The Joe Walker Podcast - Coronavirus, Covert Influence, And Cold War II - Kevin Rudd

Episode Date: February 20, 2020

Kevin Rudd was Australia's 26th Prime Minister and is the President of the Asia Society Policy Institute.Show notesSelected links •Follow Kevin: Website | Twitter •Mike Pence's Hudson Institute Speech (October 4, 2018) •'The Sources of Soviet Conduct', 1947 article by "X" (George Kennan) •Henry Kissinger's talk at Bloomberg's New Economy Forum (November 21, 2019) •'Chinese Communist Party Influence at Australian Universities', lecture by Clive Hamilton •'High Tide? Populism in Power, 1990 - 2020', report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change •'Going to Extremes: Politics after Financial Crises, 1870 - 2014', paper by Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch •'The Complacent Country', article by Kevin RuddTopics discussed •Wuhan. 3:56 •What has the coronavirus revealed about the limits of the CCP's competence? 4:30 •Is the CCP underreporting coronavirus figures, as it did for SARS figures in 2003? 6:57 •Are China and the US in a new cold war? 8:44 •Would a new cold war have any hidden upsides? 11:56 •Chinese influence in Australian universities. 13:51 •How should Australia deal with Chinese influence? 17:58 •Cross-cultural communication between China and the West. 23:40 •How does the Left reformulate itself in the face of electoral defeats around the world? 27:51See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

you're listening to the jolly swagman podcast here's your host joe walker ladies and gentlemen swagmen and swagettes boys and girls welcome back to the show i seriously considered not releasing this episode at all. The reason was our interview time was cut short. We only had about 30 minutes. That was no one's fault. My guest, Kevin Rudd's flight from New York back to Sydney was put in a holding pattern and we recorded this on Monday the 10th of February in Sydney, straight off his flight. So what I hoped would be an interview of over an hour was truncated into about a 35-minute

chat. I tossed and turned to what to do and my solution was to release the episode but without advertising at the beginning which you will now have noticed. The reason this was such a difficult decision for me was that the whole point of the Jolly Swagman podcast is to go into great depth on complex and important topics with every episode being something that you just can't find anywhere else in the world. And that necessarily entails going into great length. The reason for that is that you usually need about 30 minutes to establish the premises of the conversation so that most people can follow along. And after that point,

you can begin to branch off into some more nuanced directions and cover things the guest hasn't written about in prior publications or hasn't spoken about on previous interviews. If I'm not doing that, there's just really no point to it. I'm kind of jerking myself off. So that's why we need to be long form. And we didn't quite achieve that criterion with this episode. But as I said, I decided to release it without ads. So just treat it as a little bonus. Listen to it on your commute or your lunch break or at the gym or whatever. Just a little palate cleanser in between some of the longer episodes that I do. But I think you'll still enjoy it. Our guest is, after all, Kevin Rudd,

and he, of course, was Australia's foreign minister and 26th prime minister. He served as prime minister twice. He's currently president of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York and studying for a doctorate at Oxford University on the topic of Xi Jinping and Xi's worldview. Rudd's a former diplomat and a lifelong China watcher who speaks fluent Mandarin. This is actually his third time on the podcast. And as always, suck it up. I don't care if you didn't like him as prime minister or if you don't vote Labor. I don't want to hear your petty complaints on Twitter or on YouTube. Rudd is a world expert on a topic I'm interested in, one that we should all be thinking about more. That is how to grapple with the rise of a thoroughly non-Western superpower. So that's why we have

him on. That said, we do finish the conversation on the topic of politics, but it's about what the left needs to do to repair itself. So that shouldn't be overly triggering to anyone. And without much further ado, please enjoy this short conversation with Kevin Rudd. Mr. Rudd, welcome back to the show. Good to be with you, Mr. Swagman Jay. Mr. Rudd, soon to be Dr. Rudd, right? Depends on my supervisors at Oxford. If I get through my dissertation and what they call a viva, which means me having to orally present my thesis to a bunch of Oxford dons, then, yeah, early next year.

