313. Debt Free Government and Fundamental Values | John Anderson

[0] Hello, everyone.

[1] I'm just concluding my tour in New Zealand and Australia with a wrap -up discussion with Mr. John Anderson.

[2] And so I'm looking forward to that, and I hope you all find it valuable.

[3] The Honorable John Anderson, AC -F -T -S -E, spent 19 years in the Australian Parliament.

[4] this included six years as Deputy Prime Minister, as a member of the reformist government led by John Howard.

[5] Amongst other step -changing initiatives, this government oversaw enormous economic reform, including taxation, modernization, and the maintenance of a string of miraculous budget surpluses, which resulted in leaving a cash surplus on leaving office in 2007.

[6] Since then, John has remained active in public commentary, various advisory bodies and in the not -for -profit sector.

[7] He's been a sought -after speaker in both Australia and abroad.

[8] In recent years, he's hosted a successful YouTube and podcast interview series.

[9] I've been on that a couple of times, the preeminent one of its kind in Australia.

[10] He was made a companion of the Order of Australia in 2022, the nation's highest civic honor for his various services to the community.

[11] On leaving politics, Anderson, known for his character in Christian faith, was saluted by figures on both sides with praise.

[12] The then Prime Minister John Howard said, I've not met a person with greater integrity in public life.

[13] I'm looking very much forward to talking to John for YouTube today and then also following that up, as I frequently do with an additional half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform walking through his bio.

[14] and thanks to the Daily Wire types for facilitating these conversations.

[15] Welcome to all of you who are watching and listening.

[16] So, Mr. Anderson, I thought we could start talking by discussing something that you accomplished, along with other members of your government, several years ago.

[17] You managed to run a sequence of balanced budgets and to also pay down a substantial part or all of Australia's debt in a relatively short period of time?

[18] All of Australia's federal debt.

[19] All of Australia's federal debt.

[20] And left money in the bank.

[21] And left money in the bank.

[22] Okay, and so what years over did that, over what years did that take place?

[23] Began in 1996.

[24] And the future fund with surpluses and sales from revenue sales from a couple of assets would then put aside as a wealth fund, if you like, for the future.

[25] in from memory about 206 -207, just in time for the great financial crisis.

[26] So Australia went into the great financial crisis with no debt, money in the bank, at a federal government level.

[27] Okay, so how, why don't we delve a little bit into exactly what that means?

[28] Because there's a bunch of mysteries there.

[29] The first mystery is, I suppose, why that hadn't happened before.

[30] Then the second mystery is, how did you possibly manage it?

[31] And the third mystery is, given that it was possible and that you demonstrated it was possible, why did that stop happening and why did more countries around the world also not do the same thing?

[32] So let's start with the first one, which was why did the governments prior to the one that you were integrally involved in find it necessary to run at a deficit and rack up a tremendous debt?

[33] Well, I think probably a lot of it was born with the idea of Key Keynesian economics, that in flat times, governments spend more money to help, if you like, smooth out the highs and the lows, and then they withdraw and repay that debt in the good times, but they never do.

[34] Right, right.

[35] So the idea was to smooth out the variability in the so -called business cycle.

[36] That's part of it.

[37] And that's a good thing to do, as long as you have the discipline, start putting money back into the system when you're trading well, economy's strong, taxation revenues are flowing in, and that's what countries are not done.

[38] It's also a good thing to do if you presume that you can, by fiat, in some sense, reduce that kind of variability.

[39] And that's not self -evident, right?

[40] Because most systems that are reasonably stable have to oscillate to some degree, and you might think it would be a good idea to flatten out the oscillations.

[41] It is a good idea.

[42] Well, if you can do it.

[43] But the key is to do it in the better times.

[44] Discipline yourself to prepare for the next downturn.

[45] And one of the reasons that the whole of the West and beyond the West, in my view, is in such a dangerous place today as we haven't done that.

[46] We've got spending, spending, spending.

[47] Right, so the theory is predicated on the notion that you're going to do both.

[48] But the reality is that it's very unlikely that governments will do more than one.

[49] Yeah.

[50] Right.

[51] And so why had they not done it in Australia?

[52] To be fair, they had been, the previous government, deserve some credit.

[53] They'd done a lot of good things.

[54] they'd floated the dollar, they'd started on making the place more productive, better industrial relations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[55] But they had left a rapidly building set of deficits and a ballooning debt.

[56] By today's standards, I've got to tell you, compared to the sort of money that is owed as a percentage of GDP around the world, China being a horrendous Britain, America, France.

[57] We saw Greece, they got to 175%.

[58] debt -to -GDP ratio, and we saw what that looked like, a First World country where kids went to school hungry literally because their parents couldn't put food in the refrigerator and there was no longer a government program to put it there.

[59] These things can happen.

[60] Italy went very, very close to the same.

[61] We should clarify for everybody that's watching and listening the distinction between deficit and debt, and so a deficit is overspending generally calculated on a yearly level.

[62] Yeah, that's right.

[63] And then the debt is the cumulative.

[64] The cumulative consequence of the deficits.

[65] And so to attack the deficit, then each year the government doesn't spend more than it brings in.

[66] And to pay off the debt means that the cumulative consequences of the deficit are also eradicated.

[67] And so the government you were involved with demonstrated that this was possible.

[68] And so what exactly, how did you do that?

[69] I'm very interested in the mechanics.

[70] So how did you analyze what needed to be reduced, let's say, or what revenues needed to be increased?

[71] How did you prioritize the spending?

[72] And how did you bring that economic overspending under control without simultaneously dooming yourself to substantive, let's say, unpopularity?

[73] Well, there was plenty of that.

[74] But let me just backtrack a little bit.

[75] And I should pay some credit here.

[76] When we first met together, the first formal meeting as a new government, having been sworn in only a few days, about a week after winning the election in 1996, March 1996, we met for the first time, and the Prime Minister, who was a man of conviction.

[77] You've got to start with conviction.

[78] You've got to think these things matter.

[79] You're there to make a difference.

[80] You're not there just to satiate the latest political fad and to smooth over people's feelings.

[81] You've got to actually believe in something.

[82] And he said, we need to recognise this is intergenerational unfair.

[83] And we need to start to do something about winding back these deficits.

[84] And then after that came the issue of, well, here's the opportunity not just to pay down the debt, but maybe you'd get rid of it altogether.

[85] And then we should say the treasurer of the day, Peter Costello, was very single -minded, ably backed by a finance minister who'd been a state premier, John Fay.

[86] Then we had the health minister, we had the junior treasurer and me. And I, in theory, was asked by the Prime Minister to help with the economic portfolios because I had agriculture and mining in my brief.

[87] So conviction, believing in something that's important.

[88] The second thing I would say is that teamwork's important because the thing you just alluded to, how do you not get slaughtered?

[89] You've got to take, you know, people would speculate, oh, they're going to do this, they're going to do that, they're going to take something else away.

[90] And the minute someone had broken ranks and said, oh, yeah, look out, you better go out and protest on such and such an issue, it would have destroyed the process.

[91] because people were very wary.

[92] Everyone agrees in principle.

[93] I was great.

[94] They're going to be economically responsible.

[95] But what happens if they inflicts some pain on me?

[96] Right, right.

[97] And in this day when governments are, I'll say it, less and less coherent, less and less convicted of anything, they don't have philosophical underpinnings.

[98] They're into ad hocery and managerialism and opportunism.

[99] And opinion polls.

[100] And opinion polls.

[101] And then you combine those.

[102] with a strong sense of activism, a reluctance in the day of identity politics to identify the national interest as opposed to sectoral interests and the explosive cocktail becomes then with social media, you know, you can mount a campaign against almost any government program.

[103] So here's a staggering thing.

[104] I mean, we did that side of it.

[105] Then we did a major tax reform.

[106] Neither were popular, but we got away with it.

[107] There have been no major reforms in this country to my way of thinking that have involved great difficulty and great persuasion for over 20 years.

[108] So why not...

[109] So let's play devil's advocate.

[110] Why not run the deficit and burden the future with today's debt if you can thereby generate more revenue to help people who are in trouble?

[111] What's the downside?

[112] to that.

[113] Well, it's a very good question, and it really needs to be split into two.

[114] Some government expenditures can be reasonably described as investing in the future and valuable for our children and our grandchildren.

[115] The obvious ones would be high -quality education, research, and we know that even if it's debt -financed, very high -quality infrastructure, including communications and so forth, can help build wealth.

[116] But many other forms of government expenditure, in fact, most of them are entitlement driven and if you let them get out of hands so you legislate that if something unfortunate happens to you it might be a very desirable and compassionate thing to do but you're entitled to X, Y and Z benefits and then you get mission creep and more and more people are let into the net and you're spending more and more on an entitlement basis locked into the law of the land can only be undone by the Parliament and the Parliament won't play ball because the opposition's got the numbers in the other house or whatever then you can get into a spiral that's really difficult.

[117] And you combine that now with the information age and social media and a lack of willingness to clearly focus on the national interest.

[118] And it's really hard.

[119] I don't make light at all of the fact that modern governments, even though I can be critical of the lack of philosophical underpinnings, don't do much about it in one way, because we electors.

[120] We are in danger, Jordan.

[121] I'm sorry to say this, but I'll give you my view.

[122] In the West, we are in danger of turning our countries into places that can't be properly governed.

[123] I know that's a tough thing to say.

[124] And I'm not saying we're there, but I'm saying I think we're close.

[125] We could also point out, I suppose, that the evidence that relatively unconstrained government spending produces inflation seems to be incontrovertible.

[126] And then we might want to discuss exactly what inflation does to people.

[127] So inflation makes each unit of currency purchase less units of value.

[128] Too much money touching too few goods.

[129] Exactly, exactly.

[130] And then you might say, well, who does that punish?

[131] Yeah.

[132] And the answer is, well, inflation punishes people who've been wise enough to forestall gratification.

[133] Yeah.

[134] Right?

[135] So if you're somebody who has been sensible and taken the medium to long -term an account into account, and you've saved money, so accrued wealth, let's say, and the sort of wealth that enables you to have a house and air conditioning and some opportunities for your kids, we would generally regard that as a social good, right?

[136] Because we hope that people who are not profligate and impulsive and who put a little aside for the future, for future contingencies so that they can take care of themselves and others, those people should be valued.

[137] And if you inflate the currency by overspending, then those are the people who are preferentially punished.

[138] Because the people who spent all their money, well, they don't have any money.

[139] inflation only affects them tangentially, but it destroys the wealth of the very people whose careful and conscientious striving have produced wealth to begin with.

[140] And that seems inevitable.

[141] I mean, we've really seen that inflation break out across the Western world to quite a remarkable degree, even a degree that was unforeseen by the central banks, who claimed that they had it under control.

[142] I don't know what inflation is running at in Australia, but I know in Canada, I think on the food fronts, it's about 8 % right now.

[143] And on the energy front in Europe, it's far higher than that.

[144] That's not all because of government overspending, but it's certainly contributing to that.

[145] So you punish, inflation punishes exactly the people who should be being rewarded by taking a medium -to -long -term view.

[146] And it differentially benefits people who were impulsive and profligate in their spending.

[147] And so that seems like bad social policy, as far as I can tell.

