ABC can believe in Ita Buttrose

The media icon has universal admiration and respect.

Ita Buttrose. Picture: Hollie Adams

Given there wasn’t much of anything left to let the cat out of by yesterday, Scott Morrison saw no reason to keep the pretence going.

“I’ve known Ita for a long time and I think she’s an extraordinary Australian,” the Prime Minister told ABC TV, all but confirming who its new chair will be.

“There have been few people more than Ita that I think have lifted the standards of journalism in this country and I think that says a lot about her character and ­abilities.”

Ita, of course, needs no introduction — nor the addendum of her surname, Buttrose. In one way or another, she has been a gently lisping presence in Australian public life for more than half a century.

Cold Chisel recorded a song about her — “How could I not believe, when Ita tells me to?” it went — and back in the day, a hunky Jack Thompson bared it all to help craft the publishing legend around her breakthrough magazine, Cleo.

She’s been inducted into no fewer than three media halls of fame, run newspapers, fought and reportedly loved Kerry Packer and fronted one of the most controversial public health initiatives in history, the Grim Reaper ad campaign on HIV-AIDS.

So at 77, when her main aim in life was supposedly to spend more time with the grandkids, why would she want the job of sorting out the national broadcaster?

And with her long and storied career in commercial print media, what will she bring to the role that became a poisoned chalice for her predecessor, Justin Milne, and the ousted managing director ­Michelle Guthrie?

“Ita would be a splendid appointment,” former ABC chairman Donald McDonald says.

“She is very experienced, she is a mature, considered person. She knows how organisations work … She ticks all those boxes at the ABC.”

Actually, it’s hard to find anyone with anything but praise for the apparent captain’s pick by Morrison, presumably with input from Communications Minister Mitch Fifield and other senior cabinet figures.

Mobile users click here to see PDF

Reportedly, Buttrose was not even on the shortlist of candidates for the job who, coincidentally or not, were all men: former Fairfax Media boss Greg Hywood, former News Corporation of Australia chief executive Kim Williams, who headed the company that publishes this newspaper, Film Victoria president Ian Robertson and law firm managing partner Danny Gilbert.

She would bring to the role a lifetime of media experience and nous that was sorely tested by the most demanding proprietor of them all, the late Packer.

But what will be needed at the top of an ABC still gripped by the trauma of the conjoined demise of Milne and Guthrie is cool, collected, grown-up judgment. As chair, she will set the direction and tone for an organisation that employs 4233 people on a budget of $1.12 billion funded exclusively by the taxpayer, with a legislated charter to deliver fair and accurate news and current affairs bound by the “standards of objective journalism”, as well as uniquely Australian production content.

She must grapple with the unresolved internal tensions that destroyed the trust between Milne and Guthrie — who returned the favour and then some after he knifed her last September, forcing him to follow her out the door — and that means addressing the destructive core of the ABC’s much-maligned staff culture. This feeds into a problematic relationship with government.

The blow-up with then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull over the work of high-profile ABC journalists Emma Alberici and ­Andrew Probyn was far from unique; PMs going back to John Howard and Paul Keating had feuded publicly with the ABC, though never to such disastrous effect for the corporation. If Bill Shorten wins the federal election set for May, it’s certain his Labor government, at some point, will go after the ABC to toe the line.

Buttrose is widely seen as capable of withstanding the heat, whomever should wield the blowtorch. In one way or another, she has been around the media since the day she was born. Her father, Charles, was a newspaper man who went on to edit Sydney’s feisty afternoon daily, The Daily Mirror. Ita was two when he was posted to New York in 1944; later, he joined the ABC and rose to the rank of assistant general manager in 1974.

By then, his headstrong daughter was making her own way in magazines. She had left school at 15 to start as an editorial copy girl on The Australian Women’s Weekly, the jewel in the Packer family’s Australian Consolidated Press stable. Her first byline as a reporter was in the then Packer-owned Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph, covering the 1959 visit to Australia by Princess Alexandra.

