Tony Abbott is the former Prime Minister of Australia, who served as the leader of the opposition from 2009 to 2013, and as Prime Minister from 2013 to 2015. In this episode, he talks about his political career, and the lessons he learned from his time in office.
00:06:59.460First of all, the Liberals swapped out unpopular Trudeau for a kind of fresh face, at least in a local context.
00:07:10.300And second, Donald Trump took office in the United States and immediately waged what looked like a tariff war against Canada.
00:07:18.300And New Zealand was not threatening to annex Australia.
00:07:20.360No, Australia was not threatening to annex New Zealand.
00:07:23.440So, look, when people feel that their country is under serious threat, they tend to rally around the flag
00:07:34.580and they tend to rally behind the government of the day.
00:07:40.380So I think Carney benefited on two counts.
00:07:43.900First, he was a fresh face and people wanted to give him a chance, a fair go.
00:07:50.420And second, he looked like he was standing up for Canada against the bully in Washington.
00:07:57.620So I think that largely explains the loss of the election.
00:08:04.260Nevertheless, I've got to say that as an Anglosphere Conservative, it disappoints me greatly that there is not a strong,
00:08:17.820tough-minded Conservative government here in Canada.
00:08:20.880And I think that's what Pierre would have led, a tough-minded Conservative government that made big changes to the energy madness,
00:08:33.400wanted Canada to take advantage of its natural advantages in fossil fuel,
00:08:39.020didn't want to impose unnecessary costs on people through all of these various carbon taxes and other measures.
00:08:47.300And I think he also would have been a very proud Canadian who didn't allow the constant dilution, if you like, of core Canada,
00:09:00.260which is almost inevitable when you've got sustained record immigration.
00:09:07.620And I think on these two critical topics, Pierre would have run a very different and very much better government than we're likely to get under Mark Carney.
00:09:18.000So I want to come to immigration, but first I want to touch on carbon tax.
00:10:04.260They'll accept a policy imposed without a mandate, because once it's there and the sky doesn't fall, they just go with it.
00:10:10.940And it built such a consensus in the media and the Laurentian expert classes that by the 2021 election federally, even the Conservative Party of Canada, under Aaron O'Toole, was running on a carbon tax itself.
00:10:26.600One that was actually even worse and more interventionist than the liberal one.
00:10:30.020But, yeah, between 2021 and now, the consensus radically changed to the point where Mark Carney repealed at least the consumer portion of the federal carbon tax.
00:10:41.680The industrial portion is still there, and it could get worse.
00:10:45.100But you repealed it at a time when, globally, these were very much in vogue at all the major international conferences.
00:11:39.060I can't buy lamb, but it's not from you or not from New Zealand.
00:11:41.440Our agricultural exports are, I think, if you add up all of our different agricultural exports, our beef, our sheep, our wheat, our wine, that all of them together would not be more than maybe a third or a half of our coal exports in value.
00:12:04.660So, but you took on the carbon tax, just as it was becoming very popular globally, particularly in the West, where you're really the only places that oppose these things.
00:12:16.580How did you build a coalition against it when you're really swimming against the tide, before the kind of global tide had turned against these things?
00:12:24.360Global warming, climate change hysteria is reaching its peak.
00:12:28.760That's a difficult time to take on that issue.
00:12:33.260Was there a political cost to be paid for it?
00:12:59.180And yes, I accept that climate does change, that mankind does make a difference and that we should do what we can to reduce emissions.
00:13:10.780But I would always add this critical rider, but not if it costs you your job, costs us, our industries and puts up your cost of living.
00:13:23.040So I said that, sure, let's do what we can to reduce emissions, but let's not do it by making a great big tax on everything, which is what an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax is.
00:13:39.980And when I finally abolished the carbon tax about nine months into my government, it was the one and only time in the last two decades that there was a substantial fall in electricity prices.
00:13:55.180They fell by well over 10% in a quarter because the carbon tax was making such a difference.
