That tone. Nagging. Insistent. Unrelenting.
Even on the brink of verbal derailment he keeps signalling to his
audience: ‘What I’m telling you is urgent. These words are important. You need to know this.’
It’s a voice that speaks to a dominant share
of the Sydney talk-radio market every weekday morning. It can summon
prime ministers, premiers, police commissioners, sports stars,
celebrities and captains of industry with a single phone call. It
belongs to a man who’s amassed immense wealth by claiming to speak for
the suburban battler on ‘struggle street’. It’s considered the most
politically influential voice in the land. It’s the voice of our
best-known bunyip blowhard: a demagogue who manipulates almost by habit,
peddles base prejudice and will pipe just about any tune he’s paid to
play.
Alan, I want to thank you, from me, for being the best friend anyone could ever hope for. You’re a proud Australian, a unique Australian, and we need more Australians like you.– James Packer, Chairman of PBL, on the Alan Jones Program, 2UE, 2002
1989. We’d reached the coffee-and-grappa
stage of a black-tie function at the Marconi Soccer Club on the western
outskirts of Sydney. Tony Labbozzetta, then a capo of the local Italian
community, was moving from table to table, urging his guests not to
leave before hearing the after-dinner speaker. Alan Jones, scrubbed pink
and looking a little too well fed for his brocaded dinner jacket, was
the evening’s main attraction. Tony was in my ear. “You gotta stay
listen. Let me tell ya, this fella’s really something, believe me.”
Jones spoke fluently, without notes, but his
improvisational riff on the sanctity of individual effort was clearly no
more than tonight’s variation on a well-worn theme. Leadership,
commitment, personal resolve, the pursuit of excellence, courage. It was
par-boiled Ayn Rand meets Nietzsche, garnished with a sprig of Banjo
Paterson. Jones quickly built his little pile of platitudes from sotto
voce beginnings to a level of intense oratory. I watched the faces of
the audience. Surely these hard, self-made migrants, who’d driven here
from their suburban villas, would see through this tosh? But no. They
were all nodding in earnest agreement, lapping up the flashy verbiage.
What was it about this Anglo-rugby–coach-turned-talkback-prattler that
was striking such a chord?
The Jones persona – if there is one – is a
chimera. Slippery as an eel; impossible to define. He’s like an Escher
drawing: an intricate illusion in which up and down are interchangeable,
and where all the parts seem to connect but never quite come together.
There’s no consistent whole; nothing about his behaviour or professed
opinions that would withstand measured deconstruction. Like his
distinctive speaking style, it confounds the constraints of grammar yet
somehow makes sense to his audience.
The Parrot defies parsing.
A quick spool-through of the life, so far, of
Alan Jones reveals few dependable clues to what drives this uniquely
self-motivated man.
He grew up in rural Queensland, deeply fond
of his strong mother. Sent to board at a private school, he was a
reasonable student and keen on sports. Jones went straight from a
university arts degree back to another private school, teaching English
and French. Prominent for his success as a sporting coach, especially of
tennis and rugby teams, he left good positions at two schools after
complaints were made that he was divisive, too close to some students
and too harsh on others. Jones was an unsuccessful Liberal Party
candidate for the NSW seat of Earlwood, and failed in attempts to secure
other Liberal preselections. He became a speechwriter for the then
prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, in Canberra before working for the
Employers’ Federation of NSW.
Jones coached the Manly club to a surprise
premiership in the Sydney Rugby Union competition in 1983. A year later,
after an acrimonious campaign to unseat the incumbent, he was appointed
coach of the Wallabies. He led the national squad to its undefeated
‘Grand Slam’ tour triumph in 1984 and began a new career as
talkback-radio host with Sydney station 2UE in 1985. Sacked from the
Wallaby coaching job after a disappointing 1987 World Cup campaign,
Jones was charged soon after, in 1988, with two counts of outraging
public decency in a London public toilet. He was twice exposed by ABC
TV’s Media Watch for blatant plagiarism, and in 1999 was at
the centre of an Australian Broadcasting Authority inquiry into secret
‘cash-for-comment’ practices at 2UE. Jones switched to rival station 2GB
in 2002 for a $4 million annual salary and a large slice of the
company.
Despite the odd obvious hiccup, this is a
powerful CV for anyone who believes the only worthwhile yardsticks of
individual achievement are the growth of their personal wealth and
social position. Jones has over-achieved on both fronts. He now operates
in a stratum where – because he is rich, powerful and famous – episodes
that would surely destroy the reputations of lesser mortals are
forgiven.
