One of the most startling statistics from last year’s census was for the first time, fewer than half of Australians identified as Christian. 90% of Australians identified as Christians back in 1966 - and the number has been in decline ever since. The data shows it’s millennials turning their back on God. Today’s guest is Andrew Singleton, Professor of Sociology and Social Research at Deakin University. He says millennials now subscribe to a set of beliefs he calls "Whateverism". So on today’s Br...
Jul 04, 2022•22 min•Season 3Ep. 153
Bitcoin made a splash when it was first introduced in 2009. Since then, investors have sunk billions of dollars into cryptocurrencies. Although they were touted as being a hedge against inflation, they’ve been acting as risk assets in the recent downturn – and their value has dived with the sharemarket. Crypto’s price has fallen 70 percent since November. Paul Vigna, who writes on cryptocurrency for the Wall Street Journal, takes us through why the price has seen such a massive fall. He also exp...
Jul 03, 2022•20 min•Season 3Ep. 152
Miriam Rizvi is one third of the ARIA award nominated children’s band, The Beanies. The Beanies also have a podcast on the LiSTNR app or wherever you get your podcasts. In this conversation Jamila Rizvi interviews her little sister Mim. They dive into the pressures of growing up in a highly successful family, how imposter syndrome manifests in different ways and the lengths Mim went to supporting Jamila during a stay in hospital. For all the information on The Beanies upcoming live shows head to...
Jul 01, 2022•39 min•Season 3Ep. 151
Aussie music journalist Mawunyo Gbogbo has written a memoir taking us from where she was born in Ghana; to country NSW where she grew up; to how she became a music writer; and eventually to the bright lights of New York, the heart of hip hop. ‘Hip Hop and Hymns’ is about Mawunyo’s two great loves - music and her faith – and how both helped her confront life’s curve balls. The memoir is about moving to Australia from Africa, and growing up Black in country New South Wales. It also tracks her tumu...
Jun 30, 2022•20 min•Season 3Ep. 150
America has been rocked by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade - the case that has protected the right to abortion in the US for almost 50 years. Already, states are banning the procedure and it may be just weeks before half of the states across the US ban abortion. In today’s episode of The Briefing, Nick Sweeney, an Australian born director of a documentary called AKA Jane Roe tells us the unbelievable story of a young Texan woman called Norma McCorvey – who was to become Jane ...
Jun 29, 2022•21 min•Season 3Ep. 149
The world watched on as Tesla founder Elon Musk told his staff working from home is over – and if they didn’t want to return to the office, they could look elsewhere for a job. Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar came straight out and said any Tesla staffers looking for work would be welcome at Atlassian. So is Musk right? Is working from home dead? Dr Libby Sander is Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management, the founder and director of the Future of Work Project. Libby says for so long big corpo...
Jun 28, 2022•21 min•Season 3Ep. 148
So, you’ve been elected to Parliament. What next? How do you navigate the 75,000 square metres of Parliament House in Canberra? Where do you get a coffee? And where’s your office? Annika Smethurst, the Age newspaper’s Victorian parliamentary correspondent and The Briefing’s Canberra insider, worked in the halls of federal parliament for more than a decade. She explains what 35 new members of the House of Reps face as they start their new jobs today. They’ll be given an office, an advisor, and a ...
Jun 27, 2022•20 min•Season 3Ep. 147
More than 3,000 Australians take their lives each year and a further 65,000 attempt suicide. A suicide aftercare service developed by Beyond Blue is helping to restore a sense of hope and belonging for people recovering after a suicidal crisis. Early evaluation findings show that measures of suicidality decreased 63% and psychological distress decreased 30% among those who participated in Beyond Blue’s The Way Back Service. Beyond Blue’s CEO Georgie Harman tells us how the service supports peopl...
Jun 26, 2022•21 min•Season 3Ep. 146
The incredible Art Simone, fan favourite on Ru Paul’s Drag Race Down Under, joins us on this week’s episode of The Weekend Briefing. In this conversation Jamila and Art cover it all! Everything from Art’s early forays into drag, her shock elimination and return from Drag Race Down Under. Plus, they dive into what it is about Aussie drag that sets this country apart. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jun 24, 2022•29 min•Season 3Ep. 145
Pandemic restrictions have mostly lifted and Australians are gearing up to travel overseas. But many can’t get their passport to allow them to leave the country. The queues to collect passports are hundreds of metres long, snaking outside passport offices in all capital cities. We’re joined by Amanda, a Briefing listener whose family had to cancel a holiday in Fiji because they couldn’t get passports in time; and Dean Long, a travel industry expert and CEO The Australian Federation of Travel Age...
