00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, it's Will here. Before we get stuck into this week's show, I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who has been leaving us their ratings and reviews. It's a wonderful way to help us grow Australiana, and it's super quick and easy. If you are yet to do so, please leave us one now so we can remain in the good graces of the mystical, algorithmic podcast gods that control our destiny.
Introduction to Australiana Podcast
00:00:24
Speaker
Now, cue the jingle.
00:00:40
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. As it so happens, my guest today also hosts a podcast, which he has titled Conversations.
The Importance of Open Conversations
00:00:50
Speaker
It's a seemingly simple title, but it speaks to a deeper truth. As a society, we are less willing to have conversations, to explore different ideas, to debate, to disagree respectfully. Instead, a troubling and insidious instinct has emerged across the West to shut down conversations and cancel the people conducting
Introducing John Anderson
00:01:11
Speaker
them. We're very lucky that John Anderson is not so inclined. John is a sixth generation farmer and grazier from New South Wales who spent 19 years
00:01:20
Speaker
1989 in the Australian Parliament, including six very notable years as the leader of the National Party and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. In my opinion, since leaving politics, he has become one of the most respected and insightful voices in the Australian public discourse. John, welcome to Australia. Very, very good to be with you. I'm enjoying it enormously, the opportunity.
00:01:43
Speaker
I'll follow on from my opening remarks, John. How do you reflect on the public debate in Australia today, the health of the public debate in Australia today?
Public Discourse and Leadership
00:01:53
Speaker
Well, I think it has deteriorated enormously and it's reached a point now where we emote so much and feel so little.
00:02:06
Speaker
that people feel quite frightened away. And I do think the great bulk of Australians are just crying out for some, to use an old-fashioned word, servant-modeled leadership. It might sound a funny thing to say, to open up with, but I can't get over the fact that 4 billion people, however they measure these things, tapped in to watch the farewell to the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, last year.
00:02:32
Speaker
And as I think about it, it wasn't just the pageantry and all of those ancient British traditions and, you know, immaculately groomed horses and state carriages and, you know, great airy cathedrals. I reckon she was deeply respected because you knew she wasn't about herself. You knew she was using her position of leadership to make a difference. That's what I think people are crying out for. But it doesn't. And here's the rub. Work well in an age that's committed
00:03:02
Speaker
to a quite radical view of individualistic and secular self-worship. We're not committed enough to other people, and yet when we see someone who is, we immediately recognize its value and we're attracted to it. And so my plea would be, let's get real again about finding ourselves not from within, but by looking outwards and seeking to make a contribution.
Religion and Morality in Society
00:03:28
Speaker
In other words, looking to serve others.
00:03:32
Speaker
I've jotted down that line, an age of individual and secular self-worship. I think if you looked at the data, that would bear that out. Religious observance has been declining in all Western countries over the last century, maybe a bit less over the last 60 or 70 years. And whilst
00:03:53
Speaker
I personally am not religious. I can understand the value that religion provides in terms of providing a sense of community, in terms of giving people a moral framework. And I fear that when we've lost those things or when we've lost religion, we haven't found an alternative that can give us those things. And I think that's led some troubling consequences.
00:04:18
Speaker
point around Queen Elizabeth is a good one, and I think religion was something that really drove her sense of of duty. How do you think about this in the context of declining religiosity in both Australia and the West more generally? Well, how long is a piece of string and how long have you got? Every great civilization, there have been a lot of them down through the ages. They're all powered by a powerful engine, put it that way, that's fueled by a common agreement with the, if you like, the design,
00:04:47
Speaker
and the intent and the driving energy of that engine. After a while, the fuel in every civilization started to run low, and then you've either got to refill it or find an alternative fuel.
00:05:02
Speaker
Well, undoubtedly, you don't have to be Christian to say that the Western democratic model arose. It's demonstrable. You can see it. It arose in the countries that took Christianity seriously. And it was based around the idea of the equality and the dignity of all, the rule of law. No one should be above the law. No one should be below it. The king should not be above it. And the most humble peasant in the land should be entitled the full force of the law. Why? That's true equality.
