Al Forsyth, a man who has crossed the Kokoda Track nearly 90 times, told me not to worry, to trust the bush telegraph. I was about to begin my first crossing and was a little concerned about being off the grid for a week: no smartphone, tablet, radio or TV. Lots could happen and I’d be out of the loop. Al is a bit of a legend in military circles. He served a long time with the SAS and is a veteran of both Vietnam and East Timor. And when it came to the news that mattered to the PNG locals supporting our trek, Al was spot-on about the bush telegraph. Within hours of the full-time whistle, he was outside my tent gleefully telling me the Blues had been thumped by the Maroons in Origin 2.

It subsequently became clear, however, that not all news was equal along the bush telegraph. Only at lunch on Friday, some 40 hours after the rather dramatic events in Canberra, did we find out from passing Australian trekkers that Australia had a new Prime Minister. I pointed out to Al that this might possibly have come up in his twice-daily calls by satellite phone to his Brisbane office and that it was precisely this sort of thing I meant each time I’d asked him, ‘Is there any news?’ Al squinted and merely flashed a grin. He took Kevin Rudd and Joe Hockey across the track some years ago, but politics doesn’t really stir him the way a Maroons victory does.

I was a little relieved to learn, when back in Port Moresby, that Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb had done an exceptional job hosting hours of live television as the leadership uncertainties were resolved. For 50 years, ABC television’s news focus was on a scheduled 7 p.m. bulletin, and we have had some hair-raising moments covering live events on air. Shortly after I joined the ABC, after witnessing very challenging live coverage of the Rudd/Beazley leadership contest, I asked ABC News to develop ABC News Breakfast. How could we expect to run a much needed 24-hour news channel if we couldn’t cover a leadership spill live? Back in 2010, the ABC broke the story of the challenge to Rudd’s leadership, but didn’t stay with it through the evening on ABC1 and came in for plenty of criticism. Recent changes to how we commission and process news at the ABC are designed to provide a complete and up-to-date service for audiences on television, radio, online and mobile and, three years later, they all worked well covering this other dramatic leadership change story.

The growth of ABC News 24 is very significant. More than 4.5 million viewers tuned in on the week of the spill: the biggest week yet for the channel, not yet three years old. Still, making programming and scheduling decisions around big news events, particularly on ABC1, is never easy. While some of our audience are obsessed with news, many others are happy to wait for a scheduled bulletin. The ABC received a couple of dozen calls thanking Sales and Crabb for their outstanding work — and ten times as many complaining that the scheduled Adam Hills program was not on air.

When talking to Annabel Crabb about joining the ABC some years back, she said she had a crazy idea about a cooking show with politicians. I think my response was, ‘Sure, we can look at that.’ I’d heard worse ideas, but I suspect I would have filed it under ‘unlikely’. But Annabel is tenacious and disarming and now Kitchen Cabinet is charging into its third series, and politicians are lining up to show off their culinary skills and have conversations that can be both intense and revealing, sometimes unwittingly so. The cooking challenge is legitimate. You need to deliver on the plate for Annabel. Watching Malcolm Turnbull tussle with the yabbies from his farm dam was a recent highlight, although I perversely hoped some would emerge from the cage with price tags still attached to their claws.

The leadership uncertainty had hung a cloud across the long-planned Q&A program to Indonesia, but all ended well. In fact, with the Rudd trip to Jakarta and the newspaper headlines about the Indonesian relationship, it couldn’t have been better. This idea first emerged from the Indonesia-Australia Dialogue earlier this year, where one key issue under discussion was how little Australians understand this most important regional neighbour. The Indonesian panelists were erudite, witty and thoroughly engaging, raising the bar for their Australian counterparts. Q&A is a different beast when we take it on the road and I am keen to do more of it, visiting regional centres and having more international forums like the one in Jakarta. Next on our list, if we can pull it off, Q&A live from Shanghai.

The panels on Q&A sometimes generate a bit of heat and debate. My personal bugbear is our inability to get high-profile corporate CEOs and chairmen to join the panel. Gail Kelly appeared once and, as always, was refreshingly direct, a great communicator and contributor. I almost talked a high-profile chairman into it when I ran into him outside Blue Mountains coffee shop, but then his charming wife arrived and immediately exercised her veto. I know spin doctors and media minders warn CEOs of the risk in being drawn on issues beyond the corporate talking points. Plus, it’s a live program, and public questions are unpredictable. But a business leader should be able to answer tough questions without preparation. And if you want to shape public debate, engage a large audience and show some leadership, there are few better places to start than the Q&A panel.