Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Refugees, Fossil Fuels & the fate of Western Civilisation

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Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Refugees, Fossil Fuels & the fate of Western Civilisation · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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  Today's guest is the 28th Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott.
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  I wanted to have an uncomfortable conversation with Mr Abbott about largely three things.
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  Firstly, the Black Arm band view of Australian history, this is the sort of slang that we
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  use to connote a worldview which is that Australian history is fundamentally a story of imperial
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  conquest and genocide against indigenous people and that we should sort of be permanently
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  guilty for that.
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  That's a worldview that Tony Abbott very much opposed when he was Prime Minister.
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  He's a cultural conservative, he's a deeply Christian person and he's on the centre
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  right of government.
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  Secondly, I wanted to talk about climate change and the carbon tax.
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  The centre right party before Tony Abbott led it was led by a more moderate and pro climate
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  action parliamentarian named Malcolm Turnbull and both the centre right and centre left parties
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  in Australia in the 2000s supported an emissions trading scheme.
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  Largely as a result of the conservative party's support for an emissions trading scheme, Malcolm
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  Turnbull was rolled as the leader, Tony Abbott was installed saying, never ever will there
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  be an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax.
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  Now before Tony Abbott became Prime Minister, his predecessor from the other party, the centre
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  left party, did introduce a carbon tax which was going to transition into an emissions trading
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  scheme and Tony Abbott ran on the platform of abolishing the tax and Australia actually
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  became the first country in the world to introduce a tax on carbon and then repeal a tax
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  on carbon and we've been living with the consequences ever since.
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  Thirdly, I wanted to have an uncomfortable conversation about turning back the boats and
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  illegal immigration and multiculturalism in Australia.
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  Perhaps Tony Abbott's signal achievement as Prime Minister what he is most renowned for
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  and despised by some quarters of the country is introducing a harsher policy towards boat
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  arrivals, essentially finding boats that were belonged to people smugglers bringing migrants
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  to Australia, sending out the Navy and when the people smugglers would scuttle the boats
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  literally giving them an inflatable raft and then pushing them towards Indonesia.
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  It's been a successful policy on the basis of the metrics of boat arrivals but one that
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  many people regard as being cruel and in contravention of international law.
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  So Tony Abbott's new book gave me an opportunity to sit down with him.
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  It's a book about Australian history.
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  It's actually a really interesting book if you want to understand what made the country
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  that we know and love today.
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  It's called Australia a history.
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  Tony, just for a bit of background, was a Rhodes scholar.
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  He went to the University of Oxford where he did his master of arts in politics and philosophy.
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  He then trained to be a Jesuit priest, I wasn't kidding about his being a man of faith.
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  And then served as a journalist briefly after he did not become a priest and then he became
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  a press secretary to the opposition leader, John Husson.
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  And he became the leader of the Liberal Party in 2009 and the Prime Minister of Australia
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  from 2013 to 2015, I hope you enjoy.
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  As much as I did, the one and only Tony Abbott.
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  This is fascinating.
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  I really respect this book a lot actually because when if someone told me that Tony Abbott
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  had written a book about Australia, then I think many lefties would assume that it's
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  going to be an apologia for all things Australia and a whitewashing of Australia's treatment
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  of indigenous people.
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  But it's not.
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  It's a really balanced and kind of rich explanation of a history that a lot of Australians
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  don't know.
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  What's the main fire in your belly for having written it?
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  Well, Josh, I always thought that at some point after leaving Parliament, I should write
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  a book.
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  But I didn't want to write memoirs, which is what your average politician does.
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  And eventually I decided that rather than do the story of me, I should do the story of
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  us.
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  Now, I'm an enthusiast for Australia.
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  I think there's more to be proud of than ashamed of in our history.
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  But you can't tell the story without looking at the embarrassing even shameful aspects
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  too.
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  So that's what I've tried to do with this, to tell our story as best I can, as objectively
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  as I can.
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  But I suppose at least from a glass half full rather than a glass half empty perspective,
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  because I do think that particularly over the last generation, in correcting what Blaney
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  called the old three cheers view, we have gone too far towards what he calls the black
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  armband view.
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  Now, again, there are shameful chapters in our history, and there's absolutely no doubt
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  that the partial expansion caused mayhem for Aboriginal people.
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  The frontier was a bloody and brutal place for everyone, but it was particularly bloody
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  and brutal for Aboriginal people.
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  But that's by no means the whole story of Australia.
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  If you look at the whole story from the most unpromising beginning on the shores of Sydney
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  Harbour in January 1788, within 100 years, the colonies had the world's highest standard
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  of living, even I have an America.
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  But more than that, we were a democratic laboratory of extraordinary freedom.
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  I mean, in the 1890s, in the Australian colonies, both women and people of all races could
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  vote, and in at least one of them run for office.
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  Now, nowhere else in the world at that time was that true.
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  So while not shrinking from the downsides, I think we should also appreciate the upsides
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  of our story.
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  Yeah, I mean, you even make the point which I didn't know, which is shameful that I wouldn't
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  have known, that in New South Wales, as a colony, Indigenous Australians, Indigenous males,
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  had the vote in the 1850s, where slavery still existed in the United States.
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  A lot of Australians believe that Indigenous people didn't get the vote anywhere in the
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  country until the referendum in the 1960s.
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  I know.
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  And I guess for all sorts of reasons, we have been forgetful, even amnesiac about our history.
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  Partly, I think it's because we don't have a civil war or a war of independence.
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  But again, that's actually vastly to our credit as a people.
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  I mean, the Australian Commonwealth was not produced by war, by revolution, by conquest.
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  It was the result of negotiation between a group of politicians who didn't agree on
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  lots of things, except the fact that it would be desirable for the six colonies to federate
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  into one Commonwealth.
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  And over a period of a decade through discussion, through compromise, and ultimately through
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  a vote of the people, they did it.
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  And so almost alone of the nations, we've got this inherently democratic,
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  demotic kind of sweet reason approach to things.
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  Now, I think the challenge for contemporary Australia is to build on all of that.
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  And I think the problem that we face is that our forebears thought big, Henry Parks,
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  like to tell people in his day, the 1880s and 1890s, that Australia then was in the same
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  position that the United States had been in a hundred years earlier, implying that we,
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  in the 21st century, could be everything that America was at the end of the 19th century.
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  Now, obviously America has different geography.
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  It's somewhat geographically differently placed to us.
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  But I do think that we should set no limits on what we can achieve.
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  And if we feel good about ourselves as a nation, we're more likely to achieve great things.
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  So one of the other things about, in terms of Australia's democracy in the early days
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  that I hadn't realised was that alone New Zealand was the first jurisdiction to give women
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  the vote.
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  Australia actually passed female suffrage legally before New Zealand was the first place
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  in the world.
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  Where it actually happened.
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  So the New Zealanders just sort of pipped us to the post there, but we did it first.
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  So between indigenous suffrage in the 1850s and New South Wales, the first place to pass
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  female suffrage, and then another thing that you note that I think a lot of people wouldn't
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  be aware of is that white people were hanged in the 1800s for killing indigenous Australians.
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  Although the frontier was brutal and bloody, it's not like we were living in a situation
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  where there was complete and total impunity and an understood condition of genocide the
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  way that a lot of people think it was today.
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  I mean, do you want to tell the story of Plunkett and the big trial over Milford?
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  Yeah.
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  Well, I should stress, Josh, that there was only one mile, well, the mile creek wasn't
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  the only massacre, but the mile creek aftermath was pretty much unique in terms of the response.
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  But the mere fact that white men were hanged for the murder of black people in the 1830s,
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  there's no other settler society where this would have happened.
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  So again, I think we should appreciate that for all of the troubles and difficulties,
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  for all of the prejudice and even racism of those days, there was also a high-mindedness
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  and a liberality as well, a decency which we shouldn't forget.
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  So what happened at mile creek was that a group of about a dozen stockmen slaughtered
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  in cold blood, an encampment of Aboriginal people, and there was no obvious provocation.
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  There hadn't been any particular outbreaks of sheep killing or stockmen killing or anything
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  like that.
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  It appeared to be a completely cold-blooded massacre.
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  In news of this spread, Plungard, the Irish Catholic Attorney General of New South Wales,
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  and it's worth noting that he was appointed Attorney General here at a time when there
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  were still legal disabilities on Catholics in Britain, he was determined to investigate.
