Kim Beazley | Former Leader of Australian Labor Party

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Klim thanks for participating in this conversation for the series good to see you again John and you I'd like to get back to towards the end of a seven we left the Parliament at the same time and your valedictory speech and in that you talked about duty and service your commitment to it and you made a very interesting remark to the effect that you are ending that tour of duty and looking for new tours of duty that deep sense of wanting to make a difference what does it come from well I think it's actually inherent and an awful lot of us in politics of the year that you and I served in why do you do it we do it because they have a view about your country in your in your community and you think that direction needs to be managed that people need to be to make personal sacrifices to ensure that it is and that the and that the public life is just about the most honorable profession you can engage in no matter what people might think I've always had a concern about Australian survival I mean if you look at the various commitments I've had in political life an awful lot of it revolves around our national defense and the sense that I have that survival is a close-run thing for Australia and that is survival on many fronts the quality of our community is part of that the our education system is part of that our family life is part of that but also the physical defence of our approaches is part of that and you think about your kids you think about your grandkids you think about everybody else's kids you think about your friends and you think what we've got here is a society worth preserving and worth improving and then if you find yourself lucky enough to be able to seriously engage with it and most want all of us need that service attitude but most won't get to serve you have the advantage of actually having got there then you must continue well Kim I just simply couldn't agree with you more if I had my way every Australian would have and perhaps I will the opportunity to hear what you've just said and my immediate response would be to say I think most Australians would think that's terrific that's what we want to hear and we're worried about our future but we live in an age that's very different to the one that you are and are involved in just a little over a decade ago in that trust is broken down so you've got this massive distrust in the system they don't trust the politicians that I trust the parliaments that level the a in use work shows Trust is running at record levels distrust at record levels and of course it applies to a lot of our institutions as well how do we restore trust because of her HAP's the first question is can we dig our way out of our current was without a restoration of trust and out of that how do we rebuild it no you can't but the question is exactly the question you asked how do you rebuild it I think you first have to understand reasons why it might have gone I mean some of these things are not necessarily related to the personalities but to the circumstances we now live in an age and I was just on the cusp of it and left before it really dug in of the atomization if you like a propaganda in the political system and the way in which social media operates is to is to totally undermine the the dignity the the validity of many of the institutions and many of the relationships which have previously served to strengthen community when the the advent of cyberbullying the advent of instant opinion that is harshly judgmental of people are trying their best and trying to do things it's sort of in many ways shattered the confidence of politicians and shattered the confidence of leadership well over time we'll get to we'll get to get to grips with that I do think people of goodwill will be able to and at least counter and the impact of massive social undermining now some of that trust is that is a product of if you like our own unenforced errors as a community then other people are trying to reinforce those errors externally to us and exploit the divisions in our system and the like we haven't experienced that bit very much in Australia but they have massively in the UK in the United States and those are our reference countries in it we're still in many ways the US and the UK are our reference country countries so you have that you also I think have and maybe it's a part of product of that is enormous difficulties in being prepared to lead amongst our political parties and political leadership and one of the great things about living in a democracy and we're still democracies is actually it doesn't matter if you lose you're not going to go to jail your kids aren't going to be put in concentration camps you will probably live reasonable lives and you'll certainly live with the opportunity for a comeback in those circumstances you can afford the chance your arm I mean leading a dictatorship and a ruthless and brutal oppressive one at that it's a different matter altogether we don't have those excuses though our leadership is not going to have bad things happen to them as a result of the a defeat psychologically they'll be impacted but in no other way and we do need to I think have that have that willingness again the chance your arm when you think something's right in to argue your case I think a further thing on trust is a breakdown in civility between people who are actually engaged in politics that you're you know I can't remember whoever has said it to me first he also had a cynical coder on it he said those people in front of you when you stand up in Parliament be your opponents the they're not your enemies now if the quote stop there it would be a