The ABC has lost one of its foremost champions. Matt Peacock – co-founder and inaugural chair of ABC Alumni, former ABC staff-elected Board member and a journalist best known for his pivotal role in pursuing corporate corruption and the deadly truth about asbestosis – died this week, aged 72. This tribute has been prepared by colleagues Helen Grasswill and Quentin Dempster who worked with Matt both at the ABC and later in the formation of the Alumni.
Great journalism is often born of an obsessive determination to expose injustice. So it was throughout the career of former ABC journalist Matt Peacock, who is widely acknowledged for his 30-year effort exposing the deadly dangers of asbestosis.
Peacock, who died on Wednesday (30 October), was dedicated and uncompromising in his work, providing a voice for marginalised people and communities. He faced formidable legal and other counter measures of vested interests trying to prevent the ugly truth of corporate greed and corruption in the asbestos industry from being reported. His persistence was pivotal in asbestosis and other ‘dust’ diseases like silicosis now being well understood in Australia and internationally, saving countless lives and achieving some level of justice for victims and their families.
A great believer in the importance of independent public broadcasting to bring the powerful to account, Peacock was never afraid of a fight. He went on to become staff-elected director on the ABC Board during one of the public broadcaster’s most tumultuous periods, when massive program cuts and redundancies were forced by shrinking budgets and broken government promises.
Peacock was well qualified to fulfil this position.
He began at the ABC in 1973 as a researcher on the ground-breaking current affairs program This Day Tonight (TDT), soon becoming a specialist trainee on Four Corners and Monday Conference. But he spent much of his career in radio, reporting for ABC’s AM and PM programs, The World Today and Background Briefing, later becoming chief political correspondent for ABC radio current affairs in the Canberra bureau (1997-2000). He was also appointed to two foreign correspondent postings, first in Washington DC and New York (1990-93) and later in London (2001-03).
His lengthy investigations into the use of harmful asbestos fibre in building materials spanned his entire career. The issue had its genesis in a major 1974 report in the Bulletin magazine which raised the dangers of blue asbestos. Peacock’s attention was then drawn to problems with asbestos building materials produced by James Hardie Industries when contacted in the late 1970s by what he later referred to as the ‘James Hardie spin machine’.
Peacock dug deeper, rapidly learning of the perilous nature of the then widely-used asbestos fibro in Australian housing. He produced many stories on the subject including a 7-part series for Radio National’s science unit (1977-78). A notable report around this time told of the devastating health effects on the local Bundjalung Aboriginal community at Baryulgil in north-eastern New South Wales, due to James Hardie Industries failing to install protective measures at its local white asbestos mine. [It was a story Peacock would return to decades later with a chilling account of ongoing misery and lack of compensation.]
Peacock’s dogged reporting in the 1970s and 1980s had an impact on the public, but not on the two main industry unions, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and the Miscellaneous Workers Union (MWS), neither of which, according to Peacock, believed at the time that there was a problem.
Eventually, however, state and federal governments were forced to consider introducing regulations controlling asbestos use and manufacture – leading to a total ban on asbestos in Australia from December 2003 (the wheels of justice move excruciatingly slowly) – and measures were set in place to provide compensation for victims, such as the New South Wales Dust Diseases Tribunal established in 1989 and presided over by the thorough and compassionate Justice John O’Meally, who coincidentally also died this month.
Peacock continued to contribute stories about ongoing problems and suffering from asbestosis, including for ABC TV’s 7:30 program and for other outlets, notably a feature for New Scientist magazine.
In his much-lauded 2009 book, Killer Company: James Hardie Exposed, he forensically documented how the company’s strategies “led to the deaths of thousands of workers and customers, who were never informed of the dangers” of asbestosis and how the company’s management circumvented the rules and regulations designed to protect the community from serious health hazards. James Hardie Industries, he said, “embarked on a cold, calculated strategy to maximise profits, minimise compensation and conceal the culprits”.
Although it took many years of legal wrangling, James Hardie Industries was eventually ordered to pay billions in compensation to asbestosis victims.
In 2012 Peacock’s work was portrayed in the docu-drama Devil’s Dust, with Peacock’s own role portrayed by actor Ewen Leslie.
Peacock’s commitment to public broadcasting as a pillar of democracy extended to protecting the ABC and its staff from political attack and interference.
