Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Malcolm Turnbull

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Malcolm Turnbull · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  One thing I try to do on this show is to frame conversations in a way that's going to be
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  comprehensible, even generous, to people I disagree with, to have conversations that will
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  resonate, that will sound honest, to people from multiple different communities, from across
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  the whole political spectrum, and thereby to create some kind of a coalition of reasonable
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  people who can talk to each other regardless of what their prior assumptions about a topic are.
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  And I sometimes think that would be the hardest thing about being a political leader,
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  especially the leader of a democracy in the 21st century, when so many of us get our information
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  from different sources, so many of us are siloed inside our social media feeds and our friendship
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  groups and our news media ecosystems. How do you try to stitch together the fabric of a nation
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  when it comprises so many disparate parts? How do you have conversations with 25 million
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  people at once, conversations that are respectful, but truthful, that are harsh, but powerful,
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  that are necessary, but sometimes just a little uncomfortable.
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  Today's guest needs literally no introduction, the 29th Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull.
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  He spent the first 50 years of his life as a Rhodes scholar, lawyer,
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  merchant banker, venture capitalist. He rose to fame in the 1980s as a high-flying barrister,
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  representing billionaires like Kerry Packer, and he won a very high profile case against the
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  British government to allow the publication of a memoir that was written by a British spy.
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  That's what first lent him a certain level of celebrity and notoriety both in the UK and in Australia.
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  Then in 2004 he ran for parliament and he won and became a bit of a fixture of talk shows
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  as a charismatic, wealthy politician and commentator, and it took him less than four years in politics
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  to ascend to the top of his party and become Australia's leader of the opposition.
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  He then was deposed a little more than a year later for having supported a sweeping climate change
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  policy proposed by the centre-left Labour government that was led by the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
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  at the time. Instead of leaving politics after he was stabbed in the back by his right-wing
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  colleagues in his own party, he stuck around and six years later he then stabbed in the back
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  the leader who had stabbed him in the back Tony Abbott while Tony was Prime Minister and that
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  made Malcolm Turnbull the Prime Minister. That was in September of 2015 and to win support for his
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  challenge of the sitting Prime Minister from the right-wing of his party and the right-wing
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  national party which his party was in coalition with, he made certain promises to them that he wouldn't
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  rock the boat by pushing issues like same-sex marriage or climate change that he wouldn't try to
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  do what he did the last time around as the party leader and get real on carbon emissions.
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  At least not before the next election he promised. He then called that election for July of 2016.
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  He won it by a single seat, the smallest majority since 1961. It was only two years later,
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  barely three years into his Prime Minister ship that the right-wing of his party stabbed him in the
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  back and turfed him out. Now Turnbull is a specifically fascinating world leader for a number of
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  reasons, not least of which is that his Prime Minister ship straddled the Brexit vote in the UK
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  and Donald Trump's election in the United States 2015 to 2018. As the other two big
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  Anglophone democracies convened into eruptions of populism, Australia had this highly intellectual,
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  almost milk-toast multi-millionaire lawyer trying to resurrect the values of 19th century small
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  L liberalism against the forces of populism and global chaos. There are a couple of things that if
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  you're not Australian you will want to be aware of in this conversation. One is something called
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  franking credits which is incredibly boring. I'll read you the literal definition of a franking
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  credit. A dividend paid to shareholders by Australian resident companies, a taxed under a system
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  known as imputation. This is where the tax the company pays is imputed or attributed to the shareholders,
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  the tax paid by the company is allocated to shareholders as franking credits attached to the dividends
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  they receive. All you need to know about it for the purposes of this conversation is that at the
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  last election in Australia, the Labour opposition party which was the favourite which was favoured
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  to win had a sweeping policy to amend the current system of franking credits in such a way that
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  would have disadvantaged elderly Australians who own a lot of shares and are retired,
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  but that the current system of franking credits and taxation was only introduced 20 years ago
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  and it's quite bizarre. Australia is one of the only countries in the world that has this
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  weird system where if you own shares you can actually get refunds on tax that you never paid anyway.
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  All you need to know is that it was a great big shamazzle and something audacious that the
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  Labour leader had tried to introduce. The other thing you probably need to know is what the lodges,
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  the lodges the White House in Australia. So when we talk about the lodges, that's what we're
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  talking about. If you like this conversation, if you like this show, look, take the time to bother
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  toggling over on your phone to the iTunes store and rating it, leave us a little comment. Most
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  importantly, should a text message to a friend or family member who you think might enjoy it
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  with a link to the show and just ask them if they've ever listened to this show before.
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  If only one in ten of you does that, then pretty soon I will have some incremental but exponential
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  increase in listeners which I could probably calculate and use to astound you with the power of
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  compounding but I suspect you'd rather hear me talk to Malcolm Turnbull so don't make me make you
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  just take your phone out of your pocket, text someone to ask if they've heard of this show and if
• 6:44
  you're very eager, leave a remark on iTunes so that the algorithm thinks that people are buzzing
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  about it which they are and should be. Do enjoy the 29th Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull.
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  Let's start at the beginning because I'm interested in what your your sort of influences were
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  when you were a kid. Did you have heroes? Who did you want to be?
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  No, I didn't have a, there wasn't a figure in historical or otherwise that I, you know,
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  idolized, not at all. How did you figure out what you wanted to do when you were eight then?
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  I was always very interested in history and in politics so I always had a thought that I would
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  you know be a politician or a lawyer or a, you know, I had all sorts of things I wanted to do.
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  When I was very small, according to my mother, I announced to some of her rather startle friends
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  that when I grew up I was going to be the general secretary of the Australian Workers Union.
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  There's one of my mother's interests while she was a labor historian in her youth and she wrote
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  quite a lot about the history of the AWU, the foundation of the AWU and you some of the leaders
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  at the time I remember Tom Doherty she knew. It was a big figure at the time but she used to write
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  labor history with a professor that was her, you know, mentor I suppose in that area,
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  man called B. Men. Well, I mean, there are another, another leader of New South Wales, former leader
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  of New South Wales, Bob Kars is that you told him that as a young man you dreamt of being a union
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  boss and that, so this obviously persisted beyond the age. No, I didn't know, I didn't know that I
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  direct, yes, I direct that up and I was, yes, that was true. Of course, Bob, I don't know
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  whether Bob told you that it's a story, it's not a story, it's an intel, but it's absolutely true
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  how I met Bob. So the scene was, it was the summer of 1972. I was working as a laborer in the city
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  markets sort of between school and university and I had been working for a banana merchant
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  and the banana I was working very hard, I was, you know, trying to sort of, you know, use this
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  as a workout as well as, you know, because I was fairly sporty, you know, I wanted to be fit
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  and you know, so I was basically just lifting boxes of bananas in and out of the gas chambers.
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  Did you know that bananas are gas? I do, but do you want to explain to the list?
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  I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, is it CO2? I think it is, it's, they're putting
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  chambers with their gas, but I just can't come, but they're called ripening. Yeah, this is just
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  to fast ripen them and to mimic the ripening. That's right, if they come in green to the markets
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  and then the banana merchant, you know, depending on demand and so forth will ripen, you know,
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  ripen them before you sense them off to the, you know, fruit shops or they picked up by all of
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  retailers. I've got to tell you, there is so, so larger distance between where we currently are
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  with the ripening of bananas in a market gas chamber and you as a laborer and the Bob Car story
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  that you're getting to, that I want to know. I want to know how you make this dish not work.
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  People can't just, just stay with me, just stay with me, have faith. So anyway, I ended up having
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  a disagreement about my wages with this my employer and I was fired and he, I believed he owed
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  me some money and he didn't. That was annoying and I ended up being reduced to working on the
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  watermelons, which I maintained in the hardest physical work you can do now. It's a large fruit
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  because in those days, watermelons were not shipped on great big bins and lifted up and down
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  with forklifts. They came on trucks and you got them on and off the trucks by hand. So you're
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  a little, you can just imagine passing a watermel at watermelons all day, like a football.
