Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: “Old Media, New Media & the Truth” with legendary journalist Chris Uhlmann

Transcript

PREMIUM: “Old Media, New Media & the Truth” with legendary journalist Chris Uhlmann · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
G'day, humans! Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
0:07
Here's a dangerous idea for you.
0:09
Exactly how much culpability and responsibility and blame
0:14
should senior very professional legacy media journalists bear?
0:20
For the disintegration of trust in modern institutions,
0:24
in the mainstream media, the rise of podcaster stand and sub-stacker stand,
0:29
I suppose the erosion of truth. I put that question to one of the most important,
0:34
most influential, most experienced, most famous, most respected,
0:38
legacy media journalists in Australia, Chris Ulman.
0:42
His resume is sort of too long to just rattle off and list,
0:46
but he basically worked for decades as either the host or the chief political reporter
0:51
on many of Australia's most important current affairs and news shows.
0:56
The 730 report, ABC News. He helped to kick off ABC News Channel,
1:01
24 hour news channel in Australia. He was the chief political reporter for nine news.
1:07
He hosted the ABC's flagship current affairs radio show AM.
1:12
He's now a contributor on Sky News. He writes for the Australian,
1:15
the nation's largest broadsheet newspaper. He is the guy you go to when you sort of want to hear
1:20
from the voice of the traditional legacy press.
1:24
And he now has a sub-stack and he has a lot of thoughts about the failings of the legacy media in general.
1:30
His failings in particular in the way that he conducted certain interviews.
1:34
We get into that along with a lot of hot button issues like climate chaos,
1:38
which he and I disagree on. He's a lot more conservative than I am.
1:41
Questions like Ukraine, China, Taiwan, energy independence, immigration.
1:47
This is a fascinating crossover, really, between one of the sort of titans of old media
1:53
and me perhaps one of the more upstarted Puckish-Nederwels of new media.
1:59
I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one the only Chris Ullman.
2:08
I want to get to Zelensky.
2:10
How much foreign affairs reporting have you done?
2:13
Were you ever a formal foreign affairs correspondent posted by any of the...
2:17
No, I wasn't.
2:19
No, so I worked with the ABC and I worked as a political correspondent out of Canberra,
2:22
which is our capital, obviously, so I covered what's federal politics.
2:26
And so quite often would follow the Prime Minister around the world on the trips that they did over time.
2:33
So I've certainly visited many foreign capitals, been to many of the great big meetings that we hold around the world.
2:38
These great jamborees that go from different names to G7, the G20,
2:43
the Council of the Party's thing, which is the giant climate change jamboree,
2:47
been to one of those.
2:48
So seeing all those sorts of things.
2:49
And of course, when you're doing federal politics out of Canberra,
2:51
a big part of it is foreign affairs.
2:54
So I've always had an interest in it.
2:55
And what's that like when you're trailing around?
2:57
Assume that the Prime Minister is going to the G20 or something like that.
3:00
Where are you in the press pack physically?
3:02
And how much access are you having to the PM on the road?
3:05
And what are you looking for as a story?
3:08
Well, unlike the US, for example, where you've got Air Force One
3:12
or the flying Katari plane, whatever it's going to be next in the United States.
3:16
You'll be interested to see what the press quarters are on the Katari plane.
3:20
I'm sure the journalists won't complain once they get on board.
3:23
Or they will or Trump will have it decked out so that there's like Ryan Air Style economy class in the back for the journal
3:28
for that to put CNN in.
3:30
And they're in New York Times.
3:31
But they did these on his King's Eyes bed.
3:34
This is a thing with the Australian government.
3:37
One of the things that the Australian government is always worried about is that being seen to sort of big note yourself
3:41
because, you know, in the United States people don't mind people having success.
3:45
In Australia, we've always had what we call the tall poppy syndrome.
3:47
And that includes our Prime Ministers.
3:49
Don't want to be too showy.
3:50
You don't want to be too flashy.
3:51
No bling.
3:52
Look, the first time I went around the world with the Prime Minister,
3:55
he had what was called a business class, which really couldn't travel terribly far.
3:59
So you have to do these little hops around the world.
4:01
It wasn't that big, right?
4:03
And we pull up to these events.
4:04
And if you've got a little regional prop to this propeller plane or something, not quite.
4:08
Well, yeah, in 2008, Kevin Rudd decided that he'd do a trip around the world.
4:12
Now, Kevin Rudd was essentially like an international Messiah.
4:15
At least he saw himself that way.
4:17
He was a Mandarin-speaking Australian Prime Minister.
4:19
And we thought then, like, come with the hour.
4:21
Come with the man.
4:22
This guy's going to be the bridge between the West and the rising.
4:26
He was a central left leader.
4:27
He was coming off two decades of conservative rule.
4:30
He was young and sunny and left wing.
4:33
He was almost like an Obama figure in 2007 in Australia.
4:36
Or Jesus.
4:37
Like, if you asked, if you asked Kevin, he was speaking.
4:40
He's a Mandarin-speaking Jesus.
4:42
And he'd been foreign.
4:43
No, he hadn't yet been foreign minister.
4:45
No, he became foreign minister after being prime minister.
4:48
He was shadow firm minister, became prime minister.
4:50
Okay, great.
4:51
Yeah, long story.
4:52
But anyway, look, so he decides Africa selected in 2007.
4:54
He's going to lap the world and essentially leave no leader unmolisted.
4:58
So we started in Washington.
4:59
We made our way around the world.
5:01
When we got to the NATO conference, which was in Bucharest,
5:04
I'll never get pulling up in this tiny little plane alongside one of the two American planes.
5:10
Like, this is a jumbo jet.
5:11
Yeah.
5:12
And we are essentially in a tiny little business class.
5:14
I think it's a 737 or something, right?
5:17
The Australian.
5:18
Well, it's bigger now.
5:19
Then it was a tiny little business class jet.
5:21
And we had two of them.
5:22
But Kevin wanted to take the entire press pack with him.
5:25
So we needed a lot of space.
5:26
So it's literally a private, it's like a private jet that a businessman would fly around.
