It’s official: Q+A won’t be putting all of its chips on a single host again.
The largely-unsuccessful 18-month experiment with Hamish Macdonald as the successor to Tony Jones has moved the show to focus on not one, but three hosts going forward.
Diary can reveal the word out of the Q+A bunker is David Speers and Virginia Trioli in Melbourne, and Sydney-based Stan Grant will be initially trialled as the show’s hosts until the end of the year.
If the three hosts prove successful separately and in combination, it’s considered more than likely they’ll be rolled out as Q+A’s permanent hosts.
We’re told Q+A types see all three hosts as a good bet, given they have all recorded significantly higher ratings than Macdonald, after he mysteriously disappeared from the role and bolted off to Ten’s The Project, as revealed by your columnist last week.
Grant, Speers and Trioli all achieved a jump in the ratings for Q+A compared with Macdonald, who was the host in April when the show plummeted to its lowest-ever ratings of 224,000 viewers across five capital cities.
Having three hosts based in two cities also provides more flexibility for Q+A, which is seen as a significant positive for the show in the time of Covid-19.
Both Jones and Macdonald were Sydney-based, but with the Harbour City in the midst of an increasingly gruelling lockdown likely to last more months, that would not allow the show many options if it wants to find the sort of live studio audiences that the show made its name on.
Splitting the Q+A job will also allow the busy threesome to carry on with their main jobs. Speers, of course, is the host of Insiders and works across the ABC’s TV and digital platforms, while Trioli has a five-day a week gig as host of mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.
Grant, meanwhile, has multiple TV roles, from his role as the ABC’s international affairs analyst, to hosting the ABC’s China Tonight and One Plus One, and reporting for Four Corners.
But the new arrangement will not require them to ditch these projects, allowing each to host Q+A only once every three weeks or so.
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Jones defends Hamish: “It’s a hard gig.”
Tony Jones may have lasted more than a decade longer in the host’s chair at Q+A than his successor, Hamish Macdonald, and put Macdonald’s ratings in the shade. But Jones was admirably in no mood to talk himself up at Macdonald’s expense when Diary caught him in his current home of Washington DC late last week.
Jones has hinted hosting the ABC’s flagship live panel show in these coronavirus-cursed times would have been difficult even with his own lengthy experience of fronting Q+A for 12 years.
“It would be gratuitous for me to talk about the departure of someone who has had to host Q+A through a pandemic,” Jones told Diary. “It must be a very hard gig when there’s often been no live audience.”
When Jones left Q+A at the end of 2019, he lined up a deal to host a number of Q+A regional specials from Asian countries. But as Jones confides to Diary: “With the situation with the pandemic in the region, that’s just not going to happen. You couldn’t put together a live audience there anymore.”
But happily for fans of Jones and his wife, the ABC’s US special reporter Sarah Ferguson, the power couple will soon be back on air on another Aunty flagship show: “Sarah and I are working pretty intensely on a project for Four Corners, and it’s in its genesis at the moment.”
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How ‘soon’ will Leigh Sales be back?
Earlier this month, this column asked the question on many lips at the ABC — “Where the hell is Hamish?” — after Q+A host Hamish Macdonald had appeared on only one episode of the ABC panel show in six weeks.
The eventual answer came last week through the announcement that Macdonald was departing the ABC after 18 months, and your diarist’s subsequent revelation that he was heading back to Ten’s The Project.
Now those at the ABC are now asking about Leigh Sales, who has been absent from her 7.30 hosting gig since June 24.
On Thursday at 4.09pm, Diary made a low-key inquiry about Sales’s time off air.
Four hours later, our question was answered on national television by 7.30’s stand-in host, Laura Tingle – who wrapped up the show at 7.59pm with 12 words: “Leigh is still on leave and will be back on deck soon.”
But what does “soon” actually mean? It’s open to interpretation. While it’s defined as “quickly” in the Cambridge Dictionary, and “in a short time from now” in the Oxford, it starts to sound longer in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, which defines it as “without undue time lapse”. In the Collins Dictionary it’s a vague “before long”.
For what it’s worth, Diary hears Sales is likely to be “back on deck” by early-to-mid-August — or two to three weeks from now.
We’ll know “soon” enough.
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Palaszczuk: ‘Give me a hand, John!’
Finally, the full story behind the viral moment that IOC vice-president John Coates dressed down Annastacia Palaszczuk in front of the world’s media in Tokyo last week can be revealed.
When Diary reached him in Tokyo ahead of Friday’s Olympic opening ceremony, Coates was keen to set the record straight once and for all about the controversial incident. He has now claimed his alleged public “mansplaining” to Palaszczuk to force her to attend the ceremony was actually instigated by the Queensland Premier herself.
