The Joe Walker Podcast - Xi Loves Us, Xi Loves Us Not? - Kevin Rudd

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

This is an episode about a rising superpower (China) and its ruler (Xi Jinping). It's also a conversation...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello there, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes. I'm your host, Joe Walker, and this is the Jolly Swagman Podcast. Welcome back to the show. This is an episode about a rising superpower, China, and its ruler, Xi Jinping. It's also an episode about what their rise means for a complacent country that lies to their south. Allow me to give you some brief context before I introduce the conversation you're about to hear. China is a sleeping giant, Napoleon warned. Let her sleep, for when she wakes, she will move the world. That awakening is now well and truly upon us. At some point in the 2020s, China will outstrip the United States in nominal GDP. To be sure, China's rise has enabled one of the greatest

human and economic achievements of the 20th century. Since Deng Xiaoping initiated market reforms in 1978, 850 million people in China have lifted themselves out of poverty, according to the World Bank. But China's rise also threatens to rupture the liberal international order. For the first time in over two centuries, the world's leading economy will be a non-Western power. My concern and my motivation for publishing this episode is that the average educated Australian doesn't understand viscerally what this really means. There was a time when scholars were sanguine about China's rise, if only because it seemed as if non-Western powers were unlikely to remain truly non-Western. In 1989, a wall came down in Berlin. Francis Fukuyama penned his famous

treatise, The End of History, and it looked as if the world, China included, was flowing ineluctably towards liberal democracy as the final form of human government. At the time, Fukuyama's democratization thesis sounded persuasive. Here's what he wrote about China, quote, there are currently over 20,000 Chinese students studying in the US and other Western countries, almost all of them the children of the Chinese elite. It is hard to believe that when they return home to run the country, they will be content for China to be the only country in Asia unaffected by the larger democratizing trend, end quote. Fukuyama was wrong. And he was wrong because, as Sinophile John Garno argues, he underestimated the dynastic determination of the parents of those students. 30 years later, the current leaders of the Chinese

Communist Party, the students of the 70s and 80s, have if anything imposed a more totalitarian grip on their country. The only difference between them and their parents is that today's CCP elite are equipped with technologies of state control that would make the inner party in Orwell's 1984 jealous. We now have to contend with a thoroughly non-Western superpower. So where do the limits of China's geopolitical ambitions lie? And what does all this mean for Australia? Our guest, Kevin Rudd, is uniquely qualified to help us answer these questions. He served as Australia's 26th Prime Minister and as Foreign Minister.

Before politics, Kevin was a diplomat in Beijing and since leaving politics, he became the inaugural president of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, a think-do tank dedicated to resolving policy challenges between Asia and the US. In this conversation, Kevin and I discuss what the world looks like with China as a superpower. We also delve into the personality and worldview of Xi Jinping, the man with his hands on the rudder, arguably the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao himself. Kevin is currently writing a PhD thesis on Xi for the University of Oxford, and he's met Xi personally on many occasions, including intimate conversations

at the Lodge while Kevin was Prime Minister of Australia. The first time I had Kevin on the podcast last year, the feedback I received was polarised, in large part because of Kevin's tumultuous time in Australian politics. This time round, suck it up. Kevin is as close as we can get to a world expert on Xi and China, two crucial independent variables on which Australia's future will increasingly depend. Without much further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Kevin Rudd. Kevin Rudd, thank you for joining me. Good to be with you. Welcome to my home studio. Emphasis on the home. It's a serious home and it's less of a studio.

It's great to see you again. I want to talk to you first about what's happening in Australia before we talk about China. And my current position on Australian politics is fetal. What's yours? Comatose. It's the place you go to after being in a fetal position, but assuming you've had something to drink on the way through. So I'm comatose and slightly post-comatose. But I've been back in the States for a couple of weeks,

and frankly, politics there are not proceeding in an entirely rational manner. So, irrationality is not uniquely an Australian preserve. Yeah. You're back for a Hawke state funeral tomorrow? Yeah, I thought it was important to come back. Hawkey was an extraordinary figure in Australian politics, but more importantly, provided the political environment framework within which Keating as treasurer and then later as prime minister was able to reform the economy and to prepare Australia for the 21st century. So they're a remarkable double act. Yeah.

They fought like Kilkenny cats, but they're a remarkable double act. So I think we should honour Hawkey's contribution to the nation. My first year of university, I read Blanche's biography of Hawke, the first biography. And that book changed my trajectory. That sort of solidified me as a labor man. Baby oil or what? Or was it more like the bathrobes? It was the bathrobes and the nobility of working for the betterment of mankind. Well, Hawkey, I mean, I saw Blanche recently after Bob had passed away.

And she reminded me of something which I'd always suspected, which is the deep imprint on Hawkey's soul of his dad, Clem, the Congregationalist minister. And despite Hawkey's absence of formal religious faith, there's a deep imprint from that whole tradition of Congregationalist Protestant Christianity, which carries with it a deep sense of social responsibility. So I think gripped very deeply into the soul of R.J. Hawke and shaped him profoundly. And it would be great to farewell him tomorrow, the day this podcast goes out. I took a bouquet of flowers down to the Opera House

the day after he died, actually, and they were all laid out on the steps, all the flowers and bouquets that members of the public had contributed, and there was a single schooner sitting in the in the middle of it it's remarkable it was very strange a friend of mine in Oxford has just organized a commemoration for him there yeah where obviously the yard glass is the central religious icon of the hockey experience I don't think anyone can ever do that again yeah I mean I mean, I love the cricket probably as much as hockey, but I'm not a big beer drinker.

And so, you know, the idea of sculling a pint at the SCG certainly wouldn't come naturally to me. And besides, the whole notion would erupt in laughter. They'd see me more as a mango daiquiri man. And they'd be right. So I want to talk to you about China, but not so much China's rise, seems almost trite to talk about that these days, as its impact. And one of my bugbears about this country is a great sense of complacency, economic complacency, strategic complacency. We've just come through 28 consecutive years of continuous economic growth, and we live in the shade of the Anzus tree.

But while we call ourselves or we think of ourselves as the lucky country, there's the potential to invalidate that thesis in a day. And you wrote a great essay over the summer. Tell us a little bit about that before we start talking about China in more detail. Well, like any patriotic Australian, you have a sense of rolling physical angst about this country's future. And it comes back to some pretty basic propositions. It's a dry continent. It's a long way from most places. And here we are as a bunch of 80% plus Anglo-Westerners sitting adjacent to this vast continental and archipelagic mass of four billion people from different radically different civilizational and cultural traditions. Yet we seem to have about us all this psychology that, yeah, she'll be right, mate, not to worry.