[148] I agree with all of what you've said, but I think it's really important to understand that it's actually with, we've done something worse than that.

[149] Because what happened was that Australia went into the great financial crisis.

[150] I don't know whether you use that term internationally, but that's what we call it here.

[151] The meltdown, you know, Lehman Brothers, you know, a real story about the link between culture and good policy outcomes.

[152] That one was because they didn't break the law, but by you, they broke the spirit of everything that was decent.

[153] You know, and these are important things.

[154] Where's personal responsibility?

[155] Where's decency?

[156] Where's doing the right thing in banking more important than making an instant bob.

[157] But leave that aside.

[158] Most countries actually were starting to worry about their debt to GDP ratios in the build -up to the great financial crisis.

[159] They were starting to try to do something about it.

[160] Take a line through it.

[161] It was around 35, 45, 50 percent in a lot of Western countries.

[162] And they're saying, this is getting, you know, need to wind it back, prepare for a rainy day.

[163] These are good times.

[164] They were the right to do so.

[165] Then the Lehman Brothers, you know, unsound money everywhere, all over the place at one side.

[166] The system nearly collapsed at one stage.

[167] So governments did extraordinary things.

[168] The government of America bought General Motors.

[169] And Chrysler, from memory, I don't think they bought Ford.

[170] Governments everywhere put bailed banks out.

[171] Insurance companies.

[172] All that debt went onto the public sector balance sheet.

[173] You know, private citizens.

[174] Suddenly owed, in theory, owned General Motors.

[175] that privatising profit and socialising risk.

[176] Yeah, well, I'm an Australian farmer.

[177] We sometimes get accused of wanting to do that here, but I would push back against the charge that all farmers are guilty of it.

[178] But that's right.

[179] However, what then followed was that government's looking at this mountain of debt, say, what do we do now?

[180] Because the discipline, you ask, let's come back to how we did it, of tough decisions.

[181] There was no stomach for it.

[182] Matthew Paris wrote, at the time, face it, we're broke.

[183] We've overdone it.

[184] We're all going to have to live much lower living standards because none of us have got the stomach to do the hard work to wind back this debt that's going to be so bad for our kids or we're just going to have to eat.

[185] But what governments did then is they looked for inflation because inflation debate is money and makes a debt smaller.

[186] And they looked for it and they pump money into everything.

[187] We had very low interest rates for an incredible period of time.

[188] We pursued endlessly quantitative easing, which is basically printing money in a fancy way.

[189] It's always ended in tears.

[190] Think bymer, Germany.

[191] And people kept saying, where's the inflation?

[192] We want the inflation to devalue the government debts to get it under control so that we don't have to cripple people with taxation.

[193] But the inflation was there.

[194] It was in asset prices.

[195] Right, right.

[196] Housing prices.

[197] And who did that hurt?

[198] Where's the social impact of that?

[199] It's in housing prices, especially for young people in this country.

[200] It really, really worries me. When I left school, I'm a bit older than you, Jordan.

[201] I mightn't look it, but I am.

[202] And when I left school in the mid -70s, an average Australian house cost four times every January learnings.

[203] Today, it's 11 times, and in Sydney and Melbourne it's more like 13 times.

[204] Now, that impacts a lot of things.

[205] Social cohesion, I would argue it impacts.

[206] Perhaps more seriously and related is family formation.

[207] in a time when 92 countries in the world have collapsing populations and we haven't realised how difficult that's going to be to handle.

[208] So I think, you know, it's a very dangerous story all round and again I say to you, I actually have a lot of sympathy for modern politicians.

[209] I could say to you've lost your philosophical heart.

[210] Where are the great strands of thinking through which you used to look through to see will this policy advance or take backwards my dream of what the country ought to be so I could be harsh at that level but the other lever I'd say we've not been prepared to delay gratification to make tough choices to say yeah look we want to elect a government that'll do some hard things for our kids' sake to get the whole show back on the road and here in this country we've had a minerals burn we're back in debt our debt to GDP ratio now is creeping out over time it will get out to around 40 % on current projections 40 % is the level at which as European and American country started to lose control at the time of the GFC.

[211] This stuff matters.

[212] And as interest rates rise, more and more taxpayers' money is just going into servicing the debt.

[213] So it's not buying hospitals or looking after schools or providing reparations to the countries for climate change damage, all of those things.

[214] That's all going to be debt financed from now on.

[215] And who's going to pay that debt?

[216] So what did you do to bring down the deficit and to pay off the debt that was hard and what worked well?

[217] I'm very interested in the actual mechanics.

[218] How did you decide where savings could be obtained?

[219] How did you do the analysis?

[220] And where were the major savings garnered?

[221] And how much of that was a consequence of tax increase as well?

[222] No tax increase.

[223] No tax increase.

[224] We promise not to.

[225] And we kept to it.

[226] I mean, look, there are a few little things like airport charges and passport levies and so forth that we adjusted.

[227] But there were no tax increases worthy of the name.

[228] We said we wouldn't.

[229] We relaxed low -taxed government.

[230] We're committed to that.

[231] And we're delivered.

[232] And the only answer, really, to your question at the headline level is it was incredibly hard work.

[233] And those five people with their helpers, I was one of them.

[234] And, you know, I don't want to take all the credit.

[235] I mean, this was the Prime Minister saying, this is what we're going to do.

[236] And this is a very capable man called Peter Costello.

[237] and the little team around him and the rest of us, working ridiculous hours.

[238] Was that his primary goal and your primary goal?

[239] In government?

[240] We saw it as a vital part of what we were doing.

[241] Now, industrial relations reform, a more productive economy.

[242] For me, rural recovery, because it was in a very bad way at the time.

[243] That was very important.

[244] And I think it's fair to say that we had a deep commitment to tax reform, but we're unsure about how we were going to do it.

[245] But we saw that as, yeah, But getting back to what might have been called in Britain in those days, I don't know whether they don't use it in Britain anymore.

[246] They talked about sound money.

[247] We thought that really mattered for a trading nation like Australia, a mid -sized nation.

[248] We were very deeply committed to it.

[249] But essentially it involved going through everything.

[250] At the level of detail.

[251] Everything.

[252] I often tell people, forgive me if somebody's listening to me, oh gosh, he's going to try to that story again.

[253] We spend three hours debating whether to continue a $90 ,000, rat -baiting program on Lord Howe Island, which is a little island off to the coast.

[254] Rats got their off a ship in the 1960s and they were trying to eradicate them and we thought it's not working.

[255] Should we continue it or can we save $90 ,000?

[256] So you've got the leaders of the country sitting around a table spending three hours on $90 ,000.

[257] We got the bureaucrats who, I've got to say, they served as well.

[258] They'd put up the options.

[259] But we got them to bring in a list of all of the community groups.

[260] And many of them were gently activist in those days.

[261] They'd be wildly activist today who were drawing on a government teat somewhere.

[262] I remember being staggered.

[263] They put this up.

[264] The list on the, oh, does this list ever in?

[265] Oh, no, there's another page, and there's a page after that.

[266] And we went through that laboriously.

[267] You trim here, you trim there.

[268] You say, don't need that group.

[269] That group's just working against the country's interest.

[270] Here's another one we will support.

[271] and whether it's tax deductibility or grants or whatever.

[272] So why didn't the furor around that?

[273] Because I don't imagine people were very thrilled about that.

[274] Right, because you guys didn't, I see.

[275] We didn't break ranks.

[276] And neither did the broader political team around us.

[277] It was teamwork.

[278] It was conviction and teamwork.

[279] They're the things I'd want to emphasize.

[280] Why did the public put up with it?

[281] Well, they nearly threw us out after three years.

[282] For 12 months, the first budget, with some tough measures in it, It was well received.

[283] We went up in the polls.

[284] The second budget, when Treasury and Finance had advised us that, in fact, we weren't making the progress we thought we were, so we tightened the screws a bit more, and we were in deep trouble.

[285] And we were nearly a one -serer.

[286] But then what happened?

[287] This is a really interesting thing.

[288] The rewards started to flow.

[289] Oh, look, I should just say on how we did it.

[290] There were still some assets that we felt could be privatised.

[291] That's not always a popular idea, but there were some we felt that could be privatised.

[292] And we made a solemn commitment that selling any family silver that was sold would go to debt reduction, not to a new kitchen, if I can put it that way.

[293] We're going to pay the house off.

[294] We're not going to build a new kitchen, if you see the point I'm trying to make.

[295] And we did that, and we stuck to it.

[296] And I think there was a slow but begrudging respect in the Australian community.

[297] These guys, you know, actually believe in something.

[298] I think conviction and belief well in those days it carried for something I hope it still would and so we progressed for all that only just won a second term we won it promising to do something as tough which was to reform the tax system and scrapped the whole messy old arrangement and replace it with what was called a new tax system without its heart a GUST a goods and services tax and some people say oh that was a thing that nearly did kill you altogether but actually I think my personal view is the other way around because we were saying we believe in something they just put us back and I think the mood of the country would have been we don't like this so much we're really sick of it but at least they believe in something so we'll give them a second term but then the fruits started to flow unemployment started to drop real employment started to rise for the first time in this country for a very long time real wages started to rise We've got a row going on in Australia about how to get real wages up and the current government, they didn't tell us so we're going to do it.

[299] I'm not here to be political, but they didn't tell us during the campaign they were going to do it.

[300] No, they have.

[301] To get wages up, we're going back to an old system of industrial relations.

[302] You can graph it out.

[303] Wages rose when we engaged in industrial relations freedom measures, you know, to free up the workplace and let people negotiate better outcomes and be more productive and ask them more pay.

[304] That's when wages started to rise.

[305] And so by the time the next election came, We had our sort of amazing results, and everybody loved us, and it was all turned around.

[306] So you got relatively rapid results in ways that people could actually detect and enjoy.

[307] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[308] Absolutely.

[309] I mean, we didn't think we'd ever see employment, unemployment down at those levels again, but we got there.

[310] You know, the bureaucrats were saying, you know, modern economies don't get that low, and we got there.

[311] So why did it go sideways and things return to their normal?

[312] state of affairs, let's say.

[313] I said I wouldn't be political.

[314] Let me be honest.

[315] And so I think towards the end, we were getting a little lax, and the opposition was looking good, and the alternative Prime Minister was promising to be fiscally conservative, i .e. to continue what we would do in.

[316] And he looked like John Howard liked.

[317] John Howard is our second longer serving Prime Minister.

[318] A man I admire hugely and count as a friend.

[319] And people thought it's time for a change.

[320] So there's a bit of the Australian sort of give the other go.

[321] Yeah, yeah.

[322] Well, there's something to be said for that.

[323] There is something to be said for that.

[324] I'm not knocking it.

[325] No, no. Well, one of the reasons that democracies work, I think, is because you constantly replace people at the top.

[326] And so your point is that...

[327] But not too constant thing.

[328] You've got to leave them there long enough to get there.

[329] See, it took us three years.

[330] I mean, we did all that hard work.

[331] But it took us three years, I think, if I look at it back, as a government of conviction, because it was a group of people made up they'd been, opposition for quite a while.

[332] We were convicted and we were committed to working as a team and to trying to do something.