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  A boy, I'll tell you what, there's a wanders for the upper body. So very good. So I'd suggest
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  that's right. I mean, that is a new workout. I'm just writing down, just withdraw
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  application for banana processor and really submit to watermelons processor for my next
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  day for skiing. So I fed up with this after work, which, you know, I'd knocked off from my shift
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  at, you know, about around midday because I'd started at four o'clock in the morning. I walked
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  up to the trades hall, the labor council I should say, in Sussex Street and I walked in there and I was,
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  you know, dressed in my, you know, pair of shorts and some boots and the shirt and looking
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  sweaty and filthy no-da. And I walked in and I asked to see the secretary, the labor council,
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  at the top and John Ducca came out. I told him my story briefly and he was sympathetic. I thought
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  and he said, look, I know who can best person for you to talk to is bomb car. And so he took me
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  in to see bomb car and bomb was this very skinny guy with glasses, a white shirt tie and it was
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  a very thin tie and he was sitting at a desk with a tie fighter and he had some roll of the labor
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  council, I wasn't quite sure it was, but I explained to him my terrible story of injustice
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  and Bob said to me, listen to this carefully and he said, do you know, I've just read the most
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  fascinating book on the politics of Eastern Europe, would you like to borrow it?
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  I said, no, you don't want me to get my money back. Well, anyway, he was at no use there but
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  we became friends and very good friends in fact and I later got him a job at the bullet.
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  I'm surprised that he didn't try to sell you something about American Civil War history,
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  which he seems to constantly be banging on it. No, I know, I know because that's the stories I
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  recall it. He was good. I mean, Lucy and I actually our first date was with Bob and Paulina
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  Carr because they were the, when I asked Lucy out, she was a teenager. She was 19, I guess,
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  18 or 19. Bob was the only person vaguely my age and he's a few years older than me that I knew
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  who was married. So I thought, what could be safer than that? And she might take the hint that I
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  like a guy with a married couple. Why did you join the Liberal Party then? Why were you a Liberal
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  Prime Minister instead of a Liberal Prime Minister? I mean, that's the sort of stop question.
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  Maybe you would have been Prime Minister for 12 years for how it liked durations. If the
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  whole like durations had been in the Liberal Party. I mean, when I joined the Liberal Party,
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  which is actually not long after meeting Bob was in 1973. I joined the Liberal Party in the first
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  place when I was a beauty. I was, you know, I'm essentially a, I'm a small little liberal.
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  You know, there's no doubt about that. I mean, that is now practically a, that's an endangered
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  species and the capital of the Liberal Party Australia today. But it wasn't in the 70s. So I think
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  that sort of small liberalism was what always appealed to me. I'm a free enterprise person.
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  But having said that, I've always appreciated and admired the romantic history of the
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  labor movement, particularly the unions and the shearers strike and all of those things. And I mean,
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  I got, you know, I got all that from Coral when I was a, when I was a kid because that was the
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  ear at the cheek she wrote about. I've got a wonderful letter, somewhere an original letter,
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  which was written to a by William Guthrie Spence, you know, who was the, like if there's one
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  person who you'd say found at the AWU, it was him. So yeah, anyway, she was a pretty old man.
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  When you say that liberal, small little liberals are finding it hard to find a home in the Liberal
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  Party at the moment. Where do you see the fate of that going if you were to put on your prognosticator's
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  hat? Who was that? I think this is a problem around the world. But it's particularly, you know,
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  particularly it's a problem here, but it's even worse than the United States. The answer is I'm not
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  sure. You know, the party is of the centre right and I use that term advisedly, but the traditional
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  right wing party, Liberal Party in Australia versus the central ed party in the way of that.
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  So what's happened is that, and Murdoch has had a huge role in this. I mean, in the United States,
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  as here, you've seen this move to a sort of right wing authoritarian, if not anti-democratic,
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  at certainly undemocratic populism, which, you know, thrives on culture wars, conspiracy theories,
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  hatred and division. And, you know, I mean, I wrote about this in my book. I mean, I've talked
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  about it a lot. Actually, it's just talking about it, but when I was in politics, not too widely when
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  I was PM, but I mean, it was clear where this trend was going. And it was, you know, abitruct,
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  abit, certainly channeled it. It's essentially the politics of negativity. And it does work
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  intellectually, you know, because what you do is you get people, particularly what had been
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  traditional working-class labor voters, you motivate them with issues of values, identity, race,
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  resentment against migration or, you know, whatever, you know, there's a whole, they vary from
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  place to place and time to time. But you get them to vote on those issues, rather than economic ones.
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  I mean, the classic case was Brexit, right? I mean, Brexit was a case where the, where the
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  traditional labor constituencies, working-class constituencies voted for Brexit. Essentially,
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  it was a vote against migration, against, against foreigners. And regrettably, as they'll find out,
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  the economic cost of Brexit will be borne most heavily by those communities. I mean, I'm not
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  talking about. People who had the most to lose voted for it. I mean, how else do you explain,
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  you know, working-class voters in, you know, the Midwest of the United States, particularly in
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  Rust Belt States, voting for, you know, Donald Trump, a billionaire reality TV show host, you know,
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  serial bankrupt. I mean, let me give it a crack. Let me give it a crack. How do you
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  have to explain it? I mean, I'm not sure that I concur with the accepted narrative that Brexit
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  was about being anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner, or that there's something mystifying about
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  people who feel like they've been shut up on by a corrupt elite of people on K Street in
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  Washington and Wall Street in New York who've got the, the game stitched up for themselves. And
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  that, you know, one way of looking at Brexit and Trump is that these are xenophobes and deplorables,
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  as Hillary Clinton called them. Another way is that we live in a fast-changing, disorienting
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  world and that globalization has left people feeling uprooted and disoriented, and that there's
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  a kind of a demographic anxiety that people are expressing about their cultures and their societies
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  changing so quickly, and the economy is changing so quickly. And traditional, you know,
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  Rust Belt towns having the guts dragged out of them by the rapidity of the decline of manufacturing
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  in the United States, and, you know, and all of this gets channeled in admittedly sort of confused
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  and not particularly constructive ways, but that, you know, when there's an option on the table to
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  just say, enough is enough, let us have some autonomy over our own lives again instead of
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  constantly swallowing this bullshit that we're being fed, then let's go, let's at least opt for
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  the disruption because we like that. I get it. I don't think what I said is it also got
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  you to say it. I mean, I think that's, I think that's all part of it, and I think the, you know,
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  so what is the, what are the big lessons at an economic level if you like? The problem with the
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  Rust Belt is that there is a Rust Belt. The fact is that when governments have to be
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  absolutely, you know, gimlet-eyed and just focused relentlessly on ensuring that when you get
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  these economic industrial changes and transitions, you bring up the new opportunities
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  as the old opportunities wind out. So, you know, this is one of the things I've been, you know,
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  concerned about with the coal industry. Now, I want Australia to stop mining coal. I do. I want
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  everyone to stop. I want people to stop burning coal because we don't do that. You know, we're going
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  to have an uninhabitable planet, right? But the problem is, how do you do that in a way that is
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  just and to the people that are working in those industries today? And the answer is that you've
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  got to be absolutely focused on ensuring that in the areas where there is, for example, a lot of
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  people working in coal mining, such as the Haunder Valley, that you make that a, you know, clean
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  energy zone. The reckless irresponsibility of the way in which we're approaching coal in Australia,
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  it's beyond belief. In fact, outside of Australia, most people cannot believe how reckless we are
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  and how we've fetishized coal. I mean, what we should be doing, say in the Haunder, and this is
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  what a responsible government would do. So, obviously, a state issue, you know, overwhelmingly,
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  you should be not approving new coal mines for extensions to existing mines unless you're
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  absolutely satisfied. That's not going to be the expense of jobs in other mines. In other words,
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  you know, the goal has got to be not to cannibalize your own employment. But at the same time,
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  turn that region into a clean energy center. Now, some efforts are being undertaken there,
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  but the problem is, you know, I think there's plenty of people in the state government here
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  that have got good intentions like Matt Keen. But ultimately, they all knuckle under the whip
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  of Murdoch and the fossil fuel lobby in the minerals council, and anything that suggests that coal
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  will come to an end or that there should be some limitations to coal mining or open cutting,
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  you know, a wonderful agricultural land. Any suggestion to that is anti-cold, and therefore,
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  it has to be condemned. This is one of the problems we face. We've got areas where we should be having
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  a rational policy discussion and rational policy, where we're deviled by these crazy values issues.
