Inside Story: Recent Episodes
Swinburne University of Technology
Inside Story combines original, high-quality journalism and rigorous analysis to bring its readers a distinctive view of Australia and the world. Drawing on a network of Australian writers and academic researchers, together with correspondents in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas, Inside Story investigates the forces shaping politics, society and culture.
Homelessness is entrenched and many Australians face overwhelming housing costs, yet housing policy has slipped off the political agenda. In this discussion with Peter Clarke, housing specialists Wendy Stone and Peter Mares trace the rise and fall of housing policy in Australia, and how the right to adequate, affordable housing can be brought back to the centre of policymaking. Podcast originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 30 April 2019.
A decade after her first interview with Inside Story, writer and media analyst Margaret Simons talks to Peter Clarke about ten years of change, and looks at the prospects for journalism and the media Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website 31 December 2018.
Australia's last big healthcare reform was in the 1970s. As the election campaign gets under way, two analysts talk to Peter Clarke about urgently needed reforms. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website 15 April 2019.
Two political insurgencies - in Batman and in South Australia - failed to live up to expectations this weekend. Peter Clarke talks to political scientist Rob Manwaring about why. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 18 March 2018.
With its debiliating symptoms - fatigue, "brain fog," pain, gastrointestinal disorders - and its elusive causes, chronic fatigue syndrome has been one of the great unsolved medical mysteries. Now, a growing number of research teams around the world are tackling the challenge of diagnosing and treating the illness using new medical research techniques. By looking at patients' genetics and the changing pattern of their metabolites - the molecules produced by their individual metabolisms - these researchers have made enormous progress in uncovering patterns exclusive to the condition and countering once-popular psychological explanations. Among the research centres working on CFS (also known as myalgic encephalomyoletis) is the Bio21 Institute at the University of Melbourne. Earlier this month, amid the centrifuges, mass spectrometers and NMR cylinders used to identify shifts in biological material, Peter Clarke spoke to Bio21 researcher Chris Armstrong. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 24 November 2016.
They might have started off meaning the same things, but words acquire all kinds of baggage along the way - which means that mutts, hounds, curs and canine quadrupeds aren’t interchangeable, despite what the thesaurus might imply. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 12 October 2016.
Kate Burridge and Peter Clarke discuss how and why we turn nouns into verbs into adjectives. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 28 September 2016.
Kate Burridge and Peter Clarke explore the erratic history, contentious present and far-from-certain future of this tricky piece of punctuation. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 14 September 2016.
Dutch courage, French letters, it's all Greek to me... In the latest Inside Language podcast, Peter Clarke talks to linguist Kate Burridge about how outmoded attitudes have hung around in English. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 25 July 2016.
Small words can create big problems. In the latest Inside Langage podcast, Peter Clarke talks to linguist Kate Burridge about misplaced pronouns. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 24 June 2016.
Ted Cruz has gone; Bernie Sanders's numbers still don't add up… it looks like Clinton vs Trump in November. Political scientist Simon Jackman talks to Inside Story podcast editor Peter Clarke about how the contest is likely to unfold and what it means for Congress and the post-2016 political scene. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 4 May 2016.
Nouns and verbs aren't the only parts of the language on the move, says Kate Burridge. She talks to Peter Clarke about the evolution of that short but unequivocal word, "not". Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 8 April 2016.
English is peppered with contronyms - those words that mean one thing in one context, and the opposite in another. Where do they come from and what do they signify, asks linguist Kate Burridge in this conversation with Peter Clarke. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 28 March 2016.
Content contains strong language.
Once a word attracts negative connotations there seems to be no going back, linguist Kate Burridge tells Peter Clarke in the second of a series of Inside Language podcasts. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 17 January 2016.
Once a word attracts negative connotations there seems to be no going back, linguist Kate Burridge tells Peter Clarke in the second of a series of Inside Language podcasts. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 8 January 2016.
