Pod Insights All In The Mind From prohibition to social media - what makes bans succeed ... or fail? About this episode From the prohibition era in the US, to gun control in Australia, bans have been used throughout history to change behaviour.
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Sometimes, they lead to a whole lot of unintended consequences.
With the social media ban for under-16’s taking effect this week, we uncover the three factors that can determine whether a ban is more likely to succeed or fail – and find out what the history of bans tells us about how effective this policy might be (or not).
Plus – how solid is the research on the link between mental ill health and social media use?
You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on the ABC Listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.
Guests:
Dr Alexis WhittonAssociate Professor and psychologistThe Black Dog Institute and University of New South WalesDr Kate Harrison BrennanProfessor of Practice and Academic Director of the Sydney Policy LabHonorary Associate at the Sydney Law SchoolUniversity of SydneySeb, Eva, Ciara, Lily
With additional thanks to Associate Professor Susanne Schweizer, from the University of New South Wales.
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Micky GrossmanA big thank you to everyone who sent us emails and voice memos with their thoughts on the social media ban. We couldn't include everyone but we appreciate getting to hear your perspectives.
Thanks to freesound.org users TRP https://freesound.org/people/TRP/ and davidbain https://freesound.org/people/davidbain/
More information:
Support for under-16 social media ban soars to 77% among Australians https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-social-media-ban-soars-to-77-among-australiansIllegal tobacco is a deadly $10 billion industry wiping out legitimate businesses https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-04/illegal-tobacco-is-a-deadly-10-billion-industry/105607186Smoking rates continue to decline while vaping triples, national household drug survey shows https://www.aihw.gov.au/news-media/media-releases/2024/february/smoking-rates-continue-to-decline#:~:text=Tobacco%20smoking%20The%20proportion%20of%20people%20in,49%25%20in%201991%20to%2065%25%20in%202022%E2%80%932023Psychological reactance to system-level policies before and after their implementation https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2409907122The presence of laws and mandates is associated with increased social norm enforcement https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487024000114Youth mental health enters 'dangerous phase' https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/professional/youth-mental-health-enters-dangerous-phaseSocial psychologist and author of best-selling book The Anxious Generation Jonathan Haidt talks to News Breakfast about Australia's world-first under 16 social media ban https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRk5oHHj3oL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D — ABC Lifestyle
eSafety appoints Stanford University-led academic advisory group to assess the impacts of the Social Media Minimum Age obligation https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/esafety-appoints-stanford-university-led-academic-advisory-group-to-assess-the-impacts-of-the-social-media-minimum-age-obligationDigital mental health, Black Dog Institute https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/research-areas/digital-mental-health/
Transcript 4,683 words · 17 speakers
0:06 Speaker 00 Hello, my name is Nij and I host Imagine This, a science podcast for curious kids and their grown-ups about the questions you've probably always pondered but never actually known the whole answer to. Like, how do magnets push and pull? Why is dew on everything in the morning? And how does sunscreen actually work? Find Imagine This on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:39 Speaker 01 Welcome to 1925 in the United States of America. The country is five years into prohibition, which means officially at least, the sale of alcohol is banned across the country.
0:59 Speaker 01 But that doesn't stop a lot of people. Bootlegging, the illegal production and smuggling of alcohol into the country from neighbouring places like Canada or Mexico, that's become more common. Speakeasies spring up across major hubs like New York City and customers just gotta cross their fingers and hope that police won't discover these clandestine setups.
1:30 Speaker 01 But by the late 1920s, opposition to the laws among the American public is growing. In some cities, violent crimes increase under prohibition, the opposite of what the ban was meant to achieve. And in 1933, a little more than a decade after it began, prohibition is repealed.
2:04 Speaker 02 ...
2:06 Speaker 01 That is a ban that clearly failed. But there have been plenty of others through time that have been successful, including examples in Australia's own recent history.
2:18 Speaker 03 Prime Minister John Howard's hailed the agreement on tough national gun laws as an historic and extraordinary outcome.
2:25 Speaker 04 I would hate to contemplate the future of this country if we went willy-nilly down the American path.
2:32 Speaker 05 We are going to ensure that in Australia, there are no remaining avenues for tobacco companies to market and promote their products, particularly to young people.
