Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “What's Become of the Left?” with Prof. Clive Hamilton

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“What's Become of the Left?” with Prof. Clive Hamilton · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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Here's a doozy foyer. What is the left? What should the left be? What has the left become?
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What is the battle between perhaps an old school definition of left-wing politics,
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which was very agitated by class and inequality and economic justice?
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And the left we see today, which is more agitated by
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identitarian politics and social justice issues.
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Today's guest is one of the most important and influential left-wing thinkers in Australia
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and perhaps the English-speaking world, if I were to be so boldest to make such a claim.
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He founded a think tank called the Australia Institute in the early 1990s, which became an important
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left-wing think tank and academic institution at its own right. He's a professor of public ethics
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at Charles Sturt University. He's written a swag of books about climate change,
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about the influence of China, spoiler alert. He thinks it's mostly nefarious on Australian politics
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and Western politics and spying, shall we say. But today's conversation is really about his
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thoughts about what justice means in the context of modern left and right.
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He has been a visiting academic at Yale at the University of Oxford at University College
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London at a bunch of different places. He recently published articles entitled things like
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blaming baby boomers for your money woes is unfair, lazy and wrong and wake up lefties and reject
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wokeness. There's so much that I could talk to Clive about. We only scratch the surface but
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I found it absolutely fascinating. He's a truly fascinating gentleman. I hope you enjoy
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this as much as I did. The one and only, Clive Hamilton.
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Well thanks for being here, lovely to have you. Should we start by talking about the left,
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what's happening to the left and what has happened to the left in Australia. Where do you survey
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the state of things? Well I mean the left has got well looked at from one point of view,
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it's been in severe decline for some decades really. I think the victory of neoliberalism meant that
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the social democratic left really had to concede an enormous amount of ground and I think it was
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the way in which the left could not find a way of developing a kind of new and persuasive
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social economic program in the way that it had prior to the victory of neoliberalism in the
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80s. Just by the victory of neoliberalism, do you mean the ascent of right-wing governments
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like that during Reagan? Or do you mean the period after that when the left sort of triangulated
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under Blair and Clinton and sort of tried to? I'm talking more about well Blair and Clinton
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are very good cases in point because they capitulated to the neoliberal paradigm. They said
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markets must reign supreme, smaller government is good, we're not going to try to change that.
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Interesting to see Andy Albanese announce his new heavy duty investment program manufacturing
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yesterday, which is kind of a return to the past. So welcome on I think.
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But yes, no, they're right. Just to pause on them for a second. Didn't they do that because
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voters just weren't having a bar of the social democratic left as it existed at the time?
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And so they found a way to revitalize and reinvigorate the centre left.
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Well, no, I mean, and this was towards the end of this period in which neoliberalism
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basically won the battle. Well, I set up, this is in the early 90s, the Australia Institute,
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the think tank that I founded and by then the kind of fight was all over. But nevertheless,
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we carried on writing papers about how privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, for example,
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or CSL, the Commonwealth Serial Laboratories was a really bad idea. And one of the things that
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sustained us in continuing to do that work was the fact that the Australian public, like public
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never went along with the neoliberal free market paradigm. There was always substantial
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majorities that were opposed to selling off public assets to imposing stringent competition
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policies on dairy farmers is a case in point we saw half of the industry disappear within a year.
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That kind of thing was actually very unpopular, but the Labour Party basically was unwilling to
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resist. It basically was overrun by the argument, partly within the party. And so I think
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Anthony Albanese, who incidentally I know I remembered listening to him yesterday, was a student
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of political economy at the University of Sydney a few years after I was there. And I said to my
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partner, oh, Anthony, he's speaking as a political economist there, he's remembering what he was
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taught. And it's coming back some three or so decades later, which I think was kind of extremely
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interesting. But I think there's a strong element in the Labour Party, particularly on the left of
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which Albanese is a member, that has always wanted to go back or be it with modification to some
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of those policies of building the Australian economy rather than just allowing private enterprise
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to do whatever it might. But wasn't the building of the Australian economy, I mean a lot of economists
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credit the building of the Australian economy to Anthony Albanese's hero Bob Hawke and that
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government in the 80s that did a lot of the things that you're saying were bad for the economy.
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I suppose the floating of the dollar, deregulation, privatisation, although it was a Labour
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government, it was enacting a lot of neoliberal reforms at the time. It was wildly popular
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as a government, Hawke won a lot of elections, subsequently Tony Blair won a lot of elections,
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Bill Clinton won both his elections at a time when the left that had been a more traditional left
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had not been more a bond. No, no, no, no, no, you're completely right. But those, I think there was
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a general view within the Australian community that they had to look for other issues to differentiate
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between the parties because, as you say, Keating with Hawke's backing was the kind of Uber liberaliser,
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you know, I mean it was famously called over to Treasury by John Stone, it was kind of ultra free
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market, kind of a two free market for the Liberal Party it turned out. So the Secretary of the Treasury
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and he said to Keating is no need to bring any of your advisors Treasurer and this is in months
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of Keating becoming Treasurer and Stone basically persuaded Keating to adopt the neoliberal agenda,
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which Keating then pursued vigorously. I think it made a lot of Labour people confused,
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well what does the Labour Party stand for? But there are other issues, I mean, you know,
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we've become used to politics as theatre nowadays and Hawke and certainly for the press gallery
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Keating were kind of brilliant players on that stage and I think that's what made them popular
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and of course the opposition was hopeless. I've done that when the opposition's hopeless.
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So just to clarify on the substantive question, because I guess I'm talking about a popularity
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contest really, but on the substantive question, would you regard it as having been a bad thing
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that those reforms were put into place? Like would Australia be better off today if we hadn't
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floated the dollar and if we come off bank and Qantas were still in government hands,
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then tell us what I mean, we at the Australians who didn't have a blanket opposition to
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certain free market and liberalisation policies, but we thought they were being applied in an
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ideological way without assessing each one's merits. So for example, one of the worst decisions
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made by Kim Beasley, who was the finance minister in the Hawke government, he flagged off
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Commissium Laboratories and this was a scientific body that was a government.
