The Joe Walker Podcast - "Just because I consulted doesn't mean I didn't dominate": How prime ministers really govern — Patrick Weller

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

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Today I'm speaking with Patrick Weller. Pat is an historian, a political scientist and an emeritus professor at Griffith University. He's the author or editor of about 40 different books, including the study of Malcolm Fraser as Prime Minister, study of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, and the definitive history of cabinet government in Australia. Pat, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. So, Pat, you are, of course, originally from England, but you've called Australia home for about 60 years now, I think. I arrived in October 1966. Okay. The day was notable mainly for Galilee winging the Corfield Cup. Wow, so you're coming up on your 60th anniversary? That's right, yes. So I think of you as a kind of a kind of combination of a British talkville come to Australia and,

an Australian Robert Caro who examines the sort of texture of political power. And for that reason, I was very excited to read in, in a few of your essays, reflecting on your work, especially your book about Malcolm Fraser as Prime Minister, that Robert Caro was, or maybe the major influence on you intellectually, certainly the major influence on you with respect to your book about Fraser. But he adds to other works which. sort of took me up there, one of which was a book, which made me a political scientist, rather than a historian, about how parties operated in the pre-party days in Australia.

And it's the nitty-gritty, it's how people work, it's the way that they understand the problems they've got, which I find particularly interesting. And the second one was a book written by two Americans about the British Treasury. Now, the details. are slightly outdated. But the way they did it was to point out that these are people who work with each other day in, day out. You know, when you deal with somebody on a particular problem, you know you've got to deal with them next week on another problem. So it's the routines which become important. And the third thing was a book by Richard Neustadt, who's talked about the American president and says,

the power of the president is the power to persuade, and what we need to do is to be looking over their shoulder to see how they see the problems. Then Caro comes along and has this magnificent study of the routines by which Lyndon Johnson managed to create a structure of power, and he did it by incredible hard work, but it was the daily activities that gave him the power. Too often we look at crises. I want to know what underpin the crises. So Carrow was the last nudge, so to speak, of saying, you can do things like this. And I thought, can you study an Australian Prime Minister? And who would be interesting? And this was 1983, 1984. So at this point, we only had the first Caro biography of Lyndon Johnson. The first volume comes out in about

1983. Yeah. So I thought, well, Malcolm Fraser might be interesting because there are two pictures here. There's a picture of the very dominant prime minister. And everything you hear talks about, he spent his life consulting. So I thought, well, we've got Carroll, volume one. That showed the sort of inspiration of what you can do. So let's see if I can go and talk to Fraser.

if I can work out how he ran his government, how he ran his life. One year after he's left power. Now, I knew David Kemp, who was his principal private secretary, and he knew that I had in the past edited the Labour Party's caucus minutes. I was given the job of... They kept minutes ever since 1900. The day the Federal Labor Party met, they kept minutes. and Goff Whittland was sick of people

coming to his office to look at them. He kept disrupting his life in 1972, so he contacted the ANU and said, can you get something to edit them? And I was asked to do that. So I had three volumes of the Labour caucus minutes and then I was going to talk to Malcolm Fraser.

So I wasn't sure about that. But I was interested in seeing what you could do with Fraser. So I wrote to Kemp. and said, if I'm thinking of doing this, how will he react? And Kemp said that he won't care about your politics, or what may be perceived to be your politics. The only question you'll ask is, is he any good? David must have said yes, because I then got an invitation to come down and talk to him.

The first question he asked, why do you want to do this? and I said Well your image is of a very dominant Prime Minister and yet everyone emphasizes how much you consulted

he said just because I consulted didn't mean I didn't dominate you know and although I didn't realize it at the time he gave me the theme for the whole book

you know that he consulted dramatically but if he wasn't getting the answer He kept consulting. And he ran a very consultative sort of exercise so that if one public servant gets a phone call at 3am, he knows who's ringing. And he often took half the side of the bed,

the papers that are going to be discussed next year. So wait a moment, Prime Minister. Give me a moment to find out where you are. Now, yes, what we do. And another one who was rung up and asked something at 2 o'clock in the morning. morning, said to him, well, Prime Minister, I think you should consult, named another officer. And as Fraser suggested, he said, oh, by the way, Prime Minister, happy Christmas.

And when he rang the other guy up at six in the morning, at least started with happy Christmas now. It was that sort of character. So Carrow's approach gave a lot of useful tips about how to talk about Fraser. It's a very different book. He's a very different circumstance and a very different man. But that exercise is saying, how does this work? What does he do? So I was really interested in his day-to-day operations, his timetables, he's scheduling,

because that's the way that he could organize mostly to get his own way. So is there anything more specific to say about what you took from Carra? Caro says, I study power because power reveals. If you want to understand the way a person operates, the way he uses his character, it's how does he exercise power. And that's what I think you can usefully apply to a whole set of circumstances. And of course, Caro spends 10 years writing each volume. His volumes came out in 80, 94, 92, 2004, 2014, or 2012, and we're still waiting for the last one of which I gather he's written 900 pages. And since he's, I think, now 92, we're hoping that he will finish it soon.

It's a magnificent description of how politics actually works. And what Carra does is put the institution and the individual side by side. He wrote a very short book in the middle of this called Working. Great book. It's a great read. It's a fascinating study. And there's one line there when he went and started talking to his editor. And the editor says to him,

Turn every Godam page. When you go through a set of things, don't take anything for granted. What I found, I found a note from Tony Eggleton to Fraser. Tony Egleton was the president of the Liberal Party, former private secretary. And this was in 1977 when Fraser was thinking of calling an election. He said, I, Egleton wrote, I just spoke to the Governor General, John Kerr. he says that you need to give some reasons if you want an early election,

which he says he hopes and expects that you will want a call. Now, a note from John Kerr, a message from John Kerr via Egleton to Fraser, he's sort of dynamite. It's fascinating. But you do that if you actually can go through page by page to understand. the way that they work. Right. Because Prime Minister's deal in detail.

I mean, when I went on Kevin Rudd, I was allowed to see his diary, appointment diary. So you knew who he talked to, and how often he talked to them. And you knew you could sort of start tracing through, through that sort of detail, the way that he could actually operate. Why do you think Fraser gave you such access so soon after leaving office? I haven't got a clue. It was, it was, I mean, this was, I say, 1984. Yeah. He'd been out of government for less than 12 months.

Yeah. So I had written a little book with Michelle Gretton called Cam Ministers Cope, which came out a year or so before. we had written a book on policy making. So he knew via Michelle, who I was. And perhaps he was interested in the hope that somebody would actually write a sort of serious history about the process of governing. Not only did I, I went to see him, expecting, hoping he would say yes, and expecting to talk to him and talk to his ministers. and talk to some senior public servants, all of which I did.

But then at the end of the initial discussion, he said, oh, I suppose you want to see my cabinet papers. But I thought, yes, I'd love to see your cabinet papers. Just for people's context, at this time, so today they're not made available to the public for 20 years. Back then the rule was 30 years. So this was a massive time. And he said, I'll have a look at them to check them before I let them have them. But he couldn't get round to it, so he never did.

So I just moved to Brisbane. I spent a week a month in camera. The Prime Minister and Cabinet gave me an office. Prime Minister and Cabinet helped me look at, you know, identify things that might be useful. also a friend of mine who was head of the cabinet secretary, you don't only want to look at these, you want to look at these files and these files and these files. And I was given a list of all the files.