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  And when the jury at the first trial refused to convict, we don't know whether this is
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  fact or legend, but one of the jurors supposedly said in the pub afterwards that the perpetrators
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  were as guilty as hell, but they weren't going to hang whites for the murder of blacks.
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  Plungard was determined one way or another that this crime was not going to go unpunished.
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  So he brought new charges against a slightly reduced group of the perpetrators, persuaded
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  one or two of the perpetrators to turn Queen's evidence, and the second trial gave a
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  very emotional summing up to the jury where he said that this crime cries out to heaven
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  for justice, and the jury did convict, and seven of the perpetrators were shortly thereafter
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  hanged. Now this is a tribute to the fact that at least some of the judges were men of great
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  decency that really did, they really did believe in equality before the law, and Plungard
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  himself was in his own way a crusader for justice and decency.
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  Some years later there was another atrocious episode, up near Grafton, present day Grafton
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  where a squatter called Coots was almost certainly guilty of poisoning flour, and some 20
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  Aboriginal people were killed as a result of this. Again, Plungard brought the alleged
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  perpetrator to trial. On this occasion, however, because the only eyewitnesses were who could
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  testify were Aboriginal people, and Aboriginal people at that time not being Christian were thought
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  incapable of swearing on a Bible and therefore giving testimony on court. This guy Coots got off,
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  and at the time Plungard tried to get the law changed to allow Aboriginal testimony and failed
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  10-9 in the Legislative Council, but this is another episode in which Plungard against the
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  general sense of the times was prepared to try to do justice in favour of Aboriginal people.
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  I think Plungard is one of the unsung heroes of our history, and if I can, in my own,
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  small way, do something to remind people of some of the great men and women of our past.
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  Well, let's do it. Yeah, and the book does do that, and what I like about it and appreciate
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  about it is that it paints a picture of all of the grays and the nuances that were going on at
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  the time, where instead of it being a black and white picture of a bloodthirsty imperial power
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  coming in and willfully committing genocide, it's about the personalities who were clashing in
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  their different interpretations of what the Australian project was. So you had people who were
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  bloodthirsty racists and you also had people who regarded themselves as being enlightened,
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  sort of custodians of Western civilization who were trying to create a great country and to
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  treat the natives as they saw them as compassionately as possible. Exactly right, and even
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  someone who probably did verge on the bloodthirsty, someone like John Batman. Now Batman is one of
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  the founders of Melbourne, Victoria. His father, an emancipated convict, ran a school for Aboriginal
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  boys in Paramatta. So John Batman grew up very familiar with Aboriginal people. He then went to
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  Tasmania and was a squatter in the Tasmanian hinterland, and he was very much part of the black line
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  and all of the troubles of Tasmania in the 1820s before going across the best straight to Melbourne
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  in the 1830s. The troubles for non-Australians, meaning the brutal annihilation of Indigenous populations
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  in Tasmania. Correct. I mean, there was a, it was the nearest thing to a war that we had,
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  and there were very brutal incidents. I mean, it was the most successful Aboriginal resistance,
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  but it also involved a lot of brutality on the other side. Anyway, Batman was, he says in
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  his own diaries at one stage that he took some Aboriginal prisoners, and because the prisoners
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  were unable to walk, he shot them in cold blood. But at the same time, he was someone who took
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  Aboriginal orphans in his own household and raised them as his own. So he was obviously a man
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  of his time, a man capable of great brutality, but also someone who was capable of at least some
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  elements of the kindness or at least what passed the kindness in those days.
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  So this history of a kind of a complicated clash between what at the time was the most advanced
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  technological empire the world had ever known, and what was the most traditional
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  civilization on the planet and the difficulty of that clash. Why is, what do you think has happened
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  to us culturally in terms of our pedagogy that if you asked my eight-year-old twins what Australian
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  history is, I mean, eight might be a bit young, but it would probably apply also to 15-year-olds
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  and 20-year-olds. It would be a story that we are on stolen land, which is wise and always will be
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  Aboriginal land, and that mean white people came in from abroad and took it, and we're still
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  awaiting the proper reckoning for that crime. Exactly right. I think that is the general view,
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  which is being imparted to young Australians today, and the problem with that view is that it
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  gives people a sense of fundamental illegitimacy. I mean, any country which is founded on
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  something which is supposed to be a genocidal crime is a country that can never feel really comfortable
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  with itself, and I think that that does pose enormous difficulties, particularly because I just
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  don't think that's a fair version of our past. I mean, yes, we have to accept that the arrival of
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  the British in 1788 and the subsequent settlement of our country was at least in the first instance
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  a complete disruption and overthrow of the Aboriginal way of life. I mean, a largely nomadic
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  existence was simply incompatible with the kind of partial expansion and settlement which was
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  inevitable once the British arrived, and yet even at the time of the expansion, the initial
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  partial expansion, sure there was the bloodshed, but at the same time most of the explorers were
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  relying on Aboriginal guides to explain to them the country that was new to British eyes,
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  wasn't new to the Aboriginal eyes, and most of the squatters relied on Aboriginal
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  stockmen, Aboriginal women would work in the stations and so on. So even at the very beginning,
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  it was a story of cooperation as well as conflict. Yeah. So what happened?
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  Well, I think in our eagerness to redress the balance, very understandable, given that it was
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  very much the three cheers for Australia history up until about the 1960s. In our eagerness to
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  redress the balance, I think we've let the pendulum swing too far, and while rightly dwelling
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  on the downside, we've forgotten the upside. In particular, we've forgotten the fact that
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  at the official level always, and at the level of the citizenry often, there was this great
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  goodwill, and at least an attempt however sometimes paternalistic and misguided to do the right
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  thing. So what I try to do in the book is to tell both sides of the story as fairly as I can.
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  You talk about there being three pillars to Australia. One is the First Nations history,
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  the other two are British foundation and immigrant character. Now you could say that I suppose
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  about the United States as well, but I guess there were two more fundamental things about the United
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  States. Either war of independence would be the civil war, and there is no doubt that a bloody
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  conflict does tend to stick in the cultural memory of people more than a kind of a gradual evolution,
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  which is what we had. Yeah, and the legacy of institutionalized slavery in the state. So I think
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  is one part of their big part of their general puzzle that we don't have. Exactly, but I think if
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  we appreciate that modern Australia has an indigenous heritage, a British foundation and immigrant
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  character, all of us can agree that this is in fact correct. I think if we can all say yes,
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  there are these three elements. However, however much weight we might choose to place on any one
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  of the three. I mean, if I'm a recent migrant, I might want to stress the immigrant character.
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  If I'm an Aboriginal person, obviously, I will want to be very celebrating of the indigenous
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  heritage. And if I'm a traditional conservative like myself, I might want to put a lot of stress on
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  the British foundation, but the truth is these are all undeniably part of us. They all
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  undeniably have an ongoing impact given that the institutions, the shapers today are still
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  very much the ones that were derived from Britain and developed and I would say improved
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  by and large in this country. So again, if I was asked for, if I was asked what's my purpose,
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  I mean, my purpose is broadly speaking without glossing over the downside to help Australians
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  to feel okay about themselves by telling what I believe to be a balanced and objective story
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  in which there is much to feel great satisfaction.
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  Yeah, I mean, it strikes me, correct me if I'm wrong, you're also trying to redress what you
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  regard as an imbalance between our focus on those three things, that the indigenous heritage
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  and the multicultural immigrant character of the country have over the past generation
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  been valorised in a way that the Anglo institutions have been employed or have been overly
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  downplayed. So we've sort of talked about the indigenous heritage and some misconceptions
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  that you think exist there. Let's just talk about that Anglo heritage. You talk about an Anglo-American
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  ascendancy that has basically been the thrust of Australia's, I suppose, co-tailing upon our two
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  more powerful neighbours. Do you just want to give us a sense of how that shapes Australia and the
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  West, the Anglo-American ascendancy? Well, plainly, the late 1700s, notwithstanding the
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  revolt of the American colonies, was the time when Britain was approaching it zenith as a country
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  in terms of its scientific excellence, the industrial revolution in terms of its military
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  strength that was about to defeat the greatest continental power of the time, namely Napoleonic
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  France. So Britain was very much in the ascendancy in those days and I guess that ascendancy
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  continued throughout the 19th century. And then in the first half of the 20th century, I guess Britain
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  gradually ceded its dominance to the United States. And arguably this is one of the very few times
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  in history when one hegemonic power handed things peacefully to another hegemonic power
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  without a horrible war. Because in the end, I guess what both Britain and America had was more
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  in common than opposed. I mean, they both had the strong concepts of the rule of law,
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  strong concepts of representative and responsible government. And I guess the English language,
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  the literary inheritance and all the rest of it in common. And look, I think there's absolutely
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  no doubt that the modern world has been made in English. I don't want to deprecate the heritage of
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  Greece and Rome. I don't want to deprecate the wonderful things that I guess
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  sineic and other civilizations have contributed. But if you look at the modern world,
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  English as if you like the world's common language, our global dialogue tends to be very much in
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  terms of the sorts of things that we would talk about in London or New York. And I think one
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  of the reasons why at the moment the West's challenges are so determined to upend that global
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  order is precisely because they feel that it has, in a sense, culturally predominated for too long.
