 Welcome everyone tonight. It is my pleasure to welcome you to our first ever meet the author virtual event. My name is Brian Schmidt. I'm the Vice Chancellor of the Australian National University and we are very privileged to be hosting the honorable Malcolm Turnbull and Catherine Murphy. Now for those of you who are regular attendees of a new events, you will know that we often utilize Llewellyn Hall for our bigger events. And while we can't host you on our campus tonight, it is wonderful that we are able to bring to you this event virtually from the Llewellyn Hall. I'm joining you from my home on the traditional lands of the none of all people and our large audience tonight joins us from many different parts of Australia. Tonight we acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we each of us meet and we pay our respects to the elders past and present. Before we start this evening. I'm going to run through a few pieces of quick housekeeping. This event will include a Q&A component later this evening. So please submit your questions throughout the event by clicking Q&A. You will receive an email from our events team with step by step details on how to do this. Please include your name and city along with a brief question. Due to the large size of the audience, we won't be unmuting microphones or using chat for your questions. So please submit them via the Q&A button and try to avoid using the raising hand function if you can. If you do have any questions or experience any technical difficulties, please contact events at anu.edu.au. I'm now delighted to welcome former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to chat about his new book, A Bigger Picture. Congratulations Malcolm, this week it has been hard to miss the extensive coverage of your autobiography and it's clear you have more stories than can fit into one book, even if it is more than 600 pages long. Now the audible Malcolm Turnbull served as the 29th Prime Minister of Australia from 2015 to 2018. And during his time as Prime Minister, we saw the fierce debate of marriage equality across the nation and eventual public affirmation of same-sex marriage. He was responsible for the establishment of Snowy Hydro 2.0, an important step in creating sustainable and reliable renewable energy. He also stood up to Donald Trump very memorably and rebooted Australia's defense industry, among many more achievements. Malcolm grew up in Sydney, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Sydney. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship that allowed him to complete a Bachelor of Civil Law with honors from the University of Oxford. Malcolm spent his pre-politics life working in many different professions, including as a journalist, a lawyer, merchant banker, and venture capitalist, and bringing such diverse life experiences to be unpacked. This book gives the Australian people such a rare access to the inner workings of Australia's political system, something that fascinates many, including myself as an American. I think your insights during your time as Prime Minister provide a particularly valuable and unique perspective as you discuss events many of us experience, yet you do so through a lens that we would otherwise not get to view. Beyond politics, though, your book tells stories from your childhood and, importantly, the highs and lows of business and of life in general. I'm looking forward to reading your book as I'm sure many of the audience are. I'd also like to introduce our host for this evening, Katharine Murphy. Katharine has been Guardian Australian's political editor since 2016, working in Canberra's Parliamentary Press Gallery for 22 years. Katharine is Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Canberra, from which she was awarded an honorary doctorate in October 2019. Katharine has won the Paul Lyonham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism, and has been a wokely finalist twice. Lastly, I'd like to thank emeritus fellow, Mr. Colin Steele, who has established our fantastic Meet the Author program, which has captivated our community for over 30 years now. Very pleased Colin is with us here tonight, and I thank you for your continued work to make the Meet the Author series possible and bring such a high caliber of authors to A&U. It is now my pleasure to hand over to Katharine to host the in conversation. And so without further ado, I would like to invite Katharine to start. And thank you, Katharine. Thank you one and all. Thanks to Brian for such a generous introduction for both Malcolm and myself. And I join with him in paying my respects to the traditional owners on the lands on which we meet. And also in paying my respects to A&U, to Colin and to others who, as Brian says, runs an absolutely superb Meet the Author series that I've been part of several times in the past. So I'm delighted this evening to be speaking to Malcolm Turnbull. I covered Malcolm's Prime Minister ship, obviously, all the highs and lows of it. And I have read the book and it's a terrific read. And I want to start Malcolm with an observation that is also a question, if I can. So the book opens with this great brio and abulience. There's young Malcolm racing around the eastern suburbs of Sydney. There's your school adventures. There's university adventures. Your precociousness in doing several things all at once. You head to Oxford among many, many japes there. You demand that the vicar marry you and Lucy. Then we sort of sprint into the business career again, where there's great sort of energy and abulience. But then the creeper or the closer we creep to your political life, a Paul begins to descend. I felt the gear change very strongly actually reading the book from early life to public life. So I just want to start with a general observation. So obviously you did come across from business, from journalism, from the law to politics. Setting aside traumas, which I'm sure we'll get to. What are your observations about being a politician in this period of history? What is it actually like to run a government right now? Alison, before I begin, given that we are at least virtually in Canberra, can I say Yungo Galenian Nalawi, Dhani Ngunnawal Dara, Wangara Viginian, Marni Balaan Bagarabang. Now, that's an acknowledgement of country in the Ngunnawal language. And I was the first Prime Minister. I think that I may have been the first member of the House to speak in the Ngunnawal