Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
"The Teals are an existential threat to the Liberals" - Joe Hildebrand
2.3k Plays1 year ago
Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
Australia is facing serious domestic and international challenges, all at a time when the political class has arguably never been so ill-equipped to address them. In fact, perhaps the only thing that nearly all Australians can agree on is that our leaders are not a patch on what they were in times gone by.
At the same time, ‘she’ll be right, mate’ has served Australia well enough so far, and may yet still. To help us understand the state of the nation and our politics in 2024, Will is joined by one of Australia’s best-known and most insightful political journalists, Joe Hildebrand.
Follow Australiana on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Recommended
Transcript
Australia's Structural Challenges
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston.
00:00:19
Speaker
Last month, one of the world's most influential geopolitical analysts, Peter Zion, pointed to three structural challenges facing Australia. Less Chinese demand for raw materials, an ongoing failure to move up the value chain in the rural commodities sectors, and a looming subprime credit crisis that he estimates is five times worse than what sent the US into the GFC. Put together, he predicts these problems will spark a depression in Australia
00:00:48
Speaker
that will last at least half a decade. Even if you think that's pessimistic, there is no doubt the country faces serious challenges all the time when the political class has never been so ill-equipped to address them. In fact, perhaps the only thing that nearly all Australians can agree on is that our leaders are not a patch on what they were in times gone by.
00:01:11
Speaker
At the same time, she will be right, mate, has served Australia well enough so far and may yet still.
Political Class and Economic Future
00:01:18
Speaker
To help me understand the state of the nation and our politics in 2024, I have enlisted the help of one of Australia's best known and most insightful political journalists, Joe Hildebrand. Joe, welcome to Australiana. Thank you very much, Will. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad that we got to have this chance before the apocalypse hit.
00:01:37
Speaker
Well, I will start there because you're right. It is a very apocalyptic outlook for the country. What's your macro view of where we are at as a nation and where we're going?
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, look, it's an interesting one. It was much more optimistic before I heard your introduction. But there is no doubt that there are a number of serious economic and strategic to use that great euphemism challenges ahead.
China's Influence and Australia's Position
00:02:03
Speaker
It remains to be seen, I suppose, firstly, what will happen with China. I was just reading overnight before we chatted about further challenges China has in its property market, which we know that
00:02:16
Speaker
has been a bit of a sort of looming sort of Damocles for some time, and it hasn't quite dropped yet, but people keep saying, all right, any minute now, the big one's coming, bubble's going to burst. So it'll be interesting to see what happens there on both fronts, because of course, Australia relies on very strong
00:02:32
Speaker
economic growth from China for its export markets. But of course, we don't want China to be a bigger, more powerful defensive force or military force than the United States. And I remember many years ago, someone basically saying that the window for China to leapfrog the United States in terms of military power was actually quite small because of its aging population. Suddenly it will have to
00:02:59
Speaker
take care of all these people who have moved from the country to the cities and now need pensions and will need a workforce to accommodate them. And of course, the sheer scale of the number of people that involves is eye watering.
00:03:11
Speaker
And so it's actually really just sort of had that kind of window recently, you know, that sweet spot to sort of thread the needle that just happened to coincide with Donald Trump's presidency. And so I think the fact that that was such a chaotic period and you can talk about the sort of Richard Nixon crazy man theory, if you like, I think that made it kind of quite difficult for China to sort of make the most of what it had going for it during that period. And
00:03:36
Speaker
And now you know again with the housing stuff and we'll still see what the aging population does is it possible that china's rise and fall has kind of already happened and we just haven't seen it yet it's happened below the surface demographically and economically and we're about to see the result so.
Australia's Strategic Choices
00:03:52
Speaker
That would be a strategic benefit for Australia, but an economic disaster. And that's, I suppose, just one factor. And we can maybe talk about the more political stuff in the next bit. But I suppose that's just one example of the strange and, as the Chinese curse goes, interesting times that we live in.
00:04:13
Speaker
We will get to the political stuff in a second, but maybe just to follow on from that, there are, I guess, two schools of thought on how Australia approaches the relationship with China. You've got the heating-esque view that we need to engage more closely with China and with Asia. And then you've got the view on the other side from say the right that says, well, we need to align ourselves with the US militarily and economically shared values, all that sort of stuff.
00:04:39
Speaker
Where do you sit in that conversation and has Australia got the positioning right at the moment? Yeah, I still, I suppose kind of the tricky part is that as to that last example, those two things kind of always intersect. You can't just say, right, we're going to be economic allies with you over here and we're going to be military allies with you over here and expect everyone's going to be sweet with that. We know, I mean, my position is obviously that.
