Originally published on Oxford Policy Podcast.
In this episode, Nick Fabbri speaks with The Hon. Tony Abbott AC, Former Prime Minister of Australia. They discuss:
The influence of the Jesuits, Oxford, and Father Paul Mankowski on Mr. Abbott's life and leadership qualities
The art of effective opposition and developing alternative policies for the nation
Achievements and regrets of the Abbott Government in office
The role of government in fostering trust and cohesion in communities
National service and giving back to the country
National identity, immigration, and multiculturalism
Industrial and energy policy
The state of right of centre politics globally, and what a conservatism for the 21st century might look like
The importance of promoting classical education and an understanding of western civilisation to strengthen cultural self-confidence
The global security situation and the need for a military, industrial, and cultural re-armament to resist the authoritarian axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea
Poetic reflections on Australia and advice to young Australians abroad.
Transcript below ^_^
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 1:49)
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. I'm a student here at the Blavatnik School of Government with a background in the humanitarian sector, government and the military in Australia.
It's a great honour to be joined today by the Honourable Tony Abbott AC, former Prime Minister of Australia. Mr Abbott attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar at Queen's College between 1981 and 1983. He then worked as a journalist and trained as a Catholic seminarian before entering politics in the Australian House of Representatives as the Liberal Member for the Electorate of Warringah in 1994.
Mr Abbott served in a range of ministerial portfolios in the Howard Government from 1996 to 2007 before becoming Leader of the Opposition in 2009 and then being elected to government in 2013. Mr Abbott served as Prime Minister from 2013 to 2015 with his government implementing a number of economic and national security reforms. Today we'll be speaking about Mr Abbott's early life and time at Oxford, his career in politics and the future of conservatism, as well as the international security outlook.
Thank you so much for your time today Mr Abbott, it's a great pleasure to be speaking with you. So it's always a challenge to know where to begin conversations such as this, but I've long been fascinated by your connection with the Jesuits, their commitment to education and spiritual formation, and the sense of becoming a man for others.
So how important were your early years attending St Ignatius College Riverview in Sydney in forming your instincts towards public service and duty?
[Tony Abbott] (1:50 - 2:37)
I think they were very important Nick, because as you say, the Jesuits back then, and I hope still, have this idea that you should be a man for others, and I found my Jesuit teachers and mentors quite inspirational. I admired them, I looked up to them, in many respects I wanted to be like them, and certainly I took that message very much to heart. One of my Jesuit mentors, Father Emmett Costello, after my dad, probably had more influence on my early life and development than anyone else, and he's no longer with us, I hope he's up there looking down and pleased with what he achieved.
[Nick Fabbri] (2:38 - 2:59)
I'm sure he would be. Like so many young Australians, you made the move to the United Kingdom in your mid-twenties, and like very few fortunate young Australians, you did so as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford University. Can you speak a bit about that sense of familiarity or homecoming you had when arriving in the UK, flying over the Thames Valley into London, and how Oxford shaped you as a man and a leader?
[Tony Abbott] (2:59 - 7:09)
Well, again, thanks, Nick, and you've obviously read some of the things I've written. But yes, I still remember, I was coming to England on a very cheap airline, and this dodgy budget airline dumped us in Brussels with another ticket to get ourselves to London, and so it was a very short hop flight, and it was a clear enough day, and the plane flew low up the Thames Valley, and I looked out the window, looking at the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, all of these great London landmarks, which had been part of my, I guess, cultural hemisphere, but which I'd never actually seen in real life. And I think for anyone who grows up speaking English, grows up reading the kind of literature that was familiar to most of us in the 1960s and 70s, there is a sense of homecoming to be in Britain, to be in London. London is, I think, the world's greatest city, certainly one of the world's greatest cities.
Britain has been the source of so much that has shaped the modern world. I think really the modern world has been, if not shaped in England, certainly shaped in English. Britain has given the world the mother of parliaments, our common language, the industrial revolution, the emancipation of minorities.
And I was extremely conscious of this when I came to this country back in 1981 as a 24-year-old, and I was ready to learn as much as I could. And for two years, I soaked it all up like a sponge. I absolutely soaked it all up like a sponge.
