Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Hi there.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to we need to Talk, a.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Podcast that helps empower each of us. And I'm the host, Jane Hasla, a sociologist, mental health professional, and mother of eight, one daughter and seven sons who range in age from 19 up to 36 years.
Each episode I'm talking with an expert on a particular social issue, from bullying to climate change, from pornography to the.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Human brain and our need for connection.
Knowledge is power.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: So let's get started.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: This episode, I had the great pleasure of talking with historian, teacher and public policy writer, Professor Peter Botsman.
He's an honorary fellow at Melbourne University and was a founder and head of the Whitlam Institute and led think tanks the Evatt foundation and the Brisbane Institute.
Peter wrote the Great Constitutional A Citizen's View of the Australian constitution in 1999, which sparked debate about who actually wrote the first draft of our constitution with him, pointing to Tasmania's Andrew Inglis Clark as its unsung author.
He studied at Cornell and Yale universities and advised the US government on health care after completing his PhD at the University of New South Wales in 1987, such is his respect in America, he was invited to President Clinton's inauguration in 1993.
In Peter's push for Australia to become a republic, he's developed a model, the Australian Executive Council, which he believes will best achieve this aim.
He's a passionate advocate of Indigenous rights and frequently travels to the Outback and Arnhem Land to teach in first nations communities.
In Peter's spare time. I mean, does he ever really have any? He runs a Scottish Highland cattle property in New South Wales. Stunning Kangaroo Valley.
So grab yourself a hot or cold beverage and sit back for a fascinating and deeply insightful discussion on Whitlam, the Constitution and becoming a republic with Professor Peter Bots.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Today we have Peter Botsman. What a pleasure.
Welcome, Peter, to We need to Talk.
[00:03:06] Speaker C: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Fantastic. Thank you so much.
Look, it's coming up, Peter. Not far away next month.
Well, almost next month in November, November 11, that Gough Whitlam was dismissed 50 years ago.
Boy, I remember at the time, I was 13 years of age and my mother, because of Gough Whitlam, was able to leave a very difficult marriage and was able to raise four kids because of what he brought in.
You've had a lot of involvement with Whitlam and the Whitlam Institute.
What are your thoughts about and in relation to goodness? We're gonna be talking about how much we need a republic. If anything shows we need a republic, it's what happened then? So I'll let you get started then.
[00:04:00] Speaker C: Oh, look, my first memories of the dismissal was when I was around 18 years old and I was working as a Storman with Simon Crean as my union organizer in Salmon Street, Port Melbourne.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:04:18] Speaker C: And the instant that the, you know, the news came through, it was tools down and marching into the main, you know, the main center of Melbourne.
And I remember that very vividly. And he was. He represented so much hope and refreshing change. And even though it was a very tumultuous day, economic period for us young people, he was it, you know. And I remember I met. I can remember the 30th or 30th anniversary. Anna Booth and I both talked about our, you know, personal experiences of the dismissal. And it was similar for her, but it was just. Sorry, Anna Booth being the former vice president of the ACTU, head of the textiles union.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:05:14] Speaker C: This is the 80s 90s Keating Hawke era times. And Anna was very significant in that period. But we were both on the COVID of the Melbourne Herald, I think, talking about those days and what it meant and all those sorts of things. But that really comes down.
I think that was the closest I've ever seen in my lifetime to some kind of revolt in Australia. And a real division between people like my uncle who really wanted him out, you know, he was a Malcolm Fraser, you know, fan and.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[00:05:52] Speaker C: And, you know, and us young ones who were just so passionate about golf and what he represented. And, you know, that division, that raw emotional division has only probably just been healed, but maybe, maybe it's never going to be healed. And then, of course, all of the crazy actions of John Kerr have just become more and more amplified. And I think Gough was right when he said, nothing will save the Governor General.
His reputation has just taken a big dive. And Jenny Hawking's work really kind of, I think, shows that.
And so that's the first memory. But I had the joy of working with Gough at 100 William Street, Sydney.
That was the office Hawke was below. Gough had the office above. And it was the kind of office that they had after Prime Ministerial life.
And the great thing I remember was Gough would just come in every day and work like a student on his histories of the ancient world, on whatever it was that he was doing. And I was there meticulously scanning and transcribing and getting onto the Prime Ministerial archive. I was the first director of the Whitlam Institute.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:18] Speaker C: And it was a very, you know, it was a time we had Nicholas Whitlam Mark Latham, Jan Reid on the board. It was a pretty hairy period for me.
But I just love going into Hundred William street, working with Gough and just seeing him and his files were meticulous.
It was just absolute joy to go in there and work with him and see those filing cabinets all historically, with each speech, whether it be a Labour Party branch or whether it be a major speech or whether it be a United nations or a China minor speech, there they all were. And it was just like every day was fantastic. And I think within six months we had most of his speeches online. And now there's 35,000 items, I think, in the Whitlam Institute collection just from Gough.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Wow. Because it was begun. It was established in around 2000.
[00:08:17] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right, 2000. Around that time, yeah.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: And you were the head of it at the beginning?
[00:08:22] Speaker C: I was the inaugural head, yeah.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Wow.