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Well CSL in the 80s. CSL was basically, they took the blood that the Red Cross collected
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and it collected and turned it into useful blood products. There were blood products,
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government owned, they also developed anti-benines and other related
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pharmaceuticals. Yeah, so a science lab, but government run a science lab in the health space.
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And you know, there was no competition. So when they sold CSL, it had a monopoly.
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And boy, did they use that and they've turned into this, I think it's the second
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biggest company in Australia now. And the same is true of the telecommunications company
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that was government run that was then sold off and remains the biggest because it has an
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incumbent effect and the AI, there used to be a government airline in our private.
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True indeed, but what we're seeing in some countries, this debate hasn't really taken off
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in Australia so much. I'm thinking Britain is the core for the re-nationalisation of certain
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industries, rail for example. Well, rail is a good, I was just going to talk about rail because rail,
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I mean, I was just in the UK a couple of weeks ago and it still baffles me that it's such a
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hodgepodge over there. I mean, I think it was the Fatcher government, wasn't it, that sold off
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the rails, but it sold some companies bought the trains and other companies bought the tracks.
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Other companies would buy the tracks that connect to one set of tracks, but not to another set
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of tracks. So you ended up buying multiple, you'd have to buy a ticket for a train, but then a
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portion of the ticket would be for the company that owns the tracks. You'd never know, like the
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underground in London is still eye-wateringly expensive because it was supposed to be turning
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a profit somehow as if a public service like public transport is ever going to be legitimately
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profitable. So that I think would clearly fall into the category of a bad form of nationalisation.
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We never went that far in that straight out. Yes.
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No, we didn't, although in certain industries, like electricity generation and transmission,
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for example, state owned assets and some states like New South Wales, Victorian, in fact, most of them
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flagged them off. Queensland held onto them and I think the general view is that that was
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good decision, not to sell them off. But think about, well, what did all that mean for the left?
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Because sometimes you had labour governments flogging off assets, assets which were just going
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to be monopolies in private hands, rather than monopolies in public hands, and it's just not a good idea.
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And so because of this kind of the way in which labour, particularly under hawk
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Keating and then subsequently, became very much a free market party like the Liberals,
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this left a kind of vacuum of for left actor. I mean, what is a what is a young left-oriented
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person to do in the 2000s? What do you campaign on? I mean, if you've got a radical disposition
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as many young people do, God bless them, what do you focus your energies on?
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And I think increasingly it was identity politics. And so what they did is, in many respects,
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justifiably and welcome it for all the positive gains, but took the initial breakthroughs
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of people on the left in the 60s and 70s in women's rights, gay rights, Indigenous rights,
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and so on, and started campaigning to take them further. And then in my view,
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it's in recent years, crossed over into a threshold of really fanaticism,
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of extraordinary intolerance, of other views, legitimate views, about, I mean, gender
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is the most extreme case, of course, where I signed a letter which was published in the
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Sydney Morning Herald a couple of weeks ago about the way in which the Human Rights Commission
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was planning to conduct an inquiry into, you know, alleged vilification of transgender people.
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And what, what, and it was a very biased, you know, as it was set up as to kind of beat up on
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anyone who isn't kind of ultra transgender. And most of the organisations that I added my name
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to were lesbian organisations or feminist organisations. And these groups are the enemy for the
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transgender brigade. I mean, these are left wing, very progressive groups that have campaigned
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for gay rights and women's rights for years, and yet they have become the devil incarnate
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to the extremists in the transgender movement. So I think this is extremely untoward development
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for a whole bunch of reasons. And why is it happened, do you think? I'm a bit perplexed
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about the causation here, because I mean, you'll say that there will be some feminist or lesbian
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groups who are opposed to this hypersensorious and extreme transgender ideology. And yet,
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there are also a lot of feminists who go along with it and who won't touch stories that have
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anything to do with this subject, because that ought to be accused of being bigots or, you know,
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transphobes or something. And they'll just want to sort of be on the right side of history and
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feel like, well, why wouldn't we want to be nice to trans people? So we don't, you know, they'll
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find themselves in that camp. And similarly, you'll find transgender people, some of whom I know,
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who don't appreciate the people who are claiming to speak on their behalf, who just want to
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be allowed to live their lives and don't want to be a lightning rod in a culture war. But it does
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seem that the mainstream sort of elite consensus amongst middle class university educated people
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is on the side of the transgender activists, not on the side of those feminist groups and
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curiosities about what it is. I think most people are intimidated. I mean, it's frightening
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to be attacked and cancelled and accused of being, you know, you know, a gesture of transphobes,
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you're a lot of other phobes at the same time, naturally, because it's your one, you must be
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all of the others. And I mean, it's scary given the way in which some of the extremist activists
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go after people. I mean, look, when Holly Lawton Smith, I think I've got her name right, sorry,
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Holly, if I haven't, the feminist on the University of Melbourne campus, when she is kind of
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pursued by a black-hearted trans activist so that she needs police protection to go to her lectures,
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I mean, that's not left-wing. That's, I don't know what that is, but...
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Is it not left-wing? I mean, just to push back on that, they would say there's a long and proud
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history of sometimes violent, radical social justice and civil rights movements. The black
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panthers weren't friendly in the 1960s either and the pursuit of justice sometimes requires
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breaking a few eggs. Yeah, but there's a difference between Bull Connor, the Mississippi Mayor who
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got out his stock whip to beat civil rights activists and Holly Lawton Smith going to give a lecture
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saying, I think there's a difference between gender and sex. I mean, to me, that's a legitimate debate.
