Originally published on Oxford Policy Podcast.
In this episode, Nick Fabbri speaks with George Brandis, former Australian Attorney-General and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. They discuss George's time at Oxford and Magdalen College as a law student, his career in the law, the philosophical traditions of liberalism and conservatism and how they might be applied to policy issues in the 21st century, some major security and social policy reforms George influenced, George's time as High Commissioner to the UK during Brexit negotiations, the COVID pandemic, and Tory party leadership changes, and international security issues.
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Professor the Honourable George Brandis KC is a lawyer, former Australian Senator and Attorney-General, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and now Professor of National Security at the Australian National University.
Transcript below ^_^
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 0:25)
Welcome back dear listeners to another episode of the Oxford Policy Podcast. My name is Nick Fabbri and I'll be your host for today. I'm delighted to welcome Professor the Honourable George Brandis KC, an Australian lawyer, former senator, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and now Professor at the National Security College within the Australian National University.
It's an honour to welcome you to the show George, thanks for being here.
[George Brandis] (0:25 - 0:26)
Pleasure Nick.
[Nick Fabbri] (0:27 - 0:42)
So it's especially wonderful to have an Oxonian on the show. Could you start off by telling us a bit about your time at Oxford and Magdalen College in the early 1980s and what some of your fondest memories are from that time, who your contemporaries were and maybe what some of your favourite pubs were?
[George Brandis] (0:44 - 3:04)
Well, I was at Magdalen, I was a BCL student of the greatest cliché in Oxford and I think it still is as Aussie law students are doing Magdalen BCLs and it was between 1981 and 1983. So that was not long after the election of the Thatcher government, so it was a time of some upheaval in the United Kingdom. It encompassed the time of the Falklands War, which I think was a very important sort of turning point in the national mood.
And I was a suburban boy from Brisbane, I grew up in Sydney and Brisbane, but mainly Brisbane. And I guess like a lot of Australians who go to Oxford, it was just a remarkable eye-opening experience. I think the most important thing about a great international university like Oxford are the people you meet and the friends you make who become lifelong friends.
And there were a number of my contemporaries at Magdalen, not all of them were personal friends of mine, but they were contemporaries who I got to know, who did go on to have very major roles in public affairs. One was Neil Ferguson, the historian, who was a direct contemporary. Another one was William Hague, who was in his final year of PPE in my first year, but whom I subsequently came to know many years later when I was the High Commissioner and he became President of the Britain Australia Society, whose career I followed all throughout his very interesting public career.
One particular friend I made at Magdalen, who was and still is a close friend, is Nick Kristof, the journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes when he was very young, and has been for decades now the leading columnist of the New York Times and a very important global opinion leader, and we stay in touch from time to time. So that's a sort of a sample, I suppose you'd say, of the sort of people who become your contemporaries who you rub shoulders with, and I'm sure in your generation it's the same, because that's always the same at Oxford, as a great international university.
[Nick Fabbri] (3:04 - 3:21)
Indeed, and it's interesting meeting them when they're not always, you know, when they're not sort of part of the great and the good as it were, they're just in their youth and enjoying, you know, sunny Sunday afternoons up at the perch or going for runs around the, you know, the Christchurch meadow or whatever it might be, you sort of catch them at a very unique time of life.
[George Brandis] (3:22 - 3:32)
Of course, and you asked me about my favourite pub. Well, the one not quite closest to Magdalen, but the one that we always went to was the Turf.
[Nick Fabbri] (3:33 - 4:09)
Oh yes, very good, and Bob Hawke obviously made that very famous for setting the Guinness World Record of sculling a yard glass of ale. Indeed. Yes, so you were taught jurisprudence by Ronald DeWalkin and Joseph Raz at Magdalen, two of the greatest legal scholars and philosophers of the past century, so it must have been a remarkable experience to have entered into a dialogue with the past, as it were, with Raz having been taught by HLA Hart and DeWalkin having worked with the great American jurist Leonard Hand.
What was that intellectual experience like and how did it shape your legal and political careers?
[George Brandis] (4:10 - 7:54)
It was a tremendous privilege. By the way, neither Ronald DeWalkin nor Joe Raz were at Magdalen, no one was at Univ and Joe Raz was a don at Balliol, but we were farmed out for our tutorials, as I assume that still happens to other colleges. DeWalkin ran a series of seminars at Univ that were an absolute must-see event.
He was a great showman, Ronald DeWalkin. He, by the way, also had been taught by HLA Hart. He would walk into the seminar, he always wore a dark blue pinstripe suit, usually a red bow tie, and always was smoking a cigar.
I was taught by him one-on-one, I was one of the people who attended his seminars at Univ and he was a very great showman. He was very, as you'd expect, very swaggering almost in his style, very funny and obviously extremely sharp. Joe Raz was in a way the opposite.
He was Majura's tutor and he was a painfully shy, terribly, terribly humble man who was terribly sweet as well. There was no bombast about Joe Raz. There was a real intellectual humility and a really deep interest in you as his student.
In those days, he'd written The Concept of a Legal System in a couple of his early books, but I don't think people realise just how famous he would go on to be in the world of jurisprudence. The immediate effect, I guess, of me doing jurisprudence as part of my BCL is that when I went back to Brisbane, I wanted to share that with students at my old university, the University of Queensland. So I persuaded the Dean of the law school to let me teach part of the jurisprudence course.
Even though I was a lawyer in the city, I was a commercial lawyer at Midderellison and then I was at the bar. I taught jurisprudence part-time for seven years after I came back from Oxford. My part of the jurisprudence course I called Recent Developments in the Theory of Justice.
I varied the texts a bit, but always, of course, we taught rules as theory of justice because that was, probably still is, but certainly in the 1980s when it was more recent, it had been published, I think, in 1972. That was where all the intellectual debate was about in jurisprudence was rules as theory of justice. Also, Robert Nozick had just published Anarchy, State and Utopia, which was an interesting counterpoint to a theory of justice.
