In this interview Adam Creighton appeared on 2SM Mornings with Chris Smith to discuss the IPA’s research on Welcome to Country.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Chris Smith:
Adam Creighton is the senior fellow and chief economist with the Institute of Public Affairs, columnist with the Australian newspaper and former Washington correspondent as well. He’s on the line once again. Good day there, Adam.
Adam Creighton:
Good morning, Chris.
Chris Smith:
I want to start with a topic that I was going to leave until our final chat, but I want to do it now because I’ve just played what Michaelia Cash had to say in response to Penny Wong’s what would you say… Insolent kind of treatment of Jacinta Nampajimpa Price. Cash is very keen on dropping the welcome to country. What I don’t understand is that Penny Wong’s excuse for keeping it in is because of the rituals and traditions of this place. Well, I don’t know exactly when that began, but it wasn’t beyond 18 years ago. That’s hardly traditional.
Adam Creighton:
Yes, look, that’s true. And firstly, what a speech by Michaelia Cash.
Chris Smith:
Wow.
Adam Creighton:
Really terrific. It really, that’s the first time I’d heard it, just listening to a show before, and I wasn’t even watching it obviously, but it was obviously electric and good honour. No, look, the idea that this is some deep tradition is absurd. I mean, these welcome to countries, let’s be frank. I mean, these were invented in the seventies, I believe, by Ernie Dingo, and they were later picked up and they’ve become a very lucrative side hustle outside the Parliament for the average-
Chris Smith:
Side hustle is right.
Adam Creighton:
Well, it’s thousands of dollars a pop. And I mean, as for the Parliament itself, I mean they are divisive. I mean, the IPA has done a lot of surveys on this and 56% of Australians feel that these ceremonies have become divisive. So that’s a majority.
Chris Smith:
And dramatically overdone.
Adam Creighton:
And yes, I look, they may well have a place, and I’m not against them 100% totally everywhere, but they do seem to be vastly too frequent and common. And I think it’s becoming embarrassing. I mean, every time you land on a Qantas flight, although I know not Jetstar, which is interesting, but Qantas, you get it of course and acknowledgement with the country, and I just think it’s a bit embarrassing. And also, this is maybe slightly changing the subject, but we’re struggling with people signing up to the defence force. Well, if you keep telling Australians it’s not their country, then who’s going to sign up for that? I mean, who’s going to defend something that’s not theirs in the first place apparently. So look, I think just on the politics of this too, I think that Michaelia Cash is right to try to stake out some difference from the government. And this is a good issue to do so because we had a Voice vote that was 60/40. People don’t want this sort of stuff. I think this would be a great area to start on some political distinguishment.
Chris Smith:
But what I get the feeling is that the way Penny Wong speaks and speaks down to those who dared not love the acknowledgement to country and respect the acknowledgement to country and the incredible tradition of it all, I get the feeling that those who don’t appreciate it are somehow racist in her eyes.
Adam Creighton:
Yes, well, that’s the card that they always play. But this is not resonating as much anymore, I believe. Whether it’s on welcome the country, whether it’s on the issue of immigration, I just think the left has been screaming this word for so many years, it’s lost all meaning. I actually think it’s counterproductive for them when they accuse others of racism baselessly, I think it undermines their own position, actually. So bring it on. Keep saying it just makes them look stupid as far as I’m concerned.
Chris Smith:
All right. The big story this week, and this is a huge story on this programme because I go to all of these other stations right around Australia, and so many farmers have rung in yesterday and today to have their two Bobsworth. So many I haven’t been able to get to all of them, but the fact that we would reduce or lower our biosecurity measures is something so foreign to us because we’ve had such strict biosecurity and quarantine measures in this country for a long, long time. And I just want to remind people of what Anthony Albanese said on the ABC only recently about the suggestion that we would do what Donald Trump wanted and allow American beef and thereby reducing our biosecurity measures. This is Anthony Albanese.
Anthony Albanese:
We will not change or compromise any of the issues regarding biosecurity. Full stop, exclamation mark, Adam.
