Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Chinese War Games” with Sam Roggeveen

Transcript

“Chinese War Games” with Sam Roggeveen · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, so here's a doozy foyer of a dangerous
• 0:08
  idea.
• 0:09
  Let's say that you are a medium sized country, medium sized power.
• 0:14
  And a gigantic superpower that could wipe the floor with you begins to bully you, could
• 0:18
  Joel you, coerce you, intimidate you.
• 0:22
  Your natural reaction is to push back and bully them a little bit, so they bully you
• 0:27
  a little more and you bully them back.
• 0:30
  But you know that at the end of that long chain of escalation, they will win.
• 0:37
  What do you do?
• 0:39
  How do you stand up for yourself at the same time as making it clear that you're not
• 0:42
  going to be pushed around?
• 0:44
  This is a scenario that could apply to Canada's current situation with regard to the United
• 0:49
  States as much as with regard to Australia's situation vis-a-vis China.
• 0:55
  Next Friday, a virgin Australia pilot was flying the heavily trafficked route between
• 1:02
  Australia and New Zealand and noticed some flashes in the water underneath him.
• 1:09
  And he called it in and began to divert away from what seemed to be live firing taking
• 1:14
  place on the seas between Australia and New Zealand.
• 1:19
  All flights had to divert because of these mid-air warnings over what turned out to be
• 1:25
  massive Chinese warships, at least one of them was a massive Chinese warship accompanied
• 1:31
  by others, conducting live fire training sessions directly underneath one of the busiest flight
• 1:38
  paths between Australia and New Zealand.
• 1:41
  This is the first time that the Chinese have ever sent naval assets this far south down
• 1:47
  the Australian coast.
• 1:48
  It's the first time they've conducted live fire exercises so close to Australia, inside
• 1:54
  our exclusive economic zone, and it has a lot of Australians scratching our heads.
• 2:00
  Why would you send warships, 13,000 kilometres from your home base, immediately off the coast
• 2:07
  of the largest city in Australia, into a busy flight corridor that links the only two
• 2:13
  Western democracies in the region to shoot at things just off the coastline?
• 2:20
  Imagine if China sent warships just off the coast of Florida to conduct live training
• 2:26
  exercises that forced flight between Miami and New York City to divert.
• 2:31
  There would be hell to pay because America can make hell to pay and Australia can't.
• 2:38
  So what do you do in a world of Ukraine, of Putin, of Trump, and threats against Canada?
• 2:44
  I wanted to sit down with somebody who studies this for a living who understands geopolitical
• 2:48
  strategy and who can help us to understand what the 21st century might look like and
• 2:52
  how we should be behaving regarding the United States, its allies, and the rise of China.
• 2:57
  Sam Rogovin is just the man he's an Australian foreign policy analyst, he's the director
• 3:02
  of the Lowey Institute's International Security Program and he previously worked in intelligence
• 3:07
  for the Australian government, his book is called The A Kidna Strategy, that's about how
• 3:12
  Australia should develop an independent security strategy, I hope you enjoy it.
• 3:16
  As much as I did, the one and only, Sam Rogovin.
• 3:20
  I like all the material, I like the fleshy humanness of just listening to the conversation.
• 3:28
  Once you're taken all that out, you might as well just read a transcript.
• 3:32
  That's right.
• 3:33
  Exactly.
• 3:34
  And if you've ever read a transcript of a podcast, it's not good.
• 3:38
  It's Goldigook.
• 3:40
  So your origin story, I'm just going to imagine you as being like a James Bond desk super
• 3:46
  spy, might not be that glamorous in the Australian intelligence services, but you tell me, definitely
• 3:53
  not.
• 3:54
  I hate to let you down, but no, so the word spies typically attach to people who are undercover
• 4:01
  and go overseas and extract information from foreign officials.
• 4:05
  I didn't do that.
• 4:07
  That is a profession, and I dealt with some of those people, but I never did that.
• 4:11
  Can we call you a spook?
• 4:12
  Yeah, I guess so.
• 4:13
  So look, there are various categories of intelligence, right?
• 4:17
  There is spying, which in the trade is known as human intelligence.
• 4:23
  There's also sigint, signals intelligence.
• 4:26
  That's where you listen in on people's phone calls and on their electronic transmissions.
• 4:31
  There's also immense, which is imagery intelligence, and that's satellite photos.
• 4:35
  And now there's in more recent years, a separate category has been created, and it's now hugely
• 4:40
  important.
• 4:41
  Ossent, open source intelligence, getting much bigger for obvious reasons, right?
• 4:46
  Because of the explosion of information that's taking over our whole.
• 4:49
  Open source intelligence, meaning you shift through the deluge of information that's
• 4:55
  on the web.
• 4:56
  Right.
• 4:57
  That's not protected.
• 4:58
  That's not secret.
• 4:59
  And so there are groups of people whose job it is to sift through all that stuff.
• 5:04
  Those are people called all-source analysts, and that's what I did.
• 5:08
  That was my job.
• 5:09
  That was my job.
• 5:10
  I was an all-source analyst.
• 5:11
  So I said at a job, I read this fire, I was a material that came my way, and I tried
• 5:16
  to make sense of it for the government.
• 5:17
  So I write reports for ministers, and what's the top of the funnel?
• 5:20
  And what is the difference between my order on Uber Eats as a piece of public information,
• 5:27
  assuming that it is, I don't know if it is, and something that could be relevant?
• 5:33
  Well, the main thing that all-source analysts look at is classified sources.
• 5:38
  So the open source stuff tends to come last.
• 5:41
  Traditionally.
• 5:42
  That's something that needs to change, and the culture is changing.
• 5:45
  How is that different from signals intelligence, then, if it's classified?
• 5:49
  How is what different?
• 5:50
  How is the analysis of classified information different from signals intelligence?
• 5:55
  Well, so signals intelligence alone is known as raw intelligence.
• 6:00
  So you might get a transcript of a telephone call that you listened to.
• 6:03
  Right.
• 6:04
  So the job of the all-source analyst is to read that transcript and say, well, what does
• 6:07
  this mean?
• 6:08
  What was that minister who we were listening into, or that army general who we were listening
• 6:14
  into, talking to some counter-poor, what do they mean when they say X, Y, and Z?
• 6:19
  How do I interpret this for the government?
• 6:21
  And by the way, what are all these other sources telling me?
• 6:24
  Do they accord with what I just read about this phone transcript or a contradictory?
• 6:29
  What is it all mean?
• 6:30
  And most of those sources derive from our own assets, or are they shared from other
• 6:35
  allies?
• 6:36
  So it's shared among the five eyes.
• 6:38
  So that's a huge asset that Australia has, there's part of the five eyes intelligence
• 6:42
  community along with the United States, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand.
• 6:47
  Obviously, the United States is the biggest contributor of raw intelligence to that.
• 6:51
  All five countries participate, and all of them in their various patches contribute intelligence
• 6:58
  to the feed and share.
• 7:00
  And is that feed a thing that actually exists in cyberspace in the sense that everything
• 7:05
  goes into it, and you can just take out what you want, or do you need to submit a request
• 7:09
  for a specific thing from one of the five eyes members in order to get your eyes on it?
• 7:12
  Well, my experience is pretty old, but I don't think it's changed that much.
• 7:16
  There's basically an internet, a web that's shared amongst them.
• 7:21
  But everything gets shared.
• 7:22
  Some stuff is sensitive that only gets shared by one or two of the partners.
• 7:27
  Sometimes it's kept within one country, Australia knows only, for instance.
• 7:34
  And when you're pouring over something that, you know, suppose that there's a transcript
• 7:37
  of the phone conversation that a minister for a foreign government had, you know, was
• 7:41
  someone else.
• 7:42
  Would it be fair to say that senior cabinet level ministers in most of the major countries
• 7:47
  are being spied on constantly by all of us?
• 7:51
  I don't think it's fair to say that they were all being spied on, but they're certainly
• 7:53
  all assuming that they're being spied on.
• 7:56
  I mean, it's a hard thing to do.
• 7:57
  It's a constant battle between offence and defense.
• 8:02
  It's also worth saying that actually the, you know, the value of all this intelligence
• 8:06
  is pretty limited.
• 8:07
  So the phone call, the salacious kind of stuff that you might imagine, that can be useful
• 8:13
  in the short term.
• 8:14
  Actually Bob Carr, former Australian foreign minister, had a great term for this.
• 8:18
  He called it espionage erotica, but, and it has its uses.
• 8:23
  You've got the mistress talking to the Japanese cabinet minister or something, right?
• 8:27
  Yeah.
• 8:28
  Yeah.
• 8:29
  Look, it has its uses.
• 8:30
  So, for instance, if I, if I were still an analyst and I had to produce a briefing
• 8:34
  for a minister who's going off to negotiate with a foreign counterpart, then a week later,
• 8:41
  let's say, then that intelligence material about, say, phone calls that they've been making
• 8:46
  a week earlier, extremely useful, could turn the negotiation in Australia's favour.
• 8:51
  But, the big picture issues, the kind that I'm guessing we'll get into later about China
• 8:57
  is rising, America is in relative decline, what's happening to NATO.
• 9:04
  My long experience in the intelligence community tells me that secret intelligence has only
• 9:10
  a marginal difference to the kind of conclusions that you draw.
• 9:13
  So, for those people listening who spend their time just looking at, you know, the unclassified
• 9:18
  world, the open source world, don't assume that you're at a huge disadvantage.
• 9:24
  And is that largely because the kinds of, I mean, there are a few at possible explanations
• 9:28
  for that that occurred to me?
• 9:29
  One would be that in general countries sort of make clear what their strategy is anyway.
• 9:36
  So there isn't a huge amount of behind-the-scenes conniving that you could glean from secret conversations
• 9:41
  that you can't glean from their outward actions and their policy pronouncements and their
• 9:44
  behaviour anyway.
• 9:46
  The other would be that even if there is a big difference between what they say they want
• 9:50
  to do and what they actually want to do, the kinds of conversations that they would be
• 9:54
  having would be had in person and in hypersecure manners that we can't get access to.
• 9:59
  Yeah, I think that's all correct, but I'd add one other factor, which is that the countries
• 10:06
  involved probably don't know themselves.
• 10:09
  So there's a classic somewhat more terrifying than either of the two of us.
• 10:13
  Well, maybe, but we're talking about trying to understand the world in five years time or ten
• 10:19
  years time.
• 10:21
  There's an American political scientist named Philip Tetlock who wrote a really groundbreaking
• 10:28
  book on this several years ago called Expert Political Judgment.
• 10:31
  And he followed political experts of various kinds around for literally decades at a time.
• 10:38
  And he would come back to them year after year and ask them to make predictions about their
• 10:42
  field of expertise and to sort of crudely abridge that mammoth piece of research.
• 10:49
  What he found was that political experts are no better at making predictions about their
• 10:54
  area of expertise than a chimpanzee throwing a data.
• 10:58
  I mean, prediction is incredibly difficult when you're talking about five and ten year
• 11:02
  trends.
• 11:03
  You can apply certain analytical techniques to improve your chances of success and intelligence
• 11:08
  agencies increasingly do that.
• 11:10
  But beyond five years, the rates of return on those kind of techniques and the rates of success,
• 11:17
  it becomes pretty low.
• 11:18
  It's amazing, isn't it?
• 11:19
  I mean, just says something about our psychology and our need for certainty and for predictability
• 11:24
  and for security that this is true across so many different spheres that, you know, meteorology
• 11:30
  beyond about five days is a coin toss, managed funds and financial experts rarely outperform
• 11:36
  the market.
• 11:37
  You know, you can look at field after field after field where we're just not a lot better
• 11:42
  than random.
• 11:43
  Yeah.
• 11:44
  Meteorology is an interesting example because in the intelligence studies field, and this
• 11:49
  is a whole field of research right into the intelligence world, there's a classic distinction
• 11:55
  made between puzzles and mysteries.
• 12:00
  So meteorology, I would class as a puzzle, but let me put it in another term that's sort
• 12:04
  of more in my field of geopolitics.
• 12:07
  So if you ask the question, how many nuclear weapons does North Korea have, that's a puzzle,
• 12:14
  which is to say that we have the answer, but it has an answer.
• 12:17
  Yeah, right.
• 12:18
  And we could find out if we try hard enough.
• 12:20
  But if you ask the question, what does North Korea intend to do with its nuclear weapons,
• 12:23
  that's not a puzzle.
• 12:24
  That's a mystery.
• 12:25
  I see.
• 12:26
  The answer's not out there.
• 12:28
  Intelligence agencies tend to focus on puzzles, the big issues, the things that ultimately
• 12:35
  matter most to us as a nation and as a world, those are mysteries.
• 12:39
  At the risk of going on a total tangent, do you have feelings about whether or not artificial
• 12:43
  intelligence is going to get any good at solving mysteries?
• 12:46
  And I only say that because you've worked with sophisticated computers that are trying
• 12:50
  to crunch a lot of information and sort what information is relevant from what information
• 12:54
  isn't.
• 12:55
  And I frequently think about computational power, just grunt force power, increasing at
• 13:00
  the exponential rate that it is, right, such that you're getting artifacts such as
• 13:04
  chat GPT that can communicate with us in ways that seem indistinguishable from sentience
• 13:09
  sort of, right, even just using, using grunt power, such that questions like the one that
• 13:15
  you posed as a puzzle, how many nuclear warheads does North Korea have, you know, a question
• 13:20
  like how many raindrops were falling from the sky on the day of JFK's assassination, right,
• 13:27
  is a much harder puzzle, but is still a puzzle that actually has a genuine answer.