My delusions of grandeur lasted maybe an hour. My delusions of adequacy lasted maybe a day, because I found that I wasn't just mixing with a bunch of bright kids from Sydney, which was my experience at Sydney University. I was mixing with some of the smartest youngsters from the entire English-speaking world, indeed from the world more generally.
And you've got to have your wits about you in that company. But nevertheless, eventually, I think I got the hang of it. And really, it was an extremely important part of my development as a man, and certainly a very important part of my development as, I suppose, an intellectual character.
The great thing about the Oxbridge tutorial system is that there's no spoon feeding, there's no rote learning. You don't sit in the lecture theatre and carefully transcribe what the lecturer says and regurgitate it in an exam to get a credit or a distinction. No, there are really no lectures at all that you have to attend.
You've got to prepare as an undergraduate two thoughtful essays a week based on an assimilation of the most important texts in the area that you then have to read, explain, and defend to someone who is a genuine expert in the area. And honestly, I can't think of a better intellectual training. Certainly, if you want to be a journalist, a politician, an advocate of any sort, this is beyond compare as a preparation.
[Nick Fabbri] (7:10 - 7:26)
And a lot of the education you receive at Oxford is beyond the textbooks and actually comes from learning from your peers who come from all corners of the world. A lot of the education takes place in the college tutorial system, certainly learning from world experts and so on, but there's that incredible peer-to-peer dimension too.
[Tony Abbott] (7:27 - 8:20)
And look, this is why Nick, the whole COVID thing was such a catastrophe for anyone going through education because the idea that you learn in isolation, the idea that you can do online something which is comparable to what happens in a tutorial or through the simple mixing with your fellow students and your teachers that should normally be part of a university experience is just wrong. There was so much that was appalling about the whole pandemic period, but the way we closed down schools, the way we closed down universities, the way we stole two years from the lives of young people in particular absolutely appalls me. And it's been tragic for anyone who was going through education at that time.
[Nick Fabbri] (8:20 - 8:57)
Yeah. And I'm studying alongside a number of undergraduates through my college at the moment, and it's really apparent that they've lost two of the best years of their lives and that they've been developmentally held back educationally, but also, frankly speaking, socially. Absolutely.
And just coming back to your time at Oxford to conclude this part of the conversation, one of the most formative experiences you've written about was meeting Father Paul Mankowski, the Jesuit priest from Chicago in the United States who led a remarkable life of service and spirituality, who sadly passed away in 2020. What was it about Father Mankowski that left such a mark on you as a young man?
[Tony Abbott] (8:59 - 13:14)
I met Paul in my first term at Oxford. He was studying at Campion Hall. An Australian Jesuit, Father John Honor, was up there, and John Honor invited me to dinner, probably in the first fortnight or so I was in Oxford.
And through John, I met this American Jesuit scholastic, Paul Mankowski, who was obviously quite a charismatic individual. Slowly but surely, I became quite enamored of Paul. I discovered that he really was a companion spirit, a kind of a soulmate.
And at the beginning of the following term, it would have been in mid January, 1982, I was just back from the Christmas break. I caught up with Paul for a drink at the old East Gardens Hotel. It's now been replaced by something else.
After about three beers, he said to me, look, Tony, the Oxford boxing team is short of a heavyweight. Would you like to go down and try out? Anyway, I said, look, no, no, no, that's not really me.
After a few more beers, he tried again. And I thought, well, what the heck, let's give it a go. Anyway, next day, I turned up at the boxing club, but feeling a little sheepish, went through the motions, decided afterwards that I didn't really want to do this and resolved that I'd go down the following day and say, look, I think you're fantastic.
It's a great sport. I'd love to do it, but I'm just too busy with rugby and other things, maybe next year. Well, Paul, who was a Jesuit who took his vow of poverty very seriously, he outfitted himself from the dead Jesuit's clothing box.
That's how seriously he took his vows. Paul had noticed that the previous day I'd had trouble finding a skipping rope the right size. So he'd gone off and spent 10 quid buying me a skipping rope, which he then presented.
And I just didn't have the heart to quit. After a few days, again, I started to get the hang of it. I loved it.
