On Friday 6 June 2025 Margaret Simons delivered the 2025 Andrew Bent Lecture.
Andrew Bent struggled with censorship by the colonial powers.
But what are the contemporary threats to an informed population and a healthy democracy? And what role is there for the ABC?
The influence of the legacy media is declining. Artificial Intelligence is already playing a role in the information we absorb.
Increasing numbers of Australians gain their news from social media. Misinformation and lies are everywhere.
Award winning journalist Margaret Simons will deliver the 2025 Andrew Bent Memorial Lecture. Her lecture will explore change in media, the nature of mediatised truth, the responsibilities of engaged citizens and the role of the public broadcaster in safeguarding and reforming our democracy.
A transcript of Margaret’s lecture is available below.
Intelligence, Democracy and Public Service Media – What does the future hold?
It has been a pleasure, in preparing for tonight, to find out a little bit more about that extraordinary man, Andrew Bent. As I am sure this audience knows, Bent effectively established the free press in Australia, or at least gave it its first expression, when, in 1824 and contrary to the orders of the Lieutenant Governor, Colonel George Arthur, he published his newspaper without first submitting the proofs for government approval.
Later, of course, he was jailed for libel more than once. But you can read all that history in many places.
What struck me most about Bent’s story, was that such a courageous, contrary and stubborn man came from such a background. He was born in 1791 at St Giles in the Fields in London. He was a pauper, by the time he was 17 years old, and orphaned shortly after that.
Probably by the time he was 15 – we are not sure of the date – he was already an apprentice to a printer. He was learning the means of publication, and how to produce a newspaper – and newspapers were still relatively new back then. They were one of the most powerful and frightening innovations of his times.
He was 19 when he was found guilty of theft, and 21 when he arrived in Hobart. By the age of just 24 he was appointed government printer. And the actions he took in establishing the free press occurred when he was 33.
He was clearly a difficult man, in the best sense. Not all the causes he advocated would win approval in modern day Hobart, or even be understood. But that is of course not the point, and not the reason he is celebrated today, and has a lecture in his name.
We celebrate him because he was courageous, because of his values, because of his subversiveness.
I’ve taken a walk around Hobart this afternoon, visiting some of the sites of Bent’s life here. And I find myself wondering: if he was with us today, what would he be doing?
He would surely not be founding a newspaper.
He published an article denouncing Colonel Arthur as a 'Gideonite of tyranny'.
If he wanted to say that today about, say, the Premier of Tasmania – who is that again? Where would he do it?
We know the answer, I suggest.
He would be on social media.
He would be on TikTok. Perhaps he would have a podcast, and be an influencer.
And then, he might be interviewed on the ABC.
Because the locus of media influence has shifted. Whereas once freedom of speech , freedom of the press, belonged to those who had a press, or in more recent times access to a broadcasting licence, now it is much more broadly spread.
I want to move, in a moment, to talk about the Albanese Government’s very popular, but I think misguided, attempts to prevent teenagers under the age of 16 - the age Bent was when he learned to print - from participating in social media.
But first, and because by definition this audience is interested in the ABC, I want to talk about the ABC’s history in navigating the new media world.
And later I will have some things to say about what the future might hold, and the role we should expect the ABC to play.
The main thing I am doing at the moment is writing a history of the ABC - picking up where the historian Ken Inglis left off after writing two volumes, which covered from the founding in 1938 to 2005.
My story starts with the term of Mark Scott as MD 2006-2016.
Now 2006 was a hugely significant year. Twitter launched. Facebook became available to the general public. There was a sense of wonder and optimism about social media, as well as a deal of fear.
Starting in 2010 there was the Arab Spring, with social media being the means by which pro democracy protests rocked the middle east. In China, with the invention of Weibo and then WeChat, it seemed impossible for censorship to continue.
Scott was nothing if not an optimist about new media in general, including social media.
This was partly because he had seen where the failure to understand and embrace the future could lead. He had been a senior manager at Fairfax newspapers and had seen the decline in their influence. He had witnessed the journey from the days when people would queue up outside newspaper officers to get the news hot of the press, to the days when people asked why they were called newspapers – when everything in them happened the day before.
He had seen the main source of revenue, classified advertising, disappear to online platforms.