• 13:34
  Will grunt computational grunt power only ever get us to that class of question, or is
• 13:40
  it also going to open up fields of understanding that we can't yet predict on the mysteries
• 13:46
  of geopolitics?
• 13:49
  Well, I'll confess at the start that I'm only beginning the process of trying to understand
• 13:55
  what to the implications of artificial intelligence for our world.
• 14:00
  My preliminary answer would be to say that it won't help, it ultimately, well, I would
• 14:11
  say that it can help reduce the rate of failure, but I'm reluctant to go much further than that.
• 14:18
  Given that the rate of failure is currently chimpanzees throwing things at a dartboard,
• 14:21
  I'll take what I can get.
• 14:22
  Yeah.
• 14:23
  Okay, let's talk about China then, unless you want to finish that thought.
• 14:26
  Please, no, please, no, let's get onto Terra firma here.
• 14:30
  What, so they've just come further south towards Australia, the Chinese Navy, they're never
• 14:36
  before, they're conducting lifefire exercises, you know, and patrolling essentially within
• 14:43
  Australia's exclusive economic zone and, you know, disrupting our flight paths between
• 14:50
  Australia and New Zealand.
• 14:52
  The government's answer to this is to say, don't worry about it, no Australian lives were
• 14:57
  ever under threat, you know, they weren't shooting at anybody.
• 15:01
  I think the average punters sense is that that's the wrong question, the actual, the correct
• 15:07
  question is like, what the fuck are you doing, China?
• 15:10
  Yeah.
• 15:11
  Well, let's first ground this in a little bit of context about what exactly the Chinese
• 15:19
  have done in these lifefire exercises.
• 15:21
  Please.
• 15:22
  It's tempting to imagine the worst, after all, the Chinese have sent a destroyer, a frigate
• 15:29
  and a replenishment ship.
• 15:30
  And the destroyer is known as the type 55 class, which is the most advanced of its kind
• 15:39
  in their Navy and one of the most advanced ships to operate in any Navy.
• 15:43
  So this is their best kit that they're sending to us and combined with the frigate that they've
• 15:49
  sent, it has somewhere in the order of 200 missiles of various kinds on board, right?
• 15:57
  It's not using any of those missiles in these drills, in these lifefire exercises.
• 16:01
  So when you hear the word lifefire, you're tempted to imagine the worst, but really what
• 16:05
  they're doing is floating some targets at sea off just off where the ships are and they're
• 16:14
  aiming their guns at it and they're deflating the target with their guns.
• 16:18
  That's essentially what they're doing.
• 16:19
  So the guns on board these ships are the lowest, the smallest class of weapons they have
• 16:24
  on board, the least powerful thing.
• 16:26
  Yes.
• 16:27
  This is powerful enough that a pilot at 34,000 feet can see flares on the surface of the
• 16:33
  ocean.
• 16:34
  And what absolutely ruin their day and the passengers on board, if it were to hit them.
• 16:38
  So yes.
• 16:39
  Lots of mention the fact that all of those missiles can easily take out Sydney and Melbourne
• 16:42
  from where that ship is located, were they to choose to press that button?
• 16:46
  No.
• 16:47
  No, that's not the case.
• 16:48
  Those missiles can't reach Sydney from the surface.
• 16:50
  It's not clear at the moment, even if those ships are carrying weapons, missiles, that
• 16:57
  can attack land targets at all.
• 17:00
  So basically, Peter Hartschib wrote that those missiles on that ship can reach Sydney
• 17:05
  and Melbourne.
• 17:06
  Well, he knows more than I do.
• 17:07
  I'm not sure he does know for sure.
• 17:08
  Well, we don't know that they were loaded, but the point is it's a big ship that has
• 17:13
  big guns on it.
• 17:14
  Yes.
• 17:15
  Those missiles can surely have a range of 1,000 to 2,000 kilometers.
• 17:17
  Ah.
• 17:18
  Well, again, it depends on what they have on board.
• 17:20
  So there are certainly plans to arm those ships with missiles that can attack land targets.
• 17:24
  It's not clear at the moment whether that particular class of missile has entered service yet.
• 17:29
  I see.
• 17:30
  That's literally a different piece of equipment.
• 17:31
  That's a different piece of equipment.
• 17:32
  It's a shooter to play in that it is.
• 17:33
  Oh, yeah.
• 17:34
  Absolutely.
• 17:35
  Shooting at a plane and shooting at a land target is a very, very different thing.
• 17:37
  And it's not clear that the, certainly not this frigate, the frigate is purely armed with
• 17:42
  air defense weapons.
• 17:43
  The destroyer may be armed with land attack weapons.
• 17:47
  But mostly you would carry weapons to shoot down aircraft and to sink ships.
• 17:52
  Okay.
• 17:53
  Got it.
• 17:54
  I mean, I think Hatch's point was simply, it's certainly a curious provocation to sail
• 17:59
  13,000 kilometers away from your home base and order to sit directly off the coast using
• 18:03
  a piece of equipment that may or may not be fitted precisely for the purpose of, but
• 18:09
  nonetheless clearly has the capacity to spontaneously take out one of your cities or do significant
• 18:15
  damage to it and not to announce that to the Australian government.
• 18:20
  And apparently not to get a message to the Australian Defence Force that you're about
• 18:22
  to do that.
• 18:23
  I mean, it isn't just a way of saying we can do this and if we were doing something different
• 18:28
  than an innocent exercise, then we would be doing that as well and there'd be nothing
• 18:31
  you could do about it.
• 18:32
  Yeah.
• 18:33
  Well, keep in mind that last part is still that last part that you said about the Chinese
• 18:37
  not informing Australia about it.
• 18:39
  That's contested.
• 18:40
  Yeah.
• 18:41
  Right.
• 18:42
  So we should just put a caveat on that.
• 18:46
  It's worth going back to the first part of your question about destroying Melbourne or Sydney.
• 18:51
  Let's assume for the moment that Peter Hatcher is right and they were armed with missiles
• 18:55
  that could attack land targets.
• 18:56
  That's not a clarify.
• 18:57
  I'm not claiming that Peter Hatcher claimed that they were armed with missiles that could
• 18:59
  do that.
• 19:00
  Okay.
• 19:01
  He was saying that this is obviously a demonstration because that vessel is one that
• 19:05
  whose missiles would be capable of a range of a thousand to two thousand kilometers.
• 19:09
  I understood.
• 19:10
  Let's assume they were land attack weapons.
• 19:13
  Those weapons could not destroy Melbourne or Sydney.
• 19:15
  No.
• 19:16
  They would not be nuclear arms.
• 19:17
  No, no, no.
• 19:18
  They could get targets.
• 19:19
  Yes, they're enough.
• 19:20
  And that was my personal idea.
• 19:21
  I wouldn't want to be in a skyscraper in Sydney while I was under attack from a Chinese
• 19:25
  destroyer.
• 19:26
  But yes, you're right.
• 19:27
  It doesn't mean it doesn't mean curtains to the five million people.
• 19:29
  No, indeed.
• 19:30
  Yeah.
• 19:31
  So anyway, to get back to the main question, which is what on earth were they doing?
• 19:35
  Yeah.
• 19:36
  What were they trying to do?
• 19:37
  There is a temptation here and it's reasonable and I don't want to resist it all together,
• 19:42
  but a temptation to constantly read subtext and to forget the text.
• 19:47
  But as Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
• 19:51
  So we should look at the text first and the text here is that they are training.
• 19:55
  They are practicing with new weapons that they have, but they're not terribly experienced
• 20:00
  at operating at long range.
• 20:02
  So from the southern fleet headquarters in China to the off the coast of Sydney is well
• 20:07
  over 7,000 kilometers.
• 20:10
  That's a long way for any navy to operate.
• 20:12
  The Americans can do it.
• 20:14
  They're a handful of other advanced navies that can do it.
• 20:17
  China has shown more capability to do this.
• 20:19
  They now have a, they actually have a base in Djibouti on the west coast of, excuse me,
• 20:24
  on the east coast of Africa.
• 20:26
  And they frequently deploy on anti-piracy patrols off the east coast of Africa.
• 20:30
  So they have some experience with this, but certainly not with this new class of ship.
• 20:35
  And they, they just need to do it more because they've got, they've got this equipment
• 20:38
  now.
• 20:39
  They need to know how to do this.
• 20:40
  So I think first and foremost, this is training.
• 20:42
  This is an activity that navies do to train their crews and to make themselves capable
• 20:47
  of using the equipment that they have got.
• 20:49
  So that's not to discount the subtext because, I mean, obviously it's 7,000 kilometers,
• 20:54
  but they could have gone in a different direction, right?
• 20:55
  They just, I mean, they just doesn't pass the, doesn't pass the bullshit test to me,
• 20:59
  to read the, like, a cigar, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar when a cigar is being violently
• 21:05
  masturbated.
• 21:06
  And it's not just a cigar.
• 21:07
  All right.
• 21:08
  And in this case, they are violently masturbating right in front of Australia.
• 21:11
  And you know, I mean, you know, get a, get a, get a compass or a protractor and, and
• 21:14
  draw the 13,000 kilometer radius from wherever those boats are, are stationed, whatever port,
• 21:21
  whatever Chinese port that is.
• 21:23
  There's a lot of places they could be doing that exercise that are not directly underneath
• 21:29
  one of the most trafficked flight routes between the two, the only two Western liberal democracies
• 21:35
  in the Asia Pacific.
• 21:36
  Right.
• 21:37
  First of all, I immediately regret invoking Freud, so welcome to Uncomfortable Conversation
• 21:42
  Sam.
• 21:43
  But on, you're absolutely right about the broader points.
• 21:47
  So they are making a statement.
• 21:49
  So the, the, I think that one temptation that we ought to avoid a little bit is to view
• 21:55
  this purely through Australian eyes.
• 21:58
  In my experience, China is much more centered on America than it is on Australia.
• 22:03
  So this may not be certainly not solely a message to Australia and may not even be a message
• 22:09
  to Australia at all.
• 22:10
  It's a message to America and also a message to the region more broadly that the Pacific
• 22:17
  is not an American lake anymore.
• 22:20
  America aims to be a regional leader, aims to eventually succeed the United States as
• 22:25
  the undisputed leader in the Asia Pacific.
• 22:27
  You can't do that without having a large navy.
• 22:30
  And here is a signal that we are now challenging America as far away as, you know, the, the
• 22:38
  East Coast of New South Wales.
• 22:41
  Imagine if instead of coming here, if their focus is really America, if they'd gone to
• 22:46
  the Gulf of Mexico and perched in international waters somewhere between Puerto Rico and
• 22:52
  the United States, if such a thing exists, I don't know how close those things are, but
• 22:55
  between Venezuela and the United States, for example, what do you think the Trump administration
• 23:00
  would have done?
• 23:01
  I think there would, it would have caused a huge scandal and it, there would have been
• 23:06
  major political and diplomatic repercussions for China.
• 23:12
  It would have been shows of force by the United States in East Asia.
• 23:16
  So it's a great point.
• 23:17
  They prefer to do this in a secondary, slightly standoffish way than a direct way.
• 23:24
  Would that kind of response from the United States be wise?
• 23:29
  Well, it would certainly, it seems to me impossible to, for the United States to do anything less
• 23:43
  that would be consistent with its own self image, if you like.
• 23:46
  So the United States doesn't like being challenged so directly and they would feel the need
• 23:52
  to respond in that way.
• 23:54
  They, the United States.
• 23:55
  We not like being challenged so directly, because we're smaller and we don't have the
• 24:01
  capabilities to respond in the way that the Americans would.
• 24:04
  Well, we don't have the capabilities to go to war with China the way that the Americans
• 24:07
  would, but we presumably have the capabilities to respond the way the Americans would if
• 24:11
  what we're talking about is a symbolic show of force by sending a, one of our naval vessels
• 24:17
  up near China and doing a similar thing.
• 24:20
  So strategists talk about, a lot about escalation and when a smaller power thinks about the
• 24:29
  kind of response that you're talking about, it needs to think beyond the immediate step
• 24:33
  of responding and think two or three steps ahead, okay, so if we do that, if we respond
• 24:38
  in kind and send our ships north and maybe even conduct, you know, life fire exercises
• 24:43
  between Taiwan and the mainland.
• 24:46
  Yeah, to disrupt air traffic coming into, to China, well, then what does China do next?
• 24:52
  And the Chinese in that kind of scenario have what strategists call escalation dominance.
• 24:58
  They can always step up and we can't at a certain point we have to stop.
• 25:02
  Yes, I see.
• 25:03
  Yeah.
• 25:04
  Yeah.
• 25:05
  So then what is the correct posture?
• 25:06
  So the correct posture, the argument that I've been making is, is what I call foreign policy
• 25:11
  stoicism.
• 25:13
  So this is the idea really that for a middle power up against a great power, escalating
• 25:20
  a dispute rarely pays off, but you can win or if maybe a better way to say it, you cannot
• 25:28
  lose if you never escalate but never give in.
• 25:33
  So actually the Chinese have been, three years ago launched a series of economic coercive
• 25:39
  measures against Australia and just explain what those were.
• 25:44
  So there were various tariffs placed on Australian exports, everything from coal, wine, barley
• 25:52
  was another one.
