The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:57.000 Hello everyone, I'm just concluding my tour in New Zealand and Australia with a wrap-up discussion with Mr. John Anderson.

00:01:19.000 And so I'm looking forward to that, and I hope you all find it valuable.

00:01:23.000 The Honourable John Anderson, ACFTSE, spent 19 years in the Australian Parliament.

00:01:30.000 This included six years as Deputy Prime Minister.

00:01:33.000 As a member of the reformist government led by John Howard, amongst other step-changing initiatives,

00:01:39.000 this government oversaw enormous economic reform, including taxation, modernization, and the maintenance of a string of miraculous budget surpluses,

00:01:49.000 which resulted in leaving a cash surplus on leaving office in 2007.

00:01:54.000 Since then, John has remained active in public commentary, various advisory bodies, and in the not-for-profit sector.

00:02:02.000 He's been a sought-after speaker in both Australia and abroad.

00:02:07.000 In recent years, he's hosted a successful YouTube and podcast interview series.

00:02:13.000 I've been on that a couple of times, the preeminent one of its kind in Australia.

00:02:17.000 He was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2022,

00:02:21.000 the nation's highest civic honour for his various services to the community.

00:02:26.000 On leaving politics, Anderson, known for his character and Christian faith, was saluted by figures on both sides with praise.

00:02:35.000 The then Prime Minister John Howard said,

00:02:37.000 I've not met a person with greater integrity in public life.

00:02:41.000 I'm looking very much forward to talking to John for YouTube today,

00:02:46.000 and then also following that up, as I frequently do with an additional half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform,

00:02:52.000 walking through his bio, and thanks to the Daily Wire types for facilitating these conversations.

00:02:59.000 Welcome to all of you who are watching and listening.

00:03:02.000 So, Mr. Anderson, I thought we could start talking by discussing something that you accomplished,

00:03:09.000 along with other members of your government, several years ago.

00:03:13.000 So, you managed to run a sequence of balanced budgets, and to also pay down a substantial part,

00:03:23.000 or all of Australia's debt in a relatively short period of time.

00:03:26.000 All of Australia's federal debt.

00:03:28.000 All of Australia's federal debt.

00:03:30.000 And left money in the bank.

00:03:31.000 And left money in the bank.

00:03:32.000 Okay, and so what years over did that, over what years did that take place?

00:03:36.000 It began in 1996, and the Future Fund, with surpluses and revenue sales from a couple of assets,

00:03:48.000 were then put aside as a wealth fund, if you like, for the future.

00:03:53.000 And from memory, about 2006 to 2007.

00:03:56.000 Just in time for the great financial crisis.

00:03:59.000 So, Australia went into the great financial crisis,

00:04:01.000 with no debt, money in the bank, at a federal government level.

00:04:05.000 Okay, so, why don't we delve a little bit into exactly what that means?

00:04:10.000 Because there's a bunch of mysteries there.

00:04:12.000 The first mystery is, I suppose, why that hadn't happened before.

00:04:18.000 Then the second mystery is, how did you possibly manage it?

00:04:22.000 And the third mystery is, given that it was possible, and that you demonstrated it was possible,

00:04:27.000 why did that stop happening, and why did more countries around the world also not do the same thing?

00:04:32.000 So, let's start with the first one, which was, why did the governments, prior to the one that you were integrally involved in,

00:04:41.000 find it necessary to run at a deficit and rack up a tremendous debt?

00:04:46.000 Well, I think probably a lot of it was born with the idea of Keynesian economics.

00:04:52.000 That, in flat times, governments spend more money to help, if you like, smooth out the highs and the lows,

00:05:01.000 and then they withdraw and repay that debt in the good times, but they never do.

00:05:04.000 Right, right.

00:05:05.000 So, the idea was to smooth out the variability in the so-called business cycle.

00:05:09.000 That's part of it.

00:05:10.000 I think, and that's a good thing to do, as long as you have the discipline to start putting money back into the system,

00:05:16.000 when you're trading well, the economy's strong, taxation revenues are flowing in, and that's what countries have not done.

00:05:21.000 Well, it's also a good thing to do if you presume that you can, by fiat, in some sense, reduce that kind of variability.

00:05:29.000 And that's not self-evident, right, because most systems that are reasonably stable have to oscillate to some degree,

00:05:36.000 and you might think it would be a good idea to flatten out the oscillations.

00:05:39.000 It is a good idea.

00:05:40.000 Well, if you can do it.

00:05:41.000 But the key is to do it in the better times.

00:05:43.000 Mm-hmm.

00:05:44.000 Discipline yourself to prepare for the next downturn.

00:05:46.000 Mm-hmm.

00:05:47.000 And one of the reasons that the whole of the West and beyond the West, in my view, is in such a dangerous place today is that we haven't done that.

00:05:53.000 Mm-hmm.

00:05:54.000 We've gone spending, spending, spending.

00:05:56.000 The theory's predicated on the notion that you're gonna do both.

00:05:59.000 Yeah.

00:06:00.000 But the reality is that it's very unlikely that governments will do more than one.

00:06:03.000 Yeah.

00:06:04.000 Right.

00:06:05.000 And so why had they not done it in Australia?

00:06:07.000 To be fair, they had been.

00:06:08.000 The previous government deserved some credit.

00:06:10.000 They'd done a lot of good things.

00:06:11.000 They'd floated the dollar.

00:06:12.000 They'd started on making the place more productive, better industrial relations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:06:19.000 But they had left a rapidly building set of deficits and a ballooning debt.

00:06:26.000 By today's standards, I've got to tell you, compared to the sort of money that is owed as a percentage of GDP around the world, China being a horrendous, Britain, America, France.

00:06:38.000 We saw Greece, they got to 175% debt to GDP ratio.

00:06:43.000 And we saw what that looked like, a first world country where kids went to school hungry, literally, because their parents couldn't put food in the refrigerator and there was no longer a government program to put it there.

00:06:53.000 These things can happen.

00:06:56.000 Italy went very, very close to the same.

00:06:58.000 We should clarify for everybody that's watching and listening the distinction between deficit and debt.

00:07:03.000 And so a deficit is overspending generally calculated on a yearly level.

00:07:08.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:07:09.000 And then the debt is the cumulative consequence of the deficits.

00:07:12.000 And so to attack the deficit, then each year the government doesn't spend more than it brings in.

00:07:17.000 And to pay off the debt means that the cumulative consequences of the deficit are also eradicated.

00:07:22.000 And so the government you were involved with demonstrated that this was possible.

00:07:27.000 And so what exactly, how did you do that?

00:07:31.000 I'm very interested in the mechanics.

00:07:33.000 So how did you analyze what needed to be reduced, let's say, or what revenues needed to be increased?

00:07:39.000 How did you prioritize the spending?

00:07:41.000 And how did you bring that economic overspending under control without simultaneously dooming yourself to substantive, let's say, unpopularity?

00:07:51.000 Well, there was plenty of that.

00:07:53.000 But let me just backtrack a little bit.

00:07:54.000 And I should pay some credit here.

00:07:56.000 When we first met together, the first formal meeting as a new government having been sworn in only a few days, about a week after winning the election in 1996, March 1996, we met for the first time.

00:08:09.000 And the Prime Minister, who was a man of conviction.

00:08:12.000 You've got to start with conviction.

00:08:14.000 You've got to think these things matter.

00:08:15.000 You're there to make a difference.

00:08:17.000 You're not there just to satiate the latest political fad and to smooth over people's feelings.

00:08:24.000 You've got to actually believe in something.

00:08:26.000 And he said, we need to recognize this is intergenerationally unfair and we need to start to do something about winding back these deficits.

00:08:37.000 And then after that came the issue of, well, here's the opportunity not just to pay down the debt, but maybe to get rid of it altogether.

00:08:44.000 And then we should say the treasurer of the day, Peter Costello, was very single minded, ably backed by a finance minister who'd been a state premier, John Fay.

00:08:53.000 Then we had the health minister.

00:08:55.000 We had the junior treasurer and me.

00:08:57.000 And I, in theory, was asked by the prime minister to help with the economic portfolios because I had agriculture and mining in my brief.

00:09:04.000 So conviction, believing in something was important.

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00:10:44.000 The second thing I would say is that teamwork's important.

00:10:51.000 Because the thing you just alluded to, how do you not get slaughtered?

00:10:54.000 You've got to take, you know, people would speculate.

00:10:57.000 Oh, they're going to do this, they're going to do that, they're going to take something else away.

00:11:00.000 And the minute someone had broken ranks and said, oh, yeah, look out, you better go out and protest on such and such an issue, it would have destroyed the process.

00:11:11.000 Because people were very wary.

00:11:14.000 Everyone agrees in principle, oh, it's great, they're going to be economically responsible.

00:11:17.000 But what happens if they inflict some pain on me?

00:11:20.000 Right, right.

00:11:21.000 And in this day, when governments are, I'll say it, less and less coherent, less and less convicted of anything, they don't have philosophical underpinnings, they're into ad hocery and managerialism and opportunism.

00:11:35.000 And opinion polls.

00:11:36.000 And opinion polls.

00:11:38.000 And opinion polls.

00:11:39.000 And then you combine those with, you know, a strong sense of activism, a reluctance in the day of identity politics to identify the national interest as opposed to sectoral interests.

00:11:53.000 And the explosive cocktail becomes then with social media.

00:11:56.000 You know, you can mount a campaign against almost any government program.

00:12:01.000 So here's the staggering thing.

00:12:02.000 I mean, we did that side of it.

00:12:04.000 Then we did a major tax reform.

00:12:05.000 Neither were popular, but we got away with it.

00:12:08.000 But there have been no major reforms in this country, to my way of thinking, that have involved great difficulty and great persuasion for over 20 years.

00:12:17.000 So why not, so let's play devil's advocate.

00:12:22.000 Why not run the deficit and burden the future with today's debt if you can thereby generate more revenue to help people who are in trouble?

00:12:37.000 What's the downside to that?

00:12:41.000 Well, it's a very good question.

00:12:42.000 And it really needs to be split into two.

00:12:44.000 Some government expenditures can be reasonably described as investing in the future and valuable for our children and our grandchildren.

00:12:52.000 The obvious ones would be high-quality education, research, and we know that even if it's debt-financed, very high-quality infrastructure, including communications and so forth, can help build wealth.

00:13:06.000 But many other forms of government expenditure, in fact, most of them, are entitlement driven.

00:13:11.000 And if you let them get out of hand, so you legislate that if something unfortunate happens to you, it might be a very desirable and compassionate thing to do, but you're entitled to X, Y, and Z benefits.

00:13:22.000 And then you get mission creep and more and more people are let into the net, and you're spending more and more on an entitlement basis, locked into the law of the land, can only be undone by the parliament.

00:13:32.000 And the parliament won't play ball because the opposition's got the numbers in the other house or whatever.

00:13:37.000 Then you can get into a spiral that's really difficult, and you combine that now with the information age and social media and a lack of willingness to clearly focus on the national interest.

00:13:49.120 And it's really hard.

00:13:50.960 I don't make light at all of the fact that modern governments, even though I can be critical of their lack of philosophical underpinnings, don't do much about it in one way because we electors, we are in danger, Jordan.

00:14:02.440 And I'm sorry to say this, but I'll give you my view.

00:14:04.860 In the West, we are in danger of turning our countries into places that can't be properly governed.

00:14:10.400 I know that's a tough thing to say.

00:14:12.340 And I'm not saying we're there, but I'm saying I think we're close.

00:14:15.300 We could also point out, I suppose, that the evidence that relatively unconstrained government spending produces inflation seems to be incontrovertible.

00:14:27.340 And then we might want to discuss exactly what inflation does to people.

00:14:31.340 So inflation makes each unit of currency purchase less units of value.

00:14:38.680 Too much money charging too few goods.

00:14:40.660 Exactly, exactly.

00:14:41.780 And then you might say, well, who does that punish?

00:14:44.200 Yeah.

00:14:44.680 And the answer is, well, inflation punishes people who've been wise enough to forestall gratification.

00:14:51.280 Yeah.

00:14:51.420 So if you're somebody who has been sensible and taken the medium to long-term into account and you've saved money, so accrued wealth, let's say, and the sort of wealth that enables you to have a house and air conditioning and some opportunities for your kids, we would generally regard that as a social good.

00:15:10.700 Because we hope that people who are not profligate and impulsive and who put a little aside for future contingencies so that they can take care of themselves and others, those people should be valued.

00:15:22.220 And if you inflate the currency by overspending, then those are the people who are preferentially punished.

00:15:29.760 Because the people who spent all their money, well, they don't have any money.

00:15:32.700 Inflation only affects them tangentially, but it destroys the wealth of the very people whose careful and conscientious striving have produced wealth to begin with.

00:15:43.100 And that seems inevitable.

00:15:44.120 I mean, we've really seen that inflation break out across the Western world to quite a remarkable degree, even a degree that was unforeseen by the central banks who claimed that they had it under control.

00:15:55.400 I don't know what inflation is running out in Australia, but I know in Canada, I think on the food front, it's about 8% right now.

00:16:02.260 And on the energy front in Europe, it's far higher than that.

00:16:05.680 That's not all because of government overspending, but it's certainly contributing to that.

00:16:09.640 So you punish, inflation punishes exactly the people who should be being rewarded by taking a medium to long-term view.

00:16:17.480 And it differentially benefits people who were impulsive and profligate in their spending.

00:16:23.220 And so that seems like bad social policy, as far as I can tell.

00:16:27.500 I agree with all of what you've said, but I think it's really important to understand that it's actually, we've done something worse than that.

00:16:33.960 Because what happened was that Australia went into the great financial crisis.

00:16:38.520 I don't know whether you use that term internationally, but that's what we call it here.

00:16:40.960 The meltdown, you know, Lehman Brothers.

00:16:43.380 Yeah.

00:16:43.560 A real story about the link between culture and good policy outcomes.

00:16:48.540 That one was.

00:16:49.160 Because they didn't break the law, but by gee, they broke the spirit of everything that was decent.

00:16:54.300 You know, and these are important things.

00:16:55.940 Where's personal responsibility?

00:16:57.320 Where's decency?

00:16:58.660 Where's doing the right thing in banking more important than making an instant bob?

00:17:04.100 But leave that aside.

00:17:05.120 Most countries actually were starting to worry about their debt-to-GDP ratios in the build-up to the great financial crisis.

00:17:12.920 They were starting to try to do something about it.

00:17:14.780 Take a line through it.

00:17:15.600 It was around 35%, 45%, 50% in a lot of Western countries.

00:17:19.420 And they were saying, this is getting, you know, need to wind it back, prepare for a rainy day.

00:17:23.420 These are good times.

00:17:24.620 They were the right to do so.

00:17:25.680 Then the Lehman Brothers, you know, unsound money everywhere, exposed all over the place.

00:17:32.500 At one stage, the system nearly collapsed at one stage.

00:17:37.380 So governments did extraordinary things.

00:17:40.020 The government of America bought General Motors and Chrysler, from memory.

00:17:45.120 I don't think they bought Ford.

00:17:47.380 Governments everywhere put bailed banks out.

00:17:50.400 Insurance companies.

00:17:51.720 All that debt went onto the public sector balance sheet.

00:17:56.580 You know, private citizens.

00:17:58.000 Suddenly owed, in theory, owned General Motors.

00:18:01.080 You call that privatising profit and socialising risk?

00:18:03.900 Well, I'm an Australian farmer.

00:18:05.800 We sometimes get accused of wanting to do that here.

00:18:07.820 But I would push back against the charge that all farmers are guilty of it.

00:18:11.920 But that's right.

