On Sunday night Kerry O’Brien was inducted into the Logies Hall of Fame and received his award with a widely celebrated speech on the “failures of politics, failures of journalism [and] failures of society”. The following is a transcription of that speech. You can watch the full video here.
Thank you, Waleed. Thank you, everyone. And can I just say how pleased I am not to be receiving this award posthumously.
Television was only six years old when I discovered journalism in a tiny television newsroom, Channel Nine, upon Mount Coot-Tha, overlooking Brisbane. I worked for every commercial network, had some great shared moments and made lasting friendships.
The ABC has never been the sole bastion of good television journalism but I was always in my natural home at the ABC because the pursuit of excellence wasn’t just permitted, it was expected.
As the importance of journalism became more and more obvious to me, absolutely fundamental to a healthy democracy despite its many imperfections — that’s the many imperfections of journalism as well as democracy — it also added more meaning to my life. And being paid to satisfy your curiosity and feed your imagination and have fun along the way didn’t hurt either. But the joy of it, the joy of it has been fed largely by my wonderfully collegiate culture that I experienced at all those terrific programs.
This Day Tonight, Four Corners, Lateline and 7.30, we all competed with each other vigorously but from a bedrock of mutual respect — even love. Those friendships have been incredibly important in my life. The other joy has been to watch new talent emerge and to feel that in some way, I’ve helped to nurture it. There have been the tough times, the budget cuts to the ABC again and again and again, driven more by a desire to punish and by an ideological obsession than because the public broadcaster was inefficient.
In my view, the day Jonathan Shier was appointed to run the ABC in the Howard years was the beginning of a dark time in that place. So, some of the best and the brightest were shown the door in that time. 7.30 was in the eye of the storm. I was described in headlines, as you saw a little while ago, as “dead man talking”. But on that program, we walked a straight line and allowed our work to speak for us. The program could have died in that era, but it’s still there — still going strong, still driven by good people, still accused of bias, but still walking a straight line. And the ABC is still forging its way through strong headwinds, probably never threatened more than it is today by a combination of forces, cash-strapped in a totally disrupted, digitally driven industry, and still confronting the same sad ideological prejudice.
And now, even the Federal Police — some of whom have themselves leaked to us in the past — have seen fit to raid the place. And yet as I sat here tonight and watched nomination after nomination after nomination for the ABC, including for most popular categories which rely on a public vote, I felt so much better about the place.
My message, my message to every person working in Aunty’s embrace today is simple: keep your heads held high and your eye firmly fixed on delivering programs of relevance, quality and integrity for people in every corner of Australia and those same people will repay your loyalty with theirs as they always have.
And to the rest of the country: don’t ever again allow politicians to diminish the public broadcaster. It is one of the most precious institutions we have. Along with reporting the bad news, my colleagues and I have told many stories of hope and inspiration, and mostly I’ve been proud to call my self a journalist. Yet, we the journalists have to share the responsibility for the great failures of our time. A time of enormous ferment and challenge, failures of politics, failures of journalism, failures of society in the end.
For instance 40 years after powerful evidence first kicked in that human-caused climate change threatened the world with an existential disaster, we’re still stuck in the mire of drab, dishonest arguments that will come at great cost to future generations and we the journalists have not cut through the fake news effectively. We have not properly held politicians to account.
But there is one big glaring gap in this nation’s otherwise great story that I want to spend a brief minute on tonight: the failure to reconcile Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. When I started my career, First Australians were not even counted in the national census. On paper, they didn’t exist. I was first personally exposed to the awful racism this country is capable of when I visited Alice Springs more than 45 years ago, and sadly you don’t have to go too far to see it still today. A trip to any prison will do it.
We all have an opportunity together in this term of the federal parliament to understand and support what is embodied in the Uluru Statement From The Heart. A remarkable document, forged in unity by more than 250 Aboriginal and Torres-Strait Islander leaders, representing the oldest surviving culture on the face of the earth. [It’s] a culture that adds a richness that is unique to this continent and yet we other Australians are mostly ignorant of it.
The Uluru statement represents no threat to a single individual in any corner of this country, and certainly no threat to the integrity of parliament. And if you’re told that, don’t you believe it. On the contrary, it will add much to the integrity of our nation. We like to be seen as one nation made up of many parts. Now, it’s time to prove it.
