Even by Q&A’s increasingly low standards, this was shocking. Not content with giving
airtime to climate change deniers, far-right politicians and trolls such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Tony
Jones’s Q&A decided that, with Hong Kong burning and more than a million Uyghur Muslims
languishing in state-run torture camps, now was a good time to host a China apologist on the show's panel.

I am the University of Queensland student who helped to organise pro-Hong Kong protests on campus and who, for my trouble, was assaulted by pro-China students and received death threats. On Monday night, I appeared on Q&A, asking questions of its panel via Skype.

Some have suggested the ABC’s decision to host people’s panellist Li Shee Su was simply
a failure to do due diligence. I think it was not so benign. The ABC has a history of seeking to manufacture vapid conflict on its premier current affairs discussion program to obtain higher ratings.

This, after all, is the same show that bizarrely put distinguished physicist professor Brian Cox up against climate-change sceptic Senator Malcolm Roberts. Such occasions make great television, in the same way a boxing match between a silverback gorilla and dozens of kangaroos might be entertaining. (Tony Jones should really look into this!) But they insult the Australian public’s intelligence.