Originally published on Oxford Policy Podcast.
In this episode, Nick Fabbri speaks with Bob Carr, a former Australian Foreign Minister and long-serving Premier of New South Wales. They discuss politics and embarking on a political career, the art of good policymaking and some of the major policy reforms of the Carr Labor Government, international affairs and security issues, Australia and its natural beauty, and the love and grief that Bob has for his late wife Helena Carr.
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Professor the Honourable Bob Carr was the longest continuously serving premier in the history of New South Wales, a major Australian state, from 1995-2006. He then entered the Australian Senate in 2012 and served as foreign minister for eighteen months. Since leaving politics Bob has led a distinguished career as an author and academic. Bob is also an accomplished writer and has published many books, including My Reading Life, Diary of a Foreign Minister, and Run For Your Life.
Transcript below ^_^
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 1:00)
Welcome back dear friends and listeners to another episode of the Oxford Policy Podcast. My name is Nick Fabbri and I'll be your host for today. It's a great honour to welcome the Honourable Bob Carr to the program today, who joins us all the way from sunny Sydney in Australia.
Bob was the longest continuously serving Premier of New South Wales from 1995 to 2006, leading the Labor Party to multiple electoral victories and implementing significant policy reforms across the environment, education, infrastructure and healthcare policy domains. Bob then returned to the Australian Senate in 2012 to serve as Foreign Minister for 18 months in the Gillard and Rudd governments. Bob is also an accomplished writer and has published many books including My Reading Life, Diary of a Foreign Minister and Run for Your Life.
He's an adornment to the Australian policy and civil society and it's a privilege to be speaking with him today. Welcome Bob.
[Bob Carr] (1:01 - 1:02)
Nick, pleasure to be with you.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:02 - 1:25)
I've always enjoyed your reflections on your early days growing up in humble circumstances in a fibro shack amongst the sand hills of Mattreville in South Sydney and how you found your way to attending branch meetings of the Australian Labor Party as a 15 year old. So can you take us back to that time and paint a picture of what life was like back then and what called you to attend those political branch meetings as a youngster?
[Bob Carr] (1:26 - 2:40)
I'm inviting you to think about a suburban Australia, what was then a bit of the urban fringe, a new housing estate, fibro cottages, please don't call it a shack, fibro cottages on a sand hill from which the scrub had been recently bulldozed. And my father is a serviceman in World War II and won himself a war service loan to enable him to buy his own home. He's a train driver.
I heard you talk about politics quite a bit and in the way that political prejudices and perspectives are transmitted from parents and children. I absorbed some of his hot-blooded, indignant laborism and before long was reading a bit about one of the labor legends, Prime Minister Ben Chifley from 1945 to 1949 and in the end deciding at the age of 15 that I wanted to be a labor politician. And the first step, even as young as I was and naive as I was, had to be joining the local branch of the Labor Party.
[Nick Fabbri] (2:41 - 3:07)
I suppose in joining the Labor Party and finding yourself amongst a lot of working-class, older people from Mattreville and South Sydney, it would have been quite an interesting juxtaposition basically between this sort of youthful, idealistic person who was interested in a political career and what that might mean for, I guess, the economic and political fortunes of these older working people who were attending these meetings in good faith that they could actually shape something in Australian democracy.
[Bob Carr] (3:09 - 5:25)
Here's one perspective I've got and that is that local party branch activity tends to be dominated by what I'd describe as municipalism. People talk about roads and bridges and people from working-class backgrounds can find it very attractive to be elevated and to become a local councillor, a local alderman. And that means they've got an interest in talking, talking, talking about roads and gutters and some local subdivisions that might be controversial and garbage collection.
It drove me mad as a kid. I was wildly interested in big political issues in seeing that the Labor Party was revived under the leadership of Gough Whitlam. That's what I wanted.
He wasn't leader when I joined. And I wanted to see, for the first time since 1949, a federal Labor government. But local branch activity, as I said, dominated by municipal concerns, was somehow opposed to my idealistic nation-building view of Labor's task in the early 1960s.
And I only stuck at it because I had this burning ambition. I thought all the time I was sitting at those meetings with local working-class men and women, mainly men, that one day I wanted to be a member of Parliament. And I had to be patient.
And I had to learn everything about, well, effectively about the ethos, not just the rules, not just the policies, but the very spirit of a political party. I mentioned how municipalism can take over local party activity, whatever party, Conservative, Labor in the UK, whatever party it is. But another principle applying to political parties is the importance of party ethos.
More important than ideology, more important than policy detail. The spirit of a party and what that permits, what that encourages, what it fosters.
[Nick Fabbri] (5:26 - 6:45)
And there's been a lot of commentary about the decline in civic participation and also participation in party politics. And nonetheless, those kind of aldermanic or municipal exchanges still do take place. There is blood in the bodies of the old party still, even though it's sort of anemic in some quarters of the country, it's still there.
And I think in Diary of a Foreign Minister, you write, attention must be paid to these bread and butter kind of elements of the party as well. Coming towards that sense of patience and becoming, in realising your dream or your destiny, in Run for Your Life, your kaleidoscopic and unconventional political memoir, you open with a vignette about being 30 and going nowhere, still waiting, not being the 15-year-old boy who's just joined the branch, but being very much in the world, while a writer for the Bulletin, where you recounted the feeling of observing and writing about politics and political figures, while longing to be in politics yourself, and actively shaping policy and the governance of the nation. So what did it feel like to go over the waterfall and finally enter politics after aspiring to be part of it for so long, aware of all its challenges and pitfalls as a career, and then to suddenly find yourself amongst figures you'd written about, such as Neville Rann and Bob Hawke?
