Tony Abbott is the former Prime Minister of Australia and former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. He is a world-renowned anti-racist, anti-colonialist and human rights activist. He has been a leading voice in the anti-racism movement in Australia and around the world, and is one of the most respected human rights activists in the world. In this interview, Tony talks about his views on China, immigration, the Middle East, and much more.
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00:02:03.840Tony Abbott, it's a great pleasure to have you on the show.
00:02:06.240We want to talk to you about China, immigration and a bunch of other things.
00:02:10.160But the thing that we really felt is so important to raise with you, you're the former prime minister of a Western country in Asia.
00:02:17.760And the one thing I think people in the West are really not appreciating is the seriousness of the moment that we're in when the president of Russia, the leader of China, the leader of Iran are all talking about the multipolar world.
00:02:32.800People don't seem to appreciate what's going on.
00:02:35.080And I know that you have some unique thoughts on that that I really want you to share with people.
00:02:38.800Well, Constantine, I think you're right.
00:02:42.480We've had 70 years of unparalleled and unprecedented peace and prosperity.
00:02:49.200If you take the world in 2020, just before the pandemic, never before had people all around the globe been more free, more rich, more safe.
00:03:01.740And since then, we had a pandemic where, frankly, policy to deal with it did far more damage than the disease itself.
00:03:11.920In the process, we saddled ourselves with mountainous debt.
00:03:16.520In the process, we sapped our work ethic and damaged our spirits.
00:03:21.620And then, of course, we had the Ukraine war, which was a horrific reminder that war between nation states was not a thing of the past.
00:03:35.980That aggression by large countries against small ones was not a thing of the past.
00:03:40.680While the initial Western response to the horrific Russian invasion was pretty good, the truth is that we've given the Ukrainians enough military support to avoid being defeated.
00:03:54.460But we haven't given them enough to allow them to drive every last Russian soldier from every last inch of Ukrainian territory, which, frankly, is the only fair outcome here.
00:04:08.820And now we've got this horrific business in the Middle East where Hamas have unleashed on the innocent people of Israel an attack of the most appalling savagery.
00:04:21.780And right around the world, including in cities like London and my own hometown of Sydney, you've got large swathes of the population who seem to be on the side of the terrorists rather than the people who are trying to stamp out terrorism.
00:04:37.900We had the most appalling scenes in Sydney, just a night or two after the initial massacre, where hundreds and hundreds of demonstrators were crying out literally,
00:04:49.740gas the Jews, gas the Jews, eff the Jews, eff the Jews.
00:05:04.780Now, in Australia, as in Britain, we have a vast anti-racism apparatus.
00:05:11.900And this vast anti-racism apparatus has not as yet raised a finger against those people who are preaching the most unspeakable race hate on our streets.
00:05:24.460So we here in the West have got a very serious challenge, a challenge that we've only woken up to very recently from dictators on the march.
00:05:42.000We've probably got an even bigger challenge, and that is to believe in ourselves, believe in our values, because so many people who should know better do not seem to appreciate that for all the faults of countries like Australia, countries like Britain, countries like the United States, these are the best societies that mankind has ever had.
00:06:06.120And until recently, these were the best times that mankind has ever had.
00:06:12.060And our challenge is to try to ensure that we have not already lived through the best of times.
00:06:18.160And so much to pick up on there, and I wanted to talk about geopolitics and all that other stuff, but there was something you touched on, and I know to many people it seems like old news, but I will say this.
00:06:28.100To hear a former prime minister of a major Western country talk about our response to COVID in the way that you just did, it is so comforting, actually.
00:06:38.260I mean, what was happening, including in your country, was horrific.
00:06:44.480And it was particularly dispiriting that so much of this happened under governments of the centre-right, because at the heart of the centre-right political philosophy is greater freedom and smaller government.
00:06:58.960And yet here we had the Boris Johnson government in Britain imposing absolutely unprecedented restrictions on freedom, creating absolutely massively intrusive systems of surveillance.
00:07:17.280It was more the states that did it in Australia than the feds itself, but the feds certainly acquiesced in all of this.
00:07:24.600And one of the reasons why people on the political centre-right, I think, have been so discombobulated and somewhat dispirited lately is because the people who are supposed to be our leaders have acted so against those things that are supposed to be our instincts.
00:07:43.100And the other extraordinary thing is that no one seems interested in having a serious, hard-headed look at exactly how we overreacted so badly, exactly how the pandemic plans that had been carefully prepared over decades were junked in panic in the first week of March when the Italian hospital system appeared to be collapsing.
00:08:09.520And instead of the sensible, modulated, proportionate plans that had long been prepared, basically everyone, except for Sweden and except for some states in the United States, everyone adopted a variant of the Wuhan plan, which was to lock everyone up, close everything down, hope that you could somehow uninvent this virus.
00:08:36.180And it was always, and it was always simply wrong.
00:08:39.080And at no point were the obvious things that we do in almost every other instance applied, that's to say, cost-benefit analysis, which asks, well, what is the danger we are attempting to deal with?
00:08:54.560What are the costs of trying to deal with it?
00:09:01.480Instead, in an extraordinary moral and physical panic, governments did things which the consequence, the doleful consequences of which we will be living with for years to come.
00:09:16.440And you made quite a profound point there, Tony, where you were talking about we're not sensible or rational in our response to COVID.
00:09:25.220I don't think we're sensible or rational in our response to anything at the moment, if I'm being brutally honest.
00:09:31.460You can take any particular topic or issue and you look at the way it's been covered and the way people talk about it.
00:09:38.420A lot of the times it's fundamentally irrational, isn't it?
00:09:42.380Look, there are any number of other issues that we can talk about.