[00:08:26] Speaker C: I mean, there's some things there, I think, that are still like. The site of the Whitlam Institute is also the site which I kind of. When I left the Whitlam Institute, I had some issues, I think, that I really needed to resolve, one of which was the Aboriginal history of the site.
It was the 1814 Macquarie Aboriginal School.
And the story for that of that has only just becoming known. Those children were the.
The children of the massacre people massacred at appin really in 1814. And that massacre really inaugurated. It was when Macquarie declared war on the Aboriginal people of Sydney and the troops went in and performed an absolute. It started the tide of massacres in Tasmania and across the country. And so there's that shadow over the Parramatta site which I really wanted to.
To sort of do a bit more work on, but really didn't know was it a. Was a female orphan. That's its most. That's its most notable.
But it was also the site. And that Aboriginal institution moved to Blacktown after that. But, you know, the other thing I would say, Jane, about Gough is what really blew me away was his role in the Second World War as a flight lieutenant navigator. And we did an exhibition.
One of the first exhibitions at the Whitlam Institute was his correspondence and his famous flight logs. He kept a log of every single flight he ever took in his life, really, but which began because he flew out of Hope Vale, Gove and Milangimbi to the Philippines on extremely dangerous bombing and missions to New guinea and the Philippines. And two or three years ago, I went up and worked as a teacher in the Aboriginal school at Milungimbi. And it's pretty much the same as it was in 1942. The Runway and the air and all of the. But there are still planes, wrecks. And you just imagine what it must have been like for Gough to be on those flights, you know, wondering whether you're gonna get home. Cause where exactly is Millingimbi is?
It's near Nullumbuy and Gove in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: Oh, okay, okay.
[00:10:56] Speaker C: It's a really remote area, but even the diesel cans that were marked U.S. army are still there in the bush up there. And it's just brought it back home, having that done that exhibition at the Whitlam Institute and then going to Milongimbi and seeing that it was pretty much unchanged from time. That Runway was the same. The wrecks of the planes that had crashed were there. There's even pictures of Gough at a memorial service up there for a couple of the airmen that went down at Ykala, I think. And he took a lot of notice of the Aboriginal people that I had become friends with by then.
And he was very aware of Gove and very aware of Yukala and very aware of Hopevale, which is where Noel Pearson's family comes from.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[00:11:48] Speaker C: In. In Cape York, in Queensland. So. Because he'd gone out of those. So the thing about him, he's a big man and he's. He had so many different sides to him.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Big man physically too.
[00:11:58] Speaker C: Big man physically. Lots of dimensions to him.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Yes. Well, look, so many of the policies that he introduced and before.
When he won government finally.
[00:12:10] Speaker C: Yeah, he.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: Before they were sworn in, did so much. He said, I'm not wasting a minute here. And I think it was him and one of his people that he made the front bench minister, just all of a sudden implemented so many policies.
[00:12:24] Speaker C: He's smart. Yeah, he's.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: And I mean, you look at the universal healthcare in Australia, you know, Medibank then, now Medicare, so many things. Free university, which it's not now, but I mean, he implemented all of that. And so many wonderful things. So many social reforms and one of them being the single mother's benefit, which freed up my mother from.
In the relation to being able to move on.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: I think it helped Anthony Albanese's mum too, of course.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And so many. So many parents, so many mothers. Absolutely. And the no fault divorce and so many amazing, wonderful things. And he ended the conscription with the Vietnam War. He ended up. He ended Australia's involvement with the Vietnam War. I mean, this man was just so prolific with the policies and I think.
[00:13:21] Speaker C: You know what I think as an 18 year old at that time and what I would really love 18 year olds today to know is there was an energy that took, went right through us like politics was not something that you kind of watched on the news, it was something that you felt a part of and there was change happening all the time. And that was what Gough brought. And I guess the big thing for the 50th anniversary is this. There's so many things that he did that are still in place that have not changed. And one of the things that I've been writing about lately is the honours system which Gough of course renovated. He was the one who brought in the Australian honour system and I think that's an example of something that needs now a whole lot of reform because it's just a symbol, you know, being an Order of Australia is a symbolic, you know, gesture but it doesn't create the kind of change and momentum that we really need in Australia. And I'm particularly concerned about the Aboriginal elders and community because I think they really need to be recognised but not just recognised with an Order of Australia but recognised with something like the Japanese have, which is national living treasures. When you get recognized as a national, there's a stipend for 10 years and there's a house and they support you. And my latest thinking is that we need to have a really strong stipend for national living treasures that goes for 10 years and it allows them to carry on with their work. So it's not just a symbolism like a king or a dame, but it is something really worthwhile. And that's the spirit of golf, you know, those are the spirit he would want us to be continually moving forward. Medicare too, you know, like thinking about how that can evolve now, the state systems.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: Let's include dental.
[00:15:21] Speaker C: Yeah, let's include dental.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: I'm sure he'd be behind that one.
[00:15:25] Speaker C: He would have been pushing that then.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Oh absolutely. And of course I didn't mention about his self determination for our indigenous community. He did so much with Lingari and I mean that momentous photo dropping the soil.
[00:15:40] Speaker C: Jan the Northern Territory land rights legislation which he virtually put into place at the time is still the strongest and best land rights legislation in the country.