Jun 23, 2022•20 min•Season 3Ep. 144
It’s been a big week in international sport with FINA and the International Rugby League announcing bans on transgender athletes. It follows an announcement late last year from the International Olympic Committee that it would leave it up to individual sports to formulate policy on trans competitors. Trans athletes even surfaced as an election issue at the federal poll in May. Caroline Layt, a trans woman and former elite rugby league player joins us to tell us what the bans mean for trans athle...
Jun 22, 2022•20 min•Season 3Ep. 143
NASA is preparing to launch three rockets from the Arnhem Space Centre in the Northern Territory, scheduled for the end of this month and early July. Professor Melissa Zwart from Flinders University tells us the three rockets are “sounding” rockets. They won’t actually reach orbit, but they will collect scientific data. It’s a big deal, it’s the first time NASA has conducted a rocket launch from a commercial facility outside the United States. The traditional custodians of the land, the Gumatj p...
Jun 21, 2022•18 min•Season 3Ep. 142
An energy crisis across Australia took us to the brink of blackouts last week. A cold snap; the war in the Ukraine; and escalating global coal and gas prices formed a perfect storm where we were being urged to turn the dishwasher off. The crisis prompted the market operator to suspend the short term market and take control over supply. Mark Ludlow writes for the Australian Financial Review on energy. He says the long term solution is renewables with storage, but how do we manage that transition ...
Jun 20, 2022•21 min•Season 3Ep. 141
It’s January 1982, Lyn and Chris Dawson appear to have the perfect marriage. He's a star footballer and popular high school teacher. She's a devoted wife and mother who worked as a nurse. Lyn Dawson goes missing shortly afterwards. Chris Dawson was charged with the 1982 murder of his wife, Lynette. The cold case was at the center of widely popular investigative podcast series Teachers Pet, which focused on the disappearance and probable murder of the Sydney mother-of-two. Chris Dawson has pleade...
Jun 19, 2022•22 min•Season 3Ep. 140
Pete Helliar is one seriously funny dude. He is also seriously busy. Pete is a regular host on The Project and the creator and star of 10's How To Stay Married. He has created and co-produced two series of the award winning It’s A Date for ABC TV. He hosts a podcast called You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, has written children’s books and his latest stand up special is streaming on Paramount Plus now. But what is Pete about behind the smiles and the jokes? How much of his real life is channeled into h...
Jun 17, 2022•31 min•Season 3Ep. 139
Tik Tok has been the fastest growing social media app ever. In just five years it has had over 2 billion downloads and now reports 1.6b regular users - about half of Facebook, already. Many of its users are young and so there’s obviously concern that it's being used to sell and promote drugs. Dr. James Martin is a senior lecturer in Criminology at Deakin University who specialises in the online drug trade. How concerned should we be about TikTok and where does it fit into the much bigger and mor...
Jun 16, 2022•21 min•Season 3Ep. 138
The Reserve Bank of Australia provides forward guidance for the economy. One of the key levers of fiscal policy is interest rate projections. RBA boss Philip Lowe predicted he couldn’t see interest rates rising before 2024 – and many Australians took out mortgages based on that advice. Well we now know he was wrong. John Kehoe, the economic editor at the Australian Financial Review, joins us to explain how and why Philip Lowe got it so wrong....and what the consequences will be in the housing ma...
Jun 15, 2022•25 min•Season 3Ep. 137
The concept of the four-day working week has been around for almost a century, but like the idea of working from home which needed a pandemic to make happen, the four-day week concept hasn’t really taken off in Australia until recently. Researchers have found a four-day work week without a pay cut improves both productivity and a sense of wellbeing, less stress and burnout, and a better work-life balance among workers. Joe O’Connor is the CEO of 4 Day Week Global who’s running a huge trial in th...
Jun 14, 2022•20 min•Season 3Ep. 136
Johann Hari’s new book Stolen Focus is all about the crisis in concentration sweeping the world. The book goes into why it’s happening, how much it’s affecting us, and what can be done to tackle the problem. Johann joins us to explain there are so many things competing for our attention, it makes it really hard to focus. Can we fight back against it as individuals... by being more disciplined... or is there a bigger war we need to wage on the forces that are stealing our attention? There is a lo...
Jun 13, 2022•22 min•Season 3Ep. 135
Australia’s new government has appointed an Assistant Minister for the Republic. Matt Thistlethwaite has been tasked with taking the Labor Party’s policy of making Australia a republic from policy to reality. Mr Thistlethwaite joins us on the Queen’s Birthday holiday to talk about what his plans for a republic, what our new nation’s leader would be called….and if we’ll get to KEEP our Queen’s birthday long weekend!! On today’s Briefing…is Australia going to become a republic? Follow The Briefing...
