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Simon Holmes à Court: Beyond Political Parties · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and here's a dangerous
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  idea for you.
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  Do we need political parties?
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  Do they serve our interests?
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  Is it better to work inside the political system or to blow it all up and try to find
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  a way to empower and to fund independence who can indeed topple governments?
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  Today's guest was fundamental in the last change of government in Australia.
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  His name, the home's a court name, is well known in Australia because his father was the
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  first ever billionaire.
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  They come from generation after generation of extremely influential and powerful, wealthy
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  figures not just here but back in the UK before Australia was even settled or invaded
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  as the case may be by Europeans.
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  And Simon home's a court, he's a brilliant guy in his own right, has an extraordinary
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  tale to tell about his relationship with his billionaire father and the consequences
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  of his father's untimely death.
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  And what Simon did at the last election was not single handedly, he's very bashful
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  about it and he's very bashful about his financial role as well as his motivational and cultural
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  role in creating the landslide that happened in Australia at the last federal election.
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  So with all of that being said and all of that throat clearing aside, he's basically
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  the most important figure in Australia in creating a wave of centre-right, independent, mostly
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  female candidates who swept aside the conservative governing coalition after almost a decade
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  in power by targeting them on a few vulnerable issues, climate change where voters felt there
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  was inaction, women's rights where voters felt there was a kind of a tinnyed deafness towards
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  the need to get real about sexism and indeed even sexual assault and harassment in Parliament
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  House.
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  And corruption, not so much the old-fashioned corruption of bribing politicians to do your
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  bidding, but just the slightly sleazy everyday corruption that we've gotten used to Australia
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  is did not have an anti-federal anti-corruption body to oversee that everything was clean.
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  These candidates who were loosely called the teal candidates because they all shared
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  the colour teal on their pallets became a monumental phenomenal force in Australian politics.
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  They now sit in Australian Parliament and they were largely responsible for the sweeping
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  aside of a decade's old conservative rule and the introduction of Australia's Labour government.
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  Simon's beef is bigger, it's really not just about the short-term tactics of getting
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  rid of any one government or other, it's about the long-term strategy of resting power away from
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  institutions, political parties that seem deaf to the needs of voters and seem obsessed with their
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  own factional infighting and their own special interests and putting power back in the hands of the
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  people, back in the hands of independence, back in the hands of members of the community,
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  business people who might want to run for office. Simon's a totally fascinating person,
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  I hope you enjoy this insightful conversation as much as I did with the one, the only Simon Holmes
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  Accord. Let's talk about you Simon. I'm just so you started out working for Netscape,
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  you went to the States after? Yeah, not wasn't your first job, but it was maybe your first
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  big one. I started studying in Perth at UWA and I got really involved in student organisation,
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  there sort of student politics without the politics, a large student organisation called Isaac
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  and I got involved in that. Student politics without the politics, what do you think is that?
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  Because my recollection of student politics was that it was incredibly ideological and
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  hostile and fiery and Marxist. Yeah, there was a sort of power, there was this
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  international, it still exists, organisation called Isaac, it's in 80 countries around the world
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  or it was then, it's probably more now, that specialised in student exchanges, internship
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  exchanges, conferences with a lot of sort of professional development along the way and just
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  drinking and a lot of drinking. Yeah, so I got really involved in that, became the state manager.
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  The drinking or the club, for instance. Sorry, I'll leave the drinking. No, we're all about it.
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  Yeah, the University of Western Australia, we won the national boat race competition more
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  than a few times. What's a boat race competition? When you get the group of people
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  sculling beers one after the other. Oh, fabulous. In a chain, so it did reasonably well at that.
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  Yeah, so I got really involved in that and I didn't finish my undergraduate degree at University
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  Western Australia. Did that for about three years, worked in Malaysia for a year and towards the
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  end of that. Well, that for your dad? My dad passed away by then, but it was for, yeah, before my
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  family company, it was an engineering company. When did he die? I was 18, he died in 1990.
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  Oh, so first year uni. Was that unexpected? Yeah, absolutely. That was probably a significant,
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  with that was a significant role in me moving away from my studies and getting distracted,
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  and I had a business on the side. And was he still, I mean, just for people who don't know,
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  I mean, he was the first race, first billionaire, he was a titan of Australian business,
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  was he still at the top of his game when he died? Yeah, that's me a bit. Yeah, yeah, no, he,
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  yeah, no, very, yeah, very much. He got smashed by the stock market crash of 87,
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  but put businesses back together, had recovered from that,
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  but his health wasn't, wasn't as good as he laid on, wasn't as good as we thought it was,
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  and he had a massive heart attack in September 1990. Oh, shit. Yeah, so that was, that was a big thing.
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  So, yeah, I worked for ISEC for about three years. But just pause on that for a moment. So
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  you're at uni in first year. Yeah, your dad's a very famous guy, suddenly dies. It's pretty surreal.
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  Yeah, what was that, what were the weeks and months after that? Like,
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  yeah, a bit of a blur. No, very, very much a blur, because there's a sort of a private or
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  a family grieving aspect, but there were many, many people in his life and a very complex business
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  left behind. Yeah, it was, it was a complex, a complex time. And had there ever been an
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  assumption that it was a family business where there'd be an air? I don't, I don't think so. No, it was,
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  it was, yeah, it was, there was no succession, no, no, no, no, it's funny, it's funny to watch,
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  it's, yeah, I've only actually very recently started watching the succession. It's funny to
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  watch that to think of, you know, I can sort of see how, how that could come about, really,
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  really grateful that my family avoided that. Yeah, right. So what happened to his business after he
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  died? My mother took over. Right. Very different, very different style. Yeah, my father was about
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  identifying, identifying businesses that were undervalued, buying them, buying them up. And it
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  was, it was an amazing group of assets. I mean, at one point, it owned the rights to the Beatles
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  and the muppets and a bunch of newspapers. There were some resource companies in there. It was
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  some steel holdings. There were a lot of disparate businesses in there, including a winery and
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  a beef cattle business and a construction company. That's the one I went to work for in
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  in Malaysia in 93. My mother ran the company very differently, rather than acquiring and,
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  yeah, my father would sort of restructure and then move on to buying restructuring, selling off
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  parts and really sort of how to say it, you know, sort of finding the undervalued assets and
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  extracting that value and moving on to the next. My mom was much more into running the businesses
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  as going concerns. And so she took the basket of assets that sort of a bit like musical chairs,
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  you know, her dad died and suddenly what was left when the music stopped. She had to sell a bunch
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  of stuff to stabilize the business and pay off a bunch of debt because the banks were a lot
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  more risk averse without, you know, without his genius around. So she stabilized the business and
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  then ran a number of them, including construction, beef and wine from there and a few other smaller
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  entities. And so what was Malaysia like in the, what was this, the 90s? Yeah, so I understand it's
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  quite different now. I haven't, I haven't been back. A lot of people I know who've spent time in
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  Malaysia think of the building of the Petronas towers, which were the largest building in the
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  world for a little while as being sort of a marker between old Malaysia and new Malaysia.
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  I spent a year there. It's, I'm going to offend people, but this is Malaysia in the early 90s.
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  It was, it was about, it was, it was, it was, the racial tensions were really, really strongly felt
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  then the, um, uh, Indian Malaysians and, well, the, the Malaysians hated the Chinese and the
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  Chinese Malaysians didn't respect the Malaysians. Yeah. And, uh, both, uh, had no respect for the
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  Indian Malaysians. And then the sort of white expats had this strange, uh, life of, um, uh, being
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  very, very temporary citizens, um, a necessary evil for, for the development of the country. But, um,
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  uh, it was, it was very clear that we, you know, we, we didn't belong, uh, we didn't belong there.
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  And was my heart here in power at this time? Yeah, he was. I remember. For people who don't know,
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  he was a long serving sort of slightly cantankarous, yeah. And I do, I remember one thing quite
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  explicitly, um, it was, uh, poor Katie was our prime minister at the time. I still, this is,
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  yes, I was at uni, I think, when this happened and Katie, yeah, Katie, Katie called him
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  recalcitrant. That's right. That was going to say intransition, but yeah, recalcitrant, because he
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  didn't come to the Asia-Pacific economic. Was that what it was? Yeah. I think he didn't come to one
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  of these events. And there was a huge diplomatic. Yeah, we, we all got a call to come to the, uh,
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  Australian embassy for an emergency meeting, um, that the Malaysian, um, government had, um,
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  were very concerned about this word recalcitrant. And they had their best translators working on.
