Q&A is the symbol of High Kevinism and should be interred with Rudd's memory
|
Version 0 of 1. While many conservatives disdain, not always wrongly, “their ABC”, there have been times when its flagship show Q&A has done good work. However, Monday night’s episode was omitted from my viewing schedule, not out of any ideological objection but because Q&A’s panel offended, again, the most basic rule of good conversation: never be boring. Perhaps it is time for 2015 to be Q&A’s final year? The only part of the show that remains amusing are the audience statistics, which have a Nigerian bankers’ plausibility, as if Coalition voters would ever trek to Ultimo, let alone on a Monday night. Sadly, Q&A is Radio National with clapping. Related: Zaky Mallah: I stand by what I said on Q&A. Australia needs to hear it Q&A first aired in 2008, a kooky year, when Kevin Rudd dominated Australian politics and fomented the “Kevinist” media culture that still plagues us, in all its superficial sombreness, spin and insincerity. While Rudd rightly apologised to the Stolen Generations that year, he also thrust panjandral Kevinist idiocies upon us, like the 2020 Summit, whose recommendations disappeared without trace and the dream for an Asian Union. It was a time when Robert Manne could, in all seriousness, edit a book entitled Dear Mr Rudd: Ideas for a Better Australia – which presupposed Kevinism had an interest in high policy, utterly at odds with the reality revealed in recent weeks by the Killing Season series. It was a year when a Labor prime minister would visit with Cate Blanchett’s newborn, rather than attend stalwart John Button’s funeral. When he would appear on camera, it was in the service of all manner of lightweight media interlocutors, from Rove McManus to whoever was tripping over morning TV’s autocues. Indeed, 2008 was a crazy year when, one suspects, even a Mark Arbib or a Sam “Dasher” Dastyari would still don the “Kevin 07” t-shirt to a march for climate justice with Ross Garnaut and Tim Costello. Given Q&A’s peculiar origins in that time of High Kevinism, and the unintended self-parody the show has since become, any Abbott government boycott of Q&A would be pathetic. An essential aspect of conservatism is arguing for moral absolutes, not relativities, which necessitates a willingness to be unpopular, indeed to be reviled. Approached in the spirit of Wordsworth’s “happy warrior”, Q&A is the perfect forum for conservatives, even if alone, to do battle for sound ideas against the brigados of the silly and the confused, to use all possible means that we might save some. Whose vote shifts if you are the lone conservative fending off some hemp-clad Green, or one of the black-skivvy intifadists from a university common room? Everyone already knows most Australian media leans to the left in a “disappointed Labor” way, and Tony Jones is hardly Andrey Vyshinsky, so why refuse the challenge? There is no Virginia Trioli reciting your crimes to the bien pensants as the tumbril takes you to a Harris Street guillotine. Some perspective is needed. If anything, Australia has far too few venues where people with opposing points of view can engage with each other – another legacy Kevinism bequeathed to Australia (and indeed, to his own party). Any opportunity to put one’s case or defend it should be seized with gusto, not avoided. Yet, at the same time, Q&A emerged from the aberration of 2008 and therefore, whatever its professed wonkish interest in policy, the show is hopelessly corrupted. Moreover, it is dull. Related: Politics as blood sport: The Killing Season makes the Blair-Brown rift look tame Where Q&A may once have hosted contrarians, iconoclasts and demi-mondes, Monday night featured its all-too-regular not-quite-star panel, as well as the obligatory foreign writers festival guest. Indeed, so plodding has Q&A become that even the Coalition plays along, sending one of its more colourless functionaries, Steve Ciobo. Monday night’s only excitement was the gift to a political hack like Ciobo of an opportunity to shine, because of the ABC’s inexplicable invitation to Zaky Mallah – whose history has been detailed elsewhere. It was one of those occasions when fact provides us with a lesson no fable can match. Perhaps after seven years it is now time for Q&A, like that whole Rudd era, to be made dead, cremated and interred. Perhaps the final footnote of the Killing Season is the end of its symbolic show, Q&A? From the digital ashes, something better, more interesting and hopefully more noble and more serious can arise. Take that as a comment, anyway. |