For most Australians watching the ‘live’
telecast of the memorial service for Kerry Packer, the choice of Alan
Jones as MC must have seemed obscure, even bizarre. Who was
that smug, middle-aged man with such pretensions to familiarity with
the deceased and his family that he could refer to the departed mogul as
“KP” throughout the service? He made Packer sound like a brand of dog
food, yet the choice of Jones for this sensitive role passed with little
comment. At one point towards the end of proceedings, Jones, who has no
sense of irony, solemnly described the nation’s wealthiest and most
notorious bully as “an everyman – the voice of Australians with no
voice”. Not one of the twelve hundred mourners dared laugh.
Rupert Murdoch: Well, look at the power of radio. Look at your power. You’ve got more power than I have at the moment.Alan Jones: Oh, cut it out.– Alan Jones Program, 2GB, April 2004
Jones claims extraordinary power, and he
glories in its exercise. His influence flows directly from his radio
program, a punishing 5.30–10.00 am, five-days-per-week effort that
attracts twice the audience of his closest talkback rivals. He commands
the breakfast market in Sydney largely because he’s so very good in the
role.
Veteran publisher Richard Walsh, who spent
months sampling Jones every morning for the caustic ‘Psittacosis Corner’
column in the Zeitgeist Gazette, is a grudging admirer of
his craft. “I’m prepared to concede one thing about Jones. He is a
skilful broadcaster. It’s a slick show. He’s eloquent. It’s eloquence I
don’t particularly like because he’s eloquent about things I don’t agree
with – but that’s like saying the Devil has all the best tunes.” Former
Media Watch host Stuart Littlemore QC is less impressed.
“The amazing thing about Jones is that he’s not even a lightweight. He
has no ideas of his own. His skill – his only job – is to be Alan Jones,
going on with all that crazy populist nonsense.”
But it is precisely this mastery of populist
nonsense that gives the Jones program its perceived power and influence.
He has become amazingly adept at identifying material that can be
beaten into a lather of public outrage. The bulk of his program – apart
from the advertising – is now devoted to these campaigns: Jones
pompously putting himself on the white charger of moral certainty and
riding the tired old nag all the way to his next ratings win. It’s done
with such arrogance, hyperbole and eruptions of offensive intimidation
that few are brave enough to stand against the juggernaut. Out of my
way! Here comes radio’s caped crusader to the rescue!
The methodology that underpins these
campaigns rarely changes: pick a target that’s unlikely, or unable, to
hit back, then go for the jugular. Pursue the victim with relentless
hammer-blows of repetition and keep the emotive crusades rolling for
weeks on end. Yesterday’s rumour becomes today’s half-truth and
tomorrow’s established fact. The Witches of Salem descend on the
breakfast airwaves.
His stock-in-trade is to champion the sad
cause of a powerless individual who’s purportedly been wronged by a
large institution: government, the police, the public service, insurance
companies, local councils, heartless lawyers, large corporations. This
can be painted by Jones in comic-book terms as yet another David versus
Goliath battle – the courageous broadcaster standing up for the little
people against the faceless, indifferent might of ‘they’. In truth,
Jones knows that major institutions will rarely choose to engage him in a
public fight. It would be their single spokesman or a media statement
against his four hours of airtime every day. No contest.
Here’s an example of how it works. In early
March, Jones took up the plight of a sub-contractor running a one-man
business servicing Coca-Cola vending machines. He’d been shot and
permanently injured in a violent hold-up in Sydney’s outer suburbs. The
original compensation case had awarded him substantial damages, but this
was overturned on appeal after lawyers for the insurance company
convinced the court the man had not been a genuine employee of
Coca-Cola.
It’s a sad and complex story, and a sure-fire
heart-tugger that Jones proceeded to squeeze for every last drop of
moral outrage. He swung his bludgeon at Coca-Cola: If we’re going to
have to drag Coca-Cola through the public, we will! (having
already, of course, done just that). Within minutes, angry listeners
were phoning in to say they’d now stop buying Coca-Cola products and
would rip out the Coke vending machines from their workplaces. Good
stuff! Good stuff! quoth Jones, delighted by this visceral
response to his mob oratory. When a caller cautiously pointed out that
the insurance company was only pursuing its rights under law, Jones
exploded: If the world runs on legality we may as well shut up shop! We
don’t need to know our legal rights – this is a moral obligation!