Youth and Renewed Religiosity
00:05:29
Speaker
Our four fellow bettors knew it. They wrote it into our constitutions. Now, we have moved away from that, as you've just said, although there's a stabilisation starting to happen amongst young people, according to the latest research, which is really interesting. Can you explain that for a second? That stabilisation? Yeah, the latest national church life surveys and some research from a very clever person who'd played around with these numbers shows that, in fact,
00:05:55
Speaker
In under 25s, there's now almost the product of such emptiness, I suppose, a reaction against the sterile secularism and the number of young people under 25s, as I understand it, and I can't show you the work here.
00:06:12
Speaker
But my understanding of it is that it's showing a stabilization and even a little bit of a pickup and a greater willingness to reconsider. And I think that's the product of people can see the engines running out of fuel because my question would be, and I posed this on a national radio interview after the last census, there was a crowing really from the secular media.
00:06:33
Speaker
Oh, wonderful, you know, less than 50% of people are now Christian. My question was, well, yes, okay, but how's it going? We've never been as atomized, never been as fractured, never been as subject to anxiety and depression and self-harm numbers amongst our young people.
Economic Concerns for Future Generations
00:06:51
Speaker
educational outcomes, sweeping and trust breaking. And something that really worries me, and I'm a baby boomer, we need to have a more civilized and level-headed conversation about the reality that years of bad economic policy have resulted in the increase in asset prices that have made people who have assets wealthier than ever.
00:07:12
Speaker
whilst those who don't are finding it really hard to get onto the treadmill and are therefore disengaged. And that's affecting. I mean, it's normally you left school, you started to think about taking on a mortgage, getting married, starting a family. You were then invested in the politics of the day in a way that made you stop and concentrate on what's going to work and what isn't, as I think about bringing children into the world, so forth.
00:07:35
Speaker
All that's now being disrupted. That in itself is feeding, I think, some serious, quite serious dislocations in our society. Yes, any regular listeners to your podcast, John, will recognise that as a consistent refrain, the failure of today's generation
00:07:53
Speaker
to adequately support and prepare the next generation. Before we get to that, one more question on religion. I think a lot of people would agree with what you're saying, would feel that sense of sterile secularism, and they'd feel a certain emptiness.
00:08:12
Speaker
At the same time, a lot of them simply couldn't get to the point of believing in a God. How do we engage those people? What is the alternative?
Purpose and Morality without Religion
00:08:21
Speaker
What's the alternative moral framework that you can provide to someone, to a young person, who maybe for whatever reason isn't religious, but is crying out for something more in their lives, for crying out for a sense of purpose? That's a really big group.
00:08:36
Speaker
It is, and I agree with that. I've asked myself that question many, many times. I don't think he'd mind me saying, I asked Tom Holland that question after a conversation I'd had with him. It was off air, but I don't think he'd mind me saying it. I said, I think this issue of how we make our society work when we've stripped out a sort of transcendental view, if you like, a higher authority saying,
00:09:02
Speaker
You don't have to like the person next door to you, but you have to love them because their soul matters as much as yours. Once you strip that out, on what basis do you say that someone you disagree with is not just to be clobbered, but still has to be respected? When a higher authority says you may disagree with that person,
00:09:24
Speaker
You may not even sort of like them very much, but you got to respect that person because their soul is of equal value. Menzies made that point. He said democracy in Australia works. It's not a machine. It's a spirit in which no matter your place in life, we respect one another. We have to a higher authority who said all souls are equal in the eyes of heaven. Pull that out, that sort of belief system in a God who instructs that and try to construct an alternative. That's the great dilemma.
00:09:54
Speaker
And I don't have a need answer. I'm not trying to sidestep. I know a lot of people ask that question very sincerely. I'm not trying to sidestep it when I say, I think it is a huge dilemma. I'm not sure you can find an alternative answer. There is an author in Australia who has written on this, and I must try and find him and do a conversation with him. And he makes the point that once you say, oh, well, we'll say we're, you know, all people matter because human beings have a moral sense. They're moral beings.
00:10:24
Speaker
Well, some are more moral than others. Am I going to rate the person who I think is immoral as in some way important than worthy of full dignity, or am I going to lord it over them? If you go to, well, we're more intelligent, we have IQs. What happens if you're less intelligent? Are you then a lesser citizen?
00:10:42
Speaker
It is a real dilemma. You've hit the nail on the head. And I would say that's the biggest single reason that our society is starting to unravel.
