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When Donald Trump took the stage to claim victory in Palm Beach, Florida, he was joined by a football team sized contingent of family and friends, including the chief executive of the Ultimate Fight Championship, Dana White. White, who has admitted to assaulting his wife, took the mic to thank some people he regarded as crucial to delivering his friend Donald Trump the presidency. They included on...

It is more or less impossible to imagine Australian literature of the past half century without Tim Winton. From his debut, An Open Swimmer to his epic Cloudstreet , the four-time Miles Franklin Award winner is beloved by generations of readers. On this special episode of Read This , host Michael Williams sits down with Tim to discuss his latest novel, Juice , a gripping tale of determination, sur...

After the Country Liberal Party came into power in the Northern Territory, they scrapped a number of key portfolios. Among them was the climate change portfolio, with responsibility for the environment now sitting under lands and planning. It indicates the NT government is prioritising the economy, in particular big development projects. And now, according to a leaked consultation paper, the NT go...

As the US election began to rapidly slip away from Kamala Harris, it became clear that the presidential candidate wasn’t going to speak at her election night rally in Washington D.C. That’s when people started slipping out of the event, including Dr Emma Shortis. Donald Trump is projected to win not just the presidency, but also the popular vote. Today, senior researcher at The Australia Institute...

On the eve of the American election, polls say Harris and Trump are neck and neck. Of course, Donald Trump says that’s not true. It’s nothing new for the former president to deny facts. What is new is the way America’s biggest cable news network is handling it: Fox News has started cutting away from rallies when Trump lies. The network’s support of the big lie – that the 2020 election was stolen f...

One of the first things David Crisafulli did when he became premier of Queensland was order the state’s Truth-telling inquiry to stop immediately. The Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, which launched earlier this year, was examining the impacts of colonisation on First Nations people. Work was underway, with witnesses already having testified about racial discrimination and abuse.  The premier ga...

The prime minister’s relationship with former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, and whether he likes a free upgrade, has been the talk of Canberra, prompted by the publication of a new book called The Chairman’s Lounge . Speculation about what the book would reveal had been swirling for months, and it was widely known in political circles that some of it would be bad for the prime minister. But when the book...

In just three books Robbie Arnott has established himself as a writer to trust. Flames (2018), The Rain Heron (2022) and Limberlost (2022) were all rapturously reviewed and garnered a hefty swag of award nominations and wins. On this episode of Read This , Michael Williams sits down with Robbie to discuss his new novel, Dusk , which explores loss, redemption, and survival in Tasmania’s high countr...

On a street in downtown Beirut there’s a five-storey building – a derelict hotel. It was empty for years, until recently, when hundreds of displaced people started arriving. Their experience of fleeing southern Beirut to find safety in the city’s busy neighbourhoods is being repeated across Lebanon right now as Israel’s bombardments continue. There has been a massive effort to help shelter the one...

When the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme handed down its findings, the commissioner in charge went to great lengths to refer six individuals to the National Anti-Corruption Commission for investigation. What followed outraged many, particularly the victims of the scheme: The NACC announced that it would not act on the referrals. That decision generated so many complaints that it has sinc...

In a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, just over a week from the election, Donald Trump took to the stage with a vision for the first day of his presidency. Trump is promising to deport more than 11 million people if he wins, making it “the largest deportation program in American history”. Immigration has been one of the most pressing and divisive issues of the presidential race, with fe...

When West Australian mining billionaire Chris Ellison was accused of a decade of tax evasion, his lawyers responded by trying to cut a deal with the Australian Taxation Office.  The terms of that deal included an 80 per cent reduction in the penalty payable and an assurance that his conduct wouldn’t be referred to police or the corporate watchdog.  The reason that Ellison, managing director of the...

When Elon Musk took the stage at a pro-Trump rally in Pennsylvania to announce he would start giving a million dollars a day to randomly chosen people who had signed an online petition, it begged the question, is this legal? To win, people had to be registered to vote in one of the seven key battleground states and have signed the petition saying they support the First and Second Amendments, which...

