If you thought Kyle Sandilands’ humiliation was complete, just wait for what Albo has in store: PVO
Marriage of convenience
For years, The Kyle and Jackie O Show has occupied a strange place in Australian public life: part breakfast-radio juggernaut, part celebrity confessional, part rolling exercise in vulgarity dressed up as entertainment.
Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson built a massive audience – in Sydney, at least – by turning outrage, intimacy and spectacle into ratings gold, with politicians, celebrities and hangers-on all too willing to climb aboard when it suited them.
Anthony Albanese famously became one of those hangers-on when he set his sights on becoming Prime Minister.
He can’t now pretend he didn’t know who Sandilands was all along. He simply didn’t care, because the exposure ‘King Kyle’ gave him – reaching floating-voter tradies and undecided suburban mums – was simply too tempting for the now PM.
Sandilands didn’t suddenly become toxic this past fortnight after he viciously turned on his co-host Henderson live on air, leading her to terminate her $100million contract rather than ever have to be in a studio with him again.
His career has long been built on vulgarity and outrage, with controversies ranging from his 2019 Virgin Mary comments to repeated decency findings and complaints against his show.
And yet when it suited him, Albo was more than happy to play along and turn a blind eye. He appeared on the program repeatedly as PM, and as Opposition Leader before that while positioning himself for the top job.
Albo was Kyle Sandilands’ best mate when he was useful. Where is he now?
Defending his decision to attend Sandilands’ wedding in April 2023, he leaned into his well-worn persona as a music lover and joked about being the DJ for the special occasion.
Even in January this year – just weeks before Sandilands’ blow-up with Henderson, when no reasonable person could plausibly claim ignorance about the show’s coarseness – Albo was on again, chatting away and playing along.
Just watch Albo try to wriggle out of their closeness if the temperature keeps getting turned up in the weeks and months ahead. Kyle was always ‘vile’ – as his critics liked to say – but Albanese disregarded that while the relationship had value.
He’ll become a ghost in Sandilands’ life now – just you wait and see. The definition of a fair-weather friend.
When Sandilands was useful – a ratings machine with a huge audience and a shortcut to parts of suburban Australia politicians scarcely reach – Albo was his best mate. He was happy to borrow the platform and launder the association as harmless populism.
So where is Albo now? Has he called Sandilands to check in on how he’s doing?
Is he still the mate who was happy to bask in the reflected attention when it helped? Or has this become one of those classic political friendships that expired the second the other party stopped being useful?
Albo should be asked directly at a press conference about their relationship. Perhaps he’d sum it up as ‘difficult’, the same way he summed up Grace Tame recently.
Albanese (pictured holding Kyle’s son Otto) has been criticised for his friendship with Sandilands. Up until now, he doesn’t seem to have cared
The real story here isn’t just Kyle Sandilands being Kyle Sandilands. It’s the shallow, transactional nature of political relationships with media figures. Indeed, the shallow nature of many media relationships within the industry.
I bet Sandilands is finding out who his real friends are right now, and I bet the Prime Minister isn’t one of them.
Yesterday’s useful idiot becomes today’s inconvenience, and when that happens, the supposed ‘friendship’ goes missing.
Taylor’s first big mistake
At his first Question Time as Opposition Leader last week, Angus Taylor didn’t ask a single question about the economy. And his new shadow treasurer, Tim Wilson, didn’t even get to ask a question.
If the Liberal Party is to rebuild any credibility before the next election, it has to start with economics. More than that, the economy is where the next election is most likely to be fought and, even if not won outright by the Coalition, where disaster might at least be avoided.
Which makes Taylor’s choice all the more puzzling. Economic management is supposed to be one of his strengths. He’s a former shadow treasurer, has economics qualifications and brings business experience to the role. Taylor flagged the economy as central to his leadership the day he took over.
Yet on day one back in parliament, with Labor under pressure on inflation and interest rates, Taylor went in a completely different direction with his questions.
To not even reserve a single question to frame an argument around living standards, growth, productivity or household pressures was a judgement fail. It leads to the obvious question: who is advising Taylor to take the approach that he did?
At his first Question Time as Opposition Leader last week, Angus Taylor (pictured) didn’t ask a single question about the economy. It was a missed opportunity
Mind the gap
Speaking of missing in action, how is the goal of ‘Closing the Gap’ on Indigenous disadvantage really going? The promises to do so have been made so often over so many years now that they function as little more than a political reflex.
Each year brings another statement of intent, another round of carefully staged seriousness, and yet another assurance that the effort is deepening as the money spent on the pursuit of improvements only grows.
If this cycle was producing results, it would be a worthy cause being well addressed. Instead, the whole self-rotating system has become very good at learning how to survive failure.
The Productivity Commission’s 2025 findings put the truth of ‘closing the gap’ work into context. With data available for most targets, only four are assessed as on track nationally. More damning is the Commission’s finding that outcomes are continuing to worsen on measures that go to the heart of intergenerational disadvantage: adult imprisonment, children in out-of-home care, suicide and early childhood development.
A serious government would treat that as a repudiation of current settings and find new ways to fix the problems. The Albanese Labor government has made Closing the Gap part of its governing identity, fluent in the language of respect, partnership and evidence.
But watching your tone for marketing purposes doesn’t guarantee actual delivery. When Labor trades on moral authority in this space, it also assumes a higher obligation to show improvement where it counts, and that’s not happening. Instead, the national report card continues to show stubborn underperformance, and in key areas the results are going in the wrong direction.
Albo’s instinct is to wrap himself in the cause rather than confront the system failures that keep producing the same woeful results. He’s been in charge for nearly four years now and what does he have to show for it?
Justice settings still funnel Indigenous Australians into prison at extraordinary rates. The dashboard’s figure for adult imprisonment (2,304 per 100,000) speaks for itself. The recorded rate of Indigenous children in out-of-home care is 50 per 1,000. These are the clearest signals of whether the state is reducing harm or reproducing it. They represent failure because they aren’t improving.
This is where the criticism must extend beyond the politicians, to the ecosystem that has formed around this worthy cause. Closing the Gap now sustains a large professional and bureaucratic architecture that is excellent at producing plans, meetings and PC language, but it is far less effective at forcing change in the mainstream institutions that shape Indigenous lives day to day.
Whole careers are now being built on managing the gap, winning applause without results. A genuine national project of this sort would shrink as it succeeds. This one keeps expanding as it fails.
The defence is always the same: it’s complex, it takes time, responsibility is shared by all of us. Shared responsibility has become a way of ensuring no one carries actual responsibility. Complexity has become a shield preventing consequences for ongoing failure. Time has become a substitute for urgency.
The result is a policy agenda that generates an enormous volume of effort at an even greater financial cost, but with an underwhelming record of achievement.
Are fewer Indigenous Australians being imprisoned? Are suicide rates falling? Are more kids arriving at school developmentally on track? The Productivity Commission makes clear that the honest answer is no, and in some areas things are even getting worse.
It’s a national disgrace.