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  It's a difficult word to translate. It's full of New York. And, um, then, then we came back a
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  couple of days later, because, um, Katie had said that he regretted the comment. He used the word
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  regret. Right. And they got the best translators again to work out what the word regret really
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  means. And they decided, sorry, they decided that regret, um, was, uh, in, in, the way we use it,
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  regret was equivalent to sorry. Oh, good. So, so as the Australians were told, don't worry, you're
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  safe now because the Malaysians have forgiven you because I remember wondering whether or not
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  that whole thing was just a mis-translation problem because half of Australia wouldn't know what
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  recalcitrant means. And like, you know, when you translated it to another, it's possible that they,
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  you know, they translated it as, uh, you know, idiotic or something. But anyway, so, yes, Malaysia
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  in the 90s, I mean, yes, it's a funny, it's a funny part of Southeast Asia, Malaysia. I've been
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  there a few times and it's changed a lot. Yeah, the first, the first week I was there, a, um,
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  uh, there, I remember, there was a, uh, an incident where everyone in the office was standing by a
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  window looking at the river below. And, um, a body was floating down the river. And I remember the,
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  the person in the office with the lowest station of all, the, the tea lady, um, coming across to the
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  window, looking out, looking out the window and went, oh, it's only an Indian and walked off.
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  Wow. And, and that, that was, um, yeah, the, the racial tensions there, um, were, were quite,
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  quite mind-blowing. There were, um, and lots of institutionalised to where, um,
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  Malaysia's would have access to cheaper housing or there would be, um, quotas for university.
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  Every company had to have a Malay director. So we had one guy just came to an office a day a month
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  and we paid him a lot of money and he didn't do anything for the company. But it was just part of
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  Dr M was very fixed on elevating the station of Malay. Dr M meaning Mahatim Ahmad, the president,
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  yeah, prime minister. Um, it's interesting you say that because you're reminding that during the
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  lead up to the voice referendum in Australia last year, which would have seen the creation of
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  an indigenous body, an advisory body to Australian Parliament, uh, comprising First Nations Australians,
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  I actually got an email, uh, when I still had my ABC show from a Malaysian Australian listener
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  saying, trust me, you don't want to import, uh, like racial, you know, you don't want to encode racial
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  dominance into any facet of your political system because I've seen what happens in Malaysia,
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  we have allocations for certain types of people and all the Malays we hear first, so the Malays
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  get this quota and this person was found the, you know, the, the, yeah, the designation of First Nations
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  people have been given this prime, this place of primacy in the Australian constitution as like
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  reminiscent of that and problematic. Well, certainly problematic, problematic there and the Malays
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  weren't the first either. The, the, there was a, there's an indigenous group. Of course, the
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  orange butcher are there, uh, who are completely sidelined. Right. Yeah, right. So how far back do you
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  want to go? I mean, yeah. Well, that's, Israel guards anyone. You want to take that on? Uh, it was
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  going, we do it. Do we start the clock in 1948? Next 5,000 years ago. Yeah. So anyway, so you,
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  so you end up, and you go and learn to study cognitive science and computer science and stuff in
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  the States and so the work I was doing in, in Malaysia, I was helping the, I was helping the
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  construction company with, um, it was John Holland constructions, uh, with, we're basically
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  modernizing, um, setting up, um, uh, email for the first time between, between offices,
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  doing a lot, a lot of IT work. And, um, I realized at the end of that skint that, well, for me,
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  IT was about getting people's printers working and, um, you know, teaching them how to use fonts in
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  Word. Yeah. And, and I swore to myself, I was not going to do anything with computers ever
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  again. I'd been a big computer geek from long way back. I'd been playing with computers since I was
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  about eight or so, uh, and online from, you know, about 11 years old. Um, so I was, I was, I was very
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  much a computer geek, but I realized that when it came to business, computers were, it was just an
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  awful career. It's where, it's where I left, uh, um, you know, when I left the industry, no, I, I,
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  um, uh, while I was in, while I was in Malaysia, I applied for, for university, um,
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  called Dartmouth College in the US. Um, I didn't know much about university called Dartmouth.
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  Isn't it an Ivy League? It is. Yeah. I didn't know what Ivy Link meant at that point. I didn't
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  know much about it, but my, um, uh, I've got two brothers who went to, uh, went, went to college and,
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  you know, college and university, college university mean the same thing in the US. Yeah. They went,
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  they went to college in the US and said, yeah, you should apply for Dartmouth. It's pretty good.
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  And without having ever seen it, without having thought much about it, I was offered a spot and I
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  took it. Right. Um, how does that work? I mean, does the fact that you're the sort of a billionaire
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  help? Look, I think, um, I, I remember seeing the application brochures said, um, uh, we have
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  students from 69 countries, uh, uh, and then, um, and then the next year when I'd been there, um,
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  uh, you know, once I'd accepted it, I said, we have students from 70 countries. So,
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  I think, look, I think that was part of it. Um, I, I'd, I'd had good results, um, from, uh,
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  yeah, from, from school. You are academically good. Uh, yeah. I, I, very illustrious private
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  school in Australia. I wouldn't say great school. I wouldn't say illustrious. It's a, it's a school
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  for the upper crust. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. We could, we could do a whole episode on that.
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  Well, why don't we just touch that since it seems to, uh, since there seems to be something
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  there in your eyes that I can detect about your lung grammar. What, when you say one of the great
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  school way, um, so the, the school had a pretty dark period, um, and that, that's been,
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  that's been covered. Um, I mean, it was, it was touched on in recent four corners, uh, report.
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  Just explain that for people who can say, um, well, the school had a, had a very significant
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  problem, um, with abuse through the, well, I was there in the eighties, um, but it predates
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  that and postates that. But, um, uh, it was, um, uh, a subject of a lot of complaints
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  through the Royal Commission into sexual, uh, abuse of, of, of, um, of children in care. Um,
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  it was, you know, it's full, it's boarding school and it had a very significant, um, problem
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  with, uh, with pedophilia in the 60, 70s, 80s, 90s. Um, did you say any of it?
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  I was lucky not to be the subject of any of it, but certainly, um, uh, we all saw in appropriate
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  relations, relationships, um, and, uh, through the Royal Commission, you know, read lots of the
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  evidence for that. And I went along to one of the days of the, um, of, of the hearings and, um,
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  people I knew, um, were, were the subject of, um, uh, uh, you know, were, were, were
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  complainants, uh, and, and teachers who had, um, uh, played a significant role in my education,
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  were implicated and charged and served time. Yeah. Yeah. You were aware at the time that it was
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  wrong, like how old. Yeah, yeah. No, we were, um, well, I was secondary school, so, you know,
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  age 12 to 17. Um, but yeah, no, we were very, very aware it was wrong. Um,
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  uh, but yeah, it was, it was a, it was a funny environment, you know, the, the, the teacher who, um,
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  who, who I think has been most punished out of, uh, you know, who served time, um, and with
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  subject of many complaints was my mass, my, um, my, my mass tutor. And, uh, for the last two
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  years of school, I went around to his house, uh, uh, yeah, every Tuesday night and, uh, you
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  poured me a glass of wine. Um, luckily, uh, for me, I was never, you know, I, I, I never felt
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  threatened. I never, you know, never moved on me. Um, um, uh, but, you know, this guy was convicted.
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  Um, and a lot of, you know, my, I know someone who, um, who went through that Royal Commission and
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  said that they were, they were 35, uh, teachers who, or teachers of staff who were named, um, uh,
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  in from Jolong grammar in that process. I had a real problem there. The, the, the, that was,
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  that was part of it. I mean, it didn't affect me, but I know it affected, um, a number of people
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  very, very much. Um, but, but that was, um, that was in a context where it was a, it was a,
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  it was a very violent, uh, school at that time. Um, my understanding is that it's, it's,
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  it's very, very different now. No, I wouldn't want people. I wouldn't want people to think that I'm
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  saying, don't send your kids there because it's, it's awful. I'm sure 40 years later. 40 years later,
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  and it's, um, we're in a different legal context. I think now that if a school, if a kid at Jolong
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  grammar had called the Harold son today and said, hey, I'm, you know, um, I wrote a little,
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  uh, a chapter on, on, on, on it in a little book that I published a couple of years ago. Um,
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  a friend of mine was, was, um, was forced down a, uh, a drain, uh, a stormwater drain. And, um,
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  six boys stood on top and urinated on him and then stood on the grate on top so that he couldn't
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  get out. So we're standing in the dark, uh, in the cold soaked in the urine of six boys on top
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  as they laughed, right? Um, uh, and there were, you know, he, he reported that incident and nothing
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  happened. Um, in today's environment, if you called up the Harold son from Jolong grammar,
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  and said, hey, this just happened to me. It'd be front page of the next day. We're in a different
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  context, whereas then people acted with complete impunity. In fact, the, the headmaster who
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  oversaw that, who was aware of that incident and many like it, who had documented evidence of all
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  of this, um, went on to be the head of Eaton and was, um, uh, tutor of Harry and, and, uh, and William,
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  at, uh, at Eaton, um, and never suffered anything from that. It's like the church. It's like the
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  church. It's like, you know, so you, you just take the, the problematic person and you move them
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  to another jurisdiction where their reputation isn't going to follow them. So, so it was, um,
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  it was a brutal place. It was more about the, um, the violence, not, not really the physical
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  violence, but the psychological violence of, of that school that between the kids or from teachers.
