Democracy Sausage with Mark Kenny

Is Australia's looming digital duty of care about censorship, as its critics claim, or about handing control back to the people whose attention is being sold to advertisers?

With Meta's $18 billion US settlement still fresh and an exposure draft due out within hours, independent MP for Curtin Kate Chaney makes the case for a broad duty on tech platforms to prevent foreseeable harm — and why she thinks this fight has nothing to do with free speech at all.

THEN: from Perth's outer suburbs to a state election in Germany, the populist right is romping home wherever voters are abandoning the major parties. So why isn't the same thing happening on the left?

After One Nation's rout of Labor in the Secret Harbour by-election, the Australia Institute's Richard Dennis and the University of Sydney's Stewart Jackson join Mark and Marija to ask whether the Greens have got too clever by half, too comfortable inside parliament, and too reluctant to just say whose side they're on.
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For the first time since federation Australia's population is made up of a majority of migrants and their children, changing the electoral maths for our politicians - have our leaders caught up to the times or are they getting left behind? Labor has learned how to win an election, but does the Liberal party have what it takes to break their losing streak? As trust in both our allies and our key trade partners has waned will our past inform our future?

Mark and Marija tease who we, as a nation, are becoming in the 21st century with the author of Three Shocks, George Megalogenis.
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Why has David Farley's and Pauline Hanson's immigration number not matched up — and does it even matter to One Nation's supporters? What do focus groups really say when people explain why they're giving up on the major parties? If many disaffected voters want a left-wing agenda of "taking back what we own," why is it the populist right keeps cutting through?

RedBridge's Alex Fein joins Democracy Sausage to talk about the confusion at the heart of One Nation's immigration pitch, the voters who feel failed by the political class, and why the simplest story is winning.
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Twenty-five years ago, Insiders went to air for the first time – the morning after the Aston by-election, before smartphones, before social media, and long before anyone had to explain what a fax machine was. So how much of what's changed in Australian politics since has really been about the politicians, and how much about the technology reshaping how they communicate and how we watch? Is the feminisation of politics and the press gallery a quarter-century story, or something that's only really happened in the last five years? And now that everyone gets their news from a different, algorithmically sorted feed, is there still such a thing as a shared public – or a shared set of facts – for a democracy to argue over?

Historian Anna Clark, Professor of Public History at the University of Technology Sydney and author of Making Australian History, joins Democracy Sausage to mark Insiders' 25th anniversary and take the long view on how politics, the media and the public conversation between them have been transformed.
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Why has the government fallen so far short of the Murphy Report's recommendations despite around 80 per cent of Australians wanting gambling ads banned? How did an under-resourced Northern Territory regulator end up overseeing a $34 billion-a-year industry? Why do inducements — not just the eye-watering ones, but the humble "here's $100, have a punt" kind — count as predatory when someone's trying to quit?

Gambling researcher Charles Livingston joins Democracy Sausage to unpack the politics behind the federal government's gambling reform package.
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