00:18:12.640 However, what then followed was that governments looking at this mountain of debt,

00:18:19.540 say, what do we do now?

00:18:21.320 Because the discipline, you asked, let's come back to how we did it, of tough decisions.

00:18:28.840 There was no stomach for it.

00:18:30.540 Matthew Paris wrote, you know, at the time, face it, we're broke.

00:18:36.360 You know, we've overdone it.

00:18:37.500 We're all going to have to live much lower living standards because none of us have got the stomach,

00:18:41.060 you know, to do the hard work, to wind back this debt that's going to be so bad for our kids

00:18:46.340 and we're just going to have to get...

00:18:47.220 But what governments did then was they looked for inflation because inflation devalues money

00:18:52.480 and makes the debt smaller.

00:18:54.340 And they looked for it and they pumped money into everything.

00:18:56.980 We had very low interest rates for an incredible period of time.

00:19:01.000 We pursued endlessly quantitative easing, which is basically printing money in a fancy way.

00:19:07.240 It's always ended in tears, think, buy my Germany.

00:19:11.360 And people kept saying, where's the inflation?

00:19:13.740 We want the inflation to devalue the government debts to get it under control

00:19:17.680 so that we don't have to cripple people with taxation.

00:19:20.540 But the inflation was there.

00:19:22.420 It was in asset prices.

00:19:23.380 Right, right.

00:19:23.820 Housing prices.

00:19:24.940 And who did that hurt?

00:19:26.900 Where's the social impact of that?

00:19:30.240 It's in housing prices, especially for young people in this country.

00:19:34.120 It really, really worries me.

00:19:36.180 When I left school, I'm a bit older than you, Jordan.

00:19:40.060 I mightn't look it, but I am.

00:19:42.360 And when I left school in the mid-70s,

00:19:44.440 an average Australian house costs four times average annual earnings.

00:19:48.060 Today it's 11 times and in Sydney and Melbourne it's more like 13 times.

00:19:51.840 Now that impacts a lot of things.

00:19:54.920 Social cohesion, I would argue, it impacts.

00:19:57.420 Perhaps more seriously and related is family formation.

00:20:00.320 In a time when 92 countries in the world have collapsing populations and we haven't realised

00:20:06.780 how difficult that's going to be to handle.

00:20:09.380 So I think, you know, it's a very dangerous story all around.

00:20:13.880 And again, I say to you, I actually have a lot of sympathy for modern politicians.

00:20:18.040 I could say to them, you've lost your philosophical heart.

00:20:20.560 Where are the great strands of thinking through which you used to look through to see,

00:20:24.480 will this policy advance or take backwards my dream of what the country ought to be

00:20:29.520 so I could be harsh at that level?

00:20:31.760 But at the other level, I'd say, we've not been prepared to delay gratification,

00:20:36.800 to make tough choices to say, yeah, look, we want to elect a government

00:20:39.920 that will do some hard things for our kids' sake to get the whole show back on the road.

00:20:44.560 And here in this country, we've had a minerals boom.

00:20:47.020 We're back in debt.

00:20:50.400 Debt to GDP ratio now is creeping out over time.

00:20:54.840 It will get out to around 40% on current projections.

00:20:57.880 40% is the level at which those European and American countries

00:21:00.980 started to lose control at the time of the GFC.

00:21:03.880 This stuff matters.

00:21:05.080 And as interest rates rise, more and more taxpayers' money is just going into servicing the debt.

00:21:10.520 So it's not buying hospitals or looking after schools or providing reparations to countries for climate change damage.

00:21:19.860 All of those things, that's all going to be debt financed from now on.

00:21:23.480 And who's going to pay that debt?

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00:22:32.660 So what did you do to bring down the deficit and to pay off the debt that was hard?

00:22:41.880 And what worked well?

00:22:43.400 I'm very interested in the actual mechanics.

00:22:46.000 Where did, how did you decide where savings could be obtained?

00:22:50.300 How did you do the analysis?

00:22:51.600 And where were the major savings garnered?

00:22:55.360 And how much of that was a consequence of tax increase as well?

00:22:59.820 No tax increase.

00:23:00.840 No tax increase.

00:23:01.220 We promised not to.

00:23:01.860 Okay.

00:23:02.760 And we kept to it.

00:23:03.880 I mean, look, there are a few little things like airport charges and passport levies and

00:23:08.300 so forth that we adjusted, but there were no tax increases worthy of the name.

00:23:12.440 We said we wouldn't.

00:23:13.460 We relaxed low-tax government.

00:23:15.080 We're committed to that.

00:23:15.840 And we delivered.

00:23:16.980 And the only answer, really, to your question at the headline level is it was incredibly hard

00:23:21.420 work.

00:23:22.420 And those five people with their helpers, I was one of them.

00:23:25.340 And, you know, I don't want to take all the credit.

00:23:27.800 I mean, this was the prime minister saying, this is what we're going to do.

00:23:31.000 And this is a very capable man called Peter Costello and the little team around him and the rest

00:23:35.620 of us working ridiculous hours.

00:23:39.260 Was that his primary goal and your primary goal was to be done?

00:23:43.020 In government.

00:23:43.160 Yeah.

00:23:43.580 We saw it as a vital part of what we were doing.

00:23:45.840 Now, industrial relations reform, a more productive economy.

00:23:48.760 For me, rural recovery, because it was in a very bad way at the time.

00:23:53.160 That was very important.

00:23:55.920 And I think it's fair to say that we had a deep commitment to tax reform, but we were

00:23:59.660 unsure about how we were going to do it.

00:24:01.720 But we saw that as, yeah, getting back to what might have been called in Britain in those

00:24:06.960 days.

00:24:07.300 I don't know.

00:24:07.540 They don't use it in Britain anymore.

00:24:08.960 They talked about sound money.

00:24:10.360 We thought that really mattered for a trading nation like Australia, a mid-sized nation.

00:24:15.060 We were very deeply committed to it.

00:24:16.520 But essentially, it involved going through everything that government's been on.

00:24:22.860 At the level of detail.

00:24:24.060 Everything.

00:24:24.640 I often tell people, forgive me if somebody's listening to me, oh, gosh, he's going to trot

00:24:29.280 out that story again.

00:24:30.380 We spent three hours debating whether to continue a $90,000 rat baiting program on Lord Howe Island,

00:24:35.740 which is a little island off to the coast.

00:24:37.560 Rats got there off a ship in the 1960s and they were trying to eradicate them and we thought

00:24:42.100 it's not working.

00:24:43.220 Should we continue it or can we save $90,000?

00:24:45.240 So you've got the leaders of the country sitting around a table spending three hours

00:24:48.620 on $90,000.

00:24:50.660 We got the bureaucrats who, I've got to say, they served us well.

00:24:54.780 They put up the options.

00:24:56.380 But we got them to bring in a list of all of the community groups and many of them were

00:25:03.400 gently activist in those days.

00:25:05.620 They'd be wildly activist today who were drawing on a government teat somewhere.

00:25:10.200 I remember being staggered.

00:25:11.340 They put this up, the list on the, does this list ever in?

00:25:15.040 Oh, no, there's another page and there's a page after that.

00:25:18.260 And we went through that laboriously.

00:25:20.080 You trim here, you trim there.

00:25:21.220 You say, don't need that group.

00:25:22.200 That group's just working against the country's interests.

00:25:24.760 Here's another one we will support.

00:25:26.460 And, you know, whether it's tax deductibility or grants or whatever.

00:25:30.440 So why didn't the Fuhrer around that?

00:25:32.700 Because I don't imagine people were very thrilled about that.

00:25:35.040 Right, because you guys didn't, you didn't, I see.

00:25:37.620 We didn't break ranks.

00:25:38.660 You didn't break ranks.

00:25:39.120 And neither did the broader political team around us.

00:25:41.900 It was teamwork.

00:25:43.000 It was conviction and teamwork.

00:25:45.020 They're the things I'd want to emphasize.

00:25:46.200 Why did the public put up with it?

00:25:48.320 Well, they nearly threw us out after three years.

00:25:50.940 For 12 months, the first budget, with some tough measures in it,

00:25:55.700 was well received.

00:25:56.960 We went up in the piles.

00:25:58.700 The second budget, when Treasury and Finance had advised us

00:26:02.900 that, in fact, we weren't making the progress we thought we were,

00:26:05.080 so we tightened the screws a bit more, and we were in deep trouble.

00:26:08.880 And we were nearly a one-sitter.

00:26:11.540 But then what happened?

00:26:12.820 This is a really interesting thing.

00:26:15.320 The rewards started to flow.

00:26:16.700 Oh, look, I should just say on how we did it.

00:26:19.020 There were still some assets that we felt could be privatized.

00:26:23.200 That's not always a popular idea, but there were some we felt

00:26:26.020 that could be privatized.

00:26:28.140 And we made a solemn commitment that selling any family silver

00:26:31.420 that was sold would go to debt reduction, not to a new kitchen,

00:26:35.820 if I can put it that way.

00:26:36.840 We're going to pay the house off.

00:26:38.100 We're not going to build a new kitchen,

00:26:40.200 if you see the point I'm trying to make.

00:26:42.540 And we did that.

00:26:44.400 And we stuck to it.

00:26:45.700 And I think there was a slow but begrudging respect

00:26:49.460 in the Australian community.

00:26:50.620 These guys, you know, actually believe in something.

00:26:54.180 I think conviction and belief, well, in those days,

00:26:57.740 it carried for something.

00:26:59.140 I hope it still would.

00:27:01.920 And so, you know, we progressed through all that,

00:27:04.460 only just won a second term.

00:27:05.880 We won it, promising to do something as tough,

00:27:09.280 which was to reform the tax system.

00:27:11.160 And scrap the old, messy old arrangement and replace it

00:27:14.040 with what was called a new tax system with, at its heart,

00:27:17.020 a GST, a goods and services tax.

00:27:19.240 And some people say, oh, that was a thing that nearly did kill you

00:27:22.280 altogether.

00:27:23.220 But actually, I think my personal view is the other way around.

00:27:26.760 Because we were saying we believe in something,

00:27:30.720 they just put us back.

00:27:32.380 And I think the mood of the country would have been,

00:27:34.600 we don't like this very much.

00:27:36.140 We're really sick of it.

00:27:37.080 But at least they believe in something,

00:27:38.720 so we'll give them a second term.

00:27:40.560 But then the fruits started to flow.

00:27:43.420 Unemployment started to drop.

00:27:45.780 Real employment started to rise.

00:27:47.380 For the first time in this country for a very long time,

00:27:50.340 real wages started to rise.

00:27:52.060 We've got a row going on in Australia about how to get real wages up.

00:27:55.440 And the current government, they didn't tell us

00:27:56.980 they were going to do it.

00:27:57.740 I'm not here to be political, but they didn't tell us

00:27:59.460 during the campaign they were going to do it.

00:28:00.800 Now they have.

00:28:01.700 To get wages up, we're going back to an old system

00:28:03.840 of industrial relations.

00:28:05.340 You can graph it out.

00:28:06.900 Wages rose when we engaged in industrial relations

00:28:10.280 freedoms measures, you know, to free up the workplace

00:28:13.520 and let people negotiate better outcomes

00:28:15.440 and be more productive and ask for more pay.

00:28:17.580 That's when wages started to rise.

00:28:19.700 And so by the time the next election came around,

00:28:22.220 we had our sort of amazing results and everybody loved us

00:28:26.020 and it was all turned around.

00:28:27.280 So you got relatively rapid results in ways

00:28:31.440 that people could actually detect and enjoy.

00:28:34.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:28:35.580 Yeah, absolutely.

00:28:37.660 I mean, we didn't think we'd ever see unemployment

00:28:40.000 down at those levels again, but we got there.

00:28:42.640 You know, the bureaucrats were saying, you know,

00:28:44.060 modern economies don't get that low.

00:28:46.120 And we got there.

00:28:48.360 So why did it go sideways and things return

00:28:51.000 to their normal state of affairs, let's say?

00:28:54.420 I said I wouldn't be political.

00:28:55.740 Let me be honest and say that I think towards the end

00:28:57.840 we were getting a little lax and the opposition was looking good

00:29:02.000 and the alternative prime minister was promising

00:29:03.860 to be fiscally conservative, i.e. to continue what we were doing.

00:29:08.680 Right, right.

00:29:08.940 And he looked like John Howard light.

00:29:12.900 John Howard is our second longest serving prime minister,

00:29:15.360 a man I admire hugely and count as a friend.

00:29:18.860 And people thought it's time for a change.

00:29:20.640 There's a bit of the Australian sort of give the other go.

00:29:23.660 Yeah, yeah.

00:29:24.360 Well, there's something to be said for that.

00:29:26.100 There is something to be said for that.

00:29:27.160 I'm not knocking it.

00:29:27.820 No, no.

00:29:28.360 Well, one of the reasons that democracies work, I think,

00:29:30.740 is because you constantly replace people at the top.

00:29:35.340 And so your point is that...

00:29:37.140 But not too constantly.

00:29:38.620 You've got to leave them there long enough to get there.

00:29:40.600 See, it took us three years.

00:29:41.980 I mean, we did all that hard work.

00:29:43.500 But it took us three years, I think, if I look at it back,

00:29:46.420 as a government of conviction,

00:29:48.160 because it was a group of people made up.

00:29:50.220 They'd been in opposition for quite a while.

00:29:52.400 We were convicted and we were committed to working as a team

00:29:55.860 and to trying to do something.

00:29:57.920 Having a leave as a power wasn't just about keeping them.

00:30:01.360 And people would say, oh, you know, John,

00:30:03.200 you're just a politician, you all say that.

00:30:04.900 But it was true of us.

00:30:06.260 There were enough of us who believed in the country,

00:30:09.480 and in my case, not particularly addicted to politics as such.

00:30:12.360 It was a means to an end.

00:30:13.380 You know, I believed in these things.

00:30:15.540 My father had almost lost his life fighting during the Second World War,

00:30:19.560 and I thought, well, I don't have a war to fight,

00:30:21.260 thank God.

00:30:22.760 But I can try and make a contribution here,

00:30:24.740 and if it's a bit painful, well, it's not like losing a life, is it?

00:30:28.240 Lying on a hospital bed for 18 months, shot to pieces,

00:30:32.320 and spending the rest of your life covered in scars

00:30:34.600 and with bits of lead coming to your shoulder

00:30:36.440 and stomachs that don't work,

00:30:38.160 and that's what he had to put up with.

00:30:39.340 Right.

00:30:40.080 So, you know, a little bit of courage doesn't hurt sometimes.

00:30:43.160 Have a go.

00:30:44.160 Yeah, well, I did a podcast with Benjamin Netanyahu here recently,

00:30:48.380 and he talked about the price they paid in Israel for his government's economic reforms,

00:30:55.600 and they tried to, while their actions were analogous in some sense to yours,

00:31:00.920 he was more concerned with cutting tax rates

00:31:03.920 and transforming the environment away from the hypothetically socialist paradise

00:31:08.660 that Israel had degenerated into,

00:31:10.880 and they paid a big price for that electorally,

00:31:15.000 but the medium to long-term consequences for the country seemed,

00:31:18.420 I would say, seemed to have been spectacular,

00:31:20.560 and of course now he's back in charge of the country,

00:31:23.840 or will be soon,

00:31:24.760 and he seemed also to be somebody who was driven fundamentally by principle

00:31:31.280 rather than by, what would you say,

00:31:35.140 a desire for the trappings of popularity and power.

00:31:38.080 Keeping your hands on the levers for the sake of it.

