Oct. 21, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
43:16
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| I used to be very confident in the long-term survival and success of Western civilization, because I thought that our civilization, unlike almost all of its uh predecessors and current competitors, had a capacity to learn and adapt from others. | ||
| I think that self-critical capacity, which has been so important to our survival and success up till now, has to some extent um mutated into a kind of self-loathing uh uh and this is very destructive. | ||
| It's very destructive. | ||
| Yes, look at yourself in the mirror and say this can be better and that can be better. | ||
| But don't look at yourself in the mirror and despise what you see for nations, for cultures, for civilizations, as for individuals. | ||
| almost nothing is worse than self-loathing. | ||
|
unidentified
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*outro music* | |
| All right, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, nice to see you, and thank you for being gracious and allowing us to enjoy this beautiful view from your office. | ||
| It's good to see you again. | ||
| Dave, welcome to Australia. | ||
| Uh, thanks for having me on the program. | ||
| And yes, Sydney is an incandescently beautiful city, so it's good to have you. | ||
| It's incandescently beautiful, and the people seem to be happy and ha the people seem to be happy and it's buzzin'. | ||
| I mean, it's really is it always like this out there, or is this just everyone keeps telling us how great the weather is, which it absolutely is right now, but it's just there's a there's a feeling out there right now. | ||
| Look, I I think Sydney is a very vibrant place. | ||
| It's always been a vibrant place. | ||
| Uh, and the vibrancy of this city seems to survive economic ups and downs, it seems to survive good governments and bad governments. | ||
| I just think that uh there is something about the Sydney environment that tends to tends it it tends to bring out the enthusiasm in people. | ||
| Is it just this? | ||
| I mean, is it the water? | ||
| Is it the landscape? | ||
| Is it just the natural beauty that no matter what's happening politically, things are kind of going to be okay here? | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| Um, Australians have been an upbeat people. | ||
| Sydney siders in particular, and it's very hard to feel down in the dumps on a good day in Sydney. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And even on a day which is grey and cool, um, particularly from this vantage point up here, there's always something happening. | ||
| Uh, it's a spectacular city, uh, whether the view is radiant as in today, or uh uh full of mist and cloud. | ||
| So there's many things I want to discuss with you, including your new book which just came out last week, and the cover is absolutely beautiful, and it's interesting because when we sat down uh in Hungary about four or five months ago, I think the first question I asked you was, what do people not know about Australia that they should know? | ||
| And this is a full history of Australia, so there'll be plenty to talk about on that. | ||
| But at the moment, your current Prime Minister has just left the White House. | ||
| Uh, he's obviously in the Labour Party on the left. | ||
| What do you make of him? | ||
| What do you make of the meeting? | ||
| Did something have to happen that maybe didn't happen? | ||
| Did anything happen that you didn't expect to happen, etc., etc. | ||
| Look, as an Australian patriot, uh I want every Prime Minister to succeed, including the Prime Ministers who I would not have voted for. | ||
| Uh Anthony Albanese is from the other side of politics. | ||
| I think that the government is making some mistakes, but nevertheless, I do think it's been a very successful White House meeting. | ||
| From the reports, it seems that um AUKUS, the um deal to give Australia nuclear-powered submarines, initially Virginia class and ultimately the next generation of British nuclear submarines. | ||
| That deal seems to have been confirmed. | ||
| Uh it seems that there is an agreement between Australia and the United States for rare earths and critical minerals, and that's a good thing. | ||
| And obviously there was a degree of bonomy between our national leader and your national leader. | ||
| And given the potential for argument over things like Palestine, over things like climate over perhaps China. | ||
| Uh that's that's very encouraging. | ||
| So all credit to Anthony Albanese for navigating uh the at times perilous passage uh through uh the White House, and all credit to President Trump for seemingly being his best self in this meeting. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| There were one or two little moments of poking a a member of uh the cabinet and that sort of thing, but it seemed like it went pretty well. | ||
