The Makings of a Leader | The Honourable Tony Abbott | EP 393

I want the future to be at least as good as the recent past, uh, and yet things look much more ominous now than at any time since the early 1940s. I don't think we're going to fix it, um, by surrender. Uh, whether it's economic surrender, whether it's military surrender, surrender is not the way. Um, a a decent and self-confident approach is going to be best for [Music] everyone.

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today, I'm speaking with Australian journalist and former Prime Minister The Honorable Tony Abbott. We met before once in Australia, and this will be a follow-up to that. We discuss Australia's role on the world stage, the problems facing the Australian economy and culture, the broader problems that face the West, how the quasi-cult of carbon threatens in particular the poor in the developing world, why new religions propagate where traditional faith has been abdicated, and the looming threat of war as China destabilizes and Putin pushes forward against Ukraine.

We also discuss our joint involvement in the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the Ark, which is a new venture, um, grounded in London, designed to put forward a positive vision of the future that everyone could in principle be on board with voluntarily. So, Mr. Abbott, let's start by talking about Australia as a whole. I mean, what role do you think Australia plays on the international front now? Like, H, how do you think Australia should be conceptualized by people outside of the country?

Well, Jordan, I think Australia is one of those wonderful countries which is big enough to be interesting and significant but not so big as to be intimidating and threatening. Australia's history is such that there's really no one anywhere in the world who has a grievance against us. Um, and that's not true of so many other countries. You think of the United States, you think of Britain, you think of France, you think of Germany, you think of Italy, you think of Russia, you think of China—there are grievances, uh, that different countries have against all of those countries that all of those countries have great strengths as well.

But, um, Australia is one of those happy places, uh, which has been a welcoming home to migrants from all over the world. Uh, yes, we fought on Britain's side in two world wars, and we fought as America's ally in just about every, uh, conflict over the last 100 years that America's been in. And yet we've managed to do that, uh, while retaining, I think, our global reputation as a country which is free, which is fair, and which wants to be a good mate, uh, to the people and the countries of the world wherever we can.

So that, at least in principle, lays open the option for countries like Australia, and I suppose this was true of Canada for a good while too, although I don't know if it is any longer, to play a role in, what would you say, being a good faith partner in brokering peace, for example.

And so, um, what problems do you think Australia faces at the moment? What—and what—and, H, how are the issues that are broadly besetting the West, say on the cultural war front, making themselves manifest in Australia?

Well, the problems that every country has all the time are essentially how do we maintain our prosperity; how do we maintain our security? Um, and just at the moment, uh, this is perhaps a little bit more acute than usual. Uh, we've got all of the challenges which, um, all of the Western countries currently face.

Uh, we've got the risk of recession, we've got, uh, highish inflation, we've got all of the supply chain issues which arose from the pandemic, and then the conflict in Ukraine, then the degree of decoupling with China. So we've got all of those issues. We've got, uh, a particular problem with energy. While we are abundantly blessed, Jordan, with coal, with gas, with uranium, we don't have all that much oil. But because of the emissions obsession, uh, we are not using these blessings sufficiently to our own advantage.

So that's a particular problem that we've got. We're exporting our coal and our gas, uh, to the countries that are still only too eager to get it, but we're not readily using it as much as we...