Went on to win two blues in boxing. On both occasions, the heavyweight bout was the deciding bout. And on both occasions, I was able to help bring back a big win for the dark blues.
Against Cambridge. Against Cambridge. But Paul, of course, you're thinking to yourselves, what's a Jesuit trainee doing in the boxing club?
Well, this was a very unusual Jesuit trainee, the ultimate muscular Christian, if you like, a guy who was utterly faithful to the Jesuit calling, but who was also very much a man's man. And I guess that was the thing that struck me about Paul. And indeed, I think helped to motivate me when I got back to Australia to train for the priesthood for a couple of years.
The fact that one of the most impressive and charismatic people I knew was able to do this. And I thought, well, if he can do it, maybe I should be ready to give it a go. Which I did before discovering that it takes a much deeper faith and a much greater self-discipline than I had in order to live the life of a priest in the modern world.
And so Paul went on to be ordained and to serve faithfully, sometimes under difficult circumstances for the rest of his life. And we stayed in pretty good touch, but I decided after a couple of years that I was a square peg in a round hole and went off to do other things. And here I am now.
[Nick Fabbri] (13:14 - 13:39)
And so you left St. Pat's Seminary in Manly, Sydney, and moved into the world of politics and policy. Nevertheless, motivated by a similar sense of higher service or duty that Father Paul Mankowski was in joining the church. So I'm curious as to what prompted you to leave serving the church as a seminarian and priest to pursuing a different kind of service in devoting your life to government, public service, and the public good.
[Tony Abbott] (13:40 - 15:07)
Well, I concluded after three years in and around the seminary that A, I lacked the patience to be a parish priest. B, I was unlikely to be celibate for the rest of my life. And C, I doubted that I had the kind of deep personal faith in the risen Lord that I think is needed to be an effective priest.
I still regard myself as a Catholic, however imperfect. I have always taken the holy faith seriously, not that I regard myself as any kind of exemplar. But to be on the other side of the altar rail, so to speak, requires a certain sanctity and almost spiritual heroism, which I wasn't cut out for.
But that said, I certainly thought and still think that all of us have a vocation in this life to make a difference. And whether we're making a difference as a parent, as a worker, as a community member, whatever it is, we should try to do everything we can, as well as we can, and we should do whatever we can to leave this world a little better for our presence in it.
[Nick Fabbri] (15:07 - 15:45)
And coming now to your time in politics, only four Liberal Party leaders have led the party from opposition into government, as part of a coalition, including Bob Menzies, Malcolm Fraser, John Howard, and yourself, all on the conservative wing of the Liberal Party, at least while they were in office. Many have labelled you as the most successful opposition leader in our country's history. So what is the art of being in opposition and holding a government to account, while also forming a positive vision for the country, especially when so many of your policy prescriptions as opposition leader ran against the currents of conventional political bureaucratic wisdom?
[Tony Abbott] (15:46 - 18:57)
Nick, the job of an opposition is to both oppose and propose. Obviously, you've got to defeat the government, but it's not enough just to defeat the government. You've got to have a plausible, credible plan for what you would do if you were in government yourself.
And that's certainly what I tried to be when I was in opposition. Yes, I wanted us to be a clear alternative, not a weak echo. But I also wanted to be able to tell people in advance exactly what we would do should the government change.
And in the 2013 election campaign, I had a little mantra. We would stop the boats, axe the tax, fix the budget, and build the roads. These were the famous or infamous three-word slogans that even some of my own colleagues sometimes didn't much like.
Anyway, and look, to change the government, people have got to not just be unhappy with the incumbent. They've got to believe that the alternative would do at least as good a job. And particularly as time goes by and people become more and more disillusioned with elected politicians who seem increasingly impotent in the face of unelected and unaccountable officials, I think it's more important than ever that a credible politician who's not in government be able to explain to the public that he doesn't just have an idea.
He actually has a plan to turn the idea into reality, because so much contemporary government is performative rather than effective. So many people in government think that you put out the press release and that's the end of the matter, that you make the announcement and then it all just somehow happens. It doesn't somehow happen.