2:43 Speaker 01 And now, there is another significant ban on the way.
2:47 Speaker 06 And this one's for the mums and dads. Social media is doing harm to our kids, and I'm calling time on it.
2:54 Speaker 07 Australia's social media ban for kids under 16 comes into force in early December. The federal government argues it's needed to protect children's mental health.
3:08 Speaker 01 From ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, why do certain bans work and others fail? What factors play a role? And which way will the social media ban for under 16s go?
3:32 Speaker 08 So bans tend to be often temporary measures, but sometimes they are more long-term. Trying to control access to a harmful substance is understood to be harmful across a population. So there've been all sorts of examples of bans in history.
3:46 Speaker 01 This is Dr Kate Harrison-Brennan. She's the director of the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney.
3:53 Speaker 08 And sometimes we might associate them with prohibitions as well. So a prohibition of alcohol, there might be a ban of access to material that's deemed harmful. Or it could be something that is banning more widespread use of an item, like plastic straws or plastic shopping bags are more recent examples.
4:11 Speaker 01 But the ban that perhaps looms largest on the Australian psyche involves guns.
4:17 Speaker 03 In southern Tasmania, a standoff continues between a gunman and special operations police after a horrific massacre at the Port Arthur historic site.
4:27 Speaker 01 In 1996, in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were killed and 23 were injured, the Howard government acted to buy back guns from thousands of people and make it a whole lot harder for people to get access to guns in the first place.
4:45 Speaker 08 The new laws were a test of metal for John Howard. The new prime minister wore a bulletproof vest at a rally in Victoria.
4:52 Speaker 09 I'm sorry about that, but there is no other way.
4:55 Speaker 08 Effectively kind of creating an amnesty and restricting access to firearms was really significant in Australia. And the data shows pretty clearly that if you look at a graph, the use of firearms for widespread killing of people just dropped off a cliff after those restrictions were brought into place.
5:13 Speaker 01 Kate says other bans that have worked pretty well include the ban on lightweight, single-use plastic shopping bags, which she mentioned briefly a moment ago.
5:22 Speaker 08 Although that took some 20 years for an initial move by a council in Tasmania to this becoming nationwide.
5:29 Speaker 01 And the ban on advertising on cigarette packaging.
5:32 Speaker 08 Like a lot of the rest of the world, we took a long time to deal with tobacco. But eventually we became famous for as a country taking a position on tobacco advertising.
5:42 Speaker 01 But on tobacco, it has to be said, while smoking rates are down, the mix of measures to tackle smoking, which in addition to plain packaging includes high taxation, that has created a pretty lucrative black market for tobacco products in recent years, worth about $10 billion. Maybe we didn't learn all of the lessons from prohibition.
6:07 Speaker 08 Colleagues in public health always raise really importantly the issue of when you ban a substance, it's human nature, people will find a way of getting around that. And so we often see when substances are banned or controlled, that other forms will pop up. And so the development of black markets is endemic and really problematic because of this displacement of access underground in ways that then can actually create further harm.
6:34 Speaker 01 So what is it then that makes a ban more likely to be widely accepted and successful? Well, Kate says there are three elements.
6:45 Speaker 08 The first factor in driving understanding and acceptance is people being persuaded of the inherently harmful nature of the substance as being banned or controlled. So for example, the way that plastic bags, shopping have been banned for use, that it has taken some 20 years of people understanding when they use a shopping bag at their local shops. The full life cycle is kicked off from that, that of course doesn't end with potentially, you know, a marine animal being harmed because it gets caught in a plastic shopping bag, but continues on for many thousands of years because the plastic simply doesn't degrade.
7:22 Speaker 01 So maybe people weren't fully convinced of the harms of alcohol back in the 1920s. Plus, while alcohol is harmful to our health, many would argue it also has social and cultural benefits. You'd be hard pressed to make that same argument for plastic bags. Kate says the second thing you ideally need in order for a ban to be successful is a reasonable alternative, something that can fill the gap left by whatever it is that you're banning. And then the third element is?