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  No, mainly between the kids, but it was, um, understood and accepted, um, and almost, uh, I, I,
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  I think it was deemed part of the experience by, um, you often think that, yeah, there,
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  there are 70 kids, 70 young men who are in a boarding house together, uh, with maybe one staff member,
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  um, who sticks around to 10 o'clock at night. Um, the rest of the time, it's, it's Lord of the,
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  I mean, it's Lord of the Flyers the whole time. Uh, without the, without the stratification of, um,
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  yeah, the structure, the social structure that builds based on fear and threat of violence, um,
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  it would be a much more disorganized place. I think that the, the Lord of the Flyers, uh,
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  uh, uh, uh, uh, structure that, uh, that, that, that, that emerges out of that is, it was a useful
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  way of maintaining some level of order. Um, yeah. I mean, it's timeless. That's how we've been arranging,
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  it's how mammals have been arranging their societies for millions of years, right? It's like, and,
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  and you could, you know, um, to any macro level. Yeah, exactly. And the same, the same. Yeah, the
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  tougher going to be tough and the weaker going to get preyed on. I mean, it's just insane that
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  anyone ever thought it was a good idea to take the most irrational and power hungry and
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  hormonal demographic of humanity, which is teenage males. Yeah. And put them in an, an archic
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  situation like that and sort it out for themselves and everything would be a hunky-dory. Yeah.
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  So just before we leave that on a dwell on this for too long, but so you had friends who you knew
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  at the time were having relationships with teachers. Um, certainly, uh, you know, closer acquaintances
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  in my year group knew that they were having, um, or wouldn't call them relationships that, that,
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  that they, uh, were being pursued. Um, right. And that, some of that came out in, in the Royal
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  Commission. I mean, the reason I asked, I say, we used word relationships is because it's sometimes
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  interesting in these scenarios where the, the, the child will not realize that there's anything
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  wrong with her because it lands for the child as love, care, affection, attention or something.
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  And that's what can be so predatory about it in a way. You've got someone who is incapable of
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  consent who doesn't have the maturity to process what they're going through. Yeah. Someone in
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  a position of power abuses that power. And it doesn't, you know, it's not, we have this idea
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  about pedophilia as being this brutalizing sort of rapy act, but often it's more insidious than
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  that. And that's why I say, yeah, no, no, I think there's, there's definitely something to that.
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  It's, um, and it's a, it's a strange environment. It's, um, uh, the schools at the end of a
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  peninsula, uh, tucked away in sort of no man's land, um, uh, not far from Jolong. It's not actually
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  in Jolong. It's in Karyo, you know, sort of, um, separated from the rest of the world by, um,
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  the biggest oil refinery in, in, you know, this part of the world. Um, and, uh, you, and it's,
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  yeah, it's, it's a, it's a cold, you know, um, you know, physically emotionally cold place, um,
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  with, um, you, at that, at that stage, you're only allowed to see your parents, um, uh, for, um,
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  you could have one overnight exit at a time. And you, and, uh, you could apply to have two
• 26:40
  day exits, but you, but most people wouldn't have any contact with their family, um, for months at a
• 26:46
  time. Did you talk to your mother and dad about your concerns about the place? Um, certainly did
• 26:53
  about the, uh, about the physical violence, uh, and about, um, about the bullying culture there.
• 27:01
  Uh, I know, there's, you know, the response, I remember the response from, um, uh, yeah, from
• 27:08
  parents of all, if, you know, if you don't, if you don't like it, you can take it out and put
• 27:11
  you somewhere else. Um, but part of the culture of the school was any, anyone who left was,
• 27:17
  or they can't hack it, right? They were the weak kid who couldn't hack it, um, couldn't find their
• 27:22
  place, or they were too weak. And so there was, there was very significant pressure to, to grind
• 27:28
  through it. It's been fascinating going to school reunions since and, um, it feels, it feels a bit
• 27:34
  like group therapy. Yeah. Very few of us have sent our kids there. Um, and everyone is sort of, by
• 27:41
  now, almost everyone has made peace with it. Um, so it's not something I think about. No,
• 27:46
  it's just daily or just not sensitive. Still interested in the dynamic between you and the
• 27:50
  friends of yours or the friends of friends who, you knew this was happening to, I, just tell me
• 27:58
  how you get your head around that when you're 15 and you like, yeah, you look at, um, do you have
• 28:03
  pity for them? Do you, is it something you just don't talk about? Do you ever talk about it?
• 28:07
  Um, no, I haven't, I haven't talked about it. Um, I mean, at the time, does one, did
• 28:14
  you know, no, no, no, it's just, it's just rumors in your window. Um, I, and I,
• 28:20
  it's funny, uh, funny, it's not the right word, but I, but I went along to a day of the
• 28:24
  Royal Commission where I saw three headmasters get up on, in, in the stand and none of them
• 28:30
  said in as many words, but what the subtext was, it, things were different back then. Um, and
• 28:38
  it was shocking to hear and a bit, and outrageous, but there is some,
• 28:45
  I wouldn't say some truth to it. I mean, it was, it, it, it, it is as a parent then as it is,
• 28:49
  as it is now. But, um, as I said before, you know, you can call, if, if, if something like
• 28:58
  that happened to you now and you called the Harold Sun, front page next day, Royal Commission,
• 29:02
  places shut down. Um, there, if you called up back then, if you called up some of the media,
• 29:09
  there's a, you know, boys or we boys or, you know, important growing, you know, character building.
• 29:15
  We, we, um, societal standards have moved a lot in that time. Lots of innuendo. Um, and, um,
• 29:25
  uh, and that was, and some of that too was, was bullying by the school community of some
• 29:31
  of the weaker teachers, you know, if, if a teacher was a feminine, then they were, um, uh, it
• 29:37
  was automatically assumed that they were a predator. Right. Um, some, well, it's turned out some,
• 29:43
  some were, um, some were not, they were just unusual. Yeah. Right. Okay. So you survived
• 29:48
  along. You survived Malay. Uh, you survived. Uh, uh, uh, uh, um,
• 29:52
  Dartmouth was, Dartmouth was, uh, was, was wonderful. But it was, it was quite, quite odd in that.
• 29:57
  So I was, um, the time I went, I was 22. Um, uh, in the US, the drinking ages 21, my,
• 30:05
  my peers, um, was 17 and 18. Uh, so I was, um, I was a mature age student.
• 30:12
  Wow. Yeah. Um, and I, um, I'd long ago worked out, you know, how to, how to manage life around
• 30:20
  alcohol and how that is, um, whereas the, he was a haven where these kids were away from home
• 30:26
  for the first time. Well, you, when you were talking about July that reminded me a bit of an
• 30:29
  American college fraternity with its hazing rituals and the, the people who've just, and, and
• 30:35
  into it with, you know, Dartmouth has, um, they've ever left Mommy and Daddy's house.
• 30:39
  Dartmouth has a very strong, what they call Greek system, right? It's so weird to have it,
• 30:44
  called the Greek system. I know. I've asked Americans why it's called the Greek system,
• 30:47
  and no one can tell me except that the, yeah, I know, but they said that it was inherited from,
• 30:51
  from the ancient Greeks or something. Uh, most of the people who asked say, isn't it from Greece?
• 30:56
  No, no, no, it's not from Greece. Just a letter. Um, yeah. So I saw, my peers going through that,
• 31:04
  uh, you know, the process to get into the fraternity where you, um, you pledge and then you go
• 31:09
  through a hazing, uh, hazing period and then you come out the other end and you are then
• 31:14
  entitled to run the whole process from the other end the next year against the next lot of kids.
• 31:20
  And I just had zero interest in, uh, joining a drinking club. I'd been part of them before.
• 31:26
  Yeah. Uh, all going through any hazing rituals, especially, um, with people who were
• 31:32
  four or five years younger than me who were just, you know, tasting freedom for the first time
• 31:37
  when I was, I felt a lot more mature. But the, the friends I made there and the quality of the
• 31:43
  education was phenomenal. And so how does Netscape happen? Uh, so I, I, I promised myself I wouldn't do
• 31:51
  anything to do with computers because computers were just getting people's printers working.
• 31:55
  Yeah. Uh, but I, but this is now the late 90s, right? It's so, yeah.
• 32:01
  The internet is. Yeah. So, so I, um, I got really interested in, uh, there was a,
• 32:06
  a relatively new subject that I think was the second year to do it or a new major called cognitive
• 32:10
  science. Um, and it was a mix of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence.
• 32:18
  It was Bay, you know, these days would probably call it digital humanities within AI,
• 32:24
  specialization. Um, I think cognitive science still exists as a degree probably does. Um,
• 32:29
  uh, it's, uh, you know, people don't advertise for cognitive scientists. Not sure.
