Curious Worldview

Tony Abbott (Australia's 28th Prime Minister) On "Our Countries Remarkable History"

• Ryan Faulkner • Episode 226

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Tony Abbott served as Australia's 28th Prime Minister from 2013 to 2015. He is a Rhodes Scholar and among the most polarising and consequential figures in modern Australian political history. 

Rather than writing a series of memoirs detailing the turbulent years before, during and after his leadership of Australia, he instead, wanted to re-introduce a pride for Australia's history which he is afraid 'the black armband view of history' has erased. 

Tony makes the case that Australians have far more to be proud of than ashamed.

His book is called 'Australia: A History' and tells the story of a not so long ago Australia. The evolution of Australia post 1788. Tony's speculated origins for Australia's egalitarianism. How settlers and convicts ending up working together  to create the institutions that endure through till today. And all the meanwhile, not ignoring the devastating consequences the English expansion into Australia had to the indigenous Australian's who were here as long as 60,000 years before. 

This interview would be good to listen to alongside my interview with Robyn Davidson. They aren't two different idea's of history, but rather two differently sympathetic perspectives on an Australia both have travelled widely and thoughtfully. 

Link's To Tony Abbott

This is a summary of what was covered in the interview today. 

  • [00:00] — The Black Armband view of history? Abbott defines the term and stakes out his "glass half full" position on Australian history.
  • [01:50] — Ryan pushes back: did Abbott downplay frontier conflict? 
  • [03:59] — The Myall Creek Massacre, the legal scandal of the first acquittal, the fury it sparked, and the eventual hanging of seven perpetrators.
  • [06:03] — How short Australian post-1788 history actually is. 
  • [08:35] — Peter Thiel's stagnation thesis 
  • [12:08] — What evidence does Abbott see of Australians being ashamed of their history? 
  • [15:09] — Ryan offers a different read: most Australians are curious about history, not ashamed of it.
  • [18:43] — Why isn't Australian history dramatised more on screen? 
  • [20:19] — Finding Nemo point: great fiction drives engagement more than philanthropy or think tanks. 
    [21:04] — Mark Twain visited Australia and described Sydney as "an English city with American energy." Abbott loves the line.
  • [24:47] — The convict origins of Australian egalitarianism. 
  • [27:26] — What made the early governors enforce the rule of law rather than create their own tyranny? 
  • [31:56] — Overrated / Underrated (Tyler Cowen's question). 
  • [35:05] — Indonesia. Why don't we have deeper cultural ties with a neighbour of 300 million? 
  • [39:13] — Serendipity vs. Providence. 

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SPEAKER_00

What is the black arm bat of history?

SPEAKER_01

Well, it's a term that Jeff Blaney, our greatest living historian, coined in the nineteen nineties to refer to the view becoming more prevalent at that time amongst academic historians that Australia had far more to be ashamed of than proud of. He contrasted the Black Armband view with what he called the Three Cheers view, which was that Australia was this wonderful, triumphant story of progress. Now, personally, I've always been more inclined to the three cheers than the black armband. But I suppose one way of trying to characterize, if I might, my history is to say it's at least a glass half-full version of Australia. I do think we've got far more to be proud of than ashamed about. Every country has some dark chapters, and obviously, particularly on the frontier of settlement, there were some pretty terrible things that happened, mostly to Aboriginal people, sometimes to the settlers, but certainly more often by the settlers to the Aboriginal people. And we can't ignore that or gloss over it. But that's not the whole story. Even on the frontier of settlement, uh, at the roughest of times, from say the 1820s through to the 1870s, it was a story of cooperation as well as conflict. And most of the explorers relied on Aboriginal guides to get through country that was new to them. And nearly all of the pastorists relied on Aboriginal stockmen, Aboriginal domestic help, and so on. So, yeah, uh a mixed bag, but on balance, a good one.

SPEAKER_00

You described that uh frontier relations as characterized by friendship, cooperation, and adaptation.

SPEAKER_01

That was part of it.