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You might disagree, fine. Right? I mean, I guess, again, wouldn't there be people who in the 60s
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were saying, look, I think black people should have whatever rights they want to, but they don't
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have to come into our pub, like they have their own pub, like Aboriginal Australians can drink in their
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pub and we can have our pub, you know, they can sit in their pub, part of the bus and we can
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sit in our part of the bus. And if someone had said that, then wouldn't the person saying that be
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a justifiable target? Well, what do you mean by a justifiable target? Well, they're lives
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sort of being upended by protesters and look, I mean, I wrote the book about the story of protest
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in Australia and studied pretty closely the kinds of protest activity that people have engaged in,
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particularly since the 60s and there were some, you know, extremely effective radical
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forms of protest, but there was always a line that, that depending on circumstances,
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most agree shouldn't be crossed. And that line would be violence towards people or
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yes, yeah. But excluding them from the public square online and what about, I mean, let's assume
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that black hooded people are hunting you, it's bad, but I think a lot of what people are afraid of
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in this climate is not that it's that they'll just sort of not be invited to the right cocktail
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parties in the inner city enclaves where they live because they'll be regarded as being a little bit
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off, you know, there's that person who's always, they're talking about, you know, alienating trans people
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and being mean, they're not really kind of our club. Well, I mean, well, first of all,
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people like the Holy Lord Smith, I mentioned the feminist and lesbian groups that
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developed that ad, they fundamentally agree that we should be respectful of trans people and
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treat them with dignity and respect for human beings in their gender identity, fine, great.
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But, you know, perhaps I'm unduly burnt by my experience battling climate size denies,
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because I see an exact parallel between the trans extremists and the climate size denies
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in the way in which they pursue their agendas. And any in the 2000s is still, but particularly in
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the 2000s, I noticed that as someone who wrote a lot about climate change, I would periodically
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get this kind of horror into extreme abuse mostly from a non, not always, but mostly from anonymous
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email accounts, sometimes involving threats to my person and death threats. And so I thought
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right, so I can't be the only person experiences. So I started asking around to
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our climate scientists on you, a couple of journalists, some environmental activists,
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and they also said, yeah, we're getting these. I said, can you send me some of the examples
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of the emails you're getting? And so I collected a kind of dossier of them and wrote an article about
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it, basically naming the beast. And it kind of broke a damn war when I did that because
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everybody, so many people said, yeah, I'm getting those. And yes, it really is intimidating.
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And climate scientists, I remember one at UNSW, for example, saying that he's got, he had PhD
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students who had decided not to go into climate science, but to do other kinds of science,
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because they were so afraid of being targeted by these bullies and thugs. And I did notice,
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in fact, I wrote about this, actually, every time I was denounced in print by Andrew Bolt,
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which happened on a fairly regular basis. He's a conservative columnist in Australia,
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for people at UNSW. Well, more than conservative. He's very right-wing and agro-comists.
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I'd get a flood of these threatening and abusive emails. And so there were some climate scientists
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on you, who were friends, one, for example, in Brisbane, rang me very concerned because he got
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all these threats. And one of them was an email that said, we know where your children go to school,
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and named the street where they waited for the bus, and said, you might want to think about
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your children's welfare if you keep talking this climate rubbish. Now, you know, I mean,
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this is so far over the line, and wow, that, you know, if people are terrified, frightened,
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worried for their families, looking at the front door, like, I was once. I wrote an article
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about, I was doing the drought, the millennium drought. I wrote an article saying, look,
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you know, it's really bad, farmers are suffering, but why on earth are we paying drought assistance,
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so that farmers can just keep scraping by to get to the next drought and suffer all this again.
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And the backlash was enormous, including a very serious threat from a farmer with a gun,
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which involved me calling a police, because I was very worried about my staff,
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but every time I stepped outside my house's door in the morning to go to work, I would kind of stop
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and look around. So, you know, it was, some of these attacks can be extremely intimidating,
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and if you need a bulky bodyguard to walk across campus, sorry, you've crossed the, you know,
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you, you trans activists, you've crossed the line, I know, so no doubt about it.
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It's interesting that you draw the parallel between climate science deniers and the trans activist.
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Some don't seem like we're beating up specifically on gender minorities here, so I assume that
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you could make the same parallel with extreme race activists or people who might be starting riots,
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because I don't know, Netflix didn't employ enough people of color or something like that,
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right? Because these people would regard themselves as being on the side of science and justice.
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I mean, these are probably people who feel themselves closer spiritually to the climate activists who
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chain themselves to train lines or deface a painting than they do to
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climate, you know, that climate is less about, it's less about the content of the belief
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and more about how one prosecutes one's case.
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Well, it's how one prosecutes one case. I mean, I actually, you know, when climate activists
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chain themselves to train lines, I say, good on you, you know, I'll hold you coat the next time.
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But what's the difference? Isn't that, isn't that all on a spectrum?
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Oh, what? You think the, the, the fossil fuel company executives and the train driver
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intimidated and worried to, you know, well, I guess I assume that they're the same people who are
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going to, you know, splash a can of Campbell's soup on the Mona Lisa, which may be intimidating,
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or who would, I don't know, cause the hell epithets that people who are walking into a mine to
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do their job or whatever it might be. Well, look, I mean, I've been, I've been challenged on
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this same question when I've defended unlawful activities, but on the part of climate activists,
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well, if they can do it, why can't anyone who claims to have justice on their side engage in
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civil disobedience in the way you say? And look, there's no, I've thought about this a bit,
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because it's tricky one, you know, there are, there are a lot of people who, who, who really are
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way beyond the pale in their politics, whether it be on race, you know, or whatever, that you would
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never, I would never agree that their form of activism, if it comes to law-breaking,
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intimidation, so on, was justified. I think the only answer to that challenge is to say, well,
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in the end, history will judge, you know, because there are certain things that were utterly condemned
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at the time that have seen, that now seem to be completely justified. If you think about, you know,
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for the, yeah, the women's movement, for example, there are certain things that women's groups
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did that were almost universally condemned back in the 60s, 70s. And yet now, we think,
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little only 1880s or the Ed N90s, the first wave feminism as well. Now we write books lionizing,
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you know, and would give them awards, or the ANC in South Africa, and conducting terrorism
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in apartheid, South Africa. I take that, I mean, I suppose it comes down for me for what it's worth,
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just to what the utility will be, will there be a real utility? I mean, I think I'd objective,
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I thought that it was likely to yield fruit, but to the extent that it is likely to alienate people
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and enable Middle Australia or Middle America to form caricatures about that group, or to
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regard it as an extremist fringe movement, or to dismiss its concerns, because of the
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behaviour of those people. Yeah, even Asia. I mean, the way you're a bit younger than I am,
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so perhaps you don't remember it as kind of direct experience, but the way feminists in the 60s
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and early 70s were caricatured, and it wasn't, and by the conservative media, which was basically
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all media at the time, from the perspective now, except probably Tribune, the Communist Party
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newspaper, but they were, you know, the caricature of the hairy-legged feminist in the overalls,
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you know, a stuck in the Australian community, very deeply, and so they persisted,
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and good on them for it, they weren't intimidated out of their cultural political
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expression. Now, there shouldn't be intimidated out of their cultural political expression.
