The Verdict: Karl Stefanovic speaks with voice of the people

Karl Stefanovic for Channel 9's The Verdict. Picture: Channel 9

How many people with a marked interest in politics, how many members of the governing classes and the chattering classes, those who wield power and those who aspire to influence, have caught up with Channel 9’s new political panel show, The Verdict?

Well, they cannot afford not to. This Karl Stefanovic-compered show creates the strongest impression that it’s taking you to the very depth of the belly of the Australian political beast.

And that’s not simply because Mark Latham is there, truculent as ever, as the Beast in Chief.

It helps, of course. On Thursday night, Latham asked Julian Burnside QC, eminent refugee advocate, “What kind of animal are you?” during a discussion of boatpeople.

Burnside, who has had a lifetime of dealing with thugs and judges, was not discountenanced. No doubt it helps to have appeared for the wharfies and Alan Bond and Rose Porteous.

Latham’s point (so delicately insinuated) was that thousands of boatpeople had died under what he vigorously made clear were the failed politics of the Rudd and Gillard governments. Women and mothers and children, he kept saying with mounting indignation.

Burnside said at least 10 per cent of people driven to seek refuge around the world died. He took his familiar line that 25,000 people (the peak of the boatpeople) was relatively small and that we could easily afford it. So why not process people within a month and — for instance — get them to live in country towns while their claims were assessed?

Then the discussion turned to Anne Henderson, who has worked with asylum-seekers. She disputed the legal status of these people with Burnside: you soon knew which side of the law you were on if you overstayed your visa.

The Verdict is riveting television of a visceral tabloid kind. The week before last, in the season premiere, we had Latham saying there were too many Muslims in western Sydney, to a live audience that looked like the face of just such folk. He said there were too many people on disability pensions and that doctors were overprescribing drugs for depression and misdiagnosing anyway. It wasn’t depression, it was anxiety, and that was just being a bit ­worried.

Later in the program, Campbell Brown, a former AFL footballer who has been a bit of a worry himself on occasions, said if doctors prescribing medication stopped people topping themselves, then that had to be a good thing.

The Verdict is divided up into segments in which the panellists — and movable guest — furiously rage together, then move on.

On Thursday, there was a discussion about whether social media was a bad thing.

Anne Aly, a regular and an expert on radicalisation and coping with the aftermath, said that if Coca-Cola had the low success rate that Islamic State had from internet propaganda, it would be tearing out its hair.

Last week, in his winning way, Latham suggested that Aly hardly had much depth of experience because she worked in Perth: she said she worked in Sydney, too.

The other night we got an interview with Miranda Tapsell, the indigenous star of The Sapphires, talking about the moment at high school when a boy told her she was a half-caste and how she was subsequently called a gin-bag and a pile of other abusive things when she spoke out against this. She admitted to Stefanovic that on Australia Day she couldn’t identify with being Australian.

So were Australians racist?

Burnside, getting into the vernacular spirit of things, said there were always going to be dickheads. Aly said that anyone indigenous or “brown” — she came from Egypt at the age of two — had been subjected to some form of abuse.

Latham, at his most considered and quiet, said the track record was of tolerance.

Burnside said we were not racist but we were xenophobic and that this could easily be played on. He took exception to a clip of a speech from British Prime Minister David Cameron saying there had been too much passive tolerance of nasty cultural practices, such as genital mutilation and ­arranged marriages.

The whole thing is engrossing television and it has the look of a brilliant winner because it is wild. There is an aspect of The Verdict that makes Fox News — a network it’s hard not to admire for the mastery with which it projects its message — look tame.

But The Verdict is not propaganda, though it can provide the loudest megaphone for populist opinion.

There was a spirited discussion on Thursday about whether the mayor of Geelong — the guy with the weird hair who looks a bit like Elton John if you put him in a tumble dryer — should have had the image of a topless Madonna on his T-shirt.

Latham saw fit to tell us that Madonna was more successful than anyone on the panel. Aly said quietly enough that she thought Madonna on this occasion had contributed to the objectification of women.

No one seemed to want the madcap mayor to lose his job, though Brown asked what if he had Charlie Sheen on his T-shirt and Burnside had to confess he didn’t know who that was.

In the end only Sandy Rea, one of the regulars and a psychologist of liberal opinion, was willing to say Australians were racist: she thought it was the secret stain, the thing we couldn’t admit to.

The Verdict is rather dazzling in the way it exhibits the inadmis­sable. Brown is a tremendous found object because he is an ordinary bloke who is disinhibited. Latham’s shockingness and jockishness seem things of wonder and Stefanovic radiates an easy, if sometimes bewildered, calm that makes Tony Jones look fidgety and full of himself.

In the week that the staff of a leading Melbourne hospital condemned the detention centres, The Verdict contributed an important discussion. Besides, it is the antithesis of Q&A and Sky News and all that impressive palaver. It has danger, it speaks, God help us, in the voice of the people.

If that has a high-bunkum element, we had better learn to listen to it.