Profile

In another of the occasional series of profiles of members of the Australian Press Council, the editor interviews Elizabeth Johnstone, a public member for more than a decade.

Elizabeth Johnstone has been a public member of the Press Council since 1984.

"I had always followed with great interest what was happening in the print media. In the early 1980s, I had been a lecturer in Communications Studies and taught media courses. In 1985, when the then Chairman Hal Wootten approached me, I was interested in what the Press Council did and how I might make a contribution. He had already known about some things I had done in the discrimination area. We had a meeting and he asked me if I would be interested in joining the Press Council.

"I came on as David Flint's alternate in 1985, and I found the fact that I came to only a couple of meetings in that first year very helpful. I was appointed as a full public member in late 1986."

Elizabeth is currently a solicitor with the national legal firm, Blake Dawson Waldron, but she started as an academic and moved into management consultancy before her move to the law.

"I was a lecturer in literature a long time ago. In fact, I wrote a masters thesis on Patrick White and lectured at the Universities of New England and Wollongong.

"The move from the university across wasn't so much that I gave it up but that I was increasingly invited to do other things. As a lecturer in Literature and Communications Studies I developed some innovative programs for some government departments that came out of the communications side of my work. That led me into a whole series of consulting projects. It wasn't as a dramatic a change as it might seem because in fact as I was lecturing I was starting to do some consultancy work and that just became a bigger component. I did some additional study in business and public management in 1981 and then I was asked to do some major organisational reviews That moved me away from the university as an academic into management consultancy work.

"I had 13 years as a management consultant, essentially specialising in strategic planning, organisational change and executive development."

Law Course

Elizabeth then undertook a graduate law degree at Sydney University as an adjunct to the management consultancy work "It seemed that if you were going to be a useful consultant in a corporate sector you really needed to know enough commercial law, contract law, administrative law, trade practices, employment and industrial law to be useful. So I kept consulting right through that period and a number of major law firms realised that I could bring useful things to them and I was persuaded to join Blake Dawson Waldron.

"I joined BDW to bring the skills that I gained in that consulting career, merge them and marry them with legal practice.

"Here, I practice in the trade practices and intellectual property area but primarily I manage BDW's growing legal management consultancy practice and that involves managing legal risk and legal resources. This includes major strategic reviews of client organisations and training managers in their legal requirements and assisting them in the way that they use legal services generally. There is an exciting new preventative approach to legal practice and we are very much at the forefront of that in Australia. There is a great synergy with this and what we try to do on the Press Council."

Council Changes

Elizabeth became a full member of the Council at the time of the most dramatic events in the Press Council's history: the debate over the News Limited take-over of the Herald and Weekly Times that led to the resignation of Hal Wootten and the withdrawal from the Council of the then Australian Journalists Association (AJA).

"I was one of the public members very concerned with what those events meant to the Council, particularly for the Chairman to resign and for the AJA to leave the Council. I've always felt that the membership of the Council was somewhat diminished for having lost the AJA. I believe that the professional employee body of journalists (now the Media Alliance) should be represented on the Council and, from time to time, I've been involved in steps to try and encourage that to reoccur."

Elizabeth has noted significant change with the Council in her ten years as a member.

"I think the Council has changed in three main ways. First, its public profile is much higher. It's always seemed to me that we should attract a lot more complaints. With a country with our population base and with the number of publications, the number of complaints that are coming to the Council is still not as high as it might be. So I've been one of those on the Council pushing for us to lift our public profile through our interstate meetings, the conduct of seminars, publications and programs such as the Case Studies Seminars. That's one of the most outstanding things that has happened since I've been involved. Secondly, the Council is now a more vigorous and more lively place than it once was.

"There's more diversity in views and it is better at reflecting the broader society that it serves. Thirdly, in terms of both our complaints handling and in the freedom of press side of the Council, we now have better procedures, we move faster on issues and we handle the complaints themselves much more effectively, especially as the Council has developed outstanding skills in mediating complaints. Our adjudications, while they don't always please people, demonstrate a very high degree of fairness and consideration of the issues.

