Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Multiculturalism in the UK” with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer

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“Multiculturalism in the UK” with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, what a treat we have today.
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One of the most consequential Australian politicians in recent history, Alexander Downer,
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who was the foreign minister of Australia, which is what Americans call the Secretary of
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State, for those American listeners, during the Iraq War, 9-11, he was at the helm of
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a very successful conservative government, headed by the Prime Minister John Howard for
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over a decade.
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And subsequently became Australia's ambassador to the United Kingdom.
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Now in a weird quirk of terminology, ambassadors between Commonwealth countries are called
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high commissioners.
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So when you hear us talk about the high commissioner to the UK, that's just a fancy way of saying
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ambassador because Australia and the UK are both Commonwealth countries.
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And while he was the ambassador slash high commissioner to the United Kingdom, he had
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a drink with a gentleman named George Papadopoulos, who was on the Trump campaign before Donald
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Trump was elected president.
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And Papadopoulos mentioned something about the Russians having dirt on Hillary Clinton.
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Now Downer as the Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom, and obviously a member
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of the five eyes intelligence alliance between the sort of Anglophone countries, very close
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with the FBI and the CIA, thought that it might be appropriate to alert American law enforcement
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about the fact that an allegation had been made that a foreign adversary was going to
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interfere in the 2016 election.
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Let's begin, rush a gate, the Mueller investigation, and a huge amount of global kerfuffle around
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this inciting incident, which Downer was part of.
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I wanted to pick his brain about that.
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I wanted to pick his brain about what it was like to be the foreign minister at some of
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the most trying times in recent history, and what it was like to be fundamental to essentially
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coordinating the Western security response to jihadism, the Islamic State, after 9-11.
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An al-Qaeda.
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In Australia, Alexander Downer is a household name.
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He recently wrote about the UK race riots, and that's really the pretext for having
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this conversation.
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So you'll recall that last month there were riots in the United Kingdom that were fueled
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by a deep kind of resentment towards the pace of immigration.
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There were certainly racially motivated racist riots in the case of some of the offenders,
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but the underlying conditions for those riots as Alexander Downer sees it is a failure
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of elites and of successive governments to really address the integration of migrant communities
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and to have an honest conversation about immigration in the UK.
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So as a man who has lived in Australia and both Australia and the UK, he's well positioned
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and in New York, also when he had a lot of appearances at the United Nations, which
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is headquartered there, he has a fundamental understanding about the way that migrants can
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and cannot integrate into societies.
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So I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, the one and only Alexander Downer.
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I'm interested in you anyway, but I'm here to make a speech to a energy association
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to their annual dinner. I'm just the guest speaker to talk about geopolitics in the
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state of the world.
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Do you tire of travel?
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I woke up this morning and I was thinking, I was asking myself that question, God, I flew
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up here from Sydney yesterday and I'm going from here to the Gold Coast to make another
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speech there and then back to Earthload for a week and then I'm going to Melbourne to
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make a speech.
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I do a lot of speeches.
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It's pretty good.
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I mean, there are worse ways to make a Bob.
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There are.
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I mean, there are many worse here.
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What do I think?
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I mean, it's nice to come to different countries, but Bangkok, it's not my...
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I love Bangkok, Alexander.
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I'm so lovely about that.
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I mean, it's got a...
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Bustle.
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Arrow.
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What's that?
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Have you been to Vienna, or in Southeast Asia, Hanoi?
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Yes, Hanoi is fabulous.
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I mean, they're all very different places.
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A Hanoi has that kind of charm and beauty about it, but I do like a bit of chaos.
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I feel like the world is divided into people who prefer Singapore to Bangkok and Dubai
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to Cairo.
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And I've always been on the Cairo Bangkok side of that equation.
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Cairo is brilliant.
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I love that.
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I mean, you have to understand Cairo.
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You have to know where to go to buy the bakeries and things like that.
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There's sort of arrow bakeries and all sorts of wonderful things to do in Cairo.
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It's an incredibly Singapore.
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Well, it's scary.
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That's what I mean.
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I mean, some people like that.
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Some people like the Dubai application and Singapore application of everything.
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Well, I know it's being recorded, but I'm not a great lover of Dubai.
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Why is that?
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Sterile.
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Nothing.
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I mean, I was stuck there once because some problem with the plane and I was just stuck
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there for 48 hours or whatever it was.
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I mean, after about three hours, there's nothing to do.
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You can go and look at the shopping malls.
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They're just amazing.
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But I mean, I do.
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I've been part of my time in Palau also at Stanford University, and there's a Stanford
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shopping mall, which is might as well be the Dubai.
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Yeah, that's what I don't remember which golf state capital it was.
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It was either Abu Dhabi or Dubai or Doha.
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I passed through all of them a lot, and they'd become indistinguishable after a while.
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But I remember being told that I had to go to the sook to the local markets because it
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was so authentic.
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And I went down there, and they were things that were built in the 1980s to look like a traditional
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sook.
