Here are some highlights from the autobiography of the former Australian Prime Minister:
* only 7 per cent of Australia is above 600 metres, as compared with 45 per cent of the United States. Another factor is our volatile and capricious climate. Droughts are often followed by equally destructive floods. There’s the extreme variability of our rivers. The ratio between the maximum and minimum annual flows of the Rhine and the Yangtze is 2:1; for the Murray it is 30:1 and for the Darling, 10,000:1!
* Our big cities, I realised, had little or no ability to build new dams, and even if they did, the declines in streamflow meant they couldn’t be relied on to be adequately filled all the time. As far as urban water was concerned, my passion became recycling waste water as well as capturing storm water and directing it into ground water.
* One evening, Costello and I attended a Liberal Party fundraiser at the Royal Motor Yacht Club in Point Piper, so Peter stayed the night at our place. Before turning in, we sat up and talked. While he argued that Howard was too old, had run out of ideas and should go, when it came to himself, he said nothing to me about why he, Peter Costello, would be a good prime minister. He offered no vision or policy of any kind apart from saying he’d ratify Kyoto and apologise to the Stolen Generations. These, though important, were crazy political corners into which Howard had painted himself.
Rather than making a case for himself, he proceeded to argue that nobody else was qualified to succeed Howard. He told me I was too rich, Downer was a proven failure as leader, Abbott was crazy and more Democratic Labor Party (DLP) than Liberal, and Brendan Nelson was really a Labor person and a lightweight, and so on. It was very underwhelming and left me less convinced about Costello’s leadership capacity.
* The GFC began in the United States, where a long period of low interest rates coupled with imprudent lending practices resulted in a large percentage of home loans being made to people with poor credit histories. There was little prospect of them repaying the loans. These ‘sub-prime’ loans were made on the expectation that property prices would keep rising. The asset bubble inevitably burst and by the end of 2008, house prices in the United States had fallen dramatically – by more than 20 per cent on average overall, and in some areas by 50 per cent or more.
The loans had been securitised – sliced and diced and sold as complex securities and derivatives that were difficult, almost impossible, to reliably analyse. As the US housing market fell, the value of these securities also fell; their complexity made them hard to value and the fact that they were widely held across the banking world made banks distrust each other; confidence collapsed and banks were reluctant to lend to each other. US and European banks asked themselves, was the institution they were dealing with today going to be the next Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers or Washington Mutual – all venerable financial institutions that collapsed.
* Newly minted as opposition leader, I saw scope for bipartisanship: surely we could assist the government in its response to the financial crisis. Rudd, however, showed no interest in working with us at all. He wouldn’t meet with me to discuss the crisis and when I tried to engage him at public events, he’d cut me off.
Labor’s consistent refrain was that we should get out of the way. Rudd’s scornful rejection of our proposals suited the bulk of my colleagues: it invited partisanship. One of the tensions for an opposition leader, I was learning, is that the party room wants you to fight and slam the other side day in day out. Yet the public want to see constructive solutions and cooperation. That’s why the ferocious denunciation of your opponent in the House will get the backbench cheering and banging their desks but cause people at home to switch to another channel.
* Over the summer Rudd wrote a long paper on the economic crisis, which he attributed to unbridled capitalism and the neo-liberalism personified in the Coalition and in particular its leader – me. The answer, he said, was to put government at the centre of the economy!
His analysis was quite wrong, as I often pointed out. One of the causes of the collapse in the US housing market (which triggered the GFC) was that, unlike Australia, the government was at the centre of the housing economy. Far from the free market being allowed to rip, the US government underwrote two-thirds of the national mortgage book through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government-guaranteed funds. Added to that, governments, especially President Clinton’s, had mandated and encouraged banks to increase their sub-prime lending.
In Australia, by contrast, apart from the appropriate financial and prudential regulation, there was no government interference with banks’ lending policies.
In America there was a banking crisis; in Australia we had none.
* Abbott was no sooner elected than his inadequacies as a leader became even more apparent. His natural pugnacity had suited opposition – he could get up every morning and go out with ‘axe the tax’ and ‘stop the boats’ – but government required a positive agenda.
Dominating him was his CoS, Peta Credlin. In all my life, I’ve never known a leader more dominated by another than Abbott was by Credlin. Peta has always strongly denied that she and Tony were lovers. But if they were, that would have been the most unremarkable aspect of their friendship.
From my observation, the relationship was completely asymmetrical. He worshipped and feared her; she, on the other hand, treated him with disdain. I recalled from when I was opposition leader, Credlin (and her husband, Brian Loughnane) had always been scathing about Abbott – about his lack of discipline and his drunkenness, in particular. Then he became leader; she became his CoS; he nearly won the 2010 election and, of course, won in 2013. And she believed that without her, he couldn’t have done it. She’d remade him. She’d turned him into a prime minister – he was her creation.
And Abbott acknowledged it, publicly and privately. When Peta was upset, Abbott rushed to calm her. She could do no wrong and no matter how tyrannical or vindictive she became, he wouldn’t hear a word against her. He believed that without her he couldn’t do his job – maybe he was right; she certainly thought so.
This dependence on Credlin, and downright fear of her, was at odds with Abbott’s carefully cultivated image as the hairy-chested, bike-riding, weight-lifting, fire-fighting alpha male – complete with a swagger that would put a sailor to shame.
