Four Corners Season 46, Episode 16: The Road to Nowhere

1

The Greenhouse Mafia

Four Corners returns for 2006 with a whistleblower... and revelations of a powerful insiders' club...

45 min

2

Wheeling and Dealing

There's road rage over private tollways... Have deals between politicians and tollway bosses killed off grand new visions for public transport and decongested streets? Are they creating a road monster that leaves Australians addicted to cars?

45 min

3

The Convert

Jack Thomas has become the first person to be convicted under Australia's new terrorist funding laws.

45 min

4

How The Kids Took Over

Kid watching is very grown-up business. The 12-and-unders are a demographic that marketers ignore at their peril.

45 min

5

Riot and Revenge

One Sunday last December, 5000 Australians gathered at Cronulla, singing and waving the national flag as they "reclaimed" the beach. Fuelled by drink, the crowd became a mob, hunting down and beating anyone who looked Middle Eastern.

45 min

6

The Ice Age

It's cheap, highly addictive and ultra-powerful. "Ice", or crystal methamphetamine, is now more popular than heroin, playing havoc with the minds and the bodies of nearly 50,000 Australians.

45 min

7

Big Fish, Little Fish

Seven got life sentences and two are facing death by firing squad - but the blood of the Bali Nine will not stain the hands of this country's crimefighters.

45 min

8

Sex Slaves

"I sold your wife."

45 min

9

Cash Crop

For Saddam Hussein, it must have been a no-brainer. He would pay $200,000 to a top UN official. In return, Saddam would be showered in billions.

45 min

10

Cash Crop Part Two

In the space of four days, Australians have witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of their Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister each submitting to rigorous, sustained and public interrogation at the Cole inquiry.

45 min

11

Stockwell - Countdown to Killing

All of London was on edge when a young electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, headed off for work on 22 July last year. The previous day, four would-be suicide bombers had attacked the transport system. A fortnight earlier, a series of suicide bombings had killed 52 people.

45 min

12

The Making of Zarqawi

Many thought he was dead or wounded. But when he dramatically appeared this week in an Internet video, firing off an automatic weapon and anti-American rhetoric, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi looked very much alive.

45 min

13

The Boys

The Westpoint collapse...Ticky Fullerton digs into the scheme that has wiped out the life savings of thousands of Australians. Who's taken their money? And why did regulators let it happen?

45 min

14

A Deathly Silence

In the hours before he killed himself in April last year, Campbell Bolton wrote a long note in which he told his family how sorry he was for the pain he was about to cause them. "It fills me with grief when I think of what I have done to you," he wrote.

45 min

15

Reigning in Hell

Murder, drugs, extortion, robbery, gambling, prostitution... for 40 years, this has been the daily business of the Aryan Brotherhood, according to US law enforcers.

45 min

16

The Road to Nowhere

There's another story buried deep beneath the horrific headlines about sexual abuse in indigenous Australia.

45 min

17

Far From Care

Imagine being about to give birth, cocooned in a speeding car on a night-time dash to a hospital that's still hours away, every bump, every brake to dodge a kangaroo sharpening the pain and discomfort.

45 min

18

Monkey Love

To his fans, research psychologist Harry Harlow was a 20th century hero, a scientific pioneer who revolutionised the way we raise our children today.

45 min

19

Stoking the Fires

As Australian troops stand between the warring factions in East Timor, Liz Jackson reveals the power plays and intrigues that are tearing the infant nation apart.

45 min

20

Car Wars

If your late model car goes missing, don't expect to see it again soon.

45 min

21

Killed by Care

"Do no harm." It's the ethos of medicine, the bedrock principle for all its practitioners.

45 min

22

Peak Oil

"The price of petrol is disgusting, absolutely disgusting..."

45 min

23

The Right Stuff

For decades the Liberal Party has carried itself proudly as a broad church, home to a wide spectrum of ideology among members. Now a bitter factional war is playing out in Australia's biggest state that many say is disenfranchising grassroots members and threatening democracy.

45 min

24

The Price of Life

Breast cancer stalked Becky Measures. It had struck 14 of her female relatives, killing some of them.

45 min

25

Junk History

Four Corners often explores extravagant claims and tall tales. Rarely though does it meet a character quite as colourful as author Gavin Menzies.

45 min

26

Execution of a Teenage Girl

Not long after dawn on August 15, 2004 a teenage girl was dragged through a town square in the Iranian provincial city of Neka, past a crowd of people to the spot where a mobile crane had been converted into a makeshift gallows. Atefah Sahaaleh was 16 years old. She was hanged that morning for crimes against chastity.

45 min

27

Sick No Good

A member of a 'raskol' gang talks about rape as a ritual part of crime. A career truck driver on the highland's highway picks up a teenage prostitute - just part of his routine. A 'hostess supervisor' at a Port Moresby brothel explains that he may tell clients to use a condom with his girls but that sometimes he is too tired to bother. These are voices from Matthew Carney's intimate report on how Papua New Guinea became a hot spot for the AIDS virus.

45 min

28

Seachange

Cares and crowds are forgotten. Sand crunches between your toes, there's salt on your skin and sun on your back. Here is where blue ocean meets virgin bush, and a golden stretch of beach is all yours for camping, swimming and quiet reflection.

45 min

29

What Price Global Warming?

Heat waves and cyclones; droughts ravaging farmland; rising seas swamping beach havens; forests drying up and species dying out; the Barrier Reef and Kakadu, icons of nature, doomed.

45 min

30

Diet Confidential

It's a battle for your body and for your money - a tug-o-war between two powerful forces: the marketing pressure to eat more versus the social pressure to weigh less.

45 min

31

Five Years

The dust settled long ago at Ground Zero. But the world is still searching for clarity after 9/11.

45 min

32

In the Line of Fire

They were ordinary suburban Australians setting out on a big overseas adventure... to cheer on the Socceroos at the World Cup, or take in the sights of Europe. They would climax the trip with a visit to ancestral lands in southern Lebanon where they would rekindle family ties, rediscover their heritage and relax.

45 min

33

Separate Lives

They've launched controversial forays into election campaigns in Australia, New Zealand the US. Now the Exclusive Brethren are drawing more unwanted headlines, this time accused of trawling for dirt on the sex life of the NZ Prime Minister's husband.

45 min

34

The A Team

It was a signature TV news image of the 1990s: the bush as battleground, greenies blocking bulldozers, shouting slogans and trading insults with angry timber workers.

45 min

35

The War on Al Qaeda

Two weeks ago a leaked US intelligence assessment gave powerful new ammunition to critics of the Iraq war.

45 min

36

@NZACS

From Iraq to Solomon Islands and Afghanistan to East Timor, Australia's Army is stretched tight. The burden of overseas deployments weighs like a straining kitbag on the back of each of Australia's 22,443 regular soldiers.

45 min

37

Buyer of Beauty, Beware

From marginal to mainstream, once furtive but now flaunted, cosmetic surgery is being eagerly explored by Australians from teens to pensioners, female and male.

45 min

38

Journey of No Return

Each week more than a thousand Australians are delivered the cruel diagnosis: they have dementia - incurable, untreatable, terminal.

45 min