Tony Abbott Speaks Out

>> Andrew Roberts: My guest today is Tony Abbott, who was Prime Minister of Australia between 2013 and 2015. We discuss his approach to statecraft. Tony Abbott, who taught you history? Was there a particularly inspiring history teacher in your life?

>> Tony Abbott: I was very lucky, Andrew. I had quite a few outstanding teachers, particularly at the jesuit school St Ignatius College in Sydney back in 1972.

My history teacher, year nine history teacher, was a man called John Kennedy. And I can remember in the 1972 election run up, he asked us 14 and 15 year old kids to write an essay on what we thought might happen in the 1972 election. And I decided that unlike my compatriots, who were all just listening to the Labor and the Liberal policy speeches, I'd listen to the Democratic Labour Party policy speech given by the redoubtable Vince Gair.

Who subsequently disgraced himself by accepting a job from Gough Whitlam and becoming Ambassador of Ireland and the Holy See. And so my essay was a little different from everyone else's because it covered this quirky but at the same time important and influential, distinctively center-right party. Anyway, John Kennedy, he was only a young fella back then.

But many, many years later, in the 2018 Victorian state election, at the age of 70, he suddenly turned up as the Labor candidate for Hawthorne. And against all expectations, he won the seat. So there were two future members of parliament. I think there were three future members of parliament that class.

Myself, David Gillespie, currently the member for line in the federal parliament, and John Kennedy, the teacher himself, who became a Labor member of parliament past retirement age. I also had some great jesuit teachers. One of my really important mentors, a Jesuit by the name of Emmett Costello, who, after my dad, was probably the most important person in my young life.

Emmett was fascinated by history and biography. Emmett had this motto read with voracious appetite, and I did my best to take him up on that instruction.

>> Andrew Roberts: And he became a Rhodes Scholar at Queen's College, Oxford, studying PPE. Presumably history must have played a quite an important part there in your Oxford career as well.

 

>> Tony Abbott: Not really, Andrew. I did politics and philosophy. I'd done economics law at Sydney University, so I didn't see the need to do any economics at Oxford at an undergraduate level. I did very much focus, I suppose, on the politics side of PP without the E.

>> Andrew Roberts: Which is suffused by history, isn't it?

 

>> Tony Abbott: Of course it is, of course it is. And particularly in my second year, when I did quite a bit of subcontinental and east asian politics, there was a lot of history in it. But I guess, in one sense, going back to your earlier question, my mother was an incredibly important mentor in this sense.

When I was a youngster in primary school, just about every other week, mum would bring home a Ladybird book. Now, I didn't think anyone could remember Ladybird books, but Charles Moore, in one of his speccy columns a couple of months back, talked about the man who put all those wonderful, wonderful, accessible histories together.

And I can remember back then reading about Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and Richard the Lionheart.

>> Andrew Roberts: You remember the picture.

>> Tony Abbott: Horatio Nelson.

>> Andrew Roberts: They were all fantastically well illustrated. Do you remember the picture in the Richard the Lionheart one, of him standing on the steps of that acre, or wherever it was, with his two handed sword over his head?

Do you remember that? Ladybird books were wonderful for what they were, but also the illustrations works, stay with you for the rest of your life, didn't they?

>> Tony Abbott: And I can remember from that time and that book, the story of his minstrel, Blondin, going around all the castles of the king of Austria, singing outside, knowing that if Richard were inside, he would at some point join in, which he did.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, yeah, it's a great story, isn't it? So you mentioned Gough Whitlam, who, of course, in 1975 was dismissed by the british governor general and you were.

>> Tony Abbott: It was, please, and it was the Australian governor general. It was Sir John Kerr. He represented the Queen, but she was the Queen of Australia.

And Sir John Kerr was very much an Australian. He was a former chief justice of New South Wales. So whether you agree with him or not, I think it's wrong to characterize him as a British captain general.

>> Andrew Roberts: Many, many apologies. That was a moronic mistake for me to have made.