(The next commercial on his program was for the Litigation Hotline, a
company of compensation lawyers who promise listeners they can extract
more in damages for their clients than any of them might dare to
expect.)
Jones continued his assault on Coca-Cola for days: Coca-Cola is practising bastardry!
He read out a list of Coca-Cola products, inviting listeners who
intended boycotting the company to consult his website for more
information. Individual board members of the company were named in
diatribes that bordered on blackmail. He kept referring to “hundreds” of
letters, faxes and emails of support, as if these somehow legitimised
his position. After a fortnight of having the company name trashed
mercilessly for hours every day, Coca-Cola cut their losses and offered
the injured man a settlement.
The whole saga is an exemplary demonstration
of how Jones enlists the spurious ‘democracy’ of public sentiment, most
of which is his own creation. At no stage does he acknowledge that the
views of those among his audience who choose to communicate with him are
not a representative sample of general attitudes. They are, in truth, a
miniscule number from a small, self-selecting group. Yet lazy (or
uncritical) journalists routinely report this ‘talkback opinion’ as if
it were a significant and reliable indicator of broad public sentiment
or political intent.
Here’s the reality. Remarkably few people now
call talkback programs. (Conceding this drought, Jones has taken to
urging people to ring him rather than send emails.) Of those who do
call, only a few are chosen by the producers for the honour of joining
the queue to converse on-air with Jones. The producers do a quick
pre-interview with each caller and make a selection of those who best
suit the tenor of the program. Thus, anyone who survives this process to
have their fifteen seconds of fame on 2GB has been manipulated into a
role that primarily serves the purposes of Jones and his staff. Such are
the pathetic practical dimensions of the ‘tide of talkback opinion’.
None of this is unique to Jones or his program, but it is Jones who most
frequently claims to represent the thundering truth of public
sentiment: Public opinion can win the battle. The power of public
opinion can never be underestimated so long as we get off our backside
and do something.
More deceitful than the base emotional
grandstanding of these campaigns is Jones’s refusal to allow that most
issues – even an apparently simple case of injustice – are complicated
by detail and competing principles. He sidesteps genuine analysis of
complex questions because they resist reduction to his habitual,
knee-jerk, us-and-them terms. Jones tends to stick with the anecdotal,
to simplify until the themes can be compressed into six-word, hot-button
headlines. Richard Walsh, who has medical qualifications, experienced
this rejection of complexity first-hand during the NSW Drugs Summit. “He
was attacking methadone treatment. I wrote to him, asking that he might
possibly take a call from someone – not myself, but someone of
authority in the area – who doesn’t share his view on drugs. I never
received a reply. He’s not really interested in communicating, not
remotely interested in opening his microphone to a countervailing view.
Intellectually, he’s a totalitarian.”
Money has an immense gravitational pull. You have to be a saint if you’re not going to be influenced by receiving it.– Julian Burnside QC, Counsel Assisting the ABA’s ‘cash-for-comment’ inquiry
For someone who expends so much verbiage
trying to give the impression that money isn’t important, Jones has
proved himself incredibly adept at amassing the stuff. Sam Chisholm, no
slouch at negotiating media deals of dazzling scale, told John Singleton
that the agreement that brought Jones to 2GB was the largest single
contract for a media performer in Australian history. He should know.
And that’s not counting the income we don’t know about –
the millions that ooze through the sewers of commercial radio with
secret strings attached, but leaving few traces.
To the bulk of Australia, beyond the endless
suburban sprawl of Sydney, Alan Jones is best known as a central villain
in the ‘cash-for-comment’ scandals of 1999. But five years earlier he’d
already been exposed as a broadcaster who was happy to push a barrow,
so long as the price was right. In an episode titled ‘Optus and The
Parrot’, Media Watch proved that Jones had taken huge
undeclared payments to favour Optus, then a new telecommunications
carrier, while at the same time denigrating its major competitor,
Telstra.
The ABC program didn’t pull its punches: “Let
there be no doubt about it: Jones turned his program over to barefaced
Optus propaganda. You can’t criticise Jones for unethical conduct,
because he has no ethics.” Neither Jones nor his station, 2UE,
challenged the Media Watch broadside. They cruised blithely
onwards, collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporations
and lobby groups keen to buy Jones’s opinions, provided their purchase
remained hidden from public knowledge. It is difficult to imagine a more
serious abuse of the trust vested in a popular broadcaster.
