Nick McKenzie Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Nick McKenzie is a published Australian author and an investigative journalist.

McKenzie is president of the Melbourne Press Club. He is also Jewish, with both grandparents bearing the distinction of being Holocaust survivors.

McKenzie has done work uncovering the corruption that exists in business, politics, policing, human rights issues, foreign affairs/defense, and criminal justice. He has also worked for programs such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, and Four Corners and 60 Minutes.

He attended RMIT University in Melbourne and graduated with a Bachelor of the Arts in journalism in 2001. He also attended the University of Melbourne, where he graduated with a Masters in International Politics.

Nick first worked at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as a cadet journalist. He would then join Fairfax Media. His reporting has led to different government inquiries and investigations by police. A 2009 report done into foreign bribery that involved Reserve Bank of Australia subsidiaries led to a national scandal. It also led to Australia’s first prosecution of foreign bribery in 2011. He received a Walkley Award for Investigative Reporting for his investigation along with Richard Baker, his colleague who also worked on the report.

His reporting on organized crime and corruption in the Australian customs service was recognized in 2012 with a Walkley Award. His reporting led to reforms in the customers service in 2013. He also obtained files in 2012 documenting suicides of people abused by Catholic clergy in Victoria. There was an immediate parliamentary inquiry into the allegations called by Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu.

Other high profile stories that McKenzie have worked on have led to public awareness as well as results. A news story done by the journalist in 2014 that looked into abuse going on in disability care homes led to an inquiry by a Victorian Ombudsman and a federal senate. He has also worked on a report co-authored that focused on a large payment to a Hong Kong chief executive from an Australian company, and revealed an oil industry corruption scandal that involved some of the largest oil firms in the world.

His documentary Power and Influence in 2017 reported that ASIO warned Australian political parties about taking donations from two billionaires, and that Trade Minister Robb had been hired by a company linked to the Chinese government. It led to controversial counter foreign influence laws being passed in Australia and would later lead to senator Sam Dastyari’s resignation.

Nick would present Crown Unmasked in 2019, a report that went into corporate misconduct that involved Crown Resorts. This extended to allegations that Crown Resorts was working with casino junket operators who were owned by the triads in Hong Kong. It was also reported that the Department of Home Affairs in Australia was actively favoring the visa applications put in by those considered by Crown to be VIP gamblers. Probes were also opened into the allegations of money laundering by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

McKenzie continued his journalist pursuits, and his reporting for The Age and 60 Minutes Australia featured covert recordings released that alleged to show the Labor party power broker and the cabinet minister branch stacking. The recordings also included sections where the broker makes derogatory comments about the MPs and the ministerial staffers. Somyurek would later resign his membership to the Australian Labor Party in disgrace.

Nick ran into a little trouble in 2010 when he revealed along with two other investigative reporters that political parties were apparently storing personal voter information. They were charged with counts of unauthorized access to data, avoiding a conviction by admitting a responsibility. While The Age acknowledged the conduct in a news article, editor-in-chief Andrew Holden made a point of defending the report, saying that public interest stories needed to be reported by investigative journalists.

An interesting court case came up in 2013 involving three journalists that included McKenzie. They applied to keep their sources confidential, but the Justice ruled that the pledge to keep sources confidential by a journalist was not a ‘right’ or ‘end in itself’ and could be overridden. In the end, the case settled without any sources being disclosed.

McKenzie defeated an application in Victorian Supreme Court about disclosure of sources, the first test of the journalist shield laws in Victoria. The court ruled that identifying sources would put their safety in danger, and disclosure would have a ‘chilling effect’.

The journalist also put together several reports along with Chris Masters in 2017 going into the various allegations that the Australian special forces had committed war crimes while serving in Afghanistan. After reporting that Ben Roberts-Smith was under investigation by federal police and military inspector general, the claims were called unfounded by Roberts-Smith, who then sued them for defamation in a trial that went on for 110 days. The case was dismissed in 2023, as the Justice ruled that four of the allegations out of the six were true.

McKenzie has won several awards for his work, including the Melbourne Press Club’s Grant Hattam Quill for his work in investigative journalism in 2022. He has received fourteen Walkley Awards and has twice been named the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year. He also has been the recipient of the Kennedy Award for Journalist of the Year for two years, in 2020 and then again in 2022.

He has been the recipient of the George Munster Prize along with Richard Baker in 2010 from the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. They were both named the third most influential journalists or editors in 2012 by Crikey, a news website. He also won the Lowy Institute Media Award in 2019.

The Sting is a 2012 book by Nick McKenzie. The book focuses on one of the largest organized crime and money laundering investigations in Australia. It was published by Victory Books of Melbourne University Publishing.

This is the story of Australian investigators who took on a global empire of organized crime. The battle was described as being like that of David and Goliath. This seemed like a near-impossible task that ended up becoming one of the most far-reaching and ambitious investigations to ever take place, successfully infiltrating money laundering streams as well as revealing the global crime bosses that were controlling the world drug trade.

This is the story from Nick McKenzie of how one of Australia’s most powerful and secretive law enforcement agencies made the effort to take down this new branch of organized crime, one that reaches all over the world into many different areas.

Going over different tactics to different players in this world, this is a shockingly true story from a journalist who was there. If you appreciate important non-fiction, The Sting is a must-read.

Crossing the Line: The Explosive Inside Story Behind the Headlines is a nonfiction book from Nick McKenzie.

There are lines that should not be crossed in war. In 2017, there were rumors of executions and cover-ups that had gone down in the SAS, the most elite military unit Australia had, as well as one of the most secretive.

Thus started an investigation by McKenzie and Chris Masters that would reveal much about Ben Roberts-Smith while also taking them into one of the largest defamation trials to ever occur in Australia.

The investigation would go on for five years as the journalists fought for the truth to be known. It would put them in danger as they received threats and more. Read this book to find out more about the breakdown of the myth of Ben Roberts-Smith as an idol and how McKenzie and Masters’ work on this investigation assisted in delivering justice to the victims of this individual in a historic case.