Ita Buttrose: ‘I hope the government is listening’
In her first sitdown interview since taking on the job of ABC chair, Ita Buttrose talks candidly about the challenges involved and reveals why this role won’t be her last.
Stellar
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She’s in attendance at January’s Australian of the Year Awards in Canberra, enjoying a drink and a nibble with her son and daughter-in-law.
Suddenly, she recalls, “Some bloke comes through the crowd and says, ‘Are you Ita Buttrose?’” Yes, she tells him, she is. In response, the man tells her that he’s with Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who wants to see her.
Buttrose remembers the encounter with a smile. “So I put the drink down,” she tells Stellar. “And said, ‘Lead on!’” Soon after, she and Morrison exchanged the usual pleasantries — and he “just offers me the job”.
The “job” is, of course, chair of the much-loved Australian public broadcaster, the ABC. “I just looked at him,” recalls Buttrose.
“He said, ‘No need to decide now. Just give me a ring next week.’ So I did.”
Despite being caught on the hop, Buttrose soon realised it was also a natural progression. “I’ve spent my whole life in the media, worked in all the mediums, so I really know what we do for a living,” says Buttrose.
“And I think you can bring some of that wisdom and knowledge, and perhaps share it as we move into the future.”
The sharing is part of the deal. Everyone feels they know Buttrose, and are comfortable approaching her. They talk to her and tell her what they think, particularly in the ABC lift.
“They don’t know me, but they know me,” she tells Stellar. “It’s quite advantageous for all sorts of things. [The familiarity] is good because you can communicate with people easily — and that’s the business we’re in.”
The ABC occupies an odd place in the Australian landscape, regularly voted our most-trusted institution, yet often pilloried in Canberra and by sections of the commercial media.
Buttrose’s appointment as a rather public chair, particularly her leadership lobbying for press freedom, has soothed some of its critics.
Buttrose and her managing director David Anderson are leading a coalition of “very odd bedfellows”, including Nine Network’s Hugh Marks and News Corp’s Michael Miller. “They’ve come together on this united front and realised they quite like each other, so there’s a new discussion going on,” she says.
“I hope [the government] is listening. I’ve certainly met with the PM and with our minister [and] they know how we feel. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some changes, some look at the legislation [because] we can actually be trusted; we’re not a bunch of idiots. We know what’s right. We know what to do.”
Nothing has surprised Buttrose about the ABC. She knows the organisation well, partly because her father Charles Buttrose rose to the role of the ABC’s assistant general manager after an early career in newspapers.
“And I always watched the ABC anyway,” she says. “There’s some wonderful work going on here, but we’ve got many programs people don’t actually know about. I call them ‘sleeper programs’ and we need to promote them more than we do, so people can see how diverse we actually are.”
She’s well aware the ABC is on a never-ending quest to please everyone. The latest invention in connection with this is a suite of programming across all ABC media — TV, radio and digital — after a mass survey of the Australian public’s attitudes to social issues.
Already, the ABC has surveyed 50,000 Australians on a range of issues for its Australia Talks National Survey, and the major themes will be discussed across the ABC throughout this coming week.
“This is an attempt by us to find out what Australians think about almost everything we can think of,” explains Buttrose. “The more we know about our audience, the better we can serve them.”
More Australians will be encouraged to do the survey and compare their social profiles ahead of a live ABC TV telecast on November 18 featuring the two major themes to emerge.
The ABC is keeping the themes from the chair — although she is fascinated by some of the revelations, including the prevalence of loneliness, particularly among 18- to 24-year-olds.
Australia Talks will help shape some content the ABC will deliver in the future.
“Obviously if we discover people are happier outdoors, we might have nothing but sea-change shows!” she says, laughing.
Buttrose recalls a similar enterprise when editing The Australian Women’s Weekly in the late 1970s, a survey called The Voice Of The Australian Woman.
“But that was to make our voice heard because we weren’t heard at all in the ’70s,” she says. “It allowed us to hear things we had no idea were going on, for example, the incidence of rape, and we had no idea of the rate of domestic violence, or incest. So when we ran it, it gave permission for people to suddenly talk about these things in the public arena.”
She expects Australia Talks to do the same. Incredibly, the 77-year-old is spruiking such a project more than 40 years after she promoted the Weekly’s one.
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The end of a full, long day in her “part-time” role as ABC chair, she says, beats rising at dawn to be on television. Her previous media role was a panellist on Network 10’s morning program Studio 10, another unexpected high-profile gig.
“You do get to a certain age where you think these things might not happen, and I’d always wanted to do a show like that, but I just thought it’s not going to be, it’s not in the plan,” she says. “And then you get this opportunity and think, ‘Well, if you wait long enough, anything’s possible.’”
When asked if she has ever had moments of professional doubt, Buttrose slows and quietly recalls closing her publishing company and eponymous magazine in the 1990s “during the recession we had to have” as “a bit of a lull”.
“It was a good six years, a very hard six years. It’s hard being a small business. I went off and grieved a while, and then you just sort of think, ‘Come on, no-one else is going to pick you up, so get up and get going again.’ And you can see I’ve had lots of opportunities since then, and I’ve taken them all.”
And there will be more, as Buttrose determines retirement is not on the agenda. “Never. I don’t think I could bear it. I like running things. I like this role, it’s a leadership role. I enjoy leadership, and I probably think we need a few more leaders in Australia.”
Visit abc.net.au/AustraliaTalks.