Media Watch returned to the
‘cash-for-comment’ theme in 1999, but this time it had a smoking gun:
leaked copies of paperwork confirming that Alan Jones and John Laws
entered into lucrative but undisclosed “personal representation
agreements” to spruik the interests of a raft of businesses, including
the major banks and Qantas. An extended Australian Broadcasting
Authority inquiry then duly established that Laws and Jones had indeed
enriched themselves in this shameful way. They found that Laws first
belittled and vilified the banks for months, then miraculously became
their chief apologist. That breathtaking volte-face had been achieved by
the simple laying on of cash by the bankers’ lobby group. Jones enjoyed
the benefit of similar arrangements. Result: the broadcasting
regulations were gently amended – not to outlaw these ‘cash-for-comment’
deals, but to regulate their disclosure. It was back to business as
usual.
John Laws, caught with his tonsils in the
till, sensibly kept his own counsel about the scandal. But Jones is cut
from more hysterical cloth. Always the aggrandising self-deluder, he’s
never stopped blustering about the unfairness of the ABA’s inquiry. As
recently as February this year he was still proclaiming his innocence on
air: I have never, ever in my life received money for doing anything.
The fact that someone’s said that is just the most ludicrous
proposition. No one has ever paid me for saying anything. No one.
To anyone who knows their way around
commercial radio and the inquiry’s findings, this sophistry bears the
distinct taint of Nixon-era ‘deniability’. True, some of the later
‘cash-for-comment’ deals from which Jones profited at 2GB may have
technically been done with the radio station, not with him. But at 2UE
the bulk of the money ended up in his pocket, and at 2GB he now enjoys
an immense annual income, plus dividends from his part-ownership of the
station, which builds each year. Yet the same man who so stridently
denounces others who cite legalities still resorts to transparent
hair-splitting as his means of denial: It was not an official court or
charging process, and the only people guilty of ‘cash-for-comment’ was
the judge in charge of the inquiry because he found actually what the
Alan Jones critics wanted him to find, and he was paid to come to that
conclusion. Jones knows he’s being too clever with the truth.
Further proof that Jones will say just about
anything for money emerged after he switched from 2UE to 2GB. At his
former station he’d been paid to boost Optus; at the same time, he had
denigrated Telstra, at one point describing them as “corporate thugs”.
Now, at 2GB, the station did a $1.2 million per year deal with Telstra
for Jones to turn his coat inside out and say precisely the opposite.
The Telstra marketing plan for 2002 provided a
helpful description of why spending $5000 a day to buy Jones’s opinion
is good value: “The audience is extremely loyal to Jones and they listen
to and respect his opinions and they use them to influence friends and
families.” When the deal was concluded, Jones wrote to a senior Telstra
executive cooing, We will be doing our very best to advance your causes.
And he delivered in spades. Jones was soon – and repeatedly –
describing his new paymasters as “good corporate citizens” and praising
them for their “contribution to the community”.
But there’s an even more sinister aspect to this deal. The package with Jones also bought Telstra silence. Cash for no
comment. Hush money. An ABA investigation found that during the period
of the Telstra–2GB deal there were no interviews during the Jones
program with experts or commentators who might hold views counter to the
nominated Telstra line. Nor did representatives or spokespersons for
Optus and Hutchison – Telstra’s main competitors at the time – get one
second of airtime. Yet Jones can still declare, I have never had a cent
from Telstra in my life, presumably relying on his standard
disingenuous claim that it was the radio station, not him directly, who
received the money.
The bulk of the damning evidence assembled by
the ABA on this whole smelly arrangement was never officially
published. After the draft report arrived on the desk of then ABA
chairman, Professor David Flint, its original findings and conclusions
were mysteriously recast. The Telstra–2GB–Jones deal now received what
David Marr, on the ABC, called “the big tick” from the ABA and its
chairman. A possible reason for this remarkable turnaround was then
revealed by Media Watch and Mark Day of the Australian.
There had been an exchange of cloying letters between the ABA chairman
and Jones, each stroking the other’s tummy. Here’s an excerpt from just
one of those letters, written by Professor Flint to Jones on 11 June
1999, three months before the ABA’s inquiry began:
Dear Alan,… you have an extraordinary ability of capturing and enunciating the opinions of the majority on so many issues.This of course annoys those who have a different agenda. I suspect it is extremely irritating to them that you do it so well …Keep up your considerable contribution to the widening of our national debates.Sincerely,David
How nice, and how utterly unwise. Not long
after this correspondence became public, Flint was forced to resign his
chairmanship.