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  You know, look at the way, you know, the nationals, you know, with the reincarnated Barnaby Joyce,
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  a year again wanting the government to build a new coal-fired power station. Like it doesn't,
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  there's a reason why it hasn't been built or hasn't been built for years, because it doesn't
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  make any economic sense. I mean, when you talk about... No, why not? Well, why don't they advocate
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  that we equip the Navy with, you know, sailing ships, you know, you know,
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  uh, you know, frigates of the sort of the horn blower era, and we can sail forth and take on
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  people's liberation army Navy with a, you know, a, you know, wind powered Navy. I mean,
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  I mean, like it's just... To be fair, nobody is currently employed in the manufacture of sailboats,
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  but lots of people are employed in the coal industry, which is why they're there. They are quite a lot of
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  it. I'm interested in who you, in A, what you think the solution is and B, who you think is guilty
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  of this kind of rhetoric, because when you think about Brexit and populists and Trump and the pro-col
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  Ned Wells here who are, you know, instead of speaking rationally about things
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  bedeviling us with values issues, are you including the Morrison government in that? Oh, sure.
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  Totally, absolutely. You know, Scott is, uh, he wants to placate suburbanites by
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  indicating that he's entering towards net zero, and, you know, he's constantly being
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  rewarded by some of his appreciative friends in the press gallery, you know, and, particularly in
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  Newscorp and also in Fairfax for that matter. You know, they regularly praise him for
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  indicating that he's open to such a move, right, which is amazing, that you get praised for not
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  doing something but indicating that you might be open to doing something. Anyway, so that's to pacify
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  the suburbs, and then in the regional areas, it's a full-on, we love coal, we love mining,
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  you know, the Labour Party want to shut down coal mines and so forth.
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  But I mean, if the critique of the Prime Minister is that he gets credit for seeming right on
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  the issue or paying lip service to it without actually substantively moving forward on it,
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  can't the same critique be made of your Prime Minister ship with regard to climate change?
• 25:07
  Well, you can criticise us for not getting enough data, but I mean, the difference
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  was I tried very hard to do it. I got a lot done. I mean, do you really think you'd have
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  Snowy Hydro 2.0? I haven't been Prime Minister. No, probably not. I suppose I'm
• 25:22
  I'm probably not certainly not Prime Minister. Yeah. Well, it depends who the alternative Prime Minister
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  we're talking about is, but yeah, but you see that the point is that what I was able to do was
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  putting long-duration storage and pump hydro, not just on the map as an issue, but actually
• 25:39
  getting in and starting to build something. I mean, which other big pump hydro projects are
• 25:46
  being built in Australia? The answer is there are none, but one that a private company is going
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  to embark on in Queensland, the Gen X, but bottom line is people talk about renewable energy and
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  they talk about making renewable survival and they talk about this stuff, but ultimately you've
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  got to get in and build it. I mean, the thing about talk versus action, the reason that this is
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  so sort of pressing at the moment is precisely because populism is so popular, it's right there
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  and it's in its name. And then there are, I sort of think that there are politicians of the head
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  and politicians of the gut. There are people who obey the rules of politics and have a 13-point
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  plan for everything. And then there are other politicians who speak to people's values and their
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  fears and their big themes and these people don't need details, they don't need qualifications,
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  they've got stories to tell. Hillary Clinton was a rules politician, she had a plan for everything
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  and Donald Trump was a pro wrestler. I can't remember who wrote it, I think it might have been
• 26:49
  Matt Taibe and Rolling Stone saying that in the boxing match during the presidential debates
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  between Clinton and Trump, Hillary would still be tying on her boxing gloves in perfect form
• 26:59
  while Trump would come into the ring and smash her over the head with a chair. And when you were
• 27:03
  before you were prime minister, you sort of admire that, Josh don't you? Well, I do a little bit,
• 27:07
  I mean, I do. Well, there you go. Now, right, okay, well, that's good. I do, I do a little bit.
• 27:11
  You've made a confession. Yeah, I don't admire. No, it's a very serious thing. But hang on, let me,
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  let me just, let me just, why am I far to the problem? Okay, I'll tell you what, because journalists
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  media like you who focus on politics as a game, right, and are essentially race cause.
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  What you do is you praise the politicians who lie and get away with it. You praise politicians
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  who excite visceral hatreds and get elected on the strength of it. Well, that's why it's not a game
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  you don't pay enough. You don't pay enough attention to what they actually do. Well, I do, I do,
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  I do pay enough attention. I don't know who the hypothetical journalist you're talking about. It
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  is, but the, I mean, it's not a game when Trump gets elected. So the reason I, the reason I admire
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  him smashing Hillary over the head with a chair is because he ends up getting elected. If he didn't,
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  then I wouldn't care. I wouldn't admire it. But why would you admire somebody for doing that?
• 28:14
  Well, admire might be the wrong word, but I mean, let me take, let's rewind to before your
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  prime ministership when you were on Q and A and wearing your leather jacket. I mean, you had,
• 28:24
  you had a bit of that disruptor about you and you courted that image. I don't think, I don't think,
• 28:29
  I don't think I was, I mean, heaven's sake, I mean, I've always been a sort of betnuer of the,
• 28:37
  of the right wing media. I mean, they, you know, they used to attack me from, they used to suggest I
• 28:44
  was a sort of labor like when I was the liberal prime minister. Yeah, but that was descent. I mean,
• 28:48
  you may be misunderstanding what it is that I say that I'm admiring about someone who doesn't
• 28:53
  fit a box. It's the, it's the sense of them not, not simply reciting canned responses to everything
• 28:58
  and being able to share them. But you see, but you see the problem, the, the only problem is this,
• 29:04
  you know, ultimately, you, I mean, yes, politics, there is a tactical element in politics,
• 29:11
  you know, if you don't win elections, you can't be in government, if you're not in government,
• 29:15
  you can't get anything done. But ultimately though, the important thing is, what do you actually
• 29:23
  get done? You see, you see, the concern that I have, you know, frankly, the concern I have with
• 29:29
  Morrison is that he will get elected and re-elected maybe several times. But his government won't
• 29:39
  do very much. And, you know, we've had state governments like this. I mean, Bob Kars, frankly,
• 29:44
  was like this. Bob was very good at winning elections. But what else did he do? The part of the
• 29:49
  problem is that if you see your only objective in politics as winning elections, and I recognize that
• 29:57
  winning the election is the, isn't, is necessary. You know, there's no point being having a great
• 30:03
  political program that you can, you can't persuade people to vote for it. But ultimately, you know,
• 30:11
  what you, what we've got to do is ensure that governments deliver, you know, real, real reform
• 30:17
  policies that work. And they've also got to behave in an honest and accountable way. And I mean,
• 30:23
  you know, we've got some huge issues of, you know, lack of accountability at the moment.
• 30:28
  My concern, Josh, is that, you know, in the sort of media political ecosystem that we,
• 30:36
  we operate in, increasingly political skills, i.e., your ability to persuade people to vote for
• 30:43
  you, is all that matters to the commentariat. And there is very little attention paid to the
• 30:51
  actual substance of what is being done. I'm 100% with you. And I did not go blow by blow over all
• 30:58
  of Trump's, you know, misdeeds while he was president for precisely that reason. In fact, it's one
• 31:04
  reason why I moved back from New York to Australia to avoid having to cover him, because I couldn't
• 31:08
  see a way to do it fruitfully. But the, I do think there's, there's a case to be answered for the
• 31:15
  utility of playing the political game as well, if only because winning elections does lead to you
• 31:23
  remaining in power. I mean, no, no, no. There's no point, you know, there's nothing to be gained from
• 31:29
  just eternally squabbling over the spoils of opposition. And in fact, I mean, this is obviously
• 31:34
  you know better than anybody, because you had, you faced the question when you became Prime Minister
• 31:40
  of what are you going to do about the fact that there's a rump of your party that's much more
• 31:44
  conservative than you are, and has always been suspicious towards your smaller liberal ideas.
