Why Virginia Haussegger won’t stay silent

Virginia Haussegger has experienced a variation of the same criticism throughout her career. 

Time and time again, the award-winning journalist, writer, commentator and advocate, has been asked if she could just stay silent. 

She has voiced her opinions in and out of newsrooms, and has always struggled with the concept that a presenter, as she puts it, “ought to be mute”. 

“I’ve always been opinionated,” she tells Helen McCabe as part of FW’s Too Much podcast. 

“I come from a family of six kids who are all opinionated and our parents really encouraged us to talk and to think and to argue”. 

When Haussegger first started working at Channel Nine, she remembers what one of her heroes, Australian journalist Jana Wendt, said in an interview. 

“[Jana] was asked her opinion about a particular issue that was going on at the time and was quoted as saying, and I’ll never forget this, ‘my opinions don’t matter’,” she says.

“I was shocked and confused by that. And, to be honest, a little bit angry.”

Image credit: Sevim Dogan Ozkan

Haussegger battled with this notion – the notion that she should fit a mould because no one would be “interested in what I thought at all” – throughout her career. 

“I really struggled with that,” she says. 

“How can I be presenting the news night after night for year upon year upon year [but I was] not entitled to express an opinion, particularly political opinion.”

Haussegger first experienced heat and blowback in “a very personal way” when she started writing columns. 

“It got to the point where, every Monday, I was called into my boss’s office and ripped apart for what I had written in my column,” she recalled.  

“So every bloody Monday I’d be called in and be read the riot act.” 

One column in particular struck a raw nerve.

In 2002, Haussegger expressed her anger at how she had been told she could “have it all” when, in her late thirties, she discovered it was too late for her to have children. 

The blowback was immediate and vicious. It was, in Haussegger’s words, a “public king hit”. 

One headline in The Age read, “Meet Virginia, the woman some love to loathe”. 

Another headline simply demanded, “Shut up you brat”. 

Haussegger remembers “hiding under a rock” and talking to her parents during this period. 

“[My] beautiful mum who was a very polite person … and she said, ‘Oh, darling, I wish you would stop writing these things’,” Haussegger recalls. 

“And then mum said: ‘Oh, darling, look, I would, I think you should just stop talking’.”

But instead Haussegger made a decision to continue talking, to “make a fuss and fight it”. 

“I said what I had to say because it was the truth,” she says. 

“And I could hear people discussing me and public speaking absolute nonsense, as if they knew me, and I didn’t.”

She hopes other women – particularly those who have been told they are too opinionated – will not be cowed into silence.

“I would say very, very clearly do not stop being that [outspoken] person,” she says. 

“[We might] make a bit too much noise and therefore, crowd out a few other voices … but we are not wrong being who we are, as long as we are respectful and mindful of others in our feelings. We’re not wrong. 

“The problem is, we’re women. We’re girls. And we live … in a very misogynist culture that still doesn’t see that women should take up and fill space in the way that men and boys do.”