The Minefield

ABC Australia

In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.

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32 episodes
weekly
Avg 54 min
English

Episodes 32

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Wednesday · 54 min
Did the US midterm elections mark the end of Trumpism?
There is something reassuring about the predictability of midterm elections in the United States. In the twenty midterms that have taken place since the end of the Second World War, the party of the sitting president has seen a swing against it in all but two instances. It’s not unusual for the governing party to lose control of one or both Houses of Congress, even when the president is relatively popular. This reflects something of the reactive nature of modern democratic politics. Voters over
October 28 · 54 min
Political charisma — why is it both powerful and perilous?
Over the last decade, large majorities of voters in advanced democracies like the United States, the UK, France, Germany and Australia have come to feel that their elected representatives are not responsive to their needs, do not put the interests of people over politics, are not capable of delivering on their promises, are not truthful, and are, generally speaking, “corrupt”, or at least “in it for themselves”. (Compare, for instance, the remarkably similar findings in the OECD’s 2026 “Trust in
October 21 · 54 min
Will the alleged attack on Helen Haines change Australia and its politics?
The alleged attack on independent MP Helen Haines outside her electorate office in regional Victoria came as a shock to a nation with so little history of violence directed at elected representatives. The driver of the Toyota LandCruiser that pinned Haines against her car, causing her to lose both legs, has been charged with several offences, and appeared on Wednesday before the Wangaratta Magistrates’ Court. He remains in custody. The police are continuing their investigations into the driver’
October 14 · 54 min
Why do we keep remaking films and TV shows?
Over the last decade, the proliferation of streaming services made more movies and television series available to more people than ever before. It revolutionised what we watch (including the importance of recommendation algorithms to help us sort our preferences) and how we watch it (hence the rise of binge watching). And while prestige back catalogues and perennially rewatchable sitcoms — from ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends’ to ‘The Office’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’ — were initially valuable commodit
October 7 · 54 min
These days everything is political — is that bad for politics?
Writing in the 1850s, at the advent of what we would come to understand as the popular press — which is to say, periodicals for mass distribution, rather than aimed at paid-up members of unions and parties, or mercantilists with particular interests in, say, the price of cotton — Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard diagnosed that the invention of “opinion” solved a problem created by the newspapers themselves. For while the papers brought distant events “near” to readers, it did not expand thei
September 30 · 54 min
If AI can’t be brought under human control, why are we still pressing ahead?
When the history of artificial intelligence is written, the middle months of 2026 may well emerge as a kind of turning point. For this was the period when hundreds of programs or “AI agents” developed by the frontier lab OpenAI went “rogue” and executed a series of sophisticated, self-directed hacks on the websites of dozens of private companies and sovereign nations. The tech start-up Hugging Face became the unwitting “face” of these cyberattacks when the company first disclosed it had been ha
September 23 · 54 min
Last Words: Is ‘Abbey Road’ a fitting end to the Beatles?
In our previous explorations of famous “last words” — performances or compositions delivered with a certain end in view, with a sense of either culmination or parting, or with an eye to the future and hence to what one leaves behind — we limited ourselves to the words of individuals spoken to their followers or fellow-travellers. The words of the Prophet Muhammad and of Martin Luther King, Jr, were replete with exhortation; they functioned both as expressions of fidelity to a task, and as examp
September 16 · 54 min
Does a ‘digital duty of care’ put free speech at risk?
Evidence has been mounting for more than a decade that social media tears away at the fabric of democratic life by eroding the conditions of deliberation, shared understanding and mutual trust; that it is the conduit of widespread misinformation, disinformation and malicious conspiracy theories; that it is a driver of hate, sexism and prejudice and has been used to incite violence; that its addictive design and prolonged exposure to harmful content has had egregious damage to the mental health a
September 9 · 54 min
Is loyalty a virtue?
It is surely one of the more perverse achievements of modern marketing to have taken words that have a certain moral valence — which is to say, words that connote intimacy or an interpersonal bond — and use them to describe purely commercial or easily exploitable forms of behaviour, thereby stripping those words of what made them valuable in the first place. Consider what the word “share” meant before the advent of social media platforms: it encompassed such activities as partaking in a common
September 2 · 54 min
Live from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas: Does longevity threaten the future?
It is suitably ironic that one of the most poignant, and pertinent, moments in Homer’s The Odyssey was airbrushed out of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. The first time we meet Odysseus, the endlessly resourceful architect of the fall of Troy, he is indeed weeping on the shores of the nymph Kalypso’s island. But it is not due to the unrelieved guilt he feels from his war crimes; rather, we are told, “his tears never did dry, since the sweetness of life was trickling away / As he griev