language in the House of Representatives. It's a very interesting story how the Ngunnawal language group and the Canberra district has been rediscovering and the language, which was not entirely lost, and they've had fantastic support from a great institution in Canberra, AACIS. So with that said, let me get on to the answer to your question. Look, being Prime Minister of Australia is the best possible job. There is never a bad day to be Prime Minister. You can have bad days in the sense of terrible things happening, but it's always a great honour and a great opportunity. But it is, look, it's the office of wicked problems, as Annabel Crabb described the Prime Minister's office, because if the problems were easy to solve, they probably wouldn't find their way to the PM's desk. So these are particularly challenging times at the moment. But as you know, and people will read in my book, we had plenty of interesting challenges, personal, party, ideological, international. No one was expecting the parliament to be progressively cleaned out by section 44, and nobody was expecting Donald Trump either. So it's a lot of exciting challenges, and that's what makes the job such a great job to have. It makes it very interesting. Okay, well, let's start with leadership and leading a political party. Now, you had two periods of leadership, one in opposition, one in government. Now, I saw you try and learn some lessons from your first period as opposition leader and project them into your Prime Minister's shift. But this is your show, Malcolm. So what did you learn from your first period of leading the Liberal Party? Well, you know, I learned that the Liberal Party, there is a group, or a tendency or an element in the Liberal Party that have always opposed me. This is the sort of the right wing. The Liberal Party is a broad church, but I've had some pretty trenchant critics on the right, as you know, pretty much, all my political career. So that managing that was always going to be challenging. I learned from the experience with the emissions trading scheme policy in 2009 that when we came back to energy, I should do everything I could to keep the party together, keep the cabinet together, be consultative painfully so, you know, make sure that nobody felt they hadn't been brought into the tent or consulted. And I did all of that. And that's why the National Energy Guarantee had such overwhelming support, but it was still not enough because there was a minority that was determined to bring the government down and bring my leadership down, you know, in part because they wanted to frustrate Australia taking effective action on climate change. So that's the sort of, that is the fundamental problem. As I said to you on the day I resigned, you asked me that question in the Prime Minister's courtyard and I said to you, you know, the coalition has a fundamental problem dealing with climate change. And that's because of that group who basically hold the coalition hostage. But you did, I concur with that, you did, that's precisely the lesson you learned and you took into your Prime Minister's ship was to be more consultative, to try to bring together the various camps in your political party. I mean, that is the story of your Prime Minister's ship on so many fronts, but they saw you off anyway. So the question really is about learning. I haven't learned what the question is yet. Well, be patient, Malcolm. Be patient. So you learn, be more consultative, be more collaborative. You project that into your Prime Minister's ship, yet in the end they dispatch you anyway. So did you not learn the right lessons? Were they again you from the start reflecting on that? Does it feel like I suppose the learning from round one was a waste of energy? Well, no, not at all, because we've got a lot of other things done as well. If there is a group of people in a parliamentary party like the Liberal Party that are prepared to blow the government up to get what they want in the expectation that the government will lose office, which is what they did. It is very hard. It's like being on a ship with members of the crew wanting to let off an explosion against the hull below the water line. People are prepared to do that. You've got a fundamental problem. So you're right. I did everything right in terms of consultation, but it wasn't enough. And they were determined to see me off and create enough mayhem with their friends outside the parliament, particularly in the media, to do so. Of course, they didn't get their candidate up. Their goal was to make Peter Dutton Prime Minister, but in the chaos that followed, they got Morrison, and of course, was the person they least wanted to be Prime Minister. So they got full marks for destruction, but very low marks for effectively achieving their goal. Achieving the endpoint. During that mad week where you were blasted out of the Prime Minister's ship, Warren Ench wrote on the petition that he was signing the petition to spill your leadership. And this was for Brenda Nelson. That was a bit of self-serving. That was a self-serving fig leaf to cover up the reality that Warren was doing it because he was under pressure from the LNP. The LNP basically put out a, what do they call it, a three-line whip in the House of Commons, but the pressure on the Queensland members was inexorable and irresistible for almost all of them to support Dutton. No, sure, and that's certainly true. They did whip their own numbers behind Dutton, but my point was a larger one. Obviously, that mad leadership week was, without a doubt, the maddest seven days I've ever seen in politics, and I've seen a number of mad days. But why is it, the events beg the question, beg Warren's question. Obviously, you took the party leadership from Brenda Nelson. You also replaced Tony Abbott in the leadership on two occasions. On two occasions, you lost the leadership of the party. So why is it okay for you to take the leadership of the party but not okay to lose it? Well, in the case of, I mean, each leadership contest has got to be looked at on its own facts, right? Nelson was in a terrible situation, as you know, electorally from the polling point of view. I didn't challenge him. I mean, Nelson, I wasn't sort of setting out to challenge Nelson. I've been overseas for 10 days or so with Lucy in Venice, actually, and I got back jet lag one morning and at about six o'clock that night, Nelson announced that he was spilling the