Episodi

  • 441 - SA Death Festival The Key To Living Well
    Oct 11 2026
    A week before the third SA Death Festival at Centennial Park, Steve sits down with India Wallace and Catherine Ooi to ask what we’re really afraid of: being dead, or the business of dying? The answer reaches from a hospice companion who helped a woman set down a lifelong secret to the surprising power of a family saying, “You can leave. We’ll be okay.” There is no SA Drink of the Week this episode. The Musical Pilgrimage is a world premiere: “Cowards of Us All” by Steve Davis and The Virtualosos, inspired by Andrew Scott’s Almeida Theatre take on Hamlet’s soliloquy, a diagnosis that arrives out of the blue, and a moth that made it outside, if only briefly. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concisepage. Running Sheet: SA Death Festival The Key To Living Well 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week No SA Drink Of The Week this week. 00:03:28 Catherine Ooi and India Wallace Steve opens with Andrew Scott’s 2017 Hamlet for Almeida Theatre, then makes a confession. A few years ago he fainted in the middle of the night, hit his head hard enough to need stitches, and remembers only what he calls “perfect nothingness”, a strangely unfelt bliss. Set that beside Dante’s circles of hell, which he’s reading at the moment, and his question becomes sharp: is our fear about being dead, or about dying? Catherine Ooi chairs Pure Land Home Hospice, works on Malaysia’s national palliative care standards and is researching death anxiety for her PhD. She delivers a humbling finding: the field has no agreed definition of the fear it studies. Two people with identical diagnoses can have wildly different experiences of it. Her argument for a festival is that death touches everything, from existential questions to money, burial choices and relationships. Festivals, she says, exist for people to ask the right questions rather than receive neat answers. India Wallace co-founded the hospice and organises the festival. Her hospice “companions”, who are “not friends, but they’re friendly”, can hear what family members often can’t. One woman carried a massive secret for decades, and after confiding in her companion she felt lighter and went on to have what India calls a beautiful death. India also tells a personal story. Her sister, a committed atheist, became curious about Buddhism and began attending Theosophical Society talks after her husband died. India herself practises a daily exercise in impermanence on her farm driveway: that house won’t be there, that cow won’t be there, and neither will she. Steve brings in Camus, Ecclesiastes, Bronnie Ware’s regrets of the dying, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (his pick for the finest title in fiction), and a tangent about the farmer whose world Napoleon upends. Catherine seizes on the farmer. A diagnosis is the same earthquake, and the hospice response is “I’m here with you” rather than a script of answers. A man who loses his legs may find a new normal, and for someone near the end that might simply be a flower that bloomed in the garden today. The conversation turns to what people reach for at the end. India names forgiveness, including a Daw Park Hospice role-play that helped two sisters finally talk. Catherine’s most surprising observation is permission. Sometimes a dying person holds on because they can’t leave a family in fear and grief, until someone tells them they will be okay. She also gently refutes the idea that fear means a lack of acceptance: acceptance, she says, isn’t the absence of fear. They also cover death doulas (unregulated, so “buyer beware”), death literacy, and why more people would die at home if they felt supported. Finally, the festival itself. Between them they recommend Catherine’s death anxiety session, the impermanence meditation, the Pure Land Home Hospice session on dying at home, creative activities, a Peter Goldsworthy ...
