KERRY O'BRIEN (Lateline Host, 1990-1995): Welcome to Lateline. A program that promises something new in Australian television.

MAXINE MCKEW (Lateline Host, 1995-2006): Good evening. Welcome to Lateline, I'm Maxine McKew.

VIRGINIA TRIOLI (Archival): I'm Virginia Trioli.

ALI MOORE (Archival): I'm Ali Moore.

LEIGH SALES (Lateline Host, 2007 - 2010): I'm Leigh Sales.

TONY JONES (Archival): I'm Tony Jones.

EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: And I'm Emma Alberici. Welcome to the final episode of Lateline.

I have been sitting in the presenter's chair for the past six years but the show has been a staple in the ABC's evening schedule for just shy of three decades.

I have invited some friends to join me tonight to pay tribute to the important journalism that has been a hallmark of the Lateline brand.

Welcome to you all, Maxine McKew, Kerry O'Brien, Leigh Sales. Welcome and apologies from Tony Jones who is out of the country.

What do you call a collective of presenters?

LEIGH SALES: An ego of presenters.

KERRY O'BRIEN: No, no, no. Ego is not collective. That is a contradiction in terms.

EMMA ALBERICI: A small herd?

EMMA ALBERICI: Kerry, you introduced this program in 1990 by promising viewers something different.

What do you think made Lateline unique back then?

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, apart from the fact that there had been nothing like it on Australian television before, and there were several reasons or several factors involved in that.

One was simply the way we used satellites to travel the world and trawl the best people, the best minds around the world, who, surprisingly, were prepared to be available to speak to people on the other side of the world.

But also, because the ABC was prepared to invest the time in conversation. We were not defensive about talking-head television where a lot of people were, and are still.

This thought that you can't grab and sustain an audience unless you've got constant movement and you're constantly distracting them from one thing to another because, oh my goodness, we can't possibly keep their minds concentrated on one thing for any length of time.

So that was another element.

But the fact that we had the freedom to choose between hard-edged programs, strong social programs, philosophical programs and even sometimes have a little bit of fun and the audience came with us and they loved it too.

And people were hooked because they were hungry for knowledge, they were hungry for intelligent conversation that explored the world.

MAXINE MCKEW: And Emma, could I just add to that, I think what happened very, very quickly is that the word went out that Lateline was the go-to program for serious commentary and throughout the '90s, if I look back on the '90s now and I think actually compared with today, it was a period of hope and optimism, certainly, you know, after we got through the recession we had to have and all the rest of it, you think internationally, the wall had come down, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid.

This was a hopeful moment in multilateral relations. There was the idea if you had something serious to say, Lateline was the place to go to because they had a precious thing that few other programs had, they had time.

There was time for proper research, there was time for reflection and time for serious discourse.

The '90s, nationally, I think was the decade you could say of Keating and Howard, both of them conviction politicians, both very, very different but both prepared to argue their corner and they did that over and over on Lateline, didn't they?

KERRY O'BRIEN: But we ...

EMMA ALBERICI: Can I just hold you up there? Sorry to interrupt you, Kerry, but we will actually get to the debate around the way the media landscape has changed a little later.

I wanted to stay with those early years first off and talk specifically about some of the stories that were the hallmark of that era and Kerry, I guess the coup attempt against Gorbachev and Yeltsin stands out in those early years as one of the most memorable that you were involved in.

Can you take us back to that night?

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, we had one of the hardline plotters against Gorbachev and Yeltsin on the program from Moscow, a guy names Viktor Alksnis, who was the head of a very powerful bloc of hard line conservatives called Soyuz in the Supreme Soviet and he said on the program if Gorbachev does not come back to us there will be a coup within the next few months - now this is what you're alluding to.

We're back in Australia, come August, Gorbachev was in his dacha or ducha, however you pronounce it, on the Crimean Coast, and suddenly there's a coup attempt and we were on air as the old guard generals were in their cars driving to Moscow airport, to fly down to the Crimea. It was their second attempt actually, they were going back to Gorbachev to say, "Well, crunch point, come back and join us and sign the declaration of a state of emergency or your resignation" and he did neither.

And at the same time, Yeltsin is in the Parliament, the White House of Moscow surrounded by tanks and about 10,000 people, which is not a lot, it is not a very big ring of protection and in the old days they would have just been ploughed under but because by then the world and a lot of citizens of Russia had got used to the idea of democracy, the old guard melted, the coup was over.

And I think that because we were in the satellite age and the world was covering this as it was happening and the pressure of world opinion coming back in on them was a part of deciding that outcome.

EMMA ALBERICI: Extraordinary in the early days when we hadn't established ourselves yet.

KERRY O'BRIEN: We were getting great talent right from the start.

