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Here’s an astonishingly large number. Around 900 million Indians are heading to the polls to decide if they want to reelect the current government of Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

India Tomorrow is a seven-part podcast series by The Anthill (produced by The Conversation UK), exploring some of the major issues facing India – identity politics, the rise of Hindu nationalism, Kashmir, the role of caste and gender in shaping Indian society, and how women and young people experience these phenomena.

Part one, an episode on India’s information wars and how fake news fuels violence, launched on April 9. You can sign up to The Anthill newsletter to stay up to date and send questions via [email protected] or via Twitter @AnthillPod. The producers will be putting your questions to academics.

Today on Trust Me, I’m An Expert, we’re hearing from an academic featured on India Tomorrow. Craig Jeffrey is the director and CEO of the Australia India Institute and Professor of Development Geography at the University of Melbourne.

He explains what issues are front of mind for India’s millions of first-time voters delivering their verdict on the performance of the BJP government, led by Narendra Modi.

“Two things are really crucial. One is jobs. Young people across India and particularly in parts of India where the economy’s been less successful at creating jobs - so some of the northern states, for example, are going to be really concerned with the capacity of the government to provide better employment opportunities,” Professor Jeffrey told The Conversation’s editorial intern Bageshri Savyasachi.

“The second issue, I think, that they’ll be very concerned about is education. So they’ll be looking to see which political parties and politicians are promising to improve higher education […] Because for a lot of young people who aren’t part of the elite in India, there is a mismatch, often, between the educational opportunities they obtain in school or university and then the employment markets and the demands of key private sector firms.”

“A third area that’s perhaps less obvious is the issue of health care and public health. And my own observations, as an anthropologist and human geographer working in mainly Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand over the past 25 years on social change, is that young people are often demanding access to health services that are poorly provisioned in provincial India, particularly in relation to issues like sexual health, mental health, reproductive health and that’s an area where I think young people are looking to government for more action.”

Join us as Professor Jeffrey explains what implications this enormous election will have for the world’s second most populous nation, and for the rest of the globe as well.

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Craig Jeffrey: Those numbers are astonishing, aren’t they? And it’s very difficult, I think, for pundits to predict what precisely they’ll do in terms of the elections. What’s slightly easier to say, though, I think, is what’s in the minds of those voters. And I think two things are really crucial, one is jobs. So young people across India and particularly in parts of India where the economy’s been less successful at creating jobs - so some of the northern states, for example - are going to be really concerned with the capacity of the government to provide better employment opportunities. The second issue, I think, that they’ll be very concerned about is education. So they’ll be looking to see which political parties and politicians are promising to improve higher education, tertiary education more generally, the skills environment and school education. Because for a lot of young people who aren’t part of the elite in India, there is a mismatch, often, between the educational opportunities they obtain in school or university and then the employment market and the demands of key private sector firms.

So I think jobs and education are going to be at the top of young people’s minds as they go into the polling booths. What are parties and politicians promising in those areas?

A third area that’s perhaps less obvious is the issue of health care and public health. And my own observations, as an anthropologist and human geographer working in mainly Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand over the past 25 years on social change, is that young people are often demanding access to health services that are poorly provisioned in provincial India particularly in relation to issues like sexual health, mental health, reproductive health and that’s an area where I think young people are looking to government for more action. And I think that will also be in young people’s minds in the lead up to the elections.

Bageshri Savyasachi: What jobs are available to young people and do they want to do those jobs?

Craig Jeffrey: Well, I think one of the stories of Indian economic growth since 1990 is its failure to create a large number of what might be regarded as white collar or middle class jobs for the increasing numbers of young people who are getting high school matriculation certificates or degrees in India. Now, India’s not especially unusual in that regard. Particularly since the global financial crisis in the late 2000s, economies around the world have often found it difficult to create secure employment opportunities for people. Of course, automation, mechanisation is changing the nature of work throughout the world. So this isn’t specific to India but India is an almost very condensed or intense example of the failure of economic growth to create lots of good quality jobs, that long predates 2014 and the coming to power of the BJP. It’s a structural feature of the Indian economy since 1990 and especially since the mid-2000s period.

So to get to your question of what jobs actually exist, in many cases what we’re seeing in India is people having to realign their expectations of what work they’re going to do in that five to 10 year period after they graduate from high school or university. This is not new. Ronald Dore wrote in his book The Diploma Disease in 1970 that India was the country of the BA bus conductor. So that sense of having to downplay your expectations in light of circumstances is quite old in India. But now, I would argue, that a lot of people with bachelors degrees in India would be very keen to have a job on state roadways as a bus conductor, so intense and cut-throat has the employment market become. So you’re seeing people with masters degrees, with PhDs having to do very small scale entrepreneurial business work, you’re seeing them especially having to go back into agriculture – not as large-scale agricultural innovators making large amounts of money and employing other people but rather working on quite small plots of land in an environment where they didn’t imagine that they would go back into farming. So one of the alarming statistics, I think, is that while in most of the period between 2000 and 2010 the number of young people in agriculture was declining, as you would expect in a country that’s undergoing a structural transformation from agriculture into manufacturing and services, in the 2010s and particularly since 2014 there has been an increase in young people in agriculture. Now that is quite worrying for India and reflects the point that jobs in the modern economy are not becoming available quickly enough, young people are not finding the infrastructural and institutional environment conducive to moving into successful medium-scale entrepreneurship where they employ other people and find an outlet for their talents.

