DAVID FRUM: Malcolm Turnbull, thank you so much for making time for The David Frum Show today.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, great to be with you, David.
DAVID FRUM: So let me begin with what I know has been one of the major themes of your political work since 2018, and that is your observation of a challenge that exists in Australia, and really in every English-speaking country and across the democratic world: this tension within the former right-of-centre between those who are business-minded and those who are more statist; between those who want to develop more cosmopolitan and modern values and those who look backward; those who integrate into the world and those who seek nationalism as a refuge from the world;and those who want to participate in a global democratic partnership, and those who reject those ideas. First, how do you describe what has happened? How do you explain it? And what are the stakes?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, I think much of what is going on, David, on the right of politics - and these terms, as we know, are very plastic - is not about conservatism at all. Donald Trump, for example, and MAGA are not conservatives. They are disruptors, they are radicals, revolutionaries if you like, populists, but they're certainly not conservatives in any meaningful sense.
I think what we've got is a bundle of things that have come together: resentment about cost of living, slower economic growth, people feeling that they're not getting ahead, feeling the system is not working for them. You've got people resentful about the pace of change. You see this obviously with immigration, and I'm not talking about illegal immigration here, I'm talking about legal, government-permitted immigration. A lot of people find that confronting, their societies are changing, and they're struggling with that change. You've seen the disruptions from globalisation, obviously a lot of manufacturing jobs, a lot of jobs of every description, have gone, and there'll be more to go too, I suspect, with AI. So we're living in an environment where the pace and scale of change is unprecedented, and I think that rocks people.
Now, at the same time, I'm about to do what Enoch Powell famously said politicians should never do, and blame the media, because, as he said, a politician who complains about the press is like a ship's captain who complains about the sea. But the reality is the media, and you and I know this having lived through it, has dramatically changed. We've gone from a world in which there was a relatively small number of curated platforms - newspapers with editors, radio stations and television stations with directors and producers - to this plethora, this multitude of voices, some of which are curated, many of which are not. And in a world where narrowcasting can actually be a successful business model, and not just in magazines, what you now get is this intense competition for attention. And of course the way people seek to achieve that, whether it's the automatic algorithms on the social media platforms, or it's the producers at Fox News, is by angertainment, by riling people up, by promoting division, by promoting animosity, by appealing to the worst angels of our nature. And I think all of that has created this toxic brew that has been devastating for what used to be called the centre-right of politics.
DAVID FRUM: Well, let's do a close-up on what happened in Australia. One of the issues that rocked your government was your attempt to reduce Australia's quite heavy taxation of enterprises, which you might have thought would be an issue that would unite all brands of centre-right people, and that led to a rupture in your coalition, where some in your coalition said: well, we're fine lowering taxes on smaller businesses that don't compete globally, but not on the big businesses that have to compete globally,and that are actually most exposed to the cost of capital and to capital competition.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: David, I don't think that's quite right, forgive me. I don't think that's right. Certainly there were people who had different views, but the big divisive issue on the right of politics when I was leading the Liberal Party - and I led the Liberal Party on two occasions, in opposition and in government - was our approach to climate change. I always took the view that it was prudent and rational to reduce emissions, that you had to accept the reality of climate science. Global warming was a fact, there's no point talking about whether you believed or disbelieved in it, it was physics. But you've seen this in the US in particular, this got turned into a culture war, and so instead of talking about these challenges in an objective, rational way, informed by engineering and economics, they're informed by ideology and idiocy.
So the bugbear I faced with the right, even though they didn't like the same-sex-marriage legalisation either, but 62% of the country voted for it, so it was a bit hard to argue with that politically, the thing that was always the destabilising issue was the approach to energy policy.
DAVID FRUM: And do you find the withdrawal of American leadership on that issue made your life more complicated?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yes, of course it has. Because Trump and Trumpism and MAGA-ism has its imitators everywhere around the world. At the last election here in Australia Peter Dutton, the Liberal leader who lost very badly, and lost his own seat, was, in different ways, effectively channeling Trump. It's very alluring, because the media is so global. We spend as much time, I'm sure Canadians feel the same way, even more so, following American politics as we do following our own. Rupert Murdoch's subscription television service here used to be called Sky News, now it's called News24 - it's effectively a local version of Fox now. So you get a globalisation of this sort of populism. These culture wars have gone global, and they cross-infect, particularly through the English-speaking world.