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    1 ora e 25 min
  • 440 - Kangaroo Island News, Satire, and Frontier Journalism
    Sep 26 2026
    Somewhere in an Indonesian shipyard, a new ferry for Kangaroo Island went quiet for three weeks. Dan Clarke, former South Australian Journalist of the Year, double Kennedy Award winner and Walkley winner, arrives with breaking news: Ruwi is back on the tracking signal. From there we cover his start as a messenger at The Advertiser, his move to the island, and his running of Island Independent and the Kangaroo Island News and Satire page. We also talk about why a small community needs a fourth estate even when some readers find the jokes too negative. There’s no SA Drink of the Week in this episode. In the Musical Pilgrimage, Steve Davis and the Virtualosos answer satire with satire. Schrödinger’s Platypus takes a $4 million pledge to bring platypuses back to the River Torrens and asks whether they are in the river, not in the river, or just useful for a press release. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concisepage. Running Sheet: Kangaroo Island News, Satire, and Frontier Journalism 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week No SA Drink Of The Week this week. 00:03:50 Daniel Clarke Daniel Clarke first came to Kangaroo Island as a boy on family summer holidays at American River. He returned years later with his partner, who had never visited before. She fell for it straight away, and with two young children they decided it was the place to raise a family. He expected freelance work to be scarce. Instead, he says the island has given him the best stories of his career, one after another. His path into journalism started with storm-chasing videos and the Clarke and Dawe segments on the 7.30 Report. He missed out on the university course and got a cadetship at The Advertiser, starting as a messenger. He describes that job, fondly, as the lowest rung in the building: making coffee, handing out faxes, collecting an editor’s dry cleaning, and once buying a cabbage for an editor. On night shifts, the sub-editors began testing him with headline suggestions. He still remembers seeing his “human shields” line in print the next morning, from a story that tied John Howard to the Iraq War protesters. Steve compares Dan to A.W. Merrick in Deadwood, the newspaperman who hauls a printing press into a gold-rush camp and learns the local power brokers push back. Dan knows the comparison well. He has lost friendships over his stories and still sees those people in the checkout line. But he insists he isn’t looking for conflict. His aim is simple: to make the island “a better place and an easier place for people to live.” Then we come to satire. After one reader called his posts “misinformation dressed up as satire,” Dan posted a reminder about what satire is for, with a photo of Valerie, the famous missing sausage dog from his Australian Story documentary. His census parody neatly sums up island debate: islanders want visitors, but not too many visitors, and want cheaper ferries, but not so cheap that more visitors come. He says the piece simply repeats what he hears every day. Another post, about a large branch hanging over a bridge at Cygnet River, shows how absurd the jurisdiction problem can be: the tree stands on council land and the branch hangs over a state government road, so a year later it is still there. Dan argues that satire is “almost the softest way of getting a message across,” and that governments dislike embarrassment enough to act on it. The SeaLink saga is the story Dan would most like to stop writing. The new ferries are more than two years late. The contract, signed under a Liberal government, apparently doesn’t even allow a fine. Almost 30-year-old vessels carry around a quarter of a million sheep off the island each year, and a planned three-day shutdown for ramp works lands in the middle of the sheep-moving season. Earlier cancellations have already cost small tourism businesses thousands of dollars. Steve ...
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    1 ora e 12 min
  • 439 - Lady Marie Galway And Her Husband's Pipe
    Sep 12 2026
    She was a Bavarian baroness, a childhood playmate of Bavarian royalty, fluent in seven languages, and widowed with two children by her early twenties. Somehow she ended up, more than a decade later, presiding over Government House in Adelaide for the entirety of the First World War, married to a man a historian later called the most pernicious governor South Australia ever had. In episode 439, Susan Neuhaus, author of A Woman in a Thousand: Lady Marie Galway, South Australia, and the Great War, sits down with fellow author Lainie Anderson at the Mortlock Library launch to unpack a story that folds together German suspicion, Catholic prejudice, secret concentration camps, peacock-hunting governors and a genuinely radical stand for equal pay. Paul Burnett, the man behind Galway Pipe’s fortified wines, joins Steve Davis to pour the rare 25-year-old tawny that carries Sir Henry Galway’s name, for the South Australian Drink of the Week. Steve rounds out the episode with the Musical Pilgrimage, previewing his own composition And Drink to Us, a modern-day Greek folk song imagining an uprising against a tyrant laying waste to a beloved town, inspired partly by Lady Marie’s story and partly by Steve’s own frustrations with short-termism in South Australian leadership. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concisepage. Running Sheet: Lady Marie Galway And Her Husband’s Pipe 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:05:37 SA Drink Of The Week Steve Davis welcomed regular guest Paul Burnett, who steers the fortified wine program behind Galway Pipe, to pour a genuine rarity: the 25-year-old Rare Tawny, presented in a gift box dripping with the kind of heraldic livery Sir Henry Galway himself would have approved of. Burnett explained that a “pipe” is simply a large barrel, roughly 500 litres, which Sir Henry would personally select to serve visiting dignitaries at Government House. Fittingly, Burnett’s own team once repeated the ritual for a modern-day governor, presenting six base tawnies to Government House and letting the current occupants choose their favourite for a bespoke blend. Tasting notes ran from cathedral organ tones and rancio to fruitcake, nutmeg and dried orange peel, with Steve reaching for an unlikely comparison: a luxury car’s suspension, so smooth and integrated you barely notice the road beneath you. At roughly $100 a bottle and 18.5 per cent alcohol, Burnett’s advice was blunt: don’t save it for a special occasion, because opening it is the special occasion, since all the ageing has already been done. Refrigerate after opening, he suggested, and gather six or seven friends, because at 7.3 standard drinks a bottle, this is one built for sharing rather than saving. 00:25:30 Susan Neuhaus and Lainie Anderson Lady Marie Galway arrived in Adelaide in April 1914 as the new governor’s wife, greeted with what Susan Neuhaus called a celebrity welcome: Outer Harbor decked in flags, bands playing, crowds packing the town hall for a glimpse of her and Sir Henry. Lainie Anderson put it more bluntly on the night: they arrived like the Beatles of their day. Nobody in that crowd could have known that within four months the world would be at war, and that this elegant, seven-language-speaking baroness, half Bavarian, half Anglo-Irish, and a practising Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant colony, would spend the next four years quietly running the state’s entire volunteer war effort out of the stables at Government House. The contrast with her husband could not have been starker. Sir Henry Galway, twenty years her senior and a career colonial administrator, married Marie in England in August 1913, and it was only a week after the wedding that the announcement came that he was to be South Australia’s seventeenth governor. Neuhaus is clear that this was, by all accounts, an arranged marriage, though she admits she isn’t certain why....
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    1 ora e 22 min
  • 438 - Is Peter Malinauskas A Liberal Party Asset?
    Aug 22 2026
    Steve Davis surprised himself this week by liking not one but two posts from South Australian Liberal politicians, so he called in long-time political commentator Robert Godden and geopolitics expert David Olney to ask a pointed question: is Peter Malinauskas becoming the Liberal Party’s secret weapon, not by helping them, but by driving his own supporters into their arms? The verdict: Jack Batty and Ashton Hurn are operating like grown-ups in a party otherwise described as riddled with “decrepit fossils and weird cultists,” and the conversation turns to whether Malinauskas’s drift from consensus premier to contentious premier is manufacturing the very opening they need, while the Liberals themselves remain too fractured to properly capitalise on it. From there the trio put South Australia’s Health Minister through the wringer, running his saccharine response to a horror day of ambulance ramping through The Adelaide Show’s free Spin Detector tool, which diagnoses the reply as “flooding the zone with warmth” while the union’s four specific claims quietly leave the room. This episode did not include an SA Drink of the Week segment. The conversation closes on the value, or otherwise, of protest, with Robert and David comparing Sunday’s planned Stop the Chop march to the Vietnam moratorium marches and the Arab Spring, before Steve rounds out the episode with the Musical Pilgrimage: his own new ska track, For Pete’s Sake, a “streetwise, maybe slightly embittered” take on politicians who set sail from the people who elected them. No SA Drink Of The Week this week. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concisepage. Running Sheet: Is Peter Malinauskas A Liberal Party Asset? 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week. 00:04:53 Robert Godden and David Olney Is Peter Malinauskas, without meaning to, building the Liberal Party’s next asset? That’s the question Steve Davis put to Robert Godden and David Olney after finding himself, against every instinct, liking videos from Bragg MP Jack Batty and Opposition Leader Ashton Hurn. Godden’s answer arrived with a caveat wrapped in a compliment: “it would have to be said that Ashton Hirne and Jack Batty have only a vague resemblance to the entire rest of the Liberal Party.” He rates them as two capable, switched-on operators surrounded by what he bluntly called “decrepit fossils and weird cultists” — but he’s blunt about where any Liberal opportunity is actually coming from. Asked whether there’s now something for the Liberals to seize, Godden pushed back hard on the framing: “I don’t agree with that… They’re riven with division,” pointing to a 40,000-signature petition against the premier as evidence that discontent is building on Labor’s own side of the ledger, not because of anything the Liberals have done. David Olney sharpened that point into a broader theory about how governing parties eventually lose the benefit of the doubt. “At a certain point, the ideology smells like five-day-old fish,” he said, and once a party in power starts breaking things badly enough, voters go looking for competent alternatives regardless of their politics. In this reading, Batty and Hurn aren’t succeeding because the Liberals have fixed themselves — they’re succeeding because Malinauskas’s own missteps are softening up his supporters and making them receptive to a Liberal alternative for the first time in years. Godden underlined how fragile even that is, noting a federal example where a promising, competent candidate “lasted six months before the rabble that has no chance of winning decided that they’d rather destroy it for themselves than destroy her.” The pair also dismantled the comfortable idea that Labor’s 41 per cent polling represents genuine popularity. As Godden put it, “if a 39, ...