• 31:50
  And you did, you made a pact with them, and you held off on the things that you cared about
• 31:55
  deeply, like climate change and marriage equality, in order to, in the hopes that, that, that would
• 32:01
  be a sustainable relationship. It's sort of that, that's kind of, that that's true anyway.
• 32:06
  That's the narrative, but I mean, I, that that's, but it's pedal, but it's not quite right. I mean,
• 32:12
  what I, you know, so I became Prime Minister in September 2015, an election was due within,
• 32:21
  you know, six months, right? The nationals wanted me, you know, insisted that I agree to one,
• 32:28
  sticking to the commitment that the Abbott government had made to having a plebiscite on
• 32:34
  marriage equality, which was not something I agreed with, but I took very much, took the view,
• 32:40
  once you've made that public commitment, you can't walk away from it. And the second one was not
• 32:46
  to change our climate policy, you know, to stick with our existing climate policy and, you know,
• 32:53
  write through to the election. I wouldn't have planned to change either, to be honest,
• 32:58
  in the circumstances. I mean, you know, if I'd thought I could have got marriage equality
• 33:03
  through the parliament on a conscious vote, I would have tried to do it. Really? Didn't you have vote?
• 33:08
  Didn't you have those votes? You would have got more. But pretty much all of Laver and the Greens.
• 33:12
  The view at the time, and this is a later time, after this is around the time that when we had the
• 33:18
  plebiscite, the my view, and I think Orange, you know, who was very committed on this issue,
• 33:24
  shared this view, our view was that we would not get it through the Senate on a conscious vote.
• 33:30
  You'd probably get it through the House, but in the Senate, there are so many, because the
• 33:36
  Senators are, they're pre-selected by their party branches, and they tend to be much more
• 33:42
  doctrinaire than people in the House, because the general election doesn't really determine whether
• 33:47
  they get into the Senate. It's just whether they get on the party ticket. Right.
• 33:51
  They, our view was that we would not get a majority, because there would be too many of the
• 34:00
  Liberal and National Senators. I mean, you could have tried. You could have tried.
• 34:05
  I mean, if the front page of every newspaper had been the new Prime Minister defies the right
• 34:12
  flank of his own party, and betrays the commitment that he made to the National Party by
• 34:17
  calling a conscience vote, and then it passes overwhelmingly in the House, and it's on the
• 34:22
  desk of the Senate, you would imagine. Look, who knows? What would have happened?
• 34:24
  I think you're, I think you're, yeah, well, who knows? But I mean, you would be essentially
• 34:32
  blowing up the government over what is essentially a procedural point. I mean, the thing, the story
• 34:39
  about marriage equality, frankly, is that there are many people in the left who bitterly resent the
• 34:45
  fact that I legalized it, that I made it happen. And because they wanted it to be a great achievement
• 34:52
  at the Labor Party, even though Labor had been an office for six years and, you know,
• 34:57
  done nothing about it, but they wanted to be a treatment at the Labor Party, and they did everything
• 35:03
  possible to prevent my government from delivering it, but I was able to do so.
• 35:09
  Wait, the Labor Party did everything they could to prevent your government from passing
• 35:12
  marriage equality? They would have voted for it on a conscience vote, wouldn't they?
• 35:16
  Well, most of them would have, yeah, but they did everything they could to stop there being
• 35:23
  the, the plebiscite. I mean, you know, one of the many ironies of this whole debate was
• 35:29
  that I have never, ever said that I thought marriage equality should be the subject of a plebiscite
• 35:36
  until, in fact, I was quite opposed to the idea, but shortened had actually fallen to the Australian
• 35:41
  Christian lobby and told them that he believed there should be a plebiscite. So this was the,
• 35:45
  you know, and this just shows you the, you know, the craziness of politics, I guess, and then I
• 35:50
  was ended up defending a process that, in effect, had, you know, I inherited, and all opposed
• 35:59
  to process that he'd actually advocated, because he didn't want, because he, I think, had no doubt
• 36:06
  that the plebiscite would be successful, and I was very confident it would be. I mean,
• 36:13
  the postal vote, and look, I hastened about it, I recognise it was, it was a painful time
• 36:20
  for many people, but the, you know, it was, it, well, it did nonetheless result in a very big
• 36:31
  yes vote. Yeah, look, I thought it was fine, and I thought, and I think it was actually worked out
• 36:37
  better than a conventional attendance ballot order. I mean, none of us would have thought of doing it.
• 36:42
  Well, it was, it was timed out perfectly, because I moved back from the states where I had married
• 36:47
  my partner, like in the month that it passed. So we were literally, yeah. I mean, I, I didn't,
• 36:56
  I didn't, I didn't to blame you at all for that, for that procedural way of doing things. I think
• 37:00
  the, the interesting thing, the interesting thing to me is, how do you make politics sort of
• 37:08
  exciting and values driven and take the best bits of the populist and package it into a meaningful
• 37:16
  set of policies that you can get across the line? And, and part of do it, part of that is
• 37:20
  standing up to bullies, and that you mentioned your book. One of the one of the most interesting parts
• 37:24
  of the book for me was your relationship with Donald Trump. He wasn't elected, you know, he wasn't
• 37:29
  the president when you became Prime Minister, and Brexit hadn't happened yet when you became,
• 37:34
  had Brexit happened? No, it was, it was a year after. In 2016. So you sort of became Prime Minister,
• 37:40
  you know, in a world that was still sort of held together with the fabric of the old order,
• 37:45
  in a way. And when Donald Trump got elected, you write in the book about how there was a scramble
• 37:52
  even to contact him. He had no transition team. You had to, you had to call Greg Norman the,
• 37:57
  the golfer to get Donald Trump's number. He was going to work back down, not he didn't think he was
• 38:01
  going to win. And you had the opportunity to basically stand up to him because he was pissed off
• 38:07
  at the fact that the Obama administration had done this deal about refugees, which we won't go
• 38:11
  into the details of. But there's a passage in your book about you saying that essentially bullies
• 38:16
  have to be stood up to, because, and that you had advisors who were saying, oh, maybe we can
• 38:21
  throw, throw them a bone by giving him some concessions on a, on the free trade deal. And you
• 38:25
  were saying, no, don't give him anything, because if you give him something, he's not going to
• 38:28
  respect you. You've got to essentially not give him anything and stand up to him. And then I
• 38:34
  wonder, just looping back to the, the sort of criticism that you faced of not getting into power
• 38:40
  and rolling the nationals, is there an analogy to be drawn there that like you stood up to Trump,
• 38:49
  but didn't stand up to finally do it. Josh, the reality is the nationals are part of the government.
• 38:54
  I mean, you can't roll the, I mean, you may be able to persuade the nationals to go along with
• 39:01
  something that they don't like. Yeah, I shouldn't say wrong. I would say, I would say dare, dare them,
• 39:08
  dare them to fire you as Prime Minister, by announcing an image of a straining scheme.
• 39:13
  You're daring them to bring the government down. And I mean, I think, you know, one of the lessons
• 39:18
  of Australian, Australian political history is that people in, that the political culture is one
• 39:24
  where people are not afraid of blowing governments up. And, you know, I mean, you look at that coup
• 39:31
  against me in 2018. I mean, that was complete and utter madness. And if there'd been an election
• 39:39
  held, you know, the following week, you know, the Labour Party would probably, you know, one,
• 39:45
  two, three, you know, like it was just, it was just, and this, this comes back to your critique earlier
• 39:50
  of the media in the sense that the one of the things that annoys me the most about my colleagues
• 39:55
  and my industry is leadership speculation talk because if ever there was a self fulfilling
• 40:00
  prophecy, it's leadership speculation questions like the moment the question, the moment the question
• 40:05
  becomes a constant question of like, I do you have the confidence of your party as leader?
