7am

Australia’s health care system is facing unprecedented amounts of pressure.

Our public health systems have been cut back for decades, and now the private system is facing a death spiral… with younger Australians opting out of increasingly pricey insurance options.

Today, senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton on why some health experts are worried that Australia’s health care system is becoming more and more like the expensive, privatised model in the US.

Guest: Senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton.

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Speaking from a hospital in Perth, Priya Murugappan details her daughter’s sickness and her family’s struggle in detention. More than three years after they were taken from their home in Biloela, the Tamil family just want to be settled. Medical records show their children are deficient in Vitamin D and have psychological issues related to being locked up.

Guest: Writer for The Saturday Paper Rebekah Holt.

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Hip-hop is the biggest musical genre in the world right now, and one of the fastest growing locally, but in Australia it still feels like it hasn’t quite broken through and dominated the mainstream yet, in the way it has overseas - especially in the US and UK. 

Acts like the Hilltop Hoods and Bliss n Eso helped popularise Australian hip-hop in the mid-2000s, but while they were achieving commercial success, a much grittier and raw kind of hip-hop was coming out of housing commission estates in Sydney and Melbourne.

Known as gutter rap, or lad rap, this underground subgenre never saw much airplay and didn’t sell heaps of records, but it influenced a generation of artists redefining hip-hop in Australia today.

Writer, journalist and contributor to The Saturday Paper and The Monthly, Mahmood Fazal, joins The Culture to discuss the history of Australia’s underground hip-hop scene and how it feeds into the music being made today.

Guest: Writer, journalist and contributor The Saturday Paper and The Monthly, Mahmood Fazal

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This week, Scott Morrison announced Australia’s involvement in a massive organised crime sting coordinated by the FBI. He pushed for greater security powers, but some observers believe what he really wants is a distraction from bad news and poor polling.

Guest: Contributing editor for The Monthly Rachel Withers.

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After 20 years of war, Australia gave three days’ notice before closing its embassy in Kabul. The dramatic end expresses how unsafe Afghanistan still is and how little the conflict achieved. But the decision also leaves hundreds of local staff vulnerable to retaliation by the Taliban. 

Guest: Chief political correspondent for The Saturday Paper Karen Middleton.

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A further outbreak of Covid-19 in Victorian aged-care homes was not just a possibility: it was almost a given. Even before a vaccine was available, the federal government ended the support payment intended to stop casual staff working across multiple sites. That is exactly how the virus spread.

Guest: Senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton.

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Christian Porter’s decision to settle his defamation suit against the ABC is the end of one battle. But the former attorney-general, accused of a historic rape he strenuously denies, is still fighting on at least two other fronts. Mike Seccombe on how the so-called ‘Defamation trial of the century’ ended - and what happens next.

Guest: National correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe.

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Australian writer Yang Hengjun has been detained by the Chinese government since 2019.

He’s been charged with espionage offences, but the exact nature of what he’s accused of has never been revealed. He’s now awaiting the verdict of a secret trial held a few weeks ago, with the death penalty one possibility. 

Linda Jaivin is a former China correspondent and the author of ‘The Shortest History of China’. Today, she unpacks the mysterious case of Yang Hengjun and what his treatment says about the Chinese government's approach to human rights.

Guest: Writer Linda Jaivin.

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Olivia Rodrigo’s hit single ‘driver’s license’ is undeniably the biggest song of 2021 so far. Now the actor turned singer-songwriter has released her debut album ‘Sour’, which has broken streaming and chart records.

But who is Olivia Rodrigo and why has a teenage girl’s break-up album resonated with so many people of all ages? This week on The Culture we explore what her enormous success says about the way pop stars are manufactured in this current era, with music writer and critic for The Saturday Paper Shaad D’Souza.

Guest: Music critic for The Saturday Paper, Shaad D’Souza.

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Today, Sarah Krasnostein, the best-selling author of ‘The Trauma Cleaner’, reads her essay from the latest issue of The Monthly. 

It’s called ‘The most hated man’ and it explores the sentencing of Richard Pusey, who was convicted of outraging public decency after he filmed the horrific aftermath of a car crash that killed four police officers.

Guest: Writer for The Saturday Paper Sarah Krasnostein.

Background reading: The most hated man in The Monthly

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