• 32:33
  Yeah. And, and I, so I really was intrigued by the AI side and, um, you had to do a bunch of
• 32:40
  computer science to get there. And I was, um, uh, I was surprised with how much I really enjoyed,
• 32:47
  that, that pathway. What intrigued you about the AI side? Um,
• 32:52
  um, thing, I think if I found most interesting about AI at that point was that, um, everything,
• 33:01
  um, any complex behavior by a computer was, uh, that a computer couldn't do was, um,
• 33:09
  intelligence until we worked out how to solve it. Like it was at that. I was, um,
• 33:15
  um, I was at university there when computers started beating the, the, the best chess players
• 33:22
  in the world. And, uh, we had to sort of grapple with, is the computer intelligent or is it just
• 33:27
  a better algorithm than we've had before? And we always went down the path of, no, it's not
• 33:32
  intelligence. We're just getting better at working out how the game works. Um, you know, one of the very
• 33:37
  first things you do in an AI course is you, you program, um, noughts and crosses, uh, where, where you can,
• 33:45
  you can make a, um, uh, very easily, as anyone who's played the game more than a few times, no, um,
• 33:52
  if you, if you don't stuff up, um, you'll at least, the worst you do is a tie. Um, uh, and you can
• 34:01
  make a computer that is, um, that will never, never lose and always win against a weak player.
• 34:08
  And, and you can do that in your first term of, of doing an AI. And you go, okay, is this intelligent?
• 34:14
  No, it's just an algorithm. It's just a very simple algorithm. So I, I found it interesting. The,
• 34:19
  the philosophical side of what is, um, what is AI? Well, what is intelligence? Um, and, and what is
• 34:27
  just, um, uh, it's just an algorithm. Yeah. And now that you've fast forwarded a quarter of
• 34:34
  a century ahead and seen what AI can do. Now, how do you feel when you see chat GPT? Um, question.
• 34:44
  Uh, let me just go back a little bit. I remember, um, a day in, in, is in, um, uh, February 94,
• 34:52
  when I was in, in the office in Malaysia. And I'd been trying for three months to get the computer
• 34:58
  onto, um, I get, get my computer onto this thing, uh, they call it, um, jarring, which was Malay
• 35:04
  for net. Uh, so getting, getting computer onto the net and you had to go download Mac TCP from
• 35:10
  something and, yeah, you had, you know, you had any, and get permission from the, um, university
• 35:15
  chancellors to connect to the net. Um, so after months of work, I finally got the computer onto
• 35:23
  the internet and I downloaded, um, Mosaic, which was the first, um, browser came out of, um,
• 35:30
  University of Illinois. Uh, so I downloaded that and I remember being in the office, it was sort of
• 35:35
  six PM at night, everyone had gone home and I was, I was busting to go the toilet, but I'd got
• 35:42
  the web browser up for the first time and it blew, absolutely blew my mind. I'd been playing
• 35:46
  around and bullet boards for a decade before, before then more than a decade. But the, the penny
• 35:52
  dropped of how significant this thing, this internet thing's going to, going to back. And this
• 35:57
  is probably still with a dial up modem. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And the pages are loading,
• 36:03
  loading text like just one line at a time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the, the images would come in
• 36:08
  progressively, right? It'd start blurry. The pixels would just slowly load. Yeah. So, um, I,
• 36:14
  you know, I remember that distinctly and then again in November 22, when I first saw chat
• 36:20
  GPT, uh, I had the same experience without the going to the toilet bit, um, uh, where I just
• 36:28
  thought holy crap, everything, everything's changed. And, and, you know, I'd done this, uh,
• 36:33
  AI major. And, um, am I, the professor I started under most for that is now the head of AI at MIT.
• 36:41
  And, uh, in, in her class, we all came to the conclusion, I think everyone in that AI
• 36:48
  would not happen in any interesting form in our lifetime. And, uh, when I stumbled across chat
• 36:55
  GPT one, you know, one night in November 22, it was just a holy crap. Um, this is an inflection point,
• 37:04
  where, yeah, I, yeah, it's a beginning of a year where nothing will be the same again.
• 37:09
  It's funny isn't it seeing the wave build in, in, in some ways, yes, you've seen chat GPT,
• 37:16
  but it hasn't yet impacted. I mean, it's going to change everything. I feel actually a little bit like
• 37:23
  I did in February of 2020 when COVID was coming. Right. And yeah, I knew I, I knew, I, I knew
• 37:33
  enough people in epidemiology to know that something absolutely, like, world changing was, was
• 37:40
  happening. And everybody was walking around as if life was normal. And I was a chicken little. And
• 37:45
  in a strange way, when everything fell apart and, you know, the lockdowns came and, you know,
• 37:49
  all of a sudden, everyone, I was sort of, everyone was running around scared and I was kind of
• 37:53
  relieved because I felt like I'm less of a crazy person. I've been saying the trains coming.
• 37:58
  Now we're all on the train. We're all together. You know, we're all, we're going to, we're going
• 38:02
  to go on this journey and it'll be, and we'll, we'll survive it. Who knows where it's going.
• 38:06
  Yeah. And in some ways, I feel like that about, I like, I know that this is going to be completely
• 38:13
  world changing. Nobody else quite sees it yet. We talk a lot about it. Our job losses or misinformation
• 38:18
  or this or that. It's going to be so much bigger than that. Yeah. And now I'm just like,
• 38:23
  okay, let's wait and see. It was waiting to see what the train looks like at some point in the
• 38:27
  next eight months or two years, three years. There's going to be a moment where we're going to go,
• 38:32
  we're not going to recognize the world that, well, I just, I'm still amused that we, you know,
• 38:38
  after several years of study and some of the best minds and we went and visited MIT, well,
• 38:44
  we were there and we, you know, talked with Marvin Minsky, who was one of the leaders in AI
• 38:49
  thinking, we all left that, that major with the idea that it's, it's not going to happen in our
• 38:56
  lifetime. And yeah, expectations of despair. And so just on that question of intelligence, though,
• 39:02
  that you were alluding to about like, you know, what you, what intrigued you about AI when you
• 39:06
  were at university was this question of, is the Noughtson Cross's machine just doing algorithms
• 39:12
  or is there some intelligence there? Has your thinking on that? What was your thinking then
• 39:16
  and has your thinking evolved now that you've seen what Chuck J. PT can do? What is intelligence?
• 39:21
  Okay, the evolution in my thinking on that is that is not so much that is not,
• 39:31
  computers becoming intelligent. My thing is more is many of the things that we think that we do
• 39:40
  that are intelligent are not. So I'm thinking actually that we overrate many of the things that we do.
• 39:49
  Yeah, we, we think it's brilliant work when we write, write, write a, um, an article.
• 39:56
  Yeah, you write an op-ed, um, throw 10 bullet points at chat,
• 40:02
  PT and ask it to write an op-ed. And it, it does better than your average columnist.
• 40:08
  That may say something about the quality of our columnists.
• 40:10
  Um, but we would have said long, not long ago, it requires a basic level of intelligence to
• 40:16
  write a piece. Actually, this shows us that a very significant amount of what we do is, um,
• 40:23
  is not, there's no secret source. Right. But the, the, the, the AI is piggybacking on the human
• 40:29
  intelligence ball of the op-eds that have ever been written. Yes. Which is not to say that humans
• 40:34
  aren't doing that as well. I think we, I think we do. Right. We, we, we, we all do. We spend years,
• 40:39
  um, piggybacking on, on, on, you know, standing on the shoulders of, of, of others. Um, I think
• 40:44
  that we're, we're coming to a fascinating stage when the AI is that we have now have been
• 40:49
  trained on 100% human content. Um, content is now being, you know, where we sit right now, 99
• 40:57
  percent of content being created in the world is by AI. We don't see most of it, most of it's
• 41:02
  junk. But, um, Google's having a hell of a time filtering out pages that have just been,
• 41:07
  you know, they're content farms, just creating billions of pages have been created recently,
• 41:13
  that we're not, we're, we, we, we don't see enough, but Google's trying it's
• 41:18
  down to, to try to, uh, to filter out. But we're getting to a point where AI is going to be
• 41:24
  training, being trained on, uh, AI generated content. Um, and I, uh, sort of quip the other day, it's,
• 41:33
  um, it's, it's, it's a bit like mad cow disease, right? We're now feeding, feeding AI output
• 41:39
  into AI. Because mad cow disease was caused by feeding, feeding cows to cows to cows, they put,
• 41:46
  they put cow matter into the feed of cows, yeah, the feed of cows. Um, so we're at this
• 41:53
  interesting point where AI is being trained by humans pretty soon. AI is going to be trained by,
• 41:58
  well, you, when you find some content, it's basically impossible to work out, whether it was
• 42:03
  generated by human or by AI. Um, so pretty soon, AI will be feeding on itself. Yeah. Yeah. What
• 42:11
  happens then? I don't know. It's going to be, it's going to be fascinating. Anyway, we can delve
• 42:17
  into this just for hours. Yeah. A final point about AI before we get to the other things that
• 42:22
  interest me about, about you, there are so many. The, um, the ability of AI to write a John
• 42:30
  Grisham novel is undisputed or we'll soon be undisputed, right? It's going to be able to
• 42:36
  write your op-eds. It's going to be able to write screenplays that are just as good as an
• 42:43
  Avengers film, right? Right. Whether or not an AI can ever write any haul, right? Or
• 42:52
  Chikovsky or Proust or James Joyce or something. Yeah. Is another question. Like, do you believe
• 43:00
  that there's a sprinkle of pixie dust in human consciousness that elevates us beyond just the
• 43:05
  integration of information processing? Or are we just so good at information processing that we
• 43:10
  can sometimes produce a Beethoven? Uh, I, I, I mean, so I've gone back and spoken, you know,
• 43:22
  met with some other professors I had at that, at that stage, um, and had fascinating conversations
• 43:29
  about what changed, um, why, why has there been such a rapid increase recently? And, and
• 43:35
  significantly, it comes down to the amount of processing power and the resources, you know,
• 43:40
  the memory, uh, that these machines have, but also the access to the corpus. When we were working
• 43:45
  on AI in the late 90s, there'd be, you'd download a few megabyte file, which would be a language
• 43:52
  corpus, which would be, um, you know, 57 works of literature that were all put together in a file
• 43:58
  and you'd throw it to AI and say, learn something about language from that. Um, the training sets
• 44:04
  are now literally billions of times larger than that and the processing speed is billions of times
• 44:10
  larger than that and they're running, these things are running for months at a time, right? So
• 44:14
  there's just a step change in resources. Um, I, I think some of our, um, some of our pixie dust
• 44:23
  comes down to an order of magnitude more, orders of magnitude more, um, experience, uh, you know, we,
• 44:31
  we, um, just, you know, every day walking down the street, we are taking in a massive amount of,
• 44:38
  of information and every interaction, human interaction we have, the, um, I think AI is still,
• 44:44
  uh, orders of magnitude away from having the stimulus and training sets that, that we have.