• 40:09
  There's blood in the water. And then what can you possibly do except end up falling on your
• 40:14
  sword or getting stabbed in the back because if the question doesn't stop, then the issue doesn't
• 40:17
  stop. And everyone's just then says, well, we have to make the issue go away, which means nothing
• 40:21
  to later. Did you know when you started hearing the rumors, when you started smelling it in the press,
• 40:27
  did you know that the writing was on the wall or were you just disbelieving?
• 40:30
  I, I didn't believe Dutton was as crazy as that. You know, I didn't believe he was, I mean,
• 40:39
  I didn't think he had the numbers and he didn't have the numbers. But, you know, I thought he was
• 40:43
  being in effect jogged along, but it was, it then became obvious that it was, it was real,
• 40:51
  you know, because crazy can be real. People can be really crazy. That was, you know, hard,
• 40:57
  I mean, obviously this has all been, you know, the best account of it is in my book, I might say.
• 41:03
  Naturally. It actually, I know what, you know, obviously I had insights that no one else did, but
• 41:11
  the, it can be very tough. And, and I think, you know, I mean, Scott, he knows that Joyce
• 41:20
  on climate is channeling a sort of an ecosystem, a sort of a, called a media political ecosystem,
• 41:26
  the components of which are the fossil fuel lobby, obviously the right wing media, particularly
• 41:32
  Murdoch, Sky News, you know, the tabloids and so forth to GB, and the right wing of the
• 41:42
  liberal party itself as well as the national party. And this is the, you know, this is the problem
• 41:47
  that, that's a reality. They're very highly motivated and they're very influential in terms of
• 41:54
  people's pre-selections, particularly in Queensland. You know, this has all been part of the
• 41:58
  process that has seen the liberal party move further to the right. I mean, one of my moderate
• 42:04
  liberal friends and the liberal party in New South Wales had set, you know, reminded me the other
• 42:10
  days that he said, you know, when I go to liberal party branches, one of the most common, or,
• 42:18
  you know, frequent observations is what a pity it is that Craig Kelly has left the liberal
• 42:23
  party and wouldn't it be good if he could come back? And so, you know, that's, that's where a lot
• 42:29
  of the branches are and that's, that is part of the problem. So should Barnaby Joyce be where he is?
• 42:36
  Well, I mean, the answer is he where he is because he's the leader of the national party, right?
• 42:40
  Should they have brought him back? No, I don't think that was a particularly sensible, you know,
• 42:46
  progressive worthwhile move, but that party room has been so bitterly divided, you know, there's
• 42:54
  only 21 or so often, but they, the animosities, the patrons are just ferocious. I mean, they make
• 43:02
  in a way they're even more intense than they were in the liberal party, you know, when you had
• 43:07
  Abbott floating around. When the government, I mean, looking at the government's popularity,
• 43:13
  the big things that Scott Morrison has been riding high on since the pandemic began,
• 43:18
  are his handling of the pandemic both economically and then also obviously in terms of stopping
• 43:24
  the, the stopping it from becoming a local epidemic here in Australia. Yet we look at the vaccine roll
• 43:30
  out and we look at other countries starting to open up and we look at the border and we look at
• 43:34
  where we rank on vaccines. What happened? Well, I think the, you know, it's a sort of a plague of two
• 43:44
  parts, right? The last year, you know, the heavy lifting in terms at the governmental level was
• 43:50
  done by the states and territories. I mean, Scott can basking the credit for that, but the truth is
• 43:57
  that the all of the, you know, the border closure is the quarantining, even quarantine was
• 44:04
  managed by the state. So the states were the ones that actually managed yes, but put in place,
• 44:10
  put in place by the, I mean, you know, at the instigation of the federal government who decided
• 44:14
  to close the border. No, sorry, the quarantine hotels were at the instigation of a plan from
• 44:21
  the federal government to close the borders and ensure that anybody coming in was going to be
• 44:25
  quarantined. Yeah, which the states insisted on, but the bottom line is that the public health,
• 44:32
  you know, at that level is essentially managed by the states and that's so I'm not criticizing
• 44:37
  the feds for this, but I'm just saying that it was largely done by the states. Now the federal
• 44:43
  government had one huge responsibility and that was to get the vaccination thing up and get the
• 44:49
  vaccines procured the vaccines. They didn't have to handle the vaccination and in fact that was a
• 44:56
  political decision they took to manage the vaccination process because vaccines vaccinations are
• 45:04
  handled by states and territory public, you know, health departments and obviously there are millions
• 45:09
  and millions of vaccines, you know, done every year, flu vaccines and of course all the vaccines
• 45:16
  kids get. So anyway, the fact is that we or the feds did not buy enough vaccines, but you can't
• 45:27
  get around that, Josh, I mean, it's that they didn't, they didn't, they got hardly any Pfizer,
• 45:32
  they didn't get any Moderna, they didn't get any Johnson and Johnson, they, you know, they got
• 45:38
  AstraZeneca and no doubt because they felt they could make it here as well and that's
• 45:43
  fine and dandy, but essentially we put all of our eggs in one basket and that has put us in
• 45:49
  the position where we are absolutely vulnerable as we can see at the moment to variance because,
• 45:56
  you know, in the US with all of its complexity and you work there, you know what I'm talking about,
• 46:02
  it's a big, complex, difficult to administer country, the the yanks have a managed to vaccinate
• 46:10
  with at least one shot sick right now, 68% of people over 18 and in many states and territories,
• 46:18
  many states and enterities, the figures are, you know, upwards into the 70s, you know, 75%
• 46:25
  of some places. So, so the Americans are more or less achieved in many parts of the country,
• 46:30
  herd immunity. Brits have have done much the same, you know, we are, we're how long away,
• 46:37
  away from that, you know, it's a year, maybe I don't know, like it's a year. It is the single
• 46:43
  biggest failure of public administration that I witnessed because it wasn't, you know, often you get
• 46:51
  good ideas and good policies that are poorly executed, often, you know, things just go wrong,
• 46:57
  often your true is option A, doesn't work, but options B and C Martin worked either,
• 47:02
  but this was pretty simple, this was get as many vaccines as you can and make sure you've got
• 47:11
  to first supplies, because obviously, you know, we all know, in investing and everywhere at
• 47:17
  all start, put all your eggs in one basket. So, so that's so it's a big fail, I mean, you can't,
• 47:23
  you know, the you've only got to compare our percentage, I think we're a bit over 7%
• 47:29
  fully vaccinated now, but we're just miles and we're miles behind and months behind and in all
• 47:35
  of those months, we're vulnerable because it may be that by, you know, keeping still thousands
• 47:42
  of Australians locked out of their own country, keeping millions of Australians, all of us locked
• 47:47
  into this country, it may be that we can, you know, the quarantine lock up will continue to work,
• 47:56
  but she, it's a very high price we're paying. I mean, imagine if we had the same level of vaccination
• 48:02
  as the Brits did or, you know, New York and California did or multi did or, you know, well, we
• 48:08
  wouldn't, we wouldn't have been locked, I mean, Sydney wouldn't have been locked down, is the
• 48:11
  simple answer because I mean, where we should have been by now, and this is what we're told,
• 48:17
  we're going to be kind of a few, we should have been in the position where you can say
• 48:21
  everybody who wants a vaccine has had one, right? And let's say that gets you to 70, but let's
• 48:31
  say that gets you to the sort of levels they're seeing in the US and other developed countries.