[Bob Carr] (6:46 - 9:48)
Well, it was, for me, fulfilment. Building a political career was fulfilment of that dream I had as a 15-year-old, that I would be a career politician, and an honourable one, committed to nation-building, committed to reform politics at that. A career politician, but with somewhat noble aspirations.
And as soon as I was elected member of the State Parliament, the New South Wales State Parliament, I felt a sense of having arrived and having no time to waste. So when, after 13 months, I became the State Minister for Planning and Environment, I embarked on a pretty vigorous nature conservation agenda, based on what other occupants of the office had done, but also based on the notion that I'd be building a reputation for myself as a bright young minister who was making a difference, and in particular, making a difference by saving the environment, picking up a tradition of nature conservation, and politically helping craft a natural working partnership of the New South Wales Labour Party and the voluntary conservation movement. And that was to have an effect in, I'm not saying I drafted federal labour, but I think it was a coincidence altogether that federal labour under Bob Hawke began to take a strong position on saving the Dane Tree, the wet tropical rainforest of North Queensland, on top of what it had already done in saving the wild rivers of Tasmania.
And for a long time, this stood as a very important demarcation in Australian politics. Labour government, the federal state, would take a stand in saving the great natural forest systems and the wild rivers, and ultimately, the reef system of Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef. Labour's commitment to environmental protection became a feature of Australian politics, and it enabled, well, for example, Bob Hawke's Labour government to draw the preferences of the so-called Green political party in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s.
My own government benefited, my own party benefited in my early years in the leadership, because of the strong nature conservation record I'd laid down, ineffably getting the preferences of people who voted first for the Greens. British voters would appreciate the preferential voting enables you in the Australian system to vote for the Greens, but then in the vote that really counts to give you a number two preference to the Labour Party.
[Nick Fabbri] (9:50 - 10:40)
And I think that whole vignette really highlights, in the same way, of the local branch meeting, influencing state party policy and state party conferences and things, the bottom-up nature of Australian democracy and its ultimate, I think, quite vital and healthy state, where you can affect macro change from smaller positions which don't immediately have your hand on the lever of power, essentially. Coming to, you mentioned being a cabinet minister within 13 months of starting, you then served as opposition leader from 1988 to 1995, and then you then had a remarkable 11-year stint as Premier of New South Wales from 1995 to 2006.
Looking back on your time as Premier, what are some of the reforms and legacies you're most proud of, particularly when it comes to generating that conversation with the future you've written about?
[Bob Carr] (10:41 - 14:06)
I think reform of the police force was very important because New South Wales had a reputation as suffering a police force that was prone to corruption. We forced a Royal Commission as an opposition. The Wood Review?
Was it the Wood Review? Yeah, the Wood Royal Commission, and it got passed because the independents sponsored it. We backed it.
It got forced on a resisting conservative state government, but it fell to my government to implement every one of the recommendations, some of them very bold recommendations for institutional reform that has given us, here I choose my words carefully, no longer a corruption-prone police force, but a corruption-resistant police force. The second big area of reform was in nature conservation and the environment. The first marine national parks, a million hectares of wilderness protection, 350 new national parks during my 10 and a half years as Premier, major environmental reforms in water management, storm water management and all the rest.
The third area was drugs policy, Australia's first medically supervised injecting room, which has saved lives, but was even though a modest departure from orthodoxy, still considered brave at the time. I think the way we built support for that was an exemplary case of government managing what might have been an alarming reform. Pioneering private-public partnerships in Australia, we got $800 million of capital for the road network around Sydney.
Sorry, we got $5 billion of capital for the road network around Sydney. I think it overshadowed what came from the state budget. So we really did establish alternative sources of infrastructure delivery and a system with tollways based on user pays and getting great slabs of additional environmentally sound expressways, cutting travel times, saving fuel while protecting the state budget.
I mean, these are very, very good models. Introducing competitive policy in various areas of the state public sector followed, but we got down state debt while running a very bold infrastructure program. And I'm very proud that at the end of my time in government, the amount spent per head on hospital care in Sydney's western suburbs had pulled even with that spent per head on hospital care in the older, more affluent inner city and north Sydney suburbs.
And it shows what a long-term social democratic government can do budget by budget, shifting resources, overcoming long-entrenched inequities.
[Nick Fabbri] (14:07 - 14:23)
I think it goes to the heart of that nation-building project you referenced at the beginning, when thinking about Whitlam and the idea of, what was the expression about Octavian leaving Rome in marble and Whitlam leaving it plumbed or something like that, suburbs?
[Bob Carr] (14:26 - 14:30)
Octavian, or Augustus, inherited a Rome made of stone and left it a city of marble.
[Nick Fabbri] (14:32 - 14:33)
I think the second part of that...
[Bob Carr] (14:33 - 15:48)
To be fair, a large part of state politics is about public works. In the old days, 19th century, they called it roads, bridges, politics. And every successive state government spends more on infrastructure than its predecessor.
And a new government gets to cut the ribbon on a new hospital or a new highway or a new bridge that was started by its predecessor. And that's part of the employment. I'm very proud of what we did with great slabs of additional infrastructure for the state.
And you couldn't imagine Sydney without the east-west tunnel that runs under the city. Or the fact that with the Eastern Distributor, we enabled people to travel from the north of Sydney, all the way to the Victorian border, without a single set of traffic lights. So these are the things that any government's proud of, and we maintain the pace.
But we mobilise private sector capital in a way that never happened before, to maximise outcomes without just having a crushing debt burden on future generations.
[Nick Fabbri] (15:49 - 17:22)
And that's all the wonderful physical built environment and architecture of a city and a place and a community. But there's also the intangible legacy through education reform and adding additional units on to HSC English, for instance. And I myself, I think, in the email exchange organising this interview, mentioned that, I think it must have been 2001, 2002, so after the Sydney Olympics, I was at an auditorium where I was about eight or nine years old.
