The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 393. The Makings of A Great Leader | The Honourable Tony Abbott

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with Australian journalist and former prime minister, the Honourable Tony Abbott. They discuss Australia’s role on the world stage, the problems facing their economy and culture, how the quasi-cult of carbon threatens the developing world, why new religions propagate where faith has been abdicated, and the looming threat of war as China destabilizes while Putin pushes forward against Ukraine. Tony Abbott was elected prime minister by the Australian people on September 7, 2013, and served for two years. In that time, the carbon tax and mining tax were repealed, free trade agreements were finalized with China, Japan and Korea; the people smuggling trade from Indonesia to Australia were halted, and Australia became the second largest military contributor to the US-led campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq. Currently, he is a director of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, serves on the council of the Australian War Memorial, and is an adviser to the UK Board of Trade. He’s patron to several charities, including Soldier On, the International Sports Promotion Society, and Worldwide Support for Development.  - Links - For The Honourable Tony Abbott Website https://tonyabbott.com.au/ On X https://twitter.com/hontonyabbott?lang=en 

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with Australian journalist and former Prime Minister, the Honourable Tony Abbott, we met before once in Australia, and this will be a follow-up to that. We discussed Australia's role on the world stage, the problems facing the Australian economy and culture, the broader problems that face the West, how the quasi-calc of carbon threatens, in particular, the poor in the developing world, why new religions propagate where traditional faith has been abdicated, and the looming threat of war as China destabilizes and Putin pushes forward against Ukraine.

We also discuss our joint involvement in the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the ARC, which is a new venture grounded in London, designed to put forward a positive vision of the future that everyone could, in principle, be on board with voluntarily. So, Mr. Abbott, let's start by talking about Australia as a whole. I mean, what role do you think Australia plays on the international front now? Like, how do you think Australia should be conceptualised by people outside of the country? Well, Jordan, I think Australia is one of those wonderful countries, which is big enough to be interesting and significant, but not so big as to be intimidating and threatening.

And Australia's history is such that there's really no one anywhere in the world who has a grievance against us. And that's not true of so many other countries. You think of the United States, you think of Britain, you think of France, you think of Germany, you think of Italy, you think of Germany, you think of Italy, you think of Russia, you think of China. There are grievances that different countries have against all of those countries. All of those countries have great strengths as well. But Australia is one of those happy places, which has been a welcoming home to migrants from all over the world. Yes, we fought on Britain's

side in two world wars and we fought as America's ally and just about every conflict over the last hundred years that America's been in. And yet we've managed to do that while retaining, I think, our that while retaining, I think, our global reputation as a country which is free, which is fair, and which wants to be a good mate to the people and the countries of the world wherever we can. So that, at least in principle, lays open the option for countries like Australia. And I suppose this was true of Canada for a good while too, although I don't know if it is any longer to play a role in what would you say being a good faith partner and brokering peace, for example.

And so what problems do you think Australia faces at the moment? And how are the issues that are broadly besetting the West, say, on the cultural war front, making themselves manifest in Australia? Well, the problems that every country has all the time, are essentially, how do we maintain our prosperity? How do we maintain our security? And just at the moment, this is perhaps a little bit more acute than

usual. We've got all of the challenges which all of the Western countries currently face. We've got the risk of recession. We've got high-ish inflation, we've got all of the supply chain issues, which arose from the pandemic, and then the conflict in Ukraine, then the degree of decoupling with China. So we've got all of those issues. We've got a particular problem with energy, while we abundantly blessed Jordan with coal, with gas, with uranium. We don't have all that much oil, but because of the emissions obsession, we are not using these blessings sufficiently to our own advantage. So that's a particular problem that we've got. We're exporting our coal and our gas to the countries that are still only too eager to get it, but we're not readily

using it as much as we should here. And then of course being in the Asia-Pacific region, Asia Pacific region, obviously we're very conscious of China, in particular China under the Communist Party and the challenges that that poses. I keep saying that the disruption that has been caused globally by the Russian attack on Ukraine is small beer compared to the disruption that would be caused globally by any attack from the Beijing regime on Taiwan, given its much greater significance in the world economy and given the effective security guarantees that the United States has always given to Taiwan. So look, those constant challenges of security and prosperity are particularly acute right now.

You ask about the cultural issues which are reflecting the West. We may be maybe five years behind America, maybe three years behind the United States, the United Kingdom, but we have them here too Jordan. Universities are more into brainwashing, and the best that's been thought and said, our schools, their nice places, in the sense that they want to teach our kids to be nice to each

other, but I'm not sure that there's that much rigorous learning going on or as much as assured. All right, so let's dive in. We outlined a number of potential issues there of concern. Let's dive in first to what you described as the emissions obsession. And so this is something that Australia and Canada share particularly, Canada is blessed on the fossil fuel front and we have vast reserves of uranium as well. And we are doing everything we can at the federal level in Canada to scuttle the oil and gas industry in favor, hypothetically, of renewables, which is a really bad idea in a country like Canada, which is massive and completely inhospitable to human life. And in Australia, you guys have

the same issues in many ways, ambivalence about utilizing your natural resources, but strangely enough, very little compunction in sending them to China, coal in particular. And this strikes me as extremely peculiar, given that the Chinese, as far as I know, breathe the same atmosphere we do. And if the Chinese are building coal-fired plants like madmen, which they clearly are, then what difference does it make to us in the West, let's say, except in terms of prosperity, whether or not we use our technology

to produce relatively clean, say, coal-fired plants or the Chinese do it in China. Like, what in the world is the possible rationale for that, as far as you're concerned? Well, Jordan, I find it as mysterious as you do. We are inflicting gratuitous economic damage on ourselves without doing any good to the global environment by refusing to use coal and gas in this country while exporting as much coal and gas as we can sell to others, particularly China. And the interesting thing is that while we are fastidious in measuring and reducing our emissions, we are fastidious in making commitments to the wider world that we are determined to keep. We're oblivious to the fact that emissions are going up and up

because Russia, China and India are understandable and are for reasons of making no such commitments. So this is really an act of economic self-arm that we are engaged in. It's a kind of virtue signalling on a national scale, and I very much regret it. I regard myself as a conservationist. I accept that we only have one planet. I accept that if you look back over what we know to have been the history of the planet, there certainly has been global warming, there has been global cooling, there have been hotter times, there have been colder times.

