Global Roaming with Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald

Australian author Richard Flanagan joins Global Roaming to talk about his new essay collection Heresies. He tells Hamish Macdonald and Waleed Aly why he thinks Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter echoes the public punishment of heretics in the Spanish Inquisition, why he believes Australia is a uniquely conformist nation unable to reckon with its colonial history, and the extraordinary story of a plan to build a Jewish homeland in the wilderness of southwest Tasmania.
Plus: why Flanagan says hope, not despair, is the truly heretical position in 2026.Guest: Richard Flanagan, author of HeresiesVote in Radio National's Top 100 Australian books here
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China controls as much as 95–99% of the world's heavy rare earth processing.
Your phone, your car, the wind turbines on the horizon, the F-35 fighter jet; all of them run on permanent magnets made from a handful of obscure elements, and nearly every gram of it passes through Chinese hands before it reaches the rest of the world. 
Beijing didn't seize this position overnight. It's the result of three decades of Western capital and regulation walking away from an industry China chose to dominate. 
Now, with export freezes already hitting Japan and rattling European car makers, analyst and author Tomasz Nadrowski explains how deep the West's dependency really runs and whether Australia's own rare earth deposits can help close the gap before it's too late.
Guest: Tomasz Nadrowski, author of Mineral War: China's Quest for Weapons of Mineral Destruction. 
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Argentina's President Javier Milei is suffering in the polls. The Falkland Islands may help with that.
Javier Milei's radical style of leadership has earned him more than just the nickname 'El Loco', it's engendered a serious turnaround in Argentina's economy, slashing inflation down from triple digits. 
However, with his approval rating dropping and an election approaching, Milei has returned to a long-standing issue to drum up some support - Argentina's claim to the Falkland Islands.
Hamish Macdonald and Waleed Aly are joined by Constanza Sanhueza, a senior lecturer in comparative politics at ANU, on why exactly the issue of the Falklands (or Malvinas) resonates so strongly with the Argentinian people, and whether there's any bite behind the president's bark.
Plus, will Trump back Argentina's claim in order to punish the UK over the Iran conflict? and why is Argentina struggling with such a persistent poverty rate despite their economic turnaround?
Guest: Constanza Sanhueza, senior lecturer in comparative politics, ANU
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Historian Lord Andrew Roberts, biographer of Churchill and Napoleon, sits down with Geraldine Doogue fresh from visiting the site of the Bondi Beach massacre, a visit he links directly to his work chairing the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report, produced by the UK-Israel All-Party Parliamentary Group. He argues antisemitism's fastest growth is coming from elite universities, traces a "bridgehead" from fringe to mainstream politics in the UK and Europe, and gives his read on Trump's Iran gamble, Taiwan, and whether the postwar order can hold. Guest: Lord Andrew Roberts
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Tech giants from OpenAI, Anthropic, and X have all warned in the same week that AI could threaten humanity itself, as former employees go public with their concerns.
Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald ask foreign correspondent Anna Fifield if calls for regulation are credible, and if Donald Trump is even listening.
Plus, how does China feel about AI? Models like DeepSeek have grabbed media attention, but internal voices have been raising concerns that widespread AI use could undermine the party line.
Meanwhile, China and the U.S. vie for allies in the Pacific islands. Can America be taken seriously as a diplomatic force when they haven't had a resident ambassador in a Pacific island nation for over a decade?
And Russians have gone to the polls for the first parliamentary elections since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion. It doesn't take a fortune teller to predict that Putin's Russia United party would be successful, but is his political grip beginning to slip?
Guest: Anna Fifield, Independent journalist and foreign affairs commentator. Author of the Between Giants Substack.
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Find all the episodes of Global Roaming now via the ABC Listen App or wherever you get your podcasts.