Michael Bachelard

Michael Bachelard is a senior writer at The Age who brings an investigative lens to politics, focusing on how power is exercised behind closed doors in government, religious movements and security agencies. He is a former deputy editor and investigations editor at the masthead, which shapes his emphasis on accountability, documentation and the wider public interest in his reporting. Across his work he follows the trail of influence, money and secrecy, whether the subject is a separatist Christian sect, an “ISIS bride” facing terrorism charges, or foreign governments attempting to shape what can be published.

Secretive religious movements and political influence

Bachelard has a long record of reporting on secretive Christian sects and their reach into public life, a thread that runs through both his daily politics coverage and his long-form work. At The Age he has written extensively on the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, including stories about messages from its leader being treated as holy writ and thrusting the group onto the national stage. His reporting has revealed internal recordings in which members are instructed on how to obscure who they are, and traced political campaign material carrying slogans such as “Make Australia happy.

Put Labor last” that echo the sect’s messaging across key electorates.

Earlier in his career he spent more than two years uncovering the inner workings of the Exclusive Brethren while working as an investigative reporter at The Age, producing a detailed examination of the sect’s practices and its involvement in politics. That work culminated in a book-length investigation into the Brethren, reflecting his willingness to follow a sensitive subject beyond the news cycle and into sustained, evidence-heavy reporting.

Alongside his current political coverage, this background makes him a go-to reporter when religion, money and electoral strategy intersect, and when a story requires patient engagement with fearful or tightly controlled communities.

National security, extremism and the machinery of the state

Bachelard’s political reporting often centres on the sharp end of state power: terrorism, home affairs and the limits of civil liberties.

In stories on alleged “ISIS brides” charged with terror offences, he follows individual cases while setting them within a wider picture of Australian Federal Police investigations and counter-terrorism policy. His coverage balances the legal detail of charges and investigations with questions about how security agencies exercise their authority and what that means for the communities involved.

He has also pursued the institutional side of national security and border control, co-authoring investigations into how the Home Affairs Department has overseen the payment of millions in taxpayer funds, scrutinising where public money flows and what oversight exists over those decisions. His international work includes award-winning reporting from Mosul on life under and after Islamic State, in which he and photographer Kate Geraghty documented the experiences of people who survived IS rule and the battle to reclaim the city. That coverage, recognised with a Gold Walkley and a feature-writing award, shows his willingness to report from conflict zones and to connect foreign extremism back to the policy debates and security choices at home.

Bachelard’s national security and politics reporting also extends to foreign influence in more everyday settings. In one notable investigation he revealed how the Chinese government pressured publishers to remove or alter ruling lines in Australian books, illustrating how a foreign state can reach into domestic cultural and academic life through censorship demands.

This strand of his work tracks the often unseen levers of influence that sit alongside more visible debates about defence and foreign policy.

Public-interest politics, environment and policy

Beyond security and religion, Bachelard covers the broader public-interest edges of politics: how policies affect land, communities and the environment, and who benefits from those decisions.

He has written books on contested land and resource questions, including a work on land rights in the wake of the Wik and Mabo decisions that examined what those rulings meant for ownership, development and political debate. More recently he has co-authored in-depth reporting on environmental policy and outback land, including an award-winning investigation that questioned whether outback scrub is really as economically and environmentally valuable as it is sometimes claimed, work that earned recognition for outstanding reporting on the environment.

In these stories he tends to combine political reporting with on-the-ground detail, speaking with people affected by policy while interrogating the assumptions built into legislation, subsidies and regulatory settings. The result is coverage that treats environmental and land-use debates as core political stories about who holds power over country, who profits and who bears the long-term risk.

Long-form, multimedia and newsroom leadership

Bachelard works across formats, from daily political investigations to long-form multimedia projects and narrative audio. At The Age he has been part of major interactive features such as “Surviving IS: Stories of Mosul”, which combined text, photography and multimedia to tell the stories of civilians emerging from Islamic State rule. He has also moved into podcasting, co-hosting the investigative series “Phoebe’s Fall”, which examined the unexplained death of a young woman in an apartment building’s rubbish chute and raised broader questions about institutional responses to unexplained deaths.

Inside the newsroom he has held senior roles as deputy editor and investigations editor at The Age, positions that signal his involvement in setting editorial priorities and shaping investigative projects beyond his own byline. He also serves as president of the Melbourne Press Club, reflecting a wider leadership role in the industry and an interest in supporting investigative and public-interest journalism more broadly. Alongside these responsibilities he continues to write, ranging from serious investigations into political and institutional power to occasional lighter, personal pieces – for example, a feature-length defence of the old-fashioned handkerchief and a column about the place of frivolous celebrity stories alongside hard news in a serious newsroom.

Across this body of work, Bachelard’s distinctive contribution lies in his persistence with difficult subjects and his focus on the structures behind political events: the religious networks funding campaigns, the bureaucracies channeling money, the foreign governments seeking to shape what can be written, and the human consequences that flow from those choices.