| What do you make of the overall nature, not just of of the current administrations, but the overall nature of the relationship between America and Australia? | ||
| I said to you before it's like Australia we just have positive view of Australia. | ||
| Nobody you say Australia to somebody, nobody thinks they think Crocodile Dundee. | ||
| I mean, it's as cliche as that in some sense. | ||
| What do you make of the overall nature of the relationship over the years? | ||
| Look, I think of all the English speaking countries as family. | ||
| Um Britain, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the Five Eyes Partners, uh we are linked by interests, by values, by history. | ||
| Uh I think that's very strong. | ||
| I don't ever want it to change, as far as I'm concerned, uh, although the United States and Australia are juridically independent and separate nations. | ||
| I don't believe we're foreign countries to each other. | ||
| Perhaps a bit exotic in some respects, uh, but certainly not uh foreign or strange in important ways. | ||
| So it's a good relationship. | ||
| Yes, it waxes and wanes a little, uh, but it's essentially a very strong relationship. | ||
| I guess the big questions are um how much support uh will Australia continue to give the United States in its various international undertakings. | ||
| Well it seems like the minerals dealer will go a long way with that, right? | ||
| Uh it's certainly going to help. | ||
| Um I like to remind American audiences that American soldiers went into action in the Great War for the first time under Australian command on the 4th of July 1918 at the Battle of La Hamel. | ||
| John Monash, the ost the famous Australian commander, was in overall charge on that day. | ||
| Uh Australia has been with the United States in every single one of its subsequent conflicts, uh including um Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and I think it's important that the English speaking countries stand shoulder to shoulder. | ||
| I think it's important that the great democracies uh form a very strong partnership because this is a perilous world. | ||
| More perilous now than at any time since the late 1930s. | ||
| I think we have a tendency to be complacent about uh the dangers facing us. | ||
| I think that Communist China is a more formidable competitor than the old Soviet Union ever was. | ||
| And uh while President Trump is currently playing down uh the prospects of uh uh serious tension over Taiwan, I think we have to take the Beijing regime seriously when it says that it is determined uh to take Taiwan by force if necessary, and the sooner the better. | ||
| So do you think the Minerals deal kind of pulls you guys back into our orbit in a sense as it pertains to China? | ||
| Well, we've always been very much in the American orbit. | ||
| The ANSUS Treaty was signed back in 1951. | ||
| The AUKUS arrangements were entered into in 2021. | ||
| The AUKUS arrangements really reinforce the earlier ANSUS arrangements. | ||
| And not only that, the AUKUS arrangements bring Britain back into this part of the world as a significant strategic presence. | ||
| So look, um, the relationship is strong. | ||
| I want it to be as strong as it possibly can be, uh, given all of the ties of history, of values, of interests, particularly at this time. | ||
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| So I want to talk a bit about the history of the country and sort of culturally, and then I want to get a couple tourism uh hints from you at the end. | ||
| Uh but what should Americans know about your political system? | ||
| My sense is you guys basically are a centrist country that occasionally just goes one way or occasionally just goes the other, never too far. | ||
| Is that is that a fair assessment? | ||
| I think that uh probably the polity that we most resemble is the United Kingdom. | ||
| So if you think of Australia as being Britain, only a federal Britain, you'll have a reasonable grasp of our political system. | ||
| Like Britain, uh we oscillate between governments of the center-right and of the center-left. | ||
| Uh just recently, as in Britain, uh, we had a relatively long-serving and disappointing government of the center-right, which I led into office back in 2013, uh, followed by uh a government of the center-left, which is probably more green-left than usual. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And one of the points uh that I like to make to my fellow countrymen is it's important for conservative governments to be strong, because when you get a strong conservative government, the next uh center-left labor government will be better than would otherwise be the case. | ||
| Um if you've got a disappointing conservative government, well, that if you like, gives the left license to be even more left, which I think is uh normally bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Undesirable. | ||