And really the other states should look at that and hang their heads in shame. Thank God we've now got the treaty in Victoria. Yes, but really Gough went so far and he took the representative for the Milpram versus Nabalco case which was 1972. I think it was a failed case. Galro Yunupingu's father made a case against Nabalco annexing the land there. They lost that case, but the whole basis of their defence.
And the defence lawyer became the person who instigated the Northern Territory land rights. So it could never happen again. And it never has happened again in the territory. And so there you go. There's another thing that Gough has done.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: What do you think his reaction would have been with the result from the Voice referendum?
[00:16:44] Speaker C: He would be turning over in his grave, I think. But look, we move on. Maybe the best thing is to go straight to treaty and to go like a Canadian pathway.
Canada went province by province via things like their Medicare system, but also reconciliation. So Victoria set the standard now. So maybe we need to be moving treaty by treaty across the states.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: And maybe that's a stronger way to go. And maybe we'll think of the Voice as being a kind of rehearsal, an interesting rehearsal for something bigger, the treaty. Truth telling.
And you know, the Victorians have really. Jacinda Allen needs a big, you know, sort of tick for what she's done in Victoria, but so do the aboriginal elders of Victoria and the young ones. They have just stepped up and it's very inspiring for places like New South Wales and South Australia and Western Australia and Tasmania. So those states probably will move in the same way.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Oh, well, you. You can only think so, really. Cause it's the right thing to do, isn't it?
[00:17:52] Speaker C: It's totally thing to do. It's so over.
It's like a lot of things around the constitutional areas. It's so overdue.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. We'll be getting on to the constitution. So. Yeah, look. Huge, huge, massive. You can't have a big enough tick for Gough Whitlam. I think he is. So many people say he's the most influential Prime Minister in a positive sense that we've ever had.
I think he was the 21st prime minister.
And I just. I also remember, you know, the it's time slogan. You know, we had it all. We were on a main road and we had the it's time slogan all out the front. And I was 10 and I'm going, oh, Mum, why are we doing this? And she said, watch the tv, you know, and I think, I think it's time again. Do you feel Australia is in a kind of a rut at the moment? You know what I mean when I'm saying that? In relation to needing to overhaul. I mean, it was Socrates that said we need to change our constitution according to the Times.
And Australians are so averse to change in the Constitution, but we need to. I mean, you've got to remember how it was formed and let's get onto that. I mean, you know so much about that.
[00:19:09] Speaker C: Well, the person who I.
Has really inspired me lately, Jane, in the last 10 years is Andrew Inglis Clark, the great Tasmanian jurist. And look, I think Henry Reynolds and his father were the ones that first brought attention to Andrew Inglis Clark as being a great Tasmanian and Henry Reynolds being the historian of Aboriginal Australia and a prominent Australian historian.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:19:45] Speaker C: They've sort of really, you know, like, focused on Clark as being as important as Samuel Griffiths, you know, who was also seen to be one of the writers of the Constitution.
I've always thought Clark played a much bigger role than Griffiths. And in fact, I've done. I've argued that case in Queensland, the home of. And I went to Griffith University. So it was. And I think I won the argument pretty much because Clark had written a draft Constitution of Australia. He'd gone over to see Oliver Wendell Holmes in Boston and came back and came to the Sydney convention with that draft, and a lot of it didn't change. He was really the kind of major architect of it, especially our high Court, and the way in which there'd be checks of balances and the way the federal system would work and the extent to which America influenced our Westminster preconception of what government.
But Clark was more than that. Clark was more than anything that I think we've really contemplated. And the reason is a measure to me. I went over to Yale and did a whole lot of study on Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was Clark's mentor, and I realised he wasn't.
Holmes wasn't mentoring Clark, Clark was mentoring Holmes, who became the greatest jurist of his time in the United States Supreme Court. Wow.
And why? Because Clark, in Australia, a little colonial country, he'd been a politician, he'd gone and argued as a lawyer for the Tasmanian government in relation to the Privy Council in London, which was a big deal. And then he became Attorney General and then he became a judge. So the breadth of his experience was incredible. And Holmes admired Clark. And I think the letters that they had, you know, were scanty, but I imagine they are enough to show how much Clark had influenced Holmes and how much he'd thought about it.
Of course, Holmes was a veteran in the Civil War who became a judge and Clark absolutely idolised Holmes as well as a true patriot and democrat, you know, fighter for civil rights, fighter for the abolition of slavery and all these sorts of things. So there's this amazing relationship which. Yeah. And like I always say, our Constitution is so boring if you leave Clark.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Out, out. Look, reading about him from a lot of the material you sent me, I am just so in awe of him. And he managed to have seven children and be such a family man.
[00:22:34] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: And I walked past, I was recently in Hobart and walked past his home, Rosebank in Battery Point. It's gorgeous.
And wow. I mean, what an astounding person because he was really driven by his values, wasn't he?
[00:22:49] Speaker C: He really. Look, he was a true American mericaphile. He loved because the whaling ships would come to Hobart in those days and his father was a ship boatswain and he would fix up the, you know, the whaling ships that were battered by the Roaring Forties as they came over from Boston. Often in those days, Hobart would get news of civil war and events in America before London because the boats would come straight, you know, there and go whaling. So his family dinner table was really something which. Who discussed these values. And he had a group of men, men that met men and I don't think there were any women, I think. But anyway, he was also a suffragist, though he was very. On everything. He was, he was very good for his time.
