Dick Smith is an exemplary candidate for Arsehat of the Year
Dick Smith is to be congratulated on his nomination yesterday for the Crikey Arsehat of The Year Award. I’m sure we all hope he goes on to win. It would be difficult to imagine a more worthy recipient.
But seriously, when will the mainstream media start treating Smith for what he really is: a hypocritical huckster with a serious ego problem?
For more than 40 years the tabloids and the commercial radio and TV networks have all fallen over each other to report his every new venture, thought-bubble brainwave or shameless publicity stunt. From flogging electric toilet seats to towing a fake iceberg into Sydney Harbour, Smith is easy, breezy copy. Editors and producers assume that his cheeky bespectacled boy-scout enthusiasms go down well, so they keep giving him generous free exposure.
They buy anything Smith is selling because they know he’s a recognisable character sure to deliver them the kind of upbeat pap that feeds the prejudices of their audience. We’re asked to forget he’s a multi-millionaire. Instead, Smith is portrayed as a plucky, idealistic little underdog fighting the next righteous battle on our behalf.
It’s all a con. Rolled-gold baloney. But perhaps his current paranoid campaign against the ABC will finally provide the trigger for a more realistic appraisal of this self-proclaimed patriot.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with being a successful entrepreneur, or a good salesman. Smith is both. The problem is the credibility gap between what he says, and what he actually does.
Crikey has already mentioned the hypocrisy of his “Buy Australian” posturing after making his first fortune selling cheap imported electronics. But there’s much more.
While painting himself as a concerned environmentalist, he flew his large helicopter around the world as a self-promoting stunt, polluting the atmosphere on a long and utterly unnecessary trip, and burning plenty of fossil fuel along the way.
After selling the Dick Smith stores to Woolworths he established another business built around his Australian Geographic magazine. While presenting “Buy Australian” TV ads, Smith was printing his magazine at the Dai Nippon works in Japan. He’d also assured readers in an early editorial that he would never sell the AG subscriber list. A few years later, he sold the Australian Geographic business to Fairfax — complete with its subscriber list.
Never bashful about exploiting his name and media-fuelled image as the game little Aussie fighting the greedy multi-nationals, Smith’s next major venture was Dick Smith Foods. It is a case study in the hypocrisies of his modus operandi.
DSF was purely a licensing and marketing business. Despite all his guff about supporting “our farmers”, he didn’t grow, manufacture or even package the supermarket lines that carried his moniker and grinning dial. He just owned all the product names, label images and marketing apparatus, and then licensed them to anyone prepared to pay.
Then, in 2002, Smith licensed the entire brand management rights of Dick Smith Foods to Sanitarium for five years. The Sanitarium Health Food Company is owned by the US-based Seventh Day Adventist Church and pays no tax here because it is the offshoot of a registered religion. So much for “all the profits staying in Australia”.
Not surprisingly, Sanitarium may not have over-exerted themselves pushing the Dick Smith brand because they have their own competitive supermarket lines. Next, the brand was licensed to Green Bros. But by the time that deal expired and the rights reverted to Smith, turnover had plummeted.
So what did he do? Re-launch the brand with the fawning help of A Current Affair. They filmed him — in the obligatory silly “OzEmite” hat — going from door to door clutching a fistful of bank notes and promising $500 to anyone who had one of his products in their fridge or pantry. Classy stuff.
Indeed, a defining characteristic of Smith’s campaigns has been their constant references to money. Every time he wants to push a new cause, he tells the media how much cash he’s going to spend doing it. The man apparently believes that his honesty can be measured by the amounts he promises to give away. These totals are always quoted in neat millions. Gosh, isn’t he generous! That wonderful Dick Smith bloke really puts his money where his mouth is.
Or does he? Do the media ever check whether all those millions, so breathlessly reported at first, were actually paid out as promised? We’re still waiting.
Smith’s egocentricity is now blossoming into the realms of delusional behaviour. All the advertising material in his current Malthusian population-control campaign features Smith, front and centre. His appetite for media exposure is insatiable. The message is secondary to the cult of personality. He imagines that anyone who doesn’t accept and promote his arguments is conspiring against him, and should be punished.
Which is why there’s now to be a $1 million Dick Smith campaign of TV ads against the ABC because, he claims, they haven’t given his anti-growth propaganda a fair run.
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