LEIGH SALES: And I think that was a really defining thing of the show because in this era, when you guys were doing it, I was just a baby journalist starting out.

MAXINE MCKEW: Oh thanks for making that point, Leigh, oh right, okay!

LEIGH SALES: It was such a good show and I remember if I would get in the lift and one of you would be in, and I'd think, "Oh, it's Kerry O'Brien", "it's Maxine McKew" but the thing that I think made that show so amazing in that era and I sort of mourned a bit when they changed format away from the one-issue show, because I thought it just worked so well, it was the fact the show always went for the top-level talent that you could get.

They weren't looking for just some commentator, they were looking for the type of people you just described which were absolute players.

And so if you were watching Lateline any night, you would be guaranteed that you'd be getting people who were either players or they had been players until very recently and had then stepped aside.

And I think that that culture carried right through Lateline, that you weren't looking for sort of B-grade people just banging on with their opinions, you were looking for the best people that you could get your hands on around the world.

KERRY O'BRIEN: That's just a given, Leigh. I mean that's a given. That's what you do.

(Extract from an archival Lateline story)

KERRY O'BRIEN: The battle for Perstryka is being fought out behind these Kremlin walls in the president's office and the Supreme Soviet.

How long do you think it will take before Mr Gorbachev does go?

VIKTOR ALKSNIS (translated): This depends on Gorbachev. We should expect changes in the next few months.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (translated): I could have easily sent him to Australia as an ambassador - or to be really mean, Guinea Bissau.

He would have sat in a different continent and everyone would forget about Yeltsin.

But I thought it was wrong for me to do that as a person who started social reforms and the democratisation of the country and the Party, to do such a thing to your colleague and partner!

KERRY O'BRIEN: And yet there are many who would say that it was Yeltsin's courage that saved you in that August coup?

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (translated): At the time he was very courageous but I don't think he was really thinking about Gorbachev. He was thinking about himself.

(End of extract)

EMMA ALBERICI: Maxine, I wanted to get to one of your most memorable moments on the program in those early years and that was, of course, when you interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi when she was under house arrest.

How on earth did you manage that?

MAXINE MCKEW: Well, it wasn't a case of turning up one morning for the morning conference and saying, "Hey! Let's go to Burma tonight". That was weeks in the planning, if not a bit more actually in the execution.

This was at a time I think the interview was about '96, '97 and Aung San Suu Kyi had been under house arrest since 1990. She had come to incredible prominence during the '89 riots, got the Nobel Peace Prize in '91. So by this stage she is attracting huge international attention.

There is immense sympathy because her family is in England, she is afraid to leave the country because she doesn't think that the regime will allow her back and she has got that beautiful, sort of almost angelic, delicate demeanour, that beautiful voice.

What we couldn't do, obviously, is organise a satellite, a live satellite out of there.

We got a crew to her residence and I'm pretty sure actually, the tape was flown out, let's say to Singapore or something like that and that had to do with kind of not contaminated the material but I'm sure the Burmese officials would have been all over. She was watched at every moment, so I don't think there was, she would have been very careful, in a sense, about what she said but she was certainly making her case for democracy in Burma, Myanmar.

(Extract from an archival Lateline story)

MAXINE MCKEW: We look around the region and recent history, in the Philippines it took something like a very frustrated middle-class that was fed up with corruption and in the end, of course, the Marcos regime collapsed.

Can you see something similar happening in Burma? Do those sort of preconditions exist?

AUNG SAN SUU KYI: Well, Burma is not the Philippines but I think one can say that there is a lot of frustration building up in this country and whenever frustration builds up at that rate, it is never good for the future.

MAXINE MCKEW: Can there be a peaceful transition to democracy, do you think?

AUNG SAN SUU KYI: I think we can bring about a peaceful transition if all of us are interested in bringing about one.

MAXINE MCKEW: What about the position of the Australian government? I'm interested in your view on that? Of course, our policy says that economic sanctions would not be effective this law and it maintains a policy of neither encouraging nor discouraging investment in Burma.

Does the neutrality of this position worry you somewhat?

AUNG SAN SUU KYI: Well, I think that sitting on the fence must be an extremely uncomfortable position and I myself have never been in favour of such a very precarious, precarious stand, or should I say, sit, as it were.

(End of extract)

MAXINE MCKEW: Now, what I recall from that time, I am pretty sure I never asked her the question I would ask her now - what is your concept of respect for religious tolerance and the wider pluralism?

We now have a semblance of democracy in Myanmar. They have elections but quite frankly, it is illiberal democracy and we have seen the shame and the disgrace of what has happened to the Rohingya.

