Kerry O'Brien on the perfect storm destroying our politics — with Richard Flanagan

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Natasha Mitchell, bringing you big thinkers at the best live events. This is Big Ideas. Hey, speaking of an exciting event, ABC Radio National's Top 100 Books is back next week.
Voting opens on the 31st of August and this year for your Top 100 favourite Australian books of all time. Victorian listeners, if you'd like to be part of the magic of making radio, the very next day, the first day of spring, we are celebrating with a very special event in Melbourne, with two of Australia's most popular kids authors, Andy Griffiths.
Yes, behind the Treehouse series and much more, and Hilary Rogers, who is one half of Madi Mara, behind the Dragon Girl series. The event is free. It's in Carlton. If you want a book, head to the Big Ideas homepage, scroll on down and look for B in our audience. I cannot wait. Well, today on Big Ideas, for decades, former ABC journalist and presenter, Kerry O'Brien, made a career of asking the hard questions. And now in the face of what he calls the perfect storm, wreaking havoc on the few remaining democracies globally, what he really thinks, his strong views about how we got here and what we might do next.
At the Byron Writers Festival, on beautiful Bundjalung country, to a full house, the six-time Walkley award-winning journalist, former host of iconic ABC current affairs programs. You know them well. This day tonight, Four Corners, Lateline, I so miss that show. And for 15 years, of course, the 7.3 Report is delivering the annual Thea Astley Address, named for the celebrated writer who spent her later years living in the Northern Rivers region. And Kerry O'Brien has named his speech Lessons from History. And it's not every day you get introduced by one of Australia's greatest living writers, so we'll hand over now to Booker Prize-winning author Richard Flanagan to do the honours.

**Richard Flanagan** (2:40)
The story of Kerry's working life mirrors an extraordinary half century of Australian history, in which television became the defining prism through which we understood politics. Television was still finding its feet as a new medium when Kerry began work in television news with Channel 9 in 1964 By his retirement in 2015, free-to-air television had begun its decline into the increasing irrelevance it now occupies in our culture. But over that half century in which politics and TV went hand in hand, Kerry O'Brien became the guide to power the people trusted. During a period in which journalists moved from being outsiders to becoming insiders, from being a check on the political class to too often becoming a part of it, Kerry O'Brien moved in the opposite direction. If his interviews with such figures of global history as Mandela, Gorbachev and Obama were exemplary and his epic Keating Interview series magisterial, it was in his holding the dun-coloured party hacks and blathering blimps of power to account night after night on the 7.3 Report that endeared him and thrilled the nation and reminded us of what was right and what was wrong, what we should expect of our politicians and where they had failed us. In his interviews, a nation felt here at least was someone speaking for us, seeking the answers we wanted, calling out the evasions and dissembling that so angered us, giving us some insight about this or that issue and the character or the lack of it of our elected representatives. And so doing, Kerry acquired a goose gaggle of gongs for his work.
But the one honour that matters above all, he won through dogged integrity, and that was the respect and affection of the Australian people.
Over time, Kerry O'Brien became recognized as our greatest TV journalist, a people's advocate who in his stories and particularly his interviews demanded of his subjects, our leaders, the truth. He did this with doggedness, with humour and a steely resolve that could at times edge into an icy ferocity. Unlike others, he refused to cower, to fear, or to stop. He cut through politicians spruiking with the everyman's candour that endeared him. Nor after retirement did he stop asking who we are and what we might yet be. To his immense credit, he spent the best part of 2023 in that exemplary odyssey he and Thomas Mayo made travelling our vast nation, explaining the voice in the lead up to the referendum.