But you were 18 at the time and you supported Kerr, which is a. And of course, Australian people in the subsequent general election, by electing Malcolm Fraser, also supported Kerr in a sense, when it came to the ballot box. This was a radical thing for a young person to do, wasn't it?

You set up, at least you were director later of the Australians for constitutional monarchy. I mean, it's a really key moment in your life and your political development, isn't it?

>> Tony Abbott: I guess, Andrew, while I can't say I was a model child and I certainly kicked over the traces at lots of points and often was quite defiant to teachers, parents, etc.

I never had a politically radical phase. I never rejected religion, even though I couldn't always live up to its dictates. I never felt embarrassed about my country. I was never ashamed of my family. I never thought that I was somehow crippled by white guilt or male privilege or anything like that.

And so it was natural for me to think, when Gough Whitlam was trying to govern without supply, that at some point in time, before the money ran out and the government was reduced to complete chaos, that the governor general, as the ultimate umpire of the system, should step in.

And funnily enough, the school speech day or prize giving at St Ignatius College in 1975 was at the middle of October. And when the governor, the then governor general, Sir John Kerr, was invited to be the guest of honor that day, no one would have imagined that he would be the first.

Focus of a constitutional crisis at the time he came to the school. And I can remember all of us were saying to each other, as we were milling around. Waiting to go up and collect our books for being fourth in English or sixth in religious knowledge or whatever it was, what we might say to the special guest.

And we were all joking about how we thought he was probably a bit of a Labor man, given that he'd been appointed by a Labor prime minister. Anyway, I went up and I thought, I'll bugger and I will say something. So after I'd shaken his hand and gave him my praise, I said, look, Sir John, there's a big liberal party rally in town today.

This is very dull, why don't I take you there? Anyway.

>> Tony Abbott: He laughed at what was a pretty lame attempt to bonner me. My dad, who was watching, said I could see Father Peter Quinn's face fall. So I knew you must have said something to the governor general.

Anyway, I got hauled in the next Monday morning and given a first class bollocking by the headmaster for my rudeness and insolence and defiance. But as it happened, three weeks or so later, Sir John Kerr did his duty.

>> Andrew Roberts: And he did it.

>> Tony Abbott: As I certainly saw it, and dismissed the prime minister, who was trying to govern without supply.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: And he did that under the constitutional monarchy in the name of the Queen. And of course, it's been hugely controversial ever since. Now, we find that the Queen's, sorry, the King's face has been taken off Australian banknotes. And there have been calls, including by the prime minister, for a republic, Australia to become a republic.

How do you feel that will pan out over the next few years?

>> Tony Abbott: I think it'll probably pan out badly for the people who want Australia to become what Nigel Farage memorably said on his last trip down under. He said, a dreary republic. Look, not all of us are royalists, not all of us are anglophiles, but I think most people appreciate that the system has worked pretty well for Australia.

I mean, if democracy is the least worst system of government, constitutional monarchy is the least worst system of democracy because it keeps out of the political fray that apex of the system. And I think that's a very good thing. I mean, in the United States, in Britain, and in Australia recently, we've seen at times fairly shambolic government.

But there's the crown, in the case of Britain, the Queen or the King. In the case of Australia, the governor general representing the monarch, floating serenely above it all a symbol of unity and continuity. And I suspect sometimes Americans look across the Atlantic and think, well, George III might not have been that fantastic.

But there is something to be said for the system of constitutional monarchy.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, I think Americans who've read my book on George III would probably think he was quite fantastic, but I understand your thoughts.

>> Tony Abbott: And I confess, I haven't read that particular book of yours. It's probably yet another gap in my education.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: You became an MP in 1994, and then very quickly a minister in John Howard's government. Only four years later, you were in the cabinet by 2001. It was quite a meteoric career, really, wasn't it, in politics? I know in Australian politics, people can get ahead very quickly.

But that was surprisingly fast, even by the standards of your own country's politics, wasn't it?

>> Tony Abbott: Could I take issue with you when you use that word career, Andrew? I really dislike politicians who speak of their career. Not because I necessarily dislike the individuals, but because I just think it's wrong to think of a parliamentary or a public life as a career.