All I had to do was call them up. And they would appear the next day. I wasn't allowed to take them out of the department. And some of them were so modern. They even had bits and pieces of the new Labour government attached to the last bit of the file. it was an opportunity

which I've never had since and I would be quite surprised if anyone gets them again in a hurry so he never asked he never checked he never asked to see what I'd seen he never wanted to know

what's whether I'd sort of abide by any rules or conditions I just suddenly had access to the cabinet files. Now, for historian-stroke political scientists, that's gold dust. It is. That's gold dust.

I mean, it's so fascinating to be able to pick a file and trace a story. And you realize the degree to which what the public sees is like an iceberg, the top 10%. And you saw how ideas come and go, how people raise them, they get set upon, other proposals come along. they're presented as though it was a government decision which was undisputed but in practice it's a whole range of compromises proposals

all of which are tossed around within the government and within the public service right and suddenly you can put a bit of flesh on those bones about how serious the process is and that adds to that notion you have to understand how they understand the problem. I mean, there's a quote in Hekla Bredeski,

which is the book on the British Treasury. They make the decisions. We have to understand why they make the decisions. And that's understanding about them. And the other thing which comes up is Hekla says, government's puzzle. Governing is a process of collective puzzlement on the public's behalf.

You know, people sort of think governments know what they're doing and why they're doing it. Often they are not very sure why they're doing it. And it's a 49-51 decision at the end anyway. Should we do this or we do that? Or I don't know. Perhaps we'll try to do that sort of thing. And then you start developing a policy which follows on from that. That's the process that interests me.

Less often the decisions themselves. And Fraser, then you talk to Fraser and then you talk to his ministers. not one of the ministers said they were scared of him and I talked to them all all of them said several of their colleagues were scared of them there's something inconsistent about that

he said they made them nervous and he would occasionally use cabinet raising questions because he wanted to test how well how strongly they felt what they were proposing and they often thought oh the prime minister thinks this No, the prime minister was testing them.

He was testing the way that the the cabinet process worked. Yeah. And the way that he worked. So that was a... I came out with a totally different view of when I went in about Fraser. And I lived through the Fraser period, of course.

As a prime minister, he was much more thoughtful that he often gave the public view. In public, he gives the view. I know what I think. In private view, he's agonizing about what I think. He's looking about it, but he knows that in public you have to get out and take a strong view on this way or that way. But it was interesting different times. You had AM and PM on the radio.

And in between, you could pretty well be left alone. So in that sense, I think you could pace yourself far more. Totally. Right. But he also would come back on a Monday morning and saying, I've got 10 questions from all the people who have asked me questions. So I met, that's just say who he met. Somebody said this. I want to know about that.

Someone said this. So the department will get a swag of questions each day on about who he had met previously or who he read over the weekend. And he queries this and queries that. There's a lot there. I have a bunch of follow-up questions. The first is, so you got access to the cabinet minutes, which is the term of art for the decisions of the cabinet, the minutes. You got access to the departmental files, but I don't think you got access to the cabinet notebooks. No, no.

So the first cabinet notebook for the Fraser government became available in January of this year, right? 50 years after the end of his first year in office. Have you had a chance to read it yet? I have tried. I read some of the cabinet notebooks for the 1950s for the book I was writing on cabinet. Cabinet notebooks are not Cabinet minutes. There is no record of discussion of the cabinet meeting.

The notebooks are taken by, the cabinet note takers, there are usually three note takers from Prime Minister and Cabinet in the Cabinet room. And they will take increasingly detailed notes for the sake of writing up the decision at the end of the process. So at the end of the process, the Prime Minister might say, okay, we'll do what the Minister wanted. Or we'll do what the Minister wanted, but with the variations as Smith suggested

earlier. So somebody has got to be in a position of knowing what the minister wanted and what

Smith said earlier. So the notebooks are entirely idiosyncratic dependent upon the person

who's taking the notes. They may be in their own short end. They may be including a series of

sort of ironic jokes about what actually happened. But you can't reconstruct from the notebooks what was said at the meeting, which you can in the British ones. So that's one of the great differences. The British give you a much fuller version of what was actually being discussed.

So what you have here is at the end of a meeting, the Cabinet office goes away and drafts a decision on the basis of what happened in Cabinet. uses its notebook as a point of reference. So it says, okay, this is what I think was said. Usually they're then circulated, signed off and circulated. They don't go to the ministers or to the prime minister unless there's a point of dispute. And that doesn't very often happen. Nor very often do ministers challenge the decision. I mean, I have heard of occasions when a minister said to the cabinet, somebody in PM and C, now I know that that's what cabinet decided,

but if they'd actually had a proper discussion rather than deliver, they would actually have decided something different. So why can't we decide what I wanted them to decide, rather than what they actually decided was told. No. That's not how it works. Yeah. So the decision is brief.

I have certainly seen decisions under the Fraser government where things were added to make sense of the decision but weren't actually raised. I've seen decisions taken when there was no meeting. So at one occasion, the Fraser was in Tanzania. And he was in one of those debates about the independence of Rhodesia, Zimbabwe.

And he rings up the head of his department and says, I promised, I think it's calendar, that I'll open a high commission. Can you check around the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and make sure they're all comfortable with that? A few of them said this isn't the way to make cabinet decisions, but they agreed and the secretary Julie recorded a

cabinet decision from meeting that hadn't taken place no not hadn't taken this recorded a cabinet decision or no meeting had taken place yeah didn't say that I had one so it's a flexible process

well I mean and and it's really just guided by conventions right I mean they weren't really breaking a legal rule in doing that were they? No no I mean it's this very

malleable kind of institution. There is a Captain Hamble. Yeah. Which at that time hadn't yet been launched into the public arena. Yeah, so I didn't realize that you were the person who launched it

in Australia. I mean, so I said I'll bring props. What happened? I mean, if we look there, there's, this is the Politics is a journal of political science. And if you look at the bottom under document, it says the cabinet handbook.

And if you look at the introduction, it says this is the first of bringing in documents through the public interest. This would be the first of a series. There never was a second. Ask the editor of the journal. What had happened was I was lecturing in first year at the ANU. And I gave a lecture on cabinet and mentioned there was a cabinet. handbook and grumbled. For some reason, it's secret, which is ridiculous because everyone should be able to know

how Captain actually works. And that was it. I just had a grumble. A lot of my students, of course, are part-time public servants. Well, now, public servants and part-time students. And at the end of the next lecture, some lady walked out to me and said, Pat, I thought you might like to see this. and handed me a copy of the cabinet handbook.

It was a loose-leafed fulner. I have no idea who she was. I never did find out who she was. But I thought, this is, when you read it, really silly. I'd just been to New Zealand, I think, and they have actually quite public in theirs. So I thought, well, I'll publish it. I'll publish it in the journal.

And I asked a deputy secretary in PM&C, who was in charge of the government division, later became secretary of the Attorney General's department, who I'd met a few times. I said, what would you do if I published the cabinet Hamble? He said, hmm, it's breach of copyright. I said, I know. What else would you do?

And he just laughed. and I assumed that the answer was nothing, which of course is what it was. But when they produced the next version two years later, the secretary of the cabinet, who was an assistant secretary, who I knew well, apparently said, well,

perhaps produced one journal, it's on the public record, no one's fussed, why don't we just publish it? So the cabinet has, book came out with the Australian government printing service. That's the first half of the story.

