The Minefield

Epizode

• Last Words: The ‘Farewell Sermon’ of the Prophet Muhammad 04.06.2026 54min

  It could be said that human beings reveal who they most truly are as they approach the end. For the end of one’s life is not simply its terminus ad quem; it is also its telos, its goal or meaning. A life that has been lived in the thrall of egotism, whose fundamental pursuit has been the safeguarding and satisfaction of the self, will almost certainly, at the end, turn inward upon itself and find itself grasping, desperately, at something like immortality — as the indefinite prolonging of the self. It would not be surprising for such a life to be shrunken, fearful, petty, suspicious, diminished at the end, rather than open-handed, open-hearted, at peace. Consider the example of Shakespeare’s King Lear, who craves flattery and reassuring falsehoods, who obsesses over small offenses and slights to his ego, who remains unconcerned with truthfulness and unnourished by the love of his youngest daughter. On the other hand, a life that is lived meaningfully — which is to say, a life that serves a purpose beyond itself — is able to approach the end without fear, not only because a certain humility has become a habit of life, but because the prospect of the end brings what is most important into sharper focus. This is perhaps what Socrates had in mind when he said that “the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death” (Phaedo, 64a). Here we could think of Martin Luther King, Jr’s final sermon at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on 3 April 1968, during which he reflects on threats made to his life. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life”, he admits. “Longevity has its place.” Then he immediately says, “But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’ will … And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.” Or consider the philosopher Stanley Cavell, writing tenderly in his memoir that, “anticipating the ending of my life, I am becoming freer than ever of the desire to persuade”. Or Toni Morrison, after surveying modern literature’s fascination with evil (“Evil has vivid speech; Goodness bites its tongue”), affirms “these last forty years, I have become more and more invested in making sure acts of goodness (however casual or deliberate or misapplied or … blessed) produce language”. Only lives spent renouncing egotism, and pursuing what matters most, could speak such words. So occasionally over the coming months, we’re going to spend some time in the presence of those who are approaching the end, listening to what they have to say. It may not be the end of their lives, but their lives will, in each instance, be approaching a pivotal moment for which their habits of life, their daily devotion to a cause bigger than themselves, will have prepared them. Perhaps the most historically consequential of these moments has just been observed by millions of Muslims around the world. In February 632 CE, twenty-three years after receiving his first revelation in a cave near Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad would lead tens of thousands of his followers back to the city of his birth with the intent of guiding them through the full ritual of the hajj. It was to be his final pilgrimage. Over the course of several days, Muhammad led them in the seven processions around the Ka‘aba — the simple square structure believed to have been constructed by Adam, and then rebuilt by Ibrahim/Abraham, the first monotheist, and finally by Muhammad himself — followed by the journey back-and-forth seven times between the nearby hills of Safa and Marwa, thus re-enacting the frantic search of Hagar, wife of Ibrahim, for water for their dying child Ismail. The Prophet then led them to the plain next to the rocky hill of Arafat and addressed those gathered. His message has all the marks of finality about it. Here is part of what the Prophet said (the translation comes from Yahiya Emerick): “O People, listen to my words, because I don’t know if I will ever be with
• The Problem of Nationalism, with David Moscrop — Live at the Sydney Writers’ Festival 28.05.2026 54min

  It’s common these days to refer to “the return of nationalism”. But that assumes that nationalism receded for a time, like the tide, and here the world is, now, getting its pants legs wet. Such an assumption misunderstands the peculiar character of nationalism. It would be better to think of it as a swell, as a political phenomenon that periodically gathers power and force, that crests and crashes, but that never entirely goes away. It’s always there, beneath us. Nationalism belongs to the emotional valence of the collective life of a nation state. Using the analogy of Aristotle’s taxonomy of the moral emotions — with, say, cowardice on one end of a continuum, foolhardiness on the other, and courage sitting in between — we could even think of nationalism as an extreme expression of the bundle of political emotions that ordinarily manifest as civic pride or patriotism, among them: love and fear, loyalty and hatred, attachment and jealousy. But with nationalism, it is as though the emotional balance is out of whack.  Ever since the origin of the term at the end of the eighteenth century and its subsequent emergence in the nineteenth, nationalism has typically been associated with three components: Membership — the recognition of an “imagined community” constituted through shared language, ethnicity, religion, geography and so on; Self-determination — the demand for sovereignty over a defined territory; “Civil religion” — the existence of self-reinforcing symbols, practices, rituals, stories which serve to reify “the nation”, turning the abstract idea of national membership into a lived experience. While there is undeniable overlap with patriotism, nationalism adds the additional element of bellicosity. Not just national pride but superiority. Not just love of one’s own place and people (patria), but a corresponding antipathy toward other nations — including “others” within one’s own borders. Nationalism thus tends to be a Janus-faced phenomenon, with its heedless pursuit of territorial and tributary interests without and its requirement of the dominance of an ethnic and religious majority within. We could think of nationalism as the political equivalent of what happens when proper “self love” (amor sui) turns inward on itself (incurvatus in se) and devolves into egotism. Ever since the Second World War, nationalism has been indelibly associated with territorial ambition, categorical violence, a pseudo-religious zeal, utter partisan loyalty. As George Orwell puts it, “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.” And yet over the last decade, a form of brazen nationalism has been willing to speak its name, to own its ambitions and cast off the veneer of polite cosmopolitanism. It has both fed off and fuelled intense popular emotions — fear, resentment, disgust, patriotic love — and seems willing to regard one’s nation as “beyond good and evil”, as answerable to no criteria other than its own interests. The problem, of course, is that bellicose nationalism invites responses in kind. Is nationalism a term that can be rehabilitated, or even redeemed? Orwell was convinced that “every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty”; is nationalism compatible with the kind of constructive shame that follows from truthful encounters with one own history? Is it possible to cultivate an appropriate sense of self-love that does not devolve into group narcissism? David Moscrop is a Canadian political columnist and commentator. He is the author of Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones and the forthcoming “On Nationalism”.
• What is the moral of Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus’? 21.05.2026 54min