Particulars of Aggravated Damages:
… the defendant’s express malice in publishing matter, which malice includes his ulterior motives being his hatred of police, as evidenced by his serial defamations of serving and former officers.– Document filed in the NSW Supreme Court, defamation action against Alan Jones, judgment dated 22.3.02
“Ulterior motives” … “express malice” …
“serial defamations”: the phrases have a wonderful legal sonority.
Lawyers in that case (Scott v Jones 2002) alleged that Jones had for
years waged a campaign against a number of senior NSW police. Certain
plaintiffs claimed that the broadcaster had acted maliciously because he
was conducting a vendetta against police as a response to his 1988
experiences in London. The judge later struck out that particular as
(legally) embarrassing, but Jones does have an inglorious history of
making allegations against police officers that are later found to be
untrue, and which ultimately cost his employers considerable sums to
remedy.
It’s a recurrent failing of Jones that he
cannot resist a disproportionate response. His sledgehammer crashes down
daily on insignificant lapses. No morning on the program passes without
at least one outburst of belligerent chest-beating. What might prompt a
passing sharp remark from any reasonable commentator provokes prolonged
banshee wails from Jones. Third-tier concerns become matters of
national importance. Like many self-obsessed people he lacks a reliable
sense of perspective, and that can lead him into error.
Some of his most strident crusades have been
against individual police officers, and the general competence of law
enforcement in NSW. He is fixated on the notion that the state has
become ‘soft’ on crime. Jones is credited with hounding former premier
Bob Carr into demanding the resignations of both his police minister and
the police commissioner. But when it comes to pursuing individual
serving officers, Jones finds it difficult to contain his rhetoric
within the bounds of defamation law. His record of substantiating those
allegations in court is woeful. For example:
Terry Dawson, Tactical Response Group officer v Jones. Settled.Deborah Wallace, Crime Manager at Cabramatta v Jones. Settled.Lola Scott, NSW Assistant Commissioner of Police v Jones. Settled.
There’s now another case afoot against Jones,
brought by Clive Small, a former deputy commissioner of the NSW Police.
A jury has already found that Jones broadcast material with imputations
that were defamatory of Small. The constraints of professional ethics
prevent the lawyers who were involved in any of these cases from making
public comment. But why, up until now, has Jones (or his employer)
always settled? Why hasn’t he stood by his own on-air claims and fought
these cases to the end?
One senior barrister believes the reason is
simple: Jones will not voluntarily give evidence in his own defence. “He
won’t get in the witness box because he just doesn’t want to be
cross-examined about his research, his sources, his motivations. 2UE and
2GB always plead a defence of qualified privilege and fair comment,
both of which would require Jones to give evidence and defend his
information. He’d have to nominate his sources and demonstrate that he
was acting without malice – that he properly enquired into the facts. He
just won’t get in the box voluntarily. Never does.”
But there was a delicious turning of the
tables in the Lola Scott case. Stuart Littlemore QC, acting for Scott –
and by then no longer hosting Media Watch – forced Jones on
subpoena to give evidence. It was a highly unusual tactic: the
plaintiff calling the defendant as a witness. The day when an unwilling
Jones finally had to present himself at the Supreme Court in Sydney is
well remembered. According to journalists assigned to cover the trial
who swapped yarns afterwards, Jones was retching in the toilet before
his call. A lawyer who watched the case describes the scene: “He was
waiting in one of those little witness rooms. You could see the steam
coming out from under the door. In court, he behaved in a most truculent
way, which I’m sure gave the jury the shits.”
Yet the continued reluctance of Jones to
appear as a witness has not prevented him from bringing defamation
actions of his own. He’s currently suing the Sydney Morning Herald
for an article that he claims accused him of using his program to
blackmail AMP into forgiving a $7 million debt to the South Sydney Rugby
League Club, of which he was football director at the time. Meanwhile,
the knowledge that Jones is prepared to sue his fellow toilers in the
media acts as a constant threat against anyone who would attempt a
comprehensive account of his life and work. For a person so keen to
mould public opinion and bend politicians to his will, Jones is highly
reluctant to endure real journalistic scrutiny.