magnificent quote because it is truth yeah the people across the chamber from you and not your in Henry's there your opponent pilots they're actually fellow Australians that's right and then he says the enemies are behind yeah that's the second part of that quote which of course there's a tonne its own resonance and and its own essential truth the first person who said that the movie was actually in Sinclair how was it yeah I I pointed it you backs on the other so I liked him I I remember participating at a event that the National Party put on and they invited me to speak at and it was an event which I'd been told privately was to encourage you and to step down and and to move on and because they noticed I had a good relationship with him I asked me to participate so I got a funny portrait together of a well it wasn't a portrait it was a picture of a and a Japanese heavy cruiser which had just been bombed and raked over and I said this symbol of being Sinclair for his opponents in the Labour Party and but at the end of it he got up and said oh yeah I was thinking of going but you know obvious piece so like me I'll continue to stay up and be in it but the look I think there was a there was at least in in the times that I was in Parliament ie a degree of mutual respect a lot of hostility and questions I have a lot of that was there but there was also a lot of stake because there's a real Drive intellectually for what we thought were necessary for our survival part of that in my lifetime extended from the experience of Bob Hawke who was a very effective Prime Minister and his driving force was a sense that the the country had run out of steam that without serious reform we would never be internationally competitive that live for news poor white trash evasive you will never be able to sustain the sort of standard of living that people wanted now things moved away from that but you know we're still pretty good and sometimes you don't appreciate what you have one of the problems in the United States is it for the last 40 years the the why middle-class they call themselves and we'd say working-class has not actually had a real wage rise in Australia in that period of time after the reforms of the 80s the income of the average Australian has increased two and a half fold it actually has been a substantial benefit from the wasn't just the 80s it went through the 90s that's right real wages did rise that's a flat line for 40 to 50 years in America while asset prices have gone through the roof and household and public sector debts gone through the roof and that's a dangerous thing that yeah very dangerous squeeze the middle-class out and and we have an one of the difficulties in politics today that is it's sort of undermining beginning to undermine the trust not as bad as it's been in the US but beginning to is we actually haven't had real wage rises for about five or six years now I think that's a real threat to the future I think our children and grandchildren will be very angry with us because right across the Western world you've had economic policies designed to promote inflation inflation they've kept going because inflation hasn't happened but it has it's an asset prices hmm so when you and I left school an average Australian house it cost about four or five times average annual earnings now it's 11 or if you're in Sydney or Melbourne 13 homes anymore so you're really gonna collapse trust you deprive young families of a chance to have that life that they were brought up with two things are out of your comments there I just liked a teaser one social media now Neil Ferguson the economic historian who Scottish then Oxford then Harvard now Stanford has written a book about this he actually thinks that social media may prove so destabilizing and he worries so much about the way in which the levels of hostility and hatred from the keyboard warriors bubbles away that if it ever surfaces is doing enough damage now if it surfaces it could result in serious destabilization I guess there's a couple of questions out of that one is i I think it requires enormous courage to stand in the face of social media campaigns if you're going to serve in a public position the second is I don't think we've come to grips with how to how to manage it and regulate it as societies we've got all these but this machinery in place now to stop hate speech and tell people what they can and can't say and yet we've got people who literally commit suicide after social media campaigns and no one seems to know what to do about it people are trying you know their say the pressure is on the on the people who do the service and that pressures beginning to work its its efforts to stand down hate speech are actually occurring and it is possible with the technology to to chase down purveyors of hatred and it is possible to turn them off the the sort of websites that they they must massively use to spread the messages that they do there's always issues there of course issues of free speech come into it but but it is the case I think that many of the societies are now starting to move to deal with it I think ironically what what's a force driving this is not so much the hatred that is being expressed by the the people who you know sitting in their own bedrooms typing it in it's actually the exploitation of it by external factors and external forces undoubtedly in the United States now an awful lot of this is being driven by the experience of being trolled by Russians and and the possibilities that other people might do this so the paradoxical effect of that has been that what the Russians have been doing is to start to develop a counter to it and it's a difficult thing to argue against if you actually happen to be in the