EMMA ALBERICI: Leigh, like me, you were a foreign correspondent before you took on the chair on Lateline.

You were in Washington and in fact, you went back to the United States to do an interview with Henry Kissinger?

LEIGH SALES: Yeah, one of the things that I absolutely loved about Lateline, so I had been US correspondent just after 9/11 and I got back in 2006 and I came into Lateline in 2007, the time slot for Lateline. So it was at 10:30pm although it sort of wiggled around a little bit around that, it always floated a bit.

MAXINE MCKEW: Did it ever!

LEIGH SALES: I know, the strength of it was that you pretty much had the international terrain to yourself because 7.30 was too early in the evening. London had only just come on line, the Americans were asleep still.

But the 10:30pm slot, it was first thing in the morning in the United States and London had by then been awake, it would be sort of early afternoon.

So you really had the pick of the sort of northern hemisphere talent to yourself and so that was for me, particularly cause as I had just come back from overseas, I always wanted to be trying to do as much international coverage as we possibly could and it was a really amazing time, it is always an amazing time in American politics but it was when it was apparent that the invasion of Iraq had been disastrous and Afghanistan was falling apart, the Bush administration was really sort of limping to its conclusion, Hillary Clinton seemed a lock on the Democrat nomination for the presidency in 2008 and then all of a sudden, this Barack Obama shows up on the scene.

And so we were doing a lot of American coverage. The reason that Henry Kissinger and going to the US to do that interview and we did some other people there sticks in my mind, is not so much because of interview, it is because I travelled with the then executive producer of Lateline who was John Bruce, and people watching at home see us as the faces of the show but there is such an incredible team of people who work behind it and I can't really think about working at Lateline without thinking of the contribution that some of those people made - Rob Dorma, who is the long-time director of the show who I would hear every night in my ear, and John Bruce had this unbelievable memory for international affairs but also federal politics.

And so one of the highlights of my day would be, if we had a politician or it was a Friday night and we had a panel, it would be I would do all my research and thinking about it and go and sit down with John for half an hour and we'd sort of throw ideas back and forth and John would always say, "Reminds me of '94 when blah, blah, blah", he'd always throw out some fantastic.

KERRY O'BRIEN: I remember...

(Laughter)

LEIGH SALES: Yeah, that's right. And so he could give you think and again I think that is the difference with Lateline to a lot of programs that are out there, it was the sort of depth that you could bring to it.

Also, because you had the 15 minutes or so to work with the interview.

I remember when I came to 7.30, Kerry said you were about to discover there is a big difference between a 15 minute interview or a seven or eight minute interview.

EMMA ALBERICI: Absolutely.

LEIGH SALES: And they're just worlds apart in terms of the skills that are involved.

EMMA ALBERICI: But it's that historical context that John Bruce ...

LEIGH SALES: Absolutely.

EMMA ALBERICI: ... gave to everything you were doing, gave you that extra dimension, extra layer to the interview you were about to do.

LEIGH SALES: And also, I think the other thing with John and Rob and the people behind the scenes, Mick, the floor manager, often because you would be going overseas, and particularly so when you guys were doing it when you'd have the three guests, the technology, the potential for things to mess up was just absolutely epic.

And so, when you come into the studio and you're sort of live, when I heard the music before, I felt slightly anxious because of the feeling of when you'd be sitting in there and hear it go and some nights it would start and it would be, "Well, we haven't established the coms yet to Afghanistan", "We haven't established the coms to wherever" and so then you're out there on the high wire thinking "Well, geez, I hope I hope I get this happening."

KERRY O'BRIEN: Do you think the people came along with you? I mean I think that a part of the appeal of the program, people actually could understand that you were on something of a high wire and there was an element of unpredictability to it and that just added to the magic of live, I think.

EMMA ALBERICI: Collectively, we've interviewed everyone from politicians to philosophers, authors, entertainers, even a drag queen.

But above all else, the show made a name as the place that attracted some of the world's most significant figures.

(Extracts from several archival Lateline stories)

LEIGH SALES: You know, watching that clip I know you're running the discussion, Emma, but what do you...

(Laughter)

KERRY O'BRIEN: Are you sure you know that?

LEIGH SALES: Just allow me to take over for a moment, what do you think are your more memorable interviews? I mean there is a difference between favourite and memorable?

EMMA ALBERICI: It's a bit vexed talking about favourite but in the clip, you'd have seen Sergei Lavrov, the Russia Foreign Minister, just after I got back from my four years as Europe correspondent in London.

It was January 2012 and he was in the first month in Australia and had one day in Sydney and decided to do one interview and we were lucky enough he granted it to Lateline and he did want to talk about the Australia/Russian relationship, and of course, all I wanted to talk about was Syria, because this was only 10 months into the civil war.