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    52 min
  • 437 - The Great AI Climate Debate
    Jul 31 2026
    Adelaide Climate Action Week co-founder Mark Rowland joins Steve to unpack The Great AI Climate Debate, the Oxford-style contest his organisation staged this week between the “carbon glutton” and “silicon saviour” camps. Rather than settling for headline alarm about data centres guzzling power like mid-sized nations, Mark walks through the nuance: how much of that energy use is genuinely AI rather than general cloud computing, why the time horizon people use to judge AI shapes their verdict, and how concepts like the Jevons paradox and the “time value of carbon” complicate any tidy answer. He leaves listeners with a practical, human-scaled way to think about their own digital footprint. Renmark’s 23rd Street Distillery supplies the South Australian Drink of the Week, and it’s a genuine coup: their single malt has just been named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, outscoring Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal. Head distiller Paul Burnett returns to the show to talk peat, oak and the fine art of finishing a whiskey in casks that once held tawny, muscat and Tokay. The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode on a reflective note, with Steve premiering his own composition, Higher Legacy, written for two Adelaide City Council gardeners whose combined century of service tending the city’s parks and squares is honoured on a plaque in Rymill Park — and for everyone, past and present, quietly building something worth protecting. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concisepage. Running Sheet: The Great AI Climate Debate 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:04:00 SA Drink Of The Week There SA Drink Of The Week this week is 23rd Street Distillery Australian Single Malt Whisky. Steve opens with a pop quiz: name a South Australian product that just outscored Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal at a fraction of the price. It’s whiskey, specifically Renmark’s 23rd Street Distillery, freshly named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, with their single malt scoring 96 points against entries from 39 countries. Head distiller Paul Burnett, returning for another visit, credits the win to restraint rather than showmanship: a low-level peat profile, around half a percent in the finished blend, used as what he calls a “complexing agent,” paired with an unusually wide range of cask finishes, from first-fill bourbon barrels to old tawny, muscat and Tokay casks. Steve, tasting alongside him, works through notes of honeyed fruit, fig, all-spice and a citrus edge that shifts as the glass warms in his hand, while Paul walks through the distinction between “heads, hearts and tails” in distillation and how the team’s small-batch, six-way finishing blend has quietly shifted in proportion release after release. The pair also compare notes on serving it right: a proper tulip glass, a touch of water, room temperature rather than ice, and, in Paul’s case, a slice of chocolate or nuts alongside it. Steve, for his part, admits an evening spent testing whiskey sours and old fashioneds the night before only confirmed his preference for drinking it neat. 00:35:20 Mark Rowland and Adelaide Climate Action Week Steve opens by declaring his hand: he uses AI daily for work, has solar and a battery, drives an EV, and admits the more he learns about what sits behind that lifestyle, the less smug he gets to feel about it. It’s a fitting frame for a conversation built around nuance rather than tribal certainty. Mark explains why Adelaide Climate Action Week chose an actual Oxford-style debate over a polite panel discussion, tapping into people’s competitive instincts to get them to actually take a position rather than scroll through it. The audience voted before and after: undecided voters dropped from 24% to single ...