00:31:40.000 Well, yeah, well, I think a lot of the politicians that I've watched and talked to,

00:31:44.760 when they don't rule by principle, let's say,

00:31:46.920 or when they're not governed by principle themselves,

00:31:49.360 they devolve to short-term opinion poll manipulating,

00:31:55.320 and they deliver people what they hypothetically want in the short term,

00:31:59.440 even though it's very hard to measure what people truly want,

00:32:02.000 and you can't do that very accurately with opinion polls.

00:32:05.180 No, you can't.

00:32:06.040 No, no, it's very good.

00:32:07.000 You don't give them choices.

00:32:08.320 You can't set the choices out clearly enough to get them.

00:32:10.440 No, no, no, it's very hard.

00:32:12.280 First of all, in some really comprehensive sense,

00:32:15.960 people want many contradictory things simultaneously.

00:32:20.320 Yeah.

00:32:20.680 And so scattershot asking them about what they want today

00:32:24.860 in a very narrow manner doesn't inform you about their true wishes.

00:32:29.120 That's a very difficult thing to catch them.

00:32:30.660 Well, it's very, very hard indeed.

00:32:32.060 Yeah.

00:32:32.420 You know, would you like a $10 pay rise?

00:32:34.360 Well, yes.

00:32:35.560 We're all for that.

00:32:36.720 Right.

00:32:37.220 But if it means that you're going to have to repay it

00:32:39.220 because it's borrowed money and it's going to cost you $12,

00:32:41.540 well, no, maybe I don't want that.

00:32:42.680 Right, right, exactly.

00:32:43.720 This is a problem you get.

00:32:44.940 You can't present them with the real cost

00:32:47.340 and the implications of the decisions that they make.

00:32:51.220 Very important, just to go back to the issue, though,

00:32:53.300 we got, by the grace of God, reasonably quick results,

00:32:56.980 and people could see the benefits of better governance.

00:33:00.520 And in the end, maybe we got a bit tired,

00:33:03.640 but they felt that there was an alternative that would be safe hands

00:33:07.300 and perhaps a little bit less edgy than we'd been in saying,

00:33:11.620 you know, perhaps we sounded a bit like we were...

00:33:13.660 Harsh.

00:33:14.160 ...little.

00:33:14.720 And maybe sometimes even a little bit self-righteous,

00:33:17.120 look what we've done.

00:33:18.620 Maybe that was the way some Australians saw it at the time.

00:33:21.460 But here's the point.

00:33:22.340 It unravelled very quickly because the GFC hit

00:33:24.680 and the saying in Australia was go hard, go early, go households.

00:33:29.760 We pumped a whole heap of money out there to try and counter the GFC,

00:33:34.160 in my view, far too much for too long.

00:33:36.660 Mm-hm.

00:33:37.680 And some would say, well, that was the voice of reason and experience.

00:33:40.760 I'd say that talking.

00:33:41.960 Mm-hm.

00:33:42.120 Others might say, oh, Anderson, you're just a tight Scott.

00:33:45.940 Right, right.

00:33:46.220 I thought it was too much.

00:33:47.500 And then, you know, so we started to build up the debt again

00:33:51.660 and then we had COVID and now we've got climate policy

00:33:54.940 which, in my view, is often being ill-advised

00:33:57.220 and not subject to rigorous economic analysis

00:34:00.360 and environmental analysis for the real impact

00:34:02.800 that those policies will have.

00:34:04.120 Mm-hm.

00:34:04.440 And here's one point that I would challenge people

00:34:08.000 to really, you know, correct me on, but I think I'm right.

00:34:12.580 Right through all, the tendency in policy terms

00:34:15.680 has been to produce results that discriminate against younger people

00:34:20.900 that make it harder for them to improve their real wages

00:34:26.560 and harder for them to get their foot onto the asset ladder

00:34:31.320 unless they inherit it.

00:34:32.540 Well, how much do you think that that's driven in some sense

00:34:35.820 consciously and explicitly by something approximating an anti-growth ethos?

00:34:40.440 I mean, my understanding is that the more radical voices

00:34:46.520 on the climate amelioration front

00:34:48.640 presume that it's simply impossible

00:34:51.340 for upcoming generations of people in the West

00:34:54.900 and certainly people in the developing world

00:34:56.860 to aspire to anything even approximating the standard of living

00:35:00.560 that we currently enjoy

00:35:01.720 and that they should bloody well get used to having less

00:35:04.860 and the sooner the better.

00:35:06.600 And so the fact that young people are being priced

00:35:10.000 out of the housing market, let's say,

00:35:11.700 and face a more uncertain economic future in some ways

00:35:15.720 looks to me like a feature, not a bug.

00:35:18.060 It's something that's actually part of the plan.

00:35:20.380 Because if your viewpoint is fundamentally Malthusian,

00:35:23.440 you think, well, human beings will multiply

00:35:26.040 until there's far too many of us

00:35:28.060 and there'll be a catastrophe as a consequence,

00:35:30.940 which is pretty simple-minded biological modelling, by the way,

00:35:34.360 then you're going to assume that everything has to be

00:35:37.640 oriented towards placing it

00:35:40.000 extremely severe constraints on growth.

00:35:43.420 And if that means impoverishing people now

00:35:46.380 while you're forestalling some hypothetical future catastrophe,

00:35:50.180 and that's entirely justifiable.

00:35:51.780 And it seems to me we're running down that road

00:35:53.700 as fast as we possibly can, you know,

00:35:55.680 with moral flag firmly in air,

00:35:57.720 saying to young people and the developing world,

00:36:00.260 well, you know, we had it pretty good,

00:36:01.740 but we probably burned up more than we should have.

00:36:03.600 And I think it's time for you guys to pay.

00:36:05.720 And so, and like, I don't buy any of that

00:36:08.600 because I don't think the limits to growth model

00:36:10.480 is biologically appropriate in the least

00:36:13.240 because human beings aren't yeast in a petri dish

00:36:15.420 by any stretch of the imagination.

00:36:17.460 And I think that the idea that we need to impoverish

00:36:20.280 the poor and the young to save the planet

00:36:23.200 will not only, is not only morally reprehensible and arrogant,

00:36:26.400 but will also produce a far worse planet

00:36:29.380 on the environmental front.

00:36:30.540 I mean, I think all the data suggests that.

00:36:33.400 And so I don't exactly understand

00:36:35.340 why people are buying into this with such avidity

00:36:37.580 because there's no evidence whatsoever

00:36:39.700 that is producing the results that are intended

00:36:41.680 even by the people who are pushing forward the policies.

00:36:44.940 A lot of issues in there.

00:36:46.360 Let me have a little bit of a go.

00:36:47.700 Let me have a little bit of a go.

00:36:49.340 I think you're right.

00:36:51.780 Our parliaments now are infused with a lot of people

00:36:53.900 who think we've got to stop growth and wind it back.

00:36:56.100 But they won't tell you that.

00:36:57.200 So I had a scientist say to me a couple of years ago

00:37:00.920 when I said, you know,

00:37:04.200 we've got to be really careful on climate change policy.

00:37:06.420 If we frighten the living daylights out of our kids

00:37:08.160 so that they're all so depressed as we're told they are

00:37:10.500 because they think there's no future,

00:37:12.340 rather than saying, well, here's a challenge.

00:37:14.500 Let's go out and try and solve it.

00:37:16.040 We've solved other challenges.

00:37:17.300 We can solve this one.

00:37:18.540 They've become very defeatist.

00:37:19.900 And now we get stories all the time

00:37:21.160 about young men having vasectomies

00:37:22.560 because they didn't want to bring children

00:37:23.620 into this terrible world.

00:37:24.720 And the scientist said to me, oh, well,

00:37:27.340 it's because governments are not taking effective control

00:37:30.800 over climate and that's what's depressing the children.

00:37:34.080 So I went to Australia's, the bloke I respect most,

00:37:37.440 a fellow called McRindle in this country.

00:37:40.380 He has a research outfit.

00:37:41.920 And I asked him, I said, there's anxiety

00:37:45.000 amongst our young people's record numbers of kids

00:37:47.560 expressing anxiety because of climate change.

00:37:51.440 I think the world's going to end.

00:37:53.680 He said, no, it's much more complicated than that.

00:37:55.380 The kids are smart.

00:37:56.620 They're working out.

00:37:57.520 It's going to be really hard for them to get a job.

00:38:00.040 They're working out.

00:38:00.860 It's going to be really hard for them to afford a home.

00:38:03.400 They're working out that that probably means

00:38:05.140 they're going to have to live at home and not go and fly.

00:38:07.760 They're working out.

00:38:08.560 The romance is very difficult.

00:38:10.100 They're worried about climate.

00:38:11.320 But there's a whole heap of things.

00:38:12.840 So there you have it.

00:38:13.660 So you couldn't possibly confess your policies

00:38:15.420 were going to make it even harder for young people.

00:38:17.460 And this is at the heart, in my view,

00:38:19.660 of a lot of the problem we now have.

00:38:21.880 I alluded to it briefly.

00:38:23.700 Traditionally in Australia,

00:38:24.640 we've had three broad philosophical political streams.

00:38:27.780 Conservatism, nothing left to conserve,

00:38:30.100 so they haven't got much to say.

00:38:32.180 The classic liberals believed in small government,

00:38:34.860 in free enterprise, strong civil societies.

00:38:37.460 Well, now they look to government for everything, it seems.

00:38:39.940 And the social democrats, you sort of left of centre types,

00:38:42.800 many of whom looked like they were pretty noble.

00:38:44.720 Their objectives, at least, were noble.

00:38:46.520 The last time I said this, I got a problem.

00:38:47.480 That was particularly true of the union leader types

00:38:49.700 and the people who were really working for the working class.

00:38:52.380 Many of them were people who just wanted the weak and the oppressed

00:38:55.880 and the marginalised to be recognised as members of the community,

00:38:59.360 as part of the family Australia.

00:39:01.000 That's noble.

00:39:01.800 Might disagree with what they wanted to do.

00:39:03.460 We used to have these arguments in the parliament.

00:39:05.560 People had views and they assessed the issues of the day.

00:39:10.160 They looked through the lens of the issue

00:39:11.720 to what they thought Australia should look like.

00:39:14.700 But now there's a fourth, which is this inversion

00:39:19.920 of our traditional belief system so that now the problem is

00:39:25.540 that Mother Earth is God.

00:39:27.440 We're the enemy of Gaia.

00:39:30.720 We're the ones who have offended and we must atone by,

00:39:37.620 maybe we've got to reduce our living standards.

00:39:39.360 Or at its extremes, you think Club of Rome in the 60s,

00:39:44.700 we're all going to die, there's too many of us.

00:39:47.480 If you really press some of them, it boils down to lifeblood ethics.

00:39:51.940 You know?

00:39:52.780 We're sinking the planet.

00:39:54.260 The lifeblood is going to go down.

00:39:56.460 So we've got to...

00:39:57.840 So anything is justified.

00:39:59.340 We've got to jettison some.

00:40:00.600 Yeah.

00:40:01.000 Now, would you rather be the person, Jordan,

00:40:02.740 who was jettisoned, drowned,

00:40:04.600 or the person who made the decision that somebody else was going to?

00:40:08.460 Yeah, well, that's right, precisely.

00:40:11.080 Yeah, well...

00:40:11.580 Here's just one little question I would make out of that.

00:40:14.340 I do see some very, very, very, very privileged people

00:40:18.300 who are climate change activists

00:40:20.500 who don't seem to intend themselves to make any sacrifices.

00:40:24.120 They're not going to go overboard.

00:40:25.640 They think someone else should.

00:40:26.720 And I'm really worried that the young

00:40:29.060 and the less well-off in our society...

00:40:31.940 Well, we already know who's going to go overboard

00:40:34.220 because they're already starting to go overboard.

00:40:36.560 I mean, what happens inevitably

00:40:39.160 is that if you...

00:40:41.260 If you're...

00:40:42.280 The policies you're pursuing to save the planet,

00:40:45.620 which, by the way, have been highly ineffective

00:40:48.120 even by the metrics of the people who are attempting such things,

00:40:52.780 if you're...

00:40:53.720 The consequence of your policies

00:40:55.120 is to radically increase the price

00:40:59.720 and decrease the reliability of energy provision,

00:41:04.020 then what you do is you tip

00:41:06.180 the hundreds of millions of people

00:41:08.800 who are already living at a near subsistence level,

00:41:12.940 maybe have just started to clamber somewhat above that,

00:41:16.540 you tip all of them back into insufficient subsistence living.

00:41:21.460 And so you definitely...

00:41:22.600 By making energy more expensive,

00:41:23.900 there's absolutely 100%, no doubt,

00:41:27.180 that the primary effect is the impoverishment,

00:41:30.640 the further impoverishment of the already poor.

00:41:33.860 And so they're going to be the sacrificial victims on this front.

00:41:37.080 And that would be true in part in the West

00:41:38.980 because the poorest Western people

00:41:41.500 will definitely pay the biggest price for higher energy costs.

00:41:44.940 But it's even more true in the developing world

00:41:47.200 because as poor as poor people are in the West,

00:41:50.360 they're richer than poor people in the developing world.

00:41:53.620 And if energy is more scarce and food is also more expensive,

00:41:59.540 then the poor people in the poorest places will be the ones who suffer the most.

00:42:04.080 And there's absolutely no doubt that that's already happening.

00:42:07.380 And so it's a very peculiar thing to see,

00:42:10.980 especially when it's conjoined with the fact that I don't see any evidence whatsoever.

00:42:14.760 And I've talked to people who are very knowledgeable on this front,

00:42:17.900 people like Bjorn Lomborg, for example,

00:42:19.720 who've reviewed the evidence very carefully

00:42:22.120 and showed that all of the tremendous amount of money

00:42:25.760 that we've already spent, wasted, let's say,

00:42:28.380 on such things as hypothetical climate amelioration

00:42:31.220 have not only not ameliorated climate alteration in the least,

00:42:37.240 not measurably,

00:42:38.640 but have definitely made energy far more expensive.

00:42:42.020 And in places like Germany have also made it dirtier.

00:42:45.380 So I read the other day that I think Germany has fallen to 170th.

00:42:49.180 I hope I have this stat right, but the principle of it's right anyways,

00:42:52.540 is that energy is not only way more expensive

00:42:56.180 and way more unreliable in Germany

00:42:57.900 to the point where, for example,

00:43:00.000 manufacturers of car batteries for electric cars

00:43:03.460 can no longer do it profitably in Germany

00:43:05.840 because electricity costs are too high,

00:43:08.020 but that while they've demolished the energy provision system

00:43:11.980 and rendered themselves hyper-reliant on the Russians,

00:43:15.440 they've also made their energy per kilowatt much dirtier.

00:43:19.180 Because you need backup for these hypothetically green renewables,

00:43:22.860 which aren't green at all, by the way.

00:43:24.400 You need backup, and that backup has to be fossil fuel,

00:43:26.820 and they've shut off their nuclear plants,

00:43:28.360 and so now they're turning to coal.

00:43:29.900 Or many of the Europeans are now turning to wood burning

00:43:34.120 to prepare for the winter,

00:43:35.600 and they're deforesting, in many places,

00:43:37.820 they're deforesting the country.

00:43:40.700 And so one of the things we've got to get real straight here

00:43:43.440 is that even if your goal,

00:43:46.600 and even if you have the goal of a more sustainable environment,

00:43:52.080 and you have your metrics in place to produce that,

00:43:54.620 and even if you accept the apocalyptic version

00:43:58.540 of carbon dioxide overproduction,

00:44:00.480 which I don't at all, by the way,

00:44:01.840 but even if you do,

00:44:02.920 there's no evidence whatsoever

00:44:04.560 that these counterproductive policies

00:44:06.520 that are punitive in relationship to the poor

00:44:09.000 have had any impact on the environment at all

00:44:13.040 that hasn't been entirely negative.