5:30
Yep.
5:31
Okay.
5:32
So nothing flashy.
5:33
It was then.
5:34
So, so it's changed now.
5:35
But this is the first story.
5:36
So, and then we pull up alongside that.
5:37
And then the Chinese, of course, had a gigantic plane.
5:39
Even the Canadians had a giant plane.
5:41
We had these tiny little planes, which is good to put you in perspective.
5:44
Because we are a tiny little country at the our end of the world.
5:47
But eventually they did get, and this is where I was going.
5:50
They did get a bigger plane, which took forever and they had to get it through the world Australian Air Force.
5:54
And it had to be traded.
5:55
Should have bought or something else.
5:56
Yeah.
5:57
You should just have it given to us by the Qataris.
5:58
Yeah.
5:59
All the Chinese would have given us one too.
6:00
Probably.
6:01
But when they did that, the then chief of staff to the prime minister of Tony Abbott,
6:07
there's a woman called Peter Kreadland, who's actually a friend of mine.
6:10
She works on Sky News now as a commentator.
6:12
She put in economy class seats for the media.
6:15
So you had the lovely business class seats up the front.
6:18
You could lie down.
6:19
You got to ask.
6:20
Get out.
6:21
Everyone's sitting upright.
6:22
As we travel across the world, and can I say to your American and European listeners,
6:26
they've got no idea what long haul flying just like.
6:29
It takes us nine.
6:30
It takes us nine hours to get to the halfway mark somewhere in Asia or in Hawaii or somewhere
6:35
before we go on to the rest of the world.
6:37
That's ridiculous.
6:38
So it's our long time.
6:39
And you said there are two Air Force ones.
6:41
Some people might not know.
6:42
There's always a decoy Air Force one, right?
6:44
So there's not just, which I've actually been wondering about with the Qataris deal.
6:48
Right?
6:49
They have to give them two because there's always a decoy.
6:51
And you never know which one the president's in for security reasons.
6:54
I ask you this.
6:55
That gift from Qatar to Donald Trump.
6:57
How long do you think it's going to take the people in defense to pull that entire thing apart?
7:02
Yeah.
7:03
Check every element of it for bugs and put it back together again.
7:07
I know.
7:08
I know.
7:09
It will end up in Donald Trump's museum before it gets to fly in it.
7:11
Every single couch, every single seat, presumably has to have the lining taken out of it
7:15
and looking for either spyware or some kind of, I mean, even if they had like a
7:20
trigger that had some explosives or something.
7:23
I mean, I went to a Pacific island forum once in Micronesia, tiny, tiny little country,
7:29
right?
7:30
And what had happened there for this big forum was for all the world leaders were given
7:34
cards to drive around in this beautiful black SUVs that had been provided by the Chinese government.
7:39
Sitting like the coastline was a Chinese warship.
7:43
What do you think they were doing?
7:46
That's amazing, isn't it?
7:50
Just providing a fleet of bugged limousines.
7:53
We'll happily take them.
7:54
Listening in.
7:55
We'll take them.
7:56
So, okay, so you're in a climate class on these little, and this was the rad era.
8:00
And when you get to a forum local where the prime minister is doing something,
8:05
what are you actually doing?
8:07
Are you going to a hotel that is paid for by the news organization?
8:11
Is it paid for by the government?
8:13
Is it like, and what access do you have to things?
8:17
Yes, it's paid for by the news organization.
8:19
So, even the flights across on the prime minister's plane, we could charge to fee for that.
8:24
And then your organization would pay for your hotel last fee.
8:27
Yeah, I think it wasn't that special.
8:29
It was reasonably cheap.
8:32
I don't know what the price of it was, but we did pay a fee for that.
8:35
And we paid, obviously, when we stayed in our accommodation overseas.
8:38
And it looked sometimes that we couldn't get on the prime minister's plane.
8:40
So, we would have to leapfrog and go ahead on commercial aircraft to try and get ahead of him.
8:47
And when we got to wherever we were going, then you do have really good access, actually, to the prime minister.
8:52
But you don't necessarily have access to those events.
8:54
So, the security is so strict on some of those, particularly G7, G20 or NATO.
9:00
But when the leaders meet, we might be able to send a camera in.
9:03
So, you can send a camera in.
9:05
What, quite often, we are able to send one journalist into the actual meeting.
9:09
So, you see those things we ever see them sitting just like this, right?
9:12
And they'll have a little conversation.
9:14
It's a pro-former thing, where they'll say, welcome, it's great to see you.
9:17
It's never not great to see you.
9:19
Usually in those most meetings, even if you hate each other, they say, that's good.
9:23
And then you would see that opening piece, and then you'll be bundled out of the room
9:27
when they get down to the real tin tats of the right position.
9:30
So, you get to that.
9:31
But then, quite often, you'd be pushed off into some forum.
9:33
We'd watched the rest of it on a television set.
9:35
And if you're working from overseas for Australia, it's always the opposite side of the day.
9:39
You end up working 24 hours a day to try and keep up.
9:42
You've got to go through the day with the Prime Minister to gather all the information that you need.
9:46
And then, essentially, you work through the night to feed the beast that is on the other side of the world.
9:51
And things change in the time that I was in the media.
9:54
So, we go from just doing a 7pm news report, for example.
9:58
So, that's our evening news.
9:59
People would wear that around the world.
10:01
So, if you're in the United States, ABC, CBS, they're news.
10:04
So, I used to do that for our national broadcaster, and then I did that for one of our commercial broadcasters.
10:09
So, you know, I would have to do a package which might run two minutes for the ABC.
10:13
Well, at my 90s, seconds for Channel 9.
10:16
But early on, that was it.
10:18
That was all I had to do.
10:19
But then I might have to do some radio as well, or radio, current affairs.
10:22
So, there were other things to do.
10:23
And then we invented this 24 hour news beast and the thing never went to sleep.
10:28
So, people would be knocking on your door like 24-7.
10:31
What are you to feed this beast in the hard part where that is?
