Chris Smith:
He’s the chief economist and a senior fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs, columnist with the Australian newspaper, Adam Creighton. Welcome to the programme once again.
Adam Creighton:
Good morning, Chris. Great to be here.
Chris Smith:
I’ve got to start in Washington because I’ve been doing a little bit of fossicking through some of the tapes that I’ve been hearing over the last three days. This week’s Senate hearings I’m referring to with Dr. Anthony Fauci in the hot seat. They have been incredibly revealing. His diaries have showed how much he loved the attention during COVID as he started writing down all his appearances and how much he was focused on. He tried to avoid criticism of the true cause of COVID-19, which was Fauci’s own research inside the Wuhan lab. And he was very upset with Sharri Markson who wrote for the Australian exposing Fauci on all of this. And then today, he decided to plead the fifth, and have a listen as this went on 111 times.
Josh Hawley:
Well, nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, doc? Let’s try something. What day of the week is it today?
Anthony Fauci:
On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
Josh Hawley:
What colour tie are you wearing?
Anthony Fauci:
On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
Josh Hawley:
What colour is the carpet in front of you?
Anthony Fauci:
On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
Josh Hawley:
Let’s just get one thing straight. You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned. As you very well know, as the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more, Brown versus Walker, 1896, “When he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.” You know that. Your lawyers sitting behind you now shifting nervously in their chairs, they know it. This isn’t about the Constitution. This isn’t about the law. This about contempt. Contempt for this body and contempt for the American people. But I think I know why you’re doing it. It’s because you don’t want to answer questions. It’s because you did all kinds of terrible things. It’s because during the pandemic you got rich, didn’t you? You got rich while people were dying, hundreds of thousands of Americans, over a million in the end, and you were getting rich.
And not only were you doing that, you were using federal employees with taxpayer money to apply for and solicit cash prizes for you personally. Cash prizes totaling over a million dollars. You did all of that during the pandemic, didn’t you? That’s a question.
Anthony Fauci:
On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
Chris Smith:
Prosecuting Fauci there was Republican Josh Hawley. Adam, before he decided to plead the fifth, I tell you what, the exposure of his diaries has solved many of our suspicions.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, look, it certainly has. I was shocked at the thousand pages of diaries. I mean, the vanity, as you referred to, the self-obsession, the very careful noting of every media appearance and every compliment toward him was. I mean, it struck me as particularly strange as someone who’s known a lot of senior bureaucrats in their life. They tend not to be people who are obsessed with fame, and yet he was a career bureaucrat, career bureaucrat scientist of great power, and he was clearly obsessed with being a celebrity. So I suppose that’s the top line, but the more fundamental revelation was that his private views were far closer to those of the critics of both lockdowns and the critics of the supposed natural source of the virus that we were all led to believe at the time. And people like me, people like Sharri Markson, who were very critical of various aspects of the official narrative were slammed repeatedly by the consensus.
And yet he in private would often agree that there was a lot of doubt there. And as it all turned out in the end, we were right and he was wrong. And he has been incredibly destructive human being. I mean, you just look at Melbourne and Sydney, I mean, they followed the lockdown narrative at enormous economic cost. And it all ultimately came from this man who was pushing it in the US and yet privately saying in his diaries that there wasn’t much scientific evidence actually for that.
Chris Smith:
But he’s the sort of guy putting himself through what he just put himself through and then taking the fifth so arrogantly who couldn’t walk down any main street of any city or town in the United States of America.
Adam Creighton:
No, on a grand scale, it’s kind of a Dan Andrews reversal of public opinion. I mean, you’re exactly right. He was adored. And I think even if he’s not ultimately convicted and ends up in jail, he’s going to have trouble travelling outside for the rest of his life because people will abuse him, rightly so in my view. It was a very interesting precedent that Senator Josh Hawley said, I hadn’t heard of that, but maybe… Well, I mean it certainly will. This going to drag on in the courts of the Congress for a very long time because he really is holding the Congress there with contempt. I mean, not even answering the colour of the carpet and so forth. That just seems excessive to me and he’s not trying to cooperate at all. So we’ll see what happens. But look, I think his public reputation and the damage he’s caused is now thankfully well-known and his reputation is mud.
Chris Smith:
Yeah. And as we’ve now had revealed through those diaries, we suffered right around the world because of his stance on these issues, just appalling. All right. The Australian public may not be able to know how much of their money the government is spending on the ridiculous renewable transition because after all, we’re only humans. But we are reminded today, Adam, of how much is regularly wasted. We learned this morning that Chris Bowen’s pre-COP event in Fiji will be a frost because it’s being snubbed by world leaders, $150 million down the drain. And then this labour charity… Charity, named the Smart Energy Council has spent almost a half a million dollars on solar studies in Bangladesh and China. We are being had.
Adam Creighton:
No, there’s so many aspects of this story that are just so bad. I mean, firstly, the corruption, as you point out, this supposed independent think tank, which has charity status, so therefore tax-deductible donations to it, the Smart Energy Council has been donating to the Labour Party. And of course getting these so-called contracts from the federal government to do absurd studies into, as you say, solar and wind power in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, one of the smallest countries in the world in terms of density. So they barely have any room for wind and solar anyway. I mean, they hardly have any of it now. It’s just extremely poor, just a ridiculous way [inaudible 00:06:46]… As for the pre-COP nonsense in Fiji that you mentioned, I mean the COP is bad enough. And now there’s another pre-COP event, which no world leaders are going to because the Australian government… Chris Bowen’s written to all prime ministers and presidents and invited them. Not one of them has said that they would come.
