The Briefing

Thursday Headlines: 

• Swans players issue apology as investigators travel to Sydney
• IDF clears soldiers over Gaza strike that killed aid worker Zomi Frankcom
• Jacqui Lambie’s emotional plea to the PM over plan to cap veterans’ health spending
• Nick Kyrgios suspended from tennis after positive cocaine test
• Karl Stefanovic responds to Robert Irwin’s Logies jab

Deep Dive: Today, the Senate is expected to pass the government's long-awaited gambling reform package, with tougher rules on advertising and inducements. 

Labor is calling the legislation the toughest gambling reforms the country's ever seen, but critics say they don't even scratch the surface of harm that is caused by betting platforms. 

In today's episode of The Briefing, Sacha Barbour Gatt is joined by independent senator David Pocock to discuss where the legislation falls short and why he thinks the Australian public has been betrayed by the government. 

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Wednesday Headlines: 

• Swans board meets to decide on player sanctions over incident that lead to a sexual assault allegation
• NDIS reforms pass senate as Labor strikes deal with Coalition over gambling regulations
• Landmark trial against Meta begins
• Erin Patterson’s appeal begins
• SpaceX rocket splashes down off Christmas Island, Musk called in to remove it

Deep Dive: Several Sydney Swans players are at the centre of a police investigation in Melbourne, over an alleged sexual assault at the team's hotel in the early hours of Monday morning.  
 
The club has confirmed its players were involved, notified the AFL, and says it's cooperating fully. No charges have been laid.   

But alongside the allegations sits a second question - how a story like this gets reported, and why the focus turns so quickly to a finals campaign 'in jeopardy.' 

In this episode of The Briefing, Chris Spyrou is joined by journalist and sports creator Lavender Baj to unpack it all - what she made of the Swans' statement, and how a trial by social media can wreck the chance of a fair one in court. 

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YouTube: @TheBriefingPodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tuesday Headlines: 

• Sydney Swans footballers involved in 'alleged incident' in Melbourne hotel
• Pauline Hanson’s plan for $21 cigarette packets
• American actress Hayden Panettiere has died at the age of 36
• Coles and Woolworths test facial recognition technology to combat crime
• Ten Aussie YouTubers added to the National Film and Sound Archive

Deep Dive: White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is on her way out, marking the fifth high-profile woman gone from Donald Trump's second administration, though how they went varies.  
 
Her announcement landed days after news broke that Trump had been secretly moved off Air Force One leaving a NATO summit, fuelling an online theory that Leavitt walked after being stranded on a decoy plane.  
 
She wasn't even on the plane, or the trip - she was on maternity leave.  
 
In this episode of The Briefing, Chris Spyrou is joined by David Smith, Associate Professor at the United States Studies Centre at USYD to unpack why the theory took off - what it says about how Trump really runs the place, and whether any of this churn at the top actually reaches the voters who'll decide the midterms.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Monday Headlines: 

• NSW to begin Australia’s biggest gun buyback in decades
• Gov confirms it’s slowing the processing of backpacker visas
• Anthony Albanese deepfakes featured in celebrity scams to con Australians out of $7.4 million
• DRC Ebola outbreak set to become the deadliest ever
• Sam Pang takes out the Gold Logie

Further reading from the headlines: Andrew Thorpe's Ebola piece in the ABC

Deep Dive: The Victorian Opposition has announced a two-year trial of 70 PSOs across seven major hospitals, including emergency departments, high-risk areas and staff car parks. The proposal comes amid almost 24,000 violent incidents in Victorian hospitals in 2024–25, including 680 “code black” incidents. It’s a similar story across the country. 

In this episode of The Briefing, we’re joined by Maddy Harradence, Secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation. Rather than asking “Are guns in hospitals a good idea?” We focus on what actually makes nurses and midwives safer, whether PSOs address the problem, and what should happen instead. 

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Australia’s courts have long allowed judges to consider “good character” references during sentencing, even in child sexual abuse cases. 

For many survivors, hearing offenders described in court as “good people” or “champions of young people” can be deeply retraumatising and after years of campaigning, the laws are being changed right around the country.  
 
NSW changed its laws earlier this year, and this week Victoria announced it intends to do the same.  

In this episode of The Briefing, we're revisiting Chris Spyrou's powerful conversation with survivor advocate and Your Reference Ain't Relevant co-founder Harrison James - on why these laws had to change, and why he won't stop until the reform goes national. 

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We're back with The Briefing: Our Take, our weekend hang-out where we loosen our ties and kick off our shoes to take you behind the scenes of the week that was, and what you (and we) made of it.

This weekend Chris is joined by Dan Mullins - LiSTNR's Acting Head of Factual, and a voice you'll already know from The Briefing - to debrief the story we couldn't stop talking about: Bension Siebert turning to sex work to fund his investigative journalism.  
 
From there Chris and Dan crack open the inbox and read your comments on Bension's story, the fuss over the PM and those Japanese melons, and whether anyone outside a newsroom actually cares about the Census.

