The Kyle & Jackie O Show receives a gumming from ACMA's toothless tiger

Oct 01, 2025

Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade. Today: The ACMA is slow and powerless, as The Kyle & Jackie O Show demonstrates once again. And further down, SCA’s share price goes negative as the market digests the SWM merger plan.

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The woman whose job it is to regulate The Kyle & Jackie O Show asks: ‘Why does The Kyle & Jackie O Show keep breaking the rules?’

If you’d like a barometer reading of how little Australia’s media regulator is feared, look at the movement of ARN Media’s share price today.

At 10am, the Australian Communications and Media Authority released its findings that The Kyle & Jackie O Show, broadcast on Kiis FM in Sydney and Melbourne, had breached the radio industry’s decency standard multiple times. However, the punishment (not that ACMA uses that word) will follow later.

In the hours that followed, despite this ruling against ARN’s most expensive and high profile show, the company’s share price rose by 3%. And that on day when the wider ASX All Ordinaries was flat.

In other words, the investment market has zero fear that ARN will suffer a meaningful consequence for the breaches.

The case demonstrates the fact that not only is the ACMA failing to regulate broadcasters in a reasonable time span, but it also lacks any powers to deliver meaningful consequences.

I’ve been writing versions of this piece for the last 16 years. Back in 2009, came the ACMA ruling that The Kyle & Jackie O Show had breached radio standards after they put a lie detector on a 14-year-old girl who blurted out that she had been raped. The show was then on Southern Cross Austereo station 2DayFM, and after a months-long investigation, the regulator ruled that a new licence condition would be added covering content featuring children.

Then came Kyle Sandilands’ 2011 attack on a female journalist. Many months later, the ACMA ruled that he’d breached the standards of decency for calling her “a piece of shit”. Again the consequence was that ACMA added a licence condition covering what would happen if there were further breaches.

The licence condition, incidentally, applies to the radio station, not the individual presenter. So when Sandilands and Jackie Henderson crossed town to Kiis FM, they started with a fresh slate.

In 2023, ACMA took a full 18 months to find that Sandilands had breached decency provisions over comments he made about Paralympians. Kiis promised to employ a second censor.

June 2024 came another breach, covering decency rules broken during explicit segments. This time the result (when the ACMA investigation concluded several months later, of course) was for the regulator to sit on deciding any punishment until it had looked at other potential breaches.

The ACMA only became interested in those breaches after its chair Nerida O’Loughlin was invited during Senate Estimates to read out extracts from the show and she refused.

Today, we finally got the result of those new investigations. In a bunch of other tawdry segments in the latter half of last year, the decency clause was breached seven more times, ACMA ruled. It turns out that playing recordings of people urinating and holding graphic discussions of masturbation may not be suitable listening while the kids are in the car.

In today’s press release, O’Loughlin sure did sound cross:

“The Kyle & Jackie O Show has repeatedly and deliberately aired content that is vulgar, sexually explicit and deeply offensive,” Ms O’Loughlin said.
“Even after previous breaches and the employment of additional censors required by the ACMA, the program continues to broadcast content that is unacceptable to the community.
“ARN as the licensee of these stations appears unwilling or unable to rein in these presenters. As a result, the ACMA is currently considering enforcement actions so that ARN takes full responsibility for the content broadcast on their stations.”

If only somebody (like Ms O’Loughlin, for instance) could do something.

So what “enforcement actions” are now available, I asked the ACMA (already pretty much knowing the answer). The reply:

“Enforcement actions available to the ACMA for a breach of the Code include:
Agreed measures
Court enforceable undertaking, and
Imposing an additional licence condition on the licensee.”

Only if the ACMA now imposes a new condition that breaching the decency standard for a tenth (11th; 12th?) time could affect the licence, might we see an actual commercial consequence.

No wonder the ARN share price went up.

Share market turns against SCA deal

Southern Cross Austereo’s share price dropped by a hefty 7.3% today as the market continued to digest the audio company’s proposed deal to merge with Seven West Media.

SCA’s price initially improved by 6% yesterday when the news first broke. However, the company’s stocks have now gone backwards on where they were before the deal announcement.