Kerry O'Brien: 'Freedom is usually eroded gradually', Walkley Awards - 2019

28 November 2019, Sydney, Australia

This year, for a brief moment in the history of Australian journalism, every significant news organisation in this country put its competitive instincts and its differences to one side and united as one voice to stand against an unacceptable step down the road to authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism unchecked can lead to fascism. Fortunately in this country we’re a long way from that yet, but a study of history amply demonstrates how fascism begins. Freedom is usually eroded gradually. It might happen over years, even decades. Its loss is not necessarily felt day by day, but we will certainly know when it’s gone.

So far the Morrison government has resisted the industry’s appeal for fundamental protections of a free and robust press to be enshrined in legislation at the very least—not placing journalists above the law—but enshrining in a practical and meaningful way their special place as a crucial pillar of democracy.

Perhaps the government is intending to wait us out, waiting for the issue to go away in the hope that most people in this country are so consumed by bread and butter issues, so consumed by their own lives and personal struggles and challenges, that they won’t care enough when the chips are down to support something as abstract as the spirit of democracy or the spirit of freedom—because you can’t cash in the spirit of something at the bank, as you might a tax cut.

That is why we have to remain resolved to keep this campaign going, and not let it go, even after a few months, because those of us who have witnessed and experienced and reported on repression in other countries, some of them not too far from our own shores, understand the solid reality of democracy as well as the strength or weakness of its spirit. Some of our colleagues have paid the ultimate price for exposing abuses of democracy, and lost their lives.

Australia’s Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, recently chastised China on its human rights record, observing that “countries that respect and promote their citizens’ rights at home tend also to be better international citizens.”

I would add to that: countries that don’t respect and promote their citizens’ rights at home are living in glass houses and have diminished their right to be taken seriously when they try to preach to neighbours from a high moral ground they have surrendered. .

There’s another inconsistency that needs to be called out. This Government is fond of saying, as it did in seeking to distance itself from the decisions by Australian Federal Police to raid the ABC and the home of News Corp journalist, Annika Smethurst, that it can’t interfere in police operational matters. Yet, in seeking to assuage the concerns of media companies and journalists after the raids, the Attorney-General, Christian Porter, promised that he would actually be prepared to become involved in the process to the extent of insisting on the Director of Public Prosecutions getting his personal consent before seeking to prosecute a journalist.

Sorry Mr Porter, that is not reassuring. The judgements you might bring to bear will not be independent of the government’s own self-interest, and we all know that self-interest of any stripe, political or otherwise, can be a powerful deterrent from doing the right thing. That is not understanding the spirit or the concept of free speech, nor materially guaranteeing free speech or a free press.

But we have to practice what we preach. Our work across the breadth of all media and all communities should speak for our integrity—from the smallest story to the biggest. Individually and collectively. And if it doesn’t that should make us uncomfortable, in the very least. Because if we are going to stand on our dignity and defend press freedom as a fundamental pillar of democracy, then we have to be sure that our actions are defensible, that we practice what we preach, that we do what we say we do. And at the heart of the Walkley Foundation’s work is the protection and promotion of integrity in journalism.

There is one other issue I want to acknowledge tonight. In 2011 Walkley judges awarded a Walkley to Wikileaks with Julian Assange as its editor, for its outstanding contribution to journalism. The judgement was not lightly made that Julian Assange was acting as a journalist, applying new technology to “penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup”. Those inconvenient truths were published far and wide in the mainstream media. As we sit here tonight, Julian Assange is mouldering in a British prison awaiting extradition to the United States where he may pay for their severe embarrassment with a life in prison. Again, this government could demonstrate its commitment to a free press by using its significant influence with its closest ally to gain his return to Australia.

Another challenge our industry faces is the trend towards the polarisation of our craft—the attempts by some to paint us as either of the left or of the right—has to be resisted, because I firmly believe that for the vast bulk of us, that is not how we practice our trade. We do not arrive in the nurseries of journalism as budding ideologues of left or right, nor do the vast bulk of us become that way as we develop.

I absolutely reject the Roger Ailes view of the world, that if you’re not on the right then you must be on the left.

Adele Ferguson was not reflecting some personal ideological hatred of capitalism when she called out corrupt behaviour within our banking and financial sector, forcing a royal commission on a reluctant government. And nor were the whistleblowers who helped her, being ideological. They saw a wrong and followed their conscience with great courage to reveal it, paying a heavy personal price in the process.

There was nothing ideological about Chris Masters’ determination to bring into the light of day, serious and deeply disturbing allegations of war crimes by elite Australian military forces in Afghanistan, first in his book, and then with Nick McKenzie in further sustained investigative reporting. It was strong, compelling journalism of integrity.