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And it's a bunch of expats walking around, I was like, what is going on?
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Give me a Stan Bull or Cairo or any day.
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So Cairo has an amazing sook.
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I have a lot of tourists in the Cairo sook, but nevertheless, it's huge and it is amazing.
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Dubai, the sook, the gold sook, right?
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It's completely uninteresting and hugely expensive.
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Yes, it was either that or it might have been in Doha.
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I can't remember.
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What are your favorite places in the world as the world traveled diplomat?
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You mentioned Vienna and the Hanoi.
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It depends on my mood.
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London is the great meeting point of the world.
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I mean, you know, Dr. Johnson saying, if your tired of London, your tired of life is true,
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there is everything to do in London.
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As somebody very smartly, somebody from Sydney very smartly said to me, once, well, that's
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not quite true, where can you go surfing in London?
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I mean, the other thing that the other thing that London doesn't have is vast expanses
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of nothingness, which Australia has bucket loads.
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No, exactly, but I mean, if you're just thinking of a city, you're not looking for nothingness.
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No, that's true.
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England, England, England doesn't know Scotland has some nothingness, but England not a lot
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of nothingness.
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There are different things to see there, not nothingness.
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America is great for nothingness.
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America is great for everything.
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I mean, I spent most of my professional life in New York City, which I feel the same affection
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and excitement towards New York as you and Samuel Johnson do towards London.
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There's just nothing that can't be done in New York.
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And you can also get out of it reasonably quickly.
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And you can think of a thing on Long Island, I suppose.
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You can.
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Exactly.
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There you go.
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We win.
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You lose.
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Let's talk about London.
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You wrote a great piece in the Australian about what's going on in the UK, and you make
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the point that with respect to the race riots that that eruption has not happened without
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a broad context, what's the context?
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Yeah, the context is, is the British failure to make multiculturalism work, and this
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requires a bit of discussion, because people confuse multiculturalism with multirationalism.
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In a country like the UK, which once had an empire which spans most of the world, multirationalism
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is not an issue.
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People are not fussed about people's race, what color they are, whether they have curly
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hair or straight hair.
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People are not fussed at all about that.
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The issue is in a way quite different.
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It's about culture.
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They have brought a large number of migrants into the UK.
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These people come from countries that were, and now one would say, are part of the Commonwealth,
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what part of the British Empire.
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The problem is that in some cases there has been no effort to integrate those people.
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So they've gone to, I mean, a percentage of them have gone to living enclaves.
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The enclaves carve out parts of major cities like Birmingham and Manchester.
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In some cases, pretty much ethnic groups pretty much take an over-whole town, or the
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bigger part of towns.
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So you've established, they've established in the UK a patchwork of enclaves without
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any effort to try to integrate people who have come into the country.
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And so you have separate cultures living side by side.
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And this is, for those people who are the migrants or the descendants of the migrants,
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it's a disadvantage because they are not integrated and therefore they don't have the opportunities
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that they would have if they did integrate.
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And for people who are part of the broader mainstream of British society, they resent
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these enclaves and then they start to resent the people.
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And so it's a slightly complicated story, but it is about having a policy of integration.
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And it's nothing to do with race, it's about integration and about finding common values
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that bind the country together, regardless of where people have migrated from.
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If you don't have some common narrative and common values, then the country just becomes
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a gigantic hotel.
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Alexander, what does integration look like and mean?
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Because ever since I was a boy, I've been told that integration is actually not the point
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of a society, for example, like Australia is that multiculturalism is about finding a unity
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without enforced integration, that we can sort of respect the diversity of all the newcomers.
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Well, I think this is the difficulty with language.
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There was another word that was used and has been banned now, and I'm in favor of not
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abandoning the word, but abandoning the concept and that is assimilation.
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We're not looking for people to assimilate, to all become the same, to have the sort of
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intellectual and cultural homogeneity in our society.
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It's good to have diversity in the society, but there must be some common values that
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bind people together.
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There must be something that binds the people of the country together.
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And if, for example, they live in ethnic enclaves, like as has happened in the UK, they
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speak the language of their countries they came from and don't learn English, and there's
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a lack of English language skills in some of those British enclaves.
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They don't move out of the enclaves, then they become, if you like, separate countries
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within a country, and that is not going to work.
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So somehow you have to, and the government has to take the lead on this, you have to establish
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the common values of the country and make sure that migrants, as they come into the country,
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are committed to those common values, you know, they're to clichate things like a commitment
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to liberal democracy and understanding of the rule of law, how laws are made, the obligation
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of a citizen to obey laws, the obligation of citizens to contribute as well as to take
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from society various different values, which it's not nothing to do with where you're
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a migrant from Rwanda, wanting to continue to practice some of the practices that you feel
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culturally comfortable with from Rwanda, that's nothing wrong with that.
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In fact, banning that sort of behaviour, which is what assimilation essentially does,
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is entirely the wrong thing to do.
