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Mike Murphy: Never Trump? The future of the Republican Party and Election 2020
July 12, 2020	Misha Zelinsky	Australian leaders, Democracy, Inequality, Nationalism, Populism, Trump, US, US Leaders	01:02:12
Mike Murphy is a legendary political consultant and one of the Republican Party's most successful ever campaigners.
Mike has handled media and strategy for more than 26 successful Republican campaigns including Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger as well as leading John McCain's historic presidential race in 2000. Mike has advised political leaders all over the world.
Mike is a prominent media personality, Hollywood writer and co-host of the hugely popular podcast, Hacks on Tap. As a leading 'Never Trumper', Mike heads up the 'Republican Voters Against Trump' (www.rvat.org) movement.
Misha Zelinsky caught up with Mike for a chinwag about why he's been against Trump since the 1990s, the Republican Voters Against Trump movement, President Trump's first term in office, why Trump loves dictators so much, why trust has eroded so badly in politics, the future of the Republican Party, who Biden should pick as his VP candidate and what should keep Democratic strategists awake at night.
It's a big chat and we hope you enjoy it! Please rate and review the episode, it really helps.
Misha Zelinsky:
Mike Murphy, welcome to Diplomates. Thanks for joining us today, mate.
Mike Murphy:
Well, Misha, great to be here. Thanks for inviting me now.
Now, so many places we could start our thought. We'll get to the current political situation in the U.S. shortly, but I thought a great place to start would be talking about November 8, 2016. You're a very prominent never Trumper and you were a Never Trumper then. I was wondering if you might just take us through the thoughts running through your mind on election night.
Well, it was a mix of shock and horror. I've been anti-Trump since 19, probably 93 only because I was working back then for the newly elected governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, and Trump was slippering around Atlantic city. So we had some unfortunate experiences with him, so I was no stranger to his character and his problems. Now, that said, like most people in my business, I was very surprised when he won because it was pretty obvious from the polling and just the normal rules of political gravity that he was going to get clobbered in the popular vote.
And most of the time, almost all the time, it's only happened five times in American history where the popular vote does not elect the president because of course we have the electoral college, which is old device from the original founders, kind of like the Senate where the smaller States have outsized power. California has two senators, little Rhode Island has two senators, so it works the same with electoral college.
So he was able to draw the inside straight Michigan, Pennsylvania, my home state of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three States by the way that had not voted Republican and not been carried by the Republican Party in a presidential race since the 1980s. But narrowly 77,000 votes out of 13-and-a-half million, the three States all cast together, the margin was that small, but it was enough.
I remember I was there with James Carville, we both worked for NBC News and he was getting texts, I was getting texts from friends of ours out in the field with just disbelief that Trump was showing this weird pattern. He did worse than Mitt Romney, our last Republican candidate in a lot of suburbs, but in what we call exsubs, which are farther out suburbs with cheaper housing, but a lot of middle class, lower middle class people. And then out in rural areas, he was blowing the doors off it.
So it started to dawn on us that the polls were going to be wrong, they were going to predict the popular vote right. Hillary won by nearly three million votes, but in the distribution of the vote in those industrial Midwestern States and a few other places, he was going to come really close and maybe win the damn election, so it was just complete shock. Then when I got my pulse under control about that, because I was not excited about Hillary Clinton, but I thought Trump was a cheap demagogue, and a populist and not a conservative, and I thought, what is this guy going to do?
Then for about a month, I'd started thinking, well, give him a chance, surround with staff. I saw Reince Priebus that night in the middle of the night at NBC and I knew him from the party. He had been our party chairman and he was rumored to go in as chief of staff. I remember I pulled him aside at 3:00 in the morning election night and I said, "Look, you got to take it. You got to surround this guy because…" And he's like, "We know, we know. We're going to build a cage. We're on it." Then it began.
I also felt like an idiot because I… Sorry for the long answer, but I had done a podcast during the election called Radio Free GOP, a precursor to Hacks on Tap, was basically just me screaming about Trump and then interviewing operatives about how they got into politics and their stories. Still on iTunes if anybody cares. And so I had predicted with great certainty a thousand times he'd lose and then there he was winning, so I thought, oh, this is great. I'll be eating crow here for a year, and I did.
Well, I have to say, you're not alone in predicting that Hillary would win. I've famously said that Hillary wouldn't just win, but win well, that she'll absolutely crash it. So you certainly not by yourself there, mate, consider that point in this podcast on a number of occasions.
Well, she half did, that's all I'll say. Here's a little bit of American political tribute, you know who… So the electoral college, and again, it's happened five times in American history, never in the 20th century, twice the 21st, 2000 and 2016 where the electoral college has been different than the popular vote. You know who invented it? Alexander Hamilton. That's the song that never made the musical.
I came up with this stupid thing [inaudible 00:06:09], but yeah, and it's here to stay, so we'll see. This year looks a little more aligned, but we have a lot of campaign yet to happen.
Now, Mike, I'm curious for you take on Trump's first term thus far. We're coming up to the end of his first term. You're obviously very bearish about his presidency overall as a Never Trumper, but how would you assess it? Has it been what you expected? A bit better? Worse? Care for your take.
Worse. Yeah, I thought, all right, they're going to put the training wheels on him. One of the things that is true about this, Trump didn't think he was going to win, Trump's people didn't think he was going to win. Kellyanne Fitzpatrick Conway, I always call her Kellyanne Fitzpatrick because that was her original name when she started in politics, so my apologies it's Conway, Kellyanne Conway, she was calling…
There's a thing in American politics, the media spend millions and millions, millions of dollars on exit polling, which is they do it as well as it can be done, but it's shaky. Because you have to do two things; you intercept people at polls when they come out and say, "How did you vote?" And you try to get bellwether precincts, but it's a big country, and again, we learned about you got to really understand the distribution of the vote with the electoral college.
The other thing people forget is what about absentee voters? Well, you do a phone poll two days before the election. Then you put it on a computer and you predict. So during the day, the exit polling data comes in and waves, so the morning vote, plus the absentee, the afternoon vote and the evening vote. And there is a projection that the exit polling service at the three networks or the five networks, wherever they are now control sends out an hourly update where the number keeps moving, and that leaks.
Some of us get it, other people leak, and it's a big sport among politicals, "What are the exits?" Starting at about 3:00 in the afternoon really. So the exits were coming out and they're bad for Trump. And so Kellyanne was on the phone calling all the national reporters. "This campaign was screwed up, if they'd only listen to me. I knew they were going to lose, that darn Reince Priebus." And unbelievable because it's the snake pit in their world and culture is set from the top.
Then Trump is sitting there on election night and they've got the classic five TVs in the suite and they're starting to predict he's going to win and he doesn't believe it. So he's checking each channel, he think it's a prank, it's like it's fake. Then the famous story, I wasn't in the car, so I can't say it's absolutely true, but I believe it, and the people who also believe it were almost in the car. He turned to then PRA, Hope… God, it's early here and I'm trying to remember. She left and came.
Anyway, he turned to a PRA as they drove through the White House gates to begin the transition process and he looked at her and said, "All I was trying to do was increase ratings on the apprentice." So he was more surprised than anybody, so I thought, okay. If the dog has caught the car, he'll bring in some war horses and it'll be a Jimmy Carter semi-competent buffoonish presidency, but he won't actually try to be president other than ride around in the big plane and try to find the alien remains in Roswell out at the Air Force base in Nevada.
It was like a movie of some kind of clown talk radio person got beamed up into the presidency, what would they do? Well, do I have a yacht? They'd get into the quality of life. I thought that would probably happen. Instead, he tried to be president and most of the serious people wouldn't work for him because he has a bad style, he's abusive and he won't read anything. The military briefers and the intelligence people among themselves were all impressive career types would walk in there and they used to call the briefing story time like they were talking to a five-year-old because he wouldn't read anything.
So they learned to quickly do cartoons and charts. I used to joke, sock puppets were going to be next because he has zero attention span. What he likes to do is pace and talk about the election, and how they tried to steal it from him, and he only lost New Hampshire because they bused in union act and it's crazy. In every campaign, sometimes you have to suffer foolish donors who give the party a fair amount of money.
And they mean well, most of them are great, but you have a few who make their fortune and plastic coat hangers. And they give you a 30-minutes on how the wire coat hanger is a joke, and if hadn't been for their genius and the plastic coat hanger, they wouldn't have all this money. They could use that same insight to fix the entitlement budget problems, they're blowhards. Well, it's like a guy like that got elected and here we are.
Now, we've got to get a little on topic. This is of course a foreign policy show. I'm curious to get an insight from you. Trump's first term, what's been interesting is how in the few times that Trump's ran into trouble with the house Republicans who have essentially backed him most of the way. The times he's run into trouble with them or bumped up against them has been on foreign policy, be it what happened in Helsinki, some of the issues relating to NATO and other matters of that nature.
How costly do you think it's been for the U.S. in terms of Trump's approach to our allies and alliances, including the Australia AND U.S. Alliance? And also what is it with Trump's tendency to lord strong men and dictators? And why does he seem to push away his friends and get drawing closer people that in regimes that had essentially been enemies of the United States and these types of characters that are quite unsavory? He seems to cling on to them. What is it about him that does that?
It is the question. I'm not enough of a psychiatrist to really go through it, other than his dad had a little deuce step in his behavior. They didn't have a great relationship, he was an authoritarian. Look into Fred Trump. I always joke if there was a time machine in one trip, I would not go back and kill baby Hitler, I'd go back and tell Fred Trump to be less of an asshole to his kid because 45 years later would solve a lot of problems.
He has shown a real hostility to the classic alliances, and I don't think he understands geopolitics. A friend of mine, I don't want to blow up his career, who was a very distinguished American career person in the foreign policy space went into the White House and was stunned to see that as bad as he thought it would be, and this person is no amateur. It was worse and Trump literally had a limited understanding of basic geography.
So I think everything is transactional to Trump and it's all very small time like what are we paying for Ramstein Air Base in Frankfurt, it's high rent. He doesn't understand the Atlantic Alliance, he's hostile to it. Clearly, Australia is a critical ally of ours and increasingly geopolitically even more important one, linchpin in many ways of what ought to be our Asian network of alliances along with the Koreans and Japan, and he just seems to have an instant hostility.
