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Professor Ross Garnaut: Bouncing back from COVID – how renewables can make Australia a manufacturing superpower.
May 11, 2020	Misha Zelinsky	Australian leaders, China, Chinese Communist Party, Economics, Nationalism, Populism, Trade	00:32:47
Professor Ross Garnaut is one of Australia's most distinguished economists and a global expert on climate change, trade and energy policy. He was Prime Minister Bob Hawke's principal economic advisor and was Australia's Ambassador to China. He's lead many government reviews, including the seminal though ill fated Garnaut Climate Change Review into carbon emission reduction for the then Rudd Government.
He is the author of many studies and books too numerous to mention, but his recent book – Superpower – details how Australlia can make the most of the economic benefits of the upcoming clean energy revolution.
Misha Zelinsky caught up with Ross for a chinwag about the politics of climate change including why Kevin Rudd was unable to pass his emissions trading scheme in 2009 and who was to blame, why COVID-19 shouldn't distract us from climate change action, why Australia should be the world's smelter for aluminium and steel and how renewable power can make Australia a manufacturing powerhouse, what the decoupling between the US and China means for Australia's security, and why we need coordinated global action more than ever.
Transcript of Episode:
Misha Zelinsky:
Hi everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Diplomates, I'm Misha Zelinsky. I'm joined today by Professor Ross Garnaut. Ross, have I got you there?
Ross Garnaut:
Yes. Hello, Misha, good to be with you.
Thank you very much for joining us. Now, of course, you are, as I understand it, in Queensland in Barcaldine, is that right?
Yeah. Barcaldine. Home of the AWU amongst other things.
Indeed. Indeed. The scene of the very famous 1891 Shearer Strike and where the Labor Party was formed under the Tree of Knowledge there. So it's an auspicious place to be.
Yeah. That's right, not a bad place to be during a pandemic, warm and isolated.
Very good. I'm glad that you're socially isolating. Now, you've touched on the COVID-19 crisis, you've been around and dealt with government policy for some time, dating right back to your work with the Hawke government. What are the similarities or differences to the crisis from the past that you see?
Well, we've been through a few. The deep recession of 1991, the Asian financial crisis of 98, the global financial crisis of 08/09 and this one. I must say this is bigger than any of those.
Almost anything that goes wrong can trigger an economic crisis. And then they take on a life of their own. And when this one's all over, we'll be very much aware that it was begun by a health event, the pandemic, but the economic collapse that followed took on a life of its own. And it was very damaging in ways that were not easily foreseen at the time the pandemic hit.
One big difference between this and those earlier crises is that we don't have a coherent international system to deal with it now. You compare it with the GFC, which before this one was the biggest hit since the Great Depression, biggest hit to global economic stability. Back then you had an effective co-operation between the leadership of the US, China, Europe, Japan, Australia.
Kevin Rudd as prime minister used that episode really to create the G20 as a heads of government meeting. And a couple of meetings of heads of government, presidents and prime ministers during the GFC was very important to getting a coherent global response. A commitment not to respond in protectionist ways and beggar thy neighbor ways. A commitment to have simultaneous fiscal expansion and monetary expansion.
And under that rubric you did get a coordinated global effort that greatly diminished the damage that was done by the crisis. Well, that's in contrast to the current situation where you've got incoherence in global leadership. Where you've got the world's biggest economy run by a man who thinks that international cooperation is a bad thing. That created crises in relations not only with geo-strategic rivals, China and others, but with his allies in Europe.
So that incoherence in the global response to crisis is the big difference I think between this one and anything we've seen in our lifetime.
That's an interesting point and a useful segue into, if you want to talk about global political incoherence, you've done a lot of work in the recent past, and the last decade certainly and beyond, in response to climate change. Now, it's easy to forget, it seems it was only just yesterday that we were absolutely beside ourselves in Australia about the impacts of the summer from hell, the bush fires. Certainly now we find ourselves in a completely different situation with the covid-19 pandemic. Do you worry that the covid-19 response and the overall situation is a distraction from the efforts on climate change?
Well, inevitably it is a distraction. Just a fact of life. But this pandemic is a pretty serious thing, both in the health effects and the huge economic damage following it. But the pandemic and the economic collapse do not change the way carbon dioxide works, the physics of carbon dioxide just keeps on doing what it does. And the process of warming continues. And we'd be foolish not to keep that in mind.
It's inevitable that we deal with the health crisis and the economic crisis as it comes. But wise leadership can deal with immediate things in ways that help rather than hurt progress in dealing with longer term issues.
We could manage the recovery from the economic crisis we're going to go through with a strong focus on investment in the new economy. Or we could deal with it with a lot of ad hoc measures that increase short term employment and have no regard to what's going to be sustainable in the long term. And that's one of the most important choices that Australia and the international community will make in the period ahead.
Now, just turning to the so called summer from hell relating to the bush fires. And one of the things that was talked about, directly quoted from a report that you prepared for the Rudd government then, it was that fire seasons will start earlier and slightly later and generally be more intense. This effect increases over time, but should be more directly observable by 2020. That was very popularly shared, I think in sorrow, online. I mean, firstly, are you surprised how accurate that was?
Yeah. My report got that exactly right. And I should explain how I got it right. My report was very well resourced. I had a very strong group of people working with me, initially from all the state governments. My report was initially commissioned by the six states and two territories with an invitation for the Commonwealth to join. And the Commonwealth joined when Kevin Rudd became prime minister late in 2007.
And I had the resources to commission work from the very best atmospheric physics scientists in Australia. And I got a group in CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology to do that report on bush fires. And, as you say, my report got it right. All I did was honestly and accurately, put into my report what they reported to me and said.
Am I surprised that it was exactly right? Well, the fact that 2020 was mentioned might be a bit of a fluke. But all of the science that I commissioned, in ways that foretold how things would evolve in the impacts of climate change, turned out to be very sound.
What the work I published in my report said about sea level rise, about the warming effect of climate change, what would happen in Australia in the decade ahead, the drying of southern Australia. All of these things turned out pretty much as the science said they would.
All of the scientific work over the past dozen years since my report came out has broadly confirmed the accuracy of the scientific evidence as it came out in the work that I commissioned and which I published in my report in 2008. Bush fires is just one part of that. And getting the year exactly right might be a bit of a fluke, but the work was very sound. And like reports on other effects of climate change, it's turning out to be, sadly, very much as predicted.
Now, one of the things I'd be curious to get your take on, of course, you produced the Garnaut Report for the Rudd government. One of the things people talk about or believe when you look at the polling for support for action on climate change was that the support fell essentially after the millennium drought broke. So there was a belief at the time that the dams would be empty, that they would never fill again. There was a great degree of urgency. It then of course rained and we lost, I suppose, support for action. And then we had the climate wars under Gillard and then Abbott. Do you think the bush fires will be a turning point or is this the new millennium drought?
Misha, I don't think you've got the history of the politics right there. A very simple reason why my recommendations weren't implemented as the States and the Commonwealth had in mind in 2008, and that's when the legislation to implement the central feature of my recommendations, the carbon price, went past the House of Representatives, the opposition had said it would support it in the Senate. And at the 11th hour, just days before the vote was to come in the Senate, Tony Abbott organized himself to depose Malcolm Turnbull as the leader of the Liberal Party. And the numbers were no longer in the Senate.
In those days, the government needed the support of the opposition to pass legislation. The Greens weren't enough. So the reason why Rudd did that at the time was that Abbott rolled Turnbull in the Liberal Party party room.
And the Greens also voted against it as I recall.
Yeah. But that was incidental. The Greens didn't have the numbers to pass it.
Now, a couple of Liberal senators, who were supporters of Malcolm Turnbull, did support the legislation. But whether they would have actually supported it if the Greens were on the same side as them is a moot point. But certainly the Greens, with the Labor Party, didn't have the numbers at the time.
Now, I don't think that the end of the millennium drought had anything like the influence on public opinion that you're talking about. What reduced support for action on climate change was the visceral attack waged by News Corp and Tony Abbott against action on climate change. Supported of course by elements of the business community that stood to lose. And organizations like the Business Council and Mining Industry Council tend to support the squeakiest wheels. And so they tend to support their coal miners and others opposed to anything being done about climate.
But it was the visceral attacks, especially by the opposition, but with support from the majority media, that led to the change of opinion. I think there's lots of evidence in Australia when the leader of one of the major parties takes a very strong position, there's a certain proportion of the Australian community that follows that lead. Whether it's the Labor Party leader or Liberal Party leader taking that lead. And when Abbott started attacking any action on climate change, that moved the opinion polls a bit. But it never moved it against action on climate change. And I record this in my book, Superpower.
If you track the polls right through, sure, there was a dipping of support for action on climate change during the Abbott era. But there was never a majority support for Tony Abbott's positions.
Yes, that's a really good prompt on the history, but also you mention your book, Superpower, recently released, available at all good bookshops. So I encourage people to read it, it's a very interesting read. But you make the case for a renewable makeover of Australia. But essentially from more of an economic standpoint, clearly there's a climate imperative to it. But you argue the case on an economic standpoint. Can you explain the benefits of how you see this renewable makeover? And should we have been aiming for these net zero emissions target? And what's a realistic timeframe to get it done?
Yeah, well, in Superpower I talk about what's changed since my two big reports. First of all for all the premiers and the prime minister back in 2008. And then the multi-party committee on climate change in the hung parliament chaired by Julia Gillard in 2011.
Now, the big thing that's changed since then, there's the cost of the alternative technologies, the zero emissions technologies, have fallen dramatically.
I said that I'd assumed in all my modeling that solar costs would come down by a few percent per annum. Well, they came down by 85% in the first decade. And they're still coming down since then. So that means that in places with good solar and wind resources like Australia, the costs of renewable energy are now lower than the costs of new-build thermal energy, much lower. So if the economics run things there won't be a new, coal-powered power station ever built again. And that's different from the story as it looked a dozen years ago.
Now, with the whole world committing to going to zero emissions, as it did in Paris, that was the decision of the Paris Agreement 2015, there was a decision to hold temperature increases below two degrees and as close as possible to 1.5. Well, two degrees will require zero net emissions in the world as a whole by 2050.
If the whole world goes towards zero emissions, then everyone will be using zero emissions energy, renewable energy. Australia has by far the best combinations of renewable energy of all of the countries on earth. And very much better than other developed countries. And they are the main competitors for these very capital intensive forms of energy. And Australia therefore should be the lowest energy cost country in the zero emissions world economy.
Now, you need an awful lot of electricity, an awful lot of energy, to produce metals like aluminum or iron with zero emissions. Currently, Australia is quite a big exporter of aluminum using coal. But in the zero emissions industry of the future, you won't be able to make aluminum that's made from coal.
The Chief Executive of the two companies that make aluminum now in mainland Australia, Rio Tinto, which owns the Gladstone smelter and the Tomago smelter. And Alcoa which owns the Portland smelter, the Chief Executives of those two organizations have said they won't be making aluminum with coal-based electricity in a couple of decades time. Plants will have to either be based on renewable energy or they'll be closed.
And when all of the world is making aluminum with zero emissions, electricity will be the low cost way of doing it. Now, we're already the world's biggest exporter of aluminum oxide, aluminum ore as bauxite or turned into alumina, the alumina plants in Gladstone and in the south west of WA. If you've got the lowest cost electricity and you've already got the alumina, you are the natural place to turn it into aluminum.
So our strength in aluminum smelting will be much greater in the renewable energy world economy of the future than it was in the coal based electricity economy of the past. So shifting to renewable energy not only will give plants in Portland, Tomago and Gladstone a future. When currently using coal, they don't have a future. These should be expanding industry, should become much bigger in Australia.
Iron is an even bigger possibility. Currently iron is made from iron ore mostly by putting in coke, from coal, in a blast furnace. Well, that's a very emissions intensive process, 7% of all the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from blast furnaces turning iron ore into iron metal.
In the zero emissions economy to which we're all committed in the future that will be made from hydrogen made from renewable energy. Again, we will have a tremendous advantage being the source of the iron ore and also the lowest cost source of renewable energy. The natural economic place to make iron metal will be Australia.
So we'd have to be real duds, real dimwits not to be a major iron producer with huge employment and income from iron production in the zero emissions economy of the future.
Well, I think that'd be very welcome news for all the AWU members that make steel now living in the country at the moment, and alumina and bauxite mining. But one of the things I was trying to get you take on, you talk about Australia as the world's smelter. One of the challenges we have as an energy nation is that we want, unlike every other country in the world that exports gas, we are now the world's largest gas exporter. We've been silly enough to not reserve any of that for ourselves. Every other gas exporting nation does that. I mean, how do you consider that policy, in light of the energy transition we need to make, and the role that gas should play in the energy transition?
I think you're being rough on Australia. Not all Australians are tarred with that brush. West Australia is the biggest the gas state and that does have domestic reservation. And WA's gas is the cheapest gas in the developed world now. So WA's made itself a natural place for a lot of energy intensive industry and petrochemicals.
Eastern Australia is different. But don't say that all Australia has that policy. WA didn't. Certainly, we did ourselves economic damage by encouraging over investment in LNG plants in Gladstone. We actually put in more plants than we had gas. And that created a scarcity.
And we went, in Eastern Australia, from having the developed world's cheapest gas, so that Melbourne, Geelong and Adelaide were all quite substantial cities for gas-based manufacturing. We killed our advantage in that. And in fact went from having the world's lowest cost gas to amongst the highest cost gas in the world as a result of over investment in export in Gladstone.
I think this was simply a failure to think through analytically all of the implications of that over investment in Gladstone export capacity. If you like, we didn't think it through. We were a bit dumb.
I think that's a really good point. And the WA policy, of course, only extends as far as the WA waters, but it doesn't capture the Commonwealth waters. So it's an imperfect policy in WA, but still a much better policy than we have in the East Coast. So thank you for clarifying that.
The other question I had, and you talk about this in your book, but I'm curious, maybe you could talk about the prospect of carbon farming and what exactly that means in terms of smarter land use? I mean, I know one of the things you talked about in the Garnaut Report was us becoming more reliant on kangaroo meat, for example, given the nature of Australia's soil base. But can you talk about the smarter land use and carbon farming?
Yeah, on the kangaroo point, which was about one page of my 650 page report back in 2000, that got a lot of attention. But it is true that kangaroo's a very healthy meat. And it is a zero emissions meat. And it's the traditional meat of Australia. Australians lived on kangaroo for 60,000 years and we had more of that in our diet even if we fed more of it to our pets rather than using mutton or old beef. Then it would be helpful to emissions.
But on carbon farming, there's more carbon in the top two meters of soil than there is in the whole of the atmosphere plus all of the living things, all of the living plants and animals on earth. So just incrementally increasing the carbon content of soils could have very big leverage over carbon in the atmosphere.
And the process is that living things are putting down roots, dying leaves, the residuals of plant matter, which can become long term additions to the carbon content of soils if you manage soils in different ways. And quite evidently this could be very big. And there's certainly big opportunities for this in parts of Australia.
But there's also opportunities for capturing more carbon in biomass. And in both my reports, and also in Superpower, I talked a little bit about some of the ways this can be done. But if you've got large parts of Australia, for example, the Valley country, the Mulga country, country with low productivity grazing, we don't care very much about the vegetation on it. So then it's carrying a lot less carbon and living plants than was there a long time ago. Carefully manage that in different ways and there can be a lot more carbon absorbed into the plants. Quantitatively, potentially very large. But you can also harvest that in a sustainable way. And more plant biomass can grow behind it. So you can harvest sustainably without diminishing the carbon stock. And then use that biomass as a basis for various industries, chemical industries, petrochemicals industries that currently use coal, gas and oil. And use of the biomass in those petrochemical industries, chemical industries will have zero emissions. Whereas use of coal, gas and oil has very high emissions. So that can be another path to the zero emissions economy.
And I mentioned in the book that Australia has got very big advantages in growing biomass, huge land area compared to our population. And it's that opportunity that means that we can have a comparative advantage in biomass for industrial use just like we've got a comparative advantage in renewable energy.
Well, that certainly paints a very positive picture about some of the economic benefits. One of the things I'd like to get your take on, just turning back to the covid-19 crisis, and we've certainly seen supply chains under stress. We've already seen China and the US engaging in what's called a decoupling. As they sort of pull apart their supply chains on security grounds and also economic protectionist grounds. How do you see this impacting on Australia? And do you see, first, what are the risks? But also what's the case for more domestic capability in light of the crisis?
Just on the general question, closing up global supply chains, that would make us poorer. Australia had a huge growth in wages and average living standards in the nineties through higher productivity. And a lot of that came through greater use of international trade, specializing more in the things we did best.
And we had another growth in incomes in the first decade of the century on the basis of the China boom and increased exports to China. So, let's be clear, de-globalization means taking away the increases in living standards we had then. We'd have to have lower wages, lower incomes, if that process went very far.
Now, we may need to accept lower wages on security grounds. But I think we should not unquestionably accept reductions in living standards for security reasons. So we should question the basis for that. And only restrict trade where there's a really good security reason for doing it.
Sometimes businesses that benefit from protection will argue for breaking up global supply chains and use security arguments, but they're really just arguing their own book. And I don't think we should accept lower wages from reduced trade just because someone says it's important for our security.
Let's analyze whether the particular restriction on trade really is important for our security. Some things might be. We might need an industry making surgical masks and other protective gear in the pandemic. And that might cost us more than relying on imports. But let's not just accept what someone says about that because every restriction on trade will mean lower wages and a lower standard of living.
Do you see opportunities that could emerge, for example, China dominates rare earth metals, which is what people make batteries. Australia actually has quite a bit of it, though we've only got a small developing industry. Do you see there's opportunities, as the world de-couples, that Australia could potentially use that to its advantage as well as maximize its security in the world security?
Well, if de-coupling goes far enough, then a lot of our rare earths will stay in the ground. Because de-coupling means America first and not relying on countries across the Pacific like Australia. So, I think we've got to be careful about that argument. We've got a wonderful endowment of a lot of minerals that are important in the new economy. A lot of the battery materials, processing those could be a huge source of growth in incomes. We could do that competitively with China or anyone else. And a healthy global trading system will make those industries bigger, will increase employment and incomes. De-globalization in the big countries on this earth though will get in the way of us taking advantage of those endowments.
Well, Ross, I'm sure I could talk to you about this all day but you've got plenty of things to be doing up there in sunny Queensland. But thank you very much for joining us on Diplomates. And really appreciate the time and the insights.
And very good to talk to you, Misha, and all the best.
Benedict Hugosson: Still the heartland? How social democrats can fight back in Sweden, Europe and the world.
December 15, 2019	Misha Zelinsky	Democracy, Economics, Europe, Faith, Inequality, Liberalism, Nationalism, Populism, Social Democracy	0:46:29
Sweden is often considered to be the heartland of social democracy – but that may no longer be the case.
Benedict Hugosson is a global expert in political campaigning.
He has lead national field campaigns for the Social Democrats in Sweden and is a leading thinker in political engagement strategies and tactics.
An Australian born Harvard graduate, Ben has trained activists in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
I caught up with Ben for a chinwag about the fall in support for the historically dominant Swedish Social Democratic party, the rise of right wing nationalists in Sweden, why party membership is critical to voting patterns, how face to face conversations are still better than digital campaign tools, and what the future holds for mainstream European political parties of both the left and right.
It's a fascinating, in-depth insight into what is happening right throughout Europe. It also uncovers the important role that membership and organising plays in electoral outcomes.
As ever, if you're enjoying the show – please rate and review!
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Misha Zelinsky: Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us here in Australia.
Ben Hugosson: Thank you very much.
Misha Zelinsky: Now, we might start with a little of your background because I think this is somewhat curious one. How does an Ozzie end up in Swedish politics because, one I'm curious to know about and to how do I get the job?
Ben Hugosson: Exactly. Like you said, I didn't grow up in Sweden. I grew up on the far North Coast of New South Wales. I think that the reason why I ended up in politics has a lot to do with my background here in Australia. When I was about 12 years old, my mother passed away with cancer and my dad was pensioned, he got sick and couldn't run the family farm. When, we grew up there was a recurring theme of not having much money. There was one night in particular that I remember, it was a very hot day and Australia's great in that respects, I love the warm weather. But what I love is when, of an afternoon, the temperature just drops and then you get these fantastic thunderstorms that come in and you get these fork lightning and it's just such a spectacular light show.
Ben Hugosson: On this night I'm lying in bed and we're just about to go to sleep and a storm is raging outside and all of a sudden the whole roof blows off our house. Me and my twin brother, we get out of there and the family, we spend the whole night in the bathroom because that's the safest place in the house. The next day I remember, workers coming and climbing up over our house and they basically had this bird's eye view of my room and where I sleep, my bed. I remember looking at my bed and just seeing it very tattered and broken and I was embarrassed. I wasn't only embarrassed, I felt so powerless. I never really got involved in politics in Australia, for me that was something that other people did.
Ben Hugosson: When I got to Sweden, there was a lot of people talking about a politician called Olof Palme, and he was the prime minister's Sweden. People seemed to love this guy and I had no idea who he was. One day, I looked up on, on Wikipedia, I looked up who he was, and I started to read. Down the bottom of Wikipedia there's a lot of different links and I click on one of these links and I go into a website, which is Olof Palme International Center. Which is the aid organization for the labor movement in Sweden and I see pictures of people that are held back by structures, that basically may mean that people are powerless to affect their own situations. I see them and I see other people that are helping to remove these structures. So, people do feel empowered and oftentimes these people are the same people. And I could see myself in the people that were held down by structures, but I could also see myself in those people that helped remove those structures. That for me was really inspiring. There, and then I basically signed up to the party.
Misha Zelinsky: The social Democrats.
Ben Hugosson: The Social Democrats, exactly. After that, I went to an education to a training that they had for aid projects. Despite the fact I could not speak the language, I didn't have a project, I didn't have anything, they welcomed me with open arms. When you get there, there is such a focus on people's movements, on getting people involved and when I was there, I met people and they just dragged me along to a meeting. All of a sudden you sit there and you start seeing how people are writing motions and they're sending them through the party and it's becoming party politics. You get this taste of democracy and you want more of it. That's why I got involved with the party and why I have been involved with the party since then.
Misha Zelinsky: For those that listening, and may not completely understand the situation currently in Sweden. Maybe you can just quickly cover that off, I always joke that most of the political parties in Sweden are all to the left of the labor party. But currently the Social Democrats are in government, but they were a minority government. Maybe you could just quickly cover that off before we dive into, what else is happening.
Ben Hugosson: I can begin by saying the Swedish Social Democrats have been the most successful democratic political party in the history of the world. They have pretty much-
Misha Zelinsky: I think the Labor Party, we also claim that. But we can arm wrestle for it.
Ben Hugosson: Basically since the 1920s, 1930s the Social Democrats had been in power in Sweden, pretty much unbroken. What's been happening recently is that that hegemony has been changing, has been loosening up. What we find now is that we have gone from a party that's been about 45% and that's great because we could, we could govern on 45% because we had. And left this party to the left of us that would just accept everything that we wanted to do. Just slowly but surely going down in getting smaller and smaller election results and then having to start bringing in other parties into our coalition. We started with the greens, but our share of the vote has sunk so much now that in the last election we were very, very lucky to form government. It took three months for us to form government. What we've had to do is actually start negotiating with some of the neo liberalist parties.
Ben Hugosson: The reason why we can negotiate with these, is that there has been a dramatic increase in right wing populism in Sweden. We've had a, traditionally there are the Moderates who have been out our opposition who have basically now been dwarfed by a far right party. This far right party in the last week has actually become the largest political party in polls in Sweden. For us, that's a bit of a defeat because we've always been that party. We're sitting there now with a progressive block this has to negotiate with a neo liberalist block to hold out the conservative block. This conservative block hasn't existed in Swedish politics for a long time, but they are becoming the most powerful block in Swedish politics. What is happening then is that now that we're having to negotiate with neo liberalist, we're having to negotiate away a lot of things that we went to the election on that are very, very dear to us as a political party. But, it's becoming a solution that we have to have if we do not want a far right government.
Misha Zelinsky: This increasingly is a challenge for a lot of… Social democratic parties globally been in decline of course, we lost the election here in 2019. But this is a challenge throughout Europe with the traditional center-right parties in many cases disappearing or being cannibalized by far right parties. What's driving it in Sweden in particular, is there a particular issue that's driving this populism that you can see?
Ben Hugosson: You can look at this on many levels. Firstly, I think that the narrative that the far right is using, is built on the narrative of the right wing parties. To break down the social democratic hegemony that has been in Sweden, the right wing party, the Moderates, when they were looking to attack us back in the early two thousands. They looked at the welfare system and we're looking at the amount of people that were actually cheating the welfare system. One of the first things that they did was they hired a right wing think tank to do a study and it came out in the newspapers and the title of the newspaper was. Or the article in the newspaper was two out of 10 people cheat or know somebody who was cheated the welfare system or something like that. It makes it sound like there's a lot of people cheating the welfare system. But in reality, if we're 10 people and everybody knows one of those people, then you can say 100% of people know somebody that's cheating the welfare system.
Misha Zelinsky: Lies, damned lies and statistics.
Ben Hugosson: Exactly. What it did is it painted that picture that there were people cheating the welfare system.
Misha Zelinsky: Is this a new thing in Sweden or it's always been bipartisan support for welfare's an attack of that nature, a new phenomenon?
Ben Hugosson: The righters always attack the welfare system, but there has been such a large acceptance for the welfare system. Mainly because our welfare system it's not means tested. It's something that is general for everybody. So, if you are getting some government rebate, we don't test if you have a low paying job or a high paying job, everybody gets it. That for us has been very, very important because what it's done is it created a broad acceptance for welfare in the country. But, these attacks on these democratic systems were then use by the far right. Basically when you have the Moderates coming in and saying that, "There's a lot of people cheating the welfare system." Then you get the far right coming in and saying, "Okay, yes, we established that fact that people are cheating the welfare. They add that we know who was cheating the welfare system."
Ben Hugosson: They run ads where they say that our budget, it's a competition between, pensioners that that wants a decent living standard and immigrants that are coming in and cheating the welfare system. They build up that tension, but we have to say that, that narrative that they have formed is actually on the back of neoliberalism. What they did when they created this mistrust of the welfare system, they created and an arena for the far right to come in and actually create conflicts in between groups in society.
Ben Hugosson: I think that that is an important thing to see that the right wing and neo-liberalism has broken down a lot of the support for our democratic institutions. But I think that it goes a lot further than that as well. I think that when they have come in and they've broken down support for democratic institutions. They have broken down and privatized and hollowed out, democratic structures as well. One of the things that we have done is we've looked at the role of engagement in this crisis and one of the things that we see is that self-governing organizations have been basically the playground for where people have engaged. There've been the default mode of engagement for very many people. Since the 70s these institutions have started to lose members, so there's a narrative that it's political party, that are losing members but this is definitely not the case. It's all-
Misha Zelinsky: People don't join anymore.
Ben Hugosson: People don't join anymore. We're not a nation of joiners basically, and this is a problem both for the union movement or for political parties, but all-
Misha Zelinsky: Churches.
Ben Hugosson: Forming clubs, churches, you name it. What's happening is that people aren't experiencing democracy on an everyday basis or in these self-governing organizations. They're not experiencing democracy and when they don't experience democracy as a lived experience on an everyday basis. Of course, they're not going to start thinking that democratic institutions can actually provide solutions to our pressing problems because they haven't experienced it before. I think that there is a big connection there between what is happening now and the distrust in political process and the way that we engage. One of the things that we also did was look at what is the effect of party membership on election results.
Ben Hugosson: In the 90s the Social Democrats had 260,000 members, which was roughly four percent of everybody that voted and when we had four percent of everybody that voted, we also got 45% in the elections. Since then, that figure has dropped, we've lost about 160,000 members and we're down to about 1.2% of the voting population as a member of our party. We've also done the worst elections in our history and this is basically a straight line down. It pegs the loss of members. Another thing that we've also looked at is, what is the role of party membership in personification. Personification it comes from the Greek political party Pasok and when they basically disappeared overnight. Other examples of this are the socialists in France.
Misha Zelinsky: France.
Ben Hugosson: We've had Netherlands also being pasokified, Labor in Scotland. When we look at this, when we look at what are the organization, what are the political parties that are being pasokified. We see that they basically do not have members and there seems to be a critical role for members in this crisis.
Misha Zelinsky: What is the key then to turn around this decline in membership, if you say that there's this a causative relationship. How can parties encourage people to join, because we have the same problem here with the Labor party. Membership has declined as percentage of the population overall and certainly our primary vote has declined. What is the answer there?
Ben Hugosson: I think that what we have to do is, we have to look at nature of engagement. There are many people that are saying, and I don't know if it's the narrative here, but it's definitely the narrative in Sweden. That these, these old political structures and these old political parties have got old methods of engagement.
Misha Zelinsky: Is in having a say in what the party does and its structures.
Ben Hugosson: Yeah. Or just getting involved in a political party is not a modern way of engaging. But the problem with this is that the way that people engage now is a new way of engaging and our political parties are also engaging that same way. We've made a shift from engaging with people to engaging with content. When we like something on Facebook, we're engaging with content and the thing about that is that you can do it by yourself. When we engage with people, we're doing totally different things and this is basically how self-governing organizations have been built up. They haven't been built up on engaging with content they're being built up on engaging with people. That might be that, we sit round us in a local club and decide what we're going to do, which issues we're going to push.
Ben Hugosson: But it is a discussion between people, we sit around and we talk about doing a campaign and this is the relation of organizing that. We see that it is coming up more and more where we're actually rediscovering the old methods of engagement. I think that is really important, the innovative stuff that is being done today within the realm of engagement is actually a lot of the stuff that has been forgotten. Since the 70s I mentioned before that self-governing organizations have lost members since the 70s is that, what's happened is that we've had TV, radio, email, social media. All these mediums come that have basically been mobilizing mediums and we've seen them as the new default mode of engaging with people and they're the ones that have dominated. During this period of time, when we have been predominantly mobilizing people, not organizing people. We have lost leadership capacity within our organizations.
Ben Hugosson: A lot of this memory of how you actually organize people and how you engage people with other people, we have lost. This is one of the biggest challenges that we have is that we have to relearn a lot of this stuff and not only relearn it for ourselves, but teach it to a lot of different people as well. It's going to be a long road, it's going to be a very hard road, but it's a road we have to travel and we have to stop now.
Misha Zelinsky: You talked about this disappearing acts of some of these great parties on the left and right. We're talking specifically about the left in that example, but I'm curious about whether or not it's caused it, even certainly correlated. The refugee crisis that existed as a result of the civil war in Syria and the flow on effect in Europe. What was the impact, certainly gets debated a lot and it's been used by a lot of far right parties, particularly those who've got in to power in Eastern Europe and Hungary and others. What has been the impact of immigration on the political discourse in Sweden?
Ben Hugosson: That is the number one most discussed political issue at the moment. Like I said, a lot of these narratives are built off the neo liberalist narratives. They use immigration as a way of, dividing Sweden up and putting people against people and it has been a tough issue for us to deal with. Absolutely, and when we had this immigration crisis in Sweden, we had very many people trying to come to Sweden. During a period of time we had this massive spike of people landing in Sweden and wanting to seek refuge. We didn't have the organizational capacities at the time to be able to bring that many people into to Sweden. And to make sure that we integrate them into Swedish society by making sure that they have a job, that they have a place to stay. Just basic things that we all really, really take for granted. This was a a period of time that the right, they tried to blame us for it and they always are bringing up this period of time and of course, it was a very extreme period of time.
Ben Hugosson: It meant that we had to take extreme measures to make sure that we could handle this. It was cold at the time, but we had to make sure that we had a place for people to stay. We had to basically look at every single building in the whole of Sweden and make sure that we had a place for them to stay. Some people, we had to make sure that the military maybe had tents to house people. So, it was a very big thing for Sweden and very tumultuous for a lot of people and a lot of people felt that things were, were spiraling out of control, absolutely.
Misha Zelinsky: I'm curious about this, because there's a debate that exists and migration has always been a fixed problem in Australia, which I'm sure you're aware of. It has been politically difficult for Labor, particularly in the refugee question, although there's been more favorable attitudes towards permanent migration. But Europe is a little bit unique in that it has more of a borderlines about it. People are free to move around though they're, Sweden's a little bit different but largely participates in that. Has bought or corroded support for democracy, do you think? I mean, it's a big factor in the Brexit debate, taking back control. How does that impact, because I know, look at the Danes are probably one example, where the labor party's done well there. But they had a rather conservative position on immigration that they took the election. I'm curious about your take on this borderless, this question and whether or not it's consistent with democracy.
Ben Hugosson: Democracy works when people feel that they can actually influence democracy and even before this debating immigration, there was always a debate about how democratic the EU actually is. The immigration is a way for people to maybe express that feeling of disjointedness of not being able to influence, but it's probably not some of the root causes. Not being engaged in your local society, if we can fix that and give people a place in society, I think that a lot of these issues will fade away. Because people will see that they do have a place that they can actually influence their local societies and they will feel empowered.
Ben Hugosson: I talked earlier about the Olof Palme and he has a great speech about industrial society's problem. He begins to speech by talking about, how much room you have, he calls it, elbow room and he says that when that starts to shrink, people will try to escape to their own private economy and I think that, that's the case. Our job as Social Democrats is to make sure that people actually feel that they can influence their societies. We can have borderless societies, but as long as you feel that you can influence your society and where you live, then I don't think that, that's going to be a huge problem.
Misha Zelinsky: What about, you talked about economics there. One of the things that's so scary is I think as a Social Democrat is that, the country you would instinctively point to where Social Democracy has flourished traditionally and could flourish ongoing basis, is Sweden, the Scandinavian countries. A lot of people say, "Oh, that model can't work." I always joke that, Sweden's not a theory, it's a place you can fly to, you can literally go there, it's not Narnia. But, what is it that… Is there an inequality emerging within Swedish society economically? Is that regional city divide emerging as well and are there people being felt, looked at economically. Is that impacting and is that creating a space for the far right to try to get in and sell populous message?
