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The Adelaide Show

The Adelaide Show

By: Auscast Network
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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 1-79.2026 Auscast Network Art Politics & Government Social Sciences
Episodes
  • 436 - Rag-Tag Extremists

    436 - Rag-Tag Extremists
    Jul 18 2026
    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. Stuart 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 concisepage. 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 Stuart 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 ...
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    2 hrs and 12 mins
  • 435 - The Adelaide Show Spin Detector

    435 - The Adelaide Show Spin Detector
    Jun 27 2026
    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 concisepage. 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 ...
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    42 mins
  • 434 - Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction

    434 - Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction
    Jun 12 2026
    This is not a typical Adelaide Show episode. For the first time in 434 instalments, Steve Davis opens by confessing he’s not sure how many more episodes there will be because something has broken in him. Not in South Australia’s people, whom he loves unreservedly, but in his trust of the state’s governance. What follows is one of the most honest conversations the show has ever hosted. There is no SA Drink of the Week this episode. The mood didn’t call for it. In the Musical Pilgrimage, Steve closes with Australia Day by Steve Davis & The Virtuosos, a song whose thesis turns out to be the quiet heart of everything discussed: that we’ve retreated into our selfish dwellings, stopped sticking our arms over the fence to say hello, and in doing so have left ourselves vulnerable to exactly the kind of politics this episode is about. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concisepage. Running Sheet: Something Has Broken: SA Politics, the Park Lands, and the Politics of Distraction 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week. 00:03:15 David Olney and Steve Davis Steve opens by describing where he is: not disconnected from South Australia’s people, but from its governance. He says he is earnestly worried, and that there is no performative aspect to the episode. To stress-test his thinking and provide context, he has invited back David Olney, whose academic background covers history, international politics, international security, and complex problem-solving. David notes that colleagues once told him he thought more like a psychologist or neurologist than a political scientist, always searching for the human motivation beneath structural problems. David introduces the work of political theorist Ted Robert Gurr, who studied the conditions preceding revolution across different periods of history. Gurr found two sequential thresholds: first, when people stop believing things will get better; and second, when they become convinced things are actively getting worse. Steve places himself at Gurr’s second threshold, citing the government’s handling of the algal bloom, a secret tower deal at peppercorn rent, tree clearing in the Park Lands for a golf event, and the prospect of further clearing for a motorcycle race. His concern is not with the events or sports themselves but with the irreversible damage to trees that Tourism SA uses to represent Adelaide. Two further things have deepened Steve’s despair. The first is what he reads as a coordinated flood of upbeat ministerial social media videos that do not address the Park Lands issue at all. He sees it as a tactic borrowed from Trump’s playbook. The second is the government’s launch of a media literacy tool to help students decode messaging, at the same time as the government itself, in Steve’s view, avoids transparency, attacks critics personally rather than engaging with their arguments, and operates through private deals. David draws on Rebecca Costa’s book The Watchman’s Rattle to frame this: Costa observed that as civilisations struggle to deal with significant problems, political attention shifts to small and peripheral ones. David’s illustration from literature is the war in Gulliver’s Travels fought over which end of a boiled egg to crack. Steve recommends the book Angertainment by Ed Koper as a guide to recognising this pattern. He uses Koper’s framing to contrast two dystopian visions: Orwell’s 1984, where repression at least provokes resistance, and Huxley’s Brave New World, where a population entertained into passivity never finds cause to push back. David agrees that Huxley’s version is the more troubling of the two. David then explains neoliberalism at Steve’s request: the economic model adopted across the English-speaking world in the early 1980s under Thatcher, Reagan, and Hawke, which replaced mixed ...
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    56 mins
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