domestic debate and are now finding yourself scooped up along with the with measures that are being put in place to deal with that well it's an important subject because it does appear to have enormous capacity for destabilization and perhaps it's like the printing press ultimately it'll turn out to be great for democracy and for human progress but you'd have to say at the moment it is I think as you say exacerbating the problem particularly when extreme start hurling abuse at the middle if you can put it that way at the reasonable middle and the reasonable middle of people who want to retreat when they make that so much but the starting point really is isn't it's it's what we put into ourselves what our families put into us what our schools put into us it's a it's a discussion that we have and and the starting point is the family and the school and what do we what do we ask our teachers what do we ask of ourselves in terms of what we encourage our young people to think the Apple does not fall far from the tree and in if what you're talking about is of a character and quality that means that the the kids pick it up and at least internalize some of it and that in itself is a countermeasure you know what what you what values you teach at home and teachers teach about bullying about respect about respect for the other gender about you know respect for people's backgrounds ethnicity and the rest of it what you teach about that will not fall on fellow ground may be rejected but at least will be there in the mind and what you teach is acceptable in discourse that's there too so one of the things you can't run away from in the same way as you can't and politics run away from the responsibility you have for your society as a whole you can't as an individual in on the island is run away from the responsibility you have for the community David books wrote in January this year in the New York Times that he thinks we have a problem with atomization in our society the pursuit of narcissism over 60 years look after number one it's all about you has produced a society where it's hard to find consensus on the core things that matter and that worries me about Australia because we do seem to focus too much on the things have divided us when there's a an extraordinary number of domestic issues as well as international issues which need to be resolved for all Australians regardless of who you are having spent six years in the States I think we're better place than there you know one of the things that used to I used to say I have various sayings that you'd have a different the differences between Australians and Americans for as Americans the leitmotif is freedom yep for Australians the leitmotif is fairness yes and and freedom in the United States have many different aspects to it in many ways they're more family-oriented them we are they're more attuned to moral debate than we are that lower divorce rate than we have the greater religious participation right all these sorts of bit different of the Hollywood portray yeah very different the u.s. is not Hollywood and not by any shape or for in any shape or form but having said that the interplay of that with the concept of freedom which means that and because in their society the experience of the average American citizen is to struggle with anonymity there are a lot of it is very hard to get the sort of ego satisfying prominence in the United States and and you don't get there by being a shrinking violet so while they've got all these counter elements to the if you like the divisive character of the sort of atomizing narcissism that you that you talk about there still is that struggle against anonymity which helps to drive that atomizing narcissism here in Australia we tend to value the collective much more we tend to think that the that all of us have the right to be risen as opposed to the right to rise there's more of a sense here that part of the job of government is to sustain levels of equity in the community that have that concept in the United States not at all but here there is a sense that part of the role of gotten doesn't actually now you'll often hear conservatives in Australia and conservative political parties argue against that but when they're in office that's exactly how they behave whether they like it or not they do it's a default position fairness everybody gets forced back to it embodied in the old term of made sure it's quite so much but still very deep in our psyche very very interesting isn't it that for the Americans it seems to me there's a great battle going on in America between the sort of traditional 1776 model of Independence and resilience on the part of the individual individualism their right to do what they like short of it turning into license and a sort of a much more restrictive view that the government will have much greater say over your life that seems to be to something of the clash in America it's there no doubt about that and you know the and this again a difference in attitude there between Australia in the United States the Americans really do struggle with the intrusiveness of the of the protective systems on on freedom of speech and the line but come with a Counter Terrorist legislation the Patriot Act and that sort of thing and and there there is a a real objection to having the government interfere with your privacy but almost no concern about private interference with your privacy in in the American system again we're the exact opposite to that you know in Australia the attitude is well if the government is interested in you perhaps we should be too and and but when it comes to the invasion of our privacy by the bankers or somebody else we are mortally offended and so there so that's sort of