Jeremy Cordeaux is in the garage with Pete and Gary, and opens on a scandal close to home: "corridor care" in South Australia, where patients are being treated, and dying, in the hallways of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the most expensive hospital building in the world. The same system, he notes, is now building a new Women's and Children's Hospital at $3 billion, and he asks where the media and the opposition are, and why the old hospital is being turned into apartments rather than kept to ease the load.

He relays ASIO chief Mike Burgess's blunt warning not to talk in your Chinese-made car, and extends it to phones, smart speakers and the Chinese electronics inside nearly every vehicle, citing a Four Corners demonstration of a car being remotely hacked. He rounds on Tony Burke's suggestion that homeowners take in a lodger, noting Burke owns six houses, and warns of a possible spare-room tax, skewers Jim Chalmers for mocking early super access while doing it for his own staff, and welcomes the scrapping of the veterans' medical-expenses cap as a template for reinstating the over-65s health rebate before 1.2 million people drop their cover. Plus Transport Minister Catherine King's lifetime Qantas Chairman's Lounge membership, the $7 billion home-battery scheme he likens to the pink batts scandal, the Alan Jones trial's anonymous accusers, and this day in history from Howard Florey and Jim Henson to The Muppets and the dismissal of the Whitlam government.

 

The Court of Public Opinion with Jeremy Cordeaux AM streams live every Friday from the dining room table at jeremycordeaux.com and via Auscast Radio at auscastnetwork.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app.

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Jeremy Cordeaux is in the garage with Pete and Gary, and opens on the big one: the bosses of the major AI companies warning, all within days of each other, that their own technology may be an existential threat to humanity. Jeremy believes they mean it, and asks the obvious questions, how do you put the genie back in the bottle, why build it without a kill switch, and has anyone thought to ask the AI itself? He notes we managed the nuclear threat for eighty years, but doubts the US and China will slow down when, as Trump says, whoever wins the AI race wins the world.

 

He is scathing about the Prime Minister in Silicon Valley worrying about artists' and content creators' copyright rather than the survival of the population, and argues that platforms and creators need each other, the audience of 10.1 million a month is an opportunity, not a grievance. He questions the pursuit of a UN Security Council seat, calling the UN impotent, irrelevant and a $100 million-a-year cocktail party that stood by at Srebrenica, and turns to immigration: with around 919,000 Australians of working age on unemployment support at a cost of $21 billion, he asks why we are told cutting migration will crash the economy. Plus a cynic's look at Earl Spencer's Diana memoir and the numbers behind it, the flop of Alan Joyce's book, and this day in history from Michael Faraday and Irving Berlin to Friends and Hobbit Day.

 

The Court of Public Opinion with Jeremy Cordeaux AM streams live every Friday from the dining room table at jeremycordeaux.com and via Auscast Radio at auscastnetwork.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app.

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Jeremy Cordeaux is in the garage with Pete and Gary, and opens on the strange and the serious. First the strange: a passenger on an American flight duct taped to his first class seat after a mid air outburst, which Jeremy turns into a run of one liners, and Harvey Norman's double page spreads for an $800 Dyson electric toothbrush, camera and all, which sets him wondering how the human mouth became such a gold mine.

 

Then the serious. Ambulance ramping has hit a record 5,891 hours, five years after Labor won an election promising to fix it, and the union that campaigned on the issue has gone quiet. Aged care beds, the worst housing market in forty years, headline after headline, and Jeremy asks whether the media honeymoon is finally over. He looks back forty years to 1986, Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster, and a Hawke and Keating housing experiment they eventually had to scrap, and joins the dots to today.

 

Plus the digital duty of care legislation heading through Parliament, why he would rather empower parents than pass another law, GDP growth propped up by subsidised electric cars, and billions in public money poured into Whyalla steel and an aluminium smelter. He wants to see the agreements before anyone signs us up, and asks why union controlled super funds are called industry funds. All that and this day in history.

 

The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST) at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app.

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Jeremy Cordeaux is in the garage with Pete and Gary, and opens on a genuine medical breakthrough: a Monash University trial, co-authored by Professor Mark Nelson, suggesting a daily statin for the over-60s could cut heart attack and stroke by 30 per cent, overturning earlier fears of a dementia link. He asks why medicine took so long to investigate it, and promises to chase the answers on the Friday live stream.

