‘It was word for word’: The political power of John Laws

Way back in 1988, Bob Carr, the reluctant, newly minted leader of the opposition in New South Wales, attended his first lunch with the then king of talkback radio, John Laws. It went very well.

The best part, Carr recalls, was when Laws complained about the difficulties he had filling airtime.

“He said, ‘I’ve only got a small staff. I’ve got to fill three hours a day. I don’t know why one of our political parties can’t get one of their young staffers to send me material that I can use,’ ” Carr says. “My heart started to beat with excitement at this possibility.”

Back at his office, Carr dictated an editorial and had it sent to Laws’s “direct fax”.

“The next day,” says Carr, “one of the staff came in and said, ‘Turn the radio on, he’s reading it.’

“It was word for word. Perfect.”

So began a generally happy relationship. Although Carr’s practice of submitting editorials “petered out” over time, he became a frequent guest on Laws’s program, both during his seven years in opposition, then later as premier.

To listen to them talk was to hear two of the great radio voices.

Laws’s mellifluous baritone, which earnt him the epithet “Golden Tonsils”, was apparently innate, whereas Carr had to work on his. He became a student of the foremost voice coach of the time – Gina Pioro, who also worked with actors and the ABC back when diction and timbre mattered to the national broadcaster.

In the view of some who watched Carr’s evolution in state parliament, that voice work and his affinity for radio, particularly talkback, was key to his success.

“He was gawky and balding – you might recall he got a hair transplant – and he had what he and certainly others considered to be not a great head for television,” the source says. “So his voice on radio was one of his most successful weapons.”

Carr says he quite enjoyed the “fizz and fun” of doing radio with the king of talkback. There was, however, a pretender to the throne – Alan Jones.

As luck would have it, later in that same first year as Labor leader, an opportunity presented itself for Carr to ingratiate himself there, too.

In December 1988, Jones was arrested at an underground public toilet in London and charged with “outraging public decency” and “committing an indecent act”.

In their 2003 book, Bob Carr: A Self-Made Man, Andrew West and Rachel Morris quote Carr’s then speechwriter, Catherine McGregor, on what ensued:

“We picked up a copy of the Daily Mirror and saw that Jones was in a world of hurt. And I said to Carr, ‘Fucking get to this bloke straight away. Beat [then Liberal premier Nick] Greiner to him. You should extend the hand to him in his hour of need, and he will never forget you. Send him a telegram.’

“He penned a personal note, quoting Nixon, basically saying to Jonesy that your contribution to public life will sustain you through this. Jonesy was in the palm of his hand for a time after that.”

The charges against Jones were subsequently dropped, and on his return to Sydney a dinner was organised.

“It was a funny night,” McGregor said, “and Jones was at his charming best. He was bloody well singing and telling jokes.”

Carr’s gesture of support, she told West, had “paid off big”.

If this story is beginning to read like one about Bob Carr, it’s not, except inasmuch as he is an exemplar of the lengths to which politicians would go to curry favour with radio broadcasters – having been the dominant political figure in the state with the two dominant radio hosts, both at the height of their powers.

West says at the time the men were so important that a senior bureaucrat was specifically assigned to respond to Jones’s voluminous correspondence.

Give Carr and McGregor credit for being honest about their efforts, but they all did it. The power of talkback in the latter part of last century and the early part of this one was such that politicians had to.

The Australian Media Hall of Fame records that the 1983 election was dubbed the “John Laws election” for the number of major campaign announcements politicians made on his show.

As has been repeatedly noted in various obituaries for Laws, following his death last weekend, Paul Keating once said politicians might as well forget the Canberra Press Gallery. “Educate John Laws and you educate Australia,” he said.

Not that Keating was keen on engaging with the punters on air, says a former staffer. “He went on talkback but generally refused to take questions from listeners.”

The staffer recalls that in 1996 Keating lost the talkback contest on his way to losing the prime ministership.

