Amping up for the release of the Talking About Marketing Podcast, Steve and David share this teaser for what to expect from this new and exciting show!

Amping up for the release of the Talking About Marketing Podcast, Steve and David share this teaser for what to expect from this new and exciting show!

Talking About Marketing is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with editing by Tim Whiffen. Artwork by Casey Cumming.

Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity.
Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde
Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde
Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde
Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde

Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business.

We welcome your comments and feedback via podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com

<a href="https://talkedaboutmarketing.com/podcast/">Talking About Marketing</a> is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with editing by Tim Whiffen. Artwork by Casey Cumming.
Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity.
<ol>
<li>Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde</li>
<li>Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde</li>
<li>Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde</li>
<li>Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde</li>
</ol>
Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business.
We welcome your comments and feedback via <a href="mailto:podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com">podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com</a>

The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about...

Talking About Marketing

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.

Talking About Marketing Teaser

SA Drink Of The Week

Mark Rowland

Musical Pilgrimage

Adelaide Climate Action Week co-founder Mark Rowland joins Steve to unpack The Great AI Climate Debate, the Oxford-style contest his organisation staged this week between the “carbon glutton” and “silicon saviour” camps. Rather than settling for headline alarm about data centres guzzling power like mid-sized nations, Mark walks through the nuance: how much of that energy use is genuinely AI rather than general cloud computing, why the time horizon people use to judge AI shapes their verdict, and how concepts like the Jevons paradox and the “time value of carbon” complicate any tidy answer. He leaves listeners with a practical, human-scaled way to think about their own digital footprint.

Renmark’s 23rd Street Distillery supplies the South Australian Drink of the Week, and it’s a genuine coup: their single malt has just been named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, outscoring Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal. Head distiller Paul Burnett returns to the show to talk peat, oak and the fine art of finishing a whiskey in casks that once held tawny, muscat and Tokay.

The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode on a reflective note, with Steve premiering his own composition, Higher Legacy, written for two Adelaide City Council gardeners whose combined century of service tending the city’s parks and squares is honoured on a plaque in Rymill Park — and for everyone, past and present, quietly building something worth protecting.

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 Great AI Climate Debate

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:04:00 SA Drink Of The Week

There SA Drink Of The Week this week is 23rd Street Distillery Australian Single Malt Whisky.

Steve opens with a pop quiz: name a South Australian product that just outscored Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal at a fraction of the price. It’s whiskey, specifically Renmark’s 23rd Street Distillery, freshly named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, with their single malt scoring 96 points against entries from 39 countries.

Head distiller Paul Burnett, returning for another visit, credits the win to restraint rather than showmanship: a low-level peat profile, around half a percent in the finished blend, used as what he calls a “complexing agent,” paired with an unusually wide range of cask finishes, from first-fill bourbon barrels to old tawny, muscat and Tokay casks. Steve, tasting alongside him, works through notes of honeyed fruit, fig, all-spice and a citrus edge that shifts as the glass warms in his hand, while Paul walks through the distinction between “heads, hearts and tails” in distillation and how the team’s small-batch, six-way finishing blend has quietly shifted in proportion release after release.

The pair also compare notes on serving it right: a proper tulip glass, a touch of water, room temperature rather than ice, and, in Paul’s case, a slice of chocolate or nuts alongside it. Steve, for his part, admits an evening spent testing whiskey sours and old fashioneds the night before only confirmed his preference for drinking it neat.

00:35:20 Mark Rowland and Adelaide Climate Action Week

Steve opens by declaring his hand: he uses AI daily for work, has solar and a battery, drives an EV, and admits the more he learns about what sits behind that lifestyle, the less smug he gets to feel about it. It’s a fitting frame for a conversation built around nuance rather than tribal certainty.