[333] Having a leave as a power wasn't just about keeping them.

[334] And people say, oh, you know, John, you're just a politician, you all say that.

[335] But it was true of us.

[336] There were enough of us who believed in the country.

[337] And in my case, not particularly addicted to politics as such, it was a means to an end.

[338] I believed in these things.

[339] My father had almost lost his life fighting during the Second World War.

[340] And I thought, well, I I don't have a water fight, thank God.

[341] But I can try and make a contribution here.

[342] And if it's a bit painful, well, it's not like losing your life, is it?

[343] Lying on a hospital bed for 18 months, shot to pieces and spending the rest of your life covered in scars and with bits of lead coming to your shoulder and stomachs that don't work.

[344] And that's what he had to put up with.

[345] Right.

[346] So, you know, a little bit of courage doesn't hurt sometimes.

[347] Have a go.

[348] Yeah, well, I did a podcast with Benjamin Netanyahu here recently and he talked about the price they paid in Israel for his government's economic reforms.

[349] And they tried to, while their actions were analogous in some sense to years, he was more concerned with cutting tax rates and transforming the environment away from the hypothetically socialist paradise that Israel had degenerated into.

[350] And they paid a big price for that electorally, but the medium to long -term consequences for the country seemed, I would say, seemed to have been spectacular.

[351] And, of course, now he's back, he's back in charge of the country, or will be soon.

[352] And he seemed also to be somebody who was driven fundamentally by principle rather than by, what would you say, desire for the trappings of popularity and power.

[353] Keeping your hands on the levers for the sake of...

[354] Well, yeah, well, I think a lot of the politicians that I've watched and talked to, when they don't rule by principle, let's say, when they're not governed by principle themselves, they devolve to short -term opinion poll manipulating, and they deliver people what they hypothetically want in the short term, even though it's very hard to measure what people truly want, and you can't do that very accurately with opinion polls.

[355] No, you can't.

[356] Because you don't give them choices.

[357] You can't set the choices out clearly enough to get them.

[358] No, no, no. It's very hard.

[359] First of all, in some really comprehensive sense, people want many contradictory things simultaneously.

[360] And so scattershot asking them about what they want today in a very narrow manner doesn't inform you about their true wishes.

[361] That's a very difficult thing to...

[362] Well, it's very hard indeed.

[363] Yeah.

[364] You know, would you like a $10 pay rise?

[365] Well, yes, we're all for that.

[366] Right.

[367] But if it means that you're going to have to repay it because it's borrowed money is going to cost you $12, well, no, maybe I don't want...

[368] Right, right, exactly.

[369] This is the problem you get.

[370] You can't present them with the real cost and the implications of the decisions that they make.

[371] Very important, just to go back to the issue, though, we got, by the grace of God, reasonably quick results and people could see the benefits of better governance.

[372] And in the end, maybe we got a bit tired, but they felt that there was an alternative that would be safe hands and perhaps a little bit less edgy than we'd been in saying, you know, perhaps we sounded a bit like we were so harsh.

[373] And maybe sometimes even a little bit self -righteous.

[374] Look what we've done.

[375] Maybe that was the way some Australians saw it at a time.

[376] But here's the point.

[377] It unraveled very quickly because the GFC hit.

[378] And they're saying an Australian was go hard, go early, go households.

[379] We pumped the whole heap of money out there to try and counter the GFC.

[380] In my view, far too much for too long.

[381] And some would say, well, that was the voice of reason and experience.

[382] I'd say that talking.

[383] Others might say, oh, Anderson, you're just a tight scot.

[384] I thought it was two months.

[385] And then, you know, so we started to build up the debt again.

[386] And then we had COVID.

[387] And now we've got climate policy, which in my view is often being ill -advised and not subject to rigorous economic analysis and environmental analysis for the real impact that those policies will have.

[388] And here's one point that I would challenge people to really, you know, correct me on, but I think I'm right, right through all the tendency and policy terms has been to produce results that discriminate against younger people that make it harder for them to improve their real wages and harder for them to get their foot onto the asset ladder, unless I inherit.

[389] Well, how much do you think that that's driven in some sense consciously and explicitly by something approximating an anti -growth ethos?

[390] I mean, my understanding is that the more radical voices on the climate amelioration front presume that it's simply impossible for upcoming generations of people in the West and certainly people in the developing world to aspire to anything even approximating the standard of living that we currently enjoy and that they should bloody well get used to having less and the sooner the better.

[391] And so the fact that young people are being priced out of the high, housing market, let's say, and face a more uncertain economic future in some ways looks to me like a feature, not a bug.

[392] It's something that's actually part of the plan.

[393] Because if your viewpoint is fundamentally Malthusian, you think, well, human beings will multiply until there's far too many of us, and there'll be a catastrophe as a consequence, which is pretty simple -minded biological modeling, by the way, then you're going to assume that everything has to be oriented towards placing extremely severe constraints on growth.

[394] And if that means impoverishing people now, while you're forestalling some hypothetical future catastrophe, and that's entirely justifiable.

[395] And it seems to me we're running down that road as fast as we possibly can, you know, with moral flag firmly in air, saying to young people and the developing world, well, you know, we had it pretty good, but we probably burned up more than we should have.

[396] And I think it's time for you guys to pay.

[397] And so, and like I don't buy any of that because I don't think the limits to growth model is biologically appropriate in the least because human beings aren't yeast in a petri dish by any stretch of the imagination.

[398] And I think that the idea that we need to impoverish the poor and the young to save the planet is not only morally reprehensible and arrogant, but will also produce a far worse planet on the environmental front.

[399] I mean, all the data suggests that.

[400] And so I don't exactly understand why people are buying into this with such avidity because there's no evidence whatsoever that is producing the results that are intended even by the people who are pushing forward the policies.

[401] A lot of issues in there.

[402] Let me have a little bit of a go.

[403] Let me have a little bit of a go.

[404] I think you're right.

[405] Our parliaments now are infused with a lot of people who think we've got to stop growth and wind it back.

[406] But they won't tell you that.

[407] So I had a scientist to say to me a couple years ago, when I said, you know, we've got to be really careful on climate change policy.

[408] If we frighten the living daylights out of our kids, so they're all so depressed as we told they are, because I think there's no future, rather than saying, well, here's a challenge.

[409] Let's go out and try and solve it.

[410] We've solved other challenges.

[411] We can solve this one.

[412] They've become very defeatist, and now we get stories all the time about young men having vasectomies because they didn't want to bring children into this terrible world.

[413] And the scientists said to me, oh, well, it's because governments are not taking effective control over climate, and that's what's depressing the children.

[414] So I went to Australia's, like I respect most, a fellow called McRendell in this country.

[415] He has a research outfit.

[416] And I asked him, I said, there's anxiety amongst our young people's record numbers of kids expressing anxiety are because of climate change.

[417] I think the world's going to end.

[418] He said, no, it's much more complicated than that.

[419] The kids are smart.

[420] They're working out.

[421] There's going to be really hard for them to get a job.

[422] They're working out.

[423] there's going to be really hard for them to afford a home.

[424] They're working out that that probably means they're going to have to live at home and not go and fly.

[425] They're working out that romance is very difficult.

[426] They're worried about climate, but there's a whole heap of things.

[427] So there you have it.

[428] So you couldn't possibly confess your policies were going to make it even harder for young people.

[429] And this is at the heart, in my view, a lot of the problem we now have.

[430] I alluded to it briefly.

[431] Traditionally in Australia, we've had three broad philosophical, political streams.

[432] Conservatism, nothing left to conserve, so they haven't got much to say.

[433] The classic liberals believed in small government, in free enterprise, strong civil societies.

[434] Well, now they look to government for everything, it seems.

[435] And the Social Democrats, you sort of left of centre types, many of whom, look, they were pretty noble.

[436] Their objectives, at least, were noble.

[437] That was particularly true of the union leader types and the people who were really working for the working class.

[438] Many of them were people who just wanted the weak and the oppressed and the minds and lies to be recognised as members of the community is part of the family Australia.

[439] That's noble.

[440] Might disagree with what they wanted to do.

[441] We used to have these arguments in the Parliament.

[442] People had views and they assessed the issues of the day.

[443] They look through the lens of the issue, to what they thought Australia should look like.

[444] But now there's a fourth, which is this inversion of our traditional belief system so that now the problem is that Mother Earth is God, we're the enemy of Gaia, we're the ones who have offended and we must atone by maybe we've got to reduce our living standards or at its extremes you think Club of Rome in the 60s we're all going to die there's too many of us if you really press some of them it boils down to lifeboat ethics you know we're sinking the planet the lifeblood is going to go down So we've got to...

[445] So anything is justified.

[446] We've got to jettison some.

[447] Yeah.

[448] Now, would you rather be the person, Jordan, who was jettisoned, drowned, or the person who made the decision that somebody else was going to?

[449] Yeah, well, that's right, precisely.

[450] Yeah, well...

[451] He's just one little question I'd make out of that.

[452] I do see some very, very, very, very privileged people who are climate change activists who don't seem to intend themselves to make any sacrifices.

[453] It's not going to go overboard.

[454] they think someone else should.

[455] And I'm really worried that the young and the less well off in our society is.

[456] Well, we already know who's going to go overboard because they're already starting to go overboard.

[457] I mean, what happens inevitably is that if you the policies you're pursuing to save the planet, which by the way have been highly ineffective, even by the metrics of the people who are attempting such things, if you're the consequence of your policy, is to radically increase the price and decrease the reliability of energy provision, then what you do is you tip the hundreds of millions of people who are already living at a near subsistence level, maybe we have just started to clamber somewhat above that, you tip all of them back into insufficient subsistence living.

[458] And so you definitely, by making energy more expensive, of there's absolutely 100%, no doubt, that the primary effect is the impoverishment, the further impoverishment of the already poor.

[459] And so they're going to be the sacrificial victims on this front.

[460] And that would be true in part in the West because the poorest Western people will definitely pay the biggest price for higher energy costs.

[461] But it's even more true in the developing world because as poor as poor people are in the West, they're richer than poor people in the developing world.

[462] And if energy is more scarce and food is also more expensive, then the poor people in the poorest places will be the ones who suffer the most.

[463] And there's absolutely no doubt that that's already happening.

[464] And so it's a very, it's a very peculiar thing to see, especially when it's conjoined with the fact that I don't see any evidence whatsoever.

[465] And I've talked to people who are very knowledgeable on this front, people like Bjorn Lomburg, for example, who've reviewed the evidence very carefully and showed that all of the tremendous amount of money that we've already spent wasted, let's say, on such things as hypothetical climate amelioration, have not only not ameliorated climate alteration in the least, not measurably, but have definitely made energy far more expensive.

[466] And in places like Germany have also made it dirtier.

[467] So I read the other day that I think Germany has fallen.