10:36
You quite often have extremely small amounts of time to try and make big calls
10:42
on what you've just seen going on.
10:44
So, you get put into circumstances quite often, where you only just have the bare bones of what the meeting was.
10:50
And someone says to you, well, what does this mean for world peace?
10:53
Yeah.
10:54
And the answer is, I haven't got the foggiest idea.
10:56
I have not slept in 48 hours.
10:58
Yeah.
10:59
I don't know where my room is.
11:00
Sometimes I forgot my room number.
11:02
So, you get to the hotel and you think, I have to go ask at the desk, where am I staying?
11:06
I don't know if you've heard the adage that in the new media environment
11:09
with big, long podcasts like Joe Rogan's show and so on,
11:12
and also things like TikTok where everybody's just scrolling through 15 second videos
11:16
that Gen Z only consumes media that see the 15 seconds long or three hours long
11:23
that there's no appetite for, you know, no one consumes anything.
11:27
That's a pretty big arc, really.
11:29
You know, there's nothing between anymore.
11:31
And I, I have a hunch that that's because people got fed up with exactly what you're talking about,
11:36
which is an attempt to cram into a sort of medium length of time,
11:41
something that is too complicated to be able to be explained in that duration of time.
11:46
It's not sexy enough to want to watch it for 15 seconds
11:50
and it's not in-depth or substantive enough to actually give you very much.
11:54
So you get this fairly glib sort of surface manufactured interpretation of things
12:00
that don't leave you terribly much wiser.
12:02
You can probably jot on the napkin in advance what Chris Olman's going to say from the G20.
12:09
Like, you know, it's going to be, well, there was a lot of talk,
12:12
but as yet we don't have a firm, you know,
12:14
there's a communique about this or about that,
12:17
and then, you know, intention of free trade and climate,
12:20
but, you know, let's see where all this goes.
12:22
You're on, you're on, you're on. How do you fight that?
12:24
You know, look, I don't want to get too down on the mainstream media.
12:26
I did it for a long period of time,
12:28
and there is a real art form to try and get something compressed into one minute and 30 seconds
12:33
to try and tell a story, and very good people can actually put that into some kind of context.
12:39
I'd always laugh though, and a politician would say to me,
12:41
I can't fit that into a 30 second grab.
12:43
Mate, if you can't fit something into a 30 second grab, you are not trying.
12:46
If you can't get your message out because 30 second is how long already a new story used to run.
12:51
Right? So a minute would be a really long one. You didn't do that.
12:54
The way that it would work in the old form television news media was that
12:59
it took me four seconds to super you. That was to say,
13:02
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, President Donald Trump.
13:05
Right? So that little bit of word that comes up underneath,
13:08
you need four seconds for people to be able to clock that, and it goes,
13:11
after four seconds, I'm looking for a reason to dump you
13:13
because I've got to get on to other things.
13:15
I need to fit other things in there.
13:16
So it was basically trying to build this mosaic
13:19
and to try and tell some semblance of a story in that period of time.
13:23
And I actually think that you can actually communicate a lot in 90 seconds if you try hard.
13:27
You can communicate a lot more in two minutes.
13:30
I much prefer a long form interview, obviously,
13:33
but that was not the format that we had.
13:36
And for all of the faults of the mainstream media,
13:38
and I'm as big a critic as anyone now of its blind spots.
13:42
It's really clear weaknesses. It's obvious biases.
13:46
But beyond all of that, most of the information that people get about their politicians
13:50
now still comes from the mainstream media,
13:52
still comes from journalists who are actually doing the work in there every single day,
13:56
trying to find out what's going on.
13:58
So everything has its place.
13:59
My big fear about what's happened is that the collapse in the model,
14:03
particularly the commercial media, means that there are,
14:05
as many eyes and ears now covering presidents or prime ministers,
14:08
and particularly in a place like Australia, state politics now,
14:12
there's almost nobody covering that stuff.
14:14
Which means that, you know, is there any surprise
14:16
with seeing sort of what would appear to be more corruption at the state level?
14:20
Of course, yeah, about local politics.
14:21
I mean, you know, where's the, what is the financial model for the journalist
14:25
to sit at the bar near the local municipal courthouse,
14:29
or after some hearing, and sort of try to understand
14:33
from people who've just knocked off work,
14:35
what might be going on behind the scenes in some local council election?
14:38
I mean, that used to be a thing.
14:40
Now, it doesn't exist. We just have to hope.
14:43
In 1989, when I joined the Canberra Times,
14:45
it's a 29-year-old copy kid, you know,
14:48
after coming off the back of working as a security guard
14:51
in a storm and packing in the western suburbs of Sydney,
14:53
and I finally got to, you know, get a cadetship at that newspaper
14:57
at very late age.
14:58
You know, this is a little local regional newspaper,
15:01
obviously based in the national capital,
15:03
but, you know, we had a finance reporter and an economics reporter.
15:06
We had three court reporters.
15:08
We used to cover the high court.
15:09
We used to cover the local trades and labor council,
15:11
which is where our unions used to hammer out things
15:13
just for the local ACT tiny little territory,
15:16
a little bit like Washington DC.
15:18
We used to cover that.
15:19
We had five people in Parliament House.
15:21
All of that's gone.
15:23
Like almost all of that's gone.
15:24
I drove past the building where I used to work the other day.
15:26
It's been bulldozed, right?
15:27
So, and there's a certain sadness in that for me.
15:30
Now, I want to let a thousand flowers bloom.
15:33
I would like to see more of this, more of what you were doing.
15:36
I want people to have as much opportunity to see
15:38
as many different opinions as I possibly can,
15:40
because the world is full of opinions,
15:42
and there are some good ones, and there's some bad ones.
15:44
But as we enter into an era where it's going to be harder
15:47
and harder to tell what is real and what is not real,
15:49
I want to know that there's somebody,
15:51
somewhere who checked a fact.
15:53
And when I saw that video of Donald Trump or Zelensky
15:57
or Anthony Albanese with Australian Prime Minister,
16:00
that he actually said that.
16:02
Yeah.
