Oct 25, 2026 · 50 min · 12 segments
As Israel heads to the polls, Os and Scott examine the country's increasingly right-wing political landscape, the candidates vying to replace Netanyahu, and why Western media coverage may be missing…
Osman FaruqiHostScott MitchellHost
Okay, Scott, before we get into the latest in terms of the media and political response to the alleged attack on Helen Haynes, let's give a brief update on her condition.
Over the weekend, the Alfred Hospital said that Haynes' condition had been downgraded from critical to serious but stable, despite...
It's good that she's no longer critical, but is now in a serious but stable condition.
Her husband, Philip, did say, though, when he spoke last week, that this was going to be a long, long road for her recovery.
Meanwhile, we reported on last Thursday's episode that Haynes' alleged attacker, Brendan Nugent, had been charged with dangerous driving causing serious injury, intentionally causing serious injury, and the federal offence of causing harm to a Commonwealth public official.
He's since been charged with two additional offences, cultivating and possessing cannabis.
Now, Scott, over the last few days, it kind of feels like the discussion around this incident has gone down two tracks.
There's now quite a bit of reporting about Nugent's mental health and the breakdown of his relationship with his family, which is a line the police now are pursuing in terms of exploring potential motivations for this attack.
But then there's a separate conversation that's happening about political violence, the threats that MPs receive regularly, the role social media is playing around ratcheting up division, and what, if anything... could be done in a legal sense, in a political sense to deal with those things.
Now, there's obviously overlap between those two different conversations, but it seems to me they're kind of being had in parallel at the moment.
Does that feel right to you? And is there anything else that stood out to you since we last spoke about this issue on Thursday's show?
I mean, like, I think there is nuance here, but it's really important, so I'm going to try and lay it out.
So not talking about this specific case, but just in general, when it comes to anyone who commits an act of public violence...
There are going to be a certain number of people who do that who are in a total state of psychosis, right? Where politics or any kind of cogent motivation is not really present.
There's also going to be cases where their mental illness is a factor, and so are... ideological, political, other kinds of motivations, and those things interact in some way, and there is nuance in exploring how much each affects the person doing it.
And then there's going to be cases where someone might have a history of mental health issues, but that plays absolutely no part in the alleged act, right? And right now, we're in a position where all of that is on the table.
Those determinations are going to take a lot of work, are a matter for the courts, psychiatrists, and not journalists, which may surprise some colleagues who've been going down that track.
Like when it comes to the conversation about political division the other track you mentioned i think i said last episode i actually have no problem with that conversation happening we do live in a world where anger and vitriol are rewarded by tech corporations with bigger and bigger media coverage that probably is breaking all of our brains to a degree and doing a lot of damage to people and to society.
I think if people took their shock and sadness at what we have seen and directed it towards reflecting on that, that is a productive and good thing to probably come out of all of this.
Okay, Scott, before we get into the latest in terms of the media and political response to the alleged attack on Helen Haynes, let's give a brief update on her condition.
Over the weekend, the Alfred Hospital said that Haynes' condition had been downgraded from critical to serious but stable, despite...
It's good that she's no longer critical, but is now in a serious but stable condition.
Her husband, Philip, did say, though, when he spoke last week, that this was going to be a long, long road for her recovery.
Meanwhile, we reported on last Thursday's episode that Haynes' alleged attacker, Brendan Nugent, had been charged with dangerous driving causing serious injury, intentionally causing serious injury, and the federal offence of causing harm to a Commonwealth public official.
He's since been charged with two additional offences, cultivating and possessing cannabis.
Now, Scott, over the last few days, it kind of feels like the discussion around this incident has gone down two tracks.
There's now quite a bit of reporting about Nugent's mental health and the breakdown of his relationship with his family, which is a line the police now are pursuing in terms of exploring potential motivations for this attack.
But then there's a separate conversation that's happening about political violence, the threats that MPs receive regularly, the role social media is playing around ratcheting up division, and what, if anything... could be done in a legal sense, in a political sense to deal with those things.
Now, there's obviously overlap between those two different conversations, but it seems to me they're kind of being had in parallel at the moment.
Does that feel right to you? And is there anything else that stood out to you since we last spoke about this issue on Thursday's show?
I mean, like, I think there is nuance here, but it's really important, so I'm going to try and lay it out.
So not talking about this specific case, but just in general, when it comes to anyone who commits an act of public violence...
There are going to be a certain number of people who do that who are in a total state of psychosis, right? Where politics or any kind of cogent motivation is not really present.
There's also going to be cases where their mental illness is a factor, and so are... ideological, political, other kinds of motivations, and those things interact in some way, and there is nuance in exploring how much each affects the person doing it.
And then there's going to be cases where someone might have a history of mental health issues, but that plays absolutely no part in the alleged act, right? And right now, we're in a position where all of that is on the table.
Those determinations are going to take a lot of work, are a matter for the courts, psychiatrists, and not journalists, which may surprise some colleagues who've been going down that track.
Like when it comes to the conversation about political division the other track you mentioned i think i said last episode i actually have no problem with that conversation happening we do live in a world where anger and vitriol are rewarded by tech corporations with bigger and bigger media coverage that probably is breaking all of our brains to a degree and doing a lot of damage to people and to society.
I think if people took their shock and sadness at what we have seen and directed it towards reflecting on that, that is a productive and good thing to probably come out of all of this.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.