ABC chair Kim Williams finally loses control (2024)

Anyone who knows anything about ABC chair Kim Williams will vouch that he is always on top of absolutely everything.

The media executive, sports lover, arts patron and polyhistor (look it up – we had to) was setting the pace as ABC chair with a headland speech last week when he accompanied the board and executive to that ABC regional outpost known to the rest of Australia as Melbourne.

Williams put his staff on notice, in a speech to the Redmond Barry Society at the State Library of Victoria, about his desire for ABC renewal. He also said Aunty was well placed to be a “national campfire”, inoculating the country against the threat from anti-democratic populist actors weaponising social media.

It was quite the intellectual hit-out. But there is one aspect of work/life balance where Williams has lost control – his inboxes.

CBD can reveal that after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced Williams in the role in March the media maestro was deluged with more than 4500 direct messages.

“I stopped keeping a count after around 4500,” Williams tells CBD. “They were ... email, SMS, WhatsApp, Signal, snail mail and phone calls – it was quite overwhelming. I tried to reply personally but probably got to only about two-thirds of them.”

Cubism in the ladies’ cubicles

To Hobart, yet again a frontline of the culture wars. Specifically, Section 26 of the Anti-Discrimination Act and Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art.

For those who came late, Mona came a cropper after a visiting male curmudgeon took the museum to a tribunal over its Ladies Lounge, after he was denied admission to the women-only space.

In a dubious victory for mankind, complainant Jason Lau won his anti-discrimination case and Mona shut the Ladies Lounge rather than be forced to let the blokes in. But the victory proved temporary.

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Lounge creator Kirsha Kaechele, spouse of Mona owner David Walsh, was not done yet.

Kaechele simply converted some of Mona’s unisex toilets into women’s toilets (perfectly allowable under the legislation), and furnished them with the Picassos from the museum’s collection, making them the first documented case of the pioneering cubist’s work adorning a ladies’ loo.

“While the Ladies Lounge undergoes a series of reforms to meet the exemptions required for reopening, I’ve been doing a little redecorating,” Kaechele told CBD.

“I thought a few of the bathrooms in the museum could do with an update … Some cubism in the cubicles.”

The toilets are now rebadged the Ladies Room.

Kaechele labelled the judgment of Richard Grueber, Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal member, a “fantastic read”.

“We’ll get the Lounge open again as a church / school / boutique glamping accommodation / facilities / etc under Section 26 of the Anti-Discrimination Act, but in the meantime, enjoy!” Kaechele wrote breezily to her social media followers.

Kean to get going

Within days of former NSW treasurer Matt Kean revealing his surprise resignation from state politics last week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did the funniest thing possible by announcing the Liberal’s appointment as the next chair of the Climate Change Authority.

Appointing a pro-renewables, anti-nuclear Liberal was a clear up-yours to Peter Dutton, but hey, nobody can accuse the Labor government of giving out jobs for the boys.

Just days earlier, deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley proposed a toast to an absent Kean at the moderates’ Black Hand factional dinner.

We doubt Kean, the moderate powerbroker whose blue-green environmentalism has always angered Coalition conservatives, will be getting too many more of those from his former comrades.

Within hours of the appointment, Barnaby Joyce was on Sky News calling him treacherous, and plenty of Liberals, particularly Kean’s factional opponents, want him gone from the party.

All this for a part-time gig that pays $62,660 a year, even less than the $172,546 he made as a humble opposition MP in NSW, where shadow ministers don’t get a bonus. Will Kean even stay on in the Liberal Party? We asked, he didn’t reply.

Brooky is back

Now, where were we? Observant readers might have noticed that one of the bylines at the top of this column has changed once again and the vibe is distinctly Back To the Future.

Or, to put it another way, a previous Melbourne incumbent of this journalistic oblong, be it on a page or a phone, has returned to his former stomping ground.

We could take this opportunity to muse about how in our two-year absence many of the people we write about are looking younger (hello, Botox!) and thinner (hello, Ozempic!), but we seem to have unfortunately run out of time, energy and space.

So let’s just say, everything old is old again. Some pundits are already calling it the most arresting comeback since Kevin Rudd returned to The Lodge, but let’s hope without the same result.

If you want to get in touch, drop me a line at: stephen.brook@theage.com.au

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