Inside Story

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Brian McFarlane talks to Peter Clarke about a lifetime at the movies.Interview originally appeared on the Inside Story web site, 23 December 2010.

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.

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.

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.

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.