More than just about anyone I’ve encountered, Abbott is primarily driven by hatreds, fears, prejudice – anything negative. It’s as though he’s defined himself by what he’s against, without much thought for what he’s for. Right from the outset, the government lacked a coherent economic narrative: apart from repealing the carbon tax and the mining tax, what else did we have to say? Budget repair? But was it all to be about cutting expenditure? What was to be done to encourage investment and economic growth?
Neither Abbott nor Credlin were prepared to work within a conventional cabinet system where matters were discussed candidly in private, decisions were taken collectively and then announced. Instead, everything was geared to whether it would make a headline. Decisions were impetuous and more often than not briefed out to the media, typically The Daily Telegraph or The Australian, before being discussed with cabinet colleagues.
Credlin would humiliate ministers she didn’t like. Julie Bishop was a prime target. Her travel requests were often denied or held up until literally the last minute – all to make sure Julie (whose popularity outstripped Abbott’s) knew her place.
* The right wing of the Liberal Party has generally shown little interest in economics. Like Abbott, many of them are more DLP than Liberal and their economic instincts are invariably populist and interventionist. What gets them going are ‘values issues’. In the Abbott years, the two most prominent ones were same-sex marriage (they were furiously against it) and the reform of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
Ever since Andrew Bolt, the right-wing columnist, had been found to have breached the act because of some offensive remarks he made about several Indigenous leaders, there’d been a campaign to ‘amend 18C’. The proponents of change were either champions of free speech (according to News Corp) or advocates of hate speech (according to the left and the multicultural lobby). Brandis didn’t help things when, trying to channel Voltaire, he justified the reform proposal with the immortal line, ‘Everyone is entitled to be a bigot,’ in response to a question from Indigenous senator Nova Peris.
Section 18C prohibits acts that are ‘reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people’ where that act is done because of the person’s race, colour or ethnic origin. There’d developed a consensus, at least on the side of the reformers, that the best amendment would be to replace the words ‘offend, insult, humiliate’ with a stronger term, such as ‘vilify’.
However, on 24 March, a few hours before cabinet was due to meet, a set of sweeping proposed changes to 18C was circulated. They made the ‘vilify’ change but went much further. Once again, proper process was being bypassed; this was designed to railroad a proposal through the cabinet without ministers having the opportunity to fully consider it.
As soon as I saw it and recognised the problems, I wrote to George and copied Abbott. One of the proposed changes had the effect, I pointed out, ‘that promoting hatred against a group of people, Jews for example, will no longer be prohibited unless a particular Jew can satisfy a court that hatred has been incited towards him’.2 This would effectively license hate speech so long as it wasn’t directed at a particular individual.
However, there was worse. As I also said, the current exemption for public commentary and opinion applied so long as it was done ‘reasonably and in good faith’.
I noted that these amendments:
… are designed to ensure that a person CAN vilify or intimidate somebody else on the basis of race etc so long as it is expressed in the form of an opinion or belief and that opinion or belief can be unreasonable, motivated by malice, unfair and/or inaccurate.
This will be seen by many as a licence for racial hate speech. It will undoubtedly permit holocaust denial, not to speak of the expression of views about the inferiority and/or depravity of particular races.
* For many of my Liberal Party colleagues, the ABC was a nest of dangerous, mung bean–munching, latte-sipping lefties out of touch with the world beyond their inner-city elitist enclaves. The Nationals (and some rural Libs) generally had a more nuanced view. They recognised the ABC did an outstanding job in its coverage of rural and regional Australia. To them there were good programs (Landline) and bad ones (Q&A, The 7.30 Report … pretty much everything that wasn’t hosted by people wearing akubras).
Personally, I was thoroughly pro-ABC. In an age where social media had smashed the advertising business model of the mainstream media of newspapers, television and radio, the ABC had a crucial role to play. But it needed to improve its journalism so it was genuinely accurate and impartial. This was harder than ever of course, not because of left-wing bias but because the rest of the media had, by and large, become debased to the level of social media: light on facts, dripping with bias, full of fake news and outrage.
* These bad polls made Abbott’s media backers go in harder. After days of demented denunciations from Alan Jones, I agreed to go on his program. On 4 June, the night before the interview, at 5.59 pm, I called him up. We spoke (mostly he spoke) for 31 minutes. I wrote in my diary that night:
I tried to persuade him to stop this mad jihad against me on the basis that it was (a) utterly baseless and (b) very damaging to the Government, creating issues of leadership all at a time when we were behind in the polls and thus vulnerable.
Jones was totally hysterical, screaming (literally) at me. He kept on accusing me of being ‘a traitor, a treacherous schemer’. He said again and again, ‘I love Tony Abbott and I will stand between him and anyone who tries to undermine him and that means you Malcolm Turnbull … You don’t love Tony Abbott.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I am quite fond of him –’
‘But you don’t love him, like I do,’ screamed Jones.
‘Not like you do, Alan, that’s true,’ I replied.
At one point, he started screaming, ‘Don’t you know, everybody hates you, they hate you, everybody, everybody hates you …’ At another point he said, ‘Why aren’t you out there every day selling the Medicare Co-payment?’ I said that it might be because I wasn’t the Health minister. ‘That’s just an excuse!’ said Jones.
Jones wasn’t quite as mad the next morning, but when he tried to get me to repeat after him a statement of support for the budget, I put him back in his place. ‘Alan, I am not going to take dictation from you. I am a cabinet minister.’4
By the end of the interview, I was exhausted but I could tell I’d won it. I’d stood up to Jones: few politicians do that. I told him he was doing the Labor Party’s work and was a bomb-thrower. He hated that. And if I needed any confirmation how weird he was, this is the text message he sent me after the interview: ‘Malcolm. Thank you for your time today. Now that all that stuff is out in the open everyone can get on with the job. I look forward to being able to support you in the future. Alan.’