Early next year. We'll see. I'm sending in new chapters as we speak. Yeah. I had to rediscover the art of footnoting. Wow. And you'll be a doctor. So you'll finally get to operate on people?

I hope so. There's a whole bunch of people I'd like to operate on, of surgical knives, rusty instruments, things that cut and cause people to bleed, those sort of things. No ulterior agenda? No, no. But I gather this is not one of those doctors, but I'll find out once I get a bit of paper. So we only have 30 minutes today, so I'm going to be unusually direct. Have you ever been to the underground seafood markets in Wuhan? No, I haven't. I've been to Wuhan, though. I think I was in Wuhan probably the year before last, 2018, I think. The great city, huge city in the Chinese revolutionary history, going back to 1911. In fact, in the late Qing period, that's where they

started China's industrialization push by building China's first factories in that part of the world. Great city. It's currently 400 million people in some form of lockdown in China. So a population 16 times the size of Australia, which is pretty crazy to think about. But what has the coronavirus... It's bigger than Tassie. Yeah, certainly bigger than Tassie, bigger than Byron as well. Could be.

I have to check that. What has the coronavirus revealed about the limits of the CCP's competence? I think it's a huge debate in China right now about the essential trade-off of this authoritarian political and economic system. The trade, your listeners will be familiar with. We, the authoritarian party, will have political power and reduce your personal freedoms in order to stay in power and exchange will give you security and prosperity. Enter the coronavirus. Am I still giving you security and prosperity. Enter the coronavirus, am I still giving you security and prosperity? Huge question mark. And so the debate which has erupted in Chinese social

media for the last several weeks has been, in the absence of transparency on basic public health information, are we seeing the essential internal flaw of that social contract, if you like, between the ruling party and those who are ruled? Is there also an issue whereby local authorities don't have the right incentives to pass information up the line because they don't want to report bad news? Well, to be fair to the Chinese Communist Party at present, that's long been a problem endemic in the Chinese hierarchical system of government. Back to imperial times, you didn't necessarily get a huge reward in the days of the Chinese emperors by saying, hey, comrade, well, your majesty, things are not well under heaven.

Things are falling apart here in Wuhan and you need to do things differently in the centre. Genuinely, that was not welcome even in the past. But applied to the modern period, it's a compounding problem. If you report up transparently, you run the risk of being accused of, quote, rumour mongering and creating problems of public confidence in the system. If you don't report up and subsequently there is a huge problem, as has occurred here, then you also get into trouble. It's a problem endemic to authoritarian systems of government in history. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, I believe the CCP underreported the number of people infected by at least an order of magnitude and infamously hid infected patients from the World Health Organization when they're inspecting hospitals in Beijing.

I think they even moved patients to hotels and had patients moving around the city in ambulances while the WHO inspectors came by. It's fairly certain they're underreporting numbers for the coronavirus as well. What we know from the SARS experience of 2003 is that the Chinese, for the reasons we've just been discussing, delayed public notification that we had a major crisis unfolding. In fact, there's about a seven-week delay. The best we can point to the delay in this one is probably several weeks, maybe three or four, maybe less. We still don't know the full story. Now, that's not good in itself. Is it an improvement on the past? Yeah, modestly. And had it been as bad as before, we'd be infinitely in a more difficult position than we've landed today. But under reporting on fatalities and transmission,

I see such a welter of conflicting information from Western analysts of this data that I'm reluctant to comment on the extent to which the data is accurate or not. What I can say in this exchange is that based on the SARS experience, both at home and abroad, people are scratching their heads as to whether they can fully believe the numbers. That's a real factor out there. I said I was going to be unusually direct, so let's steamroll right on to the next topic area. In December 2017, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy Report, where it changed its rhetoric and said that China was now a major strategic competitor. In October 2018, Vice President Mike Pence gave an infamous speech at the Hudson Institute, which many

people, including, for example, the historian Neil Ferguson, regard as an analogue to George Kennan's anonymous article in Foreign Affairs Magazine in 1947, where he... The X article. The X article, yeah, where he announced the containment strategy towards the Soviet Union. And now more recently, in November 2019, at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing, Henry Kissinger said that the United States and China were in the foothills of a new Cold War. And I know you were at that talk because watching the YouTube video, I could see your shiny noggin in the front row. I was apologizing at that morning.