| Aaron Powell So I want to read. | ||
| So I was glancing through the book before you stepped in. | ||
| I thought it was interesting. | ||
| The the first line of the author's note, you wrote, this is the book that should have never been needed. | ||
| That's quite a sentence to write to start a book. | ||
| And then and then you explain a bit about obviously why you wrote it and really about the confused history that has entered the the ethos here. | ||
| Yeah, Dave, this is true of Australia. | ||
| Uh it's true of the main Anglosphere countries. | ||
| Uh for countries which have mostly been brimful of self-confidence and brimful of national pride. | ||
| Um I think generally speaking, obviously there are some individual instances that are exceptions to this, but but I think generally Speaking, there's been uh a lack of national pride, a lack of national self-confidence recently, and a great deal of angsting about particular historical episodes. | ||
| I think if you look at contemporary America, Donald Trump is obviously an exception to this, but I think uh contemporary America, uh much of it at any event uh obsesses over slavery. | ||
| Uh contemporary Britain obsesses over the empire. | ||
| Contemporary Australia obsesses over indigenous dispossession. | ||
| Now, obviously slavery was a dreadful blot on the United States history. | ||
| Uh Abraham Lincoln magnificently responded to that challenge. | ||
| Uh and I don't think America should be damned simply because of that part of its past. | ||
| Likewise the British Empire was far from perfect, but on balance, the British Empire was actually a wonderful benefit to the wider world. | ||
| All of the countries that have a British heritage in some way are the better for that. | ||
| And it was in fact the Royal Navy, which more than any other entity stamped out the transatlantic slave trade, and it was British colonists and missionaries in Africa and the Middle East who did everything they could to stamp out local slavery as well. | ||
| And yes, while there is no doubt that uh the Aboriginal people of Australia suffered considerably, particularly in the uh early years of settlement and the periods of pastoral expansion. | ||
| At all times, official Australia said that uh Aboriginal people had all the rights of British subjects and had to be treated uh fairly. | ||
| Now we all know that it's one thing to say something uh at head office. | ||
| It's another thing to make sure that uh out there on the frontiers of settlement uh things are going well. | ||
| But the story of Aboriginal Australia was not just one of conflict with the settlers, it was also one of cooperation with the settlers. | ||
| For instance, almost none of our early explorers would have been able to make progress through a harsh landscape, but for the Aboriginal guides who were very familiar with the the landscape that was new to British Australian eyes. | ||
| Almost none of our pastoralists would have been able to succeed without the help of indigenous stockmen and so on. | ||
| So it's been a story of partnership and cooperation as well as a story of dispossession uh and occasional serious conflict. | ||
| And I think it's important that we look at our history in the whole. | ||
| Um I think it's important that we judge our forebears not by modern stereotypes, but by the best standards of their day, not our day. | ||
| And I certainly think that uh for all the exceptions, generally speaking, um, both Australia and Britain and also the United States have got far more to be proud of in their past than to be ashamed of. | ||
| So why do you think that our countries and most of the Western world seems to be going through this internal strafe about its history? | ||
| Is this all connected to sort of leftist politics and and guilt over the past, or is there something else going on? | ||
| I think a lot of it has to do with cultural Marxism. | ||
| Uh a lot of it has to do with perhaps uh the decline of faith generally, uh faith in institutions as well as uh religious faith. | ||
| Uh I used to be very confident in the long-term survival and success of Western civilization, because I thought that our civilization, unlike almost all of its uh predecessors and current competitors, had a capacity to learn and adapt from others. | ||
| I think that self-critical capacity, which has been so important to our survival and success up till now, has to some extent um mutated into a kind of self-loathing uh and this is very destructive. | ||
| It's very destructive. | ||
| Yes, look at yourself in the mirror and say this can be better and that can be better. | ||
| But don't look at yourself in the mirror and despise what you see uh for nations, for cultures, for civilizations, as for individuals. | ||
| Um is worse than self-loathing. | ||
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|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I mean, this naval gazing seems to be happening across the West. | ||