And when Donald Horne wrote The Lucky Country, he wrote that with a deep, deep sense of irony. And so when I wrote a long essay over the summer entitled The Complacent country, it was driven by a similar sense of anxiety that these things that we have taken for granted for so long can no longer be taken for granted. So whether it's the complacency of Australia's corporate culture, I've never seen a more self-congratulatory mob as Australian corporate leadership. But a corporate leadership in this country, by and large, which has yet to discover the region in the world and operate comfortably within it. And you find this in conversations with returning Australian corporate leaders from abroad coming back to Australia about the level of self-satisfied complacency

about where we've got to. But frankly, unless we carve out a future for the nation, which sees not just exports but investment and capital markets as a way to grow the country into the future, then I sense that once we descend from the sheep's back and the resources boom back, there may be not a whole lot left. But it's just not there. It's also our trade union leadership who seem to be ever more focused on their distant halcyon past rather than carving out a future for working Australians, which is embracing as much of the little guy

moving from employment into his or her own business and deploying enterprise and building the small and medium and big businesses of the future. That should be part of what union leadership is about, not just protecting fairness in the workplace, but encouraging Australians to paint a bigger canvas for their own lives. And I think these things contribute to what I describe as a broader malaise in our national political consciousness as well. We seem to have become a country of small ideas and are comfortable and complacent about

how small those ideas can become, rather than understanding that, frankly, given we're 25 million people in the middle of nowhere to whom nobody owns a living, that it is only through the creativity of our minds and the energy of our entrepreneurial culture and the breadth of our political imagination that we can carve out a much bigger, more robust, sustainable and secure national future for ourselves. It's all doable. But underneath it all is a question of our nation's psychology. It's the private scoffing that people engage in when anybody in this country comes up with a big idea. It's how you tear them down or tear the idea down on the way through.

Of course, at the end of the day, a lot of folks just don't like being shown up as having none. Of course course the nation ultimately pays the price for that we've come through a long extraordinary patch of good times and it's the good times which make a country lazy and complacent there was a great book by ross garner which i'd encourage everyone to read 2013 dog days but the beginning of the book he references a speech that he gave years earlier where he says that these are Australia's salad days

during which average policy looks celestial, but soon there'll be the dog days during which good policy looks diabolical. And my concern is that we're regressing towards some dog days. I've been speaking a lot on this podcast about our economic complacency, and you've just referenced that very articulately. I think that we need to look to entrepreneurs willing to take risks, not property speculators trying to get rich for our future prosperity. But for the rest of this conversation, I'd like to focus on the, you know, the strategic complacency and China, because you're as close as a person I can find

who is a true world-leading expert on China and on Xi, China's president. And I thought it might be fun to start with some stories about your personal background in relation to China. And I'd like to ask you, do you remember the moment when you first realized that China was going to be a big kid on the block? You started at the embassy in Beijing there in 1984. Was that the moment the penny dropped when you saw what the country was like under deng xiaoping was it earlier than that was it a gradual process i think as a kid growing up in rural queensland obviously we didn't have much access to things the internet didn't exist but my mother was an educated working class woman who would insist that we as kids read stuff which would expand our minds

so what i remember most clearly is mum storming into my bedroom as a 14 year old always a hazardous exercise uh and uh and uh and handing me that day's newspaper, the august publication called The Courier-Mail, not exactly a global journal of record. But the article said, China enters the UN. And my mother, who'd never been much past primary school, said, this is going to change the world, and you need to understand this.

Now, my mother was a product of the DLP, the country party, and prior to the split in 57, I presume had been a good Catholic Labour voting girl. But this is unusual for your mum to interrupt your repose and to confront you with this news story

of what she said was the century that I think had an influence on me rolling off to the Australian University and studying Chinese language and politics for five years and then back back in those days, in the early 80s, you're essentially unemployable in the private sector. So what could you do? So that's when I applied to join the Foreign Service. That was 1991? Yeah, yeah. And as one of their better Chinese speakers, they then sent me to Stockholm. But shit happens.

And I end up in Beijing. And I've got to say, in that period in the 80s, both as we felt it then as young embassy officials, and then as we look back on the 80s and how, frankly, formative that was in shaping China's future for the subsequent 40 years, it was an extraordinary period to be there. Frankly, all the taboos had been ripped away. The conservatives in the Chinese leadership

had been pushed into the corner. When I arrived in the embassy, they'd just finished conducting the campaign against spiritual pollution and unhealthy winds. I was particularly fond of the campaign against evil wins. And Deng basically said, well, bugger that. Let's just get on with the business of modernizing the economy,

throwing open the doors of the Chinese economy to the world outside. We'll manage the politics on the way through, as most Leninists are confident that they can and they then unfolded the 80s where frankly anything went um it was a remarkable period to be there from an economy the size of australia's in 1980 to outstripping the us sometime in the 2020s. Truly extraordinary. Well, it's true. And these guys are no intellectual slouches. I think one of the great miscalculations by Australian and American political elites is to not understand how thorough the Chinese are in their disciplines of analyzing the external

environment. Partly it's because they're trained as Marxist dialecticians and are therefore in the great tradition of Hegel into thesis, antithesis, cause, reaction, challenge and response, and all those sorts of binaries. But as a consequence, as a intellectual disciplinary exercise, these folks spend a lot of time working out what they call as the Daqiu Shi, the great trends of history and where they fit in terms of their own national and party aspirations within it. So their analysis of the China and the world and the region of the 80s and the 90s and the progressive opening of the global economy through trade liberalization and increasing investment liberalization was how do we catch this wave and how do we use that

to build China's economic strength for the future and that disciplinary process is alive and well at the senior echelons of the Chinese leadership today as it was back then. And so they are forensic in understanding, for example, the internal ebbs and flows of American domestic politics, even the ebbs and flows of Australian domestic politics, and where that lands, China's principal regional and global partners, interlocutors, and adversaries. So when we talk about the complacent country, how many Australians in our political life understand the internal

currents of Chinese politics and where that leads to in the future directions of China's political economy and therefore China's military expenditures and what China therefore seeks to do in our region? Or do we just pick up a few headlines here and there and ride with it and say, well, once it was fine and now they're a problem. It's more complex than that. You first met Xi Jinping in 1986. What was the context and do you remember much about that encounter?

