Is, is there a growing push for that to happen among the general population?

Honestly, it's really hard to know, so I need to be very measured in what I say here.

Doing opinion polling in the middle of a war is difficult.

Um, you literally have millions of people, Ukrainians who are dispersed around the world, so it gets to questions about who can even vote in an election, and would you be polling the right people if you can go out and do the polling? So we honestly don't know a lot of that.

We know that the Trump administration has been concerned and has expressed concerns about corruption.

Um, so there are questions about who else wants this debate about the election or who else might want to destabilize Ukraine.

There's lots of factors here, which are not just is there some groundswell of Ukrainians asking for an election.

Can I infer from your previous answer that potentially Russia is sowing these seeds of doubt in Zelensky's leadership and would be pushing for an election because they wanna destabilize Ukraine from within?

Do you think there's a connection between this One Nation Party and the mega movement?

Yes, I think there absolutely is.

And I think that's driven by very deep undercurrents, to get back to that ocean metaphor, where we are seeing a world of much more intense economic competition because of the rise of China.

So you have a world where 8 billion people are competing for money and success and their future amongst these two superpowers.

And you've also seen the rise of technology, which is extremely disruptive on labor markets.

And we saw what one manufacturing rust belt did to American politics and the development of the Trump backlash and the MAGA movement.

And AI really risks creating a bunch of sectoral rust belts, including amongst white collar professions.

If we turn back to thinking about D.C., what do you think is something that people in D.C. should know about Australia or Australian politics at the moment?

What is the biggest story in Australian politics right now in that bunker? [laughs]

[laughs] It's got to be the breakdown of the two-party system.

We're really living in a world now of a five or a six-party system, and that's partly due to the rise of, uh, the populous nationalist right, our version of MAGA, uh, personified through the One Nation party.

Haven't had the election yet, um, that really calibrates what the five-party or six-party system looks like, but we're on the track.

Um, how do you think Trump has changed the way that Australia thinks about its relationship with the United States?

Uh, it definitely makes Australia more pragmatic, and realizes that because Trump is transactional, it, one, has to stump up some of the things that Trump wants.

But also, like a lot of other countries in Europe, Australia is investing more in itself so it's got more sovereign capability.

So to some extent, Trump is getting what he doesn't want, which is nations like Australia being more independent.

What is Politico Um, w-what is it doing that others don't? Like, what, what's its kind of, uh, reason for existence? And then maybe if you can tell us a little bit about your backstory and how you got to this point of being the, the Aus- you know, incoming Australian editor for Politico.

Yeah.

Uh, so Politico's turning 20 in three months' time, uh, and has been in Europe for 11 of those years now.

And so it's basically the, the insider's insider publication, and it becomes very interesting to lots of other people.

But instead of treating politics as something you write about for everybody, uh, we write about politics for the people who do politics, who live and breathe politics.

And it's open to anyone else to read, but it's not written for the anyone else, it's written for the people who have to do this for a living.

And that allows us to dig into some of the details and the juicy dynamics that, you know, might not be interesting or might go over the heads of other people who, who don't have to [chuckles] sort of do this from dawn to dusk.

It's a bit weird at the moment." Your observations on the, what's happening over there.

What are you going to do and what can we expect from the Canberra playbook that we can't get from The Guardian or the ABC or all the others?

And you hit the nail on the head.

It's literally crowded.

The department that runs the parliament keeps telling us there are no offices that we can have inside the press gallery, which turns out not to be true.

I've already found four empty offices, so I'm going to have a battle with them about that.

But you're right.

It is a literally crowded space up there.

Yeah.

What you're suggesting is a slightly different approach to getting into the nitty-gritty of it and being unapologetic about sometimes being a little bit dull, maybe.

It's okay to be a nerd.

And I don't want to say that it's boring and dull, but it's a mix of the vegetables and the dessert, is what I would say.

You can give people the tough stuff that they know they need, but that they don't really want to always eat.

And then you need to put some light and some fun into it as well.

And people think, people, I shouldn't use a term like that, we're all different.

But around Australia, many would say, well, Canberra's boring, Canberra's just politics.

I wonder what you've made of that.

What you're suggesting is a slightly different approach to getting into the nitty-gritty of it and being unapologetic about sometimes being a little bit dull, maybe.

It's okay to be a nerd.

And I don't want to say that it's boring and dull, but it's a mix of the vegetables and the dessert, is what I would say.

You can give people the tough stuff that they know they need, but that they don't really want to always eat.

And then you need to put some light and some fun into it as well.

And people think, people, I shouldn't use a term like that, we're all different.

But around Australia, many would say, well, Canberra's boring, Canberra's just politics.

I wonder what you've made of that.

Beyond labor rates, what are the other le- levers in cost plus GMP that move contractor margin? Insurance markup, shared savings clauses, contingency, fee base?

Yeah, yeah.

And, and again, we would use, um, the qual exhibits for a lot of these things in, as well, but, you know, um, if you can find a way, and a lot of companies do, to charge a margin on insurance, that's always a great profit center.

Um, and we can talk about a little bit more, but, uh, programs like SubGuard and CSIP, you know, your, your commercial general liability and bonds and stuff like that, you can always, you know, charge a margin for.

And again, you can just charge a, you know, a rate for it, which I'm sure a lot of people listening to this call already do.

Another thing was contractor contingency.

Well, obviously the biggest thing on the legal side is who controls it.

You said your current contractor wants to do a lump sum design build, closed book project, and it, quote-unquote, "drives you nuts." Why is that structure so dangerous for an owner on a big build, and what do you give up versus a cost plus GMP?

What was your favorite segment of that one?

It was always people having some little trauma to do with their rent, or sometimes very seriously being harassed in some way because it was also the Me Too era.

Um, but my favorite story was really when the European General Court decided to fine itself for basically failing to process a case for 26 months.

They admitted that for 26 months they did absolutely nothing with this case, and then it took them another two years to, to deal with it.

And I can't remember who was awarded all of this money, but I just thought it was so absurd because there's really not much to do in Luxembourg.

And people say Brussels is boring, but if anyone really thinks that, get yourself down to Luxembourg and then tell me what, what would you do in 26 months in Luxembourg, like, if not deal with your court case that was in front of you.

And that is changing the narrative.

And it's a real road to respectability in a sense, where I, I'm old enough or been around long enough to know, uh, when the Freedom Party in Austria first was brought into a coalition, and then people flipped the table here.

What do you think are the things we need to pick out?

Well, I'm very amused by the idea of mandatory work from home days after the last two years of debates of various leaders insisting we all get back to the office.

So I'm, I'm not saying that the EU was telling us to get back to the office, but it's a kind of hilarious full circle when you consider it in the broad context.

We've got lower or free public transport might be coming in in certain places.

The member states are getting nudged to do tax cuts on electricity and other clean technologies to get people to shift to those decentralized green options so there is no Strait of Hormuz problem next time round.

And then the biggest one of all is the EU wants to move forward on coordinated buying of gas because as we all know now, there aren't many gas reserves, and these high prices look set to stick around.

So time to get collective bargaining.

But that seems such a long way off that I think the criticism will be that that's not solving anything at the moment with this acute crisis of rising prices now that people see at the petrol pump.