This was published 6 months ago
Opinion
Scott Morrison took Ita’s breath away, but she’s looking forward to getting her voice back
Peter FitzSimons
Columnist and authorIta Buttrose retires from her role as ABC chair this coming week, concluding the latest chapter in a media career that spans eight decades. I talked to her about the totality of that journey at her office in the ABC HQ at Ultimo.
Fitz: You have had the most extraordinary media career, for – dot three, carry one, subtract 2 – the last 67 years! Can we safely think of this as your final curtain?
Ita: Life takes you by surprise – I didn’t expect to end up as ABC chair. And so I never say “never” because doors keep opening, and I peek in, and I think, “oh that looks interesting, I might have a go at that.”
Outgoing ABC chair Ita Buttrose in her office on Tuesday. The ABC is “still the most trusted media organisation in Australia.”Credit: Anna Kucera
Fitz: Back in the day, what thrilled you more: being named editor of the Australian Women’s Weekly – back at the time when the cultural significance of that was up there with being the Australian cricket captain – or having the song Ita, by Cold Chisel, be a hit?
Ita: Becoming editor. That was the job I wanted. And I worked very hard to get it and made sure I had the right skills. I still had lots to learn when I got the job. But I wanted it.
Fitz: As Women’s Weekly editor, I am guessing your best covers would have been royal covers?
Ita: Yes, the Queen would sell mega copies every time she was on the cover.
Fitz: But here we are 50 years later, and it must be time for you to break cover. Are you a monarchist or a republican?
Ita: That’s very sneaky. Ultimately, Australia will become a republic, but I’m constantly surprised how loyal our nation is to the royal family. I suppose they’ve all grown up with the royal family and think of them as being a part of their own family.
Fitz: Yes, but you, Ita? Will you say now, what I begged you to say when I was chair of the Australian Republic Movement, that you are a republican?
Ita: [Laughing, then dead-pan.] I am the chair of the ABC and have no view. Ask me in a week.
Fitz: I will! Now, before we get to your time as ABC chair, you pioneered two things in Australian cultural life: Cleo magazine in the 70s, which was sexually liberating for Australian women, and then, in the 80s, the virtues of sustained celibacy. In the end, did you decide that sex was not all it’s cracked up to be, and you’d rather have a cup of tea?
Ita: Cleo was aimed at women who knew very little about their own bodies. The push in the ’80s on radical celibacy was to get across to people the need to take care if you didn’t know the person you were sleeping with – to get the message over about safe sex in the age of HIV.
Ita Buttrose and Kerry Packer in 1992. “When our ideas matched it was really exciting.”
Fitz: You famously had a very strong working relationship with Kerry Packer for many years. Why was it so successful?
Ita: Because I think we truly thought alike, and it didn’t take me long to realise I was working with a man with big ideas, and when our ideas matched, it was really exciting. Yes, he had a short fuse. But he admired people like me, Sam Chisholm, Ian Kennon and David Evans, who had achieved things without being born to his wealth, and he gave us all the freedom to run bits of his empire.
Fitz: I don’t know if this story is true, but I have a scrap of memory that Kerry’s father, Sir Frank, once gave you a lesson about men’s bodies.
Ita: Yes. [Laughs.] Cleo had done a piece on how men’s erogenous zones included their armpits. Sir Frank saw the draft and called me down to his office. He was trying desperately to understand the new progressive woman, but this went too far for him. And he said, “Where did you get this information? A man’s armpit is not sexy!” The story did not run.
Fitz: You left Kerry Packer to work for Rupert Murdoch. Who was the better boss?
Ita: Oh, they were so different. But I’d have to say Kerry because he gave me more freedom.
Buttrose with Scott Morrison in February, 2019. “We were having a chit-chat and the PM said, ‘I’d like to offer you the chair of the ABC’“.Credit: Jessica Hromas
Fitz: Was part of the success of Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer as media magnates the sense that they were watching everything, reading everything?
Ita: Yes, they were both like that, Kerry being a particularly avid watcher of television. And when I was an editor-in-chief of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph for Rupert, he’d find the tiniest things and be across it all.
