never entirely resolved the tension. A player's income now depends heavily on formats and competitions the board does not fully control, which is the same structural problem the board faced in 1977 with the roles reversed. The global franchise landscape that produced it is surveyed in T20 franchise leagues around the world, and Australia's own entry in it is the Big Bash League.

From board to business

On 1 July 2003 the Australian Cricket Board renamed itself Cricket Australia. The change of name was cosmetic; the change it acknowledged was not. A federation of state associations had become a national sporting business with a brand, a commercial department, a broadcast negotiation cycle and a duty to grow participation as well as to select a team.

Whether that is a Packer legacy or simply what happened to every major sport in the same period is arguable. The reasonable position is that Australian cricket got there earlier and more completely than most, because it had been forced through the transition twenty-five years before by a proprietor who understood the value of the product better than its owners did.

Forty years of Nine, then Seven and Foxtel

The era ended in April 2018, when Cricket Australia awarded its rights to the Seven Network and Foxtel in a six-year arrangement reported at around one and a quarter billion dollars. Nine, which had broadcast Australian cricket continuously since the 1979 truce, lost it.

The commentary at the time treated this as the end of something, and in a narrow sense it was: the coverage style, the theme music and the voices had become part of the summer for two generations of viewers. In a broader sense it was the Packer model working exactly as designed. Cricket had become valuable enough that a rival network would pay a sum no one in 1976 could have imagined for a sport the same network had once declined to bid for.

He died on Boxing Day

Kerry Packer died at his Sydney home on 26 December 2005, aged sixty-eight — the opening day of the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, the fixture his broadcast money had helped turn into a national institution. Australia and South Africa wore black armbands the following morning and stood for a minute's silence before play. Cricket Australia's chairman placed him alongside Donald Bradman among the most important figures in the Australian game.

That comparison caused some irritation, and it is worth sitting with rather than dismissing. Bradman scored the runs. Packer never played a first-class match. What he did was change the terms on which the sport existed, which is a smaller kind of contribution to admire and a larger one to measure. The fixture he died during is treated in detail in the guide to the Boxing Day Test at the MCG.

The argument that never settled

Two defensible positions survive, and most people who followed cricket through the period hold a mixture of both.

The case for Packer is that he found a sport administered by amateurs, underpaid by broadcasters and exploitative of its players, and left it professional, watchable and solvent. Night cricket, coloured clothing, competent television and a living wage all arrived on his watch, and none of them arrived because the board wanted them.

The case against is that he introduced a permanent principle: that whoever pays for the broadcast has the strongest voice in how cricket is played and when. Format proliferation, compressed Test schedules and the steady squeeze on first-class cricket in favour of shorter formats all follow from that principle rather than from any cricketing argument, and Australian domestic cricket has felt it directly — a point that recurs throughout the Sheffield Shield debate and across the wider cricket in Australia section.

Sources and method

This page is based on contemporary reporting of the 1976 rights negotiation and the figures involved, on Cricket Australia's own published history including the 2003 change of name, on reporting of the 2018 broadcast rights award to Seven and Foxtel, on published accounts of PBL Marketing's role and the point at which commercial rights returned to the board, and on obituaries and Cricket Australia statements issued after Packer's death in December 2005. Where the wording of his remark to board officials is disputed between the participants, both versions are given rather than one being presented as fact. Financial figures are reported as they were announced at the time and are not adjusted for inflation. Nothing on this page is derived from our own datasets.