Leading with Integrity | Australia's John Anderson | EP 313

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor's home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion; probably 80 percent of Scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing! Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone, from Shakespeare to modern education, and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all history, and hopefully, people can walk away with at least a sense of that.

If democratically people want to address this issue, that is their right. But secondly, you must do so on an informed basis, and you must look for high-quality policy. You won't get that without a good debate. And if you ask me to make a trade between saving the planet tonight on a whim and feeding people, I'm sorry, I'm going with feeding people. You've got to have conviction. You've got to be guided by the data. You've got to actually think facts matter. Taking people with you matters.

The fundamental spirit that has imbued the West is the only spirit that has ever actually lifted people who are oppressed out of their oppression. Yeah, and so what that means is this: I believe that the radical critique that's been aimed at Western culture in the name of freedom for oppression is actually attacking the very spirit that has lifted people out of oppression to the degree that that's been the case. If there's no intrinsic worth that's divine in some sense, so sacred, then why can't I just do with you what I want if I have the power? But I don't see how you can make a moral case that if I can do it, I shouldn't. If you're going to make the moral case, you have to make the assumption that each person in some sense is created in the image of what is sacred, and you can't violate that regardless of apparent evidence for hierarchical difference.

[Music]

I'm just concluding my tour in New Zealand and Australia with a wrap-up discussion with Mr. John Anderson. So I'm looking forward to that and I hope you all find it valuable. The Honorable John Anderson AC FTSE spent 19 years in the Australian Parliament. This included six years as Deputy Prime Minister as a member of the reformist government led by John Howard. Amongst other step-changing initiatives, this government oversaw enormous economic reform, including taxation modernization and the maintenance of a string of miraculous budget surpluses, which resulted in leaving a cash surplus on leaving office in 2007. Since then, John has remained active in public commentary, various advisory bodies, and in the not-for-profit sector. He's been a sought-after speaker in both Australia and abroad. In recent years, he's hosted a successful YouTube and podcast interview series. I've been on that a couple of times, the preeminent one of its kind in Australia. He was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2022, the nation's highest civic honor for his various services to the community.

On leaving politics, Anderson, known for his character and Christian faith, was saluted by figures on both sides with praise. The then Prime Minister, John Howard, said, "I've not met a person with greater integrity in public life." I'm looking very much forward to talking to John for YouTube today, and then also following that up, as I frequently do, with an additional half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform, walking through his bio. Thanks to the Daily Wire types for facilitating these conversations. Welcome to all of you who are watching and listening.

So, Mr. Anderson, I thought we could start talking by discussing something that you accomplished along with other members of your government several years ago. You managed to run a sequence of balanced budgets and to also pay down a substantial part or all of Australia's debt in a relatively short period of time.

Oh, Australia has a federal debt, let alone Australia's federal debt, and money in the bank, and left money in the bank.

Okay, and so what years did that take place?

It began in 1996, and the future fund with surpluses and sales from revenue, sales from a couple of assets would then put aside as a wealth fund, if you like, for the future. And from memory, about 2006-2007, just in time for the great financial crisis. So, Australia went into the great financial crisis with no debt, money in the bank at a federal government level.

Okay, so why don't we delve a little bit into exactly what that means because there's a bunch of mysteries there. The first mystery is, I suppose, why that hadn't happened before then. The second mystery is, how did you possibly manage it? And the third mystery is, given that it was possible, and that you demonstrated it was possible, why did that stop happening, and why did more countries around the world also not do the same thing?

So, let's start with the first one, which was why did the governments prior to the one that you were integrally involved in find it necessary to run at a deficit and rack up a tremendous debt?

Well, I think probably a lot of it was born with the idea of Keynesian economics, that in flat times, governments spend more money to help, if you like, smooth out the highs and the lows, and then they withdraw and repay that debt in the good times. But they never do. Right, right. So, the idea was to smooth out the variability in the so-called business cycle. That's part of it. I think another— and that's a good thing to do as long as you have the discipline to start putting money back into the system when you're trading well, the economy's strong, taxation revenues are flowing in, and that's what's what. Well, it's also a good thing to do if you presume that you can by fiat, in some sense, reduce that kind of variability, that's not self-evident, right? Because most systems that are reasonably stable have to oscillate to some degree. You might think it would be a good idea to flatten out the oscillation. It's a good idea, well, if you can do it. But the key is to do it in the better times, discipline yourself to prepare for the next downturn.

One of the reasons that the whole of the West, and beyond the West, in my view, is in such a dangerous place today is we haven't done that. We've got spending, spending, spending, right? So, the theory is predicated on the notion that you're going to do both. But the reality is that it's very unlikely that governments will do more than one. Yeah, right.

And so why have they not done it? In Australia, to be fair, they had been, the previous government deserved some credit. They had done a lot of good things. They had floated the dollar. They'd started on making the place more productive, better industrial relations, etc. But they had left a rapidly building set of deficits and a ballooning debt. By today's standards, I've got to tell you, compared to the sort of money that is owed as a percentage of GDP around the world—China being a horrendous example; Britain, America, France, we saw Greece—they got to a 175 percent debt to GDP ratio, and we saw what that looked like. A first world country where kids went to school hungry, literally, because their parents couldn't put food in the refrigerator and there was no longer a government program to put it there. These things can happen; Italy went very, very close to the same.

We should clarify for everybody that's watching and listening the distinction between deficit and debt. A deficit is overspending, generally calculated on a yearly level.

Yeah, that's right.

And then the debt is the cumulative consequences of the deficit.

Yes, and so to attack the deficit, then each year, the government doesn't spend more than it brings in, and to pay off the debt means that the cumulative consequences of the deficit are also eradicated.

And so your government, the government you were involved with, demonstrated that this was possible. And so what exactly, how did you do that? I'm very interested in the mechanics. So how did you analyze what needed to be reduced, let's say, or what revenues needed to be increased? How did you prioritize the spending, and how did you bring that economic overspending under control without simultaneously dooming yourself to substantive, let's say, unpopularity?

Well, there was plenty of that. But let me just backtrack a little bit and I should pay some credit here. When we first met together, the first formal meeting as a new government, having been sworn in only a few days, about a week after winning the election in 1996, we met for the first time. And the Prime Minister, who was a man of conviction, you've got to start with conviction. You've got to think these things matter. You're there to make a difference. You're not there just to satiate the latest political fad and to smooth over people's feelings; you've got to actually believe in something. And he said, "We need to recognize this is intergenerationally unfair and we need to start to do something about winding back these deficits."

And then after that came the issue of, "Well, here's the opportunity not just to pay down the debt but maybe to get rid of it altogether." And then we should say the Treasurer of the day, Peter Costello, was very single-minded, ably backed by a finance minister who'd been a state Premier, John Fay. Then we had the Health Minister, we had the junior Treasurer, and me. I, in theory, was asked by the Prime Minister to help with the economic portfolios because I had agriculture and mining in my brief. So conviction, believing in something, was important in today's world. We sometimes lose sight of the Judeo-Christian beliefs that built our society.

