‘A bit of a slow-motion train wreck’: 3AW’s Tom Elliott on his infamous father’s fall

This story is part of the March 23 edition of Good Weekend.See all 18 stories.

It’s 4.58am on a Monday in late January, still dark, and Tom Elliott marches south by streetlight, the roads of Melbourne silent but for the metrical tramping of his feet. The newly minted 3AW Mornings host sets a cracking pace on the 40-minute walk from his home in inner-city Fitzroy to his radio booth in the city’s Docklands.

“I like to train hard,” says Elliott, 56, wearing ­runners, shorts and his stylistic trademark – a violently ugly Hawaiian shirt. “I’ll go for a swim and to the gym after the show. A surf on the weekend. This is extra. It burns calories and lets me gather my thoughts.”

For someone who has spent the past dozen years on the Drive show – a cruisy and coveted 3pm hosting slot – rising at sparrow’s since taking over Mornings in mid-January has been tough. “There’s a double shock, too,” Elliott adds, “because there’s really no easing into this job.”

That’s an understatement. Mornings are prime time in radio land, particularly commercial talkback like 3AW, where haranguing and harrumphing hosts ­hammer home topics for imaginary water-cooler conversations. It’s a responsibility compounded for Elliott by the shadow of his predecessor, Neil Mitchell, who dominated Victorian airwaves for most of his 34 years in charge, building and catering to a broad-church audience that skews a little older than younger, more male than female, outer suburban over inner, but which Elliott characterises as “pretty much middle Australia”. Part of the Nine stable (publisher of Good Weekend), it’s the top-rating mornings show (8.30am to 12pm) in Melbourne, virtually unchallenged in the slot. Big shoes? Mitchell was seated at his send-off lunch between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. So yeah, kinda.

“For influence and platform in Victoria, the premier is always hard to beat. The head of the AFL, too. But the host of the Mornings program on 3AW isn’t far ­behind,” says Shane Healy, the former station manager who hired Elliott back in 2012, wresting him away from a career in finance. “You’re setting the agenda for a city of more than five million Australians.”

When we speak in the middle of summer, the latest partial survey of results hasn’t yet dropped (we’ll discuss those later), so Elliott has little idea how he’s resonating with his new listeners. But if the host is feeling any nerves about that, they’re not showing. He seems to know who he is and isn’t. He definitely isn’t Mitchell – a former newspaper editor who clung to his ink-stained origins, curating his show like an aural version of a print product, with his lead story acting as a viva voce front page before cascading through the lifestyle, ­entertainment and sport sections. He also isn’t the man he succeeded at Drive, Derryn “the Human Headline” Hinch, who had a rigid format for parsing each topic: Hinch’s own unwavering opinion, an expert interview, then talkback – one outrage at a time.

Elliott “sees things differently”. He reckons people now consume radio exactly as they do social media, so he touches lightly on all topics up front then returns to each one periodically – offering less segmentation, more fragmentation. “The audience dips in and out, and my view is whenever they listen they should get a snapshot of what you’ve been talking about all morning.”

Elliott took over in January from Neil Mitchell as host of 3AW’s Mornings program, a job Mitchell had held for 34 years.Credit: Jason South

Finding things to talk about is easier in this gig, too. In the afternoon, the news cycle has been chewed over and picked clean. But in the morning, you eat first from the buffet. As we amble in darkness down Collins Street, Elliott peers into the light of his phone, scanning the ideas he bombarded his producers with all weekend. Are we upset that vandals just chopped down a statue of Captain Cook? Should a Prahran school teacher be allowed to talk about conflict in the Middle East? Could local councils freeze rates to ease the cost of living? What to do about graffiti in the CBD? Protests in the CBD? Workers not returning to offices in the CBD?

Now inside his own CBD office, Elliott reads the newspapers – three in 30 minutes – and at 6.37am gathers his team to spitball conversation ­starters, like the article in his hand now: an op-ed from The Australian advocating the reintroduction of conscription. “That always fires people up,” says ­executive producer Michael Hilder, nodding. “Our ­audience loves it: ‘Sort out the young people! Give them a sense of pride and purpose!’ ”

Senior producer Jimmy Szabo pitches the latest Qantas woes – maybe something wider about brands on the nose? “Which brands need to fix themselves? Optus? Medibank?” Szabo asks. “Woolworths? The Melbourne Football Club?”

Radio is, of course, one of the most egotistical forms of media imaginable, with hosts cloistered alone in soundproof booths, prattling away in the belief that anyone cares. But Elliott insists the endeavour is ­collaborative – even democratic – not just within his team but among his listeners, too. It’s not really about his opinions, but yours.

“Your letter to the editor might not get published. You can’t get on television. And your online comments probably won’t get read. But we’ll listen.” He loves the performative part, too. Headphones on with 30 seconds to go, he likens it to live theatre. “It’s a rush. It really is. To have a microphone and a platform every day to say what you think? It’s a great privilege.”

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Speaking of privilege, we’re in the kitchen of Tom Elliott’s home, a sleek architectural addition to what was once an old brick pub, and he’s trying his darnedest to explain how his childhood could ever qualify as a “conventional middle-class upbringing”. There’s ­nothing wrong with privilege, of course –kicking it has ­become a sport – but the denial of its existence (“I don’t really like to talk about class systems in Australia – because I like to think we don’t really have them”) is the sticking point.

For context, Elliott grew up the eldest of three kids in various lovely pockets of Melbourne’s green eastern wedge. His late mother, Lorraine, was a state Liberal MP for a decade, and his late father was the headline-grabbing entrepreneur John Elliott. Dear non-Victorian readers: please enjoy a quick primer on the man known down here as “Big Jack”.

Elliott with his father John and daughter Ava, Christmas 2013.Credit: Courtesy of Tom Elliott

Although he eventually became a caricature of that brash 1980s-style swashbuckling businessman, John Elliott began in the 1970s as a more forensic financial consultant, then transformed a boring jam-maker (IXL) into a conglomerate that owned Elders and CUB and was, by the mid-1980s, one of the biggest companies in the country. Far from blue-blood aristocracy, he was nevertheless president of the Blues (AFL powerhouse Carlton) and the Liberal Party of Australia, and at one time even touted as a future prime minister. He used to warn his children that they would need to make their own way, rather than inheriting wealth. Turned out, he was right.

“It was hard to watch … but Dad was in many ways the architect of his own demise.”

Tom Elliott

Elliott snr spent much of the 1990s fighting court battles with the National Crime Authority and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, including facing charges of operating while insolvent. His wealth plummeted. In 2003, he was banned from holding a company directorship, and by 2005 he was bankrupt (at one point selling his $11 million Toorak home to pay his legal fees). He was forced to step down at Carlton in 2002 after ­salary cap breaches went public, and in 2009 was banned from the club after making comments about hush money paid to sexual assault victims of Blues players – a claim strenuously denied by the club. (He died in 2021, aged 79.)

“It was a bit of a slow-motion train wreck,” reflects his son, who was in his 20s during Elliott snr’s downfall. “It was hard to watch … because I felt sorry for him. But Dad was in many ways the architect of his own demise.”

Yet the scale of his very public fall from the top ­echelons of Melbourne society makes me wonder why his eldest son would ever seek the public eye. “Every second day Dad was in the newspaper, and I didn’t want to be like that. I didn’t want public life. It’s completely at odds with what I thought I would do,” Elliott admits. “But through radio it just sort of … happened.”

His father, he adds, was absent for large stretches of his childhood, travelling for work; his parents ­separated in 1985, the year he finished high school. He was very much his mother’s son. An intelligent kid, he possessed his mother’s ability to digest two lines of text at once, and still reads several books a week. “He’d have friends over to play,” says his sister Caroline, “and Tom would exasperate them ­because he would sit and read a book while they were left wondering, ‘What am I doing here?’ ”

He was dux of four subjects, prefect, and vice school captain at Carey Grammar. He also took up rowing, and remains proud to have captained the team that won “Head of the River” – the Melbourne private school version of the Henley Royal Regatta – in 1985. (An oar from that race is mounted on the wall of his garage.) He also starred as captain of debating, and when studying commerce at the University of Melbourne, lived in at Trinity College and won the university debating championship with a team that included Michael Gronow (now a King’s Counsel) and human rights lawyer Julian McMahon. “If there’s any ideal training for talk radio, it’s either being a barrister or debating,” Elliott notes. “You have to think on your feet and talk the hind leg off a donkey.”

