Katherine Keating talks about her new TV show

Kathreine Keating. Picture: Vogue magazine. Source: Supplied

SHE’S the daughter of former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, but Katherine Keating is making a name for herself in the US and has her own television show.

“It’s super-exciting,” Keating tells Vogue magazine of the documentary-style series, launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The series of five-minute interviews is a combination of everything the Keating name conjures up: politics, pop culture, social issues – all packaged with a nod to the younger generation. The aim, Keating says, is to bridge the “disconnect” between older leaders who have a lot of wisdom to impart and the younger generation who could learn from it.

“I want to make politics more palatable, to make current affairs issues more sexy … to try to educate young people about what matters and [that] their voice and vote really matter at the end of the day,” she says.

The well-connected Keating contacted “all my political and popculture friends” to take part in the series, which she hosts. The result is an eclectic mix of big thinkers and fascinating people across all genres, such as former British prime minister Tony Blair, Google chief Eric Schmidt, United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, artist Jeff Koons and model Naomi Campbell.

One On One was launched in January on the Huffington Post’s new World Post website, for which Keating is a contributing editor, and which provides her series with a potential audience of 90 million monthly viewers. It will also be housed on Ideapod, a new ideas-sharing website developed by two Australian entrepreneurs. Furthermore, Keating recently forged a deal with Russell Simmons, the US businessman and founder of the hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings, to publish the series on his hip-hop news site Global Grind.

Katherine Keating for Vogue magazine. Source: Supplied

The format has also been picked up by the United Nations, which commissioned Keating to film a similar series of interviews with the Millennium Development Goal Advocacy Group, which includes Bob Geldof, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Muhammad Yunus, economic-development expert Jeffrey Sachs and Nelson Mandela’s widow Graça Marcel. “The driving force behind what I’m doing…is kind of a humble contribution to try and engage with an online audience about the issues that matter,” Keating says.

The wisdom of her father, who, despite leaving parliament in 1996 is enjoying a renaissance of sorts, thanks to the recent interview series on ABC television, was one of the inspirations behind One On One. “My dad is full of words of advice across so many different subject matters,” she says of the former Labor Party leader. “All through my youth I’ve always been saying to him: teach me about this subject, teach me about your love of music, teach me about this political issue – and so in some funny way that’s where he comes through [with this]. I’ve been inspired by these political heavies who still have a lot to say.”

Keating, affectionately known as “KK” to her friends, moved to New York in 2010 after working as a policy advisor to the New South Wales government, including a period in the office of former Labor premier Bob Carr, and paving her way through the Sydney social and fashion scene. “I started working for the state government when I was 19, and there was no connection with young people, none of my friends were engaged in politics or understood it,” she recalls. “I was thinking: ‘I love politics and I appreciate it, I studied it, I’ve grown up in it, worked in it’, but I was so disappointed to know that so many of my friends weren’t interested in the political process, so I thought, ‘why is there such a huge disconnect?’” Then she saw An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning documentary about global warming produced by former US vice

president Al Gore. “That was a game-changer for me, to know that a documentary could have such a huge impact on public policy, that a film-maker could actually rattle the core of the political system around the world,” Keating says.

“I thought, this is the space that I want to be in, but I don’t want to just be a staffer, I want to be working in the international affairs space in a way that I could actually add a lot of value.

I wanted to be in social-impact media.”

For more pick up a copy of this month’s Vogue magazine.

This month’s Vogue magazine features Kylie Minogue on the cover. Source: Vogue Australia