Are we in a new Cold War? Has a silk curtain descended across the Pacific? I'd say not quite yet. When Henry used the words in the foothills, I think it's an apt analogy. In fact, I was talking to him not long before he spoke that day in Beijing last November. I don't think it was a pre-rehearsed line. I think it's a metaphor he'd been thinking about, about how to describe where we are.

So where were we? I think we're in this false period in the past of let's call it strategic engagement, pretending there wasn't a problem. Well, there are problems right across the board, whether it's in the South China Sea, whether it's on China's international trade investment economic practices, or whether it's on the question of human rights in Xinjiang. So the normal fabric of the US-China relationship under the rubric of strategic engagement, that is the rubric post-78, had frankly frayed at the edges. And so you had this announcement of a new period of strategic competition of itself not inaccurate. Here is the problem, whether we characterize it as a Cold War or not,

or decoupling or not, is if you have a period of now defined strategic competition declared by the United States, if not so far so declared by the Chinese, then the question is, what are the rules of the road? Or are there now none? And the thing that seizes me most intellectually in public policy terms and the work that we try to do through our think tank in the United States in New York is, what might be the rules of the road? A doctrine I refer to as managed strategic competition. The alternative is we just kind of unfasten our seatbelts every morning and see where the ride takes us.

Sometime that can be a real walk on the wild side, and history suggests it can end in some pretty ugly places. I wonder if there's an upside to a possible Cold War as well, domestically in the United States at least. It might have the potential to politically unify what is an increasingly polarised society, as well as give a shot in the arm to a lot of their innovation and technology projects. Well, you make an interesting observation there. And I'm in and out of Washington a reasonable amount of my work and certainly when you go up to the Hill, as I do,

and I was there just a week before last, Democrats will say to you in the corridor, in their offices, this is the only thing we agree with this president on. And then I say in my next question, what exactly? And so they've picked up, as it were, the rhetorical frame that we're now into a period of strategic competition. But if you asked any of them to define what the elements of such a new national China strategy might look like on the part of a US administration, Republican or Democrat,

it then basically flows in multiple different directions. Could it cohere along the lines that Kennan caused the political and policy establishment to cohere in 1948 with the X article and then his long telegram which preceded it on containment? Possibly, but it won't, if it's to be effective, it couldn't simply be a replication of containment. Last time we caught up in downtown Darlinghurst. Beautiful part of the world.

It is, it is. And I wanted to ask you. Very, very, very kind of Brooklyn of you over there. Yeah, Brooklyn. Bit scratchy, bit edgy. Soho, yeah. No, no, it's Brooklyn. Okay, all right.

You haven't got a Brooklyn beard though. What's happened? Yeah, I shaved it off last night. Okay. Yeah, I wanted to be well presented for you. I'm impressed. Thanks, mate. I did want to ask you about Chinese influence in Australia.

We didn't get time. And I want to ask you about that now. There are many axes of Chinese influence in Australia, obviously in the business sphere, politics. But the one I want to focus on is at Australian universities, possibly the most disturbing because of how insidious it is. And in a speech in August last year, Clive Hamilton mentioned some of the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to influence thought on campus at Australian universities. And he listed the Confucius Institutes, obviously, but also direct

lobbying from Chinese embassies and consulates, the usually unspoken threat of cutting off the flow of cash from Chinese students, threatening to cancel joint programs and lucrative executive training classes, funding and controlling Confucius Institutes, threatening to withhold visas to researchers too critical of the CCP, and encouraging Chinese students to report on university activities and to organise protests. And that's just before Friday. Yeah, yeah. Get to the weekend, it really heats up.

Does Australia need to more aggressively assert its sovereignty in regards to Chinese influence? I'd make two comments about that. The first is, if you read the statutes which exist in this country, underpinning the powers of vice chancellors in our universities, including most of those enactments exist under state legislation across Australia, and the exception is the Australian National University, which is a federal act. Vice chancellors are little dictators in themselves. They have enormous power to do whatever they really want on campus. That includes maintaining full, effective academic freedom. So I'd say to the vice chancellors of Australia, man up.

