A prime minister intervenes at the last minute to stop a minister from a scheduled appearance on the ABC’s Q&A program. Unprecedented?
Actually, it’s happened before.
It was 23 August 2010 and the so-called Labor “faceless man” Mark Arbib was due to attend the first program after the election that resulted in a hung parliament. The prime minister, Julia Gillard, had entered protracted negotiations with crossbenchers to form a minority government.
But Arbib did not turn up. Q&A producers left an empty chair to signify the no-show. It was, Gillard argued, not the time to fuel campaign analysis. The host, Tony Jones, gravely informed viewers that the prime minister had provided the show with a statement “late this afternoon” that said: “The focus of Labor’s ministerial team must be on providing stable and effective government and discussing Labor’s positive plan for the nation’s future.”
In the statement, Gillard said she had “requested and Senator Arbib has agreed to not appear on Q&A tonight which is focused solely on campaign analysis” – but she suggested a Labor backbencher, David Bradbury, as a replacement representative on the panel.
Q&A’s executive producer, Peter McEvoy, was unimpressed. He rejected the prime minister’s substitute offer, saying “this would be a clear breach of the ABC’s editorial independence” and an empty chair would have to do.
Malcolm Turnbull – who is one of the actors in the 2015 drama known on Twitter as #qandagate, and faces questions about whether to press ahead with an appearance next week – was the Liberal party’s representative on the 23 August 2010 show. He took the first question about Arbib’s absence.
“Being one of the faceless men,” a viewer asked, “doesn’t this obvious snub to public accountability speak volumes?”
Turnbull replied: “Well, it does ...”
A fellow panellist – the News Corp columnist Janet Albrechtsen – was scathing. “Well, I think it, you know, proves that Mark Arbib is not only faceless but gutless not to turn up,” she said.
That was then and this is now. On 30 June 2015, Albrechtsen wrote in the Australian that she had boycotted Q&A last year “after years of suggesting to the producer that the show needs to find a better balance”.
“It gets boring to be the ‘tick-a-box’ panel member,” wrote Albrechtsen, who is a former ABC board member. “Every conservative who joins Q&A legitimises a show that has become so conceited it makes no attempt at balance. Free speech on Q&A means stacking the panel, the audience and the questions to skew left.”
Barnaby Joyce, the agriculture minister and deputy Nationals leader, will be absent from the panel on Monday evening. He had committed to attend the show – and was likely to spruik the agriculture white paper – having said as recently as Sunday morning that he would be there.
But Tony Abbott intervened. “The prime minister expressed a view that he didn’t want any frontbenchers to go on the program,” Joyce’s spokesman said.
The prime minister’s office cited the ABC-commissioned review of Q&A which could take weeks to complete. Late last week, the Department of Communications finished its own fact-finding review of the decisions that led to the inclusion of Zaky Mallah, a former terrorism suspect who was convicted of threatening to kill Asio officers, as a questioner on 22 June. McEvoy received a formal warning over the decision.
Joyce’s withdrawal follows the decision of the prime minister’s parliamentary secretary, Alan Tudge, to quit last week’s program amid uncertainty over what action would follow the Mallah controversy. There’s no word yet whether Turnbull will follow through on his scheduled appearance next week.
Whereas Gillard’s decision to pull Arbib from the program was a one-off, Abbott’s frontbencher edict could be a longer lasting event.
Not everyone in the Coalition is keen on the idea of a blanket boycott. Last week the Queensland-based backbencher Ewen Jones said the Liberal party was meant to be about individualism. “Q&A made a grave error, but only the impotent are pure,” Jones said last Monday. “If we’re going to do this groupthink [a blanket ban] I think it would smack of petulance.”
Jones added: “I stand by what Tony Abbott said: it [Q&A] is a lefty lynch mob. But by us not being there we’re going to guarantee it’s a lefty lynch mob. We’re going to guarantee they don’t include a different point of view.”
But Q&A has its detractors from the left too. The former Labor prime minister Paul Keating said in 2011 he “wouldn’t be caught dead” on the program and if he were still in charge no ministers would go on it. His reasoning was about it being a poor format to push a government message.
“You just wash the government through mud every time you turn up,” Keating said.
