Nick McKenzie

Nick McKenzie is an Australian journalist and author who has won multiple Walkley Awards.[1] [2]

Nick McKenzie
NationalityAustralian
OccupationInvestigative journalist
WebsiteNickMcKenzie.com.au

He works for Nine Newspapers, based in Melbourne's The Age newspaper and also appearing in theThe Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review. He was also a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television program, Four Corners[3] and is also a reporter for Nine's tabloid current affairs programme 60 Minutes.

Life and career

His career began as a cadet journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, later joining Fairfax Media (now Nine Newspapers). McKenzie's reporting has led to a number of government inquiries and police investigations, including a federal police probe into political donations given by alleged mafia figures.[4]

McKenzie’s reporting on corruption and organised crime within the Australian Customs service in 2012 was recognised with a Walkley Award.[5] The reporting led to reforms of the Australian customs service announced in 2013 by Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare and overseen by former NSW judge James Wood.[6]

A news story by McKenzie on Four Corners in 2014 into abuse in disability care homes led to a Victorian Ombudsman inquiry and a federal senate inquiry, which recommended a royal commission that was later announced by the Morrison Government.[7]

In 2012, McKenzie obtained confidential Victoria Police files documenting the suicides of at least 40 people sexually abused by Catholic clergy in Victoria.[8] [9] Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu immediately called a parliamentary inquiry into abuse allegations by religious clergy.[10]

McKenzie has been involved in many high profile stories.[11] He interviewed Australian terrorist leader Abdul Nacer Benbrika months before Benbrika was arrested and jailed for leading terror cells in Sydney and Melbourne. During Benbrika’s court case, the public prosecutor told the court that Benbrika was covertly recorded by authorities claiming that he had threatened McKenzie, telling him to “watch yourself” and that he knew how to find the reporter.[12]

An interview McKenzie conducted with sports scientist Steven Dank was used by Australia’s anti-doping agency ASADA in its controversial doping case against the Essendon Football Club.[13]

An report in 2009 by McKenzie and his Nine Newspapers colleague Richard Baker into alleged foreign bribery involving two companies owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia, sparked a national scandal and prompted an investigation by the Australian Federal Police.[14] It ultimately led to Australia's first-ever foreign bribery prosecution in 2011, with the criminal charging of two firms, Securency and Note Printing Australia and several individuals.[15] McKenzie and Baker were awarded a Walkley Award for Investigative Reporting for their investigation, which also led to the governor of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stevens, testifying before a Senate committee to respond to allegations the bank mishandled the scandal.[16]

In 2014, a report co-authored by McKenzie on an undisclosed multi-million dollar payment to Hong Kong chief executive CY Leung from Australian company UGL, prompted widespread calls for Leung's resignation and sparked an investigation by Hong Kong authorities.[17]

Much of McKenzie's work has been produced with Richard Baker. In 2016, the pair revealed the Unaoil oil industry corruption scandal that implicated some of the world's biggest oil industry firms, including Rolls Royce, ABB, Petrofac and Halliburton in alleged corruption involving a Monaco firm called Unaoil.[18] In 2019, the founders of Unaoil pleaded guilty to bribery and corruption offences in the United States.[19]

Documentaries

McKenzie has been awarded the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award (with Richard Baker) and the Lowy Institute Media Award for his documentary reporting on foreign interference in Australia by the Chinese Communist Party.[20][21]

His 2017 Four Corners documentary program Power and Influence reported that ASIO had warned Australian political parties about receiving donations from two men, billionaires Huang Xiangmo and Chau Chak Wing.[22] It also reported that former Trade Minister Andrew Robb had been hired on a $880,000 yearly consultancy by a company closely linked to the Chinese government.

The story sparked intense national political debate and was a catalyst for new counter foreign interference laws.[23] Donor Huang Xiangmo was in 2018 expelled from Australia by ASIO on security grounds but maintains the allegations made about him are false.[24] In 2018, Chau Chak Wing commenced defamation proceedings in June 2018 against McKenzie, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Fairfax Media over the joint investigation.[25] [26]

In July 2019, McKenzie presented a report on Nine Network's TV program 60 Minutes titled Crown Unmasked which made allegations that Crown Resorts had violated Chinese law by promoting its casinos to mainland gamblers. The investigation, which was assisted by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers (which became sister businesses of Nine Network after Nine Entertainment Co. acquired Fairfax Media in 2018) and featured comments from former Crown employees, also questioned Crown’s relationships with certain junket operators — the middlemen who help recruit VIP gamblers and act as credit agents to get around China’s capital controls — that have been linked to Hong Kong’s triads.[27] The investigation also revealed the existence of an arrangement with Australia’s Department of Home Affairs to speed up processing of short-stay visa applications by Crown’s VIP gamblers. Crown denied the report's claims, publishing advertisements in local newspapers calling the investigation “a deceitful campaign” that relied on “unsubstantiated allegations, exaggerations, unsupported connections and outright falsehoods.” Federal and state authorities, including the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, have opened probes into the allegations.[28]