When Hedley Thomas gripped the world with his Teacher’s Pet podcast, forced the re-opening of the Lynette Dawson case, leading to the arrest of her husband, was he driven by ideology? Of course not.

Or when Anne Connolly forced another royal commission, into aged care with her exposes of the sickening abuses within that industry?

Joanne McCarthy wasn’t under instruction from some secret socialist cell or driven by a hatred of Christianity when she exposed the pattern of endemic sexual abuse and attempted cover-ups perpetrated from within the Catholic Church in the Hunter region.

Kate McClymont wasn’t acting as a servant of either the conservative right or the Labor left when she doggedly and courageously exposed the entrenched corrupt practices of Eddie Obeid.

The Walkley Foundation grew from the creation of the awards themselves more than 60 years ago. And like the awards, the foundation is here to promote and help safeguard the integrity of quality journalism in all its forms, without fear or favour. And the judges of these awards, drawn from all corners of our craft and across the spectrum of our industry, deliver that same integrity in their judging. It couldn’t be otherwise, or these 60 years of awards could not have been sustained, and would have long since collapsed.

It has been a great privilege to chair the Foundation this year and see close up the super efforts of Louisa Graham and her small but dedicated team delivering the important and expanding Walkley program of grants, scholarships and mentorship, as the industry struggles. I would also like to acknowledge the voluntary efforts of my fellow directors, Marcus Strom, Marina Go, Karen Percy, Lenore Taylor and Michael Janda, all of whom give up significant time in busy lives to guide the foundation in its work.

This is a time of serious challenge for our craft across a broad front, at a time when democratic societies like ours are losing their trust in institutions pretty much across the board. The integrity reflected in the work we’re about to celebrate tonight is our bulwark against that erosion of trust and a reminder not only to the citizens of this country, but importantly to ourselves, of what we’re capable of, and of what we aspire to be. Thank you.

Ron Chernow: 'Then Olivier told me that they wanted to try boring at this year’s dinner and I said, Oh, I can deliver on that', White House Correspondents' Dinner - 2019

28 April 2019, Washington DC, USA

Thank you for that lovely introduction, Olivier. I confess that I was surprised when I received the invitation to speak here tonight. I mean, I knew they weren’t approaching me as an international sex symbol, right? Then Olivier told me that they wanted to try boring at this year’s dinner and I said, Oh, I can deliver on that. Big time. Now you’re talking my language. So here I am, your twenty-minute sedative for the evening.

It’s nice to see such a healthy turnout tonight. You all know that on Tuesday the president reportedly said that members of his administration should boycott this dinner. At first I was puzzled by this, but then I learned that a rumor was circulating in Washington that I would read aloud the redacted portions of the Mueller report and everything was explained.

Of course there’s also been some squawking from the comedians and I’m sorry about that. Frankly I thought those folks would have a little more of a sense of humor about my selection—after all, they are comedians—but we need them more than ever during this surreal interlude in American life. As Will Rogers once observed, “People are now taking their comedians seriously, and their politicians as a joke,” and that describes our topsy-turvy moment. I hope the comics will be back for many more star turns in the future. Meanwhile, it’s always fun for a serious historian to stand in the cross-fire of an active war zone. When I asked a friend what the atmosphere would be like at this dinner, he replied, “Oh, the Roman Colosseum.” Now, being a dutiful historian, I thought I should research my audience, so I picked up a copy of Henrik Ibsen’s great play, Enemy of the People. I hadn’t realized before that the president was a student of Norwegian literature. The drama takes place in a small Norwegian town that hopes the discovery of mineral springs will turn the sleepy backwater into a thriving spa. Then the hero of the play, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, discovers that the miraculous springs are polluted and breeding typhoid and other diseases. In his naivete, he imagines that the townspeople will applaud him for saving them from calamity. Then he discovers that truth is a political commodity defined by the town’s business interests and he’s persecuted for truth-telling. His house is stoned, his windows are shattered, and angry mobs brand him, yes, an enemy of the people. So the next time you’re dubbed an enemy of the people, please think of the term in the Norwegian sense and wear it as a badge of honor.

I’m delighted to make a spirited case tonight for the First Amendment. We now have to fight hard for basic truths we once took for granted. We gather here in perfect security because of a little piece of parchment called the Bill of Rights that has acquired the status of American scripture. In the last analysis, that paper barrier stands between a free press and executive tyranny. Its author, James Madison, was a tiny, often sickly man, who probably wouldn’t have gotten past the bouncers in this ballroom and whose low voice would scarcely have projected from this podium.