00:05:02
Speaker
Just having just said it's impossible, that is my position. I'm a huge supporter of AUKUS. I think it was absolutely the right call. I fully commend the Labour government for sticking with it and strengthening it. Whether any nuclear subs will actually arrive is another matter altogether, but we'll park that to one side for a second. So we do have to do that. We do have to rely on the US militarily. The alternative is just unthinkable. The alternative is basically saying
00:05:28
Speaker
I mean, and again, I love Paul Keating, but his stuff on China and since leaving the prime ministership has just been completely crazy. I mean, you know, he talks about sort of throwing toothpicks at a mountain. Great line. But again, what is the alternative he's proposing that we just throw in our luck with China strategically and economically and just, you know, just hope that China allows us to live
00:05:52
Speaker
as long as it feels like, or that China just does whatever it wants in terms of human rights. Indeed, in terms of economically, is it a rules-based order or not? Of course, you need big players like the US to apply a bit of stick as well as a bit of carrot, which is all our iron ore, to a player as big as China. I think you also can't be too
00:06:16
Speaker
I mean, you can become over obsessed with China. My recent obsession and I'm mad at many obsessions, so never have one
India and Global Dynamics
00:06:22
Speaker
obsession. I think we've also got to look at places like India as well, which is much more suited temperamentally to the West. It is a liberal democracy. And indeed, that's probably why it hasn't been able to advance economically as fast as China, because democracies are very messy and you can't just, you know, can't just flood a village of 100000 people every time you need a new dam.
00:06:44
Speaker
But, you know, India is going to probably overtake China in terms of population pretty soon, if it hasn't already. And it has a huge, highly educated workforce. It has similar values that we have. Ironically, it's a legacy of of empire. And so that could be the next big strategic and economic relationship we have. And of course, we've already got the quad with Australia, US, Japan and India. And I think that's another fantastic bulwark against
00:07:13
Speaker
China. The last thing you want is a uni polarity in global affairs. The last thing you want is one country that is stronger than any other. And also the last thing you want is kind of a whole bunch of different powers sort of jostling for supremacy where there is no rule based order because then you end up with something like World War One.
00:07:33
Speaker
A couple of people have drawn, much smarter people than me, have drawn parallels between what the world is starting to look like now and just before 1914, where you have, for example, China being Germany, growing in power, growing in strength, seeing all these goodies that other superpowers have and saying, hang on, why don't we have those? It's almost a cliche these days to note. China has been the absolute master of
00:07:59
Speaker
all its domain of the entire sort of East Asia, Northern Asia region for its entire history, except for the last century or two. Whereas we in our lifetimes and the 20th century would look at all the
00:08:14
Speaker
the struggles between the exploitation of it by the UK and the weakening and the Opium Wars and the siege of Hong Kong and the Nationalist versus the Communist, which just ran the joint into the ground. For China, that was just a kind of blip in millennia of history where it has been the master of the known world. And I think you have to see that just like you've got to see how Russia sees itself. You have to see how it's thinking to think about how to deal with it.
00:08:40
Speaker
One of the big problems, I think, amongst a lot of Western pundits is just this instinct to look at the instincts of China, of Russia, of non-Western countries through a Western lens, as if they have the same underlying motivations and they have the same sort of calculus, or calculuses, as we do. And they just don't. And they go, calculate, it's calculate! All right, not all of it's due to Latin at Eaton.
00:09:08
Speaker
Well, whatever may be the case, we need to have a strong political class to be able to deal with some of these geopolitical challenges and some of the internal stuff we're facing. I made the comment in those remarks in my introduction that our political class has never been worse. Is that unfair or do you think we are at a historically low end for the quality of political representation in Australia?
00:09:32
Speaker
It's not the
Australian Political Leadership
00:09:33
Speaker
quality of the people so much as the quality of the culture. In the last, what is it now, 15, 16 years of Australian politics, no one has actually had the chance to get any good at it. No one has had the chance to get any practice in. You know, I imagine Taylor Swift's boyfriend or Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth or whatever.
00:09:57
Speaker
If you just stuck them on a court, having never given them a basketball or football or whatever it might be, they probably wouldn't be very good no matter how much natural talent or intelligence they had, because you have to actually practice something to be any good at it. And what we've had in Australia, and this is my absolute article of faith, and I've felt very much like a lone voice in the wilderness at times,
00:10:20
Speaker
But from the minute the Labor Party knifed Kevin Rudd in his first term, which was, for all intents and purposes, a completely unprecedented move in modern Australian politics, you have to go way back before the First World War, before the Second World War to find it. And even even then, I don't think there's any sort of comparable circumstances.
