Future Perfect

Lesbia Harford was a poet, a law graduate, a factory worker and a radical from Melbourne, Australia.

She was a leading trade unionist, and wrote openly about same-sex desire in the middle of the Great War.

But she died in 1927 aged just 36.

And while her poetry collections have become progressively more loved over the years - and her status as a queer icon, and political activist, has grown - she is far from a household name.

Now, hopefully, that will change.

Somewhere Here the Future’s Hid: The Extraordinary Life of Lesbia Harford is the name of the brand new biography of this remarkable person.

It’s written by author, academic, and Walkley-award winning journalist, Jeff Sparrow.

The book provides much more than just an account of Lesbia’s life; it captures the wisdom, vitality, and sense of justice that makes her story so important for us today.

“She has become this semi-legendary figure … not massively well-known, but known by some of Australia’s best writers who rated her as this almost unprecedented figure: someone who was writing this modernist poetry from a radical perspective decades ahead of everyone else.”

Waleed Aly is one of Australia’s sharpest public intellectuals.

He has a particular skill in probing the bigger questions that lie beneath our politics and culture, and his new Quarterly Essay is no exception. It’s called Time of Monsters: What Future for Liberalism? As the title suggests, it asks whether we’re living through the death of an old political order – one that’s animated global politics for a couple of centuries.

The essay maps the new politics rising in its place, both conservative and progressive. It takes in the battles over identity, injustice and free speech, the appeal of illiberal democracy, the rise of AI, and why freedom has started to feel so unfree.

It’s a clarifying essay that casts our current mode of political volatility in fresh light. And while it might not provide all the answers, it certainly asks the right questions.

“It’s just been one of those centuries where it’s crisis, then another crisis, then another crisis, they’re just rolling shocks … I think there’s a temptation for us in a moment like this to say 'What’s going on with the populist right?' but it ignores that there’s been a breakout on the left as well. This is better understood as a widespread thing.”

Journalist, author and long-time Triple R subscriber George Megalogenis joins host Dylan Bird to discuss his new book Three Shocks: Who We Are Becoming In The 21st Century.

It looks at the transformative shifts that are changing Australia's self-identity and the huge implications for the country's politics.

"The middle class is clearly not White anymore, and it's clearly not male. And its not an aspirational battler, as John Howard used to define his sort of ex-Labor voter that he picked up in outer metropolitan [areas] and in the regions. So that part of Australia, 'real Australia', middle Australia, is not White. For our politics, that is the most profound thing."

 Kae Tempest is a person of deep feeling, with a rare ability to channel life's beauty, pain, and mysteries into moving works of art.

From his roots as an MC and spoken word artist on the London scene, he rose to critical acclaim in 2013 by winning the coveted Ted Hughes Prize for Poetry for the work Brand New Ancients. The following year, he was named the Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society, a once in a decade honor. To go with his eight poetry collections, he's published four plays, one nonfiction essay, and released five albums, two of which have been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.

In 2026, his track I Stand on the Line from a 2025 album, Self-Titled, won the Best Contemporary Song at the Ivor Novello Awards. In the same year he published his second novel, Having Spent Life Seeking. The story follows Rothco Taylor, who returns to their hometown after 15 years away, determined to find atonement and connection with the turbulent past they left behind. It's a story that explores gender identity, desire, and addiction, themes that overlap in some ways with Tempest's own life journey.

This conversation, recorded on the eve of Kae's Australian tour, explores what went into his recent novel and album, where inspiration comes from, and what it's like to be in touch with the world.

"My relationship with my work is so beautiful. To be creative is so necessary for all of us. We all have it. We all have this capacity to express ourselves and meet ourselves there in that place of creativity.  It's so abundantly powerful.

If I didn't have my writing, I couldn't imagine having got through life. Creativity has given me my life, and now I give my life to creativity. Music saved my life, now I give my life to music.”

In late 2023, Antoinette Lattouf had a five day contract to host the mornings program on ABC radio Sydney. It’d normally be a light and breezy week of broadcasting in the pre-Christmas wind down. Instead, it became the central flashpoint in a legal saga – when she was taken off air by management two days early, after reposting a Human Rights Watch report about Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. In response, Lattouf sued the ABC for unlawful termination – and won.