It's a calling, it's a vocation. You've got to do it out of a sense of duty and commitment and passion and love. And if you're doing it as a vanity project, if you're doing it because you think it might look good on your CV. If you're doing it because you think you might get lots of swish consultancies when you leave parliament, well, frankly, you're there for the wrong reasons.

And I fear that there are too many people in the public lives of anglosphere countries today who aren't really there for the right reasons. Back in the Hawke-Howard era, I mean, Hawke had a wonderful front bench, I've got to say, even though they were my political opponents. And most of them had serious distinctions, quite apart from the fact that they were ministers in the Hawke government.

Likewise, the Howard government had a very strong front bench. I mean, you had former premiers, you had people who went on to become senior court judges and so on, very, very capable people. I think that in both the Hawke and the Howard governments, there are probably three or four people who you could readily see as credible prime ministers.

Not just as the sort of people who the system might throw up in extremists, but as credible prime ministers. Big beasts, I think, they used to be called in the Thatcher era. I just don't think it's as good as that now. I mean, the Rudd Gillard cabinets were much weaker than the Hawke-Keating cabinets.

My cabinet was much weaker than the Howard cabinet. And I think by the time Scott Morrison was prime minister, it really was even weaker. And look, I don't wanna run down the current government or the prime minister, because he's personally been very kind and courteous and respectful towards me.

But I just think that if you look at the trajectory over time, we are losing the ability to get really capable people into our public life. Because, as we know, the pay is not fantastic, the hours are horrific, the pressures are immense, the psychic rewards are occasional. And most public lives end in defeat, disgrace, or disillusionment, but people have got to do it.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, well, exactly, and good people have got to do it. And we've got an organization called Civic Future here in England that tries to get good young people into politics. You've given three or four reasons about what's the reasoning for this, for what's going on. But do you think that the kind of attacks that one gets on social media also?

You just don't want to open up yourself and your family to these kind of risk, scurrilous, and low assaults of your reputation that happened because of Twitter and other social media. Do you think that's an aspect as well?

>> Tony Abbott: People say that it is, but because I never go on social media myself, it doesn't affect me.

And I don't actually think anyone much in the Abbott household does. My kids were just old enough to miss the whole social media thing. Jonathan Haidt reckons that the mental health of american teenagers, particularly american girls, took a massive hit after about 2010, when social media started to become really prevalent.

And just about every youngster had a smartphone. Now, as I said, I think I really missed that. I can remember one day back in, I think it was 2000, I was driving the kids up to school and we walked down the stairs to the cardinal. Frances, my middle daughter, picked up a copy of the Manly daily, which was the local paper.

And the front cover of the Manly Daily was this big cartoon of me in my budgie smugglers with a sort of a flaccid Olympic torch in my hand. Because the previous day I'd pulled out of the torch relay prior to the Sydney Olympics on the grounds that a whole lot of much better sportsmen than I were complaining that they hadn't got to carry the torch.

What's this politician getting to do? And I thought, well, I don't want to cause controversy. So anyway, Francie saw this cartoon and she burst into tears and she said, daddy, why are they so mean to you? And I said, well, it's just life. Just the ebb and flow of politics.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: It's quite tough, though, isn't it? Australian politics is famously of contact sport, isn't it? You become leader of the opposition in December 2009, you win a landslide victory in the September of 2013, and yet you're brought down by Malcolm Turnbull only two years later. I mean, it's a tough old business, isn't it, Australian politics?

 

>> Tony Abbott: Certainly is. Look, that period of the revolving door prime ministership, a kind of an antipodean local version of the wars of the Roses, was pretty dispiriting for everyone, I think, particularly the public who were looking on. And hopefully it'll never happen again. I suppose the first decade of our national life, 1901 to 1914, involved high turnover of governments and prime ministers, but since then there had been considerable stability.

