Well students, today I have with me Mr Waleed Aly.
Waleed is a journalist, a musician, an academic, a cricket tragic and tragically he’s also
a Richmond supporter, but just as importantly, he’s also a lawyer, so thanks for joining
us, Waleed.
Thanks for having me.
So can you tell me about your journey from law to journalism, was it accidental or deliberate?
Yeah, total accident.
I was working…so when I left law school, I had applied for a cadet at The Age and I’d
also applied for legal jobs and I got through to the exam at The Age and it was on grand
final day.
So I didn’t want to take it.
And also the legal job, I was a legal associate to Justice Kay in the family court.
And that job got offered to me and I looked at it and thought, well the chances of me
getting the cadetship, there’d be a million people going for this, they’ll give the
job to 5 people or something, I’ve already got this legal job I’ll go with that.
SO to me, that’s what I was going to do with the rest of my life, be a lawyer.
I hadn’t imagined it would become anything else.
From there I was in commercial law, I worked for Maddocks, I probably worked for you quite
a bit because state government was my main client, although probably not your department
(laughs) But anyway, so that’s what I was doing and at the time, this was early 2000’s,
so it was just after the 9/11 era, the Bali bombings, the London bombings, so I ended
up writing a lot of stuff in the press and it was out of that other things grew, so Monash
university had been reading my stuff.
They clearly thought there was some academic merit in that.
They asked me if I wanted to come on board with them, so I went and did that.
At the same time, just kind of writing this stuff, so media activity just kind of happened
that way.
The odd bit of broadcast followed as a result of that and then the next thing I knew I was
working in media.
So I don’t consider myself a journalist, a journalist does reports and…mine grew
out of commentary and I guess that’s how it all happened.
Ok, so from studying law to initially practicing law, what extra skills do you need apart from
what you learn in the law books?
Well I think what media about is, how to present knowledge you have.
The knowledge you have in media is not necessarily terribly deep.
But eh difference between someone who can broadcast and someone who can’t, is that
they can convey what knowledge they have, however limited it is.
That’s really all it is.
The legal part of my training though, I think, was utterly indispensable to what I did later
because that was what honed my analytical skills.
That’s what taught me how to identify an argument, assess it really rapidly and ask
the next question that might expose the weakness in whatever is coming at me.
And so the broadcast I ended up doing was at the ABC initially on radio.
And it was things like filling in Jon Faine’s slot where you are doing a lot of accountability
interviewing, sometimes over a long period of time, 10 minutes, which in media terms
is forever.
So, that sort of interrogative style, law was just indispensable for that.
What about the language though?
Language of the law, language that a lot of lawyers use, the average punter just doesn’t
understand it.
How can we make the language simpler?
I had to lose the Latin (laughs).
No, no, do you know what?
I think in my case, I went through my own evolution with that.
Like, occasionally I’ll go back and look at article I wrote 10 years ago and I can
see the lawyer there.
I can sort of see the language, there’s a lot of ‘in respect of’ that sort of
stuff and now I look at…once you have to broadcast, everything has to be snappier.
And so now I look at it and go ‘Gee, why did I?’ and I look at what I write now and
it’s just much more colloquial.
But I think what happens is, as the concepts you’re dealing with actually become ingrained,
so that you’re just understand them, they become more or less instinctive, you need
to rely on the jargon less.
It’s one these weird things I think you learn once you have to step out of the bubble
of your profession, whether it’s law or academia or whatever it is and you have to
speak to non-experts about it.
You actually begin to…it challenges how well you understand a concept and the ability
to move beyond the jargon flows from the fact that you’ve mastered, well mastered is probably
a bit strong….but you have a really strong grasp of what it is that you’re doing.
So in my case, there will be times administrative law principles will come up in the course
of the interview that I’m doing, maybe it’s judicial review, for example.
I understand what judicial review is because I had to sit through a whole lot of boring
con and admin classes at uni.
And I got the concepts of the difference between judicial review and merits review but I know
that the audience that I’m speaking to does not have the benefit of those classes, and
if I started talking in those terms, they’d probably be bored.
So, you start to think of analogous ways of explaining it, then going through a checklist
to make sure you got the process right, that you actually followed the law in making the
decision, you didn’t just make it all up or whatever it is.
Now, that’s not the kind of precision you’d expect in the High Court but it conveys the
concept in a way that non-lawyers will be able to access.
But without that legal grounding, I could not have done it, because you can’t access
the concepts well enough to unlock the meaning for other people.
And when you’re in a field of expertise which the law is, or academia is, just be
really careful sometimes that what you’re not doing is just hiding behind the jargon.
You can actually disguise that you don’t understand something that well, because you
know what words to put around it.
Well, absolutely.
But talking I guess about describing concepts, you’re pretty passionate about human rights,
as a lot of students who’ll be watching this who are passionate about human rights
issues and social justice issues and the like, but they’re pouring over their law books
and they’re reading about contract and judicial review and the like, how do you actually put
those very noble concepts, that our students are passionate about, into everyday language
where they’re understood better by everyday people?
It’s hard to answer that because I don’t know that I’ve mastered that.
I don’t know that I’ve got how you don it.
I know though that in each particular case you can find an avenue to do it.
And it’s not the same avenue every time.
