TRIGGERnometry - "We're not thinking, we're emoting" - John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia

Episode Date: June 18, 2023

John Anderson is an Australian politician and commentator who served as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and leader of the National Party from 1999-2005. He was a member of the House of Representatives from 1989-2007, serving as Minister for Primary Industries and Energy from 1996-1998 and Minister for Transport and Regional Development from 1998-2005 in the Howard government. After politics, Anderson has been a public voice on civic freedoms, global food security, modern slavery and the economy. In 2017 he launched a YouTube channel, Conversations with John Anderson, featuring interviews with public intellectuals. SPONSORED BY: Babbel. Go to https://babbel.com/play/ and use promo code TRIGGER to get an extra 6 months free! SPONSORED BY: AG1. Go to https://drinkAG1.com/triggernometry/ to get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase!  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I look around and I see a desperate lack of hope. really, really troubles me. But I think what we're missing is that when we say our politicians are behaving disgracefully and that's all so broken, they're just reflecting the society that's voting them in. We're missing that. It's telling us something about our own society. So if you don't engage respectfully,

if you don't think through the issues, if you don't grapple with the facts rather than the emotions, there's your civilizational moment. We're not thinking. were emoting everything. And that's your classic with social media. I think there's another aspect. There's the old Edmund Burke thing.

You know, all it takes for evil to prosper is good people to remain silent. So you've got a huge number of people who are disengaged from politics, from public life, from the public square, and they're frightened of going on social media. And what we actually need is more people have balanced in the middle, being prepared to say, you know,

I don't like all this stuff out there, and I'm just going to go online and say, Hey, listen, Carmen, let's think this through. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is the show for you, if you want honest conversations, with fascinating people.

Our terrific guest today is a former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia who's now become a YouTuber. How far he has fallen, John Anderson. Welcome to Trigonometry. It's fantastic to be with you both. Oh, it's so great to have you on the show. You've interviewed me a couple of times. We've met and we know each other well.

Welcome to the show, first of all. For anyone who's not familiar with you, you host a brilliant YouTube show called Conversations, which is what we tried to do here. But tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are? What has been your journey through life? Because you've done a hell of a lot of things, many of them very interesting.

Well, I'm actually a farmer by background. Or an Australian farming terminology, I suppose I'm a farmer in grazier, cropping and animals. And, you know, I sometimes quipped that when I'm out on the farm, people say, I can't see you in a suit. And when I look like this, they say, oh, you're not a farmer.

You know, you're something dreadful like a banker or a lawyer or whatever. So I'm a bit schizophrenic. But I'm a sixth generation on the land in Australia, Scottish extraction. And a product of the University of Sydney, a lover of history and a public life fascinates me. Great devotee of the democratic tradition. And frankly, of a mixed market economy, controlled capitalism, I suppose you'd say. I found myself in public life more by accident than design. I'd never gone looking for it.

I was talked into it, literally talked into it. And if you'd told me when I was young, I'd end up having 10 years as a cabinet minister and 6th as Deputy Prime Minister, I would have said you had rocks in your head, and a lot of people would probably still say should never have happened, but it did. And I left at a time when Australia was in a purple patch.

It was going really well. And I'd had enough of public life. I wanted some family life back. I wanted to go back to farming. And then the great financial crisis hit. And I saw the fishes in Western society because, A, it should never have happened. And B, when it had, we wouldn't accept our responsibility

to clean up the mess, pay down all the debt, engage in good policy to restore our strength. And I'm talking the West generally. I'm frankly talking about my own country. I'm talking about America, Canada, Britain, in particular. Europe as well. And so a friend and I started our series of conversations. And the idea is more than anything else is just to provide a conduit for good thinking.

So I don't have a model where I sort of interrupt or try to interfere or play any entrapment games. Let the audience, let those who listen do their own interpreting. What's the idea? It's to encourage thinking because we're doing too much emoting at the moment. Well, that's something we're definitely going to get into. But, John, one of the things that you and I've often talked about, and Francis and I were very keen to ask you about, is we've talked many times about the fact that there's a culture of victimhood,

wallowing in terrible, bad things that our countries did and also in our own personal lives. And you're actually somebody who, as a child, experienced an awful lot of tragedy, didn't you? I did, yeah. Would you mind telling us about that and how you overcame that and how you went on to be who you are? Well, that's really a story of personal faith.

So if you're up for it, I'll give you the encapsulated version. We are, so we're going to get the hardest what we deserve. I suppose in a way, the point of the story is to say, we're very judgmental when we say you're a victim and you're not a victim because we don't know what other people have been through. You know, I mean, I don't know what tough times. You know, I know a little of your story back in Russia. That wasn't easy, you know.

And people could say, oh, look at this privileged westerner in London, living it up. and he's got millions of followers. So in my case, my parents' lives badly interrupted badly by the Second World War. So marriage was very delayed for them. I was born 10 years after the war on my mid-baby Burma. My mother died very shortly afterwards of undiagnosed stomach cancer, leaving my sister in me as very young.

And that was very tough for my father, really tough. We lived in a fairly isolated part of Australia. Anyway, we were sent off to boarding school because that's what you had to do when you got to age 11 or 12 in Sydney. And home on holidays, my father was a very gifted sportsman. So every afternoon, he was a good dad in this sense. We'd go off target practising. We had a rabbit plague in Australia.

So we'd be popping off rabbits along the creeks. Or we'd be boxing. He was a brilliant boxer. Or we'd be playing cricket because he was a brilliant cricketer. staggeringly good eye for a ball. And as a teenager, we were practising cricket during one Easter break. And I was building my father all over the place. And he had that smile that a father gets when he sees his kids really latched on to something.

And then it all went horribly, horribly wrong. And I hit a six. And my slightly younger sister, we were very close to an age, was watching from sidelines a long way away. playing with a cat. And she looked up and saw my sick stitcher coming straight for her and instinctively turned away. And the ball caught her in the back of the neck.

