Claim OwnershipCurtin’s Cast
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Welcome to Curtin’s Cast, the John Curtin Research Centre’s podcast of politics, ideas and culture brought to you by JCRC Executive Director Nick Dyrenfurth and Redbridge’s Kos Samaras. Each fortnight we will bring you the freshest and most challenging conversations from the world of Australian and global politics, culture, and ideas every week with leading political leaders, activists, and thinkers.
51 Episodes
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Has World War 3 already begun — just without a declaration?
This week on Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by the excellent Misha Zelinsky — Fulbright Scholar, economist, lawyer, and national security expert — to unpack a confronting idea: We may already be living through the early stages of the third great global conflict of modern times.
From Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine to chaos in the Middle East and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, Misha argues we are witnessing an unevenly distributed, undeclared world war — driven by a loose but dangerous alignment of authoritarian powers.
On episode 51 we cover:
Why historical analogies (1930s, WWI, Cold War) only go so far
Why defence experts now see a 20–30% chance of global conflict this decade
The rise of a “bad guys club”: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea
How Western democratic deterrence failed — slowly, then all at once
How modern warfare contains multiple overlapping theatres — military, economic, cyber — along with the familiar use of proxies
Whether democracies are strong enough — including internally — to prevail
This is a serious, sobering conversation about power, geopolitics, and whether the world has already crossed a threshold we don’t yet recognise.
This week, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by arguably Australia’s finest historian and public intellectual, Professor Frank Bongiorno, for our landmark 50th episode — and a big question at the heart of Australian politics:
Is Bob Hawke really the “gold standard”… or a myth we can’t escape?
Our conversation is anchored in the new book Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke Government, edited by Frank, Carolyn Holbrook and Joshua Black — a major reassessment of Hawke’s record and reputation.
We unpack:
▪️ Why Hawke still dominates how we judge governments
▪️ What actually made the Hawke model work
▪️ Why reform feels harder today
▪️ Whether Labor is misreading its own history
What matters now is what Albanese Labor can realistically learn from Hawke — and what his record tells students of Australian politics about the limits and possibilities of reform today.
A seismic election result in South Australia — but was it a Labor landslide, or a structural collapse of the Liberals? Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras unpack:
The Liberals finishing third and fourth across large parts of the state
One Nation’s 22% surge and what it really means
The critical importance of SA Premier Peter Malinauskas
Why this could be a warning shot for Victoria 2026
This is a deep dive into fragmentation, realignment, and the future of the two party system. Check out episode 49 wherever you get your podcasts.
This week on Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras break down the most striking polling shift in a generation — and what it means for Australian politics.
Victoria is no longer a conventional contest. Both major parties are struggling to reach 30%. One Nation is now polling in the mid-20s. The next Victorian election won’t be one election at all. It’ll be eighty-eight by-elections happening simultaneously across the state.
In this episode we explore:
📊 RedBridge/Accent Victorian state election polling
👥 Generational and class realignment playing out in real time
🗳️ Check in on South Australia ahead of March 21
🌍 Whether Middle East conflict influences domestic voting behaviour
This is a deep dive into the end of the old electoral map — and what replaces it.
This week co-hosts Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by Dr Kylie Gilbert-Moore — Middle East scholar, columnist and former political prisoner in Iran. After spending 804 days jailed in Tehran’s Evin Prison, Kylie offers a rare perspective on how the Iranian regime works and how ordinary Iranians see the world. In this episode we unpack:
• Iran’s widening war in the Middle East
• The death of Ali Khamenei and rise of his son
• Whether authoritarian regimes are stronger or more fragile during war
• What Iranians actually think about the conflict
• How the region might change if Iran’s regime falls
🎧 Listen now via Apple, Spotify or YouTube
This week Curtin's Cast is joined in the studio by Peter Khalil — Labor member for the federal seat of Wills in Melbourne, Assistant Minister for Defence, former Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, ex-national security adviser to Kevin Rudd, and previously the government’s former Special Envoy for Social Cohesion. From public housing in Melbourne’s north to junior tennis glory, from working as an executive with SBS to the frontline of Australia’s national security debate — Peter’s story is as global as it is grounded. And Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras go deep with Peter, exploring:
🎾 Growing up in Melbourne’s north to immigrant parents — and what a good working-class boy was doing playing tennis
✝️ Who are the Egyptian Copts? Peter gives us a history lesson — one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, tracing their lineage back to the early Church, shaped by centuries of survival, faith and minority resilience in the Middle East
🧭 Why Peter chose the brutal occupation of parliamentary politics over a a successful and comfortable executive career
🏘️ On the ground in Wills — what voters are actually saying at the doors
🤝 Social cohesion beyond the slogan — what happens when trust frays?
⚠️ Extremism — left and right — protest, grievance, and social media accelerant
🌏 Geo-political volatility — what does middle-power strategy look like now?
All killer, no filler. Catch Episode 46 wherever you get your podcasts.
