https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=fcWhoZ7cdEA
One of the things I’m curious about is, are you pleased about the fact that you stuck to your guns? And if so, why, given the defeat on the electoral front? And also, what did you learn from, suffer from, and benefit from as a consequence of being attacked in the manner that you were? One of the phrases I think I used on the night I was ejected from the parliament, Jordan, is that it’s better to be a fighter than a quitter. And if you’re not prepared to lose in a good cause, you’re not really prepared to fight for a good cause. And so look, I’m pleased that I did try to resist the emissions obsession. I did try to get the government less burdensome on people’s lives. I did try to ensure that our country had a degree of integrity in its borders. I did try to ensure that our country was an effective and valuable ally to our friends. And look, there are a few things that I guess I might have done differently. Everyone makes mistakes, but fundamentally, I think what I was trying to do was good and proper. Could I have been more emollient from time to time with colleagues? Of course. Could I have lavished a little more time on some people? Sure. Might I have expressed myself better in different circumstances? Well, absolutely. I’ve done plenty of dodgy interviews over the years. Who hasn’t? But I think the project, if you like, the purpose, if you like, was good and right and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. What made you prepared to lose, do you think? Well, in the end, it’s about trying to make a difference. And if you wanna make a difference, you’ve gotta strive for it. And if you’re prepared to sacrifice that what you are striving for in order to win, it’s not about the cause, it’s about you. And this is the problem in our public life right now. Too many people seem to be about preferment, promotion. It’s about them, it’s not about the country. It’s not about the cause. They would rather stay in office than make a difference. Yeah, it’s a very narrow conception of self. I mean, one of the problems with, so if you look at the life outcomes of psychopaths, and psychopaths are particularly interesting, because they’re completely self-interested in the narrowly selfish sense. But one of the interesting things about psychopaths is they betray their future selves just as badly as they betray other people. So like a psychopath will take momentary gratification whenever he can get it. And the problem with that is that there’s always a price to be paid. And so psychopaths are completely incapable of learning from experience, and they’re much more likely to end up in prison. And the reason for that is that that impulsive, narrow focus on the demands of the self actually turns out to be a very, very bad medium to long-term strategy, even if you’re thinking selfishly, right? Because you’re not conceptualizing how you’re going to be interacted with by people over any span of time. It’s all about now. And when we talk about the power monger types being selfish, it isn’t just that they’re selfish, it’s that they’re stupidly and narrowly selfish in a manner that can’t sustain itself, yeah. One of the things that I often used to say to myself was, no unnecessary enemies. Now, there are some necessary enemies, because if you want to do something that you really believe is right for the country, and others oppose it, they are going to be your enemies, and you just can’t avoid that. But let’s not gratuitously offend people, because we can. I mean, that’s the mark of the bully. It’s not the mark of someone who has at least tried to be a statesman. Yeah, yeah, well, no unnecessary enemies. That’s sort of like the doctrine of minimal necessary force. Oh, it’s a good doctrine. Let’s turn our attention, if you don’t mind, to the international landscape. And so you have given a lot of thought, for example, to the issue of China. I’m not a big fan of the CCP, not least because they support North Korea. And I would say that any state that supports North Korea is, let’s call them questionable on the moral front, to say the least. And so, and you guys in Australia, you have to deal with China in a way that’s even more immediate and threatening and promising than say those of us who are a little bit more distant. And so what do you see looming on the international front vis-a-vis China? Their economy doesn’t seem to be very stable. They seem to be degenerating into a very comprehensive surveillance state tyranny. The, our hope in the West that increasing material wealth would liberalize China doesn’t seem to be bearing fruit, although the Chinese aren’t starving and there’s something to be said for that. And we’ve had a lot of cheap goods as a consequence. So what, how do you, how do you conceptualize China, the West’s proper relationship with China? What are your views in that domain? Well, I think it was the current American Secretary of State Blinken, who said that we would cooperate where we can, we will complete where we should and confront where we must. I think that was the formula he used. And I actually thought that was quite a good formula. In my time, when MH370 disappeared into the wastes of the Indian Ocean with 240 people on board of whom about 150 were Chinese nationals, Australia put everything we had into that search because that was the right thing to do. And I think the Chinese government appreciated that. By the same token, when China declared unilaterally air defense identification zones over parts of the East and South China seas, we flew military jets through there because again, that was the right thing to do. When China was trying to create this Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, against the wishes of both America and Japan, our very good friends and allies, we were prepared to join this. Although we insisted on changes to the governance structure because we wanted it to reflect the kind of governance structures that global bodies typically had rather than being simply a proxy for the communist government in Beijing. So look, I think in my time, we did pretty well. We successfully secured the first free trade deal between China and a G20 country. But prior to 2015, I think it was still possible to be optimistic about China and to think that even under the CCP, economic modernization was going ultimately to lead to a degree of political liberalization. And over the decades, there would be some kind of convergence, if you like. Unfortunately, as we discovered in the COVID period, if there was any convergence taking place, we were getting more like communist China than they were getting like the liberal West. So my attitude to China and to the CCP, I think was fair enough, over optimistic perhaps, but it was fair enough back then. My view today is quite different. China is increasingly oppressing its own citizens. It has crushed the freedom of Hong Kong, one of the world’s great cities. It’s being monstrous towards its Uyghur, its own Uyghur citizens. It’s bullying and threatening all its neighbors. And it’s now particularly focused on taking Taiwan by force if necessary. Now, I think that if the Beijing regime believes that it will be 1.4 billion Chinese against 24 million Taiwanese, at some point in the near future, they will strike. And I just think it would be horrific for 24 million Taiwanese to have their lives surrendered into the hands of a brutal dictatorship. And while no one wants conflict, I think it is important for free countries like Australia to join with our partners and allies, such as the United States, such as Japan, such as the United Kingdom, to say very clearly to Beijing, there will be the most severe consequences if you try to alter the status quo by force across the Taiwan straits. As I said earlier, Jordan, the Ukraine war has been a catastrophe, but it would be, any war over Taiwan would be several orders of magnitude greater. And I think we have to do everything we can to deter that, but I think strength is much more likely to deter than weakness. And so you seem to be quite concerned about the probability of a Chinese assault on Taiwan. And so, in my darker moments, I think, well, if I was running the CCP, a little distraction to take my citizens’ attention away from the catastrophes on the domestic economic front might be quite welcome. There’s nothing that unites a fractious population more than a targeted enemy. It’s a pretty easy thing to use propaganda to agitate for a vision of a unified China as it should be. And so it would be a lovely distraction. And so, Nan, you said you take a peace through strength approach, let’s say, and you talked a little bit, you made some allusion a little bit to deterring China. Like, what do you think that the West could do on the deterrence front that wouldn’t increase the probability of a cataclysmic interchange between the West and China? See, the terrifying thing about China is that they’re likely more willing to sacrifice their citizens than we are, right? And God only knows what price they’d be willing to pay to invade Taiwan, for example, especially if that gave them a purchase on power for another five years. So that’s a very hard enemy to deal with, right? Because if they’ll light themselves on fire to singe you, that’s a pretty difficult thing to contend with. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]