Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Liberalism in 2025”: STAN GRANT

Transcript

“Liberalism in 2025”: STAN GRANT · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Okay, humans, welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, and who boy?
• 0:06
  A lot to think about, Syria is front of mind what exactly will happen, the entire Middle
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  East being reshaped, and questions as we look towards 2025 about exactly what that year
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  will bring, what the second Trump term will deliver us, and the future of democracy and
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  liberalism not just across Middle East, but the entire globe.
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  I had intended to bank this conversation and release that around New Year's as a kind
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  of amusing on what liberalism might mean in 2025.
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  Keep an eye on the podcast feed throughout the holiday season, even if you're on a break
• 0:41
  over Christmas and the New Year, subscribe to the sub-stack, there'll be sub-stack live streams
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  with interesting guests and so on, as I basically just want to wrestle with this moment that we
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  find ourselves in and take a moment. I thought to step back from the news of the day and take
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  a bigger picture, look at the next four years and the coming year, but sometimes the news
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  of the day actually is the news of the next year and next four years as it seems to be this week.
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  So I have pulled the plug on one of those slots that I had lined up for the New Year and we're
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  releasing it to you now, because stand grant is one of the people who I would most like to wrestle
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  with a big question like this with. What does Syria mean for the Middle East? What does the flailing
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  of Western liberal democracy is both in the case of Ukraine and in the case of the Middle East,
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  in the case of our relationship to Israel and Gaza and in the case of our own democracies ourselves
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  pretend for our own fate. Stand grant is a household name in Australia, if you're listening in
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  Australia, of course you know who he is, he's probably the most famous indigenous Australian and
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  probably the most experienced global international journalist that Australia has ever produced.
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  He was the senior international correspondent for CNN for many years, he was based in Abu Dhabi,
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  he was based in Hong Kong, he was based in Beijing, you could turn on CNN anywhere you were
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  in the world across the Asia Pacific and you could see him as a newsreader, commentator,
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  anchor, announcer and correspondent. He returned to Australia and he took up a position as the
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  international affairs analyst for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, he hosted the weekly
• 2:15
  panel show called Q&A, a household name ubiquitous. And then last year he resigned spectacularly
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  in a massive flame out from the National Public Broadcaster, it was a huge national scandal
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  and it was a crisis essentially of race and racism. We don't dwell on that, although we go into it
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  a little bit in the context of how we should all be talking to each other and having uncomfortable
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  conversations both inside and outside legacy media institutions like the ABC, but we talk mostly
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  about the future of the global order, the place for enlightenment values in the 21st century
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  and the role of podcasts like this and conversations elsewhere. I hope you get as much as I did
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  from the one, the only stand grant.
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  The 30,000 foot kind of picture of the world. We're sitting here as the future of the
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  Middle East is completely upside down. I mean, what do you make of the events of the past week
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  and so on? Again, you know, in a way it's been ever thus, certainly since the end of World War
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  one and you know, the reshaping of the Middle East and the Sykes Pickle Agreement and you draw
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  up maps in the ground. That's where the Brits and the Friends just drew up drew lies on a map
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  that said, and this will be Syria. And we have supported despots because they've served our
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  purposes at various times. Gaddafi has been an ally of the West and Saddam has been an ally
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  of the West and the Americans helped to fund the Iraq war against Iran because that suited
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  their interests and you know, the shifting sands if you want to use that analogy of the Middle
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  East have always been there. Right, but this feels like something of a general or
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  significance to me, not to you? Not necessarily, not necessarily because you know, we've seen
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  this script and we heard the same thing post Gaddafi post Saddam, you know, we've seen this.
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  What I fear is that in that vacuum, people will turn to what is comforting and familiar,
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  which may not be our idea of who we want to run those countries. If you look at the fall of
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  Saddam, what happens is that Iran essentially steps in and you become the Iraqi government that
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  is a proxy of Iran and a sheer population then dominating a majority, Sunni population,
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  which leads ultimately to the rise of Islamic state that then effectively for a period takes
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  over. And then of course goes over right into Syria. But I see this as the final rebalancing of
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  that bad chess move in the sense that Iran was a backer of Assad. Now that's gone and this is
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  a counterweight backer. And then who do we, is it a counterweight or is it another bad option?
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  I mean, you don't know who's going depends on your yardstick of bad. But it seems like this,
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  these groups, these Islamist groups that are taking control of Syria at the moment who hated Assad,
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  also hate Iran and will probably maybe cross fingers, not allow Iran to keep funneling weapons
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  through Syria to get to Hezbollah. And who else? Who else hates Iran? There were harbists and the
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  salafists, the Sunni extremists that gave rise to al-Qaeda and Islamic state. They hate Iran,
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  they hate the Shia. So because you know, all of this emerges. We look at this in westernized
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  and we try to see this as who is going to be better, better served for the Western interests and
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  democracy and human rights. And this is a long term internal war for the soul of Islam itself,
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  the Shia Sunni split the Saudi Iran proxy war in places like Yemen, the rise of groups like
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  al-Qaeda and Islamic state. You know, this is a hornet's nest that we don't know what's going
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  to come out of this. You know, look at the Taliban. They were greeted by the people
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  and people in the West as heroes, as as as saviors when when they came to power and crossed the
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  warlords. I mean, you know, in the 90s. Yeah, so you get you get the Soviet invasion, the Soviet pull
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  out, you then get the civil war, the warlords are controlled various parts of Afghanistan.
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  The Taliban come to power and the Taliban overthrow those and people see that it's just being
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  liberated. Women at the time celebrated that because they were so brutally treated by the warlords,
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  then what did the Taliban become? And who's, you know, during the the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
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  who does the West carry favor with and and in a secure way help to fund the Salafis and Wahabists
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  of al-Qaeda or others who who the Mujahideen are they giving rocket shuttle the warlords grenade?
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  So so this is where we find ourselves in something that is so intricate, something that is deeply
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  theologically rooted, something that is historically rooted, socially rooted. One of the things I
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  look at in in Syria now and I say if if you get to a point when the euphoria of the overthrow of
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  Assad has gone and suddenly, you know, you're confronted with the struggles of daily life and
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  you don't have, you know, if you can switch and your light doesn't come on and there's no one to
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  do your plumbing and the schools close down and the hospitals not working and who do people turn
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  to? Who do they choose to represent them? Are we going to see a democratic future for Syria?
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  Who do they vote for? Yeah, you look at Egypt, do you look at the rise of the Arab Spring?
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  Who got elected? The Muslim Brotherhood. Why? Because they've been running the hospitals and the
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  schools. They were working in the communities. And then we get to let that happen and we
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  helped assist a counter revolution, a military counter revolution. And we and a military counter
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  revolution. And this is this is where we end up and again, you know, this is this is this is the
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  complicated world that we live in. I don't know where the ethical ballast comes to
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  hold this in place. If you look at the cold war, it was that standoff provided an ethical counter
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  way. You know, there was the world was held in place. And there were proxy wars, of course,
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  in career and Vietnam and the Middle East, of course, meddling in the Middle East. And there
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  was there were there were power plays there and the Soviet supporting some and the American supporting
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  others. But broadly, there was this this counterbalance of ideologies and power that provided a moral
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  ballast to the society. And we in the West believe that morality and ethics were on the outside
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  and and then ultimately that that prevails. And the post Cold War world, which we rushed to call
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  an end of history and were all on a journey to liberal democracy descended so quickly back into
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  the warring tribes, it was nothing to hold that in place. Where does that ethical moral ballast
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  come from now? Who can hold this contest in place? Certainly America comes. Well, did it come from
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  the existence of an evil empire to be an opposite stand in opposition to in the form of the Soviet
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  Union? In which case, we may be developing another evil network of empire in the form of, well,
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  China is one of them Iran. I think it's different. But I'm thinking no, I'm thinking specifically
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  of Iran in the sense that you've got this weird, theocratic, America hating, Jew hating, corrupt,
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  religious, high dogmatic regime, which is shamelessly in alliance with an increasingly authoritarian
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  Russia and China. And so you've got these three big powers standing sort of in opposition to us.
