Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / BOB CARR on Diplomacy, Statesmanship and Grief

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BOB CARR on Diplomacy, Statesmanship and Grief · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, and wow, we cover a lot
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  in this chat, even if you are not Australian. Trust me, you want to listen to this conversation
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  with Bob Carr, one of the sort of greatest elder statesmen of Australian political life.
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  He is an iconoclast, he is a champion debater, he is a student of American history of geopolitics
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  of diplomacy. He also happens to be the longest continuously serving premier of the most
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  popular state in New South Wales. That means that he was effectively what Americans would
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  call the governor of New South Wales from 1995 to 2005. He steps down voluntarily. His
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  reign presided over the Sydney Olympic Games and really a big resurgence in the life of Sydney
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  as kind of a transitioning, I suppose, from a bit of a regional backwater to being the global
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  city that it is today. He then went on after his premiership of New South Wales to become the
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  foreign minister of Australia under two prime ministers, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
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  But he's so much more than that, he's a deep thinker about liberal democracy, about how to
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  structure the global order about China, about Trump, about the United States. For the first
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  portion of this conversation, we do talk about his premiership and about New South Wales and about
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  things that might be of more interest to local listeners. If you're not interested in that,
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  don't give up, skip through, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, something like that, because the final hour
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  is a really interesting reflection about what it means to lead a successful life, what it means
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  to be a statesman and a diplomat and what it means indeed to be a widower as someone who lost
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  his life partner not all that long ago. Please enjoy as much as I did a total delight, the one
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  and only Bob Carr. I mean, it is amazing how much the media landscape has changed over the past
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  few years in terms of where people are getting information from and how young people are consuming
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  information. There's like perils as well as opportunities, obviously, in any one being able to
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  have an audience the size of Joe Rogan's, I guess. What was it like when you first became premier,
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  did you have a conception of the go-to media outlets that you had to go through them as sort of
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  mandatory? Yeah, but everything was covered in the daily media conference,
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  covered all bases, just about. Did you do a press conference every day? Just about, yeah.
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  Yeah, it was nice sometimes to offer them a bit of light and shade by vanishing for a period,
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  but they just wanted you all the more. Yeah. And in the mornings, I remember one curiosity that
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  we'd interest you when I started as premier, the tension between Lawers and James was acute
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  really on Lawers' side. So your appearance on James would arouse in him for a rages jealousy.
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  In John Lawers. Yeah. Right. So this was a time, this is mid-90s, right? Yes, yes.
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  Roll the 30th anniversary yesterday by election as premier. Oh, the 30th. 30 years yesterday.
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  Oh, wow. I had drinks with staff last night. Fabulous. What stood out as highlights?
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  What? As you were reminiscing with them. All the fun, the sluggish 1995 election that we won.
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  Wasn't a surprise. It was to me. I'm a pessimist. It was narrow in the end. A few busloads of
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  voters determined that so every, everything counted to what do you attribute your ability to then
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  grow that slice of the pie? The instinct of the electorate to back a first-term government
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  and our success after stuff ups, to learn our lessons and hold the middle ground. What was a lesson?
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  Lots of lessons, but not taking them by surprise. The public. Yeah, being able to lead them through
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  an argument. I mean, it was early in the second term that I was able to talk about the medically
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  supervised injecting room. I wouldn't have had the psychological strength to pull that off
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  in the first term. And just for people who don't know, this was a facility in which drug addicts
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  would be able to go and safely acquire needles and die on the stream and it's controversial,
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  because obviously people say, well, why are you allowing drug addicts to inject themselves?
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  And I had to explain to people that this was not a heroin trial. It was not decriminalization
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  of heroin. The legal status of the drug didn't change. But we were saying that if you are addicted
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  to the thing, there is a space for you to retreat, where there will be paramedics on hand,
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  and that saved lives. When you say that you sort of had faith in your ability to articulate a
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  long form arguments to the electorate, where did that faith come from? Because a lot of people.
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  From a big election win. Right. Okay. Okay. I mean, a lot of politics is a psychological game.
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  And if you've got a big election win behind you, you know the listening when you're leading
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  them through a difficult nuance. Right. This is after your election, after your second election.
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  Yeah. I've been reluctant. And in the first term, many people's instinct, especially, can be,
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  if they're cautious minded, can be to try to keep things simple, keep it simple, stupid,
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  don't over complicate things. You know, the electorate doesn't have a long attention span.
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  People aren't paying that much attention to politics. Talk about tax cards, whatever it might be,
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  you know, that whatever the popular things are, and don't get into the weeds on too much stuff.
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  Did you have people suggesting that in your first term? I learned that the electorate
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  is prepared to forgive you. If you can say, I'm sorry, I got that wrong, but I've learned from that
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  mistake. Do you think that still has true? I think it would be yeah. Yeah.
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  We have a tendency to judge politicians quite harshly when they flip flop.
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  You know, or how can you even trust what this person believes? Five years ago, they said this,
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  now they're saying something completely different. I wonder if that's a harsher instinct now
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  than it was 30 years ago. Well, we've got to remember what George Orwell said. When the evidence
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  changes, I change my opinion. What would you do? What would you do? And I think if you've got the
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  confidence to put that to the electorate, they will give you a second chance. More than that,
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  more than that, they'll say, well, Bob is explained why he did that. And I think it makes sense.
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  And on Alan Jones and John Laws, yes, I worked for Alan in my first big job out of university
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  as a producer and knew him well. He was a friend and mentor. Was there ever a calculus in your mind
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  where it's like, well, I have to do this show versus the other because I'm going to totally piss off
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  one of them if I don't do? Well, when I was elected Premier 1995, Jones had become a phenomenon.
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  He worked so hard at building those ratings. You'd know more about it than I, but he would be out
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  every night addressing a rotary or a charity gathering. And every letter got a response. Again,
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  you'd know all of that, the fanatic. The tsunami of correspondence that I was frequently tasked
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  with. And he's best. He was an on-budgetment. He'd take up someone's case. He'd press it with
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  government. And if a minister responded, even with one case, a handwritten note, facts to him,
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  which is what he'd do in those days, he'd be a few of you. So he built these ratings and he was
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  overtaking clearly, he occupied a richeterratory in the radio timetable, the ratings from 530
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  to 9. So he demanded first call, but that upset. I remember when I was a bulletin journalist,
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  when I got invited to say something about state politics on the laws program, you were aware
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  that everyone was listening to you, but Jones moved into the earlier segment and made himself
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  a phenomenon of our time. So we went there, but that upset John. Yeah, I was happy to deal with
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  both of that very present exchanges with both of them in a dinner or a lunch.
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  Did Jones hold your feature of the fire on anything policy-wise? Oh, a lot of times he
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  sought to influence a policy outcome. And did you find that to be constructive and in good faith?
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  Or again, I'm quoting George Orwell, George Orwell said on one occasion, just because the
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  daily telegraph says something, it doesn't mean it's wrong. I found myself saying to a minister,
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  Alan's running this furious campaign for a drag strip in Western Sydney is a very specialized
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  motor event, just cars roaring down a single stretch of road. Right. And I said, he may be right.
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  He's campaigning on it because he's picked up the group that wants a drag racing strip.
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  And he might be right. So see if we can give it to him. Another occasion is just asking us to back
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  one factor and over another in the police force. And he was very good at peeing up whistleblowers.
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  And I think if they were a flaw in his motor's operandi, it was to assume a whistleblower was always
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  right. There was definitely an instinct to side with the little guy. I mean, that was the
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  stick if not the reality always. I remember there was a moment when there were all those failed
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  apartment buildings in Sydney. There were the cracks and people were out of their homes because
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  they'd bought them from Shoddy, you know, builders and so on. And he had premier Gladys Berragiclian
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  on the show and just went into her saying, give them the stamp duty back. Give them back their
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  stamp duty. And this was his cause, Salab. This was the most important thing for him just to
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  get the state government to refund the stamp duty tax, which you pay when you buy a property
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  to these people who'd bought these turkeys of a property. And I think it worked. From memory,
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  I think she did it off the back of his counting. One campaign going that there should be
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  state government support for anyone who lost a property in a flood or bushfire. And I said,
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  Alan, we just can't open up the budget responsibility to be the insurer of last resort. We can't,
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  that's not an option for me. No one would ensure a property if they knew the government.
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  Well, that's right. Yeah, exactly. To put the insurance business industry out of business.
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  And it would be a massive liability on our books that the ratings agencies would have judged us on.
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  But the on budget quality was his great strength. And people, I think people assumed, even if he
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  got it wrong, even if he was going too far, he was someone who might champion their courts.
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  Yes, if they needed. Yeah. That's right. What do you make of the, what was your attitude towards
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  all of the rumors swirling around him at the time? I mean, now that he's been arrested, obviously,
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  I don't want to preach up to court case and I'm not implying that he's guilty or anything. But
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  there is this whole that I have been somewhat uneasy about the glee with which everyone is now
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  in lockstep about a set of alleged misdeeds when as far as I'm aware, and I was a bit too young to
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  be aware of the narrative as it existed in elite circles, but I'm told that it was an open secret
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  that he was a little bit flirtatious and inappropriate and handsy for years. And so now all of a sudden
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  that he has no political power. I'm not saying it's a witch hunter that you didn't happen. I don't
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  know anything, but do you remember that being a narrative? My instinct would have been, it's not
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  of our business. It's his private life. And he's asking questions that the public want the answers to
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  in any case, we're taking as we find him. And he's meanwhile, the public have judged
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  in those rating surveys that they want to listen to him. And occasionally someone would say,
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  someone from the left of politics would say, why do you go on Jones and Laws? And my response was
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  even if they hostile in an interview, I get marks, including from other newsrooms,
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  for fronting up. And if they're 90% hostile, what if I intrude an argument?
