Uh.

So I don't think you're on very strong ground on the podcast story.

Honestly, I, I sort of can't believe we're even having this conversation, but there you go.

One interesting thing that's occurred, uh, after the intervention of the former Japanese ambassador, who broke what had hitherto been a discrete diplomatic silence about the incident, subsequently, a diplomatic document from the current diplomatic infrastructure [laughs] in Japan was made public via a drop to some media outlets, saying that the issue had been beaten up and that it wasn't a significant diplomatic problem-

Mm.

But it seems like high risk for not certain return.

But I mean, this is the situation that political figures now find themselves in.

They don't have a ready-made national audience just waiting to hear the pearls drop from their lips, you know? They've gotta find voters and constituents and citizens wherever they're gathering.

I'll let Annabel take the conversation away.

I've got a question for you, though, about, um, about getting older because, you know, you've had a much more significant television career than I have, and I'm kind of a person who was a writer who then started doing television.

And I remember when I, um...

I think I took some long service leave about...

God, it was before my brother died.

It was, like, maybe about five or six years ago.

I took, like, six months off or something.

... because you're working as a team.

[laughs] One thing I read that you'd said about your kids, and I thought this was really beautiful, is that for you it's about you want to raise kind human beings.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Well, you know, we [sighs] when you've got kids, obviously as soon as you have one, you've got a, there's a new element of terror that's introduced to your life that would never go away, like, completely.

Like, I've gotta look after this person and get them through life.

And then y- you have...

And so tell me about James.

... a show loosely based around food, it's, it's one of life's great, uh, icebreakers, isn't it?

Well, the thing is, and you know, it's, it's a polite format as well.

I mean, every season there's people, guests who various people, you know, are furious about and, "Why, how could you sit down and eat with that person?" And, "How, how can you humanize this monster?" And so on.

But I do think, you know, the practice of sitting down and eating with somebody with whom you may not agree, but giving them the opportunity to speak in a courteous way, it, it, it can bring things out of people because they're not in a defensive crouch.

And so you can sometimes observe things about them that you might not have if you were kind of engaged in a classic kind of back-and-forth interrogation.

And I- But that's valuable for people to be able to see.

I mean, it's important to do the back and forth interrogations as well.

[laughs]

Mm

... as the French would say.

He's done all the chopping, and it's all sorted, ready to just put together.

The other thing about it, and the conversation that we had that day, and it was, it, we recorded between two sitting weeks after the budget, where he was absolutely getting kicked around like a footy on the budget.

And I must say, I mean, you know, um, sometimes when he's under pressure, you see him at press conferences, he can get a bit chippy.

And I thought, "Oh, am I gonna get chippy PM? That's gonna be tricky." But very, very relaxed.

Like super r- like you see him laugh a lot, and he's quite frank in his reflections about his career.

Like, just go through the sorts of ways he sees Howard, 'cause a lot has been written about how he has actually, weirdly, quite a lot of similarities with Howard.

... and that that's been detrimental to them.

I think it's useful to, hard as it is, just take the figure of Pauline Hanson out of this scenario.

Like, she's a very eye-catching figure.

She is, um, everybody's got a view.

If you took her out, like what is the Australian electorate responding to? Right now, it's coming off 20 years, nearly, of a revolving door of leadership ever since 2009.

So it's not really 20 years.

I can't add up.

He thinks that's a winner.