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  I don't know if that provides us with another. No, I don't think so. I think it's much more
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  intricate and contradictory and complicated now. I mean, China is not an adversary of the West
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  in the way the Soviets were, because they're enmeshed in the Western systems. They're enmeshed
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  in the global network. And then I really have an idea to sell the world the way the Soviets did.
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  They just sort of have their idea is the West is cynical and hypocritical and stop worrying about
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  ideals. And they're very transactional. You know, they want to do business. And we need them.
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  They're the biggest engine of economic growth. They are everybody's biggest trading partner.
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  And they need us and we need them. So I don't see it as clear cut in terms of ideology and morality.
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  I don't see the lines as clearly drawn and the lines were very clearly drawn in the Eastern
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  block and the West. So there's a fluidity to this now that makes it so much more difficult
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  to deal with in terms of bringing any moral weight to it. And there are no easy sides to choose.
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  Not that they're ever were easy sides to choose. But you could see those who broadly aligned,
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  I think, with your values and interests. I don't think that's the case now. And they're given
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  in democracies themselves. You can't even talk about a democratic block. I mean Putin can say he's
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  elected. But you can't talk about a democratic block because we've seen the frame of democracy
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  from the inside the rise of autocrats and authoritarians who have corrupted democratic systems,
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  the collapse of democratic checks and balances, the soft guardrails of democracy through judiciary
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  and other things that are corrupted within democracies themselves. So we're really in a very,
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  very fluid state, Josh. It is a, I do see this in a broad sweep. I do see this as the sort of
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  the 500 year experiment of modernity that was infused by post-enlightenment, liberalism and
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  democracy. I see that as being really stretched to the limits. And you know the old thing about
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  something dying and something yet to be born. I think we're in that stage. And it's very difficult
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  to see where the leadership comes from to be able to bring some sort of moral order to that.
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  Or what that moral order is. What is a moral order, Josh? Who determines that now?
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  I mean, can you speak clearly about what moral ballast is now?
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  The standard institutional, small sea conservative response would appeal to institutions of
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  global governance, right? And would appeal to the post-World War II world order and say something
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  about NATO and the United Nations. And the importance of liberal democracies,
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  maintaining a global order so that we're not just driving tanks into neighboring countries and
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  taking them over. But obviously as you're pointing to that increasingly lax credibility,
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  the security council is obviously just an arbitrary vestige of the people who happened to
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  win World War II. Like why is it that way? Where is Brazil in all this? Where is
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  Australia and Canada and New Zealand and South Korea and Japan and India in all this? Like
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  clearly we need some updated, I mean, I would hope that we reduce our alliance on America as being
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  the beacon on the hill and that the European Union find some kind of, for a start,
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  boot out Hungary, like get serious about liberal democracy. Make it an actual, like it is,
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  it actually has to be a club of legitimate democracies. But you know what? You talk to people in
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  Europe and you talk to people in Hungary and many people say Hungary now is what Europe used to be
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  and should be. They actually say, isn't the liberal democracy one in which we as Hungarians
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  determine who gets to be Hungarian? We want it to be safe. You know, you can make whatever
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  immigration policy you want, but you don't get to stack the judiciary. You don't get to criminalise
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  universities for thinking the wrong thing. You don't get to tacitly penalise opposition parties
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  and give preferential treatment to your own political party. And there are all kinds of anti-democrat
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  things that they're doing that. And yet, aren't there different ways of doing that in democracy
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  that hide and disguise the fact that they're doing that anyway? Who gets to serve on the judiciary?
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  What class of people are they taken from? The prevalence of elitism and people who stack
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  all of those. Of course, but the solution to that is not just to shrug nihilistically and say,
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  well, because the whole thing's corrupt, we might as well be overtly corrupted. But again,
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  if you're looking for something that brings more weight to the world, I mean, your earlier point
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  is, you know, stands and that is it appears to be corrupt and contradictory. So who gets to speak
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  with that with that weight? I mean, some some quorum of us has to gather together re-invigorate
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  enlightenment ideals, speak to people about the city on the hill. I'm not sure enlightenment
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  ideals are the answer. I mean, this is the problem. You see, I'm not, you know, I think I think
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  enlightenment had a devil in the detail and the devil in the detail of enlightenment is that it's
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  rationality, it's horizontalism, it's cosmopolitanism, it's severance of tradition,
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  creates a space of rootlessness that blows back on you. I think a lot of what we're seeing now
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  is precisely because of the enlightenment. I really do think that we have stretched
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  the compact of modernity so thin now that I don't know that it holds and I don't know where the
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  the new idea that replenishes that comes from. I mean, you know, we're still living on the fumes
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  of 17th and 18th century ideas and one of these are really beautiful. But maybe they were the best
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  ideas anyone ever came up with. At the time, maybe, I don't think so, I think the best idea when
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  I come up with is Christianity. Now, you know, we can argue the philosophy of that, but you know,
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  I believe that Christ is the great event of the human experience. I believe that the miracle
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  of the birth of the divine human, I believe that there were moral insights that Christianity
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  popularized, which have since become, I think, almost universally accepted by secular people.
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  And much of what at the expense of what was really true about Christianity was not just a moral
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  proposition. What was true about Christianity was the fact that the divine is greater than the
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  human and the human is completed in the divine. That's the Christ moment. He is divine and human.
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  If we take that seriously, if we say the human is not the limit of the world, it's okay to
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  cherry peak and take some of the morality and, you know, a manual can't can take the do it,
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  do unto others as you do unto yourself and essentially call that the golden rule of his philosophy
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  of how to bring about a perpetual peace. Hagel can take eschatology, you know, the idea of
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  fulfillment through Christianity in a second coming of Christ that leads us to a place of peace
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  and see that in the unfolding of history that ultimately leads either to communism or liberalism.
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  I mean, philosophers of all cherry pick this and that the Western epistemology is scattered
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  with bits cherry picked from Christianity, but missing the fundamental thing. And I do believe
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  the Christ event is the great moment where the world breaks open and God comes to earth as human
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  and tells us that he is how you live. You forgive your enemies. You love or you judge none.
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  Right, but the vast majority of humans in the world who are not Christians and who have ever
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  existed who are not Christians have also found ways. Oh, yes, they have their civilizations
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  and their societies. But I, but I, but I, that's true. And, and, and, and I have great respect
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  for that and I've lived in those societies. I believe the Christ event is the great event.
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  And just in terms of cherry picking, it's of course true that secular philosophers of cherry
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  picked Christianity, but it's also true that religious institutions get battered by the
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  forces of modernity and cherry and cherry pick. I mean, one of the reasons that I, I'm a Catholic
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  and I converted Catholicism is that it still stands rooted in a tradition that's pre-modern.
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  It is, it is, it isn't Eastern tradition. It comes out of there is a direct lineage,
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  you know, and, and, and it does stand as a form of resistance to modernity. It does hold out
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  against the whims of modernity. It holds on to something mystical and magical that modernity
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  of course banishes to the realm of superstition. So, so just, just to come back, I mean, we did,
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  you know, by that logic, you wouldn't have reformations. No, exactly. Thank God.
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  Yeah. I, I, I think reformation is hard. But do you go to a mass in Latin?
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  I would like to. Sadly, sadly, you know, we don't post Vatican II, you know, we've made those.
