As the anchor of the ABC’s flagship current affairs program, 7.30, Leigh Sales was a picture of composure. For 12 years, she pinned down evasive politicians, charmed superstars and calmly imparted news of domestic and international calamity. When she left the role in 2022, she was looking for a new challenge. A different person with her ambition and grit might have sought out more prestige. What Leigh wanted, however, was to help others.
“I’ve had an awesome career and a really amazing time. A lot of that’s been possible because people have put energy and time into me,” Leigh says, after our photo shoot at The Weekly’s Sydney studio. “Now I want to make sure I’m passing on those skills and some of that energy to other people.”
Leigh is taller in person than she seems on screen, and quick to laugh. As well as hosting Australian Story, she’s been working with ABC cadets, and last year met with a group of young female journalists visiting from Bangladesh as part of a collaboration between the ABC and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The most visible form her mentorship has taken is as host of The Assembly. Now in its third season, the program primes autistic journalism students with interview skills and then lets them loose on high-profile guests. The rules are that no subject is out of bounds and no question is off the table. The results are often surprising, frequently moving, and always engaging.
Wanting to give back
“I think when I agreed to do it, I didn’t realise how emotional it would actually be,” Leigh says. “The thing that’s moving about it is to see what they’re like at the start and then what they’re like at the end, and also the relationships that they form with each other and the friendships that they’re able to develop.
“You just feel incredible pride in them, and like any team of people you work with, you do get attached to your team. So seeing them all be so happy and proud of themselves after coming in often very quiet and hesitant and nervous, it’s just very affecting.”
If you watched the first season of The Assembly, you may remember Dale Mackey. Still in his teens, with a big smile, he is chatty and thoughtful on camera. He asked Sam Neill how he remembers his lines, and elicited the answer that Sam has trouble with names. Dale then asked Sam if he’d consider dating Leigh, making everyone in the room, including Leigh and Sam, laugh. It was an ice-breaker moment that relaxed the tone for the rest of the group conversation.
When Dale first arrived, Leigh says, he was shy and quiet. “He wouldn’t say a word. He admitted later he very nearly pulled out.”
Just a few years prior, Dale couldn’t even summon the courage to walk up to a shop counter to get a straw. “He was one of the ones who just blossomed with the tiniest bit of care and attention.”
A different kind of challenge
Leigh speaks about The Assembly alumni with affection and enthusiasm. The students see a different side to the fearless interviewer who takes no prisoners. They might be shocked to learn that, when the former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci sat down for an interview with Leigh, he recognised and applauded her.
“Wait a minute,” he said, delighted. “You’re the one who karate chopped [former White House press secretary] Sarah [Huckabee Sanders] in the Adam’s apple! I didn’t realise this was you, Leigh. Congratulations.”
“Sometimes guests will say, ‘Is Leigh a tough taskmaster?’ because they’re used to me on 7.30 and the students are kind of baffled by that,” says Leigh. “They’re like, ‘No’. I remember one time, one of the girls said, ‘She’s like our mum.’”
Hearing this was very touching. Leigh is practised at keeping her emotions in check, but her new role has tested her composure. She spoke at the graduation ceremony for the season one students at Macquarie University. Her voice broke with emotion as she thanked them for putting their trust in her.
A platform for change
On the show, we see a picture of adversity overcome, but the challenges the students grapple with are very real, and Leigh takes her role as mentor extremely seriously. Before season two started, she booked a regular session with the ABC’s staff psychologist to ensure she was supporting the students as best she could.
“Sometimes they say things that reveal really low self-esteem, which can be upsetting to hear,” she reveals.
In one episode of The Assembly, Dale’s mother, Nicole, reveals that Dale has “always been told no, he can’t … Even as a child, his kindergarten teacher told me the best you can do is put him in a home … She told me he would never amount to anything.”
These are the attitudes the show strives to change.
“When I saw his mum say that, it was like: Oh my God. All that potential that could have gone to waste,” Leigh says.
Opening doors and expanding minds
After filming wrapped, Dale started a YouTube channel, and Leigh went on and gave him a half-hour interview. It was, she says, “fantastic” to see how his confidence had grown.
“I feel my responsibility is to give confidence,” she says. “Because a lot of people on that show have only ever been told, ‘You won’t be able to do this. You can’t do this.’
“They will often tell me deeply personal things or upsetting things. Say, for example, about suicide attempts. You feel so sad and upset for them, but obviously, in the moment of recording the show, you can’t just start to cry, so you have to suck it down.
“There was one young guy,” she adds, “and I hope it doesn’t make me cry to say it because it was so touching … I’m such a sook, sorry.” She pauses and smiles. “He wanted to ask Delta [Goodrem], ‘What does it feel like to be confident?’
“It really smashed me because I just felt like, ‘Oh, wow, you don’t know ever what it feels like to be confident.’ In the moment, you’ve got to be like, ‘Oh, that’s a good question.’ But you’re just …” Leigh breaks off, wet-eyed, and exhales.
Changing perceptions
The Assembly addresses the notion that you can’t be what you can’t see and provides a picture of autistic people assuming responsibility. Leigh laughs as we shift to the topic of the dream she had as a child, but felt unable to pursue because she had no role models. It was musical theatre. Growing up, she loved the TV show Fame, which was set in a performing arts high school in New York.
“I can still remember every word of the theme song,” she says. “I remember going to my own high school’s musical when I was in Grade Eight and looking at it and going: ‘I want to do that.’” She begged her mother for organ lessons and lucked out with a “terrific” teacher. “She really fostered the love of it, and it just kept going from there.”
Career-wise, she also harboured dreams of being a novelist. However, without artists in her life, a creative career seemed out of reach, so she pursued journalism.
As a young reporter, Leigh learnt what a difference a trusted mentor could make.