“Every single time Keating was on the radio, Howard would be next up. It was incredibly disciplined. There wasn’t a day they missed. Any radio anywhere that Keating was on, Howard was on next.”

In the decades-long political war over talkback, it did not matter if the radio hosts frequently possessed egos bigger than their very large pay packets or held offensive opinions; they had to be courted.

So John Laws might rail against “feminazis” and Alan Jones might spout misogynistic bile about “Ju-liar” Gillard, once suggesting to a Liberal Party fundraiser that her recently deceased father had died of shame. It didn’t matter.

Nor did it matter that, in 1999, Laws and Jones were both exposed for taking secret payments from companies in exchange for favourable on-air commentary. The Australian Broadcasting Authority found 2UE and the broadcasters had committed 90 breaches of the industry code and estimated the value of the deals at $18 million.

At the height of the scandal, veteran ABC broadcaster Jon Faine asked Howard why he would “continue to give them credibility by appearing on their programs?”

Howard’s reply: “I am sure you think that when I come in here I am coming in to talk to you – but I am really coming in to talk to your audience, and while they have an audience I will continue to appear on their programs, too.”

The competition between politicians to woo talkback hosts was matched by the competition between talkback hosts to woo the big players.

In his 2003 A N Smith Lecture, Faine spoke of how other media in Victoria were “put out” by the fact premier Jeff Kennett held a weekly exclusive interview with 3AW’s Neil Mitchell, meaning they all had “to wait for the premier to make whatever announcements were to be made through the unofficial organ of a commercial station radio show”.

Inevitably, given the egos and interests involved, there were jealousies and bust-ups. Jones eventually turned on Carr and ran, in West’s words, “a relentless campaign” against him in the 2003 NSW election. Carr won regardless.

More recently, in 2017, another of the nation’s more prominent talkback provocateurs, 2GB’s nationally syndicated Ray Hadley, scratched the then treasurer Scott Morrison from his regular Monday spot for cheating on him.

Hadley told his listeners that Morrison’s staff had told his producers the minister could not make it one week, because he would be travelling. Then Morrison gave an interview to Faine. Hadley thundered to his audience: “The love affair, or the bromance that has been written about, is over.

“He’s lied to me, or his staff have lied. The regular chat with the treasurer is now abandoned.”

For a while, former prime minister Tony Abbott filled the slot, then it was given to Peter Dutton.

There are innumerable examples of the tensions between talkback hosts and politicians over the decades, but they are no longer as consequential as they used to be, for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people are tuning in.

According to a report by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, released last December, the number of radio listeners declined by almost a quarter between 2017 and 2024.

Overall, 65 per cent of people still listened to radio, but the young were abandoning live radio in droves. Only 28 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds were listeners.

Over the same period, the number of people listening to streaming services roughly doubled to 73 per cent and the number of people listening to podcasts reached 50 per cent.

“Not only are younger Australians not consuming free-to-air,” says Kos Samaras, pollster and political strategist at RedBridge Group, “they are in particular not listening to the talkback format. Podcasts are killing it.

“Talkback is now a niche market. There’s still a demand for it but almost exclusively from older listeners. Look at the type of ads that these stations are running: very specifically targeted to Baby Boomers and older.”

He’s not wrong. Indeed, Sydney’s 2GB, in its pitch to advertisers, stresses that those who listen to “Sydney’s #1 talk station” are “superconsumers, aged 55-64s … a high value audience … worth $2.3bn in weekly household spend”.

This might be an attractive demographic for those advertising investment products or guided tours of Europe, but the political salience of the cohort is fast dwindling. At the 2025 federal election, Gen Z and Millennials, people aged in their mid 40s or younger, made up about half the electorate, and Boomers only about one-third.

This has made communication much more complicated for politicians, says Susan Templeman, Labor MP for Macquarie.

Templeman has seen it from all sides. From 1985 to 1988 she worked in the Canberra Press Gallery for 2UE, in the heyday of Alan Jones. In 1990, she took a job at Telecom in its media relations team, where part of the job was fielding calls from John Laws’s media team about customer complaints, trying to get the “slow machine of Telecom to find an engineer or someone who was brave enough to go on radio”.