This activism began formally as a member of ABC’s union House Committee.
In 2013-2018, supported by the House Committee, he served as staff-elected director on the ABC Board, reclaiming the position which had been abolished in 2006 by an amendment to the ABC Act moved by then Howard government Communications Minister Helen Coonan but legislatively restored by the Rudd government and its minister Stephen Conroy.
Peacock’s arrival at the board table came at a critical time after the election of the Abbott government which immediately dishonoured its pre-election hand-on-heart commitment that there would be ‘no cuts to the ABC or SBS’.
Although an active unionist (CPSU and MEAA), he understood that the staff-elected director position obliged him to carry out his duties as any other director and not as a ‘union rep’. Over his term on the Board, the ABC had to radically downsize program output, losing programs like Lateline, state TV current affairs, cutting radio broadcast times, international correspondents, short wave radio to the Pacific, cutting program staffing and resourcing, and losing much local production. Peacock had to manage anguish, depression and outrage as an estimated 1000 experienced broadcasters were made to walk the redundancy plank.
He often said that what was hardest to deal with during this period of punitive defunding was the loss of collective memory and the undermining of the ABC’s mentoring culture where experienced broadcasters had willingly passed on their knowledge to younger staff.
He also pushed at the Board for the cuts to be applied just as rigorously to layers of management so the emphasis in any restructure would be to ‘save the furniture’ – the services which still engaged the ABC’s audiences, particularly in regional Australia.
Peacock was on a Board-appointed interview subcommittee assigned to cull a long list of applicants for the managing directorship after the departure of MD Mark Scott. Also in this context was the need for someone to manage the ABC’s transition from terrestrial broadcaster to a ‘cybercaster’ – broadcasting audio, video and text via the internet to mobile phones, laptops and iPads in the still evolving digital revolution.
On a majority Board vote, the role went to a former Google executive, Michelle Guthrie. But Peacock, who with another director had interviewed applicants, was impressed by two other contenders, Kim Williams and an internal applicant, David Anderson.
Nearing the end of his term as staff-elected director, Peacock himself was made redundant. Before leaving the ABC he and others co-founded ABC Alumni, an organisation of former ABC program-makers and other staff, to continue the public advocacy for the democratic, cultural and public interest benefits of taxpayer investment in public broadcasting, also known as ‘the public good’. Peacock was a driving force in the early days of the Alumni, working his extensive contact book to garner support from not only former colleagues but also from current and former politicians, board members, educators, ABC Friends and other like-minded organisations supporting the ABC and public broadcasting.
His life’s work also included several years working for the ABC in regional Australia, reporting on a range of issues affecting remote communities and developing a passionate interest in Aboriginal welfare. He assisted with the development of Indigenous television in the 1980s and authored two books early in his career, Asbestos: Work as a Health Hazard and The Forgotten People – a History of Australia’s South Sea Islanders. And he remained dedicated to promoting high standards of reporting as an Adjunct Professor of Journalism with Sydney’s University of Technology (UTS) and through media teaching programs, often for Indigenous students in northern Australia.
His last story, published in the Sydney Morning Herald in February this year, was appropriately an opinion piece responding to the controversial discovery of tonnes of asbestos-contaminated mulch in Sydney’s school playgrounds and public parks which he labelled ‘an accident waiting to happen’ and pointing out that an estimated 6.4 million tonnes of asbestos remains in Australia’s built environment with no coordinated incentives for their disposal.
Peacock’s final years were punctuated by personal turmoil. He underwent radical cardiac surgery last year before his recent devastating diagnosis of pancreatic cancer with secondaries in his liver.
In a deathbed vigil as he lay sedated under palliative care at Royal North Shore Hospital some close ABC friends hoped he could hear them as they expressed their love and support for a comrade, mate, friend, professional journalist and broadcaster of exceptional commitment, fearless determination and a champion of the ABC.
Above all, his greatest and most profound legacy is his unrelenting 30 years of work in exposing asbestosis against formidable vested interests, which was pivotal in helping to save countless lives in Australia and worldwide. Public consciousness about the lethality of ‘dust’ diseases recently also resulted in the prohibition of a product and process known to cause silicosis.
Matt Peacock was the investigative journalist and broadcaster who put the dangers to human health posed by popular products like asbestos on the public agenda, here and internationally.
Vale Matt Peacock.