3AW’s Neil Mitchell feels privileged to get up early each day and ‘do positive things for people’
He’s interviewed world leaders and held politicians to account but Neil Mitchell is most proud of what he’s done to help average people that have been “screwed over”.
Victoria
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Melbourne talkback powerhouse Neil Mitchell is used to being the one asking the questions, but for a change, he’s answering them. The beloved 3AW stalwart reveals his Labor roots and now right wing leanings, the politicians he’s found “most human” over the years, his most memorable radio interviews, who he would like to interview if he had the chance and why he loves going into bat for average Aussies to make a positive difference to their lives. He also reveals his love for mowing lawns, which after so many years of early starts and hard work, is the closest thing he has to a hobby.
HM: Do you like asking or answering questions?
NM: I hate answering questions, and you’re going to struggle to make this interesting.
HM: We will see. How does someone who makes a living out of asking questions, dislike being asked them?
NM: I hate being photographed too. I don’t think I’m very interesting, I’m private, and a bit shy. I prefer to do work on air and leave it there.
HM: Are you like me where you find it excruciating to listen back to yourself, or watch yourself?
NM: I certainly can’t watch myself. I have found when I have watched myself on a few docos I’ve done over the years, I’ve thought, ‘have I just spent six months doing that and it’s gone already?’ I don’t listen to myself a lot, I am critical enough of the way I work without sitting down and analysing every word. Occasionally, if I think I’ve stuffed up an interview, I’ll go back and listen to it and think, “Where did I go wrong? How could I improve that?” I don’t listen much to presentation, I want to be natural, I’m not an actor.
HM: You’ve used the word shy already. Would you say you’re introverted in an industry that rewards self-promotion, and extroversion? How do you explain the contradiction?
NM: I’ve never tried to explain it, it’s just the way I am. I’m not an introvert, what you hear on radio is me, I’m not faking it, but I am more comfortable doing it in front of a microphone than I am doing it walking around the room. I am a bit shy, perhaps an introvert, but having worked in newspapers, it took a long time to get used to that public notoriety. I quite like bumping into people on the street and talking to them. I enjoy that, but I don’t particularly like working a room full of A-listers.
HM: We are all a product of our environment. What did Jack and Edith teach you?
NM: Work ethic, and integrity, mattered more than anything else. The audience would be horrified to hear it, but my father was a Labor supporter. He was very hardworking, totally committed to his job, and I think I’ve inherited that. I always wanted to do a job I loved. I couldn’t stand turning up to do something I didn’t like. I have been lucky, I’ve loved it my whole life and I still do. My mother had an air of decency about her, she taught me a few things with a clip round the ears occasionally. Integrity was always very important in our house. You didn’t con people, if you told a lie, you got caught, and in the old days, my father wielded a mean strap as a schoolteacher. That’s illegal now …
HM: You moved around Victoria a lot. Did that help you with your ability to understand people?
NM: My father and the rest of the family moved around the country, from little school to little school, but by the time I came along which was late in their lives, we were settled in Melbourne. I was the last child. I was an accident, and I remember growing up being told I was an accident. I never quite understood what that meant until a few years later. Having older parents certainly has an impact on you. My father died at 65 but in those days, you were old at 45. They were in their early 40s when I was born. My father played a less active role in my life than the kids with younger fathers. At the local footy, when I was playing and doing reasonably well, it was rare for my parents to turn up, even when all the other parents would be there. I didn’t resent it, I was just aware of it.
HM: When your father died of a stroke, you were 19. How did that change life?
NM: It delayed me leaving home. I stayed home with mum for a few more years. It illustrated mortality to me. I remember an interviewer once saying to me that because my father died when I was young, I spent a lot of my life trying to prove something to him.
HM: Do you think that was accurate?
NM: I have thought about it a lot. It could be but I’d be the last person to know. I don’t think he approved enormously of me in his last years, because I was 19-years-old and I was out on the tear. He was a homebody, and I was partying, drinking, and being an idiot. I didn’t have a real job, I was a journalist. I think he was starting to become proud of me as he approached his death. My mother lived into her 90s and I remember her saying to me: ‘You’re working in radio, when are you going to get a real job?’