  There are four stories that could justifiably be described as foundational to Western culture: the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden; Prometheus’s gift of fire to humanity; Doctor Faustus’s pact with the devil; and Victor Frankenstein’s act of monstrous creation. Not only are the principal names immediately evocative to anyone who hears them, but that recognisability allows for nearly endless variations on their original themes. This is, in part, what gives these stories their staying power. But these stories could themselves be said to represent four variations on a still older theme: the longing for some forbidden knowledge, to transgress a proscribed limit — or as WH Auden would put it, the desire to “know too much”. In each instance, rightly or wrongly, the pursuit itself brings a severe punishment, even catastrophe. This is what gives each of these foundational stories an element of tragedy, of pathos. About whom could it not be said that, even though we know the danger of going too far, we want to do it anyway? And yet it is at this point that an important difference emerges between Faustus and the other three stories. Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, granting fire to humankind and giving life to a “creature” of one’s own making all point a certain ambition, a restlessness, an unwillingness to remain in a perceived state of underdevelopment or adolescence. The consequences of that restlessness may still be both foreseeable and severe, and so suggest a lack of wisdom or trust or prudence — but that doesn’t mean the acts themselves are either base or self-seeking. The same cannot quite be said of Christopher Marlowe’s depiction of Doctor John Faustus at the end of the sixteenth century. It is true that, at the outset, explicit reference is made to the flight of Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who fastened wings to his back with wax, but which melted when he ventured too close to the sun. Speaking of Faustus: “His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And, melting, heavens conspir’d his overthrow; / For, falling to a devilish exercise, / And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts, / He surfeits upon cursed necromancy …” But even here, the point is not that Faustus went further than he should in his chosen disciplines, but rather that he abandoned them in favour of sorcery. And what Faustus seeks from the outset is not so much forbidden knowledge as it is wealth and renown — his own version of Lucifer’s sin of “aspiring pride and insolence” — and his attraction to necromancy’s “words of art” are mere means to that end. In other words, the reference to Icarus places the emphasis not on the ambition of Faustus’s heaven-ward reach but on the precipitous nature of his subsequent fall. Indeed, the trajectory of Marlowe’s play could be said one of perpetual descent: from the heights of academia to the utter solitude of his plunge into hell. In Marlowe’s play, it is not Lucifer who is the tempter, but Faustus who actively seeks out the means of his own “voluptuousness” — on the belief that the cost (“his soul”) can either be indefinitely deferred or that the bill will never come due (“Come, I think hell’s a fable”, Faustus says; to which Mephistopheles replies, “Ay, think to still, till experience change thy mind”). The lesson of the tragedy of Doctor Faustus probably remains the ridiculousness of the exchange of long-term beatitude for short-term prosperity and pleasure. The bill always comes due. But what Marlowe also reminds us is that the punishment is already present in the solipsism, the self-enclosure of the lives heedlessly devoted to pleasure. As Mephistopheles puts it, “for where we are is hell”. Guest: Kate Flaherty is the Head of English and Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at the Australian National University.
• Does the budget have a coherent underlying philosophy? 14.05.2026 54min

  The federal budget is, in many respects, the high point of Australia's political calendar. This federal budget is no exception. The public had been primed for weeks to expect a series of significant reforms this year. But it is striking how little there is in the budget by way of direct social benefit. The budget is broadly redistributive — it removes certain tax concessions that disproportionately benefit the wealthy — but it does not then distribute that additional tax revenue to those struggling with cost-of-living pressures. Even the $250 permanent annual tax offset for workers is quite modest and deliberately non-inflationary. It would seem that the object of this “rebalancing” through changes to capital gains tax, negative gearing and discretionary trusts is “intergenerational equity” itself: the budget adjusts the tax system so that it benefits property investors less than first home buyers — even if these benefits are dispersed over time and only gradually felt. The question is, does the underlying philosophy of this federal budget provide a template for budgets-to-come? Guest: Luara Ferracioli is Associate Professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and Philosopher-in-Residence at the Sydney Policy Lab. — THE MINEFIELD - LIVE AT THE SYDNEY WRITERS’ FESTIVAL 24 May 2026 “The Return of Nationalism and the Crisis of Democracy” With each new election, geopolitical deal and technological advancement, it seems like the ideals of democracy are slipping away. In this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield, hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discuss the state of democracy today with Canadian podcaster and political scientist David Moscrop. When: Sunday, 24 May 2026, 4-5pm Where: Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015 To purchase your tickets: https://www.swf.org.au/program/festival-2026/abc-the-minefield-live — NEXT WEEK: Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul. In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death. It is neither a long nor an overly complicated play, but it is powerful and ethically rich. We will be discussing the so-called “A-Text” of Marlowe’s play, revised in 1604. We hope you’ll join us in reading the play beforehand.
• Are ‘reaction videos’ dulling our ability to be genuinely responsive? 07.05.2026 54min

