The Minefield

Episódios

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  How to protect democratic politics from the malign influence of money? 06.08.2026 54min

  Ever since Aristotle, it has been recognised that money poses a particular threat to the integrity of political office. Ever the realist, Aristotle knew that those who seek political office are invariably motivated by a certain ambition (philótimo). Though not problematic in itself, but when combined with avarice (philochrematía) it can give rise to a form of corruption as corrosive as the unconstrained exercise of political power. For as Aristotle would put it, one who accepts gifts (katadōrodokoúmenos) will also be one who shows favouritism (katacharizómenos). He holds up as an example the council of “elders” (gérontas) in Sparta, who were “well known to have taken bribes and to have been guilty of partiality in public affairs” (Politics II.1271). The fault of the Spartan system, he concluded, the source of its underlying political rot, was a kind of pervasive unaccountability (aneuthúnos), such that citizens no longer had a reasonable expectation of impartial treatment from lawmakers — which is to say, they could no longer expect justice. The suspicion of hidden influence and the fear of special consideration undermine the faith of citizens in our shared institutions to behave justly. Even when these institutions are conducting themselves equitably and representatives are making decisions on principled grounds, the ubiquity of money in politics breeds mistrust and ensures that suspicion lingers just below the surface of democratic life. This is why any healthy political order depends on trust and is sustained through rigorous forms of public accountability. For once democratic faith is lost or significantly damaged, it lends credence to the claims of populist entrepreneurs and charlatans that politics per se is corrupt and that anti-democratic means are the only way to fix an untenable status quo. Concerns around overt political corruption and undue influence being exerted by oligarchs and billionaires over government policy have reached endemic levels in places like the United States, the UK and France over the last decade. And while Australia has been spared the luridness and eyewatering sums of political “donations” now commonplace in US politics, public faith in this country has nonetheless been challenged, to say the least, over the last month by a series of political scandals from across the political spectrum In each case, the question of money in politics goes deeper than what is legal — it goes to what corrupts public perception of, and faith in, democratic politics itself. Is that criterion best served through aggressive anti-corruption bodies? Or is there a case for something more thoroughgoing: not just caps on donations or a prohibition on donations from certain sectors, but a ban on private donations altogether? Guest: Yee-Fui Ng is an Associate Professor of Law at Monash University, where she specialises in the areas of public law and political integrity. Her most recent books are Combatting the Code: Regulating Automated Government Decision-Making in Comparative Context and The Rise of Political Advisors in the Westminster System.
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  What happens to our moral lives when we stop reading books? 30.07.2026 54min

  According to every available metric, the number of people who read books across almost every demographic in countries like Australia and the United States has fallen precipitously over the last fifteen years. Whether it be for enjoyment or edification, reading books is no longer something many of us choose to do. As Rose Horowitch writes in her recent cover story for The Atlantic, “The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most — retirees, women, and college graduates — have seen a collapse.” This isn’t to say we don’t read. Indeed, the paradox is that this crisis of literacy comes at a time when we are inundated with words. The incessant production and circulation of texts constitute our cultural milieu, to the point that we could say these messages are our medium. But isn’t there is a vast difference between merely looking at or reacting to or skimming words on a screen, and the kind of sustained attentiveness or self-forgetting patience that is demanded by the commitment to immerse oneself in a book? Just as there is a vast difference between expressing oneself in writing and supplying prompts to a chatbot. It is not merely that the activity is different; so too is the effect the activities have on our inner life. When he was trying to make sense of the peculiar process involved in reading-with-understanding, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it this way: “When I read a poem or narrative with feeling [mit Empfindung], surely something goes on in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines [die Zeilen … überfliege] for information.” How are we to account for this difference? And how does it relate to the “something” that Wittgenstein refers to? The size of the text has something to do with it. Both Søren Kierkegaard in 1846 and Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, warned against the effect of the ever-increasing abbreviation of our modes of writing on our interior lives. Bradbury’s nefarious Captain Beatty thus anticipated the trajectory that would lead to the advent of social media with remarkable precision: “Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending … Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column … One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” But, as they say, size isn’t everything. Big books are not necessarily “good” or “serious” or “weighty” books, and there is an infinite distance between a well-wrought poem and a tweet. Rather, what seems to matter is the time that is involved, and the intensity or focus of the inner labour that the text demands. Which is to say, what matters is our exposure to the moral reality of another as it presents itself to us in that text. This brings us to the other paradox of our moment. The proliferation of modes of communication and expressions of opinion has not brought about greater exposure to the moral reality of others. Through the speed, the superficiality and the algorithmic selectivity of our rapid-fire systems of hypercommunication, we have effectively walled ourselves off from the strange, the other. As the Korean-German philosopher Byung Chul Han has argued, the “digital web inhabited by the ego has lost all that is foreign … we operate in the numerical space of the Same”. He continues: “Literature and art are on the way to the Other. The desire for the Other is their essential trait.” But today, “the silent voice of the Other is drowned out by the noise of the Same. The literary crisis ultimately stems from the expulsion of the Other.” In some religious traditions, there are habits that are instilled to prepare readers for encounter with the absolutely “Oth
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  Do prediction markets enhance our understanding of the world or corrupt it? 23.07.2026 54min

