Journalism Leadership Winner

Michelle Grattan, political editor, The Age, and political commentator, ABC Radio National, Breakfast

The people she deals with often comment on Michelle Grattan’s “obsession with accuracy”. It’s a magnificent obsession for
a journalist to have.

She may irritate ministers, MPs, advisers and senior bureaucrats (not to mention their spouses) with phone calls in the middle of the night to check and double-check aspects of whatever political story is running at the time. But the result is that she is rarely wrong, and that has made her one of the most respected and influential journalists reporting on Australia’s national politics over the last three decades.

A bedrock of accurate information enables her to write with great authority.

Grattan’s persistence is matched by a ferocious work ethic – two qualities which have led some to see her as the journalistic equivalent of John Howard.

But she has always found time to take an interest in young journalists, particularly young women new to the press gallery in Canberra.

In 2004, her long and distinguished service to journalism was recognised when she was made an officer of the Order of Australia.

Grattan came to journalism from academia. She graduated BA (Hons Politics) from the University of Melbourne and was tutoring in political science at Monash University when the then assistant editor of The Age, Creighton Burns, recruited her.

She was posted to the newspaper’s Canberra bureau in 1971, became chief political correspondent in 1976, and received the Graham Perkin Award as Australian Journalist of the Year in 1988.

In 1993 Grattan moved to The Canberra Times as Australia’s first female editor of a metropolitan daily. But by 1995 she was back with The Age doing what she does best – reporting on politics.

Since then she has had a stint as a senior writer and columnist for The Australian Financial Review, and spent three years as chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald. She returned to The Age, her true home, in 2002.

In addition to her newspaper work, Grattan provides a daily dose of astute political analysis on the Radio National Breakfast program. She is also an adjunct professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland.

And, as if to demonstrate her prodigious energy, she also writes and edits books. Most, as might be expected, deal with politics and government, including her first, Can Ministers Cope?: Australian federal ministers at work with Patrick Weller in 1981 (Hutchinson of Australia), Reformers: shaping Australian society from the 60s to the 80s with Margaret Bowman in 1989 (Collins Dove), and two she edited in 2000, Reconciliation (Bookman Press) and Australian Prime Ministers (New Holland).

But in 2004 she showed that her interests extend beyond the political field when she retraced the footsteps of Charles Bean, the eminent early 20th-century journalist and war historian, whose book On the Wool Track is an Australian classic.

Grattan’s Back on the Wool Track (Vintage Australia) provided a perceptive and affectionate portrayal of the western NSW wool country and its people a century on. It showed that the woman nicknamed “Cobber” – the word she uses to greet colleagues – is a fine journalist even outside the area in which she has built her formidable reputation.