Unbelievable. Had he asked Julia Gillard out for a beer after he said she should be dropped into the sea in a chaff bag? Consensus was I’d put him back in his box.5 He wouldn’t stay there for long.
In what was to become a standard modus operandi, the attacks by Bolt and Jones were dovetailed with a campaign against me in The Australian –loudly complaining that I wasn’t doing enough to sell the budget! The editorials on 3 and 6 June denounced me, echoing and endorsing Bolt and Jones.6 I wrote to Lachlan Murdoch on 6 June to remind him I was doing as much media as the PMO would allow me to do. And just in case anyone imagines the Murdochs don’t influence the editorial line of their papers, following my email an editorial of 7 June took a different line, urging Abbott to ‘make better use of his government’s best-credentialled and, in theory, most persuasive advocate’.
* Serving in Abbott’s government had been painful, humiliating, embarrassingat once. Cleaning up the messes created by his lack of discipline, trying to rationalise or temper his latest weirdnesses … I felt like I needed to take a shower some days just to wash off the indignity and taint of being part of such a shambles. But now, one way or another, it was going to be over. Either we rolled him and I became prime minister or we didn’t, in which case I would resign from parliament.
* Howard’s government had been unpopular, markedly so after Rudd became Labor leader. But Howard, no matter how bleak the polls, 18 kept governing, legislating, reforming, while the Abbott government was a bad government and in some respects was barely governing at all. There were a few moments of panic under Howard, but they were the exception. With Abbott, whether you called it panic or frenzy or just madness, there was no remission.
* Abbott, of course, was anything but a ‘real Liberal’. Years earlier, Peter Costello was on the money when he described him as Australia’s first DLP prime minister. But reality wasn’t especially relevant: the group Miranda Devine aptly dubbed ‘delcons’, or deluded conservatives, could tell themselves whatever they liked and have it confirmed every hour of the day in one accommodating echo chamber after another in the right-wing media.
The Canberra press gallery cover politics as though it was sport – all that matters is who’s ahead,who’s in the team, who’s the captain. Policy is of secondary importance, and so leadership change, any leadership change, will always be viewed by them through the prism of polls. And I reinforced that by mentioning 30 Newspolls in my speech on the 14th.
* Keating used to say, ‘In the great race of life, always back self-interest because you know it’s trying.’
* Border protection was a definite strength for the Coalition. To their great credit, Abbott and Immigration minister Scott Morrison had ‘stopped the boats’ and while praise for that would diminish over time, this represented a sharp political difference with Labor.
National security more generally was also a Coalition strength, but it wasn’t as clear-cut. Nobody seriously thought the Labor Party were ISIL sympathisers or about to sell the country out to the Chinese or the Russians, but overall our side of politics was seen as a steadier, safer pair of hands when it came to defence and security.
* Trade, and especially with our region, was absolutely central to my vision for a more dynamic, prosperous Australia. We were perfectly positioned to take advantage of the rapid economic growth in Asia. Technology had in large part abolished longitudinal distance – and we were in the same time zone as all the major centres. Moreover, with a growing percentage of our community of Asian heritage, we had the background, the cultural understanding and language skills to connect. I often commented on how our multicultural society and its diversity was a source of strength. I imagine more than a few cynics thought those were just warm words, but they were not only heartfelt but hardheaded. Large global firms generally recruit far more Australians than they can ever use in Australia because growing up in our diverse society we’re generally well equipped to work with people from very different cultural backgrounds.
* I’d often felt New Zealand handled matters more efficiently than we did, at lower cost and with less red tape. John said that was because, lacking a minerals bonanza, the Kiwis couldn’t afford to be as wasteful as we were. Plus it’s a smaller country: no state governments, and a single national parliament with only one chamber, so, no Senate!
* Following the murder in October 2015 of NSW Police accountant Curtis Cheng on the steps of the Parramatta police station, I said, ‘Australia is the most successful and most harmonious multicultural society in the world. There is no comparable country with as large a percentage of its citizens and residents born from outside its shores with such a diverse cultural mix of peoples. None of us, no one of us can look in the mirror and say, “All Australians look like me.” Australians look like every race, like
every culture, like every ethnic group in the world.’ 1
Our success was because of the mutual respect that was fundamental to our harmony as a multicultural society, to our future prosperity and our national security. If we wanted our faith and our cultural background to be respected, then we had to respect that of others. Violence began with intolerant, hateful speech, and we had to call it out.
Duncan Lewis, ASIO director general, sent me a text thanking me for my remarks and forwarding positive feedback from Muslim community leaders who applauded my vision ‘to protect, promote, celebrate our successful Australian multicultural social cohesion and harmony’.
* For the next legs of my journey – to Baghdad and Kabul – we flew on a C-17, which had defensive systems Wombat One lacked. Once in Iraq we wore body armour almost everywhere and were ferried around in American Blackhawk helicopters, which featured two large M-60 machine guns trained by their fiercely alert gunners out of a window on each side of the passenger compartment.
I was proud to see our troops there, as I was in Kabul and elsewhere in the Gulf.