HM: If Jack was looking down now, how would he grade you? Would he be proud?
NM: He wouldn’t leave me wondering. He wouldn’t like my political views. He probably would be a little proud. I haven’t done too much wrong over the years. I’ve done stupid things, I’ve been an idiot growing up – but I reckon he’d think I’ve done all right. I haven’t breached a lot of what he stood for.
HM: I read somewhere that your first job was delivering newspapers. You said ‘I loved newspapers, but hated getting up early’. Does that mean you only like half of your current job?
NM: I still don’t like getting up early and I like even less going to bed early. I remember going to The Herald on my first day, about 6am, and I thought ‘why am I doing this?’ I’ve been doing it ever since. I love getting up early when I’m not working because you can go out and enjoy the morning.
HM: What time are you up?
NM: Up at 4.30am and when I’m working from home I’m at the desk belting into a computer by 5am. It’s hard to hit the ground running, it tires you out a bit. When my kids were little, they used to send me up because I’d be going to bed before them.
HM: You’ve got a few children and from what I understand, you’ve always kept your private life, exactly that. Is that conscious or just the way it’s evolved?
NM: It’s conscious. They’re civilians. Clive Robinson said once that his wife was a civilian – a couple of years later he was divorced. The kids when they were growing up, they’d suffered enough with people who knew what I did. I remember my daughter injured her eye in the playground in grade one. It was the end of the world, she thought she was going blind. The teacher, who went over to help her, said ‘now you’ll be one-eyed, just like your father’. Funny now but to a six-year-old kid, it was devastating. That’s a reason to protect them.
HM: Have they been affected by your role?
NM: They’ve copped a bit of flak about me over the years, there were security issues around them when they were little, which is not unusual. I wanted to protect them. My wife has always been a very private person. She didn’t enjoy the red carpet and still doesn’t. She banned going to opening nights some years ago. I told the kids I was talking to you and they weren’t particularly keen on talking about what they did.
HM: In terms of your political views, how complicated is it preventing bias in your discussions?
NM: At times, people wouldn’t know how I vote. I would have voted both ways over the years on radio but I’m conscious of serving an audience. I would like to think I take on both sides at times. I had an interview with the Prime Minister a week ago, where people said I was far too tough on him. I will do the same with Anthony Albanese. I don’t think I have a political bias, I think I have a news bias. Of course, I lean to the right and if you are in talk radio in a sense you need to do that because your audience is conservative. Not entirely, and they’re not stupid politically, but I lean to the right. I’m not going to avoid that. But in the end I work for the audience. I chase what they want to know and expose some of the spin and dodging along the way.
HM: I guess one of the privileges of the role is that you can help shape debate but also help shape people’s lives, whether it’s raising money, finding dogs, having politicians become more honest and accountable.
NM: It is a privilege. The real privilege is to do positive things for people along the way. There’s more to do than beat up the politician. It’s to find the dog that’s disappeared in a stolen car, it’s to organise a massive birthday party for a little girl who wasn’t going to make it to her birthday, it’s restructuring the blood collection system, starting the Alannah and Madeline Foundation as we did with Walter Mikac. The positive things are what you remember. It doesn’t stand out for me whether I’ve had a screaming match with a politician, or whether I thought I tricked them in an interview. What stands out to me are the positive things you can do in people’s lives. Finding that dog a few days ago lifted people. We had a nurse on last week who was really struggling, she’d had her car stolen, had three kids with Covid, she had Covid herself, she didn’t have enough money, and couldn’t afford to give the kids swimming lessons. People started ringing in and donating money for the swimming lessons. It just reassured everyone of this level of decency in the community, which I think is still the overwhelming instinct of the Australian community, despite the nastiness now.
HM: Who’s the most human politician you have known?
NM: With all his faults, Jeff Kennett is human. A different sort of human, but he is human. Joe Hockey. I’ve always thought he was a very down to earth and human person. John Cain. Compared to Jeff, he was a bit cold and stand-offish but I got to know him well in retirement. I used to talk to him about the cricket and he was a lovely, decent human being. Even though he’d been Labor Premier, he was quite happy to take on Labor, as he was the Liberals. Joan Kirner, I thought she was special. Josh Frydenberg is human. He hides it when he gets in front of the microphone but away from the microphone, he is a very human and decent person.
