Patricia Karvelas

Australian journalist (born 1981)

Patricia Karvelas

Born|  (1981-01-28) 28 January 1981 (age 44)

Australia

Other names| PK
Alma mater| RMIT University
Occupation(s)| Radio and television presenter
Known for| Current affairs, journalism and political correspondence

Patricia Karvelas (born 28 January[1] 1981[citation needed]) is an Australian radio presenter, current affairs journalist and political correspondent.

Karvelas hosted Breakfast on ABC Radio National from 2021 until 2024.[2]

## Early life

[edit]

Karvelas was born in Australia to Greek migrants who moved to Melbourne in the late 1960s. Her father was from the village of Foinikounta in the Peloponnese region of Greece. When Karvelas was 8 years old, both her parents died suddenly and she lived with her maternal grandmother and later her two older sisters, Voula and Sue in Carlton.[3]

Karvelas attended a number of schools but completed her senior schooling years at University High School[4] and graduated from RMIT University.[5]

## Early career

[edit]

Karvelas' journalism career began around 1994 when, as a young teenager, she joined the community radio station 3CR Melbourne. She hosted programs such as Wednesday Breakfast and Girl Zone. By the age of 15 she was also a guest presenter at 3RRR. Karvelas stayed at 3CR until 2000 when she briefly worked for the ABC and SBS.[6]

## Career at The Australian

[edit]

### Trampled by a police horse as a cadet

[edit]

Karvelas started working as a cadet journalist for the newspaper The Australian around 2002. In November 2002, while covering the protests against the WTO in Sydney, Karvelas was knocked over and trampled by a police horse that was being utilised to charge into and disperse the protestors. She was severely injured and sent to hospital with a suspected broken pelvis. She was later discharged after being treated for a head wound and severe bruising to her lower abdominal area.[7]

### Welfare reform reporting

[edit]

From 2004 Karvelas authored a number of articles in The Australian that gave favourable coverage to the Howard government's tough reforms on welfare. These articles were written under headlines such as "Tougher checks for job cheats", "Welfare cut would save $100 million", "Toughen rules on teenage mums", and "Tougher dole for shirkers". It has been stated that labelling the long-term unemployed by terms such as "shirkers" was rhetoric designed to facilitate the introduction of measures that punished this low socio-economic group.[8]

### Indigenous affairs reporting

[edit]

During her tenure at The Australian, Karvelas became noted for reporting on Indigenous affairs during a time when highly significant policies such as the Northern Territory Intervention and the Apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples were occurring.

Karvelas wrote articles such as "Crusade to save aboriginal kids: Howard declares 'National Emergency' to end abuse" that were supportive of the Liberal Party's Intervention in the Northern Territory. In 2007, she wrote a piece under the title of "Aborigines must learn English", which argued that Aboriginal children should not be taught their own languages at school. The article blamed bilingual schooling as the cause of the children's "failure", and that they should only be taught in English. The article ignored the lack of government funding for these schools as a possible cause of poor outcomes.[9][10]

When the Australian Labor Party took power later in 2007, Karvelas argued for the continuation of the Intervention through such articles as "Labor is 'destroying' NT intervention", "How Macklin took on the Left to transform indigenous policy", "Fast track on return of permit system" and "Agency to force NT truant kids from bed to classroom". In her 2008 piece "Labor to overhaul Native Title laws", Karvelas implied that Aboriginal people needed intervention into the control of finances earned from mining to prevent them from being "frittered away".[11]

When Kevin Rudd gave the Apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples in 2008, Karvelas' article "Wording divides Indigenous leaders" focused on the divisions in the opinions on the Apology between prominent Aboriginal people.[12]

Karvelas also produced articles in 2013 such as "Overhaul township leases, says Council" that promoted the newly elected Abbott government's push to secure 99-year leases over Aboriginal townships, a plan that caused widespread distress to Aboriginal communities.[13]

### The "character assassination" of Larissa Behrendt controversy

[edit]

In 2011, Karvelas wrote a series of articles in The Australian against Aboriginal lawyer and Harvard graduate Larissa Behrendt which amounted to what has been described as a "disgraceful saga of protracted character assassination". Behrendt was a strong opponent of the NT Intervention and was also involved in a racial discrimination legal case against another News Corporation employee in Andrew Bolt. Karvelas' articles attempted to portray Behrendt as an insincere hypocrite, out-of-touch academic and a "white blackfella" for her writing a tweet against pro-Intervention advocate Bess Price.[14]