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I guess my bias would be towards to whatever extent possible, use conversation and argument
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to make your case, and if a bit of civil disobedience is necessary, because you're trying to hold
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a gay, gay rights march in the 1960s and the police want to bash your head in for it, so you get
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violent, then that's probably a good way of putting the topic on the table, so we can then actually
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talk about it and use persuasion. It strikes me that the feminists in the 60s were using
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the minimum amount of civil disobedience necessary to initiate a conversation, and then they won
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on the power of ideas. Yeah, and I think there's different there. Nationating conversation and
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winning on the power of the ideas are two different trends or phenomena. You know, sometimes climate
28:49
activists, particularly young climate activists, criticize because they're alienating the public,
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they go sit down the road, block the traffic, how dare you. Violet cocos who blocked one lane
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off the harbour bridge for 14 minutes was a case in point, but often when in, and historically,
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when you look at this, how protest works, it's not about winning an opinion poll. Sometimes I'm
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thinking of the 10th Embassy too, for instance, just explain what that was to non-Australian
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sorry. Okay, so in 1971, a group of young indigenous activists were actually sitting in a house
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in Erskinville and in the city suburb, and they decided that they were sick of the older generation
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of indigenous leaders who they thought were too conservative, too implicated with the system,
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too willing to accept slow progress. And so one of them said half jokingly that,
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you know, we don't have a voice in this country, it's if we in our mob it will live in another
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nation. And one of them said, well, yeah, we should have our own embassy in Canberra.
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And so that was the germ, and it was actually, I think, the next day they got in a car,
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they drove to Canberra, and they borrowed a beach umbrella from a sympathetic activist,
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and they set up the umbrella in the lawns in the front of Parliament House and held a cardboard
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sign on which was called Aboriginal Embassy. And within a day, too, they had a tent,
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and they became the tent embassy. And the tent embassy attracted more radical indigenous activists
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to come and join them. They adopted some of the iconography and behaviour of the Black
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Panthers in the United States. They terrified middle-class Australia, they alienated the police,
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most politicians denounced them vigorously, and some of the older indigenous leaders had denounced
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them, too. But they seemed to capture a moment. And they started to attract tension,
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and a lot of students, including me, for example, at the Australian National University,
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converged on the embassy, the tent, because the police had been instructed to go and tear it down.
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And it became a defining moment in the indigenous struggle in Australia. And it was because
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these four young blokes decided to screw this. We're just going to go there and do something
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we don't care how much we piss off people. They can all go and get stuff. So it wasn't about
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winning public opinion. In fact, they enraged public opinion. And yet it was a vital turning point
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in the whole. And so were you there in the early days of the tent embassy? What was it like?
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It was exciting. It was frightening. I remember the police had been instructed to tear down the
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tent embassy. And was it an actual... I don't even think I've ever seen a photo of it. Was it
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a tent? Was it a set of tents? No, it was just a tent. It was just a little tent. And it was
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to have sides too. And it was just a umbrella. No, well the umbrella kind of... I don't know what
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happened to it. Dude, be worth a fortune. Now if someone has a... It's not even. It'll probably
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sustain off the way. A little kind of tent. It's just kind of a... Like a camping tent. Yeah,
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like a camping tent. And not very big. But it was enormously symbolic. I mean, it might be a two-person
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tent of the old style. And it's in front of Parliament House. Old Parliament House. So it was
32:53
just Parliament House at the time. Yeah, it was... What is now Old Parliament House? Yeah, we've
32:57
Australia changed and built a new Parliament House in the interim. But they're not for that reason.
33:02
And so you would have photos presumably of this huge august Parliament House, which sort of looks
33:08
like the White House. And then a little ramshackle tent where there's some Indigenous Bloks being
33:12
in it right in the moment. That's right. With these defiant angry Indigenous Bloks, but also
33:22
they had a tremendous kind of humour. A humour is a very important protest. And the authorities
33:30
decided that the Canberra Police were too wimpy to do their job. And so they got the kind of riot
33:38
squad or whatever from Golban and Sydney. And that's quite unusual because that's a different state.
33:44
So that normally law enforcement would be held in power by the territory itself. But so that's...
33:50
Now a couple of years ago, it gathered around the tent to protect it. And I remember seeing
33:59
this phalanx of cops lined up at the side of Parliament House. Very scary. What were they wearing?
34:08
They weren't in right gear, but they had their night sticks and they had taken off their numbers.
34:17
So they could be identified for whatever they might do. And they came marching, you know,
34:22
these ranks around the corner and headed straight for the tent. And there was a first kind of
34:30
circle of young Indigenous actors who linked arms. And then there was a kind of larger circles
34:37
of white supporters basically a bit further out. And the cops just came storming straight out.
34:47
These kind of thousand or so protesters. And just started throwing punches and kicking and
34:56
carrying on. And they made it straight for the tent. And the black activists put up a fight.
35:03
Some of them were quite willing. But got beaten up basically. And the cops grabbed the tent and
35:13
dragged it away and rested a few. And then of course the next day a new tent went up.
35:26
And the whole scene was going to be repeated.
35:32
And how old were you at the time? What were you doing? I was doing an arts degree at
35:37
and you and I was. So university age, whatever that is. Why did you feel the need to go?
