Page 87 – Griffith News

Processed meats are often publicised to be as bad as smoking. Thankfully, you are not doing the same harm as a cigarette every time you reach for that charcuterie board, but it is definitely far from harmless. Is this the end of the Christmas ham?

Seeing red

Processed meat is any meat that has been changed or preserved. Processes such as curing, salting, canning, smoking and the addition of preservatives all create processed meat products. Examples of processed meats include bacon, ham, chicken loaf, luncheon meat, salami and any kind of sausage. Broadly speaking, it also includes pâté, jerky, corned beef, chicken nuggets and even smoked fish.

The bad news: There is irrefutable evidence that processed meats are associated with increased colorectal cancer risk. The misconception that processed meats are equivalent in harm to smoking largely stems from the fact that the World Health Organisation has classified it as a Group 1 carcinogen; these are substances where there is convincing evidence that demonstrates cancer-causing ability in humans. For context, other Group 1 carcinogens which are regularly consumed in various places across our world are tobacco, alcoholic beverages, Betel or areca nut.

Sadly, colorectal cancer is the 3^rd most commonly diagnosed cancer for Australian men and 2^nd after breast cancer for Australian women. Globally, colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer but is the second most deadly. Long-term evidence has shown increasing wealth in a population leading to shifts towards sedentary lifestyles and increased consumption of animal-source foods match the increase in colorectal cancer incidence.

“There is irrefutable evidence that processed meats are associated with increased colorectal cancer risk.”

It’s just a tiny slice of bacon!

You might want to rethink that. There is global consensus that there is no safe level of processed meat consumption. The American Institute for Cancer Research suggests that consuming as little as 50g of processed meat a day increases the risk of colorectal cancer risk by 18% compared to someone who consumes no processed meat. 50g is a single slice of thinly shaved ham. That’s it. There is also a strong dose-response relationship when it comes to the consumption of processed meats and the risk of cancer or death cancer or death from cardiovascular disease. So if you were to consume two slices of leg ham in your sandwich every day, that’s potentially a 36% increased colorectal cancer risk. Very risky sandwiches! A meta-analysis published in Public Health Nutrition which summarised multiple studies encompassing over 1.1 million study participants, 35,000 cardiovascular events, 125,000 all-cause deaths and 45,000 cancer deaths found that consuming processed meats was associated with a 15% increased risk of death by any cause, 15% high risk of death caused by cardiovascular disease and an 8% increased risk of death by any cancer.

But what does this all mean when it comes to our own lives? Talking about risk as percentages can be confusing and unfamiliar. Well, that two slices of ham you just consumed? That’s potentially 36 minutes of a healthy, good-quality, disease-free life, gone. Just like that sandwich… and that’s not even talking about death, that’s just losing a good quality of life and being disease-free. Maybe reconsider that add-on bacon altogether when brunching at the cafe. Substituting just 10% of your total caloric intake away from processed meats to fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes or sustainable, minimally processed seafood can give you back 48 mins of your life. Maybe Super Mario’s creators were onto something with the 1-Up Mushroom.

But humans have smoked meats for thousands of years!

Indeed, meat preservation using methods such as salt-curing, smoking, drying, fermenting or any combination of these has been in recorded history since at least 1500 BCE. Meat is a valuable protein source and with no mechanical refrigeration meant our ancestors out of necessity had little choice but to develop ways to preserve meat. For people in reasonably developed countries, food supply chains are reasonably robust in supplying fresh or minimally processed produce safely and reliably. Most of us consume processed meats for culinary delight and convenience. The curing process has lost its relevance to prevent our households from going hungry between harvests or dying from microbially contaminated meat. While curing does prevent food-borne diseases like botulinum currently, with what the risks we know about and the alternatives we have, eating processed meat does seem unnecessarily risky.

Processed meats are bad because they are rich in the haem molecule, found in myoglobin, red blood cells and in cytochrome, an iron-containing protein in cells. When meat is digested, it produces a soup of amino acids (nitrogen-based molecules), the breakdown products of haem and fats. Haem’s breakdown products alone are toxic to our gut cells and are known to be carcinogenic. These very same products also have strong oxidative potential and cause a fat oxidation chain reaction which creates free radicals thus increasing oxidative stress on gut cells which also leads to cellular and DNA damage and are cancer-inducing. To add salt to the wound, some of the haem breakdown products also react with broken amino acid chains to form N-nitroso compounds. These compounds are known carcinogens and are particularly damaging to the cells in the bowel lining. And this is actually just for red meat alone! We haven’t introduced the negative impacts of nitrites used to make the meat deliciously pink and tasty!

Nitrites such as sodium or potassium nitrite are added as preservatives in many cured meats. These increase the production of N-nitroso compounds in the gut and, yup, you guessed it, reacts nicely with haem’s breakdown products to pump out even more of these carcinogenic molecules. Finally, processes like smoking or charring meats over high temperatures (roasting, charcoal or grilling) produces a broad class of compounds called polyaromatic cyclic hydrocarbons (PAH). They form through complex chemical reactions mediated by heat and smoke. PAHs are known carcinogens but we don’t know exactly how they affect cancer risk in individuals.

But hold on, beetroot and many vegetables are rich in nitrogen compounds and nitrates. Nitrates have a different oxidation state (note the ‘A’ instead of the ‘I’ in nitrate). Not only do vegetables lack heam and the fats, the nitrates are chemically different and actually reduce certain cancer risks and cardiovascular risks.

What are the alternatives?

Perhaps reconsider rushing out to replace that bacon or turkey loaf with a plant-based analogue. Many commercially available plant-based meat substitutes are considered ultra-processed foods. The Institute of Food Technologists highlight that there are no long-term studies evaluating the health effects of consuming plant-based meat alternatives. In fact, some of these substitutes have higher saturated fat contents than their comparable meat counterpart, while certain plant compounds have antinutritive effects which could reduce the body’s ability to absorb certain minerals. Some products even contain added haem which could still have the same negative effects as regular meat, but we don’t know for sure. Plant-based meat alternatives are reported to be less carbon-intensive, but the magnitude of this benefit is clouded because it is difficult to measure and many manufacturers of meat substitutes keep their production methods secret or do not report the full picture.

” … some (plant-based) substitutes have higher saturated fat contents than their comparable meat counterpart, while certain plant compounds in high concentrations could have antinutritive effects which could reduce the body’s ability to absorb certain minerals.”

Bin it?

Yes, not all processed meats are created equal, and some might carry less risk However, given what we know, it is best to avoid processed meats altogether. Also, reducing consumption of red meats will help you stay healthier; follow what is recommended for your age, sex and life stage according to the Australian Dietary Guidelines. If you really need that Christmas ham, eat sparingly and co-consume it with plenty of fresh vegetables, plant fibre and fruits. The fibre and antioxidant compounds in fresh vegetable, fruit and whole grains can bind some of the toxic compounds created or prevent their creation to a small extent. Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food puts it succinctly, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.”

Author

Dr. David Chua Dr David Chua is a Research Fellow at Healthy Primary Care, Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Griffith University. His interests are health equity, primary care systems innovation, utilising primary care data pragmatically to improve outcomes and improving lifestyle prevention in primary care.

David’s background is in food science and nutrition. His past projects include multicultural healthcare coordination, end-of-life care, person-centred care, the role of medical receptions in the healthcare system and community lifestyle prevention.

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Human Evolution and Climate Change

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. It’s also one of the most complex, and scientists are still learning new things about it all the time. One thing that is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that climate change impacts humans and the way we live. This is true today, as it was in the past. Climate change has influenced human evolution and has played a role in shaping the way we are today.

However, a key question remains. How did climate change impact early humans?

I started the North of Kuruman Palaeoarchaeology Project to address precisely this. I look to Africa because the first members of our species, Homo sapiens, emerged there, and I focus on the southern Kalahari Basin because much less is known about early humans in arid interior environments than in other kinds of environments. The team is inter-disciplinary and global, because a diversity of perspectives and expertise is the best way to tackle tough questions like this. And, to positively impact the next generation of researchers, the project supports student-led research projects in both Australia and South Africa.

In a paper published by PLOS ONE, we report new results that reveal the impact of water availability on early humans. The authors include researchers from Australia and South Africa at Griffith University, the University of Queensland (Project co-Director Benjamin J. Schoville), the University of Melbourne, and the University of Cape Town. We used a combination of archaeological and geochemical techniques to investigate how early Homo sapiens responded to changes in the local environment.

Stone tool from Ga Mohana Hill — A 105-thousand-year-old stone tool recovered from the rich archaeological deposits at Ga-Mohana Hill. Photo: Dr. Jayne Wilkins

A rare opportunity at Ga-Mohana Hill

Archaeological sites preserve evidence for past human behaviors. Estimates of past temperature and rainfall can sometimes be extracted from caves, lakes, dunes, and other geological features. The best scenario is when the archaeological record and the palaeoenvironmental records come from the same locale and can be precisely dated.

This scenario is rare across much of the African continent, and particularly in the more arid interior regions.

In a paper published by PLOS ONE, we report results from one such locale.

