ALP

Richard Marles: Going Big – Navigating Australia’s foreign policy in a post COVID-19 world.

Richard Marles is the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Labor’s Shadow Minister for Defence. 

Misha Zelinsky caught up with Richard for a chinwag about how COVID-19 has accelerated history’s timeline, the rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, why the US is still a force for a good, how Australia’s record defence procurement program can rebuild our manufacturing sector, the choices facing Australia as it seeks to carve out an independent foreign policy,  why sovereign capability is the new black, how Australia must do more with its key pacific partners, and why – in order to figure out our place in the world – Australia must play big.

 

Misha Zelinsky:

All right, Richard Marles, welcome to Diplomates. Thanks for joining us.

Richard Marles:

It’s great to be here, Misha. Looking forward to it.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, look. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to start any conversation these days without the C-word. COVID-19, now. This is a foreign policy podcast. You’re obviously Labor’s defence shadow. To your mind, what do you think is the single biggest … ? So many changes have come from COVID-19, but what do you think is the biggest single foreign policy challenge that’s come from the crisis?

Richard Marles:

That’s a really good question. I suppose what I think is ultimately, I think it’s an accelerant if I was to identify anything. I think that the sort of trends that we had seen out there probably go faster, but part of the world we’re in was one that was much more difficult to predict and obviously challenging for Australia. We use lines like this was the most challenging set of strategic circumstances that we had faced since the second World War, and we were saying that before COVID-19 took hold.

Richard Marles:

I think this has made that much more so. Kind of multiple times so, and so the breadth of possibilities for us and the unknowns for us, all of those, are much bigger, and ultimately where you get to is not being able to answer more questions about COVID-19 means, but you do realize these are really challenging strategic circumstances for us as a nation, and so the need for us to be able to take care of ourselves has probably never been as important, or as important as the second World War.

Misha Zelinsky:

I think that’s right, and certainly you can feel the way that things, the compression of history, and the pulling forward of things.

Richard Marles:

That’s a really good term.

Misha Zelinsky:

One of the things you just mentioned is looking after ourselves, now. I think a lot of Australians were shocked by some of the shortages that we saw in terms of PPE, health and safety equipment. Sovereign capability’s now become a bit of a new theme. Something that I’m very interested in. But given the exposure to just in time supply chains, and given the sense now that we don’t necessarily produce enough of the things that we need, in a defence context, what are the must haves for Australia? What are the things that we really need to produce here, to your mind?

Richard Marles:

Again, this is a really good example of where it’s changed thinking, or perhaps really clarified thinking. If you’d said to me back this time last year that the making of surgical masks was a thing that was essential to Australian security, I would’ve laughed, and yet earlier this year we had members of the Australian Army at a factory in Sheffield, I think, helping to churn out masks because we didn’t have enough of them.

Richard Marles:

If something as kind of simple, really, as a surgical mask, can be seen or become central to our own security, then what else? And it raises a whole lot of questions about that. From a defence point of view, I think the traditional answer to this question is that in an environment where the kind of platforms that you are part of are incredibly complex, and you take the joint strike fighter as an example. This is a fighter plane which has been made in and by numerous countries, and there are absolutely global supply chains in place there, the notion that going back to the second World War where we saw the making of fighter aircraft as part of our sovereign capability, that’s kind of not going to be the case now, but where people have got to in their thinking now is we at least may be able to maintain and sustain the platforms that we use here in Australia.

Richard Marles:

It’s certainly that. I think, though, there does need to be something of an audit of all the defence capabilities that we have, inputs that we have, and then over and above that traditional setting we clearly do need to be able to sustain and maintain the equipment that we use, but our best certain things in addition to that or as part of that that are absolutely critical. And I’d have to format some of that, but I think a much broader assessment of what’s in that basket, we will come to see as being what defines sovereign capability going forward.

Misha Zelinsky:

Obviously there’s the what of sovereign capability, i.e. the things that you get. What are the things that we need to have here, what are the things we need to store? But in terms of, also, the wear, the Henry Jackson Society did a study which showed that of the Five Isles nations that Australia was most exposed of all nations to the Chinese Communist Party in terms of key production areas. They identified 535 areas including 30 that were critical to future economic innovations. Should we care about the regime that supplies the goods as well as the goods themselves?

Richard Marles:

That’s a good question. Answered not specifically in relation to China but in the abstract, of course we need to be thinking about the places from which we import material and the places that we in effect do business with, and historically that’s been the case, and we do that. We do that right now. We would say, in relation to Iran and North Korea for example, that our ability to do business with those countries is significantly curtailed. In that spectrum, where’s China fit? I mean, we’re not … in a defence context, obviously, there’s not a lot of interaction in terms of defence supply chains, and I can understand that.

Richard Marles:

I think it is important, while China raises a whole lot of challenges in terms of Australia, it is a country with whom we’ve had a relationship for going back to the Wippen government. I don’t put China in the same category as countries like Iran or North Korea. I certainly don’t put China in the same category as the Soviet Union. I don’t think that’s who we’re talking about, and I think that the economic relationship that we have with China is appropriate. Now, in saying that, we want to make sure as a country that we have a diverse set of trading relationships around the world.

Richard Marles:

That’s just prudent. It’s, in a sense, the equivalent of having a balanced financial portfolio. We need to have a diverse set of trading relationships, and particularly as a country which is reliant on trade. But I do think that we have had an ongoing trading relationship with China, I think that is fair enough, and I’m comfortable with that going forward.

Misha Zelinsky:

In terms of, you talked about the speeding up of history, so to speak, and a contested Indo-Pacific is something that is going to be an inevitable feature of Australia’s foreign policy settings now. In terms of defence procurement and new kit, Australia, we’ve made this sort of commitment, I think it’s a bipartisan commitment, to 2% of GDP, which is around give or take 40 billion a year. Do you think given the challenges that we’re seeing and the speed of which this is going, is it enough in terms of a broad commitment?

Richard Marles:

I think it’s important that we determine our spending in relation to defence based on the strategic challenges that we face. That’s kind of, when you think about it, a matter of logic. If a country’s strategic circumstances are very predictable and certain, and it can’t get away without spending a lot, countries which find themselves in a precarious position spend more, but the rational act here is to be spending in proportion to what our strategic circumstances dictate, and I said, too, earlier, that what I know is they’ve become a whole lot more complicated rather than more simple as a result of COVID, but even prior to COVID they were as complex as they’ve been for a long time.

Richard Marles:

That’s got to be the guide in terms of what we’re doing. The second point is that, whilst 2% of GDP is a good benchmark, I do think that ultimately what’s important in terms of defence spending is that you have an absolute amount. In other words, that it’s not a functional GDP, because you need certainty in relation to programs over a very long period of time, which, if spending kind of fluctuates as a function of how GDP fluctuates, it’s going to make it hard to deliver those programs.

Richard Marles:

You look at submarines for example. This is a program which is going to be delivered over decades. There needs to be a predictable funding stream over that period of time, so I guess I make that point in the context where we’re in a recession for the first time in the better part of 30 years. If you measure defence spending as a proportion of GDP, that has implications there, and I think we need to be mindful of that, and the final point I make is that it’s really important that our defence force is dense, by which I mean there is a risk in having a wholeness about your defence force if you don’t have the wherewithal to ultimately use the critical platforms that you have.

Richard Marles:

We are purchasing, and I think appropriately so, some pretty significant platforms in terms of the naval ship building program, but also Lam400 and we mentioned earlier the joint strike fighter. Across the three services, you’re seeing an appropriate modernization of equipment, but it’s really important that we have the brunt behind that to make sure that we can use all of those, that we’ve got enough people, for example, that if we have the better part of 100 fighter planes we can use 100 fighter planes. If you’ve got 100 fighter planes, but you’ve only got the personnel to actually, effectively, operate a small part of that, then you don’t have 100 fighter planes because you can’t use them.

Richard Marles:

That’s what I mean in terms of there being, we’ve got to guard against the highness in the way in which we have a defence force, and a number of serious observers have made that observation about where we’re at at the moment, so we need to make sure that in terms of our spending we’re the opposite of that, which is why I say we need to have an ADF which is robust and dense, the opposite of being hollow, and I think that’s a very important thought in terms of how we set our budget. Ultimately, we face a really challenging world.

Richard Marles:

We face a challenging world where we have an assertive China, which is doing what great powers do, so I don’t really even say this with judgment. China is seeking to shape the world around it, but that does raise challenges for us, and our alliance with the United States is profoundly important and I think is as important as it has ever been going forward, and from where I sit, the more we have America engaged in East Asia, the better, but it’s also true to say that we have an American president who would regard unpredictability as being a virtue, and I can understand that, but it makes life difficult for allies.

Richard Marles:

And so I think with all, you put those things together, and what that means is we’ve got to make sure we’re in a position to be able to look after ourselves and that’s why our defence spending at this moment in time really matters.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, and I want to dig into the questions about US-China relations and what it means for Australian policy, but before we get off procurement, getting the amount of money that we’re spending on new kit, they’re big programs we’re talking about here, can we do more? In terms of innovation policy, what’s the role that the defence procurement program can play in sort of driving Australia up the innovation chain? And how can we make it to make a more complex Australian economy in terms of its manufacturing and innovation capability?

Richard Marles:

Defence industry, I think, plays a really important role there, and has done with a number of countries. If you have a place like Israel, they will say that so much of their being a country where innovation is very central to their economic character that at the heart of that is defence industry, and the kind of innovation that you see in defence industry, and partly that’s because defence equipment is about as high tech equipment as you get. It is literally at the very cutting edge of innovation and science, so if you’re in the business of making high end defence capability, then what you are is in the defence of making high end manufactured product, and for a first world nation that’s central to the ability to engage in manufacturing.

Richard Marles:

Successful first world economies that have export manufacturing as part of their economy do so at the highest end of the value chain, and defence industry can play an important role in getting you there. Having said that, it’s important that we understand how you get defence industry. When you look at countries that do it, they didn’t start off doing it because they thought, “Well, if we do a defence industry, that will lead the rest of the economy.” They’ve done it because they’ve had a strategic reason to be engaged in it.

Richard Marles:

Israel is a very obvious example, given the threats that have surrounded it for most of its existence, but you can take a country like Sweden which has a really strong defence-industrial base through a company like Saab, and at the heart of that is strategic decisions as well. Sweden was not a part of NATO, was really right there next to the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, and so needed to be in a position where it was able to look after itself, and needed to have a capacity to do defence manufacturing within its borders.

Richard Marles:

If Sweden hadn’t been a part of NATO, I’m not sure, for example, that Saab would exist in quite the way that it exists today, so strategic circumstances and strategic decisions that countries make which end up leading to successful defence industries, and then the benefit that can have for the general economy becomes a spinoff. One of my criticisms about where the government is at is that thinking through the ecosystem of defence industry hasn’t been their strong suit, and so there’s never really been a proper strategic rationale which has been put forward by the government for why we would have a defence industry.

Richard Marles:

There has been, I think most observers would say, that this government, having seen the car industry leave our shores on its watch, was looking for some answer to industry policy, and so has leapt upon defence industry as a proxy for a general industry policy. Well, okay, if that’s what they’ve done, is there an example anywhere in the world where that’s worked? And I think there is one. Strong defence industries come about through a strategic decision about having them in the first place.

Richard Marles:

I actually think there is a strategic rationale for us having a defence industry but you just never hear this government seem to articulate it. I think at the heart of what would be a strategic purpose for us having a defence industry is the fact that defence exports and defence partnerships around industry really go to a core of a nation’s interests and trusts. If you think of the situation we’re now in with France, with the building of our submarines, that has dramatically changed and upgraded our bilateral relationship.

Richard Marles:

France now is critically important as a bilateral partner to us as a nation because they’re involved in the building of our submarines. Well, actually, there’s the opportunity for us, in terms of the way in which we engage in defence industry, to start partnering with a whole lot of countries within our region, and if we did that I think defence industry could play a really important role in helping Australia be taken more seriously within the region and within the world, and that’s really important for us for a whole range of reasons, in terms of our shaping our strategic circumstances, and putting us in a much better position.

Richard Marles:

And I think defence industry, we can do it, and can play a really important role there, but you need to actually make that argument. And it’s not just that you need to make the argument to the Australian people. I think you need to make that argument to the defence establishment, and I frankly think this government haven’t even thought about the argument let alone made it, and so as a result you’re kind of seeing all of the hoopla that surrounded their claims around defence industry when Christopher Pine was defence industry minister, and in defence that’s all just gone by the wayside now. There is just a barren silence, and there is a real question about whether defence industry is actually made to, by this government, now, or not.

Misha Zelinsky:

Turning to US-China relations, at the moment it just seems a day doesn’t go past without some kind of an escalation between both sides, and certainly rhetoric, and also in diplomatic action, and Australia has likewise found itself in a similar situation. How should Australia handle these increasingly tense relationships between the Chinese Communist Party and the principal trading relationship on one hand, and as you said our absolute critical security alliance that’s our longstanding relationship there? How do we navigate and triangulate this, or can we?

Richard Marles:

Well, look, it’s a really good question. I suppose the starting point is I think the world feels a lot safer and more secure and more predictable when China and America are talking with each other, so it’s in our interest that that relationship be as best as it can be, and if it’s in our interests for the relationship between America and China to be in the best possible shape, then it actually stands to reason that it’s in our interests for our own relationship with China to be in the best possible shape, and so we do need to think about that, and that actually requires the adults in the room when it comes to this government playing a part in determining Australian foreign policy, and right now the adults, such as they are, I think are pretty silent.

Richard Marles:

We don’t hear a lot from our foreign ministry about a pretty fundamental issue in terms of our relationship with China. We don’t hear that much from our prime minister, to be honest, either, and the space tends to get filled by all the fringe developments on the part of our government ranks, and I don’t think that helps, and I think the second point is we need to have a kind of underlying philosophy. What are the guiding principles that we seek to put in place in terms of our relationship with China?