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  But was Vatican II on the stage? Well, there are bits of it. I think, obviously, I think there
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  are bits of it. Because my point is simply that you could have a fundamentalist, you could have
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  a fundamentalist reading over New and Old Testament. Yeah, you can. And that would lead you to a
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  very different church than the one that currently exists. It does. And it has lived to very
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  different churches than the one that, you know, I, I, I have an allegiance to. But I do think
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  Catholicism holds for me at its best to, to that, to that belief in the Christ event as the great
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  defining event of humanity. But to me, there's no solution in that stand because all that is
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  the saying is the ultimate solution. They're saying, yeah, but I know, but Muslims think that
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  there's the ultimate solution. Every sect thinks that it has the answer. And, and part of the
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  communication of that, which I love, I love the, the, the ecumenical conversation. I love the
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  interfaith dialogue. But as Pope Benedict says, you have interfaith dialogue, not for consensus,
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  but to reach truth. And I believe that in the crucifixion and the Christ event, I believe you see
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  the great truth. But that, that's me. I'm open to that, to that conversation. But to bring it back
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  to your idea, when you said, you know, is this the best idea? I, I refute the idea that enlightenment
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  and liberalism is the best idea. And I think we're seeing the limits of that right now in a world
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  that that that we are increasingly incomprehensible to one another. There is no moral balance. I mean,
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  right. Right. So I'm not going to say what I mean by the best idea, right? Because it depends
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  what the art sticks you one uses to define best. I see the world as a generally us a collection of
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  tribes in most places and most times. There are dogmatic tribes that believe that they have a
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  monopoly on the truth about the nature of the cosmos in some way, whether those are traditional
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  societies that pray before a bunch of imaginary gods or whether that's, you know, Islam or one of
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  the big faiths of Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism and or whether it's a secular thing like
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  communism or Marxism. Most people in most places at most times have been quite convinced
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  that their system of doing things is the correct one. And what I, why I say that I would
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  nominate enlightenment values as being the the best ones is because they step above all of that.
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  But do they work? And well, we can have a strategic question about whether they work. I would say
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  they work the test ultimately. Well, I would say they will up and then tell us that it holds.
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  Well, in a globalized pluralistic world in which there is digital communications at the speed of light,
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  I would say they have the better chance of working than any particular orthodoxy.
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  I think the opposite might be the case in that in that in that scaled up world with communication
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  at the speed of light, we actually see the capacity to become incomprehensible to one another,
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  alienated from one another, and a blowback of a return of tribes in their most violent way.
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  I think part of that is what we see. Yes, we're seeing that. But is the solution to that that
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  everyone should become Christian or what? I don't think
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  well, I hold to my tradition as the truth of tradition. I believe that's the great event.
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  But you know, I know people are not going to see that. So then we live in a world of contested
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  traditions. How do we bring a respect and a peace to that if cosmopolitanism and liberal neutrality
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  is not enough? You see, John Rawls' idea of a veil of ignorance that you come to the public
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  marketplace, you come to the public square, devoid of any inherited advantages, devoid of
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  culture, color, severed from ancestry, and then we construct a place of fairness if none of us
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  have any particular vested interest. It might be a wonderful thought experiment,
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  but the moment someone puts a weight on that scale, the moment someone says,
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  I'm a Muslim in France and I want to wear a veil. And France says no. According to our
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  of La Satae and the public square, that will not be happening. Is that person French? In the
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  fullness of their faith, the fullness of their identity, you put an existential weight
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  who mediates that weight, and then you add mass to that, and then you get real conflict where
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  people are inside a society, demanding a recognition of a right that society can't recognize.
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  And I think rights themselves as a way of ordering society, first of all, they're coercive,
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  and the distribution of rights as Hannah Arendt put it, the right to have rights,
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  becomes definition of fairness. And I think these are the rocks that liberalism stumbles on.
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  But wait, so Rawls' idea for people who aren't across and correct me if I'm getting it wrong
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  is that when deciding whether or not a system or a rule is just, you should have the
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  thought experiment of saying, imagine if I didn't know who I was going to be in this society,
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  and I was just going to be reborn as anybody in this particular society. What would the first
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  what would the better option be? I'm not going to be worried that I was coming in as a yeah.
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  It strikes me, but then no one has answers. That that that that that you've been in a
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  self fulfilling failure in the sense that you're saying you're saying people are going to come at
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  things with baggage. Therefore, we can't construct a society that is well, the thought is the
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  maximally acceptable to everybody. Therefore, because I'm smuggling in identity and tradition,
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  I'm therefore going to doom the entire enlightenment project because of the existence of these
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  things which the enlightenment project seeks to overcome. No, I think I think I turn it around and
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  say the enlightened project is doomed itself because it doesn't scale and it comes out of it.
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  But it did scale for no, it's scaled own hundreds of years in very predominantly Western
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  white countries that did not have the most multi-ethnic countries in the world like America around
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  for up to up to a world. Well, I mean, America World War II got almost 100 years.
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  Did it? America was founded on a genocide of First Nations people was founded on the enslavement
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  of people. It fell apart in disastrous war precisely because it couldn't hold the first
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  iteration of enlightenment values against tribalism. Well, not necessarily when we know we know
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  was also a war of a lot of other things, self-interest and trade and states. You can't play the
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  slavery card and then say no when enlightenment values. The parts of that demolished slavery. They
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  weren't doing a good thing. There was part of that. But these things are never the purity of that
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  idea. I don't know that it means the test of our times. I think when you when you scale.
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  To the extent that the United States has flourished, it has been to the extent that it has been able
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  to rise above its tribal squabbles and aspire to something greater. Yeah, it's flourished for a lot
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  of other reasons. Josh, it's flourished because of its capacity to weaponize war. I mean,
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  part of the reasons for it's where it's flourished as it turned into a war machine in World War II,
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  which it kept funding afterwards and we know it's a war machine. It's been a place of gang war
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  fear. It's people by gangsta families that still run everything. So a lot of other countries
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  that aren't successful. Oh, no, no, that's true. But I'm saying there are a lot of things that
• 27:36
  contribute to it to it's success, which doesn't go back to the purity of some enlightenment idea
• 27:41
  of neutral public spaces and the and the virtue of the common good. What doesn't hurt? It doesn't hurt.
• 27:48
  North South Korea and North Korea. Look at East Germany and West Germany. Look at places that
• 27:53
  are more enlightenment and places that are less enlightenment. Yeah, yeah, that's true. But I don't
• 27:59
  know. I don't know that well, let's take the US versus China. I mean, there is an argument that
• 28:07
  China lifting 800 million people out of poverty. China, which comes with a very different
• 28:14
  treatment idea and recognition of what human flourishing is and human rights are, has actually
• 28:20
  provided human flourishing is for its people greater over the past 20 or 30 years in America has.
• 28:25
  I'd agree. It's certainly not so such a low base. Well, when you come out, when you come out,
• 28:30
  it's got being an impoverished rice paddy farmer who dies at the age of 35. It's not hard to
• 28:34
  afford. We're all beginners now than America and more Christians now than America. And I mean,
• 28:40
  you know, it's the these things are not are not more Christians than America. It does. Really?
• 28:46
  Well, it's got a bigger population. I mean, a much bigger population. That's going to help. That
• 28:50
  would mean one in five Chinese people. There's about 300 million Christians in America.
• 28:54
  Amazing. In China. In China. But but but again, you know, just come back to this. If this is
• 29:00
  I think I don't think that I think there have to be a lot of very specific circumstances
• 29:08
  for liberalism to flourish as it was intended. I think if it's smaller, flourish is better.
• 29:14
  Flows is better in Denmark, although you go to Denmark. And what do you see? The tension now
• 29:19
  of post, you know, post Iraq, post Syria, Middle Eastern wars of people coming there,
• 29:27
  Ukrainians coming there, creating a level of tension because those enlightenment values
• 29:35
  don't hold when it meets the stranger that lays an existential claim against those values.