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But a country will not, will cease to be a country, you will cease to be a nation if you
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don't have some common values that bind you together.
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And it's a huge challenge this because when you talk about values, they sound like a list
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of cliches.
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And some of them might be cliches, but they're still important.
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And people physically don't have to sign up to these values, but there has to be a sense
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that they embrace those values, because if they don't, then society will fragment.
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And that's what's happened in the UK, I mean, not to defend that people have been writing
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and burning police cars, and in one case threatening to burn down a motel with refugees
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in, and that's preposterous and criminal behaviour.
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But this doesn't come from nowhere, this comes from somewhere, and this comes out of that
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sense of resentment that they have been unsuccessful if you like in integrating migrants into
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the UK.
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They can blame all sorts of people, you can blame the migrants, you can blame the government,
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you can blame the indigenous people, it doesn't matter.
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The fact is that there's a problem there, and it's a problem that's caused resentment
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and creates political and social problems, which I think are going to get worse there before
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they get better.
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Is there something particular Alexander to the situation in the UK, because the retort
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that I would expect to hear from, against what you just said is, look, when people first
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arrive in a place, it's unreasonable to expect them to hold all of the same values as that
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place.
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I mean, they're from a different place.
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When my grandparents came to Australia as penniless refugees from Water on Europe,
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after the Second World War, you know, what appreciation did they have for liberal democracy?
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I mean, my grandmother was a communist in Poland, you know, she didn't understand liberal
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democracy, but over time she assimilated, she integrated, she inherited the norms of
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the culture around her, and over time, subsequent generations, normalize, get absorbed, bump into
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other communities, create a roiling melting pot that grows its way towards, you know, the
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liberal democracy that sort of undergoods the political structures and leeches its way
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into those communities.
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Why do you have to enforce it or guide it, why isn't it just organic?
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I don't like the word enforce, you can't force people to do anything, but at least that
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in my book, but why do people want to come to the UK in the first place?
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They don't want to come there because it's a country that practices Sharia law and they're
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able to live out the life that they might be living out in Pakistan, that's not the reason
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they go there, they go there with a full understanding of what, you know, a fool is an exaggeration
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with an understanding of what Britain is about, as they do when they come to Australia,
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I mean, your ancestors like mine came to Australia with an understanding, albeit a rudimentary
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understanding of what the society was about, migrants coming to Australia know it's a
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liberal democracy, know how the rule of law operates in our country, knows that it has
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certain liberties and there are certain liberal principles in our country, I mean, we don't
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ban homosexuality and we believe in the quality between men and women, these sort of things
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which are not for norms in a lot of societies, they probably were the norm for your grandmother
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actually, by the way, although she was a communist, I mean, I don't know what a Polish woman
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in the 1930s thought of homosexuals or gender equality, but that's not now, what people thought
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in the 1830s, in the 1930s, and what they'll think in the 2030s are all a bit different,
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but there are norms in society, so in the case of the UK, somewhere between 35 and 50, it's
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not clear, 35 to 50% of all Muslims in the UK, who are about not a big percentage of the
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population, 4% of the population, about 35 to 50% of them marry their first cousins, so
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that is, well in Pakistan, it's something like 60% of people marry their first cousins,
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so that points to a lack of engagement with the broader community, so for example, cross marriages
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between cultures and races are a very good way of integrating people, but in the case of
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the UK, within those communities, they're marrying their first cousins, and it's not
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second cousins, it's just first cousins, the range that 35 to 50% is a broad range, because
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the data is a bit unreliable.
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Yeah, how could that possibly be true, because wouldn't you see genetic consequences
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among that population from incest?
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Well, you see, that's debatable in relation to first cousins, some genetic consequences,
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but relatively small genetic consequences, as compared to marrying or having children
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with your siblings.
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When you went to the UK as Australia's chief diplomat 10 years ago, did you notice
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that there was a difference between, I guess, the nature of multiculturalism in the UK and
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what it had been in the past or what it is in Australia?
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Yeah, I'm not sure that I knew enough about what it had been in the past in the UK, and
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that's obviously something that's grown.
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The UK is a bit like France, actually, the two of those countries in this one respect,
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well in several respects, but in this one respect quite similar, and that is these are
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countries that had huge empires, so for hundreds of years have had a reasonable percentage
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of their population who come from other parts of the world, and multi-racialism has been
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a component of their society.
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The great difference between most of Australia and the UK is not the multi-racialism,
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because Australia is increasingly a multiracial society, and it says it's multicultural,
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but in Australia, migrants haven't gravitated into any place to the extent they have in the UK.
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There isn't that failure to integrate in Australia, so it really struck me when the Birmingham
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and the West Midlands, they're called the Birmingham Police, taught me on a tour through a
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part of Birmingham, which is entirely Kashmiri.
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So all of the buildings are late 19th, early 20th century British working class,
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terror thousands and shops, but all the signs are up in Kashmir, in Kashmiri,
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all the people are dressed as they would be dressed if they were in Kashmir,
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and the police told me that they don't spend much time outside of this particular,
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these particular suburbs, they're two or three suburbs joined together in a part of Birmingham.