another difference between the two culture and these are subtle differences but they but the differences are real so just to tease out this issue I think is a very important one that they concept of freedom zinc you know the thing they bang on about all the time fairness has been the great Australian thing yeah it seems to me there's a something of a danger if you convert fairness which i think is a brilliant way to try and organize your collective life we want a quality of opportunity but if you pursue equality of outcome you can end up sacrificing freedom and fairness yeah and that there's a very important argument to be had in there I think you know and that's one of the difficulties equality of opportunity is I guess the leitmotif of the the Social Democratic wing of the Labour Party and as introduced by golf with them that was equality of opportunity was his main sub thing but then equality of opportunity inevitably gets measured and when it gets measured in equality of outcome looks bad yeah and in that you'll often find I think the essential difference in Australian politics between the conservative side or the right side and the left side the the left gets seriously desert disturbed by evidence of a lack of equality of outcome and the other side the conservative side tends to be less worried like that yeah they'll accept the idea of equality of opportunity dancing hard and darn hard thing to argue against when you sit down and think of it very hard to argue against God the secure and have a secure value against so I guess you'd say that the one of the major differences between the political parties and they still do better mobilizing opinion than the left and right in most the rest of the Democratic world it's I'm not big knocker of the Australian system I think we've got to have problems that we've got to deal with those problems and they can get worse but I think we're too bad compared to others and part of that rests is systemic it's the character of our system which produces that and it's important that it does so so so I think that it's while it's getting harder I think we have better control mechanisms than anyone else now I just got an invitation the other day they wanted me friends old friends wanted me to go up to Harvard I can't do it but the restrictions of my job imposes and lecture them on the subject of preferential and compulsory voting right and what are they noticed well what they noticed was this that while our society is seeing a drift away from the major parties and the emergence particularly in the PR section proportional representation sections of the parliament of alternative political forces a preferential system brings them back together again in the end the preferential system conglomerate's votes and in Kalama conglomerate's votes to the largest section in it and the largest sections in it happened to be the Labour Party the Liberal Party in the National Party so in the end votes get conglomerated under those headlines no matter what people might think the in compulsory which I always used to say to the Americans we don't have compulsory voting in Australia we have compulsory attendance at the polls and I may can have less objection to compulsory attendance at the polls when they have the compulsory voting and these people these friends of mine but they're you know academically powerfully engaged see the Australian systems the answer to the American problem so and and you know when you look at the European systems when you look at the Brits now you look at us I think we're doing it a bit better than than most but that's but none of the divisive nough sin their systems is absent ours so that's then agree that that the system can deliver for us as long as we use it wisely as mature and sensible Australians and we can chant we can overcome those undoubted very real policy challenges here at but the reality is that as you've said we can't take our future for granted the world we now live in has changed unbelievably and with you know your background and the time that you've had in America you've got some very valuable insights I think he does share with us and for one thing we've been able to take it for granted ever since 1778 that the superpower of the day mm-hmm was there for us hmm can we still take that for granted more complicated and we really don't know where Trump Ahmet Trump's America is going to end up one place we know pretty clearly it's going to end up at is with a real challenge to the what the so-called liberal international order rules-based order put in place after World War two so many institutions of that from World Trade Organization United Nations to you know the sanctity of the global Commons all of that is is off the list of important rom values in global politics in global politics his attitude is essentially transactional essentially tolerant of force majeure if it's seen as an American interest that it be deployed and all of that is leads to an atmospheric in which those who create facts on the ground get those facts effectively recognized and that nobody necessarily has any rights they can't fight for I don't know if the United States is going to end up like that for four or five years from now there's a lot of resistance to that attitude inside the inside the American system and one Minh I think Trump's our one off I don't actually think you'll see somebody emerge with his exceptional set of media skills and either brass narcissism and determination to say what he likes when he likes about whether or not there's any truth in it at all it suits an interest that he's trying to pursue I don't see anybody in American politics who can establish that with the salience ideas managed to do so so whatever happens is that