Q&A: sensible debate the real victim in Duncan Storrar furore

I didn’t watch Q&A last Monday, meaning I didn’t see the now-famous clip with Duncan Storrar until Tuesday.

Like everyone, I was moved by the statement he made, about how he didn’t have enough money to take his kids to the pictures.

I actually wrote a piece about it for The Australian cursing the conservatives on the panel for being so heartless in their responses to him.

Later that day, I talked about Duncan on the public broadcaster’s current affairs program The Drum, where I said much the same thing. I was thrilled when I saw that somebody had set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for Duncan’s family.

He seemed like a decent bloke, and like everyone, I can’t bear the idea that some families don’t have enough money to buy their kids a box of popcorn.

The first thing I saw on the page was a comment from a young lady warning people not to give Duncan any money because, to her mind, he didn’t deserve it. She’d known him since she was seven years old, she said, and he wasn’t the person he was pretending to be.

I responded, asking her what she meant by that. She replied, saying that she was a friend of Duncan’s 20-year-old son — his name is Aztec Major — and he wanted to tell his side of the story.

“He’s worried that people are giving away their hard-earned money,” she said. He’d asked her to pass on his number to any reporters who called.

What is a reporter to do in that situation?

A number of people — mainly on Twitter — seem to be suggesting that I should have said: “Well, sorry, but we can’t talk to him. That doesn’t fit the narrative.”

But he wanted to talk to somebody, so I called him. We had a good chat on the phone. Aztec has had a rough childhood — his parents split up, his mum died when he was nine, and he was raised by his grandparents — but he’s an impressive young man, who is almost through his spray-painting apprenticeship, and well on the way to a solid future.

He told me that his dad had been in prison. He used to go there to visit him. He said his mum was frightened of Duncan. He had a long criminal record, including assault, and making threats to kill. His mum raised him almost single-handedly before she died of breast cancer, and he thought, well, if people wanted to give money, maybe they could give it to the Cancer Council.

Now the paper had a problem. Should we keep that to ourselves? Because people were giving money — tens of thousands of dollars — and they were doing so, in part, because Duncan had been promoted in an ABC producer’s tweet as a “new national hero.”

We sought a response from Duncan, independently verified key facts and published.

The avalanche of hatred that has flowed our way suggests to me that plenty of people think I should have kept it all to myself. That I should have told Aztec: “Sorry, but I can’t report what you’re saying because it will make people furious.”

It suits people who hate the paper I work for to imagine that we went rustling around in people’s garbage bins, or knocking on doors, to try to crucify Duncan because he’s a threat to the capitalist system or something.

That’s not what happened. We published Aztec’s story and next thing we knew, Duncan had gone into hiding, and our staff were being threatened with violence.

We live in a mad world. Mad, as in furiously angry. The Left is angry with the Right; the Right is angry with the Left, which makes sensible debate about how we might improve each other’s lives pretty much impossible.

That’s not mad. That’s just really sad.