2 December 2021
Article from January 2022 edition of INPractice
“The election will be fought on it, I have no doubt about that whatsoever”.
He’s been shot at multiple times driving through the streets of LA in an armoured car. In fact, he used to fly frequently to LA to meet with tinsel town celebs, that is until COVID clipped his wings.
The highly respected host of FIVEAA’s popular morning radio talk show, Leon Byner these days spends much of his time castigating Marshall and Wade on air for their lack of action on health.
Suffice to say, he’s a strong friend of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation. “Oh, God yes,’’ he says. “I’ve got a couple of friends who are nurses. One girl in particular; in the last month she’s left an eight-hour shift to go home and didn’t get into her driveway and was asked to come back and do a double shift.
“That’s just one. But I since have made some inquiries and that is not unusual. The thing I’m really crook on is why would you be making redundancies, that is removing positions, when at the same time the demand on staff is not only high but it is that they must work double shifts and that is happening a lot.’’
Leon, a doyen of the airwaves since his radio beginnings in 1966 in Shepparton, Victoria, has a reputation as a fearless broadcaster with his finger firmly on the public pulse; a highly articulate, powerful voice of reason that resonates with the community and leaves politicians fearful of being on the wrong end of a verbal takedown.
An intellect well-versed in the machinations of politics and bureaucracy, with a deep-seated grasp of current affairs and the hopes and fears of everyday folk, when Leon says health will be the deciding issue in this coming state election, you’d think certain figures who populate a particular iconic building in North Terrace might just take heed.
But more on that later.
What the heck happened in Los Angeles?
Seems Leon happened to be in LA filming interviews for his TV show Byner’s Hollywood on, of all days, April 29, 1992 - the day a jury acquitted four white policemen who had been charged with assault and excessive force in the arrest and beating of unarmed African American Rodney King.
The police mob attack, with tasers and batons, had been caught on video from a nearby apartment and widely broadcast on television.
From the moment the verdict was delivered, LA, which had been simmering with racial unrest, simply exploded. Mass rioting and looting erupted that day and continued for the next five days, leaving 63 people dead and around 2,400 injured, resulting in 12,000 arrests and a $1 billion damage bill.
Luckily for Leon, Hollywood author Jackie Collins rallied to his rescue.
Leon and Jackie became friends after years of radio interviews, including a couple of stints on LA radio.
“I got a call at my hotel from Jackie Collins’ press agent. “He said ‘The s@@@’s about to hit the fan, you would be wise to get out of here because I can tell you tonight there will not be one aircraft left at the airport’.’’
Collins dispatched an armoured vehicle with an armed chauffeur to his hotel. “We got shot at a couple of times, you could hear it. We got to the airport, it was a bullet-proof vehicle, but you could see there were indentations, a couple of people had had a go,’’ Leon said.
“For an Australian who is relatively unexposed to that kind of thing it’s a bit of a shock. The driver had quite a substantial handgun. It was pretty scary.
“I got the last flight out of LA, to Sydney. I got to the airport, I’ve never seen LAX so deserted. The departure lounge was full but from the outside the place was just deserted, there were police blocks, it was just mad. All the insurance companies had apparently told the aircraft owners to get their planes off the tarmac, go somewhere else.’’
Byner’s Hollywood was a celebrity interview show screened on cable TV overseas and on Network 10 here, with guests including Collins, LA Law star Corbin Bernsen, Jane Seymour and Patrick Swayze.
It’s a show he hopes to resurrect once international travel is a happening thing again.
As for his radio show, Leon has a reputation as the Mr Fixit of the South Australian airwaves. He has been nominated 13 times for an Australian Commercial Radio Award (best talk and current affairs) and Australian of the Year three times for helping everyday people in their battles against bureaucracy.
“When you do this sort of job you get to know who the decision makers are, who the movers and shakers are, who the people are that make things happen or stop things from happening. Having kind of worked all that out quite a long time back, when somebody rings me and has an issue, nine times out of 10 we’ll be able to fix it,’’ Leon says.
“There are two main reasons for that. One is that the person we refer them to gets a guernsey (good publicity) because they helped them, so that’s good for them, so they’re going to want to do it.
“And secondly, it means that every time we do it there is this belief out there in the public arena, and I get this all the time when I go anywhere, ‘Oh, ring Leon. When nothing happens or it should or something’s wrong, forget everything else, ring Leon’.