He had seen newspapers, once so mighty, become thinner, less influential and in some cases entirely redundant.
At the same time, television stations were also challenged, because the audience was fragmenting. Whereas once the whole family gathered around a single television screen to watch the evening news, and then whatever came after that, now there were multiple screens throughout the house. No single mediatised family conversation, but many of them.
But whereas commercial media were undermined by the fact that everyone was watching multiple screens, the ABC could embrace it.
As Scott argued, it didn’t have to worry about making money by gathering the audience in a single spot and selling its attention to advertisers. It could embrace all the new platforms, spread its content as widely as possible, both on platforms it owned and controlled and elsewhere – on Facebook, on Twitter and when they came along, on Instagram and TikTok.
When Scott joined the ABC, it had a single tv channel. Radio stations were mainly delivered through airwaves. By the time he left, there were four tv channels plus iView, plus an ABC Kids App, a rural app and many others, as well as whole ecosystems of digital radio channels, such as those around JJJ.
When Scott announced his departure in 2015, he did an exit interview with the Australian Financial Review. The interviewer noted that he had a brand new Apple Watch on his wrist – a technology released only a few months before. It was the latest device on which media content, including ABC content, could be consumed.
It is hard to believe now, but up until 2013, there was a raging controversy about whether the ABC should be publishing on the world wide web, let alone streaming content on the internet and all the other things it was doing.
It was Stephen Conroy, then communications minister, who in the dying days of the Rudd-Gillard government, had five crucial words inserted into the ABC charter. They were: “to provide digital media services”, thereby establishing that it was the ABC’s job to do more than broadcasting in the literal and old-fashioned sense – transmission over the broadcasting spectrum.
Now of course, the ABC was already seizing the opportunities of the new media world, but until that legislation was passed, News Corporation, as you would expect, was seriously arguing that the ABC was exceeding its charter and should eschew new media and not publish on the web, let alone through apps and the like.
Imagine if that argument had been allowed to succeed. The ABC would be close to irrelevant now.
But thankfully, the ABC continued full steam ahead into the new media and social media world, despite being buffeted and diminished by continuous funding cuts under the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments.
Scott used Twitter ably, and ABC employees encouraged to do likewise.
Q and A – at the time an agenda setting program – was enlivened by a Twitter stream on the bottom of the screen, part of a vibe that this, and the wider ABC, was a means by which the nation could conduct its conversations.
But the optimism didn’t last. So many at the ABC got themselves into trouble, or were caught in conduct unbecoming.
When Scott’s successor, Michelle Guthrie, was sacked by the Board in 2018, journalist and Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour, tweeted “excellent decision”. Which potentially undermined her ability to go on to produce a Four Corners program about the things that had led to Guthrie’s sacking.
Or in 2021, the ABC decided to pick up the legal bill over Louise Milligan’s defamation of Andrew Laming MP.
There are so many more examples.
Increasingly there was vitriol piled upon ABC people on social media. David Speers was attacked, largely because he was not Barry Cassidy. Stan Grant suffered. Lisa Millar faced astonishing abuse. So too Tony Armstrong. And, of course, the most recent episode of self-damage, Antoinette Latouf was sacked because of what she tweeted – and the rights and wrongs of that case are not something I want to get into today.
Alongside all this, the atmosphere of optimism about social media has declined, both within the ABC and outside it. Now ABC reporters are strongly discouraged from using social media.
Guthrie’s successor as MD, David Anderson, who just recently retired, tells me he has never been on social media and can’t understand why any of his reporters should be. He never shared Scott’s optimism about the medium.
So, generally, society now has a darker and more pessimistic take.
And I understand why. But I do want to challenge some of where this is taking us. Because I think it’s dangerous.
And I think there are better ways, and the ABC could be part of them.
In November last year, the Albanese Government passed legislation to prevent those under the age of 16 from having social media accounts. These laws, which are set to take effect at the end of this year, are the world’s first ban on social media for young people.
Exactly how it will work, even whether it CAN work, is still being worked out.
Support for the laws is bipartisan between the two main political parties – though they are opposed by the Greens and some independents. Albanese has been congratulated internationally for standing up to the digital behemoths.
Polling data on the social media ban in Australia shows consistent majority support for such a ban.