• 29:40
  But now you're saying like Marine Le Pen or the anti-immigrant right in, well, I would say the
• 29:46
  enlightenment will work. I can see and I can see where that I can see where that comes from.
• 29:52
  I don't agree with that because I think they play to the worst instincts. I'm a Christian
• 29:57
  Josh. I lean into charity. I lean into into the love of the stranger. You know, I don't believe
• 30:03
  in holding people out, but I but I do think you need something stronger than just an enlightenment
• 30:10
  neutrality to meet the test of difference. I think when you reach scale, it becomes incredibly
• 30:17
  fraught. Japan's OK because the Japan society they're Japanese. They're not having a lot of
• 30:21
  migrants. You and I can't go there and become Japanese citizens. And you know, so that's
• 30:25
  but smaller countries, homogenous countries, countries of singular faith, countries where people
• 30:32
  speak the same language. You know, liberalism, you can create that veil of ignorance. You can
• 30:37
  create that sense of neutrality that's going to hold. It gets more fraught when you scale up
• 30:43
  within a society, when you hit 300 million people in a place like America, which is a nation of
• 30:48
  strangers, or then when you try to export that to other countries as a moral ballast for ordering
• 30:54
  a world with those countries absolutely reject those values. So I don't know that liberalism
• 30:59
  is going to hold. I think when you, I think the enlightenment project itself starts to hit limits
• 31:06
  in the world that we live in now where a country like China is the biggest engine of economic
• 31:11
  growth. It is our biggest trading partners where countries reject those values and hold on to
• 31:17
  whether it's theocracies or you know, different ideologies. I don't see that it brings us to a world
• 31:26
  that can't imagine of a cosmopolitan neutral world of perpetual peace. And I think we hit limits
• 31:33
  of it. And we're seeing that. So I mean, you're making good a good case for a more restrained and
• 31:42
  perhaps less universalist conception of global order. And hard conversations that need to be
• 31:49
  have Josh. I mean, we can't have a conversation about immigration, for instance,
• 31:52
  Scotie argument about the Marine Le Pen, which is clearly needed, right? It is clearly needed.
• 31:58
  We can't have a conversation about that without it being hijacked by the bad faith actors.
• 32:04
  Or the liberals who say, we love everybody, let everybody in and you know, you can do whatever
• 32:09
  you like here and you can pursue your own, you know, your own life choices and your own faith and
• 32:15
  you're, yes, that's fine. That doesn't work. I was so struck Stan earlier this year when the
• 32:21
  opposition leader of Australia was talking about house prices and was saying that obviously one of
• 32:28
  factors for house prices is Australia's a very high immigration rate that puts upward pressure on
• 32:33
  property prices. And one of Australia's most prominent journalists was giving a speech and said
• 32:39
  that this was a racist dog whistle. Well, I meant to public it's there. And I was so disheartened
• 32:49
  because I thought, why do we have to go into these like snappy sort of, I don't know, tribal
• 32:59
  crouches? It can be true that obviously importing a quarter of a million or a half million people
• 33:04
  a year, or you know, what it is in over the course of two or three years or whatever, that is going
• 33:09
  to have an impact. Yes. Like that additional demand when supply is not growing is going to
• 33:15
  have an impact on a resource. Why do you have to, why don't you racialize it?
• 33:19
  Racial. And also Josh, if we can bring, we can bring different people in. If we can find ways
• 33:29
  of meeting each other, you know, I've mentioned, you know, earlier conversation we had about
• 33:33
  living in the Middle East and entering into a vertical Islamic space. I'm not, I'm Muslim,
• 33:39
  I'm not going there to change them. I'm not going there to convert to Islam. But I loved
• 33:43
  being held in a vertical space of love and charity and the beauty of the space with a long
• 33:50
  rich health role. And the beauty of the faith and a hospitality that made me feel at home.
• 33:55
  But I was never going to own the place. I was never going to change the place. If I went there
• 34:00
  and started, you know, in mass numbers and started changing it and said, actually, we can't do
• 34:05
  the call to prayer in the morning now because some people like to sleep in and you're really
• 34:08
  disrupting the morning sleep or whatever it might be. I mean, it's a remarkable experiment.
• 34:15
  The liberal enlightenment idea of cosmopolitanism and neutrality. It's a remarkable experiment.
• 34:22
  But it hits the rapids. It hits the rapids very quickly. And I just don't know for me,
• 34:28
  again, to come back to the idea of faith, I know what my moral ballast is. I know what I try to
• 34:34
  live by. But if we can't create spaces to meet each other and a language that is communicable
• 34:41
  and a proposition to which we can be, you know, to steal Lincoln's line, a proposition to which
• 34:46
  we can be dedicated and dedicated to the point of offering our lives for one another. Even when
• 34:54
  that doesn't recognize you, what might such a proposition be that would have purchased outside
• 34:59
  your faith tradition? It's very difficult. I mean, I would have, I would have,
• 35:05
  either of times in my life when I've been a paid up member of sort of liberalism. And I've seen it
• 35:11
  as a Christian, it rapidly loses its ability to speak to me morally. It is far too horizontal
• 35:19
  for me, as a Catholic in particular, as far too horizontal for me. But I look Josh, I think
• 35:29
  it is very, we are, we are confronted with the reality that the experiment of creating cosmopolitan
• 35:38
  spaces of neutrality, of creating liberal spaces of rights that can regulate difference and a
• 35:48
  portion, proportionate justice. In light of our historical and cultural baggage, I think we have
• 35:57
  hit limits of that everywhere. Now, there are real hard conversations to be had then about what is
• 36:04
  a cohesive society? Who do we allow in and who do we not allow in? Under what circumstances,
• 36:10
  in what numbers? Who are we as a people? I mean, if a state itself becomes
• 36:19
  leveled out to the point at which everyone can belong, but no one can belong. You know,
• 36:24
  Dostoevsky, in the famous novel, The Brother of the Karamatsov, is talking to the woman of
• 36:28
  little faith, and she's a person who can love everybody but love no one. If we can love everybody
• 36:34
  but love no one, then we don't have a nation. We don't have a society. You can't love everyone,
• 36:40
  if you can't love someone. And who do you love in that society? These are really difficult,
• 36:48
  difficult things because, of course, it's anathema in a liberal society. To bring that weight,
• 36:56
  to bring the weight, which is then... I'm not sure about that. No, I think it's in the
• 37:02
  idealized version, enlightenment version of liberalism. It's not anathema to bring that weight.
• 37:06
  It's anathema to impose that weight outside of your clan. No, what I'm saying by that is in
• 37:14
  liberalism, to then stop and say no. Oh, I see. Like we're not having any more minds for example.