HM: You’ve been doing this a long time. What is funny is when you observe people you know well, in front of a camera or microphone, how they change.
NM: That’s true. Some people suffer as they don’t show the public, the listener, the viewer, their real selves. Bob Hawke was very good at it. He manipulated the media and built his career on it but what you saw was real. I think Paul Keating, who in my mind was a far less admirable character than Hawke, that nasty snarling thing you got from him was Paul Keating at times. Bill Shorten, real for a while, then he lost his edge with reality and lost the election as a result.
HM: Is there one person you’ve never interviewed that you would love to?
NM: I would love to have interviewed Richard Nixon.
HM: What would you have asked him?
NM: What were you thinking? Did you really think you would get away with it? I would love to interview Queen Elizabeth.
HM: I wonder how hard that is? What’s the process?
NM: It’s impossible. Particularly to ask the questions you’d want to ask her. Imagine the stories she’s got to tell. The hell that she’s been through in the public eye is extraordinary. I’d still like to interview Rupert. I’ve met and dealt with him but I can’t get an interview with him. I wouldn’t mind interviewing Daniel Andrews; that would be good.
HM: Am I right in saying you haven’t really had a hobby other than work?
NM: That’s the one thing my wife advised me to tell you. Yes. She has been at me to get one for about 30 years. Work and family are all consuming.
HM: Nothing? Golf? Football watcher? Football player?
NM: I played junior footy with some success and I played bad golf for years. I’ve gone to the footy off and on for years. I love sitting on a ride-on mower, pretending I’m a farmer. I love cars but I can’t fix them. I haven’t got an all-consuming hobby about which I am obsessive.
HM: Are you searching for one?
NM: No. Haven’t got time.
HM: You’ll have to find something because when you finally say goodbye, you’ll drive Selina mad.
NM: She’s pointed it out. I’ll keep working. Even when I step away from radio, I will keep doing bits and pieces. To my surprise I am involved in discussions about a new TV project at the moment. I thought I was too old. May or may not happen but it is nice to be considered. I’ll keep writing. With a bit of luck I’ll write some commentary stuff, I’ll do some radio and some TV. I’ve written one book but it was a massive failure. I would write some fiction, I’ve always liked the idea of that, but I don’t know if I’ve got the discipline for it. It’s a strange thing when you work to a deadline, as I have my whole life. It’s very hard to look at a long-term project. I won’t sit around on my hands; I’ll be doing something journalistic. It’s too late to take up golf. You got any ideas?
HM: Do you enjoy the racehorses at all?
NM: No, it’s a game for crooks and spivs.
HM: OK. Do you want to run a surf lifesaving club, and teach the next generation how to save lives?
NM: Can’t swim.
HM: Perfect. There’ll be a Lawnmowers Association you could join …
NM: It’s enormously satisfying.
HM: It’s my favourite thing to do. My wife says, ‘it’s amazing how many hours you can spend on a mower in a week’.
NM: Don Scott and I have had endless conversations over the past year about ride-on mowers. You’re right, you start off with this grotty looking grass, you focus on it, you do it, think about other things and you’re finished, done. It’s so organised compared to the rest of my life.
HM: You can see what you’ve achieved. You do three-and-a-half hours of radio and it all goes into the air and disappears.
NM: Exactly. I’ve written a lot of columns on a ride-on mower, I’ve worked out a lot of problems, thought of a lot of things driving around in circles. I used to do it when I was jogging. I wrote most of my book while I was jogging. I would think about things, get back and write them down. I now do that on the mower. I could set up a business going around mowing everybody’s lawn, couldn’t I?
HM: Neil’s Mowing. Jim’s greatest competitor.
NM: Neil & Jim’s Mowing.
HM: Wow, a merger. Are you still an active Twitter user? How do you go with the toxicity?
NM: Not as active as I used to be. The toxicity wiped me out. The bitterness, the abuse, the threats. ‘Go away and die, you silly old bastard’. I could have found a cure for cancer and they will have accused me of doing something wrong. It’s a pointless exercise. I look at it now to pick up little news tips every now and again but I will not engage.