• 44:51
  But in principle, it could, um, talking about something truly new, right? So, yeah, obviously,
• 44:58
  now that, um, Tolkien has existed, AI is going to be able to write Lord of the Rings books,
• 45:06
  but prior to Tolkien ever having existed, yeah, I don't, uh, I don't, I don't, I don't,
• 45:15
  I don't enjoy having this, uh, view, but I don't, I don't think there's any magic pixie dust.
• 45:21
  I think, you know, we, we are, um, we are an amazing computer, um, uh, we're amazing computational
• 45:29
  engine with amazing sensors and actuators, um, and that, um, uh, eventually if we replicated
• 45:39
  something with similar, uh, resources and we're a long way off that, um, then, then we will start to see
• 45:47
  um, behavior that, yeah, I mean, we, I, I, I just saw, um, open AI's, uh, Sora, uh,
• 45:56
  demonstration this morning. I don't know if you've got a video, uh, AI. Yeah. And
• 46:01
  where we've come in one year from what that we're doing in, in AI generated images a year ago,
• 46:06
  with, oh yeah, they'll be able to generate whole movies on the fly that a tailor made to what you
• 46:12
  and it'll be able to do. So will it be, will it be in the top 1% of creativity, um, uh,
• 46:19
  maybe not for a while? Will it be, um, so already, I, I think the, um, AI can do
• 46:29
  better than a lot of us at mundane things that we used to think required intelligence, much the
• 46:35
  same way that we solved, um, uh, I just, speaking of an academic recently, he said that, that,
• 46:43
  that they, they use AI for recommendation letters. Oh, interesting. Yeah. You put in five bullet
• 46:49
  points of what the student did. You throw it in AI and it spits back, um, you know, what,
• 46:54
  what used to take you half an hour to do, right? It will spit out, um, uh, something that is
• 47:00
  completely respectable, useful, um, uh, that, that, that, that both the university administrator
• 47:08
  and the student are both happy with. Yeah. Um, now, just like I had that flash of, oh my god,
• 47:14
  you know, but computer can do tech, tech toe, um, uh, it's just an algorithm. We've come to that point
• 47:21
  with AI. Um, yeah, I, I, I, I want to believe there's something special in, uh, in, in, in, in
• 47:30
  humanity. Um, um, yeah, but you know, really by it, in which case AI will exceed our, uh, creativity,
• 47:40
  our, uh, discoveries are understanding. I mean, it has to, if it can get, yeah, if it can get,
• 47:44
  if to us, then there's no reason why. And if we, if we give it the resources, yes, right? Which,
• 47:50
  well, by, by the time it's that smart, it may figure out how to get its own resources.
• 47:54
  Yes. Right. I mean, it's embedded in the internet. It has control over, yeah.
• 48:00
  As someone sent me a link to a robotics, uh, start up in, um, that's, that's working on
• 48:05
  humanoid robots. And, and it, uh, and it's talking, it talks in the, you know, um, yeah,
• 48:11
  our next challenge is to make sure that we have the robots are able to make the next generation
• 48:15
  of robots. Oh, have you seen this movie? Exactly. I mean, see, see, see this movie before,
• 48:22
  it's like, can we please just have humans as the decider of whether it relates? We're already,
• 48:29
  we're already generating these things in beta online. I mean, I always thought that AI was going
• 48:34
  to be built in a lab, highly secure, the way that like the Manhattan project. Yeah. And then
• 48:39
  there'd be a conversation about how to release it. And then worry would be maybe it'll
• 48:43
  bribe one of the officials who work. No, we're shoveling the results. We're pushing it out there.
• 48:47
  It's in, it's embedded in everything. I mean, it's got access to everything apart from,
• 48:51
  yeah, I was talking to someone who's, who's working with, uh, data centers, uh, in, in, in, in,
• 48:57
  on the periphery of the data center industry and in the US. And 10 years ago, uh, two or ten
• 49:03
  mega watt demand for a data center. Um, yeah, that's just a big number. Uh, was, was a, was a, was,
• 49:09
  it was a big, a big thing. Um, and the last five years or so, you know, 200 megawatts is what a,
• 49:16
  um, you know, the big Facebook Amazon, uh, from what? Sorry. From, from, from two to two hundred.
• 49:23
  Yeah. And then now, um, there's a data center company in the US that apparently is building
• 49:28
  two data centers that are a gigawatt each and they're motivated. Yeah. So it's a thousand megawatts.
• 49:33
  So, so 500 times bigger than they were a decade ago. Yeah, right. Uh, and, uh, the, the, the,
• 49:40
  the energy demand is coming from AI. It's massively more energy, um, hungry. Uh, and people are
• 49:48
  talking very seriously that we're going to have to build power stations next to these data centers.
• 49:53
  And, uh, I just, yeah, they were hard to swallow, uh, science fiction films 20 years ago,
• 50:02
  where there were these AIs with nuclear reactors at the core of them and the hero would go in and
• 50:06
  turn off the nuclear reactor and the whole AI would power down and humanity would be free. Um, we,
• 50:14
  we, we are, I just think, you know, it's not that we're, we're not even thinking, oh, um, how do we
• 50:21
  work carefully with this? We are, we're scaling up. We are throwing, if, if the AI had, if, if it,
• 50:31
  I'm not at all saying it has, uh, uh, uh, uh, sentience, but it's almost like saying humans give me
• 50:35
  what I need. And we're saying, yes, uh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, let's talk about, uh, power,
• 50:42
  about power, then, uh, oh, crystalline energy. This is obviously something that motivates you
• 50:47
  and obviously where, where did your, where did your concern and activism come from?
• 50:52
  Um, well, first, um, I, uh, um, I moved back from the US in 2000. Um, sorry, 2001.
• 51:04
  Was that before or after the 11? Um, I missed 9, 11. Um, yeah, I left the US on September 10th
• 51:12
  and arrived on September 12th. Um, you're lucky you're able to land. Was it just, I guess it was
• 51:18
  just happening? Was it while you were landing? Yeah, we, an hour out of Sydney, um, the pilot came
• 51:23
  on, on, on to the, um, yeah, uh, catacombs and, and said, uh, while you're in flight, terrorist threats
• 51:31
  were received against US aviation, um, our intelligence is that we were never, um, we were
• 51:38
  never in threat. More information will be available on your arrival. And we said, what does that
• 51:42
  even mean? Yeah. Um, you know, terrorism wasn't even something we thought about at that point.
• 51:48
  We landed and, um, there was, I remember there was a, a form letter that United Airlines had that
• 51:54
  was, was all blank except for the flight numbers. So it was something that they prepare in
• 51:58
  the event of a crash while you're flying. Um, and they had to squeeze two, I think three,
• 52:03
  you know, two, two, was two United flights. Oh, I see. Um, they, they, they, they put in the,
• 52:08
  the call signs and had to squeeze them into the box and the media swamped our plane and we had
• 52:12
  no idea why we were of interest. Right. And just in terms of the timing, so that, uh, listeners who
• 52:18
  aren't in Australia or where it happened very late at night on, uh, the 11th in Australian time,
• 52:24
  which means that it would have been while you were in flight, you would have landed at six in the
• 52:28
  morning or something. Exactly. Probably. Yeah. And it was all just still underway. You know,
• 52:33
  George W. Bush would have been flying in a, um, disclosed location and all that sort of stuff.