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  I think they perhaps understandably resent that, even though I think that the modern world
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  produced by that long Anglo-American ascendancy, if you look at it objectively,
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  the world at the beginning of 2020 was more free, more fair, more safe, and more rich for more people
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  than at any time in human history. And what role does Christianity in your view play in that?
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  Well, I think it plays a very important role because Western civilization is unimaginable
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  without Christianity. Now, that doesn't mean that every Westerner has to be a Christian. And
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  plainly, these days, many of us are not. But I think it's hard not to be
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  whether consciously or subconsciously a cultural Christian, if you are a part of the West, given that
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  until relatively recently there was, if you like, an institutionalized Christianity and explicit
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  Christianity to most of us. And even now, our democratic ideals are based on this fundamental
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  intuition that all are equal in the eyes of God. And our systems of justice are based on this
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  fundamental intuition that we should treat others as we would have them treat us. And again,
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  these are very much gospel intuitions. Is it another component of your Christianity that,
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  I suppose, the secular individualism of the West of Western civilization? In other words,
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  the idea that human beings shouldn't be used as a means to a greater end, that an atheistic
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  sort of hard-nosed utilitarianism can trample people's rights in a way that a Christian ethic
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  would not. Correct. I mean, in the end, people have value and deserve to be respected,
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  regardless of whether they're useful or not. I mean, my mum, God, bless her, has just passed away
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  at the age of 92. And a lot of people would say when you're not really capable of looking after
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  yourself, when there's not really much that you can do, that your life has no meaning. Well,
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  I think that's dangerous, because I think it can lead to some inhumane behaviour. But,
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  I think it's wrong. I mean, I think that there was beauty and purpose and meaning in
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  mum's last days. I'm sorry to hear you just lost your mum. I lost my dad this year as well.
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  It's a weird thing to go through. What was that experience like? Well, I guess all of us expect
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  to lose our parents at some point. The natural order of things is that the parents go first.
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  So I guess we're in a sense accepting intellectually of it, but that doesn't mean that it's not a
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  wrench when it happens. And I was always, as a youngster, for understandable reasons, I guess,
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  closer to my dad than to my mum. And I put my dad up on a huge pedestal. There's a wonderful
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  man, my father. And I mean, dad's great insight, which I imbibed early and have very
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  imperfectly practised is that if you look hard enough, you can find quality in almost everyone.
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  And if you want to like people and it helps to get on with them, if you like them,
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  you just need to look hard to turn that quality and focus on that as opposed to focusing on
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  things that aren't so appealing, which is what most of us tend to do most at the time.
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  Instead of looking at the good in someone, we look at that which we don't like and fixate on that.
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  Anyway, so my dad was a very important part of my life. And then I guess after he died about
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  eight years ago, obviously I had, I suppose, duties and responsibilities towards mum. And
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  I think one of the lovely things about her last days is that I think there was a kind of a
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  reconciliation between her and people close to her.
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  Had you been estranged? No, no, no, no, I'm just talking more generally.
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  Yeah, right. And was she still lucid until the end?
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  Yeah, she was, she started to get very vague in the last four nights or so. And then she started
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  to get a bit disoriented, I think, would be the kindest way of saying it in the last week or so.
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  That's pretty good. I mean, maybe the last few weeks. Yeah, my dad had Alzheimer's, so the past
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  couple of the final couple of years were not, were not pretty. And I mean, she must have been proud
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  of you. Well, I think she probably was, but I was proud of her.
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  In terms of Christianity, religion, patriotism, national pride, and these narratives of national
• 31:45
  sort of self-recrimination and the black arm band view, we're seeing a rise throughout a lot
• 31:50
  of the world of a more populist, bombastic version of right wing politics. And the rise of
• 31:58
  Christian nationalism in the United States, Charlie Kirk's assassination, sort of the, you know,
• 32:04
  the current, I suppose hand ringing on the right in the United States about certain people's
• 32:09
  associations with white nationalists or anti-Semites or white supremacists.
• 32:13
  Almost a clamoring for some sort of national
• 32:18
  juice and meaning. What's going on there and is there a way to cause correct?
• 32:25
  Well, I think all of us want to feel a degree of pride in that which is shaped us, whether it's
• 32:35
  our family, whether it's our community, whether it's our country, whether it's our religion,
• 32:42
  if we have a religion. And I think that in the Anglo-Sphere, in particular, over the last
• 32:52
  generation or so, there's been too much self-flagellation about a lot of that. You know, the patriarchy,
• 33:01
  you know, sexism, racism, all this kind of stuff. And again, it is undeniable that at times past
• 33:12
  we have been too oblivious to these things. But I think we should give ourselves credit
• 33:21
  for at least having it within ourselves to see our flaws and to do our best to correct them.
• 33:28
  I mean, I've always thought, Josh, that one of the reasons why Western civilization
• 33:36
  could flourish indefinitely in the way that other civilizations have tended to rise and fall
• 33:43
  is because more than any other civilization, I would say, we've had this self-critical
• 33:51
  capacity. We look at ourselves and say, no, no, no, we can do better than this. And we look at others
• 33:57
  and we say, well, actually, we can learn from them in this respect and that respect. But I think in
• 34:03
  just the last couple of decades, to some extent, at least, it's metastasized. The self-critical
• 34:09
  faculty has metastasized into almost a self-loathing facility. And it expresses itself in this
• 34:21
  imagination that there's nothing much that's good. There's almost nothing that we can do right.
• 34:31
  And I think that's a real problem. And you say the populist rights as a backlash against that thing?
• 34:36
  I think so. I mean, it's said that amongst 20 something, late teens and 20 something, young men
• 34:45
  today, there is a real reaction to this kind of toxic masculinity thing that has become
• 34:56
  prevalent. And look, if I was 18-year-old bloke, who'd been constantly taught by maybe tough-minded
• 35:07
  feminist teachers, and I'd been put in my place maybe once or twice too often, I might be inclined
• 35:18
  to say, well, actually, I am not a bad person. And my fellow males are not bad. We might sometimes
• 35:26
  do bad things, but that's because we're human. Everyone sometimes is less than his or her best self.
• 35:33
  But this idea that blokes have to be, as it were, retrained, reprogrammed so that they aren't
• 35:46
  kind of energetic and occasionally forthright, maybe even aggressive. Because some situations require
• 35:54
  a bit of aggression. I mean, if you are confronted on the street with some active violence,
• 36:01
  it might be desirable for you to respond with a bit of force. And so I think there is this
• 36:10
  reaction. The important thing is for the reaction to be a constructive one, not a destructive one.
• 36:16
  And I know Nigel Farage quite well, and I can fully understand why a lot of lifelong conservative
• 36:27
  voters in Britain were very disappointed and felt quite betrayed by the previous conservative
• 36:35
  government there, and are now tempted to vote reform. And certainly, if the opinion polls were to
• 36:41
  be translated into an election result, you would get a reform government most likely in Britain.
• 36:47
  Certainly reform would sweep away the conservative party as the party of the right.
• 36:55
  My anxiety about all of that is that it's much easier to criticize than to create.
