Gold Quill Award

For reporting on systemic wage fraud at 7-Eleven

An expose of systemic wage fraud across the national 7-Eleven retail chain won Adele Ferguson the highest honour in Victorian journalism, the Gold Quill, in 2015, for the second year running.

Ferguson – a senior business writer and columnist at The Age and the Australian Financial Review – is the first journalist to win consecutive Gold Quills. She won the 2014 Gold Quill for her expose, with ABC Four Corners colleagues, of the financial advice scandal of the Commonwealth Bank.

The judges praised Ferguson’s reporting as “an outstanding feat of investigative journalism.”

“It triggered the resignation of 7-Eleven’s founder and chairman, Russ Withers, high-level inquiries and big compensation payouts,” the judges  said.

“The story was especially compelling because it revealed the wholesale exploitation of some of the most vulnerable migrant workers in Australia; it gave voice to the voiceless.”