Then there was, of course, Dworkin's own book, Taking Rights Seriously. It was really an exciting time in jurisprudence. You asked me more broadly how that shaped my career.
Well, I had always been a liberal in a philosophical sense and always have been, but what it did, I think, was anchor and sharpen my sense of rights-based political philosophy.
[Nick Fabbri] (7:56 - 8:24)
Fascinating. I've got rules as a theory of justice sitting on my desk, actually, so it could be describing the Master of Public Policy reading list as well. There was a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald describing Oxford as Australia's prime minister factory.
What is it about this place that has proven so decisive and formative in shaping so many political careers in Australia, especially? You mentioned that intellectual sharpening or grounding that it gave you, but is there something more in the waters basically here?
[George Brandis] (8:25 - 10:37)
I think that it becomes almost a self-fulfilling thing that the more young people who aspire to big careers in public life see earlier role models and they see that so many prime ministers and senior cabinet ministers have gone to Oxford, the more they think that that is a sort of box to tick. Of course, it's more than a box to tick, that's probably a poorly chosen phrase, but it's sort of a waypoint on the cursus honorum. I think the fact that a number of Australian prime ministers, three in fact, Hawke, Abbott and Turnbull were Rhodes scholars has reinforced the Oxford tradition.
The Rhodes scholarship has made Oxford a more familiar place to Australians than Cambridge, for instance. But there are other prime ministers, the first I think was Malcolm Fraser who went straight from being a schoolboy, finishing secondary school at Melbourne Grammar to go to Oxford without going to an Australian university first. The next was John Gorton and then there were other people who had senior roles like Gareth Evans, for example, who's a Magdalen man and he was, I think, in Oxford in the early 1970s.
Angus Taylor, who's currently the shadow treasurer, is another Rhodes scholar. So, I think there's a sort of a mutually reinforcing Australian tradition. I always advise people who are wondering what to do after they've done their first degree at an Australian university, go and do a postgraduate degree somewhere else in the world for all the obvious reasons.
And naturally, I recommend Oxford because I think the idea of a collegiate university and one with strong Australian links is the best postgraduate experience that you can possibly have.
[Nick Fabbri] (10:37 - 10:40)
And you were here with Tony Abbott as well, I believe.
[George Brandis] (10:41 - 11:41)
So, Tony and I were direct contemporaries. We met at Oxford. We weren't sort of close mates.
We saw each other at Australian society events from time to time. We were both interested in politics. He wasn't a member of the Liberal Party in those days.
I had been. I'd been the president of the Young Liberals in Queensland at the time I won my scholarship to Oxford. So, I was more invested in the Liberal Party than Tony was.
And he was actually quite scathing about aspects of the Liberal Party, because I don't think he was a big fan, for instance, of Malcolm Fraser, who was the Prime Minister for most of the time we were at Oxford until Hawke won the 1983 election. And of course, in those days, Tony's ambition was not to be a politician, but to be a priest. And famously, he joined the seminary after he came back.
[Nick Fabbri] (11:42 - 11:52)
Indeed, and having been influenced by, I believe, Brother Mankowski, or some religious figure here at Oxford as well. So, trajectories can change.
[George Brandis] (11:52 - 12:03)
Yeah, I didn't know that man, but Tony often speaks of him and writes of him in his memoirs. So, he was a very big intellectual mentor to Tony, obviously.
[Nick Fabbri] (12:04 - 12:34)
And so, you then worked in the law for several decades after your university studies, while keeping a foot in the world of politics and policy, having edited a book in 1984 on the future of liberalism in Australia, with Don Markwell and others, I believe, who were at Oxford. So, what was the spark that lit your interest in politics in your youth? And what ultimately drove you to leave your private life behind for a public one in the early 2000s, and to trade your career in the law for politics and policy?
[George Brandis] (12:36 - 18:04)
Well, there are two parts to that question, and they're two quite different answers. A lot of people, and I'm sure a lot of the people who are doing the MPP, I suspect probably all of them, get bitten by the politics bug when they're teenagers. And that happened to me.
And I can remember it with remarkable precision when that happened. It was in 1971, it was just before my 14th birthday, and John Gorton, who had been the Prime Minister, was torn down and forced out of office by Malcolm Fraser, who had been his army minister. And it was the great political scandal of the day, or the great political controversy of the day, I should say.
And I remember thinking to myself, this is so exciting. So I'd like to say that what drove me initially into politics was some sort of noble sense of vocational calling. It wasn't.
It was the first time I noticed politics and got excited about it, was because of the sheer drama of it. And then, of course, because, I was a humanities student, predictably, when I was in secondary school. I was very interested in modern history, and I was very interested in ideas, and I developed quite a deep interest in political philosophy.
And in the sort of roundabout that time, perhaps a year or so later, I encountered John Stuart Mill, I read On Liberty, I agree with all of it, pretty much. And I became more and more interested in the values side, the ideas side of politics. And I decided that was the career I wanted.
So that's the answer to the first part of your question. Now, why did I go into politics when I did? When I came back to Australia from Oxford in 1983, I had, you know, I was still interested, as you say, me and two other friends published a book when we were at Oxford, a collection of essays on the future of liberalism and the Liberal Party, which remarkably, Oxford University Press agreed to publish as part of their Australian, one of their Australian series.
And so I was interested, but I also stepped back for a few years, because I was busy getting on with my career, I wanted to be a barrister. I worked for a Brisbane firm, which was one of the tributary firms of Minter Ellison, in those days, it was called Morris Fletcher and Cross. And after two years with them, I went to the bar and established, you know, busy junior commercial practice.
And the more and more absorbed I got in my practice, the less and less time I spent thinking about politics. And I should say, one thing happened to me at Oxford, which, intellectually, which made a difference. And that is doing the BCL.