Ga-Mohana Hill in the southern Kalahari, South Africa provides detailed records of both human behavior and paleoenvironment. Ga-Mohana Hill has revealed some of the world’s earliest evidence for innovative technological behaviors – the collection of non-functional objects and container technology; a result that we reported previously in Nature. Ga-Mohana Hill also has a datable record of past environment preserved in the form of abundant tufa deposits.

Thus, Ga-Mohana Hill provides a valuable opportunity to investigate the impact of climate change on human evolution.

Walking up to Ga Mohana — Walking up Ga-Mohana Hill in the southern Kalahari Basin. Ga-Mohana Hill is an important location for human evolution research because it has datable archaeological deposits and a record of past environmental conditions. Photo: Dr. Benjamin J Schoville

Tufas as archives of past climate

Tufa deposits can be thought of as springs, waterfalls, and ponds that have turned into rock. As water evaporates, it can leave behind a calcium carbonate precipitate, forming a porous rock we call tufa.

We can find out how long-ago tufa formed using a method called uranium-thorium dating. Tufas in general have been considered too porous and ‘dirty’ for this method to be applied effectively. However, this study is adding to the growing body of research that proves otherwise.

PhD candidate Jessica von der Meden at the University of Cape Town, and first-author of the study published in PLOS ONE, carried out the extensive survey program across the landscape at Ga-Mohana Hill, documenting and sampling the variety of tufa deposits.

Ga-Mohana Hill has spiritual significance for the local communities. Out of respect for this, Jessica adopted a low-impact sampling approach, with targeted samples carefully chosen in inconspicuous locations.

Jessica discovered she could reliably date the tufas at Ga-Mohana Hill by specifically targeting ‘cleaner’ layers within the tufa formation. The method used for this is called laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), which in a nutshell uses laser technology to measure the relative amounts of uranium and thorium along a small transect. Layers in the tufa that have high uranium levels and low thorium levels are better for dating, and so once those layers are identified they are then sampled for dating analysis.

The Isotope Geochemistry Group at the University of Melbourne and Dr Robyn Pickering (University of Cape Town) helped develop the laser ablation and uranium-thorium approach, and trained Jessica on these procedures. The approach used here is a significant methodological advance for the science of dating geological formations, and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of its kind to tufa samples.

Tufa formations at Ga-Mohana Hill. Tufa forms when calcium carbonate precipitates out of slow flowing or standing water. Occasionally the tufa formations at Ga-Mohana Hill drip water today. Photo: Dr. Benjamin J Schoville

sampling tufa — PhD candidate Jessica von der Meden, first-author of the study described here, sampling the tufa formations.
She uses a hand drill with a diamond-tipped core barrel to recover a core that can then be thin sectioned and
sampled for laser ablation and uranium-thorium dating. Photo: Dr. Jayne Wilkins

Combining the archaeological and geochemical data

Our results show five tufa formation episodes dated to between 114 thousand-years-ago and 3 thousand-years-ago. Three of these tufa episodes are coincident with the archaeological units at Ga-Mohana Hill that date to ~105, ~31 ka, and ~15 thousand years ago.

Together these data when combined with that from other nearby local records, show that in the southern Kalahari, from ~240 ka to ~71 thousand-years-ago wet phases and human occupation are coupled. That is, humans chose to live in this region during periods with the climate tended to be more humid and appear to have been absent when the climate tended to be drier.

However, this isn’t the case in more recent times. By the Last Glacial Maximum (around 20 thousand-years-ago) humans occupied this region of the southern Kalahari despite evidence for drier conditions. And this timeline may even extend back to 31 thousand-years-ago, though we are limited by the resolution of the dating methods available to us to confidently assert this at this time. Future research can help pinpoint the earliest evidence for humans occupying an arid Kalahari.

The study we conducted also showed that this region of the southern Kalahari was relatively humid for much of the period between ~71 and 31 thousand-years-ago. This is interesting as this time period (called Marine Isotope Stage 4) is known at the continental scale to be relatively dry. Furthermore, despite the wet conditions, no evidence for human occupation is yet known at or near Ga-Mohana Hill.

Archaeological excavations at Ga Mohana Hill — Excavations at Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter. These archaeological deposits were dated using a method called optically stimulated luminescence and tell us when humans were occupying the shelter. Photo: Dr Jayne Wilkins.

Humans and climate change: a complex relationship

In Africa, climate change has been a major driver of human evolution, but the precise nature of this relationship has not been established.

Our research adds important information to what is developing as a complex, multi-factorial picture of early human-environment interaction. It shows that simple stories about humans only occupying arid regions when they were humid are inaccurate.

Our evolutionary history was rich and complicated, and we can only truly understand it by looking for and investigating linked records of both human behavior and paleoenvironment, like what we discovered at Ga-Mohana Hill.

By studying the details of this relationship at early Homo sapiens’ sites in Africa, we can learn how our species adapted to changing environmental conditions in the past. Ultimately, this can help us understand what climate change means for our future.

VIDEO

Published in Nature in 2021, Dr Jayne Wilkins from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution led an international collaboration which found evidence far from coastal sites of the complex symbolic and technological behaviours that define modern humans, stretching back 105,000 years.

Author

Dr Jayne Wilkins

Dr. Jayne Wilkins is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow with the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE) at Griffith University. Her research investigates the origins and evolution of Homo sapiens. Through archaeological excavation and lithic analysis, Wilkins is identifying important drivers behind our species’ enhanced capacities for social learning, sociality, and adaptability. She currently leads North of Kuruman Palaeoarchaeology Project, which is a multidisciplinary study of Pleistocene hunter-gatherer adaptation in the Kalahari Basin, southern Africa. Much of world’s earliest evidence for the emergence of Homo sapiens has been discovered in South Africa. Wilkins’ team has made significant contributions to this field, recently reporting new evidence in Nature for innovative behaviours 105,000 years ago in a wetter Kalahari.

Her interdisciplinary, international team includes researchers from eight institutions across Australia, South Africa, Canada, Austria and the UK. Local South African collaborators with the University of Cape Town’s Human Evolution Research Institute play an especially crucial role, and the project actively engages with local Kalahari communities.

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For Griffith University’s A Better Future for All series, in partnership with HOTA, Home of the Arts, Kerry O’Brien welcomed Leigh Sales AM.

Leigh Sales AM is a multi award-winning author and journalist. In her wide and varied journalistic career, she’s anchored the ABC’s prime-time current events program 7:30, as well as being the face of the network’s major events coverage including federal election and budget nights. She’s interviewed every living Australian Prime Minister and innumerable world leaders and celebrities, from Hilary Clinton and Tony Blair to Paul McCartney and Elton John.

A three-time winner of Australia’s highest journalism prize, the Walkley Award, Leigh is also the author of four books including the national bestseller Any Ordinary Day. She also co-hosts the smash hit podcast Chat 10 Looks 3 with Annabel Crabb. In 2018 Leigh was awarded the Order of Australia for her services to journalism.

Professor Carolyn Evans

Good evening, everybody. My name is Carolyn Evans. I’m the Vice Chancellor of Griffith University. Griffith University is proud to partner with HOTA, the Home of the Arts here on the beautiful Gold Coast, to present you another in our series of A Better Future for All conversations with Kerry O’Brien. I begin on behalf of both HOTA and Griffith in acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we’re situated the Kombumerri families of the Yugambeh Language region, and we pay our respects to their elders past and present, and recognise their continuing connections to the lands, to the waters and the extended communities throughout Southeast Queensland. Can I also acknowledge the many people here tonight from HOTA, from Griffith University, from sporting, educational, government organisations, community groups, the media, I think this is one of the most diverse audiences we’ve had. And I think that’s because of the appeal of tonight’s conversation. Because tonight, two of Australia’s most distinguished journalists take the stage for a lively conversation about the times they’ve reported on, the dramatic ways journalism and politics have changed in the digital age, and the challenges that those changes presented.

Between them, our host Kerry O’Brien and guest Leigh Sales have spent almost 30 years in the chair for the 7:30 Program, becoming the faces of their time for the ABCs current affairs reporting. Given their significant stints at the pinnacle of these nightly news dives, Kerry and Leigh possess a shared understanding of life in the limelight, underpinned though by some distinct differences in experiences. With Leigh stepping down from the 7:30 helm in June this year, she is primed to reflect on the peaks and the pitfalls of her time as the host of The ABC’s flagship Current Affairs show. In almost 25 years with the ABC, Leigh has covered state and federal elections, including the big election nights, Olympic Games, and the world changing pandemic, has been a foreign correspondent in the US during the second Bush administration, and has interviewed every living Australian Prime Minister. Perhaps somewhat to her own surprise, she’s also become one half of one of Australia’s most successful podcasts, ‘Chat 10 Looks 3’. Now journalism today is different to when Leigh’s career began, indeed, has some beginnings here on the Gold Coast as we might hear. Social media, citizen journalism, opinion as fact in the 24/7 news cycle have changed the landscape of news reporting. Journalists today must contend with an environment that’s not particularly suited to nuance. Leigh’s been clear about her thoughts on the impact of platforms such as Twitter have had on public discourse and journalistic engagement with the community. Leigh has continued to thrive as a woman in the public eye, winning awards and national recognition for her service to broadcast media, most deservedly. So please enjoy this exploratory discussion into Leigh’s extraordinary career and join with me in welcoming Kerry and Leigh.