Interestingly, though, most academics and specialists in the field are opposed. And I am one of them.
It is not because I am numb to the damage wrought through social media, or because I love the work of Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg and the like.
Albanese himself has acknowledging that his ban is unlikely to work perfectly or completely. He wants to send a social message, a sign to parents and to young people themselves, about the dangers.
Well, I support that. I am all in favour of a conversation about better parenting, and better civic participation, and the responsibilities of publishers – which is, at least in part, what these digital platforms are.
They have at least as much responsibility as Andrew Bent in his time.
But since when was passing laws, and restricting access to means of political speech, the best way for the government to send a message about the appropriate behaviour of citizens, parents and the community?
Since when did we embrace such incursions on our freedom?
What do you think Andrew Bent would say about that?
Like it or not, social media is today one of the main means of gaining information, interacting with that information and making your mark, however tiny, on the world.
What are we doing when we try to say to young people – almost old enough to be ripped off in the gig economy, almost old enough to be sent to war – that they are not old enough to post a TikTok dance video, or to make a comment on X?
When Greta Thunberg first downloaded Instagram in June 2018, the Swedish schoolgirl used the app to post pictures of herself posing with her rescue dog, Roxy.
But later that year, when she was just 15 years old, she used the same account to announce she was going on her school strike to protest lack of action on climate change. In a long post, she said she was going to sit outside the Swedish parliament and encouraging other teenagers to do likewise. Hashtag #climate strike.
If Albanese’s legislation had applied to Thunberg in Sweden at the time, we would probably never have heard of her.
Or, closer to home in Tasmania, we have a potent example of the importance of young people having a voice. Grace Tame was a teenager when she was abused by a teacher, and even once she turned 18 was prevented by Tasmania’s Evidence Act from speaking out about her abuse – although her abuser was quite happy to speak about her. Her campaign to change those laws, hashtag #LetHerSpeak, was largely conducted on social media, only then coming to the attention of the mainstream.
Or other close to home examples, Toby Thorpe, whose work at Huonville High School led to the school becoming international winner of the Zayed Sustainability Prize, launching Tasmania as a global leader in renewable energy innovation. He organised the first state-wide climate leaders conference in three Tasmania cities. And then he entered local government.
Again, social media was crucial.
Social media is not benign. It is powerful. That is why it both hurts and empowers.
Now, let us be clear. Unlike Andrew Bent these young people won’t be jailed for their freedom of speech, should they manage to circumvent the restrictions. The law applies to the digital platforms themselves, not to their users.
And it is true that young people use social media for many things, many of them trivial, some of them harmful. They do not use it only, or mainly, for political speech. But it is a means of social connection. And of artistic expression – such as the dance videos on TikTok. But then, artistic expression is also freedom of speech – and democratically important in the larger sense of the word democratic.
So banning these young people from having social media accounts is not the equivalent of what happened to Andrew Bent, who was jailed for what he published.
Rather, it is as if he has been prevented from accessing the means of publication.
As if he had not been apprenticed to a publisher at the age of 15, banned in fact from learning the skills he later deployed.
Now, Albanese is acting partly because of an increasing conviction that social media is damaging young people. The American author Jonathan Haidt attributes a plague of mental health issues among young people to the use of social media in his book The Anxious Generation, which was influential on Albanese.
But as a detailed review in Nature magazine noted, while Haidt is an excellent storyteller, the evidence is thin.
Correlation is not causation.
While there are certainly plenty of anxious teenagers, and they certainly use social media, there is no clear evidence that social media causes their anxiety and distress. And there is some evidence of positive outcomes from social media use. It is a mixed picture, as you might expect from such an all-pervasive communications activity.
And there are, as we all know, plenty of other reasons for young people to be anxious and depressed.
So is this the solution? To ban the means of them expressing their distress, while failing to tackle the things they are surely right to be worried about?
Climate change. War.
Now, I want to tie this back to the ABC – its present and its future. And its importance to democracy.
Obviously people are expecting me to talk about the journalism, and I will.
But within the democratic eco-system, artistic expression and explorations of identity are often overlooked, but also essential.
The period I am writing about in my book includes the end of internal television production in Tasmania. Some of you will remember Gardening Australia being produced out of studios here, and then The Collectors… That all ended in 2012-2014.
