Late Night Live - Separate stories podcast

Our regular Canberra correspondent dissects the careful language being used by the Australian Government, in the wake of the US and Israel's surprise attack on Iran.   Guest: Anna Henderson, chief political correspondent with SBS

Former NSW Premier and former Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Bob Carr and his wife Helena were almost inseparable. When she suddenly died, while they were in Vienna on an opera and galleries tour of Europe, Bob was bereft.  Back in Sydney, he took to walking the streets late at night. His memoir 'Bring back yesterday' pays tribute to Helena, born to Chinese and Tamil parents in Taiping. Bob...

A NSW man who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a priest in the late 1960’s when he was 13, has won his High Court battle over liability, but had his compensation nearly halved. His lawyers argued the church had a responsibility for the actions of the priest and the High Court agreed. So what could this mean for other compensation cases?  Guest: Judy Courtin, Principal and Advocate, Judy Court...

US President Donald Trump has just given his State of the Union address, saying America is winning so much they don't know what do. But who believes him? Bruce Shapiro dissects the claims, and the realities of Trump's America so far. Guest: Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor with the Nation, Executive Director at the Global Centre for Journalism and Trauma Producer: Catherine Zengerer

Australia's last big drought was from 2017 to 2019; a relatively short drought, but a vicious one. Water storage levels in Sydney dropped by 50% in just two-and-a-half years. In the aftermath of a drought there's always a focus on water policy and preparedness, but it's a focus which tends to evaporate over time. Here on Late Night Live we don't like nasty surprises, so we're checking in on Austra...

As well as his Antarctic work, the explorer Sir Douglas Mawson had a deep interest in the Flinders Ranges. A team has been working for years to decipher his poorly written diaries, to understand more about the other aspects of Mawson's work and life. Guest: Mark Pharaoh, Manager of the South Australian Museum’s Australian Polar Collection Producer: Ann Arnold

Ocean advocates call it 'the most exciting thing that's happened this century'. The lawless High Seas have a new international Treaty - the UN's High Seas Biodiversity Treaty. It came into force in January, and is the first international agreement to protect the marine environment.  Guest: Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance , an international not-for-profit organisation which prov...

As the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion gets underway, legal writer Richard Ackland discusses what the Commission can and can't cover, and the challenges of making determinations around social cohesion.  Guest: Richard Ackland, publisher of Justinian and Spilled Ink

A new report from the group GWL voices (Global. Women. Leaders) has highlighted the scarcity of women at the top of international organisations, across the world. Former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark says it's about time the UN had a female Secretary General.

As the debate continues over what to do about the Australian ISIS women and children in Syria, Anna Henderson discusses the current political obsession with 'Australian values'. Guest: Anna Henderson, chief political correspondent, SBS

The LGBTQI rights movement in the West has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams,  but gay author Ronan McRea argues this success seems suddenly fragile.  He says forces favourable to gay rights, such as the wider cultural shift towards greater sexual freedom,  are weakening while political developments, cultural changes, and migration patterns mean that sources of opposition are gaining strength.  ...

With political rhetoric around immigration firing up again, we look at the great potential, but very real problems, of a temporary migration policy, PALM - The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme. Guest: Peter Mares, author of a report on PALM for the not-for-profit  Scanlon Foundation Research Institute Adjunct senior research fellow, Monash University. Author of several books on immigration...

The  best political communicators don’t just speak, they position. They don’t just answer, they frame. They don’t just promise, they hedge. A look at the daily battle between politicians and journalists in the twenty four hour news cycle.  Guest: Toby Ralph, marketer, strategist and Liberal Party campaign veteran Producer: Ali Benton 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a Zeitenwende, a “watershed moment”, in the words of Germany’s chancellor at the time. Germany shook itself out of its long, post-World War Two pacifism and began to rearm. Now, stuck between an expansionist Russia and an economically aggressive China, what does a militarised Germany look like? Guest: Michaela Kuefner, Chief Political Editor of Deutsche Welle and c...

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's has spruiked Britain's necessity to be closer to Europe, both in defence and economic terms, at the Munich Security Conference, telling the audience "we are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore." But at home his own security as leader is still under a cloud, with calls for him to resign over the Jeffrey Epstein/Peter Mandelson scandal.  GUEST: Ian Dunt, colu...

Knowing that your body is contributing to the growth of a tree or the richness of soil is increasingly attractive. But the healthier climate claims made by some companies offering new technologies, or green alternatives, are largely unverified.  Guest: Hannah Gould, Senior lecturer in Buddhist Studies at the the University of Melbourne, where she also works with the Death Tech Research Team and au...

Whether former President Donald Trump will strike a deal with Cuba remains an open question, as pressure on Havana intensifies. Trump has signalled that worsening fuel shortages and economic strain could create leverage for negotiations, but Cuban officials will reject any arrangement they view as compromising sovereignty. Guest: Dr. Luis Martínez-Fernández, Pegasus Professor at the University of...

While Australians lose over  $31 billion to gambling each year, industry donations to major political parties continue. Over the past decade, millions have flowed legally to both sides. While the federal government has committed to new rules for faster disclosure of political donations, a new report form the Australian Democracy Network says the federal lobbying framework is amongst the  weakest i...

Conny Aerts had a hunch, that stars had internal rotation and measuring those rotations could give us rich information about the universe. She was right, and became the "founding mother" of the new field of asteroseismology. And because the vibrations of the stars are waves, they can be rendered as music: what does a red giant star sound like, anyway? Guest: Professor Conny Aerts, Institute of Ast...

The Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai will die in prison, after being sentenced to 20 years. Lai is one of the island's most prominent pro-democracy advocates, and his newspaper Apple Daily was founded to be a voice for press freedom on the island that is increasingly under China's thumb. Guest: Antony Dapiran, a writer, lawyer, and photographer who was based in Hong Kong from 1999 to 2025. His latest...

The new Opposition leader Angus Taylor and deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume are flagging their crisis plan will involve lowering taxes and immigration, changing our immigration policy, and focusing on home ownership and the cost of living. Guest: Anna Henderson, chief political correspondent with SBS Producers: David Marr, Catherine Zengerer 

In his new book, Steven Pinker asks us to look at how group knowledge works. Pinker argues that what drives society is knowing that what we know is widely know — in his term, "common knowledge". But what if our beliefs about everyone else's inner thoughts turn out to be wrong? Guest: Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist and the author of many popular books on the human mind. His latest is When...

The White House is publishing AI slop images; ICE conducts raids and turns the video into film-style trailers; right-wing influencers are sitting in the White House press briefings, in chairs that used to hold journalists. Social media has become the new location of politics in the US, which substantive policy changes beginning as memes. Where does it end? Guest: Charlie Warzel is a technology and...

Gaza is today in ruins, with over seventy thousand dead and buildings everywhere rendered rubble by the onslaught from Israel since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Many argue the war on Gaza began at this point, but historian Julie Norman has traced the history of both the land, its people and the terrible wars that have plagued what was once a beautiful and prosperous place for a century and...

When librarians from the University of Sydney found a sketch and an inscription in the back of a 1497 copy of Dante's Divine Comedy, they called in Renaissance expert Professor Jaynie Anderson. Soon the discovery was confirmed: the sketch was by the hand of master painter Giorgione, and the inscription solved the mystery of Giorgione's life and death. A book of scholarship on that remarkable disco...