This week it’s a one-on-one Kos vs Nick deep dive. No guests. No niceties. Just a hard look at the polling — and some of the rubbish floating around. We unpack:
📊 The latest federal and state polls — what’s real and what’s noise
🔵 The new Liberal leadership — and why it’s not generational renewal
🗳️ The same free-market fundamentalism dressed up with culture-war garnish
📰 The same campaign/media tactics including obligatory News Corp sit-down
🏙️ A leader who doesn’t hold an urban metropolitan seat
💥 And the deeper truth: the problem isn’t just the leader — it’s the party
We also dig into:
📍 Victorian and South Australian polling
🎤 The Mally campaign launch: One Nation is the real threat
⚠️ How One Nation can eat into Labor’s base especially in Victoria
Then:
🏗️ Why issues like the CFMEU saga are viewed by voters as intra-elite squabbles
🧍♂️🧍♀️ The widening gender divide and growing generational fracture — Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z — and how each tells a different political story
If you want to know where Australian politics is actually heading — beyond the hot takes — this is the episode for you!
🎙️ New Curtin’s Cast: Alastair Campbell on democracy in the age of Trumpism
Politics everywhere feels simultaneously stuck and combustible — in the US, the UK and here in Australia. This week Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by Alastair Campbell — former Director of Communications and Strategy to Tony Blair, co-host of The Rest Is Politics, and one of the sharpest observers of modern democratic politics — for a wide-ranging and unsparing conversation. We explore:
Why UK Labour PM Keir Starmer governs with a commanding majority yet struggles to project purpose
How Anthony Albanese’s Australian Labor and Canada’s Mark Carney are resisting the right-wing populist surge
The global ecosystem of right-wing media, influencers and big money amplifying grievance and normalising transgressive politics of the MAGA, Reform UK and Aussie One Nation variety
Why figures like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Pauline Hanson can get away with behaviour mainstream politicians cannot
What New Labour got wrong - namely the downsides of globalization
Housing, intergenerational equality and climate are the means by which the social democratic centre-left can beat back the populist Alt-Right
Alastair also speaks candidly about his own reaction to Trump — even joking about how he has “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — and what that reveals about the emotional intensity of contemporary politics 🎧 Listen to episode 44 wherever you get your podcasts.
🎙 Curtin’s Cast returns for 2026
Episode 43 | Polling shocks, Coalition fracture and the new politics of grievance
Australian politics is realigning in real time. In the first Curtin’s Cast episode of 2026, co-hosts Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras unpack a turbulent political summer — from polling shocks and Coalition breakdown to the surge of One Nation, the Gen X revolt, and the risks now facing a dominant but vulnerable Labor government. We discuss:
• What the polling is really telling us
• Why the Coalition’s break-up (and make-up) doesn’t fix the right
• One Nation’s consolidation and electoral prospects
• Gen X as the new grievance cohort
• How legacy media built a populist right-wing Frankenstein it can’t control
• Why the Greens are stuck in neutral
• Why Labor’s next term must be about delivery, not luck
• What the 2026 SA and Victorian elections will reveal about federal politics
🎧 Listen now on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
As we wrap up Curtin’s Cast for 2025, a big thank you to everyone who’s tuned in this year — and a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and season’s greetings to all our listeners. Your support has helped make Curtin’s Cast one of the most widely listened-to political podcasts in the country, and we’re deeply grateful. To close out the year, we couldn’t ask for a better conversation.
Quarterly Essay has reached its 100th edition — a remarkable milestone for long-form political writing in Australia. And to mark it, Kos and Nick sit down with Sean Kelly, author of The Good Fight: What Does Labor Stand For? — an essay that asks an important, and uncomfortable, question in Australian politics.
Sean argues Labor’s challenge today isn’t simply electoral, but moral: a crisis of purpose, confidence and imagination. Why has the party that once reshaped the nation struggled to articulate what it stands for heading into 2026? What replaced the old sense of mission? And can a politics built on “kindness” survive a harsher, more unequal era?
📘 Buy Sean Kelly’s Quarterly Essay #100 here:
👉 https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2025/11/the-good-fight
Thanks again for listening in 2025. We’ll see you in 2026 — with plenty more to talk about.
On this week’s Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras go one-on-one on what the latest Redbridge and Resolve polling is really telling us about Australian politics heading into a huge 2026 calendar. With two state elections looming in South Australia and Victoria, and federal pressures building, we unpack what to expect at state level, how federal factors are cutting through, and why One Nation’s surge is no longer a side story. The conversation then turns to the deeper question behind the numbers: who is actually experiencing material decline in living standards, and how that economic anxiety is reshaping voting behaviour across One Nation, Labor, Liberals and the Greens. With inflation risks still live and global instability rising, we also ask what kind of nation-building agenda Labor will need to put on the table in 2026 to hold the political centre.
🎧 NEW EPISODE | CURTIN’S CAST 🇺🇦🇦🇺
Recorded live from Parliament House, Canberra
Winning the Peace: Why Ukraine’s Reconstruction Is Australia’s Test Too
This episode features one of the most powerful voices in Australia’s Ukraine community. Alex Vynokur didn’t become an advocate by choice — history chose him. A Ukrainian Jew whose family endured antisemitism and world war, Alex's family have built an incredibly successful life in Australia. When Russia invaded, he didn’t look away. He built the United Ukraine Appeal into a lifeline for hospitals, families and frontline communities under fire.