Palaszczuk, he said, made it clear to him she wanted to beat off growing public pressure for her not to attend the ceremony.
“She said to me: ‘Give me a hand, John, will you?’,” Coates told us.
“So I did. She’s my very good friend. I might have done it too crudely. But I thought if I did it crudely, I would be taking the hit for her.”
What resulted was his headline-making telling off when he told her: “You are going to the opening ceremony!” and added: “I’m still the deputy chair of the candidature leadership group and … none of you are staying behind and hiding in your rooms, all right?”
The starting point for what now appears to be a staged outburst came the Thursday before last, amid the well-publicised controversy over the Queensland Premier’s trip to Tokyo. In an attempt to pacify the Queensland media about the fact she was going to Tokyo at all, she told them: “I am not attending any events whatsoever.”
But last Tuesday, things seemed to be shifting. An online report in Brisbane’s Courier Mail on Tuesday said Palaszczuk was “set to attend” the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony.
However, we’re told that story earned a private rebuke for the Courier Mail from the Premier’s office, with the paper forced to quickly correct the story because of a renewed insistence she definitely wouldn’t attend the ceremony.
On Coates’ version of events: Palaszczuk then made her “give me a hand” plea to him sometime between then and the Wednesday press conference.
“She needed help because she was being bashed up on the ceremony,” Coates has told Diary. “So I helped her.”
Palaszczuk sent Coates an apologetic text the day after the dramas of Wednesday. The Queensland Premier’s text read in part: “I’m sorry there was negative media on this. They always look for a problem when there is none.”
And so to the question being asked all over Twitter and on shows such as The Project last week: is Coates a “misogynist”?
“I am not anti-women,” he told Diary.
“For a start, I led the way for gender equality and gender diversity for these Games.”
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Tele’s Gladys coffee snaps spark tension
Rising tensions in recent weeks between Gladys Berejiklian’s office and The Daily Telegraph have been highlighted by the masthead’s decision to run “pap shots” last Monday of the NSW Premier having a coffee on the run with her recently-revealed partner, barrister Arthur Moses SC.
Diary hears Sydney’s most feared masthead and the office of the Premier have clashed in the wake of the publication of the photos, as the paper has progressively applied the blowtorch to the Harbour City’s lockdown.
A defiant Telegraph editor Ben English maintains the publication of the photos of Gladys’s morning coffee run – which showed the NSW Premier and Moses standing maskless outside a cafe in Willoughby on Sydney’s north shore – have “highlighted a serious issue” with the current health settings in NSW.
The shots were taken during the Premier’s coffee runs on both days of the weekend before last, with English claiming she should have worn a mask when standing less than 8m from the cafe entrance.
On the first day, the Telegraph used a photographer from paparazzi agency Matrix, who snapped Berejiklian — who was seemingly unaware of his presence — maskless outside the cafe. But on the second day, the NSW Premier started off maskless, but immediately masked-up upon seeing the Telegraph’s photographer.
English claims her belated masking-up on the second day highlighted a problem with interpreting NSW rules. “If it was kosher not to have the mask on, why did she put it on when she noticed someone was taking a photo?,” English says. “I thought that was curious, and seemed to highlight a serious issue about whether it is perhaps the design of the health orders that is undermining the government’s response.”
Diary hears the Premier’s office remains unimpressed with this justification for the story. But English is adamant there was a clear public interest in its publication, given Berejiklian’s coffee run came hours after she issued a new order requiring people in Sydney to wear masks when “near” a cafe.
“It’s clear the rules aren’t easy to understand, concise or enforceable,” English said. “It seems even the Premier is confused.”
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Queensland government MIA for Covid updates
You may recall last week your columnist conducted his own research that definitively showed Annastacia Palaszczuk spends less time answering questions from reporters than any other Australian state or federal leaders.
Now more evidence of question dodging. On Wednesday, the day of the announcement from Tokyo of the 2032 Olympics win, there was no Queensland government press conference on the grimmer but more pressing subject of the coronavirus.
Yes, it seems Covid-19 was given a day off in Queensland, despite the confirmation 24 hours earlier that a Melbourne woman with the Delta strain of Covid-19 had flown to the Sunshine Coast and then headed up to Cairns.
We’re told the absence of any briefing raised eyebrows across the Brisbane press gallery, from the ABC to the Courier Mail to AAP.
To fill the void, a resourceful Queensland Opposition Leader David Crisafulli decided to call a snap news conference, attended by all major media, where he morphed into a kind of amalgam of Palaszczuk and Queensland chief health officer Jeannette Young, to deliver the Covid-19 news of the day. A scary thought! Adopting his best Palaszczuk impersonation, Crisafulli delivered one of the Premier’s signature lines: “That’s good news Queenslanders: no new Covid cases!”