The Age/Nine recordings

On 14 June 2020, Mckenzie reporting for The Age and Nine Network released covert recordings purporting to show cabinet minister and Labor party power broker Adem Somyurek organising branch stacking. In its investigation, Somyurek is alleged to have registered local party members with false details, taking funds from business owners to pay for party membership fees, and directing ministerial staffers with branch stacking activities.[29]

Included in the numerous covert recordings, are several sections where Somyurek is heard making derogatory comments towards MPs Gabrielle Williams and Marlene Kairouz and ministerial staffers, which have been described as sexist and homophobic.[29]

“This is going to be relentless; we're just going to go fuck them. We're just going to go to town. This is fucking war. We've got fucking massive numbers, we've got about thirty going in every week...”

— [29], Covert audio recording of Somyurek

Following the release of recordings, on 15 June 2020, Premier Andrews sacked Somyurek from his cabinet and referred Somyurek's conduct to Victoria Police and the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission for further investigation.[30] Andrews also wrote to the National Executive of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to seek the termination of Somyurek's party membership. Later that day, the Labor Party's national president, Wayne Swan, confirmed that Somyurek had resigned his membership, adding that Labor's National Executive Committee had taken further steps to ensure there would "never be a place for Somyurek in the ALP ever again".[31]

Source protection and defamation cases

In 2015, McKenzie defeated a Victorian Supreme Court application brought by an alleged mafia figure for disclosure of his sources in the first legal test of Victoria’s journalist shield laws.[32] [33] The case was described by the ABC's Media Watch program as a landmark test of source protection.[34]

In the case, the defence successfully argued that to identify McKenzie’s source for a story about the plaintiff’s alleged mafia link would jeopardise that person’s physical safety. The court also accepted arguments about the strong public interest in publishing such a story, and the chilling effect on such stories if the order were granted.[35]

The Australian journalists’ union, the MEAA, described the decision as “important for public interest journalism because it acknowledges that journalists must protect the identity of sources who have asked to have their identity protected.”[36] However, other reporting of the case outcome said from an investigative journalist’s perspective, it left shield laws in a state that was still far from satisfactory.[37] [38] In his ruling, Supreme Court Justice John Dixon found that it was reasonable for police to suspect the alleged mafia figure had put out a $200,000 “hit” on a man suspected of providing information to McKenzie.[39] [40]

In 2016, the alleged mafia boss abandoned his defamation legal action against The Age over a series of articles describing him as a mafia boss involved in murder, extortion and drug trafficking.[41] The Age published an apology to the man that acknowledges that he was never charged by the police with any criminal offence. The apology did not retract that he is the head of the Calabrian mafia and involved in organised crime[42]

In an earlier case in 2013, Chinese investor Helen Liu commenced defamation proceedings in the Supreme Court of New South Wales against The Age and three of its journalists including McKenzie in relation a series of stories about the Chinese-Australian businesswoman and a Labor MP. Each journalist made an application to keep their sources confidential, however were unable to rely on shield laws as they hadn’t been introduced. Justice Lucy McCallum rejected the application, finding that a journalist's pledge to keep a source confidential "is not a right or an end in itself" and could be overridden "in the interests of justice".[43] The case was settled out of court and no sources were disclosed.[44]

In 2017, the ABC reached a confidential settlement with the Canberra University president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association after she appeared in a Four Corners program reported by McKenzie about the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in Australian politics and universities. A report by The Australian newspaper about the settlement states that the president "demanded an apology from the media companies, which was refused. Five months later, [the president's lawyers] filed a defamation action in the Victorian Supreme Court, prompting both media outlets to reach an out-of-court settlement within weeks." Later on, in 2018, Four Corners added an editors note to the program transcript with the rider that: “It was not the intention of the ABC to suggest that [the president]... was a spy or a person who would deliberately cause harm to other students.”[45]

McKenzie and veteran reporter Chris Masters have produced several reports detailing allegations that Australia’s special forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan. They have reported that Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith is under investigation by the federal police and the military inspector general.[46] Roberts-Smith has attacked the claims as unfounded and is suing McKenzie and Masters.[47]