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  that boasts a state government achievement or gets people thinking about the other side of the
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  case. And I was confident in asking my debating ability to think, I'll go on, you'll be hostile,
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  you'll be angry, you'll be fuming, you'll be cutting me off. But if I, the test is to retain my
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  cool during all of that, says, I welcome the professional engagement, I like debating, I'd
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  define myself as a, as a debater, as a, did you look forward to it? When you woke up on the
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  morning that you knew you had to talk to him at 705, how are you feeling? Oh, no, it was always a
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  bit of nerves. It was, it was a test, because you didn't know what direction you might be
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  you're off in. But if it was a subject where it can only be, the exchange can only be positive,
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  it was, there aren't a lot of those, especially in the second half, especially in the second half
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  of the term, where he was very hostile, and he campaigned for the other side in the 2003 election.
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  Yeah, no, I mean, I think you're completely right that there's a, I get constantly frustrated
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  with political figures who think that there's something to be gained in only doing softball interviews
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  or only doing, you know, very short format interviews on might be 730 or something like that,
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  where you know that it's only going to last for five or six minutes. There's a virtue in
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  being harrained for 20 minutes by somebody, because you might land a punch, as is that.
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  Yeah, and I spoke to John Howard about it once. He had a roughing up on Jones, I said, I
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  heard you at the, the other morning, John, I said, I said, what you did was retain your cool,
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  that's the challenge, what he's getting more excited, more worked up, you've got to take a step back.
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  Are you sure about that? Are you sure about that as a strategy?
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  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it does, as you know, the electronic is a cool medium,
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  no, that from a time of, but I've lost some of the most memorable moments of which I'm proud
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  as Tim Broadcasting have been where I've allowed myself to lose it a bit, not get hysterical,
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  but I remember during the black summer bushfires in 2020, or after the death of the queen,
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  or like some moment where you, where you have a sense that there's a national
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  anger and frustration that needs to be channeled and needs to be given voice to, or something's not being
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  fair. What are the queens doing? Oh, it wasn't that case, it wasn't anger, in that case,
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  it was sorrow, in that case, it was a kind of a national grieving and speaking in a way that
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  did not conform necessarily to the proper pomp and piety of the moment, but in a more raw way.
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  But just a certain amount of authenticity that if like, if a bully is coming for you,
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  isn't there sometimes a utility in slapping back and being like, Alan, stop it, I know what you're
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  doing, you know, or whatever the case may be, you never took that tack. Oh, I did know he was
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  getting stuck in to be once during coming, it's in the, yeah, so far back, it's in the near
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  Paleolithic, it was the the Warftus feud of 1998, and he thought I should have used the police
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  to have cracked heads on the picket line and allowed the strikebreakers, the scabs
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  through onto the warves to do the jobs of the guys who had been sacked just for belonging
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  to the union. And I said, Alan, it's not my job to give instructions to the police commissioner,
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  but I said they didn't behave any differently from the police in Victoria or under a liberal
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  government and a premier candidate in respect to the picket lines down there on the Melbourne
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  and he just exploded with anger, I suppose to be an interview about my state budget the day before,
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  but in fact he turned it into and by just standing firm, I made my point and I'm told that the
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  TV newsrooms, other radio newsrooms, thought it was a great stash because he said we're going to,
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  we're going to, I'm going to hold you there, going to come back after the 730 news and I'd
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  never done that to my knowledge before. Fabulous. And someone else got bumped.
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  But at what? I was in Fadi, right? I stated my name. Yeah. And he didn't back down, but I thought
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  that was good radio. It was entertaining and full of personality. I'm surprised also at how
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  intellectual, I mean, I don't want this to all become an Alan Jones thing, but I think that
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  he exemplifies a bunch of interesting other things that are going on in the world. The capacity of
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  the public to understand an intellectual argument, the point that you were making about your first term
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  and having some faith that if you articulate something clearly, the public will be with you.
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  I really think we're at risk of underestimating the capacity of the public to understand things.
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  He was a ferociously intelligent broadcaster. Whatever you thought of his politics, whatever you
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  thought of his bombast, he was pitching extremely high intellectually and linguistically and how
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  articulate he was and the sophistication of the ideas and the things that he was addressing.
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  Is there a risk, I mean, obviously in my industry, I'm worried about the dumbing down of
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  podcasts, the dumbing down of the news, a certain amount of conformism and echo chambers in
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  the legacy media, kind of staleness, a staleness, a lack of boisterousness, a lack of playfulness,
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  a lack of, I guess just expecting that there seems to be an expectation at the moment from both
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  establishment elites in politics and also in the media that you're always safest to give the
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  simplest explanation to the lowest common denominator. I don't know if you see that.
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  Well, the ABC news on television, when I watch it, can lead with a murder.
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  My view is the public's more intelligent. They don't, an ABC listener's in particular, are not
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  drawn to a news report of a murder. Police coming out of a fibro cottage with murder weapons.
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  They're more interested in the driver of our time, which is the debauchery of American politics,
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  the Trump phenomenon. That's what they're more interested in.
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  And what about our politics? I mean, as well, you know, there's,
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  this is interesting how newsrooms decide what matters. Why exactly does a murder even matter?
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  Yeah, I don't think it does. It's part of a crime scene. It's always been there. It doesn't shed light on
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  the, on, on, on, on human nature. Meanwhile, there's a huge geostatic drama taking place. The,
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  the world's dominant power is undergoing what looks like a political nervous breakdown. It's
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  going to test the viability of the oldest written constitution in the world.
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  America is disposing of allies and entering a period of great power competition and negotiation
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  with Russia and China, disposing of its precious alliance system. This, this is the
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  and and with drawing from so many world engagements, they could be out of the world bank. They
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  could land the 101st Airborne Division in Greenland and gestate it. Trump values two things in
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  international policy above all else tariffs, which he sees as a positive good, not something that
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  can wreck the world economy and an alliance with Russia. De facto alliance with Russia.
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  So Trump's defenders will say the Greenland staff, the Canada staff, the Panama staff,
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  it's all even half the tariff staff is rhetoric. It's him putting bargaining pressure on people.
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  You know, he's him blustering how much of it actually comes through on the question of Russia.
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  They may make arguments like, well, you want to isolate China. You want a sideline China. There's no
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  harm in necessarily having a better relationship with Russia, even if it doesn't, is on seemingly
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  way. Shame. What do you make of the mainstream arguments? So not crazy. That argument applied
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  in the first term. You could say it's rhetoric taking seriously, but not literally, not in the
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  second term. Because what he's doing with Canada is tipping the Canadian economy into recession
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  and creating an anti-American current in the politics of Canada that was never there before.
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  What he's doing with the Europeans, even the headlines of the New York Times this morning,
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  confirm that they've now got a operate on their own. They can't assume that NATO works. NATO had
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  been cultivated. The transatlantic alliance, which NATO was one part of, had been cultivated by
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  all previous US presidents since Harry Truman. And now that's dumped. And a working relationship
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  with Russia is one thing. But the closeness he seems to be craving with an autocratic
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  Russia is something, something different. And it's not just rhetorical. Is it necessary for
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  European countries to be basically at the end of the day responsible for their own defense?
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  Yes, but it does mean a burden. It does mean huge stress, stress on their economies and on
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  their politics. America was getting deriving big strategic benefits from a manageable investment
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  in European security. For example, when America walked into Afghanistan, it had NATO, every
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  NATO country contributing to back what turned out to be a mistaken war and the longest war in American
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  history. But for every year of that mistaken war, America had Norway and France and Britain
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  supporting its forces. But do you think that it doesn't get the bulk of those countries in
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  the absence of NATO? It got Australia. We're not in NATO. Got a bunch of other countries.
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  When I talk about NATO, I'm not just talking about the words on paper in a document,
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  I'm talking about the whole ethos around the transatlantic relationship. Build on trust,
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  build on cooperation. But the Trumpist says, yes, we want trust and cooperation on
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  an equal footing. They're not building trust. They're not building trust. When the vice
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  president of the US goes to the Munich Strategic Conference, he says to the most important and
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  powerful and biggest NATO partner, Germany, I'm not meeting your chancellor. I'm meeting the leader
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  of the alternative for Deutschland, which is a racist, anti-immigrant far-right populist party.
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  As vice president of the US, I'm going to sit down with their leader, but you as a chancellor
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  of Germany, I haven't got time to meet. That's right. Yes. I mean, the unholy alliance,
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  the footsie that's being played between the Margaret Wright and the United States and the far-right
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  in Europe is worrying unseemly. But it's a discrete question, I think, from the question of whether or
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  not we're a global capital city to be attacked again, like 9-11, the global community would come
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  together in a collective retaliation, whether or not there's unity and harmony between
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  the countries of NATO, the way that it has been conceived since World War II.
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  America's competitive advantage in the world up against rivals, Russia, China, has been
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  its soft power. Part of that soft power has been an alliance system.
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  Countries putting their hands up, Japan, South Korea, not just the Europeans, to be aligned with
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  the United States. After the 2023 Russian invasion of Ukraine, you had Sweden and Finland put their
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  hands up to join NATO, a huge source of American strength. This new president has abandoned it,
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  just abandoned it when the Europeans are looking for a continuation of America's deterrent power.
