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“I didn’t have a boyfriend to text anymore so might as well text a therapist,” a millennial podcast host tells her audience while recommending they seek out counselling. Online therapy services like BetterHelp are some of podcasting’s biggest advertisers, promising to address the barriers that prevent people from accessing face-to-face therapy. Now, the American company is expanding its app into A...

Brittany Higgins has now been at the centre of three court cases. First, there was the criminal trial of Bruce Lehrmann - which was aborted with no findings made against him. Lehrmann later sued Network 10 and journalist Lisa Wilkinson, claiming that they defamed him by identifying him as a rapist. The court found that he did, to a civil standard, rape Higgins. Now, Higgins’ former boss, Senator L...

Three years ago the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan.  From his new home in Adelaide, Australia, Hazara human rights activist and photographer Muzafar Ali watched warlords returning to the places he had loved but had been forced to leave. He saw Western journalists describing a place they didn’t know and didn’t really understand.  So last month, Muzafar returned to Afghanistan at great pers...

Neale Radley was in his early 40s when he dived off a houseboat and hit a sandbar, becoming a high-needs quadriplegic. With no family members able to look after him, he was faced with limited options and ended up in aged-care. Now, a clause in the government’s New Aged Care Act could mean that more younger people will end up in aged-care, potentially unwinding decades of work to prevent this from...

This year’s Olympics has been phenomenal for women in sport. Paris 2024 also set a milestone as the first Olympics to achieve full gender parity on the field of play. But these achievements have been overshadowed by the abuse levelled at two female boxers who both clinched their first olympic medals over unfounded speculation about their sex. One of the boxers, Imane Khelif, has spoken out several...

In this episode of our sister podcast, Read This , host Michael Williams speaks with journalist, editor and media proprietor Eric Beecher about his new book The Men Who Killed the News . Eric has worked for some of the most well-respected newspapers in the world, including the Sydney Morning Herald and the Wall Street Journal. He’s currently the head of Private Media, which runs the website, Crike...

It’s been called a forever war: the fight over how to teach children to read. For decades, an outdated method has lingered in Australian classrooms as states protect schools’ right to teach how they wish. Following a recent report from the Grattan Institute that found a third of Australian children couldn’t read well, state governments are finally picking a side and mandating the best way to teach...

In the weeks since he was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, some of JD Vance’s past remarks have resurfaced. He is now at the centre of a number of bizarre rumours and jokes.  They’ve been picked up by some Democrats, who are labelling the two men on the republican ticket as ‘weird’. Kamala Harris has chosen the man who started the ‘weird’ line of attack, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, as he...

Hardly any foreign journalists have been into Gaza since Israel’s bombings began. The Economist ’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes is one of the few who has. On a recent trip, Zanny visited the streets of Jerusalem, the Knesset, Gaza and the West Bank, and spoke to dozens of people about what will happen to Gaza when, or if, the fighting stops. Now, an end to conflict in the Middle East seems...

They’re hard to miss: the number of gambling ads flooding our screens and devices everyday. They’ve become such an inescapable part of sport that a parliamentary inquiry was formed, which looked at the impacts the ads have on the community.  In the final months of her life, Labor MP Peta Murphy was the chair of that inquiry – and after hearing from the gambling industry, dependent sporting codes a...

It was supposed to be a routine call out when four police officers attended a property in regional Queensland just before Christmas in 2022. The young officers approached the house, looking to do a routine welfare check, when they were fired on. After a siege that lasted hours, six people were killed, including two constables. In the weeks that followed, media reporting focused on the strangeness...

In this episode of our sister podcast, Read This , host Michael Williams speaks with the winner of the 2024 Miles Franklin Award, Alexis Wright. Her epic novel Praiseworthy , also won the Stella Prize and has been described as “an astonishing feat of storytelling and sovereign imagination. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At Sydney Airport on a muggy night in November 2022, a group of volunteers from Sydney’s northern beaches crowd inside arrivals waiting to greet a family they had never met. Known as the ‘Manlygees’, they’re there to welcome a Kurdish family originally from Syria who had spent the past decade in a refugee camp in Iraq. They’re part of an ambitious pilot program introduced in 2022, called the Commu...

It wasn’t so long ago that renewables pundits glowingly described hydrogen as the “Swiss Army knife” of renewable technologies, able to be turned to almost any purpose. But more recently, the gas has become an expensive and painful point of political debate, with many experts tempering their praise. Now, one of hydrogen’s biggest backers, mining magnate Andrew Forrest, has announced he is scaling...

When Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to twenty years jail for sex trafficking crimes, journalist and writer Lucia Osborne-Crowley was there in the courtroom.  She watched on as Ghislaine Maxwell – a British socialite, and close associate of Jeffrey Epstein – waited to hear her fate. And she listened as her victims testified to the harm inflicted by Maxwell’s predatory actions.  But the more Osborn...

It was one of the biggest corporate scandals the country has ever seen when it was revealed that PwC had used confidential government information to enrich itself and its corporate clients.  Since then there have been two parliamentary inquiries, an AFP investigation, nine investigations by the tax practitioners board, one internal review and an investigation by the international arm of the compan...

The historic teal wave at the last election delivered the two major parties their worst electoral results ever. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that the government looks set to introduce new laws that could make it harder for newcomers to compete. The minister responsible says he wants to address the “growing threat of big money in politics.” The rules could include a requirement that all donations o...

In this episode of our sister podcast, host Michael Williams speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks. She shares her life sentence and reflects on how her upbringing provided the essential building blocks for a career as a writer. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Climate activist Katta O’Donnell sued the Australian government for failing to disclose how much climate change would impact the value of government bonds.  It was a world-first case, she was a law student at the time and she won. But the experience left her feeling more disillusioned than ever and determined to find another way to make change. Today, Katta O’Donnell on why she believes direct act...

Recently, Mike Seccombe has been looking into the divide between Australia’s richest and poorest schools – to find out why this gap keeps widening. And what he found was a broken system. Rich parents are able to get huge tax breaks by donating to opulent building projects at their kids’ private schools.  It’s a practice that goes way back – and many argue – is outdated. Today, national corresponde...

On a remote island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, there are two towns. One is home to a thriving economy. It has a golf course, cinema and tennis courts. It’s the richest postcode in the Northern Territory. Most of the people who live there are white. The other is home to the Anindilyakwa people - the Traditional Owners. The locals live just a few hundred metres from the world’s largest manganese min...

With just over a hundred days to go until the US election, Joe Biden has announced he’s dropping out of the presidential race. In a letter posted to X, he said “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term”. His decision comes after weeks of pressure from donors and colleague...

News stories about violence against women have been coming hard and fast these past few weeks.  These stories of the women — and sometimes children — killed, usually by a man they knew and often in a terribly violent way, are hard to read.  Yet years of education campaigns and talk of respect for women seem to have made no difference, and every few days, another woman dies. Today, Australia’s Sex...

For many Australians, facing the reality of this country is a task that has proved enduringly difficult, both at a public and a political level. For investigative journalist David Marr, finding the right way to tell the stories that allow us to see the truth of our history is a personal quest and one that has led to his latest book. In this episode of our sister podcast, Read This , Michael talks...

This week, allegations of corruption, criminal infiltration, standover tactics and other nefarious activities within the ranks of the CFMEU have been all over the media.  The reports have shocked, but not surprised, many in the community. Stories of underworld figures trading their leather for high viz, motorcycle helmets for hardhats – all in order, it is alleged, to get a slice of taxpayer-funde...