| So when you were Prime Minister, which wasn't that long, only about a decade ago, I mean, do you think there's anything that you could have done that would have addressed some of the issues, perhaps with the aboriginals or elsewhere that might have stemmed the tide of this, or this was j all all of this upendingness was just going to happen either way? | ||
| Well, there's no doubt that the cultural Marxism, the long march of the left through the institutions has been underway for quite a few decades now, uh at least since the 1960s. | ||
| I think it's got much worse in recent times. | ||
| Um the Black Lives Matter thing was uh was uh was a particular uh I think toxic manifestation of it. | ||
| I think that the current uh outbreaks of uh anti-Semitism or due hatred are another very toxic manifestation of this. | ||
| And if you want to destroy a country, um it's much better to destroy the self-belief of its citizens than it is to destroy its physical infrastructure, because in the end, the physical infrastructure is yours if the defenders uh and the advocates have lost their self-belief. | ||
| So how would you define an Australian these days? | ||
| We we were in Melbourne a few days ago, and one of the things that my whole team was trying to figure out is what what is the city kind of feel like? | ||
| And you couldn't really pin it. | ||
| It didn't feel like it had a particular sense, or it didn't feel particularly Australian to any of us. | ||
| Now that's very different than here in Sydney. | ||
| But broadly, if you were to say, what is an Australian? | ||
| I mean, what is that? | ||
| And that's actually connected to all of this as it pertains to immigration and everything else. | ||
| Well, uh trying to define uh a nation uh and try to put a, if you like, uh an uh a label on uh what defines a citizen of one country as opposed to another uh is pretty elusive. | ||
| Um say in the book, um, again and again, that the three pillars upon which modern Australia rests uh uh an aboriginal heritage, a British foundation, and immigrant character. | ||
| We are a fundamentally Anglo-Celtic culture, regardless of the ethnicity of our citizens. | ||
| I think we have a profoundly Judeo-Christian ethos, again, regardless of the particular religion of our citizens. | ||
| I do think that the left establishment is uh unhappy and at times subversive of both the Anglo-Celtic core culture and the Judeo-Christian core ethos of our country, and I think it's important that we maintain and reinforce both. | ||
| Um But look, what's the Australian project? | ||
| I mean, uh America uh used to uh talk about its manifest destiny. | ||
| Um I think Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom have all, in a sense, consciously and subconsciously pursued their own version of a manifest destiny. | ||
| Um In Australia, I think that what's animated almost all of us from the very beginning of Modern Australia has been this idea that this is a country where everyone who is prepared to have a go is going to get a fair go in order to build a better life for uh his or her children. | ||
| I think in the United States uh the manifest destiny was uh to tame a vast land, uh and subsequently to I suppose uh uh be a beacon of hope and freedom to the rest of the world. | ||
| Uh the shining city on a hill, the phrase that Ronald Reagan liked to use. | ||
| Uh I think Britain they've had uh if you like a manifest destiny, um a civilizing mission, if you like. | ||
| I think it was Macaulay who said of uh the British in India back in the early parts of the uh 19th century that our role in India is to enable, quote, the native people to walk alone in the paths of justice. | ||
| Uh I think so I think all three countries in their own way have had this sense of manifest destiny. | ||
| But uh amongst wide swathes of the uh elites, if you like, there would be this scoffing at that kind of thing, uh this deep uh cynicism towards uh what I think are actually uh quite noble and uplifting ideals. | ||
| Aaron Ross Powell So speaking of those uh of noble and uplifting ideals, so outside of the aboriginal piece, which you've already addressed, what what is something you would want people to know about Australia that they don't know? | ||
| Maybe an Australian themselves or or outsiders. | ||
| Well, uh I think this is a country that prides itself on being the land of the fair go, and part of uh being a land of the fair go is that uh if you come to this country uh with uh curiosity and goodwill, you will have uh a very warm welcome. | ||
| And if you are able to live in this country uh with good will and a determination to make a go of things, uh you will very quickly be an absolute first-class Australian. | ||
| Aaron Ross Powell So is that part of the confusion maybe around some of the immigration stuff now that you guys don't have illegal immigration in that you have an unbelievable geography and you're an island and a huge landmass. | ||