We’re also joined by Karli from marketing who takes on this weekend’s quiz and then we of course cap it all off with The Weekend List!

The Weekend Quiz:

1. One of Donald Trump's key allies resigned this week. Who was it?
2. Did the RBA increase, decrease or leave unchanged the official interest rate this week?
3. What occurred across Australia on Tuesday night?
4. Two planes almost collided at an airport this week. Where was it?
5. What were school students protesting when they walked out of school?

The Weekend List:

To Watch: Ted Lasso Season 3 (Listener Georgie)  
To Watch: Dark Matter with Joel Edgerton (Listener Jane)  
To Read: Realms of Gold by A.J. Mackinnon

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Friday Headlines: 

• Third near miss at Sydney airport
• Meta, TikTok, Youtube and Snapchat to face Social Media ban enquiry today
• Penny Wong to speak on the dangers of Monoculturalism 
• Popular weight loss drugs suspected links to more than 60 deaths in Australia 

Deep Dive: It's been 30 years since rapper Tupac Shakur was shot dead in the streets of Las Vegas, his death sparking three decades of conspiracies, mysteries and an enduring question: who killed him? 

Amid disappearing witnesses and a street code that made talking to police punishable by death, the case went cold. 

But in 2023 former gang boss Duane 'Keffe D' Davis was charged with Tupac's murder ... only he's not believed to have been the one to pull the trigger. 

In this episode of The Briefing, Chris Spyrou is joined by hip hop historian Michael Namikas to discuss the upcoming trial of Keffe D, but also Tupac's life, career and legacy. 
 
Michael’s book: The Tupac Encyclopedia - Volume 1  

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Thursday Headlines: 

• Students to stage school walkout over Pauline Hanson
• One dead and more than 200 rescued after Bali ferry fire
• News bargaining incentive hits parliament today
• Victorian authorities prepare for mass vaccine event of little penguins
• Tooth decay cases soar across Australia as people put off expensive dentist work

Deep Dive: When Bension Siebert's role was made redundant, the award-winning journalist found himself staring down a shrinking media industry that no longer seemed willing to invest in the investigations he'd spent his career chasing. 

A week later, he was walking out of a stranger's apartment with $600 in his pocket, having just taken his first paid in-person sex work booking. 

In this episode of The Briefing, Chris Spyrou and Sacha Barbour Gatt welcome their former colleague and co-host back to the mic to unpack an unlikely career move - and the essay about it that's turned his life upside down in a matter of days. 
 
Bension explains how five hours of sex work can out-earn a week of journalism, why he sees it less as a last resort than a kind of liberation, and how a media landscape squeezed by redundancies and legal risk pushed him toward telling the stories he says newsrooms won't. 
 

• Bension’s essay on Cheek Media: How sex work saved my investigative journalism career 

• Bension’s Instagram: bensionfindsout 

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Wednesday Headlines:

• Coalition to back One Nation’s foreign fighters bill 
• PM refuses to apologise over melons comment
• Colombia quake death toll climbs above 200
• RBA leaves door open to hikes after leaving rates on hold 
• Donald Trump signs executive order to reduce the number of childhood vaccines
• New canine study reveals they're skilled in responding to human emotion

Deep Dive: Harry Potter fans this week had a major win. They managed to have critical infrastructure worth almost a billion dollars moved to protect a memorial for Dobby the house elf. 
 
That critical infrastructure was a single undersea cable.  
 
These cables rest in the ocean and are responsible for 95% of all internet and data traffic. Cat videos, financial transactions, email – all of it would disappear if these thin cables were cut.  

In this episode of The Briefing, we’re joined by Dean Veverka, the Chair of the International Cable Protection Committee, to learn who built this critical infrastructure, and who’s protecting the world’s undersea cables from threats and sabotage. 

Follow The Briefing: 
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YouTube: @TheBriefingPodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tuesday Headlines: 

• Hanson to introduce foreign fighters bill as PM and Taylor hammer out gambling, NDIS and widow tax deal
• More than 80 people dead after Colombia earthquake
• South Australia announce royal commission into AI
• Aussies being urged to challenge their car insurers over price hikes
• It's Census night

Deep Dive: How do you escape from a cult? That was one of the questions a Victorian parliamentary inquiry has been trying to answer, ever since a LiSTNR podcast exposed an abusive cult in Geelong and sparked a firestorm of advocacy from cult survivors. 

Last month, that inquiry handed down its report, “Coercion and harm in high control groups”. There are 39 recommendations in the report, with a focus on protecting children and better support for those exiting a coercive group. 

One of the advocates behind that inquiry was Laura McConnell, a survivor of the Two By Twos fundamentalist cult who speaks to Sacha Barbour Gatt in this episode of The Briefing. 

You can listen to Pray Harder – Episode 1 – Noel's War here.

Follow The Briefing: 
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YouTube: @TheBriefingPodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.