Kerry O’Brien

I’m not going to suggest that interviewing Leigh Sales feels a bit like interviewing myself. Because you may notice there are one or two differences. But it does feel a little bit weird. We’ve each anchored Lateline, we’ve each anchored 7:30 for a long time, and we’ve interviewed many of the same people. So I’ll try to avoid too much self indulgence and introspection. Leigh, it’s two months since you walked off the 7:30 set, how do you feel?

Leigh Sales AM

Ah, I feel, the very first thing I felt almost immediately was that I didn’t feel rushed. And I realised that for, you know, the best part of 12 years I had felt rushed from 6:30am if not earlier, till 8:15 at night, because my life has been and you know, I’m gonna say this once and then I won’t say it again, as you would know Kerry, but my life has been, I wake up, I go, okay, quick, what’s in the news? Oh god, that’s happened overseas, we’ve got to get on to it straightaway. Because otherwise, you know, the time. Okay, quick, Justin, we need to do this. Alright, kids, just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And then you know, and the kids, quick, quick, quick, come here. And so that was my life all day, every day for 12 years. Or you’d, you’d think, oh, great. Looks like a pretty, pretty organised day, I know I’ve got the finance minister at four o’clock. That’s good. I’ve got time to go to the gym. And then suddenly, Lindt Cafe happens or something. And then oh, god. So, the removal of that feeling straightaway was really, really, I think good. And also, even prior to 7:30, I’ve always worked on daily, programs that are kind of tied to the daily news. And so what I’ve also done is switch off from consuming the news like I have for my entire career, so for 30 years. So I can’t help myself, because it’s so engrained, I still do look at what’s in the news. But I don’t read it in any detail unless I really am hooked by it. And what that has shown me is actually how much of what’s in the daily news cycle, you don’t need to know. And that’s taking up your mental load unnecessarily.

Kerry O’Brien

So you’ve still got to kind of select what you are going to read though, haven’t you?

Leigh Sales AM

Yeah. And certain things you just like, say for example, Salman Rushdie being attacked. That, that shocked me so much, and I was so rattled by that. And I read a lot about that, and strangely enough, I found I went to a bookshop that day and I kind of felt like, I just want to buy a Salman Rushdie novel, like it was born of a sense of complete powerlessness and hopelessness. I just felt like the only thing I can do to show any semblance of support is to buy one of that man’s books. And so certain stories like that, Shinzo Arbe’s assassination, I read, I read this stuff last week about Scott Morrison.

Kerry O’Brien

For a while, for a while. For a while, that’s right. I think, I think, by the 19^th, Anthony Albanese, very serious appearance, worrying about it, I’d kind of lost interest of it.

Leigh Sales AM

But there’s kind of, there’s issues that are always significant and important. Like if you kind of draw a distinction between what’s important and what’s urgent. There’s issues that are important. Like for example, I think the under resourcing of the public health system, the way the NDIS functions, that there’s issues like that, that are always important, but there’s a lot of, the news is full of a lot of things that are urgent but not important. And that’s really leapt out at me while I’ve been off.

Kerry O’Brien

Yeah, that’s, that’s fascinating, actually. One of the things that occurred to me and didn’t occur to me until after I walked away, it was, was that I must have been operating under a kind of constant drive of adrenaline for 20 something years that I was anchoring, where you’re, where you’re anchoring live, as you know, whether you want to or not, you’re on high alert, aren’t you? You are. And I was never sure what impact that actually had on my body, let alone my brain, because I wasn’t really aware of it while I was doing it.

Leigh Sales AM

That is so true. And again, what I’ve realised is that even when you say somewhere like this, and you think you’re having just a nice kind, of it’s not really relaxing, being in front of a roomful of people, but you know what I mean, like a pleasant interaction, there’s always a base level of anxiety because you’re never quite sure every time the phone rings or pips, if it’s going to be somebody just say, this huge thing’s just happened and you need to come in straightaway and your whole life is going to be up ended and your plans are going to be up ended. And so I think that means you are operating all the time with a low level anxiety. The other thing that did strike me over the years of, you know, I think I’ve done about 15 years between of anchoring between Lateline and 7:30 is your workday as an anchor is not like, the only person’s day that it’s like is like a performer on the stage, like a musician or an actor. Because most normal people’s day goes, you kind of arrive at work, you ramp up, you have your meetings, you do things and then you know, by three o’clock, it’s kind of winding down. Our day goes, it starts kind of slowly ramping up, you might get a sudden, like, like that, but it’ll ram up up up and then it goes at the end of the day. So when everyone’s at their most tired is when we would have to perform at our biggest peak. And so you have to kind of learn to do things during the day that conserve your energy because what you’re judged on is not how brilliant your ideas were at the 10am story meeting, you’re judged on how well you execute the live performance at 7:30 at night. And so that’s an unusual thing to and if it’s a very, say testy show where you’ve had like a live 20 minute interview with the Prime Minister, like a performer, you can’t just go home and then just go to bed, it takes quite a while to sort of come down from that.

Kerry O’Brien

I used to do the the morning conferences, I think it was at 8:30. If I remember right, I used to do the first morning conference, I was in the car driving the kids to school. Same. So I’ve done all my homework, right? But the kids had been in the car and Michael Brissenden was the Canberra correspondent, I forget all of the other players. But there were people who would come on regularly every morning, whether you are in Melbourne and so on. And a few months after Brisso went to Brussels, or somewhere as a correspondent, one of my kids popped up and said, where’s Brisso?

Leigh Sales AM

Yeah. Mine would have a bit, so the time of it had changed until nine when I was there. And my kids, we’d get on the call because I’d dial it in before I started driving. So it would be sort of sitting there and the kids would be betting who’s going to be first, is it going to be Clay, and you know, some of them had nicknames, like is it gonna be C dog, is it gonna be, so yeah.

Kerry O’Brien

Oh course, there were the odd occasions when the conversations would get a bit fruity. Yes. A bit, a bit willing, and you’d suddenly remember that your six year old was tagging along. Exactly. Anyway. So I want to go back to when you were first tasked with becoming a feature interviewer, which was Lateline. With Tony Jones, you shared it, I can’t remember whether it was two nights, on two nights off, or night about, but.

Leigh Sales AM

I had three and Tony had two, cos Q&A had just started and Maxine had retired.

Kerry O’Brien

So as opposed to being a journalistic all rounder, and you’d come back as the correspondent, the US and so on, operating from the field, what do you remember as your biggest challenges in honing your interviewing skills, very different set of disciplines.

Leigh Sales AM

Extremely different set of disciplines. Because when you’re interviewing in the field, for a news story in particular, but even for a current affairs story, you’re listening, actively listening to what the person is saying, and you’re looking for them to give you a grab, that is a kind of short, sharp, impactful precis of either how they’re feeling or what’s happening, or so on. Whereas, in an interview for Lateline, Lateline style interviewing is different to 7:30. But really, you were doing, you had the space where you could let the interviews breathe a bit, and you could let people speak and explain themselves. But if it was, say, a political interview, there was still an accountability aspect to it. So what you had to get used to fairly fast was the idea of pulling somebody up and interrupting somebody. And it’s, it’s an awkward thing socially, right, because in reality, if Kerry’s saying something I disagree with, I don’t cut him off and go, well, Kerry, back in 2011, actually, you said blah, blah, blah. So you have to get quite used to doing that. And it takes a bit to sort of steel yourself for that. And then also just understanding that

Kerry O’Brien

Or smiling as you’re thinking to yourself, you’re really quite stupid.

Leigh Sales AM

Exactly. And also, learning to keep your face completely neutral, because you never can be sure when the director might be cutting to your face. So maintaining a neutrality on your face. And in fact, I’ve always thought I’ve had a quite good poker face. And one of my friends one night, it was actually an actor that I was interviewing, I won’t name the person but I find them to be a bit of an arrogant tosser. And my friend sent me a screenshot of my face and she said, you love so-and-so, don’t you, and it made me laugh so hard because my face was like this. I thought I had neutral face, but I didn’t. But so you have to learn all of that kinda stuff, and then also just understanding, and you know, I had the benefit of there, there was a really good EP on the show, executive producer, called John Bruce, who was really encouraging and helpful and just kind of supportive, rather than crushing as sometimes people can be with their criticism. And learning, John had a really, really good memory. And so he would often remember oh, this is like, this policy, they did in X year, or this is like when they said this, or I think this person once said, something or other. And so what I became used to doing in the political interviews was always get going for primary source material so I would have it there to rebut. And so hopefully, I’ve instilled in my producers who’ve worked with me at 7:30, who have often been younger people, I don’t want you to give me the Sydney Morning Herald article that has the COVID stats, I want the Australian Bureau of Statistics, or I want the auditor general’s report or the primary source material, because invariably, the politician will say, well, that’s your opinion, Leigh,

Kerry O’Brien

Or I want that point in history. Yeah. Where there was a real, you know, where this mistake was made before, and you haven’t learned from it. Exactly. So, um. Which is really demonstrating one of the great losses of modern newsrooms, and that is the loss of age and experience, because so many of the older journalists have either been shown the door or walked out the door on payouts, because they were at the expensive end of the payroll.

