The prime minister could not get through on the phone, so he rang the wife instead. Anthony Albanese had tried Kim Williams three times, each call swallowed by voicemail, before he dialled Catherine Dovey, the daughter of Gough Whitlam and the woman Williams affectionately calls "the bureau" because, as he puts it, "she is the authority."
The couple were in the car. Williams was driving. Dovey put the call on speakerphone, and Albanese got straight to it: he was announcing Williams as the new chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation at 8.15 the following morning, and it would be rather useful if the man himself were standing beside him in Canberra. "When you put it like that," Williams replied, "I'll see if I can get on a plane." Albanese's response was typically laconic: "Well, you can always drive, mate."
That anecdote, recounted by Williams himself with obvious pleasure, tells you something about the man: the missed calls, the formidable wife who keeps him honest, the slightly theatrical sense of occasion. It also tells you something about his relationship with the ABC, an institution he has been circling for nearly five decades. He first applied for the managing director's role at 30 years old. He was told, politely, to come back later. He never stopped wanting in.
Williams is now 72, and the list of things he is besides ABC chair is long and only partially predictable: clarinettist, amateur composer, oenophile, book collector, devoted swimmer, Lego enthusiast from childhood, arts philanthropist, sufferer of two degenerative health conditions he manages largely without medication, and a reader of almost compulsive breadth. His first wife left him for human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson. In 2014, he was among the first Australians to have his personal genome mapped. He once had a relationship with an opera singer. These are not the biographical details of a conventional media executive.
His office at the ABC's studios in Ultimo, in inner Sydney, is walled with bookshelves and arranged unmistakably for serious work. Williams told the journalist profiling him for the Sydney Morning Herald that he is, at heart, "a naturally shy person," a claim that tends to produce disbelief in those who know him. He also volunteers: "I don't have a groaning, super-pumped, conquer-the-world ego." He qualifies this almost immediately: "I mean, I think I'm quite good in an argument. And quite effective in prosecuting something I've thought about."
High Culture, High Stakes
Williams' tastes are unambiguously highbrow. He loves classical music, poetry, and demanding non-fiction. His devotion to Radio National is well known inside the ABC, where staff have reportedly learned not to abbreviate it to "RN" in his presence. In his 2014 memoir, Rules of Engagement, he lamented a society "descending into a vast vapid mediocrity" in the name of democratising information. He named what he sees as the broader threat more forcefully in his 2024 Redmond Barry lecture, describing "the dark, digitally enabled populist forces that are at war with civilised values and human freedom across the globe."
This is the tension at the core of Williams' chairmanship. He heads a public broadcaster that must court young audiences abandoning free-to-air television, build credibility in an era of information fragmentation, and hold the line on impartiality at a moment when impartiality itself is politically contested. His stated strategic priorities include hard news, Australian drama and documentary, arts programming, children's content, and a continued commitment to regional broadcasting. These are not small ambitions, and they do not come cheap.
Those who admire Williams point to a genuine and rare combination: deep institutional knowledge of media, serious engagement with technology including artificial intelligence (the ABC is deploying a bespoke language model called Assist AI in its news department, which Williams uses to help draft some speeches), and a philosophical commitment to public broadcasting that runs well beyond the careerist. His oldest friend of more than 50 years, arts administrator Mary Vallentine, describes him as "incredibly steadfast to his friends and very principled as a person," while noting he is "passionate if he's on a track."
His most high-profile career setback, his departure from News Corp in 2013 after just 22 months running its newspaper division, came precisely because he pushed too hard for digital transformation against institutional resistance. "I aged markedly," he has said of the experience. The failure reads, in hindsight, less as a referendum on his judgment than on the organisation's appetite for change.
The Interventionist Question
Not everyone inside the ABC views Williams with warmth. Critics raise a concern that deserves serious consideration: that his tastes are too refined, his instincts too managerial, and his vision of the ABC too much a reflection of his own cultural preferences to serve a genuinely broad national audience.
"The concern is that he's too interventionist and he's too elitist," one ABC veteran told the Herald, "and an ABC cast in his mould would risk losing even more audience. He feels the ABC should be talking to people like him." Another, blunter, observed: "The last time Kim Williams found himself to be wrong was when he was about 12." These are not trivial objections. The ABC is a publicly funded institution, accountable to all Australians, not only those who share its chair's enthusiasm for Radio National and chamber music.
The controversy over his reported intervention in editorial matters on behalf of a comedian known as Austen Tayshus gave these concerns some traction. Whether that episode reflected a chairman overstepping his governance role, or simply a forceful personality expressing a view, may depend on where one sits on the spectrum of institutional orthodoxy versus pragmatic leadership. The governance question, however, is real, and it is one the Australian Parliament and the ABC board both have an interest in resolving clearly.
Williams himself believes the stakes are existential. "The ABC is the one publicly owned idea of the public square that our nation has," he says. "I think the intensity of a lot of the reaction to the ABC is an indicator of how important it is to democracy." That may be true. It is also a framing that can, if one is not careful, become a justification for treating any criticism of the institution, or of its chair, as an attack on democracy itself.
The more useful question is a narrower one: can Williams hold his instincts toward intervention in check while still bringing the force of his convictions to bear on an institution that genuinely needs strong leadership? Can someone who mourns cultural mediocrity build a broadcaster that speaks to Australians who are not, by inclination or circumstance, his cultural peers? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the practical test of his chairmanship, and the answers will come not from profiles or lectures but from the choices the ABC makes over the next several years.
What seems clear is that Williams, for all his complexity, takes the responsibility seriously. He is 72, he has chronic pain, and he chose this over a quieter life. His wife told him not to be stupid and put his hat in the ring. He did. After 40 years of trying, he finally got the job he always wanted. Whether the ABC, at this particular moment of digital upheaval and democratic anxiety, got the chair it needs is a question worth watching carefully, and without prejudgment in either direction.