The federal vice president of the Liberal party has delivered a train wreck performance on the ABC’s Q&A in which she accused the New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern of “copying” John Howard’s gun laws.
Teena McQueen, in her first appearance on the program, also had to be warned by host Tony Jones about potentially “defamatory” remarks about Greens leader Richard Di Natale.
The panellists were asked about the contrasting leadership styles between prime minister Scott Morrison and Ardern in the aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack and if they thought “there will be a swing against the standard masculine, power-driven politicians in the upcoming election”.
American writer Roxanne Gay told the audience Ardern had done “a remarkable job”.
“For once, we saw a politician who didn’t think about politics and thought about humanity and empathy and said the exact right things at the exact right time,” Gay said.
She continued, saying New Zealand’s prime minister “then did the right political thing by, within six days, banning semiautomatic weapons”.
Will Jacinda’s example lead to a swing against the standard masculine, power driven politicians in the election? #QandA pic.twitter.com/NzrPetvrrU
— ABC Q&A (@QandA) March 25, 2019
McQueen interjected and said “we did that years ago. The Liberal party did that years ago with John Howard”. She then accused Ardern of “copying” Howard’s gun law reforms, to groans from the audience.
McQueen dominated the program’s running hour, repeatedly interrupting co-panellists Gay, the Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, the Labor party’s multicultural spokesman Tony Burke and the Centre for Independent Studies’ Simon Cowan on subjects including racism, white extremism and what media companies and governments could do to manage content considered to be “hate speech”.
She was at one point pulled up by host Tony Jones and warned about the risk of defamation over comments she made about a radio interview involving Di Natale.
At one point, an Adelaide resident used a video question to say she was “worried about the rise of neo-Nazism around our city”, including racist propaganda.
McQueen responded by saying she had been to Adelaide and that if there was evidence of this, laws were in place to have people “carted off and deal with them”.
Gay said she was “in a bubble”.
“That’s really terrifying. Because if you think that you can just call the police and they’ll take away people who are racist, that’s not how any of this works,” Gay said.
“I understood she was being threatened,” McQueen replied.
“No, she said she’s seeing markers of hate speech, posters in her community and more and more online and in-person chatter from neo-Nazis.”
Burke also told the program that footage of the defeated New South Wales Labor leader Michael Daley saying young Sydneysiders were being replaced by Asian immigrants with PhDs was “unacceptable” and derailed the party in the final week of the NSW election campaign.
Did Michael Daley’s comments about “Asians with PhDs” lose the Labor Party the NSW election? #QandA pic.twitter.com/crhSwwwlzR
— ABC Q&A (@QandA) March 25, 2019
“It was offensive, it was unacceptable, he needed to apologise, and he apologised,” Burke said.
“But, from that moment, there was no momentum. What then happened in the debate continued to just stall the momentum.”