16:04
I mean, not just that he said that,
16:06
but that there's someone who has done enough interviews
16:09
and is in and off with the people who are in the room
16:12
when he says other things to give context
16:15
to whether or not we can take it at face value,
16:17
what he's saying.
16:18
Like there's a whole holistic sense of knowledge
16:20
that a good political reporter, you know, that you used to have,
16:23
that was a lot bigger than the commentary.
16:26
And I mean, I've always said that, you know, what I do,
16:29
I don't want this to be the only thing in the media.
16:32
You know, it's really important that the news organizations
16:35
continue to have investigative journalists
16:37
and on the ground reporters.
16:39
And it's a shame that they're losing that
16:42
because, you know, you say that most people still get their news
16:45
from the legacy media.
16:47
People under 40 get their news from social media.
16:52
Now it's still based on the reporting frequently of the journalists.
16:55
You know, you can't talk about a thing
16:57
unless someone has reported on it in the first place.
16:59
But everything's going through this prism, this looking glass,
17:02
this kaleidoscope of other opinions before they get to it.
17:04
They're not hearing anything from the source,
17:06
subjectively, anymore.
17:08
It's all coming filtered through someone like me,
17:11
which is a worry.
17:12
Yeah, well, you're not as much a worry as some other people.
17:14
Thank you.
17:15
But some of them are very big worry.
17:16
And this is like the thing is, you know,
17:18
what we're saying now is, you know,
17:20
more and more extreme voices in the media environment as well.
17:25
When I say the media environment,
17:26
now I meet in every one of its iterations,
17:28
it's still a media environment.
17:30
Now we've got all of the different forums.
17:32
I mean, it's hard to know where to look.
17:33
And this is one of the things I think about being a world leader now
17:36
be a national leader in a place like Australia is,
17:39
if you have a serious message to get out to the Australian people,
17:42
how do you talk to them?
17:44
Once upon a time, if you decided that you were going to say something,
17:47
you would go on the 6 p.m. users in Australia.
17:49
So that was where most Australians,
17:51
6 p.m. every night, there'd be destination television.
17:54
You would get to 2-3rds of the Australian population.
17:57
And you could get a message out.
17:58
And you could say, you know, this COVID, for example.
18:00
But that was different because that was a time everyone was focused across all platforms.
18:04
But if it was something else that, you know,
18:06
didn't necessarily excite the interest of TikTok or whatever,
18:10
how do you get a message out now?
18:12
And how do you talk to your people?
18:15
And how do you communicate complex messages?
18:19
And like you can do it on forums like this.
18:21
And so I hope that people do listen to forums like this.
18:23
You know, when you're talking about things like immigration and Australia,
18:25
it's a nuanced argument.
18:27
It's not a black and white argument.
18:29
When you were talking about the number of people in Australia,
18:32
you're not necessarily talking about where they're coming from.
18:34
You can just be talking about, on environmental grounds,
18:37
how many people can a water-poor country like Australia sustain?
18:41
We should have that conversation, you know?
18:44
That's an environmental conversation.
18:46
All too often, though, when you say the word immigration,
18:48
the next word out of someone's mouth is racist.
18:51
And you did find this.
18:53
Like, there are too many people who have too many stop clauses on conversation.
18:59
Yeah.
19:00
And I find, and it's on both sides, like, you know, extreme right, extreme left,
19:05
is they've all got their stop clauses.
19:07
They'll all pull out the stop sign at some stage.
19:09
But in what I do recently, it's more often from the left and from the right.
19:13
You say, I want to talk about immigration racist.
19:15
Can we please talk about net zero climate change tonight?
19:19
You know, it is these are complex things.
19:21
Yeah, I mean, people have taken...
19:23
There are a couple of things going on, right?
19:24
I mean, one is that in the past five or ten years,
19:27
we've had this swing on the left from believing in economic equality,
19:32
you know, class and uplifting people who are disadvantaged.
19:37
A sort of basic egalitarianism,
19:40
a material egalitarianism that defined the trade union left,
19:45
historically, to a much more egalitarian,
19:49
almost language game,
19:51
where everyone's vying to demonstrate their fealty to a new set of precepts
19:56
about race and gender and sex and whatever it might be.
20:01
And so there's that.
20:04
And then that happens a lot in the conversations that you see in the legacy media,
20:07
where, you know, we're sort of constrained about what you can say
20:10
if you're on a panel show or something,
20:12
without getting enduring an enormous amount of shit on social media
20:16
or sometimes even the mainstream press.
20:19
But then there's this other tendency which happens on current affairs shows
20:23
and the news,
20:25
where...
20:26
I wonder if it's because of how short the interviews are.
20:29
I understand the reticence of a prime minister who wants to get his message out.
20:32
If he goes on a show like the 730 report,
20:34
which you used to run on the ABC,
20:36
which is the nation's flagship current affairs show,
20:39
let's say, on the national broadcaster.
20:41
The questions can be really...
20:44
I don't want to say tough because it's good for journalists to ask tough questions.
20:48
They can be really gotcha.
20:50
And sort of disrespectful and kind of inconsequential in the long run.
20:55
But they're set up to create a hostile moment between the host and the prime minister
21:01
by trying to catch him out on either some inconsistency between what he's saying now
21:04
and what he used to say or some way in which he's...
21:09
There's less of an attempt to really drill down to the bottom of the point
21:14
and understand him and then expose it as being either true or false.
21:18
And there's more of an attempt to... it seems to me
21:21
get the interviewee to say something that is going to go viral in some way.
21:27
And I don't think that's constructive either.
21:29
So the prime minister is left with few options.
21:32
They can go on 60 minutes or some other credible show and risk that happening.
21:38
Or they can sit down with a busty, good-looking Instagram influencer for two hours
21:45
and have a nice chat, you know, who's sympathetic to their political cause
21:48
or a Joe Rogan.
21:50
And they can get no questions at all.
21:53
We don't seem to have found a way to do what I'm trying to do,
21:55
which is have the conversation that's free of bullshit
21:59
and is sort of harsh and confrontational and a little bit provocative and spicy
22:04
without being intended in a state of ill will to try to trap the person.