Leigh Sales AM

And it is, you know, that’s exactly right. And it is, you know, that kind of experience, and I think of the people that I learned from as well, who were very experienced, like I always remember, and, you know, in the era that I came up in, and you know, you too Kerry no doubt, some of the behaviour would today be bullying, you wouldn’t get away with it. But like, I remember, as a young reporter in the Brisbane newsroom, being sent out on a story, which was the Boxing Day sales. And when you’re a young reporter, you often get sent on what actually are the hardest stories to do, because if you get sent on 9/11, or a siege or whatever, that that news story writes itself. Whereas if you get told you gotta go to the EKKA and get a colour

Kerry O’Brien

News story. And find a new story, yes. From the other 100 years of stories.

Leigh Sales AM

That’s hard. And so I was sent on a staple of the news, which is the Boxing Day sales, and I came back and it was in the era where you put a tape in and you used to spool it with a spool thing. And I was watching the vision kind of on fast forward. And there was this news, very experienced news producer called Dave English. Did you ever know Dave English? Oh, I know him, yep. So Dave, came over and slapped my hand on the thing to stop it from toggling. And he said, what are you doing, you are missing every good line for your script. And I didn’t know what he meant, coz I was watching the pictures. I wasn’t, you know, writing the script. And he, he rewound. And he stopped it at a shot of a woman who picked up a shoe, had a look at it, put it down and walked away. And he said, there’s the opening line of your script. Not every looker was a buyer. And it was such a great lesson to me. And I’ve never forgotten it. But

Kerry O’Brien

That’s because he’d done it for the previous three years. Yeah, exactly. But he didn’t remember to tell you before you went out, look for the woman who puts the shoe back.

Leigh Sales AM

Exactly, that’s going to be invaluable, that shot. But that always stuck with me that you know, the vision, it’s all about, you got to write to the pictures and write to the vision. And so you know, that’s, that’s only because you know, the benefit of having older people. And also, you know, frankly, a lot of what I learned was watching you do it, watching Maxine McKew do it, watching Tony Jones do it, and like kind of reverse engineering it, like looking at it and going well, what are they actually doing there and so kind of watching and learning.

Kerry O’Brien

I won’t dwell on Lateline’s virtues, but it was a unique programme on the Australian landscape, particularly with the format that it had for most of its life, I think, which was a single issue programme. Yep. I know there was a feeling in senior news management at the time of Lateline’s demise, that the format didn’t fit the times, the kinds of delivery platforms that were coming or were already here like iPads and and mobile phones or even Apple watches. That wouldn’t suit programs like Lateline. It seemed to me at the time that if you follow that logic to its conclusion, and the platforms dictated the program formats and the content, you could end up with little value at all, that everything coming at you in small bites would ultimately mean a severe diminution of the presentation and analysis of news. What do you think of that logic?

Leigh Sales AM

I actually think that the rise of podcasting shows that there is an appetite for shows like Lateline and that people will listen to a long conversation if it’s interesting. And so the key is in who’s asking the questions and the choice of guests and you know, how effectively the conversation work. So, I remember, you know, the kind of golden era of, I guess, what I would consider the golden era of of Lateline, which I agree, I liked it when it was a single issue show. But I remember when you know, Tony would be interviewing Christopher Hitchens and like I found that show such a pleasure to do myself because it was, because it was that the focus was heavily national and international. And because of the time difference, because it was on so late, you could actually get great guests out of the US and out of the UK. And so you might get 20 minutes to talk to Salman Rushdie, or to Simon Schama or Tony, I was thinking about talking to Christopher Hitchens, and like these amazing conversations that they would have, that would just be really interesting. But actually, you can’t really do it in six minutes or seven minutes, you’re not going to be able to make, or even 10, or even 10, you can’t kind of make it work. And that was a thing with when I went to 7:30, I remember talking to Justin Stevens, who is my kind of final executive producer, who both Kerry and I worked with. And I remember for years and years, I’ve wanted to interview Shane Warne. And the reason was because I felt like Shane Warne was absolutely a very significant cricketer in the history of cricket, but also a genuinely significant Australian cultural identity, and

Kerry O’Brien

That’s one way of putting it

Leigh Sales AM

and with the exception of Michael Parkinson,

Kerry O’Brien

A cultural representative overseas.

Leigh Sales AM

With the exception of Michael Parkinson, when, Warnie had retired, he’d never really been given an interview that treated him like a kind of serious figure as opposed to just you know, some buff blokey buffoon. But I said to Justin, it will only work if I can have like, I’m certain I can do a really good interview with Shane Warne. But I can only do a really good interview with Shane ward at length. So if you don’t want to run it at length, let’s not do it. And there were often interviews like that, where I would say, I can do this, but you have to back me in that I need the time to be able to make it work. And sometimes they would be the interviews that would get the biggest audience response. And in my view, it was because you let it run at length. Yes, absolutely. And I think, you know, podcasting, as I say, has shown that that I mean, Joe Rogan, I think does like two hours, which I think is excessive and too long, but people will listen to it.

Kerry O’Brien

It used to drive me nuts, Leigh, that the defensiveness in our industry, in television for what we call quaintly the talking head, that that if somebody is on television for more than 30 seconds talking, you start getting twitchy. This is the producers of the shows, of the news shows and and if if somebody, I mean, you’ll see it commonly that if there’s a talking head in a news package or a 7:30 story or whatever. They’re only talking for about 10 seconds, and suddenly there’s other extraneous pictures running over their conversation, often of absolutely no relevance to what they’re saying purely because of this defensiveness that if if you the audience have to be subjected to a talking head in vision for longer than a very brief period, you’re going to get bored and go away, which is a complete insult to you, of course. And there is a real hunger out there for real people with real things to say that are relevant.

Leigh Sales AM

And my friend Richard Fidler, who hosts Conversations, you know, would would add to that, that it doesn’t even have to be somebody well known or significant. Like if it if it’s somebody who just has an interesting story to tell or a particular expertise. And, you know, conversations, I think is up to about 5 million downloads a month, there is an audience for that.

Kerry O’Brien

My biggest challenge I thought on 7:30 was, was maintaining the integrity of the interview. Because after Lateline, and I’m asking you this too, I’ve worked out before I went down there that when I say went down, I was moving down the floor. The studio was actually in the basement, it was like a dungeon. But it was knowing full well that that having having had the luxury for six years of being able to take 20 minutes or even 25 minutes, sometimes with a single individual to do the real interview and actually get somewhere, to go down to 7:30, where the average interview was probably going to be about six to seven minutes, and if it was a really strong political interview that needed a bit more time, you’d be really having to sort of put your foot down to get totally in. Yeah. So that was a huge thing for me, I thought no, and I expect that it would be for you.

Leigh Sales AM

Yeah. And you you do get into arguments over one minute. So I would be going I want you know, I need 12 minutes and Justin would go well, I can only give you 11. And I would go, I need 12. I’m telling you right now, I’m running over, I’m going to 12. Like, and so, yeah.

Kerry O’Brien

Because, there were reporters who had spent days honing a story that they’d been told they could have six minutes for, but because the interview ended up looking like it was going to go over, they’d be told they had to cut it to five and a half. Well, you might have to do that with two stories. So there was always a juggling act going on and I’m sure you respected that as well as I did. Oh absolutely. Nonetheless, you were there making judgments about what your interview needed.

Leigh Sales AM

Well and just, what what I can bring to it. And as I said, there’d be certain things I think, if we have a five minute hole, don’t do that person as the interview, if you’ve got a five minute hole, let’s pick something different because it won’t work. But I did learn early on in the first year, there was definitely a different rhythm to doing an interview on Lateline, then there was on 7:30. And even over the time I was at 7:30, it changed and I think it’s partly because of streaming services. So, Lateline, I used to notice, because of the kind of people that stopped me at the supermarket, Lateline had a particular audience, and people who would often kind of stop me would be students, because they’d be up late studying or they might be studying international relations or politics or something. Women with kids in prams because they’d be up late feeding and they just put the telly on and Lateline was on. And don’t forget, you know, this, of course, is we’re going back to the, you know, 2000, 1st decade of the 2000s. So not as much, you know, sort of other stuff to look at. And then it would had a very hardcore audience of foreign policy wonks, and political nerds. Whereas 7:30, because it aired in primetime, and it’s going up against blockbuster shows on the other networks, people are thinking, do I want to watch this? Have I, is there a reason for me to watch this? Or should I watch, I really, my kids love Masterchef, and we can watch that as a family, or now it’s, should I watch my first episode of, you know, Breaking Bad or whatever you’re streaming, because I can squeeze in one extra episode. So you have to,

Kerry O’Brien

And I’ll catch up with 7:30 on iview tomorrow, and they don’t.