But I remember hearing you speak in an auditorium, launching the Premier's Reading Challenge and encouraging young primary school students to get through up to 100 books a year or something. And the way that that bears fruit over many decades is also, I think, heartening. Coming back to the legacy of your government from a policy and practice perspective, you maintained a remarkable longevity personally, while as Premier, but also subsequently, I think the government was voted out of office in 2010 under Christina Keneally.
But you maintained a remarkable longevity while managing and implementing contentious reforms that centre-left or social democratic parties often struggle with, such as, as you mentioned, balancing environmental conservation with economic growth, social reform, such as the drug laws, and working with business to fund infrastructure through public-private partnerships. So how would you define the art of good policy making, noting that we're at a school of government here and I'm doing the Master of Public Policy with 150 other students here, and how governments can best architect ambitious and necessary reform agendas without being labelled radical and voted out of office?
[Bob Carr] (17:23 - 21:11)
Well, I think you can be reassuring with those. With the drug, the medically supervised injecting system, people were prepared to trust me because they knew my record. I was more likely to be criticised for being conservative about drug policy than for having radical instincts.
And therefore, when Bob Carr was on TV explaining in a long interview why this was a useful experiment, I wasn't holding out unrealistic expectations. I wasn't talking of unrealistic expectations. I said anything to do with heroin, this addictive white powder, is bound to be unsatisfactory.
But what we're attempting might be less bad than any of the other alternatives. That is enabling people, while they're still addicted to heroin, to come in to a safe space, oversighted by paramedics, inject themselves as much as that very process repels and deeply concerns people like me, but be protected from an overdose death for the period they remain addicted, knowing that in the vast majority of cases, people grow out of it. By their late 30s, they're likely to give up their period of living with heroin use because they find a relationship, discover religion, or end up in a job they like and want to stick with.
So I said to the electorate, it's a matter of, if you're a mum or dad and you've got a youngster who's experimenting with this drug and is hooked on it, better to have them inject in a place where medical assistance is right on hand, than to be injecting in a dark alleyway or a corner of a park, where paramedics might be delayed in getting to them and themselves run risk of needle stick injury, which is for them an occupational health and safety challenge that deserves to be taken very seriously. This is, the medical supervised injecting, as I said, is the least bad alternative. And I think when people heard that, they realised their leader wasn't bullshitting to them.
He wasn't holding up false promises. He wasn't over eating the pudding. Low expectations, but stick with this, trust my judgment.
It's not a heroin trial. We're not decriminalising drugs. I think that's one bit of advice.
The other thing is to identify the reform in terms of the interests of the voters. When we privatise school maintenance, that is enabling local tradespeople to go in and repair the window or fix up a school building that's been vandalised. I could quote figures from the Auditor General that showed it saved the taxpayer $50 million a year.
And it's a compelling argument that the electorate hears you and they think, well, that's in our interest, that's 50 million more to spend on hospitals or classrooms. I think the other thing too, is to work even harder at that and identify key killer facts that enable you to win an argument. Margaret Thatcher, in fact, used that term, give me the killer facts, talking to her ministers.
And I think before you take a difficult case to a media conference or to the Parliament or into a radio studio, you should have a focus on a piece of paper in front of you. You should be able to list the killer facts explaining the situation to the taxpayers, who are your voters.
[Nick Fabbri] (21:12 - 23:21)
I suppose it's that art about being actually able to enter into a conversation with the electorate at all, because I think a lot of the contemporary Australian polity, we haven't had the levels of maybe the 1980s, 90s Hawkeating reform, or even Howard Costello or Car Egan reform from your administration in the past decade, decade and a half, let's say, because I think that the polity have maybe neglected the art of actually persuading voters or presenting those killer facts and implementing necessary reforms.
And ultimately, I think in one of your books I've referenced before, is that Kissinger's remark about not being able to ask the electorate for sacrifices that might be necessary in certain policy domains, whether it's climate or perhaps reining in social welfare spending to appropriate more money on, you know, defence or something in the current environment, you know, making those hard policy trade-offs.
But it all goes back to the authenticity of the politicians and the policy makers, I suppose, from what I've just gleaned from your insights then. But continuing on the above theme, one of the things that struck me most in Diary of a Foreign Minister were your humorous musings on the life that you could have had as a conservative Labor Prime Minister, perhaps compared to Rudd and Gillard, opting for fiscal restraint, more modest and compartmentalised environmental, economic and education reform packages, not the sort of the grand sweeping utopian visions that were sort of just dropped on the electorate or, you know, the mining industry or lobby groups, which then inevitably get their hackles up and do a number on you in the media and advertising campaigns, etc., and undermine your support with the electorate. So noting this and your record as Premier you've just talked about, how would you summarise your political philosophy beyond the middle way approach to politics and policy as outlined before? Substantively, what's at the heart of your ethos, your political ethos?
[Bob Carr] (23:22 - 27:40)
Well, I said when I was Premier, four objectives. One, good economic management. The public want that.
They particularly wanted it in 1995 when I was elected Premier because in several states they'd seen state Labor governments linked fairly or unfairly with incompetent fiscal outcomes. So good, good, good fiscal management. And second, a good working relationship with the private sector, maintaining economic growth, ensuring that the flow of investment into the state, encouraged by your achievement of the first objective, sound budget, was competitive with what other states were doing, but preferably better.
So you're governing in a context of economic growth to the extent you as a state government can make that happen. You're explicit, we want economic growth, we're a pro-investment government. We've got responsible fiscal outcomes working for surplus over the economic cycle.
But thirdly, we're also embracing social reform. We're also embracing social reform. And that means an openness to new ways of dealing with drugs, new ways to deal with juvenile crime.