We're talking 1880s, we're talking 1880s, 1900, I think, you know, around that period. He dies early, a sickly kind of a person, and never made the High Court, which was a terrible travesty given that he played such a role in the formation of the court, in the formation of the Constitution. But politics knocked him out and.
But he needs to come back for young people to understand our Constitution, what it is, what it's trying to do, you know, span two worlds. Westminster, London and America, Federalist system and all the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence and things like that. You need to understand Clark. And then suddenly the Constitution actually becomes quite interesting and you start thinking, oh, which way should we go? Should we be a little bit more towards Westminster or should we move towards American style pol? And that's always the balance with Australian.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Politics and getting over, getting onto the Republic. And you and I are die hard Republicans.
[00:24:52] Speaker C: As was Clark.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: As was Clark, yes. And here he was one of the main authors of the Constitution. How many people were involved in writing the Constitution, Peter?
[00:25:03] Speaker C: A lot of people. There were two or three conventions, you know, there's a cast of thousands that claim and probably so. But the real writer was Clark.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: Clark and then Samuel Griffith.
[00:25:16] Speaker C: Samuel Griffith was a great editorial, you know, consultant and there's a whole lot of stories. I wrote a book called the Great Constitutional Swindle. I was going to ask you about it. It was about how in effect, you know, Griffiths stole the publicity and he had all the reporters up on the Queensland yacht, the Lucinda.
When the Sydney convention was on, Clark had gone. Been sick and gone to his hotel, wasn't there. So Griffith pretty much presented the whole constitution as if it was his and.
[00:25:50] Speaker A: Oh, that's naughty.
[00:25:52] Speaker C: Look, you know, I don't. It wasn't. I think he really acknowledged Clark, but that was the perception and that's the way it was reported. And so other people got far more adulation than Clark ever did.
[00:26:04] Speaker A: Well, it just goes to show how much Clark wasn't involved in his ego because he didn't say hello, it was me that did the first major draft here. And you built on it.
He was such a.
Look, I'm so in awe of him, really reading about him.
So talking about the republican, you know, you're looking at the republican movement in America. A lot of Australians sometimes think, oh my God, if we become a republic, which rev. Which we need to become a republic because I believe three major things as you do. We're an independent country now in that Australia governs itself independently. However, we're still really tied to the monarchy in that King Charles is our head of state, which doesn't make any sense at all. And we need to totally change that and have an Australian or Australians representing the head of our state.
And I mean the travesty of justice against Whitlam, Gough Whitlam and his government back in 1975 when he was sacked by the then Governor General Sir John Kerr representing the Queen.
I mean, that is a perfect example of how this major wrongdoing can be done in our country. And it totally changed the course of our history. And Gough Whitlam was one of our best prime ministers. And secondly, why we need to become a republic. We're multicultural, so, so rich with our multicultural heritage and the way it is now. And also it reflects deep respect for our first nations people from the, from the horror that happened from the way we were colonised. Yeah, okay, you've only got to read a couple of research papers to see and books to see how horrendous that was for our indigenous community.
But some people say, oh well, hold on, if we become a republic, aren't we going to become like the American model? And look, my God, look what's happening over there now. And how is that, how can you explain that to them that it's going to be different.
[00:28:18] Speaker C: Well, I think what's really interesting. Evatt. H.V. evatt. Doc Evatt.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: And what was his role exactly, Peter, in relation to his prominence as an Australian? From 1930, I think, to 1960, he.
[00:28:33] Speaker C: Was the minister, he was the first President of the United nations, for one thing. He was the leader of the Labor Party, but he was a High Court judge in New South Wales, a great jurist and a brilliant jurist.
He argued in a book called the Royal Prerogative that Australia had gradually, like all the other dominions of England, attained independence without having had a revolution.
But a series of statutes gave us gradual independence. And really, the last. And, and in some ways the last thing we have to do is to, you know, end the governors and Governor General's role in our system of government.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: Yes, because getting onto your model, what you're proposing, Peter, let's hear it. The Australian Executive Council. How?
[00:29:24] Speaker C: Yeah, look, there currently is executive councils in every state and an executive council which advises the Governor General in Canberra. And so what I'm saying is we should have the Prime Minister and all the premiers and chief ministers forming one Australian Executive Council that oversees all the functions of what the Governor General does and what the governors do in the states.
What that would mean is that we didn't go to an American presidential model. In fact, we would stay closer to the idea of the Westminster system.
And the reason I think that's so important is because our Prime Minister and all our premiers are all elected by local, you know, electorates of maybe 50,000 people, and then they are elected by their peers who are all elected in a similar electorate. If we move to a presidential model and have an election, for example, for a president, it just. The whole thing goes out of balance.
We probably never would have a Trump, but we have a situation where one person potentially has a bigger mandate than any of our politicians across the country.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:30:39] Speaker C: So my solution to that is to say we need to have all our leaders in the Executive council taking over the jobs of the Governor General and the governors, and they. Then it balances because, you know, at the moment we've got three Conservative premiers and chief Ministers. We've got it. Yeah. We've got a Chief Minister, a Conservative Chief Minister. We've got six labor people. They have to get along in that council.