The last and most important thing of all for me, personally tonight, is to acknowledge with gratitude and love the precious part family has played in my life and been so central to it. My children — and indulge me for 10 seconds here — Lara, Chris, Anthony, Jack, Ben and Meg; and my grandchildren, Joe, Gigi, Billy, Harrison, Tom and Mason have been at the centre of my life. Sue Javes, my wife and best friend for 40 years, warned me tonight not to say how much she’d helped me in my career — as Karl Stefanovic had said here at the Logies a few years ago, because it’d probably cost him a couple of million. Sorry darling, you’re going to have to lower your sights.
The truth is, I have been so lucky and so privileged to be able to call on Sue’s impeccable judgment, instinctive wisdom and good humour throughout our years together. She also told me to avoid using the word “journey” tonight. So I’ll close simply by saying: this has been a wonderful road to have been allowed to travel. Thanks to all of you, especially in the living rooms of Australia, who have travelled that road with me.
Well done and said Kerry – unfortunately the ABC is already diminished – and another 3 years god help us. Hopefully all the good journalists will stand tall and straight as you said, but I bet it is harder for them now than it was for you and your compatriots.
So true. The ABC will need a lot of love and medicine to restore her to her former glory.
Yes the medicine the ABC needs is a good laxative to restore a balanced gut flora – called microbiota.
First class speech indeed. Congratulations Kerry O’Brien.
It’s a long way from the red Kerry to the fatuous sisters, Crabb and Sales who would rather cook with a crook or blush with school girl giggles at the top-hat wearing PM. Heaven forbid one should actually question them at any depth at all.
‘…a long way’, you’re too kind RH, it’s another world away.
What will the journalistic legacy of Crabb and Sales look like in years to come “…ah well , together we helped Scott Morrison become the P.M. ,oh and we had a podcast too,such fun.”
The ABC’s Limited News Party Chorus Line.
When it’s their Limited News Party in the poo, you can trust the Chorus Line to come up with mitigating anecdotes and examples of Labor doing as badly or worse to lessen LNP embarrassment : but when it’s Labor in the gun, they’ll run them up their flagpole solo to flap in the breeze, like their gums.
Crabb on Birmingham – Sunday’s Insiders – him going off about Labor’s dog-in-a-manger obstructionism (on tax cuts) – at which point Crabb could have skuttled in to remind him of what he and the rest of the Abbott Opposition did too? But no, not her.
Sales – last night she had the chance to probe Morrison on some of his ‘loose with the truth’ moves, and look what happened ….. or, rather, didn’t.
Whatever Sales performance seems, I consider the contempt to which Scott Morrison always subjects her (“what you’ve got to understand Leigh is …”) is simply appalling, always cringemaking and for the writer, now an indelible turn off . In the eyes of our dictator, sorry PM, Leigh Sales is merely a woman. MR morrisin is one of the current batch of politivcsons and trained by a certain party adviser to not answer questions, to obfuscate and justb brush off journalists.
This atitude and behaviour is is an abrogation of responsibility to voters, whichnis to be accountable. Journalists, after all, are proxies for voters.
Your language bespeaks your jellies, a few red, some yellow but mostly just clear jellies with their colour gone. I am also jealous of Crabbe and Sales because I admire their work especially the dimpled one who has our confidence in her constantly great reporting.
When Annabel Crabbe writes or talks she takes reader listeners and viewers with her, because of our confidence in her workmanship as a journalist.
Leigh Sales has a tough task getting answers, at least fulsome (frank, honest) answers from Ministers, who have a well-rehearsed style of not answering, not providing genuine answers, dodging questions and treating Sales with clear contempt: for some because she is merely a woman.
Current affairs journalists / program hosts and interviewing journalists need a kill button for the guest microphone with a capacity to stop politicians (and any guest) who fail to to answer questions and go on to make speeches, in pursuit of their party agenda. Ministers must be made accountable. It is practical to have journalists as our proxies in this task and impractical, to the extent of impossible, to pursue accountability in other mechanisms. 17 million voters cannot all ask questions (USA about 200 milion eligible, of a population in the order of 320 million, possibly already 360 million). We need journalists to pursue our questions, to enable democracy. Journalists are a fundamental element of democracy as is our-voters – right to know, which Australian media have highlighted in 2019 as our government becomes more regressive, as in totalitarian. The more we allow goverment to deny accountability the more politicians will enjoy not answering and thus the more journalists will be denied information.
Journalists have a difficult task.
More power to you Kerry. People don’t realise what they are losing.
We shall not see the like again.
The ABC cannot, and should not, be saved in anything like its present emaciated, deracinated cowed form.
It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Fat chance.