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They were bemoaning this, and saying how difficult it was to police,
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that people didn't speak English, only about half, I forgot what the percentage was,
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but around half of the people there spoke any English at all,
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and some of these people were second and third generation.
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Well, you don't see much of that in Australia, there was the issue of the Lebanese concession
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refugees who came during the Lebanon Civil War, or one of the Lebanon Civil Wars,
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into what southwest Sydney, so there's a bit of that there to tell the truth,
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but nothing like in the UK.
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So, were any of your contacts in British politics or law enforcement able to articulate
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how this has come about, because it doesn't seem like it takes place in the US either.
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I mean, I've spent a lot of time in New York, which is the most multi-ethnic city in the world,
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and you don't have the same, I mean, there are uncleys, just like there is.
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Actually, just correct you factually, there it is not as multi-ethnic as London is.
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London is much more multi-ethnic than New York.
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New York Posts that it has the largest number of different languages spoken
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and different ethnic communities residing there, but I'm sure it's a line ball
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between London and New York, yeah, they're both pretty fabulously multi-ethnic places
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if you're into that, which I am.
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But there is much more bumping into each other between different communities there.
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They integrate, I mean, I spent quite a lot of time in New York,
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because I worked for the United Nations for six years, but I can speak more for London.
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London is in the main, amazing, that you have different European people who work there,
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you can call them migrants, I suppose, from different European countries,
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from East Europe, from West Europe, people from Africa, people from South Asia, East Asia,
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and so the list goes on, people from everywhere, all interacting with each other
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in a perfectly reasonable and tolerant way every day of the week.
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There are, however, one or two enclairs in London, in an area like Tower Hamlets,
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which is in as completely one ethnicity.
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And in that sense, they separate themselves from the rest of the community.
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That's not healthy.
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So that is mainly not the case in London.
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I would make a vigorous defense of the British saying that they are not in the slightest,
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I mean, because not 100% of them, but in the main, they're not in the slightest racist people.
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But I think people and human beings are in the main, not particularly racist.
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I've always thought this argument of racism was massively overplayed, comes out of America.
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But the whole argument about it does, but people are culturalist.
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I do think that people like their own cultures and gravitate to their own cultures.
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Doesn't that sort of become, sorry to interrupt, but doesn't that sort of become functionally a distinction without a difference
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in the sense that, and you said earlier that this is not a racial thing,
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let's set aside for the moment the fact that presumably there are racists in the UK and some of the people do,
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so the riots were obvious, were racists, right?
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But if what we're talking about is...
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Yeah, if what we're talking about is the sort of, oh yes, I have many East Asian friends who find it hilarious.
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If you want to get into the game of criticized, how about hunting with some of the Asian countries?
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They're very racist.
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And yes, some of my East Asian friends are gleefully so towards other Asian cultures and Asian ethnicities.
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But I mean, we're white, so let's talk about us.
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The claim would be that, yes, okay, you might not be motivated by animus towards another person's skin colour.
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But if you're motivated by a tribalistic bigotry towards their culture and their culture overlaps perfectly or almost perfectly with their ethnicity, then who cares?
27:22
It depends what you mean by their culture, right?
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I mean, they're elements of their culture, which for another culture are not going to be problematic.
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But if it comes to, you know, don't want to sort of single out Muslims here, but it's just a bit easier to us both.
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Take the example of Sharia law, child marriages, that sort of thing.
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Well, I think in a country like the UK, they would draw the line at that.
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And so people who might come from I don't know, we're going to use your grandmother again, she Polish, did you say?
28:04
Yes.
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People who come from Poland would naturally have pretty much the same attitude to issues like the law.
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And they wouldn't think that the law or comes from something I'm actually thinking that one of the folks came from Poland.
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I'm pretty sure my grandmother was a godless secular Jew, so she would not have had a lot of time for that for the Roman Catholic church.
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But talking about these things, sort of notions of God having created the law, and it not being for politicians to change God's law, and Parliament to change God's law, these kinds of concepts.
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I think would be rejected by most people in a country like the United Kingdom, and certainly in Australia too.
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So if people come to the United Kingdom as migrants and they demand, they demand the right to have child brides and say that it's a God given right to do certain things which are actually against the law of the land,
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then this creates a huge problem, a huge problem.
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Because when the police, for example, try to enforce the law, well, that can trigger rights, and then the rights trigger counter-rides.
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So there was a case of, in leads, quite recently, in the city of leads in Yorkshire, where the police and childcare workers from the local council went to a household and took a child away who was a,
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wasting
31:00
No. No. Oh, he's fabulous. You'll have to, I'll send you some, I'll send you some links.
31:05
A brilliant young black writer, activist and academic, who has written the case for a colour-blind
31:13
society and is on the attack against neo-racism as he calls it. The racism of the anti-racism saved.