So fervently did Madison believe in these ten amendments that he didn’t want them tacked on to the end of the Constitution, as an afterthought, but woven straight into the original text. Of those ten landmark amendments, Madison considered the first indispensable. Like all our founders, he regarded a free press as the cornerstone of democracy. As Jefferson famously said, if forced to choose between a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, he would unhesitatingly prefer the latter.

The First Amendment wasn’t written for the exclusive use of saints and choirboys, nor was it granted only on good behavior. As Mark Twain noted, ruefully, the right to stupidity is protected by the U.S. Constitution. That became patently clear during George Washington’s first term in office. As best I can tell, Washington committed only one major blunder as president: He failed to put his name on Mount Vernon and thereby bungled an early opportunity at branding. Clearly deficient in the art of the deal, the poor man had to settle for the lowly title of father of his country.

The press of the early republic was as ferociously partisan as anything we see today. In that golden age of character assassination, writers murdered reputations while hiding behind Roman pseudonyms. Washington became the victim of preposterous slander when the opposition press said he’d been a British secret agent during the Revolutionary War. Obviously the British had gotten a lousy return on their investment.

Some of the most blistering attacks against Washington came from an unexpected source. His Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, had hired a poet named Philip Freneau as State Department translator. Now Freneau was perfectly qualified for the translator job except for one small detail: He knew only a single foreign language. In truth, Jefferson had recruited him to found a party organ called The National Gazette that would publish slashing broadsides against the very president Jefferson served. Freneau performed his task with such malicious gusto that he dropped off copies of his incendiary paper on Washington’s doorstep every day.

It’s hard to convey the anguish that seized Washington’s mind as he reeled from press criticism. One day Freneau printed a cartoon showing Washington behind beheaded a la Louis XVI. In his diary Jefferson recorded Washington’s towering rage: “The president was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself” and said “that rascal Freneau sent him 3 of his papers every day, as if he thought he would become the distributor” of them. A very 18th century form of chutzpah, eh?

But despite this extreme provocation, Washington always honored the First Amendment, saying such evils “must be placed in opposition to the infinite benefits resulting from a free press.” Like every future president, Washington felt maligned and misunderstood by the press, but he never generalized that into a vendetta against the institution. In fact, when he wrote his farewell address, he never delivered it in person, but had it published in the newspapers for readers to digest. My main theme here tonight is that relations between presidents and the press are inevitably tough and almost always adversarial, but they don’t need to be steeped in venom.

Our founders were highly literate people and none more so than Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant who arrived, thank god, before the country was full. I don’t know why they let him in. Clearly somebody slipped up at the southern border. You know, Hamilton was a human word machine. When Columbia University Press published 27 thick volumes of his papers, the editor joked that he wanted to dedicate the entire voluminous edition to “Aaron Burr, without whose cooperation this project would never have been completed.” Hamilton had a flourishing career as a journalist as well as a government official, founding the New York Post long before its Page Six incarnation.

When writing the Federalist Papers, Hamilton cranked out as many as five or six essays per week and this, mind you, with a full-time legal practice. He would be scribbling the final sentences of an essay as the printer waited in his outer office, ready to rush the latest installment into print. After leaving as first Treasury Secretary, Hamilton defended in the press a major treaty with England. He wrote one set of essays under the pen name Camillus, then launched a second series under the pen name Philo Camillus. Now Philo Camillus heaped extravagant praise on Camillus, and both Camillus and Philo Camillus, for some reason, were rapturous in their adoration for the former Treasury Secretary, one Alexander Hamilton.

During the administration of John Adams, the country lurched into a period of reaction amid a war scare with France and rampant fear of foreigners. Congress enacted the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime for journalists to write about the president in a scandalous or malicious fashion. At this dark moment, Jefferson, with his serene faith in the people, prophesied, “with a little patience . . . we shall see the reign of witches pass, their spells dissolve.” Let it be noted that because of his anti-press record, John Adams not only lost his reelection campaign in 1800, but his Jeffersonian opponents reigned supreme for the next quarter century. Campaigns against the press don’t get your face carved into the rocks of Mount Rushmore for when you chip away at the press, you chip away at our democracy. The tribunal of history does not deal leniently with presidents who punish the press.

People say that we’re now fighting for the soul of America. But, folks, we’ve always been fighting for the soul of America. We’ve always fallen short of the hallowed ideals enshrined in our founding documents. America has always been a work in progress, a perpetual journey, a freedom ride with no final destination. And it falls to each new generation to renew and rediscover our country’s lofty promise. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said memorably that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but it never does so in a smooth or unbroken line.