  One of the by-products of digital technology’s pervasiveness in our lives is its seeming irresistibility. However much we try to remain conscientious objectors, to resist its allure, its promises of convenience and casual pleasures, to keep some part of our inner lives free of its influence, we soon discover that it is of the essence of new technological forms to exceed their boundaries, to seep out into the wider culture — into our language, our rhythms and habits, our expectations, our ways of seeing and interacting with the world. Such that, before long, we find we’ve become like the technologies we created. It’s like the Turing Test, but in reverse. And once that happens, precisely because there’s no longer any “outside”, it can become very difficult to think clearly about what is, in effect, our habitus. This is how technology ushers us into a condition of unthinkingness. Perhaps we could call it habituation. Digital technology’s irresistibility and sheer scale can make our efforts at thinking seem tiny, irrelevant, insignificant. Perhaps the best we can do is occasionally pause, and try to make sense of underlying rules that govern online experience — perhaps we could call it “the grammar of online life”: the rules of the game, as it were, that you must obey if you want to go viral. Over the last ten years, one of the most popular forms of online content is the reaction video — a kind of split-screen experience in which viewers watch both a piece of content (the livestream of a game, a movie trailer, a music video, another YouTube clip and so on) and another person’s reaction to that content. There is something about the desire to see the facial responses of other people, their seemingly spontaneous responses to what they see and hear, that is inseparable from the viewers’ enjoyment of the content itself. It is similar to the experience of hearing audience laughter during a sitcom, and before that “canned laughter”. Emotion here is the currency. But the point isn’t that the emotion is felt — rather, that it is conveyed. It is communicated. It is as if the emotion is the content. But even if we were to regard all social conventions as performances, as various ways of paying homage to the rules that govern social interactions, this commodification of emotions — which is to say, turning reactions into content — invites such a degree of performance, of exaggeration, that would be impossible to sustain the kind of un-self-consciousness that is essential to authenticity. To put this another way: the online emotion economy encourages participants — whether on reaction videos or video podcasts — not to be themselves but to act themselves; not to listen to what’s being said, but simply to react to it. What is this doing to our capacity to cultivate moral responsiveness? Guest: Nicholas Carah is the Director of Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies and Professor in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. Nicholas makes reference to Rose Horowitch’s article in The Atlantic: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (1 October 2024).
• NDIS reforms may be necessary, but they’re also morally fraught 30.04.2026 54min

  In a speech to the National Press Club, Health Minister Mark Butler announced a series of sweeping changes that the federal government will make to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). In the thirteen years since it was legislated, the growth of the NDIS has surpassed all expectations. By 2030, the Productivity Commission projected that the scheme would cover around 550,000 people and cost about $40 billion. This year there are already 760,000 people on the scheme at a cost of $50 billion. On the current trajectory, by the end of the decade there will be 900,00 people on the NDIS and it will cost $70 billion per year — this would represent a greater expenditure than Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme put together. Concerns over the affordability of the NDIS are nothing new, and since returning to government Labor has repeatedly indicated their intention to curb its growth (even if, while in opposition, they resisted the Coalition’s efforts to do the same). But in an economy threatened by high inflation and at a time of increasing cost-of-living pressures — from fuel and food to housing — it is understandable that the federal government would feel a certain urgency to bring the NDIS under control, not least for the sake of the long-term viability of the scheme. And yet, what was telling about Butler’s speech was the way he proceeded to justify the radical changes the government has in store for the NDIS — which include removing around 160,000 people from the scheme by 2030 and reducing the projected annual cost by $15 billion. He swiftly pivoted from its long-term viability to its declining “community support, or social licence”. Citing research conducted by Talbot Mills, Butler claimed that 70 per cent of Australians think the NDIS has “gotten too large and struggles with dodgy providers” and that 60 per cent think the scheme is “broken”. He went on to detail mistakes in design and “structural flaws” that make the NDIS susceptible to fraud. He drew particular attention to criminal behaviour on the part of unaccredited “third-party” service providers and neglect by unqualified support workers. Given the dearth of qualified, registered, sufficiently committed carers, it was perhaps inevitable the NDIS would become “a soft target for shonks and rorters”, as Butler described them. It is, frankly, baffling that there wouldn’t be tighter government regulation over who could qualify to be paid to provide such support in situations that demand attentiveness and care. But some of the criticism that is now being levelled at the design of the NDIS threatens to besmirch its original moral genius: the provision of support to those with a disability in the form of personalised budgets, such that those in need of care would be accorded the dignity of “choice and control” over the form their care would take. Which is to say: it turned people with a disability from those for whom everything must be done, those who are a societal “problem” needing to be solved, and who must rely on the “good graces” of others; to those who are rightfully accorded agency in their own pursuits on an equal basis with other Australians. While this approach effectively created a competitive “disability services market” over which there has been far too little oversight, such a market is also the condition of possibility for the type of agency and equality the NDIS promises. This raises a number of dangers lurking beneath the government’s proposed reforms. In addition to the inherent danger that the expressed intention to reduce the number of people covered by the NDIS will see some people denied the care and support they are entitled to, there are a range of unintended moral consequences that accompany the reputational damage done to the NDIS itself. If we accept that the NDIS is noble if flawed, that it was a worthy aspiration for a nation like ours and represents a tremendous collective achievement which nonetheless needs to be p
• Smart glasses — a new frontier of foreseeable digital harm? 23.04.2026 54min

  There has long been a gap between the emergence of new forms of technology and the development of laws designed to mitigate their dangers. But with the rapid advances in artificial intelligence and immersive technologies, that gap is becoming increasingly problematic. Take the example of wearable technology, such as smart glasses. Companies like Meta, in particular, have poured vast amounts of money into the development and commercialisation of augmented reality (XR) headsets. This would seem to represent the natural extension of the decades-long ambition to commodify and capture the attention of users — combined now with seamless search, audio, call, image/video and geolocation functions. But quite apart from their troubling military and law enforcement applications, there are a range of ethical problems presented by the widespread adoption of smart glasses. For example, on the side of the wearer/user, the interposition of technology directly into one’s field of vision — thereby making the technology the immediate object of one’s gaze — corrupts the ethical concept of attentiveness and further erodes our capacity to be morally present to others in a technologically unmediated way. Smart glasses also erode the concept of a shared reality by imposing prompts from interested parties and advertisers directly into users’ field of vision. And speaking of interested parties, don’t these forms of wearable technology represent new means of acquiring vast amounts of data for advertisers and the training of large language models? What about those who are being observed by wearers of smart glasses? We are assured that safety measures are in place to indicate to non-consenting parties that they are being recorded. But even if those safeguards are trustworthy, the mere possibility of misuse imposes a degree of suspicion between persons that cannot help but be corrosive. And this doesn’t approach the opportunities for abuse that are presented by the technology itself — not least due to embedded facial recognition technology. Then there is the wider issue of the prospect of the inescapability of technology itself, even for those who attempt to opt out or evade the datafication of their lives by tech platforms.  It is clear that legislation needs to catch up in order to encompass the vast new possibilities for harm presented by wearable technologies with AI integration. But are we prepared for what that same technology might do to our moral conceptions and habits? Guest: Milica Stilinovic is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Sydney, where she is working on the ARC-funded project “Governing Immersive Technologies”. You can read her analysis of the social harms of smart glasses on ABC Religion and Ethics. — The Minefield — Live at the Sydney Writers’ Festival 24 May 2026 “The Return of Nationalism and the End of Democracy” With each new election, geopolitical deal and technological advancement, it seems like the ideals of democracy are slipping away. In this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield, hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discuss the state of democracy today with Canadian podcaster and political scientist David Moscrop. When: Sunday, 24 May 2026, 4-5pm Where: Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015 To get tickets: https://www.swf.org.au/program/festival-2026/abc-the-minefield-live — UPCOMING EPISODE: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S “DOCTOR FAUSTUS” Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul. In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death. It is neither a long nor an over
• The price of sovereignty: Are we prepared to pay more for less vulnerability? 16.04.2026 54min