But we did go into this period where I think we had something like seven pm's in 15 years, which did seem a bit over the top. But look, it is what it is. Ambition is not unknown in politics. And as I often said, Malcolm didn't stay in parliament to be a minister in someone else's government.

And when he got the chance. And first term governments nearly always have their moments. When he got the chance, he took it.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you, when you were prime minister, you did have some in those years, some pretty major issues to deal with, didn't you? Can we go through a few of them?

Have we got, is there anything that Britain at the moment, which is suffering from a good deal of illegal migration with the small boats coming over the channel every day, is there anything we can learn from the australian, from your government and what you did about that?

>> Tony Abbott: Yes, there is.

You've just got to be absolutely determined to stop them. And I think the problem is that amongst the british establishment, there's nothing like the requisite determination to stop them. There's a lot of people in the british establishment, perhaps even inside the Whitehall bureaucracy, if not actually within the government itself, who think that Britain is a rich country, these are poor people.

What moral right have we to say no, the trouble is. Well, there's two problems. First of all, I think that the government has its highest duty to the existing citizens, and I think government has a duty to keep the character of the country. Now, that's not to say that the character of the country has to be preserved in aspic forever, but nevertheless, I think the government has a duty to its existing citizens not to engage in social engineering.

And mass immigration of people from very different cultures is really a giant exercise in social engineering. I stress that the vast majority of these people, regardless of their culture, are going to turn into wonderful citizens. I mean, you look at the current british cabinet, there are so many people who are the product of immigration from all sorts of places, and they're now first class Britons and they're all doing a good job.

But nevertheless, I think it is important that the government keep control. And apart from the fact that any government that loses control of its borders has to that extent lost its sovereignty, I think it is important to ensure that we do not too heavily tax the ability of communities to absorb and to adjust.

So I think that's the first thing. The other important moral consideration is people. Smuggling is deadly. I don't know how many people drown in the English Channel, probably a lot more than we know about, because many of these small boats probably just sink without trace. But in the period from 2008 to 2013, when the Rudd Gillard government abandoned the Howard government border protection policies and we had a big wave of people smuggling.

In that period, 50,000 more or less people came illegally by boat. There was just under a thousand boats in total that we know about that made it and we think that at least a thousand people died at sea and there were certainly a couple of major incidents. One incident where a people smuggling boat crashed into the rocks on Christmas island and at least 40 people were killed in that particular instance.

I think there was another instance back in the Howard days when a boat with some 300 people went down in the sea between Java and Christmas Island. I think 300 plus died that time. So look if we want to stop the deaths we've got to stop the boats.

So I think there is a moral imperative as well as a very important national sovereignty imperative in stopping boats. So you've got to first of all have the will then you've got to address the mechanisms. Now in the Howard time, the mechanisms for stopping the boats were offshore processing first at Christmas Island, later at Nauru.

Temporary protection visas so that anyone who actually made it on the Australian. Australian mainland had no guarantee of staying and becoming a permanent residence. And third, turning boats around. Now eventually, the people smugglers worked out that if they scuttled their boats, the boats couldn't be turned around. And the people would, for humanitarian reasons, have to be brought on board Australian naval or customs vessels.

The Abbott government had three refinements on the Howard policies. First of all, we had a media blackout. Previously, every time a boat arrived, it was announced to the public, and that was basically shipping news for people smugglers. So we had a news blackout on what happened on the water.

Second, we established a unified command structure under Operation Sovereign Borders led by a very distinguished lieutenant general. Which meant that the navy, the customs, the police, the immigration were all operating under a unified command rather than in different silos. Third, very importantly, where the people smugglers scuttled their boats, we would take the boat people on board our ships.

And then when the time was right, we would transfer them to unsinkable orange life rafts, which we would take to just outside the 12-mile Indonesian limit, with just enough fuel to get to Indonesia and say, that's the way. Off you go back to Indonesia. And when the people who paid ten or $15,000 to the people smugglers found that they had just got from Java back to Java, they were very angry.

And that essentially broke the people smugglers' business model. And since then, there have hardly been any boats. Now, I know it's a little different with Britain. The English Channel is 20 odd miles wide at its narrowest point, whereas Java is a couple of hundred miles of more open sea away from Christmas island.