Ben Hugosson: Yeah, most definitely. I think that inequality… Absolutely during the time of the Social Democrats. I don't think that we should feel that, we've always done the right thing. But definitely when the right wing took over Moderates, then took over after 2006 that inequality started to shoot through the roof.
Misha Zelinsky: Right around the time of the global financial crisis.
Ben Hugosson: Absolutely. They took over just before, but I think that they probably used the global financial crisis as a way of actually forcing through some economic policies. That basically weakened the labor movement that made employment a lot more precarious and I think that people are feeling the effects of that. Things like, having to wait for an SMS to know that you have worked that day and these are problems that we shouldn't have in a wealthy society like Sweden. These economic problems are actually starting to creep up and starting to become a problem. We see that in all unequal societies you'll start to have people that have things and those that don't have things. I think that this is one of the big problems that we have to actually start to address.
Misha Zelinsky: One of the things that I find, I think a lot of social democrats globally are struggling with, is the theory with inequality increasing theoretically that should be good conditions for a social democratic government to come to power. For whatever reason, social democratic parties throughout the world or center left parties are really struggling to connect with people and the concerns that they have. May have, some policy solutions for them but it seems that whatever it is that we're selling people aren't buying it. And this precariousness or anxiety they feel we're not connecting with them in fact, perhaps is that were being portrayed that way. But change seems scary when you have so little you only you're afraid to lose even that little, bit. A risk on a social democratic party becomes more difficult. What do you think is the answer to make people have faith that we have the answers for them?
Ben Hugosson: Actually there was one part of your question that I didn't answer before about the divide between-
Misha Zelinsky: Other regional areas.
Ben Hugosson: The Regional areas and because I think this actually ties in a little into what we are talking about. If you go and have a look in the Swedish Social Democrats, we sing a lot of songs. Yeah. So we have our work of songs and when you look at a lot of these songs, they are stories about people moving from the country. Who often are the good people moving to the city and being exploited by the bad people. There is, even in our old songs, there is this divide and that I think stays, when I grew up, there were films like City Slickers. City Slickers is a derogative term for people that live in the city. This divide, it's always really been there and it has been used like in our songs of workers to portray what some injustices are there. This is still there and it's still a problem.
Ben Hugosson: But for the Social Democrats, we have been those that have been able to bring these diverse groups together. One of the things that we have brought together and being like this big party that's conformed government is that we have brought together progressive people but also conservative people. People that want some welfare or security system and those that value security. We've been this amalgamation of these two value groups and we've been able to talk across almost value sets but actually land in a set of progressive policies.
Ben Hugosson: This is one of the keys to actually getting back into talking to some of these people is that, we can't also divide up our country as well and say, "These are those people that think this and we think this, we're progressive's and we're Social Democrats. We need to actually… How we've done it before is to go in and be really, really embedded in our societies and actually get these people to start talking together. Social democracy has never been a set of policies, it's been a promise of democracy. It's been a promise that together we can actually go together and influence our situation. I think that that's what we have to do.
Misha Zelinsky: It's interesting you've talked about this conservative element of social democracy. Increasingly it's been overlooked, I think one of the problems that we have are attitudinal and we tend to hector people that are a bit more conservative. People that might be economically progressive as you said, but have more socially conservative views. What do you think the role for people perhaps that are religious or have more socially conservative views. What is the role for them to play in social democratic parties? Because increasingly they're looking at parties such as ours and saying, well that party, I don't feel at home there anymore. The labor party traditionally had a large Catholic element, which is I think still of our fabric, but an increasingly minimized fabric. I'm curious about your take on that from a European perspective.
Ben Hugosson: Sweden is a lot more secularized than what Australia is.
Misha Zelinsky: That's interesting because a lot of people say Australia is quite secularized.
Ben Hugosson: We have the Swedish church and up until the 90s everybody was born directly into the Swedish church. In fact one of the largest elections outside of political elections or the largest selection outside of political elections is the Swedish church and it's a big thing. That's actually traditionally how the right wing in Sweden have come and gained power. Because, what they've done is they've won in the Swedish church election and because they get money and they a position in the society.
Misha Zelinsky: It's a platform.
Ben Hugosson: It's a platform to run other elections. But for us, we don't have large diverse groups of different religious groups, that is increasing, absolutely because of the immigration that has happened in Sweden. But religion generally does not play a role in, in Swedish politics. But, if you start thinking about say conservative and conservative values and their role, we traditionally have not had a large conservative block. This is something that is very, very new in Sweden, but it doesn't mean that those conservative views haven't been there. I think that this is largely because the Social Democrats have been able to sew together and to do it on this idea that, we want some security, we want unemployment insurance. We want a welfare state or health care that when we get sick we can actually be taken care of and it not break the bank. We've been able to amalgamate these groups and I think that we have to say that if we're going to move forward, power is through the electoral system.
Ben Hugosson: And, in the electoral system you need 50% plus one. We can't just be talking to one value group, we have to be talking to multiple value groups and to make sure that we have the majority that we need to win. Our electoral system is geographically based so, we have to say, "Okay, well who are the people that exist in my neighborhood." We have to go out and talk to these people and people that have progressive views and those that have conservative views, there is a possibility that they can land in the same policy platform. That's traditionally what social Democrats have shown, but at the moment these more conservative people, these are the people that were leading to the right wing parties.
Ben Hugosson: We have to start talking to them and start bringing them back in and make sure we have some common consensus about what we want. It's not just us giving to them, it's them giving to us as well. But, we have to see that our power is based on each other because the alternative is more right-wing ideologies that are more individualized. That see people as sometimes a commodity within a system, but also people that follow a powerful leader. There's not much power in that for these people and like I said, we need to make people feel empowered. We have to start talking to them and we have to create arenas for that.
Misha Zelinsky: One of the things I think is becoming difficult in a lot of democracies is this, either a winner takes all approach to the governing. No longer having mutual toleration and maybe the way Trump has approached governing, which is basically winner takes all. Or increasingly people just not accepting the outcome of elections or not perceiving elections to be the best way to get things done. I think of something like maybe the extinction rebellion, which is a bit of a global phenomenon, but people being extremist in their activists but also authoritarian in their approach to whatever issue or change they're seeking. How do you think we can still make sure that people think that the town square or politics is the actual way to get things done. And that there's an art of compromise there as compared to the, cancel culture in the left or the right wing populism on the right. What is the answer?
Ben Hugosson: We can't deny that we have very large and pressing problems and a lot of the problems that we face will require large and urgent action. I think that, that's what organizations like the Extinction Rebellion are talking about. They're saying that we need large and urgent action and we're fed up with the inaction, we need to do something. I think that there is a lot of inaction and politicians might have to take some blame for that, but we also have to see that we need to create the prerequisites for actually being able to tackle these urgent problems. We have to create space for innovation, absolutely. For innovating in the climate movement. We can't have the situation where we are, where we can only present incremental politics. Because, that incremental politics is not going to solve the environmental crisis.
Ben Hugosson: The only option for us is to start talking to other people, is to start talking in society and creating a dialogue on what this is going to take. Because people, when you aggregate their opinions, that is vastly different. That aggregation, what you end up being is vastly different to when you get people to sit down in a group and to actually come to some consensus. When people sit and they start talking to other people, they start to empathize and they start to be able to give up things. That they didn't think that they could give up before, mainly because they've empathized with other people and they see that it's for the greater good. I think this was actually what was happening in the civil society and that's why engagement is so important. We need to start talking to our neighbors and mix up.
Misha Zelinsky: Mix in.
Ben Hugosson: Once we start doing that, then I fully believe that we will be able to enact the policies that we need to be able to tackle these crisis. We do have large and pressing problems and we too need to solve them very, very quick. In some ways, these organizations are totally right, like Extinction Rebellion, we need to act now. We do, but we also need to create a dialogue and that dialogue will create the space for us to attack these problems.
Misha Zelinsky: That's a challenge, I don't think there's much of a dialogue when you turn up and shut down cities and make people whose lives are already difficult, more difficult. I'm not sure that's the way of getting it done but the thing actually is, you're a party machine man and one of the challenges of seeing to this discourse question is this information bubble that we all live in now. You basically see it on Facebook or any other social media and be served up your own opinions of things that you agree with, in an increasingly specified manner. The right seem to have weaponized these in a particular way that is confounding social democrats globally. Are you seeing that in Sweden and secondly, how can we make sure that these social media channels, and have 50% of people now get the majority of their news from social media. How do we make those things work for us and how do we push back against these advent of fake news and this toxi fication of social media.
Ben Hugosson: It is a very big problem and again, I think a lot of this comes back to how we engage with others. If we are to… There's a researcher called Erica Chenowith and one of the things that she has proven is that no social movement that has been able to mobilize 3.5% of the population has failed. So, if you can mobilize 3.5% of the population, you'll probably succeed.
Misha Zelinsky: What is define and mobilize.
Ben Hugosson: Exactly. To get people involved in some action. I think that, that's a very good statistic because it goes to show that, we probably don't need to get everybody involved, but we do need to get a certain percentage of the population involved. Another thing is, is that if we're going to get to that level, a lot of people that aren't interested in politics today is going to have to be involved in this. The way that people generally get involved in movements is not that they see something on Facebook feel very, very inspired and then sign themselves up. That's not how people get involved on that level. There was a guy called… I forget his name, but he wrote, he wrote a book called The Making of Pro-life Activists, and he basically followed people into the pro life movement.
Ben Hugosson: These people became leaders after a while and so he could ask them, "Why did you join the movement? And they said, because I feel really passionate about this and I wanted to make a difference." But he had followed the means, we knew full well why they actually joined the movement to begin with. A lot of them joined the movement because a friend had taken them to a meeting. I think that if we are going to get to that 3.5% then we need to start bringing friends to meetings. It's about going through our contacts in our telephone and actually saying, who are these people that we can get involved? Who are these people do I want to bring to a meeting and to start experiencing some politics on an everyday basis basically.
Misha Zelinsky: You say don't rely on digital, get human to human contact.
Ben Hugosson: These digital tools are just tools. I'm going to be using them to contact my friends, but I think that we do need to see that there is people to people relationships. They are the most important thing in what we're doing and these people to people relationships are something that exist in real life. And, if we are using digital tools to actually communicate between us, then that's great and then digital tools do play a role but we can talk to other people as well, ring them up, bring them to meetings. I think that we need to start bringing people in. People that are 100% interested in politics today, people that may be vaguely share our values but probably haven't really been able to work out very clearly for themselves. Where they stand on issues but they need to be exposed to them basically and they need to come into our organization.
Ben Hugosson: As an organization as well dealing with this, we need to basically, create activities that we can systematically make sure that our activists are bringing new people into our organizations. That can be done with online work tools, absolutely they make the process a lot smoother. But just like in door knocking, it's the most effective method because it is face to face and I think that we need to see that value in being face to face. Even though it might seem like a long hard slog, it is actually the most effective way of getting people involved.
Misha Zelinsky: People power, it's old fashioned but it works, right?
Ben Hugosson: People power, it all comes down to that.
Misha Zelinsky: Just to share a quick story, I remember I was studying in London recently and they had the guy who led Macron's campaign and he came in and said, "We had this secret weapon." I leaned in because I was curious, because it was a party that came up out of nowhere and he said, "Door-knocking." I was like, Oh, wow. Something that every young activists gets taught right from the beginning, but they used it. Perhaps that they hadn't really used it much in France, apparently it's not a really fresh thing to do. But I thought it was fascinating that person or persons still the way to get it done.
Ben Hugosson: Absolutely. The guy that was leading Macron's campaign, he was educated by Marshall Ganz who is the lead community organizer in the world. They used that.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, people power it's interesting because I'm always have a clunky chinwag at the end of these things, right. The question I always ask everyone is, if you're a foreigner, you got to invite three Ozzies to a barbecue. But if you're an Ozzie, you've got to invite three foreigners. I'm not sure where quite sit here, I'll let you cheat. But, three people, who would they be at your barbecue and why?
Ben Hugosson: I can't say anybody else, but Olof Palme, I would really, really love to meet that guy. He was amazing and if you can listen to his speeches, they are fantastic. I would invite him, I'd without a doubt invite my wife.
Misha Zelinsky: I'll assume she's there, right.
Ben Hugosson: Exactly, she's the one keeping me in Sweden.
Misha Zelinsky: Very good, very good.
Ben Hugosson: I think that I would invite, who would I invite the last person, I don't quite know at the moment, but it might be somebody from the film world.
Misha Zelinsky: Oh, right.
Ben Hugosson: I've got a keen interest in films. I really like film, it's interesting what's happening in the film world at the moment. We've got this massive serialization of films and maybe I'd invite one of the Marvel guys and then we talk about that. How they envisioned that going and how they have succeeded at doing that.
Misha Zelinsky: A superhero, a politician, and your wife. You got all the important ones in there, right. But look, Ben, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you here in Australia. Good luck in the upcoming elections in Sweden.
Ben Hugosson: Yeah. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure being here.
Wayne Swan: Economic inequality and the global rise of right wing nationalism
September 15, 2019	Misha Zelinsky	Australia, Australian leaders, China, Democracy, Economics, Inequality, National Security, Nationalism, Populism	0:50:06
Wayne Swan is the President of the Labor Party. He served as Australia's Treasurer from 2007 to 2013 and was Deputy Prime Minister. Wayne is credited with helping save Australia from the GFC and in 2011 was crowned World Finance Minister of the year.
As the author of numerous books on social policy, he has lead the domestic and global debates on the dangers of economic inequality.
Wayne joined Misha Zelinsky for a chinwag about what went wrong at the 2019 federal election for Labor, why fiscal policy still matters in economic management, how far right nationalists are using inequality to win government around the world, why big philanthropy is a big problem for democracy, how Australia should manage an assertive Chinese Communist Party and where to from here for social democrats around the world.
Misha Zelinsky: Wayne Swan, welcome to Diplomates. Thank you for joining us.
Wayne Swan: Good to be here.
Misha Zelinsky: Now, what a place so we could start. It's been a few months since the 2019 federal election. It was a difficult one for Labor Party people, the Labor Party supporters and members. I'm kind of curious, firstly, did you see it coming? And then, to your mind, what went wrong is the big question. But we can start there maybe.
Wayne Swan: Well, I didn't think we were going to have an easy victory. And I think the way in which the opinions polls were hyped up and the expectations got out of control and the bookies got it all wrong simply heightened an inevitability about our victory that wasn't there in the foundations. And indeed, I don't think it was there in the published opinion polling either.
Wayne Swan: Yes, it was wrong, but it was not out in many respects and there's no way in the world that anyone who was studying the opinion polling closely could've formed a conclusion that we were headed for a massive victory. Changes of government in Australia are always difficult, particularly for the Labor Party, and that applied last time. There are some things we did well, there are some things we did badly. We're having a review about all of that, but I don't think that there should be any automatic knee-jerk reaction when people are analyzing the result.
Misha Zelinsky: So there's been a lot of talk, I mean, your state of Queensland, Labor did most poorly there until in terms of our primary vote, but there's a lot of discussion about labor's performance in regional areas, outer suburban areas and this sort of discourse that we've lost touch with traditional labor voters, more working class voters. Is that something that you think is true or something you're concerned about?
Wayne Swan: Well, there's no doubt that the Liberal Party campaign managed to dislodge many low-income, insecure and loosely politically aligned voters from the labor camp. No doubt about that at all. I think part of that was a very effective scare campaign, and particularly a campaign run under the radar via social media, which was promoting an economic Armageddon through death taxes and other claims that were terribly effective, got under our guard and dislodged those voters from our camp.
Wayne Swan: So we've got some fundamental reassessment to do there, because if you look around the Western world and you look at the progress of social democratic parties, there's no question that what I call the radical right, and I include the Liberal Party of Australia, which has now been taken over, if you like, by hard right elements. There's no smaller liberals in it. Around the world, those groupings have been successful in removing voters, particularly lower income working people, from support for social democratic parties through the use of wedge politics, through the use of race, through the use of gender and increasingly through the use of climate change to pull those voters away from their traditional social democratic support.
Misha Zelinsky: And so, you talked a little bit about this, yeah, the online campaign that we saw, but also there was the impact of the Clive Palmer money.
Wayne Swan: Sure.
Misha Zelinsky: How much did that influence the outcome [crosstalk 00:03:03]?
Wayne Swan: Well, there's no question that the Clive Palmer money supercharged the themes that the Liberal Party were running. The Clive Palmer-
Misha Zelinsky: Which was $80 million spend, right?
Wayne Swan: Yeah. The Clive Palmer money was part of the conservative spend, so the biggest single spend that I can find in the Western world by a single person in an election campaign was turned into a preference recycling scheme aimed particularly at those groups that I spoke about before and it was very successful. So when people are evaluating this result, you can't ignore the impact of this big money, which certainly had an impact in my home state.
Wayne Swan: But I don't believe the results in Queensland, putting aside the central and North Queensland seats, were any different to what we saw anywhere else in the country. It's true, we did lose the outer suburban vote and we lost a regional vote, but that was no different in Queensland than it was anywhere else bar in Queensland the three seats that you would describe as directly affected by the issue of coal, where there were separate circumstances. So I don't think the result in Queensland was little different to the result that we saw in outer suburban Sydney, regional Victoria or regional New South Wales. Or, for what matter, in cities like Perth.
Misha Zelinsky: Now, unpacking this. You touched on the global phenomenon. I think that this is a challenge for all social democratic parties around the world since global populism. In many ways, I think this is almost the U.S. 2016 election result or the Brexit result arriving in Australia, it has similar characteristics. So I'm kind of curious, firstly, what's driving this global populism? And then why is it that the right, and the far-right, seem to be able to dig into it a bit [crosstalk 00:04:41]
Wayne Swan: This is the critical question. The fact is that the Great Recession, or otherwise known here as the global financial crisis, really shattered the foundations of modern capitalism, which had already been loosening through 40 years in the growth of income and wealth inequality. And that growth of income and wealth inequality has bred resentment. And that resentment has materialized in the form of much more insecure work, the disappearance of what were once solid career opportunities with decent pay.
Wayne Swan: And that, in many ways, shattered the faith of those people in basically their democratic arrangements. And as that's occurred, unless governments domestically put in place a range of policies to look after those people, indeed as we did, principally, in this country, those votes increasingly became lost to basically what I'd call the center-left, and they've been increasingly captured by what I would call the radical right.
Wayne Swan: You've seen this most particularly in recent elections in Scandinavia, you've seen it in Sweden, you've seen it in Finland, you've seen it around the world, that the use of race, the use of gender, to play into the insecurities of working people, and to play in to their loss of faith in the authority structures and decision making structures, in a society where they see the great gains of their labor principally going to a few at the top, has been the driver of the radical right and the great failure of the post-war period.
Wayne Swan: See, for 30 years following the war, policies were put in place to drive a more equal and fairer society. And they were done as a hedge against communism on the left and fascism on the right. Following the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, and the advent of trickle-down economics, otherwise known by many as neoliberalism, we've seen a growth in rampant income, wealth, and inequality. And that has seen a fracturing in societies where there was once a consensus about a fairer share being the best way to drive prosperity and growth into this notion of trickle-down economics that if you give more to the top, then somehow, everyone down the bottom will benefit.
Wayne Swan: Well, that's just produced an enormous amount of distrust and it has created, if you like, the political space for the rise of the authoritarian radical right, which we now see so dominant in many countries across Europe, and you see represented in the leadership of Donald Trump.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah. And you covered a lot there about, I suppose, the conditions that are allowing this radical right to rise around this insecurity, economic inequality. The thing that's got everyone, at least that's on the center-left of politics about how do we respond to this, is that the conditions would seem to be good for a social democratic agenda around inequality and [crosstalk 00:07:35]
Wayne Swan: They certainly are, but there hasn't been the sort of social democratic leadership that we've required. I mean, we've done best here, in Australia and New Zealand, where we've had our social democratic aspirations reflected in Labor parties. And the anchor of our Labor Party is, of course, the trade union movement, which provides that direct linkage. And I think that has been why you could actually say that the big difference, say, between the radical right in Australia having a section of a Liberal government, and manifested, say, in the form of Pauline Hanson with a couple of senators, the big difference between that, and the election, say, of a Donald Trump in the United States, has been 30 years' worth of real wage growth in Australia and 30 years of wage stagnation in the United States.
Wayne Swan: But we started to see that wage stagnation. We started to see the profit share rise and wage share be suppressed. We've seen policies increasingly in this country after the six years, where pre-tax income has been suppressed in the form of wage suppression, post-tax income has been suppressed in the form of more regressive taxation. The twin combination of unfair taxes and low wage growth is tailor-made for either an ascendant social democratic party to storm to victory, or for a radical populist to storm the victory if the social democratic offering is not up to scratch. And when you translate that into our last election result, we should've won, but we didn't have the sort of defeats, either, that you've seen in various other social democratic offerings in the past.
Wayne Swan: That's not an excuse for our outcome.
Misha Zelinsky: And so, in terms of connecting with working people and sort of reflecting their concerns, one of the challenges seems to be that there's a perception, at least, that all sides of politics have been sort of colonized by so-called elites. And that seems to particularly hollow out that social democratic side of politics, both here and abroad. I mean, do you think there's something about this question of big elites being from nowhere and people being from somewhere, and this question of place [crosstalk 00:09:58] communities?
Wayne Swan: Well, I think that is really important. And I think it's a reminder to all of us, on the center-left of politics, that to be out there with the people all the time, or of the people all the time, as comfortable in the tea room as you are in the boardroom, is absolutely critical. And I think many of our comrade parties around the world, in particularly the U.S. Democrats, have fallen prey and have not really learned that lesson.
Wayne Swan: So I think it's something we all have to keep in mind, but it is also something that the radical right specializes in through their authoritarian leadership and the associated gutter campaigns that they put into the system beneath the radar. And I would cite, in this example, the vilification and the smashing of the standing and reputation of Bill Shorten behind the scenes through one of the most aggressive and unprincipled demolition jobs on a politician's character and standing that I've seen my whole time in politics.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, and so, in terms of… One of the things I think is challenging for social democrats is that, as faith in democracy, faith in government, goes down, it almost suits the right-wing agenda because they don't like government [crosstalk 00:11:18]
Wayne Swan: Well, of course it does. You see, the whole right-wing agenda, and this is what you see at the core of this government here, is to destroy the credibility and standing of government and to demonize government intervention. So, stage one of that was to demonize our stimulus, which saved our country from recession. To continue to demonize it, to do that, and to get into bed with plutocrats and parts of the business community so that when next time a huge global event comes, no government will have the guts to stand up and do what the Rudd and Gillard governments did in a time of need, which was protect our people and to use the power of government to do so.
Wayne Swan: But it is ongoing, you've only got to pick up a newspaper or observe just about any policy of this current Liberal government, and find, at its core, an attempt to destroy the credibility and efficiency of public service provision. And there is perhaps no program that demonstrates that more than the so called robo-debt campaign that's going on in Centrelink. The treating of people, that they fired the hired staff in Centrelink so that when the public wants to actually ring and find out what their entitlements, they're on hold for 30 minutes an hour. This is all part of a systematic attempt to destroy the quality of public service provision so they can turn around ain the end and say to social democratic parties like mine, "Look, you can't trust government, they can't deliver services. I'll tell you what, we've got a better offering. Have a tax cut instead."
Misha Zelinsky: And so, you touched on plutocrats. And one of the things that I'm so curious about, and there's been a big backlash against what they called the Davos tops. And so, I mean, how do we make the case that democracy in government is still the answer, given that you see, increasingly, these big philanthropists plutocrats, where the argument is we can return the benefits of this inequality actually-
Wayne Swan: Well, it's outrageous and shocking. If people want to give money and make their society a better place, fantastic. But don't expect a tax deduction. Don't erode the basis of the government to provide the basic service provision upon which a civilized society depends. It's just shocking that people who don't actually pay the right amount of tax in the first place then turn around and want to give more money and get a tax deduction for that.
Wayne Swan: Look, I know many people in the Australian business community who pay their taxes and they give away a lot of money, but equally there are plenty of people with a lot of money who aren't paying their fair share of taxes and still expect a tax deduction and be regarded and favored in the community because they've given away money when they have shattered the very linkage between collecting tax and service provision by becoming tax termites and ripping away at the very essence of a civilized society.
Misha Zelinsky: And it also is fundamentally undemocratic in that, ultimately, you want to see taxes collected by the government people deciding where those taxes should be [crosstalk 00:14:07] correlation.
Wayne Swan: Exactly. And no wonder people then lose faith in democracy, because they see people who obviously have a lot of money, they see the publication from the Tax Stats that they're not paying it, and then they see them standing up pretending to be very generous because they're at some very worthy cause using these people as a shield against the underlying evasion they're engaged in, and they expect to be clapped. No wonder the average person gets cynical.
Wayne Swan: I mean, no wonder the average wager could get… well, actually, gets really cynical when all they ever hear is of high profile people, be they sporting people in Rugby Union or whatever, who are earning millions of dollars a year, but no one's out there debating at the same time the fact that they can't even get an enterprise bargaining up for a 2% increase. And they see this conflict. A news agenda dominated by elements of identity politics and big money for the top-end of town, and on the other they don't hear many reports about the fact that their enterprise bargaining's being squashed and they're not going to get a decent wage increase for the next couple of years.
Misha Zelinsky: And so, yeah, in terms of this question of identity politics and economic justice, I mean, do you see those things in conflict? Because a lot of people say, "Well, we have to choose one or the other," but my view is the thing that can unify people the most around whatever their identity is, is around economics and class.
Wayne Swan: Exactly, and just ask Martin Luther King. I mean, it's just not well known that when he went on his freedom march it was called Jobs and Freedom, and it was called Jobs and Freedom for a reason. That gender equality, racial equality is always going to be ultimately completely unattainable without a degree of economic inequality. So, we don't ignore them. They're all part of the same equation. But when you're a truck driver in Western Sydney, or when you're a steel worker in Wollongong, and all you ever hear about is a sporting hero on a million dollars a year having a court case dominating the news every night, and then you're told in your latest bargaining round that you're not getting even a reasonable increase, well, you really get the shits.
Misha Zelinsky: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And so, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Whereas you talk to people in the business community or you talk to the Davos set and they say, "What are we going to do about populism?" You say, "Pay taxes and lift wages." And they're like, "Well, I guess we'll never solve it then," right?
Wayne Swan: Well, the two most fundamental elements of doing something about the entrenched long-term inequality in our community are progressive tax and a stronger voice for workers, principally through unions.
Misha Zelinsky: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And so you touched a little bit about the economy, GFC response or the Great Recession response. I'm kind of curious, firstly, you're a former treasurer, what's your take on the state of the economy at the moment? So, current… we're in the weakest period of growth we've had pretty much for a decade.
Wayne Swan: Well, it's weak and anemic growth induced by the federal government's refusal to put in place decent spending on infrastructure. It's pretty simple, really. And it's galling to watch the current treasurer somehow go out and try and blame the Reserve Bank for the fact that their fiscal policy isn't working and that he intends to put pride ahead of outcome. We didn't put pride ahead of outcome when our economy was challenged.
Wayne Swan: I mean, imagine if these clowns were in charge and there was a pronounced international downturn, the likes of which we had back in 2008 and 2009. Well, I know what they'd do. They wouldn't act, because they're part of a weird brigade out there that wants the cleansing impact of a recession. Because they see that as eating away at the power of workers and a way of reducing wages, and they also see it as a political opportunity to run some of the authoritarian lines that may work for the sort of parties of the far-right elsewhere when people feel dreadfully insecure.
Misha Zelinsky: And so you talked about, basically, that the Reserve Bank, which is a controlled monetary policy-
Wayne Swan: Yeah.
Misha Zelinsky: … and the treasurer who's ostensibly in charge of fiscal policy. Now, there's a suggestion they're going to be pulling against one another.
Wayne Swan: That's right. Well, the treasurer's fiscal policy is wrong and to cover that up he's seeking to somehow say that the Reserve Bank governor should fix it through monetary policy.
Misha Zelinsky: Despite [crosstalk 00:18:18] big 1%.
Wayne Swan: Monetary policy is tapped out. Tapped out. Everybody's saying, and it's not just the governor of the RBA in Australia, I mean, there has been an excessive reliance on monetary policy because governments around the world have been dominated by an austerity ethos and therefore a reluctance to effectively deploy fiscal policy. Fiscal policy here and around the world should be playing a much, much larger role as we seek to deal with the economic challenges that we face 10 years on from the Great Recession.
Misha Zelinsky: And obviously when you were a treasurer in the then-run government, there was a massive intervention via stimulus package. Do you think it's possible today with the world the way that it is for the-
Wayne Swan: No.
Misha Zelinsky: … global response that we saw from every country to be coordinated through the G20 or any other mechanism?
Wayne Swan: Well, 10 years ago, in fact, in March, early April, 2009, the world came together via the G20 and put in place a massive stimulus package to save the world from a Great Depression Mark II and to ensure it was only the Great Recession. Despite that package, it's taken most developed economies over a decade to come out. Australia sailed through that period. Our economy now is almost 35% bigger than it was in 2007. The American economy is in the low 20s. The British economy is around 20 or a bit below. We sailed through. And because we didn't see the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the destruction of so many small businesses, we averted the skills and capital destruction that dragged other economies around the world down.
Wayne Swan: Yet still, the conservative parties in this country carry on as if this was a massive mistake. Now, because of, if you like, the rise of the radical right it's hard to see us getting the sort of international cooperation that we got from the London Summit in 2009 that dragged the world out of their recession and didn't become a depression. If we have to go into those circumstances again, I don't think we are or will see the sort of actions that G20 took 10 years ago. And that will be a tragedy, if that happens.
Misha Zelinsky: And so a lot of this dysfunction we're seeing principally probably arises from the election of Donald Trump in the United States which has been a disruptive force for the old world order, if you can call it that, and also the rise of China. Australia finds itself in the middle of this, particularly one of the big headwinds in our economy relates to this so-called trade war between China and the U.S. I mean, how do we navigate that in a political sense and in an economic sense?
Wayne Swan: Well, sensibly, because our principal trade relationship is with China and our principal investment relationship is with the rest of the developed world, and our principal security relationship is with the United States. So we have to be incredibly careful and deft in what we do. We can't be compliant if the China is out of step when it comes to really important issues like the South China Sea or, for that matter, even Hong Kong. But equally, when we are seeing some of the absurd decisions announced by the U.S. President, we can't be seen to necessarily be compliant there. There is a real challenge for diplomacy and nuance for us to navigate what is a very, very difficult period.
Wayne Swan: You see, this issue of inequality, however, is not just one that's a problem in the U.S. and in the developed world. It's a massive problem in China itself and, I think you'll find, a massive problem behind the protests that you are also seeing in Hong Kong as well, because-
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, there's a real challenge around the rental market there and the average wages from Hong Kong.
Wayne Swan: Yes, that's right. That's right. Intergenerational issue. You know, it's not just a question of political rights. But they have no political rights and are facing, if you like, economic prospects that they can have no say in or real impact on their government's arrangements. So it's a complex world. There's no doubt the rise of China has been tremendously beneficial for the Chinese themselves but also for the rest of the world, but what it requires is principled and nuanced leadership, not bombast.
Misha Zelinsky: And you touched there on an intergenerational inequality. I'm kind of curious about that, because one of the big things of the last election, just returning back to the election, was this question of the, imputation credits became a big focus and the impact on retirees. What about the impact on young people who are unable to get a secure job or are unable to enter property market? How are we going to balance the intergenerational pact?
Wayne Swan: It's a very good point. Well, we have got a huge intergenerational inequity problem. And my view is that our actions on negative gearing were broadly supported across the community for the very reasons that you have just outlined. I've got lost track of a number of people I know who have got negatively geared properties, but absolutely understand that there has to be fundamental change in this area if their kids and/or their grandkids are ever going to get a toehold in the market. So I don't think that was one of those policies that was responsible for the blowback in the election. There might be ways in which you could be nuanced and change, but the fundamental generational inequity involved in those arrangements is one I believe that is understood in the community and the consequence was a tolerance for change in that area.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, the thing is as well, I mean, on the question of negative gearing, that's a policy Labor took in 2016-
Wayne Swan: Exactly.
Misha Zelinsky: … when it very nearly won in the election by one seat majority, or left a Turnbull government a minority government at the time. So, in terms of what are the policies we need to do though to make sure that we can… because one of the things that worries me is young people increasingly feeling disenfranchised from the countries that they're residing in in terms of youth unemployment in the regions. And I think some of this sort of far-right politics we're seeing there was a trumpification of the regions, a lot of it is from young people not feeling they got a chance to get their hand on the first rung.
Wayne Swan: Well, we got to spend a lot of more time interacting and communicating in this area. I think a lot of young people want to know that principle matters, I think a lot of people want to know that values matter. Now, our challenge is to live up to that creed. And this is the point that I'm going to continue to make as president of the party, that principles and values matter. But so too does compromise from time to time, because to ultimately implement your principles and your values you've got to hold power. And we have to be seen to be able to do that in ethical ways.
Wayne Swan: And I believe there's probably no party around the world in a better position to actually do that properly than the Australian Labor Party. The period of government under Hawke and Keating, the period of government under Rudd and Gillard, over and above any of the blemishes those governments had, did achieve an enormous amount. Very much in the tradition of earlier labor governments whether it's a post-war reconstruction under Chifley. Labor's got a tremendous history to draw from as we go forward and to demonstrate to people that politics and government can be a force for good and can make a difference in the lives of people.
Wayne Swan: But it's just, making a difference through a government decision-making is not something that happens one day and is seen the next. To convince people that these objectives could only be achieved in the long-term, not the short-term is the challenge, because the populace from the radical right will never give a principled and effective policy a chance to get off the ground. No greater example of this than what the Conservatives did to the carbon price. If that carbon price had survived in Australia, we would be having an entirely different political and economical debate. And what sections of the business community aligned with the radical right of the Liberal Party did in destruction of the carbon price will go down in history as one of the most wanton acts of economic and social destruction in the history of our nation.
Misha Zelinsky: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I actually also would give a special shout-out to the Greens who were voting against the ETS twice in 2009.
Wayne Swan: Exactly. Exactly. [crosstalk 00:26:36] that as well. Yeah.
