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Joe Hildebrand: Was QandA infiltrated by China?’

When Joe Hildebrand turned on QandA last week, he never imagined he was about to watch the most excruciatingly funny thing he has seen.

Joe HildebrandJoe Hildebrand
6 min read
August 18, 2019 - 12:08PM
How Good is Democracy? (Q&A)

OPINION

The problem with debates about democracy is you never know which one is going to be your last.

And so this week, I was delighted to witness probably the greatest moment in Australian television history: when the Chinese government somehow managed to get a spot on the ABC’s Q&A panel.

Or at least that was how it seemed.

The theme of the show was literally “How good is democracy?” which I assumed was a Scott Morrison quote until I realised the panellists were genuinely asking the question.

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This struck me as somewhat bizarre, given that Winston Churchill — the man more responsible than any other for keeping Western democracy alive to this day — has already answered it.

Democracy is the worst system of government in the world, he famously declared, except for all the others.

In other words, democracy is flawed, inconsistent, inefficient, and infuriating but anything else is unthinkable.

And this is because democracy is the only form of government that can correct itself. It is the only shop on the block with a returns policy.

The most important outcome of a democratic process isn’t the side that wins but the side that loses. It is a political system based not on victory but on goodwill.

Democracy is a civic pact — that rules are rules, results are results and those rules and results will be respected even by the losing side.

In other words, the critical pillar of government by consent of the governed — even when many of the governed might have preferred a different result.

This brings us back to the existential debate on Q&A in which the selected People’s Panellist ended up sounding more like the People’s Liberation Army panellist.

This was Li Shee Su, who is described in his Q&A profile as an extraordinarily high-achieving IT executive who was “born in Malaysia of Chinese descent”. It concludes: “Li Shee is interested in discussing Australia’s place in Asia, international relations, national security and surveillance, multiple citizenships, asylum seekers, immigration, crime and punishment, and how our political system and major parties are letting Australians down.”

To be clear, Li Shee is also an Australian citizen and repeatedly referred to the West as “we” and “our side”. I am not seriously suggesting that he is a Chinese government plant — as I joked on Twitter — but he was an uncannily word-perfect mouthpiece for Beijing propaganda on the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

“What’s happening in China, really, you need to look at a view of, say, the Chinese government,” he said.

“How are they looking at it versus how we look at it? Because we see it all the time. And we have this blinkered view. What we see on the news media can be selective. It can be very biased in some aspects.”

Li Shee then went on to liken the Hong Kong protesters to terrorists, apparently referencing the reported arrest of a man with homemade explosives shortly before one of the many rolling actions.

“In Australia, when we catch people with bombs in their garages and homes, what do we call them?” Li Shee asked.

“Terrorists,” a Q&A audience member dutifully responded.

“Terrorists. Correct. In Hong Kong, when you catch them with bombs and bomb-making material, what do we call them? Pro-democracy protesters.”

It was at precisely this point that I spat out my socialist chardonnay. Honestly, it was the most excruciatingly funny thing I have ever seen.

It was like the Queen had just cut the cheese in an elevator or Wesley Snipes had just strolled in to a KKK meeting. And as I was curled up howling on the couch, it’s fair to say the Queen’s bowels were the least of my problems.

Li Shee went on to say that democracy wasn’t what people really wanted in the long run — which, ironically enough, he has the democratic right to say — and then pulled out the tried and true Trump card:

“Look at the way we do elections. If democracy was perfect, Trump wouldn’t be in power.”

This is both the most dumb and disturbing sentiment to emerge from the populist upheaval we have seen in liberal democracies over the past decade: Someone we don’t like got elected, therefore we have to get rid of elections.

At this point any sane person would have been desperately waving a red flag. Instead the most esteemed intellectual on the panel ran up the white one.

This was AC Grayling, a British philosopher who looks like Doc from Back to the Future if he’d had the time to invent a hairbrush. And his response showed no less contempt for the laws of rationality.

“Hillary Clinton got more than three million votes more than Trump got, he got the votes in the right place in order to get the Electoral College,” Grayling said, in a penetrating statement of the bleeding obvious.

Unfortunately, he carried on: “The Electoral College was set up to ensure that no idiot, tweeter, sexual harasser, ignoramus would get into the White House.”

This alone proves how decrepit the state of academia is these days. Not only was the electoral college set up well over two centuries before the invention of Twitter but it has in fact ensured countless idiots, sexual harassers and ignoramuses effortlessly got into the White House.

Perhaps Grayling considers George W Bush an intellectual titan or is unaware of the sexual harassment allegations against William Jefferson Clinton — after all, neither ever made the news.

As any serious person knows the Electoral College system was set up for no reason of the sort. It was to ensure that the United States of America — there is a clue in the name — was a federal system that preserved a degree of state autonomy.

This was yet another of the republic’s checks against tyranny — in this case the tyranny of the majority. It means a candidate for president can’t just ignore the smaller states and appeal solely to the huge population centres of California and New York.

It’s certainly not perfect but it’s no less democratic than Australia’s system of safe and marginal seats — which has also produced winning governments that lost the popular vote.

The extraordinary thing about the 2016 US election isn’t that Trump won despite losing the popular vote — that has happened many times before.

The extraordinary thing is that despite getting almost three million extra votes — not “more than” as Grayling claimed — Hillary still managed to lose because she didn’t focus on the places where those votes mattered; the working-class states of Middle America.

This was not a catastrophic failure of democracy, it was a catastrophic failure of the Clinton campaign. Because this debate isn’t really about democratic systems at all, it’s about out of touch people being blindsided by results they don’t like and then crying foul and arguing about the rules.

"This debate wasn't really about democratic systems at all, it’s about out of touch people being blindsided by results they don’t like and then crying foul and arguing about the rules," writes Joe Hildebrand. Picture: Twitter. Source: ABC QandA.

If you want pure democracy you need only to go back to Ancient Greece, which started the whole damn mess. Back in Athens, decisions on whether or not to actually go to war would be decided by simple votes of the people. This was as direct a democracy as you can get.

But when that same pure form was exercised by the UK in 2016, when people voted in a straight out yes/no referendum on whether to exit the European Union, Grayling again disputed the result.

In a mournful opinion piece this week, he lamented that the Brexit referendum was also somehow invalid because — despite a higher voter turnout than any UK election this century at over 72 per cent — not enough people voted. You honestly could not make this stuff up.

Meanwhile in Australia, where voting is compulsory, elites just blamed the whole country for being too stupid to vote the right way at the last federal election.

“Very hard to understand a nation who, through its own wilful ignorance, will cause our grandchildren to abandon all hope,” said one high profile political commentator who is supposedly a man of faith.

I too could easily be considered an elite, even if my favourite holiday destination is Kmart. And I too confidently predicted that Trump, Brexit and the Morrison government would never get up. But I accept the result and I respect the result and I believe the result has a right to be enacted.

Why? Because if you trash democracy just because it doesn’t produce the result you want then you never believed in it in the first place.

Democracy, like life, is nuanced, inconsistent, flawed and disappointing. And, just like life, it is a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

Joe Hildebrand co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten. Continue the conversation @Joe_Hildebrand

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Original URL: https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/joe-hildebrand-was-qanda-infiltrated-by-china/news-story/b25be508a4b2797bfb170c07729c7bac