So, what do you see happening in the in the near future with the political system in Australia? Do you think we're going to get out of this sort of hole of short term site and fighting.
I hope we can. Look, sometimes, I think it's personalities and and I think our political system has allowed the egotistical, and of course if you're going to be a politician you have to have an ego, there's no question about that, but it's it's allowed the people who have that short term it's all about me, ego, rather than I'm going to be the saviour of the country.
A tool for the state, it's not the state helping become more famous.
Exactly, so, I think some of it has been personality based, but some of it is just an inevitable consequence of the form of democracy that we have. But the bounce back to that, which has happened in many countries around the world over the last 20 years, is not necessary for a long time, but it even happened in Australia as you mentioned with Julia Gillard being the prime minister of a minority government, is that I think there'll be more and more minority governments with the so-called minor or smaller parties having a more significant contribution.
Do you think that's the way it should be? That'll help?
I think... It should be is a difficult thing to say because all of these things are just a natural evolution of, you know, social, economic, political decisions that get made at a local level. I don't think anybody decides we're going to have minority governments. Certainly, the big parties hate it because they can't dominate things and therefore their own philosophical positions don't stand up.
Well, they can't just steam engine everything, right? Or bulldoze everything.
You can't just bulldoze everything through.
You have to satart making negotiations and not just ploughing through it all. But I think it's really good for the smaller parties, right? The Greens and everyone must love it because it means finally they get a seat at the table and people have to talk to them and take them seriously.
The irony is, as we were talking about with the move from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard and then back to Kevin Rudd, the at least the public reason that we were told that the Labour Party wanted to get rid of Julia Gillard is because she didn't do anything, but if you go back and look at the legislation changes, she made more changes to legislation in the period that she was the prime minister than any prime minister in the last 50 years, and so and she did that with a minority government, but what happens then is that you have to make sensible policy decisions if you want to get them through parliament as a minority government because you're going to have to get people on side who are not necessarily politically aligned with you. And the only way you can do that is by making sensible social decisions. And so I think that's a way that we will probably go is that there will be more minority governments because some of the smaller parties like the Greens, for instance, are getting significant and, you know, One Nation is another example. Not that I'm supporting them at all I, think they're are a bunch of nut bags.
I just think... It's one of those things where you're like come on! Like, I understand that a lot of these issues are worth talking about and they're serious problems. You know, you want to worry about things like Islamic extremism, but they're just the wrong mouthpieces, right? They're just the wrong people to be talking about this.
You can't run a country on a very narrow set of policies. Immigration is not the biggest issue in the country. The economy will always be the biggest issue in any country and what you do with your money and how you spend it.
But I do agree with you, I think that it is good to at least have groups like the Greens and One Nation there because they at least get to throw out things to say, can we just talk about this? And then let's resolve something and move forward.
And it does mean that some of those points of view end up changing the way the minority leaders have to manipulate things, to get things through, because there is always going to be the quid pro quo of well, if you want me to vote for the legislation that you want to get through, then I want you to consider doing this or I want you to do this, and so some of those smaller things that are never going to get through the major parties because, ironically...
Well, they won't touch them, right? They're not going to touch any controvertial topics.
But they're too conservative, if not conservative in the typical political context, but conservative is in not wanting it to change because the worst thing you can do in government at the moment is to try and change something from a getting re-elected position, not from running the country point of view, but from a getting re-elected position.
So, I think there's going to be a fair bit of that, but if we look at New Zealand, as an example, do you know who the most...just trying to think of the word that was used because I don't want to misquote somebody, the most trusted politician in Australia is?
Who they are?
Yeah. No, I wouldn't have no idea?
The prime minister of New Zealand?
Why? Because she counts as part of it or it's just the joke?
Oh, no, but that is actually true. There were surveys done and the most trusted politician by Australians is the prime minister of New Zealand and partly, I think, because, yes she's been in international news because of the Islamic extremist, the anti-Islamic extremist mass shootings that went on, but in addition to that she just seems to be an intelligent, empathetic person who just makes the right decision every time something comes up and she's come out of a country where they've had minority governments and they've had political struggles to, you know, to maintain long term Labour or Conservative Party power. But she just seems to have got it right and everybody in New Zealand loves it no matter which side of politics you sit on. So, that's what I was saying, sometimes it's about personalities and every now and then the right personality pops up and I think they're the saviours, unfortunately it's random. You can't say well, in order to sit for parliament this time we have to have sensible, empathetic people. There are no qualifications other than a popularity vote.
