Curtin’s Cast

This week on Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras break down the most striking polling shift in a generation — and what it means for Australian politics.
 
Victoria is no longer a conventional contest. Both major parties are struggling to reach 30%. One Nation is now polling in the mid-20s. The next Victorian election won’t be one election at all. It’ll be eighty-eight by-elections happening simultaneously across the state.
 
In this episode we explore:
 
📊 RedBridge/Accent Victorian state election polling
👥 Generational and class realignment playing out in real time
🗳️ Check in on South Australia ahead of March 21
🌍 Whether Middle East conflict influences domestic voting behaviour
 
This is a deep dive into the end of the old electoral map — and what replaces it.

This week co-hosts Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras are joined by Dr Kylie Gilbert-Moore — Middle East scholar, columnist and former political prisoner in Iran. After spending 804 days jailed in Tehran’s Evin Prison, Kylie offers a rare perspective on how the Iranian regime works and how ordinary Iranians see the world. In this episode we unpack:
• Iran’s widening war in the Middle East• The death of Ali Khamenei and rise of his son• Whether authoritarian regimes are stronger or more fragile during war• What Iranians actually think about the conflict• How the region might change if Iran’s regime falls
🎧 Listen now via Apple, Spotify or YouTube

This week Curtin's Cast is joined in the studio by Peter Khalil — Labor member for the federal seat of Wills in Melbourne, Assistant Minister for Defence, former Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, ex-national security adviser to Kevin Rudd, and previously the government’s former Special Envoy for Social Cohesion. From public housing in Melbourne’s north to junior tennis glory, from working as an executive with SBS to the frontline of Australia’s national security debate — Peter’s story is as global as it is grounded. And Nick Dyrenfurth and Kos Samaras go deep with Peter, exploring:🎾 Growing up in Melbourne’s north to immigrant parents — and what a good working-class boy was doing playing tennis✝️ Who are the Egyptian Copts? Peter gives us a history lesson — one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, tracing their lineage back to the early Church, shaped by centuries of survival, faith and minority resilience in the Middle East🧭 Why Peter chose the brutal occupation of parliamentary politics over a a successful and comfortable executive career 🏘️ On the ground in Wills — what voters are actually saying at the doors🤝 Social cohesion beyond the slogan — what happens when trust frays?⚠️ Extremism — left and right — protest, grievance, and social media accelerant🌏 Geo-political volatility — what does middle-power strategy look like now?All killer, no filler. Catch Episode 46 wherever you get your podcasts.

This week it’s a one-on-one Kos vs Nick deep dive. No guests. No niceties. Just a hard look at the polling — and some of the rubbish floating around. We unpack:
📊 The latest federal and state polls — what’s real and what’s noise🔵 The new Liberal leadership — and why it’s not generational renewal🗳️ The same free-market fundamentalism dressed up with culture-war garnish📰 The same campaign/media tactics including obligatory News Corp sit-down🏙️ A leader who doesn’t hold an urban metropolitan seat💥 And the deeper truth: the problem isn’t just the leader — it’s the party
We also dig into:
📍 Victorian and South Australian polling🎤 The Mally campaign launch: One Nation is the real threat⚠️ How One Nation can eat into Labor’s base especially in Victoria
Then:
🏗️ Why issues like the CFMEU saga are viewed by voters as intra-elite squabbles🧍‍♂️🧍‍♀️ The widening gender divide and growing generational fracture — Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z — and how each tells a different political story
If you want to know where Australian politics is actually heading — beyond the hot takes — this is the episode for you!

🎙️ 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.

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.