• 52:38
  And all the monitors and the fact that the towers had come down. Yeah. And most, yeah, most of
• 52:43
  the monitors in, in the airport were switched on to the news and it, we had no idea. No one was
• 52:49
  sure at that stage where there was two buildings or 20 and there were all sorts of rumors. Uh, yeah,
• 52:56
  it was, it was a complete fog of your information fog. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but distinctly there was,
• 53:02
  there was a woman checking our bags from Sydney down to Melbourne, uh, was crying. And we said,
• 53:10
  yeah, that's pretty awful. And she said, uh, and, and she was crying because it was the last day
• 53:17
  answer that was flying. Oh my goodness. A domestic airline in Australia. Yeah. No,
• 53:22
  it bust. Yep. Wow. Hmm. That's, that's revealing of her priorities, I suppose. Yeah. Well,
• 53:28
  it was a, yeah, I think a traumatic, uh, it was, it was, anyway, bizarre. So, yeah, so, so we,
• 53:33
  we left the US, um, uh, wondering if we, it was a very tough decision to move back to Australia.
• 53:41
  Um, we thought, oh, are we doing the right thing, hopped on this plane and then arrived going,
• 53:46
  thank goodness. It's a, who's the we? Uh, already married. Uh, already married. We had a, um,
• 53:53
  Katrina and I had a, had a one year old. Uh, um, and where did you meet Katrina? Uh,
• 54:00
  actually met her at, uh, Jolong grammar. That's cool. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We were, we were friends, um,
• 54:05
  didn't, didn't go out for, it took us about five years to get together. And we had, um,
• 54:10
  uh, a long distance relationship as, as I bounced around the world and she did too. Um, uh, yeah,
• 54:16
  but we got, we got married in, in, uh, 97, um, in the States. Uh, no, we actually got married
• 54:22
  in Greece. Um, oh, how wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. We, uh, we didn't want to drag our Australian friends
• 54:28
  to the US. We didn't want to drag our US friends to Australia. So we thought, well,
• 54:31
  neutral territory, neutral territory. We're pretty lovely. Okay. So you get back to Australia.
• 54:35
  And then yes, I want to get to present day politics. Okay. So, so get, so get, get back to Australia.
• 54:41
  And, um, uh, I started working for the family, um, business with, uh, they, they, I had a,
• 54:48
  they gave me a task. Um, uh, they wanted to do two things, um, bring some automation into the,
• 54:56
  into the business. It was very difficult to get staff to a particular job checking the water
• 55:01
  supplies of the, um, of, of cattle stations because everyone with a pulse had been, uh,
• 55:08
  sloped across to the mines in northern Australia. And it was very, very difficult to staff this, um,
• 55:14
  particular job of where you'd just hop in a car and drive between each of the different
• 55:19
  bore sites and just check that there's water for the cattle. Right. Um, you'd do that. Take you
• 55:24
  six days to do the whole, uh, to, to do sort of three loops of the property. Uh, you have Sunday off
• 55:30
  and do it again. And they just had a real problem with, um, attracting staff. It wasn't a job boom
• 55:35
  at the time. And there was a lot of money in mining. And yeah, exactly. And agriculture just could
• 55:40
  not afford to pay people the same. Um, yeah. So they wanted me to solve, yeah, how can we
• 55:45
  apply some automation with this? And, you know, some of the work I'd done, um, uh, I'd been in,
• 55:50
  we sort of skipped over Silicon Valley, but I worked sort of in deep tech for, um, nearly five years
• 55:56
  there. Um, and, uh, and we also had another problem is that we, we were burning about a million
• 56:02
  litres of diesel a year, um, a lot of it for electricity on, on the stations. And was there a way,
• 56:11
  you're that because they were off grid or they just had some high power demands? Uh, both off grid.
• 56:17
  Water is, water is a big thing. One, one, one station I worked at, did some analysis worked out.
• 56:21
  It was, um, costing us 18 grand a year, uh, just to keep the grass green. Um, well,
• 56:29
  I said that to a manager and he said, worth every penny.
• 56:34
  Yeah, you come in from a day at the yards and to take your shoes off and walk on green grass.
• 56:39
  Oh, that's a lot. Uh, it was, you know, for the mental health of everyone on the station,
• 56:43
  he said, worth every penny. Um, but we were wasting a lot of power, a lot of diesel for,
• 56:50
  there are a lot of inefficiencies in the system. So, uh, I worked on an energy efficiency project.
• 56:54
  The first time I'd really worked, I mean, I've been, I've been playing with electricity and,
• 56:58
  you know, I electrocuted myself when I was two and a half. So I said, I, I, I tried to
• 57:03
  spec my fascination till then. But, um, yeah, did a lot of work on energy efficiency.
• 57:08
  Did a, did a pretty detailed review of whether solar could help us at that point? And it was, um,
• 57:14
  it was marginal. It's back in 2002. It was hard to justify. You'd have to bring in tons of
• 57:20
  lead acid batteries and solar panels, um, cost about 15 times as much. Maybe I should really think
• 57:27
  those numbers, but probably 30 times as much, uh, as they do now. So it really didn't make a lot of
• 57:32
  sense. And around that time, um, my wife and I built a house in regional Victoria on a farm.
• 57:39
  And it was off grid. Um, uh, it just was going to cost way too much to bring power lines in.
• 57:46
  And they would have gone across our view. So we, um, we built off off grid. And it was pretty early
• 57:51
  for an off grid system. So I learned a lot about. And what was the electricity supply off grid
• 57:56
  there? Were we using solar or solar with lead acid batteries? Yeah. Um, it was going to,
• 58:01
  it was going to cost $66,000 for a power line and it cost 50 grand for, um, solar, battery,
• 58:08
  with a diesel and diesel backup. Right. The diesel backup was, you know, with that,
• 58:15
  that, that phase, uh, probably, um, uh, I don't know, a few hundred hours a year of, of diesel
• 58:26
  generator. Yeah. Um, we, we upgraded the system a few years ago. And were you exercise about
• 58:30
  climate change at this point? What was motivating the solar thing that long ago? For that, it was
• 58:35
  just the, initially it was, it was just practical. You didn't want a diesel generator running
• 58:40
  24 hours a day. Um, yeah, I definitely didn't want that. What didn't make sense to do,
• 58:45
  yeah, economically, to run one. Right. Um, and you, you, you, you, you want the freezer going,
• 58:52
  even when you're not there. Yeah. Yeah. So made a lot of sense to, and it was cheaper to have
• 58:56
  solar than it was to bring, to bring power. And so I learned a lot from that. A lot of
• 59:00
  teething problems in the early stage. Um, uh, the, the supplier of our system later admitted
• 59:06
  to me that we were their first off-grid customer. What? And, uh, and then he joked that we were
• 59:10
  also their last off-grid customer. Yeah. I decided it was just too much hassle. But so, and get,
• 59:15
  so get us to the point at which this becomes a tipping point for you. And, uh, you know, essentially
• 59:20
  a life quality. And also how you got into politics were like when, okay, well, uh, if I could,
• 59:27
  if they were probably the most important moment, um, for, for all, for that whole journey or the
• 59:32
  important episode was, um, I, I, I bumped into a, um, a lovely but somewhat eccentric Danish, um,
• 59:43
  builder of straw bal houses in, in, in Dalsford, who wanted to build a community wind farm,
• 59:49
  wanted to, he'd grow, he'd grown up in Denmark. And at that stage, um, I think there were, there
• 59:55
  were 2,300, um, community owned wind farms in, in Denmark, whether it was owned by the local
• 1:00:01
  council or farmer cooperative or, um, the, the one of the first offshore wind farms in the world is
• 1:00:07
  in the Bay of Copenhagen and its own by a cooperative of, um, tens of thousands of Copenhagen
• 1:00:13
  residents. Um, so he had that vision to bring it, to bring that model to, uh, Victoria and I was
• 1:00:19
  just hooked on the idea as soon as I heard it. Um, he, uh, eventually held, um, he got a bunch of
• 1:00:25
  people together, project gained, um, started gaining traction, held a town hall meeting to decide
• 1:00:30
  whether or not we're really going to go ahead and do this. And I went in, um, to that meeting,
• 1:00:35
  thinking I'd be up for being part of it. Uh, but it accidentally came out as the chairman of the
• 1:00:40
  new organisation. Yeah, I said, you know, put my hand up, you know, that I was interested and
• 1:00:46
  got on the board and then the board sort of pointed to me and said, well, you, you should be
• 1:00:49
  in a real chair. It's like, okay, I've never done this before. But we, but that, that was a really
• 1:00:55
  fun project because it was at the intersection of community, um, capital raising. We had to raise
• 1:01:01
  a bunch of money to build this. It's a two turbine wind farm quite small now, uh, only four
• 1:01:07
  megawatts, but um, it's owned by a cooperative 2000 members and it generates as much power as
• 1:01:14
  the town uses. Uh, so it's, um, uh, yeah, um, we, so we had to raise a bunch of money. We had to
• 1:01:23
  find people who, you know, the contractors to build it and sign on the contracts. There's the
• 1:01:28
  planning system you had to go through. But there was a whole media and politic, politic side to it.