So climate change is real in that sense, although you can argue about the contribution that mankind's carbon dioxide makes to it. But certainly the efforts that we in this country are making to reduce emissions are harming us and they're not actually making any difference to global emissions. And I just think that's pretty irrational. Well, it seems to me that you could make a case that not only are they doing no good on the global emissions front that in places like Germany, these idiot-green policies have actually made the emissions situation worse. And so, you know, one way you could conceptualize this that sort of cuts across

the political argument problem is that if the green policies that have been implemented by countries like Germany fulfilled their own mandate, at minimum, you could say that they have some credibility. So you know, you could look at Germany and you could think, well, electricity is more expensive and it's more unreliable. And the Germans are dependent on the Russians and other relatively autocratic states to provide their energy, but at least carbon emissions have gone down. But in fact, in Germany, partly because they've had to turn to burning late night and they shut their nuclear plants down, which was an act of unconscionable stupidity, they're

actually producing, I think it's 10 times as many emissions per unit of electricity as France and they're far more polluting on the energy front than they were like seven years ago. So, not only have they failed utterly on the economic front, they're actually doing worse by their own criteria. And the same thing has to be true of countries like Canada and Australia when you look at it globally, if we export our resources to China and they do a relatively bad job of generating electricity, especially given the immense corruption in countries like that, why in the world wouldn't we do that

in the West where we could do it, you know, with a certain degree of, let's call it finesse. And so I cannot see that there's something wrong with my reasoning when I walk through the problem in that sense. And so what do you think about that? Is there something that I'm missing, say, in relationship to Germany or is this as foolish as it appears to be? Well, Jordan, I think this is monumental folly. I think it is self-destructive folly. But I think what we are dealing with here is something more akin to a new religion than ordinary considerations of rational self-interest and even ordinary stock standard idealism.

As I said, I'm all in favour of doing what we can to protect the planet, but I'm not in favour of doing things which harm us and don't help the planet, and plainly that's what's going on right now. One of the many reasons why I think there's a religious dimension to all of this, a kind of almost like a cultish dimension to all of this, is that the same people who are most insistent on the urgency of emissions reaction are normally deeply hostile to the only form of emissions free 24, 7 base load power, namely nuclear.

Now if it really is absolutely essential that we move rapidly to a zero emissions world, and if we do want at the same time to maintain our standards of living, there's really only one way to go, and that's nuclear, which is proven, reliable, safe, it may well be somewhat more expensive at this time than alternatives, certainly than coal and gas and oil. But we know it works and we know it's emissions free. We know that France has been generating something like 70% of its electricity from nuclear for the best part of 40 or 50 years, they haven't had any significant accidents. So why not do something like this in other countries if we really do think that emissions

are as important as all that? The religious cult idea. So I think I want to pick up two streams of thought there. I'm also puzzled like you with regard to attempting to conceptualize the opposition to nuclear power because the bitter pill were asked to swallow constantly is that climate change,

and caused by excessive carbon dioxide production, poses an existential threat to mankind. And so that's the ultimate shibboleth, let's say, with regard to the radicals on the left, or people who are utilizing radical left ideas for their own nefarious purposes, let's say. And if that is the case, then, and we're willing to contemplate tactics like geoengineering, because I know the Biden administration, for example, is toying with the idea of blotting out the sun like Mr. Burns

in the Simpsons. And if we're willing to go to that extreme or even to look into going to that extreme, then why in the world wouldn't we turn to nuclear? And the answer has to be, as far as I'm can tell, tell me if what you think about this is that there's actually an anti-industrialism and an anti-humanism at the basis of the climate apocalypse claims. And so the anti-humanism is something, it's often expressed in the form of the claim that there are too many people on the planet, you know, and that we can only, and you hear more extreme versions of this, where the claim is, well, we could really only

tolerate in an ecologically sustainable manner, a population of about 500 million, which is a big problem given that there's 8 billion people, and we'd have to figure out what to do with all those excess bodies. And that even if we did have 500 million, those people would have to live, you know, basically at a subsistence level so that we wouldn't be scraping the surface of the planet to, with too much diligence, okay. And so I have a lot of problems with that standpoint, not least because there's an element

of it that's genocidal. And then there's a kind of naive, russotian anti-industrialism that seems to go along with that, which is part and parcel of the claim that all human activity is somehow pathological and that we're violating some essential state of nature. And then that, all that mess, because that's a mess, also is allied with something that I think is even darker, which is this attempt by the hypothetically a religious radicals on the environmental front to reduce the entire panoply of human problems to one issue,

and that's of Carbidoxide, and then to claim for themselves an elevated moral virtue that goes along with, well, opposing Carbidoxide at all costs. So to me, that's, you know, one of the commandments is that you're not to use the Lord's name in vain, and that commandment means that you shouldn't claim divine virtue or even moral virtue when you're actually acting in a manner that's only benefiting yourself.

And I see that as the cardinal sin of this new religion, which is all morality can be reduced to the claim that I'm a good person because I oppose carbon dioxide and to hell with the cost. And I'll add one more thing to that, to which is that from what I've been able to understand, if you can help the world's poor, raise their average income on the GDP as a measurement to about $5,000 a year, which pops them out of basic subsistence, then they start to be able to take a longer-term view of their future and their children's future and to attend to environmental issues spontaneously. So my

sense is that we could have a planet that was full of thriving people with a large population, if people were rich enough, and that would mean that they would have to have access to cheap energy. And if we did that globally, then everyone would spontaneously start to events concerned for the environment so we could have like a flourishing population and a planet that works. And so what the hell's wrong with that? Why isn't that a good plan? Well, nothing's wrong with that, Jordan. It's a very sensible plan. And if you want to look at environmental devastation, the places where you will find environmental devastation are the

poorer countries where they can't look after their forests, they can't look after their paddocks and fields where they can't afford to worry about the conservation of native animals. It's really only the better off countries where we can take all these things seriously because in the other countries they're embarked in a constant struggle just to stay alive. And this is why, as you say, if we want a better environment and if over time we want the world's population to stabilize and perhaps even reduce a little, if you look at what has already happened in many of the more developed countries, let's do what we can through trade and through the encouragement of better governance.

Let's do what we can through the encouragement of decent education and the liberation of minorities. Let's do what we can to try to bring what are currently the most impoverished countries up to, as you say, a better level of life. I mean, you're right. Once a country gets up to about $5,000 US dollars per person per year in national income, things start to transform. And if you look at some of the countries of Africa, which have got to this level, they are very, very different countries in a host of wise to what they were just a couple of decades back.

Right, well, I know that you have recently agreed to participate in this alliance for responsible citizenship, conference, and movement that we're organizing in London in October. And I mean, part of our vision on the energy and environment front, well, it's, it's two-dimensional. The first proposition is stemming off of what we've already discussed is that we don't have the moral right to sacrifice the world's poor, either in the West or in the developing world, to our to our narrow green agenda, especially because it's not going to work anyway, isn't it puts

all these people at risk. And so you see this very strange conundrum, right? Because the left in principle historically has been the voice of the oppressed in the working class, and particularly, let's say, strong voice for the poor. But when you see now what's happening that the radical environmentalist types in particular seem to be willing to sacrifice the world's poor at the drop of a hat to not make any progress whatsoever on the planetary salvation front. Right. Like I said, it would be different if they could point to any success is whatsoever on the alternate energy front that have actually produced a positive outcome.

