In its final week, long-time co-hosts Julia Baird and Ellen Fanning pay tribute to The Drum’s legacy of sharing, listening and inclusion.
Julia Baird: ‘What I’ve learnt from hosting The Drum: It’s about hope’
Some of the most remarkable moments on The Drum have come after a pause.
I have often watched panellists stop, take a breath and shake their heads, then say they have changed their minds, after having heard the previous guest talk. Some just grow very quiet. I remember small business advocate Peter Strong saying he just wanted to listen for a bit to the other panellists as he was learning so much. I remember a concerned Kate Eastman, SC, listening to Grace Tame — under an astonishing level of attack — then telling her that reams of older women supported her. Scientist Darren Saunders thanking Tarang Chawla, activist against men’s violence, for his work, acknowledging the personal cost.
Panellists have revealed their full selves on the show: they have revealed mental health diagnoses, come out as queer, spoken for the first time about surviving rape, PTSD, or about their experience of domestic abuse. And others have listened.
This is why, fundamentally, I think the show has been about hope. Bear with me here.
When I first hosted The Drum, in 2012, it had been running for about two years, with Steve Cannane at the helm. Julia Gillard was prime minister, and Quentin Bryce Governor-General. The Labour government introduced a carbon pricing scheme, created a royal commission into the institutional responses to child sexual abuse, and began securing state funding to launch a National Disability Insurance Scheme. Interest rates were at 3 per cent. Alan Jones was ordered to apologise for calling Lebanese Muslims “vermin” and “mongrels”.
Since then, we’ve had five more prime ministers, four federal elections, two more governors-general, COVID lockdowns, a report on the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, a review into the running of the NDIS, a same sex marriage plebiscite, a referendum on the Voice and, of course, the cancellation of the successful carbon pricing scheme.
The interest rate has been jacking up like a scissor lift, now at 4.35 per cent. A dark cloud hangs over Alan Jones, with allegations he abused young men — which he denies. A war has been waged in Ukraine and now the Middle East, the #MeToo movement toppled titans, Donald Trump won and lost presidential campaigns, and the UK voted to leave Europe.
My fellow hosts — Ellen Fanning for the past six years and, this year, Dan Bourchier and John Barron — and our now thousand-strong team of panellists have discussed, analysed and generally tried to make sense of all of this on The Drum, first for an hour on the News channel, then half an hour on the main channel, and then finally for a full hour at prime time, 6pm.
The EP of The Drum, Eliza Harvey, says: “The Drum has been a space for conversations between thoughtful people — punctuated by laughter and respectful disagreement — to help the audience make sense of the world.”
What we have aimed to do is not just add depth and insight to a topic, or chew over the merits of any particular policy, but to challenge stale and conventional ideas about who has the right to sit at the table — who should be heard, and who should be listened to.
In short, who should be on television.
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Lifting voices that are rarely heard elsewhere
Our priority has been diversity. We have valued lived experience alongside expertise, and ensured that different groups of people are not spoken “about” but given voice. Archbishops, hairdressers, lawyers, plumbers, lecturers, the unemployed, farmers, firefighters, teachers, athletes, waiters, political strategists, police officers, an undercover drug dealer, the chronically ill, the neurologically divergent, those living with disabilities or in aged care homes, those who too often go unheard.
We have had conversations that are very rarely had anywhere else, as prioritising lived experience inherently transforms debate. Under the leadership of ABC News programs director Annie White, who has had a fierce, genuine commitment to diversity, The Drum gave a platform to hundreds of people who had never been on television before, and now do it with ease.
People have not appeared on the show as single-dimensional commentators, but multi-faceted, complicated, genuine humans. The community leader who spoke of her yearning for the children she never had. The small business advocate who ran an erotic bookstore. The financial expert with the autistic child, the executive women who struggle with endometriosis and chronic pain, the author who wept about her experience of rape.
When I first began, it was often grinding work to encourage women to come on air, and our books were full of men who’d hop in a cab at the drop of a hat, while women demurred. There were so many excuses — kids, work, the pressures of being on live television. I still remember one of our most loved panellists — a powerhouse of her industry — telling me she hadn’t want to come on because “you don’t want to see a middle-aged woman on TV”. She was wrong.
Now, pretty much every night, at least half of our panel has been female.
At the centre of the work The Drum has done here has been our interview producers. The indefatigable Ghada Ali has occupied this role brilliantly for the past five years. She says:
“The way we produce this program is unique. I understand more than anything else that people don’t trust the media. So, I approach people with the idea that: ‘You might not trust me and I don’t want you to until I’ve earned it. My job is to earn your trust, so you feel in control of the platform and the stories you chose to tell. This environment is take-take — if you tell me something about your kids, your trauma, your life, I carry it as I would any of my closest friends and families’. I’d like to believe we have done this in a way no one else would. We hold space and look after each other.”
The team has learned a lot about reporting on trauma — to ask permission, to fully prepare, to debrief afterwards, to never assume a person is happy to tell and re-tell a trauma, to take full care. The wonderful reporter Steph Boltje, who has been with The Drum for six years, has carefully, respectfully, helped many dozens of people tell their stories.
We have been acutely conscious of the cost of speaking in public — from vicious trolling on social media, to exposure and exhaustion, it can be huge. We have ensured survivors are not just plumbed for their stories, then ushered off, but at the table, formulating policy.
As the ABC News Director, Justin Stevens, said this week, “The Drum has helped lead the internal conversations at the ABC about diversity over a number of years.”