HM: I was always surprised you did. I was asked to get on Twitter years and years ago by Channel 7. I did, lasted three months, it’s not an environment that’s healthy for me.
NM: I think you’re right. I’ve still got 70,000 odd followers which isn’t many in Twitter terms but I won’t engage. It’s not worth it. I remember trying to engage with somebody about Peter Doherty, a year or two ago. It was during the pandemic. It turned into this abusive tirade about me, about my family. Stuff this. Because I have opinions and put myself out there, I thought initially it was fair enough but then they started having a go at me in a way they never would on radio or personally. Cowardly.
HM: It’s an unwinnable fight too.
NM: I still find the odd little story and the odd laugh there, but there’s a lot of vitriol.
HM: What are you most proud of, from an on-air performance?
NM: We had $26 million repaid to motorists who had been caught on dodgy speed cameras. A person came to me and said ‘I got booked for doing 160km/h in my Datsun 120Y and I wasn’t doing it’. She was an average kid from the suburbs and she’d lost her licence. I thought, ‘there’s something wrong here’. She didn’t do it. I took it to the police and they said, ‘no, she’s guilty’. We took the car, gave it to a professional driver, and he got up to 120 km/h before he thought it was going to explode. He said, ‘this car will not do 160km/h’. I started going on about it. The Age went after me, the Premier went after me, the police went after me, they all said I was totally wrong. I started getting leaks from inside. The government eventually admitted it and people had lost their licences who shouldn’t have, and potentially, lost their jobs. In the end they repaid $26 million dollars. I was proud of that. They were average people getting screwed over and I had everyone shouting at me telling me I was irresponsible. I’m very proud of some of the things we’ve done for sick kids. I was proud in helping set up the Alannah and Madeline Foundation. We helped save TLC for Kids, which was going to the wall. We had the blood collection system rewritten after we broke a story about a young girl who’d received a blood transfusion and contracted aids. She is OK, still nobody knows who she is – we’ve kept that secret. They’d been insisting it couldn’t happen, and it did happen. We changed it so you could take your own blood before an operation. Nelson Mandela, I was quite pleased with that interview.
HM: What stood out about Nelson for you?
NM: He had an aura about him. I don’t know whether that was built up by his history, or whether there was a genuine aura, but I remember being totally intimidated. It was live TV, he had trouble understanding the Australian accent, he was partially deaf, and he didn’t want to address several the issues I wanted to address.
HM: Daunting.
NM: He came on to the stage, I hadn’t been able to meet him before and he shook my hand, leaned forward and said ‘you be gentle with me, won’t you?’ He would read your body language. If he was talking too much I would move in my chair and he’d cut his answer short. He was superb. The best look on his face was when a little kid came up on the stage to present him with something. You see it in a good teacher, a genuine shining warmth for a little kid. He was so delighted, and he was a gentleman. An absolute delight to deal with. I’m just some bozo reporter in Melbourne to get stuff out of him.
HM: The Covid crisis has exhausted everyone. How did it affect you?
NM: It wiped me out. I did it easy compared to a lot of people. I still had a job, I still got paid, but I felt the pressure, particularly in those days where there was no treatment, no vaccine, from people who were just frightened. And rightly so. They were calling me in tears, and you can’t help but take that on board. I was comfortable, working from home, comparatively safe, the wages were coming in. You had people ringing you in terror, people who hadn’t been able to leave their house and were living there alone. It was one of the most demanding, but also most rewarding things that we’ve done.
HM: Any part in particular?
NM: We set up a system where we would ring people without them knowing we were calling; we’d get their number quietly and ring them and talk to them about what it was like. We got some extraordinary stories; you just step into their life. An old lady was living in a four-bedroom house all by herself and she was all right but another man was in tears because he’s lost his job, and his wife still had hers, so she was the breadwinner. He was crying saying, ‘I’ve let her down’. She came on the phone and said ‘you haven’t let us down’. It was raw, genuine, human experience. It was a privilege to broadcast it but also help people with it.
HM: What’s the one positive to come out of Covid?