I remember quite a lot, actually, because I was hawkey's bag carrier not in the tradition of the nilp organizer which is a fundraiser but a bag carrier in the literal sense that i was the first secretary of the embassy hawkey was visiting china with his great friend who you bang and uh and uh as he used to routinely call him my great friend Hu Yibang. And only Australian political leaders could get away with that. And most Americans just drop their drawers when I describe that relationship. So good. And those two got on like a house on fire.

And my job was to go early to Chengdu in Western China to prepare that leg of the visit as Hawkeye and Hu Yibang arrived on the the Chinese government jet and it was just remarkable seeing that relationship at work. This was only a year or so before Hu Yibang was purged but then when we got to xiamen on the east coast in Fujian province which we look at the map is directly opposite Taiwan and it's these it's the city which is closest to the historic artillery shellings between the nationalists and communists in the 50s and 60s across the Taiwan Straits.

Our host that day was the newly minted vice mayor of Xiamen, a guy called Xi Jinping. So there you have the serious senior honcho, R.J. Hawke, drinking champion extraordinaire, Oxford University, On's first class, newly minted vice mayor of shaman future general secretary of the communist party uh xi jinping and kevin from queensland carrying the bags you've also you also met him uh you know in a more intimate sense, in 2010, you had him around to your place while you were prime minister for private drinks. And you had a long conversation about Chinese political history. In your encounters with him and your observations of him, what's he like as a man?

My conclusion from what was, I think, eight sets of conversations with him over those days in June of 2010, was he was a bloke who had clearly thought through his role in contemporary Chinese history. And that stage, he was vice president about to become president. Of course, he would never have committed the mistake which I committed, which is to focus on an important visitor rather than to watch what Julia was up to at the same time. Because as I spent two or three days with Xi Jinping trying to work out how we could carve out a future for Australia under this guy's national leadership of the People's Republic of China. Julia and Swan and Abib were up to no good behind my back,

but that's history. I was trying to do my day job as effectively as possible and work out a conclusion of the mining tax at the same time. But in those conversations, and I spent a lot of time with the guy, it was all in Chinese, it was remarkable how he saw his role in bringing China to the next stage of its economic modernization, the remaining domestic economic policy challenges. challenges and certainly I could detect a confident self-assured tone about where he wanted to take China in the future. Eight conversations, most of them at the lodge, not one of them with a single note from him. Hu Jintao, his predecessor who I had got to know very well, basically would not ask to go to the men's room unless it was in his speaking notes.

This guy was the first Chinese leader I met who simply was able to free range on any subject that came to the discussion. So what I need to deduce from that, enormously self-confident, deeply thoughtful about the country's past and its future, and a deep sense of mission about what he had to do for the country in the future. Your friend Graham Allison from Harvard calls she

the most competent political leader on the world stage at the moment. Yeah, well, Graham probably met a few more than I have. And Graham is a first-class scholar, and particularly if you've looked at his work on the Cuban Missile Crisis, an essence of decision, 40 or 50 years later, it's still the standard text of international relations theory and decision-making politics within regimes. And in my year at Harvard, Graeme and I worked very closely together, and he's written, of

course, the book on Thucydides' Trap. I think Xi Jinping, being a product of a Marxist disciplinary tradition and the analytical skills that go with it is certainly head and shoulders above most leaders in terms of a brutal ability to distill fact from fiction, reality from rhetoric, and what the hell's actually going on out there as opposed to the um uh the mad chook raffles which uh somehow substitute for high politics in western in western democracies these days in the politics of distraction yeah so against that ability just to frankly see the forest and not be confused by the

trees i think he has quite a razor sharp ability and secondly again because of his training what i've deduced from she's behavior is he's usually one or two steps ahead of the game in terms of domestic opposition that he's encountering or twists and turns in the international environment in which he has to contend so any western political leader who thinks they're dealing with you know a faceless Chinese apparatchik captured by some equally faceless system which sort of grinds its way into oblivion in the great tradition of Brezhnev, Chernyanko and Dropov. They don't understand this guy. He's the most formidable Marxist-Leninist leader I think the world has seen probably, probably since Stalin.

So on that note, talk about Thomas Carlyle's view of history and how she thinks about it. Well, Carlylean history, as you know, is about history as determined by the decisions, lives and decisions of great men. Of course, Carlyle, writing the 19th century, didn't conceive of the possibility of great women. But it's basically we as major

political agents, as he would describe the political leaders of the 19th century, shape history and that structure in international relations or economics counts for something much less. That is that the inherent structures of either liberal democracies or capitalist economies or, for that matter, Marxist states are of secondary importance to what leaders themselves do to shape things. And I don't know whether Xi Jinping has read Carlyle or not, but as I observe his political behaviour, his political chutzpah, and the zeitgeist of what someone described recently as shemiotics. I just think those two expressions in itself would have landed me in a week's ridicule if I was still Prime Minister. Zeitgeist and shemiotics. Not as bad as programmatic specificity. I'm coming to that,

but I'm doing it in a programmatic and quite specific way. God, this country needs a sense of humor. Bloody hell. Anyway, I mean, if you look at this guy, going back to your Carlisle-ian question, he sees himself as in this position whereby the currents of historical determinism are there to observe. But they can only be shaped fully and turned fully in China's direction through the impact of dominant Kailarian leadership politics, as Mao did, as Deng did, and as now Xi Jinping does. That, I think, is how he would view these things.

And how would you describe his worldview more broadly? I mean, I've heard the Chinese view of history and the Maoist-Leninist view of history described as a corkscrew. You mentioned the word determinist. Talk about that and the role of that in Xi's worldview. Of course, the catchphrase for contemporary Chinese politics in the post-78 period has been this marvellous term, political convenience,

socialism with Chinese characteristics. That's my third night crime this morning after shimmy otics and zeitgeist but they did that for a purpose remember they are a bunch of comms and we're about to commemorate the 100th anniversary of founding the Chinese Communist Party in 2021 and so we at our peril underestimate the Marxist Leninist overlay on shaping as I said analytical frameworks historical determinism dialectical materialism in the way in which these guys understand reality and seek to act within it but then you go that's the noun socialism and then you've got with Chinese characteristics that's the adjective well that opens up a multitude of sins like which Chinese

characteristics are we talking Confucianism here are we talking Taoism are we talking legalism are we talking Buddhism are we talking what what exactly are we talking about and when you try and pin our Chinese interlocutors down on this subject as to what does Chinese characteristics mean and the ideologues and the ideational leaders will just look at you and smile benignly says and that's that's for us to determine. So basically, it's one ginormous escape clause. Whenever this Western import, which is what Marx is, doesn't fit local cultural realities, they simply adapt and adjust. Well, that's fine. But you bring the two together in terms of a worldview, I think there are two big parts to it.

