Opinion Morning Edition podcast host May 5, 2026 — 3:30pm When Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert was released from one of Iran’s most notorious prisons , 5½ years ago, Australia celebrated. After falsely being accused of espionage, she’d spent 804 days in prison – a year, cumulatively, in solitary confinement – an experience so psychologically torturous that on one occasion she found herself beating her skull against the wall, dozens of times. “I don’t know how it happened,” she later wrote in her memoir, The Uncaged Sky . And finally, she was free. Kylie Moore-Gilbert was kept in an Iranian prison for 804 days. Louis Enrique Ascui But now, she has a message for the federal government. So-called “hostage diplomacy”, of which she was a victim, is on the rise. This is the result, she says, of the disintegration of the international rules-based order. With that disintegration, countries like Iran, Venezuela and China have become emboldened to “act with impunity and do whatever they like”.…