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This episode references Dan Carlin’s Wrath of the Khans series from Hardcore History.
Music: Franz Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major
Performed by Rudolf Serkin, Adolf Busch, and Hermann Busch
William Sinclair
Welcome to Why Can’t They Just, looking at politics, policy and getting stuff done. My name is William Sinclair and I’m a recent graduate of the ANU with an economics and science degree with a major in mathematical finance.
Janaline Oh
Hi, I’m Janaline Oh, I’m a former diplomat. I’m also very active on environment and racism issues.
I would like to acknowledge that William and I are both recording today on the unceded lands of First Nations people in different parts of Australia. We would like to pay our respects to the elders past and present, and to any First Nations listeners that we have.
William Sinclair
Today’s episode is on the rise of One Nation, and I thought it would be worth starting off with a story. This comes from one of Dan Carlin’s episodes. Dan Carlin, of course, the Hard Core History podcaster, who’s very popular and who was the inspiration for me to start this podcast. His story goes something like this.
The Khorasian Shah, the sort of king of Khorosan, which is a country in, I think, around the 13th century, about where Iran is now. The king is talking to his son when he’s on his deathbed, giving his son some advice for the eastern neighbour kingdom, which they’re having problems with and they’ve had fights over the years. And his father tells his son that no matter how much trouble they’re giving you, if they’re attacking your villages or if they’re attacking your trade routes, leave them alone. Because as he describes it, that kingdom, this sort of Central Asian kingdom is a wall behind which lie terrible foes.
And of course, as the story goes, his son ignores that advice and helps bring down that kingdom. And on the other side of that kingdom is the Mongols who scream through the Shah’s empire after finishing off the Central Asian kingdom and smash their way through the Muslim world. And there’s stories of the rivers running black with ink as they burn and throw all of the Muslim knowledge into the rivers. And it’s one of the most shocking events in the Muslim, the entire Muslim history is the Mongol conquests.
And I bring this story up thinking about the Liberals and the Labor Party, where I feel like the Liberals are soon to be devoured by One Nation. And I’m not as convinced that the Labour Party should be as happy as they currently are. I think that what comes next is more dangerous and, in a sense, I don’t know if we should necessarily be as keen to bring down this wall as we currently are.
Janaline, what do you think?
Janaline Oh
Yeah, look, I totally agree with you. I have been, I mean, I think our very first episode on this podcast was my concern that the collapse of the Liberal Party at the 2025 election was going to be bad for Australian democracy and bad for the Labor Party, right? I agree. I think the Liberals are that little buffer kingdom and I think One Nation arguably is the Mongols.
And I think this raises a lot of just coming back to the theme of our podcast, right? I think this raises a lot of really important policy questions about why this is happening. The reasons that, you know, a pretty extreme party with no real policies beyond keep all the brown people out and, you know, suppress First Nations people.
We need to look at why that party is gaining so much in popularity, and I really do think it is about a sense that governments are failing people, that the current political system is failing people.
And One Nation firstly articulates that grievance, but secondly, gives a nice simple scapegoat. If we just kicked out all of those horrible brown people who hate Australia, who don’t share our values, who are sucking up your jobs, houses, school places, you know, hospital beds, then we would get back to nice, comfortable lifestyles that we like to think we had and everybody would be happy and we would have social harmony.
And it, it’s a very attractive picture for people who are kind of at their wit’s end as to how they get ahead and who are feeling a lack of hope. And I think that is both a massive risk for the Labor Party and also a massive opportunity if we can get the policies right, that will actually help to give people hope.
William Sinclair
My concern is that I think the Labor Party in some sense is running out of time to reverse the decline in living standards. I’m just going to quote a poll released on the 4th to the 7th of February. So this is a bit old and this doesn’t take into account the recent leadership spill for Angus Taylor, but it holds the primary Labor votes at 33% and the One Nation vote at 27%. And this is very similar to what we’re seeing overseas. So in Britain, the British version of One Nation called Reform is far ahead of every other party and Nigel Farage is set to be the next Prime Minister. And of course in the United States, they’re knee-deep in far-right politics with Donald Trump and his immigration enforcement agency.
Unless we can make significant progress soon - I’m not saying we’re going to run out of time tomorrow - but unless we start addressing some of people’s economic problems soon, we’re going to start looking a lot like UK Labour.
