Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Streptococcus pyogenes is a critical micro-organism for every doctor to know about.

It is a gram positive coccus that grows in chains and has the potential to cause significant morbidity and even mortality. It has taken us centuries to learn the significance of this infection and is a testament to modern day medicine that its complications are rare.

This is the story of Streptococcus Pyogenes.

Streptococcus pyogenes is a critical micro-organism for every doctor to know about.
It is a gram positive coccus that grows in chains and has the potential to cause significant morbidity and even mortality. It has taken us centuries to learn the significance of this infection and is a testament to modern day medicine that its complications are rare.
This is the story of Streptococcus Pyogenes.

Welcome to the This Medical Life podcast. Our mission is to share stories about the triumphs and tragedies of diseases and illnesses from ancient times up until what we know today. It is about those scientific and medical minds who came before us and how, every single day, we stand on the shoulders of giants. This is a podcast about the stories of medicine.


Hosted by Dr. Travis Brown and Steve Davis, our target audience is General Practitioners, medical students, and other health professionals. We hope to educate, inspire and celebrate those who choose to care for others in their profession. From experience, we know that our audience extends beyond these fields and would like to welcome anyone to listen. The stories of those who came before us are nothing short of remarkable and we hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

Production by Tim Whiffen

Design by Tom Buzz

Welcome to the This Medical Life podcast. Our mission is to share stories about the triumphs and tragedies of diseases and illnesses from ancient times up until what we know today. It is about those scientific and medical minds who came before us and how, every single day, we stand on the shoulders of giants. This is a podcast about the stories of medicine.
 Hosted by <a href="https://twitter.com/drtravisbrown">Dr. Travis Brown</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/stevedavis">Steve Davis</a>, our target audience is General Practitioners, medical students, and other health professionals. We hope to educate, inspire and celebrate those who choose to care for others in their profession. From experience, we know that our audience extends beyond these fields and would like to welcome anyone to listen. The stories of those who came before us are nothing short of remarkable and we hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Production by <a href="https://whimsyproductions.com/">Tim Whiffen</a> Design by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/tom.buzz/">Tom Buzz</a>

This Medical Life

Auscast Medical Channel is a podcast channel that provides a wide range of medical-related content. The podcasts feature interviews with experts in various medical fields, including doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, as well as discussions on the latest medical research and treatment options. The channel covers a wide range of topics, including general health, mental health, and specific medical conditions. The podcasts are aimed at both healthcare professionals and the general public, and provide listeners with the latest information and insights on healthcare topics. Auscast Medical Channel is a great resource for staying informed about medical issues and trends, and for learning more about how to care for yourself and your loved ones.

Auscast Medical Channel is a podcast channel that provides a wide range of medical-related content. The podcasts feature interviews with experts in various medical fields, including doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, as well as discussions on the latest medical research and treatment options. The channel covers a wide range of topics, including general health, mental health, and specific medical conditions. The podcasts are aimed at both healthcare professionals and the general public, and provide listeners with the latest information and insights on healthcare topics. Auscast Medical Channel is a great resource for staying informed about medical issues and trends, and for learning more about how to care for yourself and your loved ones.

Auscast Medical

A weekly podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us each week as a co-presenter to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, food, art, music, relationships, critical thinking, health, news, interviews, chat and quizzes. 

Every single interview, every single show, unlocks insights into what drives people to be doing what they're doing and what keeps them striving. 

The Adelaide Show is produced by Steve Davis and Nigel Dobson-Keeffe.

Please subscribe to our In Crowd list; you get an email each Friday (when we have published a new episode) with an overview of that week's show. Plus, consider joining our Inner Circle; a small group of passionate South Aussies who allow us to pick their brains and gain interviewee suggestions.

This podcast began life as Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide from episodes 1-79.

A podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us each week as a co-presenter to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, ...

The Adelaide Show

A podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, food, art, music, relationships, critical thinking, health, and general news. Every single interview, every single show, unlocks insights into what drives people to be doing what they're doing and what keeps them striving. The Adelaide Show is produced by Steve Davis, and ends with an original song by a South Australian artist. Please subscribe to our In Crowd list; you get an email each Friday with an overview of that week's show. This podcast began life as Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide from episodes 1-79.

A podcast recorded in Adelaide that puts South Australian passion on centre stage with a featured guest who joins us to share how they're pursuing their passions. We venture across topics as diverse as history, wine, food, art, music, relationships, critical thinking, health, and general news. Every single interview, every single show, unlocks insights into what drives people to be doing what they're doing and what keeps them striving. The Adelaide Show is produced by Steve Davis, and ends with an original song by a South Australian artist. Please subscribe to our In Crowd list; you get an email each Friday with an overview of that week's show. This podcast began life as Another Boring Thursday Night In Adelaide from episodes 1-79.

Episode 22: Group A Streptococcus / Streptococcus Pyogenes | A Classical Killer

SA Drink Of The Week

Stewart Sweeney

Musical Pilgrimage

If you’ve ever felt that nagging sense that the South Australia you were promised at the ballot box isn’t quite the one being delivered, this episode is for you. Stewart Sweeney arrived in Adelaide in 1975 to work inside the Dunstan government’s industrial democracy unit, and fifty years later he’s applying that same insider’s eye to a premier he believes is running the tobacco industry’s old doubt-sowing playbook against the citizens fighting to save the Park Lands. It’s a long, unhurried conversation – fitting, Steve notes, for an episode built around a Negroni “made to be sipped slowly and savoured.”

On that note, before the main event, in the SA Drink Of The Week, Alexis and Tina Cattley – the show’s resident cocktail authorities – put Never Never’s Panettone Negroni through its paces, fresh off its win as World’s Best Contemporary Cocktail at the 2026 World Drink Awards in London.

And in the Musical Pilgrimage, Adelaide music legend John Schumann returns with the Vagabond Crew to perform and unpack “Rag-tag Extremist Blues,” the song born directly from Malinauskas’ now-infamous put-down of Park Lands protesters.