Misha Zelinsky: I always like to remind my friends of that if they are particularly left-wing and inner-city Greens that there's only one party that's put legislation as a party of government to the floor and enacted price and action on climate change.
Wayne Swan: Well, if we would've got it through back in 2009, a lot of the other events that occurred may not have occurred either, but anyway.
Misha Zelinsky: And so, how does Labor… I mean, the last 10 years, I think, the climate wars for the last decade in Australia have been pretty devastating, both the cause of climate action, but also on progressive politics. I mean, how do we square this circle between these young people who are very energized about climate change and people in the inner city that I think are energized?
Wayne Swan: Well, we've got to get them to understand that when you're tackling climate change and doing very substantial emissions reductions it's just not a question of coal. It's a question of emissions reductions across the board. Of course we have to move as quickly as we can from fossil fuels and replace that with renewable energy. And it has to be driven. It has to be driven by a price on carbon. And the problem at the moment it's not driven by a price on carbon. Many of these well-intentioned people think that their obligations are discharged by fighting against a particular coalmine here or there. The truth is that our coal, our thermal coal is 4% of world's thermal coal. Most thermal coal around the world is mined-
Misha Zelinsky: Locally and used locally. Yeah.
Wayne Swan: … and used locally. What the world needs, what Australia needs is a carbon price for us to make the transition across all of those elements. To think that if you knock off Adani or knock off a couple of coalmines in the Adani basin, that this is some substantive contribution to the fight against climate change in the short term or the long term is simply not true. Yes, we have to make that change. We are, despite the government's opposition, making substantial headway in renewable energy thanks largely to the NASA progressive business and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation that I set up and that the Conservatives did not manage to destroy.
Wayne Swan: So this climate change debate is broader and more complex than it appears in the media, and as a progressive party we've got to continue to argue for a strong set of emissions reductions which are far greater in their impact and their scope than any one particular coalmine at any one point of time. I was with Nicholas Stern the day that he announced the Stern report back in two-
Misha Zelinsky: Was it 2009? '8?
Wayne Swan: No, not '9.
Misha Zelinsky: '7?
Wayne Swan: Yeah. '6, probably.
Misha Zelinsky: '6? God, that was a long time ago. I remember [crosstalk 00:29:15]
Wayne Swan: When I was in Whitehall visiting Gordon Brown.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah.
Wayne Swan: And if you go to the Stern report, it always envisioned that coal production would go down gradually as renewable energy went up. And that has not fundamentally changed. We are not getting the emissions reductions across many of the other critical sectors that we need, and so much of this concentration on a particular mine here or there drags critical attention away from what is a diabolically difficult area of public policy achieving these reductions across a whole range of sectors that people never talk about.
Misha Zelinsky: And the other thing I think we need to… those that are passionate about climate change and the environment, except we need to make significant action in that space. I think one of the things that challenges the politics of it is the asymmetry of who's impacted.
Misha Zelinsky: And so the people that are very passionate about it in the city, their job's not impacted. But the people that are going to be impacted, have to wear the costs of it have to-
Wayne Swan: Exactly. Yeah. And where the people are impacted, they feel that the people that have strong views don't care about them.
Wayne Swan: So you get a political backlash that ultimately undermines the progress on climate change.
Misha Zelinsky: Correct.
Wayne Swan: Because a very significant section of the progressive alliance is told by another section of it that they don't count anymore, or that they don't like their lifestyles, or they don't know how to think, or they're ignorant.
Wayne Swan: And that was the problem of the Bob Brown caravan.
Misha Zelinsky: Indeed.
Wayne Swan: And yeah, we just can't go down that road if we are going to win this fight against climate change.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, and we need to build those coalitions and find ways… I think there's a role for industry policy in terms of finding ways… industry's going to decline over the time.
Wayne Swan: Absolutely. You know what I find when I go out? In the business community it's a generational thing. If you meet anyone now involved in business under 50, they're talking the economics of climate change. Because what's going to drive climate change is not necessarily reductions targets. It's going to be the fact that the market won't lend to these people. That there's good business to be done. So you could have a decent conversation with many in the business community who are younger, because they actually get the economics of climate change as well as the environmental issue and outcome. And they are actively out there, involved in the fight in a commercial way, and we need all of them in the tent.
Misha Zelinsky: And so I just want to turn a little bit back to your time as a treasurer and deputy prime minister in the Gillard government, commissioned an Asian Century White Paper. I'm kind of curious to contrast the view of the government then with how the world's turned out. I mean, it was a very cheery or upside sort of document about the economic potential and perhaps overlooked maybe some of the bigger challenges of an assertive China that we've seen in the [crosstalk 00:31:54]
Wayne Swan: Well, it wasn't meant to deal with security matters. I mean, it was a very good paper. And these people would've been burning books back in the 1500s. I mean, they eliminated the Asian Century White Paper from every government website.
Misha Zelinsky: Is that right?
Wayne Swan: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Misha Zelinsky: So it's just gone? I didn't know that.
Wayne Swan: I mean, I recommend it to anyone who's interested in the future of our country should go and read the Asian Century White Paper, because-
Misha Zelinsky: How will they find it?
Wayne Swan: Well, it's-
Misha Zelinsky: It's on Wayne's website.
Wayne Swan: Well, fortunately, it's still around, but-
Misha Zelinsky: Right. Well, that's an interesting aside. But anyway, we were getting into the… yeah.
Wayne Swan: Anyway. And it was so well received in the region. And in many ways, as I moved around and the members of the committee moved around, it was, if you like, putting the final nail in the coffin of White Australia, that they finally thought, over a whole range of issues, this seemed to bring together the notion that Australia saw itself as Asian-facing and part of Asia. And we have a different discussion now about Asia and Australia than we had when I first went to university or indeed was in politics for the first decade or so. You know, that we all understand that it's part of a growing region and with it come the challenges, one of the biggest one we were talking of, climate change.
Wayne Swan: And the other one is growing inequality, because unfortunately the trickle-down model that has been used in the developed world is now being aggressively used in the developing world including by communist China and resulting in rampant wealth and income inequality in both types of countries. So the problems we face are similar. Of course, in our region at least a third of the countries are in dire poverty in what you'd call the broader Asian region and a lot more work needs to be done in dealing with their challenges. It's not just a question of China when you're dealing with Asia. Non-China Asia is bigger than China.
Misha Zelinsky: Sorry, India and Asia and somewhere else?
Wayne Swan: Well, but all those other little countries that there is so many of them where the very basis of development has not even begun. So there's still a lot of poverty alleviation to be done in Asia. We do focus on the Asian middle class because it's what brings so much prosperity to our country, but we shouldn't lose focus either in Asia or in Australia on those struggling countries across the Asia-Pacific.
Misha Zelinsky: So when you said the White Paper was an economic document, obviously, there were defense white papers at the time, and there's that duality that exists in public policy in Australia which is that kind of that Tony Abbott describes as fear and greed. Do you think the relationship with China since the Rudd -Gillard government has changed and how would a Labor government best interact with a more assertive China now?
Wayne Swan: Well, I think the Abbott government bungled it from day one when they held that completely dysfunctional G20 in Brisbane and Prime Minister started lecturing global leaders about the Australian health system and all sorts of bizarre things and he banned climate change from discussion at the summit.
Misha Zelinsky: That's right.
Wayne Swan: So President Obama went and gave a speech up the road at the university about the importance of climate change. It hasn't been a great start in terms of our relationships with China. I think the government's playing catch-up there now, but still is deeply confused about where we are and who we are.
Misha Zelinsky: And so one of the things you responsibility when you're treasurer is the FIRB decisions and the FIRB board reports treasurer in the cabinet. But I'm curious about foreign investment decisions. Should we worry about state-owned enterprises buying up shares [crosstalk 00:35:21]
Wayne Swan: Absolutely. And I-
Misha Zelinsky: … by an autocracy.
Wayne Swan: Well, of course we should. And one of the first statements I made after I became treasurer in the middle of 2008 was putting obligations on approvals for state-owned enterprises. We don't want any government body dominating a supply chain or dominating a market. I didn't-
Misha Zelinsky: And you talked about Chinalco trying to buy Rio Tinto?
Wayne Swan: Well, far bigger than that, but takeover… it was actually always an attempt to take over a BHP. So if we had five medium-sized companies in a particular area and they wanted to buy one, well that's fine, but if they wanted to come in and buy the lot, no. So we put down some principles about competition being observed, the whole series of principles, because ultimately you don't want another government directing the private enterprise activities of its subsidiaries in your country.
Misha Zelinsky: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And what about things like critical infrastructure? We've had [crosstalk 00:36:15]
Wayne Swan: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Misha Zelinsky: … network, but, of course, [crosstalk 00:36:19]
Wayne Swan: Well, in fact, I did that.
Misha Zelinsky: That was from the NBN, yeah.
Wayne Swan: Yeah. For a good reason. So yes, there are national security implications of these things, always has been, always will be. You shouldn't be letting foreign countries buy companies in your missile launch zone, for example. And I stopped one Chinese company from doing that. I say there's another example of that that's almost live at the moment, of course.
Wayne Swan: There's always been a national security element of any form of economic policy. And I think in recent years the capacity, including under us the broader part in this outlook, if you like, has increased.
Misha Zelinsky: And so what about situation where government makes a decision and then China often responds with a fair bit of hostility about those decisions. You've got sort of this use what they call hostage diplomacy with the detaining of Canadian citizens, Australian citizens in response to 5G decision here and also with the arrest of the Huawei executive in Canada. I mean, how did you stand up to Chinese decisions at the time and how does a government do that going forward?#
Wayne Swan: Well, I had a couple of particularly difficult and tense meetings. In fact, went I went to China to explain the fact that for the first time Australia was going to enforce responsibilities on state-owned enterprise investments in Australia, I was accused openly of being a racist. Now, that regime exists to this day. It was put in place for a good purpose. But when you look at these people, you got to go and look them in the eye and tell them what you're doing. I think one of the problems that we've got is a lot of this diplomacy doesn't necessarily come from what'd have been across-the-table discussions.
Misha Zelinsky: You're talking about megaphone diplomacy?
Wayne Swan: Yeah, megaphone diplomacy rarely works. But if you got to engage in it, you're want to make sure you go and look in their eyes first.
Misha Zelinsky: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So you think there's a bigger interpersonal thing that we should be working on in that sense?
Wayne Swan: Well, I think you got to work on it, but you got to be realistic it won't always work.
Misha Zelinsky: Although [crosstalk 00:38:23]
Wayne Swan: You don't know until you try.
Misha Zelinsky: Indeed. But, I mean, for example with Turnbull, when he was making some decisions around foreign interference around donations et cetera, Australia was essentially put in what they call the freeze where meetings were all canceled. So how do you handle that sort of stuff?
Wayne Swan: Well, I don't know whether that was what caused that… I mean, but we've got, and any country would have responsibilities. For example, China wouldn't let us invest in a company in their missile launch zone, so we most certainly wouldn't let them do it in ours. And that was the conversation I had with the minister at the time, and it turned out to be amicable. So you got to have these discussions. They are difficult. There will be positioning publicly. There will be conflicts. But the most important thing, and you don't always know what's going on, is that there needs to be under the surface, effective dialog by other ministers, diplomats or both.
Misha Zelinsky: That's right. That principal reciprocity, I think, is a good one and I think it's a very useful one for us to use. So do you see a new… you know, we haven't had blocks in the world since the fall of Berlin Wall. Do you see increasingly blocks emerging between the so-called liberal democracies and autocrats?
Wayne Swan: Well, what I see emerging is a hard-right movement which has its roots in both United States, in a number of European countries and most particularly Hungary, backed in by some pretty sophisticated operations coming out of the Soviet Union. And there is plenty of documentation now about how that worked in the last presidential campaign in the United States, how it worked in the Brexit campaign and how it has played out in a number of other countries. So yes, I think we have to be alive and alert to the fact that there is an authoritarian push across a number of democracies to influence domestic outcomes.
Misha Zelinsky: And so how do we deal with this challenge of these open systems? You know, this use of Facebook, social media, and yeah, you touched on it at the beginning with [crosstalk 00:40:25] question about it.
Wayne Swan: Well, by making sure that your capacity to repel it is high, to detect it and then repel it.
Misha Zelinsky: And should we be holding these… Facebook's in America [crosstalk 00:40:37]
Wayne Swan: There's no question that Facebook and those organizations are going to be subject to much more regulation and scrutiny than they have in the past and that will be a good thing.
Misha Zelinsky: And so just turning back to Australian politics, you recently retired from parliament, though you're not retired, I know that, otherwise you'd jump across the table on me, I'm sure, if I were to say that, but are you missing politics at all, the [crosstalk 00:40:57]
Wayne Swan: Well, I got out of parliament, but I haven't got out of politics.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, still the president of the party, so…
Wayne Swan: Yeah. No, but I got out because I wanted to have a bit more time to particularly spend with family. I've got two grandchildren, two children living overseas, so a bit of travel. I'll never give up my public policy interests and I'll never give up fighting for the Australian national interest, but I thought it was time to move on in terms of the parliamentary party, but I'm not giving up the discussion or the battle of ideas, because that's something I've dedicated my life to. I just want a bit more time to get into surf which I'm doing a lot more of and to be with and talk to my family.
Misha Zelinsky: And so one of the things you talked about in your valedictory, but also in other, in the last few of years of being in parliament, was the impact of time away-
Misha Zelinsky: … and what politics does to families and the people. I mean, give us a bit of insight about the difficulties.
Wayne Swan: Well, it's a cruel world and if you've got a busy job, you're away a lot, so you miss so many important events and you run the risk of being emotionally separated from and decoupled from the most important people in your life. And I said it in my main speech, that I wished I'd actually made more time for that, and I do regard that as a failure in my career. I have just been fortunate to have a very tolerant family, but it's something that I want to spend more time on.
Misha Zelinsky: In your time in politics, it's probably fair to say that the prestige of the political class and of their institutions has probably diminished and faith in the institutions is much lower now when you look at any survey, not just in Australia, around the world. What's driving that and can we get it back, and how? Because I think it's so important.
Wayne Swan: Well, I think the radical right is driving it. I think there are political forces driving this who've got an interest in demonizing the role that government has in our society and that is a vested interest so they can grab more of the product of the labor of our people than they're entitled to. I think it's very much driven. It's also driven in an underlined way by many of the technological changes, the speed of communication and the nature of communication, or sort of hyper drive that or make it a hyper circle, if you like.
Misha Zelinsky: And politics is sort of slow, the legislative process is slow, the world is quick.
Wayne Swan: Yeah. Yeah. So it's a combination of all of those things, but we got to get back to a bit more moral base and value base in our politics we got at the moment. And to do that you've got to out these people and hidden actors behind the scenes who are setting out to destroy trust between people.
Misha Zelinsky: And you talked again, in your valedictory, about a turning point in Australian politics being the Tampa crosses, and you sort of touched there on values and morality. How did that impact on politics and what are the [crosstalk 00:43:38]
Wayne Swan: Well, it was the beginning of the radical right in Australia purposely, deliberately using race as a wedge. And we hadn't seen that in that way in this country before. It's been a feature of politics in the United States for a long period of time, but the first we really saw of it as the country basically came out of its White Australia and embraced multiculturalism was Pauline Hanson.
Wayne Swan: And what we've now seen as the embrace of Pauline Hanson by the conservative side of politics and the use of race and gender issues both openly and covertly, and I mean covertly even in the recent election campaign, where most people would say to you, "Oh, the refugees or all these things weren't an issue." They were. They were out there and they were pushed hard by that radical right under the scenes in many marginal electorates around the country. So we've got to try to eradicate that again. But my fear is that Liberal Party has been taken over by the extreme right and we're in for an extended battle here. A battle for the nature and the type of Australia that we all want.
Misha Zelinsky: And it's interesting, because you talked, in '87 Howard was basically pilloried for his attitude to Asian immigration.
Misha Zelinsky: Then when Hanson first came to parliament she was basically excluded by the entire political class, but also by the media.
Wayne Swan: Now you've got Channel 7 paying her and TV channels paying her to do interviews, when she's an elected member of parliament. It is an outrage and a disgrace that media organizations in Australia are involved in that sort of activity.
Misha Zelinsky: And then the other… you know, the somewhat perverse one is that Tony Abbott, of course, was famously involved in destroying One Nation Pauline Hanson and then the next iteration, when Hanson returned back into parliament in the 2016 double dissolution election-
Wayne Swan: Yeah. Well, the big-
Misha Zelinsky: … he was photos with her and saying that One Nation's now different.
Wayne Swan: Well, the big change in my time in politics has been the elimination of smaller liberals for a Liberal Party and its takeover by a U.S. style republican right. And significant sections of the business community as well. The Americanization, if you like, of the conservative side of politics has occurred in our lifetimes and we're now living with the consequences of it. And, as I said before, exhibit A is energy policy.
Misha Zelinsky: And so I was curious, and I've put this question to you before to give you a bit of a chance, but, your best day on the job and your worst day on the job in politics, I'm kind of curious about, what are the things that make politics so powerful and what can make it so hard?
Wayne Swan: Oh, well, the best day was the day we found out that we weren't going to recession. That all the stimulus that we put out there had effectively worked. It was the very, very, very best day that I've ever had in public life. Because we didn't know. We were operating in a very difficult policy environment. The worst day? Oh, there's lots of bad days in politics.
Misha Zelinsky: I'll bet.
Misha Zelinsky: And, well, I won't explore that any further, but now, the final question I always ask everyone, so it's a foreign policy podcast largely, we've covered all the terrain, but, three foreigners alive or dead would be at a barbecue at Swannie's. Who would they be and why?
Wayne Swan: I think I'd go for Neil Young, just for a bit of sort of music interludes. I could've easily picked Springsteen.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, I was going to say, I mean, I think you could've picked a few.
Wayne Swan: Or even Dylan. So I would just take those three.
Misha Zelinsky: Okay. Practical list, practical list.
Wayne Swan: I would just [crosstalk 00:47:20] in terms of-
Misha Zelinsky: I think everyone… you'll pay in about odds on to pick Springsteen, but we'll go with Neil Young.
Wayne Swan: I'm just in the Neil Young phase at the moment for some reason.
Misha Zelinsky: Very good.
Wayne Swan: Secondly, it's a sort of toss-up, but I'd actually say Lyndon Johnson.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, LBJ.
Wayne Swan: Well, you know, he really stuffed up the Vietnam War, but I tell you what, what he did with the Great Society, just about every big social and economic change of a progressive nature, most of which have now been eliminated now was put in by that guy. Anyone who reads the Robert Caro books will understand why I've chosen LBJ.
Misha Zelinsky: He's a fascinating character as well because he's considered to be the ultimate machine politician who did so much progressive change, right?
Wayne Swan: Well, that's it. Well, maybe there's a connection. Maybe he knew how to get it done.
Misha Zelinsky: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Wayne Swan: And thirdly, well, I better choose an Aussie.
Misha Zelinsky: No, no. It's got to be foreign.
Wayne Swan: Oh, foreign? Oh, right.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, yeah.
Wayne Swan: Well, you probably got to go for Mandela, right?
Misha Zelinsky: Oh, well, Nelson Mandela. Yeah, indeed. I mean, Nelson Mandela, LBJ and Neil Young all in a room at Swannie's would be a good one, right? Well, look, before we go, I'm going to give a plug to the podcast. If you haven't rated and reviewed it yet, please get on. It's been a great chat with Wayne. If you don't do it for me, do it for Swannie because he's going to want to see this getting out to as many people as possible. So Wayne, thank you so much for joining us and I really appreciate the chat.
Wayne Swan: Pleasure.
Chris Bowen: Reasons to be optimistic and the future of progressive politics and liberalism
July 30, 2019	Misha Zelinsky	Australia, Australian leaders, Brexit, China, Democracy, Economics, Faith, India, Indonesia, Inequality, Liberalism, Nationalism, Populism, Trade, Uncategorized	0:47:53
Chris Bowen is the Member for McMahon in the Australian Parliament. In his time in public office, he has served as Treasurer, Minister for Human Services, Minister for Immigration, Minister for Financial Services, Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Competition Policy.
As the author of the books of 'Hearts and Minds' and 'The Money Men', Chris is a noted public policy thinker and expert.
Chris joined Misha Zelinsky for a chinwag about the future of democracy and liberalism including the threat to democracy posed by inequality, the role of faith in politics, how Australia can properly engage with India and Indonesia, what the future holds on Australia's China policy, why we should be much more worried about global debt and how progressive parties can rebuild trust with the public.
Misha Zelinsky: Chris Bowen, welcome to Diplomates, thanks for joining us.
Chris Bowen: Long time listener, first time caller. Good to be here Misha.
Misha Zelinsky: I think you'd be one of our very, very few listeners that have become calls so it's very pleased to hear that.
Chris Bowen: I did get on early, so it's a great listen. Well done.
Misha Zelinsky: Thank you so much for that plug, we'll make sure that we're putting that out in the socials. There's so many places we could start obviously, but one of the places I thought we could start was interesting recently leading into the G20 we had Vladimir Putin come out and say that liberalism was dead, is a dead project, that the West effectively had lost the post Cold War era. I mean, what do you make of those comments firstly, and secondly what does it say about the state of the world given that perhaps ten years ago that would have been laughed off, now it's a serious point?
Chris Bowen: Yeah, I think that's right. That's a good way if putting it. I'm more optimistic than that, I think we have to be more optimistic than that. We can't accept that as being the statement of fact, we have to fight back against that. But the fact that a world leader could even say that with some credibility tells you where the debate's at. The one thing we know is that the Francis Fukuyama theorem of, "History has ended, liberalism has won", is not how things have panned out. For a long time we thought he was wrong because Islamic fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism was a challenge to liberalism and that remains an issue.
Chris Bowen: But also, authoritarianism has become a much more accepted framework in many countries of the world to some degree or other, whether we're looking at what's happening in Turkey or Hungary, but the United States is on a different part of the continuum. The trend is all to populism/some form of authoritarianism and at the other end of the spectrum, whereas say twenty years ago we might have been having the discussion, will the rise of China and the economic growth of China lead to China becoming a liberal democracy? Well in fact, if anything we've seen Chinese authoritarianism increase, not become more of a liberal country.
Chris Bowen: The fact that we're having this conversation tells you that the world's not in a great state, but I'm an optimist about liberalism. Some people question whether democracy is under challenge.
Misha Zelinsky: We'll get to that.
Chris Bowen: Yep.
Misha Zelinsky: Yep.
Chris Bowen: And that's a legitimate question to be asking, and then I guess to subsidize smaller liberalism under challenge, or liberalism as a world view in the international context. It is under challenge, but I think we have to think of ways to ensure that it's not only survives, but prospers.
Misha Zelinsky: So what are the reasons to be optimistic about it? It's so obvious to give all the counter examples about the insurgence of autocracies and all the crisis of confidence in the liberal democratic order. So, what are the reasons to be optimistic? Very easy to point out the problems.
Chris Bowen: Yeah, that's right. Well, just looking around the world a lot of the defeats of, if you like, liberalism or, in some senses, progressivism, have been narrow. Trump didn't actually win by much, as you know he lost the popular vote, and actually a swing of not many votes in key states would've changed that result.
Chris Bowen: UK politics is highly contested. We may or may not get into the inner workings of the British labor party.
Misha Zelinsky: We've got a bit of time! Cover all sorts.
Chris Bowen: The two party system is pretty closely contested in the United Kingdom. You'd be a brave person to predict the result of the next UK election. Macron in France now, we all have our criticisms of Macron perhaps, but he's a force of centralist liberalism, maybe slightly to the left. Trudeau in Canada, he's had a few challenges, but he's got one good election win and will probably win another election in the next twelve months. So, you can look at those places, and of course New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern didn't win an election, she won a parliamentary majority, but I don't think there's much question that she'd win an election now.
Chris Bowen: So there are some bright spots. And, the fact that the forces of progressivism are being challenged means that we do need to think about what our answers are. I think we are doing that, thinking around the world, parties of the center left, to some degree of success or otherwise. Or at least asking the right questions. And I'm an optimist because we have to be, otherwise you wouldn't get out of bed in the morning, that we will come up with the right answers.
Misha Zelinsky: One of the things that troubles me, is this intersection of economics and politics, right?
Misha Zelinsky: One of the consistent things everyone talks about from a public policy point of view is this level of inequality that you're seeing, both within and between countries. Can you have an increase in equality, where people feel more disenfranchised, particularly when you look at the pattern of that inequality where it seems to be regional areas, where regions that are distressed tend to become less hopeful.
Misha Zelinsky: Are democracies and healthy democracies consistent with inequality, or do we have to address one to address the other, where you're addressing them isolation?
Chris Bowen: Well we should address inequality, one, because it's the right thing to do, and two, because it is leading to this populism. You can look at inequality through any number of frameworks or spectra, but I think the most useful one for this conversation is the one that you've given a nod to, pointed to, which is geographic inequality. If you look at this challenge to the forces of the center left or liberalism, progressivism, what ever you want to call it around the world, it is very much a geographic divide.
Chris Bowen: Brexit one outside London. If it was up to the people of London, they'd be very firmly in the EU. Trump one in rural America. Not in the cities. If it was up to the people of California or New York, Hilary Clinton would be preparing for re-election. Macron won in Paris. He lost in the region of France to Le Pen. And, if you look here to our recent kick the guts election defeat, we had swings to us in the city, in wealthy areas, in both safe labor and safe liberal seats, the inner ring. We had swings against us in outer metropolitan areas, particularly in Sydney, which we weren't necessarily expecting. And big swings against us in regional particularly in Queensland.
Chris Bowen: Now these are people, in my view, who say in the Australian context, twenty-seven years of uninterrupted economic growth, give me break. I don't see it. My kid can't get a job, I'm maybe forty-five and I've been unemployed for two years. You go down the main street of Mchale or Gladstone, or Gladstone's a bit different, it's going better than some regional centers. Mchale, or Bowen, or Rocky, and things aren't feeling too great. They're saying what about us? And the straight, center-right message of, "We care about inequality", has not appealed to them. It's our challenge to make sure that we do put it in ways which does appeal to them, when we ensure that the product is the right one for them, and two we are expressing it in a way which speaks to their views about inequality. Because they are, if you like, victims of inequality, they are falling behind in our society.
Chris Bowen: Obviously our message of, "We care about you and care about inequality.", has not resonated.
Misha Zelinsky: It is a bizarre thing when you look at the traditional, I guess, areas that social democrats care about globally, and the regional inequality that we're seeing somehow, whether it's message, whether it's policies. I think there's an element of attitude and tone about it.
Misha Zelinsky: But, how is it that we're just misaligned, we're not connecting somehow?
Chris Bowen: This is not a new challenge in some ways, it's more intense and more acute than it has been. But it is also not a new challenge. Do you remember fifteen or twenty years ago Thomas Frank wrote the book, "What's the matter with Kansas?", which was about this very matter. In some countries it was published as, "What's the matter with America?", but the real title is, "What's the matter with Kansas?". And he spoke about these issues, the people of Kansas, Alabama and Arkansas, and those states are doing it tough or falling behind, subject to inequality, have been left behind by the elites. And the democrats have all these wonderful policies to deal with that, and they are turning up on the first Tuesday of November and letting some old Republican. What is going on here?
Chris Bowen: And he put it down to cultural issues, lack of empathy with the cultural concerns of people in those states. And I think there is still something to that.
Misha Zelinsky: And you raise that recently, talking about whether or not people of religious faiths feel at home.
Chris Bowen: Yes. Which is, I think, an existential problem.
Chris Bowen: If you look at the United States, the single biggest indicator of voting intension is faith. Not income, not ethnicity, not geography, it's faith. What ever faith. Even if you're of Islamic faith, that's the best indicator that you'll vote Republican, if you are of very solid faith.
Chris Bowen: Again, I think we have a real challenge here in Australia about this. Now, we're a progressive party of course, we believe in equality. I voted for major equality, I'm very proud of that. But, we need to ensure we are also having lines of communication to people who are economically progressive, and who believe in social justice. And some instances believe in social justice because of the ethos that they were brought up in, in their church.
Chris Bowen: But also have some concerns about their social conservative. Now, I'm not suggesting for one second we need to not continue with the progressive project, but I am suggesting that we need to think about how we talk to people of faith, how we bring people of faith with us, ensure that they know they have a role in our party, that they can be treated with respect by the party, and have their views considered, both within the party processes and by the party in government. And we have not done that. To be frank, we have neglected that as a movement and as a party, and we have paid a price.
Chris Bowen: I think a big part of the swing against us in western Sydney and probably in some regional areas, was the concern of people of faith, that the labor party has lost touch with their concerns and their issues going forward. People who say to me, "We just want to know that you'll listen to us. We may have voted against marriage equality, but we accept the result, but we want to know we've got a place at the table going forward." I think, collectively, the party and parties of the left, need to ensure that there is a role for people of faith. Again, many faiths teach social-
Chris Bowen: Social justice.
Misha Zelinsky: It's not antithetical-
Chris Bowen: No, that's right.
Misha Zelinsky: The tenants of religion are in no way an antithetical decision. Obviously, love thy neighbor, looking after one another, there's plenty within the-
Chris Bowen: Quite the contrary! Quite the contrary!
Chris Bowen: I mean, in most religions as you say, preach love, and respect, and tolerance and understanding, and justice. We might use different words, but it's what we're about as well. But we've lost the connection with people of faith, and we must get it back. I don't mean to be melodramatic. I regard it as an existential crisis.
Misha Zelinsky: Well that's that. Certainly putting it at a high level.
Misha Zelinsky: This narrowness, how do progressives, and this a global problem. You look at it globally, rightfully identified progressive parties, social democratic parties have either been marginalized or disappeared in some countries, you've got France.
Chris Bowen: Yeah. Well there's the French socialist party effectively no longer exists.
Misha Zelinsky: Right.
Misha Zelinsky: And so, as you say, the existential threat, Macron's essentially co-opted that group and other parts of the center-right. Globally this retreat for the regions, this retreat from the suburbs even, this retreat from, as you say, more conservative social values, how do, rather than narrowing, how do progressive parties broaden? How do we become broader?
Chris Bowen: Well, there's no one thing Misha. It's got to be part of a tableau, an embroidery of our party. It's as simple as making sure that we're in touch. We're in touch with the regions, we're in touch with people of faith, we're in touch with people who maybe at least open to the argument that's put by the populists, that the answer to your problem is less trade and less immigration. Now you know, and I know that's the antithesis of what the answer is. We have to say to people who have been spoken to, in the Australian context, by one nation or even Parma, or the liberals in their own cunning way, to say look, the answer to your problem is less immigration, less trade. We have to show that the answer is not less immigration, less trade. But, we cannot dismiss the question or the issues that we come back to, moving our faith back down to the regions.
Chris Bowen: If you're in Mchale, or Bowen, or Townsville, and the economies not doing too great, we cannot say you're wrong. We have to say, you're right! But the answer to your problem is not Pauline Hanson. We have the answers. Now the essential key to those we have to have the answers, otherwise we can't give it.
Misha Zelinsky: But we do tend to jump to say, you don't get it, you don't understand the data, you don't understand the policies.
Chris Bowen: Yeah, what are you talking about? We've got twenty-seven years of uninterrupted economic growth, and unemployment's low, and interests rate.
Misha Zelinsky: And the macro numbers don't tell the micro story, right?
Chris Bowen: They certainly do not.
Chris Bowen: When I was shadow treasurer I used to say this, I used to do a lot of board rooms with the countries most senior business people. I used to say to them respectively, because they used to say to me, "Oh well, the labor party is wrong about this and that, and everything's going-", well I said, "You don't get it. With respect, you don't get it."
Chris Bowen: Things look good from here. We're sitting in a board room in Sydney, we can see the Opera house, the Harbor bridge, the unemployment rate in Sydney has a three in front of it, or sometimes a two in front. There's no vacant shops, everything's bustling. Come out with me. Come to Mchale and walk down the main street. Come to Emerald! Inland Queensland. Things don't feel too great out there. We collectively, not just political parties, but the establishment, if you want to use that word, economic establishment, the political establishment, the business community, the elites, need to get it.
Chris Bowen: Far too much, collectively, we haven't got it. Or, haven't communicated that we do get it anywhere near effectively enough. The door has opened for that Charlottetown [clark parma 00:15:42] and the populist Pauline Hanson, and we have to close the door by being more responsive to the concerns of people who say this twenty-seven years of uninterrupted economic growth, I think, is bullshit.
Misha Zelinsky: Quote that!
Chris Bowen: You don't beep out on this podcast?
Misha Zelinsky: No, no, that's all right. I'm not too sure too many kids are interested in geopolitics and social democracy globally. But for those that do, close your ears.
Misha Zelinsky: So look, that was really interesting. One of the things I was keen to talk to you about, and we started with Putin and liberalism, and we've talked about social democracy, but the question of liberalism, the United States being the typical guarantor. They've underpinned the global system-
Chris Bowen: Shining hope of the world!
Chris Bowen: Last hope.
Misha Zelinsky: This trade war with China, they've now appeared to be retreating from their own system. Firstly, what do you make of that? And secondly, what's the implications of that war between the US and China for Australia?
Chris Bowen: The trade war will be sorted. There will be a truce. The only question is when and how? Why do I say that? The alternative is unthinkable, because the only alternative to the trade war being sorted is in effect decoupling. Saying the United States and China will decouple from each other and not have tradings.
Misha Zelinsky: And some people argue for that, increasing national security grounds.
Chris Bowen: Well that's about unthinkable as men and women decoupling. Because we need each other, right?
Chris Bowen: China and the United States need each other. And the idea that you could have a two polers in the world, two poles of the world economy with very little to do with each other is just… The world doesn't work like that. The production chains don't work like that. Half the things that are made in America, the components are made in China. And that's not about to change.
Chris Bowen: Now, there's an easy way and a hard way, and that's the only question open to president Trump and president Xi is, do we take the easy way or the hard way? I hope very much they take the easy way. But even if they take the hard way, either they or their successors will sort it. It's true to say that in the United States this is not just Trump, it is a broader concern in the political elite, including the Democrats, that China has not been playing fair in the world trading system. And it's also true to say that in some elements they have poy. President Trump is not always wrong. And he does have some legitimate concerns about the world trading system and China's place in it. But the trade war is very much not the answer.