35:46
Ah, because I was a young student radical. I'd been radicalized at school through the Vietnam war
35:52
experience. What did radical artists look like?
35:56
Well, for some reason, you know, I was a very placid kid. But when the teenage hormones kicked in,
36:02
I became disgruntled and rancorous and rebellious against authority, which was mainly school
36:12
authority. So I began to hate school because of the regimentation and so on. And the political
36:18
conservatism or not that the school I went to was particularly conservative, very good public
36:24
schooling in Canberra. And so I just stood there. Then was the radicalism mostly along socio-economic
36:32
and political lines like were you agitated about were you a fan of communism at the time?
36:37
Did you want to smash the system? Was it about capitalist pigs? Was it about racism?
36:41
I mean, all that was, for me, it was against the Vietnam war, was protesting against the Vietnam
36:47
war and apartheid. This was a springbok tour. And I turned up at the Oval in Canberra where the
36:56
springboks were playing. This was a huge controversy when the South African rugby team came on
37:02
tour to Australia at a time when apartheid was still. And many people thought in a way.
37:06
Yeah, it was, yeah, despicable to basically. So yours was mostly a social, an anti-militarist
37:11
social justice, racial justice. But as I got to university, when I got to university,
37:17
I realized that those social justice concerns were part of a much broader
37:29
social critique by, you know, the leaders of those movements and there was a critique of capitalism
37:38
and the conservative political system that sustained it. So increasingly, I became a critique
37:49
of, you know, the system has such and saw the manifestations, well, I saw Australia's willingness
38:00
to fight in Vietnam. It's unwillingness to repudiate apartheid, the oppression of black people,
38:10
the oppression of women and so on as part of the broader system. I don't believe those things
38:18
anymore, but at the time, that's how I saw it. You don't believe that racial injustice is implicitly
38:24
connected to the economic and political system. That's not a gothic question, by the way.
38:34
No, no, no, no, no, no, I wouldn't frame it that way. What I'd say is that it's perfectly consistent
38:46
with prevailing capitalist system for a radical improvement in the conditions for Indigenous
39:01
people, for women, for gay people, for trans people, to coexist. In fact, I've argued that
39:09
the kind of woke political culture that, in fact, much of the left is highly consistent with
39:17
the kind of capitalism we have because it focuses directly on individualism, on expressing
39:25
personal identity. It doesn't challenge the system as such. How individualism? Why individualism?
39:32
Because they would say that they're about their group identity. They're about uplifting,
39:36
traditionally marginalized groups as communities. You'll often hear this talk about my community.
39:41
But in able to manifest and express who they really are as a person. As a member of such a community,
39:52
well, yes, as a member of that community, but that's not quite the same thing as a person who
40:00
identifies in a certain way. If you think about the transformation of the women's movement in the
40:11
90s, 2000s, with the kind of spice girls phenomenon, for example. That was all about
40:21
empowerment using equates. Empowerment of women because they can go girl and get out there and
40:28
do whatever they like. I'm thinking, well, okay, that's not going to challenge the system.
40:33
And in fact, if you look at the way in which the market capitalist consumer system has
40:41
responded to those kinds of demands, they say, great, well, you know, we'll make products
40:47
to allow those people to express their identity. There was a very good example in the
40:52
equal marriage campaign, right, where you had one of the strongest, this was a vote that Australia
41:00
took to legalize, same as the next marriage. Yeah, some marriage equality. How long ago?
41:05
It was under Malcolm Turnbull, so it must have been 26 days, I think. No, in fact, it was
41:11
the end of 2017. And so Quantus, Quantus, with a gay CEO, Helen Joyce, turned itself basically
41:26
into the rainbow airline, a campaign heavily in favor of equal marriage. I mean, I can't remember
41:34
painted jets in rainbow colors if it didn't probably wanted to. And you know, all the staff were
41:41
mobilized to support equal rights and so on and so forth. At the same time, quite a
41:46
bit of ripping off its employees, something awful. You can think about what Quantus did to
41:51
its employees during the COVID lockdowns. You know, the treatment of their work was shocking.
41:57
And even pre-COVID, I mean, they used COVID, Alan Joyce used COVID as an excuse for plans that
42:03
had been well underway to fire half of the baggage handling staff, outsourcing to other companies.
42:08
Sleshing their conditions. Yeah. So there you had a major Australian company who was, you know,
42:17
the focus to all when it came to equal marriage. But one of the most brutal when it came to
42:23
treating its workers, particularly its, well, all of its workers, but more so is kind of more
42:28
marginalised workers. And so that was perfectly consistent within the logic of modern capitalism.
42:36
So that's why I say there's nothing fundamentally challenging to the system of graded gay rights,
42:46
graded black rights, graded women's rights. In fact, the liberation of women to pursue
42:55
their education, their careers has been fantastic for the system. I'm not saying that women shouldn't
42:59
have done that, of course. But- Right. So there's a- The system has accommodated itself.
43:04
Yeah. Right. Okay. That's interesting, because what you hear from the modern left, the social justice
43:09
left a lot is that we live in an iridimably white supremacist, misogynistic, superstructure.
43:19
Right. The system is that capitalism is an intrinsically racist and half of the world's
43:28
billionaires are not white. I mean, these are people who've never been out of Australia.
43:35
I mean, really, I mean, go and travel, understand other countries, get to see how it works.
43:41
I mean, go to China. Really, I mean, if you've been to China, for example, or India,
43:48
you can't say that stuff anymore. It just doesn't make sense. Why isn't it? Because of
43:53
the contrary to the facts. What would you see in China or India that would disprove that capitalism
44:00
is white supremacist? Well, you see amongst people of color and extremely vibrant,
44:06
extremely exploitative, extremely unequal form of capitalism that is replacing
44:16
US-European capitalism in terms of its size and dominance. And so it's just historically wrong.
44:28
I think they would say that in modern Western liberal democracies, in the Anglo-Sphere,
44:36
it's true that it's always been implicated in the suppression of people of color.
44:41
It has, but that doesn't mean it necessarily has to be. And in fact, if you go to China or Japan,
44:56
China and Japan are pretty good cases, they're extremely racist places.