Benedict Cumberbatch set off a small storm when he unconsciously pronounced penguin as "pengwing" in a recent wildlife documentary. For linguist Kate Burridge, it was another case of "distance assimilation," one of the ways we tend to harmonise the elements of difficult words as we speak. In the first of a series of Inside Language podcasts, she talks to Peter Clarke. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 7 January 2016.
Ian Macfarlane's failed attempt to switch from the Liberal Party to the Nationals highlights problems in Queensland's merger of the two main anti-Labor parties and suggests tensions within the federal Coalition. With a leadership change looming for the Nationals, Peter Clarke talks to Brian Costar, emeritus professor of politics at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, about Barnaby Joyce, Malcolm Turnbull and the balancing act that keeps the Coalition afloat. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 18 December 2015.
The Coalition has won a convincing victory in New South Wales. Stephen Mills talks to Peter Clarke about the result and its implications. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 29 March 2015.
Down to the wire? In this fifteen-minute podcast, Peter Clarke talks to psephologist Peter Brent about this Saturday's NSW election and the federal Coalition's continuing problems. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 25 March 2015.
To the surprise of most commentators, Labor looks set to form government in Queensland. Not so surprised was Brian Costar, professor of politics at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. He talks to Peter Clarke about what went wrong for the Liberal National Party. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 1 February 2015.
The Coalition lost in Victoria and looks like doing less well than expected in Queensland and New South Wales. Peter Clarke discusses why, and what it says about the Liberal Party, with Brian Costar, Sally Young and Peter Brent. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 22 January 2015.
Senate voting needs to be simpler and more transparent. Brian Costar talks to Peter Clarke about a plan to fix the system, and looks at the politics of the federal budget. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 16 May 2014.
Bill Shorten discusses Labor factions, parliamentary career paths, and winners and losers in this interview with Peter Mares recorded in 2006. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 14 October 2013.
Peter Clarke talks to Brian Costar about why Cathy McGowan is likely to serve more than one term, why the Electoral Commission is under attack, and who should lead the Labor Party. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 27 September 2013.
Peter Clarke talks to Fact Check presenter John Barron about the ABC's newest project. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 20 August 2013.
A third Kerry Packer-based TV series is in production just as the late mogul's magazines head offshore. In this interview in 1978 with Terry Lane, Packer provided a rare insight into his childhood and the influence of his father. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 5 September, 2012
John Bell talks to Peter Clarke about acting, King Lear and the Bell Shakespeare Company. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site, 30 June 2010.
Six months into the job, the ABC's director of news, Kate Torney, talks to Peter Clarke about where the national broadcaster is headed. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site, 16 November 2009.
Australian journalist Martin Chulov tells Peter Clarke about the challenges of reporting from Iraq and the preparations for January's election. This interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site on 9 November 2009.
After nearly a quarter of a century collecting data among the Mennonites of southern Ontario, Kate Burridge is identifying the broader linguistic implications of her research. She talks to Peter Clarke. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site, 1 October 2009.
The Victorian government has invested considerable effort in securing the UNESCO designation, City of Literature, for Melbourne. Infrastructure and staff are now being assembled to help the city match the title with reality. A new literary hub, the Wheeler Centre, has been established in a renovated wing of the State Library of Victoria on the fringes of the city's university precinct, which contains RMIT University and the University of Melbourne. Other resident literary organisations including the Melbourne Writers Festival are moving in.
Cultural observers remember how tough it has been for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, based more centrally at Federation Square, to capture the popular imagination and loyalty. At the Wheeler Centre, the two people facing the challenge of meshing their vision and funding clout with the existing literary and cultural life of Melbourne are director, Chrissy Sharp, and head of programming, Michael Williams. They told Peter Clarke about their plans. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site 2 December 2009.