He then turns to a run of "nanny state" and double-standard stories: Queensland's new age limits for e-bikes and scooters, the disturbing report that most young people say they have experienced strangulation during sex and the tragedy that can follow, and the coming "digital duty of care" law aimed at social media giants, which he suspects is softening the public up, noting the same government caved to the gambling lobby. He argues banning camera glasses at swimming centres is pointless when phone cameras are everywhere, warns that 91,000 over-65s have now dropped private health cover after Labor axed the rebate, flags Russian and Chinese timber and window-frame dumping threatening a $6 billion local industry, backs Queensland teachers wanting the same legal protection as police and nurses, and rails against a looming $4 stamp with once-a-week delivery. Plus this day in history from Ferdinand Porsche and Frank Capra to Britain declaring war in 1939.

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Jeremy Cordeaux is in the garage with Pete and Gary for the first day of spring, and there is plenty to cover. He pays a warm tribute to Dolly Parton, larger than life and loved by everyone who met her, then turns to the political earthquake in the west: One Nation's Luke Herdegen taking nearly 40 per cent of the primary vote and 57 per cent two-party-preferred in the Secret Harbour by-election, a seat Labor held for 40 years. He calls it strategic, psychological and a genuine shot across the bows of both major parties, backed by Red Bridge and Newspoll numbers putting One Nation ahead of Labor nationally.

He argues Anthony Albanese is "delusional" for insisting he has to beat One Nation because "we owe it to history," lists the government's record of higher taxes, higher debt, falling house values and electricity up by billions, and questions a Prime Minister whose diary is full of overseas trips, including a Pacific Islands Forum most island leaders are skipping. He rejects using the Nepal avalanche disaster to justify net zero, restating that Australia could switch everything off and change the climate not at all, and returns to Adelaide, where the Malinauskas government plans to cut down another 400 trees, more than 1,000 in total, for a $96 million, three-day MotoGP-style race most locals do not want. Plus this day in history from the outbreak of World War Two and the discovery of the Titanic to Rear Window and Barry Gibb.

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Jeremy Cordeaux is back in the garage with Pete and Gary, and opens with a milestone: Andy Martin reports 10.1 million people checked out the show across all platforms in the last 28 days. He then turns to the record-breaking "Stop the Chop" petition, more than 45,000 signatures carried book by book up the steps of Parliament House, to save trees of significance the government wants to cut down for sport and events, and warns Labor there is always a price to pay in the court of public opinion.

He questions why Treasurer Jim Chalmers says he is worried about the coalition and One Nation influencing the $4.5 trillion superannuation industry, but not the union movement that already sits close to it, and argues Labor has its eye on super to fund a renewables push that has seen electricity costs rise. He defends free speech and Pauline Hanson's right to take her 18C case to the High Court, citing Voltaire; flags the "unintended consequence" of paying $40,000 to $60,000 a day to anchored fuel tankers with nowhere to store the fuel; asks whether an AFL player is really worth $5 million a season; and makes a heartfelt case against putting parents and grandparents into aged care, recalling three generations under one roof. Plus this day in history from Krakatoa and Halley's Comet to Mountbatten, Mary Poppins and Don Bradman.

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Jeremy Cordeaux is back in a cold, wet garage with Pete and Gary, and the headline number is staggering: federal debt has passed $1 trillion, a one with twelve zeros after it. He works through what that means, roughly $29.6 billion a year in interest, about $569 million every single week, and contrasts it with 2006, when Peter Costello declared Australia debt-free, sold Telstra and set up the Future Fund. He argues a government this poor at managing money has little to show for the debt beyond "a masterclass in what not to do."