Adam Creighton:
That’s extraordinary, isn’t it really? Because obviously he has the timing of this report is very suspicious. It comes at a low point in the Australia US relationship, which is partly, or mostly due to the Australian government, I would say. And so it does very much look like that they’ve done this to appease him. Trump himself has mentioned beef. I think a few months ago he said that Australia bans our beef, et cetera. I mean, of course he wouldn’t be aware that that’s for sound biosecurity reasons, as you mentioned. Look, this is bad news. I mean, the only kind of thing that the saving grace is I think that our farmers are so efficient we can produce it more cheaply than the American farmers can. So I doubt that Australians would buy much or at least that’s my hope.
Chris Smith:
Same here.
Adam Creighton:
They wouldn’t have a better idea than that. So I think it might be a purely academic decision, but it’s nevertheless a concern because it only takes a small amount of beef to bring in a virus of some sort.
Chris Smith:
And the way the American system is set up, they can only trace it back to the abattoir. So they can’t really chase it to the source.
Adam Creighton:
Yes. Well, that’s the issue. It’s going to be the ultimate source I think is Mexico. I think that’s why we had banned it, but now we say that Mexican tracking has improved or something like that. I mean, as someone who’s been to Mexico a few times, I find that hard to believe.
Chris Smith:
This actually could be a master stroke in alleviating the intimidation coming from these tariffs. It could be a master stroke for that. But I think Labour has underestimated the damage it’s going to rural life and the pushback they’re going to get from rural Australia. Of course, Labour as we know, don’t have in their DNA rural politics, do they?
Adam Creighton:
No, that is certainly true. And also they would think that there’s not many votes here to be lost for them because as you allude to, these are largely national party seats, and so if there is any loss, they’re not going to lose people. So it’s probably political cynicism has underpinned this as well. But as you say, it may be quite a clever thing the government’s done. If we don’t buy much American beef as I hope we don’t, and I don’t think we will. And we also get some relief elsewhere from the Trump tariffs. So let’s see what happens. But I must say the timing’s very suspicious.
Chris Smith:
Now I get the feeling that the judiciary see themselves as fairly good at scientific issues, especially the science of climate change because an upcoming headhunted coal mine has been stopped in its tracks because of the damage being done by climate change.
Adam Creighton:
Yes. Look, this decision by the courts is, well, not surprising because we all know the political views of most of the judiciary, but I think it’s very economically disappointing for the region. I mean, this mine has been there for many years. It’s not like it’s a new mine that’s been proposed. It was a matter of whether it would be extended. And there’d be thousands of jobs in that region that depend on that mine both directly and indirectly. And it was also going to generate a lot of resource export income for Australia. It was all going to Indonesia, I believe, and now it’s been… Well, it’s been stopped temporarily. I know it’s going to go to another court, so it may ultimately be approved, but the media articles around it have kind of implied it was this groundswell of support from local community.
But I would be surprised if that’s actually the case. I imagine this is a well off group of locals and probably finance from people outside the area. That’s just a conjecture. But I imagine that’s the case and it’s just more of this nonsense about our so called contribution to global emissions, which your listeners know is about 1%. It’s farcically low. This mine wouldn’t have made any difference. And if we take these rulings to the logical conclusion, we don’t have any export industries at all, but we have to shut down all our gas industries, all our coal exports. I mean, these people don’t realise that their standard of living basically depends on these mines.
Chris Smith:
Well, today coal made up 58% of our energy source nationally. So we don’t have a hot shower this morning without coal.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, it’s just absurd. And I read yesterday from the International Energy Agency that the coal burning’s gone up globally 20% since 2020. And so it’s not being phased out. All this nonsense about transition, there is no transition. It’s just a media mirage that’s paraded. If you look globally, there is no transition. I assure you.
Chris Smith:
One last one, I found this rather comical that the ACTU would blame bosses in Australia for our zero productivity. Here is Sally McManus on television this morning.
