Curtin’s Cast

🎙 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.

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.

 
Fifty years to the day after the Dismissal, this week on Curtin’s Cast, Nick Dyrenfurth and guest co-host Emma Dawson talk to acclaimed historian and political biographer Troy Bramston about his stunning new biography Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New. 700+ pages of reform, chaos, and vision — from Gough’s youthful poem to the tumultuous events of 11 November 1975. What does Whitlam still mean to Labor today? Listen now on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Buy Troy's book:
https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460716137/gough-whitlam-the-vista-of-the-new-the-definitive-and-most-up-to-date-biography-from-australias-leading-political-biographer/

 
🎙️This week on Curtin's Cast, Kos Samaras and Nick Dyrenfurth sit down with Gerard Dwyer, National Secretary of the SDA — Australia’s largest private-sector union covering retail, fast food and warehouse workers and a proud John Curtin Research Centre Board member. From regional NSW, to the classroom and social work, and now the frontline of the labour movement, Gerard shares his journey, values, and vision — from the dignity of retail work and the scourge of workplace violence to the fight for fair pay for young workers, and why housing must be at the heart of Labor’s renewal. There’s even a yarn about his short-lived career as a jockey 🏇 This is a conversation about work, safety, and fairness but also about the enduring moral purpose of the labour movement in an era of economic insecurity and populist politics. 🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

🎙️ This week's Curtin's Cast delves into what one British political writer calls the Netflixisation of Politics. Nick Dyrenfurth & Kos Samaras dive into the end of the political pendulum: both major parties bleeding to their disruptor flanks, the rise of niche tribes, and how politics has become algorithmic entertainment — the voter as subscriber, not loyalist, from Reform UK and the Greens’ surge in Britain with Keir Starmer's Labour government assailed from right and left to similair Aussie trends. We also ask why do right-wing fear campaigns on crime and law and order still work outside the cities but flop inside them? And what does the recent and successful Albo–Trump meeting — and the Coalition’s hysteria over it — tell us about Australia’s underlying political psychology?

🎙️ Our guest today has lived the Australian story from the inside out. Born in Basra, Iraq, arriving to Australia as an asylum seeker aged nine including spending time in Villawood Detention Centre, and now a lawyer, chairperson and entrepreneur — Sam Almaliki’s journey is one of hope, hardship and renewal. From learning English behind fences to leading in business and community, Sam’s story captures the resilience and reinvention that define the Australian project. In this episode Nick and Kos yarn with Sam about:
🏠 Growing up in public housing & the power of aspiration🏏 From Cricket Australia to navigating boardrooms🤝 Migration, belonging & social cohesion
 
🎧 Listen to Curtin’s Cast with Sam Almaliki wherever you get your podcast goodies!