NM: I had hoped it would be a unity of purpose. If we can’t all get on the same page to fight something like this, there’s something wrong. That’s gone. It lasted about a month. I thought there would be a community concern for each other but it’s gone the other way. There’s a level of bitterness in the community and nastiness. We have kids wearing body cameras in supermarkets. Maybe we will get the health system organised at last. I’ve been campaigning on that for 30 years. Maybe we have woken up to the fact that the health system is crumbling, and maybe we will listen more to the people in the middle of it who understand it. The doctors, the nurses, the staff in the hospitals. I haven’t seen anything positive yet, I hope it’s coming … have you seen anything?
HM: It’s a small observation but people’s flexibility seems to be weighted more towards their own family, rather than the employer, which I maintain is the right way to have the balance. I feel much more comfortable now ringing whoever I was supposed to be meeting with, saying, ‘I can’t make it, my daughters just qualified for district swimming’. Family being first is now not questioned.
NM: I think that’s a good point. The working from home is part of it. We have had the Chief Minister of Tasmania and the Premier in the Northern Territory who have both quit within recent weeks, for their families. Maybe kids will grow up thinking they don’t have to work like you and me to justify themselves, or to get ahead. Maybe people are taking more of their life balance into account? We have always known that family is the most important thing but it’s so easy to lose focus on that when you are on the treadmill. There are times I have been pedalling too hard to pay the attention I should have paid. That’s why you need grandkids, to make up for the mistakes.
HM: Or have youth around you every day. You have a great team of Millennials and Gen Zs around you. Do they keep you feeling young?
NM: They do. They challenge you. I like to work in a democratic environment. Actually it’s more a benevolent dictatorship because I make the decisions in the end, but I like people to debate, challenge, argue, and tell me I’m wrong. It’s a good thing to have that level of challenge intellectually, and professionally. What is better than having a bright kid stand you up and say, ‘hang on, what about this?’ They might be right or wrong but they’ll make you think about it. Les Carlyon was always a great teacher in that way. He loved dealing with the younger kids and bringing them along and mentoring them. I was lucky enough to be one of them.
HM: He was one of your mentors you’ve lost, and Tony Beddison the other? What was the great lesson from Tony?
NM: I wouldn’t be in the job if it wasn’t for Tony. Every time I quit, he talked me out of it. It happened a few times. Tony taught me patience, he taught me how to take a step back and think things through. I tend to be hot headed at times. He would be an enormously positive sounding board for a bit of rational thinking. A typical successful businessman and such a decent man. Both Les and Beddo were overwhelmingly decent people. Beddo had a magnificent sense of fun and Les is the best operator I have seen in my career. I miss both desperately. I would ring Les on the way to work at 4.30am and he’d still be up of course. I’d still be talking to him at 5.45am. Bouncing things off him, getting ideas. He was very subtle telling me his ideas and turning them into yours. I also often rang Beddison for advice on things. Even now I find myself thinking, ‘I wonder what Les would think of that?’
HM: Bruce McAvaney, Dennis Cometti and Les are the three individuals that have made it the most enjoyable ride for me. Going to the races now has nowhere near as much gravitas and fun as it did when Les was there.
NM: The beauty of Les Carlyon is you could read his description of a Melbourne Cup from start to finish and even I could understand it as a bloke who’s hardly been on a horse and hasn’t really got any interest in racing. Even I could understand what it was about, and that’s genius. Then you could read him on a federal budget and do the same thing.
HM: He had the best way of bringing to life a vision. I read a line once. It was a heavy, wet winter’s day in Melbourne, Flemington, and he was talking about a couple of old stayers. He said ‘their lungs were screaming, legs were hurting, and they were doing it on memory’. He was unbelievable.
NM: And he worked so hard over it. He sweated over it. He was so smooth, just magnificent. I often think of him. I tried to tell him in his last days how important he was to me, and typically, he’d tell me to piss off!
HM: He would have known.
NM: I hope he did. A great man, who had a huge influence on my life professionally and morally. Les taught me very early in my journalistic career at The Age to stand up for what was right.
HM: You are so busy, you have a huge number of colleagues, how many close, close friends do you have.
NM: I haven’t got a lot of close friends, other than my family.