And she staggered a few feet towards my father and called out and died. And that was an extraordinary experience with very few people go through where you've been the innocent cause of someone else's death. And I was innocent. And I don't say for a moment I had a guilt up hangover, just the utter misery.

of going to a place where you think, no matter how nice people are to me, they don't know what this is like because so few people have been there and where your childhood just ends and it impacts your sense of humour. So I love other people with a sense of humour, but I'm very aware that I didn't practice mine very well as a young person. And I had to go looking for answers to the big questions. I couldn't avoid them. They were there and I thought this is either going to sink me

or I'm going to find a resolution, find a way through. and for me that was the source really from a thoroughly secular family, I suppose you'd say, of me coming to personal faith as a Christian believer. Wow. And was that then your faith a platform for you to be able to go and succeed in life? Has your faith always been the bedrock for you? I think the answer to that is yes. And I think in many ways, the thing it's done most for me,

against the grain of my own nature, I think is to say that my neighbour matters and that I should be careful, not about so much judging their actions sometimes, I think you'd be as tough as you like in saying to others, I think that's a bad thing to do, but not to write them off as people

and to say that if I matter, because part of this journey for me was to discover that this was not the way it was meant to be, God intended things to be better. That's my belief. That's standard Christian belief. We broke it by our own selfishness. But as part of that, the deep desire to see others flourish

and to participate in a society where you're building, not tearing down, became a very strong motivation for me. And I sometimes think to myself, I feel the hurt of unwarranted, I've never had much trouble coping, deserve criticism. But when it's undeserved or unfair or unjustified or people in wrong motivation for me, I've always found that hard because, quirkily enough, I've actually been very deeply committed to the idea of trying to help build a better world. I find that response quite surprising, John, because you're saying that you find undeserved

criticism difficult to deal with, and yet you went into politics? Yeah. Well, it's a good point. Yeah. But I think the point I would make is that when I copped flak for something I'd got wrong, you know, I'd be remorseful and tailed between the leg and what have you, but I could cope with it better than when somebody made an accusation that was just false or wrong or imputed to me, you know, motivations that I felt were unfair, you know, base motivations.

And sometimes I'd have to pull myself up and say, actually, this is saying a lot more about them than it is about me. And John, as we sit here recording this, we've just spent a few weeks in America. And in America, people are very comfortable expressing their religious faith openly. But with you, I sense a hesitation. Is that just because you're sitting here with two filthy agnostics? Or is there, are we now, you know, in Australia and Britain, are we a little bit more hesitant perhaps to talk about things like that, do you think?

Look, it is a fair bit of that. No, it's not you guys. I know you and trust you and care enough about you to know that, Anything you throw at me will be good-natured. It will, one. He doesn't know you that way. He doesn't. I've got a division here.

You know, politicians. Always looks for division. I'm an ex-politician. Look, I'm just aware that my story can be, you know, it's a hard one to tell. It is to talk about those things openly. I'll tell you partly why I do it. More recently, it's because I've seen Jordan Peterson addressing packed houses of mainly younger people. And I've noticed that young men in particular respond when he tells them that life's tough and it's gritty and don't pretend otherwise and that truth, I think his line is truth as the antidote to suffering.

And as I've watched in Australia, those young men responding to him, I'm thinking they're wanting what I would say is a real stake not fin gruel. They're wanting to know other people's experiences. They want to know the unvarnished truth. And I suppose that's part of why I tell it. But the other part of it is that I know that a lot of people particularly, not so much in America, but in Australia and in Britain, will say, oh, we've moved on from that. You know, John, you're just being superstitious.

It's rubbish and so forth. But to me, it is the core of my being. I had to answer three very tough questions after that. What is this suffering? Why is suffering so real? You know? And secondly, does anybody care? Does anybody understand?

And thirdly, will the wounds be bound up? Will there be joy? And I think the answer to those three questions in short or there is, no, this is not the way it was meant to be, but we broke the world. And people will sort of say, what are you talking about, original sin? And I suppose, yes, I am.

And it's not a complete explanation. In my case, why did I live and my sister not live? I don't know. I hope I may know one day. But here's the point. What would really kill me would be the idea to think it was just totally random. No purpose. You just have all this pain because that's the way life is and that was the way it was always meant to be. No, I don't believe it was meant

to be like that. Secondly, can it be restored? Does anybody care can it be restored? Second part of the triangle? Well, I believe yes. I do believe the Christian message of redemption. I do believe that the most central figure in history is Christ and he suffered in every way in a way that's beyond anything I might suffer. New alienation and rejection by his friends more than anything I might know. So he can identify. And because of his actions, I do believe the words can be bound up and that there is hope. And I look around and I see a desperate lack of hope.

It really, really troubles me. I used to see it all the time as an MP in the really disadmarted parts of my electorate, including, and this is a sensitive issue in Australia amongst Indigenous kids. And I'd see them in the school and their lives being, you know, pissed up against the wall by what was happening at home, in their community. And I'm sorry to say it, even in the schools, despite well-meaning teachers. And you think this is just a dead end street. No wonder they've got no hope.

And hope is so important. We don't talk about it as enough. No, we don't. And with that religious bit that we just did, we lost all our British audience. But welcome Americans, it's good to have you on board. There must be some Brits that have started with me. I'm kidding. Six of them.

Exactly. Name on. You can just write a list down. But, you know, the other thing I think about, you know, I don't know if I'm projecting this on to you, but I think you come from a generation, us less so, but still where the idea of talking about difficult things that you've experienced, it wasn't really the done thing. No, it wasn't. That's right. But I do start to get the sense that, as you say, Jordan Peterson and others. And, you know, I tried to do a bit of this in my Oxford speech as well, which we've talked about privately, to give some examples that are much more.

real rather than sort of theory and talk about the difficulties that we all go through. So it's very easy for people to look at me and my wife and my kids and grandkids and say, it's all picture perfect. That's right. That's where I was going. Sorry. No, no, that's where I was going. Tell me more. Well, that's partly why I want to say to people, look, can we draw alongside and I want to to acknowledge that you're doing it tough?

And I don't want you to think that I haven't known what it is to have to ask a big question. just because, you know, I, in many ways materially, I've never wanted for any of you. You know, I've been very fortunate in that regard. But that's, life's about much more than that. And you know, this business of creating victims selected, very carefully selected victims who are then weaponised that is such a feature of our modern, so-called progressive society. And we say we care, do we? when we carefully select our victims and we say,

this is the Jordan Peterson things, when you see him in front of an audience of hundreds and hundreds of young people, and they're all there because he's not saying, your masculinity's toxic, you're toxic just because you're a young Australian male, which is the message they're getting. You know, that's what they're hearing. And he's saying to them, you know, that's not right.