• 25:53
  And they were huge tariffs, they weren't 10 or 20%, I mean, there was almost 40% or something
• 25:57
  where they basically enough to force Australia out of those markets and force the companies
• 26:01
  involved to seek new markets overseas.
• 26:03
  And at the time, and it remains the case, China was the number one buyer of Australian
• 26:08
  produce, the main thing about was iron ore, I think, and there was like a massive tariff
• 26:14
  put on and 40% of Australian exports went to China.
• 26:19
  So we were basically all in and it had major repercussions on the Australian economy.
• 26:25
  Well, depends on your definition of the major, so on export sectors.
• 26:30
  On those specific export sectors, certainly iron ore trade continued and other exports
• 26:35
  continued as well.
• 26:38
  Now, the interesting thing about that whole episode is that, first of all, the Australian
• 26:43
  economy, by all accounts, by the economists that I work with, who've studied this, responded
• 26:48
  brilliantly, which is to say our export has found new markets immediately or very soon.
• 26:54
  So there was some pain, there were some losses in those specific markets, but in terms of
• 26:58
  Australia's economy broadly, it was a rounding error, it never really hurt us too much.
• 27:03
  So that was a testament to our economic resilience and our economic openness that allowed Australia
• 27:08
  to find new markets for its export goods.
• 27:12
  On the political level, I'd say the most significant fact about that whole episode was that
• 27:18
  no Australian government, whether that was the previous Morrison government, which was
• 27:21
  the right of centre and then the left of centre, Labor government, neither of them ever
• 27:27
  proposed retaliating against China.
• 27:29
  There was one politician, there was one exception that was Matt Kattavan at the time, and
• 27:33
  National's politician who said, we need to put tariffs on iron ore to punish China for
• 27:38
  building this ore.
• 27:39
  There's a bit of a right one.
• 27:40
  For the right one.
• 27:41
  For the populist figure in Australia.
• 27:42
  Indeed.
• 27:43
  No one else took this seriously.
• 27:44
  Instead, basically the policy that we, the approach that we took was to wait it out, a
• 27:48
  stoical approach.
• 27:49
  Okay, we're going to have to absorb some pain here.
• 27:52
  We won't retaliate, but at the same time, we will not give in.
• 27:55
  Now Australia never made any serious concessions in this period, and eventually the Chinese,
• 28:00
  I think, concluded that this isn't working, and now that a new government's been elected,
• 28:05
  which happened a couple of years ago, we can, we can try a new approach.
• 28:08
  Right.
• 28:09
  So, relationships have warms since then.
• 28:11
  And just to give some people some background, there is suspicion, and you can correct me,
• 28:15
  you want what, the truth is here, because you probably know better than I do, that the
• 28:19
  tariffs were introduced in the first place by China for political, not economic reasons,
• 28:23
  and this may have had to do with COVID, and a certain amount of bombast that the Australian
• 28:29
  government was swaggering around with in the early days of COVID, saying that we need
• 28:34
  to launch a full scale investigation of the origins of the virus.
• 28:36
  There was a bit of sort of populist posturing by the then Prime Minister Scott Morrison,
• 28:41
  which went down very poorly in China, and there's some suspicion that the retaliation,
• 28:45
  that the tariffs were a retaliation for that, new government comes in, the tariffs go away.
• 28:52
  What were the concessions and so forth that Australia, that China wanted to extract from
• 28:56
  Australia, that Australia did not yield to?
• 29:00
  Well, there was a famous document handed over to Australian journalists by the Chinese
• 29:04
  embassy called the 14 points, which included some pretty, you know, draconian requests,
• 29:11
  some frame them as demands of Australia, which even included, you know, getting the government
• 29:18
  to change the editorial lines of certain think tanks, you know, who were critical of China.
• 29:24
  And all sorts of other measures, including some economic issues around foreign investment
• 29:31
  by Chinese companies.
• 29:33
  Australia had also banned Huawei from bidding on our 5G project, which had gone down
• 29:38
  very badly.
• 29:39
  So there were demands of that kind.
• 29:42
  Australia didn't give in on any of those substantive points.
• 29:45
  My frustration in recent times has been why haven't we used that methodology, that thinking
• 29:53
  in our defence policy, you know, adopt a stoical posture in our defence policy as well.
• 29:58
  Instead, what we've done is ever since Orkus was announced in 2021, and we can, you know,
• 30:05
  remind listeners about what Orkus is, it's a very big deal in Australia.
• 30:11
  We have adopted an approach where we essentially take the fight to China.
• 30:15
  We're buying eight nuclear powered submarines that are designed to sail off the Chinese coast
• 30:21
  and even put missiles onto the Chinese landmass.
• 30:25
  So it's essentially an idea that Australia needs to have the ability to punish China,
• 30:31
  rather than simply absorbing pain in the way we did during the economic coercion campaign.
• 30:38
  And waiting China out through a policy of resilience and stoicism.
• 30:42
  Isn't implicit in that strategy and assumption that China will never be a belligerent?
• 30:52
  I don't think so.
• 30:53
  I think we can expect China to be assertive and even aggressive, more than assertive or
• 30:58
  aggressive.
• 30:59
  Well, it strikes me that you certainly don't want to antagonize a great power if you
• 31:10
  worry that your antagonism towards them is going to trigger them into starting a real fight
• 31:19
  with you.
• 31:20
  If on the other hand, you live in a universe in which they're going to start a real fight
• 31:24
  with you either way, then your antagonising them is a price worth paying in order to make
• 31:29
  sure that you're as well defended as you can pay.
• 31:32
  Well, it's, first of all, it's very possible to defend yourself very well without having
• 31:38
  the ability to strike to fire missiles.
• 31:41
  Well, if you end up in a war with them, you probably want to be able to fire on their
• 31:44
  mainland.
• 31:45
  Actually, I don't think so.
• 31:47
  Then why are we getting them?
• 31:49
  Because we want the ability to hit the Chinese mainland.
• 31:52
  What uses that if it's no use in a war?
• 31:54
  Look, it's of some use in a war.
• 31:56
  I just don't think it's a very essential capability, given that we're talking here
• 32:00
  about opportunity costs, the more you spend on that thing, the less you spend on something
• 32:04
  else.
• 32:05
  I see.
• 32:06
  I would much rather see Australia spend its defence dollar on essentially making it impossible
• 32:11
  for any foreign power, but we're talking about China here to operate safely in the air
• 32:17
  and maritime approaches near Australia.
• 32:19
  Right, I see.
• 32:20
  That's why this latest episode with the Chinese warships is so important.
• 32:27
  The Prime Minister is absolutely right when he says the Chinese have done nothing illegal.
• 32:32
  We can't stop them doing what they're doing.
• 32:34
  We can't stop them operating in international waters and even doing gunnery practice.
• 32:40
  But what we can do is set the terms on which they come here.
• 32:44
  When we have a defence force that is strong enough to, in the worst possible case, take
• 32:50
  care of any such flotilla if we need to, then the Chinese know that these kind of deployments
• 32:56
  are happening on our terms.
• 32:59
  In effect, that happens in the opposite direction as well.
• 33:02
  Australia routinely sends ships into the South China Sea.
• 33:06
  We sometimes sail naval ships through the Taiwan Strait.
• 33:09
  But we do that knowing very, very clearly that if war started an hour later, those ships
• 33:15
  would be sent to the bottom.
• 33:16
  Yes, right.
• 33:17
  And so what you're talking about, do we have, by the way, the capacity to take out a Chinese
• 33:24
  ship in the Tasman?
• 33:25
  I mean, suppose we just wanted to spontaneously go crazy and start a war?
• 33:29
  Yeah, I think we do.
• 33:31
  Yes.
• 33:32
  We need to improve those capabilities and one thing we're doing at the moment is introducing
• 33:38
  a whole new class of stealthy anti-ship missiles, which would be very useful for that kind
• 33:44
  of contingency.
• 33:45
  Stationed on what?
• 33:46
  Mobile or on land?
• 33:47
  Yeah, no fired from aircraft, primarily, but also surface ships and submarines.
• 33:52
  Okay.
• 33:53
  And what is our current, because you mentioned Orkut, which would probably just pause on
• 33:56
  Orkut for a second and maybe a way to get into Orkut is just to give me and everyone
• 34:01
  understanding of what is the current defence capacity of Australia?
• 34:04
  I mean, you call us initially a small country, then you call us a medium-sized country,
• 34:08
  by some metrics where one of the most significant military powers in the Pacific, then it depends
• 34:13
  who you, where the Pacific begins and ends and who is in that club and who is out of that
• 34:17
  club.
• 34:18
  Where does Australia stand on the, you know, I suppose the rankings of the region?
• 34:23
  Yeah.
• 34:24
  Well, typically Australia is thought of as a middle power.
• 34:29
  So we are, gosh, you've caught me on the hub.
• 34:31
  I don't know where we stand in the OEC, but we want to, one of the top 20, I think 14
• 34:36
  can fly just economy in the OECD.
• 34:38
  Yes.
• 34:39
  So Australia is a significant international economy, significant military.
• 34:45
  When did you, one of the top 10 economies in the world could be, as I remember we were,
• 34:50
  we were, there was a, it was conceivable that someday we would be in the G7, you know,
• 34:57
  depending on how quickly we could grow, but nonetheless, yes, but, but in just in terms
• 35:00
  of our military equipment, who, is there a comparable country that you can think of like
• 35:04
  presumably we can get into a war with New Zealand, no problem, and they're toast.
• 35:10
  That may also apply to Indonesia, it may apply to, I don't know, Malaysia, it definitely
• 35:19
  doesn't apply to China.
• 35:20
  Does it apply to Japan?
• 35:21
  I don't know.
• 35:22
  Perhaps in terms of military weight, Canada is a good, is a good comparison.
• 35:31
  One of the middle sized European countries would be another one.
• 35:34
  We spend roughly the same as they do in terms of defense GDP.
• 35:37
  Right.
• 35:38
  In our region, we are, other than Singapore, we are far and away the most capable and sophisticated
• 35:43
  military in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia.
• 35:46
  Got it.
• 35:47
  Okay.
• 35:48
  Right.
• 35:49
  So that's the only Singapore is comparable.
• 35:50
  That's interesting.
• 35:51
  Yeah.
• 35:52
  I didn't realize that Singapore invested so heavily.
• 35:54
  Singapore invests very, very heavily.
• 35:56
  The problem is they have no strategic dip, which is to say it's a tiny place and so it's
• 36:00
  very, very, very difficult to defend, you know, barely long enough for the airfields to
• 36:06
  take.
• 36:07
  Yeah.
• 36:08
  To fear expensive aircraft to take off from.
• 36:11
  So let's just go to Walker's then.
• 36:13
  So the Australia United Kingdom, United States, hence AUKUS, or Walker's, was a deal that
• 36:20
  was signed by the last Tenerife government of Australia to do what exactly?
• 36:26
  Yes.
• 36:27
  September, 2021.
• 36:29
  It was then Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was the British
• 36:33
  Prime Minister and Joe Biden, was the president.
• 36:35
  They all stood in front of cameras in their own capitals and said that there was now a trilateral
• 36:42
  agreement that would supply Australia with eight nuclear power to tax submarines, stress
• 36:49
  nuclear power, not nuclear armed.
• 36:51
  We currently don't have nuclear power submarines.
• 36:54
  No.
• 36:55
  We have diesel powered or conventionally powered.
• 36:57
  Right.
• 36:58
  And there was a deal on the table for us to buy a whole new fleet of diesel powered French
• 37:01
  submarines.
• 37:02
  Correct.
• 37:03
  We're going to buy 12 submarines and we can't sell them last minute.
• 37:07
  We can't sell them.
• 37:08
  We can't sell the program.
• 37:09
  You know, contracts have cancellation clauses.
• 37:12
  This one was particularly generous to the French.
• 37:14
  So, you know, they were very loud after that and made a lot of complaints.
• 37:20
  But, you know, Crimea river, they did very well out of that.
• 37:23
  That's true.
• 37:24
  And I think the criticism there was that there was a sense that the Australian government
• 37:26
  could have been somewhat more delicate in informing them about what was happening instead of them
• 37:30
  finding out on the grapevine.
• 37:32
  Yeah.
• 37:33
  Fine.
• 37:34
  A minus sign if you ask me, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for the French in that regard.
• 37:39
  So, Orcas is an agreement, as I said, firstly to supply Australia with eight nuclear power
• 37:45
  submarines.
• 37:46
  And that really is the bulk of Orcas.
• 37:48
  There's a second part of Orcas called pillar two, which is all about three-way technology
• 37:53
  sharing on everything from AI, drone warfare, gosh, there are so many other categories
• 38:02
  that I'm forgetting, but all sorts of that type of sonics, other kinds of exotic military
• 38:07
  technologies.
• 38:09
  And that pillar two is essentially the first phase of it at least is an attempt to put
• 38:16
  together what you might call a free trade agreement between those three countries.
• 38:20
  Typically free trade agreements exclude military stuff because it's so sensitive.
• 38:25
  This is a free trade agreement that is all about military kit, advanced military kit.
• 38:29
  Does it include non-military stuff?
• 38:30
  No.
• 38:31
  Purely military.
• 38:32
  Yep.
• 38:33
  Yeah.
• 38:34
  So, there's talk of completely breaking down the bureaucratic barriers between those three
• 38:40
  countries so they can cooperate freely and, you know, particularly in America, those
• 38:45
  barriers are very high and extremely hard to sell any defense-related equipment outside
• 38:50
  of the United States for obvious reasons, because their paranoid about falling into the hands
• 38:54
  of an adversary.