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  But presumably the American attitude is there was a landscape after World War II that made sense
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  in which it was necessary for America in its posture vis-a-vis the Soviet Union to extend its
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  security guarantee all the way to the edge of the Soviet space. Nowadays, there's no reason why
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  wealthy people in Europe who are more populist than Americans are, who have an economy that's
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  larger than America's, who have nuclear weapons in several of those countries, can't have their
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  own nuclear umbrella for their own deterrence of Russia, and we will collaborate with them on
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  whatever we need to collaborate with them on. And vice versa, what's wrong with that?
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  Two points. One of the advantages of the U.S. alliance system is that many countries that had the
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  power to have nuclear weapons were safe in not having nuclear weapons. Japan, South Korea are
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  examples, and in Europe, Poland. Well, the French are talking to the Poles now about extending
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  the French nuclear umbrella, so Poland. Yeah, we've got to hope that... And would that be happening
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  where it not for Trump? Would that be happening where it not for Trump? No, it wouldn't, it wouldn't,
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  but it is that better than what we've lived with. The point is he is a hugely disruptive
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  prison, and it remains a mystery that he's so over-accommodating for Russia. There is, by the way,
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  an element of truth in that, in what you point to about NATO and Russia, why is a huge mistake
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  going back to the Clinton presidency to attempt to expand NATO up to the borders of Russia,
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  the Russian Federation? That was threatening to the Russians, because it meant recruiting
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  to the Western Alliance, countries had been part of the old Soviet Union, right up to the borders
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  of Russia. Given that Russia has got no natural barriers, just this vast plain, there's always been
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  an invitation for invaders, the French adjourned. It was written... And the Russians in the other
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  direction, certainly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, as they roll a few of the invaders back. As the Zara's power
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  expanded into, after the time of Friedrich, Peter the Great, but yes, that was a mistake
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  instead of building a new security architecture for Europe that had Russia part of it, even recruiting
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  Russia for NATO. Don't go anywhere, humans. We'll be right back. I mean, just to play levels
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  advocate on NATO again, there was always going to be a question at some point, whether or not,
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  voters in Oregon and Alabama were going to be crazy about sending their kids off to fight a war
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  because Estonia got invaded. That was always going to be alive as a question, and so does that mean,
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  or let's say it's not invaded, but Russia sends in little green men who, you know, there's an
• 29:47
  uproot, it's all of a sudden, there's up, we don't know who these people are. Well, Russia has to
• 29:51
  keep the peace. The isolation has just never finished thought. So it is not insane to me that you
• 29:57
  want to relocate the locus of the deterrent to Berlin and Paris and London from Washington DC.
• 30:07
  Yeah, that's not an irrational response. And I think one factor, one factor in support for Trump
• 30:15
  is a sense in those great lakes, states that voted for Biden, but then swung to Trump,
• 30:24
  as voted for Trump originally in 2016, Michigan was an example, a feeling in those states
• 30:34
  that our American internationalism has cost us, and they had contributed higher than other
• 30:41
  communities to the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are a lot of boys coming home,
• 30:49
  wounded, suffering the disability for life, and a lot of families that marked the loss of a young
• 31:00
  soldier. And that feeds into what is the most interesting part of the Trump pitch.
• 31:11
  Rembery said in his inaugural address, words to the effect, we would have measured our success by
• 31:17
  the wars we don't join. And there could be the promise in all the all the confused messaging
• 31:29
  out of Trump that America may now no longer think of military intervention as the fallback
• 31:38
  resort option. I mean, the two great cliches of American foreign policy out of Washington,
• 31:43
  sanctions, sanctions, sanctions. I mean, they got sanctions delivered by the president or the Congress
• 31:51
  on so many countries and so many individuals, they might as well pass a world sanction bill
• 31:57
  and have a few exemptions. So sanctions and the other cliche of the American foreign policy is
• 32:03
  military intervention. You got a problem. Okay, the results got to be descend in an aircraft carrier
• 32:09
  and it's associated fleet and the hundred and first airborne division, you think of military
• 32:15
  intervention instead of something a more targeted subtle perhaps diplomatic approach.
• 32:22
  And I don't do targeted well. No, they swing between extremes. I've got a massive intervention.
• 32:29
  This is massive. I thought I was back in the Civil War, the American pattern of war, the North
• 32:34
  won by allowing Grant with a massive army just to assault the south in the summer of 1864 and in the
• 32:43
  face of unbelievable casualties, just keep going, just keep going. It's an American pattern of war.
• 32:52
  It's been written about, it's been discussed. Although they've switched in recent times in West
• 32:57
  Point and the other, the other centers of war scholarship to talking about what was the
• 33:05
  acronym coin counter insurgency, counter insurgency. Now they're moving beyond that to contemplate
• 33:11
  the vast big power conflicts, as mandated by the traditional Russian invasion of Ukraine,
• 33:24
  which was very much a traditional all purpose assault on recognized international borders,
• 33:30
  old fashioned aggression. Although being responded to increasingly in new ways with drones
• 33:35
  and so on, the way that that conflict has changed over the past 12 or 18 months in terms of the
• 33:41
  prevalence of how of drones. The reason I was getting here, I was just, this morning I was just
• 33:46
  captivated by the New York Times and article by Tom Friedman, very arresting column, saying
• 33:52
  you're sure for Tom Friedman, but I guess, yeah, yeah, indeed. But saying perhaps the most important
• 33:58
  event of late last year was not from selection, but history might judge the exchange between
• 34:06
  Ukraine and Russia where drone ground-based structures supported by drones in the year
• 34:17
  assaulted a Russian position. This could be the wave of the future, what's its expression,
• 34:24
  general artificial intelligence? Yeah, white and Henry Kissinger,
• 34:32
  the everyone's wise statesman, my favorite world historical figure, talk about in his last
• 34:39
  years talk about artificial intelligence as up there as the biggest threat humankind faces.
• 34:49
  What do you think? What do you make of it? I'm profoundly ignorant on the subject, but
• 34:54
  if Kissinger says that and Friedman challenges us that this military exchange was even more
• 35:02
  important than the election of Donald Trump, I think we've got to sit up and take notice. The other
• 35:07
  example Friedman used was the decision last year of Uber in two American cities to embrace
• 35:16
  electrical vehicles. You mean automated vehicles? Yeah. Vehicles? Yeah, driverless.
• 35:24
  Yeah, driverless. I've been in one. In Phoenix, the total driverless taxi cab.
• 35:31
  I mean, I do, I think that is probably a bit gimmicky because computers and not actually
• 35:37
  they're proving to be a lot trickier to get good at physical things than we thought,
• 35:45
  and much better at reasoning than we had anticipated. Yes, I'm bullish on the pace of change that AI
• 35:55
  is going to deliver over the next 10 or 20 years. I think the second half of my life is going to
• 35:59
  involve much more change than the first half did. In other areas, the change we need is
• 36:09
  disappointingly slow in getting to fusion, for example, instead of fusion. If we had fusion
• 36:18
  reactors and they've always been on the points of being rendered viable, we'd have limitless
• 36:26
  sources of power without a speck of carbon, but we are just waiting for that technological breakthrough
• 36:36
  that can prevent the one and a half, two degrees warming that is going to make life on this
• 36:42
  planet so difficult. Well, they might be connected. I mean, there may be all kinds of things that AI
• 36:46
  can see that we can't see yet that are coming down the park. Certainly, if you talk to medical and
• 36:52
  biotech people, they're very optimistic about the ability of AI to do a huge amount of data
• 36:58
  point connecting that will give us new insights into queues for cancer and things like that. So
• 37:03
  whether or not it's possible on the energy front. I mean, while you're talking about fusion,
• 37:07
  should fish and have a role? Where are you on this whole nuclear debate? In economic, I'm
• 37:14
  coldly pragmatic about it. I haven't got a phobia about nuclear power. How could you when
• 37:20
  France gets 70% or 80% of its power from nuclear power plants, but they're being overtaken
• 37:28
  economically. The promise of a small module reactor, again, like fusion, is just painstakingly slow.
• 37:39
  20 years ago, if you looked at the clippings, we're on the point of getting to them. People
• 37:46
  were predicting that within 10, 15 years, that is earlier than we now are. They would have been
• 37:55
  commonplace throughout Asia, that the Philippines and Indonesia, that Vietnam would all have small
• 37:59
  module reactors. Isn't engineering impediments? There's still on the drawing board. There's not
• 38:07
  one American city that signed up to them and we were told, again, in the early 2000,
• 38:14
  is that we're on the point of this. This is about to happen. But this could also be because people
• 38:18
  are afraid of them and there's a lot of radiation. No, it's technological. The models they're
• 38:24
  looking at reportedly don't turn out to be small at all, but they turn out to be a big lumpy
• 38:31
  expression. In the context of a giant nuclear reactor, they're small, but in the context of a
• 38:35
  neighborhood, they're large. Well, certainly that's the case, but they even might be getting up
• 38:40
  to the size of a nuclear. If nuclear were the wave of the future, why wouldn't America
• 38:47
  anywhere be building a nuclear reactor? Well, why can't America build a single high-speed rail?
• 38:54
  Why can't there are lots of things that America can't do? It's not an avatar of, you know,
• 38:59
  the magic of America is the New York Stock Exchange. It just disproves marks.
• 39:08
  We haven't discovered a different way of producing goods and services than capitalism.