SPEAKER_00

Do you think you're missing out on some of the conflicts that came through that?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think I did dwell on some of the conflicts. Um certainly the best documented conflicts. I mean, the best documented conflict was the so-called Black War in Tasmania, because we've got a lot of contemporary newspaper accounts, we've got a lot of contemporary official records. There was while a degree of uh civil alarm at the number of settlers who were being harassed and even killed, there was also considerable understanding of the plight of the Aboriginal people who were inevitably being disrupted and dispossessed by the expansion of pastoralism and farming into the interior of the island. So, so look, um I certainly talk about the situation in Tasmania. Uh I deal extensively with the Mile Creek Massacre, uh, which was an utter atrocity, no other word to describe it, but there was a sequel, and that was the putting on trial of the perpetrators and ultimately the hanging of seven of them for murder. And while we should not gloss over the horror of what happened, I think we've also got to accept that in no other settler society at that time, 1838, would white men have been hanged for the murder of black people. So, yeah, a mixed bag. And in the end, what we've got to do, given that we can't alter our history, is to understand the good and the bad, try to judge our forebears uh by the standards of their day, uh the best standards of their day, and build a better present and future based on that understanding.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, your documentation of the Mile Creek massacre was really impactful because it went through how the legal system first let them off, but such was the fur and uproar to that response that they eventually went back to trial. Well, well the judge delivered a very emotional case for why this had to happen.

SPEAKER_01

Exact exactly. But but uh the the furore was at the fact that the uh perpetrators were put on trial because a lot of the settlers, uh, contrary to the view of official Australia, a lot of the settlers regarded Aboriginal people as a pestilential nuisance and didn't think it was right and proper for uh these uh perpetrators to be put on trial. But thank God we had a wonderfully humane Attorney General at the time, John Plunkett, and a very decent man, George Gibbs, as the governor. And Plunkett was determined that this uh abomination was going to be thoroughly investigated and brought to trial. And when the first jury refused to convict, uh, well, uh Plunkett didn't let it rest, he brought fresh charges, and that was uh how the ultimate uh uh justice was was done, at least to a great extent. So so look, uh I mean uh the predecessor of the Sydney Morning Herald was uh very eager to see the perpetrators uh that was just let go of the detail the house. And it was interesting that uh in more recent times the Herald has apologized for its view towards it back then. And look, uh it it it was a horror, but thank God the horror was not the only thing. And I guess um it's interesting how times change.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. I got this uh appreciation for actually just how short post-78 1788 Australian history is.

SPEAKER_01

Well, it's it's really only three lifetimes ago.

SPEAKER_00

Which is nuts.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, you know, 240 years ago was our beginning, um, 38 to 24, you know, three lifetimes ago. And yet when you think of Sydney Cove in the 1790s, uh, when I think of my grandfather's time, I mean my grandfather came to Australia from Holland, my maternal grandfather, in I think about 1909 or 1910. In those days, most of the ships in Sydney Harbour would have been sailing ships, there would have been almost no motor vehicles on the streets of Sydney, no one had uh domestic electricity, uh, very few people had uh sewerage, proper sewerage. Um to the extent that there was lighting, it was mostly still gas lighting. Uh there were no international travel, and of course, other than by sailing ship, by the end of Parr's life, um, we had TVs, fridges, uh, we had international travel, we had motor cars, um, people had people had people had kind of ensuite bathrooms and so on. So in his life, which stretched from 1907 to 1995, what an extraordinary transformation. And in fact, it's the view of Peter Thiel, and the tech entrepreneur, the American tech entrepreneur, that not a lot has happened since the 1970s. Now, this was before AI. Uh the Thiel view, at least pre-AI, is that the real transformations happened from the 1800s through to about 1970. And since then it's just been IT that's gone forward. But IT uh has perhaps changed how we communicate, but it hasn't necessarily changed how we live. Now, AI is obviously going to do all sorts of things to white-collar jobs in the same way that previous technology has done all sorts of things to blue-collar jobs. But I think there's a lot in the in the TL thesis, frankly. I mean, my life from 1957 till now has not changed that much. Mobile phones and then smartphones is really the only key difference. Whereas my grandfather's life was utterly transformed.

SPEAKER_00

His famous line is they promised us flying cars, and all we got was 140 characters.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, he's a smart guy.

