Whenever the Australians pick up The Australian newspaper on the weekend, most would go directly to the opinion pages to be able to read Janet Albrechtsen and her latest column. This Adelaide-born lawyer-turned-journalist has influenced conservative discourse in Australia over the past twenty years, causing hot debate over all manner of things, including Indigenous recognition and media freedom. You may or may not agree with her views, or they might be controversial, but there is no denying the fact that Albrechtsen is one of the most heard people in the field of Australian journalism at the moment.
Who is Janet Albrechtsen?
Born on 23 September 1966, Janet Kim Albrechtsen is the daughter of Danish immigrant parents living in Adelaide, South Australia. She is a 59-year-old who has developed a strong career in the field of law, academia, and journalism that has placed her at the centre of both political and cultural discussions in Australia.
Upon taking up his secondary education at Seacombe High School in Adelaide, Albrechtsen proceeded to the University of Adelaide, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Laws with Honours. She went ahead to complete her studies in law at the University of Sydney, where she received a Doctor of Juridical Science. Her dissertation work was on the regulation of the fundraising process in Australia, and how the proper mix of legislative prescriptions and market forces can be achieved.
Albrechtsen started her career as a commercial solicitor at Freehills (since 1995 Herbert Smith Freehills) in Sydney and taught at the University of Sydney Law School. Nevertheless, she later switched on to journalism and commentary, something that would characterize her public image.
Career Highlights and Influence.
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Albrechtsen has been an opinion columnist in The Australian, the flagship newspaper of News Corp, since January 2000. Her artwork has also been featured in some high-profile magazines such as The Australian Financial Review, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Quadrant, National Post in Canada, The Wall Street Journal, and The Wall Street Journal Asia.
Albrechtsen has had other important roles beyond journalism, and these have further increased her impact. Between 2005 and 2010, she was a board member with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which is the public broadcaster of Australia. Interestingly, she was openly critical of the ABC as a Soviet-style workers ’ collective before her appointment to the board, so her appointment is of particular interest as a board member.
Other honours and resources also include being the Chairman of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) between July 2018 and November 2019, Director of the National Museum of Australia between March 2015 and November 2017, and a member of the Foreign Affairs Council between 2003 and 2007. Since 2008, she has been an Ambassador of the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation (AIEF) 2008 until 2021.
Life: Personal Life: Marriage, Partnership, and Family.
Janet Albrechtsen is the former wife of John O Sullivan, a lawyer whom they married sometime in 1991. They have three children named Sascha, Caitli, and Jamie O Sullivan. The couple later separated.
O Sullivan is a great name in the business and politics of Australia. He has been a board member of AMP and was previously nominated by the former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to become the ASIC chair in 2017-18, but withdrew his nomination.
After separating from O’Sullivan, Albrechtsen involved herself romantically with Michael Kroger, a past President of the Victorian Liberal Party and a leading conservative political personality. The association between Albrechtsen and Kroger attracted the media, especially when Kroger sold his Prahran mansion in 2017 after turning it into a large six-bedroom house. Nonetheless, modern information on their continued relationship has not been publicly verified, and some sources show that Albrechtsen is a single mother at present.
Albrechtsen resides in the Greater Sydney Area, and she has kept her personal life fairly secret, concentrating the attention of the public on her work and political commentary.
Scandalous Viewpoints and Huge Discussions.
As a journalist, Albrechtsen has cast herself very squarely on the right wing of the Australian political spectrum, and her unreserved opinions have produced considerable controversy over the course of her career.
The Voice Referendum
Albrechtsen was a leading figure on the No side of the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum. She contended that the referendum would be divisive and not unifying. She said that equality would be the one concept that would do most to destroy the proposal to establish a race-based body in the Constitution. She argued that the Voice would provide special rights to the Indigenous Australians that would not be provided to the non-Indigenous Australians.
In October 2024, Reconciliation Australia issued a comprehensive rebuttal to the articles by Albrechtsen, saying that her opinion pieces were full of false claims about reconciliation and offered a false dichotomy, raging against self-determination and demanding that Australian institutions instead provide First Nations people with jobs, training, education, and other economic benefits.
Greetings, Country Controversies.
Albrechtsen has also decried Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country practices as being forced into existence in other places. In 2012, she defended a student who told an off-colour joke in Welcome to Country by arguing against what she described as the New Puritanism of people who consider such jokes offensive.
