John Laws was one of the most influential, commercially successful yet polarising figures in the history of Australian radio broadcasting. He has died at the age of 90.
He was among a handful of pioneering presenters who swiftly took advantage of a critical change in the broadcasting laws in April 1967. Until then, regulations enforced by the Postmaster General’s Department and the Broadcasting Control Board prohibited telephone conversations being put to air.
Laws was at the Sydney station 2UE when this epochal change was made, and his deep resonant voice, combined with an instinctively combative style, gave him a competitive edge over his rivals. In his biography, Lawsie, Laws quotes Paul Keating as saying: “The most important thing to say about John Laws is he really made and created the medium of talkback radio in Australia.”
Keating, as federal treasurer and later as prime minister, understood the value of Laws and his connectedness to audiences all over the country. This was especially true in the western suburbs of Sydney, which contained then – as now – a number of marginal federal electorates. Keating also famously said: “Forget the press gallery. Educate John Laws and you educate Australia”.
The 1983 federal election, in which the Labor Party, led by Bob Hawke, defeated the Liberal-National Coalition led by Malcolm Fraser, became known in political circles as the “John Laws election”. This was because so many major campaign announcements were made by politicians on his show.
It was also on the Laws show that Fraser made a statement that was to go into Australian political folklore: that if Labor won, people would be safer keeping their money under the bed. This set up Fraser for Hawke’s equally famous riposte that there was no room under the bed because that’s where all the Reds (communists) were supposed to be.
Despite Laws’ substantial wealth, his listeners, who lived in far more straitened circumstances across Sydney’s “fibro” suburbs, were intensely loyal. This loyalty was based on a belief that Laws would stand up for them against government bullying and the depredations of criminals. One woman credited him with saving her son from the clutches of drug-traffickers by putting pressure on the local police to clean up the neighbourhood.
His was a voice for these otherwise voiceless people years before his great rival Alan Jones invented the term “Struggle Street”, using the platform of radio to put pressure on the powerful and creating a template for talkback that survives to this day.
The contrary view of Laws is captured in this passage from a communications academic, Glen Lewis:
[H]e foregrounds minority group negative stereotyping in his show … he specialises in moral crusades against the unrespectable weak – the unemployed, prisoners, homosexuals, anti-nuclear demonstrators – in the name of the upright citizen and honest taxpayer.
In November 2004, Laws and another 2UE presenter, Steve Price,