Loved, loathed and feared, no one could ignore the Jones phenomenon

No one could brow-beat a politician on air, or off, quite like Alan Jones.

"Deep down I reckon a lot of politicians hated him, or regarded him as a massive inconvenience," one well-placed industry insider said this week. "But they knew they had to play ball, and the very few that didn’t usually didn’t last long."

It was his listeners for whom Jones reserved unwavering courtesy – the hundreds of thousands of rusted-on supporters who tuned into his weekday breakfast broadcasts decade after decade to deliver him a near unbeaten record as king of breakfast talkback.

Jones relished his image as the champion of the underdog and the battler, going in to war against progressive elites. "It tickled his fancy, that part of the role, coming as he did from a conservative background," says Sky News stablemate and former Labor heavyweight, Graham Richardson.

Jones’ listeners were his sounding board, and an endless source of ideas, stories and hobby-horses. They were also a source of emotional sustenance for a man who some felt was, in private, deeply lonely.

Those who knew Jones’ operation well saw a man with a ferocious work ethic, who’d often rise at 2.30am to be on air by 5.30 that morning, and would pack out the rest of his day with meetings and correspondence as well as filing columns for The Daily Telegraph and fronting the evening cameras on Sky. He would try to answer nearly all the emails he got from listeners, sometimes up to 150 a day.

"He forged a real bond with them," says one industry source. " A lot of broadcasters would run their programs according to the headlines, but he would not ... it was a very grassroots-led program in some ways. Not only would he read out listener emails but if someone was making a good point, he would get them up as an interview and get them to make those points again [which would] make them feel amazing."

Shane Healy, a former station manager of 3AW, says few radio hosts have matched Jones in terms of clout.

"He was feared – and I use the word ‘feared’ quite deliberately – by people of influence from the prime minister down," says Healy. "I remember [2GB morning host Ray Hadley] saying he’d never seen anyone apart from Jones who can read a four-page broadsheet newspaper article, then regurgitate it within 30 to 60 seconds in a way his listeners can understand. Alan really is one of the most eloquent communicators."

Media analyst Steve Allen says Jones "didn’t care whether you loved or hated him but he did champion the underdog and his listeners [were drawn to that]".

Yet in recent years, though his ratings held on, his reputation as rainmaker for 2GB's owners (currently Nine, who also owns this masthead) was falling away. The man who was paid millions to rake in even more millions for his employers fell afoul of a new era in which social media was able to generate broad-scale consumer boycotts overnight, scaring away big advertisers.

Jones apologising for his remarks about Julia Gillard's father dying of shame in 2012.Credit: Dean Sewell

Such was the case after he famously suggested then prime minister Julia Gillard should be put in a chaff bag and dumped at sea, later also claiming that her father had "died of shame" – remarks which, though they were made at a function off air, drew immediate nationwide condemnation.

He stepped on a similar landmine last year when he said Prime Minister Scott Morrison should "shove a sock" down the throat of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern over her warnings about the devastating impacts of climate change in the Pacific.

Appalled, big advertisers walked and never came back. Women, in particular, were repelled by his naked bullying of Sydney Opera House chief Louise Herron over her resistance to projecting race colours and numbers onto the building’s sails to publicise the Everest horse race. It didn't help that Jones was revealed to have a large personal stake in horse-flesh himself.

Of the Ardern meltdown, Richardson says "I think he did regret it. It was the old bridge too far, we have all done it at some stage, but when most people do it no one notices. When Alan Jones does it, a million people notice … He always knew when he had gone too far. You couldn't get him to admit it necessarily. But he knew."

Another source who knows him well says "if anything had knocked the wind out of him it would have been the Ardern stuff".

It wasn’t the only miscalculation. In 2014 Jones was forced to apologise to NSW chief scientist Mary O’Kane for suggesting the mining industry might have influenced a report she produced on coal seam gas. In 2009 he was forced to apologise on air after the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal found he had "incited hatred, serious contempt and severe ridicule of Lebanese Muslims" in the run-up to the Cronulla riots. In his tirade Jones had described them as "vermin" and "mongrels" who "rape and pillage a nation that’s taken them in".