I like the second half more. The second half was a friend of mine in Britain, a person called Peter Hennessey, who was a great journalist as well as an academic, just retiring from the House of Lords and

just being admitted to the order of the garter. He was a great guy. I met him at a conference. And he said, well, you'd never get it in our place. I said, well, I'll send you a copy. So I sent him a copy and he sent it to number 10 and said, are you going to release this like the Australians have done? Because it was now on official document. No way. So it signed as a change of prime minister. He sent him a copy and said, are you going to release it until John Major says, going into an election, just to hang on a moment and announce it during the election they get

of publishing and it becomes a public document. And of course, both those are now on the web. That's amazing. You know, now this is the lovely case of, it's a nudge. It's a nudge. Yeah. You know, everyone realizes nothing much is lost when you publish the things. Yeah.

And other people follow up and you eventually have most of those records and now public records. And each prime minister introduces his own new version. Yeah. of the cabinet handbook. Yeah, in preparation for my podcast, last year with Glyn and Terry, I spent hours reading the 15th edition of the cabinet handbook and didn't realize that I have you to thank for that. Well, it would probably have happened anyway.

Maybe, yeah. But it helps when it's out already. Right. Because there's not a lot of logic in trying to keep in secret. But that's very much what interests me is the how. It's if you, I mean, if you ask Dick, I suggest to talk as he does at times about PMNC made sure the rules are being followed, that the criteria for the Capted Handbook had been fulfilled,

that the document which was going to cabinet is now is in a suitable condition to be considered by cabinet. I mean, up until the 1940s, the cabinet secretary was a minister, and the cabinet records were sparse. You could have heard of whole things that were discussed in cabinet, which never got noted at all.

But now is far too big for that. I mean, there may be a cabinet secretary for deciding or agreeing on what the agenda will be subject to the potential veto the Prime Minister. But everyone else has got to actually settle themselves according to the rules. And that's protecting, I think, everyone, because you can be assured that you can't bounce the cabinet. Just bring something up at the last minute.

Prime Ministers still can. But Prime Ministers are judge, jury and executioner. Right. when it comes to the processes of cabinets. They can decide, enough discussions being done, they can decide what the discussion will be about, and they sum up at the end. Exactly.

I mean, that's really the kind of institutional source of their power, right? It's the being the chair of the cabinet. Yeah, being the chair of the cabinet. Deciding who will talk in what order. Yep. I mean, ideally nothing will go to cabinets until the prime minister has a pretty good idea what everyone thinks.

Yeah. Yeah. And what everyone is going to say. And that's the job of the secretary of briefing now. How they get briefed varies from place to place. But that's the power. And then it's the power about, so what exactly was decided potentially? Well, there is some people stick pretty well to what the prime minister does.

If anyone can remember them. There are times when you have long discussions. and people forget that, well, I'll do what blog said, but what did blog say? What was it that was talked about that? Yeah. So let's come back to Fraser because I've got a few more questions about him. I think the five kind of abiding impressions of Fraser that your book left me with were, firstly, the work ethic, which it sounds kind of trite when I say,

say it like that, but the very vivid descriptions you give of him, as you mentioned earlier, sort of calling up a senior DPMC official at 2am on Christmas Day to talk about some cabinet papers, those kind of things were very, they made a great impression on me. Secondly, how he was kind of less intellectually secure than his public image gave off. So he was constantly interrogating both his staff, public servants, ministers, with this kind of scattergun approach of just bowling questions at them. But the purpose was to stress test ideas and make sure he got to the right outcome because he didn't always know what the right outcome was.

For which we should be grateful. Yes. The Prime ministers don't think they know all the outcomes before. No, it's very admirable. It's very admirable. The third thing I found interesting was he had this instinct for understanding the politics of institutions and how each department has their own kind of agenda and set of objectives. And he was very determined to never be captured by a single group or department.

So he didn't want anyone to have a monopoly on his advice. And he sourced advice from a wide range of people, even people outside of parliament and would even sometimes have different departments working on the same question at the same time to kind of, get like an uncorrelated spread of opinions. The fourth thing I found interesting was that he had a hand in or approved virtually every decision that his government ever took. Every decision he wants to be involved in. He would be involved in everything significant that he wanted to be. I see.

Yeah. Okay. So I might have potentially mis-erogyn. No, I think you slightly over. I mean, there were 17,000 decisions in seven years. That's an awful lot each week. Now, some of them were decisions not to make a decision. But that does mean the Prime Minister was involved in actually all those decisions.

Yep. And then the fifth thing, which of course is the kind of central theme of the book, is that he dominated through consultation. Yeah. And which is so interesting because there's this false dichotomy that you critique that there is on the one hand kind of traditional cabinet government and on the other hand, prime ministerial government. Yeah. But he exercised a kind of blend of those two approaches. And he invariably got his way, but through a process of consultation, through exhaustive cabinet meetings in the bunker until everyone had just through sheer kind of.

weariness, kind of agreed to, consented to the decision or the outcome that he wanted, the collective outcome that he wanted. Let me add a sixth. Yes. The sense of insecurity created by the means of reaching office, he was incredibly conscious that the protests of 1975 were incredibly divisive. and he was really conscious, I think, at times that he didn't want to do things which would divide the country as he saw it.

Now, that's totally different from what one would have expected going in. But he's often the things that, well, yes, but, you know, if we did that, it would do X, Y, and Z. And he wasn't always bold. When John Hart starts suggesting a GST in about 19801, And there's an interesting argument going on about who was responsible for checkmaking who in those occasions. That Fraser would argue that Hart was too cautious. He should have got ahead and done things in Howard for saying, well, he wouldn't let you.

So Hart was talking about a GST and Fraser said, you can't have a GST. you would introduce it, you'll take three years to introduce it, you'll be running to election on it, and the impact will come straight afterwards, and you wouldn't win. Howard was saying, well, we wanted to have a review of the financial system that basically turned into the Campbell Inquiry,

and Fraser sat on it. So on one occasion, on a couple of occasions, I talked to, Howard was quite keen to talk. because we had this discussion going on about what was Fraser in favour of and what wasn't it. Howard was quite keen to. I talked to him once and got cut off. He rang up and said, can we finish it?

Because he had a good story to tell. And Fraser was telling the opposite one. So the 11 November was never quite put behind. Interesting. I think, I said I thought the second question. was why to do it. Either the first or the second one was should the Governor General have done it. This is in your first meeting with Fraser?

My very first meeting with Fraser, should the Governor General have done it. He asked you that? Yes, he asked me that. I said, no. I said he should have went to him. Actually, what I said was before you're coming, Prime Minister. It's not really within my reading me. But since you asked, no.

You should have waited to money, tried out. It should have done it immediately. But what was interesting is, having said that, he seemed unconcerned that I didn't agree with him. Now, that was not, and this is the other interesting thing, I know at least one senior officer in PM&C who had been working very close to with the Labor government, the Whitlam government, disappears for a time,

that is brought back, and he's brought back to a senior job in Prime Minister and Cabinet. one of Fraser's advisors thinks that I mean this is a decision for the secretary not for the

Prime Minister but thinks that the Prime Minister should know that he's about to get a key advisor who worked closely with the Labor

government and Fraser apparently stuck his jaw out and said so is he any good didn't care as long as they were good

you didn't care who they'd work for that was their job you know In that sense, that's a lot more tolerant than I suspect most people would have given credit for. It's interesting his sort of theory of government. He saw it as, I think at the end of the book, you write this.