Our precious republic feels fragile, even perishable, at the moment. I shudder at the sheer savagery to which Washington politics has descended. But we’ve also seen the wisdom of our Constitution at work with a boldly assertive press, an independent judiciary, and a rejuvenated Congress providing checks on executive power. We’re being tested—fiercely tested—but I like to think that decency will prevail. History shows that, in the short run, the American public can be swept up in all sorts of misguided and wrongheaded things—think Scottsboro Boys; think Japanese internment camps; think Joe McCarthy—but in the long run democracy endures.

During the Civil War, we battled each other not with ballots, but with battalions. We slaughtered 750,000 of our fellow citizens, maiming millions more. Amputees hobbled through every American town. Towards the end of that bloody conflict, a chastened but still hopeful Abraham Lincoln sat around a Virginia campfire with his chief general, Ulysses S. Grant, and he quoted his Secretary of State William Seward as saying, “that there was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency.” Like Lincoln, I believe devoutly in that saving remnant of grace in our country. We’ve fought horrific wars, weathered massive depressions, and ended the unspeakable cruelty of slavery and Jim Crow. America has always been great, not when it boasted, not when it blustered, but when it admitted its mistakes and sought to overcome them.

Okay, let me move on to the president and the press in the twentieth century. Back in the days of William McKinley, there was no White House press room, just a long table for reporters on the second floor. As one journalist complained, “It’s part of the unwritten law of the White House that newspapermen shall never approach the president as he passes . . . unless he himself stops and talks to them.” A rather royal conception of the presidency with no shouted questions allowed.

In those more innocent days, reporters still shielded the private lives of presidents. Let me tell you how Warren Harding got the Republican nomination in 1920. Party bosses summoned him to the proverbial smoke-filled room in Chicago and asked him point-blank if he had any damaging personal issues they should know about. Now Harding, a married man, drank heavily and gambled freely, he’d had a fifteen-year affair with his best friend’s wife, and he had a mistress and an illegitimate baby daughter right there in Chicago. In fact, his young mistress sat in the balcony of the convention hall, enjoying the speeches. But Harding assured the party bosses that he couldn’t think of a single personal problem to worry about. Of course the press corps would grow bigger and more intrusive as the century progressed, and relations with the White House would grow ever more acrimonious.

Even though it may seem wistful and naive and a touch quixotic, I would like to keep alive tonight the fading memory of more civilized dealings between chief executives and the news media. Call it a museum of presidential decorum. At this confrontational moment in American politics, we must recall that civility has been an essential lubricant in our democratic culture and that our best presidents have handled the press with wit, grace, charm, candor, and even humor.

After McKinley’s wooden formality, Teddy Roosevelt proved a virtuoso in dealing with the press. The prolific author of 45 volumes, he devoured a book a day in the White House and retained all of them. One novelist who brought a new work to dinner was amazed that the president had read it by breakfast the next morning. Such a literate president enjoyed a natural affinity with the press corps. He devised a midday ritual called the ‘barber’s hour’ in which reporters would cluster around him as he was being shaved. The babbling president would spout a never-ending stream of opinions while his poor barber, bobbing and weaving with his razor, gamely tried to shave him without slitting the presidential throat.

When Calvin Coolidge was president in the 1920s, he inaugurated the first regularly scheduled press conferences. Reporters had to file their questions in advance and silent Cal sat stiffly behind his desk, working his way through a tidy stack of index cards. Small wonder that Dorothy Parker, when informed of Coolidge’s death, retorted, “How do they know?” Press relations only worsened with Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover. Mired in the Great Depression and his own personal gloom—even his own Secretary of State bemoaned that chatting with Hoover was like “sitting in a bath of ink”—the president hired a hapless press secretary who proved so unpopular that one reporter quipped it was “the first known instance of a rat joining a sinking ship.”

When Franklin Roosevelt came into office, he swept away restrictive rules and treated reporters, lo and behold, like grownups! “We’re not going to have any more written questions,” the genial president declared at his first press conference. “Of course while I cannot answer seventy-five or a hundred questions . . . I see no reason why I should not talk to you ladies and gentlemen off the record.” Please note the ladies and gentlemen. The 125 reporters packed into the oval office were so impressed by FDR’s clear, straightforward rules that they gave him a standing ovation at the end—the first and undoubtedly last time that would ever happen.

In the end, FDR conducted nearly a thousand press conferences, not to mention thirty fireside chats, and even Eleanor Roosevelt held her own press conferences, where she invited only female reporters. This proved a tremendous boon to women journalists across the country since even the most hidebound publishers were now forced to hire them.

