Malcolm Turnbull

Well, history would suggest that falling house prices, even if they take a sharp dive, doesn't automatically mean that we're in a recession.

Between 2017 and 2019, under the coalition governments of Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, Sydney house prices, which is Australia's hottest property market, fell around 15%.

Now, that wasn't due to interest rates at all.

It had nothing to do with that.

So that to us is a very concrete example at a kind of macro level of damage that this news organization has done.

I think you could also safely say that Turnbull, Malcolm Turnbull, lost the leadership of the Liberal Party not once, but twice over the issue.

And at both times, News Corp was involved in the process.

And we document the second case when he lost the prime ministership, where he had a conversation with Rupert Murdoch and Murdoch claimed that he was hands off and he was retired now and that he wasn't driving the coverage.

I don't think Lachlan's as committed to newspapers.

as his father and I think that probably could mean some sort of further shake up in the Australian press scene as well as in other markets.

Okay, now Malcolm Turnbull at your Melbourne launch, and I'm sorry if I've misquoted him, he suggested that news is now more like a drunk uncle at Christmas, best avoided and ignored.

And I think that he suggested that its power was waning, but...

And we've had support across the political spectrum for this.

We've also had two former prime ministers support it, Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull.

And we did polling that found that 71% of Australians supported this policy change, and that was regardless of voting preferences.

That's huge.

To this idea of performance politics, the apparently growing urge for politicians of all persuasions and levels of achievement to write books and give retrospective interviews in order to sort of shape and mold and burnish what might otherwise be an undistinguished record.

Uh, five prime ministers of the 2010s, for example, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, all left o-office unhappily, not of their own choosing.

Uh, then they and their former ministers, advisors, backbenchers, and journalists took to print and participation in documentaries in an attempt to cast their own version of truth for posterity.

Is this a noble urge to ensure [chuckles] history's record is true? And how did this trend to publish and polish become such an urge, uh, anyway? Josh Black has been a policy researcher and speechwriter and, uh, now lectures in Australian Political Studies, uh, in Canberra.

Hawke had some...

It's hard to g-think of other examples.

Perhaps Malcolm Turnbull's one, where people, before they were in parliament, always thought, "Well, one day you'll be in parliament, and you'll be prime minister." Uh, Hawke was seen by a h-lot of people as, as being on a course with destiny, wasn't he? Particularly by himself, probably.

[chuckles]

I'd like to also acknowledge that we meet on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

Mr. Keating has asked me to acknowledge that also in the audience is former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and issue a special welcome to him.

Grand Ambition, Paul Keating's Global Vision for Australia, was published just yesterday by Scribner Australia.

Tonight we're going to be hearing from the book's author, Professor James Curran, Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, a noted historian of and commentator on Australians' foreign relations.

away? Look, I think the key thing is the maintenance of Australian sovereignty.

That is, being in charge of ourselves, being able to do things ourselves.

This is something Malcolm Turnbull, Malcolm's here tonight, Malcolm and I share this view about sovereignty.

We've lost, in these arrangements with the Americans, we've lost, and the British, we've lost sovereignty, right? If the American Navy decided to have military engagements in East Asia with the Chinese or anyone else, they could decide it independently of us from bases in Australia.

combining a fervent desire to surrender to any allegedly progressive policy with a thuggish brand of internal politics that tries to remove any conservative thought from the party.

From Malcolm Turnbull's drive to eliminate climate sceptics from the party to Julian Leese's misguided attempts to voice the voice on the party to the various moderate, in quotes, attempts to deprive gender-critical women of a voice, the moderates are in effect just useful idiots.

But by always shying away from prosecuting a culture war, they ensured the left won it.

And in doing so, they helped nurture the remarkable rise of One Nation.

But then again, he, uh...

Well, made sure that Malcolm Turnbull put a no bonk, a bonk ban-

A bonk ban.

That's right