Richard Marles:

The guiding principles in terms of our relationship with the United States are clear. They’re our alliance partner. We have shared values, and we often use that phrase. That really means we’re both democracies, we both respect the rule of law at home, but importantly we both seek to create a global rules based to order, and we’ve been parties in seeking to do that really since the aftermath of the second World War, and we see that global rules based order where issues and contest is determined by rules rather than power as being central to a stable and prosperous global environment, which really is the way you would characterize the environment in East Asia for most of the period since the second World War, with the obvious kind of exceptions of the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

Richard Marles:

But those aside, we have seen a high degree of stability in that period, which has allowed East Asia to be a part of the world which has been an economic powerhouse, and that’s been of enormous advantage to Australia. But they are the shared values, and so what we’re about in our relationship with the United States is clear. What is the guiding principle behind our relationship with China? What are we trying to do here? And so I think the first thing is we don’t really ever get an answer to that question from this government. I think getting a government minister to try and have a crack at even answering that, you’d be hard pressed, and so often it feels to me like what you get is you get to irreconcilable propositions, or two propositions which they don’t seek to reconcile is perhaps the way to put it.

Richard Marles:

Yes, China’s a great country to deal with. On the other hand, China creates anxiety as the government would describe it. I would say that that’s not particularly helpful in terms of having a way forward. For me, and it’s just my view, but what I think matters is the theories of view, but my view, I think the starting point is in our relationship with China that actually we make clear we’re in alliance with the United States, and that that is fundamental to our worldview and to our national security, but from the place of being in an alliance with the United States, we value the relationship with China and we seek to build the best relationship that we can.

Richard Marles:

One which is robust enough that we’re able to express our national interests when that differs from Chinese action. One where we can raise questions of human rights but we do so in a manner which also acknowledges human rights achievements, and there are human rights achievements in China which we should acknowledge. It is important to speak on behalf of the Uyghurs, for example. It’s also important, if we’re being fair, to acknowledge that China is responsible for the single biggest delineation out of poverty in human history. It’s important to say both sides of that equation.

Richard Marles:

And we also need to submit ourselves to judgment. Part of the global order is that, and what we seek to do since the second World War with something like the human rights commission, is to place stock in the international community’s judgment of individual countries, and that means we’re not immune from that judgment. In a sense, we come to this with humility, but we will participate in judgment, and it’s important that we do that, and from that place we do seek to do all of those things but build the relationship and trade is the critical part of that.

Richard Marles:

Now, I actually think that can be done, but it does actually require articulating some kind of underlying set of principles which both try to do, and then it requires doing decent diplomacy. I mean, there needs to be personal relationships between senior figures in the Australian government and senior figures in the Chinese government. I don’t actually think there is one. I mean, I literally don’t think there is a single relationship that exists between a senior member of this government and a member of the Chinese government. I find that astonishing, and I find it astonishing in the context of how significant the relationship is, both in terms of its challenges and its opportunities, for our nation.

Richard Marles:

It’s certainly under previous governments there were personal relationships which were able to mediate the difficult moments, but right now there is just nothing, and I think that’s a real issue. I think we’ve got to do our foreign relations with the nation a whole lot better. I think we’ve got to have a set of guiding principles. I think we’ve got to do our diplomacy well. This isn’t rocket science; this is just saying we’ve got to actually do foreign policy like a grownup nation that we should be, and I think that would go a long way to helping us navigate what is the difficult terrain.

Misha Zelinsky:

I mean, it goes without saying that currently, we’re not in the good books of the Chinese Communist Party, and you talked a lot about striking the balance there. The business community basically goes into a tizz every time the relationships gets into any choppy water, saying essentially we should just acquiesce for the benefit of letting the good times roll on. In terms of the decisions that sort of earn the ire, if you look at foreign interference laws, if you look at decisions relating to Huawei and 5G, if you look around calling out of misinformation, if you look at South China Sea in terms of the adherence to international law, perhaps even more recently around Hong Kong although we tend to not really talk a great deal to be honest about domestic affairs in China as a country.

Misha Zelinsky:

Which of these things would you say that we’ve got it wrong on? Because an issue is approached, we’ve taken a decision, and it’s a sovereign decision of Australia which has seemed to earn the ire of the Chinese Community Party, so it’s very difficult to understand how you can navigate it in a way that protects sovereignty without stirring them up in that sense.

Richard Marles:

I guess the answer to that question is what I’ve given. I don’t think we’re doing our diplomacy very well. I don’t think we’ve got those relationships in place.

Misha Zelinsky:

But do you think you can make those decisions, but do them in a way that doesn’t, I suppose, upset the Chinese in the same way? Or … ?

Richard Marles:

I think you can build balance in a relationship so that there’s at least a chance that you can move forward in a context where we exercise our own voice. Now, let me be clear. It’s really important that we exercise our own voice. That is not something that can be compromised, but it needs to be the voice of the nation, and that’s what I’ve said before. We have a significant interest in the South China Sea. Most of our trade goes through the South China Sea. The UN convention on the law of the sea, which if you like is the rules of the road for that part of the world, for the high seas which includes that part of the world, is fundamentally important to us as an island trading nation.

Richard Marles:

And so we need to be able to exercise our voice in respect of our national interests when it comes to what’s going on in the high seas around the world, and in asserting the UN convention on the law of sea, specifically in the South China Sea. We must do that. As I said earlier, I think as a nation which seeks to contribute to a civilized world, it’s important that we are exercising our voice in relation to human rights issues such as Uyghurs, noting that we need to do it in a way where we submit ourselves to the same judgment, and where we acknowledge other treatments.

Richard Marles:

But that architecture only works if countries are willing to speak out on behalf of people around the world who it seems as being the subject of difficulty, and that certainly would understate for what was going on for the Uighur population in China. We need to be able to do those things and they’re not matters on which you should compromise. Having said that, we’ve seen government members write articles which use ham fisted analogies between China and the rise of Nazi Germany. Well, I mean, I don’t think that’s helpful at all. I don’t remotely think that that’s what China is.

Richard Marles:

And then I can understand why China gets upset about it. You have George Christians en up here using astonishing language in the context of COVID-19, which is not helping, and we don’t have a foreign minister or a prime minister who is articulating a clear voice on behalf of the nation in respect of what we need to be saying in terms of our national interests, what we should be saying in respect of China, while these voices are going on, and so they occupy the space in a way that those things are gratuitous, and I don’t think it is possible to defend those sorts of comments, and we’re talking about a relationship which matters deeply which is the basis on which a whole lot of people in Australia is employed, and that is a reasonable thing to be thinking about as well.

Richard Marles:

And then underlying all of that is a complete absence of any personal relationships which can help navigate through difficult waters. There are going to be difficult waters with China. China does raise challenges. No one’s suggesting that it doesn’t, and it is really important that we’re able to exercise our national voice in respect of those challenges. All the more reason, then, to get our diplomacy right, and to be doing it in a more smart way. Now, it is possible that we could have the best diplomacy in place, the best personal relationships that exist, but the need to say these things means that China would still act in the same way.

Richard Marles:

But wouldn’t it be nice to try that experiment? To actually see how it would go if we did diplomacy well. And I frankly think on a governmental level, I should say, I don’t think that this government is actually doing it, and let me also just be a little bit clear in terms of clarifying this. I think our professional diplomats do an excellent job, and I think our professional diplomats in Beijing do an excellent job, and I know a number of them, and they’re very highly regarded.

Richard Marles:

But at the end of the day, at a political level, you need critical relationships with countries that are critical to us, and right now this government has been an abject failure, really, in developing those relationships, and I’m not sure why anyone would think that that’s a good thing.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, you talked about doing diplomacy well, so turning to the other side of the coin, President Trump, the US has become somewhat more of a capricious actor under Trump and has more of a go it alone, it’s even been actively hostile, to be honest, to alliances, or even multilateral institutions. What’s the implications for a middle power like Australia, and how can we shore up some of these things? For example, would you support Australia joining an expanded G7, something like a G10 with South Korea and other countries joining? Do you see a way that Australia can play a balancing role against US capriciousness, in that sense?

Richard Marles:

Well, I’d be careful about using that tone in respect to the US. I mean, firstly, I still fundamentally believe that the US is a force for enormous good within the world, and I think that our relationship with the United States, which has been there for a long time, is very deep. It is not just with one person and never has been. It’s at a commercial level, at a military level, at a scientific level, at a cultural level. It is very deep, and that depth is really important right now, and actually that relationship has been and in many ways continues to be highly predictable. I think the one thing with President Trump, as I said earlier, is he would see his own unpredictability as a virtue.

Richard Marles:

And I think that that makes life challenging for an ally. We would obviously prefer to have a more predictable line of sight about what the president’s actions are going to be, but that’s not who he is and so that’s just where it’s at, but I think it is really important that we understand, that we not completely judge America by one person. I mean, the president is clearly relevant, highly relevant, to the running of America, but America is a big place and it’s a very deep relationship and it’s a relationship that will be in place, say, five years from now, irrespective of who wins the presidential election this year.

Richard Marles:

But in a world post-Donald Trump, whenever that world is, we will still be in a very strong alliance with the United States, and they still maintain all the core values that we hold, and I think that’s really important in terms of how we view our relationship with America going forward. I think it’s about putting it all in context and understanding that, and I still come back to the point

Richard Marles:

I think what we need to be doing is making sure that we are able to take care of ourselves to the extent that we can, that we need to have more of an eye on that, and perhaps the other thing is that we need to contribute to the burden of strategic thought within our region. We need not just to be a dependable, solid ally, but a country which has ideas and views about our region which actually I think America is hungry to receive for us.

Richard Marles:

I think sometimes we underplay what we can contribute in that sense. It’s probably all a long way of saying I think now’s the time for Australian leadership, and I think leadership within our region, but leadership within the alliance as well, and I think that’s probably the best way of making sure that we keep the alliance in the best possible shape at this moment in time.

Misha Zelinsky:

In terms of Australian leadership, then, do you think that we should seek a seat at the table at some of these major diplomatic groupings? Obviously, under Rudd, Labor was very set true in creating the G20 for the GFC response which is still an important institution, but should we be seeking to deepen and expand our influence in things like an expanded G7 or something like that?

Richard Marles:

I think the more tables we’re at, the better, to be honest, and I think that would obviously be a fantastic opportunity for Australia were that to eventuate, and the G20 is a really important forum for Australia, and Australia helping to shape, for example, the East Asian Summit, is really important. Australia’s pivotal role back during the Horton Keen governments in the creation of APEC is important.

Richard Marles:

I think these are important bodies for us to be a part of, and I think the reasoning goes a bit like this. We have a real premium on being taken seriously. That might seem like an obvious and trite thing to say, but it really stems from the fact that, along with New Zealand, our two countries have pretty unique sets of strategic circumstances. Yes, we’re in an alliance with the United States, but that’s a country much bigger than our own with a capital on the Atlantic Sea board, and how in the northern hemisphere, and how they see the world is very different to the way we see it as a country of 25 million people in the southern hemisphere in the East Asian timezone.

Richard Marles:

We’re not part of, to use a Labor party analogy, in a sense, we’re not part of a faction. We’re not a European country in the European Union. We’re not an African country in the African Union. We have to navigate our way, in a large part, on our own, and that means we actually need to play bigger rather than smaller when it comes to foreign policy because we have to figure this stuff out for ourselves. Sharing the burden of strategic thought about our circumstances, we can do it with New Zealand, but beyond New Zealand and ourselves we really need to be figuring this out for ourselves, and that means we need to play big.

Richard Marles:

Play big is not just about a kind of misplaced sense of the extent to which we can shape the world. It’s actually about so that we learn. Being at these tables helps us to learn and to understand the way the world works, and we have a premium on that more than most, and if we’re going to be able to navigate our own way through, then actually we’ve got to be out there being in these forums, understanding the way the world’s going to work so that we can part our path because there’s not really going to be anybody else getting us there. Now, that’s actually very different to being a European nation, which can talk to other European nations, or as I said, an African nation which can share notes with those other countries in the African Union.

Richard Marles:

We’ve really got to work this stuff out for ourselves, so in many ways I’ll often say that we’ve got a bigger premium on playing big and on being taken seriously than almost any other country in the world, and I genuinely think that’s right, and so being present in these places, making sure that we are there at the G20, I think taking our place on the UN security council periodically; these are really important things for us to do because they help us understand how the world’s working, and we really need to understand it.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, and so we’ve talked a lot about, I suppose, Indo-Pacific, East Asia, Southeast Asia, but drawing it right down to our backyard, our real backyard, and I know you’re someone who talks a lot about this, but the Pacific. You know, I mean, to put it bluntly, we’ve had the step up here from the government, but it somewhere we’ve dropped the ball, because China’s now actively contesting the region. It’s traditionally an area where it’s been Australia’s domain in terms of its diplomatic relationships. Do you think we have dropped the ball here, and are we doing enough?

Richard Marles:

I think over the journey it’s been as big a blind spot in terms of our strategic framework, in terms of our national security, as any. I welcome the step up, but the step up needs to be more than rhetoric. It’s got to be real and it’s got to be noticed by countries in the Pacific, and it’s got to be reflected in a fairly changed attitude from people in Australia. A point I’ve made a number of times is there’s 10 countries in the world who would probably identify their critical, number one bilateral relationship as not being with the United States or not being with China but with us, but go out there and ask anyone to name the 10 countries.

Richard Marles:

And it’s just something about our kind of psyche. You would think if you’re a practitioner in this space you would realize countries off in an instant, because the countries which see us as being completely central to their world necessarily has to define a space in which we is important as any, and yet by and large we tend not to think about this nearly enough in the way that we should. There is huge opportunity, I think, for us to play better and more impactfully within the Pacific in a way which will change positively the lives of those who live in the Pacific.

Richard Marles:

But we’ve really got to commit to that, and we can’t do this on the basis of being worried about what others might do in the Pacific in the sense that, if our reason for engaging with the Pacific is because of what someone else might do, then we’re getting it wrong in the start. Our call to action in the Pacific, I think, should be really clear. The millennium development goals, which were a relative measure of progress around a range of social indicators between the years 2000 and 2015, had the Pacific performing worse than any region on the planet.

Richard Marles:

Now, I actually think that has something to do with us, that that is, as you say, the region most proximate to us. It’s the part of the world where we can make the most difference. What that says is that, at a point in time, if we don’t change that trajectory, then the pacific will end up the least developed part of the globe, and that’s patently unacceptable. That will be reflected in maternal mortality rates, in short life expectancy, in low education, and a rage of other social indicators.

Richard Marles:

That would be the clearing call. We ought to be listening to that and saying that’s not acceptable in a part of the world where we have an ability to have a big impact, and so let’s really unpack the issues around that and try and affect meaningful change in relation to that, and that’s the way we will become the natural partner of choice for the countries of the pacific, by demonstrating to them that central to our interest is not any other country, but them. But that does require us to, I think, have a significant sea change in the way that we think about this, and ultimately that goes to who we are as a people.