SPEAKER_00

It must feel amazing. This is definitely getting off the narrative line that I was hoping to take the interview. But to be where you are now, to look at the frontier of what artificial intelligence might do, not only to how we work, but physically how we might be engaging with uh the lives around us and how it's going to affect the institutions as well. Australia is 75% services, that makes up our GDP, and it's not like all of them are going to be replaced by some type of disruption with AI, but we could make a pretty safe bet that a lot of them will be. What's Australia's response to this?

SPEAKER_01

Well, look, I'm not a technologist and I don't claim to be uh uh a deep thinker about uh AI. Um all I know is that uh you can go on Chat GPT or Gemini, and it's like having the world's best librarian at your fingertips. Instead of having to pour through books for hours, like searching for needles in haystacks, AI can get it for you almost instantaneously. Now you still have to run uh a bit of a critical judgment over it because occasionally AI gives you very quirky answers, but nevertheless, uh 19 times out of 20, it's just brilliant. So I think that AI is going to make an enormous difference to so-called brain workers. Um a lot of white-collar jobs, particularly analytical jobs, research jobs, and so on, are going to be changed utterly and perhaps disappear. But every technology in the past uh has on balance made life better. Technology can be misused, we know that, but on balance, every technology um has made life better and richer, and I think AI overall be the same. I suppose the question is going to be: can Australia maximise our use of AI, um, given that Silicon Valley and perhaps parts of China seem to be, and maybe parts of Britain seem to be where this is really powering forward. But look, I'm told that some of our universities are pretty good. I mean, the University of New South Wales is supposed to be a world leader in uh quantum computing, for instance, which I'm sure is going to have a big role in this. One one point I I should make, Ryan, is that AI is going to be absolutely energy voracious. It is going to demand extraordinary amounts of electricity, which powers the modern world. Electricity is what has made the modern world. Without electricity, the modern world simply could not exist. And I think our energy policy is massive, is a massive folly. Uh we're going to need vastly more energy. We're going to need a 24-7, and I just can't see uh wind and solar power with maybe battery backup providing anything like the electricity that a modern economy is going to need in the AI era.

SPEAKER_00

Let's move back to history. Um you the impetus, I've listened in interviews, that the impetus for writing the book was because, and actually I was just talking to Zach about this earlier. There is a not misunderstanding, just a gap of knowledge about what what is our Australian history post 1788. And further on, listen to you say that you wrote it as a part to teach a lot of Australians to be more proud of their history. But I wanted to ask you, what's the evidence that you're seeing of shame that we might have for our history?

SPEAKER_01

Well, the obvious evidence is the ambivalence about Australia Day. Uh and and there's something like 80 councils around the country that no longer have citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day. There's lots of councils that don't have any acknowledgement of anything on Australia Day because they think it should be called Invasion Day. That's, I suppose, the most obvious example. Um if you look at uh the emphasis of history teaching in schools, it's a lot more these days about Aboriginal dispossession and frontier violence than it used to be when in my day it was all about the expansion of settlement, um, pastoralism, wealth, gold. The great wall economy. Um the the the the federation movement, which was a triumph of democracy and egalitarianism, then of course the glorious history of the Anzacs, etc. Now uh, you know, I'm not saying that we should uh brush the bad stuff under the carpet. We have got to deal with it because it is a part of our story, and I've tried to deal fairly with it in the book. But um it's only a part of the story. So so the Australia Day, uh ambivalence, uh even rejection. We get protests on Anzac Day today. Um I think that's a pity.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, really? I haven't seen that.

SPEAKER_01

Uh it started to get quite quite intense uh during the 1970s and 80s. There was a group called Women Against Rape in War who would routinely throw red paint on war memorials and uh protest on Anzac Day. There's a bit of there's a there's a bit less Well, no, but but given the centrality of the I suppose uh and Anzac legend uh and the sort of digger ethos to much of uh mid-century Australia, uh I think it's a bit a bit shocking. And of course, in more recent times, we've got this statue toppling business and this statue-defacing business where instead of throwing red paint on war memorials, these days they throw red paint on Captain Cook's statues or something like that, and even try to topple some of them.

SPEAKER_00

Um I think that that type of fringe behaviour gets a lot of attention. But if you take me as an example of what maybe a regular Australian might think about their own history, it is more out of an interest about what it was, not a shame about what was happening, and certainly not a protestation over whether we should celebrate Australia or not, though there is a sympathetic ear to if some if if everyone's not for it, then we should find somewhere where it is everyone's more for it.

