Last night’s episode of Q&A came with an all-women panel, chaired by Annabel Crabb and featuring Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, author Roxane Gay, businesswoman Holly Kramer, activist Yasmin Abdel-Magied, and complete-lack-of-filter-haver Germaine Greer.
The panel dissected topics from sexual harassment in the hospital system to Bishop’s own reticence to identify as a feminist, but the most talked-about moment of the evening came during a discussion of the Free The Nipple movement.
It began when Crabb asked the Foreign Minister if she would ever go topless in public to make a political statement. “It’s not something I’ve ever had the desire to do online. I’m quite adept at my emoji language and that’s about as radical as I get,” Bishop replied.
Greer, presumably bored with the lack of controversy, jumped in out of left field and asked: “What if it got you commutation of the life sentences (we’re guessing she meant death sentences) for two Australians?”
As the audience groaned at the thought of a senior political figure putting on a cam show for diplomatic purposes, Bishop tried to come up with a TV-appropriate response, before settling on “please don’t go there, Germaine.”
She then diverted into a lengthy ramble about how the internet is full of weirdos and stalkers and trolls, as Twitter utterly shat itself. Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at peak Q&A.