Instead you see Germany, you see the UK where energy prices are much more expensive than they were before and much more unreliable. So how do you understand, and this is maybe where we can start touching on issues, broader issues of faith, you characterize this anti-industrial environmentalist movement as a religious enterprise. It's like, how do you, and you are and you are, you've been involved in the political game for a long time. How do you understand the fact that these policies have started to become dogmatic doctrine and that they're being pushed so hard,

you know, across the political spectrum, the Tories in the UK are worse on the net zero front than the lefties or at least is bad. So how do you understand how this happened, given it's that it's so preposterous? Well, that's a very good question, Jordan. And let me just give you one little anecdote, which I think might be telling. The other week in London, I went to the famous Farm Street Jesuit Church. We got to the prayers of the faithful,

and one of the prayers of the faithful was about the rapid decarbonisation of our society. Now, I don't normally stand up in church and object, and I wasn't going to break the habit of a lifetime on this particular day, but I did suddenly decide, well, bugger it. I went online, found the parish website and sent a note to whoever was the parish recipient of this thing saying, why the hell are you doing

this? The other day, a father Dominic sent a response to me saying that we have a moral obligation to reduce our emissions as quickly as possible, to which I said, well, sure, don't we also have a moral obligation to try to ensure that poor people in rich countries and poor countries more generally have access to the affordable energy that they need in order to have a decent life. Now, I don't expect to get a response from Father Dominic or anyone else from the Farms Street Jesuit Church. But I do think that what we're seeing here is one of the many byproducts of the decline of what I would regard as a more substantial faith because we human beings tend to be creatures of faith.

Maybe it's because we need faith. Maybe it's because there's just something out there drawing us to faith. If we don't have faith in our countries, if we don't have faith in our countries, if we don't have faith in our God, if we don't have faith in the religions that have stood the test of time, we'll find new things to have faith in. And even in the heart of Catholicism, we now have this green thing, which I think is a strange, unsettling, fundamentally foreign, and it can lead no way good. So I've been thinking about this issue of needing faith for a very long time, you know, and the

the classic objection of the rationalist materialists, say, the atheist rationalist materialists, is that you shouldn't have faith in anything for which there isn't proof. And, you know, there's a certain amount of, you can give a certain amount of credence to that viewpoint because it helps protect you against believing evidently counterproductive and foolish things. But I think the idea that you can't have faith or that you don't have to have faith in anything that isn't factual is misguided. And here's why. So tell me what you think about this. Well, the problem with human beings or app problem with human beings is that we're fundamentally

bounded by our ignorance. And so, for example, if you embark on a marriage, you have to take a vow. And in principle, it's an unbreakable vow. And the reason you do that is because you have to jump with both feet with your partner into a kind of a bis. And the reason you have to do that is because, well, what the hell do you know? You don't know what's going to happen to you in your life. And so you take this person and you say, as a show of good faith, we're going to bind ourselves together, predicated on the assumption that we'll be able to handle what comes at us better as honestly communicating and loving couple

then we could do with sequential relationships or alone. Now, we don't know if that's true, but we're going to spend our whole life giving it our best shot. Okay, well, that's an act of faith because you don't have the evidence for what's gonna happen in your life in front of you. Right. Okay. You do the same thing when you take a new job, right? Whenever you make an

important foray, you have to say, I believe this could work if I abide by this particular set of principles. And that's an active faith. Okay. So that's inaradiable. Then, you know, you said, there's something drawing us to faith. And so this is how it looks as far as I can tell, is that first of all, some things have to be more important than others. Because if they're not, you can't do anything. And the reason for that is that if you're going to do something, you have to do that thing instead of all the other things you might have done or instead of nothing.

So you have to prioritize. And as soon as you prioritize, you have a hierarchy of value. And that means that if your hierarchy of value is internally consistent, there has to be something at the top of it. Now, the classic Judeo-Christian answer to that conundrum was that something like truth and love, the spirit of truth and love should be at the pinnacle. And that should be expressed in honest discourse, for example. That's part of the worship of the word. And now, if nothing is put at the top, then, well, then there's nothing at the top, and you have disunity and confusion. And so there's no, the only alternative to organizing your

perceptions and your actions in a hierarchical manner with something at the top is confusion and disunity. There's no third choice. So I think that's what draws us to faith is that we're drawn to integrate our perceptions and our actions under a single scheme. And that helps stabilize this psychologically because then we're not confused and hopeless. But it also unites us socially. Because you and I, for example, right now,

we can sit and engage in civil discourse because we've agreed on a unifying framework, right? We're going to talk for 90 minutes. We're not going to play any tricks on each other, and we're going to see how that goes. And that means now we can cooperate and compete in a peaceful manner. Okay, so I don't see any of, I don't see that any of that is replaceable. Now, you know, you pointed out that if we don't have faith in one thing, we're either going to have faith in nothing or in something else. And it does seem to me to be the case that, you know, Gaia, the earth mother has risen up as an alternative to, let's say, Yahwa and the classic and the classic uniting God of the West. And that

doesn't seem to me to be a reasonable replacement. Well, I agree with you, Jordan, and look, the things that really matter can't be proven. Certainly, they can't be proven in the way that a mathematical formula or some scientific experiment proven in the way that a mathematical formula or some scientific experiment can be proven. We can't prove that the people close to us really love us. They can't prove that they are really loved by us. We have to take all this stuff on trust. And similarly, we absolutely need an important purpose to our lives, which is above simple survival, simple pleasure, just the basic satisfactions that an animal might seek.

We need to have a purpose and whether the purpose is looking after our loved ones, whether the purpose is being very good at a necessary but quite possibly simple job that we do as well as we can, whether the purpose is love and respect for the God that we think is our creator. Every single human being to live well needs a sense of purpose to his or her life. Once upon a time, it was, I suppose, civic-mindedness. In the case of Sarmatt was family commitment in the case of others. It was a sense of the divine in the case of still more. But all of those things are much weaker today across the West than they were a generation or two back. But because we are faith-focused people, we will seek other

things and it might be money, it might be pleasure, hedonism in all its forms, or we might find some alternative, a kind of green cultivator, or a climate cultivator, saving the planet not from the devil, but saving the planet from a climate apocalypse that might fill that gap. Now, again, I say, I think all sensible people should be conservation minded.

I don't want to see beautiful buildings demolished readily. I do not want to see our flora and fauna devastated. I take infinite satisfaction and delight in the waves rolling in at Manly Beach when I get down there of a morning on my longboard. I love to see the dolphins in the distance and occasionally the spout of a while, magnificent, absolutely magnificent. But you can't worship that. And certainly this idea that we should fixate on man's contribution to carbon dioxide emissions, I just think is odd.

All right, so let's walk through this a little bit more conceptually. So about 40 years ago, 50 years ago, psychologists started to analyze the manner in which the way people describe themselves aggregates. And they were looking at the underlying statistical structure of self-descriptive language. So here is the idea. We're going to study personality. Personality is reflected in language.

If we could analyze the statistical structure of language, we might be able to understand something more about personality. And so psychologists did this. They aggregated great bodies of descriptive phrases and sentences and adjectives and found out by statistical analysis, kind of an early application of AI, by the way, that temperament had five dimensions. Extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Now, neuroticism is the is the dimension on which all the negative emotions aggregate. So if you're more sensitive to anxiety, you're more sensitive to pain and

frustration and disappointment and guilt. And that's like a baseline sensitivity to life's challenges. And so the higher in neuroticism, you are the more units of physiological preparation, you undertake per unit of stress, right? And it's kind of a guess. Okay, now, one of the things psychologists discovered at the same time was that all of the emotions associated with attention to the, to the narrow self were indistinguishable from negative emotion.