• 37:21
  Or we're not having... I mean, the rock that liberalism stubs its toe on, and I'm talking
• 37:28
  liberalism here in the sense of progressivism. Is is is is relativism? At what point is no no? I mean,
• 37:38
  you know, if we said in the abortion debate, first trimester, second trimester, third trimester,
• 37:43
  at what point is no no? If someone wants to transition, if a 10-year-old is, you know,
• 37:49
  just for arguments, like I don't know if it's at the case, but if a 10-year-old is to begin
• 37:53
  gender transition, what are the five-year-old? I mean, I look at these things and I think
• 38:03
  progressivism that continually expands the horizon reaches a point where you do love everyone,
• 38:09
  but love no one. And there is nothing that holds that society together. And this was always
• 38:16
  the devil in the detail of enlightenment because it was capacious and because it did tilt
• 38:23
  towards a pacifying neutrality, that it ceases then to have any purchase. And if someone brings
• 38:29
  something to that public square that puts an existential weight on it, we then either have to
• 38:33
  accept or reject that person. If you reject that person, is it liberal? If you accept them,
• 38:38
  are you bringing something into liberalism that's going to poison it itself? It's, you know, a drop
• 38:43
  in the well can poison the whole well. So this is really, really tough, they're tough conversations
• 38:52
  to have. And of course, when we open the door to these conversations, we get half-wits and
• 38:55
  bigots who want to capitalize on this and pit us against each other and weaponize it,
• 39:01
  rather than being able to say, what does a cohesive society look like? And Australia is going
• 39:07
  to look different to Korea. It's going to look different to India. It's going to look different
• 39:11
  to America. What is it to be British? We saw this with the Brexit vote. It wasn't just about
• 39:17
  trade, it was about identity. What is it to be British? Trump inhabits something of that identity
• 39:23
  when people say, you know, enough, enough, I don't want you to speak in acronyms. I want a man
• 39:29
  to be a man and a woman to be a woman. I mean, I'm a cape, I'm a cane a world of acronyms, but,
• 39:34
  you know, I come out on my liberal leaders to come out of the universities. But, but, but a lot of
• 39:40
  people, my parents don't live in that world. You have an interesting anecdote in a great piece
• 39:44
  that you recently wrote for the monthly magazine about going and giving a, you know, this very
• 39:49
  high-falutin lecture at Yale and then walking down the hill and getting lunch in a diner and
• 39:55
  feeling like you've just walked from one side of America to the other. Exactly. From the summer
• 40:00
  to the elite into the land of the real people. And I'll feel more at home because I, you know,
• 40:06
  at heart, I'm a working-class person and I'm an aboriginal person from a working-class family.
• 40:14
  You know, JD Vance has got more in common with me than Kamala Harris. That's just a fact.
• 40:20
  That's just a fact. Her liberal elitism doesn't speak to me at all. JD Vance, while there are things
• 40:26
  I might disagree with him politically about and some of his language I find in temperate. When he
• 40:31
  talks about growing up as a poor boy, sharing a room, dysfunctional people around you, you know,
• 40:38
  I know where he's coming from. And you know, I walked down to the diner. I sat in the diner and
• 40:42
  there's a bloke at the bar and he's complaining about the cost of buying a new window.
• 40:47
  And two black women who birthed next to me and there's a Latino waitress. Not everyone's sitting
• 40:53
  around with each other. There's not come by. People aren't holding hands, but they're breathing
• 40:56
  the same air. And there is something, Josh, if there is a kernel of something to hold on to
• 41:03
  in liberalism, it is the ability to breathe the same air, to bring things down to a granular level,
• 41:10
  sitting in a diner in peace with your difference over eggs, you know, and doing the simple things
• 41:18
  with civility and but holding the balance of that is very, very fragile. And I think we've lost
• 41:28
  the capacity to have that conversation. Take it out of the liberal sphere and then put it onto
• 41:34
  a global level. I mean, you come to something like the Israel and Palestinian conflict, the war
• 41:42
  Gaza and the moral ballast to even have that conversation, the ability to be comprehensible to one
• 41:49
  another, that people choosing a side because it represents something of identity in themselves
• 41:56
  that they seek to impose on another person, the inability to hold nuance and difference. There's
• 42:01
  a podcast you did with Brendan O'Neill and you were talking and I may have been your
• 42:06
  phrase, maybe you picked it up with someone else, but you said the ability to give to the other
• 42:14
  both agency and sympathy. Yes, I think Tim mentioned what it pointed this out to me, but I
• 42:21
  mentioned it recently on the Brendan O'Neill. All those things in tension at the same time,
• 42:30
  it alludes us because when we come to those spaces and again to bring liberalism into it,
• 42:37
  you know, we come to those spaces with the liberal freedoms of choosing our truth because liberalism
• 42:42
  doesn't have a truth. It has a contest of truths and then we bring the contest of truth to something
• 42:50
  like this and there's no way to even have the conversation. You're in the briar patch already
• 42:54
  in the ability to say what is heinous about October 7th. Are you talking about liberalism here
• 43:00
  as progressivism or as in classical liberalism? Well, I think they all come out of the same source.
• 43:06
  I think I think because I see I think I think I'm back to my defense of the Enlightenment. I mean,
• 43:11
  I was in Israel recently and just wandering around Jaffa and looking at the at night, you know,
• 43:17
  about 11 p.m. and there are Muslims and there are Jews and they're all hanging out and they're
• 43:21
  laughing and they're drinking in the streets and, you know, in spite of them. Again, the granular
• 43:25
  level of which we live in. Yes. And it struck me that the extent to which culture can permit
• 43:33
  a large different range of people to bump into each other peacefully is a testament to its
• 43:40
  success. New York is successful. Tel Aviv is successful. Sydney is successful. You know,
• 43:46
  we're not successful. Aleppo up until, you know, three seconds ago and it remains to be seen.
• 43:52
  Places where groups like the alawights from the past, you know, half century have dominated others
• 43:59
  because their sense of their own identity needs to trump everybody else's. And it just strikes me
• 44:06
  that there's no way, I mean, currently if I'm wrong, is there a way to get towards that
• 44:12
  peaceable, universalist conception of comedy other than small L liberalism?
• 44:20
  I think it's a two-edged sword. I think the small L liberalism that creates that is also the
• 44:25
  small L liberalism that carries the seed of the incomprehensibility in the post-truth world
• 44:30
  for co-hosts coming out of a liberal tradition. You know, you're the loose and Jacques Derrida.
• 44:34
  Can we just stop the liberal tradition before we go? Would that be okay? You can't do that. You can't
• 44:39
  do that. You know, listen, the Nazis read Goethe and Shakespeare. You know, they are coming out
• 44:45
  of an enlightenment tradition. They are absolutely, they're elected. They are coming out of an
• 44:52
  enlightenment tradition. Yeah, they found liberalism's feckless. They hated Myanmar. They
• 44:57
  Carl Schmidt, you know, the absolutely, you know, the friends enemies dichotomy of politics that he
• 45:03
  set up. But fundamentally, the enlightenment births the gulag in the gas chamber and it births,
• 45:10
  you know, the beauty of the cosmopolitan world. It births in America and a Britain that can stand
• 45:18
  up at the horrors of Nazism. And it births the ideas that can lead to that Nazism in the first place.
• 45:25
  I don't think it's us. Oh, no, most definitely. I don't think Nazism is in any way a pure expression
• 45:32
  of enlightenment. No, not a pure expression. Of course, it's building on the cultural traditions
• 45:36
  of the existing and how could it not? But it is, to me, a highly dogmatic, almost religious,
• 45:43
  right? It's a secular religious form of, for an identitarianism. But the seeds for this are
• 45:49
  planted there. I mean, first of all, we talk about enlightenment. They're enlightenments. And,
• 45:54
  you know, there are some who leaned more towards, I'll take the Scottish one. Yeah, you've taken
• 45:59
  the Scottish one. But, you know, take the Scottish one. Okay, well, Hume also gives birth to
• 46:03
  modern atheism. So if you want to take, well, fine by you, but there's some heinous things done in
• 46:10
  the name of atheism. Again, you've just signed up communism. They're religions. You want
• 46:14
  to mean as a religion, North Korean, and so is liberalism. And so is liberalism? Well, not in
• 46:19
  the sense that it doesn't require you to believe a set of doctrines. Oh, I think it does. I think
• 46:24
  it doesn't mean isn't, again, to use a term that's over years, but woke isn't woke a dogmatism
• 46:30
  that emerges out of a liberal group. Yes, and I would say it should have truths, truths,
• 46:35
  multiple that leads you to a dogmatism. And, anyway, I'd say it's a new faith, yeah, a new
• 46:42
  liberal in that sense. But, but it's non-secular. It has all, it has, it has a kind of pie, not
• 46:48
  circular. It has things you're supposed to say, has things you're supposed to pretend to believe in,
• 46:53
  but just as you're supposed to undertake that are contrary to it. But this is the inherent,
• 46:59
  you know, everything has a, you know, there's a devil in the machine. And I think in Enlightenment,
• 47:05
  if you take it right across its entire scope, the devil in the machine is what nature identifies
• 47:14
  as a death of God. I know a loss of a singular truth to a contest of truths that we seek to
• 47:22
  mediate through or either a rosy and veil of ignorance that emerges from a Kantian cosmopolitanism
• 47:28
  that if you keep going down the line, you do reach a place of incomprehensibility. You do
• 47:34
  reach a place of post-truth. You do reach a place of the new faith that pit us against each other.
