A Simple Question That Might Help Us Disagree Better: What's Your Poison?

I've launched a new podcast designed to model better discussion about politics, especially with people from across the political divide.

I first met Damian Damjanovski at a lunch his firm General Strategic convened in late 2024. It was full of people I would never normally break bread with: a vanquished Liberal MP, a Sky News provocateur, an industry lobbyist.

As a lifetime spear-carrier for the left I had always taken the position that life was too short to bother much about the other side; that our differences were too fundamental; that spending time was a concession. As the food and wine flowed through the afternoon, I ended up chatting to this avuncular Slav who had worked for Scott Morrison through the lockdown years and had a bank of hilarious stories, from being ordained a priest to avoid movement restrictions to his love of semi-glutes.

The next time we bumped was in Canberra at the Realm, where he was ensconced with a lapdog and his business/life partner Jules, another PMO veteran from the Abbott-Morrison years. We swapped book recommendations, me ‘Blood in the Machine’ by Brian Merchant, the Neil Theise’s ‘Notes on Complexity’. We actually read the books and followed through with conversation.

I started dropping into the General Strategic office, a throwback to Sterling Cooper, where a bottle of Macdonia’s national elixir Rakja is open regardless of the time of day. I invited him to eat bad Chinese at the Bob Hawke Leisure Centre, where I introduced them to some of my network for whom ‘former Liberal staffer’ was an exotic disease.

What was striking me about our interactions was that there was a friction embedded from the start that you rarely get with people from your own tribe. When political discussion is based on an agreed set of values and you quickly get drawn into personalities and tactics. Here there was an assumption that we had different starting points, so that disagreement was factored in and any common ground felt like a new country. NB Dame’ has shared his own generous take on this relationship with his ‘Evil Twin’ here.

Over the past few months, the idea of formalising these discussions into a regular Friday afternoon session have taken form. Friday afternoons are my happy place, something I only came to really appreciate during the lockdowns when it was taken away from us. From here the idea of ‘What’s Your Poison’ has emerged, an end of week chat amongst friends, where we agree the best way to disagree is to do so over a drink.

Each week we bring a guest from our side of politics, pour a drink and shoot the breeze. We don’t do this to trivialise our political differences, but to respect them and find a way to put them to the test. Talking about the project to people on my side of politics I have had a range of responses: ‘I would never want to spend time with THAT person;’, ‘why are you giving Liberals airtime? But I have also found people genuinely interested in how we might interrogate our differences

Over the past months we recorded a few pilots where we noticed a tendency to be polite and jump too fast to the points where we agree. But teasing out the points of disagreement in a way that doesn’t end up hating or casting judgement has been far more interesting. And the good news is that we have radically different views of the world – from the way the economy works, to the way people organise in systems, to where the world is hurtling.

The deepest differences are our approach to technology, where Dame’s ardent enthusiasm for AI and its applications in everything from writing automated columns to disrupting industries bashes into my scepticism for the underlying business models and true awfulness of those driving this change. But having someone articulate the positive use cases and deploy the tools against me as he does with his AI-offsider Klaus Botovic, has offered a sort of discipline that running my ideas through my own LLM could never offer me.

Last week we recorded our first episode with external guests - you can watch it here: . I invited the Race Discrimination Commissioner Giri Sivaraman and Dame’ bought along the almost-Liberal member for Bradfield Giselle Kapterian. The discussion traversed immigration, racism and AI and at all points there was both genuine tension in views and an openness to sit with others’ positions. We were not there to win a debate, nor to really make a point, just to see what makes other people tick so as to understand ourselves better.

All of which is to say this will be a pretty regular addition to the Burning Platforms feed and a hope its one that offers something a little different to the normal fare of self-appointed experts and performative insiders. Hope you enjoy and let me know what you think.