Ita Buttrose: Australia is 'more divided' and migrants should 'live our way'

The country's vision of multiculturalism was not working, the 83-year-old told Professor Henry Brodaty during a national webinar for the UNSW Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing on Tuesday, ahead of the release of her new book, Unapologetically Ita.

"I think we're more divided. I don't think the multicultural society that we've spoken about so proudly in Australia is working as well as it could be," Ms Buttrose said.

And that's because we've allowed divisive groups to come into Australia. And that's fine. I mean, we need all points of view, but this is Australia, so I think we have to be emphatic that you try and live our way.

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"Not the way you did when you were in the country that you left to become an Australian."

She added that most new arrivals eventually take out citizenship, saying: "So, we have to be grateful for what we have in Australia."

Ms Buttrose was responding to a question about changes in Australia over time, and was asked, "are we more divided, more selfish? More interested in goals than people?"

With a media career spanning six decades - from women's editor of The Daily Telegraph, to founding editor of Cleo, to editor-in-chief of The Australian Women's Weekly - Ms Buttrose became the first woman to edit a metropolitan daily newspaper when she took over The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph in the early 1980s. She later became a familiar television presence as a panellist on Channel Ten's Studio 10, and served as chair of the ABC from 2019 to 2024.

During the webinar, she warned of widening inequality, saying some Australians had become "obsessed" with money while others were slipping into serious hardship.

"Some people don't have enough money, so we have people living below the poverty line, too many. Too many children sleeping on the streets - these things should concern us because we're a wealthy country," she said.

Cost-of-living pressures were reshaping daily life, she added, pushing many out of the housing market and even out of the rental market.

"I never thought I'd live in Australia where people couldn't afford to buy a home in any of our capital cities. That's appalling," she said.

"That's bad government planning at all levels of government, and they've let down Australia and Australian people by their ineptitude."

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