It only happens if the people at the top are driving it. And it only happens if the elected and accountable politicians are able to actually influence and indeed run the unelected and unaccountable officials. And one of the problems with modern government everywhere, but particularly here in Britain, is the amount of governing, which is no longer in the hands of the elected ministers, but is in the hands of quangos and unelected officials.
And if there is to be substantial change in this country, and much as I love Britain and honour the wonderful contribution it's made to the modern world, I think that there are things that need to change here. And over the last couple of decades in particular, there really has been this cauterisation of the work of running the country from the hands of the people who are actually elected to do it. And that's a big problem.
[Nick Fabbri] (18:58 - 19:33)
And could you talk a bit about the art of persuasion as an opposition leader, politician or party leader, noting that you stood against the ascendingly popular Rudd government and against Prime Minister Julia Gillard as well. It must be personally quite taxing to sometimes controversially chart a different course for the country and attract the ire of the media, politicians and the public. And famously, your opposition team was called the Noalition instead of the Coalition of the Liberals and Nationals, because of your steadfast and sometimes automatic opposition to a lot of the government's policies of the day.
[Tony Abbott] (19:34 - 22:50)
Look, on a lot of things, I was against the zeitgeist, if you like. I did not think and do not think that climate change is the greatest political, economic and even moral challenge of our time. I think that climate change certainly happens.
I think that mankind does make a difference. I think it's good to reduce emissions if you can. But I don't believe there's any compelling evidence that mankind's carbon dioxide emissions are the principal factor in climate change.
If that's the principal factor in climate change, how on earth do you explain the ice ages and all the other climatic changes that had nothing to do with mankind's emissions? So look, I certainly think that we should try to reduce emissions where we can. The last thing we should do is turn the world upside down in the process.
So I was very much against the carbon tax. I think what current governments are doing in pursuit of net zero is laudable enough in its own way, but not if it pushes up the price of power, drives industries offshore, damages people's standard of living, and generally weakens the Western democracies that take climate change seriously vis-a-vis the dictatorships, which couldn't give a bugger about climate change, whatever they might say at conferences, which are designed to weaken us and strengthen them. So look, that's one issue. I find this whole identity politics really wrong and counter to the whole thrust of our political and moral development over centuries.
I mean, Martin Luther King's famous invocation to be judged not by the of your skin, but by the content of your character. Well, a lot of people on the left now think that indeed it's the color of your skin that's all that matters and everything is determined. So they say, so these quasi Marxists say, by whether you've got white privilege or whether you've got, I suppose, the oppression, which automatically comes to anyone who is not white, even if that person is in fact fabulously successful and wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.
So look, these are things which I've never had any regard for. And I think that the sooner we get over the climate cult, the identity obsession, the cultural self-loathing, which currently afflicts the best and most successful societies the world has ever seen, the better for everyone.
[Nick Fabbri] (22:51 - 23:10)
And I will come to that last point later in the conversation, but if we stay with your time in politics for the moment, it's 2024 now and your government was elected in September, 2013, just over a decade ago. Looking back, what are some of the political and policy achievements you're proudest of? And what are some of your regrets from your time in office?
[Tony Abbott] (23:11 - 25:48)
Well, Nick, obviously stopping the boats was very important because this was one of the things that really epitomized the failure of the previous Rudd-Gillard government. Kevin Rudd had been elected in 2007, promising to keep essentially the Howard government's border protection policies, in particular the readiness to turn around boats. In fact, he abolished them almost immediately on taking office.
And sure enough, the boats started again and eventually a trickle became a flood. In July of 2013, there were 5,000 illegal arrivals by boat in Australia. So something had to be done.
What we'd worked out in opposition was that we needed to bring together the disparate parts of government dealing with this problem into a unified command structure, Operation Sovereign Borders. What we quickly found out once in government, when we found that the people smugglers were, in a sense, trying to force our hand by constantly scuttling their boats, once Australian Naval and Customs personnel were at hand, was that we had to find a way of defeating this tactic. And we defeated it by supplying to these would-be illegal migrants by boat, an alternative boat.