22:09
Yeah, well, that's an intellectually honest way of going about things in the eye
22:12
and I can put my hand up to the fact that I have been guilty of just what you charged right.
22:16
So in working on 730, I remember one interview in particular
22:20
and it was with Julia Gillard.
22:22
And I can't remember with which budget it was.
22:24
So she was our prime minister, our first female prime minister.
22:28
And one of the problems that Julia Gillard had was that she had essentially had risen to her job
22:33
by taking out her own leader.
22:35
So she'd knocked off Kevin Rudd, who we spoke about earlier,
22:37
to become prime minister herself without going to an election.
22:41
And then we did go to an election and she did win enough votes to be prime minister again.
22:46
But she always suffered from the fact about the way that she got her job.
22:50
And it really did change the way that she talked in public.
22:53
If you saw her before, she was prime minister.
22:56
She was one of the most fluent people in parliament.
22:59
She's a highly intelligent, really articulate woman.
23:02
But what happened was after the whole unpleasantness with Rudd,
23:06
she basically became more and more constrained by the job.
23:10
And you could see that reflected in her language,
23:12
and even in her body language, it really affected her.
23:14
Anyway, I was interviewing her after one of her budgets.
23:18
And I knew that one of the real issues that she had with the Australian people
23:22
was this idea of trust.
23:24
So I began that interview by saying,
23:27
because there were some really inconsistencies in this budget.
23:30
Do you think the people of Australia trust you when you say you're going to?
23:34
It was completely unfair.
23:36
Because I did not give her the opportunity at the outset to be able to say,
23:43
look, prime minister, you've just bought out a budget.
23:45
You tell us what you think it is before we start talking about some of the things that I might think it is.
23:51
And it was precisely that.
23:53
It was precisely to try and find a way to weedle away at her major weakness.
24:01
I justified it to myself at the time,
24:03
because I thought there were a whole lot of inconsistencies.
24:05
There were myths truths in the way that this budget was being expressed,
24:09
particularly when it came to the fact that they were cutting defense spending,
24:12
and they said that they were going to lift it.
24:14
But by the buy,
24:16
if I was to say that I was ashamed of one interview,
24:19
I'm ashamed of that one.
24:20
Did I learn something from the interview?
24:22
Yes, I did.
24:23
Because quite rightly, I copped a lot of criticism for the way that I conducted it.
24:29
And I did, of course,
24:31
me to stop and think about the way that I conducted my own business.
24:34
To start to think about how much of this is your own ego on display rather than trying to get out information,
24:41
because in the end, what is the point?
24:43
Like, I go back to the basics of this.
24:45
I think the point of journalism, of good journalism, of being a reporter,
24:49
and that's what I am.
24:50
I don't describe myself as anything else.
24:51
I am not an expert in anything.
24:53
I have interests in certain areas.
24:55
What I'd always say to people is that, you know, I'm not that smart,
24:57
but I know a lot of people who are.
24:59
And if they can explain things to me,
25:01
I'm pretty good at explaining them to other people.
25:03
That's what I can do.
25:04
I can tell a story,
25:06
hopefully an engaging story,
25:08
that can help you understand a point,
25:10
and sometimes quite a complex point.
25:13
And I hope to do that fairly and accurately.
25:15
That should be the job.
25:16
That's the basis of that.
25:17
It should be of service to the people who you are listening,
25:21
who are listening to you,
25:22
like the people that you're trying to help understand things.
25:25
When I fail to do that, that's the biggest fail I can have.
25:28
When I'm not fair and accurate,
25:30
that's the first thing my first editor said to me,
25:32
and I just be fair, just be accurate.
25:34
You know, try and tell, give all perspectives on a story.
25:38
And you can't always do that.
25:39
Be aware of your own biases.
25:41
We all have them.
25:42
You can't stand outside yourself when you are telling a story.
25:44
There is no other place to stand.
25:46
Did you know during the interview with the Prime Minister
25:50
that it was not the way that you wanted to start the conversation?
25:56
No, I think you have the time.
25:57
I thought, you know, at the end of that,
25:59
like it was, you know,
26:00
and I've had plenty of these,
26:01
like tough conversations where at the end of an interview,
26:04
either when the microphone goes off,
26:06
and these have been with Prime Ministers,
26:08
I've had them sit there waiting for the microphone to be turned off,
26:12
so they could tell me precisely what it was that they thought of me.
26:15
And one of the great things about being an Australian journalist
26:18
is that Australian politicians,
26:19
when they want you to know that they're unhappy,
26:21
they speak in words of full letters.
26:23
Yeah.
26:24
And for quite some period of time,
26:26
and I've had those conversations with Prime Ministers,
26:29
with opposition leaders, with Ministers.
26:33
And I'm usually grateful for them too, because...
26:35
Well, I mean, that's risky.
26:36
But if there's a microphone in the room,
26:38
that's risky, even if you've gone off the air,
26:40
right, you never know what editor or director
26:42
is going to have a copy of that tape.
26:44
But how did Julia Glad respond to the interview?
26:46
She just got up and left.
26:48
Right.
26:49
She just stood up, turned around and left,
26:50
and I never really had, you know,
26:52
because the other thing too,
26:53
is that one of the most useful things to a politician is to be able to.
26:56
And you can do this, like, you know,
26:58
it is that particularly if you're working for one of the big outlets,
27:01
is to pick up the phone and have a private conversation
27:03
with the Prime Minister and say,
27:05
tell us what's really going on,
27:06
go down to their office and do them.
27:07
And I've had the privilege of doing that.
27:09
And so, but, you know,
27:11
so that was the least of the things that I lost, you know,
27:14
what was the most of the things that I lost?
27:16
Well, self-respect from myself at the time,
27:20
you know, in the days and weeks after that.
27:22
So, you know, it is...
27:24
I do think that you are being dishonest
27:27
if you don't reflect on your own behavior constantly,
27:30
constantly reflect on your own behavior.
27:32
And constantly try to measure yourself against those things,
27:35
which you believe in.
