"She hissed, 'You just had to go too far.'" Former conservative Liberal prime minister John Howard wrote in his autobiography Lazarus Rising that "the politics of Kerry O'Brien, presenter of the ABC's 7.30 Report were a mile away from mine. Yet I appeared regularly on his program, because it was a serious current affairs presentation". Of the 1996 prime ministerial election debates, Howard wrote: "I flatly refused to have Kerry O'Brien of the ABC [moderate the debates] because of the way he had handled the second Keating-Hewson debate in 1993" (in which, Howard wrote, O'Brien "went in to bat" for Keating). O'Brien opposed the Howard Government's budget cuts to the ABC, and said the appointment of Jon Shier as its Managing Director was a manifestation of the "conservative obsession with the ABC as a kind of biased, left-wing culture". After retiring from the 7.30 Report, O'Brien presented the 2013 ABC series Keating: the Interviews from which he wrote a biography of former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, who co-operated with O'Brien rather than write an autobiography. O'Brien welcomed the replacement of Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott by the less conservative Malcolm Turnbull in 2015, telling Fairfax that it was "a little burst of sunlight nationally" and that "There's a surge of relief because things were so bad." In his 2019 induction speech to the Logie Hall of Fame, O'Brien voiced his support for the Uluru Statement from the Heart and called on the Australian Parliament, during the current term, to "make a genuine effort to understand and support what is embodied in the Uluru Statement From the Heart". He added "the Uluru statement represents no threat to a single individual in any corner of this country, and certainly no threat to the integrity of Parliament. And if you're told that, don't you believe it. On the contrary, it will add much to the integrity of our nation." References External links Paul Keating in conversation with O'Brien, Ideas at the House on YouTube. 1945 births Living people ABC News (Australia) presenters Australian television journalists Australian people of Irish descent Walkley Award winners People from Brisbane Journalists from Sydney Australian Roman Catholics Queensland Greats Australian political journalists