• 38:55
  So this would take away all of that blood and red tape and basically just trust that
• 38:58
  Australia is good on its word and isn't going to share it with the Chinese or something.
• 39:01
  Yes, that's right.
• 39:02
  Exactly.
• 39:03
  And was there a phase three?
• 39:04
  No, that's it.
• 39:05
  Just those two phases.
• 39:06
  Well, actually, it's worth mentioning a third.
• 39:08
  It's not usually referred to as a separate part of the project, or a separate phase,
• 39:15
  but it's worth mentioning.
• 39:16
  It's actually really important, which is that Australia, as part of Orcas, has agreed
• 39:20
  to build what in the acronym Crazy World of Defense is called SurfWest, submarine rotational
• 39:28
  force west.
• 39:29
  We are building facilities at HMA Sterling in Western Australia, just near Perth, so
• 39:35
  that up to four American nuclear powered submarines can be stationed there, not permanently,
• 39:41
  but what they call rotated.
• 39:42
  So it's essentially a base.
• 39:44
  Right.
• 39:45
  American naval base, just near Perth off the west coast of Australia.
• 39:49
  Got it.
• 39:50
  The Russia...
• 39:51
  Sorry, did you want to finish that thought?
• 39:52
  Well, separately, it's somewhat outside Orcas, it's never branded as an Orcas initiative,
• 39:57
  but there's also a deal for Australia to modernize an airbase in the Northern Territory,
• 40:03
  just south of Darwin, which will house American bombers, strategic bombers.
• 40:08
  Now the important thing about those two things, the submarines and the American bombers, is
• 40:13
  that not since World War II has Australia hosted operational American forces.
• 40:17
  We've always hosted Americans for training and for exercising, but these two deals mean
• 40:24
  that if there's a war, the US will be using Australian bases to conduct missions.
• 40:31
  So if there's a war against China, planes, American bombers will be taking off from Northern
• 40:36
  Australia.
• 40:37
  American submarines will be operating from out of Western Australia, and they'll go back
• 40:40
  there to rearm and refuel, et cetera, et cetera.
• 40:43
  In turn, that means they'll be targets.
• 40:45
  Got it.
• 40:46
  So, the selling point, let's talk about the upsides and downsides, because this then
• 40:50
  gets us into the whole conversation about the United States and China and the future
• 40:54
  of global peace and security.
• 40:56
  So the upsides for Australia are pretty obvious for Orcas.
• 40:59
  We can talk about the downsides in a second.
• 41:01
  We get a bunch of shiny submarines that are more sophisticated than we would have been
• 41:05
  able to design ourselves or get from elsewhere.
• 41:09
  And we weave ourselves more closely into an inescapable alliance with the United States
• 41:14
  that means that any future US administrations, who may be isolationist and who may not
• 41:19
  come to the defensive Australia if we get into our own trouble that does not otherwise
• 41:23
  involve the United States, will be inescapably pulled into defending Australia, because all
• 41:28
  of us that would constitute an attack on their own assets, not just with those of an
• 41:33
  ally.
• 41:34
  The benefit for the United States is they get these bases, they don't have to rely on
• 41:38
  Guam to station their things out, right?
• 41:41
  They suddenly have a presence in the South Pacific, they wouldn't otherwise have benefits
• 41:45
  for the UK.
• 41:46
  What do they have?
• 41:47
  Money.
• 41:48
  Purely commercial, I think.
• 41:49
  Yeah.
• 41:50
  I mean, then the Brits have talked about having a sort of semi-permanent submarine presence
• 41:54
  in Western Australia as well, but given the demands on, you know, Royal Navy forces in
• 42:02
  Europe, given the Ukraine-Russia war, that seems.
• 42:06
  Yes.
• 42:07
  Hard to imagine them being stationed there.
• 42:09
  Yeah.
• 42:10
  Yeah.
• 42:11
  Yeah.
• 42:12
  Downsides.
• 42:13
  So, downsides for the United States are what, of Orcas.
• 42:16
  I don't think there are any downsides for the United States, but I questioned some of
• 42:20
  the upsides that you've listed.
• 42:22
  What's wrong with those upsides?
• 42:24
  What do I get wrong?
• 42:25
  Well, I don't think Orcas does tie the United States more closely to Australia.
• 42:30
  So the upsides for Australia.
• 42:32
  Yeah.
• 42:33
  No question the upsides for America that it's useful for them to have bases in Western
• 42:38
  Australia.
• 42:40
  It has some benefits.
• 42:41
  Yeah.
• 42:42
  I think the motivation for the submarine base, for instance, in Western Australia is more
• 42:46
  to help Australia out, to familiarize us with the technology and to make sure that when
• 42:50
  our submarines come along, starting in 2032, that we're ready to operate them.
• 42:55
  I see what you're saying.
• 42:56
  Right.
• 42:57
  Yeah.
• 42:58
  Okay.
• 42:59
  Because we're suddenly going to be presented with a whole bunch of equipment that we've
• 43:00
  never used before.
• 43:01
  So now we can get to, we can learn the ropes before they arrive.
• 43:04
  Can we just pause on the question of whether or not this is actually going to happen?
• 43:07
  Yeah.
• 43:08
  So 2032, you say, it's not around the corner, it's not 2026, it's quite a long way away.
• 43:16
  The US, as I understand it, has the right to walk away from this penalty free.
• 43:22
  Yeah.
• 43:23
  So I'll start by saying that in my observation that the skepticism about Orcas
• 43:33
  in Australia actually, this is worth saying to your American listeners because I don't
• 43:36
  think Americans who are familiar with Orcas would understand that there is opposition to
• 43:43
  this in Australia and there is skepticism about it.
• 43:45
  And the skepticism comes in two forms.
• 43:47
  There are the strategic skeptics and there are the practical skeptics.
• 43:52
  Are you both?
• 43:53
  I'm both.
• 43:54
  Yeah.
• 43:55
  But there's not total overlap between those two.
• 43:56
  The strategic skeptics are the people that say this is a bad idea for Australian defence
• 44:00
  policy and Australian defence strategy and we should be doing the shelves for a moment.
• 44:04
  That's the big conversation.
• 44:05
  Let's just talk about the pragmatic skeptics are the people that say, yeah, Australia
• 44:09
  should get nuclear power submarines.
• 44:11
  That's a great idea.
• 44:12
  But this project that you've devised, it's never going to happen.
• 44:15
  Right.
• 44:16
  Now, that first group, the strategic skeptics, I would say where am I already in the Australian
• 44:19
  debate?
• 44:20
  That second group of the pragmatic skeptics, I'd say they are the overwhelming majority in
• 44:25
  my observation of the people that follow Defence New Comment on Defence.
• 44:29
  In fact, it's hard to find anyone who isn't paid to be optimistic about office, but
• 44:34
  it is optimistic about office.
• 44:37
  So how do the real skepticism stick on the pragmatism for a second before we get to strategic
• 44:43
  questions?
• 44:44
  How do the wheels fall off this thing if they do?
• 44:46
  Oh, God.
• 44:47
  So many ways.
• 44:48
  Australia has never done anything of comparable complexity before.
• 44:53
  We have barely any nuclear expertise, the kind of regulatory and technical knowledge and
• 45:00
  infrastructure that's required in Australia is just vast.
• 45:03
  The sheer number of sailors required to operate these vessels is huge.
• 45:06
  That will present a barrier to Australia.
• 45:08
  Don't we just transfer them over from whatever they're currently working on?
• 45:11
  Nuclear submarines are completely different.
• 45:14
  Yeah.
• 45:15
  I mean, that can be retrained, of course.
• 45:16
  But nuclear is a problem.
• 45:17
  Well, this is what's 2032.
• 45:19
  Well, you can recruit and train a lot of people in seven years.
• 45:22
  That's true.
• 45:23
  But look, for 30 odd years now, we've been mostly a sub 4% unemployment national economy,
• 45:33
  the defence forces always had trouble, has rarely met its recruitment targets.
• 45:37
  It's not going to get any easier for them.
• 45:39
  Right.
• 45:40
  And then what about the questions about whether the things, because let's assume that
• 45:44
  you can train them up or let's assume that America can, if it's peacetime, American
• 45:49
  providers with people who can at least do a portion of that training or overseeing, then
• 45:53
  what about the possibility of the submarines never being delivered in the first place?
• 45:56
  Yeah.
• 45:57
  So the big unanswered question here is the capacity of American shipyards to produce enough
• 46:02
  submarines to meet both Australian demand and American US Navy demand.
• 46:07
  So the Americans got their own plans for how big they want their submarine fleet to be
• 46:11
  in, by the middle of this century.
• 46:14
  Because they now need to produce all of those submarines plus three and maybe five Virginia
• 46:20
  class submarines for Australia.
• 46:23
  That's a big lift for the United States.
• 46:25
  It's not clear at the moment whether their shipyard capacity is going to increase enough
• 46:30
  to be able to do both.
• 46:31
  You know how big their sub fleet currently is?
• 46:33
  I think it's in the order of 60 attack submarines and 12 ballistic missile submarines.
• 46:40
  Okay.
• 46:41
  Those are the submarines that carry America's nuclear deterrent.
• 46:43
  And do we know how many they want to build?
• 46:48
  How many more they want to build by the middle of the century?
• 46:49
  They basically want to modernize.
• 46:50
  They want to roughly stay as is.
• 46:52
  So they're going to dip because old boats will be retired.
• 46:56
  Yeah.
• 46:57
  But then the plan is to bring it back up to I think around 66 by the middle of the century.
• 47:00
  Okay.
• 47:01
  I mean, it doesn't sound like it.
• 47:03
  It doesn't sound like it should be beyond the capability of the United States to build
• 47:07
  themselves a dozen and us a half does.
• 47:09
  Yeah.
• 47:10
  I mean, you would think so.
• 47:12
  But so when you consider the fact that they've also got to build a new class of ballistic
• 47:17
  missile submarines because their current ones are timing out, so they need to replace those.
• 47:23
  The current shipyard capacity, there are I think only two shipyards in the United States
• 47:27
  that build submarines.
• 47:29
  So in order to build up capacity there, build up the workforce is going to require a lot
• 47:33
  more investment.
• 47:34
  And in fact, Australia has contributed financially to that investment.
• 47:37
  Okay.
• 47:38
  So bottom line is they've got a lot of shit going on and all it would take would be for
• 47:42
  the Trump administration to wake up one morning and go, you know, what instead of having
• 47:46
  a dozen ballistic missiles with our nuclear deterrent, we should have a dozen and a half.
• 47:51
  And that wipes out Australia's entire allocation.
• 47:54
  Yeah.
• 47:55
  Something like that.
• 47:56
  It's important to stress that the final decision on transferring the first Virginia class
• 48:01
  nuclear power submarine won't come during the Trump administration.
• 48:05
  It'll come in the successor administration whoever that is.
• 48:09
  However, a lot of smaller decisions have to be made.
• 48:12
  That'll be the Trump Jr administration.
• 48:15
  The Vance.
• 48:16
  The Vance or the Ivanka.
• 48:17
  The Ivanka.
• 48:18
  The Ivanka.
• 48:19
  President Ivanka.
• 48:20
  Yeah.
• 48:21
  However, a lot of smaller decisions have to be made in the lead up to that.
• 48:24
  It's not.
• 48:25
  It's not.
• 48:26
  What are the shipyards building?
• 48:27
  It's the question.
• 48:28
  I mean, are they currently building our Virginia class submarines or are they working on
• 48:32
  something else that they've got a backlog of that, you know, that the Obama administration
• 48:37
  commissioned?
• 48:38
  It devoted to submarines, but, you know, the big question, of course, is who four is it
• 48:42
  for the US or for us?
• 48:43
  And are our nuclear powered Virginia class submarines the same, the identical submarines
• 48:48
  to those 60 odd that the US is cycling it, cycling through?
• 48:52
  Yeah, in fact, the first one, and I think maybe even the second one will actually be second-hand
• 48:57
  submarines.
• 48:58
  That will be both today.
• 48:59
  That are in American service now and are going to be refurbished for before they're transferred
• 49:03
  to Australia.
• 49:04
  So as the Americans wipe the dog shit off the bottom of their shoe, they flick it
• 49:07
  our way for a little while until they can get rid of it after it's no good, good to
• 49:12
  know.
• 49:13
  So the strategic controversy, essentially, is what one important point I wanted to make,
• 49:19
  even though that I was leading up to where I said that it won't be the Trump administration
• 49:23
  making this judgment, but there will be lots of smaller decisions leading up to that
• 49:26
  that Trump will have to make.
• 49:27
  And I think one real danger point for Orcas for Australia is if Trump has to make a decision,
• 49:36
  let's imagine it's put to him in the following terms.
• 49:39
  Mr. President, you need to sign this bit of paper in order to allow for the later transfer,
• 49:44
  sale of our one, two, three, maybe up to five submarines to Australia.
• 49:50
  And if you agree to this, then the United States Navy will have one, two, three, or maybe
• 49:55
  five fewer submarines.
• 49:58
  If the deal is presented to Trump in those terms, I find it very hard to imagine that
• 50:02
  he would agree to it.
• 50:04
  So he could exercise that veto even there, even though it's not Trump making the final
• 50:07
  decision.
• 50:08
  He could slow it down or scupper it because it's simply not in his worldview to supply
• 50:15
  submarines to an ally if it means America having fewer submarines.