Case on database access

In 2010, McKenzie and two colleagues, investigative reporters Ben Schneiders and Royce Millar, wrote a story detailing how political parties were storing personal information about voters, raising privacy concerns.[48] A Greens party candidate in the 2010 state election, Fraser Brindley, had supplied the password to a political party database, which he had obtained unlawfully and the journalists including McKenzie subsequently accessed the ALP Eleczilla database.[49]

The Victorian Electoral Commissioner referred the journalists to Victoria Police, who charged McKenzie with unauthorised access to a restricted database.[50] McKenzie and his co-accused admitted responsibility for the offence as part of a court diversion program by acknowledging they accessed the database, thereby avoiding a conviction.[51]

The trio’s barrister told the magistrate the journalists believed there was a public interest in whether political parties should maintain such data and that investigative journalists provide “genuine service to this community.”[52] The Age also agreed to publish a news article and editorial acknowledging the unlawful conduct.[53] The Age editor-in-chief Andrew Holden defended the paper's decision to publish the database story, stating that investigative journalists needed to pursue stories in the public interest but said the paper was not mindful enough of the legal issues involved.[54]

Awards and recognition

McKenzie has won Australia's top journalism award, the Walkley Award, on eight occasions.[55]

In 2012, McKenzie and Baker were rated the third most influential journalists or editors in Australia by news website Crikey.[56]

McKenzie won the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year award with Baker in 2017 for his work on Chinese Communist Party interference in Australia.[57]

In 2010, McKenzie and his colleague Richard Baker were awarded the prestigious George Munster Prize for Independent Journalism by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism.[58]

McKenzie is the most decorated journalist in the history of the Melbourne Press Club's Quill Awards and has twice won the press club's highest award, the Gold Quill.[59][60]

Books

In 2012, McKenzie's book The Sting,[61] about one of Australia's biggest organised crime and money laundering investigations, was published by Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) Victory Books.

McKenzie has also contributed to the Australian journalism textbooks, Australian Journalism Today (2012)[62] and The Best Australian Business Writing (2012).[63]