31:20
I must have a look at it. Nonetheless. So the leads story, yep. So there was a
31:26
biopsy-roma-traveler child. The police and the child care workers came and took this child away,
31:32
and because, you know, obviously the child care department didn't think that the parent or parents
31:43
were looking after the child appropriately. And so the, these Roma people live in a particular
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community in a particular suburb of leads. And they rioted. And then when they rioted,
31:59
there was a counter riot, and you know, police cars for burnt, all sorts of trouble took place.
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And it goes to the question of whether protection of children, which is a, you know,
32:17
a major feature of Western culture, whether that is going to have much of a role in that particular
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community where they basically argue that it's not up to the state to make sure that we're looking
32:36
after our children properly. We'll decide how we look after our children. So it's an example of
32:45
where cultural values clash. And when they clash, something has to prevail.
32:51
But do cultural values really clash in that context? I mean, I would have thought that the
32:57
conception of culture and family taking primacy over the state was a conception that actually,
33:04
in another way, aligns with your small sea conservatism in the sense that, you know, one wouldn't
33:09
necessarily, if you transition this example to a Christian family or a traditional community
33:16
that doesn't want the state interfering in, I don't know, what they teach their children about
33:20
gender or sexuality or something like that, then would be quite comfortable saying,
33:24
it's no business of the state, how we raise our children.
33:27
No, that isn't any business of the state, but abuse of children and neglecting children and
33:35
abuse of children. I think at the end of the day, it's appropriate. There are laws about that.
33:40
I don't have a problem with that. I mean, we all agree that abuse of children, well,
33:46
in Western societies, we would agree that our definition of abuse of children,
33:52
abuse, we have our own definition, but abuse of children, including physical abuse of children,
33:57
is unconscionable. And we're happy to have laws that address that issue. So in the case of
34:04
leads, I don't know all the details of what happened to what was happening to this child,
34:08
which led to the intervention and the child being taken away from the parents. But you know,
34:14
there are cases in Australia of this happening every day of the week, and it usually relates to
34:20
often, not always, but often, physical abuse of little children. So I don't think there's any
34:27
debate about that. What you teach them about gender or something like that is none of the
34:34
state's business. On this broader question of the clash of cultures and the integration of
34:42
especially Islam into the West, the sort of the thunderbolt across my consciousness as it was
34:49
for many when I was at university was September 11th that suddenly shook me to the core and shook
34:56
a whole bunch of certainties that I thought that I had about the end of the Cold War. And, you know,
35:01
as a child of the post-Cold War period, I mean, the post-Soviet period, I just sort of thought that
35:08
we were triumphant and that was that. I mean, Triggs, since you were... Tonight. Is that clear?
35:16
Right. Yeah. Right. And there were two huge water shed points for the West. There were three.
35:24
I'm interrupting you. But at the end of the Cold War, 1989 to 1991, we thought that the liberal
35:32
democratic paradigm had been completely triumphant. And we went around the world just assisting
35:41
countries in one way or another to achieve the near-vana of liberal democracy and liberal
35:48
economics. And there are all sorts of examples of that. Followed by 9-11, which was a cataclysmic
35:58
event, really. And, you know, Afghanistan, Iraq, flowed from that. And then the global financial
36:07
crisis in 2008. So the combination of those things led to the loss of confidence in what we might
36:18
call the liberal democratic model. And particularly our politicians, but our communities
36:26
have been flailing around, flailing around. That's what they've been doing ever since.
36:32
And our adversaries, the anti-liberal democratic powers, the ones that want to weaken that
36:40
liberal democratic model, because they see it as particularly an American-led hegemony.
36:48
They have made a comeback. Russia, Iran, China, they're not doing that well, but they're doing
36:56
quite well. Better than they should be. For the first and the third of those three calamities,
37:03
you were not in a position of world-changing authority. But for the second one, for 9-11,
37:10
you were one of the most important players as the Foreign Minister of Australia. Do you recall
37:19
that day, do you remember finding out or seeing it? What are your recollections?
37:23
It was the evening. I was sitting in my study at home in the Adelaide Hills.
37:29
And my wife was in another room next door, and the children were asleep in bed. And Josh
37:36
Prytonberg, who's become very famous in a different context, well, similar, but not the same context,
37:44
was a political adviser on my start. And he rang me. And I can't remember what time of night.
37:52
I think I was watching an ABC, the once ABC program late-life, I think I was. And he said,
38:00
you should switch over to CNN and have a look at these pictures coming out of New York.
38:06
There seems to be a fire on the World Trade Center. So I switched over. And then over the next
38:15
whatever it was, somebody will know exactly how long it is, but a couple of hours.
38:21
I called my wife into the room, and we watched Transpixters, the full horror of it unfolded.
38:28
In the tech, so traumatized, where we got the children out of bed, we got them to sit there with us
38:35
in the study. And one thing led to another, then there were phone calls and hangs, and I didn't get
38:44
my sleep that night. But I remember very well. And I remember talking to my chief of staff,
38:49
it was a guy called Mike Smith, as we were starting to organize ourselves and to respond to this.
