Last night at our traditional GrodsThink debrief over pizza and beers we discussed the ways that Triple J had gone bad since we were its target audience. Ant, Wah, John and I basically agreed that it wasn’t just us getting old and grumpy but rather the presenters are now completely unlistenable and the format is in desperate need of an overhaul. Singled out for particular scorn were Robbie Buck (time server), Marieke Hardy (good reading but bad listening) and Scott Dooley (utter, utter cunt.)

I’m cursed in my classroom with poor radio reception and if I leave my iPod at home I’m forced to listen to Triple J before and after school because I can’t tune in 3RRR or 3PBS. Just now I was listening to the afternoon show with presenter Linda Marigliano and I was pleased to hear that at least the inarticulate phone interviews with idiot listeners haven’t changed over the past ten years.

Linda: So, dude, you’re in year nine.

Idiot listener: Yep.

Linda: I seem to remember that year nine is a pretty rebellious year.

Idiot listener: Yep.

Linda: So have you been rebellious?

Idiot listener: Oh, yeah.

Linda: Well tell us about something rebellious you’ve done then.

Idiot listener: Oh…

(uncomfortable pause for two seconds)

Linda: Go on! Tell Auntie Linda.

Idiot listener: Ergh…

(total silence for a good five or six seconds)

Linda: Okay, well that’s enough dead air for me.

This is exactly the kind of shit that the ALP’s style-over-substance preselection of celebrity candidates produces:

ALP federal candidate Nicole Cornes has stumbled on radio while trying to explain her party’s industrial relations policy.

[…]

Asked by ABC 891 morning announcer Matthew Abraham about Labor’s alternative to the Federal Government’s WorkChoices, Ms Cornes stumbled and went silent…

“AWAs allow for over $100,000…,” she said before inexplicably going silent.

Abraham was forced to ask “what do you mean, sorry?”

Ms Cornes tried to recover.

“AWAs take away penalty rates, WorkChoices…”

Abraham again had to ask “what do you mean by they allow for over $100,000?”

Ms Cornes said: “They don’t allow for people to negotiate over $100,000.”

But, finally, Abraham had to rescue her.

“Federal Labor believes workers earning under $100,000 per year should be protected in the workplace by a strong safety net,” Abraham said.

Ms Cornes agreed: “They should be.”

(source)

There goes a couple of hundred more swinging voters who were considering voting Labor — and who can blame them?

Clearly impressed by Lachlan Connor’s radio interview some months ago, Prodos has followed his trailblazing lead and done a 1am phone interview with radio station Triple R. Make sure you listen to the interview all the way through to the end for an encore performance of Prodos’ hard rock MIDI campaign tune.

Caller: Alan, um, just saw some snippets from the news, Channel 9, of the horrendous bashing…
Alan Jones: …appalling
Caller: …or if you like, gang attack on the beach in Cronulla yesterday. I mean what type of grubs do we have in this … (indistinct)
Alan Jones: What kind of grubs? Well, I’ll tell you what kind of grubs this lot were. This lot were Middle-Eastern grubs.
Caller: There we go.
Alan Jones: And, you’re not allowed to say it, but I’m saying it…

_____

Caller: If the police can’t do the job, the next tier is us.
Alan Jones: Yeah, good on you, J…
Caller: Now, my grandfather was an old digger and he used to say to me when we were growing up, ‘Listen, shoot one, the rest will run’.
Alan Jones: [laughing]
Caller: Right?
Alan Jones: …yes [laughing]

_____

Alan Jones: ‘J’ has a good answer, he says police and the council are impotent here all rhetoric and no action. My suggestion is to invite the biker gangs to be present at Cronulla Railway station when these Lebanese thugs arrive, the biker gangs have been much maligned but they do a lot of good things – it would be worth the price of admission to watch these cowards scurry back onto the train for the return trip to their lairs…and wouldn’t it be brilliant if the whole event was captured on TV cameras and featured on the evening news so that we, their parents, family and friends can see who these bastards are…Australians old and new should not have to put up with this scum. Peters of Kensington…

_____

Alan Jones: Yeah, let’s not get too carried away ‘B’, we don’t have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in Western Sydney. So let’s not get carried away with all this mealy-mouthed talk about there being two sides. I can tell you, because my correspondence here from mums and dads I am inundated, and I don’t hear people complaining about Catholics and Protestants and Anglicans, I’m sorry, but there’s this religious element in all of this and we’ve got to make sure that we welcome people into our community but we welcome them in on certain terms and certain standards and those standards are not being met. So let’s not have this mealy mouth talk about oh well, everyone’s to blame. All across Sydney there is a universal concern that there are gangs, the gangs are of one ethnic composition…

(source — PDF)

I am not going to get involved in comments on individual decisions, but let me say this: I think Alan Jones is an outstanding broadcaster. I don’t think he’s a person who encourages prejudice in the Australian community, not for one moment, but he is a person who articulates what a lot of people think.

(source)

It’s surely only a matter of time before The Parrot shuffles off this mortal coil and joins the choir invisible. He’s clearly gone mad and is only still speaking on radio due to having been nailed to the perch.

Even the (questionably) previously sane Alan Jones wouldn’t squawk something like this.