19 November – In the long shadow cast by John Laws’s state funeral, one line echoes more than any accolade, controversy, or career milestone. It’s the sign-off he used day after day, decade after decade:
“Be kind to each other.”
Russell Crowe — neighbour, friend, and occasional sparring partner — drew a sharp circle around those six words in his eulogy today at Law’s State Funeral. At first glance they seem straightforward, even soft, coming from a man who built a career on provocation. But as Crowe reminded those gathered at St Andrew’s Cathedral, they were anything but soft. In Laws’s world, kindness wasn’t sentimentality. It was instruction.
Laws was never a simple figure. His voice could soothe, but his commentary could cut. He could champion the ordinary listener one moment and unleash a tirade the next. Crowe captured this contradiction with affection, noting that Laws was often “invective-laden” on air but unfailingly gentle in his farewell. The tension between those two modes didn’t diminish him; it made him recognisably human.
Crowe’s insight reframes the sign-off as something deeper: a deliberate counterweight to the heat of the day’s arguments. Laws understood that talkback could inflame, provoke, or divide. By ending with kindness, he drew a boundary around the performance. However fiery the debate, there was a human obligation that sat above it — connection, empathy, decency.
In that light, “be kind to each other” wasn’t a contradiction at all. It was the anchor.
Those who knew Laws personally often spoke of a man who enjoyed bravado but was capable of quiet generosity. Crowe’s bourbon-gift anecdote, a gift for his son Charlie’s first birthday was both absurd and touching and revealed a man who expressed affection through gesture and theatre. The public might have seen a titan of the airwaves; Crowe saw the loyal neighbour, the constant friend, the man who showed up.
It’s no surprise, then, that Laws placed kindness at the end of every broadcast. It communicated something his on-air persona rarely allowed him to say outright: I care about you — the person listening.
For a broadcaster who commanded millions, it was an intimate expression.
Talkback radio today is louder than ever, but rarely slower. Outrage is cheaper. Amplification is instant. The kind of broad national conversation Laws once hosted has splintered into algorithms.
Crowe’s recollection invites reflection on how rare — and how needed — Laws’s sign-off has become. Kindness is now countercultural. It is not the default posture of public debate but the exception.
Laws, in his way, recognised the corrosive potential of unchecked argument. His voice bridged generations and political divides not because he played it safe, but because listeners sensed that behind the bluster was a man who valued people more than points scored.
His final instruction still matters: speak your mind, but don’t lose sight of the person on the other end of the line.
For all the complexity surrounding his career — the triumphs and the controversies — Laws leaves behind a remarkably simple ethic. He built a vast body of work, but the sign-off distilled the heart of it.
Kindness isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t trend. It doesn’t win ratings. But for Laws, it was the one thing worth saying every day.
At the state funeral, as Crowe repeated the line one last time, it had the feel of a baton being passed. Not from a broadcaster to a successor — but from a man to a country he helped shape. The show, as Crowe put it, is done. But the instruction remains.
In the end, John Laws’s legacy may be measured less by the thousands of hours he spent behind a microphone and more by six words he chose to leave ringing in people’s ears:
Be kind to each other.
