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.

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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. 

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

Well, the mushroom murders was the criminal case of the year and in this episode, we take you inside the court on the day Erin Patterson was sentenced to life imprisonment. 

Patterson received a triple-murder conviction for the now infamous lunch of beef wellington that a jury trial found she laced with death cap mushrooms and served to her in-laws.

Since we recorded this episode with court reporter Erin Pearson, Patterson has applied for leave to appeal her convictions, which is yet to be decided. But this episode addresses the big question after the sentencing, which was why she was granted the opportunity of parole. 

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

Today, we return to an episode recorded in October with senior columnist Jacqueline Maley, when more torrid tales emerged of the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and his connection to sex offender and disgraced financier, Jeffrey Epstein.

When this was recorded, the royal had just been stripped of his Duke of York and Prince title. British MPs have since announced a parliamentary inquiry into the Crown Estate, after revelations the former prince had not paid rent on his mansion for more than 20 years.

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Hi, it’s Samantha Selinger-Morris here, the host of The Morning Edition. We’re bringing you the best episodes of 2025 before your Morning Edition team returns mid-January. 

This one is about Belle Gibson. 

One of the original wellness influencers, Gibson claimed to have healed herself from terminal cancer through healthy eating. The problem was, she never had cancer. 

This episode was recorded shortly before the release of the worldwide hit television series Apple Cider Vinegar, which was based on the work of two of our journalists, Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, in exposing Gibson’s cancer con.

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In this bonus episode of Inside Politics, former primer minister Tony Abbott joins host Jacqueline Maley and chief political correspondent Paul Sakkal.

Abbott has penned a new book, Australia: A History, describing a more positive view of our past. He also discusses the current political and cultural challenges facing the Liberal Party, as well as reflecting on his own political career, including his relationship with Julia Gillard and the accusations of misogyny.

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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.

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On the evening of the shooting at Bondi, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese  said: “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian” – that was indeed proven when the entire community sprung into action, those who ran towards the disaster, not away from it. 

There are tales of heroism, like the couple who first tried to stop the gunmen and paid with their lives, the man who single-handedly wrestled the rifle out of the shooter’s hands and those who shielded their loved ones and strangers from bullets. 

Today, chief reporter Jordan Baker, on the acts of bravery and kindness at Bondi. 

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When Michael Visontay heard of the shootings at Bondi Beach on Sunday, his first instinct was to call his son, who often swam there. Then came the sickening feeling of dread, when his son didn’t answer his phone.

Something that thickened this dread even further, was a family history that taught him to always be alert to possible threats. His father and grandfather survived the Holocaust after living in concentration camps. His maternal grandmother was killed in Auschwitz.

Visontay is far from alone. Australia has a higher proportion of Holocaust survivors than any country in the world, besides Israel.

Today, Michael Visontay, author of the book Noble Fragments, and a former senior editor at The Sydney Morning Herald, on how this unique makeup of Australian Jewry impacts their response to the Bondi terror attack.

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We’re releasing an additional episode today featuring one of our reporters, Elias Visontay, who was at Bondi Beach with a friend on the day of the terror attack. Elias recounts his first-hand experience as the gunmen fired bullets at the unexpecting crowd.

You can read his story on our websites here.

And if you’re struggling with the bad news at the moment, support is available on Lifeline 13 11 14 or NSW Health mental health line, available 24/7 on 1800 011 511.

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