I fell in love with the law. Intellectually, I'd done a BALLB. I was much more interested in my BA than in my LLB.
But when I did the BCL, I really fell for the law and the intellectual complexity of it and the fascination of it. And of course, the standard and challenge of the teaching was incomparably greater than it was at the University of Queensland Law School. So I would quite happily have spent the rest of my days as a barrister and perhaps a judge.
But I still maintained a level of involvement in the Liberal Party in Queensland. And then at the end of 1999, the party president rang me up. And he said, look, we have a senator who is about to retire, announce his resignation from the Senate.
So there'll be a casual vacancy. We will put the numbers, as it were, of the ruling faction behind you if you want it. And I really agonized about it because I was really doing, my career at the bar was going really well.
I was on the cusp of taking silk. And I spent weeks agonizing about it. But I thought in the end, well, this is what you always wanted to do.
And here's an opportunity that has been presented to you, not quite on a silver plate, because I did have to fight for the preselection. But I decided to do it. And what persuaded me, and I give this advice to people who are doing the MPP and wondering about how to make career decisions, always do the thing that you anticipate.
If you fail to do it, you'll regret most not having done it. And I thought, well, you know, if I pass up this opportunity now, I think I'll always regret having done so. So I did.
And I'm very pleased I did.
[Nick Fabbri] (18:05 - 18:22)
And so looking back over your nearly two decades in Parliament, in both opposition and in government, what stands out for you most in terms of significant policy reforms and social impact? And how are bold and contentious policy reforms best achieved in today's environment?
[George Brandis] (18:24 - 19:53)
I suppose, naturally, what I'm going to say are the ones that I took the most interest and had the most involvement in. I came in sort of about halfway through the time of the Howard government. So I was a backbencher for all but the last year of the Howard government, when John Howard was kind enough to make me a junior minister.
And then we went out about a year later. And I became the shadow Attorney General. So I concentrated on Attorney General's matters.
And I was the shadow Attorney General and then the Attorney General for slightly more than 10 years in that one portfolio. So two things when I reflect on the time that I spent in Parliament. Two things, I think, are legacy issues that I'm proud of.
One, and they're extremely different. One was what we did in reforming the national security laws during the time I had responsibility for that area of policy. And in particular, the foreign interference laws, which I was responsible for preparing that were introduced, the bill was introduced at the end of 2017, became and now seem to be a very, very important reform in the area of national security and, in fact, have since been copied by the United Kingdom and Canada.
[Nick Fabbri] (19:53 - 19:55)
The countering foreign interference, yeah.
[George Brandis] (19:55 - 21:33)
All of that. So, I mean, that was something that was a project that I steered. And, I mean, I don't want to sound vain about it, but it was, it did turn out to be a world-leading area of law reform in which Australia was acknowledged to have been the first.
So that was one thing that I was directly responsible for that I think mattered. The other area in which there were a lot of people who had a very important involvement in, and I was one of several, was marriage equality. The recognition of same-sex marriage at the end of 2017, which was long overdue.
There was a body of us on the more moderate wing of the Liberal Party who had been agitating for this for several years. Tony Abbott was always a big roadblock to that. When Malcolm Turnbull became the Prime Minister in 2015, we had kind of the green light to go ahead.
It was tricky. The Labour Party was extremely unhelpful. I always thought that Senator Wong was very reluctant to see this reform authored by a Liberal government rather than by a Labour government.
But it was authored by a Liberal government and by a number of, you know, success has many fathers. And there were, I can think of, half a dozen people during the Turnbull government who played key roles in that reform.
[Nick Fabbri] (21:34 - 21:38)
Tim Wilson and others I recall from the time, Dean Smith.
[George Brandis] (21:38 - 23:17)
Well, I mean, the people I would nominate, frankly, are Tim Wilson, Trent Zimmerman and Trevor Evans. These were three openly gay Liberal MPs who were quite junior and basically threatened to cross the floor and sort of held a gun a bit to Malcolm's head because Malcolm was very, very sensitive about the political turmoil this would cause with the right wing of the party and also with the National Party. Dean Smith built a private Senator's Bill, largely based on an exposure draft that we had prepared in the Attorney General's Department at my direction.
So, but the other person I think really who was the father of gay marriage in Australia, more than anyone else, is Warren Inch, the member for Leichhardt in Far North Queensland, who had been raising this issue for as long as I was in Parliament, from the early 2000s in the party room, long before it became a popular issue. And it was in the early days when Warren used to raise it was seen almost to be eccentric. And it's often forgotten that until about the first half of the first decade of the century, the left was against gay marriage.
Not because they were against gays, but because sort of the left regarded marriage as a conservative institution.
[Nick Fabbri] (23:17 - 23:19)
Patriarchal construct or something.
[George Brandis] (23:19 - 24:30)
Indeed. And I mean, if you look at the intellectual history of this idea, which began to be promoted by commentators from about the late 1980s, and in particular by another person from Magdalen, by the way, who was a contemporary of mine, Andrew Sullivan, who became another famous journalist when he relocated to America. It was people on the conservative side of politics who were the initial, who made the early intellectual case for same sex marriage, was resisted by the writers and thinkers on the political left.
And then from around about the early 2000s, they changed their position. So as I said in my speech, when I made the second reading of the marriage equality legislation in the Senate, it was appropriate given that the intellectual case for same sex marriage was made by a conservative commentator, that it should have been brought to fulfilment in Australia by a centre-right government.
[Nick Fabbri] (24:31 - 25:55)
Fascinating. And very interesting to kind of reclaim that territory for conservatives and right of centre party is when I suppose a lot of those social reforms are often associated with progressivism and left-wing causes, where in actual fact there is a very strong conservative argument or case to be made for gay marriage. You mentioned two policy reforms that went well and that stand out for you in terms of their positive impact on Australian society, and I guess you're involved with them too, but sometimes policy development goes dramatically or even catastrophically wrong, at least at the political level, setting aside implementation and so on.