Bageshri Savyasachi: How crucial has mobilising young people been to the electoral successes of the ruling party, the BJP?

Craig Jeffrey: That’s an easy question to answer because of the demographic structure of India and the figures for voting in 2014 in particular show that of course the BJP has been very successful at mobilising people generally in India to vote for them and that includes young people. It’s done so through making a series of important statements about its approach to social and economic change. And it has done so also through tapping into, I think, a sense of national identity that’s important to young people. So the BJP has been pretty successful. Not just the BJP but also various organisations connected to the party at the grassroots level.

Bageshri Savyasachi: Is young people’s support for Modi on the wane? A lot of young people supported him when he was first running for prime minister but now a lot of young people are feeling disappointed. What do you think?

Craig Jeffrey: I should do that classic academic thing of saying that I’m not an expert on the contemporary views of young people in India. Where I’ve done most of my research has been in particular pockets of India, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand and the bulk of that research was done in the period between 1995 and 2010. Since 2010, my work has been mainly in a village in quite a remote part of Uttarakhand, in Chamoli district, and I’ve written quite a lot about the social and political attitudes of young people in that village. Now, those are quite particular to one part of India. Like you and like lots of people, I read the newspapers, I talk to friends in different parts of India, I try to pick up on the streets a sense of the mood. But in that regard, I’m an armchair or amateur interpreter of young people’s political views at the moment.

With those caveats in mind, my sense is that young people may not support Modi as much as they did five years ago but that doesn’t mean that they won’t vote for him. So one needs to maybe distinguish between support and how people will actually behave in the ballot booth. I think lots of people that I speak to recognise that given the high pitch to which Modi raised people’s aspirations in 2014 there was always going to be a sense of disappointment, that skilling hundreds of millions of people quickly was going to be a very tough ask. And that the vision of New India, while attractive in certain respects, is not borne out in social reality for those outside of the elite and particularly in provincial parts of India, in small town and rural India. So people see on the social and economic side a kind of mismatch between promise and actuality. And I think that’s undermined a certain enthusiasm for the ruling BJP government. I’m really not in a position to be able to adjudicate on the extent to which people have sort of fallen out of love with a particular vision of the nation as primarily Hindu or driven by a Hindu civilisational push. That’s, I think, more difficult to ascertain. It’s tricky. The question, I suppose, is: is 2019 to be like 2004, where there was a bit of a surprise that actually the Indian population, including the young population, did move away from the BJP? And it was partly because they didn’t feel that they were sharing in the social gains associated with economic growth. And it was partly, as you just observed, that some of the aspects of the sort of rhetoric of Hindu nationalism were not anymore particularly attractive. So it is possible that the same kind of cocktail will still exist in 2019, of sort of a sense of social and economic exclusion and a sense of being a little bit tired of the same message coming out from the government. But it’s very very difficult to tell. As I said, one has to distinguish between support and enthusiasm on the one hand and the actual decision to vote on the other. Because one thing you see again and again in elections in India is people putting their votes in for politicians or parties that they don’t actually very much like but they feel like they ought to. Ultimately, it’s the least bad choice that they want to make, which is of course it’s not distinctly Indian, it’s an aspect of how people vote across the world.

Bageshri Savyasachi: We’ll just have to wait and watch. What is the state of youth unemployment in India? My impression is that for young people, it’s hard to get a job if you don’t have a masters or a bachelor’s degree. And even then you may not get a job in your chosen field.

Craig Jeffrey: Oh, that’s absolutely right. The recent NSSO figures show that youth unemployment in India is something around 16 or 17%. Now those figures are contested but my view is that they are fairly robust. And, of course, beyond that problem of outright unemployment, there’s a very large problem of underemployment where people are working in part-time insecure work that doesn’t reflect their skills, ambitions and credentials. So both outright unemployment and underemployment are becoming increasing problems in India. In 2010, I wrote a book called Timepass which drew attention to this problem based on fieldwork work in Western Uttar Pradesh. I talked about the emergence of a generation of young people who described themselves as people with nothing to do. Who were doing nothing but also in some sense saw themselves as being nothing. A very intense form of social suffering associated with a prolonged period of unemployment or underemployment.

When I talk to young people in the same area now they say that actually that book is more relevant in 2019 than it was in 2010. Someone told me when I visited India two weeks ago “I felt like it had been written yesterday” and this reflects the way this problem of unemployment and underemployment to young people has intensified over the past nine years rather than dissipated.