• 39:18
  No, but America is not a New York capitalist. No, but if America, if America,
• 39:24
  with that capitalist engine and all the money that the state can mobilize through debt and
• 39:31
  taxation, can't produce competitive nuclear power. They're not building a single nuclear power
• 39:39
  plant, and they haven't succeeded. Well, if your claim is why has American capitalism not been
• 39:45
  able to solve the engineering challenges of building, of inventing a small modular nuclear reactor?
• 39:52
  That's one thing, but if the claim is it's not, you know, nuclear as a dead end because America
• 39:59
  has not built a new nuclear power plants, I think that overlooks the extraordinary thicket
• 40:05
  of regulation that currently exists in the United States when it comes to environmental and
• 40:09
  and energy questions. I mean, there's a new book called Abundance by Ezra Klein and another book
• 40:17
  called Why Nothing Works, which is about how since, and these are lefties who are just carrying
• 40:22
  their hair out in frustration at, you know, they use the California high-speed rail as an example.
• 40:27
  There are so many infrastructure projects that all Americans on all sides want to happen,
• 40:31
  but there, since the sort of Ralph Nader revolution on the left in the 70s, which took a very
• 40:38
  proactive approach towards constraining governments so that it doesn't trample on people's rights,
• 40:43
  and you have to make sure that there's permitting for this and permitting for that, and that everyone
• 40:47
  has an opportunity to be heard, you know, community conferences, and then they can sue over whether
• 40:51
  or not it was appropriate for this piece of land to be taken or that, like a million ways from
• 40:56
  Sunday America has basically outlawed large controversial projects, infrastructure projects,
• 41:02
  of which nuclear reactors are one. There's no objective reason why America shouldn't have
• 41:06
  built a single nuclear reactor in the past 30 years. Well, they could have not burned a lot of
• 41:10
  coal. There is their experience of building them in Georgia, building one in Georgia over time,
• 41:20
  over budget, and both sides of politics support nuclear. I was in Biden's policy, Biden's policy.
• 41:28
  It didn't see any advantage in adopting an anti-nuclear agenda, but nothing happened
• 41:33
  during his four-year presidency, and it's because of the lumpiness and the vulnerability
• 41:41
  of this sort of power, and the sheer cost of it. Well, we can agree to disagree about American
• 41:47
  red tape, perhaps, because he also poured a huge amount of money into broadband network that was
• 41:51
  going to revolutionize everything, and I think like 15 homes have been signed up to it, because
• 41:55
  every single time you try to do anything in the United States, it ends up running into regulatory
• 42:00
  problems. So in this destabilized sort of world that we've now got, just going back to the
• 42:07
  question about Trump and NATO, and so on, why doesn't it make sense for medium-sized countries
• 42:13
  like Australia to be as aggressive as we can in enhancing our military capabilities?
• 42:21
  Well, aggressive, why not say effective? Why not say effective? There's no easier way to waste money,
• 42:32
  as even the Trump administration can seize when it takes a critical look at the Pentagon,
• 42:37
  than with military grand military commitments. And I mean, this is one of the examples, one of
• 42:47
  vulnerabilities of all, because someone said it's so overengineered, so overengineered, so
• 42:55
  grandiose, grandiose was the adjective, that the chances of things not going wrong,
• 43:03
  they're just not there. It's going to go wrong. Right. It's going to go wrong. So because someone's
• 43:08
  going to back out of the deal, or because- For a host of reasons, the Americans need to produce
• 43:14
  2.3 new Virginia class subs every year, they're producing one, and Ulrich Colby said when he was
• 43:25
  being ticked off by the Congress, and when asked a question about this, he says,
• 43:31
  and the Congress says, we're not going to- we may not be able to supply the Australians,
• 43:37
  if it means losing ships boats to our submarine fleet, and you can see it happening,
• 43:48
  you can see it happening, the qualifications are beginning to appear in Washington talking about
• 43:53
  this. The easiest thing to assume happening in the early 2030s is that America will say,
• 43:59
  we had made this commitment, but our shipyards aren't keeping up with the Chinese,
• 44:04
  we can't afford to peel these subs off our order of battle. So we've got a new deal for the Australians,
• 44:10
  this is August, August, version 2. What we're going to do, and it's a fabulous deal for your Australians,
• 44:18
  what we're going to do is put more of our Virginia class subs with the American flag,
• 44:23
  of course, in your ports, especially at this port you're building for us in HMA,
• 44:28
  Sterling in Western Australia. And of course, dumb Australians, oh, this is good, this is good,
• 44:35
  this is even better, and the Americans say they're going to train our submariners on board,
• 44:38
  won't that be precious? Well, no, it won't be, it won't be, because it means Australia will lose
• 44:44
  its sovereign submarine capacity for the first time since the 1960s, when we bought the,
• 44:50
  what were they, the Oberon class? We won't have submarines, we can call our own, as the columns
• 44:56
  class, the six remaining columns class, are faded out, are retired. And the second terrible thing
• 45:02
  about it, the loss of sovereign, sovereign submarine capacity is one thing, the loss of overall
• 45:08
  sovereignty is the other regret of that, the shape this is taking. That is, we'll have American
• 45:14
  subs here, based here, they'll be targets, should there be a showdown between the US and China,
• 45:23
  as well as Pine Gap, as well as Tindall, the base air base in Northern Australia, where we've got
• 45:30
  American B-52s now aimed at attacking China, we'll make ourselves a nuclear target, and we'll make
• 45:37
  it, make it virtually impossible for us to say no, if America decides on a war with China.
• 45:43
  This is by the way to revert something I said earlier, where Trump gets interesting,
• 45:48
  the possibility that he skepticism about overseas military engagements might lead him,
• 45:56
  after a lot of economic warfare with China, to think about a great power deal, to think about
• 46:02
  a great power deal, we're effectively China and the US, except that both have a role in the
• 46:08
  Asia Pacific, or that the Western Pacific is an area where China primacy, Chinese primacy has
• 46:16
  got to be accepted as effective life, like American primacy and the Caribbean. What does
• 46:20
  he get out of it if he gives China Taiwan? You have to ask him, he sees himself as the master
• 46:26
  of the deal, he could get a commitment from China to shift manufacturing to the US, bringing
• 46:33
  jobs into America, or give America more market access, who knows, who knows how he's thinking,
• 46:42
  but it's interesting that Marco Rubio, in talking to Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister,
• 46:47
  was quick to rule out support for Taiwanese separatism, an independent Taiwan. In other words,
• 46:53
  to assert the long established one China policy that goes back to Kissinger and Joe Nlai in
• 46:59
  1972, the Shanghai communique, that wasn't reported, but there was none of this, none of this
• 47:07
  posturing about. So, wait, what did Marco Rubio say? I missed that. Yeah, it was his first meeting
• 47:12
  with his Chinese counterparts, and you missed it because the Australian newspaper reported it,
• 47:18
  he said, matter of factly, America accepts the one China policy, he ruled out support
• 47:27
  for an independent Taiwan, which is a notion that from time to time, people in the Republican party
• 47:34
  picked up and run with them. I mean, even Joe Biden said point blank that he would,
• 47:40
  three times, he would go to war with three times, he tripped up and said, of course,
• 47:44
  Taiwan. It's a lot of tripping up. Eventually, I kind of thought, well, maybe he means it.
• 47:48
  Yeah, but then he pulled back. Well, the White House always sends out a communique the day after
• 47:52
  and says, just to clarify, the policy is unchanged. But I think it's pretty, yeah, I mean, I think
• 47:57
  nobody did in the end go a bit further because it was in his own words saying, returning to the
• 48:05
  position that's called strategic ambiguity. Yeah, you don't spell out whether you defend them,
• 48:10
  you don't rule out defending them. You leave China guessing that strategic ambiguity.
• 48:14
  The Chinese can live with it. The Taiwanese leadership can live with it. For God's sake,
• 48:19
  strategic ambiguity and saying using that keyword, the West acknowledges the Chinese
• 48:27
  claim acknowledges that China has this claim, recognizes the Chinese claim to Taiwan, but
• 48:36
  stands by the proposition that it should be achieved. And let's suppose that all this happens,
• 48:44
  right? What are your criticisms of it assuming that it goes through? They manage to increase their
• 48:49
  submarine capacity. You're asking me to imagine something that, day by day, becomes clearer.
• 48:57
  It ain't happening. We're not getting the results. But I want the, you know, there's a maximum
• 49:04
  in debating as you know that you should attack the strongest version of your opponent's argument,
• 49:07
  not the weakest. So let's attack the strongest. It's going to happen. Let's say we have a backup
• 49:14
  plan, right? Okay. We go back to the French cap in hand and we say, if it doesn't happen,
• 49:19
  then can we have a bunch of other submarines just as a backup? But let's say it does happen.
• 49:23
  Is it still a bad idea? Oh, yeah. Yeah. The French deal by contrast gave us eight subs.
• 49:32
  At least seven would be in the water at any one time compared with the nuclear subs.
• 49:38
  Two out of three are going to be in hospital at any one time. The French sub.
• 49:44
  Yeah. You need to, I perhaps I should say up to up to two out of three could be in maintenance
• 49:51
  any one time. It's a fragile technology. The French subs were there to protect, to make
• 49:58
  inviolable the Australian continent and our sea lanes of communication lethal and affordable.
• 50:07
  The appeal to the cold warriors of the Virginia class is that they're able to get up
• 50:14
  into the state of Taiwan. In other words, they're locked into America's battle plans.
• 50:21
  Effectively, effectively, we're coming close, coming close to saying we will be in a US China war.
• 50:28
  Don't they enhance our spying and surveillance capacity over China? Over China.
