The ABC chair Kim Williams has used this year's Sir Vincent Fairfax Oration to speak on the role media plays in preserving public trust, democracy, and the accountability of institutions.
Williams, speaking last night at The Grand Room of Alpha Events in Sydney, also reflected on the leadership lessons he has learnt throughout his career.
The Sir Vincent Fairfax Oration honours the legacy of Sir Vincent Fairfax through a public celebration of ethical leadership.
Each year, the Oration is delivered by a prominent Australian leader offering a personal reflection on the role and meaning of ethical leadership in their own experience and in contemporary Australian society.
The event was hosted by the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation.
Kim Williams' speech:
Good evening. It is a great pleasure to be amongst friends at Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation and the graduating Fellows for 2024.
As a former Chair of the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership who drove the partnerships with Monash University and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program it is a real honour to deliver this 2024 Vincent Fairfax Oration.
I begin by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of these ancestral lands, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and recognise their enduring connection to the land and waterways around us.
I pay my respects to Elders past and present, to the Elders of other indigenous communities in Australia and to all indigenous people here this evening.
I also acknowledge the diverse peoples and cultures who have been welcomed to this nation, along with the laws, freedoms, rights, and faiths they have brought or represent.
And I recognise the shared freedoms and responsibilities we have inherited from British legal and parliamentary traditions dating back to Magna Carta.
As a nation Australia is profoundly shaped by our past, both ancient and recent.
In 2022, in the first of his Boyer Lectures for the ABC and in the context of the then forthcoming Referendum on the Voice, Indigenous leader and orator Noel Pearson, explicitly reminded us of the importance of acknowledging thecomplex heritage that has shaped the Australia we are today.
He said, “Mutual recognition will enable us to acknowledge three stories: the Ancient Indigenous Heritage which isAustralia’s foundation, the British Institutions built upon it, and the adorning Gift of Multicultural Migration.”1
That is as clear a statement as you will ever get about the importance of recognising and drawing upon the lessons of history as we deal with the issues of today and plan for tomorrow.
In the same spirit, the great 18th century Anglo-Irish politician, Edmund Burke, saw the task of leadership as an inter-generational one. As you will all know, he regarded every society as a contract through time. This was a contract that should be treated, he thought, with ‘reverence’ precisely because it was not some passing phenomenon.
Society, said Burke is, ‘a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’2
Burke offers a remarkable piece of bold foresight and his writing has of course, stood the test of time.
The Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership converts that sentiment into achievement, with the partnership between the Myer Foundation, Monash University and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation to cultivate ethical practices and standards in succeeding generations of Australian leaders.
Sir Vincent Fairfax was proud of his family links to rural Australia and contributed enormously to Australian business life and civic improvement, not least as a Director of John Fairfax Limited. He was a committed Anglican and supporter of the Scout movement, an organisation dedicated to helping children to thrive.
Of the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, that he established in 1962, he specifically said: "This action was taken on the basis that my children are well provided for, and hopefully, in their turn will contribute further assets to this family pot of gratitude for all the benefits we have received since landing in Australia in 1838."3
It’s a reminder that we must each find and play our own role in shaping the inter- generational project that is modern Australia. We contribute as individuals, in our families, through our affiliations with community groups and interests, charitable organisations, in civic and cultural institutions, our corporations and businesses large and small, and of course through our democratically elected governments.
When Edmund Burke wrote those lines about the importance of inter-generational duty in 1790, it was in the context of truly dramatic change. There was the democratic American Revolution which Burke supported. And the French Revolution, only posing as democratic, that he abhorred. It was a time of new discoveries and scientific breakthroughs, spurred in part by global expeditions such as those across the Pacific to document the Transit of Venus, that resulted in colonisation in Australia shortly thereafter.
Today, of course, dramatic change is with us again, only accelerating. Technology change. Climate change. Geo-strategic realignments, intense competition, hot wars. Mass movements of people. Economic inequality, made painfully visible to those with less good fortune on the devices carried in the palms of their hands. With these tectonic shifts new political attitudes and movements have arisen. If we look at voting outcomes around the world, we can see democratic pessimism creeping in and a worrying retreat in wholehearted support for democracy.