Richard Marles:

That becomes a statement about how we see the significance of Australia as a polity in the world, positively impacting the world, and so I feel that Australian leadership, which is so central in terms of helping shape our strategic circumstances on the big questions that we’ve been talking about, the relationship with the United States, the challenges that are posed by China. Australian leadership is critical in terms of, as best we can, shape those strategic circumstances, but that Australian leadership in my view begins in the Pacific. That’s where we find it, and so it really does require us to think very deeply about it, and I do think there has been more attention in relation to the Pacific over the last couple years, but I don’t think nearly enough to turn around what I think has been a blind spot for this country for a long time.

Misha Zelinsky:

You spoke in a very positive context there, but I mean, there is a flip side there where there’s some systems competition underway. How concerned are you about things like debt book diplomacy, and China seeking to basically rope in the Pacific nations into the BRI program, and the prospect there of critical assets falling into control potentially of a more assertive China? Is that something we should be worried about? You know, there was a talk about Vanuatu potentially being a base for Chinese military assets. How worried should we be about that kind of sort of hard projection of power into our region?

Richard Marles:

I think it’s in Australia’s national interest for us to be the natural partner of choice for the countries of the Pacific. I think that’s the point here, and I think we get there by focusing on the countries of the pacific themselves, and I think if we get worried about what other countries are doing, and certainly if we start lecturing the Pacific about who they can have relationships with, then we’re not on a pathway to success here. Success lies in us focusing on the relationship that we have with the Pacific and getting it right, and that at its heart is about making sure that we place the interests and the fortunes of the people of the Pacific at the center of what we seek to be doing in the Pacific.

Richard Marles:

Now, we can do all that, and we are in a position where we can be a natural partner of choice, and I feel very confident about that, but I also don’t think that that’s inevitable. I don’t think that that happens by us just being here, and I think it does in large measure define circumstances at the moment but I don’t think it necessarily always will, but I think it’s within our power if we get our relationship right with the Pacific to make sure that that is the enduring characterization of our relationship to the Pacific, and that’s in our national interest, but that’s in the interest of the people in the Pacific, and it’s what we should do.

Richard Marles:

It’s who we should be as a people. But I know that if we are really focused on the plight of those in the Pacific, and in a sense the outrageousness of in some places life expectancy for them ending in their 50s, and that we really seek with our heart but with the best brain that we can bring into this equation as well to change that, then that’s all that’s going to matter. The rest is actually going to take care of itself. It really will.

Richard Marles:

But that’s the place that we’ve got to get to, and you know, what frustrates me at times is that … let me sort of declare, I love the pacific and I’ve completely fallen in love with it, but it frustrates me that not enough of us understand it and see its importance, but also see the cultural wonder that represents, and I’ve opened up hearts to how incredible a part of the world it is, and how lucky we are to really live as part of it, and to have the opportunity that we have to contribute to it.

Richard Marles:

That’s where we’ve got to go. There’s kind of an emotional connection which I think that we’ve got to get to. It’s interesting comparing us with New Zealand in respect of this. New Zealand do, I think, identify in a deeper way with the Pacific, for a whole lot of reasons that make sense. I mean, Auckland is a much more Pacific city than any city that exists in Australia. New Zealand is part of Polynesia, so you can see why it happens, and maybe it is a tall order to ask Australia to sort of have that same cultural connection, but actually we have a lot more presence in the Pacific than New Zealand. Much, much more.

Richard Marles:

And if we could back it up with just a bit of that kind of connection then I think that working alongside New Zealand would go a long way to securing the kind of interests that we need to in terms of the relationships that we should be building with the countries of the Pacific.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s a huge responsibility.

Richard Marles:

It is.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s great to hear you talk about it so passionately. Switching gears slightly, I think the profound change, and we could do a whole podcast about this so you’ll probably have to do this at a reasonably brief level, but I mean, open and closed systems. Open and closed systems, and political warfare, this seems to be, I think, the preeminent challenge of the 21st century, and one of the things that worries me as someone, and I think you obviously share my view of the world in this sense, is that we’re both passionate about democracies, passionate about open societies, but autocracies seem to be gaining our openness in a way that is very difficult for us to resist, and at the same time closing themselves off to, I suppose, the virtues of openness that we would see in terms of interacting with open societies.

Misha Zelinsky:

How can open societies prevail, and how can they beat closed systems, and do you think they can?

Richard Marles:

Well, I certainly hope that human progress and prosperity lies with human rights and with democratic thoughts and democratic freedoms, because that’s what I passionately believe in. I think over the long run innovative thought both in terms of the evolution of society in a social sense, but also in a technological sense, in terms of size, have performed better in open societies where there is freedom of expression and freedom of debate, and I think that that is still going to be the case going forward. I do think that there are real challenges in relation to the evolution of technology which present themselves, and I understand the point that you’re making that in closed systems there might be ways in which closed systems can deal with the development of technology around IT.

Richard Marles:

But ultimately I think this has got a fair way around and I do passionately believe in the power of government of the people by the people for the people. I think putting the people central to the equation is still the best recipe going forward, and so I don’t take democracy for granted. I think it is something that needs to be continually worked at, but I am as strong a believer in it at this point in my life and at this point in time as I have ever been, and I think that is still fundamentally critical to the future of a more civilized world.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well, a very uplifting place than the more formal part of the proceedings. I know that you’ve been dying to get to this part and the audience can’t wait to hear your answer about my trademark clunky segue to my incredibly hokey and lame part of the show, the fun part of the show. Now, you’re a very worldly man, Richard. Who are the three people, foreign guests, that would come alive or dead that would be brought along to a barbecue with you up there in Dulong? It might be difficult to get them there even if they are alive, with the COVID restrictions made, but it’s fantasy football so we can do our best.

Misha Zelinsky:

But who are they and why, mate?

Richard Marles:

Okay, so I’m answering this in a political way.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well, you are a politician, mate. I can’t-

Richard Marles:

Exactly. There’d be a sporting version of this where I would love to meet Ty Woods, and I’d probably like to meet Bobby Jones, and you could kind of throw in Shane Warne. Also I kind of-

Misha Zelinsky:

We’re going to get together, mate. If Warnie is coming I’m definitely coming over, so yeah.

Richard Marles:

I also think, though, I mean, they’re all I’m sure great people. I love their efforts on the sporting field and I kind of have a bit of a rule. I don’t know whether you want to get to know your sporting heroes. I just enjoy what they do on the sporting field.

Misha Zelinsky:

Exactly. You’ve always got to be careful meeting your heroes, they do say.

Richard Marles:

Let me answer the question in a political way, though. None of them are alive. Abraham Lincoln for sure is definitely my great political hero, but I would love to have him at a barbecue because by all accounts he was a raconteur. He was funny. He was self-deprecating. He had a kind of certain melancholy, but a warm kind of charm about him which I would love to experience firsthand, and he is the great man.

Richard Marles:

Churchill would be there as well. I mean, Churchill, whatever else, he would be fun. There would certainly be no shortage of drinks if he was there, and you get the sense that a guy who routinely was in the bath, as I understand it, sipping alcohol throughout the entirety of the second World War, not that he was in the bath throughout the entirety, but he was there on many days, I mean, that is pretty amazing. He is going to be fun at a dinner party, and again, it is the defining moment of modern history and he is the central character to it, and if anyone won the second World War, I mean obviously not one person, but the person who had the most influence on it was Winston Churchill, so it would be great to have him there.

Richard Marles:

And the third goes back a bit deeper in history. I think it would be fascinating to speak to Queen Elizabeth the First. She really, I think, is probably the great English monarch, and when you think about how does the British Empire come to its preeminence, I think the seeds are there in her reign, and she comes to power, you know, father is Henry the Eighth. There is a kind of tussle for power which she was probably unlikely to win and yet does.

Richard Marles:

I doubt there has been anyone in history who has been more underestimated in terms of their ability to do the job. People were desperate for her to find a partner because they felt that there needed to be a male presence around, and she resolutely refused to that, and then becomes the greatest of them all. That’s somebody I reckon would be fascinating to meet. Her kind of desire to plot her own path and do what she was going to go, and not conform to what just about every voice around her wanted her to do, that would be a force of nature I’d like to meet.

Misha Zelinsky:

That’s three good ones, there, mate. Kicking the ass of slave owners, kicking the ass of the Nazis, and kicking the ass of the Irish and the Scots, mate, so it’s a good list. Well, look, we’ll leave it there. Richard Marles, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a fantastic chat, and we’ll catch up soon.

Richard Marles:

Thanks, Misha.

 

Bonus Content: Kristina Keneally and Misha Zelinsky talk COVID-19, immigration and trade policy as panel guests

Bonus Content: Senator Kristina Keneally and Misha Zelinsky in panel discussion on COVID-19, immigration and trade policy.
 
This is a special content episode!
 
Senator Kristina Keneally is the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs and Immigration and Citizenship. Senator Keneally is Labor’s deputy leader in the Senate and also served as the first female premier of NSW.
 
Misha Zelinsky and Senator Keneally appeared as guests on a NSW Young Labor panel session discussing the future of immigration and trade in a post COVID-19 world.
 
This is a recording of that live panel session.
 
Senator Keneally gives some fascinating insights into the economic and migration challenges facing Australia, discusses the shocking fact that Australia has the second largest guest worker program in the OECD, tells us why Australia should always be a nation of permanent and generous migration and explains how COVID-19 gives us a chance for a policy reset.
 
Misha talks about the sovereign capability challenge facing the world and why Australia can no longer rely on just-in-time supply changes to deliver the things it needs when it needs them.
 
We apologise in advance for the BBQ question making its way into the program; don’t blame us!
 
Enjoy!
 
(We hope to have Senator Keneally on soon as a guest!)

 

TRANSCRIPT OF PANEL

Brandon Hale:

I’d like to firstly acknowledge that we’re meeting on the lands of the First Nations people and want to acknowledge any First Nations people emerging. So tonight, we’re joined by Kristina Keneally, the senator for New South Wales who is also the shadow home affairs minister, and was of course a former premiere of New South Wales. We’re also joined by Misha Zelinsky, who’s the assistant secretary of the Australian Workers Union, who also runs a podcast called Diplomates, which is a foreign policy podcast.

Brandon Hale:

Tonight, we’re going to be talking about immigration and trade policy. Kristina will be focusing on any questions about immigration policy and Misha will be focusing on any trade policy. So I’d like to just begin by just asking Senator Keneally how she thinks COVID-19 can change immigration policy first in Australia for the foreseeable future.

Kristina Keneally ::

Thanks, Brandon. Thanks everyone for being here. Thanks, Misha, as well, for joining the conversation. Clearly, COVID-19 is having a massive impact on immigration and migration, and that starts with the fact that the borders are closed. They’ve been closed now for almost two months. They look likely to remain closed for the next 12 months. There may be some small changes in that in certain ways to allow people in safely, if it’s safe to do so, but if you look at what is happening in the United States, in Indonesia, in India, in China, in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, in Western Europe, you only need to realize that Australia’s relative success in flattening the curve would be undone if we were to reopen the borders to the type of free movement, relatively free movement, of people that we had prior to COVID-19.

Kristina Keneally :

Now, this stoppage of migration means that at some point over the next 12 months, most likely, and we’re not entirely sure when yet, we will as a country do something we have never done before, which is restart a migration program from a standing stop. That gives us an opportunity right now to be asking, what kind of migration program do we want that to be? This is, I believe, an opportunity for the country to take stock of what’s been happening in the migration program for the past two decades and for us as a political movement, particularly one that is concerned about not only a progressive future for our country, but also the rights and conditions of working people, of all working people.

Kristina Keneally ::

This is an opportunity for us to argue, to reset a migration program, international interest, and when I say that, I mean in the interest of working people, in the interest of social cohesion, in the interest of economic growth, in the interest of the budget bottom line. Now, let me be clear. We are a country built on migration. You only need to think about the story of Australia, particularly since the war, since post-war Australia, were we have seen successive waves of migrants come here from every corner of the Earth, settle permanently, and build this country. Raise their families, build the infrastructure. Think of the Snowy Hydro scheme. Start small businesses, send their children to school, join their local churches, political parties, community groups, and become part of the fabric of this nation, which makes us the most successful multicultural nation on Earth.

Kristina Keneally ::

All of us, no matter how long or short ago, our ancestors came here. Unless we are First Australians, unless we are aboriginal or Torres Strait islander, we are all part of that immigrant story to this country. I also acknowledge that Australians celebrate that Australians are enthusiastic welcomers of new migrants, and I myself experienced that in the sense that I came here in 1994 as a permanent resident, as a migrant. We know that our national benefits when people come here and are able to join in, make that contribution, and become part of the story of Australia and have a stake in its future.

Kristina Keneally ::

Now, what this COVID-19 stoppage gives us a chance to examine in detail is really a case portfolio. Our full unifying idea, a nation built by migration, where people come here, settle down, and become part of the Australian community, is an idea that risks becoming nostalgia rather than our ongoing reality, and that is because since John Howard, we have seen a shift in our migration program, away from that pathway to permanency. And successive governments, including labor governments, but I really have to acknowledge that it’s been under liberal governments that these settings have been ramped up, we have seen the pathways to permanency narrow. We have seen temporary migration expand. We saw it come to almost its logical and perhaps almost absurd conclusion under Scott Morrison last year when he said he was capping permanent migration at 160,000 people per year.

Kristina Keneally ::

This was a congestion-busting measure. But yet he has allowed temporary migration to continue uncapped and be demand-driven, which means that really, the government towards migration policies, they’re not determining who comes to this country and the manner in which they come, to borrow a famous phrase. What we are really seeing is businesses, universities, state governments, and other forms of employers make that decision about who they’re going to allow into the country, and we are also seeing an expansion, a real significant expansion, of schemes like the Working Holiday Maker Program and the Seasonal Worker Program, and of course, international students and the work rights that they have.

Kristina Keneally ::

Now, all of these things might be useful, and there is a role for temporary migration in certain places and in certain contexts, things like seasonal work, fruit picking, where it is hard sometimes, quite often, to get Australians to take on a seasonal role in a regional area. There might be reasons, say, in cyber security, where we need a lot more people qualified in that area and we can train up quickly. And so temporary migration, skilled or unskilled, has a role to play in our economy and it always will. But, we are now, our island home, is now home to the second largest temporary… Excuse me, the second largest migrant workforce in the world, sorry, in the OECD, I apologize, behind the United States. So we’re the second largest migrant workforce in the OECD. We are right behind the United States.