DAVID FRUM: They seem to be less successful outside the United States than they are inside the United States, at least from an electoral-politics point of view.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: My friend Mark Carney did - John Howard would have called it a Lazarus-with-a-triple-bypass resurrection - of Canada's Liberal Party, which of course is Canada's centre-left party, by campaigning against Trump. And Trump being Trumpy has not been an assistance here, but nonetheless these anti-science forces, this algorithmic cultivation of hatred and negativity that we're seeing now more than ever, is a challenge that I think has infected both sides of politics, but I think it's done more damage to the sensible right.
Let me give you a theory of the case, as someone who's led a centre-right party. My view, grounded in my own experience and observation of others, is that the centre-right's political equity is economic management. The left will generally be regarded as being more likely to do good things with health, even with education, with spending - the left will always be regarded as being more likely to spend more. And the right is often, in most countries, regarded as being a better bet on national security, but that's rarely an election issue. Sometimes it is, but the economy obviously always is. My attitude is that the more you get sidetracked down these culture-war issues, the more you lose the time and the attention on the one political equity you've got, and that's economic management. Jobs and growth is what centre-right politicians should be focused on.
DAVID FRUM: But centre-right politicians often nowadays seem to have lost interest in those issues - the economic management of the second Trump term has careened from higher tariffs, lower growth, lower employment, higher inflation. He's at last paying a political price for it. Other centre-right parties around the world seem to be interested in talking about immigration issues, issues of sexuality, race, of ethnic transition, that's what gets the activists excited, that's what the leaders respond to, and economic management goes out the window.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, that's all true, but let me just unpack a bit of that. The first thing you've got to remember about politics is that it's a relative business, it's like football. You may be playing in a team that is absolutely hopeless, can't catch, can't kick, terrible, but if the people you play on the weekend are even more hopeless than you, you'll win. Now, the Democrats in the last election in the United States gave it to Trump. Their failure to secure the southern border alone was just an extraordinary abdication of responsibility. One of the fundamental things people expect of their government is that it should be able to determine who goes in and out of their country. If you can't do that, you're failing in a very basic responsibility. And you're a better assessor of this than me, David, but I would think if that had been properly addressed, I suspect even with all the other problems they had, Trump wouldn't have been successful.
The other thing to remember, too, is Australia is a little bit different - we have compulsory voting, which means everyone has to turn up to the polling place and take a ballot paper. They can write a rude word on it, or not number all the squares and cast an informal vote if they like, but we get over 90% of people turning up to vote, and 97.5percent of every eligible Australian is on the roll. So this means you don't have to run off to the right to fire up your craziest activists, or the left for that matter, to get them out to vote - that may be a legitimate strategy in the US and many other places, but there's no point here, because they're going to vote anyway. So the electoral contest is focused at the centre, which is where it should be.
DAVID FRUM: Well, Australia is one of the most outward-facing economies in the world. You're one of the most urban societies in the world. So it's not going to work in Australia to say "let's put up a big fence around the country and keep out trade with everybody else," the way Americans may falsely imagine is plausible in the United States.So when Australians turn against the rest of the world, or when leaders and political entrepreneurs invite them to turn against the rest of the world, how does that resonate in a country that says "we can't make a living if we're not connected to the rest of the world"?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Protectionism has never, not in modern times anyway, has never had a good degree of political support here. Generally Australians understand free trade is good. Now, obviously attitudes were different decades ago, there was protectionism, but I think all of us pretty much in Australia are united in supporting free trade, fair trade. You have got to have fair trade. We do have laws that deal with dumping and so forth, but generally our barriers to trade, whether it's tariffs, are vanishingly small. We have many free trade agreements, my government kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership alive after Trump pulled out, for example, working with Shinzo Abe in particular to do that. Free trade is good for us, but I can understand the case they make in the US.