7:51 Speaker 08 How we frame a ban or a control of access to something overall, whether it is something that should best be understood as a prohibition of an inherently dangerous substance, or in fashion abolition, which kind of raises the stakes a bit by making the case that by removing this substance, we actually would have access to greater freedom as humans. If a ban is able to be framed, hitting each of those three points, then it has a much greater likelihood of being successful. It's an inherently harmful substance that people can understand how that operates. A substitution or an alternative is feasible, desirable, and the removal of access to that substance ultimately would just give us greater freedom as humans.
8:37 Speaker 08 If you can do all those three things, these types of interventions tend to be far more stable in the long term and effective.
8:46 Speaker 01 Interesting things also happen once a ban is in place. This year, a group of European researchers published a study looking at the opposition towards bans before and after they take effect. They found a consistent drop in the opposition to a ban after it's been implemented versus when it gets announced. Which I have to say, has kind of been my gut feeling about bans or any big policy changes anyways. They seem to cause the most amount of noise leading up to implementation, and then, once the dust settles, the noise settles too. The researchers in that European study said, "Part of the reason why this happens is that when a ban gets announced,
9:28 Speaker 01 we are really focused on what we're going to lose personally. Once it's put in place, we're less likely to fixate on the personal loss and more likely to think about the gains we get as a society." Other research has found that once laws are put in place regulating behaviour, people feel empowered to confront those going against the law. For example, confronting someone who wasn't wearing a mask during COVID-19. We become more likely to police others' behaviour and further reinforce whatever the new ban or law is. So, the big question is, how do these ideas, and particularly the three factors that Kate mentioned that can make a ban more acceptable,
10:13 Speaker 01 fit into the new social media laws for kids? To answer that, I'm going to leapfrog over the first factor that Kate mentioned for a moment, which is that people need to be persuaded of the inherently harmful nature of the thing being banned. We'll return to that. I want to start with factor number two: whether there are reasonable alternatives to the thing being banned. And Kate says that still needs to be worked out.
10:39 Speaker 08 If we want our introduction at a minimum age to be successful, we need to think pretty swiftly about, oh, what is the substitution going to be? As teens and tweens are not connecting online under the age of 16 like they have been, but they still have this drug... To connect socially, how are we going to facilitate that?
10:58 Speaker 01 And that's a tricky question to answer, right? Because as she explains, communities, cities, the lives of modern families, all of that's changed significantly over the last two decades. We kind of need to redesign elements of how we live for this to be successful.
11:15 Speaker 08 Put simply, this might mean for an individual family, thinking through getting back the old landline phone. How are kids going to connect with their friends? Could they have a mobile phone that, you know, is on a cord? It's in the kitchen or it doesn't leave the kitchen. It just gets used there so that kids can contact their friends easily. It might look like in some communities, facilitating more sports or community activities after school, or indeed like organised, subsidised after-school hours care.
11:43 Speaker 01 In terms of element number three, how a ban is framed and whether it's seen as a freedom giving move, here's how she sees it.
11:51 Speaker 08 My point of view is that social media is designed using persuasive design. You could use, substitute the word there of addictive design. These online worlds create something that is kind of super normal. It's very addictive because it dumps dopamine in our system and tells us, you know, this is, this is what we deep down are kind of made to do. And so it has significant effects on children's brain development and social and emotional development more broadly. And so this measure really, in my mind, is trying to ensure that children have the freedom not to be persuaded by social media at such a young age, but actually have the freedom to have a real childhood and to actually develop social bonds that are at a human pace.
12:34 Speaker 08 And so it's got incredible potential to enable Australia to be one of the best places in the world for children to grow up. But as we've talked about, how you characterise this is really determinative and it's why it's so important to have these types of public conversations about the nature of the ban or the imposition of a minimum age here on social media.
12:55 Speaker 01 This is probably why in a lot of the federal government's communication around the new laws, they're not actually using the word ban. They're calling it a delay in access to social media or a restriction. However, in the media and elsewhere, it's the ban language that's caught on.
13:11 Speaker 08 But what's important here again is that teens need to have the opportunity to understand the rationale of this and they deserve that opportunity to be brought into the rationale of it, but also to see this as a freedom giving move, not a freedom removing measure.
