David Flint writes: Alan Jones, probably the most influential commentator in the Australian media has announced his retirement from leading Sydney radio station 2GB, owned by Nine Radio, formerly Macquarie Media. During most of his 35 years career, Alan Jones dominated breakfast radio, recording an unequalled 226 survey wins.

His influence cannot be overestimated. His reports were always based on meticulous personal research, his approach guided by conservative values presented with the common sense he learned from his farmer parents.

This was typified in the 1999 republican referendum when the national media, print and electronic, commercial and public, was next to unanimous in its opposition to the constitutional monarchy. Almost alone among major media figures, he supported the NO case. Alan’s response to undecided callers became one of the No case slogans, ‘If you don’t know, vote No’

Although Alan is leaving radio he is not retiring. He will still appear regularly on Sky Television, as well as writing in the Sydney Daily Telegraph and no doubt on rugby, one of his many interests, in The Australian.

The following comment appeared in The Spectator Australia last year when he was the target of a quite fraudulent campaign to remove him from breakfast radio.

The longstanding aim of a sinister fifth column has been, for over three decades, to silence Alan Jones. It is neither paranoid nor exaggerated to use the term ‘fifth column.’ Their policies are to overturn, by hook or by crook, the dream realised at Federation when the people, ‘ humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God’, agreed to unite in an indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown and under the Constitution. This was above all, as David Kemp insists in his magnificent project —a five-volume history of Australian liberalism —an essentially Liberal dream, whatever political labels were chosen by the Founders. As Sir Henry Parkes said, ‘if a perfectly free people can arise anywhere, it surely may arise in this favoured land of Australia.’

Arthur Phillip, viceroy of one of the world’s few constitutional, rather than absolute governments had, by bringing the rule of law, already ensured the exceptionalism of the Australian project. Intending this to surpass even America’s dreams, Phillip adopted Lord Mansfield’s finding that under the common law ‘the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.’ To his eternal glory, Phillip ordained that Australia be the first continent free of the scourge of slavery, a fact ignored in the disaster that is education today. Australia remains an exceptional nation.

The fifth column, a veritable Anti-Australian Alliance, has long been ready to overthrow this great achievement. As Hal Colebatch demonstrates in Australia’s Secret War: How Unionists Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II, they even treacherously undermined our war effort. They did this with impunity only because of the impotence of the Curtin government, hostage to extreme elements within the Labor Party. It is extraordinary that the AAA fifth column is triumphing through the application of Gramsci’s wildly successful counsel to the communists to engage in the long march through the institutions, as well as through the application of Burke’s eternal truth, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ Its path has been eased by the takeover, in recent years, of the two-party system by cliques of preying powerbrokers and lobbyists who have ensured that the parties are, among comparative countries, the least open, transparent and democratic. The result has been that on any matter — from energy, defence, water, education, law and order, immigration, even the approval process for home units, government (whether federal or state) has proven massively incompetent.

There is something even more sinister, and that is demonstrated by the fraud that is, if not in the worship accorded the increasingly discredited theory concerning man-made global warming, the complete obedience required for the globalist solution decreed by the UN  IPCC. Even firm believers in the theory, such as Bjorn Lomborg, have been declared heretical within Australian universities for daring to propose an alternative to a problem which Alan Jones has the courage to declare does not exist.

On all this, in seeking the truth and advancing the constitutional prescription to the politicians, that they exist and only exist to provide for the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth, Alan Jones has emerged as the tribune of the Australian people. That is, in a nutshell, why, to the cultural Marxists, Alan Jones is as Carthage was to Cato the Elder: he must be destroyed. To achieve this he must be swept from the airwaves by targeting, through algorithms, a fake sense of non-existent widespread outrage, sufficient to destabilise the weakest and least courageous advertising executives. They forget that while advertising is indispensable, the individual advertiser is easily replaced, especially with the massive audience Alan Jones commands. Moreover, this is an audience which is constantly increasing and not just by relay. He has, for example, only recently come to social media, yet he is already a dominant voice. His interviews uniquely feature a long introduction simplifying anything complex, followed by the judicious use of leading questions to ensure an efficient flow. Mixing talkback, interviews and monologues, his conclusions are invariably based on research and common sense. On that, he has advanced the best test of any act of government: ‘Does it pass the pub test?’ Perhaps that could be the basis of the solution to the nation’s ills for which he constantly searches, constitutionalising common sense. (He has, in fact, supported this in his generous forewords to both editions of a book I co-authored, Give Us Back Our Country.)

The range of the interests he traverses is extraordinarily broad. Like some Renaissance prince, these range from politics to sport and culture, including the theatre and music. No armchair commentator, he is heavily involved in keeping politicians to principle, was probably the nation’s most successful rugby coach and when it comes to theatre, is famously never reluctant to tread the boards. That he himself is the most supportive of charitable organisations and those in need is something he never mentions but which is known, personally, by legions of supporters. Above all, he is a decent and honourable man, properly rewarded for his unique skills, but only receiving a proportion of the salaries of some of our virtue-signaling CEO’s receive.

And so we come to the feigned affront caused by his variation  of the oft-used and very-Australian retort, ‘Put a sock in it.’ For her hypocritical, opportunistic and unjustified attack on Australia on, unsurprisingly, global warming, the New Zealand Prime Minister deserved much more. It would seem unlikely any rank and file Australian was either seriously offended or even mildly disappointed by these words. But if any were, perhaps they should just get out more. The fifth column’s campaign will not succeed but it will not be the last.Those who give some credence to the campaign are lending support to the destruction of the Australian project.

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