And I think that's a really positive thing to do. And it would change depending on the electoral relationships. But the other thing is the National Cabinet.
It's very complicated in some ways, this stuff. But Coag The Council of Australian Governments was meant to oversee the reforms in the states, but we're still 13 colonies. Effectively, we still have governments that are reflective more of those colonial, of those colonial structures than are reflective of the nation. If we get every reformer in the one leadership group, there's a chance that we can start to do big things like we can start to properly reform taxation across the whole country. We can do things like, you know, have a decent honour system. We can have one electoral day in May where all the elections, the local government, state government and the federal government have an election on that day. We can do what the Americans have tried to do, but we can do it in a way that suits us.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: And you were saying every four years.
[00:32:18] Speaker C: Every four years, yeah, we can start to coordinate things like that. So these are big reforms, but they're big reforms the country needs, I think, and it can't. We need to sort of shake up our complacency and we need, rather than just go into our shell and say it's not possible to change the constitution, I think we need to be able to convince Australians that we need a republic that's actually going to improve the country and be something substantial and something better than what we've had before.
And that's all the arguments that I make for an Australian Executive council being our collective head of state where no one person can dominate, where there's a lot of balances and forces to have to weigh up and we can actually start talking about whole of country, whole of government reforms.
Why doesn't it work at the moment, Jane? Because when we have COAC and when we have our national cabinet, the premiers bring all their bureaucrats in from every state and the last thing they're going to do is start rationalizing their areas of government.
They're actually going to start multiplying and pushing for their own interests. We need the leaders in a small group on their own and they need to be thinking about the national good and they need to be saying, no, we can't do this. And yes, I'll give up that.
I'll be Western Australia and I'll say, okay, if we do move the GST upwards, we'll even out the taxation collection and we will have a more equitable system across the whole board.
So these things, they're big national interest issues that kind of. Gough was the best at articulating and working on, and we just, we just really need these things. I think Albo's been a great Prime Minister and he's probably the most effective Politician of his generation, but he's a relationship man and I think we need to be prodding him with these big ideas and saying, no, it's not good enough to just have steady as she goes. We really need to be doing some.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Stuff because Australia is ready for some big ideas and big movements, isn't it? I mean, I'm really surprised that we have.
I want to see the criminal age increase to 14 across Australia.
[00:34:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: I mean, it's madness that it's age 10.
[00:34:45] Speaker C: That's a classic example of what I'm talking.
We need a group of leaders to say, let's put aside the, you know, the politics of this. We need to have a principled stand. What is the proper age for a child to be seen as a child and for an adult to be seen as an adult.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:09] Speaker C: And that stuff is what I think an Australian Executive Council could do. It's a head of state with a bit of guts, you know.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:35:19] Speaker C: A collective head of state with some guts and some capacity and some hope that we might get some changes across the whole of the country, not just federally or in a particular state.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: Exactly. And having those unified values right across each state. Because we had federation implemented in 1901 when the constitution was formally implemented. And I think a lot of states forget that we're a federation. And even the federal government, let's face it, it has. It has that's ultimate power, doesn't it, over the states and the territories. Really.
[00:35:58] Speaker C: I think we get in a box about these things, Jane. Like, I worked as a teacher in the Northern Territory for a year. That involves applying to the Northern Territory again to be registered as a teacher, as I was in New South Wales.
What the hell is that?
[00:36:14] Speaker A: That's nice.
[00:36:15] Speaker C: We apply for driver's licenses in every state.
[00:36:19] Speaker A: Oh, my God.
[00:36:20] Speaker C: There's all sorts of things like this. It's a reflection of. Of the fact that we were 13 colonies, we weren't unified. And Federation hasn't completed the job of figuring out what works best. Now, there are some things that. It's a fluke in a way. The federal government is so powerful no one knew that income tax, which they were given as part of the constitutional arrangements in 1901, would become the dominant area of taxation. So that gives them a big amount of sway, but it means they can and in a sense put a kind of even standard across the country. But payroll taxes, stamp duties, these things are all levied in the states, have distortionary economic impacts. If we had one GST that covered all of that revenue we could eliminate all those, you know, distortionary and regressive state taxes. We could do all sorts of things like that. And that's the kind of thing that I reckon we should be doing.
[00:37:23] Speaker A: Yeah, and increasing, putting a resource tax there for the people that are making billions of bucks from our resources.
[00:37:32] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean there are big challenges like that. And there are, for example, you know, we don't tax property enough. You know, we need to have superannuation is a really imbalanced situation.
I mean, I'm not saying this Executive Council is.
There's still gonna be politicians. Yeah, but they're gonna be politicians. And I was looking at what we've got in terms of the governors and the Governor Generals and I could list, read out the governors and Governor General. We've got Sam Mostin obviously as Governor General, but those are our heads of state, effectively.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: Can you explain, Peter, a head of State now at Governor General, what is their role? Some people get a bit confused about what exactly is their role. And when we hop over, say if we did hop over to the Australian Executive Council, you say that that'll take over the Governor General role.
