Tracey Spicer

Tracey Leigh Spicer is an Australian newsreader, Walkley Award-winning journalist and social justice advocate.

From 1980 to 1984, Spicer attended the private Soubirous and Frawley Colleges in bayside Scarborough, 30 km north of Brisbane.

In 1987, Spicer graduated from the Queensland Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Business (Communications) with a major in journalism.

Spicer began her career at Macquarie National News providing reports to the Brisbane station 4BH, before moving to Melbourne radio station 3AW as morning news editor.

Spicer moved on to television: first for the rural network, Southern Cross Television, and the Nine Network.

The Network Ten station in Melbourne later hired Spicer as a local correspondent and then co-host of the First at Five News in Brisbane (with Glenn Taylor and Geoff Mullins).

She is known for her association with Network Ten as a newsreader in the 1990s and 2000s when she co-hosted Ten Eyewitness News in Brisbane, Queensland.

In 1995 she moved to Sydney to present the National Weekend News bulletins, and late night news until it was taken off air in 2005.

In a 10-page letter of demand served to Network Ten, Spicer claimed she had been discriminated against since giving birth to her first child in 2004.

The case garnered attention in the media, with speculation she was fired because of her age; Network Ten strongly denied allegations of discrimination and said it was related to ongoing restructuring of the news division and related cost efficiencies.

Spicer threatened to take the case to the Federal Court, but eventually settled with the network.

Spicer remained with Network Ten until the end of 2006.

In late 2006, after 14 years with the network, Spicer was dismissed after returning from maternity leave when her second child was two months old.

She signed off for the final time on New Year's Eve 2006, beginning work with Sky News Australia four days later.

She later went on to work with Sky News Australia as a reporter and presenter from 2007 to 2015.

Spicer has hosted the Ethnic Business Awards, which is a national business award that highlights and celebrates migrant and Indigenous excellence in business, for 11 years in a row (2008-2018).

Spicer writes the Mama Holiday column for Traveller Magazine’s Sunday edition, focusing on family holidays.

In a 2010 Daily Telegraph article, Spicer urged politicians to approve the use of "medical marijuana".

Spicer was previously a weekly op ed columnist with Wendy Harmer's The Hoopla from 2011 to 2015 and travel writer and ambassador for Holiday with Kids Magazine from 2009 to 2014.

She was a columnist with the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

In January 2011, Spicer interviewed anti-vaccination campaigner, Meryl Dorey (Australian Vaccination Network now Australian Vaccination-Skeptics Network) on 2UE.

Citing an editorial in the British Medical Journal which confirmed there was now ‘clear evidence’ that the now discredited research linking autism with the MMR vaccine, undertaken by Andrew Wakefield, was conducted unethically and based on falsified data, Spicer asked Dorey to concede the AVN's "scare campaign" was based on "fraudulent and misleading information".

When Dorey tried to direct listeners to her AVN website, Spicer ended the interview prematurely by terminating the call..

And in December 2011, in an article for the Daily Telegraph, Spicer became a public advocate for childhood vaccination when she wrote of her frustration with the growing anti-vaccination lobby.

In June 2014, Spicer delivered a TEDx talk for Southbank Women in Brisbane, Queensland.

Spicer worked as a Sky News presenter until leaving in 2015.

Since August 2015, Spicer has been an occasional contributor to ABC TV's The Drum and currently works as a freelance writer, speaker, media trainer and broadcaster through her two media companies, Spicer Communications and Outspoken Women.

Spicer produced a documentary for the World Wildlife Fund, World Vision and other non-government organisations about the plight of women in Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Papua New Guinea, and India.

In late June 2022 Spicer said in an interview that since contracting COVID-19 in January, subsequently developing Long COVID, she had had to reduce her working hours since returning to work.

By June she was down to working only 4 hours per fortnight.

Spicer is an ambassador for World Vision, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the Queensland University of Technology's Learning Potential Fund and the Penguin Foundation, and Patron of the NSW Cancer Council, the newborn care unit at the Royal Hospital for Women, the Life's Little Treasures Foundation and the National Premmie Foundation.

She is also an Ambassador for Dying with Dignity, and is the face of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research's research into pancreatic cancer, the disease responsible for her mother's death.

In 2015, Spicer featured in a short documentary, Let's Talk About Breasts.

In 2015, she became an ambassador for KidsMatter, an Australian mental health and wellbeing initiative focused on primary schools and early childhood.

Spicer hosted KidsMatters's Starting School videos.

In the same year, she was appointed as ambassador for Autism Spectrum Australia.

In May 2017 Spicer released her autobiography, The Good Girl Stripped Bare.

She was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia "For significant service to the broadcast media as a journalist and television presenter, and as an ambassador for social welfare and charitable groups".

Spicer was born in Brisbane.

In May 2017, Spicer addressed the Sydney Institute on the topic “Ways Forward for Women in the Workplace”.