A, I don't think a victim culture is going to fix your problems. And B, life is tough. let me acknowledge that. So then we can talk. Life does present us with big challenges, not just material. I agree with you. It presents us with huge challenges.

One of the big challenges that is presenting us with is politics does seem to be broken at the moment, John. And as somebody who used to work in politics, what's going wrong with it now? We had a member when I was in the parliament. And whenever a constituent asking something, he'd say, I'll bring it up in the house. So they called him Spiri.

And when they realised that he realised he was being called Spiri, he changed it. He said, I'll look into it. So they called him Mirror. Now what's the point of that yarn? The point of that yarn is that what I think we miss is that in the democratic tradition, which I say we're privileged to live in in the West,

I know people are losing confidence in it. Now, young people especially, democratic capitalism. They're not invested in it anymore because it's not working for them well. And there's a bit of truth in that, and we ought to be honest about it. But I think what we're missing is that when we say our politicians are behaving disgracefully and that's all so broken, they're just reflecting the society that's voting them in.

We're missing that. It's telling us something about our own society. And I'll tell you one of the biggest things is telling us. We're raising our kids in contradistinction to the way that I was raised. Not all that. I mean, I know I've got grey hair and I'm older than you guys. But in the great scheme of things, it's not all that long. I was educated in the 60s and 70s.

And a big part of the education was don't think you're more special on the person sitting on the desk next to you in the classroom. Now it's you're the centre of your universe, if not the universe. You know, it's all about you. You know, the whole radical autonomy idea and find yourself from within and go out and be your own God. But when we see it in our leaders up on the stage and we say they seem to think it's more about them.

No, it's not. They should be serving us. Hang on, they're actually mirroring us. That's what we've become. Why should we be surprised? And look at the way the Queen's memorial service. I don't know how they work these things out, but apparently it was what's by four billion people.

She's hugely admired. How would you describe her leadership? It was servant leadership. And when we see it, we say, yeah, that's right. That's the way it ought to be. She was committed to working hard for us, a lifetime of dedicated service to others. You can't escape it.

and we admire hugely for it. And we're not seeing that in enough of our politicians. I'm not going to blackguard them all. I know some very good ones, I really do, who are genuinely trying to make a difference. But there are too many of them now that are there about power. And that's the other problem you have. You know, when you've got no God over government,

government becomes God, and the people in it become about power. And principle disappears. So we used to argue on principle, sometimes for minority groups. increasingly. And unfortunately, it hurts me to say this a bit, but I think it probably applies to politicians on both sides of the aisle all too often. It's really about power. And that's, we don't like that. And we shouldn't like it. We should be worried about it. That's why our four bears set all these checks and balances in place. As one person said of democracy in America,

we're so good we had to give ourselves the vote. You know, we recognize the dignity and the worth of everyone. We're so bad we had to give ourselves a vote. We need a peaceful means of breaking up power and ensuring that no one can hold it for too long and we can arrange for changing our leaders at the point of a pencil, not a gun. And we ought to be in love with that system. But we've got this double-sided problem. We keep promoting the wrong people and then they keep doing the wrong thing and we all get more and more cynical. But isn't it also the problem as well, John, in that we have become a society. that is pleasure-seeking.

We love pleasure. We don't want to endure a moment of discomfort. That being the case, what do you do as a politician when you've got some uncomfortable troops you need to tell people about their society and particularly, let's be honest, about the economic situation we find ourselves here?

I couldn't agree with him more. I think there's a really serious problem. That was a hard. I didn't pat it out much. But back home, I've got this conversation series and Constantine, you've been on it and we've just loved having you. And, you know, we've got this whole sort of problem of trying to get people to think a little

bit more deeply about tomorrow. And this business of living way beyond our means, you know, we're borrowing not just against our children, but against the unborn. So it doesn't matter. We matter more than they do. That's not what our forebears said. They were prepared to say, we've got to take a long-term view. It's like parents do.

You've got a little boy now, Constantine, which I think's fantastic. Try and convince him to have some kids. Yeah, Britain, you need to get your population rate up, you know. Nobody's worked it out yet, but there's a depopulation bomb about to hit most of the world, not Africa and not some parts of the Middle East, maybe South America, but everywhere else. And it's going to be a real problem, but we're not invested in the future. And being invested in the future means family and kids actually matter. And you now know very deeply what you're going to be a real problem.

do for your boy. And that other person centeredness is something that we really need to learn very deeply if cultures like ours that are survive and thrive. Isn't that amazing, John, the, you know, the vast majority of people in this country in Australia and America where this is happening are parents. And yet we are consciously as a society, saddling our own children and, as you say, unborn grandchildren with, if you said to me, Constantine, are you prepared? to saddle your son with hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt for your own immediate satisfaction, pleasure, whatever, so you can have a nicer house. I don't think there's a parent in the world who would do that.

Very few, I imagine, I hope so. Yet, as a society, that is exactly what we're doing. Yeah, but this is part of the problem we're emoting everything. I feel I need more support from the government, but I don't think, on the other hand, that it's actually other taxpayers' money and that is now being borrowed. and that that money's got to be serviced. The fastest growing area, I was part of a government that left Australia with no debt

and money in the bank. I was one of the five people co-opted by the then Prime Minister in 1996 going wind back the deficits and then we'll see if we can pay down the debt. We got rid of the lot over 11 years left money in the bank. And now that's been largely squandered, and so we've got a big debt again. And I find that extraordinary

because it is really impacting on taxpayers today and our children because the fastest growing area of expenditure in Australia is the interest on the debt. So the taxpayers have got to find a whole heap of money before you build a hospital or pay nurses or provide police or buy a destroyer for the Navy. Before you do anything, you've got to fork out a whole lot of hard-earned money and our kids and our grandkids if we don't,

rein this in, we'll have to fog out even more. And it says something very profound about our culture that we've reached that point where it doesn't matter. I couldn't agree more. And this brings us to a question I was going to ask you because the government that you were part of and your political career all happened pre the social media age. Yeah. And I can't help thinking that social media has been a huge part of what you're talking about because social media rewards things that sound good but don't work in practice. Social media encourages not just, you know,