  Ever since the eighteenth century, there has been a prevailing belief that mutually beneficial commercial relationships between nations provide a powerful disincentive to international conflict. Montesquieu perhaps put it best in his Spirit of the Laws (XX.1-2): “Commerce cures destructive prejudices, and it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce there are gentle mores … The natural effect of commerce leads to peace. Two nations that trade with each other become reciprocally dependent; if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling, and all unions are founded on mutual needs.” After the devastation of the First and Second World Wars, the principle that commerce is conducive to peace was the guiding philosophy behind the establishment of some of our vital international institutions. And even if its implementation has been inconsistent and most of the economic benefits have tended to flow upward toward wealthier nations, the belief was that such disparities represent a fault in design not in the animating principle itself. We should remember, for instance, the role interdependence played in thawing Cold War antipathies. As West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told US President Jimmy Carter in 1980 regarding Germany’s decision to develop a joint energy policy with the Soviet Union, “those engaged in trade with each other do not shoot at one another”. But the practices of interdependence and “oil diplomacy” that emerged from energy crises of 1973 and 1979 paradoxically reinforced the reality of a further source of instability — one that has become especially pronounced in 2022 and again in 2026, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the current conflict in the Middle East. And that is what Michael LaBelle calls the use of energy as a “weapon of war”, in which assertions of state sovereignty intentionally disrupt relationships of energy interdependence in order to inflict economic pain. This leaves nations like Australia — which is both a major energy exporter (of LNG and the critical materials for solar panels, among other things) and extremely reliant on fuel imports for our own energy needs — vulnerable to disruptions in the global supply chain as the result of international conflict. When this sense of vulnerability translates into higher fuel costs or uncertain supply, and when it accentuates an already palpable sense of rising unaffordability, it can be a catalyst for democratic instability and popular resentment. Even as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledges the reality of Australia’s dependence on other countries for our fuel needs by making diplomatic trips to Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, he has also stressed the need to reduce that dependence: “The Middle East conflict has reminded us of … the need to make more things [in Australia], of the need to not be at the end of supply chains and to be less vulnerable to global events.” For many, becoming “less vulnerable” means pursuing greater “energy sovereignty”, or even “energy nationalism”. But what would that pursuit entail? Some insist it means a turn to far greater reliance on renewables; for others, the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act (EPBC) has denied Australia access to its own oil reserves. And then there is the vexed question of the balance between Australia’s LNG exports and its domestic reserves. But on top of all this is the likelihood that greater “energy sovereignty” will likely prove more costly to voters. The tension between these three elements — the benefits of interdependence, the dangers of vulnerability to global supply chains, and the domestic costs of greater self-reliance — presents one of the most vexing problems of our time. Guest: Hamish McKenzie, Deputy Program Director of Grattan Institute’s Energy and Climate Change program. — UPCOMING EPISODE: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S “DOCTOR FAUSTUS” Expressions like “dea
• Social cohesion is straining — can citizens’ assemblies help? 09.04.2026 54min

  There is a thread that’s been left dangling from our show at the end of last year on Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth century “Allegory of Good and Bad Government”, painted on the walls of the Sala dei Nova in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. The dominant figure of Justice sits on the left side of the central mural. She has her thumbs on two scales to hold them in balance, with angels on either side meeting out punishment and just recompense. Directly below her sits the figure of Concord (Concordia), a carpenter’s plane across her lap, as she weaves together the judgements into a red-and-white braided rope. This rope then passes from her hand to the hand of the first of 24 citizens who stand along the base of the mural. The rope finally becomes the staff held by the figure of “the Good Commune” — or, perhaps, “the Common Good”. It is as though the Common Good is constituted by concord among citizens, from which citizens in turn hope to receive what is necessary for their shared life. From Roman philosophers like Cicero down to the artists of the Italian Renaissance, there has been an understanding that concord — or what we now might call “social cohesion” — proceeds from the fair distribution of justice, and is grounded in the confidence of citizens that it is being distributed fairly. But what happens when concord begins to fray? This month, the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will be handing down its interim report. It is fair to say that, since the horrific attack at Bondi Beach that precipitated the establishment of the commission, social cohesion is under severe strain, perhaps to breaking point for some communities. The question for us now is: When the conditions of public trust in a society have weakened, could the deliberative capacity of a mini-public — such as a citizens’ assembly — help restore it? Guest: Ron Levy is a Professor in the College of Law, Governance and Policy at the Australian National University.
• Why do democracies seem so fragile in the face of shortages? 02.04.2026 54min