when he goes we'll be different now will it be what it was before well it's combined with other factors in the global system which is sort of driving things was driving things away from that level of intense commitment to that old international order and they will remain even when Trump has gone I still think that we can bet on the United States ourselves and that if we can't bet on the United States what will need a bet on we probably can't afford and we are in many ways the default Ally in the asia-pacific region so I think they stick with us and I think part of the reason they stick with us is that we have one attribute which most countries don't have we have always had a determination to defend ourselves now that might sound an odd thing to say most countries don't defend themselves most countries rely on the the attitude of strangers has set in the play or most of them a kindness of strangers most rely on civilized discourse between states their armies essentially for ceremonial or internal order Australians have never taken that view we have always taken the view that if we have to have a big powerful friend we'll have it and we'll pay the price for keeping them and part of the price of keeping them is that we be easy to defend and so we utilize them not so much to interpose themselves between us and the enemy but to ensure that we have the capacity to confront the enemy ourselves and as we've got wealthier and we've got larger that has been a more important or plausible goal but we started really to try it from day one I'm an Alfred Deakin determining that we would not simply be part of the British Far East fleet whatever our Navy and so on so from day one we've been taking the view and while we'll have to have our alliances will be self-reliant within them so two big issues there that I'd love to explore a bit more firstly America itself and Australians look at a comment how to say well what does Trump mean is he the problem or the product of the problem but you're painting the picture of an America where there's still a lot of ballast there's still a lot of solid community strength perhaps deriving from that sort of commitment to family and to Family Values to religion that's easily missed when we look at inner-city riots or tensions between police and blacks or the Hollywood portrayal of an America that's lost its way there's still real balance there because that obviously plays out in where they go post Trump well absolutely I think we important things on to our comprehend is when you look at the various groups that participate in the vote in the United States there is actually no American majority there are there are multiples of forces some stronger than others I always used to it at my table point out to the Democrats how rapidly they're losing the so-called white middle class they call we would say white working-class in in this country and that when you turn it together if you start playing identity politics you're an african-american or Hispanic American you play identity politics there's you constitute in the case of African Americans 9 percent the other 16% us Society you add up to 25 white working-class about 35 so you play identity politics you lose yeah that's that's the thing that you most have to watch out for you know I guess the thing is in the conservative forces in Australia and the Labour Party generally speaking our message has been Universalist and we've seen that as the as the way to go how do they keep that message in the United States because in their presidential system as opposed to the Westminster system every person in Congress is his own government and they operate as though they are their own government so that it's it's a much more divided you know political entity anyway which sometimes looks quasi corrupt as you said oh yeah absolutely but you also find to with them that they they all have to manipulate this scenario and whatever the mix is in their particular district so it's mutually reinforcing the divisive and components of that of that sort of identity you know in the whole world would look very different if Hillary Clinton had won the last election now why didn't Hillary win it there are many many factors involved in that and there's no single answer but the the key step which I keep telling people is this you take her firewall states of Pennsylvania Michigan and Wisconsin Democratic firewall was the Republicans will never win these in a presidential election therefore the Republicans will never win a presidential election from now on Trump won them all when you go into those states which he only just lost by Barack Obama had got 45% of the white working-class in those three states she got 35 if she got 40 she would now be President so you can actually take a dip in that that support but not the dip that she actually took now how she got there there's so many other the Russians are involved Kobe's involved all sorts of people are involved in getting me but the fact that she got to that point I mean that that little blip instead of just dropping to 40 but dropping the 35 meant in those states she fell over by a total of about 70,000 votes and millions and and she was gone so it's the u.s. is a close-run thing and all these these factors are engaged what is terrifying the Republicans at this election is white educated women in many ways the base of the old Republican vote not the new people the traumas bought on is white suburban women and they are making amply clear they do not like mr. Trump's behavior and they're very smart so when their congressman come to them because our mainly Congress men as opposed to Congress women come to them and Satan Ellison where you know you know us you know what good liberal Souls that we