politics has always been adversarial and that's a good thing in a liberal society. You want different points of view. But it's not adversarial anymore. It's now hostile. You are the enemy because you're on the right and I am the enemy because I'm on the left. And the point of speaking,

in public now in a parliament is no longer about persuading or articulating a principal point of view. It's about getting a good clip for social media, which shows you destroying the evil, bigoted or stupid or whatever the other side. How much of this do you think is a product of the changing technological landscape? I have in the past often just said, look, all it's been is an amplifier of trends that were there. But I'm increasingly thinking that it's been a part of the problem, a bigger and bigger part of the problem in its own right. An example that really occurs to me is the issue of free speech. Now, they tell me in America that majority support for free speech

on American campuses, you can actually... went to minority speech about 10 years ago, about 2013-14. How on earth can you say there was such a narrow period of time? Leaving alone, the questions of why it happened, it's got to be largely social media. Because so many people use that ability to hit others without a sense of responsibility and respect that suddenly people are saying,

I've been destroyed, or my friends have been destroyed, or I'm terrified of being destroyed by the way people use this thing. Therefore, let's abandon free speech and say, should only be appropriate speech. And in a way you can understand it. An old cynic like me says, good grief, don't you understand? That means some Orwellian vision

and someone out there will determine what's appropriate. But they're not thinking, that, many of them, they'd be thinking, I just want some protection from the possibility of being torn apart. So we're not using the technology wisely. We're using it to feed our worst instincts in an age when we've lost respect for one another. And it's the old, you know, it's cliched I know, and it's attributed to Voltaire and it wasn't him. But, you know, I may disagree with you, but I'll defend it the death you're right to say. It's now, if you dare to disagree with me, I'll do everything I can to destroy you. And they are poised.

are opposites and until we can recover some common understanding of our shared humanity. See, one of the things that I've really noticed in politics in Australia, I used to have some really spirited but enjoyable conversations with people who had a totally different worldview to me. But in their own way, they were noble. They wanted to build a better way as they saw it. And I'm talking about, you know, people from the serious left, as the left was then. It was about universalism.

Let's lift the disadvantaged up so they're part of the family. And some of those people will say now their own movement. It's so distorted. It's now about creating an aristocracy of victims and then weaponising them. It's never about solving their problems because you solve their problems. They're not victims.

And you lost your weapon. And what a terrible thing to do to other people. And somehow we've got to rebuild that respect. And it's the same with something like private property. We should respect. I mean, the four freedoms, free service. speech to my way thinking freedom of conscience and belief, freedom to associate, and freedom to own private property, including your intellectual prowess, you know? You're using yours highly

effect. It's yours. It's not for a government to come along and shut you down or take away your private property or whatever. It's yours to use wisely. Well, you know, weaken any of those freedoms and you weaken them all. It's like a four-legged stool, you know. You break one and a stool will fall over. But we don't talk like that anymore. And Australia in particular has fallen victim to this, because when I was growing up, I saw these Aussie blokes as being these kind of ruggedly masculine,

dare I say too masculine, right? Loving a punch up in a beer and whatever else. And now you've got Melbourne, which, I mean, is it the wokenest place on earth, practically? Well, there are regional differences in Australia. I don't live in Melbourne, all right? The politicians come out. No, I don't think that's it.

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Yeah, well, you know, it is extraordinary. I was in America recently, and I had a two-hour interview with Patrick Bettavers in Miami. And he called the show whatever happened to the Australians. And I don't know how many Australians understand that, you know, we've got this image now around the world

of the most severe lockdowns, and you're going to only walk for an hour a day. Well, why not an hour and one minute, you know, and why not five and a half kilometres away from home instead of five kilometres and then, you know, pregnant women being dragged away by police and what have you. One Facebook post and this pregnant woman is now in deep trouble.

You're under arrest in relation to incitement. Incitement? What's that? What on earth? Excuse me, what an earth? Just put your phone down. Can you, like, report this? In my pyjamas?

What's this? Yeah, she's pregnant, so... What's this about? Do I have an ultrasound? In an hour. Let me finish and I'll explain it. In relation to a Facebook post, in relation to a lockdown protest, that's why I'm arrested you.

In relation to... How can you arrest her? She could face a jail sentence of up to 15 years. But they voted for more of it. It's sort of Stockholm syndrome, you know? The regime that put it in place has been subjected to an election, and they won it again. partly because the opposition didn't stand for enough,

but partly because people, who was the American forefather, I think was Benjamin Franklin, that people who become afraid and go looking for security over freedom are worthy of neither. I think we've lost sight of how valuable freedom. Which is why I've enjoyed my conversation so much, Constantine, with you as we've talked in the past, about your home environment,

and you've written this marvellous book, which I really, you sent it to me and I really, you know, it survived the British and Australian it. It arrived at home on my farm in North West New South Wales and I read it. And I thought, isn't this terrific? Because you can see as so often those who are sitting in the luxury spot when everything else seems comfortable, how our own slothfulness is placing at risk with very things that we enjoy. Well, it's very kind of you. And I've just started writing my second book, so I look forward to sending you that as well. But, It may not arrive after this conversation.

It may not. But come back with me to the social media conversation because you're one of the few people. We avoid having politicians on the show because increasingly it's hard to get a straight answer out. So do I. Well, I'm sure you do. And I haven't been on.

Tell us why you avoid having politicians. Look, in my case, it's largely because if I have one or there will be others who will want to and I don't particularly, because, you know, I'm obviously very close to some of them still. And I have, you know, people that I talk to all the time and they kindly ring and say, you try. some of them are wise enough to actually say

there's nothing new under the sun, John, I think you might have tried this, what happened. You know, if only more of them did it. Because very often it's not me being clever, I was just saying, yeah, sure, we tried that, and here's where it went wrong. And all that experience is washed out of the system. We used to listen to it.

Can I call myself an elder? I'm old, I don't know whether I can call myself an elder. I certainly wouldn't. Well, no, rather, what the old bit or elder? Anyway. But, you know, the other reason is that you know, I'm trying to provide a service to some of the good politicians and their staffers because I know a lot of them do listen in in Australia.