[468] into 170th, I hope I have this stat right, but the principle of it's right anyways, is that energy is not only way more expensive and way more unreliable in Germany, to the point where, for example, manufacturers of car batteries for electric cars can no longer do it profitably in Germany because electricity costs are too high, but that while they've demolished the energy provision system and rendered themselves hyper -reliant on the Russians, they've also made their energy per kilowatt much dirtier because you need backup for these hypothetically green renewables which aren't green at all by the way you need backup and that backup has to be fossil fuel and they've shut off their nuclear plants and so now they're turning to coal or many of the of the Europeans are now turning to wood burning to prepare for the winter and they're deforesting in many places they're deforesting the country and so one of the things we've got to get real straight here is that even if your goal and even if you have the goal of a more sustainable environment, and you have your metrics in place to produce that, and even if you accept the apocalyptic version of carbon dioxide overproduction, which I don't at all, by the way, but even if you do, there's no evidence whatsoever that these counterproductive policies that are punitive in relationship to the poor have had any impact on the environment at all that hasn't been entirely negative.

[469] And so I don't see at all how anybody on the radical left on the globalist utopian environmental front can put forward an argument saying that there's anything about that that's moral because we have way more people who are poor than we needed to have we're impoverishing people in the West and the developing world and while we're doing that we're actually making the environment worse by the standards that the people who put in the policies regard as the appropriate standards so how is that helpful and then on the colonial front you know one of the things we hear all the time is how awful the European world really has been in terms of its imposition of the colonial empire on the rest of the world.

[470] And there's no doubt that, you know, all of us walk on blood -soaked ground.

[471] And that's part of the catastrophe of being human, I suppose.

[472] But I can't see anything more colonial that we've ever done than to insist that we enjoyed a pretty damn good standard of living, and that was driven almost entirely by fossil fuel reliance.

[473] But it's pretty not much enough of that for everyone else.

[474] And we cannot expect to have a world where those in the developing world could aspire to or hope to have anything like the prosperity that we've enjoyed.

[475] And we're going to be the good examples in our own country and teach those, let's say, backward savages exactly how they should treat the planet.

[476] I don't see, I can't see anything more colonial than that attitude.

[477] Like I see in Canada, for example, I think I read recently that if Canada hits all of its climate goals for the next 25 years, we will reduce our carbon output less than China will increase its carbon output next year.

[478] So it's completely bloody pointless from any practical perspective.

[479] And the argument might be, well, we should lead by example.

[480] It's like, now should we?

[481] We think those developing people in the developing countries who are trying to move towards some reasonable standard are too damn dumb to figure this out all by themselves, and we're going to charge in there like the saviors.

[482] And while we're doing that, we're going to impoverish them and we're going to make our own countries worse off.

[483] And there's nothing colonial about that.

[484] It's like, I don't think so.

[485] I think there's something plenty colonial about that.

[486] We should say, it's no wonder that you'd like to have enough food to eat and not have to burn dung and wood in your huts.

[487] And it's no wonder that you'd like to.

[488] have some educational opportunities to your children, and obviously the way forward to that is going to involve fossil fuel utilization, clearly, because there's no alternative, and we'll just get the hell out of the way while you pursue quite successfully by the way what we've been pursuing for 200 years.

[489] I don't see a moral, I don't see a moral leg to stand on in that debate.

[490] It's appalling, and it's murderous.

[491] It's worse than appalling.

[492] It's murderous.

[493] Well, they pick up some of those themes.

[494] I mean, I'm, as you know, involved in agriculture, and I'm passionate about feeding people.

[495] And you made the comment about driving people in the developing world into poverty.

[496] I put a slightly different twist on it.

[497] You'd reverse decades of the most astounding progress in lifting people out of poverty.

[498] Australia is one of the seven big hitters in international agricultural research of six countries and the Gates Foundation that put money into it.

[499] And we've just done some research which is really interesting.

[500] It shows that participants benefit their own agricultural sectors enormously because while we participate and help the third world, developing world, with their feeding issues and so forth, we learn things that we're able to bring back here.

[501] It's a real win -win.

[502] And the progress has been amazing.

[503] An extra 5 billion people fed properly.

[504] Right, right.

[505] It's stunning.

[506] Over the last 50 years.

[507] That's something to celebrate.

[508] That's for sure.

[509] This is good news.

[510] And that's a huge part of it.

[511] that is a consequence if they're turning to something like free market solutions.

[512] Western know -how, under a Western rules -based system, led by the dreadful Americans, I mean, petty helpless of the Americans are not oversight.

[513] You worry about climate change and environmentalism, the two greatest threats are to return big slabs of the world's population to grinding poverty so that they're not able to afford the luxury of wondering about how the environment might be faring because they can't feed their kids.

[514] And the other will be the breaking of the rules -based that the Allies basically put in place in 1945.

[515] And people will laugh at me for saying that, but it's true, and every Western country is worried about supply chain security after COVID.

[516] Well, that was globalisation, and it was Americans making certain that the trade routes were kept open.

[517] All right, we've got to retreat a little bit, but the answer is not to go back to some system where we break that rules -based system.

[518] And the reason is very simple.

[519] The autocrats of this world don't give a damn about environmental.

[520] It rates a very distant priority behind their own power.

[521] We know that.

[522] You can see that in Beijing today.

[523] What matters to them is power.

[524] So if you're worried about environmentalism, don't starve people and don't break the Western liberal rules -based system that we've imposed and policed, you know, and we beat the Soviets and all of those sorts of things, and now we're putting it at risk.

[525] The limits to growth model, too, has a certain type of deep pathology associated with it that needs to be brought to the surface too.

[526] Because one hypothesis is, you know, the planet has a limited carrying capacity and it's a zero -sum game and we're Malthusian, you know, rats and overpopulating the place.

[527] And that what we need to do in consequence is limit growth and perhaps move towards a much less populated planet.

[528] That last one is a very frightening proposition because, as you said, life by ethics.

[529] Well, who gets to go?

[530] You know, that's the real question, and exactly how.

[531] And who are the monsters who make the decision?

[532] Well, exactly, exactly that.

[533] But I also think that that model, it's certainly not the only model that you can derive from the data, let's say.

[534] Because one of the things I learned when I was deeply investigating the relationship between economic growth and long -term environmental viability, let's say, sustainability, something like that, was that, strangely enough, and perhaps not so, if you can lift people out of absolute poverty and get them up to something approximating $5 ,000 a year in terms of average, say, contribution to GDP, then they stop adopting a short -term view and they start to adopt a long -term view because they have the luxury of being able to think beyond the moment.

[535] And I suppose partly why we want security, which is what wealth can offer, at least to some degree, is so that we're not bound by the absolute emergencies of the moment.

[536] Absolutely.

[537] And we can stretch our minds across a longer span of time.

[538] Couldn't agree with them all.

[539] Well, and so if you make...

[540] It'll impact on family formation as well.

[541] Right, right, right.

[542] Well, one of the things you see is that as soon as you educate women, that family size tends to fall.

[543] Don't accuse the women of being dumb.

[544] I hate the way we do that.

[545] Women in the developing world are not stupid.

[546] How can we be so patronized?

[547] If you get them to a point where they think their children are going to survive and they're going to get an education deal, you know, and what have you, they will do what everybody else has done and control the size of their families.

[548] Actually, they might overshoot because of what's being missed, 92 countries in the world today have declining populations.

[549] 92, there's only 180 countries in the world.

[550] Half of them are in decline.

[551] Some demographers believe China might go from 1 .4 billion to 5 or 600 million by the end of the century.

[552] Right, right, right.

[553] One child policy, they're not having children, surfeit of boys, not enough girls.

[554] That's a horror story in itself.

[555] And you're going to have massive loneliness and a terrible burden on young people trying to support the old people.

[556] So you're going to overshoot.

[557] The possibility of a collapsing economy.

[558] But the real point here is your point.

[559] It's a really relevant one.

[560] Lift those people out of poverty.

[561] Give them a perspective where they can make wise decisions and what have you on that issue of global.

[562] And then we can talk.

[563] It's only the Middle East and Africa, Nigeria, countries like that look like they're going to keep building populations for the next few decades.

[564] Other parts of the world, it's stabilized or coming down.

[565] We've got a high immigration policy here because the government's worried about our low birth rate in Australia.

[566] Well, we could also talk about perhaps what some of the preconditions for that wealth generation are.

[567] So first of all, we could point out that if you get people up to about $5 ,000 per year in terms of their ability to generate income, then they start to be concerned about the environment.

[568] But the environmental concerns start to be expressed in a way that's, I would say, truly sustainable.

[569] Because you could imagine that we could take a top -down approach to environmental planning.

[570] But top -down solutions have the problem of, first of all, being unitary and second of all, so they can go catastrophically wrong if they're wrong.

[571] They're also difficult to impose.

[572] but if you make enough people, if you free enough people from absolute poverty, they start to be concerned about environmental maintenance locally.

[573] And so what we get is a distributed attempt across the world of people to improve the quality of their local environment.

[574] So that's maybe hundreds of millions of people that have a longer -term viewpoint instead of a few centralist utopians trying to govern the whole planet.

[575] And that's a much more stable solution.

[576] So we should be doing everything we can to lift the world's absolute poor out of their absolute poverty.

[577] And we do that, so then we can say, well, how do we do that?

[578] And one of the ways we do that is by moving towards the provision of free and ample energy.

[579] That's a crucial issue.

[580] That's how we fed five billion extra people over the last five years.

[581] And so that means we have to give some serious consideration to intelligent use of fossil fuels, which we're doing anyways, except badly and stooply.

[582] We're using too many.

[583] We are.

[584] We're hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels, and there are many downsides and precautionary principles we should pursue technologies and so forth that lower our reliance, that help us absorb more carbon.

[585] That's a good thing for farms in our soils.

[586] I wouldn't want to be misunderstood as saying we should stop technology or what have you, but here's the rub.

[587] It's the point that you're making.

[588] If we're going to pursue policies which drive people back into poverty, we will defeat ourselves unbelievably and no one's paying enough attention to it.

[589] We lift them out of poverty with available and affordable energy.

[590] And if we break that, we will drive them back into it.

[591] It's your point.

[592] I'm confirming your point.

[593] And we will destroy the planet while we're doing it.

[594] That's the other aspect.

[595] Yeah, we won't save the planet.

[596] That's right.

[597] Because of badly designed policies driven by, I hate to say this, by the fact we've become so emotive.

[598] So I'm staggered to discover that if you go out and I do a poll in Australia, it's been done, and ask Australians, what is our contribution to global emissions?

[599] 50 % of people say it's somewhere between 10 and 20%.

[600] It's 1%.

[601] And so here's the rub.

[602] I'm a farmer, okay?

[603] Well, I work on a farm now.

[604] My son and daughter -in -law, as you know, run the business, and they do a terrific job, and they are looking for ways everywhere to be better environmental stewards and to absorb more carbon.

[605] Pull it out of the air.

[606] Good.

[607] We happen to meet on that one.

[608] That's good.

[609] That's a good thing to do.

[610] And farmers recycle.

[611] Cycle and recycle carbon.

[612] So you've only got to absorb a little bit more, and if people are worried about carbon in the air, there's part of the solution.

[613] But here is the point that we've got to do this in ways which continues the upward march in lifting people out of deprivation and poverty.

[614] The improvement we don't realize how well we're doing.

[615] done, not just in lifting people out of poverty by improving their nutrition.

[616] Education, with the exception of a few cultures now, even the girls around the world are getting much better education we thought.

[617] Most people have much better access to electricity than has been thought.