Bosses who believed in her
“I was really lucky that I had a number of bosses who believed I could do more than what my experience on paper was,” she says. “I often had people who would give me a shot. Like, ‘Why don’t you have a shot at reading the news?’ Or, ‘We’re going to appoint you to be state political reporter.’”
She was made ABC’s Washington Correspondent at 28. “On paper, I didn’t really have the experience to do that, but I got given a shot.”
Incidentally, Leigh’s organ skills have come in handy more than once. When she interviewed Sir Paul McCartney, she got to play his piano, and she accompanied Jimmy Barnes in a rendition of ‘Something in the Way She Moves‘, at the insistence of Jane Barnes.
Despite these achievements, Leigh still suffers from pre-interview nerves, which helps her empathise with her Assembly students. She was so anxious in the days before her interview with Hillary Clinton that she vomited.
“I’ve gotten a bit better at it over the years,” she says. “I tend to know things that will make it worse. If I’m tired, that’s not going to help matters.”
Overcoming nerves
The week before her Weekly interview, Leigh had interviewed former US Presidential candidate Kamala Harris on stage in Canberra. The nerves arrived on cue. Her strategy was to have a “super quiet morning … Anything that keeps my nervous system calm.
“I’ve become good at going, ‘Wow, I’ve got to go on stage in 10 minutes, and I feel pretty sick. Okay, I observe that I feel pretty sick. I know that in 10 minutes’ time, when I start, it will be past because this is not my permanent state.’
“It sounds so wanky, but I’ll kind of go, ‘Ah, yes, I welcome this as part of the process. This is essential to me being able to get up there.’” She laughs.
Leaving the grind of daily news behind has helped her keep the nerves in check.
“I only realised when I stepped away, how much you’re heightened the whole time, anticipating what might happen all the time. Now that’s not there anymore. I think it generally means you’re at a lower level of alertness. Now I have a more normal life routine, I think that is just generally good for wellbeing.”
The lingering nerves, she says, are part of being human.
“The same with getting upset with The Assembly and feeling emotional. If you didn’t feel moved by some of those experiences with the students, you wouldn’t be human.
“I was thinking … with Kamala Harris, ‘Wow, that is an incredible thing to be able to do.’ You can be sitting at home and watch someone else do it and know that you were too scared to do it, or you can put on the big girl undies and get out there and do it. I’d rather push through the fear and do it and view it as an amazing opportunity.”
“I woke up and felt so amazing.”
On the subject of amazing opportunities, Leigh’s interview with Sir Paul McCartney is a memory she will always cherish. When sitting down with people who have been famous for a long time, it can be hard to break through the persona to the real person. Leigh connected with Sir Paul with a question about workplace anxiety dreams. The former Beatle revealed that, for as long as he’s been performing, he’s had a recurring dream that his audience starts walking out. It’s a feeling Leigh knows well. For almost her entire adult life, she has had recurring dreams of being caught in a tsunami.
“Sometimes I’ll be on a beach, and I’ll see water suck out, and I know it’s going to be a tsunami. Then I see this gigantic wall of water coming,” she says. “Sometimes I’m in an apartment block, and I’m running upstairs, and the tsunami hits the block, and it’s filling up the stairs … Sometimes I’m in the water. I’ve already been hit by it.”
When she began thinking about leaving 7.30, she had a dream that she was sitting on a rock surrounded by a calm ocean. Once she made the decision to leave, the tsunami dreams stopped.
“The first night after I’d finished 7.30, I had a dream that I was surfing. It was the first time ever that I’d had an ocean dream – other than the calm ocean dream – where I wasn’t overwhelmed. You don’t need to be a psychotherapist to work out that my subconscious is telling me it’s all overwhelming.
“I woke up and felt so amazing. I took that as such confirmation that this was the right decision for me to make.”
Chasing new challenges
Leigh’s life is now less intense, but just as full and busy. She has found new ways to stretch herself and satisfy her intellect, like pursuing her lifelong dream of learning the cello.
“That is really using a lot of my intellectual energy,” she says. “I think the other thing that’s rewarding about it is, you have to get used to being terrible at something and allow yourself to be.
“At least for two years, to my own ears, I sounded absolutely horrendous, and it was pure mind over matter to just persist. I’d have days of thinking: Am I going to be the first person in history who will never be able to make this instrument sound any good?”
She describes going to hear the orchestra at her sons’s school and feeling humbled that there were 11-year-olds who could play better than she could. Leigh remained determined. She gets up early every morning to practise the cello before her day begins. It’s meditative and rewarding, she says.
“Just in the last year or so, I feel like, ‘Oh yeah, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.’ I’ve definitely improved. I can see forward momentum.”
She’s also thinking about taking up floristry because she loves the idea of working with something creative that is not related to words. She gets the same fulfilment from cooking. In fact, she and her friend Gwen Blake have written a cookbook inspired by the holiday meals they plan for their families.
“That has been so fun,” Leigh says. “To do something well off my main area of expertise, and then to have a friend that I could indulge that with – it’s just been awesome.”
A rewarding future
The Walkley Award-winning journalist and author has a reputation as someone who approaches everything she does with energy, discipline and ambition, that she would succeed at anything she turned her hand to.
The Assembly, too, is stretching her in new ways, as she occupies the role of teacher and confidante. Instead of trying to figure out how to crack someone open, she’s pondering, “What does this person need to help them get to where they need to get to?”
It has rewarded her in ways she never thought possible.
“I just feel like I am given a lot from that show, when I’m someone who already has a lot,” she says finally.
“It’s a joy.”
Season three of The Assembly begins on Sunday, April 26 at 7.30 pm on ABC TV, with all episodes available to stream on ABC iview.
This article appeared in the May 2026 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