Comes to mind in the Australian context at least, the implementation of the mining tax, I think in the late 2000s, the emissions trading scheme slash carbon tax, in which the Labor government before you, or the Abbott government was elected, came undone over. But also in your time, reforms like the 18C, free speech amendments, things sometimes go awry, or even more under the Morrison government, the robo-debt scandal about sort of automated debt reclamation services through our welfare programs in Australia and the really nasty impact that had on a lot of people's lives. So why does it go wrong when it does go wrong?
And I suppose when you're in government, how do you try to arrest or recalibrate things when it's just not working out?
[George Brandis] (25:57 - 27:11)
Well, you're right, it sometimes does go wrong. It can go wrong for a variety of reasons. In the case of robo-debt, which, you know, I mean, all the controversy about robo-debt was post my time in politics.
But it was just a bad idea. It was a shocking idea, and it should have been picked up from the get go. What was subsequently revealed to be the illegality of the scheme should have been identified at the get go.
No advice was sought from the Attorney General's Department. It was sought by in-house lawyers within the Department of Social Security, as I understand. And that's a systemic failure.
I mean, the Attorney General's Department should always be the Department of Government, which is ultimately responsible for for legal advice. And it's, I mean, we see this in the private sector, too, how there is such a thing as client capture of lawyers who are in-house lawyers. So that was a systemic failure in the case of robo-debt.
You mentioned that 18C that I was responsible for and got blamed for the failure of it was never going to get up.
[Nick Fabbri] (27:11 - 27:12)
I'm not blaming you, I'm just saying.
[George Brandis] (27:13 - 28:48)
But I was, and I was at the time. And that was never going to get up because the Senate was never going to pass it. But Tony Abbott particularly wanted to press this, as it were, to make a statement about centre-right politics and freedom of speech.
And that was, you know, partly on my part, I suppose, a failure of advocacy, but in the rather frustrating circumstances that it was never going to pass anyway. So this was a, this was really a gesture, rather than something that was ever going to happen. Then there are policies that are, in my view, are good policies, but which the public has just not prepared to accept.
And a good example of that was work choices, which the Howard government introduced. And there are a lot of people say that work choices was the issue on which Howard lost the 2007 election. That was also in part a failure of advocacy, too.
But also a case of a government getting way too ahead of public opinion. So there is a variety of reasons why policies, including good policies, by the way, I think work choices was a good policy, I think what we were trying to do to Section 18C was a good policy, fail the politics. Now, Peter Costello has a saying, he says, good policy is good politics.
Well, up to a point, but it's not always as simple as that. You can have a perfectly good policy and screw up the politics.
[Nick Fabbri] (28:50 - 29:24)
And I think it's a bit of an art form for the political class or the polity to actually enter into a conversation with the electorate to persuade them of the needs and the merits of certain policy reforms and to be able to kind of have that sustained dialogue with which the Howard, Costello government did well, I think all Keating did. There have been examples of it under Turnbull, Abbott and Morrison, respectively. But I think certainly within the last decade and a half, I think we've seen a bit of a regression in terms of our ability to actually persuade the electorate on the need for, you know, major reforms in certain areas.
[George Brandis] (29:25 - 30:42)
Well, I think that's right. I mean, the last really powerful reform, economic reform attempted in Australia was work choices. And after that hit the wall and cost the incumbent government office, I think people on both sides of politics, frankly, have been a bit wary of the sort of fundamental systemic reform that Hawken Keating and also Howard, but he did the GST, had the political courage and the political smarts to accomplish.
So we had about in Australia, about a quarter of a century of economic reform, beginning with the election of a Labor government in 1983 under Hawken Keating, almost universally regarded as the best Labor government Australia has ever had by some people, but as the best government Australia has ever had. And that period of reform continued into the Howard government elected in 1996. And the tax reform that John Howard was responsible for accomplishing.
So I mean, that quarter century or so from 1983 to 2007 was a very important time of reform. And I think on both sides of politics, we have not seen the like of it since.
[Nick Fabbri] (30:44 - 31:38)
Indeed. And we mentioned the, I suppose, political skills or advocacy skills of politicians and parliamentary or leaders of the parties as well to drive that reform. But there's another important element as well, which comes, I think, to the question of stability of calibre of leadership as well.
So you were part of a period of Australian politics that saw great instability and turnover in national leadership from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard, and then back to Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party. And then from 2013 onwards from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull, and then after your time, Scott Morrison. So you observed or worked closely with Prime Ministers John Howard, Tony Abbott, and Malcolm Turnbull in the Liberal Party, the conservative side of the Australian policy, political landscape.
And what leadership qualities and shortcomings stand out for you most amongst that group in the context of the broader instability and turmoil that I've just mentioned?
[George Brandis] (31:40 - 34:33)
Well, I think of the people you've mentioned, the standout political figure was John Howard. Because, I mean, John was someone who had a very clear sense of where he wanted to take his government in a policy sense, founded on a very thoroughly thought out philosophy. He was a liberal conservative, he came from the right of the party originally, but not from the crazy right, from the sort of more pragmatic right.
So he came from pretty much the middle of the Liberal Party. He wasn't one of the moderates as I was, but he wasn't one of the far right either. So he came from, you know, and he famously said the Liberal Party is a broad church, and he made sure that he embraced all the different elements in his governments, which was a good thing to do.
Until Work Choices in 2007, he didn't overreach. And he was very good at keeping his team together. He was also very good at communicating to the public.
The public found him very relatable. He had a low key kind of Harry Truman common man style. And comparing that with Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, it was very different.
I mean, Tony was seen by a lot of people to be very right wing, probably more right wing than he was, to be honest, but the image that he had was of something of a zealot. Malcolm Turnbull was seen as someone, for better or for worse, you know, this wasn't anything he deliberately did. It was just a stylistic thing.
