Look back on memorable moments from Q+A's 18 years

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

Q+A was a rarity in Australian television news history — a show led in part by its audience where anything could happen, live on air.
The panel show, which the ABC has announced is being discontinued, regularly set the agenda and made headlines.
Here are just some of the memorable moments from its 18 years on the ABC.
When John Howard was on the panel in October 2010, an audience member hurled a pair of shoes in his direction in protest against the former PM's stance on the Iraq War.
"I remember jumping up and I tried to catch the shoes," host Tony Jones said in an interview on Conversations with Richard Fidler in 2019.
"And John Howard in the most brilliant way, so calm, grabbed my elbow and said, 'Just calm down, Tony. It's alright,' and pulled me back down and we went on with the show.
"Later we learnt that [the man who threw the shoes], Peter Gray, had terminal cancer and was in hospital close to death.
"We heard he'd like to auction them off and give the money to charity and we did that with John Howard's agreement.
"He actually signed a document certifying that these were the shoes that were thrown at him by Peter Gray from Newcastle and many thousands of dollars ended up going to the Red Crescent, which is the Islamic version of the Red Cross."
In May last year, Vincent Hurley was listening to politicians debate family violence after a series of deaths that shocked him and the nation.
And he couldn't stay silent.
"How dare you go into politics, in an environment like this, when one woman is murdered every four days, and all you … can do is immediately talk about politics? That is just disgraceful," he said, in a plea that went viral.
In 2016 Victorian man Duncan Storrar found himself on the receiving end of a media barrage when he appeared on Q&A to ask politicians why he wasn't getting a tax cut.
The Geelong man asked the election panel why Australians earning more than $80,000 got a tax cut while low-income workers received nothing.
"If you lift my tax-free threshold, that changes my life," he said to applause. "That means I get to say to my little girls, 'Daddy's not broke this weekend. We can go to the pictures.'
"Rich people don't even notice their tax-free threshold lift. Why don't I get it? Why do they get it?"
In her reply, then-Liberal minister Kelly O'Dwyer said company tax cuts would help businesses, like a cafe whose owner she spoke to who needed to buy a $6,000 toaster to boost business.
Storrar later received $60,000 in donations via a GoFundMe campaign.
But within days of appearing on the show he was attacked by various media outlets, who commented on his criminal history and revealed he paid no net tax.
The media's treatment of him was questioned given he had raised his mental health concerns.
Q+A courted controversy by inviting former terror suspect Zaky Mallah on to ask a question in 2015.
Mallah was the first man charged with terrorism under laws introduced by the Howard government. He was found not guilty of preparing a 2003 suicide attack on a Sydney Commonwealth building after being held for two years in Goulburn jail, but was acquitted two years later.
He asked then-parliamentary secretary to the minister for foreign affairs, Steve Ciobo, a pre-approved question regarding his detention.
"I had done and said some stupid things, including threatening to kidnap and kill, but in 2005 I was acquitted of those terrorism charges," Mallah said from the live audience.
"What would have happened if my case had been decided by the minister himself and not the courts?"
Ciobo said he thought Mallah was acquitted on a technicality and would be happy if he was removed from the country.
Mallah later responded: "The Liberals now have just justified to many Australian Muslims in the community tonight to leave and go to Syria and join ISIS because of ministers like him".
Host Tony Jones said the comments were completely out of order.
Prime minister Tony Abbott banned his frontbench from appearing on the show over the incident.
ABC management later made a statement that it was wrong to allow Mallah onto the program. The Q&A executive producer was given a formal warning and the program was moved into the News division.
When Simon Sheikh, then national director of the lobbyist group GetUp!, collapsed at the desk mid-show in July 2012, his fellow panellists rushed to help him — except one.
Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella was sitting next to Sheikh on the show but looked on in surprise as panellist climate change minister Greg Combet rushed over to help.
Mirabella was criticised on social media for her reaction to her co-panellist's collapse.
She later said she was taken by complete surprise.
"I didn't know what it was," she said.
"I thought initially he was just bent over laughing because that's what you see, and [I] turned around to try and get a better look and I — like everyone else on the panel — was just stunned."
GetUp! took to Twitter to defend Mirabella, urging people to go easy on the Liberal MP.
"Folks, please don't criticise @SMirabellaMP — it was an extraordinary circumstance and everyone was shocked," it tweeted.
Sheikh was taken to hospital and fully recovered.
In an emotional final appearance in May 2023, Q+A host Stan Grant spoke directly to the people who sent him hateful messages during his time in the chair.
"To those who have abused me and my family, I would just say — if your aim was to hurt me, well, you've succeeded," he said.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I must have given you so much cause to hate me," he said.
Grant had announced the week before that he was stepping away from Q+A, and he accused the ABC of "institutional failure", saying the organisation did not publicly defend him amid a storm of racist abuse.
Grant said he feared the media did not have the love or the language "to speak to the gentle spirits of our land".
Yassmin Abdel-Magied appeared on Q&A in 2017 and was involved in a heated exchange with senator Jacqui Lambie over sharia law.
The pair was asked by an audience member if it was time to define new rules surrounding migration to avoid community conflict, to which Lambie replied: "Anyone that supports sharia law should be deported."
Abdel-Magied questioned if she even knew what that meant before getting into a heated defence of feminism and Islam.
"My frustration is that people talk about Islam without knowing anything about it and they're willing to completely negate any of my rights as a human being," Abdel-Magied said.
"Islam to me is the most feminist religion. We got equal rights well before the Europeans. We don't take our husbands' last names because we ain't their property."
One of Q+A's real strengths every week was everyday Australians showing the human side of government policies.
In March last year, Charlotte Kaye told her personal story of trying to survive on Jobseeker and pension payments and facing ageism in the workforce, which touched a nerve with the panel and Australians alike.
Conservative independent Bob Katter and comedian Josh Thomas must have been one of the show's most unlikely double acts.
But when they were sitting together on an October 2014 episode about mental health, sparks flew.
When Katter was asked by an audience member about how his public statements on homosexuality impacted mental health, he tried to change the topic to mental health in his electorate, and Thomas couldn't take his comments sitting down.
He said it was clear Katter cared about his community.
"But then you go out and you deny the existence of homosexuals in north Queensland. They exist. There's an app called Grindr. I'll put it on your phone."
Dylan Storer was just 15 when he appeared on the program in 2018, and blew Australia away with his take on the Voice to Parliament.
The West Australian appeared on the panel alongside other high schoolers who were invited to speak about issues affecting their communities.
He revealed how he came from a school with a majority Indigenous population and questioned the lack of focus on Australia's black history.
"We had eight weeks of term focused on the American civil rights movement, and in the last two weeks, we crammed in Australian Aboriginal history," he told the panel.
"We have the opportunity to be a part — and be a good part — and acknowledge cultures that have been in this country, on this land, for 65,000 years.
"It could be such a large part of our country and such a large part of our identity."
Storer, who is now a journalist, went on to say he believed more education about our First Nations people could not only help address racism but also misunderstanding, which came from a lack of education.
Only comedian Barry Humphries would answer a call on air and tell host Tony Jones to "shoosh".