There'll be a surprising number of people on the hill in Canberra who will listen to this conversation. And that's good. But part of it is I want to be a bit bipartisan about it. So I've spoken to quite a few number, quite a number of ex-politicians that I really respect from both sides, including one from an old-fashioned hard left perspective. But maybe they're just delighted on balance that I don't want them on. Well, that makes sense. For us, the reason we don't is it's hard to get a straight answer out of them quite often.

But you are one of the few people that we've ever spoken to on the show who's actually been in a senior leadership position in running a country, right? And the reason I want to talk about social media is, to me, it's the central conundrum, until AI takes over and makes things even worse, the central conundrum of the age that we're living in, and I don't really understand how you might go about addressing that,

because we talk about free speech, and Francis and I, as you know, are huge believers, and I think it's essential. But I'm also increasingly convinced that a free internet of the sort of that we had in the early days of the internet is never coming back. It's not going to happen because the technology is too powerful.

We saw it during the pandemic, when, you know, David Dyke says something about how COVID is caused by 5G masks, the next day you've got people burning things down. Better to be safe than sorry. He's joking, YouTube. But you see what I mean? Yeah. The technology is very powerful.

Yes, it is. We saw it. Some people would argue January the 6th is an example of this, right? A thing that's whipped up on the internet, whatever you think happened, on that day. It was not a good thing to have happened. Happens in the real world. And it's been happening in Australia on a regular basis. There's a little show somewhere that suddenly gets out blown out of all proportion and everyone's

polarized and nobody's understood what truly happened. Right. And the politician instinct, I imagine, is to go, well, we must do something about this, right? But what do you do? The moment you start interfering it, some people are going to say, well, you're restricting our free speech. The moment you don't restrict free speech, other people are going to say, you're, you're going to say you're allowing things to happen that are damaging in the real world, you know,

suicides and terrible tragedies and, you know, protests that go violent and all of this stuff. How does a political operative look at this problem and actually try to address it? I wish I knew. I don't have a grip answer. I just don't. Because I think like all technology, the technology itself's neutral. It's morally neutral. It's what you do with it. So that comes down to our sense of responsibility. But we don't talk responsibility anymore. We only talk freedoms and rights. So somehow the answer is probably, I mean, the only parallel with this is a printing press, which threw Europe into chaos for 100 years. Let's hope this modern version doesn't do the same thing, a modern version of upgraded communications, if I can put it that way. Let's hope we can

find a resolution faster than that because it's a fast-moving world and is very dangerous. And for a long time, my view was very much the tech company should be told, well, you're like the postal service, and this is a bomb in it. You know, it's got nothing to do with you what's written in those letters. Nothing to do it.

You're the carrier. But that's too simplistic as well because the bombs now can be embedded in bad ideas. Who decides what's a bad idea? You're into Orwellian territory before you know it. So I think I'm too old. to answer the question. That's a cop-out, I know. There you go. You're probably half expected. But I think the answer long-term has to lie in us accepting, because I think this is a civilizational

moment, frankly. I think it's that serious. Why do you think it's a civilizational moment, John? Because I think we're so cynical about the values of the past or so disengaged from them, and we've not found any guiding values for the present, and this is one of them. And I think a big part of the common cause we made in the past was the respect for people that you disagreed with. The genius of Western society, and Constantine, you know about this because of your own background, was our capacity for people who had very different world views to coexist and resolve their differences through the political process, through the parliaments, and what have you. And the public square, I suppose, it went from being a literal public square and the

Arigopoulos, if I've said that right, you know in ancient times, through to our parliaments, then added to by newspapers, then radio, then television, and now the public square is just a chaotic global thing that the very thing we're talking about, social media, has developed. And we have not managed to find some rules for it, but we can draw some principles from the previous ones. If you don't engage respectfully, if you don't think through the issues, if you don't grapple with the facts rather than the emotions, there's your civilizational moment. We're not thinking. We're emoting everything. And that's your classic with social media. We're not thinking

about what will it mean if I put this stuff up there. We're thinking about will it give me a hit? Will it make me feel good? Will it destroy someone else? Rather than will it build a stronger society based on respect and regard for one another? It's a pretty boring answer, I know. bit, but on the other hand, it's something I increasingly have come to. When we started this, I was quite readily trolling people and making fun and whatever. You know, satirically, that's kind of what you're supposed to do. But the longer we go, the more I see the way the world is going, and also the bigger my audience grows, I've become far more responsible. And that was the word that you said there, which I think, you know, we always look to government to solve these problems.

Actually, it sounds to me like the biggest solution is within every human being, which is to say I am responsible for the things that I'm communicating. And yes, this device makes me angrier and more hostile and whatever, but it is my duty as a human being to seek to be careful about the way that I use this neutral technology. I think that's right. I think there's another aspect. There's the old Edmund Burke thing. All it takes for evil to prosper is good people to remain silent.

So you've got a huge number of people who are disengaged, politics from public life, from the public square, and they're frightened of going on social media. And what we actually need is more people have balanced in the middle, being prepared to say, you know, I don't like all this stuff out there and I'm just going to go online and say, hey, listen, calm it, let's think this through. Because I think there's a bit of a tendency now for people who want to win the battle at the risk of losing the war. You know, we're turning every battle into, I've got to win this even if I destroy the other person. But often, that's very counterproductive to a harmonious society in which we can all flourish.

John, we have now been made to feel guilty for the sins of our ancestors. Yeah. And that has been a recurring theme, and it has just erupted over the last couple of years. How was that affected Australia, particularly when it comes to the indigenous communities? We have the same disease. It's very bad policy to hold someone responsible for what their forebears have done. You start going down that road. There's no end to the misery we will inflict on one another.

And in many ways, the greatest problem with it is that you start to withdraw agency. We're talking responsibility. So people fall into, you know, this is your victim culture again. It's identity politics. Oh, it's not my fault that, you know, I'm an abusive man in my home. And I'm doing appalling things to, you know, my own children. and the neighbours' children and what have you. I'm a victim of frontier violence or whatever.

