← The Monocle Daily
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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 26 March 2026 on Monaco Radio.
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US President Donald Trump, angrier with NATO than he is with Iran. Has the EU finally solved the migration crisis? And why does everyone want to run marathons? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily start. Hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guest Marta lorimer and Vincent McAvenny will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll have a report from Australia, where staff at the national broadcaster have gone back to work. But tensions persist. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle. D. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Marta Loram, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, and Vincent McAvenny, journalist and monocle Radio regular. Hello to you both. Hello, Marta. Because this will be coming up later in the show. You have recently been in Europe discussing populism.
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A
Yes, that is what I do with half of my life.
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B
Have you fixed it?
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A
No.
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B
Ah, so you have to go back?
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A
Yes, I unfortunately do have to go back. We'll have to do this all over again in a couple of weeks in Salzburg. And let's see. That works better.
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B
That sounds dreadful. This particular conference you were attending or symposium was in Lisbon, was it? Lisbon? Lisbon. Was it Portuguese populism in particular you were discussing?
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A
No, we were discussing the connection between populism and neuroskepticism at the EU level. So it wasn't specifically about Portugal. It just so happened that the institution hosting us was in Portugal.
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B
Okay. And, Vincent, you are embarking on writing a book, which I can confirm from experience is an absolutely rock solid, solid, guaranteed, one way path to fame, wealth and glory. So congratulations on that.
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C
That's what I've heard. It's just write it and that's it exactly.
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B
License to print money.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Can you tell us anything about it?
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C
Yeah, I mean, it's that stage where pretty much every journalist I know at some point has written a book now, and I haven't done that yet, so scratching my head and thinking about this. But a couple years ago, it struck me that a lot of my friends were asking me a very specific question, which was, what was it like to be an only child? And I sort of gave them my thoughts on it because they'd already had one. They were wondering whether to have another one or not. And it just felt like this question was sort of A much more active choice. And if you look at demographics, particularly in the UK and Europe, only child families are becoming much more common. That part of it is biology. You know, people starting families later in life. Some of it is economic, but it has profound consequences for, you know, policymakers in terms of how they game out and map the sort of next 10 to 20 years of education policy. What happens with welfare spending for, you know, and if we look at the biggest part of welfare spending in the UK is pensions, what happens with that? So it's looking at kind of how we went from boomerism in the 1950s to slightly bust. Now.
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B
When people asked you about this, was there any amount of, I guess, instinctive defensiveness on your part? Did you feel obliged to say, look, I turned out all right?
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C
Well, I mean, part of my early research has been discovering that the like only children are selfish myth, got to say, in my view, is was a government concoction. It was a active campaign by the British government in the 1950s to boost the birth rate, was to basically discredit only children. So it wasn't like an organic thing that came.
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B
Your only children will turn into serial killers. Have another one.
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C
Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Or, you know, they'll be selfish brats.
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B
Amazing.
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C
And I think my line on it always is inevitably you, I think you grow up a little bit quicker, you're more comfortable dealing with adults at a younger age and you inevitably get more of your parents time. But I think in my case and friends I know who are any children, actually, you are so much more under the microscope. You can get away with nothing. You know, you can't drop a grade without a restorative program being put in place for the next term. So, you know, there are definitely trade offs. But actually in the case of my parents, you know, it was going the other way. It was actually being like tougher in terms of spoiling and things like that,
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I think, well, we will start with NATO and the latest salvo launched against the alliance by its most implacable antagonist, that is US President Donald Trump. In one of the all caps pre dawn social media blurts, which are so reliably the indicator of an ordered mind and equable temperament, Trump declared that NATO nations have done absolutely nothing to help with the lunatic nation now militarily decimated of Iran. The USA needs nothing from NATO. But never forget this very important point in time. Speaking in the last couple of hours, Trump has talked at length about his plans for the new White House ballroom and discussed his fondness for sharpie Pens Marta Trump has also said again that Iran is begging to make a deal and Iran again has said not. And I think this was the question that I started last night's show with. Who do we believe? The President of the United States or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps?
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A
It's such a difficult choice, isn't it? I mean, both are plausible in a way, because part of the problem is that Trump might be speaking to someone in Iran. We just don't know who he's speaking to.
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B
There's 90 odd million people who knows who's picking the phone up?
