Sam Dastyari: What PM and Premier can learn from Kyle and Jackie O
After decades wheeling and dealing in politics, Sam Dastyari has focused his formidable polling abilities on radio royalty Kyle and Jackie. He couldn’t believe what he discovered.
Opinion
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Kyle Sandilands is alive and another political leader is dead.
This time it’s National Party Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack who is politically dead. Which really just means he has to do a mea culpa and make a comeback next year.
Reportedly, a move is on to swap out McCormack for Barnaby Joyce as soon as next week.
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Considering he only got the job because Barnaby resigned in scandal, this is particularly harsh on someone who is universally seen as being “a good guy”.
McCormack might survive next week, but that doesn’t matter. His authority is now shattered.
I’m trying to explain all this to Kyle Sandilands at a Kings Cross cafe but he isn’t listening.
He can’t. People keep coming up to him to talk.
I’ve spent my life working with politicians, premiers and prime ministers and none of them get this superstar treatment.
“He’s actually famous,” Bruno Bouchet, the executive producer of the Kyle and Jackie Radio Show, reminds me.
“Not politician famous. People have to vote — no one HAS to listen to breakfast radio.”
I’m ordering a flat white coffee. Kyle doesn’t order. Food and drink just seems to appear. They know him here. I’m learning they know him everywhere.
Meanwhile, my phone keeps buzzing with titbits of gossip.
“Barnaby in Wacca’s office??” one says. That’s shorthand meaning Barnaby Joyce is meeting with National Party NSW senator and powerbroker John “Wacca” Williams.
Another tells me that “Beetroot has the numbers”.
Beetroot is what Barnaby is called to his face by his enemies and behind his back by his friends.
Now that I’ve left politics, I find the rolling leadership crisis in Canberra unreal. What makes perfect sense when you live and breathe inside the bubble comes across as totally mad outside of it.
It’s not as if my hands here are clean. I was involved (mostly nefariously) in every NSW and federal Labor leadership change in the past decade. And let me remind you: there were a lot of them. Carr, Iemma, Rees, Keneally, Rudd and Gillard.
The premise of why there is a push within the National Party makes sense inside the Canberra bubble. “The polling is disastrous,” someone will say. “Let’s change the leader,” the rest will reply in unison.
It’s a model that keeps getting repeated — and keeps failing miserably. Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull and now Morrison. It’s a bloodlust that has now even infected the National Party.
I was able to convince the Kyle and Jackie show to let me do some polling — proper political polling on Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson, as if they were candidates running for Parliament.
I thought it would be a funny piece of radio content for a lighthearted political radio segment I do called “gutter politics”.
The results were unbelievable and show what the producers of radio understand and our politicians don’t.
The Kyle And Jackie Show is No.1 again in the FM market in Sydney. Which is where it has pretty much been for the past two decades.
Alan Jones has been No.1 on the AM band for eve
n longer in his different capacities.
For a brief period Kyle and Jackie had dropped to No.2 — overtaken by their stablemates The Jonsey and Amanda Show earlier this year. After a long run at the top this will happen.
Perhaps it was just an off set of ratings — a “bad book”, as they say in the industry. Perhaps it was a brief genuine dip in the ratings.
It doesn’t matter.
If this was politics the rumours of their imminent demise would be everywhere; leaking, undermining, knifing. In radio there was silence.
Why wouldn’t there be? Kyle And Jackie is the most successful and profitable radio show in Australian history; there would be no reason to mess with it.
Two decades at the top. During the same time how many prime ministers? How many premiers in Sydney? How many opposition leaders?
Breakfast radio shows understand something politicians don’t get; everyone craves stability.
Life is hard, especially in a place like Sydney. Cost of living. Congestion. Overdevelopment.
Just getting around from A to B is a nightmare.
People like having the same radio show to listen to in the morning — and, it would appear, the same political leaders.
Deep within the polling I did for Kyle And Jackie was a fact that blew me away. Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson are actually better known in Sydney than the Prime Minister and the Premier.
Let that sink in for a moment. Two breakfast radio show hosts actually have a higher recognition than the leaders of the state and country.
And this isn’t a flippant comment — I actually have the polling now to prove it.
The National Party won’t take any advice from me (I wouldn’t if I was them, either) but perhaps they can take it from the most successful radio duo in Australia. Stay consistent. Be stable. Don’t panic and just keep getting on with the job.
Sam Dastyari is a former Labor senator for NSW and can be heard on the Kyle & Jackie show on KIIS FM.