You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve!

The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it.

And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concise
page.

Running Sheet: Rag-Tag Extremists

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:04:32 SA Drink Of The Week

There SA Drink Of The Week this week is Never Never Panettone Negroni.

Steve, self-declared “Negroni newbie,” calls in reinforcements for this one: returning cocktail experts Alexis and Tina Cattley, last on the show refereeing a Crows-versus-Power gin showdown. They start with a reference Negroni built by Alexis from Never Never triple juniper gin, a Ruby Bitter in place of Campari, and a small-batch Rosso vermouth from David Franz, north of Adelaide – a drink Steve describes as landing “like a cloud-like pillow,” with a gentle bitter-orange finish. Tina, a self-described “Negroni naysayer” put off by Campari’s bitterness, finds herself won over by how the flavours linger and play off one another.

Then comes the star of the segment: Never Never’s bottled Panettone Negroni, fresh from being crowned World’s Best Contemporary Cocktail at the 2026 World Drink Awards in London, and born behind the bar of the brand’s McLaren Vale distillery door before going nationwide. Built from triple juniper gin, a bitter citrus aperitif, sweet vermouth, aged muscat, orange liqueur, rye distillate and vanilla bean, it lands as something else entirely – “IMAX Christmas cake inside my mouth,” in Steve’s words. Alexis reckons it’s the perfect entry point for Negroni sceptics and a ready-made Christmas gift (buy two bottles, he warns – one won’t survive the wait), while Tina, newly vindicated in her Campari aversion, likens it to a sherry or port with all the spiced-cake flavour of the season, minus the traditional Negroni’s lingering bitterness.

00:18:51 Stewart Sweeney

Stewart Sweeney has spent fifty years watching power slip loose from democratic control, and he’s watched a lot of it from the inside. In January 1978 he was working inside the Premier’s department when Don Dunstan sacked his own police commissioner over the Salisbury affair – a decision a Royal Commission later vindicated. Nearly fifty years on, Steve posits that the shoe is now on the other foot: where Dunstan acted because he felt deceived by an official, he contends today’s citizens are the ones being deceived, by a premier “savaging our Parklands for a golf tournament and a motorcycle race.”

Sweeney’s own arrival in South Australia is a story in itself. A Glaswegian socialist who’d been coaching tennis in upstate New York and found himself unexpectedly unemployed back in Scotland, he stumbled into a tutoring job at the University of Tasmania, landed – almost by accident – in the middle of the Lake Pedder fight, and was introduced to the Democratic Labor Party within his first week in the country by his next-door neighbour, a young Gerard Henderson. From there it was a short hop to Adelaide and Don Dunstan’s Unit for Industrial Democracy, where Sweeney worked alongside economist Phil Bentley on an initiative to bring worker participation into South Australian workplaces – and where, as a footnote that says a great deal about how political communication has evolved, a young Mike Rann landed his very first Adelaide job doing media for the unit. Steve puts it to Sweeney that this early media training was the first real sign of rot in the system – the moment premiers became unreachable, hiding behind stage-managed doorstops instead of being interviewed. Sweeney doesn’t fully disagree, though he tempers it: whatever else came of it, Rann’s genuine gift was for writing speeches fast and communicating big-picture ideas clearly, “sort of decades before AI.”

The conversation’s sharpest edge comes when Steve puts the government’s own numbers to Sweeney: the premier’s claim that only 585 of the Park Lands’ roughly 9,000 trees are affected by the disputed golf and motorsport development, against Park Lands management’s markedly different tally. Sweeney names the mechanism he believes is at work – the doubt strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry against the medical evidence on smoking. You don’t need to win the argument, he explains – you just need to plant enough doubt to keep people from acting on their convictions. Layer social media on top of that old tobacco-industry trick, he argues, and doubt becomes exponentially more powerful. Steve adds a live example of his own: an anti-protester Facebook page mocking demonstrators as “NIMBYs,” liked by the premier and half his ministry, that nobody in Labor will admit to running.

None of this is abstract history for Sweeney – he’s a park guardian for Park 11 North, and he brings real texture to what’s actually at stake. He unpacks his argument that Adelaide’s Park Lands and squares are treated as “available” land rather than civic inheritance – fenced off for events for weeks at a time, repeatedly re-turfed and re-fenced in what he calls an annual cycle of “fence, event, repair” – and traces the intellectual lineage of the neoliberal thinking now driving those decisions back to a 1949 gathering in Switzerland convened by Friedrich Hayek. He also charts how a shrinking, disciplined leadership pipeline – what he only half-jokingly calls “Farrellism,” after Senator Don Farrell – has narrowed South Australian Labor’s internal debate at exactly the moment its base is most restless, evidenced by the wave of Adelaide residents telling him online, in effect, “I loved Peter Malinauskas, but now I hate Peter Malinauskas.”

Sweeney closes on a note that’s more hopeful than the rest of the conversation might suggest. Reaching for the “world systems” thinking that has shaped his outlook for three decades, he reminds listeners that empires, ideologies and premierships all eventually give way to something else – pointing to the radical London reformers who dreamed up the idea of Adelaide in the first place, and to public servant Wainwright, whose ideas quietly transformed the Playford-era economy, as proof that a handful of good ideas, patiently pursued, can still redirect a small regional economy like ours.

Further articles by Stewart Sweeney

Manufacturing Doubt: Peter Malinauskas’s Political Weapon

Think “outside the fence”

Power without power: Is Farrellism Labor’s solution or its problem?

Productivity is the symptom. Rentier capitalism is the disease

01:45:23 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Rag-Tag Extremist Blues by John Schumann & The Vagabond Crew.

The episode closes with John Schumann and the Vagabond Crew performing “Rag-Tag Extremist Blues” – a song that exists purely because Peter Malinauskas dismissed Park Lands protesters with that exact phrase.