• 50:19
  If he is not the person doing the deal and he is not the person in power when the deal
• 50:24
  is actually finalized, why is his signature on anything?
• 50:29
  Well, his signature will be on all sorts of preliminary, could be on all sorts of preliminary
• 50:34
  documents.
• 50:35
  So, a thousand and one things need to happen before a submarine, nuclear power submarine
• 50:40
  can be transferred to Australia.
• 50:42
  And most of those decisions will be made well before 2032, they're already being made
• 50:46
  now.
• 50:47
  But hopefully most of them are made without him, without the office of the president
• 50:49
  and them being aware of it.
• 50:50
  You would think so.
• 50:51
  You would think so.
• 50:52
  So I'm just, I mean, this is what Doge is all about.
• 50:55
  We're supposed to get rid of the lead tape.
• 50:56
  We're red tape.
• 50:57
  So just let them, let the Aussies have the subs.
• 50:59
  We don't need to keep signing pieces of paper.
• 51:01
  They did the deal.
• 51:02
  Get the subs out the door.
• 51:03
  Come on, Leon.
• 51:04
  Let's see how far, let's see how far Elon gets in the world and that sort of buys in
• 51:07
  time world of American military exports.
• 51:11
  Okay.
• 51:12
  So, stoicism and, you know, agnosticism versus belligerence poking the bear, not poking
• 51:22
  the bear, the concerns about orcas sort of bring us to bigger strategic questions about
• 51:27
  what medium sized countries ought to do in an uncertain global environment.
• 51:33
  What's your worry?
• 51:36
  My worry is that we're depending ever more closely on an unreliable ally.
• 51:40
  And I base that worry not only on the last four, first four weeks of the Trump administration,
• 51:46
  although that certainly helps to sharpen the dilemma a little bit.
• 51:50
  But I base that really on 30 plus years of evidence since the end of the Cold War,
• 51:56
  which is roughly when we can date China's emergence as an economic and military power.
• 52:04
  It's military modernization, the one that they're still going through and it's still growing,
• 52:10
  the PLA, the People's Liberation Army.
• 52:13
  But most analysts date the beginning of that modernization to the early 1990s when the
• 52:19
  Chinese witnessed the incredible feat of American arms in the first Gulf War when they pushed
• 52:28
  the Iraqis out of Kuwait.
• 52:30
  And they saw a revolution in warfare.
• 52:32
  And they said to themselves, oh my God, we're not prepared for this.
• 52:34
  They had a Stalinist style, you know, army heavy military.
• 52:38
  They were not modernized at all.
• 52:40
  Lots of beautifully synchronized troops or marching in lockstep.
• 52:43
  All of that.
• 52:44
  And they just weren't ready for, you know, 21st century warfare.
• 52:47
  So they have modernized at a rapid clip at a speed and at a scale that probably goes beyond
• 52:58
  even what the Soviet Union did after the Second World War.
• 53:02
  And let me just pause but hold that thought.
• 53:05
  In the same way that I asked you to put Australia's military capacity into context of like
• 53:10
  neighbors and we got a good sense of that by saying that it's, you know, it has equal
• 53:15
  status of the most formidable military in the in Southeast Asia.
• 53:20
  How does China's military capacity, particularly naval compared to Americans?
• 53:24
  Well, China already has a bigger Navy than the United States, which is to say more ships.
• 53:30
  America has a bigger Navy in this in terms of tonnage.
• 53:33
  So American ships are mostly bigger.
• 53:37
  And that gap is still fairly wide into the aircraft carriers who all sit around flying planes
• 53:41
  often.
• 53:42
  Yes, that's right.
• 53:43
  Chinese Navy is still, although it's increasingly ocean going or what they call a blue water fleet,
• 53:48
  it does have a huge number of small coastal vessels that are essentially defensive ships
• 53:56
  to protect and monitor the Chinese coastline.
• 53:58
  Well, they're defensive, but don't they also use those to basically extend the edge of
• 54:03
  China's maritime boundary ever further into international waters?
• 54:07
  Oh, there's that.
• 54:08
  Certainly in the South China Sea.
• 54:09
  I thought you were going to say Taiwan.
• 54:10
  I mean, it's only, it's not exactly less than 200 kilometers, right?
• 54:13
  Yeah.
• 54:14
  So yes, that's certainly relevant there.
• 54:17
  But what I was going to, what I was getting onto is that in that 30 year period of modernization,
• 54:21
  which has been incredibly dramatic, if you, if you examine carefully what America's military
• 54:27
  presence in Asia looked like at the beginning of that modernization process in 1991 and what
• 54:33
  it looks like today, it's actually not that different.
• 54:36
  The sheer number of troops, American troops in Asia is roughly the same as it was then.
• 54:41
  It still has one aircraft carrier based in Japan.
• 54:45
  It has slightly more submarines based in Asia than it used to.
• 54:50
  Still, you know, four fighter wings based in Korea, roughly the same number of ships based
• 54:54
  in Hawaii.
• 54:56
  So the response of the United States has essentially been to stand pat.
• 55:01
  It hasn't drawn down its forces in Asia, but it hasn't increased them in the face of
• 55:07
  potentially the greatest modernization of any military since the Second World War.
• 55:11
  Just to, I mean, I'll just chime in and say there is, of course, an opportunity cost to
• 55:14
  deploying assets to the Pacific theater when you're also dealing with a period during which
• 55:20
  there was enormous strife in the Middle East that they had to focus on, right?
• 55:24
  I mean, you know, this is 9-11 happened, July 5th, years ago, there was Afghanistan,
• 55:28
  there was Iraq, they did have their eye on another ball.
• 55:31
  Of course, a lot of that was self-harm as well.
• 55:33
  Absolutely, but I mean, it's not, you know, you work with the assets you've got,
• 55:37
  the assets you'd wish you had, and maybe if you were a fairy godmother,
• 55:40
  sprinkling pixie dust, they would have expanded.
• 55:42
  I mean, they kept talking about it, they kept talking about expanding there.
• 55:45
  So the pivot to Asia, I mean, they started talking about this in the late 2000s.
• 55:49
  Every US president has talked about it, and ever since Trump, China has been formally
• 55:55
  designated as America's peer competitor, and as an adversary in strategic terms.
• 56:01
  And yet the basic, you know, military posture in Asia hasn't changed.
• 56:07
  Even 2011, Obama came to Australia and announced the pivot, what he called the pivot,
• 56:12
  or the rebalance as it later became called.
• 56:15
  Which meant, yeah, which meant war on terrorism, okay, that continues on in the background,
• 56:20
  but we see how the world economy and the strategic balance is shifting towards Asia,
• 56:31
  therefore America needs to shift as well.
• 56:33
  What happened after Obama's announcement?
• 56:35
  Really not very much. The big economic, the big trade deal that Obama tried to push
• 56:42
  founded called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but that became a potato during the Hillary
• 56:46
  Clinton campaign. They, you know, there was a protectionist wave, and that didn't really go
• 56:51
  anywhere. A few minor wins like a quadrilateral relationship between India and Japan and
• 56:57
  Australia and the United States that people keep talking up, but yes.
• 57:00
  I think the other thing that's worth mentioning is, well, as we were talking about US presidents,
• 57:06
  even though in all of these sort of modern presidencies, George W. Bush and after,
• 57:12
  they've all talked about China in these terms as a major challenge to American leadership.
• 57:19
  None of them ever talk about that in America or to Americans.
• 57:22
  So a comparable example would be 1947, President Truman stands before the joint session of Congress
• 57:29
  and the live radio audience around the United States and announces the containment doctrine,
• 57:34
  announces basically that the United States is now dedicating itself post-Second World War
• 57:40
  to opposing Soviet power around the world. This is going to be America's new mission.
• 57:46
  Well, China is already way bigger than the Soviet Union ever was.
• 57:52
  No comparable statement like that has ever come from a US president.
• 57:57
  When American presidents talk about Asia, they tend to do that when they're in Asia.
• 58:01
  No, it doesn't. Trump bang on about China constantly. He did during his first election campaign.
• 58:06
  He talks about China as a viral clips of him. China. Yes, that's right. He talks about China as
• 58:11
  an economic competitor and he's obsessed with bilateral trade balances, but he is not at all
• 58:17
  interested in the strategic balance between China and the United States. I mean, he's talked
• 58:23
  in really alarming terms if your Taiwanese about the fate of Taiwan. He's generally very
• 58:31
  skeptical of alliances. He thinks America's allies are basically exploiting American taxpayers
• 58:37
  and getting their defense on the cheap from America. Not entirely untrue, even though he's going
• 58:44
  about it in an appalling fashion. It is true that one reason why Western Europe has been able to
• 58:49
  have such cushy social safety nets for so long as because they haven't had to plow as much
• 58:53
  money into defense as they would otherwise have had to had there not been an American security
• 58:57
  guarantee. Actually, I think they could keep their cushy social safety nets and yet still defend
• 59:03
  themselves without America pay taxes for it. But also the dials have to be balanced somehow.
• 59:09
  Yeah. I mean, we're probably getting off the point here, but the Europeans spend their
• 59:13
  defense dollars terribly. Oh, did that? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Just deal on that for a moment.
• 59:17
  Just, I mean, it's a market that's roughly the size of the United States defense terms.
• 59:23
  And the overall sum that European spend is less than the US, but still pretty healthy. I don't
• 59:29
  have the number to hand. Right, but there are more people in the European Union than there are in
• 59:33
  the United States. The economy is about the same size. They could invest what the US does.
• 59:37
  Except so many of these countries insist on maintaining their national defense industries.
• 59:42
  So the United States has one advanced fighter aircraft, for instance. The Europeans have three.
• 59:47
  I see. So it's all terribly inefficient. Yeah. So basically, everyone has to do whatever the
• 59:52
  French do because the French are never going to do what anybody else wants them to do. So
• 59:57
  everyone in Europe should just do whatever the French have got. Actually, nobody does.
• 1:00:00
  The French just go alone. And then the British, you know, signed deals with
• 1:00:06
  the Italians, for instance, the next generation of British fighter aircraft is going to be a
• 1:00:12
  project with Italy and Japan. Really? Yes. Why don't they do what the French are doing?
• 1:00:19
  Because they just can't agree on what they want, the mission of the aircraft, what it should look
• 1:00:24
  like, what it should be capable of doing. I mean, there's a long history of this in Europe.
• 1:00:28
  Right. Okay. What should just briefly the priority of a European defense strategy be?
• 1:00:34
  Well, I think it should be to consolidate. I mean, this is easy to say, incredibly
• 1:00:39
  difficult to do, but to build a European army and build European defense industries.
• 1:00:44
  Right. But that should that be focused on policing, people smuggling flows across the Mediterranean.
• 1:00:50
  Should it be focused on projecting power into the far east in case of war with China?
• 1:00:54
  Should it, like, what's the priority with your Russia? Russia. Right. It should be focused
• 1:00:59
  on deterring Russia. That's it. That's all that European nation should be focused on.
• 1:01:04
  Do you reckon they'll get this shit together? By the skin of their teeth, I mean, it kind of
• 1:01:09
  looks like in fits and starts, it's happening. And we shouldn't forget that the Europeans collectively
• 1:01:16
  have an economy that's 10 times out of Russia. So they should be able to get this shit together.
• 1:01:22
  Yeah. They have no excuse. Well, it's a collective action problem, isn't it?
• 1:01:25
  I mean, it's like a, you know, it's a sort of a game theory thing of like, you know,
• 1:01:29
  the Russians can always play Estonia off Portugal or something. But of course,
• 1:01:33
  the whole point of NATO is to get around that collective action problem. Yeah. Article five of
• 1:01:38
  NATO says an attack on one is an attack on all. So that problem should have been solved by now.
• 1:01:43
  Should have the problem about pieces of paper we're writing on them is that everybody has to believe
• 1:01:48
  that the writing actually reflects what will happen in the real world. Yeah. And the, you know,
• 1:01:54
  the current state of politics, especially in the United States doesn't give one great faith that
• 1:02:00
  that NATO means anything. Yeah. I don't think the Europeans can now seriously believe that if
• 1:02:08
  Russia attacked Europe, uh, that the United States would automatically come to Europe's nice.
• 1:02:15
  And I mean, it depends what there's a lot buried in that phrase if Russia attacked Europe, right?
• 1:02:19
  I mean, if Russia sent its Air Force to bomb Paris, then Trump would feel aggrieved and outraged
• 1:02:26
  and it would all be on. But there are more sophisticated, I think so. I think so. Yeah.
• 1:02:31
  Because it'd be a snub and he doesn't like being disrespected. But there are ways of doing things
• 1:02:35
  that people who are playing three-dimensional chess can do. And, you know, we saw it,
• 1:02:40
  Putin's good at this stuff. But it's worth extrapolating here. If we bring it back to the Pacific,
• 1:02:46
  if the Europeans are having these worries, why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we in the same terms
• 1:02:52
  think about whether the United States really would come to Australia's defense in the worst possible
• 1:02:57
  case? Okay. But I mean, then let me make the, the analogy that disfavours your strategic position,
• 1:03:03
  which would be that the inner reason why Europe finds itself in the situation that it's in is
• 1:03:07
  because it many people, including Angela Merkel and other leaders at the time, didn't take
• 1:03:12
  seriously an early act of Russian aggression. They didn't take seriously Georgia and, and, you know,
• 1:03:18
  other indications that Putin was not appeasable, that there was nothing that they could do that was
• 1:03:22
  going to get his eyes off the prize. And he would just keep pushing as far as he could push.