I don't say that in a sexist way. And simply be confident in the tradition that we come from, which is a Western, liberal, democratic, academic tradition, whose central pillar is freedom of thought, freedom of be confident in the tradition that we come from, which is a Western liberal democratic academic tradition whose central pillar is freedom of thought, freedom of expression and academic inquiry. Now, if you ever run into in your day-to-day work examples of what you just read through before, then hit it out of the ballpark. It just shouldn't be tolerated. That brings me to my second point, which is having spoken to many of our vice chancellors and asked how many of you have experiences like the type that you've just referred to, you'd be surprised that many of

them scratch their heads and say, well, once or twice and not all that often. The Confucius Institutes, frankly, are regarded in academic terms as a bit of a joke, but they always have been. I've never liked them because unlike Allianz Francais, Dante Alighieri Societies for the Italians or the Goethe Institutes for the Germans. These things are state-controlled, the Confucius Institutes. But we've got to keep in context how big a problem this is. And I just think that we may be, as it were, over-egging it a bit, given what the vice-chancellors say to me. But if there's a real problem, look at the statutes. You are fully empowered to defend the integrity of your institution. If you're worried about Chinese blowback in terms of student numbers and the flow of foreign enrolments, then make it public. And then you establish a direct, as it were, feedback loop between your taking an action and whether there is any punitive response

by the Chinese state. You know something? China, despite all the policies towards the United States and other countries in the world, still has a huge national interest and there's a huge popular interest in having your kids educated abroad, including here. In 2004, the Chinese Communist Party decided that Australia should be part of its overall periphery. In other words, treated like China treats its neighbours in terms of the priority it sets for needing to influence people within the country and how they view China and the CCP. We know this because a diplomat at China's embassy in Australia, Chen Yonglin came out and said that and then sought asylum in 2004. What other ways beyond universities does Australia need to be taking a more firm stance in pushing

back on Chinese influence? Well, firstly, on the methodology of defining what the periphery is. Yeah. In Chinese strategic thinking, in the communist period post-49, there's a category which is called the zhoubian guojia, which is the neighboring states. There's 14 of them with land borders shared with China, six with maritime borders. Those 20 states constitute category number one. We're not one of them. We're outside that. And sometimes the language used to describe it differs depending on the official literature you're looking at it. It doesn't mean that we're not unimportant in this scheme of things. Australia is a G20 country. It's a major US ally here in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific, and with a very strong

relationship both with Japan and India, who historically have been great adversaries of the Chinese. So that's just a word of caution about the absolute nature of the taxonomy being used there. But on the broader point, at a national level, beyond our discussion just now about universities, I'd say to the country at large, whoever the political and corporate leadership happens to be, be confident in our values. These are good values. We come from a Western tradition anchored in principles of political and economic freedom. We believe that markets work on the basis of freedom. We believe that humans are their most fulfilled through the exercise of personal freedom.

We also believe in something called human solidarity. In other words, we look after people who fall by the wayside in our societies. But these are good values, and they've evolved from a Western tradition over several centuries. So what I always say to Western governments, including our own, is just be confident where we come from. And don't take a backward step if there is any, as it were, crossing of the line in terms of any infringement of those values in our engagement

with any authoritarian state. But here's the rider. To do that, you can do a whole lot of it operationally in the way in which government does its work. You don't need to issue a press statement every second Thursday shoving it right up the nose of the Chinese that we loathe and despise every element of the Chinese Communist Party system because, A, that doesn't have any effect in changing their behaviours and, B, it also, frankly, doesn't advance the range of other interests

