Opinion
The blockbuster trial in Jackie “O” Henderson’s wrongful termination case against her former employer, KIIS FM owner ARN Media, may have been kicked down the road until April next year.
But the delayed trial, originally scheduled to kick off this month, hasn’t cauterised the release of detail about Henderson’s departure from the company this year, following the now-famous on-air bust-up with her former co-host, Kyle Sandilands.
On Monday, the Federal Court heard the contents of text messages Henderson sent to close friends, including fashion designer Pip Edwards and interior designer Steve Cordony, in the days after her on-air clash with Sandilands on February 20.
In one, sent on February 23, Henderson said she would take some time off, and may even “be done” working with Sandilands.
“I’m taking time off the show. I think I might be done, or at least working with Kyle,” Henderson wrote in the text message, the court heard, before writing another saying she would be speaking with a lawyer to get “an idea of where I stand”.
Later that day, Henderson’s manager Gemma O’Neill texted Henderson to say she’d call once she had Henderson’s lawyer on the line. “[The lawyer is] also having her colleague join the call who is a specialist with workplace law and Fair Work,” O’Neill wrote in the message, the court heard. O’Neill and ARN declined to comment on the hearing.
Less than an hour after Henderson was scheduled to speak with her lawyers, she then told her friend Dr Justine Corry she’d decided not to return to the Kyle and Jackie O Show.
“I’ve made the decision to not return to the show,” Henderson wrote, the court heard. “Just on the phone to the lawyer to write up a legal letter. We will see what happens from here.”
Three days later, Henderson’s lawyers sent ARN a formal complaint outlining allegations of bullying. Monday’s procedural hearing was scheduled to hear arguments over what should and should not be privileged in next year’s trial.
But in airing the text messages, ARN’s barrister Peter Gaffney also opened a window into one of the central arguments in the company’s defence: that Henderson had decided to leave the show before the letter was sent.
“It’s not like I won’t have a job,” Henderson wrote in a message to her assistant the day her lawyers fired the letter off to ARN. “I have an offer anyway. There’s a safety net.”
Outstanding corporate citizen
How lucky is Australia? The artificial intelligence behemoth whose rogue agents attempted to infiltrate multiple Australian government websites earlier this year has now helpfully convened an “independent” taskforce that’ll make policy recommendations to help manage AI risks.
The AI behemoth in question is, of course, OpenAI, which on Tuesday named the Australian appointees that’ll form the taskforce. They are former Department of Social Services secretary Ray Griggs, Tech Policy Design Institute co-founder Johanna Weaver, and former eSafety Commissioner Alastair MacGibbon, now chief strategy officer at CyberCX.
The taskforce will make recommendations on how to improve AI incident notifications, how to improve co-ordination between AI firms and government, and how – wait for it – to better manage AI risks as part of a report due to be completed by the end of the year.
OpenAI has also thrown in $US10 million ($14 million) worth of credits to help organisations strengthen cybersecurity, prioritising the agencies its models tried to hack.
The cynical interpretation of all this, of course, would be that OpenAI has made its own safety and government relations failures the Australian government’s responsibility, while pitching itself as an upstanding corporate citizen.
But given the Albanese government’s hands-off approach to regulating AI and the obsequiousness with which Labor officials have treated the world’s biggest AI companies, we wouldn’t be surprised if the recommendations find their way into legislation.
We can already hear Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles thanking the company for its cooperation.
Where’s Simon?
The annual Walkley Awards trigger a wave of chatter in media circles every year. The nominations (and snubs) reliably light up group chats, as do the trickle of events scheduled around the journalism industry’s night of nights.
But last week it was the absence of one of the industry’s biggest names from a Walkley Awards lunch that offered crumbs to the media’s chattering class to feed on.
That’s because the big-name absentee was none other than the ABC’s newly installed director of news, Simon Robinson, who we’re told was expected to attend the 2026 Walkley Partners and Supporters Lunch at Arturo’s in Sydney’s Woolloomoloo last week.
The absence became a curio in media circles because it was only days earlier that Robinson found himself staring down staff backlash. As this masthead reported at the time, the ABC’s union house committee called an urgent meeting of its members after ABC reporter Michael Slezak, who is also the federal president of media at the union, was threatened with disciplinary action over a column he wrote for The Australian Financial Review.
When we asked the ABC about Robinson’s absence on Tuesday, though, there was nothing to see here. Robinson, like much of Sydney, was forced to stay home sick, we were told, and couldn’t make it to the supporters lunch. But he can be expected to attend the awards presentation.