With siblings Ed and Caroline.Credit: Courtesy of Tom Elliott

He eventually ended up at Oxford University, studying a masters in PPE (politics, philosophy and economics), and loved being surrounded by bright sparks. Forced to read as many as a dozen books a week, it was tough, too, the pressure intense – at times tragically so. “We had this lovely church spire at Merton College,” he says, “which you weren’t allowed to climb in your last term because people would throw themselves off it.”

After that, with a nudge from his mum, he began working as a junior staffer for Michael Wooldridge, then Liberal federal shadow minister for Indigenous affairs. It’s a subject that Elliott says remains a passion. So why come out hard against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, as he did regularly on his show? “Because I didn’t think it would work,” Elliott says. “I don’t have the answers, but it offends my senses that we spend billions of dollars and still have that disadvantage. I’d like to see a deeper argument, without accusations of racism and colonialism.”

Winning Head of the River (fourth from the back).Credit: Courtesy of Tom Elliott

Some whisper about Elliott as a potential pollie, suggesting he would love the chance but never did enough work at branch level to get what he wants: preselection in a blue-ribbon seat like Kooyong, Higgins, Menzies or Goldstein. “Absolute rubbish,” Elliott responds. “I’ve been offered those seats and said no. I’ve had people come to me and say, ‘We’ve organised this, all you have to do is put your hand up and it’ll happen,’ and I’ve ­always said no.”

He saw what political life extracted from his mum – her time never her own, always sacrificed to opening nights and other after-hours activities. “We give politicians – rightly – a hard time, but it’s an extraordinarily tough job.” One that demands compromise and self-censorship, too. “They don’t have the freedom to say what they think, whereas I do. No one tells me what to say.”

He started in radio in 1993, at age 26, doing semi-regular financial reports for 3RRR while working (briefly) as a business manager for Country Road. He loved being part of an indie radio station where acts like The White Stripes and Jeff Buckley played gigs on the rooftop, and where hosts interviewed Sonic Youth and Nirvana. It was a nursery for talent, too, like John Safran, Sam Pang and Dave Hughes.

“Tom slotted right in – it suited him far more than you would think,” says peer Julian “Jules” Schiller, currently Breakfast host on ABC Radio Adelaide. “We had a paintball competition once, and Tom ran it like we were at West Point. He flanked us, sniped us, attacked like he was jumping over burning barrels. We were all dead within about 10 minutes.”

Elliott became a pleasant anomaly – this establishment capitalist besotted with a ragtag bunch of ­bleeding-heart reprobates. “He had the most beautiful manners,” says friend Kate Langbroek, comedian and presenter on The Project. “If we had a dinner party, he would write a thank-you note. Like, a real written thank-you note!”

“He’s a bit of a chameleon,” says his mate Will Lempriere, an agribusiness investor who met Elliott in 1985, when rowing against him in that Head of the River race. Elliott may work in “low-brow media” but his friendships run the gamut: “I wouldn’t even characterise him as a traditional conservative so much as a libertarian.” Therein lies his appeal with listeners. It’s unlikely they have the same wealth, connections or education as Elliott, but he echoes their thoughts and becomes their avatar. You know the type. Your foreman at work maybe, or your smart-arse uncle. That guy whose stock-in-trade is a conspiratorial wink – who says something provocatively contrarian just to stir the snowflakes.

Elliott in the mid-1990s with friend and now TV presenter Kate Langbroek.Credit: Courtesy of Tom Elliott

And those snowflakes? They call in to his show to argue or they go online, favouring such disparagements as “peanut” or “flog” or the clever-albeit-tasteless “living proof that shit doesn’t fall far from the arsehole”. Don’t cry for Elliott – he’s fond of dishing out dismissive sneers to these “dingbats” and “idiots” for promoting “woke nonsense”, whether it’s a super­market chain scaling back on the sale of Australian flag merchandise or an AFL decision to no longer list the weights of individual players.

