Interview with academic Dr John Lee, senior consultant for the US Dept of Defense and former national security adviser to Australian Government.

Among other things we cover:

1. Australian treasurer Jim Chalmers upcoming trip to Beijing

2. What Australia's trade and investment relationship should be like with China

3. Ideology v culture in foreign policy

Regular catch up on contemporary issues between Jordan Knight, founder of Migration Watch Australia and Dan Ryan, Executive Director of The National Conservative Institute of Australia.

My guest today is John Roskam who is the the former long-time executive director and now senior fellow of the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA), a well-known centre-right think tank based in Melbourne, Australia. He writes a regular column for the Australian Financial Review, which he has done for over 20 years.

In this episode we discuss:

• How the philosophy of the Institute of Public Affairs has changed over the years and why it originally supported tariffs among other things
• His views on Australia's Federation and the "Australian Settlement" and whether the criticism from liberal free market types is justified
• Why he thinks the "Washington Consensus" has changed and what this means for the Canberra bipartisan consensus and how it might need to change going forward.
• His current views on foreign policy, immigration, trade and much, much more.

Interview with Gerard Rennick, Senator for the State of Queensland, Australia. Always interesting chatting to Gerard who is, whatever you may think about particular policy positions, a very authentic guy and has given a great deal of thought to where Australia is going.

We cover issues such as (a) how government decisions actually made both in Australia and internationally (b) what explains why governments across the world increasingly seem to move in lockstep (c) his criticism of the bipartisan consensus on trade, foreign policy, and immigration.

Interesting discussion/debate with Dr Zachary Gorman in-house professional historian at the Robert Menzies Institute in Melbourne. www.robertmenziesinstitute.org.au

We cover issues such as (a) how Australian Liberal Party different from British version (b) how Australian Liberal Party differs at all from other centre-right parties in other Anglo nations (c) whether many academic liberals have a spiteful view of the Australian Settlement and Australia history more generally and whether that is fair (d) whether liberalism can be seen as a destructive political philosophy and what restrictions can or should be placed on it.

Discussion with Prof Timothy Lynch, head of political science at the University of Melbourne. He writes on contemporary America and its intersections with Australian life.

Among other things we discuss:

• His recent article in The Australian and areas which touches on various "natcon" themes:
• We discuss where we agree American conservatism has changed (trade, foreign policy), important areas his article did not touch on e.g. immigration, and also whether there is much of a difference on social issues/culture war between JD Vance and Ronald Reagan https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/win-or-lose-vance-has-sparked-a-revolution-across-conservatism/news-story/813282f509ac255fa39562d5fa8cab95
• We also discuss his general views on foreign policy, the realism of Prof John Mersheimer, and how Prof Lynch's own views have changed
• We finish with some questions about Australian universities and liberalism generally and whether what and how we are teaching students today advances the interests of students and the West more generally

Dr. Samuel Gregg is the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is a moral philosopher who has written and spoken extensively on questions of ethics in public policy, jurisprudence, and bioethics. He has an MA in political philosophy from the University of Melbourne, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in moral philosophy from the University of Oxford.

He has written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, monetary theory and policy, and natural law theory. He is the author of seventeen books, including On Ordered Liberty (2003), The Commercial Society (2007), Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy (2010); Becoming Europe (2013); Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (2019); The Essential Natural Law (2021); and The Next American Economy: Nation, State and Markets in an Uncertain World (2022).

In this episode we discuss a variety of topics including:

• What should trade policy be towards China (both for America and Australia)?
• How the "Washington Consensus" on trade and other matters has changed since 2016
• American trade policy over the years and whether periods of high tariffs have been justified in the past

Stewart Paterson is an economist and banker and spent 25 years in capital markets as an equity researcher, strategist and fund manager. He has worked in London, Mumbai, Hong Kong and Singapore in senior roles with Credit Suisse, Credit Suisse First Boston, CLSA, among others. He is a senior research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation and author of "China, Trade & Power".

It was this book which calls for a more realist assessment of trade arrangements with China that caught my attention when I read it several years ago. In this episode we discuss:

• How his views on China trade and investment changes over the years
• What the view is like from London and how UK is in many ways behind Australia and the United States in its understanding of China and a reassessment of trade more generally
• What appropriate trading arrangements should be like with China going forward.