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A
We just don't really know what kind of. Because every time that there seems to be some kind of established leader, someone goes ahead and murders them. So that has been the pattern so far. So it might, it might well be that Trump has managed to find someone that he is talking to in Iran. It just doesn't really happen to be the same people that are telling us that we are not talking with him. And that is kind of a problem because it does mean that in certain ways they're both right, but it's also not really advancing the cause of finding a deal.
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B
I mean, it could well be, Vincent, that it's some guy running a panel beater shop on the outskirts of Tehran somewhere. And, you know, he just keeps picking up the phone. This guy seems to want to talk. But we should pivot more to Trump's attitude to NATO, which he has been also sounding off again today in terms which strongly suggests that he does not understand that the percentage of GDP that you're supposed to spend on defence is exactly that. It's not the entrance fee, it's not the annual members.
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C
He thinks it's like the Mar A Lago.
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B
Yeah, I think, to be honest, he literally does think that. But do we think he is? And I know it's an other question whether it's actually legally possible, but is he looking for an excuse to yank the US out of NATO?
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C
Potentially, he's no friend of NATO because he just simply doesn't understand it. And the classic example is that, you know, after 9, 11, very quickly after those towers fell, Donald Trump was on radio bragging about how he now had the tallest building in Manhattan, which wasn't true, and banging on about how he had known that in the years after that that Osama bin Laden was the target and he told presidents through the years to go after him. OK, what did NATO do? Article 5 was triggered. NATO allies, including the UK and Denmark, to a really big extent supported the US, went to their aid in Afghanistan and were there for over a decade. So this sort of slight is really doing damage across the Atlantic because you've got veterans families and veterans themselves and bereaved families who just, just don't like this at all. Donald Trump famously, of course, dodged the draft captain bone spurs, interestingly, that the latest line from the US Today is that he's looking at putting the conscription age from 35 up to 42. That is an interesting one. But Trump just simply does not understand that NATO is not something and he has problems with any institution that has really fixed rules. It's why he hates the eu. Nothing that he could, if he can't bully it and make it do what he wants, he simply just wants to destroy it.
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B
Interestingly, however, though, Marta, no NATO country as such has really come out and said, yay, Go. We support entirely United States and Israel's endeavors in Iran. But NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has, I mean, he has, and I quote, said Trump is doing this to make the whole world safe. Now, do we think Mark Rute, who is of course a politician, formerly prime minister of the Netherlands, actually thinks that, or does he think, well, if I say this, it doesn't really commit any body to anything and maybe it keeps him happy and therefore the United States in NATO.
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A
I'm wondering if you're making Rutte to be more intelligent than he actually is. This is the same man who referred to Trump as Daddy relatively recently.
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B
I have, in fairness to Rutte, seen him recently asked about that at a small event at the Munich Security Conference. And he did try and say that this was a slight misapprehension on his part of the nuance of that phrase in this context.
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A
Okay, well, that is more understandable. But I still struggle to see how in any context I would be referring to, say, my head of department, he's
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trying to get down with the Gen Z.
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A
You know, I don't know, it just feels a little bit weird.
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No one's arguing on that.
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A
And I'm also not a native English speaker, so, you know, same excuse. But I mean, there is a case to be made that Margaret is basically, he's worked out that the person that he has to keep under some kind of control is Donald Trump and that if he still hopes that Trump will listen to some form of reason, he is going to get there through deep, deep flattery. The problem is that you do have an alliance that doesn't just have the United States in it and everyone else pretty much disagrees and has been very, very clear about the fact that they think that this is a terrible idea. So. And it doesn't really seem like if Rutte is using this to say, well, look, Donald, you're the absolute best, but cut them some slack, that message is not getting through. So I don't really know that this is a strategy that is working and it's also successfully pissing off essentially everyone else in the alliance because they just say, well, what's the point of a President of NATO if all he's doing is basically following Trump?
