I gave up on The Drum long ago. The formula doesn’t work: four panellists expected to speak at length on three or four different current affairs topics when they only have anything resembling expertise in one of them, if that. And restrained by the program concept from clashing with one another, which might at least sharpen focus on the issue at hand. Understandably, all the panellists ever do is waffle on, ask rhetorical questions back at the host, and/or call for a conversation to be had – at some other time and in some other place, presumably.
Shove the topic of gender-identity ideology into this formula, along with the ABC’s servile allegiance to ACON/AWEI, and the program you get is very painful to watch and listen to.
That’s what happened on Friday 12 May, the day Victorian MP Moira Deeming was expelled from the parliamentary Liberal party room, basically because she helped organise, attended, and spoke at the Melbourne Let Women Speak rally on 18 March.
Ah, how different – how much better – it would have been if Vera Figner had been hosting the show instead of Dan Bourchier! Here’s what Vera surely would’ve done.
Choice of Panellists
Vera would’ve included at least one panellist who’d attended the Melbourne Let Women Speak rally. It’s supposed to be one of the foundation concepts of The Drum that it’ll ‘talk with a particular group of people, not about them’. Dan Bourchier says that’s his personal credo as well. Yet what viewers got was over 10 minutes of talk about Moira Deeming and ‘others who support her position’ without any member of this group of people anywhere within cooee. I’ve heard The Drum doesn’t have sitting pollies on its panels, so fair enough that Deeming herself wasn’t there, but there are loads of articulate rational women who could’ve taken part – Associate Professor Holly Lawford-Smith, for example, comes easily to mind.
Host’s Introduction
Vera would’ve avoided false and misleading statements. Unlike Dan Bourchier.
FFS, even The Age knows the rally was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis, not attended! And so does the odd presenter and reporter at the ABC itself!
Host’s Moderation
It’s surely the role of the presenter to challenge panelists if they spout nonsense. There were ample opportunities, but Dan Bourchier took none of them. Vera wouldn’t have let them pass.
Like: a girl who wants to be a cat?
A 60-year-old who wants to be a teenager?
A man who wants to be a woman?
After thousands of years of patriarchal oppression, aren’t women a vulnerable and marginalised sector of society? Especially women in prisons, survivors of male violence, young women, and lesbians?
Well, we could go on, but 6 o’clock has struck and Mastermind’s starting over on SBS. Till next time.
Update!
DECEMBER 2023
Largely unmourned and unmissed, The Drum was axed in December 2023. What a relief! One less vehicle for gender-identity ideology, though loads of them are still sprinkled throughout the ABC.