This should concern us all. The alarm was recently raised by Australian writer and George Orwell expert Dennis Glover in his blistering essay, Repeat: A Warning From History in which he clearly cites the parallels that can be drawn between what is happening in our world today and what was taking place in Europe in the 1930s: “The populists are back” he says “and we know [their] game plan”. Read his book to be reminded as to just how badly things can turn out.
In any time of change, we can only face the world as it is, and as it is becoming, if we hope to make a difference and have the courage to confront that which is reprehensible. Individual leadership will always be important, which is why the work of Cranlana Centre and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship matters. Outstanding leadership will be needed to build and maintain the strong, capable institutions that will protect and nurture Australian culture and Australian democracy.
And here we can take comfort and inspiration from a great Australian whose name is associated with the Cranlana Centre via its partnership with Monash University, which was named in honour of the great engineer and general, Sir John Monash.
When approached to lead a right-wing coup in the 1930s, in what his urgers at that time considered to be a hopelessly failing Australia, Sir John Monash – our greatest general - declined, saying with magnificent simplicity that all Australia needed was an educated citizenry and the ballot box.
Indeed we do. I don’t think by an ‘educated citizenry’ Monash was talking purely about turning up to school. He was describing an Australian democracy comprised of informed, curious, sceptical and well-rounded citizens; deeply sustained by and attached to our distinctive Australian culture; protected and nurtured by our civic and cultural institutions led wisely and well.
Right now, in all modern societies, we can seem to be heading in the opposite direction to Monash’s vision of a world well-informed and well-rounded society with its educated citizenry.
In this data-rich but fact-poor, always on, opinion-loaded era it is, ironically, becoming harder than ever for thoughtful citizens to feel confident that they are being well and truly informed on all the issues that matter to them.
Modern exchanges too often lack either the intellectual merits of curiosity and scepticism or the civic virtues of fair-mindedness and civility. Or both. Technology-facilitated discourse is often characterised by barrages of instant, often ego-fuelled, claims and judgements, fusillades of contempt and abuse, and torrents of complaint and self-pity. With the inevitable result that good citizens are tempted to retreat from civic life, lose faith in their institutions, leaving society more divided than ever.
A report from The World Economic Forum in January this year highlighted, “The growing concern about misinformation and disinformation is in large part driven by the potential for AI, in the hands of bad actors, to flood global information systems with false narratives.”
The report suggested that the spread of mis-and disinformation around the globe could result in civil unrest but also drive government censorship, domestic propaganda and controls on the free flow of information.4
But it’s not all gloom. Prime Minister Albanese gave a speech recently to encourage us. He acknowledged that ‘trustin institutions is low’, that we had a ‘fractured media landscape’ with people ‘confronted with more and more opinions and fewer and fewer verified facts’.5
But the Prime Minister resolutely celebrated the ‘organising and mobilising power of democracy’ and our ongoing challenge and responsibility to resist pessimism, reminding us that ‘no system that derives its authority from the people will ever be…a finished artefact’.
It’s been our great fortune as a nation, for a very long time, to assume democracy as a given and mostly take it for granted. Unfinished, imperfect, but never under threat. But more and more, I think, our good leaders across all fields recognise the need explicitly to nurture our effective, optimistic Australian democracy for this generation and those yet to come.
A central part of this national challenge is the continuous refreshment and reinvigoration of Australian national and cultural life. No democracy lives in a vacuum, it lives in the culture of its own polity, drawing from its distinctive characteristics. We must confidently continue to confidently nurture our own culture.
We must have Australian stories and Australian narratives and Australian imaginations and Australian accents and Australian settings and Australian history populating audio and video on the screens of Australia…and elsewhere.
I can assure you that this is a message I am taking to Canberra and to many discussions about the ABC and its future with decision makers in our land distributed across our vast landscape from Toowoomba to Perth. Successful nations don’t lose interest in themselves, they are continuously curious and optimistic about what they can achieve today and what they may become tomorrow.
Australia is fortunate to have many great civic and scientific and cultural institutions across this country. Our parliaments and courts. Our state libraries, archives and art galleries. Our universities and scientific institutes. The public sector that serves the public interest.