• 1:01:33
  And because it was a small organization and being the chair, I had to have my, I had to have a
• 1:01:39
  part in every, you know, I had to get a taste of every part of it. I think there were 35 different
• 1:01:44
  contracts to sign to put this project together. Uh, and I was a signatory on, you know, on,
• 1:01:49
  on pretty much all of them. Um, so, uh, yeah, through that, I, um, yeah, I met a lot of really
• 1:02:01
  amazing, um, local, you know, local Daosford residents, but people around the country who are
• 1:02:08
  interested in this concept, um, and, uh, and it became, you know, it was a fairly significant project
• 1:02:14
  of community, um, taking, uh, yeah, rather than sitting back and thinking someone's sure
• 1:02:20
  ought to fix this. Yeah. Of, of saying, you know what, we're going to do it ourselves and they
• 1:02:24
  did it and they're incredibly proud. So a lot of, a lot of social capital was built in that. And
• 1:02:28
  it was at a time, um, we're seeing echoes of this now, a time where, you know, wind farms were
• 1:02:32
  controversial. And he was a, he was a community embracing it, you know, as a yes in my backyard
• 1:02:37
  rather than a not in my backyard. Yeah. So I got a, I got a lot out of that, um, got co-opted to, um,
• 1:02:44
  to join a lot of, um, advocacy trips up to Canberra, uh, which I thought made, we're making,
• 1:02:50
  you know, we're going to make a difference and I realized that that, that kind of advocacy of,
• 1:02:55
  of getting a bunch of, um, uh, a bunch of people together and, um, putting together a report
• 1:03:02
  and going and knocking on doors in Canberra and saying, Hey, we've got this great idea,
• 1:03:05
  is not really how change happens. Change happens by funding independent candidates to run against
• 1:03:12
  vulnerable, uh, politicians. Well, certainly, uh, that's probably the most impactful thing.
• 1:03:23
  How did that idea come about? I, I, I was, I was exposed. One of, one of my favorite thinkers, uh,
• 1:03:31
  in, in the public sphere, um, Professor Lawrence Lessig, uh, he, he was at Stanford now,
• 1:03:37
  now at Harvard, um, gave, gave a, he's a fascinating guy if you ever come across him. He,
• 1:03:43
  he invented or he came up with the, um, creative commons, uh, concept where, which, which is,
• 1:03:49
  how we manage, um, uh, you know, uh, public domain, uh, licensing for content, almost every
• 1:03:58
  government report and so much content on the internet now is, uh, not under a copyright system,
• 1:04:04
  but under the creative commons system, I mean, you know, you can have this, you can do what you're
• 1:04:08
  like with these very clear, um, uh, limma strengths or not, or not as it might be. So he did,
• 1:04:14
  he, he revolutionized, um, copyright and public domain, sort of in the first decade of this
• 1:04:20
  century and he spent most of the last decade looking at, uh, at American, at democracy. He's
• 1:04:26
  still very active, um, at working out where, uh, our democratic system is, is going, going wrong.
• 1:04:33
  He inspired me very much with a, um, there's a quote that he used to start his presentations with.
• 1:04:39
  It's a, um, Henry David Thoreau quote that, um, for a thousand hacking at the branches of evil,
• 1:04:46
  there's about one striking at the root, uh, and really encouraging us to, uh, we need people to,
• 1:04:56
  to be hacking at the branches every, every, every day, but you need to go to the root problem.
• 1:05:02
  And I, I had been mucking around with advocacy, trying to convince, um, particularly my, my,
• 1:05:08
  my local member that they're on the wrong, um, who was your local member? Local member was, um,
• 1:05:13
  uh, Josh Rodenberg. It was a backbencher when I first met him, but worked his way up to being
• 1:05:17
  the treasurer, but spent a fair bit of time with him trying to get him to understand that his
• 1:05:22
  party was getting on the wrong side of history on this, uh, on energy, uh, transformation.
• 1:05:28
  Was he receptive to that message personally?
• 1:05:33
  Uh, overall, I'd say not. Um, no, for him, the, the politics were, were more important than, um,
• 1:05:42
  there was no, the, the, the politics were the purpose. Um, uh, yeah. So I, I spent a lot of time
• 1:05:51
  trying to change minds. Uh, and, uh, and, and I was, you know, and I got, uh, for a while there,
• 1:06:01
  I was a member of, um, the fundraising organization that, that supports the, the member for Kuyong.
• 1:06:07
  Um, uh, but I was ultimately kicked out of that, out of that group after making some critical
• 1:06:13
  comments on, uh, uh, on, on where the coalition in particular, Friedenberg was going, um, on, on
• 1:06:20
  energy, making some really big missteps, I thought. Um, and I, yeah. So Friedenberg kicked you out
• 1:06:29
  as a fundraiser because you, as part of that's something to do with, uh, with the approval of a,
• 1:06:34
  oh, there was a, no, uh, AGL had announced, uh, that it was closing the LL power stations and,
• 1:06:43
  and, and the government, um, well, Friedenberg was on, on the phone to the directors of the company,
• 1:06:48
  um, trying to get the CEO sacked, um, uh, trying to force the company to keep the power station open.
• 1:06:55
  Right. When actually the power station had been slated for closure by the new software.
• 1:06:58
  And you wrote, wrote a piece saying, if it's going to close, let it close,
• 1:07:01
  well, I wrote a, I wrote a piece saying why it's going to close, why the economics, uh, and, and why,
• 1:07:08
  I wrote a piece talking about how, uh, just a throwaway line in the middle that, you know, for,
• 1:07:14
  for an accomplished tennis player, um, such a simple, unforced era, uh, was, was, was, you know,
• 1:07:21
  was, was, was really silly. Um, because Friedenberg was a good, uh, tennis player when he was,
• 1:07:26
  uh, and, and, um, you know, the, AGL were never going to say yes. Um, he also picked the wrong guy
• 1:07:33
  to try to, to bully the, the, uh, CEO of AGL was American. Um, his, young kid was back in the US.
• 1:07:42
  He didn't have any, he didn't have any, um, reverence or fear of, uh, of political, uh, leaders in
• 1:07:49
  Australia. Um, he wasn't about to go and jeopardize his career because he was worried about what the,
• 1:07:56
  what the liberal party thought of him. Uh, so he was very happy to, um, to dig in on the issue.
• 1:08:02
  He was always going to win. So, and, and trying to get him fired was, was, was, um, uh, yeah,
• 1:08:10
  was, was a really silly, it was really silly path forward. I mean, was also silly of Friedenberg
• 1:08:14
  and hindsight to antagonize you and boot you out as a fundraiser since you ended up helping
• 1:08:19
  to coordinate his demise, his political demise. I'll leave that, I'll leave that to others to
• 1:08:24
  connect the dots. Um, but, you know, it's a surface to say that I, I, I worked for a long time
• 1:08:31
  to try to change minds and then realized, um, that, that that was probably hacking at the branches
• 1:08:38
  and, uh, inspired by Lesick who, who had, um, similarly, started an organization to, uh, support
• 1:08:49
  candidates running on a platform of integrity. Um, so I was very much inspired by him.
• 1:08:54
  Uh, I, I, I realized it's much easier to, um, uh, it's, you know, much easier to change the
• 1:09:02
  politicians than to change the politicians minds. Right. How did you go about doing it?
• 1:09:08
  Um, well, the, so the community independence movement started long, long, long before me,
• 1:09:13
  and I'm only a small part of, of that movement. You're a lot of its money. I'm not.
• 1:09:19
  Um, uh, climate 200 was probably, um, you know, it was less than half the money in the movement.
• 1:09:28
  And, uh, I'm about 2% of the money. Sorry. By you, I mean, climate 200. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:09:34
  Well, we're, yeah. Uh, by now, about 13,000, uh, donors behind, behind climate 200. Um,
• 1:09:42
  what I did is pull, climate hundreds a bit of a play on the organization that I was kicked out of
• 1:09:47
  was kuyong 200. Um, um, so it was, you know, a, a play on that, um, it kuyong 200 is the
• 1:09:55
  electorate that Josh frightened that you were living in. Yeah. So it, it, it, it exists, it exists to
• 1:10:00
  perpetuate, um, the liberal member for kuyong's, um, tenure, climate 200 exists to, uh, help, um,
• 1:10:11
  pro climate independence get into, uh, uh, you know, have, have a, right. But it was not,
• 1:10:17
  it was not a subtle job, but it was not. I let it do you connect the dots. Um,
• 1:10:23
  uh, yeah. I mean, I, I, I look, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have thought to do it. If I, um, I, you know,
• 1:10:32
  what's the thing they say in politics? You, you want to keep people, you know, inside the tent,
• 1:10:37
  pissing out, not outside, pissing it. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, yeah. So, but I, in, in 2018, I,
• 1:10:48
  accidentally, and it's a longer story, but got involved in the kids off Nauru campaign. The
• 1:10:52
  government had told us that there were no kids in detention, but at that stage, there were nearly
• 1:10:57
  200 kids on the road. Um, a significant number of them, uh, had been, um, uh, subject to abuse.