leadership of the party and there'd be a ballot the following morning. So I was completely ambushed and that was the intention. You know, Joe Gash, you remember who'd been overseas at the UN. She'd been brought back so that she could vote for Brendan. So the idea was to flush me out and defeat me in the ballot. And of course, as it turned out, I won the ballot. But, you know, Brendan's position was terrible from a polling and every other point of view. As far as Abbott was concerned, I thought he was leading a terrible government. I felt ashamed being part of it. It was, I either had to challenge him, you know, my intention was to challenge him and if I was unsuccessful, as I told him, resign. I'd be gone. So I did so and where the electoral reaction was extremely positive, as you know. In terms of the challenge against me, what was the basis of it? There was, you know, we were, from an electoral point of view, we were in the strongest position we'd been in since the 2016 election. I mean, the view that many of us held, including Scott and including many others, some of them are quoted in the book, was that the right were not concerned that I would lose the election, but rather that I'd win it. In other words, they'd rather they had shortened his PM than me. Let's, I'm just conscious time short and I'm just reminding everybody tuned in to send your questions. Not everyone is as fascinated with the coup as perhaps you are. Oh, no, no, no, I'm still, I wouldn't, I wouldn't describe it as, as fascinated. Morbid fascination. Morbid, no, it was, it was, it was a dreadful, it was a dreadful week. So now we, the media, we copper pasting in the memoir. And I wanted this to, You're the guardian. No, no, no. No, no, the media generally, the media generally, right? There's a significant issues here. So let's look at both of them. You critique the right wing media ecosystem in Australia, Murdoch sky and others and we can get on to that and moguls in a moment. But the rest of us also do cop a pasting that has been too interested in soap opera and not, not sufficiently interested in policy. Is that, is that your impression? And if, if it is true, I think, you know, it's right to me. You know, you and Lenore is no longer in the gallery, but Lenore Taylor used to write very well about policy always and you always have to. But the press gallery, you know, well, there are plenty of honorable exceptions. But I think we know now that politics is covered largely like a, like sport, like football. And it is, you know, who's ahead, who's up, who's down, you know, who's sidestepped whom, who's tackled whom. And that's the, that is the, so it's the game that's being covered, not the actual substance of the issues. Now, I'm not saying the game is unimportant, but you've got to be prepared to cover some of the issues as well. And I don't think governments are being held to account sufficiently. And I don't think the, you know, I think one of the problems we've got is that lying and dissembling is rewarded as clever politics rather than being called out. And of course the mediscare in 2016 was a classic case of that. Just with moguls, let's think about that for a minute. You recount a number of conversations in the book. Kerry Stokes, Rupert Murdoch, other players now in Packer. All of them, right? Well, exactly, right. But there's also, that has been a long established tradition in Australia's political system, dating back from Alfred Deacon and David Sahn, that there has been this close symbiosis, if you will, between media proprietors and politicians. But you narrate some, some, some very contemporary, well, a very contemporary experience of that. So do you think that that's always been crook, that, that, that politics and, and media moguls are, are too close, that there is this symbiosis that can send the whole thing, well, cancerous for one of a better word, or do you think that, that things have gone off the, run off the rails in more contemporary times than say, back when Alfred Deacon was speaking to David Sahn? Well, I've been involved in political politics and journalism and moguls for well over 40 years, and have worked with a number of them, worked against a number of them, sometimes the same person. So I'm, you know, I'm familiar with the scene. I think it's worse than it's ever been. I think what has happened is that the, the, for a start, the domination that Murdoch has in the print media is a, has been a big problem for quite a while. Of course it was a Labor government that allowed him to acquire the heroin weekly times back in the late 80s. But the, the reality is that media has become so partisan. You know, there isn't even, if you look at, take a newspaper like the Australian, or take, you know, Sky News for, you know, just two examples. There is not even the pretense of objectivity. This is political propaganda. This is a political organization that employs journalists to do their work. And, you know, even to absurd lengths, and, and like a political, you know, propaganda, media, they defend their friends. They don't hold their friends to account. They attack their friends' enemies. You know, they, it's a, it is a, it's a shocking state of affairs. And it is much worse now than it has been, as it has become in the United States. I mean, look at Fox News' relationship with the White House. It's like, it's the relationship is like that of a state-owned broadcaster with an authoritarian regime, except in the States maybe the ownership flows the other way, or the control and influence flows the other way. But it is, it is a real, it is a real problem. So the, you know, what you're seeing are very few opportunities for people to get a really, you know, a straight account of news. And you get this idea of alternative facts and bizarre spin. I mean, you know, just a little sort of kind of absurd things. I mean, the, the News Corp, you know, as you know, I was on the 730 report on Monday night. It was the Lee's sales and no doubt thanks to Lee's, you know, talents and star quality. The ratings for the 730 report was the highest they've had since 2015. So it was a huge success from the ABC's point of view. If you have a reader of the News Corp papers, you believe the program was a flop and they literally wrote it up as being a failure because there was one program that night and that slot that outrated it. You know, so it's literally, so it is every, it's a, it's a dangerous time. Now, why