Kristina Keneally ::

One of the largest groups within that is, of course, international students. There are over 600,000 young people from around the globe that come to study in Australia. The majority of those are in New South Wales, and what have we heard over the past few years? Example after example of wage theft and exploitation. We should remember that, the first serious case of wage theft that really brought this problem into prominence was 7-Eleven, did involve migrant workers, international students, temporary visa holders. What we know from the multiple consultations, reports that have been tabled in Parliament and the like, is that the temporary nature of these workers’ visa adds to their vulnerability, makes them vulnerable to exploitation, and creates the conditions whereby employers use that temporary status to drive down wages and to take advantage of their circumstances.

Kristina Keneally ::

While many of you may not think that this impacts you directly, although I acknowledge there may well be people on this Zoom meeting who are themselves international students, but many of you will be students or you will be of just left training or skills training or university, and I want to remind you that the treatment of younger workers has an impact on all workers. That is, if we are seeing, and we are seeing, exploitation occur, particularly amongst temporary visa holders, and quite serious as well, that starts to take hold across the economy and across employment. So when we have things like wages being undercut, people being told they have to work for cash in hand from below [award 00:10:46] rates, it is harder for every other young person in particular to get a good, well-paying, and secure job when that becomes the economic model.

Kristina Keneally ::

I would argue that in the name of lower wages and cheap labor, the government is risking a new and damaging form of social exclusion. We only need to look at COVID and the response to that to see how excluded these temporary visa holders are. The government has absolutely refused, and again today, in the COVID-centered hearing, the minister for finance, Mathias Cormann, made clear the government has absolutely no intention to provide any form of support to temporary visa holders who are trapped here during this pandemic. His only argument was, “If they can’t support themselves through a job, they should go home.” Never minding that some of them, their borders will be closed. Some of them can’t actually physically get a flight, and some of them will be on a path to permanency, not many, but some will, and that would mean they would actually have to forfeit that path to permanency.

Kristina Keneally ::

My concern has always been that we risk becoming a two-tiered society, where we have Australian citizens and permanent residents who are able to access rights, to assert their rights at work, to access services, to access support, and then we have another group of workers, guest workers, temporary migrant workers, who are locked out, locked out of those same rights, locked out of those same services, and locked out of having a stake in the future of our country. When we have a crisis like bushfires and again with COVID-19, we have seen how temporary migrant holders have been disproportionately impacted, and we talk about we’re all in this together, well, a virus doesn’t check your visa status before it infects you.

Kristina Keneally ::

We are not all in this together if we have some one million workers who live in Australia who are unable to access support and services during this time. No less than Peter Costello said back during his time in office that Australia will never become a guest worker nation. I’ve got news for Mr. Costello and the liberals, that is precisely what we are turning our country into, and I’ll end on this point. I think in this period, while the borders are closed, this is an opportunity for us to look at a range of policy settings, whether we have truly independent labor market testing, whether we are truly providing a pathway to skills and training for Australians to be able to work in these jobs.

Kristina Keneally ::

Workers don’t just pick fruit. One in five chefs, one in four cooks, one in six hospitality workers, one in 10 nursing and personal care support workers hold a temporary visa. Now, if the borders are going to be closed and we are going to have workforce shortages as the domestic economy reopens, this is the time to be saying, “How do we scale Australians up? How do we fill those skill shortages?” And do look at our skills and training systems so that we can provide pathways to employment, to good jobs, secure jobs, for Australians. But we should also think about when we reopen up migration, what do we want it to look like?

Kristina Keneally ::

I would argue that we would want it to provide more pathways to permanency, to encourage more higher skilled, younger workers to come here, settle permanently, establish families. They have the least impact on the budget, they have the greatest contributor to economic growth, they grow jobs and opportunity, and they help us build up again, that sense of a holistic society where we all have a contribution, we all have a go, we all get a fair go. I will end on that point. There’s a whole range of other things I could talk about in terms of some of the industrial relations policy settings that would help us drive down exploitation and particularly wage theft, but I will end on that point. I’m mindful there will be questions, and I know that Misha has things to say as well. So I’ll stop there, Brandon, but hopefully that gives people good context in terms of how I’m thinking and we here in Canberra in the federal opposition are thinking about these questions.

Brandon Hale:

Thank you very much, Kristina. I’ll pass onto Misha now. So Misha, how will COVID-19 change trade policy in Australia for the foreseeable future?

Misha Zelinsky ::

Well, I think what COVID-19 has done is shown how interconnected the world is. Clearly, trade is important, has always been important for Australia, and will always be important for Australia. Australia’s as a trading nation is a cliché. But trade is critical to our standard of living. But there’s probably four things that I think that are important when you think about the impacts in respect to trade policy and what’s happened with COVID-19. The first one I think is that it’s shown up the danger or how fraught these free nation states have been relied on just in terms of supply chains. So essentially, you can’t run a nation state like it’s a local service station. You can’t just have things turn up in the morning and be dropped off. It’s a far more complex enterprise than that.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Fundamentally, the basic principle of economic sovereignty and your basic expectation of citizens is that the country can produce the things and deliver the things it needs when we need them. The one that everyone’s focused on in this instance has been personal protective equipment, PPE. It just so happens that when the virus broke out in Wuhan, Wuhan’s essentially the world’s factory, so 90% of face masks are made in Wuhan, which is probably suboptimal when you need to have masks urgently for everyone around the world when you’re dealing with a respiratory illness. The other issue, and again, it was particular to this supply chain relating to health, but the number two place after Wuhan when it comes to ventilator manufacture is actually Northern Italy.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Now, it’s kind of peculiar that it happened that way, but it’s just very interesting that suddenly, you can very quickly find yourself not having the things you need when you need them. I think it’s something that’s been a real wake up call for Australians, and we actually commissioned some polling the other day, we literally asked that question, “Has COVID-19 been a wake up call for you as an Australian about Australia’s reliance on global supply chains?” And 90% of people responded yes to that, either strongly agree or agree. I think that principle, relying purely on just in time supply chains, I think is a critical change and one that we’ll see us have to make some serious decision about how we’re managing our supply chains.

Misha Zelinsky ::

PPE on this occasion, but with fuel security, for example. Australia only has 28 days of fuel. The 90 days is what the International Energy Agency mandates to have in storage. We have 28 maybe. In certain types of fuel, it’s as low as 18 days. Without fuel, you essentially can’t feed yourself, you can’t transport yourself, you can’t defend yourself. Again, on this occasion, it was health, but on other occasions, there are, and you can talk to experts in this area, but wouldn’t take much to think about the disruption that you would get throughout our fuel supply chain to very quickly Australia would be out of fuel and in dire straits really is the truth of the matter. It’s something that we need to urgently look at, but there are a whole host of other areas.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Which kind of brings me to the next point, which is that supply chains are sovereign, and what I mean by that is, look, economists talk about supply chains in high level manners over there, this kind of thing that exists above nation states. Ultimately, they are still controlled by nation states, not by corporations. And so countries make rational decisions, they make rational decisions in their own self-interest to fulfill the needs of domestic citizens before others. That’s completely okay, we would expect the same thing if there was an international shortage of a particular item and Australia was a prominent exporter of that good, we would expect that our government would say, “Hang on a minute. We got to sort out our domestic needs first before we’re going to sell this,” and that’s just the nature of things.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Nations trade in their self-interest, not doing other nations a favor. It’s done in the national interest or economic hard nosed way. So those two things in combination I think again have made a real wake up call for how the world actually works, and that globalization is not something that is beyond anyone’s control, and that the nation state is still powerful in the way that goods are exchanged internationally. The third point that I would make, it’s related to the first and the second, and it’s about whether the sticker price is the actual price. A lot of people when it comes to trade will say, “Well, you just take the lowest price that you can get.”

Misha Zelinsky ::

Now to use a wonky term, what we’ve now seen is that the risk premium adjustment for goods or more, to put it into kind of normal language, is that the real price is the price that you pay when you need it. When shit hits the fan, that’s the price. The price isn’t when there’s lots available. The price of a face mask, you could see what the price people were prepared to pay in the black market for these goods online and in other ways, and the desperation… Toilet paper, right? We laughed about it, but when that level of panic goes through communities, that’s the real price for the good. And so again, it’s about making an assessment of what are the things that we need when we need them? Who supplies them? How can we get them? And what are we prepared to pay for them? And not actually just looking beyond the sticker price to say, “No, well, the real price for this good is what we need to have in storage or in production and we need to have it when we need it.”

Misha Zelinsky ::

Those three things in combination, I think you’re going to have a profound, profound change in the way that countries trade with one another, the way that Australia trades with the world, and I think that when you used to have this debate within the labor party or within the broader public discourse, people used to think that it was kind of in the abstract, that yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s never going to happen sort of thing. So this national security augment or sovereign capability augment was dismissed as essentially a fortress Australia type thinking, scaremongering. We’re essentially ransacking, trying to promote domestic industries at the expense of the consumer.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Well, it’s shown up now, on this occasion we got relatively lucky. It was quite scary there for a period obviously, but I think the nature of the goods and the way that we’re able to respond worked out okay, but wouldn’t always. The fourth point I’d make, and this is the last point, but this is the foundational, critical point, it’s played out recently in some of our foreign policies, that it’s absolutely critical for Australia that a rules-based trading system is maintained. Australia can’t… We are a middle power. We are a rich trading nation. We benefit greatly from a rules-based trading system, whether it’s a grade set of rules, and those rules are enforced by an independent umpire and everyone observes the rules.

Misha Zelinsky ::

But we also don’t benefit. Australia can’t hope to exist in a situation or in an economic trading system where might is right. Essentially if the big dog wins, that’s a problem for Australia, given our relative size and given our reliance on trade internationally. So when we’re seeing things like trade being used in a form of foreign policy coercion, as we’re seeing from the Chinese Communist Party, or when it comes to dumping of goods into Australia, which essentially dumping is selling goods into another country with the express theme of destroying that market, so that way you can continue to sell, right? Those two things are not in our interest.

Misha Zelinsky ::

When you look at the question of barley, when it comes to the tariffs that have been placed onto barley by the Chinese Communist Party of 80%, they’re just not based in any sort of reality. Australia places zero tariffs on our barley. It’s the most competitive barley producers that come from Australia. We have zero tariffs on it. China, and other nations frankly, are notorious subsidizers of their agricultural sector. So when you look at that argument, you can see what it is. It’s Australia being punished for its foreign policy decisions, on this occasion, the decision to call for an independent inquiry into COVID-19 and the origin. But there are also other decisions that Australia has made that have been threatened, the 5G network with Huawei and other things of that nature.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Not having an independent umpire in place is a very, very dangerous place for Australia to be, and so we absolutely need to preserve a rules-based trading, because it’s good or Australia as a trading nation and it’s good for Australia as a middle power to have a well-supported, multilateral global system, not just for trade, but for all things. So I think trade’s absolutely critical for Australia, but we need to be a little bit more clear-eyed about exactly what is that we want our country to be, what are the things that we need it to have, what are the expectations of the things that we need to have at the pivotal moments, and as it all becomes more uncertain, that we are sovereignly capable in critical industries and in the things that we rightly expect to have when we need them.

Misha Zelinsky ::

So I’m happy to take questions, but I think that probably is a snapshot of where I think it’s heading. It’s heading into an area where I think Australia can actually leverage it to our advantage. We’ve got everything we need in Australia, yeah, to produce much more than we currently do. Currently, we trade a lot of primary produce, which is good in terms of mining and agriculture things, but we can definitely make a lot more finished product with everything we need from energy to raw materials to the people, apart from the vision. It’s not all doom and gloom. We can certainly use this time to retool our manufacturing sector, and in the process create lots and lots of jobs for average Aussies who can work in regional communities. So I’ll leave it at that, but happy to take questions, Brandon. Thanks.

Brandon Hale:

Thank you very much, Misha. We’re now going to move onto answering some questions that were submitted on the Google forum. Senator Keneally – how long should Australia’s international borders be closed during the pandemic, even after the numbers are heavily reduced, if not eradicated, by this year?

Kristina Keneally ::

That question that’s going to be determined by what’s happening in the rest of the world and safe for us to do. Yeah, we might want to open up borders for, say, a particular skill need. I mentioned cyber security earlier. Today, the ASIO director general made clear that we are at even greater risk of cyber security attacks and online manipulation, foreign interference, and it may be that we need to bring in more people in that particular skillset, with that particular skillset. And so do we do that with the two week quarantine? Who pays for it? Same thing with international students. There may come a time where we feel comfortable or we have a desire to facilitate the reentry of international students to universities, but again, how do you do it? How is it safely done? Who pays for it? Is that attractive to people?

Kristina Keneally ::

There may be the opportunity for somewhere like New Zealand, where people talk about this trans-Tasman bubble, that may be a possibility. But I think the question about how long our borders stay closed is really going to be determined by what’s going on in the rest of the world. It still remains the case that we have had community transmission, but a significant amount, and I need to go back and double check, but I believe it’s still the majority of our cases did come from an overseas, so we’re trying to make sure that does not spike again with the second wave.

Brandon Hale:

Thank you very much. Just to Misha, so what can the [AOP 00:29:08] do to support regional jobs in the rice industry and improve Australian trade in the face of China extorting countries that Australia export rice to?

Misha Zelinsky ::

Thank you for that question. It’s a very esoteric question. I should just note that I’m not an agricultural economist, but I’ll do my best to answer the question. I think going back to my comment about barley, look, Australia is an extraordinary competitive agricultural economy. Our farmers are the world’s most competitive, and we export to the world all sorts of produce, right? In terms of rice, I think there’ll be some ongoing challenges for Australia making sure that our farmers are able to access water when they need and we need to continue to be very innovative in our use of water for water-hungry crops like rice or cotton.