• 1:03:27
  And ultimately he has done so. Why isn't the analogy to the, to the Pacific region that
• 1:03:34
  you have to draw a line in the sand when China's firing shit in our, in the Tasman sea,
• 1:03:39
  between Australia and New Zealand, they will keep pushing and they're just going to end up engulfing
• 1:03:44
  as much as they can, unless we draw some serious lines in the sand first. You absolutely have to
• 1:03:49
  draw a line in the sand. But implicit in that thinking is that should worse come to worse,
• 1:03:57
  you'll win. So you need to have the capabilities to win if it does come to a shooting match.
• 1:04:05
  And if you think that's not possible, then actually you probably need to move your line.
• 1:04:10
  Right. I mean, are the Europeans convinced that they would win in any meaningful sense in a battle
• 1:04:15
  with Russia? I mean, what does winning look like when there's a nuclear exchange, you know? Isn't the
• 1:04:20
  point, even if there's no prospect of winning, we're not just going to get steamrolled?
• 1:04:26
  Oh, I mean, I think that's a continuum. And I think not being steamrolled is actually a way to
• 1:04:33
  to deter an enemy, to stop them from attacking you in the first place. In fact, that's the kind of
• 1:04:37
  strategy I would advocate for Australia. I wrote a book called The Echidna Strategy. And
• 1:04:41
  for the American listeners, and Echidna is a, is a spiky anteater in Australia native animal,
• 1:04:46
  like a porcupine. Yeah, like a porcupine. And basically the premise there is that you, you win
• 1:04:52
  by not losing an Echidna, porcupine has no capacity to attack, to be a threat to anyone.
• 1:05:00
  But if you mess with it, you're probably going to get hurt and you won't achieve your objective,
• 1:05:04
  or at the very least it'll be incredibly painful to achieve your objective because we try to make
• 1:05:09
  ourselves indigestible. Right. So that is a valid, I think, form of deterrence. Look, I mean, one,
• 1:05:15
  sorry, do you want to finish that? No, please. Well, one way in which Australia is indigestible is
• 1:05:19
  it is literally geographically indigestible, right? It has, you know, all of the population centers
• 1:05:25
  are many thousands of kilometers away from the most obvious access point to Australia, which is
• 1:05:31
  it's northern coast, which is incredibly inhospitable, very hot and full of either, you know,
• 1:05:36
  implacable desert or marshlands and rainforests full of crocodiles. So like it's literally,
• 1:05:41
  if you were designing, if you were working in an AI video game and you were designing a country
• 1:05:46
  to be hard to invade, you could do worse than Australia. Maybe you'd put Sydney right in the middle,
• 1:05:51
  but you know, it's, we're pretty well, we're pretty well set geographically. The problem that I
• 1:05:56
  have never found adequately answered by people who use that as a justification to be sanguine is
• 1:06:03
  we have about six weeks of fuel. We have six months of pharmaceuticals, maybe 12.
• 1:06:10
  All you have to do is blockadus and we're fucked, aren't we? No. Okay. So you, what you're
• 1:06:16
  touching on is a source of real debate among defense analysts. I have back and forth with people on
• 1:06:26
  Twitter all the time on this subject and there are many learned articles written about this subject,
• 1:06:31
  but I'm really skeptical of the idea that Australia is particularly vulnerable to a blockade.
• 1:06:37
  First of all, geography helps us in a couple of ways. One is that, well, first of all,
• 1:06:44
  the sheer distance between us and China, Australia's single biggest defense as it is distance,
• 1:06:49
  Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney. Wow. So that protects us because the further away
• 1:06:58
  you are, the harder it is to project military power against a foreign country. Right, but there's
• 1:07:03
  only so many ways you can get to the bottom corner of the Asia Pacific in other in terms of the way
• 1:07:10
  that we can get stuff from abroad. So they don't have to, well, you tell me, I assume they don't
• 1:07:15
  have to be able to be stationed between Australia and Antarctica in order to nonetheless successfully
• 1:07:20
  make it really difficult for us to get diesel. Yeah. So they'd want to be stationed pretty much
• 1:07:24
  outside every major port in Australia. So every major capital city, in order to fully block
• 1:07:29
  aid Australia, stop imports coming in and exports going out, you'd need to block aid every port,
• 1:07:35
  you'd probably want to block aid every port. That's incredibly resource intensive at that
• 1:07:40
  kind of distance. You know, you're constantly sending ships down and relieving other ships that
• 1:07:44
  need to go home and then they refuel and they come back again. You can make an arc of a blockade
• 1:07:48
  and umbrella across the top of Australia where you can detect container ships that are coming towards
• 1:07:54
  Australia and fire warning shots across there now. It's still incredibly expensive. And then you
• 1:08:00
  do it from the South China Sea though. Yeah, you can do that from the South China Sea, but how does
• 1:08:04
  that help you in the Indian Ocean, for instance? So how does that help you stop trade from the United
• 1:08:08
  States to Australia? And also how does that stop airborne trade? So if you talk about medicines,
• 1:08:12
  for instance, which you mentioned, those come on planes. Yeah. So you can't stop that unless you
• 1:08:17
  prepared to shoot down passenger aircraft and, you know, trade aircraft, which is quite an
• 1:08:24
  escalation. That's essentially a declaration of war if you're doing that. Yeah, we're sort of
• 1:08:27
  talking about wartime scenarios, aren't we? I mean, yeah, you're so
• 1:08:32
  a fair enough. If you're in a constant war with the United States, you probably don't have
• 1:08:37
  enough ships to be able to encircle the northeastern, northwestern northern coasts of Australia in
• 1:08:43
  order to prevent all the ships from, I mean, you basically have to put a ring from New Zealand
• 1:08:49
  up to Singapore and around to, you know, the Indian Ocean between India and Western Australia.
• 1:08:55
  I don't want to be totally dismissive of the argument, though, because I think there is a case
• 1:09:00
  for building Australian onshore resilience so that we can meet the kind of threats that you're
• 1:09:06
  talking about. So for instance, I think you alluded to this. Australia has very little oil refining
• 1:09:11
  capacity and we don't have much oil storage on Australian soil. So we could do better there,
• 1:09:18
  but actually even go, I'll go you one better than improving our oil storage. Let's electrify
• 1:09:25
  the entire transport. Of course, of course, and we have abundance. We have abundant, not just
• 1:09:30
  fossil fuels, but sunshine and you know, hydro and wind, I mean, it's like we have energy coming out
• 1:09:36
  the waizu, it's crazy that we're in this predicament, but it doesn't mean that it's not a predicament
• 1:09:40
  that we've got ourselves into. Okay, so let's assume that a blockade is, you know, implausible,
• 1:09:48
  but we should, I take it that you would support a policy of aggressively strengthening our local
• 1:09:55
  capacity on a whole range of different fronts. I mean, if only because, you know, COVID showed us
• 1:10:00
  just how quickly supply chains can get disrupted and how disorienting it is to walk into a supermarket.
• 1:10:05
  And there's no spaghetti. And there's no, there's no nappies. And that's in a situation in which
• 1:10:12
  everybody is willing to trade if they can. It's just that things have been disrupted too much. If
• 1:10:16
  everybody was suddenly intentionally trying to be punitive, or not everybody, if our number one
• 1:10:22
  trading partner was intentionally trying to be punitive and make it more difficult for Australia to
• 1:10:26
  get things, things could get pretty dark for a while, one would imagine. First of all, I absolutely
• 1:10:35
  agree that it's necessary and urgent for Australia to improve its ability to withstand those kind
• 1:10:43
  of campaigns. But I also wouldn't overestimate how effective those kind of campaigns would be. You
• 1:10:49
  say that would get pretty dark. And yeah, we all remember the toilet paper examples from COVID
• 1:10:55
  and so on. We got through it, okay, didn't we? In the end. And the historical examples.
• 1:11:02
  Australia didn't get through it, okay, by being self-reliant on Australia. Everyone got through
• 1:11:08
  it because all countries trying to include it were scrambling to try to figure out how to get
• 1:11:12
  everything back on track. If you had one gigantic, implacable opponent, it's not a football
• 1:11:18
  conclusion that you'd get through it as quickly. No, but what I would say is that there's, I think
• 1:11:24
  that the COVID episode adds to the evidence that we've seen throughout the 20th century through
• 1:11:30
  various wars when foreign nations tried to impose blockades. And when there were shortages,
• 1:11:38
  wartime shortages in the UK, for instance, the link between that and making a government change
• 1:11:45
  is mind about something is very difficult to establish. So creating shortages, creating
• 1:11:51
  privation in a society and then using that to force a government to to give in. Right.
• 1:11:59
  That's very difficult to establish, right? Historically, there's not a lot of evidence that it
• 1:12:03
  works. If anything, it often goes the other way. Exactly. People dig in and so that's the whole
• 1:12:09
  sort of will meet again and spirit in the UK and the blitz, you know, it actually brought
• 1:12:13
  them together and it increased support for the wartime government. Yes.
• 1:12:19
  Okay. So just tie in the strategic questions about Orcas here then as well. The basic question being
• 1:12:26
  let's try not to paint too large a target on our back and make ourselves any
• 1:12:29
  nethertable participant. Well, any configuration between the China and the United States.
• 1:12:34
  Is that that certainly part of it? I mean, the dark joke that I've heard go around about Orcas is
• 1:12:41
  that Orcas is designed to solve the security problems created by Orcas. So when we put American
• 1:12:48
  bases on Australian soil, you know, bombers in northern Australia, submarines in Western Australia,
• 1:12:54
  we make ourselves a target. If those bases are not there, it seems to me, you know, very difficult
• 1:13:03
  to imagine the circumstances in which China would ever attack Australia. Now, yeah. Yeah.
• 1:13:10
  Well, you tell me what give me a plausible scenario.
• 1:13:15
  Oh, China tries to take Taiwan and the US decides that that's not going to happen
• 1:13:20
  and an international coalition joins the United States of which Australia is a part.
• 1:13:24
  Yes. No, indeed, but so again, we're talking about a US-related scenario, independent of the US.
• 1:13:30
  Well, of the alliance. No, but I think that's a cheeky dodge because the reality,
• 1:13:34
  I think nobody is so naive that they're saying that Orcas is necessary because even in a
• 1:13:40
  universe in which the United States didn't exist, China would still be a hostile adversary.
• 1:13:45
  I think the most generous claim to the pro-Orcas person would be something along the lines of,
• 1:13:52
  I think China's noticed what side we're on. I don't think we can just pretend that because we don't
• 1:13:58
  have this base or that base in Australia, this US base, that is that the Chinese are going to go,
• 1:14:06
  oh, I guess they're just like us. They're friendly. We're Western, we're liberal, we're majority
• 1:14:13
  white. They know the game. China's on to us. We're going to be involved. The reality of Australia's
• 1:14:19
  participation in World War One and World War Two and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and the
• 1:14:25
  Gulf War and the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War and the fight against ISIS. There is no other
• 1:14:31
  country in the planet, including Canada and the United Kingdom, who have been as consistently
• 1:14:36
  out America's side as the United States. We know this. The US knows this. China knows this.
• 1:14:41
  Everyone knows this. If there's a hot war between China and the United States, we're in it.
• 1:14:45
  If we're going to be in it, let's be fucking in it. This is the argument for Orcas.
• 1:14:50
  Because trying to have a bob each way and dance across the lily pads and dodge the
• 1:14:55
  raindrops is not going to get us anywhere. I agree with most of that. I would note that there's
• 1:14:59
  a lively debate in Australia, mostly conducted privately and even among politicians about,
• 1:15:05
  well, would we really participate in a war over Taiwan? Because it is different. It's not a war
• 1:15:11
  of choice in the way that putting trips in Afghanistan was. This would be potentially the biggest
• 1:15:20
  war since World War Two and maybe a lot larger if it involved nuclear weapons. Of course,
• 1:15:25
  we'll see that with or without our involvement. That's true. And it would be framed at the time as
• 1:15:31
  a war of freedom and liberation much like Ukraine. We don't have anything any skin in the game in
• 1:15:35
  Ukraine either, but we're still participating because we're standing up for a principle.
• 1:15:39
  Yeah, but where we began in this part of the conversation was about whether Australia
• 1:15:42
  would be a target. I can't imagine even with Australia sending tanks to Ukraine, for instance,
• 1:15:47
  that we're a military target for Russia. You're saying that we could participate in a
• 1:15:51
  multilateral action to liberate Taiwan without necessarily the homeland being a target.
• 1:15:56
  Exactly. The reason to make the homeland a target is if China feels it needs to neutralise
• 1:16:03
  the bases from which attacks are happening. And indeed, may feel more at liberty to
• 1:16:10
  neutralise those bases than any other base because they're the least strategically important
• 1:16:14
  to the United States and would be regarded as the most acceptable loss probably to a US
• 1:16:19
  administration. Right, in actual fact, than to something on the US, on your soil, or made
• 1:16:23
  even in Japan or Korea. Of course, we should note one exception to this is that Australia,
• 1:16:27
  since the 1950s, has had American communications facilities on Australian soil.
• 1:16:34
  This is at the Pine Gap and North West Cape, which is a submarine communications facility
• 1:16:41
  in Western Australia. I tend to think those would be sacrosanct. They would not be attacked by
• 1:16:47
  China even in a war because those facilities form an important part of America's nuclear
• 1:16:52
  command and control network. So heating those bases would effectively be a signal that China
• 1:16:57
  intends to start a nuclear war. And that's probably a signal they wouldn't wish to send.