So self-consciousness is actually a facet of neuroticism. And so to the degree that you focus on yourself, this is quite a stellar discovery, to the degree that you think about yourself, that you're concerned about yourself narrowly, you are simultaneously possessed by pain and anxiety. Right. Now, you kind of know that it because if you're out on stage and you're addressing your crowd and you get self-conscious, it's very uncomfortable. You blush, you lose your place, you stumble. The same thing happens to musicians if they're performing. And so self-consciousness is actually a disruption of the natural flow of events. Okay. Now, when people are looking for something that unites them, let's say, and that calls

to them, they tend to look for superordinate identities that are outside the self. So you could say, well, you could find meaning in an intimate relationship with your family, with your local community, with your state, with your nation. And then maybe there's something upon which the integrity of nations itself rests. I think that's the word in the Judeo-Christian tradition, by the way. And so you nest your identity in these superordinate elements. And that's also an element of faith. And that takes you, well, the benefit on the whole side, you know, you said people have

to have something to strive for. If you don't nest your identity in these superordinate social organizations, then you end up impulsive and hedonistic and self-focused. And that makes you hopeless and miserable. Correct. So that seems to be a bad solution. And that makes you hopeless and miserable. Correct. So that seems to be a bad solution. Okay, okay, so all right, all right. So we're in agreement on that.

So let me ask you something more specific then. You know, you are a very intelligent person. You had, you won a Rhodes scholarship. That's a very difficult thing to manage. You studied at Oxford. And yet, and I'm saying this as Devil's Advocate, you're also a man of traditional faith. And so I might say, well, how is it that you have been able to balance your intellect, which tends, you know, the intellect tends to have this corrosive, rational, doubtful

element that can demolish traditional faith, for example, which is certainly something that's happened to many people and happen more broadly, culturally. Why did your faith remain for you a central element of your being? And how have you reconciled that intellectually? Well, this might sound a bit odd, Jordan, but I think that humility is incredibly important to a successful life. I mean, you've got to, in a sense, lose yourself to find yourself. You've got to, in a sense, forget yourself to fully flourish. And I guess one of the things that I'm very conscious of is that I don't have all the

answers. I don't have all the experience. I don't regard myself as morally or intellectually superior to my forefathers. And I might have personal doubts, but I think it's important to be sufficiently immersed in the tradition, at least to the point where you respect it, and you allow it to work, it's magic on you. And look, you know, my personal faith, waxes and wanes, one of the many reasons why I never further pursued something that I did for a couple of years, namely the Catholic priesthood, is because I didn't think I had enough of a personal relationship with our Lord and Master Jesus Christ to be able to communicate that to people and persuade people that they too could have it. But nevertheless, the fact that my faith was insufficient

to move mountains doesn't mean that I don't respect it. It doesn't mean that I don't strive after it, and it doesn't mean that such that I have doesn't sustain me. I mean, okay, so you talked about the role of moral and intellectual humility on that front. So, okay, so I've been reading about the book of Exodus, and I conducted a seminar with a variety of people on that front. So, okay, so, so I've been reading, I've been writing about the book of Exodus, and I conducted a seminar with a variety of people on that book. I was reading this section the other day where the burning bush appears to Moses, and it's really a compelling section, because at that point, Moses is outside of Egypt, so he's no longer concerned with the tyranny or the Pharaoh or his strange

heritage. He's gone off to this place called Midia. Midia is midia. Anyways, to a foreign country, it's midia. He's out with the Midianites. He's married a woman there. He's taking care of his father-in-laws, flocks. They respect him. He's got himself a life, you know, and it's kind of hassle-free. And he's wandering around near, near Mount Sinai, interestingly enough, when something attracts his attention, right? And he decides to turn away from his path and to go investigate. And so to me, what that story is reflecting is the fact that in our lives will be interrelatively comfortable position and something will back into us that we can decide to investigate. And if we decide to investigate that, well, God only knows what will happen and that's

what happens to Moses. He goes off of the beaten path. He goes to investigate the burning bush. And the burning bush is a symbol of life and transformation at the same time, right? Because fire is a transformative element. So he goes to investigate being that's life and becoming that's transformation. And as he investigates it more deeply, he finds that he starts to walk on sacred ground. And God tells him he has to take

his shoes off. That's humility, right? And so, and then as he investigates even more deeply, the God of the Old Testament speaks to him and says that it's the same voice that called to Jacob and Isaac and Abraham. And so this seems relevant to the issue of respect for tradition. And so you could imagine, imagine that there's a spirit that unites the great acts of history, right? It's all a manifestation of the same proper orientation towards what's highest. That's represented in that story as the spirit of Yahweh, and that part of what you do, if you're called upon to be a leader, and that part of what you do, if you're called upon to be a leader, which is, of course, the next thing that happens to Moses, is

that you bow down and have respect to that guiding spiritual principle that's operated over the entire corpus of history. And so you seem to be making illusions to something like that when you said that for some reason, you had a kind of intellectual or moral humility. Now, why did you have that given the fact that you could have been, you could have been inordinately proud of your own intellect. I mean, it was of stellar quality and you were definitely rewarded for it. So how do you think that humility developed and why do you think people who are listening should give it some credence? Well, Jordan, that wonderful story that you've just so well developed for us

is one of the great civilizational stories of our culture and of our history. And part of the modern tragedy is that we know so much, and yet we know so little about the things that have really formed and shaped us as people. And there's almost an amnesia now about the Bible stories, whether it's Old Testament or New Testament, there's an indifference to the great history, whether it's the Greeks, the Romans, the history of the development of England and so on, and how the great ideas spread from these places throughout much of the world. from these places throughout much of the world. There's just this ignorance mixed with scorn which I think is so sad. I mean, we can know all about artificial intelligence,

but if you don't know anything about the culture and the civilization which has made this possible, you are intellectually impoverished. However clever you might be in so many areas. Now, this is part of our problem. Now, I guess I was blessed, if you like, by this sense of respect, verging on reverence for our history and for our traditions. When I was very young, my mother would probably on a weekly basis, bring me home the now almost forgotten, but back in the 1960s and 70s, very well known ladybird books, which popularized great historical stories, mostly from

British history I hasten to add, but you know, there was Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and Plato and Aristotle and all these as well in there. And I just soaked it all up. And so I guess from a very young age, I wasn't scornful of these things. I was appreciative of these things. I wasn't rejecting of these things. I was respectful of these things. And I guess that's what's sustained me for better or for worse all the way through. All right, so that's very interesting observation.

So you were exposed to biographical accounts of greatness when you were a kid. And those affected you. Now I think, and I was lucky. I was lucky. Jordan as a, as a, as a youngster. I had nuns teaching me when I was in infant school. I had Jesuits who were presiding over my primary and secondary education. These were the days before the Western Church had been afflicted to the extended ultimately

was by, I guess, the religious self-doubt that seems to have been associated with elements of the Second Vatican Council. These were impressive human beings. Whatever foibles and thoughts they may have had, they were impressive human beings. Certainly, they immensely impressed and helped me as a youngster. And I've been lucky to carry all that throughout my life thus far. I have had wonderful examples of courage, of faith, of inspiration, of insight, and that's brought me along, carried me in its wake. And my challenge is to be worthy of this great benefaction that I've had. Right.