Bageshri Savyasachi: In her recent book, Dreamers: how young Indians are changing the world, the prominent Indian journalist Snigdha Poonam writes, “the world’s future depends on young Indians meeting their aspirations but it’s a pipe dream at this point”. How big of a problem is this disconnect between young Indians’ aspirations and their reality?

Craig Jeffrey: Well, I think it’s a huge problem and I think that the book Dreamers is very successful in setting that out. It’s worth again going back to the point about demographics. One in eight people in the world is an Indian under the age of 30. It’s worth repeating that: one in eight people in the world is an Indian young person, someone under the age of 30. Now, that’s an extraordinary statistic and it gives a sense of the importance of that demographic for the future of Asia and of the world. Now unlike the same generation 25 years ago, that set of young people are very well aware of events in other parts of the world which are streamed to them via their mobile phones or on the internet. They are increasingly in secondary school, including young women, and in school they’re learning to obviously dream big. And the government is also encouraging those young people to see themselves as part of a new India that’s modern, in which people are based often in urban areas doing what historically has been described as sort of middle class work, service work. And now where you’ve got that situation of both demographic growth and the rapid sort of revolution of rising aspirations, you need an outlet for young people so that they feel as they move into their 20s and 30s that they’re achieving the goals that they desire. And that’s not happening. And the question then is, how much of a problem is that? Well, obviously for the young people concerned it’s a big problem for their families. Young people are not passive in that situation, they actively and creatively seek ways to make do. That may be entering into fallback work in agriculture. It may be finding jobs that perhaps they weren’t aspiring to originally but which provide a means for establishing a family and getting by, in areas like sales and marketing. But there is also a lot of just disappointment, I think, and a sense of stuckedness and limbo that, again, I wrote about in detail in my book Timepass. What’s surprising, perhaps, is that that sense of social suffering hasn’t led to more unrest in India and I think there are several reasons for that. I think partly because India is a democracy people have an outlet for frustration through the political system, through voting, through demonstrating on the streets. I think a second reason why there hasn’t been more political mobilisation is that people often perceive this as a personal failure rather than a failure of government or of society or as a structural failure, as social scientists would put it. They see it as “Well, I didn’t try hard enough” or “I wasn’t successful enough in that examination”. So it’s quite a lot of this failure I think often is personalised rather than seen as a reflection of the structural features of the Indian economy and the wider institutional environment in which people may be trying to start businesses. There’s a whole history of commentators on India talking about the country as being poised to sort of fall into unrest. I’m not going to do that. I think India, it holds together and as I said people are, young people are actively finding ways to make do. But I do think it’s a major social issue at the moment, the lack of capacity for young people to realise their aspirations and it should be and will remain an absolutely critical issue for government in India.

Bageshri Savyasachi: How has national politics played out in Indian universities under Modi?

Craig Jeffrey: Well, the information that leaks out on this issue tends to come from a small number of the very well-known universities in India. So universities like Jawaharlal Nehru University, Hyderabad University, Delhi University and that there has been, over the past few years as you’ll be well aware, a series of controversies over the government’s treatment of student protesters in those universities and of the ideological, the role of government in shaping how universities operate ideologically through, for example, the appointment of particular vice-chancellors with particular views on politics that then shape those institutions. Now, that’s a very important debate and it’s one that people can follow through a whole series of articles in magazines and newspapers in India. What interests me more is what’s happening outside of those well known central universities. What is happening actually in universities like the one that I worked in quite a bit 15 years ago. Chaudhary Charan Singh University which is the sixth largest university in the world if one excludes universities that provide distance education. And is actually, according to some sources, the second largest university in India after Indira Gandhi National Open University, which of course is largely a distance university, distance education university. So what’s happening in those big state universities that are affiliating other colleges. And that’s an area which desperately requires consideration. I think it would repay close social research. You’re seeing the emergence of different types of student politics to that which existed 15 years ago and some of those forms of student politics are linked to a Hindu nationalist agenda. Some are not. There’s a great deal of foment in those sort of more provincial universities that operates under the radar on which commentators and social scientists know very little about but which is really important in terms of shaping the environment in which the vast majority of students in India study, which is in colleges, not actually in universities. It’s in colleges affiliated to universities like Chaudhary Charan Singh University. I’d be really interested in hearing from anyone who’s listening to this podcast about their views or experiences of the curricular, of student action in India’s colleges where most people study.

Bageshri Savyasachi: Do you think there is a growing shift towards illiberalism among India’s youth?