One is a clarity of, almost in Maslowian terms, of their own hierarchy of needs. And second is an analysis of reality, which they see as objectively and scientifically defined and correct, not just our view, it's correct objectively, about how now do in order to translate objectives through that reality that we now face domestically and internationally to advance the revolution? So the worldview, I think, has those three bits. And trying to have a coherent intellectual understanding of what makes this Chinese leadership tick must have a clear answer on those three sets of propositions. Great. So we've spoken about Xi. I just want to rewind briefly to another Kevin China anecdote.

I was hoping you can tell us the story of the time you went to translate in the great hall of the people well earlier uh you've mentioned uh ross garner who's yeah 2013 book dog days which i think is a good book and ross is a formidable australian intellect and and a good economic historian of a country where frankly uh economic Frankly, economic history is scarcely written on. So Ross was my ambassador in Beijing. Ross didn't speak a word of Chinese. Gifted economist, rotten linguist. That often goes together. And I owe my understanding of economics to Ross actually

because we spent so much time rolling around Beijing in a car together. And so when he first arrived, he was looking for an embassy interpreter. He didn't want a Chinese interpreter. He wanted someone who was batting for the Australian team, that is, an Australian diplomat. And so all the local staff said that Kevin's Chinese was impeccable. Well, it's true I was trained to speak BBC Chinese because our teachers at the Australian National University

were pretty strict. We got to speak what I'd describe as BBC Mandarin. So when Chinese folk hear me speak Mandarin, they usually fall about laughing because it's a bit like hearing someone say, I say jumbo, why don't we pop down to the club for a spot of polo? It would be absolutely smashing

and make sure we're free for tiffin just after. That's the sort of Mandarin I speak. That's the way I'm taught. And frankly, it's very hard to shake off. So the Chinese, when they meet you go, God, this guy's just come out of PG Woodhouse. I'll let him try. Anyway, but it sounds all right.

And often with the illusion of good pronunciation, it can mask a number of other more fundamental difficulties. But being able to speak Chinese and to speak it reasonably well is one skill being able to interpret some other bugger and whatever they might want to say into Chinese is something else because remember you can't control what they're saying you can control what you're saying and it's for your own conversation anyway Garneau insisted so off we went and great all the people flags flying out the front of the car.

I remember it to this day, as I sat there in the backseat with him quietly shitting myself. I think it's the technical term. And then we arrived at one of those great rooms in the great hall of the people, one named after each province, including taiwan by the way and to meet the chinese minister of agriculture whose name was he kang and uh and i remember going to sit where the interpreters always sat which is in that little jump seat behind the main chairs occupied by the principals of both sides. Australian interpreter on one side behind ambassador, Chinese interpreter behind the Chinese government minister. So I remember the Chinese

interpreter looking at me in the eyeballs as the sweat sort of poured from my face as I knew that my debacle was about to unfold. And because he knew what he was doing and he knew that I knew that I didn't know what I was doing. And so Garneau began with what I thought was a pretty clumsy phrase. He said Australia and China at present are experiencing a relationship of unprecedented closeness. Now I'm a bit finickety on the English language, and I thought that was clumsy. Garneau might be a good economist, but that was, I thought, third-rate English, and therefore needed to be improved. Note to file, if you are a young,

aspiring diplomat or interpreter, never do that. But anyway, I did, and I thought it needed a little bit of a classical flourish. And so I rendered it into what I thought was quite elegant Chinese, which is 澳中双边关系最近出于高潮。 And then it was interesting watching the reaction on the Chinese side of the horseshoe from the most senior officials through the junior officials to the junior woodchucks down the far end of the horseshoe. As the most junior officials, this is in the 80s, just broke out in peals of unrestrained laughter. And the senior guys,

and they all were guys, at the other end of the horseshoe just you could see the blood just drained from their face because apparently and I didn't know this at the time when I rendered this phrase Australia and China are experiencing a relationship of unprecedented closeness into what I thought was a very elegant semi-classical rendition I said in fact that Australia and China were now in the midst of fantastic mutual orgasm. And because gao chao, which is the word for orgasm, also in the classical tradition mean high tide. I didn't realize there were a couple of different high tides. It was the last time I was asked to interpret.

And did they have fantastic orgasm? It's a family program. I don't want to go into the detail. This blog site is only for adults after 8.30pm. That's what we call a Freudian slit. I mean, slit. Sigmund would be proud. What books or sources would you recommend for, you know, the average educated reader who wants to understand China better, but doesn't necessarily want to devote a whole career to it like you have?

You know, that's a really good question. I often think that the standard texts on China, Chinese history, etc., will often leave many general readers fairly bamboozled, not least as a consequence of the problem of getting your mind around Chinese proper names, because they all seem to be the same in the minds of many Westerners. So I understand the general frustration there, but I think if you want an understanding of contemporary Chinese politics, all of which occurs in and around the tumultuous events at the end of the Cultural Revolution leading to the reform period of the 1980s, I think the book which is on your table this morning here, which is Ezra Vogel's biography of Deng Xiaoping, is reasonably accessible. Some might find it a bit thick and a bit daunting

and there are no photographs. But the bottom line is he is the seminal figure. He shapes the future for the next 40 years. And so there's enough about him being a transitional figure from this mad cultural revolution past, the history of the Great Leap past, the history of the Great Leap Forward, and the history of the anti-rightist movement, which preceded it, which Deng Xiaoping actually presided over, going back to the events of 49 and the unlikelihood of the Communist

Party having won the Civil War of 45-49. Deng's career covers all of that. The revolutionary period, Triumph in 49, the tragedy of, let's call it, the period from the Great Leap Forward or even the anti-rightist movement of 1957-58 through to the end of the Cultural Revolution 20 years later in 76, and Deng's final re-emergence at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee at the end of 78, I think you need to have a handle on this man's life. So Ezra Vogel, good friend of mine, nonagenarian at Harvard University, one of the smartest guys I know, who's about to produce the definitive study at the age of 92 on the history of China-Japan relations. A formidable mind. Let's talk about the prospects of war

between China and the US. The last time I had you on the podcast, we briefly discussed Graham Allison's concept of the Thucydides trap. and Graham analyzed 16 cases where a rising power challenged an established power in the last five to six hundred years and in 12 of those 16 cases the result was war. I want to take a step back from that firstly and ask you a more philosophical question. Is international relations just human psychology writ large? Well, your question goes back to the earlier one about Carlyle, which is how much is agency and how much is structure? How much is individual leadership and how much is predetermined either by the gods, secular or divine, Marxist or deist.