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C
To give him some credit, he, unlike every other leader in NATO, isn't facing an electorate. He was Prime Minister of the Netherlands for a decade. He's not going to run for office again. He doesn't have to answer to electorates in the way that the other Trump whisperers, which is Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer, the Finnish Prime Minister, who've been very effective in kind of cajoling and guiding Trump around, they are having to respond in a way that Trump does not like. And we've already seen him lashing out, particularly of course, at Keir Starmer with, we think, some sort of back ending from reform to encourage that. But for Rutte, I mean, the problem is that Trump only responds to sycophancy and that is the way. And I think he thinks I've got to try and keep him on board for Ukraine. Russia is getting money in its coffers, including now after the US potentially lifting the sanctions on its oil. We still need him and I have to hug him close. And he probably thinks, look, this guy's going to be out of office in 36 months. He's going to be 83 at that point. He probably won't be living for that much longer. Got decades to come in which I can reveal what I was actually doing, what my strategy is. I do think this generation of sort of political autobiographies will actually be quite interesting when we get to find out what they're all actually doing. I hope they share the receipts from the WhatsApp group of like the fellow NATO leaders minus Trump, to see what the game plan was like.
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Well, to Europe now and to the latest efforts by the Continent's incumbent lawmakers to address the fact that while a great many people from outside Europe want to live in Europe, a great many people inside Europe don't want them to and are voting accordingly. The EU Parliament has voted in favour of proposals to deport illegal migrants to so called return hubs outside the eu. Other measures will include an increase in legal detention to up to two years and permanent entry bans for repeat illegal migrants. Marta, this very much in your wheelhouse. If you were among the European far right, would you be counting this as a win? That is, hurrah. They're listening to us and they're doing what we want them to. Or a bit of a loss along the lines of, like, God, if they actually do fix migration, we are stuffed, aren't we?
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A
Now, this is a major win for the far right.
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B
I was trying to be optimistic.
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A
Yeah. Without wanting to get into too much of the process of this piece of legislation. It isn't official yet, right? Indeed, they agreed to open negotiations with the Council on it, but it is extremely likely to pass because two very similar pieces of legislation have already passed. This is the safe third country and save third country of origin. Less. The far right can see this as an absolute win because not only does this go in the direction of policies that they have been pushing for, because this is essentially a deportation law. On top of that, they have been very involved in the process of drafting this piece of legislation. They were actively involved in negotiating the deal that will be discussed by the Parliament and the Council. Their amendments were taken on board by the rapporteur. And there was also apparently a WhatsApp group between them and members of the European People's Party. So the main centre right force in the European Parliament. That very much shows that this was a negotiated deal between the right and the far right. So we are dealing with a. At this point. There used to be a cordon sanitaire in the European Parliament where you said, the far right will not be included in any of our decisions. That has come down completely. They're being actively included in decision making. And even though they will still claim, oh, this deal doesn't go nearly far enough, but we had to come to some kind of compromise. It is still quite a radical shift in terms of what was already, frankly, quite restrictive policy in the eu.
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B
The thing is, though, Vincent, and I guess this is the thing with any policy of any kind, is is this actually going to work? Because this is not a million miles in some respects removed from the UK's Rwanda Idea or Italy's Albania Idea. The UK's Rwanda Idea failed entirely and the Italy Albanian one has not been quite the roaring success that everybody might have hoped for.
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C
Yeah, I mean, well, with the Rwanda deal, I mean, this was from the last Conservative government. They did a deal with Rwanda. They, in the end only deported four people to Rwanda and they paid them to go. And I was down there they deported
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a great deal of taxpayers money.
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C
They did, yeah, hundreds of millions. And I was down there several mornings at an RAF base outside of London with a plane fuelled up on the tarmac, engines sort of purring quietly, waiting to see people being taken onto this plane who all managed to sort of get last minute legal reprieve and the plane didn't depart. And it became a sort of battle on sort of individuals. The government did win, you know, effectively in the Supreme Court. Well, they basically won the legal battle in terms of being able to actually send people to Rwanda by simply declaring Rwanda as a safe country, kind of over the head of the Supreme Court. But then it was sort of individual circumstances which were really kind of tripping them up. And then when Labour came in, they scrapped it entirely. So, you know, these do have problems. But it has been, I mean, in your native Australia a policy work was implemented that did, you know, do what it was designed to do and did stop the sort of traffic of small boats. In the UK in particular, we've got this sort of, you know, ongoing political issue of the small boats. It's such a really unlike, you know, people can look at migration figures and not really understand them or not get it, but when you see that sort of constant flow over, particularly over the summer months of small boats, that really has driven the UK in particular towards having a much tougher line on this kind of stuff.
