Neil Mitchell on Doyle, Dan and the daunting prospect of life after radio

“I love mowing paddocks,” he concedes. “I’ve got a small place on the coast and I go down there and drive a ride-on mower in circles. You get a paddock and it’s scrappy grass and you get out there and it’s done, it’s ordered, it’s finished. You’ve got a direct result from what you did, and that doesn’t happen often in our business.”

He gets a buzz from making things happen by leaning on politicians and business connections through his massive reach – helping a listener get access to expensive medical treatment overseas; raising money for sick children; helping reverse $26 million in wrongly issued traffic fines. But it’s the personal connections he says he values most.

“Anybody I’ve been asked to try to coach on how to do it, the first thing I say is ‘listen’,” he says. “Don’t just let them talk and respond – listen, react, engage. If callers put themselves on the line sufficiently to ring up and go on radio it’s probably a bit daunting for them. You at least owe them an ear.”

Mitchell describes himself as shy. John Narduzzo would probably not say the same of himself.Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui

Man of the people he may be, but Mitchell confesses he is also shy, and watching him banter a little stiffly with the ebullient John the grocer, it strikes me as a reasonable self-assessment. He’s a little uncomfortable too when an elderly gent recognises him and says he’s a fan. But it’s the woman in her 40s who visibly grimaces in disdain and mutters “Oh God” as she passes him in the meat hall who really knocks him off guard.

“What did I do?” he asks, a little shocked, before jokingly suggesting I must have set it up. “I’ve never got that before.”

He presumes this long-time listener, first-time scowler must have a reason to dislike him, and is entitled to her opinion, but he can’t for the life of him think what it might be.

Well, I suggest, maybe it was something to do with the COVID crisis last year. After all, it not only taxed everyone’s emotional resources but at times saw Victoria seeming to fracture along ideological faultlines – the #IstandwithDan zealots on one side, the #openitup conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers on the other. And some people perhaps saw you leaning more one way than the other.

With Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews before the big chill.Credit:Justin McManus

“I didn’t find a division,” Mitchell says. “I found a bit of anger at times, but I found almost a sense of unity in crisis. We got a lot of fury towards Dan, and some of it was deserved, but it was also a bit rough because having gotten us into that mess, he did what we probably had to do, which was lockdown.”

Did he stoke that anger at times? “Possibly,” he admits. “Probably.”

Any regrets? “No, because I think at times it was legitimate to have a go at him. I think he was doing a bad job at times and I think you’ve got to call that as you see it.”

Though he was one of the loudest voices calling for its end, Mitchell thinks that on balance “lockdown was probably the right thing to do”. But he took enormous issue with the Premier’s style of communication – “he told people what to do, rather than convinced them what they should do” – and with the government’s reluctance to admit mistakes.

He insists his anger is directed at both sides of politics, and says the bickering over who was responsible for aged care was “disgraceful … it’s as angry as I’ve ever been with politicians”.

Ditto the current impasse over quarantine. “We’re lucky, we’re walking around, but it’s not gonna last. And if you arseholes can’t get your act together and start to run things properly … There should be a kitchen cabinet, it should have Albo in there as well. If you can’t get them all going in the same direction now, you never will.”

Mitchell is painted by some as a right-wing shock jock, but while he readily concedes he’s a social conservative he’s less willing to be pegged as politically so. And the truth is Sydney’s batch of radio hardheads – Alan Jones (now retired), John Laws (now marginalised), Steve Price, Ray Hadley et al – play the game very differently. They take themselves “too seriously”, he says, and tend to “wind up things that they don’t believe in”.

But surely that’s precisely what some would say of you?

“Yeah, they do. But I can’t act. There’s no way I can get on air and pretend something that I don’t believe in. I can put some mayonnaise on it and stir people up a bit, but if I don’t believe in the principle, I can’t do it.”

Recently, Mitchell invited the ire of his critics – “I’m not going to buy a place in Brunswick to keep them happy”, he scoffs – by giving former lord mayor Robert Doyle airtime to publicly address the sexual harassment allegations that brought his career (and subsequently his marriage) to an end in 2018. It was powerful radio, and was widely covered by other media – as is so often the case with Mitchell’s show – but it was also accused of not going hard enough.

With former lord mayor Robert Doyle at a guest appearance on Joy FM in 2015.

Some assume that’s because Mitchell and Doyle are close – perhaps too close for the former to legitimately scrutinise the latter. Mitchell flatly denies that charge.

“People perceive him as a mate; he’s not a mate,” he says. “I know him well, and I have quite liked him over the years, but what he’s done is atrocious and I’ve told him that.”

In a subsequent email exchange, he elaborates on the issue of closeness: “I have spent my career dealing with public figures of one type or another. With the possible exception of Bob Hawke in the 1970s, I believe I have not got so close to them as to be journalistically compromised.”

Nonetheless, over coffee in Prahran he admits he could have pushed harder on Doyle in the interview – “I should have asked whether he would now co-operate with the inquiry” – but admits “it was draining, sitting opposite a man who was right on the edge”.

He rejects suggestions he was too much in the Doyle camp back in 2018, too.

“I would never condone assault or harassment of any woman,” he says. “I said from day one [that] if guilty, Doyle must go.

“I think all such complaints should be taken seriously, investigated and dealt with,” he adds via email. “But some in the media at times are turning presumption of innocence to presumption of guilt. That helps nobody, accuser or accused.

“Some in the media at times, around many issues, act like a lynch mob,” he adds. “I hate to consider I may have been guilty of that myself at times.”

Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin