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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 Labor Party within his first week in the country by his next-door neighbour, a young Gerard Henderson. From there it was a short hop to Adelaide and Don Dunstan’s Unit for Industrial Democracy, where Sweeney worked alongside economist Phil Bentley on an initiative to bring worker participation into South Australian workplaces – and where, as a footnote that says a great deal about how political communication has evolved, a young Mike Rann landed his very first Adelaide job doing media for the unit. Steve puts it to Sweeney that this early media training was the first real sign of rot in the system – the moment premiers became unreachable, hiding behind stage-managed doorstops instead of being interviewed. Sweeney doesn’t fully disagree, though he tempers it: whatever else came of it, Rann’s genuine gift was for writing speeches fast and communicating big-picture ideas clearly, “sort of decades before AI.” The conversation’s sharpest edge comes when Steve puts the government’s own numbers to Sweeney: the premier’s claim that only 585 of the Park Lands’ roughly 9,000 trees are affected by the disputed golf and motorsport development, against Park Lands management’s markedly different tally. Sweeney names the mechanism he believes is at work – the doubt strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry against the medical evidence on smoking. You don’t need to win the argument, he explains – you just need to plant enough doubt to keep people from acting on their convictions. Layer social media on top of that old tobacco-industry trick, he argues, and doubt becomes exponentially more powerful. Steve adds a live example of his own: an anti-protester Facebook page mocking demonstrators as “NIMBYs,” liked by the premier and half his ministry, that nobody in Labor will admit to running. None of this is abstract history for Sweeney – he’s a park guardian for Park 11 North, and he brings real texture to what’s actually at stake. He unpacks his argument that Adelaide’s Park Lands and squares are treated as “available” land rather than civic inheritance – fenced off for events for weeks at a time, repeatedly re-turfed and re-fenced in what he calls an annual cycle of “fence, event, repair” – and traces the intellectual lineage of the neoliberal thinking now driving those decisions back to a 1949 gathering in Switzerland convened by Friedrich Hayek. He also charts how a shrinking, disciplined leadership pipeline – what he only half-jokingly calls “Farrellism,” after Senator Don Farrell – has narrowed South Australian Labor’s internal debate at exactly the moment its base is most restless, evidenced by the wave of Adelaide residents telling him online, in effect, “I loved Peter Malinauskas, but now I hate Peter Malinauskas.” Sweeney closes on a note that’s more hopeful than the rest of the conversation might suggest. Reaching for the “world systems” thinking that has shaped his outlook for three decades, he reminds listeners that empires, ideologies and premierships all eventually give way to something else – pointing to the radical London reformers who dreamed up the idea of Adelaide in the first place, and to public servant Wainwright, whose ideas quietly transformed the Playford-era economy, as proof that a handful of good ideas, patiently pursued, can still redirect a small regional economy like ours. Further articles by Stewart Sweeney Manufacturing Doubt: Peter Malinauskas’s Political Weapon Think “outside the fence” Power without power: Is Farrellism Labor’s solution or its problem? Productivity is the symptom. Rentier capitalism is the disease 01:45:23 Musical Pilgrimage In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Rag-Tag Extremist Blues by John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew. The episode closes with John Schumann and the Vagabond Crew performing “Rag-Tag Extremist Blues” – a song that exists purely because Peter Malinauskas dismissed Park Lands protesters with that exact phrase. Schumann, a good deal more measured these days than in his fiery Redgum years, tells Steve he “grabbed it and expanded on it,” deliberately framing his cast of extremists as ordinary South Australians: a retired teacher, a war veteran, taxpaying citizens who’ve never broken a rule in their lives. He’s candid that his fear is less about the golf course – “that boat’s sailed” – and more about the MotoGP development still to come, and about a public whose attention span, he admits, will inevitably wane long before the next election. Streaming and download proceeds go directly to the Adelaide Park Lands Association, and the band will donate part of every ticket sold for their show at The Gov on 29 August to the same cause. Link to all things John Schumann including links to upcoming shows and musicSupport the show: https://theadelaideshow.com.au/listen-or-download-the-podcast/adelaide-in-crowd/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Expect intelligent conversations on the big issues as Professor David Flint urges Australians to take back their country. Watch ‘Save the Nation' live and on demand at ADH TV, Tuesdays & Thursdays 9pm AEST. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the first Pubic House Forum episode of the The 9pm Edict since 2018, I was joined by Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Cathy Wilcox and satirist Mark Humphries at Sydney's Royal Exhibition Hotel in Surry Hills with an enthusiastic live audience.There's also a video version of this episode on YouTube.In this episode we begin with our audience rating Anthony Albanese's first year as prime minister on a scale of 1 to 5, and end by getting ChatGPT to ask the questions. They were terrible.We also talk about the late Barry Humphries (no relation to Mark, he claims), Elon Musk and Twitter and SpaceX, so-called "firming strategies", the Doug Anthony All Stars, Doug Anthony, Alan Seale, car parking considered as a superpower, Kyle Sandilands, Gerard Henderson (briefly), how many ducks you'd need to form a herd, and Farmer's Union Iced Coffee.Full podcast details and credits at:https://the9pmedict.com/edict/00197/Please support this podcast by throwing a few dollars into the tip jar at:https://the9pmedict.com/tip/https://skank.com.au/subscribe/Another Public House Forum episode is scheduled for 27 May 2023. Stay tuned.
Author and political commentator Gerard Henderson joins Jonathan for a conversation about B.A. Santamaria and the seminal political moments in Australia history that he was involved in. Drawing on his personal recollections of knowing and working with Santamaria, as well as the three books he has written on this "most unusual man," Gerard tells the story of communist influence in the trade union movement and Santamaria's efforts to combat it through "The Movement," the Labor Party split and Labor Party leader Bert Evatt's efforts to lay the blame at the feet of Santamaria and Victoria's catholics, the creation of the Democratic Labor Party, as well as the role of Archbishop Daniel Mannix and Santamaria as tribal Catholic leaders in an age of anti-Catholic sectarianism. Gerard Henderson is an author, columnist and political commentator. He is Executive Director of The Sydney Institute, a privately funded Australian current affairs forum, and author of Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man. The Political Animals is hosted by Dr Jonathan Cole, an academic, writer, speaker and translator specialising in political theology: the intersection of religion and politics. Jonathan was a senior terrorism analyst at Australian intelligence agency the Office of National Assessments where he worked on Islamist terrorism and the global jihadist movement. He is the author of The Reign of God: A Critical Engagement with Oliver O'Donovan's Theology of Political Authority and Christian Political Theology in an Age of Discontent: Mediating Scripture, Doctrine, and Political Reality. Jonathan posts regularly about political theology, political philosophy and conservatism on Facebook and Twitter.
The war on Christians, including Gerard Henderson on the framing of Cardinal George Pell.
Leftists surprised conservatives have feelings, PLUS, Gerard Henderson on the Pell witch hunt, and media double standards See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We're joined by James Clark of the Tomorrow Movement to discuss Joel Fitzgibbon and why he's on the side of fossil fuel billionaires, not the workers he claims to represent. Labor Platform The Labor party are holding the Special Platform Conference on the 30-31st March 2021. Labor takes lots of money from the fossil fuel industry. Fire Joel Fitzgibbon Joel Fitzgibbon’s brother Mark is the head of health insurer NIB, and in 2009 used Joel’s ministerial office to lobby the ADF to buy insurance. Mark Fitzgibbon has also lobbied for the scrapping of Medicare, and allowing private insurers access to medical records. Joel Fitzgibbon was a key figure in destabilising Julia Gillard’s leadership. He also believes someone earning $250,000 a year isn’t wealthy. During the 2019 bushfires in Australia, Fitzgibbon met with Matt Canavan and the CEO of the World Coal Association, then wrote an Op Ed saying people shouldn’t be upset at him because there’s a crisis on. Fitzgibbon has joined Craig Kelly’s “friends of coal” group. Joel Fitzgibbon formed the conservative Labor OTIS group, and lobbied for Labor to drop climate targets from their platform. He also attended a cocktail party with BHP, Chevron, Coal21, ENI and Exxon. Brain-worm host Gerard Henderson wrote a conservative media “Watch Dog” blog in the voice of his dog for the Sydney Institute. Joel Fitzgibbon thinks that Labor party should take cues from the Liberals and John Howard. Actions Sign the petition to kick Joel Fitzgibbon out. Visit the Tomorrow Movement website and follow @tomorrowmvmt to keep up with their campaigns.
Last year, Scott Morrison announced that the government had “resolved … to form a national cabinet to deal with the national response to the coronavirus”. Gerard Henderson, Author, Columnist, Political Commentator & Executive Director of the Sydney Institute, joins Michael to discuss his latest opinion piece where he writes the ‘real story about Australia’s national cabinet is that no such constitutional entity exists.’ ‘Australia does not have a national cabinet today and it never has had a national government in the past.’ (Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch Dog blog can be found at theaustralian.com.au See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Looking back at the shock election result, Gerard Henderson says it's no wonder the media got it so wrong. Despite the forecast by the academics, the polls and the pundits, there is no substitute for 'staying in touch' with the voting public. Will May 18 go down as the most dramatic failure of political prediction? Gerard Henderson, author, columnist for The Australian and executive director of the Sydney Institute. WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT 70 years after the establishment of NATO, the threat that justified its creation has long gone. Wasn't the expansion that started 20 years ago, a dangerous idea?
Looking back at the shock election result, Gerard Henderson says it's no wonder the media got it so wrong. Despite the forecast by the academics, the polls and the pundits, there is no substitute for 'staying in touch' with the voting public. Will May 18 go down as the most dramatic failure of political prediction? Gerard Henderson, author, columnist for The Australian and executive director of the Sydney Institute. WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT 70 years after the establishment of NATO, the threat that justified its creation has long gone. Wasn't the expansion that started 20 years ago, a dangerous idea?
Islamic State mastermind Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead. Now what? After five years of his Sunni jihadist movement's caliphate across parts of Syria and Iraq, and widespread barbarism, video-recorded beheadings, mass executions and the enslavement and raping of women, what should we expect? Will the jihadists bounce back? Jessica Stern, research professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and co-author of ISIS: The State of Terror. Also Recently the Liberal Party of Australia celebrated its 75 year anniversary. Two thirds of this time was spent in federal power. Historians Gerard Henderson and Troy Bramston look back at 'Menzie's Child': the good, the bad and the ugly. Gerard Henderson, former chief of staff to Liberal leader John Howard, now executive director of the Sydney Institute and author of Menzies Child: the Liberal Party of Australia, 1944 - 1994 Troy Bramston, former speech writer to Labor leader Kevin Rudd, now a senior columnist with The Australian and author of Robert Menzies: The art of politics.
Islamic State mastermind Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead. Now what? After five years of his Sunni jihadist movement's caliphate across parts of Syria and Iraq, and widespread barbarism, video-recorded beheadings, mass executions and the enslavement and raping of women, what should we expect? Will the jihadists bounce back? Jessica Stern, research professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and co-author of ISIS: The State of Terror. Also Recently the Liberal Party of Australia celebrated its 75 year anniversary. Two thirds of this time was spent in federal power. Historians Gerard Henderson and Troy Bramston look back at 'Menzie's Child': the good, the bad and the ugly. Gerard Henderson, former chief of staff to Liberal leader John Howard, now executive director of the Sydney Institute and author of Menzies Child: the Liberal Party of Australia, 1944 - 1994 Troy Bramston, former speech writer to Labor leader Kevin Rudd, now a senior columnist with The Australian and author of Robert Menzies: The art of politics.
Gerard Henderson says despite the forecast by the academics, the polls and the pundits, there is no substitute for 'staying in touch' with the voting public. Also, 70 years after the establishment of NATO the threat that justified its creation has long gone. With the benefit of hindsight, wasn't the increased numbers of member states a dangerous idea?
Gerard Henderson says despite the forecast by the academics, the polls and the pundits, there is no substitute for 'staying in touch' with the voting public. Also, 70 years after the establishment of NATO the threat that justified its creation has long gone. With the benefit of hindsight, wasn't the increased numbers of member states a dangerous idea?
On this episode of the Bolt report Andrew speaks to Professor Jason Bainbridge about the life and times of comic book genius Stan Lee PLUS Newswatch with Gerard Henderson and our Political panel Andrew Hastie and Kimberley Kitching. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.