Every three years, we go through the same election debate ritual. No, not decrying the debates themselves as boring and pointless, but complaining about the silly wrangling and brinkmanship between the parties and the banal formats that remove as much risk as possible from the debates. At least this time around we were spared any stupidity over the “worm”, but otherwise this might have been 2010, or 2007, or 2004, just with a different cast.
The media is complicit in this. It allows the parties to get away with refusing to agree to some permanent arrangements for election debates. To its credit, the Canberra press gallery has pressed the parties hard to come to permanent arrangements for campaign debates, without a result. But what is needed is a more aggressive approach by the media, in refusing to cover, moderate or participate in leaders’ debates that aren’t established in accordance with mutually agreed arrangements negotiated outside of campaigns, or under the auspices of some form of debates commission (the Americans have a Commission on Presidential Debates, established by both the Republicans and the Democrats, for overseeing debates).
Moreover, we need an actual debate between the leaders, not last night’s format where they may as well have been beamed in from different cities, so little did they interact. That, of course, is exactly what the parties do not want, because that’s more risky.
The time to work through all this is after the coming election, not during the 2016 election campaign. And the media has a role to play in forcing the parties to accept genuine debates.
There is a way, and it relies on the press gallery to show some courage.
Simply schedule it with established rules. Invite both leaders. As soon as one party commits, both will show.
Why? because they won’t dare have their equal air time showing an emtpy chair.
If neither show, then the gallery should ask questions to the camera and themselves and discuss why the parties don’t want to answer them. Which would probably be a better outcome….
its not the matter of whether it was a great debate or not or whether crikey thinks there should be a differnt formula
the simple fact is that kevin rudd came across as having more idead of the policies costing etc than abbott did
ie abbotts answer to lyndal curtis regarding aged care was a classic, when she pointed out to abbott that aged care only rated 1 paragraph in his policy document abbott said no problems with that, were on the same page as labor
can you imagine the furore from the MSM if a labor opposition leader had repeated the same answer to john howard in one the the debates when howard was PM
talk about bias, and now a person wakes up this morning and the genius politial reporters are saying abbott held his own or abbott won the debate
is it any wonder that people are so disgusted with the MSM in the country
by the way crikey too is going down that path
Abbott didn’t actually win the debate but he was able to string a sentence together without a plethora of ‘ah’s and appeared less shifty than usual. This may explain why he impressed some commentators.
Why don’t they have the courage of Julia Gillard and go on Q&A? Preferably one show each. Or have a debate which included Christine Milne who would show both of them up by actually answering the questions
The chances of Krudd or MM participating in a real debate, to & fro, putting forth ideas are zilch because, for all their mutual loathing, they agree on one thing, the need to keep the public OUT.
Can anyone imagine what would happen were Milne to be allowed into the arena?
She’d show them both up for the automatons they are, devoid of probity, integrity, vision or ..plain simple decency.
Poor Bugger, my Country.