Back when she was starting out, she says, it was different. There was diversity of political views on individual radio stations.

“So on 2GB you’d have Mike Carlton doing breakfast – definitely left of centre. You then went to Laws, doing mornings, with a whole different perspective. And through the day you got a whole range of political views.

“What is different now is that you get the same tone, more or less, on a given station through the day.”

For the most part, that is a conservative view.

“These days,” says Templeman, “I only listen to certain radio stations to understand what the people who don’t vote for me are thinking.”

As the media have fragmented, so have the media strategies of political parties. As one senior Labor strategist puts it, there is no longer a “handful of megaphones that you can grab that will reach everyone”.

At the May 3 election, the major parties grasped for different ones.

Peter Dutton and the Coalition focused heavily on friendly legacy outlets. Anthony Albanese and Labor sought to engage a wide variety of outlets. Social media influencers were invited onto the campaign trail, for example.

“Talkback,” says the strategist, “like a lot of other legacy media, is less influential today than it perhaps was 20 or 30 years ago, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore it.

“The PM has done more FM breakfast radio, trying to reach young families and working people.”

Then there are podcasts. “They tend to have an issue focus or there’s a community of interest that they are associated with,” the strategist says. “So when we go there, we try to match the talent, so to speak, with the medium. We’re trying to, like, engage with the type of content that they usually produce, rather than expecting to go on there and just do a hard political interview.”

The risk, he says, “is that if you’re tailoring the persona that you’re presenting for every different format that you’re going on, that you come across as inauthentic”.

In Albanese, he says, Labor has a leader who projects authenticity.

Of course, you would expect him to say that, but the election result lends weight to his words.

Even within political parties, he notes, different leaders make different choices in how they interact with media. He cites former Labor Victorian premier Daniel Andrews and compares him to the current NSW premier, Chris Minns.

“Minns has clearly cultivated Sydney talkback radio and The Daily Telegraph, trying to disarm outlets that would otherwise be very hostile to a Labor government. It’s the opposite of the Daniel Andrews strategy of seeking to inflame your enemies and use social media to talk to your base.”

Such choices, he says, may be seen “as an expression of their leadership style or even their philosophy or their policy agenda”.

“Certainly you can see policy areas where other Labor governments have been more progressive or reform-minded, and where Chris hasn’t, and I think that the attitude to talkback radio is certainly related to that.

“He is seen as a bit more of an old school Labor premier in the mould of a Carr or a Beattie or a Bracks.”

The source declines to opine on which approach is more productive. “Horses for courses,” he says.

Underlying all this political positioning in the fractured media environment is another question: What even qualifies as talkback these days?

To an ever-increasing extent, listeners do not actually use the telephone to interact with program hosts. Instead, they send text messages, which are read out on air. This is not dialogue.

There is academic debate about the distinction between talkback radio and talk radio. It is questionable whether the frequently transgressive, decidedly lowbrow Kyle and Jackie O Show, for example, qualifies as talkback, even though the pair take calls from listeners.

Whatever else might be said of the talkback hosts of yore, they did often engage with serious matters. Bob Carr recalls, for example, that Alan Jones at one point became heavily focused on tort law reform. It’s hard to imagine Kyle Sandilands doing anything similar.

On Monday, the prime minister went on radio to lament the passing of John Laws. He chose Kyle Sandilands’ show. It went like this.

Albanese: “He was a legend, of course. I had many conversations with him over the last, I think, four decades, even back to before I was in parliament. And he also was a fantastic company off air as well.”

Sandilands: “Oh, yeah, great stories.”

Albanese: “I had a few lunches with him. And he was someone who was an authentic voice of Australians. He was a patriot. He loved Australia.”

Sandilands: “He did.”

Albanese: “He talked Australia up just as you guys do, and that’s a great thing.”

It was cloying. Almost four decades on from where this story began, politicians still suck up to radio hosts.