Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a privilege to make a statement about Mark Colvin. I did not know Mark Colvin. I had the privilege of saying hello to him once. But I would like to talk about four aspects of Mark Colvin: his family, his kidney, a remarkable lecture I saw him give and his quite extraordinary voice, which was one of the great sounds of the ABC and one of the great sounds of Australia.

Mark Colvin comes from a family of public service. His father, John Colvin, was a British spy and diplomat. Mark Colvin wrote, not that long ago, a significant memoir about his father and the difficult relationship that they had, particularly around the way his father seemed to act for much of his life, the sorts of behaviours that a former spy would show: a lot of secrecy in his life and a lot of half-discussions, as it were. He was also of interest to people in this place as the great-great-nephew of Stanley Melbourne Bruce, a former Prime Minister of Australia, a man who was, sadly, more noted for wearing spats and losing his seat in the federal election while he was Prime Minister than for his many achievements. In recent years, Mark Colvin tried to help correct the record and present a more balanced view of SM Bruce, particularly through exhibitions in national institutions—in this place, at Old Parliament House and at other places.

Colvin was 15 when his 'Uncle S', as he used to call Bruce, died. The two of them would often talk about sport. They would talk about figures that he did not know that much about at the time, about when SM Bruce served in the war cabinet and stood up to Churchill, about some of his amazing friendship with Kemal Ataturk—given that both of them had served at Gallipoli and were leading their countries at a proximate time—and about many arguments with Billy Hughes, whose portrait, of course, appears in this Chamber. Colvin said of SM Bruce:

He wasn't some perfect politician, he wasn't somebody who necessarily would have fit in very well into modern day Australia, but he was a much, much more interesting figure than some people have dismissed him as.

Mark Colvin is also the brother-in-law of Ambassador Mark Higgie, Australia's current ambassador to the EU, NATO, Belgium and Luxembourg. Some colleagues will remember that he is also a former senior international adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, so he has an intergenerational connection with this place.

I want to talk a little bit about Mark Colvin's kidney. Mark Colvin was probably the most famous kidney transplant recipient in Australia. He developed a disease which affected his kidneys as a journalist in Africa in the 1980s. He had met a remarkable woman called Mary-Ellen Field. Mary-Ellen Field was a great friend of my predecessor, Philip Ruddock. She had been a victim of the News of the World hacking scandal. She had done some work for Elle Macpherson, and News of the World had hacked into Elle Macpherson's phone equipment and so on, and Mary-Ellen had copped the blame for this. Mark Colvin took up her story and championed Mary-Ellen Field. Mary-Ellen was so taken with Mark that, when he needed a kidney, she volunteered to donate her own. They were not related. There was no particular reason to do so, but anybody who has met Mary-Ellen will know what a remarkable person she is and what an extraordinary relationship the two of them had. In fact, the story of Mark Colvin's kidney was made into a play by Tommy Murphy. I am very proud to have been on the board of playwriting australia, which develops Australia's great playwrights; playwriting australia was one of the organisations that were involved in the dramaturgy of bringing this uniquely Australian story to the stage earlier this year.

I wanted to talk about Mark Colvin as a lecturer and as an innovator in the media. There are very few lectures that you will ever hear in your lifetime where you think, 'This is so remarkable, both in its presentation and in its content, that I just don't want it to end.' There have only been three or four for me: Dyson Heyden's Quadrant lecture; Jonathan Sacks's Beckett lecture; and Bruce Ackerman's Holmes lectures that I got to hear at Harvard—although I disagreed with Bruce Ackerman's perspective on American constitutional law. Mark Colvin's Andrew Olle lecture is up there with those for me.

Mark Colvin's Andrew Olle lecture in 2012 was about the digitisation tsunami. Although Mark Colvin had a voice that made him sound as establishment as a deep-button leather couch, he was very much at the forefront of mixing up both the old media and the new media. He was an enormous user of Twitter through the @Colvinius account that he put together. Who better, then, to talk about what the digitisation tsunami would be like?

What was remarkable about his lecture is that, obviously, he was not very well at the time. He came to the stage and sat on a bar stool to deliver this lecture. It went for about 45 minutes, but it was extraordinary in its observations and extraordinary in the way in which he delivered it with some considerable passion. I would just like to read a short passage about the digitisation tsunami and then refer to four points he made about the way which one should use modern technology:

The digitisation tsunami has finally hit, and that means that mainstream media in Australia and around the world face of not one, but several crises at the same time.

There is a crisis of consensus, with journalists find it increasingly difficult to find a common ground from which to write.

There is a crisis of authority, in which institutions that have tended to hand down pronouncements like stone tablets from the mountaintop now often find themselves subject to disagreement, abuse or even ridicule.

And there is a crisis of credibility, as, Wizard of Oz- like, the curtain is pulled away from so-called authorities like News Corp and the BBC to reveal the sometimes despicable reality.

Looming over all, though, is the fourth crisis, the biggest of all - the crisis of finance. How, in the age of creative destruction brought on by digitisation, can we make journalism pay?

He went on to look at all four of those issues in the lecture.

I thought, given that he was such a great user of technology, that it would be worthwhile noting some of the lessons that he had learned—four lessons that he had learned from his time on Twitter. The first lesson that he noted was that one should be a crowdsourcer. That can mean using the crowd for anything from checking a date to asking people to help scour through large government documents.

Secondly:

Be a presence on social media, giving as much as you. Don't just plug your own stuff: encourage conversation and join in others' discussions.

Use Twitter as a rolling news wire, but subject it to the verification tools developed by journalists over decades.

Thirdly:

Admit you can be wrong, but correct yourself as soon as possible.

And fourthly:

… if you're an institution, admit that you're not monolithic. You're a collection of individuals, as good and as fallible as those individuals and the culture you create around them.

The digitisation tsunami has been very disruptive to journalists and to news organisations around the world. Colvin ended on an optimistic note, without saying, in any sense, that he could predict the future. He said:

All I can give you is my profound conviction that good journalism - journalism of integrity - is a social good and an essential part of democracy, and we have to do everything we can to try to preserve it.

I think he was absolutely right about that.

The final point I wanted to make was about his extraordinary voice and what an extraordinary presence that was in the lives of so many Australians. For me, it was sitting in the car and driving to a function or driving home, listening to his voice interviewing people on PM and compering stories. As an interviewer, he was firm without being aggressive. He was able to extract facts from the interviewee—from the subject—and he was able to present things in an authoritative style, with his civilised, cultured, educated and modulated voice that became a feature of so many Australian families and Australian lives as they tuned into PM of an afternoon, either at five or six o'clock and listened to his pronouncements.

Australia will miss Mark Colvin and the wonderful contribution he made to journalism in this country. To his family, may I say that I hope his memory is a blessing.

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