He doesn't do protocol well. He has a hard time doing two-way conversations. He's blowhard again so you're sitting there, you're the prime minister of Australia, you have to listen to this guy, ill informed whinge on and on. I'll tell you a funny story. Erskine Bowles who had been a big leading Democrat, had been a White House Chief of Staff, good friend of mine. We both got a call cause in the U.S. if you're known in politics, there's a whole, and I'll call it a racket because that's somewhat accurate.
Because I'm on cable TV bloviating a bit and Erskine of course is highly esteemed. You get called to do paid speeches, so you go to the outboard motor dealers and tour, you joke around or [inaudible 00:14:03] do it, or Carville or the gala, and you entertain the crowd, but it's… And then they give you a big check, and dinner, and you go home. It's easiest the dollars in the world.
Well, we both got a call from the speakers bureau early in the Trump presidency, "Well, you want to go to London?" And I always want to go to London, but it's going to take three or four days. "Well, paid trip or your fee. When are we leaving?" So Erskine and I wind up in an elite hotel there, and I got to be a little careful cause I think we're under an NDA and there are only 12 people in the room, and they are 12 of the oldest, richest, private families in Europe; France, UK, Germany.
Barnes Heineken was sitting there, big, big names, Rothschild. We had a very polite discussion, but their question was yours with a little more of an exclamation point, which is, "What the hell is going on? Don't you idiots understand?" There was a German that was very persuasive. "Our largest trading partner is Russia, we don't like them, they're next door. And you guys are the metronome clock of the Atlantic Alliance and now all we hear are clown shoes tapping around and baby gurgles, and this is really bad and you clowns get it."
Now, we of course got it, but it was hard to explain that we'd had this eruption and we would have a clown president for a while. Long answer, to get to the meat of it, we have damaged our alliances, we've emboldened our enemies. We've taught every dictator in the world that bad behavior can be rewarded. Hell, we went out and legitimize Kim Jong-il for no trade. I came up in the foreign policy world and rule number one is you want to get an American president eyeball to eyeball, you earn that with behavior.
Instead just out of vanity and ego, this guy shows up to arguably the worst regime in modern history in terms of what it's done to its own people. It made Stalin look like amateur night and there he is. So the next president is… It's going to be interesting and I'm sure there will be grins in Canberra, in Bonn, in London, and Paris because there will be relief that there'd be somebody back to normal, but they're also going to get a price.
We're going to be paying some taxes here, making up for the egregious behavior of this guy, and that's the way the world works. So it has been really damaging, I think to our position in the world and there's less security now. There's more instability.
Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because during the Trump presidency in his first term, what are the words to look into U.S. leadership and saying, "Well, there's still a role for U.S. leadership and a craving for traditional U.S. leadership?"
Right, right.
And so whether or not the Trump presidency is a reorientation of U.S. policy or whether or not it's an aberration is going to be decided in November and it's a critical question for the world.
Yeah. It reminds me of it's like a jet airliner and the pilots died, and the copilot died, and they're going passenger to passenger to see if anybody has a pilot's license before a thousand miles. And luckily there are some pilots on the plane, they're just in the back row and it's going to take them five months to find one.
That's a chilling metaphor, mate. Now, we've talked a little bit about it, but the question of trust, I want to talk about trust in politics. Because Trump in many ways is the consequence of low trust, but he's also the destructor of trust. A lot of people will say, "Should we trust Trump?" One of the things that's interesting when you look at some [inaudible 00:17:37] on coronavirus, about 20% of Americans trust that the president of the United States on information about the coronavirus, which is about half of Trump's approval rating.
So half of the people that approve of Trump don't trust him on coronavirus, which is peculiar to say the least. But what is low trust more generally tell us about politics? And should it worry us? And do you think trust can be restored in politics more importantly? Because it is a critical ingredient in democracy.
Yeah, that's a great question because the glue of the democracy is some trust like that. I think it's working at several levels. I think when Trump first got elected, one of the problems we have in our culture, and I ran Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign for governor California, the second biggest job here. And Arnold was the first classic example since maybe governor George Murphy, no relation, back in California who came out of Hollywood and then later Ronald Reagan.
But Arnold was a pop culture celebrity who just made a huge audacious leap sideways into national politics. But I can tell you, Arnold is very shrewd and he knew that he had to build a machine to be ready to govern. Arnold on movie sets would spend all this time in his trailer hanging around with political policy nerds to learn the business. He took it very seriously. Trump was also a move and pop culture, but he didn't take it seriously, nor did he build a bunch of strong staff relationships.
I think one of the things in the culture that happened when Trump moved from pop culture was people had become so cynical through political doublespeak and Washington's arrogance, the gilded city that's never felt a recession that the stakes of politics became low enough that your vote was a joke. You saw in Italy, they're voting for baggy pants comedians, you've seen this before in other places. Well, your vote did mean to say, "Oh, I'll give it to that guy who's going to drain the swamp."
There was a combination of antipathy for institutions. We have a middle class that's been squeezed by flat real wages for a long time, so the American dream is not working for them. They're working harder and getting less. Then you've got the financial engineering class, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, though they're of course more innovative, but people at the top corporate America, particularly Wall Street who when they win, they make billions, when they lose, we bail them out.
And so there's all this anger, and so here comes a guy who's credentialed outside of politics because he's on TV for 10 years on prime time being… Even if all he's doing is firing comedians for not selling enough cotton candy at some… Remember, it's all product placement. The whole thing is rigged. It's a TV ad, is a TV show for products, they paid to be there. But Trump was the in-charge guy.
When you did the data and it was all art of the deal. He'll get things done, he'll shake it up. And the risk of Trump was not really in the calculation because people hadn't had real, real, real 20th century pain in a while. We've had wars, but wars with a volunteer army, not a draft. We had the great recession in 2007, but we hadn't had a lot of economic pain, not real economic pain since then.
So it was easy to take a flyer on Trump and laugh and it's all entertainment. And then corona came and all of a sudden the stakes shot up. A lot of our political class, he was like, "Well, the Mueller report, the this, the that. Why doesn't anybody abandon him?" Blah, blah, blah. Well, two things were going on. One, people were abandoning him. Trump has had crappy poll numbers since a month after he got elected, so I've been short his reelection ever since then, but they've gotten worse.
But this Washington stuff looks like another Washington food fight. The Republicans say this and that. And you go to a focus group, somebody will say, "Yeah, he got dirt from the Russians about Hillary, but you know Hillary, she would've gotten dirt from the Russians about him and she could have done it. They're all the same. They're all corrupt." Blah, blah, blah. A sign of institutional weakness, which ought to worry us because we used to hold presidents to a standard, which would force them to act the standard.
So now with the coronavirus, it's in your life. Your plan's closing, you're in economic pain, real economic pain. Your brother-in-law's restaurant may never open. Your 62-year old uncle has it and he's on a ventilator in a hospital, even money chance to live are worse. So a real crisis came and all of a sudden it is like the movie, Premise where the actor who plays a cop suddenly has to solve a real case and it all falls apart. And that's what's happened to Trump, and Trump's method is the lie.
You saw the exaggeration and superlatives, greatest ever. Swallow a Christmas tree light, drink a little Clorox. It's just ripped them to pieces. It's funny, most leaders, and this has happened with the American governors in most places until recently during the first wave of the virus, their polling goes up because it's a crisis, they're standing there, are five guys in state trooper uniforms and doctor outfits, and they got a plan. People want authority when they're scared, so they cling to it.
Fauci, the chief doctor in our world who's highly respected, his polling now, 80% he's a national celebrity. Trump's gone down significantly, even among as you say, his own people where he's got real problems, a third of them are more not buying in because he's been so bad in the spotlight and all he's done is lie and they know. So this has been the final neck breaker for him politically, which is why right now, Joe Biden, who was far from a perfect super formidable candidate, as far as candidate skills, he's sitting on the count of numbers that looked like Nixon in '72 or Reagan in '84.
Joe is going to be damn hard for Trump to beat because Trump has dug himself in such a horrible hole and he doesn't seem to have any of the tools to get himself out of it through being president. Now, maybe he'll have the tools to run a campaign and vilifies Biden, that's in his wheelhouse and his comfort level, but it's hard to run against the government when you are the government.
Now, I'm super keen to dig into the 2020 campaign and Biden versus Trump, but before we get to that, just want to round out this point on trust. You talked about the food fight in Washington, how much of a problem is this blue team, red team approach? And how critical is it to have friendships across the aisle or even just relationships across the aisle? And you're famously very close with David Axelrod who was Obama's chief strategists and your cohost on the great podcast, Hacks on Tap.
It's a fantastic podcast, my favorite podcast, everyone should listen. There's a plug there for you, mate.
But how critical is that?
Well, it is a problem. So the ugly little secret is, and this is true in the Congress too. It used to be more true, but it's still true is behind the food fight, most of them are friends. They get along pretty well. You will see on our television two members of Congress who are in the leadership cast, the top 60 people, they're fighting on TV, calling each other names, and then you're be in the Capitol building and they're both on an elevator talking about, "Hey, you're going to the barbecue tomorrow? We got a thing for the national association of plastic molding."
What has happened is there's nowhere left for them to hide, be friends and get anything done. Part of it is the way our system works, and our house of representatives, we have 435 congressional seats that are normally all quarter million or 200,000 voters, maybe 700,000 people, and they're all over the country. And there used to be between the most liberal Republican and the most conservative Democrat about 80 seats, kind of there.
And there were about 80 seats that were what we would call swing seats that could go either way, so they had to build a coalition beyond just Republicans or Democrats to win that seat. But then redistricting took over where State legislatures, and governors, it's a complicated process, but they drew the seats to be safe. So all you care about are your party voters. So now we only have about 20 of those seats and there are only three people between the most liberal Republican, most conserved Democrats.
So it becomes you're on a team and you don't have any room to move, and the incentives are to fight. And then you've got the cable TV business where we got a channel for every point of view saying, "You're right, you're right. They're terrible." There was a Congressman, was a minister in Philadelphia who coined a great phrase that I steal all the time, Bill Gray, who said, "The problem is the formula has now become, I'm right, you're evil."