00:14:01.880So what you've got to do to win this argument, because people will often tell you that the so-called science is settled.
00:14:15.900Any time you say it's settled, it's very unscientific.
00:14:18.620But nevertheless, it's hard to win an argument on so-called climate science, but you can very readily win an argument on the impact of climate policy if the impact of climate policy is to destroy your job and to put your cost of living through the roof.
00:14:40.020And every time there has been an election in Australia where the centre-right fought hard on this issue against the centre-left's climate cultism, the centre-right has done well.
00:14:56.320In 2010, in 2013 and in 2019, we in the Australian Liberal National Coalition fought hard on climate and energy, saying that we are not going to do anything that is going to badly damage our economy.
00:15:13.060And in all three of those elections, we did much better than expected and we had a smashing victory in 2013.
00:15:20.920So, look, politics is always about a contest.
00:15:24.600If you aren't prepared to create a contest on policy, it becomes a beauty contest.
00:15:33.200And what's the point of being in a beauty contest, particularly when politics is show business for ugly people?
00:15:40.140So, you've got to create a policy contest.
00:15:43.280And I think the most important immediate policy contest is energy,
00:15:51.420where this climate-driven mania for renewables is a form of economic self-harm.
00:16:03.700In countries like Australia, we are on the verge of committing a form of economic suicide by moving rapidly away from reliable 24-7 fossil fuels to intermittent renewable power,
00:16:17.920because while batteries and solar panels can run a house, they cannot run a modern industrial economy.
00:16:25.500And yet, that's what we're trying to do in Australia, and it's insane.
00:16:30.100Well, that's a great segue to where I want to go with, you know, there's few countries in the world that are as similar as Canada and Australia.
00:16:41.160Roughly similar geographic size, vast tracts of our country is, for all intents and purposes, not practically habitable for area of the land and whatnot.
00:16:52.440So, we have, you know, thin strips of population and huge tracts of wilderness.
00:17:07.920Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest difference in our political systems is that you have a rational Senate of some kind.
00:17:15.140We have an elected Senate as opposed to a kind of a House of Lords type Senate.
00:17:19.400Ours is even worse than the House of Lords, because it's not even based on if your parents did something, your great-grandparents did something of note.
00:17:25.480Ours is just, did you donate the right amount to the Liberal Party?
00:17:27.940And it's a very powerful Senate, unlike the House of Lords in Britain, which can delay, but it can't deny.
00:17:34.440But overall, but even the shapes of our economies are very similar.
00:17:40.880Heavy in primary resource extraction and agriculture, export-focused.
00:17:46.800I mean, as an island, you're by necessity export-focused, but we're export-focused.
00:17:57.920Probably one of the defining issues in Canadian politics over at least the last 15 years has been resource extraction versus climate change, hardline environmental protection.
00:18:11.380And the debate appears to be swinging more back in favor of resource development, wealth creation right now, away from kind of radical green ideology, at least rhetorically.
00:18:25.800The government, the new federal government here is rhetorically more, at least less implacably anti-resource development.
00:18:33.260But it's still far too early to see how it's going to manifest itself.
00:18:39.680You know, we have, actually, it's a major Australian project just south of here in the Crowsnest Pass in the Rocky Mountains.
00:18:48.240I think it's a metallurgical coal project.
00:18:51.700And there's, you know, the opposition to it is actually not even from the locals.
00:18:59.880It was something like 70-odd percent supported it.
00:19:01.980But then you've got folks in cities who actually don't live anywhere near this kind of thing who are up in arms saying, oh, this is going to destroy everything.
00:19:09.980As is often the case, you know, it's not actually the locals.
00:19:13.980But, you know, what are some of the Australian lessons in building consensus around...
00:19:20.040You also have, you know, Indigenous issues that you face similar to us.
00:19:24.460It's another one of the major parallels, especially as it develops our economy and resource development.
00:19:29.120What were some of the major challenges you faced that Canada also faces and perhaps some of the lessons that we can take from the successes you have?
