Hi and Merry Christmas!

Your Inside Politics team is on a little hiatus over summer before we return at the end of January.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy some of our favourite episodes of the year, starting with a trip down memory lane to election night with our former chief political correspondent David Crowe before he passed the baton to BFF of the podcast Paul Sakkal.

Subscribe to The Age & SMH: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’re bringing you the best episodes of 2025 before your Morning Edition team returns mid-January.

It was another big year for the human headline that was U.S President Donald Trump, and political and international editor Peter Hartcher was an essential listen each week on our podcast as we tried to make sense of it all.

This episode was recorded in May, just as Trump was poised to introduce what he called his ‘big beautiful bill’, which was predicted to tip government debt over the one trillion mark.

What did it matter? Because, Hartcher argues, these figures point to an empire in decline.

Hartcher explores what it would mean if the United States ceased to be a great power, and what it would take to bring America back from the brink.

Subscribe to The Age & SMH: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week it feels wrong to talk about politics in the wake of the horrific antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach on Sunday. Australians and Sydneysiders in particular are still trying to make sense of the senseless.

But the fact is that the response to the massacre has been deeply political, and things got divisive very quickly.

So this week on Inside Politics we are going to discuss the political response to the incident and how it might affect our national life in the months and years to come.

Jacqueline Maley is joined by political correspondent Natassia Chrysanthos.

Subscribe to The Age & SMH: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.