  Within days of the commencement of the war that has enveloped the Middle East — and that continues to severely disrupt global energy supplies — a familiar pattern began to emerge in some of the world’s most prosperous democracies. Much as they did at the outset of the pandemic, people began stockpiling. Then, it was toilet paper and food; this time, it’s fuel. In cities across Australia, long lines formed outside petrol stations and tensions flared as motorists seized their opportunity to fill not just their cars, but jerry cans as well. Since then, the fears that motivated this behaviour have only heightened as the war goes on, petrol prices sharply rise and “not in use” signs appear on petrol pumps. The federal and state governments have already introduced measures designed soften the economic blow of significantly more expensive fuel. And while the prospect of rationing fuel reserves remains some distance away — at this stage, at least — the Prime Minister is nonetheless urging Australians not to use “more fuel than you need”. It is nonetheless telling that the mere possibility of fuel rationing has seemingly sent a chill down the nation’s collective spine. The prospect of government restrictions on petrol is tailormade to the exacerbate the underlying conditions of distrust, division and resentment, and to make the parties who are most adept at harnessing that resentment, that distrust, more attractive still. There is something here that is eerily reminiscent to the popular backlash to US President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech to the nation, with its modest request for voluntary sacrifices in the face of a similar energy crisis: “And I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense — I tell you it is an act of patriotism.” Carter’s exhortation proved wildly unpopular then, and there is every reason to wonder whether similarly voluntary measures would be politically costly now. This presents us with a dilemma. We’ve long known that liberal democracies are averse to sacrifice, and that the basest yet most effective commentary on federal budgets divides the population into “winners” and “losers”. We know that economic growth is the precondition of political stability. Does this mean that liberal democracy is, fundamentally, a politics for times of prosperity? Is the corollary, then, that, during times of scarcity and sacrifice, the majority of the electorate revert to being populists? For John Rawls, one of the defining features of a society dedicated to “justice as fairness” is the agreement among citizens to bear each other’s burdens, “to share one another’s fate”. The challenge, then, is how to inculcate those just dispositions — we could call them the habits or virtues constitutive of democratic morality — such that, during times of scarcity, we do not turn habitually to fear, envy and self-interest. For when that happens, citizens soon become competitors, and neighbours become threats. There is every reason to believe that intermittent energy crises will be a feature of our common future. If our social commitments are this fragile in times of prevailing prosperity, what will become of them in the face of shared hardship? Guest: Melanie White is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales.
• Why Autocracy Needs Spectacle — with M Gessen 27.03.2026 53min

  One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is "autocracy": which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself. Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule. Autocrats don't claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for "the people" — but "the people" politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns "us"/"we". Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against "they"/"them", who have no part or place in the nation's life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics. What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is "corrupt" in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character. In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some "emergency" which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable. As George Kateb writes in "The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy": “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.” It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one's legitimacy could be extrinsic to one's own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people. It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation. This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland's "Dialogues Across Difference" event series. Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.  
• Can illegal wars still be legitimate wars? 19.03.2026 54min

  It’s like déjà vu all over again. After launching a devastating but limited series of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and against the nation’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists in June last year, the United States and Israel recommenced hostilities against Iran at the end of February. The objectives of this ‘war’ are similar — to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities and remove the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic regime — but its implementation is more thoroughgoing, more open-ended, more uncontainable, and more problematic in terms of its basis in international law. There is near consensus among international law experts that the US-Israeli attacks on Iran come in violation Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. And yet neither the United States nor Israel seem interested in justifying their actions in terms of their legality (unlike their “middle power” allies, who are intent on using the language of “collective self-defence”). In its place are assertions of power, of unassailable might, of moral legitimacy, of “good and evil”, of an “intolerable threat” posed by Iran. The casual way that international law has been cast off in the conflict that is spreading across the Middle East raises pressing and pertinent questions about the moral considerations that undergird international law itself. Guest: Tamer Morris is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, where he focusses on international law, United Nations peacekeeping and international humanitarian law. You can read his penetrating article on the illegality and (il)legitimacy of the Iran war on ABC Religion and Ethics.
• Ramadan: Politics Straight from the Heart — with Christos Tsiolkas 12.03.2026 54min

  If there is something inherently suspicious about political appeals to “the heart” — which is to say, attempts to exploit unreflective prejudices and reactive emotions — then it is also true that a form of politics that is unresponsive to heart-felt appeals to a common humanity, to compassion, to decency, is dangerous. How can we maintain the precarious balance between a politics that trades cheaply on emotion, and one that both comes from and appeals to the heart? Guest: Christos Tsiolkas is the author of eight novels — Loaded, The Jesus Man, Dead Europe, The Slap, Barracuda, Damascus, 7 ½, The In-Between — and the short story collection, Merciless Gods. He is a playwright, screen writer, essayist, radio host and currently a film critic for The Saturday Paper. In September last year, he delivered the 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library of Australia, on the topic “Fence-Sitting”.
• Ramadan: ‘Do Not Harden Your Heart’ — with Avril Alba 05.03.2026 54min