Janaline Oh
Yeah, this is also my fear. And I actually, when you say urgency, I think we basically have 2026 to start shifting the dial. Now, obviously, we’re not going to solve all of Australia’s economic issues and, you know, all of individual Australians’ cost of living issues this year. But I think it is really important that the Government shows some significant steps that give people hope that they can do it within the next few years, right?
The openness, apparent openness of senior leaders like the Prime Minister and the Treasurer to looking at bigger questions of tax reform - and definitely the capital gains tax is the thing that is being thrown around a lot at the moment as a possibility. The ACTU and a bunch of other unions are looking very closely at the petroleum resource rent tax. So this is the super profits tax on gas exports. And obviously the Labor Environment Action Network, of which you and I are both members, is also very, very supportive of increasing that tax. So I think the fact that they’re willing to talk about these things, I think is actually a good sign. And I hope that we will continue that conversation in a way that is constructive.
And I think Labor should be concerned that One Nation is surging so much at the expense of the centre right, because it does seem to indicate that the message that the centre-right parties in Australia have tried to craft and deliver are not landing anywhere. So the small L liberals in the Liberal Party who previously held them up in the cities have now gone to the teals.
Why have they done that? Because they believe, those voters believe in free markets. They are probably moderately terrified of unions. They don’t like the degree of government intervention that Labor is implementing, but they also think we should have credible climate action. They also think that we should protect the environment.
They also think we should not be racist and that migrants make a strong positive contribution to Australia, and frankly, a lot of those, you know, moderate liberal voters in the cities are from migrant backgrounds. You know, a lot of people of Chinese and South Asian origin, of Middle Eastern origin, are small business owners. They believe in aspirational economic policy. They believe in low taxes. They don’t like masses of government intervention, but they also respond very strongly to perceptions of racism. They also respond very strongly to the very clear message that the Liberal Party sadly has been delivering since Tony Abbott, that they are somehow only conditionally accepted in Australia, that somehow their Australianness depends on their behaving in a particular way. And so, you know, they’re voting Labor or they’re voting independent. They are not voting for the Liberal Party and they are a very, very significant natural constituency for that sort of, kind of centre-right economic narrative.
William Sinclair
I think that this is indicative of the fact that central right politics is collapsing in Australia, not just Australia, but all over the world. And I think that it has been collapsing since basically 2008. I suppose the data point that I would hold up as evidence is Donald Trump is the only Republican president since 2008. So since 2008, the right wing party in the United States has only been kept afloat by grievance and hatred of immigrants.
And centre-right politics is basically saying that the economic system, neoliberalism, if you will, is good. The system where there’s economic winners and losers is good because winners deserve to win and losers deserve to lose. Of course, I would expect the teal seats, which are the top ten wealthiest seats in Australia to believe in centre-right politics, because centre-right politics has done pretty well for them. So I would see the teals as basically a centre-right rebrand. So out with the Milton Freeman finance bros and the kind of yucky, harder-edged facets of central right politics, but fundamentally no structural change in the system because why would the people who’ve done so fantastically well want to change?
For the rest of the right-wing side of politics, they are looking for someone to blame because they don’t want to blame the system. They still believe in the system to an extent. So that’s where they find immigrants - some scapegoat to say, “Oh, well, the system was going to be fine. You were going to buy a house if you worked your whole life, but some immigrant bought it instead. So that he’s the problem, not the system”.
Janaline Oh
Yeah, you know, I think your analysis is actually quite good in an Australian context. I would kind of contest this idea that this is happening all over the world. I mean, Donald Trump is the only Republican president since 2008 because of the number of elections that the US has. I mean, they’re only every four years. And there are various reasons, but I take your point. I think, I think you’re absolutely right. The centre-right has essentially disappeared in the US because it has been just overwhelmed by that wave of grievance.
And when you say anti-immigrant, he talks about being anti-immigrant. What he really means is anti-non-white people. You know, he has - the only people who have got refugee status in the US in this term of the second Trump administration are white South Africans. He has repeatedly said, why can’t we get more migrants from nice countries like Norway and Denmark? And fewer people from shithole countries like Somalia. Like, it’s not even a veiled racism. It’s actually pretty blatant racism. He went to Davos and literally said, I am of, you know, good European stock. My father was 100% German. My mother was 100% Scottish. As in, I am purely white, and that makes me a good person. So I think we also, you know, we talk about blaming immigrants. I think we need not to ignore that the immigrants that we’re really blaming are non-white immigrants. So I think there is a very significant undercurrent of racism here, that in Australia is still an undercurrent. Pauline Hanson still insists that she’s not a racist.