And the truth of it is, if you've studied international relations theory, as I've done a little later in life, some of it makes sense in describing the realities that you're up against in the field and the daily praxis of international relations. So anyone who thinks that there are not underlying forces at work in the world, driven by technology, driven by capital, driven by the rise and fall of economies, and as a consequence, the investment in militaries, and then the traditions through which militaries are deployed for good or for ill, and the nature of the politics and the political cultures of individual countries,

these things have structural dynamics. That's true. Whether it's a Hegelian structure, a Marxist structure, or a liberal capitalist structure. But for individual political leaders then to say, almost like 21st century Pontius Pilate, I wash my hands of all the above because these forces are too big for any of us to control. It's just horseshit. That's a technical Australian term in Australian international relations theory. Leaders make a difference. And I've seen too much evidence of that either in Deng Xiaoping's career, he could have tapped the mat earlier on and just said, bugger that I'm out of here. His political career is defined in

Chinese as Sanqi, Sanluo, my fourth cardinal sin today, rising three times and falling three times in his life in terms of when he was purged and when he was rehabilitated. Now, if he hadn't come back the third time, where would China be today? Just one huge North Korea, threatening us all with a massive nuclear arsenal, or this much more complex, frankly, mixed economy governed by still an authoritarian political party, but utterly integrated into the global economy, for God's sake. Absence the agency of Deng Xiaoping, how could that have occurred? So to go to Graham's thesis then about Destined for War, which is the tabloid title given to his book, which is more thoughtful as a book than the title suggests.

Graham, who I know very well, and I was just chatting to him last week, would never for a moment conclude that our hands are tied. I think in chapter two of the book, he mentions that Thucydides himself used the word inevitable in a hyperbolic sense. Yeah, very much so. And the classical Greek around the word for inevitable is one of, frankly, shades of definition. And in fact, I think Graham's overall conclusion, if I recall the book correctly,

is that it's probably better rendered as significantly probable. Anyway, his I recall the book correctly, is that it's probably better rendered as significantly probable. Anyway, his thesis from the book is that there's enough in history to cause us to conclude, by God, these things can push in a structural for hegemony, then a number of things happen. The established power may preempt militarily in order to prevent the rising power from obtaining hegemony, or the rising power may itself act unilaterally at a time when it believes that the established power is at its most vulnerable, either of which results in war. Now, there's enough, as it were, observable common sense in the proposition which Thucydides first wrote about

in his reflections on the Peloponnesian Wars. And as it's been seen in international history since then, for people to say, yep, there's a fair bit in that. And those of us who've looked at the internal machinations in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Petersburg, and London in the lead up to the guns of August in 1914 understand how that Thucydidean principle was shaping so much of the high politics of various chancellories of Europe which landed us in an entirely avoidable war in the First World War so Graham's great value added is to point to these forces. But equally, the job of politics and statesmanship is to understand that those forces are at work

and to row as hard as possible in the reverse direction. So people like myself, for example, working, albeit at the margins, on US-China relations, my project at the moment is how can I devise a mutually acceptable, common strategic narrative for US-China relations, even this period of mutually declared strategic competition, which conducts the competition vigorously, hard, but in non-military terms, lending and war. It's difficult, but I think someone else wrote Blessed are the Peacemakers.

Can't remember his name, but I think that's right. He was in a movie called Life of Bride. Was that Blessed are the Cheesemakers? I can't remember now. All makers of dairy products. That's right. Well, I'm a camembert man. So God doesn't drink beer, prefers daiquiris and eats camembert.

What else can you say? No wonder you moved to New York. No hope. It's either me or Setka in the CFWU. No, look, that's fantastic. And I think, Kevin, it's also worth noting for the record, the four out of 16 cases that didn't end in war so we had Portugal versus Spain in the late 15th century we had

we had the United Kingdom versus the United States in the early 20th century we had the Soviet Union and the United States between the 1940s and the 1980s. And then we had England and France versus Germany from the 1990s to today. Do you think we can draw any general lessons, anything meaningful out of those four case studies and apply them to the China-US relationship? It's an excellent question and one which I'm ruminating on at present, but I don't have any definitive conclusions on. Where's your mind heading at the moment? A pretty vacuous direction. Too many drinks on the flight back home.

Anyway, in a non-vacuous moment, I think probably the least applicable is the Anglo-American handover. Why? Because it was all within the common culture. Exactly. It was all within the Anglosphere. And finally, by 1919, the Yanks and the Brits had got over the events of the War of 1812 and prior to that the Revolutionary War. And even the Brits' teetering temptation to intervene in the Civil War on behalf of the South, which was certainly an active consideration in the

Foreign Office at the time. The Foreign Office has long memories. Despite all of that, by the time you get through the Civil War in 1865 and then basically half a century later you're into the mop-up after the First World War, there is not only an intrinsic sense of British national economic exhaustion and the beginnings of the retreat from empire, ultimately culminating in the winds of change

another half century later, and the movements of decolonisation, that the Brits knew that internally the game was up. And for them, the most benign outcome for them was a special relationship with the emerging hegemon, with whom they broadly shared common values. Of course, it was never smooth. Look at the post- war ii period and the enormous flack between roosevelt and truman on the one hand and that great old imperialist winston churchill's determination to hang on to the empire including for god's sake india churchill had his way and had been re-elected in 45 god knows what bloodshed would have erupted on the subcontinent as he tried to deal with that little man in the dhoti as he described Mahatma

Gandhi. But by and large, it was a reasonably smooth transition despite all those complications. So that one within, let's call it the Western cultural canon, within the Western cultural and political hemisphere, was navigable. When I look at China and the United States, there is absolutely no parallels whatsoever between those. And the Soviet US one, the Chinese would never accept as a paradigm because guess what? The Soviets lost. Containment won.

The long telegram was accurate eventually 40 years later from Kennan when he designed containment after his posting in moscow after the second world war um and so when the chinese look at that they say not we know what you're trying to do there thank you very much screw you so we chucked that one out so where does that leave us well the pope is probably not in a position to do a little deal between Washington and Beijing, as he was able to do in sorting out the competing claims of the Spanish and Portuguese empires by drawing a magical line down the middle of Cartus Mundi.

And so, you know, it's after all one Catholic faith and we don't mind which of you runs the show. So here's a division of labor. Mind you, implicitly within much Chinese strategic thinking is something which has parallels to that, which we in Australia and we in this region would find unacceptable, which is a Chinese Monroe doctrine for East Asia, whereby the Eastern Hemisphere becomes for China what the Western Hemisphere became for the United States in the 19th century, essentially an extended sphere of influence.