And if the other side is evil, you can say anything about them or do anything. You're a hero, you're killing the devil. So that corrosiveness has trapped everybody and a lot of them hate it, into this world where it's all worrying about your primary voters. Because you might have 700,000 people in your district and 195,000 voters, but because it's a mostly Republican district and you're going to win 90% of the time, unless something really crazy happens, all you really care about is the 35,000 voters in the primary who are generally driven by interest groups. Same thing on the Democratic side.
I remember California, big Democratic State, used to be a swing State. I was working for Schwarzenegger, we would do the big budget negotiation at the very end of the process. After all the fighting, we'd put everybody in a room, be the governor and the two legislative leaders, the big five, and the Republicans were in the minority. They'd sit there and wonder what was for lunch, and the speaker of the house, the Democratic speaker could not order lunch or move a chair without calling the head of the Teacher's Union or the head of the State Employee Union.
So Arnold used to say, "Throw him out, get her in." Because they were so powerful in primaries, you couldn't buck them. So that has taken the lubrication out of the gears and frozen everything. And it's bad because we're teaching people that politics doesn't solve anything, which means they lose faith in the system, which means they elect drags, they just fight. So it's a compounding thing that's really trouble.
I have got one more plugin. When I'm not doing what I normally do, I also spent a lot of time at University of Southern California, USC, the center for the political future with Bob Schrum, who like David Axelrod is a Democrat consultant that I spent a career fighting in campaigns, but we've been friends. He's wrong on everything, he's got a iHeart Lennon tattoo, but he's a good guy and he's a patriot. So you can be opponents but not enemies. That's the way politics used to work.
Axe and I have a joke, we have run more Iowa governor races against each other, and we would go back and forth. And even though we're killing each other in the campaign, we'd sneak off and have dinner in some small rural place where nobody would see us. It's like pro wrestling, I'm the Russian assassin, he's Captain America, and actually were cousins. But it's not quite that cynical because he… I'm a conservative and I believe it. One of the reasons I hate Trump is I don't think he's a conservative at all, and Axelrod's a good committed liberal. So we know we disagree on stuff, but we love the system.
Having those relationships too, if a campaign really goes out of whack, you can have a little back channel knowing there's no mercy in it, but there are rules, and there can be a little back channel to try to keep the thing on the playing field, not out in the stands hurting civilians.
Now I just want to turn attention to your side of the show, the Republican Party. You are a very, very prominent Never Trumper, but I want to talk about the future of the Republican Party. Trump was even an outsider. He undertook a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, but it's very much now fashioned in his image, there is a resistance. But I want to pose it a question to because a lot of people focus on 2020.
If Trump wins, is that the end of the Republican Party? And does it have a future if Trump wins the election? Because it is important that mainstream politics does have a mainstream-
… conservative party.
Well, that is a great question. So it was a takeover and we've gone from being a, I'll use the Australian example, we're a small-l liberal party. We believed in free trade, and we believed in the Atlantic Alliance, we were fiscal conservatives, we were classic. Then Trump takes over and all of a sudden it's Juan Peron. He doesn't care anything about the budget or entitlements, blows up all the alliances. Runs a racket near criminal behavior with Confederates and people like that as a soft spot for the white supremacist movement, which was long dead. And he just sprinkled a little gasoline on the embers, see what he can do there.
And he's ruined the Republican brand, and Republican politicians with a few notable exceptions. I'll give a salute to my old friend and client, Mitt Romney. Pretty much gone cynical and looked the other way, thinking, well, we won, we have power and, or I'm afraid… One Senator told me, "Look, I see you on cable TV screaming about Trump." This was two years ago. "I would love to do that. I go home, give a fiery speech, he's a moron. I've seen him in the White House, he can't work at TV remote. The aide has to come do it.
He's an idiot. And my wife would be so happy, she'd talked to me again. It would be fantastic. And I'd give that fiery speech back in my State. A day later, I'd have a guy in an uncle Sam suit with an aluminum foil hat primarying me, and I'd be only one point ahead, and I probably lose. Then some socialists would take over or some Democrat and I've been in the trenches 30 years fighting that and Trump wouldn't change at all. Trump will just be Trump, so we're going to wait him out."
And I said, "Well, what if 10 of you guys came forward?" And he said, "Sign me up. I'm number three, tell me who the first two are." That has been the problem, but as you say, he's ruined the brand, and I think if Trump loses, we're going to have a big civil war over what we are. Do we go back to the liberal party conservatism? Or do we stay in this populous madness? Now, the argument for a reversion to some modernized mean is political parties don't like losing, and under Trump we've been wiped out.
American politics is such a big country, is full of a lot of bullshit because there's room for commentators, and pollsters, and it's endless TV show. Guilty, I'm part of it, but most of them haven't really done campaigns. Like hardheaded businessmen, one thing we know from doing campaigns here on both sides, the operatives know is like Wall Street, we have a thing called mark-to-market. What is it worth today?
You have to sell your factory this week, there's a price you get. Not going to be maybe the best price or maybe that week it will be, but there's what it's worth now. You mark it to market, take an asset, what is it worth today in cash? Not what in 10 years it'll be worth. Well, in politics, mark-to-market is election day, we count the votes and the polls don't matter, the predictions don't matter, it's just what is.
So when every mark-to-market moments since Trump took the oath of office after being elected, problem part he's got beat, and we've gotten beat either really bad, medium bad, or mediocre. There are no big wins where we would have a special election and a safe Republican seat, and we'd win it by 10 instead of the normal 20. And swing seats would generally gotten our clock cleaned.
We've had the biggest wipe out in the Congress since Watergate, we've lost nine governorships, and right now we're on our way to lose in the Senate, which is a shocker because to do that we're going to have to lose some lean Republican States, and right now the pollings a disaster. Maybe there'll be a big come back as possible, but it'll be hanging on by one seat if we do it. So Trump has been anthrax. We are drinking Clorox politically.
When the party regroups after that, I think the biggest We're going to get tired of winning guy in America" becomes the biggest loser, wiped out our political power. And our legislators are all moving into smaller office and nobody calls them Mr. Chairman anymore. We have had a… One of the stats people don't look at is since Trump was elected, almost half the serving Republican members of Congress or the Senate have retired or been beaten and left.
So out of that rubble, we either decide this is 1946 and we're Toyota, and we're going to need some new modern factories here. Or we go with Trump Jr, or Trump tries again, or a Trump imitator, which will have strength in the party. There are diehards who will… It's a cult, but I think it'll be a much more fair fight and Trump will have none of that or lower the big winner who's going to do anything because there's going to be very little left.
So my guess is we will lurch in a more normal direction, but the other part of the story is we have to modernize conservatism simply because the demography is against us. It used to be in American politics, '88, then down to '82, 80% of the vote was Caucasian and the Republicans won a majority of that vote. This election, we'll see if we can get to 71% Caucasian. My guess is it'll be more like 70.
So we've been standing still retreating among white voters. Well, nonwhite voters where we can't get arrested, no surprise, look at the way we act, especially lately have been exploding in size. So we're in a demographic vice, so we need to modernize conservatives. Now, the good thing is there's a market. Thank God for the Democrats because the loony left is getting stronger and stronger on their side and over time there'll be a fatigue there.
And we will have an opportunity to offer quite an alternative, but it's up to us to figure out what that alternative is going to be.
So who are the people to keep an eye out for? Who are the likely leaders of the future in the Republican Party, good and bad?
Well, there's always a casino game of who's who and it's always wrong, but the next generation, I'll start, there's former governor, Nikki Haley of South Carolina. She was two term governor there. She was Trump UN ambassador. She escaped the chains of Trump, but she was Trumpy when she had to be. I think she's the most cynical person I've ever dealt with in American politics. So she's very formidable, but I'd love to sprinkle a little holy water on her and see what happens.
I'm not a big fan because I've dealt with her, but she is definitely a contender and again, she'll make a deal with anybody to get the job. So you got to look at her. And she has been a droid at being right with Trump when it was in her interest and who Trump, huh? Lately. That cynicism may catch up with her, but she is formidable. Then in the Senate, you got a couple of junior Trumps, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton.
Tom's a veteran, does the veteran hero, Trumpian thing. I appreciated his service but as politics were demagogic, but hey, there's some evidence to show there's a ticket there. Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida is always humming hail to the chief. We'll see, he ran before. Ben Sasse is a thoughtful conservative. He's been gutless on Trump, but his other stuff has been very good from Nebraska. Doesn't have a huge base, but attractive candidate. The Trump sons, particularly Don Jr. He's openly talking about it, yeah.
One of the problems is, this happened in Hollywood after Arnold got elected. Arnold was funny, a California governor is enough of a big figure. You have security issues, particularly of a super movie star like him. He'd run around Sacramento in a suburban with a chase car, but whenever Arnold was in Hollywood, he'd have them put on the full package two suburban sirens and motorcycle, it was ridiculous just to show his friends.
And next thing you know, Rob Brian is thinking about running for governor, Rob Lowe, it caught on. Well, with Trump, every idiot with yacht is thinking, hey, can be me. So we can have a couple of those guys. And then the latest D.C. bubble, and again, I've been around this too long and most of the people, American TV pitches about politics never run a campaign. So I'm a little cynical about the conventional wisdom, but Tucker Carlson, who probably…
I don't know if he means anything over there, but he's… Yeah, yeah. You'd know about him, but he's very glib. He's a big star on Fox. Old friend of mine before he went crazy. He used to be a respected journalist, but he's the sharp acid tongue, but clever trumping guy in TV, so there's a boom right now for Tucker. I think he would never make it and my guess is, he's making too much money being a TV blowhard, but he's being mentioned right now.
I would tell my friends in Australia to tune in. I can finally admit it, I used to do a lot of work in Canada. They didn't talk about it at the time and it was always fun with my Canadian friends. There's probably a parallel kind of a Commonwealth thing with Australia, but the Canadians would always say, "Well, I'm a federal toy. I'm a provincial social credit voter and I'm an American Democrat." Because they'd see so much of it, they'd adopt a party to root for it.
So I would say if you like the theater of the absurd and it may… I think it may get better and become hopeful. And if Trump loses as he is likely, but not certain to keep an eye on the Republican primary because there'll be no end of entertainment.
Well, it certainly sounds like good theater, if nothing else. Of course, so for there to be a Republican primary, there's got to be firstly, a Democratic victory, a Biden presidency. Biden at the moment, you look at the polling, he's well ahead on national polls, double digit, leads in most national polls, he's got good single digit leads in all the critical swing States.
