A speech I gave about power and secrecy and the way the media shapes reality. For me the challenge in journalism is, when every other media voice in the known universe is screaming the same thing, to have the insight and the courage to say, no matter how ineffectually: this isn’t right. Yes, how trite.

Colin Simpson Lecture,  Australian Society of Authors February 2007

 I want to talk about secret things. Of a hidden country that shares our borders: about the unmarked roads of power and influence that shape our society and our culture; the secret Australia that doesn’t submit to scrutiny or accountability. There’s something incorrigibly covert about the exercise of money and power. It functions almost always as a community of privilege and exclusion that marks those who are in and those who are out, those in the know from those outside not looking on. Continue reading →