This is why it is so important to study scripture and develop a dedicated prayer life. There's no better way to do that than with Hallow. Hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the U.S. and the number one Catholic app in the world. It's filled with studies, meditations, and reflections, including the number one Christian podcast, "The Bible in a Year." Download Hallow today and try their Advent Pray 25 challenge, a 25-day journey through Bible stories from both the Old and New Testament leading up to the birth of Jesus. These meditations are led by cast members from the largest Christian streaming series in history, "The Chosen."

Advent Pray 25 will help grow your understanding of mankind and develop a disciplined prayer habit during the season when our discipline is put to the test. Download Hallow for three months completely free and experience a personal development that can come from regular prayer, meditation, and reflection on who the Bible calls us to be. Get Hallow for free at hallow.com/jordan. It's hallow.com/jordan.

Give yourself the gift of peace, calm, and discipline this Christmas. Go to hallow.com/jordan today.

The second thing I would say is that teamwork's important because the thing you just alluded to, how do you not get slaughtered? You've got to take—you know, people would speculate, are they going to do this? They're going to do that. They're going to take something else away. And the minute someone had broken ranks and said, "Oh yeah, look out! You better go out and protest on such and such an issue," it would have destroyed the process because people were very wary. Everyone agrees in principle. "Oh, that's great! They're going to be economically responsible." But what happens if they fix some pain on me?

Right, right.

And then this day, when governments are, I'll say it, less and less coherent, less and less convicted of anything, they don't have philosophical underpinnings. They're into ad hockery, managerialism, and opportunism, and opinion polls, and then you combine those with, you know, a strong sense of activism, a reluctance in the day of identity politics to identify the national interest as opposed to special interests, and the explosive cocktail becomes then— with social media, you know you can mount a campaign against almost any government program.

So here's a staggering thing. I mean, we did that side of it. Then we did a major tax reform. Neither were popular, but we got away with it. There have been no major reforms in this country to my way of thinking that have involved great difficulty and great persuasion.

Okay, so for over 20 years. So why not?

So let's play Devil's Advocate. Why not run the deficit and burden the future with today's debt if you can thereby generate more revenue to help people who are in trouble? What's the downside to that?

Well, it's a very good question, and it really needs to be split into two. Some government expenditures can be reasonably described as investing in the future and valuable for our children and our grandchildren. The obvious ones would be high-quality education, research. And we know that even if it's debt-financed, very high-quality infrastructure, including communications and so forth, can help build wealth.

But many other forms of government expenditure, in fact, most of them, are entitlement-driven, and if you let them get out of hand—so you legislate that if something unfortunate happens to you, it might be a very desirable and compassionate thing to do, but you're entitled to X, Y, and Z benefits. And then they get mission creep, and more and more people are lead into the net. And you're spending more and more on an entitlement basis locked into the law of the land, which can only be undone by the Parliament, and the Parliament won't play ball because the opposition's got the numbers in the other house or whatever. Then you can get into a spiral that's really difficult.

And you combine that now with the information age and social media, and a lack of willingness to clearly focus on the national interest, and it's really hard. I don't make light at all of the fact that modern governments, even though I can be critical of their lack of philosophical underpinnings, don't do much about it in one way because we electors—we are in danger, Jordan, I'm sorry to say this, but I'll give you my view—in the West, we are in danger of turning our countries into places that can't be properly governed. I know that's a tough thing to say. Well, and I'm not saying we're there, but I'm saying I think we're close.

We could also point out, I suppose, that the evidence that relatively unconstrained government spending produces inflation seems to be incontrovertible. And then we might want to discuss exactly what inflation does to people. So inflation makes each unit of currency purchase less units of value. Too much money changing too—

If you're good.

Exactly, exactly.

And then you might say, well, who does that punish?

Yeah, and the answer is, well, inflation punishes people who've been wise enough to, yes, forestall gratification, right? So if you're somebody who has been sensible and taken the medium to long-term into account, into account, and you've saved money—accrued wealth, let's say—and the sort of wealth that enables you to have a house and air conditioning and some opportunities for your kids, we would generally regard that as a social good, right? Because we hope that people who are not profligate and impulsive and who put a little aside for the future for future contingencies, so that they can take care of themselves and others, those people should be valued.

And if you inflate the currency by overspending, then those are the people who are preferentially punished because the people who spent all their money—well, they don't have any money; inflation only affects them tangentially—but it destroys the wealth of the very people whose careful and conscientious striving have produced wealth to begin with. And that seems inevitable. I mean, we've already seen that inflation break out across the Western world to quite a remarkable degree, even a degree that was unforeseen by the central banks who claimed that they had it under control.

I don't know what inflation is running at in Australia, but I know in Canada, I think on the food fronts it's about eight percent right now. And on the energy front in Europe, it's far higher than that. That's not all because of government overspending, but it's certainly contributing to that. So you punish. Inflation punishes exactly the people who should be being rewarded by taking a medium to long-term view. And it differentially benefits people who were impulsive and profligate in their spending.

And so that seems like bad social policy, as far as I can tell.

So I agree with all of what you said, but I think it's really important to understand that it's actually— we've done something worse than that because what happened was that Australia went into the great financial crisis— I don't really use that term internationally, but that's what we call it here—the meltdown. You know, Lehman Brothers. You know, the real story about the link between culture and good policy outcomes—that one was because I didn't break the law, but budgie, they spread the spirit of everything that was decent, you know? And these are important things. Where's personal responsibility? Where's decency? Where's doing the right thing in banking? More important than making an instant buck.

But leave that aside. Most countries actually were starting to worry about their debt to GDP ratios in the buildup to the great financial crisis. They were starting to try to do something about it. Take a line through it— it was around 35, 45, 50 in a lot of Western countries. And they're saying this is getting—you know, we need to wind it back, prepare for a rainy day. These are good times. They would have right to do so.

Then Lehman Brothers fell. You know, unsound money everywhere exposed, all over the place. At one stage, you know, the system nearly collapsed. So governments did extraordinary things. The government of America bought General Motors and Chrysler from memory. I don’t think they bought Ford. Governments everywhere bailed out banks, insurance companies; all that debt went on to the public sector. You know, private citizens, suddenly, I had in theory owned General Motors. Call that privatizing profit and socializing risk.

Yeah, wow, that’s—I’m an Australian farmer. We sometimes get accused of wanting to do that here, but I would push back against the charge that all farmers are guilty of it. But that’s right, however what followed was that governments looking at this mountain of debt saying, “What do we do now?” because the discipline you asked—let's come back to how we did it, of tough decisions. There was no stomach for it. Matthew Parris wrote, you know, at the time, “Face it, we’re broke. We’ve overdone it. We’re all going to have to live much lower living standards because none of us have got the stomach to do the hard work to wind back this debt that’s going to be so bad for our kids. We’re just going to have to”— but what governments did then was they looked for inflation because inflation debates money and makes a debt smaller, and they looked for it. And they pumped money into everything. We had very low interest rates for an incredible period of time. We pursued endlessly quantitative easing, which is basically printing money in a fancy way.