13:28 Speaker 01 So that is part of the argument at least in favour of the social media ban slash restriction slash delay for under 16s. But as we know, not everyone sees it quite that way.
13:42 Speaker 10 Hi, my name is Kira Walsh. I'm 14 years old and I think that the social media ban is a bad idea.
13:48 Speaker 11 We should have rights to choose what does and what doesn't work for our families.
13:53 Speaker 12 I think overall, it's kind of just like a Band-Aid solution. I don't know, I feel like there's two things that are probably going to happen. Kids are going to get past the verification methods and stuff and then other kids will get pushed into more unsafe social media platforms.
14:09 Speaker 11 My teenager in my life is incredibly into their artwork and uses social media to connect with other artists all over the world.
14:19 Speaker 10 The other day in class, I was talking to my teacher and he thought that it was a good idea. And I asked him why and he said, because when his son was like 12 and first was allowed to use social media, he got super addicted to his phone and never came out of his room. But my rebuttal to that was that if that happened when he first got social media, it doesn't mean that that's not going to happen when he's 16. It just means that he's going to become super obsessed with social media when he's 16, when you have exams and like, you know, studies are really important at that time.
14:52 Speaker 01 Now, I have to say, although the majority of people who sent us voice notes with their opinions were not jazzed about the social media ban, I'm just going to stick with that language for consistency's sake, it won't shock you to learn that it's not exactly a representative sample. By comparison, a 2024 poll by YouGov found 77% of Australians back the under-16 social media ban, with only 23% opposing the measure. And this poll was based on a sample of 1,515 people, but the results were weighted to be representative of the population by age, gender, education, income, and other factors. And so, that suggests
15:34 Speaker 01 there is broad support for the ban, which is the first element Dr. Kate Harrison-Brennan from the Sydney Policy Lab mentioned, the first element that you need in order for a ban to have a chance of being successful.
15:47 Speaker 08 The first factor in driving acceptance is people being persuaded of the inherently harmful nature of the substance as being banned or controlled.
15:57 Speaker 01 And look, we know that youth mental health is in the tank. A Lancet study from last year found in less than two decades, there has been a 50% increase in the rates of mental ill health among young people in Australia. But, and there is a but, in terms of just how much social media is to blame for that, that is actually really unclear.
16:25 Speaker 13 So, the interest in the link between social media and mental health has been around since the late 2000s, and we've seen a surge of scientific publications come out, really since 2010, when social media platforms became more mainstream.
16:43 Speaker 01 This is Dr. Alexis Witten. She's an associate professor and psychologist at the Black Dog Institute and the University of New South Wales. Part of her work involves developing web-based interventions for mood disorders like depression.
16:57 Speaker 13 Now, what's really interesting is that although there's such a wealth of research in this space, the findings are really inconsistent. So we see findings showing correlations between higher rates of social media use and worse mental health, but we also see research showing either no correlation or beneficial correlations for certain subgroups. So this is really complex and it's difficult to make sense of sometimes.
17:25 Speaker 01 I feel like that's counterintuitive to what a lot of people assume is in the research literature, like that feels like news almost, that we don't actually have it pinned down that social media is causing mental health problems, because there's been so much written about this.
17:38 Speaker 13 Sure, and I think sometimes complex explanations for something that is so salient and important as increasing rates of youth mental health. When we look at technology, that's something that's very visible. It's something that parents and teachers can look around and they can see that that is something that has changed since when they grew up. It's also something that's very appealing, that we can maybe control and try to regulate as a solution for what is actually a really complex issue.
18:11 Speaker 01 So, do you think the legislation is misguided or predicated on like a shaky foundation?
18:18 Speaker 13 So one of the core motivations behind rolling out this social media legislation is that there is such a wealth of evidence on the correlation between social media and mental health. Now, we know that correlation does not imply causation, and it is just as likely that the relationship goes in reverse. So we might see that young people who are experiencing mental health difficulties are more likely to go online and spend more time online searching for help and support. And it could also be bidirectional. But in the face of evidence that suggests there might be signals of risk, one perspective is that it is right to act now.
19:03 Speaker 13 As a precautionary approach to try to mitigate risk. So that's where this is coming from, even though we don't have definitive evidence of causality.
