Vale Geoffrey Whitehead – 28 September 1934 – 24 December 2024
The ABC shared the below tribute to their first Managing Director:
Taking the reins of the public broadcaster newly corporatised under the ABC Act (1983), Geoffrey Whitehead faced the monumental job of bringing it into the modern era while grappling with the broader existential questions: what purpose the ABC should serve, and how best to serve it?
Whitehead, who has died at the age of 90, was appointed from an international field of applicants following a career working internationally as a print, radio and television journalist.
As historian Ken Inglis writes in Whose ABC? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1983-2006, Whitehead stood out from the shortlist of six candidates by eloquently presenting his strategy for the new ABC. His comprehensive 19-page application to the panel pointed to “a crucial decision: how far will public radio and television go, in competing with the private sector? How aggressive should its programming and marketing be? Once that has been settled, then program decisions can be made; staff with the flair to make the programs recruited and retained; and the executive structure amended as necessary to achieve the established aims.”
Whitehead’s experience in media spanned more than four decades and three countries: Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
Educated at London University, where he received a Diploma in International Affairs, he spent the first 20 years of his career working as a journalist in England, mostly as a Westminster and Whitehall political correspondent, including for Reuters news agency and the BBC, where he became deputy political editor.
As Radio New Zealand’s assistant director-general from 1974 to 1976 he helped establish the new organisation created following the division of the NZBC into separate statutory bodies. He assumed the director-general’s job, where he remained until 1983.
Whitehead held the role of ABC chief executive from 1983 until 1986. His 1988 book Inside the ABC detailed his sometimes turbulent three-year period leading the ABC.
“I believe the gains (of the period) outnumber the losses,” he wrote. “We did change attitudes, we had begun to make the ABC a more open corporation; more open to accountability in Parliament, more open to the public and more open to ideas from staff. I look back on my period as one in which the mould was broken and major reforms begun, so that the ABC had a chance to become more relevant to more Australians.”
In Tending the Flame of Democracy (2004) Whitehead argued that the health of democracy relied on governments tending to the needs of people as citizens, not just as consumers.
Whitehead remained a staunch supporter of the ABC and public broadcasting to the end of his life. In October 2022, on the ABC’s 90th birthday, he argued on the ABC Alumni website that the ABC’s role required formal consolidation: “[By] enshrining the national broadcaster, through an all-party Declaration, as an institution that’s integral to our democracy and to which all citizens have a right.”
Taking issue with the Liberal Party’s 2018 Federal Council policy resolution that the ABC should be privatised, he wrote: “It’s timely for Western governments to start building all-party declarations to the world that they see their traditional national public service broadcasters – like the 90-year-old ABC – as important democratic institutions having a focus on serving their people’s needs as citizens rather than their wants as consumers, and so helping us meet the new challenges we all face.”
ABC Chair Kim Williams AM said Whitehead was a committed and diligent individual who worked hard to reframe the ABC’s priorities and bring the new Corporation into the modern era.
“As the first Managing Director of the newly created Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geoffrey was determined to shed its older mindset as the ‘Commission’, which was redolent with many outmoded administrative approaches and inflexible practices, Mr Williams said.
“Geoffrey Whitehead was impatient for change, however he found resistance in many distributed pockets and eventually felt compelled to resign and move back to New Zealand after three turbulent years. His frustration provoked sympathy and disappointment equally. Many will recall the large task he inherited and recognise the often intransigent resistance he encountered.”
“I am pleased to say that the ABC is now a very much more open and responsive place to change and innovation than in those early days”, Mr Williams said.
Whitehead died in New Zealand on Christmas Eve. He is survived by his partner, Faith Barber.