Societal Values and Free Speech
00:10:50
Speaker
What the fuel that we used to pour into the engine of Western civilization.
00:10:56
Speaker
often not honored as well as it should have been. But that broad acceptance that we depended on the view that all citizens matter. And I hear this equality debate today, and I see it runs off the rails because the minute you dare to disagree with the people who are espousing equality, they scream and yell, make it very plain, they regard you as an inferior human being. And everyone knows that. It's extraordinary, isn't it? Everyone fears. You know, we talk about the four freedoms being threatened, speech, conscience, and belief.
00:11:25
Speaker
assembly and property. On speech, more than anything else, it's the self-censoring that's the problem. People are afraid to speak. This is such an important point. There have been wonderful thinkers throughout history who have been able to argue for free speech from first principles. John Stuart Mill of course comes to mind. There are very few people in society today that appear confident enough
00:11:52
Speaker
to be able to do that. And there are almost no politicians today who have the guts to argue for free speech on first principles. In other words, to say people should be allowed to say what they think, even if it is nasty, even if it is in inverted commas hateful. Why are politicians particularly so seemingly afraid to argue for free speech in today's environment?
00:12:19
Speaker
I think for the politicians, I'm going to be really tough here and say that I think a lot of them simply don't know. They just don't understand. They don't have a worldview that lets them dissect what is really happening. How did you get that worldview? Well, I didn't go into a classroom until I was nine. We did correspondence school around the kitchen table. Partly my father and coming to grips with the fact that he'd been through a civilizational moment.
00:12:46
Speaker
He was a very brave man. People used to respect him enormously, being nearly killed in the Middle East and the big pushback against the Germans in the North African desert. That was part of it, I think. He was amazingly kind and patient with people that he disagreed with, although he'd often tell you what he thought afterwards. I think I was really fortunate. I went to Gunndar South Primary School for three years from the age of nine.
00:13:11
Speaker
And I reckon it was a high watermark in public education in Australia. The teachers that I had, three of them, I could still name them. I stopped and think about the values they inculcated, the expectations they had of their students. They were high. They expected character. And that was in the public system. And then I was fortunate enough to go to, yes, a very privileged school, no doubt about that.
00:13:39
Speaker
But there were people there who I think were teachers have an enormous impact. I think I was very fortunate to have teachers. For example, I hated debating. I really hated it. I thought that's something that's not me. But I had a history teacher who said, you are going to do this, whether you like it or not. And I'm going to help you hone your skills. And that was part of it. And then at university, I
00:14:05
Speaker
I was really fortunate to be at Sydney University. I'd always really enjoyed history, never really understood that it was the key to understanding the now and the future. I understand that more recently, but in those days, I just genuinely interested in it, and I was thinking about being a, you know, the law and all that sort of stuff, wasn't thinking about politics at all. But we had a marvelous lecturer taking us for late modern European history, the thought of the last 500 years and the major Western.
00:14:32
Speaker
societies. And that confronted me pretty bluntly with the appalling, can I put it this way, outcomes when you try to get away from the Christian basis of our society. Nazism on the right, or if it was on the right, national socialist, communism on the other, both atheistic,
00:14:53
Speaker
both lacking in principle, both disastrous for human beings. And we were challenged actually by the electorate. He put his notes down just before we did our exams one year and said, this isn't in the curriculum, but I want you to think carefully about where we've arrived at, because really the study of the intelligence here over the last three or 400 years has been about how do we do it better without God? And we haven't actually seen much evidence that you can.
00:15:17
Speaker
And he said, I really grapple with that. And he said, like you, he said, I'm not a believer. But he said to the lecture hall full of people. And he said, this isn't part of the curriculum. This is just me talking to a bunch of students I care about. There was a big lecture theater, too, a lot of us doing the course. He said, but just think about where you really arrived at. You know, the intelligentsia is tried desperately.
00:15:38
Speaker
find ways to do it better based on human reason and thinking and all the rest of it. And everything they've tried seems to end up in the gutter. That was a pretty profound moment for me, frankly.
00:15:49
Speaker
We had Peter Begosian on the podcast last week. He's been talking about the rot in Western intelligentsia, where he says, what you've just described is unthinkable today. Absolutely unthinkable. There's no way a lecturer at Sydney University would get up and say what you've just said. I want to be really fair to him. He made it really plain, not part of the curriculum. I'm doing this on my own bat.