27:37
And what are the foundation stones of the things that I believe in,
27:39
when I'm trying to tell a story,
27:41
is that I should try and be fair.
27:43
Have you spoken to Julia Galadson?
27:45
No, I haven't.
27:46
You know, it's one of those things that I've thought about it,
27:49
and I've thought about writing it to her,
27:51
but I wonder, you know,
27:53
whether or not I think,
27:55
oh, you know, what's this all about?
27:56
You know, feeling sorry for yourself.
27:58
You know, is it a genuine apology,
28:00
or are you just feeling bad about yourself?
28:02
That's not a big difference.
28:03
For a former seminarian,
28:04
that's not very Christian of you.
28:05
Haha, and that's true.
28:07
It's true, you know,
28:08
constantly struggle with the things that you believe in in your own faith.
28:11
And, you know,
28:12
but, no, I haven't.
28:13
Is the answer to that question.
28:14
Would you?
28:15
Yeah, I've certainly thought about it a lot.
28:17
So, I might.
28:18
You're going to apologize to her now.
28:20
Yeah, well, look, I am genuinely sorry,
28:22
but I think that it's something that I need to do personally.
28:24
I don't think that it's something that I should broadcast.
28:27
It's fascinating.
28:28
I mean, the idea of like you want to confront the person in power
28:32
with their greatest flaw.
28:34
And yet,
28:36
when you have time to do so,
28:39
I've always felt that the best way,
28:41
if you suspect that the person you're interviewing is untrustworthy,
28:44
to demonstrate to the viewer that they're untrustworthy,
28:47
is to try to allow the person to show it somehow.
28:50
Right?
28:51
There's this idea,
28:53
and this is a big deal in podcast stand as well,
28:56
where people who are not professional journalists just turn on a microphone
29:00
and think that the way to own another person,
29:02
and they're going to get clicks on Twitch or on YouTube or something
29:06
if they do so,
29:07
is to hammer directly the point that they're trying to make
29:09
and prove that the person is wrong.
29:11
This is a very kind of like Ben Shapiro
29:13
or like destiny type of way of attacking a conversation.
29:17
But I've always felt that, you know,
29:19
if you suspect that someone's a hypocrite,
29:21
then allow them to demonstrate their hypocrisy.
29:24
If you suspect that someone's lying,
29:26
allow them to allow the viewer or the listener to go,
29:30
hang on, they sound like a bit of a liar here.
29:34
And there's no forum that I'm aware of in the legacy media
29:37
that has the time and space to allow that to take place.
29:40
Right?
29:41
I mean, where is the half hour or hour long conversation,
29:44
interview conversation on a commercial television station
29:46
or radio station?
29:48
You sort of have to,
29:49
I mean, I'm kind of giving you a pass here on the Gellart thing.
29:52
If you don't go to for the Gellart right off the bat,
29:55
then the point doesn't get made in an eight minute interview.
29:58
I mean, if it was even eight minutes, that would be long.
30:01
Yeah, look, that was quite a long one.
30:03
It's usually with those after budget things,
30:05
they're probably about 12 minutes.
30:06
And again, I think there is a skill in that.
30:07
And I think you can get somewhere in that.
30:09
And, you know, in terms of why you go for that form
30:12
of gotcha journalism,
30:13
it's because so much of politics now is essentially
30:15
repeating right lines.
30:16
And you are trying to get people in a short period of time
30:20
to see the fact that there's this armor on,
30:22
and they're avoiding a question.
30:23
I remember once I asked Kevin Rudd,
30:26
eight times what would be the consequences of a rapid withdrawal
30:30
from Iraq.
30:32
And, and the interview, I think went for four or five minutes.
30:35
I just had one question.
30:37
And I think at the end of that, at the end of that,
30:39
people pretty much got the idea that this guy was either unwilling
30:41
or unable to answer that question.
30:42
Yeah, that's great.
30:43
So there is a point in some of that.
30:45
And so, yes, why is the reason some people go for the gotcha question
30:48
is because, you know, we're sitting in an area where both sides know
30:51
of the truth is, and one side doesn't want to talk about.
30:53
Yeah.
30:54
So that's where you get into that sort of conversation.
30:56
But still, there were no excuses for the way that I conducted that.
31:01
I did learn something from that,
31:03
and hopefully have applied it in the future.
31:06
You mentioned Zelensky on a recent trip abroad.
31:09
You sat down with Zelensky.
31:11
Was it last year?
31:13
It was 2023.
31:16
What was the context around that?
31:18
And what did you make of the guy?
31:19
Where were we in the Ukraine war?
31:20
Okay.
31:21
So we had been, essentially, it was, you know,
31:24
the second year of the Ukraine war,
31:26
we were there in October of that year,
31:28
a friend of mine, what's a friend now?
31:30
In fact, I advertised from the mainstream media,
31:32
I'd pull the plug, I was exhausted,
31:34
and it spent a bit of a part of the year doing pretty much nothing.
31:36
And then I realized,
31:37
some days I couldn't tell you what I'd done all day.
31:40
And then a mutual friend had contacted us,
31:42
said that they'd raised the money to do a documentary on,
31:45
it was essentially on what Australians were doing
31:48
to assist the war effort in Ukraine.
31:50
And when you looked there quite a lot,
31:52
well, we'll be on the military equipment
31:54
that we were providing to Ukraine.
31:56
And so, yeah, we went to Ukraine,
31:58
we got down to the front line.
32:00
There's an extraordinary experience.
32:02
We saw where the Australian bushmasters,
32:03
which are a big armoured vehicle, were being used, you know.
32:07
But we also obviously...
32:08
The bushmasters, if people are not aware,
32:10
are actually an incredible military asset.
32:13
They're way better than your hummus.
32:15
They're one of the greatest Australian engineering inventions.
32:18
And they're really...
32:19
I got a text from a made-of-mind
32:21
who works for the Wall Street Journal.
32:23
He's a Brit who has been spent a lot of time in Ukraine.
32:25
He's based in Southern Europe.
32:27
And they send him in when they send him into Gaza and all this sort of stuff.
