Warwick Fairfax
Warwick Fairfax (born December 1960) is an Australian businessman who had tried unsuccessfully to privatise his family's media company Fairfax Media in 1987. He was the son of Warwick Oswald Fairfax and his third wife, Mary, Lady Fairfax. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, he successfully took over the company but on 10 December 1990 the company collapsed and a receiver was appointed. The controversial method of financing and purchasing holdings of the established company from family members and the consequential problems arising in the media group in later years are still cited today in Australian media history.
Former Australian opposition leader and former investment banker Malcolm Turnbull first came to prominence by representing the interests of a number of American holders of bonds issued by Fairfax at this time. At this time, Fairfax was in competition with competitors Alan Bond, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch for increased ownership of print titles.
Fairfax is perhaps best known for its flagship titles The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Fairfax's activities in media ownership coincided with a time in Australian business when many media businesses were undergoing takeovers and mergers, some to certain degrees of success and legality. Principal figures such as Alan Bond, Christopher Skase, Kerry Stokes, Robert Holmes à Court and to a certain extent, Canada's Conrad Black and Israel Asper bought and sold media properties frequently within Australia during the 1980s. However, these figures were more limited in wealth and success than the largest of Australia's media proprietors, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, who had since moved to the UK and later the US to build print media and satellite television operations.
Even with Fairfax's enormous weight and influence in the newspaper market across the country, cross media ownership rules limited its operations in electronic media, a different situation to Packer whose print media operations were limited mostly to magazines.
References
- A history of The Age newspaper
- Family affair again after days of young Warwick The Age, Melbourne