• 37:06
  It's much easier to tear down than to build. And the people making very valid criticisms
• 37:15
  of the previous conservative government might turn out to be even worse at governing themselves,
• 37:22
  because if there were for arguments like to be a reform majority in the British parliament after
• 37:29
  the next election, almost none of them would have been MPs before. None of them would have been
• 37:35
  ministers in the government before. Almost none of them would have had the experience that
• 37:41
  elected an accountable minister has of having to work through civil servants. And plainly one of
• 37:50
  the problems, particularly in Britain, but also to some extent in Australia and America,
• 37:56
  is that governance has been more and more devolved from the elected and the accountable politicians
• 38:03
  to the unelected and the unaccountable bureaucracy. And fixing that is going to require
• 38:10
  not just a level of strength and confidence, but also a level of sophistication. And
• 38:19
  people who are new to the parliament might not have insufficient depth and insufficient numbers
• 38:27
  the kind of sophistication that is needed to improve what I accept is in some respects a broken
• 38:34
  system. And what exactly is broken about the system? Because the centre-left critique of a person
• 38:40
  like Farage or of President Trump would be their finding scapegoats in all the wrong places.
• 38:46
  There are complicated issues here. There's the decline of manufacturing. There's chronic
• 38:50
  under-investment in the National Health Service in the UK. There's the bungling of immigration.
• 38:54
  And there's a whole bunch of things. And here are some, as you say, people who are more inclined
• 39:01
  to break things or criticize than they are to build themselves. So the liability is not merely
• 39:06
  a lack of experience among incoming MPs or an incoming Prime Minister. The problem is a fundamentally
• 39:12
  simplistic allocation of blame towards, I don't know, there are too many Pakistanis in Liverpool
• 39:18
  who don't speak English and we need to clamp down on them. In the case of America, we need to send
• 39:23
  our ICE agents into Home Depot and grab some Mexican-looking people and hustle them away
• 39:30
  with guys wearing black balaclavas and made to put them in South American Gulag.
• 39:34
  That's not actually going to address the decline of manufacturing and appellation,
• 39:39
  the rise of robotics. All of the things that are actually hollowing out the middle class in
• 39:43
  those places. But again, this is where we need to have our best people in our public life and we
• 39:50
  need to have our best people having what are essentially civil conversations with each other.
• 39:58
  Now that doesn't mean that they've always got to agree and part of the critique,
• 40:03
  I think part of the valid critique of the forages and the trumps is that the established political
• 40:12
  parties were kind of, I think they call it the uni party. I mean, I sometimes thought that
• 40:22
  my successes as Prime Minister, Coalition Prime Minister were inclined to be a bit too
• 40:28
  labour light, if you like. And certainly, there are a lot of people who thought that the
• 40:35
  recent Conservative government in Britain was almost indistinguishable from the Blair government
• 40:41
  Freitman. So I haven't, I think the Blair government was a pretty good labour government.
• 40:46
  Certainly on foreign policy, I thought Blair was remarkably courageous. But nevertheless,
• 40:53
  I mean, John Howard often used to say, and he was sometimes mocked for it, he often used to say,
• 41:00
  we need to remember the things that unite us should always be more important than anything
• 41:04
  that divides us. Now, we can quite properly divide on things like, should the states rather than
• 41:15
  the Commonwealth do this or that, or should government rather than the private sector do this or
• 41:22
  that, or should youngsters be encouraged to go to university or get a trade? Do we need some
• 41:31
  form of national service to encourage a spirit of patriotism? I mean, there are all sorts of things
• 41:38
  upon which we can and should divide, but I think we should, I try to be patriots in the sense that
• 41:49
  we love our country and want it to be its best self. And we should do our best to appreciate
• 41:56
  that even those we disagree with are normally people of good faith who want the best,
• 42:01
  even if we happen to disagree about what they think is the best. And that's a tricky narrative
• 42:08
  to spend in a world of social media and sound bites where people are just picking the worst
• 42:12
  possible example of each other. Correct. And this is where John Howard, Bob Hawke,
• 42:19
  our two best recent prime ministers were probably lucky that they didn't have to live in the world
• 42:25
  of social media, which is an echo chamber for passion, often very destructive as opposed to
• 42:35
  constructive passion. I certainly think that the task of governance is getting harder all the time
• 42:42
  and this is why it's more important than ever that our best people don't be put off
• 42:49
  and that once they're there, our best people try as best they can to
• 42:59
  accept that the other side are not bad, just wrong on some policy issues. And some of their
• 43:06
  own side are probably wrong on some policy issues as well. So thinking about immigration as the
• 43:10
  third sort of tranche of the Australian experience after talking about the indigenous heritage
• 43:15
  and then the Anglo institutions, you're known for famously turning back the boats and assisting
• 43:22
  in the implementation of this quite hard line policy towards illegal immigration, which we've
• 43:27
  seen cause so many problems in the United States. And in the UK, how did that come about and just
• 43:32
  explained to non Australians what that process was? Well, I was a staffer for John Husson
• 43:41
  back in the days of the of the Hawke Keating government and we did have a boat people problem then
• 43:51
  which was largely brought under control by John Howard in the aftermath of the Tampa situation.
• 43:59
  This was in the 90s and early 2000s. And I very much form the view back then in my staffer days
• 44:06
  that a country which loses control of its borders ultimately loses its sovereignty. Now
• 44:14
  we never lost control of our borders to anything like the extent that the US did across the Rio
• 44:20
  Grand and Britain has across the channel because it is actually harder to come to Australia
• 44:26
  other than across the Torres Strait from P and G and for all sorts of reasons that hasn't become a
• 44:33
  problem. So look, I think it is absolutely critical that countries maintain absolute control of
• 44:43
  their borders. And what I did as Prime Minister was build on the three Howard elements which were
• 44:53
  temporary protection visas for those who did get to Australia, offshore processing for those who
• 44:59
  we could, who we had to pick up at sea and where possible boat turn around so that they never really
• 45:06
  came into our control. The difficulty which arose in the Rudgillard era was that the
• 45:15
  these your predecessors. Yeah, my predecessors on the other side of the fence was that the people
• 45:21
  smugglers developed this tactic of scuttling their boats when our ships hovered the view which
• 45:27
  meant we had to pick them up. And of course in the Rudgillard era they came to Christmas Island,
• 45:35
  they were then kind of enveloped in the kind of activist lawyer ecosystem. Because that's
• 45:41
  some Australian territory so they're into our refugees. Exactly right. So they could they can get
• 45:46
  sort of social justice lawyers go before various tribunals appeal their way through the system
• 45:56
  and 10 or 15 years later they're still here. I mean you wouldn't believe the number of
• 46:03
  Uber drivers who when they've worked out who I am Josh have told me the story of how they came
• 46:09
  by boat sometime between 2008 and 2013. And could I please sort out their citizenship status
• 46:19
  anyway. You're like you know what I did to boater drivers right? Anyway so so so what I did as
• 46:28
  Prime Minister assisted by Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton was when they scuttled their boats
• 46:36
  and we had to take them on board instead of taking them to Christmas Island because the game
• 46:41
  was up essentially once they got to Christmas Island instead of taking them there we would hold
• 46:46
  them on a mothership where they could not communicate with their activist lawyer friends they didn't
• 46:53
  have their mobile phones etc. And then on a suitable night we'd put them in a big orange life
• 46:58
  raft and send them back to Java and I knew one morning early in 2014 that we had gone on top of
• 47:06
  this when the front page of the Daily Telegraph was a full page photograph of a big orange life
• 47:12
  raft washed up on a beach in Java and I thought this is going to go through all of the would be boat
• 47:19
  people would be illegal migrant networks and they will figure out that giving 10 grand or people
• 47:25
  smuggler is just a return ticket back to Java and the boats stopped then and for the next 10
• 47:31
  years we didn't have any and to the credit of the Albanese government it's largely maintained
• 47:37
  that that policy architecture we've had a few boats around the Albanese but the would be
• 47:48
  illegal migrants have all been swiftly repatriated so it's worked for us Britain has
• 47:54
  completely fouled again on top of this completely fouled again on top of this why is that why
• 47:59
  they're both going across the channel I mean you would have thought that France was an even better