SPEAKER_01

But but the trouble is you're never going to get 100% agreement. I'll take 90. And and you'll only get 90% agreement if there's a fair degree of social reinforcement. Uh once upon a time there was, uh now there's much less. Yet the interesting thing is that uh such polling data as we've got, uh, and everyone has a vested interest here, I accept, but nevertheless, there appears to be significant polling data uh to suggest that Australia Day is making a comeback and that more people have resolved that we should keep the day, even if it is um a bit of a mixed, even if there is a bit of a mixed view in in in some quarters about it. If you look at history teaching itself, um there is less history taught, right? I mean um I I can't remember the exact figures, but when I looked at this um a few months back, I think there's only about a half the number of students in New South Wales doing history now as did history uh 30 years back. And of course the population's probably doubled in that time, which means that not only is there more of a black armband view than there was, there's actually less study than there was. And I think one of the reasons for that is that anyone who lives here, who's reasonable, thinks that for all our faults, we're actually a pretty good people and a pretty decent place. And if the messages that you're getting about the history is that it's something that's pretty ambiguous, I think the natural reaction is to say, well, that jars with my feelings, so let's not bother. Hence the sort of amnesiac view of Australian history, which I hope my book uh is doing something to counter.

SPEAKER_00

I was just speaking with Zach earlier about it. It sounds like it is doing really well. I feel like I see it everywhere. Well, I'm pleased. Thank you, Rob. The documentary was fantastic as well as it's not a good thing. The documentary was wonderful.

SPEAKER_01

Documentary was wonderful. I mean, I am responsible for every single word uh in the book. Uh it's all mine, although I did get a lot of help. The doco I presented, but Sky, uh, particularly a terrific producer called Alex Garipoli, was in the end the author of the DOCO, and I was just blown away with how good the DOCO was. I don't want people to watch the DOCO and ignore the book, but um, if for whatever reason you haven't got uh the interest in reading a 400-page book, uh The Sky three-part doco, which is available on YouTube, just put uh uh Tony Abbott documentary into the search function, you'll get the Sky Duck DOCO up on YouTube. It it really is well worth watching.

SPEAKER_00

So I kept feeling as well, particularly in some parts of the book, when the Frontiers were going out and they started the Great Wall Economy, that there was so much room for dramatic fictionalization of Australia during this period. So, why do you think, in your your instinct, is there aren't more TV books and movies sort of celebrating romantic dramas about this period?

SPEAKER_01

That's a fair point. Uh I think when I was growing up, there was a TV series called The Man from Snowy River. There was certainly a movie, The Man from Snowy River. Um there was a series not long after the wonderful movie Gallipoli, there was a series about Australians in the Great War, which was very good. Um, but you're right, I can't recall any contemporary uh cinema or uh TV about the gold rushes, about the pastoral expansion, um, not even a serialization of something like Capricornia, which was actually uh, I think a very sensitive study of um race relations in Northern Australia in the early years of the last century. So yeah, maybe our artists are a bit nervous about this because of the fact that uh there has been this massive ambivalence, uh this massive guilting, if you like, of European Australia or um, you know, settler Australia um over the dispossession of Aboriginal people.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, uh because there is evidence that great fictionalization can drive engagement into a field. You mentioned before maybe half the people were studying history that used to. And this always sticks with me that that after finding Nemo came out, something like ten times the amount of work that was done within ocean conservation that had all the philanthropy, all of the think tanks, all of the government sponsorship had done before it. And fiction can kind of do that.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely right, and there's no doubt that the film Gallipoli was an important part of the revival of interest in Anzac Day amongst everyone, as opposed to just war veterans uh in the in the um 1980s.

SPEAKER_00

Mr. Abbott, we're not gonna get uh to the timeline that I was hoping to achieve here. So I got a few more for you. One that really jumped off the page at me was Mark Twain. Um I had no idea that he had come to Australia, let alone written about it. And he described Sydney as an English city with American energy.