00:44:15.080 And so I don't see at all how anybody on the radical left,

00:44:18.580 on the globalist, utopian, environmental front,

00:44:20.880 can put forward an argument

00:44:22.300 saying that there's anything about that that's moral,

00:44:25.100 because we have way more people who are poor

00:44:27.280 than we needed to have,

00:44:28.960 we're impoverishing people in the West

00:44:30.700 and the developing world,

00:44:32.160 and while we're doing that,

00:44:33.740 we're actually making the environment worse

00:44:36.160 by the standards that the people who put in the policies

00:44:39.400 regard as the appropriate standards.

00:44:42.280 So how is that helpful?

00:44:44.380 And then on the colonial front,

00:44:46.340 one of the things we hear all the time

00:44:47.860 is how awful the European world really has been

00:44:52.140 in terms of its imposition of the colonial empire

00:44:56.820 on the rest of the world.

00:44:58.020 And there's no doubt that all of us walk on blood-soaked ground,

00:45:02.860 and that's part of the catastrophe of being human, I suppose.

00:45:06.160 But I can't see anything more colonial that we've ever done

00:45:10.860 than to insist that we enjoyed

00:45:15.080 a pretty damn good standard of living,

00:45:16.780 and that was driven almost entirely by fossil fuel reliance.

00:45:20.660 But it's pretty much enough of that for everyone else.

00:45:25.680 And we cannot expect to have a world

00:45:27.780 where those in the developing world could aspire to

00:45:31.160 or hope to have anything like the prosperity that we've enjoyed.

00:45:34.480 And we're going to be the good examples in our own country

00:45:38.020 and teach those, let's say, backward savages

00:45:41.000 exactly how they should treat the planet.

00:45:43.680 I don't see...

00:45:44.600 I can't see anything more colonial than that attitude.

00:45:47.020 Like I see in Canada, for example,

00:45:49.040 I think I read recently that

00:45:50.380 if Canada hits all of its climate goals

00:45:53.320 for the next 25 years,

00:45:55.280 we will reduce our carbon output less

00:45:58.500 than China will increase its carbon output next year.

00:46:02.360 So it's completely bloody pointless

00:46:04.560 from any practical perspective.

00:46:06.800 And the argument might be,

00:46:08.100 well, we should lead by example.

00:46:09.780 It's like, now should we?

00:46:11.320 We think those developing people in the developing countries

00:46:15.300 who are trying to move towards some reasonable standard

00:46:18.020 are too damn dumb to figure this out all by themselves, eh?

00:46:20.980 And we're going to charge in there like the saviors.

00:46:22.820 And while we're doing that, we're going to impoverish them.

00:46:25.200 And we're going to make our own countries worse off.

00:46:27.800 And there's nothing colonial about that.

00:46:29.980 It's like, I don't think so.

00:46:30.920 I think there's something plenty colonial about that.

00:46:32.840 We should say,

00:46:33.700 it's no wonder that you'd like to have enough food to eat

00:46:36.660 and not have to burn dung and wood in your huts.

00:46:39.580 And it's no wonder that you'd like to have

00:46:41.360 some educational opportunities to your children.

00:46:43.640 And obviously the way forward to that

00:46:45.700 is going to involve fossil fuel utilization,

00:46:48.560 clearly, because there's no alternative.

00:46:50.060 And we'll just get the hell out of the way

00:46:53.360 while you pursue quite successfully, by the way,

00:46:56.520 what we've been pursuing for 200 years.

00:46:58.780 I don't see a moral leg to stand on in that debate.

00:47:04.340 It's appalling.

00:47:05.440 And it's murderous.

00:47:06.780 It's worse than appalling.

00:47:07.960 It's murderous.

00:47:10.740 Well, to pick up some of those themes,

00:47:12.760 I mean, I'm, as you know, involved in agriculture.

00:47:15.560 And I'm passionate about feeding people.

00:47:20.240 And you made the comment about driving people

00:47:21.940 in the developing world into poverty.

00:47:23.600 I put a slightly different twist on it.

00:47:25.740 You'd reverse decades of the most astounding progress

00:47:30.640 in lifting people out of poverty.

00:47:32.700 Right.

00:47:34.100 Australia is one of the seven big hitters

00:47:36.100 in international agricultural research.

00:47:38.020 There's six countries and the Gates Foundation

00:47:40.140 that put money into it.

00:47:41.800 And we've just done some research.

00:47:43.060 It's really interesting and it shows that participants

00:47:45.120 benefit their own agricultural sectors enormously

00:47:48.200 because while we participate and help the third world,

00:47:51.620 developing world, with their feeding issues and so forth,

00:47:55.260 we learn things that we're able to bring back here.

00:47:57.100 It's a real win-win.

00:47:58.700 And the progress has been amazing.

00:48:00.640 An extra 5 billion people fed properly.

00:48:03.360 Right, right.

00:48:04.120 It's stunning.

00:48:04.920 Over the last 50 years.

00:48:05.980 That's something to celebrate.

00:48:07.160 That's for sure.

00:48:07.860 This is good news.

00:48:08.480 And that's a huge part of that as a consequence

00:48:10.900 if they're turning to something like free market solutions.

00:48:14.560 Western know-how under a Western rules-based system

00:48:17.920 led by the dreadful Americans.

00:48:20.880 I mean, petty helpers of the Americans are not oversight.

00:48:23.020 Are you worried about climate change and environmentalism?

00:48:25.040 The two greatest threats are to return big slabs

00:48:28.040 of the world's population to grinding poverty

00:48:29.880 so that they're not able to afford the luxury

00:48:32.260 of wondering about how the environment might be faring

00:48:35.220 because they can't feed their kids.

00:48:37.360 And the other will be the breaking of the rules-based system

00:48:40.480 that the Allies basically put in place in 1945.

00:48:43.720 And people will laugh at me for saying that, but it's true.

00:48:46.880 And every Western country is worried about supply chain security

00:48:49.900 after COVID.

00:48:51.300 Well, that was globalisation and it was the Americans

00:48:55.120 making certain that the trade routes were kept open.

00:48:58.600 All right, we've got to retreat a little bit,

00:49:00.180 but the answer is not to go back to some system

00:49:03.480 where we break that rules-based system.

00:49:05.740 And the reason is very simple.

00:49:07.520 The autocrats of this world don't give a damn

00:49:09.580 about environmentalism.

00:49:10.880 It rates a very distant priority behind their own power.

00:49:14.760 We know that.

00:49:16.060 You can see that in Beijing today.

00:49:17.440 What matters to them is power.

00:49:19.800 So if you're worried about environmentalism,

00:49:21.960 don't starve people and don't break the Western liberal

00:49:24.960 rules-based system that we've imposed and policed,

00:49:28.080 and we beat the Soviets and all of those sorts of things,

00:49:33.400 and now we're putting it at risk.

00:49:34.500 Well, the limits to growth model, too,

00:49:36.620 has a certain type of deep pathology associated with it

00:49:40.560 that needs to be brought to the surface, too,

00:49:42.320 because one hypothesis is the planet has a limited carrying capacity

00:49:47.940 and it's a zero-sum game,

00:49:50.300 and we're Malthusian rats and overpopulating the place,

00:49:55.400 and that what we need to do in consequence is limit growth

00:49:59.640 and perhaps move towards a much less populated planet.

00:50:03.120 That last one is a very frightening proposition because, as you said...

00:50:07.260 Life by ethics.

00:50:08.080 Well, who gets to go?

00:50:09.700 You know, that's the real question, and exactly how.

00:50:12.040 And who are the monsters who make the decision?

00:50:13.500 Well, exactly, exactly that.

00:50:15.000 But I also think that that model,

00:50:19.440 it's certainly not the only model that you can derive from the data, let's say,

00:50:23.940 because one of the things I learned when I was deeply investigating

00:50:27.840 the relationship between economic growth

00:50:30.320 and long-term environmental viability, let's say,

00:50:34.260 sustainability, something like that,

00:50:36.280 was that, strangely enough, and perhaps not so,

00:50:40.640 if you make people, if you can lift people out of absolute poverty

00:50:45.740 and get them up to something approximating $5,000 a year

00:50:49.940 in terms of average, say, contribution to GDP,

00:50:54.320 then they stop adopting a short-term view

00:50:57.440 and they start to adopt a long-term view

00:50:59.680 because they have the luxury of being able to think beyond the moment.

00:51:03.820 And I suppose partly why we want security,

00:51:07.640 which is what wealth can offer, at least to some degree,

00:51:11.780 is so that we can, we're not bound by the absolute emergencies of the moment.

00:51:16.420 Absolutely.

00:51:16.960 And we can stretch our minds across a longer span of time.

00:51:18.960 Couldn't agree with you more.

00:51:19.980 Well, and so if you make people...

00:51:20.940 It'll impact on family formation as well.

00:51:22.780 Right, right, right.

00:51:23.600 Well, one of the things you see is that as soon as you educate women,

00:51:26.320 that family size tends to fall.

00:51:29.280 Don't accuse the women of being dumb.

00:51:30.740 I hate the way we do that.

00:51:32.880 Women in the developing world are not stupid.

00:51:35.020 Well, how can we be so patronising?

00:51:38.560 If you get them to a point where they think their children are going to survive

00:51:41.460 and they're going to get an education deal, you know, and what have you,

00:51:44.020 they will do what everybody else has done

00:51:45.520 and control the size of their families.

00:51:48.200 Actually, they might overshoot because of what's being missed.

00:51:51.460 92 countries in the world today have declining populations.

00:51:54.160 92, there's only 180 countries in the world.

00:51:57.040 Half of them are in decline.

00:51:58.460 Now, some demographers believe China might go from $1.4 billion

00:52:02.660 to $500 or $600 million by the end of this century.

00:52:05.780 Right, right, right.

00:52:06.720 One-child policy, they're not having children,

00:52:09.200 a surfeit of boys, not enough girls.

00:52:11.240 That's a horror story in itself.

00:52:12.600 Yeah.

00:52:13.160 And you're going to have massive loneliness

00:52:14.620 and a terrible burden on young people trying to support the old people.

00:52:18.240 So you're going to overshoot.

00:52:19.200 And the possibility of a collapsing economy.

00:52:20.860 But the real point here is your point.

00:52:22.740 It's a really relevant one.

00:52:24.120 Lift those people out of poverty.

00:52:25.440 Give them a perspective where they can make wise decisions

00:52:29.220 and what have you on that issue of global...

00:52:32.020 And then we can talk.

00:52:32.740 It's only the Middle East and Africa, Nigeria, countries like that,

00:52:36.980 that look like they're going to keep building populations

00:52:38.920 for the next few decades.

00:52:41.440 Other parts of the world, it's stabilised or coming down.

00:52:44.020 Well, we could talk about that.

00:52:45.160 We've got a high immigration policy here

00:52:46.420 because the government's worried about our low birth rate in Australia.

00:52:48.980 Mm-hmm.

00:52:49.500 Mm-hmm.

00:52:50.040 Well, we could also talk about perhaps what some of the preconditions

00:52:54.640 for that wealth generation are.

00:52:56.180 So first of all, we could point out that

00:52:57.980 if you get people up to about $5,000 per year

00:53:01.920 in terms of their ability to generate income,

00:53:05.180 then they start to be concerned about the environment.

00:53:07.660 But the environmental concerns start to be expressed in a way

00:53:11.200 that's, I would say, truly sustainable.

00:53:14.160 Because you could imagine that we could take a top-down approach

00:53:18.380 to environmental planning.

00:53:19.460 But top-down solutions have the problem of, first of all, being unitary,

00:53:26.160 and second of all, so they can go catastrophically wrong if they're wrong.

00:53:29.520 They're also difficult to impose.

00:53:31.680 But if you make enough people, if you free enough people from absolute poverty,

00:53:36.040 they start to be concerned about environmental maintenance locally.

00:53:40.420 And so what you get is a distributed attempt across the world

00:53:44.200 of people to improve the quality of their local environment.

00:53:47.820 So that's maybe hundreds of millions of people that have a longer-term viewpoint

00:53:52.140 instead of a few centralist utopians trying to govern the whole planet.

00:53:55.880 And that's a much more stable solution.

00:53:57.940 So we should be doing everything we can

00:53:59.880 to lift the world's absolute poor out of their absolute poverty.

00:54:04.140 And we do that, so then we can say, well, how do we do that?

00:54:06.740 And one of the ways we do that is by

00:54:08.600 moving towards the provision of free and ample energy.

00:54:14.480 That's a crucial issue.

00:54:15.760 That's how we fed 5 billion extra people over the last 25 years.

00:54:19.900 And so that means we have to give some serious consideration

00:54:22.280 to intelligent use of fossil fuels, which we're doing anyways,

00:54:26.200 except badly and stupidly.

00:54:27.220 Can I say as a farmer, we're using too many.

00:54:29.340 We are.

00:54:30.100 We're hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels.

00:54:32.480 And there are many downsides and precautionary principles.

00:54:34.720 We should pursue technologies and so forth that lower our reliance,

00:54:38.400 that help us absorb more carbon.

00:54:39.900 That's a good thing for farms and our soils.

00:54:41.800 I wouldn't want to be misunderstood as saying we should stop technology

00:54:46.320 or what have you, but here's the rub.

00:54:49.880 It's the point that you're making.

00:54:51.900 If we're going to pursue policies which drive people back into poverty,

00:54:55.860 we will defeat ourselves unbelievably,

00:54:59.260 and no one's paying enough attention to it.

00:55:01.440 We lift them out of poverty with available and affordable energy.

00:55:05.580 And if we break that, we will drive them back into it.

00:55:08.420 It's your point.

00:55:08.900 Yes, and we will destroy the planet while we're doing it.

00:55:12.120 That's the other aspect.

00:55:12.940 Yeah, we won't save the planet.

00:55:14.460 That's right.

00:55:15.020 That's because of badly designed policies driven by,

00:55:18.760 I hate to say this, by the fact we've become so emotive.

00:55:22.240 So I'm staggered to discover that if you go out and do a poll in Australia,

00:55:27.520 it's been done, and ask Australians,

00:55:30.300 what is our contribution to global emissions?

00:55:33.140 50% of people say it's somewhere between 10% and 20%.

00:55:36.040 It's 1%.

00:55:37.660 And so here's the rub.

00:55:40.260 I'm a farmer, okay?

00:55:41.780 Well, I work on a farm now.

00:55:44.640 My son and daughter-in-law, as you know, run the business,

00:55:48.160 and they do a terrific job,

00:55:49.360 and they are looking for ways everywhere to be better environmental stewards

00:55:53.840 and to absorb more carbon.

00:55:55.600 Pull it out of the air.

00:55:56.640 Good.

00:55:57.500 We happen to meet on that one.

00:55:58.720 That's good.

00:55:59.700 That's a good thing to do.

00:56:00.560 And farmers recycle, cycle and recycle carbon.

00:56:04.380 So you've only got to absorb a little bit more,

00:56:06.500 and if people are worried about carbon in the air,

00:56:08.460 there's part of the solution.

00:56:10.260 But here is the point,

00:56:14.680 that we've got to do this in ways which continues the upward march

00:56:20.180 in lifting people out of deprivation and poverty.

00:56:23.800 The improvement, we don't realise how well we've done,

00:56:27.300 not just in lifting people out of poverty by improving their nutrition.