He saw it as a kind of job of continuous administration. And he says that he would actually be proud to have administered the government well than to be known for any single achievement. Yeah, it was a really interesting, I mean, interesting, we actually, not the one I would expect. It fits, do you know, the Oakshot? Michael Oakshot.

Michael Oachottson's definition of governing. Is this the boundless and bottomless sea? Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a, political activity meant sail a boundless and bottomed the sea, there's neither harper of a shelter nor a pointed destination. The enterprise is to keep a float on an even keel. The sea is both friend and foe, and seamanship consist in using the resources of a traditional

matter of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion. The previous line is, in government, people are not offered the black sheet of infinite opportunity, which is a phrase I love. That is his image. I mean, I quote it in the book because it really came back to when I taught first year politics, that was one of the definitions I gave them.

Yeah. That politics, there is not a end point. Right. Politics is about keeping things going. You're never going to solve in inverted commerce, poverty. Poverty becomes relative. You never get to solve

the economic problem. There is this constant attempt under new circumstances to work out what we're going to do with the economy. You don't ameliorate, get things off the agenda, but they can always blow up again. Yeah. It's not, I did this, I did that. He said, because you may have made a complete mess of several other things. Right. It's the overall picture that he thought was important. And that's how he governed. Yeah, it also helped me understand. how to make sense of his legacy, because in policy terms, the Fraser government was an underwhelming government. But I guess maybe that wasn't quite the test that he was holding himself to.

Well, he won three elections would be his answer to that. Well, that'll be one of the answers. and certainly the notions of economic rationalism, if that's the word, that dries in the party, only start emerging in about 1980. So for the first five years, at least part of it was trying to say, we're a competent, if boring. I mean, government, the notion, lying he out, I want to get politics off the front page, which he didn't do. But you can't. But the, that level governing was, I suspect, what he was very much saw his role. A couple of years ago, I had an assume Taleb on the podcast. And one of the most important life rules I've taken from Taleb is that you can't reason properly about any domain until you know

whether it's thin-tailed or fat-tailed. In a thin-tailed domain like human height, the average tells you almost everything. In a fat-tailed domain like wealth or pandemics or book sales, a tiny number of extreme cases drive almost all the variants. Charity, as it turns out, is fat-tailed. By giving to the best charities, you can often have 100 times the impact of the average donor. Givewell evaluates charities purely on cost-effectiveness, its top four charities, which include medicine to prevent malaria and cash incentives for routine childhood vaccinations, save a statistical life for somewhere between $3,500 and $5,500 US dollars. Effective Altruism Australia is how Australians give to those charities tax deductibly and with 100% pass-through. Until June 30, 2026,

Effective Altruism Australia is matching new donations up to $300,000. To donate, go to eaaa.org.com slash Joe Walker. That's e-a-a-org. dot-a-u-a-u-a-u-a-L-K-E-R. How do you think your book changed how Fraser saw himself and his job? I have no idea. Do you know if he read it?

Oh, I'm sure he's read it, because I think he grumbled once about it. And the last time I saw him he cut me dead. What did he say to it? I don't. Well, I just ignored you. Well, give the lecture I walked up to say hello. at one.

Oh, wow. I think he comes off pretty well in the... No, I think he probably does too. I think it's a different phrase for the people that certainly would talk about in 1975. I wasn't trying to make him come out particularly well. I always find it quite difficult if you finish the book on someone

to then try and talk to them about it. The other one on John Button. And John's only had one conversation, really, with me about it. John said, well, you wrote as though I wasn't paying adequate attention to the management of the department. I didn't think that was my job. Okay, I should have picked that up. You know, I should have made the point that he didn't see if it's his job. But now, of course, some ministers do, most ministers don't.

But having a conversation about, did I get you right? I suspect that will be quite difficult. I do my best shot at trying to see what happens. I haven't had a discussion with RAD either, by the way. Oh, interesting. So, okay, so for people's context, the three kind of Caro-esque studies of political leaders in power and how they, the practices by which they governed are the Fraser book,

the John Button book. Yeah. Dodging raindrops. Yep. And then the Kevin... He hated the title. Oh, really? And then there's Kevin Rudd.

The Kevin Rudd book. Now, there's a distinction which I'll give. The Kevin Rudd book was largely written while he was in office. I was asked if I'd like to write a study of a Prime Minister in power in office. And therefore, I actually had an office in the cabinet. It's sweet. It wasn't allowed to see cabinet documents, but I could

talk to a lot of people around the government. I wrote the book and on a couple of occasions I was allowed to sit in on his meeting with his advisors. On one occasion I sat in

while he had a meeting with international leaders about the GFC. I was out of shot. So it was really interested being able to see that. So Rudd was, it was a different one because he was still worried about what was happening now. And I suspect, you know, because he was prime minister for much of the time.

And therefore, acknowledging mistakes were something which Fraser was prepared to do. But Rudd was uncomfortable with the notion I would write it up. I mean, on one occasion, which is written up there, I was going to sit in while he had a meeting with public servants, about 30 of him, because he was going to a G-O-8, I think, and he wanted to be briefed, and I sat there with the public servants for an hour and a half while we waited for the Prime Minister to arrive, which was an appalling characteristic of his government, which his sense of timing was very different from, say, John Hart, who was always up

time for meeting. So he was a prime minister of great talent, but a prime minister who upset quite a lot of people on the way through. So have I talked to him about it? No. Do I know what he thinks about it? Well, I know what he quotes from him when he writes his own books.

But interesting process, sitting there while what is happening. To what extent, Can your studies of political leaders in power be used as manuals by political practitioners, like Machiavelli's the Prince? I'm not going to start comparing myself to Bakkevalli. No, I think there's a difference. Machiavelli was consciously trying to use it to teach lessons.

I mean, the prince sees how a prince should behave. And even if Caesar Borges, the person he's talking about most of the time, Much of the time, it's not an account of seizure bourgeois behavior at any given time. These books are not trying to be manuals at all. They are saying, this is how this person operated in government. But to what extent could they be picked up? Oh, other people could they, like, and be co-opted as a manual? Oh, people could draw the lessons from it.

but that wasn't my intent. My intent was to, you know, when we were talking, I mean, the lovely sideline is a thing called Weller's Law. You started as Wheeler, I think, W-E-I-L-R, but it's one of the, it's not me, by the way, but it's one of those interesting comments that nothing is impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it. Yeah.

And whenever you look at observers, it's always so easy. to do this, do that, do the other. It's obvious that you should have done that. I'm interested in actually asking them what they thought about these sorts of things, why they did or they didn't do that, because looking over their shoulder is much more interesting than lecturing them on how they should behave.

And I think if you understand how they see the world, and this is on the book I'm writing on secretaries, you know, what's your job? you know, how do you deal with difficult circumstances? It's much more useful to get their view, the me tell them what their view should be. So I, in that sense, is it a manual? No, it's not a Machiavelli, it's a counter of how a number of people understood the job, interpreted the job. I mean, go back to Fraser for a moment, because I think it, I asked him, when you got into the office,

What were the first things you chose to do? He looked at me slightly askance and said, it's not like that, the things you just do. The job determines what it is. You are going in, I'm going to do this or that or the other. These are the things I have to do because I'm prime minister. And the job determines the way that you're going to do it. And I noticed when, you know, it would be quite interesting to try and do the manual thing.