Schumann, a good deal more measured these days than in his fiery Redgum years, tells Steve he “grabbed it and expanded on it,” deliberately framing his cast of extremists as ordinary South Australians: a retired teacher, a war veteran, taxpaying citizens who’ve never broken a rule in their lives.

He’s candid that his fear is less about the golf course – “that boat’s sailed” – and more about the MotoGP development still to come, and about a public whose attention span, he admits, will inevitably wane long before the next election.

Streaming and download proceeds go directly to the Adelaide Park Lands Association, and the band will donate part of every ticket sold for their show at The Gov on 29 August to the same cause.

Link to all things John Schumann including links to upcoming shows and music

If you&rsquo;ve ever felt that nagging sense that the South Australia you were promised at the ballot box isn&rsquo;t quite the one being delivered, this episode is for you. Stewart Sweeney arrived in Adelaide in 1975 to work inside the Dunstan government&rsquo;s industrial democracy unit, and fifty years later he&rsquo;s applying that same insider&rsquo;s eye to a premier he believes is running the tobacco industry&rsquo;s old doubt-sowing playbook against the citizens fighting to save the Park Lands. It&rsquo;s a long, unhurried conversation &ndash; fitting, Steve notes, for an episode built around a Negroni &ldquo;made to be sipped slowly and savoured.&rdquo;
On that note, before the main event, in the SA Drink Of The Week, Alexis and Tina Cattley &ndash; the show&rsquo;s resident cocktail authorities &ndash; put Never Never&rsquo;s Panettone Negroni through its paces, fresh off its win as World&rsquo;s Best Contemporary Cocktail at the 2026 World Drink Awards in London.
And in the Musical Pilgrimage, Adelaide music legend John Schumann returns with the Vagabond Crew to perform and unpack &ldquo;Rag-tag Extremist Blues,&rdquo; the song born directly from Malinauskas&rsquo; now-infamous put-down of Park Lands protesters.
You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We&rsquo;re here to serve!
The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for&nbsp;Best Interview Podcast in Australia&nbsp;at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for&nbsp;Best News and Current Affairs Podcast&nbsp;in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.
And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It&rsquo;s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we&rsquo;ll add you to the list:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au">podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au</a>
If you enjoy the show, please&nbsp;<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/another-boring-thursday-night/id696302138">leave us a 5-star review&nbsp;</a>in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/theadelaideshow/shop?asc=u">The Adelaide Show Shop</a>. We&rsquo;d greatly appreciate it.
And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/complete-list-adelaide-show-episodes/">our index of all episode in one concise page.</a>
Running Sheet: Rag-Tag Extremists
00:00:00&nbsp;Intro
Introduction
00:04:32&nbsp;SA Drink Of The Week
There SA Drink Of The Week this week is&nbsp;<a href="https://neverneverdistilling.com.au/products/panettone-negroni?srsltid=AfmBOoq5dhFioblFdKisTYtmH2px9vGWk57zo0mXORhG3nmfHxXj5jn5">Never Never Panettone Negroni</a>.
Steve, self-declared &ldquo;Negroni newbie,&rdquo; calls in reinforcements for this one: returning cocktail experts Alexis and Tina Cattley, last on the show refereeing a Crows-versus-Power gin showdown. They start with a reference Negroni built by Alexis from Never Never triple juniper gin, a Ruby Bitter in place of Campari, and a small-batch Rosso vermouth from David Franz, north of Adelaide &ndash; a drink Steve describes as landing &ldquo;like a cloud-like pillow,&rdquo; with a gentle bitter-orange finish. Tina, a self-described &ldquo;Negroni naysayer&rdquo; put off by Campari&rsquo;s bitterness, finds herself won over by how the flavours linger and play off one another.
Then comes the star of the segment: Never Never&rsquo;s bottled Panettone Negroni, fresh from being crowned World&rsquo;s Best Contemporary Cocktail at the 2026 World Drink Awards in London, and born behind the bar of the brand&rsquo;s McLaren Vale distillery door before going nationwide. Built from triple juniper gin, a bitter citrus aperitif, sweet vermouth, aged muscat, orange liqueur, rye distillate and vanilla bean, it lands as something else entirely &ndash; &ldquo;IMAX Christmas cake inside my mouth,&rdquo; in Steve&rsquo;s words. Alexis reckons it&rsquo;s the perfect entry point for Negroni sceptics and a ready-made Christmas gift (buy two bottles, he warns &ndash; one won&rsquo;t survive the wait), while Tina, newly vindicated in her Campari aversion, likens it to a sherry or port with all the spiced-cake flavour of the season, minus the traditional Negroni&rsquo;s lingering bitterness.
00:18:51&nbsp;Stewart Sweeney
Stewart Sweeney has spent fifty years watching power slip loose from democratic control, and he&rsquo;s watched a lot of it from the inside. In January 1978 he was working inside the Premier&rsquo;s department when Don Dunstan sacked his own police commissioner over the Salisbury affair &ndash; a decision a Royal Commission later vindicated. Nearly fifty years on, Steve posits that the shoe is now on the other foot: where Dunstan acted because he felt deceived by an official, he contends today&rsquo;s citizens are the ones being deceived, by a premier &ldquo;savaging our Parklands for a golf tournament and a motorcycle race.&rdquo;