Of course, when it came to wit and charm, John F. Kennedy probably retired the prize. His memory reminds us how far a little self-deprecating humor can go. Remember modesty? When a small boy asked Kennedy how he became a war hero, he replied, “It was absolutely involuntary. They sank my boat.” In 1958 then Senator Kennedy was being touted as a presidential hopeful, but he was shadowed by scurrilous rumors that his rich father would buy the race. So at the Gridiron Club dinner, JFK drew a slip of paper from his pocket and proudly announced that he had a telegram from his “generous daddy.” He read aloud: “Dear Jack, don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” The press was enthralled. When JFK held his first televised press conference in January 1961, 60 million captivated viewers were glued to their TV sets, a record only eclipsed by the 70 million who watched The Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan Show three years later. I often wonder what The Beatles’ poll numbers would have looked like in Iowa and New Hampshire in that presidential year.

Ronald Reagan was a no less sunny personality and a past master of media relations. When he became president, he said, “I think that most of the time the overwhelming majority of reporters do a fine job, and as a former reporter . . . I know just how tough their job can be.” Nevertheless, Reagan had a sometimes bumpy relationship with the press. Then on March 30, 1981, he was shot and nearly killed outside this very hotel, the Washington Hilton, as he was about to duck into his limousine. A bullet lodged within an inch of his heart. Reagan was scheduled to speak, yes, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, so he telephoned in this line instead: “If I could give you just one little bit of advice, when somebody tells you to get into a car quick, do it.” That was a touch of class that has been sorely missing in our political culture in recent years. It was a subtle reminder that, whether Republicans or Democrats, we are all bona fide members of team U.S.A. and not members of enemy camps.

Okay, I know I’m wallowing in nostalgia and ignoring less savory moments of these and other presidents. Richard Nixon forced himself to go to dinners like this, where he had to hobnob with reporters who’d just written exposes about him. In the spring of 1971, he followed the advice of Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and decided to ‘play the good sport’ at the White House Correspondents Dinner. His gesture did not impress the news media. After his next press conference, Nixon grumbled privately, “the reporters were considerably more bad-mannered and vicious than usual. This bears out my theory that treating them with considerably more contempt is . . . a more productive policy.”

When Nixon hosted a party for P.O.W. families and felt bathed in female adoration, he thought his masculine appeal insufficiently acknowledged by the press coverage. “That’s what the goddamn New York Times and Washington Post should be writing about,” he groused. “I’m going to kick their asses around the block.” Such presidential eloquence. Shall we ever see its like again? Don’t answer. Of course the one who ended up getting his ass kicked around the block was . . . you know who.

You know, you folks in the media write the early drafts of history and we historians the later ones. Your work gives freshness, color, and immediacy to our sagas. I know how embattled you feel at this critical juncture as you combat the mistrust of a significant portion of the American electorate. I think you’re doing noble work to preserve democracy at a time when a rising tide of misinformation, masquerading as news, threatens to make a mockery of the First Amendment. There are so many journalistic fakes and forgeries out there that the genuine article becomes devalued and debased. You must also deal with a pervasive world of social media rife with self-appointed pundits who search out news outlets that only strengthen their preconceived views.

Still, this is as good a time as any to take stock and rededicate yourself to the highest standards of accuracy and integrity. Donald J. Trump is not the first and won’t be the last American president to create jitters about the First Amendment. So be humble, be skeptical, and beware of being infected by some of the very things you’re fighting against. The press is a powerful weapon that must always be fired with reluctance and aimed with precision. Warren Buffett has a handy saying: Always take the high road, it’s far less crowded there. And some days in Washington, let’s face it, a politician can sail along that upper roadway for hours without spotting another car. You folks should always remember that you are heirs to a grand crusading tradition that dates back to Ida B. Wells exposing the horrors of lynching; Jacob Riis the misery of Manhattan slums; Lincoln Steffens municipal corruption; Ida Tarbell the machinations of standard oil; Upton Sinclair the scandalous meat packing industry; Rachel Carson the dangers of pesticides; Woodward and Bernstein exposing Watergate; and the New York Times and Washington Post publishing the Pentagon Papers. This is a glorious tradition, you folks are part of it, and we can’t have politicians trampling on it with impunity. H. L. Mencken once warned of a political system that would “keep the populace alarmed . . . by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” We simply cannot allow the press to become an imaginary hobgoblin for political gain.

The thing that troubles me most at the moment is the sustained assault on truth, or at least a cavalier disregard of it, both here and by autocratic regimes abroad. As John Adams said, “facts are stubborn things” and our wishes cannot alter them. Facts are the foot soldiers of our respective professions, they do the hard marching and should wear no ideological coloring. Without the facts, we cannot have agreement in our badly divided nation; more importantly, without the facts we cannot have an honest disagreement. I applaud any president who aspires to the Nobel Prize for peace, but we don’t want one in the running for the Nobel Prize in fiction.