Even though Behrendt apologised for the tweet, Karvelas and fellow columnists in The Australian such as Gary Johns (who described Aboriginal culture as being "inconsistent with basic human decency") called for Behrendt's employment at university and government level to be reviewed. Karvelas was afterwards described as "a master of The Australian's familiar false-inference, disguised-assumption, report-as-accusation house style" in her attack on Behrendt. Other commentators have written that the pile-on over Behrendt's tweet left out crucial facts and was a pretext for a campaign against an ideological adversary.[14][15][16]

### Awards and promotions at The Australian

[edit]

Karvelas won the inaugural Wallace Brown Young Achiever Award for Press Gallery Journalism in 2008. She was later promoted to the Victorian Bureau Chief and Senior National Affairs Journalist for The Australian. One of her notable decisions as Bureau Chief was to employ Rachel Baxendale as a cadet in 2012.[17][18]

## Sky News Australia host

[edit]

From 2016 to 2017, Karvelas became employed at another News Corp media outlet, that being Sky News Australia presenting a weekly program called Karvelas.[19]

## ABC

[edit]

Karvelas joined the ABC in 2015. She presented Radio National's program RN Drive from January 2015 to 2021 and hosted Afternoon Briefing, a national affairs television program on the ABC News channel, from 2018 to 2021.[20] She has also co-hosted a weekly political podcast, The Party Room, with Fran Kelly since April 2016.[21] In 2018, she commenced as host of the weekly interview-based national affairs program National Wrap.[22]

In 2019, Karvelas conducted a bizarre interview with Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce who tried to pin the blame on the Queensland Labor government for a controversial $80 million water buyback scheme by simply repeating "Labor, Labor, Labor, Labor" several times.[23]

In 2019 and 2020, she spoke at WOMADelaide.[24]

In November 2021, ABC announced that Karvelas would host RN Breakfast on ABC Radio National replacing Fran Kelly.[25]

Since mid-2023, Karvelas has been hosting Q+A.[2]

In November 2024, it was announced that Karvelas would leave RN Breakfast to take up other cross-platform roles within the ABC from January 2025.[2]

In January 2025, Karvelas returned to host Afternoon Briefing on the ABC News channel

### Advocacy for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament

[edit]

Karvelas is a strong advocate of the Albanese Government's proposal for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. She tweeted a message of support from the Labor 2022 election night party, posing with Labor's shadow Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney and writing: "This woman is a legend and looks like she will be the next Indigenous affairs minister #UluruStatement".[26][27] ABC Managing Director David Anderson told a Senate Estimates hearing on 29 November that this did "not" demonstrate political bias.[28]

In a 13 November article for the ABC, Karvelas likened the referendum to enshrine an Indigenous body within the constitution to the same-sex-marriage debate, and endorsed Noel Pearson's claim that "heartless" people opposing the Voice will be easy, writing that it would be "like shooting fish in a barrel because of the racism inherent to the colonisation experience that has not been reckoned with".[29] For RN Breakfast following the National Party's November announcement that it would oppose the Voice, Karvelas conducted an 8 minute combative interview with Nationals Leader David Littleproud, rejecting his arguments as "inaccurate", before conducting a supportive extended 17 minute interview with Voice proponent Noel Pearson, in which he attacked Littleproud and Indigenous Senator Jacinta Price without cross examination.[30][31]

## Personal life

[edit]