We had something like 5,000 civilian deaths and the conversation was already moving to Russia's role and its support of Assad and so, you know, we didn't know very much then, other than, quite obviously, the disgrace of a president turning his military on to the people.

And so, that's where I was going with the interview and in hind sight, when you listen to what Sergei Lavrov had to say in early 2012 about the role of the international community in that war, it's incredibly prescient because he said, he said we need to learn the lessons of Libya.

He said we were so fixed on removing Gaddafi, we paid scant regard for what came in its place and look at the chaos that has ensued.

That's what he was saying to us. He said, isolating Bashar al-Assad is never going to be the answer. It's never going to bring peace to Syria and it's potentially erupt into a much greater calamity throughout that region and hasn't that proven to be exactly the fallout?

KERRY O'BRIEN: And Colin Powell said that America should, and had, learned the lessons of Vietnam and there he was, standing up in the United Nations with false information as an excuse and a pretext for going into Iraq, which became the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history. So much for learning the lessons of history.

EMMA ALBERICI: Absolutely.

Maxine McKew, we saw in that video there the interview you did with Pauline Hanson, which you recently said, in hindsight, that you wished you'd shown her a little more civility. What happened?

MAXINE MCKEW: I'm a bit bored talking about this, but anyway, because I have revisited this a number of times. It's remarkable, of course, we are seeing Hanson II 20 years later.

But that was 1998. So I secured the first major interview with her. She didn't respect any of the rules and in fact, that's what those who voted her, that is what they liked about her and I think that is probably what we in the main stream press did not sufficiently appreciate at the time.

And certainly I had, Kerry had, the program had a set of expectations, it was produced on a set of expectations that if you came on this show at 10:30 at night to talk for 20 minutes, then you had something to say, you had something to say of substance and it could withstand a bit of interrogation.

I had those expectations of Pauline Hanson, so I have to say, it was a shock, it was a genuine shock to me that she fell so far below that bar.

But it was the beginning of a convention-busting period, which I think we are still living through, we get shock after shock.

EMMA ALBERICI: Kerry, recently the creator of Newsnight at the BBC wrote a piece where he was bemoaning the death of the political interview. He said on the one hand you've got politicians who have become exceptionally good at not saying anything of substance and that has led to interviewers who just go for the jugular to avoid what he called boring, snoring TV?

KERRY O'BRIEN: I reject the fear of boring, snoring TV. I think the greater issue is if that is what the interview is going to be, the interviewer trying to get anything of substance and the political interviewee doing everything in his or her power not to answer the questions and in the process not just to show a complete lack of respect to the interviewer but more importantly, to the audience, the issue isn't that it's boring and snoring, the issue is that it is a fundamental contempt for one of the key elements of democracy, which is a vibrant media, and which is one, which is a part of the process of keeping the people who hold the power honest.

And so, I mean, look, if you are delivering boring, snoring television then you'll pay the price yourself, as a program, as an individual. But the balance that you have to walk in this day and age, and I haven't done it for a couple of years now, but the balance you have to walk is between allowing the guest in the studio, if it's a straight one-on-one interview, the opportunity to provide answers, but at the same time to try to keep them honest and if you've got to squeeze that into seven or eight or nine minutes, then more often than not you're not going to do it and if the interviewee is skilful enough as some are, they will actually try and persuade the audience that you the one who is being rude and abrasive and disrespectful of the guest and the audience when in fact, it is them.

LEIGH SALES: And I think one of the key things is the point that Kerry made about the contempt for the audience and one of the things that I find quite baffling, is when I approach the interview, I approach it exactly as Kerry just described, and I think that often the questions I ask are quite basic and reasonable because I try to think what would the average reasonable person watching at home like to know about this?

And I try to give the person the opportunity to address concerns that ordinary people might have or criticisms that ordinary people might have and so I think, you, politician, you are in the business of trying to persuade people to vote for you. So if you can't engage on basic sort of points that I think are fairly reasonable, what hope do you have of persuading people who might be fence-sitting or even in the opposing camp to come across?

And I think there has been very few times probably in the past, you know, 10 years of my career, or even close to the past 20 really, where I've actually felt persuaded by the argument that somebody has made.

MAXINE MCKEW: Can I just pick up on that, the political players are actually no longer in the advocacy business for the most part. I think the attitude among many is how do I sit here for seven minutes and make as few mistakes as possible and few headlines.

KERRY O'BRIEN: I think you're being too kind to them.

MAXINE MCKEW: Hang on, because I'll tell you, what I notice when I got to Canberra as a political player.

EMMA ALBERICI: I was about to say, you have seen it from both sides and I was curious to know from you ...

