Outgoing ABC chairman Justin Milne’s humble beginnings in Adelaide
JUSTIN Milne became the most talked-about man in Australia yesterday when he resigned as ABC chairman. Penelope Debelle reflects on his humble beginnings in Adelaide.
HE came to the job in March last year as the powerful, approachable and digital-savvy ABC chairman.
The fact that he was a good friend of then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was of interest but it seemed a benign detail, at least at the time.
Justin Milne, who is from Adelaide, seemed like a cluey, laid-back breath of fresh air with a casual approach but a degree of passion about the digital future and where the national broadcaster should go.
He had been around film and media since the early 1970s when he was a long-haired student at Flinders University, protesting the war in Vietnam and studying drama and arts.
“It was the early ’70s and everybody was active,” Milne told The Advertiser last year.
“We were getting out of Vietnam and a lot of people were very motivated about that, especially students, so I was in good company.”
He grew up in Coromandel Valley and his friends at Flinders included filmmaker Scott Hicks, with whom Milne also went to St Peter’s College. He arrived at Flinders a year behind Hicks after taking a year off to work as a stagehand and mechanic at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
At Flinders, he discovered film rather than theatre suited his technical/mechanical bent and he graduated into a job at the resurgent South Australian Film Corporation.
In his mid-60s, the freshly-appointed ABC chairman was relaxed and unpretentious with a knack for good timing.
He didn’t get the job because he and Mr Turnbull were mates but the fact they were from the same milieu wouldn’t have hurt either.
His timing was always good. Back in the 1970s, he had arrived at the SAFC when film was the next big thing and worked on Peter Weir’s mystery The Last Wave, and in a minor way on Picnic At Hanging Rock. He then formed a company with Adelaide photographer, Geoffrey Simpson, who became an internationally regarded cameraman and was back in SA in 2016 on location shooting the Martin Freeman zombie thriller Cargo.
Milne tapped into the lucrative market for educational filmmaking, bought a film company in Sydney and moved there. As the early 1990s’ recession hit, he became an early adopter of new technology and turned to computers and CD-ROMs then the internet.
As the new ABC chairman, his strong record in the digital economy was seen as a particular asset that would help the national broadcaster steer its way to a future where it could be accessed in multitudes of ways, not just in front of the loungeroom screen.
His career became more serious when he was appointed head of Microsoft in Australia. No one knew how to do the job, he says, so he put up his hand. Through this success, in the late 1990s he became Ozemail’s head of datacasting not long before it was taken over by a US phone company, WorldCom, and he became its chief executive.
Milne came into Ozemail when Mr Turnbull was chairman, and while he did not work for him for long – Mr Turnbull reportedly sold his $500,000 Ozemail stake for $57 million – they worked together on the NBN and remained friends. On Wednesday night, even Mr Turnbull’s intervention from Manhattan, denying he ever asked Milne to sack anyone, failed to save Milne, whose position as head of the independent ABC became untenable after leaked emails showed he ill-advisedly demanded the sacking of two journalists for overtly political reasons.
His departure leaves the board temporarily stranded because Milne had been tipped as the next ABC chairman long before it was announced. He was the obvious man for the job, not just because Mr Turnbull knew and trusted him but because he was experienced and highly qualified. He had a strong record in digital economy at a time when the ABC’s greatest challenge lay in market fragmentation.
His core belief was that the ABC must harness new generations of ABC consumers through different means because Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y had progressively watched less TV and Millennials barely watched any at all.
Milne was accepting of the new world, which still included long-form storytelling on platforms such as HBO and Netflix. He said there was no point grieving for a lost time when the family watched TV in the living room from 7pm until bedtime. They were the glory days when everybody watched the same shows – Bellbird, The Sullivans – then went to work and talked about them.
“Those days are gone so we need to find ways to be part of the new conversations and that will probably mean having a greater role in the way content is distributed to all of us, Millennials included,” he said.
The way the message was received did not matter to the ABC, which was taxpayer- funded and not reliant on advertising. The ABC could meet its obligations to reflect Australia to Australians on a conventional screen, phone, iPad, or on Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp.
He brought to the job critical hands-on transformation experience that included in 2002 taking over Telstra’s broadband business, which he progressively overhauled and made more competitive.
When appointed, Milne said he would not initiate ideas about the day-to-day running of the ABC. In the early days, he showed little interest in debates about the organisation’s perceived left-wing bias – at least until it became a political problem that threatened the ABC’s relations with the Government that paid its bills. He saw his job as supporting then ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie as she embarked on a cycle of change that would slash middle management and divert $50 million into content.
“My role is not to wade in and say ‘I’ve had a great idea, we should do this’ or ‘I’d like to make a program on that’,” he said at the time. “I have a non-executive role and that means I need to take responsibility for the governance of the organisation in general terms.”
As the knives came out yesterday, it was reported Milne was criticised for having called a woman “chick” when he worked at the MYOB accounting company. A person who worked with him said that two years ago, Milne had asked about his plans for the board, and said “We’re even looking to appoint a chick.”
For the record, after our interview, Milne asked if he once knew me because I sounded like “the kind of chick he used to know”. No offence was intended and certainly none was taken but it was a blast from the past in personal style that may be coming back to haunt him.