00:16:17
Speaker
I don't have the answers. I just hope you see that what we've been studying presents massive problems and you need to think about them. So to be fair to him, but you're right. No, I can't say because of, I mean, really crude and rude here and say, I think they're just too bloody arrogant. Most of them now to do something that requires that level of honesty and humility. He was saying, you know, you need to think about this because
00:16:45
Speaker
You know, you can't think the other and the intelligentsia has got it right. There's no evidence that they have. In fact, the lesson of history is they made a mess of it. There are awful moments in Australian history that there are moments, for example, when English colonizers have treated indigenous people terribly. And we should recognize that at the same time as Western civilization more generally has had awful moments.
00:17:10
Speaker
There has been wonderful things about Western civilization from the Enlightenment and before that. Why are we so unbalanced in how we talk about both Australia and Western history? I am particularly fond of Warren Mundine. I really love the guy. We have a great relationship. Our families go back to the 1830s. And he said to me one day, he said, look, not everything that happened between us and he met our families was fantastic. But he said, actually, on balance,
00:17:39
Speaker
You taught us a lot and we taught you a lot and we can celebrate that now and move on together. And that's absolutely right. And I believe it to be right.
00:17:49
Speaker
And I respect him hugely. And I've grown up with Indigenous people. I went to school with them. I come from Gunnedah in the Northwest.
Indigenous Australians and Constitutional Voice
00:18:00
Speaker
If I had the opportunity to say to every single Australian who's going to vote in the referendum, I'd say there are two books you must read. One is The Red Kangaroo, the only attested story we have of an Aboriginal hero before European settlement, other than the Dreamtime stories. This was carefully recorded.
00:18:19
Speaker
from the tribal historians. They all had oral historians who passed on in enormous detail and with great accuracy what had happened in their tribes history. So that's one history we have and it's largely forgotten. It was written up in the 50s by Ian Idris from papers written, directly recorded from the 1840s.
00:18:45
Speaker
And the other book would be Peter Sutton's The Politics of Suffering. But the reason people should read The Red Kangaroo is it reveals, hey, they're just like us. They were a mixture of good and bad. The Red Kangaroo was an absolute hero, a man that every one of us could admire. He saved his tribe from corrupt
00:19:07
Speaker
broken down leadership that was eating away at the soul of the tribe, and he saved them from a takeover, warlike takeover from their neighbours. It culminated, his story, in an enormous battle in which huge numbers of people were killed. They lived in fear.
00:19:27
Speaker
of the medical doctor pointing the bone, but he was an admirable man that we would all like. We should not look at our own culture through rose-tinted glasses, but we should tell the story of our heroes and our progress.
00:19:42
Speaker
and we should not look at Aboriginal history through rose-tentred glasses just as we should respect their heroes and recognise the worth and dignity of every individual. That is my profound philosophical and starting point, and the only thing I want to add to it is whatever the faults of democratic capitalism might be handled the right way and the right spirit, no system has offered a better means for resolving differences peacefully and correcting wrongs peacefully and fairly. No other system.
00:20:12
Speaker
Name me another system that does it better. There isn't one. You reference the voice. Notwithstanding the principled arguments against the proposal, which I know that you've written about and spoken about recently, what do you say to people who would argue that, well, we've tried everything. Nothing's worked. In all likelihood, if you're not indigenous, this won't impact you. Why don't we just give this a shot?
00:20:40
Speaker
I believe Frank can say I think that's the weakest argument at all. I genuinely believe. I don't mean any offense to anyone who's out of frustration arguing that point.
00:20:50
Speaker
You see, you've got to realise that a lot of Aboriginal people are not in that terrible circumstance. As this debate teases out, you've got large numbers. Look, I met one of the finest Australians I've ever come across the other day. I know that because I had an hours conversation and I've been in the people business all my life. This was a bloke you just naturally warm to. And I met him out on my own farm. He was there with his son.
00:21:15
Speaker
And they were doing some ecology work for one of our neighbors. And we'd had a very long conversation about emissions, you know, and agriculture and climate change and, you know, our over-reliance on fossil fuels, which is something that actually worries me. We'll get to that, don't worry. It's another angle on the emissions debate. It's on my list. Yeah, really. Anyway, and we'd talked for a very long time.