So how will that do that? So how we stand now and how it will take over.
[00:38:37] Speaker C: So currently the Governor General and the governors are responsible for the formation of each Parliament, the calling of elections for Australian honours and for a range of other symbolic functions.
So it's currently being the Governor General and the governors are currently advised by these councils. What would happen with the Executive Council is that they'd be amalgamated into one group and the Prime Minister and the Premiers would collectively have responsibility for putting in place Parliament for calling elections, which I think should be happening every four years in a kind of coordinated way for state, Commonwealth and local governments.
So there wouldn't be such a fuss over when the elections are called. They would be more of a New South Wales has a mandatory four year term. The whole thing is that Australia across the whole board would start to move to these things. We'd only go to election on the second week of May. That's my proposal. Every year, every four years.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: Why the second week of May?
[00:39:48] Speaker C: Well, in America they go in the. I think it's the second week of November every four years. So our equivalent of, you know, spring and, or, you know, the end of summer is May and it's just a sort of Southern hemisphere version of.
And we'd all know we're going for election. None of this by, you know, all of the. I suppose there would still have to be by election from Time to time, but. But not so many elections, not so many election dates. We'd all go and vote on the same day for the Commonwealth, the state and the local government representatives.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: And fiscally that would make a lot.
[00:40:23] Speaker C: Of sense too, wouldn't it? That's huge amounts of money, as would abolishing our vice regal governors and governors general. It would save a huge amount. And my proposal is that we turn the government houses into places of, you know, like peace, reconciliation, multiculturalism.
They become people's houses and perhaps our, you know, our national treasures who are recognized in the new honor system be given the role of putting on events in the Governor, in the. In the former government houses on the behalf of indigenous people or multicultural events or peace.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:41:01] Speaker C: And it would become people's places rather than ornamental, you know, houses of the Queen or the King, you know, and back in Britain.
[00:41:11] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It is. It does beggars belief, really, that nowadays our head of state is, you know, the King now.
[00:41:21] Speaker C: Prince Charles, I mean, or King Charles.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: King Charles. Prince Charles.
[00:41:24] Speaker C: I still think, even going out to Long Grammar and Timber Top back in the day.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: Yes. Oh, my God, that's right. He came out here. But it does beg a belief. And so as a head of state, an Australian head of state, many Republicans here in Australia who support a Republican, as myself does we say that we need an Australian head of state to reflect our values here in Australia. Integrity, justice, unity.
So are you saying this Executive council, they would be upheld by those values? Yeah.
[00:42:01] Speaker C: Look, I don't want Shane Warne or Donald Trump as our president.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: And I think there's a Shane we won't be able to talk about.
[00:42:07] Speaker C: Well, no, I mean, you know, the equivalent of Shane.
[00:42:09] Speaker A: I know what you mean. Yeah.
[00:42:11] Speaker C: Like, I don't.
Demagogues and popular figures are not what we need. We need business to be done. And that's why I'm proposing that Australian collective head of state balanced by politics, balanced by regional state interests, balanced by the national interest.
It's where we need to go. It's where we should have gone a long time ago.
[00:42:34] Speaker A: So what do you think's been holding that back?
[00:42:36] Speaker C: Well, the, the constitutional change process has been quite tricky.
We didn't vote for the federal government to take responsibility for aviation in one referendum. And that is madness, you know, that is just pure madness. But there is an art on which, you know, how you do referendums and I think it's made everyone very, very cautious about even asking for. Look, if you look at what Anthony's been saying in the Last few days, Anthony Albanese, our Prime Minister, I should say, Prime Minister Albanese, how dare you respect Peter. But he's been saying, you only get one chance at a referendum if you're a Prime Minister. And I've had my chance.
And I just think that's accepting a kind of conservatism that is unnecessary. You have to make the case for a referendum and both sides of politics have to agree on the case you're gonna put to the Australian people. And we, I hate to say it, a really big mistake by going to the referendum when Peter Dutton didn't agree to it. I'm not saying that we needed to support Peter Dutton, but as soon as he was against that voice proposal, it should have been put off for another day. The fact is that wheels had gone too far down the road and it was very hard to turn back. And a lot of people were telling the Prime Minister, we can't turn back. And he accepted that and good on him and good on them. But in a referendum, you have to have both sides learned that lesson the extremely hard way. And so again, the reason why I would say this Executive Council's proposal is a good one is that it has. It's got things for both sides of politics. I think it is a national interest proposal.
It can bring the country together. It can create a more cohesive place.
[00:44:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that focus on unity. You know, we have to be unified.
Just going back to the.
I, I have an opinion about the needing bipartisanship. I mean, the sense is when you go to a referendum, the power is in the peoples. The people have the power. Right?
[00:44:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: And we cannot, I personally believe we can't wait for it to be bipartisan. Cause let's face it, some, some opposing parties will be totally against. The opposite party will be totally against what we're proposing. Sometimes it doesn't mean to say we've got to keep waiting for them to be on board because look at all the misinformation that we had and the disinformation we had with the voice referendum. We know who did it.
And unfortunately many people chose who were on the fence to listen to that.