And that beyond that, China would have no broader territorial ambitions. It's not that China would seek to invade the Eastern Hemisphere, but it would seek to have within the Eastern Hemisphere a bunch of fairly compliant states. Now, there's a fair bit of literature within the Chinese foreign policy establishment which talks a bit about that. But A, America won't agree to that, and B, those of us who live here wouldn't agree to that either. So where does that leave you? I'm not sure in terms of Graham's precedence. I think we may be sui generis.

It's my fifth offense for the day. You only get six. Okay. Six are the best. I went to a Catholic school. I know what that's like. Whack. But it was only a spelling brother. Whack. But it was only a spelling brother.

Whack. We're both former Marist boys. Yeah, it shows. Yeah. I see you're still limping too. You mentioned the stark cultural differences between China and the US. Let's dwell on that for a moment. In 2013, a document known as Document No. 9 was circulated amongst committees and officials of the Chinese Communist Party.

And it mentioned seven dangerous Western values, which, among other things, included press freedom, constitutional democracy, and human rights. That's pretty galling to me. Yeah, well, it might be galling, but you know something? That's always been the reality. You see, I'm a creature of the West. I'm a creature of the Occident. I'm a creature of Judeo-Christian values and of the Enlightenment and of political emancipation of the electorate and social justice.

That's the tradition I'm from. And I'm proud of it. I also think it has universal claims. And guess what? The international community agreed with that when they framed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which was not just drafted by a bunch of Westerners, by the way. If you look at the drafting process of the Universal Declaration in 1948, which goes to so many of the freedoms which you've just alluded to,

it was not just Eleanor Roosevelt, it was John Wu from nationalist China, a contemporary colleague of his from emerging and newly independent India and elsewhere, as they sought to harness and harmonize the values traditions of these great civilizational traditions beyond the West. Hence why it was called the Universal Declaration. So there's often a critique, particularly in China today, that this is some Western construct unilaterally imposed. Not if you look at the drafting history. It's quite a fascinating study. I've been reading recently the biography of John Wu, the Chinese negotiator, a fascinating contribution. But I say all that simply to say that that's where we come from. That's where the international

community reached its consensus in 1948, one year before the Chinese Communist Party won the Civil War in China. But what we should not be surprised about is that that Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist party, and as a Marxist-Leninist party, has never changed its spots. Deng Xiaoping, who I referred to before, is the Mao Zedong to run the anti-rightist campaign, which threw into jail hundreds of thousands of Chinese who had put their hands up to critique the Communist Party and the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957. So if you read the history of these guys, whatever they might say about the economy, whatever they might say about opening up the Chinese market at home and abroad, at the end of the day, it's a Marxist-Leninist state which holds power through the barrel of a gun. And that reality has not changed. You and I find that unacceptable. It's, however, a continuing Chinese reality. And so the nine poisons you referred to before, they've been ever thus since not just 1949, but if you go back to the earliest days of the party and its own internal rectification

movements, back to the 1940s in the Yan'an period, during the Long March after 1934, the days of the Jiangxi Soviet after 1927, through to the first half dozen years. This hardline Leninist party has been in continuing existence, and it is a party which has already reflected that it intends to hold on to power. So therefore, that makes a little complex reality for people like Australia in this region in the future. As I said, navigating that against the economic dimensions of our engagement with China, against the underlying political reality of the Chinese

system has always been hard and will become progressively harder. We began this conversation by speaking about Australian complacency. And the key reason I wanted to speak with you about China was that the world is going to look so different in the next few decades with it as a superpower of equal standing to the United States. And I don't think the average educated Australian has thought about what that really means. Now, a lot of people say that China is not interested in exporting its ideology overseas. It has no imperialist ambitions. But I want to question that assertion, both in terms of the historical record, but also China's future intentions. Because I'm not sure it's even true to say that China was never a country with imperialist ambitions. You know, the Qing Empire was taking up huge chunks of Russia just over a century ago.

And people could argue that the One Belt, One Road initiative today is nothing other than Weltpolitik. So where do you think the limits of Xi's ambition and China's ambition lie? we look at Chinese history, it leads us to some conclusions about the extent to which China has any territorial ambitions as such. If you look at the map of China by the time we reach the former and later Han dynasties, essentially the period of time from 200 BC to 200 AD. China then and the map is not hugely dissimilar from the China of today. It is waxed and waned in between. When I looked, for example, to the Tang around about 600 to 900 AD and the Song which followed, it's quite remarkable that the Chinese territorial map

reaches right across the Stans of Central Asia, virtually to Kashmir. And then you get to the Qing dynasty and you have a refashioning of maps again with Tibet in or out, Xinjiang in or out, and depending on which side of the argument you believe, large slices of what was once Russian imperial territory being Chinese imperial territory, going back to the days when the Russians were a bunch of pre-Viking nomadic thugs occupying Volgograd in the 9th century, depending on which side of the historical ledger you want to read it. What's the overall take of that? China has always been paranoid about its land borders.

Most countries are, which share land borders with others. It has 14 land neighbours, the largest of any country in the world, apart from Russia, which also has 14. And therefore, in its history, has sought to have its land borders as strong and as consolidated as possible, and where the neighbours exist, for them to be as benign as possible, the land neighbours to exist. In terms of an overseas colonial empire, in the tradition of what happened in the last 500 years of European history, there is no replication of that. And there is a reasonable Chinese commentary, which I think is believable, that when you get to Zheng He's voyages of 1421

in the early Ming period, when these vast Chinese fleets roamed the entire southern seas across the Indian Ocean into the Persian Gulf and the coast of East Africa, the Chinese could have set up a maritime empire if that's what they chose to do, but they didn't. In fact, the Chinese Ming emperor at the time, after the Third Zheng He Voyage, told his admirals to burn the fleet. Kind of interesting when you think about it. So the answer is an untidy one.