38:58
And I remember saying to him, I think this is an event that will change the world. No good will come
39:06
of this. I remember saying that, no good will come of this. And I didn't think much good did come
39:13
of it. No, I mean, and at what points, just I'm fascinated by the sort of logistics of how
39:17
governments scramble in such moments. At what point did you touch base with the Prime Minister,
39:23
and at what point did you start to think, well, obviously, we're going to have to send some sort
39:27
of message to Washington, or well, the PM was in Washington, right? Yeah, yeah. So that wasn't
39:33
necessary. I'm in that during the night. I touched base with him. I spoke to him. And how was he?
39:43
Robin, he was shocked. But, you know, what do you do in these situations?
39:50
Do you remember what he said? I don't know. He didn't say anything that's particularly memorable
39:57
in that conversation. I spoke to John Anderson as well. I remember that evening, but he was the
40:03
acting Prime Minister. It was the acting Prime Minister. I mean, just to tell him what I was doing,
40:08
I mean, deep hat has all sorts of things. That's the foreign affairs department. Yeah, they have
40:15
all sorts of contingency plans, but events like that and lesser ones. And so it's just a question
40:24
of putting them into action. They did a very good job. I tried to ring our ambassador to the U.N.
40:33
in New York and couldn't get through to him for ages eventually. He had watched it all
40:44
from his office window, watched the World Trade Center tell us collapse.
40:50
He was pretty traumatized. Anyway, yeah, a long night.
40:59
Did you have any time to reflect on the way in which things would not be better?
41:06
Yeah, so I had always bought against the Samuel Huntington pieces of plasual civilizations.
41:14
Now, I read the book. I met Samuel Huntington. I argued with him because I've been saying and
41:25
you can find common values and common ground with people. And I understand why cultures are
41:31
different because I've visited. I know this. I was in Peru recently and it was the 100th country
41:39
that I have ever visited. I see a huge number of countries and I can see why cultures are
41:45
different, why people behave differently and organize themselves differently because of the
41:51
history and the geography of different countries. So I've always been optimistic and thought, well,
41:59
put people together in one location and now find ways of collaborating and getting by and
42:06
Samuel Huntington's more pessimistic hypothesis was the reverse that gradually the world would
42:13
optimize into competing and hating enclaves. So that I think was a moment where that was a real risk
42:30
that there would be an upsurge in antipathy to anybody who was Muslim. I remember a week or so
42:40
later going to visit and inviting the media to come with me to make a media event of it,
42:47
to go and visit a Muslim school in Applaid because I wanted to try to explain to people that just
42:56
not all Muslims are the same. You know, there are Wahhabists and Shalafists and so on,
43:02
they're extremists and fundamentalists but I mean in Indonesia there's not much of that
43:11
and you can't generalize about people who are Muslim so don't think of it like that.
43:19
But you know, inevitably and there were other acts of terrorism and not least a year or so later
43:29
the Bali Bonyas October 2002, the Bali bombing which you know could have triggered a huge reaction
43:42
against Islam and people who are Muslim but I think we sort of contained it reasonably well,
43:50
couldn't do a bad job in containing it. Did you go to Bali right after the bombings?
43:57
I did, yeah. What do you recall of what you encountered?
44:03
Just shocking, you know, going to the morgue, that sort of thing,
44:08
to too many horrible things to to tell you in a podcast. I remember meeting out,
44:16
it might have been, I went to Bali, met with the governor, met with a police commissioner,
44:24
met with some of the survivors, went to the morgue which was at the hospital,
44:34
some of the bodies were just piled outside the hospital because the morgue wasn't big enough,
44:39
the morgue only accommodated you know, 20 bodies or something and they were piled up outside
44:45
the hospital with ice on them, I mean just grotesque really, just grotesque.
44:54
But I mean, I can't say actually Bali, oddly enough, it's a Hindu part of Indonesia, it's not
45:04
not Muslim, but Indonesia being a predominantly Muslim country, I can't say it triggered any
45:14
particular feelings in my mind against Muslims because most Indonesians are moderate Muslims,
45:22
they're not, but that is. And if I told you in the aftermath of the Bali bombings that we'd
45:31
be sitting here in 2024 and with a few major exceptions, there would not have been any
45:40
subsequent acts of mega terrorism in the intervening couple of decades. Would you have been surprised?
45:50
I would say if I had known that, well there was another Bali bombing two years later.
45:55
Yeah, and there was the London attacks and there would have been a few.