SPEAKER_01

Which is a nice way of thinking about us, and I think there's a lot in that actually. I think that in some respects Australia combines the best of our two big English-speaking brothers, Britain and America. So, uh and Mark Twain was obviously a writer, a s an incredibly good writer. I mean, Huck Huck Finn, which was on the syllabus when I was a kid at school, was one of the most impactful books I've ever read.

SPEAKER_00

And then again, not to return to I sense a ground that you don't want to uh visit, but he did also write that in the context of a squatter who murdered some Aboriginal people by. Poisoning their Christmas pudding. There are many humorous things in the world, among them white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

SPEAKER_01

I suspect that Mark Twain was using humorous uh as as in the sense of odd. I can't imagine Ironic. Yeah, I can't imagine that Mark Twain would find that funny. No, no, sir. Given the way the way the way he wrote about uh the way he wrote about uh race relations uh in America uh in the anti in the in the sort of um civil war times. Um look, uh there's there's no doubt horrible things happened. I mean, uh I talked about John Plunkett in the context of the Mile Creek massacre. Uh there's a lot of oral history about poisonings. Uh there's not a lot of contemporaneously uh attested to uh record of poisonings for obvious reasons. I mean, the poisoners don't want to admit to it, and the poisoned uh were often dead. Um but there is one case uh very well attested to uh up in the Clarence River in the late 1840s where a squatter called Coots uh almost certainly poisoned uh 20 or so Aboriginal people. Plunk had tried to bring that to trial. Uh unfortunately, because the only eyewitnesses to that uh particular abomination were Aboriginal people, and in those days, Aboriginal people, because they were not Christians, were thought incapable of giving sworn testimony in court, the trial collapsed and Coots got off. He didn't deserve to, and in his uh records at the time, Plunkett says that um a monstrous crime has been almost certainly committed and not brought to justice. But again, Plunkett, to his great credit, then tried to change the law so that Aboriginal people could give testimony in court. He lost 10-9 in the Legislative Council of New South Wales, and so it was another dozen or so years before this particular uh problem with our system was rectified. Now, what Twain was referring to in terms of this plum plum pudding, uh it may it it may it may or may it may or may not have been true. Uh it may have been a tall tale, um, but there is no doubt that uh um at times uh there is savagery, and there was savagery in our past as well as.

SPEAKER_00

Correct, correct. There was a really nice detail from the book. You sort of speculated that this was not a birth but an explanation of where Australia's egalitarian instinct came from, which is otherwise known as some type of tall poppy syndrome. So could you talk about how the convicts and then the first settlers ended up getting along so well that the institutions that they built still sustain today? Which is so unusual in history.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I I mean, you know, just think of yourself as one of the 1,500 uh people dumped on the other half of the world in a completely unfamiliar place where everything was in some respects literally upside down. You've just got to make a go of it. So different religions, Catholic and Protestant, uh different ethnicities, English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, different uh states of life, uh, Marine, officer, convict, all of those distinctions dissolved. And because for its very survival, the settlement required uh the enthusiastic participation of the convicts, um, almost from the very beginning, the convicts were treated like everyone else. Uh uh convicts were hanged for stealing food by Governor Philip. Marines were hanged for stealing food by Governor Philip. The first civil trial in the new colony, uh, a convict couple, the cables, successfully sued the captain of the ship that had brought them here because it seems he'd plundered some of their goods on the way out. So because everyone had to muck in together, all of the traditional distinctions of England, the class distinctions, the ethnic distinctions, uh, the distinctions of station were very substantially dissolved. I mean, Governor Macquarie, uh, who at the time was known as the Father of Australia, was in some respects your typical British Army officer of the 1810s. In other respects, a remarkably progressive man, and he gave literally hundreds of tickets of leave and pardons, and so nearly every nearly everyone in those early days, the first 50 years of the of the colony, um worked with, often had as, in a sense, family, someone who was a convicted criminal. And you can't give yourself too many airs and graces under those circumstances.

SPEAKER_00

How do you suspect what what drove them to be so sturdy at enforcing the law? Since you're literally in the other side of the world, it takes a year and a ship to get there. We're in this enormous land which felt very prosperous, whether it was or wasn't, for any individual to walk on.