And just when we're making tremendous progress on, this is the Douglas Murray point, isn't it? Tremendous progress on a whole lot of these issues. We've moved an incredible distance on the issue of, if you like, overcoming racism, embedded racism and so forth. Incredible distance in my own country. I genuinely believe that. suddenly in the eyes of the activists,

it's as though, goodness, me, as Douglas Murray puts it, the train's coming gently into the station's about to slow down. We've got this all wrong. We've got to put our foot on the throttle and take the train off faster and say that we're more racist than ever. And I do think that's a big part of the problem and it's very easy for people to say, well, I don't have to accept responsibility for my reactions.

I'm like this because of what someone else has done. to my ancestors, what their ancestors have done to my ancestors, that's hopeless. That's hopeless. We all need to be accountable for the way we treat our fellow human beings now. Because there's a lot of people who go, and it's not even ancestors of people, Aborigines or people from that community will go, look, it's not even that far into the past that we were treated appallingly. So let's, can we have a honest discussion about this?

And also, let's explode a few myths because there's this perception that Australia's a deeply racist, culture and country, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the vast majority of people who say those views don't really know what they're talking about. You can say the same of America.

Now, there is racism. I mean, you find it everywhere. But what is racism? It's hatred of another person. What's the difference between hating somebody of your same skin color and somebody who's not, by the way? And a lot of the people

who bandy around, this very, very progeny sort of, you're a racist if you say that, or if you go anywhere, or if you raise that question, they're actually displaying their own level of vitriol and hatred towards another person by refusing to engage with the mind and looking to appeal to raw emotion again. Now, I think that's a real problem. The second thing I would say is that if you look at the amount of resources, the amount of effort, But the amount of land title and so forth in Australia that's been made available to Indigenous people.

And I want to say this, Matt, it's quite raw for me. I actually really do care. My family have been enmeshed with Aboriginal people for a long time. One of Australia's most prominent Aboriginals calls me Coe, which is short for cousin. Because he says to me, our families have been intermeshed for so long. And I value his friendship enormously. I went to school with Aboriginal people and I represented a lot of them. So I actually, I really do care.

But what I'm worried about is what are most prominent Aboriginal leader, I suppose you'd say, I think, Noel Pearson, and he and I disagree on a lot of things. But he says, you know, welfare culture has actually destroyed his people. But what's that tell you? It means that we've actually been almost too generous. His words, not mine. Secondly, he would say, I don't think I'm misrepresenting him here, you've got to restore agency.

You can't indulge the idea that you're a victim of what somebody else's forebears did to your forebears. We are each responsible, you know, and we should be prepared to give account for the way we behave towards other people. So I don't see a lack of generosity in Australians. I see just the opposite. you know, a willingness to spend a very large amount of money and often it's been misdirected. We know that now, you can't get away from it. Often has made problems worse. One of our best thinkers, from a very different political perspective to mine,

is a man called Peter Sutton and he wrote recently that the determinant of bad outcomes is to do with family and community environments, not the colour of skin in Australia. And I do believe that to be true. Not to say there aren't major issues, there are. But I think it requires all of us to accept that denying, you know, blaming others all the time, well, you have a justice system if it's true to try and sort it out.

But we have to be responsible for our own actions. That being the case, what do you think about this referendum that's appearing on the horizon. I think it's in October, November, 2023, which is Aboriginal voice, is it not? So just explain to people what it is and whether you agree of it, whether you disagree with it, etc. Well, for a start, it's very hard to define what it is

because, in fact, the Prime Minister says it's a modest proposal that just recognises Aboriginals in the Constitution, for example, the people who have put it together say, no, it's a major proposal, which will empower us in a way we haven't been before. The lawyers are having a... picnic because some lawyers are saying this is sound law, others are saying it will lead to endless activism.

I'm simply reporting the facts there. It's very easily checked. There's no agreement on what it is or what impact it will have. I am opposed to it for three reasons. The first is the reasons I've just given, the denial of agency and what have you means, and I've had a lot of experience with this. I have had a lot of experience. And I've seen it on the ground.

And Aboriginality is not a nation. There are in fact three to four hundred nations And they are many of them proudly individualistic So I don't know how 54 people are going to represent 300 plus nations And have a special voice that no other Australian has The second thing is that the debate has been highly emotionally charged And there have been the put-downs If you're against this, you're a racist

Well, I'm against it because I don't think it's going to work And for the third reason, I don't think constitution I think good constitutions, they only work in the culture. I mean, Russia had a great constitution. You would know that, but it wasn't a free country. They only work in the culture in which they're embedded. That's right. But our constitution was put together.

I mean, we're one of the oldest democracies in the world, Australia. And we were able to draw on the absolute best internationally, particularly from the American Declaration of Independence and everything that came out of, sorry, out of the, well, out of that process. and drawing on the British model as well. But it was late in the piece. And I am on record as saying, and I repeat here,

that in my view, a constitution should be a dry, dusty document that draws no distinctions at all based on wealth, where you live, gender, position in society, all the colour of your skin. The very model of equality is to ensure that no one's singled out. Now, John, one of the things that I think we would massively benefit from in this country is Australia's understanding how to deal with immigration. Because we are completely paralyzed, as I'm sure you've noticed, in this country and in America. But this country particularly interests me because the similarities are so strong.

I mean, how an island is incapable of ensuring that it has borders is, frankly, beyond me. And you were part of a government under John Howard that actually addressed this issue, not an easy issue to address, with some very unpleasant and difficult things to do. We have the Home Secretary in this country attempting to deal with it, being called racist and all the rest of it. Tell everybody, first of all, how you guys did it and what are some of the lessons that you think people in this country who want to see immigrants like me come in and make their contribution, who don't want to see people discriminated against. but also don't happen to think that people coming illegally in boats is the right approach.

How does one navigate that? With enormous difficulty and with a lot of misunderstanding being bandied around, I think, is part of the process. And I don't take it lightly at all because I don't want to be seen as somehow not concerned for humanitarian values. But the first thing I'd say is that I think it's important that countries maintain their cultural cohesion. And I think your former Prime Minister Blair was onto something

when he said, was it Blair? It may not have been Blair. One of your former Prime Ministers made the interesting observation that there should be a bigger effort to try and help the people who are wanting to escape their own countries to develop better, more coherent societies of their own, to try and encourage them to build democratic models that respect differences and don't squeeze people out.

and that create wealth and jobs and opportunity. And in many ways, it'll often be economic immigrants, you know, that become, if you like, boat people. And they're needed at home. Their skills and abilities are needed at home. And can't we find better ways to support them? I always believe that Australia should take in a lot of refugees and we're never given much credit for that.