HM: That wasn’t supposed to be a negative. I have an amazing number of colleagues, but I only have four or five really close friends.
NM: Les and Tony were very close friends and I have a close friend I went to school with who I saw recently. He’s a scientist who’s been living in the States for 40 years. Whenever I see or speak to him, within minutes we are as close as we ever were.
HM: Is that outcome because of the hours worked, which means you spend all the time with your colleagues, and your friends are the ones that suffer?
NM: You have got to put effort into maintaining friendships and I haven’t done that because I’ve been working.
HM: Mum has always said if you have five close friends, you’ve had an unbelievable life. Close friends. Did you want to write, or did you want to talk? Did you fall into talking through Hinch?
NM: I decided when I was 14 that I wanted to be a journalist. It’s because I wanted to write, to be out and about, and not be locked in an office. Now I am locked in an office all day, not writing, but talking. I always wanted to write and I still like writing, although it’s very hard. Very hard to do well. I’m a harsh critic and I don’t think I’m a particularly good writer but on my day, I can get a message across in an uncomplicated way.
HM: How do you find the rolling deadline? Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
NM: It’s onerous but in another way it’s refreshing. You turn off that microphone at midday, and if you’ve stuffed something up, it’s too late. It’s gone. By 12.30pm, when we have our production conference, I’ve forgotten what we did that day. I’m looking to the day ahead.
HM: Have you ever got something completely wrong?
NM: Yes.
HM: Is there one you regret?
NM: I can’t think of one I’ve got wrong that has been hurtful, or harmed people. I can’t say I have ever been furious about something and gone after someone, and then sat down and said I was wrong. I may have but nothing sits in the conscience that says I was unfair to that person.
HM: If you could have taken the new ball for Australia, or opened for Australia, which would you have taken as a kid?
NM: I would have opened. When I played junior cricket I always preferred batting, and I bowled spin. I once took four wickets in five balls.
HM: A hat trick?
NM: I did. Bob Hawke was the first wicket of the hat trick.
HM: As PM?
NM: No, he was president of the ACTU at the time. The unions vs the press. He tried to hit me out of the park, and I got him middle stump. He was shitty. We were walking off and he says, ‘still don’t know how you did that’. Neither did I, really.
HM: If you were a footballer, who would you be likened to in the AFL?
NM: A trier. I played underage footy and was captain of the team for a couple of years. I was a trier without much skill. I got a fair bit of it but couldn’t kick on my wrong foot. Not anybody playing AFL is that bad these days, are they?
HM: I’ll find a player that’s going to be delisted.
NM: That’s about right. I loved it but I stuffed up my knee and had to retire at age 17.
HM: You used to be a cynical Melbourne supporter – now you must be an excited one?
NM: It’s a danger game this week …
HM: Can you believe that you can now turn on the television and at this moment watch the best team in the league, and they are wearing red and blue?
NM: It still makes me nervous to watch a game, or go to a game, thinking we are supposed to win this. We are the favourites. I remember saying I thought the Hawks worked us out, St Kilda will have learnt from that. I am still pessimistic. I’ve been following them since I was born. My father was captain and coach of Emerald, in football and cricket. He was a very good country footballer. He was always a Melbourne supporter. He used to take me into the members, he’d go into the smokers and sit me with a family to watch it. I thought, that’s nice, he knows all these people. I found out later he didn’t know them. He’d just go up to them and say ‘watch this kid, will you?’
HM: What?
NM: You wouldn’t do it now. It had to be Melbourne; my brother was on the board there for years. They certainly look good now, although we’ve had a very good run with injuries … North could be a danger this week …
HM: Is it true that on your first day, the sound of your voice had the listeners filling the board?
NM: Yes, they didn’t like it.
HM: Ross Stevenson surprised you on air on the 30th anniversary of your radio career. He made the observation that your voice hadn’t changed in 35 years.
NM: Not much. I’ve learnt a few presentation tricks. Even when I was saying happy, positive things, people thought I was complaining. They thought I had a whinging voice. That was the main criticism we got for the first year. I was just thrown in; I never got any advice from anybody on how to do it. I might have told them to stick it but never got any advice from anyone. Hinch once said to me ‘if you’re writing a script, and you make an error, just let it stand and correct it in the script, it’s more natural’.