45:01
And those kinds of gains that have been made by people of color in Australia have been
45:07
enormous. And the United States, by comparison. Yeah, an Asian friend of mine was saying that
45:12
the only places that you can be racist in Australia actually are around the dinner tables of his
45:16
family. You go to an Asian Australian household and they're quite comfortable shooting on the
45:22
Koreans. Japanese hate the Chinese. And they're quite open about it, and they don't think
45:28
of anyone with that. If you're a black person, an African, for example,
45:32
black African person in Japan or China, whoa, I mean, it's like, I mean, it's worse than Australia
45:41
in the 50s. It's just kind of raw racism at its worst. So with no feeling, no need to apologize?
45:51
No, that's right. That's what's odd about it. Yeah, it hasn't even reached the level of
45:56
their being embarrassed about it. I mean, what's interesting though is that there's now a definition
46:01
of racism, which is that something isn't racist unless it exemplifies an existing power differential
46:08
between the two races. So that racism is now conceived of as being prejudice plus power.
46:15
So that, you know, when Samantha calls a cop, you know, a white bastard allegedly or whatever,
46:23
stupid white bastard. Yeah, then because she's a woman of color, which I didn't know until
46:27
this whole thing happened anyway, because she passes for white as far as I can tell, but because
46:31
she's a woman of color, she's allowed to say that. And to a white man, that's not racist,
46:38
because white people hold all the racial cards. And therefore,
46:43
so that would, that way of thinking would complicate your black person in Japan model,
46:49
because Japan has never been a colonizer to black societies. It has never enslaved black people.
46:56
I mean, it enslaved all of Asia, of course, in the 1940s, but setting that aside.
47:01
Yeah. Well, I mean, actually, a Korean person in Japan might be,
47:05
you know, then the analogy would hold. Well, and Korean people in Japan are really
47:10
looked down on. It's lesser creatures. But no, the same co-responding incident was really
47:16
interested. So yeah, she, she, there was an incident in a taxi cop turned up and she called
47:23
him a stupid white bastard. She was drunk. That's the allegation. It hasn't been, she hasn't,
47:26
hasn't been challenged, but yeah. No, I think she's, I think she has challenged the word. I think
47:32
she said that she called him a stupid white, something else, not a bastard, stupid white guy,
47:40
or something like that. I think this, there's some legalistic reason why that's relevant,
47:44
because if it was an act of some law, it was explaining to me, if it's, if it's harassment and
47:50
then the racial claim comes on top of harassment, then it's a different consequence than if it's
47:56
simply a racial claim. I understand. Well, when I, when I, you know, when I heard that that's what
48:00
she said, I thought, well, so what she's, she's, she's punching, she's punching up. So, you know,
48:07
it's, to me, it wasn't a problem. But what I wondered about was the taxi driver. I mean,
48:14
she had apparently allegedly vomited in the taxi. Good chance the taxi driver was a person of color.
48:23
So, you know, so the punching up thing has valence for you. You buy that. Of course.
48:30
Why, of course. Well, because power matters in everything. You know, I mean,
48:37
but yeah, power matters, but you that just, that could just mean that there are worse and better
48:42
forms of racism, right? The racism's always bad, but there are really, really bad ones.
48:47
Well, that's true. I mean, it's why, but it wouldn't make it not racist. Well, that's why, you
48:51
know, I mean, in the United States, if a black person uses the N word as rappers to add nauseam,
49:02
we'd say, oh, you, that's outrageous. You can't say that time. You know, we're going to
49:06
prosecute you for whatever. But if a white person uses it, I mean, it really is a serious
49:14
slur. It's a tack on black people in general, because of the history of slavery and racial violence
49:23
in the United States. And so, you know, outrage at that is legitimate. Whereas, see, I mean, the power,
49:30
it's power, it's powers everything. And so, well, power isn't everything.
49:39
Prejudice is also a thing. And prejudice might be worse if it is directed against the powerless,
49:47
but it doesn't stop being prejudice because it's directed at the powerful, doesn't it?
49:55
It doesn't stop being prejudice, but the character of it changes.
50:00
Um, if a, yeah, I mean, I mean, you can think of all the examples of, you know, of course,
50:09
I mean, I, I, I, I do like thinking of some of the examples. And I didn't episode on this in
50:13
which I had a, in which I sort of threw up a few thought experiments like, uh, wealthy
50:20
Indian Australian neurosurgeon is driving along in his BMW and gets cut off by a homeless white
50:28
person and says, get out of the way. You're white bastard. Yeah. What's the power? Like, my point
50:36
is just that power is complicated. Prejudice is easy to define. There are lots of scenarios that
50:44
you could invent in which the power matrix does not cleave neatly along racial lines. Well,
50:49
it doesn't, I mean, I, I tried to author a experiment. Have you ever, have you ever seen a
50:56
30 big brand new expensive Mercedes parked in a disabled car place? Uh-huh. You think something
51:02
just not right about that. But it's very hard to say why. You know what I mean? And even if it's
51:10
got it to say, well, stick it, you mean, you know, so it's, yeah, they're allowed to be there. Yeah.
51:14
You think, well, maybe that's how prejudice, right? People with disabilities. We like to think
51:21
of them as vulnerable and needing help, but maybe I'm just exposing my own.
51:28
Prejudice is quite the right word. Yeah, or bias at least. Yeah, about people with disabilities.
51:36
But yeah, I mean, there's nothing simple about these things. And when I say it's all about power,
51:41
of course, power comes in many different flavors. I mean, what interests me is, sorry, do you
51:47
finish that thought? I don't want to try to be a bit. Well, no, but I mean, power, power never
51:51
exists in pure form. It always, it's always embodied in a situation and a power relationship.