• 1:17:01
  Right. Is there a universe in which China takes out the Orcas assets, the submarine base in
• 1:17:06
  Western Australia and so on? And we shrug and pull on a kidner and go, well, okay, that's that.
• 1:17:15
  No, I don't think so. I think, well, as I think you said, in for a penny, in for a pound,
• 1:17:21
  once we're in Orcas, once we have the American bases on our soil, then yes, we would be all
• 1:17:28
  in with the United States on such a military campaign. The argument I've been making about
• 1:17:34
  the Orcas nuclear submarine, so the government's very, this government and the previous government
• 1:17:39
  is at pains to always say, this is a sovereign capability, right? So the submarines are hours.
• 1:17:45
  They're not just American submarines that we're borrowing. The Americans don't have a veto
• 1:17:49
  over how we use them. They belong to us. And in sort of purely legal terms, they're absolutely
• 1:17:54
  right. Of course they're ours. And we can use them as we wish or not use them as we wish.
• 1:17:59
  But we are now embarked on one of the most intimate, technical, regulatory, strategic,
• 1:18:07
  doctrinal partnerships with a foreign military that any country could ever imagine. It seems to
• 1:18:13
  me very difficult to imagine that you embark on a relationship like that that could last 40,
• 1:18:18
  but potentially 50 years. And that somewhere along that pathway, when the senior partner in that
• 1:18:24
  relationship says, excuse me, we'd like you to use your submarines on our behalf. That's suddenly
• 1:18:29
  Australia then says, sorry, we're out. That seems to me very hard to believe. So I don't know about
• 1:18:35
  the plausibility of that scenario, but I will grant you that it's inconceivable that the Chinese
• 1:18:40
  would not perceive would would the Chinese would regard that rightly, I think, as a distinction
• 1:18:45
  without a difference about it in the sense that to say that it's that these are our sovereign
• 1:18:50
  submarines is a bit like a McDonald's franchise saying these are our hamburgers, not McDonald's
• 1:18:55
  as hamburgers because technically the name on the ownership slip of the franchise is not
• 1:19:00
  McDonald's corporation or, you know, a Catholic church that is embroiled in some kind of abuse
• 1:19:06
  scandal saying, you know, we're not, we're not, this doesn't go back to the Vatican. We're
• 1:19:10
  completely, we're completely independent and the Vatican trying to wash its hands of it. We know
• 1:19:13
  these kinds of scenarios where there is a deep link and people try to absolve themselves of
• 1:19:18
  responsibility because of some technicality would always be perceived as a technicality by any
• 1:19:23
  adversary. And yeah, so the question for me, and I want to get on to Trump in a moment before we
• 1:19:29
  lose you, question for me becomes how much of this is about faith and gut and trust and optimism
• 1:19:41
  and the vibe that you expect the next 100 years to have and how much of this is a puzzle.
• 1:19:54
  How much is a mystery and how much is a puzzle really? Because my
• 1:20:04
  gut tells me that some people's guts are saying leave no possibility for an emboldened China
• 1:20:16
  to dominate the region and therefore do absolutely everything that we might need to do in order
• 1:20:24
  to bolster our defenses against a China that may or may not be committed to wiping us out
• 1:20:30
  regardless of what we do. So appeasement is not an option and be all churchillian about it.
• 1:20:37
  And then there are other people who in their guts just feel we're confecting this problem.
• 1:20:43
  China obviously has a right to have more power in the region than it has historically had
• 1:20:50
  because it is a rising power and that is just what rising powers assert throughout time.
• 1:20:55
  So don't derange it and derail it by being obstreparous, allow it to expand its influence
• 1:21:03
  and manage that and work with it and it's fundamentally all going to be okay. And to me,
• 1:21:07
  those are two basically different emotional outlooks about the mystery of the future
• 1:21:13
  rather than right or wrong descriptions of a puzzle.
• 1:21:17
  Well, the future is a mystery but there's a couple of things we can know with reasonable certainty.
• 1:21:27
  They say demographics is destiny. China is a huge country, 1.4 billion people I think.
• 1:21:35
  It's economic growth is likely to continue. Who knows of what rate but the chances of it
• 1:21:41
  collapsing economically are very small. We should assume that it won't collapse politically,
• 1:21:48
  that it will remain relatively coherent. So when you take those simple things into consideration,
• 1:21:55
  assume those to be true over the long term, then it's impossible to escape the conclusion that
• 1:22:01
  China is going to be a massive part of our future. This is a once in a century shift of global
• 1:22:07
  power towards China. It seems to me impossible to resist. Now you use the word dominate in regard
• 1:22:14
  to China. I think even with that, with the certainty of China's growth, further growth in mind,
• 1:22:22
  it is possible to weave a path in between those two alternatives that you sketched.
• 1:22:29
  That is somewhere short of Chinese domination, but also well short of just simply giving in to China
• 1:22:37
  and assuming that it will be dominant. I don't think it's possible to stop China being the
• 1:22:42
  leading power in Asia, but it is certainly possible to stop it from being the dominant
• 1:22:46
  power in Asia. That is really the mission, I think, for Australia, among many countries in the
• 1:22:52
  region. China is surrounded by other great powers, even if we assume that the Trump
• 1:22:58
  trend continues in America fully withdraws from Asia. There are other great powers in the region
• 1:23:05
  that are going to have a big say, and they're going to frustrate China's ambitions.
• 1:23:08
  Who? India, Japan.
• 1:23:09
  India, Japan. Russia, absolutely, perhaps in future, are unified Korea. If we are in a future
• 1:23:17
  of American withdrawal, for instance, then some of those countries are going to get nuclear weapons
• 1:23:22
  as well. Japan and Korea will probably get nuclear weapons in a kind of a world.
• 1:23:28
  The interesting little ripple here for Australia is that the one bit of Asia that doesn't have a
• 1:23:36
  resident great power is Southeast Asia. That makes it a more natural outlet for Chinese ambition,
• 1:23:43
  I think, because it's simply more vulnerable.
• 1:23:46
  Right.
• 1:23:50
  I've written quite a lot now on the urgent necessity for Australia to get closer to Indonesia,
• 1:23:57
  because the only country in Southeast Asia that has the potential to become a great power,
• 1:24:01
  and in economic terms is on track to become one of the top five biggest economies in the world
• 1:24:06
  by the middle of the century, that's Indonesia.
• 1:24:09
  Yeah, it's got more people than any other country in Southeast Asia by far. It's the closest
• 1:24:13
  big country to Australia. Exactly.
• 1:24:15
  Yeah. It has the same geographic strategic interest that Australia does.
• 1:24:20
  Effectively, what both countries want is that China never dominates maritime Southeast Asia.
• 1:24:26
  So that's an ambition I think they can pursue together.
• 1:24:29
  That's interesting. So would you have, I mean, if you were an Australian diplomat,
• 1:24:34
  if you were foreign minister or something, what would you do? I'm just thinking about stitching
• 1:24:38
  together, say, Indonesia, the Philippines.
• 1:24:44
  Maybe you include some South Pacific countries or maybe you don't.
• 1:24:47
  But some kind of almost Australian led, as the end,
• 1:24:54
  counterweight to Chinese influence in the region, what would you do?
• 1:24:58
  Well, it can't be Australian led. It could be Australian initiated, but given the trajectory
• 1:25:02
  that Indonesia's on, it has to be Indonesia led because they're going to be bigger.
• 1:25:06
  And this is a mindset shift that Australians need to make and get used to.
• 1:25:11
  Indonesia is going to be a great power and we are going to have a great power on our doorstep.
• 1:25:15
  And we've never had that before. That's a really important change.
• 1:25:18
  And it's worth just as an aside, it's worth saying that as difficult as the China challenge is
• 1:25:25
  at the moment, it's very far away and that helps us a great deal. Australia has never had a great
• 1:25:30
  power on its doorstep. And if Indonesia was both wealthy and hostile to Australia,
• 1:25:37
  that would be a far worse security outcome for us than what we now face with regards to China.
• 1:25:42
  Certainly. Yeah, interesting. I mean, it's a long way from being wealthy enough to build
• 1:25:48
  its own military that can rival ours, isn't it? It doesn't so much lack wealth.
• 1:25:53
  I mean, they only spend about 1% of GDP on defence. If they double that to, you know, what is a sort of
• 1:25:59
  Western or OECD average of around 2%, that would be utterly transformative for Indonesia.
• 1:26:07
  But what's really needed in Indonesia, economic growth is pretty steady 5%. So that's good.
• 1:26:12
  But what's lacking in Indonesia is state capacity. It's more than just defence, but the entire
• 1:26:17
  state apparatus in Indonesia is weak. It can't tax properly. It can't educate. It's quite
• 1:26:24
  a difficult place to geographically to rule, isn't it? It's an archipelago of thousands of
• 1:26:29
  islands. That's tricky to manage. Yeah, that's fascinating. You also wrote recently about what
• 1:26:36
  Donald Trump's postures towards Canada and his remarks about Canada sort of tell us about
• 1:26:40
  American isolationism and the world order. What are you gleaning from it? Well, it's interesting
• 1:26:47
  actually just this morning I read that he's made similar tariff threats now against the EU. He says
• 1:26:51
  that the EU was founded as an anti-American economic or what's that effect? Look, it was about
• 1:27:01
  steel tariffs between France and Germany, wasn't it in the 1970s? It was that precursor. But actually
• 1:27:07
  there's just bringing us back to an earlier topic. The EU or the European coal and steel community,
• 1:27:14
  as it was known at the beginning, was created so that France and Germany would never go to war again.
• 1:27:19
  Yeah, and it's worked. It's worked spectacularly well at regard. So for that reason alone,
• 1:27:24
  it's worth preserving. Look, on Trump and Canada, what I reflected on in my article is just how
• 1:27:30
  extraordinary it is that an American president could make the kind of threats that he did against
• 1:27:37
  such a familiar country as Canada, like to Australians. It's the closest analogous country,
• 1:27:46
  Western Commonwealth, a post-colonial society, English speaking, an American ally.
• 1:27:54
  Absolutely. I mean, a federation of different states and provinces, a largely inhospitable
• 1:27:59
  geography with its population clustered around along one central strip. In our case, it's the coast
• 1:28:05
  in their case, it's the border. Absolutely. I mean, so similar. In so many ways, they're just like us.
• 1:28:10
  And here was Trump making really incredibly powerful threats against Canada. So powerful,
• 1:28:17
  in fact, that I would recommend to the listeners go and read the statement that President, excuse me,
• 1:28:23
  Prime Minister Trudeau made after Trump's announcement. It's take your lesson five minutes to read.
• 1:28:29
  Tell me that doesn't sound like a wartime address. Do you mean the one from the initial,
• 1:28:33
  the initial announcement? The initial announcement? Yeah, yeah. I watched that actually. He says that
• 1:28:37
  doesn't French and English as well back and forth. Absolutely. It's like he's talking about all the
• 1:28:44
  times that the Canadians have helped Americans. It is. It's extraordinary. And the darkly
• 1:28:51
  ironic part of that address was that he invokes shared wartime sacrifice in exactly the same
• 1:28:59
  way that Australian Prime Minister's routinely do. So even afterwards, we had a meeting between
• 1:29:04
  Australian and American Defence Ministers in Washington and Kevin Rudd sent out a tweet who is now
• 1:29:11
  our ambassador, used to be our Prime Minister, now our ambassador in Washington. He sent out a tweet
• 1:29:16
  with exactly that kind of language about, you know, Australia and America together for 100 years
• 1:29:21
  in every war, shared sacrifice, et cetera, et cetera. We've heard this. It's so familiar that language.
• 1:29:27
  But when you hear it put into the mouth of a Prime Minister of a fellow, you know,
• 1:29:33
  Commonwealth country who's just been economically assaulted by that same partner. I mean,
• 1:29:38
  that kind of language takes on remarkably, it's sort of darkly ironic tones. I understand it.
• 1:29:44
  It struck me really deeply. Yeah. I mean, I understand that Australian Prime Minister
• 1:29:48
  met by phone with President Trump last week. Is that right? Or am I, do I misread that?
• 1:29:54
  I'm not aware. Okay. I was just wondering whether or not you had any
• 1:29:57
  instinct about whether or not Australia has, I think it was about tariffs. It may have been
• 1:30:02
  at a foreign minister level, but I thought it was between the leaders about whether or not Australia
• 1:30:06
  is enough of a small target to be able to dodge the iron of the Trump administration and, you know,
• 1:30:11
  Canada looms large because Canada's right there and it has a border and Trump's obsessed with
• 1:30:17
  fentanyl and, you know, whatever. But is there a way of playing the the games such that we get
• 1:30:23
  exempted? Yeah, you're right. There was a phone call a couple of weeks ago in regard to steel
• 1:30:28
  and aluminium tariffs and the message afterwards to the public was that Australia was well-positioned
• 1:30:34
  to get an exemption. Yeah. And that's because we have a trade deficit with the United States,
• 1:30:39
  rather than a surplus. So, you know, that puts us in. Oh, right. As far as Trump is concerned,
• 1:30:44
  he's literally, he's got a mental abacus, doesn't he? He's like, yeah, it's like a five-year-old,
• 1:30:49
  it's mercantilism. It's like this idea of, you know, you have to balance the, balance the books.
