It’s not axiomatically true that dispiriting times create the space for people to push back, to impress us with their generosity, principles, bravery or talent. This makes the following nominees for Crikey‘s Person of the Year all the more remarkable — the theme that unites them is a willingness to stand against what in some cases feels like insurmountable opponents.
David McBride
Whatever complications may attend his initial reasoning, Australia owes David McBride a great deal for his disclosure of the information that would lead to the ABC series “The Afghan Files“, reporting that was ultimately vindicated by the Brereton Report. As Briana Charles put it in these pages, upon McBride’s inevitable guilty plea once his public interest defence collapsed: “McBride’s disclosure gave the public a rare window into the fog of war, with all its hypocrisies and secrecy.”
After a pre-trial process lasting more than four years, and with a potential life sentence ahead of him, McBride’s fortitude and positivity — aided by his dog, and companion throughout the trial, Jake — has been equally impressive.
“I don’t see it as a defeat,” McBride said after his plea, his fist raised to the sky. “I see it as the beginning of a better Australia.”
Maria Vamvakinou, Fatima Payman and Mark Coulton
Amidst what our political editor Bernard Keane calls the “9/11-isation” of the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians on October 7, it took a great deal of courage for Labor backbenchers Vamvakinou and Payman and, given the tenor of his colleagues, most especially Nationals MP Coulton, to join with the Greens and announce their support for a ceasefire in Gaza.
If you want a sense of that courage, of how easy it is to jettison principles when they become inconvenient, simply regard the journey of Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley. Ley went from warning that a “crushing economic embargo feeds fury and resentment both in Gaza and the West Bank” in 2017 to labelling mild calls for restraint from the Israeli government as “disgraceful”.
The Matildas
Crikey generally doesn’t recognise solely sporting achievements in these awards, but if all the Matildas had achieved at this year’s football World Cup was Mackenzie Arnold’s two penalty saves in their quarter-final win against France, or Mary Fowler making the highest level of the sport look like playing FIFA on the easiest setting with her exquisite through ball to set up Caitlin Foord’s clinical finish against Denmark, I’d argue they’d at least warrant a mention.
As it turned out, it was a great deal more than that. Game after game, in front of tens of thousands of fans, the Matildas forever changed the way Australia thinks about women’s sport in general and the world game in particular. During an era when the sense of what’s possible seems to be shrinking by the year, the Matildas’ journey to the semi-final against England, the most watched free-to-air television event since records began, achieved something no politician did in 2023: they allowed a lot of people to dream a little bigger.
Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters
The biggest defamation case in Australian history came to a conclusion this year. A decorated soldier, a man viewed by much of the country — and certainly some of its most powerful citizens — as a war hero, Ben Roberts-Smith, brought a defamation suit against the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times for the reporting McKenzie and Masters had produced accusing him of murder and war crimes. The pair staked their reputation as journalists on this reportage (not to mention millions of dollars worth of their employers’ money, incurring threats to their safety).
In June came the ultimate vindication — Justice Besanko found that they had substantially established that their reporting had been correct. Outside the courthouse, McKenzie said that this was a small dose of justice for Roberts-Smith’s victims in Afghanistan, while Masters thanked the soldiers who testified during the defamation trial: “My final words go to those soldiers. I don’t want people to think of this as a bad day for Australian soldiers. I think of those soldiers that not only had physical courage, but also moral courage.”
Extra marks for McKenzie who had a busy year — in September, alongside Michael Bachelard and Amelia Ballinger, he produced the bombshell report that brought down former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo, one of Australia’s most powerful public servants.
Megan Davis and Pat Anderson
As we have mentioned elsewhere, there were principled and defensible oppositions within the Indigenous community to an enshrined voice in Australia’s constitution. None of that detracts from the energy, dedication and generosity shown by these two architects, Cobble Cobble woman Davis and Alyawarre woman Anderson, in the campaign, not to mention the six years leading up to it after Davis read out the Uluru Statement from the Heart for the first time on May 26, 2017.
Typical of this was the yarning circles led by the pair, an online iteration of a universal First Nations concept, a place of traditional negotiation, opened to Indigenous and non-Indigenous attendees, to attempt to bridge gaps in understanding. In the face of distortions and out-and-out lies (not to mention the visceral racism Davis reports in her weary campaign post-script), the yarning circles gave us some idea of another way, and ultimately, the opportunity that was wasted.
Alan Stuart
Stuart is a church minister who waited 97 years before having his first run-in with the law when he was one of 109 people arrested blockading a coal port in Newcastle. Stuart is emblematic of a growing number of people willing to risk incarceration to protest Australia’s ongoing addiction to fossil fuels.
Stuart felt it was his “duty, to stand up and be counted”, he told SBS News. “I’m doing this for my grandchildren and for future generations because I don’t want to leave them with a world full of increasingly severe and frequent national disasters because of climate change.”