And indeed in their defence, Anthony Albanese hasn’t even been to any of these silly COP events himself anyway. So it’s just the delusions of grandeur of Chris Bowen. And the waste. We’re spending millions of dollars in Fiji on five-star accommodation for international bureaucrats to come to this pre-COP nonsense. The whole thing’s costing Australia $150 million. And it seems like nothing’s actually going to be agreed at this year’s COP because as we all know, from net-zero, and everyone’s trying to do it without others noticing, but that’s the economic and scientific reality. And so my forecast is these COPs in even five years won’t exist anymore.
Chris Smith:
If Chris Bowen was the CEO of a corporation, the shareholders would be getting at the AGM and demanding he hand back the $150 million.
Adam Creighton:
Yes, gosh. Yeah, the share price would be very low indeed if the Australian government was some sort of company. Yeah, the waste is just spectacular. The state government’s too arguably even worse. So it’s very sad to see this. But sadly, Chris, not enough people listen to your show. I mean, I know you’ve got great ratings, but people still vote for this nonsense. In large numbers, people vote for governments that do this, and that really upsets me.
Chris Smith:
It does me too. The union movement has been crowing about the Prime Minister’s special gift to them at the ALP National Conference last week, which was this fair work court. The only problem is, the true statistics from the federal court that deal with these issues show that there are no lengthy delays warranting another new giant work claim court, Adam.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, no, it’s completely ridiculous. I mean, I can’t believe this is a proposal, and it just goes to show how beholden the federal government is to the far left factions of the Labour Party. I mean, we already have this thing in Australia called a Fair Work Commission, which is a very powerful… I mean, it’s not technically a court, but it’s a very powerful tribunal. It’s got huge influence over what especially large companies can and can’t do with their staff. Very few countries in the world have anything like it. So we already have an extremely interventionist system. And now this proposal for a special court, which of course would be extremely expensive, but you’d have to have all these new judges on massive salaries and staff, et cetera. But it’s not just the cost, it’s the more interfering with the running of businesses by judges and bureaucrats.
I mean, it’s crazy. I don’t know why any large foreign multinational would bring their workforce here unless they had to for some reason. It’s just crazy. The wages are so high now, often by Fair…. I mean, just recently, Farewell Commission said, “The minimum wage for Uber drivers was going to be $31.80.” I mean, most of them, they’re not even permanent residents, let alone citizens. And here’s the Fair, this government agency, basically leaving a tax on Australians to pay these huge salaries, much of which is sent home. So I mean, it’s just obscene. Anyway, that’s probably another topic, but still, it just gets me worked up.
Chris Smith:
To a piece you wrote this week about superannuation and our kids, so much for giving the next generation a hand up, which is apparently what the budget was all about. The days of having your resources in super and having trust in super are probably over, right?
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, look, I think so. I mean, I’ve kind of banged on about super for many, many years. I really hate… I’m one of these strange people that doesn’t like compulsory super and thinks people should choose whether to save or spend their own money. But look, this study I talked about was just interesting. It said that the returns in the share market, the property market have been steadily falling basically for 150 years. And the high point was actually… It wasn’t the boomers, it was their parents and grandparents. If they had invested in the share market back then and property, they would’ve done even better than the boomers did. So the conclusion is that young people now starting out, they’re going to be forced to not have 12% of their wage and salary, which of course makes renting and buying a home harder.
And then the study was suggesting the returns on their super aren’t probably going to be that great if history is any judge. So look, it was a pretty pessimistic article, so I hope it’s wrong. But I think the bigger concern is something John Hurst, a late great Australian historian and friend of mine said to me at the end, he said towards the end of his life, he wasn’t really a fan of compulsory super either. And he said, “When there’s a war or when there’s a major crisis, you know what’s going to happen with all those trillions of dollars in super, which are all legally distinct and have had beneficial taxation, is they’ll be nationalised and it’ll all be taken by the government in a wartime.” So I don’t know, I don’t mean to scare people, but I’m just saying it is… The government will always be able to say that that pool of money has had beneficial treatment and therefore the government has some claim to it, which is pretty scary.
Chris Smith:
As Albo says, “It’s a national asset.” You’re dead right.
Adam Creighton:
Exactly.
Chris Smith:
You’re dead right.
Adam Creighton:
Exactly.
Chris Smith:
Hey, listen, just very quickly, question without notice. What do you make of yesterday’s drop in inflation? I get the feeling it’s a false dawn because it’s been overly impacted by the government’s temporary propping up of petrol prices and flattening of the housing market.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. This is based on June when those things fell. Let’s just wait until we see the July figures and the August figures soon. It’s still ridiculously high. It’s almost 4%, the highest in the Western world. And it really upsets me. People just don’t realise how serious a 4% inflation rate is for people on ordinary incomes when their purchasing power of their small wages already, they’re shrinking by 4% every year. I mean, they’re not getting pay rises. In three years, it’s gone down by 12% in value. It’s a very, very serious problem. And then the Reserve Bank doesn’t even seem to care. They’re going to leave interest rates where they are and not do much. So look, it’s all a bit depressing to me. We have a serious inflation problem in Australia, and the positive spin that was put on these numbers yesterday is just ridiculous to me.
Chris Smith:
Yeah, excellent analysis on all of those topics. Adam, thank you very much for your time.
Adam Creighton:
Thanks, Chris. No problem.
Chris Smith:
Senior fellow and chief economist with the Institute of Public Affairs, Adam Creighton.
This transcript with Adam Creighton talking on Mornings with Chris Smith 2SM from 30 July 2026 has been edited for clarity.