Langbroek says she always loved jousting with Elliott, and laments the narrow modern desire to be so binary in how we view people and their politics. “The term ‘shock jock’ is not a million years removed from him,” she admits, “but to think that’s all there is to our ‘TS Elliott’ is also a mistake.”

Perhaps his on-air personality is a persona? His wife Elise, a former Canberra press gallery correspondent for the Seven Network and now motoring journalist, thinks of him as a “small l” liberal who cares deeply about the vulnerable and disadvantaged. “I wonder sometimes if some of that anti-woke stuff is part of his shtick. His personal philosophy doesn’t quite align with that public stance, to be honest. The man behind him is far more embracing of …” she trails off. “I think he’s a compassionate person.”

This comes as a surprise to Elliott – not that he’s compassionate, but that his public voice contradicts his private character. “I think the way I am on air is who I am. There’s an element of showbiz, so maybe it’s a slightly exaggerated version of myself, but I believe what I say – I don’t make up opinions.”

“If you don’t grab those opportunities, they give them to someone else. But I was killing myself, I really was.”

Tom Elliott

He’s not always easy to read. I walk into his office inside Media House, opposite Southern Cross Station, and the walls seem plastered with evidence of a cold conservative heart. That’s how it looks anyway.

I spot a photo of mourners inside a church, all wearing masks, and can imagine Elliott ranting about the tyrannical overreach of “Dictator Dan” during the pandemic. Turns out I’m way off the mark. “That’s just a photo of me that someone took at Bert Newton’s memorial,” Elliott explains, smiling. “The service went much longer than I thought, and I had to text the dentist to tell them I would be late, but someone took a photo of me off the TV – texting during a state funeral!”

Fine, so how about that magazine cover, featuring veteran Sydney broadcast blowhard Alan Jones. A peer whose career he admires and emulates? Again, not quite. Appearances can be deceptive. “I find his style of radio hilarious,” Elliott counters, palms ­apologetically upturned. “He writes these long lectures and just reads them out! He would ­honestly just talk at people.”

What about that scrap of paper scribbled with the words “Communist Victoria or Germany 1941” – an apt geopolitical comparison? Nope, just a false equivalence Elliott found ridiculous. “I get some mad letters from people! You do have to put up with people ­saying things that are awful.”

OK, but for a guy who claims to represent the “sensible centre”, has he ever backed a progressive cause? “I supported gay marriage, and it was the Liberal Party that brought that in, by the way,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “After all, why shouldn’t gay ­people have the right to be miserable like the rest of us?”

In 1985 with mum Lorraine.Credit: Courtesy of Tom Elliott

His dad used to accuse him of being a socialist, he adds, and he’s also an admirer of the American social justice philosopher John Rawls, known for his theories on addressing inequality. During the week we meet, Elliott is probably the only conservative media mouthpiece not banging on about the “broken promise” behind Labor’s amended stage 3 tax cuts.

“As a piece of policy, it’s good. I can’t argue with it,” he concedes. “You’re giving people in the low-income spectrum a bigger tax cut, and people at the high end – like me – a smaller one. Why die in a ditch for that?“

To a crusader like shareholder activist and Crikey founder Stephen Mayne, who for almost two decades has co-hosted RRR’s end of financial year Party Show with Elliott, he’s the most tolerable type of right-winger. “Tom’s not a nasty guy who deliberately punches down on minorities – not a total Liberal arsehole,” says Mayne. “He’s more about backing business: ‘Get out of our way and let’s all make some money.’ ”

It’s worth mentioning here that Elliott was once an investment banker, and in 2001, at 33, almost joined the so-called “millionaires ­factory” at Macquarie Bank. It was a strange experience. First, during the recruitment process he was asked to re-take the bank’s psychometric tests, following some “rather odd” results. Then there was a dinner with ­senior partners at Langton’s in Flinders Lane. When one asked what his golf handicap was, Elliott said he didn’t play. He found golf boring. “They looked at me like I said I’d murdered children for a ­living,” Elliott says. In subsequent days, a mutual ­recognition of incompatibility emerged, and a sliding door closed. “If it had gone slightly differently, I might still be ­toiling away in the bowels of Macquarie Bank. Thankfully, I’m not.”

