Do we like them?Do we like Paul Kelly?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words of his own found and a long respected career, but we could only read a thin slice of his record.
Paul Kelly is one of the old hands of Australian political journalism, a fixture at The Australian for decades. His book Triumph and Demise, an account of the Rudd and Gillard years, won the Walkley Book Award in 2014. He is the sort of columnist both sides of politics read, even when they grumble about him.
The one big public stoush we could properly read came in November 2020 on the ABC's Q+A. Malcolm Turnbull went at Kelly over News Corp's climate coverage, asking how offensive, biased and destructive it had to get. Kelly came back hard, snapping “How dare you!” and saying Turnbull was telling him how to run his career.
Kelly's defence was that Turnbull was overstating News Corp's reach, saying “I think you exaggerate the impact we have”. He also pointed to many other publications backing strong climate action, and said Turnbull was blaming the company for his own political failures. Where you land depends on whether you read that as fair pushback or as a man defending his employer.
On the harm test, we found no harmful words of his own in what we could read: nothing aimed at LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or people of colour. The asterisk is the climate exchange, where he defended the paper he writes for rather than breaking from it. That is a contested position, not a pattern we could document.
On how he treats people, nothing turned up: no court cases, no allegations from staff, no tabloid territory worth repeating. That is a clean sheet, though it is also a thin one, because a columnist's private conduct rarely makes the news. We can't say much about what he has done for others at a cost to himself.
Nothing new or controversial turned up on him lately. Our tools could read only a handful of pages for this card, so treat it as a first look rather than the full file. If you want his views on a particular issue, his columns are the place to check.