Television Review: The Bolt Report

The Bolt Report is a half-hour Sunday morning television program on Australia's Ten Network. It presents a spectrum of bright, articulate, and passionate Australians talking about political issues which matter to them and us in whole sentences, and with clear and bright voices. It offers a brand new approach to political affairs coverage from a TV network that does news and current affairs very well. It is bold programming from what amounts to a new generation of Australian media proprietors.

There is much to like about this program. It is smart and intensely political, sometimes brilliantly so. Witty, funny at moments and modern, up-to-the-minute current, incisive, and fast paced, so you hardly notice the ad breaks at all. This program positively shines with intellectual passion, glows red-hot with expertise that keeps it on the whole sure footed on the often rocky, thorny, winding paths of Australian political affairs.

A seamless, scintillating episode last Sunday, a broad range of interesting subjects covered in thought provoking ways, fast moving and expertly paced so that one topic melts almost unnoticed to another. They do television very well at the Ten Network, very high production values. The Bolt Report is something new and very interesting from the network.

Interesting because its host, long time News Limited columnist Andrew Bolt, is a sparkling, often passionate writer whose newspaper columns I try to catch at least on Saturdays. Chuckling still over a recent word-picture of steely-eyed communist cadres from Victoria Police marching rank by rank in Melbourne's annual gay-pride parade, and am moved even now by one think piece about a rich and influential media personality, which speculated her rise to fame had little to do with either wealth or power. People have all sorts of reasons for doing stuff, and money and power are sometimes the least of them. Thank you for saying that, I thought.

New because The Bolt Report is a political affairs program with attitude. The program deals with political issues of the day from what I comprehend as a conservative perspective, and has an editorial policy, one that values small government, individual freedom, democracy - and institutions, for example Australia's Constitutional Monarchy, which sustain those ideals. Tax, government waste, school halls, home insulation disasters, industrial relations, tax, aboriginal affairs, social security, multiculturalism, tax, refugees, trade unions and of course tax, the Green Party, a minority Labour Government and the independent members of the Australian Parliament which keeps it in power are all issues I can recall that are regularly spotlighted. Did I mention it covers tax? And the program offers so much more than political television has before.

Nightly commercial television current affairs programs tend to steer clear of political controversy, investigating instead difficult issues like "Does My Bum Look Big In This?" Politics is known to divide the most amiable of families. Maybe the biggest political issue for the average Australian is deciding how much distance apart will be enough, at the table, to keep favourite but belligerently political uncles or aunts from coming to blows at a family do. For sorting out the easier stuff about the economy and international relations and the UN and all that we have parliaments, and politicians, the press, and now The Bolt Report.

The Bolt Report presents numerous, articulate politicians, policy wonks, commentators and sometimes ordinary Australians in thoughtful and thought provoking discussion. Production is creative and seamless; the program has pace to die for. It offers an analytical approach to issues of the day that pushes the program way beyond the usual, superficial, coverage of politics you see on the older, sleepier television programs that have dominated Australian networks for a decade or more.

The Bolt Report is by no means a Sunday morning meander around political issues of the day featuring Mr Left and Ms Right and a charming but authoritative mediator to prevent overmuch disagreement. Instead there is calm, analytical dissection and forensic examination of topics from sometimes astonishingly diverse points of view. Those are contextualized often simply but beautifully by the host and one or more guests.

It is difficult to pick one favourite moment from so many bright spots, but my personal best of those exchanges so far is a conversation with Richard Walley about Aboriginal affairs and a controversy over the Welcome To Country Ceremony which precedes many State and Federal Government events. It is good journalism's gift to simply and surely bring context to a subject with some salient facts, the who what when where and why of everyday reportage. This particular presentation of a painful issue sharply focused that particular discussion for me. So much so that later, when I was stuck next to a large and very loud TV, on which the Chief Judge of the NSW Supreme Court was delivering a farewell address, I knew what the hell His Honour was on about when he mentioned Charles Perkins, Freedom Rides, and why his Court did the Welcome To Country Ceremony. Thank you for that, Bolt Report.

This program responds to difficult topics by rolling up its sleeves. Following a speech by Federal Liberal Leader Tony Abbott that outlined how and why he changed his views on Australian multiculturalism there was an engaging, illuminating debate on that Sunday's Bolt Report. The program has taken an editorial position on the topic, that was put, and panelists and hosts engaged with each other's ideas with a sense of working through. Thank you for that, Bolt Report.

I tend to get political news in fragments, from a TV in a shop, an overloud cab radio, newspaper headlines and sometimes the television news. I prefer opera music to the soap opera of morning talk radio, and by the evening am too worn out, beyond glancing at a news bulletin, to have any interest at all in the nightly TV talk shows. Our house is busy six days a week, but Sunday morning there is a bit of relaxed time, and space, to catch up on a week's worth of politics on TV. The Bolt Report on the Ten Network is perfectly pitched and timed for that.

This past Sunday's Bolt Report even covered a topic of interest to artists; cultural copyright, or who owns a Wondjina? Moving outside its studio set pieces into broader Australian life with TV engineering magic presents amongst the best moments in this program. I hooted at coverage, taken from a radio program, of the National Broadband Network's mainland Australia switch-on, and loved the satellite cross to English social commentator and Twitterati David (Lord) Monckton.

The program covers the great climate change dispute at length and Monckton's views were very well put, in whole sentences, in a clear and bright voice. Doesn't get much better than that.