I noticed in the session you had with Terry Moran and Glenn. Glenn says somebody, it quotes me, should interview them all about what they thought the job wasn't how what it went. And I think that's what you should do. I think you should go and actually talk to us a group of prime ministers and say just those sorts of questions. You know, what did you learn about being prime minister? So it becomes a set of exercises on, you know, what was, what worked, what didn't work, what I thought I was doing, et cetera. That would be a, it would indeed be a really interesting exercise. I have to think about that.

I'm not the person to do. You may be. If I did sit down with a few former prime ministers, what are some questions you think I should ask them? It's sort of things like, how do you get there? What's the job? How do you understand the job? Because I think that becomes quite important

if they are running it on a day-to-day show or actually thinking they have some sort of vision that the people outside need to, understand. I do think they do need some sort of idea about what we're doing.

Strategic plans are overdoing it for governments and circumstances change. But too many of them seem to have survival as the be-all

and end-all. What you want to do? Well, do, leaving no worse after when I got there. I just think it would be, I'm really interested in how they see the job, what they see as the priorities, how much they, who they could trust. I mean, it's not a job with many friends. Until your book on Fraser,

I don't think there was another book in any Westminster system country that offered a, a detailed study of a prime minister in power as distinct from a biography or an autobiography. There are plenty of biographies, but you're not, this isn't really a biography. It's a study of Markham Fraser as prime minister. And of course, that's the power bit.

Yes. It's the carot bit. How did he use his power? Yes. And the way to do it comes out of the Hekler-Wydowski, which is to say, they make the decisions. Our job is to understand why they make the decisions.

Right, right. But are there, since that was published, we've got the Kevin Rudd book now, which is another one of yours. Are there any other book-length studies of Prime Minister's in power? In Australia, or anywhere.

In Australia, not that are consciously worried about how they operated in power. So it's still just these. I think it is. I mean, the red one was a little more, chronological. Jack the nose

wrote a very good book on Deakin, but he's a historian. And Jeff Bolton's had a couple of good books. I think he went one on Barton. There's a book on Scullin by John Robertson. Alan Marcy in those

two volumes, study of Menzies. Now, they were all historians. So they were asking, in a sense, how did it happen and what did we understand about? the person. I have this odd combination, perhaps,

of being a historian by inclination since the age of about 12, to finding myself in a politics department, purely by accident, absolutely by accident, with an interest in those questions about power and process and routine and how those things shape what people choose to do.

So yeah, it's a different sort of book. I noticed at one stage, I think it's in this actually. Somebody says the best five books written on prime ministers was Judith Brett. The Deacon one? No, Judith Brett, I think, on Menzies. Oh, yeah. The, me, the nose, I forget one of the other two.

Oh, yeah. One on Keating by Lennsies. leading heart. So most of these weren't actually books traditional biographies. I mean, the nose was, but the other ones were all approaching it from a different sort of angle. And the idea was to say, how do we understand the prime minister who's there? How do we understand what it is that drove them and how they managed to succeed? I mean, I'm quite consciously say, when their front door closes, I'm not interested. And I'm not a scientist. And I'm not a decoratist. So I don't even pretend to understand the psychology, prime ministers. I would make

a fool of myself if I did. And I'm not interested in their private life. So I don't write a study looking at the agonizing of this, that or the other that may have happened. I suspect both of them probably would have been quite good examples. somebody with that sort of skill. Which Prime Minister doesn't have a Pat Weller slash Bob Carrow-style book written about them that you'd love to see one written for? Well, you see, I think you can do better than, or very difficult to do better than Watson on Keating.

It's so idiosyncratic. But it's such a vivid picture, even if it's infuriated Keating, who thinks that, Probably recently they'd come and go so fast that, um, I mean, if they're even worth it? How did they come and go so fast at the moment? Fraser was interesting. I'm not sure a couple of the recent ones are.

When I want to spend five years doing it, probably not. Right. You need a good subject if you're going to do that. Say we did have 10 or 20 Pat Wellers, and we had a book. like your book about Fraser for every Prime Minister in Australian history. That'd be great. Yeah. If we had that, and maybe it's a little too late now because a lot of people have passed away,

but say we did, we're in that universe where we had all this, we had a Pat Weller-style book for every Australian Prime Minister in history. What do you think we would learn from the collection of books? So I'm abstracting away from particular things about how we're going to be. which Prime Minister govern. What are the problems of governing? I mean, that well as law. You know, everything is possible for the person who doesn't have to do it.

Our Prime Ministers are not fooled. They don't lack ambition. They wouldn't have got there. And many of them are quite bright if so, you know. Why is it so difficult? Well, I think I know to some extent why it's difficult. There's a pile of material that's coming. We don't know the answers.

answers and governing I think is becoming infinitely more difficult which I quibble with you about on your reform yeah the staff um we'll come to that yeah the because you don't I mean for as I mentioned with Fraser he had a am he at PM you know you could go on 730 report or late light but that was pretty well it and you could plan your day around the media reactions. Now you just have to sit in a prime minister's office to know, boom, boom, boom, boom, bu.

You know, it's happening much of the time about what are we doing about this? What are we doing about that? The speed of which is happening, the deep fake stuff, which of these stories are even true? That's not the first time. People told lies about people,

but it circulates at exponentially fast speed and it's getting faster. So I would really like to know about how they see those sorts of changes. Now, I'm accused by some of my academic colleagues of assuming that it was always like this. And they say, but now, now politics has come much faster, etc. and prime ministers are much less, much more demanding. I don't think human nature has changed. I don't think the politicians have changed.

I don't think suddenly the current group are greedier for power than many of the people 120, 130 years ago. I think that if you really want to take keep back and look at Woolpole in Britain. And it's a great book, which I bought when I was an undergraduate and should have read, but did for a long time, called the Structural Politics by Lewis Namia. And it's about the nitty gritty about how people maintain their numbers by organizing candidates, by persuading the opposition to go away, by giving money, by a whole range of things that they did in order to keep a majority, not by party, but by a process of

political manipulation. We now don't do it through parties. Okay, it's different. I don't think the humans are different. I don't think that you can say that prime ministers now are greedier for power than Billy Hughes, who's always the one I use. I mean, Billy Hughes was outrageous in the way that he behaved. Oh, Fitzhardy's book on Hughes is quite good too. That's a long way back. I mean, Hughes used to make decisions and announce them. He used to undermine anyone and everybody.

The deputy prime minister then was a bloke called W.A. W. W. who was a Victorian Premier also happens to be my wife's great uncle and when he Hughes was overseas during the First World War

yeah sorry just on that yeah it's crazy I don't know if many people know this but Hughes governed Australia from Britain for about 16 months yes that's what I was about to say yeah and he was insisting that he see every cabinet decision

And I pointed out the price. By the time you've got a decision, you've coded it, you've sent it it to him, you decoded it, he replies, the cost of each of those was about the price of a small house in Melbourne. So they must have been spending millions of dollars on telegrams? Yes. Wow. An awful amount of time. Yeah, he governed for 18, 15 months, and he didn't want them to make any decisions. And then when what went overseas as treasurer,

And so just for people's context, it's sort of towards the end of the First World War, 1918, 1919. And that's why he's in Britain. He's in Britain because he's got Versailles. Right. And maybe he originally goes via maybe Canada, then America, then Britain, then aside. It's outrageous behavior. And then what, as Deputy Prime Minister of Treasurer, wants to be asked about his own portfolio. And he said, why?