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    1 ora e 38 min
  • 436 - Rag-Tag Extremists
    Jul 18 2026
    If you’ve ever felt that nagging sense that the South Australia you were promised at the ballot box isn’t quite the one being delivered, this episode is for you. Stewart Sweeney arrived in Adelaide in 1975 to work inside the Dunstan government’s industrial democracy unit, and fifty years later he’s applying that same insider’s eye to a premier he believes is running the tobacco industry’s old doubt-sowing playbook against the citizens fighting to save the Park Lands. It’s a long, unhurried conversation – fitting, Steve notes, for an episode built around a Negroni “made to be sipped slowly and savoured.” On that note, before the main event, in the SA Drink Of The Week, Alexis and Tina Cattley – the show’s resident cocktail authorities – put Never Never’s Panettone Negroni through its paces, fresh off its win as World’s Best Contemporary Cocktail at the 2026 World Drink Awards in London. And in the Musical Pilgrimage, Adelaide music legend John Schumann returns with the Vagabond Crew to perform and unpack “Rag-tag Extremist Blues,” the song born directly from Malinauskas’ now-infamous put-down of Park Lands protesters. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concisepage. Running Sheet: Rag-Tag Extremists 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:04:32 SA Drink Of The Week There SA Drink Of The Week this week is Never Never Panettone Negroni. Steve, self-declared “Negroni newbie,” calls in reinforcements for this one: returning cocktail experts Alexis and Tina Cattley, last on the show refereeing a Crows-versus-Power gin showdown. They start with a reference Negroni built by Alexis from Never Never triple juniper gin, a Ruby Bitter in place of Campari, and a small-batch Rosso vermouth from David Franz, north of Adelaide – a drink Steve describes as landing “like a cloud-like pillow,” with a gentle bitter-orange finish. Tina, a self-described “Negroni naysayer” put off by Campari’s bitterness, finds herself won over by how the flavours linger and play off one another. Then comes the star of the segment: Never Never’s bottled Panettone Negroni, fresh from being crowned World’s Best Contemporary Cocktail at the 2026 World Drink Awards in London, and born behind the bar of the brand’s McLaren Vale distillery door before going nationwide. Built from triple juniper gin, a bitter citrus aperitif, sweet vermouth, aged muscat, orange liqueur, rye distillate and vanilla bean, it lands as something else entirely – “IMAX Christmas cake inside my mouth,” in Steve’s words. Alexis reckons it’s the perfect entry point for Negroni sceptics and a ready-made Christmas gift (buy two bottles, he warns – one won’t survive the wait), while Tina, newly vindicated in her Campari aversion, likens it to a sherry or port with all the spiced-cake flavour of the season, minus the traditional Negroni’s lingering bitterness. 00:18:51 Stewart Sweeney Stewart Sweeney has spent fifty years watching power slip loose from democratic control, and he’s watched a lot of it from the inside. In January 1978 he was working inside the Premier’s department when Don Dunstan sacked his own police commissioner over the Salisbury affair – a decision a Royal Commission later vindicated. Nearly fifty years on, Steve posits that the shoe is now on the other foot: where Dunstan acted because he felt deceived by an official, he contends today’s citizens are the ones being deceived, by a premier “savaging our Parklands for a golf tournament and a motorcycle race.” Sweeney’s own arrival in South Australia is a story in itself. A Glaswegian socialist who’d been coaching tennis in upstate New York and found himself unexpectedly unemployed back in Scotland, he stumbled into a tutoring job at the University of Tasmania, landed – almost by accident – in the middle of the Lake Pedder fight, and was introduced to the Democratic ...
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    2 ore e 12 min
  • 435 - The Adelaide Show Spin Detector
    Jun 27 2026
    If last episode cracked open the lid on South Australian politics, this one peers inside the engine. Steve Davis reunites with international relations analyst David Olney, and is joined by long-time Adelaide Show political commentator Robert Godden for a compact but chewy conversation about why our democratic system reliably produces a certain kind of politician, and what, if anything, citizens can actually do about it. The SA Drink of the Week does not feature in this episode. The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode with something deeply personal: Steve’s original song, Goodnight Don, a Brechtian cabaret-styled tribute to Don Dunstan that names Steele Hall as an unlikely hero of South Australian progress; a fitting coda to an episode about leaders who felt compelled, rather than merely ambitious, to change the world. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concisepage. Running Sheet: The Adelaide Show Spin Detector 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week. 00:02:00 David Olney and Steve Davis David Olney’s opening thesis sets the frame: stop blaming the individual politician and look at the system that produced them. Political parties absorb people at eighteen. By their mid-thirties, the successful ones know the rules, know who to listen to, and know how to sell the message. Whatever they were before they entered that pipeline is largely beside the point. Party discipline does the rest. Robert Godden comes at it from economics, or more precisely from the widespread misunderstanding of it. Almost every political party fails to grasp that incentivisation and punishment change behaviour, which is why the same voters who accept cigarette taxes as behaviour-modification tools will simultaneously insist that everything else they disapprove of should be dealt with outside the law. Godden’s observation