* In the last weeks of the Abbott government, with my strong encouragement, we’d agreed to take 12,000 additional refugees from the Syrian conflict zone with priority given to oppressed minorities like Christians and Yazidis. It’s tragic that some of the most ancient Christian communities, which had lived alongside their Muslim neighbours for over a thousand years, were now being driven out, caughtbetween the Shia anvil and the Sunni hammer as each sought to demonstrate their contempt for non Muslims. ISIL had embarked on a genocidal campaign against the Yazidis and came close to succeeding. Al-Abadi’s assessment confirmed my view that the prospects of his Christian communities were bleak. The diverse and multicultural Middle East was coming to an end.
* Our law currently prohibits the construction or operation of nuclear power plants, nuclear enrichment, fuel fabrication or reprocessing facilities. 9 And any change to that would prompt a massive political debate about nuclear power. We’ve had that debate several times before, most recently when John Howard was prime minister and commissioned Ziggy Switkowski to do a review of nuclear power in Australia in 2006. 10And then there’s the environmental challenge of nuclear power plants, their operation and the disposal of their waste. Whether in response to the disaster at Chernobyl or more recently Fukushima in Japan, the developed world, for the most part, is moving away from nuclear power. Germany and Japan are committed to decommissioning their nuclear plants. A recent effort by the South Australian Labor government to win support for establishing an industry of storing nuclear waste in a remote, deep, geologically stable bunker failed miserably.
There’s no country with a nuclear navy that doesn’t also have a civil nuclear industry – the latter supports the former with expertise and, of course, job opportunities for retired nuclear submariners. If we were to move to nuclear submarines, we’d need to have some civil nuclear industry, justified by its support for the navy rather than its offer of cheap electricity. It would need long-term, bipartisan support and well over a decade would be needed to establish the pool of skilled personnel in every field to support it.
* I was PM by the time Rudd finally decided he did want to run and he did need Australia to nominate him. We spoke about it by phone, the day before the budget, on 2 May at about 7 am. ‘Kevin, as I told you last year, I would take this to cabinet and I’m happy to do so. However, I don’t believe cabinet will support your candidacy and so it would be in everyone’s best interests if you didn’t ask me to do so,’ I said.
Kevin was most indignant and pressed me as to why, so I told him. ‘Kevin, the consensus view, and it’s my view too, is that you aren’t suited to the role because of your poor interpersonal and management skills.’ That was about as tactfully as I could put it.
‘You little fucking rat, you piece of shit! I’m going to get you for this. I’m going to come down to Australia and campaign against you in every part of the country. I will remind them of Godwin fucking Grech, you …’ A torrent of obscenities followed as he went on in this way for quite a few minutes.
‘Look, Kevin, calm down. Don’t you see this is just confirming what I’ve said to you. You don’t get what you want and immediately you are screaming at me, swearing at me, threatening me. Don’t you think this is a bit unedifying you doing this, an ex-PM to the current PM?’
He kept going and didn’t appear to draw breath. Finally I had to bring the call to an end. ‘Okay, Kevin, now I’m not hanging up, but as you know this is a big job, very busy, lots of meetings, so I have to go,’ and then gently I put down the phone with the abuse still echoing through my office.
I reported on the call to the secretary of DFAT, Frances Adamson. She responded in one word: ‘Yikes.’
Fortunately, Julie Bishop was able to calm Rudd down and the matter went into abeyance until after the election, when he made another application for our support. 3
My senior colleagues all agreed on two points. Nobody thought he was really suited for the role, and everyone agreed that he had no chance of winning. Julie’s view, which was shared by others, was that nominating Kevin would make us look bipartisan; it avoided him being out in the media attacking us and, given he wouldn’t win, no harm would be done.
* When I became prime minister, I was determined to lead an inclusive government that embraced and promoted Australian multiculturalism and, in particular, didn’t demonise Muslims, let alone tag them all with the crimes of a small extremist minority. No PM before me had ever held an iftar, the dinner that breaks the fast during the month of Ramadan. The first opportunity to hold an iftar was in June, which was during the last four weeks of the campaign. So, we arranged to hold it on 16 June at Kirribilli House in Sydney…
The truth was that News Corporation, like others on the right wing of politics, did want to define Muslims only in terms of national security. But it’s equally true that I shouldn’t have held that iftar during an election campaign. I underestimated the extent to which my opponents would seek to exploit it. Shorten obviously was tipped off to Sheikh Shady’s past statements and may have even collaborated with News Corp to complete the hit. It transpired that he spent the evening at a vigil in memory of the victims of the Orlando massacre, which he no doubt thought was a useful contrast.
* Politics, I reminded a press conference, is governed – as John Howard likes to say – by the iron laws of arithmetic.
* I was on the move again to New York for the annual UN General Assembly leaders’ week. Australian prime ministers don’t attend these events every year, but they are, like all international conferences, a great opportunity for meeting a large number of leaders who don’t attend regional forums in the Pacific or the big summits like the G20. In addition to old friends like Bibi Netanyahu, I was particularly interested to meet several Eastern European leaders – including President Grabar-Kitarović of Croatia and her counterparts from Romania, Ukraine and Bulgaria. All of them attributed the Brexit vote in June 2016 to the decision Angela Merkel had made in September 2015 to allow a million asylum seekers from Syria to enter Germany. Their message was unequivocal – nothing is firing up right-wing populism so much as the threat of uncontrolled migration.
* The United Nations has been the source of continued criticism of Australia’s border protection policies for many years, and so rather than duck the tough issues, I gave a speech there on 21 September that set out our position plainly.
I said, ‘In order to secure and maintain public support for immigration, multiculturalism and a generous humanitarian program, the public need to know that it is their government which controls their borders.’