Melanie Cheng began her writing career as an author of short stories. Her first collection, Australia Day, was published in 2017 to much acclaim. Her second novel, The Burrow, follows a Melbourne family forced to confront the tragedy of their shared past. On this episode of Read This , Michael sits down for a conversation with Melanie about family, connection, and the power of narrative medicine....

King Charles’ first visit to Australia as monarch laid bare a lot of unfinished business. Moments after the king sat down following an address to the Great Hall in Parliament House, independent Senator Lidia Thorpe was escorted out after shouting “you are not our king” and “this is not your land”. It didn’t just bring home the fact that, despite a failed referendum in 1999, the Australian republic...

The fight over abortion in Queensland had seemed settled. It was decriminalised in 2018 and has since attained wide public support. But with Katter’s Australian Party promising to introduce a bill to repeal those laws in the new parliament, it’s become a surprise issue heading into this weekend’s election. The leader of the Liberal National Party David Crisafulli has insisted he has no plans to ch...

This week, a group of Stolen Generations survivors visited a site from their childhood that holds a lot of painful memories: the notorious Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Training Home in New South Wales. The gathering marked 100 years since Kinchela was opened – a home that institutionalised hundreds of Indigenous boys, and subjected them to torture, abuse and reprogramming, in order to assimilate them...

When Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister, he made a call that made the then president of the United States very, very angry. Donald Trump called it the “worst call he’d had all day” – a “killer”, “crazy” and “disgusting”. But Turnbull argues that standing up to Trump, even if it means saying things he doesn’t want to hear, is the only effective way to deal with him. Now, as Australia faces the pro...

The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is a pivotal moment in the war in the Middle East.  Sinwar, a mastermind of the October 7 attacks, was top of Israel’s most wanted list before he was killed by Israeli troops in Rafah last week.  His death represents a significant win for Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing it as a “settling of the score”.  While United States President...

There are few people in this country as obsessed with understanding the cultural and social potential of Australian cuisine as New Zealand-born chef Ben Shewry. And there are even fewer who have managed to combine that passion with the highest echelons of success. On this episode of Read This , Michael sits down with Attica’s head chef to discuss his new memoir, Uses for Obsession. expect. See omn...

The government led by Anthony Albanese is a timid troupe of shivers looking for a spine to run up. That’s the assessment from the Labor wise men who gather for lunch in Sydney once a month – Paul Keating, Bob Carr, John Faulkner and other warriors of the past – who claim the government is too cautious and defensive. For many Labor insiders, both in Canberra and across the country, the carping from...

According to Bruce Lehrmann’s lawyer Zali Burrows, he is “arguably Australia’s most hated man”. Burrows also told a federal court that her client is too “scared” to attend court, and his reputation has been so tarnished that “the only shot he’d probably ever have in making money is by going on OnlyFans or something silly like that”. Lehrmann has launched an appeal after a defamation trial judge ru...

Alice Springs is littered with “For Sale” signs as those who can afford it are packing up and leaving. Punitive government curfews made daily life more challenging, and families struggle to see a future for themselves if things continue the way they are. With the newly elected Country Liberal Party promising to be even tougher on crime – and lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 10 years...

Police are everywhere in Alice Springs. You see them driving pursuit vehicles and caged vans on the streets, or stationed outside the bottle shop checking IDs. But more police doesn’t mean less crime – it just means more people are getting locked up. As Alice Springs reels from the police shooting of Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walker, and in the wake of an apology from the Northern Territory Poli...

From afar, Alice Springs is a whirlpool of myth and truth. A town with competing interests and few solutions, marked by chaos and decades of government overreach.  That all came to a head earlier this year, with what’s been described as a “youth riot” in town. The violence led to the Northern Territory government imposing an emergency curfew.  This is when the headlines started: in cities and town...