Sometimes it’s through a story that illustrates a concept.
Sometimes it’s through a hypothetical, or it’s through an analogy that you’d want
to draw.
Oddly, I use legal analogies sometimes.
So when I talk about, as a sociologist, when I talk about concepts of political alienation,
for example, people understand the idea that when you feel like you’re being accused
of something, it’s a great relief to be able to have your day in court.
People get that concept.
They can understand the concept of being accused of something but not being able to tell the
judge about it.
And so I can take that, which is a legal concept of natural justice and I can take that and
apply it to something that’s not legal at all, that’s more sociological, it actually
works both ways.
But really all you’re trying to do, I suppose the art of communicating something that’s
dry and complex and abstract to an audience that isn’t used to that conversation or
doesn’t have those terms of art, is really just to do it through analogy and story.
You have no regrets about doing law?
No, God, no!
Doing a law degree, and I’m not just saying this, doing a law degree was the best decision
I ever made.
Because I honestly think, if I had not done a law degree, I couldn’t have done anything
that flowed from it.
Now, it’s a counterfactual.
Maybe if I’d never done a law degree, I would’ve ended up with a different set of
skills, that would’ve meant I ended up in the same position, doing it a different sort
of a way, I don’t know.
But I’m pretty convinced that the reason I was able to enter media at a high level
pretty quickly.
Like my first ever shift on radio, on air by myself, was the morning shift on 774.
Like, I didn’t come through 3CR and RRR which is the normal…
Straight to the top?
Kind of, yeah.
Scandalously so!
To the extent that I told them ‘You are crazy.
You should not be doing this.’
And it took them about a year or two to convince me that it was worth doing, but I think the
reason that I was able to do that and that so far at least it’s worked out ok, is that
I am not press gallery journalist.
I’m not the person who spent my time at uni learning how to edit things or learning
how to speak in the way that reporters are meant to speak.
I didn’t do those things.
I don’t actually know those things.
You put me up a journalist graduate and they could talk a whole lot of stuff that I just
have no grasp of, nothing except an intuitive grasp of.
But I think it was in every media situation, I was always something else.
That’s actually what gave me the advantage, in fact every situation.
In my academic work, I’m the guy who communicates to a mass audience and gets the media’s
side of things.
In my media work, I’m the guy who’s got technical legal training and an academic background.
They complement each other pretty much?
Yeah, but what it means is, I end up being a package that’s not the same as…I’ve
always got a weapon.
Even if I’m not very good at using that weapon, there’s always a dimension I can
draw on and without the legal side of it, without the law degree, it just simply wouldn’t
have happened.
So, if you had one piece of advice for our students, because they’re all watching this…
(Laughs) Are they?
Is this set reading?
Oh yes, this is the highest rating locally produced RMIT Legal show.
(Both laugh) What would that one piece of advice be?
I think it depends what they want to do with it but my advice generally, and this applies
especially in law, to grasp big concepts.
If you can get your head around big concepts, that is so intellectually powerful, because
it means you can encounter indefinite number of factual scenarios, and have an analytical
window.
And it may not be the best analytical window or whatever but it’s something.
And this happened all the time, especially in radio, I’d get a call or the producer
would get a call and they’d say ‘You’ve got the treasurer right now’ and you’ve
given zero thought, you don’t even know what the story of the day is because you’re
on radio and the story hasn’t broken, right?
All you know is you have 5 minutes with the treasurer with zero preparation.
You know that if you have one question, you now have at least the potential for a whole
interview.
A bit like this?
Yeah.
I suppose.
Because what you’ve got is a series of concepts in your intellectual background you can draw
on, to ask the next question or to interrogate the next thing.
So for example and this isn’t strictly a legal example, but this is one of, just to
illustrate the point of having a conceptual understanding of things.
At Monash, I teach in the Global Terrorism Research Centre and I teach, this year I’m
doing a different subject, but up until this year I was teaching a subject that was really
about big, social and political theory applied to the case study of terrorism.
But it’s all about the relationship of identity politics and radical politics and globalisation
and parochial identify movements and all this sort of stuff.
That, was one of the most powerful set of ideas I’d ever come across to help me understand
the politics of climate change.
I’m not an environmentalist, I don’t have that background.
I’m not an environmental scientist.
I did a chemical engineering degree, I was still looking up CFC tables when I was doing
chemical engineering, that’s not my background but I had enough of an understanding of some
of the big socio and political ideas that could help me grasp this, as a socio and political
pheromone.
And it’s the same with the law.
When you understand the difference between a line of reasoning that is prejudicial and
not probative for example, and you really get that concept, you can apply that to pop
culture debates.
You can apply that to political debates.
You can apply that to social debates and it allows you to find analytical positions that
a subject matter obsessive wouldn’t, or someone that’s an advocate for a particular
cause, related to that topic wouldn’t and then it becomes interesting.
So whether it’s media or law or whatever it is, the stronger the grasp you have of
those big abstract ideas, the more powerful you’ll find your reservoir of knowledge
than if you’re just remembering facts.
Well there you go students, there’s some great advice.
Grasp those big concepts and the analysis will follow and it can be used in any walk
of life and if you look at Waleed as an example, you too could ultimately use your law and
become a media superstar.
Thanks for joining us.
(Laughs) No worries, thank you.