Sweeney&rsquo;s own arrival in South Australia is a story in itself. A Glaswegian socialist who&rsquo;d been coaching tennis in upstate New York and found himself unexpectedly unemployed back in Scotland, he stumbled into a tutoring job at the University of Tasmania, landed &ndash; almost by accident &ndash; in the middle of the Lake Pedder fight, and was introduced to the Democratic Labor Party within his first week in the country by his next-door neighbour, a young Gerard Henderson. From there it was a short hop to Adelaide and Don Dunstan&rsquo;s Unit for Industrial Democracy, where Sweeney worked alongside economist Phil Bentley on an initiative to bring worker participation into South Australian workplaces &ndash; and where, as a footnote that says a great deal about how political communication has evolved, a young Mike Rann landed his very first Adelaide job doing media for the unit. Steve puts it to Sweeney that this early media training was the first real sign of rot in the system &ndash; the moment premiers became unreachable, hiding behind stage-managed doorstops instead of being interviewed. Sweeney doesn&rsquo;t fully disagree, though he tempers it: whatever else came of it, Rann&rsquo;s genuine gift was for writing speeches fast and communicating big-picture ideas clearly, &ldquo;sort of decades before AI.&rdquo;
The conversation&rsquo;s sharpest edge comes when Steve puts the government&rsquo;s own numbers to Sweeney: the premier&rsquo;s claim that only 585 of the Park Lands&rsquo; roughly 9,000 trees are affected by the disputed golf and motorsport development, against Park Lands management&rsquo;s markedly different tally. Sweeney names the mechanism he believes is at work &ndash; the doubt strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry against the medical evidence on smoking. You don&rsquo;t need to win the argument, he explains &ndash; you just need to plant enough doubt to keep people from acting on their convictions. Layer social media on top of that old tobacco-industry trick, he argues, and doubt becomes exponentially more powerful. Steve adds a live example of his own: an anti-protester Facebook page mocking demonstrators as &ldquo;NIMBYs,&rdquo; liked by the premier and half his ministry, that nobody in Labor will admit to running.
None of this is abstract history for Sweeney &ndash; he&rsquo;s a park guardian for Park 11 North, and he brings real texture to what&rsquo;s actually at stake. He unpacks his argument that Adelaide&rsquo;s Park Lands and squares are treated as &ldquo;available&rdquo; land rather than civic inheritance &ndash; fenced off for events for weeks at a time, repeatedly re-turfed and re-fenced in what he calls an annual cycle of &ldquo;fence, event, repair&rdquo; &ndash; and traces the intellectual lineage of the neoliberal thinking now driving those decisions back to a 1949 gathering in Switzerland convened by Friedrich Hayek. He also charts how a shrinking, disciplined leadership pipeline &ndash; what he only half-jokingly calls &ldquo;Farrellism,&rdquo; after Senator Don Farrell &ndash; has narrowed South Australian Labor&rsquo;s internal debate at exactly the moment its base is most restless, evidenced by the wave of Adelaide residents telling him online, in effect, &ldquo;I loved Peter Malinauskas, but now I hate Peter Malinauskas.&rdquo;
Sweeney closes on a note that&rsquo;s more hopeful than the rest of the conversation might suggest. Reaching for the &ldquo;world systems&rdquo; thinking that has shaped his outlook for three decades, he reminds listeners that empires, ideologies and premierships all eventually give way to something else &ndash; pointing to the radical London reformers who dreamed up the idea of Adelaide in the first place, and to public servant Wainwright, whose ideas quietly transformed the Playford-era economy, as proof that a handful of good ideas, patiently pursued, can still redirect a small regional economy like ours.
Further articles by Stewart Sweeney
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/stewart.sweeney.7/posts/pfbid02fHHBheT9JuWQMTAa9eDc1ewB5Y7hjao9yeaQMyDH7NU3brfkBjLGjxtkmM6m822rl">Manufacturing Doubt: Peter Malinauskas&rsquo;s Political Weapon</a>
<a href="https://www.adelaide-parklands.asn.au/blog/2025/2/11/think-outside-the-fence">Think &ldquo;outside the fence&rdquo;</a>
<a href="https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/06/power-without-power-is-farrellism-labors-solution-or-its-problem/">Power without power: Is Farrellism Labor&rsquo;s solution or its problem?</a>
<a href="https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/07/productivity-is-the-symptom-rentier-capitalism-is-the-disease/">Productivity is the symptom. Rentier capitalism is the disease</a>
01:45:23&nbsp;Musical Pilgrimage
In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to&nbsp;<a href="https://checked.lnk.to/ragtagextremistblues">Rag-Tag Extremist Blues&nbsp;by John Schumann &amp; The Vagabond Crew</a>.
The episode closes with John Schumann and the Vagabond Crew performing &ldquo;Rag-Tag Extremist Blues&rdquo; &ndash; a song that exists purely because Peter Malinauskas dismissed Park Lands protesters with that exact phrase.
Schumann, a good deal more measured these days than in his fiery Redgum years, tells Steve he &ldquo;grabbed it and expanded on it,&rdquo; deliberately framing his cast of extremists as ordinary South Australians: a retired teacher, a war veteran, taxpaying citizens who&rsquo;ve never broken a rule in their lives.
He&rsquo;s candid that his fear is less about the golf course &ndash; &ldquo;that boat&rsquo;s sailed&rdquo; &ndash; and more about the MotoGP development still to come, and about a public whose attention span, he admits, will inevitably wane long before the next election.
Streaming and download proceeds go directly to the Adelaide Park Lands Association, and the band will donate part of every ticket sold for their show at The Gov on 29 August to the same cause.
<a href="https://schumann.com.au/">Link to all things John Schumann including links to upcoming shows and music</a>