• 50:35
  Yeah. I mean, in the sense that you can just park them up there and then they're just there.
• 50:39
  Well, why are we looking at a submarine type is commanding virtue is getting us into a war with China.
• 50:48
  What about because we're principally worried about war with China as our greatest strategic threat.
• 50:52
  If we enter a war with China, we could have nuclear missiles landed on Tindall, the base, the air base,
• 51:01
  for one reason, by the way, that we've got B-52s stationed there to attack China.
• 51:06
  As Keating says, he's never said a true thing, that the only reason we've got B-52s in the north
• 51:12
  of Australia is to attack China and China would have no interest in attacking Australia,
• 51:18
  were it not for our foolishness in planting American cities here to attack them.
• 51:23
  Well, that's the game. 59% of Australians. That's the suicidal gamble.
• 51:27
  You have to be right. You have to be 100% certain that that's right.
• 51:32
  That China would not attack us were it not for our involvement with the United States.
• 51:37
  Now, forward leaning approach. If there is a 1,000th of a percentage point chance
• 51:40
  that that calculus is wrong, then you're gambling the fate of all of Australia.
• 51:44
  Yeah, because the price you pay is so high. Yes.
• 51:47
  So high. This is a beautiful continent. It's been gifted to us.
• 51:52
  It's been a custodianship going back 40, 60,000 years. It's gifted to this nation,
• 51:59
  a nation for a continent, a continent for a nation, none other on the planet.
• 52:03
  We've got it and we should do nothing to invite a nuclear attack on this beautiful landscape
• 52:11
  with all its riches. And that's what we've done. We've militarized the north of Australia.
• 52:16
  You've had a US Congressman here. US Congressman here saying you are now the front line.
• 52:21
  Now, that is terrifying. That's terrifying. You had Kurt Campbell,
• 52:27
  former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific say,
• 52:33
  with this decision on August, we've locked them in for 40 years,
• 52:38
  locked Australia's gullible leadership in for 40 years.
• 52:44
  To think of Australia, I think of this continent in different ways. I think most Australians
• 52:49
  from Americans, Americans are now thinking of us as the front line in a war with China.
• 52:54
  I want to get Australians thinking, hey, hey, hey, no, that's not our future. 59% of Australians
• 53:00
  according to the last poll, the only poll I can recall on this subject, don't think we should be
• 53:06
  in a war between China and the US because it's not in our interest. Of course, you don't want to be.
• 53:12
  The question is whether or not you will be regardless of whether or not you're, you've got
• 53:17
  all this. This is the risk. The pro-walkers person will say, somehow I think that China
• 53:26
  has got the message that we're not Asian and that we're part of the Western liberal world order.
• 53:31
  And should it come to pass that the Chinese Communist Party goes a bit nuts and wants to declare war
• 53:38
  on not just America but the West, we will be involved whether we like it or not. Of course, 59% of Australians
• 53:44
  don't want war with China. We may not get that. You just made one big mistake.
• 53:49
  You're referred to the Western liberal world order. It don't exist, brother. It does not exist.
• 53:56
  With Trump, that has got to be, that has got to be scot from the vocabulary of you and the
• 54:01
  lower institute and the Department of Foreign Affairs. Well, we don't have the ability to scratch it
• 54:05
  from the vocabulary of Beijing. Like, they're going to notice that Beijing is consumed by several key
• 54:14
  goals and they don't include going to war with the West. That would be insane. And whatever you say
• 54:20
  about the leaders of the Marxist-Leninist One Party state in Beijing, they are not insane. They
• 54:25
  are calculating and they're shaping a foreign policy around their definition of China's self-interest.
• 54:31
  The first on their goal is the preservation of the power of the Communist Party. The second is
• 54:36
  protection of China in this region. A subset of that is China being the dominant power in
• 54:44
  Eurasia. A subset of that is protecting sea lanes of communication and protecting the
• 54:52
  ports from being blockaded by American naval power. Don't you get a whole lot of China's
• 54:56
  behavior has been determined by America saying in 2012, during the Obama presidency, there will be
• 55:02
  a pivot to Asia. In Beijing, you read pivot to Asia's meaning, we're going to enhance our capacity
• 55:09
  to blockade your ports and to choke off your sea lanes of communication. And China's reacted. By
• 55:16
  the way, America said that and did nothing about it, did not put a scent into it. There's not
• 55:22
  next to American vessel there as a result of the so-called pivot. To be fair, they did get a little
• 55:26
  distracted by events in Europe. But yeah, they didn't realize that they were going to have to be
• 55:31
  involved in Ukraine. I think the basic thing here is that Australians would be appalled.
• 55:38
  A majority of Australians would be appalled. 59 percent compared with 17 percent you thought we
• 55:42
  should be in a war. 59 percent of Australians quite acutely say no. But the leadership of this
• 55:50
  country is so besotted with the idea that a magic idea of an Australian American alliance
• 55:57
  and an Australian defense and foreign policy that says there shouldn't be a sliver of difference.
• 56:04
  People listening to this on audio should see that hand gesture of fingers.
• 56:07
  Holding up a tiny gap between your fingers. It shouldn't be this much difference between Australia
• 56:13
  and the US on anything. So the defense minister says a few things. One is this is one of these,
• 56:20
  as you said, when you mentioned that these this equipment needs to be in the shop quite a lot.
• 56:25
  It is the most sophisticated piece of equipment, arguably that humankind has ever produced.
• 56:31
  Like it may be more complicated than the international space.
• 56:34
  But a moonshot, right? These things are the peak of human engineering.
• 56:41
  We would be one of only seven countries in the world apparently to have military hardware that
• 56:46
  has sophisticated as this. The United States has only shared this once before with the Brits
• 56:51
  after World War II. And we would join that illustrious club.
• 56:56
  Is that no price to be paid, isn't it? No price to be paid. Might there be an assumption
• 57:02
  that doing that for us would mandate that if there is a war, we would fling our asset
• 57:10
  into that war. And might might the former defense department official you said to me.
• 57:17
  If we send a sub up there to a showdown on the Taiwan Strait, we'd better make sure
• 57:22
  that every one of our sub mariners is made out of will,
• 57:26
  might he be right in his reading of the threat to Australia? And 59% of the Australian people might
• 57:32
  they in fact be right when they say their instincts drive them to say no, no, not a war between the
• 57:41
  US and China. No, that's not a war we should join. You see, we I had Peter Garrett on the show
• 57:47
  and he said he doesn't think that regardless of the American administration that they will actually
• 57:50
  defend Taiwan in the event of a China. No, well, that's your sense about it. Yeah, my sense is
• 57:54
  the same. Trump Trump is reported to have said, you know, in a speculative way talks on two or
• 58:01
  three occasions that America wouldn't defend Taiwan. It's too far off. I think that would be
• 58:09
  thinking. Ripett Murdoch said the same, which might suggest some channeling between the Oval Office and
• 58:16
  and news, newscorp. But I mean, look, it may not happen in the next three and a half years. So
• 58:22
  the question is whether or not if there's any political candidate who would, you know,
• 58:27
  is this all just suffering essentially? We know that the development of Chinese missile strength
• 58:32
  and ship numbers makes it less likely than America that America could be comfortable
• 58:39
  about sending naval assets into the Second Island chain. And as the decades go on,
• 58:53
  it's likely that that transformation of the strategic balance will continue to shift in China's
• 59:00
  favor. When it comes to China's, what might be seen as China's natural sphere of influence,
• 59:09
  that doesn't mean we don't work at building deterrence. I think it's entirely legitimate that we're
• 59:15
  in the quad talking to other nations, sending a message that's a little grouping of India and Japan
• 59:21
  and America right now. Yeah, yeah, that sends a message to Beijing that that should they be
• 59:26
  too adventurous in any of their, any of their behaviors or actions. This diplomatic talking
• 59:33
  shop could come to life, could be more serious. At the present time, the Indians aren't making a
• 59:38
  commitment to East Asia. Taiwan is not, the Taiwan Strait is not part of the strategic
• 59:46
  concept of all these things. It never will be. They're not going to be in East Asia. No, and they're
• 59:52
  good at playing neutral when it suits them. Yes, well, brilliantly. Let's do some sort of
• 59:59
  quicker questions. If that's okay, just all over the shop. Do you remember your first day as premier?
• 1:00:04
  Yes. Was it like tremendous? To have been opposition leader for seven years, to have had people
• 1:00:11
  said, you know, car can never do it. You won't win with car. You used to bookish, doesn't look
• 1:00:17
  the part. And then do a one. And they've been able to move confidently on my big promises like
• 1:00:25
  saving the southeast forest, saving twice as much as we even said in the election we'd saved.
• 1:00:31
  It's a great new national park. Just one morning waking up and banning canal estates
• 1:00:37
  to save the river systems of the state. I mean, it's just the use of power to achieve good policy
• 1:00:43
  just thrilling. My happiest years, at 10 years as premier, stopping jet skis on Sydney Harbour.
• 1:00:51
  The minute they serve us, injecting room. I know a few people who didn't like it for the
• 1:00:55
  jet ski thing. For for for for you to English in the curriculum. Just just the small some of the
• 1:01:02
  small things you do as well as the big things, budgetary things, infrastructure thing.
• 1:01:06
  What country have you visited that you were most surprised to enjoy as much as you did?
• 1:01:11
  Do you know there's an answer to that question? I'm not fishing for one particular. Whatever
• 1:01:16
  pops you know, I'm just I'm just Solomon Islands. Solomon Islands. I thought
• 1:01:24
  here's a here's a spray of islands separated by this waterway, the slot.