00:19:37.600Well, Derek, I think that all of the Anglosphere countries face similar problems today.
00:19:45.240So, depending upon the government of the day, they deal with them differently.
00:19:50.660But I think all the major Anglosphere countries have the problem of economic stagnation, a problem of social fracturing and a problem of strategic peril.
00:20:02.420I think all of us are in a similar boat.
00:20:07.880And I think that at the heart of the economic stagnation is the politics of climate.
00:20:17.140And I think at the heart of the social fracturing is identity politics.
00:20:22.920So, I think we've got to tackle both the politics of climate and identity politics head on as serious centre-right politicians and political movements.
00:20:36.420And, look, as I said earlier, if you approach climate as a moral issue, you're on hiding for nothing.
00:20:46.480Because if the climate really is changing and we really do have to reduce emissions to zero as quickly as possible or die, yes, there's an imperative.
00:20:58.340If the climate is changing, I don't think it's changing that fast.
00:21:05.800And to the extent that it's changing, I think it's far from clear that human beings are the key factor.
00:21:12.740I mean, one of the challenges I always put to the climate alarmists is, how do you explain the ice ages?
00:21:18.600Because it was a very different climate then.
00:21:21.240And obviously, human beings had nothing to do with it.
00:21:23.640I think it's far more likely that the biggest impacts on climate are less atmospheric carbon dioxide and sunspot activity and oscillations in the orbit of the Earth around the sun.
00:21:36.980I mean, it stands to reason that the biggest impact on the Earth's climate is the sun.
00:21:42.500So, you'd think that changes there would be what matter most.
00:21:46.980But let's put the so-called science of climate change aside for a second and look at the economics of it.
00:21:55.520If you try to eliminate fossil fuels, not only do you make your energy far more expensive and far less reliable, but you're also in peril just about every aspect of daily life.
00:22:20.880All of these are critically dependent on fossil fuels.
00:22:25.160I mean, fossil fuels are the feedstock, not just of our power system, but of just about all the things we take for granted in modern life.
00:22:36.200I mean, these things that are ubiquitous and that every climate activist spends half his life on, these things are impossible without the oil and the gas that goes into making the things that comprise them.
00:22:54.120So, we've got to understand that this emissions fixation is going to cause us to live like the Amish or worse if we take it to its logical conclusion.
00:23:08.040I think we just have to keep reminding people that energy is the economy, that you cannot have a community without an economy to sustain it.
00:23:20.640And if we drive fossil fuels out of our economy, we are making modern life almost impossible.
00:23:29.260I just think we've got to, I mean, I suppose if you're living in the city, you might think that water comes out of a tap as opposed to a dam.
00:23:38.600You might think that milk comes in a bottle as opposed to out of a cow.
00:23:43.320All this stuff comes out of fossil fuels, and we've just got to understand that.
00:23:51.240Okay, I want to switch gears to immigration, kind of tangentially touch on it a little bit so far.
00:23:58.440You know, wealthy countries are magnets for migration, legal and illegal.
00:24:06.040There's been a huge shift in public opinion in Canada pretty recently where we've generally always been, it's been verboten to even talk about having even a mid-level of arrivals.
00:24:26.520But we just essentially abandoned all controls whatsoever, and we had wild numbers of people just pouring in to a saturation point that we simply couldn't absorb it.
00:24:38.620It's been one of the major contributing factors to the housing crisis, cost of living crisis.
00:24:45.620You know, we're not just taking the cream of the crop from other countries now.
00:24:49.360We're, in some ways, we're scraping the barrel.
00:24:52.420We're getting people who are not good candidates to become members of Western civilization.
00:24:59.620But that's a very recent transformation of public opinion in Canada where anyone who even, if you even mentioned it in any context other than more,
00:25:09.060you were called a racist, a xenophobe, bigot.
00:25:12.000Now even the liberals are backing away from what they've done.