Misha Zelinsky ::

But certainly, the expectation would be that in a rules-based, going back to my comments about a rules-based trading system, if nobody is subsidizing rice, then Australia should be essentially the world’s rice bowl, to the extent that we can produce it, the world should be able to buy it. Now, from memory, and I’m just going off the top of my head, but China subsidizes agricultural sector quite significantly. I was looking at this recently, I’m pretty sure it’s about… I might have these numbers wrong, so for those listening on the tape and Googling, wanting to hang me on this, I’m pretty sure it’s about 25% that they subsidize their rice industry to that extent.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Again, if you don’t have an umpire in place to say, “Well, hang on a minute. You can’t subsidize your goods here and then use that subsidy to take market share off not just Australia, but other countries that are producing rice, or you use that 25% advantage to dump into another good.” So for example, let’s just say we had a situation with Chinese rice was subsidized, and then it was dumped into Australia below cost with that subsidy, so therefore, the domestic industry can’t compete and has to close down, and suddenly what was a completely competitive industry is now being closed through basically legal cheating. It’s effectively, and when you look at dumping, it’s the same way as using steroids at the Olympics. You’re using an unfair advantage to cheat.

Misha Zelinsky ::

There are ways to, in Olympics, we drug test. In trade, we put in place anti-dumping duties to basically say, “Well, you’re dumping. So you guys put 25% on a subsidy or you’ve undersold it for 25%, we’re going to whack that back on, and we’re going to equalize it back to where it’s supposed to be.” And then the World Trade Organization sits at the top of that, and enforces those rules. So really, back to the beginning, which is the way that we would do that is we would get a competitive industry. We support that with I should also say very good, strong labor laws in agriculture, because that’s an area that I’d like to see some improvement from our farmers. I think, unfortunately, there’s a lot of exploitation that occurs within the agricultural and the horticultural sector, particularly with migrant workers, as the senator talked about earlier, and it’s shocking actually.

Misha Zelinsky ::

But parking that, looking at the macro economic argument, we want to see a competitive industry here. We want to make sure that there’s a global system of rules in place, and that Australian farmers are able to compete, and then if we apply that to every other industry, Australia’s very well-placed to export all sorts of things, and so the critical piece here is countries not cheating and there being an umpire to enforce when they do cheat. Currently we’re getting to a stage where countries are cheating and they’re also just basically thumbing their nose at the umpire. That is not a game that we can win. And so whether it’s rice or anything else, it’s a big concern for Australia as a middle power trading nation if we don’t have the rule book enforced.

Brandon Hale:

Fantastic. Well, thank you. So I’ve got another question for Senator Keneally, just from Aden. So how do you see labor confronting anxiety immigration in broad electorates, particularly key seats?

Kristina Keneally ::

I think you froze a tiny bit on me there, which I mean, Parliament has-

Brandon Hale:

Oh, sorry.

Kristina Keneally ::

We have terrible… No, Parliament has this terrible connection, so I hope I’m coming through all right. Yeah, this is a really good question, because at one level, immigration becomes at times a political touchstone. I would recite that towards the end of last year, the Scanlon Foundation poured out their annual report, which really surveys the electorate across Australia on their attitudes towards a range of issues. Go and find it if you’re interested, it showed that there’s incredibly high support for migration, that overwhelmingly Australians celebrate our cultural diversity and multiculturalism, and think that it makes Australia a stronger place. What I do think a road support for migration is when we see that shift away from permanent migration to that two-tiered society that I spoke about earlier.

Kristina Keneally ::

But I do think we can take some comfort in the fact that Australia is not like our American or Western European cousins, where immigration has become what is blamed for a range of other ills or economic challenges. I think we start off in a positive space. I think we have to advocate for a positive view of migration. We have to articulate how it benefits the country economically and socially, and we have to in some sense appeal to people’s sense of pride and nostalgia on who we are and who we were and how we want to define ourselves into the future. I don’t like the notion of thinking about it just in terms of key seats, but I’m not naïve to the fact that it plays itself out differently in different communities.

Kristina Keneally ::

I would point to this, a lot of people might think that when we’re talking about regional communities that there might be an instant kind of resistance. In fact, if anything, regional communities very much seem to want migrants and permanent migrants to come and settle there. They help bolster the population, they create economic opportunity. Misha just mentioned the exploitation of farm workers. I went to a regional town, I went to Shepparton in Victoria, and visited there one of the biggest apple growers in the country. They were frustrated because all they can get in terms of labor is temporary migrants or undocumented workers that come from labor hire companies. They know the labor hire companies are exploiting them. There’s very little they can do about it.

Kristina Keneally ::

When I said, “What can we do to solve this?” They kept saying to me, “The Albanian solution,” and I had no idea what the Albanian solution was, except it turns out under the Fraser Government, there was a program to bring Albanians to allow them to come to Shepparton and to work in the orchards to learn skills, because there were some problems going on in Albania at the time. If they wanted to, they could settle down and stay, and many of them did, and they spoke glowingly about how these were the best thing that had happened to the town, that many of them stayed, started their own businesses.

Kristina Keneally ::

I think Australians understand the benefits of migration. I think where we get into dangerous territory is when we do see an erosion of wages, when we do see a lack of independent labor market testing, when we don’t have a robust industrial relations framework, when companies are making a choice, offering wages that they know that an Australian won’t work for or conditions they know won’t appeal to an Australian, so they can say, “Oh, we’ve done labor market testing and we’re going to now bring in a migrant to do this job.” That’s when we start to erode away support for multicultural communities and for migrant communities to come be part of us. So I think that’s what we have to safeguard.

Brandon Hale:

Absolutely. Thank you very much for that. So we’re going to move onto a bit of a fun section now. A lot of people in young labor have been following the US-

Kristina Keneally ::

[crosstalk 00:38:25] Oh, I was not told there would be a fun section, so I’m very excited.

Brandon Hale:

[crosstalk 00:38:28] quite a bit now.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Anything fun about politics [crosstalk 00:38:31].

Brandon Hale:

Yeah, so just going to ask Misha, just have a question from Dillon just about who Misha would have supported in the Democratic primaries and what he thinks the Democrats need to do to win in 2020.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Right, well, it’s an interesting question. As a faithful New South Wales right winger, I actually was on team Biden from the beginning. I’m going to be honest though, I thought they were going to sink him as the primary went on and those big stats on Biden. I quite liked Pete Buttigieg. I think he was a really interesting and exciting candidate. But I think they’ve… Look, I think this election’s important. Every election’s the most important election, but I think this election is a critical election in terms of the future of the United States, but also it’s profoundly important for Australia and the world in terms of US leadership of some of these things we’ve talked about, in terms of multilateralism.

Misha Zelinsky ::

I was in favor of Biden. I took a little Buttigieg, but I think he actually got a bit unlucky, too. I think the way Iowa played out I think was bad luck for him. He didn’t get that Iowa bounce into New Hampshire and then Klobuchar kind of touched him up in that debate. Anyway, so he very nearly could have jagged it, but he’s got about 40 years on his side as a competitor to Biden, so I’m sure he can have at least one or two more shots. It was third time the charm I think for Joe. So I think Biden is a good candidate. I think I was pleased to see that they went with a moderate candidate and didn’t go down the Sanders path or the Elizabeth Warren path, because I think that would’ve been very jarring and I actually think it would have become a referendum on the Democrats and not being a referendum on Trump, which I think is kind of critical here.

Misha Zelinsky ::

We could go, we could do an entire conversation on this, but I think what’s going to be critical, clearly the Rust Belt States, the question of trade’s going to be very important, how managing that issue. When you look at the states and the regions that swung to Trump, when you actually overlay trying a suspension to the World Trade Organization, they’re called the China Shock, which essentially was the loss of all the manufacturing work in those areas and they all become extraordinarily economically distressed. Trump promised, rightly or wrongly, and whether or not you believe he’s actually done any of these things, he promised people that he would stand up for them in their economic interests, and I think it’s critical that the Democrats have got a really good answer when it comes to manufacturing policy, industry policy, jobs policies for people in those swing states, and the Rust Belt States, the so-called blue wall that crumbled.

Misha Zelinsky ::

I should preface, well, not preface, but I predicted Hillary Clinton would win, so you can take all that with a grain of salt. Now we can perhaps defer to Senator Keneally, who’s probably a little closer to home to these matters than I am.

Kristina Keneally ::

Brandon, [crosstalk 00:41:53].

Brandon Hale:

… same question to Senator Keneally.

Kristina Keneally ::

All right.

Brandon Hale:

[crosstalk 00:41:58]

Kristina Keneally ::

In my fantasy football league, I would have gone for Elizabeth Warren, but I knew that was never going to win. I think Misha’s really covered it all well there.

Brandon Hale:

Absolutely. In terms of Australia’s immigration strategy, I’ve got another question. Can you see an Australian government, particularly a labor government, using immigration as a strategic tool to drive growth while bundling out the domestic labor market? If so, how?

Kristina Keneally ::

Yeah, look, I think we had seen under particularly this government since Malcolm Turnbull created the Department of Home Affairs, we have seen migration downgraded as a key economic tool. This government through the creation of the Department of Home Affairs has securitized migration. It talks about it in terms of the threats of people who might come in. It talks about it through a security lens. I’m not saying security isn’t important. It has always been an important part of migration. The immigration department has always been two sides of one coin, who we let in and who we don’t. On the who we let in, it has always been about why we let people in, how we integrate them in, what skills they bring in, how it grows the economy in our community.

Kristina Keneally ::

All out of that has just been so lost under the creation of the Department of Home Affairs where you’ve got a real security gloss that cuts across the whole department. You only need to look at the Department of Home Affairs to see it ranked 93rd out of 93rd in terms of morale. A third of the people who work there wish they worked somewhere else. It has had an exodus of people who understood how to use migration as an economic and community building tool. Anthony has created here in the Parliament a group, we’ve got some working groups that are working on policy as we go toward the next national platform.

Kristina Keneally ::

We are very much looking at migration as an economic tool, because this government has just… The immigration minister doesn’t even sit at the cabinet table. So nobody is really talking about immigration in that context. But that is a fundamental important part of why we have a migration program, is to grow the economy. I think you do remember that under Hawke and Keating in particular, we did rely on migration, and we did use it to grow the economy. We did use it to create a sense of successful multiculturalism in our community. That is there, and Australians are ready for that message, I believe. I think it can be done, but I think because we bring a real focus on skills, training, fixing up the vet system, investing in education, investing in public education.

Kristina Keneally ::

We had a whole range of policy settings at the last election that I think you will see similar or same variations are that the next one in terms of Australian skills authority, about labor market testing, about a national labor hire licensing scheme, and the like that I think will help us really promote the opportunities to grow the skills of Australians and yet argue for the importance of migration to grow the economy and create opportunity.

Brandon Hale:

Thank you very much, Kristina. I’ve just got just one final question for Misha. China allows the flaunting of intellectual property rules in order to allow Chinese industries to have unfairly competitive prices at a global stage. Is it ethical for Australia to buy these products? Should Australia do more to clamp down on this? And what does this say more broadly about China’s trade practice?

Misha Zelinsky ::

Yeah, you went out there a bit, but I think I understood the thrust of the question, that IP theft. Look, the question of… Technology is kind of critical to economic success, right? Every country strives to out compete other countries and to essentially have a tech advantage, and then economic advantage comes from tech, as does military advantage. So the Chinese Communist Party has made an absolute art form out of IP theft. It was described, I can’t remember who said it, but it was essentially described that the intellectual property theft by the Chinese Communist Party is the single greatest transfer of human wealth in human history.

Misha Zelinsky ::

The capacity to make intellectual advances and technological advances and protect that intellectual property, that’s critical to the way that we understand how the principles of economics work and that’s how it’s worked, and making those rights enforceable are critical to making sure that people spend their time and effort and energy investing into research, investing into innovation, investing into improvements. So again, not to go right into… You can spend a lot of time talking about the various strategies, for example, if you want to set up a business in China, they make you essentially force transfer your IP across to an adjunct venture partner, and then over time, once the domestic firm has worked out all your secrets, it should be often that they then deny you market access.

Misha Zelinsky ::

China, when it comes to IP, is extremely ruthless, and every country I think should be thinking about its own system and making sure it rigorously defends those from incursion and cyber incursion. Going right back to my original comment, the critical piece here for Australia, for everyone, is that we’ve got a rules-based system. So be it IP law, be it trade law, etc., that we respect one another’s sovereignty, that there’s a rule book in place, and that there’s an umpire, and that when the umpire makes a decision, we respect that decision. And so IP theft is a huge concern, it’s particularly a concern when it’s occurring auto credit regime, stealing text secrets, military secrets, and then using those to either further enhance its own military or repress its own people. I think that’s a further concern to what is already an economic concern.

Brandon Hale:

Thank you. With that, we’ll have to end, but we have one final two questions for both of you, just as Misha does with all his podcasts. If you were to choose three historical figures, international relations, who are dead or alive you could have at a barbecue?

Kristina Keneally ::

Are you going to me first? All right. Well, I have just finished watching Mrs. America on Foxtel, and Gloria Steinem, who I have met and have had lunch with, is from my hometown, Toledo, Ohio, and I did reflect after watching that show that I would love to have dinner with Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Bella Abzug. That’s just my moment, that’s where I’m at at the moment. I’m sure if you asked me at some other time, I’d have a whole ‘nother list. But they would be a rocking dinner party, as a child of the ’70s, I would love to do that.

Brandon Hale:

That’s a great lineup. And what would yours, Misha, be?

Misha Zelinsky ::

I should just point out that this is meant to be the fun section, and I painstakingly point out that this is the world’s lamest question in my podcast. So the fact that someone has decided to take me up on this is… Anyway, look, give yourself an uppercut, whoever’s written that question in. But look, so for me, funnily enough, I probably haven’t spent enough time thinking about this, notwithstanding that its my show. Winston Churchill would be someone that I would have on there. I think particularly one of the things that troubles me these days is that it doesn’t seem to be abundantly clear that the Nazis are the bad guys. So getting the guy that essentially kicked the Nazis’ ass back to the Stone Age I think would be a person that I would definitely love to hear from, and plus hearing a few of his witticisms would be great.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Another person would be Bobby Kennedy. I’d probably spend all the time asking him about JFK, but what I love about Bobby Kennedy particularly, I don’t know if any of you have seen it, but I’ve been thinking back quite a bit with his speech that he gave the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, if you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to watch it. It’s a very, very, very powerful speech, and I think particularly timely with things that we’re seeing at the moment with the protests in the United States and in Australia as well about race relations, and I think had Bobby not been assassinated in 1968, I think things might have been very different in the United States. I think he’d be a great person to have.

Misha Zelinsky ::

And probably lastly, I’m reading a lot of Ernest Hemingway at the moment, so I don’t know how much Bobby Kennedy drinks, but Hemingway and Churchill [crosstalk 00:52:20]-

Kristina Keneally ::

You’re saying this is an alcoholic dinner.