"One other area needs particular comment: the Press Council News has gone from strength to strength. I think that its a compliment to our present Executive Secretary and Editor that it is now a very professional publication with a wide readership throughout the country. I think that it not only looks good but is consistently full of very interesting material. I know that it is widely read in tertiary institutions and many of the schools are using it. These are initiatives we did not have ten years ago."

View of the Council

Elizabeth also sees that the perception of the Council has not changed in some way.

"One of the things that's always concerned me about the Press Council is the perception that people have out there in the community that the Press Council is 'the publishers' poodle' or whatever terrible phrase is used. The Council is constantly trying to ensure that the public perception of it is different to that. There is the difficulty that the public members are not a majority of the Council. They're in the majority when you add to them those people who are not representatives of the publishers. At the same time most people do not realise how independent the Council is. You cannot predict how the Council might vote. There are many situation where the voting across the Council will fit no preconceived pattern.

"It's very important that the Council be seen as a very strong independent body. It should have on it a wide diversity of people from a wide diversity of backgrounds. It's always concerned me that the way the Council's membership is set up at the moment with no recompense for public members, public membership will mainly be drawn from a few groups: either self-employed people who are prepared to bear the cost of attendance, public servants who can get leave or are forced to use their own annual leave to attend and retirees or people who have a private income or derive their financial well-being from someone else. The Council's membership is somewhat skewed. You have to have a benign employer or sufficient personal resources or you lose a lot of money. At the same time I'm not strongly advocating we should be paying sitting fees for public members but it could influence the composition of the Council. In my case, Blake Dawson Waldron have positively supported my continuing membership of the Council. But I have to make up the time which is lost. The main reason that I would like to see us look at that issue would be to see who can take a day out of every month or, sometimes, two days, if you sit on the Complaints Committee and Council for ten meetings each year."

Role of the Public Members

Elizabeth sees a distinct role for the public members. "I think the public members must at all times think about the reader. You can't represent the public in any real sense but I think you have to keep the lay reader not fully immersed in the industry firmly in mind. Your role is to be independent, to scrutinise the complaint and the response from the respondent newspaper, to look very closely at the issues that are involved in the complaint and as independently as possible determine whether, on the information we have available to us, each falls within the principles that the Council upholds.

"We still have a problem that some in the community believe that the Press Council has wide ranging powers, such as the power to fine. Others ask if we can send people to jail. Public members also have to ensure that the hearings of complaints are as fair and as rigorous as they possibly can be without duplicating a court of law. I've always thought that hearings should be more informal. One of the positive things I would say the present Chairman has achieved is that complaints hearings have become much more user friendly, less intimidating."

Elizabeth has also been involved with the freedom of press side of the Council's activities. "Our role is firmly to recognise in this country that we do have a press that we can be very proud of and a press that we should ensure remains as free and open to public access as possible, given the constraints that we have by virtue of our nearly monopoly situation and the constraints we have by way of financing in respect of the print media, foreign ownership rules and regulations etc."

Other Interests

One would think that her work and the Press Council would keep Elizabeth Johnstone busy enough but there is a further side to her.

"I have two children, Rebecca and Edward, and my life is very full with them, and with close friends and family. We travel a lot and are very involved in many activities in the local area. My other hobbies include reading and walking and obviously travel and that's about all I've got time for between various other involvements. I sit on couple of other bodies and committees and doesn't leave a lot of time for much else. I do stay in touch with community opinion on the print media. As I move around Australia a fair bit (I often work interstate) I always take the opportunity to talk about the Press Council. On a number of occasions the Chairman has asked me to give talks to various groups and to speak at seminars about what the Press Council is about.

"I have found my time on the Council to be very stimulating and I hope I have been able to make some small contribution."

Jack R Herman

Return to APC News 1995 Index

[ return to top ]

Documents with the icon require the Acrobat Reader, a Free Utility from Adobe. Click here for more information.