which we're seeking to prosecute with the Chinese. So go public when you need to. There's a fundamental external clash of values on a major issue affecting the two countries. But frankly, on an operational basis, simply say no. It's not all that hard. Just say no, we disagree. We're a bunch of Westerners. That's kind of the tradition we come from. Do you think appeals to western values work when one in three of Australia's export dollars comes from China? We often think that we're Robinson Crusoe on this. Australia is the leading, sorry, China is the leading economic partner of virtually every country in Asia. And heading that way in Europe, it's just become Germany's leading economic partner. So we often have a view here in the Antipodes that, you know, we're kind of

sui generis. We're not. Others go through these dilemmas as well. So how do you execute a public policy given those two realities? 30% or 31% of Australian exports go to China. Secondly, they're concentrated in five critical areas of iron ore, LNG, coal, students and tourism. There's a whole bunch of bits and pieces hanging around the edge of that. I wish it was more diverse. I wish it was more diverse. I wish it was more textured than it is, but it ain't. So that's just part of the reality. But you know something?

In the overall economic equation, foreign direct investment flows to Australia. China is actually, in aggregate terms, a relatively minor player. And Australia is accessing global capital markets. China is a minuscule player relative to the capital markets we use every day off Wall Street and out of the City of London and other financial centres around the world. So we need to put this in a wider context too, and therefore have some confidence when it comes to any clash of values, simply asserting what we stand for and why, and not

fearing that there is going to be an economic price to pay. But you can execute that as a national strategy without, in Groucho Marx's tradition, picking up a big cream pie every morning and throwing it in the face of our Chinese friends as if that is good domestic politics. Well, there's a difference between catering to domestic political appetites in Australia, which the conservatives are first class masters of in this country, as opposed to objectively just standing up for our interests and values in the most intelligent way possible and without yielding. Can you explain to me, just at an interpersonal interpersonal level what good communication with a Chinese person or a member of the Chinese Communist Party would look like?

Like, hello, friends. Hello. Oh, Luke, are you here? Yeah, I'm here. That's kind of how it starts usually. Right. Okay. Oh, you meant something else, did you?

At a deeper level, how's the Chinese psyche different? I think in the West, in Australia, we overestimate the extent of difference. Chinese people, including leaders, are human beings just like you and me. Sure. They've got families, they've got kids, they want their kids to go to the best universities, get the best jobs, and all that sort of stuff. But just focus on the differences for a moment. Yeah, sure, but I'm just going through a rounded picture.

Yeah. So the reason I say that is it's important to begin any conversation with our Chinese interlocutors asking about their personal circumstances because they're human beings just like us. That's point number one. Number two is in dealing with Chinese at a governmental level, I think what's important to us is to establish briefly or at length, depending on the seniority of the engagement, three or four minutes on fundamental principles. And in my case, it used to go along these lines. Good morning, comrades. How are you? How's the family?

And let me just explain some fundamental principles of Australian international security policy and foreign policy. One, we're allies of the United States, ain't going to change. Sorry about that. That's just the way it is. Been that way for 100 years, not likely to change anytime soon. And there's a reason for it. They helped save the country in the Second World War. And Australians are pretty sort of mindful of that, given that we're 25 million people in the middle of nowhere. So that's not going to change. Number two, we're also a Western liberal democracy. So we have a view about the universality of human rights, which means that from time to time, we're going to have disagreements. Sorry about that. That's not going

to change either. Number three, how do we make as much money as possible between our two economies? And then we get on to do that. If you think in an exchange with our Chinese friends, you can just leave one and two off the agenda. Or as someone once said to me, chipmunk your way through it. Remember the chipmunks on television, probably before you were born? So that no one can actually hear what you're saying. It doesn't work. You've got to put it on the record, make it plain.

This is what we stand for. Now let's go on to the practical business of cooperation. I think the thing to bear in mind in being interlocuted with the Chinese is the length and depth and antiquity of the civilisations you're dealing with, which should, for those of us which are relatively newcomers on the block, like the Commonwealth of Australia, a couple of hundred years as opposed to 3,000 or 4,000, it's useful acknowledging the depth and antiquity of Chinese civilisation. That reflects some learning and some appreciation.