But he was seen as somebody who was out of touch and who talked down to people. So embodying within your persona, a figure that the public can relate to, and understand and trust is a key aspect of getting things done. And it's interesting that even though Howard went out of office in 2007, after nearly 12 years, his personal approval rating at the time he lost the 2007 election was still very high.
People still respected him, or he had earned that respect over those 12 years. But they just thought it was time for a change, which is the one thing that when that mood grips the electorate, it's like the tide coming in or going out. There's just nothing you can do about it.
[Nick Fabbri] (34:33 - 35:33)
Yes. Unless you, of course, opt for that sort of regeneration that I think that was talked about in 2006, with potentially putting his long serving treasurer in there, Peter Costello, and trying to get another term out. But at least that's so it goes.
And so is history. But moving on to the philosophy of liberalism and conservatism, which you mentioned in talking about John Howard's articulation of those two strands inside the Australian Liberal Party. There's a sense across the Western liberal democratic world that the right of centre parties, variously embodying traditions of liberalism and conservatism, as you've mentioned, are at a low ebb or undergoing a fundamental transformation from their 1980s neoliberal days under Thatcher and Reagan, towards more interventionist and sometimes populist movement.
How do you understand these respective philosophical traditions? And what does a 21st century liberalism or conservatism look like to you, and particularly one that works for young people, which seems to be the Conservative Party's great challenge at the moment?
[George Brandis] (35:34 - 37:43)
Well, it's a complex question, Nick. No, no, no, no, that doesn't mean it's not a good question. It's a very good question.
But I think it's made more complex by the fact that nobody can agree on what liberalism means. And nobody can agree on what conservatism means. So when I talk about liberalism, I talk about the classical English liberal tradition is imported into Australia at the end of the 19th century, and adopted by liberal statesmen from Alfred Deakin through to Robert Menzies and Malthus Fraser, and subsequent leaders of the centre-right.
And when I talk about conservatism, I talk about, again, the English antecedents of conservative philosophy, traceable to Edmund Burke, and more recently, Michael Oakeshott, and that philosophical tradition. And I think there's a great convergence of that liberalism so understood, and conservatism so understood, because we have constructed throughout the 20th century, what is, I think, broadly a liberal society in Western countries, certainly more a liberal society than a socialist society. So in seeking to defend that which we have built, we are conserving that which we have built.
So I think there is, as I say, a greater convergence between those traditional understandings of liberalism and conservatism. However, as we know, particularly in America, liberalism means something completely different. I mean, I think American liberalism has become diseased, because it has failed to hold fast to the basic principle of the autonomy of the individual, and the freedom of the individual.
And in the embrace of identity politics, and a more censorious attitude to freedom of expression, and so on, I think it has lost its way.
[Nick Fabbri] (37:44 - 37:52)
Just the instantiations of, you know, woke movements, and the new puritanism of deplatforming and cancelling people, etc.
[George Brandis] (37:53 - 39:59)
I think that the new puritanism is a perfect description of what a lot of American liberalism so described has become. It has become illiberal. This is not liberalism.
I mean, liberalism is based on the idea of what, I mean, I mentioned John Stuart Mill before, but in my maiden speech to the Parliament, I actually quoted Immanuel Kant, and one of his principles, treat every person as an end in themselves, and not merely a means to an end. I mean, that the sovereignty of the individual in a community is the core understanding of liberalism, and to squash the individuality of a person is to do by limiting what they unnecessarily limiting what they can say, or what they can think, or with whom they can associate, I think, does violence to liberalism. Now, coming to conservatism, I published a column in the Sydney Morning Herald of the Age a couple of weeks ago, under the title, Donald Trump is not a conservative.
These extreme right-wing ideological movements are not conservative movements. There is nothing conservative about a doctrinaire, ideological, right-wing figure who disrespects constitutional government. There's nothing conservative about a figure who finds Vladimir Putin not such a bad guy.
I think that, frankly, the Republicans in America have gone crazy. And there are some elements in Western Europe, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, who are sort of imitating this profoundly, not just illiberal, but unconservative line associated with this new brand of demagogic, ideological, hard right-wing politics. And I think it's very, very dangerous.
[Nick Fabbri] (40:00 - 40:55)
And it seems to have been precipitated or catalyzed by that one individual figure of Donald Trump. And that disease has metastasized to other figures like J.D. Vance and Senator Tom Cotton, I think from Arkansas as well, who will probably keep this ideological fervor going long beyond Donald Trump's repeated claims on the White House, which I think is disturbing in many ways, because you see a fundamental upsetting of the constitutional health of the nation, whereby the actual institutions and the bedrock of the country is under attack or being eroded, right? And so you don't have this normal political advocacy policy debate between left and right as understood as liberals and Republicans, conservatives, etc. It's actually almost like a personalist kind of demagogic overtake of the whole system.
[George Brandis] (40:56 - 42:21)
Well, that's true. But you know, Nick, being a lifelong and close student of history, and particularly political history, I am firmly of the view, as I think anyone who understands history should be, I'm a firm believer in causation. I'm a firm believer that in the evolution of history, nothing happens by accident.
The emergence of this extreme right-wing movement embodied by, but not initiated by, Donald Trump didn't come out of nowhere. And I lay the blame in part, only in part, but importantly, at the feet of Trump's enemies, the censorious liberal elite that he attacks so often, who have, let's be frank about this, who have adopted an exceptionally censorious view of opinions, which are not their own, which don't tick the boxes of what liberal political thinkers regard as an acceptable arena of political or acceptable bounds of political debate.
[Nick Fabbri] (42:21 - 42:25)
Like how Hillary Clinton called the demos the basket of deplorables, indeed.