19:13 Speaker 01 Why isn't there causation data after all this time that we've had with social media and smartphones?
19:18 Speaker 13 Measuring social media use is incredibly difficult. A lot of studies rely on self-reported social media use, which has a range of different problems with inaccuracies in recall. And so one of the issues comes down to a lack of reliable data on social media use itself. The other side of this is a lack of longitudinal studies. So if you take a sample of young people and you measure their social media use and their mental health symptoms, you might find an association. But to establish causality, you need to show that increased social media use
19:58 Speaker 13 occurs and precedes the onset of mental health symptoms or exacerbates it.
20:04 Speaker 01 Right.
20:04 Speaker 13 And those studies are really difficult. You have to follow young people up over many years and you have to capture social media use in a very granular way.
20:19 Speaker 01 Can I tell you what I feel, just as a parent of like a five-year-old?
20:22 Speaker 13 Of course.
20:22 Speaker 01 Who's not quite at the stage of knowing about social media or being on it at all. I feel kind of relieved because I'm like, okay, by the time he reaches the stage where he's aware of this and wanting it, I can be like, sorry, the government says you can't have it. That argument is off the table for me. Do you feel like there are parents that feel that way? Like that's a significant cohort of people? Or what are you hearing from parents? What are they saying?
20:47 Speaker 13 Oh, look, I also, as a parent of a five-year-old, I can absolutely empathize. In some way, this legislation makes the job of being a parent simpler in some ways. You know, it does take that argument out of their hands to some extent. But what the research is showing is that young people will attempt to access social media platforms anyway.
21:13 Speaker 13 So parents shouldn't be lulled into this sense of security. And it is really important for parents to maintain an open dialogue so that they can understand whether their child is accessing social media in unregulated spaces. And so that they can be attuned to some of the harms that they may be encountering in those spaces.
21:34 Speaker 01 That is useful advice because there are harms aplenty.
21:38 Speaker 14 Um, yeah, so basically it was just really gruesome, out of pocket videos, like shootings.
21:45 Speaker 01 This is Sebastian from Adelaide. He is eighteen years old now, so he won't be affected by the new laws. But he was about twelve when he first got social media and about fourteen when this kind of graphic content first slipped into his feed.
22:00 Speaker 14 People getting run over or like leaked footage of just things that quite gruesome and would shake up a little kid.
22:06 Speaker 01 And how were you coming across these videos? Was it like friends kind of sharing this or the algorithm just at some point throwing it up or like how would you come across these?
22:14 Speaker 14 Uh, yeah, so it was mainly just Instagram reels, but some days you'd have a completely normal page and your algorithm would just be showing you sports or your friends or something. And then the next day it would just be, yeah, showing you these gruesome videos.
22:27 Speaker 01 And would you like talk to your friends about it? Like, what would your friends say with, when everyone was seeing these things?
22:32 Speaker 14 Yeah, they would be shown and then everyone would just have like a big reaction and yeah, go a bit squirmish, but then it wouldn't really be spoken about again.
22:44 Speaker 01 And so what did you do when you saw those or how did you feel?
22:48 Speaker 14 Well, at the time, everyone was seeing it, so I just thought it was a normal thing on social media, so I didn't really have anything else to think of it.
22:55 Speaker 01 So it didn't, it didn't freak you out or bother you at the time? It felt like kind of socially normal?
22:59 Speaker 14 No, it did, it did freak me out and like obviously I was like, geez, that's really strange and gruesome. And when I look back at it now, it's like, it shook me up, but now seeing it that I've been on social media for a long time, I feel as like kind of normal, something to see like that.
23:18 Speaker 01 So what do you think of the ban?
23:19 Speaker 14 Uh, I think it's a good thing for younger kids. Sixteen's probably a bit old. I'd probably have it like around fourteen or something like that.
23:29 Speaker 01 Looking back now, do you feel like twelve years old was too young to have been logging on to social media for the first time?
23:36 Speaker 14 Yeah, honestly, probably.
23:42 Speaker 01 One of the highest-profile supporters of Australia's social media ban for under 16s internationally is social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He's the author of the bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, and he's really vocal about the potential negative impacts of social media and smartphones.