51:59
And so that's why the Sam Kerr comment, you know, you have to think about it. Or is that a bad
52:06
thing to say? And you have to work out, well, what is the situation? Who are these two people
52:13
plus a taxi driver? What were the circumstances? But yeah, on the face of it. And I mean,
52:19
there's the added wrinkle of the fact that you're talking about a cop. I think if you remove the
52:23
cop element, because he had, he had, well, he's a representative at the stage. Yeah, he has a
52:29
monopoly on the use of violence and force against the citizenry. And we expect the place to be
52:35
tougher skinned. You, they should be, should they? I mean, and he's in a position. Yes, he's in
52:40
a position far worse than that. And he's in a position to throw you up against, he's the only
52:45
person a policeman is the only person who's in a position to be violent against a member of the
52:52
public justifiably. Yeah, right. I mean, without being charged for it, of course, he'll be charged
52:57
if he steps out, be able to sit in boundary. But if he starts antagonizing you verbally and you
53:03
give him lip and he feels like you're, you know, questioning the directives of a police officer,
53:08
he can slam you up against the wall and put you in handcuffs and throw you in a car and lock
53:11
you in a cage for some period of time. So I think that power matters. If he was any other
53:20
not very well-paid public servant who happened to be a white man, and she, a multi, multi-millionaire
53:27
globally successful athlete was in an argument with him, then I think the power thing would be more.
53:34
I think that's also where I stumble on the on the Sam Kurt thing too, because there's the
53:40
whiteness, wide issue that we've focused on. But there is, I think you're absolutely right, Josh,
53:48
the power relationship here is quite complicated. Yes, the policeman has a monopoly on violence
53:56
in our sort of legitimate violence. But Sam Kurt is, as you say, a multi-millionaire,
54:03
extremely famous, loved and adored by so many people, and that gives her tremendous kind of
54:11
clout. And so, and that will play out in court too, I imagine. Yeah, so she has the power to
54:18
employ the best lawyers as well. Yeah, and we see that. Identical situations, but a wealthy person
54:25
can hire a flash lawyer and get off, happens constantly. So yeah, it's actually,
54:32
somebody should write a PhD. So it could be called stupid white bastard and investigation
54:39
power relations in modern, I like it. So, coming back to the modern left, and I mean, race,
54:46
I just want to linger on race for a second, because the fact that you are exercised by a partied
54:51
and we're at the 10th Embassy then gives you a certain credibility and having been sympathetic
54:56
to racial injustice at the sort of crucible of modern civil rights. Now we have a situation where
55:05
race has become one of the issues I would put it in the same basket as the transgender issue,
55:10
but correct me if I'm wrong, where there are extremely hot culture war rifts. There's a quite
55:18
asensorious attitude towards people who trigger tripwires. So I mean, one of the reasons,
55:26
one of the many reasons why my relationship with the ABC fellow part last year was because I
55:30
did to have a conversation with a colleague on the air about the nature of the N word. So I mean,
55:36
you were just talking about rappers, but this was a, I've noticed with interest over the past 10
55:42
years or so, maybe 15 years, that the distinction between what linguists would call using the word,
55:48
in other words, saying, hey, your N word, get your ass over here, that's the use. And then
55:55
linguists would talk also about a mention of the word, not using the word, but saying the N word
56:01
is the worst word in the world and you should never call someone the N word. And there's been
56:05
an illusion of the difference between those two things such that you've had, you know, people
56:10
fired from the New York Times, people fired from professorships for referring to the word for
56:16
reading old books that contain the word, Mark Twain, whatever it might be, even in one case a
56:21
professor who was teaching Chinese and talks about a word in Chinese that it sounds like that,
56:27
but an offended one, you know, this kind of, it becomes quite, it becomes a catechism in a way,
56:33
it becomes a sort of a, a faith-based position that even the act of questioning and arguing
56:40
and saying, hang on, why is that, why is that now taboo? Are we saying that people are actually
56:47
harmed by the recognition of the existence of the word? I mean, maybe, maybe we should all just
56:52
agree that that's a new taboo, which we all seem to have done, but at what point was that decision
56:56
made, and is it okay to go back into the past and read tweets that someone was tweeting 15 years
57:02
ago, and I don't think we quite had this consensus yet about that word. These conversations strike
57:08
me as being equally sensitive and dangerous as conversations about transgender stuff. So I wonder
57:16
where, whether, where you see the conversation around race having evolved to in the time since the
57:22
10th Embassy? Well, enormously, and driven mainly by the United States, of course. I have to say,
57:32
I'm pretty influenced by the writings of John McWater, who's a black professor of linguistics,
57:42
linguistics, I can say English, but yeah, linguistics at Columbia University, it was actually very
57:48
intolerant of of this kind of hypersensitivity around race, and he's written a very very powerful
57:58
kind of denunciation of this kind of social trend, which he doesn't think is the interest of
58:05
in the interest of black people at all, because it makes them into victims constantly and doesn't
58:12
give them the kind of dignity. And so, you know, I just think it's become part of this
58:21
cultural, I think many people, particularly white people, are basically getting off on it
58:29
in political and personal terms of creating a trying to create the sense that, you know,
58:37
I understand these issues more deeply than you do. Therefore, you must succumb to my judgments
58:47
on these things, because if you don't, then you're a racist, a homophobic, or whatever else,
58:53
powerful, powerful accusation. I know that, you know, I've been accused of both of those,
59:00
I think, how dare you. That's outrageous. You can't call me that. I've got this history.
59:08
Don't you know I was at the 10th Embassy young man. Yeah, and so, particularly in the context of
59:15
the China debate, of course. So, look, I mean, these are subtle and difficult questions, I mean,
59:24
but, you know, things change. I mean, 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, the C word was completely,
59:33
you know, there was no circumstances in which you could use it. I hear it said on the ABC.
59:38
Hey, were you talking about a bad word for a woman, a woman's anatomy?
59:41
Well, we'll see what you're mad at me. Yeah, I can't say it on you.
59:44
No, it's a proportion. Actually, my, you know, my wife is very offended if I say,
59:50
I wonder if that's also an inheritance from America.