Right. Well, you also said that your mother brought you these stories, and that's kind of interesting psychologically and symbolically, because what that means in a sense is that your mother brought you tales of the great men of the past, which indicated that your mother, so the primary feminine influence in your life, was someone who believed that that greatness of spirit actually existed. Now, you could imagine the counterpart, right, because you could have had a mother or female teachers who were bitterly resentful about the patriarchal oppression of the past,

who believed that every heroic figure was nothing other than a patriarchal oppressor and that was anti-masculine in the most fundamental sense in that manner. Now, you see this, there's lots of women and this is increasingly true and I think it's increasingly a consequence of familial breakdown. There's no shortage of women who have never had a positive relationship with anyone masculine in their whole life. You know, now I talked to this leftist scholar, Naomi Wolf, a while back on my podcast, you know, and she's, she wrote the beauty myth and she's been a pretty powerful voice on the left, on the pro-patriarchal oppression front. That's a narrative she buys. But she was raped when she was

11. And then she had a pretty dismal experience with someone who was supposed to mentor her in university. And it left her fractured and with a permanent animus against men. You know, and you can see that sort of thing spiraling out of control. But your mother had respect for these historical figures. What was the relationship between your mother and your father-like on the personal front? Look, you know, I don't claim to have seen every intimate moment, so to speak, but my mum and dad had a long and I think pretty successful marriage. And they raised four kids who have turned out to be okay. All of us respected, well my mum still alive, all of us respected our parents very much and have done our best to honour them. But look,

I absolutely accept Jordan that again to use a phrase that the Jesuits used to use back in the day, in a sense, we are all the product of those who have loved us or failed to love us. And I guess if you've come from an affirming and supportive, intellectually curious, capable family, you are more likely to turn out with a certain set of attitudes than if the opposite has been the case. And yeah, I can fully understand why someone who's experience of others who's been bitter, how they might be less optimistic and outgoing. outgoing, but if you believe as I do that most people most of the time are basically good

and if you think as I do that the challenge is every day to try to come closer to being your best self, well that's a good way to live your life because even if it's not perfect, at least you won't be concerned with bitterness. Yeah, well, that's something that can stop the tragedy from degenerating into hell. So that's at least a door stop against the catastrophe of life. I've thought that through a lot, partly as a consequence of working as a clinician. I've seen people in very dire situations, and

it's certainly the case that if Job-like tragedies come to visit you in life, you can make the situation a hell of a lot worse by becoming bitter and resentful. You know, and you can point to the catastrophes and say, look, I have every reason to be bitter and resentful. And the proper response to that is, well, be that as it may, and you could well be right. If you go down that road, tempted towards it by the weight of your suffering, all that will do is make your suffering much worse and universalize it. Say, that's, that's what the book of Job concentrates on. So in such an interesting manner, because Job has absolutely every reason to lift his middle finger towards the sky and to curse God.

I mean, God literally bets with Satan that Satan can't take Job out. You know, and that's a pretty rough situation, right? And, but I think the moral of the story is something like, no matter what happens to you in your life. And this is a, this is a bitch of the thing to say, no matter what happens to you in your life, no matter how deep the degradation and the suffering, you are called upon to maintain faith in the essential goodness of being and to orient yourself upward. You know, and that's a hell of a thing to ask of people, but the alternative seems to

be degeneration into a kind of hopeless and bitter misery. Exactly right. And one of the books that I read as a youngster was Victor Frankl's famous book from Death Camp to Ogg's existentialism. Now I didn't know too much, still don't know too much about the existentialism, but I do know that he survived that by virtue of focusing on the love he had for his wife, the love he had for his family, because if you have a why, as he kept saying, you can bear any how. The tragedy is that the modern world, while having less and less in the way of objective

difficulties, has less and less of the why that will enable us to endure the how. So you talked about humility as a precondition for your development of a certain kind of respect for the accomplishments of the past. And you know, we could also talk about, so one of the, one of something I've learned about the religious enterprise is that the emphasis on virtues like humility is allied with the sense that that has to be practiced. So the practice of faith in that regard

is to actually practice to consciously adopt an attitude, let's say, of humility and humility might be in principle, you know, I still have something to learn. I could learn to listen better. I could learn to attend better to the treasures of the past. I'm an ignorant creature. I should conduct myself in that manner. I should seek wisdom. And there are all sorts of counter positions that the full play of the rational mind can produce that will fight against that impulse, but it is something you can practice. And the same thing seems to apply to let's say an attitude of gratitude, um, that, and this is also the part of the problem with the idea that of you, the fact that you, of the idea that you could orient yourself by mere facts. Like if you look at

the conditions of life, especially when things are not going well for you. You could easily proclaim, like the anti-nadilists proclaim, that life is so bloody miserable in its essence that it would be better if it didn't exist at all. That's mefistophileist, by the way, in Gearthus' Faust, right? Is the whole enterprise should just be scrapped because the suffering is just too much. Well, the alternative to that is to attempt to practice finding what's good, I suppose, even in the darkest spots. You know, like when my wife, a while back, my wife was afflicted with what she had been told would be a terminal cancer. And in fact, the cancer that she had had only been reported by 200 people and every single one of them died within 10 months.

So it was pretty damn dismal, you know. And I watched her nearly die daily for like nine months. It was rough. And then she had surgical complications that, you know, the surgery probably, it was certainly one of the factors that saved her life, but it also put her in great peril, you know, and she, what did she do to cope with that? Well, she turned to the things that she had in her life that were positive, right? She really opened herself up, for example, to the love of her children in a way that even though she had been a very good mother and had a very close relationship with her kids, she found a dimension of love, of that

maternal love that was fathomless, I would say. And that really helped her, and she also decided when her father, her father had to cope with the long-term neurological degeneration of his wife. She had prefrontal dementia and she deteriorated from the age of about 55 to about 70, you know, in the way that neurological diseases take you out piece by piece. And he did that. He was stellar, man. He took care of her like a chap. And like he was a real man about time, but he's, he just reoriented himself in a selfless manner that was something to behold. And he was also willing to accept help. And that's another thing that happened to Tammy when she was ill is that she abandoned the law of her pretensions and she allowed people into her life to support her.

And that was also part of that practice of being grateful even under dreadful circumstances. And Jordan, this is where suffering is not ever something that we should go out and seek, but if suffering finds us, if we react rightly to it, it is in its own way or it can be at least in its own way, enobling. And I'm thinking of a good friend of mine whose wife ultimately died of dementia. For four or five years, she didn't know him, but he went every day, even so. And you could say, well, why did he bother? Well, just in case she did know, and because that was the duty of a husband for a wife in extremists. And we can say, well, let's try to, you know, baptize the suffering. Let's try to make the most of this. Or we can say it's all too hard and we can euthanize people, we can institutionalize people.