• 1:01:32
  John F. Kennedy's story of course is relevant to that. That's where he struggled in the oceans,
• 1:01:37
  massive naval battles, Garda Canal. And what was JFK's story in the Sol Islands? He he was in a PT
• 1:01:48
  boat. It was sunk. And was this at Guadalcanal when when when they were shipping in after after
• 1:01:56
  okay. He was sunk. He struggled in the waters shark-infested waters tropical waters for a day or days
• 1:02:07
  and he saved one of his crew members who was wounded and then brilliantly sent a message
• 1:02:15
  through delivered by a native in a canoe. A message on a coconut shell that that please come
• 1:02:23
  and look after us where we're survivors of PT 109. Wow. And then he really really was
• 1:02:31
  remarkably and genuinely brave. Incredible. So funny to you say to Solomon Islands because I
• 1:02:38
  just went to the Solomon Islands because one of my best friends yeah who works for the public
• 1:02:44
  service is a PhD in science in Canberra. His wife is also a scientist and she got a job there.
• 1:02:49
  And so they've moved their three kids to Honiara. So I took my kids and my partner to go and visit
• 1:02:55
  them and to go I mean I agree with you it's it's it's like Tahiti in the 1950s or something
• 1:03:00
  combined with Papua New Guinea. It's like this strange mix of yeah when I was in Honiara I just
• 1:03:06
  thought what an adventure it would be to to load a car with supplies and just drive up into
• 1:03:12
  those hills yeah like one of the spies one of the watches left behind by Australia with binoculars
• 1:03:22
  in the hills to keep an eye on Japanese shipping in the second world war. Incredible. What period
• 1:03:30
  of your life did you feel most alive? I think the last years as opposition leader when my whole
• 1:03:37
  future was swinging on events I had the support of wonderful people in the labor caucus I've
• 1:03:43
  down in the polls against John Faye a popular premier how old were I was I was born in 1947
• 1:03:51
  and this was the early 1940s the early 40s you're a late 30s 40s definitely 40s okay and I had to
• 1:04:04
  live on my wits and one day it might look I had a chance being premier another day with wiser
• 1:04:11
  to assume I'd fall into the abyss that's what I felt so that was quite not your right mid to late 40s
• 1:04:18
  you were a late starter well no I was a late succeeder yeah yeah you wrote in your diary what
• 1:04:24
  wrote in my diaries looking looking back at my diaries reading them about this period I thought
• 1:04:31
  this was the time in my life I felt most alive because I was either going to be flying into the abyss
• 1:04:39
  at the 1995 election or elevated into the front rank of political leadership and that could
• 1:04:44
  lead anywhere yeah if I told you then that it was going to lead to being foreign minister would you
• 1:04:51
  have welcomed that I would have been very fulfilled I have been fulfilled you know inock power
• 1:04:56
  bridge politicians say at all political careers and in failure I'm just writing a bit of them in
• 1:05:02
  why now and I can't in all honesty I can't agree looking back on my political career is the field
• 1:05:10
  every dream I had as a 15-year-old schoolboy from a working class family you took himself down to a
• 1:05:17
  local public school and joined the Malibar South Metroville brand for the Australian Labour party
• 1:05:22
  seeking to be prime minister one day I'm totally fulfilled you were a senior cabinet minister
• 1:05:29
  when the prime minister was rolled Julia Gillard it was when Kevin Rudd came back for a second time
• 1:05:34
  Julia Gillard what do you remember of that a total yeah just remember the sadness of seeing a
• 1:05:40
  government do such damage to itself paying the price for the original sin which had been the brutal
• 1:05:48
  removal of Kevin Rudd in 2010 I threw it yeah what a a private sector organization would not
• 1:05:59
  behave in this fashion if a prime minister was performing disappointingly a general manager was
• 1:06:05
  performing disappointingly they'd be coaching they'd be workshopping they'd be mentoring you to
• 1:06:12
  tempt to improve the network of relationships on which an outfit private sector or government does
• 1:06:21
  depend so amateurish to butcher Kevin Rudd and for Julia to be drawn into that process
• 1:06:29
  and in the manner of taxpayer and tragedy it had its consequence does Bill Shorten deserve some
• 1:06:35
  blame for that entire fiasco I'd have to go back and watch that ABC series documentary series on it
• 1:06:42
  but I don't think I don't think he was in the front rank he was a minister serving in the
• 1:06:47
  right government I think you'd look at some factional figures and maybe his successor as he
• 1:06:53
  did the AWU right before you could point the finger at him my sense from when I was a journalist
• 1:06:59
  was just that he was never the main person to point the finger to but he was always in the room
• 1:07:06
  there was something a bit richer the third it happened to me just like it was just always the he
• 1:07:11
  was like you know he was a common denominator it was a common thread across a lot of the labor
• 1:07:17
  parties that's just a huge defamation if I were to make more of saying that Bill Shorten now
• 1:07:23
  we'll go we'll go through Richard the sir we'll see with Richard the first lovely man I'm sure
• 1:07:29
  he's great I'm sure he loves his pets he's probably he's probably fine what country is Australia
• 1:07:35
  ignoring diplomatically at our peril none I think I think there are cliches that suggest we should
• 1:07:43
  do more with India for example now listen for 30 years people have been saying Australia should do
• 1:07:49
  more with India question is does India want to do more with us and Indian diplomats in Delhi don't
• 1:07:58
  want to spend their time responding to Australian initiatives we're not that important they're not
• 1:08:03
  looking south people say we've got to work harder with Indonesia well we do one idea might be to
• 1:08:10
  stop spying on Indonesia for the benefit of the Americans that would be a nice gesture if we're
• 1:08:16
  able to say to the Indonesians you know we've been doing it but we're not going to do it anymore
• 1:08:21
  but we couldn't put a bigger diplomatic effort into it our embassy in Jakarta is our biggest
• 1:08:25
  in the world even bigger than our one in Washington which is offers secure easy retirement jobs to
• 1:08:34
  about 40,000 of our defense personnel now you need to worry about the defamation lawyers which
• 1:08:39
  is more predictable to deal with Washington or Beijing I think Beijing definitely their instincts
• 1:08:46
  are conservative especially now that they've moved beyond wolf warrior diplomacy they're
• 1:08:54
  instincts are conservative they want a predictable world the rules of the you in or something they
• 1:09:01
  accept they go power in the in the security council you might quickly say plus the new institutions
• 1:09:09
  they've sponsored like bricks or the Shanghai Cooperation organization is bricks a positive thing
• 1:09:16
  and it's neither positive or negative it's part of the world saying we want a voice too
• 1:09:27
  and we ought to begin building alternatives to the almighty US dollar they're not succeeding in
• 1:09:34
  that altogether but the fact that they're coming together and talking about the option
• 1:09:37
  is a reminder of the latent pluralism a multilateralism that confirms we no longer talk as you
• 1:09:48
  were a moment ago about the Western based liberal order that's Americans repudiated that and the
• 1:09:54
  rest of the world's got to respond in view of Washington's repudiation should we reconstruct it
• 1:10:01
  without Washington Australia Australia given what America is doing should be running a foreign
• 1:10:09
  policy with a lot less Washington in it with more multilateralism in it more engagement and more
• 1:10:21
  Asia in it and that means that's that's not code for China that's Japan South Korea India
• 1:10:32
  and of course the ten asian state we're able to say to Indonesia now look we're a huge strategic
• 1:10:39
  advantage what we're saying is that your south is protected you've got a friend here
• 1:10:46
  and by every tick every box we're a reliable friend and that's a huge commitment to our own
• 1:10:55
  security we should revive poor greetings treaty with Indonesia I mean that all makes total sense
• 1:11:02
  strategically on the medium term I guess I'm thinking globally in the long term about the
• 1:11:08
  post-World War II period in which we emerged from a status quo that involved essentially centuries
• 1:11:16
  or millennia of countries just doing whatever the hell they wanted in an unconstrained fashion and
• 1:11:22
  people making a massive over investment of resources into defending themselves worrying about
• 1:11:28
  whether or not they're going to be invaded and incurring wars from time to time and something about
• 1:11:33
  World War II got us to get our shit together and all sit down and go okay all right what do we
• 1:11:38
  need in order to make sure this doesn't keep happening and it's been great generally if that's
• 1:11:44
  coming to an end if or if America is bringing its role in it to an end is there a future in which
• 1:11:54
  we don't revert back to the pre-Great War period of great powers just rolling tanks over borders
• 1:12:02
  but can find a way to have NATO minus the United States I guess the EU, ASEAN maybe not ASEAN maybe
• 1:12:11
  it's Japan and South Korea and Australia and the New Zealand and Canada in an alliance with
• 1:12:17
  the EU and some other friendly nations to go like you know what we are now what liberal democracy
• 1:12:24
  looks like and we're not going to take any shit from anybody when we do our best to keep things
• 1:12:29
  going along yeah well let's look that's a tremendous question you're asking us to think about
• 1:12:40
  a world order based on great power politics national interest politics the anarchy a world where
• 1:12:49
  great powers can do what they can and do what they can in pursuit of their national interest
• 1:12:55
  and that was yes as you say modified by a post-World War II order in which the structure and rules
• 1:13:04
  the UN were a factor but in the absence of real clout America at its best when it was at its best
• 1:13:17
  was delivering for example America at its best and it all makes makes me regretfully
• 1:13:23
  throwing away a US power and leadership enforcing nuclear non-proliferation it wasn't in America's
• 1:13:29
