By Peter Craven
WOULD that politics in this country were as well run as the ABC's political panel show Q&A - on a good day. Television transforms our apprehension of politics by its vividness, its accuracy and the sense of occasion with which it presents it.
Q&A began only last year, but is already essential to the political landscape. It presents a panel that includes a member each from the government and the opposition, a couple of journalists or intellectuals, perhaps someone from business or a think tank - five in all plus the presenter (Lateline's Tony Jones) - and subjects them to live questions from the audience plus a sprinkling sent in electronically. The format works superbly, highlighting both the political skill of our politicians and the fact that there is a lot more to the governing of a country than mere party political differences.
Anyone who has watched Q&A regularly will remember particular vivid moments. Tanya Plibersek saying that if she had been asked, as Tony Abbott was, about her advice to a teenage daughter, on premarital sex, she would not have answered. Abbott himself with the eerie patience reminiscent of the calm before the storm in domestic brawls, as Catherine Deveny jabbed and jeered at him. The steadiness with which Lindsay Tanner refused to sneer at the Pope's visit, welcoming the insight of religious people though he wasn't religious himself. David Marr's patrician scorn together with his reluctance wholeheartedly to condemn the government, even over the asylum seekers.
And then all sorts of bright people caught in the meshes of self-involvement. As bright a thinker as Waleed Aly banging on about his own take on conservatism in wheel-discovering mode. Satyajit Das, looking as if he had an even higher opinion of his intellect than Kevin Rudd had of his. Rudd himself, back in February with an audience of high school students, had seemed notably insensitive to the fact that they were ''frightened'' - or, at any rate, intimidated - and could never for a moment concede, even out of courtesy, his equality with his questioners.
It was a telling moment that, with hindsight, had a prophetic glow, as if Q&A had exposed the fatal flaw. It was uncharacteristic for a politician on the show and demonstrated the absence of a common touch in the shaker of the sauce bottle.
Most of the time Q&A brings out, to a surprising degree, that politicians perform better than intellectuals and some journalists, let alone celebrities and performers.
There are exceptions to this. Louise Adler has often talked sense, and the most qualified admirer of Robert Manne could not fault his modesty and gravity on the program (if you want to accuse the man of moral vanity, it does not appear here). And Jonathan Biggins, the comedian, left most people for dead when he gave the liberal line on the asylum seekers.
But these just prove the rule. Q&A is like an extension of the Churchill take on democracy: however dim your view of them - say of Peter Garrett at his most stumble-footedness on Q&A or Stephen Conroy talking about censoring the internet with all the charm of a McCarthyist witch-hunter - most of the time it's the politicians who shine. You feel that these are the people best suited to running the country: they not only have better communication skills, they actually seem to care about the vast complexity of opinion and grievance, striving and specific interests, that characterises society.
On Q&A you notice Julia Gillard's geniality, her alertness to the game of politics and the humour that underlines her seriousness, and that dizzying lawyer's shrewdness. You notice Malcolm Turnbull's openness, his charm and emotional range. You notice, too, qualities in people you disagree with.
Even if you thought of Nicola Roxon as Madam Alcopops with the firmest possible grasp of the worst principles of nanny-stateism, anyone who listened to her on home birthing would be impressed by the care she brought to her portfolio.
What's so instructive about Q&A is that you get the strongest suggestion of how political opponents can be united by goodwill and a desire to further the common good. The program homes in on the swinging voter's sense of the world and is an antidote to the committed voters' tendency to think their party is right on every issue.
One caveat about Q&A recently has been the celebrity panelist or ring-ins from non-political arenas. Sometimes the strategy can work. In a Q&A on May 24, Malcolm Fraser was impressive but little light was shed by such panelists as novelist Peter Carey. Though visiting American novelist Lionel Shriver, a libertarian despite her belief in an American national healthcare system, was piercingly intelligent when she said, of the proposed resource rent tax, that she thought it was impossible for such a tax to be imposed, with such speed, without sending a shiver throughout the community about the arbitrariness of government.
A few weeks later on June 21 (the Q&A immediately before Rudd's demise) Graham Richardson intimated that the mining tax was doing the worst kind of damage to Labor.
Richo is Q&A gold because he has such a large political brain and such a wealth of experience, and seeing him in company with Sarah Hanson-Young, Turnbull and Craig Emerson made this look like a return to form for Q&A after flirtations with the odd celebrity drop-kick. The June 28 Q&A - after the coup - was not quite in this category, though it was riveting because the program had teed up that chief conspirator and born politician, warlord and former union boss that he is, the Xavier-educated, very plausible-sounding Bill Shorten. He talked with palpable (unconvincing) sincerity about how difficult it had been to wield the knife. It was such a good performance that it reminded you that sincerity is a face politicians can assume.
Fortunately Barnaby Joyce reminded us, with impressive vehemence, that an elected prime minister in his first term had fallen at the behest of the warlords. This episode also showed Q&A's weaknesses. Chris Wallace, the Gillard biographer, offered familiar truths like personal illuminations and Magda Szubanski came across as an intelligent celebrity with ordinary political opinions.
But that glamorous lady of the right, Janet Albrechtsen, was impressively unpredictable in the way she cheered Gillard on. She also said the single most vivid thing of the evening - Rudd had wept for himself, not the Aborigines, at that terrible moment in his speech.
Elsewhere, Harold Mitchell complacently announced that Joyce represented the extreme right. The Nationals senator objected and instanced his crossing the floor for ''that bloke in Guantanamo''. The politician beat the wise guy hands down.
Despite the fascination of having Shorten in the hot seat, there was no one on the panel who reflected the sentiment, discernible in sections of the audience, that a prime minister who had carried Labor to victory and had still been likely to beat Abbott, had been disposed of with maximum brutality.
It would have been good to have a cool head to air this view. Despite this, the post-Rudd Q&A showed, with a pretty transfixing vengeance, how good this show is for Australian democracy.
And that continued last Tuesday with Tony Jones back at the helm and with journalist Annabel Crabb and former Democrat leader (and Labor convert) Cheryl Kernot saying what they thought of the asylum seeker issue on the eve of Gillard's dazzling something-for-everyone speech with its East Timor solution and gestures to Julian Burnside.
With a prime minister who can weave the wind such as Julia Gillard, we need Q&A all the more.