Instead, he hung his own shingle: MM&E Capital. In the 2007 book, Young Guns on the Sharemarket, author Eli Greenblat made Elliott the first chapter, describing an investor who was neither reckless nor conservative, instead epitomising “a third way” – straddling the risk/reward spectrum with a methodology inspired by a group of 1950s New York financial strategists (whose theories became the basis for today’s hedge funds).

Elliott says he aped (and tweaked) this idea – also evangelised by the late controversial Rene Rivkin – of trading on takeovers. Starting with $12 million in ­managed funds, by 2007 MM&E Capital had grown to about $270 million. But little could stem the bleeding that followed the global financial crisis, when markets around the world began seeking the security of cash. With precious few takeovers or bidding wars left to trade on, they returned funds to investors and the ­company merged with their biggest Australian customer, Choice Capital. Elliott still heads its investment committee. He also met Elise around this time. Their “meet cute” story is as follows …

Elliott had long been a fan of “shoegazing” music (so named for the musicians’ habit of staring at the floor during guitar solos) and in 2008 he curated and produced a CD of the genre – Take Me on the Wildest Spree – which was written up in The Age under the headline “Standing on his own”. Elise had bought the album a week earlier, then read the profile of her “perfect man” – a runner, who works in media, lives in a warehouse and loves music – and emailed him. He Googled her, burnt three mix CDs and couriered them to her at Nine, where she was by now a reporter for A Current Affair. “Initially I think he was afraid I was just another fan,” she says. “But it was the ultimate love letter.”

Those hideous Hawaiian shirts – a collection now 75 abominations strong (which he began wearing daily to brighten the pandemic) – is something she endures. “I wonder if it’s like his little Superman cape – offbeat, ­idiosyncratic, memorable. It’s the same reason he ­favours terry towelling and safari suits. His sartorial choices are just …” she’s lost for words. “I figure men are like radio stations – you can get rid of the static, but you can’t change the frequency.”

Elliott in one of his trademark Hawaiian shirts, with daughter Ava and wife Elise.Credit: Courtesy of Tom Elliott

They were married in December 2011, almost two years after their daughter Ava was born. “They have these bonding nights where they go through old war movies like Apocalypse Now,” says Elise of her husband and Ava, now 14. “She’s tall like him, a baby giraffe, and she drapes her legs over him while he’s talking about the history of war.” They surf as a family near their beach house in Flinders, too, which sounds impossibly idyllic. Zoom back to the formation of their family unit, however, and the moment could scarcely have been more stressful.

Back then Elliott was managing the merged financial company while the sharemarket bottomed out. He was also hosting the Weekend Break at 3AW, a gruelling six-hour shift every Saturday and Sunday. When Hinch was sentenced to five months’ home ­detention for contempt of court, Elliott shouldered his hosting duties, too – taking on a second Monday-to-Friday job. All this while changing nappies, planning a wedding and renovating a house.

His parents had taught him to say “yes” as his ­default. “When you get given an opportunity you grab it, even if it means you’re working too hard. Because if you don’t grab those opportunities, they give them to someone else,” he reasons. “But I was killing myself, I really was.”

In 2012 he finally left finance behind, taking on the Drive show for five months before signing on as the permanent host at the start of 2013. Langbroek was impressed by the decision to leave the security of wealth creation for the volatility of media.

“It was like Tom had this map,” she says, “and instead of going straight to the pirate treasure, he chose to sail off into the far corner that said, ‘Thar be monsters.’ ”

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Tom Elliott doesn’t sit during his show. He’s seen enough hosts hunched over like Gollum by the end of their shift. Almost four hours at a standing desk tires him out, but his posture stays strong. His voice does, too, because he drinks three cups of warm water per hour. No lemon or honey, just warm tap water.

His show will likely feel a little different to listeners. Mitchell never recorded sponsored ads, for instance, but Elliott does. Today he’s flogging an app for Sky News. I ask if he’s a fan and he shrugs: “If they want to spend their money with us, I’m not going to stop them.”