Political analyst and Dunstan government insider Stewart Sweeney sits down with Steve Davis to dissect the battle for the Adelaide Park Lands, tracing a direct line from the tobacco industry’s doubt playbook to Premier Peter Malinauskas’ handling of protesters, before John Schumann debuts his new protest anthem, “Rag-tag Extremist Blues.”

436 - Rag-Tag Extremists

David Olney, Robert Godden

The Spin Detector

If last episode cracked open the lid on South Australian politics, this one peers inside the engine. Steve Davis reunites with international relations analyst David Olney, and is joined by long-time Adelaide Show political commentator Robert Godden for a compact but chewy conversation about why our democratic system reliably produces a certain kind of politician, and what, if anything, citizens can actually do about it.

The SA Drink of the Week does not feature in this episode.

The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode with something deeply personal: Steve’s original song, Goodnight Don, a Brechtian cabaret-styled tribute to Don Dunstan that names Steele Hall as an unlikely hero of South Australian progress; a fitting coda to an episode about leaders who felt compelled, rather than merely ambitious, to change the world.

You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve!

The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it.

And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concise
page.

Running Sheet: The Adelaide Show Spin Detector

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week

There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.

00:02:00 David Olney and Steve Davis

David Olney’s opening thesis sets the frame: stop blaming the individual politician and look at the system that produced them. Political parties absorb people at eighteen. By their mid-thirties, the successful ones know the rules, know who to listen to, and know how to sell the message. Whatever they were before they entered that pipeline is largely beside the point. Party discipline does the rest.

Robert Godden comes at it from economics, or more precisely from the widespread misunderstanding of it. Almost every political party fails to grasp that incentivisation and punishment change behaviour, which is why the same voters who accept cigarette taxes as behaviour-modification tools will simultaneously insist that everything else they disapprove of should be dealt with outside the law. Godden’s observation that he would personally outlaw religion and instant coffee, while conceding not everyone shares his distress about either, is the episode’s warmest moment in a conversation that doesn’t have many warm ones.

The thread tying both arguments together is shame. For hundreds of years, Godden argues, the one reliable corrective available to citizens was the ability to shame politicians into doing the right thing. That rulebook got torn up in 2016. Steve says “because of Trump.” Godden confirms it. Two words and the subject is closed.

After Godden departs, the conversation turns to what collective action actually looks like when the system is this good at absorbing or deflecting pressure. Steve raises Possum Park as an example of the government’s capacity to flood the zone, announcing Gather Round to push the other issue off the front page. Olney draws on Ted Robert Gurr’s theory of relative deprivation: collective action only rebuilds when enough people believe both that things should be better and that they are in fact getting worse. We are only just entering that zone. The grassroots energy Steve is seeing is not wishful thinking; it is the early stage of the only mechanism that has ever produced real political change.

Barbara Pocock closes the argument. She is Olney’s model of the kind of leader collective action eventually produces: not someone who wanted to rule the world, but someone who looked at the state of things and felt she could no longer sit and do nothing. The contrast with the party-machine pathway, Malinauskas entering politics through the party room before he ever held a seat, Ashton Hurn as Marshall’s comms manager before pre-selection, is left to speak for itself.

The Spin Detector

Steve has built a tool, available on The Adelaide Show website, inspired by Ed Coper’s Angertainment and a good deal of additional thinking. You paste in a social media post and its comments. You choose whether you want a draft reply or simply an analysis of what rhetorical move is being played. The tool’s one job is to identify the mechanism, name it, and give you the option to respond or simply move on better informed.

The worked example is a meme circulating from a One Nation-adjacent account: Gina Rinehart above, Albanese below, the implicit message being that her money is hers to spend and his is yours to waste. Pasted into the Spin Detector, the tool surfaces what the meme papers over. Rinehart’s wealth comes from royalties on sovereign natural resources. As Olney notes immediately, that makes her money our money, and we have a system that allows her to keep taking it. The same voters this meme targets often also support taxing international gas companies on the same principle. The meme cannot survive both positions, but that inconvenience is the point of the meme.

Olney’s observation about pace is the practical underpinning: every second between seeing something and reacting is a second in which the emotional charge dissipates and clearer thinking becomes possible. The Spin Detector is a structured pause. Steve calls it a mini David in a bottle. Olney asks only that nobody shake it.

Steve is open about the fact that hosting logistics are still being worked out, and that if the tool proves useful, a conversation with Ed Coper about something larger may follow.

The following resources were mentioned during the episode.

Books

Angertainment by Ed Koper
The Spin Detector

00:31:38 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Goodnight Don by Steve Davis & The Virutalosos.

The closing conversation touches on what Don Dunstan would make of a Labor government in 2025, and on the historical context Steve uncovered while writing the song: that neoliberalism had not yet fully gripped the Labor party during Dunstan’s era, that shift arriving more in John Bannon’s time, and that Steele Hall, Dunstan’s political opponent, played a genuine role in making the reform era possible by supporting electoral changes that cost him politically but were simply the right thing to do.

Goodnight Don is Steve’s original composition, performed by Steve Davis and The Virtualosos, written for a cabaret performer to take on and bring to life. It gives Steele Hall his own verse, which feels right in the context of an episode about the rarity of politicians who act from obligation rather than calculation. Steve writes all lyrics by hand. The Virtualosos bring them to life.

PS The image for this episode was taken as part of the SA Electoral Commission's campaign to urge people to vote in the 2026 State Election.

