Bring back vigorous debate to TV leader forums that are so managed they are boring

TV DEBATES don’t have to be yawn carnivals. Perhaps the answer is to turn leaders loose at People’s Forums in marginal seats where genuine swinging voters ask short questions.

ALMOST as much as the result of the election itself, I want to see sales figures during May and June of coffee, Red Bull and No-Doz.

Forget about pharmaceutical treatments for insomnia. This campaign should be listed as a safe naturopathic alternative.

We know that timidity and slow burns are likely in long campaigns with even longer faux starts. But in the past we at least had explosive leaders’ debates to snap us from our slumber.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Labor Leader Bill Shorten before the debate which was over-scripted to the point of boring. Photo: AP

During our last marathon campaign back in 1984, Liberal leader Andrew Peacock shocked us when, during Australia’s first televised election debate, he surprisingly outperformed the very popular PM Bob Hawke.

It set the tone for the campaign’s final days and produced a far closer result.

Later, we had fiery exchanges between Paul Keating and John Hewson. Later still, we had strong policy contrasts between John Howard and Kim Beazley and, of course, between Howard and Mark Latham, the television debater from central casting.

Compare that to last Sunday’s snooze and we can only ask if there’s even a future for such stage-managed TV debates – especially those controlled exclusively by journalists (who, on Sunday, asked just seven questions in an hour) – in a social media sphere dominated by celebrity and sensation.

True, there were a few fruity moments: stinging salvos over border protection, and Opposition leader Bill Shorten’s top shelf zinger – he actually leads his party while Malcolm Turnbull is led by his – was well worth the wait.

But the leaders’ personal back stories and other patois was far too risk averse for audiences that, opinion polls tell us, are evenly divided.

Faced with make or break opportunities to steal the following day’s headlines, Turnbull and Shorten instead offered long, mechanical responses written by spin doctors drawn from careful focus group research.

US presidential candidate Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Richard Nixon had a gritty battle of ideas in 1960.

That’s why we heard Turnbull return to “jobs and growth”, border protection and Labor’s allegedly profligate spending, and Shorten trot out fiscal fairness and tax breaks for the rich.

Despite dancing around the edges, neither leader left viewers with a clear vision for the next 10 (or even three) years, with each leader – the very symbols of automaton machine politics – lacking anything resembling humanness.

If any votes were shifted by Sunday night’s performance, they may well go to parties unrepresented in the debate.

At least the inclusion of the Greens’ Richard di Natale – overdue in these debates given the weight his party carries in the Senate – would have livened up proceedings.

But, given the event’s rather modest viewing audience, I doubt too many voters would have been so moved. With just 888,000 Australians watching (or at least nodding off during) the debate, perhaps Turnbull should have got on the tools, and Shorten should have sung, to engage the 1.3 million who watched The Voice and the 1.2 million who opted for House Rules.

The worm turned in favour of opposition leader John Hewson during his debate with Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1993.

We know reality TV is far from real, but at least it was more authentic than Sunday’s suffering scenes.

But TV debates don’t have to be yawn carnivals. Look at the gritty battle of ideas in the classic American Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960 – the first of its kind – that resulted in TV viewers giving it to the photogenic JFK, and radio audiences declaring victory for Richard Nixon.

Recall also Gerald Ford’s weird insistence in 1976 that Eastern Europe was not under the Soviet yoke, or the lively Lloyd Bentson-Dan Quayle vice-presidential debate in 1988 when Bentson put down Quayle (who likened himself to JFK) with “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy”. Ouch.

Perhaps the answer is to turn leaders loose at more People’s Forums in marginal seats where, apart from a journalist moderator, only genuine swinging voters are allowed to ask short questions – in return for short answers – on issues salient to most Australians.

Broadband would be a good place to start.

Opposition Leader Andrew Peacock gave Prime Minister Bob Hawke – and viewers – a run for their money in the 1984 debate.

More critically, what value lies in late campaign debates when so many of us now pre-poll? In 2013, about one in four voters cast a ballot before polling day.

This year, that figure is expected to grow to one in three. For millions of Australians, traditional campaign strategies are increasingly archaic and do nothing to attract the 1.5 million who don’t even enrol or vote.

Televised election debates can be moments of great national revelation as well as great entertainment.

Can we at least see the return of the public opinion “worm”?

Dr Paul Williams is a senior lecturer at Griffith University’s School of Humanities
Twitter:@PDWilliams1

Originally published as Bring back vigorous debate to TV leader forums that are so managed they are boring