It is also, bad for democracy.

 The format is pretty simple – host Tony Jones leads five other people in an hour-long discussion about issues of the day. Questions can come from a live audience or from people who have submitted online.

 The problem for Q&A is how it structures its panels.

 Since it began in 2008 Q&A has aired 94 episodes. Only four those episodes have featured a panel entirely devoid of politicians. A massive 96.75% of episodes have featured one or more politicians (or former pollies) on the panel.

 And tonight kicks off in a similar vein with two prominent former politicians included.

 The messages this sends is pretty clear – all issues need political solutions. An informed citizenry can’t solve problems on its own.

 Too much of our daily lives are framed by expectations that politicians ‘will fix it.’ Too often we look to politicians – and just to politicians – to solve our problems. Q&A reinforces this.

 I wouldn’t suggest politicians don’t appear at all, or even that politicians don’t appear on a significant number of episodes. But once you invite one politician on, you invariably have to invite someone from the other side on to balance things out. And political dialogue is a very particular kind of dialogue that isn’t always suited to illuminating a topic inside the space of an hour.

 So here’s a humble suggestion, Q&A. Instead of only having one episode out of every 25 as a pollie free zone, how about you aim for one in every four. I’m sure people would watch the show if the episodes featuring politician panellists dropped from almost 97% of the total to just 75%.

 It’s important to hear from our political leaders, and that we get to question them about the issues of the day. But Q&A could play a bigger role encouraging broader social discourse if it refrained from taking the easy option when putting together its panels. Let’s hear from more business leaders, more young people, more writers, more internet entrepeneurs about their thoughts on solutions to our problems. It will actually help imp[rove our democratic discourse.

There’s a lot to look forward to on this trip – the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, catching up with buddies at the bar in Calgary, visiting San Franciso and Washington. But I’m most excited by the fact we arrive in New York the night before the presidential election. I love elections (and not just because it’s part of my job to help win them) but there’s such a vibrancy to them. In Brisbane we’ve got a polling booth across the road from us and it’s a great feeling to be able to simply walk out the door and vote.

Come the night of November 4 I’m looking forward to finding the right kind of bar in New York, sitting down and watching the results roll in. It could be interesting if it’s a close result because we’re booked in to have breakfast with a publisher the next morning, and I’m kinda figuring that pulling an all-nighter probably isn’t the done thing. But I’m getting the feeling it won’t be a close thing.

It’s been an interesting campaign. From a political sense it was interesting to watch McCain throw the dice again and again (choosing Palin, halting his campaign to deal with the economic crisis, and raisng the stakes by going super-negative) and lose but I’m just as interested to see the wash-up of the internet and the effect it had on the election.

Lots of people are rushing to say us inter-webbed masses have already won the election for Obama but I’m not sure whether they are confusing cause and effect. I genuinely don’t know. I think the impact is wide but I’m not sure how deep. And I think it could also be a result of Republican ineptitude. Anyway, I’m looking forward to talking about it in the US.

In the meantime, let me leave you with two intersting pieces of information pertinent to the changing face of elections The first is the information people googled during the VP debate. Read some analysis of it here.

The second is the fact You Tube wasn’t even around during the 2004 presidential election, which is a shame because it it was we may have seen more gems like this:

Here’s betting the number of views on YouTube increase tenfold in the next 24 hours.

UPDATE: YouTube received a takedown notice for the video. You can see it here instead.