And really I see it as a 40, 40% voted yes. So we only need a 10 or 15% more to get over the line.
And I believe that education and more education out there and people wanting to find out because we're in a cost of living crisis. And a lot of people were thinking, oh my God, you're putting this first before us. You know, we don't want to vote about this yet, or we're not ready to, or we feel like there's an importance on that rather than us.
So I think that if we position it as it's not a them and an us, it's not choosing that cause against your cause. I mean, we're supporting both initiatives. It's supporting the people in the cost of living crisis.
But also, we need to have a voice.
I personally still believe we need to have a voice in the constitution for our indigenous people.
But as what you're proposing, how will that be implemented in the constitution with the support for our first nations people in relation to a voice?
[00:46:41] Speaker C: Look, I'm. You know, this is an issue where I'm maybe a bit becoming conservative in my old age, but I think.
No, but I think it is important for 55% or 51% of the Australian population and a majority in a majority of states to change things about our constitution. In other words, it has to be seen to be a universally good idea. I think if we start to change that, it gets us into dangerous territory. And the reality is, if you want to be able to have that kind of majority, you do need both sides of Parliament on your side accepting the validity of your ideas. And look, where do I get that conservative? I get it from elders in the Aboriginal community who I've been really privileged to know in the last 25 years, you know, across the whole of a country.
[00:47:33] Speaker A: Course, you go up there yearly.
[00:47:35] Speaker C: I do go up to Arnhem Land and I'm part of the Gulpu community up there. I've been adopted in, and I have formal roles and so on.
[00:47:42] Speaker A: Gorgeous.
[00:47:43] Speaker C: And I love that relationship I have. But look, I'm not just talking about the Arnhem Land traditional community that I go to. I'm talking about indigenous leaders who I've seen, and Paul Briggs particularly is one of them in Victoria. And, you know, he has. Has been achieved extraordinary things in the most conservative electorate in the country. In Goulburn Valley, in Shepparton. He's achieved the Kiowla Institute. He's achieved this incredible football and netball club that won the Netball A grade women's premiership this year and hadn't been defeated in two years, but they're just. He's an inspiring person, but he struggles.
And he says to me, you know, sometimes the sons of the original kind of oppressors, if you want to call them that, of the graziers and so on, they can't accept us, but their grandchildren come and we greet them with open arms and it's about waiting sometimes for that sense to have a generational change. And that change then becomes something, a foundation that you can work on. Whereas if you're dealing with people who are really openly hostile and racist, it's very tricky to be able to achieve the things that you want. And as he says, the river is always the Murray river and the Goulburn river always flow through that country. And he says the Murray River's always flowing. The water's always flowing. Our time comes and we just have to be patient. And I think that's a wise thing. And I mean, there's an element of Anthony Albanese, what his views are now, but I guess I'm pushing him to say, come on, Anthony, we need to, we need to have a few ideas and push hard on some of these big issues in the spirit of golf as well.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. But just going back to the bipartisanship, we can have 51%. That's not bipartisan. We can still have enough votes to get a referendum over. And why do you think Australia, you look at Ireland, you know, they have a. Every referendum, probably every couple of years, two years, three years. I mean, I was reading, I think Switzerland had 11 referendums in one year. That's, I think, going overboard.
But why do you think Australians are so averse to having referendums?
[00:50:14] Speaker C: I don't think we're averse. I think politicians are adverse to being rejected and I think that is a big issue for our politics. But look at the difference. Ireland may not have had. We haven't had any revolutions. We haven't had. We've had. The Eureka Stockade was probably our most serious insurrection. If you look at Ireland and its history, my God, you know, like my great great grandmother was from County Mayo, sent to Port Arthur as a convict for stealing food for her children.
Brought my great great grandmother with her as a child.
And my God, that history is so profoundly challenging. And we in Australia haven't had that. And so when it comes to tick, yes or no in Australia, well, we haven't had very many life or death decisions to make. We haven't had that in. Maybe we're a little bit more conservative about just going with the status quo and maybe it's okay.
I think we're fast reaching the point where we just can't do that anymore. There's too many things that need to be done and we are getting a little bit complacent and we are thinking, we do accept things like why we've got driver's license being in every state, we've got teachers registration. We've got these huge bureaucracies at state levels, you know, which need to be rationalised and we need to start thinking about local government.
Local government is not even recognizing our constitution. It's the closest, you know, space of government to the people. It needs to have some secure funding and it needs to be able to make some decisions on behalf of communities. And we just don't have that in Australia.
The Americans would freak because, you know, their sheriffs, their education people are all elected at local government level. They just could not believe how centrally we govern ourselves at a community level. So we've got to recognise that's a big shortcoming of Australia. There is too much, there's too many fiefdoms at the central federal government level and at the stakeholder level. We need to be diversified, we need to be talking about rationalizing all these things and it is something that Albo in the past has really been passionate about. So you would think, come on, mate, come on, let's, you know, do these things and let's start to talk about them more openly.
[00:52:41] Speaker A: He needs to do a golf.
[00:52:42] Speaker C: He does, he needs to start. And I mean, you know, the productivity group that met the other day were, you know, they were starting to achieve that. But it's, you know, as we were talking about before Jane, before we really started, you know, as we were walking up to the podcast, you know, Anthony Albert is probably the most successful politician of our times.