  Even for those who don’t gamble, the exponential growth of online sports betting since 2018 has made it impossible to avoid. Not only have odds and ads been seamlessly integrated into sports broadcasts, but the language of betting has now become pervasive in sports commentary. Thanks to ease of access through mobile technology and their relative value as ready-made “content”, speculation and predictions are the air that sports fans now breathe. It is into this cultural environment that prediction markets have recently exploded. Prediction markets are online platforms that accept wagers on whether relatively specific events will occur by a certain date, whose payout is determined by the likelihood of that event occurring. These zero-sum “event contracts” can cover everything from geopolitics to popular culture. Real examples include: will Justin Bieber perform during the World Cup final half-time show; what will the high temperature be in New York City on a particular day; will Nicolás Maduro still be the president of Venezuela at the end of 2025; will Trump use specific words during the State of the Union; will the second coming of Jesus Christ take place before 2027. Like sports betting, prediction markets have grown rapidly in both value and reach over the last two years. The odds of one platform accompanied the broadcast of the 2026 Golden Globe Awards, and at the end of 2025 media companies like The Wall Street Journal, CNN and CNBC announced partnerships with prediction markets to integrate their data directly into news coverage. Advocates for prediction markets insist they represent a sophisticated form of “crowd sourcing” and that, in a world of unaccountable punditry and rampant misinformation, the financial incentive is a way of getting people to “put their money where their mouth is”. (A similar rationale has been given for the superiority of calculated sports bets over irrational fandom.) We could think of this as a kind of corruption of Karl Marx’s famous aphorism from the Communist Manifesto: analysts have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to profit from it. Such high-minded epistemological justifications notwithstanding, we have already begun to witness the ethically problematic uses to which prediction markets can be put. In January 2026, one platform allowed users to bet on whether Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be ousted by 1 March (though the company subsequently issued refunds and refused to honour what amounts to a “death contract”). There has also been a predominance of perfectly timed bets on covert military operations involving Venezuela and Iran, leading the Anti-Corruption Data Collective to conclude “that certain categories of political prediction markets, especially those tied to military activity, display signs of asymmetric information and potential insider trading”. Such concerns over corruption have led both to the prosecution of a member of the US military and the passage of the Banning Event Trading on Sensitive Operations and Federal Functions (BETS OFF) Act by the US Senate, prohibiting politicians and staff from trading on prediction markets. This raises a number of pertinent questions. Do the epistemological claims offered by prediction markets hold up — or do they not only incentivise corrupt behaviour but, thereby, signal a pervasive distrust in more ethically credible sources of knowledge and expertise? In countries where prediction markets are not legal, like Australia, what does the habit of viewing the world through the predictive lens — which treats the trivial and the tragic alike as fodder for speculation and profit making — do to our sense of justice, legitimacy and decency? Guest: Adam Piovarchy is a Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He is a lead investigator on a research project examining the ethics and politics of prediction markets.
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  ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ — high fashion or vision of hell? 16.07.2026 54min