Well, I think that's why a lot of people my age, and I don't know what it's like for your generation and the older generations, but I've definitely become disenchanted with it because it feels like everyone is just fake and they're just there purely to try and stay in power. You know, there's no real... I just want to see an honest real response from some of these people to these questions.
I agree.
Because it just always seems canned like they're just saying what they have to to not get in trouble, which might reflect social media and the Internet and the media and how it acts.
I think there is.
A constant "I've got you" they have to be careful of saying anything that can get misinterpreted.
They do, but I think the other side of the broad scale social media is that anything they say will get out.
And they'll be held to account.
No. Not just from they'll be held to account but they can almost say anything and they can push it out through social media so, they can tell the whole, you know, Donald Trump fake news thing. Fake news is only fake news because nobody tests it and the fact that any politician now can you know put out a tweet and a significant proportion of the population will believe it, not just believe they said it, but believe that it's true, means that you can manipulate the electorate.
Well, it's a two edged blade, right? There's no, there's been no other time in history where you could be proven wrong so easily and quickly. There's also been no other time in history where you could be so easy, that the truth could be so easily ignored and or misrepresented.
And or recreated. Yeah and look, I think one of the challenges that we have certainly within the Western political systems is to redevelop the so-called fourth estate and that is that the news media to be the testers of truth, not the setters of truth. So, I don't want to have them writing editorials on what they think about politics. What I want them to be doing is questioning politicians. So, when a politician comes out and says something, I want them to go into the research and present it back to them and say we don't believe that's true, and holding them to account, rather than the news media, particularly the other formal news media, not so much social news, but the formal news media now is much more around their own advertising on television, websites, radio, newspapers. So, they want the 10 second grab. They want it to be controversial. They want more people tuning it or more people buying their papers or more people clicking on their website to read a story that is complete rubbish.
That's it, they care about views, they don't care about truth.
Exactly. And and so, therefore all that's doing is that it is exacerbating the problem we have with social media which was the... well, hardly the cause, but the result of that sort of stuff is from social media.
And a big issue with that too, though, is that it's largely, at least, in Australia owned by someone, Rupert Murdoch, who leans largely, he support the Liberals.
He owns, his company owns 60 per cent of the news media in this country.
Which is all then targeted at Labour and the Greens and, you know, they will ignore anything bad the Liberals do, because they're liberals to win now because they support...
And so, it's not about balance. I've always said that it doesn't matter what you're arguing about, you don't need a balanced argument in the sense that you give 50 per cent of time to one side and 50 per cent of it's on the other side. What you have to do is give the same amount of effort into questioning each argument and that is no matter who says it or why they say it and no matter which side of politics or which side of an argument there on the news media should be there as the the truth seekers to say we don't trust anybody, we want to test what they are saying and ask them back again.
What did you make recently of Leigh Sales interviewing both Bill Shorten, head of labour, and Scott Morrison, the head of the liberals on ABC, which is the publicly funded broadcasting network, the Australian Broadcasting Commissioner, not commission, corporation? She seemed very different in both interviews, right? So, she seemed to go really soft with Scott Morrison, handing him these easy questions. Do you think climate change is real? You know, what are your views for the future? And yet, when Bill Shorten came on she hammered him. Did you find that strange?
She works for the ABC. Who is her boss? Scott Morrison.
Exactly. I didn't think it was so blatant.
And the irony is that she has a reputation for being tough.
That's what I mean. She's one of the people who is, one of the very few politician interviewers who still is tough on them, whereas when I was growing up, when I was your age and younger, there were people in her in almost every new form of news media who would just refuse to let politicians get away with the rubbish that we see and get away with on a daily basis.
And nowadays they don't get questioned.
No, and look, it's really hard when you have...I genuinely believe that the ABC is the most important media organisation in the country and that it should be separated more from government, it should be funded by government, but none of the appointments to their management should be done by government. There should be an independent board that does that.
Because that seemed like a massive red flag to me. The juxtaposition between those two interviews seemed highly unfair and inappropriate and obvious that she was ok, we'll get the current sitting prime minister on and we'll give him easy questions and we'll get the one who is, you know, meant to be coming or challenging...
The want-to-be Prime Minister.
And we'll hammer him and try and embarrass him, when Scott Morrison has so many more things that you could nail him to the wall for.
Anyway, Dad! Thanks so much for coming on. It's been an hour, so..
An hour? Feels like five minutes.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Pete, anytime.
See you later.
Bye.