MAXINE MCKEW: Okay, I walk in after a 30 year ...

EMMA ALBERICI: Sorry, Maxine, whether it is more the cause of the journalist, the change in this dynamic or the politicians?

MAXINE MCKEW: Well, I walked into Canberra after 30 years as a journalist on the other side, I go there as a political player and it wasn't the ABC everyone that was dying to get on, it was Sky News, to get on and do a bib-and-bub biff at 8:30 in the morning.

LEIGH SALES: You know what all that was about?

MAXINE MCKEW: That was all about, exactly but that where the focus was. That was all about impressing your colleagues, getting on this committee or whatever.

I saw colleagues congratulated if they got one over their opponent at 8:30 in the morning on Sky.

KERRY O'BRIEN: For an audience of 15,000.

EMMA ALBERICI: With the tiniest audience.

MAXINE MCKEW: It was the smallest of bubbles but that was the focus and people were less inclined to put themselves through the longer scrutiny of, if you like, an ABC extended interview.

KERRY O'BRIEN: It wasn't just Sky that was being exploited by politicians.

I can remember Alexander Downer's press secretary, Chris Kenny, actually acknowledging in print, volunteering in print once how the cycle worked and how they would often use Lateline to launch something new into the next day's news cycle.

Now, that's fine, let them try. But if Alexander Downer was prepared to come on and have any one of you interview him for 15 or 20 minutes, then you've got a chance to keep the Alexander Downers honest.

So at least it is a bit of a genuine playing field. Where they go through these other circuses it is not, it is just performance territory.

LEIGH SALES: There is also media culpability in how things have evolved and it is partly to do with because the business model has fallen out of commercial media and a lot of space now is filled with fluff and opinion.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Partly because it's cheaper.

LEIGH SALES: It's cheaper, exactly. It's cheaper, we've got 24/7 internet news and it needs to be filled.

So I noticed for example, just the example of the first interview that Malcolm Turnbull did when he became Prime Minister. We did basically the whole 7.30, it was about a 21-minute interview with him.

There was so much, looking at it as a journalist, I thought there was so much news in it and for me the thing that stuck out as the biggest news was that I asked something like what do you consider to be the biggest regional security threat and he said China and I thought it is extraordinary, that the new Prime Minister has nominated China as the greatest threat.

But the way the interview gets written up, it gets written up, every single time I do Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten it's like well, who landed the biggest punch on who? Did Leigh Sales punch harder or did Malcolm Turnbull or whatever and so it focuses a lot on the sort of dynamics of it because that is easy to write rather than the actual content of the interview.

EMMA ALBERICI: And it is easier to distil in 140 characters.

LEIGH SALES: Yeah and so I think that there is a media culpability.

MAXINE MCKEW: But I have to say, if Turnbull had continued as he started cause he looked pretty good in that first 24 hours.

EMMA ALBERICI: That's a rabbit hole we're not going down.

MAXINE MCKEW: I thought he might have broken the cycle, but he didn't.

EMMA ALBERICI: So Lateline has been responsible for breaking countless important stories, including four years ago when our work on the institutional responses to child sexual abuse became one of the triggers for the royal commission.

(Extracts from several archival Lateline stories)

EMMA ALBERICI: Maxine, you were the presenter during some of those investigations around the treatment of asylum seekers in the Curtin detention centre and with Vivian Solon.

I wanted to reflect, if you could, on the way the issue of asylum seekers has been reported over the past decade or so.

MAXINE MCKEW: Can I just pick up first on some of the voices we heard there, Margot O'Neill, Susie Smith, again just to the gravitas of Lateline.

Those programs were, again, a long time in the making. You don't get those sort of admissions, revelations, in an instant. So I want to make the point, that Lateline and a good cracking current affairs is an important ecosystem.

Everyone sees the job we do, we're supported by executive producers, you talked about John Bruce before, Leigh, but there were such layers of talent and I think Lateline's effectiveness over the years, the fact that talent like is drawn to talent and Lateline has had that in spades.

EMMA ALBERICI: And we've had, as presenters, we've had, well, in the earlier days, two producers finding talent around the world to come into our studios and local ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: Two producers?

EMMA ALBERICI: Yes.

LEIGH SALES: A foreign and a domestic.

EMMA ALBERICI: Well, we used to, that has changed.

MAXINE MCKEW: So I just wanted to make the point the depth of talent that Lateline has attracted over the years.

But you ask about the reporting, this is something that has dogged since, certainly in a big way since the Tampa and it has been a very divisive issues for journalists who covered, divisive in the community and divisive in terms of the national parliament and we are still living with that.

I also look at some of the clips there and just in terms of our neglect of children.

You can see the story of the two Australia's in all that. There's a debate in Victoria now about the age of criminality for children.

