Vulgar content in the Sesame Street time slot: how Kyle and Jackie O skirt decency laws

Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O Henderson are reading out text messages from listeners on their breakfast show shortly after 6am in early October.

One comes through from “Shin Yoong” – someone pretending to be the Taiwanese housemate of Peter Deppeler, a producer on the Kiis FM show.

“Your Asian housemate keeps messaging us,” Henderson says.

“Shin Yoong here back again, Peter sucked my dick last night,” she reads out, laughing.

“You’re back in the game, brother!” Sandilands says.

It is the latest in a long-running joke about the housemates of Deppeler, known to listeners as “intern Pete”.

“Is there any talking [with your housemates]?” Sandilands asks.

“I say hi, they make noises,” Deppeler says.

The day before the duo aired a caller with a fake accent saying: “Petey-boy, it’s Shin Yoong! Petey-boy, we come for you!”

In an earlier segment, Deppeler brings in food from their shared pantry to “get to the bottom” of his housemates’ ethnicity, and jokes that he can’t pronounce one of their names.

“What the hell is all this shit?” Henderson asks as they unwrap salted duck eggs and shredded squid.

“Oh, shit no!”

They joke about finding heroin when unwrapping the food, and later Sandilands says: “Imagine if … they take offence to you stealing all their food and everything, and they just beat you to death.”

In two weeks of listening to The Kyle & Jackie O Show in October, Guardian Australia has documented segments that mock Asian people and insult women and mental health patients, as well as vulgar and aggressive sexual language. The most offensive content involves Sandilands, while Henderson often offers mild protest to his comments about women and sex.

Aggressive sexual content

Sandilands and Henderson have been presenting breakfast radio together for more than 20 years. They are billed as the “king and queen” of Australian commercial radio and their show has rated No 1 in the coveted breakfast slot in Sydney for 47 surveys in a row.

Last year they announced that as part of a $200m, 10-year deal with Kiis they would be taking their show national, expanding into the tightly fought Melbourne market from April 2024.

But the show has been in the spotlight for its tanking performance in the southern capital.

And despite executives saying Sandilands has “removed” graphic sexual content as part of the expansion, material that has made it to air continues to raise questions about how the show manages to skirt Australia’s broadcast decency standards, including in Senate estimates.

Women’s safety advocates have also raised concerns that broadcasting content that objectifies and disrespects women is at odds with efforts to curb the epidemic of family violence in Australia. The tagline of the federal government’s multimillion-dollar Stop it at the Start campaign is: “Violence against women starts with disrespect.” The campaign is targeting young males aged 10 to 17 – the same age as a notable portion of Kiis listeners.

Even as these concerns are being ventilated, politicians remain eager to appear on the program. The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, who attended Sandilands’ wedding in April 2023, has appeared at least seven times on the show since the 2022 election. The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has appeared three times this year.

Two weeks of broadcasts monitored by Guardian Australia in early October included:

• Derisive language about women and descriptions of aggressive sex, including Sandilands telling Henderson a man should be prepared to “smash you anally” regardless of her politics. He also calls Henderson an “annoying bitch” and a “ho”.

• Jokes about dating men who are not white, with Sandilands telling Henderson her 13-year-old daughter is “like mother, like daughter, white only” and asking about whether her daughter has dated “darkfellas”.

• Sandilands quizzing one of his colleagues on air about her dating habits, saying: “What flavour of man is it? Are we white? Black? Are we bloody … what are we dealing with here? Asian?” before asking one of his female producers if she’s still “only dating Islanders”. She replies that her ex-boyfriend was Greek but she “won’t do that again”, and he says: “Why not? … You like vaginal sex instead?”

• Jokes from Sandilands about overweight women and mental health, talking about “bigger girls” needing help, “porkers”, “fat mentals” – in regard to the lead character in the Netflix show Baby Reindeer – and discussion about “all the other mentals” in a psychiatric hospital.

Graphic sexual content is a recurrent theme. Callers are asked to describe their favourite sexual position and often go into vivid detail using aggressive language.

One caller who said his favourite sexual position was “the jackhammer” was invited by Sandilands to describe it. The caller explains that a man props a woman up “so they’re upside down … and then, yeah, you just go to town”. Sandilands summarises it: “It’s similar to what I refer to as the human drilling rig, Jackie. You would have thought with all the influx of penetration you’ve had lately, you’d know all this.”

Another caller said his favourite position was a “butcher’s wheelbarrow” – holding a woman’s arms from behind like a wheelbarrow, “and then you go to town and just butcher the pussy”.