Misha Zelinsky ::

Well, he’s Irish, Irish-Catholic, so maybe he does drink as well. Look, yeah, and an Australia union official, so it’s definitely going to be we need to have a well-stocked bar. But they’re my three for the extraordinarily lame, not fun time question.

Brandon Hale:

Well, there you go. Well, we’ll have to leave it there, but thank you so much, Senator Kenneally and Misha, for coming.

 

Wayne Swan: Economic inequality and the global rise of right wing nationalism

Wayne Swan is the President of the Labor Party. He served as Australia’s Treasurer from 2007 to 2013 and was Deputy Prime Minister. Wayne is credited with helping save Australia from the GFC and in 2011 was crowned World Finance Minister of the year.

As the author of numerous books on social policy, he has lead the domestic and global debates on the dangers of economic inequality. 

Wayne joined Misha Zelinsky for a chinwag about what went wrong at the 2019 federal election for Labor, why fiscal policy still matters in economic management, how far right nationalists are using inequality to win government around the world, why big philanthropy is a big problem for democracy, how Australia should manage an assertive Chinese Communist Party and where to from here for social democrats around the world.

 

Misha Zelinsky:             Wayne Swan, welcome to Diplomates. Thank you for joining us.

Wayne Swan:                Good to be here.

Misha Zelinsky:             Now, what a place so we could start. It’s been a few months since the 2019 federal election. It was a difficult one for Labor Party people, the Labor Party supporters and members. I’m kind of curious, firstly, did you see it coming? And then, to your mind, what went wrong is the big question. But we can start there maybe.

Wayne Swan:                Well, I didn’t think we were going to have an easy victory. And I think the way in which the opinions polls were hyped up and the expectations got out of control and the bookies got it all wrong simply heightened an inevitability about our victory that wasn’t there in the foundations. And indeed, I don’t think it was there in the published opinion polling either.

Wayne Swan:                Yes, it was wrong, but it was not out in many respects and there’s no way in the world that anyone who was studying the opinion polling closely could’ve formed a conclusion that we were headed for a massive victory. Changes of government in Australia are always difficult, particularly for the Labor Party, and that applied last time. There are some things we did well, there are some things we did badly. We’re having a review about all of that, but I don’t think that there should be any automatic knee-jerk reaction when people are analyzing the result.

Misha Zelinsky:             So there’s been a lot of talk, I mean, your state of Queensland, Labor did most poorly there until in terms of our primary vote, but there’s a lot of discussion about labor’s performance in regional areas, outer suburban areas and this sort of discourse that we’ve lost touch with traditional labor voters, more working class voters. Is that something that you think is true or something you’re concerned about?

Wayne Swan:                Well, there’s no doubt that the Liberal Party campaign managed to dislodge many low-income, insecure and loosely politically aligned voters from the labor camp. No doubt about that at all. I think part of that was a very effective scare campaign, and particularly a campaign run under the radar via social media, which was promoting an economic Armageddon through death taxes and other claims that were terribly effective, got under our guard and dislodged those voters from our camp.

Wayne Swan:                So we’ve got some fundamental reassessment to do there, because if you look around the Western world and you look at the progress of social democratic parties, there’s no question that what I call the radical right, and I include the Liberal Party of Australia, which has now been taken over, if you like, by hard right elements. There’s no smaller liberals in it. Around the world, those groupings have been successful in removing voters, particularly lower income working people, from support for social democratic parties through the use of wedge politics, through the use of race, through the use of gender and increasingly through the use of climate change to pull those voters away from their traditional social democratic support.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so, you talked a little bit about this, yeah, the online campaign that we saw, but also there was the impact of the Clive Palmer money.

Wayne Swan:                Sure.

Misha Zelinsky:             How much did that influence the outcome [crosstalk 00:03:03]?

Wayne Swan:                Well, there’s no question that the Clive Palmer money supercharged the themes that the Liberal Party were running. The Clive Palmer-

Misha Zelinsky:             Which was $80 million spend, right?

Wayne Swan:                Yeah. The Clive Palmer money was part of the conservative spend, so the biggest single spend that I can find in the Western world by a single person in an election campaign was turned into a preference recycling scheme aimed particularly at those groups that I spoke about before and it was very successful. So when people are evaluating this result, you can’t ignore the impact of this big money, which certainly had an impact in my home state.

Wayne Swan:                But I don’t believe the results in Queensland, putting aside the central and North Queensland seats, were any different to what we saw anywhere else in the country. It’s true, we did lose the outer suburban vote and we lost a regional vote, but that was no different in Queensland than it was anywhere else bar in Queensland the three seats that you would describe as directly affected by the issue of coal, where there were separate circumstances. So I don’t think the result in Queensland was little different to the result that we saw in outer suburban Sydney, regional Victoria or regional New South Wales. Or, for what matter, in cities like Perth.

Misha Zelinsky:             Now, unpacking this. You touched on the global phenomenon. I think that this is a challenge for all social democratic parties around the world since global populism. In many ways, I think this is almost the U.S. 2016 election result or the Brexit result arriving in Australia, it has similar characteristics. So I’m kind of curious, firstly, what’s driving this global populism? And then why is it that the right, and the far-right, seem to be able to dig into it a bit [crosstalk 00:04:41]

Wayne Swan:                This is the critical question. The fact is that the Great Recession, or otherwise known here as the global financial crisis, really shattered the foundations of modern capitalism, which had already been loosening through 40 years in the growth of income and wealth inequality. And that growth of income and wealth inequality has bred resentment. And that resentment has materialized in the form of much more insecure work, the disappearance of what were once solid career opportunities with decent pay.

Wayne Swan:                And that, in many ways, shattered the faith of those people in basically their democratic arrangements. And as that’s occurred, unless governments domestically put in place a range of policies to look after those people, indeed as we did, principally, in this country, those votes increasingly became lost to basically what I’d call the center-left, and they’ve been increasingly captured by what I would call the radical right.

Wayne Swan:                You’ve seen this most particularly in recent elections in Scandinavia, you’ve seen it in Sweden, you’ve seen it in Finland, you’ve seen it around the world, that the use of race, the use of gender, to play into the insecurities of working people, and to play in to their loss of faith in the authority structures and decision making structures, in a society where they see the great gains of their labor principally going to a few at the top, has been the driver of the radical right and the great failure of the post-war period.

Wayne Swan:                See, for 30 years following the war, policies were put in place to drive a more equal and fairer society. And they were done as a hedge against communism on the left and fascism on the right. Following the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, and the advent of trickle-down economics, otherwise known by many as neoliberalism, we’ve seen a growth in rampant income, wealth, and inequality. And that has seen a fracturing in societies where there was once a consensus about a fairer share being the best way to drive prosperity and growth into this notion of trickle-down economics that if you give more to the top, then somehow, everyone down the bottom will benefit.

Wayne Swan:                Well, that’s just produced an enormous amount of distrust and it has created, if you like, the political space for the rise of the authoritarian radical right, which we now see so dominant in many countries across Europe, and you see represented in the leadership of Donald Trump.

Misha Zelinsky:             Yeah. And you covered a lot there about, I suppose, the conditions that are allowing this radical right to rise around this insecurity, economic inequality. The thing that’s got everyone, at least that’s on the center-left of politics about how do we respond to this, is that the conditions would seem to be good for a social democratic agenda around inequality and [crosstalk 00:07:35]

Wayne Swan:                They certainly are, but there hasn’t been the sort of social democratic leadership that we’ve required. I mean, we’ve done best here, in Australia and New Zealand, where we’ve had our social democratic aspirations reflected in Labor parties. And the anchor of our Labor Party is, of course, the trade union movement, which provides that direct linkage. And I think that has been why you could actually say that the big difference, say, between the radical right in Australia having a section of a Liberal government, and manifested, say, in the form of Pauline Hanson with a couple of senators, the big difference between that, and the election, say, of a Donald Trump in the United States, has been 30 years’ worth of real wage growth in Australia and 30 years of wage stagnation in the United States.

Wayne Swan:                But we started to see that wage stagnation. We started to see the profit share rise and wage share be suppressed. We’ve seen policies increasingly in this country after the six years, where pre-tax income has been suppressed in the form of wage suppression, post-tax income has been suppressed in the form of more regressive taxation. The twin combination of unfair taxes and low wage growth is tailor-made for either an ascendant social democratic party to storm to victory, or for a radical populist to storm the victory if the social democratic offering is not up to scratch. And when you translate that into our last election result, we should’ve won, but we didn’t have the sort of defeats, either, that you’ve seen in various other social democratic offerings in the past.

Wayne Swan:                That’s not an excuse for our outcome.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so, in terms of connecting with working people and sort of reflecting their concerns, one of the challenges seems to be that there’s a perception, at least, that all sides of politics have been sort of colonized by so-called elites. And that seems to particularly hollow out that social democratic side of politics, both here and abroad. I mean, do you think there’s something about this question of big elites being from nowhere and people being from somewhere, and this question of place [crosstalk 00:09:58] communities?

Wayne Swan:                Well, I think that is really important. And I think it’s a reminder to all of us, on the center-left of politics, that to be out there with the people all the time, or of the people all the time, as comfortable in the tea room as you are in the boardroom, is absolutely critical. And I think many of our comrade parties around the world, in particularly the U.S. Democrats, have fallen prey and have not really learned that lesson.

Wayne Swan:                So I think it’s something we all have to keep in mind, but it is also something that the radical right specializes in through their authoritarian leadership and the associated gutter campaigns that they put into the system beneath the radar. And I would cite, in this example, the vilification and the smashing of the standing and reputation of Bill Shorten behind the scenes through one of the most aggressive and unprincipled demolition jobs on a politician’s character and standing that I’ve seen my whole time in politics.

Misha Zelinsky:             Well, and so, in terms of… One of the things I think is challenging for social democrats is that, as faith in democracy, faith in government, goes down, it almost suits the right-wing agenda because they don’t like government [crosstalk 00:11:18]

Wayne Swan:                Well, of course it does. You see, the whole right-wing agenda, and this is what you see at the core of this government here, is to destroy the credibility and standing of government and to demonize government intervention. So, stage one of that was to demonize our stimulus, which saved our country from recession. To continue to demonize it, to do that, and to get into bed with plutocrats and parts of the business community so that when next time a huge global event comes, no government will have the guts to stand up and do what the Rudd and Gillard governments did in a time of need, which was protect our people and to use the power of government to do so.

Wayne Swan:                But it is ongoing, you’ve only got to pick up a newspaper or observe just about any policy of this current Liberal government, and find, at its core, an attempt to destroy the credibility and efficiency of public service provision. And there is perhaps no program that demonstrates that more than the so called robo-debt campaign that’s going on in Centrelink. The treating of people, that they fired the hired staff in Centrelink so that when the public wants to actually ring and find out what their entitlements, they’re on hold for 30 minutes an hour. This is all part of a systematic attempt to destroy the quality of public service provision so they can turn around ain the end and say to social democratic parties like mine, “Look, you can’t trust government, they can’t deliver services. I’ll tell you what, we’ve got a better offering. Have a tax cut instead.”

Misha Zelinsky:             And so, you touched on plutocrats. And one of the things that I’m so curious about, and there’s been a big backlash against what they called the Davos tops. And so, I mean, how do we make the case that democracy in government is still the answer, given that you see, increasingly, these big philanthropists plutocrats, where the argument is we can return the benefits of this inequality actually-

Wayne Swan:                Well, it’s outrageous and shocking. If people want to give money and make their society a better place, fantastic. But don’t expect a tax deduction. Don’t erode the basis of the government to provide the basic service provision upon which a civilized society depends. It’s just shocking that people who don’t actually pay the right amount of tax in the first place then turn around and want to give more money and get a tax deduction for that.

Wayne Swan:                Look, I know many people in the Australian business community who pay their taxes and they give away a lot of money, but equally there are plenty of people with a lot of money who aren’t paying their fair share of taxes and still expect a tax deduction and be regarded and favored in the community because they’ve given away money when they have shattered the very linkage between collecting tax and service provision by becoming tax termites and ripping away at the very essence of a civilized society.

Misha Zelinsky:             And it also is fundamentally undemocratic in that, ultimately, you want to see taxes collected by the government people deciding where those taxes should be [crosstalk 00:14:07] correlation.

Wayne Swan:                Exactly. And no wonder people then lose faith in democracy, because they see people who obviously have a lot of money, they see the publication from the Tax Stats that they’re not paying it, and then they see them standing up pretending to be very generous because they’re at some very worthy cause using these people as a shield against the underlying evasion they’re engaged in, and they expect to be clapped. No wonder the average person gets cynical.

Wayne Swan:                I mean, no wonder the average wager could get… well, actually, gets really cynical when all they ever hear is of high profile people, be they sporting people in Rugby Union or whatever, who are earning millions of dollars a year, but no one’s out there debating at the same time the fact that they can’t even get an enterprise bargaining up for a 2% increase. And they see this conflict. A news agenda dominated by elements of identity politics and big money for the top-end of town, and on the other they don’t hear many reports about the fact that their enterprise bargaining’s being squashed and they’re not going to get a decent wage increase for the next couple of years.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so, yeah, in terms of this question of identity politics and economic justice, I mean, do you see those things in conflict? Because a lot of people say, “Well, we have to choose one or the other,” but my view is the thing that can unify people the most around whatever their identity is, is around economics and class.

Wayne Swan:                Exactly, and just ask Martin Luther King. I mean, it’s just not well known that when he went on his freedom march it was called Jobs and Freedom, and it was called Jobs and Freedom for a reason. That gender equality, racial equality is always going to be ultimately completely unattainable without a degree of economic inequality. So, we don’t ignore them. They’re all part of the same equation. But when you’re a truck driver in Western Sydney, or when you’re a steel worker in Wollongong, and all you ever hear about is a sporting hero on a million dollars a year having a court case dominating the news every night, and then you’re told in your latest bargaining round that you’re not getting even a reasonable increase, well, you really get the shits.

Misha Zelinsky:             Mm-hmm (affirmative). And so, I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Whereas you talk to people in the business community or you talk to the Davos set and they say, “What are we going to do about populism?” You say, “Pay taxes and lift wages.” And they’re like, “Well, I guess we’ll never solve it then,” right?

Wayne Swan:                Well, the two most fundamental elements of doing something about the entrenched long-term inequality in our community are progressive tax and a stronger voice for workers, principally through unions.