really are the centrist souls and moderate souls that we are we're not in with any of this they say oh yes you are I haven't noticed any of you standing up to this fellow when he's been doing the various things that he has been doing and while Trump got a majority of these women in the last election he's probably down to the mid-20s among them now and that translating across to the Republican Party these are big Turner's out these women these are the women who organize everything and and and they have turned against the Republican Party now I got a couple of months to make it up weeks a long time in politics a couple of months as a generation but they're the ones who are going to that last time it was the white working-class this time it is the is the white matriarchy who are going to determine the outcome the world though has changed enormously you're a former defense minister you've always been very strong on Australia's standing up for its interests what should we be doing now on that defense front well I think that there are many fine things in the defense white paper of 2016 and I said so at the time but there's also based on certain assumptions which no longer apply one of those was that we had an active ally in the rules-based origin order defense and we do not have that Ally anymore not not in the way in which we Envisat it then and we determined that playing a part in that was to be a major determinant of the way we did our fourth structure well what we have to do is to go back to basics here that all those things are important and we ought to do what we can with them and we particularly ought to do it in the South Pacific we know what else will it's just us prepared to play that sort of role in the South Pacific but and the Southeast Asians need people prepared to stand up behind them and we do that too we're very courageous very forward-leaning and very valuable and we have to perform all those roles but we're the starting point really now is being able to defend ourselves in our approaches that's got to get priority and priority two is to be reflective of our weaknesses and to deal with those weaknesses I would identify one in big-time that nobody will talk about and that is we have no fuel reserves couldn't agree with it more we the International Energy Agency demands that we have 90 days reserves we don't we don't have anything remotely I think it's 17 and less in in specialist fuels that is not possible well I can't feel what's on ships coming towards us and the way they themselves could be highly vulnerable absolutely totally vulnerable the solution is storage and refining which has largely disappeared the amount that would cost to build the storage and refining that we need about two billion dollars if the four years you put an extra two cents a liter on the on the petrol exercise you get it now will people in politics have the courage to stand up and say that I'm not sure they will but if we don't well that will be remain a vulnerability I used to argue we had a we had a big ulnar ability in categories of missiles actually our engagement in Syria and Iraq has actually solved the problem the Americans have loaded a bunch of missiles onto it and we now have quite a bit of capacity in that area we have a the the forward projection of getting the kit that we need particularly submarines is too far forward and there'll be a chance to review all that when the the three or a study that's going on in the French submarine comes in and we ought to take full advantage of that I think to review progress on on where we want to be with that but we also I think have to consider what we are spending back in the day in the 80s we spent about 2.3 percent of GDP if we spent that now and had been spending that for the last say 10 15 years the defense budget would be 5 billion a year higher and we would really not be talking about many problems at all when we came to talking about Australian defense however should we decide that the United States will play no part in this should we ask you the weapon systems that we get from them which make our defense workable we can't work it without the renovations we get from American inventiveness and American intelligence and you decide to go it alone you have to do it with a nuclear weapon and were we to get into it people have to say that outright that's their alternative if we're going to defend ourselves we might choose not to defend ourselves we might choose to become like everybody else and see how long we last not long I don't think maybe another 30 or 40 years but not long and and if you don't do it with what we how we do it now then you've got to have a serious debate on nukes you have a serious debate on nukes and you're talking about a cost of Defense that's four or five percent of GDP we cannot sustain that we're going to educate our kids we've got to sustain our health we've got to ensure that we have the infrastructure that this nation needs none of this is helpful of this sort of spending is help for any of us on any of those fronts except perhaps employment and and so we you know you don't want to have to spend huge amounts of money on defense you have to spend adequately on defense now we we've got the framework where we can do that but we just have to do a few things differently well to take a simple of the your starting point the fuel to not do that if something goes wrong what will be said about today's generation of politicians by those who lose their freedom would be unprintable yes I'm always amazed by this I had to do some unconscionable things of the United States which I won't go into detail about about trying to convince them we were serious on this front because we're about to be expelled from the IEA so I