The Morning Edition

The Morning Edition

The Morning Edition (formerly Please Explain) brings you the story behind the story with the best journalists in Australia. Join host Samantha Selinger-Morris from the newsrooms of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, weekdays from 5am.

Episodes

December 24, 2025 17 mins

We’re bringing you the best episodes of 2025 before your Morning Edition team returns mid-January.

It was another big year for the human headline that was U.S President Donald Trump, and political and international editor Peter Hartcher was an essential listen each week on our podcast as we tried to make sense of it all.

This episode was recorded in May, just as Trump was poised to introduce what he called his ‘big beau...

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We’re bringing you the best episodes of 2025 before your Morning Edition team returns mid-January. 

Well, the mushroom murders was the criminal case of the year and in this episode, we take you inside the court on the day Erin Patterson was sentenced to life imprisonment. 

Patterson received a triple-murder conviction for the now infamous lunch of beef wellington that a jury trial found she laced with death cap mush...

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We’re bringing you the best episodes of 2025 before your Morning Edition team returns mid-January. 

Today, we return to an episode recorded in October with senior columnist Jacqueline Maley, when more torrid tales emerged of the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and his connection to sex offender and disgraced financier, Jeffrey Epstein.

When this was recorded, the royal had just been stripped of his Duke of Yor...

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December 21, 2025 28 mins

Hi, it’s Samantha Selinger-Morris here, the host of The Morning Edition. We’re bringing you the best episodes of 2025 before your Morning Edition team returns mid-January. 

This one is about Belle Gibson. 

One of the original wellness influencers, Gibson claimed to have healed herself from terminal cancer through healthy eating. The problem was, she never had cancer. 

This episode was recorded shortly bef...

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In this bonus episode of Inside Politics, former primer minister Tony Abbott joins host Jacqueline Maley and chief political correspondent Paul Sakkal.

Abbott has penned a new book, Australia: A History, describing a more positive view of our past. He also discusses the current political and cultural challenges facing the Liberal Party, as well as reflectin...

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This week it feels wrong to talk about politics in the wake of the horrific antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach on Sunday. Australians and Sydneysiders in particular are still trying to make sense of the senseless. 

But the fact is that the response to the massacre has been deeply political, and things got divisive very quickly. 

So this week on Inside Politics we are going to discuss the political response to the inciden...

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On the evening of the shooting at Bondi, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese  said: “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian” – that was indeed proven when the entire community sprung into action, those who ran towards the disaster, not away from it. 

There are tales of heroism, like the couple who first tried to stop the gunmen and paid with their lives, the man who single-handedly ...

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When Michael Visontay heard of the shootings at Bondi Beach on Sunday, his first instinct was to call his son, who often swam there. Then came the sickening feeling of dread, when his son didn’t answer his phone.

Something that thickened this dread even further, was a family history that taught him to always be alert to possible threats. His father and grandfather survived the Holocaust after living in concentration camps. Hi...

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We’re releasing an additional episode today featuring one of our reporters, Elias Visontay, who was at Bondi Beach with a friend on the day of the terror attack. Elias recounts his first-hand experience as the gunmen fired bullets at the unexpecting crowd.

You can read his story on our websites here.

And if you’re struggling with the bad news at the moment, support is available on Lifeline 13 11 14 or NSW Health mental ...

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Sunday’s Bondi Beach terrorist attack, which targeted a Hanukkah celebration, was the worst mass shooting in Australia since Port Arthur. Some in the Jewish community have been fearing a deadly attack for years.

This episode features the stories of witnesses, such as reporter Elias Visontay, and mother-of-three Jacqui Cohen, who took cover with her 12-year-old daughter.

Crime and justice reporter Amber Schultz, who spoke to t...

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As we record this on Sunday night, 12 people, including the shooter, have been confirmed dead in a mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, with the New South Wales Police Commissioner declaring it a terrorist incident. The number of dead has since increased to 16, including a child.

Dozens of people had been gathered to mark the first night of Hanukkah, the most joyous holiday on the Jewish calendar, before two gunmen ope...

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Today, we're delving into the expenses scandal, if indeed we are calling it a scandal, that has engulfed the Communications Minister Anika Wells. A $100,000 taxpayer funded flight to New York snow-balled into a drip-feed of information about flights to the Formula 1 grand prix, the Boxing Day tests and even a family reunion at Thredbo. All of this dropping at precisely the moment the minister wanted to be talking about th...

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The video is, according to those who have seen it, horrific to watch. Two sailors cling to the debris of a blown-up boat in the Caribbean, when they’re killed by a US military strike. 

This occurred after the first strike on their boat failed to kill everybody on board.

It has sparked outrage, and led to accusations – by Democrat and Republican lawmakers alike – that the US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth,...

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Our mastheads have discovered that a number of sex offenders have committed crimes - in our communities - after serving their time in prison.

And here’s the thing. They committed these crimes while under a “supervision order”. This little known order, issued by a court, is meant to keep a “ring fence” around these known offenders, to keep tabs on them and monitor their movement. But it has also served ...

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Parents across the country have been wringing their hands for months about how the social media ban will work – and more so, if it will work. So, what exactly does the ban cover? And how will it be enforced? Today, reporter Bronte Gossling on the main methods children plan on using, to circumvent what the federal government has called a “world-leading” ban. And why most Australian parents say they won’t...

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When American author Anne Applebaum travelled to the frontlines of the Sudanese civil war this year, she gave herself a stern remit. Bear witness to, and report on, a lawless world that - since the United States has pulled most of its aid - is now run by warring militias, clans and families. Crucially, she would keep emotion out of it.

But then she met with people who were so thankful for the meagre aid the United States was...

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This week the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was on his honeymoon after his low-key Lodge wedding last weekend, while Senate estimates rolled on in Canberra, uncovering some interesting secrets.

Notable was the head-scratching amount that Communications Minister Anika Wells spent on flights to New York, made public ahead of the mammoth social media ban coming into effect.

Chief political correspondent Paul Sakkal and federal polit...

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When Mark Leishman and his wife Kathy first sought out the help of George Dimitriou, they were suffering with cash-flow problems at Mark’s business. 

By the time their working relationship with Dimitriou finished - and after they discovered he was only pretending to be an accountant - their Newcastle home was repossessed, and they lost, they say, $4 million.

Today, chief investigative reporter Kate McClymont on Geor...

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New figures out on Monday show that the median house values in Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane have become, well, kind of insane. They’re the kind of figures that make people who’ve been desperately saving to break into the housing market tear at their hair by the roots.

But new research shows that allowing Australians to subdivide their properties could mean a million new homes being delivered in the nation’...

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It really was the stuff of nightmares. A Swiss tourist, who was swimming with dolphins off the NSW coast, was suddenly mauled by a three-metre bull shark. 

The 25-year-old died from her injuries, despite her heroic boyfriend, an exchange student also from Switzerland, fighting off the shark and carrying her to shore.

Today, environment and climate reporter Caitlin Fitzsimmons, on why the number of people killed by sharks in Au...

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