Chris Bowen: Now I'm hopeful that they'll choose the easy way. Either they will choose the easy way, or if there's a new president next year, but I hope it doesn't take that long because the implications of a worsening trade war, I mean, you don't really need us to spend much time on, because they're pretty self evident. They're pretty bad. They're pretty bad for the world economy, they're pretty bad for us as a trading nation, pretty bad for our region. Even more than the direct implications of the trade war, because you can do all the modeling, and you'll have this impact, this flow into Australia, and all that's legitimate. But, I think the bigger problem is just the blow to confidence around the world, just the uncertainty created by the trade war, and the general blow to confidence is terrible for a country like Australia.
Chris Bowen: I tend to be on the more optimistic side of what will happen in the world economy and the political system, but I'm also a nice, open realist as to the implications if I'm wrong, and that they choose the hard way, and it's not pleasant.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, it's interesting, because pretty much the only by-part [inaudible 00:19:34] that you can find in Washington is the attitude to China. The peace arises, you described before, China's getting rich, China's going to get democratic, peace will now be, perhaps… Has not eventuated-
Chris Bowen: Well it has been peaceful, but there's been no move towards greater democratic freedom
Misha Zelinsky: And so we're seeing increasing authoritarianism. The question, to your point, it's unthinkable to decouple economically, but there's a real push to decouple on the national security elements. How do those two things sit together when you consider the techno nationalism around Warway, and the security of data and that element of the debate? And then all the economic points that you've made. They seem to be completely pulling against one another.
Chris Bowen: Yeah, it's really hard. I know I don't underestimate the difficulty for any government in the western world. I think the liberal national government here has made mistakes in that space over the last six years, but I'm not overly critical of them because I don't underestimate the size of the task, or the degree of complexity of the task in navigating that. Now what you need is a national strategy. The problem Misha, I think you're really making this point, is that in many countries, including Australia, the economic establishment and the national security establishment shout at each other.
Chris Bowen: And the national security establishment shouts, "China's terrible, have nothing to do with them." And the economic establishment shouts, "They're our largest trading partner, we're buggered without them!". Both sides have some evidence to their cases, the trouble is that far to often, it's just the shouting. In the cabinet, and I've served in both, there's the Expenditure Review Committee, which is in effect the Economic Policy Committee, and you've got the National Security Committee, the cabinet, I've served on both for some years. What you really need is probably a National Strategy Committee. To get the intelligence agencies and the economic agencies in the same room and say, what are we going to do about it then? How are we going to navigate this?
Chris Bowen: Some countries are doing it differently, but we're all faced with similar conundrums. Prime minister Trudeau is dealing with this very acutely in Canada. Prime minister May, they've dealt with their own Warway issue in a different way to many other countries. And they've obviously weighed up the evidence. And you know I've seen the briefings, not the classified briefings, but I've seen the public briefings about Warway, and there are some issues, and our position is the same as the government on Warway.
Chris Bowen: These are tough issues and we've got to stop shouting at each other about them.
Misha Zelinsky: That's an interesting point.
Misha Zelinsky: One of the things, to your point about China is the oscillating between greed and fear, but I think actually we don't oscillate that much, as you say, to people that are national security minded tend to be hawkish and people who are economically minded tend to be doveish.
Chris Bowen: We have tribes.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, right.
Misha Zelinsky: Hilary Clinton said you can't argue with your banker. I think we have situation where it's difficult to argue with our best customer. China touches up a little around coal exports, I mean, certainly the coal or oil type situation with the Canadians, as you alluded to there. But is there a case on national security grounds, or even just on a diversification basis, for Australia to build deeper links into other parts of the regional, global economy?
Chris Bowen: Absolutely. This is the key question. I think you correctly put Misha. We can talk about China and how we handle it, and obviously I have views about that, but what we're not doing as a country is deepening our links to the region. More broadly, the Indo-Pacific. Every country is important, but the two key countries for us are India and Indonesia. We're doing a little more in India than Indonesia-
Misha Zelinsky: Which we don't talk about much at all.
Chris Bowen: No, no. But, by and large we're not very much.
Chris Bowen: Both of those countries have been bedeviled, in terms of our bilateral relations with different but similar problems in that in both cases the relationships have been transactional. Indonesia in particular, our relationship with Indonesia is transactional, it's not deep.
Misha Zelinsky: Going to Bali.
Chris Bowen: Going to Bali or, from a government-government level, we've got a problem with boats, can you help us? Or live exports, it's all about a transaction. And with India it's a related but slightly different problem, is that it's stop start. So there's been good intentions by prime minsters, etc., and there's been bilateral visits, and it disputes-
Misha Zelinsky: You would've thought it's easier, perhaps on a language basis and a cultural basis. There's cultural alignment around sport, there's language alignment-
Chris Bowen: Curry, cricket, and Commonwealth. That's what they say about India. Well let's just step back for minute Misha. In each case, let's look at why both countries are vital for us, and then look at why we need do better, or what we could do better.
Misha Zelinsky: Sure.
Chris Bowen: So, let's just take India, the fastest growing major economy in the world. Probably will be the second biggest economy in the world by 2050, probably, on track. It will overtake China as the largest, most populous country in the world. OK. You'd think that means they're pretty strategically and economically important for us. And, they absolutely are. But, again, it's been stop start.
Chris Bowen: I'm hopeful though that perhaps we've turned the corner with India because the biggest thing we've got going for us with India, is that they are now, pretty consistently, our largest source of permanent migrants. So we have a critical mass of permanent ambassadors, from us to them, and them to us. Those Australian-Indians or Indian heritage who now make Australia home, are very entrepreneurial, active in business, and hopefully will help us cement that relationship and stop it being about curry, cricket, and Commonwealth, but actually deepen it.
Chris Bowen: There are a few things we can do for India. Firstly, we should be actively, not just say we agree, but we should, in my view, very actively promote India joining APEC. APEC's an Australian invention-
Misha Zelinsky: Forgot institution largely.
Chris Bowen: It's fallen off the tree a bit-
Misha Zelinsky: Keith talked about it a lot, obviously.
Chris Bowen: Yeah. See when APEC started, it was the main game in town-
Misha Zelinsky: G20.
Chris Bowen: Now you've got G20, you've got East Asia Forum. Summit season's a busy time. And APEC tends to now be the forgotten cousin.
Chris Bowen: Well one, Australia should promote invigoration of APEC, in my view, for all sorts of reasons. And two, we should welcome India to APEC. It's an anomaly that they're not in APEC. They've been trying to join since 1994. And the concern about India is, it's a legitimate concern by some of our colleague countries in APEC, that India is generally not a globalized, generally not pro-free trade, and would be a blocker in APEC. Well my answer to that is we have to bring them in.
Chris Bowen: You can't pretend to exist. They are going to be the world's second biggest economy. Let's bring them in. We've got to give more support to those people in then Indian system arguing for openness. Now the proportion of trade in the Indian economy has doubled. Their exports have doubled over the last period. So, they are being more openly focused. Prime minister Modi's instincts generally on the economy are more free trade and global in their approach. It's still a very different economic system to ours. But there is cause for hope. So we've got to try to build our institutional, bilateral links with India much more, and we should try to bring them into regional architecture.
Chris Bowen: On Indonesia. Now, Indonesia is the most stable country, basically in the world, when it comes to economic growth. They just continue to grow. China does, but Indonesia's growth rate has been, if anything, even more stable. They're just consistent, quiet achievers when it comes to economic growth-
Misha Zelinsky: Quarter of a billion people!
Chris Bowen: Yes! And so much so that they will be the world's seventh biggest economy probably, by 2030, and fourth biggest economy by 2050. They'll overtake us, Germany, the UK, everybody.
Chris Bowen: Guess what? Their next door to us, and they're not in our top trading partners. I think, hello? Are we getting something wrong here?
Misha Zelinsky: Well it's certainly…
Chris Bowen: Yeah! And, again, as I said, our relation's transactional. We don't talk to each other.
Chris Bowen: Here in Australia, more Australian school students study parts of Indonesia in 1972 than they do today. University campus after university campus is closing their Indonesian faculty, because they don't have enough students.
Misha Zelinsky: Is that an emphasis question? Why is that happening? You've learnt the language.
Chris Bowen: Yeah, because I decided that, for a couple of reasons, I couldn't talk the talk, without walking the walk, and talk about Indonesia about how important it was, for example, that we left out Indonesia literacy, if I'm a middle-aged Anglo-Celtic, middle class guy, lecturing the country and young people that we need to do this, if I wasn't prepared to do it myself.
Chris Bowen: So, I took myself off at age forty-two, when I started, and got myself a degree in Indonesian language.
Misha Zelinsky: Old dog, new tricks mate!
Chris Bowen: Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Chris Bowen: People say Indonesian's an easy language, I say, no it's not. There's no such thing as an easy language to learn.
Misha Zelinsky: Absolutely.
Chris Bowen: There are just some that are easier than others. And Indonesian's at the easier end of the scale. It's still very bloody hard.
Misha Zelinsky: Other languages are always challenging.
Chris Bowen: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Bowen: But it can be done. And it can be done at middle age, mid-career. But language is important because one, it shows respect. Well I'm going to Chicago, and my language skills aren't as good as I'd like them to be, I'm constantly working to improve them. But I can start a meeting with an Indonesian finance company, for example, in Indonesian. They often fall off their chair in surprise that a western politician can speak Indonesian. I don't finish the meeting in Indonesian in case I agree to something I didn't mean to.
Chris Bowen: The fact that you show the respect, and often when I'm there the meetings flow in and out of Indonesian and English, because they can't half speak English, and if I can speak Indonesian we show each other respect of floating in and out of each other's language, to make sure we understand each other. It just changes completely the tone of the meeting. If you're just speaking English, and often it's pro-former, it's formulaic, it's a lot of, "Here you are.", and "Thanks for your visit.", "And stay as a good friend." It's bullshit.
Chris Bowen: If you actually show the respect that you've learnt their language, it changes the tone of the meeting. And also, because we're getting more young people learning Indonesian, or any other Asian language, Indonesian's what I chose because you can't learn them all. Any Asian language. You almost inevitably are engendering and interesting the country, and their background and their history. Part of my Indonesian degree was two compulsory subjects, the history of Indonesian language, and Indonesian contemporary culture.
Chris Bowen: But even at school. When I was school I had the choice between Italian, and French, and German.
Misha Zelinsky: Same.
Chris Bowen: But they also taught us about the culture as they were teaching us language. The same with Indonesian, or Mandarin, or Hindi. We talked about India, but how many schools are teaching Hindi? None.
Chris Bowen: And recently ABC fact checked me, and I'm glad they did, because I had said in a speech, going back to China for second, but it's about Asian languages, I said in a speech Australian's have non-Chinese heritage who can speak Mandarin to a level of business competence. The number is one-hundred and thirty.
Misha Zelinsky: I've heard stat, it's an extraordinary stat.
Chris Bowen: It's extraordinary!
Misha Zelinsky: It's actually quite damning in a way.
Chris Bowen: It is. And sometimes when I say to the speech people shake their head and say that can't be true. One friend of mine slammed a pencil on the table and said, "That can't be right!". As I said, fact checked found that essentially it was right. So it was an educated guess, but even if it's double that, even if it's two-hundred and sixty! [crosstalk 00:32:21]
Misha Zelinsky: Two fifty.
Chris Bowen: Out of twenty-four million, that's a pretty poor figure.
Chris Bowen: Now, Mandarin skills aren't bad, because of immigration.
Chris Bowen: But that's not going to get us there. Education is to get us there as well. So, we've got a massive step change to undertake, in terms of our engagement with the region. Because, to get back to your essential point, yes, we can't put all our eggs in the China basket, share politically, economically, interest of the world, we've got to be lifting engagement with India, Indonesia, as young and in the entire region in particular.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah. Going back to the Indian question, because people look at India, look at China, now China has an economic miracle, and India tends to get forgotten. India's mess here is democratic. I'm so curious on your take of, what's the future for democracy, open markets, and mesial liberalism versus the Chinese model of state capitalism, state owned enterprises? At this point a lot of people are pointing saying, "Well, that model appears to be delivering, bringing people out of poverty." Now it's a convergence, it's easier to catch up than it is to go forward, but is there legitimate case to stay that the state owned enterprise model, the central control model, is the way forward? Or do you still think the Indian model can prevail in the long term?
Chris Bowen: No, the Indian model's getting there. It's a unique Indian model. It's not what you recommend as a starting point with a tradition of protectionism and heavy state, very heavy handed regulations and anti-foreign investment. But they're getting there.
Chris Bowen: They now have a national GST, for example. It's got seven different levels, depending on the product you're buying, which is not necessarily how you design it from scratch in a perfect world, but it's what they had to do to get it through, because up until then-
Misha Zelinsky: John Howard did a deal here on the early exclusions. I mean, these things happen in politics, right?
Chris Bowen: Well up until recently, every states had its own GST, and I've seen it, I've traveled through India and the trucks get stopped on the state borders to check the goods. That's all gone. And they're getting there with retail and land reform, etc. And their growth rates are strong. As I said, they're the fasted growing major economy in the world, and probably on track to overtake the United States and become the world's second largest economy at some point when you and I are still on the workforce Misha.
Chris Bowen: That's a big turnaround. So they're getting there, and of course they're a very robust, strong democracy. They just had an election. It's a remarkable feat and logistical feat, the Indian election, as is an Indonesian election. But there's two examples, India and Indonesia, two recent elections, all by and large comparatively smooth and straight forward, and democratic, and both engaged in pro-market reforms and continuing to grow.
Misha Zelinsky: Does that give you hope for democracy in the region? Obviously, similar outcomes in Indonesia, very complex acapella go style elections-
Chris Bowen: Absolutely!
Misha Zelinsky: Very difficult to run them. And India's also complex. A lot of people say, "Well, democracies on the way. China's being more assertive. The Russian's are being more assertive. The traditional democracies have lost their swagger. Brexit, Trump, etc." Does that give you hope for the region?
Chris Bowen: It does, and of course democratic change in Malaysia. An economy of similar size to us, similar population to us. I know Malaysia pretty well, I didn't necessarily think I'd see a change of government in my lifetime, from the all-know government. I don't think many Malaysians did either. They certainly had elections for a long time, but one party happened to win them every time, until this time. So, we shouldn't discount that either. I'm not commenting on the details of Malaysian politics, but there's been a change in government, which was unexpected.
Misha Zelinsky: A peaceful change as well.
Chris Bowen: They had a peaceful change, yeah!
Misha Zelinsky: Which is always the test.
Chris Bowen: Yeah.
Chris Bowen: And you could not have guaranteed that a few years ago, if there was a change of government, that it would be peaceful. As I said, they tend to be forgotten, but they're a significant economy roughly. A roughly comparable economy in terms of middle power, and there's another example.
Misha Zelinsky: One of the things I wanted to get your take on, former treasurer of Australia, you had the portfolio a long time in opposition, one thing that gets overlooked a lot in the debate is this question of debt, global debt. Since the GFC effectively money around the world has been effectively, if not free, subsidized, and we've just cut our own straights yet again here in Australia to 1% levels, unthinkable even five years ago. How concerned should we be about one more generally, what it's doing to the global economy, and how concerning is debt when you look at the debt loans that individuals and countries are carrying? Big question.
Chris Bowen: Yeah, it worries me. It wouldn't worry me if I was currently serving as treasurer of Australia. If you look at the global debt levels, it's about 234% of GDP at the moment. Pre GFC it was 208%. So we have higher exposure than we had pre-GFC in the globe.
Chris Bowen: Now, then you've got to look underneath it and say, what's driven that? Now the good news is, is that a lot of that is driven by states, sovereign states. About eleven trillion has been handed by the United States. About five trillion has been added by China. Debt created by a sovereign government has its issues, but in terms of economic [stability around the world, it's probably one of the less 'badish' types of debt.
Misha Zelinsky: Owing it to yourself in your own currency.
Chris Bowen: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Bowen: Some comes from corporate in United States. And some comes from corporate in China, which is perhaps a cause for instability, if, because there are concerns about the opaqueness of some of that debt. If there is a downturn or a problem, it could be that, that is the cause of it. I don't want to be too alarming, but you have to be realistic about where the shock could come from, and that is one.
Chris Bowen: And some is household debt, which is a concern, and that's our problem.
Chris Bowen: Australia and Canada, household debt.
Misha Zelinsky: World champions in that dubious area, right?
Chris Bowen: Yeah, that's right. Second highest in the developed world. Not a record we should be looking for. And that does expose us. If there was an international downturn, whether it be caused by Chinese debt crisis, whether it be caused by a US recession, which the markets would indicate. Possible/likely.
Misha Zelinsky: Not to get in a super wonk-ish discussion, but inverted yield curves.
Chris Bowen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly right.
Misha Zelinsky: Predicting a US recession in twelve months, or so.
Chris Bowen: Exactly right.
Chris Bowen: And there is some rushing after that. Or it's caused by an elongated, worsening trade war, or it's caused by Europe/Brexit. Europe's hasn't been in a great state. Germany's narrowly avoided a recession. Italy's bouncing along the bottom. Greece continues to be Greece. Europe's not in a great state, so from somewhere you could see the makings of an international downturn from one of the above. And if that happens, one of our exposes is our very high household debt.
Chris Bowen: I think most households can cope with an increase in interest rate, obviously they're going down at the moment, but even if they did start to move up, most households have factored in some buffer. What you can't cope with is unemployment. And that's where, if there is a downturn, and we've got very high household debt, we are in-
Misha Zelinsky: The assumption is you've still got your job.
Chris Bowen: Correct.
Chris Bowen: Debt does worry me.
Misha Zelinsky: What's the role of government? Because one of the things that troubles me, it's a global question, going right back to basic economics, cheaper money means businesses borrow, means they invest, households borrow to an extent they can consume, but largely, we want to see this investment piece. Now, the rate of capital formation. So, i.e. people borrowing money to invest in new things to build. New factories, new businesses, etc., is on the way. You're seeing largely this subsidized money being driven into asset markets, property shares and other forms of equity.
Misha Zelinsky: Is there a role there to make sure that we actually, well, if we're going to subsidize money, it goes into job creation, or into things that are going to create economic activity?
Chris Bowen: Well, ideally.
Chris Bowen: I don't want to go through the war, but that was one of the policy rationales for our negative gearing reforms, for example. Obviously the pay will go through a process of revising our policies. But one of the things that drove us on negative gearing reform was that we have the most generous property tax concessions in the world. I mean it's almost irrational not to be a property investor in Australia.
Misha Zelinsky: Well the tax system tells you to do it, right? You can watch my essay on this, but I find it crazy for every ten dollars that's borrowed in Australia, six bucks go in the property market.
Chris Bowen: Because we provide such incentives to do for the tax system.
Misha Zelinsky: People go with incentives like water goes down hill.
Chris Bowen: And so, that's one of the reasons why we have the second highest household debt in the world. It's because our tax system encourages it. Now, again, as I stress, the party has got to go through the process of a review, but that was the number of rationales for that reform, one of them was housing affordability, one of them was budget repair, and the other one was financial stability and high household debt.
Misha Zelinsky: What's the way forward here, in terms of actually getting consumption going? Because 60% of the economy is driven by consumption. So the focus tends to lead largely on supplies, so let's get monetary policy-
Chris Bowen: Well the reserve bank governors made it clear they can only do so much, right?
Chris Bowen: Again, it's a bit hard to avoid the recent election, but we had policies on the investment guarantee to encourage businesses to invest. But we also, unapologetically said, well you can't expect people to consume when the wage is going backwards. And so we did have some, you might call them radical, but strong policies on the living wage, on penalty rates, because unless we get wages growth going, and it did require a degree of intervention because the systems not sorting it. And this is an international problem, I don't hold this government entirely responsible for all of it, but I hold them responsible for the lack response, and for saying-
Misha Zelinsky: And incoherence in the policy, cutting penalty rates-
Chris Bowen: Exactly.
Misha Zelinsky: Demand for consumption.
Chris Bowen: Well we can argue about the way it'll increase wages, but I think we could probably agree the way to increase wages is not to cut them on weekends.
Chris Bowen: We saw wages growth as being pretty important for social justice and fairness, and equality, but a pretty important economic stimulus as well. Unless there is a solution found through those mechanisms or others, we are going to continue to bounce on the bottom of consumption. And the economy will continue to be anaemic. In my view.
Misha Zelinsky: Well I could probably pick your brain all day, but you're a very busy man with a lot of things to do. But, before you go, and one of my classic clunky segues into the lamest of all questions, Chris Bowen's barbecue, three international guests, three international shows, so who are the international guests alive or dead that you'd have at a barbecue at Bowen's? It's got alliteration, so already-
Chris Bowen: There you go, I could get an apron printed or something.
Chris Bowen: Three international guests! Well, and they can be dead? Well first-
Misha Zelinsky: Might be less fun.
Chris Bowen: Well, OK, to show my pure [wonkiness 00:44:15], in the fantasy football world, and they could be dead, Winston Churchill. I was born eight years after he died, so never walked the planet with him, but I've read basically everything you can read about him, an enormous, remarkable figure. And then you'd put Clem Attlee in. You'd see those to be in the same room as those two. Being a bit more realistic around the world, pretty interested in the US presidential race at the moment. I wouldn't mind spending a couple of hours with Pete Buttigieg.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, I met Pete, he's really a compelling guy isn't he?
Chris Bowen: Yeah! Yeah, I'd have him over for a barbecue. I'd have Ruth Bader Ginsburg over as well, if she could make it. Very admirably figure, powerful intellectual, extraordinary figure.
Chris Bowen: And then just to mix it up completely, I'd probably have, this guy is actually a friend of mine, I've come to know him, I'd have, just to mix it up a bit, a guy who I think is probably the best, in my view, the best living novelist in the world, I'm bias, is John Boyne. He's an Irish novelist. He wrote the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and he wrote The Absolutist, which I highly recommend. A compelling read. I've come to know him, he's a good fella. An Irishman, an Irish novelist. He loves Australia! He comes to Australia at every opportunity, that's how we got to know each other.
Misha Zelinsky: [crosstalk 00:45:48] I think Churchill might have an interesting discussion.
Chris Bowen: Yeah, yeah! That's right. I don't think Churchill's appeared directly in any of his novels. He certainly has written about the issues of the day. So I'd have John over as well.
Misha Zelinsky: So we've got a novelist, a former British prime minster-
Chris Bowen: And the nearest south bender [crosstalk 00:46:08]-
Chris Bowen: I added one.
Misha Zelinsky: And that's right, a former president of Australia. So that would be a great barbecue, I'd definitely like to be a fly on the wall with that one. Chris Bowen, thanks for joining us, I really appreciate your time mate.
Chris Bowen: Been a lot of fun Misha. Good on you.
Misha Zelinsky: Cheers.
Ambassador Curtis Chin
June 9, 2019	Misha Zelinsky	ANZUS, Belt and Road Initiative, China, Debt Diplomacy, Democracy, Economics, Human Rights, National Security, Nationalism, Pacific, South China Sea, Trade, Trump, US, US Leaders	0:54:28
Ambassador Curtis Chin served as the US ambassador to the Asian Development Bank. In doing so, he became only the fourth US ambassador of Chinese heritage. As one of the world's foremost experts on the Asia-Pacific region, Curtis now serves as the Asia Fellow of the nonpartisan Milken Institute and works with a range of startups and impact funds in Asia. Curtis joined Misha Zelinsky for a chat about the US-China trade war, what a deal looks like for both countries, the future of global trade and governance, and how the world should respond to countries that want to break the rules.
Misha Zelinsky: Curtis Chin, welcome to Diplomates. How are you?
Curtis Chin: Hey, doing well. Great to be with you.
Misha Zelinsky: And I should just reference for the audience, that we're doing this through a web chat interface, so you're currently in Bangkok, which is three hours behind Sydney time. So thank you for joining us. You're an American in Thailand, but thank you for joining us as an international guest.
Curtis Chin: Delighted to be with you. I think though with so many of us, it's one city one day, another city the next day, but very clearly, I spend most of time here in Asia, really Southeast Asia. And I'm with the Milken Institute out of Singapore, but yeah, from the US, but back and forth between the US and Asia-Pacific. So great to be with you today, chatting about Asia-Pacific, sharing some thoughts on Australia, the rest of the region, and some of the big stories of these weeks, and probably the whole year, which is the front and foremost, China and the US.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah. I think that's actually a good place to start. So you're obviously an Asia-Pacific expert, you spend a lot of time in the Asian region. Big news at the moment, and certainly the last six to twelve months has been this question of trade, and certainly this trade tensions between China and the United States, and what increasingly now looking like a trade war. So I suppose the first question is, is this a trade war and what should the world make of the sort of these trade tensions between the United States and China?
Curtis Chin: First let me go back to your comment that I'm an expert, I don't think there's anyone that's an expert in terms of what's going on right now between the US and China. I mean, it really is unprecedented. You know, I was very lucky to serve primarily in Republican administrations, but I was lucky to serve also in the Obama administration as our US ambassador to the Asian Development Bank. And I'd say for a long time Republicans and Democrats … and no one's really been a big fan of tariffs. So today we're at a situation where back and forth, whether you call it a trade war, or let's say a tariffs war, we're seeing the United States and China continue to raise tariffs on each other's products. For me in the short run, clearly not a good thing. In the long run my hope is that both sides will come up with a way that will lead to a more balanced, more sustainable relationship between China and the US.
Curtis Chin: But also if both sides succeed in moving this forward, it will be to the benefit of the entire region, of all of Asia-Pacific, including Australia. When you think about countries that in my view, have become so dependent on China as a source of purchases of their commodities, Australia comes to mind, but also as a place where you move supply chains because labor costs have been cheaper there. So you've seen this movement over the what? Last decades, but that needs to change. One, it's already changing even before these tariffs back and forth, because the cost of production in China is getting more expensive. But also I could say quite frankly, that as we think about China's behavior, what might have been acceptable two or three decades ago … I mean, clearly China was a poor country, is not acceptable today. Bluntly we might say it's time for China to grow up and take on some of the responsibilities that come with being again, a great economic power.
Misha Zelinsky: It's interesting you said there, you touched on that for a long time the bipartisan consensus in the United States, certainly globally too, is that free trade is good, tariffs are bad, interventionism is bad. What's interesting is … I suppose firstly, and I'm keen to get your take on this, a lot of people will say that this is a Trump thing, but it's actually, interestingly, perhaps the only thing that both sides of the United States, of the aisle politically agree on, which is that sometimes the war on trade is popular and bipartisan, because you saw Trump tweeting as he does, about tariffs that he's going to put on, and being encouraged by the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, saying he was doing the right thing and to keep going. So it's interesting the US in a very quick way, in a bipartisan way, to have a more assertive approach to Chinese trade in the United States. So I'm curious to get your take on what that journey is and how the United States has gotten itself to this point.
Curtis Chin: Well, you know I think your points, it's clearly not just a Trump thing, I think President Trump to his great credit, has really captured kind of the moment, the feeling, the frustration of not just Americans, but people all around the world who have tried to engage with China. Clearly the world has benefited from less expensive products made in China because of traditionally what have been lower labor cost. And in may ways it was a gamble, with purchasing products from China, with making products in China, lead also to a more economically, politically liberal nation. That gamble has not paid off. We're seeing a China today that is much more strict in term of how it treats its own people, in terms of its crackdowns on Christians and Muslims, in terms of its behavior on human rights. And it shouldn't take away from the successes that China has achieved in lifting really, hundreds of millions out of poverty. But again, I think to one of my earlier points, China also has to evolve, China has to grow up.
Curtis Chin: And so Trump has in a way, come into this moment, really perhaps, he was the president for this moment, and even China in the past has said this trade imbalance between the United States and China is not sustainable, because ultimately it will lead to a pushback, and we're seeing that, not just in the United States, but really throughout the Southeast Asia region in particular. Again, I'm based mainly in Southeast Asia, and when I speak to chairmen, CEOs, senior leadership of Southeast Asian businesses, you also find tremendous support, tremendous sympathy for the points that Donald Trump is making. I was out actually recently with the chairman of a Southeast Asian company, he stepped down as CEO from his role, and what he said to me was very interesting, he said that in many ways, they would all love to go on record and say what Trump is saying, but China has been a vindictive nation, that we've seen records recently, of where they've punished companies for doing things that went against China's foreign policy.
Curtis Chin: One specific example would be South Korea. In South Korea, there's a big conglomerate called Lotte, big South Korean company, respected company. The South Korean government, to protect its own people, made the decision to install kind of like a missile defense system. The land that was used was once owned by Lotte. So what happened? China sought to punish Lotte in terms of its business transactions in China. So just one very real example of how the Chinese government behaves against individual companies. President Trump to his great credit is saying, "We the United States will speak up on these issues," because in many ways I think his language was, "China has been ripping off the US and too much of the world. We need to rebalance that." And that rebalancing also will be to the benefit of China itself. I'm sure China is not happy with it being kind of like the country that's increasingly kicked around in rhetoric not just in the US, but in public and in private, in parts of Asia.
Curtis Chin: That's not good for China. China really should be embraced for what it has done in terms of lifting millions out of poverty, but its treatment of foreign businesses, both in China and outside of China really has to stop. And so where I would say that I think the Trump administration needs to evolve, is they've identified very clearly and spoken out very clearly on the issue, but I think they have to evolve in a way that also brings in their many natural allies to come together, to help China move forward in this situation.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah. One of the things I'm curious about, Trump sort of is always promoting himself as the great deal maker, but the question of tariffs is obviously that it sort of punishes the country that's taking their export for some sort of practice, but at the same time it obviously lifts prices for households. Now, a figure I saw was that if they end up putting up this 25% tariff on all Chinese imported goods into the United States, we're talking about $2,500 a year per household increase in the cost of living. The thing I'm curious about is does this have implications for Trump in the domestic policy sense, and also to your mind, what does a deal look like? Trump focuses a lot on trade deficits, but what does a deal look, and what does victory look like in this situation, because the grievance is clear, but it's not as clear one who wins, households in the United States get punished, and secondly what does a deal look like in the minds of Trump or other experts?
Curtis Chin: Yeah. A number of interesting points you raise. First, when you have tariffs … and I'm no fan of tariffs. Tariffs openly I hope, are means to a more balanced relationship between the United States and China. The other is that question, who pays for a tariff? So let's say you're selling a product, a tariff is imposed, one question will be, "Can that tariff be passed on to the end consumer?" Right, then of course the consumer will most ultimately pay. Will that company though first try to absorb it because they're afraid of losing the business? It's a little bit more complicated than what people say. But I also underscores, there are always winners and losers when it comes to tariffs. Another tricky point. We talk about the impact of tariffs on the American consumer, but I remember I did one interview where someone said to me, "But don't you benefit from cheap products at Walmart?" Though again, it's a big American store. Of course we do, but clearly I can only afford those cheap products if I have a job, and have I lost my job because of all those cheap products?
Curtis Chin: It's really kind of a balance that we need to seek, and then likewise, when people raise the point of American consumers ultimately in the short term pay, I wonder if people will pose that same interpretation to China, or is it just China cares less about its consumers, and they're thinking that the US will worry about its consumers but China will not, as it tit for tat, tries then tariffs the other way around? So I think we need to look at the individual winners and losers. I think the Chinese are now trying to target agricultural areas, big support areas for President Trump. As we think about the politics of trade also, President Trump of course, is running for reelection. Election is next year, next November. That's a lot of months before that election, to get a deal done. So we'll see how it plays out with this timing. Your second point, what will a deal look like?
Curtis Chin: My fear is that ultimately there will be a face-saving deal, where each side claims victory, but really nothing changes. And so that goes to you, what is success? For me success isn't simply that Chinese buy a lot more US exports. Clearly that's a short-term win. But it doesn't address the longterm issue that many countries … maybe the US is at the forefront, but many countries are facing with regards to China, which is theft of intellectual property, which is forced technology transfers, which are non-tariff trade barriers. It's a range of things that companies, whether they're Australian, or American, or from somewhere in Southeast Asia are facing. For me a real success would be if some of these things change. You know there was some talk that actually, that the Chinese as part of the negotiation process, had agreed to some of this, because perhaps they saw that it was in their interest too.
Curtis Chin: On this war, who knows the backstory and all these reports and tweets? But then you saw, most recently, leading up to the latest announcement by President Trump, about really, a move to impose tariffs on all Chinese exports, was this point that China reneged, that China moved backwards in terms of edits on the agreement that the negotiators had already agreed to. So only the people involved will know the truth to that, but I can tell you as business person who's worked in Beijing, who's worked in Hong Kong, and now worked throughout Southeast Asia, business people from all kinds of companies, American, Australian and others, have seen that same reality, where something that you thought was negotiated with a Chinese counterpart, all of a sudden doesn't seem so negotiated as the process moves forward. So I would not be surprised that there is quite a bit of truth to that comment, to that tweet from President Trump, "The Chinese reneged, the Chinese moved backwards." And so again, that needs to change.
Curtis Chin: So again when we talk about what is victory, victory ideally is a victory for both sides. That both sides, China and the United States, to go back to their really important domestic constituencies, and say "We've come to an agreement, we moved these things forward." But then ultimately that victory will be a more sustained trading relationship between the United States and China. One of the point I always want to make though, is that we looked at some of the drivers of where we are today. Clearly for decades the Chinese have in a way, been gaming the system, taking advantage of the system, something that might have been tolerated when they really were a much poorer nation and a less militaristic nation than they are today. So that has to evolve. But I think one thing that we need to think more about more, and hopefully media can talk about more, is that in the world today, exports are both of goods and services.
Curtis Chin: So we talk a lot about things that were made, or grown, and exported, but we also need to think about the services. United States, developing nations, are also trying to move this way, but the United States has moved to develop the economy, where a lot of things we produce are services, are intellectual property, are things that again, are of great value, of greater value added than something simple that might have been made 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. As we talk about the balance between nations in terms of what they import or export, I think we should ideally spend also more time talking about both goods and services, versus the focus on the easy number to understand, which is how many widgets or bushels of this has a nation purchased. Out of all this I think back about our evolving sense of trade, of Asia. Ultimately, and I say to people, "Things have moved forward, it's a positive thing. Trade has been a wonderful thing."
