A big part of the problem with this show was the panel the ABC selected, but there’s also an inherent bias towards encouraging activists rather than citizens to participate. A third problem is the way Tony Jones works the panel and the questions.
Q&A is premised on transparency, balance and the role of social media as an emerging pillar of our democracy. It declares the voting intentions of its audience, it invites members of the public to go online and propose questions, and it uses Facebook to focus the topics of discussion.
For Monday’s show, the political leanings were 33 per cent Labor, 39 per cent Coalition and 13 per cent Green, so it’s already only moderately unrepresentative when compared with the 2013 election result, but this snapshot didn’t say how many audience members are professional activists (more on this later).
Viewers nominated Australia’s military action against Islamic State, the September 18 terror raids in Sydney and Brisbane and civil liberties as the three topics to be discussed live on the program.
So with these three topics marked down, surely Q&A’s producers would have invited on to the show a counterterrorism expert, or an expert on multiculturalism, or possibly a moderate Muslim leader?
Of course not. Instead, the producers invited two academics from Muslim backgrounds who, to varying degrees, proceeded to lambaste the government for carrying out the terror raids, which they characterised as “theatre”, before going on to engage in anti-Western hyperbole.
The tone of the discussion on the night was influenced by Jones, who asked whether the largest terror raids in Australia’s history were “a manufactured spectacle or a legitimate series of raids”.
The Muslim author and PhD scholar Randa Abdel-Fattah took her cue from Jones and said they were indeed a “spectacle” that had served “the purpose of whipping people up into more of an Islamophobic environment”.
When invited by Jones to comment next, the Muslim academic Anne-Azza Aly began by saying she respected Australia’s law enforcement authorities, before quickly moving on to describe the raids as “theatre”.
Of these two Muslim experts, Abdel-Fattah expressed the most extreme anti-Western views and even said that Australians were responsible for the perception that linked Islam with terrorism. “I’m very sorry to say but that is not my failure, it is yours,” she said.
One hardline Muslim expert would have been sufficient, but the two together became overkill and in fact their comments consumed 50 per cent of the response time. Jones allowed Abdel-Fattah to rant on extensively.
A second panellist with expertise in counterterrorism could have reminded the audience of the extensive history of raids on Islamic extremists that have led to more than 30 convictions since 2005, contrary to the view put by Abdel-Fattah that the raids were timed ahead of the new anti-terror laws.
Some of these earlier raids foiled plans to attack Sydney’s Holsworthy army barracks and bomb the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Or a moderate Muslim could have talked about the wider community’s desire to be law-abiding Australians and to be rid of extremists.
As Liberal MP Alex Hawke told Inquirer, the panel and debate were designed as though the ABC “wanted to create an inflammatory program” by portraying Islamic values as “anti-Western and anti-Australian”.
This created a dangerous perception for mainstream Australians who could have come away thinking the anti-Western views expressed by the panel’s “experts” represented a majority Muslim view.
But in fact, there’s much worse. The three other panel members were politicians, and two of them were left of centre, Greens senator Scott Ludlam and former Labor attorney-general Mark Dreyfus.
Jones’s use of the panel and the audience served to magnify the inherent bias.
He took a question from a woman wearing a hijab who complained bitterly about racial vilification and threats of extreme violence against her family.
The woman was mother-of-four Rebecca Kay, an activist who on a Seven Network show in 2012 defended a child holding a placard that called for people to be beheaded. She has been quoted extensively in the print media over the past four years.
Kay said the threats were made by a far-right group that she called ADL, the Australian Defence League, but Jones somehow thought she said ASIO and interrupted the program several times to clarify what she had said.
Hawke says the fact that Jones so quickly jumped to the wrong conclusion that ASIO had threatened her was telling and it underscored the imbalance in the way the program was framed and played out on live television. He said this moment added “a hysterical, Looney Tunes feel” to the show.
In another example, viewer Peter Sonners put a question via video about whether the problem called for curbs on “Muslim” immigration. This wasn’t an unreasonable question, but Jones turned immediately to have it shot down in flames.
He turned to Ludlam and then to Aly for a response, and sought no comments from the other panellists.
In terms of the subjects addressed in the debate, civil liberties took up about 40 per cent of the air time, with 22 per cent devoted to the anti-terror laws and just 11 per cent dedicated to Australia’s military action overseas.
The first quarter of the program addressed the terror raids with a single question which asked the panel why only two men were charged.
And as for details that weren’t mentioned on the show, Omarjan Azari, 22, was arrested and charged with conspiring to plan or prepare a terrorist act intended to “shock, horrify and terrify the community”, most likely to behead a random person in Sydney.
ASIO had been monitoring phone calls between Azari and the most senior Australian in Islamic State’s ranks, Mohammad Ali Baryalei, who is believed to have helped at least half of the 60 Australians fighting in the conflict.
But on Q&A, such communication was ridiculed by Aly as follows: “We are making arrests based on somebody tweeting something, somebody saying something.” Abdel-Fattah then chimed in: “Chatter.”
Aly concurred: “Some chatter.”
And Abdel-Fattah reiterated: “Chatter.”
ABC management declined to answer 12 questions put by Inquirer about the show.