Chris Masters, the nation’s most respected
long-form TV reporter, has discovered how difficult it can be to get
anything genuinely new about Jones on the public record. He began work
on a biography for ABC Books in late 2002, even though Jones declined to
be interviewed. Masters finished his first 220,000-word draft in
mid-2004 and completed the final edit by August 2005. That was the easy
part. Since then the road to publication has been long, hard and slow.
Masters remains confident his 600-page
effort, ‘Jonestown’, will be on sale before the end of the year. He
points out that, remarkably, his will be the first book on Jones.
“Here’s a very good question: Why isn’t there a book on
Jones? Here is the most successful broadcaster in Australian history. No
book. Here is the only Grand-Slam-winning rugby coach Australia has
ever had. No book. Here is a man who was at the centre of
‘cash-for-comment’, one of the most intense scandals in broadcasting
history. No book. Why not?”
It’s a good question. Stuart Littlemore QC, a
specialist in defamation, ventures one rather depressing answer: “The
certainty is that he’d sue. It’s almost not worth doing a proper book
about Jones because he’ll sue, and even if you win it’ll have cost you
so much money.”
In the acrimonious aftermath of the riots at
Cronulla Beach in December 2005 the broadsheet newspapers amused each
other by trading elegant opinion columns about whether or not Australia
was a racist country. Alan Belford Jones could have saved them all that
trouble. He knows it’s racist, and he knows how to surf those waves of
simmering hatred.
Whether or not Jones is a genuine racist
himself is difficult to judge from his transcribed words staring back
mutely from the page. We need to listen to the off-air tapes from the
days leading up to those riots to appreciate the full, goading venom of
his self-appointed vigilantism. More frightening still was the way he
proudly put himself at the head of the baying mob. Jones apparently sees
no problem with crossing the line from demagogue to rabble-rouser:
Let me say this to you. You know I’m the person that’s led this charge here. Nobody wanted to know about North Cronulla, now it’s gathered to this. I can understand the young blokes who sent that text message yesterday: “Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday, every Aussie in the Shire, get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and Wog bashing day. Bring your mates. Let’s show them that this is our beach and never welcome.”
No qualification, no distancing of himself or
his radio station from those inflammatory sentiments. Jones didn’t even
pause to question what was being revenged, or to condemn
the blatant incitement to violence against ethnic groups that he’d just
quoted in full. Instead, the king of Sydney talkback gleefully kept
parading public prejudice in the guise of acting as the mere conduit for
community feeling:
I’ve got a stack of emails in front of me. Let me read you this one: “Alan, It’s not just a few Middle Eastern bastards at the weekend. It’s thousands. Cronulla is a very long beach and it’s been taken over by this scum. It’s not a few causing trouble. It’s all of them.”
Then, the cynical propagandist’s trick of
pretending to deplore what you implicitly advocate. Callers who
mentioned confrontation were sagely advised not to take the law into
their own hands. At least not yet:
We’re not giving any ground to them … I do understand what you’re saying, Paul, but we’ve got to back off here … I’m saying to all those young people, let’s see if the full force of the law works.
There it is again. That recurring Jones
insinuation of police being ‘soft’ on crime and not using physical force
to control crowd behaviour. But the ugly truth was soon out. For him,
it’s always us and them. Assimilate or suffer the consequences:
These people have got to know that we’re not going to cop this stuff anymore. You’re welcome in our home but our home has certain rules. If you don’t live by those rules you’ll be tipped out of home.
“These people”? “This stuff”? “Our home”?
“Tipped out”? And who, precisely, are “we”? Surely not another ethnic
group who Jones then cheerily attempted to dragoon into doing the dirty
work he was so disingenuously pretending to condemn:
I tell you who we want to encourage, Charlie: all the Pacific Island people. Because you want to know something? They don’t take any nonsense. They are proud to be here – all those Samoans and Fijians. They love being here. And they say, ‘Uh-oh, uh-oh. You step out of line, look out.’ And of course, cowards always run, don’t they?
So “these people” – whoever they may be –
are, axiomatically, cowards. As for anyone with the courage to suggest
there might actually be two sides to this situation, Jones was ready
with both barrels of venom-filled invective:
Let’s not get too carried away. We don’t have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in Western Sydney. So let’s not get carried away with all this mealy-mouth talk about there being two sides. I can tell you. You don’t hear people complaining about Catholics and Protestants and Anglicans. I’m sorry, but there is a religious element in all of this and we’ve got to make sure we welcome people into our country and we welcome them on certain terms and certain standards and those standards are not being met. All across Sydney there is a universal concern about gangs, and the gangs are of one ethnic composition. And they have one thing in mind.