• 48:38
  At that point you say, look, okay, for those people who don't want to be vaccinated, you know,
• 48:43
  you've made your decision and if you get COVID, well, you know, will be very sympathetic, but ultimately
• 48:50
  that's a consequence of a decision you took, right? But the problem we've got at the moment is
• 48:56
  that we can't say you can't get on a plane unless you're vaccinated. We can't say, you know, you can't
• 49:02
  go to the theatre unless you're vaccinated. And these are all the sorts of things we should be
• 49:08
  doing, you know, we should have vaccine passports absolutely, but we can't do that because people
• 49:15
  can't get vaccinated. Not everyone can, anyway. All the other anglophone countries, they stitched
• 49:22
  up their deals with Pfizer in July of 2020. Well, it was the 5th of August that Canada signed off
• 49:28
  on. And we know that the Australian government met with Pfizer in July and then came back and asked
• 49:35
  for doses in November. Well, it's just a complete failure. Well, okay, so with Israel who probably
• 49:42
  did the biggest deal with single deal with Pfizer, oh, not the biggest, but, you know, per capita.
• 49:47
  I'm not sure. But the BB Netanyahu spent hours and hours and hours. He's the prime minister.
• 49:55
  Whatever you think of him, he spent hours and hours and hours on the phone to the head of Pfizer,
• 50:00
  to the head of Moderna, to all of the vaccine manufacturers. He made his mission
• 50:07
  to get as many vaccines as quickly as he could. And, you know, if you spoke to him, he would say,
• 50:14
  look, he said, he'd say, I knew Israel's a small country, densely settled. There was no way,
• 50:21
  you know, the quarantining social distancing thing was going to be very effective. And so,
• 50:28
  he knew that vaccination was the way out, and that he made it his mission to do that. And I,
• 50:35
  it was a fail, Josh. I mean, you know, the, I was reading an article in the Sydney Morning
• 50:40
  Hill today, which is just full of one excuse after another. I mean, that's what that's political
• 50:46
  journalism nowadays, making excuses for the government. The bottom line is, was it possible
• 50:51
  to get a plentiful supply of Pfizer, Moderna, as well as AstraZeneca? The answer is yes, because
• 51:00
  other countries did. And it was certainly possible to pay for it, or we didn't have the energy or
• 51:08
  the focus, who knows, but we're paying the price for that now. So, that's what I say. This was an
• 51:14
  unforced error. It's the biggest failure of public administration that I can recall.
• 51:20
  Let's close with the rapid fire round. I asked you some rapid fire questions when I spoke with
• 51:24
  you on ABC Sydney. So, let's do it again. There's a, I like to get your thoughts about whether
• 51:31
  something is overrated or underrated. So, I'm just going to say some things and tell me if they're
• 51:36
  overrated or underrated. Robert Menzies. I think underrated. Lamington's. I've rated.
• 51:47
  Political biographies. I would say underrated. Going to the moon, the moon landing.
• 51:58
  Oh, no, I think that's that's that's not that can't be overrated. That's definitely underrated.
• 52:02
  What about going to Mars in the future? No, underrated. I think that's I'd love that love to
• 52:09
  go to Mars. Elon Musk? Probably overrated. That's that's a fine call. It's pretty amazing
• 52:19
  innovator. Flying first class? Oh, definitely overrated.
• 52:29
  Because the, I mean, basically the object in, you know, air travel and the day when we used to be
• 52:35
  able to do that, I've always thought is and I've done a lot of it. My Chinese is to sleep. So,
• 52:41
  you know, the minute they introduced, you know, business class seats that could lay flat,
• 52:48
  that was yes. Right. So, we're comparing. As long as I'm to business. Yeah. Okay.
• 52:54
  No, I'm not interested. We're not in Jetstar seat 64b. No, no, no, no. I know the drop. In fact,
• 53:01
  the, yeah, the object is my object is all as long as I'm flat, I can sleep.
• 53:06
  Is the Prime Ministerial Jet nice? Is it nicer than a first class?
• 53:11
  Well, three or one is fabulous. The new, which I have not flown on. I commissioned or,
• 53:16
  you know, I approved the final design. There you go. And they kicked you out before you even got on.
• 53:21
  Yeah, no, no, sucks. It's a, it's an A330 sort of plane, which has been, has got a,
• 53:32
  which is actually an air in air refueler. And it's got a, it's got a PI, but they call it VIP fit
• 53:40
  out. So, it's got a, you know, nice feature for the Prime Minister and all that stuff.
• 53:45
  Maybe the plane that I used to fly around internationally on was one of the two, which I've
• 53:51
  still got, the two Boeing business jets, which are very nice. They're 737s. And they haven't,
• 53:58
  yeah, they look that, no, they're lovely because they're sort of old and noisier than a modern
• 54:04
  Airbus. I like sort of things that are, you know, a bit old and quirky too.
• 54:13
  I once, that's right, I once gave a, I once moderated an event at the Ronald Reagan Library in
• 54:19
  California for the Gidea Australia events for tourism Australia. And it was a black tie garland.
• 54:26
  They've got the, they've got Air Force one. They've got Ronald Reagan, the Air Force one that was
• 54:31
  retired, I guess, during the Reagan administration. And it's hanging there in the presidential library.
• 54:37
  And you can walk through it and you can see what Air Force one was like before the current
• 54:41
  incarnation of the 747 that it G. Yeah, I almost, I would almost rather fly around on that than on
• 54:46
  something new and fancy. The big difference I would say between say the Boeing business jets and
• 54:52
  the new plane, apart from the fact that the new plane is, you know, as bigger and, you know,
• 54:58
  new and stuff. Is it very much quieter? Yeah. Yeah. And you are, you are a crafter to be a lot quieter.
• 55:04
  There's a passage, Malcolm, in Obama's, in the first part of Obama's presidential memoir,
• 55:10
  where he talks about coming out of the, the Oval Office one evening early in his presidency.
• 55:15
  And walking along that, is it the portico, I guess, that walkway between the Oval Office and the
• 55:20
  presidency and pausing in the evening and looking up at the, the same trees and sky that Lincoln
• 55:28
  looked at and all these presidents before him looked at. And it was the first time that I read
• 55:33
  something that really made me feel what it must feel like to be a president and how sort of surreal
• 55:43
  that must be. Did you ever have any moments like that? Not quite. I slept in the, in the bedroom
• 55:57
  that John Curtin used to sleep in and which I assumed he died in. So I was sort of always wondering
• 56:05
  whether I might get one of his ghosts. There are two, there are two sort of main bedrooms in the
• 56:14
  lodge. One on the western side and one on the, on the eastern side of the house and the one on the
• 56:25
  western side, unfortunately, it's, you can't sleep in that room and open a window. So it's
• 56:33
  essentially, and I, I was like to have some fresh air. So that room, which is called the Menzies room,
• 56:40
  I did not sleep in other than a couple of times. And then I, when I moved over to the other side
• 56:46
  of the house, which is not quite as noisy and you can open the window and get some fresh air. So
• 56:54
  that was a, that was a statement about ventilation, not stating about politics.
• 57:00
  Will Josh Friedenberg make a good Prime Minister? I think he would actually. Yes, I think he would.
• 57:06
  I didn't use the conditional. I use the future tense, but I was just assuming he will be.
• 57:10
  Well, I mean, he's, he's absolutely, that's his mission. And he's, and I look at, yeah, I think he's
• 57:18
  a, he's a very human humane, you know, intelligent, energetic person. He's got, you know, his wife,
• 57:26
  Amy, who I'm sure you, you know, wonderful woman and, you know, very, very full bearings or
• 57:33
  political spouses have to be. Because it's not much time for anything other than politics,
• 57:39
  if you're a politician, but I'd say, you know, he's a, he's good, but I think the, you know,
• 57:46
  how, how that all plays out, who knows. I mean, I, I always thought Morrison was most likely to
• 57:53
  succeed me, if I'd fallen under a bus, as it were. And I thought that, you know, Josh is probably
• 58:01
  the next cab off the ramp, but it depends what happens. I mean, I think if Shorten had won the last
• 58:05
  election, Josh would have definitely become opposition leader. I think there's any doubt about that,
• 58:11
  but, you know, that's, I mean, that is a, getting from being opposition leader to being Prime
• 58:16
  Minister is very hard. So we will see it. I wouldn't see Scott resigning in office, to be honest.
