S2E28 Australia's Future with Tony Abbott - Woke Corporates Dividing Australia

welcome to Australia's future with Tony Abbott I'm Daniel Wilde from The Institute of public affairs Australia is facing its most significant challenges since World War II geopolitical tensions are increasing cultural self-confidence is in Decline the values which Define us freedom democracy egalitarianism and sacrifice are being put to the test over this special podcast series Tony and I discuss how Australia can survive and flourish in the decades ahead hello Tony and g'day to all of our listeners great to be back for another episode of Australia's future with Tony Abbott uh today looking forward to our discussion we'll be talking about Tony Abbott's recent uh Speech he delivered in London a wide-ranging assessment of the future of the center right uh we'll also be discussing the role of big business and industry groups in the major debates including the voice to Parliament Tony great to be back with you Dan wonderful to be with you and with our viewers great so let's kick off with this wide-waging speech you delivered Tony in London last Thursday it was widely covered in the local media over there in the UK and also covered here in Australia in the Australian I just want to read the last part of that because you end on a very hopeful and optimistic note you say my sense is that Peak Insanity on climate and identity already may have passed I have no doubt that our best days are yet to come if we can but fight the good fight stay the cool and keep the fate and keep the faith end quote um Tony maybe we could start with the sort of your optimism and your course for optimism on the center right across the Western World well the main reason for my trip to London Dan was to attend the international Democrat Union which was having a 40th anniversary conference to look at this broad issue of where to for the center right of course the IDU was the original brainchild of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and there's a sense in which the center right triumphed magnificently in the late 80s with the fall of the Berlin Wall the collapse of Soviet communism and as we then were told the end of History because liberal capitalism was triumphing everywhere what we discovered in the aftermath of 2001 what perhaps we should never have forgotten is that history never stops history is ongoing and there's a sense in which uh no battle is ever finally won it's just something that you are ahead or behind in at any one time and I guess the difficulty for the center right at the moment is that at least in the anglo-sphere countries we seem to have lost our way a little the current British conservative government is perceived to lack courage and conviction um the Republican party is a little confused over whether it's a political movement or a personality cult in the United States and while I think Peter Dutton is doing very well here in Australia um you can't say the same thing about the liberal party in all of the states and I think you can say that the recent Coalition federal government was in some important respects a disappointment what I said to the Danube Institute which was probably my key speech of the recent trip is that Reagan and Thatcher had to Face Down The Challenge of Marxism in the form of the old Soviet Union what we need to face down is in some ways a more Insidious challenge it's the neo-marxism which has become so entrenched in so many of our institutions in particular in our education systems and this is why we've got so many young people obsessing about climate this is why so many young people seem confused as to whether they're male or female they don't simply think biology comes into it as much as we always used to regard as self-evidence so so there are some challenges for the center right but I do think that there are some green shoots of Hope one of the byproducts of the massive increase in gas oil and coal prices as a result of the Ukraine war is people starting uh to ask themselves isn't it really important to keep the lights on as much as to reduce emissions uh one of the byproducts of the rise of uh people complaining about the chemical sterilization which has been inflicted on so many young people as part of this whole wave of gender dysphoria is that people are starting to think well actually maybe we shouldn't be playing such games with Biology but I also want to stress Dan that while I wanted to leave my audience on a optimistic hopeful note we have a struggle ahead we have a struggle ahead things have gone far the wrong way and it's very important that we do not for a second think that this is going to be easy or become complacent because quite literally the future of our countries our culture and our civilization depends upon us regaining faith in ourselves and just at the moment Britain which I regard as in a sense the Cradle of modern civilization is still plagued with self-doubt we still see the Ramona Elites complaining about everything uh when they should know better and the United States which for so long has seen itself as having if you like a manifest destiny to bring liberal Democratic ideas to The Wider World which has done so much in terms of spending blood and treasure to keep the world free and safe is certainly going through a period of acute self-doubt of which the turmoil inside the Republican party is simply one expression yeah Tony you mentioned the end of the Cold War and the idea of the end of history and I often think that that made us complacent on the right that we had sort of just assumed that the values that we hold were self-evident and we didn't need to defend anything anymore but if course the left just kept going and you mentioned that the sort of the transmogrifying from the Soviet Union to this sort of cultural Marxism and I think it's important you say in your speech in some ways this what I'll call sort of identity politics uh cultural Marxism is in some ways more dangerous because it's internal rather than having a clear external enemy are you able to elaborate on that inside a little bit well I suppose at the heart of this post-modernist now Marxism is the idea that we can never really know truth that nothing is really objective and real it's all simply a social construct it's the construct of imposed power structures um and and I suppose the most striking example of how things have shifted is that for centuries we were advancing towards the liberal ideal of of the liberal Humane ideal of of human equality if not necessarily an outcomes and