Leigh Sales AM

Or they don’t, because the news cycle’s moved on. So you don’t you don’t catch up. And so what I realised, and I learned it, actually, through doing an interview with Tony Blair, where I had pitched up hill and down dale about the amount of time I wanted to do it, and then when I watched it back in the context of the show, I had this realisation of, oh, that doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work, because I’ve done it like a Lateline interview and it looks kind of odd in the context of 7:30 in the packages and the duration, it just, and the kind of questions I was asking, even, it just didn’t quite work. And it was just sort of a lesson to me about right, okay, this is not, it’s not, I can’t just shift from Lateline to here, it is a different rhythm and a different kind of show. And I think also you have to with 7:30, you have to kind of try to hook people in right from the start and you know, not kind of put them off. And so I was always very conscious too of, well, what are we promoting off the top of the show, even if we were running maybe as the lead story, something people might find an off putting topic, I would think well, can we promote something off the top, so they might sort of, you know, have the meat and then stick around for the dessert later. So that that time slot is is uniquely difficult.

Kerry O’Brien

Yeah. So tell me how you, given that, that the the issue of politicians, being media trained up the wazoo, had been going on for a long time, it’s been happening gradually, this kind of growing contempt for the audience. For the sake of a) avoiding getting into trouble, and b) using whatever platform you’re offered, literally as a platform to spruke your line, endlessly. So, so were you ever able to work out a way of dealing with that? I. Particularly, when you knew it was not a prime ministerial interview, so you weren’t going to be able to get maybe up to 15 minutes or 12 minutes or something, it was one of the sort of down the line ministers but nonetheless, an important interview, but you weren’t going to be able to get more than seven or eight minutes.

Leigh Sales AM

I would always keep, kind of fighting and applying the same, and by fighting I don’t mean fighting them. I mean fighting to get an answer by applying the same stuff I said earlier, which is facts, rigour, and interrupting and trying to point out that they’re not answering, nonetheless, you know, and I’m sure this plays a part of my, in my thinking to step down, it gets wearing to be the person at the pointy end of that all the time. And in the middle of 2021, after two years of COVID and feeling like there were very significant questions to be asked and answered and feeling like if you asked questions, it was it was kind of set up like the war on terror, which is, you either you’re either with our policy or in favour of killing people. It’s like, you know, there has to be somewhere in the middle where you can ask some questions and that was like the War on Terror, you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists kind of vibe. I got so tired of trying to get answers from people and I started to feel like what is the point? And I had a conversation with my friend Richard Flanagan, the writer, and I said, I feel really despondent and I just feel like what I do is completely pointless. And Richard sent me this most amazing you know, as only he could express, message and he said, I wish I had it with me so I’m, because I’m going to not say it as well as he did. But he basically said, I understand you know how you feel, but it’s not pointless, because every time you ask a question that we at home feel like we want to know the answer to, and they don’t answer it, it reminds us that they should answer it. And also, there’s a basic assertion of human dignity in you sitting there and putting to them something on behalf of the average member of the public. And it actually like kinda, yeah.

Kerry O’Brien

And how many people were sitting at home, feeling insulted about the contempt with which they were being treated, the lack of respect with which they’re being treated?

Leigh Sales AM

Well that’s the thing sometimes that I think the person in power forgets, then they kind of can, will, sometimes behave somewhat contemptuously of me, but I think they forget that I am the representative of the audience.

Kerry O’Brien

That is that section of the audience that doesn’t think you’re asking the questions for the other side of politics?

Leigh Sales AM

That’s right. Exactly. Which happens both ways. Then they warrant the contempt.

Kerry O’Brien

You’d be surprised the number of people in this country who don’t understand the concept of the devil’s advocate. Yeah. Or. And assume that whatever questions you’re asking is a reflection of your deep inner thoughts.

Leigh Sales AM

I know. I often used to think that people, you know, if people were trying to read my opinion, based on the questions I asked, jeez, it must be confusing. Cos I have a range of varying,

Kerry O’Brien

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know right after the after the in the 2004 election campaign where twice or three times through the campaign, I’d interview Mark Latham and I’d interview John Howard. And they sort of switched around in the order, but they were one night after the other. And after the final one of those last week, so obviously, the public’s pretty heated, that those who follow their politics are engaged by then and the way you know, getting nervous about what’s going to happen. So I interviewed Latham and I interviewed Howard. And later compared the two phone logs, we had phone logs in those days, I don’t know whether they still do. But, but it was like a mirror. Each was a mirror image of the other. And in both, after both interviews, I was accused of, so if it was the Latham interview, I was accused of loving Howard, and representing Howard with my questions. And if I was doing Howard, I was a Latham lover. And it was an extraordinary illustration. And in a way, it’s how it should work. Not some of the, not some of the comments that get made. But nonetheless, people should be a bit confused about where you stand.

Leigh Sales AM

And I always viewed it as an opportunity to, for the person being interviewed, although, to be honest, not that many people avail themselves of the opportunity. If if if somebody has, say a politician is trying to persuade somebody of the merits of a policy or persuade somebody to vote for them. And I put a kind of like, but if you do that, isn’t this going to happen? I think that is an incredibly good opportunity for them to persuade someone sitting at home who might go actually, now that they put it like that, yeah, actually, yeah, I’ve kind of changed my mind on it. But people don’t. People don’t seem to know or have the guts these days to try to change people’s minds.

Kerry O’Brien

Because, because as they walk into the parliament for the first time as a new member, it’s like the hand, the shepherd’s crook comes out and drags them into the side room where they are injected. They are injected with anxiety, about the possibility that they might displease their masters.

Leigh Sales AM

I think the media is also to blame for this because of the kind of things that we seize on and report which is

Kerry O’Brien

of course, it’s, it’s you know, there’s this devils dance that goes on between the two, the media and the politicians. But but they are told from the minute they walk through, in fact, the media training starts when they become pre selected as a candidate, and they are told every step of the way, whatever you do, don’t make a mistake. Play it safe. Do this, do what we tell you. Don’t do anything until you’re told from the top. Can you, you know, you, woe betide the politician who says yes to an interview before they’ve got clearance from the Prime Minister’s Office. And so it goes. I did an interview, I don’t know how many people would remember a man named Michael Wooldridge. He was a vaguely competent health minister in the Howard government. But he was a pretty assured media performer and he came into the studio one afternoon for a pre record and afterwards, I walked into the door. And it was a relatively short interview, probably about six and a half minutes. And he answered every question. And I was so taken by this concept, that, that when we walked out, I said to him, I said, Michael, that was a really good interview. I said, you answered every question. He said, Yeah. I said, can you go back to Canberra and tell all your bloody mates to watch it, and they might learn something. You know, the ground didn’t open up and swallow you. You weren’t hit by a lightning bolt. And the public probably thought you weren’t bad.

Leigh Sales AM

Do you know I won’t, again named the politician without asking them but one of the current politicians said to me, Oh, I realised that the secret actually to getting through an interview with you is to answer the questions. Because if he said, If I answered the questions, you have nowhere to go, because you know, it’s a good faith kind of actual exchange.

Kerry O’Brien

Yeah, yeah. You’re, oh, I’ve got to say this on the way through, and I bet you’ve got them if you can think of them. Every now and then someone would swim before your vision, who would show a sign of nerve, some kind of nervous tic, and for a brief period fairly early in John Howard’s Prime Ministership, even though he was a very seasoned performer, he was always to me like the, like the Boycott, the Geoffrey Boycott of politics. Boycott was this very staid batsman, who blocked blocked blocked but as soon as the loose ball came down, he hit the fence. So he bought everyone rigid, but he ended up with massive scores. And, and so Howard was always a quite a consummate media performer until he became prime minister. And so, I’m interviewing him, and suddenly I noticed his shoulders going. When it got to a point that was a bit tricky for him, his shoulder started going. And I thought, Oh, that’s interesting. So I’m thinking, how can I exploit this? I mean, I mean, how can I ask my next responsible question, and, and that passed, and about three or four interviews later, it came back, it was another tough, it was another tough interview for him. And I’ll acknowledge along the way that Howard was one who almost always turned up, when the times were tough, because he worked out that there was actually kudos to be earned from being seen to front up in the tough times. Anyway, I gotta move on.

Leigh Sales AM

Can I just, I just wanted to tell and I don’t think I’ve actually told you this story before. So Kerry, and I used to cross paths in makeup, because I’d be getting made up for Lateline as Carrie would come down to get the touch up to go in for 7:30. And there was a night where Tony Abbott was an in for a, in for an interview. And it was, became a very famous interview, which was, it was the one where he said he could be trusted on things he’d written down, but not things that just spontaneously came out of his mouth. And so Tony was in, came in live, so he, so I’m sort of just quietly in the makeup chair and Kerry’s got made up, Tony has gone in and then Tony’s in the greenroom, then he’s gone on. And so I’m watching as I’m being made up on the monitor as this interview unfolds, and then it gets to this part, and I’m just watching it going. And then when he starts with the will, you know, if it’s written down, it’s like, it’s gonna go, Oh, God, I could hardly watch it like, and you feel this sometimes as an interviewer too, as well as in the audience, which is just like when the person has gotten into such a mess, and you just know that what they’re saying is a disaster for them. And so I’m sitting in makeup, I’m just watching, like, almost through my fingers. Oh, this is so terrible. And it was one of those ones where Tony got knottier and knottier, which meant you just got calmer and calmer and calmer. And then it finished and I felt like I was just in a cold sweat of horror. And then I’ve realised, oh, God, Tony’s gonna come in here now to take his makeup off, and I’m gonna have to like, make small talk, and he’s just gonna be falling apart. But he completely wasn’t, he was completely pleasant and lovely. He was always very even Tony Abbott. But oh, my horror watching it was just oh.

Kerry O’Brien

Except as we walked up the steps from the studio into the master, into the control room. And his press secretary, who was a fairly young woman, and I. Claire Kimble I believe. And I could see, I could see by the look on her face, that she knew exactly what had happened. And Tony looked up to her. And she’s sorta, and Tony looked up to her and he said that went okay, didn’t it? And she did not know how to answer. Anyway, that’s, that’s enough of that. So, you arrived in journalism, pretty much just as the internet was starting to take off, and your profile was rising, just as social media began to become popular. So your career has paralleled one of the most exciting but one of the most turbulent eras in the history of journalism. Let’s talk about the good bits of that first, what do you think, have been the benefits of the of the Internet age?

Leigh Sales AM

Firstly, just being able to find people for stories. Because when I was a young reporter, you know, the most sought after, thing you know, was the White Pages on your desk. So now to be able to find people, experts around the world. That’s amazing. And also, I remember when I was US correspondent getting sent to Hurricane Katrina and my producer who was a really great tech guy had this dongle that he said, we went to the airport in New Orleans. And Jason said, we’re going to be able, we don’t have to get back to a phone line. I can, we can go and sit on the meetings from that side and file and he plugged this thing in and we sent, I just did my voiceovers and we sent them for the 7:45 radio news, you know, on the spot in the middle of a disaster zone. And I remembered thinking, this is an utter game changer. And so the technology and what you can do with the technology, and then again, just the jump up through COVID of you know that you can just interview people in their own house and so on, that, that has been amazing. Social media for, again for say finding people in the middle of something like a disaster, and there’s amazing tools you can use as incredible. As a marketing tool for your own work to put it out there, so for people who haven’t watched 7:30, you can just plunk a video on and whack it out, or you can alert people to things coming up on your programme that night. It’s completely invaluable in that regard. And then just as a kind of, just the sort of options you have in storytelling now, because there’s just so many different ways and different platforms on which you can tell stories. So previously, you know, we might think, oh, that doesn’t really, it’s not going to work, because it’s not long enough to sustain a 7:30 story. It’s not six or seven minutes worth, but it’s too long for a minute thirty on the news, now, doesn’t matter, you just put it on YouTube or whatever. So that has been fantastic, too.

Kerry O’Brien

So what’s the downside? What about 24 hour news? And the 24 hour news cycle?

Leigh Sales AM

Okay, I am still trying to process this, and I don’t have answers, but I’m just going to raise it as a concern. I am very concerned that the model of what we consider news reporting is problematic in an age of rolling news, cos I think we are causing and making worse the mental health epidemic in this, not in this country only, but around the world. Because when I was coming through journalism, you know, they teach you like, what’s the definition of news. Basically, news is reporting the aberration to the way the world works. So for example, my journalism lecturer would say, today 99 helicopters will fly safely, but the one that crashes, that’s the thing that makes news. Now, I know from the research I did, for my book, ‘Any Ordinary Day’, that the human brain’s kind of wired to notice aberrations and we’re kind of, because of evolutionary biology, we have evolved to fear the aberration because things for our ancient ancestors, things that had never been seen before, that you couldn’t plan for, threatened, say the safety of your tribe. And so things that were unusual, would stand out in neon lights, because they were threatening. So humans are trained to see and that’s why I guess the the news model has evolved, that we see one helicopter crash, and that feels like, threatening to us. But the brain is not super sophisticated. So when that model of news came up, there was say, only maybe the six o’clock news. So you might see the image of the twisted helicopter wreckage once over the course of the day, and then the next day, you know, there might be more news. Now, you might see, on your social media at the airport, the news that night, when you’re scrolling some websites, you might see that one helicopter crash 15 times during the course of the day, and that to your brain feels like 15 helicopter crashes, not one. And so say for example, during the pandemic, when we were talking about vaccine, bad reactions to vaccines, that was statistically negligible. There is no reason that people should have been scared to get the AstraZeneca vaccine. And yet, because every day, it was like two people have died from this two people have died from that, three people have died from this. The sample size was never reported out of five or six thousand. So it’s point 00001%. But the brain’s, as I said, not that sophisticated. So it sees that’s a threat to me, that’s a risk, I have to protect myself. And so we have all these irrational ways of thinking. So say for example, I drove past Dreamworld on the way down here. I remember when the Dreamworld roller coaster, or not the roller coaster, the water thing, accident happened. Like everybody, I felt incredibly distressed by that story and rattled by it. And I remembered thinking on the way to pick my kids up from their daycare at the time, wow, I’m never going to let my kids go on a ride like that. As I’m driving my car, which is statistically, a far greater risk to my children than any ride they will ever go on in their lives. And so I’m kind of worried that with 24/7 news, the kind of repetition, the over emphasis of the negative and the aberration, that we are making people fear the world as a less safe place than it really is.

Kerry O’Brien

Yeah. It’s a mix. It’s a mix, isn’t it? Because on the other hand, there’s a certain familiarisation process that’s going on all the time. You know, there are so many, there are so many individual aspects of this that bear questioning. I can remember being in Four Corners when, when the first pictures came out of Obama’s cabinet sitting around the cabinet table, watching live images in Osama bin Laden’s house, as the SEALS went in to kill him. Yeah. A sanctioned murder. And we were watching it on a television and while this is happening, there is a crawl across the bottom of the screen with some live soccer scores. It was, it was rendering a kind of familiarity and an ordinariness to an assassination. Yeah, you know, if you really wanted to, you could come up with 1000 illustrations. Like, I could remember going to CNN, when I was doing a sort of a tour of newsrooms, because we were looking at changing the models back here. And so I walked up the steps, the main, the main steps in CNN, and was caught by a chart on the wall. And the heading above the chart was, was the the high points of human history. And when I got closer, what I realised was that it was a ratings chart. And according to that chart, the most important story in human history, as recorded by that CNN graph, was when OJ Simpson was being chased by the police, filmed live from news helicopters above the freeways of Los Angeles. It distorts, it distorts reality. Definitely. It distorts priorities.

Leigh Sales AM

Yeah, definitely. I mean, that probably, the OJ chase would be an example of what I was talking about earlier about urgent but not important, you know. So, and like I say, I mean, I don’t, I’m kind of thinking my way through this stuff. Because obviously, I love journalism. And I’ve had a fascinating career over a long period of time. So it feels a bit rich to turn around now and go, well, I’m really worried that we’re contributing to, you know, the mental health crisis. But I do think things have changed. And I think that what we haven’t done is sit down and talk about, you know, the way we’re reporting. I did during COVID on the show, try to, in the introduction to COVID stories, basically put the equivalent of sample size, where I would say there’s been one death today out of X, Y, Z population, or X, Y, Z number of people who’ve been vaccinated, to try to not be unnecessarily fear mongering and creating fear. But it’s it’s a tight balancing act. And it’s also around, you know, say the news, you know, the nature of the news is quite negative, and it focuses on conflict. You also don’t want to sugarcoat it, you can’t always, not everything’s got a silver lining either. Yeah. So it’s a tricky kind of balancing act to give people the right information, but also to not be excessively, you know, fear mongering.

Kerry O’Brien

I’m going to have to start jettisoning questionings as we go. Because we’ve been having too much fun, Leigh, so I’ll, I’ll I’ll put democracy to one side.

Leigh Sales AM

A lot of people are, Kerry, it’s fine.

Kerry O’Brien

So, you know, we talk endlessly about Trump. But there’s still some good questions. I would, like I’ll ask you one about it, because I want to get to some of the more personal things as well. You know, you were, you were a Washington correspondent, you arrived there just after September 11. And you were there for those huge, huge global stories with the, with the subsequent fallout, some of which we are still feeling, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq, America’s worst ever, in its history, foreign policy disaster, not to mention what kind of a disaster it was for the rest of the world. But we now are in the era of Trump, which has coincided with the era of fake news, and whose shadow still hangs over US democracy. I was shocked the first time. I was shocked. I saw Steve Bannon, quote, back in 2018, early 2018, after he’d served as Trump’s chief adviser, explaining what the way, explaining that the way to novel mainstream journalism was, as he put it, to flood the zone with shit, clog social media up with so much false information, that the major media outlets were simply rendered incapable of processing at all properly, sorting out fact from fiction. In other words, in other words, an assault at the absolute at the absolute heart of democracy. Trust. So, how has that changed the game for you?