You will know better than I what happens when a locus of cultural production is moved out of a community the size of this one.
It is disempowering. Yes, there are still stories ABOUT regional Australia, set in Tasmania, on the ABC. Bay of Fires, anyone? Backroads.
But I think that is not a substitute. There is the sense of being a subject, rather than an active producer, of one’s story, when outsiders fly in to do the creative work.
And this decline of localism is also about democracy, because democracy is not only casting a vote. It is the sense of participation and agency in a society. For that, a sense of identity – who I am, how that relates to my community, suburb, state and nation – is an essential component. Disaffection, feeling alienated and powerless, is a pathology.
We see its worst expressions in mental illness, suicide and acts of terrorism. But alongside that we see social capital decline, vulnerability to misinformation increase and democracy falter.
How does the ABC address the need for explorations of identity? For connection?
We might mention the drama House of Gods – an exploration of politics and spirituality within a Muslim community in western Sydney
Or You Can’t Ask That. Which has explored post-natal depression, gay men, drug addicts, dementia sufferers and public housing tenants, to mention just a few.
Or Muster Dogs, which my dog loves. And which surely helps those who manage agricultural businesses feel seen, while educating the rest of us on some of what they do.
Then there is Bluey, of course. Centred on the Australia cattle dog. Quintessentially Australian in that way. But it was a co-production with the BBC and others, with the merch rights held by the BBC. What a shame. I imagine, had the ABC retained some or all of those rights, they would be funding a fair whack of its budget right now.
This is worth mentioning because it illuminates broader issues about rights to content and what we want a public broadcaster to be in the new media world. The advent of the streamers – Netflix and so on – means they have become close to essential partners in the making of original content. That means they want to control the rights to that content.
Does it matter that in five years or less a drama such as Fisk is a hit on Netflix, and has disappeared from iView, and many people who watch it might never register that it was originally on the ABC?
What rights should we expect the ABC to retain? How dependant do we want it to be on other platforms, which it does not control? Or, are we content to get the content out there, as broadly as possible, on any and all platforms, to achieve its democratising effect?
Is it sufficient for the ABC to be a commissioning fund and team? Or do we want more from this institution?
Many of these questions come down to money. If we want the ABC to do more, either on its own or with a budget that allows it to control more of the rights to its content, then we have to pay more. If we want it to be back in Hobart, producing programs in house about Hobart, then we have to pay more.
But obviously for most people, think about the ABC and Democracy and it is about the journalism.
What is the evidence for the often-asserted claim that the ABC is good for our democracy?
Well, like many public things – public health, public housing – the benefits are hard to prove. They are about bad things NOT happening (and therefore never being thought about) rather than good things happening that can be pointed to and credited.
Nevertheless, there is evidence that a healthier democracy and public life is correlated with healthy public service media.
The evidence suggests this effect is not limited to the direct audience for public service media.
Even those uninterested in news were better informed than they might otherwise be, because they encountered information incidentally, in conversations and social interactions.
The effect of public service media spreads through the democratic ecosystem and changes it for the better.
Now, I should say that the studies that support my statements here are not without flaws and limitations.
Nevertheless, with some reservations, I think they make the case for the democratic importance of public service media – and that is bolstered by the evidence from both from the ABC’s own research and independent reports that consistently shows that public broadcasters are the most trusted media organisations, by a long way.
I’d like to now address how the ABC might do better. It’s about funding, obviously, but not only funding.
I’ll start by looking at the recent past, and the issues I have been talking about concerning social media
What might we have done about social media, if we had had insight into what it might become, in 2006,
- when Twitter was invented,
- Facebook became available to the general public and
- Mark Scott began his ten-year stint as Managing Director of the ABC?
Surely we would have wanted social media to be in public hands.
And/or we would have wanted it regulated from the outset.
Might the world’s public broadcasters had banded together to create their own social media platform? Would we have funded them to do so?
And if they had, how would public broadcasters have handled the algorithms that today help to divide us, drive some of us down conspiracy rabbit holes and help to make us crazy and ungovernable?
Differently, surely.
Better, surely.