It’s always ended in tears—think Weimar Germany. And people kept saying, “Where's the inflation?” We want the inflation to devalue the government debts to get it under control so that we don’t have to screw people with taxation. But the inflation was there; it was in asset prices.

Right, right.

Housing prices. And who did that hurt? Where's the social impact of that? It’s in housing prices, especially for young people. In this country, it really, really worries me. When I left school, I'm a good long-time near Jordan; I might look it, but I am. When I left school in the mid-'70s, an average Australian house cost four times average annual earnings. Today, it’s 11 times, and in Sydney and Melbourne, it’s more like 13 times.

Now that impacts a lot of things—social cohesion, I would argue it impacts perhaps more seriously—and related is family formation in a time when 92 countries in the world have collapsing populations. And we haven't realized how difficult that's going to be to handle.

So I think, you know, it's a very dangerous story all around. And again, I say to you, I actually have a lot of sympathy for modern politicians. I could say to you, “You've lost your philosophical heart.” Where are the great strands of thinking through which you used to look to see, “Will this policy advance or take backwards my dream of what the country ought to be?”

So I could be harsh at that level, but the other level I’d say—we've not been prepared to delay gratification, to make tough choices, to say, “Yeah, look, we want to elect a government that’ll do some hard things for our kids’ sake to get the whole show back on the road.” And here in this country, we've had a minerals boom. We're back in debt; the debt to GDP ratio now is creeping out over time. It will get out to around 40 on current projections. 40 is the level at which European and American countries started to lose control at the time of the GFC. This stuff matters. And those interest rates rise, more and more taxpayers' money's just going into servicing the debt. So it's not buying hospitals or looking after schools or providing reparations to countries for climate change damage. All of those things, that's all going to be debt-financed from now on. And who’s going to pay that debt?

[Music]

Men, is it time to stop mindless scrolling? Time to finally gain that higher quality of life you know you're missing out on? If this sounds familiar, then on January 9th, join thousands of men all over the world to embark on a 90-day journey together in search of a better life. It’s called Exodus 90, and it was built to help men enjoy the freedom of becoming who they were truly made to be. Exodus 90 guides you in removing the attachments that are holding you back from a better life, and it actually works. Independent research shows that Exodus 90 men report considerable shifts after the first 90 days, including stronger satisfaction rates in their marriages, more meaningful prayer lives, and dramatic decreases in time spent on their phones. For the past seven years, Exodus has helped more than 60,000 men build a roadmap for living with virtue in a culture that offers far too many paths to self-destruction. Is it time for your Exodus? We start January 9th. Find resources to prepare for Exodus at exodus90.com/jordan. That's exodus90.com/jordan.

So what did you do to bring down the deficit and to pay off the debt? That was hard. And what worked well? I'm very interested in the actual mechanics. Where did— how did you decide where savings could be obtained? How did you do the analysis, and where were the major savings garnered? And how much of that was the consequence of tax increase as well?

Uh, no tax increase, no. We promised not to.

Okay, so we kept to it. I mean, look, there are a few little things like airport charges and passport levies and so forth that we adjusted, but there were no tax increases worthy of the name. We said we wouldn't; we relaxed low-tax government; we were committed to that, and we delivered.

And the only answer really to your question at the headline level is it was incredibly hard work. And those five people with their helpers, I was one of them. And you know, I don't want to take all the credit. I mean, this was the Prime Minister saying this is what we're going to do, and this is a very capable man called Peter Costello, and a little team around him, and the rest of us working ridiculous hours.

And was that his primary goal, and your primary goal, was it in government?

Yeah, we saw it as a vital part of what we were doing. No industrial relations reform, a more productive economy. For me, rural recovery because it was in a very bad way at the time, that was very important. And I think it's fair to say that we had a deep commitment to tax reform, but we're unsure about how we were going to do it.

But we saw that as— yeah. But getting back to what might have been called in Britain in those days—I don't know whether they use it in Britain anymore—they talked about sound money. We thought that really mattered for a trading nation like Australia, a midsized nation. We were very deeply committed to it, but it essentially involved going through everything.

I often tell people, forgive me if somebody's listening to me, “Oh gosh, he’s going to try to tell that story again.” We spent three hours debating whether to continue a $90,000 rat-baiting program on Lord Howe Island, which is a little island off to the coast. Rats got there off a ship in the 1960s, and they were trying to eradicate them. And we thought, It's not working.

Should we continue it, or can we save $90,000? So you've got the leaders of the country sitting around a table spending three hours on $90,000. We got the bureaucrats, who I gotta say served us well; they put up the options. But we got him to bring in a list of all of the community groups, and many of them were gently activist in those days; they'd be wildly activist today, who were drawing on a government teach somewhere. I remember being staggered; they put this up—the list on—does this— this never end—oh no, there's another page. Oh, there's a page after that. And we went through that laboratory, trimmed here, you trim that, you say don’t need that group. That group’s just working against the country’s interests.

Here’s another one we will support, whether it’s tax deductibility or grants or whatever.

So why didn’t the fervor around that? Because I don't imagine people were very thrilled about that, right?

Because you guys didn’t— you didn’t. I see we didn’t break ranks, and neither did the broader political team around us. It was teamwork; it was conviction. And teamwork, they’re the things I’d want to emphasize.

Why did the public put up with it?

Well, I nearly threw us out after three years for 12 months. The first budget with some tough measures in it was well received; we went up in the polls. The second budget, when Treasury and Finance advised us that in fact we weren’t making the progress we thought we were, so we tightened the screws a bit more— and we were in deep trouble, and we nearly— we were nearly a one-term government.

But then what happened?

This is a really interesting thing: the rewards started to flow.

Oh look, I should just say on how we did it. There were still some assets that we felt could be privatized. That’s not always a popular idea, but there were some we felt it could be privatized. And we made a solemn commitment that selling any family silver that was sold would go to debt reduction—not to a new kitchen, if I could put it that way. We’re going to pay the house off; we’re not going to build a new kitchen, if you see that?

Yeah.

What I’m trying to make. And we did that, and we stuck to it. And I think there was a slow but begrudging respect in the Australian community: these guys, you know actually believe in something. I think conviction and belief, well, in those days, it carried for something.

I hope it still would.

And so, you know, we progressed through all that. Only just one second—turning point. We won it promising to do something as tough, which was to reform the tax system and scrap—oh, messy old arrangement and replace it with what was called a new tax system. It was heart— a GST, your goods and services tax.

And some people say, “Oh, that was the thing that nearly did kill you altogether.” But actually, I think my personal view is the other way around. Because we were saying we believe in something.

They just put us back!

And I think the murder of the country would have been—we don’t like this very much; we’re really sick of it. But at least they believe in something, so we’ll give them a second term. But then the fruits started to flow: unemployment started to drop, real employment started to rise for the first time in this country for a very long time.

Real wages started to rise—

We've got a row going on in Australia about how to get real wages up, and the current government—they didn’t tell us they were going to do it or not. Here to be political, but they didn't tell us during the campaign they were going to do it. Now they have to get wages up. We’re going back to an old system of industrial relations. You can graph it out; wages rose when we engaged in industrial relations freedoms measures, you know, to free up the workplace and let people negotiate better outcomes and be more productive and ask for more pay. That’s when wages started to rise.

