Patricia Karvelas is a force in Australian political journalism. Her career spans the breadth of Australia’s media ecosystem – ABC, SBS, The Australian, now ABC RN Breakfast, and ABC TV Afternoon Briefing, and as the current host of Q+A.
“Being a journalist is an entire way of being. It’s not just a job; it’s in every part of my life,” Karvelas says.
Beginnings: ethnic and gay media as safe havens
For a young Karvelas, Neos Kosmos, and the gay media were the first safe havens in her career.
“I wrote for Neos Kosmos. Why haven’t you ever written that?
“The Greek press and community are places where you feel safe and encouraged—ethnic media was a gateway for me.”
You know you’ve arrived in the Greek Australian community when Neos Kosmos runs your pic and story. Her grandfather, who passed away just over 10 years ago, pinned up her story when she “first got published in Neos Kosmos”.
“My career had many manifestations, but there’s not been any part of the media where I haven’t worked.”
Outside her professional identity, she’s “a Greek Australian who grew up in a Greek family speaking Greek.”
Dualities and the complexities of a contemporary life
The duality as a Greek Australian shapes her identity and contemporary life.
“I feel, first and foremost, Australian, and I’m very proud, but my cultural background is a big part of my contemporary life.”
“I’m also gay, and in the gay press, I felt comfortable too.”
These communities “are safe” she says, but doesn’t ignore “their complexities and problems.”
When western Sydney councillor Steve Christou persuaded Cumberland City Council to ban books about same-sex parenting from the council’s libraries, Karvelas opined on the ABC ‘that it’s often only the free speech that people align with that they are prepared to fiercely defend’,
Christou’s ban was brief, as more than 40,000 signed a petition to lift the ban.
Karvelas was “worried that that would be seen as a mainstream view in our community because it’s not a mainstream view in our Greek community”.
“Like every community, ours has had complex issues but has made significant progress,” says Karvelas.
“There’s a lot of Greek parents and grandparents who are very proud of their gay children and grandchildren; it is part of a cosmopolitan Greek Australian identity. And I don’t think that that guy [Christou] reflects that. “
Some in the Greek community encased in a migration’s cultural diving-bell at times express homophobic views. Yet, gay life and values were normative in Ancient Greece. We even had a transgender god, Hermaphroditus.
“I agree fully,” she says.
Karvelas feels a pang when Hellenes express intolerance as a member of a “minority group who identifies as being in that group”.
“There is a sense of being a representative of that group, not a formal representative.
“No one’s elected me in the Greek community to represent them.
She was born and raised in Melbourne “in a very Greek environment, in Greek-dominant suburbs” she says, “That’s my DNA—so I do feel it, and I don’t like to see darker parts of our community emerge.”
Karvelas says many from a minority working in the mainstream “feel that sense of burden”.
“It must be very true if you’re Arab, or Jewish now.”
Growing up the ‘Greekest’
Karvelas lost her parents when she was young and was raised by her grandparents, and older sisters.
“My Greek experiences were the Greekest [sic] of all – I grew up with my grandparents who only spoke Greek.”
She calls it a “very intense experience–my grandmother had never gone to school. She was illiterate”.
It was a formative time; like many, Karvelas, as a child, was the conduit between her elders and mainstream society. She read the official letters, translated for doctors, and helped them navigate an alien world for her immigrant grandparents .
“You get raised by someone illiterate, and you’re a kid; there’s nothing like it for skilling you up intellectually – having to be the translator for people who can’t speak and read English.”
Karvelas’s grandfather forced her to read Neos Kosmos “out loud to practise” her Greek.
“I hated it…but being forced to read out loud impacted me, and I speak Greek.”
Media as the polis and the freedom to speak
Karvelas adheres to the principle of liberal democratic journalism as a form of Aristotelian ‘good’.
“You’ve nailed it,” she says.
“We must be upfront about the fact that we start with a set of values—liberal democratic values—so let’s not pretend that we’re not.”
“My prism is anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy. You can call that a bias, but it’s an open one, and a journalist starts from a position in Western democracies mostly, unless they are breaking ranks from a kind of set of values.”
She approaches everything with “curiosity”, yet she often cops it for either being too left or too right, which she calls “laughable”.
“I think the left and the right should be interrogated about where they’re coming from and what they’re doing.”
The bloody Middle East is an example, and she looks “at different perspectives on Israel and Gaza even though people like to choose a side”.
“I choose to seek the truth and challenge everyone’s narrative — everyone has a narrative.”
Karvelas believes it’s her “job to test things” when “narratives conflict”.
Karvelas finds calls to dump Q+A “offensive to voters.”
She was brought in last year to rescue the decade-old ABC program which has suffered ratings atrophy over recent years.
It was shifted back to Monday nights from Thursdays, and Karvelas was part of the effort to stem the criticism that Q+A was too ‘woke’.
Karvelas says that argument is just a perception “without evidence.”
“Q and A is the only show where voters can come and ask questions of powerful people.”
“In a fragmented democracy… why on earth are people so troubled by asking powerful people across the political spectrum questions and holding them to account?”
Dangerous media silos
Karvelas is concerned with “left-wing media and right-wing media”. She worries that audiences are hermetically sealed in their “silos and choose their favourite platform to hear only the views that they agree with.”
“If you’re on Sky, the right loves you, or if you are a left-wing Guardian columnist, the left loves you, but if you do what I do, which is: ‘This person is in front of me, I’m going to interrogate them,’ then not all will love you.”
Karvelas knows says that some of the country “is conservative.”
Independent Tasmanian federal senator Jacqui Lambie is the archetype that represents “where many Australians are”, she says.
“[Jacqui Lambie] confuses people because some things she says represent a left-wing view, but some a right-wing view.
“Not everyone is contained in a neat worldview. Fewer people are rusted onto a political party –there’s a lot of movement, and I think we need to question orthodoxies.”
“A prevailing progressive view should be questioned,” Karvelas says, as much as a “right-wing view conservative”.
Working for the ‘good’
Things do keep her up at night.
“What keeps me up at night is people scared to hear views that they don’t agree with.”
Karvelas views the media as the polis, where truth should be sought She pulls out the example of when some ABC RN listeners criticised her for interviewing former prime minister Tony Abbott on the tenth anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
Abbott was prime minister when 38 Australians perished among the 298 passengers who were murdered by Russian-backed forces using a Buk 9M38 surface-to-air missile.
“The idea of ‘how dare he be on my show’, or ‘why would I want to hear his views’ – really?”
Karvelas, who is rusted on to democracy, posits her love of politics to her Greek family DNA.
“You got that right. I’m born and bred with the news and politics, it’s in my family – politics is what I talk about with my siblings, and that’s what I grew up with my grandfather.”
She has a dig at what she calls, “antiquated ideas about identity and where we come from”.
“It happens to me like, ‘Oh, but you are an inner-city gay person, so you must think this’.
Her social media algorithm “is crazy,” she says.
“They don’t know who I am or what I think because I don’t even know who I am or what I think,” says Karvelas, channelling Socrates.
Karvelas is full of “doubts” and “lots of questions”.
“I can have a changed mind; there’s nothing worse than not changing; it leads to authoritarianism.”
She is concerned that “No one talks to each other anymore”.
“Identity is important and should be part of who we are, but we should also always guard against it dividing us.
Karvelas ends with a joke she often repeats.
“Whenever there are pictures of me in Neos Kosmos it’s a good week for me, a good week.”
This is going to be a good week for Patricia Karvelas.