00:21:39
Speaker
Before I made the comment that I was just a tad concerned about the rush to embrace the voice without enough detail. And he looked straight at me and he said, you know, I'm indigenous and I hate offending people. That might surprise you, but I really do. All my inclinations are to find common ground and get on with people. And I looked at him genuinely horrified and I said, gee, I hope I haven't said anything offensive. And he looked straight at me, said, no, you haven't. No, you haven't. Don't give that a moment's thought. He said to me, I am
00:22:08
Speaker
A highly qualified scientist. He didn't say highly qualified. I deduced that when I found out how clever he was. I've started my own business. I employ eight or nine people and I love my life. He said terrible things have happened, but I do not want to be singled out. I love my life as an Australian. I want the past to be the past. I love what I'm doing now.
00:22:33
Speaker
Now, he's not alone in that. So that's the first thing you've got to do without getting into the argument about who's Aboriginal and indigenous or not.
Societal Challenges: Family and Substance Abuse
00:22:41
Speaker
You've got to recognize there's a lot of people who have moved to a different place.
00:22:45
Speaker
So they don't need and don't want some sort of separate special emplacement in the constitution, which I have massive philosophical problems with. That's the first point. The second point is Bruce Sutton's. We've tried 40 years of progressivism and he makes the point, the dividing line between kids who make it and don't. And I come from, I represented an area and still live in it where there are a lot of disadvantaged kids. And he makes the powerful point that I want to make now.
00:23:12
Speaker
And it is a very simple one. The dividing line between kids who make it and don't is not skin color. It has to do with family and community. And the reason that I'm opposed to this model is that I haven't heard anybody say that the fundamental issue, the one that must be addressed, the one that the voice should really be focusing on above all else if it's to exist. And I'm not against the voice. I just say, don't put it in legislation. If you want to try another thing like we tried with ASIC and several bodies like it, that's OK. But don't lock it in the Constitution.
00:23:41
Speaker
where if it turns out to go wrong, as I believe this model will, don't leave it there where it can't be removed. But you've got to break that cycle of violence and give kids an opportunity to grow up without the fear of physical and moral violence being perpetrated against them.
00:24:01
Speaker
Why do most people on the Labour side and some people on the Liberal and National side think about it as a skin colour problem as opposed to a socio-demographic or cultural problem? I think a lot of people have bought the rhetoric around the things that have happened in the past which were often unfortunate.
00:24:23
Speaker
I think there is a terrible problem with the smugness of our society. All the focus is what has happened in the past. There's nowhere near enough focus on what our generation has both done in terms of sins of omission and commission. When you get out there and talk to indigenous leaders, they will talk about the difficulty of getting alcohol bans up. That's now. That's our society. That's not our forebearers.
00:24:48
Speaker
You go to a place like Alice Springs, as I have done and talk to the kids outside the casino on Social Security payment nights, and the kids are milling around the outside looking utterly miserable. And you sit down on a bench. I did this. So why are you fellas looking so upset? Mum's in there. She's pouring next fortnight's pension down the poker machine. The kids said this to me.
00:25:13
Speaker
And his mates were all milling around, drawing into the conversation the way they do. And he said, almost certainly mum's going to lose the money and tomorrow we'll go to school hungry. The day after that we'll be so hungry, we'll break into the tuck shop trying to find something to eat. And then the coppers will be after us.
00:25:29
Speaker
That's us. That's not what our forebears have done. And then you come to another one. Remember, I represented a lot of Aboriginals. Two elders came to me one day and they said, the trash into your society is socializing young men. I said, what do you mean? And that was back before the days of the internet in remote areas. And he said, we're getting truckloads of porn coming out of Canberra in particular.
00:25:55
Speaker
And they bring it in, and our young men just get addicted to it. And references to, I said, well, the civil libertarians out of Canberra don't want to confront that debate. And he said, well, how about you start saying they ban anything that makes references to mother effing? That's what he said to me. And I looked at him, and I said, oh, mate, why do you start there? And he said, our boys think that's what whitey does, so now our mothers aren't safe.
