Comedian and breakfast radio host demands the right to be offensive but concedes some lines shouldn’t be crossed

On his summer holidays from his job as co-host of the ABC’s breakfast radio show in Melbourne, Sami Shah got to work. He’s making a Radio National series on freedom of speech in Australia, called Shut Up, for which he has interviewed everyone from conservative journalist Andrew Bolt to lawyer Nyadol Nyuon. He’s finishing off a Melbourne Comedy festival show. He writes micro stories on Medium. He’s chipping away at a novel.

“I’ve never done one thing at one time,” he says over coffee in his inner-city home. “I get bored quickly otherwise.

“One reason is that I’m a workaholic; I enjoy doing these things. The other thing is there is a pressure that might be self-inflicted that I feel as an immigrant, a person of colour … [I] try to work hard to say, ‘I have things I can do, things I can provide, things I can create, and I hope you like them’.”

Shah, 40, speaks rapid-fire, words and ideas tumbling out, strong in his opinions but always keen for debate. He had lessons to slow the pace down a little, just one of his challenges when he started at the breakfast shift at the beginning of last year.

Not only were he and co-host Jacinta Parsons replacing the dumped veteran Red Symons, but Shah also had a Pakistani accent. He lived in Karachi before migrating with his then wife and young daughter in 2012.

Who on earth cared about his accent? Some listeners did, with feedback that he was hard to understand, but there were also heartening responses from everyone – Iranian Australians to the Irish – grateful to hear a different accent in a city where close to 40% of the residents were born overseas.

“It’s been incredible for me to learn how much it matters to people,” he says. “You’d think it wouldn’t. You’d think ‘what’s it matter?’ But apparently it does a lot.”

Morning host Jon Faine is more blunt: “Some of the abuse that’s been directed at him is little short of extraordinary. Some of it is just plain racist.”

Shah may be precociously talented, but he carries the burden of representing “diversity” in a media long dominated by Anglo faces. Bolt rolled his arm over, saying Shah’s accent would be “distancing for many Australian listeners”, and worse, that diversity was well and good, but Shah was “yet another ABC-style leftist”.

When ratings dipped – predictable for a new line-up – the story focused on Shah. As it happened, he and Parsons got used to each other, the show found its rhythm, and ratings picked up late last year.

It is impossible to pigeonhole Shah. He grew up in Pakistan within a moderate Muslim family, studied English at the University of Virginia in the US, and became for a time a radically-minded Muslim after 11 September, when he was drawn to his religion in defence against its persecution and because of his outrage that America’s allies fell so quickly into line to support the invasion of Iraq.

He moved back to Karachi in 2002 and gradually became an open atheist, rejecting religion as a human invention. As he describes it, his rage was channelled into acerbic comedy rather than faith. He and his then wife and young daughter moved to Australia in 2012 in part because he could not stand the thought of his child having fewer freedoms than a boy would have had in Pakistan.

Breakfast radio is mostly light-hearted – although he and Parsons have introduced more thoughtful discussions, including a back-and forth about television personality Kerri-Anne Kennerley’s recent remarks about Australia Day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sami Shah: ‘I will do a job of prosecuting any guest I have on air thoroughly and if I if don’t do that, that’s my failure as a journo.’ Photograph: Nicole Cleary

Shah loves the radio show, but he’s restless, and the chance to do a “deep dive” into the fraught area of free speech intrigued him. What are the limits of free speech in this country? How do we resolve the tension between the right to free speech, even offensive speech, and the harm it can cause?

“I’ve always been passionate about free speech,” he says. It’s been the thread through his life. As a stand-up comedian in Pakistan, he was threatened for making jokes about Islam. He worked as a TV journalist and was threatened for criticising government policy and politicians. He assumed Australia would be a free-speech paradise and, compared with Pakistan, where blasphemy is punishable by death, it is.

Yet he bumped up against its edges here, too. His 2016 radio series on Islam in Australia, followed by a book, the Islamic Republic of Australia, were his attempts to provide “nuance” to a noisy debate that too often fell into non-Muslims’ stereotypes about Islam and Muslims’ defensiveness about criticism of their religion. The book highlights the diversity of Muslims in Australia and, while it certainly criticises Islam, he wrote that he “constantly worried about fuelling anti-Muslim bigotry”.

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After the book was published, the Daily Mail ran a hyped-up story that avoided Shah’s nuance, reporting that the family had “fled” Pakistan – they arrived in Australia on a skilled immigrant program – and felt lucky to escape a country that executed apostates.

That story enraged Islamist extremists all over the world, and Shah was inundated with death threats, and forced to cancel his comedy acts for six months and disable his social media accounts. He could have his free speech, but it came at a cost, and he worried about the safety of his parents living in Karachi. He now believes he can never visit his home country again.

When he was still a contributor at the ABC, tweets were dug up, including one in which he wondered whether the then immigration minister Peter Dutton “wakes up every morning with a hard-on for abusing refugees”. The then ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie was quizzed in a Senate estimates hearing about the suitability of Shah doing any work for the ABC.

When he arrived in Australia, Shah and his family lived in Northam, a small town in Western Australia, and he travelled around the state for comedy gigs. He “basically just begged” to get any work with the ABC, and he picked up guest spots and fill-in positions, which continued when he moved to Melbourne. He understands that his role as breakfast presenter comes with responsibilities he didn’t have as a career comedian, but he also argues that when governments get riled about old tweets from ABC contributors, it verges into censorship.