Craig Jeffrey: Well, I think that’s a really interesting question. First, one has to think about, well, what is liberalism? And if we define that relatively narrowly in terms of a commitment to formal equality and individual freedoms then I think there’s evidence both ways. There’s evidence of young people contesting those visions of formal equality and individual freedom, for example through their views on areas like sexuality. So there was a recent Centre for the Study of Developing Societies survey that showed that the majority of young Indians didn’t approve of homosexuality. So there’s some evidence there of a certain kind of “illiberalism”. There’s evidence of young people’s involvement in societies or organisations that are policing people’s right to eat certain foods, again which would suggest the rise of a certain form of illiberalism. But there’s also of course a great deal of evidence the other way, that young people are very active in nongovernmental organisations that are seeking to protect people’s formal equality, protect people’s freedoms. The number of youth NGOs in India is growing very, very quickly. There’s also, I think, a very interesting debate about the relationship between the individual and liberalism in India. So an argument that’s been made by several people is that actually liberalism in India is organised around a sense of group rights rather than around individual rights. So it’s perfectly possible to be part of a caste organisation or a religious organisation that’s about equality and freedom but nevertheless is articulating those notions of equality and freedom through reference to caste and religion. So that would be an argument that I think lots of Hindu nationalists would make, is that even though Hindus are the majority and even though that they’re making an argument in Hindu terms, it’s an argument about tolerance and about liberalism rather than about violence or exclusion or limiting people’s freedoms. So it’s a very complicated question. There’s evidence both ways. There’s also a tangled set of debates about whether you could have a kind of liberalism based on a sense of group rights and whether so-called Western visions of liberalism can really be applied to a place like India, where notions of religion and caste and family are so strong. That might be a more detailed answer than you wanted but it’s one that really interests, this is a question that really interests me.

Bageshri Savyasachi: What do young people think now in 2019 that their parents or grandparents may not have thought at the same age?

Craig Jeffrey: Well, I think one of the effects of more young people studying in secondary school is that they’ve often absorbed notions of citizenship and good government that are communicated in school textbooks. So in one of the villages where I work, I was sitting working with a young person who was doing an English lesson recently and one of the English exercises was to write a letter to the local district magistrate in English complaining about the state of the drains in their neighbourhood. And this was obviously an attempt not only to learn English but to inculcate a particular vision of the citizen and of the state. And I think the effect of having large numbers of young people in school, being exposed to these narratives is actually that many more people have accepted and appreciate that kind of vision of rights and citizenship than in the 1990s when I started doing fieldwork in north India. So you see that’s reflected, for example, in young people’s support for anti-corruption movements. You see it in terms of young people’s questioning of forms of malpractice that exist in certain bureaucracies in India. Another point I’d really like to stress is the revolution that’s been happening in India with reference to women’s and especially young women’s rights and capacities. And that’s, I think, really a major success story in the last 20 years in India or 30 years, is that women and young women have achieved a much greater degree of autonomy and voice at all levels of society and in cities as well as in villages. Now, that comes, of course with all sorts of caveats about the continued problems of gender violence, of disparities in terms of pay and access to schooling and social goods. Nevertheless, I think that is a really important point to stress about the achievements of India in the period since 2000.

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks

Shutterstock

Today, Trust Me, I’m An Expert brings you a special episode carried across from another Conversation podcast, Essays On Air.

In the north-east corner of Australia’s most populous state of New South Wales is a small former dairying and banana farming community. Today, however, that village is unrecognisable.

Nimbin is now widely acknowledged as Australia’s counter-cultural capital, a sister city to both Woodstock in New York State and Freetown Christiania in Denmark.

Among Nimbin’s tourist attractions today are its Hemp Embassy and the annual Mardi Grass festival in early May, which argues for the legislation of marijuana for personal and medicinal use.

The village’s transformation from a rural farming community to its present form can be traced to 1973, when Nimbin became the unlikely host of the Aquarius Festival – a counter-culture arts and music gathering presented by the radical Australian Union of Students.

These social and political origins of the commodified hippie culture on display today in Nimbin have become less apparent to visitors and more recent migrants to the region.

Visitors, especially those arriving on bus tours, tend to shop, buy coffee and leave again. To counter this, the Nimbin Tourism Office commissioned me in 2016 to produce an app-based audio walk to promote a deeper engagement for tourists with the town and help answer the question: why is Nimbin the way it is?

Here’s a snippet:

The audio walk, an adapted version of which features on today’s episode of Essays On Air, was published onto the GPS-enabled mobile phone app Soundtrails. Soundtrails is owned by The Story Project, an Australian organisation focusing on oral history-based audio walks and they’ve published more than a dozen such walks in regional Australia.

Anyone with a smartphone can access it by downloading the app and the Nimbin audio walk and following the route through the village’s streets and parklands. Headphones provide the best experience.

The stories I share with you today are excerpts from the Nimbin Soundtrail and are drawn from consultations and interviews with more than 60 Nimbin residents, Aquarius Festival participants and Indigenous elders.

Here, I’ve tried to reconnect the past and the present to make clear how Nimbin became the counter-cultural capital that it is. And the caveat is that many of the events in this documentary walk happened more than 40 years ago. I’ve recognised that memories have merged with other retellings that evolved over the years and the definitive truth is perhaps unavailable. Any version of Nimbin’s counter-culture will be an incomplete history.

The nine months it took me to gather these stories and make some sense of how they fitted together were rewarding.

