In a political scene that’s been all about “moving forward,” George Megalogenis bucks the trend.

I’ve written a lot about race and that sort of politics, but I was always conscious in my job that I had to catch the nation.

The veteran political journalist prefers to remain still, even – shock – stepping back from time to time.

Megalogenis is a senior writer at The Australian, covering national affairs. He’s been writing for them for nearly 20 years.

But we’re rushing ahead.

Having settled in a quiet fishbowl of an office in The Australian HQ, I ask Megalogenis about his time in Canberra as a young political journalist.

“Well, I’ll take you back a step,” he says, pausing to make sure he has the facts straight.

“Graduate cadetship at the Sun in ‘86, ‘87-‘88 I covered state politics as a junior reporter, d-grade and c-grade for the Sun, 1988 state election I covered, then went straight to Canberra aged 24 for The Sun.”

He rattles off the dates, staring into the corner of the room as he makes sure he has the numbers right, but it’s nothing he needs to double-check.

After all, Megalogenis has made his name as Australia’s leading economics reporter.

“In the late ‘80s, there was still a high premium on policy, as opposed to just the horse-race journalism that, unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues are forced to engage in,” he says.

“I don’t say this with any disrespect at all but, when I was there, you didn’t have a poll every other minute to distract everyone’s attention, and you didn’t have leaders that were so frightened of their own shadow that they didn’t stand for anything, like this present generation.”

We take another step back, to when Megalogenis decided he’d become a journalist, aged 15.

“Coming from a good working-class migrant background, you set goals, whether you’re motivated or not,” he says.

“Because part of the migrant journey is achievement and trying to deliver on your parents’ expectations, which, to their mind, are a step up from the life they lead.”

Neither of Megalogenis’ parents finished primary school. His father came out from Greece in 1952, his mother in 1962, and the Megalogenis family lived in Malvern, in Melbourne’s southeast.

But the Greek Australian journalist insists his heritage hasn’t affected the way he reports.

“I’ve written a lot about race and that sort of politics, but I was always conscious in my job that I had to catch the nation,” he says.

“Even if I was talking about race, I had to catch more than one ethnic group.”

Megalogenis’ first book, Faultlines: Race, Work and the Politics of Changing Australia, was released in 2003.

In it, Megalogenis talks in heartbreaking detail about his family.

About growing up as a ‘wog’ in suburban Melbourne, the son of migrant parents.

“As silly as it seems today, when I was young I thought I wasn’t a real person,” he writes.

“That’s what being a wog in a very white school felt like.”

This is the book he refers me to when I ask about his family.

“It’s certainly very important to me, but I’m pretty private about my family,” he says.

“To the extent that I mention them in my first book, but that’s really just an author’s way of saying, ‘this is who I am, and now I’m going to write.’”

“Just so the reader gets to know the author, so all the baggage is checked in at the start.”

I ask him whether he feels connected to a broader Greek community.
This is when he really pauses. It’s a very long pause.

He stares ahead, and it’s a different kind of thinking face from the one that earlier reached for dates.

He replies that he hasn’t been to Greece in over a decade, that he traveled there quite a lot when he was younger, but now has no association to the country at all.

“But to my mind, the “Greekness” is a personal thing, as opposed to any connection with the mother country,” he says.

“But that’s something I don’t give much thought to, so that’s why I paused to answer it.”

Although he’s a regular guest on ABC TV’s Insiders program, the thoughtful reporter says he is suited to print journalism.

“I’m more discursive, I think, than that.”

But Megalogenis is no longer just a print journalist.

As well as his presence in the physical paper, and his books, he’s now online.

And the Internet, by its very nature, moves at a rate of megabytes. In every direction.

He clearly doesn’t want to move forward too quickly, but Megalogenis, who turns 47 in January, says it’s vital to stay on top of what people younger than him are thinking.

“It’s all those people who are coming after you who are generally more interesting in any society; the next big idea is usually sourced at that place,” he says.