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B
Is there, rightly or wrongly, Marta, a feeling developing among what we might think of as mainstream, respectable European parties that they've kind of brought this on themselves? They, they did not pay sufficient attention to immigration and certainly what their own electorates felt about it. Again, rightly or wrongly. And the far right stepped in because there's a quote attributed to the French mep, Francois Xavier Bellamy, who said, straightforward principle, if you come to Europe illegally, rest assured that you will not stay here. It reminds me a bit, in fact, Vincent was talking about Australia, John Howard, the then Prime Minister's statement that we will dec who comes here and the circumstances in which they come. That's quite hard to argue with.
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I think that the real problem is that a lot of the migration that has come in the past has actually benefited hugely these countries.
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Absolutely.
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But no politician seems to be willing to make that case because migration has been securitized so much as an issue. It's been made an issue of national security rather than one of, say, economic prosperity or humanitarian values of sorts of. So they have very much gotten themselves in the situation where for, I think for a few decades they said, well, you know what, we are still going to allow economic migration, but we're still going to scapegoat migrants hugely. And now they are getting to a point where I suppose that people are seeing that this is what is happening. Again, once the far right gets in government, they don't necessarily change the policy. Giorgio Meloni, you know, stop the boats, sink them, had to actually issue a huge amount of work visas for non EU citizens to come to Italy to work because she simply doesn't have the workforce. So essentially what you're creating is a situation where you're demonizing migrants for no particular reason other than, again, you're just using them as scapegoats, but at the same time you are also exploiting them and leaving them in conditions that are quite bad. The other thing with the returns Directive specifically is that one of the reasons the EU keeps floating using this figure, that only 20% of the people who are told to leave Europe leave Europe. The reason for that isn't necessarily that they don't want to leave. It's also that there are a lot of reasons why they cannot leave. There's a huge amount of people who simply cannot return to their own country countries, for whatever reason, and they are long term trapped in a situation, in an irregular situation, because there's no real path towards regularization for them. So it's basically a needlessly cruel system that they've created. And the far right is benefiting from it, particularly sort of electorally, and no one else is benefiting from it because as Jean Marie Le Pen famously said, between the original and the copy, the voters will always choose the copy. So mainstream parties copying the far right doesn't necessarily help them much. It just makes the situation worse for everyone involved and makes the far right stronger.
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B
Vincent, if we just bring this back, though, to, for example, the United Kingdom, would it actually be politically feasible for any, say, for example, Labour politician who wished to keep their job trying to point out anything like the half of what Marta just had?
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C
Well, this you've just hit on the point I was about to make make. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister's former Director of Policy, was actually writing in the Times newspaper this week saying that British politicians need to get their head out the sand and do something on this, particularly this, what reform is dubbing the Boris wave. And this was a spike, and it was sort of a bottleneck from the pandemic years. So it was a spike in sort of 2021, 2022, where sort of a million and a Half people came into the UK and Nigel Farage has really kind of capitalized on that in part to. To obviously drum up his usual arguments about immigration, but also to really bash and hammer the Tories. And Kami Bade, not having been in that government, it's a sort of cudgel against her. But he was making points saying that a lot of people in Labour heartlands just simply, you can sort of try and convince them that we do need some forms of economic migration. But part of it I think just comes down to, obviously there's the security acts aspect as well, but there's a bit of a sort of, of a sense of fairness that I think those communities that have already struggled feel about people. You know, this is a nation ultimately of people who love to queue, both in our own country and, you know, whenever we go abroad. And I think people just feel like, you know, you have to wait your turn, you have to go through the right way, we have to know who you are and that's the way in. And just to come back to that point, because the dominant image, because it's so hard, you know, if you put out figures on this, inevitably, you know, you can't show a waiting room in an immigration centre somewhere because you're not allowed to film it. What you do show is the small boats coming and that is an image that is just really striking to people and they have real issues with that, which just looks like queue jumping to them.
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Well, returning to Washington D.C. an AI powered robot has accompanied Melania Trump to the launch of a new White House initiative. Yes, the awkward mannequin with stilted delivery, able to feign at best, an unconvinced sensing simulacrum of normal human interaction, shared the stage with an AI powered robot. Thank you, I am here all week. The wingding in question was something called the Fostering the Future Together Global Coalition Summit. Catchy at which various tech bosses and first spouses have gathered to ponder the possibilities and pitfalls of AI for children. Melania Trump said, or at least read out loud, that the future of AI is personified. It will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon, artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humans that deliver utility. Marta, how excited are you for a humanoid delivering utility?