We've had the horror stories of young people in a place like Parkville, Victoria. Victoria, which prides itself on its progressive politics, has one of highest incarceration states in the country.

You know, we talk about the NT and all the rest of it, here we are in 2017 and some of these basic social justice issues are plaguing us.

KERRY O'BRIEN: It is interesting you have got the two juxtaposed. You have got the sexual abuse involving substantially the church and other big institutions that we thought we trusted and then you've got the intervention in the Northern Territory from the Howard government based substantially around the allegations of child sexual abuse happening in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.

EMMA ALBERICI: The substantial work of Susie Smith.

KERRY O'BRIEN: And look, good journalism, more power to it. But I think we also carry a responsibility to go back and look at the effect of political outcomes.

It's 10 years since intervention - 10 years.

Now, look at the two ways that sexual abuse of children is treated. You had this massive intervention, you had fundamental human rights taken away from Aboriginals, you had the Racial Discrimination Act, which is really the thin legal line, the one thin legal line offering any kind of real protection against racism for Indigenous Australians. You had that abused with the introduction of intervention.

You see, and I might add that two years later the Australian Crime Commission came to the view that there was no paedophile ring in the Northern Territory as was alleged and as the intervention was based on.

You look at the difference in the way that child sexual abuse was used in that regard, the allegation of it and the way it's dealt with in the white community, domestic violence. I would think you would find that incidents of domestic violence in the rest of the Australian community away from Aboriginal communities is highly substantial, highly substantial.

And yet 10 years after that intervention involving the military and all kinds of processes that were immensely demeaning of Aboriginal communities, it was as if the rot of paedophilia and drunkenness and abuse was persuasive right through every community in the Northern Territory.

The intervention is still there. Well, if it worked, why is it still there? And where is the journalism that is challenging that?

EMMA ALBERICI: Well, that was the question I was going to ask and to you, Leigh, I wonder what you think about where the media's responsibility starts and ends on a story like that? Which was something that Lateline was at the forefront of?

LEIGH SALES: Well, I think it's exactly as Kerry said. There should be accountability.

When politicians say I'm going to do something, again, just to reference as an example, that first interview with Malcolm Turnbull, in many interviews since I have gone back to that and said you said that when you started you said you were going to a free market government. You've just announced this policy that is a massive government intervention, how does that square with the sort of government you said you'd deliver?

Something like intervention, something that I've reported a lot on say Guantanamo Bay, you said that you setting up this facility and setting aside fundamental principles of justice because it was necessary to keep the world safer from terrorism and to deliver terrorists to justice to terrorists, how have the results actually measured against what you said was necessary at the start?

Because often what happens when these sort of big sweeping policies come in, is that fundamental rights are traded off.

And so in the case of Guantanamo, you look at that and you think, well, it has achieved neither of those goals, the world is far less safe from terrorism than it was back in 2001, there are tonnes, well not tonnes actually, there's dozens of people still there who have been held indefinitely without trial now, coming close to 20 years.

So I think that we do have a responsibility to revisit these stories, you know, and not just let them be little ...

EMMA ALBERICI: And it's interesting, isn't it, because there has never been, there have never been more media outlets if you like, never more people engaged in parlaying the news.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Emma, Emma, Emma!

EMMA ALBERICI: But this is what I'm saying, and yet, there are issues as big as the one we've just talked about ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: No, no, it's more than that.

EMMA ALBERICI: ...that is not being revisited in a substantive way.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You have got a situation where there might be more journalists, in some instances there are many fewer journalists and overall there are few journalists but they are also being asked to do more. They are being far more thinly stretched.

I mean there are press releases going to air, and appearing in newspapers virtually untouched, with little subing marks around them.

EMMA ALBERICI: Robots are being deployed to actually write them.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, maybe in some instance, if the facts fit.

MAXINE MCKEW: Don't say it, don't say it.

KERRY O'BRIEN: No, I'm joking, everyone.

EMMA ALBERICI: Are you, Kerry, pessimistic about the future of journalism?

KERRY O'BRIEN: The bottom line is, it is the organisations and the individuals who have the resources who will still control the bulk of the output.

So I think we are going through a period where quality is under challenge, we're going through a period where accuracy is under challenge, we're going through a period where we are far more open to cynical manipulation and particularly in the way that software and algorithms can dictate, they can alter.

MAXINE MCKEW: The players are going to different places. Now, we've seen a lot of examples tonight of the top players knowing that they can come on Lateline and that's where they strut their stuff.

Just this week, Martin Parkinson, head of the Prime Minister and Cabinet who once upon a time. might have been lured on to program like Lateline, he did an half an hour interview on the Policy Shop which is the podcast that is run out of the University of Melbourne by vice-chancellor, Glynn Davis.