Curtis Chin: But the reality also is that in this more globalized world, this globalized economy of ours, many people have not done so well. So Trump has captured that moment, and spoken to people about what can he do to fight for them. But I see that across this world of ours, and across Europe, but very much across here and Asia, where in the Philippines, they had a recent election also, a very populist leader, India is going to an election, Indonesian had its own election, where leaders have to respond to their vast number of citizens who maybe don't see that they've become better off as part of this globalized economy.
Misha Zelinsky: And we've certainly seen that with Brexit as well. I think you're right. I mean, the question of trade and who benefits, and it might … it looks good in a headline number, but often say trade destroys and distributes unevenly. And I think there's a lot of people that have been left behind or dislocated, and it's expressing itself in this politics in a worrying sort of way. So I think certainly a lot to think about there for policymakers. One thing I'm curious about is, and you sort of talked a lot about the trade relationship, that seems to me now that the United States very much considers itself or it sees China now as very much a strategic competitor.
Curtis Chin: I think in every US administration, every country around the world, even your government hopefully, is working to give its citizens a better life. And so I think what we've seen is this continuing movement to a richer world, but also a more unequal world. And so you've seen so much talk about inequality kind of bubbling up over these last, really two decades, and I think we've reached that point where people are trying to look for what are the drivers of this inequality, how do we address that? And so very clearly, the two biggest economies in the world, China and the US, ought to be very much part of that conversation. You raised an intriguing question when you talk about China and the US, China versus the US. For me taking a step back, in many ways I see things also as not just China versus the US, but a US-driven system versus an alternative that China is pushing when it comes to concepts of competition, economics, of trade, and governance.
Curtis Chin: In general, I think no country wants to chose and say, "I'm on the US's side or on the China side," but I would say to nations, I would say to the people of Australia and elsewhere, "It really it's up to you to decide which system is better for your own people." For me, clearly I'm biased, I am for a system of free markets, free trade, and free speech. This is not what China is for, right? But often people will say, "But I got to follow the money, I got to pay the bills, I got to do what I need to do. It's China that is the big customer." And so that's what people think to think through. It's a very difficult question sometimes. I spoke recently at a Bloomberg event in Singapore on this whole same issue of China and the US, and I was struck by one of our fellow panelist, a friend … he's actually from the Democrat side versus Republican side, but clearly we're both Americans. Kirk Wagar, the former US ambassador to Singapore.
Curtis Chin: It was very interesting when he made a comment, and that comment was basically, "Western businesses, when they deal with China, the big question for them is, 'Do you have to sell your soul, or to what degree do you sell your soul?'" So I'm paraphrasing his comment, but that's that challenge of you're going to make so much money hopefully dealing with China, the reality is many companies lose money dealing with China. But in pursuit of that market, or in Pursuit of that cheaper production base, do you simply look the other way on all the terrible things that China is doing? Maybe case number one, we see these days are these reports coming out of Xinjiang, this Northwest part of China, of where they put, by some accounts, one million to two million people into camps. Some would say concentration camps, of all the terrible connotations that raises from World War II. But they put people there simply because they're Muslim.
Curtis Chin: That clearly, I would hope the world would speak out about. But we've seen how Muslim nations, many nations have looked the other way. "It's China's right," I think one Saudi leader said, "as to how they deal with what China perceives as a terrorism threat." But for me, maybe I'm not getting any business in the near term in China, because I want to speak up on behalf of all Chinese people, whether they're Muslim, or Tibetan, or Han Chinese. You know I'm ethnic. People can't see me on your podcast, but I think my great-grandfather went to the US way back in the late 1880s to help build the railways or something. I'm ethnic Chinese, but for me it shouldn't be about your ethnicity, really even your nationality, but people should willing speak up on behalf of those that really need speaking up on behalf. So clearly the Muslims, the Tibetans, but even Christians. We're seeing reports that the Chinese have been particularly aggressive in tearing down Christian churches, which they don't recognize. These are all not great things.
Curtis Chin: But what if you want to do business in China? Do you say nothing because you're going to make some money? That's a very difficult question for people who again, who have to pay the bills. But for me, you can't, in my mind, simply chose to say nothing because you want the money. There is some balance and each individual, each company needs to think through what is that … and in the long run, my hope is that all Chinese people will appreciate this notion that every single individual has value. There I go sounding like an American.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, that's okay. It's good to be of your people. But it's so curious, you were touching quite a bit there about the rule of law, I think largely, I mean. And the United States is larger] since World War II certainly, in this so-called rules-based global order. China's really bumping up against that now, and one of the things I'm sort of curious to take on, I mean, where are the areas that you think that the United States is prepared to turn the other way? So for example, if you take South China Sea where Barack Obama, President Obama sort of didn't do a great deal as the Chinese government sort of constructed these artificial islands in the South China sea, and then militarizes on, has in effect sort of annexed a part of the South China sea.
Misha Zelinsky: How do you see things of that nature when it comes to getting the Chinese government to obey and respect maritime law in that instance, where the international courts very clearly ruled against China, and it essentially ignored them? How do make your earlier point that China, and they need to be a responsible grown up actor? How do you actually enforce that with the Chinese government?
Curtis Chin: I think the reality here, even when I go back thinking about that question you asked, the reality is it cannot just be China and the US deciding. What are the regional bodies, global bodies that can play really, a shaping role? I mean, the reality is that at the end of the day, and sadly this goes back to a statement, even when you think about Chinese history that, "Power grows out of a barrel of a gun," Mao famously said in the civil war in China. And the reality is that when you look at some our regional institutions like ASEAN the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, they act by consensus. Many of those nations have a stake in the South China Sea, and the Philippines even calls it the West Philippines Sea, but China has been very aggressive in building up … I don't know, we call them [islandets00:25:55], or little islands, or fake islands, I don't know. And then despite saying they wouldn't, moving into to militarize them.
Curtis Chin: But China's got the guns, and maybe other countries don't have the guns, or they want Chinese investment. So lets deal with that. But to your point, I would hope that a nation let's say like Australia, can step up. It's what we call like freedom of the seas, freedom of navigation, trips to the South China Sea. That nations throughout the region can seek to come together to engage with China. The Chinese strategy has always been one of like picking off countries, some would argue that ASEAN already has in a way, been nullified because China has bought out Laos and Cambodia. And for a associations that acts by consensus, if Cambodia has in the past said, "Well, no, no. We're not going to issue a joint statement because we Cambodia, don't agree," it blocks efforts. So hopefully that will evolve and all. Your question also raised this point about systems, and organizations, and governance.
Curtis Chin: One I know very well, is this whole issue of how will we support and fill the financing gap? How will we support the building of infrastructure in the region when there's been a big gap? The region's infrastructure needs and how they will be financed. So four years, nearly two under Obama, nearly two under Bush, I served as our US ambassador to the Asian Development Bank. For those who don't know, that's kind of like an Asia-Pacific base, Philippines headquartered version of the World Bank, primarily focused on ending poverty in this region, mainly through building infrastructure, a lot of core infrastructure, roads, power, water systems, sanitation. Really doing good things there. But how do you build those infrastructure projects? So World Bank, Asian Development Bank, they're all in this region. For the last couple of years we've seen Chinese rivals.
Curtis Chin: And so we've first and foremost seen the rise of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. We've seen something called the New Development Bank, some people call it the BRICS bank after Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the key players there. That one's based out of Shanghai. We're see moves by bilateral financial institutions like the Chinese development banks, or that will be just working with one country, versus these multilateral banks. We're seeing a lot of new players challenging that old, what they call this old Bretton Woods type institutions to finance and move Asia forward. In many ways that's a good thing, hopefully it makes some of those old bodies, like my old colleagues at the ADB, a little bit more hungry, innovative, focused on acting quicker to serve the needs of this region. But it's a bad thing if what it is, it's also a push to the bottom, who will get the money out the fastest. When I was on the board of the Asian Development Bank, I visited a nation whose engagement with the ministry of finance, is they seek to get funding for key infrastructure projects.
Curtis Chin: ADB, I think to its great credit, like the World Bank and others, we'll try to push for certain, what we call safeguards, so that if you put in an infrastructure project, the environment would be in some ways be protected. There'd be … the lingo today is ESG, so there'd be like environmental, social, governance safeguards put in place. These are all good things, but then it makes a project take a little bit longer to develop. So if you're a country just in search of financing, what if all of a sudden there are Chinese-backed banks? There's nothing else. "We don't care about those ESG, those safeguard standards, we trust you as the borrowing country to decide what's right for your own people." You can see there will be sympathy for that, "You decide what's right for your own country in term of protecting the environment based on your own spot in that kind of development line." But then the Chinese might say, "But if we do the financing for you, maybe Chinese state-owned enterprises were going to do a lot of the work, maybe it will come with 500 to 1,000 Chinese employees and workers."
Curtis Chin: So I think any nation, they decide. It's their money, they ultimately have to pay it back, but read the fine print. So don't think that because maybe the Chinese aren't insisting on certain safeguards that others might, that it doesn't come with other things that they might well insist upon. And so that's how it should be. As long as it's transparent, these institutions are accountable, that's how it should be. Let the market compete. What the big problem is though, and we're beginning to see it even in China's One Belt, One Road initiative, this is a big infrastructure funding push, is that what if decisions aren't made fairly? What if corruption is involved? What if money changes hands? And case in point has been what we've seen has happened in Malaysia. In the last year or so, Malaysia brought back its longtime prime minister, probably the oldest prime minister in the world, Mahathir came back in with … was swept his party back into government, overturning the rule of, I think for decades, of what is not the opposition party.
Curtis Chin: And when Mahathir came back in as leader of Malaysia, he raised questions, it certainly raised eyebrows in China, but he raised question about some of the big infrastructure deals that were signed by his predecessor Najib, with the Chinese government. And to his great credit, forced renegotiation. And so one that's come up most recently is … I think is calling it like an East Rail, a project … Really so much money in his huge infrastructure projects. Mahathir was ultimately able to shave the cost of the product or project. Not exactly apples and oranges because the project did change somewhat, but shaved the cost of that project by a third. And so it makes you wonder where was that extra third, you were talking really tens of millions of dollars, where was that money going? Into Chinese pockets? Into construction company pockets? Into Malaysian pockets? And then a question for the region, for countries that haven't had this kind of democratic revolution bringing back an old prime minister, focused now on corruption.
Curtis Chin: What about all of those countries with deals other than the One Belt, One Road initiative, that haven't had a Mahathir, to try to renegotiate and bring those costs down by a third? Where has that money gone? And so these are some of the questions that I think individual citizens may well raise when they see deals signed with China. But sadly in so many nations, those citizens are ignored, because the deal is done with leaders, and those leaders know for good and for bad, where that money has gone or will be going. So yes, China can be a constructive force in this region, but for that to happen in this changing world of ours, China too must evolve. And so bringing this all kind of full circle to how we began talking about China and the US, clearly we see this rivalry between the Chinese and the US government at this time. Hopefully it's not a rivalry between the peoples of these nations, where people just want a better life for themselves.
Curtis Chin: But it's also a rivalry, I believe, between different systems. So this Chinese system is one again, of subsidizing their own companies. To what degree is that acceptable or should it be acceptable, and then how do you have a level playing field when you're up against a state-owned enterprise that's completely subsidized by the second largest economy in the world? And I think these are important questions, that again are just not US versus China questions, and hopefully they're questions that are also being asked within China. But we're seeing now in some of the reports that are coming out of China, few and far between, where China itself is cracking down on its own Chinese economists and their own people who would dare challenge what Xi Jinping is pushing through right now. As I think a Chinese American, as somewhat Asian American, someone who's living in both the US and Asia, I in particular want China to move forward and to succeed just like every other nation, but China must evolve, and my hope is that it'll be done peacefully versus all the turmoil that China has gone through this last century.
Curtis Chin: My hope is that that does not come back. In a weird way, that may be what Xi Jinping fears, but is he putting in place a system which might encourage or increase the odds of that coming back. A case in point, Xi Jinping, president of China, pushed through a way for him to serve as really president for life. So in a way governance has moved backwards in China. Xi Jinping has a lot of rivals within China that maybe aren't so happy with how he's done things. This US-China back and forth, this trade war really emerged under his watch. So there's a lot of questions within China about he's doing things, but those people are increasingly kind of squashed. In the old days, if you were a senior Chinese leader, maybe you'd wait out whoever the president was, you'd wait five years, you'd wait 10 years, but that has now changed. Maybe there is no waiting out Xi Jinping.
Curtis Chin: And so are people moving sadly, back to that old system? Are they trying to bring him down, stab him in the back? Things that are not good, because that's how China has evolved. It's evolved backwards, and it's gone back to the system where actually it's almost like there's a new emperor in town, that emperor is Xi Jinping. And what happened to emperors in the past? They either died or were overthrown. So that's not a good thing for China, and I think no one should welcome turmoil in China. And so again it's in China's own interest to rethink about how it treats not just the US, but how it treats all its neighbors. The Chinese version of rule of law is not one that I would hope the world seeks to emulate. We look right now at an imprisoned … out on parole I think, the technical term is, but an imprisoned Huawei, this big Chinese tech company CFO in Canada under the Canadian version of rule of law.
Curtis Chin: I think that Huawei executive has just moved from one of her multimillion dollar houses in Vancouver to another multimillion dollar house in Vancouver while she goes through the Canadian legal process as will she be extradited to the United States regarding charges of was she really directly involved in her company's trying to avoid sanctions on Iran, create shell companies, all these things. Right? So the rule of law is proceeding. Meanwhile in China, and I dare say it's not coincidentally, but connected, China has retried one Canadian, I think sentenced him to death. China is now putting I think two Canadian citizens under arrest, alleging that they're spies. There was one, I think social media post, that's never all …. as you know never sure how accurate some of these posts are, but this particular social media post contrasted the treatment of those Canadians under the Chinese version of the rule of law, versus the Huawei CFO, her name is Meng, CFO Meng, among under the Canadian rule of law.
Curtis Chin: And so I say to countries, I say to people, "As you think about the systems that are really contending now, a Chinese way of doing things, a Western way of things, what is better for you?" And so my hope is that this notion of East versus West isn't one of really of East versus West, it's really what's right for a nation. And as I think about even one person … I did an interview when someone said to me on air, "Well, isn't this stealing of property by the Chinese cultural?" And I had to push back, one because I'm ethnic Chinese. But when you think about what does that mean, culture, because very clearly when I go to a dynamic place like Singapore, or a dynamic place like Hong Kong, or Taiwan, mainly Chinese people, ethnic Han Chinese people, I don't see them ripping off and stealing other countries' or other companies', other countries companies' intellectual property like you do in China.
Curtis Chin: So if it's cultural, it's because of a business climate that the communist Chinese have created, it's not because people are ethnic Chinese or Caucasian or whatever. And I think that's how we need to look at things in order to move things forward. And again, I keep coming to this point that moving things forward are also in the interest of the Chinese people. And so it's always intriguing where people say that, "How long will you as a citizens stand for tariffs?" If indeed those higher costs are passed on to them. But then we can throw that same question at the Chinese, how often will Chinese citizens stomach and tolerate all that their leaders do, then impose this higher cost and burdens on them, whether it's the money they spend, the lives they live, or what they can say? And unlike in a democracy, where the Chinese citizens say, "No, we want to change things. We'll have different leaders," how do people change things in China? Their track record has not been good when it's been a system where the Chinese people have no way to peacefully speak up. And that's the challenge for our world today.
Misha Zelinsky: So the question I have … So you sort of talked a lot about this sort of the competing models and the hope that I suppose, over time the theory always was that China would gradually adopt Western norms of global leadership and rules-based order. The thing that is curious in all this is that the United States has always been the underwriter of these systems and has always had great confidence in these systems. One of the great strengths of the United States model of global leadership has been its alliance system. Now, people have thought about Trump's approach to the strategic rivalry with China, but one of the things I'd like input is Trump's administration approach to United States' friends in a way that has attacked NATO allies, it has attacked allies in Asia region, such as South Korea for not pulling their weight, etc. How can the United States' friend believe in the system that United States has underpinned and expect China to adopt a system that perhaps the United States itself seems to be walking away from somewhat.
Curtis Chin: I don't know if the answer is walking from a system that we've all benefited from, this global trading system, but very clearly, the United States is saying it needs to be change and fixed. One case and point I look at is think about all these global bodies, and that's where my hope … We talk about West versus East, but I hope some of these global bodies are really seen as global bodies, because I think part of the challenge is we say it's a Western system or, "I'm from the East. I don't want that system." But I would argue that things like human rights, free speech, worship whatever you want, your religion, or whatever your faith is, isn't a Western concept, but then I hope would be more universal concepts. So going back to your point, so one of the institutions that I think needs to evolve, one example would be the World Trade Organization, and I think even the WTO leadership has said, "Yeah. We need to change too." And it's the Trump administration that is pushing for some of these changes.
Curtis Chin: One example would be under WTO rules right now, that China is still treated as a developing nation. So maybe it's allowed to do certain things, can it have more state-owned enterprises, more support for state-owned enterprises, but then a developed nation can't? So doesn't that need to change? For me it's kind of ridiculous also that this second largest economy in the world that is China, some would say largest economy based on purchasing power parity, that this nation still borrows money from the World Bank, still borrows money from the Asian Development Bank, because they say, "Oh, we're a poor country." So again it goes back I think, to these metrics, but very clearly, China has resources that other nations do not have. China again, amazing, has put like this little rover on I think, the far side of the moon, and yet it still borrows money from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank because it says, "Oh, we're a poor country, we need these subsidized loans to help us fight poverty."
Curtis Chin: And so I think these institutions need to change, WTO, ADB, World Bank, and how they treat a nation like China. And what's great about these rules-based organizations also, it would be that, it's not just about China. If it were another nation in that same kind of role as they move up, they also should in a sense, graduate from these kinds of assistance like grants and subsidized loans. And so I think, we think about this China and the US, I think that's part of the challenge that right now because of this tariffs war, it's seen as China versus the US. But in many ways, there will be many allies in the battle if they could speak freely, and also many more allies in a sense, if the Trump administration to your point, I think were more adept in how it handles its long time allies and friends. The US relationship with Australia, with Thailand, with Singapore, with the Philippines, these are relationships that will continue to evolve, but really are foundations for moving things forward in a way that will I think, benefit the countries involved, but also benefit this region, this Indo-Pacific region as well as the world.
Misha Zelinsky: So one question I want to ask you, are you a member or do you have an involvement in the International Republican Institute, the IRI which is responsible for promoting democracy globally? There's a sister organization to Democrats version of them. Traditionally people have always thought that China would grow rich and then it would grow democratic. What we've seen as it's grown richer, unfortunately it's become more autocratic. You touched on the fact that Xi has made himself emperor for life. With your sort of background in what makes democracy great and how democracies flourish, do you hold any sort of hope … is there anything to hope for people that want to see China become more democratic, or is that just a lost hope now to your mind?
Curtis Chin: Are both the International Republican Institute and this National Democratic Institute, they're both come under this umbrella, National Endowment for Democracy, which really comes out of … started to work way back when I began my career, like an intern under Ronald Reagan. But something that Ronald Reagan sought to encourage, was the spread of democracy. So these are nonpartisan groups, even though one sounds Republican one sounds Democrat. And their job really is to encourage democracy, but I think more importantly and this goes to the heart of your question, to encourage institutions, and systems, and processes that allow democracy to flourish. I'm usually always like the most hopeful person in the room, even though like the room's falling apart. And so I'm always hopeful that things will be moving forward. But I think it's important that we talk about democracy, that we realize that democracy is not just elections, democracy is about balance, it's about systems, checks and balances, it's about institutions.
Curtis Chin: And so like the work of both IRI, NDI, would be things like encouraging political parties, it doesn't matter which party you are, but encouraging political parties to think through the use of research, degree that is allowed or easily done in a given country, so that they can better understand what citizens are worried about, what they're concerned about, and then think through how they can best address those concerns. It's about how do you strengthen a democratic process? Where people don't like whoever is running, there's a chance to get rid of that person. So yes, I'm hopeful for China in the long run, but clearly what we see in these last what? Five years, is a China that's become much more economically assertive and militarily aggressive in the Indo-Pacific region. And so what will happen over time? The reality is that it won't just be China and the US contending, it will be the other rising powers in this increasing … what they call multipolar world.
Curtis Chin: They will also have to contend with a rising China. One day we'll see India come into its own, we will see Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia come into its own. How will China engage with an India, with an Indonesia, with a stronger ASEAN, Association of Southeast Asia Nations? How will they deal with this? Probably one of their biggest headaches is their friend, North Korea. At the end of the day, I believe, here I'm being hopeful again, I believe that Korea will be united one day, but clearly when it unites, the reality will most likely be a democratic, in a way, westward-oriented democracy, versus the model that China and North Korea itself now present to the world. That's really what holds back these two nations from coming together, North Korea and South Korea, is China. China would probably prefer kind of a somewhat unstable North Korea on it's border than a united westward-looking Korea.
Curtis Chin: And so China has a lot of headaches to contend with, this trade war is really just one of them. And as you think about the calendar of this year, China has so many worries to contend with. An anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen, I say massacre, Chinese doesn't like that word, incident, I would say. But when we think about the June 4 anniversary coming up, when you think about labor unrest in China, Xi Jinping is in a difficult situation, and maybe in some ways much less secure and stable than he would like the world to think he is. And so this trade war at a time of an already slowing but still growing Chinese economy, is not good for him either. And so maybe he will pursue the route of again, trying to unite the Chinese people in a very nationalistic way. You're seeing some of the rhetoric coming out of China, "China will never back down." Very nationalistic, trying to unite his own people against an enemy, when the reality that maybe his biggest challenge is what's happening at home, in his country.
Misha Zelinsky: Thanks. I could probably talk to you about this all day I think, it's so may fascinating different areas we could go to, but of course you're a busy man, you've got things to do. So as I always do, very clunkily segue to the fun part of the show. I get a lot of good feedback on this really lame question that I ask everyone. But of course you're an American guest on our show, just curious about the three Australians that are coming to Ambassador Curtis Chin's barbecue and why? And I should disclose, earlier he said, "What if I can't think of three Australians?" I said, "Well, just do your best."
Curtis Chin: Yeah. What if I can't think of three Australian? But yeah, I kind of laughed when you asked me that question earlier, because in the United States when we think of Australians, they're like people we've taken from Australia like Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, but I think … wasn't Keith actually born in New Zealand? But again, I think they live in Tennessee right now. So I'm going to cheat and only give you two, but because they live in Tennessee, I bet they have some of the best barbecue in the United States. So I'd certainly love to have them because then maybe we wouldn't talk politics, or we wouldn't talk about China and the US, and we'd just have a great time …
Misha Zelinsky: Well, it's funny you should say that …
Curtis Chin: … and enjoy American-Australia hospitality.
Misha Zelinsky: It's funny you should say talking about Americans stealing Australians, because Australia is very famous for stealing New Zealanders like Russell Crowe. So it's sort of … it's all just [crosstalk 00:52:52].
Curtis Chin: That's right. I think Keith Urban, I think he's really a New Zealander. I don't know what he is, but …
Misha Zelinsky: I'm not sure, but that's a cute …
Curtis Chin: Nicole Kidman is Australian for sure …
Misha Zelinsky: She's absolutely Aussie.
Curtis Chin: … and maybe they both Americans, I don't know. But let me close by just saying that US-Australian relationship is a great one, it's a solid one. I think United States, we can learn from Australia. I mean, look at your economy, you haven't had a recession in a long time. A lot though has been driven by China, and so also how will Australia deal with this evolving economic world. Australia also, I think for a while, kept changing its prime ministers, I don't know. It seems like there was a new one all the time, but maybe that's also a broader point for all of us, that no matter who's in charge things will be okay if we leave it to our people to run things, just American, Australia, Chinese whoever. They just want to move things forward, but maybe it's the politics that gets in the way of everything. And sometimes when government does nothing, maybe things just move on forward.
Misha Zelinsky: A very positive message of hope to finish on there, Curtis. Thank you so much for joining Diplomates, mate.
Curtis Chin: All right, my pleasure. Take care.
Misha Zelinsky: Take care, mate.
Gordon Bajnai
January 28, 2019	Misha Zelinsky	Brexit, Democracy, Economics, Europe, Inequality, National Security, Nationalism, Populism, Putin	0:44:19
Gordon Bajnai was the prime minister of Hungary from 2009 to 2010.
Banjai took charge of Hungary in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and lead the country through an incredibly difficult period in its history.
As prime minister, Gordon was the last socially democratic leader of Hungary before the country took a turn towards a more right-wing, populist and now largely autocratic regime. Gordon is now the chair of global investment firm Campbell Lutyens.
Gordon joined Misha Zelinsky for a fascinating discussion about, Brexit and the rise of populism, the role economics plays in politics, the march of nationalism in Europe and just how fragile democracy really is.
To my fellow Diplomates out there – if you're enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe, rate and review. It really helps!
Misha Zelinsky: Welcome, Gordon Bajnai to Diplomates. Thank you for joining us.
Gordon Banjai: Thank you for your time.
Misha Zelinsky: No, thank you, but I was just seeking before as I was walking here there were just a couple Eastern Europeans in London, so you're we're really living the European-London cliché right now, but given that we are in London, and I'll say it for the recording. We're in London right now that obviously Brexit is top of the mind here. Where to from here? From Australia, it all seems quite mad. The clock's ticking. Where do you think this is actually heading now as we head towards the cliff with the potential hard Brexit?
Gordon Banjai: Well, every country have their own special kind of populism. I think the special tailor-made populism of the United Kingdom is the hatred towards Europe, and that's probably a result and it's a lesson for other countries that if for 40 years politicians try to blame everything on Europe and take all the credit to themselves, that's then sometimes people start to believe them. Brexit, but it's been a very clumsy two years since the vote.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, and it has been two. It's gone quick.
Gordon Banjai: Quick, but two years after it's still unclear what's going to happen as we speak. We are just a couple of days from the first vote in the House of Commons about the deal that was negotiated by the British government, and they are not very likely to win that vote. The uncertainty will remain and be honest, in 80 days to go out to Brexit.
For people in business, or people with investments, or people with jobs in the UK, it's a huge uncertainty with a very short time to react. It is clearly hurting the economy longterm. Whatever happens, it's going to be negative for the economy, and then even in the best scenario, but there are further down downside scenarios that can hurt the UK better. But instead of, just let me give you two very interesting polls that I've read recently.
Within the voters, the committed voters of the Conservative Party, 54% would support no-deal Brexit, hard Brexit, and only 18% of last week, 18% was supporting the deal proposed by the Prime Minister. On the other hand, if you look at the whole country, the latest poll I have seen was 54% against Brexit, only 46% for Brexit. At the national level, it's a turnaround-
Misha Zelinsky: From 52-48.
Gordon Banjai: 52-48 yeah, the other way.
Misha Zelinsky: In 2016, yeah.
Gordon Banjai: Just still not the huge shift even [crosstalk 00:03:01], but it is a shift. It shows how far committed hardcore politics can go from the national mood if we believe both [parties 00:03:14].
Misha Zelinsky: Just going back to the original value, sort of touch on populars and then anti-European sentiment in the UK, but was that what drove the Brexit vote? Were there other factors? It's been sort of debated to death, but what's in your mind drove that vote, the leave vote?
Gordon Banjai: Every such political upsets or surprise votes combine many factors, but I think that the specific nature of these referendums, direct democracy, is that they give a chance for many different groups in society to express their protest by a single vote against something.
Misha Zelinsky: So something's annoying you and you just vote, leave.
Gordon Banjai: So many people, I think, have felt disenfranchised, sort of inequality in the UK has grown significantly. It has always been one of the most unequal countries within the European Union. Inequality has grown significantly after the global crisis. That's one factor. But that seems like a social problem, and still it transferred somehow into an identity crisis. That's very similar to the US, where many of the disenfranchised Midwest voters who lost their jobs have turned into a kind of identity politics, who are supporting 'America first.'
Misha Zelinsky: That's right. Similarly, we see the Northern England vote to leave, which is where you've seen a lot of deindustrializations. It's similar to Trump, the industrialization in the Midwest.
Gordon Banjai: That's a global phenomenon, that populism, which is collecting the vote of those who are losing on the social economic agenda. Populism is often able, at least right wing populism, because this is just one form of populism. But right wing populism is able to collect that vote with an identity message. That's very varying, and that's very similar to what happened in the 1930s.
Misha Zelinsky: It's interesting on the 1930s. Sometimes it's seen as a very basic analysis, but do you think it's similar? Is it 1929-1939 all over again, where you have a major economic event? The Depression is somewhere, the global financial crisis. Then the rise of communism and fascism, et cetera, across Europe. Is this the same thing again, or is it something different?
Gordon Banjai: Well, I think there are similarities. We are living in a different age and with different history experiences. But, yes. There are similar trends and rules applied here. First, there is a time lag between the economic crisis and the rise of populism. Second is the interesting switch from the social problem to the identity politics. Then the problem with identity politics is that it's often cynical politicians use identity, be it the national or religious identity, or regional identity against a national identity. They use this to get into power, and to stay in power, they need to continuously escalate the feelings. They need to pump more steam into the steam room until it blows up.
The permanent escalation is an inherent feature of this kind of politics, and it usually doesn't end well. That's probably a commonality.
Misha Zelinsky: To put it mildly, yeah.
Gordon Banjai: If you look at the whole global politics today, the system is breaking down. One consequence of the global financial crisis, technological change, the inequality in the developed societies all ending up is that the status quo, as we have known, as you and I have grown up, you probably less than I, but we have both grown up in the Pax Americana, the system which was guaranteed or supplied by the United States. This system is breaking apart because the US is pulling up, creating a vacuum. Then some actors, often maligned actors, are occupying that vacuum, taking it over.
That's also a result of this kind of populism. Also of the fact, if you take one step back and look deeper into what's behind populism, is that following the great financial crisis, the legitimacy of the status quo in most developed countries and the global status quo has disappeared, that the political reserve that was keeping the system together was used as a result of not just the crisis, but the way the crisis was managed in that. The real issue is, if there is a next crisis, which is going to come soon, that political reserve will not be there to back up the system.
So, we are going into the next crisis with much less political reserves, much less legitimacy behind the status quo, and less tools in the policy makers, especially economic tools. [crosstalk 00:08:52]-
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, [military 00:08:52] policy being so exhausted and fiscal policy being restricted.
Gordon Banjai: And in that context, Australia is doing quite well actually, compared to other countries.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, yeah. You wouldn't know it though, looking at our politics, which is a little bit just as crazy as well. We've had multiples prime ministers in recent years.
Gordon Banjai: One experience that I can share, speaking from Hungary, from Europe, from this part of the world, is that there is a process of deterioration, gradual moral deterioration, but seems to be radically different today, will become the new norm tomorrow. Other things will appear radical, which the day after tomorrow will become the new normal. It's a kind of amortization of centrist politics, ethics, and morale, play by the rules, checks and balances. Those countries which can stop this amortization early on are more fortunate than the ones who go through this long process, because it can always get worse.
Misha Zelinsky: Indeed. But before we get to the democratic question, I was to unpack a little bit about the drivers of populism. You talked about populism and inequality, the GFC as a trigger point, though inequality was probably on the rise before that, but middle class people really got wiped out during the global financial crisis. You became prime minister in Hungary during the GFC, so you understood this crisis very well. In retrospect, did governments do enough to protect ordinary people during the global financial crisis? Is economic equality the antidote to this sort of ethno right wing nationalism? Is more equality the answer to this? How do you see that?
Gordon Banjai: Fortunate countries who have enough room to maneuver, i.e., take on more, to survive the crisis, the deepest point of the crisis could, or are able to protect their middle class. But unfortunate countries like my own country, Hungary, was very indebted and not trusted by the markets with new credit. So we have to take a much bigger change and shift, more radical reform that my government was running. We just have to make sure that we survive, but there was not much room to maneuver in the social arena at the time.
But you know, crisis doesn't have an ideology. There is no left wing crisis and right wing crisis. Crisis wants solutions quickly. Like military surgeon versus the plastic surgeon, you can't measure by the millimeter. You have to cut 10 centimeters away from the wound to make sure that it doesn't kill the patient. You have to act quickly and decisively and focus on the core areas to stop bleeding, so that's what you do in crisis management, because that doesn't have a philosophy.
To put it differently, in life you can't choose what situations you get into. What you can choose is how you behave. If you are coming from a progressive center-left approach, you can try to manage the crisis, to stave it off, and still try to keep the texture of society together. One thing that we could learn, for example, from the Thatcher era in the United Kingdom is: if you let, in certain regions or geographies, the system of labor collapse, the social inept to collapse, then it can decades to recover. If you can hold together the middle classes, the systems of employment lower in the classes. If you kept people in jobs, or if you can keep them able to get back to jobs as soon as there is some rebounds, then after the crisis, there's a chance to recover quickly. However, if you let it collapse under the weight of the crisis, then it maybe decays.
Misha Zelinsky: What is it then, do you think? We've had this crisis. and inequality is rising. Why do you think that the ring wing populism has taken hold much stronger, seemingly, than left wing populism of, say, redistribution, high taxes, more social safety? You've seen a lot more similarly nationalism style populism rise up, be it the UK, the United States, other countries in Europe. Why do you think social democrats are struggling to articulate a populism message on economics?
Gordon Banjai: I wish I had known the perfect answer.
Misha Zelinsky: Probably a lot of money to be made if you knew the answer!
Gordon Banjai: Interestingly in some countries, the progressive forces have done pretty well. If you think about, President Obama managed the economy pretty well in the crisis, and the US bounced back very, very quickly and very decisively. It's one of the longest period of recovery, post-crisis recovery in economic history. There are some other good examples. Portugal has a progressive left government, and they are doing reasonably well, very well.
Misha Zelinsky: But Obama, of course, led to Trump, which is the question.