If we couldn't turn around the boats that come in, because they'd scuttled them, we would put them on a mothership, keep them there until an appropriate time, put them in big orange life rafts, just unsinkable orange life rafts, just outside Indonesian territorial waters, and send them back with just enough fuel to get back to the beach in Java. And I knew early in 2014 that we were on the verge of winning this when the front page of the Daily Telegraph was a full page photograph of a big orange life raft beached in Java. And because these would-be illegal migrants by boat are pretty savvy and pretty switched on, that kind of imagery spread like wildfire.
And people quickly realised that you might give the people smuggler $10,000, but the journey was just going to bring you back to a beach in Java. So they stopped doing it.
[Nick Fabbri] (25:49 - 25:51)
And the people smuggling trade completely stopped?
[Tony Abbott] (25:51 - 26:55)
It completely died. And throughout the life of the recent coalition government, from early 2014 right up until 2022, I don't think there was a single people smuggling boat that made it to Australia, certainly over that Indonesian route. Now, of course, we've had a few because the people smugglers and their customers doubt the commitment of the now Labour government to the cause of border protection.
So far, there've been a few wobbles by the government, but let's hope we don't see any more wobbles because the last thing we want is to see a resumption of this trade because as sure as night follows day, if the boats start coming again, the deaths, the deaths at sea will happen on a large scale as Britain is seeing in the English channel right now.
[Nick Fabbri] (26:55 - 27:25)
This whole debate is very fraught and charged politically, but also in the public and the media. And a lot of people at the time criticised you for being anti-immigrant, for this hardline approach to border integrity and national security or national sovereignty. But at the same time in 2015, you admitted an additional 12,000 Syrian refugees from the crisis in that region.
So in other senses, you're extremely pro-migration, but more integrationist and from a one nation Australian perspective in a way.
[Tony Abbott] (27:25 - 29:31)
Look, absolutely right. Modern Australia is an immigrant nation. That's what we are and we should be proud of that.
I'm proud of that. And one of the glories of our country is the way that people can come to Australia from all four corners of the earth and provided they're prepared to have a go, they're thoroughly welcomed into our country. They quickly become thoroughly integrated into our society and very quickly become proud Australians and that's wonderful.
But you're only going to keep support for legal migration if you have illegal migration under the strictest of control. And you're also only going to maintain support for legal migration in the long term if there is this strong expectation on everyone who comes that they'll join Team Australia. And I fear that looking at some of these appalling outbursts of antisemitism that we've seen in Australia, as well as in Britain lately, that not all of our migrants are as well integrated as they should be.
Not all of our migrants have as fully assimilated our ideals of tolerance, fairness, and justice for all as I think they should have. I mean, you can argue about the policy of the Israeli government towards Gaza, but you cannot for a second, if you have properly assimilated the universal decencies of mankind, which our countries normally exemplify, you cannot support what would effectively be a new holocaust, the expulsion of Jews from the river to the sea.
[Nick Fabbri] (29:32 - 30:02)
Parallel debates are happening here in the UK about migration and across the Western world more broadly. So what is the role of government in building trust and fostering cohesion in society? Because we often talk about the atomization we feel in civil society in the 21st century with the erosion of social bonds between us, Putnam's thesis about bowling alone, the lack of civic participation in volunteer and faith groups.
What is government's role in facilitating a more cohesive country?
[Tony Abbott] (30:03 - 31:44)
Well, you know, government is not there to be the all powerful, all knowing shepherd with the citizens as timid and industrious sheep, so to speak. Government is there to, as far as it can, foster and facilitate the organic growth of civil society. Government can't substitute for the family.
Government can't substitute for community. Government shouldn't be shoving its nose into individual neighborhoods. What government should be doing is the defense of the realm, the maintenance of order, the fostering of good educational and health services, not necessarily delivered by government, so that we have a well-educated, civic-minded people who are going to go into this wonderful world and create their own dreams, realize their own destinies, rather than have the whole thing somehow determined by government. So look, freedom is important. Responsibility is important.
People with a sense of duty and service, that's all important. And government's role is, as I said, not to direct people, not to control people. It's to make all these things more likely.
[Nick Fabbri] (31:44 - 31:51)
And do you think the Tory government's proposal for national service for 18-year-olds is something that's feasible and desirable for Australia?