Now they know each other, perhaps Parkinson went on there because feels comfortable with someone like Glynn but that podcast coming out of a university, produced the lead story on the Guardian, because Parkinson talked to Davis and said this is the legacy of what Abbott did. Abbott sacked me simply because I was doing my job and this has been the escalating effect on the public service. Good interview.

EMMA ALBERICI: Leigh, when I was thinking about tonight, I was thinking well, when Kerry started on the show, um, you know, there was no internet, the phone was largely at

home and stuck to the wall, and you watched the news at 6.00 or 7:00 at night and if you missed it, you had to wait for the next round of news programs in the morning.

And that was pretty much all the, or the newspaper to be delivered. There was no catching up on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else on a device. You had to watch things by appointment and schedule.

KERRY O'BRIEN: And I just didn't know what I was missing.

EMMA ALBERICI: Leigh, do you think it's better now?

MAXINE MCKEW: Stop sounding like a dinosaur!

LEIGH SALES: It's not better, it's different. There's lots of things about the current situation that fill me with pessimism and just despair, sometimes, quite frankly, when I see certain, you know, things that make news.

But there is, the thing that's exciting about it you can reach an audience that you could never reach previously.

Say, for example, the New Yorker now, the audience, and the New York Times, when I was starting in journalist, if I wanted to see the New York Times I had to go to the Brisbane state library.

MAXINE MCKEW: Leigh, I think that's a very good point. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker had not bastardised or cannibalised their core product to create, ...

LEIGH SALES: Absolutely.

MAXINE MCKEW: They understand that you actually have to keep investing in the core content and that content drives everything else they do. I'm like you, I love having all those different platforms but it comes from well-resourced news rooms.

The Post has got lucky, they have got Jeff Bezos there now, pouring the money in.

LEIGH SALES: I think for the ABC, we need to, our core brand, in my crusty old bag view, should be that we do quality, thorough, serious, journalism. That should be the ABC's brand and I think that we should absolutely jealously guard that, whether it is on-air, online, whatever.

And I think that is what we need to be in there fighting for. That doesn't mean, I mean, I don't think that needs to be boring or staid and I like having a laugh as much as the next person but at the end of the day, I think there are some core responsibilities that the ABC has to meet that are very serious.

Holding politicians to account is one of them, covering international affairs is another one.

KERRY O'BRIEN: There has never been a more complex time in history as far as I am concerned. So what is the role of media in that time?

It is a broad role, it is as important as it has ever been, probably more important than many other times in history and you need time to reflect.

You need to have access to the information, you need to have the great minds who are grappling with these things rather than politicians who are too scared to stick their heads above the parapet and acknowledge that they actually don't have answers.

EMMA ALBERICI: Can I pick you up on that actually, because Lateline was responsible for quite a key documentary branded Lateline just recently, where we looked at the AI race and the way that is changing the workforce, the way that is changing business.

The way that is changing all our lives, indeed, many academics are now saying that by the time the current crop are graduating from university, 60 per cent of them will have studied for jobs that don't exist.

MAXINE MCKEW: I did an interview with Nicholas Negroponte in the mid-'90's right, for Lateline. He was the big guru of MIT in Boston and he was talking about Internet and he's talking about email and all these sort of things and at the end of the interview, he said, "I'll give you my email address" and he is saying Nicholas Negroponte underscore, whatever. I had no idea how to write it.

I was such a "Margo, Margo, where are you". I had no idea, I did not know what he was talking about.

EMMA ALBERICI: Well, I had a similar story at Channel Nine walking into an office I shared with another reporter and saying to her "Do you know what Google is"?

(Laughter)

Let me shift gears a little and bring some levity to the conversation.

I want us to take a look at some of the funny and unexpected, perhaps unfortunate moments from Lateline.

(Extracts from several archival Lateline stories)

EMMA ALBERICI: I had so much feedback over that debate between Malcolm Turnbull and Anthony Albanese in 2013 election campaign on the NBN. We ended up running at about 27 minutes.

MAXINE MCKEW: It is still a hot topic, that one.

EMMA ALBERICI: And it is still a hot topic and at the end of that debate between Anthony Albanese and Malcolm Turnbull, that had already gone on for 27 minutes, Malcolm Turnbull ushered us all out of the studio to a whiteboard that is outside this studio and continued to explain why the Coalition's NBN, by way of diagrams on the whiteboard, was the optimum policy and this went on for quite some time.

LEIGH SALES: I had an explanation on that same whiteboard from Malcolm about the Murray-Darling river basin.

EMMA ALBERICI: Did you every any kind of have disastrous moments?