Mark explains why Adelaide Climate Action Week chose an actual Oxford-style debate over a polite panel discussion, tapping into people’s competitive instincts to get them to actually take a position rather than scroll through it. The audience voted before and after: undecided voters dropped from 24% to single digits, and belief that AI will be a net negative for climate rose from 56% to over 70%. The real story, though, was in the follow-up conversations, where the deciding factor wasn’t the argument itself but the time horizon people used. Ask about the next five years and the mood turns pessimistic; ask about 20 to 50 years out and people start to believe things will improve.

The pair dig into the “carbon glutton” case, distinguishing AI-specific energy demand from data centres in general, since cloud storage and streaming were already drawing power long before AI arrived. Mark points out that air conditioning, EV charging and industrial electrification are all expected to outgrow AI’s energy demands in the years ahead, and that steel and concrete for data centre construction already account for roughly 14% of global emissions. He also raises a genuinely alarming case: a data centre approval in an African nation that led authorities to cut off a village’s water supply, with fatal consequences, the kind of guardrail failure he says South Australia needs to avoid as its own data centre legislation opens the door to rapid growth.

On the more optimistic “silicon saviour” side, Mark describes a proposed Barossa data centre project that would generate two to three times the renewable energy it needs, feed the surplus back into the community, and capture atmospheric moisture from its waste heat to supply water to nearby farmers and wineries, reducing pressure on the Murray. He frames this as “hybrid intelligence” in action: letting machines handle the split-second optimisation work, like grid load-shifting to squeeze more renewables in without new poles and wires, while humans retain the judgement calls machines aren’t suited to.

Steve presses on the Jevons paradox, the pattern where efficiency gains simply invite greater use rather than genuine savings, and confesses to his own sprawling AI toolkit, from Claude to NotebookLM to Suno. Mark’s response is refreshingly proportionate: an individual’s prompt volume is negligible against industrial-scale use, and Google’s own sustainability reporting shows the energy and water cost per prompt has dropped by roughly half in a couple of years, even as overall usage climbs. The conversation lands on the “time value of carbon,” the idea that AI’s emissions are happening now while its promised climate benefits, if they arrive at all, are speculative and delayed. It closes with Mark’s own conviction, shaped by a master’s degree in climate change, that humanity’s Anthropocene-era warming is real, drawn partly from personal memory of snow days in his native England that simply don’t happen anymore.

Asked to leave listeners with something to hold onto, Mark returns to a theme James Clear would recognise from Atomic Habits: start with the smallest available step. Downloading rather than streaming a favourite album, watching YouTube at 720p instead of 4K on a phone, deleting old emails sitting in a data centre somewhere: none of it solves the problem alone, but it restores a sense of agency against the temptation to slide into overwhelm or apathy.

Further information

Adelaide Climate Action Week

Google’s 11th annual Environmental Report

01:27:56 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Higher Legacy by Steve Davis & The Virtualosos

The Musical Pilgrimage takes an unexpectedly personal turn this week. Prompted by a photograph shared in a local Facebook group of a plaque in Rymill Park honouring brothers Antonio and Carmine Lepore, whose combined century of tending Adelaide’s parks and squares began back when Clydesdales still pulled bakers’ carts through the suburbs, Steve wrote an original song called Higher Legacy.

Inspired by the plaque’s closing line, borrowed from the idea that a society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they’ll never sit in, the song also nods to Jane Goodall’s advice to Adelaide listeners years ago: when the world’s problems feel overwhelming, start with the square metre you’re standing on. Brought to life with Steve’s virtual session band, The Virtualosos, it’s offered as a piece for anyone who wants to take it, own it, and perform it as their own.