00:25:14.840And, yeah, the conservatives will raise questions about how the liberals are coming along on their targets, and they'll say, well, you're a racist.
00:25:21.100And, you know, so some of their rhetoric hasn't changed.
00:25:23.580But, you know, you cracked down on a lot of illegal migration, which by necessity has to, you know, walk across the border into Australia.
00:25:33.940What kind of political pushback did you get for that?
00:25:36.580Because that was at a time, actually, it would have been just at the time when the migration consensus in Europe was just changing.
00:25:46.720Angela Merkel had just bullied her EU partners into throwing open the gates and allowing tons of so-called refugees,
00:25:55.420many of which were not legitimate refugees, just to pour into Germany and to pour into the rest of Europe,
00:26:00.200straining social services, straining housing, and obviously creating major, major cultural issues as well.
00:26:09.340But you were kind of at the tip of the spear there before there had been a, I don't know, what kind of,
00:26:14.520were Australians already on that page?
00:26:16.700Or were you kind of going against the grain by cracking down on migration at that time?
00:26:21.640Well, what I cracked down on was illegal migration by boat.
00:26:27.180And the problem with illegal migration by boat is, A, it's illegal, but B, it's also very dangerous because you get a lot of people drowning at sea.
00:26:38.980So by stopping it, you are actually being a humanitarian.
00:26:42.840We'd had a wave of illegal migration by boat in the late 1990s, which was effectively stopped by the Howard government.
00:26:53.500There was a change of government in 2007.
00:26:56.960And the incoming Labor government reversed the Howard government policies, which had stopped the boats.
00:27:04.380And naturally enough, the boats started up again.
00:27:06.940And in the six years of the Labor government, a trickle of illegal migrant boats ultimately became a flood.
00:27:17.300And I said in opposition that we would stop the boats.
00:27:23.740I said we would do it by any and all means in our power, including turning boats around and sending them back to Java,
00:27:33.960which is where 99% of them were coming from.
00:27:37.920And the response of the then Labor government was to say, A, it's immoral, B, it's illegal,
00:27:44.820and C, it would cause tension, perhaps even conflict with Indonesia.
00:49:58.500The Americans and regrettably the British and Australian governments went along with this.
00:50:03.060The Americans had facilely assumed that windbags in exile, like that Shalabi guy, had far more support than they really had.
00:50:16.740And in retrospect, the best thing would have been to restore the Iraqi monarchy, because the only countries in the Middle East that work are the monarchies.
00:50:29.060That would have been very much in contradiction, though, to kind of the neoconservative push at the time of spreading democracy, that we're going to plant the seeds of democracy in the Middle East, and it's going to flower.
00:50:42.740Which is a nice ideal, but centuries of experience disproves it.
00:50:51.460I mean, democracy is a desirable further state of development, but you can't simply impose democracy on what is effectively a medieval society.
00:51:11.020I mean, as I said, the only countries that really work in the Middle East are the monarchies.
00:51:16.360Democracy in the Middle East tends to be one man, one vote once, and it becomes a dictatorship, and it's usually a much worse dictatorship than the monarchical regimes, because the king wants his grandson to be in the same position that he's in one day.
00:51:38.680He's never going to completely alienate anyone in practice, monarchies are negotiated societies rather than societies ruled by fear or force.
00:51:52.600And unfortunately, America is still neuralgic about monarchy because of the experience of George the Third.
00:52:01.120Because of the experience of George the Third.
00:52:02.080But that would have been weird to see the Americans do it.
00:52:04.020But if they weren't prepared to come at a monarchy, which would have been the best outcome, they should have found the least bad of Saddam's generals and said, mate, you're in charge, and we will back you on two conditions.
00:52:20.060One, no genocide against your own people, and two, no terrorism against ours.
00:52:34.380They tried to impose a quasi-Western democracy.
00:52:39.480It's now got to, I think, a tolerably good position, but it's taken two decades, the best part of two decades.