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A
Not very. A lot of the conversation on AI I find difficult to be excited about because I keep getting told that AI is going to be doing all of the boring work, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm yet to find a way to integrate artificial intelligence into My workflow. And I don't know that this humanoid robot is actually going to be doing the dishwasher. Because robots are still far from having the kind of dexterity that we need them to have to do the really, really boring tasks.
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B
That will change, though.
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Well, this is the thing, right? We've been saying this will change for decades. It's probably not going to change as fast as people think. And it's also going to come with risks. There was an article always. There was a discussion in the last few days also around AI powered toys. And that was also slightly horrifying in terms of saying, well, listen, you're gonna let your child interact with a toy that doesn't really have the interactions that you would expect of a human. How is that gonna shape them going forward? So, yeah, I'm more worried than excited.
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B
I would say, do you want a robot butler?
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C
I mean, my first thought just on the doing the dishes. I'm so curious. Cause this is an argument. In many households, do you put the nuts knives up or do you put the knives down? I'm really curious to see what AI thinks.
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A
You put them in the robot?
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B
Possibly. You could.
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C
Yeah, but no, I mean, I can think of, look, I can think of applications I wish it would get to quicker, such as, you know, fixing the hole in the roof of Chernobyl. That seems like a good task for AI robots to be doing in a, you know, highly dangerous area. You know, clearing land minefields, operating in, you know, in harsh climates which would do real damage to human humans, you know, things like mining. These are all places that I can see that we could maybe focus it on first, you know, having one in the house. Yeah. Okay. If you've got a big enough property and you want it, you know, really great garden or something like that. But I, I think there's a real issue with, you know, we already see with kids and the addiction problems that they're having with mobile phones. If they can have a, you know, an AI friend or teacher robot, which means that they can kind of bend, you know, they can go into the personality settings and bend to their will that, you know, it'll never tell them off or give them a stern word or anything like that, I just think it's going to then really negatively impact how they relate to others and what they expect from their interactions.
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B
Just a final thought on this one, Marta from academia. When we've heard about AI in that context, it's mostly been about how it has enabled students to cheat. Have you seen any indication that it's actually going to be useful in helping students learn stuff.
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A
Not really, because I think to some extent there are ways that AI could be useful for students learning process. But unfortunately a lot of the way in which it's used is to almost to cheat themselves out of doing the really hard work. And unfortunately that is the one that helps you learn. So. So the concern around cheating isn't so much that they're cheating. We have a problem with academic integrity. It's that in the UK they're shelling out over £9,000 a year, but they're not actually acquiring the skills that we would want them to acquire because they're not putting in that difficult work that they need to acquire those skills. So that's been really one of the most frustrating aspects that I try to convey to my students. But I also understand that from the student's perspective, the student who doesn't want to use AI, sees everyone else using AI, thinks that they're having an easier life than that they're going to be somehow advantaged by it. Spoiler they won't because their essays are not going to be very good. But they're also going to feel sort of compelled to use it. And that is something that I think is quite concerning.
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C
And just a quick point on that loop, I think when they graduate there's a really dangerous feedback loop growing as well in job applications. In that if you look at most job applications now, it's actually saying to you like, oh, we've got AI detectors, don't use AI in your application. So you spend ages organically writing it and then within 10 minutes these young people are getting automatic like thank you application. But no, because it's being screened by AI. So it's really hard for them being told not to use AI. Spend time on this. You know, they can be doing hundreds of applications and getting very little back and then, you know, just a HR worker is just running it through a program and not actually looking at at it.
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B
Well now to the curious proclivity of a certain cast of unfathomable maniacs for running 42km in a single stretch. Despite the manifold options of mechanised transport readily available, London is apparently preparing to turn its annual marathon into a two day event, running back to back races on consecutive days in April 2027, thereby allowing another 50,000 people to shuffle schlepp or sprint from Blackheath to Waterloo and raise several skipfuls more money for charity. In the process, the London Marath grows ever more popular. More than 1.1 million people entered the ballot for this year's race, a number which has nearly tripled in the last three years. Vincent, you have done this, and you're doing it again.
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D
Why?
