Curtin’s Cast

As we wrap up Curtin’s Cast for 2025, a big thank you to everyone who’s tuned in this year — and a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and season’s greetings to all our listeners. Your support has helped make Curtin’s Cast one of the most widely listened-to political podcasts in the country, and we’re deeply grateful. To close out the year, we couldn’t ask for a better conversation.

Quarterly Essay has reached its 100th edition — a remarkable milestone for long-form political writing in Australia. And to mark it, Kos and Nick sit down with Sean Kelly, author of The Good Fight: What Does Labor Stand For? — an essay that asks an important, and uncomfortable, question in Australian politics.

Sean argues Labor’s challenge today isn’t simply electoral, but moral: a crisis of purpose, confidence and imagination. Why has the party that once reshaped the nation struggled to articulate what it stands for heading into 2026? What replaced the old sense of mission? And can a politics built on “kindness” survive a harsher, more unequal era?

📘 Buy Sean Kelly’s Quarterly Essay #100 here:
👉 https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2025/11/the-good-fight

Thanks again for listening in 2025. We’ll see you in 2026 — with plenty more to talk about.

On this week’s Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras go one-on-one on what the latest Redbridge and Resolve polling is really telling us about Australian politics heading into a huge 2026 calendar. With two state elections looming in South Australia and Victoria, and federal pressures building, we unpack what to expect at state level, how federal factors are cutting through, and why One Nation’s surge is no longer a side story. The conversation then turns to the deeper question behind the numbers: who is actually experiencing material decline in living standards, and how that economic anxiety is reshaping voting behaviour across One Nation, Labor, Liberals and the Greens. With inflation risks still live and global instability rising, we also ask what kind of nation-building agenda Labor will need to put on the table in 2026 to hold the political centre.

🎧 NEW EPISODE | CURTIN’S CAST 🇺🇦🇦🇺
Recorded live from Parliament House, Canberra

Winning the Peace: Why Ukraine’s Reconstruction Is Australia’s Test Too

This episode features one of the most powerful voices in Australia’s Ukraine community. Alex Vynokur didn’t become an advocate by choice — history chose him. A Ukrainian Jew whose family endured antisemitism and world war, Alex's family have built an incredibly successful life in Australia. When Russia invaded, he didn’t look away. He built the United Ukraine Appeal into a lifeline for hospitals, families and frontline communities under fire.

Now he joins Curtin’s Cast — just minutes after the launch of our new report in Parliament along with report author Dr Dominic Meagher and hosts Kos Samaras and Nick Dyrenfurth  — to argue that rebuilding Ukraine is not charity, it is solidarity and strategy to serve Australia's national interest.

Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras sit down with Nine Media’s Chief Political Correspondent, Paul Sakkal, for one of the sharpest political conversations we’ve had all year. We cover everything reshaping Australian politics right now:

• The latest polling — and what it really means
• Liberal Party chaos & whether Sussan Ley can hang on?
• The rise and rise of One Nation: who’s voting for them? Why?
• Whether Pauline Hanson has finally hit her ceiling
• Andrew Hastie — principled conservative or emerging Messiah figure?
• Why the Liberals’ national future runs through fixing Victoria first
• And what to expect from new Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson

It’s a wide-ranging, data-rich, brutally honest breakdown direct from the corridors of power.

With Kung Fu Kos away, Nick Dyrenfurth teams up with guest co-host Emma Dawson (Chifley Research Centre) to tackle a huge few weeks in politics:

📊 What the latest federal polling really says
🌆 Mamdani’s NYC upset + outsider politics
🇬🇧 UK Labour turmoil, Reform & Greens surge
📱 Australia’s under-16 social media ban

Is a new generation rejecting “politics-as-usual”? And what should Australian Labor, indeed political parties of all stripes, learn before it’s too late?

Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.