32:31
And he texted me saying,
32:32
like, these bushmasters,
32:33
you asked the Ukrainians what their most dependable asset is militarily.
32:39
And they'll talk to you about the Australian bushmasters
32:41
until your head falls off.
32:42
And he's not even an Aussie.
32:43
He's like, these are...
32:44
So these are not tanks.
32:45
These are military vehicles.
32:48
They're armoured characters.
32:49
They're armoured characters.
32:50
They're armoured characters.
32:51
And they were important in Iraq,
32:53
but even more important in Ukraine,
32:54
because Australia is the main sort of source of this vital,
32:58
very, very hardy piece of equipment
33:01
that they can get around in without being blown up.
33:03
Yeah, they're designed to keep people alive
33:05
as they go to and from the battlefront
33:07
and what they're being used for a lot more in Ukraine,
33:09
as essentially as field ambulances.
33:11
And I'll never forget that going out to that front line,
33:14
we saw them during the day with some of the troops.
33:16
But then we were trying to find this combat nurse, Hannah Havana.
33:21
And, you know, we desperately wanted to speak to her.
33:24
And we got lost, basically,
33:26
near the front line in Ukraine.
33:28
And we were going on this dirt track as it got dark at night time.
33:31
And then in the end,
33:32
we finally found the village that we were looking for.
33:34
We couldn't sit up outside because if we put up lights,
33:37
we were, you know, in danger.
33:40
And so we all piled into the back of this bushmaster
33:43
with this combat nurse who had this faraway look in her eyes,
33:47
like the things that she had seen.
33:48
Her husband was a driver.
33:49
The two of them were on the front line.
33:51
There was dried blood in the back of this thing.
33:54
And so that's the way she got on and off the battlefield.
33:57
And the bushmaster is brilliantly designed
33:59
so that, you know, if it runs over a mine,
34:01
it's got this V-shaped hull with a whole lot of water in it.
34:03
So there could be explosions underneath it.
34:05
They survive.
34:06
These things were bullet riddled.
34:08
But the thing that struck me then about talking to her
34:12
was I asked her what it was.
34:14
She must have sent some terrible things.
34:15
She was speaking to Ukraine.
34:16
She just said,
34:17
duh, yes, you know.
34:19
And what do you think about now?
34:20
And she said,
34:21
I've been thinking my husband and I have been married for a long time.
34:25
And I've been thinking about life.
34:28
I've been thinking about having children.
34:30
We never were going to have children.
34:32
But now I think I want to bring life into the world.
34:34
So there in the absolute depths of darkness
34:38
was this tiny little light of hope.
34:42
Of someone who wanted to give life,
34:45
to bring life into the world even to the very worst of circumstances
34:49
to make it just that little bit better.
34:51
And that for me again is the essence of humanity
34:54
is this unquenchable hope.
34:57
You know, it is that if you find a why you can bear
35:01
with almost any how.
35:03
And she was doing that.
35:05
And that's the thing.
35:06
I felt like I found anything in Ukraine.
35:08
It was finding that.
35:10
And finding that human's indomitable human spirit.
35:13
And then in the conversation with Zelensky.
35:15
So it is.
35:16
And the thing that was really great about that conversation
35:19
is we asked him to speak in English.
35:21
Now, English is his third language.
35:23
His first is Russian.
35:24
His second is Ukrainian.
35:25
His third is English.
35:27
Remember that when you see him quizzed
35:29
in front of a white house press giggle
35:32
with a president and a vice president going at him.
35:35
This guy is communicating in his third language.
35:38
But he did speak in English to us
35:41
because he wanted to communicate to an Australian audience.
35:45
And so we were really grateful for him doing that.
35:50
And what did he say to us on that again?
35:52
What did we find in the midst of war?
35:55
When I asked him what it was about why he fought.
35:58
I mean, you think about this.
35:59
This is a guy who could have taken the opportunity
36:03
to flee the country as so many leaders do
36:06
when things get hard.
36:07
He was offered a ride.
36:08
He said, why don't you ride on it ammo?
36:10
He decided he would stand and fight.
36:12
And that spirit helped his people stand and fight by his side.
36:17
And I asked him why.
36:18
And he said, what is a life without freedom?
36:22
Without the ability to do what you want to do.
36:25
To say what you want to say.
36:26
What is a life?
36:27
It's nothing.
36:29
And that's what the people of Ukraine are fighting for.
36:32
The right to a life lived on their own terms
36:35
without interference from somebody else.
36:39
And so that is something worth fighting for.
36:42
And that I think again,
36:44
along with seeing Hannah on the front line
36:46
and speaking to the Zelensky,
36:47
that what did I take away from that?
36:49
I took away the fact that, you know what?
36:52
Humanity is an amazing thing.
36:54
People are amazing things.
36:55
The one choice we get is how to respond to the circumstance
37:00
in which we find ourselves.
37:01
You know, it's what was in Victor Frankl's man search
37:04
for meaning even in the Holocaust, in the camps.
37:08
There were some people who hoarded the food that they had
37:10
and some people who shared it.
37:12
You are radically free.
37:14
You get to decide how you respond to the things that happen to you.
37:17
That's what matters.
37:19
What do you make then of the...
37:24
I suppose shift in the way that many people are thinking about
37:28
not just Ukraine, but a lot of conflicts
37:30
and you could loop in Gaza here as well,
37:33
where there's...
37:36
Let's just say an overly simplified version on both sides
37:40
that seems to lack an insight into the messy complexity
37:44
of the decisions that people are making on the ground.
37:47
Especially on the right in America,
37:49
there's this kind of sort of great power
37:52
that kind of shrugginess about Ukraine,
37:54
where it's like, well, you know, I mean, of course,
37:56
Russia wants to control its own backyard.
37:58
We would feel the same way.
37:59
You know, look at the Cuban Missile Crisis.
38:01
We have our Western hemisphere.
38:03
They have their Eastern hemisphere.
38:04
Ukraine's only been a country for a few decades anyway.
38:06
So what's the big deal ultimately?