Leigh Sales AM

I mean, I suppose I am still trying to wade through the shit to tell people, you know, this is what’s legit, and to point out, and not just with politicians, but with, you know, business leaders or other people in positions of power, like when they are saying things that, you know, are demonstrably not backed by, you know, objective evidence of reality. But this, you know, we were talking about the back, when I was in the States, in that Iraq War period, where the the vibe was, you are either on board with this, you know, war in Iraq, you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists, was how it was kind of framed. And there was this quote that appeared in a, in an article in Newsweek, which at the time, like, brought Washington to a standstill, because it seems so Machiavellian and it was anonymous in this I think, Michael Liskov was the journo. It was anonymous at the time, but it was real later that it was Karl Rove, who was Bush’s Chief of Staff, and it said something like, You journos and you people that you know, are in the, and he called it the reality based community, you are going to keep chasing around after what we say and trying to disprove it and trying to show that it’s not reality. And while you’re tied up doing that, we’re just going to keep creating new realities. And it was just like a gobsmacking remark, and it seemed kinda like way out there. Now it just looks incredibly prescient because it’s exactly what they were doing. So it’s that has been kind of building, you know, for a long time. And even the 2004 presidential election, which I covered, John Kerry was the Democratic nominee, there was this campaign called Swift Vote, Veterans for Truth. And it was quite incredible, because John Kerry’s great strength was that he was a war hero. A genuine one. Like he was a decorated genuine war hero. And this campaign was about casting doubt, like had he exaggerated his feats in war and so on. It was really based in absolutely nothing. And yet it kind of got this traction. And it was through the early use of, you know, kind of, at that point that Facebook didn’t exist, but it was kind of blogs and television, viral television advertising, and Glenn Beck on Fox News, and this kind of, these kinds of blowhards who, who kick stuff along. Now it’s that on steroids because of Twitter, and Facebook, and the rest of it.

Kerry O’Brien

Yes. Misinformation has always been around, like, like propaganda, but, but we now have the capacity to propagate it at a rate that simply cannot, that journalists can’t keep up with. This is where I was going to ask the Dorothy Dix question for the night, which was how you framed the importance of the ABC in the context of what’s happening in democracy. But I’m going to assume that you’re all ABC supporters, and you understand you, and you understand that. So I’m going to stay with social media, but social media and you, I can remember in the early days of Twitters and you hadn’t long started anchoring Lateline. And once again, I remember those moments in the makeup room where our paths would cross. And I would say to you, now you’re you’re on Twitter, aren’t you, Leigh? And she’d say, yes. And I’d say, what are you doing it for?

Leigh Sales AM

Yeah, I remember. So my late colleague, Mark Colvin, the anchor of PM, and I had got on Twitter around the same time, and we were like, let’s just dip a toe in the water in this and see, you know, because it could be useful. And we both felt found straightaway, like, okay, this, this could be useful for all of the reasons that I explained before. And I so often actually wonder, you know, Mark has died about five years ago, I so often, I just wish I could sit down to have a conversation with Mark about many things, actually. But

Kerry O’Brien

he would probably wish that too if he could.

Leigh Sales AM

But I would love to know what he thinks of the evolution of Twitter in particular, because it wasn’t the same kind of bullying pitch that it has turned into when he was there, it’s that seems to have been something that’s developed where people have realised that it can be used as a tool to kind of bully journalists into pulling their punches, or, you know, really effectively spreading misinformation. But the advice, it’s kinda like, I don’t know if any of you have seen any of Hannah Gatsby’s work, but she talks about the kind of bullying that she gets. And she says she sort of feels immune to it, because it’s bet that the volume of it has been so gigantic, she said, It’s like almost being micro dosed against it. And that’s to be honest about how I feel. But with some of my colleagues who say, they might do one story that that sort of gets on the wrong side of social media, or they might be filling in for me and or they start an anchoring job, and they get this abuse, they can find it very rattling. And the only thing that I sort of, well I’ll say a few things to people, but one of the things I say is, you have to put as much faith in people telling you, you’re dumb, you’re useless, you’re a joke or whatever, as you do, in people telling you, you’re awesome, you’re a legend and all the rest of it, like it’s all kind of meaningless, that kind of noise. What matters is trying to keep in touch with what the average fair minded Australian who doesn’t hold a great deal of power, what that person cares about? And what are the issues in their life that are important to them. So for me, when I think about that, I think, for example, things like the Medicare gap, I think that’s a really significant issue for people. I read a piece this week that fewer doctors are bulk billing now, that’s really significant for the average Australian and so that’s the kind of issue I think that we should be, you know, spending our time on. Whether social media likes that or not, you know, that actually makes a meaningful difference to people’s lives. So finding a way I think, to keep yourself plugged into the actual community in a time of social media is critical.

Kerry O’Brien

How hard, how hard was it for you to walk away from it? And, and, and what was it in particular that got to you? Because you, you know, you don’t spend that long in journalism, without understanding, the critics are always going to be there and some of them are going to be ugly.

Leigh Sales AM

Yeah. It was really hard because it’s a fantastic job. And you meet the most amazing people and you get to, you know, have incredible conversations. And it’s a, it’s a really privileged position to have. So that was hard. And I took like months to actually think it through. But I think there were a few things. One, one is just, you know, to be honest, my kids were getting to a point where they just wanted me to be home more at night. And when they were little, it was fine, because I could see them in the morning. And then when I’d get home, they’d be asleep. And so I could get home and be exhausted, and it wasn’t a big deal. Whereas now that they’re older, so they’re 10, and 8, they go to school, they’re awake, when I get home, they want to talk to me, they get a new lease of life, because I get home. And I’m completely drained, because I’ve left everything on the floor at work. And so I’ll be thinking, I just want you guys to go to sleep. And I think that’s not fair on them. And so that was part of it. Also, just the exhaustion of being at the pointy end of constantly having to try to get people to tell the truth, and just the kind of toll that that takes. And I do think just that, as I said, that sense of being rushed, and that from the second I wake up that somebody wants something from me, whether it’s they want my voice on something, they want me to look at a script, they, a contact wants to bring me to talk about a story, my kids wants something, my friend wants something, some random wants me to open a charity thing, some bloke I used to work with wants me to come and speak on stage with him. There’s some, there’s always, you know, something, and it just, I just got to a point where I was tired, I was really, really tired. And also, I, there’s lots of other things that I want to do. And I felt like, I do think shows benefit sometimes from fresh energy. And I never wanted to be someone that stayed too long. I always felt like I’ve admired people who go out when they’re kind of, people want more. And so I just wanted to judge all of that kind of, right. And I also, because I believe in what that show does. And I think the take the responsibility of it seriously. When I felt my energy starting to flag for the accountability stuff, I felt like that’s really important. And I just feel like it’s time to pass the ball. And someone like Sarah, of course, has huge energy for that, you know, so then I just think it’s, it was just the right time for me and the right time for the show.

Kerry O’Brien

You’ve said somewhere that, that writing has to be in your life writing always has to be in your life. Why?

Leigh Sales AM

I think because for me, it helps process what I think about things and I find it kind of a way of processing complex ideas. And so,

Kerry O’Brien

That’s a very elaborate way of,

Leigh Sales AM

It is. It is. It, and painful.

Kerry O’Brien

To write a book. I’m just not sure. I know I’ll write a book.

Leigh Sales AM

The feeling of having written is always better than the feeling of writing too, I might add. And I just, I don’t know, I I actually like writing and I enjoy writing. And so yeah, I would like to have a bit more space in my life to do that.

Kerry O’Brien

You’ve also got as Carolyn said, at the start, one of the most successful podcasts in the country along with Annabel Crabb, ‘Chat 10 Looks 3’. I never found out what that meant. But I won’t ask now. What did you actually set out to do? And can you understand why it’s been a success? So we set out. Apart from your dazzling personality.

Leigh Sales AM

Well, there’s that, obviously. There, we started out because we we just had a good creative kind of spark. And we’d say, ahh we should do something together. And then we’d always, when we’d sit down to go what and when, we’d never have any time to fit it in. And so we kept reducing it to, all right, well, what’s the least amount of work and the least amount of us being locked into something. And podcasting was just kind of starting to become a thing. We both realised that even though we did a lot of you know, politics, and for me national security, foreign affairs and stuff that we had a lot of interest in literature, the arts, so on. And so it was a way where we could have conversations about the stuff we didn’t really do in our day jobs. And we thought, alright, well, we’re just gonna record it on our phone. We’re never, we’re not going to commit to even a regular timeframe. We’ll just do it whenever we can. And so we started having these conversations. And then I think we didn’t really have any sense of how many people were listening to it, but people would start stopping us and raising it. And so I looked at the website that was hosting it one day, and I rang Crabb, and I said, I think the last episode that we just did got 100,000 downloads. And so then we started realising, oh, people are actually listening to this. And then we’re at a Writers Festival and we did this thing together and t was really well attended, and people were lining up to talk to us at the end. And then we kind of realised, right, we’re in the centre of this wheel with all these spokes coming off as to all these people, and we think maybe they actually just want to talk to each other. And so then we set this Facebook group up where now they can all interact with each other kind of a little bit removed from us. But I guess around us, and I think what has appealed to people about it is, to be honest, we thought it was about culture. But actually, I think it’s about friendship. I think that’s what appeals to people about it. That there’s a sense of community that it’s two people who clearly like each other and spark off each other well, and I know myself that some of my friends say, when they listened to it, it in a life where people are really busy and you don’t always have time to catch up with your friends, that it gives you the same hit as if you have caught up with your friends and people who listen to the podcast certainly interact with us like we are their friends, like they perceive us as their friends.