We actually have one of the highest on a pro-rata basis refugee intakes in the world, far above politically correct New Zealand. It's always painted as a hero in this matter, who actually does the heavy lifting on compassion. Turns out to be Australia, not the more politically correct, as in public perception, country not far away from us. Sorry to have to say that to my New Zealand friends.

You know, you've got to look at the facts. The facts matter. No, they don't. Not anymore. It's not anymore. I thought we'd found some common ground. And I do think it's incredibly important, though, to recognise that it's really, you know, with poorest borders, ultimately countries can't survive.

So if you want beacons of light, if you want countries that are coherent enough, that are prosperous enough, that are strong enough to then do good works abroad, you can't have them in a situation where there's massive social unease of the sort of it's shore in Germany, where there's serious economic disruption and disruption to the orderly management of people in genuinely humanitarian crisis through a properly coordinated approach of refugee management around the world, and there are far too many of them. That tells a terrible story about ugly regimes. You've written about that.

Well, what do we want to try and do? Help them escape their terrible regimes in their own homeland. build better homes. You know, we were like societies once that none of us would have wanted to belong to. Why do they want to come to our societies? To help them build democratic and prosperous societies. And I don't think you can do that.

If you're so weakened and divide your own communities, if you make them so incoherent that they can't be a beacon of light or a source of finance and aid and export of knowledge. Okay. However, you've skipped over. a really big part there, John, and I'm sure it's unintentional. But the chances of us building a democratic regime in Syria and in Afghanistan, which we, by the way, the West is destroyed,

etc. are quite slim. We do have a lot of people also coming who are, as you say, economic migrants. I mean, one of the biggest sources of people into the UK at the moment is Albanians. Albanians is a safe country. But we don't seem to be able to deal with the fact that the people are coming and they're not following the rules. So, for example, my mum, wanted to come and visit my wife and I for our son's first birthday in a few weeks. Her visa application was denied because the person in the home office decided she doesn't have enough money or the visa center or whatever, which is fine. You know, you make an application, whatever.

But at the same time, there are 50,000 people a year who are coming in on a boat without any of those checks. We don't know who they are. We're paying for them to stay in hotels. That is, I put it to you, completely unsustainable. And that also, we have to have a solution to that point. part of it as well, right? The illegal immigration that's happening. And that's what you guys had to deal with. Yeah, well, we did. And it was controversial in Australia at the time, but we

sent them. And of course, you've got to remember it in Australia. They were coming through bad waters and leaky boats, and a staggering number of people were drowning. So it was very inhumane. You had people smuggling going on, no doubt about that, quite corrupt and very cruel and dangerous. And so we were able to stop that by simply ensuring they did not get onto the mainland. They were processed offshore. What people miss when they say Australia's being terrible

is the very high refugee immigrant. But be your point. We bought it in an ordered way based on properly assessed need to give those people some hope from the really troubled parts of the world. So I'm not pretending it's easy. I'm not trying to duck it either.

You seem uncomfortable about this. Are you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I am uncomfortable about it. I can't stand the thought of people suffering. But I also know that you know you've got to keep your own culture coherent, your own economy coherent. You've got to stand against evil regimes and you got to somehow, rather, despite what

you say, and you're right. In some parts of the world, this is nearly an impossible dilemma. I think we've got 40 million refugees in various camps and staging posts around the world. Maybe we need to all take more, but it's got to be an orderly process. It has to be. Otherwise, you're so weak in our societies, both socially and economically, that they start to lose their ability to really insist on change and to finance that change and to make it all, if you like, as coherent as possible. I think that discomfort you experienced is actually a much more honest position than the vast

majority of people on both sides. You have people here at least, you know, who say, well, you know, these people are suffering and we must help them, which, of course, we want to. On the other hand, there are people on the right who say, no, keep everybody out. And your conflict internally is actually reflective. I think where the majority of the people are, which is they think people should follow the rules. And they also think the rules should allow people who are in genuine need to be able to come. The problem is, once you get into the practical side of it, it's all hard choices all the way down. It's very hard choices. But here's a fundamental problem. We don't believe enough in our own

cultural values to say that we've got to keep them coherent and together if we're to be a beacon to the rest of the world. And I think that's a big part of it. We don't draw a distinction, enough of a distinction between the nobility, I'm going to use this word, the nobility of the democratic ideal and the appalling nature of the regimes that these people are trying to escape. And that's my point. I put it poorly. But one of your former prime ministers was very big on this idea. I heard quite a cogent argument from him once. and I just can't remember who it was, about how we have to redouble our efforts, even if we've got to take them into staging camps somewhere,

to pick up those people who have skills and abilities and then somehow try and feed them back wherever we can into their own country to rebuild those. And of course, it's happened from time to time. There are countries that have found their way out of me. You could argue that of our own culture. I'm a Scottish background. I mean, there were about five warring tribes that murdered one another across Scotland

until probably really the coming of a Christian Reformation. And they all started to recognize that it's not a very Christian thing to do to slaughter one another. And they gradually began to change their behaviour. This does happen. Once upon a time he would have said, we were not good candidates to live in peaceful democratic societies. We need to keep sight, I think, of the essential beliefs and values

and not to cry and debase them so much time that gave us, those things and then redouble our efforts to extend them. But because we don't believe in them anymore in 30 years since the fall of the Berlin war when we thought democracy had won out and it was on the advance, it's now in the retreat. We need to redouble our confidence in ourselves, I think, and our commitment. I'm deeply invested in trying to help people in the majority world and help them find

their way out of poverty through food production, for example. And Australia is one of the biggest heavy hitters in this regard because we know about farming in tough environments. One Australian farmer now, we're told, feeds 700 people. And exporting some of that knowledge has helped us globally. Australia's just been one of the players. Britain's been another. We don't give ourselves enough credit for this stuff.