  interest that you don't have a spread of nuclear weaponization but it was in the world's interests
• 1:13:37
  and the treaty that Obama got with the world and Iran to dissuade the Iranians from weaponizing
• 1:13:47
  their nuclear capacity was America at its diplomatic best and America being able to say to its
• 1:13:55
  allies Japan South Korea the Europeans the non nuclear states in Europe will protect you
• 1:14:01
  under our alliance umbrella but don't develop your own nuclear capacity again that was the
• 1:14:07
  American lead system at its best at its worst it was the Vietnam War the invasion of Iraq
• 1:14:14
  a 20-year war with the dream of reconstructing Afghanistan as a liberal democracy with equal rights
• 1:14:21
  for women that was America at its worst the question is whether in the whole wreckage the Trump
• 1:14:31
  is delivering there might be a nugget of virtue that is in America avoiding that great cliche
• 1:14:40
  of American foreign policy military intervention and sanctions who's you mentioned Kissinger as
• 1:14:48
  being someone you admire what about in the Australian context who's the best Australian either
• 1:14:52
  political figure or speech maker that you can think of you're forced to go back to hawk and
• 1:15:01
  I can see them as the one personality really I don't think either of them would like that
• 1:15:07
  no no but cleaning was president of young labor when I started going to young labor so naturally
• 1:15:12
  my loyalty and effect was gravitate to a contemporary and I think he's got a vision he's got a vision
• 1:15:21
  if we had a French style political system he could be president he could have a worker day
• 1:15:26
  prime minister under him but he'd provide the visionary concepts and at his best you really
• 1:15:35
  is very very good I think that probably exhausts my thoughts on Australian leadership they're
• 1:15:48
  people in my life I watch Neville Rand as premier of New South Wales and learned a great deal
• 1:15:54
  from him what's a political opinion that you hold that would be most problematic for a young
• 1:16:00
  aspiring labor politician to express at a labor conference yet more independence for Australia
• 1:16:06
  yes under the umbrella of the American Alliance so aligned but independent and if you start
• 1:16:14
  talking up an alternative to the closest closest closest possible relationship with America
• 1:16:20
  you're going to get a lot of criticism spark a lot of antagonism from people whose lack of
• 1:16:26
  imagination just mandates them to say the only role for for Australia the only international
• 1:16:34
  personality for Australia that we will permit is as the most rusted on American ally
• 1:16:41
  you mentioned the hawk eating era is the Australian Labor Party intellectually stronger or weaker
• 1:16:45
  and it was in the 80s it's weaker because hawk and keeding hawk backed by the arguments of
• 1:16:53
  keeding we're presenting an alternative vision of the Australian economy it could be open to the
• 1:16:59
  world and competitive focused on productivity improvement through competition who was the best
• 1:17:06
  US president Franklin Roosevelt labor ham Lincoln what's the best takeaway from Cicero
• 1:17:16
  he said you said in respect of C of of of Augustus's March Augustus's or some now in respect of
• 1:17:29
  Cicero's crossing of the Rubicon Cicero says said this cause lacks nothing but a cause
• 1:17:37
  in other words in other words it was a brutal seizure of power without without any policy justification
• 1:17:48
  this cause likes nothing but a cause and I love that because in it you can see the modernity
• 1:17:55
  of Rome and and Cicero's commentary on it something could be said about a political strike for power
• 1:18:06
  in the real in in today's world this cause lacks nothing but a cause is philosophy and the writings
• 1:18:12
  of the ancients an intellectual pursuit for you or is it all so emotionally philosophy doesn't
• 1:18:17
  stick for me right history is concrete history is infinitely interesting because it tells for example
• 1:18:24
  what happened when in a cafe or a bar in Sarajevo a young assassin who'd been associated with a
• 1:18:38
  failed bomb attack on the ear to the austral Hungarian throne was taking a drink to recover his
• 1:18:46
  strength and he looked up the door and there having taken a wrong turn was the fate on the the open
• 1:18:56
  car the open vehicle with the the grand Duke Franz Ferdinand and I think Sophie Sophie
• 1:19:06
  wife and they were stalled in a traffic jam he reached into his coat pocket picked up his revolver
• 1:19:12
  and stalked out and shot them both there and what happened from that moment if it hadn't been that
• 1:19:19
  would have been something else are you a bit of a fatalist or like how much pitch event matter
• 1:19:25
  yeah happens dance is huge the world could have stumbled on without a trigger although if you
• 1:19:34
  you look at that untidy mix of a Serbian politics and the fatalistic Austrian well almost
• 1:19:48
  elegant fatalism in Vienna and this terrible thing that must not ever overtake us the idea that
• 1:19:55
  there's going to be a war coming it might as well be now yeah it might as well be now
• 1:20:01
  and that existed in some other capital it existed in in Petersburg it existed in Berlin
• 1:20:10
  but that's the fascination of history it's so concrete so anecdotal
• 1:20:17
  getting into a philosophical argument about does it the cheer exist if no one's in the room looking
• 1:20:22
  at well it's not necessarily what I mean about I mean there are different strands of philosophy
• 1:20:25
  out there I mean you could be told them about the Stoics and they could they could have a
• 1:20:28
  month more practical I like Marcus really that's a popular version yes and and I'm writing
• 1:20:35
  something now I'm driven to look at him he talks about the quest for perfection of character
• 1:20:40
  what do you do when you're my age when you've lost your partner why not focus on that challenge
• 1:20:46
  that huge challenge of achieving perfection of character never in the words of Marcus really
• 1:20:53
  never attitudinize never think harshly of people if they do something that's
• 1:20:59
  bad they're doing it because their genes tell them to do it it's in their nature
• 1:21:07
  all the arguments think of all the arguments of history that matter not a job
• 1:21:14
  retain your cool it's a stosism is very difficult and I think it's possible and contemptible
• 1:21:22
  in ways in asking us not to suffer but to think of the suffering of other people that's impossible
• 1:21:29
  I went to a Buddhist retreat for a day and someone said that and I got up and walked out
• 1:21:36
  if someone's suffering you cannot tell them a bereavement for example you cannot tell them
• 1:21:41
  you cannot tell a mammal dead who've lost their soldier son in a helicopter accident
• 1:21:47
  pause think about how other people are suffering your suffering will go away
• 1:21:51
  the Buddhist who said that had obviously never suffered a bereavement
• 1:21:58
  why doubt that hmm I doubt that why if you say I doubt the Buddhist I completely understand
• 1:22:04
  the psychological phenomenon that you're pointing to which is that it's completely useless to try
• 1:22:10
  to finger wag you know stoic bon mose to somebody who's in the throes of yeah that's
• 1:22:17
  beautifully poor but the it's highly likely to me that the the the stoics and the most enlightened
• 1:22:25
  Buddhists have had their share of grief and that they regard the injunction as being one of
• 1:22:31
  personal mastery rather than of what other people ought to do right that that it's an internal
• 1:22:38
  pursuit to try to constantly to try to do the impossible the challenge is to is the challenge
• 1:22:45
  is presumably the quest to do what's impossible yeah a different approach might be to embrace the
• 1:22:53
  suffering to make it part of you that strikes me as more sensible and that's the advice I gave
• 1:23:02
  the mum and dad it lost his son in a letter I wrote them what have you found useful in your grieving
• 1:23:10
  process after losing your partner that it's not a process bereavement is not a process it's a place
• 1:23:18
  you inhabit the place and you can rearrange the furniture straight in the painting hanging
• 1:23:24
  on the wall but you inhabit it and you got to live with it and someone said to me only a week ago
• 1:23:31
  she thought it's best to think of it as a two-track two-tracks one-track you can enjoy life you
• 1:23:38
  can't enjoy life the entertainment of the Trump presidency the surfer North Meru brother
• 1:23:48
  the company of friends above all the friendships the written the written word the surface of the
• 1:23:54
  earth again for the third time in quoting all world but the other track is you can be drawn
• 1:24:03
  into it just the yearning the absolute yearning to be reunited with the lost partner do you think
• 1:24:12
  you will be do you think you will be reunited no but you know she's before me all the time her
• 1:24:21
  presence is dancing around me and I don't want to I don't want to lose that people say get
• 1:24:33
  beyond it well if my default position when I'm walking along the the coastal all the track
• 1:24:42
  my default position is to think of her then so be it I'm honoring her memory
• 1:24:47
  hmm would it feel like a betrayal should you get to a point at which you weren't missing her
• 1:24:56
  like that she wasn't present or that maybe you were over the grief more yeah you fear that
• 1:25:04
  and the other the other sense of panic hint of panic is that parts of her memory will be lost
• 1:25:15
  seriously was right about snow falling on the portrait of his lost wife
• 1:25:26
  other other writers on this have speculated in some ways the you know the the the lost person
• 1:25:31
  becomes an historical figure and and I think one one element of grief perhaps one part of it that
• 1:25:39
  is most manageable is the the sense of panic that's going to happen it's happening the disappearance
• 1:25:47
  of the memory you mean yeah someone who was it who said that there are multiple deaths as a person
• 1:25:54
  there's the physiological death and then there's the death of all the people who ever knew you and then
• 1:25:59
  there's the final time anyone says your name yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so
• 1:26:09
  true so a grief counselor would say this is the universal experience it happens to us all you're on
• 1:26:17
  this trajectory there are and that's that common sense yeah the other the other the other thing