Ulysses S. Grant wasn’t a flawless president, but he was a stickler for the truth. One day in the White House, Grant was busy when a stranger called. Knowing Grant was occupied, an aide informed the usher, “Tell the gentleman that the president is out.” Overhearing this, Grant grew outraged. “No, don’t tell him that,” he said. “Tell him I am engaged and must be excused. I never lie for myself and do not want anybody to lie for me.” That’s a powerful example that all presidents should emulate.

You know, we’ve seen past administrations threaten the press directly, whether it be Lincoln shutting down disloyal papers during the Civil War or Woodrow Wilson stifling dissent with the Espionage Act in World War I. But what is happening today is perhaps even more insidious: a relentless campaign against the very credibility of the news media. Even the smartest courtroom lawyers can’t defend the press against such vague and sweeping attacks. You folks can only preserve that hard-won credibility in one way: with solid, fair-minded, and energetic reporting.

Since I’ve cruelly deprived you of a comedian tonight, I’d like to end with some pertinent quotes from Mark Twain, who cast a satirical eye on Washington folly. He said, “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.” And I love this quote: “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” He could be scathing about Capitol Hill, saying, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” He could be equally savage about presidents, saying the U.S. was never content “to have a chief magistrate of gold when it could get one of tin.” And as we head into another election season, I will leave you with one final gem from Twain: “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”

Good night and god bless America!

…

JK Rowling: 'I had no idea the phrase, “I’m praying for you,” could sound so intimidating', PEN America Literary Gala - 2016

16 May 2016, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, USA

Video for this one is here

Personally, I want to say thank you very, very much for this huge honor, given as it is by an organization that I have admired very deeply for many, many years. It’s also been an absolute privilege to share this stage tonight with your previous honorees. PEN’s campaigns on behalf of imprisoned writers are essential and inspirational, though it is sad to reflect how needed your defense of writers continues to be today.

Speaking personally, I have very little to complain about where my freedom of expression is concerned. I was once confronted by a Christian fundamentalist in a toy shop here in New York. I had no idea the phrase, “I’m praying for you,” could sound so intimidating. A bomb threat was once made to a store at which I was appearing. The premises were searched, nothing was found, the event went ahead. And the Harry Potter books have figured frequently on lists of the most banned. But, as such lists feature many of my favorite writers, I’ve always been very flattered to be included. Of course, I can afford to take these things lightly, protected as I am by citizenship of a liberal nation where freedom of expression is a fundamental right. My critics are at liberty to claim that I’m trying to convert children to Satanism. And I’m free to explain that I’m exploring human nature and morality, or to say, “You’re an idiot,” depending on which side of the bed I got out of that day.

However, I’ve never taken these freedoms for granted. In my 20s, I worked for Amnesty International, where I learned exactly how high a price people across the world have paid and continue to pay for the freedoms that we in the West sometimes take for granted. In fact, I worry that we may be in danger of allowing their erosion through sheer complacency. The tides of populism and nationalism currently sweeping many developed countries have been accompanied by demands that unwelcome and inconvenient voices be removed from public discourse. “Mainstream media” has become a term of abuse in some quarters. It seems that unless a commentator or television channel or a newspaper reflects exactly the complainant’s worldview it must be guilty of bias or corruption.

Intolerance of alternative viewpoints is spreading to places that make me, a moderate and a liberal, most uncomfortable. Only last year, we saw an online petition to ban Donald Trump from entry to the U.K. It garnered half a million signatures.

[An audience member claps. Rowling holds up her hand.]

Just a moment.

I find almost everything that Mr. Trump says objectionable. I consider him offensive and bigoted. But he has my full support to come to my country and be offensive and bigoted there. His freedom to speak protects my freedom to call him a bigot. His freedom guarantees mine. Unless we take that absolute position without caveats or apologies, we have set foot upon a road with only one destination. If my offended feelings can justify a travel ban on Donald Trump, I have no moral ground on which to argue that those offended by feminism or the fight for transgender rights or universal suffrage should not oppress campaigners for those causes. If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on them grounds that they have offended you eat, you have crossed the line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justification.

