Do we like them?

Do we like Paul Kelly?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful found, a climate song and a public Yes vote on the Voice, but the record we could open is thinner than a 10 needs.

Paul Kelly is about as close to a national songwriter as Australia gets. He moved from Adelaide to Melbourne in the 1970s and has spent decades turning ordinary lives into songs. Fans know him for storytelling, from St Kilda to Kings Cross, and his 2025 album Seventy sold strongly and topped the ARIA albums chart.

On trouble, the cupboard is bare. We searched for court cases, lawsuits and accusations and found nothing about the singer, only results about a different Kelly. Our page-fetch tool was rate-limited for most of this run, so we leaned on search results rather than full articles. Treat the clean slate as what we could confirm, not a guarantee.

On the harm check, nothing turned up. We found no remarks about trans people, women, migrants or vaccines, and no sign of grievance politics or conspiracy talk. We also found no run of projects with people who push harm. The record is thin on these topics, so say so plainly: absence of evidence, not a glowing reference.

What he has said publicly leans toward looking after people and the planet. In 2020 he released Sleep, Australia, Sleep, a lullaby-style warning about climate inaction. In 2023 he put his name to a public statement backing a Yes vote in the Voice referendum, and released a song for the campaign.

The recent news is a gentle one. He is still writing and touring in his seventies, with a surprise Kings Cross gig and a mural of him on the hotel wall in Potts Point. At BIGSOUND he talked songwriting with an ABC journalist. Nothing messy, which is a nice change for this page.

Would we support him? Yes. A lifetime of songs, public causes that sit on the right side of this page's house rule, and no red flags in what we could read. If something turns up later, we will say so, but today it is a clean pass.