Stan Grant removing Sasha Gillies-Lekakis from Q+A (Image: Q+A/ABC)Stan Grant removing Sasha Gillies-Lekakis from Q+A (Image: Q+A/ABC)
Stan Grant (Image: Q+A/ABC)

It’s apparently time for our annual reminder that Q+A exists, via the only method it has of reminding us: controversy. Stan Grant has turfed a questioner from last night’s episode for, in Grant’s words, “advocating violence”.

Russian-Australian Sasha Gillies-Lekakis prefaced his question with his anger over “the narrative depicted by our media, with Ukraine as the good guy and Russia as the bad guy”.

“Believe it or not, there are a lot of Russians here and around the world that support what Putin’s doing in Ukraine, myself included.” He then, through heckles, repeated the Kremlin line about Ukraine killing 13,000 mostly Russian civilians in Donbas and Luhansk.

Twenty minutes passed before Grant decided a line had been crossed.

“Something has been bothering me … people here have been talking about family who are suffering and people who are dying. Can I just say — I’m just not comfortable with you being here. Could you please leave?”

We may completely reject the premise of the question, but it is hard to detect a direct call to violence from Gillies-Lekakis. People ask disingenuous questions (and get disingenuous answers) all the time on Q+A. So why was this the line in the sand? Perhaps previous blow-ups could give us a clue.

Zaky Mallah

It’s probably the biggest fuck-up in Q+A history. Back in 2015, Zaky Mallah, who had been convicted of threatening to kill Commonwealth officials many years earlier and was fresh from tweeting that some female News Corp journalists were “whores” who needed to be “gang banged”, was allowed to put a question to the Coalition MP Steven Ciobo about his treatment by Australian authorities. Ciobo took the opportunity to play it tough, saying that while he wasn’t familiar with the specifics of Mallah’s case, he would be “happy to look you straight in the eye and say that I’d be pleased to be part of a government that would say you are out of the country, as far as I’m concerned”. Mallah followed up with typical grace and said, “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.” He later said he hated ISIS and argued he’d been “misinterpreted” in a piece for Guardian Australia.

Bedlam followed. Then-prime minister Tony Abbott was furious about the broadcast of inflammatory language on a show he called a “lefty lynch mob” and banned members of his front bench from appearing on the panel. The News Corp tabloids took up the issue with gusto — The Courier Mail going so far as to photoshop the ABC logo onto an ISIS flag. In the aftermath, the ABC appointed Shaun Brown and Ray Martin to audit Q+A and issued a formal warning to executive producer Peter McEvoy.

Duncan Storrar

We wonder if Gillies-Lekakis can expect the same treatment dolled out to Duncan Storrar after he had the temerity to ask then-assistant treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer about tax-free thresholds and became something of heroic figure for it, attracting a fundraiser that netted him tens of thousands of dollars.

Q+A producer Amanda Collinge may have sealed Storrar’s fate when she tweeted (and later deleted) that he was a “new national hero”. And so naturally, News Corp went to work, delving into Storrar’s troubled past, finding a violent criminal record and enough problems with drugs and estranged family members to keep him on the front pages of The Herald Sun and The Oz for a week. As Media Watch put it at the time, it “ticked all the boxes” for News Corp: “Bash the poor. Bash the ABC. And bash Labor.”

Mona Eltahawy and Nayuka Gorrie

By November 2019 Q+A appeared to have learnt its lesson. Broadcast from Melbourne as part of the Wheeler Centre’s Broadside festival, the panel featured columnist and author Mona Eltahawy asking “How long must we wait for men and boys to stop murdering us, to stop beating us and to stop raping us? How many rapists must we kill?” Actor, writer and Indigenous activist Nayuka Gorrie said they looked forward to the tipping point where “people start burning stuff”.

There was a series of complaints and the ABC launched an investigation into the show. But there was far less tabloid interest, and the only government response was a pretty mild statement from Communications Minister Paul Fletcher. Still, ABC pulled the episode from iView.

Back to Gillies-Lekakis

Perhaps the preemptive booting of Gillies-Lekakis on a show nominally about debate is just an attempt to save us all the trouble of an extended scandal.