LEIGH SALES: The one that sticks in my memory, was in the, oh, what election campaign? Maybe 2007, it would have been. We talked earlier about the time slot would always float depending on the previous programs and it was is a source of great irritation because you would spend a lot of time securing really good guests and then you find yourself on at 10.45pm and every five minutes at that time of night you're losing audience and so it was week one of the election campaign and we're coming on at 10.45 and the show that started at 10:15 were re-runs of Summer Heights High or something and just I thought, why? Why not put that at 10.45 and we come on at 10.15.

So I fired off an email to Kate Tourney, who was then the head of news, to make that point and it sort of 8pm on Friday night when I fired it off, thinking well she will get on to that next week.

Now Kate Tourney, the model of efficiency rings the head of television and has the program pulled forward half an hour from that very night but all the guests are locked in live for 10:45pm and so we then discover sort of by shock at about half past nine that the show has now been brought forward by half an hour and now we have nothing to fill it because nobody's coming in until 1045 and I remember John Bruce, the executive producer, who never ...

MAXINE MCKEW: Who's unflappable.

LEIGH SALES: Totally unflappable and never lost his cool, my phone rang and I was just having a meltdown think oh my God, ...

MAXINE MCKEW: Houston we have a problem.

LEIGH SALES: And I pick up and John says, "Leigh, what do you think you're doing?'.

EMMA ALBERICI: We had a similar story only just very recently, where we were about to cross to someone, I was here in the studio ready to go live and we were about to cross to someone, an expert somewhere in the world, I won't say where and I had just had very casually Jamie Cummins, my producer, in my ear say, "That interview won't be happening" and we were five minutes before air and I said "Why?" and he wouldn't tell me.

And I just thought what is going on and I wasn't getting any answers and ...

MAXINE MCKEW: The guest was tired and emotional?

EMMA ALBERICI: He came down and said because I have just spoken to him and he's very drunk. We can't put him on air.

EMMA ALBERICI: Did you have tricky moments?

KERRY O'BRIEN: Oh plenty, I had plenty, but I had one moment where I took a bit of a punt and it worked and that was when I was interviewing Tim Fischer, who was deputy Opposition leader and shadow trade minister and it was Lateline and I had him on his own.

And there were a couple of tricky issues he wasn't entirely across, which became increasingly obvious, one was NAFDA, the free trade agreement between the North American Free Trade Agreement and the other he had been sounding off about aviation policy and on aviation policy he started to flounder and he got to a point where he said, "Look, Kerry, I could go on but I know that time is of the essence for you" and I said, deep breath, I said, "Take all the time you want".

EMMA ALBERICI: Nice moment. So I want to get your final reflections on what the program has meant for you, Kerry?

KERRY O'BRIEN: It's meant a great deal and one of the best times in my life as a journalist, without a doubt.

Twenty-eight years is a very long time for any program to survive on television, so it's a testament, not only to the quality of the work that went into it and the effort, but to the importance of what it offered the audience.

And you can fiddle with formats in a way, but when you look at the fundamental concepts that are going to fill a need with the broader community and that other television networks and other forms of media are not going to offer, always got to be careful not to throw baby out with bath water and I hope, at some point in the not-too-distant future, that ABC management take as good close look at those early years of Lateline, not just mine, Maxine's and others, look at that format, single-issue, single-issue topic, dealt with well, dealt with interestingly and offering something to an audience and asks themselves seriously whether it is really too much to take back on.

EMMA ALBERICI: Maxine?

MAXINE MCKEW: As for legacy, I don't know, it's too early, we'll have to wait and see.

But I agree with Kerry. Among the most professionally both challenging but satisfying times of my life and I was thrilled that the ABC gave me the opportunity to do it.

So I remain very grateful for that. I feel I had superb opportunities and was brilliantly supported by a great set of people.

EMMA ALBERICI: Leigh?

LEIGH SALES: I could not believe when I was asked did I want to do it, given the history of the program and just the great pleasure of coming in every night to do it and some of the people you could speak to,

Great minds like Christopher Hitchens, or I used to love John Micklethwait who was the editor of the Economist, just these aerodite, articulate, witty, interesting people, that it was just, you had to give the most gentle steer as an interviewer and it was such a pleasure to have those conversations about the most interesting issues in the world.

It has a very fond place in my career.

EMMA ALBERICI: Well thank you all so much, Leigh Sales, Kerry O'Brien, Maxine McKew.

MAXINE MCKEW: And good luck to you Emma.

EMMA ALBERICI: Thank you.

And that brings us to the end of our show tonight as we farewell an ABC icon.

Thanks for your company these past six years. I'll miss this chair very, very much and the many privileges it has given me.

Goodnight.