She’s been praised as the “teen who skewered Rudd” in the Telegraph and lionised on conservative blogs. “Meet the student who asked a tougher question of Kevin Rudd than did Left-spruiking Paul Bongiorno this morning on Meet The Press,” said Extreme Right-spruiking Andrew Bolt on the weekend.
Eighteen-year-old Angela Samuels asked Rudd on last week’s Q&A about his laptop promise, inducing a cranky reaction from the Prime Minister, who looked flat and uninterested while being grilled by students for an hour. She then used the Telegraph interview to accuse Rudd of lying.
“I’m in contact with schools. I know what he’s saying isn’t the truth. It’s annoying that he stands in front of cameras and says things that aren’t true.”
Hard-hitting stuff from someone from the real world. But absent from the Telegraph’s praise was some relevant context: Samuels is a Young Liberal from Brisbane, studying at ANU (and not a schoolgirl, as some media reports initially suggested).
A moment’s checking by the Telegraph journalist would have revealed Samuels’ background. Her Facebook page (doubtless shortly to be made private) details a long list of conservative causes in which Samuels has been involved: Abbott’s Army, Tony Abbott for PM, Mr Rudd, I Want My $300 Billion Back, a climate denialist group and her membership of the Young LNP South Brisbane Group.
In last year’s ANU Students Association elections, Samuels stood as part of the Act! Ticket, headed by ACT Young Liberals George Ober and Sam Jackson-Hope.
None of this reflects on Samuels, who has done nothing to hide her partisanship. Yesterday, she commented on her Facebook wall “I Love Tony!!! Hooray for local health boards!” Half her luck for getting a question on Q&A. It hardly invalidates her question to Rudd, and it’s entirely his fault that his media persona, on Q&A and elsewhere, is starting to slip apart.
But it does reflect on journalists and reactionary commentators happy to overlook her partisan affiliations in favour of the “fake Rudd brought down by authentic teen” narrative.
It also suggests Q&A is having continuing difficulties getting the balance right between partisan audience members who can deliver controversy, and representatives of the other 98% of the population. Last night’s dreadful episode, in which the mouth-watering clash between Lindsay Tanner and Barnaby Joyce was ruined by the presence of three other irrelevant and less-than-exciting guests, seemed to have been allowed by the ABC to be used as a soapbox.
There was a group of ex-ADF personnel running a well-organised email campaign to have their pension benefits boosted, and an apparent supporter of Melinda Tankard-Reist’s campaign to censor and regulate everything faintly connected to sex, who served her up with a Dorothy Dixer that allowed her to range over sexualisation of children — including peddling the internet myth that Noah Cyrus is launching a lingerie line for nine-year-olds — and the recent attacks on Government websites.
Which is all fine if Q&A wants to become a lobby for professional barrow-pushers, but it makes for less-than-compelling television.
True that she does not hide her right wing political leanings on her Facebook page , but it would have proper for the Telegraph to possibly question her on her leanings and affiliations and covered these in the article as well. She is not representative of the average Gen X or Gen Yor their voting intentions.
Das was one of the few who blew the whistle BEFORE the GFC, and has a lot to say about the weird and whacky way our economy has been entrapped by the financial wizards. Why have someone like that on a panel and give him only a few seconds of soundbites between Tanner reciting policy details so mind-numbing that he had to have been primed beforehand, and Joyce waffling on incoherently? He must have realised he’d been set up and played the jester for some light relief.
Bloody dreadful television.
Does it matter who asks the question? or where they are from or how old they are? All we are interested in is the answer. So what if she was a young Liberal and she knew he wasn’t telling the truth. Good for her for asking the question, something the media seem to be afraid of doing with Rudd. If an 18 year old young Lib can rattle Kevin Rudd and catch him out on lies, so be it. Rudd gave her that look of, how dare you! To me that alone, even without an answer spoke volumes about his character.
Again is Q&A “Janet’s Revenge” and does she get to audition inquisitors (going on vehemence and tone) besides get them a seat and an actual soap-box? A show that goes for less than an actual “hour”.
Last night we were treated to the spectacle of our “Shadow Finance Minister” – with his history of “anti-China-state-owned-business-investment in Australia”, doing commercials, railing against such things, with “National Party appeal waning in spades”, tapping the Sinophobia keg, just like Hanson, for the electoral collateral it elicits, holding out hope to that gold mine for the so inclined, the “nurtured, numerically and electorally rich, clueless, ill-educated, desperate and needy” demographic – specifically, and embarrassingly, obviously, being asked what he’d do to stop that sort of investment here, a couple of times, in search of clarity of policy.
“Alice” Jones might just as well have asked “The Hatter” “Why is a raver like a writing desk?” “The Hatter” went off, when pressed, into some diatribe about (selective) “Labor national debt”! Unlike the original, “ours” went some way to answering it – “underneath, they’re both occupied with empty space and they’re both probably made of wood”?
And, from the “non-core promises party”, did he heckle something about “broken promises” in relation to Tanner’s Labor?
@John Donovan
“…She is not representative of the average Gen X or Gen Yor their voting intentions…”
Says who? Got anything more than peer anecdotes to back your statement up?
Instaed of ‘intentions’ are gathered to make YOU feel less alone.
Do us a favour and remind us of how they actually VOTE. Start with the AEC.
“…it would have proper for the Telegraph to possibly question her on her leanings and affiliations and covered these in the article as well…”
How is that even remotely relevant? You sound as desperate as Bernard in the Quest for Conspiracy.