The ABC has apologised for airing an interview in which Melbourne breakfast radio host Red Symons asks the ABC journalist Beverley Wang if she is yellow.
The network removed the interview from its website on Friday after an outcry over Symons’s comments.
Symons also asked Wang “what’s the deal with Asians” in the combative and awkward interview.
He said he was unhappy about her new podcast It’s Not A Race because he too had an idea for a podcast he wanted to call “What’s the deal with Asians?”.
“First question is, are they all the same?” Symons asked.
When he asked what part of China Wang was from, she told him she was a Taiwanese Canadian.
She remained calm and friendly throughout the 18-minute chat despite the increasingly bizarre nature of the questions. Symonds conceded he had not listened to her podcast and did not know what it was about.
This and other questions Red Symons asked me
— beverley wang (@beverleywang) June 15, 2017
Listen: https://t.co/aS4Lmtn3hs pic.twitter.com/4oZq5QeWdj
Symons: “Do they speak Mandarin or Cantonese?
Wang: “Who’s ‘they’?”
Symons: “The people in Taiwan.”
Wang: “They speak Taiwanese and they speak Mandarin. And in Canada, where I’m from, they speak English and French.”
Symons: “I knew that. You’re probably from the west coast of Canada.”
Wang: “Why do you think that, Red?”
Symons: “Because it’s closer to Asia.”
Wang: “I’m just asking, don’t get defensive.”
Chrissakes. When a leading ABC radio personality asks an Asian colleague "are you yellow?" we have a problem https://t.co/cS2ms3mxLb
— Marc Fennell (@MarcFennell) June 15, 2017
Originally recorded and edited for his Melbourne breakfast show, the entire interview was released as a podcast this week, before being taken down by the network.
“ABC Radio has removed the latest episode of Radio National’s It’s Not A Race podcast and an earlier ABC Radio Melbourne segment,” a spokesman said.
“A review of the editorial processes around this content and its use is in progress. ABC Radio apologises for the content going to air.”
Symons, 68, is famous for his role as a judge on Hey Hey It’s Saturday and has carried his abrasive style over to his popular ABC radio breakfast program. He was also a guitarist in the 1970s band Skyhooks.
Symons asked Wang about her attitude to blackface and the Harry Connick Jr incident he was involved in on Hey Hey in 2009. He challenged her opposition to blackface and said he defended the show when it was attacked for hosting a blackface act and offending Connick.
“I remember thinking at the time that it had become uncomfortable because Harry Connick Jr felt most uncomfortable with someone wearing what is alleged to be blackface,” Symons said.
Wang corrected his use of the word “alleged”. . “The make-up is there,” she said. “It’s definitely black make-up.”
Other ABC personalities argued on social media about the implications of the interview. Radio host Jonathan Green accused TV presenter Julio Zemiro of “trashing” her colleagues after she took him to task for his response to what she called Symons’s “racist rubbish”.
I say this as a friend of Red Symons: this is audio he never imagined would see the light of day. ugly, but in its way private. i'm uneasy.
— Jonathan Green (@GreenJ) June 16, 2017
In her first podcast, Wang says she is the “first of my kind to host an ABC podcast on race” which she is tackling because it is complicated and “part of all of us”.
