Red Symons yesterday sat down with 3AW’s Neil Mitchell for his first interview on air since his departure from the ABC.
“I’d like to thank the ABC for putting my three children through exactly the sort of schools they pretend to disapprove of,” Symons said.
“To tell you the truth, because I was there for 15 years … I started off on a reasonable sum and got the, you know, 2 per cent added on each year.”
Symons sparked controversy in 2017 during an interview with Radio National’s Beverley Wang when he asked her, “What’s the deal with Asians?”
Of the incident, Symons said:
“It was a rhetorical question, are you yellow, but it was never reported that way.
“This amused me. I did say to the two producers I worked with when this thing was to come out: You see, by the end of the week Andrew Bolt will have defended me. And he did.
“I just turned off. I don’t read endless Twitter feeds. In the context of doing radio, I would get, every day, a text message from a person or persons criticising me. You get used to it.”
ABC management offered Symons other roles after the decision to move him on from the breakfast slot, but instead he chose to resign.
“It’s very clear in the commercial [radio] environment what the objectives are and what the measure is,” he said. “At the ABC… it’s intellectual of some sort.
“They did a rubber stamp around all the breakfast programs in metros Australia where they had a boy and a girl, a man and a woman together as a duo because for whatever reason they thought that’s how you did it.”
Listen below.