I’d like to conclude these remarks by reading you two short passages from the blog of a teenage girl. In 2009, Tal Al-Mallouhi became one of the youngest prisoners of conscience in the world when she was taken from her home by Syrian security forces. She was 18 years old. Her friends and family had to wait 11 months to find that she had been charged with giving aid to foreign country. Her parents have been permitted to see her only once. There are fears she may have been tortured. This is some of the material that was considered so dangerous and inflammatory that she remains incarcerated:

I do not like the words of the poet Rudyard Kipling: the East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet. Instead, I promote the union of the East and West. They meet somewhere. With rational thought, two great souls from here and from there can agree with each other, irrespective of the vast separation of time and space. Oh my brother human, if I disagree with you in thoughts, principles or beliefs, does this deny the fact that we are both human? All you and I have to do is to respect each other. Tolerate the views of your opponents coolly and patiently. While listening to them, do not think to respond before listening to all opposing opinions.

I repeat that beautiful plea for plurality, tolerance and the importance of rational discourse in the hope that Tal Al-Mallouhi will soon be freed. In the meantime, long may PEN continue to fight for her, for the freedoms on which a liberal society rests and without which no literature can have no value. Thank you very much indeed.

John Milkins: 'I couldn't understand how this horrific tragedy had occurred on our doorstep', Melbourne Press Club Press Freedom Dinner - 2015

25 September, 2015, Melbourne Press Club Press Freedom Dinner, Australia

Hello everyone. I am John Milkins. I am Gary Cunningham’s son - murdered along with his colleagues by Indonesian special forces, in Balibo, 1975. I am very humbled to be here tonight. I’ve been invited to tell you a bit of a story, about love, sacrifice, hope and truth - from a personal and an international level.

When I was six weeks old I was adopted. I always knew something was up. My sister was half Malaysian, and even in the hippie suburbs of 1970s Eltham, we knew that something was going on.

When I was twenty, with the love and support of my Mum and Dad, I always think of them as Mum and Dad, they let me know that I could look into my heritage and try and find my birth parents. I had everything I needed, but there was this indescribable core drive still that I felt I had to know where I had come from - to know where I was going.

It’s a strange feeling, sitting in a government department with other adoptees, about to find out about your first life, reading that manila folder as I drew it out for the first time. I discovered that I was Edward Giles Norman, and it said ‘mother Heather Norman, aged 21, and father, unknown’. After a long search, using electoral roles, I found my birth mum, Heather, and I wrote a ‘I’m researching my family history’ letter, and ‘if you happen to know anything about these details, please give me a call’.

Heather left her car in the driveway, and ran around to my grandmother’s house some eight blocks away. As she came down the driveway, Grandma knew.

Heather explained to me when we met that she’d always wanted me to have a two parent family. I have enormous respect for what she did in an age when there was no support for single mothers in the seventies. About two weeks later, I met about eighty people that I was related to, many of whom had no idea I existed. Grandma said to me that the hardest thing she’s ever done, was watch her daughter give birth, and then the prevailing wisdom was ‘do not touch the child’, so as Heather reached out to me, I was taken away.

I learned the most amazing things about that family. I learned that my uncle in that family is Peter Norman, who won the ’68 silver medal in the Mexico Olympics, and is known for his support for the black power salute.

On first meeting Heather, down by the fairy tree in Fitzroy Gardens, where I walked today on the way here - Heather told me that Gary Cunningham was my birth father. That freaked me out, because I’d just been studying [the Balibo Five]at university in a politics class. I spent a fairly dark five years in a library, looking at microfilm ... of their deaths. Horrible descriptions of what had happened. Very quickly it became not just five Australians, six with Roger East, but over 183,000 Timorese, and I felt the increasing need to do something about this. I couldn’t understand as a young man, becoming an angry young man, how this horrific tragedy had occurred on our doorstep, and our country seemed to be deliberately burying the truth.

I felt we had an enormous debt to the Timorese - after all they’d lost 40,000 of their people defending our shores in World War II, and we at that time were signing a treaty taking 90% of their oil.

After five years, I decided I had to know more about how Gary lived, and how he died. There was a 1975 article in one of those papers that mentioned the Cunningham family, and their address in Moorabbin. I looked that up, and this time Heather and I wrote a much more direct letter to the Cunninghams. ‘Your son, had a son.’ Because Heather had never told anybody that Gary was my birth father, she suffered alone for all those years. I found grandparents, and an aunt and uncle, that are here tonight.

Gary had no other children - that we know of [grins] and neither did his sister or brother. Of all of the Balibo Five young men, there are only two children - Evan Shackleton, and myself.

In 2002, the Bracks Victorian government set up the Balibo House Trust and invited family members to join. Together with channel 7, 9, Multiplex and World Vision, and many other generous sponsors, we refurbished the Balibo flag house where we saw Greg Shackleton painting the Australian flag on the wall. This was incredibly significant for us. It was the first time in 25 years that a government had acknowledged what we were going through. And it took a State government to do it.

