The Joe Walker Podcast - Outlining My Live Events in 2025

Episode Date: December 29, 2024

To get tickets, email [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi everyone, this is an announcement for my Australian audience, so if you're not in Australia feel free to skip this or come along for the ride, you might find parts of this announcement interesting. In early 2025 I'll be hosting a series of live podcast conversations, or salons as I'm calling them, in Sydney and Melbourne. Each salon will focus on a different Australian policy issue ranging from immigration and inequality to housing and defense. Why am I calling these events salons? I'll explain that in a moment, but first, here's the format for these events.

Salons will be held on Thursdays in Melbourne and Wednesdays in Sydney. Doors will open at 6pm for a 6.30pm start. For each salon, I've handpicked an expert guest. For the first hour or so, I'll engage the guest in conversation. I'll ask the questions that I want to ask. It'll basically be a live recording of my podcast. Then we'll switch to audience questions. And after that, we'll have an informal meet and greet to keep the conversation going. I'm particularly excited for the audience Q&As and the meet and greets. Having met many people in my Australian audience, I think it might be one of the smartest

audiences in the country. So I'm quietly betting that the quality of the audience questions is going to be two standard deviations better than the quality of audience questions at a typical live event. At the end of this announcement, I'll take you through the guests and topics I've picked for each salon. But before we get to that, why am I calling them salons? A salon in this context is a semi-structured social gathering held for the purpose of exchanging ideas. Historically, these were usually literary or philosophical ideas, but we're going to be discussing policy ideas. I'm definitely not claiming to recreate 18th century Paris here, but my purpose is to bring together a community of thoughtful Australians. And the salons are particularly timely given the federal election in early 2025, which I predict will be running

during our salon series. In the spirit of the salons of the French Enlightenment, my policy salons will be intimate, high-quality discussions. They're not public lectures. Availability is highly limited. Tickets are capped at about 50 to 100 people per event, depending on the event. At the very end of this announcement, I'll share how listeners of this podcast can get tickets.

But next, let me tell you about the program. There'll be six salons in total, two in Melbourne and four in Sydney. I thought carefully about the perfect guest for each, and I'm very lucky that everyone I invited said yes. January 29th in Sydney, a salon on inequality with Andrew Lee. February 5th in Sydney, a salon on state capacity with Richard Holden and Stephen Hamilton. February 12th in Sydney, a salon on the housing crisis with Peter Tulip. February 26th in Sydney, a salon on defence with Sam Roggeveen. March 6th in Melbourne, a salon on compulsory voting and Australia's political culture with Judith Brett. Let me say a brief word about just the first three salons and why they excite me. So first up is Abel Rizvi on immigration. What's interesting about this one,

apart from the fact that it's a political minefield? Well, in 2001, Australia made a fateful decision that went largely unnoticed at the time, but would change Australia forever. We decided to massively increase our intake of skilled migrants, especially overseas students. In the two decades since, more than 2 million overseas students and working holidaymakers have migrated to Australia, many becoming permanent residents or citizens. This policy has helped slow our population aging and turned education into our third biggest export. But for better or for worse, the public discourse is increasingly linking immigration and housing affordability in a zero-sum way, and immigration is shaping up to be the dominant issue in the upcoming federal election,

similar to debates we've seen in Canada, the US and UK. Australia has never had an election fought primarily on these grounds before. So in light of all of that, wouldn't it be great to sit down with someone who not only has all of the academic research on immigration and population policy at their fingertips, but was also intimately involved in the design of Australia's modern migration system, and just asked them a bunch of questions about how the policy was originally designed and what well-managed migration would actually look like today. Well, I managed to track down precisely such a person for our first salon. Abel Rizvi is one of the key architects

of Australia's modern migration system. He was Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration. He managed Australia's migration program from 1995 to 2007, and he was instrumental in reshaping our migration policy in 2001 to focus on skilled migration. We're fortunate to be catching Abul for this salon while he happens to be in Melbourne. So if you're a Melburnian, come along to that on the 23rd of January. Okay, quickly on the next two salons. For our second salon, Andrew Lee joins us in Sydney. Andrew is Australia's Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury and Assistant Minister for Employment. Before politics, he was a Professor of Economics at ANU. He's the author of multiple books and is one of the Labor Party's true intellectuals. He's also one of Australia's leading thinkers on inequality,