And while there are some who might dispute the accounts of what happened in these stories, others agree that it’s a fair record of Nimbin contemporary history. The full Nimbin soundtrack can be heard by downloading the Soundtrails app and listening here. And if you are ever in the area, I invite you to take a day out, visit and listen to the stories in town.

Podcasts are often best enjoyed using a podcast app. All iPhones come with the Apple Podcasts app already installed, or you may want to listen and subscribe on another app such as Pocket Casts (click here to listen to Essays On Air on Pocket Casts).

You can also hear us on PlayerFM or any of the apps below. Just pick a service from one of those listed below and click on the icon to find Essays On Air.

Recording and editing by Jeanti St Clair from Southern Cross University.

This podcast contains excerpts from the Nimbin Soundtrail, used with grateful permission from The Story Project/Soundtrails. See the app for the walk’s full credit list.

Selections of original music from the Nimbin Soundtrail by Neil Pike.

Excerpt from Deke Naptar’s Culture, Culture from Necroscopix (1970-1981), Free Music Archive

Fair Use Excerpts:

Snow by David Szesztay

Jeanti St Clair would like to again thank Lismore City Council and Nimbin Tourism for commissioning the Nimbin Soundtrail, and all the many contributors to the audio walk.

Nimbin Soundtrail

Lead image from Flickr/harryws20/Harry Watson Smith/, published under Creative Commons.

Correction: An earlier version of this article included a caption that described the 1973 Aquarius Festival as the “first”. In fact, it was the first Aquarius Festival in Nimbin, and followed other Aquarius festivals that had taken place on university campuses.

Jeanti St Clair has consulted in the past for Soundtrails as an associate producer. She was paid by Lismore City Council to produce the audio walk. She does not have any ongoing financial benefit from Soundtrails or Lismore City Council.

We are but a few weeks from a federal election, and the way the wind is blowing may depend on what state you’re in.

Trust Me, I’m An Expert – along with Politics with Michelle Grattan – is bringing you state-focused podcast episodes as polling day approaches. To catch up on all the political drama unfolding in NSW, I spoke to political scientist (and self-described political tragic) Andy Marks, who predicted a Labor victory on May 18.

“Labor will win this election. I think that’s virtually unquestionable. We’re just not seeing enough movement, even in the polls at this point, in the primary vote level, to say the Libs or the Coalition will hang on. I think this is going to be a Labor victory,” he said.

Take this week’s Newspoll – which appeared to show the gap between the two major parties – with a grain of salt, he said.

“Early in April, we saw exactly the same primary vote polling as we saw on the weekend. So, there hasn’t really been a discernible shift. You need to see a gap open up to the degree of around about five or six points, for the Coalition to even look like hanging on. It will stay tight, I think until polling day, but I’d suggest the momentum is with Labor and it hasn’t substantially shifted.”

You can read the full transcript below, and hear The Conversation’s chief political correspondent Michelle Grattan talk with experts on the seats and issues to watch in WA and Victoria on the Politics with Michelle Grattan podcast.

Production assistance by Tilly Gwinner.

Podcasts are often best enjoyed using a podcast app. All iPhones come with the Apple Podcasts app already installed, or you may want to listen and subscribe on another app such as Pocket Casts (click here to listen to Trust Me, I’m An Expert on Pocket Casts).

You can also hear us on Stitcher, Spotify or any of the apps below. Just pick a service from one of those listed below and click on the icon to find Trust Me, I’m An Expert.

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks

SBS news report

ABC news report

AAP Image/NIC ELLIS

Andy Marks: I’m Andy Marks, I’m a political scientist and Assistant Vice-Chancellor at Western Sydney University.

Sunanda Creagh: So Andy, let’s just catch up on where things are up to in New South Wales. What do you see as the key issues in voters’ minds in New South Wales as polling day approaches?

Andy Marks: New South Wales is a strange case. It’s the usual suspects in terms of issues but not in the usual way. So we’re seeing the economy feature but we’re not hearing too much in the way of big ticket reform. We are hearing some of that from Labor of course and it’s not about fiscal performance. That’s not winning votes anymore. It’s about issues like cost of living, it’s about issues like wage stagnation. At the other end, you have issues around negative gearing reform and franking credits which are more at the investment end. So a very unusual take on the economy in terms of elections.

The other issues that feature, of course, Labor have made it about health in terms of cancer care and the package they have there. Alternatively, the Libs have sought to bring it back towards security and issues around border protection, of course, that we saw with John Howard coming into the campaign on the weekend.

The big sleeper is climate and it’s a sleeper in the sense that it’s coming to the fore from a number of angles. We’re seeing the issue of energy reform come up from industry who are madly seeking coherent energy policy from both sides of the parliament. We’re seeing the issue of the environment played out with issues like Adani, and water, of course, is the big one in terms of agriculture and rural electorates across the country. So there’s three different lenses being applied but they all come up in terms of how both sides address the issue of climate.