And I just think it's important that we choose the better way. As far as we humanly can, we should choose the better way. And again, if we go back to the teachings of Holy Mother Church, I mean, it's best if you get something out of the sacraments. But even if you don't, you should keep going because you just never know. And maybe even if you don't think you're getting anything out of it, you might actually be getting something out of it, which is beyond your comprehension, but is nevertheless making a difference. Well, you know, when I was a kid, 13 or so, and starting to turn away from the Protestant

Church that my mother in particular was part of, we didn't have a particularly religious home, but she went to church every Sunday, she liked to sing and she liked the community. And I got pretty skeptical about probably about my emerging understanding of the conflict, hypothetical conflict between, say, evolutionary views of the origin of man and the views that were being put forth in the church and decided that it was appropriate for me ethically to stop going, which caused my mother a certain amount of distress. Now, part of my cynicism at that time,

I suppose, was the kind of standard petty observation of weekend about the criticism of weekend Christians, right? People go to church for an hour a week, and they proclaim their allegiance to this virtuous pathway and then they go back out into the world and do exactly what they were going to do anyways. And, you know, there's some truth to that, I suppose, in that everyone can be hypocritical, but that was also true of me. And I had an insufficient understanding of that at the time. But I would also say, and this is to your point about what the practice might be doing for

you, even if you don't understand it, is that, you know, even an hour badly spent contemplating your own inadequacies, let's say in the form of sin and trying to aim upward, seems to be an improvement over never doing it at all, at all, for even a minute. And which is seems to be the alternative, right? Because once you scrap the church, and this is the sort of thing that people like Richard Dawkins and the atheist types would have us do, we'll just dispense with all that. And his plan was that we'd all become enlightenment rationalists, but we tend to degenerate into polytheistic pagans instead. And then we don't even give a second thought

to anything approximating a higher moral endeavor. And then these weird quasi-religions grip us and pull us down. Exactly right. Look, you know, I do not claim to be a particularly virtuous person. And I certainly do not put myself on any kind of a pedestal. But I am confident not that faith makes us good, but that faith makes us better. And I am sure that I would be even worse, but for the fact that I had a wonderful early beginning and even now, pretty imperfectly, I try to practice it all.

So when you were, when you were the leader of the opposition, that was 2009 to 2013, and then you were prime minister for two years. Now you said that you didn't regard yourself as this sufficiently developed person on the moral front, let's say, to, um, to enter the priesthood. You, you, you studied as a Catholic seminarian. And so you, you took the devil's root into politics, let's say, I saw the dark. You, yeah, you saw the dark. Okay, well, so tell me about your experiences as a leader of the opposition and as prime

minister. I mean, you got to see how things operated at the highest level, both nationally and internationally. And so what did you learn about people and what did you learn about the kind of machinations that go on at the highest political levels? And I'm also curious about your experiences on the international front, like with organizations like the World Economic Forum and so forth. So what conclusions did you derive from this time that you spent so integrally involved in the political landscape?

Well, I think the important thing is to say what you mean and do what you say. And it doesn't matter whether you're the local cobbler or the local school teacher or a professor of law or indeed the leader of a country. I just think you've got to say what you mean and do what you say. And there were some leaders that I interacted with who I thought were brilliant and capable, but I never really sensed that they were being fair-dingham with me. And there were others who were probably less brilliant

in some ways, but I got the impression that they were being straight with me. And always that's the test. Can you be straight with someone and do you think that person is being straight with you? And I guess knowing that the world is made up of all sorts of different people, some of whom will try to be helpful, some of whom will not try to be helpful, you've got to try to conduct yourself in such a way that the people whose welfare it is, your duty to advance, are as best as you can manage it, having there, there, there will be in advance. So as opposition leader, it was my job

to try to work out what the then government was doing wrong. And what I might do that would make it less wrong, or perhaps even more right. And then in government, it was my job to try to ensure that to the extent government can, it's making bad situations better, making good situations better, knowing that you're never gonna make it all right.

There are some things which you probably can't even begin knowing that you're never going to make it all right. There are some things which you probably can't even begin to improve. So you've got to know what's within the purview of government and what's not really. And it's a question I suppose of applying your insights and your judgment. Hopefully, I guess, helped by such character as you've managed to develop over the years in ways which make sense and make a difference. And look, I can talk about

different policies. But in the end, the job of everyone in public life is first to do no harm and then to try to respond intelligently to the exigencies of the day, all the time hoping to nudge things in a better direction as best you can tell. That's the duty of everyone in public life. How would you analyze the narrow and broader success of your attempts to play a straight game when you were Prime Minister? You ran into a lot of opposition and your faith ran into a lot of opposition as well. And a cynic might look at your record and say, well, if you would have been a little more instrumental in your tactics, a little more Machiavellian, let's say,

you might not have run into so much difficulty in opposition. I'm not necessarily saying that's the case. I'm asking in retrospect, you attempted to play a straight game. In some ways, I think you were a man out of time. You know what I mean is that the qualities that you brought to the position weren't necessarily the ones that were being demanded loudly and publicly at the time. You know, when your Catholicism, for example, is certainly something that exists in opposition to the new environmentalist ethos, arguably so at least. And so, do you think that attempting to play a straight game worked for you, and if so,

how? And do you think that politics tends to attract people who are more likely to play a crooked game than other modes of interacting with the world, business, art, culture? Well, Jordan, I think it would be generally thought or conceded that I was a very effective leader of the opposition in that I brought my side of politics back into government in record time. Now I did that by, I suppose, ruthlessly focusing on the mistakes of the then government and coming up with what I thought were feasible and principled and effective ways of improving that. Now I got into government and it would generally be thought that I was less effective as a prime

minister and I guess the fact that my own party replaced me after two years would provide a certain validation to that. But nevertheless, I did my best to try to temper the emissions obsession. I did my best to stop the border protection disaster. And I think pretty much completely succeeded in that. I did my best to get taxes down. In fact, abolished a couple of taxes, big taxes, the carbon tax and the mining tax, did my best to reduce the regulatory burden,

did my best to honor and respect the traditions and the institutions which had stood the test of time. Now, because I was probably against the zeitgeist in a way that most contemporary politicians are not, I did attract a kind of visceral dislike, including from people inside my own party who were happy enough when I was a successful leader of the opposition to put up with this more traditional conservative approach to things, but decided once we were in government that they could do better. But look, it's just one of those things. I mean... So why do you think you were so... So, like, universally claimed as effective as leader of the opposition,

and that that was then flipped on its head to some degree when you became... Prime Minister... When you became the Prime Minister itself, right? It doesn't exactly stand to reason, so what do you think happened? Well, Jordan, the leader of the opposition has effectively one job to get his team into government. The leader of a government has many jobs. You've got to try to ensure that everything which is

in the purview of government is handled as well as it can. So so running a government is much harder than leading an opposition. It is. And it's particularly difficult at the moment given that we are more fragmented and more polarized in the West than we have been for a long, long time. And I suppose I think it was more difficult as a conservative because there's a sense in which you're against the zeitgeist, you're out of sympathy with the temper of the times. But rather than conform yourself to the so-called signs of the times, I think the important thing is to push on with what you think is right and do your best to be good enough to overcome the difficulties of these times.