And fourthly, the fourth big objective was elevating environmental protection. So for people who wanted reassurance, people who might be softly committed voters, swinging between the Conservatives and Labor, you had the assurance that we're working with the private sector, with the big end of town, and you've got people in business leadership who are saying to be funny about it. You know, Carr's the best liberal premier we've ever had.
And people here are treasurer, always having some kind of tax cut in the budget and progress towards surplus or the delivery of surplus. And for people open to progressive politics, who might be swinging between Labor and the Greens, the assurance that we have got a lively, active, out front environmental agenda, and where the case can be made for it. Long before same sex marriage was on the agenda, protecting the property rights of same sex couples, the drug law reform we discussed, they can see a government open to that sort of agenda.
So I think that four part mix was altogether appropriate. Now, with COVID, with the global financial crisis, there's some erosion of those principles, people think, oh, well, let's just spend, spend, spend, and debt can take care of itself. Well, debt always catches up with you.
So I'd go back to my 1995 first principles, responsible budgeting, the conservative instincts. And it's too easy, just to run up debt. And you ought to have a, you ought to have a balanced budget over the cycle, over the cycle.
And not beating up the private sector, being tough on them, when required, don't let them rule the roost. But always knowing that this is a private sector economy. And when investment decisions are made, because there's confidence, you're generating jobs.
And the best investment in our social foundations is a surplus of well paid, unionised jobs in the context of high standards of occupational health and safety, and an industrial relations system that protects the rights of working men and women. Yeah. It all hangs together.
I don't think, I don't think COVID and the global financial crisis have required a rewriting of these rules. And I think centre left parties will be forced by circumstances to return to them.
[Nick Fabbri] (27:40 - 28:20)
Yeah, indeed. I mean, it's just that, I mean, to come back to your remark about being a liberal in labour clothing, or perhaps not being, you know, anti-business enough as someone on the left of the party might like, you know, it's sort of hard to kind of maintain that coherent four pillar approach to politics and your political philosophy, your reason for being in being in power, and to make those long term changes, but not being all things to all people and kind of being like a, just a big hodgepodge mix of kind of contradictory, you know, different political philosophies. But the way you framed it does hang together, but it's more nuanced than just being like a socialist.
[Bob Carr] (28:20 - 29:54)
What I say about being pro-business, which is pro-investment, doesn't mean having cronies. It means having no favourites in the private sector. You win if you've got the best idea.
You win if you win in an open, supervised, corruption resistant, tender process. Yeah. So no one should say that invites favours, and the private sector, at the same time, as having a government that encourages their investment, and can always reach the ears of the head of the government, the ministers, has also got to deliver, for example, on the highest occupational health and safety standards.
And we successfully over those 10 years, upped the standards, upped the standards, and reduced the number of workplace injuries. In all the massive building for the Sydney Olympics, there's only one workplace death. And I'm told that that's a new standard, a new standard for big projects.
In my lifetime, I think one of the happiest things that's happened is that the law takes occupational health and safety seriously. And my government was engaged in a major battle with James Hardy to bring them back to Australia, when they'd gone offshore, and force them to accept responsibility for the workplace and household victims of asbestos.
[Nick Fabbri] (29:55 - 30:00)
Mesothelioma, is that the mesothelioma asbestos case, wasn't it?
[Bob Carr] (30:00 - 31:13)
Yes. But they left the fund in Australia, purportedly big enough to look after the victims of asbestos exposure, and then left Australia, no longer an Australian entity. They went and registered, I think, in Amsterdam.
By setting up a public inquiry into what they'd done, we forced them to return. They had no alternative to return, and to fully accept the topping up of that fund, so that every, that the family of every guy in overalls, who had breathed in these fatal white threads into his lungs, every family knew that when their breadwinner died, because of asbestos related disease, their settlement would enable them to pay off the mortgage, to pay off the car, to survive. And I'm so proud that we, working with the victims, working with the ACTU, were able to deliver that.
That was a major battle, and showed that the government was prepared to stand up, and not be praised, to a big, then reputable, public company.
[Nick Fabbri] (31:13 - 31:24)
Right, right. Which demonstrates the pro worker, and not necessarily a cosy relationship with the private sector. You're not afraid to be tough on them, when you have to be.
Shifting away...
[Bob Carr] (31:24 - 32:04)
When there's a strike on the Sydney waterfront in 1998, sorry, when there's a lockout, because the employer of waterfront labour said, I'm sacking all my unionised employees, and I'm going to bring in anti-union and non-unionised employees, who've been trained overseas in Dubai. That caused a major set piece battle. My government unabashedly said, we want a resolution to this.
But in the meantime, we're standing with the workers who've lost their jobs, only for being union members.
[Nick Fabbri] (32:04 - 32:12)
Whereas the Howard government, and Peter Reef, if I recall, came in and cleaned out the MWU, and the maritime workers, the dock workers.
[Bob Carr] (32:13 - 32:57)
Yeah, they were with the errant employer. Now, we've also said the workers have got to accept the reform agenda. But there is, we will never live with the principle that people can be sacked, simply for having a union ticket, for being a member of a union.
And by the way, when it came time to settle with James Hardy, I said, well, hang on, the government's not going to force a settlement here. In goes the ACTU, the trade union leadership, and in goes Bernie Banton, the representative of the victims, and they will negotiate the outcome with James Hardy. When they've got what they want, they bring it to the state government, and we will legislate it.
[Nick Fabbri] (32:57 - 33:55)
Mm-hmm. So, shifting away from state politics and leading your own government, in 2012, you remarkably found yourself back in politics, this time in the Australian Senate, to fill a casual vacancy upon the appointment of the then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, following the resignation of Mark Arbib, for Australian political fans who remember those tumultuous times. You spent the next 18 months as foreign minister, your dream job, where you were involved in international issues, such as the conflict in Syria, Australia's campaign for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, and managing the rise of China.