• 1:11:07
  There were kids as young as tan attempting suicide, and the, and all while the government was
• 1:11:11
  telling us to know kids on detention, um, and a very well-run civil society campaign, um, worked
• 1:11:19
  on elevating the issue, uh, to, um, and it was, it was clever because Australians have a complex
• 1:11:28
  relationship with, you know, asylum seekers that arrive by boat. Um, uh, and, and, you know,
• 1:11:35
  it would disappointingly all over the map. And on, on, on that, and disappointingly, a large
• 1:11:39
  proportion of people are really worked up, um, uh, about that. But almost no one thinks that
• 1:11:46
  kids deserve to, uh, be in detention just because their parents, uh, you know, for, for whatever,
• 1:11:54
  however, their parents arrived in the country. So that was a very effective campaign. And
• 1:11:59
  the independence in parliament at the time, who had the balance of power, um, very, you know, it's,
• 1:12:04
  it's funny that whole, um, Nemesis series came and went and it was never mentioned in that, that for
• 1:12:10
  the first six months of Morrison's tenure as prime minister, it was a minority government.
• 1:12:14
  Right. Uh, and the independence had a massive win with first getting the kids off Nauru and then
• 1:12:21
  with the Medevac, uh, legislation that helped, um, uh, you know, medically vulnerable, detainees,
• 1:12:30
  offshore, get access to medical care. Yeah, bring them to the main known to, so what? Yeah, so in
• 1:12:35
  that, I had a lot of exposure to independence, particularly Karen Phelps, uh, and I just saw how
• 1:12:41
  they were. Karen was a former head of the Australian Medical Association and a GP who went into politics
• 1:12:46
  and independent. Yes. She, she, um, went, went Malcolm Turnbull, um, uh, resigned from the
• 1:12:54
  little party after he was ousted. Um, she, yeah, she contested his seat and, uh, and one in, in,
• 1:12:59
  in November, 2018, um, and, um, she and the other and the rest of the crossbench, both in the
• 1:13:07
  House and the Senate did an, did an amazing job, uh, working legislation through the system,
• 1:13:13
  uh, against the government's wishes that, um, was the, you know, probably the, the only piece of
• 1:13:20
  legislation that had, that had only positive human rights impact on, on refugees in, in, in that
• 1:13:25
  decade. Um, so all the pieces came together. I, I had been given, I didn't so much realize that,
• 1:13:35
  that my, um, work to change from within, it wasn't a realization that my change from within
• 1:13:42
  wasn't working. It was, it was, I was very forcefully told, your change from within is not welcome.
• 1:13:46
  Right. Um, uh, so I had to be, yeah, I had to have a door at one point literally closed in my face,
• 1:13:54
  to get that message. So I was stubborn to give up on that change within, within strategy.
• 1:13:59
  Yeah. But it came across, um, independence, who were just a cut above when it came to
• 1:14:05
  integrity and, uh, eventually you were like, well, all right, if you want to fight, then, uh,
• 1:14:09
  well, my, my, my theory of change was you've got a, you've got a party that is being pushed further
• 1:14:17
  and further to the right every day through bad advice in, uh, in, in the Murdoch media. And
• 1:14:24
  there's no countervailing force pushing, pushing them back. And I remember, um, but I don't think
• 1:14:30
  more to the right now as a result of the independent insurgents.
• 1:14:36
  I, um, they certainly further the right. And I, um, uh, and I would say my, my theory of change
• 1:14:44
  that they would, um, they would respond by, you know, they would respond rationally. Um, uh, my,
• 1:14:52
  my, you know, I was wrong. I, but of course they won't because you've stripped all of the moderates
• 1:14:57
  out of the party. Yeah. So that's what, that's what I want to question. Who were the moderates that
• 1:15:00
  left the party? Um, I'd say, well, Jason Fallinsky, Josh Friedenberg, uh, Trent Zimmerman,
• 1:15:07
  Zimmerman, I'll give you as a moderate. And Sharma, maybe the, the voting records certainly, um,
• 1:15:13
  are not flash. I mean, um, Zimmerman was on the, um, but let's just define what we mean by
• 1:15:19
  moderates. When you're voting as a government, you're going to vote along with the government.
• 1:15:24
  So your voting record is always going to be whatever the government's is. But what the government
• 1:15:29
  does in the secrecy of cabinet room is, I mean, in a parliamentary, in a party system,
• 1:15:35
  that is the way the party works, right? But the liberal party prides itself on free thinking,
• 1:15:40
  right? On, on, on, on, on, that's a slogan. Yes. That's a slogan. Yes. But the overall
• 1:15:46
  direction of the party or the government is going to be determined by the, yeah, the sort of,
• 1:15:52
  the reasonable list of the members who were in it and all the reasonable ones are no longer there.
• 1:15:57
  Well, let me, let me challenge. Um, I mean, Friedenberg didn't call himself a moderate. He wasn't
• 1:16:01
  part of the moderate faction. He was part of Morrison's faction. Yeah, but that was not the hard
• 1:16:06
  right faction. They were the, yeah, because I'm not, I'm not saying it was part of the hard
• 1:16:09
  right faction, but, um, Friedenberg wants the other faction, if not the moderate faction.
• 1:16:15
  Oh, they were, they were, they were three factions in, in the liberal party at that point. Um,
• 1:16:20
  the, so semantic, but, all right. Um, but, but, I mean, in the battle, in the battle between,
• 1:16:26
  between Scott Morrison and Josh Friedenberg on the one hand, you know, versus the right,
• 1:16:31
  they were perceived as the moderate, they were perceived as the less right wing faction.
• 1:16:35
  I don't know what they call it internally in the party. Yeah. So, I mean, I challenge you to, to,
• 1:16:40
  um, give me an identifiable position that Friedenberg took on anything. Um, that, a moderate,
• 1:16:48
  you know, that, that would classify him as a moderate. Um, he's, uh, the moderates didn't count
• 1:16:52
  him as a moderate. He didn't call himself a moderate. Um, uh, he, I mean, in fact, I find,
• 1:17:00
  you know, no discernible ideology at all. Yeah. I mean, that's fair. Let's say, let's say that
• 1:17:05
  being and being not an ideological right winger is better than being a highly ideological.
• 1:17:11
  Sure. Sure. Sure. So I wouldn't, uh, um, I, I mean, I think he was, um, uh, look, I,
• 1:17:18
  I mean, leave to, leave to fry to the side and just talk about the fact that the dynamic that
• 1:17:23
  happens when you, by, almost by definition, one's ability to get independence to win in conservative
• 1:17:32
  seats depends on the running in conservative seats, where the voters are going to be most
• 1:17:38
  amenable to not voting for a conservative. Therefore, you're going to take out the candidates,
• 1:17:44
  the members of parliament who are, if you don't want to call them moderate, then you're
• 1:17:49
  at least call their voters moderate because they're the, they're the electorates we've got,
• 1:17:52
  whereby definition and independent could win in a hard right seat, where, where voters are
• 1:17:57
  super, super right wing, you couldn't do what you did because it'd be hard for, to convince
• 1:18:03
  anyone not to vote for. So what did I do? Uh, so that's that, um, so, so I'd, well, replaced
• 1:18:10
  modern, replaced, replaced moderate, uh, you know, members of parliament with independence,
• 1:18:16
  replaced moderate members of the ruling government with independence and therefore allowed
• 1:18:22
  Labour to win. Labour would have won anyway, wouldn't they?
• 1:18:28
  Labour, Labour, Labour, Labour won enough seats in their own right, uh, to govern. So they,
• 1:18:34
  they went in the context of a teal wave. Uh, if the teal wave hadn't happened, Labour still would,
• 1:18:41
  let's say every one of those seats still, every one of the, maybe I'll grant you that, but either
• 1:18:45
  way that the conservative party would be more full of, I think there's, I think there's, I think
• 1:18:50
  there's definitely, um, it's a, it's a form of survivor bias here. Um, uh, so climate
• 1:18:57
  200 supported 23, uh, communities at the, at the 2022 election. Um, we didn't start any of the
• 1:19:04
  campaigns. We had nothing to do with the selection of any of the, uh, of any of the candidates. Um,
• 1:19:10
  we stood back and these groups, uh, these groups rose up. Now, um, what does that mean now? How,
• 1:19:17
  how did they, uh, rise up? Um, so this, this movement started back in, um, really about 2012
• 1:19:24
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