What also makes these centres so important is not only what they do today and tomorrow but their accumulated knowledge, their deep Australian memory and history. As Elie Wiesel, the great writer and Nobel Laureate said: “Without memory there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilisation, no society, no future”. These institutions must continue to be nourished and celebrated.
Democracy also demands not only the consent but the active leadership of the private sector to serve shareholders’ interests within an informed envelope of the greater public interest. Over the past ten years, we have seen a string of scandals relating to the conduct and ethics of large, prominent, respectable Australian enterprises, led by highly-compensated professionals, ranging from management consulting firms to leading banks, from aviation to bigsupermarkets. I note here that the ABC has played a very important role bringing some of these cases to light and in some other instances it has been found wanting itself.
We might also note that these scandals have rarely affected the public reputations and careers of those involved, certainly not in any meaningful way. It’s as if these acts of malfeasance are relatively harmless, or somehow irrelevant to the broader culture. But they are not victimless crimes or misdemeanours. They hurt those personally affected but they also erode our civil society. They reduce trust. They take us away from the principles and practices of a healthy democracy.
On this topic I turn to Yale historian and linguistic polymath, Timothy Snyder. I am an unabashed enthusiast and admirer of the quality of his observations and and the analysis that follows from them.
In his small potent book ‘On Tyranny’ from 2017, Snyder draws on the lessons of history, particularly the horrors of Nazi Germany, to offer us 20 rules that we should follow to protect democracy. Rule number 5 is this: Remember Professional Ethics.
Snyder uses the example of the collapse of professionals ethics throughout the Nazi regime to illustrate his point, saying: ‘If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.’6
Snyder isn’t going to let contemporary business leaders and professionals off the hook with the excuse of ‘unique situation” or some ‘one-off event’ or even ‘exceptional circumstances’. Professional ethics, Snyder reminds us, become most important as a guide to behaviour precisely when we are told that the situation is ‘exceptional’.
When we talk about leadership, we often refer to the personal qualities of exceptional individuals, qualities like integrity, charisma, and character. If you love to read biographies, as I do, you’ll know that many exceptional leaders have emerged from the most unlikely circumstances.
But the broader truth is that good leaders at all levels and in all sectors are more likely to emerge in societies with the right cultural circumstances; the conditions that allow a good leader to flourish. Those conditions will include universal access to high quality education, a commitment to merit and excellence rather than patronage, a strong social safety net, and the secure knowledge of available healthcare and childcare that creates opportunities for men and women alike.
I’ve talked about democratic pessimism. In a healthy society there is optimism. Hope. Belief in the future. Optimism which drives us to believe in better.
So, the question is how do we in Australia confront the rise of pessimism and circulate optimism? We do it in two ways. By nurturing and energising the tools of democracy, with a shared reality based on facts and truth, respect for the law, insistence on equality and inclusion, freedom of speech and open debate. And by cherishing our uniquely Australian version of democratic life.
This is where the ABC comes in and plays its part. So let me count some of the ways that can happen.
By sharing the stories of Australia’s cities and regions, the outback and the bush, hopefully enabling a shared understanding of national problems and opening pathways to solutions that work for people locally and at a regional and national level. Through documentaries which see the ABC performing reliably as the mirror, camera and microphone to the nation, revealing and explaining our grand institutions – the parliaments, the courts, the regulators and so forth – to the people; in compelling, frank and accessible ways that invigorate transparency and liberate knowledge, understanding and accountability.
By creating drama and comedy and entertainment that is distinctively Australian and helps us see ourselves and each other with compassion and affection. But not only that. Through great story-telling we have a way to see ourselves with more objective, critical eyes. That challenges us to reflect upon our society and consider how we can make it better.
Through ABC Education programs that are dedicated to encourage enquiring minds and critical thinking. And through children’s programming more broadly, bringing knowledge, ideas, community and joy to our kids and their parents, notleast through the remarkable phenomenon that is Bluey.
By the conversations we host, on ABC radio particularly, modelling civil discourse and rigorous thinking with the finest minds in medicine, education, science, the arts, philosophy, from Australia and around the world. And through the partnerships we have with many academic and cultural institutions across this continent.
Through music, which binds a culture like nothing else. The ABC is still the home of Australian music, and supports musical culture across this country for all ages and tastes.