Jun 12, 2022•22 min•Season 3Ep. 134
Sophie Cachia has always been in a rush. At twenty she met a bloke and fell in love, by age twenty-three she’d given birth to her first child, and within another year or two grew a formidable social media following for her account “The Young Mummy”. Then There Was Her is Sophie’s debut book. It’s intimate, illuminating and revealing - which might surprise readers given that so much of Sophie’s life has been lived publicly on Instagram. The book details Sophie’s catapult into the public eye and t...
Jun 10, 2022•29 min•Season 3Ep. 133
Filming on Australia’s longest-running television show Neighbours, finishes today…..after nearly 9,000 episodes, 63 weddings, 20 births and 68 deaths. We’re joined by Ryan Moloney – who plays Jarrod "Toadfish" Rebecchi to talk about the show’s legacy – and his plans for the future; and Andrew Mercardo – the TV reviewer and historian about why the show is ending and it’s place in the Australian psyche. On today’s Briefing we look back on four decades of Neighbours with long-running cast member To...
Jun 09, 2022•21 min•Season 3Ep. 132
Australian journalist Cheng Lei has been charged in a Chinese court of supplying state secrets. Detained since August 2020, her family and friends now say she’s been denied access to consular officials and prison officials have tightened her food supply. Her partner, Nick Coyle joins us on the Briefing to talk about what the future looks like for Cheng Lei and what life is like for her behind bars in a Chinese prison. With the Albanese government pledging to improve relations with Beijing, it’s ...
Jun 08, 2022•22 min•Season 3Ep. 131
In the next 20 years, almost 250 billion dollars will be transferred from baby boomers to Generations X, Y and Z. We’re joined by Aleks Vickovich, the Wealth Editor at the Australian Financial Review to discuss what it means for the economy – and in particular young Australians hoping to buy their first home. And with yesterday’s interest rate decision by the Reserve Bank….younger Australians are going to be watching the housing market, hoping prices fall to help them enter the market. So what w...
Jun 07, 2022•19 min•Season 3Ep. 130
Will Joe Biden be the US President who actually changes gun culture in America? 19 students and two teachers were shot at an elementary school in Texas last week. It was the 27th school shooting in the US this year. It feels like every time it happens we hear the same calls for action on guns, AND the same rhetoric from the NRA and gun owners…..that the Second Amendment is the right to bear arms. We’re joined by Farrah Tomazin, the US correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. So where...
Jun 06, 2022•19 min•Season 3Ep. 129
The LiSTNR team has launched a new podcast, Post: News In Five Hosted by journalist and producer Ninah Kopel, Post: News In Five is a brand new, daily news short cast adapted from The Saturday Paper’s daily newsletter Post, written by Max Opray. Each weekday morning, a five-minute episode will drop, bringing listeners up to speed on the top five news stories of the day. By 8.30am you will know what’s going on, why it’s going on and where it’s going next. Add it to your LiSTNR playlist or subscri...
Jun 06, 2022•1 min•Season 3Ep. 128
In just 12 months, the video app TikTok has transformed the music industry….artists can reach audiences like never before. Directly getting new music to their fans in seconds. But some artists say they’re being told to create content purely for the short-attention span market of TikTok. Halsey blew up last week after her record company insisted she create a FAKE post to promote a song she wanted to release. We’re joined by Reuben Styles-Richards from Peking Duk who takes a hilarious approach to ...
Jun 05, 2022•21 min•Season 3Ep. 127
Daniel and Luke Mancuso are brothers who live in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. In 2010, after 23 years of marriage their parents separated. What followed was a campaign of intimidation and coercion by their father Paulino towards their mother Teresa. Hang up calls. Stalking. Threats. Rumors… Three years later, Daniel and Luke’s beloved mum was murdered at home by their father. These two remarkable young men have since moved back into what was once their family door and reconnected with their Gre...
Jun 03, 2022•29 min•Season 3Ep. 126
The Liberal Party began its rebuilding process under new leader Peter Dutton this week. The Young Liberals are the next generation of conservative politicians. So what do young Liberals see as the future of the party - they will, after all, potentially be candidates for election for the Liberal Party in years to come. What will the Liberal Party look like in 2030? Deyi Wu is President of the NSW Young Liberals. Her brutal assessment of the election loss is both honest and troubling. Deyi says th...
Jun 02, 2022•22 min•Season 3Ep. 125
New Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised a referendum on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. So what is it? What will Australians be voting on? The Statement itself calls for an Aboriginal voice to parliament and a Makarrata Commission, a process of agreement making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about their history. It came from a convention bringing together over 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders at the foot of Uluru. Thomas Mayor was one of the...
Jun 01, 2022•23 min•Season 3Ep. 124