And Indonesia is a different country to France. But frankly, it is an unfriendly act on the part of the French not to stamp out the people smuggling trade out of Calais, those camps should be policed effectively by the French. Plainly, they're not being effectively policed. And I think at some point in time, as well as saying, if you come illegally, you'll never get permanent residency and citizenship.

As well as flying people off to Rwanda and overcoming this absurd european hangover, which seems to have temporarily stopped that from happening, you also need to have the capacity. And perhaps the actuality, of landing some of these people back on the shores of France, because that will certainly let the French know that Britain is serious about never, never having to endure what amounts to a peaceful invasion.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Another very modern parallel, of course, with your government was over Ukraine. You were prime minister when Putin annexed the Crimea and started the fighting in Eastern Ukraine. And, of course, during the shooting down of the Malaysian flight MH17, which was an important moment in your premiership, wasn't it?

Tell us about that.

>> Tony Abbott: Well, Andrew, yeah, I think that MH17 episode was probably the most fraught period in my time as PM. I think it was shot down in the early hours of July 17 australian time. The previous day, late on the evening of the 16th australian time, the Senate had passed the bill to repeal the carbon tax.

So I was expecting to spend that particular day, a Friday, I suppose, savoring the triumph and telling people you elected the government to scrap the carbon tax. And that's exactly what we've done. Anyway, I was in the gym at the police college where I was resident in the renovation of the lodge.

I was in the gym at about 5 o'clock that morning and I had sky news on. And at about 05:15 they started covering a plane crash in eastern Ukraine. And it became obvious within a few minutes that this hadn't been a crash, this had been a plane that was shot down.

And by the time 5:50, when I had to get on, my morning media call came around, it was obvious that there were quite a few. We didn't know how many, but there were quite a few Australians on board. Anyway, later that morning, at about 10 o'clock, I went into the parliament and I said, this is not an accident, it's a crime.

This is not a tragedy, it's an atrocity. And we have to make sure that the bullying of small countries by big ones and the trampling of human rights in the name of national aggrandizement have no place on this earth. It was short, but I think, damn fine speech, I regard as probably the best speech I made as prime minister, because it was, as I said, it was very much to the point and it was very much under a degree of pressure.

So look, I spent that day, A, talking to our own defense people. B, dispatching Julie Bishop to the United Nations because we were a temporary member of the Security Council at the time. C, dispatching Air Marshal Sir Angus Houston, our former chief of the defense force, to Kiev as our special envoy.

And getting on the blower to people about this, including Barack Obama, including Petro Poroshenko, the then Ukrainian president, who I've been lucky enough to meet at the D-day commemoration a few weeks earlier. And Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister. Anyway, a couple of days went past. There was this constant footage of the Russian-backed rebels looting and pillaging and plundering the crash site.

It was just disgusting and appalling what was going on. And eventually I said to my military chiefs, if there'd been 38 Americans on board, what would be happening? And they said, well, the 82nd airborne would be there by now. And I said, well, damn it, we are not going to be taken advantage of or treated like this.

I want a military plan now. To his credit, the Australian CDF, who was a little anxious about this, did get on the blower to the Dutch chief. And within 24 hours, they did have a military plan for the securing of the site. I like to think that the Russians were listening in on our conversations and faced with the prospect of a thousand australian soldiers coming into Ukraine along with a couple of 1000 Dutch.

they thought, my God, we can't possibly have that. So they agreed that police and investigators could secure the site, retrieve the remains, and such wreckages was needed for the investigation to carry on. So we didn't need an armed presence in the Eastern Ukraine. But I said at the time that Russia had become a rogue nation, that Russia had become a pariah.

And subsequently, I had my famous shirt-front conversation with Vladimir Putin, where I said to him, look, it's obvious what happened. The Russian missile battery came over the border, shot down that plane. 298 people, including 38 Australian citizens, were killed. I don't say that you personally gave the order, but you obviously authorized that missile battery to go into Ukraine, and you owe the families of the dead an apology and compensation.