00:56:31.520 Education, with the exception of a few cultures now,

00:56:34.580 even the girls around the world are getting much better education,

00:56:37.980 we thought.

00:56:39.280 Most people have much better access to electricity than has been thought.

00:56:43.460 We've fallen behind in our understanding of the progress we've made.

00:56:47.060 It's been so rapid, it's hard to believe.

00:56:49.000 And to stop it.

00:56:49.940 I think we should take great pride in it.

00:56:51.840 And we've done it with research, with extension, compassion, concern for others.

00:56:58.140 That's not a bad thing to have.

00:56:59.860 Well, we've also done it, we've also done it, I would say.

00:57:02.500 And free market interviews.

00:57:03.400 Well, that, okay, so we can turn to that.

00:57:05.440 So not only, so we know that we've made tremendous progress on the economic front,

00:57:11.000 especially since the fall of the Soviet Union.

00:57:14.140 And it's partly because.

00:57:14.920 The last 10 years, here's a little factoid.

00:57:16.740 But I'm told, and by people I believe, you know, I meet a lot of people in this area,

00:57:21.520 the world's farmers have produced enough food in each of the last 10 years for 10 billion people.

00:57:26.100 That's well in excess of global population.

00:57:28.920 And I don't think we're straining our ecosystems to do it, to be honest.

00:57:33.780 Using more fertiliser, perhaps, than I would like, and that's a story in itself.

00:57:37.820 But, of course, that's made out of gas.

00:57:39.700 It's one of the great emitters and all of that things that people are worried about.

00:57:42.900 But Germany is a country where a lot of gas is turned, you know, used to make ammonia.

00:57:49.000 Half the world's grain production depends on the artificial fertilisers that are made out of it.

00:57:52.920 Right, on fossil fuel.

00:57:54.260 And BASF, as I understand it, in Germany, one of the biggest producers in the Western world,

00:57:58.260 is moving their operations to China.

00:58:00.080 And we talk supply chain security.

00:58:02.440 Yep.

00:58:03.020 It's going to move.

00:58:04.120 I think that, as a farmer, I'll be blunt about it.

00:58:06.780 I'm worried about that.

00:58:07.660 Yeah.

00:58:08.080 I'm worried about that.

00:58:08.840 And, anyway, we have made this solid progress that we're in danger of reversing because we don't know what we're doing.

00:58:17.900 And here's the other point I wanted to make.

00:58:19.160 Sorry.

00:58:19.720 As a farmer, one thing I know is that it doesn't matter what we do in Australia.

00:58:24.300 Our chief scientist, no less, confirmed this in Senate hearings only a little while ago.

00:58:29.880 When we talk about floods and fires and damage to the reef, it doesn't matter what Australia does.

00:58:34.200 So, as a farmer, whatever is going to happen globally is not going to be influenced by Australia.

00:58:41.040 I have to prepare, my family have to prepare, to farm in whatever circumstances come.

00:58:47.580 What's the point?

00:58:49.440 At a practical level, for politicians to say, we're doing the things that will save you the next flood or the next fire or whatever in this country is just dishonest.

00:58:57.400 It's not going to make any difference.

00:58:58.560 We know that.

00:58:59.300 There's no evidence that any of the things we've done so far have made any difference.

00:59:02.740 But the whole, even if the whole globe did it, maybe we don't know what the outcome would be.

00:59:07.460 It doesn't matter what Australia does.

00:59:08.740 Well, one of the things that, with regards to carbon dioxide output, one of the things that people are listening and watching might want to think about is, you know, I've been attacked many times for being a climate change denier, let's say.

00:59:21.100 And I don't really care for that accusation one way or another.

00:59:24.100 But one of the things I know recently from my investigations is that one of the consequences of carbon dioxide overproduction over the last 15 years, because carbon dioxide levels have been going up and some of that seems to be a consequence of anthropogenic activity, human industrial activity, let's say.

00:59:44.500 Is that, paradoxically, and contrary to all predictions on the environmentalist side, the planet is now 15% greener than it was in the year 2000.

00:59:56.280 And 15% is, that's a tremendous amount.

01:00:00.300 It's an area that's larger than the United States.

01:00:03.000 And it isn't obvious to me that that's a bad thing.

01:00:06.780 And it's more than that.

01:00:09.060 The most remarkable greening has occurred in semi-arid areas.

01:00:16.580 And so the deserts are supposed to expand as the globe warmed or the climate changed, because that was a, you know, fait accompli in terms of terminological transformation.

01:00:26.320 And what's happened instead is that the green, that plants have invaded the semi-arid areas to a large degree.

01:00:35.140 And the reason for that is because plants have to breathe through pores.

01:00:39.940 And if they open their pores to get more carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide levels are relatively low, let's say, they let water evaporate out of these pores.

01:00:49.760 If there's more carbon dioxide, they can close their pores.

01:00:52.320 And then it turns that out that they can grow where it's drier.

01:00:56.000 And that's driven not only an expansion of greening everywhere there already were plants, but the proliferation of plants into areas that couldn't support them before.

01:01:06.380 And so that, it's very hard for me to look at that, because that's a huge change, 15%, and not think, well, maybe more plants is a good thing.

01:01:14.840 But there's an additional feature that's going along with that that also has to be contended with.

01:01:19.420 And I don't see people on the environmental front grappling with these issues in any manner that strikes me as credible.

01:01:28.380 Not only has the total biomass of plants increased tremendously, 15%, but crop yields have gone up.

01:01:39.420 Because it turns out that carbon dioxide is a pretty damn good fertilizer.

01:01:43.040 So instead of having less food because of climate change forced by carbon dioxide, we actually have more food.

01:01:50.860 And we have more food with less fertilizer.

01:01:52.900 And so I think you could make a case, and I know this is utterly heretical, and it might not even be true, that carbon dioxide outputs a net good.

01:02:00.360 And I also know, for example, that we have somewhere between 300 and 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now.

01:02:07.840 And that's actually a historical, it's actually low by historical standards, quite low.

01:02:12.460 And plants really have a hard time even living at 150.

01:02:15.860 So that's the cutoff for plants to breathe.

01:02:19.100 And so a carbon dioxide intensive world is actually a lot more friendly to plants.

01:02:23.620 Now you could say, well, we're still risking catastrophe by changing the biosphere that rapidly,

01:02:29.620 because a 15% increase in plant coverage is nothing trivial.

01:02:33.760 And there may be elements of that that are destabilizing in some ways I don't understand.

01:02:39.300 But the prediction that we were going to produce an expansion of desert, for example,

01:02:45.620 and a denuding of transformation of semi-arid areas into desert, that all seems to be, like, completely wrong.

01:02:54.740 It just, that did not happen.

01:02:56.120 The opposite happened.

01:02:57.040 And so I don't know what to make of that fact, because as far as I can tell, that fact is incontrovertibly true.

01:03:05.140 And so I don't see that there's a leg for the apocalyptic environmentalists to stand on,

01:03:12.060 especially given that their policies have been counterproductive and they're driving people into poverty.

01:03:16.840 So, different question.

01:03:19.100 Now, for what it's worth, just a brief encapsulation.

01:03:22.220 I think I'd make a few comments.

01:03:23.240 I'm not a scientist.

01:03:24.400 I would only say I don't think the science has ever settled.

01:03:27.040 I don't buy that line, because science always moves.

01:03:29.860 It should always be questing for more knowledge, more information.

01:03:34.320 So I will assume that the science broadly tells us that things are changing.

01:03:38.860 And a 15% increase is extraordinary rapid change in itself.

01:03:42.360 Yeah.

01:03:42.540 So I expect volatility.

01:03:43.540 But there's a couple of really important points to make out of this.

01:03:47.460 If democratically people want to address this issue, that is their right.

01:03:53.240 But secondly, you must do so on an informed basis.

01:03:56.800 And you must look for high-quality policy.

01:03:59.140 And you won't get that without a good debate.

01:04:01.160 So we've been talking about some of the things here that really matter.

01:04:04.720 There's a trade-off to be made if you go too far with these things.

01:04:07.780 And if you ask me to make a trade between saving the planet tonight on a whim and feeding people,

01:04:14.800 I'm sorry, I'm going with feeding people.

01:04:17.320 Why?

01:04:17.860 Educating them too.

01:04:18.680 That's a moral choice, you know, and I'm going with feeding people.

01:04:23.420 If you were to say to me, do I think we should be looking for new technologies

01:04:27.140 for reducing agriculture's reliance on fossil fuels and artificial fertilisers,

01:04:32.760 as it happens, yes, I do.

01:04:34.660 But I don't think we ought to be doing it in a way that sacrifices production and feeding people.

01:04:39.500 That's what I'm saying.

01:04:41.280 And so it comes back.

01:04:43.220 We were talking earlier about budget deficits and what have you.

01:04:45.460 And you've got to have conviction, you've got to be guided by the data,

01:04:50.720 you've got to actually think facts matter, taking people with you matters.

01:04:55.580 Well, you also talked about the necessity of being guided by principles.

01:04:58.940 And so one of the things we could talk about too is if we accepted the proposition

01:05:03.200 that it would be good to develop policies that would ameliorate absolute poverty

01:05:08.560 and that that would be good for poor people and that would be good for the planet too.

01:05:11.780 We've done a lot of it.

01:05:13.080 Well, we might also ask how we've done it,

01:05:15.120 because I would say that it's clearly the case that in places like communist China,

01:05:20.880 let's say, which has undergone this economic revolution,

01:05:25.340 that the degree to which that economic revolution was possible

01:05:28.880 was because even the Chinese communists accepted the necessities,

01:05:33.800 the necessity of some of the principles that go along with open and free markets,

01:05:37.860 open and free trade.

01:05:38.760 And so one of those would be, so the West is getting a pretty rough time now on the radical front.

01:05:44.080 And this is feeding into ideas like we owe the third world reparations for our climate damage

01:05:49.240 for being colonial and oppressive.

01:05:52.260 And that the ethos that's associated with the West is fundamentally colonial and oppressive in nature.

01:05:58.840 And the thing that really bothers me about that is that I believe that the fundamental positive spirit

01:06:04.640 that has imbued the West, which is actually not a Western creation,

01:06:08.080 because it's actually a Middle Eastern creation,

01:06:10.580 the fundamental spirit that has imbued the West is the only spirit that has ever actually lifted people

01:06:18.360 who are oppressed out of their oppression.

01:06:20.360 And so what that means is this.

01:06:22.300 I believe that too.

01:06:22.920 The radical critique that's been aimed at Western culture

01:06:25.700 in the name of freedom for oppression

01:06:28.540 is actually attacking the very spirit that has lifted people out of oppression

01:06:32.800 to the degree that that's been the case.

01:06:34.440 I'm sure you're right.

01:06:35.680 Well, we could start with, so what are the bedrock assumptions of Western culture

01:06:40.640 that make such things as free trade possible,

01:06:43.440 assuming that that generates a sort of generous wealth, which seems to be the case.

01:06:47.420 And one of them is that there's an idea, and the West hasn't been,

01:06:52.160 what would you say, without sin in applying this idea,

01:06:54.680 that every single person is a locus of implicit divine worth,

01:07:01.980 regardless of their particularities.

01:07:05.120 It's a very weird proposition, right?

01:07:06.900 Because we differ so much in our obviously admirable attributes.

01:07:11.180 Some of us are more intelligent, more attractive, more powerful,

01:07:15.900 have more physical prowess, are more ethical, are more hardworking.

01:07:21.280 Like, there's endless dimensions on which you can rank order human beings.

01:07:24.800 But there's this strange proposition that emerged essentially in the Middle East

01:07:28.920 that despite all that surface variability and that hierarchical rank ordering,

01:07:35.360 every single person, man and woman alike, regardless of race or creed or color,

01:07:40.740 has to be treated as a locus of divine worth.

01:07:43.900 And I don't think that you can even make a credible argument against slavery on moral grounds

01:07:50.080 without accepting that as an axiomatic presumption.

01:07:52.860 And so then I think, well, if that's the case, because, look,

01:07:57.500 if there's no intrinsic worth that's divine in some sense, so sacred,

01:08:02.980 then why can't I just do with you what I want if I have the power?

01:08:09.560 Why is that wrong exactly?

01:08:11.180 Like, it might be inconvenient for you,

01:08:12.720 and you are no doubt going to be motivated to rebel,

01:08:17.140 maybe, if you don't want to succumb,

01:08:19.040 but perhaps you'd be motivated to rebel.

01:08:20.980 Well, but I don't see how you can make a moral case that if I can do it, I shouldn't.

01:08:25.760 If you're going to make the moral case,

01:08:27.320 you have to make the assumption that each person, in some sense,

01:08:31.240 is created in the image of what is sacred,

01:08:33.440 and you can't violate that regardless of apparent evidence for hierarchical difference.

01:08:39.740 And so it's that spirit, as far as I can tell.

01:08:42.780 We were talking about William Wilberforce just before the podcast started,

01:08:46.120 and the British attempt to abolish slavery, which is the real miracle, right?

01:08:50.300 Yeah.

01:08:50.520 Not that they were ever involved in slavery,

01:08:52.320 because that was true everywhere for all time.

01:08:55.300 Every empire, including black empires.

01:08:57.080 Right, right.

01:08:57.500 Well, and it was part of the alternative hypothesis that something like might meant moral virtue,

01:09:06.360 and might-inspired moral virtue meant right.

01:09:09.580 Yep.

01:09:09.700 And that was the ethos that governed everyone, everywhere,

01:09:13.600 until this strange idea emerged that regardless of appearance,

01:09:18.500 somehow each person was characterized by intrinsic and viable worth.

01:09:23.640 And so then you see the radicals go after that in the name of the poor and oppressed,

01:09:28.200 and I think, wait a minute, guys.

01:09:30.040 Like, you're failing to understand something here,

01:09:32.680 which is that the spirit that emerged to push back against slavery

01:09:37.640 is the central spirit of the very system that you're trying to demolish.

01:09:44.220 And so how in the world is that going to work out

01:09:46.500 for the people you purport to stand for practically?

01:09:50.220 I mean, it's definitely the case that the distribution of the biblical corpus

01:09:55.140 throughout Europe to begin with was part and parcel of the process

01:10:00.700 that indicated to the oppressed peasantry of Europe

01:10:05.060 that there was something fundamentally wrong with serfdom, for example.

01:10:12.040 That it was a violation of something like a divine order.

01:10:15.740 And that all happened, that happened in large consequence

01:10:19.960 because of the Gutenberg Bible

01:10:22.420 and the distribution of the biblical corpus far and wide,

01:10:26.340 which also helped people become literate,

01:10:28.400 and to also start to understand that no one had the right to oppress them.

01:10:32.880 We can go into that issue of, like, inviolable individual worth,

01:10:36.700 but I don't see how that idea can be challenged on historical grounds

01:10:40.900 because, as far as I can tell, that's what happened.

01:10:43.660 It's those ideas, strange ideas that led to the abolition of slavery.

01:10:48.180 We can talk about Britain.

01:10:49.080 You know a fair bit about Wilberforce.

01:10:50.580 Why don't we talk a little bit about what he did?

01:10:52.380 Because it's quite the bloody miracle.

01:10:54.160 Well, thank you for asking.

01:10:56.000 It does.

01:10:56.780 Before I do, to take up this point that you're alluding to,

01:11:02.320 Australia's longest-serving prime minister

01:11:04.000 and probably the deepest intellectual leader,

01:11:06.540 certainly since the Second World War.

01:11:08.640 Not the only one, but a very deep thinker.

01:11:10.660 He was not a religious man, but he had a religious tradition in his education,

01:11:14.580 I suppose you'd say.

