It’s 5.30am on Sunday and Barrie Cassidy has already laid out the morning newspapers like tablecloth. Once upon a time the old Cassidy – the one who was a night owl, unwinding late in restaurants and bars – might still have been “a little hoarse” or else planning to doze off in the makeup chair. Instead, the new Cassidy, who hosts the ABC’s popular political program Insiders, is quiet and focused. He jots down a few notes, clears his throat. Familiar dark eyebrows crease together under loose silver hair.
Cassidy has been a morning person for the past 14 years now – as long as Insiders has been running. He’s earned his own Barrie Cassidy Appreciation Society, albeit of uncertain membership. Ratings for the Sunday talkshow, featuring a big political interview and a panel of journalists (and a regular segment from Guardian Australia’s photographer Mike Bowers), are up 30% in two years. And over the past six months, it has has surged ahead of both Channel Seven’s Sunrise and Channel Nine’s Today to become Australia’s most watched morning program.
“Seeing as it’s been the better part of the year, I guess we can finally boast about it,” Cassidy says. “We’re now the top ranked morning show any day of the week.”
In the wooden booth of the Korean restaurant he’s “been meaning to try”, Cassidy explains this is his day off.
At 65, he golfs “badly”, jogs a regular path along the Yarra and works his way through some of Melbourne’s better restaurants. “In a job like this, you never really switch off.”
Cassidy has been on our screens for the better part of half a century, as a newsreader, a foreign correspondent in Washington and Brussels, the host of shows from The 7.30 Report to Offsiders. He was press secretary to Bob Hawke, and has been variously accused of “losing the plot” by Malcolm Turnbull and of “declaring war” on Kevin Rudd but insists he is a friend to neither party – and gets along just fine with them both. He has a great shaking laugh, the kind that catches you up under his arm .
According to outgoing ABC news director Kate Torney, Cassidy is “too humble”. She is surprised to hear he has even agreed to be profiled.
“When he offered me the job as executive producer on Insiders, I was really surprised he knew who the hell I was, to be honest,” Torney says. “I was just in awe of him in those days but also a little scared of him because he’s a man of very few words.”
That seemed to serve him well enough on the morning of the show’s very first episode in July 2001 – when the then prime minister John Howard appeared as the guest.
It was also the weekend the Wallabies won a test match against the British and Irish Lions and, from the stands, Howard had screamed himself hoarse. Less than an hour to airtime, he could barely speak.
“He thought about pulling out,” Cassidy says. “But he was good company. At least I’m not the only one who suffers from getting carried away at football matches.”
Another brand of football has made its mark on the program too. “They tell me my performance will sometimes be affected by Collingwood’s performance,” he says. That has included two separate grand final defeats.
“He didn’t say a word before going to air and I was wondering whether he’d say a word on air, to be honest,” Torney says.
Worth remembering, too, is that it was the cheek of a football fan that landed Cassidy his first stint reporting in 1962. Twelve years old and thumbing through the weekly four pages of his home town of Chiltern, Cassidy decided the match reports weren’t up to scratch.
“The shire president owned the newspaper and he was a lovely bloke but he wasn’t a great writer,” he says. “Even at 12, I understood that.”
Later he moved from his first job at the Border Morning Mail in Albury to Shepparton News so he could play football on the weekends.
However, it would be many years and many jobs in between, including court reporting for the Melbourne Herald, before Cassidy became truly excited about journalism. The feeling stole up on him suddenly, on his first day as a press gallery reporter in Melbourne’s Old Parliament House.
“Almost instantly, for the first time really as a journalist, I loved what I was doing,” Cassidy says. “I had no background at all in politics growing up, but I loved the debate. I could sit there all day listening.”
For the next year, Cassidy spent his evenings at night school, taking any class even vaguely related to politics to find out “who was prime minister before Menzies”.
In Melbourne, Cassidy recalls, the day began at 10.30am in premier Dick Hamer’s office, with a cup of tea and the rest of the press gallery.
