Press gallery

This is actually something to lead a party into a next election.

And so this current crop of candidates, while we at the, at Queen's Park, at the Press Gallery certainly know all of them, it seems like the general electorate are largely unfamiliar with them.

And, and the numbers are pretty bad, right? For Navdeep Bains, it's 52% who don't know him.

For Eric Lombardi at the, at the tail end of it, it's in the 80s, right? Uh, him and Dylan Mirando, they're 80 to 85% of people who [audio cuts out] are.

It's not a bunch of business people trying to get the ear of politicians.

Basically, when I work in Westminster, I'm part of something called the Press Gallery and the Westminster Lobby.

And that means basically all the journalists sort of have a structure where we all get together and we can make sure that we get the right access, the right appropriate media access to our politicians and can understand what's going on among each other and sort of fight for basically the right to actually hold power to account on behalf of the public in a proper way and make sure that when we do that, we do it with one voice and we do it correctly and that we're all sort of bandied together on the same mission.

And it is being brought back.

I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7AM.

Today, Press Gallery veteran Paul Bongiorno on a fiery week in Parliament and who came off second best.

It's Saturday, September 12.

Paul, great to see you.

I edited Farago, the student newspaper, including in 1974, which was an election that we'll talk about very shortly.

My Fraser years I spent as a journalist at the age, first of all, as a cadet in Melbourne, but I quickly got myself to the Canberra Press Gallery.

And the reason for that was back in my student days, We'd done some kind of then pioneering, quote unquote, actually gonzo journalism, as we like to think of it, by reporting federal politics for National U, which was the national student newspaper, and used to come up to Canberra a couple of times regularly.

And the experience of being in Canberra, I loved Canberra, the city.

I loved the old Parliament House.

We would find ourselves, you know, you could sit in the press gallery and look down actually on Gough Whitlam and Jim Cairns and Bill Hayden and they were all there.

And that was, like, incredibly impressive.

But... very real and immediate.