is this happening? Let me give you a theory. In the old days before pay TV, before the internet, media and newspapers, for example, had to have wanted to appeal to a broad audience because they wanted to maximize the eyeballs that they got for their advertising. And so when the Sydney Morning Herald was founded in 1840 or thereabouts, it's set on its first page in moderation placing all my glory while Tories called me wig and wigs of Tory. Now the old Fairfaxes were very much in the Tory side of the political divide, but they knew they had to get as many readers as possible. Nowadays the economics of media have completely changed and so people can narrowcast. It's cheaper to produce news, particularly electronically. You can narrowcast to a very, you know, narrow silo of the community and you can do quite well out of that. And so essentially people are now able to select their own facts and their own news and instead of us getting the same set of facts more or less and the same, you know, fact-based reporting, we're now getting basically being told what we want to hear and it's becoming increasingly opinionated and partisan. And so you get what used to be news organizations turning into effectively political organizations that purport to be media organizations. Now, you know, I think the ABCs strives very hard and indeed do so to the Fairfax newspapers to keep the balance right. The Guardian does a very good job too, although the Guardian is about a smaller liberal, you know, I suppose left of centre newspaper, but you're not seeking to misrepresent the facts, because it's where in the media landscape it's getting more and more, you know, it's getting more and more dangerous because you're essentially dividing the community and they're not having the shared facts that you need to have to make the shared decisions that we should be making in a democracy. Well, it kind of loops back to the question I opened with about what it's like to govern in this contemporary era. Look, it's hard, but I mean, having said that, you know, as I've said many times before, quoting, I can't recall whether it's Churchill or Enoch Powell to very different people, but one or other of them said a politician who complains about the newspapers is like a sailor who complains about the sea. But equally, it's not really complaining about them, it's just pointing out calling them calling it out for what it is. I want to ask you too, because I don't think you've covered it in a number of your interviews, book interviews so far. There's some fantastic stories about your interactions with world leaders. Brian kind of flagged that in the introduction. Quite fabulous stories, including the encounter you had in the skiff. Skiff, is that the acronym? I thought Donald was referring to a sailing boat. Well, yes, yes. It's quite extraordinary. Make sure you read that in great detail. Everybody who's listening on it's quite, it leaves quite an impression in your mind. But look, yours in that sense of drawing out character studies of your contemporaries overseas, you know, it's the most rollicking kind of political memoir certainly since Bob Carr's, which also told a lot of stories about his involvement or interactions with his foreign ministers overseas. So you've been very candid. So let's be candid. Did you have favourites? Did you have people whom you regarded as friends amongst your leader cohort around the world? And conversely, who was the most terrifying? I think I can guess the answer, but who was the most terrifying? Well, let's start off with terrifying. I think the most terrifying is not the right word, but a leader that left a very distinct impression on me was Vladimir Putin. He's got a cool deadliness around about him. That is a sort of a genial menace. That is quite... Can you be a genial menace? I don't know what you mean. Well, I'll tell you the story. I first met him. It was 2007 and I was Howard's environment minister. And it was during the APEC in Sydney and Putin was president and he was there for APEC. And we had a meeting with some of his ministers and John had some of his. And as he was introducing us, he said, oh, Mr. President, this is Mr. Turnbull. He's the environment minister. And, you know, he spent some time in Siberia and Putin, this thin smile just came across his face and he lent forward like this. And he said, really? What crimes did you commit? And nobody knew whether to laugh or not. It was very good. Anyway, look, in terms of unpredictability, obviously Trump, I mean, Trump's MO is to be unpredictable. And he boasts about that. He is unpredictable and he is idiosyncratic. He is, you know, one of a kind, all of those things. So I think that's, you know, the assumption about Trump was that he would become institutionalized by the American system when he became president. But he did not. And he's, you know, he is very much the same, you know, larger than life New York real estate billionaire reality TV show host personality that he was when he was elected. But in terms of, we talked about friends. I mean, you know, you know, John Key is a, remains a very good friend. Joko Adodo, president of Indonesia is a very good friend. Lucy and Loom is a good friend and their wives. You know, Lucy, I mean, you know, that's sort of Lucy and I are friends with all of those people and their partners, you know. So that's, you know, their examples. And I stay in touch with the, regularly with Emmanuel Macron, not so often with the Prime Minister, Edward Philippe, who is a phenomenal, phenomenally impressive person as well. France is very lucky. So, yeah, I mean, it's not, it's not a complete, it's not, you're not, you're not entirely cast into the wilderness when you lose office. We've got, we've got a stack of questions lining up, which I will get to in a sec, folks. I promise just a couple of things, because I'm curious. I wanted to just engage you. You've spoken a lot about this in interviews for the memoir, but you write very compellingly about Shane, regret, trauma, remorse, falling into depression. You know, Bob Hawke was very candid emotionally during his Prime Minister shift. It was kind of all out there. Did you feel during your Prime Minister shift that in terms of the emotional right of it, that you couldn't be all out there? You've told the story after, after being in office, not during it. Well, I think a bit of circumspection was probably required. You know, so you have to, in