  It’s no mystery why David Frankel’s 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada was a hit. The movie had all the ingredients of a certain kind of success. Take a bestselling novel (by Lauren Weisberger) about a midwestern girl trying to make it in the big city, place it in the hands of a screenwriter known for broadly appealing rom-coms (Aline Brosh McKenna), cast a much-loved screen legend in an uncharacteristically villainous role (Meryl Streep) and put her alongside a doe-eyed starlet on her way to becoming a superstar (Anne Hathaway) … then set the plot in the rarefied world of haute couture and divide it between New York and Paris — what’s not to love? What is a little surprising is that The Devil Wears Prada should have achieved the quality of a certain timelessness (despite being released a year before the now ubiquitous iPhone). It is a cinema classic whose enduring appeal and pop cultural resonance have been demonstrated by the global success of a sequel, two decades on. But does the film’s success point to narrative and thematic elements that run much deeper than the appeal of the glossy surface? Take, for instance, the obvious Faustian connection, evoked both in the title of the film and the blunt words of Emily (played by Emily Blunt) to Andrea Sachs (Hathaway): “You sold your soul the day you put on your first pair of Jimmy Choos.” The narrative arc of the film is, broadly, the naïve Andy’s “descent” into the world of high fashion, cultural influence and sterile, superficial beauty, only to step back from the hellmouth of corruptibility at the end, lest she too share Miranda Priestly’s (Streep) unhappy fate. Does this mean that Andy also shares in Faust’s culpability, less a victim than a participant in his own damnation? Who, then, plays the role of the seducer? Who is the film’s Mephistopheles, also trapped in a hell of diabolical design? Is it Emily — starved, harried, contemptuous, miserable? Is it Christian Thompson (Simon Baker) — urbane, erudite, well-connected, corrupting, and ultimately impotent? Surely it is Nigel (Stanley Tucci) — personable, appealing, but a slave to Miranda’s imperious demands, and a prisoner to a corrupted vision of beauty (“size six is the new fourteen”). And to what extent does Andy escape unscathed, given her string of broken relationships? The Devil Wears Prada also draws deeply on those specifically New York stories of tragic or monstrous success. Stories like Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 The Sweet Smell of Success (with imperious newspaper columnist JJ Hunsecker playing the Miranda Priestly role) and Darren Aronofsky’s 2011 Black Swan, or John Badham’s 1977 Saturday Night Fever and Mary Harron’s 2000 American Psycho, or Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street and Taylor Hackford’s 1997 The Devil’s Advocate. Is New York really a place of opportunity, or is it the kind of environment in which the price of success is one’s own soul? The transformation that Andy Sachs undergoes in the first half of the film initially looks like an external accommodation to a class or caste of society where one wants to belong — a sartorial equivalent of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, though with Nigel in the role of Henry Higgins. But if there is any lesson from the film, it is this: in a culture where appearance is essence — which is to say, how you look is who you are — the change of appearance rarely remains skin deep. Finally, The Devil Wears Prada trades on, and in no way resolves, one of the central contradictions in modern democracies — one that is explored at length by Elizabeth Anderson: in political cultures that prize agency and democratic self-determination, many workplaces are tyrannies, and bosses despots. The glimpses we get of Miranda’s unhappy home life, however sympathy inducing they are, does not reduce our sense that she presides over a domain in which she has no equals, no one to whom she is morally answerable. All there is, is the standard of aesthetic perfection and cultural sway to wh
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  Copyright theft is AI’s original sin — are we doomed to repeat it? 09.07.2026 54min

  Essential to the profitability and widespread adoption of modern technologies is the need to conceal their costs — the human labour, the unjust or exploitative working conditions, the environmental degradation and drain on natural resources, the reduction of precious goods to mere ‘raw material’. By means of such concealment, those who enjoy the conveniences these technologies afford are lulled into a state of (what Hannah Arendt called) “unthinkingness”. The benefits simply appear, and consumers are left incurious about how it could have happened so quickly, so cheaply, with so little friction. The other thing that is crucial for the success of such technologies is the way that their speed, financial backing and sheer scale project a sense of irresistibility — what Shoshana Zuboff has termed “the cult of inevitabilism”. Put otherwise, the belief that resistance, however principled and noble, is ultimately futile. So get on board or get out of the way. Artificial intelligence represents, in many ways, the apogee of both aspects. The assumption that AI development hovers somewhere between an “arms race” with existential stakes and the key to unlocking untold productivity and economic growth has had the effect of reducing calls for prudential care and democratic consultation to little more than inconveniences to be gotten around rather than objections to be engaged with meaningfully. At the same time, the twin mantras of “more compute” (more chips, more data centres, more electricity) and “more data sets” have been used to legitimate both the expenditure of unimaginable sums of money and the indiscriminate (and ultimately illegal) use of intellectual property for the training of AI models. You could call this theft generative AI’s original sin. In both cases, the guiding philosophy seems to be that the purportedly beneficial ends will have justified the unprincipled means. Which is to say, the emergence of artificial general intelligence will cicatrise the moral wound inflicted by these companies’ originary theft. After all, what’s a little copyright infringement between inhabitants of an AI-ushered utopia? And yet, beginning in 2024, despite the size, the rapaciousness and the heedlessness of these AI companies, a number of courageous pockets of profoundly human opposition have emerged. To date, perhaps the most consequential are the resistance on the part of local councils in the US and UK to the construction of data centres, and the lawsuits filed on behalf of writers, artists and some media companies against the illegal use of their copyrighted work to train generative AI models. Met with such opposition, unsurprisingly, AI companies are looking for new terrain on which to construct their data centres, and new sources of data to be strip-mined for their models. Concerns are that the Australian federal government is attempting to position itself as an attractive destination for these companies, and Australia as the beneficiary of the investments that come with them. But at what price to Australia’s creative industries? Last year, the Productivity Commission proposed a “text and data mining exception” to the Copyright Act, paving the way for AI models to be trained on the copyrighted work of Australian authors and artists. Concerned that this exemption may be revived as part of a proposed deal with AI companies to “attract more than $50 billion worth of datacentre investment”, authors and artists converged on Canberra last week to oppose any such dilution of legal protections to their intellectual property. The questions raised by this opposition are difficult and extremely consequential. Is “fair compensation” for the use of these artists’ works sufficient to heal the moral wound inflicted by the original theft of their work? Is the establishment of a fund to support future artists enough to encourage and sustain such creative work, when the cultural effect of AI is to devalue both human creativity and the time and la
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  Last Words: ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ — Martin Luther King, Jr in Memphis 02.07.2026 54min