Social media is tricky for all media, particularly the ABC. The rules are imperfect and individual judgment imperative. There are distinctions between news reporters and commentators and presenters. Shah still tweets, mostly amusingly (he loves Phil Collins), but robustly, too, particularly about racial issues. Of Kennerley: “Imagine believing saying something racist shouldn’t lead to being called a racist.”

And in October last year: “From documentaries about the fabricated persecution of white South African farmers created by Nazi supporters, to a 4chan meme on “ok to be white”, Australia’s political class is full of neo-nazi ideologies and blatant white supremacists.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sami Shah’s 2016 radio series on Islam in Australia was followed by a book, Islamic Republic of Australia. Photograph: Harper Collins/ABC

The management has spoken to him “constantly” about his tweets, he says, but less so lately as he’s become more careful. Melbourne radio manager Dina Rosendorff says that “in the beginning he caused us a few headaches. We had to counsel him on what was acceptable and what was not”. She has no desire to censor people’s views, and these days, “Sami might take it to the line, but I don’t think he crosses it too much.”

“I had this conversation with them when I got this job,” says Shah. “I said that I’ve been in Australia for six years, and I’m being offered a radio show in one of the biggest cities in the country. I didn’t get here by being polite … I’m noisy and I’m crunchy, and I’m loud and I’m obnoxious. Some of those things don’t work within the context of this job and I’ll consider that.”

His personal views don’t mean he isn’t professional on air, a distinction he says conservative critics ignore.

In Pakistan, as a TV news producer and atheist, he was required to line up and conduct interviews with religious extremists, people who wanted him dead. “I did those interviews, I reported on those matters, and I did it without a bias because I am a professional … the critics of the ABC have no concept of that level of professionalism.

“I will do a job of prosecuting any guest I have on air thoroughly and if I if don’t do that, that’s my failure as a journo. It doesn’t mean you have a left-wing or a right-wing bias, it’s that you’re a bad journo.”

He points out that audits into claims of bias at the ABC have mostly determined that the criticism is unfounded.

“I agree with Andrew Bolt, there are no presenters who I know of who are outwardly right-wing, outwardly Liberal party supporters, or maybe one or two.

“I don’t think that’s that big of a problem. I’ve got other fish to fry. Why is that every single TV show on the ABC has a white host? I’m more interested in other biases, because political biases shift with the wind … My biggest thing right now is, where are the women of colour?”

Shah will always be “crunchy”, and will never stop giving his opinion on issues such as Australia’s treatment of refugees. “That’s a human rights issue and that’s bigger than left or right. I criticised the Julia Gillard government and the Kevin Rudd government for the three weeks that it was there just as vehemently about offshore detention as I will anyone else.”

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He finds some ABC restrictions puzzling. “The ban on cursing, are you serious? Every second word out of every Australian’s mouth is the word cunt.”

Shah has interviewed people with hugely different views on free speech. Yet every person of colour he spoke with raised the treatment of Yassmin Abdel-Magied when it came to what freedom of speech really meant. The fury unleashed by her seven-word Facebook post on Anzac Day in 2017 – “Lest we forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine)” – especially in News Corp newspapers and on Sky, made anyone with brown skin with even a mildly controversial point of view shiver.

“It was a seminal moment for me,” Shah says. “They genuinely targeted the most innocuous of statements, and turned it into a massive culture war, even the PM [then Malcolm Turnbull] got involved.

“I thought, ‘we don’t do such shit here’. Just prior to this [Attorney-General] George Brandis had stood up in parliament and said freedom of speech is the freedom to be a bigot. So, you can be a bigot, but you can’t say something as innocuous as a seven- word Facebook post that isn’t inherently racist or obscene or any of those things?”

Shah is in his way a warrior for free speech. As a comedian, he demands the right to be offensive. Yet there’s a balance, somewhere, a need to respect the experiences of others. At a live recording for Shut Up in Melbourne, he spoke about how being called a “curry muncher” at a workplace made him “feel small, weak”. He spoke about being castigated by disability advocates because he used the word “handicapped” on air, without realising why it was offensive.

One answer, he says, is to broaden the range of people with a voice, giving ballast to the claim that Australians have free speech. He applauds the ABC for its overdue efforts to diversify its workforce, but he wants others to have the same chance. On the day we talk, he is trying to get in touch with Rita Panahi, a conservative Herald Sun columnist and Sky presenter.

“She is more symptomatic of an improvement in diversity than I ever will be,” Shah says. “She is a brown woman who got a TV show on a station that is vehemently anti people of colour, vehemently anti women in all its reportage and its coverage. You may argue it’s because she toed the line politically, but people say the same thing about me ... that the reason I’m at the ABC is because I’m a leftie.

“The fact that a woman of colour finally got the freedom to be as mediocre as all the white men on that TV station is a huge glass ceiling breaking.”

Sami Shah and Jacinta Parsons co-host ABC Radio Melbourne’s Breakfast program. Shah will perform at the Melbourne International Comedy festival next month. https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2019 and his series on free speech will air on Radio National later this year.