So what resides Because Hughes Wanted to be treated one way And he treated the other people With completely stained I mean eventually he lost government because of it I lost the position because of it I mean he was a horrible little man

So the notion that somehow Modern politicians are Greedy and more cynical Than people are huge I think is the nonsense So what we need to understand is how systems have changed and how technology's changed. So that what they, and how the role of government has changed.

So that they're doing things in government now, they wouldn't have dreamt of doing 100 years ago. A lot of the things now being done, they're getting involved in with state problems, they're not theirs. So I think what you need to do is actually say to prime ministers, you know, what's different? I mean Menzies went to Britain by boat It took three, four weeks

He was out of touch What would he have been doing on those voyages That seems like such a luxury for a modern politician He was going from London to New York Yeah When the Korean War broke out Yeah But how would he, how do you think he would use his time?

Would he be reading? I haven't got a clue I've got pictures of him walking around deck with the secretary of the department. But the deputy premier, Prime Minister, Artie Fadden, was asked by the British, are you going to be there in

Korea? And he couldn't contact for Menzies. So he had made the decision and he was dead scared. So Fraser, I mean, Menzies arrived in New York. Why was he scared? Because he had announced that Australia

would support the UN in the Korean War without asking the Prime minister. Oh, I see. Because he couldn't contact the prime minister because he was on a boat. So they'd get there and Fraser, I mean, Fraser, sorry, Benzzi's sort of, yeah, okay, but there was this time in which Fadden couldn't contact him. Now, you're never out of contact now.

I mean, Fraser's time you're okay when you were flying somewhere. Right. Yeah, the irony is that it would be much easier to govern Australia from Britain today because of modern telecommunications. Yes. You could do it. So it's, my view

when you talk about the role of prime ministers is not that they've become different in what they're treated to do. I mean, Terry Moran said, why would you try and do it if you're flying?

And his answer was because you can. You know, why would a prime minister want to give orders? Because he could. You don't become prime minister in this issue.

What do you exercise your authority? they once come Prime Minister by mistake So I think that's what I mean yes politics has dramatically changed But the people running it happen You need a public service which has that capacity To understand what's happening

So that it can have the basis of answering ministerial requests Yeah Now the public service in course of days views were very limited. Yeah. But they had much less to do. And the biggest change for government was one is war,

but the other is Keynes. You know, the white paper on employment. So suddenly government has a macroeconomic responsibility from 1945 onwards. which means it's interested in everything. And then you start interpreting the Constitution to allow it to give grants on such terms and conditions, it's section 96 that it sees fit. Yeah.

So these are all circumstances which have changed the role of the Prime Minister. There's a question that's been bugging me for a couple of years now. How can Australia get a piece of the AI action? In particular, should we try to become a... Sam Altman has suggested we could, a data center capital of the world. I recently worked through this question with Greg and Ewan from E61, a non-partisan Economic Research Institute focused on Australian public policy. It was a real joy sitting down with two of Australia's sharpest economists to apply some

rigor to my nagging question. What we found surprised me. In the long run, the financial returns to data centers may actually be modest, more like returns for electricity generation than for iron ore. But there is still a case for government support for data centers if they produce national benefits that aren't captured in the private returns. For example, we discuss how a compute industry could be important to Australia's sovereignty. We unpack these arguments and more in a new special edition for E61's Plus 61 newsletter. To receive a copy of our essay on data centers and the compute economy, go to E60s.

I-N-I-N-S-J-W-W-W-W-W-K-W-K-E. Are there any interesting or instructive historical examples of how new technologies have changed practices of government? So, for example, I mean, I've been reading this book recently. It's called Under the Wire. It's about how the Telegraph changed diplomacy. centralized foreign ministries, sped up international crises. Well, the whole telecommunication thing has changed.

How government works. How government works. Yeah. I mean, because you can get a meet, I mean, they say you get on a plane and you use the time flying to Britain or something as a opportunity to work. Because you're on the phone with everyone,

whereas you used not to be. It feels like there's less thinking time. Like if we go back to Menzies, Menzies kind of three-week voyages, I imagine those would have been quite productive. Yeah. Because ideas are kind of gestating. He might have moments of insight. He was walking around the deck with the secretary of his department. Yeah.

So, you know, what are we talking about, Alan? Yeah. Yeah. I think pace is the thing. I mean, people can react within moments and do. Yeah. And feel they have to. Yeah.

So that the way in which government works actually is being much more rushed about. Do you think prime ministers need more time to just be able to think uninterrupted? Well, that depends if they have a sensible capacity to think. I mean, there's this Amos-Diverski quote, which is people waste years by not being able to waste hours. Yeah. I think you can, yes, they need time to think. Yes, they need time to talk it over. Do they have it? Not necessarily. I mean, but the other interesting thing, and here's another contrast, talking about Glenn and the difference between governments. when Glynn was Secretary of the Cabinet office

he would see the Premier morning and evening and probably four or five times tweet they were each into a corridor he sees the Prime Minister in cabinet possibly one meeting for briefing cabinets and hardly anymore so and much

of the instructions come This is universal, come through the chief of staff. So it's a different sort of relationship which exists at the different levels of government. And that's not getting any easier. I mean, when ministers first came to Cambridge, they worked out of parliament. Because many of their departments were in Melbourne, and they didn't have them. Now they've all got offices if they once in Cambridge. they never use them.

You know, they work out in Parliament. That's now, the difference between Britain and Australia is, in Britain, the Secretary of the Department of the Minister have basically adjacent offices. Here, they're 15 miles apart. And that changes the way that it operates as well. So a brief biographical interlude, obviously we're very grateful that you brought yourself to Australia. But I'm curious why you chose Australia.

So you're a young man, an Oxford graduate, you've got the world at your feet, why you chose to came to Australia, and then why you stayed, and then why you have made Australia the focus of your academic work? Load of accidents. Right. Why Australia? Well, it only cost 10 quid. I could see if I stayed in England exactly what my future would look like. Which was? I would end up teaching it at private.

school for the next 40 years. And I would be bored stick after the first 10 of them. It didn't appeal to me. So where do I go? Well, I thought Australia looked possibly interesting. I wrote to Australia. I wrote to New Zealand. New Zealand said, no thanks.

Australia said yes. So I come to Australia with $100. And a few addresses from girls I met in Kangaroo Valley, which is, by the way, the 1960s name for Earl's Court, because it was full of Australians, going home for a period of time. One of them, her mother's house in Doublebeck. So I sort of went to stay there for a bit.

The ultimate irony, I met her sister, whose name was Ross, who had a daughter called Gretelor, and a husband called Kerry. The Packers? The Packers. So I literally had few contacts, not a lot of money, and just went for the hell of it,

and I was there for two years, which was what you were hard to do if you didn't want to pay your fareback. I applied for a teaching job, and when I was there, it was a pretty awful place. I applied for a lectureship in history at the University of Tasmania. Now, it was utterly outrageous. I was not qualified for the job, but I didn't know much about it. I got a letter back quite reasonably saying that it has been given to Dr. Sonson, so-sense.

and the professor was wondering if you'd be interested in a tutorship. So I said, sure. Museum in Sydney gave the Parliament, he says at the end of it, anything you want to know? I said, yeah, how did I do? He said, I had a job, yours if you wanted. Not something you would do now. So I went to Tas.

