Nobody is going to fire Kerri-Anne Kennerley. The Studio 10 presenter and Australian television hanger-on is set; as long as there’s a market for indignant disapproval of climate protestors or Invasion Day marchers, she’ll have the opportunity to spruik her views with relative impunity.
She wishes that wasn’t the case, though.
Appearing on Tuesday night’s The Death of the Aussie Larrikin?, a Sky News Australia production about the supposed death of Australian humour, Kennerley said she “very rarely” chooses to self-censor.
Kennerley added that production staff “really pray” she pulls back from her more onerous takes.
“They really go, ‘Now, you know, maybe, we don’t want you to pull back, but you know, maybe’ and I go, ‘Oh what the, so fire me!’” she said.
If it didn’t happen after she joked about running over climate protestors, and if it didn’t happen after she falsely accused Indigenous Australian march organisers of turning a blind eye to child abuse, it’s hard to see what will finally make Ten execs boot a daytime talkshow darling.
They showed the KAK clip about using protesters as speed bumps. Apparently political correctness is killing our ability to [checks notes] wish physical harm against people engaged in politics?
— Demon King of the Unstacked Branch (@clothedvillainy) June 16, 2020
Kennerley added that she “can’t resist” making contentious statements, which surely figures into her on-screen appeal. After all, if you’re going to fill hours of the day with conjecture about god-knows-what, huffy outrage is a good way to do it.
She has the added bonus of familiarity, too, which is a considerable draw for Studio 10’s older viewers.
Still, firing someone is hardly the banishment it used to be, either. While it’s very easy to imagine a world where daytime TV isn’t decorated by someone who appears to take pleasure in slut-shaming journalists live on air (and subsequently apologising), you only need to look at the transformation of Pete Evans to see how easily ‘Ostracised TV personality’ can become ‘Popular social media pariah’.
If anything, being shunned over really crap views is the ultimate badge of honour to a certain subclass of Australian media personality: imagine being so edgy and off-putting that frequently naked commentator Joe Hildebrand feels embarrassed sitting next to you.
But she’s still on Studio 10, so it’s a moot point. If she’s a larrikin, the larrikin archetype isn’t dead: it’s still there, on our screens, slagging off people who aren’t lucky enough to be rich, straight, white, and deemed palatable to Australia’s media industry.