Anyway, he gave me a long rant through an interpreter to the effect that Ukrainian provocateurs have brought down the plane. The Ukrainians were all fascists, and Ukraine had no right to exist anyway. And I said to him, look, Vladimir, I get the mother Russia thing. I've read my Solzhenitsyn and my Tolstoy, and I know about Kievan Rus, but if the Ukrainians want to look west rather than east, surely that's their right.

Anyway, I got this further rant about they were all fascists, and they had no right to exist. Anyway at that stage, and this was all happening on the margins of the APEC conference in Beijing. At that stage, we were called back into the main conference. And as we were walking in, Putin, who’s quite a small man, he’d only be about five six or five seven, suddenly turns around, and he grabs me on the elbows, both hands grabbing my elbows, and he literally tries to shake me.

And he says, in his quite good English, he says, you are not a native Australian, but I am a native Russian. Then he kind of pushes me away, and I'm thinking, what is the meaning of this extraordinary outburst? And pondering it, I figured, well, what he's really trying to tell me is that as the citizen of a settler society, I have no concept of the blood and soil connection that he, as a mystical Russian, feels with all the land of greater Russia.

I mean, there's big Russia, there's little Russia, and there's white Russia, Ukraine being a little Russia. And that was why, I think, I knew way back then, if I hadn't grasped it before, that this guy sees himself as being on a mission from his God to take back all the lands of greater Russia.

And this is why the whole Ukrainian thing is so serious, not just for Ukraine, but for Europe more generally. Because if he does succeed in Ukraine, there's an absolute certainty that the baltic states, Georgia, Moldova, and Poland will be next. And at the very least, there will be a new iron curtain down the middle of Europe.

But frankly, if one nasty dictator gets his way against a smaller country yearning to be free, I can think of another nasty dictator in North Asia who sees another country that's regarded as a rebel province, even though it's a practically independent democracy, which will be very much in the firing line.

So I think that free people everywhere should be incredibly concerned, and I think all of us are invested in the success of Ukraine. And I just think that the Ukrainian people have been utterly heroic in the way they've resisted this enormity which Putin wants to inflict upon them.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Though you didn't send Austrian forces into the Donbas, you did send them into battle against ISIS in Syria. Well, how do you think history will see the war against terror?

>> Tony Abbott: I think that the war against terror, I mean, people quibbled about the terminology, but I think the struggle against Islamism, which may be a better way to describe it, I think was absolutely necessary.

Absolutely necessary. And if we go back to 2003 and the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was a monster. Everyone, including the people who were against the war, like the French, thought back then that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. Obviously, at some earlier stage, he'd had them because he'd used sort of poison gas on a large scale against the Kurds and the marsh Arabs and others.

So it was a monstrous regime. It was sponsoring terrorism. It was guilty of genocidal actions against its own people. And I thought the American led invasion was eminently justified, given those circumstances. Now, the tragedy was that there was a plan for the war, but there wasn't a plan for the peace.

And if there was any culpability on the part of our leaders at that time, it is that they didn't think adequately about the peace. In retrospect, the disappointment was that the Americans, and indeed the British and the Australians, didn't agree that the least bad of Saddam's generals should have been made interim president with the instruction, don't commit genocide against your own people and don't permit terrorism against ours.

And on that basis, go and govern the place as best you can, and we'll do what we can to help. Unfortunately, instead, they disarmed the Iraqi army, which meant that there were half a million unemployed guys with guns. They disbanded the Baathist civil service, which meant that no one knew how anything worked, and the whole place descended into a dreadful chaos and anarchy.

And under those circumstances, it's not really surprising that the most vicious and evil terrorists found a sanctuary. And I guess, George W Bush did eventually get things under control with the surge. But then we had the whole ISIS thing surge out of Syria to the gates of Baghdad.

And I guess that was when I said to Obama, look, whatever you think is necessary, Australia will be there with all the strength we can muster to help. And so we send out special forces, we send our training team, we send our. Our strike fight, we send our strike fighters.