It was a huge result for the journalist personally, but also one of broader significance, throwing up questions around the power of the pro-Israel lobby, the integrity of ABC management’s decision making processes, and freedom of speech.

Antoinette’s new book is called Women Who Win, and it places her struggle in a larger context - of women throughout history who have taken on authority. It’s part memoir, part roadmap for change, asking what it takes to succeed when the odds and systems are stacked against you.

“[Establishment media are] so concerned about advertisers or lobby groups – like the ABC running scared of the next attack by the Murdoch Press or the chain of complaints from pro-Israel lobbyists or gas lobbyists … Are they really giving a voice to the voiceless, or are they just making power comfortable? And when journalism in this country walks alongside or in step with powerful institutions and people, then our democracy is in a bit of trouble."

Francesca Albanese is a human rights expert, legal scholar, and one of the world's most significant voices on Palestinian struggle.

As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, she has spent years documenting what she and others, including the International Court of Justice, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have described as genocide. This has made her a target for the pro-Israel lobby.

She’s been sanctioned by the US government, threatened with arrest in Germany, and has faced repeated death threats for her unwavering commitment to calling out Israel's attrociies.

Her new book is called While the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine – its part memoir, told through the stories of ten people she’s met in her life and career as legal expert on Palestine, and a rallying cry for the world to stop the horrors that the international human rights system is supposed to prevent.

In this conversation, she reflects on her life and career spent face to face with human suffering, the moral imperative to mobilise against genocide, and where she finds hope.

"Documenting human rights violations in a time of genocide are excrutiating for the mind, for the body....I've been swalling death and horrible things that humans have done to other humans for over three years now.

"The genocide has changed my life forever. I don't think there is a way to repair it other than being good, to being caring towards myself, towards my loved ones...I have two young children. Preserving my sanity is something that goes hand in hand with being their mum.

"I know that if all good people on Earth did what they could, and what they know they can do, the world will heal sooner than we think."

Louis Theroux's new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere has refocused public attention on how toxic masculinity is incubated online. But what whappens when these often violent, sexist attitudes towards women and girls enter the schoolyard?

Dr Stephanie Wescott is a lecturer at Monash University who researches how manosphere figures like Andrew Tate influence gender attitudes in schools. Her new co-authored study reports on teachers' experiences of being harassed and targeted with intimidatory behaviour while at work - a pattern they say is getting worse. It paints a worrying picture of the education system's failure to properly address the problem.

Dr Wescott spoke about the study's findings and what can be done both to protect teachers and educate boys about respectful relationships.

"The level of violence, the visceral misogyny, and also the impunity or the brazenness with which young people can feel…entitled to do this to teachers…is pretty shocking."

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers across the world, has grown to become one of the most visited sites on the internet.

Dylan Bird is joined by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to reflect on the origins of the website, how a radical idea of crowd-sourcing knowledge worked, toxicity on the internet, and what lessons we can draw from Wikipedia in countering division and building trust, as explored in his newest book The Seven Rules of Trust.

Jimmy will be in Melbourne for an in-conversation event through RMIT and The Wheeler Centre at The Capitol Theatre on May 20.

“At Wikipedia, the community has the tools to control the space … people respond well to that, and it sets a tone that we’re not supposed to be bashing each other; we’re supposed to be working together in a collegial way.”

Photo credit: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Yanis Varoufakis is an economist and former Greek finance minister. He’s also a best-selling author of titles including Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, and his latest: Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance.

During his recent visit to Australia, Yanis sat down with Dylan Bird in the Triple R studios to share his thoughts on the US and Israel’s attack on Iran, the power of the Zionist lobby, the links between Israel and Big Tech, how we might combat the rise of right-wing populism, and Australia's response to Trump's bullying on the world stage.

“The mind-numbing cowardice of Anthony Albanese and his government is going to stay as an albatross around the neck of Australia for decades.”

Photo credit: supplied.

Although the podcast format of Future Perfect has now wrapped, this show continues to be broadcast on Triple R. You can now listen to new episodes on Triple R’s FM On Demand service at rrr.org.au/explore/programs/future-perfect.

Thanks for listening!