Sandilands regularly refers to women as “that” and “it” when talking about sex, saying in a conversation about sharing women for sex: “If your mate wants to smash that, and you want to smash it too, it has to be OK.”

While fascinated by sex, Sandilands also routinely expresses a juvenile horror of female anatomy. In one segment the pair discuss a time that the radio veteran John Laws hung up on them because, before his interview, Henderson had been talking about her vagina on air.

“Jackie was talking about some – I think you were getting a vaginal rejuvenation or something, from memory,” Sandilands says.

Henderson says she had been discussing a gynaecological operation she’d had, to which Sandilands replies: “Getting the ham trimmed off, I don’t know what you’ve done down there.”

When Henderson clarifies that she had a cyst removed, Sandilands groans in revulsion and yells: “Even worse!”

In another segment, he talks about pulling a tampon string out of his mother’s vagina.

“I yanked on mum’s string, yanked it out, she was horrified, I didn’t even know what a vag was … Lachie, you ever pulled your mum’s tampon string out in the shower?”

How is this allowed on breakfast radio?

Since 2019, Australia’s media regulator has received more than 307 complaints from listeners regarding at least 15 separate broadcasts on The Kyle & Jackie O Show. Most allege breaches of the radio code of practice’s decency standards which cover “material not suitable for broadcast”.

Under the co-regulation system of Australian commercial radio, complaints must go to the licensee to be dealt with in the first instance. If a complaint hasn’t been through this process, the Australian Communications and Media Authority will decline to assess it.

Of the 307 complaints against Kyle and Jackie O, only 40 had first gone to Kiis FM’s owner, ARN. Acma assessed these and rejected the vast majority without publishing a reason. It launched three investigations which all resulted in the finding of a breach. Just one resulted in an enforceable action.

“It’s the proverbial slap on the wrist with a damp lettuce,” Matthew Ricketson, professor of communication at Deakin University, tells Guardian Australia.

“[This] is the criticism of Acma. The basic conclusion is that it isn’t a very effective regulator. It’s putting it a bit politely.”

Ricketson analysed 10 years’ worth of complaints to Acma as part of his book Who Needs the ABC?, finding that 89% of complaints about the show had been rejected between January 2010 and July 2021. The Kyle & Jackie O Show attracted the second highest number of complaints of all commercial radio programs in that period, after Alan Jones.

“[We] need more nuance in [our] regulatory regime, so that [audiences] can actually do something,” he said. “If someone really did want to complain properly about Kyle and Jackie, they’re not going to get much satisfaction at the moment.”

The segment that led to an enforceable action was from September 2021, when Sandilands made derogatory comments about athletes competing in the Tokyo Paralympics, a tournament he described as “horrific”.

“When they were playing soccer, the blind people, I was thinking: are you joking? They’re throwing themselves on the ground like sausages to block the ball,” Sandilands said. He also mocked a high jumper who “veered right because he was blind and landed on his arse”.

At the conclusion of the segment, Sandilands said: “Listen, you can be nice to the handicapped, but you don’t have to compare them to the non-handicapped.”

ARN was forced by Acma to employ a second real-time censor on the show and to deliver sensitivity and code compliance training to the hosts and staff. It was also required to report back to the regulator on its progress every six months for two years.

Who’s listening?

When it investigates complaints under the code’s decency provisions, Acma is required to take into account the demographics of a show’s audience.

Who is listening – just adults? Families? An impressionable teen audience?

“Context is a pivotal consideration in … the decency and harm and offence provisions,” the regulator’s guidelines say.

And: “An important contextual consideration is audience expectations,” an Acma concept report states.

In response to a 2019 complaint about a segment in which Sandilands said the Virgin Mary had been “chock-a-blocked” behind the camel shed, ARN said The Kyle & Jackie O Show “has an adult audience”.

But ratings figures reveal that it might no longer be that clearcut.

A Guardian Australia analysis of 2024 rating surveys from the industry body Commercial Radio and Audio shows that Kiis attracts the biggest share of listeners aged 10 to 17 – averaging about 18% over the year. This means about 200,000 children and teenagers are listening to the station each week in Sydney alone.

CRA does not break down the demographic by program, but Kyle and Jackie O is Kiis’s top-rating show in the Sydney market.

In Melbourne the station attracts about 11% of the 10- to 17-year-old demographic, a cumulative audience of about 150,000.