that line of work, fake it till you make it, to be honest. Yes. By the way, Catherine, can I just ask you this? Can you see me all right and hear me okay? Yes, all good. I'm having a computer problem here, but it's all right. As long as you, I can't see you, but as long as you can see me, and everyone else can, that's good. Okay. Yeah, I might just turn this. Okay. Yes, so I think I was, I think, you know, this question of judgment of how much of your heart you want to wear on your sleeve when you're in public office. And I don't think, someone said to me, you know, did you think of consulting your colleagues about your depression at the time? And I said, as you know, very well, if I'd done that, the press gallery would have found out about it within minutes. Yes. Yeah, dangerous. And also just on a couple of current issues, just because I'm quite curious, COVID obviously, it's a major crisis. Wicked problem. Does it make you want to be back? And if you were back, how would you be dealing with it? Would it be similarly to Scott Morrison? Would it be different? Is the stimulus too big, for example? Oh, look, I think it would, the reality is it's too early to say as to the second part of the question, whether the stimulus is too big. It's certainly, what would I say? Look, I think that, let me just see if I can, hang on, I'm just going to try and fix something here. Sorry, I'm just having a bit of a... Yeah. I'm just having a... Sorry. Okay. I'll just have to put up with it. Look, it's too early to say whether the stimulus is too big, or whether the stimulus is too big, but I think it's, I suspect it may turn out to be, about somewhere between about right and inadequate, and have to be topped up. I think the government's made, the decisions that it's made have been good. The policy responses have been very similar to those in other comparable countries. So that gives you an indication that, at least if we're getting it wrong, at the same time, I think the response of the federal government and the states and territories have been good. It's good the way they've worked together. These are unprecedented times. There's no rulebook for this. So they've just got to, do everything they can to keep people engaged with the workforce and their employers during this hiatus. And of course, see if we can either mitigate or if not eliminate the virus. And then the hard bit, both at the medical side and the economic side, is getting out of this lockdown and back into a normal economic environment. Yeah, what comes on the other side. And just quickly about trust. Some of the polling is indicating that we're beginning to see a return of some sort of trust to the system. The people's perceptions of institutions is better than it was 12 months ago. So a couple of direct questions. Can Morrison be trusted to preside over this crisis and work out what needs to be done on the other side? Oh, sure. He's a very pragmatic person. He's a political professional. I think he's, I don't think there's any issue about trust here. I mean, it's really a question of competence and capability. And I think he's got all of the resources of the Australian Public Service. He's got all the resources of his colleagues and the states and territories. So he's getting plenty of advice. I think the challenge is going to be, the hardest bit, I think is going to be managing the economic recovery and what the right measures are to get out of it. But the good thing is, you know, at one level, but it's a good thing in another. The bad news is that the whole world is affected by this. The good news is that every other jurisdiction is going to be dealing with the same problems. So that's going to provide lots of opportunities for observing and learning from others. And sticking just with trust just to finish this point, that sort of return of institutional trust is interesting. I think federal ICAC fit into that, do you think? Well, I think we definitely need a federal ICAC. I absolutely, you know, well, it was one of the policy, well, one of the policies, the proposals that was literally a week or two away from going into my cabinet when I was stumped as PM to set up a National Integrity Commission. And I think I'm disappointed that hasn't been done. I think there's a real problem that governments are not being held to account. I think in particular, the partisan press does not hold this government to account. You know, the News Corp does not hold the Morrison Government to account. Full stop, it's a fact because they've got it, they want, you know, they like it, they like the government, they want to keep them there and they're not interested in asking any questions. So it is, now the rest of the media does do their best to one to some degree or other, some extent or other, but I think we absolutely need an independent Integrity Commission. I really do. I'm very concerned very concerned that that has not been set up. This is sort of the trust point. It wasn't a gratuitous slap at Scott Morrison. This is what I made about trust. Do you think he sort of, he gets, do you think he gets the trust picture? Does he get the sort of mechanisms one needs as Prime Minister in order to renew that social licence for one of a better term, right? If people are feeling more positive than they have been about institutions and about political life, do you think the Prime Minister gets that you might just need some institutional changes in order to bed that trust back down? I don't know. I just, I simply don't know. You know, you better off, rather than speculating, you better off judging people by their actions and the inaction on a National Integrity Commission is rather disturbing, I think. Okay. Will we go to some questions from the audience here? I'm sorry, this is obviously troubling for you, Malcolm. It's okay. I've just turned my screen off. I can read flashing lights in front of me, so I've got a problem with my screen, but that's okay. As long as it's working at your end. It is, yes. Let's press on. So a couple of questions from folks watching on from Michael Horner who says, hi, Malcolm. A lot of your critics speak about the need to excite a political base in order to be electrically successful. The idea being that if you don't have die-hard supporters, you can't successfully deliver a political base. How do you believe that rational evidence-based policy can bring with it enthusiastic supporters that are fundamental to winning