38:09
You know, make a deal, shake hands, draw it up on the map
38:12
and stop the bloodshed because bloodshed is bad.
38:14
So therefore, because bloodshed is bad, you know, stop the war.
38:18
Does your compassion, which sounds quite Christian,
38:21
when you talk about it that way, your compassion,
38:23
your sense of the inherent dignity of each individual casualty,
38:27
lead you towards or away from, like, a perpetuation of necessary wars.
38:34
Like, because I could take it both ways, right?
38:36
I could say, well, if that's the case, just stop it.
38:39
Just draw the lines where they're going to end up.
38:41
Yeah.
38:42
You know, and just stop the killing.
38:43
But stopping the killing might mean that in five years' time,
38:46
Putin comes back for another bite.
38:49
Exactly.
38:50
And the answer to this is if there were simple answers to these things,
38:54
someone would grasp them because the one thing politicians want more
38:57
than anything else is simple answers.
38:59
And unfortunately, they're not that simple.
39:01
Look, the war in Ukraine can only be ended by a settlement
39:04
through peace and diplomacy.
39:05
And at the moment, Ukrainians are on the back foot.
39:08
They are going to have to give up some territory if they want to have peace.
39:11
The gamble that they will all make is that the end of it.
39:14
Is that the last demand?
39:16
They just want that to not be a gamble though, right?
39:19
I think everyone understands, including them,
39:22
that they're going to give up some territory.
39:24
The question is, under what conditions?
39:26
And is there, like, an international force at that border
39:30
that somehow NATOizes the eastern border such that Russia can't come back?
39:37
Do you actually have French and Spanish troops permanently stationed
39:44
in Ukraine as a deterrent?
39:47
Is that, like, what's your judgment?
39:49
Well, look, the one thing that the Ukrainians genuinely wanted
39:53
in order to try and do something about where the war was headed in 2023.
39:57
In fact, they were doing better.
39:59
They were doing well than they had taken back some territory
40:02
and they've lost ground since then.
40:04
So they wanted Americans on the ground in Ukraine because why?
40:07
Because the Russians don't want to take the chance
40:10
that they might kill some Americans and then drag the United States into the war.
40:14
None of us want that.
40:15
None of us want the United States in that war
40:16
because we don't want a war between Russia and the United States
40:19
because it would necessarily, not necessarily,
40:22
but could end in nuclear war.
40:24
We want to all avoid that.
40:26
So the question...
40:27
I'm not sure I'd hate America having been involved from Taiwan
40:29
because Putin would have linked.
40:30
No, I mean, I'm not, I'm disagreeing.
40:32
I think Putin would have backed down.
40:34
Yeah, it would have been a gamble, right?
40:36
So it's a gamble.
40:37
It's a gamble.
40:38
How far do you push this guy?
40:39
And what's the other thing too is that, you know,
40:41
that close attention to what Vladimir Putin says
40:43
because one of the things about him is he was an intelligence officer
40:46
who spent his entire life watching the United States.
40:49
He has that country and the West sorted out way better than we do.
40:52
He saw the weaknesses in our society way before we did.
40:55
One of the things that he did, which is really interesting
40:57
and he may well believe it,
40:58
but I think that it was a political thing.
41:00
It was essentially that he re-birthed the Orthodox Church inside Russia.
41:05
So, you know, it's Soviet Union crushed this thing.
41:09
But he brings the Orthodox Church back to life essentially
41:13
and then he pitches himself as the only Christian leader left in the world,
41:17
which resonates with the right in the United States.
41:20
It's like, yeah, we don't go in for this gay stuff.
41:22
We don't go in for all this sort of stuff that's tearing your society apart.
41:25
We believe what you believe.
41:27
So, that's been a very effective campaign.
41:30
I think a lot of the sympathy that's on the right in the United States for Putin
41:34
comes from that and he's been working on that for a very long time.
41:38
Yeah, that's interesting.
41:40
So, I think that, you know, it's that he understands that.
41:42
And both he and Xi Jinping recognized that the West, they believe,
41:46
is in terminal decline.
41:48
The West, after the Second World War,
41:50
the United States basically presided over a whole range of organizations,
41:54
which we now know by their acronyms, the United Nations,
41:57
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
41:59
the World Health Organization.
42:01
All of these things were well intended to try and stop what we saw,
42:04
the cataclysm of the Second World War,
42:06
and to settle the world in a way where it wasn't what we're going to see,
42:10
from, you know, from Thiccities, which is the strongdoers they will
42:14
and the weak suffer as they must.
42:16
We tried to get away from that.
42:18
We had some success with that.
42:20
It was more successful in some parts of the world than in other parts of the world.
42:23
Can I say, you never want to be living under a superpower?
42:26
So, I think the entire Western hemisphere, like down through South America,
42:30
would have thought they didn't get a great settlement out of what happened
42:33
after the Second World War.
42:58
And I think the great catastrophe of the 21st century has been that invasion of Iraq.
43:28
Now, you had to go to the old sub-stack to do that and follow me on sub-stack
43:32
and add one more platform to your life if you're not already on sub-stack.
43:36
But here's the thing, we're now on Apple Premium Podcast as well.
43:40
So, with one click, Apple will just subscribe you up to the premium feed.
43:43
You'll be able to listen to the rest of this conversation right now, right now, right now.
43:46
So, open up your Apple Podcasts.
43:48
Click the old pay-old Zepsi button, that's probably what it's called, pay-old Zepsi.
43:53
And you click the button and then you no longer have to be a free rider.
43:57
You can feel like you're contributing to the mission of this show,
44:00
which is really what we're all here for, better conversations.
44:03
A freer, more free-wheeling attitude towards the things that we can talk about,
44:07
a way to steal man-hour opponents and to take the most gracious approach towards disagreement.
44:13
That is what you're voting for when you vote for uncomfortable conversations
44:16
by going into your Apple Podcasts and clicking subscribe.
44:20
I love you, if you don't do that, that's fine.
44:23
And I'll see you the next free episode, I guess.
44:25
Take care.
44:27
You