But he’s familiar enough to his inherited audience, too. He’s not about to adopt the sound of his 2GB ­counterpart Ray Hadley, or anyone in the thunderous sermonising tradition established by John Laws. That very specific Sydney style still baffles Elliott. “If it works for them, fine. But if they said to me, ‘I need you to go broadcast up there’, I don’t think I could do it.“

Elliott almost lets the tenor of his program be dictated by those for whom it’s broadcast. Sitting in the control room this Monday morning, senior producer Breanna Edebohls fields call after call – “3AW please hold, 3AW please hold …” – as Angie from Mt Martha and Rowan from Dandenong are added to the digital “board” of ­callers waiting to vent. Elliott takes around 50 calls per show – more than double what Mitchell aired – partly because of the sheer numbers that swamp his switchboard. “I think with Neil they were intimidated, or scared of getting into a debate with him,” says producer Michael Hilder, “but they’re not with Tom.”

His craft is solid. He knows how to make meandering callers get to the point. He’s quick to distance himself from extreme opinions they hope he’ll share, as when a regular like “Angry Ron” begins bellowing about the need to reintroduce ­public executions and charge money to watch them. With defamatory content, Elliott knows to interject – “that is alleged” – but he also has a 10-second delay and dump button. He almost pressed it once when chatting with his dad, who used to join him for a Friday afternoon ­segment. Discussing the salary cap scandal at Carlton, Elliott senior said something untoward about former star Stephen Silvagni. Station lawyers called immediately, insisting Elliott read a retraction: “My father did not understand what he said …”

“Yes I did!” snorted Big Jack, on air. “I know exactly what I said, and I meant it!”

“No you didn’t!”

“Yes I did!”

When Elliott started at 3AW, one nickname that did the rounds was “Jess”, a mean-spirited acronym for “John Elliott’s Stupid Son”. But that regular radio ­segment together, says Elise, was a lovely balm for their complicated relationship. “If Tom was ever overshadowed, that was rectified later,” Elise says. “I used to make John a gin and tonic on Friday – possibly more gin than tonic – and drive him into the studio. He was just so chuffed to do that show, and so proud of Tom.”

That recognition is not insignificant. When he was younger, Elliott’s mum Lorraine built a shrine to Tom – a wall of clippings, photos and points of maternal pride. “But he still likes to hear that he’s doing a good job,” says Caroline, a business manager (brother Edward has a ­logistics company). “He still likes to get that affirmation from family and friends.”

Of course, affirmation in broadcasting comes in a more consistent, concrete form than attaboys from loved ones. In the first ratings survey of 2024, released just over a week ago, Elliott increased the 3AW audience share he inherited in the last survey of 2023, from 16.1 to 16.8, while also growing average listeners from 120,000 to 128,000 – a clear No. 1 in the Melbourne mornings market on both metrics. Things seem to be going well.

Yet it’s unwise to give him too much credit for the early bump – just as it would have been to blame him for any dip or plateau. James Manning, editor-in-chief of MediaWeek, points out that the 3AW brand is so big that it’s hard to find a new announcer who hasn’t worked out for them – let alone one like Elliott, who’s already performed well on the same network. (He’d been No. 1 on Drive for roughly three-quarters of his dozen years there.) The obvious parallel is Sydney stablemate Ben Fordham at 2GB, who also came from the Drive slot on the same station, and whose new stint – also replacing a heritage host, in Alan Jones – launched with an initial drop before stable, consolidated success.

Elliott also enjoys the advantage of following the Breakfast program with Ross Stevenson and Russel Howcroft every morning – effectively riding the coattails of a juggernaut, with “Ross & Russ” being the biggest radio show in the country, bar none (comfortably better even than the Kyle & Jackie O show). “It’s a ratings phenomenon,” says Manning. “The odds of Tom Elliott not working out in Mornings would be very slim.”

Not everyone is certain. Media buyer Steve Allen says Elliott’s rails run only raises the stakes. This first ­ratings survey was a “half panel” or short sample, too. “It’s too early to tell,” Allen says. “If Tom loses four share points in the next survey, people will be questioning – and rueing – their decision.”

Elliott, meanwhile, will keep doing what he does, ­chatting about the lost art of handwriting, or testily ­defending any challenge to negative gearing – rolling his eyes over “conscious uncoupling”, then launching a ­dog-whistling diatribe against changing the date of Australia Day. “The show is like a sandcastle,” he offers. “You build it, the tide knocks it over at night, and you come back and build it again.”

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