Misha Zelinsky:             Mm-hmm (affirmative). And so you touched a little bit about the economy, GFC response or the Great Recession response. I’m kind of curious, firstly, you’re a former treasurer, what’s your take on the state of the economy at the moment? So, current… we’re in the weakest period of growth we’ve had pretty much for a decade.

Wayne Swan:                Well, it’s weak and anemic growth induced by the federal government’s refusal to put in place decent spending on infrastructure. It’s pretty simple, really. And it’s galling to watch the current treasurer somehow go out and try and blame the Reserve Bank for the fact that their fiscal policy isn’t working and that he intends to put pride ahead of outcome. We didn’t put pride ahead of outcome when our economy was challenged.

Wayne Swan:                I mean, imagine if these clowns were in charge and there was a pronounced international downturn, the likes of which we had back in 2008 and 2009. Well, I know what they’d do. They wouldn’t act, because they’re part of a weird brigade out there that wants the cleansing impact of a recession. Because they see that as eating away at the power of workers and a way of reducing wages, and they also see it as a political opportunity to run some of the authoritarian lines that may work for the sort of parties of the far-right elsewhere when people feel dreadfully insecure.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so you talked about, basically, that the Reserve Bank, which is a controlled monetary policy-

Wayne Swan:                Yeah.

Misha Zelinsky:             … and the treasurer who’s ostensibly in charge of fiscal policy. Now, there’s a suggestion they’re going to be pulling against one another.

Wayne Swan:                That’s right. Well, the treasurer’s fiscal policy is wrong and to cover that up he’s seeking to somehow say that the Reserve Bank governor should fix it through monetary policy.

Misha Zelinsky:             Despite [crosstalk 00:18:18] big 1%.

Wayne Swan:                Monetary policy is tapped out. Tapped out. Everybody’s saying, and it’s not just the governor of the RBA in Australia, I mean, there has been an excessive reliance on monetary policy because governments around the world have been dominated by an austerity ethos and therefore a reluctance to effectively deploy fiscal policy. Fiscal policy here and around the world should be playing a much, much larger role as we seek to deal with the economic challenges that we face 10 years on from the Great Recession.

Misha Zelinsky:             And obviously when you were a treasurer in the then-run government, there was a massive intervention via stimulus package. Do you think it’s possible today with the world the way that it is for the-

Wayne Swan:                No.

Misha Zelinsky:             … global response that we saw from every country to be coordinated through the G20 or any other mechanism?

Wayne Swan:                Well, 10 years ago, in fact, in March, early April, 2009, the world came together via the G20 and put in place a massive stimulus package to save the world from a Great Depression Mark II and to ensure it was only the Great Recession. Despite that package, it’s taken most developed economies over a decade to come out. Australia sailed through that period. Our economy now is almost 35% bigger than it was in 2007. The American economy is in the low 20s. The British economy is around 20 or a bit below. We sailed through. And because we didn’t see the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the destruction of so many small businesses, we averted the skills and capital destruction that dragged other economies around the world down.

Wayne Swan:                Yet still, the conservative parties in this country carry on as if this was a massive mistake. Now, because of, if you like, the rise of the radical right it’s hard to see us getting the sort of international cooperation that we got from the London Summit in 2009 that dragged the world out of their recession and didn’t become a depression. If we have to go into those circumstances again, I don’t think we are or will see the sort of actions that G20 took 10 years ago. And that will be a tragedy, if that happens.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so a lot of this dysfunction we’re seeing principally probably arises from the election of Donald Trump in the United States which has been a disruptive force for the old world order, if you can call it that, and also the rise of China. Australia finds itself in the middle of this, particularly one of the big headwinds in our economy relates to this so-called trade war between China and the U.S. I mean, how do we navigate that in a political sense and in an economic sense?

Wayne Swan:                Well, sensibly, because our principal trade relationship is with China and our principal investment relationship is with the rest of the developed world, and our principal security relationship is with the United States. So we have to be incredibly careful and deft in what we do. We can’t be compliant if the China is out of step when it comes to really important issues like the South China Sea or, for that matter, even Hong Kong. But equally, when we are seeing some of the absurd decisions announced by the U.S. President, we can’t be seen to necessarily be compliant there. There is a real challenge for diplomacy and nuance for us to navigate what is a very, very difficult period.

Wayne Swan:                You see, this issue of inequality, however, is not just one that’s a problem in the U.S. and in the developed world. It’s a massive problem in China itself and, I think you’ll find, a massive problem behind the protests that you are also seeing in Hong Kong as well, because-

Misha Zelinsky:             Yeah, there’s a real challenge around the rental market there and the average wages from Hong Kong.

Wayne Swan:                Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Intergenerational issue. You know, it’s not just a question of political rights. But they have no political rights and are facing, if you like, economic prospects that they can have no say in or real impact on their government’s arrangements. So it’s a complex world. There’s no doubt the rise of China has been tremendously beneficial for the Chinese themselves but also for the rest of the world, but what it requires is principled and nuanced leadership, not bombast.

Misha Zelinsky:             And you touched there on an intergenerational inequality. I’m kind of curious about that, because one of the big things of the last election, just returning back to the election, was this question of the, imputation credits became a big focus and the impact on retirees. What about the impact on young people who are unable to get a secure job or are unable to enter property market? How are we going to balance the intergenerational pact?

Wayne Swan:                It’s a very good point. Well, we have got a huge intergenerational inequity problem. And my view is that our actions on negative gearing were broadly supported across the community for the very reasons that you have just outlined. I’ve got lost track of a number of people I know who have got negatively geared properties, but absolutely understand that there has to be fundamental change in this area if their kids and/or their grandkids are ever going to get a toehold in the market. So I don’t think that was one of those policies that was responsible for the blowback in the election. There might be ways in which you could be nuanced and change, but the fundamental generational inequity involved in those arrangements is one I believe that is understood in the community and the consequence was a tolerance for change in that area.

Misha Zelinsky:             Well, the thing is as well, I mean, on the question of negative gearing, that’s a policy Labor took in 2016-

Wayne Swan:                Exactly.

Misha Zelinsky:             … when it very nearly won in the election by one seat majority, or left a Turnbull government a minority government at the time. So, in terms of what are the policies we need to do though to make sure that we can… because one of the things that worries me is young people increasingly feeling disenfranchised from the countries that they’re residing in in terms of youth unemployment in the regions. And I think some of this sort of far-right politics we’re seeing there was a trumpification of the regions, a lot of it is from young people not feeling they got a chance to get their hand on the first rung.

Wayne Swan:                Well, we got to spend a lot of more time interacting and communicating in this area. I think a lot of young people want to know that principle matters, I think a lot of people want to know that values matter. Now, our challenge is to live up to that creed. And this is the point that I’m going to continue to make as president of the party, that principles and values matter. But so too does compromise from time to time, because to ultimately implement your principles and your values you’ve got to hold power. And we have to be seen to be able to do that in ethical ways.

Wayne Swan:                And I believe there’s probably no party around the world in a better position to actually do that properly than the Australian Labor Party. The period of government under Hawke and Keating, the period of government under Rudd and Gillard, over and above any of the blemishes those governments had, did achieve an enormous amount. Very much in the tradition of earlier labor governments whether it’s a post-war reconstruction under Chifley. Labor’s got a tremendous history to draw from as we go forward and to demonstrate to people that politics and government can be a force for good and can make a difference in the lives of people.

Wayne Swan:                But it’s just, making a difference through a government decision-making is not something that happens one day and is seen the next. To convince people that these objectives could only be achieved in the long-term, not the short-term is the challenge, because the populace from the radical right will never give a principled and effective policy a chance to get off the ground. No greater example of this than what the Conservatives did to the carbon price. If that carbon price had survived in Australia, we would be having an entirely different political and economical debate. And what sections of the business community aligned with the radical right of the Liberal Party did in destruction of the carbon price will go down in history as one of the most wanton acts of economic and social destruction in the history of our nation.

Misha Zelinsky:             Mm-hmm (affirmative). I actually also would give a special shout-out to the Greens who were voting against the ETS twice in 2009.

Wayne Swan:                Exactly. Exactly. [crosstalk 00:26:36] that as well. Yeah.

Misha Zelinsky:             I always like to remind my friends of that if they are particularly left-wing and inner-city Greens that there’s only one party that’s put legislation as a party of government to the floor and enacted price and action on climate change.

Wayne Swan:                Well, if we would’ve got it through back in 2009, a lot of the other events that occurred may not have occurred either, but anyway.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so, how does Labor… I mean, the last 10 years, I think, the climate wars for the last decade in Australia have been pretty devastating, both the cause of climate action, but also on progressive politics. I mean, how do we square this circle between these young people who are very energized about climate change and people in the inner city that I think are energized?

Wayne Swan:                Well, we’ve got to get them to understand that when you’re tackling climate change and doing very substantial emissions reductions it’s just not a question of coal. It’s a question of emissions reductions across the board. Of course we have to move as quickly as we can from fossil fuels and replace that with renewable energy. And it has to be driven. It has to be driven by a price on carbon. And the problem at the moment it’s not driven by a price on carbon. Many of these well-intentioned people think that their obligations are discharged by fighting against a particular coalmine here or there. The truth is that our coal, our thermal coal is 4% of world’s thermal coal. Most thermal coal around the world is mined-

Misha Zelinsky:             Locally and used locally. Yeah.

Wayne Swan:                … and used locally. What the world needs, what Australia needs is a carbon price for us to make the transition across all of those elements. To think that if you knock off Adani or knock off a couple of coalmines in the Adani basin, that this is some substantive contribution to the fight against climate change in the short term or the long term is simply not true. Yes, we have to make that change. We are, despite the government’s opposition, making substantial headway in renewable energy thanks largely to the NASA progressive business and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation that I set up and that the Conservatives did not manage to destroy.

Wayne Swan:                So this climate change debate is broader and more complex than it appears in the media, and as a progressive party we’ve got to continue to argue for a strong set of emissions reductions which are far greater in their impact and their scope than any one particular coalmine at any one point of time. I was with Nicholas Stern the day that he announced the Stern report back in two-

Misha Zelinsky:             Was it 2009? ‘8?

Wayne Swan:                No, not ‘9.

Misha Zelinsky:             ‘7?

Wayne Swan:                Yeah. ‘6, probably.

Misha Zelinsky:             ‘6? God, that was a long time ago. I remember [crosstalk 00:29:15]

Wayne Swan:                When I was in Whitehall visiting Gordon Brown.

Misha Zelinsky:             Yeah.

Wayne Swan:                And if you go to the Stern report, it always envisioned that coal production would go down gradually as renewable energy went up. And that has not fundamentally changed. We are not getting the emissions reductions across many of the other critical sectors that we need, and so much of this concentration on a particular mine here or there drags critical attention away from what is a diabolically difficult area of public policy achieving these reductions across a whole range of sectors that people never talk about.

Misha Zelinsky:             And the other thing I think we need to… those that are passionate about climate change and the environment, except we need to make significant action in that space. I think one of the things that challenges the politics of it is the asymmetry of who’s impacted.

Wayne Swan:                Yeah.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so the people that are very passionate about it in the city, their job’s not impacted. But the people that are going to be impacted, have to wear the costs of it have to-

Wayne Swan:                Exactly. Yeah. And where the people are impacted, they feel that the people that have strong views don’t care about them.

Misha Zelinsky:             Yeah.

Wayne Swan:                So you get a political backlash that ultimately undermines the progress on climate change.

Misha Zelinsky:             Correct.

Wayne Swan:                Because a very significant section of the progressive alliance is told by another section of it that they don’t count anymore, or that they don’t like their lifestyles, or they don’t know how to think, or they’re ignorant.

Misha Zelinsky:             Yeah.

Wayne Swan:                And that was the problem of the Bob Brown caravan.

Misha Zelinsky:             Indeed.

Wayne Swan:                And yeah, we just can’t go down that road if we are going to win this fight against climate change.

Misha Zelinsky:             Yeah, and we need to build those coalitions and find ways… I think there’s a role for industry policy in terms of finding ways… industry’s going to decline over the time.

Wayne Swan:                Absolutely. You know what I find when I go out? In the business community it’s a generational thing. If you meet anyone now involved in business under 50, they’re talking the economics of climate change. Because what’s going to drive climate change is not necessarily reductions targets. It’s going to be the fact that the market won’t lend to these people. That there’s good business to be done. So you could have a decent conversation with many in the business community who are younger, because they actually get the economics of climate change as well as the environmental issue and outcome. And they are actively out there, involved in the fight in a commercial way, and we need all of them in the tent.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so I just want to turn a little bit back to your time as a treasurer and deputy prime minister in the Gillard government, commissioned an Asian Century White Paper. I’m kind of curious to contrast the view of the government then with how the world’s turned out. I mean, it was a very cheery or upside sort of document about the economic potential and perhaps overlooked maybe some of the bigger challenges of an assertive China that we’ve seen in the [crosstalk 00:31:54]

Wayne Swan:                Well, it wasn’t meant to deal with security matters. I mean, it was a very good paper. And these people would’ve been burning books back in the 1500s. I mean, they eliminated the Asian Century White Paper from every government website.

Misha Zelinsky:             Is that right?

Wayne Swan:                Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Misha Zelinsky:             So it’s just gone? I didn’t know that.

Wayne Swan:                I mean, I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the future of our country should go and read the Asian Century White Paper, because-

Misha Zelinsky:             How will they find it?

Wayne Swan:                Well, it’s-

Misha Zelinsky:             It’s on Wayne’s website.

Wayne Swan:                Well, fortunately, it’s still around, but-

Misha Zelinsky:             Right. Well, that’s an interesting aside. But anyway, we were getting into the… yeah.

Wayne Swan:                Anyway. And it was so well received in the region. And in many ways, as I moved around and the members of the committee moved around, it was, if you like, putting the final nail in the coffin of White Australia, that they finally thought, over a whole range of issues, this seemed to bring together the notion that Australia saw itself as Asian-facing and part of Asia. And we have a different discussion now about Asia and Australia than we had when I first went to university or indeed was in politics for the first decade or so. You know, that we all understand that it’s part of a growing region and with it come the challenges, one of the biggest one we were talking of, climate change.