Sunanda Creagh: You mentioned negative gearing there. Sydney, being the centre of the property boom in Australia, people here seem to be mortgaged up to their eyeballs. Lots of people negatively gearing properties. Do you think that issue might be a decider for some Sydney voters who do take advantage of that policy?

Andy Marks: Negative gearing will factor on the minds of many voters, but not in the seats that are pressure cookers, so they’re not going to swing seats. I think, for example, certainly among the retirement community those issues, particularly around the franking credits matter, are of importance. The housing market in Sydney and across the eastern states more broadly is softening anyway ahead of this measure. It’s hard to tie a definitive link to that and the coming reforms, should Labor win government. It’s not an issue that’s going to turn swinging seats, but it will factor into some more rusted-on voters.

Sunanda Creagh: And speaking of seats, what do you see as the key seats to watch?

Andy Marks: Across New South Wales, I reckon there’s about five that are up for a change. At the outset, I have to say this election won’t be won or lost in New South Wales. It’s most likely Queensland where you have up to eight seats and margins of 4% or less that will decide it. In Victoria, there’ll be some significant movement as well. There’s about five that I’m looking at in New South Wales in terms of potential change. Wentworth, of course, is the big one with the contest between Kerryn Phelps and Dave Sharma. Lindsay, where Emma Husar has been moved aside through misconduct allegations, and you have a contest there and out at Western Sydney. Banks, the immigration minister faces a challenge there on a 1.4% margin.

Then we, move into some coastal regional seats. Gilmore, where former ALP president Warren Mundine is running against Labor’s Fiona Phillips. Robertson on the Central Coast which is held by just 1.1% by the Libs, so they’re the ones where I think you can see some movement. Now the exciting stuff, in terms of drama, Warringah, of course, where former PM Tony Abbott is facing a challenge. In Reid, Turnbull-backer Craig Laundy turned that razor thin margin into almost a moderately safe seat for the Libs, and that’s up in play again as well.

Sunanda Creagh: You mentioned Gilmore, that’s an area that takes in places like Shoalhaven, Jervis Bay, and some of those Batemans Bay type areas. Tell us, what are some of the issues that will be in voters minds in that area?

Andy Marks: Look that’s a difficult one to pick. It’s really a four-way contest. You have a candidate in Warren Mundine who was essentially parachuted in by Morrison. The controversy there, of course, being his former role with Labor.

You also have Katrina Hodgkinson, who was a former Nationals New South Wales minister and really reputable individual running against the Labor candidate Fiona Phillips. And Grant Schulz, the Lib turned independent who was passed over by Mundine. So, it’s interesting in the sense that the way the vote splits over the course of the election will be something to watch. It’s really one that’s very uncertain for all of the players.

Sunanda Creagh: You mentioned Reid, which takes in Canada Bay, Burwood, Strathfield and is currently held by Craig Laundy for the Liberals. He’s been somewhat of a comparatively moderate voice. What do you think will be the issues there?

Andy Marks: Reid is an interesting one. Laundy was an incredibly strong local member and he stood up against his own party’s attempted reforms of the anti-discrimination act. That area was lost to Labor in the recent New South Wales election, due to comments made by the Labor opposition leader around Asians taking jobs. Really retrograde comments on his part. So the momentum probably was with Labor, whether the voters have forgiven the foibles of the state party though will remain to be seen. But, that’s a big loss to the Libs in Craig Laundy moving on.

Sunanda Creagh: I wanted to ask you about the seat of Farrer. That’s a regional seat, it takes in places like Hay, Murrumbidgee. Some of those areas around the Murray Darling, the Central Darling. With the seat of Farrer, what do you think of some of the issues there?

Andy Marks: Look Farrer is an interesting one - you wouldn’t be talking about an electorate with a 20% plus margin as being one that’s up for grabs, but it is. We saw swings in the state election against the coalition of up to 26% in Murray, 19% in Barwon, and around 37% in Orange. So these rural electorates are very volatile and the issue of water management, of course, is the dominant thread across a seat like Farrer. But it’s a diverse seat. So you have areas like Albury, where unemployment is very high, educational attainment is quite low, economic activity has been suppressed through the drought. So the issues across that electorate are incredibly diverse and equally you don’t have in the New South Wales case we had the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party running against the Nationals quite successfully in three seats. They’re not a consolidated force at the federal level.

Really, Farrer’s in play because of the Albury Mayor Kevin Mack, who is running the strongest challenge against Sussan Ley. She’s held onto that seat since 2001 and that’s Tim Fischer’s old seat. So, it should be a sure bet for them. This is suddenly a seat that’s in play.

Sunanda Creagh: So you mentioned water being an issue in the seat of Farrer, and certainly that’s shaping up to be an issue across the board. If you believe what you read on social media, suddenly everybody’s talking about water buybacks and we’ve had the big story breaking around the water buybacks issue that involved Barnaby Joyce. I’m interested to know what you think on how that issue may influence voters in the lead up to polling day.