And so by the time the next election came around, we had sort of amazing results and everybody loved us, and it was all turned around.

So you got relatively rapid results?

Yeah, oh yeah, in ways that people could actually detect.

Oh, even enjoy!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely!

Yeah. I mean, we didn’t think we’d ever see unemployment down at those levels again, but we got there. You know, the bureaucrats were saying, “You know, modern economies don’t get that low.” And we got there.

So why did it go sideways? And things returned to their normal state of affairs, let’s say.

I said I wouldn’t be political. Let me be honest. And so I think towards the end we were getting a little lax, and the opposition was looking good, and the alternative Prime Minister was promising to be fiscally conservative, i.e., to continue what we were doing, right? And he looked like John Howard, liked John Howard’s a second-longer-serving Prime Minister, a man I admire hugely and count as a friend. And people thought, “It’s time for a change.”

There’s a bit of the Australian sort of “give the other guy a go.”

Yeah, yeah.

Well, there’s something to be said for that.

There is!

There is something to be said. No, I’m not knocking it.

No, no!

Well, one of the reasons that democracies work, I think, is because you constantly replace people at the top, and your point is that not too constantly—we’ve got to live in there long enough to get there. See, it took us three years. I mean, we did all our hard work, but it took us three years, I think if I look back, as a government of conviction because it was a people—a group of people made up—they'd been in opposition for quite a while. We were convicted, and we were committed to working as a team and trying to do something.

Having relievers of power wasn’t just about keeping them, and people say, “Oh, you know, John, you’re just a politician; you all say that.” But it was true of us; there were enough of us who believed in the country. In my case, not particularly addicted to politics as such; it was a means to an end. You know, I believed in these things. My father had almost lost his life fighting during the Second World War, and I thought, “Well, I don’t have a water fight, thank God, but I can try and make a contribution here, and if it’s a bit painful, well, it’s not like losing a life, is it?” Lying on a hospital bed for 18 months, so great. Shot to pieces and spending the rest of your life covered in scars and with bits of lead coming to your shoulder and stomach— that’s what he had to put up with, right?

So you know, a little bit of courage doesn’t hurt sometimes. Have a go!

Yeah, well, I did a podcast with Benjamin Netanyahu here recently, and he talked about the price they paid in Israel for his government's economic reforms, and they tried to—well, their actions were analogous in some sense to yours. He was more concerned with cutting tax rates and transforming the environment away from the hypothetically socialist paradise that Israel had degenerated into, and they paid a big price for that electorally. But the medium to long-term consequences for the country seemed— I would say seemed to have been spectacular. And of course now, he’s back; he's back in charge of the country, or will be soon.

He seemed also to be somebody who was driven fundamentally by principle rather than, by what would you say, a desire for the trappings of popularity and power—keeping your hands on the cycle of the levers.

Well, yeah. Well, I think a lot of the politicians that I’ve watched and talked to when they don’t rule by principle, let’s say— or when they’re not governed by principle themselves, they devolve to short-term opinion poll manipulating. And they deliver people what they hypothetically want in the short term—even though it’s very hard to measure what people truly want. And you can’t do that very accurately with opinion polls.

And now you can’t.

No, no!

Because you don’t give them choices.

You can’t set the choices out clearly enough.

No, no! It’s very hard. First of all, in some really comprehensive sense, people want many contradictory things simultaneously.

Yeah, yeah!

And so, scattershot asking them about what they want today in a very narrow manner doesn’t inform you about their true wishes. That’s a very difficult thing to learn how to do it!

Yeah, you know, would you like a ten percent pay rise? Well, yes— we’re all for that, right? But if it means that you’re going to have to repay it because it’s borrowed money that’s going to cost you twelve, well, no— maybe I don’t want that!

Right, right! Exactly! This is the problem.

You can’t present them with the real cost and the implications of the decisions that they make—very important.

Just to go back to the issue, though— we got, and by the grace of God, reasonably quick results, and people could see the benefits of better governance. And in the end, maybe we got a bit tired and they felt that there was an alternative that would be safe hands and perhaps a little bit less edgy than we had been in saying, “You know, perhaps we sounded a bit like we were so harsh.”

Little bit self-righteous—look what we’ve done!

I don't know—maybe that was the way some Australians saw it at the time. But here’s the point: it unraveled very quickly. Because the GFC hit, and the saying in Australia was “go hard, go early, go households.” We pumped a whole heap of money out there to try and counter the GFC, in my view, far too much for too long. Some would say, “Well, that was the voice of reason and experience.” I’d say that talking, others might say, “Oh, Anderson, you just did a tight Scot.”

Right, I thought it was two months, and then we started to build up the debt again. And then we had COVID, and now we’ve got climate policy, which in my view has often been ill-advised, not subject to rigorous economic analysis and environmental analyses for the real impact that those policies will have.

And here’s one point that I would challenge people to really, you know, correct me on, but I think I’m right. Right through all the tendency and policy terms has been to produce results that discriminate against younger people that make it harder for them to improve their real wages and harder for them to get their foot on to the asset ladder.

Unless—

Well, how much do you think that that’s driven, in some sense, consciously and explicitly, by something approximating an anti-growth ethos?

I mean, my understanding is that the more radical voices on the climate amelioration front presume that it’s simply impossible for upcoming generations of people in the West, and certainly people in the developing world, to aspire to anything even approximating the standard of living that we currently enjoy, and that they should bloody well get used to having less. And the sooner, the better.

And so the fact that young people are being priced out of the housing market, let’s say, and face a more uncertain economic future in some ways looks to me like a feature, not a bug. It's something that’s actually part of the plan because if your viewpoint is fundamentally Malthusian, you think, “Well, human beings will multiply until there’s far too many of us and there’ll be a catastrophe as a consequence,” which is pretty simple-minded biological modeling, by the way, then you’re going to assume that everything has to be oriented towards placing extremely severe constraints on growth.

And if that means impoverishing people now while you’re forestalling some hypothetical future catastrophe, then that’s entirely justifiable. And it seems to me we’re running down that road as fast as we possibly can, you know, with moral flag firmly in the air, saying to young people—including the developing world— “Well, you know, we had it pretty good, but we probably burnt out more than we should have, and I think it’s time for you guys to pay.”

And so, like, I don't buy any of that because I don't think the limits to growth model is biologically appropriate in the least. Because human beings aren't yeast in a Petri dish, by any stretch of the imagination.

And I think that the idea that we need to impoverish the poor and the young to save the planet—well, not only is that not only morally reprehensible and arrogant, but will also produce a far worse planet on the environmental front.

I mean, I think all the data suggests that, and so I don't exactly understand why people are buying into this with such avidity. Because there’s no evidence whatsoever that it is producing the results that are intended, even by the people who are pushing forward the policies.

