Do we like Kyle Sandilands?
Our score: 2 out of 10. Regulator findings on gay men and disabled athletes, plus fresh praise for Pauline Hanson, outweigh a few real donations.
Kyle Sandilands is the shock jock who spent two decades as half of Sydney's top-rating breakfast duo with Jackie O, and a judge on Australian Idol before that. The pitch was always pushing past the line, and he has been dragged back over it by employers, regulators and prime ministers for years.
The stunt that nearly ended him came in 2009, when a 14-year-old girl was put on a lie detector on his 2Day FM show at her mother's request. When she said she had been raped at 12, he asked whether that was her only sexual experience. He apologised repeatedly, Network Ten dropped him from Idol, and the show was put on hold.
Now the harm check. In August 2022 he called mpox “the big gay disease” on air, and the media regulator ACMA found the segment breached decency standards and went “beyond any acceptable standards”. In 2021 he talked about the “Special Olympics” being “horrific”, and ACMA found that segment disparaged athletes, then found he intimidated a journalist who criticised it. The licensee agreed to sensitivity training for the hosts.
In March 2025 ACMA found another broadcast included “sustained and vulgar graphic sexualised descriptions” that went beyond community standards. That is a pattern across years, not one bad morning. He has previously denied his gay-men comments were homophobic, though the reports we opened carry no statement from him on the ACMA finding.
The recent stuff is more of the same. On 9 September 2026 his new show interviewed an educator who had faced backlash over LGBTQIA+ terminology in primary schools. Sandilands defended her, and when a co-host pushed back he swore at him and then snapped at another colleague. In June he said Pauline Hanson was “one of my favourite people now”, and the report said it was understood he had helped her party with its messaging.
On the settlement: ARN agreed to pay him $12.09 million over three years, in return for a share of revenue from his new venture and a bar on joining its competitors until March 2027. He told Variety the whole thing was “devastating” and that he had “apologised a half-dozen times” to Jackie O, and her own legal action against ARN is still going.