Andy Marks: Look, there’s already a bit of disaffection towards the Nationals. I think their own internal troubles around leadership, and the other controversies they’ve had around Andrew Broad and other figures have given weight to the perception that their mind is not on the game. They’ve taken their eye off the ball in terms of the concerns of rural voters. So, that’s why we are seeing such a pronounced reaction against them in some seats. Whether that anger was spent, at the New South Wales election and the earlier Victorian poll remains to be seen. I can’t see a repeat of the swings we saw in the state election here in NSW. But certainly, some very generous margins will be really damaged, I think.

Sunanda Creagh: So let’s talk about Warringah where Tony Abbott is facing that strong challenge from independent Zali Steggall, who’s been supported by GetUp! in her campaign. That’s also become a point of contention and a point of attack for her political foes. How do you see things playing out?

Andy Marks: Look, there’s no doubt it’s going to be a contest. Zali Steggall will take it down to the wire. People need to be aware though that Tony Abbott loves a fight, shifting him on that margin of over 11% is going to be incredibly difficult. It’s not like Bennelong, for example, where we saw John Howard go as a result of demographic shifts and other factors. And it’s not like Wentworth where, of course, Turnbull stepped aside. A former PM, even one that’s controversial, still attracts some traction among voters. Zali Steggall has done well in opening the debate up into issues that challenge the principles that Tony Abbott’s put forward. So, forcing him to for example to talk more about climate, to talk more about issues where he’s clearly a little uncomfortable, has been a good tactic on her part. Obviously, the work of groups like GetUp! will influence things as well.

I just can’t see it shifting. I think Tony Abbott is far too an experienced player to go down without a fight, and this is the guy that loves to be backed into a corner. I might be proven wrong, but I think he’ll just hang on in Warringah.

Sunanda Creagh: And you mentioned former PMs, speaking of which, let’s talk about Wentworth. Do you think voters will punish the Coalition for turfing out Malcolm Turnbull? We saw Turnbull’s son, Alex Turnbull actively encouraging people not to vote for the Liberal candidate Dave Sharma. And as it turned out Kerryn Phelps did win that seat. So how will things play out there?

Andy Marks: Wentworth is an interesting one. I like to call it the contest for the soul of the Liberal Party. Because really, it’s about whether the party will choose to push forward in a progressive way, or revert more to those hard right tendencies that we’ve seen in recent times. The thing to watch at Wentworth will be whether Phelps has managed to translate in a really short timeframe that protest vote into a base. And that would mean Phelps has to have really strong points of differentiation on issues like climate, immigration and border protection. Which she’s, to a very large extent, done on the latter issue. Whether that’s enough to shift people across for good remains to be seen. That’s one that’s too hard to call.

Sunanda Creagh: So, Andy Marks what’s your prediction? Who do you think is going to win this federal election?

Andy Marks: Look, Labor will win this election. I think that’s virtually unquestionable. We’re just not seeing enough movement, even in the polls at this point in the primary vote level to see the Libs or the Coalition hang on. I think this is going to be a Labor victory.

Sunanda Creagh: Even with Newspoll saying it’s tightening as voting day draws closer?

Andy Marks: You have to look again at that primary vote figure. Early in April, we saw exactly the same primary vote polling as we saw on the weekend. So, there hasn’t really been a discernible shift. You need to see a gap open up to the degree of around about five or six points, for the Coalition to even look like hanging on. It will stay tight, I think until polling day, but I’d suggest the momentum is with Labor and it hasn’t substantially shifted. So with the Coalition on 38% and Labor on 37%, I don’t see it shifting sufficiently for there to be a change in the momentum.

Sunanda Creagh: Let’s talk about the upper house. What do you see as the issues to watch there?

Andy Marks: Look, that’s an interesting one from the New South Wales point of view. Jim Molan, arguably their highest profile senator, finds himself in an unwinnable spot on their ticket. This is largely due to reforms that he instigated, internal party reform. So it’s a big ask therefore for somebody to get up. You know, you’re going to require a quota in excess of 14% of the vote to get a spot. Brian Burston’s the other interesting one. He’s a former One Nation representative, now with Clive Palmer’s outfit, and he’s their parliamentary leader in the house. It’s a very interesting contest there. There’s Doug Cameron, a long-standing senator for Labor, retiring, and Tony Sheldon, the former Transport Workers Union secretary coming in on his spot.

Sunanda Creagh: And just lastly, what do you want to say about preferences? Do you think preferences will make a big difference in this election?

Andy Marks: Look, there’s no doubt that the question around where the United Australia Party’s preferences flow has been a dominant issue in Queensland. I don’t see it being of sufficient weight to shift the momentum, which again in those marginal electorates, up to eight of them, is all with Labor at the moment. So, it will make things a little trickier to call earlier. But, I still see things going Labor’s way in those key seats.

Sunanda Creagh: Any final comments?

