There was a storm online and a boycott by Labor of appearing on his show. Advertisers fled. Jone's show was in real strife.
But Abbott's stance back then, as opposition leader, was 180 degrees different than his present stance on the ABC's Question and Answer show. He has presently ordered his entire front bench to boycott the show whilst the ABC itself does an investigation into the impartiality of the show. How very North Korea of him.
In 2012 though, with his mate Jones being boycotted by Labor, his view was thus:
Tony Abbott, then opposition leader, described Jones' comments as "wrong, unacceptable, offensive".
But when asked whether he would boycott Jones' show, he said he would not. It was all about the numbers.
"I am certainly not going to ignore an audience of half a million people in Sydney," Mr Abbott said.
Joe Hockey, then the shadow treasurer, agreed.
It would be "the height of arrogance to say you're going to boycott some sort of radio show that has an audience of 5, 6, 700,000 Australians", Mr Hockey explained.
According to the most recent Sydney radio ratings figures, Jones had a cumulative audience of 435,000 for the April to June survey period, meaning that many listeners tuned in each week. His average audience was 145,000 - the number of people listening to the program at a given time.
Meanwhile, Q&A had an average audience of 967,000 viewers nationally and 777,000 viewers in the capital cities for a March episode featuring Julie Bishop and Annabel Crabb. Q&A had 560,000 metro viewers for the controversial episode featuring Zaky Mallah, one of its lower-rating shows. more
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