Wayne Swan:                And the other one is growing inequality, because unfortunately the trickle-down model that has been used in the developed world is now being aggressively used in the developing world including by communist China and resulting in rampant wealth and income inequality in both types of countries. So the problems we face are similar. Of course, in our region at least a third of the countries are in dire poverty in what you’d call the broader Asian region and a lot more work needs to be done in dealing with their challenges. It’s not just a question of China when you’re dealing with Asia. Non-China Asia is bigger than China.

Misha Zelinsky:             Sorry, India and Asia and somewhere else?

Wayne Swan:                Well, but all those other little countries that there is so many of them where the very basis of development has not even begun. So there’s still a lot of poverty alleviation to be done in Asia. We do focus on the Asian middle class because it’s what brings so much prosperity to our country, but we shouldn’t lose focus either in Asia or in Australia on those struggling countries across the Asia-Pacific.

Misha Zelinsky:             So when you said the White Paper was an economic document, obviously, there were defense white papers at the time, and there’s that duality that exists in public policy in Australia which is that kind of that Tony Abbott describes as fear and greed. Do you think the relationship with China since the Rudd -Gillard government has changed and how would a Labor government best interact with a more assertive China now?

Wayne Swan:                Well, I think the Abbott government bungled it from day one when they held that completely dysfunctional G20 in Brisbane and Prime Minister started lecturing global leaders about the Australian health system and all sorts of bizarre things and he banned climate change from discussion at the summit.

Misha Zelinsky:             That’s right.

Wayne Swan:                So President Obama went and gave a speech up the road at the university about the importance of climate change. It hasn’t been a great start in terms of our relationships with China. I think the government’s playing catch-up there now, but still is deeply confused about where we are and who we are.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so one of the things you responsibility when you’re treasurer is the FIRB decisions and the FIRB board reports treasurer in the cabinet. But I’m curious about foreign investment decisions. Should we worry about state-owned enterprises buying up shares [crosstalk 00:35:21]

Wayne Swan:                Absolutely. And I-

Misha Zelinsky:             … by an autocracy.

Wayne Swan:                Well, of course we should. And one of the first statements I made after I became treasurer in the middle of 2008 was putting obligations on approvals for state-owned enterprises. We don’t want any government body dominating a supply chain or dominating a market. I didn’t-

Misha Zelinsky:             And you talked about Chinalco trying to buy Rio Tinto?

Wayne Swan:                Well, far bigger than that, but takeover… it was actually always an attempt to take over a BHP. So if we had five medium-sized companies in a particular area and they wanted to buy one, well that’s fine, but if they wanted to come in and buy the lot, no. So we put down some principles about competition being observed, the whole series of principles, because ultimately you don’t want another government directing the private enterprise activities of its subsidiaries in your country.

Misha Zelinsky:             Mm-hmm (affirmative). And what about things like critical infrastructure? We’ve had [crosstalk 00:36:15]

Wayne Swan:                Absolutely. Absolutely.

Misha Zelinsky:             … network, but, of course, [crosstalk 00:36:19]

Wayne Swan:                Well, in fact, I did that.

Misha Zelinsky:             That was from the NBN, yeah.

Wayne Swan:                Yeah. For a good reason. So yes, there are national security implications of these things, always has been, always will be. You shouldn’t be letting foreign countries buy companies in your missile launch zone, for example. And I stopped one Chinese company from doing that. I say there’s another example of that that’s almost live at the moment, of course.

Misha Zelinsky:             Correct.

Wayne Swan:                There’s always been a national security element of any form of economic policy. And I think in recent years the capacity, including under us the broader part in this outlook, if you like, has increased.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so what about situation where government makes a decision and then China often responds with a fair bit of hostility about those decisions. You’ve got sort of this use what they call hostage diplomacy with the detaining of Canadian citizens, Australian citizens in response to 5G decision here and also with the arrest of the Huawei executive in Canada. I mean, how did you stand up to Chinese decisions at the time and how does a government do that going forward?#

Wayne Swan:                Well, I had a couple of particularly difficult and tense meetings. In fact, went I went to China to explain the fact that for the first time Australia was going to enforce responsibilities on state-owned enterprise investments in Australia, I was accused openly of being a racist. Now, that regime exists to this day. It was put in place for a good purpose. But when you look at these people, you got to go and look them in the eye and tell them what you’re doing. I think one of the problems that we’ve got is a lot of this diplomacy doesn’t necessarily come from what’d have been across-the-table discussions.

Misha Zelinsky:             You’re talking about megaphone diplomacy?

Wayne Swan:                Yeah, megaphone diplomacy rarely works. But if you got to engage in it, you’re want to make sure you go and look in their eyes first.

Misha Zelinsky:             Mm-hmm (affirmative). So you think there’s a bigger interpersonal thing that we should be working on in that sense?

Wayne Swan:                Well, I think you got to work on it, but you got to be realistic it won’t always work.

Misha Zelinsky:             Although [crosstalk 00:38:23]

Wayne Swan:                You don’t know until you try.

Misha Zelinsky:             Indeed. But, I mean, for example with Turnbull, when he was making some decisions around foreign interference around donations et cetera, Australia was essentially put in what they call the freeze where meetings were all canceled. So how do you handle that sort of stuff?

Wayne Swan:                Well, I don’t know whether that was what caused that… I mean, but we’ve got, and any country would have responsibilities. For example, China wouldn’t let us invest in a company in their missile launch zone, so we most certainly wouldn’t let them do it in ours. And that was the conversation I had with the minister at the time, and it turned out to be amicable. So you got to have these discussions. They are difficult. There will be positioning publicly. There will be conflicts. But the most important thing, and you don’t always know what’s going on, is that there needs to be under the surface, effective dialog by other ministers, diplomats or both.

Misha Zelinsky:             That’s right. That principal reciprocity, I think, is a good one and I think it’s a very useful one for us to use. So do you see a new… you know, we haven’t had blocks in the world since the fall of Berlin Wall. Do you see increasingly blocks emerging between the so-called liberal democracies and autocrats?

Wayne Swan:                Well, what I see emerging is a hard-right movement which has its roots in both United States, in a number of European countries and most particularly Hungary, backed in by some pretty sophisticated operations coming out of the Soviet Union. And there is plenty of documentation now about how that worked in the last presidential campaign in the United States, how it worked in the Brexit campaign and how it has played out in a number of other countries. So yes, I think we have to be alive and alert to the fact that there is an authoritarian push across a number of democracies to influence domestic outcomes.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so how do we deal with this challenge of these open systems? You know, this use of Facebook, social media, and yeah, you touched on it at the beginning with [crosstalk 00:40:25] question about it.

Wayne Swan:                Well, by making sure that your capacity to repel it is high, to detect it and then repel it.

Misha Zelinsky:             And should we be holding these… Facebook’s in America [crosstalk 00:40:37]

Wayne Swan:                There’s no question that Facebook and those organizations are going to be subject to much more regulation and scrutiny than they have in the past and that will be a good thing.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so just turning back to Australian politics, you recently retired from parliament, though you’re not retired, I know that, otherwise you’d jump across the table on me, I’m sure, if I were to say that, but are you missing politics at all, the [crosstalk 00:40:57]

Wayne Swan:                Well, I got out of parliament, but I haven’t got out of politics.

Misha Zelinsky:             Yeah, still the president of the party, so…

Wayne Swan:                Yeah. No, but I got out because I wanted to have a bit more time to particularly spend with family. I’ve got two grandchildren, two children living overseas, so a bit of travel. I’ll never give up my public policy interests and I’ll never give up fighting for the Australian national interest, but I thought it was time to move on in terms of the parliamentary party, but I’m not giving up the discussion or the battle of ideas, because that’s something I’ve dedicated my life to. I just want a bit more time to get into surf which I’m doing a lot more of and to be with and talk to my family.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so one of the things you talked about in your valedictory, but also in other, in the last few of years of being in parliament, was the impact of time away-

Wayne Swan:                Yeah.

Misha Zelinsky:             … and what politics does to families and the people. I mean, give us a bit of insight about the difficulties.

Wayne Swan:                Well, it’s a cruel world and if you’ve got a busy job, you’re away a lot, so you miss so many important events and you run the risk of being emotionally separated from and decoupled from the most important people in your life. And I said it in my main speech, that I wished I’d actually made more time for that, and I do regard that as a failure in my career. I have just been fortunate to have a very tolerant family, but it’s something that I want to spend more time on.

Misha Zelinsky:             In your time in politics, it’s probably fair to say that the prestige of the political class and of their institutions has probably diminished and faith in the institutions is much lower now when you look at any survey, not just in Australia, around the world. What’s driving that and can we get it back, and how? Because I think it’s so important.

Wayne Swan:                Well, I think the radical right is driving it. I think there are political forces driving this who’ve got an interest in demonizing the role that government has in our society and that is a vested interest so they can grab more of the product of the labor of our people than they’re entitled to. I think it’s very much driven. It’s also driven in an underlined way by many of the technological changes, the speed of communication and the nature of communication, or sort of hyper drive that or make it a hyper circle, if you like.

Misha Zelinsky:             And politics is sort of slow, the legislative process is slow, the world is quick.

Wayne Swan:                Yeah. Yeah. So it’s a combination of all of those things, but we got to get back to a bit more moral base and value base in our politics we got at the moment. And to do that you’ve got to out these people and hidden actors behind the scenes who are setting out to destroy trust between people.

Misha Zelinsky:             And you talked again, in your valedictory, about a turning point in Australian politics being the Tampa crosses, and you sort of touched there on values and morality. How did that impact on politics and what are the [crosstalk 00:43:38]

Wayne Swan:                Well, it was the beginning of the radical right in Australia purposely, deliberately using race as a wedge. And we hadn’t seen that in that way in this country before. It’s been a feature of politics in the United States for a long period of time, but the first we really saw of it as the country basically came out of its White Australia and embraced multiculturalism was Pauline Hanson.

Wayne Swan:                And what we’ve now seen as the embrace of Pauline Hanson by the conservative side of politics and the use of race and gender issues both openly and covertly, and I mean covertly even in the recent election campaign, where most people would say to you, “Oh, the refugees or all these things weren’t an issue.” They were. They were out there and they were pushed hard by that radical right under the scenes in many marginal electorates around the country. So we’ve got to try to eradicate that again. But my fear is that Liberal Party has been taken over by the extreme right and we’re in for an extended battle here. A battle for the nature and the type of Australia that we all want.

Misha Zelinsky:             And it’s interesting, because you talked, in ’87 Howard was basically pilloried for his attitude to Asian immigration.

Wayne Swan:                Yeah.

Misha Zelinsky:             Then when Hanson first came to parliament she was basically excluded by the entire political class, but also by the media.

Wayne Swan:                Now you’ve got Channel 7 paying her and TV channels paying her to do interviews, when she’s an elected member of parliament. It is an outrage and a disgrace that media organizations in Australia are involved in that sort of activity.

Misha Zelinsky:             And then the other… you know, the somewhat perverse one is that Tony Abbott, of course, was famously involved in destroying One Nation Pauline Hanson and then the next iteration, when Hanson returned back into parliament in the 2016 double dissolution election-

Wayne Swan:                Yeah. Well, the big-

Misha Zelinsky:             … he was photos with her and saying that One Nation’s now different.

Wayne Swan:                Well, the big change in my time in politics has been the elimination of smaller liberals for a Liberal Party and its takeover by a U.S. style republican right. And significant sections of the business community as well. The Americanization, if you like, of the conservative side of politics has occurred in our lifetimes and we’re now living with the consequences of it. And, as I said before, exhibit A is energy policy.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so I was curious, and I’ve put this question to you before to give you a bit of a chance, but, your best day on the job and your worst day on the job in politics, I’m kind of curious about, what are the things that make politics so powerful and what can make it so hard?

Wayne Swan:                Oh, well, the best day was the day we found out that we weren’t going to recession. That all the stimulus that we put out there had effectively worked. It was the very, very, very best day that I’ve ever had in public life. Because we didn’t know. We were operating in a very difficult policy environment. The worst day? Oh, there’s lots of bad days in politics.

Misha Zelinsky:             I’ll bet.

Misha Zelinsky:             And, well, I won’t explore that any further, but now, the final question I always ask everyone, so it’s a foreign policy podcast largely, we’ve covered all the terrain, but, three foreigners alive or dead would be at a barbecue at Swannie’s. Who would they be and why?

Wayne Swan:                I think I’d go for Neil Young, just for a bit of sort of music interludes. I could’ve easily picked Springsteen.

Misha Zelinsky:             Well, I was going to say, I mean, I think you could’ve picked a few.

Wayne Swan:                Or even Dylan. So I would just take those three.

Misha Zelinsky:             Okay. Practical list, practical list.

Wayne Swan:                I would just [crosstalk 00:47:20] in terms of-

Misha Zelinsky:             I think everyone… you’ll pay in about odds on to pick Springsteen, but we’ll go with Neil Young.

Wayne Swan:                I’m just in the Neil Young phase at the moment for some reason.

Misha Zelinsky:             Very good.

Wayne Swan:                Secondly, it’s a sort of toss-up, but I’d actually say Lyndon Johnson.

Misha Zelinsky:             Yeah, LBJ.

Wayne Swan:                Well, you know, he really stuffed up the Vietnam War, but I tell you what, what he did with the Great Society, just about every big social and economic change of a progressive nature, most of which have now been eliminated now was put in by that guy. Anyone who reads the Robert Caro books will understand why I’ve chosen LBJ.

Misha Zelinsky:             He’s a fascinating character as well because he’s considered to be the ultimate machine politician who did so much progressive change, right?

Wayne Swan:                Well, that’s it. Well, maybe there’s a connection. Maybe he knew how to get it done.

Misha Zelinsky:             Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Wayne Swan:                And thirdly, well, I better choose an Aussie.

Misha Zelinsky:             No, no. It’s got to be foreign.

Wayne Swan:                Oh, foreign? Oh, right.

Misha Zelinsky:             Yeah, yeah.

Wayne Swan:                Well, you probably got to go for Mandela, right?

Misha Zelinsky:             Oh, well, Nelson Mandela. Yeah, indeed. I mean, Nelson Mandela, LBJ and Neil Young all in a room at Swannie’s would be a good one, right? Well, look, before we go, I’m going to give a plug to the podcast. If you haven’t rated and reviewed it yet, please get on. It’s been a great chat with Wayne. If you don’t do it for me, do it for Swannie because he’s going to want to see this getting out to as many people as possible. So Wayne, thank you so much for joining us and I really appreciate the chat.

Wayne Swan:                Pleasure.