HM: What have you learnt over 30 years on air?
NM: What I’ve learnt more than anything is to totally be yourself. If I am angry, I’m angry. I’ve shed tears often on air, I nearly did this week when we found a dog that had been lost. If you are emotional, show it. Don’t pretend. Don’t focus too much on how you say it, worry about what you say, and be real. If they don’t like it, you’re gone, but presumably they don’t dislike it too much because I’ve been there 35 years. That and remember who you work for, your audience.
HM: Be yourself, work hard.
NM: That’s right. My wife said to me, ‘it should get easier’. The night before a big story, I don’t sleep well. Maybe it’s insecurity, attention to detail, I don’t know.
HM: There are two parts of that which resonate with me. The first day I ever met Bruce, he held his arms out as wide as he could and he said ‘do this much preparation’. Then he narrowed his pointing finger and his thumb together, about a centimetre apart, and he said, ‘you’ll only use this much but you don’t know which it is, so you’ve got to do it all’.
NM: I’ve never known anyone who’s been successful who isn’t a hard worker.
HM: As they say, you don’t fall on top of the mountain.
NM: That’s right. Look at Ross Stevenson. He gets in at 5.10am and leaves at 8.40am. Ross’ mind works every moment he is awake and sometimes when he is asleep, coming up with silly lines, names for people. He never stops working. He has a brilliant mind, and it never stops. He doesn’t do it easy. I don’t know anybody who does. Those that have tried to cut corners, who try to do it easy, get caught.
HM: Anyone who makes a good off the cuff speech, has generally spent eight weeks preparing it. If you were going to ask Neil Mitchell a question, that he hadn’t been asked much, and it would illicit an outstanding response, what would the question be?
NM: It’s not about me, but in media, all of us, I’d ask ‘how do we turn it into something more positive than it is? How do we survive?’ The future of the media really worries me. Newspapers, radio, TV. How do we make media a more positive influence on the world and represent and work for our audience better? Media has lost the plot, it’s self-interested, self-promoting, superficial, often irrelevant. I don’t know if it can be done, it might be too late. I grew up believing working in the media could change the world, I could make the world a better place, could really help be a positive influence on the world. We are not doing it anymore.
HM: We need to … A book I should read?
NM: I still like The World According To Garp. John Irving. There’s a line in that, ‘keep walking past open windows’. I read Joe Hockey’s book recently.
HM: What makes you happiest?
NM: I am happy when I am working but what makes me happiest is Saturday afternoon, kids around, barbecue, family, dog running around, relaxed. Either that, or the ride-on mower.
HM: Or both? Family by the BBQ, you on the mower?
NM: I’ve been lucky enough to have some magic moments with the family. I remember when we were moving some years ago, a house my wife and I had been in for 40 years. The kids had grown up there, and we all sat down one night and talked about our memories of the house. To hear those kids talking about their memories growing up, it was really one of the highlights of parenthood. Admittedly, not all memories are great but they remembered things I’d forgotten. It happens rarely, too rarely, but to sit down with the family and have that discussion, there’s nothing better than that. It’s a reassessment of your life, it’s an absorption of your life, and a reminder of what matters. At my age, you look back, you look at your adult kids and you think, ‘what should I have done when they were little? I mucked this up, I did this wrong’.
HM: Was it generally around spending not enough time with them?
NM: That’s part of it, or not doing things that they wanted. Remember that song, Cat’s in the Cradle?
HM: Cat Stevens.
NM: When I was working at The Herald, I’d leave at six and get home at six. I wouldn’t see the daylight in winter. My daughter was born when I was there. I was there two-and-a-half years, and I missed two-and-a-half years of her life. I was there at weekends or if the phone didn’t ring but that’s atrocious. Looking back, that’s one of the things I really regret. She doesn’t feel bad about it at all, neither does my son.
HM: ‘Can you teach me how to throw? I said – not today, I got a lot to do, he said that’s OK.’
NM: ‘As I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he’d grown up just like me, my boy was just like me’. I was talking to my son the other day and he said to me, ‘I’ve got to go, work’s calling’. I said “righto mate, I remember the song.’
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