In this interview, Senior Fellow John Roskam appeared on Sunday Sweep – 2GB Sunday to contextualise and disseminate the IPA’s research into the Voice to Parliament and the political realignment.
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.
Luke Grant:
Plenty to talk about this morning. I’m delighted to tell you that my friend John Roskam joins us, Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Australian Way of Life at the IPA, the Institute of Public Affairs. And he was formerly the distinguished Executive Director of that fine institute. I want to prick his brains, wow, about Donald Trump’s plans to drain the swamp. I want to ask him if we can do something like that here. I’m delighted to say he’s on the line. Mr. Roskam, my friend. How are you?
John Roskam:
I’m flourishing, Luke. How are you?
Luke Grant:
Just fine. Wonderful to hear your voice. When you look at some of these appointments, John, and there’s a couple of standouts, I’m not so sure about Elon Musk, but why not? If the public service was perfect everywhere, then you wouldn’t have to do this. But I think the lived experience from people is that perhaps it’s not perfect everywhere and we do have to perhaps do things a little out of the box because the definition of insanity, doing the same stuff and expecting a different outcome, is a bit silly.
Now, on Saturday our time, oil and gas industry executive, Chris Wright, he becomes the Energy Secretary. He’s founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oil field services firm based in Denver. He wants to help maximise the production of oil and gas and to seek ways to boost generation of electricity, and that is very different to what we see here. But, of course, he’s made all sorts of statements in the past and this is where his appointment will become difficult. He says there’s no climate crisis and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either. What do you make of, first off, the idea that we have to drain the swamp? I mean, it’s got merit, doesn’t it?
John Roskam:
Well, it does, and Americans last week voted for change, and there’ve been headlines in the U.S. newspapers saying, “Decisions by Trump please his supporters, but alarm Washington insiders.” Now, that’s exactly the point. You have a government that’s out of touch. You have a government that’s surveilling its citizen. You have a country that is spending amongst the highest per capita rates on health and medicine when the quality of life of most Americans is declining. People want change and, exactly as you said, this appointment of Chris Wright as Energy Secretary is significant. And here in Australia there’s going to be shock and there’s going to be outrage. But we need to understand that in America there’s a lot more of a discussion about whether the climate is changing exactly as is predicted. There are many people who, exactly as he says, argue there is no climate change crisis.
So someone like Steve Koonin, for example, who is Barack Obama’s Scientific Advisor says exactly the same thing. Chris Wright is very supportive of nuclear energy and he and Trump understand that when you push up power prices, you’re pushing up the price of food, you’re pushing up the price of transportation, of your heating. It helps to create a strong manufacturing sector if we can get the price of electricity down. So for someone like me, these appointments are very exciting and it just reveals how out of touch I think Australia is compared to the rest of the world these days.
Luke Grant:
Yeah, we have a system where you can’t just say, “Righto. The boss of the biggest manufacturer, if there even is a thing, we can get him on board in a cabinet and he can become the leader of that organisation.” It’s a lot more difficult to do that in Australia, isn’t it?
John Roskam:
Well, it is because we have a parliamentary system and cabinet ministers are, of course, from Parliament. And so if you have been an MP and you’re Labour or Liberal or anything else, and you’ve spent your life climbing the greasy pole and going to branch meetings and stacking out your pre-selections and you become a Minister, are you going to take risks? Are you going to do what you think is necessary even though you’ll lose friends, even though you might only be there for a very short time, but you’ll undertake dramatic change?
And I think one of the things that has led to the vitality and the dynamism of the American political system is you can get Donald Trump and you can get Donald Trump to appoint a series of outsiders who don’t think like politicians, who are not safe, who are not looking to their next job as a consultant or a lobbyist, but who are committed to the people. And they will do these jobs for a couple of years and then they’ll return back to private life and they will have made a difference. And I think that’s one of the big differences between the American system and the Australian system.
Luke Grant:
You see, if we have a proposal, I mean, there’s this sham inquiry now into nuclear energy, obviously, majority Labour run, they’re going to look at nuclear, which is not even a policy within a bull’s roar of a policy of the government. This is a purely political exercise. And they’ll come up with their conclusions and then someone will say, “Oh, look, the committee found…” And then all of a sudden nuclear is, well, I don’t think it’ll be dead, I think it’s too late now, people are embracing it, but that’s the way it happens here. But why wouldn’t an Energy Minister have a special attache or someone as an advisor who rather than go through a 12-month inquiry, will sit in a room and say, “Hey, mate, A, B, C, D, do that and we can take the next step”? What’s stopping a politician by saying, “I’ve hooked our mate into this. He’s expert or she’s an expert and that’s going to help us out”?
John Roskam:
Oh, Luke, anyone who’s spent five minutes in Canberra will know all the answers to that, and the answer is that’s not going to happen anytime soon. We have, in Canberra, a bureaucracy that is focused on itself, that is focused on ticking boxes. If you want to avoid anything happening, you say, “Well, it’s not my decision. It’s another department’s decision.” So you have all these things called IDCs, interdepartmental committees. Unlike America, there is no emphasis on making decisions quickly, on making decisions transparently, accountably. And that is why we have processes here whereby it might take 10 years to get approval to extend the operations of a mine, for example. And that’s why our productivity is declining and that’s why we’re losing out in the race for private investment.
Luke Grant:
And I’m with John Roskam from the Institute of Public Affairs. John, that question about, hey, look at Trump go. If only Peter Dutton could be more like Donald Trump, it’d be a shoo-in. You say, no, and that doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work?
John Roskam:
Because there’s only one Donald Trump. When people voted for Donald Trump, they were voting for the leader of an insurgency. After the last eight years of what’s happened to Donald Trump, he represented a cry for recognition. So the other issue that Peter Dutton has is that poll after poll indicates that the brand of the Liberal Party is still the brand of big business. And what Peter Dutton has to do is he has to change that brand to represent working people, the working class, and to communicate that the elites are out of touch. But I think what is happening is that the voice, if we go back to what happened a year ago, reveals that the elite, the universities, much of the media community organisations were just not understanding what the main concerns of Australians were, which were cost of living inflation and how to get by day to day. I think that’s one of the things that Peter Dutton is going to learn from Trump.
And the other thing that I know Liberals are thinking a lot about, and the Labour Party is too, which is young people. And it’s always been assumed of the last 10 years, Luke, and we’ve talked about this, the assumption that young people are woke and green and will inevitably vote left wing. Well, that is not the case. It’s not the case in Canada. Trump absolutely proved it’s not the case. And if you are authentic, if, really, you communicate especially to young men who are having a difficult time of it that politicians are listening to their concerns, then you can at least break 50/50. And that was a very significant factor in Trump’s success. Trump goes and talks to Joe Rogan for three hours about UFOs.
Luke Grant:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Great stuff. John, great to hear your voice, my friend. I hope I see you soon. Stay well. If I don’t see you or talk to you before Christmas, all the best. And thank you for your time, John Roskam.
This transcript with John Roskam talking on 2GB Sydney – Sunday Sweep from 17 November 2024 has been edited for clarity.