00:10:42
Speaker
That was like a sort of nuclear bomb in Australian political culture because suddenly it's almost like mutually assured destruction. And then someone says, nah, fuck it. I'm just going to drop the bomb and see what happens. And what we saw was mutually assured destruction. It destroyed
00:10:58
Speaker
Julia Gillard destroyed Kevin Rudd obviously first of all then destroyed Julia Gillard after the party got decimated at the following election. Ironically she's a good person who did a terrible thing and her reputation never recovered from it and she never got the legacy that many would have thought she deserved. There was an original plan that Kevin would win two elections and Julia would win the next two and everyone go home happy after 12 years and see what happened just like Hawke and Keating but of course
00:11:24
Speaker
Ask Peter Costello how those plans work out. Exactly right. So, again, you have to respond to what's happened on the day. But the point is that they panicked and they put into a place, a plan that was self-evidently unsuccessful because they went straight into minority government. Gillard was then forced out before she could even go to an ex-election, which she would have lost in an even greater landslide than Kevin
00:11:48
Speaker
ended up Kevin Mark two ended up losing it in. And then of course the contagion jumped the tracks and spread to the liberal party, which no one thought would ever happen. No one would have thought anyone would have been stupid enough. You know, these guys having watched the labor party implode from the front row, then just come to the same things themselves. Not once, but twice. It's incredible. And this is the thing it's a bit like maybe this is too long ago to draw, but it is a bit like working from home as I am talking to you today.
00:12:17
Speaker
Once you kind of say, well, actually you can do that. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube once. Yeah. Get rid of the lead. Anytime he pisses you off every time. Anytime he hurts your feelings or you don't feel like you got that promotion. Yeah. You can knife the prime minister. Sure. Why not? No rule against it. Doesn't say the same as, you know, Oh, no, you don't have to come into the Ironman theory. Why would you come into the office? Why would you go to work when you can just stay at home and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:12:39
Speaker
That is a very hard journey to put back in the bottle. And we've seen the destruction of it. And so coming back to your sort of original question, we look at all these big governments like you talk about Howard and Costello, you know, and my sort of Golden Age would be Hawke and Keating. These guys had shocking first terms. We forget, we see Howard and, you know, John Howard as
00:13:00
Speaker
brilliant and the most enormous amount of respect for him. But there were two really rough times for him. One was the last one where he lost government and lost his own seat, where you sort of that Icarus thing where you think I'm unbeatable now, I can just go that one little sort of step too far. But in his first term, he lost three ministers to various travel rewards scandals. Everyone thought
00:13:22
Speaker
And you know, Labor was thinking, holy crap, this could be a one-term government. These guys are off the rails. He then does his crazy brave move to say, yes, I promise there'd be no GST, but guess what? We're going to go to the next election and there'll be a GST.
00:13:34
Speaker
That election was won by a bees dick. Kim Beasley won the popular vote. So most Australians actually voted against John Howard and the coalition. And Howard only won because he built up such a huge number of seats off the top of my head. I think it was something like 18 seats or something. And it went down to like three or something like that with three, you know, they had these three amazing candidates in marginal seats. If they hadn't have
00:13:59
Speaker
run a blinding local campaign. I think Pat Farmer, the marathon runner, the ultramarathon runner was one of them. So you just had these kind of divine providence just sort of said, we'll give you these incredibly popular local candidates in these marginal seats that people will vote for, even though the vast majority of Australians don't want
00:14:16
Speaker
this, they don't want the GST and they don't want you and they don't want to go, whatever, whatever. That's the only way survive. So if you, if you look at just that sort of first term, which, you know, in the last 15 years, Howard would have been knifed, he would have been dead. He would have been cast in the scrap heap.
00:14:33
Speaker
and say, John, how disastrous Prime Minister, lost all these ministers, you know, broke a promise, you know, pie in the sky idea of, you know, bringing in GSA when nobody wanted it, you know, what a disaster he was, you know, he would have been, could have been John Gorton or whatever. And then you look at, you know, subsequent to that, he's the Man of Steel, he's the guy who kept Australia's borders safe, second longest serving Prime Minister after Menzies. And again,
00:14:59
Speaker
By the calculus of modern Australian politics, it would have been a dead duck. Bob Hawke did the same thing. He got in the landslide at 83 and then thought, I'm the cat's pyjamas, I'm the duck's nuts. I'll call him early elections, stroll through a
00:15:15
Speaker
some giant six or something week campaign. It might have even been long. It was a huge campaign. Because Bob Hawke, the more they see me, the more they'll vote for me because everyone loves me. I'm Hawke. And again, went backwards and went backwards in a big way. And the only reason it's not reflected more sort of acutely in the history books is that they added more seats to the House of Reps. So there were seats that increased because they'd just increased the sheer number of seats in the House of Reps at that same election.
00:15:42
Speaker
But, you know, if you listen to or read Richo's recollections of that campaign, it was an absolute disaster. And again, by the current reckoning, would have been hawky, what a flash in the plant, what a fizzer, you know, it would have been it would have been the Malcolm Turnbull of the Labor Party.