Along with the Gates Foundation, the big, hitty, heavy hitters. We're feeding five billion miles a day more now than we were 50 years ago. and proportionately the number of people who are malnourished and stunted children and so forth, they're still too high, but proportionally they're way down. They're good news stories about what we can do to help lift people out of short, nasty, brutish lives if we have enough confidence in ourselves

and our opportunity to help others and enough respect for their humanity to do it in an orderly and sensible way. John, we're talking about regimes. There's one regime that are, is uncomfortably enmeshed with, and that's China. How worried are you about that? Very worried.

I'm extremely worried about it. Just as I'm worried about the Ukraine, and I'd love to hear your views, and we can talk about that later. We have no exit plan. We don't seem to know whether it may escalate, what it may ultimately become. You'll know more about that than me. I want to say, first up, this is so important.

I admire the Chinese people. I think what they've achieved is incredible. The West has been responsible for a lot of that. We've been great markets, we've given them a lot of technology. The democratic and capitalist model has been applied to their economy and that has lifted a lot of people out of short, nasty, British lives. That's all good stuff. But they've got another export from the West, a thing called communism in Beijing.

And of course the communist thing is about, you know, it's a flawed model. People say, oh, communism's a great deal. Again, Constantine, you'll know more about this than me. but it's just never been properly applied. No, it's a flawed concept because it says that we human beings will give our first loyalty to the party. You've got a son.

You're not going to give your first loyalty to a political party over your loyalty to your son. But it's got this model that demands all loyalty to it. And as part of that seems to have to expand its power and its influence everywhere. And that's a real dilemma

and we need to be very, very conscious of the dangers of a regime that wants all power under itself that's engaged in the most rapid armaments build up, certainly in my lifetime. And what are they up to? Well, certainly massive interference, technological, political, social, everywhere. They now have more ships in their navy than the American Navy,

who would have thought that possible a few years ago? The Americans, I suspect, who will have greater tonnage and greater sophisticated, on that sort of front. They are determined, I think, to find a way to reunify Taiwan. Well, I don't believe that a people should be denied the right to self-determination.

The Taiwanese people have decided to be a democracy, just like the people in Hong Kong did. And we should defend that principle. That's freedom. That's the right to determine the sort of lives and society that you want to live in. These things are of immense value, and we should treasure them more in the West.

You've written a book of them. Although I could also play the devil's advocate argument, which is, I mean, democracy great, but you've got to be able to defend it. And if you can't, you know, do you want America deep into China's backwater interfering in what the Chinese see as their own internal affairs? Would the Americans like if the Chinese got involved in an equivalent thing in the United States? Do you see what I'm saying? Look, I've heard the argument quite often. I'm sure.

But I still say that Taiwan, the Taiwan news people have determined that they want to be democratic. I still say that whoever controls in the end of the South China seas will control things like the Internet, for example. Because there are hundreds of cables through that region. Are we going to keep it free for the exchange of information and commerce and the free-flowing of a world where we thought we were. building a better model for peaceful coexistence and trade and interaction, or are we going to hand control to a regime that is plainly intent upon dominating the region? So what does Australia do then, John? Because Australia has got very rich with Chinese investment, with Chinese buying your products, buying your minerals. How do you break away from that? Can you?

Well, only by, I mean, you know, we must not wish the Chinese people ill. And that trade's been very important to them. It's helped lift a lot of those people out of those short British lives, sorry to repeat the term. And we want to build a cooperative model and keep it, you know, we should play with a straight bat at all times. And we should try to be good citizens.

But we also need to club together globally. Lee Kuan Yew from the Singapore miracle story, you know, wrote 20 years ago that in the end, China will have the ability to simply flex economic muscle and bring everybody to heal unless we clubbed together.

And you are seeing that. And it's really important that in our region, Japan and Australia in particular have said, look, we do believe in our values. And so we talked a little while ago about COVID in Australia and Australians being a bit too, but give us some respect, I think, for being pretty straight up and down and saying, no, we are willing to defend our way of life

and we're not going to have Chinese interference in our universities, our political parties. And yes, we are going to take army seriously. and we are going to club together under Orcus with the Brits and the Americans to share technologies and to upgrade submarine capacity and those sorts of things. And you're now seeing that model flow through into a greater willingness across Asia

to say, well, we don't have to subject to a regime that doesn't look like it's particularly interested in open democratic models. So the Philippines have stepped up, for example. India is engaging and India will supplant China over time as a bigger country and probably a bigger economy. China in many ways is peaking. They've got massive problems with debt.

Their population is leading the depopulation bomb. It's extraordinary. It's anticipated that its population may go from 1.3, 1.4 billion down to 500 or 600 million by the end of this century. And so I think, again, I really, stress, yes, our relationship with the Chinese people and their trade has been good for them, good for us. Yes, we do have some differences with the communist model of governments and their intention

on domination. We'd rather cooperation. But at the same time, recognise that we do still believe in our own values, just as you've done in Europe in relation to the Ukraine. That's what has been about. And that must have given great pause, certainly in Moscow. but in Beijing as well, they wouldn't have expected this level of cooperation, economic as well as military.

And so presumably that's caused something of a rethink. I hope it has. John, we're going to continue the conversation on our locals with our paid supporters with their questions. But for now, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. And our last question is always the same, which is what is the one thing that we're not talking about

as a society that you think we really should be? I'll surprise you there. I actually think it's fatherlessness. But it doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Now, I think it is an absolute crisis. And I think we have caught our children up in the culture wars in a way that frankly reflects very, very poorly on Western society.

I think it's a real blight. And I think we need to lift our game and say our children who are relatively voiceless, need to come first in our considerations as to what their needs are, not our conveniences and what suits us. Because I think particularly for young men right across the West, fatherlessness, the lack of good role modelling, the lack of demonstration of how to respect women properly and so forth, and all the raw figures are there with the young men who drop out, who end up traumatised, depressed, anxious, self-harm and prison and just dropping out of the system.

It ought to be worrying us. And if one sex is not doing well, neither sex is doing as well as it ought to, in my view. John, it's been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find you online? No, John Anderson.net. Are you? But it's very kind of.

You've been able to understand my Australian accent, have you? Yes, just a little bit. Just a little bit. word. And of course your YouTube show, which is Conversations with John Anderson. Head on over to locals for the bonus questions. We'll see you there. Emma says, what has shocked you most about the trajectory of Australian politics since you left office?