Without that control, we wouldn’t have been able to maintain the world’s third-largest permanent refugee resettlement program, nor to increase our broader humanitarian intake by 35 per cent, let alone take an additional 12,000 refugees from the Syrian conflict zone.
* I described the anxiety felt in the USA particularly, about the way in which China was forging ahead of America in science, technology and infrastructure – summed up in Tom Friedman’s book with Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us.2 But I rejected the proposition that China’s economic growth meant it was inevitably going to become a military threat…
* I travelled to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, in September 2016 for the East Asia Summit, where the newly elected Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, made his first international appearance. It was quite a debut. At the plenary session, he described how as a young man he’d worked as a prosecutor but couldn’t get convictions because the drug traffickers had bribed the judges. He said that he had then decided to run for mayor and won. ‘And you know what I did to the drug traffickers?’ he said. ‘I killed them all!’
You could have heard a pin drop. Li Keqiang, who was sitting next to me, looked around as though something had gone wrong with the translation.
Duterte repeated, ‘I killed them all!’
* Everyone, including the leadership in Beijing, was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. When President Xi and I discussed the prospect of a Trump presidency and a trade war with China in Lima, Xi was confident he could do business with Trump, believing that as a businessman he would be pragmatic and transactional. However, he also believed, as everyone else did I might add, that Trump’s bellicose campaign rhetoric about China wouldn’t be followed through in office. We were all wrong there.
* We recognised that China’s goal was to supplant the United States as the leading power in the region, and that was plainly not in our interests. We also knew, from first-hand experience, that China’s policy towards other countries was thoroughly integrated. If a foreign nation disappointed China – for instance by criticising its conduct in some manner – then it could expect both criticism and economic consequences. Ministerial visits would be stopped or curtailed, trade deals would be frozen or not followed through, Chinese tourism would drop off, foreign businesses in China would be boycotted.
These bullying tactics were designed to force the foreign critic to become compliant. And they work, and not just with governments in Australia. Take the current situation in Xinjiang, where about a million ethnic Uyghurs, all Muslims, have been locked up in ‘re-education camps’ and are subject to many other types of surveillance and oppression. Has the Muslim world protested? Hardly a word – the Saudi king was feted in Beijing, and the new prime minister of Pakistan professed to be barely aware of the issue when asked about it last year.
A threat is a combination of capability and intent. Capability can take years or decades to put in place, where it can be done at all. But intent can change in a heartbeat. In the six years between my speech at the LSE in 2011 and my Shangri-La address in 2017, China’s capabilities, in every respect, had continued to grow; but what had really changed was its intent. Under Xi, it became more assertive, more confident and more prepared to not just reach out to the world, as Deng had done, or to command respect as a responsible international actor, as Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin had done, but to demand compliance.
* Managing the China relationship is a very delicate balancing exercise.
I knew, from years of experience of dealing with bullies, that if you take a strong position on something and then back down under pressure, you’ll be mightily diminished. You’ll lose respect and leverage. So, if you’re going to draw a line in the sand, it must be one you’re prepared to stand by and not flinch.
An Australian prime minister who ends up in conflict with China cannot expect any support or solidarity from the Australian business community. Overwhelmingly, they’re totally invested in the economic benefits of the relationship and, as I saw many times, they’ll always blame their own government if problems arise – even if the problems have nothing to do with government policy. Sometimes, when a Chinese Customs official says an Australian exporter’s papers ‘are not in order’, they are, in fact, not in order. Nonetheless, if an Australian government quite reasonably stands its ground and China quite unreasonably overreacts negatively (as it often does), Australian businesses will invariably blame their own government.
During my time the loudest critics of our China policies were some of the university heads. One of the most disappointing was Michael Spence, the vice chancellor of Sydney University. Of his full-fee-paying foreign students, 65 per cent are Chinese. At a particularly tense time, when we were endeavouring to pass foreign interference legislation, he publicly accused me and my government of ‘Sinophobic blatherings’.8
Added to the list of regular critics are former politicians like Paul Keating, Bob Carr and our own Andrew Robb, and former diplomats like Geoff Raby. While they would disavow that it has any influence, all nonetheless have commercial interests in remaining on the very best terms with Beijing. And, of course, many politicians and their parties rely on generous donations from Chinese business figures.
Nobody wants to have a row with China, but far too many Australians aren’t particularly fussed how high a price we pay to avoid one.
Finally, the most sensitive factor is the one and a quarter million Australians of Chinese heritage. The People’s Republic of China is ostensibly a secular multicultural society celebrating the ethnic and cultural diversity across its vast landmass. However, the reality is that it’s one of the most racially and culturally homogenous nations in the world: 92 per cent of its population is Han Chinese and there’s one written language and one national spoken language – Mandarin, or putonghua. (India, by comparison, is religiously, linguistically and ethnically diverse with 22 officially recognised languages alone.)
The Chinese government seeks to mobilise overseas Chinese, and especially Chinese students, to support Chinese government policy; this is one of the functions of the UFWD. The Chinese-language media in Australia is overwhelmingly controlled by, or completely beholden to, Beijing, and takes its line from the official media outlets in China.
* Our decision on 5G was the first formal ban of Huawei and ZTE in the world. We were careful in announcing it in as low-key a fashion as possible, but it has nonetheless been bitterly resented in Beijing, which has put enormous pressure on other countries – especially the United Kingdom – not to follow suit.
* ‘Don’t worry, Malcolm. The American people will never elect a lunatic to sit in this office.’
So Barack Obama had enigmatically assured me in the Oval Office in January 2016, when I asked him about the presidential race.
