The hashtag that shook the foundations of Alan Jones' power

In 2012, I dreamt of the day Alan Jones would retire or be sacked. Jones had attacked the then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard for months. He said women leaders were destroying the joint. He name-checked Clover Moore and Christine Nixon as other destroyers.

Those first comments were laughable and made the perfect meme. As social commentator Jane Caro tweeted at the time, “Got time on my hands tonight so thought I’d spend it coming up with new ways of ‘destroying the joint’ being a woman & all. Ideas welcome.” A few moments later, Melbourne plastic surgeon Jill Tomlinson started the #destroythejoint hashtag.

While I was busily enlisting people for an old-fashioned protest outside his home, Sally McManus, a union prodigy and now ACTU secretary, started a Facebook page, called it Destroy the Joint, and invited people to connect to fight sexism and misogyny. Within two hours, the page had a couple of hundred likes.

The groundwork for a phenomenon whose power no one – least of all Jones – would realise was laid.

A few weeks later at a Young Liberals function, Jones made the claim that Gillard’s father had died of shame. Destroy the Joint made its first call to action. On September 29, 2012, McManus with friends, acquaintances and perfect strangers, turned Destroy the Joint from ephemeral social media messaging into a movement with real results.

Those who came to the page, called Destroyers, were so happy to make calls to advertisers and ask them to stop advertising. People who’d never been activists before could now take action from their kitchens and their bedrooms, on the train, on the bus. The day Mercedes-Benz took back its $250,000 sponsored car from Jones, folks on social media cheered.

Two weeks later, there was zero advertising on his show. Jones recovered, more or less, but that campaign weakened his power.

In the years to come, there were more campaigns, more boycotts. Destroy the Joint and the campaign Sack Alan Jones made it possible for Sleeping Giants Oz and Mad F---ing Witches to exist. Power to them and, more importantly, power to people.

Australian democracy is better off without Jones wielding his microphone (yes, he’s still on Sky but Sleeping Giants is after him there too). But, ironically, in reaction to him, Australian democracy developed a new form of expression. As McManus said yesterday, the Destroy the Joint campaign, “allowed all of these people, who for a long time had been voiceless, who had no way to take on the powerful, to come together rapidly and take action”. They could do it from home. Calling, writing, tweeting, Facebooking. We didn’t have TikTok in those days – that would have been wild.

Professor of political sociology at the University of Sydney Ariadne Vromen says Destroy the Joint lowered the threshold for political participation. It made it possible for people to feel as if they could contribute in their own way. It also developed a broad sense of community, opposing sexism and misogyny rampant in Jones’ comments, well beyond Gillard.

“The importance of social media is the rapid sharing of information through social networks, people sharing with friends they trust and who trust them,” she says.

And the memery around it, the short Facebook posts, the tweets, captured the attention of an audience who even then had information overload.

Will campaigns like this always work? Government isn’t particularly brand conscious but business is, particularly when the social media going gets tough. See the MEa culpa from ME Bank last week. And big personalities may not recognise their own permeability but the organisations for whom they work certainly do.

“Everyone who is in the public eye needs to think more expansively about their audience,” says Vromen.

I’m not sure whether Jones’ audience really got sick of him but the advertisers did. They know that in their business, the kind of overt personalisation by Jones and others, the perceived violence of Jones’ remarks, won’t fly. The cheap gotcha and humiliation no longer pays dividends. Women are developing personal, political and financial power, slowly, not yet uniformly, but getting there.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney. She has a PhD in political sociology. Her supervisor was Ariadne Vromen.