I think that helps. But I'd caution by people then concluding that you therefore have to self-censor everything you say about your core interests and core values or what you're seeking to prosecute. There's a way in which you can formulate this, which is polite, firm, friendly, which is, as it were, explicitly respectful of the civilization that you're dealing with, but not retreating into your hole as if it would be impolite to say, actually, we disagree with that. Let me explain to you why. And so there's a balance in the way in which this can be presented. I see too many examples of foreigners self-censoring in their individual private exchanges with Chinese political and corporate leaders

rather than just being polite, friendly, upfront. You know, the fact that our Chinese friends are so good at capitalism should give us some insight into the fact that they know how to hustle in the marketplace themselves. And to survive in the Chinese domestic economic marketplace, you have to hustle a lot. Change of topic. Last Friday, the Tony Blair Institute released a report on global populism. And it found that since the end of the Cold War, populist leaders or parties in power around the world had increased fivefold and since the new millennium, threefold.

And what is of note is that it's not any brand of populism. It's typically right-wing populism, which especially since the global financial crisis is an outcome that we could have predicted if we'd known a little bit about financial history. There's a great paper by Moritz Schulerich and a couple of other authors from 2014 where they find that in the wake of financial crises, extreme right-wing parties increase their vote by 30% on average. Because what usually happens is that while the left kind of say it's the banker's fault, the right seem to have a more visceral and compelling call to arms, which is that it's the fault of globalization and immigrants. The left appears to be in retreat, at least across the Anglosphere. We had the Trump phenomenon, the Brexit phenomenon.

Then Scott Morrison won his surprise election on the 19th or the 18th of May. I thought that was because of Jesus. Last year. Hard to work out the causality. And it looks like Trump's set to win a second term again in all likelihood. And yet this has seemed to cause almost no introspection on the left, which appears to be preoccupied with pronouns and privilege about the future of progressivism. What does the left need to do in terms of taking a good hard look at itself in the mirror and thinking about its agenda going forward, but more specifically, how it wins power again? Because at the end of the day, that's all that matters. On the diagnostics, I think, though I've not read the Blair Institute report, there is cogency in your description of the analysis,

and that is the proliferation of voices to the far right. I often think we in the mainstream centre-left, and I've written this here, find ourselves permanently wed opportunity, solidarity for those and support for those who run into a brick wall in life and who need compassion and support, as well as sustaining principles of personal freedom and freedom in the marketplace, but also wedded to a commitment to environmental sustainability for reasons of climate and beyond climate in the biosphere. And on top of that, have a sense of not just our own national interest, but a sense of internationalism, that is support for people who are in dire straits around the world. if they are the elements of the sustainable progressive project, then we get cannibalised from either extreme.

The far right, look at Murdochism, because it has acted very much as its echo chamber across the Anglosphere. The essential common denominator there is you are feeling economically insecure because of them, meaning foreigners. And them can either therefore be popularised by the far right as being people arriving by boat, foreigners in general, or excessive immigration as so described and defined on the sliding scale of far right concerns. But the essential element of it all is race. And that's the hardy perennial we saw at work in the 30s after the Great Depression.

Now, on the other side of this political equation, we have faux-left, let's call it, permanent seminar goers who are into increasingly rarefied definitions of personal purity, for whom no environmental compact is ever perfect enough. And underpinning that is actually quite a deep psychosis, a deep psychosis which says, if I actually agree to a concrete course of action by a mainstream progressive centre-left government, I have lost my personal validity as being the permanent source of protest against

something falling short of the glory of God and something being less perfect than it should be. Now, I think the beginning of wisdom for centre-left progressive parties is to understand they're the two dynamics at work. So what do you do about that, given that's the reality? I would recommend probably two or three things. The first is, given that the great enabling force for the populist right in Australia,

primarily within the Conservative Party, but on the fringes of the Conservative Party as well, like through One Nation and the rest, is to name and shame the Murdoch media for who they are because they are, frankly, the platform which has legitimised so much of this populism over a long period of time. So that's why I, for example, for the last year and a half, routinely call out what I see to be the semi-daily abuse of this by its proposition and then to realise that it's in

a real knock-em-down, drag-em-out fight for political success in order to implement your program, which means not playing by Marcus of Queensbury rules with the far right, because they never do. It means being absolutely vicious in the sort of street fighting we must engage in overcoming what others have described to me as almost a palpable and cultural as it were concern about being in power because it's not our natural condition there is a psychology also within the mainstream center-left which says power is something to be concerned about and afraid of, not to exercise on behalf of the many.