00:15:57
Speaker
They would have got rid of him. First term governments always fuck up because being a prime minister is really hard the first time. Very few people come to the job having done it before. So Kevin Rudd, I suppose is the exception, but that makes it even worse sometimes. And so you've got to give people a go. And I think that's why.
00:16:16
Speaker
before this kind of so-called New South Wales disease, the revolving door leadership. Before that, the Australian electorate would always instinctively kind of know this, whether they knew it or not. It was like this sort of hive mind that we always give, every government we're going to give a second term to. They're always going to get a second term. And even in
00:16:33
Speaker
the worst of the worst the last decade and a half. That still happened. Gillard still got a labour, still got a second term. Gillard still managed to scrape over the line. Turnbull managed to scrape over the line. Morrison managed to scrape over the line. So it's almost as though the Australian public actually knows this in its bones subconsciously somehow and gives government, you know, gives the government another chance, even in spite of the government trying to, you know, dropping grenades at its foot and trying to blow itself up.
00:17:02
Speaker
the public going, no, no, no, just try to get it right. Please just try again. Try to get it right this time. And then as we've seen, you know, the differences, I suppose, in the previous eras in the Hawke era, Hawke Keating era and the Howard Castellier, they did get it right. They steadied the ships. Very famous. One of my best, famous, my favorite lines about John Howard. I think it was from Paul Kelly in the Australian or something or someone said that John Howard made every single mistake in the book.
00:17:31
Speaker
be only ever made at once. The point being is not that we expect these people to be flawless, saintly, messianic figures who never make a mistake. The point is they learn from their mistakes. So you've got to give political leaders a chance to make a mistake and then learn from their mistakes. And that is what we have not done in the last 15 years. And the results of that have been absolutely disastrous. So it brings us to 2023-24.
00:18:00
Speaker
Yes, the voice was a terrible mistake, or at least the way it was run was a terrible mistake. I was a supporter of the voice, but it was very quickly mortified by the sort of stuff that was coming out in the campaign and the way it was being handled. And I was sort of screaming and railing behind closed doors and then publicly sort of came to come out and apologize for all the
00:18:20
Speaker
terrible stuff that was being said in the appalling sort of positioning of the campaign and saying, please vote for us anyway. It was just a soul destroying experience. But yes, it was a mistake. And question is, do we learn from those mistakes or do we do the equivalent of insanity, which is, of course, repeating the same thing over and over again?
00:18:40
Speaker
hoping to get a different result. So that will be the test of Albanese and Chalmers. I do think they have. I think Albanese has got really good political instincts despite the
Labor Party's Dilemma
00:18:50
Speaker
voice. I think the voice is something you kind of
00:18:52
Speaker
almost backed himself into, and then couldn't get out. But I think in other things, he's got good political instincts. He very much sees himself as a centrist, despite his background from the left. He's positioned himself over the last few years very much away from that. I know a lot of people will disagree. There will be a lot of people joking on this. That's our centrist, but I can promise you that is how he sees himself.
00:19:13
Speaker
And that is what he wants to be. And he actually sees himself as keeping the more rabid sort of lefties in the Labor Party at bay. And sometimes the way that's happened, you know, fate has intervened and made it look much messier than it otherwise would have. So a good example is at Labor National Conference. He's like, Orcus is getting through. We are committed to Orcus. We are going to stick with Orcus and we are going to make it stronger and just make a deal. Whatever you have to do, get a deal to get it done.
00:19:43
Speaker
I'm Anthony Albanese, and you are going to fucking do this. And that's what he's good at, right? He's a fixer. He's a numbers man. And that's exactly what happened. And it just so happened that the tiny little theoretical compromise they made, which would have no, it was not intended to have any real practical impact on Australian politics at all, is that they slightly changed the wording about the position of the Australian Labor Party on Israel and Palestine. I think they changed it from contested territories to occupied territories or something like that.
00:20:10
Speaker
something that's obviously a fixation of the left and usually wouldn't matter at all because everyone thought that Israel and Palestine were in some kind of sort of the timetable. They just keep throwing rocks at each other and otherwise be able to sort of function. Then of course, October seven happens and it looks like labors made this giant ideological leap to the left and against Israel, which is the last thing Albo
00:20:33
Speaker
was contemplating or the leadership of the party was contemplating. That was just a terrible bit of bad luck. And again, all these psychos on the left.
00:20:41
Speaker
accusing him of being a genocidal maniac and murderer of babies and children and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's looking at all this saying, no, no, man, I'm sticking, I'm out of mass, I'm high on the line. So he sees himself as standing up to all those psychos because those are the people he sees. Again, of course, it looks a bit different from the Jewish community. And when they think he's having an each way bet with his little statements with the prime ministers of Canada and New Zealand and stuff.
