If we want the very best that the ABC can give, when things go awry, someone must be accountable to taxpayers. It may be that the national broadcaster needs a non-partisan watchdog with teeth, writes Terry Barnes.

Last week was extraordinary for the ABC. The corporation dominated the national agenda, and we're still talking about it.

On the one hand, The Killing Season told the story of how Labor leader Bill Shorten switched from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard and back again, recalling Winston Churchill's declaration that "Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat".

Worse, last week's episode also confirmed that in June 2013, Shorten lied about his meeting with Rudd to wrest the Labor leadership back from Gillard.

Already under political pressure from a reviving Coalition government, Shorten didn't need such a powerful spotlight on his trustworthiness and disloyalty, especially as his pre-Parliament activities as the Australian Workers Union boss are under scrutiny.

No wonder Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Parliament:

I don't normally say thank you to the ABC but I have to say that Australia is indebted to you in this instance.

Liberal MP Alan Tudge has pulled out of tonight's episode of Q&A. ( AAP: Julian Smith )

On the other hand, the ABC's prestigious Q&A added a disturbing dimension to its tag line, "adventures in democracy". A week on, there's still a raging furore over how a man convicted for threatening to kill public officials, and a maker of vile social media comments, Zaky Mallah, was allowed not only to ask a question on live TV of Government parliamentary secretary Steven Ciobo, but also have a platform to make ugly and disturbing extremist statements.

While Q&A showed an ugly face of fanaticism in our community, we also saw what Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull described as an "undergraduate playing at tabloid journalism style" seeking to "create the biggest shock and awe and sensation". In other words, the program planned to "gotcha" Ciobo, creating a juicy confrontation that grabbed headlines for the wrong reasons and creating the sort of water-cooler buzz more befitting tabloid TV than either a serious current affairs program or the ABC itself.

Having only days before praised the ABC, Abbott let fly last Tuesday:

I think many, many millions of Australians would feel betrayed by our national broadcaster right now, and I think that the ABC does have to have a long, hard look at itself, and to answer a question which I have posed before: who's side are you on?

Abbott's critics including, indirectly, ABC managing director Mark Scott in his impassioned free speech defence of Q&A last Thursday have laid into the Prime Minister, along with Coalition ministers including Turnbull and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, as attacking the integrity and independence of "our ABC".

Journalist Annabel Crabb reflected the views of many when she wondered whether Abbott's support for free speech was selective. But such views, and indeed most of last week's real and confected outrage from all sides, miss a fundamental point: when major lapses of judgment and standards occur on a program of Q&A's standing and prestige, and it resorts to gotchas, what hope have we of ensuring the high level of serious and impartial political dialogue on which modern democracy depends, and in which the ABC traditionally has excelled?

After hugely damaging revelations of the BBC's corporate conduct over the Jimmy Savile paedophilia scandal, and sustained accusations of political bias in programs including Q&A's British model Question Time, last week David Cameron's government announced that it was seriously considering proposals to take away ultimate editorial and managerial control from the BBC's board and handing them to Britain's communications regulator, Ofcom. The British government says it has no vendetta against the BBC, but that "a very robust system" is needed to deal with impartiality concerns.

Similarly, the ABC's integrity in future could benefit from real external scrutiny and validation from a non-partisan watchdog with teeth. This isn't to say that problems like last week's are endemic: the ABC's news and current affairs output generally is world-class, usually impartial, and encourages pluralistic views and voices.

But when the corporation's high production and journalistic standards break down, as they did with Zaky Mallah, and with mainstream Australia (not just conservative talkback hosts and commentators) worried by Mallah's staged ambush of Ciobo and the fact that Q&A gave a live platform to him, effective public discourse via the national broadcaster is compromised. This is compounded if senior politicians, like Liberal MP Alan Tudge, refuse to participate. If self-regulation doesn't address such concerns adequately, then pursuing external oversight and reducing its independence could become irresistible to the ABC's critics across the political spectrum.

Indeed, Barrie Cassidy's fiery clash with Malcolm Turnbull on Sunday revolved around the ABC's independence and the Abbott Government's perceived political interference in establishing a departmental inquiry. But Turnbull had the right, and sensible, response:

I'm the responsible minister. I've got to go before the Expenditure Review Committee and argue for the ABC to be given well over a billion dollars every year of government money. I've got to stand up in Parliament and take questions about the ABC; I don't run the ABC, but I am, in a portfolio sense, responsible for it.

In other words, if we want the very best that the ABC can give, when things go awry, someone must be accountable to taxpayers. So if the public's faith in the ABC's overall delivery of quality and impartial journalism is badly shaken after last week's misadventure in democracy, doing nothing in this case is not an option. If the ABC doesn't address such problems decisively from within, politicians will from without.

Terry Barnes is a policy consultant and former senior Howard government adviser. Twitter: @TerryBarnes5.