Democracy Sausage with Mark Kenny

Why are Australia's least resilient communities turning to One Nation? What happens when the major parties take their heartland seats for granted? Can Labor's "shallow" 2025 win hold together in 2028?Redbridge Group director Kos Samaras joins Mark and Marija to unpack the new Australian Resilience Index. It maps the financial, health and social resilience of communities across all 150 federal electorates. They look at why seats with low health resilience line up so closely with One Nation's projected gains, and at how decades of pork-barrelling in marginal seats have left regional Australia and the outer suburbs behind. Kos also talks about Meadow Heights, the Melbourne suburb where he grew up, which went from a Labor stronghold to one of the least resilient communities in the country. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What did John Howard understand about survival and self-correction that his six successors never quite grasped? Why do so many of our prime ministers trace their drive back to fiercely ambitious mothers — and what does that pattern tell us about who gets to lead? Is the Liberal Party's current unravelling the price of clinging to the "Howard settlement" long after the country moved on? Historian and biographer Paul Strangio joins Mark to dissect what makes — and breaks — an Australian prime minister, drawing on his newly shortlisted book The Alchemy of Leadership: Seven Australian Prime Ministers in a Turbulent Twenty-First Century.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is too much political capital being put into meaningless foreign policy platitudes rather than defining what modern Australian security looks like? If Australia's shared values with its allies are contradicted can we still rely on those principles to steer policy with them? Can Australia take a globally prominent position in petitioning the US to end the wars that fundamentally threaten Australia's national security?On this episode of Democracy Sausage, Allan Behm — a 30-year veteran of the Australian Public Service across defence, diplomacy and the Attorney-General's Department, and a former senior adviser to now-Foreign Minister Penny Wong — joins Professor Mark Kenny to discuss his new book, New Game, New Rules: A Foreign Policy for Dystopian Times, and why breaking Australia's "stranglehold of dependency" starts with an honest reckoning with our own identity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.