So, the ins and outs of it obviously immortalised in your book, which we've referenced a couple of times already, The Diary of a Foreign Minister. But how would you distill your time in federal parliament, compared to state parliament, and what it was like to be foreign minister after all those years of, I suppose, yearning for such a role?
[Bob Carr] (33:57 - 36:10)
It was a great pleasure, and I think another reason why I feel tremendously fulfilled by my time in politics, and very happy with it. I felt I'd succeeded in everything I wanted to do, and did so with honour in my time in politics. It was an opportunity to add value.
It was too short, a mere 18 months, because you're building relationships. I would have liked more time to strengthen our relationships in Southeast Asia with the world of the Association of Southeast Asian States, a 10-nation grouping. We made a decision over the wishes of then Prime Minister Julia Gillard, not to oppose the elevation of the status of the Palestinians in the General Assembly.
That was a vote taken in 2012. The pressure on us to join the US and vote against it, I pulled that back with the support of the majority of the parliamentary party to abstaining, not the wishes of Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister. But that was an important battle, and from the perspective 10 years on of what's happening in Gaza, it was the right thing to foster a reward for Palestinians who were taking a peaceful path to nationhood.
That was an interesting battle. The Syrian crisis demonstrated the limits of the responsibility to protect notion. Here you had a calamitous civil war with massive destruction, some of it comparable to what's happening in Gaza.
But there was no mechanism, given the divisions on the Security Council about the war, to get the protection for a civilian population in large measure abandoned by its very own government.
[Nick Fabbri] (36:12 - 38:04)
It was a disturbing, I think, instantiation. I know your predecessor and friend, Gareth Evans, did a lot of the work in developing that doctrine of R2P through his work at the International Crisis Group. I actually spoke to him on my own podcast a couple of years ago about this, but he does reflect on the emergence of the Syrian civil war as being when the rubber hit the road, the doctrine didn't stand up because of those fundamental schisms on the Security Council.
I think that was to the international community's great shame, because you ended up with millions of displaced people, but also hundreds of thousands casualties and people dead as well. Coming back to the point before, in a lot of your writings and reflections on your time as Foreign Minister, you note the essentially human nature of the role in the office. You're attending conferences such as the G20, various Security Council conferences, ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the way in which, as Foreign Minister representing the country, alongside head of state and the Prime Minister, is that sort of thing in international law, those three key roles, almost where the state is embodied in the person, which is quite remarkable.
But you talk about meeting with people who have since gone on to become national leaders, like Fumio Koshida was the Foreign Minister at the time you were, now he's leader in Japan, mixing with Sergei Lavrov, who's obviously still Foreign Minister in Russia with Putin. Obviously meeting with Obama and Putin at various times throughout your time, but could you sort of reflect on the essentially human nature and the relational nature of the role, and I guess some of the insights you you took away from that?
[Bob Carr] (38:05 - 41:28)
Yeah, well I remember reflecting on this during the G20. It was in Petersburg in my very last days, literally my last days as Foreign Minister, because my election back in Australia was witnessing the defeat of a federal Labour government led by Kevin Rudd. But there I was at the G20, and I reflected as I looked around, knowing you were going to be defeated, thrown out of your job within days, enables you to have a different perspective.
I looked at the leaders of the G20 all wearing the robes of national leadership and being embodiments of their country, and I thought of the political careers that lay behind them, and the role of accidents, and mount a bank performance, sheer chance, a fluke, the rise of people to a natural level of incompetence, the role that luck provides, one politician, the then leaders of Argentina and Brazil send out very provisional preparations for these jobs, to be the local politicians suddenly transmuted into being the embodiments of their nations in a forum like this. I have one good thing, Putin was chairing it, his career, out of Brisbane, where he headed the KGB's listing post, all of a sudden he's running Petersburg as a deputy mayor, and so on, climbing the breezy ladder of his politics.
Obama himself sitting one spot away from where I was sitting, we had the president of Indonesia between us, and reflected on the element of sheer good luck in his career, the 2008 financial collapse that occurred months before, two months before the presidential election, but also the way his talent for spooch making, for example, his intelligence, his cool-headedness, clinched every advantage that luck had conferred on him. But there's a large element of being the right person in the right place, at the right time.
Angela Merkel herself, and the large element of chance in her career, and the way her electorate warmed to her very ordinariness, and her authenticity, I don't mean ordinariness in a remotely unfriendly way, she demanded admiration for the workaday approach and spirit she embodied. All these reflections occurred to me as I sat there in the horseshoe arrangement at that conference as the debate on Syria went late at night.
[Nick Fabbri] (41:29 - 42:13)
Amazing stuff. And so looking around the world today, at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East, in Gaza, and the ongoing sabre rattling in the South China Sea, it's hard not to feel as though the liberal democratic order of the last 80 years could all come undone or unspool. And to quote Yeats, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
So are you as despondent as some are about the age we seem to be entering? And based on your experience as foreign minister, how can the nations of the world work together to ensure a peaceful global order while managing the rise of China and the emergence of a multipolar, increasingly authoritarian world?
[Bob Carr] (42:15 - 43:21)
I think we've got to this is what I'd recommend. One, that serious diplomatic effort in the Western world be committed to nurturing the concept of detente between the world's prevailing power, the United States, and the rising power, which is China. We should ask ourselves this question, are the differences, for example, over Taiwan, or artificial islands in the South China Sea, so beyond the scope of any diplomatic formula, that we've got to accept a slide into war, with the high chance of that war becoming a nuclear exchange?
I think not. And diplomatic solutions to those problems are more manageable, where you've got a commitment to reduce tensions, the very essence of the detente that the United States and the old Soviet Union arrived at in the late 70s, continuing despite stress points during the Reagan years.