Australia's twenty-second prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, defeated in 1983 by Bob Hawke after almost eight years in office, has remained a significant public figure. But he has written little about the often-turbulent events of his long political career. Now comes an autobiography written not by Malcolm Fraser alone, but in collaboration with the journalist and writer, Margaret Simons. Together they've produced Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, written in the third person and bearing all the hallmarks of rigorous research and journalistic method. How did this process actually work? Peter Clarke asked Margaret Simons to reflect on a challenging co-writing experience. Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site, 14 April 2010.
Barack Obama has gone onto the front foot, but did he leave it too late? Political historian David Farber discusses the post healthcare reform prospects with Peter Clarke. Interview originally appeared on the 'Inside Story' website 28 April 2010.
Brian McFarlane talks to Peter Clarke about a lifetime at the movies.
Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site, 23 December 2010.
Peter Clarke talks to Margaret Simons and Tim Dunlop about the federal government's media inquiry and the fallout from the judgement in the Andrew Bolt case.
Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 11 October 2011.
In this interview with Terry Lane, first broadcast on ABC Radio National's The National Interest in 2002, Rob Oakeshott discusses why he joined the Nationals, and why he left.
Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website, 25 August 2010.
With the Australian's online paywall up and running, Peter Clarke talks to the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz, Crikey editor Sophie Black and the University of Canberra's Jason Wilson about the Australian's experiment, the success of the New York Times's 'porous paywall', and the broader challenge of persuading readers to pay for online content.
This interview originally appeared on the Inside Story website on 2 November 2011.
After simmering for a year in the Melbourne Age, allegations of international bribery involving Securency, the bank-note company half-owned by the Reserve Bank, have gained national coverage following a Four Corners story late last month. Age investigative journalists Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie talk to Peter Clarke about where the first nugget of information came from, how they researched the story, how they worked with Four Corners to take it further and why it took so long to become a scandal.
Audio original published on the Inside Story website, 18 June 2010.
Even before election day the signs were that the news media were struggling to interpret national politics in a way that captured the interest of readers and viewers and enhanced the democratic process. Meanwhile, neither of the major parties was making a convincing pitch for a majority of votes. But it was the hung parliament that threw the spotlight most brightly on the shortcomings of the political and media establishment, raising important questions about how politics and policy are practised and reported in this country.
In this podcast Peter Clarke talks to political scientist Brian Costar and Sophie Black, editor of the online news and current affairs site, Crikey, about what happened and where we might be heading from here.
Originally published on the 'Inside Story' website, 16 September 2010.
Conferences on 'the future of journalism' have become a growth industry. In many ways, the news media's own digital evolution has become one of its biggest stories. The collapse of the twentieth century funding model for (quality) journalism is pre-occupying western news operations. Rupert Murdoch is leading another attempt to try to make online news content pay its old media creators as well as its new media recyclers. But the myriad micro-realities of changing journalism practice in a digital age mean journalism academics and practitioners have plenty to describe and argue about.
The School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne's recent conference, Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalisation and National Identity, brought together career academics, journalists-turned-academics and a range of news practitioners and executives from Australia and overseas. Peter Clarke was there to gauge the latest thinking on possible futures for journalism.
This podcast features interviews with Barbie Zelizer, Terry Flew, Ralph Begleiter and Sarmila Bose and is part of the 'Inside Story' series.
There are some shocks in John Keane's (University of Westminster) latest book, The Life and Death of Democracy. First, he punctures the "democracy started in Athens" myth - "assembly democracy,"" he writes, was practised much earlier and further east. But a bigger jolt comes from his thesis that democracy did not emerge as an historical inevitability. It was an invention at a certain time and place, not a natural state of human power-sharing. And its survival as a system of government in the twenty-first century is far from secure. John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster and the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin. He took part in a debate, "Does Democracy Have a Future?", at the 2009 Melbourne Writer's Festival, where Peter Clarke spoke with him about democracy's surprising past, challenging present and uncertain future.
Education reform is back on the national agenda. Among the many issues being discussed are the need for a significant improvement in teaching skills and standards and the knotty and persistent problem of entrenched inequity of opportunities and outcomes. A marked flight away from government secondary schools has been amplified by the previous government's approach to parental choice and funding patterns.