Black Rifle Coffee Company is helping you knock out your holiday shopping with a ton of awesome new products this year. Shop the best brewing gear, thermoses, mugs, and apparel designed for folks who love country and coffee. Black Rifle sources the most exotic roast from around the globe, and all coffee is roasted here in the U.S. by veteran-led teams of coffee experts. Stuff your Christmas stockings with the latest roasts from America's coffee for 10% off, with the code Jordan.

Better yet, sign your Secret Santa up for a coffee club subscription. Imagine the joy of a pre-scheduled coffee delivery—your favorite roast when you need them most. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Black Rifle Coffee Company is veteran-founded and operated. They take pride in serving coffee and culture to people who love America. Every purchase you make with Black Rifle helps support veteran and first responder causes. Go to blackriflecoffee.com and use promo code Jordan for 10% off coffee, coffee gear, apparel, and when you sign up for a new coffee club subscription. That’s blackriflecoffee.com, with promo code Jordan for 10% off. Black Rifle Coffee: supporting veterans and America’s coffee.

[Music]

A lot of issues in there! Let me have a little bit of a go. Let me have a little bit of a go. I think you’re right: our parliaments now are infused with a lot of people who think we’ve got to stop growth and wind it back; but they won’t tell you that.

So I decided to say to me a couple years ago, when I said, “We’ve got to be really careful on climate change policy if we frighten the living daylights out of our kids so they’re all so depressed as we tell they are because I think there’s no future,” rather than saying, “Well, here’s a challenge; let’s go out and try and solve it. We’ve solved other challenges; we can solve this one!” They’ve become very defeatist.

And now we get stories all the time about young men having vasectomies because they didn’t want to bring children into this terrible world. And the scientists said to me, “Ah, well, it’s because governments are not taking effective control over climate, and that’s what’s depressing the children.”

So I went to Australia’s, the buckeye respect most, a fellow called McCrindle in this country. He has a research outfit, and I asked him—I said this anxiety amongst our young people—record numbers of kids expressing anxiety are because of climate change. “I think the world’s going to end.” He said, “No, it’s much more complicated than that. The kids are smart; they’re working out there’s going to be really hard for them to get a job. They’re working now; there’s going to be really hard for them to afford a home. They’re working out that probably means they’re going to have to live at home and not go and fly. They’re working out the romance is very difficult. They’re worried about climate, but there’s a whole heap of things.”

So there you have it!

So you couldn’t possibly confess your policies were going to make it even harder for young people? So this is at the heart, in my view, of a lot of the problem we now have.

I alluded to it briefly: traditionally, in Australia, we’ve had three broad philosophical political streams: Conservatism, nothing left to conserve, so they haven’t got much to say; the classic liberals believed in small government, free enterprise, strong civil societies—well, now they look to government for everything, it seems; and the social democrats are sort of left-of-center types, many of whom look— they were pretty noble; their objectives at least were noble.

Last time I said that was particularly true of the union leader types and the people who were really working for the working class. Many of them were people who just wanted the weak and the oppressed and the mods and lives to be recognized as members of the community.

You know, part of the family. Australia— that’s noble! I disagree with what they wanted to do; we used to have these arguments in the parliament. People had views, and they assessed the issues of the day; they looked through the lens of— you know, to the— what they thought Australia should look like.

But now there’s a fourth, which is this inversion of our traditional belief system so that now the problem is that Mother Earth is God. We’re the enemy of Gaia; we’re the ones who have offended, and we must atone by maybe we’ve got to reduce our living standards.

Or at its extremes, you think Club of Rome in the '60s, “We’re all going to die; there’s too many of us.”

If you really press some of them, it boils down to life about ethics—you know, we’re sinking the planet—the lifeblood is going to go down. So we’ve got to— so anything’s justified.

We’ve got to jettison some.

Yeah, now, would you rather be the person, Jordan, who was jettisoned, drowned, or the person who made the decision that somebody else was going to?

Yeah, well, that’s a classic case of moral relativism.

Yeah, exactly!

Well, I also think that that model— it certainly isn’t the only model that you can derive from the data, let’s say, because one of the things I learned when I was deeply investigating the relationship between economic growth and long-term environmental viability, let’s say sustainability, something like that, was that strangely enough— and perhaps not so— if you make people— if you can lift people out of absolute poverty and get them up to something approximating $5,000 a year in terms of average, say, contribution to GDP, then they stop adopting a short-term view, and they start to adopt a long-term view.

And I suppose partly why we want security, which is what wealth can offer, at least to some degree, is so that we can—we’re not bound by the absolute emergencies of the moment.

Absolutely!

They can stretch our minds across a longer span of time.

Well, and so if you make— little impact on family formation as well?

Right, right!

Well, one of the things you see is that as soon as you educate women, family size tends to fall.

And if that accuses the women of being dumb, I hate the way we do that!

Women in the developing world are not stupid!

Well, how can we be so patronizing? If you get them to a point where they think their children are going to survive, they’re going to get an education, you know, and what have you, they will do what everybody else has done and control the size of their families.

Actually, they might overshoot because of what’s being missed.

Ninety-two countries in the world today have declining populations. Ninety-two! There are only 190 countries in the world; half of them are in decline. Some demographers believe China might go from 1.4 billion to five or 600 million by the end of the century.

Right, right!

On the one-child policy, they’re not having children! The surfing of boys— not enough girls! That’s a horror story in itself!

Yeah, and you’re going to have massive loneliness and a terrible burden on young people trying to support the old people.

So you’re going to overshoot the possibility. But the real point here is your point— it’s a really relevant one, right? Lift those people out of poverty; give them a perspective where they can make wise decisions and what have you, and that issue—

And then we can talk; it’s only the Middle East and America and Africa and Nigeria— countries like that that look like they’re going to keep building populations for the next few decades. Other parts of the world, it’s stabilized; it’s all coming down.

Well, we could talk about a high immigration policy here because the government’s worried about our low birth rate in Australia.

Well, we can also talk about the perhaps what some of the preconditions for that wealth generation are. So first of all, we could point out that if you get people up to about $5,000 per year in terms of their ability to generate income, then they start to be concerned about the environment.

But the environmental concerns start to be expressed in a way that's, I would say, truly sustainable. You can imagine that we could take a top-down approach to environmental planning, but top-down solutions have the problem of first of all being unitary and second of all—so they can go catastrophically wrong if they're wrong.

They're also difficult to impose.

But if you make enough people— if you free enough people from absolute poverty, they start to be concerned about environmental maintenance locally.

So what we get is a distributed attempt across the world of people to improve the quality of their local environment. So that's maybe hundreds of millions of people that have a longer-term viewpoint instead of a few centralist utopians trying to govern the whole planet, and that's a much more stable solution.

So we should be doing everything we can to lift the world’s absolute poor out of their absolute poverty, and we do that so we can say, “Well, how do we do that?”

And one of the ways we do that is by moving towards the provision of free and ample energy. That’s a crucial issue. That’s how we fed five billion extra people, right, over the last 25 years.

And so that means we have to give some serious consideration to intelligent use of fossil fuels, which we're doing anyway— exception. We're using too many!

We are; we’re hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels.