But, I mean, a lot of those people in the Liberal Party over the last couple of terms, like even going back to John Howard, were former Labor voters. They were your, kind of, your tradies, your blue collar, culturally conservative people, who were aspirational, but who had also supported, you know, Labor traditionally for a long time. And a lot of them went to the Liberal Party because John Howard also offered them a very significant cultural offering in terms of the, you know, what would now be called a kind of anti-woke agenda that, you know, people, and I’m saying, speaking to white men who don’t have university degrees.
And this is what the absolute core of One Nation’s base, right? It’s white men of my generation, Gen Xers, who don’t have university degrees. A lot of those people would have been, in earlier generations, would have been Labor voters. They are not now because they feel like all of this push towards, you know, equality and diversity is actually threatening their position and their ability to be first in the queue for jobs and houses and, you know, the benefits of society. So I think we shouldn’t understate the cultural aspects of that.
Now, in the last few elections, those people haven’t been voting Labor, which is why when you see the shift to One Nation, it is almost entirely concentrated in the Coalition vote. As in, I think somebody on Insiders said today that 90% of the surge in One Nation vote comes from the Coalition, which, you know, is pretty telling.
But I think this is where I come to kind of the opportunity for the Labor Party, because I think it is really, really important that we don’t become UK Labour, right? I think the mistake that UK Labour has made since getting a thumping majority in the House of Commons at the 2024 election, they have firstly been incredibly timid and incremental in their policy offering.
And what the people of the UK actually wanted was real competence, but also a little bit of ambition that would say, we think, maybe we think the system is basically okay, but we can also see that it has been failing people. And so, if we actually want this system to function and work and maintain its integrity, we need to fix it in a fairly fundamental way. And that requires some pretty serious policy ambition. And they have failed on that.
The second thing that they have absolutely failed on in my view and that I am really, really desperate that the Australian Labor Party does not also fall into the trap of, is pandering to the anti-immigrant sentiment. So instead of standing up and making the case that it is not the immigrants who are taking your jobs, it is not immigrants who are causing crime. It is - and actually talking about facts. They have instead pandered to the idea that asylum seekers are somehow a security threat. And some of the measures that they have put in place have been quite horrifyingly cruel, unnecessarily.
And also, if you’ve got a Labor Party that is, and this is the trap that the Liberals really seriously risk falling into, if you have a centrist party pandering to these sort of far right tropes and ideas and misinformation, then people are not going to say, Oh, well, in that case, we’ll vote for that centrist party. They’re going to say, why don’t we go for the real thing.
You know, Labour’s kind of saying, Oh, we’ll do these little tinkering measures to, you know, restrict immigration and Reform says, no, throw them all out. Like, who are you going to go for? And I think this explains the surge in Reform. I think a large part of it is actually people just saying, well, why do we go for second best? Why don’t we go for the real thing? And this is what the Liberals really risk doing in response to One Nation.
So I was actually, I will tell you, I was genuinely terrified when I heard Angus Taylor, the newly elected leader of the opposition, leader of the Liberal Party, stand up and in his very first speech as leader of the opposition, he started talking about protecting Australia’s way of life. People who don’t subscribe to Australian values should be kept out of the country. There’s good immigration and bad immigration and we want to keep bad immigrants out.
This is all heavily coded language for what countries are allowed to send people to Australia and what countries are not. And this is exactly what Bob Katter said. He actually said it explicitly because, you know, Bob Katter, bless him, does not deal with subtlety. He speaks his mind and he says it very openly. He gave a 15 minute spiel that absolutely dripped with racism.
So I think the challenge for the Labor Party is actually not just not to pander to it, but actually stand up and be the opposite. And actually say, yes, people are hurting. People do have a huge cost of living challenge, they do have housing issues. And the way that we’re dealing with that is not by chucking out immigrants. The way that we are going to deal with that is to deal with the housing problem, is to have more houses and make them more affordable and to look at ways in which we can do that through economic policy, through infrastructure policy. They have been doing that a bit. I’d like to see a lot more of it.
William Sinclair
My sense is that UK Labour’s mistake is very similar, I think, to the US Democrats’ mistake, and I’m nervous that Australian Labor will make the same mistake. UK Labour, in my opinion, it’s like the army that trains to fight the last war. It thinks it’s going to fight this 1980s war against Thatcherites and Reaganites and talk about market forces and talk about neoclassical economics and Milton Friedman and the beauty of the free market and efficiency and all that kind of thing. And they’re thinking they’re arguing against centre-right people. And their policies are very curated towards arguing against that kind of argument.