Notwithstanding the fact that I was only there for two years, I think it was probably the most successful two years of the nine years of the recent coalition government in this country. So, you know, I talked to BB Netanyahu about issues that were similar to this. And he made himself dreadfully unpopular at one point in his political career by pursuing a round of radical measures aimed at transforming Israel economically. And as far as I can tell, those worked, but they took about 10 years to bear fruit. And he was sort of in the political wilderness that entire time, but he certainly came back

with a vengeance. And so one of the things I'm curious about is, you know, are you pleased about the fact that you stuck to your guns? And if so, why given the defeat on the electoral front? And also, what did you learn from suffer from and benefit from as a consequence of being attacked in the manner that you were. One of the phrases I think I used on the night I was ejected from the parliament. Jordan is that it's better to be a fighter than a quitter. And if you're not prepared to lose, in a good cause, you're not really prepared to fight for a good cause. And so look, I'm pleased that I did try to resist the emissions obsession.

I did try to get the government less burdensome on people's lives. I did try to ensure that our country had a degree of integrity in its borders. I did try to ensure that our country was an effective and valuable ally to our friends. And look, there are a few things that I guess I might have done differently. Everyone makes mistakes, but fundamentally I think what I was trying to do was good and proper. Could I have been more emollient from time to time with colleagues, of course, could I have lavished a little more time on some people sure? Might I have expressed myself better in different circumstances? Well,

absolutely. I've done plenty of dodgy interviews over the years. Who hasn't? is who hasn't. But I think the project, if you like, the purpose, if you like, was good and right. And I'd do it again in a heartbeat. And what made you prepared to lose, do you think? Well, in the end, it's about trying to make a difference. And if you want to make a difference, you've got to strive for it. And if you're prepared to sacrifice that what you are striving for

in order to win, it's not about the cause. It's about you. And this is the problem in our public life right now. Too many people seem to be about, uh, preferment, promotion. Um, it's, it's about them. It's not about the country, it's not about the cause. They would rather stay in office than make a difference. Yeah, it's a very narrow conception of self-ay. I mean, one of the problems with, so if you look at the life outcomes of psychopaths, and psychopaths are particularly interesting, because they're completely self-interested

in the narrowly selfish sense. But one of the interesting things about psychopaths is they betray their future selves just as badly as they betray other people. So, like a psychopath will take momentary gratification whenever he can get it. And the problem with that is that there's always a price to be paid. And so psychopaths are completely incapable of learning from experience.

And they're much more likely to end up in prison. And the reason for that is that that impulsive narrow focus on the demands of the self actually turns out to be a very, very bad medium to long term strategy, even if you're thinking selfishly, right? Because you're not conceptualizing how you're going to be interacted with by people over any span of time. It's all about now. And when we talk about the power-monger types being selfish, it isn't just that they're

selfish. It isn't just that they're selfish. It's that they're stupidly and narrowly selfish in a manner that can't sustain itself, yeah. One of the things that I often used to say to myself was, no, unnecessary enemies. Now, there are some necessary enemies because if you want to do something that you really believe is right for the country and others oppose it, they are going to be your enemies and you just can't avoid that. But let's not

gratuitously offend people because we can. I mean, that's the mark of the bully. It's not the mark of someone who has at least tried to be a statesman. Yeah. Well, no unnecessary enemies. That's sort of like the doctrine of minimal necessary force. Oh, it's a good doctrine. Let's turn our attention if you don't mind to the international landscape. And so you have given a lot of thought, for example, to the issue of China. I'm not a big fan of the CCP, not least because

they support North Korea. And I would say that any state that supports North Korea is, let's call them questionable on the moral front to say the least. And so, and you guys in Australia, you have to deal with China in a way that's even more immediate and threatening and promising, than, than, than say those of us who are a little bit more distant. And so what do you see looming on the international front vis-a-vis China? Their economy doesn't seem to be very stable. They seem to be degenerating into a very comprehensive surveillance state tyranny. to a very comprehensive surveillance state tyranny. The, our hope in the West that increasing material wealth would liberalize China doesn't seem to be bearing fruit, although, you know, the Chinese aren't starving.

And there's something to be said for that. And we've had a lot of cheap goods as a consequence. So what, how do you, how do you conceptualize China, the West's proper relationship with China? What are your views in that domain? Well I think it was the current American Secretary of State, Blinken, who said that we would cooperate where we can, we will complete where we should and confront where we must. I think that was the formula he used. And I actually thought that was quite a good formula. In my time, when MH370 disappeared into the waste of the Indian Ocean with 240 people on board of him about 150 were Chinese nationals

Australia put everything we had into that search because that was the right thing to do And I think the Chinese government appreciated that by the same token When China declared unilaterally air defense identification zones over parts of the eastern South China seas, we flew military jets through there because again that was the right thing to do when China was trying to create this Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. Against the wishes of both America and Japan, our very good friends and allies, we were prepared to join this,

although we insisted on changes to the governance structure because we wanted it to reflect the kind of governance structures that global bodies typically had, rather than being simply a proxy for the communist government in Beijing. So look, I think in my time, we did pretty well. We successfully secured the first free trade deal between China and a G20 country. But prior to 2015, I think it was still possible to be optimistic about China and to think that even under the CCP, economic

modernisation was going ultimately to lead to a degree of political liberalisation and that over the decades there would be some kind of convergence, if you like. Unfortunately, as we discovered in the COVID period, if there was any convergence taking place, we were getting more like Communist China than they were getting like the liberal West. So my attitude to China and to the CCP, I think, was fair enough, over optimistic, perhaps, but it was fair enough back then. My view today is quite different. China is increasingly oppressing its own citizens. It has crushed the freedom of Hong Kong, one of the world's great cities. It's being monstrous towards its own wigger citizens. It's bullying and threatening all its neighbours and it's now particularly focused on taking Taiwan by force if necessary. Now, I think that if the Beijing regime believes that it will be 1.4 billion Chinese against 24 million Taiwanese.

At some point in the near future, they will strike. And I just think it would be horrific for 24 million Taiwanese to have their lives surrendered into the hands of a brutal dictatorship. And while no one wants conflict, I think it is important for free countries like Australia to join with our partners and allies such as the United States, such as Japan, such as the United Kingdom, to say very clearly to Beijing, there will be the most severe consequences if you try to alter the status quo by force across the Taiwan Straits. As I said earlier, Jordan, the Ukraine war has been a catastrophe, but it would be any war over Taiwan would be several orders of magnitude greater.

And I think we have to do everything we can to deter that, but I think strength is much more likely to deter than weakness. And so you seem to be quite concerned about the probability of Chinese assault on Taiwan. And so, you know, in my darker moments, I think, well, if I was running the CCP, a little distraction to take my citizens attention away from the catastrophes on the domestic economic front might be quite welcome. There's nothing that unites a fratious population more than a targeted enemy. It's pretty easy thing to use propaganda to, you know, to agitate for a vision of a unified China as it should be.