| We did have a small boats problem, but my government fixed that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So s so is it basically since your government that there's pretty much been no illegal immigration, but there's constant discussions around legal immigration. | ||
| Aaron Ross Powell And and currently uh legal migration is at an all-time record, and it's effectively been subcontracted from government to educational providers and businesses and a lot of educational providers are selling effectively an immigration outcome in the guise of education. | ||
| And a lot of businesses I think are bringing people in from overseas to do jobs that Australians uh are currently um less enthusiastic to do, and I think what we really need to do is offer locals more training, | ||
| offer locals higher pay, and perhaps some important changes to the welfare system so that it's never uh more advantageous to people to be on welfare as opposed to being in work, even entry-level work. | ||
| One of the things that I was responsible for as a minister in the days of the Howard government was something that uh went by the very blunt title work for the dole. | ||
| Uh and under the work for the dole program, you might call it work fair in the United States. | ||
| Under that program, if you were under fifty and had been unemployed for six months uh on benefits, we would say, well, okay, you've had your time looking for work and it hasn't worked out. | ||
| Now we are going to give you Part-time work for some community organization or uh for some good cause uh and if you want to keep getting your government benefit, you've got to do two days work for this good cause. | ||
| Now, I actually thought that was a very important policy, not just from an economic perspective, but really from a moral perspective. | ||
| Yeah, I mean it seems about as fair as you can get. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| The something for for nothing mindset is very, very corrosive, and it breeds uh I think a destructive sense of entitlement. | ||
| I mean, in the end, the world does not owe us a living. | ||
| Uh if we are going to flourish, it will be because we've had a go. | ||
| Uh we've we've lifted ourselves up by our own efforts, and that's been, I think uh well understood by every generation of Australian until quite recently. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So is that program gone now? | ||
| Well um it it offended the welfareist mindset, which tends to prevail on the green left of politics. | ||
| So the Howard government uh made a big thing of work for the dole. | ||
| Uh my government likewise made a big thing of it, but uh the intervening Labour government abolished it, and certainly uh after I left office it it kind of faded away, and it certainly does need to be reinvigorated now. | ||
| So how complex is between dealing with some of the historical issues that people seem to be obsessed with, even if largely they shouldn't be obsessed with them, and then dealing with integration now with some of these people that have come that don't seem to be sharing in that and don't seem to want the warmth that you just described from the Native Australians. | ||
| How much tension is there around that? | ||
| Well, uh th there's a bit, as you can imagine. | ||
| Uh I I mean America in its glory days um was uh very much regarded as the melting pot. | ||
| Uh e pluribus unum uh uh your uh one of your national mottoes, as it were. | ||
| Um we had the same sort of approach. | ||
| Uh for instance, uh the great period of post-war migration, which was the first time large numbers of non-British migrants were encouraged to come to Australia. | ||
| Uh in those days, the official attitude was, well, uh integrate from day one and assimilate as quickly as you can. | ||
| And uh there was uh an expectation and reality that at least your kids would be entirely assimilated into the Australian way of life. | ||
| Over the last few decades, uh we've adopted uh this concept from Canada originally of multiculturalism, um the uh the sort of the fruit salad as opposed to the melting bowl where the different ingredients are expected to retain their identity. | ||
| Um I think that uh 99.9% of migrants, even now who come to this country, they want to be as Australian as they can be as quickly as they can be, because let's face it, they chose to come here and they chose to come here because of a s of Australia as it is, not because of Australia that it might become. | ||
| They came here, I like to think and believe, to join us, not to change us. | ||
| But given governmental funding for um ethnic activist organizations that have a vested interest in trying to perpetuate difference, I think there has been this uh rise of separatism, if you like. | ||
| Um at this point in time, I think it's more than manageable and more than reversible. | ||