There would likely have been an ABC Kids’ social media channel – with the same ethos and protections, but also the same permissions and licence, that make the ABC Kids app such a trusted and indispensable part of children and parents’ lives.
Behind the News would have been on social media – a conversation as well as a broadcast.
Social media has been a force for good and evil. Its benefits and shortcomings are the same –
- That voices not previously heard in the mainstream are suddenly visible and amplified.
- We are confronted with each other.
- People are able to organise in new ways.
But lies spread as quickly or more quickly than the truth, as we see most powerfully in phenomenon such as QAnon and the role it played in US politics and the MAGA world.
Australia is not immune to these currents, but so far our politics has been less susceptible than that in the USA and many other countries. And one of the reasons for that is a strong public broadcaster – in the widest sense of the word broadcasting.
Good public service media has a sanity-spreading effect.
If there are better mechanisms to address the undoubted problems of social media, then public service media is surely a potential asset in finding and implementing those better mechanisms.
A better one than passing restrictive laws.
But this digression into the recent past is mostly useful, I think, as a guide to the future.
Artificial Intelligence is upon us, and it will change everything.
Exactly how is hard to see. One of the things I do is participate as a board member of the Scott Trust, which is the owner of The Guardian, worldwide. Last week we had a meeting that was all about AI, and how we are to deal with the AI companies.
There is a threat to media business models – again – because people are already being satisfied with an AI generated summary of what news sources say, rather than clicking through to the mastheads.
AI is already being used to write headlines – which it does quite well, after training, and those useful “key points” summaries of articles that are increasingly popular at the head of stories.
AI can analyse data and point out trends and inconsistencies that merit human investigation.
It can, fed with sufficient content, produce formulaic stories – ten things to do in Bali. Sports results, and so forth.
But it can’t do actual journalism, by which I mean going to places, talking to people, observing and reporting the results with judgement and clarity.
So far, that quintessential journalistic task of bearing witness remains an innately and essentially human activity. I don’t expect that to change.
But we are right at the beginning of this story. Right now, in fact this week, across the world, mainstream media companies are signing licensing agreements with AI companies that allow them to use their media content for “news products” that are not yet invented, and in some cases not even dreamt of.
I fear we may be in the process of signing away the remaining dregs of mainstream media power.
So, using the trajectory of social media, and what we might have done had we understood what was coming, how might we use the tradition of strong public broadcasting right now? What should we be demanding the government do, when we argue for more government funding for the ABC?
I think the ABC should be being proactive about media change, and governments should be supporting it to be so.
Insisting, in fact, that it be so.
The failure to be sufficiently proactive at the dawn of social media should inform new approaches.
We should be tasking the ABC with exploring the uses of Artificial Intelligence for a better public conversation. The world’s public broadcasters should, I think, be FOUNDING AI tools, rather than just working out how to deal with the ones that are being created by others.
And at the same time as working out what the robots are good for, we need more journalists, bearing witness. A more connected news.
I think that suggests more localism – not only regional, but suburban, and particularly the urban edge, where a new generation of Australians are growing up, and disconnection and alienation are rife.
More creators throughout our nation. But the content they create searchable, distributable, intelligible and interrogatable in new ways.
The aim should be to provide a trusted set of tools, using AI, but managed and moderated on behalf of us all.
We need the ABC to have seriousness of purpose, certainly. It needs to respect its traditions and its values.
But we also need change.
So it is not only about more funding. It is also about imaginative leadership and courageous thinking.
I hope for more courage and creativity, both from those who make decisions about funding the ABC, and those who manage and staff it.
Let’s think about the spirit of Andrew Bent – that young man, just a child when he began his journey to Australia. He was a disruptor, brave, fully stepping into the responsibilities of a citizen, fully engaged with the communication tools of his time.
He had particular power, and we remember him, because he owned a printing press. He had the means of publication in his hands.
Today, we all have those means of publication in our hands, and there is much to be celebrated in that.
Good citizenship requires us to be responsible participants in this new media world.
And because of our tradition of public broadcasting, of public service media, we are well placed, better than many other nations, to deal with the challenges ahead.
We need to recognise and embrace that strength, and insist that governments do likewise.
Thank you.
The 2025 Andrew Bent Lecture was delivered by Margaret Simons in Hobart on 6 June 2025.