in talents at least in terms of dignity and rights and responsibilities and that was most marvelously expressed I suppose by Martin Luther King and his famous statement that he wanted his children to be judged on the content of their character not the color of their skin in in just a generation in just a few short decades we've we've forgotten all of that or at least large swides of our academe and the commanding Heights of opinion have forgotten this and now everything is conditioned by race and color and gender hence all this anxiety about so-called white privilege and and male privilege now this is incredibly Insidious because in the end it denies people agency it says that they are programmed by things beyond their control just as economic Marxism said that individuals were simply cogs in uh some giant capitalist machine uh this neo-marxism says that individuals are completely programmed by outside forces whether it's their skin color or or the patriarchy or whatever it might be and again it's it's it it it takes away your freedom uh it takes away your self-respect it takes away it disempowers people it fundamentally disempowers people and yet the whole Glory of our existence is trying to be better it's every day try to make better choices than yesterday so that over time the world for us for our families for our communities and ultimately for our countries is better than it was I want to just briefly drill down into maybe some policy areas because I think it's really interesting and you touch on this a little bit the realignment where low-income voters are moving more towards the center right and that's largely because the left has moved so far to the left on climate on identity Politics on mass migration other such matters and you you know were probably the most successful opposition leader you brought the Coalition out of opposition into government in record time netting something like 25 seats against all the odds I always sort of thought of your uh your time as opposition leader as prime minister is what I would describe as broad spectrum conservatism where there was sort of economic liberalism social conservatism but you also I guess developed a role for government for example with paper rental leave and family policy which some economic liberals didn't necessarily agree with but I think in hindsight is you know whether you agree with PPL or other forms of supporting the family I think that when you're looking at lower income voters working-class voters these families clearly need help uh in the environment we need to have one and half or two income earners it's really hard for them so I just wanted to sort of talk about the sort of the policy direction of of the center right as you said is moving into the next period I I guess then fundamentally what I want to say is that government is not value free I mean government should support the police government should prefer intact families to standard ones government should prefer successful business to unsuccessful ones and it should support good prefer good schools to bad ones and so on I mean government has an interest in outcomes and while we have to be careful about government becoming too big and too bossy and too overbearing by the same token uh government is not simply holding the ring it's not simply holding the ring it it it it needs uh to from time to time interfere to drive good outcomes I mean take an obvious example eventually the market will deal with substandard products but some products are so substandard that they're a threat to safety and so we need to have rules against that kind of thing now the rules shouldn't be too prescriptive um and uh you can take good things like that too far but but nevertheless government is not value free and this is the mistake I think that some of the Libertarians make they think it's government's job simply to hold the ring so um when I was uh prime minister yes I wanted I wanted to uh um capable women to have more kids because the greatest vote of confidence that you can make is to have children and not enough capable Australian women are having children these days now I can understand why because um there's a career there are careers to pursue there are incomes to be earned there are all the costs involved in having children and so my paid printer leave scheme was an attempt to recognize that other than that that in the middle I mean they're the very well to do that can survive on one very large income that are the people on welfare who don't live a luxurious Life by any means but in a sense the welfare system looks after larger families and then there are people in the middle and these are the ones you've just mentioned people who these days often need two incomes to have a reasonable middle class life and and for those who I might describe as middle class aspirational women to have more than one or two kids is often quite difficult hence paid parental leave which will keep the family income going for the six to 12 months when um the the principal career normally the woman will be taking time off work but the family still needs the income I mean the mortgage isn't suspended just because someone's taking time off to to look after a child the mortgage still has to be paid that's why a paid parental leave I thought was critically important and I thought was almost the archetype modern conservative policy and I was so disappointed um I said I kind of expected the radical left to be against it once they worked out that this was really a pronatalist policy particularly coming from someone who self-identified as a conservative but I was so disappointed that some of my colleagues were deeply resentful particularly some of my older colleagues who said well my wives my wife didn't get paid brindle leaves so why should anyone else get it and I just thought that was so backward looking and so wrong yeah I think you make an important point about the government's aren't value neutral clearly they have a role to play in you know the court system and other such matters but my view is that more intellectual thinking needs to be done on the right about what the proper role is of government in our day and age which is much different to the situation in the 1980s for example we're in a different a much different situation um so there is the sort of the family situation paper interleave that you discuss you know there's also challenges that we have with the sort of migration and the the rapid population growth and many other areas where I think the the center right may have been apprehensive to