I think those people are kind of done. If you look at where the right wing is now, it’s angry, it’s anti-free market, it’s anti-free trade agreements, it’s pro-protectionism, it’s pro-government intervention. My concern is that it’s a bit like the French army of World War Two trying to fight World War One, where they think they’re going to sit behind fortifications and we’re not going to worry about the introduction of tanks. Like, if you’re trying to fight the last war, you’re going to lose. If the Australian Labor Party fails to read the room and fails to see that our principal political opponent has changed, I think we’re in for a real beating.
Janaline Oh
Yes, and I agree. I would say, though, to be fair to the Australian Labor Party. And, you know, I guess we’re talking about the federal leadership at this point. I think they do kind of get that. I think they haven’t resiled from pretty sweeping interventionist policies in their first term. The industrial relations policies were very, very worker friendly. They haven’t been afraid to spend on government services like Medicare, childcare, the NDIS. They are trying to, you know, make those programs sustainable by finding ways of delivering those services in a more cost efficient way, and also to get the States to take on more of that burden.
They have tried to present themselves as tax cutters, but when they implemented the stage 3 tax cuts, which were part of the Morrison Liberal legacy, and which would have delivered very substantial permanent tax cuts for the very, very highest earners, they reframed those so that only half of that benefit would go to the highest earners and all of the rest of the benefits would go to all of the rest of the taxpayers.
Like, I don’t think this is a Labor government that is saying the market is going to solve all of your problems. This is not a Labor government that is saying, government should get out of the way. They are not Blairites. I mean, Tony Blair and New Labour was tremendously successful, as you say, because they made that argument to Thatcherite, centre-right voters, and they persuaded them that Labour could be trusted to take them forward with a slightly, you know, more socially focused objective. So basically, a sort of more socially generous version of Thatcherism, right?
I think what really killed the centre right in the UK was austerity after the global financial crisis. I think the absolute destruction of reasonable government services during that period, that just continued and continued, was what killed the centre right. And I think the Labour Party in 2024 had the opportunity to actually come in and say, you know what, we are going to stop that. We do not think it is okay that people in the UK, which is a member of the G7 group of the seven richest countries in the world, we do not think it is okay that people in the UK are dying of starvation, which is actually what was happening.
So I think if they had come up with a very strong, “we’re going to restore government services, we are going to actually look at the whole taxation and expenditure system to make sure that we can fund our priorities, which are delivering government services to people”. I think they’d be in a lot - much better position. And I think the reason that Australian Labor won such a thumping majority at the last election was partly because of the implosion of the Coalition and the lack of alternative at that stage. But I think it was also because Labor spent its whole first term essentially saying that, essentially saying, we want to fund government services. Here are the government services that we are going to put more investment in. We’re going to find ways to pay that.
And this was that whole thing that Katy Gallagher and Jim Chalmers came in with at the beginning of 2022. And they said, we are going to go through the budget line by line to see what needs to be spent, how it needs to be spent, where we can make savings so that we can fund our other priorities. They were not saying we’re going to go through the budget to make sure that we can spend less money.
To people who are saying that, you know, well, Labor’s only polling around 33%. Well, we won the 2022 election with about a 33% primary, which was low. We won the 2025 election with a thumping majority with about a 35% primary. So I think, absolutely the Labor Party needs to work on raising that primary vote. And I think the way that we make that case is to actually demonstrate that firstly, we want to be the party that delivers services to Australians.
But also really importantly, that we want to be the party that delivers services to all Australians. And that we are the party that actually sees every single Australian, regardless of where they came from, where their family came from, what their religion is, what their sexuality is, what, how they identify in gender terms. We see every single Australian and we want to be a government for every single Australian, because Labor is literally the only party that is actually saying that and actually has any prospect of delivering that.
Now, I think it really helps that we have Labor now, Labor members in Parliament, after Bob Katter’s pretty racist anti-immigrant rant, a number of Labor members stood up and said, modern Australia is multicultural Australia. Multicultural Australia is not just some theoretical thing that the Labor Party is imposing on the country. Multicultural Australia is the reality of modern Australia. I think that is an important message.
William Sinclair
I think for all practicable intents and purposes, Pauline Hanson is the effective leader of the opposition. I think that the appeal of One Nation comes from two areas. One is that Pauline Hanson, and in a sense, far right parties across the world, can offer people something that centre-right parties can’t, and that is why you’re not a winner in our economic system.