He has the same group of people that have been around him since he was in university. They've followed him through and they are his kind of support group, his team. And I guess we need to shake things up a little bit. You know, he needs to shake up his own thoughts and start to, you know, think about the big ideas and the legacies that he really, the country needs. It's not about his, him, it's about what we really need as a country to start to achieve.
[00:53:33] Speaker A: Yes, because a good leader is somebody that doesn't think about, well, what's going to get the votes.
It is about what's right for the country, what's right for the nation. And going back about his team, I've met a number of them and they're a great team. Fantastic team, fantastic team.
So do you think just wanted to finally finish on this note. Australians really were such a.
Aside from our 65,000 year of our indigenous heritage, we're so young in many ways, aren't we, with our European heritage.
And yet we're sort of almost holding onto this colonial, the punitive way we were colonized.
And you look at the youth justice system, you look at our justice system, it is such a. I've had a few people say it's still such a penal colony in so many ways and we need to have humanity front and center and remember, that's what matters. Like coming back to Andrew Inglis Clark, he focused on all of those values, what's right for each person, what's right for humanity. Do you think we need to be really going back to his values? He certainly was a long way from a punitive thinking around colonisation. He was the opposite look, you know.
[00:54:56] Speaker C: To use him as an example and Evatt was another example that we've talked about earlier.
If he had been a high court judge like Oliver Wendell Holmes was in the United States, the country would not be the same as it is today. It would have changed dramatically. He was a Republican, you know, for one thing, and he would have pushed that Republican agenda as much as he could and he would have reformed a lot of things about our laws. We have had some great innovators and in different ways. But you know, there's an example, if it had have won the election in the 1950s, things would have changed. So we have a big change with Gough coming through and it's almost like series of revolutionary things happen.
Well, we're at that stage again where things haven't happened, you know, as much as we would have liked.
We still are struck with the, you know, the structures of the 13 colonies across the country.
[00:56:01] Speaker A: When you say 13, Peter. Because my understanding was there was the six states that went to federation, the original capital cities. Oh, okay.
[00:56:11] Speaker C: So the capital cities were the original colonies, you know, in Those settlements, the 13 settlements that became states, you know, we haven't.
They were the primary force for most of our history. They were the group that had to be convinced to federate.
But we really haven't started to talk about nationally how we operate. And that's the big challenge I think of the future is how do we rationalize all these different bureaucracies? How do we start to think about what the future looks for our grandkids and what kind of world they're going to have here. And, you know, it's just a whole different way, I think. Sort of getting out of our comfort zones.
[00:56:56] Speaker A: Yep, absolutely. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable for a period and then. And then that's moving the nation forward.
[00:57:03] Speaker C: I think that's, you know, to.
That's what The Americans said it would be uncomfortable when they declared independence from Britain, but people would get used to the young comfort and the great country would be born. And in a similar. The way Australia needs to do that with our current, we need to certainly replace the vice regal system as a minimum.
And we need to be starting to think about how we coordinate our leaders better across all of the tiers of government.
[00:57:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:31] Speaker A: And that Australian Executive council model that you've put forward sounds to me makes a hell of a lot of sense that needs to be considered. Can I just ask you, I normally ask all of my guests, is there something you'd like to say at the end that has really been at the forefront of your mind recently?
[00:57:53] Speaker C: Look, the forefront of my mind is in some ways, I'm so glad I got taken out of the bubble a little bit when I was around 50 years of age. And that was the time I left the Whitlam Institute and I really went back to the farm. But I also went back to Aboriginal Australia and really have worked, worked empowering Aboriginal communities ever since across the whole country. They have taught me so much, Jane. And they will be, you know, once we allow the Aboriginal elders and communities to start to thrive in this country, that will be a very important day for us. We will have come of age. We will start to find the spirit of the continent and we will start to have the benefits of this, their wisdom. And, you know, I was like you in a way saying, we're a young country. We're actually an old country. There's old wisdom here.
[00:58:52] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:58:53] Speaker C: And it's the envy of Europe, it's the envy of America, and it's the envy of the cultural institutions around the world that we have these people in our midst who can talk about, like my hometown of Nara in Shoalhaven High School, there's a mural of Camberwarra Mountain, which is just the mountain between Nara and Kangaroo Valley, as of volcano with cockatoos flying through white and coming out black. That's the story of the black cockatoo of Nara. That's how many countries in the world have got a story that goes back to the time of volcanoes and prehistoric animals.
But we do in every part of the country, if we embrace it and start to see it, that's where I think the spiritual sort of maturity of Australia will come and. And we'll become a much better place.
[00:59:46] Speaker A: Yep. That's a fantastic point to finish on. And I agree with you. Thank you, Peter. Thank you so much for your time today. I so appreciate your time and all of your experience and your expertise.
Wow. It has been a privilege. So thank you.
[01:00:01] Speaker C: Thank you very much, Jane.
[01:00:10] Speaker A: I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Professor Peter Botsman as much as I did. And until next time you join, we need to talk.
[01:00:19] Speaker B: Take good care of yourselves and each other.
[01:00:22] Speaker A: And remember, knowledge is power.