“Hamer would sit on his desk and chat to us about whatever we wanted and then at the end he’d say ‘get your tape recorders out and we’ll put it on the record,’” Cassidy says. “It was such a quaint, old-fashioned way of handling the media – it was almost neighbourly.”
Cassidy moved to the ABC, covering first state and then federal politics.In 1986, Hawke offered him the job of press secretary.
“I remember he was 10 points behind in the polls and people said I was crazy,” Cassidy says. “But I thought if I was ever going to see politics from the inside, then this would be the guy to do it with. And even though he was a lout and a larrikin and a drunk, I still admired him.”
That Cassidy was himself something of a blank slate in political terms, not driven by any ideology or faction, made him particularly helpful to Hawke. After a rocky first day (in which an unsuspecting Cassidy threw Hawke’s carefully marked up horseracing form guide in the bin), the prime minister came to rely on “Butch Cassidy his press bloke” more and more. It was a job that took Cassidy to more than 30 different countries, to intimate dinners at the White House and talks that changed history.
Also along for the ride at the time was adviser and later Labor minister Craig Emerson. “When I met Barrie, I thought he was really famous: Barrie Cassidy from the ABC,” Emerson says.
Over their four years working for Hawke, the pair formed a close “and entirely deniable” friendship.
“He’s got a great sense of humour,” Emerson says. “And he’s very experienced in analysing bullshit from politicians. Barrie can do that better than anyone.”
He can also smell political survival better than most, which is why when Paul Keating challenged Hawke in June 1991, Cassidy knew it was “only a matter of time” before Keating succeeded him. But he quickly realised Hawke couldn’t be persuaded to bow out.
“He said to me ‘I think you’re a bit tired’ and I said ‘you’re right’ and left,” Cassidy says. “When I’m introduced at functions, people always say that I left when Hawke left, but actually I left between the two challenges.”
It was then, after an approach by the “most senior numbers man” in the Labor party, that Cassidy’s own career could have swung into politics.
“I said there was only one seat I’d ever take – the seat where I grew up, because you’d need to have an emotional attachment to that seat to really tolerate the things politicians do,” Cassidy says.
Instead, he chose to return to journalism – to the Australian newspaper, then back to television. But, those four years in Hawke’s camp left their mark. Accusations of Labor bias have followed Cassidy ever since.
In 2013, the day after the September election was called and in one of his last acts as arts minister, Labor’s Tony Burke appointed Cassidy as chairman of the Old Parliament House advisory council.
The move was quickly branded “political favour” by opponents, with both the new prime minister, Tony Abbott, and the attorney general, George Brandis, calling for Cassidy’s resignation.
Abbott accused Labor of rushing “to appoint its friends to all sorts of positions in the dying days”. In the end, Cassidy gave in, resigning from the position to avoid “shrouding the board in controversy”.
“It was a pain in the arse, actually,” he says now. “I was never a member of the Labor party but you build up lifetime relationships with people. That’s never stopped me getting on well with Coalition MPs too. I think they understand that I do my job and they do theirs.”
In 2014, Cassidy took three months off to write his family memoir Private Bill, travelling through the old war zones of Europe in the footsteps of his father, who had been taken prisoner during the second word war.
The time off could well have been a permanent decision, Cassidy says, but he missed the “engagement” too much.
“I wasn’t ready to walk away from it all. People have said in the past that I’ve been a mentor to them but in the last few years, because of the changing nature of journalism, I’ve seen that reversed and now young people are mentors to me.”
He stops to skewer another dumpling and check his phone. In the spirit of the new digital era, he’s just celebrated his third month on Twitter.
“It took me a long time to get on, I thought it’d be too negative or too time-consuming,” he says. “But I don’t want to be irrelevant. I don’t know how long the ABC wants me to do Insiders and maybe my career is coming to an end. Twitter is about survival.”
Something beeps under Cassidy’s finger and, with one deft tap, falls silent. He reads it and chuckles.
“If I’m going to remain relevant, I better start now.”