Gordon Banjai: But there are some other factors in that, because if you look at when Obama left, he was very popular. Maybe it's also the campaign and the candidate explains part of that.
Misha Zelinsky: Absolutely, yeah.
Gordon Banjai: But clearly there is a phenomenon of identity politics, and typically progressive and left parties are much weaker identity politics than right wing parties.
Misha Zelinsky: Which is ironic, because it's the ring wing that often accuses progressives of wanting to play identity politics, because they're-
Gordon Banjai: [crosstalk 00:15:29].
Misha Zelinsky: Yes, but also through the promotion of women's rights, or the promotion of minorities groups, is that somehow that is identity politics, whereas nationalist politics is identity politics as well. It's quite ironic in that sense. We've talked a little bit about economics. One issue we haven't really talked about here, and it's probably that when you look at the Brexit vote as well, is this question of immigration. Because when you look at some of the countries that have become more populism right wing … Poland, it's done quite well economically, really.
Gordon Banjai: That's a perfect example of how contrary to what Bill Clinton said in 1991 or 1992 in the campaign, you remember is
Misha Zelinsky: "It's the economy, stupid."
Gordon Banjai: "It's the economy, stupid."
Gordon Banjai: And everybody thought he had found the stone of wisdom. There are times when it's the economy, stupid, and 25 years later, his wife long the election despite the fact that the US was booming economically. In Poland, there was a regime change despite the fact that Poland was the only country in Central Europe, or probably the only country in Europe, which was growing in the middle of the crisis as well.
Gordon Banjai: It's not just the economy, stupid. Sometimes it's identity. If I need to find an explanation, the one that is closest to my heart and brain probably is that every democracy is built on middle classes, broad and stable middle classes. If the middle classes start to fear of losing their status, their stability, if they lose their perspective, their horizon looking into the future … If you think about, this is the first time in 70 years in the western part of the world, developed world, is that the middle classes fear that their kids will do worse off than themselves.
Misha Zelinsky: Interesting. There's an interesting statistic on this where in the United States in the 40s, 90% of Americans believed their kids would do better than them, where today, it's more like 40%. That's kind of indicative.
Gordon Banjai: In some countries, it's even less. If you think about youth unemployment in Italy [crosstalk 00:17:47]-
Misha Zelinsky: 50% in some places, yeah.
Gordon Banjai: France as well. Youth unemployment and the general perspective is the horizon is looking down, not up. That's a factor that explains the volatility, the anxiety of the middle classes. If the middle classes are trembling, then populism is on the growth. Just to quote you one famous English historian, "Revolutions are not made by the poor."
Misha Zelinsky: [crosstalk 00:18:18].
Gordon Banjai: "It's made by those who get disappointed."
Misha Zelinsky: Hm, interesting. This anxiety around immigration, you're seeing it Trump, you're seeing it in Brexit, you're seeing it in Europe. Merkel's intake of Syrian refugees … Does immigration come up as an issue when the economy is doing badly? Or is it more of a cultural problem? Some people say, "It's inequality and that's what's driving everything." Others say, "Well, it's the cultural changes that make people anxious." Do you have a take on that?
Gordon Banjai: What right wing populists do is they transform the economic problem into an identity problem. They say, "Immigrants take your jobs," although in fact, very often it's automation or other forms of technology that take your jobs. Protectionism is the economic policy of nationalism. If you think about the trade wars that are revived in the world, and they are threatening, probably the single biggest geopolitical threat at the moment, is the US-China conflict, which goes well beyond a trade war. If you think about that, there is direct translation of identity politics into economic policy.
It's interesting. I'm spending a lot of time in the UK. Since Brexit, there is a sharp downturn in immigration here. There is a shortage of labor in certain segments of the economy. But still, many people are opposed to immigration because they don't see the cause of the problem and the problem together. Coming from the progressive side, we have this tendency of trying to explain all these technocratic policy different questions. In the era of populism, policy is not really a question. Policy is not the main topic of politics, it's identity. It's security. If you want to win elections from the progressive side, you need to develop your vocabulary, your politics, and catch up on those arguments.
Misha Zelinsky: And make people feel, rather than explain to them how something is going to work. Right?
Gordon Banjai: You have to find an answer to the issue of identity emotions, as well. Technocratic explanations make people feel … Let me take a step back to explain what I want to say. I think there was a consensus for a long time that these egg-headed technocrats are running these countries based on policies and complication explanations, which nobody understands, but they make the world run smooth, so it's okay. The GFC just blew that up. Many people say, "Look, you egg-headed technocrats! You are corrupt. You played only for yourself. You messed up, so you were not that smart as you pretended to be. So why should we listen to you? Why shouldn't we listen to ourselves or our own instincts? Or people who deliver, who cater for those instincts?"
That's what populism is. You have to regain that trust, and it's very, very, difficult. You have to find the language, and you have to find the right messages and as well as underlying policies.
Misha Zelinsky: Coming back to this question of democracy in Europe, after the fall of the Berlin wall, there was a kind of a democratic bloom. Everyone thought, "Well, these democracies are going to just be on the march inevitably." Now we're starting to see, you've got Poland, and Hungary, and Turkey, and Russia that are more or less autocratic. Then you've got Italy now that's elected a pro-Russian government. How concerning do you think it is for the future of democracy in Europe right now? Is there any positives there to draw on?
Gordon Banjai: Don't forget that democracy is a tool, not a means. It's a means, not an end, to put it in proper image. It's a means, not an end. I'm convinced that that's the best means to the right end.
Gordon Banjai: But for most people, they want a solution.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, they want the outcome.
Gordon Banjai: The outcome, and democracy doesn't deliver. Compared to that, they believe rightly or wrongly, I think wrongly, that other types of systems deliver better results. Then democracy can go out of fashion.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah. I think that's a really good point. I say this to the people. In '89, people didn't sit there and read Jefferson, and then read Marx, and then say, "Well, what Jefferson's argument is a lot more compelling, because I believe in liberal democracy." They looked at the results, right? Middle class growth in wester countries was much better than the equality of everyone being poor in the Eastern Bloc.
Then how do democracies deliver for people? What should the focus be? Should the focus then be on economic inequality?
Gordon Banjai: I think it should be. Irrespective of whether it's a democracy or autocracy or dictatorship, the leading elite tend to get corrupted unless they are very well checked and controlled. Democracy is the best way to control that, but even then, there can be a kind of self interest of people being … If the elite in any society don't realize that they need to [keep 00:24:48] integrating people at the bottom of society, and keep broadening, stabilizing the middle class, and keep letting people into the middle class from the up, then they can destabilize themselves. It's not a new idea. There was this Italian sociologist and philosophist, Pareto, who developed his ideas in the 1920s, 1930s. He said, "Societies, where the elite stops integrating, the best people from the bottom are breaking down sooner or later, and the elite will lose power because people are rebel against them."
Misha Zelinsky: Now, that's interesting. We've talked a little bit about countries, maybe, that people say, "Okay, Hungary and Poland. Then there's autocracy in these countries, and Russians have always been a bit different." You bring it a little bit closer to the main game, and England's, the UK's going through its things. But France, we've seen these really quite scary demonstrations in Paris with these yellow vest demonstrations against what Macron's doing there. Democracy … He's attempting a reform agenda, but it doesn't seem that people are going along with him, and there's been a violent backlash to that.
Gordon Banjai: First of all, France has great traditions in going out to the street, and sometimes being very violent.
Misha Zelinsky: That's true.
Gordon Banjai: It's not long ago. I remember in 2005 or 2006 in the outskirts of Paris. People were burning shops and cars similarly, so it's not new. That's part of the French political culture, which would not be part of other country's culture. On the other hand, clearly Macron has a very difficult job to do, because he needs to reform a country which hasn't really decided whether it belongs to the south or the north of Europe. France has this identity issue. It loves its southern identity, but it's hard, but its brain knows that it's better to be in the north.
So France, which is one of the biggest economies in the world, and is quite a good economy, I have to say, but it is need of some of these reforms. The problem is because of they're relatively high in debt, it means there is little room to manoeuvre. If you want to introduce reforms, if you want to be more labour-friendly, if you want to reduce taxes to mobilize entrepreneurship, then you have to take away from somewhere else. While Macron was delivering much more than any of his recent predecessors on economic reforms, he hasn't or couldn't deliver on the social part to keep people happy, because he didn't have the room to manoeuvre. So, I'm kind of understanding of his problems, but I think he realized he needs to change also style. The art of politics, it's not just policies and facts and figures, but it's style and explanation, and explaining people why you do things.
Misha Zelinsky: But the French are very important to the European project, because for a long time, Merkel was really the central figure in Europe maybe holding the show together through the crisis, but she's now exiting and has gone out, taken a lot of damage on the immigration issue with the million refugees. But Macron was meant to be the man to lead a European renaissance. But with him under pressure, you can start to see the beginnings of what holds Europe together, what are the things that hold Europe together. Because you've got … We haven't really talked about it yet, but I think we probably need to, which is the interest of Putin to very much break up Europe. There's very much those links between Le Pen and the other nationalists in the European countries, linked to the Russian destabilization of those countries. What is the future of Europe in terms of holding itself together where Macron's under pressure, Merkel's gone, and the Russians are meddling?
Gordon Banjai: Well, there are two ways to assess this context: one is the internal, then the other is the external, naturally. The external dimension that Europe is under multiple pressure, at least three different directions: Russia, which is interested in weakening and sort of breaking up and negotiating directly in each country. And also the US recently, under the Trump administration, is interested to have a bilateral relationships. Then China, thirdly, which is interesting in maintaining the rules-based global trading system and access to the European market, but it is also trying to access countries one by one, because with many of the countries individually, each of these countries can have a much bigger, much weightier, much more sizeable player than as if Europe kept itself together.
Europe together is a 500 million market. Even after Brexit, it's 460 million [crosstalk 00:30:34].
Misha Zelinsky: It's a big-
Gordon Banjai: Still very big.
Gordon Banjai: And it's one of the first world's, probably the world's most valuable market if you look at number of people times GDP per capita. It's the most exciting marketplace in the world. It has actually delivered on much of the promises of a single market. It is quite a single market in many aspect. But on the other hand, if Europe starts to utilize its weight of 500 million market, and starts to negotiate in a more assertive way with other powers … Says, "All right. You want access to my market? I want access to your market as well. You have to play by the rules."
If Europe starts to develop as a military union … If Europe starts to behave as a financial union, which it hasn't delivered greatly on … And if Europe starts to deploy united policy on migration, and starts to protect its external border, then Europe could be a much more heavyweight player in the global order.
Europe's natural self interest is to organize itself as Europe and not as individual states. If you think about Germany, the largest country is Europe is 82 million people. What is it compared to China, US, or Russia? But if you look at Europe with 450 or 500 million people, that's a size in which you can remain a player at the table. Because Europe's real question, looking ahead 20-30 years, whether it remains part of the rule setting table or will become the rule taker. It will be quite a shift compared to its last 500 years.
You could look at Europe as a kind of Noah's ark in the flood of globalization for the nations of Europe to survive. It's quite [balancing 00:32:54] to jump off Noah's ark. It's reasonable to discuss about the direction, but to quarrel at the wheel is not very good, because the ark can capsize. [crosstalk 00:33:14]. You want to keep it together. You want to discuss what is the right direction to go, but you also want to act in an orderly and coordinated way on the ark, so as that you can land in the good course.
Misha Zelinsky: How concerned should European countries then be, as they go through their election seasons, about Russian interference? There's suggestions there was interference in Brexit. There's suggestions you've seen it with Le Pen and the yellow shirts. How concerned should European countries be about that?
Gordon Banjai: I think Europeans should be concerned about external influence. There's a asymmetric situation, because maligned powers are looking at democracies and saying, "Where is the [oculus 00:34:11] here of democracies?" And that's elections and the daily operation of democracy. Through social media and other means, and corrupting occasionally certain parties in these countries, promoting radical parties, they can destabilize democracy.
Those countries which don't have this nitty gritty problem of democracy and free voting, they can exploit other's weakness this way. That's an asymmetric war. Europe and even the United States, in that sense, should react to this by protecting themselves, protecting their democracy, but not allowing any interference.
Misha Zelinsky: It's a challenge, isn't it, though? The thing that won the Cold War was the openness of the west versus the closed systems of the Communist Bloc, and the other countries. It seems almost that openness is being used against the west in a way that we've never seen before. With social media, through economic means, and others. And as a result, democracy lost a bit of the swagger, so to speak. So how do you make openness a virtue again, is the question. I'm not sure about-
Gordon Banjai: First of all, openness is inside a country or a region, externally, you have to assert your powers much more strongly. First of all, you have to create the community of democracies and coordinate against those who don't follow those principles. Second, you have to punish bad behavior. Thirdly, people will tend to exploit the rules-based system unless you very stiff, very firm in protecting that system. What I see today, because many of these [maligned 00:36:28] actors are exploiting these internal divisions, and that can be lethally dangerous unless re-protected. The Australian election system so far has proved to one of the most successful in the world. I don't know if you feel that way in [crosstalk 00:36:46], but look from the outside … For example, the mandatory voting system cuts out certain things like the fight for mobilizing. Because you don't need to fight to mobilize voters, there's a natural gravity to work for the can tre.
Gordon Banjai: That's a big benefit of the Australian electoral system, which others could learn from. Because in many countries, think of the US. Many politicians are working on trying to keep voters from voting.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, that's right. Yep.
Gordon Banjai: Or asymmetrically, trying to mobilize their voters and keep others away. If you think about Cambridge Analytica and what they have done in the US elections, that was tactics about that. How do you keep the voters of Hillary Clinton away from voting while mobilizing the Trump voters? Those are nasty games. If you don't have that problem, that's already a better place.
Misha Zelinsky: The last thing I want to ask you about is: I've been thinking a lot about democracy recently. Over the summer I was doing some reading. It's relatively new thing in human history, democracy. I take it for granted as something that's always been in my life, but it's really a blip in human history. What are the warning signs, do you think, that a democracy is headed down to the wrong path into an anocracy or an autocracy? What are the things that we should be watchful for?
Gordon Banjai: Right. Great question. I love it. First, endangered middle classes, the destabilization of middle classes. Second, polarization of politics, political language, which you mentioned. Behavior. Third and most important probably is media. If the mass media, and that includes social media, is losing its standards, ethical standards, or it gets under the influence of malign actors … If mass media cannot be held to ethics, or it loses its balance, the balance coverage, then if private or public forces get control of a significant part of the media, then media turns into propaganda.
Gordon Banjai: And the propaganda, you can brainwash people into very stupid things. Think about the 1930s Germany. Adolf Hitler couldn't have done in 1934 what he was doing in 1939, simply because of the Goebbelsian propaganda and brainwash. Then after media come the other institutions, independent institutions. The independence of courts, prosecutors, police, the control over political parties, checks and balances. These are very important things. Democracy is not simply the will of the majority. It's also the ability for power to change hands if the majority changes its mind. It's the right to change your mind and change your leaders.
It's not only about the will of the majority. It's also the protection of minority. Even when there is a strong majority, democracy's about probably three years from now, the other side will have a majority. You have to maintain the probability. That's what will keep power in control, in check.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, J. S. Mill talked about the tyranny of the majority, right? So you need to make sure that the majority is not necessarily-
Gordon Banjai: [crosstalk 00:40:36] countries, in many countries in central eastern Europe, in other countries, developed countries. That's a phenomenon that's only possible if there is a strong control of media and propaganda, because that facilitates, that's the anteroom for dictatorship.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, thank you so much. One final question that I ask all my guests is if they're in Australia, I ask them about international people. I know you're a huge fan of Australia, regularly attend, but if you're having a barbecue at your place, what three Australians, alive or dead, would you invite along?
Gordon Banjai: My childhood hero, Angus Young from AC/DC.
Misha Zelinsky: Very good!
Gordon Banjai: In his shorts.
Misha Zelinsky: Playing the music, yeah?
Gordon Banjai: Yes. Prime Minister Keating. I've heard a lot of good things. I've never met him, but he seems to be a very smart and-
Misha Zelinsky: He's more of an opera man than an AC/DC man, but he'll-
Gordon Banjai: It will be an interesting group around the barbecue. Thirdly, I have a good friend who I think very highly of as an investor from my close profession. Mark Delaney from Australia, super.
Gordon Banjai: He is a guru of investing, and I look up to him for his investments.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, you've got investing, politics, and AC/DC. It'd be a good combination at your barbecue. I'd like to be a fly on the wall at that. But anyway, look. Thank you for joining Diplomates. It's a punny name, and it also implies that you're my mate. I don't often get to claim former prime ministers as a mate, but just so you know I am.
Gordon Banjai: [You're welcome 00:42:19].
Misha Zelinsky: But also, Hungary's not a country that gets a lot of discussion in Australia, but my assistant Google, I did some research. There are 100,000 Hungarians in Australia, so I'm hoping that at least some of them listen and I can build an audience off the back of you as well. Thank you so much for your time. Look forward to having you back someday in the future.
Gordon Banjai: Thank you very much, and greetings to all of those Hungarians in Australia.
Misha Zelinsky: Thank you. Including our current treasurer, who is a Hungarian and a Jew. His family fled after the … Josh Frydenberg is, but shout out to Josh from Diplomates. I doubt he is someone who listens to my podcast, but hopefully he listens sometime. Thanks, Gordon.
Gordon Banjai: Thank you very much.
Professor Simon Hix
January 14, 2019	Misha Zelinsky	Brexit, Economics, Europe, Inequality, Nationalism, Populism, Putin, Russia, Trump	0:48:07
Professor Simon Hix is the pro-Director for research at the London School of Economics and is the chair of Vote Watch Europe.
Professor Hix is a globally renowned expert on EU politics, democratic institutions, parliamentary voting behaviour, political parties and elections – and to prove it he is the author of over 100 books and papers on these topics.
We had a fascinating discussion about Brexit, where to for Britain as the deadline for a deal approaches, what drove the Leave vote itself as well as the worrying rise of right wing nationalism in Europe.
Misha Zelinsky: So, Simon Hix, welcome to Diplomates, thank you for joining me.
Simon Hix: You're welcome.
Misha Zelinsky: And I should say, for the recording, that we're in your rather salubrious offices here in the London School of Economics. So thank you for having me along.
But given that we are in London and this is a political podcast, what better place to start than Brexit. So, as an Australian to a Brit, what the hell is going on? Because back home it looks kind of crazy. Is it as crazy as it seems?
Simon Hix: It is crazy. You know, I was away for a period over Christmas and came back and it's the same old, same old, in the sense that we still don't know where we're heading. So, we've got a vote next week in the House of Commons on Tuesday.
Misha Zelinsky: And that vote is for … ?
Simon Hix: This vote is for Theresa May's deal. So she's done a deal with the EU which is called a withdrawal agreement. It's an agreement that sets the terms of the UK leaving the EU and the terms are, essentially, how much money do we still owe as part of the divorce deal? What are the rights of the citizens in the UK and UK citizens on the continent? What happens to the Irish border, between Northern Ireland and the Republic? Republic, of course, is going to stay in the EU, Northern Ireland in the UK, of course is going to leave the EU. And then a transition arrangement for two years while we negotiate the long term deal.
So she signed the deal which is more or less the deal that we knew was going to be signed. It has to be ratified by the House of Commons for us to be able to leave on the 29th of March. So the 29th of March is the deadline bias.
So if they don't pass it through the House of Commons, we leave on the 29th of March without a deal.
Misha Zelinsky: A hard Brexit, so to speak. Yeah.
Simon Hix: A hardest of hard Brexit. So, leaving without a deal has potentially enormous consequences. We've got one wing of the conservative party saying, No, leaving without a deal is fine. We'll be fine. A lot of them are very Libertarian. They have a view that this is about creative destruction. Bring it on. And we've gotten to the point where you've got this left wing of the Labour party saying, Actually a no deal would be a good thing because it would be a crisis of capitalism and then they'll be a collapse of the government. And then Labour will get elected and we'll be able to implement socialism. And then we've got the right wing and the Tory party saying, No deal will be a good thing because there will be a crisis of socialism and then we'll be able to slash and burn the British state and they'll be this new Singapore-on-Thames Nirvana that we've wanted.
Misha Zelinsky: It's almost horseshoe politics with the extreme left and the extreme right, both agreeing on the outcome.
Simon Hix: They can't both be right, obviously, right?
But either way, they think there's potential disaster. Most people accept that without a deal, it will be end of Just-In-Time production supply chains which could be the collapse of manufacturing. Tariffs and quotas on agriculture, most of our agriculture produce is exported to the European market.
So I think the planes will not be able to take off and land. You know, they'll be a tail backs at Dover. They estimate a 10 minute delay on every truck going through Dover within an hour, leaves to a 30 mile tail back. So you can imagine what that cumulatively…
That super market shelves will start to empty out. The NHS is worrying about running out of drugs because their main supplier is in Holland. A no deal scenario is a disaster. Most people accept that. Most economists, most people who work in the supply chains will tell you that. All the business interests will tell you that.
What does it mean for the citizens rights? Nobody really knows.
So, it's potentially disastrous if we leave without any kind of deal. But the right wing or the Tory party are using this as a threat because they don't like the deal that she's done. They feel the EU has got a better arrangements out of this. So we still don't know where we're headed. If they kick out the deal next Tuesday, which they probably will, all bets are off. We have no idea what's going to happen after that. And the EU is willing to say, Bring it on. If there's a no deal, you guys are going to suffer more than us.
Misha Zelinsky: That's interesting because this sort of concept that Europe would get a better deal, why would they? I mean, there's no incentive for Europe to encourage other countries to leave, I should think, right? So if you're the European Union, you want to make it as hard as possible I would have thought.
Simon Hix: Yeah. So there's kind of two sides of it. So one side, I don't think it's the EU wants to be seen to be punishing Britain, although there are definitely voices that say that. Particularly you hear that on the left in France or the left in Germany, where they blame the Anglo-Saxon bankers for the financial crisis. And so they say, It's about time the Brits got their comeuppance. Sort of thing.
But the general view on the continent is they don't want Britain to leave. We're a major economy. We're important for exports and imports.
Misha Zelinsky: Defense.
Simon Hix: Defense. For the whole credibility of the European project globally. The EU project in general is weakened if Britain leaves. So there's a general sense of it's a shame that the UK is leaving. So they don't want to punish Britain, but equally, they're saying, why should we give Britain a particularly good deal? You chose to leave. We have to protect our interests and our interests are the continuity of the single market that we've worked our butt off to create a continental scale single market with free movers and good services and capital within it. Why would we undermine that? Just because you guys want to cherry pick the good bits of this and not be responsible for some of the obligations that come with being part of this single market? Why should we give that to you? We don't give that to anybody else?
So it's not about punishing Britain, it's about maintaining the credibility of the EU and holding the EU together. And of course, for the economic relationship between Britain and the EU 27 is pretty asymmetric. In London, these politicians here are very arrogant about Britain. We're the fifth largest economy in the world. We're this great global trading power. English language is the lingua-Franco globally. London is the world capital of the world services sector. Yada, yada, yada.
50% of our trade is with the EU 27. 15% of their trade is with us. That British trade with the EU 27 is worth about 20% of our GDP. Their trade with us is worth about 2% of their GDP.
Misha Zelinsky: Right. That's interesting.
Simon Hix: And if you talk to trade economists here at LSC, they'll tell you that those kind of asymmetries ultimately will predict what kind of bargain you get in a trade deal. The EU's got far less to lose from failing to agree to a deal than the UK has.
Misha Zelinsky: That's interesting.
Simon Hix: So the UK, the deal that gets done is bound to favor the EU. So, I remember a former student of mine is in South Korea, she's in the Korean diplomatic academy and she's one of their experts on Europe. And I said to her, hey, Wun, how's Brexit look from east asia? She says, well, Simon -"
Misha Zelinsky: About as good as it looks from Australia, I'd assume.
Simon Hix: Right. Exactly. So it's kind of interesting for an Australian audience to hear her say, she said, look, it doesn't matter if you're the fifth largest economy or the 10th largest economy, like Korea, or the 15th or the 20th, if you're not the US, the EU or China, you're a regulation taker. Those three markets make up 50% of the global GDP. 50% of global trade and goods and services. And they're bargaining deal with any… It's a reason why none of the three of them have got deals with each other in trade. They've all got bilateral deals with everyone else in the world. Because they say, 'You want access to our market? Here's the set of rules. Take it or leave it. You don't want to accept these rules? You don't have access.
And so that's the way the US negotiates trade deals. That's the way the EU negotiates trade deals. Why would it be any different if you're the fifth?
So, Japan is the largest economy that's accepted that kind of an arrangement. Canada, South Korea, those three countries. So Canada and South Korea both have trade deals with the EU and with the US. And the deals they have are essentially agreeing to apply European or American rules.
So for example, Canadian beef farmers have two fields. One field with cows destined for the US market and one field with cows destined to the European market.
Misha Zelinsky: Interesting.
Simon Hix: And the cows destined to the American market are pumped full of hormones, so you get these big fat cows destined to the American market. And the kind of skinny, vegan cows destined for the European market. You know, have to follow European Phytosanitary standards. So they're regulation takers.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah. So, the Brexiteers are probably going to get mugged by reality then in the end.
Simon Hix: Of course they are.
Misha Zelinsky: But so, leaving aside whether or not you get a better deal, there's a deal on the table. They're talking through the politics of it with it going to a vote, it's interesting to me a lot of the discussion is around May versus the Brexiteers within her own party. And the Parliament is bigger than one party or bigger than one faction.
Simon Hix: Well yeah. And she doesn't have a majority.
Misha Zelinsky: No.
Simon Hix: Because [crosstalk 00:08:48]have majority.
Misha Zelinsky: But there's not a lot of discussion about Labour in all of this and Corbyn. So I'm curious to get your take in all of that.
Simon Hix: Yeah so Labour, like the conservatives, Labour is also split on this. It's split into three groups. One group are the very pro-European group that would like to cause as much problems with this ratification as possible. With the hope that there's a second referendum and they overturn and stop Brexit altogether.
Misha Zelinsky: And these are the sort of Blair-ite types.
Simon Hix: They're the kind of Blair-right wing of the party.
Then there's another group, which is a more radical left group. They call them the Lexiteers. The left wing Brexiteers.
Simon Hix: Who have never liked the EU. They saw it as a kind of capitalist project. They want us to get out of the EU so they can have a sort of socialism in one country. Pull up the drawbridge. British jobs for British workers. Subsidized British industry. You know, they're living in some kind of…
Misha Zelinsky: The old socialized, left, yeah.
Simon Hix: So, in a sense, I like to describe the two radical versions of Brexit are the Tory radical version of the Brexit as the Singapore-Thames. And the Labour radical version of Brexit is Venezuela on trend.
Misha Zelinsky: That's good.
Simon Hix: That kind of epitomizes where they think they'd like to take us. Most sensible people don't want either of those outcomes.
Simon Hix: And Corbyn comes intellectually from that wing of the party. He's never liked the EU. He thinks that we want to leave. To give these guys a bit of credit, though, a lot of people who did vote for Brexit in the North of England, you know, a lot of these cities in industrial decline are former Labour voters. So a lot of Labour seats have big let it, leave majorities in them. And the Brexit voting coalition in the referendum were two groups. It was kind of wealthy rural southerners who were just centerphobes who never liked Europe because they want Britain to go back to Empire.
Simon Hix: Empire 2.0 is what they want. And cities in industrial decline. Post industrial cities, very angry voters who are really angry at the ruling elites in the south, in the establishment. And they've never liked… In a sense, voting's really the EU's symbolic vote against what has happened in those communities.
So I'll give you an example. So in Sutherland in the Northeast of England, the major employer in Sutherland is the Nissan car factory. Employs about 300,000 people. It's the largest car employer in the UK. 70 something percent of their production goes to the EU single market. Just-In-Time supply chains, meaning that any delay in their supply chains will massively increase costs. So Brexit will increase those costs because they'll be customs checks and stuff. Sutherland voted to leave the EU and the majority of those car workers in Sutherland voted to leave the EU.
So Lisa Nandy is a Labour politician and she tells a story about being asked during the Brexit campaign, being asked by the management of the car factory to come and talk to the shop floor workers because the management was saying, we're totally opposed to Brexit because of the risks to the factory. Can you come and explain to them that if they vote for Brexit, they could all lose their jobs.
So she stands up and she tells the story to a packed room full of production line workers, saying, you do realize that Just-In-Time production will end. They'll be tariffs and quotas on your cars. So, Nissan, which is a global company, will probably decide to end production here and move the factory to France or Slovakia or somewhere else. And you guys could all be out a job. And she says, one guy put up his hand and he said, we're not stupid. I've been working here for 20 years. Don't you think I know how Just-In-Time production lines work? Don't you think I know where our cars are going? He said, you know, with new technology coming along we're not expecting to have this factory here in 20 years anyway. It'll be robots doing this stuff. We're not voting for Brexit for our jobs. We're voting for Brexit for our kids and our grandkids. And to send you guys a signal that you're not listening to what has been happening around here in the Northeast of England.
Simon Hix: And that's a real challenge for the center left. And so there's an element wing of the Labour party which is very sensitive to the fact that although the kind of cosmopolitan youth, younger voters, the Londoners, are opposed to Brexit, a lot of their core voters are saying, you've got to deliver this.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah. So we'll get to the vote itself because I want to pick up on some of the things you're talking about but just to stay with the Labour party, just very quickly, so Corbyn, one of the things that I find interesting is that there's a real enthusiasm for Corbyn amongst young people. The so called Corbynistas.
Simon Hix: Yeah.
Misha Zelinsky: They would be remain people.
Simon Hix: They're all remainers. In fact-
Misha Zelinsky: How is he getting away with being probably a Brexiteer in disguise whilst-
Simon Hix: It's really difficult. And I think he can get away with it because they're in opposition.
Simon Hix: And so he's able to oppose anything the government proposes. So in a sense, what he's asking for, if you actually look at what he's asked for from Brexit, what he wants is the UK to carry on applying EU social regulation standards, EU environment standards, frictionless trade, to try employment first Brexit, he calls it. So you want to keep as much manufacturing as you can in the country. But that's exactly what May's deal is. You can't put a piece of paper between the deal that she's negotiated and what actually Labour are asking for.
So they're really only voting against this symbolically, to try and create a crisis. To try and bring down the government in the hope that there could be a general election.
Misha Zelinsky: Right. But is there any way, I mean, if you're May, just to put on your sort of… Is there a way for her to turn the focus onto Labour in the vote and I mean, far be it from me to give advice to the Tory party, but it just seems interesting to me that rather taking all these seating internally, if there's a way to force the opposition-
Simon Hix: But with the government's opposition dynamics of British politics…
Misha Zelinsky: Government always owns the result, right?
Simon Hix: Yeah. And the opposition, nobody's going to blame the opposition if this fails. They will blame the government, blame Theresa May. So they can get away with playing these kind of games. And if we end up with a no deal Brexit and that is a disaster for Britain, and it could be absolutely disastrous. There's kind of a typical British sense of, oh, it will be alright on the night. People will figure it out. People come to their senses. There'll be a managed no deal. People will just figure it out. The French aren't going to be crazy enough to stop lories going through the tunnel. And the Dutch are still going to be sending us medicines for the NHS. Come on, people will still allow British airlines to land in Paris and Berlin or whatever. It'll be all right on the night. That's the sort of general attitude of the British public.
Misha Zelinsky: Big gamble.
Simon Hix: I think it's a very big gamble.
Misha Zelinsky: While I speak of gambling, let's talk about the vote. And correct me if I'm wrong, you were given the rather difficult task of being an advocate for the remain voters. You went around the country. There were a bunch of experts who went around as the go would say, so called experts. Maybe you're one of the so called experts people speak of.
Simon Hix: I was, yeah.
Misha Zelinsky: Tell us about that.
Simon Hix: So no, I was part of a group of about 14 academics, political scientists, economists, lawyers, historians, who were funded by the British Economic and Social Research Counsel, so the main funding of the social science body in the UK, to be experts. We were meant to be neutral. We weren't advocates on one side or the other. We were meant to be able to, you know, media could call on us and we'd go on TV or the radio or go on public platforms in local communities to referee debates or to be someone there who could correct facts, this kind of stuff.
And it was modeled on what had happened during the Scottish referendum campaign. They had this program for the Scottish referendum campaign and the perception was that it worked really well. They'd had a bunch of academics who could come on and sort of neutralize the craziness of some of the claims people were making.
Misha Zelinsky: And the remain sort of came from behind in that situation to remind of that.
Simon Hix: Yeah, exactly. So, we'd go to different parts of the country and it was a real eye opener going to places. I remember going to Spalding in Lincolnshire. Lincolnshire, east coast of England, very agricultural community. Lots of new Polish and Lithuanian fruit pickers and agricultural labor going into that town.
We were called by the local newspaper, can we come for a town hall meeting on Brexit. Can they send some experts? So three or four of us went out there. Difficult place to get to in the middle of nowhere on the east coast of England. We went London to Peterborough, a bus and a train and anyway. It was hours together. Just a sense of how isolated this place is. You know Britain's a small country, it's a really isolated place out there.
And the local town is sort of boarded up and the only places open are these Polish shops and very flat agricultural land. And, you know, about 150 people show up at this town hall meeting and it's about 80% pro-Brexit. And we're standing on the platform and whatever we say, they ask questions, and whatever we say goes down like a lead balloon.
So, you know, one guy said, well why do you guys think Brexit will be bad for the British economy? And my economist friend says, well, you know, 50% of trades for the year, about 20% of our GDP, 20% of the whole size of our economy. If there's a reduction in trade that's a reduction in the size of our economy. And no matter how different people mold it in different ways, the estimate is it will be between 2 and 8% of our GDP. A reduction of between 2 and 8% of the size of our economy. And the guy said, that's your fucking GDP not mine. What should I care?
My initial thought was well that's a stupid thing to say but then I thought actually, no, that's actually a really clever-
Misha Zelinsky: Wouldn't change the economy of that town for brief-
Simon Hix: Really! And what he's saying is, it's been shit here for a long time, you guys are gonna take the hit for this.
And someone else said, I'm a farm laborer and since all these polls have been coming over, my wages have gone down every year for the past three years and I bet you lot have had rise haven't you? And it went round like that.