elections? Excellent question, Michael. Well, it's a good question, Michael, but a lot of that talk about exciting your base comes out of the United States. And in the United States, they have voluntary voting, so you've got to excite your base number one. And number two, they have their congressional districts are generally gerrymandered to protect the incumbent. And so to be a congressman, you have to your real contest is the primary. So if you're a Republican, you have to run off to the right. If you're a Democrat, you run off to the left. It isn't enough attention paid to the center, which is where, thankfully, because of objective independent districting here and compulsory voting, our politics is more or less determined in the center. So you may excite your base here, but if that loses you the center, you'll be a very excited base in opposition. Look, I think the challenge, the real problem, the fundamental problem that has occurred in the Liberal Party is this, is that the right of the party no longer accept the premise of being in a political party. The fundamental premise of a political party is that you get a group of people in the room, whether it's the Broadchurch, the Big Tent, whatever you want to call it. You debate issues and you, everyone goes along with the majority or the consensus, however you want to describe it. But if you have a minority that is so determined to get their own way that they are prepared to say, as the right did in that crazy week, Catherine and I were reminiscing about a moment ago, that they will blow the joint up if they don't get what they want. That is a form of terrorism. Now, obviously, no guns and bombs, I'm not suggesting anyone's been that you saw in that week, was typical of the way the right operates and that's both the political right inside Parliament, but also their supporters in the media. The ferocious bullying you see in the right wing media nowadays and that is designed to intimidate people and it means that the fundamental premise of a political party is undermined. John Howard's Big Church was defined, meant that we've got people on the left side of the church and the right side of the church and people who go from one side to another and people who are lurking around in the aisles, but we resolve something together and then we get on with it. But the right doesn't work like that anymore. That's why I mean there's a good, it's quite a good summary about that in my book quoting Nola Moreno who makes it who is the cheap whip and Nola's conclusion was that the right there, she said her conclusion was that they didn't want me to win and that a lot of people basically gave in and they wanted the insurgency to stop and that of course is the tactic of terrorism. So that's the fundamental problem the party has, that the premise of a political party is not being accepted by a very influential part of it. What about though from the vantage point of the community? This is, so outside the political cohort, the community, that whole sort of, well, that sentiment that populists have captured and caught, we're fatigued with experts, we are suspicious of technocratic solutions. This is the age you've governed in. There's a dynamic within politics that's poisonous as you outline but is there also an issue with the community that perhaps there is some sort of, well, a fracture around well, a fact set of propositions that centrist ideas. Can you rebuild that somehow? Is there a way of rebuilding that? Well, I hope so. I think that's certainly, that's my politics. But, you know, the problem with ideological, the problem with turning important practical issues of policy into ideological questions is that you will end up making very, very bad choices. I'll give you two examples, one current and one longstanding. There's only about six weeks ago that there are people both in politics and in the media and elsewhere who were saying that the, this COVID virus was just a bad flu, you know, just no worse than the flu in some cases. We shouldn't be worried about it. There are still political leaders in the populist right like Bolsonaro in Brazil who are saying exactly that. In most places, biology mugged politics with the reality of the disease. But you see the same thing with climate change. You know, there is a, we still have in Australia a situation where climate change is an issue of belief. The ideology of political values whereas, you know, saying you believe or disbelieve in climate change is like saying you believe or disbelieve in gravity. I mean, you may not believe in gravity, but if you jump off the top of a tower, you will find out that gravity believes in you. Yes, that's right. Yes. Another now, forgive me, Gattra, because I'm going to mispronounce your name, I'm certain. So it's Gattra, pre and detail, a question from Gattra. Hello, PM Turnbull. My name is Gattra from Indonesia, but currently residing in Canberra. My questions are, what are your thoughts regarding the climate change? And what do you think are the medium and long-term implications of COVID on Sino-American relations? And how will that impact Australia? Well, I think an inquiry is a very good idea. There's no question about that. It will face some real challenges in China. I mean, I think the, what I wish and hope for is that Xi Jinping will simply, will enable there to be a thoroughly objective inquiry into the origins of the disease. Now, I know that seems counterintuitive that that would happen, but I got to tell you the challenges of getting, you know, independent scientists getting free access to laboratories and witnesses in China, you know, in the same way that weapons inspectors went into Iraq or something. I mean, honestly, that's going to, you know, the affront that will cause to the dignity of the Chinese government, the Communist Party is immense. So that's going to be pretty challenging, you know. I mean, you can you imagine allowing a, you know, an independent delegation of Chinese and Russian scientists to conduct an inquiry in the United States. So, you know, great powers will deal with this in a different way, but the one thing that is absolutely clear is that while countries may have a vested interest in keeping certain things secret, you know, weapons and, you know, scientific inventions, perhaps, as far as this, these pandemics and viruses are concerned, everybody has a massive vested interest in the maximum transparency. And, you know, what