Viewers tell me two things
I often have people stop me in the street to talk to me about The Drum. They make two major comments: first, they appreciate the calibre of guests — how they seem to be, as one woman said to me last week, “such decent people” — no jerks, no abusers, no meanness. We don’t host slanging matches.
Second, for years viewers have said how much they value the broad, diverse range of First Nations guests we have on, from all around the country, with powerful voices, like Mick Gooda, Tom Calma, Pat Turner, Jackie Huggins, Megan Davis, Tom Mayo, Teela Reid, Taylah Grey, Shannon Dodson, Wesley Aird, Thelma Schwartz, Joe Williams, John Davis, Inala Cooper, Amy Thunig, Melissa Lucashenko, Justin Mohammed, Marcia Langton, Wesley Enoch, Yvonne Weldon, Catherine Liddle, Nareen Young, Rona Glynn-McDonald and Zhanae Dodd, to name just a fraction.
(In the lead-up to the Voice Referendum, The Drum panels were 50 per cent Indigenous. It can only be hoped these conversations continue gather momentum, and are led by First Nations people. Since 2012, many things have become worse: then, the rate of incarceration was 1,914 Aboriginal prisoners per 100,000 adult Aboriginal population. Now it’s 2,500. Much needs to be done, and much remains unheard.)
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At the end of this long stretch, it seems clear to me now that The Drum has primarily been about hope. The hope that by bringing as vast and diverse a group as possible together, we might understand each other better. The hope that by ensuring conversations are respectful, we might allow others the decency of difference. The hope that, by valuing lived experience alongside expertise, that we might deepen public debate and sharpen public policy. The hope that we might open minds and hearts to those who have the courage to tell their stories.
The hope that persuasion remains a possibility.
And we have held to that hope every night for more than a decade.
It’s not just about speaking, it’s about listening, which sometimes seems a profoundly counter-cultural act.
As Paul Keating said on the day of the National Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008: “A country has always got to look for its golden threads and when we start looking for the black threads you lose your way.”
When we ask who we are, as a country, we need to also ask who is silent, or muffled, or unheard, who we have forgotten or neglected, who we need to include.
The team that puts The Drum together has been small but dedicated, incredibly hard working and committed. They have shut out abuse and cruelty, prejudice and stereotyping.
Hope is too often spoken about as a deficit, or belonging to the simple-hearted and naive. But in an increasingly polarised, distrustful world, it also does that rare thing: it binds us.
With, hopefully, golden threads.
Julia Baird
(Note: One of the great privileges of working as a journalist is that looking for threads can be your full-time job, and I look forward to continuing the pursuit through other platforms at the ABC, an organisation that is full of hard working, decent people, in whose company I’m always proud to count myself.)
Ellen Fanning: ‘A radical departure from journalism as usual’
Australians have had a major debate this year about who gets to be heard in this country and who gets a voice in the public square. At year’s end, we all know how contentious that is.
Some years ago, a corporate insider gently took me aside and asked me why I didn’t have more “proper people” on The Drum.
I sensed she was speaking about herself. Perhaps more out of boredom than a genuine sense of curiosity, I asked what were the recognisable features of a “proper person”.
She explained that they were senior people who already had a voice in politics and corporate life. Those who already had power. “Who isn’t a proper person?” I asked. Sensing things were becoming awkward, this woman replied it was those younger people, people you’ve never heard of … you know, not “proper people”.
Journalists often hold similar views. They disdain vox pops — short interviews with members of the public — as if ordinary folk are only good for anecdotes, possess no deep expertise by dent of their lived experience and thus couldn’t possibly provide hard core analysis.
In fact, no-one knows more about poverty than someone struggling to eat every week. An older woman in her 60s or 70s who is couch surfing can tell you a great deal about the causes and solutions for homelessness. Given she has lived a full life, she will have wisdom and insights on a range of other topics. A trainee teacher can tell you a great deal about intergenerational inequality, about the cost of living, about climate change, about aspiration. During COVID, some of our best conversations were between those surviving on JobKeeper — and those denied those benefits — and economists theorising about pandemic policy.
Why book a foreign policy expert to comment on a conflict when a person born in the country you are discussing will have an encyclopedic knowledge of the issue?
Not only will an Aunty or Uncle from an Aboriginal Land Council give you grassroots insights about First Nations issues, they know about regional issues like health, housing, cost of living pressures, drought, environmental management and how to build and nurture community,
Make no mistake, The Drum has been a radical departure from journalism as usual. It’s usurping those who usually have a voice in our national conversations.
And the way we do it has a magical quality to it. I call it bending time. We will start a segment by asking the nervous newcomer one question, then another, then a third. Our very small team of producers have identified them in the community, sought them out, encouraged them, pre-interviewed them, identified their most urgent and insightful contributions.
On air, they find their voice, growing in confidence with each question, filling the space in the studio, the citizen at the centre of the conversation. These are women, migrants, refugees, regional Australians, farmers, miners those from lower socio-economic background, older people. And as they do this, the more experienced, better-known panellists — who are so generous, so supportive of this approach — wait and wait and listen and listen some more.
Time stands still and the conversation is transformed. Away from the Punch and Judy of traditional panel shows that pit one “side” against the other towards a nuanced, complex, grassroots conversation that is authentically Australian, reflecting the spirit of this country and our enduring capacity to listen and learn from one another.
Let’s not lose that.
The Drum is on ABC TV at 6pm and on iview. Its final episode airs on Friday.