John Laws obituary: A voice for the battlers, an icon of Australian broadcasting
He may have seen himself as more of an ‘entertainer’ than a journalist, but to his loyal listeners and powerful political figures, John Laws was the voice of the average Australian. Read the obituary.
Australia’s man with the “Golden Tonsils” John Laws spoke for the people of middle Australia – the battlers – and they loved him for it.
In a career spanning more than 70 years behind his signature golden microphone, Laws was at the heart of what mattered to the people who tuned in every day to hear him begin: “Hello world, I’m John Laws.”
His death, aged 90, brought tributes from politicians, industry leaders, rivals and Hollywood stars.
But the man who interviewed 16 prime ministers considered himself an entertainer and a salesman, rather than a journalist, and regularly downplayed his influence. His interview subjects did not.
Former PM Bob Hawke once said John Laws listeners “are” Australia – and won the 1983 election by making virtually every important announcement on his show.
Fellow former Labor PM Paul Keating famously said: “Forget the press gallery; if you educate John Laws, you educate Australia.”
It did not look that way at the beginning when Richard John Sinclair Laws, born in Papua New Guinea in August 1935, beat two bouts of polio, finished at Knox Grammar School and started out as a jackaroo in Wellington in western NSW.
He landed his first job in radio in 1953 at 3BO in Bendigo in regional Victoria where his very first broadcast was reading an advertisement for local haberdashery store The Beehive.
The following decades were a great time to be in radio.
Laws introduced his listeners in Sydney to rock ’n’ roll, Elvis Presley and the Beatles as he spun discs at first 2UE, then 2GB and 2UW.
Television also offered opportunities, and he appeared on shows including Bandstand, Startime, New Faces and Beauty and the Beast.
But it was a change to broadcasting laws in 1967 that allowed telephone conversations to be put to air that changed everything.
Keating said: “The most important thing to say about John Laws is he really made and created the medium of talkback radio in Australia.”
Laws’ broadcasts were often polarising and controversial.
He called his female producers “handmaids” and told them to wear skirts to work.
In 2013, he asked a female caller who described her childhood sexual assault if she had been partly to blame, and two years later told a male listener describing his childhood sexual abuse to “go to the pub and have a lemonade”.
Laws made a fortune from his career which he used to buy classic cars and a luxury apartment next door to Hollywood star Russell Crowe at the end of the Finger Wharf at Woolloomooloo.
His voice, once described as “music to a woman’s ovaries”, spruiked everything from cars, pest sprays and dental products.
“Valvoline, you know what I mean,” became one of his catchphrases.
However, in 1999 he and fellow 2UE broadcaster Alan Jones were accused of blurring the lines in the Cash for Comment scandal by making favourable editorial comments for companies in return for money.
They both denied doing anything wrong.
His career survived and he went on to be inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2003 and received an ARIA Lifetime Achievement award in 2008.
He retired in 2007 but was lured back to 2SM in 2011 before finally hanging up the golden microphone in 2024.
His great love was his third wife, Caroline, known to his listeners as “The Princess”. They had first met as teens but did not see each other again for 20 years until they were reunited, appropriately, in Luna Park’s Tunnel of Love.
Caroline’s death from ovarian cancer in 2020 after 44 years of marriage left Laws bereft.
“I miss Caroline,” he told The Daily Telegraph’s Jonathan Moran after he retired. “We sort of shared everything together.”
But he did not lose his sense of humour, telling the Sydney Morning Herald that when he died people would say: “At last.”
“I’ve been a bit mad,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
“I’ve driven too fast and ridden motorcycles where I shouldn’t have ridden them, and been a bit of a tear-around.
“I’ve been a bit bloody stupid but I loved it, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
In the end, Laws wrote his own epitaph, ending every show with the same line: “You … be kind to each other.”
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Originally published as John Laws obituary: A voice for the battlers, an icon of Australian broadcasting
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