01:11:15.700 And he said that democracy is not so much a machine as a spirit

01:11:18.940 in which, despite our different abilities

01:11:21.480 and our different positions in society,

01:11:24.360 we all have a responsibility to acknowledge

01:11:26.420 that all souls are equal in the eyes of heaven.

01:11:28.380 That's where that idea comes from.

01:11:29.480 So a higher authority is saying, you know,

01:11:31.640 you and I might disagree, but I can't lord it over you

01:11:34.140 because somebody else is, you're just...

01:11:36.220 Right, even if I have the ability to.

01:11:38.100 Yeah, that's right.

01:11:39.060 And what we're now reduced to,

01:11:41.060 I think it's really important to understand this,

01:11:43.020 you hear this bleeding that, oh, yes,

01:11:44.280 we've got to recognise that everybody's important,

01:11:46.100 that everybody has dignity and worth.

01:11:47.300 Well, on what basis, which is your question,

01:11:49.340 if you'd strip out the idea of the Godhead,

01:11:52.540 the higher authority, on what basis?

01:11:54.860 Because you run into trouble straight away.

01:11:57.020 The most common reason now given would be to say,

01:12:00.840 well, human beings have either high intelligence

01:12:04.260 or they have a sense of morality or both.

01:12:08.620 Both arguments are used, usually together.

01:12:11.060 Therefore, they're unique.

01:12:12.020 Therefore, they're special.

01:12:13.320 But the problem, you've just alluded to the problem.

01:12:15.080 Some are brighter.

01:12:16.120 Some are less bright.

01:12:17.200 Some are stupid.

01:12:18.460 Some are wise.

01:12:19.440 Some behave well.

01:12:20.280 Some don't.

01:12:20.960 So immediately you're in trouble

01:12:22.740 because you can't say they all matter equally.

01:12:26.480 You've lost a model.

01:12:28.380 So the Wilberforce one is example.

01:12:31.380 In the context of Black Lives Matters,

01:12:33.400 I've thought about this a lot

01:12:34.560 because I abhor racism.

01:12:36.680 I think it's the most appalling doctrine

01:12:38.820 because I'm deeply imbued with the Christian view

01:12:41.120 that whether I like somebody else or not is irrelevant.

01:12:45.900 Somebody else says they matter as much as me.

01:12:48.360 You know, the constituent who attacked me

01:12:49.960 on the black streets of my,

01:12:51.240 and it happened a few times,

01:12:52.740 sometimes on racial grounds, you know,

01:12:54.580 where I was attacked for my race.

01:12:56.780 And I had to stop and say,

01:12:58.520 don't respond in kind.

01:13:01.120 This person matters just as matters as I do.

01:13:03.840 I might be the Deputy Prime Minister of the country,

01:13:06.280 but I hire authorities just as worried about him

01:13:08.340 and places just as much value on him

01:13:10.020 and his life as he does on mine.

01:13:13.000 And that's genuinely where I happen to come from.

01:13:15.620 But now, okay, so every empire we know of

01:13:17.800 has kept slaves,

01:13:18.940 and there are 45 million estimated slaves today,

01:13:21.400 so it hasn't gone away.

01:13:22.280 But only one empire having kept slaves

01:13:25.260 then moved from within to abolish it.

01:13:28.200 And it's the very empire we seem to most want to hate most now of all.

01:13:32.880 It's the British Empire.

01:13:35.200 And so you had this evil slave trade known as the Triangle.

01:13:40.020 Ships would go out to the west coast of Africa.

01:13:42.220 They would buy slaves who'd been rounded up by Africans themselves.

01:13:46.760 They'd gone into the inland, slaughtered the weak and the infirm.

01:13:49.920 Pretty brutal stuff.

01:13:50.940 And the infants and what have you,

01:13:52.660 marched the able-bodied ones that could be sold for a few trinkets back to the coast.

01:13:56.740 They're sold to people in this reprehensible trade,

01:13:59.820 taken to the East Indies.

01:14:00.860 The way they were packed into the ships,

01:14:03.560 I mean, it was just absolutely inhumane, mind-bogglingly inhumane.

01:14:09.600 And, you know, there were times when they were thrown overboard

01:14:12.420 so that they could just alive to drown,

01:14:15.800 so the ship owners could,

01:14:17.120 and slave traders wanted to pick up on the insurance.

01:14:20.980 Oh, what a way to, you know,

01:14:23.480 the depravity that we're capable of slipping into.

01:14:26.820 And then they'd sail home with cargo or whatever from the...

01:14:29.820 Right, well, and we need to point out that that's par for the course, right?

01:14:32.980 That's just straight historical reality.

01:14:34.760 That was also the case with the Roman Empire and with the Greeks,

01:14:37.460 and you can trace slavery back as far as you want.

01:14:40.060 Every empire.

01:14:40.940 Right, right.

01:14:41.420 So this is the classic human condition,

01:14:44.360 and that's the condition in some sense of might makes right.

01:14:47.980 So what happens in Britain?

01:14:51.260 You know, after the Protestant Reformation.

01:14:54.220 He had predated that.

01:14:55.720 To be fair, Rome was pretty good on calling it out too.

01:15:00.560 They just never had it.

01:15:01.520 Although they often had power,

01:15:03.320 they didn't seem to have much power in that area,

01:15:05.220 particularly in terms of what some of the European countries did in South America.

01:15:09.840 But in Britain you had the rise of a deeply uneasy conscience about this.

01:15:14.500 You had a slave trader himself called Newton who wrote Amazing Grace,

01:15:18.800 the famous hymn.

01:15:20.520 He was engaged in the slave trade at one stage.

01:15:23.140 He was himself enslaved by a black African queen and made to be a slave to her slaves.

01:15:30.380 This is not a one-way street.

01:15:32.080 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

01:15:32.680 And Newton is influential in the life of William Wilberforce.

01:15:40.180 And William Wilberforce, who's unbelievably privileged,

01:15:45.300 he inherits a fortune, $400 or $500 million in a day's money.

01:15:49.520 He's seen as, you know, a young gadfly, really.

01:15:54.640 He goes to Oxford, does no work, just entertains everybody because he can sing

01:15:58.300 and he's got money so he's always got a pie in his office for the others to enjoy

01:16:03.240 and they booze their way of life.

01:16:05.680 You know, it was all pretty rough stuff.

01:16:07.420 He goes to London and with Pitt the Younger's elected to Parliament at a very early age,

01:16:11.580 they become friends.

01:16:12.420 He's seen as a future Prime Minister.

01:16:14.220 He goes off on a tour of Europe with the most brilliant mathematician of the age,

01:16:18.140 a man called Isaac Milner.

01:16:21.240 And as they're going along and he's tiny and Milner's huge

01:16:24.560 and the buggy's right over on an angle, they're deep in philosophical conversation.

01:16:29.100 And Wilberforce decides that he actually thinks Christianity is true.

01:16:34.680 So he goes back to England and says, I'm going to leave the Parliament.

01:16:36.920 That's a dirty place to be involved.

01:16:38.600 You know, it's not for good people like me now.

01:16:41.020 But before I do, I'll go and talk to Newton because he'd known Newton when he was younger.

01:16:44.320 And Newton, the ex-slave trader, says, no, stay in the Parliament.

01:16:48.480 Fight slavery.

01:16:49.340 Commit your life to getting rid of this evil.

01:16:51.920 Well, he did.

01:16:52.860 And he teamed up with some remarkable women in the days.

01:16:56.360 Remarkable women.

01:16:57.240 Hannah Moore, one of the most gifted drama people of her time, communicator, educator.

01:17:03.020 The Thorntons, who were the wealthiest family in Europe, banking family, in the world,

01:17:08.420 in other words.

01:17:09.180 They resourced it.

01:17:11.700 Terribly inconvenient.

01:17:12.580 But you had a bunch of white, privileged Christians led by William Wilberforce.

01:17:18.840 They abolished slavery.

01:17:20.700 The trade first and then slavery itself.

01:17:23.460 Horrendously, they forked out so much money that it impacted the debt of Britain for a long time

01:17:28.460 when they actually banned slavery because they compensated the slave owners,

01:17:33.820 including the Church of England, I'm ashamed to say.

01:17:37.480 That's how bad that trade was.

01:17:38.920 They didn't actually compensate the slaves themselves who had been set free.

01:17:42.580 For the owners.

01:17:43.900 Now, more than that.

01:17:46.120 Well, so why do you...

01:17:47.240 Well, here's a question.

01:17:48.640 And it's worth delving into.

01:17:50.800 So, obviously, Wilberforce was arguing from, at least to begin with, something approximating a minority position.

01:17:59.140 Yeah, very much so.

01:18:00.360 But his words didn't fall on deaf ears, right?

01:18:02.420 He was able to elicit an echo of conscience in the people that he was speaking to.

01:18:07.360 Well, so to me, the consequence of that is...

01:18:10.900 Or the reason for that is that by that time, the notion that all human beings were made in the image of God

01:18:18.540 had permeated the English narrative consciousness enough so that when what that meant was made explicit by someone like Wilberforce

01:18:29.620 and people were being called on their hypocrisy, their own conscience echoed the claim.

01:18:35.340 Yep.

01:18:36.020 Yeah.

01:18:36.400 But there's another aspect to it that's really interesting.

01:18:39.120 Just to finish on, what Britain then did is to try to end it everywhere else.

01:18:43.020 Right.

01:18:43.160 So they sent the most powerful navy in the world to free...

01:18:46.180 You know, to stop slavery on the high seas.

01:18:48.600 And a lot of white sailors died.

01:18:50.420 Were they racist because they were white males?

01:18:52.240 No.

01:18:52.340 I mean, dying to end black slavery.

01:18:55.720 So this is much more nuanced.

01:18:57.620 I mean, this idea of calling out one race against another for all the evils of the world is...

01:19:03.300 It does not stack up for a moment.

01:19:04.680 Now, to come back to your question, because it's germane to that,

01:19:06.800 I reckon it would be fair to say that it did start to fall on fertile ears,

01:19:13.080 but the shocking part of it was that he was saying it's not just we white Europeans who are human beings

01:19:19.400 who need to be valued.

01:19:20.740 See what I'm saying?

01:19:21.660 He's saying that these people who were regarded as less than human, the Africans,

01:19:27.140 were also fully human.

01:19:29.420 And the famous text is from Galatians.

01:19:33.020 We're no longer slave and free.

01:19:35.380 We're no longer Gentile or Jew.

01:19:37.440 We're no longer man and woman.

01:19:39.340 We're all one in Christ.

01:19:40.400 In other words, all equal value.

01:19:42.920 God doesn't discriminate.

01:19:44.220 Loves each of his creations and loathes it when they're violent to one another.

01:19:49.800 That's what he took out of it.

01:19:51.460 He went away and studied.

01:19:52.520 He wrote a book.

01:19:53.120 You can still get a modern translation of it called Real Christianity.

01:19:56.840 And the subtitle is The Difference Between What People Think It Is and What It Really Is.

01:20:03.600 And that was very interesting in itself.

01:20:05.380 And one of his great supporters was Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery maker.

01:20:11.420 And he struck what is regarded by a lot of people, historians, as the first political slogan,

01:20:18.820 a brilliant piece of pottery, incredibly intricate, bass relief, I think that's the word you use for it,

01:20:24.020 of an African man looking up pleadingly.

01:20:27.740 It's incredibly lifelike.

01:20:29.040 It's a beautiful piece of work.

01:20:29.900 You know, and it's white on that Wedgwood blue background.

01:20:33.600 And the thing underneath it is not, am I not a man and a brother?

01:20:37.320 Right.

01:20:38.180 Now, this is really radical stuff.

01:20:40.080 But it's fantastic stuff.

01:20:43.620 And Churchill said when a culture stops talking about its history to its children,

01:20:48.600 the story of its beliefs and its heroes, it's saying they're null and void and young people don't have a sense of place

01:20:56.540 and they're thus open to Karl Marx's dictum that are people that don't know their history or are easily persuaded.

01:21:01.720 Yes.

01:21:02.200 We don't know any of this.

01:21:03.380 I mean, what a hero is Wilberforce?

01:21:05.480 This guy could have had the life of Riley, could have been Prime Minister, got his hands on those levers of power,

01:21:11.740 but he dedicated his life as a very wealthy man, a very privileged man to people who were not regarded as full members of the human family.

01:21:23.820 Right.

01:21:24.860 Why would you not be inspired by that?

01:21:26.660 The British fought slavery for, what, 175 years on the high seas, if I remember correctly.

01:21:30.780 Sorry?

01:21:31.120 The British fought slavery for 175 years on the high seas.

01:21:34.240 Well, we're still fighting it.

01:21:35.540 Well, right.

01:21:36.400 I mean, we thought it had gone in Australia.

01:21:38.380 The Australian Federal Police were called to a house in 1975 in the suburbs of Sydney

01:21:42.900 because there was a story going around there that was a brothel that had slaves in it.

01:21:47.040 The police said, no, no, no, that's no slavery in Australia.

01:21:49.420 And they turned up there.

01:21:50.440 They'd been told there were 20, but there were 23.

01:21:52.580 It was true.

01:21:53.760 And we started to realise we had to pass laws because there was no laws against slavery in Australia.

01:21:58.520 There were no laws.

01:21:59.660 We assumed it didn't happen anymore.

01:22:01.260 But now we know there's 45 Indian.

01:22:03.520 There's a lot of them.

01:22:04.400 I've been trying to think through.

01:22:06.000 You talked about this book Wilberforce wrote about, let's say, true Christianity.

01:22:11.740 And I've been trying to think through what it might mean practically and graspably, I suppose,

01:22:21.900 that each person is in some sense of axiomatic worth.

01:22:28.380 Yeah.

01:22:28.540 That's the axis around which all belief must turn, all productive belief.

01:22:34.540 And so I think it has something to do with the nature of consciousness itself.

01:22:39.580 I mean, all of us are very particularised creatures, right?

01:22:42.280 So we're only going to make ourselves manifest in the world once.

01:22:47.120 We're a very unlikely combination of genetic improbability.

01:22:52.180 And so biologically, we're each unique.

01:22:54.920 And then the circumstances we're thrown into are also unique.

01:22:58.240 And so that's, we're each the conjunction of two unique situations, let's say, highly unique.

01:23:05.100 And, but each of us, within those unique circumstances, with those unique talents,

01:23:11.400 have to grapple with, let's say, we have to grapple with the possibility that's laid out in front of us.

01:23:17.600 And we each have to do that in a particularised way.

01:23:20.720 And if I, as a conscious being, if I grapple with the possibility that lays itself out in front of me,

01:23:28.520 I can bring something into being that only I can bring into being.

01:23:33.160 Yeah.

01:23:33.420 Because I'm particularised.

01:23:35.020 And then the thing that's so remarkable about that is that because I can communicate,

01:23:39.820 and that's part of this fact that I'm imbued with this logos, which is really the capacity to communicate,

01:23:44.920 if I create something unique, if I realise something unique because of that particularity,

01:23:51.700 I can then share it with other people.

01:23:53.580 Yeah.

01:23:53.960 And so that means they can, weirdly, even though we're all particularised,

01:23:58.400 we can all benefit from the operation of our own particularity.

01:24:03.400 Yeah.

01:24:03.520 And, you know, there's this idea that's deeply embedded in the Christian belief system

01:24:08.340 that whatever Christ is, is the word that generates order out of chaos made flesh, right?

01:24:15.760 And then he's God himself, which is the process that generates habitable order out of chaos made human.

01:24:24.180 And it's a very interesting idea because what it means is that there's a universal principle,

01:24:29.200 that's the logos itself, the word, that finds its embodiment in the particularities of time and place, right?