Fitz: Were they your rough models on how you run a major media organisation?
Ita: If so, it was only a subconscious thing. But if you don’t watch and listen to what is going out, you don’t know what’s going on. One of my staff here at the ABC said to me, “We wish you weren’t such an avid watcher because you see so many things”. But I’ve always been like that. I think because my father was at the ABC for a great many years and the ABC was always on in the house, it was well and truly in my blood.
Fitz: How did the whole ABC job come up?
Ita: It was at the Australian of the Year Awards in 2019. And after the ceremony, a guy came up to me when I was with my son and my daughter-in-law and said, “are you Ita Buttrose?”
“Yes, I am.”
“The prime minister wants to see you.”
So I put down my wine and said, “Right, lead on.”
And he took me to a room where Scott Morrison was, alone. And I’m thinking, “Have I done something wrong?” And we were having a chit-chat and the PM said, “I’d like to offer you the chair of the ABC”. I just looked at him because I, you know, hadn’t gone to the awards expecting to get a job offer. And I said, “prime minister, you’ve taken my breath away.”
“No need to decide now. What’s your mobile?” And before you could say “Bob’s your uncle,” he’d sent me his mobile number. But I knew at once I’d take it. I just thought, “it all makes sense, my entire career makes sense. I can see that all the things I’ve done have equipped me to be the chair of the ABC.”
Buttrose at the 2016 Logie Awatds. “If you don’t watch and listen to what is going out, you don’t know what’s going on.”Credit: Mathew Lynn
Fitz: It was an extraordinary ascension, though. I mean, you had had this stellar career, but it was only a year before that you’d walked out of that show on Channel Ten [Studio 10] after the infamous ding-dong with Ding Dong Drysdale, where she’d thrown Brussels sprouts at you, and suddenly, here you are as the chair of the ABC!
Ita: [Smiling.] I think even as chair of the ABC, you’d have to know how a panel show works, right? You have to know what attracts an audience, and when I was on the panel, Studio 10 was a highly successful show that was nudging Today Extra for ratings. I think it could have won if the network had kept it as it was. It could have been No.1.
Fitz: I don’t expect you to care, but I wonder if my views are emblematic of many when I say that for your first four and a half years as ABC chair, you did better than a lot of people were expecting – but the last six months have been very hard going? Is that fair?
Ita: I think the whole five years have been challenging. But in the last six months, we’ve been at the centre of this intense debate that’s going on in our country, with things like the Voice referendum. What it’s shown us is that there are cracks and passionately different points of view in the community about many issues, and this has been reflected in the debate at the ABC because we play a town square role.
Fitz: What about the damage done by the Antoinette Lattouf affair, the fill-in ABC presenter sacked in messy circumstances for social media postings about the human rights of the people of Gaza? Are you afraid that this has diminished your legacy as ABC chair?
Ita: [Firmly and crisply.] I can’t really discuss that matter. I’m sorry, but the matter is before the Fair Work Commission. However, I will say the ABC is defending the matter.
Fitz: The ABC also faced a motion of no confidence by more than 100 ABC staff, through the MEAA, including senior journalist John Lyons, alleging that the ABC had shown pro-Israel bias and was failing to protect its staff. In your defence of the managing director David Anderson, you said criticism of Anderson was “abhorrent and incorrect”.
Ita: It was. The board and I have expressed our full confidence in David. We know that he has staff safety top of his mind and, as editor-in-chief, has stressed that our coverage of the Israeli-Hamas conflict be impartial. That has been supported by the most recent report from the ABC ombudsman.
Fitz: Your watch has also seen endless accusations that the ABC has lost its way, that it is biased, that it is still too far left, or has gone too far right. How much of your energy has gone towards trying to steer towards left/right balance, or have you simply focused on journalistic independence and let the rest look after itself?
Ita: It has always been to focus on the truth, and that’s the principle we apply to everything now, and it’s my role as chair to highlight that responsibility and the need to deliver news impartially. I remind journalists, especially younger journalists, “If you want to report the news, you have to leave bias at the door. You have to report the facts. Only the facts, no opinions”.
Fitz: But you must have read or seen, I’m guessing, 500 articles in your time saying the ABC is biased?