Sally McManus:
One of those studies say that there’s a lot of well performing, high performing companies and management in Australia, but unfortunately there’s a long tail of under performing managers. So we’ve got to talk about this issue. We can’t put our head in the sand. The survey that we commissioned showed that 39% of Australian workers say that they feel burnt out at work. We say that’s a symptom of the problem of management capacity, where people are asked to do more with less. They’re given less control, less say over things. There are all the things that lead to burnout at work.
Chris Smith:
So the fact that we’ve got zero productivity would have nothing to do, Adam Creighton with the score of pay rises that have been achieved by the ACTU for workers under the labour government, never in line with productivity or inflation of course, but it’s all got to do with the bosses who despite having financial skin in the game, can’t run their businesses.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, look, it’s a totally ridiculous argument. I mean, some of the salaries I’ve heard on union websites in Victoria CFMEU websites just for middle workers, 200,000, $250,000, that’s obviously dragging down our productivity. We can’t build things and the cost of producing things is so great, but the kind of the worker-boss divide, I think the productivity challenge is the government’s fault in Australia. Just all these absurd regulations, the net-zero stuff we’ve talked about, that’s obviously boosting our energy prices, reducing our productivity, the tax rates, the regulations, and in particular the re-regulation of the labour force, which the ACTU would’ve argued for.
I mean, my understanding is the Fair Work Act from 2009 has gone from about 500 pages to 1,500 pages in the last three years. So this is extraordinary complexity on businesses, especially small businesses. It basically means they can’t compete with big businesses. So yeah, we certainly do have a productivity problem, but the idea that it’s bosses is just obviously ridiculous.
Chris Smith:
So you can see what’s going to happen at this roundtable, Jim Chalmer’s roundtable. The Prime Minister has already said workplace laws are off the table. That won’t be up for negotiation. So I doubt whether anything meaningful can be concluded.
Adam Creighton:
No. Look, I feel sorry for the journalists who have to kind of breathlessly report about the roundtable as if it’s important and as if it’s not just political window dressing, which is what it is. Nothing substantive, sadly is going to happen. I think this is just a government looking for tax grabs here and there to patch up its deteriorating budget situation.
Chris Smith:
It’s spot on.
Adam Creighton:
Addicted to spending. It won’t cut taxes. It’s all rather depressing actually. As I said in my column today, we’ve gone from the lucky country to the stupid country pretty quickly and we need to fix ourselves up, I hope soon.
Chris Smith:
Just on that article, what do you think has led us down the track of being so stupid?
Adam Creighton:
Well, today I just spoke about the tobacco excise, which it’s worth dwelling on it, because it’s just so extreme in it’s stupidity. A few years ago the government was raising $16 billion a year from cigarettes, and this year it’s going to raise 7 billion. And that’s despite massive population growth, especially from India and China where smoking rates are very high.
And this is because they’ve jacked up the excise to absurd levels. They’ve created a huge black market. Just in the last 12 months, I think there are over five… Sorry, over 100 shops in Victoria have being firebombed by gangs related to the tobacco wars. One woman’s been killed. And this is all because of some stupid government policy where they could just cut the excise as New South Wales Premier Chris Mintz has recommended. But the federal government is just so determined to pursue stupidity. So they’ve created this massive black market. Smoking rates have gone up. They’ve lost $8 billion in revenue, which is vastly more than they’ll raise from their various other new taxes.
And they lost it through sheer stupidity. But anyway, of course there’s all the other things as well, but I just thought it was worth just focusing on the idiocy of that because they could have cut the excise if they weren’t so concerned with virtue signalling and they would’ve increased revenue and they probably would’ve kept smoking rates lower. But no, no, it’s all about grandstanding, moral grandstanding.
Chris Smith:
You’re right, it can be rather depressing. I think we need a weekend. Thank you, Adam. Appreciate that.
Adam Creighton:
Thanks.
Chris Smith:
Adam Creighton, senior fellow and chief economist with the Institute of Public Affairs and columnist with The Australian.
This transcript of Adam Creighton speaking on 2SM Mornings with Chris Smith from 25 July 2025 has been edited for clarity.