Kerry O’Brien

Mostly women are audience? And professional women? Busy women?

Leigh Sales AM

Yeah. It’s about 90% women.

Kerry O’Brien

Looking for ways, looking for hints, of how to manage busy lives and juggle all the things you juggle too.

Leigh Sales AM

I think it’s actually more like an escape, to be honest from from people’s busy lives. It is mostly women, and it’s about, it’s a very broad demographic, actually, it’s about 25 to 55 would be the bulk of people, women in that age group.

Kerry O’Brien

So it has it been an antidote to you for having to carefully screen your public comments as an ABC current affairs host.

Leigh Sales AM

No, because I still screen them really carefully on Chat 10. Although it’s heavily, you know. Edited? And the appearance is of course, that it’s more freewheeling but it’s really not. Because what we do is we just simply stay off topics that are controversial. And there’s a lot of trust involved. So because I trust Annabelle, I know that she’s not going to put me on terrain, that’s going to be problematic for my day job. So for example, I might be highly opinionated on Chat 10 about my opinions about you know, a film, but that doesn’t kind of matter in my day job.

Kerry O’Brien

So it an antidote. It is. Is it translatable to television?

Leigh Sales AM

I think not. And I actually think it wouldn’t exist without Crabb. And I think she’d probably say it wouldn’t exist without you. Yeah, I think it’s unique to the two of us. I think it, we did do in 2016, six short episodes of something similar based on it. But part of the appeal is, I think the thing that keeps it going for us is that it’s fun. And as soon as you introduced that we would have to be locked into a schedule, having makeup, making us in a location that works visually, it would become less fun.

Kerry O’Brien

So looking back on a crowded journalistic life, packed into a quarter of a century or so, do you feel good about what you’ve contributed so far to what we might call the democratic discourse? And is it your intention to continue to engage in that?

Leigh Sales AM

Okay, do I feel good? I? I feel good in that I have tried really hard. Like, I do think that, I think that I have done what I’ve said that I would try to do, right? I’ve tried to say that I would hold people in power to account and find out facts for people and all of and not be biassed, and all of that. And I have tried really, really hard to do that. And so I feel like I’ve done my absolute best. So I feel good about that. Will I keep doing it? I don’t I? I hope so in some capacity. But that’s part of what taking this six months off is about just to see, like, where do I land in my thinking about this stuff around, so mental health, like where do I land? What could I do next? That makes me feel like I’m not contributing to things that I think are bad in the media. How do I do that? Is it in TV? Is it in radio? Is it in something else? I am staying at the ABC. So yeah, I just need some space to think basically.

Kerry O’Brien

I imagine you saw the breathtakingly arrogant, shallow and insulting piece by a Fairfax writer on why our esteemed colleague friend Kelly is too old to conduct a television chat show after walking away from her highly successful RN Breakfast programme. How did you react to that?

Leigh Sales AM

I was I was offended on Fran’s behalf because firstly, firstly, Fran is a friend of mine and she is a really great person. And when we talk about people who are what they seem to be, Fran Kelly is what she seems to be. She is a serious, public service minded person who has given so much. She’s a fantastic interviewer. And also she has a lengthy love and you know, a lifetime love of music and in fact started her career on Triple J. And my guess, I don’t actually know this, but my guess would be that probably the concept for that show, it was Fran’s idea. I don’t think that the ABC probably came up with that show and then said we’re going to put Fran Kelly on it, which was kind of how it was reported. And so I just felt like well, isn’t there, like I said, there’s a lot of platforms, like isn’t a space for people to be doing all sorts of different things. I didn’t really think that it warranted a personal attack on Fran Kelly, because of her age.

Kerry O’Brien

Because she dared to be 60. Yeah, well, I didn’t recognise him then. And I doubt that I’ll ever recognise him again, other than for his shallow arrogance. But I know you’ll announce your next role when you’re good and ready. But how close are you to deciding what your next step is?

Leigh Sales AM

I, people don’t believe this, but I actually am nowhere near and and I don’t actually have an idea. I’m trying to believe it. I know, people, so many people, the people who found it harder to believe, I think are my mates in commercial TV, because they find it hard to believe that you would choose to walk away from a job like 7:30. But, and you know,

Kerry O’Brien

That bit I understand. Right. But I think that, I think, I think you must find it hard to just somehow, that you have such a disciplined mind that you can actually just put it over there? Still, two months later.

Leigh Sales AM

Well, I feel like I can’t I feel like I can’t. Like I said, I’m I’m like percolating these thoughts and observations about things, but I’ve not yet, putting them into, like, what am I going to do, because I feel like I need a rest and some space. And I keep saying to Justin, who’s the head of ABC News now, what I really want is to be able to rest in this period and come back to work on the first of January, and then start to like, okay, can I come up with, you know, half a dozen things that I think could work? Or what do I want to do, or, you know, whatever. And so what I don’t want to do is use this, you know, rare period of rest, to be like brainstorming ideas and you know, talking to people and whatnot, because I know the way my brain works, and it can get really busy really fast. And so I just want to try to take some time to put some gas in the tank, and then go from go from there, kind of thing.

Kerry O’Brien

Well, more power to you if you’re able to do it that way. Is it getting harder to find new challenges?

Leigh Sales AM

Ahh, that’s a really interesting question.

Kerry O’Brien

Usually when people say that, they’re stalling for time.

Leigh Sales AM

That is true. But that is an interesting question. And it’s something I discussed with my colleague, Lisa Miller the other week, because after a long career in journalism, what, what’s always interesting and what, why 7:30 is an interesting job is, you’re using the same skill set every day, which hopefully you’re developing and getting better and better with. But every human being is really uniquely interesting. And every story is odd and differently interesting. So journalism, is the kind of career that can always remain intriguing, because unusual, and unexpected things always happen. And so, you know, like, I’ve got an idea at the moment for something I’m thinking about for a book. And so, and I find myself like, it’s hard for me to not kind of pursue that like to sort of scratch that itch. So journalism, I think, you know, does afford that you can sort of stay in a career and always find something new. But then I guess it’s the opportunity cost of, if I keep doing that, and particularly if I’m tied to the daily news cycle, well, then, am I ever going to have a stab at writing fiction? Because if my brain is gonna be too crowded out with news, you know, so it’s just that,

Kerry O’Brien

You’re not going to want to do that, unless you know, you’re gonna do it well?

Leigh Sales AM

Probably. But I think I have to, I think you have to let go in life of that, because I think that I think it’s hard to do, but I think that I can’t, otherwise I’m going to die and I won’t have a stab at writing fiction, because I probably won’t write a very good fiction book. But you got to start somewhere. And I really want to have a go at it at some point. Like, I’m learning the cello at the moment, which I’ve started doing. And because I can play the piano reasonably well, I know what good music sounds like. And I know my cello playing doesn’t sound like that. But I’m trying to be kind to myself and not judge my cello playing at the moment because if I judge it, I’m I’m just gonna give up doing it. And your kids are too young to judge. They’re too young to judge. They think I sound good.

Kerry O’Brien

Leigh Sales, thank you very much for giving up out of your, your down time to join us. Thank you. I know the audience have enjoyed it.

Leigh Sales AM

Thank you. Thank you, Kerry.

Hello, everyone. I’m Criena Gehrke. I’m the CEO here at HOTA Home of the Arts, and it’s my great privilege at the end of these talks to give the vote of thanks. I have to say I feel like I wish Laura Tingle was here. You know when you have that great insight and that great segment. Then she comes in and actually offers something more to the discussion. I’m not sure I’m Laura Tingle tonight. So this is also the bit, Leigh, just so you know where I quietly and gently rib Kerry, often. And during that discussion, I loved that you described yourself as a devil’s advocate, which I think is absolutely right. And I’ve seen that through this wonderful Griffith and HOTA talk series. Leigh described you as some random that she used to work for.

Kerry O’Brien

Fair description.

And I think both of those things are probably true. I could wax lyrical about you Leigh Sales. And I’m not one to fan girl, but I’m slightly fangirling this evening. But I think the vote of thanks to you is for asking the important questions and not always the urgent questions, for putting yourself out there, and you were just so insightful tonight about the personal toll that took some times, that it’s not really within your character to interrupt and to say, no, just answer the question. And so I know on behalf of all listeners here, we’re very grateful for that. And we look forward to the scope of what you will do next, even though Kerry kept pushing you, towards the end of that conversation. So can you please join me one more time in thanking Kerry and the wonderful Leigh Sales?

The bar remains open. Part of what we love to do here at HOTA is to always drink responsibly, but we really encourage you to hang around and to continue these conversations and some of the provocations that came out of this discussion. Kerry, I believe you’re taking a sabbatical through September. I am. Yeah, so have a wonderful break and watch this space. We’ll release the rest of the Series sometime in October. Have a wonderful evening. Drive safe.

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