And there are many downsides, and precautionary principles we should pursue—technologies and so forth that will lower our reliance, that help us absorb all carbon.

That’s a good thing for farms in our soils. I wouldn't want to be misunderstood of saying we should stop technology or what have you.

But here’s the rub: it’s the point that you’re making. If we’re going to pursue policies which drive people back into poverty, we will defeat ourselves unbelievably.

And no one’s paying enough attention to it!

We lift them out of poverty with available and affordable energy. And if we break that, we will drive them back into it; it’s your point.

Yes! We won’t save the planet; that’s right!

That’s because of badly designed policies driven by—I hate to say this— by the fact that we’ve become so emotive.

So I was staggered to discover that if you go out and do a poll in Australia, it’s been done, and ask Australians, “What is our contribution to global emissions?” Fifty percent of people say it’s somewhere between 10 and 20 percent.

It’s one percent!

And so here’s the rub: I’m a farmer, okay? Well, I work on a farm now; my son and daughter-in-law, as you know, run the business, and they do a terrific job, and they are looking for ways everywhere to be better environmental stewards and to absorb more carbon, pull it out of the air.

Good!

We happen to meet on that one; that’s good. That’s a good thing to do. And farmers recycle and cycle and recycle carbon.

So you’ve only got to absorb a little bit more, and if people are worried about carbon in the air, there’s part of the solution.

But here’s the point: that we’ve got to do this in ways that continue the upward march in lifting people out of deprivation of poverty—the improvement.

We don’t realize how well we’ve done, not just in lifting people out of poverty by improving their nutrition, education—with the exception of a few cultures.

Now even the girls around the world are getting much better education. We thought most people have much better access to electricity than has been thought.

That we've fallen behind in our understanding of the progress that we've made. Now it’s been so rapid, it’s hard to believe. And to stop it— I think we should take great pride in that!

And we’ve done it with research, with extension, compassion, concern for others. That’s not a bad thing to have.

Well, we’ve also done it, and it’s free market!

Well, that’s okay; so we can turn to that. So we know that we’ve made tremendous progress on the economic front, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union.

And it's part of the last 10 years—he's a little effect to it, I'm told, and by people I believe I've made a lot of people in this area—the world’s farmers have produced enough food in each of the last 10 years for 10 billion people.

That's well in excess of global population!

And I don't think we're straining our ecosystems to do it, to be honest. Using more fertilizer perhaps than I would like, and that's a story in itself; but of course that's made out of gas, it's one of the great emitters, and all of that.

Things that people are worried about, but Germany is a country where a lot of gas is turned; you know, used to make ammonia. Half the world’s grain production depends on that. The artificial fertilizers are made out of it on fossil fuel, and BASF, as I understand it in Germany, one of the biggest producers in the Western world, is moving their operations to China.

And we talk supply chain security?

Yeah.

It’s going to move!

I think that as a farmer, I’ll be blunt about it: I’m worried about that!

Yeah! I’m worried about that!

And anyway, we have made the solid progress that we’re in danger of reversing because we don’t know what we’re doing.

And here’s the other point I wanted to make, sorry, as a farmer. One thing I know is that it doesn’t matter what we do in Australia. Our chief scientists know this confirmed this in Senate hearings. Only a little while ago, when we talk about floods and fires and damage through it, it doesn’t matter what Australia does.

So as a farmer, whatever is going to happen globally is not going to be influenced by Australia. I have to prepare— my family has to prepare to farm in whatever circumstances come.

What’s the point at a practical level for politicians to say, “We’re doing the things that will save you from the next flood or the next fire or whatever in this country”— is just dishonest!

It’s not going to make any difference! We know that—there’s no evidence that any of the things we've done so far have made any difference!

But the whole—even if the whole globe did it, maybe we don’t know what the outcome would be! It doesn’t matter!

Well, one of the things with regards to carbon dioxide output, one of the things that people who are listening and watching might want to think about is, you know, I've been attacked many times for being a climate change denier, let’s say, and I don't really care for that accusation one way or another.

But one of the things I've—I know recently from my investigations is that one of the consequences of carbon dioxide overproduction over the last 15 years, because carbon dioxide levels have been going up, and some of that seems to be a consequence of anthropogenic activity—human industrial activity, let’s say—is that paradoxically, and contrary to all predictions on the environmentalist side, the planet is now 15 percent greener than it was in the year 2000.

And 15 percent is a—that’s a tremendous amount! It’s an area that’s larger than the United States. And it isn’t obvious to me that that’s a bad thing!

And it’s more than that! The most remarkable greening has occurred in semi-arid areas. And so the deserts are supposed to expand as the globe warms or the climate changes, because that was a fait accompli in terms of terminological transformation.

And what’s happening instead is that the green— that plants have invaded the semi-arid areas, to a large degree. And the reason for that is because plants have to breathe through pores.

And if they open their pores to get more carbon dioxide—because carbon dioxide is levels are relatively low, let’s say—they let water evaporate out of these pores. If there’s more carbon dioxide, they can close their pores, and then it turns out that they can grow where it’s drier.

And that’s driven not only an expansion of greening everywhere there already were plants, but the proliferation of plants into areas that couldn’t support them before.

And so that— it’s very hard for me to look at that because that's a huge change—15%—and not think, “Well, maybe more plants is a good thing.”

And then—but there’s an additional feature that’s going along with that that also has to be contended with.

And I don’t see people on the environmental front grappling with these issues in any manner that strikes me as credible. Not only has the total biomass of plants increased tremendously—15%—but crop yields have gone up. Because it turns out that carbon dioxide is a pretty damn good fertilizer.

So instead of having less food because of climate change forced by carbon dioxide, we actually have more food, and we have more food with less fertilizer.

And so I think you could make a case—and I know this is utterly heretical, and it might not even be true—that carbon dioxide outputs are, in fact, good.

And I also know, for example, that we have somewhere between 300 and 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now, and that’s actually a historical— it’s actually low by historical standards. Quite low.

And plants really have a hard time even living at 150. So that’s the cutoff for plant viability— for plants to breathe.

And so a carbon dioxide-intensive world is actually a lot more friendly to plants!

Now you could say, “Well, we’re still risking catastrophe by changing the biosphere that rapidly because of a 15% increase in plant coverages—nothing trivial!”

It may be that there are elements of that that are destabilizing in some ways I don’t understand.

But the prediction that we were going to produce an expansion of desert, for example, and a denuding of—of a transformation of semi-arid areas into desert—that all seems to be, like, completely wrong.

It’s just—that did not happen! The opposite happened! And so I don’t know what to make of that fact because, as far as I can tell, that fact is incontrovertibly true.

And so I don’t see there’s a lake for the apocalyptic environmentalists to stand on, especially given that their policies have been counterproductive, and they’re driving people into poverty.

So different question now, that’s it.

Yeah, just a brief encapsulation—yeah.

I think I’d make a few comments. I’m not a scientist; I would only say I don’t think the science has ever settled! I don’t buy that line because science always moves. It should always be questioning for more knowledge, more information.