| But you don't want to go too far down this path, uh, because the further down this path you go, the more difficult it gets. | ||
| H how much of it's in the government now, like policies that are currently applied by the the government. | ||
| Well, one of the things that the current government did on uh coming into office was uh abolish a requirement that the previous government had put in place that local councils have citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day. | ||
| Um Having a citizenship ceremony on Australia Day has always been thought of as a wonderful way to combine your entry in to the wider family of Australia with this great celebration of the country itself. | ||
| Some green left councils, quite a lot of green left councils, now that they have the latitude from the government to kind of disown Australia Day, have uh opted out of citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day, because they don't see Australia Day as the point when the modern world came wonderfully into an ancient land. | ||
| They see Australia Day as, if you like, a day of embarrassment, even shame when the British invaded what up till then was a series of sovereign First Nations. | ||
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unidentified
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Now I think that we got plenty of these guys too. | |
| I think that fundamentally misconceives what happened, but nevertheless that's the difficulty. | ||
| So so that kind of um quiet pride in country, which I think every Australian is entitled to feel, uh, does get a lot of official buffeting these days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you gotta you gotta really work to push that back, because as we talked about, it's it's sort of everywhere. | ||
| So g give me some piece of history or a story that just we wouldn't know from an American perspective. | ||
| Okay, well, um I don't want to try to remind Americans of their history, which they're probably use a little bit more. | ||
| More familiar with, but but um back in uh the middle of eighteen thirty-eight. | ||
| Uh there was a dreadful massacre of Aboriginal people by uh a group of stockmen. | ||
| Um about a dozen stockmen surprised an Aboriginal encampment, and uh up to thirty men, women and children were absolutely brutally butchered. | ||
| Um filtered down to Sydney, and the then Attorney General of New South Wales, an Irish Catholic who was made Attorney General here at a time when Catholics were still under legal disabilities in Britain, | ||
| who was a very deeply humane, uh very conscious of the rights and dignity of every human being, regardless of race or religion, he insisted, with the full support and encouragement of the then governor, he insisted on launching an investigation. | ||
| Um the perpetrators were put on trial here in Sydney. | ||
| The original jury refused to convict. | ||
| That could have been the end of the matter, uh, but the Attorney General, John Plunkett, uh then brought fresh charges against a slightly reduced number of perpetrators, persuaded uh a couple of the perpetrators to turn uh Queen's evidence. | ||
| Uh the judge at the second trial said that this is uh an abomination, an atrocity that cries out to heaven for justice. | ||
| The jury did convict, uh, and seven white men were hanged for the murder of black men back in 1838. | ||
| Now ask yourself, right, did that happen in the United States at that time? | ||
| I suspect the answer is no, it didn't. | ||
| Um for all our errors, for all the prejudices of those days, for all the failures um to accord uh the native people of Australia um the rights they should have had. | ||
| British justice did sometimes prevail. | ||
| And there are many stories, uh, some of them in this book, some of them in other uh more specific histories, of the wonderful warmth between settler families and indigenous families, because uh the story was by no means one of relentless conflict. | ||
| It was also one of uh of cooperation and partnership. | ||
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| Aaron Ross Powell How does the geography of your country play into the national ethos and the culture and the international relations and all those things? | ||
| In that you're the size of the United States, but you have I think it's like the fifteenth of the people's 350 to about 25 or 10. | ||
| Well, um the United States is a country of deep soils, um and uh and and vast river systems, uh high mountains, uh we're not like that. | ||
| Uh other than in some of our river valleys, the soils tend to be poor and thin. | ||
| Uh we don't have high mountains, much of the country is semi-arid, even desert. | ||
| Uh now with modern fertilizers, with irrigation, uh we are a breadbasket to much of the wider world. | ||
| But the carrying capacity, if you like, of Australia is not as great. | ||
