This week on the Democracy Sausage podcast, Mark Kenny chats to John Hewson, Katrine Beauregard, Jill Sheppard, and Paul Pickering about a campaign week dominated by water, the economy, religion, and relentless spending commitments.

Will climate change be the defining issue of the Australian election campaign? Has Labor been too bold with campaign promises? And which leader would you prefer to have a beer with? Those are just some of the questions tackled in episode two of Mark Kenny’s Democracy Sausage podcast. Mark and the panel - John Hewson, Katrine Beauregard, Jill Sheppard, and Paul Pickering - also discuss whether a surplus should be seen as a measure of economic success, whether voters have already made up their minds, and what the campaign has in common with a Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch.
Mark Kenny is a Senior Fellow in the ANU Australian Studies Institute. He came to the university after a high-profile journalistic career including six years as chief political correspondent and national affairs editor for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Canberra Times.

Dr Katrine Beauregard is a lecturer in the ANU School of Politics and International Relations. Her work focuses on political behaviour, and why people vote the way they do. She is particularly interested in gender gaps when it comes to political participation and the factors that influence this, as well as how political institutions can be used to include marginalised groups in the political process.

Dr John Hewson is a former Federal Opposition Leader who is now Professor and Chair in the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute at Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. John is an economic and financial expert with experience in academia, business, government, media and the financial system. He has worked as an economist for the Australian Treasury, the Reserve Bank, the International Monetary Fund and as an advisor to two successive Federal Treasurers and the Prime Minister.

Professor Paul Pickering is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute. Paul's research and teaching interests are very broad. He has published extensively on Australian, British and Irish social, political and cultural history as well as biography, public memory and commemoration and the study of reenactment as an historical method.

Dr Jill Sheppard is a political scientist at the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on why people participate in politics, what opinions they hold and why, and how both are shaped by political institutions and systems. 

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This podcast extra is part of Policy Forum’s Australian Election coverage, and published in partnership with The Australian National University.

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