didn't awful lot of bull dusting I have to say to try and demonstrate that the argument the propositions that you put up being about if you let's see somehow constituted a realistic response which it was not and they knew it but they liked me so they you know look at me sideways and well generally speaking you don't try to build us to us so I guess we give you a mulligan on one but the that that is that is relatively easily resolvable and everybody's got an interest in it you know you get a you get something disruptive on the high seas you get a diesel crop we've had these little crises there's lots of things yeah well you know that affects us all when this sort of thing the east coast of New South Wales went within a couple of days of running out of diesel the last major flood event in Queensland and was the middle of harvest and the farmer yeah the dislocation of the disruption in the economic wailing would have been probably enough to bring a government down yeah a news on we've done nothing about it yeah neither sides taking it serious that's right the other side is it's just extraordinary to me hmm so you mentioned the other thing they had lead times I think it was essentially a raw garlic as long ago as 2008 or 9 whitepaper broadly based decision that we needed to move to 12 upgraded submarines forget about all the argument of what they should have been where they should have come from the fact that we're now still at a point ten years after that we're final decisions are not been made contracts have not been signed and we'll be lucky to get the first one by 2035 it smacks of a complacency that again I just wonder what our kids will say about us if something goes wrong look I used to say when I was defense minister and we said you know we've got we we have short-term threat so we have to be able to deal with immediately we've got more challenging threats that one can foresee that we have to be able to deal with probably immediately to then we have the long-term existential threat which we had to keep capability to handle in the rest of it but that those clear-cut the visions don't really apply anymore we we're in a much more much more serious situation than we were then but I I think that and and I think that when it comes to submarines it's that there's one place where I'd put the question mark over our performance but you also need a little bit where the glass is half-full I used to have this feeling that what if I'm wrong in all those calculations we've made about short and long-term threats can we from a standing start defend ourselves in my day you could know the answer was no today it's yes for one reason that's the Air Force the Australian Air Force now is magnificent and when you look at the combination that we have of what we can access from the American satellite systems which we are engaged with and we now have as much access as the Americans do to their product they're really genuinely joint facilities now when you add it to our over the rise in radar which is largely an australian invention though it started with a substantial american input the best in the world when you add to that the performance of our early warning aircraft which been tested thoroughly now in the Middle East and doing a magnificent job and they're better than America is a very question one thing to their purchase those yes I know and I be happy with that and I'm very happy with it they're very good worked out that's what we bought more indeed increase the order they're great and a force multiplier right big one and then you add to that that we are classic Hornets are supported by growlers and by super hornets I was critical of Brendan Nelson when he picked up on the Super Hornet but he was right it's a very good aircraft coming in with the f-35 coming off the coming off the line now I think we own about half a dozen of them this is a fifth-generation air defense capability and very few countries have it and in their region it is decisive against all comers and I mean all comers and that is a that is a very it's not enough but you know as a defense minister who was always worried by that nighttime three o'clock in the morning I wake up and anxiety often three o'clock in the morning and you will come what if I'm wrong you know if you're the defense minister in making those calculations what if I'm wrong I'm gonna lose my country and the and I think the current Defense Minister can Christopher Pyne can wake up and say he probably won't courtesy of those attributes the Joseph just before we leave it should have controversy around them I'll stack a controller but always yes you know think back to the days of f-111 when they first yeah exactly if 111 is that there's a classic case in point and it had many flaws so you know these there are many flaws in the in these these projects which have taken a lot of technologically at the cutting edge and they're gonna work perfectly certainly not to start off with they're gonna take ages to get into the shape that you'd want them in the great thing about the f-35 is that if your opponents decide to attack the enable as the air you know the early warning aircraft we're talking about if they decide to attack them and they could attentively force you a long way back if they can do that credibly when the f-35 it doesn't matter the f-35 is its own AWACS and it's also no wax for everybody else so a couple of f-35 scan only victim their own attack like and Victor the super hornets and the growlers and so you've got a got an awful lot of redundancy in the system with the f-35 coming in people say they can't dogfight well no they're not dog fighters they're eliminators and they're they're they're not fighters they're a platform a sensor platform yeah and