involve itself in some years ago but with the changing Dynamic of of sort of our culture and political system I think some of those shifts towards you know what might be described as uh you know more conservative policy should be considered also John roscom wrote an important article in the Australian Financial review I think it was last Friday I don't have it in front of me so I can't quote it verbatim but he basically made this important point which is that people are really looking to be cared for today I think the experience of covert the fragmentation of our society uh families breaking up that that there is an expectation for government to do more and more and the right has to find a way of talking to that desire without necessarily conceding the ground on on big government so just interested in your yeah that's that's a good point you make Dan but we need to be very careful about a government which does so much that it takes away our freedom and everything the government does has to be paid for and government doesn't have a dollar that it doesn't take from us either as taxes today or taxes tomorrow so um we do need to be careful and one of the I think bail for consequences of Co was this fostering of fear by government and official them and and I guess the consequent timidity of our of our public uh I mean even now we see people wearing masks um now if you've got a lurgy and you're in close quarters with other people maybe it's courteous to wear a mask but wearing a mask for self-protection I think is drawing a pretty long bow and yet it seems that that's why most people are wearing masks almost a sign that they don't want anyone to get too close to them and again this was one of the really really unfortunate developments of of covert there was a slogan that I excuse me though I saw dorbed on on buildings and in hoardings and things in Victoria during the pandemic um start staying apart brings us together or something to that effect and I thought this is just so wrong it's just so wrong but this was the weirdness of those times indeed Tony we're a lot there to I think for us to unpack further over over the coming weeks and months I wouldn't mind now just turning to the voice to Parliament and latest developments there uh Peter Dutton was on Sky News on um on Sunday and he made a I think a pretty important point about big business and he was talking especially about some in the mining sector and the resources sector that have been putting in millions into the the yes campaign and he's basically said that they should stay out of it and they should grow a backbone and rather than trying to appease the inner city Twitter Rd uh should actually do what's right for our nation um to me that's such an important observation by Peter Dunn 100 correct as well uh interested in your observations what Peter Dutton has had to say plus also if you could give us an insight into your experience when you were prime minister into the the role of big business and how that might have changed in the intervening decade or so thanks Dan uh I think we've got to appreciate that big business and small business are very different beasts and if we can further differentiate there's a world of difference between large public companies and companies which may be publicly listed but which are still essentially a founder or family driven such as news corporation for instance and the big public companies these days I think are more like private sector bureaucracies than they are like small businesses and um one of the features of these private sector bureaucracies particularly in recent times under the influence of this so-called ESG movement is that instead of focusing on what businesses traditionally focused on namely delivering a worthwhile good or service trading staff and customers well and making a reasonable profit for shareholders instead of those things these ESG driven businesses have been more interested in trying to build a invariably left a skewed Society I think a significant factor at least in this country has been the dominance of the Union super funds in the share registers of these large private companies and so today we've got companies like Rio HP and Wes Farmers each of them giving 2 million dollars to the yes case now I think this is an absolute ripoff on the shell as a complete and utter rip-off on the shareholders of a private company wants to uh to to donate to whatever cause I may or may not agree but nevertheless at least it's it's in a sense entitled to do what it wants with its own money but these are shareholders in the end who are missing out because Rio and BHP and Wes Farmers have decided that rather than run their business as well they want to do a bit of political grandstanding now I accept that Rio's got a guilty conscience after what it did to the Heritage listed you can gorge I accept that all of these large companies have got to stay in good with government and and the labor governments in particular play favorites when it comes to business I also accept that big sport has always got its handout to government for funding for stadia and so on and so forth and so big sport probably wants to Pander to the government's latest Pet Project as well but but it's it's quite wrong that these massively resourced companies and these woke foundations should be so one-sided when it comes to the most important constitutional change we've been asked to consider um I mean I I know that the polls have been coming strongly back towards the uh sensible side of the voice debate but that's not because the no campaign has had much money I mean the no campaign has been massively outspent by the yes campaign it's only because the no campaign has the better arguments that things are shifting um so look I I really think the people in these large public companies should be ashamed of themselves frankly they don't have an argument all they have is an emotion and a desire to look good to the government yeah I think you're quite right um there's a couple of things that come to mind the first is that this clearly obliterates any notion that the voice is a Grassroots movement I mean people are not reaching into their back pocket to give five or ten bucks in the same way they're doing to the no campaign this is wealthy family trusts and big work corporations that are funneling Millions into the campaign um I think the other point as you're speaking it sort of reminded me that we used to have business Business Leaders that were patriotic they actually cared about Australia and they understood that one of the