[Tony Abbott] (31:52 - 33:07)
Well, I like to think it's the sort of thing that the Abbott government would have done if it had had longer. Because yes, I do think it's important that everyone understands that there's a duty to give back. We all owe a debt to the country which has given us a good life.
And serving in the armed forces, if you're suitable, volunteering in the community otherwise, I think is a wonderful way to give back. And one of the things that they've long had in Britain, which we haven't really had in Australia, is this idea of a gap year between leaving school and going to university. And I actually think that that's a very good practice because so many of us leave school without a lot of worldly wisdom, without a strong idea of what we want to do long-term, and doing something completely different.
Whether it's travelling, whether it's going out and getting a job for nine or 12 months, whether it's serving the community in some way, I think would be pretty useful for most people.
[Nick Fabbri] (33:08 - 33:33)
Yeah, I agree. So when we were talking before about your time in office from 2013 to 2015, you mentioned stopping the boats as a key policy achievement. There are several others you might point to, such as abolishing the carbon tax, economic reform, and implementing budget discipline, possibly stopping the subsidisation of the car industry, but you might debate that.
But yeah, I'm curious as to what some of the regrets are that you have from your time in office.
[Tony Abbott] (33:34 - 36:59)
Look, there were things that I did which, with the wisdom of hindsight, would have been better not done. Just to give two examples, I cracked down on things like members of parliament employing immediate family members in their offices on the taxpayer, because I thought that was potentially a bit of a racket. Didn't endear me to my colleagues, though, quite a few of whom were doing exactly that.
And late in 2013, we abolished the debt ceiling, anticipating being able to crack down harder on unnecessary government spending than the parliament ultimately allowed us to. And with the wisdom of hindsight, that was a mistake. At the time, I didn't want to have a crisis before Christmas, so to speak.
So I thought, let's abolish the ceiling and deal with it in the budget. And once the new senate got together the following year, but it turned out that the new senate wasn't nearly as amenable to fiscal prudence as I thought it would be. That was a mistake with hindsight.
Some people say knighting Prince Philip was a terrible mistake. A barbeque stopper, wasn't it? It's interesting that had it been done eight years later when he was on his deathbed, I think it would have been universally cheered, given the outpouring of affection and respect for the man later on.
Look, there are other things that I did which I think were right at the time, but had the circumstances been different, would not have been right. For instance, we did a trade deal with China, which I was very happy with at the time because it was the first deal that China had done with any other G20 economy, and it was a very good deal. In those days, though, it was still possible to see China as liberalizing as opposed to challenging the global strategic order.
So that was not something that would ever have happened under the circumstances that existed a few years later. You mentioned the subsidies of the car industry. Well, as I said at the time, I wasn't going to chase them down the road waving a checkbook at them, but there is no doubt that countries like ours have de-industrialized.
That is a problem, a huge problem. I don't believe that subsidies are the way to sort that, but certainly we need to be a lot smarter about creating the conditions where manufacturing industries can thrive, even in high wage economies, high environmental protection societies like ours, and we haven't yet worked that out adequately.
[Nick Fabbri] (36:59 - 37:05)
You mean like having cheaper energy sources and power and more flexible industrial relations?
[Tony Abbott] (37:06 - 38:01)
Well, plainly, if you want to be a manufacturing country, you can't artificially inflate the price of electricity, which is one of the most important inputs to all industrial processes. You can't make it harder and harder to get gas because gas is an important feedstock to so many industrial processes. You can't allow unions to run the workplace at the behest of the least efficient workers because, sure, let's pay people high wages.
That's absolutely desirable, but if you're going to earn a very high wage, you've got to be highly productive and flexible as opposed to saying, well, actually, I'm an electrician, so I can't change a washer on a tap, or I'm a driver, so I can't actually load the truck. I mean, you can't have these sorts of ridiculous rules.
[Nick Fabbri] (38:02 - 38:46)
Turning now to the state of conservatism and right-of-center politics around the world. Many people have noted the dramatic changes in conservatism in the 1980s neoliberal consensus as it was under Thatcher and Reagan, and also more recently under John Howard and George Bush in the 2000s, with the rise of Donald Trump in America and populist conservatives across Europe. As what has been behind these changes in right-of-center politics and what does an effective conservatism for the 21st century look like, particularly when we consider the Tory government here coming to an end after 14 years and the country being very much distressed and worse off in several ways after their period of governance?
