1
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So, what do you think? What do you
think of the state of Australian
politics nowadays? Has it changed
since you were growing up and voting
for the first time in the 70s, 80s,
and 90s.

2
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Yes I think it has.

3
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For better or worse?

4
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For a lot, for a lot worse. I'm
rolling my eyes for those of you who
are listening to us. I lean fairly
heavily to the left of politics, but
I don't think there has been a
politician in Australia who has had a
vision for what the country should be
since Paul Keating, Paul Keating was
probably the last one.

5
00:00:42,530 --> 00:00:45,979
Well, they seem to have a vision for
how to get their party back into
power.

6
00:00:46,690 --> 00:01:23,420
I think John Howard, who lasted it as
a long time as prime minister in this
country, I don't think he had a
vision for the country, but at least
I think he had a vision for how to
run it in a stable manner, but since
then it's just been a dog's breakfast
of people chopping and changing their
minds and I think since John Howard,
and maybe probably during that
period, there seems to have been a
shift from instead of being elected
to run the country and make decisions
on behalf of 25 million people now,
they their job now seems to be just
to get re-elected.

7
00:01:23,600 --> 00:02:02,959
And a lot of that is take the
opposite position on tasks or on
things that are contentious issues in
the media, no matter what, no matter
what the issue is we need to be the
opposite of what the others think so,
that we can get those votes. Which
seems really irritating, especially
when like, for example, I think some
of these examples were I remember
when Julia Gillard got elected and
wanted to bring in a carbon tax and
the opposition at the time were
constantly saying this is a horrible
idea and then videos came out of Tony
Abbott saying oh we should bring in a
carbon tax when a year earlier...And
so they had just taken the opposite
position.

8
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Yeah. And so there is a lot of that
where it's short term and we,
unfortunately, only have three year
terms of parliament in our Federal
Government.

9
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Which exacerbates the problem.

10
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It does because it's an old and
unfortunately becoming more and more
of a problem gag in Australian
politics that you if you get elected,
you rule for a year then you spend
another year breaking the promises
that you made in order to get in and
then you spend the next year
electioneering to get him again.

11
00:02:34,610 --> 00:02:35,618
Making more promises that you're
going to break.

12
00:02:36,170 --> 00:02:46,597
So, we really only have one year of
of stable parliamentary government
and that's that middle year, whereas
you know we have a year of lies and a
year of breaking the lies and then we
start again.

13
00:02:48,100 --> 00:02:49,413
So, it wasn't like that when you were
my age?

14
00:02:49,880 --> 00:03:23,679
It wasn't so much and maybe I wasn't
just as aware of it, but there
certainly seemed to be more people
who at the senior end of politics
because, you know, when I was younger
I probably couldn't have named you
more than 10 parliamentarians, but
the senior the prime ministers and
the people who have the Treasurer
and, you know, the sort of you know
the leading politicians in the
country were much more visionary.
They had an idea of where they wanted
Australia to be. Now, you can argue
with whether you agreed with that or
not, but at least you knew where you
sat.

15
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That was at least the aim of the
game.

16
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At least the aim of the game was to
this is what we think Australia is,
this is what we stand for as a
country. This is what our party and
therefore our government stands for
and we're trying to achieve, and yes
there were still no changes in
philosophy from one period to the
next when we had Labour Parties in we
had significant changes, particularly
in socio economic policy when we had
Liberal governments in They were much
more conservative, if not just in
their overall politics, but
conservative in terms of making
social change legislation. Those
sorts of things so, and they went in
a sort of reasonably slow cycle for a
long time. For the last 15 years we
seem to have been in this rapid
change where actually nothing changes
because everybody is just bouncing
around the the controversial issues,
trying to win votes instead of having
a vision.

17
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Can you name some of those? What are
some of the examples? I know the
carbon tax and climate change is a
massive one. The boat people?

18
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Yeah. Well, yeah. Immigration. You
know, there's... If you set the
Labour Party and the Liberal National
Party down and looked at and got them
to fully articulate or even just read
their policies on immigration,
they're probably not very different.
But it doesn't matter which one of
them is in power, the opposition
blame them for everything that goes
wrong when their policy actually
isn't much different and so, there's
there's very little differentiation
on some of those big issues. Climate
is probably a little bit different
because I think the left side of
politics, the Labour Party and the
Greens, in particular, are much more
around controlling carbon emissions
and therefore controlling and trying
to reduce coal burning power
stations, as an example, trying to
introduce more and more electric cars
into Australia.

19
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I've seen Labour in talking about
that quite a lot recently and being
like, we can do this, we can convert
almost completely, but we have to
start  yeah.