Karvelas is Greek-Australian. Her parents originate from the Peloponnese region of Greece.[32] She has two daughters (aged 9 and 11 in 2021)[33] with her wife.[34] She identifies as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and has become increasingly open about this over time.[34]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Karvelas, Patricia (29 January 2024). "RN Breakfast, 29th January 2024". RN Breakfast. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Event occurs at 1:54:04. Archived from the original on 14 December 2024. "To those of you who've texted in saying Happy Birthday, it was actually yesterday..."
2. ^ a b c "Patricia Karvelas to leave Radio National and take on political anchoring role with national broadcaster". ABC News. 9 October 2024. Archived from the original on 14 December 2024. Retrieved 14 December 2024.
3. ^ "ABC's Patricia Karvelas opens up about difficult childhood and entering the field of journalism". The Greek Herald. 25 April 2021. Archived from the original on 6 July 2022. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
4. ^ Johnson, Natasha (25 April 2021). "ABC's Patricia Karvelas on her experience of Parliament's toxic 'sexist' culture and how a childhood tragedy shaped her". ABC Backstory. ABC. Archived from the original on 14 December 2024. Retrieved 13 June 2021.
5. ^ van Houten, Jasmijn (15 May 2019). "Next gen students broadcast federal election". RMIT University. Archived from the original on 14 December 2024. Retrieved 3 May 2020.
6. ^ Karvelas, Patricia (Autumn 2009). "Patricia Karvelas" (PDF). 3CR. p. 19\. Archived (PDF) from the original on 14 December 2024. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
7. ^ "Scuffles, arrests mar 'ugly' WTO protests". The Age. 14 November 2002. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
8. ^ Mendes, Philip (2007) [2003]. Australia's Welfare Wars Revisited. Sydney: UNSW Press. ISBN 9780868409917.
9. ^ McCallum, Kerry; Waller, Lisa (2017). The Dynamics of News and Indigenous Policy in Australia. Intellect Books. ISBN 978-1783208142.
10. ^ Waller, Lisa (7 December 2012). "Bilingual Education and the Language of News" (PDF). Australian Journal of Linguistics. 32 (4): 459–472\. doi:10.1080/07268602.2012.744267. S2CID 62751063. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
11. ^ Due, Clemence (2008). "Laying Claim to "Country": Native Title and Ownership in the Mainstream Australian Media". Media-Culture Journal. 11 (5). Archived from the original on 26 March 2022. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
12. ^ Celermajer, Danielle; Moses, A. Dirk (2010). "Australian Memory and the Apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous People". Memory in a Global Age: 32–58\. doi:10.1057/9780230283367_3. ISBN 978-1-349-32356-2. Archived from the original on 25 April 2022. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
13. ^ Gondarra, Djiniyinni. "An Open Letter to Interested Parties" (PDF). concernedaustralians.com.au. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 March 2022. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
14. ^ a b Manne, Robert (2011). "Bad News, Murdoch's Australian and the shaping of the nation". Quarterly Essay (43).
15. ^ Brull, Michael (19 September 2011). "Sex with a horse: getting done over by The Australian". ABC News. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
16. ^ Rundle, Guy (20 April 2011). "Rundle: anatomy of a Larissa Behrendt beat-up". Crikey. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
17. ^ "Wallace Brown Young Journalist Award". National Press Club of Australia. Archived from the original on 10 March 2022. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
18. ^ Samios, Zoe (28 June 2021). "On the grapevine: the passions of political journalist Rachel Baxendale". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
19. ^ Sky News Australia, "Patricia Karvelas." Archived 14 March 2017 at the Wayback Machine
20. ^ "Patricia Karvelas". www.abc.net.au. Archived from the original on 3 December 2020. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
21. ^ "The Party Room". ABC Radio National Programs. ABC. Archived from the original on 17 May 2019. Retrieved 18 May 2019.
22. ^ Australian Broadcasting Corporation, "National Wrap Archived 11 April 2018 at the Wayback Machine."
23. ^ "'Labor, Labor, Labor, Labor': Barnaby Joyce's bizarre interview on RN Drive – video". The Guardian. 23 April 2019. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
24. ^ "WOMADelaide Artists". womadelaide.com.au 2019. Archived from the original on 10 March 2020. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
25. ^ Ferri, Lauren (29 November 2021). "Patricia Karvelas to take over from Fran Kelly on ABC's Radio National Breakfast". NCA NewsWire. Archived from the original on 27 November 2024. Retrieved 29 November 2021 - via news.com.au.
26. ^ Karvelas, Patricia [@PatsKarvelas] (21 May 2022). "This woman is a legend and looks like she will be the next Indigenous affairs minister #UluruStatement" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 14 December 2024. Retrieved 30 November 2022 - via Twitter.
27. ^ ‘I did consider that to be a breach of personal use of social media’: ABC boss tells senate estimates; The Australian; 29 November 2022
28. ^ ABC managing director defends journos and chair at senate estimates Archived 30 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine; The Mandarin; 30 November 2022
29. ^ Five years after the same-sex marriage plebiscite, does it hold a lesson for the Indigenous Voice referendum? Archived 30 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine; ab.net.au; 13 November 2022
30. ^ Noel Pearson blasts Nationals 'tick and flick' consultation on the Voice; abc.net.au; 29 November 2022
31. ^ David Littleproud: The Voice 'won't close the gap'; abc.net.au; 29 November 2022
32. ^ Baird, Julia (4 June 2015). "Anything But with RN's Patricia Karvelas". ABC News. Archived from the original on 14 December 2024. Retrieved 24 January 2022.
33. ^ "'My identity was debated': ABC's Patricia Karvelas on covering same-sex marriage". QNews. 28 April 2021. Archived from the original on 21 July 2024. Retrieved 21 July 2024.
34. ^ a b "LGBTQIA+ journalists on the challenges they've faced working in the media". ABC News. 14 October 2023. Archived from the original on 14 December 2024. Retrieved 21 July 2024.

Authority control databases

International|

* VIAF

National|

* Australia