00:26:21
Speaker
That's us. It's not our forebears. Stop this business of demonizing our own forebears. Yeah, they made mistakes. They did things that were not right. They also built a society in which we have opportunities, indigenous people included, a vastly improved lifespan, a quality before the law if you only choose to sort of make sure it works and we make sure it works. This is not all downside. But my big point here is our smugness in judging others is
00:26:51
Speaker
a real problem debate, a real problem. What you've just said is immensely powerful, but it also raises what I think is one of the really hurtful problems in this whole debate. And that is by fearlessly calling out some of the systemic problems in indigenous communities, like alcoholism, like gambling, like the breakdown of the family unit,
00:27:20
Speaker
Some others are very happy to throw out words like racist, to use that as a slur. How do we get past this awful debate that says if we call out problems as we see them in these sorts of communities, then you're a racist or you're a bad person? This is something I'm really struggling with in the voice debate today.
00:27:44
Speaker
So am I. I'm deeply concerned that this is meant to be an act of reconciliation and it split the Australian people down the middle. There's just no two ways about it now. It would be a very close run thing as to whether it got up or went down, if it were held today. I reject completely the idea that it's going to be that those who are saying no
00:28:04
Speaker
Of course there are people on both sides who are racist. Both sides. There are. It's as simple as that. Because there's such a thing as reverse racism. And there are some people who are so utterly convinced that it's all white's fault. They're the only ones who have ever done anything wrong. I had a very interesting moment on the ABC, I'm going to say this a couple of years ago, where it was about frontier violence that came up.
00:28:29
Speaker
And they'd invited me and a young Aboriginal man from Redfern who had a remarkable story about a turnaround in his own life sitting beside me. And the Compare was trying to dismiss what I said based on my practical experiences of engagement with Aboriginal people. Oh, no, no, that's just anecdotal was the charts from the ABC Compare. And what unfortunately the mics didn't pick up and she certainly didn't
00:28:54
Speaker
is that about four or five times through the conversation, the young indigenous man who was seated on my left kept saying, I won't mention the compare's name, but she kept saying, he was saying it softly because Aboriginal people are often very gentle. That's been my experience. He was saying very softly, no, no, no, no. You know, John's right. John's right. Listen to John. And she was determined to put
00:29:20
Speaker
the ultimate view of what has gone wrong to her listeners. I don't know what you do about this because a great deal of it is tied up with self-loathing. A lot of people don't understand, I don't think, how they've been conned by the whole sort of master through the left whose objective is, has been, and is, to undermine the fundamental thinking, ideas, and values, going back to our earlier part, the earlier part of this conversation, because they don't believe in it.
Progressive Views and Discourse
00:29:49
Speaker
And any club will do, any club to belt us up, to make us feel more guilty, to obscure the need for clear, calm debate about what is really happening to our Indigenous children and to other children of terribly broken circumstances. And remember, as I say, because I represented a vast rural electorate, which was a microcosm in many ways
00:30:18
Speaker
of these sorts of issues at large. You could see everything. You could see it in the classrooms when you went into the schools. You've got this great problem that there's not a balance. There's not a careful reasoning. There's not a proper conversation. And here's a classic example of it. We heard in very short order recently
00:30:38
Speaker
because I've been following this debate closely, that 86% of Indigenous people polled were in favour of the voice. At the same time as that happened, Crikey, which is a supporter of the voice, established that 50% of Indigenous people hadn't heard of the voice. So who's kidding who? 86% of the sample of, I think it was 600, in favour of the voice,
00:31:01
Speaker
But 50% of Indigenous people, according to Crikey, hadn't heard of the voice. I dare say a few more have now. But this is the other, you say, and you're right, that the great argument, we've tried everything else. And yeah, I agree. We need to find a better way to do it. And I think I can see where the focus needs to be. It's on breaking that cycle of violence against children in those early formative years. The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs talks about employment,
00:31:31
Speaker
housing, jobs, and education in the very remote areas where this problem is worse as the priorities for the voice. Fair enough? They're very important issues. None of those will mean a thing to you if your life in your first three formative years has been so destructive that you're not able to function properly. And we know enough now
00:31:53
Speaker
about the damage it's done, for example, to the anxiety part of the brain. If you spend the first three years of your life in anxiety and your anxiety is not comforted, it's rather fed and built up. That permanently affects the way the brain operates. So the basis of my argument is if you're to find things that would convince me it's going to work, let's have a national conversation about these things. But they're the very things, that's the point, my point about our culture.