[George Brandis] (42:25 - 43:25)
I mean, you know, I mean, I don't want to oversimplify things. But frankly, that was, those were three words that changed the world. Because you'll remember how close the 2016 election was.
If she hadn't said that, made that remark, and in making that remark, reinforced and exemplified every criticism that the Trump people were making of her and of the Democrats more broadly, she probably would have won. And we would never have had Donald Trump. So I'm not just saying this glibly.
I think that the perversion or distortion of liberalism into a censorious philosophy in America is one of the key reasons for the emergence of people like Trump and the causes associated with it.
[Nick Fabbri] (43:26 - 44:32)
So in many ways, we need to have a revitalisation of those fundamental liberal values to prevent the people doing what Michael Moore called is using Donald Trump as a human Molotov to blow up the establishment. Turning to UK politics in your time as High Commissioner, between 2018 and 2022, you had a remarkable window into British politics and indeed international affairs, including US affairs and geopolitics. So the Tory party now seems destined for a generational wipeout after 14 years in power, with the country beset by rail strikes, a housing crisis, under-resourced defence spending, and a dysfunctional National Health Service.
I think you referred to it in a recent article as comparable to the sinking of the Titanic. So how do you assess the legacy of the Conservatives' time in government in the UK? And how does the right need to reconstitute itself in opposition to become electorally viable again, noting the similar trajectories of Conservative parties in Canada, Australia and New Zealand in recent years?
[George Brandis] (44:33 - 47:11)
Well, I think there's no doubt whatsoever that when the history of British politics in this period is written, the overwhelmingly important event associated with this time of Conservative government will have been Brexit. And I mean, nothing, in my view, changed Britain more in the years since the Second World War and the development of the welfare state than the 2016 decision to leave the European Union. And in saying that, I'm not saying it was a bad or a good thing.
But it was certainly a fundamental change of direction, with consequences that will reverberate for years and perhaps decades. Now, when I was the High Commissioner between 2018 and 2022, I began during the government of Theresa May. And I had a ringside seat, almost literally a ringside seat from the Diplomats Gallery in the House of Commons.
Of the heart attack almost that the political system was suffering when the Parliament would not allow passage of the legislation to give effect to the terms on which Theresa May wanted to accomplish withdrawal from the EU. And then famously Boris Johnson won the 2019 election, that roadblock was removed. Britain's negotiating position in Brussels was re-established, and Brexit was accomplished.
Now, I mean, the politics of Europe and the politics of the United Kingdom's engagement with the European Union are the great theme of this period of history. And the confusion, the bitter division, the personal and philosophical enmity over that issue, of which the Conservative Party was the focus, the Labour Party had, there were differences of opinion, the Labour Party too, of course. But most of the division and dispute occurred within the Conservative Party.
That will be what this period is remembered for. And it is, of course, the reason why the Conservatives look to have completely lost their way, and I think are heading for a thundering defeat at the election later this year.
[Nick Fabbri] (47:11 - 48:01)
And do you think they essentially did not have the bandwidth, given the, I guess, how severe a disjuncture Brexit was, and how paralysing it was for a number of years to deal with those fundamental bread and butter policy issues, such as housing, healthcare, transport, which I've mentioned, and which they might have developed more effective Conservative solutions to? Because having arrived here in September last year, I'm quite shocked really at the stage in which the country is in, in terms of the cost of living squeeze, the inaccessibility of housing, questions around the orderliness of the migration process. It seems as though all the polity's entire attention has been absorbed on this question of Brexit, and I guess Britain's place in the world, posted being out of the EU.
[George Brandis] (48:02 - 49:25)
Yeah, and as well, of course, when you talk about bandwidth, there is also COVID. Now, you know, I said before that, you know, in the evolution of history, nothing happens by accident. But that's not to say that there aren't sometimes black swan events.
And COVID was the classic black swan event. I was, you know, in office as High Commissioner throughout the COVID period, the government basically shut the entire country down, put the economy into a deliberate managed recession. And that was the case for two years.
So you had these coming upon on top of one another in the same couple of years, you had the most important political dislocation of the postwar years, that is Brexit. And the most severe civil emergency of the postwar years, that is COVID. And for those, I mean, to absorb one of those two things would have been very confronting and challenging for any political system.
But to absorb both of them simultaneously, I think you can understand why Britain at the moment seems a bit shattered.
[Nick Fabbri] (49:26 - 49:33)
Yes, yes. Maybe we're being too hard on them. I'm being too hard on them when I give my assessment of the political state, but it certainly...
[George Brandis] (49:33 - 49:51)
Well, there's a kind of a silver lining to this cloud too. And that is, even though they were both in their very different ways, traumatising events, the system did survive. I mean, the system was not shattered by these shattering events.
And that's a good thing.
[Nick Fabbri] (49:51 - 50:31)
Indeed. And I mean, you know, not to mention just Brexit and COVID, but they have also managed to play a sort of an outsize or perhaps a historically more traditional geopolitical role in terms of marshalling the European and Western support of Ukraine against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and also to navigate a really, really important trilateral, multilateral, it's looking to be agreement in August, the Australia, UK, US agreement with the submarines and technology, military enhancement as well. I mean, you've had an amazing ringside seat to all these things, which is incredible, but it's not all kind of doom and gloom, as I maybe intimated earlier.
[George Brandis] (50:31 - 51:04)
Well, particularly, I mean, let's focus for a moment on Ukraine and Britain's role. Now, what Ukraine and the invasion of Ukraine and Britain's response to it told you were two things. First of all, that the prediction of the gloomsters that Brexit would mean, among other things, that Britain would be marginalised from European defence and foreign policy was completely wrong, completely and utterly wrong.
[Nick Fabbri] (51:04 - 51:04)
Indeed.