• 1:26:27
  that's true is that there are people you live with sadness that track of sadness
• 1:26:34
  and you talk to people you talk to a friend who's losing her sight you talk to a friend who's
• 1:26:41
  living with multiple sclerosis these are this is flon pain every minute of the day sadness
• 1:26:57
  should be more manageable it is more manageable than what then a shocking neurological condition
• 1:27:06
  or cognitive decline serious cognitive decline yes my dad's going through that my dad's got
• 1:27:13
  Alzheimer's and to to watch the everything that was profound and delightful and sparkling and
• 1:27:22
  you know effusive and intrigued about the world gradually just slop into a hunk of you know
• 1:27:32
  go is barbaric so most barbaric thing the fates can do probably is not to like gradually
• 1:27:40
  leech you of your personhood so if I'm I'm required to where think sad and nostalgic thoughts to
• 1:27:50
  quote Shakespeare bring back yesterday a bit time return that that yearning that nostalgia which
• 1:27:59
  is the biggest part of grief I think is something I can face anyone in place there are worse conditions
• 1:28:10
  yeah there are worse conditions are you an nostalgic person constitutionally I don't think so I think
• 1:28:19
  I think I think you can a song can awaken in you the soldier for a time yeah or a smell yeah it's
• 1:28:30
  quite it's a funny thing isn't it that sense of wistfulness that is at once
• 1:28:35
  I'm pleasant because you want to be back there or you're missing that thing you know it's it's
• 1:28:41
  sorrowful but it's also beautiful at the same time I guess your life is probably full of that
• 1:28:46
  in the grief I guess that is part of the grief yeah it is yeah yeah yeah doesn't make you think
• 1:28:50
  about your own mortality or your own legacy of course of course I had a few staff together last night
• 1:28:57
  that was 30 years to the day since I've been elected premier um and you think of the the
• 1:29:07
  innocence of your personality at that time in 1995 elected premier with Elena um one couldn't
• 1:29:16
  have imagined what life would be like 30 years on you'd be grateful to be told that you'd be alive
• 1:29:22
  you'd be healthy you'd be sobered by being told your partner would be lost
• 1:29:34
  but you were still finding enough meaning into life in life to keep the keep resisting with it
• 1:29:40
  it's been a good 30 years gotta say do you think about legacy do you think about what you know
• 1:29:44
  oh yeah definitely yeah I'm what you'll be made of essentially yeah do you
• 1:29:48
  extent that anyone pays attention I mean I think yeah you're talking young I'm
• 1:29:59
  respect to some university students a couple of years ago now and they don't reduce papers they
• 1:30:06
  get they use in other ways I said do you know an Australian novelist called David Maloof
• 1:30:12
  because I did it within a couple of days earlier with Elena and none of them knew him
• 1:30:20
  I said I joked with him I said when I was running this university ALP club on the Kensington
• 1:30:25
  campus um all those years ago I mean talking to someone like me I would have been talking to someone
• 1:30:33
  who'd been premier I guess before the first world war right yeah that's that's the trick
• 1:30:38
  the time plate yeah I said I said you can tell your grandchildren you spoke to a premier from
• 1:30:42
  the last century like they like they're talking about Henry Park or George Reed so these are
• 1:30:49
  these are the tricks of time but you should there's something to laugh at but I was yes I was thinking
• 1:30:54
  actually the other day about how recent World War II was when I was a kid in the 80s right
• 1:31:02
  like a 90s and it was quite recent it was like as long ago as the 80s are now yeah when I was
• 1:31:11
  you know it's weird I keep thinking back to my first year at high school which was not in 1960 or
• 1:31:20
  1961 and how close that was right the shock of World War II 16 years so I would have been traveling
• 1:31:29
  on trains and buses trains or trams and buses with Pete Paul who would have survived the
• 1:31:36
  concentration camps the middle-aged guy reading the telegraphs might have been a survivor of a
• 1:31:43
  German stalagre or the Ty Burma railroad um I when I started to pick up the first paper backs
• 1:31:53
  about German atrocities or the Knights of Bichito I was reading about a phenomenon that was
• 1:32:02
  you know five minutes ago yeah well it was 2009 when you were banging about in 1961 1945
• 1:32:11
  was 16 years ago so 2000 the way 2009 sounds to us now was World War II yeah in 1961
• 1:32:19
  Hitler in the bunker in the yeah the bombs on Hiroshima very quick lightning round you can
• 1:32:24
  just give one word answers is like a Rorschach test okay um Brexit a terrible decision such self-harm
• 1:32:32
  to Britain on its living standards Robert Menzies hugely interesting to me and if you you listen
• 1:32:42
  on YouTube you can be captivated by the Olivier Lawrence Olivier qualities of his timber
• 1:32:52
  and his enunciation his modulation Nick Griner um probably the best yeah certainly I drop the
• 1:33:03
  qualification the best of the the non-labor leaders um in the in the story of the Liberal Party
• 1:33:14
  in New South Wales government funding for private schools um two generous to the rich schools
• 1:33:21
  and we ought to remind ourselves that the low fee charging non-state schools most of them religious
• 1:33:30
  and the struggling state schools I've got a common interest uh relocating the ABC to a
• 1:33:38
  paramount of from Ultimo um look I'm entirely selfish it's easier for me to get to the studio
• 1:33:45
  in Ultimo convenient real truth Elon Musk um he's the only business leader whose biography I'm
• 1:33:55
  interested in reading the Liberal Party I wish it were true to more of its foundational
• 1:34:05
  principles free markets freedom of expression um the protection of middle class living standards
• 1:34:17
  the Australian Republic not an issue anymore Australians don't want it and we might as well accept
• 1:34:26
  the reality of a constitutional monarchy which is good enough in New Zealand and Canada the greatest
• 1:34:31
  threat to independence is not those constitutional arrangements it's our dough-wide devotion
• 1:34:39
  to being an uncritical ally of the United States that's that's the greatest threat to independence
• 1:34:44
  not the Republic not the not existence of a Republic the idea of workness um I'm just worried
• 1:34:53
  that central left parties with their agendas of reform are being tight cast
• 1:35:02
  as a result of what can be called weightless what's the most parsimonious solution to that
• 1:35:07
  um my own experience I brought
• 1:35:14
  transexuals in under the anti-discrimination act in my first terms premier there's no fuss
• 1:35:22
  there's no bother no anxiety about men competing in women's sporting events or who gets to use
• 1:35:31
  a female toilet the ethos have moved fast and break things
• 1:35:38
  I think it's got a lot of appeal um and and has me think immediately of walk and
• 1:35:45
  cheating and the floating of the dollar so it's such a big reform to float our currency
• 1:35:52
  and it was done in a flash not subjected to endless overanalysis like American nuclear power plants
• 1:36:03
  King Charles I'm I'm an admirer because he's because of one thing he accepts the reality of global warming
• 1:36:14
  he accepts that it is a reality and is committed to nature conservation and preservation of the
• 1:36:23
  the historic fabric is chair of the Australian Heritage Council I see him as a an ally
• 1:36:29
  he's not a playboy he's a serious figure the alternative for dutch and under um I can see
• 1:36:36
  where they came into being the suggestion of unlimited open immigration to generous my angular
• 1:36:44
  miracle a million Syrian refugees and I think we've got to absorb the lesson of that but it's
• 1:36:52
  frightening to think of a party some of these members look sympathetically on Hitler now striding
• 1:36:58
  the political landscape of Germany Joe Biden um I was tempted to dismiss him as an old cold warrior
• 1:37:09
  and his views of Israel certainly confirm that but looking at his record
• 1:37:16
  he accepted the wisdom of not committing America to endless military interventions
• 1:37:22
  he deposed the surge in Afghanistan under the Obama administration for example
• 1:37:28
  and he managed support for Ukraine without committing one American personnel and two
• 1:37:39
  equipment suppliers that would have been launched by Ukraine at Russian territory
• 1:37:48
  I thought I thought his diplomacy was clever and again
• 1:37:55
  showed that he'd learnt the lesson that overseas military intervention was a cliche that had
• 1:38:02
  cost America a lot if he'd gone harder faster could Ukraine have won
• 1:38:09
  gone harder faster yes for example by not putting the injunction on Ukraine firing into Russia
• 1:38:14
  and not being a scared of Putin's threats and just saying well if you want to world war three then
• 1:38:18
  bring it on but let's let the gamble that Ukraine is gonna win this look like I think there's
• 1:38:23
  part of all of us the brain of any one of us that would entertain what might have happened
• 1:38:29
  if he allowed NATO forces including Americans to strafe that great queue of tanks
• 1:38:38
  that had had become roadblocks on the highway to Kiev but let's praise his caution
• 1:38:49
  he opted to pursue a middle path that didn't risk a nuclear showdown and for that
• 1:38:56
  for that wisdom it deserves credit and it's in keeping with the position he'd argued as vice
• 1:39:01
  president against a surge of troops to a foreign war it's on how it
• 1:39:10
  a serious politician whose truth mistake was dialing with Pauline Hanson and those
• 1:39:19
  Australian instincts
• 1:39:21
  but someone with whom you could have an educated dialogue about this country its past and its
• 1:39:34
  future lastly religion it offers no comfort I think there's an instinct in all of us
• 1:39:45
  the wants the promise of eternal life but there's no voice from the void as Marcus really
• 1:39:56
  has said we've got to walk without comfort into that void and before we do so make every contribution
• 1:40:09
  we can to the common good well if Paul Keating doesn't get to be president of Australia or I'll
• 1:40:14
  nominate you to be president of Australia when we're a republic thank you Bob I don't do ceremony
• 1:40:19
  well I'd rather be a contentious debater thanks for being here thanks George