  Over the course of this Ramadan series, we are exploring the contours of a cardiocentric conception of the moral life. The notion of the primacy of the heart goes back three millennia: it finds expression in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, and in the philosophy of Aristotle; it pervades the pages of the sacred texts and subsequent traditions of Judaism and Islam — and even now, its remnants persist in our everyday speech, as if to remind us of an older wisdom. In this broader conception, the heart is a kind of physio-spiritual organ which, at once, coordinates the body’s movements by providing its orientation within and opens the person to moral realities without. A central feature of “the heart”, then, is its capacity for moral responsiveness. The heart is not all there is to the moral life — there is moral reasoning, and there are moral obligations — but it may not be a stretch to say that “the heart” is the moral life’s indispensable element. In a hadith, Muhammad is reported to have said: “There is a piece of flesh in the body if it becomes good the whole body becomes good but if it gets spoilt the whole body gets spoilt and that is the heart.” Last week, we touched briefly on the fear that is often expressed in Islam of the heart being “sealed off”, rendered impervious to divine wisdom or moral appeal. Within the Jewish tradition, this fear is expressed in terms of the heart being “hardened” (literally “toughened” or “strengthened”). In both traditions, this condition is most particularly associated with the figure of the Pharaoh of Egypt (see, for instance, Exodus 7:13, 22; 8:16; 9:24; Qurʾān 10:88). He is not, and cannot be, responsive to the divine appeal — and for that reason, he is damned. Because the worst thing that can happen to a heart is for it become hardened, Pharaoh acts as a cautionary figure (see Deuteronomy 15:7). Through his repeated refusals, his heart toughens to the point that it grows impervious — at which point, his heart is given over to what is called in the rabbinic tradition “the evil impulse”. As Rav Assi puts it in the Talmud (Sukka 52a): “At first the evil impulse is as thin as a spider’s gossamer, but in the end it is as thick as a cart-rope.” It is unsurprising, then, that in the we often find prayers in the Jewish tradition (which characterises prayers themselves as “work of the heart”) asking to be kept from having a “hard heart” and to be granted “an understanding heart” — literally, a listening or responsive heart). In a time like ours, when the temptation to refuse or fail to see others as fully human — as making some claim on our sympathy, our compassion, as requiring from us some hesitation — is everywhere apparent, what would it mean to cultivate an “understanding/responsive heart”? What can we do to avoid a “hardened heart”? Guest: Avril Alba is Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney.
• Ramadan: Having a ‘Change of Heart’ — with Claire Zorn 26.02.2026 54min

  Sometimes the language we use every day, often unthinkingly, contains within it traces of a much older wisdom. Consider the phrases “I’ve changed my mind” and “I’ve had a change of heart”. The first thing to notice is activity described by the verbs: one is something that we do — as the result of learning new information, or having experiences that alter our values or view of the world; the other is something we undergo, something that happens to us — we see something we couldn’t see before (as though the light shines differently upon it, as Wittgenstein would say), or the same person or phenomenon evokes a different feeling from us. Perhaps it’s accurate to say that changing one’s mind is like taking a different path or going in a different direction, whereas having a change of heart is more like changing one’s compass bearings. But does that mean we are simply passive when it comes to such a reorientation of heart? In this Ramadan series, we are examining what we’re calling the cardiocentrism of the moral life — which is to say, the vital importance of cultivating the inner disposition of what we most often call “the heart”: the faculty which stands for both our inner-most selves, and that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves. The heart can act as a kind of moral compass which responds to moral realities we’d prefer to evade or avoid. Consider the pivotal moment in J M Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, when the eponymous character responds to demands for reasons or “principles” that would ground her horror in response to the mass killing of animals for food: “I was hoping not to have to enunciate principles”, she says. “If principles are what you want … I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says.” So perhaps we can’t change our hearts, but does this suggest it is incumbent on us to maintain a certain “openness” or sustained “exposure” to moral realities we’d rather ignore — and that such openness is a precondition for undergoing a change of heart? Guest: Claire Zorn is the multi-award-winning author of five novels and the author/illustrator of two picture books. Her most recent book is Better Days. — UPCOMING LIVE RECORDING When: Tuesday, 10 March 2026, from 1:45 pm to 3 pm Where: Customs House, The Long Room, Brisbane City, QLD “The Aesthetics of Power: Why Authoritarianism Needs Spectacle” As democratic norms erode around the world, the performance of political power has become increasingly theatrical. From militarised displays to orchestrated media moments, authoritarian movements rely on spectacle to project stability, legitimacy and inevitability. In partnership with the Brisbane Writers Festival and as part of the University of Queensland’s Dialogues Across Difference series, this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield brings together acclaimed journalist and New York Times columnist M Gessen with co‑hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens. Together, they will explore why modern authoritarianism depends on spectacle — and how aesthetics shape the public imagination and the conditions of democratic life. Attendance is free, but registration on Eventbrite is essential.
• Ramadan: The Heart and the Moral Life — with Stephen Darwall 19.02.2026 54min

  Judging by the way we use the word in everyday speech, we intuitively know what we mean when we refer to “the heart”. We are most often gesturing toward the essence of a thing, its core, what you reach once you strip everything non-essential away. That idea is very much in keeping with what we do each year during the month of Ramadan: we try to put wider concerns and contentious debates in politics, society and culture to the side in order to focus on some of the more fundamental dispositions and practices that sustain and deepen the moral life — essential things that we frequently neglect in our haste and agitation. But, of course, that’s not the only way we use the word “heart”. It’s also a reference to what is truest about us, our interior orientation, what we want and value, sometimes despite our attempts to present ourselves otherwise or dissemble what secretly resides within. When we use terms like “heartfelt” or “heart-to-heart”, aren’t we talking about a deeper kind of emotion or a more sincere or authentic kind of conversation, one in which certain conventions or forms of conventionalised self-presentation have been set aside? The idea of the centrality of the heart is a very old one, stretching back to the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. But it was Aristotle in the fourth century BCE who gave the concept of ‘cardiocentrism’ its most thoroughgoing articulation. He considered the heart to be the organising principle of the body — its primary organ, its ‘archē’. The heart is the location of the soul and the source of the body’s heat; it is the organ that receives sensory stimuli from without and directs the body’s movements from within. He thus conceived of the heart as constituting, at once, the seat of intelligence, emotion, will, desire and sensation, and the inherent (or efficient) cause of the body’s unity, integrity and coordination. This cardiocentric conception would eventually be taken up in the High Middle Ages by theologians and philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averröes), Al-Ghazālī, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and even in the seventeenth century by English physician William Harvey. While it is no longer credible as a psycho-physiological theory, it is nonetheless striking how the centrality of the heart continues to pervade our language and moral sensibilities. Even now, “the heart” seems to possess a kind of double-aspect, it faces simultaneously in two directions: it stands for our inner-most selves (consider the term “heart of hearts”); it is also that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves. As Stephen Darwall puts it, “the heart” refers to: “the cluster of emotional capabilities and susceptibilities that fit one for emotional connection: dispositions to feel joy, grief, sadness, fear and distress for others, gratitude, trust, love …”. Perhaps it is not a stretch to say that the moral life is cardiocentric, even though our physiology is not. Doesn’t this suggest that the health of our “hearts” should be a matter of moral, not just physical, concern? Guest: Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of a number of landmark works of modern moral philosophy — including, chiefly, The Second-Person Standpoint and, more recently, The Heart and Its Attitudes.
• What can headcoverings teach us about individuality, dignity and modesty? 12.02.2026 54min

