Q&A may not be the best show on Australian TV – there’s that cats-making-you-laugh show we keep hearing about. But it is, apparently, the most dangerous.

It’s dangerous because a man wearing a marijuana-leaf hat asked a question of a minister a little while ago, and on Monday a tweet claiming (in a roundabout way – it was in the Twitter handle) that the prime minister “loves anal” was put on the screen for a couple of seconds.

Both of these required political intervention in the public broadcaster, with the prime minister saying the show is “a bit out of control” on Tuesday.

ABC chief Mark Scott apologises to Tony Abbott over crude tweet on Q&A Read more

These “scandals” are obviously not enough in and of themselves to have sparked today’s internecine war between the nation’s journalists, commentators, presenters and politicians over Q&A. Yet for some reason we’re expected to act as if they are meaningful occurrences, and not the death rattles of decades-old grievances.

How do you even go about explaining the tangle of grudges and relationships obscured by the @AbbottLovesAnal Twitter debacle and the reaction to every mistake the ABC makes, no matter how minor? What would reports like that even look like …

Monday night’s episode of Q&A broadcast a tweet claiming the prime minister loves anal, raising questions about whether the program needs to be more closely supervised.

Experts say the problems began, at the very least, in the early 2000s in response to hatreds bred during David Marr’s attacks on News Corp during his tenure as Media Watch host, outrage over Howard-era appointments of culture warriors such as Janet Albrechtsen and Christopher Pearson to the boards of the ABC and SBS, which were themselves reactions to earlier resentments from the Keating years.

When contacted for comment, the anonymous operator of the @AbbottLovesAnal Twitter account declined to remark on the episode of Q&A in question, and also failed to reply to Chris Kenny’s comments on Paul Barry’s failure to scrutinise Q&A host Tony Jones’s failure to pick up howlers on the popular panel program, as detailed in recent columns written by Gerard Henderson under the name of his dog.

ABC raises ire of Coalition again after crude tweet about Abbott flashes during Q&A Read more

Scintillating stuff. Oh, and in other news, Daily Life columnist Clementine Ford called veteran columnist Miranda Devine “a fucking cunt” on Twitter. I’ll be tuning in to the Bolt Report to hear more about that, for sure.



The saddest thing about a lot of the calls for a correction of ABC bias is that a right-leaning Q&A would largely be about the same stuff. If it wasn’t, it would probably look similar to the braindead Channel Ten Q&A-clone Can of Worms, which died in 2013 after two years on air.

Don’t remember it? Of course you don’t, because its only memorable moment was the lewd comment made by former Australian Idol host James Mathieson, who said he would “root” 2GB talkback host Alan Jones:



No man in the country that needs to get laid more than Alan Jones. That guy is so uptight that, for our country, I would bang him.

The only reason you remember that moment, if you do at all, was because of the subsequent campaign by the same old same-olds to have the show taken off air. In that case, it was waged by the crustiest man in Australia, David Flint (a Howard-era appointee to the Australian Broadcasting Authority and his protege, future crusty man Jai Martinkovits, now executive director of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, an organisation once helmed by the prime minister).

The campaign was run off an organising platform called CanDo, which was founded by Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, reportedly to defend mining heiress Gina Rinehart, who is an investor in Fairfax media, which is being sued by one of its own writers, Lisa Pryor, over Mark Latham’s columns in the Financial Review, and so on and so forth.

All of this aside, Q&A is perhaps the only thing capable of feeding this grievance engine the scandals it requires to remain alive. While dull, Q&A is nimble and consistent, has audience interaction in the form of questions and tweets, and a host who can skilfully extract the gotchas the show relies on. If nothing else, it forces many of the dramatis personae of Australia’s “long 1990s”, the age we must still suffer through, to talk to each other face-to-face instead of slagging each other in their columns.

You’d be forgiven if you started to see Q&A’s recent “lapses” of judgment as ways to keep things interesting, rather than mistakes. Since the show’s pilot in 2008 (which featured a very candid exchange between Tony Abbott and an audience member) things have become much more managed; everyone knows anything untoward will be the subject of Tuesday morning’s news.

So if Q&A is the most dangerous show on TV, and all this re-reporting of and commentary on the gotcha moments is worthwhile, then we’ve really only got two conclusions we could draw: all of this actually matters; and there are only 50 people in Australia doing anything and we should just let them sort the country out among themselves.

Or it’s the kind of stuff only fit for parody by people with Twitter handles such as @AbbottLovesAnal. Or both. Or neither. Either way, the cats are coming for us all. Love to laugh out loud at those cats!