And then someone else said, I've been waiting for a counsel house and it used to be a four month waiting list and now it's a two year waiting list.
Misha Zelinsky: Because the immigrants.
Simon Hix: Yeah. And someone else said, you know, my daughter's at one primary school and my younger son was gonna go to the same primary school but now there's no places left in the school so I've got to drop my daughter off in this school drive ten minutes to drop my son off at this other school and then I'm late for work and that's cause all this, and all the places are full of the bloody Lithuanian Polish kids!
And we're on the platform going, this isn't EU's fault. This isn't, you know, these are choices the British government has made about not investing in public services in areas where there's been large immigrant populations and they'd say yeah but no one's gonna listen to us. Doesn't matter whether we vote Labour or whether we vote conservative, you guys are not gonna listen to us, but you're bloody gonna listen to us if we vote for Brexit.
Misha Zelinsky: Interesting. So out of this experience did you think the Leave vote would succeed? We're asking ourselves after the fact now obvious, but on the night did you, after that experience did you think it was gonna go that way?
Simon Hix: Yeah I did. So the opinion polls are really tight actually and most people weren't trusting the polls. The opinion polls have been so wrong in the 2015 general election-
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah that's right.
Simon Hix: Nobody-
Misha Zelinsky: They predicted Labour was gonna win.
Simon Hix: Yeah, exactly and so nobody was trusting them in 2016 and so everyone was saying the opinion polls are obviously wrong and so then they were making up their own version of what they thought was gonna happen. So most people thought the remain was gonna win easily, the betting markets, the currency markets, the prediction models, everyone-
Misha Zelinsky: For the record I also said it wouldn't happen so…
Simon Hix: Yeah so I was doing some consulting in various different places and I was showing opinion poll data to say this is too close to call. It really could go either way. And my experience of going 'round to different parts of the country suggested that was the case. So it didn't surprise me on the night.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, okay. That vote itself had kind of, Brexit kind of reset the map for politics and we've seen a lot of things happen since like Trump. What does it tell us more generally, you're a political scientist, what does it tell us more generally about politics?
Simon Hix: Yeah, I think we are seeing a lot of advanced democracies, a realignment with politics. A realignment away from… for a long time politics in the post-war period was pretty simple straightforward. Lower income people voted for the left. Left wing parties wanted redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, creation of public services. Higher income people voted for people on the right. Right wing parties wanted to cut taxes, cut public spending, liberalize markets, and so on. And that was the sort of standard politics for most of democracies for much of the post second world war period.
We're now facing the situation where it's largely an education divide and an urban rural divide. It's much more geography driving it than anything else. So you've got cities that are globalizing cities. They're creating growth in financial services and creative industries, film, fashion, art, design, media, tourism, higher education, and so on.
The returns you get on education are massive so the economic divide is really driven by whether or not you've got a degree or not so getting university education massively increases your economic opportunities. And the economic opportunities gap between those who have university certification verse those who've not has grown massively and the economic opportunity gap has grown between cities that are growing, that is fast growing cities, and other cities in industrial decline and then aging rural populations.
So you're getting a kind of anti-establishment feeling which is a coalition of these aging rural populations feeling like what is happening to my country? It's not the country I remember or the country I grew up in.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah. Sort of pathos nostalgia.
Simon Hix: Yeah, exactly, and often that's around race and ethnicity and immigration and a backlash against gender equality. For example, interestingly, after the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations in France-
Misha Zelinsky: We'll get to those.
Simon Hix: They set up a bunch of citizens assemblists out of the Gilets Jaunes and you know what the very first demand that came from those citizens assemblies was? Abolish gay marriage.
Misha Zelinsky: So that was them… interesting.
Simon Hix: Which is more kind of symbolic politics about the kind of rolling back, nostalgia, world's moving too fast and so there's that aging rural population.
And then you've got cities in industrial decline and there's very angry, and sometimes this is young people, sometimes it's older people, particularly men who used to be in industry, collapse in industry, decline in industry, and that coaliltion, that antiestablishment coaliltion is a new force that's very much drawing support for populous parties and as far as they're concerned mainstream centre parties are basically the same. They represent different postcodes of the capital city. So the Tory party, pre Theresa May, represented Notting Hill and Notting Hill set and the Labour party represent isn't. And if in France the French socialists represent the Left bank and the French conservatives represent the Right bank of Paris. That's what it felt like to the rest of the country.
Misha Zelinsky: And it's just consensus around free trade, open markets, free movement of capital.
Simon Hix: Yeah, open liberal immigration policies-
Misha Zelinsky: And there's some differences on the margin around how you sort of dice up the pie and that type of stuff?
Simon Hix: Yeah, exactly and whereas mainstream center right leans a bit more towards financial service interest and big business interest and the mainstream center left leans a bit more towards creatives industries and the new economy and higher education interest and this kind of stuff but neither of them really care about rural populations. Neither of them really care about cities in industrial decline.
Misha Zelinsky: It's interesting that this sort of rural urban divide and the question of people being told what's in their best interest and I think that's interesting about the way that economists and people that are in the political game for the last 30 years are probably looked at the macro stories and look how good it is, right? But the thing about trade is it destroys and distributes unevenly.
Simon Hix: Trade and immigration. Both have distributional consequences. So in aggregate we know that trade is good for the economy in terms of increasing GDP, increasing opportunities, and so on. But you don't look at what the local consequences of that are. So there's loads of research now that looks at the China shock where you can locally, what has been the effect of globalization.
Misha Zelinsky: China between the WO in 2001.
Simon Hix: Yeah, exactly. David Autor is an american economist and a bunch of European political scientists, what they've done is for every region, for every local region, they've worked out what is the employment in each sector, what percentage employment is there in each sector in that region, and what is the exposure to global trade of that sector. And so you can work out what has been the globalization effect regionally. And what we know is that the bigger the globalization, the bigger the negative globalization effect regionally, the bigger the vote for populous parties.
Misha Zelinsky: Interesting, isn't it.
Simon Hix: And the bigger the vote for Trump. The bigger the vote for Brexit in the UK and the bigger the vote for Le Pen in France, for the populous in Italy and so on and so on.
So that's one. The other one is this distributional consequences of immigration. Again we know that immigration is great for the economy. It makes… new skills, new ideas, new resources, cheaper public goods, cheaper public services. On average immigrants our net contributors to the economy, they're not recipients of money. The usual story.
Misha Zelinsky: All the facts.
Simon Hix: All the aggregate level facts. But increasingly what we know is that there's local distributional consequences in two senses. One is an economic one, one's a cultural.
The economic one is in certain sectors of the economy, wages have fallen dramatically as a result of immigration. In the UK for example, it's agricultural labor and the building trades. Why? Because they're cash.
Misha Zelinsky: Yep, hard to regulate.
Simon Hix: They're cash-based economies. All the sectors where there's a minimum wage and the minimum wage is enforced, immigration has had no effect on wages. But it's had a huge effect on agricultural labor in the building trade.
Simon Hix: Everyone's got a Polish plumber and everyone's got a Lithuanian fruit picker.
Misha Zelinsky: And they're rural areas as well.
Simon Hix: And they're rural areas. That's where there's been real wage competition.
And the other one, then, is competition for public services and that's usually disproportionate. Cities of where there's immigration being sucked into cities, public services are being cranked out and a lot of these rural areas nobody's thinking about increasing school capacity. Nobody's thinking about building another classroom in a primary school or you've got to provide more surgery spaces in the local doctor surgery. Nobody's thinking like that. So the local population feels the squeeze in public services.
And then, of course, there's the cultural aspect. A lot of these places have never seen immigrants before and that takes time. That's a legacy. We forget too quickly… So my grandmother grew up in Northwest London and where she grew up in Northwest London it was very white at that time and then it became very big Indian population immigration in the 1950s and 60s.
Misha Zelinsky: How quickly did it happen?
Simon Hix: It happened in the space of about a decade.
Misha Zelinsky: They say the speeds often effective, right?
Simon Hix: Yeah, the speed. But at that time there was really vehement… I remember my grandmother being very racist, you know. Ugh they're all moving into, why are they moving into my neighborhood type thing. And now of course we're in London and nobody thinks twice about it, right? So we forget very quickly our own recent experience of what it was like with being whites with new immigrants.
Misha Zelinsky: Oh it's a similar story in Australia as well. So before we get off Brexit because I want to step into Europe but there's a lot of talk about second vote. I'm quite nervous about the consequence of second vote because after everything that we've just covered about the anger and telling people what's what, there's a sense to me that you didn't quite get it right and we're gonna give you another shot at it and I would be very concerned, and I'm curious to get your take of it, seems to be very concerning to suddenly flip and be 52/48 remain. It's almost like it's been stolen from people.
Simon Hix: I absolutely agree with you. I mean I agree with you for two main reasons. One, the call for second referendum ignores, actually, the history of Britain's relationship with the EU which is that we've always had a semi-detached relationship. We've always been reluctant members. We weren't members of the single currency, we weren't members of the Schengen border-free zone, we were always semi-detached.
Misha Zelinsky: We had a deal.
Simon Hix: You know, and sooner or later we were gonna have to make a choice as the process of European integration is moving forward. Sooner or later we're going to have to make a choice. Are we inside it or are we outside. So it made sense to have a referendum on this and the referendum was going to make the decision so you can't pretend that history is now fundamentally changed so now we really want to stay and we want to sign up to the whole thing. Of course we don't. So that's the first thing we've noticed.
The second thing is, you're right, it's incredibly condescending so I get annoyed with someone of my arch remainer friends who seem to think that going around and telling people you're stupid and you're a racist and you've made the wrong decision and you're a xenophobe and you were bought by Russians. You think that's gonna persuade people to change their mind?
Misha Zelinsky: Hasn't really worked in human history so far.
Simon Hix: The third thing is it would get really, really nasty and I do really worry about what the consequence is. I'm genuinely worried about violence, political assassination even. I mean we had a murder in British politics, Jo Cox was murdered in the 2015 general election campaign by a radical right extremist. The Labour MP in the north of England. I wouldn't be surprised if we have that kind of thing again. It's not to say that we should be scared about, it's more the, there's a legitimate angle which is that this was an antiestablishment anti-elite vote. It's very dangerous in democracies to fuel an antiestablishment anti-elite movement. That's when you really can get very dangerous types of things happening and I don't want to fuel that and I do think there was legitimate reasons for people to vote for this.
I think my experience of traveling around the country, people were not thinking about this lightly, people were massively mobilized. They thought about this very carefully. And a lot of people say, well they weren't considering the economic interest. Well whenever people have elections and make choices in elections, there's lots of things that go into their mind when they walk into the ballot box. For some people it's symbolic, for some people it's careful economical interest of their family or their personally, for some people it's national identity. There's lots of things that go into what influences why people put the x where they do on a ballot paper and so that's no different in a referendum. Why would we think it should be any different in a referendum? And it's completely legitimate.
Misha Zelinsky: Now, talking about that nationalism, and you've got another hat, you're the chair, I believe, of Vote Watch. It's a European project so you're very, obviously, across European politics. Kind of want to get your take about how loudly are you about what we're seeing other countries across, you know, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, not in Europe but peripheral to Europe, obviously, and now Italy. More and more, sort of right wing-
Simon Hix: France.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, yeah. Like you said, more of these National upsurge but not only in opposition. They've taken control of governments and dismantling democracies.
Simon Hix: That's right. What we're seeing it-
Misha Zelinsky: Is this 1929 to 39 all over again or is a bit more complex?
Simon Hix: Too early to tell in that sense. So it's true that what we've seen is part of this realignment of politics, it's the rise in support for these populous parties and the populous coalition is the same coalition we've been talking about behind Brexit.
And almost every country in Europe now has a populous movement of some kind. Some of them a bit more radical than others but no matter what country you talk about there's a party where it's… I don't throw around populism lightly so what I mean by populism is a party that says that we represent the voice of the people against the establishment. And it's very antiestablishment type view, very simplistic policy responses. A classic mainstream party moderate their promises because they know that there's certain things that it's difficult to deliver on and you can't promise this and promise that. Where as populous have no constraints so the populous will say we'll shut down immigration. Populous will say we'll stop globalization.
Misha Zelinsky: Simple responses to complex problems.
Simon Hix: In Italy, the populous parties say we're gonna have a flat tax and introduce universal basic income.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, increasing spending and lower taxes.
Simon Hix: Right.
Misha Zelinsky: Great plan if you can pull it off.
Simon Hix: It's that kind of pub politics, I think of it, and it's very attractive at the moment, particularly post economic crisis and we're growing in equality, people saying, well what the hell. Let's just try this. Let's just go for these guys. And it's a wakeup call for the establishment.
Misha Zelinsky: But once they get control of the-
Simon Hix: So here's the real test. The real test is in ten years time when we look back, there's two possible outcomes. One outcome is you get, you know, democracy is a safety valve. If there are deep divisions in society surely Democratic institutions and elections are vehicles through which these things get thrown up and then we as mainstream establishment, we have to address this stuff.
One version is mainstream parties respond, we come up with new policy responses, there's big infrastructure investment, we try to address some of these regional and individual inequalities that's developed, we try and think about how to create new sectors of the economy, try to think about what do we do to address these inequalities that have come out of globalization. How do we address issues of social integration of immigration. If those things get addressed then they'll be a restabalization of politics.
Another alternative world is these populous come to power and instead of just addressing these things they start to dismantle democratic institutions.
Misha Zelinsky: And you're seeing that in Poland.
Simon Hix: And they say we represent the will of the people and you get a narrative which is popular in Hungary which is I'm not a liberal democrat I'm a iliberal democrat because I represent the will of the people. The will of the people is the majority, why should you guys constrain what the people want? Why should you judges and you media and you other political parties, why should you constrain the will of the people?
Once you gauge that narrative that starts to get dangerously close to the types of politics we saw in the 1930s and so we don't know yet how robust our institutions are to that because you've not seen it. These post-war institutions we've built, they're pretty robust so far and they're relatively new in centuries in Europe in Parliament in Hungary and that's why I think the judiciary and the media are quite easy to be attacked. Italy is the test case. You've got the populists now in Italy. How robust are the Italian institutions to what will be? And Le Pen could win in France or Le Pen's niece, she is the rising star.
Misha Zelinsky: Let's talk about the French because I think, maybe it's an arrogance of major Western countries that some of the Eastern European countries have been on the periphery and maybe they'll never really develop democracies anyway and maybe they're experiments, France is a serious economy, it's a serious country, it's a serious democratic history.
Simon Hix: Nuclear power, the rest of it.
Misha Zelinsky: Right. How worried are you about France? If France were to become a notably autocratic nationalist sort of nation, I mean that's the European project almost over, right?
Simon Hix: It is over. Yeah. They were saying you can't have France without Europe, you can't have Europe without France.
Simon Hix: So Le Pen almost won. The Nationalists in France have been growing in support.
Misha Zelinsky: But doesn't feel like they're losing momentum.
Simon Hix: They're not losing momentum, they're gaining momentum. France is the epitome of the rotation of this politics. Macron represents the global elite, Le Pen represents the will of the people against the global elite. That's the narrative.
Misha Zelinsky: And the concern I had when he came to power was that, didn't strike me as the man for the times because the inequality story, the cultural disconnect story, he's just want to double down on all the things that people are pissed off about.
Simon Hix: To be fair to him, France is a bit particular because France…
Misha Zelinsky: They always have this history of-
Simon Hix: Yeah, but not just that. The structure of the labor market in France is quite particular because they've got highly regulated markets and you have a whole insider outsider problem meaning that a lot of young people are priced out of jobs because highly regulated labor markets make it very difficult for companies to take on new people knowing they may not be able to keep them in place in 6 months or 12 months or 18 months. So you get very, very high youth unemployment in France and so that's very different to… So a lot of young people actually were supporting Le Pen in this election.
So Macron in that sense was saying I want to liberalize the French economy in return for big infrastructure spending. In return for big spending on new technologies like digital environment, trying to shift the economy away to new technology so in a sense it wasn't your classic doubling down of globalization it was more of a, we're not gonna stop the world, we're not gonna stop globalization, we're not gonna save manufacturing in Europe. We need to think about a new economy. How are we gonna build this new economy. So in a sense, I saw his agenda of coming to power, his policy agenda and some of the people around him were really thinking creatively about how to think about what is going to be a new economy or a new society in a globalized world in an advanced democracy. That's a step ahead and that's exactly what I want mainstream politics to be thinking about doing.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, absolutely. He had a lot of hope-
Simon Hix: The problem then is he only managed to get the liberalization stuff passed without the other stuff so then it just looks like he becomes a baby Thatcher. It looks like he's doing what Thatcher did in Britain in the 1980s. And it looks like, well, we're going even more down that path and so then you get the Gilets Jaunes movement, you know, the yellow vest-
Misha Zelinsky: The yellow vest.
Simon Hix: And so these guys, again it's an odd coaliltion, the bulk of the movement are rural small town suburban and rural areas, older voters, and small towns in decline, farmers, farm related producers, social conservatives, quite Catholic, and then a small wing are kind of angry, urban, militant, radical, left anarchists. They're the guys smashing up the Arc de Triomphe and the shops in Paris but the bulk of the movement is this quite conservative movement so it's a kind of…
Misha Zelinsky: People often get hijacked with movements.
Simon Hix: They do. And so the radical left has hijacked the movement but the movement itself is quite a socially conservative movement.
Misha Zelinsky: Interesting. And one thing we haven't talked about, we've touched around it, but Russia. Every nationalist movement you look at is Putin's not too far away from it. What's his game here?
Simon Hix: Yeah so Putin is trying to metal. I don't buy the Putin is driving this but I do buy that Putin is benefiting from all this and so if there's anything that he can do that makes life difficult for the mainstream establishments so for example Brexit. The allegation is that there's Russian money that got into the leave campaign and there's Russian data hackers that were used to try and identify who to target with the leave campaign and so on and so on and so on. With Brexit-
Misha Zelinsky: When these votes are so tight though, it's interesting.
Simon Hix: It could make a difference but lots of things could make a different.
Why does he want Brexit? So there's this sort of macro level thing, anything that destabilizes western Europe is good for Russia-
Simon Hix: Yeah. But there's a micro level thing which is that Britain was the one country at the table in EU that was really pushing to maintain sanctions against Russia, right? With Britain off the table he reckons he's got much more chance of getting the EU to back down on some of its sanctions. So there's some really very concrete short term interests related to this. And so he's playing both of those games. There's often very concrete interests related to gas, relating to sanctions… The sanctions are hurting and with Europe staying together and the European Establishment have really held together with sanctions and those sanctions really are hurting Russia. So he really wants to try and loosen that so this is the game he's playing which is not just the big geo-political one. It's really concretial to economic interests.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, because he's got the foot on the throat with these sanctions.
Simon Hix: Absolutely.
Misha Zelinsky: Interesting. One thing I want to get your take on, and we're coming to the end now and you've been very generous with your time but right wing populous. I mean there's this anger and very sort febrile political environment but why is it that the right wing populous are winning and you're not seeing… in the 30s you had the communists popping up, the socialists, and all these social democrats, FDR, they're nowhere and this ethnonationalism, this right wing populism is winning everywhere.
Simon Hix: And it's interesting-
Misha Zelinsky: And inequalities there, I mean it's there in the data.
Simon Hix: Similar circumstances in Latin America with the left wing populous so great, big impact of globalization, big economic inequalities between globalizing cities and rural populations. I think it's largely to do with the fact that these are often middle-aged or older voters that are losing from these changes and so it's not necessarily younger voters. So apart from what I've just said about France, younger voters tend to be the ones to be educated, younger voters and they seem to be the ones to support more radical left ideas. Whereas older, these are more socially conservative voters. They already got their protected interest. They've already got, you know, state pensions. Often they've got houses and they've paid off these debts and so this is largely driven by social values that they don't share and so national identity.
In fact, 1930s when there was a major economic downturn and we saw votes shifting mainly to the radical right rather than to the radical left. In fact, throughout history of democracies, there's a nice paper by simple economists looking back over from 1918 to the present looking at major economic downturns. Major economic downturns tend to lead to swing votes to the radical right or to the left and that's what we've seen over the last ten years in Europe.
Alright well one last question I ask of all my guests and this might not wash so well with a Brit but with Australian audience-
Misha Zelinsky: After the last series, I'm not sure we've even won a game. We'll need some sandpaper. Australian gets asked who they'd love to invite as internationals to their barbecue. So for international audience I'd say, which three Australians would you invite to a barbecue. Alive or dead, I'll give you that.
Simon Hix: Oh boy, that's a good question. Well Misha, he'd have to be one of them.
Misha Zelinsky: No, no, you can't count me. Even thought the show's called Diplomates and I know you as a mate now, obviously, so I couldn't tap into the cult of Simon Hix online but…
Simon Hix: That's a good- I've never thought about that.
Pauline Hanson.
Misha Zelinsky: As a political scientist, no doubt on that one.
Simon Hix: As a political scientist.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, okay, she can make the fish and chips.
Simon Hix: Yeah, I think it'd be interesting to know what makes her tick.
Simon Hix: Rudd, I think.
Misha Zelinsky: Kevin Rudd.
Simon Hix: This is getting interesting.
Misha Zelinsky: And the third one would probably… the swimmer with the huge feet. What was his name?
Simon Hix: Ian Thorpe.
Misha Zelinsky: Thorpe.
Simon Hix: So Simon Hix, Ian Thorpe, Kevin Rudd, and Pauline Hanson. Wow. I mean, people like trying to get Kevin to stop speaking but… that would be an interesting barbecue to say the very, very least.
Simon Hix, thank you so much for joining the podcast and it's been fantastic and I look forward to chatting in the future.
Misha Zelinsky: Have a safe trip home, cheers. Bye.
Steve Glickman
November 4, 2018	Misha Zelinsky	ANZUS, Australia, China, Economic Opportunity Zones, Economics, Inequality, Universal Basic Income, US	1:05:58
Steve Glickman, the CEO and founder of Develop Advisors, is the world's foremost expert on Economic Opportunity Zones. Steve joined Misha to give his predictions on the mid-term and 2020 elections, discuss solutions to geographic inequality, dissect the problems with a UBI and explain what's gone wrong with global trade. Steve also gives tips on how to overcome partisanship in the legislative process. It's a BIG chat.
A young gun in US politics, Steve was an advisor in the Obama Whitehouse and started his career as Special Assistant US Attorney.
While at the Economic Innovation Group – which he co-founded with Sean Parker – Steve developed the radical 'Economic Opportunity Zones' that are tasked with kickstarting capital investment and job creation in areas of the US suffering from high inequality and low capital investment. He is now bringing EOZ's to life via his new investment firm, Develop Advisors.
It's a great and really fun chat. For policy nerds, there's a really fascinating critique of the Universal Basic Income.
We need this guy to run for President some day (no pressure, Steve).
EPISODE 2 FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Misha Zelinsky: Steve Glickman, how are you? Welcome.
Steve Glickman: Thanks for having me.
Misha Zelinsky: I should say that it's in the evening in DC right now. Is that right?
Steve Glickman: Yeah. It's 5:40. So all the government bureaucrats have already gone home
Misha Zelinsky: Very good. So I should say we're obviously recording this across time zone. So it's early in the morning here in Australia. But yeah, the wonders of technology bringing people together. So Steve, I was actually just going through your CV before. You and I first met through the American-Australian leadership dialogue where youth delegates. I'm a little bit surprised at the depth of your CV. Are you sure that you actually youth delegate or are you fudging things a little?
Steve Glickman: Well, you know, I make up most of the stuff that I do or talk about on the spot so you can pretty much assume it's all one big running lie.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, just on that. So your main role, and we'll talk a little bit about your broad career as we go along. But your main role is that to you are the co founder and CEO of the Economic Innovation Group. I was hoping that you might be able to tell us a little bit about what the EIG is and how and why it was set up.
Steve Glickman: Yeah. I think a good way to think about us is we're social entrepreneurs. So we are trying to find a new pathway at addressing big economic challenges in a very crowded marketplace of think tanks and political organizations, and other groups that are trying to make their mark in DC. We were founded in early 2013. It was really, much of this was the brainchild of Sean Parker, who as you know is the co-founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook. And when he and I got connected at the end of 2012, early 2013, he was really focused on how you leverage the private sector to solve big economic challenges. Particularly, how you drive more private sector investors to a bigger part of country.
Steve Glickman: And that was really our DNA from the beginning was could we get a group of Democrats and Republicans, conservative and liberal thinkers, private sector, public sector actors to really come together around the notion that we could create a new incentive system to change the flow of capital markets in the US?
Steve Glickman: And as we started unpacking that problem and that approach, we found ourselves doing a lot of research around what drives inequality on a community level around America, and what the depths are of that inequality and what the impact is. And the more and more we unraveled that onion, the more questions we had and the more we realized that we think we had stumbled upon maybe the most important economic policy challenge that wasn't really being addressed by either political party and that gave us a pretty strong feeling that we were onto something meaningful. So we're really intensely focused just around that problem, and bringing in a whole new set of actors from the private sector to solve it.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, that's really interesting. So we'll talk a little bit about the bipartisan part of the EIG. But I'm just curious. I mean, I think a lot of people talking about inequality. I think what's interesting about what the EIG does is that you are very focused on can I say, in an American sort of way, is that it's focused on capital investment and enterprise. I was wondering if you could maybe just unpack that a little around how you see the role of enterprise in lifting people up out of inequality and rather than it being perhaps a government led solution.
Steve Glickman: I think our approach to it is that it involves both, but that the government at all levels. Whether it's the federal government or local governments in the US, which is unique to the US structure that we've got that federalist system. That a lot of the programs initiated by government having worked very well, but even more importantly, it's both politically, financially, they're broke. There's just no capital based on the changes in our tax system and the changes in the political acceptability of big government programs to do a lot more out of the public sector. And some of that's just a factor of the economy and our debt, and the fact that between social security and Medicare, and defense spending, and payments of the debt, there's just not a lot of additional capital to go around unless you hike up taxes.
Steve Glickman: And certainly in America, the political trends are in the opposite direction where you've been lowering taxes, or have had pretty low taxes for 30 or 40 years. So if you, go ahead.
Misha Zelinsky: Sorry, keep going.
Steve Glickman: So if you're gonna solve the problem of how you create more economic growth, it costs money from somewhere. And the private sector is to contrast to all those trends in the public sector has never been wealthier, more profitable. The stock market's never been higher than ever before. So clearly there's a lot of capital that's resting there. From our standpoint, the capital markets aren't broke, they're just broken. And they're not working in the way that they could or should work. And if you're not driving more capital places, you're not ultimately creating more businesses places. And if you're not creating more businesses places, there's no other way to get jobs. So we subscribe to the notion that to change economies, it starts with the ground up. You have to create local, homegrown businesses and you can't do that without capital.
Misha Zelinsky: Now, that's really interesting. And I think you talked a lot about tax cuts there. And tax cuts at the moment, corporate tax cuts are on the agenda in Australia in a very contentious. There's a lot of argument from both sides of politics. I think what was interesting, obviously those are major tax cut I'm brought in by the Trump administration and the republican congress. But what was within that was a small piece of a very innovative policy that the EIG championed. I was wondering if you could maybe tell us a little bit about the role that the tax cuts have played in helping the EIG actually get some rubber on the road in terms of things you just talked about.
Steve Glickman: Well, so the program you're talking about is called opportunity zones. And let me separate it out a little bit from the overall tax reform package. It was a vehicle to make a certain set of tax changes, but I think it's a little bit different in the tenure of what you see from many other parts of that tax reform package. It's designed to do something that the US tax code has done for a long time, which is if you want to incentivize certain types of behavior, and in our case it was incentivizing moving private capital to low income parts of the country. The tax code is the most important and most powerful, most systemic way to do that. And of course we do that in the US to stimulate a charitable contributions. We do it to stimulate people buy houses, we do it to stimulate companies to make investments in research and development. We do it to stimulate the clean energy economy.
Steve Glickman: So it makes total sense and if you think, and we do think that community level inequality using most important problem to solve and there's lots of capital in the private sector. Let's utilize the tax code to systemically change the flows of that capital. And that's basically what the opportunity zone program does. It's essentially a deal between the federal government and private investors that we as the federal government will give you some level of tax forgiveness if you're willing to make longterm and economically productive private investments in communities that are cut off from capital markets.
Steve Glickman: The program is obviously more complicated than that and we can get into whatever level of details you want, but at the end of the day, that's what it's about. It's about getting capital off the sidelines. By our calculation there's about 6 trillion with a T, $6 trillion in unrealized passive capital gains sitting in the economy. that's in the stock market, in the real estate market that has been booming for at least a decade now. And if that money can be funneled to distressed communities around the US, there's a pretty powerful tax incentive attached to it and we think it will move markets, it'll change the way the market works.
Misha Zelinsky: That's really interesting. So yeah, obviously taxes. It controls the flow of money. You've talked a lot about the role of capital in these distressed communities. I know the EIG talks a lot about the geographic role of inequality. I'm just wondering about the role. How do you see the role of responsible business in addressing inequality? And obviously we want to see capital investment in distressed communities creating jobs, but what do you think, what's the role of the business community in addressing wage inequality and lifting up people and making sure that we don't have a situation where you have people working one job or multiple jobs, and being unable to sustain themselves?
Steve Glickman: There's no doubt that how stagnant wages have been an America is a big source of inequality on a number of different levels. And this was one of the stories of the recession and the recovery was that we gained back all of our high wage jobs. We gained back way more than we lost in terms of low wage jobs, and we didn't gain back those middle wage jobs. And a big reason for that is the industries that really never came back were a lot of those middle wage industries like manufacturing. Now a lot of thinkers and policymakers in both parties understand that. But then your solution set gets all over the place and a lot of it has been focused for years on well, if we want to bring back those type of jobs, we have to bring back those sectors, and that's not our perspective.
Steve Glickman: It's manufacturing has fundamentally changed. But those communities that were manufacturing communities need similar quality jobs to replace it. And jobs that fundamentally don't require a college education. On the democratic side, you hear a lot of talk about how everyone should go to college and that's just not really a practical solution at least in the US. So you've really got to create new business activity in order to change that. And listen, I don't think you're going to be able to get there by forcing the corporations to do that, at least not in traditional ways. There is a big competitiveness problem in the US economy. It is much harder for new businesses to start and grow. We're on this huge 40 year decline in our ability to create. So there's this myth that the US is this entrepreneurial economy, and of course in some ways we're more entrepreneurial than many other places around the country. But that edge that the US has is rapidly declining, and in part that's because we're creating businesses in such a smaller number of places around the US.
Steve Glickman: So again, we think it's a homegrown problem, and that there are entrepreneurs everywhere. And the way to get at solving that problem is by getting more and more of those entrepreneurs capital. Let me give you one quick stat. If you look at the venture capital industry which is the source of much of the high growth entrepreneurship in the US, nearly 80 percent of that capital is invested in only three states. So three out of the 50 states, Massachusetts, New York, and California get nearly 80 percent of the capital. And that's true across many other parts of our capital markets. Including how banks lend and where banks are located around the US. So this is a big problem to unravel and we think it starts with how capital flows.
Misha Zelinsky: That's really interesting, and I think it gives us an opportunity to talk a little bit about this geographic inequality, these distressed communities. It's been discussed a lot and I'm curious to hear your take on it as someone who's a Democrat and perhaps has a slightly a nuanced view of the election. The geographic role that inequality pied in the US selection, you of course grew up in Michigan. That's a state that's blue state gone red, so to speak. But I think that what's interesting is you talked about there was the loss of jobs, Trump zeroed in on very acutely around this loss of jobs and the promise to bring back steel jobs mining jobs in those distressed communities. And whether it was true or not, it certainly resonated. So I'm curious just a little bit about the geographic role that inequality played in the US election.
Steve Glickman: So I think there's a couple answers to that. One is let's take a look at how people evaluate the economy. So in a time when the national economy was booming, our unemployment rate was close to four percent and the stock market had been growing for this long bull market. That national level economy was just not resonating to people because frankly, it's just not how people evaluate the economy. They evaluate the comedy based on what they see happening in their community. And people are really good at evaluating how well their local economies are doing. And as it turns out, a lot of national policy makers and the media don't fully understand what the country looks like outside of big markets like New York, LA, San Francisco, and DC because that's where they spend most of their time.
Steve Glickman: It looks much different than the rest of America. We for instance looked at swing districts, at places that voted for Barack Obama twice and then voted for Donald trump. And those are places it'd be hard to say that the difference in the election was based on race because they elected for an African American president twice. And much more likely, the driving force there was the economy. And if you look at those counties, and there were 200 plus of them that voted for Barack Obama twice and then voted for Donald trump. The big tying factor for all of them is that three quarters of them lost businesses during the recovery years and lost jobs on net during the recovery years. So while our national unemployment rate is going lower, in those places unemployment rate is not being affected at all. In fact, they're losing jobs.
Steve Glickman: And one of the stories about the economy that people don't fully understand even now is when we talk about the recovery, we're talking about a recovery that really disproportionately benefited the top 10 or 20 percent of the country, that the rest of country kind of stayed even. And that the bottom 20 percent of American communities lost jobs and even a greater trajectory than they did before the recession. And in a lot of those places, it was totally rational to say the status quo establishment economic thinking from both parties isn't working for us. It's not changing our trajectory. So we're going to vote for something different. And, one of the things they're voting for is how to maintain their quality of life, maintain a community where their kids can stay and achieve the American dream.
Steve Glickman: And we know the reality is changing in those communities. The tragic thing is I don't think either party is really giving folks a viable solution for how they change their trajectory. Because a lot of these jobs aren't coming back. And a lot of the problems for their current economic situation isn't as simple as trade, or immigration, or any number of issues that have become the threshold issues in our debate. It's really a much more complicated, long term structural change of communities that haven't kept up with the how fast the economy's been changing and having diversified the industries and the opportunities they've given to people who have lived in a lot of these cities.
