Grattan Institute

On the Grattan Institute podcast, the institute talks through its own research one Australian policy problem at a time. The usual setup is a host plus the people who wrote the report. Kat Clay, who introduces herself as Head of Digital Communications, hosts several of these conversations. Her guests are mostly the authors themselves: Peter Braden and Elizabeth Baldwin on hospital funding, Kate Griffiths and Elizabeth Baldwin on gambling, and Sam Bennett and Riley Polishek among the team on psychosocial disability, with education experts Amy Haywood and Molly Chapman on school attendance. The rhythm is steady and easy to follow. The first questions are about scale, the next about causes, and the recommendations come last. Hospital funding is the clearest example. Spending has climbed year after year, yet ambulances still ramp outside emergency departments. The authors trace the strain to funding that is unpredictable at both federal and state level and keeps getting patched with bailouts. Gambling gets a similar treatment. The report is set beside the Murphy Inquiry, whose recommendations included a total ban on gambling advertising, and the authors explain why Grattan looked at the problem nationally rather than at one jurisdiction or one type of gambling. The disability conversation starts from a gap: adults with the highest psychosocial needs who get support from neither the NDIS nor the mental health system. Here the register warms, as the speakers acknowledge their own experiences of disability and mental health before turning to reform. The school attendance episode makes its numbers tangible, turning about 11 percent of students absent on a typical day into three empty desks in a class of 24. The democracy episode widens the lens. Matthew Bowes, a Senior Associate, describes Australia as one of the few remaining liberal democracies at a time of global backsliding. The talk then turns to shrinking news coverage and the difference between misinformation and disinformation. There are figures throughout, but they serve an argument rather than pad it, and technical terms come with plain explanations. When the subject is harm, the language turns grave rather than heated. The feed also carries 'The Prime Minister's Summer Reading List 2025 - Event Recording', a Melbourne evening opened by Tom Crowley, an ABC political reporter and former Grattan employee. It is looser and warmer. The talk about books drifts toward the idea of a shifting baseline, where people slowly adjust to hotter summers and more extreme weather without noticing how much has changed. For a first listen, 'How to fix hospital funding' shows the move from problem to reform most plainly.