[Nick Fabbri] (43:21 - 43:29)
But does that just mean giving strategic space to China and acceding to its kind of designs on the region? Or does it mean granting Russia what it wants with the...
[Bob Carr] (43:29 - 45:08)
You take Taiwan, for example, it means very firmly stating that there cannot be a resolution of this by military force, and saying to China, we accept that that means the Western world continuing to acknowledge China's claim that Taiwan is a province of China. Now that diplomatic formula could hold the peace from 1972, right through to very recently, it's worth recommitting to it. So the relationship between the rising power and the prevailing power is perfectly capable of deft, detente-charged diplomatic management, detente-focused international management, providing America does not become obsessed that everything China does is a threat to its primacy.
That's a fatal way of defining things, or of China seeking to interpret everything that happens around it as a commitment to contain China. I think the second thing that needs to happen is for the West to accept that means the United States under Trump leadership, that continuing support for Ukraine is both affordable and necessary. Yes, even while we enable the exploration of diplomatic options for a negotiated settlement, but it cannot be at the expense of a viable Ukrainian nation.
[Nick Fabbri] (45:10 - 46:00)
I suppose the specter that haunts all of the aforementioned geopolitical issues is the 2024 US presidential election in America and the possible return of Donald Trump, and what that might mean for both Ukraine and China, and obviously the question in Israel, Gaza and Palestine at the moment. And so you are a great admirer of America and the charm of its liberal values while being fully aware of America's capacity to get things catastrophically wrong. Witness Iraq, for instance, and Afghanistan, indeed.
And so what's your take on the health of the American policy and civic culture at the moment, and how the great republic's pathologies might bear out on some of these current geopolitical situations over the next year or so?
[Bob Carr] (46:01 - 47:40)
I think American civic health is in a wretched state, a wretched condition, measured by polarisation, extreme polarisation and dysfunctionality. A large part of the American electorate is prepared to vote for Trump, not caring about the damage he can do, for example, in abandoning support for Ukraine and thus undermining NATO, or for example, returning to the most extreme, adopting the most extreme protectionist policies and damaging jobs, yes, in America itself. The alienation against their own national capital is so extreme in parts of the United States, that those electorates are prepared to gift Trump with majorities in perhaps five of the battleground states, conferring on him the majority he needs in the electoral college to become president for a second, non-consecutive term, for a non-consecutive term.
And this is frightful. And I invite people to begin to speculate, not about America on January 20 next year, when Trump might be sworn in, but about other possibilities here. What would America look like after four years of Trump?
And would an even more adventurous figure than Trump be prepared to take over from Trump, mobilising his political base?
[Nick Fabbri] (47:40 - 47:43)
Like Senator Tom Cotton or, you know, someone really...
[Bob Carr] (47:43 - 50:15)
Senator Tom Cotton or Ramaswamy, or Marjorie Taylor Greene. And would we then be in a realm where the term fascist or crypto-fascist or neo-fascist might be quite applicable to prominent national tendencies in American politics? So what does the country look like four years after Trump?
And what happens to the Democratic Party? Is the Democratic Party, if it's defeated by Trump, or if it struggles on and manages four more years under Biden, but with infeasibility and political undermining, the loss of whatever strength it's got in the House and the Senate, is the Democratic Party fatally wounded? So I just think, allowing our imaginations to work at what will be left of this show four years after either a Trump or a Biden victory.
Who inherits leadership in America in 2029? Who inherits leadership? How strong might the current of isolationism be running if America walks out of Ukraine?
Which would really amount to an abandonment of NATO. No NATO member would be able to trust into American support, despite the words of the treaty, and the spirit that lives around the NATO treaty. What sort of world is it?
Where else does isolation, it's hard to imagine an America that walks out of Ukraine, and flings NATO away. Slight overstatement, but that's what it seemed to represent very much. Such an America, providing reassurance to Taiwan, defending Taiwan from a possible Chinese chokehold, let alone an outright amphibious invasion, would be hard to imagine.
It's the same America a year earlier, say, had walked out on Ukraine.
[Nick Fabbri] (50:16 - 51:30)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, but the very real possibilities and that isolationist strand within the US Republican Party, and even parts of the Democratic Party as well, and national strands too, you know, it goes all the way back to, you know, William Taft, and I think a lot of figures in the early 20th century too. So it's not as if these things have, and obviously the US's reticence to enter into World War II, it's not as if these dynamics are new, but I think perhaps in the present moment they seem to be lent with a particular gravity, given what's at stake.
We heard Rory Stewart speak here at the Blavatnik School a couple of weeks ago, former Tory MP and host of the Rest is Politics podcast, and he spoke about the, you know, from the early 1990s, the great sort of democratisation of countries around the world, but in the last decade I saw the increasing authoritarianism to the point where we're looking to get, you know, where the rubber band breaks essentially, and we end up with that unspooling of the liberal democratic order that I've mentioned before, and the abrogation or abdication of US leadership around the world, and the dire state that will leave us in in 2029, as you say.
[Bob Carr] (51:33 - 51:57)
Yeah, I want to hear less speculation about about who wins Pennsylvania in November this year, and more informed speculation about what America might be like in 2029, after four years of Trump, or four years of a second Biden term.
[Nick Fabbri] (51:57 - 52:54)
Yeah, and I don't think it's overly a stretch to kind of analogise it to the way in which a lot of Roman institutions, kind of the institutions of ancient Rome, became corrupted or lacked integrity and checks and balances, and ultimately kind of crumbled and anticipated to the fall of the empire. I think sometimes the America-Rome piece is overdone, but in this case it really, I think it is that serious. We actually need to start thinking about it, and also thinking about ways in which the capacity of the Republic's institutions, constitutional structures, etc, might be revitalised and reworked to yield different outcomes, and also the political culture.