If last episode cracked open the lid on South Australian politics, this one peers inside the engine. Steve Davis reunites with international relations analyst David Olney, and is joined by long-time Adelaide Show political commentator Robert Godden for a compact but chewy conversation about why our democratic system reliably produces a certain kind of politician, and what, if anything, citizens can actually do about it.
The SA Drink of the Week does not feature in this episode.
The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode with something deeply personal: Steve&rsquo;s original song,&nbsp;Goodnight Don, a Brechtian cabaret-styled tribute to Don Dunstan that names Steele Hall as an unlikely hero of South Australian progress; a fitting coda to an episode about leaders who felt compelled, rather than merely ambitious, to change the world.
You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We&rsquo;re here to serve!
The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for&nbsp;Best Interview Podcast in Australia&nbsp;at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for&nbsp;Best News and Current Affairs Podcast&nbsp;in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.
And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It&rsquo;s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we&rsquo;ll add you to the list:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au">podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au</a>
If you enjoy the show, please&nbsp;<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/another-boring-thursday-night/id696302138">leave us a 5-star review&nbsp;</a>in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/theadelaideshow/shop?asc=u">The Adelaide Show Shop</a>. We&rsquo;d greatly appreciate it.
And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/complete-list-adelaide-show-episodes/">our index of all episode in one concise page.</a>
Running Sheet: The Adelaide Show Spin Detector
00:00:00&nbsp;Intro
Introduction
00:00:00&nbsp;SA Drink Of The Week
There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.
00:02:00&nbsp;David Olney and Steve Davis
David Olney&rsquo;s opening thesis sets the frame: stop blaming the individual politician and look at the system that produced them. Political parties absorb people at eighteen. By their mid-thirties, the successful ones know the rules, know who to listen to, and know how to sell the message. Whatever they were before they entered that pipeline is largely beside the point. Party discipline does the rest.
Robert Godden comes at it from economics, or more precisely from the widespread misunderstanding of it. Almost every political party fails to grasp that incentivisation and punishment change behaviour, which is why the same voters who accept cigarette taxes as behaviour-modification tools will simultaneously insist that everything else they disapprove of should be dealt with outside the law. Godden&rsquo;s observation that he would personally outlaw religion and instant coffee, while conceding not everyone shares his distress about either, is the episode&rsquo;s warmest moment in a conversation that doesn&rsquo;t have many warm ones.
The thread tying both arguments together is shame. For hundreds of years, Godden argues, the one reliable corrective available to citizens was the ability to shame politicians into doing the right thing. That rulebook got torn up in 2016. Steve says &ldquo;because of Trump.&rdquo; Godden confirms it. Two words and the subject is closed.
After Godden departs, the conversation turns to what collective action actually looks like when the system is this good at absorbing or deflecting pressure. Steve raises Possum Park as an example of the government&rsquo;s capacity to flood the zone, announcing Gather Round to push the other issue off the front page. Olney draws on Ted Robert Gurr&rsquo;s theory of relative deprivation: collective action only rebuilds when enough people believe both that things should be better and that they are in fact getting worse. We are only just entering that zone. The grassroots energy Steve is seeing is not wishful thinking; it is the early stage of the only mechanism that has ever produced real political change.
Barbara Pocock closes the argument. She is Olney&rsquo;s model of the kind of leader collective action eventually produces: not someone who wanted to rule the world, but someone who looked at the state of things and felt she could no longer sit and do nothing. The contrast with the party-machine pathway, Malinauskas entering politics through the party room before he ever held a seat, Ashton Hurn as Marshall&rsquo;s comms manager before pre-selection, is left to speak for itself.
The Spin Detector
Steve has built a tool, available on The Adelaide Show website, inspired by Ed Coper&rsquo;s Angertainment and a good deal of additional thinking. You paste in a social media post and its comments. You choose whether you want a draft reply or simply an analysis of what rhetorical move is being played. The tool&rsquo;s one job is to identify the mechanism, name it, and give you the option to respond or simply move on better informed.
The worked example is a meme circulating from a One Nation-adjacent account: Gina Rinehart above, Albanese below, the implicit message being that her money is hers to spend and his is yours to waste. Pasted into the Spin Detector, the tool surfaces what the meme papers over. Rinehart&rsquo;s wealth comes from royalties on sovereign natural resources. As Olney notes immediately, that makes her money our money, and we have a system that allows her to keep taking it. The same voters this meme targets often also support taxing international gas companies on the same principle. The meme cannot survive both positions, but that inconvenience is the point of the meme.
Olney&rsquo;s observation about pace is the practical underpinning: every second between seeing something and reacting is a second in which the emotional charge dissipates and clearer thinking becomes possible. The Spin Detector is a structured pause. Steve calls it a mini David in a bottle. Olney asks only that nobody shake it.
Steve is open about the fact that hosting logistics are still being worked out, and that if the tool proves useful, a conversation with Ed Coper about something larger may follow.
The following resources were mentioned during the episode.
Books
<a href="https://amzn.to/4eiId2b">Angertainment by Ed Koper</a> <a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/spin-detector/">The Spin Detector</a>
00:31:38&nbsp;Musical Pilgrimage
In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to&nbsp;<a href="https://stevedavis.com.au/blog/goodnight-don/">Goodnight Don&nbsp;by Steve Davis &amp; The Virutalosos</a>.
The closing conversation touches on what Don Dunstan would make of a Labor government in 2025, and on the historical context Steve uncovered while writing the song: that neoliberalism had not yet fully gripped the Labor party during Dunstan&rsquo;s era, that shift arriving more in John Bannon&rsquo;s time, and that Steele Hall, Dunstan&rsquo;s political opponent, played a genuine role in making the reform era possible by supporting electoral changes that cost him politically but were simply the right thing to do.
Goodnight Don&nbsp;is Steve&rsquo;s original composition, performed by Steve Davis and The Virtualosos, written for a cabaret performer to take on and bring to life. It gives Steele Hall his own verse, which feels right in the context of an episode about the rarity of politicians who act from obligation rather than calculation. Steve writes all lyrics by hand. The Virtualosos bring them to life.
PS The image for this episode was taken as part of the SA Electoral Commission's campaign to urge people to vote in the 2026 State Election.

Steve Davis, David Olney, and political commentator Robert Godden wrestle with the machinery of South Australian democracy (the discipline of the system, the death of shame as a political force, and the rise of rage-bait), before Steve reveals the Spin Detector, a new tool built to hand you back your agency.

435 - The Adelaide Show Spin Detector

David Olney and Steve Davis

This is not a typical Adelaide Show episode. For the first time in 434 instalments, Steve Davis opens by confessing he’s not sure how many more episodes there will be because something has broken in him. Not in South Australia’s people, whom he loves unreservedly, but in his trust of the state’s governance. What follows is one of the most honest conversations the show has ever hosted.

There is no SA Drink of the Week this episode. The mood didn’t call for it.

In the Musical Pilgrimage, Steve closes with Australia Day by Steve Davis & The Virtuosos, a song whose thesis turns out to be the quiet heart of everything discussed: that we’ve retreated into our selfish dwellings, stopped sticking our arms over the fence to say hello, and in doing so have left ourselves vulnerable to exactly the kind of politics this episode is about.

You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve!

The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it.

And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concise
page.

Running Sheet: Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week

There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.

00:03:15 David Olney and Steve Davis

Steve opens by describing where he is: not disconnected from South Australia’s people, but from its governance. He says he is earnestly worried, and that there is no performative aspect to the episode. To stress-test his thinking and provide context, he has invited back David Olney, whose academic background covers history, international politics, international security, and complex problem-solving. David notes that colleagues once told him he thought more like a psychologist or neurologist than a political scientist, always searching for the human motivation beneath structural problems.

David introduces the work of political theorist Ted Robert Gurr, who studied the conditions preceding revolution across different periods of history. Gurr found two sequential thresholds: first, when people stop believing things will get better; and second, when they become convinced things are actively getting worse. Steve places himself at Gurr’s second threshold, citing the government’s handling of the algal bloom, a secret tower deal at peppercorn rent, tree clearing in the Park Lands for a golf event, and the prospect of further clearing for a motorcycle race. His concern is not with the events or sports themselves but with the irreversible damage to trees that Tourism SA uses to represent Adelaide.

Two further things have deepened Steve’s despair. The first is what he reads as a coordinated flood of upbeat ministerial social media videos that do not address the Park Lands issue at all. He sees it as a tactic borrowed from Trump’s playbook. The second is the government’s launch of a media literacy tool to help students decode messaging, at the same time as the government itself, in Steve’s view, avoids transparency, attacks critics personally rather than engaging with their arguments, and operates through private deals. David draws on Rebecca Costa’s book The Watchman’s Rattle to frame this: Costa observed that as civilisations struggle to deal with significant problems, political attention shifts to small and peripheral ones. David’s illustration from literature is the war in Gulliver’s Travels fought over which end of a boiled egg to crack.

Steve recommends the book Angertainment by Ed Koper as a guide to recognising this pattern. He uses Koper’s framing to contrast two dystopian visions: Orwell’s 1984, where repression at least provokes resistance, and Huxley’s Brave New World, where a population entertained into passivity never finds cause to push back. David agrees that Huxley’s version is the more troubling of the two.

David then explains neoliberalism at Steve’s request: the economic model adopted across the English-speaking world in the early 1980s under Thatcher, Reagan, and Hawke, which replaced mixed economies with market-driven ones. David argues that the mixed economy model of the postwar decades, while imperfect, delivered stable living standards and could absorb shocks. What replaced it produced private monopolies, underinvestment in infrastructure and services, and a political landscape where both major parties operate within the same economic framework. His summary: in Australia, both parties wear one jackboot and one fluffy slipper. David connects this to the growth of parties like One Nation and Britain’s Reform Party, arguing that voters who have seen no meaningful improvement from either major party are reaching for alternatives, not out of ideological conversion but out of exhaustion.

Steve raises a related concern: that the same billionaire interests bankrolling One Nation-type parties have no real incentive to disrupt neoliberalism, which raises questions about where that political energy actually leads.

Toward the end of the episode, Steve reads from a reply he has just received from his federal member, written in response to a handwritten letter he sent six weeks earlier about a gas tax. The reply is considered and personal, acknowledging hundreds of individual constituent responses and explaining the member’s position. Steve describes it as a strand still holding, though he is careful not to place too much weight on it. David names two economists whose recent books offer some grounds for thinking a better model is possible: Mariana Mazzucato and Daron Acemoglu.

Steve closes by naming David Pocock as an example of what a politician in this era can be, and David adds Barbara Pocock to that list. The episode ends with a brief exchange about what Don Dunstan and Malcolm Fraser might have made of where their respective parties have ended up.

The following resources were mentioned during the episode.

Books

Angertainment by Ed Koper
The Watchman’s Rattle by Rebecca Costa
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1984 by George Orwell
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
The Common Good Economy by Mariana Mazzucato

Podcasts

The Rest is Politics with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart
The Rest is Politics US featuring Anthony Scaramucci

00:42:34 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Australia Day by Steve Davis & The Virutalosos.

Steve introduces Australia Day as a song exploring how Australia lost the social conditions that made postwar migrant integration work. The central argument is that Italians, Greeks, and Vietnamese newcomers were absorbed into communities partly because people had time and proximity, sticking their arms over fences and saying hello. McMansions, mobile phones, and an economic model built on scarcity and anxiety have eroded that. David adds that prime ministers who romanticised the 1950s as a human ideal were simultaneously promoting the economic model that made those conditions impossible to replicate. Steve writes the songs and uses a virtual session band to produce them, with the hope that a live musician will one day take them further.

