You’ve declared ‘a war on whinging’. Why?
“Poms don’t whinge any more have you noticed? Whinging is an endearing Australian character trait because we’ll never take ourselves too seriously and disappear up ourselves. My predisposition is to find fault, because that’s a journalist’s predisposition, but each time I look for what’s wrong [with Australia] this other stuff starts to nag me. The fact is, no other country is in the position we are. We’re doing all right.”
You say in your new book The Australian Moment that we’re ‘in danger’ of becoming a great nation. It’s a wryly-framed comment…
“It’s something we don’t really expect to happen to us but the opportunity is clearly there.
I asked this question of the former prime ministers I interviewed for the book [The Australian Moment] and when I did, all of them turned the thought over in their head for about a second, and then they laughed, smirked, giggled. They’re thinking ‘nah, we’ll talk ourselves out of it.’
The rest of the world looking at us today would kill for the opportunity we’ve got. We’re in the right place at the right time but we have more than just locational advantage.
We have a system which is not state-based capitalism. We don’t have an issue about democratic institutions the way Chinese have, we’re much more cohesive than the Americans are at this moment. Their political system is in almost permanent civil war. They’ve lost their ability to problem solve.
Australia’s problem is only of the last couple of years. There was one ordinary election campaign in 2010, a demoralised governing party and an opposition that doesn’t care about facts. If that’s our story for the next ten years yes we’ll talk our way out of our moment.”
How is Julia Gillard going to be remembered? What will be her lasting legacy?
“You can’t do it while you’re in the middle of it. If you’d asked me what John Howard’s legacy was from 2006, the answer would have changed since the GFC because he didn’t leave enough money in the bank.
Here’s a hypothetical to think about: The carbon tax lands safely and can’t be undone by the next parliament; then in the next five or ten years there’s some sort of emissions trading scheme in the region – Australia’s already put a price on its own head, and it’s lower than the region would put on our head, if they had forced us down that path. Five or ten years from now the carbon price might seem visionary. People might look at Julia Gillard as a martyr in the same way as they look at John Hewson and the GST.
You’ve said The Australian is a paper ‘that is happiest delivering an argument’ – to what extent is that true of yourself?
The sort of approach [I take] is easier to fulfill in book form than a 2000 word column, but essentially readers will always thank you for not writing that extra line that says ‘by the way this is what you should think’. They appreciate it more when you assemble facts, point them in a direction but let them make up their mind.”
You share a concern in The Australian Moment about media in the digital interactive age, how it increasingly dispenses with filters. What’s that concern based on?
“It’s a concern to me only because it doesn’t help me in my day job. If I submit to the digital storm and basically follow the vibe on any given day, I can’t inform anyone and I don’t learn anything. Journalists too easily forget that what is most important to them in terms of what they tell the reader is something that they themselves find out.”
Let’s talk about Greece. What do you make of what is happening there politically, socially? To what extent do you connect emotionally with the turmoil?
“It’s sad to watch your parents’ homeland – in a sense your own mother country – beat itself up the way Greece has. I’m Greek hyphen Australian, but it’s the Australian that informs who I am. The paradox of Greece and it’s something the Palestinians and Irish can identify with – is that we make very good migrants but pretty awful citizens in the home country. The most interesting thing that has happened is that the Greek people have destroyed their two party system and that’s a warning for pretty much every western democracy.
When I do an economic analysis I never lose the social; you can’t keep telling a people that you lent money to, ‘ok I was an idiot for lending you the money, but you have to bear the cost of your stupidity’. There’s a collective responsibility in Europe now. Ok, so Greece ran amok, but we’re at this point where the eurozone has to decide if it is a currency union or a full federation. And if it is a full federation, then it needs to involve the sorts of transactions that Australians and Americans take for granted, which is that rich states cross-subsidise the poorer states.
The shock absorber is supposedly the Greek people – living on subsistence wages. But a recession or depression point is not the time to propose austerity, I don’t care what the economic textbooks tell you, you can’t ask a people to recess their way back to recovery. You can’t do it. I hope wise heads prevail.”
How do you believe Australia will be affected if the crisis in Greece and the Eurozone worsens and becomes a second GFC ?
“If Europe collapses, the two worst things can happen are another global financial meltdown, which freezes up your financial system, well Australia’s system didn’t do too badly during GFC mark 1. But the second thing that will happen is that you’ll see a lot of young educated people leaving Europe. Where are they going to go? America? Or will they want to come to Australia? People want to come here.” The issue of migration is never far from an Australian government’s fortunes is it?
“Both sides of politics wake up at two in the morning worried about public attitudes to migration. I believe both sides of politics are over thinking this. The problem isn’t that the last person who arrived here with a tertiary degree ends up driving a cab, or may or may not want to go to a mine in WA – the problem is Australia is still thinking on a low-growth path, when it should be a high-growth path.
Essentially the opportunity for Australia today is to run a mass migration program in the way we did after the Second World War, when we were in nation-building mode. That means both sides of politics say to the population there’s going to be some digestion issues in the short term but what we’re doing is we’re building a bigger country.
It’s great that Australians are so well off now that everybody is thinking about protecting what they’ve got, but when I say Australia does have an opportunity for greatness, it means building a substantially bigger country. The Australian political system needs to recognise that there are two choices for migration – the first is to say ‘stop’ and then try to manage our decline, and the other is to say, hang on a minute, the world is banging on our door because the world still wants to bet on us winning. Let ’em in. Let’s win.”

Read part one of George’s war on whinging.