59:55
The C word, meaning a rude word for a woman's anatomy, is something that you will hear in every
1:00:01
pub in Scotland thrown, oh, he's a good, you know, he's a good, and he used to be that way here
1:00:09
a bit, didn't that? I mean, I grew up, I mean, it was every third word I used to. I do think that
1:00:15
in the, in the, I don't think that in the, in the Utah and Australia, we've traditionally been,
1:00:21
that just has been less of a swear word. Well, in the States, it's always been an incredibly
1:00:27
offensive word. Has it? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, because when I grew up,
1:00:32
and I mean, it was an extremely offensive word, it would never be used in polite company, but,
1:00:38
you know, a bloke's talk was in use constantly. I think, yeah, I wonder if it's a cultural thing.
1:00:44
It was a women's movement in the, like, 60s, 70s, where many women would perfectly,
1:00:51
legitimately, stud protest that, well, why are you using, you know, an essential part of
1:00:58
ourselves as, as the most, um, vile way of denouncing it? But what about when you're saying it
1:01:04
in affection to them? Well, he can, but, and, you know, I mean, I, can I use it? Go on.
1:01:12
Because I remember, I remember when I was at the University of Sydney, I used to, I played hockey,
1:01:17
right, field hockey, um, for any American listening. And, uh, I became captain of the second grade
1:01:25
for, for a bit. And, um, I remember there were a couple of blokes who came from our west. I don't
1:01:31
know quite now how they were playing for the University of Sydney, but anyway, they were good
1:01:35
blokes, rougher around the edges. And I remember one of them said to me, after a few months, he,
1:01:39
he kind of took a shine, you know, he warmed to me. He said, in our club, when, when you're
1:01:45
first captain, I thought you're a real dead cunt. Um, but now you're a pretty good cunt. You know,
1:01:53
I mean, so, you know, so there it's how you're neutral. Actually, it's, well, I mean, context,
1:02:00
it's actually a term of endearment. It was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's another funny
1:02:06
thing in the, in the, in the States, the word, the word crap is a lot less offensive in the
1:02:11
States as well. I find crap to be reasonably offensive here. I mean, you would not, it's no,
1:02:16
it's no C word. But, um, yeah, anyway, that's just another one of those differences that I've
1:02:22
known as between the countries. So the young person who is instinctively anti-establishment and
1:02:26
is a bit of a radical and is fired up by the teenage hormones that drove you to, um,
1:02:31
oppose apartheid and to go to the tent embassy today is likely to reach for a collection of identity
1:02:39
theories about the justice of traditionally marginalized communities and the importance of, um,
1:02:47
putting one's pronouns at the bottom of your email address or, you know, being on the right side
1:02:53
of the Black Lives Matter movement or pushing for more gendered and sexuality diversity and
1:03:02
corporations and so on. Has that essentially replaced the, the push for a radical reform of
1:03:12
the way that we structure society? In other words, has it overtaken the left?
1:03:16
It swallowed it whole. I mean, look, the young person has a kind of radical disposition and
1:03:24
you know, all the best ones do. Um, what are they to put it into other than the kind of, um,
1:03:33
woke agenda for one of a better word? I mean, people, some people react to this. I mean,
1:03:39
because the right, particularly in the US, is taken up woke as an epithet and they
1:03:45
kind of, uh, one word, uh, depiction of everything they hate about the left. But the word woke
1:03:55
was actually first used by, um, black, black, uh, activists. Uh, I think in the, uh, in the 1990s,
1:04:07
as a kind of way of, uh, of, uh, ridiculing white activists who were there most of the syphorous
1:04:16
supporters, you know, they'd kind of, you know, woke means awake and really that they'd taken it
1:04:23
to kind of extremes and, you know, I get this kind of rye comment occasionally from indigenous
1:04:29
activists that I know, you know, about their white supporters. Um, you know, they're quite
1:04:35
savvy about it. They're happy to take it. But, you know, they realize there are other, uh,
1:04:40
personal agendas going on. But sorry, that was a digression. But what else is, uh, uh, a young
1:04:48
person with a radical disposition going to, uh, put their energies into, um, and some, look,
1:04:57
not all of them go overboard. Some of them, you know, do campaign for black rights and, and so on,
1:05:04
all in particular environment in a, in a highly effective way. Can I, I just want to make
1:05:11
another point. When I think back, you know, I realized this when I was writing the book I wrote
1:05:16
for the National Library on the story of protest in Australia. But if you, if you look at all of the
1:05:22
primary, um, protest movements of the modern year, uh, um, so from the 60s, say the anti-war
1:05:30
movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the indigenous rights movement,
1:05:34
um, all of those capitalism could comfortably accommodate. In fact, they were in some ways in
1:05:42
the interests of capitalism to free up those, uh, talents, not to mention the potential consumer
1:05:51
power in those groups to sustain, uh, and strengthen, uh, the capitalist system. But there was one
1:05:58
movement that the system really couldn't swallow, uh, or tolerate. And that was environmentalism
1:06:05
because environmentalism, except in its pale grain, um, corporate form, really does represent a
1:06:12
fundamental challenge to the nature of the system. It says the system is fundamentally exploitative.
1:06:18
Um, the system at its core puts profit before the natural world. Um, and the system needs to be
1:06:26
that growth itself for God's sake is the problem. And so these ideas of environmentalism,
1:06:34
which are very deep within the movement, um, basically challenge the fundamentals of capitalism
1:06:43
couldn't function if environmentalists manage to, uh, achieve the kinds of objectives that more,
1:06:51
uh, uh, of the, of the original environmentalism. Of course, there have been vigorous and,
1:06:58
and in some way, successful attempts by capitalism to co-opt environmentalism, to turn radical
1:07:04
activism into green consumerism, uh, for example. So, um, so, but there is no coming back to my
1:07:14
initial point. There's no, um, there is no movement that challenges the system,
1:07:24
as such, other than some kind of, um, trotschiest types of left movements left, uh, left over from
1:07:33
another year or that no longer have. Well, I mean, to go that far, what do you make of the Bernie
1:07:39
Sanders campaign in 2016 or of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labor Party? Well, okay. We
1:07:45
had quite far left social democratic candidates. The Saisler, which is why, uh, why so many, in fact,
1:07:52
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