The times suited him, then passed him by: the Alan Jones radio era comes to an end
With his defence of those on "struggle street" mixed with a hectoring and bullying style, Jones exerted enormous influence on Australian public life and its media landscape. But ultimately, progress ran over the top, argues Denis Muller in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Time has finally caught up with Alan Jones. Time as measured in years, but not time as measured by social and attitudinal change.
It is remarkable that his recipe of nostalgia, bullying and reactionary politics, all delivered in a ranting, hectoring style, is as successful today as it has been for the whole 35 years of his career in radio broadcasting.
Two hundred and twenty-six ratings wins in the highly competitive Sydney breakfast radio market is testament to that.
And power. Former Prime Minister John Howard, said in a tribute that Jones had been the most influential radio broadcaster during his time in politics, a period of 33 years.
In the early 2000s, Jones was for a time a de facto member of the NSW state cabinet. In 2001, when Premier Bob Carr was about to appoint Michael Costa as the new police minister, he told Costa to go and see Jones at his home and talk about policing policy with him.
Only a year earlier, Jones had come out badly from what was called the cash-for-comment inquiry. The inquiry found he and other talkback hosts had taken money from big companies to spruik their virtues, while making it look as if it was their own honestly held opinion.
Yet within weeks, Jones was hosting an event for Howard, who was then prime minister and had become a fixture on the broadcaster’s program.
It invites the question, why?
There are many answers, but one is overwhelmingly more important than the others: the climate of fear and resentment created in certain sections of society by economic dislocation and the threat to security represented by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.
In 2006, the Australia Institute produced a webpaper by Clive Hamilton that described the characteristics of Jones’s audience based on extensive demographic and attitudinal data from Roy Morgan Research.
It showed Jones draws his audience largely from an older generation in lower to middle income brackets. His listeners are more religious than other Australians, more socially conservative, more likely to believe that the fundamental values of Australian life are under threat and more likely to favour heterosexual families in which children are disciplined and taught respect for authority. They were also reported to feel less safe than they used to.
If we reflect on the tectonic shifts in society since Jones embarked on his radio career in 1985, it is possible to see how an audience like this might find the Jones recipe appealing.
The late 1980s were years in which the Hawke-Keating governments opened the Australian economy to global competition. Many manufacturing jobs were lost overseas. Blue-collar workers, many trained for one job only, were suddenly on the economic scrapheap.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that long-term unemployment in Australia reached an unprecedented peak of 366,000 persons in March 1993, representing 38% of the unemployed. The previous peak (31% of total unemployment) occurred in February 1984. Older men had been particularly affected by this trend.
Nobody had asked them whether they thought this was good policy. They felt disenfranchised and their resentment was to surface in a variety of ways: dislike of Asians, contempt for Aboriginal people and more lately, fear of Islam and asylum-seekers.
These attitudes were discovered in much social research during the ensuing decades. An example was a report for the Melbourne University Social Equity Institute on attitudes to asylum-seekers in 2016.
It noted that many of the fears and resentments underpinning attitudes to asylum-seekers were similar to those behind the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in the mid-1990s.
The promise by Howard in 1996 to make Australians feel “relaxed and comfortable” turned out to be a successful election strategy, and for the 11 years of his prime ministership, Howard was a fixture on the Jones program.
It was symbiotic. The people Jones referred to as living in “Struggle Street” became “Howard’s battlers”.
The election of Kevin Rudd in 2007, with its focus on climate change, was calculated to make Australians feel anything but relaxed and comfortable.
Jones read this unerringly and became a relentless climate denier, offering his own version of comfort to an audience confronting an existential threat for which the science was both irrefutable and incomprehensible.
It was over climate change that in August 2019 Jones uttered his infamous entreaty to Scott Morrison that he should shove a sock down the throat of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Powerful women were often his target. His proposal in 2011 that Julia Gillard, then prime minister, should be taken out to sea and dumped in a chaff bag, was also provoked by his anger at her government’s climate-change policies.
This may or may not have resonated with his ageing audience, but at any rate they stayed loyal to him.
He has been accused of racism, particularly in respect of Middle Eastern people and Muslims generally.
In 2009, the New South Wales Administrative Decisions Tribunal found Jones “incited hatred, serious contempt and severe ridicule of Lebanese Muslims” during on-air comments in April 2005.
He had described them as “vermin” who “rape and pillage a nation that’s taken them in”.
These insults were unleashed at a time of racial tension in Sydney that culminated in the Cronulla riots, when a confrontation between men of Middle Eastern appearance and Anglo-Australian lifesavers provoked a violent retaliatory response a week later.
Multiculturalism and feminism have been two of the most enduring forces for social change in Australia over the past five decades. Jones has been a vocal campaigner against both. Coupled with economic dislocation and the threat of terrorism, they have reshaped the contours of Australian society.
The times have suited him, but in many fundamental respects time has also passed him by.
His outbursts have generated social and commercial backlashes recently that were unthinkable just a few years ago, powered by the new force of social media.
For his latter-day employer, Nine Entertainment, he was high-risk. The withdrawal of 19 big advertisers from his program after the attack on Ardern came only a few months after he had cost 2GB $3.75 million in defamation damages, plus costs, for a baseless and relentless campaign in which he blamed a family of quarry owners for the deaths of 12 people in the 2011 Grantham floods.
It may be no coincidence that his retirement comes as his contract with Nine approaches its end.
Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Goodbye, farewell to the past – well overdue.
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Quite telling the demographic of Jone’s audience cited also mirrors similar in the US with Trump and UK with Brexit. Strategy of appealing to and leveraging those (led to be) uncomfortable with inevitable demographic and societal change, often on behalf of others for political purposes.
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Jones was gifted power by people like Carr and others who were cowed. Why would Howard give him so much love? Because he promoted themes that dovetailed very often with Howard’s preferences. In fact Jones had a tiny audience and one that he was beholden to, rather than the other way round.
The lesson of Jones is to ignore these noisemakers and for leaders to try a bit of leadership.
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How could Alan Jones have topped the radio ratings and have let the times pass him by? This is an easy conclusion to make from someone of a progressively, critical lens. Instead the truth is that standards and expectations have fragmented, with the obviously a significant sway of people (older, but also economically and culturally diverse) still gravitating with him, but his language no longer acceptable in today’s hyper-sensitive political vernacular. To discount this is to ignore that a significant percentage of our country is made up of baby boomers and more.
Also, concluding that his retirement “may” be do with the advertising boycott without actual evidence is quite laughable from someone who supposedly advocates the advancement of journalism. Sure the temporary boycott of Alan Jones took a hit on ad revenue, but he is also 79 years old and has undergone bouts of serious surgery. As the latter his Jones’ personal reason and there is nothing tangible to counter this it’s foolish at this point to assert otherwise.
Lastly, re-writing history about Kevin 07 are we? Rudd came into office on the image of Howard 2.0, offering fresh face and in his own words “fiscal conservatism”- sounds pretty relaxed and comfortable and me. The debate on climate change developed after the election, with even Howard casually agreeing implement to an Emissions Trading Scheme at the time. was calculated to make Australians feel anything but relaxed and comfortable.
If this writer wants to be critical of Jones by all means go ahead. However it’s a little rare that this article positions itself as the source of truth on Jones, when ironically has the same cracks and errors in argumentation that is so often applied to him. Instead it’s political slander at its most basic.
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