01:24:36.880 So that unites, let's say, a little town in the Middle East 2,000 years ago with the divine itself.

01:24:42.600 And that's a model for a human being, is that we each embody this process of encountering chaos and potential

01:24:49.300 and transforming it into habitable order.

01:24:51.160 That's what's laid out in Genesis 1.

01:24:53.420 And we each do that in a way that's communicable and that's universally valuable because we can share it.

01:24:59.100 And insofar as our societies are set up to insist that that be allowed to happen,

01:25:06.940 then our societies can be productive, reciprocal, and generous.

01:25:10.460 And then we can operate collectively to compete and cooperate in a manner that elevates all of us.

01:25:16.940 Yeah.

01:25:17.100 And I don't think any of that's arbitrary.

01:25:18.780 That's, so when we're talking about, it seems necessary that every culture has to establish itself

01:25:26.140 in relationship to something like axiomatic presuppositions.

01:25:29.920 You have to make some presuppositions.

01:25:31.600 Maybe the left makes the presupposition that the motive force of the world is power.

01:25:36.180 It's something like that.

01:25:37.160 Certainly the postmodernists do that.

01:25:38.560 But you could say that, well, Western culture, insofar as it's been guided by the highest possible spirit,

01:25:45.840 has made the axiomatic presumption that every person is of a divine value.

01:25:49.960 And that means they have something that's intrinsically valuable to offer, to bring into reality itself.

01:25:55.540 That's why you're not supposed to hide your light under a bushel, let's say.

01:25:58.000 And then I think you can make a very practical case that, well, isn't it valuable to learn from the particularized experience of someone else?

01:26:06.740 I mean, what an unbelievable advantage that is, is that I can sit here and talk to you.

01:26:11.400 Yeah.

01:26:11.520 And everything that you had to learn painfully, you can communicate to me.

01:26:16.420 And if I have any sense at all, I can listen.

01:26:19.260 And then I can learn that without having to undergo all that suffering.

01:26:22.600 And then you might think, well, isn't it the case that if we set up societies on that basis,

01:26:26.600 so that everybody is regarded as a valid source of redemptive information,

01:26:32.560 we can all exchange that.

01:26:34.080 And isn't that the proper pathway to life more abundant and peace and generous reciprocity?

01:26:41.700 That all seems to me to be just true.

01:26:44.080 And that's instantiated in voluntary free market economies, fundamentally,

01:26:50.660 because we get to freely exchange the goods that we can freely produce.

01:26:57.160 So we can both profit.

01:26:58.440 Yes.

01:26:59.060 And so that, yes, and more than that, even, I would say,

01:27:01.960 so that we can both profit in a way that helps us walk uphill more and more efficiently,

01:27:10.140 and that we can both do that in a way that's simultaneously good for everyone around us.

01:27:14.420 We can actually do that.

01:27:16.200 And I don't think any of that's arbitrary.

01:27:19.360 And so one of the things that's worth pointing out is that

01:27:21.660 if your stated goal is something like the removal of oppression,

01:27:26.640 we can say, well, congratulations to you.

01:27:29.380 You're not on the sides of the tyrants.

01:27:31.000 But if the consequence of your critique of Western civilization

01:27:34.740 is that you throw the baby, the divine baby, we might say, out with the bathwater,

01:27:39.920 and you don't recognize that this insistence on the intrinsic worth of each individual

01:27:45.140 is actually a precondition for your objection to slavery,

01:27:51.460 you're going to destroy the very thing that you think that you're promoting.

01:27:55.400 I think we're doing that right now.

01:27:56.140 I think we're doing that as well.

01:27:57.040 That is what I think we're doing.

01:27:57.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:58.940 And so you've put it beautifully, and I agree with what I've understood you've said,

01:28:04.620 but I'd just add to it.

01:28:05.780 How stupid are we if we not only fail to learn from one another,

01:28:08.480 but we won't bring back the great figures of history

01:28:11.060 and the learning of time to the table for their wisdom as well?

01:28:14.100 Why not tap into that?

01:28:15.920 Well, that's what it's supposed to do when you get educated.

01:28:18.360 Well, we're certainly doing that with regard to Wilberforce.

01:28:23.080 That's my point.

01:28:23.680 Well, it's kind of a miracle in some sense, and I truly don't understand this.

01:28:28.640 You know, I was in the UK earlier this year, and I went to one of the chapels there

01:28:32.260 that had a, I think it was in Oxford, but it might have been in Cambridge,

01:28:35.500 that had a statue of Wilberforce, you know?

01:28:37.260 And that was a rather emotional moment for me,

01:28:38.980 because I know that he was a stunningly remarkable person.

01:28:42.280 And it was out of his efforts that, well, that Britain organized itself

01:28:47.520 for 175 years to suppress slavery.

01:28:49.880 With his teammates.

01:28:50.860 Never got his teammates.

01:28:51.760 Right, right, right.

01:28:52.580 Just like budget repair in Australia.

01:28:54.760 It's a team, but he led it.

01:28:56.260 And also with his alliance with great figures of the past.

01:29:00.700 I mean, his morality was informed by his Christian faith,

01:29:04.000 and that emerged out of this great Judeo-Christian tradition.

01:29:06.660 I mean, he didn't do that.

01:29:08.040 He did that by allowing that spirit to inhabit him.

01:29:11.700 He didn't do that on his own, right?

01:29:14.260 So, but what I can't, I really can't understand.

01:29:19.280 It's very difficult for me to understand why that story isn't more well-known

01:29:23.680 and more celebrated, especially among people who purport to be advancing the doctrine

01:29:30.780 that we need to fight against oppression.

01:29:33.020 It's like, well, here's a man who did it.

01:29:35.640 Here's why he did it.

01:29:37.440 And the historical evidence on that is quite clear.

01:29:39.500 And like you said, it's a perverse story because he was extremely entitled and an attractive person

01:29:44.840 and could have whiled away his time.

01:29:46.640 He died penniless.

01:29:47.840 He gave it all away.

01:29:49.260 Uh-huh.

01:29:50.700 Uh-huh.

01:29:51.140 So why don't we teach that story?

01:29:52.800 Like, what the hell's going on exactly?

01:29:54.440 Why would that be suppressed in some real sense?

01:29:57.480 It's really quite stunning.

01:29:58.840 It is stunning.

01:29:59.600 And it troubles me deeply.

01:30:00.660 And perhaps, Jordan, it's because it raises the question of this.

01:30:06.700 Was the Christ that he believed in real?

01:30:11.360 And, oh, no, we don't want to confront that possibility.

01:30:14.500 But I say, personally, I think every one of us should.

01:30:18.960 Uh-huh.

01:30:19.960 Well, it seemed to work for Wilberforce.

01:30:22.440 And so, you know, I've been thinking about this in detail, too.

01:30:26.540 And so, of course, these questions always hinge on what you mean by real.

01:30:31.800 But I would say that pain is pretty real.

01:30:35.800 Everybody acts as if that's true.

01:30:38.160 That's for sure.

01:30:39.260 We feel it.

01:30:40.240 Everyone acts like pain is real.

01:30:41.900 And so then you might say, well, if pain is real, what allows you to cope with pain or transcend pain must be more real.

01:30:50.260 Because if something's real and you encounter something that is more significant than that, you have to attribute reality to that.

01:30:58.880 So I just walked Via Dolorosa, the Stations of the Cross, with Jonathan Paggio in Jerusalem.

01:31:05.620 And whether or not the events that took place at each of these stations actually took place there is, in some sense, beside the point.

01:31:14.940 You can think about it as a dramatic forum, Jerusalem itself.

01:31:17.840 And if you're a pilgrim, you can go walk through this catastrophic story of tragic suffering.

01:31:24.280 And because I'm a psychologist, I'm always thinking, well, what exactly?

01:31:27.460 Strip away the religious issue for the moment.

01:31:30.660 What exactly are people doing when they apprehend the figure of the crucifixion?

01:31:36.100 And when they do something like consider Christ's passion or walk the stations of the cross?

01:31:41.080 What are they doing psychologically?

01:31:43.080 And I actually think it's quite clear.

01:31:44.780 I think that what people are doing is voluntarily exposing themselves to a portrait of tragic suffering.

01:31:58.700 And more than that, there's more to it than that, but that's a good place to start.

01:32:02.400 It's like, let's say we all have to deal with the catastrophe of life, with the pain and limitation of life.

01:32:07.060 And so then you might say, well, how do you do that?

01:32:10.080 How is it even possible to do that?

01:32:12.460 And one answer might be, hide from it, bury your head in the sand.

01:32:17.520 And I'm not being smart about this.

01:32:18.940 It's like, the less you think about your mortal vulnerability, the better off you'll be.

01:32:24.480 It's an insoluble problem.

01:32:26.600 Your best bet is to run away from that realization, to keep yourself blind,

01:32:30.220 and maybe to busy yourself with as much hedonic pleasure as you can possibly manage.

01:32:34.080 You'll drown your sorrows.

01:32:35.540 Well, and that's understandable, right?

01:32:38.260 You could say, okay, well, a case can be made for that.

01:32:41.860 But it's not a very psychologically astute case,

01:32:44.780 because one of the things that psychologists have figured out in the last hundred years

01:32:48.040 is that if you want to stabilize people psychologically,

01:32:51.240 and if you want to imbue them with courage,

01:32:54.800 then what you do is you help them expose themselves voluntarily

01:32:58.460 to the things they're afraid of that they're avoiding.

01:33:01.100 It's a very powerful technique.

01:33:02.880 That's exposure therapy.

01:33:04.080 And what exposure therapy seems to do is to make people braver.

01:33:08.720 And I'll tell you how exposure therapy works, because it's no joke.

01:33:14.120 So I had a client who was afraid that he would cut himself,

01:33:18.140 and he was afraid that if he was on the top of a building,

01:33:22.060 that he would jump off to his death.

01:33:24.220 And one of the exercises we worked out was that he would sit

01:33:27.280 at the top of his building near the edge with a knife, right?

01:33:31.800 And that's a very frightening thing to do as a therapist,

01:33:33.640 because he's saying, look, I have this impulse to slash my throat

01:33:36.920 and to jump off a building.

01:33:38.220 And I thought, well, why don't you confront both of those things at the same time?

01:33:42.280 Now, we worked up to that, you know,

01:33:44.040 but I'm just using that as an example to show you

01:33:46.700 how intense that exposure therapy can be.

01:33:49.360 It's like we need to identify what, okay,

01:33:51.240 so then you might think, well, what are people most fundamentally afraid of?

01:33:55.740 And I would say, well, it's something like pain and death.

01:33:58.100 And then even more, particularly, it's unjust pain and death.

01:34:02.880 And that's really at the core of the crucifixion image and story,

01:34:06.320 because it's unjust suffering and death.

01:34:07.840 And so the psychological, what would you say?

01:34:13.900 Why do, why have people been compelled to gaze upon this image of unjust suffering?

01:34:21.400 And the answer is something like,

01:34:23.280 the best way to adapt to life is to gaze on the image of unjust suffering,

01:34:27.880 to do that fully.

01:34:29.380 And I think that's true.

01:34:30.520 It's been a big, yeah.

01:34:31.680 And no, there's this strange idea, too,

01:34:33.560 and this is a very strange idea,

01:34:35.180 that the spirit that guides the Israelites out of the desert,

01:34:39.320 say, in the Exodus story,

01:34:40.300 so the spirit that stands against tyranny

01:34:42.220 and that stands against slavery

01:34:44.060 is the same spirit that confronts tragic mortality voluntarily.

01:34:50.020 Right, there's an equation.

01:34:52.020 That's the equation of the New Testament and the Old Testament.

01:34:54.680 And I also think that's likely true,

01:34:57.820 that the pattern that calls to us from within

01:35:02.820 to object to tyranny and slavery

01:35:05.800 is the same pattern that enables us to have the courage

01:35:11.360 to look upon our own mortality, like forthrightly.

01:35:14.760 And I would say that has to be that way to some degree,

01:35:17.320 because imagine you want to stand up to a tyrant.

01:35:21.780 Well, you could put your life at risk to do that, right?

01:35:24.840 I mean, if you're going to speak truth to power,

01:35:27.300 you know, to use that terrible cliche,

01:35:29.200 you're going to have to face the fact

01:35:31.000 that you might be hurt and even killed in doing so.

01:35:33.560 And so how can it be different

01:35:35.280 to face the inevitability of your own mortality

01:35:39.140 for a moral cause and stand up to a tyrant?

01:35:43.300 Those have to be the same thing.

01:35:45.240 And so I would say it's time for all of us

01:35:47.300 to learn that these axiomatic presuppositions,

01:35:51.220 like the idea that part of what gives us intrinsic value

01:35:56.980 is the fact that we're reflections of the word made flesh,

01:36:00.820 that actually turns out to be true.

01:36:03.980 It's not just a...

01:36:05.680 It's true in the deepest possible sense.

01:36:08.060 And if we abandon that, which is what we're doing,

01:36:10.640 we're not going to eradicate tyranny.

01:36:12.580 We're going to fall prey to it.

01:36:13.600 And the fruit of abandoning it is all around us,

01:36:16.720 and it's wrong.

01:36:18.680 You know, the misery is extraordinary.

01:36:21.400 But you see, I mean, I think if I could respond,

01:36:27.620 you're talking to somebody, of course,

01:36:28.560 who believes that that gospel story is actually true.

01:36:30.820 I should say that right up front.

01:36:34.100 And as you and I have talked about,

01:36:37.620 people actually sometimes say,

01:36:38.660 they say it to my face sometimes.

01:36:40.740 I don't want to say this gently.

01:36:41.920 I don't want to say it judgmentally.

01:36:43.020 But they say, oh, John, you wouldn't know what suffering is.

01:36:45.940 Look at you.

01:36:46.440 You had everything, you know.

01:36:48.200 You know, that's easy to say about someone else.

01:36:50.380 Well, on the surface of it, look,

01:36:52.340 I'm privileged just to be an Australian.

01:36:54.080 Right, right, definitely.

01:36:54.820 You know, I've enjoyed good health.

01:36:56.860 One of the happy marriages, I've had four kids,

01:36:58.980 I've had grandkids, I've had opportunity.

01:37:02.240 Acclaim.

01:37:03.040 But I've known, by some.

01:37:05.400 Right, right, right.

01:37:06.360 Not many.

01:37:06.940 Right, right.

01:37:07.560 I think there's about five out there somewhere,

01:37:09.620 including the dog, who loves me because I feed him.

01:37:13.720 But I have known real suffering.

01:37:16.180 I've known pain.

01:37:16.620 And I've had to grapple with it.

01:37:18.140 And I've had to ask, why suffering?

01:37:19.620 Well, I think we bring suffering on ourselves

01:37:21.320 because we are so selfish.

01:37:25.020 It's an old-fashioned word for it called sin,

01:37:26.580 but we're self-centred.

01:37:28.460 But then, does anybody understand?

01:37:30.300 Well, I think the Christ understands.

01:37:31.880 I think Jesus does.

01:37:33.200 That's the thing I've come to realise has been so humbling

01:37:35.520 when I thought, poor little me, I have suffered.

01:37:38.720 And, you know, by any stretch of decent evaluation,

01:37:43.020 I've known some pretty awful things, times, you know.

01:37:46.620 loss and what have you.

01:37:47.860 But what we see there is a picture of the God-man

01:37:52.780 knowing injustice that exceeds any injustice I've known,

01:37:58.260 loneliness that exceeds any loneliness that I've known,

01:38:01.000 and loneliness is a dreadful thing.