That psychosis needs to be overcome as well. And a new confidence and, frankly, determination to throw the kitchen sink at the other mob in the way in which they routinely do at our proposition. And thirdly, to hang a lantern on the problem in terms of the faux left, the people in this country like the Green Party who are constantly nipping away at the edges of mainstream, as it were, centre-left government, jumping into bed episodically with the far right,

as they did when they killed the price on carbon a decade ago, and naming that for what it is as well, which is simply a new form of faux left populism in its own right, not concerned about sustainable change. So I think these three elements of action are necessary for the future. If we're going to have a hope of actually taking government by the throat and becoming once again a durable long-term progressive government for this country. I still haven't forgiven the Greens for torpedoing your carbon pollution reduction scheme in 2009. I'm a churchgoer. I'm supposed to forgive them.

But guess what? I struggle too. But I want to come back to something you said a little earlier. I think we should be careful about attributing the right's electoral success to racism. You know, I think there is racism at the margins and wherever we see racism, we should call it out. But there's a lot of wisdom in the conservative tradition and we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater there. And what I find deplorable is when people on the left kind of write off all conservative concerns as, quote unquote,

deplorable. Like that's what's deplorable. I agree with that. If you look at the things that I've written on this in a series I did on the complacent country about 12 months ago, one of them seeks to define, for example, what are a credible canon of progressive values for this country, by which I mean those of the progressive mainstream centre-left. And half of those values we should own with pride from those who would describe themselves perhaps as conservatives. Like we cannot from the left simply say that ideals of freedom, personal freedom, is somehow a conservative or neoliberal project. No, that's ours too. Economic freedom and enterprise, is that something which belongs exclusively to those guys? No, it's part of our mainstream project as well.

So these sorts of, and even what I describe as the cohering qualities of social institutions, like the churches historically, we shouldn't simply concede those to the other side as saying these are manifestations of global conservatism who should be ran asunder. That's just a poverty of political imagination, apart from being a travesty of the truth. But what we centre-left progressives then add to that is, but we also believe in something called equality. We also believe in something called compassion.

We also believe in something called sustainability. And if you start grafting those onto the traditional values of personal freedom, of political freedom, of economic freedom, which the conservatives seem to own as their own badge of honour, and have that as a compact of six or seven values, that's who we are, rather than saying all that other stuff is theirs. And the battleground for this in Australian politics, to be blunt about it, is probably in the area of small business. Small business should be, we, should be the area for political advance by the progressive centre-left.

You know why? Because we stand up for the little guy and we want the little guy to get ahead. Not just if you're a worker in a large industrial enterprise with a trade union looking after you. That's fine. Fully accept that, as it should be. But we should also be looking after and supporting

someone who decides to leave paid employment and start up their own business, has the guts to take out a $50,000 bank load and go out and build their own private enterprise and then maybe employ a couple of people. I regard that as morally worthwhile, whereas I think there's a view within, shall we say, some of the elements of the traditional labour movement in this, that to go there too vigorously is somehow ideologically unclean. And given that the small business sector and those who are supported by it in Australia represent the single largest slice of economic activity in the entire country, unless we are the credible voice for that constituency, it's going to be very hard for us to get to 50% plus one in a given election. Kevin Rudd, unfortunately, we are out of time, but thank you so much for joining me. Good to be with you on Jay Swagman. Done. Cheers, mate.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that and got much out of it. For show notes and links to everything discussed, you can find those on my website, which is my whole name, www.josephnoelwalker.com. My name isn't a domain. My name is the bit in between the www and the.com. So that's J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-A-L-K-E-R. You can also find me on Twitter. My handle is at Joseph N. Walker. And what else is there to say? Thank you for listening. Thank

you for your time. Until next time, be well. Ciao.