  In 1967, after reaching the heights of social and political influence in 1963, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and having been instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr watched his popular support fall precipitously away. He had reached the lowest point of his life on the public stage, with fully two-thirds of Americans disapproving of him.  King’s rousing vision of nonviolence — of racial coexistence within a community defined by mutuality, interdependence and love — seemed to be growing ever more remote following the landmark civil rights legislation. The Black Power movement was gaining influence, and in 1967 alone there had been 76 violent riots across major American cities. Then, in April 1967, King denounced the US military involvement in Vietnam — a war that was wildly popular with the vast majority of Americans. For his supporters, it was strategically counterproductive to so connect the cause of civil rights with the goals of peace activists; while Barry Goldwater, the standard bearer of a kind of atavistic conservatism, characterised King’s words as treasonous. King had also grown concerned that the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts represented, for many Americans, the end of their concern. This legislation had ushered in a kind of complacency that absolved them from any further inconvenience or moral concern. Now that Black people had been granted equality de jure, what was needed was for them to be accorded equality de facto — especially in education, employment and housing, and not only in the South. Therefore, in the autumn of 1967 King launched what would be known as the Poor People’s Campaign, which was meant to culminate in a new march on Washington DC in the spring of 1968. But disagreement with the ambitions and unruliness of the campaign from within, coupled with outright antipathy from the Johnson administration due to his opposition to the war in Vietnam, plunged King into a condition of deepening despair. Even as he gave himself with increasing desperation to the cause, and tried to rally support for the Poor People’s Campaign across the South, he suffered from a growing sense of futility. The constant threat of being killed did nothing to alleviate his depression. According to those closest to King, he was physically, emotionally, spiritually exhausted. In March 1968, King received a request from Memphis, Tennessee, to offer his support for the 1,300 of the city’s sanitation workers, who had gone on strike for better pay, the ability to organise and improved working conditions after two of their number had been killed on the job. King accepted the invitation, believing that Memphis would mark the beginning of a nationwide campaign against poverty and housing discrimination. In Memphis, he and his team met with reticence among their own number and political opposition to mass demonstrations — including a federal injunction obtained by the city prohibiting any demonstrations for ten days, after one such march had been derailed by violence. On the evening of 3 April, King was scheduled to speak at Bishop Charles Mason Temple. Because of severe storms, King believed turnout would be suppressed. He was, moreover, sick with the flu and asked Ralph Abernathy, whom he described as “the best friend that I have in the world”, to speak in his stead. But when Abernathy saw the church was filled to capacity, with more than 3,300 people packed into the building, they sent word back to King telling him the people needed to hear King speak, even if briefly. Once King arrived, Abernathy gave an unusually long introduction — close to 30 minutes — in order to minimise the strain on King himself. King spoke without notes, and was evidently unprepared. He habitually started his speeches slowly, haltingly, in order to allow them to reach a series of rhetorical peaks. But his weariness on this occasion was evident from th
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  Why the anxieties over multiculturalism? What’s the appeal of a monocultural society? 25.06.2026 54min

