The Project co-host Waleed Aly: ‘I thought about Peter Dutton’

The Project co-host explains why critics’ glee at The Project’s axing had an eerie similarity to the former Opposition leader’s crushing loss.

In the wake of Waleed Aly’s emotional departure from The Project, he has opened up on how he feels about the show’s cancellation, working with Carrie Bickmore and Peter Helliar — and what comes next.

“The word jungle has been mentioned,” Aly told Stellar. “Obviously I can’t tell the future, but I have no intention of doing that. There are lots of other things I’ll have to think about as well.

“That’s actually been the strangest thing. Even in my private life, people are kind of like, ‘Hey, do you want to do this?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I actually have no idea…’ Because I don’t know if I’m available in July next year.”

Waleed Aly has “no intention” of entering the jungle. Picture: Channel 10

Aly, who has co-hosted the news program for a decade alongside the likes of Bickmore, Helliar, Tommy Little and Lisa Wilkinson, also spoke about the moment he learnt The Project would wrap its nearly 16-year run on Network 10 from Friday June 27.

“I only knew, for less than a week before it was public. So it was all fairly sudden,” he said. “The hardest day was definitely the day it was announced, because that’s when you are in the room with all your colleagues.

“People that you’ve worked with, in some cases, for more than a decade. People at really difficult stages in their lives. They’ve just bought a home, or they’re just about to have a baby or whatever.

“This is not a unique experience to us. This is something that happens across lots of industries and in lots of workplaces, and it’s sad every time.”

Looking back on his time on the show, Aly told Stellar it was “a gift” to work with Bickmore and Helliar particularly, who were at the desk with him from 2015 through 2022.

Aly says working with Bickmore and Helliar has been “a gift”. Picture: Network 10

During their co-hosting years together, Aly and Bickmore each won a Gold Logie and Helliar was nominated, and many have argued the show was at its apex during that time.

Aly’s take? “I will leave it to others to judge when the golden age was.”

As for critics of the show who have delighted in its demise and long speculated the show was on its last legs, Aly has taken their glee at its axing in his stride, saying that sort of reaction “happens in a lot of places” and cites the political world.

“I get that because those things are a contest,” he told Stellar. “I remember thinking about when Peter Dutton lost his seat, and how that would be so hard, because not only does he lose his job, but he loses it in a really public way and in a way that is partisan, so that there’ll be a whole lot of people that are delighted about it or whatever.”

Read the interview in the new issue of Stellar out today inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA).

For more from Stellar, click here.