00:21:04
Speaker
This goes to the fundamental challenge, not just for labor, but for left-leaning parties around the world. I'm interested in your thoughts on it. You have say the Labor Party, which grew out of the union movement, which has traditionally been the party of working class, just like the Democrats in the Democratic Party in the US were the same, just like the Labor Party in the UK were the same. We have seen a shift over the last.
00:21:31
Speaker
20 years, which has accelerated in the last 10 years towards the inner-city progressive lens. How should, say, the Labour Party, but the left-leaning parties around the world, think about this emerging constituency of woke progressives and their traditional working class spaces? How do they try and square the circle with respect to these two groups?
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah, that is the million dollar question. Frankly, I think they should just torch the Wokena City upper middle class left. They're just an awful demographic and should focus entirely on working class and middle class mainstream Australians in the suburbs. That means focusing on economic benefits, bread and butter issues, pay packet. It means
00:22:15
Speaker
possibly being a bit more sort of socially conservative. And that doesn't mean, you know, that doesn't mean socially conservative from where most Australians are. It just means meeting those expectations and creating a safe space for, for example, people of faith. So just because you have conservative religious views doesn't mean
00:22:34
Speaker
there's no place for you in our party or that you can't vote for us and we won't represent you. You don't have to jump up and down and scream in these people's faces or lecture or harangue them. So that's sort of on the social theme. But again, politically, in many ways, the teals and the greens have given Labour a gift in the sense that they're almost never going to throw their votes either preference wise or in the house.
00:23:00
Speaker
to the Liberals first because these are parties that are based fundamentally on hatred. They're based on hating conservative values, hating conservative politicians. They are parties of protest because of course what they are for is either
00:23:17
Speaker
purely ideological or it is. And again, to be honest, I think climate change, I fully believe in climate change, I believe in taking practical steps to address it. But the obsession that the teals and the greens have with it, I think is sort of ideological. It's just telling people I care. And you only have to look at the difference between what they say and what they drive to know how much they care about the ideology and how much they care about the actual practice. And that actually frees Labour up. There'll come a time where Labour will just not be able to win
00:23:45
Speaker
inner city seats, the greens will just take them. They took three obviously in Brisbane. They've taken one in Melbourne. I'll probably take another one. And Albo's and Tanya's own seats are very vulnerable. I think Albo, because he's just the master of all his surveys, will probably save his seat for his successor. But Tanya is enormously personally popular. When she goes, does her seat also go to the greens? And again, so that means that Labor doesn't have to talk out of two sides of its mouth anymore. It can focus more
00:24:14
Speaker
Exclusively on outer suburban and regional seats and that's exactly I think Well from what people high up tell me that's exactly what they're trying to do So that's that's what's behind these stage 3 tax cut reversals for example So this is all directed at outer suburban seats
00:24:33
Speaker
battler seeds, it's aspirational because tax cuts by definition are aspirational and tax cuts are usually the sort of thing that the left just sort of doesn't like because the left likes public largesse rather than giving people back more of their own money. And so you're sort of taking something that is a traditionally kind of big L liberal idea and applying it to working class and middle class people.
00:25:01
Speaker
I think that's a really smart thing for Labor to do. A massive risk was breaking a promise like that, and I would rather they hadn't done it if they'd come about it a different way. But still, now that it's done, now that the eggs have been cracked, I think it's very smart. It targets the right seats, the right demographics.
00:25:19
Speaker
The grains of course, I mean the grains of the teal will be all for anyway, the teals are very confused by it because of course it's going to smash all the people in their seats. They're like, oh, it's a broken promise and we campaigned on integrity and all our people are rich and they're going to get less money and how they'll come around. Do you think the teals are a political flash in the pan or are they here
Political Fragmentation and Future
00:25:39
Speaker
to stay?
00:25:39
Speaker
Sadly, it's very difficult to get rid of independence once they get in. You usually have to wait for them to retire and then have another crack at it. Probably not impossible in all seats, but like, for example, I think if Freidenberg
00:25:53
Speaker
has another cracking coup on, it's possible that his kind of, I hate the word, but brand or his persona familiarity without the millstone of Morrison hanging around his neck and the fact that he's since being revealed to have been another victim of Morrison in a way because he stole his ministry.
00:26:10
Speaker
I think he could be a real threat. And from what I understand, there's polling around that shows that that would happen. But that may be self-interested polling league just for that purpose. And by may, I mean, almost certainly was, but it doesn't mean it's wrong. So that is possible. But the other thing I suppose is it's almost that the bigger question almost is what other seats could go teal? And this is a big problem for the coal and the libs. What other seats could go teal? Again, now that that genie's out of a bowl, people go, oh,
00:26:38
Speaker
So we don't have to dirty our hands voting labor, but we can vote for something else that shows how concerned we are about the environment or our children's future or integrity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And again, you've got people who don't have to worry about job security, don't have to worry about paying mortgage or paying a rent. You know, they used to be called the doctor's wives back in the Howard era, but people who, people who don't have any cause
00:27:01
Speaker
I always think with working class with poor people, they don't really have causes. They just want to survive. They just want a better life. It's not like they're left wing because that's what they chose to believe in. They're left wing because these are the only policies that will give them job security or help them put a roof over their heads.