SPEAKER_01

Well, very quickly, it very quickly it was. And it didn't take long for the I mean, there was the starvation years basically for the first, I suppose, decade. But the confidence to enforce that law and not create your own tyranny. Yeah, well, well again, I mean, I mean I like to think that the um the the passage of scripture that was chosen for the first Christian sermon uh on this continent, what can I render unto the Lord for all his blessings to me, that is redolent of a great deal of faith and hope uh and optimism. Now, even then it seems, maybe the Reverend Richard Johnson was trying to cheer people up, but even then it seems uh there was this sense that what was being created was not just a prison, but something that was going to be quite special. And certainly Governor Phillip, he thought he was starting a new nation. He didn't think he was starting a jail.

SPEAKER_00

Was there any evidence of some type of attemption, attempted coups, attempted overthrows of the government?

SPEAKER_01

Well, there was the so-called uh Rum Rebellion um back in uh eighteen oh eight. Um the the the by far the the most draconian of our governors was uh was Captain Bly, uh he of the mutiny of the bounty on the bounty. Uh because uh quite quickly the colony was being perceived as uh almost being run for the benefit of convicts rather than for the punishment of convicts, there was a sense in London that a strict disciplinarian had to be sent out, and Governor Bly was indeed that strict disciplinarian. Now, Bly turned out to be quite sympathetic towards the farmers on the Hawkesbury, who he thought were earning an honest living, but very unsympathetic towards the traders in Sydney, who he thought were basically ripping people off. And uh because uh at that point in time um uh there was a shortage of currency, uh effectively there was a barter system operating, and the real currency of the colony was rum. Naturally, if people are trading rum, there's a lot of drunkenness, which Bly didn't like either. So Bly tried to crack down on all of this, and eventually, uh, chiefly led by John MacArthur, the father of the merino wool industry in Australia, there was a rebellion. Uh the uh Major Johnson of the New South Wales Corps arrested Bly. Uh, he was bundled onto a ship in the harbour, eventually he was exiled uh to Tasmania. Uh that's where he was when Macquarie turned up about 18 months later to take charge. The interesting thing about the Rum Rebellion is that yes, Johnson was sent off to England to be court-martialed. Normally, someone who arrests and deposes uh the duly constituted government in those days would have been found guilty of treason and hanged. Now, Johnson was reprimanded and cashiered from the army, but the fact that the court martial did not take a much more severe view of Johnson's behaviour is a sign that even the authorities in England realized that Bly had gone over the top and had been altogether too severe. And it's also a sign that the authorities in England did not want to see happen in Australia what had happened in America, namely a rebellion uh by the colonies against the Crown, as opposed simply to a rebellion by the colonists against a particular governor.

SPEAKER_00

Um ripping this question off from one Tyler Cohen, who maybe you're familiar with, great American economist, marginal revolution. He tends to ask this to a lot of his guests I quite like. It's very simple, but it works. Uh overrated, underrated. What's the most underrated episode in Australian history? Something that's shaped us profoundly, but nobody really talks about it. And then the flip side of the coin, most overrated, something we obsess over that's actually less important than we think.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Uh overrated, I would say the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Because um the uh uh the Whitlam government was a very poor government, and it was trying to govern unconstitutionally uh by uh staying in office without getting the money bills passed by the Senate. So so what the then Governor General Sir John Kerr did in dismissing Whitlam was acting quite appropriately as the ultimate umpire in the system. Uh it wasn't uh a vice regal coup, it wasn't a CIA plot, uh it was ultimately the resolution of a political crisis in the best possible way through an election. So I think that was the sort of overrated episode. Underrated, and you know, you caught me on the hop a bit, but just thinking uh off the top of my head, I think our recovery from the depression was probably the most underrated episode. And I think Joe Lyons, the uh Labour acting treasurer, who then became the leader of the United Australia Party and Prime Minister, I think Joe Lyons is the most underrated of our Prime Ministers. He was a kind of Bob Hawk-like figure, um, well regarded, charismatic, uh hard to pigeonhole, um, and by uh rigorously implementing the Premier's plan, which involved um uh significant reductions in expenditure as opposed to the repudiation of debt uh and kind of proto-Keynesianism, the recovery from the depression in Australia was actually much quicker than the recovery in America, where FDR uh basically uh did Keynesianism before Keynes.