China has maintained maximal land borders to protect itself from foreign invasion across land corridors over a couple of thousand years of its imperial history but on the maritime front has not sought to establish a maritime empire training posts yes but not a maritime empire as we saw with the major European powers. So where does that lead us in our conclusions of China for the future? I do not believe that the Chinese have any aspiration at all to physically occupy any other country in East Asia, let alone beyond East Asia. What China, however, seeks to do is to consolidate its continental periphery,

have maximally benign neighbours, and beyond that, through the Belt and Road Initiative, to cause these countries across the Eurasian continent more broadly to be economically codependent with China. push the United States back towards the mid-Pacific to provide China with what it would describe as maritime space, rather than American spy flights up and down the coast every day, but also the maritime space within which to finally reclaim Taiwan. And more broadly in the international order, for an international rules-based system, which in the future, incrementally, is more accommodating of Chinese norms, values, and interests. Not a revolution of throwing over the UN or throwing over the World Bank or throwing over the WTO, but incrementally

changing the culture, norms, personnel of these institutions, and where necessary, growing other institutions like the BRI, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank, et cetera, which are outside the framework of the post-war global rules-based order led by the americans after 44 and 45 and underpinned by u.s military power and the global fabric of u.s military alliances how does she feel about Australia? He sees it as a pretty large country to the south, you know, pretty wide, bunch of kangaroos, interesting fauna and less flora, but that goes back to dry. You know, the honest answer is I haven't had a huge conversation with the guy about Australia. But that goes back to dry. You know, the honest answer is I haven't had a huge conversation with the guy about Australia.

I've always been discussing with him where he wants China to go and trying to understand in my own mind his worldview. And that's why, for example, I'm in the midst of writing a doctoral dissertation at Jesus College Oxford in my copious spare time on Xi Jinping's worldview. To try and understand that more systematically. Because I think the world will increasingly want to know what this man's worldview is with a level of granularity, which means something to countries and corporations and peoples around the world. But as for his particular view of Australia, I'm not sure. The historical Chinese view of Australia was always in what's described

as an important second league of countries. Number one league was always the United States, and that spoke for itself. And then there was always the particularities of the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation in all of its complex Sino-Soviet history. On again, off again, love, hate, love, hate, love, wherever we're up to at the moment

but then beneath that you had a group of other countries which the chinese saw as significant powers with whom china sought to have a maximally benign mutually beneficial relationship including Japan, Australia, India, Germany, Britain, France and to which more recently would be added Brazil. Now where we now stand in that hierarchical view of China's external relationships I'm less clear. I'm reflecting to you where I think the views stood as of the end of the Hu Jintao period which was about when Julia walked into my office one day. There's an old Chinese saying, big fish eat little fish and little fish eat shrimp, which Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore used to like to quote. How does a thinly populated, isolated...

And what do the shrimp eat? eat yeah they eat plankton and what do the plankton eat that's the that's the million dollar question i wonder when we get onto theology what does a thinly populated isolated country with vast natural resources like australia need to do that we're not already doing to become a safe and self-sufficient shrimp well i don't think we're plankton i don't think we're shrimp um at our best i think we should be reasonably uh nimble i won't say mulletet, because I grew up in rural Queensland. That's how we fashioned our hair. Whiting?

Yeah, yeah, we were more whiting. Yeah. And sea brim. Yeah. You know. And but with an ability to have about us, let's call it, a level of critical mass and a level of nimbleness in the way in which we conduct our international engagement. So, as I've written, I think, in my long essay on the complacent country which is now up on my own website number one we have to have a clear idea that the nation's future

hinges in large part on the future of our economy. What therefore shapes the future of our economy? Three questions. Ken Henry's eternal triptych, population, participation and productivity. These were the cornerstones of our approach to economic management when we were in office, apart from navigating the financial crisis which was an exeset coming out of left field. And so if you go to those drivers of the future population, I think we're having this utterly bogus debate in Australia at present about population, all pandering to the politics of kind of one nation

and the various fringe groups out there to the far right. And frankly, a bunch of green left folks who would happily shut the door so that no one could upset their next round of lattes at a Balmain coffee shop. And if we allow our national debate on population policy to be dictated by the green left and the far right, one ostensibly on the grounds of, oh, we have to be environmentally sustainable and we cannot, with the seventh largest nation on Earth, sustain a population beyond 25 million, or keep those bloody foreigners out, a la Pauline Hanson's One Nation et al., then we're buggered if we're going to allow our national population policy to be driven by that and either major political party, Labor and the Liberals,

seeking to appease those constituencies in one form or another. So therefore, the country needs a robust migration policy, non-discriminatory, skills-based, elements of family reunion, a manageable refugees program in cooperation with UNHCR but one which is still small in relation to our total migration inflow to offset the aging the Australian population which is occurring naturally and demographically anyway. So we're now 25 million people. People like Kerry O'Brien and various other writers from the general left went spare when I suggested that Australia's

population would grow to 35 million. Well that was just a projection of where our migration policies were taking us at the time anyway. It was no addition from me. It was simply sustaining the status quo ante. Whereas if you're mindful about where countries begin to have sufficient national economic critical mass to sustain a military set of capabilities able to deter external threats to their security long term, you're really looking at countries with populations north of 50 million. That puts you into the league of the Germans and the French and the British in Europe.

And my judgment, given the enormous uncertainties in the geopolitics of the future of East Asia and the world at large concerning the United States, China, and where ultimately do Japan and India position themselves accordingly, and similarly with Indonesia, is that we need to make those long-term preparations. Secondly, the complacent country, if it shakes itself out of it, is perfectly able to accommodate a population of 50 million Australians with decent national planning, decent infrastructure strategy. I established Infrastructure Australia.

The Tories even couldn't bring themselves to get rid of it because it made such common sense. And to therefore plan our infrastructure and our cities and our towns in a manner which is sustainable for people, but also environmentally sustainable as well. entirely doable. That may mean further migration north within the country. Look at all those Queensland provincial towns. They should be growing and expanding with the new industries of the future. And had we linked them all with the national broadband network consistent with the original plan,

the geography of this country would matter little as everyone was able to participate equally in the digital economy of the 21st century but turnbull and news limited sort of the destruction of that thank you very much and then i think finally when i look at the geopolitics of wider east asia the question for us is how long before we actually join the azyans ASEAN's. Something I first raised with SPY back in 2013 privately and I noticed Widodo subsequently raised it with Turnbull. And there are arguments for and against it in the minds of the ASEAN's but the sooner or later we realize as Australians that it's far better to be part of a much bigger sub-regional grouping linked with common arteries

of trade, commerce and investment, the better for us economically. But also this, as Indonesia rises, as it will, and its economy becomes larger than Australia's, which it will soon, it's far becomes larger than Australia's, which it will soon, it's far better to conduct Australia's future bilateral relationship with Indonesia than the framework of a collaborative regional institution already existing, namely ASEAN, governed by the principles of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation of 1967, which precludes the possibility of resort to armed force to resolve any problem in the future. I'm all for doing these things ahead of the curve, not when it's too late.