that he would personally outlaw religion and instant coffee, while conceding not everyone shares his distress about either, is the episode’s warmest moment in a conversation that doesn’t have many warm ones. The thread tying both arguments together is shame. For hundreds of years, Godden argues, the one reliable corrective available to citizens was the ability to shame politicians into doing the right thing. That rulebook got torn up in 2016. Steve says “because of Trump.” Godden confirms it. Two words and the subject is closed. After Godden departs, the conversation turns to what collective action actually looks like when the system is this good at absorbing or deflecting pressure. Steve raises Possum Park as an example of the government’s capacity to flood the zone, announcing Gather Round to push the other issue off the front page. Olney draws on Ted Robert Gurr’s theory of relative deprivation: collective action only rebuilds when enough people believe both that things should be better and that they are in fact getting worse. We are only just entering that zone. The grassroots energy Steve is seeing is not wishful thinking; it is the early stage of the only mechanism that has ever produced real political change. Barbara Pocock closes the argument. She is Olney’s model of the kind of leader collective action eventually produces: not someone who wanted to rule the world, but someone who looked at the state of things and felt she could no longer sit and do nothing. The contrast with the party-machine pathway, Malinauskas entering politics through the party room before he ever held a seat, Ashton Hurn as Marshall’s comms manager before pre-selection, is left to speak for itself. The Spin Detector Steve has built a tool, available on The Adelaide Show website, inspired by Ed Coper’s Angertainment and a good deal of additional thinking. You paste in a social media post and its comments. You choose whether you want a draft reply or simply an analysis of what rhetorical move ...
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    42 min
  • 434 - Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction
    Jun 12 2026
    This is not a typical Adelaide Show episode. For the first time in 434 instalments, Steve Davis opens by confessing he’s not sure how many more episodes there will be because something has broken in him. Not in South Australia’s people, whom he loves unreservedly, but in his trust of the state’s governance. What follows is one of the most honest conversations the show has ever hosted. There is no SA Drink of the Week this episode. The mood didn’t call for it. In the Musical Pilgrimage, Steve closes with Australia Day by Steve Davis & The Virtuosos, a song whose thesis turns out to be the quiet heart of everything discussed: that we’ve retreated into our selfish dwellings, stopped sticking our arms over the fence to say hello, and in doing so have left ourselves vulnerable to exactly the kind of politics this episode is about. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concisepage. Running Sheet: Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week. 00:03:15 David Olney and Steve Davis Steve opens by describing where he is: not disconnected from South Australia’s people, but from its governance. He says he is earnestly worried, and that there is no performative aspect to the episode. To stress-test his thinking and provide context, he has invited back David Olney, whose academic background covers history, international politics, international security, and complex problem-solving. David notes that colleagues once told him he thought more like a psychologist or neurologist than a political scientist, always searching for the human motivation beneath structural problems. David introduces the work of political theorist Ted Robert Gurr, who studied the conditions preceding revolution across different periods of history. Gurr found two sequential thresholds: first, when people stop believing things will get better; and second, when they become convinced things are actively getting worse. Steve places himself at Gurr’s second threshold, citing the government’s handling of the algal bloom, a secret tower deal at peppercorn rent, tree clearing in the Park Lands for a golf event, and the prospect of further clearing for a motorcycle race. His concern is not with the events or sports themselves but with the irreversible damage to trees that Tourism SA uses to represent Adelaide. Two further things have deepened Steve’s despair. The first is what he reads as a coordinated flood of upbeat ministerial social media videos that do not address the Park Lands issue at all. He sees it as a tactic borrowed from Trump’s playbook. The second is the government’s launch of a media literacy tool to help students decode messaging, at the same time as the government itself, in Steve’s view, avoids transparency, attacks critics personally rather than engaging with their arguments, and operates through private deals. David draws on Rebecca Costa’s book The Watchman’s Rattle to frame this: Costa observed that as civilisations struggle to deal with significant problems, political attention shifts to small and peripheral ones. David’s illustration from literature is the war in Gulliver’s Travels fought over which end of a boiled egg to crack. Steve recommends the book Angertainment by Ed Koper as a guide to recognising this pattern. He uses Koper’s framing to contrast two dystopian visions: Orwell’s 1984, where repression at least provokes resistance, and Huxley’s Brave New World, where a population entertained into passivity never finds cause to push back. David agrees that Huxley’s version is the more troubling of the two. David then explains neoliberalism at Steve’s request: the economic model adopted across the English-speaking world in the early 1980s under Thatcher, Reagan, and Hawke, which replaced mixed ...
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    56 min