And so it would be a lovely distraction. And so, and you said, you know, you take a piece through strength approach, let's say, and you talked a little bit, you made some illusion a little bit to deterring China. Like, what do you think that the West could do on the deterrence front that wouldn't increase the probability of a cataclysmic interchange between the West and China? See, the terrifying thing about China is that they're likely more willing to sacrifice their citizens than we are. Right? And God only knows what they'd price they'd be willing to pay to to invade Taiwan, for example, especially if that gave them a purchase on power for another five years. So that's a very

hard enemy to deal with, right? Because if they'll light themselves on fire to cinch you, that's a pretty difficult thing to contend with. I take your point Jordan and I take your point and I particularly take your point that a dictatorship in trouble is a more unpredictable and dangerous dictatorship than a dictatorship that thinks that its best days are ahead. But likewise, I don't think that free countries can be blasier about the fate of what is practically a free and independent country. I don't think that the democracy should depart from the one China policy, I don't think that the United States should change its strategic ambiguity as such, but I do think that back channels and certain practical steps ought to be taken to try to ensure that Beijing is under no illusions

about the magnitude of the challenge it would face. And I'm not necessarily President Biden's greatest fan, but on this particular issue, his statements repeated now I think four times that the United States would defend Taiwan may well have sent a strong message to Beijing even though when officials have subsequently walked them back, they have stressed that the posture of strategic ambiguity has not changed. I mean, I think he has actually changed what strategic ambiguity means without abandoning the term. What are your thoughts, sir, on the situation vis-a-vis Russia and the Ukraine? Well, Joe, I know that's a complicated topic. Well, look, again, I don't say this is easy,

but I think what Putin is doing is monstrous. I think it's monstrous. He regards Ukraine as a rebel province, just as Beijing regards Taiwan as a rebel province. And unlike Taiwan, which has had a kind of a legally ambiguous situation now for decades, Ukraine has been fully and legally independent for 30 odd years. Putin has never accepted that, even though Ukraine was no threat to Russia, even though NATO

was no threat to Russia, he sent his army across the border, expecting a rapid victory, expecting that his death squads would find and eliminate President Zelensky. The Ukrainians have turned out to be much more united, much more heroic, much better prepared, much more imaginative, much more creative on the battlefield. And so for the last 15 months, they have at worst stalemated the Russians, and in some ways, bested the Russians, notwithstanding the fact that Russia has vastly more resources, vastly more manpower, vastly better weaponry. I think it's the duty of free countries, such as mine, to try to avoid escalating the war, sure, but also to try to do whatever we can to help the Ukrainians into the most

advantageous possible position. In if things went optimally, let's say, for the Ukrainians, and realistically, optimally for the Ukrainians and for the West, how do you think, what do you conceptualize as an ending? Because one of the things I've really tried to puzzle out is, well, what's the end game here? Like, if we got what we wanted, and by we, I mean the West that's supporting Ukraine, if we got what we wanted, what would

that look like? Do you have a sense of that? Well, ideally, it would be Ukraine regarding every inch of its territory and driving every last Russian soldier off its land. Ideally, that would be what it looks like. Now, in the end, I think it's up to the Ukrainians to decide what they are prepared to accept. But at the moment, despite the fact that Putin is relentlessly and mercilessly devastating their infrastructure, pulverising their cities, they are determined to fight. And the extraordinary thing is that this message that we got, very, very pervasively, prior to the 24th of February last year, that really there were the Western Ukrainians and then there were the sort of Russian Ukrainians. That appears to be largely

a Putin-inspired myth. The Russian-speaking Ukrainians appeared who have been almost as appalled by the brutality of the Russian invasion as everyone else. And Putin has succeeded in uniting the country in a way that maybe no one else has. So look, I think out of respect for the heroism of the Ukrainians, we have to leave them to determine what they think is a satisfactory outcome. Obviously, we do not have to support, and I would not expect this for a second. Any any official Ukrainian incursions into Russia. But I do think that NATO and NATO's partners, such as Australia, should first do everything we humanly can to help the Ukrainians into the best possible position militarily, be say to the Ukrainians that once this war is over, of course we will admit you in to NATO and see if there is any use of nuclear weapons by the Russians, well we will then

immediately admit you to NATO. That would I think, a reasonable position for Ukraine's friends to adopt, which is trying to avoid escalation while at the same time trying to avoid the triumph of aggression and dictatorship. So, all right, we're coming to the end of our time on YouTube. I know you have a hard out that we negotiated a priori. And so I won't ask you any more questions. I would, however, like to offer you the opportunity, if you think it would be useful to address anything that you think might be well communicated to people on whatever broad international level we manage with this podcast. Is there anything else that you'd like to say to people before we close up this segment?

Well, Jordan, obviously I'm here because I have a great deal of respect for the work you have reached a wide international audience, particularly an audience of younger men, and tried to remind them of the enduring virtues. You have tried to give them through your own insights and your own experience, something to live for, and some ways of actually grasping those essential truths. And look, I just think that countries like Australia, and look, I would extend this to the Anglo-Sphere in particular, and I suppose to the Western world more generally, we have achieved so much. And largely through the influence of the Anglo-American ascendancy, the whole world in 2020 was more prosperous,

it was more safe, it was more free than it ever before, than ever before in human history. And rather than despise and reject the values that created that, we should cherish and admire them. And yes, to do our best to renew them and take them forward, because I want the future to be at least as good as the recent past, and yet things look much more ominous now than at any time since the early 1940s. And I don't think we're going to fix it by surrender, whether it's economic surrender, whether it's military surrender, whether it's cultural and civilizational surrender. Surrender is not the way.

A decent and self-confident approach is going to be best for everyone. Well, hopefully that's something that we can outline in more detail with this alliance for responsible citizenship. You know, and what was it that Churchill said at the beginning of his histories of the Second World War in defeat, defiance in war resolution in peace, goodwill, and in victory, magnanimity. I mean, something like that is what we need to die. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it would be lovely. What we're hoping to do is to help inspire a vision for the future that draws on the wisdom of the past with respect for the past, with the kind of

respect for the past that you described developing, you know, over the course of your life, past that you described developing, you know, over the course of your life, that people can ally themselves with voluntarily. That will provide them with hope and that will offer a respite from unnecessary anxiety. And, and with tremendous emphasis on the voluntary element, right? We, we don't want to produce a vision that would rely on compulsion force and fear to implement, but that would be invetational instead. And I don't want to produce a vision that would rely on compulsion force and fear to implement, but that would be invitational instead. And I don't think that that's a pipe dream, I think, that that's actually what everyone who has any sense and who thinks about it for any length of time would want. And so I'll see you in London, I believe, at the end of October. And so that should be extraordinarily

interesting. And we certainly appreciate your participation. I'm looking forward to it, Jordan. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you, sir. Thank you to everyone watching and listening on the YouTube side for your time and attention and to the daily wire plus crew for facilitating this conversation. And thank you again, Mr. Abbott for your time and your insight and that's all much appreciated. We've had a lot of positive response in relationship to the arc on the Australian side and so that's been very heartening and we're hoping that that'll produce all sorts of positive things in the future. So thank you very much sir, very good talking to you today. Thank you.