• 48:03
  collaborator than Indonesia well has been why don't they just tell the French French not to let
• 48:08
  them well take off from Calais because to be honest two things I if they're in France there are
• 48:16
  a problem for the French if they're in Britain they're no longer a French problem and second
• 48:21
  the French have been punishing the British for Brexit now I think the British government both
• 48:28
  under the Conservatives and now under Labor has been altogether to timid in the way it's responded
• 48:37
  for instance a little bit of informal action on the beaches of northern France where patriotic
• 48:45
  Britain's literally put a knife into these rubber duckies before they take off
• 48:53
  a little bit of MI6 action to break up some of these people smuggling gangs in France I think
• 49:00
  is absolutely called for and I can't understand why the British government has been so
• 49:06
  different about all of this I suppose they're conscious of not wanting to upset the EU but
• 49:15
  part of the problem with Britain for decades now has been this defeatism and declinism in the
• 49:23
  British establishment and this unjuly deferential attitude towards the Europeans which Churchill
• 49:33
  Fatcher to some extent Blair and to some extent Johnson stood up against but which I'm afraid far
• 49:44
  too many people in the British establishment have succumbed to I mean if you were a member of a
• 49:49
  political party that was about to get completely annihilated by an upstart party like reform largely
• 49:55
  on the basis of illegal immigration and concerns in the UK about demographic change and the
• 50:02
  assimilation of particularly Muslim communities there and there were significant numbers of people
• 50:08
  getting onto boats and coming across the channel and you've got a pretty formidable navy and
• 50:13
  I don't quite understand why you know just station the Navy off Calais and I mean you don't shoot
• 50:17
  them but like there are water cannons there are you know naval I'm sure I'm not a military expert
• 50:21
  you know more than I do I'm sure you could come up with a plan completely correct completely
• 50:27
  but there's this I suppose fastidiousness if you like this group velocity if you like
• 50:36
  which has essentially prevented the British government whether it be the former conservative
• 50:42
  government or the current Labor government from doing that kind of thing do not underestimate
• 50:50
  the human rights lawyer lobby inside the political establishment both on the left
• 50:56
  but also to some extent on the right for instance eventually the conservative government came
• 51:02
  up with a Rwanda plan which was a bit like the Howard government's Nauru solution
• 51:09
  but just for a foreign listeners basically this is another component of this is the second
• 51:14
  component that you said of Australia's immigration policy which is people come illegally by
• 51:18
  boat they they get transferred to a different country either where they will where they will be safe
• 51:24
  but they will be outside the jurisdiction I mean that's the other big criticism of your
• 51:30
  administration and of this policy right that that Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and that Nauru
• 51:35
  were places where human rights abuses basically were happening that they were horrible places
• 51:41
  I don't think that's not that's not fair no I mean it was no picnic I don't I don't say that
• 51:48
  just like I don't say that living living rough in Port Moorsby is a particularly great way to live
• 51:56
  but the Manus Island camp was run by well there was a strong Australian element in its running
• 52:05
  people were fed they were clothed they were housed they were safe detail in Nauru
• 52:12
  which is actually not a bad place I mean it might not quite be you know were Hamilton Island but it's
• 52:22
  it's a pretty lovely place Nauru so so right but they were in detention
• 52:29
  um the in Nauru they had the run of the island essentially they would go back at night to the camp
• 52:36
  but in Nauru and I'm talking now about the Howard the Howard person because we didn't need Nauru
• 52:43
  in my time yeah we were on top of the problem there were no boats so but in Nauru yeah
• 52:49
  they had the run of the island I'm not quite so sure what the what the arrangements were
• 52:55
  in Manus but but but to get back to the essential point when you've got a serious problem of illegal
• 53:03
  migration by boat it's run by criminal gangs and that's bad and it inevitably involves a lot
• 53:13
  of drownings at sea I mean we think that a thousand plus people died at sea in the Radgillard era
• 53:21
  are plainly dozens of people are dying in the English channel every month and the only way
• 53:28
  to actually be safe is to stop this illegal migration by boat so it has to be stamped out it
• 53:36
  absolutely has to be stamped out no self-respecting government can do it but when the British
• 53:42
  government tried to escalate its response through sending arrivals to Rwanda there was an immediate
• 53:53
  application to the courts and I'm not totally over with exactly the mechanics of this but the
• 54:05
  deportation of people to Rwanda was stopped because of Britain's adherence to the
• 54:12
  European Convention on Human Rights the ECHR now to me the obvious solution to this is just to
• 54:22
  abrogate the ECHR at least in so far as it applies to illegal migration by boat in your country
• 54:31
  parliament could have done that and given the majority of the conservatives had they could have
• 54:36
  passed it through the House of Commons in a day had they wanted to but I mean in terms of public
• 54:43
  opinion it probably doesn't help that Rwanda yeah the Howard government probably had the benefit of
• 54:48
  the fact that no one had ever heard of bloody naru so Rwanda doesn't sound like a good look does
• 54:53
  it accept that but Rwanda at least over the last couple of decades has been a peaceful even
• 55:02
  quite a prosperous by African standards country the other thing the British government could have
• 55:07
  done it they could have just as part of the Howard government's response back in the late 90s was
• 55:14
  Christmas Island the British government could have opened camps in say essential island or
• 55:21
  union or somewhere yeah one of the British one of the very remote British overseas territories
• 55:26
  so there are all sorts of things that the British government could and should have done
• 55:32
  up to and including direct action on the beaches of France and various assertive actions
• 55:39
  in the English Channel there are all sorts of things that could have been done
• 55:43
  but there was as I said this scrupulosity on the part of the kind of human rights lobby
• 55:52
  yeah inside both parties i mean yeah christ um um sequer starmer um is essentially a human rights lawyer
• 56:03
  the attorney general in the british labor government is apparently a very noted now spoken human rights
• 56:10
  lawyer i often used to say that moral theologians did not make good statesman and similarly
• 56:17
  i think human rights lawyers did not make good national leaders i mean you are a moral theologian
• 56:22
  well now i studied you studied you studied for the priesthood for a couple of years but you were
• 56:26
  a moral if i was a dropout you're a failed moral theologian i mean i so let's grant that
• 56:32
  that the leader of a country has a responsibility to secure that nation's borders but let's talk
• 56:37
  about the moral the morality of it and the theology of it if you want big because you are a religious
• 56:42
  person so the the detention centers you know okay let's at the risk of being too dismissive
• 56:50
  of human rights law here the there was a 23 year old asylum seeker razor barati who was killed on
• 56:58
  manus when you were PM right um in 2014 when you were PM the guardian and sbs reported that asylum
• 57:06
  seekers on naru and stitch stitch their lips shut as part of a mass hunger strike in protested
• 57:12
  what they called catastrophic conditions including children with their lips on shut well we didn't
• 57:17
  do that they did that to themselves yeah they did that to themselves as a result of the conditions
• 57:21
  that we put them in um in 2015 the same thing happened on manus island they'd be seen news reported
• 57:26
  that 15 people were signed their lips together on 400 men are on a hunger strike and in 2014 your
• 57:32
  government passed the national security legislation amendment act which threatened journalists and
• 57:37
  doctors and detention center staffers and teachers and whistleblowers with 10 years in prison if
• 57:42
  they reported on what was happening in the offshore detention centers on just interested in
• 57:47
  the theology of this because we were saying earlier about how the sort of Christian ethic is that
• 57:53
  people can't be used for a purpose beyond themselves that we have an intrinsic dignity right that's
• 58:00
  fundamental to your world view yeah and so you know the scenic would say yeah you can talk about
• 58:05
  all of the people who aren't dying at sea as a result of these people's hardship but we're still
• 58:09
  using these people who are in our duty of care in certainly unseemly ways aren't we Josh um
• 58:20
  they were always being fed they're always being clothed they're always being housed
• 58:25
  and there was no violence being committed against them by us or by the people of Nuru
• 58:32
  and PNG well I mean we were jailing them we definitely would know we were detaining them they could
• 58:38
  always volunteer to leave uh now I know I know I know there were some complications uh with
• 58:46