Basically, what centre right parties will say is, if you’re a loser in our economic system, it’s because it’s your fault, you didn’t work hard enough, you’re not smart enough. What far-right people, what far-right parties can offer people is saying, no, no, no, no, the reason you can’t afford a house, the reason you can’t afford to have a family, it’s not your fault, it’s because of immigrants or some other outside group. For a lot of people, they would see that as an improvement. I’m not being blamed for the fact that my living standards have collapsed.
The second thing that One Nation can offer people is give credence to the concern that their culture is changing.
Janaline Oh
Let’s be realistic. One Nation has a terrible, terrible record of successfully doing anything in politics, to be honest. In Queensland, One Nation won 11 seats in 1998. That was the absolute pinnacle of One Nation representation in elected office. Three years later, they had zero seats. Half of them left because they couldn’t get along with Pauline. They provided nothing constructive to the political debate.
People saw how, you know, internally divided, confused, and generally useless, they were in policy terms. And they deserted them, so One Nation, I think, is not sort of a thing in itself. It’s actually…It’s actually a manifestation. It’s kind of, it’s, it’s sort of, it’s the id of, you know, grievance politics. It represents all of those feelings, but it has not to date, and One Nation’s been around for a long time, right? I mean, One Nation’s been around for 30 years. It has not in the last 30 years actually managed to demonstrate any kind of policy competence or any kind of ability to maintain a coherent presence in any kind of political context, unlike the Greens.
And an interesting… an interesting contrast, right? Because the Greens also talk about grievance. If you listen to Adam Bandt’s speech to the National Press Club in 2022, I think one ABC commentator referred to it as being pure Donald, as in Donald Trump, because he said things like, if you think the system is rigged against you, you’re right. It is.
Even now, Larissa Waters does not stand up and open her mouth without mentioning big corporations in a negative way. So I find it interesting that the Greens are also peddling their form of grievance politics. And unlike One Nation, the Greens have demonstrated their ability to operate responsibly in a political system. They have been constructive members of the Senate in the past. They have been part of a government. They have held ministries, Cabinet positions in the ACT. So I do find that kind of interesting that the Greens also articulate a form of grievance politics and they also scapegoat, but their scapegoat is big corporations and that hasn’t really taken hold.
William Sinclair
I just want to jump in on this. I think, yeah, the Greens in, the Greens in Australia have gone backwards. The Greens in the UK are now, by some polls, more popular than UK Labour. So…
Janaline Oh
Yeah, yeah, but the Greens in the UK have never held governing positions either, right? The Greens in the UK are a new phenomenon, I think, mirroring Reform, because all of those people who don’t want to scapegoat immigrants feel that they have nowhere to go. So they’ve gone to the Greens.
William Sinclair
Well, there’s funniness to that around the British voting system, which is first past the post. The first past the post system is dreadful for translating the general sentiment of the electorate in all of its weird nuances into a Parliament that is representative of the actual vote share.
Janaline Oh
But what I’m saying is in an Australian context, if we’re talking about, you know, policy and what the government should be doing to respond to all of this, I do find on the political analysis side that. it’s interesting that one type of grievance seems to have taken hold in such a convincing way and a different type of grievance hasn’t.
And I think actually the big difference is the parties in the centre and how they’ve responded. The Liberal Party has responded by being a policy catastrophe. They have not had a coherent economic policy since Malcolm Turnbull. Scott Morrison had one legislative achievement. Put the pandemic aside, Scott Morrison had basically one piece of legislation that he got through in 2019, shortly after being re-elected, and that was the tax cuts. That was the stage one, stage two, and stage three tax cuts, which provided tax relief to different demographics, different taxpayer brackets over a number of years. The stage 3 tax cuts were the ones that were legislated to come in after the 2022 election that Labor changed.
But that was his one big policy. After that, he had basically no policies. He failed to land any kind of energy policy. He failed to land any kind of housing policy, any kind of infrastructure policy. Like he was a complete policy free zone. So the Liberals haven’t, and all through 2022 to 2025, all the Liberals could say was, “it’s not our job to have a policy, we’re just the opposition. We’ll have policies when we come into government”. When they came to the election, their only policies were just these kind of bizarre, either tinkering around the edges, we’re going to have the fuel excise and give you 25 cents back on your every litre of petrol. Or, you know, we’re going to build $600 million nuclear power plants and it’s going to be taxpayer-owned and run so much for free markets. Or, we’re going to stop you for working from home. I mean, it was like, they just haven’t provided a convincing policy offering. And I think that is the reason that the right of the, the kind of the grievances on the right have had nowhere to go but One Nation.
