VIDEO: Legendary Neil Mitchell reflects on his 33 years in the radio business

LAURA TINGLE, PRESENTER:  Welcome to 7.30, Neil Mitchell.

NEIL MITCHELL, 3AW MORNINGS PRESENTER:  Thanks Laura.

LAURA TINGLE:  Congratulations on a truly stellar career as a broadcaster. I was hoping I could get you to reflect on the changing role of radio over the course of your career. What it is about talkback radio that makes it so successful in 2023?

NEIL MITCHELL:  It’s real. It is unpredictable, it is earthy, it is in direct touch with people that can ring in and tell you, you are brilliant or you’re an idiot. They can ring and cry or laugh or whatever.

I just like the way that it represents people, in our case, represents a city. If something happens in Melbourne, our audience will ring and tell us, be it good or bad and that’s because of the mobile phone in part, that’s changed it enormously, but I just like the fact that it is much less sanitised than most other mediums.

LAURA TINGLE:  Several people have commented on that role you have given it or that it has got with your program, that if something is happening, people will feel comfortable to ring up and say, “Neil, guess what is happening in Flinders Street or whatever”. How have you built up that trust with your listeners?

NEIL MITCHELL:  I think in Melbourne we’ve changed the nature of talkback radio through what I do and my predecessor, the people who lead into me on breakfast programs.

We don’t take ourselves too seriously. I’m walking down the street with you, and I’m talking to you and helping you and involved with what you do. There’s less pretension, there is less hectoring, a bit of hectoring occasionally, but there is less hectoring and less self-indulgence and self-importance. We’re just people with a microphone, I hope, that’s the aim.

LAURA TINGLE:  Let’s talk a bit about politicians now. There’s always a lot of attention paid to the fact that Victorian Premier Dan Andrews won’t come on your program but before we get to that, could we talk more broadly about the way politicians interact with broadcasters like you. How has that changed over the course of your time on 3AW?

NEIL MITCHELL:  It waxes and wanes. Going back a long time, the politicians would deal with you a lot personally. Now they have about 90 minders to do that.

Politicians were more likely to subject themselves to an interview, to subject themselves to criticism. They took it a little less personally when it happened.

They could still try to intimidate you or seduce you, but it was less common than it is now.

There were some great communicators. I mean, Bob Hawke who also banned me for four years when he was prime minister, was one of the great communicators, he really was.

And then you go along to people like Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison. Kevin Rudd, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t know what he was talking about half the time.

LAURA TINGLE:  There was a time when politicians did want to not just advocate their positions but explain things. I suppose I’m thinking of people like Paul Keating and John Howard. They wanted to explain, they felt an obligation to be accountable and that seems to have disappeared.

NEIL MITCHELL:  Oh no, it has disappeared although I never remember Paul Keating being too accountable, I remember him being intimidating, not accountable.

John Howard actually changed it a lot. I used to have Jeff Kennett as the Victorian premier on the program every week and it made a lot of news, it did a lot of interesting things. I remember approaching John Howard soon after he became prime minister and said let’s do the same thing. It took six months to convince him and then he came on one Friday and he was a fish out of water, he really struggled.

He gradually settled into that job and by the finish of his time as prime minister, he was doing talk-back radio in just about every state and he was using it as a real gauge for community mood, but they did drift away.

I mean Kevin Rudd didn’t do it well. Malcolm Turnbull didn’t do it well. Tony Abbott, who I think can be engaging away from a microphone, tends to seize up when it’s there.

Julia Gillard, well, you know, she’d be so careful not to say anything, she wouldn’t say anything. I remember saying to her once, “Why do you bother, if you are going to do that?”

Very few of them could communicate as well as Hawke or even Howard in his later days.

LAURA TINGLE:  Why do you think politicians – the Premier of Victoria and for that matter it happens in other states like in Queensland – why do you think they can get away with not talking to people like you?

NEIL MITCHELL:  It’s risk verses benefit. That’s why they do it. They see it as risky and not much benefit.

They can get away with it because they get away with just about anything these days. There is this attitude of intimidation of much of the media and they’re doing a favour to actually answer questions.

You look at a press conference, how often do you get an answer to anything out of a press conference? You get spin, spin is dominating at a level that quite terrifies me. I know this sounds like silly old bugger territory, but it terrifies me a bit that we’re heading down this path which is no accountability, very little fact and heaps of spin.

The weather bureau refused to talk to me the other day – the weather bureau! Because they got something wrong, oh, we’re not going to talk about that. They just avoided accountability.

LAURA TINGLE:  Coming back to Daniel Andrews. At what point does it start to count against politicians that they don’t answer the questions?

NEIL MITCHELL:  Daniel Andrews’ template, while it works – and it is coming undone a bit now – but while that template works, it concerns me that it will be picked up by other governments and state governments and federal governments and they will say, “Well, look, he managed to run it this way, let’s copy Dan. It’s worked for him, why not?”

LAURA TINGLE:  Do you think he’s been able to enjoy that success in that policy partly because of that news exhaustion factor that people talk about?

NEIL MITCHELL:  Oh yeah, there’s a bit of that. He’s also brilliant at intimidation of the press gallery and seduction of the press gallery. If one doesn’t work, he’ll try the other. He does that very well.

And unfortunately, I don’t know, maybe it’s an era that media is going through, but unfortunately too many seem to either cop the intimidation or the seduction and we have a pretty young gallery here, there is not a lot of people to stand up to him.

LAURA TINGLE:  So the media isn’t really doing its job?

NEIL MITCHELL:  No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s doing it as well as it could, no.

But what would you expect? I’ve been 54 years in media. Of course, I’m going to look at the old days and say they were better.

In some ways, the new days are better but I think we certainly did more to make..

Look, I started in The Age in the early ’70s. You look at the way The Age made both sides accountable. It was a brilliant newspaper in those days, and I don’t see that happening around the country.

I see activism, I see committed journalism. I don’t see enough independent, inquiring, genuine aggressive journalism that takes on both sides.

LAURA TINGLE:  Well, you’re not going to be disappearing altogether. When you finish up at 3AW at the end of the year, you’re still going to be doing podcasting. What else are you up?

NEIL MITCHELL:  I will do a podcast a week, I’ll do some radio spots once a week. I’ll probably do a bit of TV. I have got a couple of offers for a column.

I’m not going away. I will be around annoying the hell out of them!

LAURA TINGLE:  Well, we wish you well and thank you so much for talking to us tonight.

NEIL MITCHELL:  Thank you very much, Laura.