Where did he get his information from? Diary hears it was from the Premier’s own Twitter feed, which apparently contained an updated Queensland Health graphic with the new numbers.
But on Saturday, the government went missing once more.
With Palaszczuk in Tokyo, Young on a day off, and no sign of deputy premier Steven Miles, unheralded Gold Coast MP and junior minister Meaghan Scanlon was the only government representative to stick her head up on anything approaching the coronavirus.
That left Queensland media yet again searching on where else but Palaszczuk’s Twitter feed for any Covid-19 developments.
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‘The Frewen Transfer’: General’s viral hit show
As the federal government urgently works to transfer the media heat over Australia’s troubled vaccine rollout, Scott Morrison is marshalling the media big guns. And that means creating a new daily media frontman to get its vaccine message out.
Few viewers could by now have missed the Victorian and NSW premiers’ daily shows, Dan TV and Gladys TV, as the two jostle for daytime TV ratings prominence with their daily press conferences.
But now there’s about to be a new show in town. Federal vaccine task force chief Lieutenant-General John Frewen is about to start a new daily show to shout the “vaccinate” message from the rooftops.
Let’s call it “The Frewen Transfer”. Frewen, one of Australia’s most esteemed military figures, is seen by the feds as a safe pair of hands to spearhead to get vaccines, any vaccines – most importantly, the AstraZeneca jab – into arms to stop the spread in western Sydney.
The giveaway that Frewen is about to become a much bigger presence in our daily lives has come from the hiring of Nigel Blunden, who is perhaps best known as a former media headkicker for ex-NSW premier Mike Baird and a former Channel 9 political reporter.
Blunden, of course, was working for Baird as his head of strategy when the former premier made his fateful attempt to ban greyhound racing in NSW. We all know how well that went.
But now Blunden has a second chance back in the political sphere to massage yet another difficult message – this time to convince sceptical Sydneysiders, and Australians more generally — that after a rocky start, AstraZeneca may be the way to go after all.
For all our sakes, let’s hope Blunden succeeds with his “vaccinate” message – and that The Frewen Transfer becomes a “viral” ratings hit.
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Rinehart spends up big on TV ads
Gina Rinehart is spending big on advertising during the Olympic Games. No, she’s not joining fellow mining billionaire Clive Palmer in running political ads.
Instead, she’s promoting the financial commitment of her company Hancock Prospecting to Australian Olympic sport, mainly through swimming but also her sponsorships of rowing, volleyball and synchronised swimming.
For every night of the Games other than the Opening and Closing ceremonies, Rinehart is running inspirational 90-second ads in prime time at the cost of millions of dollars. She is also running the same ads on Sky News.
Among the Australian celebrities that feature in the ads are Dawn Fraser and Instagram celebrity-turned-swimmer (and ex-boyfriend of Miley Cyrus), Cody Simpson.
We’re told that privately, Rinehart’s philanthropy is doing big things for the finances of Australian swimmers.
Diary is told apart from her multimillion-dollar sponsorship of the actual sport, Rinehart is without any fanfare paying a wage to every single member of the Australian swimming team for the Olympics, and even to many who didn’t make the team.
A source close to the mining billionaire told Diary on Monday afternoon that she wants other philanthropists to follow suit in supporting Olympic sport: “Mrs Rinehart has been vocal publicly calling for more private investment, beyond her own, into Olympic sports and their athletes which would do more to support them and their medal hopes.”
The source added: “The reason why Mrs Rinehart supports these great Australians is simple, they are fantastic role models and excellent ambassadors for our country.
“Their hard work, resilience and unwavering commitment to be the very best at what they do, is admirable and aligned to values that underpin her business success.”
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Sky and AFR postpone birthday bashes
Sydney’s seemingly never-ending lockdown has claimed what was to have been a busy week of glittering anniversary parties for media companies next month – the 25th anniversary of Sky News and the 70th anniversary of Nine’s Australian Financial Review.
Sky’s 25th anniversary was to have been celebrated in a gala function at Peter Gilmore’s Bennelong restaurant at the Sydney Opera House on August 17, in a function that was to have been attended by PM Scott Morrison, Labor leader Anthony Albanese, and other senior political figures including Tanya Plibersek.
The guest list also included some of Sky’s biggest past and present names, including Alan Jones, Peta Credlin, Paul Murray and David Speers.
But on Friday, Sky sent out a note to invited guests informing them that the party was being “postponed” to later in the year.
It was a similar tale for the AFR’s 70th at Sydney’s Hilton Hotel, which was to have featured the attendance and a keynote speech by Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.
But Diary hears that CEOs who were due to attend have been told that the function has been postponed until further notice.
Both would have been a badly needed boost to Sydney’s flagging hospitality industry, so it’s no surprise the cries for JobKeeper Mk II are getting louder.
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