The grilling season

Monday night’s ABC interviews showed how TV can be dangerous for politicians in unexpected ways When Bill Shorten took the chair for a solo Q&A at Ballarat on Monday night, the cards were stacked against him. Tony Jones, at his most adversarial throughout, introduced the program with a quotation from David Marr’s recently published Quarterly Essay, Faction Man, which described Shorten as “a consummate backroom party man who’s risen to the top without really being tested by the Australian voters.” The first questioner cut to the chase. A drover’s dog could have won an election against Tony Abbott. Would Shorten acknowledge that Malcolm Turnbull has just made his job a lot harder and his leadership more insecure? “I’m not going to be mealy-mouthed about this,” said Shorten. “I think it is a good thing for this country that Tony Abbott is no longer prime minister.” That got a round of applause, and Shorten’s follow-up statement on his hopes for a better quality of debate went down well enough, but the atmosphere was still distinctly edgy… Read the full articl