In 2018, he was again forced to modify his language after describing Senator Mathias Cormann as the "n----- in the woodpile" during that year’s turbulent palace coup against Malcolm Turnbull.

Jones’ employers were also hit with a defamation payout of nearly $3.75 million over his wrongful claims that the Wagner family in Queensland had been responsible for the deaths of a dozen people in the 2011 Grantham floods.

Rose from humble beginnings

Jones was born in modest circumstances on a small farm in south-east Queensland but his father, through extra work in a coalmine, managed to earn enough to send him to prestigious Toowoomba Grammar School.

After graduating from university, Jones took up a career as a high school English teacher and later prominent sports coach, leading the national rugby union side to victory in the Bledisloe Cup. But even as a coach his style was divisive, one interviewer later describing his method as "stirring his players with an eclectic torrent of poetry, prose and Churchillian rhetoric".

Although radio brought him rich financial rewards, and the ability to forge powerful networks across sport and business, the 79-year old would regularly speak of his humble roots describing himself to the Herald this week as "a kid from the Darling Downs whose parents died never having a holiday".

His ability to get politicians onto his show was legendary, though some wonder how much of his power was real, and how much was just assumed.

He helped break the back of then NSW Labor leader Michael Daley’s state election campaign in 2019, with the two memorably clashing over Daley’s opposition to the rebuilding of the Allianz stadium, which Jones (a long-time trustee of the SCG Trust) fiercely supported.

Jones was a passionate supporter of Tony Abbott and an unrelenting critic of Malcolm Turnbull.

"He played a big role in Turnbull going down, a huge role," says one source who saw Jones’ campaign against Turnbull close up.

Jones was equally determined to help oust then Queensland Liberal leader Campbell Newman in 2015.

In NSW, his clashes with premiers over the years were frequent, with Mike Baird enduring particularly searing treatment over the banning of the greyhound industry (a decision Baird eventually overturned).

Similarly, a vocal campaign by the broadcaster was instrumental in overturning the Abbott government's decision to build an aged care home on land belonging to the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust on Middle Head.

Federal Labor leader Bill Shorten got short shrift from Jones during last year’s federal election, earning a battering over the party’s policies on energy, electric cars and negative gearing.

Best buddies: Jones with former Liberal prime minister John Howard. Credit: Dallas Kilponen

Some believed Jones’ political influence has been exaggerated, dismissing his listener base as old, deeply conservative and unlikely to ever change its vote.

Most, however, say his influence was something politicians could not ignore, not least for how he leveraged it across print and TV as well as radio.

Former Labor premier of NSW Bob Carr says he kept going on Jones’ show because "so many people listened to him. And that was confirmed when you were out campaigning, and people would say to you, ‘I listened to you on Alan’s program’."

"I relished combat with him and I always showed up to put my case, because he had such a big listening audience and other newsrooms were listening."

Carr was among those who recently persuaded Jones to take up the cause of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder now languishing in a British jail and facing extradition to the US.

Jones could occasionally surprise progressives with some of the causes he picked, despite his lifelong tie to the conservative side of politics. He backed same sex marriage, and recently began expressing support for a Tamil family the federal government is trying to deport.

Richardson says Jones was "very good at projecting power. Whether he had it or not didn't matter, he could project it and that meant he could frighten premiers and prime ministers into doing what he wanted."

Former Liberal premier of NSW Barry O'Farrell said his interviews with Jones had ranged from the "ferocious to the friendly" but that the odd "tirade" was never personal. He said Jones' retirement would leave a "gaping hole" for fans and critics alike.

On Tuesday morning a raft of public figures phoned into Jones’ show to farewell him from radio after a 35 year career - a stepping away from the microphone he has put down to health reasons. They included Scott Morrison, Gladys Berejiklian, Tony Abbott, Anthony Albanese, cricketer Brett Lee and his old radio rival John Laws, who said despite their disagreements, he’d always had the highest regard for Jones.

"I'm going to miss you," Laws said. "You and I have had the friendliest bitterness in the history of radio."

with Michael Lallo