You can't have this kind of gerontocracy and gridlock in the House, the Senate, and the executive as well. It's fundamentally unworkable body politic, it seems, for resolving a lot of the major issues that the US has, and the world has as well.
[Bob Carr] (52:55 - 54:56)
They're working with a constitution written in the 1780s, amended most extensively with the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments in, I think, 1791. Some reform of the constitution during the progressive era. I think the last big amendments, it's a challenge, but it is my attempt to summarise the last big amendments, votes for women in the early 20s, the prohibition and the repeal of prohibition, and the bringing forward of the inauguration date from March 4 to January 20, which cut in the start of Roosevelt's second term.
And then the other big reform, of course, was in the late 40s, I think, institutionalising in the constitution the convention of no third term, as the Republicans were responding to Roosevelt. Standing four times for the presidency. Since that was institutionalised, the prohibition of three terms, it's now hard to see any constitutional change in America.
So you might speculate about a single six-year term for a president, or doing something to make the Senate more representative, but it would never pass. It's never going to pass. It's hard enough to get legislative change, new state status.
Remember all the speculation when the Democrats got a Senate majority about how Puerto Rico and Washington DC would be admitted as states, and other reforms as well. They never happened.
[Nick Fabbri] (54:56 - 55:02)
And like the judiciary, getting 13 justices rather than nine on the Supreme Court, all these kinds of things.
[Bob Carr] (55:03 - 55:12)
Yeah. So I think these are profound problems for the United States, and it is a hardening of political arteries.
[Nick Fabbri] (55:13 - 56:04)
And coming to the last couple of questions in the interview, I wanted to touch on what it is you love about writing, language and reading, which has been a common thread since your time as a student of history at UNSW, University of New South Wales in Sydney, starting your career as a journalist at the Bulletin and other publications, and then maintaining it all throughout your political career as well, when you had time, through works or political tracts like, I think it's What Australia Means to Me, My Reading Life, which I read when I was very young, and I've got on my Kindle as well, Run for Your Life, and obviously The Diary. So could you sort of talk a bit about writing and language, and how it helps you make sense of the passage of time, and also your experience of being in the world and processing everything that's happening?
[Bob Carr] (56:07 - 59:08)
Yeah, I think George Orwell said, as long as I live, I'll continue to gain pleasure from English prose, scraps of useless information, and the surface of the world. And that's not a bad, that's not a bad victim. And I think good writing grabs you.
A friend of mine, a friend of mine, an Iraqi actually, now a refugee in the West, told me he was reading The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. So I pulled it out, not having read it since I was at university 50 years ago, and I'm re-reading it with immense pleasure. It's a great piece of work.
It confirms Hemingway's status, he demands to be taken seriously, whatever excesses you might want to indict him for. I don't know what they would be, because the other ones I've revisited, have continued to impress me. But The Old Man and the Sea, it's such pleasure.
I mean, I won't go into details that take too much time. I just had this experience, too. I've been, because I'm moving house, I ruthlessly culled books.
And wouldn't you believe it, my old university copy of Old Man and the Sea was one that I had ruthlessly culled. But I also came across a postcard, and I had scrawled on this postcard some lovely phrases and sentences I'd found in Charles Dickens' Bleak House, which I didn't finish, I've got to be honest. I've got to be honest about your reading, never lie about your reading.
I never finished it. But these phrases grabbed me. It was wonderful, wonderful stuff.
And I looked for the wonderful non-such edition of Dickens, and a beautiful volume, and God, it was one I'd thrown out as well. Maybe you shouldn't cull them. The answer is never cull books, hang on to everything.
But again, it was the appeal, this tidal force, this tidal tug of good writing. In Dickens, it's wonderful verbs. He talks about a prince pancaked to a wall.
For example, he talks, it's just something I've noted from the book, he talks about ferocious dissatisfaction with existence rising from a tribe of kids in one troubled family. His verbs are always, always terrific.
[Nick Fabbri] (59:10 - 59:57)
That's stunning. Well, on the question of writing and meaning, I've always enjoyed your own poetic reflections on Australia and nature, particularly descriptions of coastal living and our proximity to, I guess, the natural world and the bush and national parks that surround us in Australia. We're very blessed.
And there's a beautiful line which you reference, where you call the east coast of Sydney, a sweet corner of the planet to live in. And then you go on to cite Robert Hughes, a description of the cliffs across Sydney's eastern beaches, looking as if they're broken off like a biscuit. So could you expand a bit on your poetic feeling for the country, Australia, and some of your favourite or most transcendent places you enjoy to be in?
[Bob Carr] (59:58 - 1:01:40)
I think the great silence that rises to greet you from the glorious canyons, the great valleys of the Blue Mountains. The Blue Mountains is the coastal mountain range outside Sydney, spectacular sandstone country that didn't lend itself to either urban expansion or agriculture. Beautifully conserved.
That's a special feature. And to think of the Indigenous people who have explored it. I remember speaking to a primary school captain on one of my visits to Western Sydney.
We looked out at the Blue Mountains. And I said, of course, it's important to remember that Laxland, Lawson and Wentworth, the explorers who were famous when I went to school, weren't the first people to cross it. And he said, yes, of course, he said, this is a captain of a primary school.
He said, yes, he said, they were just the first to record that they crossed it. In other words, Indigenous Australians have crossed it backwards and forwards routinely over 40,000 years. So that's a treasured memory.
But I think my knowledge is and my feeling is of coastal Australia. And I declared, for example, 100 new national parks between Jarvis Bay and the Bega Valley. I inspected some of them recently.
And there is a special excitement to me in looking at the Pacific Ocean and between the twisted branches of a red gun.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:01:42 - 1:02:36)
Extraordinary stuff, isn't it? And this is a sensitive question. We did speak about it before starting the interview, but I just wanted to register my sorrow to hear about the loss of your beloved late wife, Helena.