• 47:39
  The illiberalism conversely emerges from the very seeds you've sown with the liberalism that
• 47:46
  allows the freedom of thought severed from tradition that allows you to create your own reality.
• 47:51
  Yes, I'll cop that. And when the liberal offshoots of liberalism begin to emerge,
• 47:55
  that's when you have to quarterize them and stamp them out and go, we're not going to be woke.
• 48:00
  Oh, I'm not going to do that. You've just gone down the wrong path. Let's all get back together
• 48:06
  and be universalist and pluralistic again. And who decides who belongs in the
• 48:11
  universe and the pluralistic? Who decides who's out and who's going to deport them?
• 48:15
  And when you deport them, are you going to get one of the tenets of liberalism,
• 48:20
  which is supposed to be able to handle the weight of difference?
• 48:23
  Well, yeah, by quarterizing them, I don't mean that you ship them off to Antarctica in a box
• 48:27
  with their head cut off. Some might. I mean that if a person is espousing
• 48:33
  ideals that are sensorious and petty and try to read the book about that, yes, we are
• 48:39
  lit. We do say that. And I would regard that as an aberration from the spirit of liberalism.
• 48:44
  But it's really interesting, Josh, because you know, I just... Again,
• 48:50
  if we look at the world and one of the things I've done in the past year is I pretty much turn off
• 48:55
  watching television, you know, or anything out of that. I read and I read differently,
• 49:01
  and I try to stay away from events because I think we can be bamboozled by events.
• 49:06
  I mean events just keep happening. But I look to what the currents are and the undercurrents
• 49:12
  of those events. And I think we can line up all of these things. Putin's, you know,
• 49:18
  invasion of Ukraine, the rise of China as a counter to the... Look at the rise of modern China.
• 49:24
  The rise of modern China came from the collapse of the Qing Empire, the collapse of the idea of
• 49:29
  Chinese invincibility that they were the center of the universe. Then a blowback, first an embrace
• 49:35
  of Western enlightenment, liberal ideas, a blowback against that, which leads to the birth
• 49:41
  of Communist Party and, you know, we're off to the races. But if you... I look around the world
• 49:49
  and I try to gain some sense of where this shift is. How does this connect? What are we coming out of?
• 49:57
  And part of the problem now is that if we apply those principles, which, you know, I think are
• 50:04
  worthy principles, but I think fundamentally they become incomprehensible. And if... And holding on
• 50:11
  to peace, holding on to the possibility of stopping us destroying ourselves, we still do that
• 50:17
  better in democracies than any other, even in America. You know, the worst of people
• 50:21
  of predicting about Trump, Trump fits within the broad sweep of corrupt, bigoted, abrasive,
• 50:29
  foul presidents that they've had. And... But there is something there. I grew through the
• 50:37
  something there worth holding on to. I infuse that with my faith and I try to live that at a
• 50:43
  granular level where I am extending what my faith calls a man the charity and love to the stranger.
• 50:49
  But with the hope that there is a proposition that would to which we can share a dedication
• 50:55
  and commit ourselves to scale up, it gets much harder out of my village into my town, into my city,
• 51:02
  into my nation. Take it out of the nation. Take it to the rest of the world. I think this is what we're
• 51:07
  presented with now. Stop looking at the events themselves because the events will change.
• 51:12
  What's happening at this big level? We invented the modern world. We're all modern. But what's
• 51:17
  modernity going to look like? One other thing I want to bring to the conversation is something
• 51:20
  else that we don't consider. Is it we're still living, as we're living off the philosophical
• 51:25
  fumes of the 18th and 19th centuries, we're still living in a Newtonian world. I mean, the idea
• 51:31
  of the modern nation state was a response to Newtonian physics, the how you hold things in place
• 51:39
  through equal and opposite force. The beginnings of the birth of the modern state of boarded states,
• 51:44
  they are set in stone. There's gravity that holds them in place. How does that fit with the
• 51:50
  fourth industrial revolution and a quantum world where states are no longer set in stone,
• 51:58
  where there is no concept of time that holds things together, where space itself is interconnected.
• 52:06
  You know, the idea of quantum physics, where you can have particle separated by space,
• 52:13
  but the observation of one immediately changes the observation of the other. You sound like
• 52:17
  you've done ayahuasca and are now talking about. No, no, no, no. This is the geopolitics of the
• 52:22
  heat. Well, I think what does it mean for things not to be played in time, though? I think this
• 52:26
  is actually coming. Tell me a 15-year-old today whose life is defined by boarded nation states.
• 52:34
  They don't. Their friends come from cyberspace. They're entertainment. They trade it. I mean,
• 52:41
  my son's an aspiring young YouTuber. He's doing very well. He's got audience all around the world.
• 52:47
  He's not boarded economically, technologically, socially, by any notion of a boarded state.
• 52:56
  The Newtonian idea, just like the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment philosophical ideas,
• 53:04
  no longer fit with a fourth industrial revolution, quantum age, where time and space themselves
• 53:13
  are no longer fixed entities that define us and hold us. And I think again, we have to
• 53:21
  the 20th century way to answer the questions of the 21st, let alone we look into the 22nd century.
• 53:27
  There is inevitably going to be a change in the way we see ourselves identify ourselves,
• 53:34
  and form our political entities, our policies that are not territorial. That's going to come.
• 53:41
  I mean, it's already here in the senses. It's already here in a sense. It's not legislated
• 53:45
  in a specific way. No, but I mean, we struggle with the legislation.
• 53:49
  Even within nation states, we have now a collection of demos, if we ever didn't, but it seems
• 53:55
  like since World War II, we sort of all were one demos in a way. But now you don't get Trump
• 54:00
  surely without Twitter, and you know, get Brexit without the Syrian refugee crisis, and you don't,
• 54:07
  like so if there are all these kinds of interlocking, I guess, groups that all have a quorum of
• 54:14
  their own, of their own, who are fighting for spoils within nation states and between them.
• 54:20
  But if we're all just bits and bites like flying through the ether and bouncing off satellites
• 54:27
  and communicating to people all over the world, and the post-World War II system of nation states
• 54:34
  as instantiated in the United Nations and the Security Council and NATO and all that
• 54:39
  falls apart or becomes an irrelevant relic, then how do we gather ourselves together in ways that
• 54:47
  don't, that aren't just a return to tribal warfare? Yeah, well, does it have to tribal warfare,
• 54:53
  you know, maybe return to tribal peace, maybe return to something? Where was there ever tribal
• 54:57
  peace? That you don't actually see the stranger. I mean, I don't know, I don't think I look,
• 55:01
  we can't turn back the clock, and we're not going to where we have a level of communication,
• 55:06
  and we have a level of connection to each other through communication that we're not going to
• 55:11
  turn that tap off. But it is changing the nature of the human relationship, and of course, we're
• 55:18
  also on the cusp of something where the human itself, you know, we're becoming a post-human world,
• 55:24
  and the human itself is no longer, I mean, when does a robot, when does a robot have rights?