SPEAKER_00

Did it have any parallels to our post-GFC recovery?

SPEAKER_01

Well, um I don't think we have ever really recovered from the GFC. The GFC was a crisis of debt and deficit, and we addressed it with more debt and deficit. And one of the reasons why uh there is hardly a government anywhere in the developed world that isn't printing money furiously to sustain social services is because we have become addicted to debt and deficit, and sooner or later this house of cards will collapse.

SPEAKER_00

No chance I could squeeze in any more, is there?

SPEAKER_01

Oh, come on, you're gonna have another five minutes.

SPEAKER_00

Total change of chat. Indonesia.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

As I was abroad, you sort of look differently in your own country, and you start to realize we have this enormous neighbor to our north, projected to be 300 million people by the time your grandchildren are adults. Why do we not have better relations with them? And what's possible for us to have better relations with them?

SPEAKER_01

Well, when I became PM, my first overseas visit was to Jakarta, and I said at the time that I thought that should be the first overseas visit that every Australian PM made, because the one country that could seriously make things hard for us is uh is is Indonesia. I think the Indonesians had a very bad experience of colonialism. The Dutch seemed to have been pretty brutal masters in a way that the British weren't. And I think that um because Australia was seen by the Indonesians as essentially a European country, there's been a certain wariness towards Australia, even though the Chifley government was one of the very first to recognize the Indonesian government uh at the time of the uh successful overthrow of Dutch colonialism. And even though we've done our best to be helpful and supportive to Indonesia in many, many different ways, including in my time uh in the Howard government, in the wake of the uh the East Asian tsunami. So uh I think we I think we have a better relationship with Indonesia than any other Western country. Uh partly that's because uh I think the Australians that turn up to Bali uh in such numbers by the standards of tourists are not impression for sure. And not total yobbos. Um, or at least. No, I I I think I I mean you've heard of the ugly American. I don't think the Australians who go abroad are quite in that in that category. A lot of Australians feel very affectionate towards Bali. Um so look, I I think our relations with Indonesia are better than any other Western country.

SPEAKER_00

For instance, why don't I see Indonesian restaurants around? Why is Indonesian migration so low in into Australia when Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese is all further higher? When where are the cultural ties with this nation that we should be building?

SPEAKER_01

Well, that's a fair point. Why isn't Bahasa more studied in in Australian schools? My daughter studied Bahasa uh for a couple of years at school, and part of the motivation for the Abbott family's two trips to Bali was so that Francie could uh could practice her Bahasa. Look, um more Australians should study Bahasa. Um we need to make a very big effort with Indonesia to give successive governments their due. By far, well not by far, but our biggest overseas post is Jakarta. Um when I became Prime Minister, I said we needed more Jakarta and less Geneva in our foreign diplomacy. So uh I take your point. Uh more needs to be done, but more needs to be done by Australia in the South Pacific as well, uh, because um Australia is the South Pacific superpower. Um, we spend a lot of time and energy uh wondering how we can have more influence in London, in Beijing, in Tokyo, uh in Washington, and fair enough, but Australia is the big dog in Port Moresby, in Wellington, in Suva, uh, and even in Jakarta. Uh, I suspect our embassy in Jakarta would rival the American embassy. So, yeah, we we do need to make uh more of an effort in the places where we can have the most impact.

SPEAKER_00

It'd be an exciting thread to pull on, but out of respect for the time that you've allotted me, we'll finish it there with one small sappy but personal question, which I've tried to ask every guest who's appeared, which is simply what's the role that serendipity has been in your life?

SPEAKER_01

Happy accident. Look, was it a happy accident that um B.A. Santa Maria took me under his wing? Was it a happy accident that John Howard took me under his wing when I um finished my studies? Um or was it really providential? Uh I suspect providence has a much bigger role in people's lives and serendipity. Well, what's providence? Providence is the sense that there is a plan uh in the mind of God. Fate and well fate fate is slightly different from providence. I mean, providence we like to believe is uh benign, even if it doesn't always seem so at the time, whereas fate is inexorable, ineluctable, and often pretty dire. So I'd rather think of providence than fate.

SPEAKER_00

Sure. Mr. Abbott, thank you so much for being so generous with your time.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you. And thank you for the book. Pleasure.