[Tony Abbott] (38:47 - 43:16)
There's no doubt that over the last few decades in all of the English-speaking countries, we've seen this political migration. Poorer people are voting more right, and richer people are voting more left. I almost think that it's the proliferation of what we might describe as first world problems, things that only worry you if you don't have more serious things to worry about.
For a lot of people in wealthy, peaceful, safe countries like Australia and Britain, where your next meal is coming from, whether you're going to have a roof over your head, whether you're going to die in your bed, these aren't problems anymore for so many people. We start to fret about things like carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, or fret about whether the British Empire's Herculean efforts to stamp out slavery were adequate, and what might be the long-term legacy of something. I think that there are quite a lot of people in the modern Western world who are fretting about issues which I think have only marginal relevance and which have been adopted by the left.
The highest proportion of green voters in Australia is amongst people earning more than $200,000 a year, so very high income earners. Yes, there's been this shift. Realignment.
I don't think that this is something that should especially trouble traditional conservatives, because my take on English-speaking conservatism is that there's a liberal element in that we believe in smaller government, greater freedom, lower taxes. There's a conservative element in that we support the family, small business, and institutions that have stood the test of time, but above all else, there's a patriotic element. We think that our countries are the best in the world.
We want to keep them that way. I think there's a very wide potential appeal. I certainly would be more than happy to go to the public with policies that make government smaller, but more effective, which make taxes lower and fairer, which free up workers and businesses to do better, which at the same time favor the traditional family and encourage people to have more kids, that build up rather than tear down the institutions that we need to have a decent society, and which above all else, promote pride in country, because I find it completely baffling that anyone would look at a society like Australia or Britain and think that they'd rather live in the Middle East, or that they'd rather live in China. The interesting thing about so many of these people who are currently marching for Gaza is that the things they take for granted here, such as the freedom to be of diverse lifestyle, et cetera, wouldn't be tolerated for a second, wouldn't be tolerated for a second. Religious pluralism.
So there's a kind of willful blindness and extraordinary historical amnesia in so many of these misguided protesters right now.
[Nick Fabbri] (43:16 - 43:48)
And you spoke recently at the National Symposium for Classical Education in Phoenix, Arizona about this precise issue, about the critical importance of classical education as a means for restoring faith in Western civilization and the self-confidence of the Western liberal democracies. So how important is the need to rediscover our classical intellectual and educational wellsprings? And I suppose, why has our civilizational self-confidence become so degraded in the first place that we've almost got a sort of a cultural self-loathing?
[Tony Abbott] (43:49 - 46:13)
Nick, it's absolutely critical. It's absolutely critical. We know as human beings that if we don't believe in ourselves, we can't successfully do anything.
If you're racked with self-doubt, you'll be a poor student, a poor worker, a poor spouse, parent, et cetera. You've got to have a basic level of self-belief to succeed in the world. Now, that doesn't mean that you have got to think that you're completely without flaw.
All of us have flaws, but there's got to be, I guess, this conviction of essential self-worth for a successful life. And what's true of individuals is true of countries as well. And Australia can't flourish if our citizens worry that the whole Australian project is somehow illegitimate because we should never have dispossessed the original inhabitants.
People like Jacinda Price and Warren Mundine absolutely understand all that. So we need to know enough of our history to be able to sort truth from falsehood and to be able to counter the kind of corrosive myth-making, which is also prevalent today. How has all this happened?
Well, look, it's essentially the long march of the left through the institutions. Too many people who should have known better or did know better, but were too polite to say anything, have acquiesced in things that should never have happened. The curriculum should not have been dumbed down.
The curriculum should not be decolonized. So there is so much that needs to be improved and corrected. And well, the one thing that an ex-prime minister has is a slightly larger megaphone than members of the general public.
So I intend to keep using it as best I can to good effect.