Recently, she further criticised ACT Chief Justice Lucy McCallum, who incorporated acknowledgements of country in ceremonial speeches after saying the bench wrong pulpit to recite welcome to country. Legal affairs columnist Hugh Selby came to the defense of McCallum, saying that the article by Albrechtsen was misleading and that the Chief Justice should publicly apologize.
The Brittany Higgins Saga
Albrechtsen became one of the most vocal journalists who reported on what came to be known as the Brittany Higgins story with a point of view that was less favorable than how other media outlets reported the rape allegations that former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins brought against Bruce Lehrmann.
Researchers in academic evaluation of the media coverage observed that the counter-narrative has been spearheaded by Janet Albrechtsen (The Australian). She claimed that Higgins and her allies had tried to put a spin on the story by making this a media and political narrative rather than a criminal justice issue. Albrechtsen claimed that other people might believe that they can control the narratives, but in reality, it is the press that has their traditional gatekeeping powers.
The Sofronoff Scandal Inquiry.
The biggest conflict that Albrechtsen has been involved in over the past few years is arguably the connection that she had with the former Queensland judge Walter Sofronoff when the latter investigated the criminal justice system of the ACT in 2023 in response to the withdrawal of the criminal charges against Bruce Lehrmann.
In September 2024, the ACT Supreme Court released court documents that showed that during the seven months of the investigation, Albrechtsen and Sofronoff had engaged in 273 contacts via email, text, and phone calls. These messages comprised 51 phone calls and dozens of text messages.
Exchange of letters between the two individuals revealed that Albrechtsen was being given draft sections of the inquiry report days before it was delivered to the government. She informed Sofronoff that she loved the part in “The Presumption of Innocence”. Sofronoff made his contact with The Australian after the report had been published, and he stated that he was pleased with the editorial made by Albrechtsen.
More importantly, Sofronoff delivered a copy of his report to Albrechtsen less than an hour before forwarding a copy of the same to ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr on 31 July 2023. According to the ACT Inquiries Act, the report was to be given to the Chief Minister only.
In March 2025, the ACT Integrity Commission discovered that Sofronoff had committed a serious corrupt act by supplying journalists with copies of his final report. Director of Public Prosecutions, Shane Drumgold, was able to argue that communications between Sofronoff and Albrechtsen did cause a reasonable apprehension of bias, and therefore the inquiry findings were invalid.
Balancing Family and Career
Albrechtsen, in a 2024 revealing column, has described her own experience of deciding to leave her legal career behind to become a stay-at-home mother. She said: I had left a career in a big law firm in the name of turning my back on having a legal career and being home with my children. Had somebody asked me to come with them back to work with a stack of dollars in their hands when they were infants, I would have declined to do it.
It was a self-reveal of Albrechtsen on the issue of work-life balance and gender role, a subject that she has discussed in her professional commentary when she was critiquing what she regards as misery-guts feminism.
Influence of Legacy and Continuing.
Janet Albrechtsen has been both admired and denounced, but she is among the most influential thinkers in the Australian public. Her articles in The Australian still influence the conservative dialogue on the topics related to free speech and racial discrimination legislation, Indigenous politics, and judicial activism.
She has a presence on social media through X (formerly Twitter) as the account known as @jkalbrechtsen, accruing more than 32,900 followers. She is not just an impactful writer; she also has a presence on TV, appearing in such shows as Q&A, The Bolt Report, Paul Murray Live, and Viewpoint.
Left critics consider her a voice that has long since lost its tether to serious intellectual conservatism and is now growing more and more unhinged. Her advocates view her as a champion of freedom of expression and an imperative in taking down progressive orthodoxy in Australian media and its institutions in general.
Whether through the political side or not, it is undeniable that the quarter-century of commentary by Albrechtsen has been influential in the Australian political discourse. She has always stood on the crossover of media, law, and politics, both in her work on the ABC board and the controversial nature of her contribution to the Sofronoff inquiry.
To the question of what Australian conservatism up to date entails, and what the culture wars are all about, shaping much of the political debate in the country, it will always be necessary to read the work of Janet Albrechtsen, whether to agree, disagree, or merely to comprehend. Her impact on the lives of Australian people is no indication of slowing down as she proceeds with her weekly columns, and the Saturdays in Australia will remain controversial with a morning coffee and The Australian.