Ita: I reckon every chair since 1932 has had to face allegations of bias. But it’s still the most trusted media organisation in Australia.
Fitz: On the subject of bias, I don’t know which way you vote, and I don’t expect you will tell me, but it’s interesting that you’re so well known, and yet your own politics are unclear?
Ita: And that’s the way it should be. No one should know how a journalist votes, quite frankly.
Fitz: [Shifting uncomfortably.] Can I at least ask, has the way you vote changed over the years?
Ita: Yes, it has.
Fitz: Excellent! So you’ve come good.
Ita: [Laughs.]
Fitz: There have been muttered accusations that as you are now in your early 80s, you were too old to stay in touch with digital matters, reaching youth and new audiences, and the myriad things that land on your plate. How do you respond to that?
Ita: People may see my age as an issue. I don’t. I think if you’re well-informed, and you keep abreast of everything that’s happening, of course you understand what’s going on or else you make sure you’ve got people on your team that will contribute.
Fitz: Do you have a firm view one way or another on President Joe Biden, at the age of 82 – your age – trying to sign on for another four years?
Ita: [Smiling.] You’re asking me to practise age discrimination, and I won’t.
Fitz: Are you glad you took the job as ABC Chair?
Ita: Yes. It’s a public service and an extremely important one. You accept the role of chair because you support the independence of the ABC, the rights of the national broadcaster, and its importance to democracy. Those countries without a robust national broadcaster do not enjoy the kind of democracy that we enjoy in Australia. People should understand the crucial role in Australia that the ABC plays.
Fitz: Would you have liked to go on for another term, and was that even an option?
Ita: Maybe I’m a super-ager – some people think so – many of the staff here thought that I might stay on for another term. But I didn’t want to, as much as I’ve enjoyed it. I think five years was fantastic. And that’s enough. Besides, there are other things I want to do. You become conscious that you are reaching the last chapters. And you don’t know how much time you’ve got. So you think, well, “what other things do I want to do with my life?”
Fitz: And what are they?
Ita: I’ve been inundated with offers. But I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m just considering. I think, to a certain extent, being chair of the ABC constrains your voice a bit on other issues, and I’d like to use my voice again.
Fitz: Is there a particular field where you’d like to use it? In women’s rights, sexuality, the Voice...?
Ita: All of the above and more. But I am considering my options now.
Fitz: Have you talked to incoming ABC chair Kim Williams and given him some words of advice?
Ita: I wouldn’t dream of giving Kim advice. He is his own man, and he’s looking forward to being chair of the ABC. We both agree that it is a mighty organisation, and he’s looking forward to implementing his ideas.
Fitz: If indeed this is the final curtain for your media career, you must have a few regrets. Are there any mistakes you’d care to name in your five years as chair of the ABC?
Ita: No, I don’t have regrets. I don’t see the point of them. You can’t change anything. And everything you’ve done has made you the person you are right now. And I would never admit to mistakes because they only come back to haunt you in the media.
Fitz: What about your greatest satisfactions over the last 67 years?
Ita: I ran a “Voice of Australian Women” survey in the Women’s Weekly because I wanted women to have a say in legal and political decisions that were being made about their lives without their input. And when I was editor-in-chief at News Corp, we did a four-week attack on the government on the need for a national dietary survey. We didn’t know as a nation what we were eating, and the effect of what we were putting in our mouths had on our health. We won. I was very proud of both of those achievements, plus the work I’ve done with dementia and HIV. I think I have made a difference in those areas.
Fitz: When you were running the Women’s Weekly, my mother used to read your weekly letter, often filled with goings-on in your life, including news of your son and daughter. It occurs to me that 50 years later, we know a fair bit about your public life but very little of your private life.
Ita: I don’t have much private life left. Really, there’s not much about me that people don’t know. But you can be a public person who is still private.
Fitz: In the 3am of the soul, do you have someone to cling tight to?
Ita: [Smiling.] My cat.
Fitz: Ita, when the days grow cold, and we grow old, and we talk of you, what would you like us to say of you, personally and of your media career?
Ita: “She did her best.”
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