  If One Nation leader Pauline Hanson managed to reignite a public debate with her assertion that Australia is “a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural” during her address last week to the National Press Club, it is only because certain anxieties over multiculturalism have long been smouldering in the social undergrowth, just waiting to be fanned into flame. The question of immigration, handwringing over the racial constitution of the nation and the desire to maintain Australia’s essential “Britishness” go back at least as far as the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act. And these concerns continued to resurface throughout the twentieth century. As the then Minister for Immigration and future leader of the Liberal Party, Billy Snedden, said in 1969 (the year after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech): “I am quite determined we should have a monoculture, with everyone living in the same way, understanding each other, and sharing the same aspirations. We don’t want pluralism.” It wasn’t long afterward, the White Australia Policy was dismantled and multiculturalism became official national policy, culminating in the 1989 National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia. Just seven years later, the rise of John Howard and the election of Pauline Hanson placed both multiculturalism and immigration back on the table. Debates over the proper levels of immigration are, of course, entirely appropriate in a healthy democracy. Immigration policy is something about which citizens should be able to deliberate and disagree without fear being called xenophobic. But something potentially dangerous happens when the debate turns to multiculturalism, as longstanding government policy, itself. For then we are not discussing prudential concerns about the proper allocation of limited social and economic resources; instead, we are discussing the desirability, or not, of our fellow citizens, our neighbours, those with whom we find ourselves pursuing a common life. We are discussing who truly belongs, and who does not. One of the dangers of the discourse about “the utterly flawed policy of multiculturalism” (as Hanson put it) is that it turns fellow citizens into abstractions, other cultures into barriers, our neighbours themselves into impediments one’s own sense of wellbeing and social comfort. As John Dewey argued a century ago, it is not enough for our experience of democracy to be confined to elections and abstract values (call this the vertical orientation of democratic life); democratic habits must pervade everyday life and casual interactions with our fellow citizens (call this democracy’s horizontal or relational aspect). In the same way, multiculturalism cannot remain a government policy or series of eight goals; for it to become a moral reality, it must find inter-cultural expressions in civic life. It is in this way that we go from being strangers to one another, to fellow citizens. The desire not to feel like “strangers in our own home” or to be a “monocultural” society is surely a form of the desire to eliminate strangeness from our lives, to achieve what Pierre Rosanvallon calls the radical “simplification of the social bond” through the commonalities of culture, custom and language. But what does this longing conceal, and what does it assume both about “culture” and “national identity”? Guest: Glenda Ballantyne is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Swinburne University of Technology, and Coordinator of the Australian Intercultural Cities National Network.
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  One Nation is on the rise — but do we know what it means? 18.06.2026 54min

  Over the last twelve months, there have been two conspicuous trends in federal politics. One is the precipitous decline in electoral support for the Liberal Party, which began before last year’s federal election and has continued apace ever since. The other is the rise in One Nation’s electoral fortunes, which began to tick upwards in September but then took a leap in December and January. Both trends converged, rather spectacularly, in the latest Resolve Political Monitor, conducted for the Nine newspapers. Not only had the Coalition’s primary vote drop to 20 per cent (an all-time low), but One Nation’s primary vote shot up to 29 per cent (passing Labor on 28 per cent). Moreover, Pauline Hanson emerged as preferred prime minister with a third of respondents, while Anthony Albanese was selected by 29 per cent — opposition leader Angus Taylor took only 16 per cent of nominations. This poll comes little more than a month after One Nation won the Farrer by-election in rural New South Wales, with a commanding 40 per cent of the primary vote, thereby gaining its first lower house seat in federal parliament. And it came days before Pauline Hanson’s first address to the National Press Club in Canberra, three decades after she entered parliament. Almost exactly forty years ago, then opposition leader John Howard famously said “the times will suit me”. The same could now be said for Pauline Hanson. For three decades she has been a fixture of federal politics. The major parties have variously denounced and attempted to accommodate her views on immigration, multiculturalism and Indigenous policy, among other things. But while the political landscape around her has changed, she has not. If anything, due to the excesses of political rhetoric and perverse incentives of a social-media saturated informational ecosystem, the electorate has grown inured to what once would have been scandalous, perhaps even disqualifying. In an age of Trump, Hanson comes across to many voters as simply “plain spoken”, as the “voice of reason”. The question, however, is whether One Nation’s electoral support is, in fact, an affirmation of the party, its policies (such as they are) and its leader, or merely a kind of aggregated discontent with the major political parties? Is One Nation the temporary beneficiary of voter anxiety and anger — with polling and by-elections here functioning as a means of political communication — or does this point to a more profound disintegration of two-party politics? Does One Nation’s current rise reflect what Pierre Rosanvallon described as the three-fold simplification at the heart of populism’s more general appeal (the simplicity of the ‘natural’ social bond over against the difficulties of multiculturalism; the simplification of the cause of current social problems; the simplification of the political remedy, over against the complexities of deliberation) at a time of dizzying complexity? Either way, Pauline Hanson’s ability to both appeal to and harness electoral discontent in times that are characterised by “a near-constant sense of crisis, spanning the economic, social and political”, presents a challenge to the exercise of responsible political leadership — particularly that of someone like Anthony Albanese, whose moderation and commitment to a kind of gradualist centrism rarely touches the political passions that animate our current moment. Then again, in the UK and Europe, far-right parties have tended to poll well between elections and have even enjoyed a degree of success in European parliamentary elections and by-elections, only to see their support fall away come the general election. Is something similar happening in Australia? Guest: Paul Strangio is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash University and the author, most recently, of The Alchemy of Leadership: Seven Australian Prime Ministers in a Turbulent Twenty-first Century.
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  The ethics of ‘longtermism’ — what are our obligations to the future? 11.06.2026 54min