the way it should be approached, I think with China is to say, look, and this is unfortunately, you know, a lot of the rhetoric in the West has already become very angry and that's going to make it harder for China. I'm not suggesting the anger isn't justified, by the way, but I mean, really, we've got to, we need the Chinese Communist Party to say it, it mistakes undoubtedly were made, errors were undoubtedly made. It's inevitable that in a bureaucracy, things were covered up and accountability wasn't appropriately managed. But what we have to do now is let the sunlight into orbit because the whole world needs this to happen because the next virus will start somewhere else. And so everybody, we all need to have maximum transparency here. The one thing this virus has demonstrated is we're all on the same planet and the virus can start in Wuhan, but it's killing people in Wisconsin. And, you know, so you, you, that's the, that is the challenge. This is going to be a very delicate one. Now, that feeds into the second part of the question about how it will affect American Chinese relations. I think it'll affect that very badly because Americans will say this virus originated in China. Action could have been taken to control it sooner and that's, I think there's every reason to believe that. The, that, you know, there was whether it was a cover up or, you know, just turning a blind eye or not wanting to believe a terrible reality for whatever reason. Action wasn't taken soon enough and Americans and everyone will feel that this virus could have been bottled up sooner in Wuhan and that's why, you know, the most, the most powerful thing she could do as a leader is say, undoubtedly mistakes have been made. We are going to be completely transparent about them because we want to learn from them and we want everybody else to learn from them so you don't make the same mistakes too. Now, whether he's a big man out of a big country, whether he's big enough to be able to say that remains to be seen what you need to, that needs to happen because otherwise, the resentment as the, you know, as the economic damage continues as the deaths melt up, the resentment is going to become greater and greater. What about the sort of demonstration effect for one of a better word of America mishandling the crisis? Oh, yes, well, that's, I mean, the Chinese, you see, this is the, this is, this is right. You know, if you're a big man out of a coin, the Americans would need to say, as other countries would, hey, you know, we made plenty of mistakes too. We had notice of this and didn't act soon enough. I mean, you know, there's, there's, this is going to be a very complicated history to write. But, you know, one thing that is screamingly obvious is that from early February, the cruise ship industry should start to continue operating after the fourth of February when the Diamond Princess disaster occurred in, you know, off Tokyo. I mean, it's staggering. I mean, those cruise ships are plainly the ideal environments for contagion with the most vulnerable host population of mostly older passengers. So, and if you, if you, I'm not, and this is not a criticism of all governments, but not exclusively ours. Imagine what our position would be in respect of this virus if the cruise ship industry had shut down in early February. It would be, you know, we would, we would be a lot better off. It's perfectly obvious. So, you know, that's just one, that's just one, one example. But I think everybody, I think there needs to be a very open examination of both the origin of this virus and the way it's been treated. And it's not on a sort of no blame, no shame basis because, you know, the object is not to go around blaming people. The object is actually to find out what happened, what, what went right. We'll do some more of that. What went wrong. We won't do that again. But you are in a unique position on this hookup in that you, you know both Trump and she, you've had dealings with both. I'm paraphrasing you mightily, but both need to be a bit self-aware and a bit contrite about what has happened here. How do you have a chance? Absolutely. I think it's, I think it's hard for both of them. In some respects, you'd think it would be harder for Trump than she. But, you know, Trump of course is not totally in control of the situation in the United States any more than Morrison is here. It's a federal system. She ultimately, and that authoritarian regime takes responsibility for everything. So may actually this approach, this, you know, open the books approach may actually be harder for she than Trump. But either way, and I think it will be very hard to achieve it either way. This is what you need to do because, you know, I don't know if you remember this agenda in 2015, but a whole lot of measures and someone said, you know, how are you sure these are going to work? And I said, I'm sure they won't all work. I can guarantee you they won't all work. And if things don't work, we'll dump them. If things do work, we'll do more of them. If things, we think someone else is achieving the objective better or smarter or more effectively, we'll shamelessly plagiarize them. And that's what we've got to do here. We've got to think about this and the experience out as quickly as possible so that we can all learn. And, you know, I think the allocating blame, which is what everyone wants to do might actually be an obstacle to getting to the bottom of it. So that's what I'm saying. We've got to think about should this be done on the basis of no blame, no shame. We just want to know what happened and, you know, so that we don't... So we do a better job the next time we get hit with a pandemic. A couple of questions. I hope we can sprint through them very quickly. Malcolm, we're on the clock, but just a couple from Katarina. Writing a book is a lonely occupation. Being a prime minister and a minister is very sociable. Which one did you enjoy more? Well, I've written a few books for, in fact, and it is a lonely occupation. Even King said, you know, the novelist has written more books than all of us put together, probably, said that the most important ingredient for a writer is butt glue, by which he meant, you know... What did you say? Butt glue? Butt glue, by stitting, stitting. He obviously doesn't have a standing desk. You know, sitting glued in your seat, pounding away on your keyboard. And so it is a solitary occupation. Although, you know, I