24:01 Speaker 15 Australia is leading the world. Australia, your leaders found the guts to say, "Look, we're just going to do it."
24:07 Speaker 01 This is him speaking to the ABC recently on our morning news program, ABC News Breakfast.
24:12 Speaker 15 What I would like to say to Australian families is, as long as everyone understands that you're all in this together, it's going to go better than you expect. The other thing to add is, the point of this whole movement is not just put down the phones or get off social media. The point is to restore childhood.
24:29 Speaker 01 If you're not familiar with his work, Jonathan Haidt is known for arguing that the phone-based childhood that many kids have now has harmed child development and is directly tied to the youth mental health crisis we see today. But his work has also faced criticism for overstating this link and kind of ignoring the whole correlation doesn't equal causation issue. Despite that, he's still gained a large following for his ideas, but Alexis from the Black Dog Institute has a really compelling rebuttal to some of his arguments.
25:01 Speaker 13 Look, I think the arguments put forth by Haidt are very much grounded in research on American youth, and the Australian context is quite different. You know, we are a geographically very dispersed population, and there are young people whose only manner or way of interacting socially and gaining access to mental health support is online. I also think that it is really difficult to study some of these more complex socioeconomic drivers of mental ill health. They are country-specific, but those complex issues aren't as easy to digest into accessible, engaging pieces of literature. But I certainly agree with the premise of it.
25:46 Speaker 13 It is important to create safe spaces for young people online. It's just that we really need to make sure that the way this is being implemented has the intended effects and doesn't cause unintended harms. That's why it's so critical to evaluate this properly.
26:02 Speaker 01 To that end, the government is funding research into the impact of the legislation. The e-Safety Commissioner has appointed an advisory group of 11 experts from Australia, the UK and the US. And this group is being led by Stanford University's Social Media Lab. They will evaluate the implementation and outcomes of the under 16 social media ban, or in their language, the social media minimum age obligation. One of Alexis's colleagues at the Black Dog Institute is on the advisory panel.
26:35 Speaker 13 Now, doing this sort of evaluation, which the government has committed to funding, it's not simple. If you think about the conditions of this legislation, the responsibility is on social media platforms to identify accounts held by those under the age of 16 and take reasonable steps to remove them. Now, otherwise, they face considerable fines in the order of $50 million. Now, you can imagine the incentive to provide data, that's not going to be that high. So assessing the rates at which young people are still accessing social media is going to be quite difficult. But we really need that data to be able to tell
27:18 Speaker 13 whether this legislation is doing what is intended.
27:24 Speaker 01 So, all of that's to say, whether this ban becomes a success story or a cautionary tale will depend not just on policy, but how families and platforms and young people navigate what comes next. And in the meantime, if you have a young person in your life, whether or not they will be affected by the span now or later down the track, if you want to limit their screen time in general, Alexis's parting advice is something you've probably heard before, something that sounds very simple, but is often so hard to do. You need to model the behaviour you wish to see.
28:02 Speaker 13 And it might be a time to discuss new family approaches to social media use together, rather than something that impacts the young person and that they're navigating on their own. So really treating this as an opportunity for the whole family to evaluate their digital behaviour.
28:22 Speaker 01 That is Dr Alexis Whitten, Associate Professor and Psychologist at the Black Dog Institute and the University of New South Wales. You also heard from Dr Kate Harrison Brennan. She's the Director of the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. Thanks also to 18-year-old Sebastian from Adelaide. If you're a really keen listener, you might remember his voice from our episode earlier this year titled "Fighting for Focus in the Age of Distraction." Thanks also to Eva, Kira Walsh and Lily May Martin, and everyone who sent us messages and voice notes with your opinions about the band. I'm really sorry we couldn't include everyone in the end, but we really appreciate the effort
29:05 Speaker 01 that you all took to send us your thoughts. So, thank you. Final thanks for our producers, James Bullen and Rose Kerr, as well as sound engineer, Mickey Grossman. I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. I will catch you next week for our final episode of the year.
29:51 Speaker 16 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC Podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
Previous The music that saves us Next Difficult people and radical acceptance: answering your questions about tricky relationships Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated