Late Night Live — Full program podcast · ABC Australia

Meet the new Liberal Party leaders, what future for Hong Kong, and making music from stars

·54 min·3 clips

Hong Kong now has censored films, closed independent bookshops, and a legislature screened by Beijing.

The show opens on Gadigal Land. David Maher sets up an hour that moves from Canberra politics to Hong Kong to a piece of stellar science, and it does not try to pretend those jumps need smoothing over. The first stop is Canberra. Anna Henderson joins Maher to pick through an extraordinary week and the rhetoric around change, with Angus Taylor's line about change treated as something to examine rather than repeat. The exchange is brisk and lightly dry, which keeps the political segment moving as a conversation rather than a sermon. Then the focus shifts to Hong Kong. Long-time Hong Kong observer Antony Dapperin takes up Jimmy Lai's sentencing and the fate of Apple Daily, using it as a way into a larger account of how Beijing's tolerance of dissent narrowed after years in which the paper backed the pro-democracy movement and even supported protesters with material they could carry into the streets. The timeline reaches back into the immediate post-handover years, including the 2003 protests against a proposed national security law, and then into the 2019 protests, when China decided that Lai and Apple Daily were no longer tolerable. The conversation also makes clear that Beijing did not face a real military or institutional threat in Hong Kong; what was at stake was the growth of a distinct Hong Kong identity and the idea of Hong Kong as something separate within China. That is the serious centre of the hour. It is handled with patience rather than drama, which matters when the subject is liberty under pressure and the cost of speaking too plainly. The final movement is stranger. Professor Connie Arts explains how astronomers can listen to stars, and the show lets that idea breathe without turning it into a gimmick, so the listener hears both the method and the wonder. Maher leans into the oddity. The red giant comes across less like a curiosity than something with its own voice, which is a fitting way to end an hour that has already crossed from politics to history to the cosmos. The structure is loose, but it works because the same habit governs every segment: ask, press, qualify, and leave enough room for the answer to show the shape of the story.

As heard by us

A brisk hour that moves from Canberra politics to Hong Kong liberty and a star-listening astronomer.

Late Night Live opens with an extraordinary week in Canberra, then turns to Hong Kong, where Jimmy Lai's sentencing becomes a way into a wider argument about liberty nearly 30 years after the handover. After that, it moves to Belgian astronomer Dr.

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Why you'd press play

You want one hour that can move from Canberra spin to Hong Kong and then to stars.

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