You're a strategist, you're running Biden's campaign, what's keeping you up at night right now if you are in charge of that campaign?
That nobody knows Joe Biden. It's one of these things where they're way ahead of their supply lines in the polling, and what I mean by that is that the country wants to fire Donald Trump. I'd argued they wanted that since 2017, which is why the Republican Party has taken a beating on every mark-to-market day of elections. Almost everywhere, almost all the time, almost always really bad. So fire Trump is what's winning the election now, and that's not uncommon. Generally our presidential elections are a referendum on the incumbent, keep him or lose him.
But at some point in the campaign, they take a look at the challenger. Now, because the coronavirus, Joe's been locked in his basement doing a few good things, but to political junkies, Biden is well known, has been around forever. To rank and file voters, they don't know much about them at all other than old guy from D.C. who seems blue collar and seems like a good guy to have a beer with. They don't know anything else.
The Trump campaign is going to have a couple of hundred million to do what incumbents in trouble always do, which is beat the hell out of him, and that's coming. And there's been a lot of worry that the Biden fundraising operation has been anemic. His campaign started with a small staff, can he handle that? Well, the last two months he's raised more money than Donald Trump, which is a very good sign. So the Biden folks are catching up fast.
But Joe, I know him, I like him. I ideologically, I was for Buttigieg because I know him and I think he… And again, I'm a conservative, so yeah, yeah. All of this is painful for me because I'm probably seeing I'm not with many of them, but I want to get rid of Trump. I'm actually-
Well, how much were you freaking out about Bernie Sanders who's in the lead going to South Carolina and looked like he might win at one point?
Oh God, my worst nightmare come to life. It's unbelievable. I was on the phone trying to see if we can get a Neil Kinnock look alike to come over in primary. It'd be inch better. So I'm part of Republican voters against Trump, rvat.org if you're curious and we're running a big aggressive campaign. So as I like to say, I'm not buying Democrat, I'm leasing for four years to get rid of Trump.
Here's the Biden problem. Lets look at him, just like a product. So there's the Iowa caucus. Now it's a weird election, small turnout, Iowa, but it's important and it's the first test. Well, Biden starts 20 points ahead and he gets there because he's known in the Democratic Party, liked, and all of a sudden there's competition. So good soybean farmer in Iowa gets to start with Biden, but then, hey, there's this Buttigieg guy. He's really impressive.
Wow, I like this Cory Booker, I like Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a just North of here. And all of a sudden in a competitive market, Biden gets wiped out when people have other choices. And so then he goes to New Hampshire and he gets wiped out again. Well, bad sign. Then he gets to South Carolina, the first contest with a large African American population influential in it, which is true in the Southern Democratic primaries, and because of his connection to Obama, and because of earned affection in that community, and because the most powerful leader in the community was all for him, he wins.
So he's the turtle upon the fence post. He did not climb up there himself. Now, they then surf forward and beat everybody and came back from the dead, so I give him a big salute. But what that's telling me is Biden is not a magic candidate, he needs that help. And right now what's helping him is fire Trump, which I doubt will change. But Biden's going to go through some bumpy times if they can manage that, particularly the big debates.
Because the Trump campaign slogan has been, Biden's a sleepy, crazy old man, and Biden's had some bad moments on the trail. Part of it is Biden is a motor mouth and he gets tangled up and everything. I think Biden is smarter and sharper than Trump by a mile, but perception is reality of judicious editing, you get these moments. So Trump's going to build that up, and if Biden has a sharp debate, it'll be destroyed, it will be over.
But if Biden has a bad debate because Joe was too busy calling other old politicians around the country and not going through grilling debate prep for the next five months, and doesn't take it seriously. And in the past, Joe has not been a very disciplined campaigner. So if Joe can't get into shape here, he will give Trump an opening.
Now, my guess is, the country will still fire Trump, but let's remember the Obama example. Obama had bad reelect numbers, not as bad as Trump but bad, and so they went out and they defined my friend Mitt Romney a lot better than Mitt defined himself, and they beat him. And it will be the same strategy for Trump with more ferocity.
The other thing I worry about, and I'm not sending any angry emails to David Axelrod at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, dear listeners, but I'm a hardheaded politician, so I'm talking about the numbers. I worry a little, the Democrats have a fetish for identity. You go to the DNC website… See what we Republicans do and drives them crazy, but we try to pitch one big idea of room for everybody, Make America Great Again, which was originally a Reagan slogan, Shining City on a Hill.
And so we tend to have one big vision whether you like it or not for where we're going and put everybody in it. The Democrats tend to say, "New Englanders for Biden." I have a yard sign in my basement where we record the podcast. I collect a lot of this political stuff over the years and I've got a native Americans for Al Gore yard sign of a big feather at it.
Now, I have nothing against feathers, I have nothing against… In fact, I'm a fan of native American culture, but you go to the DMC page and it's African Americans for Biden, Asian Americans… It's 400 groups. And right now the theory in the conventional wisdom is African American voters are so important. We have to have an African American running mate because we've had this moment of awakening about systemic racism.
And I agree with everything, but the African American running mate, why? Because the African American vote is the one thing Biden has. He has tons of it. And what he's got to worry about are cranky white people who are suspicious of identity politics, and if there's a racial undercurrent there, I would like to fix it after the election, after you get their damn votes and you have power.
And if we nominate a Kamala Harris or something else to reinforce a vote you already have, you give Trump an opening. And Trump is a racist and a runner racist campaign. So going to the liberal African American left is scary to me. It adds risk to the Biden campaign and I don't want risk. I want Trump in a box going out of the box of his papers being shoved out of the office. So they have to be careful about that.
The theory is, oh, if you don't do it, everybody will stay home. Nobody is going to stay home against Trump. Biden has respect in that community. They know his administration will be strongly of color. But pandering to… You see, one of the problems we have American politics now, and the media is bought into this is this narrative that your base voters are swing voters.
No, base voters will vote for a box of horseshoes if it has an R or D on it, but you've got to win the election by making your base slightly uncomfortable and reaching out a little bit. And if the Biden people run an all base strategy, then we're going to be debating Kamala Harris positions like cash reparations for former slaves, which I can tell you in the industrial suburbs where Trump rang the bell in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan is going to be much better for Trump than it is for Biden. So I don't want to give Trump any of those tools. So I worry about the VP pick.
Nobody in American politics votes for VP. It's just a big Superbowl for the press, big contest where the voters learned something about the candidate for president based on who he or she picks. This whole election will come down to the suburbs. The Republicans under Trump have lost the suburbs, college educated white women, college educated white independents and males, and if Biden goes hard left or goes too racial, the suburbs are going to start going back to the safety of the GOP.
So my advice to Biden and all these things about winning is take the risk out of it. Pick an Amy Klobuchar, though she took herself out, pick a Gina Raimondo, the governor of Rhode Island. Best democratic governor in the country. Pick a Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, key State, popular, smart, generational change. Pick governor Lujan even in of New Mexico. She's impressive. But careful, careful, careful, careful with the identity stuff because their best skill is pulling the Democrats who are run by a coastal elite into culture wars.
And in the Midwest, the Dems have lost. Whitmer knows what to do in Michigan, but they've lost the ability to really understand a Republican culture war attack. Look at Hillary, I know people in Michigan, well, I grew up around Detroit who on weekends, they'd come up in the auto industry, were making good money as trained machinists, the high skilled blue collar jobs. On weekends are being paid cash to dissemble 40 ton stamping presses and put them on freight cars to Mexico.
And most of them are Democrats and they are listening to Hillary Clinton talk about gender rights and bathrooms. Now gender rights and bathroom are important, but if you're a 52-year old auto worker who's never going to learn how to code and you're watching the machine your dad worked at and it gave you a middle class life being taken down into parts and putting on a freight car to Mexico, you got other problems.
The Democrat, they don't need to win that vote, but they need to be competitive there, and I'm worried their identity fetish, sorry, for the long answer, will steer them into a place where Trump will have a good September. That said, I think Joe wins. If I had to bet, I bet on Joe definitely.
Well, personally, I have a rule to never bet on elections ever again after the 2016 presidential election. Those who know me will understand why. I just want to switch gears a little. We've talked a lot about the current presidency, the upcoming election, talk about some previous elections and candidates you worked for and a little bit of politics in the pub, a bit of Ali versus Tyson.
We talked about Schwarzenegger, but you worked for John McCain who's a legendary Republican Senator, presidential candidate. The 2000 campaign that he lost to George Bush, do you think the Republican Party, do you think the world would have been different had McCain won that one?
Oh sure. Yeah. We've got hacks at the pub here. I like it. Number one beer in Australia, Fosters?
Mate, definitely not a Fosters. It's actually an export beer. Nobody in Australia drinks Fosters, believe it or not.
What's the best one? What do I order when I'm there?
Let's go with the VB, mate.
I see the advertising. That's why I asked you. I didn't want to go with the line, "Hand me a Fosters." Got that. I'll bet I'll be wrong.
Yeah. Well, if John had won the nomination, I worked a lot in 2000 with him. He was an amazing character, I'm very fond of him. We had an incredible time because it was a pure insurgency. We got to sneak around, blowing up bridges and everything. Then if they had called our bluff and actually made us the nominee, it would have been a bumpy general election candidate because McCain was always ready to get into a good fight with a third of his own party.
But had we won, I think McCain would have been a great reformer in the Teddy Roosevelt tradition and it would have reclocked things a bit. It would have been bumpy, but it would have been, let's put, I'm from Los Angeles, I also worked in show business, a writer and producer, and there's a great old line about Jack Warner who built Warner brothers studio with his brother. And Jack was a very crusty guy.
Albert Einstein once came to the studio and he said, "Hey Jack, this is Professor Einstein. He wrote the theory of relativity in Oregon city." Warner said, "I got a theory too about relatives, don't go into business with them." Because he was always fighting his brother. But anyway, they asked him how hard it was to run a big movie studio in the golden age and he said, "Well, you got to make a choice. I don't get heart attacks, I give them."
And McCain would have given a lot of heart attacks. He would have been on offense all the time. And I think he would have been a great president. I think he really would have. Then we would have had the bad second term probably and wouldn't have been as good. But I think the party had become so corrupted by just keeping the perpetual power machine in D.C. And this stunned me, I thought most of the hacks would go wrong, but I know a lot of these Senators, I've worked for a bunch of them and Congressmen.