But, so, I would assume that the science broadly tells us that things are changing, and a 15% increase is extraordinary, rapid change in yourself.

Yeah!

So I expect volatility, but there’s a couple of really important points to make out of this.

If democratically people want to address this issue, that is their right. But secondly, it must do so on an informed basis, and you must look for high-quality policy, and you won’t get that without a good debate.

So we’ve been talking about some of the things here that really matter. There’s a trade-off to be made. If you go too far with these things, and if you ask me to make a trade between saving the planet tonight on a whim and feeding people, I’m sorry, I’m going with feeding people while educating them too!

That’s a moral choice, you know. I’m going with feeding people! If you were to say to me do I think we should be looking for new technologies for reducing agriculture's reliance on fossil fuels and artificial fertilizers, as it happens, yes, I do!

But I don’t think we ought to be doing it in a way that sacrifices production and feeding people. That’s what I’m saying.

And so it comes back— we were talking earlier about budget deficits, and what have you—you’ve got to have conviction. You’ve got to be guided by the data. You’ve got to actually think facts matter. Taking people with you matters.

Well, you also talked about the necessity of being guided by principles. So one of the things we can talk about too is if we accepted the proposition that it would be good to develop policies that would ameliorate absolute poverty, and that that would be good for poor people, and that would be good for the planet too—we’ve done a lot of it.

Well, we might also ask how we’ve done it. Because I would say that it’s clearly the case that in places like communist China, let’s say, which has undergone this economic revolution, that the degree to which that economic revolution was possible was because even the Chinese Communists accepted the necessities: the necessity of some of the principles that go along with open and free markets, open and free trade.

And so one of those would be—

So the West is getting a pretty rough time now on the radical front, and this is feeding into ideas like we owe the third world reparations for our climate damage, for being colonial and oppressive, and that the ethos that’s associated with the West is fundamentally colonial and oppressive in nature.

And the thing that really bothers me about that is that I believe that the fundamental positive spirit that has imbued the West, which is actually not a Western creation because it’s actually a Middle Eastern creation, the fundamental spirit that has imbued the West is the only spirit that has ever actually lifted people who were oppressed out of their oppression.

Yeah!

And so what that means is this: the radical critique that’s been aimed at Western culture in the name of freedom for oppression is actually attacking the very spirit that has lifted people out of oppression.

To the degree that that’s been the case, I’m sure you’re right.

Well, we could start with—so what are the bedrock assumptions of Western culture that make such things as free trade possible, assuming that that generates a sort of generous wealth, which seems to be the case?

And one of them is that there’s an idea—and the West hasn't been, what would you say, without sin? And applying this idea that every single person is a locus of implicit Divine worth, regardless of their particularities—it’s a very weird proposition, right? Because we differ so much in our obviously admirable attributes.

Some of us are more intelligent, more attractive, more powerful, have more physical prowess, are more ethical or more hard-working—like there’s endless dimensions on which you can rank order human beings.

But there’s this strange proposition that emerged essentially in the Middle East that despite all that surface variability and that hierarchical rank ordering, every single person, man and woman alike regardless of race or creed or color has to be treated as a locus of divine worth.

And I don’t think that you can even make a credible argument against slavery on moral grounds without accepting that as an axiomatic presumption.

And so then I think, well if that’s the case— because look, if there’s no intrinsic worth that’s divine in some sense, so sacred, then why can’t I just do with you what I want if I have the power?

Because why is that wrong?

Exactly! Like it might be inconvenient for you, and you are no doubt going to be motivated to rebel—maybe if you don’t want to succumb—but perhaps you’d be motivated to rebel.

But I don't see how you can make a moral case that if I can do it, I shouldn’t.

If you’re going to make the moral case, you have to make the assumption that each person in some sense is created in the image of what is sacred, and you can’t violate that. Regardless of apparent evidence for hierarchical difference.

And so it’s that spirit— as far as I can tell, we were talking about William Wilberforce just before the podcast started and the British attempt to abolish slavery which is the real miracle, right?

Yeah!

Not that they were ever involved in slavery because that was true everywhere for all times, every bar including black empires!

Right, right!

Well, and it was—it was part of the alternative hypothesis, that something like might-makes-right, so might inspire moral virtue—meant right. And that was the ethos that governed everyone everywhere until this strange idea emerged that regardless of appearance, somehow each person was characterized by intrinsic and violable worth.

And so then you see the radicals go after that in the name of the poor and oppressed, and I think, “Wait a minute, guys! You’re failing to understand something here, which is that the spirit that emerged to push back against slavery is the central spirit of the very system that you’re trying to demolish.”

So how in the world is that going to work out for the people you purport to stand for practically?

I mean, it’s definitely the case that the distribution of the biblical corpus throughout Europe to begin with was part and parcel of the process that indicated to the oppressed peasantry of Europe that there was something fundamentally wrong with serfdom, for example.

That it was a violation of something like a divine order, and that all happened, that happened in large consequence because of the Gutenberg Bible and the distribution of the biblical corpus far and wide, which also helped people become literate and to also start to understand that no one had the right to oppress them.

We can go into that issue of like inviolable individual worth, but I don’t see how that idea can be challenged on historical grounds. Because as far as I can tell, that’s what happened.

It’s those ideas, strange ideas, that led to the abolition of slavery. We could talk about Britain; you know a fair bit about Wilberforce. Why don't we talk a little bit about what he did? Because it's quite the bloody miracle!

We'll be right back with our conversation with John Anderson. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series, Exodus.

So the Hebrews created history as we know it. [Music] Don't get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert.

And we're going to see that there's something else going on here that's far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest [Music] spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.

I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That's such a Christian question.

Well, I thank you for asking it, Jordan, before I do— to take up this point that you're alluding to. Australia's longer-serving prime minister—probably the deepest intellectual leader certainly since the Second World War. I'm not the only one, but he’s a very deep thinker. He was not a religious man, but he had a religious tradition in his education, I suppose you’d say. And he said that democracy is not so much a machine as a spirit in which, despite our different abilities and our different positions in society, we all have a responsibility to acknowledge that all souls are equal in the eyes of Heaven.

That’s where that idea comes from. So a higher authority is saying, you know, you and I might disagree, but I can’t laud it over you because somebody else does.

You see what I’m saying?

He’s saying that these people who are regarded as less than human, the Africans, were also fully human. And the famous text is from Galatians: “For we’re no longer slave and free. We’re no longer Jew and Gentile. We’re no longer man and woman. We’re all one in Christ.” In other words, all equal value. God doesn’t discriminate. Loves each of his creations, and loathes it when they violate one another.

That’s what he took out of it. He went away and studied; he wrote a book—you can still get a modern translation of it called "Real Christianity," and the subtitle is the difference between what people think it is and what it really is.

And that was very interesting in itself.

And one of his great supporters was Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery maker. He struck what is regarded by a lot of people— historians as the first political slogan, in a brilliant piece of pottery, incredibly intricate, bas-relief, I think that’s the word you used, of an African man looking up pleadingly. It’s incredibly lifelike; it’s a beautiful piece of work! It’s white on a Wedgwood blue background, and the thing underneath it is: “Not am I not a man and a brother.”