Professor Jack Keating from the University of Melbourne has written a report, A New Federalism in Australian Education: A Proposal for a National Reform Agenda, which argues for a major shift in funding and accountability arrangements across government and non-government schools and between state and federal governments, a new national quality agency and better early childhood education. Jack Keating summarised the main thrust of his suggestions for Peter Clarke.
Six months into his presidency, Barack Obama is facing the first major legislative test of his administration: the passing of his reforming health care bill, with a potentially massive impact on spending. If Obama doesn't succeed on this key legislation, his entire reform agenda and his presidency will be fundamentally diminished.
Australian-born Professor Simon Jackman, based at Stanford University in California, is currently a visiting professor at the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney, from where he discussed Obama's prospects as a reformist legislator via iChat with Peter Clarke.
Six months into his presidency, Barack Obama is facing the first major legislative test of his administration: the passing of his reforming health care bill, with a potentially massive impact on spending. If Obama doesn't succeed on this key legislation, his entire reform agenda and his presidency will be fundamentally diminished.
Australian-born Professor Simon Jackman, based at Stanford University in California, is currently a visiting professor at the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney, from where he discussed Obama's prospects as a reformist legislator via iChat with Peter Clarke.
It's relatively easy to accept the fundamentals of evolutionary science when it seeks to describe changes in physical features through the processes of natural selection. But it becomes harder when evolutionary psychologists argue that our ways of thinking, use of language and even creating and appreciating art also evolved during the time of our Pleistocene ancestors. In 1994, Stephen Pinker was praised and attacked for his book The Language Instinct.
Now, a philosopher of art from the University of Canterbury, Denis Dutton, has "reverse engineered" his analyses of our artistic creativity and cultural behaviours in the twenty-first century to argue that humans evolved an aesthetic urge from the dawn of the species. The inevitable fierce debate has erupted again both within the evolutionary science community and across the science-religion fault lines. Via Skype from his home in Christchurch, New Zealand, Professor Dutton tells Peter Clarke about the thrust of his new book, The Art Instinct.
Humans have always craved and shared news. News journalism started to emerge after the Gutenberg Revolution in the fifteenth century eventually blossoming as a profession with the Industrial Revolution and the invention of a clutch of mass media technologies that characterised the twentieth century. Then, on the eve of the twenty-first century, another revolution, as profound as the Gutenberg, started a new wave of even more complex and layered transformations. We are in the "one-reeler" stage of that revolution right now, intertwined with a global financial crisis. News and the professionals who fashion its forms and disseminations are caught up in a whirlpool of often mystifying changes. Well-known media blogger and journalist, Margaret Simons, herself wrestling with the challenges of adapting to novel demands and opportunities, tells Peter Clarke there is no turning back now to the old one-to-many model of news journalism.
Digital radio as an evolving technology has been around for over twenty years. Now, after much plotting, planning, tests and delays, it will start up in Australia in the middle of 2009. It comes with a joint promise: better audio quality and potentially more diversity of audio content. But since serious discussions about its introduction here first took place about fifteen years ago, the digital media world, and the audio aspects of it specifically ,have changed dramatically. The internet has blossomed. MP3 players and other mobile digital devices have proliferated. Podcasts in their various forms are now commonplace. Our listening habits and options have shifted and multiplied. And digital radio in Britain has struggled. It is into this ever-mutating media environment, where much audio content has been decoupled from its broadcast origins or actually starts as a digital non-broadcast creation, that digital radio launches itself with all the high hopes of a new medium or a very old one with new credentials. But will it succeed? Will consumers buy a digital radio receiver? Why would they? How will broadcast radio in its digital form make its mark in the jungle of competing hybrids? Jock Given from the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology gives Peter Clarke an unvarnished look at the odds for this digital late comer. This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.