Helena Carr, who sadly passed away in October 2023. And I think, you know, looking back on this interview and the rich and interesting and, you know, deeply impactful life that you've lived has been noted throughout all of the books and the, you know, the dedications at the start of all the books. It was always to Helena or to H and their beautiful friendship and partnership that she represented in your life.
So I just wanted to sort of pass on my condolences to you, but also to say, to open up the floor to say if you'd like to sort of leave a tribute to Helena and I guess the legacy that you shared together.
[Bob Carr] (1:02:37 - 1:04:50)
I'm learning about the bereavement process and grief. And it's, I think it's the most egotistical thing, because you just crave to have the person you've lost spoken of. You just crave to have that severing addressed by other people.
So when people raise Helena, I'm so grateful to them, because it's the biggest thing inside me. And it is a large part of who I am. I said to someone recently, and maybe these words that I'm flinging out now serves the rapport of reach to other people who are going through the same process.
That with her departure, I'm no longer who I am. But in the place these in her place, taken from me, there's a large area of sadness, that I the survivor must live with. And in the statement I made from Vienna, where she died of this aneurysm, I said, I know countless, countless people have gone through this.
And I honour their suffering. But until you've experienced, until you've experienced the loss of your partner, you don't understand it. I'll conclude with this thought, because it might offer comfort to people who are living, contemplating this.
Barry Humphrey's widow, Lizzie Spender, said to me when I met her and raised the subject of how you manage grief, how you live with it. She said, a lovely message from a friend of hers, the actress Harriet Walters, who said, hang in there, you will come to another bend in the river, and the view will be different.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:04:52 - 1:05:37)
That's beautiful. And there are a lot of other, you know, beautiful literary works on grief. And I think of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, as well as being one, myself never having lost someone that close.
But I mean, the way in which, in that book, I've read it a couple of times now, she's able to sort of capture the grief and sense of rupture that one has when, you know, you lose like one of your, it's like losing a limb or something, and you have a sense of you being one person, one being, and suddenly, you know, that person is no longer there. And this was this phantom sense of longing for them to be there still, but also remembering them, you know, in memory and other kinds of commemorative ways as well.
[Bob Carr] (1:05:38 - 1:07:34)
I think it's remarkable that you've read it. I've reached for it after this has happened, simply because you want to see your experience reflected, and you're so desperately open to insights that others bring to this. But I remember one part of Joan Didion's book, where she says, her husband, John Gregory Dunn, the novelist, screenwriter, said at the dining room table, he said, I think it was something like, I have a terrific headache.
With those words, my life changed. And I'll always remember that hotel room in Vienna, of course, I'll always remember. So to put it that way, Helena coming out of the bathroom, where she'd been washing clothes, sitting on the edge of the bed, her hair fell forward, she looked, I remember thinking at the time, she looked very beautiful.
And she said, I've got a terrible backache. And this was, these were the words that shattered my life and led to the end of hers. Effectively, within 20 or 30 minutes, she battled each successive stage of the aneurysm as it took hold of her.
So I just reached for books on this subject. Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, The Story of a Widow, to extract what lessons there are for a heart with a crack in it. And I'd forgotten, in a sense, it wasn't in my mind that all those books, each and every, each of them was dedicated to H.
And one of the dedications, I said, to my co-conspirator. Yeah, that's it, your friend. Thanks for raising it.
I appreciate the tribute. Oh, it's okay.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:07:34 - 1:08:24)
Very, very happy to provide the space. And yeah, it seemed like a very, very beautiful, happy couple. So I'm again, deeply sorry.
And coming to the final question in the interview, what advice or words of encouragement do you have for the students of the Master of Public Policy here at the University of Oxford at the Blavatnik School of Government? We have a cohort of nearly 150 from 62 countries all around the world, many of whom aspire to work in politics or to work for the public good in some capacity, often in countries and contexts beset by intractable problems that, frankly, as an Australian, I can scarcely even contemplate. You think about some of our Colombian friends with ongoing violence in their countries or other countries with major environmental problems and so on.
So some final thoughts on that.
[Bob Carr] (1:08:25 - 1:10:27)
This is what I'd say to them, that nothing, nothing more warrants the investment of your talent, your knowledge, your capacity than the public good. And democracy, good government, the welfare of the whole people, including all those vulnerable people, the poor, the poor. Nothing is more valuable to them and the political system than a competent public servant, a competent, incorruptible public servant who knows their job is to provide the most astute advice to the political leadership and then to implement the decision that a political process in proper working order delivers to them.
Give the best advice, the best advice available based on their experience and their education, and then implement, as loyal public servants, the decision of respected political masters that have been put there by the will of the people. It's a most honourable career, a most honourable career, and democracy does not work, good government doesn't work without quality public servants, with a keen interest in public policy. My final message is you might make more money, bound to make more money working in the private sector, but working as a merchant banker or someone in private equity or on the bond market will never give you the satisfaction of delivering a whole suite of reforms to get corruption out of the police system, or to arrive at more effective policies in juvenile justice and drugs, or to get a corruption-free tendering system with proper oversight.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:10:27 - 1:10:33)
Or bequeathing 350 new national parks to New South Wales, for instance. Brilliant. Well, thank you.
[Bob Carr] (1:10:33 - 1:10:40)
And I needed very good advisors, very good advisors to public servants to give effect to it. I just signed the paper, I had to make it work.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:10:41 - 1:10:58)
Well, I'm a former employee of the Department of Premier and Cabinet in New South Wales, so I know all about doing a bit of the pre-work for a ministerial signature, but Bob Carr, thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure and very, very grateful to have you here on the Oxford Policy Podcast, so thank you.
[Bob Carr] (1:10:59 - 1:11:02)
Thank you, Nick. It's been my great pleasure. Thank you very much.