Andy Marks: Look, this is a contest where New South Wales will provide plenty of action. But it’s not going to be the place where it’s won or lost. But it’s certainly going to be the place of high drama.

Sunanda Creagh: Andy Marks, thank you so much for your time.

Andy Marks: Thank you.

Today we’re bringing you a special discussion about the federal election that took place at the launch of a book of Conversation essays, Advancing Australia: Ideas for a Better Country.

Recorded at Avid Reader bookshop in Brisbane on April 17, the discussion featured Indigenous academic lawyer Eddie Synot from Griffith University and Griffith’s Dean of Engagement, Professor Anne Tiernan.

Eddie Synot is currently completing his PhD, taking a hard look at the liberal rights discourse of Indigenous recognition, and has also taught Indigenous Studies.

And political scientist Anne Tiernan has worked in and advised Australian governments at all levels, so she knows politics from the inside out.

Together with Liz Minchin, the Executive Editor of The Conversation Australia & New Zealand, the panel covered topics including the Queensland seats to watch on election night, how to give Indigenous Australians a true voice in politics, and how to improve trust in the political system.

Today’s episode was recorded by Michael Adams from Griffith University.

Podcasts are often best enjoyed using a podcast app. All iPhones come with the Apple Podcasts app already installed, or you may want to listen and subscribe on another app such as Pocket Casts (click here to listen to Trust Me, I’m An Expert on Pocket Casts).

You can also hear us on Stitcher, Spotify or any of the apps below. Just pick a service from one of those listed below and click on the icon to find Trust Me, I’m An Expert.

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks

Recording and editing by Michael Adams from Griffith University

Buy Advancing Australia: Ideas for a Better Country

Griffith University’s special election coverage, including interactive maps of Queensland’s 30 federal electorates

The Uluru statement showed how to give First Nations people a real voice – now it’s time for action by Griffith University’s Eddie Synot

The 14 Indigenous words for money on our new 50 cent coin by the University of Queensland’s Felicity Meakins

Explainer: the significance of the Treaty of Waitangi by the University of Waikato’s Sandra Morrison and Ingrid L M Huygens

The end of uncertainty? How the 2019 federal election might bring stability at last to Australian politics by University of Canberra’s Michelle Grattan

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Reader advice: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article may contain images of people who have died.

A few years ago, the State Library of NSW was working with Moree’s Dhiiyaan Centre to pull together archival photographs of the 1965 Freedom Rides, an Aboriginal-led protest against racist segregationist policies in NSW.

Moree – where Aboriginal people were once banned from swimming in the public pool – was an important site in the history of protest against official segregation in Australia, and a key stop on the Freedom Rides route.

Kirsten Thorpe - a Worimi woman, professional archivist and now a researcher at UTS – was then at the State Library, working with Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville to dig out old protest photos to share with the Moree community in the lead up to an exhibition.

But in practice, collecting, sharing and storing such digital archives in perpetuity is no simple matter.

How to ensure the material is stored safely, so the whole process doesn’t need to be repeated in a few years time? How to capture the outpouring of memories and stories that such an exhibition evokes? What if the exhibition inspires more people to come forward with important historical material or accounts – where does that material end up? And how to ensure Indigenous people are empowered to tell their own stories and have a say over how digital archives are managed?

Enter Mukurtu.

Mukurtu (pronounced MOOK-oo-too) is an online system that aims to help Indigenous communities conserve stories, videos, photographs, songs, word lists and other digital archives.

Mukurtu is a Warumungu word meaning “dilly bag” or a safe keeping place for sacred materials.

It’s a free, mobile, and open source platform built with Indigenous communities in mind to manage and share digital cultural heritage. Kirsten Thorpe says it’s the kind of thing that would have been really useful back when she was collating Freedom Rides material for the Moree community.

Mukurtu is/are already being used by Native American communities to store and preserve digital archives, and Kirsten Thorpe – now a senior researcher at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at UTS – is involved in making Mukurtu more widely accessible in Australia.

She works with other key players, such as Professor Kimberly Christen at the Centre for Digital Curation and Scholarship in the US and Richard Neville at the State Library of NSW, to ensure the Mukurtu Project has the institutional support it needs to help Indigenous communities protect their cultural heritage for generations to come.

On today’s episode of the podcast, Kirsten Thorpe and Richard Neville explain why Mukurtu is needed, how it’s being used and what’s at stake if we don’t find better ways to empower Indigenous people with the skills and tech to conserve and manage digital archives.

Podcasts are often best enjoyed using a podcast app. All iPhones come with the Apple Podcasts app already installed, or you may want to listen and subscribe on another app such as Pocket Casts (click here to listen to Trust Me, I’m An Expert on Pocket Casts).

You can also hear us on Stitcher, Spotify or any of the apps below. Just pick a service from one of those listed below and click on the icon to find Trust Me, I’m An Expert.

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks

ABC News 1965 intro music.

Lee Rosevere, Betrayal.

Nina Maile Gordon