At 23, newly married, she was put in charge of the Telegraph’s women’s pages, paving the way for what became her big break — the edgy Cleo. Launched in 1972, the magazine brought her into the orbit of Frank Packer’s put-upon second son, Kerry. According to Australian 60 Minutes’ founding producer Gerald Stone, Kerry Packer and Buttrose conducted a torrid affair while working side by side on Cleo. They also fought tooth and nail about its explicit content and, later, her reboot of the flagship Women’s Weekly, which she edited from 1975 to 78.

In 1981, Buttrose was lured back to the Telegraph by News’s Rupert Murdoch, who had bought out the Packers a decade earlier. She stayed until 1984 as editor-in-chief of the daily and Sunday titles, the first woman to run an Australian metropolitan title. As chair of the National Advisory Committee on AIDS, she defended the Grim Reaper ads against accusations that they demonised HIV sufferers, especially gay people.

Unapologetic, she wrote in 2012: “It is now a textbook study in the role that campaigns can play in changing attitudes and ­behaviours.”

Buttrose founded two publishing houses and a women’s magazine, Ita, which didn’t last the distance. At 71, she became host of the Network 10 morning program, Studio 10, but quit in 2016 amid speculation of a falling-out among panellists, saying she wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren.

The mess she confronts at the ABC suggests she will have few moments to spare if and when Morrison gets around to formalising her anticipated appointment as chair.

ABC senior staff contacted yesterday were largely prepared to give Buttrose the benefit of the doubt despite her lack of public broadcasting and digital experience, the latter being a strong suit of Milne and Guthrie.

“If she could stand up to Kerry Packer, I think she will be able to handle Morrison, or Shorten if he gets there,” says one well-known ABC identity.

Another, also asking not to be named, says: “What we need most is stability at board and senior management level. If she can provide that, it’s a good start.”

Former ABC staff-appointed director Quentin Dempster, a hard-hitting TV interviewer with 30 years at the corporation by the time he left in 2014, posed three hot-button questions that he would like Buttrose to answer before “the welcome mat” goes out.

First, would she support advertising on ABC platforms to defray operating costs along the lines of the arrangements at sister public broadcaster SBS?

Second, does she agree that the ABC charter should cover free news online? This is a key area of disagreement with commercial media groups such as News and Nine.

And, third, in going to the politically fraught relationship with Canberra, does she regard the incumbent government as the ABC’s primary shareholder?

“Ita Buttrose is a great Australian and I am pretty sure she could handle telephone calls from enraged prime ministers,” says Dempster. “But these are threshold questions for the ABC and I would like to see her response.”

For now, Buttrose is maintaining a dignified if uncharacteristic silence; she was unavailable to be interviewed yesterday. McDonald, who chaired the ABC for a decade to 2006 under John Howard as prime minister, says her first task will be to lead the board to bed down Guthrie’s replacement as MD, possibly the key decision of her whole term.

McDonald speaks with the benefit of particularly bitter experience: as chairman, he moved against combative managing ­director Jonathan Shier in 2001, only two years into his tenure. Unlike Guthrie, Shier was given a face-saving exit and payout.

Asked if he sees any parallel with the situation the ABC now confronts, McDonald says: “Every period is different because … so much technological change has occurred … I think it is inappropriate that I say anything that looks like I am giving advice.”

Veteran newspaper and magazine editor Mark Day, who writes on media for The Australian and worked alongside Buttrose in the 1970s, setting up an Australian edition of Playboy for Kerry Packer, says she will need to hold ABC journalists and presenters to their charter obligation to be unbiased.

“She’s a very good choice,” Day says. “The thing about Ita is that she won’t need to think too hard about where the ABC needs to go.

“These decisions will come naturally to a person who has lived and breathed media all her life … it’s instinctive.”

Helen McCabe, a former News group journalist who edited Women’s Weekly with distinction and now heads up Nine’s digital publishing arm, says Buttrose’s stature and experience is a big gain for the ABC.

“She’s formidable, she’s thoughtful, she’s informed,” McCabe says.

“At 77, I take my hat off to her for taking on this role.”

But the last word on Ita goes to Cold Chisel, circa 1980:

“Every day and every night

She’s the only one we can depend upon

I believe, I believe, in what she says

Yes, I do

I believe, I believe, at the end of the day

Her magazine’ll get me through.”