Curtin’s Cast

🎙️ New Curtin’s Cast: Alastair Campbell on democracy in the age of Trumpism

Politics everywhere feels simultaneously stuck and combustible — in the US, the UK and here in Australia. This week Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by Alastair Campbell — former Director of Communications and Strategy to Tony Blair, co-host of The Rest Is Politics, and one of the sharpest observers of modern democratic politics — for a wide-ranging and unsparing conversation. We explore:

Why UK Labour PM Keir Starmer governs with a commanding majority yet struggles to project purpose

How Anthony Albanese’s Australian Labor and Canada’s Mark Carney are resisting the right-wing populist surge

The global ecosystem of right-wing media, influencers and big money amplifying grievance and normalising transgressive politics of the MAGA, Reform UK and Aussie One Nation variety

Why figures like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Pauline Hanson can get away with behaviour mainstream politicians cannot

What New Labour got wrong - namely the downsides of globalization 

Housing, intergenerational equality and climate are the means by which the social democratic centre-left can beat back the populist Alt-Right

Alastair also speaks candidly about his own reaction to Trump — even joking about how he has “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — and what that reveals about the emotional intensity of contemporary politics 🎧 Listen to episode 44 wherever you get your podcasts.

🎙 Curtin’s Cast returns for 2026

Episode 43 | Polling shocks, Coalition fracture and the new politics of grievance

Australian politics is realigning in real time. In the first Curtin’s Cast episode of 2026, co-hosts Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras unpack a turbulent political summer — from polling shocks and Coalition breakdown to the surge of One Nation, the Gen X revolt, and the risks now facing a dominant but vulnerable Labor government. We discuss:

• What the polling is really telling us
• Why the Coalition’s break-up (and make-up) doesn’t fix the right
• One Nation’s consolidation and electoral prospects
• Gen X as the new grievance cohort
• How legacy media built a populist right-wing Frankenstein it can’t control
• Why the Greens are stuck in neutral
• Why Labor’s next term must be about delivery, not luck
• What the 2026 SA and Victorian elections will reveal about federal politics

🎧 Listen now on Apple, Spotify and YouTube

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.