Excellent. Final question, Kev. I didn't do it. How did you know I was going to ask that? Just to look in your eyes. And it's that time of day when your average politician defences have already begun to sink. That's when we're taught, by the way, to become most vigilant.

So what is your next question? All right, I'll ask a different question then. That's okay. I'm happy to go and ask. So China is clearly important to Australia economically, but at the same time, as we've discussed throughout this conversation, we have radically different values in many important respects. Talk about this lovely idea of being Jung Yu, not Peng Yu. Well, when I was Prime Minister, I sat down with one of Australia's leading sinologists, in fact, one of the world's leading sinologists, Jeremy Barmey, who was appointed as the inaugural head of the centre that I funded

at the Australian National University called the Australian Centre on China in the World. And Jeremy is a lifelong student of China and through the Chinese Confucian tradition understood there are in fact two definitions of friendship. One which is pangyo, which is kind of as standard as the word friend in English, which means that it suffers from gross overuse to the point that it becomes denuded of meaning. And a much less used term, zhōngyǒu. Zheng in the Chinese literary tradition is a term which invokes a sense of friendship which is based on depth, candor, and when necessary, mutual remonstration.

So as you know, if you have a mate, mate, in Australia, mate, mates can either never offend each other or every now and then take a mate to one side and say mate that was just stupid. And you might choose to do that privately. Very rarely would you choose to do it publicly because they may cease to be a mate after that. But it depends on the circumstances. And if I was trying to give, therefore, an Australian vernacular exposition as the notion of Jungyo, it's along those lines. So if you go to my Morrison lecture at the Australian National University of 2010 it seeks to expound on this at some length and then it was earlier reflected in a lecture I delivered in Chinese at Peking

University when I was Prime Minister in 2008 and I was trying to lay out a framework then for how those of us who wish China well nonetheless reserve to ourselves the right to say no we don't agree with that and here are the reasons why. Rather than having us socialized into a notion of friendship with China which causes us to be in a position of permanent compliance or to render it into Chinese which would be my sixth offense in this discussion today which is kowtow one kowtow two kowtow three which is the standard means by which Chinese Manchu officials would greet the emperor of a morning so our Chinese communist friends are not

terribly happy with the idea of Zhongyou. They don't want a Zhongyou? They much prefer compliant Pengyous. Yeah. But if you come back to them within the framework of the tradition and say, I actually admire the civilization heaps. I admire, in fact, what you guys have achieved in lifting so many people out of poverty. And it's a remarkable national

achievement. Do I agree with your Marxist-Leninist system? No, not at all. Am I a universal human rights guy? Yep, that's me from Central Castings, sorry about that. Am I a religionist? Yes, you know I bat for Jesus the member for Bethlehem South. But it's on that basis we can continue to have a reasonable discussion and dialogue. That, I think, has something in it. It's not a perfect framework for the future, but it's reasonable. There's one other thing, though, affecting how that discourse with our Chinese friends evolves in the future as well, which is what happens to America in its own national self-conceptualization of its future in the Pacific and in the world at large. And America, like China at present, is not a constant. It's a dynamic. Just last week, I was in Deer Valley, Utah,

just up the road from Salt Lake City. Changing faith? No, I'm not. But there's a lot of Mormons up there. 68% of Utahns are Mormon. Yeah. And I was invited by Mitt Romney, now a US Senator, and Paul Ryan, the most recent incumbent as Speaker of the House, and a bunch of other Republicans who were gathered together to discuss in part America's future relationship with China.

And so they asked me, of course, for my views, the extent to which I was able to reflect on how China saw the world, I did so. But I said to that gathering, as I say to anyone listening to this podcast today, the real open question is what sort of country does America want to be in the future? Is it wish to be still the leader of, quote, the free world, unquote? Or is it simply going to become a country driven by its national interests and no longer its perception of its own values, being a light on the hill and upholding the enlightenment torch and what will be America's future preparedness to be an active defender

of the order which it created in the post-war period or in the age of Trump's isolationism, rising protectionism and America first-ism, is that age slowly slipping away as well, causing other countries within, let's call it not just the Asia-Pacific region, but across Eurasia and Western Europe, and even in Latin America and Africa to say, are we now genuinely in a brave new world where all the verities of the past concerning the United States are now up for grabs, and we now have to deal with this reality of this authoritarian capitalist state called China bestriding the world as a new colossus, and how do we carve out our own futures within that?

So when I talk about Australia as the complacent country, it's a level of complacency about America because the Americans can't give us an answer to the question I've just posed at this stage. Even the Republicans at the gathering I just addressed were able to say to me, fair question. The Democrats are struggling with it because they know how popular Trump's isolationism is within the American context right now. And then there's the question of China's own evolving regional international mission,

a European fractured structural decline aided and abetted by the British. And the rest of the global periphery, including us, scratching our heads as to where all this now goes. So the complacent country, Australia, needs, like the Chinese, to have a clear understanding of how radically our international environment is changing. And if we're serious about our country's future as a vibrant democracy, as a country which believes in civil liberties at home and human rights abroad, believes in the principles

of an open economy, and an international rules-based order which looks after the little guy, not just the most powerful. And that means Australia having about it a set of contingency plans for its future which are much more radical than we have at present. At present, we're just bumbling along in the hope that tomorrow looks after itself. In the past, bumbling along in the long shadow of the United States and prior to that the long shadow of the British Empire may well have been possible.

Bumbling is no longer viable in this extraordinary and uncertain world of ours in the 21st century as we move to mid-century and i'm still young enough with kids and grandkids to be worried about actively mid-century and certainly as i get ready for my 2047 campaign kevin 47 you heard it here first that's an exclusive ladies and gentlemen well my heart tear did it so why can't i make well mate this has been a brilliant conversation and i think a very important wake-up call i'm glad we have the chance to speak again thank you so much for joining me it's good to be here in downtown Darlinghurst in the People's Republic of Sydney.

Cheers, mate. Good to be with you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. For show notes and links to everything discussed, you can find them on my website, josephnollwalker.com. That's my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-e-l-w-a-l-k-e-r.com and i love hearing your feedback i love speaking with you you can continue the conversation with me on twitter

my handle is at joseph n walker as you know this is a one-man show i finance it myself i research it myself i run it myself but it's very much a conversation and it wouldn't be the same without you, your feedback, your support, and your engagement. If you do enjoy what I'm doing, I'd be so grateful for a rating and a review on iTunes. I know everyone asks, but it does help. If you've already done that, I would love it if you shared the show with your friends

or on social media. As always, thank you for listening. Until next time, ciao.