It’s absolutely wonderful that once a week I can sit down, put my feet up, and watch an hour of television that makes me so angry that I can no longer tell right from wrong.
If you love watching people with irreconcilable ideological differences argue each other at feverishly increasing pitch and volume over issues whose greatest significance is as symbols of the culture war, ‘Q&A‘ is the show for you. It’s pretty much a ‘Real Housewives‘ show for people who consider themselves to be too smart for reality TV but are apparently not smart enough to do something better with their time than watch people fight.
In saying that, I watched it tonight, which I guess means you don’t have to.
Tonight saw Nationals senator Bridget Mckenzie attempt to defend the government’s proposed changes to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Regardless of where you sit on the issue, we can all agree that the movement to change 18C is a pretty hard sell.
The government is inarticulately trying to emphasise that it somehow ‘strengthens’ the law while simultaneously claiming that it will be less easy for people to be sued under, which is beyond confusing, and by all appearances they seem to be trying to make it easier for people to be racist based only on the demands of a few Sky News hosts.
As Nationals leader and deputy PM Barnaby Joyce has said, it’s not really an issue that normal people care about or want changed.
Unsurprisingly, given all that, Senator Bridget Mckenzie did not have a very easy time convincing the audience that changing 18C is worthwhile.
She managed to dunk on herself almost immediately:
MCKENZIE: My point is that the ordinary punter out there, when they think about definitions of insult, offend, humiliate, that we shouldnt be… That we’ve got a racial discrimination act that actally prevents that, that then impedes on their decisions to have the sorts of conversations that we’re having tonight.JONES: Can i just speak to your point we are actually having this conversation right now and the law hasn’t changed so in fact we’re still able to have that conversation.
It does seem counterintuitive to argue that you’re not allowed to do something while you are doing that exact thing but, hey, who knows how the mind of a political strategic genius works.
MCKENZIE: Well right now even using 18D you can insult, offend and humiliate under artistic protections.JONES: So why would you need to change anything?
Incredible work, you can check out this farce below:
Are we making it OK to humiliate someone through changing our racial discrimination act? @senbmckenzie responds #QandA pic.twitter.com/l4NlktDiyL
— ABC Q&A (@QandA) March 27, 2017
To add insult to injury, she also referred to Hunters & Collectors frontman Mark Seymour as “Peter” almost immediately after calling herself a big Hunters & Collectors fan. Amazing work.
Should ‘hunters’ & ‘collectors’ be struck from the English language, as per PETA reasoning? @_MarkSeymour & @senbmckenzie respond #QandA pic.twitter.com/3XV8TK8dRj
— ABC Q&A (@QandA) March 27, 2017
Source and photo: ABC.
