Patricia Karvelas

Patricia Karvelas
Born	Australia
Other names	PK
Occupation	Australian radio presenter
Known for	Current affairs journalism and Political correspondence

Patricia Karvelas (born 29 January 1981) is an Australian radio presenter, current affairs journalist and political correspondent.

Karvelas currently hosts RN Breakfast on Radio National.

Early Life

Karvelas was born in Australia to Greek migrants who moved to Melbourne in the late 1960s. Her father was from the village of Foinikounta in the Peloponnese region of Greece. At the age of 8, both her parents died suddenly and Karvelas lived with her maternal grandmother and later her two older sisters, Voula and Sue in Carlton.

Karvelas attended a number of schools but completed her senior schooling years at University High School and graduated from RMIT University.

Early career

Karvelas's journalism career began around 1994 when, as a young teenager, she joined the community radio station 3CR Melbourne. She hosted programs such as Wednesday Breakfast and Girl Zone. By the age of 15 she was also a guest presenter at 3RRR. Karvelas stayed at 3CR until the year 2000 when she briefly worked for the ABC and SBS.

Career at The Australian

Trampled by a police horse as a cadet

Karvelas started working as a cadet journalist for the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper The Australian around 2002. In November 2002, while covering the protests against the WTO in Sydney, Karvelas was knocked over and trampled by a police horse that was being utilised to charge into and disperse the protestors. She was severely injured and sent to hospital with a suspected broken pelvis. She was later discharged after being treated for a head wound and severe bruising to her lower abdominal area.

Welfare reform reporting

From 2004 Karvelas authored a number of articles in The Australian that gave favourable coverage to the Howard government's tough reforms on welfare. These articles were written under headlines such as Tougher checks for job cheats, Welfare cut would save $100 million, Toughen rules on teenage mums, and Tougher dole for shirkers. It has been stated that labelling the long-term unemployed by terms such as "shirkers" was rhetoric designed to facilitate the introduction of measures that punished this low socio-economic group.

Indigenous affairs reporting

During her tenure at The Australian, Karvelas became noted for reporting on Indigenous affairs during a time when highly significant policies such as the Northern Territory Intervention and the Apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples were occurring.

Karvelas wrote articles such as Crusade to save aboriginal kids: Howard declares "National Emergency" to end abuse that were supportive of the Liberal Party's Intervention in the Northern Territory. In 2007, she wrote a piece under the title of Aborigines must learn English, which argued that Aboriginal children should not be taught their own languages at school. The article blamed bilingual schooling as the cause of the children's 'failure', and that they should only be taught in English. The article ignored the lack of government funding for these schools as a possible cause of poor outcomes.

When the Australian Labor Party took power later in 2007, Karvelas argued for the continuation of the Intervention through such articles as Labor is 'destroying' NT intervention, How Macklin took on the Left to transform indigenous policy, Fast track on return of permit system and Agency to force NT truant kids from bed to classroom. In her 2008 piece Labor to overhaul Native Title laws, Karvelas implied that Aboriginal people needed intervention into the control of finances earned from mining to prevent them from being "frittered away".

When Kevin Rudd gave the Apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples in 2008, Karvelas' article Wording divides Indigenous leaders focused on the divisions in the opinions on the Apology between prominent Aboriginal people.

Karvelas also produced articles in 2013 such as Overhaul township leases, says Council that promoted the newly elected Abbott government's push to secure 99-year leases over Aboriginal townships, a plan that caused widespread distress to Aboriginal communities.

The "character assassination" of Larissa Behrendt controversy

In 2011 Karvelas wrote a series of articles in The Australian against Aboriginal lawyer and Harvard graduate Larissa Behrendt which amounted to what has been described as a "disgraceful saga of protracted character assassination". Behrendt was a strong opponent of the NT Intervention and was also involved in a racial discrimination legal case against another News Corporation employee in Andrew Bolt. Karvelas' articles attempted to portray Behrendt as an insincere hypocrite, out-of-touch academic and a "white blackfella" for her writing a tweet against pro-Intervention advocate Bess Price.

Even though Behrendt apologised for the tweet, Karvelas and fellow columnists in The Australian such as Gary Johns (who described Aboriginal culture as being "inconsistent with basic human decency") called for Behrendt's employment at university and government level to be reviewed. Karvelas was afterwards described as "a master of The Australian's familiar false-inference, disguised-assumption, report-as-accusation house style" in her attack on Behrendt. Other commentators have written that the pile-on over Behrendt's tweet left out crucial facts and was a pretext for a campaign against an ideological adversary.

Awards and promotions at The Australian

Karvelas won the inaugural Wallace Brown Young Achiever Award for Press Gallery Journalism in 2008. She was later promoted to the Victorian Bureau Chief and Senior National Affairs Journalist for The Australian. One of her notable decisions as Bureau Chief was to employ the daughter of wealthy winery owners, Rachel Baxendale as a cadet in 2012.

Sky News Australia host

Fromn 2016 to 2017 Karvelas became employed at another Murdoch-owned media outlet in Sky News Australia, presenting a weekly program called Karvelas.

ABC

Karvelas joined the ABC in 2015, being one of a number of Murdoch media employees to have been brought into the national broadcaster since the 2013 election of a conservative government. She has presented Radio National's program RN Drive since January 2015 and hosted Afternoon Briefing, a national affairs television program on the ABC News 24 channel, from 2018 to 2021. She has also co-hosted a weekly political podcast, The Party Room, with Fran Kelly since April 2016. In 2018, she commenced as host of the weekly interview-based national affairs program National Wrap.

In 2019 and 2020, she spoke at WOMADelaide.

In November 2021, ABC announced that Karvelas would host RN Breakfast on ABC Radio National replacing Fran Kelly.

Personal life

Karvelas is Greek-Australian. Her parents originate from the Peloponnese region of Greece. She has two children, Stella and Luca, and a long term partner, Peta Sirec.