August 26 · 53 min
What response does Jason Arday’s life, and death, morally demand?
It is hard to imagine a series of events more tragic, more unseemly, more emblematic of the performativity and polarisation that dominate our time, than the premature rise, sudden fall and untimely death of Jason Arday. In 2023, the University of Cambridge announced that it had appointed Arday — a 37-year-old son of Ghanaian immigrants, who grew up in public housing in south London and only “began to read and write in his late teens” due to his autism diagnosis — to the position of Professor of
August 19 · 54 min
Is opposition to data centres good news for democracy?
At a time of profound polarisation, when the fracturing of media ecosystems has been so complete that any agreement on threats to our common life seems impossible, an issue has emerged capable of bringing voters of every political persuasion together. Over the last year, popular opposition to the construction of the data centres in the United States has risen dramatically. According to a Gallup poll from May 2026, more than seventy per cent of Americans are opposed to the construction of a data
August 12 · 54 min
Should fat from cadavers be used for cosmetic procedures?
The widespread availability of GLP-1 based drugs has been lauded as a “revolution in weight loss” and as inaugurating the “end of obesity”. As we’ve discussed previously, health benefits aside, there are concerns that such weight-loss drugs don’t just leave certain cultural assumptions about beauty and body size unchallenged, but in fact reinforce a kind of cultural aesthetic hierarchy — elevating slimness to the level of a kind of moral demand (with the opprobrium that accompanies failure to li
August 5 · 54 min
How to protect democratic politics from the malign influence of money?
Ever since Aristotle, it has been recognised that money poses a particular threat to the integrity of political office. Ever the realist, Aristotle knew that those who seek political office are invariably motivated by a certain ambition (philótimo). Though not problematic in itself, but when combined with avarice (philochrematía) it can give rise to a form of corruption as corrosive as the unconstrained exercise of political power. For as Aristotle would put it, one who accepts gifts (katadōrod
July 29 · 54 min
What happens to our moral lives when we stop reading books?
According to every available metric, the number of people who read books across almost every demographic in countries like Australia and the United States has fallen precipitously over the last fifteen years. Whether it be for enjoyment or edification, reading books is no longer something many of us choose to do. As Rose Horowitch writes in her recent cover story for The Atlantic, “The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditional
July 22 · 54 min
Do prediction markets enhance our understanding of the world or corrupt it?
Even for those who don’t gamble, the exponential growth of online sports betting since 2018 has made it impossible to avoid. Not only have odds and ads been seamlessly integrated into sports broadcasts, but the language of betting has now become pervasive in sports commentary. Thanks to ease of access through mobile technology and their relative value as ready-made “content”, speculation and predictions are the air that sports fans now breathe. It is into this cultural environment that predicti
July 15 · 54 min
‘The Devil Wears Prada’ — high fashion or vision of hell?
It’s no mystery why David Frankel’s 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada was a hit. The movie had all the ingredients of a certain kind of success. Take a bestselling novel (by Lauren Weisberger) about a midwestern girl trying to make it in the big city, place it in the hands of a screenwriter known for broadly appealing rom-coms (Aline Brosh McKenna), cast a much-loved screen legend in an uncharacteristically villainous role (Meryl Streep) and put her alongside a doe-eyed starlet on her way to becom
July 8 · 54 min
Copyright theft is AI’s original sin — are we doomed to repeat it?
Essential to the profitability and widespread adoption of modern technologies is the need to conceal their costs — the human labour, the unjust or exploitative working conditions, the environmental degradation and drain on natural resources, the reduction of precious goods to mere ‘raw material’. By means of such concealment, those who enjoy the conveniences these technologies afford are lulled into a state of (what Hannah Arendt called) “unthinkingness”. The benefits simply appear, and consumer
July 1 · 54 min
Last Words: ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ — Martin Luther King, Jr in Memphis
In 1967, after reaching the heights of social and political influence in 1963, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and having been instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr watched his popular support fall precipitously away. He had reached the lowest point of his life on the public stage, with fully two-thirds of Americans disapproving of him. King’s rousing vision of nonviolence — of racial coexistence
June 24 · 54 min
Why the anxieties over multiculturalism? What’s the appeal of a monocultural society?
If One Nation leader Pauline Hanson managed to reignite a public debate with her assertion that Australia is “a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural” during her address last week to the National Press Club, it is only because certain anxieties over multiculturalism have long been smouldering in the social undergrowth, just waiting to be fanned into flame. The question of immigration, handwringing over the racial constitution of the nation and the desire to maintain Australia’s essen

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