00:27:22
Speaker
And that's very different, I think, to political bowerbirds or whatever. Who goes, oh, I like that. Oh, I like that. Mm, yeah. What do I believe? Mm, what do I believe in? What do I believe in? Climate change? Of course, that's why something like climate change is so incredibly attractive to rich people, because it's something that they can say they are passionate about that doesn't look grotesquely hypocritical and that, again, they can pretend that they're, well, they can say that they're oppressed by it because it's coming for the whole planet. So, you know, I'm,
00:27:52
Speaker
You know, I'm fighting for the whole world and blah, blah, blah, blah, without sort of appropriating someone else's poverty. It's interesting, of course, when you look at anything like socialism or communism, that of course, this is also the domain of, well, ultra wealthy in many cases. I mean, Marx and Engels came from the most privileged backgrounds, impossible. And they sort of surveyed working class people as though they were in a zoo and thought, well, how can we improve these people's lives? I'll draw up a theory that'll make everything better. And of course, it was disastrous.
00:28:20
Speaker
I used to live in London and it always astonished me how many of those little blue circles on the houses which denote a famous person lived there were old communist leaders from the 1800s. Marks their Ingalls was somewhere in like Primrose Hill, you know, now. Yeah, I agree entirely.
00:28:39
Speaker
It is interesting how history does rhyme in that way. This is all like the teals. I think the increasing vote for the Greens is all part of this broader trend in Australia. There's less support for the two major parties, lower political party membership, less loyalty to the two major parties.
00:29:00
Speaker
We are seeing more fragmentation. My question would be, are we in, say, 20 years still going to be a two party system? And will those two major parties be or party groups be the coalition and labor?
00:29:13
Speaker
Yes, a million dollar question. And of course, I got ridiculously sidetracked. So tying that in with your earlier question. So I think that the thing is to look at seats that could turn teal in the future and think, does the Labor Party really want those seats? The Dan Andrews style of the Labor Party
00:29:30
Speaker
does or indeed they just flock to him. Labor doesn't even have to fight for them. They just walk up to him and surrender. So you got in Victoria, that ultimate kind of upper middle class socialist model where it is all just all just inner city lefties who bang on about climate integrity, except when it applies to them, of course, that's the corruption watchdog and just usual gender stuff, identity politics, all that sort of stuff. Racism is everywhere, except in my all white suburb.
00:29:57
Speaker
So my argument would be that labor is better off.
00:30:01
Speaker
leaving those seats alone and going after it. It'll be a race between Labor and the coalition to those just dead center mainstream working in middle class Australian seats on the fringes of the big cities and in the regions. So sort of Central Coast, Outer Suburban, Melbourne and Sydney, the east of WA. It's weird what's happening with the WA seats. It's hard to know. And I think Labor has to do that because
00:30:31
Speaker
The Libs have to do that or die. So when you talk about, and this is one of the risks for the Libs, like, and again, rumours of the Liberals death are always plentiful and mostly exaggerated, but you just have to look at the fundraising efforts from the tiers. You lose all those big, wealthy donors in those big, leafy,
00:30:52
Speaker
wealthy seats as well as the seats themselves, you've just got a massive structural problem. And it's just, and Dutton's, you know, he's left nothing on the pitch. He's gone out and he's swinging and everything, but it's just, you just look at the electoral map and you just think.
00:31:05
Speaker
How do you get back? Even my most pessimistic friends in the Labor Party are like, no matter how much we fuck this up, we literally just can't lose. We can't lose the next election because there's no way for, like you can go into minority, but it's just like, the question is, how does Labor win it? Does it win it with minority, knowing that they're going to get the support of all those cross benches? Does it win it with majority? Does it probably work?
00:31:29
Speaker
the idea that the coalition could actually win. And again, smart people on the coalition side. I think Paul Murray said this publicly, so I'm not throwing him under a bus and he's very close to high ups in the coalition. He's like, take a chill pill. There's actually, no matter how well you do, there is no way you can come back because
00:31:47
Speaker
There are just simply not the seats, not enough seats up for grabs for the coalition to form a majority. And that's because of the teal thing. And again, I'm someone who would much rather say, as much as I love the Labor Party or have sympathy for the Labor Party, I would much rather have Josh Frydenberg and Keo Young than Monique Ryan, because you simply want better caliber people in parliament. And Tim Wilson is another example. Dave Sharma is obviously in the Senate now, but Dave Sharma is someone of exceptional caliber. And the parliament would have been poorer.