00:52:52.220And in the process, there's been a ferocious civil war, which has cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, thousands of Western lives, and it's spilled over into Syria, which is an ongoing issue.
00:53:12.180So, look, you're right, but just because things have had bad consequences doesn't mean that they shouldn't have been done.
00:53:26.940And I don't think, even with the wisdom of hindsight, that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a bad thing to do.
00:53:38.920It's just that there should have been much more realistic planning go into it.
00:55:21.980If they were not, though, or Israel does not provide sufficiently convincing evidence of that, my concern is then that they have potentially just ignited a major regional war that could pull the western powers in.
00:55:42.540And, of course, Iran has always denied that its nuclear program was for military purposes.
00:55:50.660But it's always insisted that it did have a very active nuclear program, supposedly for peaceful purposes.
00:55:59.880And I don't think it's realistic to equate the Saddam situation in 2003 and weapons of mass destruction with the current Iranian situation.
00:59:49.160But particularly at this moment where Carney actually has him, I think, in large measure to thank for being in the prime minister's chair with his talk of 51st state, the trade war that took place.
01:00:04.800But at the same time, he's got to be really nervous about what Trump might do because while there's a lot of similarities between Canada and Australia, I think one of the big differences is there's no major secessionist movements in Australia.
01:00:16.480I don't know where they would really want to go.
01:00:19.160You know, but in addition to Quebec, it's now very, very real in Alberta here.
01:00:23.260We have a citizens' initiative law that's been amended here, and it is near certainty.
01:00:29.120We're going to be having a referendum on independence here in Alberta, potentially even Saskatchewan soon after, on independence.
01:00:35.420No one really in either Alberta or Saskatchewan talks about joining the United States.
01:00:40.640It's not really something most people are interested in.
01:00:44.380But Trump could look at this as a kind of power play for closer union with at least Alberta and Saskatchewan.
01:00:52.280What do you, I don't know, do you know the man and do you, what opportunities for mischief do you see there, where he's going to literally be in Southern Alberta, kind of the heart of the movement, of the independence movement in Alberta, at a time where he's been just dropping bombs on Canadian domestic politics?
01:01:10.980Well, I think that there's two Trumps effectively.
01:01:16.520There's domestic Trump, who's largely a positive force, and there's foreign Trump, who has often been a negative force.
01:01:25.440And most obviously, foreign Trump has been a negative force via his stream of insults against Canada, which I think were a key factor in the defeat of the Conservative Party here.
01:02:20.700And I think that Trump's tariffs on Canada, in the end, are going to hurt America, at least as much as they hurt Canada.
01:02:29.720And I think over time, they're going to get rethought.
01:02:32.920I think the risk in America at the moment is a recession brought on by the uncertain investment climate and the price hikes that the tariffs inevitably will bring with them.
01:02:47.280And if Trump wants to secure his legacy, he's actually got to produce economic success, not economic chaos.
01:02:59.000And at the moment, it's been much more the latter than the former.
01:03:04.440So what's going to come out of the G7?
01:03:06.880Well, they will obviously talk a lot about Iran and they will no doubt urge both sides to de-escalate, which is fair enough, as long as Israel's objective of preventing an Iranian bomb has succeeded.
01:03:23.560I hope that for the first time in years, the G7 might actually talk more about energy security and less about emissions.
01:03:36.020And if that happens and we've got drill baby, drill Trump coming together with a carny who at least says he wants to see resource development.
01:03:49.800So let's hope that we get at least more common sense on energy out of this G7 than we have out of recent ones.
01:04:35.860I think I think very few people were aware it was happening at the time and they quickly worked out that it was a failure.
01:04:43.240I think I think the I think the emu wars might ultimately be a bit of a piss take.
01:04:50.940My favorite thing when I when I meet Australian, most Australians don't seem to know about it.
01:04:56.460I bring this up, I make the take out their phone and Google emu war and there's a Wikipedia article and it literally is structured like regular wars like World War Two has like the belligerents on one side with casualties listed.