ARN has argued in response to complaints that its listeners have come to expect the “conversational and informal style” of the show.

“Mr Sandilands is well known for his turn of phrase, colourful vernacular and blunt manner,” it wrote. “The show has been going since 2005 so the audience is well aware and used to this manner. The audience somewhat ‘self-selects’ so that those that choose to listen are not offended.”

But the network does not address how the content might be perceived by an underage audience. And Acma does not appear to be considering this issue either.

‘No one wants to be the Debbie Downer’

“I think we can underestimate young people’s critical capacity with this stuff, and with all forms of media,” says Dr Jennifer Power, associate professor at the Australian research centre in sex, health and society at La Trobe University. But she adds: “[Teenagers] may not have experience against which to judge [the discussions of sex on the show], so for that reason I think they might be particularly primed to get that imagery in their head.

“There’s a part of me that wants to say: I love that people are having conversations about sexual positions, but it’s also classic that the only way we’re able to talk about these issues is misogynistic… and full of jokes and has no humanity and human connection.”

Of “the jackhammer” sexual position, she says: “I’m not saying all sex has to be an amazing magical human connection, sex can be a lot of things. But it’s a dehumanising depiction of what’s happening.

“The research we’ve consistently gathered from young people and I’ve seen from a lot of studies, is young people are really interested in learning what sex looks like, feels like, the mechanics of sex, the anatomy of sex.”

These conversations aren’t ones that parents and teachers are willing to have with teenagers, and vice versa. “It’s a real gap in terms of what people are talking about.” She adds: “I’m surprised that young people would still find [Sandilands] cool. I’ve got a teenage son, I think he’d just find him old.”

While society’s dialogue about sex, sexuality and consent has “come an incredibly long way in a short space of time”, and younger people are more inclined to call out discussions they think are harmful, young people still face “pressure to be in on the joke and think it’s cool”, Power says.

“It’s the classic, if you react you’re called a prude – no one wants to be the Debbie Downer or the one who can’t take a joke, or the one who is shamed.”

Patty Kinnersly, the chief executive of Our Watch, which campaigns against violence against women and children, said young people were “seeing harmful gender stereotypes, objectification of women and violent sexual interactions normalised in the world around them”.

“This is happening during a crucial time in their development and can influence their attitudes and behaviours.”

The organisation points to data from the Australian Institute of Family Studies which shows that violence against women was common in young people’s earliest relationships, with almost one in three 18- to 19-year-olds having experienced an abusive relationship in the previous 12 months.

Guardian Australia asked Acma if it had considered the potential child audience of Kyle and Jackie O when assessing complaints about the program.

The regulator said through a spokesperson that it “will consider the demographic characteristics of the audience of the relevant program” but was unable to say whether it had examined demographic data specific to the program.

“As part of the investigation process, licensees usually provide submissions regarding their compliance, which may include information regarding demographic characteristics.

“In considering audience characteristics, the ACMA will consider licensee submissions regarding the core / target audience of their programming and likely audience expectations of the content. However, the ACMA is not confined to only considering the standards prevailing to the target audience.”

‘We, um, are aware of some of these’

At a Senate estimates hearing in Canberra, the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young began her questioning of bureaucrats from Acma by circulating a highlighted document.

She asked for the chair of Acma, Nerida O’Loughlin, to be presented with the sheet with “just a handful” of comments made on The Kyle & Jackie O Show since September.

A Liberal committee member heckles Hanson-Young for being a listener, to which the steely-eyed senator responds: “I most certainly am not.”

As the highlighted document makes its way around the U-shaped table, the room falls silent.

“Now, Ms O’Loughlin, I want you to have a look at this and tell me whether you think you would be able to read this out to us,” Hanson-Young says.

After a 10-second silence, O’Loughlin, who is dressed in a formal grey suit jacket and flanked by a team of four female executives, stammers a response.

“Um, I, I can only say that, ah, we, um, are aware of some of these, I am not sure that we are aware of all of these but I will hand it over to my colleagues,” she says.

“And I would prefer not to read it out.”

“You would prefer not to read it out?” Hanson-Young says. “Understandable … I understand why you don’t want to read these comments out, because they are vulgar, aren’t they?”

“I only skimmed them, senator, but I would not think they were appropriate for parliamentary language,” O’Loughlin replies.

“Do you think they would be appropriate for broadcast radio between the hours of 6am and 10am?” Hanson-Young asks.