00:32:18
Speaker
for him not being there. He's now in the Senate, of course, so that's good. So the Teals do, the Teals present this existential threat for the Libs. The Nats are still going pretty well, so that's fine. They held their own in the last election, I think. And so what does that mean? That means the only way that Dutton and the Libs can survive is just raid
00:32:38
Speaker
out of suburban seats, raid regional seats, raid seats that were once considered safe labour. So again, something that people often forget to throw in the mix. Look at what Dai Li did in Fowler. If Ned Minoon, Frank Carboni, some of these other really popular Southwestern mayors in Sydney
00:32:56
Speaker
If they decide to throw their hat in the ring, you could be looking at seats that were 60% labour suddenly flipping to independence. Again, to stop that from happening, labour has to really look after those seats.
00:33:09
Speaker
as well. So I would say the Greens are coming after you in the inner cities anyway. The Greens are never going to preference the libs ahead of labor. They're never going to support the libs instead of labor, although sometimes they do in parliament because they're psychos and they don't negotiate. So they block it from both sides in a single block. But anyway, and otherwise the alternative is just oblivion. So I've always thought that elections, both
00:33:34
Speaker
practically, pragmatically, and just for the sheer health of the democracy. Elections need to be fought in the middle. You've got to go for the hearts and minds of middle Australia. And if you can get them, then I would hope to see Labor not necessarily even as a left wing party, but that fabled kind of natural party of government in Australia, that Labor values are Australian values and are so aligned that people just instinctively vote for them unless they really fuck it up, which of course they have a habit of doing.
00:34:02
Speaker
The existential question that is always there for the coalition is whether you do lean into the conservative side of the broad church or the small L liberal side of the broad church. Sounds like what you're saying is that it should be more the former
00:34:20
Speaker
in the latter if they have any hope of survival or would you take it differently? And again, that's why I would say they can only do that if Labor goes stupid woke left. So again, if Labor starts sounding like the teals or sounding like the greens, Dutton can then say these guys are just.
00:34:35
Speaker
loopy, dumb woke, weft, whatever it is, you know, all the usual grab bag of things. And it's often right, like, you know, if you start saying stupid shit about climate or gender or all these things and get preoccupied with these issues, which the Labour Party hasn't, the Federal Labour Party hasn't, to its credit.
00:34:52
Speaker
It's interesting that you've seen Dutton start to wade into the culture wars over the last six months. I imagine for that reason. Exactly. That's right. And so you you do that. And the only way he knows that and I think probably knows that as well. The only way.
00:35:07
Speaker
The only way he can get away with doing that is if the Labor Party falls for that again starts courting those green left TLE voters, which it probably won't get anyway because if you're if you are an ideologically left-wing voter you are always going to vote for the most ideologically
00:35:25
Speaker
pure and left-wing partying and that means a party that can never govern because governing is all about compromise and practice and practicality and pragmatism and so you're never going to be ideologically pure unless you're a party protest and so the teals and the greens will always soak up those sort of wanky I want to sleep well at night votes and tell people how
00:35:45
Speaker
right on. I am about everything. So Labor needs to just leave them alone. It can afford to reflect more mainstream values and it can afford to do more for mainstream Australians economically in terms of just don't be afraid of tax cuts. Don't be afraid of saying, you know what, 120 grand a year isn't that much in Sydney if you're trying to pay the mortgage and send the kids to school. You know what, it's all right to send the kids to a Catholic school or it's all right to believe in the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit or whatever or go to church.
00:36:13
Speaker
And you do that, Dutton can't really play that card then, because again, then he's just, he's like, oh, the rope, rope lift on any politics clown, and he's like, what are you talking about? And again, so that's the threat for Labor, but also the antidote as well.
00:36:29
Speaker
It's a smart move by Dutton and he knows that that's his one shot. He's got to try and box Labour into a left wing corner. And the only way Labour can counter that is to box itself out and say, we're here in the middle and we just ducked that. And the person you hit was Max Chandler Mather. I want to pivot to the media landscape in
Media Influence and Critique
00:36:50
Speaker
Australia. Yes.
00:36:51
Speaker
You are part of the evil Murdoch Empire. It is obviously a secular bugbear, and that's probably a very moderate word for the Twitter left, let's call it. Why does it attract such vitriol? And do you think any of that vitriol against the Murdoch media is justified?
00:37:13
Speaker
I mean, the Twitter left, I guess, and I got off Twitter a long time ago for this reason. It's completely divorced from reality and divorced from what most Australians think. And again, these are people who usually, from what I gather,
00:37:30
Speaker
They don't come from working class backgrounds. They don't come from mainstream Australian backgrounds. And this is something the left does a lot. And the way they sort of square the circle is, and I used to do this at uni when I was a crazy student socialist.