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C
That's right. I did it last year for the first time, and I'm doing it again in a month, a day, actually. I'd always kind of wanted to do one, and it was getting to the point where I was like, I'm gonna age out of doing this without doing real damage to myself. And I'm denied about doing it before. And I managed to get a place last year, and I really committed to it, and I think it was hands down, one of the best experiences of my life. I absolutely loved. I loved it until halfway. I loved running over Tower Bridge. So it starts out in Greenwich in South London. You run through South London, then you cross Tower Bridge. As you cross Tower Bridge, you get to the half marathon. Mark, I love a half marathon. I'm doing one on Sunday. I'm doing one the week after. Like, I just love a half marathon. It's a great distance. The problem is that instead of turning left and going towards Central London, where the finish line is, you turn right and you then run out to Canary Wharf in the far distance. And if you're like me, last year, I had to start at 11, which meant I got to the kind of halfway point at one and I was on time, I was on track. I got a good half time, and then, you know, prime part of the day, going out that way. The heat was so intense that I just really slowed down. I still loved it. It, but I feel like I've got a better time in me if the weather is a little bit kinder because it was very hot last year. So I'm doing another one to see. But, I mean, I can see why London is so oversubscribed. It is an amazing atmosphere. Last year was the biggest one they ever did. I actually got a Guinness World Record for being part of it because it's the biggest single day of charity fundraising in history. So I did pay five pound to get that little certificate. So that was great. But, yeah, I can see totally why they're thinking, let's do it over two days, because there's actually a gorilla version of the marathon. So people get down to the finish
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B
line dressed as gorillas?
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C
No, no, no. I mean, there are people dressed as gorillas doing it, which is frustrating when you're in your best running stuff and they're running past you. But, no, there is, like, a thing that I picked up on last year is that because the course is plotted out from sort of Saturday afternoon, there are people who, like, at sort of 8:00pm the night before, when the roads start being shut down, they start at the finish and they run backwards. So they kind of get the benefit of all the infrastruct, like, guerrilla version of the London marathon backwards. So, yeah, I can see why they're thinking, let's get it over two days.
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B
What time will you be aiming to beat?
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C
I mean, I completely fell apart in the second half last year, so I'd got my. I got around the first half in about 2:10. I was aiming for about 4:45, and I ended up at like, 5:13. So I'm hoping to sort of beat that.
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B
According to these notes here, our producer Hassan very much wants our listeners to know that he ran 3:43 in Brighton in 2020.
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C
I mean, Hassan's.
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B
That's not bad, actually.
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C
He's about 15 years younger than I am.
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B
Marta, does this appeal to you in the slightest? Has it ever appealed to you previously?
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A
I have run half marathon distance on my own time, as in not. But I don't. I don't think I would enjoy the running competitively bit, and particularly the running over. Well, basically, as a woman, it would take me at least five hours, I reckon, to run the full distance. And it just sounds, every time I hear about what happens to your toes, like to your toenails. I don't. I don't want. I don't want that for myself.
- [31:23]
B
But just a final thought on this, Marta, because it does kind of pertain to your area of expertise. Part of the pitch for doubling the marathon is allegedly that it will, quote, show unity and community across the country at a time of growing social and economic division. Are you buying that, or is that just one of those lines that people put in any proposal for any.
- [31:44]
A
I'm gonna say it depends on how many animal charities get funded over charities that take care of humans.
- [31:50]
C
I would jump in on that, though, to say, after I'd finished, my partner said, where, you know, where was it? Sort of quiet along the marathon, because he'd had, like, a big moving round basically, to try and sort of catch me at different points. And it was. He was sort of stunned at the crowds, but I was like, there was literally nowhere along that course where there wasn't supporters and people handing out sweets and people cheering. And, like, if you've got your name on your. That's something I'd recommend doing. If you do run a marathon, do put your name on your top because, you know, people see your name and they just call it out. And if you're having a really bad mile, it just really does work to kind of keep you going. And I think, I think it's one of the best days in London. I'd seen others going, you know, cheered on other friends doing it. And when you're actually doing it, it's such an amazing day and you kind of get this nice thing as well. If you obviously finish, get your medal, you get like free public transport from the city. So you get on the bus instead of having to tap your card, you just like flash the medal. It's quite.
- [32:44]
B
Vincent McAvenny and Marta Lorimer, thank you both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, staff at Australia's main public broadcaster, the ABC, have returned to work after staging a 24 hour walkout. The dispute centres on pay and conditions, but it has also highlighted the increasingly difficult environment for public service broadcasting in Australia. A problem echoed around the world. From Brisbane, Paul Osborne sent this report.