they finally exercise them boringly you know well I think was red flag or one of the last ones that the Americans did and and they gave them their attributes so they were flying by the trainee pilots and the red forces were flown by the experienced fighter pilots who came after them they lost 18 to 1 somebody turned his system's down poorly on the f-35 and they lost it all of them was shot down by the f-35 before they even the you know the umpire just rang and said you got what it's nothing here but you got ya and they say that's the thing with them they have those attributes which critical that's why they call this generation not forth excellent you mentioned something there that just like to pick up on the responsibilities of high office I think perhaps dismissed a little too lightly by people who haven't been there I I didn't live with that sort of constant concern as a defense minister but I was acting p.m. when 9/11 happened you do feel the weight of the country on you I remember thinking to myself what happens the buck stops with me what happens if I miss some important bit of intelligence cuz we assumed they might be follow-ons it's a horrible feeling and I think why do I mention it it's probably a plea to our fellow Australians to recognize that we do ask a lot of our elected leaders we shouldn't be cynical all the time we do need some trust and there are men and women who do step up and we don't want that to change because we make it so unattractive that good and capable and honorable people think it's just not worth even trying look I think that's absolutely right and you know in politics as you know you live on psychic capital no other forms not unless you completely corrupt and in Australia don't get away with corruption no it certainly fertilizers certainly not at the federal level no you don't get away with corruption you actually try you know you don't see much intentional corruption emerging no Bob Hawke is to make that for nothing right yeah I mean we don't actually at the federal level have responsibility for planning and planning is the most easily corruptible area of political life frankly and that's all the hands of state and local government not federal so that a lot the Bob Hawke call that it's not there yeah that's right there isn't that much but I think also it is the case that you will often face if not an existential threat of a kinetic character you'll often face it as a financial character that'll happen every few years no matter whether you like it or not and then you have the agonizing of having to go look at all the people losing work looking at the the the impact that you're having on the families the people of your country and and you agonize about that agonize I know people in all political parties agonize about that all the time nobody really goes out consciously to hurt anybody but sometimes what you do or what you have forced on you does hurt people and you have to live with it and fight to redress it but it's no easy life for anyone in politics and one of the problems is we make it so hard for each other we make it so hard when it comes to discussing pay or retirement benefits or you know the the various picadillo the way in which you use you allowances all of that sort of thing we constant constantly demean ourselves in political life and we wonder why other people join in yeah well you continue your noble commitment to public service you know the governor of Western Australia Suzie by your side are you enjoying it I'm finding it worthwhile and they the one thing the premier said to me which attracted me to the job he said look I think West Australia could do with a bit of an advocate and so that's not necessarily a given at Oriel role Juvenal Toria role quit essentially in the first instance is constitutional that's the things I must do on behalf of the Queen in the political system that operates here I reckon that's about six hours worth of wish then there is the what you might call the encouragement function the fact that many people look upon you to provide patronage and encouragement and to appear to verify the things that they're doing in the community or or with each other every conceivable form of community organization expects that of you and you do that and it is enjoyable it's like it's like being a member of parliament again you know when you're first elected you go around all the social units in your in your community you know the the people who do the house and the people who do the the street fake the people who are doing the health provision the people doing the employment services you go around all of them in your community well I go around all of them only then I dealt with the community level the state level the the the local level operation I now deal with the state level operation as the the thing that focuses on me I love being that I'm the chief scout for example and of Western Australia so you have all of that and it's important that they all that all of that gets done and that's it usually but what the state government here has asked me to do and do advocacy so you know we've got tourism industry things here that we need to think through we've got next phase Industrial Development you've got the minerals you've got our character of us as a state as a defence entity with them within the Commonwealth do advocacy on on those fronts that's what's attractive about it [Music]

Channel: John Anderson Media

Views: 11,172

Keywords: Kim Beazley, Kim Beazley and John Anderson, Labor Party leader, Labor, Defence, Equality, Freedoms, Geo-Politics, Political leadership, Social Media, The United States, Donald Trump

Id: 5-RHw4NN7Q8

Length: 52min 54sec (3174 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 26 2018