Propagandists in the so-called culture wars declared a major victory last week following the announcement that 2GB’s Alan Jones, the conservative colossus of talkback radio, will retire from the microphone at the end of this month.
Citing medical advice, Jones, 79, announced the days of getting up at 2am to prepare for his show were at an end, although he will continue as a columnist as well as presenting at Sky News.
ABC Media Watch host Paul Barry maintained the veteran’s departure was an ignominious one.
“Nine is adamant it did not push Jones out and it was his choice to go,” he said on Monday. “But it seems virtually no one in the media believes them.”
Obviously Barry did not catch entertainment reporter Peter Ford’s appearance on Channel 7’s Sunrise last Tuesday. “It’s an extraordinary career,” he said of Jones. “And also very rare in the world of any form of show business for people to retire when they really are at the very top.”
Barry must have also missed an interview on Channel 10 that same day between The Project’s Carrie Bickmore and long-time ABC investigative journalist and Jones biographer Chris Masters. “I’m sure he wasn’t pushed,” he said of Jones’s departure. “He’s a very successful broadcaster, it’s been speculated for some time he would leave, he’s beyond retirement age and he has been unwell.” Mind you, Barry managed to include a segment of Masters telling ABC News “The sad thing about the politicians is that they kowtowed to [Jones].”
In attempting to rationalise Jones’s huge following, his critics have resorted to playing down its significance. “It’s likely that Jones’ syndicated radio audience and his Sky News program … skew older,” wrote Sydney Morning Herald senior culture writer Michael Lallo in 2018. “More to the point, they tend to be conservative. They share his populist, right-wing views. They bask in his outrage. They listen to have their opinions affirmed rather than challenged … he speaks to a rusted-on older demographic.”
“In the years we coexisted at 2UE I don’t know that [Jones] ever read anything deeper than The Daily Telegraph,” wrote former ABC journalist Mike Carlton in 2012. “This is a man who thinks Jeffrey Archer is a great English novelist, whose taste in music screeches to a halt at Andre Rieu,” he sneered.
“He has a sure instinct for what his mob wants to hear, delivered in that prissy shriek,” he continued.
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What an indignity it is for the likes of Carlton that the Sydney airwaves have carried the patois of a Toowoomba parvenu for so long. If only Jones had risibly affected an upper class English accent as Carlton did during his hosting of a British radio station in the early 1990s – now that is the way to earn respect and be authentic. Admittedly Carlton, a former broadcaster himself, could never compete with Jones in the ratings. But let me be clear about the composition of Carlton’s former audience: we are talking about a select, cultivated and educated group of listeners, not a mass of baying, malleable and ill-bred types.
That was one longstanding battle in the culture war, but there are many others. For those who are puzzled about the definition of that hackneyed term, I refer to you online academic journal The Conversation. Writing this week, RMIT adjunct professor Gavin Moodie declared that conservatives were opposed to universities on “ideological grounds”.
“This is part of what is commonly called a ‘cultural war’ against organisations such as the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the ABC, the creative arts, museums and other cultural institutions that don’t support conservative ideology,” he wrote.
No doubt actor Noni Hazlehurst would agree. Earlier this month she accused the federal government of “waging a culture war” against the creative industry. “The arts and entertainment sector has been so savaged,” she said, warning that without a taxpayer-funded rescue package artists and arts workers would “move on to other things because they have to”.
It may have escaped Hazlehurst’s notice, but lately there has been an awful lot of people moving on to other things because they have to, and it is not only the arts and entertainment sector that is affected. Next time she visits her local supermarket she might want to consider that some people who only a few months ago were airline pilots and flight attendants are working as shelf-stackers and checkout operators.
“I’ve been reporting the inexorable destruction of Australian culture as we know it since the Liberal National Party was elected to government in 2013,” wrote novelist and critic Alison Croggon in April. If that is the case they are taking a long time to do it.
But there is evidence the culture war, far from being waged by conservative government is an internecine conflict. The arts industry prides itself on telling uncomfortable truths, yet few of its members defended the late artist Bill Leak in 2016 when The Australian featured his cartoon of a deadbeat indigenous father who did not know the name of his delinquent son. In fact, many of them signed a petition demanding this newspaper “eliminate it from our news and current affairs media”.
Last year the Melbourne International Comedy Festival stripped actor and comedian Barry Humphries’ name from the festival’s biggest award. His crime was to say that being transgender “is a fashion” and that “It’s pretty evil when it’s preached to children by crazy teachers.” Likewise feminist pioneer and author Germaine Greer, who in 2016 declared “If you’re a 50-year-old truck driver who’s had four children with a wife and you’ve decided the whole time you’ve been a woman, I think you’re probably wrong.” She was later bumped from the Brisbane Writers Festival.
Last week ABC’s The Art Show featured Alice Procter, an Australian-raised arts historian who operates so-called “Uncomfortable Arts Tours” in London’s museum and galleries. Having decided these institutions have “problematic histories”, she encourages attendees to give “feedback” to curators on postcards which list categorical violations. They are under the headings racist, colonialist/imperialist, classist, homophobic, sexist, trans-erasing, gender essentialist, ableist and (bear with me), totally impenetrable. History is being rewritten not by the winners, but by the whiners.
And while the luvvies claim they are the victim of a culture war, the truth is they occupy a gigantic safe space from which they can publicly disparage their ideological enemies. In 2014, the literary establishment lauded British author Hilary Mantel’s short story “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher”. As the Guardian noted, in 1983 the author, having spotted the then British Prime Minister from the window of her Windsor flat, fantasised about murdering her. “Immediately your eye measures the distance,” she told the newspaper, her finger and thumb in the shape of a firearm.
Then there is actor Miriam Margolyes, who played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter film series. Earlier this month she announced on live television she had been so incensed at British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s response to the coronavirus outbreak that she wished him dead when he was hospitalised. Presumably it was of little consequence to her that his then unborn child would have grown up without a father had her wish come true.
You can imagine what would happen had a conservative figure said the same of say New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. ABC presenters would demand their sacking. But if the target of your despicable musings is a conservative leader, the national broadcaster will give you your own show as it has in the case of Margolyes.
On that note, Margolyes, having travelled the country at taxpayers’ expense to make her documentary, has concluded “There is a brutality there and a greed in Australia, which I don’t like”.
Allow me to quote from a feature article by Escape Southern Highlands magazine in 2018: “Over the years Margolyes, who is now 77, has collated an impressive portfolio that includes a terrace house in Bondi, two townhouses in London, an Umbrian farmhouse in Italy, an English seaside house within sight of the British Channel and Yarrawa Hill near Robertson, her treehouse home in the Southern Highlands.”
Do not be surprised if next the ABC commissions her to do a series about Australians and our lackadaisical attitudes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If only one could wield magic by pointing a wand at Margolyes and loudly exclaiming Hooroo hypocritus or Vamoose windbagus.