[Nick Fabbri] (46:13 - 46:51)
So coming to the last few questions in the interview today, looking around the world currently at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East, and China's ongoing saber rattling in the South China Sea, it's hard not to feel as though the liberal democratic order could come undone. It could unspool very quickly perhaps. And to quote William Butler Yeats, things fall apart.
The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. So how do you assess the current geopolitical situation and what can the liberal democracies do to strengthen the sinews of the global order along the lines of cultural self-confidence that you've just mentioned?
[Tony Abbott] (46:53 - 48:04)
You're right, Nick. Everything that seemed so secure and certain just a few years ago at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall is now very fragile. American global hegemony is not what it was if it exists at all.
We're looking at a situation in Ukraine where the Ukrainians are fighting heroically for their freedom, gravely hampered by the fact that we are just not producing for them the ordnance that they need, whereas the Russians have put their whole economy on a war footing and are producing shells, missiles, tanks, drones, et cetera, at an absolutely phenomenal rate. I mean, the phrase has been used, we're sleepwalking through cuckoo land or lotus land. I mean, I think there is a sense in which we are.
[Nick Fabbri] (48:05 - 48:09)
You mean in a pre-war sense, like before 1914 or 1939?
[Tony Abbott] (48:11 - 50:36)
We tend to think that because we're not interested in war, no one is. And yet, as I think Trotsky said, you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. And the leaders of countries like Russia and China, which are vicious autocracies, don't think the way our leaders think.
Our leaders have to get elected, which means that they've got to attend to people's daily concerns, better roads, better schools, better hospitals, lower taxes. If you don't have to answer to an electorate, you can neglect the bread and butter issues in favor of the pursuit of national glory. And Vladimir Putin thinks he's on a mission from his God to restore the Russia of Peter the Great.
Novorossiya, all the way to Moldova, Caucasus, Baltics. Xi Jinping is convinced that his mission is to restore China as the middle kingdom, as the world's number one power, very quickly. And things like Hong Kong and then Taiwan, these are just speed humps on the way to China's success.
So, this is a very dangerous world right now. And the best way to avert the catastrophe of war is not through weakness, but through strength. And this is why what we need throughout the Western world, but particularly in the Anglosphere, is military, industrial and cultural rearmament.
So, we are in a much better place to resist those who would radically change the way we live and would make the free and fair and prosperous life that we have known for the best part of a century unrecognizable.
[Nick Fabbri] (50:36 - 52:02)
Yeah. And to come to the final question in the interview, it's quite a mood shift, but you've often spoken about Australia in quite poetic terms. And I remember once in 2016, reading the final passage from Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs, which you'd quoted in the Spectator in Your UK Diary.
And it's so beautiful, it's worth reading in full. So, please bear with me. As I begin this last paragraph, outside my window, a misty afternoon drizzle gently but inexorably soaks the city of London.
Down there in the street, I can see umbrellas commiserating with each other. In Sydney Harbour, 12,000 miles away, and 10 hours from now, the yachts will be racing on crushed diamond water, under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires. It would be churlish not to concede that the same abundance of natural blessings which gave us the energy to leave, has every right to call us back, all in the whippies taken.
Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection. It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home. So, what does Australia mean to you in a poetic or emotional sense?
And what message do you have for young Australians abroad who will be looking at coming home in future years?
[Tony Abbott] (52:05 - 53:24)
Well, Nick, one of the reasons I didn't take a third year at Oxford was because it was such a garden of enchantment that had I spent more time there, I would never have left. And I didn't want to become a Pom, I always wanted to stay an Australian. So, while I'm an absolutely convinced and incorrigible Anglophile, I'm also a very proud Australian.
I think that the country we've created is without peer. Yes, we've built on a wonderful heritage, but we've created something which no one else has. I think it's special, I think it's precious, and I don't think it should be lost.
But the challenge is to build on our strengths. And you don't do that by not knowing what they are. You don't do that by forgetting your past or by distorting your past especially.
So, look, that's the challenge, to be our best self, to make the most of a country which is already great, but which just at the moment I fear might be drifting backwards. Brilliant.
[Nick Fabbri] (53:24 - 53:29)
Thank you very much for your time today, Mr Abbott. It's been an absolute honour to speak with you. Thank you, Nick.