  One of the most unyielding aspects of life in the modern West is, perhaps, the ultimate value that we’ve come to accord to appearance. It is as though our essence, all that matters most about us as human beings, lies on the surface: our soul resides in our skin; how we look reveals who we truly are. Over the last three decades, this has become especially pronounced through our various forms, not so much of self-expression as self-creation — from hair removal (or recovery) to body art, from strict fitness regimens and body sculpting through to the widespread uptake of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. None of these activities are wrong or detrimental in and of themselves. But when the gap between people is an ontological one — those who are self-creations are of a higher order than those who are still subject to the natural order — the result can be a hierarchy of beings whereby one is viewed with envy and the other with contempt. This can, of course, create its own drive toward conformity and belonging (experienced as an elevation in status) and the desire to escape social punishment, from shame. Fashion can work similarly. As W. David Marx puts it: “Fashion is a never-ending process of ‘chase and flight’. Low-status individuals chase high-status individuals by imitating their conventions, which forces elites to flee to new ones. Since this fleeing will lead to another round of chasing and then fleeing, fashion creates perpetual cultural change, with status serving as the motor.” Again, there is nothing inherently problematic about the desire to conform — which is to say, belong — or the complex cultural demands asserted by fashion. But when it becomes a form of tyranny, the criterion by which our social status is judged, and either fashion or its fashionable refusal becomes the primary means by which we express our sense of ‘self’, the effect can have a suffocating, rather than freeing, effect on our inner life. We partly acknowledge as much already in places like Australia in our insistence on school uniforms: for a particular period of our children’s lives, during which education, the cultivation of habits of learning, curiosity, discovery and surprise, takes precedence, we don’t want them judging others or being judged on the basis of what clothes they can afford. But taking ‘fashion’ out of the equation, we hope they will distinguish and express themselves in other ways. Which is to say: a certain denial of forms of individual expression (clothing) elevates everyone to a common level (community of learners) thereby enabling other ways to distinguish or express themselves (through the cultivation of interiority and sociality). Within certain traditions of moral philosophy, this could find an analogue in a kind of modesty of expression: call it a commitment to non-ostentatiousness, a certain understatedness, a reticence to draw attention to oneself in order that one’s actions may not distract attention from others. It is not invisibility so much as it is principled transparency: desiring that the gracious light of one’s dignified life and actions be the means by which others are seen as worthy objects of love and bearers of dignity. But this also has expressions in certain religious registers — as when a modest uniformity of appearance (such as the use of headcoverings, habits, robes and so on) signifies not so much the suppression of individuality as a common dedication and even the dignity of service to others or to the divine. Could this point us in the direction of ways that the preciousness of the individual — and the richness of the interior life — can be saved from the tyranny of cultural demands for individuality?
• Can political moderation survive in an age of grievance? 05.02.2026 54min

  One of the common laments we heard last November, as Australia marked the fiftieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, was that Australian politics has lost its ambition — that the Labor Party, in particular, no longer had the stomach to take big risks and pursue sweeping reforms. The very act of celebrating the audacity of Gough Whitlam, it seemed, was designed to deliver a stinging rebuke to the moderation of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. There is, of course, a compelling counterargument that can be made. Voters tend not to reward ambitious proposals for reform — especially not from opposition, as both John Hewson and Bill Shorten learned — and they will sooner withdraw support from an incumbent government than vest it with confidence and a broad mandate. Voters’ fear of finding themselves on the wrong side of the “winners/losers” ledger is just too great. The decline of centrist political parties, the fragmentation of the electorate and the rise of opportunistic electoral coalitions around sometimes incommensurable, often inchoate grievances, moreover, has made it easier for political entrepreneurs and the parties of grievance amass influence. The French political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon characterised this as the politics of rejection, as the exercise of “negative sovereignty”, as the aggregation of discontent — and, as he puts it: “Rejection is the simplest thing to aggregate. Indeed, all rejections are identical, regardless of what may have motivated them.” Put otherwise, it’s easier to get to “No” than it is to “Yes”. Albanese is clearly attuned to these political realities. At the 2022 election, he was the beneficiary of widespread disaffection with Scott Morrison and of his own self-presentation as an inoffensive, steady, safe pair of hands. He watched the Voice referendum come undone through the aggregation of rejection. In 2025, Labor’s large parliamentary majority owed plenty to Australian voters’ disdain for Donald Trump, and Peter Dutton’s unwise efforts to lash himself to Trump’s mast in order to reap the benefits from his political tailwinds. Since the attacks on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, Albanese has assiduously tried to walk a middle-path through a deeply divided society, making important concessions to each side (including recognition of a Palestinian state) and appealing to the democratic virtues of common decency and mutual respect. His accession to call a royal commission into antisemitism after the Bondi massacre and the haste with which hate speech legislation was pushed through parliament are, perhaps, the exceptions that prove the general rule. Everything Albanese has done as Prime Minister seems to have been geared toward promoting a more inclusive, more cohesive society through incremental changes. During his second term, Albanese has benefited from a Coalition in disarray, that no longer seems capable of or willing to paper over the philosophical and temperamental differences between them. Under Sussan Ley, the Liberals are more of a centre-right party, even as rivals within her party and her erstwhile Coalition partners are seeking to position themselves to reap the electoral gains from the surge in support for One Nation. Deep social and ideological divisions — over Gaza, immigration, housing affordability, intergenerational wealth disparity, racial discrimination, religious freedom — are now poised to embolden the political extremes in this country. As it already has in the United States, the UK, Germany and France, the political centre is under threat from the unyielding (and often irresponsible) demands of grievance. And after years of incremental changes and promises of progress, the electoral bill is coming due. The question now becomes whether moderation, inclusivity, decency and incremental change are still political virtues, or are they electoral liabilities? Guest: Sean Kelly is a columnist for The Age and the Sydney Morning Her
• From Venezuela to Greenland — how to respond to Trump’s territorial ambitions? 29.01.2026 1h 2min

