Scott Morrison

Last Friday, former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison did a question and answer session in St Andrews, hosted by Stephen Gethins of the International Relations department (and former SNP MP for north-east Fife). Rosemary and I went along; we were by some margin the oldest people there. I expected to disagree with him on various things, but we turned out to be more in agreement than not.

I will try to represent his views accurately below, but my memory may fail sometimes.

Almost the entire session was Q&A, mostly questions from the floor but some sent in advance. The first one was I think from Stephen and asked him what he thought he had done well and what less well during his time as Prime Minister (2018 to 2022). He dodged the second part, but remarked that it had been an interesting time, with a number of difficult issues, notably Covid, which he thought Australia had dealt with well and for which he took some credit.

Here are some of his views on things as they came over from answers to questions.

• The age of globalisation is over; we now have powerful nations (he named China, Russia and Iran) trying to create hegemonies in their parts of the world. (He described Xi as the most Marxist leader of China since Mao.)
• Related to that, what should Western democracies do to help small developing countries? He was clear that we should not try to make them just like us; we should offer them the opportunity to be whatever it is that they want to be. In particular, if they need energy to develop their industries, we should not try to enforce what source of energy they should use. (In describing Chinese policy, he used the word “debt”, but did not elaborate, although much could be said.)
• Australia’s economy has always been based on trade, and so trading agreements are important to Australia. Contrast this with the USA, where there is a suspicion that trading pacts will cause American industries to be undercut by foreign competition. He cited the example of the Australian town of Newcastle, the first in the country to be based on heavy industry; now the industry has gone but the town has successfully re-invented itself.
• He is opposed to “moral equivalence”, by which if a country is prepared to trade with us then we assume that the actions of its government are justified; he follows Ronald Reagan, who called out the Soviet Union.
• On fuel, he is opposed to the widespread introduction of wind and solar power, thinking that we should instead concentrate our efforts on the fuel of the future, which he considers to be hydrogen. He also pointed out that it is shale gas which has weaned the USA off coal. In addition, the technology for making solar panels is very polluting. He never mentioned nuclear.
• He was saddened by the fact that Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to provide representation for indigenous people, considering it divisive, and was pleased when the proposal was rejected. He claims that every indigenous community is different, and there is no uniform strategy that fits all.
• He remarked on the huge change on the way we get our news now. He described social media as like “pissing in your wetsuit”, warm and “local” but unhealthy. He much prefers a debate between people with different views. (He is a powerful personality, so I imagine he often gets the better of such debates.)

Since I get the last word, I will take the opportunity of taking him to task over his energy policy. First, I think that the situation is so urgent that we can’t just sit back and wait ten years for new sources of energy to come onstream. I would have thought that this would be obvious to an Australian, in view of the devastating floods and fires recently. And second, his solutions are not solutons. It takes a lot of energy to make hydrogen, so this just pushes the problem somewhere else. And shale gas is itself a fossil fuel with the added disadvantage that its recovery leaves the underground spaces full of highly dangerous chemicals which are not going to stay there indefinitely!