[618] We've fallen behind in our understanding of the progress we've made.

[619] No, it's being so rapid, it's hard to believe.

[620] And to stop it.

[621] Yeah, well, I think we should take great pride in it.

[622] And we've done it with research, with extension, compassion, for others, that's not a bad thing to have.

[623] Well, we've also done it, I would say.

[624] Free marketing.

[625] Well, that's, okay, so we can turn to that.

[626] So not only, so we know that we've made tremendous progress on the economic front, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union.

[627] And it's partly because.

[628] The last 10 years, here's a little factor, I'm told, and by people I believe, you know, made a lot of people in this area, the world's farmers have produced enough food in each of the last 10 years for 10 billion people.

[629] that's well in excess of global population and I don't think we're straining our ecosystems to do it to be honest using more fertilizer perhaps than I would like and that's a story in itself but of course that's made out of gas it's one of the great emitters and all of that things that people are worried about but Germany is a country where a lot of gas is used to make ammonia half the world's grain production depends on the artificial fertilizers that are made out of it on fossil fuel and BASF as I understand it in Germany, one of the biggest producers in the Western world is moving their operations to China.

[630] We talk supply chain security.

[631] It's going to move.

[632] I think that as a farmer, I'll be blunt about it.

[633] I'm worried about that.

[634] I'm worried about that.

[635] Anyway, we have made this solid progress that we're in danger of reversing because we don't know what we're doing.

[636] And here's the other point I wanted to make, sorry, as a farmer.

[637] One thing I know is that it doesn't matter and what we do in Australia.

[638] Our chief scientists, no less, confirmed this in Senate hearings only a little while ago.

[639] When we talk about floods and fires and damage to the roof, it doesn't matter what Australia does.

[640] So as a farmer, whatever is going to happen globally is not going to be influenced by Australia.

[641] I have to prepare, my family have to prepare, to farm in whatever circumstances come.

[642] What's the point?

[643] At a practical level for politicians to say, We're doing the things that will save you the next flood or the next fire or whatever in this country is just dishonest.

[644] It's not going to make any difference.

[645] We know that.

[646] There's no evidence that any of the things we've done so far have made any difference.

[647] But the whole, even if the whole globe did it, maybe we don't know what the outcome would be.

[648] It doesn't matter what Australia does.

[649] Well, one of the things that, with regards to carbon dioxide output, one of the things that people are listening and watching might want to think about is, you know, I've been attacked many times for being a climate change denier, let's say, and I don't really care for.

[650] that accusation one way or another.

[651] But one of the things I know recently from my investigations is that one of the consequences of carbon dioxide overproduction over the last 15 years, because carbon dioxide levels have been going up, and some of that seems to be a consequence of anthropogenic activity, human industrial activity, let's say, is that paradoxically, and contrary to all predictions on the environmentalist side, the planet is, now 15 % greener than it was in the year 2000.

[652] And 15 % is, that's a tremendous amount.

[653] It's an area that's larger than the United States.

[654] And it isn't obvious to me that that's a bad thing.

[655] And it's more than that, the most remarkable greening has occurred in semi -arid areas.

[656] And so the deserts are supposed to expand as the globe warmed or the climate changed, because That was a, you know, fate accompli in terms of terminological transformation.

[657] And what's happened instead is that the green, that plants have invaded the semi -arid areas to a large degree.

[658] And the reason for that is because plants have to breathe through pores.

[659] And if they open their pores to get more carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide levels are relatively low, let's say, they let water evaporate out of these pores.

[660] If there's more carbon dioxide, they can close their pores, and then it turns out that they can grow where it's drier.

[661] And that's driven not only an expansion of greening everywhere there already were plants, but the proliferation of plants into areas that couldn't support them before.

[662] And so that, it's very hard for me to look at that because that's a huge change, 15%, and not think, well, maybe more plants is a good thing.

[663] But there's an additional feature that's going along with that that also has to be contended with and I don't see people on the environmental front grappling with these issues in any manner that strikes me as credible not only have has the total biomass of plants increased tremendously 15%, but crop yields have gone up because it turns out that carbon dioxide is a pretty damn good fertilizer so instead of having less food because of climate change forced by carbon dioxide, we actually have more food and we have more food with less fertilizer.

[664] And so I think you could make a case and I know this is utterly heretical and it might not even be true that carbon dioxide outputs a net good.

[665] And I also know, for example, that we have somewhere between 300 and 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now and that's actually a historical...

[666] It's actually low by historical standards, quite low.

[667] And plants really have a hard time even living at 150.

[668] So that's the cutoff for the ability for plants to breathe.

[669] And so a carbon dioxide intensive world is actually a lot more friendly to plants.

[670] Now you could say, well, we're still risking catastrophe by changing the biosphere that rapidly because a 15 % increase in plant coverage is nothing trivial.

[671] And there may be elements of that that are destabilizing in some ways I don't understand.

[672] But the prediction that we were going to produce an expansion of desert, for example, and a denuding of a transformation of semi -arid areas into desert, that all seems to be like completely wrong.

[673] It just, that did not happen.

[674] The opposite happened.

[675] And so I don't know what to make of that fact, because as far as I can tell, that fact is incontrovertibly true.

[676] And so I don't see that there's a leg, a leg for the apocalyptic environmentalists to stand on, especially given that their policies have been counterproductive.

[677] and they're driving people into poverty.

[678] So, different question.

[679] Now, for what it's worth, just a brief encapsulation, I think I'd make a few comments, I'm not a scientist.

[680] I would only say I don't think the science has ever settled.

[681] I don't buy that line, because science always moves.

[682] It should always be questioning for more knowledge, more information.

[683] So I will assume that the science broadly tells us that things are changing, and a 15 % increase is extraordinary rapid change in yourself.

[684] So I expect volatility.

[685] but there's a couple of really important points to make out of this.

[686] If democratically people want to address this issue, that is their right, but secondly, you must do so on an informed basis and you must look for high -quality policy and you won't get that without a good debate.

[687] So we've been talking about some of the things that really matter.

[688] There's a trade -off to be made if you go too far with these things, and if you ask me to make a trade between saving the planet tonight on a whim, and feeding people, I'm sorry, I'm going with feeding people.

[689] Why educating them too?

[690] That's a moral choice, you know, and I'm going with feeding people.

[691] If you were to say to me, do I think we should be looking for new technologies, for reducing agriculture's reliance on fossil fuels and artificial fertilizers?

[692] As it happens, yes I do.

[693] But I don't think we ought to be doing it in a way that sacrifices production and feeding people.

[694] That's what I'm saying.

[695] And so it comes back, we were talking earlier about budget deficits and what have you, you've got to have conviction you've got to be guided by the data, you've got to actually think facts matter, taking people with you matters.

[696] Well, you also talked about the necessity of being guided by principles.

[697] And so one of the things we could talk about too is if we accepted the proposition that it would be good to develop policies that would ameliorate absolute poverty and that that would be good for poor people.

[698] would be good for the planet too.

[699] We've done a lot of it.

[700] Well, we might also ask how we've done it, because I would say that it's clearly the case that in places like communist China, let's say, which has undergone this economic revolution, that the degree to which that economic revolution was possible was because even the Chinese communists accepted the necessities, the necessity of some of the principles that go along with open and free markets, so open and free trade.

[701] And so one of those would be, So the West is getting a pretty rough time now on the radical front.

[702] And this is feeding into ideas like we owe the third world reparations for our climate damage for being colonial and oppressive.

[703] And that the ethos that's associated with the West is fundamentally colonial and oppressive in nature.

[704] And the thing that really bothers me about that is that I believe that the fundamental positive spirit that has imbued the West, which is actually not a Western creation, because it's actually a Middle Eastern creation, the fundamental spirit that has imbued the West is the only spirit that has ever actually lifted people who were oppressed out of their oppression.

[705] And so what that means is this, the radical critique that's been aimed at Western culture in the name of freedom for oppression is actually attacking the very spirit that has lifted people out of oppression to the degree that that's been the case.

[706] I'm sure you're right.

[707] Well, we could start with, so what are the bedrock assumptions of Western culture that make such things as free trade possible, assuming that that generates a sort of generous wealth, which seems to be the case.

[708] And one of them is that there's an idea, and the West hasn't been, what would you say, without sin in applying this idea, that every single person is a locus of implicit divine worth, regardless of their particularities.

[709] It's a very weird proposition, right?

[710] Because we differ so much in our obviously admirable attributes.

[711] Some of us are more intelligent, more attractive, more powerful, have more physical prowess, are more ethical or more hardworking.

[712] There's endless dimensions on which you can rank order human beings.

[713] But there's this strange proposition that emerged essentially in the Middle East that despite all that surface variability and that hierarchical rank order, every single person, man and woman alike, regardless of race or creed or color, has to be treated as a locus of divine worth.

[714] And I don't think that you can even make a credible argument against slavery on moral grounds without accepting that as an axiomatic presumption.

[715] And so then I think, well, if that's the case, because look, if there's no intrinsic worth that's divine in some sense, so sacred, then why?

[716] Why can't I just do with you what I want if I have the power?

[717] Why is that wrong exactly?

[718] Like, it might be inconvenient for you.

[719] And you are no doubt going to be motivated to rebel, maybe, if you don't want to succumb.

[720] But perhaps you'd be motivated to rebel.

[721] But I don't see how you can make a moral case that if I can do it, I shouldn't.

[722] If you're going to make the moral case, you have to make the assumption that each person, in some sense, is created in the image of what is sacred.

[723] and you can't violate that regardless of apparent evidence for hierarchical difference.

[724] And so it's that spirit, as far as I can tell.

[725] We were talking about William Wilberforce just before the podcast started and the British attempt to a bowl of slavery, which is the real miracle, right?

[726] Not that they were ever involved in slavery because that was true everywhere for all time.

[727] Every empire, including black empires.

[728] Right, right.

[729] Well, and it was part of the alternative hypothesis that something like might meant moral virtue and might -inspired moral virtue meant right.

[730] And that was the ethos that governed everyone everywhere until this strange idea emerged that regardless of appearance, somehow each person was characterized by intrinsic and viable worth.

[731] And so then you see the radicals go after that in the name of the poor and oppressed.

[732] And I think, wait a minute, guys, like you're failing to understand something here.

[733] which is that the spirit that emerged to push back against slavery is the central spirit of the very system that you're trying to demolish.

[734] And so how in the world is that going to work out for the people you purport to stand for practically?

[735] I mean, it's definitely the case that the distribution of the biblical corpus throughout Europe, to begin with, was part and parcel of the process that indicated to, the oppressed peasantry of Europe that there was something fundamentally wrong with with serfdom for example that it was it was a violation of something like a divine order and that all happened that happened in large consequence because of the Gutenberg bible and the distribution of the biblical corpus far and wide which also helped people become literate and also start to understand that no one had the right to oppress them.

[736] We can go into that issue of like inviolable individual worth, but I don't see how that idea can be challenged on historical grounds because as far as I can tell, that's what happened.

[737] Those ideas, strange ideas that led to the abolition of slavery.

[738] We can talk about Britain.

[739] You know a fair bit about Wilberforce.

[740] Why don't we talk a little bit about what he did?

[741] Because it's quite the bloody miracle.

[742] Well, thank you for asking.

[743] It does.

[744] Before I do, to take up this point, that you're alluding to, Australia's longer serving Prime Minister and probably the deepest intellectual leader, certainly since the Second World War.

[745] Not the only one, but in a very deep thinker.

[746] He was not a religious man, but he had a religious tradition in his education, I suppose you'd say.

[747] And he said that democracy is not so much a machine as a spirit in which, despite our different abilities and our different positions in society, we all have a responsibility to acknowledge that all souls are equal in the eyes of heaven.

[748] That's where that idea comes from.

[749] higher authority.

[750] You're saying, you know, you and I might disagree, but I can't lord it over you because somebody else's, you're just...

[751] Right, even if I have the ability to.

[752] Yeah, that's right.

[753] And what we're now reduced to, I think it's really important to understand this.

[754] You hear this bleeding that, oh, yes, we've got to recognize that everybody's important, everybody has dignity and worth, well, on what basis, which is your question, if you'd strip out the idea of the godhead, of the higher authority, on what basis?

[755] Because you run into trouble straight away.

[756] The most common reason now given would be to say, well, human beings have either high intelligence or they are, they have a sense of morality or both.

[757] Both arguments are used, usually together.

[758] Therefore, they're unique, therefore they're special.

[759] But the problem, you've just alluded to the problem.

[760] Some are brighter, some are less bright.

[761] Some are stupid, some are wise.

[762] Some behave well, some don't.

[763] So immediately you're in trouble because you can't say they all matter equally.

[764] You've lost a model.

[765] So the Wilberforce one is example.

[766] In the context of Black Lives Matters, I've thought about this a lot because I abhor racism, I think it's the most appalling doctrine because I'm deeply imbued with a Christian view that whether I like somebody else or not is irrelevant.

[767] Somebody else says they matter as much as me. You know, the constituent who attacked me on the brack streets of my, and it happened a few times, sometimes on racial grounds, you know, where I was attacked for my race, and I had to stop and say, don't respond in kind, this person matters, just as matters as I do.

[768] I might be the Deputy Prime Minister of the country, but our higher authorities just as worried about him and places justice matters value on him and his life as he does on mine.

[769] And that's genuinely where I happen to come from.

[770] But now, okay, so every empire we know of has kept slaves, and there are 45 million estimated slaves today, so it hasn't gone away.

[771] But only one empire having kept slaves.

[772] then moved from within to abolish it.

[773] And it's a very empire we seem to most want to hate most now of all.

[774] It's the British Empire.

[775] And so you had this evil slave trade known as the Triangle.

[776] Ships would go out to the west coast of Africa.

[777] They would buy slaves who'd been rounded up by Africans themselves.

[778] They'd gone into the inland, slaughtered the weak and the infirm.

[779] Pretty brutal stuff.

[780] And the infants and what have you, Marts, the able -bodied ones that could be sold for a few trinkets back to the coast.

[781] They're sold to people in this reprehensible trade, taken to the East Indies.

[782] The way they were packed into the ships, and it was just absolutely inhumane, mind -boggling the inhumane.

[783] And, you know, there were times when they were thrown overboard so that they could just alive to drown, so the ship owners could entray the same slave traders wanted to pick up on the insurance.

[784] a lot of way to, you know, the depravity that we're capable of slipping into and then they'd sail home with cargo or whatever from the...

[785] Right, well, and we need to point out that that's par for the course, right?

[786] That's just straight historical reality.

[787] That was also the case with the Roman Empire and with the Greeks, and you can trace slavery back as far as you want.

[788] Every empire.

[789] Right, right.

[790] So this is the classic human condition and that's the condition in some sense of might makes right.

[791] So...

[792] So what happens in Britain?

[793] you know, after the Protestant Reformation.

[794] No, no, he had predated that.

[795] To be fair, Rome was pretty good on calling it out, too.

[796] They just never had it.

[797] Although they often had power, they didn't seem to have much power in that area, particularly in terms of what some of the European countries did in South America.

[798] But in Britain, you had the rise of a deeply uneasy conscience about this.

[799] You had a slave trader himself called Newton, who wrote Amazing Grace, the famous hymn.

[800] He was engaged in the slave trade at one stage.

[801] He was himself enslaved by a black African queen and made to be a slave to her slaves.

[802] This is not a one -way street.

[803] And Newton is influential in the life of William Wilberforce.

[804] And William Wilberforce, who's unbelievably privileged, he inherits a fortune, four or five hundred million in a day's money.

[805] He's seen as, you know, a young gadflyer, really.

[806] He goes to Oxford, does no work, just entertains everybody because he can sing and he's got money, so he's always got a pie in his office for the others to enjoy and they booze their way alive.

[807] You know, it was all pretty rough stuff.

[808] He goes to London and with Pitt the Youngers, elected to Parliament in very early age, they become friends.

[809] He's seen as a future Prime Minister.

[810] He goes off on a tour of Europe with the most brilliant mathematician of the age, He's a man called Isaac Milner.

[811] And as they're going along, and he's tiny and Milner's huge and the buggy's right over on an angle, they're deep in philosophical conversation.

[812] And Wilberforce decides that he actually thinks Christianity's true.

[813] So he goes back to England and says, I've got to leave the Parliament.

[814] That's a dirty place to be involved.

[815] It's not for good people like me now.

[816] But before I do, I'll go and talk to Newton because he'd known Newton when he was younger.

[817] And Newton, the ex -slave trader, says, no, stay in the Parliament.

[818] Fight slavery.

[819] Commit your life to getting rid of his evil.

[820] Well, he did.

[821] And he teamed up with some remarkable women in the days.

[822] Remarkable women.

[823] Hannah Moore, one of the most gifted drama people over time, communicator, educator, the Thorntons, who were the wealthiest families in Europe, banking family, in the world.

[824] In other words, they resourced it.

[825] Terribly inconvenient.

[826] But you had a bunch of white, privileged, Christians led by William Wilberforce, they abolished slavery.

[827] The trade first and then slavery itself.

[828] Horrendously, they forked out so much money that it impacted the debt of Britain for a long time when they actually banned slavery because they compensated the slave owners, including the Church of England, I'm ashamed of so.

[829] That was how bad that trade was.

[830] They didn't actually compensate the slaves themselves.

[831] They'd been set free for the owners.

[832] Now, more than that.

[833] Well, so why do you, so, well, here's a question, and it's worth, it's worth delving into.

[834] So, obviously, Wilberforce was off arguing from, at least to begin with, something approximating a minority position.

[835] Yeah, very much so.

[836] But his words, but his words didn't fall on deaf ears, right?

[837] No. He was able to elicit an echo of conscience in the people that he was speaking to.

[838] Well, so to me, the consequence of that is, or the reason for that, is that by, that time, the notion that all human beings were made in the image of God had permeated the English narrative consciousness enough so that when what that meant was made explicit by someone like Wilberforce and people were being called on their hypocrisy, their own conscience echoed the claim.

[839] Yep.

[840] Yeah.

[841] But there's another aspect to it that's really interesting.

[842] Just to finish on what Britain then did is to try to end it everywhere else.

[843] And so they sent the most powerful Navy in the world to stop slavery on the high seas.

[844] And a lot of white sailors died.

[845] Were they racist because they were white males?

[846] No, dying to end black slavery.

[847] So this is much more nuanced.

[848] This idea of calling out one race against another for all the evils of the world is it does not stack up for a moment.

[849] Now, to come back to your question, because it's germane to that, I reckon it would be fair to say that it did start to fall on fertile ears.

[850] but the shocking part of it was that he was saying it's not just we white Europeans who are human beings who need to be valued.

[851] See what I'm saying?

[852] He's saying that these people who were regarded as less than human, the Africans, were also fully human.

[853] And the famous text is from Galatians.

[854] We're no longer slave and free.

[855] We're no longer Gentile or Jew.

[856] We're no longer man and woman.

[857] We're all one in Christ.

[858] In other words, all equal value.

[859] God doesn't discriminate, loves each of his creations and loathes it when they're violent to one another.

[860] That's what he took out of it.

[861] He went away and studied.

[862] He wrote a book, you can still get a modern translation of it called Real Christianity.

[863] And the subtitle is the difference between what people think it is and what it really is.

[864] And that was very interesting in itself.

[865] And one of his great supporters was Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery maker.

[866] and he struck what is regarded by a lot of people, historians, as the first political slogan, a brilliant piece of pottery, incredibly intricate, bass relief, I think that's the word you use for it, of an African man looking up pleadingly.

[867] It's incredibly lifelike, it's a beautiful piece of word.

[868] You know, and it's white on the wedgewood blue background.

[869] And the thing underneath it is not, am I not a man and a brother?

[870] Right.

[871] Now, this is really radical stuff.

[872] but it's fantastic stuff.

[873] And Churchill said when a culture stops talking about its history to its children, the story of its beliefs and its heroes, it's saying they're null and void and young people don't have a sense of place and they're thus open to Karl Marxist dictum that are people that don't know their history are easily persuaded.

[874] Yes.

[875] We don't know any of us.

[876] I mean, what a hero is Wilberforce.

[877] This guy could have had the life of Riley, could have been Prime Minister, They've got his hands on those levers of power.

[878] But he dedicated his life.

[879] Successfully.

[880] As a very wealthy man, a very privileged man, to people who were not regarded as full members of the human family.

[881] Right.

[882] Why would you not be inspired by that?

[883] The British fought slavery for, what, 175 years on the high seas, if I remember correctly.

[884] Sorry?

[885] The British fought slavery for 175 years on high seas.

[886] Well, we're still fighting it.

[887] Well, right.

[888] I mean, we thought it had gone in Australia.

[889] The Australian Federal Police, were called to a house in 1975 in the suburbs of Sydney because there was a story going around there that was a brothel that had slaves in it.

[890] The police said, no, no, no, that's no slavery in Australia.

[891] And they turned up there.

[892] They'd been told there were 20, but there were 23.

[893] It was true.

[894] And we started to realize, we had to pass laws because there was no laws against slavery in Australia.

[895] There were no laws.

[896] We assumed it didn't happen anymore.

[897] But now we know there's 45 million Indian.

[898] There's a lot of them.

[899] I've been trying to think through.

[900] You talked about this book, Wilberforce, wrote, about, let's say, true Christianity.

[901] And I've been trying to think through what it might mean practically and graspably, I suppose, that each person is in some sense of axiomatic worth.

[902] That's the axis around which all belief must turn, all productive belief.

[903] And so I think it has something to do with the nature of consciousness itself.

[904] I mean, all of us are very particularized creatures, right?

[905] So we're only going to make ourselves manifest in the world once.

[906] We're a very unlikely combination of genetic improbability.

[907] And so biologically, we're each unique.

[908] And then the circumstances we're thrown into are also unique.

[909] And so that's reached the conjunction of two unique situations, let's say, highly unique.

[910] But each of us, within those...

[911] unique circumstances with those unique talents have to grapple with let's say we have to grapple with the possibility that's laid out in front of us and we each have to do that in a particularized way and if i as a conscious being if i grapple with the possibility that lays itself out in front of me i can bring something into being that only i can bring into being yeah because i'm particularized And then the thing that's so remarkable about that is that because I can communicate, and that's part of this fact that I'm imbued with this logos, which is really the capacity to communicate, if I create something unique, if I realize something unique because of that particularity, I can then share it with other people.

[912] And so that means they can, weirdly, even though we're all particularized, we can all benefit from the operation of our own particularity.

[913] And, you know, there's this idea that's deeply embedded in the Christian belief system that whatever Christ is the word that generates order out of chaos made flesh, right?

[914] And then he's God himself, which is the process that generates habitable order out of chaos, made human.

[915] And it's a very interesting idea because what it means is that there's a universal principle, that's the logos itself, the word, that finds its...

[916] embodiment in the particularities of time and place, right?

[917] So that unites, let's say, a little town in the Middle East 2 ,000 years ago with the divine itself.

[918] And that's a model for a human being, is that we each embody this process of encountering chaos and potential and transforming it into habitable order.

[919] That's what's laid out in Genesis 1.

[920] And we each do that in a way that's communicable and that's universally valuable because we can share it.

[921] And insofar as our societies are set up to insist that that be allowed to happen, then our societies can be productive, reciprocal, and generous.

[922] And then we can operate collectively to compete and cooperate in a manner that elevates all of us.

[923] And I don't think any of that's arbitrary.

[924] So when we're talking about, it seems necessary that every culture has to establish itself in relationship to something like axiomatic presuppositions.

[925] You have to make some presuppositions.

[926] Maybe the left makes the presupposition that the mode of force of the world is power.

[927] It's something like that.

[928] Certainly the postmodernists do that.

[929] But you could say that, well, Western culture, insofar as it's been guided by the highest possible spirit, has made the axiomatic presumption that every person is of a divine value.

[930] And that means they have something that's intrinsically valuable to offer, to bring into reality itself.

[931] That's why you're not supposed to hide your light under a bushel, let's say.

[932] And then I think you can make a very practical case that, well, isn't it valuable to learn from the particularized experience of someone else?

[933] I mean, what an unbelievable advantage that is is that I can sit here and talk to you.

[934] And everything that you had to learn painfully, you can communicate to me. And if I have any sense at all, I can listen, and then I can learn that without having to undergo all that suffering.

[935] And then you might think, well, isn't it the case that if we set up societies on that basis so that everybody, is regarded as a valid source of redemptive information.

[936] We can all exchange that, and isn't that the proper pathway to life more abundant and peace and generous reciprocity?

[937] That all seems to me to be just true.

[938] And that's instantiated in voluntary free market economies, fundamentally, because we get to freely exchange the goods that we can freely produce.

[939] So we can both profit.

[940] So that, yes, and so that, yes, and more than that, even, I would say, so that we can both profit in a way that helps us walk uphill more and more efficiently, and that we can both do that in a way that's simultaneously good for everyone around us.

[941] We can actually do that.

[942] And I don't think any of that's arbitrary.

[943] And so one of the things that's worth pointing out is that if your stated goal is something like the removal of oppression, we can say well congratulations to you you're not on the sides of the tyrants but if the consequence of your critique of western civilization is that you throw the baby the divine baby we might say out with the bathwater and you don't recognize that this insistence on the intrinsic worth of each individual is actually a precondition for the for your for your objection to slavery you're going to destroy the very thing that you think that you're promoting I think we're doing that right I think we're doing that as well.

[944] That is what I think we're doing.

[945] Yeah, yeah.

[946] And so I, I mean, you put it beautifully, and I agree with what I've understood you've said, but I'd just add to it, how stupid are we if we not only fail to learn from one another, but we won't bring back the great figures of history and the learning of time to the table for their wisdom as well.

[947] Why not tap into that?

[948] Well, that's what is supposed to do when you get educated.

[949] Yeah.

[950] Well, we're certainly doing that with regard to Wilberforce.

[951] That's my point.

[952] Well, it's kind of a miracle in some sense.

[953] I truly don't understand this.

[954] You know, I was in the UK earlier this year, and I went to one of the chapels there that had a, I think it was in Oxford, but it might have been in Cambridge, that had a statue of Wilberforce, you know?

[955] And that was a rather emotional moment for me because I know that he was a stunningly remarkable person.

[956] And it was out of his efforts that, well, that Britain organized itself for 175 years to suppress slavery.

[957] With his teammates, no, he got his teammates.

[958] Right, right, right.

[959] Just like budget repair in Australia.

[960] It's a team, but he let it.

[961] And also with his alliance with great figures of the past.

[962] I mean, his morality was informed by his Christian faith, and that emerged out of this great Judeo -Christian tradition.

[963] I mean, he didn't do that.

[964] He did that by allowing that spirit to inhabit him.

[965] He didn't do that on his own, right?

[966] So, but what I can't, I really can't understand, it's very difficult for me to understand why that story isn't more well -known and more celebrated, especially among people who purport to be advancing the doctrine that we need to fight against oppression.

[967] It's like, well, here's a man who did it.

[968] Here's why he did it.

[969] And the historical evidence on that is quite clear.

[970] And like you said, it's a perverse story because he was extremely entitled and an attractive person and could have wilded away his time.

[971] He died penniless.

[972] Uh -huh.

[973] He gave it all the way.

[974] Uh -huh.

[975] Uh -huh.

[976] So why don't we teach that story?

[977] Like, what the hell's going on exactly?

[978] would that be suppressed in some real sense?

[979] It's really quite stunning.

[980] It is stunning and it troubles me deeply.

[981] And perhaps, Shorten, it's because it raises the question is, of this, was the Christ that he believed in real and, oh no, we don't want to confront that possibility.

[982] But I say, personally, I think every one of us should.

[983] Well, it seemed to work for Wilberforce.

[984] And so, you know, I've been, I've been thinking about this in detail too, and so, of course, these questions always hinge on what you mean by real, but I would say that pain is pretty real.

[985] Everybody acts as if that's true.

[986] That's for sure, right?

[987] We feel it.

[988] Everyone acts like pain is real.

[989] And so then you might say, well, if pain is real, what allows you to cope with pain or transcend pain must be more real, because if something's real and you encounter something that is more significant than that, you have to attribute reality of that.

[990] So I just walked via Dolorosa, the stations of the cross with Jonathan Pazzo in Jerusalem, and whether or not the events that took place at each of these stations actually took place there is in some sense beside the point.

[991] You can think about it as a dramatic forum, Jerusalem itself.

[992] And if you're a pilgrim, you can can go walk through this catastrophic story of tragic suffering.

[993] And because I'm a psychologist, I'm always thinking, well, what exactly, strip away the religious issue for the moment, what exactly are people doing when they apprehend the figure of the crucifixion and when they do something like consider Christ's passion or walk the stations of the cross?

[994] What are they doing psychological?

[995] And I actually think it's quite clear.

[996] I think that what people are doing is voluntarily exposed.

[997] themselves to a portrait of tragic suffering.

[998] And more than that, there's more to it than that, but that's a good place to start.

[999] Let's say we all have to deal with the catastrophe of life, with the pain and limitation of life.

[1000] And so then you might say, well, how do you do that?

[1001] How is it even possible to do that?

[1002] And one answer might be, hide from it, burry your head in the sand, and I'm not being smart about this.

[1003] It's like, the less you think about your more, vulnerability, the better off you'll be.

[1004] It's an insoluble problem.

[1005] Your best bed is to run away from that realization to keep yourself blind and maybe to busy yourself with as much hedonic pleasure as you can possibly manage.

[1006] You'll drown your sorrows.

[1007] Well, and that's understandable, right?

[1008] You can say, okay, well, a case can be made for that.

[1009] But it's not a very psychologically astute case because one of the things that psychologists have figured out in the last hundred years is that if you want to stabilize people psychologically, and if you want to imbue them with courage, then what you do is you help them expose themselves voluntarily to the things they're afraid of that they're avoiding.

[1010] It's a very powerful technique.

[1011] That's exposure therapy.

[1012] And what exposure therapy seems to do is to make people braver.

[1013] And I'll tell you how exposure therapy works.

[1014] Because it's no joke.

[1015] So I had a client who was afraid that he would cut himself.

[1016] And he was afraid that if he was on the top of a building, that he would jump off to his death.

[1017] And one of the exercises we worked out was that he would sit at the top of his building near the edge with a knife.

[1018] Right?

[1019] And that's a very frightening thing to do as a therapist because he's saying, look, I have this impulse to slash my throat and to jump off a building.

[1020] And I thought, well, why don't you confront both of those things at the same time?

[1021] Now, we worked up to that, you know.

[1022] But I'm just using that as an example to show you how intense that exposed.

[1023] exposure therapy can be.

[1024] It's like we need to identify what, okay.

[1025] So then you might think, well, what are people most fundamentally afraid of?

[1026] And I would say, well, it's something like pain and death.

[1027] And then even more particularly, it's unjust pain and death.

[1028] And that's really at the core of the crucifixion image and story, because it's unjust suffering and death.

[1029] And so the psychological, what would you say, why do, why have people been compelled to gaze upon this image of, unjust suffering.

[1030] And the answer is something like, the best way to adapt to life is to gaze on the image of unjust suffering, to do that fully.

[1031] And I think that's true.

[1032] There's this strange idea too, and this is a very strange idea, that the spirit that guides the Israelites out of the desert, say, in the Exodus story.

[1033] So the spirit that stands against tyranny and that stands against slavery is the same spirit that confronts tragic mortality voluntarily, right?

[1034] There's an equation.

[1035] That's the equation of the New Testament and the Old Testament.

[1036] And I also think that's likely true that the pattern that calls to us from within to object to tyranny and slavery is the same pattern that enables us to have the courage to look upon our own mortality, like forthrightly.

[1037] And I would say that has to be that way to some degree, because imagine you want to stand up to a tyrant.

[1038] Well, you could put your life at risk to do that, right?

[1039] I mean, if you're going to speak truth to power, you know, to use that terrible cliche, you're going to have to face the fact that you might be hurt and even killed in doing so.

[1040] And so how can it be different to face the inevitability of your own mortality for a moral cause and stand up to a tyrant?

[1041] Those have to be the same thing.

[1042] And so I would say it's time for all of us to learn that these axiomatic presuppositions, like the idea that part of what gives us intrinsic value is the fact that we're reflections of the word made flesh, that's actually, that actually turns out to be true.

[1043] It's not just a, it's true in the deepest possible sense.

[1044] And if we abandon that, which is what we're doing, we're not going to eradicate tyranny.

[1045] We're going to fall prey to it.

[1046] And the fruit of abandoning it is all around us and it's wrong.

[1047] You know, the misery is extraordinary.

[1048] But you see, I mean, I think if I could respond, you're talking to somebody, of course, who believes that that gospel story is actually true.

[1049] I should say that right afront.

[1050] And as you and I have talked about, people actually some say, they say it to my face sometimes.

[1051] I don't want to say this gently.

[1052] I don't want to say it judgmentally.

[1053] But they say, oh, John, you will.

[1054] wouldn't know a suffering is, look at you, you've had everything, you know.

[1055] You know, that's easy to say about someone else.

[1056] Well, on the surface of it, look, I'm privileged just to be an Australian.