00:37:48
Speaker
is that it's like, well, hang on a minute. Why is everything I'm so worked up about so different to what your average blue collar worker is actually worked up about? And the blue collar worker actually thinks I'm a bit of a fuckwit and I'm an idiot and blah, blah, blah. And I remember going around Melbourne putting posters up. I'd Photoshopped a poster of Jeff Kennett as Michael Jackson and written underneath it. Who's bad?
00:38:10
Speaker
And I was going around putting it up all over Melbourne, wherever I could, including on the sort of cages that rubbish bins were in. And Jeff Kennett, Michael Jackson hybrid is actually not something I can easily get my head around. Oh, just let it settle. It was a brilliant work of art. The point being, I'm doing all this and then the garbos just so happened it was garbage collection night and they were just coming off ripping it off and emptying the bins and chucking it away.
00:38:34
Speaker
And I ended up saying, what are you doing, blah, blah, blah? And they made a company here. And then I thought, there was just a kernel and hopefully it was the beginning of my long slow awakening. Hang on a minute. Here's me thinking I'm a fucking student socialist standing up for work with rights. And I'm actually yelling at a worker while they're trying to do their job and I'm getting in the way of it. How do you reconcile the fact that you are completely unrepresentative
00:38:59
Speaker
and have no interaction with the people that you reckon that you're on the side of and fighting for or whatever. And you do it by saying, well, because there's an evil right wing conspiracy. So you place yourself again, you place yourself at the center of victimhood. So I'm a victim of the Murdoch press, the Murdoch press.
00:39:16
Speaker
is brainwashing all these people and telling them what to think. And so it's not that it's not that me and Joe blogs the Garbo at loggerheads with each other. It's a conspiracy that Rupert Murdoch has turned him against me.
00:39:32
Speaker
And this is what, you know, Karl Marx said the same thing about religion. There's all these bigger forces. It's not that I'm a wanker and this guy thinks I'm a wanker and he wishes I'd just get out of the way so he could get ahead in life. It's that, you know, these sinister forces, brainwashing the workers or brainwashing Australians or whatever and turn them against. And it's all like, you know, every single, every election, it's always Rupert Murdoch's fault. Every single, I mean, God knows whose fault it is when Labor wins.
00:40:00
Speaker
If Labour governs and governs well, it gets a big tick from it and it gets a big tick from people like me. I mean, I'm there proselytising in my beloved Murdoch mastheads all the time. And often I'm quite open about my sympathies and biases, whatever you want to call it, and saying, you know,
00:40:18
Speaker
You know, like Anthony Albanese in late is doing a good job here. It needs to do better there. Or this is the problems it's facing here or there. You know, I don't know why I'm not sure if there's a whole trove of guardian journalists who have applied for jobs at the daily telegraph and been knocked back. Maybe if they want to change the culture of news Corp, they should try apply for a job there. If they're journalistic chops are any good, they might even get one. Again, this idea that you get a change.
00:40:46
Speaker
the country or change any culture anywhere by joining your little hive mind in The Guardian or Crikey or whatever it is. And that's why I got quite cross at Jim Chalmers for writing his big essay for the monthly about how he's going to remake. Who's voting you're trying to get here?
00:41:06
Speaker
monthly readers are already on board, mate. If you want to tell people how much you're going to fucking change the economy for the better, tell the Daily Telegraph, tell the Australian, tell the people who are still a bit skeptical or the people who are still under some. Anyway, but I'm obviously very fond of Jim as well. But again, it just goes to show there is no benefit
00:41:26
Speaker
in chasing that market, there is no benefit to any politician in, you know, talking in any labor politician, in talking to the Guardian or talking to Crikey or whatever. And most of them know that, you know, often the tabloids or News Corp generally is a really good sort of stress test.
00:41:44
Speaker
I mean, the daily telegraph, which is why I love it, will jump up and down and, you know, I always liken it to Will Smith in Independence Day when the flying saucer, he brings down a flying saucer and he pulls off the canopy and there's this horrible lizard thing with tentacles and everything. He just punches it in the face.
00:42:02
Speaker
And just recurring theme in this chat, isn't it? And that's kind of like what the telegraph does to a new leader or to a new something that's not familiar. Hey, what's this thing? It looks a bit scary. Let's just punch it in the face and see what it does.
00:42:16
Speaker
Joe, we are at time. I think you've demonstrated why people both on the left and the right enjoy your commentary so much. You are fair as well as having the tendency to punch the odd alien in the face. Keep doing what you're doing, mate. I love your commentary for the telenews.com.au and on Sky. Thank you very much for coming on Australiana. Thanks so much, Will. It's been an absolute pleasure, mate. Thank you.
00:42:42
Speaker
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.