• 1:30:55
  Yeah. So, look, that a droid and energetic diplomacy could take us a long way towards getting
• 1:31:02
  out of the line of fire here, but, you know, just stand back and think about the position we're now in
• 1:31:07
  that we even have to contemplate this kind of thing. So, the Trump administration will either,
• 1:31:12
  be seen by historians as a blip in history or it will be seen as the beginning of an era of
• 1:31:20
  sort of quasi-anti-democratic, you know, populist, strong-meaning type people and maybe the
• 1:31:28
  beginning of the end of the era that had been, that had prevailed for 80 years since the end of
• 1:31:33
  the Second World War and maybe the next 100 years will look, you know, unrecognizable. We just
• 1:31:38
  don't know yet. You wrote a book in which you, of which the subtitle alludes to hollow politics,
• 1:31:45
  the book's called our very own Brexit. What are you saying in, what are you reading in the T-Leaves
• 1:31:50
  and what is a hollow politics? Well, hollow politics is a reference to the slow, steady process
• 1:31:59
  since the Second World War of, in all Western democracies, of politics slowly disengaging from the public.
• 1:32:07
  So, of the political class pulling away from the public and the most obvious sign of this is the
• 1:32:14
  fact that political major centre-left and centre-right political parties in all Western democracies
• 1:32:20
  simultaneously have gone into decline, both in terms of their vote share but also in terms of
• 1:32:24
  their membership. And at the same time, all sorts of political associations in Western democracies
• 1:32:32
  have gone into decline. Unions, professional associations, churches are in decline, they have a
• 1:32:40
  sort of political role as well. NGOs have gone from being, you know, mass organisations to being
• 1:32:46
  highly professionalised organisations. Essentially politics, during this, particularly the second half
• 1:32:51
  of the 20th century, ceased to be labour intensive and became capital intensive. You need money
• 1:32:56
  more than you need people. And that pulled the public away from politics. And as a result,
• 1:33:03
  politics feels much more distant. In democracies, we get involved at election time, but otherwise
• 1:33:08
  we are not involved. And phenomena like Trump and like Brexit in the UK, I think are,
• 1:33:16
  can be best explained. Not by the rise of extremist forces, there's a lot of worry about populism,
• 1:33:22
  I know, in Western Europe in particular. But mainly by the dissatisfaction that the public
• 1:33:27
  feels about, the fact that politics is being taken away from them and has been dominated by a
• 1:33:33
  political elite that, you know, switches over by party, but otherwise stays roughly the same.
• 1:33:38
  Right, but what does it mean to say that it's taken away from them? Because the third way,
• 1:33:43
  sort of consensus that arose in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War was this kind of
• 1:33:49
  blareight, clintonian sort of like, you know, end of history, focke armor, what did you do? We've
• 1:33:55
  sort of sold all the big problems really. And whether you're sort of a little bit right or a
• 1:33:58
  little bit left, we kind of know the contours of what a country ought to look like to be prosperous
• 1:34:04
  and peaceful. And to a large extent, they were right about that. And then along comes, I suppose,
• 1:34:12
  globalization and automation and the decline of manufacturing and the hollowing out of, you know,
• 1:34:18
  steel towns and Appalachia or whatever you might have, what should the political parties have been
• 1:34:23
  doing other than the things that the populist right is now condemning them for not having done
• 1:34:29
  that would have solved this? I'm not sure they could have done anything. So I think what's happened
• 1:34:34
  over the second half of the 20th century is a kind of mutual withdrawal. So the public drew back
• 1:34:39
  from politics because they stopped joining unions, they stopped joining political parties,
• 1:34:43
  they stopped going to church, et cetera, et cetera, all the things I talked about.
• 1:34:47
  For the political parties, when their memberships came under threat, there was really only one
• 1:34:53
  rational response. These are bureaucracies that want to survive. And so if you can't survive by
• 1:34:59
  mass membership, then you find other ways to survive. And you do that. They've become policy
• 1:35:04
  instruments of corporations and donors. That's not quite that simple, but not that they're
• 1:35:09
  instruments of them, but they, like I said, they've become very capital intensive operations.
• 1:35:13
  So actually, a large membership base becomes an incumbrance rather than rather
• 1:35:18
  some of the use of Barack Obama and your raised tons of money from people who are donating $50 or
• 1:35:22
  $20. Yeah, that's true. That's a good exception to the rule that politics has become.
• 1:35:30
  Well, I mean, it's not an exception in the sense that it's become about money raising.
• 1:35:34
  Yeah, but what I mean is that doesn't necessarily need to derange the politics or decouple
• 1:35:41
  political policy from the interests of the common folk.
• 1:35:47
  Well, I guess you'd have to ask Trump voters about that. They would certainly argue that the
• 1:35:51
  direction of American politics in, since the era of globalization and of deindustrialization,
• 1:35:59
  whether that has furthered their interests, clearly they feel it hasn't. Look, I think the
• 1:36:04
  larger point here is that that whole agenda, that neoliberal agenda, has in many ways been
• 1:36:10
  pursued without ever asking the permission of the public. So the major parties in all of these
• 1:36:15
  Western democracies basically agree with the general direction to move in and that neoliberal
• 1:36:20
  economic policies and so on work very well and they do work. They have worked very well in Australia.
• 1:36:27
  But they stopped asking us if it was okay to do that. And so the way I interpret Brexit, for instance,
• 1:36:33
  is that the Labour and the Tory parties were in rough terms basically agreed that the slow,
• 1:36:40
  steady process of integration with Europe was the right course to go on. But they never asked
• 1:36:46
  the public. And then there was this internal dispute within the Tory party about about European
• 1:36:51
  integration, which David Cameron essentially said, well, I can't solve this. We'll need to put
• 1:36:56
  it to the public. And when the public was finally asked, well, what do you think about integrating
• 1:37:01
  into Europe? They said, no, we withdraw our consent. And the book that I wrote that you referred
• 1:37:06
  to earlier was basically saying that it's possible to draw an analogy with immigration in Australia.
• 1:37:12
  So immigration is a point of elite consensus in Australia. And I'm a great benefit, I'm a
• 1:37:18
  personally, I'm a beneficiary of immigration in Australia. I'm a great supporter of it.
• 1:37:22
  But I'm worried that neither of the major parties, while they pursue very strong and aggressive,
• 1:37:28
  quite aggressive immigration targets, we're one of the fastest growing countries in the world
• 1:37:33
  in population terms, thanks to our immigration process. And have been basically says, well,
• 1:37:37
  what are really, right? I mean, more than half of the population has arrived since the Second World War,
• 1:37:41
  since the Second World War, but especially since the Howard government. Yeah, so the 90s basically
• 1:37:45
  has been an enormous, yeah. And it's been enormously beneficial for Australia. But no one's ever
• 1:37:52
  asked permission. There's a kind of implicit, implicit agreement between the two major parties,
• 1:37:59
  will maintain high immigration levels. We just want to talk about it. And the one time, the one
• 1:38:04
  notable occasion when that rule was broken was, I think it was in 2007 when Kevin Rudd was the new
• 1:38:11
  prime minister at that point. And he went on television and he said, I support a big Australia.
• 1:38:15
  And there was hell to pay. I know when you exactly what he meant, was he talking about 50 million
• 1:38:20
  or a hundred million Australians. And it kind of reinforced the lesson that, okay, let's keep this
• 1:38:25
  immigration program going because economically, there's really no substitute for it. We have to do
• 1:38:30
  this to maintain our growth and to improve our productivity. We don't have to. We could be poorer.
• 1:38:34
  Yeah, we can choose to be poorer, but sure, but if both of the major parties,
• 1:38:38
  yeah, I thought you were going to say that the first time that you got glimpses of the damn
• 1:38:42
  breaking was in the 1990s when Paul Enhancin came around. Because for me, and at least in my
• 1:38:47
  lifetime, that was the first time I noticed there being a national conversation about racism.
• 1:38:52
  Now it was a clumsy and xenophobic conversation, but nonetheless it was a moment when that elite
• 1:38:58
  consensus was openly questioned. And you saw that there was 10% of the population who just went
• 1:39:02
  on board with this at all. Yeah. Well, I think John, the lesson that John Howard, who was opposition
• 1:39:08
  leader at the time and later became one of our longest serving prime ministers, the lesson that he
• 1:39:13
  learned was that you don't flirt with that kind of politics because he made some pretty incendiary
• 1:39:18
  comments in that period. No, that was in the 1980s, of course, that he made some pretty incendiary
• 1:39:23
  comments about Asian migration. And he got his fingers burnt. Okay. That predates my way of life.
• 1:39:29
  My, my vague recollection of his reaction to Hanson, who was this right wing populist anti-immigrant
• 1:39:37
  politician, who was just a, you know, a shopkeeper who went into politics, was that he essentially
• 1:39:45
  co-opted her policies really and just pushed the conservative party to be more at least
• 1:39:50
  rhetorically bombastic in its approach to immigration. I mean, and yet at the same time,
• 1:39:55
  pursued a very aggressive immigration policy. I want to stress here, I wouldn't want anyone to
• 1:40:03
  come away thinking that I believe Australians have a deep-seated fear or hostility or concern
• 1:40:10
  about high immigration levels. Overwhelmingly, the evidence suggests that Australians are in favor
• 1:40:15
  of immigration. We are one of the most successful multicultural nations in the world, the most
• 1:40:20
  successful. We are better than any other country in the world at integrating new immigrants into
• 1:40:25
  our society. It is Australia's superpower. We do it better than anyone. What I'm concerned about
• 1:40:31
  is the failure of the political class to us permission of the public to conduct that immigration
• 1:40:37
  program. And the public might, if they're ever asked, might withdraw permission simply in a
• 1:40:43
  fit of peak that they will never ask, not because they hate immigration, not because they're xenophobic,
• 1:40:47
  but because there is now such a gap between the political class and the public that they want to
• 1:40:52
  just poke them in the eye. It sounds like you're saying we need to have more uncomfortable
• 1:40:56
  conversations about things that are currently taboo. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that just to add
• 1:41:01
  one final button to that immigration point, and then one of the reasons why it support for
• 1:41:05
  immigration has become so robust, has remained so robust in Australia. Hopefully is that we have had
• 1:41:10
  something of a fausty impact with ourselves about how brutally we're going to deal with illegal
• 1:41:15
  immigration so that, you know, I think it was Arthur Callwell, the first immigration minister who
• 1:41:20
  said that, you know, the price that you pay to win over the Australian to get the support of this
• 1:41:25
  white country for large scale immigration is going to be that they feel they have total control
• 1:41:29
  over over who comes. They may not have any say in how many come, but that we know exactly who's
• 1:41:35
  coming and why. And so you can allow teenagers to rot in NARU and so their lips together,
• 1:41:41
  and that's the price that you pay for us having 500,000 people coming in a single year.
• 1:41:45
  And if you follow the immigration debate in the UK and in the US, I think you can read a similar
• 1:41:50
  subject. It's about the ability to control the borders. Yeah, interesting. You are thinking
• 1:41:56
  about the 21st century, if we're sitting here once my, you know, primary school aged kids are our
• 1:42:01
  age. Does the world do we do we get over this? Like do we do we restabilize?
• 1:42:07
  I mean, in the historical terms, we're not particularly unstable. Are you referring to the
• 1:42:15
  geopolitics of the world? It feels like there's a, it feels like we've got a tremor. It feels like
• 1:42:19
  there's a tremor, and I don't know if it's going to turn into an earthquake or if it's just going
• 1:42:22
  to stabilize. Yeah, I mean, the skill here is to, is to not give in to the parochialism of the
• 1:42:31
  present as it's sometimes called. The other term that that you could use is availability bias,
• 1:42:37
  right? So there's a tendency that we all have that when we're trying to assess a situation,
• 1:42:43
  we, we look at the most obvious evidence first, the stuff that's closest to hand. So if you
• 1:42:49
  ask someone now, is the world in turmoil? Well, where does their mind turn? It turns to the Trump
• 1:42:53
  administration. It turns to the war in Ukraine. It turns to, you know, threats of tariffs against
• 1:43:00
  Canada, for instance, Chinese warships off the coast of Sydney. And then you turn your mind back
• 1:43:06
  to the questioner and you say, well, hell, yes, the world is in turmoil. But if the comparison is
• 1:43:12
  six months ago, right? Yeah. But if you don't think about it in 1945. Exactly. Yes, that's the point
• 1:43:16
  I'm trying to make. So I mean, I try to apply what I call the time machine test here. So imagine
• 1:43:23
  a time machine standing in the corner of your room, and it can only take you back. Can't take
• 1:43:27
  you forward only back. How many of us would get into time machine and go back any time at all?
• 1:43:32
  That may be to the 1980s, but any time before that, like especially if you're a woman, if you're black,
• 1:43:38
  if you're Asian, in Australia, would you go back any time? No, life's never been better. And
• 1:43:43
  certainly if you couldn't dictate what year you were going to go to it. Right. If you just have to
• 1:43:47
  get in and it's you just take your, take your chances. Yeah. Louis CK had that great bit where he
• 1:43:53
  said, you know, I could press the button and go to any time. And as soon as I open the door on
• 1:43:58
  the time machine, there's someone there saying, please, sir, your table's waiting for you. Exactly.
• 1:44:03
  He's a white man. He's a white straight man. Yeah, exactly. That's right.
• 1:44:06
  Lovely to talk to you. Thanks so much for enlightening us. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Josh.