• 58:24
  I think Scott sees to be Prime Minister when he, if and when he loses an election.
• 58:29
  Yes, or when the party turns on him, perhaps as it is sometimes work to do.
• 58:33
  Oh, very, very much. Well, one of the problems, of course, is that the, you know, that we all
• 58:39
  deplore instability and leadership. But, you know, a lot of people in Labor, quite reasonably,
• 58:46
  say, well, you know, the Labor Party got flayed for their changes of leadership. But if you look at
• 58:51
  the coalition had, has had three p.m.s in three terms. And it's still in office. Mind you, I mean,
• 59:01
  the difference was when I became p.m. you know, after Abbott, we had an enormous lift in
• 59:10
  approval. I mean, we were heading to obliteration with Tony, you know, and there was this massive
• 59:17
  relief rally. It was sort of the reverse when I got rolled. I mean, my deposition was not popular
• 59:24
  with the country, but the public at all. But ultimately, Morrison was able to, you know,
• 59:31
  have the election at the latest possible date pretty much. And he, and, you know, shortened managed
• 59:38
  to make himself unelectable. So that's why, you know, said in my book, you know, the 2019
• 59:44
  was an election that the Labor Party lost. The election, the Labor Party lost and the coalition
• 59:52
  didn't deserve to win. I think that's, I think most fair-minded observers would agree with that.
• 59:57
  I was at a fancy sware full of left-leaning media people who I won't mention. And I was the only
• 1:00:04
  person who was saying that I thought that Scott Morrison would win the election. Everyone else
• 1:00:08
  was convinced that Bill Shorten was going to win. But I agree with the assessment that it was,
• 1:00:15
  there was Bill Shorten's election that was lost. Is Anthony Albanese going to be prime minister?
• 1:00:20
  I don't know. I think he's, I'm not confident that he could win. I think he's, I think,
• 1:00:27
  Morrison is more likely to win the election, but it's not a very inspiring choice. And I think,
• 1:00:35
  you know, both sides will, in effect, be playing with having, you know, campaign to pretty
• 1:00:42
  low expectations, you know, be it sort of low, you know, but kind of be competition to see who
• 1:00:48
  can be the smallest, smaller target. I mean, the thing that troubles me is that the opposition,
• 1:00:59
  and I'd just say it's not as a partisan, you know, just being, trying to be objective.
• 1:01:04
  Yeah. What troubles me is that the opposition does not seem to be able to hold the government to
• 1:01:09
  account. You know, I don't, and I think that's partly because of the air cover that the
• 1:01:14
  Murdoch media give the government, which is, you know, considerable. I mean, they have a sort of
• 1:01:21
  relationship now with Morrison, you know, almost the white fox head with Trump. And the,
• 1:01:29
  so things like the sports courts or these, you know, this car park,
• 1:01:34
  grant scandal, you know, these are things that would have, if they'd occurred in my time in
• 1:01:40
  government or thinking habits or predecessors, it would have been, would have shaken the government
• 1:01:46
  to its foundations, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore. You know, there doesn't seem to be
• 1:01:51
  accountability, does not seem to exist anymore. And I find that very, very, very troubling.
• 1:02:00
  You know, and of course, the problem is if the message that that politicians get is that they
• 1:02:05
  can get away with anything, then, you know, that obviously they will do more. Harkening back to
• 1:02:11
  our earlier conversation about politics and winning elections, if you were the political advisor to
• 1:02:16
  Anthony Albany, see, how would you package everything that you just said into a one-line attack
• 1:02:22
  on the government? God, I should ask Tony Abbott that. He's the, he's the, I was at that,
• 1:02:29
  I was at Dutton or one of those, right, when Natalem said that, you know, Malcolm can't say anything
• 1:02:34
  in less than 3,000 words, and I said, look, I think the, I think, yeah, I think I've got plenty
• 1:02:44
  smart people, but they, I mean, there were so many weird things about Shorten, and then he,
• 1:02:51
  I've written about this in my book, and I don't, I've got no animosity towards him at all,
• 1:02:55
  at none, but he could not express himself with conviction, because I, you know, I like, I,
• 1:03:05
  nobody, you know, watched him as placelessly as I did, because, you know, I would give a speech
• 1:03:10
  and he would reply, and very often he had a really good speech, someone had written a fantastic speech
• 1:03:16
  right, or he'd written that, I don't know, and his delivery was so inauthentic that I sometimes wanted
• 1:03:23
  to jump up and say, look, well, give me the speech, and I'll read it for you, you know, because it's
• 1:03:28
  just, I could have done much better job, or just a wing at, or something, yeah, no, but I think,
• 1:03:33
  so this is my theory, my theory is, if you get a lot of people in politics, and I think Julie,
• 1:03:39
  Gouart, wasn't it like this too, who are, their, in politics, their whole life, they are terribly
• 1:03:46
  self-conscious, they affectionately create their own persona, and everything their persona is kind of
• 1:03:53
  calculated, and therefore it inevitably comes across as inauthentic, and that's now, obviously,
• 1:04:02
  if you are authentically a grating, alienating, person-person, then you gotta, they have to moderate
• 1:04:10
  your authenticity. It didn't hurt on a term, the fact that I think, shortened, shortened is a better
• 1:04:16
  person than the person that came across, that's my, I mean, it's, it's, I mean, and Julie,
• 1:04:21
  definitely, it's like that, I mean, I remember, he wasn't, it might have been John Key, it was a
• 1:04:28
  foreign leader, he said to me, and he said, I can't understand the difference between Gouart
• 1:04:34
  in a conversation, you know, like a meeting where she is warm, smart, you know, engaging,
• 1:04:43
  constructive, all, you know, all of the things point you have to lock it up to be, but then he
• 1:04:48
  said, when she gets up on a platform with a microphone, suddenly it's this stiff awkward,
• 1:04:54
  you know, in fakes, not the white word, you know, but, you know, very self-conscious.
• 1:04:59
  Well, I mean, fake sort of is the right word, not that she was fake, but that there's a semblance
• 1:05:03
  of fake. There's, there's, I think, what, this is all a very long roundabout way of, I was,
• 1:05:08
  I was saying that it comes down to trust, I think, I mean, I think that was the death, the shortened
• 1:05:13
  deficit. And you see, that's, and you see therein lies the problem, you know, Trump was like,
• 1:05:18
  in many ways, well, most ways, very appalling, but he was authentic. He was authentically appalling.
• 1:05:24
  Yeah. And, you know, he wasn't a, you know, greedy, selfish, arrogant, narcissistic,
• 1:05:31
  billionaire, pretending to be, you know, mother to razor. Yeah, that's right. So I think the,
• 1:05:37
  but, so I think, you know, authenticity is critically important, but I'll tell you another story
• 1:05:42
  about labor, which fascinates me. I won't say who it was because it was embarrassing, but
• 1:05:47
  it was just, it was about six weeks before the 2019 election, I bumped into one of the leading
• 1:05:53
  labor figures, and I said, oh, you know, hi, how you going? He said, oh, we're going great,
• 1:05:59
  we're going to win. I said, oh, okay, we'll put it off good work. And I said, oh, just by the way,
• 1:06:04
  I said, how's the franken credits thing going? I said, I'm really amazed you haven't
• 1:06:11
  well in that back. That's a, the Realms are really bad idea. And he said, we will not lose one vote
• 1:06:18
  over franken credits. I said, you're kidding. He said, no, we will not lose one vote. I said, look,
• 1:06:25
  believe me, I said, you lose tons of votes. You may not lose enough to lose the election,
• 1:06:31
  but it is, it's poison, absolute poison. And he then proceeded to give me a lecture
• 1:06:37
  about why the franken credit, you know, this is the cash refund of the franken credits,
• 1:06:42
  was a bad policy that shouldn't have been introduced in 2001. And I said, look, I agree with you.
• 1:06:48
  I said, I actually, I think it was, it was a bad idea, but I said, you got to remember the
• 1:06:52
  Labor Party supported it. It was there actually, I think it might have meant that idea first.
