By Karl Quinn
Stan Grant will become the sole host of Q+A from August 1, the ABC has announced.
Grant has been sharing the hosting duties with ABC Radio Melbourne morning presenter Virginia Trioli and Insiders host David Speers since June 2021, when Hamish Macdonald left the role to return to The Project on Network 10.
The show will move back to its former slot at 9.35pm on Monday, following Media Watch.
Stan Grant has been appointed the solo host of ABC’s current affairs talk show Q+A.Credit: ABC
Though the show’s ratings have suffered since its move in February 2021 to Thursdays (which was, in fact, its original night when launched in 2008), the broadcaster insists it is a one-off “special time” only, and that it will remain in the Thursday slot.
The August 1 episode will be broadcast from the Garma Festival in north-east Arnhem Land.
“Garma is a talking place where the nation asks itself hard questions about who we are,” said Grant in a statement issued via the ABC on Monday. “It is an honour to take the helm of Q+A from there.”
The move comes a little over a year after executive producer Erin Vincent told The Age and Sydney Morning Herald that the multiple-host role had been a success.
“The rotation of hosts is working very well, especially given the current lockdowns, so we will be continuing with that,” Vincent said. This was in July 2021, when the country was in the grip of COVID restrictions and the show was limited in its ability to move around the country or to host live studio audiences. “It’s a fresh approach for Q+A and the audience response has been strong.”
At the time Vincent spoke, the most recent episode of the show had drawn 321,000 metro viewers (in the five mainland capitals). The most recent episode, on July 7, drew just 194,000 capital city viewers, and a national total (including regional audiences) of 274,000.
Grant, a Wiradjuri man, is an enormously accomplished journalist, author, filmmaker and presenter, who has won three Walkley awards, a Peabody in the US, and an AACTA Award for the Adam Goodes documentary The Australian Dream, which grew out of an oration he gave in early 2016.
He is an occasionally polarising figure, accused by some on the left of being right-leaning (he has declined offers from both the National Party and the Liberals to stand for parliament, though Labor has reportedly also attempted to woo him) and by some on the right as being too focused on identity politics.
He found himself at the centre of a censorship storm earlier this year when he ejected a young Melbourne man from the Q+A audience over remarks about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Grant’s China Tonight occupies the Monday slot previously held by Q+A, which was then styled Q&A.
The most recent episode of that show, which he will continue to present, was watched by 160,000 metro viewers and 222,000 nationally. This suggests that neither the appointment of Grant as sole host nor a move to Monday nights would necessarily provide the ratings fix Q+A could do with.
Nonetheless, a permanent host might give the show a stronger sense of identity.
“Leading Q+A is a role that suits the breadth of his knowledge and talents,” ABC director of news Justin Stevens said of Grant. “With Stan at the helm we’ll continue to explore ways to further develop Q+A, including how to get audiences even more involved.”
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