  One of the criticisms often directed at democratic politics is that it is irresponsibly, even dangerously, short-term in its orientation. The wellbeing of future generations, to say nothing of the sustainability of the planet, rarely matter more to lawmakers than the cost-of-living pressures experienced by their constituents or the outcome of the next election cycle. Short-termism, therefore, would seem to be baked into democracy; hence, for some, the only way to act seriously with the future in mind would be for those with power and resources to do so unilaterally. There is no denying that democratic politics is constrained by short-term thinking. It is likewise true that our moral imaginations suffer from the incapacity to recognise the claim that future generations may properly make on our current actions — or even to recognise that such moral obligations exist in the first place. But there is no reason to deny such obligations. As Annette Baier argues, the “only special feature in the moral tie between us and future generations lies in the inferiority of our knowledge about them, not in the inferiority of their ontological status … Neither their non-presence, nor our ignorance of who exactly they are, nor our uncertainty concerning how many of them there are, rules out the appropriateness of recognizing rights on their part.” In line with this sentiment — though shorn of the concept of obligation that the language of “rights” assumes — a number of influential philosophers have made a case for what they’ve called “longtermism”. Its central tenets are relatively straightforward. William MacAskill lays them out in his best-selling book What We Owe the Future: “that, impartially considered, future people should count for no less, morally, than the present generation”; “that there may be a huge number of future people”; “that life, for them, could be extraordinarily good or inordinately bad”; “that we really can make a difference to the world they inhabit”. Because this outlook is wholly utilitarian, the “huge number of future people” is doing a great deal of work in MacAskill’s formulation. In effect, longtermism takes utilitarianism’s spatial concern with achieving “the greatest good for the greatest number” and transposes it temporally, onto the vastness of time. It doesn’t simply prioritise the indefinite prolongation of the human species in the face of possible extinction threats. It also accords a certain moral priority to the “untold number of future people”. So MacAskill writes: “Future people count, but we rarely count them. They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them … They are utterly disenfranchised … I see longtermism as an extension of [social movements for civil rights and women’s suffrage]. Though we cannot give genuine political power to future people, we can at least give consideration to them. By abandoning the tyranny of the present over the future, we can act as trustees — helping to create a flourishing world for generations to come. This is of the utmost importance.” How, then, do we go about freeing the future from the “tyranny of the present” — which here should not be limited to mere short-term thinking, but also the expressions of our more proximate, immediate obligations to human and non-human creatures? It is at this point that longtermism’s consequentialism gives way to a certain technotopian impulse. Abandoning the logic of limits, of democratic restraint and reduction, of a more pastoral and educative understanding of democratic self-governance, longtermism favours instead the unleashing our technological capacities and reach. As Émile Torres puts it: “Longtermism tells us to maximise economic productivity, our control over nature, our presence in the Universe, the number of (simulated) people who exist in the future, the total amount of impersonal ‘value’ and so on. But to maximise, we must develop increasingly powerful — an
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  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
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  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”.
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  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.
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  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.
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  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).
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  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
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  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
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  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
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  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.
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  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.
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  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.