And I suppose one of the last things I did before being rolled was I authorized airstrikes into Syria, and they agree that 12,000 persecuted minorities, members of persecuted minorities, would be able to come to Australia. And I think we have brought those people to Australia. As far as I'm aware, they're all on the high road to being wonderful Australian citizens.

But we didn't let the UNHCR pick them. We sent our people into the camps to make sure that we got people from the sorts of groups that were never gonna be able to resettle in the Middle East because they were Yazidi or Christian, or the other minorities that were at that time in that part of the world.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: In 2020, you became an advisor to the British Board of Trade, and today being the 7th anniversary of the Brexit vote, the referendum, interesting to hear your thoughts on Brexit, on how it's gone. Obviously, it hasn't been around for seven years, only came out in the January of 2020.

But tell us some of the sort of upshots, long term, historical ones as well as the short term ones.

>> Tony Abbott: Andrew, if there's one thing that I deplore in Britain, it's this defeatism and declinism with which the British establishment seems to be riddled. And as someone who read your magisterial Churchill biography with rapture.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Tony. I appreciate that.

>> Tony Abbott: It was interesting that defeatism and declinism was rampant in the British establishment even in the 1920s and thirties. But despite the great success of post war Britain, it's still there. There are so many people who, rather than being proud British patriots, would rather lose that in this kind of amorphous Europeanism.

I mean, I keep saying, no country on earth has had as big an influence on the modern world as Britain. Britain has given the world its common language, the mother of parliaments, the industrial revolution, the emancipation of minorities. There is so much to be proud of, and there is so much inventiveness, and creativity, and imagination in these islands.

Britain can cope and it will overcome, and yet there's so much even now, and I just think it's sad. Now, as a honorary member of the Board of Trade, which is only an advisory body, I think I was able to help significantly in terms of getting the Australia Britain free trade deal done.

Because it's amazing how bureaucracies in both countries and vested interests in both countries can get hung up on all sorts of trivial things and they can let small sectional issues prejudice the long term national interest. And I think at critical moments I was able to talk to the right people to overcome that.

I also think I had a bit of a hand in the fact that Britain is now joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Now this is a very big deal, and I can't understand why Britain hasn't appreciated more just what a coup this is for a group of 11 Pacific nations to welcome Britain into their trading club from the other side of the world.

It's a tribute to the size and the success of the British economy and also to Britain's standing in the wider world. Interestingly, I think the one country that was most averse to Britain coming into the TPP was Canada. Interesting that the French, yet again, have been doing their best to upset the British apple cart.

 

>> Tony Abbott: But outside of the core EU, and really outside of France, and I've got nothing against the French people, I have good friends who are French. France is a lovely country, but there just seems to be this fierce anglophobia in the French establishment. I don't think the French have ever forgiven the Anglos for rescuing them twice in the 20th century.

I don't think they've ever forgiven Britain, in particular, for that. And that animus persists to this day. We see it-

>> Andrew Roberts: You saw it in the AUKUS deal in particular.

>> Tony Abbott: Yeah, we saw it in the reaction to AUKUS. We see it in the lack of real cooperation across the Channel.

We see it in the French trying to veto Ben Wallace as the next secretary general of NATO. We see it all the time. And look, the interesting thing about Britain, and one of the reasons why the EU project was never gonna work for Britain, Britain always saw this as a trade arrangement.

It's about freer trade, which is a good thing. But the French and the Germans, in particular, saw this as a political arrangement, which is only a good thing if you want to lose your sovereignty. Not that I think the French or the Germans particularly did, but they were certainly keen on everyone else becoming, if you like, satrapies, political satrapies of France and economic satrapies of Germany.

Britain is the only major country in sort of greater Europe which doesn't have anything to be ashamed of in its 20th century history. I mean, the French, they would have lost the great war, but for Britain and America and countries like Australia, then they had Vichy, Spain had Franco, the Italians had Mussolini, and the Germans, of course, did worst of all with Hitler.