“We get some tremendously good results out of it because I think over time the people who assist like doing it because it’s good for them and it’s also good for the community because it gives people hope.
“And to me right now we’re in this chasm of depression at the moment with all this COVID stuff … people have been displaced, the hospitality industry has been kicked in the gut, that employs 50 to 60,000 people in SA alone. If you can be a contributor to making things better, I reckon that’s a good thing.’’
But back to the impending state election?
“Here is the problem. If you go and ask people, of all the different areas of government or service you think is important, which is No. 1, they’re going to say health,’’ Leon says.
“And the thing that really hurt the Government on this, and I tell you what it really came back loud and clear, as soon as the Marshall Government made these noises about a stadium for $600-$700 million, as soon as I saw that release I thought ‘you idiots’.
The No.1 thing people expect out of whoever is in government is to keep them safe.
“So that is an expectation that everyone carries about their health, that if, God forbid, they get into trouble or their mum or dad or whoever, aunt or uncle or friend needs help, that help is there.
“I just think people’s attitudes are ‘Give us what we need, which is really important. Nice to have those other things but before we start splurging on those can we please have some of these facilities that are important to our wellbeing and health, which a stadium is not’.’’
Leon believes the stadium issue could really hurt the Government at the election. “They’ve already done their own polling and it’s told them that. And you might therefore find that they’re not talking about it much now. It would be consistent with the feedback I’ve been getting and we cover the entire state in mornings, not just Adelaide. The public anger on that, phew.
“They will (backpedal), but the difficulty will be politically it’s his centrepiece for re-election. But it’s not the time right now. My listeners educate me well. Trust me, you can’t sit there five days a week and talk to people and not understand the angst on these matters, particularly when it comes to health.
“I reckon neither side of politics at the moment actually grasps how at the forefront of issues this health thing is,’’ Leon adds. “And you can understand why.
“The first rule of government is to keep us safe … so the high anxiety of protection is already setting a benchmark. It’s not unusual then for the public to react to that and say ‘Hang on, aren’t you keeping me safe?
“The callers that are talking to me, they’re not silly, they’re just making obvious points. Health is the big kahuna right now, the election will be fought on it, I have no doubt about that whatsoever.
“And it’s not just resourcing, it’s where you put the resources and that’s what people are interested in.
“What the typical caller says to me is ‘I’m paying all the taxes and charges and levies that you’ve always asked for, and they’re all going up exponentially, what are you giving me back?’
“‘And given that health is an expensive budget item which it is, what am I seeing for it, show me?’, and that, that’s the killer.
“If you’re a government and you’ve got a constituency that is going to face an election, the last thing you would want is for people to believe that you’re not doing your best to protect them and in the event that they need emergency help.
“This has also been exacerbated by the Women’s and Children’s Hospital because you’ve got an iconic hospital like that that looks after kids, then you’ve got the other issues around which emergencies have been absolutely swamped and we’ve been asking people to work double shifts.
“We have not resourced a lot of these things as well as we should have. We’ve kind of been a bit slow.
“(Health Minister) Wade has had a terrible time trying to defend this because it’s not defensible.
“The thing I do not understand is at a time when we’ve got this incredible demand on our services, you’ve got COVID and it hasn’t really spread as a community disease at this point but there’s a lot of concern about it, we are actually saying to staff, nurses and others, take a package. That is mad.
“We don’t have a crisis at the moment, we are very lucky but there is demand that is unmet, in terms of its need, and if it keeps going this way and we keep saying ‘Well, we’ll just deal with it’, we’re going to be in all sorts of trouble.
“We’ve got to be sure we don’t let this get away from us because if we don’t resource the system properly it will. It hasn’t yet but the nurses I talk to and the doctors and so on who are basically told to shut up and SA Health won’t give you anything, you just get motherhood statements and coco pops, it is an issue.
“I just wonder if we all of a sudden need a lot more beds what would we do? There aren’t any. The question is what redundancy is there to cope with this, if there is a big demand? We’ve got no spare capacity.
“We’re in a very precarious position right now, I know that’s been the advice to the Minister but they’re not saying that.
“Course they won’t.’’
Leon Byner’s morning talk and current affairs show airs on FIVEAA (1395AM) from 9am to noon, weekdays
This interview was conducted in late September 2021, before SA Health’s response to the border re-openings.
Click here to read the January 2022 edition of INPractice