[1057] Right, right, definitely.

[1058] You know, I've enjoyed good health for that.

[1059] Wonderfully happy marriage.

[1060] I've got four kids, grandkids.

[1061] Yeah.

[1062] Had opportunity.

[1063] A clam.

[1064] But I've known, by some.

[1065] Right, right, right.

[1066] Not many.

[1067] Right, right.

[1068] I think there's about five out there somewhere, including the dog, who loves me because I feed him.

[1069] But I have known real suffering.

[1070] I've known pain.

[1071] And I've had to grapple with it.

[1072] And I've had to ask why suffering?

[1073] Well, I think we bring suffering on ourselves because we are so selfish.

[1074] It's an old -fashioned word for it called sin, but we're self -centered.

[1075] But then does anybody understand?

[1076] Well, I think the Christ understands.

[1077] I think Jesus does.

[1078] That's the thing I've come to realize it's been so humbling when I thought, poor little me, I have suffered.

[1079] And, you know, by any stretch of decent evaluation, I've known some pretty awful things, times, you know, loss and what have you.

[1080] But what we see there is a picture of the God man knowing injustice that exceeds any injustice I've known.

[1081] Loneliness that exceeds any loneliness that I've known.

[1082] And loneliness is a dreadful thing.

[1083] And pain, physical and emotional beyond anything that I can compare myself to in order that he might take mind from me. of all those things, in some real sense.

[1084] And in taking that on himself, I then, in a way that I don't fully pretend to be able to explain, I can place that back on him and because he rose, he's not captured by it, we can rise too.

[1085] And that's, to me...

[1086] Yeah, well, it's something like...

[1087] The most important issue that each of us need to grapple with.

[1088] Can this possibly be true?

[1089] Well, it's something like...

[1090] it's something like adopting a form of metaphysical courage that's transcendent, right?

[1091] Because let's say you have to take on the suffering of your own life forthrightly.

[1092] And to the degree that you're able to do that, you'll be able to maintain your moral compass despite your suffering and maybe work to ameliorate it.

[1093] And in order to do that, you have to adopt a particular pattern of being.

[1094] And that pattern of being isn't just unique to you.

[1095] have to manifest it in your own life, but the pattern is universal, and it's divine and sacred for exactly that reason.

[1096] And the pattern is something like forthright confrontation with those things that terrify you.

[1097] So there's a story.

[1098] This is very cool.

[1099] And some people have heard me talk about this before, and maybe we can close with this.

[1100] Here's something that I've been chewing on that's quite the miracle.

[1101] And I don't know how else to really explain it.

[1102] So when the Israelites are lost in the desert, they start to become fraction.

[1103] and idol -worshipping.

[1104] And so they fall prey to ideological possession fundamentally.

[1105] They lose faith in the spirit that brought them out of tyranny.

[1106] And no wonder, because they're in the desert.

[1107] It's like they're not having a good time.

[1108] So it's no wonder they get faithless.

[1109] But what happens when they get faithless is that God sends poisonous snakes in to bite them.

[1110] And you might think, well, that doesn't reflect very well on God.

[1111] And that's one of the interesting things about the Bible, is that there's plenty of stories that have that strange paradoxical twist.

[1112] It doesn't matter.

[1113] The story really means that just because you're lost doesn't mean there isn't something stupid you can do to make it worse.

[1114] And so, and faithlessness will certainly make it worse.

[1115] And so God sends in these poisonous snakes.

[1116] And the Israelites are getting bitten pretty good.

[1117] And so they go to Moses and they say, look, we're sorry that we're so faithless and useless and fractious and divided.

[1118] But, you know, the snakes are getting a bit much.

[1119] So maybe you could go have a chat with God and get him to call them off.

[1120] And so Moses says, okay, and he goes and talks to God, and God says, God's, you know, he's irritated with the Israelites, but he can be bargained with, apparently.

[1121] And Moses makes the case for the Israelites.

[1122] He said they've been punished enough.

[1123] And God, what should happen or what could happen is that God just gets rid of the snakes.

[1124] He sent them to begin with, he can just chase them away.

[1125] But that isn't what happens.

[1126] And this is very strange.

[1127] And I defy anyone to come up with a, simple explanation for this because it's really something uncanny.

[1128] So what God tells Moses to do is to make a bronze stake, a staff, which is like the staff of Moses, and it's like the tree of life, that's another way of thinking about it, or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to make a staff out of bronze, and then to cast a serpent in bronze, and to put the serpent on the, on the staff.

[1129] And then to have the Israelites come and look at the serpent.

[1130] And if they look at the serpent, then the poison will no longer destroy them.

[1131] So he doesn't get rid of the poison.

[1132] He doesn't get rid of the snakes.

[1133] What he does instead is he gets the Israelites to gaze upon that which poisons them.

[1134] And the consequence of that is that they'll be strengthened.

[1135] And that's the, now, the cool twist on this is that that's what Christ says about himself, like thousands of years later.

[1136] He says, unless his image is lifted up, the same way the serpent's image was lifted up in the desert, that there's no possibility of redemption.

[1137] Now, that's a very weird juxtaposition of ideas, right?

[1138] Because you think, well, what the hell's going on in the desert and what's up with the brawn snake?

[1139] That's a mystery in and of itself, which I think is associated with the necessity of facing that which can bite you, right?

[1140] To pay attention to it, to adopt a stance of challenge in relationship to it.

[1141] It's a very deep idea.

[1142] But then to make the case that that's analogous in some sense to the crucifix, That's an unbelievably sophisticated psychological move because you might say, well, what's the sum total of all snakes?

[1143] And I think you can make a very straightforward and compelling psychological case that there's no confrontation that's more ridden with snakes than the confrontation that's laid out in the story of the passion.

[1144] It's a limit story.

[1145] So it takes all possible snakes into account, betrayal, death at the hands of the mob, innocent suffering, like you name it.

[1146] It's part of the suffering in that story.

[1147] So it takes that snake and it makes it into a meta snake and it says, well, it's one thing to look at just a snake and to get braver as a consequence, but you should instead look at the mother of all snakes and get as brave as that could possibly make you.

[1148] And then you think, well, if you're going to cope successfully with your life, with all of its particularized catastrophes, do you really think that you're going to be able to manage that without admitting that the problems are there?

[1149] Who in the world would ever think that?

[1150] And so then is it not the case that you have to look at what's darkest in order to be able to contend with it?

[1151] And then you might say if that's the spirit that redeems you, in what manner is that not a sacred spirit?

[1152] If it's the universal pathway to redemption in the face of suffering, which seems to be the case on psychological grounds, as far as I can tell, then I don't see how you can claim that that's not real, true, foundational, all of that.

[1153] I can't see a ray out of that, strange conundrum, so.

[1154] Well, I think the thing that I would say, I think, is that when you look into that darkness and into that pain, you've got to recognize your own role in it.

[1155] Yeah.

[1156] And the answer is to flee to someone who offers redemption and restoration and the ultimate return to you being the person that you should have been.

[1157] And each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made and absolutely magnificent, flawed as we are by our own failings.

[1158] We are, in my view, an extraordinary combination of unique, made in the image of a higher being destroyed by our own self.

[1159] but offered the opportunity to return.

[1160] That is my perspective.

[1161] I think that partly what happens, if you do look very deeply into the suffering that characterizes your life, is that one of the things that will happen is that you will start to understand the rule you play in that suffering.

[1162] Yeah.

[1163] And life seems to have an arbitrary element.

[1164] And, you know, there's plenty of sick children who don't seem to deserve it morally, let's say, But when you look very hard at your own suffering and you contemplate it, the probability that you're going to see some causal role that you've played is pretty high.

[1165] And then you have the option then of not doing that anymore.

[1166] And that's something like confession and redemption.

[1167] And that's something like also following this divine pattern, right, is to stop doing those things that are dooming you to unnecessary suffering.

[1168] And one of the things I've wondered about for a long time is that if you, if you stop doing everything that you could that was off target, even by your own criteria, if you stop doing all of that, how much suffering would be alleviated, not only for you, right, but for the people around you.

[1169] Most of it.

[1170] Well, that's, well, that's, well, yeah, and an indefinite amount of it, right, because it also seems like that's a sort of struggle without end, is that you can get better and better at it.

[1171] and you can get more productive and you can get more generous and you can get better at staving off suffering and you can get more helpful to other people into yourself.

[1172] We don't know what the upper end of that is.

[1173] I met a fellow once and he said, he was an old man. He said when I was a young man, I was knocking on doors, inviting people to come and worship in our church in Edinburgh.

[1174] He said, I knocked on door and an old man came out.

[1175] And he said, no, I'm not interested in God.

[1176] I was in the trenches, First World War.

[1177] I don't want to know, but I stopped believing in God.

[1178] And this young father said to him, I can understand your hurt.

[1179] Can I just ask you how you would react if I were to say to you that I think if I'd been in the trenches, I would have stopped believing in man. Oh.

[1180] And he said, the old father teared up.

[1181] He said, you better come in, I want to talk.

[1182] And so we need to be much more honest with ourselves, I think.

[1183] And I think the thing that I would say is that hope is so important.

[1184] And for me, the hope is the eternal hope for me. And the only thing I would say humbly to others is think carefully before you dismiss it too likely.

[1185] I've had to try and make sense of the conundrum that is life, of good and evil, of joy and of pain.

[1186] And what keeps me going is the secure hope.

[1187] It is for me very real.

[1188] that the wounds will be bound up and the joy will be complete and I'll be the person I should have been a lot of people would be very relieved to hear that and restored in relationship.

[1189] Yeah, well part of that is the injunction we talked about earlier not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[1190] It's like, you know, we should all be concerned about the continuing possibility of atrocity and oppression in the world.

[1191] But then, and we should be very cognizant of the role our own cultures, the cultures that have delivered to us our privilege, let's say, that have played in maintaining that oppressive regime.

[1192] But at the same time, we should very carefully differentiate what has been done that's been right and good.

[1193] And Wilberforce is a great example of that.

[1194] By their fruits?

[1195] And we sort of say, oh, Sansa was a religious nut.

[1196] Look what they did.

[1197] Look at the towering figures.

[1198] Just think of them.

[1199] Yes.

[1200] And then ask them.

[1201] yourself in all seriousness if you could have done as well.

[1202] He was followed by Lord Charsbury, another privileged man, who got the kids out of the mines and out of the chimneys and got some basic rights for women and some labor laws at work.

[1203] Right.

[1204] And we could do as well in our own life.

[1205] All right, Mr. Anderson.

[1206] I've enjoyed it here as always.

[1207] You bet, you bet.

[1208] And so thank you all on YouTube and the other platforms that you're listening to or watching through for participating in this conversation.

[1209] And We hope that it was useful.

[1210] I'm going to spend some time talking to Mr. Anderson on the Daily Wire Plus platform at a more biographical level.

[1211] Talk to him a little bit about the journey in his life that took him to the places that he's been and helped him draw the conclusions that he's drawn.

[1212] And that'll take place on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

[1213] And thank you to them for facilitating this conversation and making it possible technically and practically and to all of those of you who are listening and watching.

[1214] Hello, everyone.

[1215] I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus .com.