- [33:11]
A
This is ABC News.
- [33:12]
D
I'm Ros, ABC News back on the air today, 24 hours after close to 2,000 staff walked off the job. The first strike at the ABC for 20 years and one that had an immediate impact on both radio and television
- [33:29]
B
due to industrial action. We can't bring you your usual program.
- [33:33]
D
That meant no news on the ABC's main TV channel, just a skeleton local radio service presenter. Free music stations became jukeboxes and Australia's rolling news channel was replaced with a feed from the other side of the world.
- [33:48]
C
Your corner of the world is full of stories that deserve a home and that home is here on ABC local radio.
- [33:56]
A
You can get in touch with me right up until.
- [33:59]
B
Live from Washington, this is BBC News.
- [34:02]
D
At the heart of the dispute is a complaint that is common among journalists across the world. ABC staff say they are overworked and underpaid. They've been offered a 10% pay rise over the next three years that say unions, is barely enough to keep up with inflation. Managers also promised a thousand dollar bonus, but not for the casual staff who make up a significant proportion of the ABC's workforce, some of whom went on air in the hours before the strike to explain to audiences why they were walking out.
- [34:33]
C
Like many of our viewers, a lot of ABC staff are struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living and we're ask for a pay rise that will help keep our heads above water.
- [34:43]
D
A lack of job security is another trigger for this dispute with union saying Many people are rolled over from one temporary contract to another with little chance of promotion or higher pay, let alone a permanent role. Long standing ABC presenter Fran Kelly there's
- [34:59]
C
people on my team who've been on the same pay level for five years, for eight years, and have been told they won't get a promotion this time around.
- [35:09]
D
The strike followed nine months of ultimately fruitless talks, with ABC bosses insisting the current offer is the most they can afford. Managing director Hugh Marks apologized to audiences from the studios of ABC Radio Sydney just before its staff walked out.
- [35:26]
B
I feel terrible that we're in a position where we're going to pull services from the public like that is our job day to day. When my funding goes up by 2.27 to 2.8% a year, there is a limit to how far we can go in remunerating, you know, 60% of the workforce and staff.
- [35:41]
D
The strike coincides with the release of Medianet's 2026 Australian Media Landscape Report, an alarming portrait of the state of journalism in the country. Half the respondents to the survey said that their role had changed in some way in the last year. Some have taken on additional work to make ends meet, and close to one in ten are now looking for a job job outside Journalism Australia is one of the world's most concentrated media markets. Outside of the ABC and smaller public operator SBS. The media is dominated by two firms, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and Nine Entertainment. Between them, they account for 90% of metropolitan newspaper circulation. But as they struggle to compete with global giants, newsrooms have been hollowed out Financially and editorially, Australia's media is increasingly a low paid, insecure industry. But for more than 90 years, the ABC's been a vital part of Australian life, running more than 60 local radio stations from the most remote regions to the biggest cities like Sydney and Melbourne. It has a key role in emergencies, providing life saving information through floods, cyclones and bushfires, and is pretty much the only, only broadcaster of scale investing in Australian made drama, comedy or children's programs. But it is also a politically polarizing institution.
- [37:14]
B
Just outrageous.
- [37:15]
D
Don't they know what their job is
- [37:18]
B
and their duty is? It's journalists treated as their own left wing collective, their own political soapbox.
- [37:23]
D
The perpetually angry commentators of Sky News Australia who haven't been able to stop talking about the ABC strike this past 24 hours. Proof, they say, of its arrogance and its left wing bias. Of course, the erosion of trust in public broadcasters is a global issue. And while the proportion of Australians saying they trust the ABC has fallen. It remains higher than for pretty much every rival. According to the Reuters Institute, around two thirds say they trust ABC News, compared to fewer than half who trust Sky News Australia. Preserving that trust, say unions, is one reason why they want better pay and conditions. ABC managers are now taking the dispute to Australia's workplace tribunal, the Fair Work Commission, to try to agree a settlement. But staff say that without a better deal, they could strike again. For Monocle in Brisbane, I'm Paul Osborne.
- [38:20]
B
Thank you, Paul. And that is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panellists today, Marta lorimer and Vincent McEvany. Today's show was produced by Hassan Anderson. Our sound engineer was Steph Chongu. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening,
- [38:57]
A
Sam.