Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with Miroi Stewart and me

Ernest Gamble. Very good and let's maybe start on Australia,

Tara Ward, what are your thoughts about the new South Wales state election on Saturday?

It means the Labour Party now holds power at the federal level and in every mainland state in Australia.

Labour's pledge to scrap the public sector wage cap was instrumental in delivering the party majority government.

There's something else very interesting about the election in New South Wales, Rory.

I wonder whether both the main parties listen to our podcasts because there seem to be an outbreak of agreeable disagreement.

People, Australia is amongst the roughest politics in the world when it's rough.

It can be really, really rough.

But it seems that the new Premier, Chris Minnes, when he took office, the guy he defeated thanked him for the nice way that he campaigned,

urged all new South Walesians to get behind him.

And it just seemed a little bit strange for Australia.

And I just wonder whether it's a sort of belated reaction to the fact that they had the sort of Morrison populist politics for so long,

maybe they feel that it did a lot of damage.

But it means that all the mainland Australia knows 100% Labour.

Tasmania is the only part of Australia that now has a non-Labor leader at federal or state level.

Very, very interesting isn't it?

And I was struck, I was in Australia about nine weeks ago now.

And I was very struck there by how proud people are at the moment by Australian politics.

I had Australian students when I was teaching at Yale towards the end of the Trump era.

And I remember feeling exactly what you were expressing, which is in Britain we often had a sort of cliché about Australian politics

and it was quite sort of course almost populist in turn.

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