00:32:22
Speaker
wanting to condemn previous generations, our culture doesn't want to address, progressive people don't want to address issues like fatherlessness or like access to alcohol. So, you know, the chief minister of the Northern territory saying we're not having racially based grog bands, knowing full well, by the way, they're never racially based anyway. They were area based. When the indigenous community is just saying, give us back the bands,
00:32:48
Speaker
But I know the progressive say, no, no, no, that's anti civil liberties. And then the whole issue, of course, of of the incredible cesspit of the Internet and how it can convey to young Aboriginal men the values of the trash and as as an indigenous leader has put it to me in very blunt terms, the trash and of our society, not our forebears, our society, us. Let's be honest about ourselves for a change.
00:33:19
Speaker
You know, we're pushing this stuff out. And I don't say for a moment it's only damaging young indigenous men. We know full world's damaging an awful lot of young men. But no, we won't talk about that either. So a lot of my skepticism, if you like, about the voice comes from the fact that it's being pushed by progressives
00:33:39
Speaker
who will not acknowledge that they themselves are part of a society that's perpetrating a lot of this harm, that's heaping it all. And I freely admit, I say it as a sixth generation Australian, freely admit that. But heaping it all on my forebears, I need to ask what I'm doing that's right and wrong. There's not much I can do about my forebears. John, I've been listening to your answer very closely. I may embarrass you a tad here, but
00:34:07
Speaker
I don't think there are many politicians on either side of the house today that could articulate an opposition to the voice or articulate a policy area more generally in a way that you just have. And it leads me to my next question, which is, has the quality of politicians diminished since your day? I grew up in the era of Howard Anderson Costello.
00:34:37
Speaker
Directly before that, there were people of substance on the labor side in Keating and Hawke. Am I looking at history through rose-tinted glasses? Or is it fair to say that the current crop aren't up to the standard that those names set? And if so, why? I need to be really careful here, because I don't want to sound smug. I don't think for a moment I've got anything to be smug about. I don't think I'm a particularly clever individual. Many of your listeners would agree with that.
00:35:06
Speaker
I think what I'd actually say, I'd be much broader. I've always held pretty strongly to the view that the political players really reflect the society that they're serving, that's put them in there. And I think we've done the public debate down very badly. In a way, you made the point earlier when you said no academic would do what that fellow did for my class way back in 1977. And I think it's bearing fruit.
00:35:32
Speaker
Now what I do want to say in defense of some of the people that I know in public life today is that there are very good men and women still, even now, prepare to put their hand up and we need to get behind them and encourage them and drop this idea that the best way to get performance out of your politicians is to write them all off as self-serving, terrible people and then like a sort of
00:36:00
Speaker
you know, a broken down old horse trying to drag a heavy load up a hill, pretend that the best way you can get them to perform is to whip them to death. I think of the courage of a Jacinta Price and I think to myself, I was reading this morning in one of the erstwhile newspapers in this country,
00:36:19
Speaker
you know, a condemnation from the yes camp of some obscure person who's apparently back the no camp. And I thought, where was this newspaper? Where was this journalist calling out some of the people who made appalling personal attacks on Jacinda Price?
00:36:37
Speaker
But look, the only other thing I'd say is, and I mean this really sincerely, you know, I think one of the problems we now have is that because not enough good people are coming forward to politics, and again, I want to stress again that I'm not condemning them. I think there are some good people still having a go despite all the disincentives. One of the problems is they get pushed into leadership a little bit early. I actually think this happened to me. I think I probably, I wish I'd known then what I know now.
00:37:05
Speaker
And life is a journey where you keep learning things and you keep picking up skills and knowledge. If you're leading a worthwhile life, as the ancient said, is one where it's a reflective life. You try and learn from your mistakes. You try and gain insights and experience and put it to some sort of good use. And somebody said to me the other day, how do you feel as you look back over your political life? And I said, well, one of the great regrets I have is that I think I probably know more now than I did then.
00:37:35
Speaker
And maybe if I'd known a bit more, then I might've been better at it. One of the more enjoyable evening walks I've had of late was listening to an interview that you did with Peter Costello, former treasurer under the Howard government. For anyone who hasn't listened to it, I can't recommend it strongly enough. It is one of the most insightful and
00:37:57
Speaker
engaging conversations you can ever hope to hear on politics and the state of the world today.