Adelaide Climate Action Week co-founder Mark Rowland joins Steve to unpack The Great AI Climate Debate, the Oxford-style contest his organisation staged this week between the &ldquo;carbon glutton&rdquo; and &ldquo;silicon saviour&rdquo; camps. Rather than settling for headline alarm about data centres guzzling power like mid-sized nations, Mark walks through the nuance: how much of that energy use is genuinely AI rather than general cloud computing, why the time horizon people use to judge AI shapes their verdict, and how concepts like the Jevons paradox and the &ldquo;time value of carbon&rdquo; complicate any tidy answer. He leaves listeners with a practical, human-scaled way to think about their own digital footprint.
Renmark&rsquo;s 23rd Street Distillery supplies the South Australian Drink of the Week, and it&rsquo;s a genuine coup: their single malt has just been named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, outscoring Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal. Head distiller Paul Burnett returns to the show to talk peat, oak and the fine art of finishing a whiskey in casks that once held tawny, muscat and Tokay.
The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode on a reflective note, with Steve premiering his own composition,&nbsp;Higher Legacy, written for two Adelaide City Council gardeners whose combined century of service tending the city&rsquo;s parks and squares is honoured on a plaque in Rymill Park &mdash; and for everyone, past and present, quietly building something worth protecting.
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 Great AI Climate Debate
00:00:00&nbsp;Intro
Introduction
00:04:00&nbsp;SA Drink Of The Week
There SA Drink Of The Week this week is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.23rdstreetdistillery.com.au/products/australian-single-malt-whisky">23rd Street Distillery Australian Single Malt Whisky</a>.
Steve opens with a pop quiz: name a South Australian product that just outscored Glenmorangie, Highland Park and a 31-year-old Crown Royal at a fraction of the price. It&rsquo;s whiskey, specifically Renmark&rsquo;s 23rd Street Distillery, freshly named Australian Distillery of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition, with their single malt scoring 96 points against entries from 39 countries.
Head distiller Paul Burnett, returning for another visit, credits the win to restraint rather than showmanship: a low-level peat profile, around half a percent in the finished blend, used as what he calls a &ldquo;complexing agent,&rdquo; paired with an unusually wide range of cask finishes, from first-fill bourbon barrels to old tawny, muscat and Tokay casks. Steve, tasting alongside him, works through notes of honeyed fruit, fig, all-spice and a citrus edge that shifts as the glass warms in his hand, while Paul walks through the distinction between &ldquo;heads, hearts and tails&rdquo; in distillation and how the team&rsquo;s small-batch, six-way finishing blend has quietly shifted in proportion release after release.
The pair also compare notes on serving it right: a proper tulip glass, a touch of water, room temperature rather than ice, and, in Paul&rsquo;s case, a slice of chocolate or nuts alongside it. Steve, for his part, admits an evening spent testing whiskey sours and old fashioneds the night before only confirmed his preference for drinking it neat.
00:35:20&nbsp;Mark Rowland and Adelaide Climate Action Week
Steve opens by declaring his hand: he uses AI daily for work, has solar and a battery, drives an EV, and admits the more he learns about what sits behind that lifestyle, the less smug he gets to feel about it. It&rsquo;s a fitting frame for a conversation built around nuance rather than tribal certainty.
Mark explains why Adelaide Climate Action Week chose an actual Oxford-style debate over a polite panel discussion, tapping into people&rsquo;s competitive instincts to get them to actually take a position rather than scroll through it. The audience voted before and after: undecided voters dropped from 24% to single digits, and belief that AI will be a net negative for climate rose from 56% to over 70%. The real story, though, was in the follow-up conversations, where the deciding factor wasn&rsquo;t the argument itself but the time horizon people used. Ask about the next five years and the mood turns pessimistic; ask about 20 to 50 years out and people start to believe things will improve.
The pair dig into the &ldquo;carbon glutton&rdquo; case, distinguishing AI-specific energy demand from data centres in general, since cloud storage and streaming were already drawing power long before AI arrived. Mark points out that air conditioning, EV charging and industrial electrification are all expected to outgrow AI&rsquo;s energy demands in the years ahead, and that steel and concrete for data centre construction already account for roughly 14% of global emissions. He also raises a genuinely alarming case: a data centre approval in an African nation that led authorities to cut off a village&rsquo;s water supply, with fatal consequences, the kind of guardrail failure he says South Australia needs to avoid as its own data centre legislation opens the door to rapid growth.
On the more optimistic &ldquo;silicon saviour&rdquo; side, Mark describes a proposed Barossa data centre project that would generate two to three times the renewable energy it needs, feed the surplus back into the community, and capture atmospheric moisture from its waste heat to supply water to nearby farmers and wineries, reducing pressure on the Murray. He frames this as &ldquo;hybrid intelligence&rdquo; in action: letting machines handle the split-second optimisation work, like grid load-shifting to squeeze more renewables in without new poles and wires, while humans retain the judgement calls machines aren&rsquo;t suited to.
Steve presses on the Jevons paradox, the pattern where efficiency gains simply invite greater use rather than genuine savings, and confesses to his own sprawling AI toolkit, from Claude to NotebookLM to Suno. Mark&rsquo;s response is refreshingly proportionate: an individual&rsquo;s prompt volume is negligible against industrial-scale use, and Google&rsquo;s own sustainability reporting shows the energy and water cost per prompt has dropped by roughly half in a couple of years, even as overall usage climbs. The conversation lands on the &ldquo;time value of carbon,&rdquo; the idea that AI&rsquo;s emissions are happening now while its promised climate benefits, if they arrive at all, are speculative and delayed. It closes with Mark&rsquo;s own conviction, shaped by a master&rsquo;s degree in climate change, that humanity&rsquo;s Anthropocene-era warming is real, drawn partly from personal memory of snow days in his native England that simply don&rsquo;t happen anymore.
Asked to leave listeners with something to hold onto, Mark returns to a theme James Clear would recognise from Atomic Habits: start with the smallest available step. Downloading rather than streaming a favourite album, watching YouTube at 720p instead of 4K on a phone, deleting old emails sitting in a data centre somewhere: none of it solves the problem alone, but it restores a sense of agency against the temptation to slide into overwhelm or apathy.
Further information
<a href="https://my.acaw.org.au/">Adelaide Climate Action Week</a>
<a href="https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/sustainability/2026-environmental-report/">Google&rsquo;s 11th annual Environmental Report</a>
01:27:56&nbsp;Musical Pilgrimage
In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to <a href="https://stevedavis.com.au/blog/higher-legacy/">Higher Legacy by Steve Davis &amp; The Virtualosos</a>
The Musical Pilgrimage takes an unexpectedly personal turn this week. Prompted by a photograph shared in a local Facebook group of a plaque in Rymill Park honouring&nbsp;<a href="https://adelaideaz.com/articles/brothers-antonio-and-carmine-lepore-honoured-for-a-combined-century-of-tending-adelaide-city-park-lands">brothers Antonio and Carmine Lepore</a>, whose combined century of tending Adelaide&rsquo;s parks and squares began back when Clydesdales still pulled bakers&rsquo; carts through the suburbs, Steve wrote an original song called&nbsp;Higher Legacy.
Inspired by the plaque&rsquo;s closing line, borrowed from the idea that a society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they&rsquo;ll never sit in, the song also nods to&nbsp;<a href="https://theadelaideshow.com.au/podcast-episodes/abc-edition-adelaide-beatles-chimps/">Jane Goodall&rsquo;s advice to Adelaide listeners years ago</a>: when the world&rsquo;s problems feel overwhelming, start with the square metre you&rsquo;re standing on. Brought to life with Steve&rsquo;s virtual session band, The Virtualosos, it&rsquo;s offered as a piece for anyone who wants to take it, own it, and perform it as their own.

Mark Rowland, co-founder of Adelaide Climate Action Week, walks Steve Davis through the nuance behind the Great AI Climate Debate — carbon gluttons versus silicon saviours, the time value of carbon and the Jevons paradox — while 23rd Street Distillery's award-winning single malt takes out the South Australian Drink of the Week and a new original song, Higher Legacy, honours the parkland gardeners tending Adelaide's civic inheritance.

437 - The Great AI Climate Debate

Stewart Sweeney

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.

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