Misha Zelinsky: That's the challenge, isn't it for progressives I think is that the difficulties of the problem cannot be explained in neat, make America great again, type sloganeering. So that is always the challenge. But what's interesting as well as you talked a lot about there about the main economies LA, New York, San Francisco. But what's interesting as well is this so called red state blue state thing where people look at them on a headline map. But what's actually interesting, if you dig into a blue state, you'll see that it's actually perhaps a blue dot or a blue island on a red ocean. And maybe just talk a little bit about the differences between outcomes and metropolitan people versus outcomes in those sorts of non metro rural areas. And the tensions that are building there.
Steve Glickman: And I think the problem is even a little more complicated than that. So listen, the geographies that do really well in our economy typically are the suburbs. And the suburbs can be republican or democrat. Some studies going to do really well and some cities tend not to do well. And a lot of those cities, you have large population groups, particularly minority population groups that are doing much worse than whites even in rural areas. But ultimately, I think this comes down to a trajectory. If you're living in an African American or Hispanic community, even one that's on absolute terms not doing as well as a lot of white communities, you're probably doing better than your parents or your grandparents did. And that's not just an economic issue. That's also a social justice, civil rights status that have improved for many, many millions of Americans despite a whole set of current challenges.
Steve Glickman: If you're in the white working class community and a lot of those are small town and rural America, your trajectory has gone the opposite direction. You've lost. Particularly if you're in a manufacturing community, you've lost those industries. You've lost those quality of jobs. You've lost your main street. It's been replaced by a minimum wage jobs. Whether it's working for really big companies or for distributors or call centers, or whatever is left. And the quality is just different. There are rural communities and small towns in America that are doing great, but disproportionately the parts of the country that are doing the best are cities that are connected to global markets, connected to immigrant communities, and connected to the digital economy. And those are places like you mentioned, like New York and DC and San Francisco and LA, and also other towns that are, cities that are taking advantage of it. In the middle of the country, like Denver and Austin. And Minneapolis and other communities.
Steve Glickman: But those are the exceptions. And so the reality is this is not a rural versus urban issue. There's just huge amounts of distress in both communities, and it's not even a black versus white issue. But a lot of this has to do with trajectory. And, if you see yourself going the wrong direction, if you see your kids have less opportunities than you do, it makes people angry. And rightfully so. And I think at a starting point, and this goes back to our conversation around Trump, people want to be seen. They want to know that you understand their problem, and how their problem is unique and different because of where they live. And I think to Trump's credit, he understood it and was able to articulate it. And whether or not you have a good solution for it or not, more politicians on both sides have to articulate that as the biggest problem we need to solve with this country.
Misha Zelinsky: I think that's interesting. And you've talked a bit about Trump, but I think what's interesting and puzzling to a lot of Australians is that you had people that voted for Obama. We had eight years of Obama, and then suddenly those very same people turned around and voted for Trump someone that not only was the antithesis of Obama, but was the leader of the birther movement. So it is quite puzzling from an Australian point of view. But I'd be curious to get your views as someone who worked in the Obama administration in an economic portfolio. Could the Obama administration done more for people, in terms of making sure that those communities weren't so left behind in the recovery? Because I think Obama rightly put a lot of focus on saving Detroit with the auto bailout and focused very heavily on making sure that those working class jobs were not lost. But should the Obama administration done more and should the Democratic Party have detected this problem that was out there?
Steve Glickman: So the short answer is yes. I mean clearly, the Obama administration should have done more. I would separate a little bit the first term from the second term and not just because I served in the first term and not the second.
Steve Glickman: But I really think in the first term, the big focus was on the economic infrastructure of both America and the world. Which as you probably remember was teetering. And even right coming out of the recession, people were extremely nervous. Not just about the US, but Europe was going to collapse. That Italy and Spain and Greece, were going to default. And that meant the end of the EU and a new global recession and we would have all been screwed. And so that sucked up a lot of the bandwidth in the first term all the way through. And the bailout and TARP and the stimulus package, and the auto rescue in Detroit. And I'm pretty proud of the role I think the president played in, not just in America but globally in stabilizing the economy.
Steve Glickman: In the second term, I think we could've done a lot more. In part, we didn't have as much political capital as we had in the first term for sure. And we didn't have congress anymore. And that makes it difficult to do real big meaningful things including things that require for instance, changes to the tax code, which you need an act of Congress. Congress controls really all the spending in the US political structure and they were openly at war with the president and vice versa. So, the White House was really limited to what it could do through executive order, which is a much smaller set of authorities then you can do through law. So I think a lot of bridges had been burned by then, and all that political capital had really been used on creating health reform and creating universal access to healthcare, which I think is part of the problem you're talking about.
Steve Glickman: But this is a problem that we could have focused more in on in the second, could have done more about. It's also a really longterm problem. So the recession was not a turning point for most of these communities except in degree of distress. Most of these places where it had been distressed for at least 10 years before the recession and probably decades beforehand. Detroit hit its peak in the 1950s where it was one of the wealthiest economies in the country and had been in a downward slide as the US lost manufacturing shares to other world economies. And that's just the way the economy works. So I do think the White House has some blame and the administration has some blame. But at the end of the day, this is as much an issue about local leadership as it is about federal leadership. And there are certain places now that are just well much better prepared to take advantage of this economy than others.
Steve Glickman: And once they got lazy and passive, and decided they were gonna hope and pray for another company or another manufacturing plant to take the place of the last one they lost instead of how do we take advantage of this new tech enabled economy and use our infrastructure of universities, I mean don't forget, places like Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania have had world famous engineering research universities. University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State, and so you have the raw firepower to take advantage of the new economy. But it requires a local leadership and local vision to get there. And I think too few places had that until the last couple years or so.
Misha Zelinsky: That's really interesting. And I think you've touched a little bit on trade and touched a little bit on the effects of job replacement in communities where you've seen perhaps a steelworks shut and not be replaced with anything. One of the things I'm very fond of, and we certainly see similar things in Australia. I certainly see that in my role in the Australian Worker's Union. One of the things I always say is that trade is good, but fundamentally trade destroys and distributes unevenly. And I think we've certainly seen it in the US, but I'm curious at Trump has been putting forward a very muscular focus on trade. He sees trade in a binary sense where a trade balance if it's negative, the US is losing. And if it's positive, the US is winning, he sees it in a zero sum manner. Just curious how do progressives grapple with this question of trade which can hurt people, and how do you make sure communities aren't left behind in the process?
Steve Glickman: So there's no doubt that trade, as a lot of people will say, the benefits of trade are dispersed pretty widely and the impact of trade and the challenges with trade tend to be very concentrated. And that's certainly the case in the US economy. The economies that were most dominant by manufacturing, not necessarily most dominated by trade because the trade rich, trade dependent economies, some of them are booming. And a lot of the places we mentioned like Seattle and Los Angeles and New York, which are big hubs of trade are doing really well. But if you're a dominant sector and is manufacturing and you don't have a diversified economy, than the impact of trade can be huge. And one, as the Democratic Party or either party. I think we need to start by doing a better job giving communities the tools that they need to adapt.
Steve Glickman: Some of that is capital and how they access capital so they can build new industries. Some of it is how they retrain workers. We have a terrible and a terribly outdated worker retraining system in the US. It requires you to lose your job. It retrains you into sectors that aren't producing jobs. It's both inefficient and ineffective for people. And this is really a place where the private sector can and should play a huge role. If you're not creating a workforce training system where the private sector is at the table to talk about where their hiring needs are and how government can offload some of that training with the guarantee or the commitment that private sector interview and hire people coming out of these programs, until that works better it's really hard to solve this problem. But this conversation has been one that progressives have been good or even better at talking about for a long time.
Steve Glickman: So if you look at the height of progressivism, you're really talking about the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, even going into the seventies. So from like FDR through Lyndon Johnson where we had massive policies around retraining, around settling the west. And I think just as importantly and something that the Democratic Party is starting to talk about more around competition and corporate consolidation. So we really have the most consolidated and economy in the US we've had since the depression, since the 1920s and thirties where a smaller number of big companies control a bigger part of our economy. And that leads to a lot of this inequality and wage suppression and lack of investment, which we're all seeing. Because workers and communities are less able to compete. And if you look at where airline hubs have gone from when you've gone from having 10 airlines to having four airlines. Or where banks are located. Bank of America shut down 10,000 of their branches over the last 10 years. And community banks are growing at a slower rate than ever, which means small business lending in this country is basically plateaued at a 20 year low.
Steve Glickman: So it matters what the private sector is made up of, not just what they do. And if they're made up of lots more of, many more companies that are growing and more dispersed as opposed to a few really big companies, it makes a big difference in the economy. And so this question around how you create a more competitive economy in the US is really important. And Democrats used to talk about this all the time, and we really stopped talking about it in the last 20 or 30 years.
Misha Zelinsky: It's interesting. It's interesting, the concept of competition. It's a bit of an anathema sometimes to those on the progressive side of politics, but competition is inherently good for the economy. It's also good for consumers, which fundamentally the people that we seek to stand up for which are families, people buying things. And you want to see competition in wages, making sure that wages are going up and competing for labor, but also that you want to see competition in the cost of goods and reducing the cost of living for people. So it is interesting the level of concentration, but also what you're seeing increasingly is a global phenomenon. We certainly see it here in Australia with many US firms where it's winner takes all markets. And, one of the things I'm curious actually if your take on this and I think perhaps I could already know your answer. But one of the solutions being advocated is universal basic income. If there's no jobs and jobs that are being inherently more and more consolidated into mega firms and you're seeing market's up ended and people unable to work, that we should have a universal basic income, which is basic principle.
Misha Zelinsky: Everyone gets, no matter if you're a billionaire or dirt poor, everyone gets a certain income and then off you go to try to do best from there. But I think that there are certainly some problems with that idea, but I'm curious about your take on that because I think fundamentally, the better outcome is you want to see a good job. If you lose a good job in a steelworks, a unionized job, it's well paid that it's replaced with another good job and it's not that you're on your own driving Uber and trying to make ends meet.
Steve Glickman: So I dislike almost everything about UBI. One I think it's an American. We already really have a UBI through our social security system, and it's just for people who can't contribute to the economy. People who are disabled or a retired, or for reasons that are no fault of their own no longer working. And then it makes sense to have a massive safety net, one that's growing with the way the economy's changing, for people who are no longer contributing. But otherwise our system is premised on people working. And I believe people want to work and want quality jobs where they're contributing to their economy and being, their wages reflect their contribution.
Misha Zelinsky: Well there's a dignity in work as well, right?
Steve Glickman: Of course. But in UBI is like giving up. It's a form of charity and saying we can't solve this problem of how we create new businesses and new industries and train people with new skills. So we're going to pay people, but we're going to pay them a poverty level wage. And I believe even if we could afford it, which we couldn't because you gotta think in the US, if you're paying for 350 million people, but let's assume half of those are workers, so 150 million workers and you're paying them $15,000 a year, you're talking about a program in the trillions of dollars a year. And the US doesn't have that type of capital. It can't afford that program. And even if it could afford that program, it would suck away from every other single domestic spending program we had. We' have a UBI program, and a Pentagon, and social security and Medicare. And that's all the economy could withstand. The US budget $4 billion dollars a year. You're talking about this would be something like 40 or 50 percent of our budget.
Steve Glickman: So I don't think it's either politically or economically viable, which is why I don't spend too much time thinking about it. But I think conceptually it's also a broken. And we shouldn't be giving up. On the Republican Party, I think as they see the economy particularly in the lens of this new republicanism, it's very focused on how we separate ourselves from immigrants and our trading partners. And I think that's a big mistake, and it's particularly a big mistake in the context of immigration.
Steve Glickman: Immigrants, there are very few economic thinkers who would tell you that immigration is not a large net positive to any economy. These are people that want to be here, that want at work, that are disproportionately business owners and the creator of high growth businesses. Something like half of our venture backed businesses in the US, 50 percent are backed by immigrants or immigrant co-founders. So they're a huge part of our economy. But on the democratic side, there's this theory around the future of work that robots and artificial intelligence are taking over and there's nothing we can do about it. So let's just pay everyone, five or 10 or $15,000 a year. And to me that's just as big of a cop out.
Misha Zelinsky: It's technological determinism, so that we have no control over the technology that we can't shape it to our way either, right?
Steve Glickman: Well first, yes. And there is no evidence of that. Our economic evidence shows a low productive, low wage, low unemployment economy. And if there were tons of robots and artificial intelligence, productivity will be super high. Wages would be higher and there'd be a lot less jobs because robots would be doing it. So that's not the case right. Now that even if you thought that was the case 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, which I don't subscribe to, the fatalistic way to your point that we look at this is sad. Because there are lots of things we should try. If we thought robots were going to take over the economy in 30 years, then the solution is let's not give everyone charity so they're making a poverty wage. The solution is how do we prepare more American communities and more American workers to take advantage of that technology enabled economy? We need more thinking about that, not more thinking about how we're going to spend more money to spend our way out of this problem. At least in my view.
Misha Zelinsky: I subscribe to that view too. I don't think the UBI, whilst it's interesting, I think it's under the assumption that there's no work, and I don't believe there will be no work. So I think it's actually making sure that the work we have is well paid and people are skilled for it accordingly. But so I'm just curious. You touched on immigration there and the role that immigrants play. And I think any policy person would agree with you, but that's certainly not the mood in the community globally. You're seeing it in Europe, you're seeing it in Australia, you're seeing it in the United States, suddenly with Trump with his wall. How can progressives articulate a positive view of immigration and not purely on an identity basis, but on an economic basis?
Steve Glickman: Well listen. Fear and economic scarcity or the perception of economic scarcity drive bad policy decisions, and they drive anti-immigrant thinking for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Misha Zelinsky: This is not new. That's important.
Steve Glickman: No. And I think for a lot of these issues, the question like for instance, the answer to trade is not making a better argument for trade. And the answer for immigration is not making a better argument for immigration. It's ultimately solving that perception people have of economic scarcity and that they're in decline. And so these are all first order questions. It starts with if you want to get those issues right, and we may get them wrong for the next four or five or six or seven or eight years. And it's not because people are in my view, hateful or mean or irrational. It's because they don't see any other option. So I think we have to give people other options. We have to convince them that there's a way they're going to get skills and there's gonna be new programs, new cooperation between the public and private sector around how we upscale people.
Steve Glickman: I think they have to see that investors are rebuilding a bigger part of this country because they buy the fact that there's a future in more places than just a handful of cities around the country, and they have to see new businesses start in their backyard so the trend lines aren't just Kmart and Target, and then came Walmart, and then came Amazon, and out went all the local businesses that thrive and grow in these economies.
Steve Glickman: And by the way, the notion that San Francisco and LA, and New York, and DC are better places because everyone's crammed into them looking for opportunity and they have to pay outrageous amounts to buy condos. It costs over a million dollars to buy a one bedroom condo in San Francisco now, and they're losing more people than they're taking in because nobody wants to live there anymore, because it's unlivable. The fact that that's a better outcome even for those economies is crazy.
Steve Glickman: So this requires dramatic action. The market's not going to work it out. People are not mobile. We have lower rates of mobility in the US than we've ever had before because people don't have the connections, the skills, the capital they need to be able to move to places that have these industries. The only solution is to create more industries and more businesses in a bigger chunk of the country. And I think there's plenty of interesting entrepreneurs and you, I think at this point earlier. We know there's plenty of work because there's plenty of problems to solve. Work is just a function of solving problems for other people. Whether it's the problem of how you create stuff in mass or how you grow stuff in mass, or how you provide certain services to people. And most of those jobs you can trade away.
Steve Glickman: Our economy like the Australian economy is mostly a services economy. And those services are locally provided. They're your restaurants and dry cleaners, and they're your bars and your doctors, much of this stuff you get locally. So a lot of the economy is not going to change dramatically. We're really talking about the parts of the economy that are globally connected, and if you just focus in on that part of the problem, there are solutions there. At least in the US, we have a huge infrastructure around our capital markets and our labor markets and it's just working really efficiently, and we as a society and the government can fix that if we wanted to.
Misha Zelinsky: That's a really interesting point. So earlier on, you touched on this concept of unamerican. I think as an Australian, I certainly understand what you mean by that and I think many people in the world would. What's a lot of people asking at the moment is what is it that America stands for? And I know that's a broad question, but we talked a little bit about immigration and Trump's take on that. And, we talked a little bit about trade. The US, for many, many decades now since certainly since World War II is been the guarantor and the prorector and advocate of an open global system. Be it of immigration, be it of trade and has also added support that with its institutions. Now in recent times, the US is turning in on itself. So I'm curious about how does the US with these challenges that it has around inequality, around the negatives around trade and around the negatives around immigration and the political impacts of that is happening, and the political part is detecting that? But at the same time, the rest of the world, countries like Australia, other western liberal democracies are looking to the us to say how is it that the US can help underpin the challenges we're seeing from China, from Russia, from other models. From non-US models. And how can the US juggle both its challenges at home but also help us friends abroad?
Steve Glickman: Well, listen. There's no doubt we're at an unprecedented point in our politics where leadership that our friends around the world who are used to seeing from the US is lacking, at least in terms of our role in the global economic stage. With that being said, nothing in my view so far has fundamentally changed. We're still a part of an active participant in the WTO, the World Trade Organization. We still have, with some very small exceptions given the size of our economy, a very open market both for investment and portrayed. We still have a immigrant rich country, that takes in large numbers of people every year and it brings a large number of tourists here, and large number of people are educated around the world in US universities. So I think the tone and the rhetoric is certainly off in terms of where the US is traditionally lead.
Steve Glickman: I'm not sure anything has fundamentally changed yet in terms of how the American economy and the American immigration system fundamentally works. Now of course, some of it is starting to change. I think it's an open question of whether Congress pushes back against that. Our system is, the president's got a lot of authority, particularly around foreign policy issues, but very little unilateral authority around core economic issues. And that includes trade, taxes, and even immigration where the president's powers are limited. So congress ultimately has to come along, and I think what you're not seeing is an acceptance from either party, including the Republican Party that their norms have fundamentally changed around trade or even that our national consensus has changed around immigration yet. I wish we were letting in far more immigrants than we are now, and I wish we had not pulled out of the transpacific partnership, which I think would have put us on a much stronger footing to be closer allied to Australia and Japan, and Korea, and other countries in the region in dealing with China. That was a big I think self inflicted wound.
Misha Zelinsky: Let's talk about TPP. Let's just talk about TPP.
Steve Glickman: But I'm not sure how much has fundamentally changed in the US beyond that.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, because I think TPP is interesting because you talked about trade. And you said the US president has limited powers. But the TPP, I think there are a lot of problems with that deal. But nevertheless, the TPP was seen as the US as part of Obama's pivot into Asia is about setting the rules of the game, setting the rules of the road. And the US 2016 election pulled, both parties away. I mean the Republicans got pulled away first through trump's challenge internally, but then Hillary Clinton was also pulled to the left by a firstly Bernie sanders and then Trump himself who she was effectively crucified over NAFTA and the impact that NAFTA had rightly or wrongly at least in a perception sense on the communities we talked about earlier. So that's I think one real world example, and China are filling I suppose the vacuum around TPP with their one belt, one road initiative, certainly in the Asian region. So I think there's certainly already observable impacts from new us retreat from an open liberal system.
Steve Glickman: Yes. I mean you're totally right. I wouldn't buy too heavily into any of the campaign rhetoric, at least from Hillary Clinton's camp around TPP. She was one of the architects of TPP when she was the secretary of state in the Obama administration. And if you look back at the history of trade agreements, it's typically been democratic presidents who have done the heavy lifting on trade despite the stereotypes of the party. Bill Clinton got NAFTA done. I'm, Barack Obama did most of the heavy lifting around the TPP. Kennedy was really the initiator of the first big trade expansion in US history, and Roosevelt and Truman were big supporters of how you use economic diplomacy to solve big means here. I think what we got wrong in the TPP debate was that it's fundamentally an economic agreement. It's fundamentally a political agreement. I think the biggest, most important part about TPP was securing our place and our alliance within Asia and dealing with any number of issues that balanced powers in East Asia that would give us better footing from everything from North Korea to the South China Sea, to engaging with Russia and elsewhere.
Steve Glickman: And that should've been the debate we were really having because that's where it has the biggest impact. It would have honestly marginal economic impact even though these are really big markets because we had agreements with most of these countries. The only one that we didn't have a meaningful agreement with was Japan. And that's where a lot of the tussling was at the end and it was around really small issues. Most of the tussling and these agreements, for instance, TPP happening around Ag. And the AG sector in the US is .5 percent of our GDP. 99.5 percent is something else. Manufacturing, services, natural resources. This is a really small part of the US economy and that's not really what the agreement was about. It was about a new political order or at least preserving a political balance in Asia. And unfortunately we're losing some of that.
Steve Glickman: What's interesting is that the president's in Singapore right now trying to create a new political packed with the Koreas, and we'll see if that works and we'll see whether his shoot from the hip model is effective. I'm not ruling it out. It's not the only way to get there. But I do think when we take away the tools from our tool box, which trade is a big one of those tools, we hurt our standing around the world and thus hurt US security and foreign policy interests.
Misha Zelinsky: So you talked about China and the South China Sea. One of the things that Australia focuses a lot on is the role of China and trying to grapple with the economic underpinning relationship that we have with the Chinese, and also the challenge that China brings to the liberal world order, but also the challenges that it brings to our launches with the United States and other like minded countries, and they've been very city in the South China Sea.
Misha Zelinsky: So there is a lot of nervousness around the US's continued role as a strategic guarantor of freedom of navigation in South China Sea. But also, do you see that the US is focused enough on the challenge that China has brought? The US tends to be at its best when it's challenged. Much like in the Cold War, but also with the rise of Japan. And do you see that it might actually bring the best out of the US in terms of raising its own standards, but also reaching out to friends around the world?
Steve Glickman: Well, China is the most complicated national security foreign policy issue the US has to deal with. And we have a really complex, multifaceted conversation with China that's ongoing and has been ongoing for years. However, I think 2018 is not the 1940s and 50s. I think that across the world, countries that have long relied on the US as a guarantor have to start taking care of their own backyard. And that's both Europe and Asia. I think the Europeans have to step up and play a bigger role in world affairs. They've got the resources, they have the military technology and the military powers to do it. I think it's the same thing in Asia. I think that Japan's, the current construct that Japan is going to be taken care of by the US is one that's been outdated over the course of 70 years, and that everyone needs to play a role in keeping up their own backyard.
Steve Glickman: The US is not the sole world power. It's undoubtedly still be richest and most powerful country in the world, but that margin has decreased across a number of different factors. And that means other countries have to step up. And the US, listen. I have no doubt that over even the medium term, the US will know its allies from its friends and be there for its allies when push comes to shove. But it's a lot easier if our allies have leverage in their own regions. I think frankly, not to preach to the choir here, but Australia has done a really good job of this. Australia's emerged as a powerful force in Asia. It's a tiny country, because it has stepped up, and stepped up in a lot places have where it's had the US back where it didn't really need to, in I think asserting its roll and influence. I'd like to see Japan step up in a similar way and I'd like to see Germany step up in a similar way in Europe. These are the two richest country in the world aside from the US and China, and they need to step up.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah, I think that's an interesting point. And I know the Japanese certainly are looking at amending their constitution. But I do think even from a leveraging resources standpoint, it's important that every country unifies. Because people often look at it as though it's a United States versus China, but when you actually look at it, if you add the liberal democracies. You add Europe, you add the US, you add the UK, now Australia and other countries. You put those together, the GDP between those countries is extraordinarily huge. And you can certainly leverage that in a number of strategic ways, further the projection of a broader liberal order.
Misha Zelinsky: But I just want to take it back to domestic politics. You are, as I said earlier, a senior figure in the Democratic Party. And you're also based in Chicago, which is endlessly fascinating. From a political standpoint, it's obviously the political home of Barack Obama. I'm curious, you didn't grow up there, but you're now in there. So maybe you could give us some insights as to how you ended up in Chicago from a political standpoint, and we'll talk a little bit about the midterms as well.
Steve Glickman: So two small corrections. One, very few people would describe me as a senior figure in the Democratic Party.
Misha Zelinsky: I'm being generous mate.
Steve Glickman: And two, I don't live in Chicago. I live in Washington DC.
Misha Zelinsky: Oh yes you do. But you are Chicago Bears, Cubs fan?
Steve Glickman: I do. My dad and my grand father grew up in Chicago, so spent a lot of time there growing up and a big Chicago cubs fans.
Misha Zelinsky: Someone needs to do better research for me.
Steve Glickman: No, I chalk it up to the time zone change. That's probably what's contributing to this.
Misha Zelinsky: That's right. So your family is from Chicago. That's right, isn't it? And that is a very democratic political city.
Steve Glickman: Yeah, although every city is a Democratic city these days for the most part. But yeah, there are these very storied democratic roots in the, in the city of Chicago.
Steve Glickman: Listen, I think that there's this, what's I think interesting to me now is there's been this incredible comeback story of the role of cities as almost replacements from actors on the federal level. There's lots of ways you're seeing this in ways that are kind of surprising, if you look at climate change and the pact Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles has pulled together by getting a large contingency of mayors to subscribe to certain climate change goals. Even with us pulling out of the Paris Accords. Or whether it's the role cities are playing in creating new economic future for their citizens without relying on the federal government to step up and do anything dramatic. The most interesting I think politics right now are city level politics. And some of these cities, their economies are so large, whether it's LA, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. That they rival many countries around the world, so they're starting to pursue their own trade missions, and starting to pursue their own commercial diplomacy around the world.
Steve Glickman: And so I think those are really fascinating trends of the rise of cities around the world, and I wonder whether they'll start to displace the role of federal governments everywhere when there's more interesting things happening in the city level than on a national level.
Misha Zelinsky: And so just coming up to the midterms and a lot of attention on the elections. A lot going on. It will be very important, at least to Trump's presidency, whether or not the Democrats can secure either of the houses. How do you see that probably playing out?
Steve Glickman: So I think as is typical in lots of midterm elections, the opposition party does really well. And I expect Democrats in 2018 certainly in the house. There's a much more challenging playing field in the Senate in 2018 because Democrats are defending so many seats in the Senate. But I expect us to do very well in the house. I think Democrats will take over leadership of the house, and I think there's a lot of signals you're getting from existing members of Congress, including in the Republican Party where you see a number of senior retirements among Republicans in the house. Which is a pretty good signal that they don't have a strong feeling they're going to hold onto power next year. Now with that being said, being in control of one house of Congress only gives you so much when the presidency is the other party and the Senate is the other party, which I think is like most likely to be the case. Although the Democrats have a fighting shot to take over the Senate. We're only down two seats. 49 seats are held by Democrats in the Senate and 51 are held by Republicans.
Steve Glickman: But it will make a difference in at least slowing down the agenda that President Trump has in the White House because he'll be forced to work with Democrats. I think it might be a very interesting paradigm though, because I think President Trump has shown that he's willing to work with Democrats and Republicans when the circumstances are right. And so I wonder if he's going to have some issues he can work on with a democratic house.
Steve Glickman: I think the other big looming question is whether a democratic house moves forward to impeach the president, which they can do with-
Misha Zelinsky: I'm curious to ask you about that because you're a former trial attorney at the Department of Justice, so it'd be remiss of me not to ask you on the Trump Russia investigation, how you see that playing out.
Steve Glickman: Yeah. And there's also an investigator for congress. I investigated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so a sense for how that process works. So all democrats would need is a majority vote in the house to impeach the president. And they should I think have the numbers to do that if everyone voted that way, I'm not sure everyone would. I think right now, I think the grounds on which to impeach the president are pretty late. I think that there would be some unintended consequences of this creating some sympathy for the White House and a distraction for an agenda the Democrats may want to start to lay out going into the 2020 presidential election. And I don't think it's likely to result in the president being removed from office because Democrats would need two thirds of the Senate, which is likely to be controlled by Republican to be pretty close to 50/50.
Steve Glickman: And so they would need a number of Republican votes. Unless there's a smoking gun that comes out of the Bob Mueller investigation of the Trump campaign, and their connections with Russia which at least I've not seen or heard yet. I don't think that's very likely to be successful. And I'm not even sure whether that vote will be taken in the house because it comes with a lot of political risk. So I think the president is likely to serve out his term and I think there's likely to be a Democrat who's speaker of the house. And that brings us to 2020, which I image you're curious about as well.
Misha Zelinsky: Yeah you're well ahead of me mate. You're just naturally guiding yourself to the questions. But so 2020, you've talked a lot about I think a bit of a different democratic agenda for certainly in respect to the campaign that the Democrats ran in 2016. So I'd be curious to see what you think are some of the lead candidates are to take on Trump in 2020 in the assumption that he's there, and then who you might favor?
Steve Glickman: So I'll answer both those questions maybe a little differently than how you asked them. One, let me just talk about the context now. So if you ask voters, and I've heard this pretty recently from very experienced public opinion researchers who have looked at how voters view the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and the president. I think you get some surprising results. One, the president's a lot more popular than people give him credit for. And in part, I think it's a factor of the fact that the economy is still really strong, and the president's viewed as very strong on the economy. And he's viewed as someone who a while his unfavorability rates are still very high and they had been all the way through the campaign, even when he won. People view him as pretty strong, as someone willing to stand up to what he thinks is right. And someone who's good at business and good at the economy.
Steve Glickman: And that still holds true. And if you ask voters what Republicans stand for, it's pretty clear to them they stand for less government spending, lower taxes, and for big business. Now as a Democrat, I think that's a very vulnerable set of associations to have with voters, because people like a lot of the things government provide. And they're I think skeptical of large businesses, but you have to give them an alternative vision. And when you ask voters what they think about Democrats and their economic vision, there's a series of like 10 question marks in that answer. No one has any idea.
Steve Glickman: I was close with Hillary Clinton's economic team when she was running her campaign for president. And I could not tell you what her priorities were, and I can easily tell you what Trump's priorities were. In fact, he stayed pretty focused on them. I may disagree with a number of them, but you know what they are. And so Democrats first and foremost, they need a positive vision for the economy, which is the only game in town. People don't vote in foreign policy issues, and they don't vote on social issues, at least on a federal level. They really vote on the academy, first and foremost. It's issues like one through five for when you ask people what's most important to them, it relates to the economy. It's healthcare, it's housing, it's a good job. It's my community, etc. Wages. So we need to give them a reason to vote for democrats. We really need a new economic world view and vision and philosophy. And ultimately that boils down to a new generational thinking of this.
Steve Glickman: There's this very outdated notion in I think both democratic and republican circles that we're still having a debate that's left versus right or left versus center. When really we're having the most important debate is one that's new versus old. It's a new generation where you'd see a lot of agreement around certain issues among new republicans in new democrats. A new generation of them, let's say under 45. And the old views of what the parties stands for, and that I think is the most important debate in the country. Now, democrats are going to run 20 candidates for president. And lots of them are impressive and maybe might be very good presidents. I'd give you some who I think are going to be front runners.
Steve Glickman: I think you'll see Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey do well. I think you'll see Terry McAuliffe, the former governor from Virginia do really well. I think you'll see Jason Kander, a young rising star from Missouri who ran for senate and has now become a national figure. I think you'll see him do very well. But I think all of them are going to have a really tough time beating the president. It's very hard to beat incumbent presidents. It's very hard to beat incumbent presidents in a really good economy. It's really hard to be incumbent presidents in a good economy who's maintained a pretty high level of popularity in his own party. And he's extremely popular in republican circles. The notion that he's vulnerable is a total farce. His approval rating in the republican party is 80 percent or higher. This is like George W. Bush numbers after 9/11. He doesn't have to win by much to win. So I think you need a democrat that's got a real affirmative vision that people want. It's got to be more than being anti-Trump. And frankly, I have not heard much of that breakthrough in the party so far and it makes me very nervous the democrats are not prepared Well for 2020.
Misha Zelinsky: Well that's a very sobering analysis and we'll leave it on that note on the serious. All our guests are asked, so I know you've been to Australia and this is about making, the show's called Diplomates. So it's about making some mateship across the ocean. So just curious about having visited Australia, who are the three Australians that you would invite to a barbecue, and obviously you'd invite me. So I'd be there anyway. So I'd be looking for you to think of three others mate.
Steve Glickman: Yeah. Well I need someone to drink all the beer. So that'd be you. So I'm going to stick in the political and economics lens around three Australians I'd like to have dinner with. So let's start with politics. We're bipartisan, so I'll take a bipartisan approach to this. So on the left, definitely Julian Assange, I'd want to have him at the table. When I think about Australia-
Misha Zelinsky: You might have to get him in by Skype mate. I don't know whether or not he's going to be allowed out of the embassy, but …
Steve Glickman: You didn't say it had to be practical. You just said who I want. If I'm thinking about someone who to me represents Australia, it's Julian Assange on the left. On the right, the most famous Australian, most consequential Australia I can think of is Rupert Murdoch. So he'd be the Australia and I'd have from the right. I'm sure you're loving these choices. You'll like choice number three.
Steve Glickman: So choice number three would be an economics focused choice. And the person I have in mind gave probably the most compelling analysis of what happened in the economic crisis of anyone I've seen, American or Australia. And do you know who that would be? She's from a very famous movie you may know.
Misha Zelinsky: I ask the questions on this thing mate, so I have absolutely no idea. But you've got me on tender hooks right now with Julian Assange and that Rupert Murdoch.
Steve Glickman: So number three in this trio would be Margot Robbie, because there's no one I'd rather listen to on the economy then than Margot Robbie. I think she, Julian, and Rupert all in one room would be a tremendous Instagram photo at least.
Misha Zelinsky: Well, Steve Glickman, Margot Robbie, Rupert Murdoch, and Julian Assange would make quite a group. I don't know whether or not either Rupert or Julian would want me there, but I'd certainly be happy to get along and at least drink couple of those beers you talked about. Steve, thanks so much for your time. I think it's been a fantastic chat, a lot of great insights and good luck with everything. Hopefully if we don't see on the ticket in 2020, hopefully see 2024, 2028 Glickman. I'll be there handing out for you mate.
Steve Glickman: Well, I appreciaTe that. That will never happen, but I do appreciate you having me on the show anyhow and love talking with you. Good on your Misha.
Misha Zelinsky: Never say never mate. Thanks a lot.
Steve Glickman: Talk to you, bye.
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