  If there is a single adjective that captures the difference, both in tone and in action, between Donald Trump’s first presidential term and his second, it’s “unconstrained”. Whatever limits might have been placed on his conduct, his designs, his instincts during his first administration — legal, congressional, electoral, conventional — now seem to have fallen away, leaving Trump emboldened to pursue a series of ambitions that he’s long harboured. Mass deportations by militarised agents, revenge against his political opponents, the extortion of purportedly unsympathetic institutions (most notably law firms and universities) and his own personal enrichment have, perhaps, been the most brazen of these pursuits. But over the last two months, a different kind of ambition has come into view: the desire for territorial expansion and absolute sway over the countries and territories of the western hemisphere. This first manifested itself in the Trump administration’s increasing fixation on Venezuela. It began as a series of nearly two dozen missile strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that were purportedly carrying narcotics on behalf of drug cartels, then proceeded to the seizure of oil tankers departing Venezuela, and finally culminating in the brazen capture and arraignment of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro on drug trafficking charges. While Maduro’s corruption and brutality are notorious, and there is some precedent for the kind of case that is being brought against him, what was alarming was Trump’s clear interest in Venezuela’s oil reserves and his insistence on keeping Maduro’s unelected government in place under a care-taker leader, Delcy Rodríguez. His rationale was as brutal as it was clear: “if [Rodríguez] doesn’t do what’s right” — which is to say, what the Trump administration dictates — “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro”. It’s no stretch to suspect that Maduro’s capture and prosecution was meant to communicate that same message to Venezuela’s neighbours. The imperial logic here would have been familiar to city-states of Athens or Rome: the rulers of conquered territories and peoples would be kept in place but reduced to vassals, and would pay for their survival by offering tribute (taxes, natural wealth, crops, slave labour) to enrich the centre. Failure to pay tribute would be met with lavish punishment. (Karl Marx famously called this the first expression of “the tributary mode of production” in pre-capitalist societies.) So successful was this Venezuela operation, and having been met with such little international resistance, Trump seemed emboldened to press his long-standing claim on the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland. This was the second shoe to drop, as it were. Like Venezuela, his desire for the United States to “own” Greenland was framed as a kind of international security imperative: “Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China … The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.” But upon meeting with resistance on the part of NATO nations — which Trump, unsurprisingly, interpreted as ingratitude (“I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States”) — his willingness to threaten coercion in the form of military force or punitive tariffs laid bare the underlying sense of territorial entitlement. In his justly praised speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered one response to Trump’s ambitions: “if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from ‘transactionalism’ will become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.” This was then reiterated in the determination of European leaders to resist Trump’s bullying tactics. But the prospect of what
• What does hate speech do — and why is it so hard to legislate against? 22.01.2026 54min

  The massacre at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025 — during which two gunmen targeted a group of Jewish Australians who had gathered to mark the first day of Hanukkah, killing 15 people — violently punctuated two years of escalating antisemitic incidents. Bondi was an act of terror that realised the worst fears of many Australian Jews, who had seen their synagogues and restaurants torched, their houses, schools and electorate offices vandalised, and members of their community ostracised, harassed and abused on city streets, in cultural institutions, on university campuses. Adding insult to grievous injury was the fact that so many Australian Jews had expressed their feeling of being estranged and afraid within their own country, only to have their fears routinely minimised or dismissed. Horrific events of this kind invariably elicit a collective reckoning. What are the contributing factors that created the conditions in which something like this could occur, and what can be done to ensure nothing like it happens again? For many Australians, the act of discriminatory violence at Bondi represented a four-fold failure: the inability of police and intelligence services to prevent the attack; the laxness of existing gun control laws; the inadequacy of laws involving hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups; the unwillingness to take the fears and experiences of members of the Jewish community seriously in the face of rising antisemitism. The first and last of these failures will be the particular focus of the recently announced royal commission. But the Albanese government was intent on moving quickly to address the second and third by recalling parliament to pass new legislation. In so doing, the federal government confronted some of the dangers involved in legislating in the aftermath of a national tragedy. Not only are there the general risks of overreach, of scapegoating, or of unintended consequences due to laws that are written either too specifically or too vaguely. There is also the role that the emotion can play in attempting to craft a legislative response to the loss of these particular lives — which included someone who survived the Holocaust, some who died protecting others, rabbis, parents, grandparents and siblings, a 10-years-old girl. But then there is also the fact that this mass shooting took place in the context of a period of heightened social conflict and emotion over the war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attacks. There can be little doubt that the large public displays of anger at the State of Israel and grief over the killing of tens of thousands of men, women and children in Gaza contributed to the climate of hostility experienced by many Jewish Australians — whether they supported the actions of the Netanyahu government or not. So it seemed inevitable that the tidal wave of sorrow and remorse over the victims of Bondi would slam into the wall of anger and grief over the devastation of Gaza — to say nothing of concerns, on the left and the right, that new hate speech laws would supress or criminalise forms of robust political expression that should otherwise be protected. For the new laws to pass, something would have to give. In the end, on Tuesday, the federal government was able to pass two significantly amended bills — one involving gun control, the other addressing hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups; the first with support from the Greens, the second with members of the Coalition. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 focusses now on the grounds on which an organisation could be specified as a “prohibited hate group”, an expanded definition of “hate crimes”, new visa refusal powers and the creation of an “aggravated grooming offence” aimed at “religious official[s] or other spiritual leader[s]” who advocate violence or teach hate to those under the age of 18. What the public and political debate over these laws has exposed, in the pr