[George Brandis] (51:05 - 52:47)
The United Kingdom led Europe in marshalling solidarity against Putin in advance of and after the invasion of Ukraine. And I would say, by the way, Nick, not just led Europe, but led the world, because there's no question that the expectation of the Biden administration across the ocean was that Russia would walk all over the Ukrainians. And this would be a Russian victory in very short order.
I mean, the fact that Biden offered to evacuate Zelensky and his family, and his upper echelon, and Zelensky famously said, No, I don't want a ride and I want weapons, showed that that was what the Americans were expecting. And that was the basis upon which their policy was formed. They didn't expect Zelensky to lead the Ukrainians to resist.
And it was Johnson and also the now much criticised Liz Truss, who was then the foreign secretary, who not only marshalled Europe, and marshalled people who were dragging their feet, as it were, like Macron, but also put some spine in Biden, so that the world responded very powerfully, much more powerfully than America was expecting to respond, or that some European nations were expecting to respond in solidarity against Putin. So that was a great British foreign policy achievement.
[Nick Fabbri] (52:49 - 53:27)
Yeah, I agree. I agree with that entirely. Just to move along in the interview, and to wrap up on the time as High Commissioner, I should also add that it's not all doom and gloom and heavy and serious geopolitical events, but there are a great number of people in London and Oxford who say that the parties and events you held at Australia House were the hottest ticket in town.
And you had a wonderful way of bringing people together from politics, business, expats, etc, to Australia House. So do you just want us to reflect on some more colourful and happy moments and memories that you had from your time, your four years in London, while all these big dramatic historical events were unfolding?
[George Brandis] (53:29 - 56:10)
Sure. And, you know, I mean, it sounds like a lot of fun, and it was. But there's a serious point.
Australia has, in London, in Australia House, an extraordinary physical asset. And for those of the MPP class who have been there, it is well worth visiting if they'll let you in the door. But the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which runs the Australian High Commission, like all embassies and high commissions, I found to be very reluctant to optimise the use of that space.
I think the prevailing attitude was, this is a diplomatic building, and we have to have functions and events for ceremonial purposes, like Anzac Day, for example. But I always found a lot of reluctance to take advantage of the facility to entertain people to host events. Now, my view was, and is, that particularly in a city like London, which after New York and Washington is probably the most diplomatically the most important city in the world, there are a lot of people competing for attention.
Australia is a relatively small nation. And you have to do whatever you can to be noticed, to get into the networks of influence, to make the connections. And one of the best ways to do that is to entertain people.
Now, when you're a politician, particularly if you're a senior minister, you get far more invitations to events and functions than you can ever go to. And most of the ones you do go to, you know, you go out of a sense of duty rather than the expectation that you're going to enjoy it because it's part of the job. We got to a position in which the events we hosted at Australia House and at the High Commissioner's residence, Stoke Lodge, were such glamorous and enjoyable events.
But on occasions, I had members of the cabinet ring up and say, I didn't get an invitation. Can I come? Am I off the list?
What's wrong? It was the, and that lifted Australia's profile. And when you had half the cabinet, you know, sitting around your dining table, that was a good thing.
That elevated Australia's influence in London at the time.
[Nick Fabbri] (56:10 - 57:13)
How wonderful. Yeah, I'm still, I'm still yet to attend one of my first events there, but hopefully there's an invitation around the corner from my mutual friend, Edward Hoddle, who is very active in the diplomatic scene. Does great things for Australia-UK relations, that man.
But coming to your time now at the National Security College at the Australian National University, as Professor of Practice of National Security Policy and Law, the role dovetails really neatly with your work in the Australia-UK relationship, especially with AUKUS and also the free trade agreement that was concluded between our two countries. And so we've mentioned it before, but about global Britain, but what is the state and significance of Australia-UK relationship, relations today, especially given that the UK is now pivoting back towards the Indo-Pacific strategically and economically, and that the relationship hasn't been as important as it now seems to be since the UK joined the common market in 1973?
[George Brandis] (57:15 - 1:00:25)
Well, it's very important and more, and you're absolutely right, Nick, more important than it has been at any time since 1973. Partly, well, you've already identified some of those reasons, but let me reinforce the point. A lot of this is the direct consequence of Brexit.
Now, in this interview, I've been very Brexit agnostic. I haven't shared whether I thought Brexit was a good thing or a bad thing. But obviously, it was a very important thing.
One thing that it meant was that Britain wanted to resume a more global role, not merely a Euro-Atlantic role. And the integrated review that was published during my time as High Commissioner, one of the most important state papers ever published in the history of British foreign policy, I think, specifically adopted the so-called tilt to the Indo-Pacific as a major goal. Now, there is a commercial dimension to that, and that is the accession of the United Kingdom to the CPTPP, the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, and also the free trade agreements that it closed with both Australia and New Zealand, and also, less consequentially, Japan, less consequentially because it was a much narrower trade agreement.
But there was also the strategic dimension, which was embodied in particular in AUKUS. So, Britain wouldn't have reimagined itself as a power with global significance if Brexit hadn't happened. And I know critics, some critics, particularly on the left, say, well, this is a rather pathetic, nostalgic yearning for past imperial glory.
It's not, you know. I mean, it's a commonplace, and all the MPP students will have no doubt read the literature on this. The convergence between the Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic, the commonality of the threats we face means that for any significant nation, and Britain is a significant nation, it's the fifth biggest economy in the world, it's a permanent member of the UN Security Council, it's a nuclear weapons state, Britain is an important nation on almost any metric.
It will increasingly have global interests because it faces global threats. And the localization of interests to one region of the world, I think, is a very 20th century notion. When the nature of the threat is as global and immediate as the threats are today.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:00:26 - 1:01:24)
And it's an interesting way to segue to questions of international security in your work in security at the ANU as well, and the international dimensions of all conflicts that seem kind of hyper-local or contained in smaller theatres. So, you know, you look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, and the threat of broader regional war with Iran's recent aggression, or even China's claims on Taiwan and the South China Sea. These issues aren't just confined to their immediate geographical location, they have implications for the integrated global order and the liberal democratic order too.