* Every country and every leader tried to work out how to deal with Trump. Elaborate psychological analyses were written in foreign capitals – including our own. The general conclusion was that Trump was a narcissist who’d respond well to flattery. ‘Lay it on with a trowel’ was the consensus, echoing former British PM Benjamin Disraeli’s advice on how to deal with royalty.
I felt this approach was quite mistaken. I’d never met Trump or dealt with him but knew plenty of people who had. He was typical of more than a few of the billionaires I’ve known – Kerry Packer, Conrad Black, Jimmy Goldsmith and Bob Maxwell, just to name a few. And the one thing I’d learned with bullies is that sucking up to them is precisely the wrong way to go.
Just as imperial powers regard deference as their due, so do bullies – especially powerful ones – expect to be flattered. It doesn’t win respect, nor does it earn gratitude. And if the bully in question is a particularly manipulative one, the flattery will be used against you. Personalities like that often appear utterly lacking in emotional intelligence, devoid of empathy. But that’s not the whole picture: in my experience, the successful narcissistic bully is able to manipulate others effectively because he has a keen sense of others’ vulnerabilities. Like any predator, he can sense fear and weakness from miles away.
So, the best way to deal with someone like Trump is to be frank and forthright. Be yourself, always be courteous – there’s nothing to be gained from rudeness or scratchiness. But stand your ground. That suited me.
* When Trump arrived, he was accompanied by Rudy Giuliani and Rupert Murdoch. His deference to Murdoch was greater than I’ve ever seen from any Australian politician and was in marked contrast to the high-handed way Trump treats most people. When he asked me if Rupert could join us for our bilateral discussion between leaders, I told him that wasn’t a good idea, adding, ‘The rest of the media will kill us; let’s catch up with him later.’
For a first meeting, we covered a lot of ground. He talked about Kerry Packer a lot; he knew I’d been Kerry’s lawyer and ‘kept him out of jail’, something Donald mentioned every time we met. Most billionaires keep an eye out for a good lawyer in a tight corner.
He is a big fan of Greg Norman and described in detail several tournaments he felt Greg had unfairly lost.
Trump is a natural isolationist. Everything he had learned about the history of East Asia from Xi and Abe only fleshed out what he believed about the bitter historical enmities between China, Japan and Korea.
* But with Trump, we faced a president who was supremely confident of his own judgement, obviously didn’t pay much – if any – attention to officials and, in a manner I’d never seen anywhere before, played politics on an hour-to-hour media cycle, creating a crisis, then – if it went sour – creating another.
He was, as Joe Hockey used to say, a master at using weapons of mass distraction.
* Trump repeatedly came back to historic issues from the Second World War that seemed calculated to make Shinzo uncomfortable. It was as though he wanted to keep him off-balance, his standard negotiating tactic. It didn’t work; Shinzo was always cool and calm, never showing any sign of irritation.
Trump kept going on and on about the US trade deficit with Japan and at one point suggested he had a trade deficit with Australia. I corrected him, publicly, pointing out that he had a big surplus with us, and we didn’t complain, and we had a big surplus with Japan and Shinzo didn’t complain.
Trump’s problem with trade was that he simply didn’t understand that it wasn’t a zero-sum game and believed that if you had a surplus with another country you were a ‘winner’ and if you had a deficit you were ‘a loser’.
We talked about America’s trade deficit with China on many occasions; it was almost an obsession with him. I urged him to stop trying to get the Chinese ‘to buy more of our stuff ’ and instead focus on fair and reciprocal trade, a level playing field: if that were achieved, then the trade balance would be whatever it was, but would probably improve from his point of view.
When we met privately in Manila in November at the East Asia Summit, he asked me what I thought would happen if he banned all Chinese imports into the United States. ‘A global depression,’ I said, as quietly as I could. He was clearly straining with frustration, and returned again and again to the ‘$350 billion trade deficit, but it’s really more like $500 billion, Malcolm’.
* Donald, Emmanuel and I were down one end of the SCIF and while I wanted to talk about steel, the president of France wanted to talk about the wording of the communiqué.
Donald wanted to talk about neither. ‘Emmanuel,’ he said, ‘do you know Malcolm is the best lawyer in the world? The best. He kept my friend Kerry Packer out of jail. Nobody else could have done that.’
I was thinking, is this going to be a routine? So, on cue, I said, ‘Oh, Donald, it wasn’t that hard. He was innocent.’
Quick as a flash, Donald says with a big grin, ‘No, he was so guilty, so guilty. Deserved to go to jail forever!’
To say that Macron was astonished by this is an understatement, but the routine continued.
‘Emmanuel,’ Donald continued, ‘Malcolm has two thousand of the worst terrorists in the world – the worst in the world – locked up on a desert island.’
‘They aren’t terrorists, Donald,’ I wearily replied.
‘Oh, yes they are. They are the worst, and that fool Obama – the worst president EVER – agreed to take them to America. Can you believe that? Would you take them, Emmanuel?’
Macron opened his mouth but didn’t say anything; his eyes just got wider.
‘But you know what’s worse? Now I have to take them! Malcolm, why do I have to take them?’
‘Donald,’ I said, ‘they’re yours. And they are very nice people. You will get on fine.’ This was definitely becoming a routine.
* This transformation of Shorten – the right-wing, business-friendly, dealmaker, union leader – into an Antipodean version of Jeremy Corbyn was quite a sight and so I took the opportunity to give him some of his own back.