I thought there'd be more pushback, and as you said, other than the Russian stuff, sanctions, a few things like that, occasionally China and a lot of eye rolling at the North Korea policy, there hasn't been, they've been gutless. It's funny, they get a federal paycheck, but it's not like we're asking them to land on Anzio Beach and get shot. We're just asking them to give up Senate haircuts for two bucks if they lose a primary.
But apparently, and that shook me. And my guess is the Democrats have so tested might be just as bad. It's been very easy to be a Democrat because you get a free halo from Trump and you can say, "Oh, he's horrible. He's horrible." And it's not morally equivalent, but when Clinton was misbehaving in the White House and lying to the camera about it, all the strong feminist of the Democratic Party found comfort in silence.
So it has scared me about the fines and patriotism of the kind of people we elect to Congress because I'm proud the Democrats have been tough on Trump, but it's been easy. There's no cost in it for them, it's a winner.
Now, Mike, I could of course go on all day picking your brain on these topics, but it's time for the [inaudible 00:53:40] fun part of the show where I do my trademark clunky segue from heavy foreign policy to talk to light chat. Now, of course, you're an avid fan of Diplomates, so you know these questions coming your way, Mike.
I have it on my subscription list, so I promise you, I will.
Well, you've got to listen to this episode at least, mate. So that's great because there'll be two listeners, you and my mind. So barbecue at Mike Murphy's, who are the three Aussies coming along and why?
Oh, well, I'd love to meet an Australian prime minister, Mr. Morrison of the Liberal Party, would be interesting. And I'm also curious about all the nutty intrigue and all that.
Oh you mean the [KU capital 00:54:25]?
Yeah, yeah. No, no. It's Game of Thrones down there, so I'm curious about that. Maybe I'd also invite opponent and watch them circle each other, but I want it to be a fun barbecue. I would call my wonderful friend of mine, we did for years named [Judof 00:54:42], who's from Melbourne, grew up there. Not there now, she's in New York, but she used to tell me great stories about various characters, so I give her one person to pick because I've heard all the names, but I'm going to get it wrong right now.
I would probably do that, and boy, Australia in so many ways punches way above its weight and there are some tremendous film directors and actors that have come out of there. And based on my Hollywood life, I'd drag Sam Neill in, or maybe Hines, or one of the great Australian artists. There's a lot. It would be a tough call, but probably somebody Judof would recommend to amaze me of her knowledge. Morrison or even a former prime minister, but somebody from the Liberal Part on right just because I'm curious about all the madness.
And one of your leading film people, probably… We'll start with Sam Neill just because he's a truly great actor and he's had an amazing career than any other stars.
I'm laughing Mike because you've stumbled into one of the great Australian ripoffs, which is that anyone who becomes famous from New Zealand globally immediately become stolen as an Australian citizen. So Sam Neill, believe it or not, is actually Kiwi, so you've gone and made unwittingly a host of enemies in New Zealand and I've got a huge following the on this show in New Zealand. So there you go, mate, enemies for life all over the shaky isles.
You guys should just invade and solve that thing. I understand they don't have an army, it wouldn't take long. I don't know how many Americans, they probably always say Paul Hogan, and I was definitely not going to go there.
Crocodile Dundee obviously, mate-
… or another Kiwi, Russell Crowe.
Oh, I didn't know that. I bumped into him once. I bumped into this guy and he turned around and I thought one, sorry… And he was nice. Sorry for bumping in and two, well, you're not 6/4 like our movie stars. It was at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, long story. But anyway, Crowe would be… Guy Pearce is a tremendous actor. He would be high on my list. There's an Australian television show I love where he's a down and out lawyer detective.
It airs here like two years later and it's perfectly made, and it's a great cast of Australian character actors. Use box office. Well, can I wrap up with a few plugs here real quick?
Republican voters against Trump, we are doing a lot of cool vicious anti-Trump ads and stuff, so you got to check us out at our rvat, R-V-A-T.org. One of the things we're doing is we're having real Republicans just get online and do an ad into the camera. Very grassroots, we've done over 350 of them, and then we air them digitally in the key five States. And we got big news coming.
In fact, appreciate this as a poll. We just did a dirty trick. We took a poll of Jacksonville, Florida, Duvall County, lean Republican, but an important County where Trump wants to have the convention. We found out they don't want it. They don't want to COVID convention. So we're throwing a lot of bombs there, and if you're curious about what's going on in Republican civil war, they're a good place to go.
And then of course, Hacks on Tap and Radio Free GOP. We just did a special episode with Bill Kristol and a bunch of the other leaders of RVAT talking about our strategy. So when you listen to every Diplomate podcast twice, and after you've memorized it, and you want another one, check out one of those and hopefully you enjoy it.
Of course, mate, I love Hacks on Tap and I encourage everyone to listen in, it's fantastic show. And check out Radio GOP. There you go, I'm the Republican ads, mate. Just one supplementary question, if I could just.
Yeah, of course.
You've talked a bit about Never Trumping, what should people be doing if they are Republican in this election? Should they be voting for Biden? Should they stay at home? Should they split their ticket? What would you say to those people in this election?
My argument is vote Biden. He's not that bad, that's my powerful slogan. I got to stop Trump, so participate but vote Biden. If he can't stand that, participate, but skip, just don't vote in the presidential. Or write in Ronald Reagan, nothing wrong with that. Write in John McCain. Write in Mitt Romney, write in whoever you believe in. So vote for president you want not the one you endure.
But I encourage people to vote and down the ticket I'm really… This is the big fight in the Never Trump movement. Should we throw out the Republican Senate in-house to punish them for what they've done with Trump or is it still okay to vote for a gutless Republican Senator? And I'm really torn on this. I'm leaning toward, it's still okay to vote for a gutless Republican Senator. I have a complicated argument which I'll try to do very quickly.
Biden's big superpower in the Senate was he was the only guy on the Democratic side who could make a deal through Republicans because they trust him. He could go into a room with Mitch McConnell and they'd have a hell of a battle, but they respect each other, he'd come out with something. If the Democrats win the Senate, and the house, and the Biden presidency, Joe's going to find himself boxed in by the left and Joe's center is Democrat.
And he's going to be a little less powerful and ideologically a little more in the corner than he's going to want to be, yet the Republicans still hold onto the Senate by a vote and have the majority there, and the Democrats have the house, which they will have. Then Biden's got something to work with. He's got a little counterforce where you can say, "I'm the only guy who can get this out of McConnell. I'm not going to be able to get your AOC agenda from the hard left, but I can get this, that, and the other thing I'll trade them for that."
And the Republicans on the other hand will be hanging on by one vote and terrified and ready to deal. So there's from Biden's personal point of view, having a narrow one vote Senate lead, Biden's got more power to operate. And ideologically would be a more centrist outcome than totally turning over the world to the Ds, where the Republicans in the Senate will just go into flame throwing opposition mode like a bunch of house guys.
Will make the job of rebuilding the party harder too. So I'm for the one vote edge in the Senate, as mad as I am at him and I'm still working that through. So whatever it is, I tell everybody to vote. Don't stay home, it a democracy. Do your duty.
Do your duty, what a hopeful place in this conversation. Mike Murphy, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been fantastic.
Thank you, Misha. Anytime. Take care. Let me know if you're ever in the U.S.
Hopefully not too far away. Cheers, mate. Take care.
See you.
Hey, everyone, before you go, a little bit of homework. Mike mentioned Hacks on Tap quite a bit. It's fantastic podcast, so I encourage you to jump on, listen, subscribe. It's one of the best U.S. and general political podcasts going around with some legendary and political analysts on there. And as ever, if you did enjoy the episode, jump on iTunes or your podcasting app, rate, review, and subscribe to the show, it helps get the word out there.
I hope you've enjoyed the episode and see you next time.
You were just listening to Diplomates – A Geopolitical Chinwag. For more episodes, visit www.diplomates.show. Or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or through any of your favorite podcast channels.
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Bonus Content: Kristina Keneally and Misha Zelinsky talk COVID-19, immigration and trade policy as panel guests
July 1, 2020	Misha Zelinsky	Australia, China, Chinese Communist Party, COVID-19, Human Rights, Immigration, National Security, Nationalism, Trade, Trump, Uncategorized, US, US Leaders	00:54:08
Bonus Content: Senator Kristina Keneally and Misha Zelinsky in panel discussion on COVID-19, immigration and trade policy.
This is a special content episode!
Senator Kristina Keneally is the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs and Immigration and Citizenship. Senator Keneally is Labor's deputy leader in the Senate and also served as the first female premier of NSW.
Misha Zelinsky and Senator Keneally appeared as guests on a NSW Young Labor panel session discussing the future of immigration and trade in a post COVID-19 world.
This is a recording of that live panel session.
Senator Keneally gives some fascinating insights into the economic and migration challenges facing Australia, discusses the shocking fact that Australia has the second largest guest worker program in the OECD, tells us why Australia should always be a nation of permanent and generous migration and explains how COVID-19 gives us a chance for a policy reset.
Misha talks about the sovereign capability challenge facing the world and why Australia can no longer rely on just-in-time supply changes to deliver the things it needs when it needs them.
We apologise in advance for the BBQ question making its way into the program; don't blame us!
(We hope to have Senator Keneally on soon as a guest!)
TRANSCRIPT OF PANEL
Brandon Hale:
I'd like to firstly acknowledge that we're meeting on the lands of the First Nations people and want to acknowledge any First Nations people emerging. So tonight, we're joined by Kristina Keneally, the senator for New South Wales who is also the shadow home affairs minister, and was of course a former premiere of New South Wales. We're also joined by Misha Zelinsky, who's the assistant secretary of the Australian Workers Union, who also runs a podcast called Diplomates, which is a foreign policy podcast.
Tonight, we're going to be talking about immigration and trade policy. Kristina will be focusing on any questions about immigration policy and Misha will be focusing on any trade policy. So I'd like to just begin by just asking Senator Keneally how she thinks COVID-19 can change immigration policy first in Australia for the foreseeable future.
Kristina Keneally ::
Thanks, Brandon. Thanks everyone for being here. Thanks, Misha, as well, for joining the conversation. Clearly, COVID-19 is having a massive impact on immigration and migration, and that starts with the fact that the borders are closed. They've been closed now for almost two months. They look likely to remain closed for the next 12 months. There may be some small changes in that in certain ways to allow people in safely, if it's safe to do so, but if you look at what is happening in the United States, in Indonesia, in India, in China, in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, in Western Europe, you only need to realize that Australia's relative success in flattening the curve would be undone if we were to reopen the borders to the type of free movement, relatively free movement, of people that we had prior to COVID-19.
Kristina Keneally :
Now, this stoppage of migration means that at some point over the next 12 months, most likely, and we're not entirely sure when yet, we will as a country do something we have never done before, which is restart a migration program from a standing stop. That gives us an opportunity right now to be asking, what kind of migration program do we want that to be? This is, I believe, an opportunity for the country to take stock of what's been happening in the migration program for the past two decades and for us as a political movement, particularly one that is concerned about not only a progressive future for our country, but also the rights and conditions of working people, of all working people.
This is an opportunity for us to argue, to reset a migration program, international interest, and when I say that, I mean in the interest of working people, in the interest of social cohesion, in the interest of economic growth, in the interest of the budget bottom line. Now, let me be clear. We are a country built on migration. You only need to think about the story of Australia, particularly since the war, since post-war Australia, were we have seen successive waves of migrants come here from every corner of the Earth, settle permanently, and build this country. Raise their families, build the infrastructure. Think of the Snowy Hydro scheme. Start small businesses, send their children to school, join their local churches, political parties, community groups, and become part of the fabric of this nation, which makes us the most successful multicultural nation on Earth.
All of us, no matter how long or short ago, our ancestors came here. Unless we are First Australians, unless we are aboriginal or Torres Strait islander, we are all part of that immigrant story to this country. I also acknowledge that Australians celebrate that Australians are enthusiastic welcomers of new migrants, and I myself experienced that in the sense that I came here in 1994 as a permanent resident, as a migrant. We know that our national benefits when people come here and are able to join in, make that contribution, and become part of the story of Australia and have a stake in its future.
Now, what this COVID-19 stoppage gives us a chance to examine in detail is really a case portfolio. Our full unifying idea, a nation built by migration, where people come here, settle down, and become part of the Australian community, is an idea that risks becoming nostalgia rather than our ongoing reality, and that is because since John Howard, we have seen a shift in our migration program, away from that pathway to permanency. And successive governments, including labor governments, but I really have to acknowledge that it's been under liberal governments that these settings have been ramped up, we have seen the pathways to permanency narrow. We have seen temporary migration expand. We saw it come to almost its logical and perhaps almost absurd conclusion under Scott Morrison last year when he said he was capping permanent migration at 160,000 people per year.
This was a congestion-busting measure. But yet he has allowed temporary migration to continue uncapped and be demand-driven, which means that really, the government towards migration policies, they're not determining who comes to this country and the manner in which they come, to borrow a famous phrase. What we are really seeing is businesses, universities, state governments, and other forms of employers make that decision about who they're going to allow into the country, and we are also seeing an expansion, a real significant expansion, of schemes like the Working Holiday Maker Program and the Seasonal Worker Program, and of course, international students and the work rights that they have.
Now, all of these things might be useful, and there is a role for temporary migration in certain places and in certain contexts, things like seasonal work, fruit picking, where it is hard sometimes, quite often, to get Australians to take on a seasonal role in a regional area. There might be reasons, say, in cyber security, where we need a lot more people qualified in that area and we can train up quickly. And so temporary migration, skilled or unskilled, has a role to play in our economy and it always will. But, we are now, our island home, is now home to the second largest temporary… Excuse me, the second largest migrant workforce in the world, sorry, in the OECD, I apologize, behind the United States. So we're the second largest migrant workforce in the OECD. We are right behind the United States.
One of the largest groups within that is, of course, international students. There are over 600,000 young people from around the globe that come to study in Australia. The majority of those are in New South Wales, and what have we heard over the past few years? Example after example of wage theft and exploitation. We should remember that, the first serious case of wage theft that really brought this problem into prominence was 7-Eleven, did involve migrant workers, international students, temporary visa holders. What we know from the multiple consultations, reports that have been tabled in Parliament and the like, is that the temporary nature of these workers' visa adds to their vulnerability, makes them vulnerable to exploitation, and creates the conditions whereby employers use that temporary status to drive down wages and to take advantage of their circumstances.
While many of you may not think that this impacts you directly, although I acknowledge there may well be people on this Zoom meeting who are themselves international students, but many of you will be students or you will be of just left training or skills training or university, and I want to remind you that the treatment of younger workers has an impact on all workers. That is, if we are seeing, and we are seeing, exploitation occur, particularly amongst temporary visa holders, and quite serious as well, that starts to take hold across the economy and across employment. So when we have things like wages being undercut, people being told they have to work for cash in hand from below [award 00:10:46] rates, it is harder for every other young person in particular to get a good, well-paying, and secure job when that becomes the economic model.
I would argue that in the name of lower wages and cheap labor, the government is risking a new and damaging form of social exclusion. We only need to look at COVID and the response to that to see how excluded these temporary visa holders are. The government has absolutely refused, and again today, in the COVID-centered hearing, the minister for finance, Mathias Cormann, made clear the government has absolutely no intention to provide any form of support to temporary visa holders who are trapped here during this pandemic. His only argument was, "If they can't support themselves through a job, they should go home." Never minding that some of them, their borders will be closed. Some of them can't actually physically get a flight, and some of them will be on a path to permanency, not many, but some will, and that would mean they would actually have to forfeit that path to permanency.
My concern has always been that we risk becoming a two-tiered society, where we have Australian citizens and permanent residents who are able to access rights, to assert their rights at work, to access services, to access support, and then we have another group of workers, guest workers, temporary migrant workers, who are locked out, locked out of those same rights, locked out of those same services, and locked out of having a stake in the future of our country. When we have a crisis like bushfires and again with COVID-19, we have seen how temporary migrant holders have been disproportionately impacted, and we talk about we're all in this together, well, a virus doesn't check your visa status before it infects you.
We are not all in this together if we have some one million workers who live in Australia who are unable to access support and services during this time. No less than Peter Costello said back during his time in office that Australia will never become a guest worker nation. I've got news for Mr. Costello and the liberals, that is precisely what we are turning our country into, and I'll end on this point. I think in this period, while the borders are closed, this is an opportunity for us to look at a range of policy settings, whether we have truly independent labor market testing, whether we are truly providing a pathway to skills and training for Australians to be able to work in these jobs.
Workers don't just pick fruit. One in five chefs, one in four cooks, one in six hospitality workers, one in 10 nursing and personal care support workers hold a temporary visa. Now, if the borders are going to be closed and we are going to have workforce shortages as the domestic economy reopens, this is the time to be saying, "How do we scale Australians up? How do we fill those skill shortages?" And do look at our skills and training systems so that we can provide pathways to employment, to good jobs, secure jobs, for Australians. But we should also think about when we reopen up migration, what do we want it to look like?
I would argue that we would want it to provide more pathways to permanency, to encourage more higher skilled, younger workers to come here, settle permanently, establish families. They have the least impact on the budget, they have the greatest contributor to economic growth, they grow jobs and opportunity, and they help us build up again, that sense of a holistic society where we all have a contribution, we all have a go, we all get a fair go. I will end on that point. There's a whole range of other things I could talk about in terms of some of the industrial relations policy settings that would help us drive down exploitation and particularly wage theft, but I will end on that point. I'm mindful there will be questions, and I know that Misha has things to say as well. So I'll stop there, Brandon, but hopefully that gives people good context in terms of how I'm thinking and we here in Canberra in the federal opposition are thinking about these questions.
Thank you very much, Kristina. I'll pass onto Misha now. So Misha, how will COVID-19 change trade policy in Australia for the foreseeable future?
Misha Zelinsky ::
Well, I think what COVID-19 has done is shown how interconnected the world is. Clearly, trade is important, has always been important for Australia, and will always be important for Australia. Australia's as a trading nation is a cliché. But trade is critical to our standard of living. But there's probably four things that I think that are important when you think about the impacts in respect to trade policy and what's happened with COVID-19. The first one I think is that it's shown up the danger or how fraught these free nation states have been relied on just in terms of supply chains. So essentially, you can't run a nation state like it's a local service station. You can't just have things turn up in the morning and be dropped off. It's a far more complex enterprise than that.
Fundamentally, the basic principle of economic sovereignty and your basic expectation of citizens is that the country can produce the things and deliver the things it needs when we need them. The one that everyone's focused on in this instance has been personal protective equipment, PPE. It just so happens that when the virus broke out in Wuhan, Wuhan's essentially the world's factory, so 90% of face masks are made in Wuhan, which is probably suboptimal when you need to have masks urgently for everyone around the world when you're dealing with a respiratory illness. The other issue, and again, it was particular to this supply chain relating to health, but the number two place after Wuhan when it comes to ventilator manufacture is actually Northern Italy.
Now, it's kind of peculiar that it happened that way, but it's just very interesting that suddenly, you can very quickly find yourself not having the things you need when you need them. I think it's something that's been a real wake up call for Australians, and we actually commissioned some polling the other day, we literally asked that question, "Has COVID-19 been a wake up call for you as an Australian about Australia's reliance on global supply chains?" And 90% of people responded yes to that, either strongly agree or agree. I think that principle, relying purely on just in time supply chains, I think is a critical change and one that we'll see us have to make some serious decision about how we're managing our supply chains.
PPE on this occasion, but with fuel security, for example. Australia only has 28 days of fuel. The 90 days is what the International Energy Agency mandates to have in storage. We have 28 maybe. In certain types of fuel, it's as low as 18 days. Without fuel, you essentially can't feed yourself, you can't transport yourself, you can't defend yourself. Again, on this occasion, it was health, but on other occasions, there are, and you can talk to experts in this area, but wouldn't take much to think about the disruption that you would get throughout our fuel supply chain to very quickly Australia would be out of fuel and in dire straits really is the truth of the matter. It's something that we need to urgently look at, but there are a whole host of other areas.
Which kind of brings me to the next point, which is that supply chains are sovereign, and what I mean by that is, look, economists talk about supply chains in high level manners over there, this kind of thing that exists above nation states. Ultimately, they are still controlled by nation states, not by corporations. And so countries make rational decisions, they make rational decisions in their own self-interest to fulfill the needs of domestic citizens before others. That's completely okay, we would expect the same thing if there was an international shortage of a particular item and Australia was a prominent exporter of that good, we would expect that our government would say, "Hang on a minute. We got to sort out our domestic needs first before we're going to sell this," and that's just the nature of things.
Nations trade in their self-interest, not doing other nations a favor. It's done in the national interest or economic hard nosed way. So those two things in combination I think again have made a real wake up call for how the world actually works, and that globalization is not something that is beyond anyone's control, and that the nation state is still powerful in the way that goods are exchanged internationally. The third point that I would make, it's related to the first and the second, and it's about whether the sticker price is the actual price. A lot of people when it comes to trade will say, "Well, you just take the lowest price that you can get."
Now to use a wonky term, what we've now seen is that the risk premium adjustment for goods or more, to put it into kind of normal language, is that the real price is the price that you pay when you need it. When shit hits the fan, that's the price. The price isn't when there's lots available. The price of a face mask, you could see what the price people were prepared to pay in the black market for these goods online and in other ways, and the desperation… Toilet paper, right? We laughed about it, but when that level of panic goes through communities, that's the real price for the good. And so again, it's about making an assessment of what are the things that we need when we need them? Who supplies them? How can we get them? And what are we prepared to pay for them? And not actually just looking beyond the sticker price to say, "No, well, the real price for this good is what we need to have in storage or in production and we need to have it when we need it."
Those three things in combination, I think you're going to have a profound, profound change in the way that countries trade with one another, the way that Australia trades with the world, and I think that when you used to have this debate within the labor party or within the broader public discourse, people used to think that it was kind of in the abstract, that yeah, yeah, yeah, it's never going to happen sort of thing. So this national security augment or sovereign capability augment was dismissed as essentially a fortress Australia type thinking, scaremongering. We're essentially ransacking, trying to promote domestic industries at the expense of the consumer.
Well, it's shown up now, on this occasion we got relatively lucky. It was quite scary there for a period obviously, but I think the nature of the goods and the way that we're able to respond worked out okay, but wouldn't always. The fourth point I'd make, and this is the last point, but this is the foundational, critical point, it's played out recently in some of our foreign policies, that it's absolutely critical for Australia that a rules-based trading system is maintained. Australia can't… We are a middle power. We are a rich trading nation. We benefit greatly from a rules-based trading system, whether it's a grade set of rules, and those rules are enforced by an independent umpire and everyone observes the rules.
But we also don't benefit. Australia can't hope to exist in a situation or in an economic trading system where might is right. Essentially if the big dog wins, that's a problem for Australia, given our relative size and given our reliance on trade internationally. So when we're seeing things like trade being used in a form of foreign policy coercion, as we're seeing from the Chinese Communist Party, or when it comes to dumping of goods into Australia, which essentially dumping is selling goods into another country with the express theme of destroying that market, so that way you can continue to sell, right? Those two things are not in our interest.
When you look at the question of barley, when it comes to the tariffs that have been placed onto barley by the Chinese Communist Party of 80%, they're just not based in any sort of reality. Australia places zero tariffs on our barley. It's the most competitive barley producers that come from Australia. We have zero tariffs on it. China, and other nations frankly, are notorious subsidizers of their agricultural sector. So when you look at that argument, you can see what it is. It's Australia being punished for its foreign policy decisions, on this occasion, the decision to call for an independent inquiry into COVID-19 and the origin. But there are also other decisions that Australia has made that have been threatened, the 5G network with Huawei and other things of that nature.
Not having an independent umpire in place is a very, very dangerous place for Australia to be, and so we absolutely need to preserve a rules-based trading, because it's good or Australia as a trading nation and it's good for Australia as a middle power to have a well-supported, multilateral global system, not just for trade, but for all things. So I think trade's absolutely critical for Australia, but we need to be a little bit more clear-eyed about exactly what is that we want our country to be, what are the things that we need it to have, what are the expectations of the things that we need to have at the pivotal moments, and as it all becomes more uncertain, that we are sovereignly capable in critical industries and in the things that we rightly expect to have when we need them.
So I'm happy to take questions, but I think that probably is a snapshot of where I think it's heading. It's heading into an area where I think Australia can actually leverage it to our advantage. We've got everything we need in Australia, yeah, to produce much more than we currently do. Currently, we trade a lot of primary produce, which is good in terms of mining and agriculture things, but we can definitely make a lot more finished product with everything we need from energy to raw materials to the people, apart from the vision. It's not all doom and gloom. We can certainly use this time to retool our manufacturing sector, and in the process create lots and lots of jobs for average Aussies who can work in regional communities. So I'll leave it at that, but happy to take questions, Brandon. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Misha. We're now going to move onto answering some questions that were submitted on the Google forum. Senator Keneally – how long should Australia's international borders be closed during the pandemic, even after the numbers are heavily reduced, if not eradicated, by this year?
That question that's going to be determined by what's happening in the rest of the world and safe for us to do. Yeah, we might want to open up borders for, say, a particular skill need. I mentioned cyber security earlier. Today, the ASIO director general made clear that we are at even greater risk of cyber security attacks and online manipulation, foreign interference, and it may be that we need to bring in more people in that particular skillset, with that particular skillset. And so do we do that with the two week quarantine? Who pays for it? Same thing with international students. There may come a time where we feel comfortable or we have a desire to facilitate the reentry of international students to universities, but again, how do you do it? How is it safely done? Who pays for it? Is that attractive to people?
There may be the opportunity for somewhere like New Zealand, where people talk about this trans-Tasman bubble, that may be a possibility. But I think the question about how long our borders stay closed is really going to be determined by what's going on in the rest of the world. It still remains the case that we have had community transmission, but a significant amount, and I need to go back and double check, but I believe it's still the majority of our cases did come from an overseas, so we're trying to make sure that does not spike again with the second wave.
Thank you very much. Just to Misha, so what can the [AOP 00:29:08] do to support regional jobs in the rice industry and improve Australian trade in the face of China extorting countries that Australia export rice to?
Thank you for that question. It's a very esoteric question. I should just note that I'm not an agricultural economist, but I'll do my best to answer the question. I think going back to my comment about barley, look, Australia is an extraordinary competitive agricultural economy. Our farmers are the world's most competitive, and we export to the world all sorts of produce, right? In terms of rice, I think there'll be some ongoing challenges for Australia making sure that our farmers are able to access water when they need and we need to continue to be very innovative in our use of water for water-hungry crops like rice or cotton.
But certainly, the expectation would be that in a rules-based, going back to my comments about a rules-based trading system, if nobody is subsidizing rice, then Australia should be essentially the world's rice bowl, to the extent that we can produce it, the world should be able to buy it. Now, from memory, and I'm just going off the top of my head, but China subsidizes agricultural sector quite significantly. I was looking at this recently, I'm pretty sure it's about… I might have these numbers wrong, so for those listening on the tape and Googling, wanting to hang me on this, I'm pretty sure it's about 25% that they subsidize their rice industry to that extent.
Again, if you don't have an umpire in place to say, "Well, hang on a minute. You can't subsidize your goods here and then use that subsidy to take market share off not just Australia, but other countries that are producing rice, or you use that 25% advantage to dump into another good." So for example, let's just say we had a situation with Chinese rice was subsidized, and then it was dumped into Australia below cost with that subsidy, so therefore, the domestic industry can't compete and has to close down, and suddenly what was a completely competitive industry is now being closed through basically legal cheating. It's effectively, and when you look at dumping, it's the same way as using steroids at the Olympics. You're using an unfair advantage to cheat.
There are ways to, in Olympics, we drug test. In trade, we put in place anti-dumping duties to basically say, "Well, you're dumping. So you guys put 25% on a subsidy or you've undersold it for 25%, we're going to whack that back on, and we're going to equalize it back to where it's supposed to be." And then the World Trade Organization sits at the top of that, and enforces those rules. So really, back to the beginning, which is the way that we would do that is we would get a competitive industry. We support that with I should also say very good, strong labor laws in agriculture, because that's an area that I'd like to see some improvement from our farmers. I think, unfortunately, there's a lot of exploitation that occurs within the agricultural and the horticultural sector, particularly with migrant workers, as the senator talked about earlier, and it's shocking actually.
But parking that, looking at the macro economic argument, we want to see a competitive industry here. We want to make sure that there's a global system of rules in place, and that Australian farmers are able to compete, and then if we apply that to every other industry, Australia's very well-placed to export all sorts of things, and so the critical piece here is countries not cheating and there being an umpire to enforce when they do cheat. Currently we're getting to a stage where countries are cheating and they're also just basically thumbing their nose at the umpire. That is not a game that we can win. And so whether it's rice or anything else, it's a big concern for Australia as a middle power trading nation if we don't have the rule book enforced.
Fantastic. Well, thank you. So I've got another question for Senator Keneally, just from Aden. So how do you see labor confronting anxiety immigration in broad electorates, particularly key seats?
I think you froze a tiny bit on me there, which I mean, Parliament has-
Oh, sorry.
We have terrible… No, Parliament has this terrible connection, so I hope I'm coming through all right. Yeah, this is a really good question, because at one level, immigration becomes at times a political touchstone. I would recite that towards the end of last year, the Scanlon Foundation poured out their annual report, which really surveys the electorate across Australia on their attitudes towards a range of issues. Go and find it if you're interested, it showed that there's incredibly high support for migration, that overwhelmingly Australians celebrate our cultural diversity and multiculturalism, and think that it makes Australia a stronger place. What I do think a road support for migration is when we see that shift away from permanent migration to that two-tiered society that I spoke about earlier.
But I do think we can take some comfort in the fact that Australia is not like our American or Western European cousins, where immigration has become what is blamed for a range of other ills or economic challenges. I think we start off in a positive space. I think we have to advocate for a positive view of migration. We have to articulate how it benefits the country economically and socially, and we have to in some sense appeal to people's sense of pride and nostalgia on who we are and who we were and how we want to define ourselves into the future. I don't like the notion of thinking about it just in terms of key seats, but I'm not naïve to the fact that it plays itself out differently in different communities.
I would point to this, a lot of people might think that when we're talking about regional communities that there might be an instant kind of resistance. In fact, if anything, regional communities very much seem to want migrants and permanent migrants to come and settle there. They help bolster the population, they create economic opportunity. Misha just mentioned the exploitation of farm workers. I went to a regional town, I went to Shepparton in Victoria, and visited there one of the biggest apple growers in the country. They were frustrated because all they can get in terms of labor is temporary migrants or undocumented workers that come from labor hire companies. They know the labor hire companies are exploiting them. There's very little they can do about it.
When I said, "What can we do to solve this?" They kept saying to me, "The Albanian solution," and I had no idea what the Albanian solution was, except it turns out under the Fraser Government, there was a program to bring Albanians to allow them to come to Shepparton and to work in the orchards to learn skills, because there were some problems going on in Albania at the time. If they wanted to, they could settle down and stay, and many of them did, and they spoke glowingly about how these were the best thing that had happened to the town, that many of them stayed, started their own businesses.
I think Australians understand the benefits of migration. I think where we get into dangerous territory is when we do see an erosion of wages, when we do see a lack of independent labor market testing, when we don't have a robust industrial relations framework, when companies are making a choice, offering wages that they know that an Australian won't work for or conditions they know won't appeal to an Australian, so they can say, "Oh, we've done labor market testing and we're going to now bring in a migrant to do this job." That's when we start to erode away support for multicultural communities and for migrant communities to come be part of us. So I think that's what we have to safeguard.
Absolutely. Thank you very much for that. So we're going to move onto a bit of a fun section now. A lot of people in young labor have been following the US-
[crosstalk 00:38:25] Oh, I was not told there would be a fun section, so I'm very excited.
[crosstalk 00:38:28] quite a bit now.
Anything fun about politics [crosstalk 00:38:31].
Yeah, so just going to ask Misha, just have a question from Dillon just about who Misha would have supported in the Democratic primaries and what he thinks the Democrats need to do to win in 2020.
Right, well, it's an interesting question. As a faithful New South Wales right winger, I actually was on team Biden from the beginning. I'm going to be honest though, I thought they were going to sink him as the primary went on and those big stats on Biden. I quite liked Pete Buttigieg. I think he was a really interesting and exciting candidate. But I think they've… Look, I think this election's important. Every election's the most important election, but I think this election is a critical election in terms of the future of the United States, but also it's profoundly important for Australia and the world in terms of US leadership of some of these things we've talked about, in terms of multilateralism.
I was in favor of Biden. I took a little Buttigieg, but I think he actually got a bit unlucky, too. I think the way Iowa played out I think was bad luck for him. He didn't get that Iowa bounce into New Hampshire and then Klobuchar kind of touched him up in that debate. Anyway, so he very nearly could have jagged it, but he's got about 40 years on his side as a competitor to Biden, so I'm sure he can have at least one or two more shots. It was third time the charm I think for Joe. So I think Biden is a good candidate. I think I was pleased to see that they went with a moderate candidate and didn't go down the Sanders path or the Elizabeth Warren path, because I think that would've been very jarring and I actually think it would have become a referendum on the Democrats and not being a referendum on Trump, which I think is kind of critical here.
We could go, we could do an entire conversation on this, but I think what's going to be critical, clearly the Rust Belt States, the question of trade's going to be very important, how managing that issue. When you look at the states and the regions that swung to Trump, when you actually overlay trying a suspension to the World Trade Organization, they're called the China Shock, which essentially was the loss of all the manufacturing work in those areas and they all become extraordinarily economically distressed. Trump promised, rightly or wrongly, and whether or not you believe he's actually done any of these things, he promised people that he would stand up for them in their economic interests, and I think it's critical that the Democrats have got a really good answer when it comes to manufacturing policy, industry policy, jobs policies for people in those swing states, and the Rust Belt States, the so-called blue wall that crumbled.
I should preface, well, not preface, but I predicted Hillary Clinton would win, so you can take all that with a grain of salt. Now we can perhaps defer to Senator Keneally, who's probably a little closer to home to these matters than I am.
Brandon, [crosstalk 00:41:53].
… same question to Senator Keneally.
All right.
[crosstalk 00:41:58]
In my fantasy football league, I would have gone for Elizabeth Warren, but I knew that was never going to win. I think Misha's really covered it all well there.
Absolutely. In terms of Australia's immigration strategy, I've got another question. Can you see an Australian government, particularly a labor government, using immigration as a strategic tool to drive growth while bundling out the domestic labor market? If so, how?
Yeah, look, I think we had seen under particularly this government since Malcolm Turnbull created the Department of Home Affairs, we have seen migration downgraded as a key economic tool. This government through the creation of the Department of Home Affairs has securitized migration. It talks about it in terms of the threats of people who might come in. It talks about it through a security lens. I'm not saying security isn't important. It has always been an important part of migration. The immigration department has always been two sides of one coin, who we let in and who we don't. On the who we let in, it has always been about why we let people in, how we integrate them in, what skills they bring in, how it grows the economy in our community.
All out of that has just been so lost under the creation of the Department of Home Affairs where you've got a real security gloss that cuts across the whole department. You only need to look at the Department of Home Affairs to see it ranked 93rd out of 93rd in terms of morale. A third of the people who work there wish they worked somewhere else. It has had an exodus of people who understood how to use migration as an economic and community building tool. Anthony has created here in the Parliament a group, we've got some working groups that are working on policy as we go toward the next national platform.
We are very much looking at migration as an economic tool, because this government has just… The immigration minister doesn't even sit at the cabinet table. So nobody is really talking about immigration in that context. But that is a fundamental important part of why we have a migration program, is to grow the economy. I think you do remember that under Hawke and Keating in particular, we did rely on migration, and we did use it to grow the economy. We did use it to create a sense of successful multiculturalism in our community. That is there, and Australians are ready for that message, I believe. I think it can be done, but I think because we bring a real focus on skills, training, fixing up the vet system, investing in education, investing in public education.
We had a whole range of policy settings at the last election that I think you will see similar or same variations are that the next one in terms of Australian skills authority, about labor market testing, about a national labor hire licensing scheme, and the like that I think will help us really promote the opportunities to grow the skills of Australians and yet argue for the importance of migration to grow the economy and create opportunity.
Thank you very much, Kristina. I've just got just one final question for Misha. China allows the flaunting of intellectual property rules in order to allow Chinese industries to have unfairly competitive prices at a global stage. Is it ethical for Australia to buy these products? Should Australia do more to clamp down on this? And what does this say more broadly about China's trade practice?
Yeah, you went out there a bit, but I think I understood the thrust of the question, that IP theft. Look, the question of… Technology is kind of critical to economic success, right? Every country strives to out compete other countries and to essentially have a tech advantage, and then economic advantage comes from tech, as does military advantage. So the Chinese Communist Party has made an absolute art form out of IP theft. It was described, I can't remember who said it, but it was essentially described that the intellectual property theft by the Chinese Communist Party is the single greatest transfer of human wealth in human history.
The capacity to make intellectual advances and technological advances and protect that intellectual property, that's critical to the way that we understand how the principles of economics work and that's how it's worked, and making those rights enforceable are critical to making sure that people spend their time and effort and energy investing into research, investing into innovation, investing into improvements. So again, not to go right into… You can spend a lot of time talking about the various strategies, for example, if you want to set up a business in China, they make you essentially force transfer your IP across to an adjunct venture partner, and then over time, once the domestic firm has worked out all your secrets, it should be often that they then deny you market access.
China, when it comes to IP, is extremely ruthless, and every country I think should be thinking about its own system and making sure it rigorously defends those from incursion and cyber incursion. Going right back to my original comment, the critical piece here for Australia, for everyone, is that we've got a rules-based system. So be it IP law, be it trade law, etc., that we respect one another's sovereignty, that there's a rule book in place, and that there's an umpire, and that when the umpire makes a decision, we respect that decision. And so IP theft is a huge concern, it's particularly a concern when it's occurring auto credit regime, stealing text secrets, military secrets, and then using those to either further enhance its own military or repress its own people. I think that's a further concern to what is already an economic concern.
Thank you. With that, we'll have to end, but we have one final two questions for both of you, just as Misha does with all his podcasts. If you were to choose three historical figures, international relations, who are dead or alive you could have at a barbecue?
Are you going to me first? All right. Well, I have just finished watching Mrs. America on Foxtel, and Gloria Steinem, who I have met and have had lunch with, is from my hometown, Toledo, Ohio, and I did reflect after watching that show that I would love to have dinner with Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Bella Abzug. That's just my moment, that's where I'm at at the moment. I'm sure if you asked me at some other time, I'd have a whole 'nother list. But they would be a rocking dinner party, as a child of the '70s, I would love to do that.
That's a great lineup. And what would yours, Misha, be?
I should just point out that this is meant to be the fun section, and I painstakingly point out that this is the world's lamest question in my podcast. So the fact that someone has decided to take me up on this is… Anyway, look, give yourself an uppercut, whoever's written that question in. But look, so for me, funnily enough, I probably haven't spent enough time thinking about this, notwithstanding that its my show. Winston Churchill would be someone that I would have on there. I think particularly one of the things that troubles me these days is that it doesn't seem to be abundantly clear that the Nazis are the bad guys. So getting the guy that essentially kicked the Nazis' ass back to the Stone Age I think would be a person that I would definitely love to hear from, and plus hearing a few of his witticisms would be great.
Another person would be Bobby Kennedy. I'd probably spend all the time asking him about JFK, but what I love about Bobby Kennedy particularly, I don't know if any of you have seen it, but I've been thinking back quite a bit with his speech that he gave the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to watch it. It's a very, very, very powerful speech, and I think particularly timely with things that we're seeing at the moment with the protests in the United States and in Australia as well about race relations, and I think had Bobby not been assassinated in 1968, I think things might have been very different in the United States. I think he'd be a great person to have.
And probably lastly, I'm reading a lot of Ernest Hemingway at the moment, so I don't know how much Bobby Kennedy drinks, but Hemingway and Churchill [crosstalk 00:52:20]-
You're saying this is an alcoholic dinner.
Well, he's Irish, Irish-Catholic, so maybe he does drink as well. Look, yeah, and an Australia union official, so it's definitely going to be we need to have a well-stocked bar. But they're my three for the extraordinarily lame, not fun time question.
Well, there you go. Well, we'll have to leave it there, but thank you so much, Senator Kenneally and Misha, for coming.