a topic he's been researching for more than two decades, including for his Harvard PhD thesis. For this salon, I don't want to rehash the standard debates about inequality with Andrew. Rather, I'm keen to invite him to reflect on a fresh set of questions. A couple of questions I might explore with him are the extent to which wealth inequality can be boiled down just to housing inequality, and how Andrew thinks about the relationship between economic equality as measured by Gini coefficients and egalitarianism in the broader cultural sense. Given Andrew's role in the current government heading into an election campaign, we're very lucky he's giving us his time. So join

us for that event in Sydney on the 29th of January. The final salon I'll outline is the one with Richard Holden and Stephen Hamilton, also in Sydney. Richard and Steve are two of Australia's leading public policy economists. Richard is a professor of economics at UNSW. Steve is based overseas. He's assistant professor of economics at George Washington University. And we're very lucky we'll be catching him while he's out in Sydney for this salon. Steve and Richard recently teamed up to write a book about how Australian policymakers handled the pandemic. Now, I know we're all a bit fatigued

from talking about the pandemic, but this is really a book about Australian state capacity disguised as a book about the pandemic. And state capacity is really what I want to discuss. State capacity as a piece of jargon originates, I think, in the political science literature. It might sound dry, but it makes or breaks countries. Here, the state refers to a nation state and state capacity basically refers to the ability of a government to carry out its policy goals, its ability to get things done. Some of my listeners may already be familiar with the concept. It's risen in prominence in Silicon Valley in the last few years. A few years ago, for example, Tyler Cowen advanced an idea he called state capacity

libertarianism, the basic claim being that the more effective a government is, the less heavy handed it needs to be. Australia has very high state capacity by international standards. Any Aussie who's experienced trying to apply for a driver's license in, for example, almost any state in the US and entered that particular bureaucratic labyrinth will probably resonate with this. But the pressures of the pandemic exposed the unique nature of Australian state capacity in even more interesting ways. For example, we had one of the best designed economic responses to the pandemic in the world. People will remember the JobKeeper program, which kept companies connected to their employees,

even as the country went into shutdown. But what I didn't realize until I read Stephen Richard's book was that the JobKeeper program was made vastly more feasible by a new electronic payroll reporting system that the ATO finished rolling out just six months before the first COVID case arrived in Australia. It's called single touch payroll. It's a key piece of economic infrastructure. It exemplifies a country with high state capacity. It integrates into most businesses, electronic payroll or accounting software, both to reduce their reporting burden and to enhance tax compliance. Its rollout just in time for the pandemic was completely coincidental, but it was co-opted for JobKeeper and it enabled us to have one of the most effective economic policy responses

in the world. So it's seemingly boring things like that, things deep within the plumbing of the Australian administrative state that interest me. I plan to discuss things like this with Richard and Steve. I also plan to discuss what explains Australia's high level of state capacity. What is it about Australia's political culture that enables our administrative state to be so effective? And I'll also ask them about the paradox at the heart of our policy responses to the pandemic. How did a country that nailed its economic response simultaneously bungle its vaccine procurement strategy? And what does this contradiction reveal about the unique contours of Australian state capacity? So if you're in

Sydney, do come along to that salon on the 5th of February. So now I've outlined the first three salons. There are three more after those, but I won't make this announcement any longer by discussing them too. The last thing I'll discuss is how can you get tickets to attend these events? As I said, availability is highly limited. These are small, high quality gatherings.

To secure a spot at any of these events, just email me at joe at jnwpod.com with your preferred city and I'll reply with a ticket link. That's joe, J-O-E at jnwpod.com. And if you'd like to attend multiple events, just mention that and I'll also reply with a special discount code. Now I'm running an early bird sale on the first 50 tickets per event until the 1st of January. So if you'd like to attend, make sure you get your ticket as soon as possible. Again, to get your ticket, just send an email to joe at jnwpod.com. Thanks. And I hope to see you there.