Was it acceptable for shock jock Alan Jones to suggest that anyone thinking it was a good idea to build an aged-care home in Sydney's Middle Head parklands was a "brain dead nit-wit"?
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Yes, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which has ruled that the controversial broadcaster did not breach radio codes with his withering broadside against the now-defunct proposal.
When Jones let fly in May focusing on the plan's bushfire risks, his use of the phrase " brain dead nit-wit" to describe proponents was not a "factual assertion about the developers' regard for safety issues", ACMA has found.
Rather, it was a "a hyperbolic statement about the allegedly poor thinking behind the proposal and an expression of Mr Jones' opinion". The complainant had alleged Jones had run a "deliberate and intensive on-air campaign ... to discredit [the developer's] professional integrity".
But the authority said Jones had done his research, and that what it euphemistically described as the broadcaster's "strong viewpoint" was a core "part of the appeal" of talkback.
The finding is a reprieve for Jones who's previously been in ACMA's bad books over ill-informed tirades on climate change and who faces legal action on other fronts over comments he has made about the 2011 Grantham floods in Queensland.
The proposal to build an 89-bed aged care home on Middle Head - on parklands administered by the Commonwealth government through the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust - was passionately opposed by Jones, who lambasted former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his ministers when they first green-lit the plan at the end of last year.
It was quietly overturned by the Abbott government in May.
The company behind the proposal, Middle Head Healthcare, then took the federal government to court arguing that the reversal had been at "Mr Jones' behest".
The matter was later settled out of court.
A separate legal action arising out of the saga - launched by the primary opponents of the plan, the Headland Preservation Group against the Harbour Trust and others - was discontinued by consent of all parties on Friday.
The confidential settlement means the aged care facility on the hotly-contested site will remain "dead and buried" HPG president Linda Bergin said.
"Next year a new plan for the whole of Middle Head, including the Sydney Harbour National parklands, will begin and we hope will result in an outcome which puts public, not private, first" she said.