So again, I stress, wonderful people, great countries, let's love them and respect them, but every country carries a folk memory. And these countries, I think, all had something to atone for, and the EU was a way of helping them to atone. I became quite friendly some years back with a young Italian, terrific bloke.

But you'd ask him, what was the purpose of the EU? And he said, it was all about preventing war and maintaining democracy in Europe. Well, Italy's not gonna go to war with France, but for the EU. These days, Germany's not gonna go to war with France, but for the EU.

Spain's not gonna lapse back into dictatorship But for the EU. But this is what they've got into their heads because of their difficult history.

>> Andrew Roberts: I think it's also a case of people mistaking the EU for NATO, because it's NATO that's saved the peace for 75 years and not the EU.

But let's move on.

>> Tony Abbott: Just on the subject of NATO, I am convinced that Britain would have felt constrained in terms of its very substantial and immediate help to Ukraine had it still been in the EU. And I am sure that but for Britain, the now non-EU country, moving so swiftly, and this was one of the great things that Boris Johnson did achieve, moving so swiftly along with Brexit itself.

Moving so swiftly to do everything humanly possible for Ukraine, short of actually going to war on its behalf. I think that helped to shame the French and the Germans into a much more robust response in 2022 than we'd seen in 2014.

>> Andrew Roberts: What book are you reading at the moment, Tony?

History book or biography, I'm going to insist on you mentioning one of those?

>> Tony Abbott: Well, look, I've got a whole heap of books on my desk, including a couple by Douglas Murray, which I feel I really must get to very quickly. The Madness of Crowds and The Death of the West.

So they're ones that I've got to get to quickly.

>> Andrew Roberts: They're both brilliant, I've read them both, they're absolutely superb.

>> Tony Abbott: And look, I read Douglass just about every week, and The Spectator, and he's one of the reasons why The Spectator is so magnificently worth reading. I'm just trying to think, what was the last novel I read?

It's easy to read, particularly modern novels, and go through them quickly and think, well, that was interesting enough, but really was, it wasn't worth the few hours I spent.

>> Andrew Roberts: It's non-fiction that I'm interested in, frankly, Tony, that's the point of this podcast, in a way. What about your favorite what if?

What's your counterfactual of history that you're interested in?

>> Tony Abbott: Well, the most recent what if is, what if President Zelenskyy of Ukraine had taken the Afghan option and left Kyiv in a helicopter with a bag of money? I am sure there would have been a fierce underground resistance to the Russian invasion, but Ukraine, leaderless, would inevitably have swiftly succumbed, at least at an official level, to the Russian invasion.

So thank God for a person of moral and physical courage at a critical time. You often think, what if John Monash had been shot on the first day at Gallipoli, instead of going on to become, in the words of Lloyd George, the most resourceful general in the british army.

What if Michael Gove and Boris Johnson hadn't had their problem in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote? What if I hadn't had Malcolm Turnbull in my cabinet? There are all sorts of what ifs.

>> Tony Abbott: But it is what it is.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah.

>> Tony Abbott: It is what it is and we just have to accept, Andrew, that there is a providence, or I think Shakespeare said, there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hear them how we will.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: And also it underlines the great man and woman theory of history, as everyone that you've mentioned.

>> Tony Abbott: Absolutely right. This idea that somehow we are just pawns caught up in vast impersonal forces is wrong. Yes, there are tides, which we can go with or go against, as the case may be, but in the end, the world changes person by person, and just one person can make a massive difference.

Luck plays a part, circumstance plays a part, but in the end, it's courage and conviction and character and the will to be better, that's what makes all the difference.

>> Andrew Roberts: And with that inspiring statement, Tony, I say thank you very much indeed for appearing on Secrets of Statecraft.

 

>> Tony Abbott: Thanks, Andrew.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you to Tony Abbott for such an interesting conversation, and I look forward to your joining me on the next episode of Secrets of Statecraft.

>> Narrator: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition.

For more information about our work, or to listen to more of our podcast or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.