Hi, I'm Anouche, and on today's New Statesman podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by Professor

Mark Steers, the political theorist and leading thinker in the Blue Labour movement, who served

as Ed Miliband's chief speechwriter and is now the inaugural director of the UCL Policy

Lab, which is launching today.

Thanks so much for joining us, Mark.

That's wonderful to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for coming, and before we get into all things policy, which is what I know you want

to talk about, I'd like to ask you about what Labour can learn from the Australian election

results, because you wrote an interesting piece for us recently, and you were actually

director of the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney until recently, so you've

got a good insight on this. And your piece, and I quote, it's about a populist prime minister

known for playing fast and loose with rules, and for masking his incompetence by stoking the

cultures and about how the Australian Labour Party beat him.

There are parallels with the UK. How did they do it? And what can our Labour Party learn

from it?

There are loads of parallels, I think. It's a really exciting moment for Labour, just

to see that it can be done a year or so ago. I remember I was in Sydney, and everybody

was expecting Scott Morrison to win the coming general election. He was widely considered

to be a dreadful prime minister, and yeah, he just seemed to have the winning touch, and

he won the previous election by a surprising margin when people thought he was going

to lose. As I say in the piece, as you say, played fast and loose with the rules, he was

always doing stuff and getting called out for soft corruption, et cetera.

...