So just thinking about the current suite of conflicts that are bubbling away, it does seem as though the peace of the liberal democratic order could rapidly come undone. And so how do you assess the current geopolitical world order, and what can be done across the West, and in Australia specifically, to strengthen the sinews of our security architecture?
[George Brandis] (1:01:24 - 1:04:43)
I think the biggest threat to the West is the election of a second Trump presidency. I do. I think that isolationism, which in America, which is always a risk, under a Republican administration would reach a level that we haven't seen since the 1920s and 1930s, and we all know how that ended.
I don't want to over-interpret some of the remarks that Trump has made, but I do fear that the coherence of the West under American diplomatic leadership will be significantly weakened by another Trump administration. And Biden, for all his faults, and I think a little bit too much is made of Biden's physical frailty, broadly I think his foreign policy has been sound, and it's been very protective of America's allies and the projection of American power in beneficial ways. I think that will be the big thing in history this year and for the next few years.
More broadly, you asked about Australia, I think Australia through AUKUS now remains very engaged. I would like to see the current Labor government in Australia adopt a more forward-leaning strategic policy. This is a generalisation, I know, but generally speaking, conservative governments in Australia have been more willing to participate in global security.
Labor governments have adopted a more localised role for Australia. I think the decision to decline, for example, to send a frigate to be part of the policing efforts in the Red Sea sent a bad signal. But I don't want to overstate that point.
Australia, I think, remains a very important part of the West. It is the Western democracy, along with Japan and South Korea, in the Indo-Pacific that matters most. As an English-speaking democracy, and I'm not evoking this rather quaint notion of the Anglosphere here, but as an English-speaking democracy and as a member of the Five Eyes and a traditional partner with deep strategic, historical, cultural, people-to-people links with both the United Kingdom and also the United States, Australia, I think, is seen in the Euro-Atlantic as the go-to partner in the Indo-Pacific. Australians don't get that. It's probably the defect of our quality as a people who famously don't take ourselves too seriously, but I think Australians under-appreciate how important our role as a global actor is.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:04:45 - 1:05:51)
I think a lot of that is taking root in the academic literature and even civil debate recently with the release last year of Sam Roggeveen from the Lowe Institute's book, The Echidna Strategy, which basically argues quite controversially, Sam acknowledges this, that it would be a radical departure from the doctrine and history of Australian defence and security arrangements to stop trying to have Australia's globally interconnected defence security arrangements and adopt a more defensive, hyper-local or regional strategy of being an echidna or a hedgehog, not an appealing party for a nation or a malign actor such as China, for instance, to attack or invade, rather than the history of what we've had is a series of excursionary wars and conflicts like in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and also peacekeeping efforts around the world.
So, I think we seem to be a bit of a fork in the road as a country in terms of where we go.
[George Brandis] (1:05:52 - 1:07:03)
Yeah, well, echidnas are often roadkill. I mean, there are few nations that have been historically more generous than Australia in fighting against authoritarian states, whether in the First World War, in the Second World War, not just in the Pacific theatre, but also in the European and Middle Eastern theatres and elsewhere as well. But there are also few nations which, because of how massively exposed we are and how few people we have, comparatively speaking, that are more reliant on other powers to be our security guarantors.
And the idea that Australia can sort of withdraw into itself, not continue to be an engaged international actor, and not pay our dues as it were to the rest of the world, when we look to the rest of the world, if the rubber hits the road, to protect us, I think is absolutely the worst possible view of Australia's strategic posture.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:07:05 - 1:07:31)
I'm conscious of time, and we've already gone a little bit over what I said might be the length of the interview. But so just to wrap up, finally, do you have any words of advice to the 2023-4 MPP cohort here at Oxford, who include 150 students from over 60 countries around the world, noting you've very, very thoughtfully dispensed of a lot of wisdom and insights throughout the course of the interview, but just if you had any final words of advice or reflections?
[George Brandis] (1:07:33 - 1:10:14)
Well, look, I'm often asked a question like that, Nick, and it's very hard not to sound a bit like a cliché, but clichés become clichés because they're kind of true. And we should remind ourselves of a few fundamental truths. One is that by going to Oxford and doing a prestigious course like the MPP, you'll become a member of an extremely elite network.
And that's kind of one of the benefits and maybe one of the reasons too why people do it. But you should be conscious of that. And there are responsibilities in your future careers that go with that, because now this sounds like a kind of mega cliché, but I'm going to say it.
I mean, you're the people who, you know, the next generation are going to be running the world, or at least you're going to be among them. And the Oxford experience is delightful, but it's also consequential. And it also carries with it a burden of expectation that having had those benefits and made those connections and networks, you're going to carry them forward in careers that will be significant.
Allied to that, the thing I would say is never let lack of ambition stand in your way. I mean, the more ambitious you are, the better. Most people in their careers, I've noticed what they fail to achieve, they fail to achieve by putting limits on themselves.
Now you have a springboard that is vouchsafed to all but a tiny number of people and the intellectual equipment and experience to make the most of it. And so my advice is to pursue your careers in, if you're doing the MPP, obviously they're going to be careers in the public sector or in policymaking or in politics, to pursue those careers as ambitiously as possible, because that opportunity lies before you for the taking.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:10:16 - 1:10:32)
Wonderful stuff, wasn't cliche at all. George Brandis, thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the Oxford Policy Podcast.
And I'll wish you a wonderful Wednesday in sunny Canberra. It doesn't look too sunny actually through the window, but I hope you have a wonderful day.
[George Brandis] (1:10:33 - 1:10:44)
Thank you, Nick, and thank you for the opportunity and all the best to all the MPP students and listeners to this podcast in the important careers that no doubt they will pursue.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:10:44 - 1:10:45)
Wonderful, thank you.