“We have just heard from that great sycophant of billionaires, the Leader of the Opposition. All the lectures he is trying to run are politics of envy. When he was a regular dinner guest at Raheen – always there with Dick Pratt, sucking up to Dick Pratt – did he knock back the Cristal? I do not think so. There was never a union leader in Melbourne that tucked his knees under more billionaires’ tables than the Leader of the Opposition. He lapped it up – oh yes, he lapped it up! He was a social-climbing sycophant if ever there was one. There has never been a more sycophantic leader of the Labor Party than this one, and he comes here and poses as a tribune of the people. Harbourside mansions – he is yearning for one. He is yearning to get into Kirribilli House. Do you know why? Because somebody else pays for it: just like he loved Dick Pratt’s Cristal … Blowing hard in the House of Representatives, sucking hard in the living rooms of Melbourne.”
* Sitting opposite Shorten for nearly three years, I came to the conclusion that he was unable to speak with conviction on anything. Often we’d both read prepared speeches on set-piece occasions. I’d go first and then I’d listen to Bill. Many a time I felt his speech was better than mine, but he never did it justice. Occasionally, I wanted to jump up and say, ‘Give me your speech and let me read it for you.’ I used to feel sorry for his speechwriter, whom I imagined weeping in the office as Shorten mangled their sublime prose.
His critics would say he had no convictions. But I don’t agree with that. He’s a professional politician and very pragmatic. But he has showed great compassion during his career, whether it was representing the Beaconsfield miners or championing the NDIS. Somehow, perhaps, in his anxiety not to make a mistake he became so self-consciously contrived that he lost his authentic voice and so appeared to be ‘shifty’, as so many people said. Sometimes lifelong politicians spend so much time playing a role that they’re not able to be themselves, to be authentic. Shorten, I concluded, was a better person than he appeared to be.
* Our media culture today is more debased than ever. Traditional curated media has seen its business model smashed by the internet; Google and Facebook in particular. And the crazy, fact-free rage of social media has now infested what’s left of the traditional, but still very influential, media.
I have dealt with all the leading media proprietors over many years – current and departed, fathers and (almost invariably) sons. And the one thing they prize above all else is power, and power over politicians. And so they have always been ambivalent about me. My business background and free market philosophy are appealing at one level, but my lack of deference, and personal and financial independence are not. Media barons and many other billionaires like politicians who are dependent on them. Being a broke who cannot pay household bills does not necessarily endear you to the electorate, but it does endear you to a wealthy individual who wants to control you. Every time I heard a politician complain to wealthy supporters how hard it was to get by on a parliamentary salary, I started to wonder whether a federal ICAC maybe wasn’t such a bad idea.
So, while it’s easy to say that the Murdochs thought I was too liberal, at the heart of it was the fact that they knew I was my own man, and had seen that up close many times over 40 years. With Abbott they had a deferential prime minister they thought they controlled. He and Credlin made cabinet decisions available to them before they were confirmed; they and their editors could rightly feel they had a hand in running the country. If more journalists who’ve worked at News Corporation were prepared publicly to tell the truth about the extent of their control and influence, even the most cynical Australians would be appalled. They leave their investigative courage at the office door and even after they’ve left, very few will talk.
I wasn’t going to run my government in partnership with Rupert or Lachlan Murdoch or their editors, and I knew they’d resent that. The privileged access they’d had under Abbott wasn’t going to continue under my leadership. Of course, their right-wing columnists needed little encouragement to attack me and my government, but employing Peta Credlin at Sky News and as a News Corp columnist was consciously giving a powerful platform to a vindictive, vengeful enemy of my government.
A similar assessment can be made of Alan Jones, Ray Hadley and their colleagues at 2GB – in their vanity and megalomania, Jones and Hadley berate and bully politicians who don’t kowtow to them. They don’t work for Murdoch, of course, but their agenda is the same – they want to have politicians in their pocket. And in too many cases they do.
My assumption with these characters was that in the final analysis they’d rather have me as PM than a Labor government and that more or less worked out in the 2016 election, although Credlin and her colleagues on Sky News were among our most relentless critics. But after that election, they increasingly bought into the Abbott madness of destroying the government to bring about its defeat so that Tony could come back as leader in opposition before returning to government in 2022.
I discussed this with Rupert and Lachlan on many occasions. Each time they tried to minimise the issue by saying Sky didn’t have many viewers or The Australian many readers. True, but they had a lot of influence with Liberal branch members, as they knew. Jones became a lost cause, so much so that as we were to see at the end of 2017 and then in August 2018, he was actively trying to engineer the collapse of the government. News Corporation operates now like a political party. It attacks its enemies and protects its friends, as it did Abbott and as it is today protecting Morrison to the point of ignoring big issues of accountability. In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News’ relationship with Trump is like that of the state-owned media of an authoritarian government.
With the rest of the media, I had few complaints other than about poor journalism. I had no issues with the ABC for bias (as so many of my colleagues did), but I did complain about their failure on occasion to check facts in the most rudimentary way. Their news department needs an editor.
It was Churchill, or perhaps Enoch Powell, who said the politician who complains about the media is like a sailor who complains about the sea. But the vicious personal partisanship of much of the media today is baffling to me. Why the Murdochs were so keen to see me gone, even at the risk of a Labor government, will remain a mystery to many. The most regular question I have had over the years from News Corp editors, executives and senior journalists is, ‘Why do the Murdochs hate you?’