Now he joins Curtin’s Cast — just minutes after the launch of our new report in Parliament along with report author Dr Dominic Meagher and hosts Kos Samaras and Nick Dyrenfurth — to argue that rebuilding Ukraine is not charity, it is solidarity and strategy to serve Australia's national interest.
Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras sit down with Nine Media’s Chief Political Correspondent, Paul Sakkal, for one of the sharpest political conversations we’ve had all year. We cover everything reshaping Australian politics right now:
• The latest polling — and what it really means
• Liberal Party chaos & whether Sussan Ley can hang on?
• The rise and rise of One Nation: who’s voting for them? Why?
• Whether Pauline Hanson has finally hit her ceiling
• Andrew Hastie — principled conservative or emerging Messiah figure?
• Why the Liberals’ national future runs through fixing Victoria first
• And what to expect from new Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson
It’s a wide-ranging, data-rich, brutally honest breakdown direct from the corridors of power.
With Kung Fu Kos away, Nick Dyrenfurth teams up with guest co-host Emma Dawson (Chifley Research Centre) to tackle a huge few weeks in politics:
📊 What the latest federal polling really says
🌆 Mamdani’s NYC upset + outsider politics
🇬🇧 UK Labour turmoil, Reform & Greens surge
📱 Australia’s under-16 social media ban
Is a new generation rejecting “politics-as-usual”? And what should Australian Labor, indeed political parties of all stripes, learn before it’s too late?
Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
Fifty years to the day after the Dismissal, this week on Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and guest co-host Emma Dawson talk to acclaimed historian and political biographer Troy Bramston about his stunning new biography Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New. 700+ pages of reform, chaos, and vision — from Gough’s youthful poem to the tumultuous events of 11 November 1975. What does Whitlam still mean to Labor today? Listen now on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Buy Troy's book:
https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460716137/gough-whitlam-the-vista-of-the-new-the-definitive-and-most-up-to-date-biography-from-australias-leading-political-biographer/
🎙️This week on Curtin's Cast, Kos Samaras and Nick Dyrenfurth sit down with Gerard Dwyer, National Secretary of the SDA — Australia’s largest private-sector union covering retail, fast food and warehouse workers and a proud John Curtin Research Centre Board member. From regional NSW, to the classroom and social work, and now the frontline of the labour movement, Gerard shares his journey, values, and vision — from the dignity of retail work and the scourge of workplace violence to the fight for fair pay for young workers, and why housing must be at the heart of Labor’s renewal. There’s even a yarn about his short-lived career as a jockey 🏇 This is a conversation about work, safety, and fairness but also about the enduring moral purpose of the labour movement in an era of economic insecurity and populist politics. 🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
🎙️ This week's Curtin's Cast delves into what one British political writer calls the Netflixisation of Politics. Nick Dyrenfurth & Kos Samaras dive into the end of the political pendulum: both major parties bleeding to their disruptor flanks, the rise of niche tribes, and how politics has become algorithmic entertainment — the voter as subscriber, not loyalist, from Reform UK and the Greens’ surge in Britain with Keir Starmer's Labour government assailed from right and left to similair Aussie trends. We also ask why do right-wing fear campaigns on crime and law and order still work outside the cities but flop inside them? And what does the recent and successful Albo–Trump meeting — and the Coalition’s hysteria over it — tell us about Australia’s underlying political psychology?
🎙️ Our guest today has lived the Australian story from the inside out. Born in Basra, Iraq, arriving to Australia as an asylum seeker aged nine including spending time in Villawood Detention Centre, and now a lawyer, chairperson and entrepreneur — Sam Almaliki’s journey is one of hope, hardship and renewal. From learning English behind fences to leading in business and community, Sam’s story captures the resilience and reinvention that define the Australian project. In this episode Nick and Kos yarn with Sam about:
🏠 Growing up in public housing & the power of aspiration
🏏 From Cricket Australia to navigating boardrooms
🤝 Migration, belonging & social cohesion
🎧 Listen to Curtin’s Cast with Sam Almaliki wherever you get your podcast goodies!
🎙️ New Curtin’s Cast episode! Kos and Nick dive into explosive new polling showing the combined major party primary vote at historic lows. The Liberals are haemorrhaging votes on their right flank while collapsing among Gen Z, millennials, women and CALD voters.
They unpack the immigration debate, the rise of Advance Australia and right-wing online grifters, and ask: who exactly is voting for One Nation in 2025? (Spoiler: not the people who matter in marginal swing seats). Plus: how the Greens’ extremist rhetoric around the Middle East is backfiring with mainstream progressives.
🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
🎧 New #CurtinsCast episode - Kos Samaras is back with Brisbane Lions tragic & premiership celebrator Nick Dyrenfurth to dissect the week in politics:
🇬🇧 The rise of alt-right & MAGA politics in the UK and Australia
🛠️ Andrew Hastie on migration, housing & slaying the neo-liberal dragon
⚠️ Wayne Swan’s warning to Labor on its shallow base in a time of electoral volatility… and much more besides.
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