Curtin’s Cast

With Victorians heading to the polls on 28 November, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras unpack an extraordinary election campaign. The Coalition leads Labor 56–44 on two-party preferred, yet One Nation is polling level with Labor on 24%, and seat projections suggest the Coalition could still struggle to secure a majority. After 12 years in office, where did it all go wrong for Victorian Labor? Can ne...

Britain's Labour Party won a landslide in 2024. So why did it struggle so badly and recently replace Keir Starmer with Andy Burnham? And is Australia's Labor Party heading for the same political trap? This week, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by Jack Peacock, Associate Director at leading UK polling firm Focaldata and contributor to Future of the Left, to tackle one of the biggest ques...

In his just released, best-selling memoir A Grateful Son, Josh Frydenberg reflects on family, Jewish life and a career at the centre of Australian politics. On episode 75 of Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth speaks with the former Treasurer about the influences that shaped him, the rise of antisemitism since 7 October, and whether Jewish Australians can feel secure and at home in this country. They d...

Has political hate become a business model? And is Australia importing the toxic political culture of the United States? In a special one-on-one edition of Curtin’s Cast, John Curtin Research Centre head honcho Nick Dyrenfurth and RedBridge director Kos Samaras confront the disturbing deterioration of Australian political debate. The shocking attack on independent MP Helen Haines, whose motive rem...

Three Shocks: The Australia Politics Hasn’t Caught Up With One of Australia's finest political journalists and authors, "demography whisperer" George Megalogenis, joins Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras to discuss the three forces reshaping Australia: migration, the changing workforce and a more uncertain international order. In Three Shocks: Who We Are Becoming in the 21st Century, George argues th...

Labor has hit record-low favourability ratings as One Nation again tops the primary vote in the latest RedBridge/Accent poll. Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras unpack what the numbers really mean, whether the “Albo Derangement Reflex” obscures genuine voter anger, and why the Coalition’s dramatic immigration cuts may simply pour more fuel on the One Nation bonfire. Plus: One Nation’s Victorian campa...

India’s Gen Z Revolt: Meet the Cockroach Janta Party India’s young people are increasingly questioning whether education, hard work and competitive exams will deliver the secure future they were promised. Out of that frustration has emerged one of the world’s most unusual youth movements: the satirical Cockroach Janta Party. Kos Samaras speaks with Viren Naidu, journalist and author of the New Sta...

Can Labor Hold Back the Orange Tide? Emma Dawson and Kos Samaras talk Vic and NSW elections, Gen Z and Australia’s AI Future With Nick away, Kos is joined by Curtin’s Cast veteran Emma Dawson, Executive Director of the Chifley Research Centre, to take the pulse of Australian politics. They check in on the Victorian election campaign before taking a first look at the 2027 NSW election, where anothe...

NZ in Revolt: Leadership Chaos, Fragmentation and the Election Ahead Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by Neale Jones, Managing Director of Capital and former chief of staff to Jacinda Ardern, to unpack the turmoil reshaping New Zealand politics ahead of the 7 November election. With Christopher Luxon weakened by another leadership challenge, Labour and National struggling to command much...

Freddie Hayward on America’s ‘Summer of Socialism’ and 9/11, 25 Years On Something unusual is stirring inside America’s Democratic Party. Across the northern summer, young progressive and democratic-socialist candidates have been knocking over establishment Democrats — raising the possibility that the American left is finally experiencing its own Tea Party or MAGA-style insurgency. Nick Dyrenfurth...

They’re the generation politics forgot — and they may now be among the angriest in Australia. Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras go deep on the latest RedBridge/AFR generational polling, which has One Nation at an extraordinary 35 per cent among Gen X, Labor on 28 and the Coalition languishing at 19. Even more strikingly, Gen X voters split almost evenly between Anthony Albanese and Pauline Hanson fo...

Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras go deep on the two latest RedBridge/AFR polls and what they reveal about the extraordinary reshaping of Australian politics: One Nation’s surge, the Coalition’s weakness, Labor’s low primary vote and whether voters are moving towards a durable three-bloc system or simply renting their votes in protest. They also unpack Melongate and what the episode says about polit...