  countries that wouldn't take back people who had left and had destroyed passports and things
• 58:50
  like that but there were always other things that could have been done and I don't believe
• 58:58
  uh that a national government should be morally intimidated by the bad behaviour of other people
• 59:06
  that we have in no way forced upon them I mean no one is forced to sow his or her lips together
• 59:14
  um if if someone if there's something for Josh if someone if someone commits if someone threatens to
• 59:21
  commit suicide um and I have never mistreated the person who is threatening to commit suicide and
• 59:29
  demanding something of me is that my fault but it's the if I have never mistreated a lot
• 59:34
  lot dressing on me if I have never mistreated but honestly these people never had a right to come
• 59:41
  see this is the other thing Josh uh no one who is travelled through several safe countries
• 59:48
  can claim to be a refugee or to can claim asylum if you're fair n income let's suppose you're
• 59:54
  a persecuted Afghan um and you come through Pakistan and then you fly to Malaysia and then you
• 1:00:03
  get to Indonesia you have come through three countries where okay you might not get social security
• 1:00:10
  um you might not find it easy to get a job but you are physically safe uh and to be a refugee you
• 1:00:18
  have to have a well-found fear of persecution by the time you have gone through a safe country
• 1:00:24
  you are no longer a refugee you are a would be illegal migrant in other words you have no right
• 1:00:32
  to rock up on our doorstep or to attempt to enter our country you just don't have a right and if
• 1:00:39
  people are attempting to do something that they have no right to do they are violating your country
• 1:00:46
  just as if someone smashes down your door and enters your house they are violating your household
• 1:00:52
  they are morally and legally in the wrong and if there's a desperate person Tony who bashes
• 1:01:00
  down your door because they're you know a desperate person will knock on them let's suppose
• 1:01:06
  they're not kind enough to do that and they're not kind enough to do that they've got a problem
• 1:01:11
  right but is there a limit to what you can then do to them once they're in your duty of care
• 1:01:16
  you can certainly have a duty it doesn't the Christian in you think that you have a duty of care to
• 1:01:20
  to their well-being you you you have a duty to do what you can to alleviate the circumstances
• 1:01:28
  that might have led to that problem but once they take the law into their own hands and violate
• 1:01:35
  what is your sacred space you don't have to put up with that for a second you really don't and
• 1:01:42
  so but but let's if we may Josh move a little on from the whole question of illegal migration
• 1:01:50
  because there's a bigger problem and it's virtually out of control legal migration at the moment
• 1:01:58
  certainly in Britain and in Australia we have very large by historical standards waves of migration
• 1:02:09
  and the difficulty with migration at the levels and from the sources that we've currently got
• 1:02:19
  is that it is pretty obviously in Britain and to some extent even here in Australia
• 1:02:27
  I think challenging social cohesion I mean I thought one of the most terrible things that I
• 1:02:35
  can remember was that demonstration on October the 9th 2023 outside the Opera House
• 1:02:42
  where we all heard what we thought was gas the Jews and we certainly heard F the Jews and all the
• 1:02:47
  rest of it even if it was where are the Jews which is what the defenders say yeah yeah yeah it's not
• 1:02:52
  crazy about a bunch of anti-Semites gathering together it's an intimidatory it's a deep layer of the Jews
• 1:02:57
  in timidatory situation now now I know that there were lots of people who were native born Australians in
• 1:03:06
  these demonstrations but they have also been a large presence of recent migrants in these
• 1:03:14
  demonstrations and we certainly have people in mosques and prayerhouses in Sydney and Melbourne
• 1:03:23
  preaching deeply inflammatory sermons which I think are unAustralian they have no place in Australia
• 1:03:33
  if we take seriously the citizenship pledge from this time forward under God or not as the case
• 1:03:40
  I pledge my allegiance to Australia and its people whose democratic beliefs I share
• 1:03:45
  whose rights and liberties I respect and whose laws I will uphold in a bay I mean if those people
• 1:03:52
  have taken the citizenship pledge and meant it they aren't really living it and and I think there
• 1:03:59
  is a problem I mean if you compare postwar migration to Australia and much of the migration
• 1:04:07
  to the United States there was very much this emphasis on integration from day one and
• 1:04:16
  assimilation as quickly as possible my way of describing it is from day one you've got to be
• 1:04:24
  part of team Australia and I think far too many recent migrants are encouraged by official
• 1:04:34
  them if you like by the general zeitgeist of these times to live in hotel Australia as opposed to
• 1:04:42
  joining team Australia and because the numbers are much larger in Britain and because this whole
• 1:04:49
  enclave thing seems to have developed more in Britain it's worse there than it is in Australia
• 1:04:55
  well they also don't have a point system the way we do do they so don't they get more I don't want
• 1:05:00
  to say a more undesirable done desirable caliber of migrant but aren't we better at picking and
• 1:05:07
  choosing than their sort of family relationship you know my great aunt can come over because I'm
• 1:05:12
  in the UK or whatever I think that we get credit which we don't always deserve here we like to
• 1:05:22
  tell others and tell ourselves that we have a rigorous skills based immigration system but if you
• 1:05:29
  look at the figure that counts net I net oversees migration the figure that's been running at close
• 1:05:35
  to half a million for the last three years by far the biggest component of that is is people
• 1:05:43
  coming for education now the theory is they're coming for education the reality is that most of them
• 1:05:50
  are coming for residency and or work and our problem is that to press down on that we've got a
• 1:06:01
  press down on the universities and the other educational providers so we have created a vested
• 1:06:08
  interest which wants to perpetuate the problem as well in that net overseas migration figure
• 1:06:17
  there's many tens of thousands of short term workers who are coming in to do jobs which supposedly
• 1:06:27
  can't be filled by Australians I mean for instance if you go to a hotel or a nursing home
• 1:06:37
  if you get a food delivery or jump in a taxi almost certainly the person who is cleaning your room
• 1:06:48
  helping do all the things that you need driving your you around giving delivering your food is going
• 1:06:55
  to be a recent a recent migra now I'm not being critical of those people for a second because
• 1:07:01
  they are doing necessary jobs and quite understandably they want a better life for themselves and
• 1:07:08
  they've made the decision because no one is forced to come to Australia they have made the decision
• 1:07:13
  that life for them in Australia even doing a menial entry level job is better than wherever it was
• 1:07:20
  they've come from so I'm not at all critical of them but I am critical of successive governments
• 1:07:27
  which haven't done enough to ensure that Australians take the jobs that are available don't go on
• 1:07:35
  social security take jobs that are are are available and if we can't if we genuinely can't get
• 1:07:43
  Australians to do certain jobs either we need to improve the training we need to we need to pay
• 1:07:49
  them more right simple as that I I really dislike this notion that if I can't get an Australian
• 1:07:58
  to work for 30 bucks an hour in a nursing home I've got to bring in people from the Philippines
• 1:08:04
  it reminds me of the same conversation they have in the states where they say we couldn't do
• 1:08:08
  say anything serious about illegal immigration because who would work who would pick our oranges
• 1:08:12
  and I was just think well maybe your orange juice has has to be a bit more expensive so that Americans
• 1:08:16
  he's exactly right because at the end of the day we do ourselves no favors and we indeed do our
• 1:08:25
  recent migrants no favors if we fundamentally change the character of the country every single
• 1:08:33
  migrant comes to Australia because he or she perceives however dimly that there is a better life
• 1:08:40
  for them in Australia not Australia as it might be but Australia as it is this is why I think we
• 1:08:48
  should preserve the core Anglo Celtic culture of our country and we should certainly preserve the
• 1:08:55
  core Judeo Christian ethos of our country because that has always been central to our identity
• 1:09:03
  it's always been central to our appeal to migrants and I think we owe it to
• 1:09:11
  ourselves and to our descendants to maintain it I mean I do suspect that one reason why we enjoy
• 1:09:17
  better multicultural social cohesion than the UK and the US do is because of our strong border
• 1:09:23
  policies in the sense that you know as called well the first immigration minister had the insight
• 1:09:29
  in Australia that as long as people feel like the borders are under control they will tolerate
• 1:09:33
  much higher levels of immigration than if they feel like it's chaotic before they leave just illegal
• 1:09:38
  immigration if people think the government is under control they will be understanding because
• 1:09:43
  they think they in the end can control the government if people think that no one is in control or if
• 1:09:49