As the exchange goes on, Hanson-Young tells the committee for the benefit of Hansard that the document includes “jokes about people being gay, jokes about one of the producer’s Asian housemates, jokes about people not being white, jokes about the sexual and racial profiles of other journalists from other stations, divisive and violent language about women and sex” and “vulgar detail about sex acts”.

Hanson-Young challenges O’Loughlin about why Acma has not used its powers to initiate its own investigation into what she says appears to be a “blatant” breach of the code.

“Why haven’t you? This is revolting, sexist, racist, misogynistic, divisive stuff on free-to-air radio from 6am in the morning … and you have not investigated it.”

“We have investigated a number of matters previously,” O’Loughlin replies.

The regulator has been unable to tell Guardian Australia why complaints that did meet Acma’s reporting requirements did not trigger a formal investigation.

“In deciding whether to investigate a matter, the Acma has regard to a range of public interest considerations, which may include the specifics and/or merits of the matter, the nature and seriousness of the issue raised, the matter’s potential to affect the community at large and its priority in relation to other matters,” a spokesperson said.

The regulator does not publish its reasons for dismissing complaints. It also does not know how many complaints have been made directly to the broadcaster about the show.

Under the commercial radio code of practice, each licensee must keep a record of the number and substance of code complaints it receives, with this data given to Commercial Radio and Audio.

CRA provides Acma with an annual report containing a summary of these complaints but, in the estimates hearing, O’Loughlin confirms to Hanson-Young that the regulator does not know how many complaints an individual radio program receives.

“We are not aware of that, senator – there is no requirement under the code for people to advise us of that,” O’Loughlin says.

“That’s not very helpful, is it?” the senator responds.

‘This isn’t Sesame Street’

Australian governments have historically been reluctant to antagonise potential critics in the broadcast media, according to Derek Wilding, a co-director of the centre for media transition at the University of Technology Sydney, and this is one reason Acma does not have more robust powers, such as being able to compel on-air corrections or apologies.

“The enforcement tools are not sufficient… [They have] needed to be reviewed for a number of years and it’s never been done,” he tells Guardian Australia.

“That would be very much up to government to do – but a number of governments over many years have been aware of this and no one has pursued it.”

An Acma spokesperson said the regulator had access to a “graduated” range of sanctions depending on the nature of the code breach.

“Where there is a breach of a code, the ACMA negotiates with broadcasters on steps to address problems and ensure future compliance,” the spokesperson said.

“Actions may include additional staff training, changed editorial or technological processes and periodical reporting to the ACMA on actions taken.”

Sandilands has acknowledged that ‘there may be little ears in cars’ overhearing his show’s crude content.

Wilding also says the lack of publicly available information about complaints held by the industry body is a flaw in the co-regulation system that “shows a real lack of transparency”.

“It’s perfectly reasonable for the community to have access to information about complaints that are made, to statistic reports about the kinds of issues that are being complained about to broadcasters and then to the regulator,” he says.

A review of the industry code of practice – written by the industry and presented to Acma – is an opportunity to update the code to reflect contemporary community standards, he says.

In the past there has been “little transparency” in how broadcasting codes are drafted, Wilding says, but he welcomes a change in a review of the commercial television code, in which Acma has set out its expectations for improvements.

“If you stand back and look at the rules that exist, I think there’s a real question over whether those rules are suitable for the current environment, whether they have kept up with community standards, and indeed whether they are responsive enough, whether they embody the kind of practices that the community would expect.”

An ARN spokesperson told Guardian Australia that while The Kyle & Jackie O Show “may not appeal to everyone”, it was the country’s most successful program, with a weekly audience of more than 1.7 million people.

“ARN is committed to delivering content that meets both regulatory standards and audience expectations,” he said. “We also regularly review our content and take on audience feedback.

“We respect ACMA’s independent regulatory role and will continue to work under its guidelines.”

In an interview with the Melbourne Radio Wars podcast in May, Sandilands acknowledged that “there may be little ears in cars” overhearing his show’s crude content.

“This isn’t Sesame Street, so we’re not super kid-friendly ever,” he said. But after looking at a breakdown of “who’s listening where and when”, he said, the pair had tried to concentrate the “raunchy” content “in that first hour [6am to 7am]”.

“It’s mainly tradies and nurses coming home from night shift,” he said. “The naughty people.”

Sandilands maintained that the show followed broadcast regulations.

“We’re still very much on the right side of broadcast laws, as loosey goosey and as grey and murky and cloudy as those laws are,” he said.

“We always do walk that fine line.”