At that ceremony, where we launched the Balibo Flag House, I read a letter ... from Gary. Written on the 15th of October, 1975, one day before his death. It says, in part: ‘I don’t think I’ll be back in time for Anne’s birthday, and probably not mine. The town of Balibo, really beautiful before the revolution, now is in ruins.’

We found out the Balibo Five were missing on Anne’s birthday, the 17th of October, and shortly afterwards, the letter arrived.

It’s incredibly humbling visiting East Timor. I carry this scarf with me, at times, to remind me of nine young men who were killed by their own relatives as they fled from Dili to Balibo - killed because their families worried that they would bring the militia with them, and that it was too dangerous to have Dili University students protesting.

There were many memorable moments for me at that particular launch in 2003. My wife, Liz, singing ‘Ave Maria’ in front of thousands of Timorese people, and Jose Ramos Horta, the then foreign minister, saying ‘I want to talk to her, but give me a minute, I’m still too emotional’. One amazing moment was a photo I took of Evan Shackleton standing with his mother Shirley, in front of the Flag House. Evan has his head thrown back, because we’d just realised that I, as a photographer, was taking Evan’s photograph where his father painted the flag on the wall, and my father filmed it.

I’d like to talk a little bit about the national interest. Encouraged by the support of the Victorian government, we lobbied the federal governments of Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK and of course Indonesia, who all felt and argued for many years that it was cross-fire between rival forces that killed our relatives. At a very personal level, this infected all of us.

Each family was told that there would be a funeral in Jakarta in the half sized box that they were put into, that we had to pay for the funeral, but we weren’t allowed to go. Ambassador Woolcott said, ‘no words can explain this pointless death in Balibo’. Well I say, they can, but they don’t want to be explained. 

Since then, successive governments have hoped this issue would go away, in the national interest. In 2007, a coronial inquiry meant a great deal to us. It once and for all, after weeks of eyewitness testimony, showed that Brian Peters and the Balibo Five colleagues died from wounds sustained from when they were shot or stabbed deliberately and not in the heat of battle. No cross fire.  That helped ... and the coroner did something very brave, outside of her mandate. She referred to it as a ‘possible war crime’ to the AFP and the Attorney-General’s Department. Five years, five hundred thousand dollars, no contact with the Indonesian officials, and the finding was that there were jurisdictional error issues, and we don’t think we can prove that the Indonesians were there.

We’ve put one FOI request in which has been refused.  Stand by.

I’d like to talk a little bit about the light - because that’s the darkness, the looking back is hard. The positive things, are ... the opportunity to work with the community of Balibo, with the Flag House Trust, and I’d like to acknowledge other members of other families who have done an enormous amount, the Stewarts are here tonight.

The Flag House, with Balibo House Trust, we work to run sewing, cooking classes, we run a woodwork workshop, mechanics workshop and so on. In 2012 we found out that the community thought we owned a kinder there. We had a crèche, and the crèche had kicked the local police out of their cop shop, because it got too big. We went and looked at the kinder, and it had no roof, no toilets, the supplies were horrible. We fixed all of these things with the support of Rotary and Albert Park kinder, and 450 children so far in their little green and gold uniforms with ‘Balibo Five kinder’ have so far graduated. 

Our most ambitious project to date has been the Balibo Fort Hotel and Cultural History Museum.   This restored a 350 year old Portuguese fort above Balibo, and it’s currently creating income, employment and training opportunities for the people of Balibo, and it’s really starting to bring people to the west of East Timor. This would not have been possible without the very very generous support of Channel 7, Channel 9, Harold Mitchell Foundation, Crown, and Media Super, to name a few.

What we’re intending to do with this, is build on that. Many, many financial options, many supplies that we can get into the local community, but our next project is to bring dentists that can stay in the comfort that they’re used to, and train and run dental clinicians, while running a dental clinic to service about 15,000 people in the area.

So tonight, I’ve spoken about my journey of discovery and search for truth. My journey of adoption and personal discovery, to Australia’s journey to maturity as a nation. If we are truly mature, and self aware and adjusted society, we have to acknowledge our past, and only then can we know where we are going.

Most importantly, I’d like to thank all of you, members of the media. Every day you hold truths in your hands. Your freedom to write, film, tweet, draw or otherwise report these truths is of paramount importance. It is the media that kept fighting alongside us for the Balibo Five, and for press freedoms that are so important as fundamental human rights.

I ask you to keep that legacy going.

Thank you very much.

Longer version of this event. Includes speeches from Ron Tandberg, Laurie Oakes and Peter Grieste. Plus music video 'Balibo' by Ego Lemos Timorese musician.