He also breaks down how David Speers, in his view, sprung a trap on One Nation's newly elected member David Farley on Insiders, turning a reasonable point about skilled visas into a "new member goes rogue" headline, and warns One Nation to stop being naive with a hostile press. Along the way: the 4.5% unemployment rate and 16,000 jobs lost in a month that barely made the news, the tobacco excise that has collapsed from $16.3 billion to $4 billion while illicit smokes supply 80% of the market, why there is no excise on fast food or a sugar tax, agreement (for once) with the Greens that the government runs "a protection racket" for the gambling industry, Ben Carroll's promise of ten free dental clinics in a broke Victoria, the Malinauskas government misreading the felling of Adelaide's parkland trees, 103-year-old Spitfire pilot Harry Young flying again, and a contested reflection on the 60th anniversary of the Wave Hill walk-off. Plus this day in history from Neil Armstrong to Sean Connery and the liberation of Paris.

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Jeremy Cordeaux is back in the garage with Pete and Gary, and the theme is priorities. He returns to Health Minister Mark Butler's line that there is "no money lying around" to keep the over-65s health rebate, then points to a gun buyback that will pay up to $10,000 a gun and cost, by his reckoning, some $2.6 billion, to crush firearms he says could be stored, sold or put in museums. He asks the travel-advisory question nobody wants to touch: if the government warns us not to visit a long list of countries for our own safety, why is there no reciprocal caution about migration from those same places?

He also takes aim at the $2.5 billion bailout of the Tomago aluminium smelter, arguing Labor's own energy policy broke a business that used to be self-supporting, and that the Prime Minister blamed coal and the Liberals for a problem created by net zero. Along the way: a Pakistan National Day ceremony at Burnside Town Hall while we hesitate over Australia Day, Strathfield becoming the first council to require English on shop signs, coordinated school-student protests he calls the product of classroom indoctrination, the Commonwealth Bank's $10.9 billion profit and why the ABC gets banks wrong, Pauline Hanson's right to say she does not like the Mardi Gras, and this day in history from the Battle of Britain to Phyllis Diller and Jerry Lewis.

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Jeremy Cordeaux is back in the chilly garage with Pete and Gary, and he opens on the day itself - 18 August, the anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan and Vietnam Veterans' Day - before turning to the news. He dismisses "melon-gate" as a media smokescreen distracting from things that matter, welcomes the opposition's plan to cut the building code from 2,000 pages to 80 (and dreams of doing the same to 17,000 pages of tax law), and asks why 100 service stations were raided for illicit tobacco when the excise is what drives people to $12 packets in the first place.

The heart of the show is the NDIS. Costed on the back of an envelope at $13 billion a year, it now runs at $50 billion and is heading, Jeremy warns, for $100 billion by 2030 - and still, from Julia Gillard's founding "landmine" to Bill Shorten's warning that it was "in the hands of organised crime," no minister has taken responsibility. He is scathing about Minister Jenny McAllister saying fraud "might be something we look at," and about a plan to shift developmental-delay children into a new "Thriving Kids" bureaucracy. He also argues the Bondi attack was about immigration and hate preachers, not legal firearms - "it's not the gun, it's the person holding it" - and backs sharing immigration cuts fairly across every visa category, starting with the government's own no-go travel-advisory nations. Plus this day in history: Long Tan, the Battle of Britain's "Hardest Day," Robert Redford, Winx and the birth of Adidas.

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Jeremy Cordeaux is in the garage with Pete and Gary, and the anger is close to the surface. He opens on a London insurer threatening to cancel a driver's policy unless he removes a "Jesus loves you" sign from his Nissan — supposedly because it raises the risk of vandalism — and asks what has become of Christian England. Then the story he can scarcely believe: a Zambian immigrant with almost 100 convictions, who sexually abused a three-year-old boy and his disabled nine-year-old niece, spared deportation by a tribunal under a ministerial direction from Tony Burke, partly because he'd lose access to the NDIS. Jeremy wants to know why the Minister will explain it to everyone but him.

He also takes aim at the $400,000 and 47 days Chris Bowen spent circling the globe promoting net zero, the $100 million a year Australia pays to belong to a United Nations he says has kept the peace nowhere, the stamp duty that stops downsizing, the soft-plastics problem we could solve by simply not wrapping everything in plastic, the fight to save the Snowy brumbies from slaughter, and the new warning that more than two cups of milk a day could harm a toddler. Plus this day in history — Alfred Hitchcock, John Logie Baird and the Logies, Annie Oakley, Florence Nightingale and the last "Good night, John Boy".

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