But then again, as we reflect on Rupert Murdoch’s achievements, we have to ask, what good has he done apart from making himself and his family rich? His media have championed climate change denial relentlessly, and played a very influential role in the lack of climate action in our country and in the United States especially. So, over this last summer of 2019–20, his newspapers were filled with pages on the worst bushfires in our history facing pages mocking Greta Thunberg or anyone else concerned about climate change.
Murdoch’s media are the fiercest defenders of Trump. And across the Atlantic, the keenest promoters of Brexit. They routinely exploit and encourage intolerance and racial and religious animosities. If America is a more divided, inward-turning nation today, Murdoch can claim plenty of the credit for making it so. What a legacy.
But returning to the events of 2017, at the heart of these crazy times was an element in the Coalition, both inside the parliament and in the party membership, that would rather Shorten was prime minister than me. They wanted to recapture the leadership of the Liberal Party for the right wing and thought the best way to do this was to go into opposition. They styled themselves conservatives but were more populist reactionaries in their politics, and like terrorists they were prepared to keep up their destructive destabilisation until they got what they wanted.
* Modi is acutely aware that 40 years ago China and India had a similar GDP per capita – now China’s is five times larger. There are many explanations, but one stand-out is that China opened up to the world and India did not.
* I’d already had to speak to several ministers about this kind of thing. But the reality is that too many of them regarded it as acceptable to sleep with their staff. Conduct that would today get you sacked in the private sector was, apparently, perfectly okay in Canberra. What was worse was that all too often the keenest practitioners of traditional adultery were also passionate defenders of traditional marriage. The same-sex marriage debate was dripping with such hypocrisy and, yet again, the pools were deepest at the feet of the sanctimonious.
On 11 February, I started drafting some changes to the Ministerial Code of Conduct to expressly prohibit sexual relations between ministers and their staff. This wasn’t about adultery. It was about power. Among far too many politicians there is an ugly blokey culture of disrespecting women, which is no longer acceptable in contemporary Australia, let alone corporate workplaces, and should have no place in our parliament. How easy is it for the invariably younger female junior staff member to resist the advances of her older male boss? And when it goes sour, who is the one that has to change jobs? And to just add to the hypocrisy, if you weren’t allowed to employ your spouse in your office, how could it be acceptable to employ your lover?
* Christensen is a young man, grossly obese and at that time single. He manifested a familiar collection of right-wing views: he denies climate change, denounces Muslim immigration and presents as a devoutly religious person. Not only is there a statue of the Virgin Mary in his office, he has a tattoo of her on his right shoulder!
Regardless of whether his conduct in the Philippines broke the law or not, for a member in a marginal seat to be spending nearly a third of the year overseas, on full pay as an MP, staying in a seedy part of Manila and hanging out in bars and nightclubs beggared belief. The hypocrisy made me sick.
I was also staggered that the National Party whip had either not known about Christensen’s long absences or not cared. He should have been pulled into line a long time ago. His National Party colleagues knew he spent a lot of time in the Philippines – nobody apparently was aware how much.
* Over the weekend of 18–19 August I tried to persuade myself that the leadership speculation in the media was, as Scott Morrison described it, ‘just another 2GB Sky News conspiracy’1 – like the attempted coup at the end of 2017 that Alan Jones had tried to foment with Abbott.
Throughout all my time as prime minister, Abbott had been working hard to bring down my government with consistent support from a number of so-called conservative voices in the media – Alan Jones and Ray Hadley on 2GB, as well as Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman and many others at News Corporation.
While the News Corporation newspapers were always supportive of Abbott, the intensity of their efforts to damage my government varied from time to time. The exception was The Australian, which was as consistently destructive as it could afford to be without losing all of its diminishing credibility as a serious newspaper. Similarly, Sky News ‘after dark’ was relentless.
These outlets didn’t have big audiences, but they did reach a large percentage of the older, more conservative Liberal and National party members. Ted O’Brien, the member for Fairfax in Queensland, was an old friend and fellow republican. But he said it was ‘Like Alan Jones and Peta Credlin are having a branch meeting with my members every night’, when he explained why he was supporting Dutton.
There wasn’t a lot I could do to appease these insurgents – after all, they wanted my head. Abbott’s plan, we knew, was to ensure we lost in 2019, then he would return as opposition leader after the loss and lead the Coalition back to victory in 2022, an insane agenda which, as Rupert Murdoch later admitted to me, had strong support within News Corp. The worst possible outcome for Abbott would be for me to win the 2019 election. He knew that he wouldn’t be elected leader again before the election, so his strategy was to continue damaging my government so that I couldn’t win. We were all aware that our biggest weakness was disunity and internal instability and that whenever it blew up, our numbers went down. So, Abbott knew – just as Rudd had with Gillard – that he could dial the Newspoll numbers up and down.
* By Tuesday morning, 21 August, I’d reluctantly concluded not only that Dutton was planning a challenge but that it was being coordinated with supporters in the media. And not just the usual list of Turnbull-hating delcons on 2GB and Sky News. The Australian was clearly on the move, as were the News Corporation tabloids, in particular the Sydney Daily Telegraph and Brisbane’s Courier-Mail. It was on…
So, I could see that I was in dire straits, as I had been before. Once the conspiracy and destabilisation has developed this far it’s very hard to survive. Even if I saw it off, our polls would crash, which would in turn set off another round of destabilisation. The simple fact is that I was faced with a growing group of people who wanted to destroy the government. And they were led by Peter Dutton, the minister for Home Affairs, whose duty it was to defend Australia’s national security. He was conspiring with News Corporation – a foreign-owned media company. And we worry about the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign influence operations!