• 55:31
  Right. As we would see them, when is a robot thinking, when is it sentient? All of these things,
• 55:38
  we're going to have to have philosophical answers for, I would say also theological answers for,
• 55:44
  and I think one of the things that we've seen has been, while the West has become increasingly
• 55:49
  secular and non-religious, there are also stirrings. There are stirrings for people looking to
• 55:54
  recover something of the soul that I don't think ever leaves us. You know, when I see kids in
• 56:01
  the morning getting up to go down and look at the sunrise, yes, they're taking a photo of it,
• 56:05
  they can share on Instagram, but they're up there because of something. There is something,
• 56:10
  and there is a movement of consciousness now that we know cannot be defined by technology. It
• 56:16
  can't be measured under a microscope. We can map the human genome, we can't map the human soul,
• 56:22
  and we know there is something of the soul in us. And I think all of this is going to be part
• 56:27
  of what emerges out of the tumult that we're in right now. But I do think we're in a stage,
• 56:35
  given the fourth industrial revolution, the quantum revolution, given the the way that the
• 56:41
  amorphous nature of belonging, given the de-territorialization of boarded belonging. I think all
• 56:53
  of those things create a state of flux, and there is so much moving, and we're in a period, Josh,
• 56:59
  where we're trying to traverse that. Without dated ideas or ideas that can't speak to the complexity
• 57:08
  of it, a faith that's been pushed off to the sidelines, and people don't even know how to talk about
• 57:13
  God, religion itself that's lost its purchase and its ability to speak to these things. And this
• 57:23
  challenge that we're having of who belongs? How do we speak to the stranger? What does
• 57:30
  Calaisian look like? What does the society look like? I mean, one way that we try to speak to the
• 57:34
  strangers is through broadcasting, through conventional old broadcasting, especially public broadcasting.
• 57:40
  It's three minutes past 11, do you have five minutes? Yeah, sure, I'm great. What's the start
• 57:45
  from you, Josh? I'll be here. Exactly. And I'm interested in your thoughts about this because
• 57:50
  there are currently ruptures in the Australian public broadcaster, which you left last year.
• 57:59
  But I mean, your experience was formative for me as well, I'm seeing all of the shit that you
• 58:05
  had to go through. But now there's new management, and seemingly like a kind of a come to Jesus
• 58:12
  moment at the public broadcaster about what role is it supposed to have? I don't think I'll be
• 58:16
  worse and get the church of Kim Williams. But what are your thoughts about this whole conversation
• 58:21
  about podcasting versus, you know, the ABC really in so many ways struggling to know what it is,
• 58:30
  where it's who it speaks to, what its audience is. I mean, the ABC audience traditionally has been
• 58:36
  pretty daggy, pretty conservative. They like connection. They don't want to be yelled at.
• 58:43
  They're not a commercial audience. They're never young. So I think all of those things are part of it.
• 58:50
  But there are new ways of communicating. There are new ways of being able to speak to
• 58:53
  which are in the ABCs trying to sort of catch up with that. The ABC has got itself into some
• 58:59
  awful messes. I mean, I'm, you know, even with something like diversity, equity and inclusion,
• 59:07
  which, you know, I was always looking to see more diversity. I never, you know, I walked into
• 59:13
  journalism. I was the only Aboriginal person in the room. I wanted to see more people. But I,
• 59:17
  but I don't want to, I think there's such a fine line between where your diversity defines you
• 59:25
  and where it enriches others, where it enriches the shared experience of that. What does it mean
• 59:31
  for things like like the, you know, journalistic integrity and detachment and objectivity and
• 59:40
  all of those things. The ABC is wrestling with so much of that. Bring it back to the
• 59:43
  conversation about liberalism. It is a hyper liberal entity that now struggles to actually
• 59:49
  communicate to itself and its own audience, if you know what I mean, even its only ability to
• 59:53
  communicate with its own staff, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, hoist by its own
• 59:58
  petard in so many ways. So it's an important entity. It's an important organization. But
• 1:00:06
  it needs more clarity. It needs to stand firm. It needs to also be able to stop having to constantly
• 1:00:14
  be dragged into culture wars, where it feels as if it has to defend itself, which takes it away
• 1:00:19
  from its ability to speak to people, where they are, as we they are, in the entirety of who we are.
• 1:00:26
  It's a very important organization, but it's struggling with the same fishes that, that are weakening
• 1:00:32
  the bonds of our liberalism everywhere. I don't know what done. I mean, you know, and these things
• 1:00:37
  were on the past tense for me because I don't ever see myself being back there. I don't ever see
• 1:00:43
  myself sort of occupying a position of prominence in that sort of, it's not where I'm at anymore.
• 1:00:50
  You know, this conversation is great and we can have a nuanced conversation and people can take
• 1:00:54
  it hopefully in the spirit that it's meant that it's, it's capacious. It's, it's caring. It's
• 1:00:59
  generous. It's charitable. It's challenging. But I don't trust the spoken word as much. And part
• 1:01:06
  of my experience has been that my own words have been sliced and diced. I've been represented
• 1:01:13
  as something I am absolutely not. I'm not a card carrying race, baiting identity warrior.
• 1:01:19
  I'm not someone who hates all of Australia. I'm someone who's always looking for a deeper understanding
• 1:01:26
  and a more open conversation. I am a person of faith. I mean, all of those things, the spoken word
• 1:01:33
  for me is just, it just melts. Whereas I like writing now. I like the solitude of that. I like
• 1:01:46
  to put something on paper and say, this is what I think you take this in its entirety. You read
• 1:01:52
  this in the spirit that it's intended. I don't see a space for myself there. I see a space for
• 1:01:57
  someone like you. I think you should be there. I think you are part of that conversation. The very
• 1:02:02
  things that, if I'm not speaking for you, but the very things I see as part of the reason you're
• 1:02:07
  not there is because it wasn't able to deal with the complexity and the nuance and the spikiness
• 1:02:14
  that you can bring to those things. There's some real challenges for the ABC. I want to see it thrive,
• 1:02:22
  but I don't know that I'm not seeing evidence of that. Are you?
• 1:02:28
  I'm hopeful. You think there might be a shift? I'm hopeful. Yeah. I'm hopeful that it is
• 1:02:33
  currently reeling. Well, obviously there are big technological changes that it has to grapple
• 1:02:38
  with in terms of the way young people get their media. But I think you could have a public
• 1:02:43
  broadcaster that still produces content that speaks to everybody, including conservative voters
• 1:02:49
  in southwest Sydney and also the worthy university elite. You just need a few more.
• 1:02:58
  Yeah. Can you see it? I mean, the choices that it makes should, here's one for you,
• 1:03:03
  should the ABC still broadcast Madagra march on the night? Well, I mean, there's all kind of
• 1:03:12
  worms about whether we should still have a Madagra parade and whether that's the best way of
• 1:03:17
  expressing sexual voters. But should have given that we know that Madagra march is inherently
• 1:03:22
  political. It is. It is. It is many ways of political rally and ABC staff are involved in it,
• 1:03:31
  not only just broadcasting it or commenting on it. Well, it's usually the official broadcast
• 1:03:35
  partner of the parade as well. Should it be? No, I think we're 40% of people in Australia voted
• 1:03:41
  same-sex marriage. I mean, that's, I'm not saying it's sort of shouldn't, but I'm just saying
• 1:03:48
  these are the questions that has to ask itself. If Kim Williams says it wants to be the
• 1:03:52
  organisation that he envisages, if you're going to do that, what are the other things?
• 1:03:58
  I mean, part of the issue that I think you're pointing to is that in the in the laudable quest
• 1:04:04
  for more diversity and inclusiveness, there is a risk that the communities who are the most
• 1:04:13
  vocal about being quote-unquote diverse come to dominate everybody else and enforce the kind of
• 1:04:20
  way of speaking and thinking about those issues on everybody. Also, the ABC makes a value judgment.