It defies belief that Jones can broadcast
this bile and not immediately be prosecuted for racial vilification.
During the 1996 Olympics he described a member of the Chinese women’s
basketball team as a “cow”. They’d had the temerity to beat Australia.
He’s an influence – for better or for worse. When you get down to the community level, that’s the way democracy works.– Richard Walsh
By long-standing received wisdom, the Jones
talkback agenda is so attuned to the public pulse that it often migrates
directly to the tabloid front-pages within a day, and then to
commercial current-affairs TV. If Jones’s producer calls, everyone from
the prime minister down will cancel appointments to appear on the
program.
But there is a fundamental difference between
this day-to-day power that Jones’s gift for on-air bullying allows him
to exercise and true political influence. He may well be able to
embarrass the roads minister into erecting new traffic lights at a
school crossing by tomorrow, but the shaping of substantial, long-term
public policy is beyond him.
A dispassionate analysis of the radio
audience survey figures reveals that politicians from John Howard down
have no real cause to jerk to each pull of Jones’s puppet strings. His
reputation for influencing votes is founded on a clever illusion. In
terms of electoral politics the Jones juggernaut is not much more than a
thimble-and-pea trick. Indeed, it’s doubtful whether his petulant
breakfast blathering swings a single vote.
Here’s why. Jones’s 17.5% share certainly
leads the breakfast ‘talk’ market in Sydney by a healthy margin, but the
hard numbers show him to be a far from dominant voice. For the first
survey period of 2006 his average audience was around 185,000 people.
That’s from a potential market of 3.75 million listeners.
In other words, Jones commands a large slice of a very small pie. As a
reference point, his average audience in Sydney is on a par with the
number of viewers in that city for Gardening Australia or Mythbusters,
TV programs that languish near the bottom of the top 100 and are hardly
at the forefront of the public mind. He is listened to by one-eighth
the number of people who read Melbourne’s Herald Sun every day.
The underlying flimsiness of the Jones paper
tiger is further confirmed by the demographics of his audience. Around
70% of Jones’s listeners are aged over 40. A whopping 49% are over 55.
In party-political terms, that means just 7% of his average audience –
around 12,750 people – fall within the accepted ‘swinging voter’
demographic of 18–39. Of these, no more than 10% are likely to change
their vote from election to election. That’s a grand total of 1,250
people spread over Sydney’s 25 federal electorates.
So while the Jones program remains a highly
effective platform from which to sell pensioners cut-price groceries,
superannuation funds and funeral plans, the oft-repeated claim that he
delivers the Coalition a solid block of 300,000 votes is poppycock. The
truth is that Jones preaches to an audience whose underlying politics
were rusted on decades ago. It doesn’t matter much what he
tells them: reinforcing or challenging their views yields no long-term
change, and therefore no change of vote. He may have tangible short-term
influence in state politics but, electorally, Jones is shooting blanks.
The voters who do decide
elections – predominantly in that 18–39 age group – lend their ears
elsewhere. They’re mostly listening to the FM music stations, which
rarely mention politics outside their news bulletins for fear of scaring
away an audience that finds public issues boring and irrelevant.
Jones’s current station, 2GB, speaks to just 5% of that high-spending,
politically fickle audience; the FM stations attract more than 70%. Any
aspiring premier or prime minister would do better to study the pop
charts than the latest Newspoll figures.
Yet the myth of The Parrot persists. The
armies of PR urgers, political touts and spin doctors in NSW whose
livelihoods largely depend on the content of the Jones program accept it
as self-evident that his is the most powerful single voice in Sydney.
And that’s the nub of this deception. So long as politicians and their
apparatchiks keep investing him with that power, he’ll wield it.
Alan Belford Jones delights at hinting that
he holds enormous sway over the machinery of policy-making, but it’s
more illusion than reality: a perception founded on his tireless
self-promotion and thinly veiled threats to mobilise that influence to
embarrass whoever might be his chosen target de jour. At
core he’s just another radio performer being paid a fortune to prattle
his way through all those thousands of empty hours between the ads. It’s
showbiz, not politics.
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