And he told me, well, you better start doing some research. Gave me this book on parties. Why don't you do Tasmania in the second half of the 19th century? So I started on that. After a year, he came back and said, you went to leave. Do you want to be an academic? I said, yes, well, go to the A&U and do a PhD.

And in the way when I'd been visiting people, the two authors of that, Alan Martin's a historian, Peter, Peter Lovday is a political scientist. When I went to see them, Alan was busy, so Peter did all sorts of things about how it did. So I rang him and said,

if I come, when you supervise me. So I ended up in a politics department. I have never done a politics course in my life, apart from the PhD. And it sort of took off from there, did half a dozen books with different people that ended up at Griffith, and they gave me a chair.

So pure, a series of accident. I like it's a complete series of accidents. I mean, if you had asked me, when I was graduating through university, that one, I would teach at a university in three hours, in 40 years as a professor somewhere and just thought that that was in Australia,

I would have laughed. Yeah. And you'll be sitting doing this thing called a podcast with this Australian guy talking about your books about Australian Prime Minister. I say I'd go back to England tomorrow probably for the last time. I'm right there and I didn't stay there. So I'm perfectly happy that I came here.

So was it planned? No. Would I ever have? have told you where I ended up, no. I remember saying at one stage, I'd never want to be in a research shop. I want to be a teaching job, and the one place I'd never live is in Queensland.

You know, all of, all of it, well, that was Jelke Petus. Yeah. All of which have now disappeared. So I hope I've done reasonably well in what I do. I keep doing it because I'm not very good at anything else. Well, we've got your monument. sitting all around us on the table.

We've got that monuments in a couple watercum. I want to ask about Australia versus other Westminster systems. So it seems that Australian cabinets place a greater emphasis on collective decision-making than their counterparts in the United Kingdom or Canada. Certainly than the United Kingdom. Yeah. Canada has a larger cabinet and much more. consciously representative functions.

That's to say, it doesn't matter that much in Australia which state you come from. I mean, it may, when you get it, in order to get into the capital, for some occasions, and when Labor Party starts dividing it up on a number of New South Wales

right that you could have, and Ed Hughes gets up on the backbench that said as Dreyfus. Neither wish deserved it. but Canada is even more representative of factions and areas of places and because it tends not to have an inner cabinet then much more has to be done by the ad hoc committees of organized around the prime minister and the senior ministers

so in that sense is different Britain has always been more prime minister So what are the historical or cultural explanations for the difference between us and Britain in that regard? Why did we diverge from the more prime ministerial style? Because from the very beginning, prime ministers were elected by the party. Oh, I see, I see. So that you could actually go back, and this all came, this is all part of my PhD thesis. You let's go back to the 1890s when the parties that they had often elected their leaders.

And the notion they can elect also means you can fire. So it certainly, I mean, it didn't happen much in the first 50 years. But after the Gorton case, it has always been understood that opposition leaders or ministers can challenge the leadership for the party. And if you're challenging a prime minister and you take over, you become prime minister. So prime ministers have to be, I suspect, rather more cautious. I mean, in a way that Starr was now finding out, cautious about maintaining support within the cabinet.

I mean, Thatcher eventually lost office because they had started introducing. producing a system in Britain. Up until the 1960s, the British Prime Minister, as you would probably know, emerged. There was never a vote. Somebody took soundings to find out who had the most support. I actually didn't know that. So when Butler and Macmillan are being considered after Eden gets sick and Sonsby took soundings of the Conservative Party probably in and out of parliament but to say that

you know it's going to be Bobbittie I was going to be Macbillard and it was so distasteful that they in the 60s introduced the system for electing them but they didn't introduce a system for removing them

so it is a fact is been really difficult to get rid of party. Now, in Australia, Menzies stands down in 1940 because it's obviously not the support of the party. They

didn't actually get around to sacking anyone, I think, until much later. But for a very early stage, they've been much more democratic about the way that parties even meet. I mean, I tell you, you know,

caucus met for the first time in 1901. Regardless of the time, it continued to meet, and occasionally the people were a bit ingenuous about what was happening. But it always understood that it elected the party leader. In Britain, there isn't such a thing as a party meeting. And if it is, it's got 300 people in it and you can't manage it. So the back-based...

committee and a conservative is the 22 committee, in which the backbenchers will meet and express their opinions, but they never actually meet the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Whereas in our case, the Cabinet and the Prime Minister have a, when Parliament is sitting weekly with the party, and the party can express its opinions, and the party expects to be listened to to some extent. So the dynamic is very difficult. Canada's like Britain. I mean, Canada has had a number of occasions when the Prime Minister's standing in the polls is under 20%. Now, that wouldn't have any. If you have a Prime Minister that's got 20% standing, he'd have been gone.

Whereas Barone, for instance, was on 19%. When finally, he was persuaded that he couldn't win the next election, so he stood down and, oh, what's her name? I can't remember. The Canadian Prime Minister took over for three months before she lost the election. So that's the... So that carries on to cap it, I think, to that makes that makes total sense. So then I wonder whether Rods changes to how the labour leadership is chosen in 2013 will result in less collective decision-making for Labour governments.

Well, Labor's always been collective in the sense that, of course, the other issue is that the Prime Minister doesn't pick the ministers. Yes, true. So that... Breaks those patronage links. Yes. So Chifley had to have Eddie Ward and Arthur Cornwall in his cabinet, and he couldn't have settled. And that makes... I mean, then you have all sorts of ways about how you have to try to organize the way the cabinet works.

The Conservatives are not quite the same but all the ministers are expected to turn up to cabinet meeting to party meetings and so you have your weekly party meetings why ministers are so we leave when Parliament doesn't sit I mean Parliament in Australia sits

from about one third the time of the British or Canadian parliaments and most six days a year in Britain and Canada I think it's closer to 160 massive difference that's interesting massive difference so why don't they sit if they don't like it they much prefer to me

somewhere else what do you think is the better system I think they're different yeah I mean the consequence is that the parliament meets much more regularly in Britain but question time is different because in Australia

all ministers can be asked questions at any session in Britain they have set days. You have one day a week, which is prime ministerial question time. Here the prime minister has to turn up every day and invariably gets a fair chunk of the questions. Canada's closer to Australia, I think, in that case. So the parliament has developed,

the committees are much more powerful in Britain. So they've got the same, I call them sort of cousins. They've got the same heritage, but they're now quite different in the way that they operate. And the other thing is that there is comparatively little discipline in Britain. So that, what's his name? The leader of the Labour Party. Kirstarmo?

No, no, the previous one. Jeremy Corbyn? Yeah, Jeremy Corby, ventured against his government about 300 times. He'd be lucky to get away with it once in Australia. So, I mean, partly the numbers are much bigger. I mean, you've got six, seven, seven hundred members. So on the whole, majorities tend to be much bigger, so single people don't matter. But the notion for a long time that you could vote against your party without any consequences.

I mean, the Kelligan government lost a large number of votes in Parliament. we just announced they weren't loads of confidence and until you announced one was you didn't care much or something or you so there's a different notion of the notion of discipline which comes I mean but the argument always at the caucus was everyone turns up to caucus

everyone has a voice and the party is bound by what the party the majority beating in caucus decide Now, the ministry doesn't often lose, but it's still got to get that stage that you've got to get that caucus there. In Britain, you don't. I mean, the Whips blackmail people, they have all sorts of information about it. But the capacity to oppose is much greater. So that changed the dynamic, I think.