| And the natural carrying capacity, if you like, of Australia is not as great as that of the United States. | ||
| That said, if you go back to the Federation era, the 1890s, when we had a population at the time of perhaps three to four million, which was about the same as the population in 1776 of the United States. | ||
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unidentified
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That's interesting. | |
| Our Federation fathers, most notably Sir Henry Parks, said, Look, uh, our aim and objective is to create on this continent uh a country with all the potential and all the future prospects and flourishing of the United States. | ||
| Now, um we don't have a population of 300. | ||
| And we never will. | ||
| But you could fit it. | ||
| But but I like to think that in our own way, uh, we have created a society which is every bit uh as good, um, in some ways better than the society of the United States. | ||
| Aaron Powell Yeah. | ||
| Well, it feels like the United States here, and I mean that in the best sense of that. | ||
| I love I love my country. | ||
| Uh in the remaining time, can you just tell me a few things? | ||
| I've got all my crew here that have never been to Australia. | ||
| I've only been here once. | ||
| What should we be doing? | ||
| What else should we know? | ||
| Where should we be going? | ||
| You're a bit of a surfer yourself and you've done some interesting things. | ||
| Well, Dave, look, the great thing about Sydney, as you can tell just from looking out this window. | ||
| We've got the bush, we've got the water, the harbor, we've got the ocean. | ||
| In some respects, Sydney is a city in the midst of a national park. | ||
| Um if you try to combine Yellowstone uh with LA and New York, uh, the water of New York, the beaches of LA with the beauty of Yellowstone, um, then you've got something like Sydney. | ||
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Um so look, but it's way cleaner than LA, I'll tell you that. | |
| LA has a lot of the urban blight, which uh um uh many of the West's great cities are currently subject to. | ||
| I mean, this terrible problem of drug addiction of homelessness. | ||
| I haven't seen any of that here. | ||
| I don't know if it's maybe just not in the area that we've been wandering or what? | ||
| It exists, but it's not nearly as bad as in Washington in London. | ||
| Um again, maybe it's a function of the weather. | ||
| Umbe it's a function of the have a gun mindset that an immigrant people uh tend to have. | ||
| Maybe that our mood is better, our mood is better, uh, and long may that be the case. | ||
| But so I I think that you know, soak the place up. | ||
| Um walk the city, uh admire the opera house, admire the harbor bridge, get to the beach, if you can, get up to the barrier reef, because don't believe the climate alarmist. | ||
| Uh the barrier reef is not being destroyed by climate change. | ||
| Uh the barrier reef uh uh waxes and wanes. | ||
| Um sometimes it's doing better than at other times. | ||
| But in terms of mankind's impact on the reef, uh it's less now than it has been for a hundred years because we've cleaned up the rivers that flow into the um uh the the waters of the reef. | ||
| Um agricultural runoff is not nearly what it was. | ||
| Um in fact the most recent statistics uh that came out just in the last few months suggest that the area of coral cover is at an all-time record, or certainly uh at its greatest since statistics were kept. | ||
| So get up to the reef, uh get off to the center, have a look at Ayers Rock or Uluru as we Uluru as we now call it, um, because it is a magnificent country. | ||
| And where's the best place to surf? | ||
| Well, I surf uh uh on Manley Beach, normally about halfway between South Stain and Queenscliff. | ||
| Uh the great thing about um uh North Stain is that it's a pretty forgiving crowd. | ||
| It tends to be older, older older surfers on longboards. | ||
| I'll be okay with that. | ||
| And I've got to say that uh they uh they've always been very easygoing uh when I drop in on my constituents. | ||
| Wait, I have to ask you one last thing then, which is tell me I googled it already, so I know what the answer is, but tell me the best way to eat vegamate, because I think my team has done it wrong here and there's some confusion. | ||
| Put it on your toast. | ||
| That's the best way. | ||
| And a lot of butter, how much butter or just straight up. | ||
| I I'm probably uh going to get expelled from from the country, but I I'm not a huge fan of vegetables. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But uh most people in my family put on a little bit of butter and then a bit of vegemine. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister. | ||
| Good on you, Dave. | ||
| If you're a creepy more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here. |
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