• 1:06:56
  So I said, yes, that is it. We're not in 2001. I said, how can you, I said, you know, I said,
• 1:07:04
  you know, spoken to so many retirees and, you know, these are not wealthy people who are just
• 1:07:11
  horrified by this. I said, you've got to, you know, this is a, this is having a, we'll have a real
• 1:07:16
  impact on retirees' incomes. Well, just, you know, didn't swap it. Now, what I thought was
• 1:07:25
  interesting was, I mean, here are my, the plutocrat, Dweller and my half a side mansion, you know,
• 1:07:32
  supposedly out of touch with aspirations and needs of, you know, the bad ones. And here's
• 1:07:38
  this guy, a Labor Party stalwart, just completely and utterly out of touch, just as was ultimately
• 1:07:46
  demonstrated. So, you know, it's a, it's interesting. I mean, I, I thought that, that was a, you know,
• 1:07:53
  that is interesting because what it also shows is that they, that this person didn't understand
• 1:07:59
  that ultimately what people were going to vote on was less about the details of the, the policy
• 1:08:05
  and more about whether or not they wanted to entrust Bill Shorten with a complicated policy
• 1:08:10
  that they didn't understand. Well, yeah, because they also didn't want to have money taken out of
• 1:08:15
  their pocket. I mean, you know, but I mean, how smart you have to be to work out that in, you know,
• 1:08:21
  if you give somebody, however, as a grant or, you know, tax breaker, whatever, and if you give
• 1:08:28
  someone a dollar, they may or may not acknowledge it, be grateful for it, recognize it, they may,
• 1:08:36
  just as likely that should have been two dollars. You take ten cents of that away from them and they
• 1:08:41
  want to kill you. Maybe, maybe, but I reckon, I promised you chocolate. Well, well, put it this way.
• 1:08:49
  Do you reckon, do you reckon that there's no way that a Bob Hawke or a Bill Clinton couldn't have
• 1:08:54
  gotten that over the line? Oh, I mean, you didn't have to be Paul Hawke or Bill Clinton. I mean,
• 1:09:00
  any sensible person. Yeah, the way to get it over the line was obviously with tax changes.
• 1:09:06
  You get what is called the distributional analysis on the AKO. We'll do that for you. I think most
• 1:09:12
  of the stuff is public and you basically work out who is benefiting from this tax break and,
• 1:09:19
  you know, in what amounts. And so, once you conclude that 80% of the people that are affected by
• 1:09:26
  are only getting cash credits and tracking credits of 10 grand or less, you say, right, you know,
• 1:09:33
  won't apply to payments of 10,000 or less or 15,000 or less. There's tons of ways you can do that.
• 1:09:40
  Now, the problem, of course, is that that probably isn't going to give you the revenue gain.
• 1:09:45
  But also, what you just said is not, it doesn't, it doesn't make for a sexy ad. I mean, I love
• 1:09:51
  you, Mel, but that, but you've just reverted back to the 13 point plan style of politics, right?
• 1:09:57
  And I don't think that would have helped shorten because at the end of the day,
• 1:09:59
  you could have taken a frame at all of the amendments that you wanted to. And if people didn't trust
• 1:10:04
  him, he wouldn't have gotten across the line. Yeah, but you cannot make a sexy ad that makes a
• 1:10:10
  soft-funded retiree feel good about taking money out of his or her pocket. He's what I saw,
• 1:10:16
  he's what I saw. And I've said this on the podcast before a few days before the election Bob Hawke
• 1:10:22
  died. And Bill Shorten came on the telly and I was presenting the Weekend Breakfast Show in 2019
• 1:10:30
  on ABC TV. So it's been a lot of time watching, you know, these, I was going to say,
• 1:10:34
  droning, boring, you know, press conferences by politicians as they were, as we took them alive
• 1:10:38
  before coming back to the studio. And this is the lion of the Labor Party who's just been lost.
• 1:10:45
  Right. This is the person who was the shining light on the hill, if you want, that Bill Shorten
• 1:10:51
  was, was aspiring to be and who was his mentor, his own personal mentor. And he gets up there
• 1:10:59
  and he goes, I'm not going to cancel my trip to Perth because I could, I could do all of the things
• 1:11:05
  that make people think that I'm mourning for Bob Hawke, but I'm not going to pander that way.
• 1:11:11
  I'm going to continue to do what's right for Australia. And I looked at it and I thought,
• 1:11:15
  if you can't make me feel something about the loss of the most important man in your political life,
• 1:11:22
  how is my aunt going to trust that the ten cents in the dollar that you're taking out of her pocket
• 1:11:28
  is the right policy? Yeah, yeah. No, all I think that's, that's a fair point. And that's what
• 1:11:33
  was missing. So that gets back to that issue of trust. There's a real, just getting back to the
• 1:11:38
  fundamental problem in politics at the moment is this, this sort of anti-science, anti-reality,
• 1:11:48
  you know, populism that is, you know, taking over so much of the right particularly,
• 1:11:55
  political spectrum, you know, cultural wars, denial of biology, saying COVID isn't
• 1:12:01
  serious and masks don't work and vaccines are bad and you know, like, here's an interesting
• 1:12:07
  thing, in America at the moment, of the 22 states that have the highest levels of vaccination,
• 1:12:15
  all of them voted for Biden. Well, the states with the lowest amount of vaccination,
• 1:12:21
  all of them voted for Trump. So the people that listen to Fox News and other right wing media
• 1:12:30
  are getting this diet of, you know, anti-vax propaganda, all that sort of thing. I saw on,
• 1:12:36
  I saw on social media that they're running out of, yeah, they're running out of ventilators in
• 1:12:41
  Missouri. They've got a COVID, you know, and these are, these are all people who have had access to
• 1:12:45
  the vaccine, obviously, for quite some time. And you look at, you know, like the Northeeds corner,
• 1:12:52
  they've all got massive levels of vaccination. Yeah, although I must say, I do know a lot of
• 1:12:59
  hippie-dippy lefty in the city Instagram mums who don't, who are anti-vax as well. So this is,
• 1:13:06
  this is a problem on the left too. Do you, just speaking of the culture wars since you raised it,
• 1:13:10
  are you worried about our intolerance towards sort of speech? I mean, where do you fall on,
• 1:13:15
  you said small or liberal at the beginning of this conversation? I'm a free speech person. I
• 1:13:20
  absolutely reject cancel culture. I reject intolerance regardless of whether it comes from the left
• 1:13:27
  or the right. I'm great believer that everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but not to their
• 1:13:32
  own facts. So that's, you know, that's where I often part company with, you know, with the people
• 1:13:37
  on the right, because it's obviously denialism about global warming has just been, you know, the worst
• 1:13:42
  aspect of all of this. Yeah, I mean, that's catastrophic, but I mean, in terms of being a smaller
• 1:13:48
  liberal, the the upsurge of, I suppose, sensoriousness on the left or, you know, the haste with which
• 1:13:54
  people will jump to the worst possible interpretation of their opponent's arguments. Oh, yeah, it was
• 1:13:59
  left. But this is, but this is where, so this is the sort of social media thing. I mean,
• 1:14:03
  that one is, but one of the best things you can do for your sanity is not, not read it.
• 1:14:08
  You've got to be very careful with, particularly if you're in public life with social media,
• 1:14:12
  because you know, if you take, it's a very important means of communication, but if you start
• 1:14:18
  taking too much of it to heart, you'll become, you know, you become very sad. No, that's true,
• 1:14:24
  but I mean, I do worry somewhat that the moreays of social media are bleeding out into the rest
• 1:14:30
  of the media as well. And there are all kinds of things that we could talk about here that would
• 1:14:35
  potentially get me fired, you know, from my employer for simply having a conversation about,
• 1:14:41
  because there are an increasing number of tripwires. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, mate,
• 1:14:45
  terrific to talk to you. Thank you very much, Josh. I hope to see you in the next soon.