For many people around the world, especially in developing countries, famine is not an abstract notion. Wars, crop failures, callous urban elites and ruthless dictatorships are the classic causes, but countervailing factors are increasingly at work. Could it be that a true famine is now close to impossible, with globalised communications and relief systems? Is democracy a sure protection from mass starvation? Does the global financial crisis increase the likelihood of famine? Peter Clarke spoke to Cormac O'Grady, a professor of economic history at University College Dublin and author of Famine: A Short History. This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.
If any area of social policy deserves the label, "never-ending-story", it is childcare in Australia. Once the province of community-based providers, from the late eighties childcare gradually became broadly privatised under both Labor and Coalition governments. Recurring questions of standards and improved childcare quality were largely pushed to the background. Using tax-funded subsidies and contemporary corporate practices, ABC Learning and other companies took off, flew high and crashed. Despite soothing rhetoric from the Rudd government, the fall-out threatens to hamper more progressive policies and on-the-ground quality childcare for quite a while. As the global financial crisis tightens its grip, childcare and family policy researcher, Professor Deborah Brennan (UNSW) discusses the story so far, and the likely next moves, with Peter Clarke.
This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.
Black Saturday seared itself into the history books and the memories of many on 7 February 2009. The grieving, the slow recovery and the debates continue. Over missions of years, the world's tallest flowering plants, the great Mountain Ash eucalypts of the forests of Victoria, have evolved as "fire weeds" ensuring their survival by spreading their seeds in ash beds open to the light previously shadowed by their towering canopies. They die to survive. Their cycles are much longer than ours. But their special relationship to the inevitability of devastating fires withing the "fire flume" of the Victorian bush offers a tough but essential lesson for the local communities and policy makers at both state and federal levels, as historian Tom Griffiths (Australian National University) tells Peter Clarke.
The Iranian presidential election campaign had many of the trappings of a western democratic election, including mass rallies and live television debates. The incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was handicapped by his inept economic management, Iran's reduced oil income and the changed geo-political narrative with the election of Barack Obama. Election night brought a shock result: Ahmadinejad was returned in a first round landslide, out-polling the reformist, Mir-Houssein Mousavi, two to one. Since then there have been waves of popular protests and a violent crackdown by the regime. Scores have died. Ali Ansari, professor of Iranian history and director of the Iranian Institute at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, updates Peter Clarke on events since the presidential election. The report, Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran's 2009 Presidential Election, is published by Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews. Edited by Ali Ansari, Director, Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews, and Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House. Research and analysis: Daniel Berman and Thomas Rintoul, Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews.
This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.
Queenslander's will have a chance to pass judgment on the Bligh-Beattie Labor government at the polls on 21 March - and to respond to the newly minted, hybrid conservative Liberal National Party led by Lawrence Springborg, out for his third trot around the paddock seeking the Sunshine State premiership. If she can hold off the LNP challenge during a global financial crisis while presiding over a chronic deficit in state-wide infrastructure, Anna Bligh would become the first woman elected to office as a state premier. How different is Queensland from the rest of Australia in 2009? And how divided between south-eastern urbanites and more traditional rural and regional voters?
Brian Costar, Professor of Victorian Parliamentary Democracy and director of the Democratic Audit of Australia at the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University, tells Peter Clarke even with an aggregate 8 percent swing required to change government, it could be a close-run thing.
This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.
Iran goes to the polls on 12 June 2009 to elect a president of that Islamic Republic, and surprisingly the outcome is in some doubt. The ultra-conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is seeking re-election for a second four year term, but the drop in oil prices and the faltering Iranian economy have left him weakened. And the new Obama administration in the United States has put significant pressure on all the presidential candidates to be clear about how they would manage this new era of potential detente between the US and the Muslim world generally, and between the hardline Iranian regime and the "great Satan" specifically.
Ali Ansari is professor of Iranian history and Director of the Iranian Institute at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Via Skype from his home in St Andrews, he describes to Peter Clarke how the political momentum has sidelined the powerful Guardian Council, the economic downturn has changed the social and political dynamics, and the result could be a change of presidency.
This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.