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MEN STILL MAKE THE RULES ABOUT LETTING WOMEN ON AIR - AND WENDY HARMER ISN'T HAPPY
There's a corporate box full of men from an older generation who have an iron grip on Australia's commercial AM radio airwaves and they have no intention, whatsoever, of letting go. They imagine and broadcast a mythical Australia built in their own image.
It's an Australia from a bygone era that listeners recall with misty-eyed nostalgia. In that rear-vision mirror, women do not attain the office of prime minister, governor-general or lord mayor.
That's why Alan Jones was so apoplectic that women were destroying 'the joint'. He was incredulous and affronted to find that his joint - a rickety construction he and his cohorts have painstakingly assembled and constantly repaired for many, many years now - was being rocked by the enemy.
And this time they weren't the usual suspects - they were powerful women.
'I'm just waiting for them to die off,' says Susan Mitchell, author and former radio host on Sydney's 2GB and 2UE. Whether about Jones, or his audience, it's an oft-repeated sentiment. Is this style of radio - what former PM Paul Keating described back in 1994 as "middle-of-the-road fascism" - on its last legs? Writing in The Conversation recently, Jennifer Rayner, doctoral candidate in Australian Politics at Australian National University, argued that it is.
The high-water mark of influence for Jones was during the Howard years, she said, when, as prime minister, John Howard frequently availed himself of the gilt-edged welcome mat. Now that Prime Minister Gillard pointedly will not take Jones's calls after his appalling comment that her father must have "died of shame", the jig is up.
"I think the prime minister and the government have decided Jones just doesn't matter that much anymore, and, as a consequence, they're no longer prepared to slavishly cultivate him in the way that all sides of politics have done for the past 15 years,' Rayner wrote.
Of course, radio is all about ratings and in crunching the numbers, and Rayner came up with this: "In 2006, Jones commanded an average daily listenership of 185,000 people in the Sydney catchment area alone. Six years later in 2012 this number is down to 151,000. His is still...