• 1:04:25
  It makes a choice. It says we're going to broadcast this and celebrate it and not other things
• 1:04:31
  or in spite of the fact that for many people, they're going to be uncomfortable at night and not
• 1:04:36
  even watch the public broadcasts that they pay for. Yeah, by all means cover it. I'm just saying,
• 1:04:44
  I'm not saying do or don't. I'm just saying these are the big decisions that they that they have
• 1:04:49
  to make. Yeah, I mean, I tend to think that the solution to this will lie somewhere in
• 1:04:56
  being much clearer about what is news and much clearer about what is commentary.
• 1:05:01
  And on the commentary side of things, on the quote-unquote content side of things, I think there should
• 1:05:05
  be a much wider acceptance of more diverse opinions, which include opinions that some people might
• 1:05:10
  interpret as being intolerant or beget it or whatever, just part of the rough and tumble,
• 1:05:16
  the big rambunctious public square. And then on the news side of things, you shouldn't allow your
• 1:05:21
  desire for quote-unquote diversity to mean that journalists are bringing their whole selves and
• 1:05:25
  their own lived experiences to work and contaminating objectivity with their own activism. I
• 1:05:32
  walked that line my entire life, Josh. I mean, I was never a diversity pick. I came into an area where
• 1:05:38
  there wasn't those things. No, I know. I mean, that was why you were so valuable in some ways. I
• 1:05:41
  was never in some ways. I never had a job where being Aboriginal was a qualification. Never in
• 1:05:49
  my life, you know, working for CNN, but I came to the world as an Aboriginal person with all the
• 1:05:57
  complexity and idiosyncrasy that I demand in that I don't see the world just as all other
• 1:06:02
  Aboriginal people do. I have different experiences, but there is something that formative in my culture
• 1:06:08
  and my childhood and my family that allowed me to look upon the world. So, for instance,
• 1:06:13
  one of the things that I was always drawn to was were questions of injustice, questions of the
• 1:06:20
  suffering of little people. I went into a war not to do the big bang explosions, but to be there
• 1:06:25
  after the explosions and look at how mothers picked up the pieces. I wanted to see how people lived
• 1:06:31
  when all certainty had been taken from them. That was informed by my own background. Now my stories,
• 1:06:37
  my story telling came out of that. I could bring something of who I was to it by interpreting
• 1:06:43
  I would hope an objective set of realities and facts that helped support that story,
• 1:06:48
  but that doesn't mean I go in there and then say, I'm not going to do this, I'm going to do this,
• 1:06:52
  and I demand to put my own opinion into this story. I never did it at all. You never
• 1:06:57
  parroted an expected line. We never dreamed in knowing exactly what you were going to say,
• 1:07:03
  oh, because he's the indigenous. And then, of course, during the voice I found myself sort of
• 1:07:08
  pilloried and and and parroted as this sort of race-baiting identity warrior who hated Australia
• 1:07:14
  because I was part of a King's coronation coverage. We're very gently, very lovingly and
• 1:07:19
  respectfully in a conversation, said we have to also consider the things that happened under
• 1:07:23
  the name of the crown. Now, you know, here's something people don't know about me. Josh,
• 1:07:27
  if there was a Republican reference, I'm not sure I'd vote to be a Republic. I'm not sure I would.
• 1:07:32
  I respect tradition. I respect what that has brought to us. Australia is a really precious
• 1:07:38
  democracy. And one of the few that maybe because of our size, our geographical distance, we don't
• 1:07:44
  share a border with another nation. We have compulsory voting. We're very wealthy. Maybe all those
• 1:07:49
  things mitigate against the extremes. But there's something precious here that I would metal with,
• 1:07:55
  you know, at our peril. So I'm not sure I would yet, yet I would always be because of Aboriginal
• 1:08:01
  to cast in this particular way. And I never brought that. And I thought, you know, I was uncomfortable
• 1:08:09
  even at the ABC in being put into those boxes. I want to see more people with darker colored skin.
• 1:08:15
  I want to see more diversity. I want to see, but I want to see that enrich us that I hoped I brought
• 1:08:20
  in the best of my journalism that did not just continue the perpetuation of identity boxes
• 1:08:26
  or bring contested truths to a space that makes us incomprehensible to the other person.
• 1:08:31
  What do you remember feeling in the aftermath of that broadcast? Betrayed by the ABC
• 1:08:37
  because they did not defend me as vociferously as they should have. I was put onto that programs
• 1:08:43
  precisely to bring a perspective that was rooted in truth. These are facts. The facts are that
• 1:08:49
  things happened under the name of the Crown that directly impacted my family. That was part of a
• 1:08:54
  broader conversation. The conversation was rational and reasonable and loving. And it wasn't
• 1:09:03
  portrayed that way and the ABC didn't defend me in that way. But it also, Josh, it also made me
• 1:09:07
  reflect on myself too. And I thought, if that's what's going to happen, maybe I'm better off not
• 1:09:13
  being in those spaces and finding other ways to talk to people. It traumatized me for a very
• 1:09:18
  long time and probably still am a little bit gun shy and very careful about how I present myself.
• 1:09:25
  I write for the Saturday paper and I love that writing because I can guardrail that. I can
• 1:09:32
  signpost what I'm going to say. I can allow the arguments to develop. I can bring in new ones.
• 1:09:38
  This conversation with us in good faith, really deep and traversing so many subjects. I can do
• 1:09:45
  that. But I'm very sensitive to being misrepresented and pilloried, which then turns into violence against
• 1:09:54
  me and my family and hate against my parents and death threats against me for something I never
• 1:10:00
  even did or said. And the failure of the ABC to defend me, I think contributed to that. And others
• 1:10:08
  who wanted to maliciously malign me and my family and misrepresent me created that blowback of hate
• 1:10:16
  that never allowed me to speak in the way that I was speaking to you today. So look, it doesn't really
• 1:10:22
  work for me. I don't think in that environment. I'm also a different age now and I part of my,
• 1:10:29
  you know, I said to myself, when I left, I want to do two things. If I engage in the public space,
• 1:10:34
  there are two things. I must not contribute to the perpetuation of conflict. And that means
• 1:10:40
  being mindful of my own language. One of these I made the mistake of before was thinking the truth
• 1:10:45
  was enough. Truth is not enough. Truth must be spoken with love and compassion and charity
• 1:10:50
  for the era of the truth, even because sometimes I never heard that before. And you need to prepare
• 1:10:55
  people for that night and I was guilty, perhaps, of not doing that before. So I don't want to do
• 1:11:00
  anything that contributes to the perpetuation of conflict. And I do not want to do anything that
• 1:11:05
  reduces me or reduces the listener. This conversation, I think, enlarges us. It enlarges the
• 1:11:12
  experience of the listener. I hope that people take it in good faith. I hope that people don't rush
• 1:11:18
  to offence by snapping, it's nipping out one little part of the conversation and not hearing it
• 1:11:23
  in its entirety with all of it. They will. They will. And they do. And that is the lot
• 1:11:27
  of anyone who speaks in public happens to me every single week. But I know that I haven't
• 1:11:32
  done that. And so when I engage, I do that. So I'm very mindful of where I engage,
• 1:11:38
  how that will be heard, whether it's with people of good faith, whether people are going to weaponize
• 1:11:42
  it, turn it into conflict. And I just stay away from that. And I try to do live life in a very
• 1:11:47
  granular way. I try to offer a smile to people. I try to write for a position of love and charity
• 1:11:53
  and forgiveness. I try to stay close to my faith and be as honest and decent as I can.
• 1:12:00
  I'm not sure I can do that in the sort of broader mainstream media. So I've just been finding
• 1:12:05
  a place for me to do that in my own little way. Even if that's just, you know, having a smile
• 1:12:09
  that's somewhat nice. Well Stan, thanks for doing it here.