Morton wins Walkley for “Mean Streak”

Mean Streak (Fourth Estate), Rick Morton’s account of the robodebt scandal, has won this year’s Walkley Book Award.

Judges said, “Mean Streak is a riveting and detailed exposition of government power gone haywire and the hidden machinations of the public service. And it shows how, in tandem, they can wreak havoc on ordinary Australians. With passion and courage, Rick Morton has transformed a complex, behind-closed-doors scandal into a work of art and a warning for future governance.”

Discussing Mean Streak, Morton said that robodebt was “not an aberration” but rather “the logical endpoint of big data surveillance and an ideological war on the poor”. For Morton, “The very real story of robodebt is one that still applies across governments and corporations everywhere: when people are reduced to accounting tricks, we strip them of humanity.”

Morton is a journalist with the Saturday Paper. His previous books include One Hundred Years of Dirt (MUP, 2018) and My Year of Living Vulnerably (Fourth Estate, 2021).

Presented by the Walkley Foundation and supported by Sydney bookshop Bookoccino, the Walkley Book Award “celebrates Australian writers who take enduring subjects from news, eyewitness accounts, investigations and history”, said the organisers. “Their books bring readers immersive detail, clear analysis and new revelations.”

Eight books were longlisted for the award in October, and three shortlisted in November.

Mean Streak has also received this year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Nib People’s Choice Prize, and was shortlisted in the Australian Book Industry Awards Social Impact Book of the Year category and the Australian Political Book of the Year Award.

Category: Awards Local news