On the centre left, Labor has implemented a colossal number of policies directly aimed at trying to provide relief for people. And that is why I think the grievances on the left have essentially not manifested in the way that they have on the right. So if you’re on the right, on the centre right of politics, you don’t like Labor’s solutions. You can see what Labor’s offering, but you don’t like that level of government intervention. You don’t like the fact that the unions seem to have so much more power. You don’t like the way in which Labor is doing this. But the Liberals aren’t offering anything at all. So where do you go? You go to the people who are offering you a solution that is not really a solution, but sort of sounds good, and at least hearing your grievance.
William Sinclair
On your - hang on, I just want to respond to your idea of left-wing grievance towards corporations. I think I have left-wing grievance towards corporations. I think I’m very unhappy with the way that corporations have managed from tobacco, fighting against tobacco regulations, to fighting against alcohol regulations, to fighting against climate change, fueling climate change denialism to … I think, I think there’s plenty of examples of corporations doing bad things, preventing good outcomes. And I think some of that grievance is justified.
Janaline Oh
I’m not commenting on whether people should have grievances against corporations or not. What I’m saying is, most Australians are feeling cost of living pressure. Most Australians are concerned about housing affordability. Even if they are comfortable people like me, who own their own houses, they are concerned for their children.
But if you’re on the progressive side of politics, the Labor government is providing what you see as real solutions. They are providing services, they are focusing on reducing the everyday costs for ordinary Australians in terms of doctor’s visits, in terms of school funding, in terms of childcare. They are, so they are looking at that, they’re seeing the Labor government support workers, they’re seeing the Labor government support higher wages, and they’re seeing the Labor government promoting clean industries, taking climate change and environmental matters seriously.
And so whatever they think about corporations, and frankly, most people in Australia don’t think the way you do about corporations. Most people in Australia, frankly, don’t think about corporations at all, right? To the extent that they think about corporations, it’s in the context of who’s employing them or where they do their shopping.
I’m not saying that your concerns are not valid. I’m just saying my point is a political point about where the left and the right of politics have gone over the last few years. And what I’m saying is, on the progressive side, people have a home in a party that is delivering policies that they think are working or at least have the prospect of working.
Now, the Labor Party needs not to be complacent about that, and this is my point, that they need to really, really focus on the policy offering to ensure that that continues and that that expands and that they genuinely deliver real cost of living relief and real housing relief to people, ok?
So, the contrast with the right of politics is that if you don’t think the Labor policy offering is a good offering, if you don’t like unions, if you don’t like government intervention, if you don’t like massive government expenditure on services, then you have nowhere to go. And so the only place you have to go is the people who hear your grievance.
William Sinclair
That was this week’s episode of Why Can’t They Just, recorded on the 15th of February 2026. We’d, of course, love any suggestions and feedback. You can e-mail us at whycanttheyjust at gmail.com, no apostrophe. Or you can leave us a comment on Spotify. Of course, we’d love it if you would subscribe to our podcast on Spotify helps us get the message out or recommend the episode to a friend. My name is William Sinclair.
Janaline Oh
My name is Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?

William is an economist and mathematician.
“People on the progressive end of the political spectrum have legitimate questions: Why can’t they just stop new coal and gas? Why can’t they just end the AUKUS program or stand up to Donald Trump or do all the ambitious things that progressively minded people would support?
“This podcast tries to answer these sorts of questions in a compassionate way without the dismissiveness that often accompanies mainstream politics. We try to examine the other side’s point of view without condescension or contempt. I wanted to make a podcast that would rise above the petty politics of gossip, horserace punditry and psychological conjecture on politicians that passes for analysis. I wanted to talk about the thing that really matters: policy.
“I hope our listeners will hear an argument they genuinely find novel and reach their own conclusions about what we’re discussing.”

Janaline is a former diplomat and current climate, environment and anti-racism activist.
“As a longstanding Canberra-based bureaucrat, I believe in the power of policy to shape and improve lives. I am also acutely aware of the importance of having those policies understood by the people affected by them.
“I started Why Can’t They Just? as way of moving beyond slogans and into what policies really are and what they mean for real people.”