  people smugglers are in control well that's a huge problem yeah and so I mean when you do get to
• 1:09:54
  the sort of the end of your life and you're thinking about you know a life well lived I'm just
• 1:10:00
  interested like in terms of your Christianity will you feel like with regard to the medieval thing
• 1:10:07
  and like whether or not you know people could come off those detention centres to get medical care
• 1:10:11
  in Australia will you have an easy and relaxed and comfortable soul or will you wonder whether there
• 1:10:19
  was a more gentile way of achieving the same ends I have never been morally troubled by the things
• 1:10:29
  that I did in public life the positions that I've adopted in public life I don't for a second
• 1:10:34
  Josh claim to be a person without floral blemish but nevertheless now I'm not morally troubled I
• 1:10:41
  mean you know the terror bombing of of German cities during the Second World War was deeply morally
• 1:10:49
  troubling probably even more so than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because I don't
• 1:10:58
  think anyone thought that was going to end the war whereas arguably the atomic weapons were going
• 1:11:05
  to end the war because they were just intimidate the Japanese out of continuing to resist but no I'm
• 1:11:11
  not morally troubled by any of the actions of the Abbott government or indeed the Howard government
• 1:11:18
  or the public positions that I've taken one of the things that the conservative side of politics
• 1:11:24
  is grappling with at the moment is net zero and carbon and you know climate chaos and everything and
• 1:11:29
  we don't have to go over a whole bunch of nuanced sort of party details which will bore everybody
• 1:11:36
  to death nor do we have to give any credence to the most extreme climate activist vision of doom
• 1:11:42
  which I sort of share some of your exhaustion I get the sense that there is so much negativity
• 1:11:49
  among my peers that between Gaza and climate chaos you know we're just entering a 21st century
• 1:11:56
  that is going to be a flame and burning and but it is worth just wondering
• 1:12:05
  the criticism that I hear the most reasonable energy and electricity and climate people level
• 1:12:11
  at Australia is that the lack of certainty that we've had over the past 10 or 15 years on climate
• 1:12:17
  has made the energy sector jittery and that there's been an underinvestment in energy and one
• 1:12:23
  reason why electricity prices are as high as they are is because we've sort of kicked the can
• 1:12:27
  down the road and every see out of a big energy company knows that at some point we're going to
• 1:12:32
  have to do something about carbon we're either going to join emissions trading scheme or we're
• 1:12:38
  going to have a carbon tax of some kind is it conceivable that the past 10 or 15 years would have been
• 1:12:44
  more stable for energy in Australia if you if the Turnbull Rudd emissions trading scheme had existed
• 1:12:52
  since 2009 Josh the so-called trilemma reliability affordability and sustainability
• 1:13:05
  I'm afraid we can't have all three not in Australia given that we don't have
• 1:13:12
  mass hydro power and we won't do nuclear we could do nuclear well we well we should do
• 1:13:21
  I'm with you on that the trouble is even if we started today we wouldn't get nuclear for five to
• 1:13:26
  10 years so in the short term we've got to have I think what we need most and and you know
• 1:13:37
  sustainability affordability reliability the thing that is least important frankly is sustainability
• 1:13:44
  mean reliability and affordability are the absolute essentials so so I think that I mean if I
• 1:13:53
  were asked what what what's your energy policy Abbott my energy policy today would be no more
• 1:13:58
  qualified power stations to close get gas out of the ground with extreme rapidity no more
• 1:14:06
  subsidies for renewables because if renewables really are cheap we don't need subsidy and end the
• 1:14:12
  nuclear ban and what we really should be doing is refurbishing our qualified power stations
• 1:14:20
  A because it is still the cheapest form of base load power but who passed for that because the
• 1:14:25
  energy ultimately consumers pay for the energy companies don't invest in it because they don't
• 1:14:30
  believe that in 30 or 40 years time there's not going to be a price on carbon it's it's political
• 1:14:35
  risk that's what's pro that's the problem for them is political risk they know that
• 1:14:41
  coal-fired power is the cheapest form of base load reliable power I mean why would China be opening
• 1:14:49
  to coal-fired power stations a week if this was not the case why why would we be exporting record
• 1:14:55
  amounts of coal to China and other places like India if coal wasn't still the cheapest form of
• 1:15:03
  base load power yeah but I mean they're worried is that it's cheap right now and we're not
• 1:15:07
  factoring in the negative externalities of how much climate chaos is going to cost in the long run
• 1:15:12
  right so let me grant you the let's let's not take the the cartoon caricature of the the blue head
• 1:15:19
  you know climate hippie who is training themselves to train and throwing paint on a rembrandt or
• 1:15:24
  something but the more modest scientific consensus like what what probability do you give to
• 1:15:33
  the possibility that climate you know man-made climate change that climate chaos over the course
• 1:15:41
  of the 21st century will cost us trillions of dollars make beachside towns some beachside towns
• 1:15:49
  uninsurable require enormous investment in infrastructure for some coastal communities
• 1:15:56
  cause refugee flows due to changes in the monsoons that will put strains on liberal democracy
• 1:16:02
  increased droughts and bushfires for farmers and just generally you know not kill us all but make
• 1:16:08
  life a lot more costly and frustrating for my kids than it would have been if the world could have
• 1:16:13
  gotten its act together on reducing emissions well Josh what's the probability there is it's
• 1:16:19
  cause it's not zero is it I think it's very low you're honest I honestly think it's very low now
• 1:16:24
  now I know scientist don't well science is determined by by facts not by consensus if you like
• 1:16:34
  I mean I'm sure when Galileo told us the world was round most scientists in inverted commas of
• 1:16:41
  those days said rubbish but he was right I mean you know yeah but Galileo was the pioneer who
• 1:16:49
  was making a new prediction but like climate scientists but he wasn't a vested interest
• 1:16:53
  who was defending his turf I am I am not convinced at all by this statement that 97% of climate
• 1:17:01
  scientists think X Y and Z that's why I'm asking what you put the probability if there's a single one
• 1:17:08
  who has got a very plausible counter case now right but the Arnold Schwarzenegger attitude is like if
• 1:17:16
  you know if you go to a bunch of doctors and a few of them say that you've got cancer and you need
• 1:17:20
  to treat it and a few of them say you don't you don't just ignore it and go well a lot of them say
• 1:17:25
  that I don't have cancer you do it anyway out of a abundance of caution because you don't want to
• 1:17:29
  have to incur okay but if but if all but if all of the ones that were telling you had cancer
• 1:17:35
  were employed by a drug company that made the anti-cancer drug but then I'd be a little bit more
• 1:17:41
  stuff are they they are climate scientists are all getting what are they shilling they are all
• 1:17:45
  getting research grants that largely depend upon them accepting the so-called consensus well
• 1:17:53
  the dissenters are often getting research grants from oil companies I don't know that that's
• 1:17:59
  entirely fair if you if you can show me Josh the climate scientists who are getting research
• 1:18:06
  grants from oil companies and well they're vanishingly small the ones who say that there's almost
• 1:18:11
  a zero chance that it's going to be costly and inconvenient well I have a lot of time for
• 1:18:17
  beyond Lomburg who accepts that mankind's carbon dioxide emissions are likely I'm going to
• 1:18:26
  cause climate problems down the track and he says that by far the best way of dealing with this
• 1:18:35
  is to maximize our wealth so we're best placed to adapt to whatever challenges we face down the
• 1:18:43
  track and look I accept that we've only got one planet we have a duty to look after it we want to
• 1:18:51
  give it to our kids and grandkids in at least as good shape as we found it so I am all in favour
• 1:18:59
  of minimizing carbon dioxide emissions what I find very implausible Josh is this idea
• 1:19:08
  that mankind's carbon dioxide emissions are the sole or even the main cause of any climate change
• 1:19:15
  that takes place given that we know that there's been massive climate change over the eons
• 1:19:23
  which have had nothing to do with mankind I mean I was at a conference with Boris Johnson the year
• 1:19:30
  or so back and Boris and I were agreeing very much about Israel and the Middle East we were
• 1:19:37
  agreeing very much about Russia and Ukraine and then Boris got onto his climate change soapbox
• 1:19:43
  I said Boris tell me this if mankind's emissions are the only thing that matter how did the ice ages
• 1:19:51
  happen but Tony you can have a fluctuating climate yeah and you can also have a new cause
• 1:20:04
  for an acceleration of one of the carbon dioxide but carbon dioxide is not new with no but these levels
• 1:20:12
  I mean you're a smart man Tony if you get a goldfish bowl and you seal it up and you put it under
• 1:20:18
  a heat lamp and you put carbon dioxide into it it gets hotter than if it didn't have carbon dioxide