20
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And being like we can do this we can
convert almost completely but we have
to and that's and that's the sort of
big aim is to is to try and, within
the next 30 years, to to try and
significantly reduce carbon emissions
from industry and just from general
human behaviour like driving cars, as
a good example of that. Whereas the
Liberal Party are almost climate
science deniers, some of them
genuinely are. Some of them just
generally don't believe it.

21
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Do you think the most part, the
reason that's the case is because
that a lot of the companies that fund
them and support them tend to be
mining companies?

22
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Yes, and that was my second point is
that I think others, in terms of if
you could get them aside and having a
beer in the pub on a Friday night
with them and talk about climate
science, they would probably agree
with you in terms of what the science
is actually saying, but when they
come to speak publicly they're
running the party line literally of
saying no, no no, no, we don't
believe that burning coal to to
create electricity is a problem in
this country because, firstly,
because there are a lot of their
money is coming from big mining
industries, particularly coal mining
industries, and secondly because in a
local electorate issues one of the
biggest issues in any electorate,
particularly rural electorates is
employment, and so if you've got a
large proportion of people in an area
that are that are employed in the
coal industry, then it's a knee jerk
reaction immediately as soon you say
we're going to reduce the amount of
coal we're burning, then there's a
knee jerk reaction of what all the
coal miners going to do?

23
00:06:57,110 --> 00:07:06,055
Well, you can understand that if
climate change in the future is this
thing that sort of... It's a cloud,
right? It's not something tangible
they can hold on there but losing
their job is something that they can
imagine straightway.

24
00:07:06,980 --> 00:08:43,499
I agree, without turning this into a
political debate, the counterargument
to that is that we're not going to
turn off all the coal burning, coal
burning power stations in Australia
in the next year, two years, 10
years, 20 years. We might over a
period of 50 years wind them down.
So, we're talking about
multigenerational chain in our
community here. Very few people are
going to lose their jobs immediately
because of these decisions. Now there
have been some. There was we shut
down a power station in the Latrobe
Valley in Victoria a few years ago
and a few hundred people, in fact
probably a few thousand people, lost
their jobs, either directly or
indirectly, because that happened.
That's probably because the federal
and the State Government at the time
didn't pay attention to that and
didn't work out what the alternatives
were because it's not like we're just
going to shut down coal burning power
stations and have no industry to
replace them. We're going to have
sustainable, environmentally
sustainable power whether it be wind
power or solar power, hydro power,
geothermal power. There are a whole
lot of ways that you can create
electricity that don't involve
burning carbon and and so,
theoretically there should be more
jobs created than we lose over that
same period of time, but what it
requires is a 10 to 20 and longer a
year vision of the country and where
we're going to be going, but nobody
gets re-elected now or  they don't
think they're going to get re-elected
on what's going to happen in 20
years, they think they're going to
get re-elected on what's going to
happen next year.

25
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So, it's a cheaper game to play.

26
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It's a much cheaper game to play, but
in the long term, it's a losing one
because you either don't go anywhere
or you just miss opportunities.

27
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Feels like you're all in a boat now
runs paddling in a different
direction, right? And you're like, we
need to go forward!

28
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Or choosing not to paddle, half of
the time.

29
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Yeah.

30
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And so, I think that's where I come
back to. I think the last person,
last prime minister of this country
who had a vision was Paul Keating.
And whether you agree with what Paul
Keating was about or don't, his view
of Australia was that we are not part
of Britain and Europe, even though
the majority of our non-indigenous
population had come from there. We
are geographically part of Asia.

31
00:09:23,090 --> 00:09:24,090
Oceania, right?

32
00:09:26,280 --> 00:10:05,396
But Asia, our biggest trading
partners, outside the United States,
are China, Japan and Korea. One of
the largest countries in the world
population wise is our second or
third nearest neighbour, Indonesia.
And so he just said we we're part of
Asia. And so, he really pushed to
have collaborative trade
relationships with Asia and for a lot
of people that was just anathema.
Nobody wanted it, everybody said
look, you're crazy. This isn't going
to work, but guess what? Australia
has one of the most stable economies
in the world because of our ability
to trade with Asia.

33
00:10:05,520 --> 00:10:14,309
And so, on a big part, that's why we
rode through 2008's economic crisis,
was it?Partly to do with the fact
that we had a pretty stable economy
with trading locally with Asia.

34
00:10:15,630 --> 00:10:56,429
And because we are a sort of
isolated, I think, a lot from the
American banking system, which was
the real problem And that global
financial crisis because a lot of our
money, which historically had been
invested in the United States and in
Europe, and conversely a lot of our
investment in Australia was from
American and European industries. We
have a lot of investment too, our
investment in Asia and from Asia. And
so, I think that solved it. Now, you
could argue hypothetically that if
there had been a crash in Japan and
or China at that same time, we would
have been screwed, but there wasn't!
So...