BEING appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) is an acknowledgement that journalists, the media, and acting in the public interest matters, says former Newcastle Herald journalist, Joanne McCarthy.
"When all else fails, it's often the media who's there, and sometimes we are the only things that stand between people and the abuses of power."
Ms McCarthy, whose reporting sparked the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, is being awarded for her significant service to the media and print journalism as a journalist.
Honouring the contract the media has with the community, to act in the public interest, has been an integral part of her approach to her work, Ms McCarthy said.
"I'd like to think that, when it counted, I stood up and acted in the public interest. And it shortened my career as a journalist ... there is absolutely no doubt about it. But the 40 years that I had as a journalist was time well spent."
The award also honoured the people she worked closely with who had the courage to stand up and speak out, publicly, about important, and sometimes intensely personal issues, she said.
"One thing that kept me going at times when I was so browned-off with people in power, and the appalling abuses of power, was the activists in the Hunter that I came to know and love. The really astonishing people who could just keep going on, like the coal mining community, people who were fighting against multinational mining companies and an idiot government who were just trashing where they lived.
"And, of course, the child sexual abuse survivors who, God knows how so many of them get up in the morning, and yet they did ... standing up and fighting.
"And the women whose lives, basically, were destroyed by doctors and medical companies (involved in the pelvic mesh scandal which she reported on extensively) who just wanted to make money. They stood up and fought and fought and fought in the public interest, to protect other women.
"For a lot of them, it took enormous courage for them to stand up, but they did, in the public interest. Over and over again, people would say, 'I'm doing this because I never want it to happen again. I want to protect other people from experiencing what I've experienced'. So, it's honouring them as well."
The politicians, people in authority, institutions, and people in power people who failed to 'step up' and act in the public interest, had regularly left her feeling dispirited, and it was time for change, she said.
"It was self-interest over and over and over again, whether it was personal ambition or trying to protect an institution because their ego and their status in society relied on that institution ... it was always this self-interest ... instead of thinking, okay, I need to step up here.
"You can only be dispirited for so long. And I think that is what a lot of people in Australia are experiencing, and have experienced for years, because we've had repeated failures by our governments, by individual politicians. We all have been at the end of systems that we know are fundamentally not in the public interest. And yet we're told ... this is for you."
The results of the recent election, and seeing independents and Greens standing up to talk about the things that matter, were heartening, she said.
"They were fairly clear ... we need action on climate change, now, this minute, on behalf of our children and generations to come. We need a federal integrity commission. Now. This minute. No more crapping on. We need real reconciliation, and indigenous representation in parliament that can't be snatched away.
"These independents, they stood up for that. And people responded to that. They're not standing up for party. They're not arguing for easy things. They're saying, these are really important issues because they're in the public interest."
Journalism was a career that she never planned, Ms McCarthy said, and she had no career-based ambitions as such, but she came into the profession with a strong view of what being a journalist was about.
Working as a regional journalist allowed her to pursue that, giving her the 'space and the flexibility' she needed, and the Newcastle Herald had been "a good fit".
"I had a purist idea of journalism that, oddly enough, given what's happening in America at the moment, was informed by Watergate," she said. "As a kid, as a 14-year-old, when that really blew up, I couldn't get enough of it. And so I think the seeds were planted there ... that I aspired to journalism like that. Where the media really stepped up. "That was my idea of what a journalist should be about, like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. That's what we're supposed to do."
Some of the things that are now changing in society is because of women and women in leadership roles she said.
"We're getting the idea of getting back to what's in the public interest here. It's women saying that the way that men, a certain type of men ... have done things has been most hurtful to women and children, along with the systems that are obviously not in the public interest.
"So I accepted this award in part because I'm a woman, and to demonstrate that women lead."
