Jenny Brockie

Members of the university community, distinguished guests, graduates – very importantly, graduates – families, and friends. I too would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which this university stands, and to pay my respects to their elders past and present. What an honour it is for me to receive a doctorate from this university – a university I so admire for its thinking, its values, its creativity, and its connection to industry and to the broader community.

It’s almost 40 years ago to the day since I received my own undergraduate degree, majoring in literature and communications from another university, and embarked on my career in journalism. If it’s any consolation at all to those of you wondering about job prospects, when I first told my mother – a wise and practical woman – that I wanted to be a journalist, she looked at me with a slightly alarmed expression and gently suggested I might think about a nice, secure job as a bank teller. Many years later, she admitted to being glad that I’d ignored her. I think she was taking money out of an ATM at the time. But even four decades ago, journalism was a risky choice, especially for a young woman. My early experiences were not encouraging. Waiting to be interviewed for the cadetship that I eventually secured at the ABC, the door of the interview room flung open and the young woman being interviewed before me catapulted out of the room, sobbing uncontrollably, and fled down the hallway. I was left alone for a few minutes to ponder her distress, and then solemnly ushered in for my turn to be interviewed for the job. Not a word was said about the sobber, but it didn’t take long to get the gist of what had happened. Seated before me were two male ABC executives – a good cop and a bad cop, with the bad cop clearly believing that early exposure to some tough questioning would help knock out any weaklings amongst the young female applicants. This was the same executive who, some months later when I said I wanted to be a political reporter, dismissed me with a wave of his hand. ‘Well, you can forget that. Women’s voices aren’t authoritative enough to be political reporters.’ True story.

So my point is, obstacles can be overcome, and things can change. All those years ago, my mother could have never imagined my media career, which is now entering its fifth decade, which is quite terrifying to contemplate. And I could’ve never predicted the extraordinary media tools now at my disposal, including a thing that emerged in the nineties called the internet. None of us knows now what our chosen professions will look like in 10 or even 5 years. Things change. And I’ve changed. The young journalist I was 40 years ago was very different to the journalist I am today. When I left university, I thought I had a pretty good grip on the world. There were important stories to tell the way I thought they should be told, the stories I cared about. I was musing about this recently with my dear, dear friend and colleague Mark Colvin, one of the finest broadcasters this country has ever produced. We were talking about how certain we were as young journalists together, and how much less certain we are now. The wonderful thing about journalism is it exposes you to people, situations, ideas you haven’t even remotely thought about before – if you let it. I’ve learned to be as engaged with, and fascinated by, ideas I don’t like, as much as the ones I’m really drawn to – to extend my curiosity to topics and to people I might instinctively abhor or shy away from, points of view I simply don’t like.

Many of my most important moments in my journalistic career, and my life, for that matter, have been discovering shades of grey, ethical dilemmas, sliding door moments, counter intuitive outcomes, or just prosaic examples of human frailty. I’ve learned that people’s motives and actions can be far, far more complex and nuanced than I’d initially believed them to be. Sure, some things are straightforward. There are crooks to be exposed, there’s evidence to find, there are lies to call out. But it’s one thing to examine facts, seek out everybody’s version of events, and come to a conclusion. It’s quite another to look for a story or a character that conforms to what you think you already know. Or, to turn away from an uncomfortable truth. I’ve been disappointed by people I admire, and impressed by those whose views I least expected to agree with. People will talk to you all a lot about passion, and it is important.

But cleaving too passionately to your view of the world can, in my view, get in the way of good journalism and good thinking. You just don’t see stuff. I’d urge you all, too, to resist the binary world of tribal opinion, from the left and the right, where there’s seldom an unpredictable word or acknowledgement an opponent might have a point. You rarely get a moment’s hesitation from the righteous; tribalism can override reason, common sense and fine ideas, and ideas are so, so precious. Tribalism has its place: I’m beyond tribal about my family, and I love the Sydney Swans, but that’s not journalism. A final word to you about your futures: about 20 years ago, I caught a glimpse of a family I was filming in western Sydney, and they were watching a TV report during an election campaign. I remember registering 20 years ago that every time politicians from all parties opened their mouths with a well-crafted grab or a swing at the other side, the family in that lounge room would groan with a mixture of contempt and exasperation. They weren’t having a bar of it.  They were equally scathing about the questions the journalists were asking. ‘Oh, for god’s sake, who cares?’ they’d say. Or, ‘what a stupid question!’ They were alert to perceived bias, journalistic laziness and ‘gotcha’ moments. They were media literate, and they were craving something more authentic from both the media and from their political leaders. I remember thinking at the time how disconnected that family was from public discourse, and how potentially dangerous that was – twenty years ago. I started pulling away from political journalism around that time, exasperated with the frustrating dance that journalists and politicians were engaged in. I became sick of asking questions that elicited answers like ‘Well Jenny, the trouble with the Liberal Party is …’ or ‘Well Jenny, if the Labor party hadn’t done …’ blah blah blah. Politicians were sick of it too. They blamed the media, and we blamed them. It was like a game of musical chairs, where the public had grabbed all the seats and been sitting down for ages, but the politicians and the journalists kept dancing and dancing and dancing, long after the music had stopped. I stopped dancing at that time, with political journalism, which is a bit of a copout, really. But I just wanted to talk to average folks, and to reconnect with a bit of authenticity. More recently, I’ve had a mild hankering to do some political interviews – just a mild hankering, I have to say – but in a way, to try and test out some new forms of journalistic language, particularly around broadcasting.

And that’s where you come in. That’s your job: to find a new media language, new ideas that break through, whatever your chosen career is. It’s your generation that will find the new forms of storytelling, and find a new language to call people to account that will resonate with the public and regain the trust of the public. You’ll find the solutions to the failing business models, you’ll be able to reach more people with your work than I could have ever dreamed of 40 years ago. How thrilling is that? So get out there, class of 2017, and knock our socks off. I have the greatest faith in you. Three of your UTS predecessors, who sat in these chairs not so long ago, are amongst my guests today. They’re dear friends and colleagues, and they’re people whose shoulders I stand on, and have stood on, to do the work I do. Congratulations – it’s a great achievement. I’m sure I’ll work with some of you too, and thank you so, so much for this wonderful honour. Thank you.