01:38:04.320 And pain, physical and emotional,

01:38:07.240 beyond anything that I can compare myself to,

01:38:10.140 in order that he might take mine from me.

01:38:11.080 There is a culmination of all those things,

01:38:13.160 in some real sense.

01:38:14.540 And in taking that on himself,

01:38:16.920 I then, in a way that I don't fully pretend to be able to explain,

01:38:21.480 I can place that back on him,

01:38:24.080 and because he rose, he's not captured by it,

01:38:26.960 we can rise too.

01:38:28.600 And that's, to me...

01:38:33.500 Yeah, well, it's something like...

01:38:34.760 The most important issue that each of us need to grapple with.

01:38:37.480 Can this possibly be true?

01:38:39.120 Well, it's something like...

01:38:40.420 It's something like adopting a form of metaphysical courage

01:38:44.360 that's transcendent, right?

01:38:46.160 Because let's say you have to take on the suffering of your own life forthrightly,

01:38:50.940 and to the degree that you're able to do that,

01:38:53.580 you'll be able to maintain your moral compass despite your suffering,

01:38:59.020 and maybe work to ameliorate it.

01:39:01.360 And in order to do that,

01:39:03.660 you have to adopt a particular pattern of being.

01:39:06.240 And that pattern of being isn't...

01:39:07.820 It isn't just unique to you.

01:39:10.200 Like, you have to manifest it in your own life,

01:39:12.000 but the pattern is universal,

01:39:14.140 and it's divine and sacred for exactly that reason.

01:39:17.100 And the pattern is something like forthright confrontation

01:39:19.880 with those things that terrify you.

01:39:21.840 So there's a story.

01:39:22.780 This is very cool.

01:39:23.640 And some people have heard me talk about this before,

01:39:26.340 and maybe we can close with this.

01:39:28.020 Here's something that I've been chewing on

01:39:30.640 that's quite the miracle,

01:39:32.440 and I don't know how else to really explain it.

01:39:34.620 So when the Israelites are lost in the desert,

01:39:38.020 they start to become fractious and idol-worshiping.

01:39:42.960 And so they fall prey to ideological possession fundamentally.

01:39:47.060 They lose faith in the spirit that brought them out of tyranny.

01:39:49.880 And no wonder, because they're in the desert.

01:39:51.540 It's like, they're not having a good time.

01:39:52.820 So it's no wonder they get faithless.

01:39:55.120 But what happens when they get faithless

01:39:57.480 is that God sends poisonous snakes in to bite them.

01:40:00.540 And you might think,

01:40:01.720 well, that doesn't reflect very well on God.

01:40:03.780 And that's one of the interesting things about the Bible

01:40:05.780 is that there are plenty of stories

01:40:07.100 that have that strange paradoxical twist.

01:40:10.720 It doesn't matter.

01:40:11.900 The story really means that just because you're lost

01:40:14.520 doesn't mean there isn't something stupid

01:40:16.420 you can do to make it worse.

01:40:18.540 And so, and faithlessness will certainly make it worse.

01:40:21.860 And so God sends in these poisonous snakes

01:40:23.960 and the Israelites are getting bitten pretty good.

01:40:26.800 And so they go to Moses and they say,

01:40:29.580 look, we're sorry that we're so faithless

01:40:32.080 and useless and fractious and divided,

01:40:34.800 but, you know, the snakes are getting a bit much.

01:40:37.220 So maybe you could go have a chat with God

01:40:38.640 and get him to call them off.

01:40:39.820 And so Moses says, okay.

01:40:42.160 And he goes and talks to God and God says,

01:40:44.300 God's, you know, he's irritated with the Israelites,

01:40:47.320 but he can be bargained with apparently.

01:40:50.460 And Moses makes the case for the Israelites.

01:40:54.000 He said they've been punished enough.

01:40:55.960 And God, what should happen or what could happen

01:40:58.760 is that God just gets rid of the snakes.

01:41:00.580 He sent them to begin with.

01:41:01.840 He can just chase them away.

01:41:02.680 But that isn't what happens.

01:41:04.040 And this is very strange.

01:41:05.540 And I defy anyone to come up with a simple explanation for this

01:41:10.080 because it's really something uncanny.

01:41:13.240 So what God tells Moses to do is to make a bronze stake,

01:41:18.640 a staff, which is like the staff of Moses

01:41:20.700 and it's like the tree of life.

01:41:22.440 That's another way of thinking about it

01:41:23.760 or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

01:41:25.600 To make a staff out of bronze

01:41:27.140 and then to cast a serpent in bronze

01:41:29.420 and to put the serpent on the staff.

01:41:34.320 And then to have the Israelites come and look at the serpent.

01:41:38.500 And if they look at the serpent,

01:41:39.960 then the poison will no longer destroy them.

01:41:41.880 So he doesn't get rid of the poison.

01:41:43.140 He doesn't get rid of the snakes.

01:41:44.780 What he does instead is he gets the Israelites

01:41:46.580 to gaze upon that which poisons them.

01:41:49.840 And the consequence of that is that they'll be strengthened.

01:41:53.040 And that's this.

01:41:53.660 Now, the cool twist on this is that

01:41:56.040 that's what Christ says about himself.

01:41:59.260 Like thousands of years later, he says,

01:42:01.380 unless his image is lifted up

01:42:02.860 the same way the serpent's image was lifted up in the desert,

01:42:05.780 that there's no possibility of redemption.

01:42:07.820 Now, that's a very weird juxtaposition of ideas, right?

01:42:11.120 Because you think, well, what the hell's going on in the desert?

01:42:14.040 And what's up with the bronze snake?

01:42:16.160 That's a mystery in and of itself,

01:42:17.680 which I think is associated with the necessity of

01:42:19.980 facing that which can bite you, right?

01:42:23.300 To pay attention to it,

01:42:24.960 to adopt a stance of challenge in relationship to it.

01:42:28.140 It's a very deep idea.

01:42:30.320 But then to make the case that that's analogous

01:42:33.700 in some sense to the crucifix,

01:42:35.420 that's an unbelievably sophisticated psychological move.

01:42:38.620 Because you might say, well,

01:42:40.240 what's the sum total of all snakes?

01:42:44.100 And I think you can make a very

01:42:46.080 straightforward and compelling psychological case

01:42:49.920 that there's no confrontation

01:42:53.380 that's more ridden with snakes

01:42:55.580 than the confrontation that's laid out in the story of the passion.

01:42:58.660 It's a limit story.

01:43:00.200 So it takes all possible snakes into account.

01:43:03.460 Betrayal, death at the hands of the mob,

01:43:06.300 innocent suffering, like you name it.

01:43:08.700 It's part of the suffering in that story.

01:43:11.120 So it takes that snake and it makes it into a meta snake.

01:43:14.140 And it says, well, it's one thing to look at just a snake

01:43:16.600 and to get braver as a consequence.

01:43:17.960 But you should instead look at the mother of all snakes

01:43:21.600 and get as brave as that could possibly make you.

01:43:25.780 And then you think, well,

01:43:27.180 if you're going to cope successfully with your life,

01:43:29.400 with all of its particularized catastrophes,

01:43:32.600 do you really think that you're going to be able to manage that

01:43:35.900 without admitting that the problems are there?

01:43:39.600 Who in the world would ever think that?

01:43:41.440 And so then is it not the case

01:43:43.180 that you have to look at what's darkest

01:43:44.900 in order to be able to contend with it?

01:43:46.460 And then you might say,

01:43:49.300 if that's the spirit that redeems you,

01:43:51.360 in what manner is that not a sacred spirit?

01:43:55.000 If it's the universal pathway to redemption

01:43:56.900 in the face of suffering,

01:43:58.600 which seems to be the case on psychological grounds,

01:44:00.940 as far as I can tell,

01:44:01.920 then I don't see how you can claim

01:44:03.940 that that's not real, true, foundational, all of that.

01:44:10.640 I can't see a way out of that strange conundrum.

01:44:13.340 Well, I think the thing that I would say,

01:44:19.740 I think, is that when you look into that darkness

01:44:21.460 and into that pain,

01:44:23.960 you've got to recognize your own role in it.

01:44:26.160 Yeah.

01:44:26.980 And the answer is to flee to someone

01:44:31.500 who offers redemption and restoration

01:44:35.240 and the ultimate return

01:44:38.080 to you being the person that you should have been.

01:44:41.700 And each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made

01:44:44.420 and absolutely magnificent,

01:44:46.120 floored as we are by our own failings.

01:44:48.560 We are, in my view,

01:44:50.660 an extraordinary combination of unique,

01:44:53.660 made in the image of a higher being,

01:44:55.480 destroyed by our own selfishness,

01:44:57.420 but offered the opportunity to return.

01:44:59.860 That is my perspective.

01:45:02.180 And Jordan?

01:45:02.460 Well, I think that partly what happens,

01:45:04.180 if you do look very deeply

01:45:06.680 into the suffering that characterizes your life,

01:45:09.660 is that one of the things that will happen

01:45:12.860 is that you will start to understand

01:45:16.300 the role you play in that suffering.

01:45:18.620 Yeah.

01:45:19.000 Right?

01:45:19.460 And life seems to have an arbitrary element.

01:45:22.100 And, you know,

01:45:22.960 there's plenty of sick children

01:45:24.120 who don't seem to deserve it morally, let's say.

01:45:26.700 But when you look very hard at your own suffering

01:45:30.360 and you contemplate it,

01:45:32.760 the probability that you're going to see

01:45:34.720 some causal role that you've played is pretty high.

01:45:37.840 And then you have the option then of not doing that anymore.

01:45:41.660 And that's something like confession and redemption.

01:45:44.280 And that's something like also following this divine pattern, right?

01:45:48.380 Is to stop doing those things that are dooming you

01:45:51.920 to unnecessary suffering.

01:45:54.100 And one of the things I've wondered about for a long time

01:45:56.600 is that if you stop doing everything that you could

01:46:00.700 that was off target,

01:46:03.160 even by your own criteria,

01:46:05.100 if you stop doing all of that,

01:46:07.340 how much suffering would be alleviated?

01:46:09.600 Not only for you, right?

01:46:10.760 But for the people around you.

01:46:12.240 Most of it.

01:46:12.740 Well, that's...

01:46:13.360 Not all of it, but most of it.

01:46:15.000 Well, yeah.

01:46:16.160 And an indefinite amount of it, right?

01:46:18.300 Because it also seems like

01:46:19.840 that's a sort of struggle without end

01:46:21.560 is that you can get better and better at it.

01:46:23.760 And you can get more productive

01:46:24.980 and you can get more generous

01:46:26.160 and you can get better at staving off suffering

01:46:28.800 and you can get more helpful to other people and to yourself.

01:46:31.380 And we don't know what the upper end of that is.

01:46:33.400 I met a fellow once and he said...

01:46:35.960 He was an old man.

01:46:36.860 He said, I know as a young man,

01:46:38.300 I was knocking on doors inviting people

01:46:40.440 to come and worship in our church in Edinburgh.

01:46:44.280 He said, I knocked on a door and an old man came out

01:46:46.840 and he said,

01:46:49.520 no, I'm not interested in God.

01:46:51.180 I was in the trenches, First World War.

01:46:53.420 I don't want to know.

01:46:54.440 I stopped believing in God.

01:46:56.040 And this young father said to him,

01:46:59.260 I can understand your hurt.

01:47:03.020 Can I just ask you how you would react

01:47:05.340 if I were to say to you

01:47:06.540 that I think if I'd been in the trenches,

01:47:08.380 I would have stopped believing in man.

01:47:10.960 Oh.

01:47:12.600 And he said, the old father teared up.

01:47:15.880 He said, you better come in.

01:47:16.860 I want to talk.

01:47:17.480 Mm-hmm.

01:47:17.680 And so we need to be much more honest

01:47:20.780 with ourselves, I think.

01:47:22.080 And I think the thing that I would say

01:47:24.160 is that hope is so important.

01:47:28.140 And for me, the hope is the eternal hope.

01:47:30.740 Mm-hmm.

01:47:31.440 For me.

01:47:32.020 Mm-hmm.

01:47:33.220 And the only thing I would say humbly to others

01:47:35.020 is think carefully before you dismiss it too lightly.

01:47:39.620 Right, right, right.

01:47:40.140 I've had to try and make sense

01:47:41.840 of the conundrum that is life,

01:47:43.580 of good and evil, of joy and of pain.

01:47:46.660 And what keeps me going is the secure hope.

01:47:49.240 It is for me very real

01:47:50.280 that the wounds will be bound up

01:47:52.400 and the joy will be complete.

01:47:54.700 And I'll be the person I should have been.

01:47:57.220 A lot of people would be very relieved to hear that.

01:47:59.200 Mm-hmm.

01:48:01.060 And restored in relationship.

01:48:02.980 Yeah, well, part of that is the injunction

01:48:04.780 we talked about earlier,

01:48:05.780 not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

01:48:07.840 It's like, you know,

01:48:08.940 we should all be concerned about

01:48:10.320 the continuing possibility of atrocity

01:48:12.980 and oppression in the world.

01:48:14.700 But then, and we should be very cognizant

01:48:17.180 of the role our own cultures,

01:48:19.560 the cultures that have delivered to us our privilege,

01:48:21.920 let's say,

01:48:22.400 that have played in maintaining that oppressive regime.

01:48:26.860 But at the same time,

01:48:29.000 we should very carefully differentiate

01:48:32.020 what has been done that's been right and good.

01:48:36.060 And Wilberforce is a great example of that.

01:48:38.080 By their fruits.

01:48:38.580 And we sort of say,

01:48:41.500 oh, Sansa was a religious nut,

01:48:43.140 and look what they did.

01:48:44.260 Look at the towering figures.

01:48:46.440 Just think of them.

01:48:47.420 Yes.

01:48:47.880 Incredible.

01:48:48.200 And then ask yourself,

01:48:49.060 in all seriousness,

01:48:49.860 if you could have done as well.

01:48:51.120 He was followed by Lord Shaftesbury,

01:48:52.660 another privileged man,

01:48:54.340 who got the kids out of the mines

01:48:56.060 and out of the chimneys

01:48:57.100 and got some basic rights for women

01:48:58.820 and some labour laws at work.

01:49:02.240 Right.

01:49:03.200 And we could do as well in our own life.

01:49:05.460 All right, Mr. Anderson.

01:49:07.380 I've enjoyed it hugely, as always.

01:49:08.880 You bet.

01:49:09.320 You bet.

01:49:09.720 And so thank you all on YouTube

01:49:12.040 and the other platforms that you're listening to

01:49:14.520 or watching through for participating in this conversation.

01:49:18.460 And we hope that it was useful.

01:49:19.780 I'm going to spend some time talking to Mr. Anderson

01:49:23.420 on the Daily Wire Plus platform

01:49:24.980 at a more biographical level.

01:49:27.160 Talk to him a little bit about

01:49:28.260 the journey in his life

01:49:30.020 that took him to

01:49:31.000 to the places that he's been

01:49:33.320 and helped him draw the conclusions

01:49:35.260 that he's drawn.

01:49:36.560 And that'll take place

01:49:37.960 on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:49:39.340 And thank you to them

01:49:40.040 for facilitating this conversation

01:49:41.980 and making it possible

01:49:43.680 technically and practically.

01:49:44.840 and to all of those of you

01:49:46.160 who are listening and watching.

01:49:48.920 Hello, everyone.

01:49:50.260 I would encourage you to continue

01:49:51.500 listening to my conversation

01:49:53.160 with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

01:50:00.840 Thank you.

313. Debt Free Government and Fundamental Values ｜ John Anderson

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