The media regulator has come under fire for failing to crack down on The Kyle & Jackie O Show‘s “revolting” content, as experts label the program’s subject matter as inappropriate for broadcast.

In a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said recent comments made on KIIS FM’s flagship breakfast show included jokes about sexuality, race, women and mental health; violent language about women and sex; and “vulgar” detail about sex acts.

A transcript she handed out also included a segment in which hosts Kyle Sandilands and ‘Jackie O’ Henderson held a competition which had female staff record themselves urinating for the “boys … to figure out whose bits” the urine was coming out of.

The show has also conducted a similar segment with male staff peeing.

“It’s disgusting. It’s belittling of women. It’s misogynistic. It’s racist. It’s sexist. It’s off,” Hanson-Young said of the show’s content.

University of Wollongong honorary associate professor of journalism Siobhan McHugh told TND the sort of content included in the show was not acceptable under the industry’s decency standards.

“We used to have a catchphrase, ‘Kids in the car’ and that … essentially meant anybody could have their kids in the car as they drove to school or on the morning commute, [so] radio broadcast content should be deemed palatable,” she said.

“There might be a case for being able to get away with stuff like that after a certain time – late night, for instance, was always more lax – but certainly not if you’re broadcasting live between six to 10am.

“That should not be acceptable on any live breakfast show.”

Regulator’s lack of action

Commercial radio shows like Kyle and Jackie O Show fall under the umbrella of industry regulator Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which has a set of decency standards.

But McHugh said ACMA had never been effective at reining in prominent media personalities who break the rules, including “egregious offenders” like Alan Jones who was found to have likely encouraged “violence or brutality” before the 2005 Cronulla riots.

During this week’s Senate estimates hearing, Hanson-Young challenged ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin to read out a sample of the recent comments made on the show, which airs between 6am and 10am on weekdays.

O’Loughlin said she would prefer not to read the transcripts out loud.

Hanson-Young said the decision was understandable, but pointed out there would be far less people – particularly children – tuning into Senate estimates than the hundreds of thousands that listen to the Kyle and Jackie O Show on radio and online every month.

ACMA received 59 complaints about the Kyle and Jackie O Show between July and October alone, but O’Loughlin said complaints needed to be dealt with by the broadcaster first under the co-regulatory framework.

The regulator has found the show to have breached decency standards multiple times.

One of the most serious examples was a 2009 segment that involved asking a 14-year-old girl about her sexual history while she was attached to a lie detector; the girl revealed she had been raped.

More recent instances came after Sandilands blamed gay men for the spread of the mpox virus, and offensive comments were made on the show about athletes during discussions about the Tokyo Paralympics.

The most common outcomes of the findings have been forced sensitivity training, but the show has carried on with little change to its shock-jock antics.

Andy Ruddock, Monash University senior lecturer in communications and media studies, said ACMA’s “tepid” response was in line with media regulation internationally.

The issue was these bodies tended to be very slow to move, often had to act after something had already been done, and were trying to please multiple stakeholders by balancing commercial and public interests, he said.

Part of global misogynistic trend

Ruddock said the issue was occurring within the global content of misogyny being normalised.

“[Hanson-Young’s criticism] will likely be water off a duck’s back to [Sandilands]; it’s not the first time these sorts of things have been said about this person,” he said.

“And I think it happens within a broader media landscape where this type of thing is normalised … there is concern that media are playing a role in basically socialising … unhealthy perspectives towards gender relations.

“You’ve got a certain proportion of the population who look at this type of stuff and see it as being misogynistic, and then another significant portion who see these sorts of concerns as part of this so-called ‘woke agenda’, and so it’s instantly dismissed.”

The latest Kyle and Jackie O Show drama comes after the show failed to meet extremely high expectations after its Melbourne debut this year.

A recent survey found the show, which has long been hugely successful in Sydney, dropped to eighth in Melbourne’s breakfast radio market, shedding 71,000 listeners from the previous survey.

McHugh said the results likely had more to do with Melbourne-Sydney rivalry than anything else.

“I think it just comes down to simple old-fashioned rivalry … I don’t think Melbourne people are of a more highly evolved or more noble calling than the average Sydney listener to Kyle and Jackie O,” she said.

KIIS FM’s owner, Australian Radio Network, was contacted for comment.