00:38:09
Speaker
It had a run extensive run, especially that line. The best youth policy is a debt reduction debt and deficit reduction program so that they only have to our kids only have to pay for themselves through their taxes, not us as well. But isn't it interesting that that precise attitude seems to be out of favour today, not just in Australia, but across most modern Western governments, both on the left and the right.
00:38:37
Speaker
After COVID, it feels like governments have just given up on fiscal responsibility. The idea of low tax, low spend is not in fashion. And as debt seems to balloon with no real hard choices being made to try and pare it back, governments aren't being held to account for that. So my question is,
00:39:01
Speaker
Is it possible to still sell fiscal responsibility in the way that the Howard government did, for example, in 2023?
Government Fiscal Responsibility Post-COVID
00:39:12
Speaker
Or unfortunately, does that just not suit the times? It's a really good question. And I see the former Treasurer, Labor Treasurer, Ryan Swan. I think it was over the weekend at the Labor Party conference saying, what a wonderful thing it is. We're now free from this obsession with deficits. We're now free.
00:39:31
Speaker
You know, and COVID finished it because the coalition spent so much money during COVID. I'm pretty sure that was the sentiment behind what he was saying. You know, your question is a really good one and a really important one, because again, I'll defer to Peter Costello, who's insightfully made the remark. Well, he put it to me as a question. He said, John, do these people think we had a constituency for debt reduction? No, we didn't. You have to go out and argue the case. You have to passionately say this is to stop the intergenerational theft.
00:40:01
Speaker
So the former Labour Party Prime Minister didn't include that. He didn't say to the people at the Labour Party conference, you younger ones, we expect you to pay for the things we've indulged in during our lifetimes, as well as pay your own way, your own education bills and your own defence bills and your own NDIS bills. You're going to pay ours as well.
00:40:23
Speaker
because we wouldn't pay them during our own lifetime. So you've got to mount the argument. And I think if I did have one thing to say, and I'll claim solidarity with Peter Costello, and I don't think John Howard would mind me saying it either, and all of that team that I served with.
00:40:40
Speaker
You know, don't assume there's going to be a constituency there for you to tap into until you mount the case. You've got to take control of the public debate. And I think perhaps that's where we've failed badly in the centre and the centre right of politics right across the Western world. We've not argued the case. We've not built a constituency. And we've made a fundamental mistake, by the way, in not recognising that since time immemorial,
00:41:07
Speaker
It's no use talking numbers first up. No use saying, we've got to have a good economic policy so we can have a sweet set of numbers and brag about how we've achieved this, that and the other. You actually start out by saying we need good outcomes.
00:41:22
Speaker
for Australians, young people in particular, need us not to pass him on a big debt because that will crimp their opportunities. In other words, you start with a moral precept and then you build the argument. It's just, it's human nature. I like to be engaged with a story.
00:41:39
Speaker
that if you like appeals to me personally and emotionally and then engages the brain, I think it works better that way than the other way around. And the left has been much better at it than the other side of politics. I think we need to learn that lesson because
00:41:55
Speaker
I'll be blunt here and say that very often, right values tend to be right of center. And I think living within your means, being sensible there doesn't mean that you don't occasionally run up deficits, but to lock them in, build up huge debts. I mean, the fastest growing area of government expenditure in Australia is interest on the debt. And it will be seriously impacting on the things that we can do for people in the future. It's also going to mean that taxes will be higher.
00:42:25
Speaker
than they otherwise would have been. And that just compounds so many problems, including, and I would argue especially, for younger people. There aren't enough people telling that story. And there certainly aren't enough people telling that story with the clarity of thought that you have, John. So thank you very much.
00:42:47
Speaker
John's podcast, Conversations is Wonderful. A link is in the show notes. I can't recommend it more highly to our listeners.
Impact of Early Life on Indigenous Children
00:42:57
Speaker
John, this has been an absolute privilege having you on, Australiana. Thank you very much. I've really, really enjoyed it. Let me just finish on this note on the voice. I oppose it because I deeply and genuinely care. And what actually gets at me is the memories, the haunting memories I have. Little Aboriginal children.
00:43:16
Speaker
having their life opportunities just so badly smashed by the experiences in their formative years. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.