This is not a typical Adelaide Show episode. For the first time in 434 instalments, Steve Davis opens by confessing he&rsquo;s not sure how many more episodes there will be because something has broken in him. Not in South Australia&rsquo;s people, whom he loves unreservedly, but in his trust of the state&rsquo;s governance. What follows is one of the most honest conversations the show has ever hosted.
There is no SA Drink of the Week this episode. The mood didn&rsquo;t call for it.
In the Musical Pilgrimage, Steve closes with Australia Day by Steve Davis &amp; The Virtuosos, a song whose thesis turns out to be the quiet heart of everything discussed: that we&rsquo;ve retreated into our selfish dwellings, stopped sticking our arms over the fence to say hello, and in doing so have left ourselves vulnerable to exactly the kind of politics this episode is about.
You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We&rsquo;re here to serve!
The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for&nbsp;Best Interview Podcast in Australia&nbsp;at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for&nbsp;Best News and Current Affairs Podcast&nbsp;in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.
And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It&rsquo;s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we&rsquo;ll add you to the list:&nbsp;<a href="mailto:podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au">podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au</a>
If you enjoy the show, please&nbsp;<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/another-boring-thursday-night/id696302138">leave us a 5-star review&nbsp;</a>in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/theadelaideshow/shop?asc=u">The Adelaide Show Shop</a>. We&rsquo;d greatly appreciate it.
And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/complete-list-adelaide-show-episodes/">our index of all episode in one concise page.</a>
Running Sheet: Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction
00:00:00&nbsp;Intro
Introduction
00:00:00&nbsp;SA Drink Of The Week
There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.
00:03:15&nbsp;David Olney and Steve Davis
Steve opens by describing where he is: not disconnected from South Australia&rsquo;s people, but from its governance. He says he is earnestly worried, and that there is no performative aspect to the episode. To stress-test his thinking and provide context, he has invited back David Olney, whose academic background covers history, international politics, international security, and complex problem-solving. David notes that colleagues once told him he thought more like a psychologist or neurologist than a political scientist, always searching for the human motivation beneath structural problems.
David introduces the work of political theorist Ted Robert Gurr, who studied the conditions preceding revolution across different periods of history. Gurr found two sequential thresholds: first, when people stop believing things will get better; and second, when they become convinced things are actively getting worse. Steve places himself at Gurr&rsquo;s second threshold, citing the government&rsquo;s handling of the algal bloom, a secret tower deal at peppercorn rent, tree clearing in the Park Lands for a golf event, and the prospect of further clearing for a motorcycle race. His concern is not with the events or sports themselves but with the irreversible damage to trees that Tourism SA uses to represent Adelaide.
Two further things have deepened Steve&rsquo;s despair. The first is what he reads as a coordinated flood of upbeat ministerial social media videos that do not address the Park Lands issue at all. He sees it as a tactic borrowed from Trump&rsquo;s playbook. The second is the government&rsquo;s launch of a media literacy tool to help students decode messaging, at the same time as the government itself, in Steve&rsquo;s view, avoids transparency, attacks critics personally rather than engaging with their arguments, and operates through private deals. David draws on Rebecca Costa&rsquo;s book The Watchman&rsquo;s Rattle to frame this: Costa observed that as civilisations struggle to deal with significant problems, political attention shifts to small and peripheral ones. David&rsquo;s illustration from literature is the war in Gulliver&rsquo;s Travels fought over which end of a boiled egg to crack.
Steve recommends the book Angertainment by Ed Koper as a guide to recognising this pattern. He uses Koper&rsquo;s framing to contrast two dystopian visions: Orwell&rsquo;s 1984, where repression at least provokes resistance, and Huxley&rsquo;s Brave New World, where a population entertained into passivity never finds cause to push back. David agrees that Huxley&rsquo;s version is the more troubling of the two.
David then explains neoliberalism at Steve&rsquo;s request: the economic model adopted across the English-speaking world in the early 1980s under Thatcher, Reagan, and Hawke, which replaced mixed economies with market-driven ones. David argues that the mixed economy model of the postwar decades, while imperfect, delivered stable living standards and could absorb shocks. What replaced it produced private monopolies, underinvestment in infrastructure and services, and a political landscape where both major parties operate within the same economic framework. His summary: in Australia, both parties wear one jackboot and one fluffy slipper. David connects this to the growth of parties like One Nation and Britain&rsquo;s Reform Party, arguing that voters who have seen no meaningful improvement from either major party are reaching for alternatives, not out of ideological conversion but out of exhaustion.
Steve raises a related concern: that the same billionaire interests bankrolling One Nation-type parties have no real incentive to disrupt neoliberalism, which raises questions about where that political energy actually leads.
Toward the end of the episode, Steve reads from a reply he has just received from his federal member, written in response to a handwritten letter he sent six weeks earlier about a gas tax. The reply is considered and personal, acknowledging hundreds of individual constituent responses and explaining the member&rsquo;s position. Steve describes it as a strand still holding, though he is careful not to place too much weight on it. David names two economists whose recent books offer some grounds for thinking a better model is possible: Mariana Mazzucato and Daron Acemoglu.
Steve closes by naming David Pocock as an example of what a politician in this era can be, and David adds Barbara Pocock to that list. The episode ends with a brief exchange about what Don Dunstan and Malcolm Fraser might have made of where their respective parties have ended up.
The following resources were mentioned during the episode.
Books
<a href="https://amzn.to/4eiId2b">Angertainment by Ed Koper</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/4osyZVO">The Watchman&rsquo;s Rattle by Rebecca Costa</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/4v7scmV">Brave New World by Aldous Huxley</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/4vKLZZc">1984 by George Orwell</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/49TA6I7">Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman</a> <a href="https://amzn.to/4a0QUNs">The Common Good Economy by Mariana Mazzucato</a>
Podcasts
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/@restispolitics">The Rest is Politics with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart</a> <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-rest-is-politics-us/id1743030473">The Rest is Politics US featuring Anthony Scaramucci</a>
00:42:34&nbsp;Musical Pilgrimage
In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to&nbsp;<a href="https://stevedavis.com.au/blog/australia-day/">Australia Day&nbsp;by Steve Davis &amp; The Virutalosos</a>.
Steve introduces Australia Day as a song exploring how Australia lost the social conditions that made postwar migrant integration work. The central argument is that Italians, Greeks, and Vietnamese newcomers were absorbed into communities partly because people had time and proximity, sticking their arms over fences and saying hello. McMansions, mobile phones, and an economic model built on scarcity and anxiety have eroded that. David adds that prime ministers who romanticised the 1950s as a human ideal were simultaneously promoting the economic model that made those conditions impossible to replicate. Steve writes the songs and uses a virtual session band to produce them, with the hope that a live musician will one day take them further.

In a raw and unusually personal episode, Steve Davis admits something has broken in his connection to SA’s government and sits down with former geopolitics lecturer David Olney to make sense of the spin, the Park Lands, the politics of distraction, and whether there’s still a strand worth holding onto.

Episode 22: Group A Streptococcus / Streptococcus Pyogenes | A Classical Killer

This Medical Life

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