Right! Now this is really radical stuff! But it’s fantastic stuff!

And Churchill said when a culture stops talking about its history to its children, the story of its beliefs and its heroes, it’s saying they null and void, and young people don’t have a sense of place and they’re thus open to Karl Marx’s dictum that a people that don’t know their history are easily persuaded!

Yes!

We don’t know any of us what a hero Wilberforce is—this guy could have had the life of Riley, could have been prime minister, got his hands on those levers of power, but he dedicated his life— ultimately, successfully, as a very wealthy man, a very privileged man—to people who were not regarded as full members of the human family!

Right, right!

I think—why would you not be inspired by slavery for what, 175 years on the high seas, if I remember correctly?

Sorry, the British fought slavery for a long time—75 years!

Well, they were still fighting it!

Well, right! I mean, we did—we thought it had gone. In Australia, the Australian Federal Police were called to a house in 1975 in the suburbs of Sydney because there was a story going around that was a brothel that had slaves in it. The police said—“No, no, no, that’s— that’s slavery in Australia!”

And they turned up there; they’d been told there were 20, but they were 23! It was true! And we started to realize we had to pass laws because there were no laws against slavery in Australia!

There were no laws!

So we assumed it didn’t happen anymore, and now we know there are 45 million!

Yeah!

There’s an estimated that.

So it hasn’t gone away!

But only one empire having kept slaves then moved from within to abolish it and so the very empire we seem to most want to hate most now, of all, it’s the British Empire.

And so you had this evil slave trade known as the triangle ships: they would go out to the west coast of Africa, they would buy slaves who’d been rounded up by Africans themselves; they’d gone into the inland, slaughtered the weak and the infirm, pre-brutal stuff, and the infants and what have you, marched the able-bodied ones that could be sold for a few trinkets back to the coast—they sold to people in this reprehensible trade!

Taken to the East Indies! The way they were packed into the ships—so it was just absolutely, in your mind, mind-boggling the inhumane.

And you know there were times when they were thrown overboard so that they could just—alive to drown so the ship owners could—and traded!

The same slave traders wanted to pick up on the insurance and what a wait to—yeah, the depravity that we’re capable of slipping into!

And then they’d sail home with cargo or whatever from them, right?

Well, we need to point out that that’s par for the course, right? That’s just straight historical reality. That was also the case with the Roman Empire and with the Greeks, and you can trace slavery back as far as you want.

Every empire!

Right.

So this is—this is the classic human condition and that’s the condition in some sense of might makes right!

So, so what happens in Britain— you know, after the Protestant Reformation—no, no, he had predated that to be fair. Rome was pretty good on calling it out too; they just never had it—although they often had power; they didn’t seem to have much power in that area, particularly in terms of what some of the European countries did in South America.

But in Britain you had the rise of a deeply uneasy conscience about this! You had a slave trader himself called Newton who wrote “Amazing Grace,” the famous hymn.

He was engaged in the slave trade at one stage; he was himself enslaved by a black African queen and made to be a slave to her slaves!

This is not a one-way street! Along, and Newton is influential in the life of William Wilberforce.

And William Wilberforce, whose unbelievably privileged, he inherits a fortune—four or five hundred million in today’s money—is seen as a young gadfly, really. He goes to Oxford, does no work, just entertains everybody because he can sing, he’s got money, so he’s always got a pie in his office for the others to enjoy and they booze their way alive.

You know, it was pretty rough stuff—he goes to London and with Pitt the younger, elected to Parliament at a very early age, they become friends. He’s seen as the future Prime Minister; he goes off on a tour of Europe with the most brilliant mathematician, and via a man called Isaac Milner. And as they’re going along, and he’s tiny and Milner is huge, and the buggies are right over on an angle, they’re deep in philosophical conversation, and Wilberforce decides that he actually thinks Christianity is true!

So he goes back to England and says, “I’ve got to leave Parliament—that’s a dirty place to be involved; you know, it's not for good people like me now.” But before I do, I’ll go and talk to Newton, because he’d known when he was younger. And Newton, the ex-slave trader, says no; stay in Parliament, fight slavery; commit your life to getting rid of this evil.

Well, he did! And he teamed up with some remarkable women in those days—remarkable women, Hannah More, one of the most gifted drama people of a time, communicator, educator, the Thorntons, who are the wealthiest families in—family in Europe, banking family in the world.

In other words, they resourced it! A terribly inconvenient, but you had a bunch of white privileged Christians led by William Wilberforce! They abolished slavery—the trade first, and then slavery itself!

Horrendously, they forked down so much money, that had impact the debt of Britain for a long time when they ended—when they actually banned slavery because they compensated the slave owners, including the Church of England, I'm ashamed to say!

Well, that's how bad that trade was. They didn't actually compensate the slaves themselves who had been set free for the owners!

Now, more than that!

Well, so why do you—so here’s a question, and it’s worth delving into. So obviously, Wilberforce was off arguing from at least, to begin with, something approximating a minority position.

Yeah, very much!

But his words didn’t fall on deaf ears!

Right!

He was able to elicit an echo of conscience in the people that he was faced.

Well, so to me, the consequence of that is or the reason for that is that by that time, the notion that all human beings were made in the image of God had permeated the English narrative consciousness enough so that when what that meant was made explicit by someone like Wilberforce and people were being called on their hypocrisy, their own conscience echoed the claim.

Yep.

Yeah, but there’s another aspect to it that’s really interesting. I’ll just—to finish on what Britain then did is to try to end it everywhere else!

And so they sent the most powerful navy in the world to freeze, you know, to stop slavery on the high seas. And a lot of white sailors died for it. Were they racist because they were white males?

No!

No, dying to end black slavery—so this is much more nuanced.

I mean, this idea of calling out one race against another for all the evils of the world does not stack up for a moment!

Now, to come back to your question: it’s Jermaine to that. I reckon it would be fair to say that it did start to fall on fertile ears, but the shocking part of it was that he was saying it’s not just—we weren’t Europeans who are human beings who need to be valued!

See what I’m saying? He’s saying that these people who are regarded as less than human, the Africans, were also fully human! And the famous text is from Galatians: “For we’re no longer slave and free. We’re no longer Jew and Gentile. We’re no longer man and woman. We’re all one in Christ.” In other words, all equal value. God doesn’t discriminate!

Loves each of his creations and loathes it when they violate one another!

That’s what he took out of it!

He went away and studied; he wrote a book—you can still get a modern translation of it called "Real Christianity," and the subtitle is the difference between what people think it is and what it really is.

And that was very interesting in itself!

And one of his great supporters was Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery maker. He struck what is regarded by a lot of people— historians as the first political slogan, in a brilliant piece of pottery, incredibly intricate, bas-relief, I think that’s the word you used, of an African man looking up pleadingly. It’s incredibly lifelike; it’s a beautiful piece of work!

It’s white on a Wedgwood blue background, and the thing underneath it is: “Not am I not a man and a brother.”

Right!

Now this