435 - The Adelaide Show Spin Detector

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435 - The Adelaide Show Spin Detector

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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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