45:59
Paris Manchester. I think I would say, if you told me that, I would say, well, if that's the case,
46:13
we'll have done a pretty good job. And I think we've done a fantastically good job. I mean,
46:19
it's a combination of the work that's being done by intelligence services, the intelligence
46:26
collaboration. I mean, nobody's interested in things that work. They're just interested in the
46:31
failures. Of course. But the collaboration, I mean, just to be parochial about it, to think about
46:38
Australia's role, and I could talk a lot about America and the UK as well in continental
46:44
Europeans, but just focusing here on Australia, I mean, I can say that I did this myself, which is
46:55
something I very seldom praise myself. I don't very well. I'll give it a crack, Alexander, I'll
47:03
get a crack. But after the Bali bombing, some good came and that was the intelligence
47:12
collaboration with the Indonesians, which came immediately after the Bali bombing and then
47:21
specifically related to the Bali bombing and trying to track down who the bombers were. But
47:26
subsequently, the collaboration with the Indonesians over Islamic extremism in Indonesia and in
47:35
Southeast Asia, it's been outstanding. I mean, we've done a magnificent job, honestly,
47:42
having set it up then. And then it's gone from strengths to strengths, including since my
47:48
time as far as Minister, but since then, it's been maintained very effectively. It's been really
47:57
good work. And we've worked with the CIA and the MI6 in Indonesia as well, the Indonesian intelligence
48:05
community. And I'm here in Thailand at the moment. And we've worked with the Thai authorities,
48:13
they've had their problems in the South of Thailand, the Malaysians, Singaporeans. Of course,
48:19
it's been fantastic. So, we largely have kept it under control. And I think, by the way,
48:27
a lot of credit should go to some of the leaders of the Arab world. Because we focus on
48:37
President Hassad of Syria and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Okra, were they not Arabs,
48:45
but the bureaucracy in Iran and so on. But actually, if you stop and think about it, most of the Arab
48:52
leaders are very opposed to these extremist Islamic movements and have been very cooperative and
49:02
collaborative. In terms of Alexander, in terms of the things that we've done in the past couple
49:07
of decades that have served us well and in light of your praise of some of the more anti-Islamist
49:17
autocrats in the Arab world, was it a mistake to get rid of Saddam Hussein who may have kept
49:22
to lid on things better than the current state of. He wouldn't have kept a lid on things.
49:31
Wait, certainly he was keeping a lid on things more than the chaos that ensued after the war.
49:36
No, I think it was right to get rid of him. Of course, you can have an endless debate about
49:41
counter-narrative, something we have in some extent. It's just a matter of judgment. I was going
49:46
to say we have no idea precisely what wouldn't have happened if we'd left in there, but he was a
49:52
huge problem. There's no doubt about that. And of course, this came out of an era where we believed
50:01
in liberal democracy and universal human rights standards, counter-proliferation of weapons of
50:11
mass destruction, all of these things came together. Saddam Hussein had been defying the UN
50:18
weapons inspectors and defying mandatory security council chapter 7 security council resolutions.
50:28
I mean, if he had seen us all, as he did after the Kuwait war, Gulf War I, I mean, he would have
50:40
become a huge hero, anti-Western hero in the Middle East. No, I don't mean if they'd been a war
50:48
and he'd won, I just mean we're... No, no. If we had just backed off, we make all these threats and,
50:56
you know, breach and security council resolutions seeing off the weapons inspectors.
51:03
Well, I mean, we do that all the time. I mean, the Iranians would be less powerful. I mean,
51:07
there are all kinds of regimes that we just have to sort of put up with. Well, I think I'm not sure,
51:12
I'm not sure that I'm not sure that narrative is right, actually. You're not sure that Iran
51:17
would be less powerful. I am sure, I am sure, because there post all of this that we've been talking
51:27
about, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on, post all of that, we have taken a view that we need to build
51:35
a relationship with the theocracy in Iran and, you know, we, I personally, has been slightly
51:44
involved in that. That visited Iran as a foreign minister a couple of times. And without any,
51:51
any real understanding of the trouble that they would cause, I mean, if Iran supported
51:56
two-state solution and ceased supporting their so-called resistance to Israel, you would have a
52:09
much more peaceful world in the Middle East. This is, this is very unpopular within Iran. This
52:17
theocracy is a huge problem for us. And, you know, the Obama administration went out, turned its
52:25
back on the green revolution in 2009 and early 2009 in Iran. And instead got into these
52:35
factless negotiations about a nuclear program, I mean, and Biden has done the same thing.
52:42
Biden has gone back to that troc to drink with all the inevitable results. I mean,
52:49
the Iranian leadership have played us at the break. And it's, we've paid a huge price for this.