References
  1. Knott, Matthew. "The Power Index: Journos". Crikey.
  2. "Walkley Award: Crown Unmasked". Walkley Awards. The Walkley Foundation.
  3. Knott, Matthew. "The Power Index: Journos". Crikey.
  4. McClymont, Kate. "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black". Sydney Morning Herald.
  5. Millar, Benjamin (28 November 2013). "The Age wins Walkley Awards". The Age. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  6. Bourne, James. "Treat customs officials like corrupt police: Jason Clare". Australian Broadcasting Corp.
  7. Branley, the Specialist Reporting Team's Alison (14 March 2019). "You'd be forgiven for having royal commission fatigue, but this one's important. Here's why". ABC News. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  8. Knott, Matthew. "The Power Index: Journos". Crikey.
  9. Lee, Jane, McKenzie, Nick and Baker, Richard (12 April 2012). "Church's suicide victims". The Age. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  10. McIlroy, Tom (17 April 2012). "Baillieu announces inquiry into church sexual abuse". The Courier. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  11. Knott, Matthew. "The Power Index: Journos". Crikey.
  12. Kissane, Karen (27 February 2008). "Benbrika boasted of threats, court told". The Age. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  13. Le Grand, Chip. "Dank swears peptides were permitted". The Australian.
  14. Parliamentary Library. "Australia's Efforts Against Foreign Bribery: An Update". Australian Parliament House. Australian Parliament House. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
  15. Parliamentary Library. "Australia's Efforts Against Foreign Bribery: An Update". Australian Parliament House. Australian Parliament House. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
  16. Eltham, Ben (13 September 2012). "A Grubby Trail of Plastic Money". New Matilda. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  17. BBC News (8 October 2014). "HK leader given secret payment by Australian firm". BBC. Retrieved 31 October 2015.
  18. Thomas, Natalie. "Amec Foster Wheeler Shares Drop 10 % on SFP Probe". Financial Times. Retrieved 12 July 2017.
  19. "Monaco's Ahsani brothers plead guilty in U.S. to vast bribery scheme". Reuters. 30 October 2019. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  20. ""Interference" journalists win 2019 Lowy Institute Media Award". About the ABC. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  21. "The Lowy Institute Media Award | Lowy Institute". www.lowyinstitute.org. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  22. "How much money have Chinese businesses donated to Australian political parties?". NewsComAu. 6 June 2017. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  23. "How much money have Chinese businesses donated to Australian political parties?". NewsComAu. 6 June 2017. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  24. Dziedzic, foreign affairs reporter Stephen (18 February 2019). "ASIO denies discrimination after stripping Chinese billionaire's permanent residency". ABC News. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  25. Whitbourn, Michaela. "Court throws out truth defence in Chau Chak Wing's defamation case". Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  26. Pelly, Michael. "Chau Chak Wing wins $280,000 in defamation case v two former Fairfax Media papers". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
  27. "Crown casino inquiry gets underway in Sydney". ABC Radio. 21 January 2020. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  28. Davies, Anne (21 January 2020). "Crown Resorts may have breached casino licence over proposed share deal with Melco, inquiry hears". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  29. Llanbey, Sumeyya; McKenzie, Nick; Tozer, Joel (14 June 2020). "Calls for investigation into factional powerbroker Adem Somyurek". The Age. Nine Entetainment Co. Retrieved 14 June 2020.
  30. "'Terminated': Andrews sacks Somyurek, Albanese moves to kick him out of party". The Age. Fairfax Media. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  31. "Adem Somyurek quits Labor Party after 60 Minutes airs allegations of branch stacking, offensive language". ABC News. 15 June 2020. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  32. "Journalists' sources protected in crucial hearing". MEAA. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  33. McCausland, Sally. "Reputations in the courtroom". Inside Story.
  34. Barry, Paul. "Media Watch". Australian Broadcast Corp.
  35. McCausland, Sally. "Reputations in the courtroom". Inside Story.
  36. "Journalists' sources protected in crucial hearing". MEAA. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  37. McCausland, Sally. "Reputations in the courtroom".
  38. Barry, Paul. "Media Watch". Australian Broadcast Corp.
  39. . Vice News https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/4wmnmq/everything-we-know-about-joseph-acquaro-the-melbourne-underworld-lawyer-executed-behind-his-gelato-shop. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  40. Russell, Mark (9 December 2015). "Alleged Mafia boss Antonio Madafferi loses court fight with The Age over sources". The Age. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  41. Le Grand, Chip. The Australian https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/fairfax-apology-as-businessman-accused-of-mafia-links-drops-case/news-story/f01cf7367405f6cc8774eb89d287f6d0. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  42. Le Grand, Chip. The Australian https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/fairfax-apology-as-businessman-accused-of-mafia-links-drops-case/news-story/f01cf7367405f6cc8774eb89d287f6d0. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  43. Ralston, Nick. "Age journalists ordered to reveal sources". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 6 September 2013.
  44. Patrick, Rex (4 December 2018). "Adjournment: Espionage and Foreign Interference". Rex Patrick. Rex Patrick. Retrieved 27 January 2020.
  45. Cornwall, Deborah. "ABC quietly settles Chinese student's defamation case". The Australian.
  46. Masters, Nick McKenzie, Chris (15 December 2019). "Police launch second war crimes investigation into Ben Roberts-Smith". The Age. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  47. "Subscribe to The Australian | Newspaper home delivery, website, iPad, iPhone & Android apps". www.theaustralian.com.au. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  48. Millar, Royce and McKenzie, Nick (22 November 2010). "Revealed: How the ALP keeps secret files on voters". The Age. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  49. Campbell, James (23 April 2013). "Greens party candidate, Fraser Brindley charged with alleged hacking of ALP electoral database". Herald Sun. Retrieved 13 June 2020.
  50. "Age journos admit fault in hacking case". www.heraldsun.com.au. 5 August 2013. Retrieved 16 June 2020.
  51. "Vic journalists avoid database conviction". SBS News. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  52. Akerman, Pia. "Age journalists plead guilty to avoid conviction". The Australian.
  53. Ackerman, Pia (22 May 2014). "Age journalists plead guilty to avoid conviction". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 18 October 2015.
  54. "Vic journalists avoid database conviction". SBS News. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  55. "Walkley Award: Crown Unmasked". Walkley Awards. The Walkley Foundation.
  56. Knott, Matthew. "The Power Index: Journos". Crikey.
  57. Publisher, Master. "Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year honour roll - Melbourne Press Club". www.melbournepressclub.com. Retrieved 26 July 2018.
  58. "Munster Winners" (PDF). www.uts.edu.au. Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
  59. "Best Coverage of an Issue or Event". Melbourne Press Club. Melbourne Press Club. Retrieved 15 April 2014.
  60. "Quill awards 2011 - Monash University Gold Quill". Melbourne Press Club. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
  61. "Extract from The Sting". The Age. Retrieved 15 April 2014.
  62. "Australian Journalism Today". Palgrave Macmillan Australia. Retrieved 23 April 2014.
  63. "The Best Australian Business Writing 2012". NewSouth Books. Retrieved 23 April 2014.
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