And of course, through independent impartial news and current affairs, with ABC correspondents around the globe and across the nation dedicated to bringing facts and truth to all Australians and combatting misinformation and disinformation wherever it springs up. And yes, critically; that means being honest with the Australian public when the ABC makes mistakes.
Now, I want to say plainly that the ABC fully recognises the value of a vital media and journalism landscape more broadly. Media diversity matters to the informed democratic Australian citizenry imagined by Sir John Monash. We have Nine. Seven. News Corp. The smaller independent players like Schwartz and Crikey. All are vital parts of our democracy and contribute to a vibrant civil society with its open debates and different points of view.
The ABC is one among many great Australian civic and cultural institutions serving the nation and nurturingAustralian democracy, although it is arguably our most important and certainly that which is most widely distributed and available.
Let me conclude. I have taken on leadership roles for several decades across many government and private enterprises. I do not claim a monopoly on leadership wisdom although I do claim some relevant perspective.
My route to leadership was an unusual one. I first worked as a musician, doubling as clarinettist, composer, and teacher; and that was where many of my core life skills were developed. Performance is the end point for musicians. But to get to the endpoint, venues have to be hired, tickets printed, concerts advertised. I was the guy that did those things as well as hitting the right notes on the night. I liked making it all come together. I still do.
Over the years I have developed a sense of resilience and perseverance that also served me well. I've learned from experience to never give up when you're certain of what needs to be done, and the case is coherent, and recommends itself on all available evidence. And I have a great appetite for work.
Today we need leaders who embrace optimism and have a clear commitment to the fundamentals of a healthy society and democracy. The best leaders are those committed to the inter-generational duty that Edmund Burke described long ago, and that the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship program embodies inits founders, in their formation and in their programs today. And let me take this moment to congratulate the 2024 Fellows on completing their substantial program of work, which I am sure will assist them in being better leaders and social contributors.
It’s entirely fitting that the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership and the Fairfax Fellows draw upon the traditions and educational practises of classical democratic Athens in its work in helping modern leaders reach their potential. The characteristics of that first democracy still resonate today; a time and place where free citizens were equal before the law, where Socrates challenged the status quo and willingly paid the price for it. Plato and Aristotle founded entirely new schools of thought, and not coincidentally some of the greatest ever architecture, art and theatre was created on the bedrock of logic and applied thought they had propagated.
Earlier I mentioned Yale historian Timothy Snyder and his 2017 work, On Tyranny. Snyder’s latest book On Freedom is out now. I highly recommend it. Snyder asks us to consider what we mean when we are talking about freedom. Is it just about negative freedom; freedom from interference? Or do we want positive freedom: freedom to flourish?
Snyder argues that, in these dangerous times, it’s not enough to assume democracy is permanent and take it for granted. Positive action is needed to nurture and reinforce and protect it. All the evidence tells me that the ABC, with proper investment, is one of Australia’s essential democratic assets and must be funded commensurate with its role. There must be greater investment in Australian journalism too as part of a campaign to replace disinformation with facts and truth.
And as a nation we must keep investing in our civic and cultural institutions. We must keep backing ourselves: our culture, our art forms, our stories and our democracy.
We must remain curious and optimistic. We must build leaders ready for tomorrow. That is the pathway to a peaceful and prosperous future, and Cranlana is playing its invaluable part.
Snyder concludes On Freedom with his own vision of inter-generational duty and possibility.
“I look at my daughter’s smiling face, I think of what I can leave behind…We can be free, if we see what freedom is. We can see creativity in the past, possibility in the present, liberty in the future. We can recognise one another, create a good government and make our own luck…We can seize our chance.”7
Here at the Cranlana Centre and with the Vincent Fairfax Fellows, I salute this philanthropic enterprise dedicated to building great leaders…and thereby building and sustaining a capable, optimistic, flourishing democratic Australia.
So, we’ll always be ready to seize our chance.
Colleagues – much to be optimistic about and much effort ahead! Thank you.
2 ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ from Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches, Ed. Peter J Stanlis, Transaction Publishers USA and London, 2009
3 https://vfff.org.au/our-story/
4 https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/01/global-risks-report-2024/
5 https://www.pm.gov.au/media/address-commonwealth-parliamentary-association
6 Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Crown 2017 p 38
7 On Freedom, p 276
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