We have had contentious debates in Australia before, the ferocious dispute over gun control is a stand-out memory. The spectacle of an Australian Prime Minister - and I'm not disputing what I presume were the sound operational reasons for it - wearing a flak-jacket under his suit coat haunts me still; a symbol of distrust between politicians, the press, and the Australian people that characterized Australian public life for quite some time. We so desperately need the politicians and press to if not trust each other then act professionally together. The Bolt Report shows signs of raising the bar on the standard of political comment in Australia, providing on the whole an opportunity to put viewpoints without spin, a really hopeful approach.

As I begin to write this Liberal stalwart Joe Hockey is getting flayed on live TV by the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery over the Coalition's Direct Action policy on renewable energy, and has just walked away from an impromptu press conference in a huff. Conservative Australia has long held that it doesn't get a fair go from the Australian Press.

Australians have love-hate relations with their media. Seventy percent of Australians support Wikileaks, according to the Lowy Institute, and perhaps as well the romantic vision of crusading journalists telling the truth at all costs that is the stuff of movie thrillers. But it is a country where free speech is not guaranteed, and the press (and creatives of all kinds) are sometimes flat-footed by sudden sea changes of public taste or political preoccupation. From time to time Governments of the day force restructures on media publishers, using their special powers to regulate broadcasters in ways that affect non-broadcast media too. We just barely made it through a decade or more of Governments distrusting their own free press to the extent of employing advertising agencies and television commercials in ultimately fruitless attempts to explain themselves. Trusting instead whizzed-up advertising account executives to explain what's going on doesn't seem like the right thing to do.

Most if not every political context results from hours if not lifetimes of careful consideration and relentless debate far from the public eye. Political discussions develop shorthands, visions, pathways, connections, semantics and terms in often bewildering and short-lived succession, and these increasingly precise but still developing ideas do not translate easily to a few column inches or TV half-hour. An almost casual observer can only hope to glean after any fuller harvest enjoyed by those participating fully in political debate.

A segment in one episode called Spin Of The Week carried a brief but inexplicable characterization of community radio broadcasters as "global warming alarmists". What has my beloved 3MBS got to do with this climate change thing? Audiences may well be deserting commercial radio for Melbourne's Fine Music FM broadcasts, I can see why mainstream would fret. What can be labelled can be hated, but doesn't hating something only make it stronger? A favourite uncle played for the South Melbourne Football Club in the VFL Grand Final Bloodbath of 1945. Burly, he had a fearsomely scary on-field nickname but never decked anyone smaller than himself behind the play, and was known to all as Gentleman for that, a quintessential fair minded Aussie.

It is understood that programs like The Bolt Report will need to keep faith with its constituency and sometimes speak directly to it. So I don't mind that I don't get - although they sounded, for a while, a little going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket dispirited - some of the more focussed program editorial segments like Spin Of The Week. What I do get are obvious differences between news, opinion, and editorial content. Those are elements of reportage usually kept separate for prosaic but on the whole excellent reasons.

I made reference in a previous post to an interview with Mr Abbott, and took some lumps from fans of the program when I commented that there were no questions put about the Coalition's climate change policies. I want to gently renew that complaint here in a more focussed way because I see the program stumble a little, occasionally, between editorial, opinion, and reportage. The interview provides a loophole between news, comment and editorial; it can be a little of each, and I appreciate that keen practitioners push their practice, I do that myself in other contexts, and I mean no disrespect at all, but I look at Mr Hockey's broad but retreating frame, storming in anger from the Canberra press corps, and wonder whether sometimes pushing boundaries, and editorial agendas, goes too far. Putting editorial in politician's mouths seems unfair, overeager, to me.

There is a photo of National Party Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce at a street demonstration in last Saturday's Australian newspaper, one of those photos with that placard behind him, the one with the PM on a broomstick. The photographer worked hard to get the picture - not for nothing are they called money shots. It refers to and perhaps comments upon the original photograph, where a demonstrator snuck up behind Mr Abbott unseen and planted, unnoticed, that unfortunate image behind his back. In Saturday's incarnation Mr Joyce speaks passionately into one edge of the frame, at the extreme other edge is a by now professionally rendered version of the original sign on a placard that must be ten or more meters away. Framing politicians in editorial content seems unfair, overeager, to me.

Last Sunday's Bolt Report was I think the best of the best so far. Sure footed politics with gusto: certain, bold, adventurous, thoughtful, pacey, lively, and engagingly human. The passionate and articulate Barnaby Joyce positively shone, and the host had the confidence and smarts to let him.

This is difficult work, and the program and its host and guests roll up their collective sleeves and get down to it, on the whole. Politics is likened to a bear pit, but often it sounds like an orchestra, nervously riffing on tune-ups waiting for a conductor to walk in the pit, tap gently for quiet, and begin to make fine harmony from it all. Australian conservatives are a restless orchestra, and Andrew Bolt a passionate conductor.

Or put another way. Sometimes in public affairs the voices are so shrill and the amplification so cranked up that it all sounds like hideous squealing electronic feedback. Until a Jimi Hendrix steps up to make passionate and intense rock and roll.

Conservative Australia has long complained it has no voice. Cometh the hour, cometh the TV program. I try not to miss The Bolt Report on Australian Network Ten, Sunday mornings at ten.

The Bolt Report screens at 10 AM and 4:30 PM each Sunday. I watched episodes one to four, and six, seven and eight on Melbourne Channel 10 free-to-air television.