had a lot of help from my team at the office, a lot of research. So, and, you know, a lot of help with friends and who read parts of the manuscript and commented on it. You know, they're acknowledged in the book, of course. But, yeah, it's a grind. I found with every book I've written, and this is by far the longest, that about halfway through I've been saying to myself, why on earth did I start this? You know, this is crazy. I'll never finish it. So, yeah, there it is. So it is, it's very different. Politics is a very sociable business. That's one of the interesting things about, you know, when you get out of politics, particularly when you lose the top office, is the phone literally stops ringing. So, you know, the WhatsApp stop coming. The email stop coming. So, if you have friends, a good, you know, strong family, and you enjoy their company and your own company, you can manage it fairly well. Very well. Now, from Marion Lee. I hope I've pronounced that correctly, Marion. Forgive me if I haven't. Julie Bishop was Foreign Minister and also Deputy PM under several leaders. How do you rate her role in your government? But why do you think she was so roundly defeated in her bid for your position as Prime Minister and did it ever occur to you to endorse Julie rather than Morrison? And if not, why not? Marion asks. Well, the first thing is I did endorse Julie. I voted for her. And there were 11 people who voted for Julie. Two of them were me and Julie. Look, basically, there was a real concern from the people, mostly moderates, who were determined that Dutton not become Prime Minister. There was a real concern that if the ballot ended up between, if there was a ballot between Dutton, Julie and Scott and if the moderates all piled into support Julie, she finished ahead of Scott. And so it was Julie, the Dutton that Dutton would win. We'll never know whether that's right or not. But I think there's some force to that argument. There were quite a few people in that party room that would not vote for Julie, not least because she was a woman. And so that was the reason why most of the moderates voted for Morrison rather than Julie in that first ballot. Now, where are we? It's Helen Sullivan from ANU. Helen Sullivan says that Barack Obama said in 2019 that if women ran every country in the world, picking up from Julie, if women ran every country in the world, there would been improvements in living standards and outcomes. Do you think that men should give way to women in order to lead us out of this global crisis? That's Helen Sullivan. Well, I certainly it's an interesting argument. I don't know whether it's right or not. I don't know that I think we need more, we certainly need more women in government and in parliament and when you look at the hash, the men have made in so many places that women could only improve. But, you know, one of our big problems in Australia and particularly in the Liberal Party is we simply don't have enough women in the room to begin with in the parliament to begin with, let alone in the cabinet. And last one from JP asks, and this may be a vain hope given how busy you've been writing, what books have you been reading recently? Well, I've I've read I've read William Dahl Rimpel's The Anarchy, that great history of the East India Company, you know, that makes the most rapacious hedge fund of today look like an amateur. An amateur. And what else have I been reading? Oh, just dipping in, you know, dipping back into ancient history, actually, oddly enough, I've been re-reading re-reading one of my favourite books, which is the Citides' History of the Peloponnesian War. It's got to say, the Citides, I'm sure. Well, it's the best history, you know, I mean, the Citides' History of the Peloponnesian War is the first history in the, you know, in the Western tradition. You know, the, they're people like Herodotus that, you know, write, you know, lists of fables and, you know, tall tales from far-off people. But the Citides sets out his historiographic method, the outset, and it's, you know, it is just, it's an extraordinary piece of work, you know, two and a half thousand years old. Well, I think, sadly, that is, that's all we have time for this evening. I want to thank you, Malcolm, and it's clearly been problematic for you on and off, technically. So thank you for persevering. Yeah, no, it's okay, you know, my screen was doing weird things and then when I turned the screen off, everything worked just that I couldn't see your happy beaming face, but at least the whole thing didn't crash, so that's good. I don't know, exactly. I think it's a great recognition and for, which has allowed us to include a whole lot of people at a time when we've all got to be socially distant, so thank you very much for that and to all the hard-working folks at ANU who worked assiduously over the last couple of days to put this together, and I think I'll throw back to Brian for some final thoughts or words. Right, and thank you very much, and perhaps we'll use the technology in ways in the future to enhance some of our events in the post-COVID-19 world. Malcolm, I personally have found you one of the most unusual political figures I've come across in my times here in Australia. You've always been an intellectual with a sharp edge and forthrightness that to me seems to keep most people from getting elected these days and it's compared to what I would describe as the more typical blunt instruments that obfuscate everything that they say and so I really appreciate it again tonight, your sharp edge forthrightness. I think you have provided all of us insights into the Australian political system and indeed our Australian democracy and I will be continued to think about these in the days and months ahead. Australia needs to have conversations on our democracy our place in the world and how we're going to thrive in the future in the very challenging times that certainly lie ahead. These are of course topics at the heart of ANU's mission and I hope we can involve you in these conversations the months and years that we need to have. Catherine, thank you for leading our excellent conversation tonight. We appreciate your willingness to lead this our first for the ANU a virtual book, Malcolm Catherine, our audience, stay safe. Thank you all and I personally look forward to reading your book Malcolm. It looks to be a truly riveting read and to one and all good night. Thank you. Good night.