Polite by nature: Annabel Crabb on pollies, trolls and trash TV

ABC star Annabel Crabb is taking a break while next year’s project remains a mystery adventure | LISTEN

Annabel Crabb is on a break before launching her next ABC adventure. Picture: John Feder

As 2017 draws to a close, Annabel Crabb finds herself in unfamiliar territory.

The ABC star has taken a temporary break from the national broadcaster, after the success of her documentary series The House. Next year’s ABC project is at this moment an undiscovered country. In the meantime, she is hanging around with her three children before the youngest starts school next year.

But over a muffin (homemade) and cup of tea in the front room of her Sydney home, she muses over many aspects of the media in an interview for The Australian’s new podcast series, Behind The Media, which launches today.

Among the topics: dealing with online abuse, getting Tony Abbott to admit he missed a parliamentary vote after too much wine at dinner, and scrutiny of the ABC and staff salaries. “Well, I don’t have a problem with disclosing my salary, I’ve got to say,” Crabb says.

“I mean, The Australian has already published my salary because some berk leaked it accidentally,” she recalls during the recording of the podcast.

To be fair to Crabb, the recording session happened some time ago, before ABC chairman Justin Milne wrote to the government rejecting its request for salary disclosure of its highest-paid staff, and before ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie addressed the issue in a Senate estimates committee hearing in October. That leak to The Australian was back in 2013, when this newspaper disclosed a salary list of ABC stars and executives, sparking some consternation within the broadcaster. Crabb’s pay was listed as $217,426.

Now the government will try to force the ABC and SBS, via legislation, to disclose the names of staff earning more than $200,000.

Crabb flags privacy concerns. “You’ll notice that I’m carefully talking about my own (salary). People also have been hired by the ABC on the understanding that this is a private arrangement and all of a sudden you’re all over estimates,” she says disapprovingly.

Before her success with Kitchen Cabinet, Crabb had been a political journalist in Adelaide and Canberra since the 1990s, with a stint in London as a Fairfax ­correspondent.

But the political interview program changed everything.

“When I started doing Kitchen Cabinet, I did lie awake at night thinking, ‘What would Laurie Oakes think of this?’ ” she says.

“I’ve been a political reporter all my career really and now I’m putting on an apron and taking muffins around to someone’s house. People are going to think I’m an idiot.”

And what did Oakes think? “He was very kind, actually.”

The program moved from digital channel ABC2 to the main channel and Crabb found a whole new audience beyond politics junkies.

Everyone loves Annabel, it seems. “Wow. You should visit my Twitter account sometime,” she responds, saying online abuse is a fact of life. “I did find it really destabilising for a while. And there is no way of getting around that. Apart from getting used to it.”

What does it do for your self-esteem though? “Well, I think it just teaches you to be more clear about whom you care about and teach yourself not to care about the rest.”

This year, before The House went to air, she had “a bit of a wobble” about a series on a building that “everyone in Australia just wants to burn to the ground at the moment”.

But the program was a success, outrating rival commercial fare that included Seven’s reality cooking contest Hell’s Kitchen with Marco Pierre White.

On television and in person, Crabb’s persona doesn’t alter. During a previous interview I asked if The House would contain some hard-hitting questions or “your usual nicey-nicey stuff”?

“Well, I am polite by nature. I’ve never been a particularly sort of kick-the-door-down sort of journo. And I sometimes envy those who are,” Crabb says. “I’m very full of doubt a lot of the time. I’m not very strident in my own views. And so I always like to hear from people, even people with whom I disagree. I find it more useful to listen and not to get angry.”

That doubt means she is always interested in the other side of the argument and “can often be convinced of both sides of an argument — I mean not to a ridiculous degree”.

And while Crabb admits nicey-nicey doesn’t substitute for daily political journalism, it plainly got results in The House, including the scoop that former prime minister Tony Abbott had, while in opposition, missed a vote due to falling asleep after drinking too much wine at dinner in the parliamentary dining room.

“Look, he really didn’t need much prompting,” Crabb says. “All I did was ask him — ‘How long would you normally stay here of an evening?’ — and he was off and running.”

One project that continues during Crabb’s temporary ABC hiatus is Chat 10 Looks 3, an independent podcast she presents with 7.30 host Leigh Sales. Its title is a riff on a song from the musical A Chorus Line. (Sales is mad for musical theatre, Crabb less so.)

The program, produced independently of the ABC, is surfing the current wave of podcast popularity, and has a massive following of 20,000 people on its Facebook community group, as well as selling out live shows in Melbourne and more following next year in Adelaide, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Orange.

“Again, this was more of a recreational thing,” Crabb says. “I’ve always found Leigh just a really useful and interesting person to talk to. And she and I both read a lot. And we love to talk about what we’re reading.

“We weren’t catching up with each other enough and we both missed it and we agreed that if we had a work-type thing or an appointment to meet and do something together, we would prioritise it more.”

They are soon to record episode 70. Initially they thought listeners would be attracted to their book recommendations. “What has become really clear since then is that it’s about friendship,’’ Crabb says. “That seems to be what people like about it.”

Crabb professes a fondness for true crime in books and television. First true crime book: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Favourite Australian true crime book: Evil Angels by John Bryson. Recent TV viewing: The People versus O.J. Simpson drama.

She resists questions about what trash TV she watches before admitting: “I do love a really trashy British show called Come Dine With Me. I love it. Because the food is so shocking and it’s so fabulous you get to see into these people’s houses … what really makes it is the narrator who just supplies the most vicious voice-over.

“That’s trashy enough for you? Leigh Sales really likes RuPaul’s Drag Race. That’s super trash. She’s much trashier than I am, actually. Oh yeah. Yes. She’s a trash bag. I have got nothing more.”