Right, right. There are two ways of becoming a minister. one is to crawl up on your knees and count out of the prime minister and the others to scream from the ramparts in opposition but they said for God's sake don't muddle the two because occasionally you know a merely outspoken opposition person is much better in having a cabinet show him up so I want to ask you some questions now about why the reform era ended in Australia so if we take Roth Garner's definition of the reform era as being from 1983 to 2000.

So starting with the floating of the dollar, ending with the introduction of the GST. There's this interesting question as to white ended why we didn't keep up the pace of massive reforms. And I've been writing an essay on this, which I shared with you yesterday. I'm just curious to hear whether you think I got anything wrong or if there's some bigger picture that I missed. Well, I think it's a bigger picture. Yeah, so tell me what the bigger picture is. Our politics has always been rabid. I mean, it's the Victoria in 1970s, the mace goes missing,

and everyone knows it's sitting in a brothel somewhere in Melbourne. Billy Hughes talks about, you know, deacon at being, you know, like a child in a touch, some being grabbed out, just kicking and streaming. the rhetoric on the conscription campaign was vicious, vicious. The 1930s, when you had the Depression, the Depression, what the opposition did then to prevent things happening, to have any attempt to solve the sorts of problems

with what turned out to be changed in solutions, were illogical. The split in 1955, 1995, 1956 in Victoria, There was more hatred out in that than there has been for anything. I mean, our politics never know worse than they were. The Australians have always, I mean, I always argue Australian symbolism, military in Britain, they are slightly different, more strategic perhaps. But, you know, your language in Australian is rugged.

It doesn't matter if you hit over the head with an axe or stab them. in the back with a stiletto, which is my Britain is still dead. But I'm not sure it's worse now that it has been. Yeah, that's interesting. So I want to... But this is my comment about human nature, you see, hasn't changed. Yeah.

The methods they've used. Yeah, yeah. I'm conscious, I'm going to jump around a bit here, but that's because I've got a few different kind of questions that you've raised for me. So one is how well-run... were the, if you know this, how well run were the Deakin and Fisher cabinets? Well, if you reduce the amount that they had to do, the carrot cabinet has to do by about 70%,

probably quite well run. Yeah. Because you've got six or seven people. Yeah. You've got a very small number of people. Dealing with a much, much narrower range of topics than you have. now. Is that merely a function of the Commonwealth

having fewer powers? It's the function of the Commonwealth you see, the Commonwealth starts. Well, sorry, I mean, they've always had the same amount of, well, we added a few through referenda, but the High Court gave them increasingly expensive interpretation. The High Court gave them increasing it, and they increasingly started using

96, and then they have agreements on the Grants Commission coming up in 1928. Yeah. So to start with, they have three quarters or two-thirds or something as customs and excises. Yeah. So for the very beginning, they're looking at ways of expanding their exercise. But on the whole, you have to remember, this is a small group of middle-aged white males. Mm-hmm.

That helps. Who, and you've got seven or eight ministers maximum. And in the first one, three or four of them are being state premiers, which probably didn't help. But, I mean, Forrest and Barton and Deakin and, Deakin had been state premier, but Kingston. I think Forrest and Kingston, two of them hated each other. So it wasn't that easy as it went on, but it's a much smaller job, but a much smaller number of people. So, yeah, they probably look comparatively well-run. I see.

Because it strikes me that one thing those reform errors share in common is very well-run cabinets. Yeah. But now it's a different operation. And of course, at the time, he didn't have a Prime Minister's Department. Yeah. And... So the Chifley and Curtin cabinets were well run? Reasonably, if you allow Eddie Ward to... Yeah. Shoot off his mouth of regular occasions. Chifley in particular was quite good at dealing with Eddie Ward.

Right. He was a complete sort of I'll look at a wrong word, but still But again, smaller, 15 people Yeah, yeah The job of Prime Minister sounds a lot easier 100 years ago than it would be today Yeah, but you haven't got any of the support you had now

And you haven't got any of the technology you had now You're writing letters, you're reading letters, you were But of course you were dealing with less things. Yeah. And I'm not sure of any of our prime ministers kept a private practice going on anything. Was that a thing in Britain? Oh, not prime ministers, no.

But certainly MPs did. Yeah, yeah. Do you think the quality of Australian political leaders has been declining over the last several decades? I don't reckon it's been declining. Are there any trends? Oh yeah, I mean, but there are trends in which one would expect. I wrote a piece in 1986,

which was titled Politics's First Career. Because up until that time, often people went and made a career for themselves and they went into politics at the age of 40. Now, of course, we have far more who are going through ministerial staff positions and are getting into politics 10, 15 years younger.

but they are almost all graduates. That may or may not be a good thing. So we're getting them better qualified to think about things. We don't get the key things. Yeah. But are there trends in the quality, if you could somehow create an index of political leadership quality, does that line just look flat from?

No, because Lyons was a dullard, Scully was a failure. um fadden was pretty second rate Holt was pedestrian uh Gorton was entertaining

McMahon was awful you know I mean you see I I can't see how you you can't do it on qualifications because of course a hundred years ago

5% of the people went to university now were at 40, 45% We didn't have people with the ministerial staff experience because you didn't have any ministerial staff, which is a post-witlam exercise. So we're getting different groups. I mean, we're certainly now getting a much greater trend of people who cut their teeth in student politics, but then go on to staff jobs, which means they have a whole range of experience about politics, which may be good or bad.

And then the circumstances they find themselves in. I mean, it's easy to shine under some prime ministers and not under others. I'm avoiding the question because I don't know how to answer it. My man is a bad question. But that's, that's important. No, no, that's right. That's right. But I learn either way.

Last question. Yep. If you could summarize the course of your academic, career as sort of a journey to ask a single question, what would that question be? And then how has the answer to that question changed over time? Why do actors make the choices they do? That leaves me a whole range of actors I can talk about. But it is, of course, ministers, prime ministers, public servants, departmental secretaries. And when I, I was writing about IOs on the same sort of ways about, you know,

Director General's and people there. Because I think that it's too easy to be the glib sort of well-a-law. You know, everything's possible if you don't have to do it. I want to know what's possible, what they think is possible. It may be that sometimes they are narrower than they need being, and sometimes they're not. But I can't tell that. understanding what they're doing.

So all these things basically, perhaps not those, well, that one anyway, are about trying to understand, look over their shoulder and understand the job that they do. On the grounds that when we understand that, we can actually sensibly talk about what we can do about it. Too often people write a piece about Government should do this.

It just turns out they've written a thesis, which said that, and they're now trying to sell their ideas to government. There are three rules for governments or, you know, this is in every time you see an opening copy of Mandarin, you know, it's somebody's writing about the three rules which will solve the problem. There are no silver bullets.

It's a matter of judgment and skill and knowledge. And if I can get them thinking about how are we doing it, that I receive a reasonable purpose. But I have no ideas. I mean, it's a modest ambition, I hope. But then I think academics have an awful lot to be modest about. That's a funny and suitably humble note to finish on. Thanks for being so generous for your time.

And thank you for all of your incredible work. It's a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, you can support. the show by leaving a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or by subscribing on YouTube. Thanks to this episode sponsors, you can find them in the episode description, and thanks to Bill Manos and the Manos Foundation for their generous patronage of the show. If you'd like to become a sponsor or patron, you can go to j-nwpod.com slash sponsor or email me at joe at j-nwpod.com.

That's J-O-E at J-W-P-O-D.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time, chow.