reasons behind their business success was the fact that they lived in a country like Australia and yes um their own Endeavor their own efforts and investment are critical but you would not have the same outcomes and returns if you weren't living and working in a country like Australia they understood that and always generally speaking acted in the National interest now we've got these business people that just sort of opine and intervene on very divisive issues um you know is it your experience at the I guess uh the quality for want of a better term or the commitment of our Business Leaders to our country has declined over time or do you have any sort of perspective on that I I'm I'm reluctant to to accuse big business of lacking patriotism uh I I think the problem with big business uh is is more a reflection of the general culture uh and I can't remember the name of the author at the moment uh but but there was this distinction drawn uh someways versus anywheres um and the people who run large public companies good heart that's right good heart the British academic good heart um the people who run large public companies um normally epitomize the the anywheres yeah um whether it's London New York Paris Beijing Tokyo they're in their five-star hotels they're often enough in their private jets and so on um whereas most of us are still very conscious that we are a product of a particular time and place and generally speaking we don't lightly change our religion change the footy team we follow um suddenly decide that our hometown was pretty contemptible after all and would rather be a citizen of the world so I think there's there's that factor at work um I I guess um my admiration is for people who who build businesses uh as opposed to Simply manage them and there are a lot of businesses banks in particular that are almost a license to print money a lot of businesses that are largely protected from competition I suppose some of the very big retailers might be in that category and and as I think I tried to to say in that speech in London um if you don't have any real challenges you start to worry you start to create new challenges um and and we've spent so much time over the last couple of decades worrying about what we used to call first world problems because so much has gone well for so long and and I think that's in the end the the problem with so many of these Big Business Leaders they've become bureaucratic as opposed to Innovative in in a business sense but look you asked me earlier Dan about the business bodies um at different times in the past the business bodies have been very important to good government and to Innovative government back in the 80s when Hugh Morgan was leading the Business Council it was a very important source of policy Innovation more recently when Tony Shepard was the president of the Business Council of Australia the BCA was a very excuse me important source of Good Counsel for people in public life I think it's dramatically deteriorated since then dramatically deteriorated since then and I think it's because there have been too many people who haven't wanted to rock the boat um who would rather go with the flow and who have forgotten that the only job that really counts for business is a good product or service decent relations with your customers and your staff and making a profit because a business that doesn't make a profit cannot last Tony just returning to your speech and just to round out our conversation um there's an important point that you you make here which reminds me I think of a comment you made some time ago about the center right being uh I'm gonna get this wrong now the center right being in government but not in power I think the word was in office but not in office but not in power and so this is what you you say in your speech uh it's one thing to win government it's another thing to hold it and make something of it thanks to the left's Long March through the institution center right governments despite winning elections and having mandates must expect sabotage at every turn you then go on to point to the media the bureaucracy uh in our case the Senate uh unions and other internal factors and to that I would personally add what we've just talked about big business and other major Civic organizations so can you just uh you know given your experience as prime minister um Back In 2013 how that affected your capacity to execute on the wheel or the the improma tour given to you by the Australian people and then how has that changed over the last decade or so well it's interesting um arguably the Abbott government's greatest success was stopping the boats and we were able to do that because we didn't need anyone else's permission we didn't need to get any legislation through the parliament it was something that we were able to do entirely through the executive action of the Commonwealth government and within a couple of months effectively the boats had been stopped other things like the repeal of the carbon tax the raising of the pension age our desire to see school leavers either learning or earning as opposed to going on the Dole the desire to see a modest co-payment on on otherwise bulk build GP visits all of these things required legislation and while I think we had a clear mandate to get the budget under control we we certainly he had a lot of trouble getting legislation through the Senate even the repeal of the carbon and Mining taxes for which we had an absolutely explicit mandate or it was difficult um so so look um in retrospect I think I should have been um quicker to replace key people in the public service and I should have been ready to go swiftly to a double dissolution election where I thought that the government's clear mandate was being thwarted by by the parliament but look uh this is the the the the wisdom of hindsight I suspect that the next coalition government certainly any government that Peter Dutton leads will be a government which has been um chastened informed and ultimately better prepared because of of that experience we certainly hope so Tony so on that note I think we'll wrap it up so thanks for your time and your insights again Tony and looking forward to our chat next time thanks so much Dan the production of the center for the Australian way of life at the Institute of public affairs to find out more visit australia.ipa.org

Channel: Institute of Public Affairs

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Id: fB1q3ZrI2mM

Length: 32min 55sec (1975 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023