This week on Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth is joined by award-winning historian Ross McMullin, author of the definitive history of the Australian Labor Party, The Light on the Hill. Thirty-five years after its original publication, McMullin has returned to his landmark work, updating Labor’s extraordinary story through Keating, Rudd, Gillard and the leadership wars to Anthony Albanese’s historic...

This week on Curtin's Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by one of Australia's foremost political journalists and historians, Paul Kelly, Paul Kelly, Editor-at-Large, The Australian and author of the new book, The Twilight of Exceptionalism: The Liberal and Conservative Era (Melbourne University Publishing). Has Australia entered a fundamentally new political era? Why has reform beco...

🚨 WE'RE BACK! Curtin's Cast returns – EARLY RELEASE 🎙️ Victoria's election campaign has just been blown wide open. In a dramatic day of escalating political tension, Deputy Premier Ben Carroll has advised Premier Jacinta Allan that he intends to be a candidate for the Labor leadership should a spill occur. With just four months until polling day, is Victoria now heading towards both an election a...

Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by acclaimed author, pianist and incoming ANAM Artistic Director Anna Goldsworthy to discuss her new Quarterly Essay, The God We Made: The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence out now with Schwartz Media Is AI another technological revolution, or something far more profound? What remains uniquely human in an age of machines? Why do we still crave...

Could the 2026 Victorian election mark the beginning of the end of Australia's century-old two-party system? One Nation is now leading or tied in most national polls. Leadership whispers around Victorian Labor Premier Jacinta Allan are growing. But is this bigger than one premier — or even one party? On Curtin's Cast Episode 61 Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras unpack: 🔥 Why replacing leaders won't...

This week on Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth sits down with political strategist and campaigner Ed Coper, author of the new book Angertainment: How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything. Over more than two decades, Ed has worked with an extraordinary range of political, civic and business leaders and movements, from Malala Yousafzai and Richard Branson to trade unions, climate campaigns, advocacy...

One Nation is now Australia's most popular political party. Pauline Hanson is Australia's most popular political leader. And new RedBridge–Accent MRP modelling suggests the Australian political system may be fragmenting faster than either major party understands. This week on Curtin's Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras unpack the extraordinary polling behind One Nation's rise, the collapse of t...

No Kos this week — but Nick Dyrenfurth is joined by one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals and scholars of political leadership, Professor Paul Strangio, to unpack one of the defining political questions of our age: Why has democratic politics become so chaotic — and why has Australia, so far at least, resisted full-scale democratic rupture? Drawing on Paul Strangio’s new book ‘The Alchem...

Is Australian politics finally exiting the dead zone of managerialism and re-entering an era of genuine ideological conflict? In Episode 57 of Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and Australia’s "revered pollster” Kos Samaras unpack the political shockwaves from Labor’s 2026 budget — and why much of the legacy media may be completely misunderstanding what is happening. As newspapers scream “political s...

For years politics and media have obsessed over angry young men, the manosphere and figures like Andrew Tate. But what if the bigger political story is the radicalisation — and growing pessimism — of ‘Angry Young Women’? This week Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by New Statesman staff writer Emily Lawford to discuss her major recent cover story on the rise of the Gen Z “femosphere” and...

One year on from the 2025 federal election, the political landscape is shifting again — and not in ways either major legacy party can fully control. In this episode, Kos Samaras and Nick Dyrenfurth unpack the latest RedBridge/Accent/AFR  polling and the fallout from the Nepean by-election. Has One Nation’s surge peaked? And is there a “Trump dump” effect — where getting too close to Trump and MAGA...

In this episode, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras break down why AI anxiety is already political — not hypothetical — and why governments are at risk of repeating the biggest mistake of the last economic transition. We’ve seen this movie before. It didn’t end well. Over 70% of Australians think AI will cost jobs — and this time, the fear hits before the impact. Based off new Redbridge polling and t...

On this episode, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by leading scholars of nationalism and European politics expert Associate Professor Ben Wellings (Monash University) to unpack the forces reshaping the UK and Europe. From the collapse of the political centre to the rise of populists and Greens alike, this is a continent in flux. We cover: ▪️ The UK’s shift to five-party fragmentation wit...