52:56
I mean, all that's happening in Israel and Gaza and so on, it couldn't happen if it wasn't for
53:03
Iran. Of course, but Iran probably wouldn't be as fearless as they are if there was a
53:12
Sunni strongman in Iraq counter-balancing their power, right? Oh, really. I think it would make
53:22
it would make no difference. Right. I mean, I suppose it's a counterfactual. So one doesn't know,
53:28
but so your policy towards Iran, if you were emperor of the world, would have been a much more
53:32
hardline one over the past. Yeah. And what do you say the critics who say, well, then they would
53:38
just have a bomb because you would have, they would have just felt like there's no point. They would,
53:42
they wouldn't, they, how do you stop them? See, see, the assumption here is that the Iranian people
53:48
are all at one and think this is one, and the West are up to get them and, and Jews are terrible
53:55
people and none, all of these sort of things. Whereas none of this is true. The Iranian people
54:02
load the government. They load the bureaucracy. This is a huge mistake we're making. The people who
54:09
are on our side in Iran are the Iranians, are the a mum and dad Iran. They're all right. Don't
54:18
worry about them. No, I know, but the argument for the conciliators, right? The Obama Biden
54:23
argument is you are likely to win over those, those winnable Iranians, if the, if you deprive
54:31
the regime of the ability to cast you as antagonists. Two things about two things about that being
54:37
seen by then to be sucking up to the regime is tremendously disappointing. As an Iranian, one of
54:44
the leaders of the Iranian women's movement said to me the other day of two or three months ago,
54:52
you've got to remember we middle-class women in Iran will never forgive President Obama
55:00
for turning his back on us. We will never forgive him and getting into those negotiations about
55:07
the nuclear weapon. This line that is used, I've written an article for the Australian which will
55:18
be published next week about this, about we've got to de-escalate. What sort of message is that
55:25
sending to the Iranian leadership? You're scared, right? You're scared. So we can just make Mary
55:33
with his Balar and Hamas and the militias in Iraq, the Houthis and so on. We can just make Mary
55:41
and all you will say to us is naughty, naughty, but we must de-escalate. I would say to them,
55:49
if you keep supporting these people, we will escalate. You stop your support for these people
55:57
and it's when you stop supporting these terrorist organizations and when you accept
56:04
these rails right to exist within secure boundaries, that's the standard phrase. When you accept all
56:12
of that, we can have a very happy relationship. I wouldn't focus on the bomb the whole time. I mean,
56:18
if they build a bomb, they'll start a war. And I tell you what, I tell you what, the leadership of
56:26
Iran, having been through the Iran-Iraq war and before that, the 1979 revolution, a huge upheaval
56:35
of those people have been through and the economic deprivation in Iran today, that ordinary people
56:43
are suffering. The last thing they want, the last thing the public want is for the leadership to
56:49
plunge them into another war. It would absolutely lead to the overthrow of the regime. The regime
56:57
would have been overthrown by now. There was any leadership. But what the regime does is go around
57:03
and kill all the people who might be potential leaders. I'm fascinated Alexander when you talk
57:11
about the Obama administration about the peculiar way in which you ended up featuring in the 2016
57:17
election. And I wonder what your recollections are of the conversation with George Papadopoulos.
57:25
I have a lot of listeners in the US, so they're their only entry point to knowing about you will
57:29
presumably be that conversation where you were momentarily a global superstar. And sometimes
57:38
sometimes referred to as like, as if you were some sort of junior Australian diplomat, which I
57:42
took great umbrage at. I was like, this is Alexander Deloitte. But what can you take us back to
57:49
that conversation? It's actually much less important than it's made out to be. I was the
58:05
high commissioner as in the ambassador in London. And I had a member of my staff who had a boyfriend
58:13
who she's now married, who worked at the Israeli embassy. And this boyfriend knew George Papadopoulos
58:22
because George Papadopoulos had done work in the Eastern Mediterranean. So that's why the
58:28
Israelis knew him. Anyway, Papadopoulos was an advice, a foreign policy advisor to Trump. And
58:36
this was at a time before the Republican party's national convention and Trump had got the nomination,
58:44
but it was clear he was going together. And I knew because I was the high commissioner in London that
58:51
we didn't have very good insights into what a Trump administration's foreign policy would be like.
58:58
We saw what the Democrats said. We could see what the media was saying, which was a very similar
59:04
thing. But we didn't actually have any real insights. Anyway, this staffer of mine, she came to me one
59:11
day and said that her boyfriend knew that George Papadopoulos and she had met him. And he was quite
59:17
interesting because he was a foreign policy advisor to Trump and he talked about Trump's foreign
59:24
policy when I'd be interested in meeting him. And I said, yeah, that would be good. And so we
59:29
arranged to have a drink with him a few evenings later after work and on my way to the inevitable
59:36
dinner that I had to go to that night as you do if you're an ambassador. And so we had a drink with him
59:44
an hour or so, it was sort of between six and seven. And at the end of the conversation,
59:51
I said to him, well, I suppose Trump is going to win the Republican nomination. Are you optimistic
59:58
about that? Well, yes, he was very optimistic. And then I said to him, and what about in the
1:00:03
general election, Hillary has a big lead in the opinion polls at the moment, do you think?
1:00:10
In the end, Trump could beat her and he said, yes, I think Trump will beat her and he was right
1:00:19
about that. And she will be damaged by the release of the release by Russian intelligence of
1:00:32
material they have on her just before the election. So I thought, well, that's a, that's a bit wild.
1:00:40
So I didn't really say anything to him about it there. And then
1:00:45
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