• 1:20:24
  I look I accept it's pretty it the physics is well understood I accept the physics all things being
• 1:20:30
  equal an increase in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere should raise the temperature
• 1:20:38
  that's physics I get that but carbon dioxide is not the only factor here there's sun spot activity
• 1:20:48
  there's volcanic activity but this is what I ask about the probability because it strikes me is just
• 1:20:55
  like I don't know because I'm not climate scientists but it strikes me that if there's a
• 1:20:59
  non-zero chance that it's going to be really expensive and disruptive then the question becomes
• 1:21:05
  what do we do now and is it worth it like it may be the case that for a country the size of Australia
• 1:21:10
  the best policy is to pretend that we're doing a lot about climate change and then to burn
• 1:21:14
  as much coal as we possibly can so that other people will fix the problem for us which is like China
• 1:21:21
  so it may be that we shouldn't shoot ourselves in the foot if we've got so many fossil fuels
• 1:21:25
  but I don't understand the reticence to even acknowledge the existence of a problem that is
• 1:21:30
  worth reckoning well well well what I'm doing is expressing some skepticism about just how frightened
• 1:21:38
  we should be about all of this given that whatever we do they will still be storms, floods,
• 1:21:45
  fires, droughts whatever we do because they've been part of the world forever sure but have
• 1:21:54
  everyone every having a really bad one every hundred years is different from having a really
• 1:21:58
  bad one every ten years I accept that but the richer we are the better we will be able to
• 1:22:05
  deal with them whether they come every ten years or every hundred years and at the moment
• 1:22:11
  policy in Australia Britain and much of Western Europe is grievously impoverishing us
• 1:22:19
  and it's not actually making any difference to global emissions because China, India and Russia
• 1:22:26
  are massively increasing and many other countries are massively increasing their emissions in the
• 1:22:32
  goal of becoming economically stronger and giving their populations a better life. So I mean if we
• 1:22:37
  just look at the cost of electricity and we don't care about climate change and we think that it's
• 1:22:43
  too uncertain to bother doing anything about treasury I'm not saying there is no such thing as climate
• 1:22:51
  change obviously the climate does change and I'm not saying we should be completely indifferent
• 1:22:58
  to carbon dioxide emissions what I am saying is that our efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions
• 1:23:06
  should not be at the cost of local jobs driving industries offshore and imposing heavy costs
• 1:23:13
  on ordinary people and that's what they're doing right now. Well I mean
• 1:23:18
  I look so treasury this year. Let's take the tom, take the tomago aluminium cell. Let me just put
• 1:23:23
  them to put the claim to you and you can refute it treasury this year modeled the cost of an orderly
• 1:23:27
  versus a disorderly transition to net zero on the assumption that you're probably not going to be
• 1:23:36
  able to convince all Australians of the position that we shouldn't do anything about it and gas
• 1:23:42
  in electricity prices end up nearly twice as high if there's a lack of credible climate targets.
• 1:23:48
  Two years after you left office energy executives testified to a Senate committee about a
• 1:23:53
  damaging investment strike in new assets they were saying we're not building anything
• 1:23:57
  because there's a policy vacuum and there's no clear national you know climate direction.
• 1:24:02
  The Finkel review that year concluded that the uncertain and changing direction of emissions
• 1:24:07
  reduction policy for the electricity sector has compromised the investment environment
• 1:24:11
  in the national electricity market that's the Australian energy regulator state of the energy
• 1:24:15
  market in 2018 said the same thing investors themselves saying that the lack of stability and
• 1:24:19
  predictability was the cause of under investment. This is because our energy system our electricity
• 1:24:26
  supply has been governed to reduce emissions rather than to produce affordable and reliable power.
• 1:24:34
  For the last 15 years with the brief exception of my government we have run our
• 1:24:42
  electricity supply more to reduce emissions than we have to maximize affordability and reliability
• 1:24:50
  and I think we've got to drop that. I think we should say look reducing emissions is nice to do
• 1:24:59
  but we are running our electricity system to get the lowest possible 24-7 power.
• 1:25:07
  And if we did that you believe that the energy sector would believe that the next 10 governments
• 1:25:12
  are also going to stand by that and therefore they can invest in well the alternative is to have
• 1:25:19
  prices going up and up and up and to lose all of our energy intensive industries and I think
• 1:25:25
  that's wrong. But so if the Turnbull Rudd plan had come in and we had an emissions trading scheme
• 1:25:32
  then you would have had a short-term increase in the price of carbon-based electricity and most
• 1:25:37
  of the modeling was that then you get a medium to long-term tapering off and a lot of the industry say
• 1:25:42
  by now we'd have lower electricity prices because they would have known what Australia's policy was
• 1:25:46
  because that mainly the problem is they just don't believe that your point of view is going to win
• 1:25:52
  ultimately, permanently in Australia. Well they think that climate alarmism has so taken hold
• 1:26:01
  that governments will succumb to the kind of climate catastrophism that you earlier suggested
• 1:26:11
  was widespread. Well they just think that you know at some point Australia is going to get on
• 1:26:16
  the same page as most of the world's. But this is says the game that they talk about even if
• 1:26:23
  it's not the game that they do. I mean the Europe has an emissions trading scheme. Of course they do
• 1:26:28
  but the Europeans have succumbed to climate. The Europeans are taking their lead from
• 1:26:33
  Grant of Thunberg. It is a modern day version of the Piper but it's not sensible policy. I mean
• 1:26:44
  given all the other challenges we face the cost of living challenge domestically the geo strategic
• 1:26:52
  challenge from China and the other authoritarian powers we can't be making ourselves economically weaker
• 1:27:01
  at this time. We've got to be making ourselves economically stronger so that we can
• 1:27:07
  revive industry in countries like ours. We can power the AI revolution which is going to be vastly
• 1:27:17
  energy intensive. We aren't going to do it on solar panels and batteries. I'm sorry Josh you
• 1:27:23
  can run a house on solar panels and batteries but you cannot run a first world sophisticated
• 1:27:30
  manufacturing economy on solar panels and batteries. You just can't do it and the grievous
• 1:27:39
  era that so many people more on the labour side than on my side but on both sides of politics have
• 1:27:45
  been peddling. This last decade and a half is that somehow we can have energy abundance
• 1:27:52
  relying on wind and solar power which is only their 30% of the time. I mean you know for god's
• 1:27:59
  sake the intermittency thing is the fundamental floor in renewable power at least in wind and solar
• 1:28:07
  power and Chris Bowen can tell us till the cows come home that the wind and the sun don't send
• 1:28:13
  you a bill but the power company sure do because either they've got to build the infrastructure
• 1:28:22
  to get the sun and the wind's energy then they've got to produce all the extra transmission lines
• 1:28:29
  in a decentralized grid. Transmission lines are only being used 30% of the time on average
• 1:28:35
  then they've got to firm up all of this for all of the times when the wind isn't blowing and the
• 1:28:41
  sun isn't shining. That is a gargantuan expense. I mean why are our power bills going up?
• 1:28:48
  The power bills are going up because of this transition not because of policy uncertainty
• 1:28:54
  and inverted commas. Pulling back to wrap up I don't remember feeling as sort of anxious about
• 1:29:01
  the fate of liberal democracy as I do at the moment with the rise of far right parties in Europe,
• 1:29:09
  the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China's saber rattling, the fate of orcas in the balance
• 1:29:15
  Donald Trump you know creating constitutional mayhem in the United States. How optimistic
• 1:29:22
  are you about Australia's fate and about the fate of Western civilization at the moment?
• 1:29:29
  I think you're right to be concerned Josh. I mean I sometimes fear that we are living
• 1:29:37
  through the toilet of the West because the world would be so much worse and darker
• 1:29:47
  if that happens I remain optimistic that it won't because I think that as Margaret Thatcher once said
• 1:29:55
  the facts are conservative and when the lights start going out we will wake up to the climate
• 1:30:03
  cult nonsense. When doctors start getting sued we will wake up to the errors of some of this gender
• 1:30:10
  fluidity push. When we confront a serious military challenge we will start to realize that our
• 1:30:19
  society is actually worth defending. My anxiety is that things might have to get worse before they
• 1:30:27
  get better. That said because what has been achieved is so precious and so I think self evidently
• 1:30:37
  good I do think in the end we will discover the intestinal fortitude to preserve it.
• 1:30:45
  Tony Abbott thanks for coming on uncomfortable conversations. Thank you Josh.