Now, you made a very good point, if I could just pick up on this, because I think it's really important one, particularly for an American and Canadian audience: you made the point that Australia is very urbanised, and that's true, we absolutely are, and we always have been, by the way. Now, if most of your population lives in big cities, you do have some natural protections against circumstances where a factory closes or an industry declines, versus a society where you have towns and cities dominated by one industry or one company. If you're in a big city and the plant or the business you're working in fails, that's very sad, people lose their jobs, but there's lots of other businesses, typically and you've got more options. If you're in a company town and the company fails, what do you do? So that sort of rust-belt phenomenon you see in the United States, that has caused so much of the alienation and unhappiness, and I think provided a lot of the groundswell for MAGA,that is not present in Australia to anything like the same extent.
DAVID FRUM: You have remained very active, or at least very vocal, in Australian politics as a voice for moderate conservatism since the end of your prime ministership, and you've gotten a lot of blowback for that. One of the things, as I read the commentary in Australian media - and again I'll take your warning about beware of the media…
MALCOLM TURNBULL: I'm an old journalist, by the way.
DAVID FRUM: Well then you know what you're talking about. People will say: this new kind of politics is more authoritarian, more statist, more xenophobic, more culturally reactionary is the wave of the future, and you, speaking for openness and enterprise and environmental responsibility and cultural modernism, that's the past, that's out of date, we're the new style. And I don't know if it's true in Australia, but certainly I notice in the United States the younger conservatives are the most reactionary. You have to talk to people who are quite old to find people who have a good word to say for more moderate views. The young are more extreme. Do we confront here something where this is the wave of the future, this is what the politics of the future will look like, for good or for ill?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: America is different, it is exceptional, it's so big and diverse. I think if you declare war on multiculturalism, if you like, and there is a populist leader here, Pauline Hanson, who's endeavouring to do that, and one of my Liberal predecessors, Tony Abbott, who was always much to the right of me in the Liberal Party, has recently been saying multiculturalism has failed and talking about Australia being a monoculture. Well, that's nonsense, right? You've got about 30% of all the people resident in Australia who were born overseas so we are a multicultural society. Our political identity is defined by adherence to a set of values, not by the colour of your skin or your ethnicity or your religion. And those people who try to take us back to to a more….Christian nationalists, for example, Christian nationalists are not Christian, there's nothing Christian about that… the people trying, in a multicultural society like Australia or the United States, to define the country as being of a particular race, white, for example, if their opponents are effective in their advocacy, they will be successful, because you're asking people, in effect, to reject the society in which they live, the reality in which they live.
DAVID FRUM: And yet, as you say that they're calling on people to reject reality that you're suggesting it's kind of a backward-looking kind of politics. And yet your critics would say, and my observation of the way Republican politics works suggests, that it's not backward-looking, it's a glimpse of what's to come, for good or for ill.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Let's hope it's not. We'll be a poorer, meaner world if we abandon love, if we abandon our commitment to all of our fellow citizens. Politicians who get to the top by dividing their country may be successful for a while, but they ultimately leave their country much worse off.
DAVID FRUM: It's 11 years since the start of your prime ministership, and the world has changed in many ways. As you evaluate the strength of I don't know what we call this alliance of nations, "the West" sort of doesn't quite work, because many of the most important allies are on the opposite side of the world from the United States and the European Union and Canada and Great Britain…but this coalition of nations led by the United States, which includes Australia, is one of the most militarily capable, includes Japan, has new and more complex relationships with India and Indonesia and even Vietnam… how do you do the balance sheet of the strength and cohesion of that group of nations facing China a decade or 11 years ago, as compared to now?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: The United States, not by accident or circumstance but by design, has become a less dependable ally. That's part of their policy. The United States, which at least used to claim that its international actions, the exertion of its power across the world, was to support democracy, to support democratic values, American values, you might say, no longer does that. Trump says might is right. Stephen Miller was channelling Thucydides' Melian Dialogue saying the strong always do what they want, we're a great power. Trump makes this very clear, there's no bones about it. So naturally America's allies are hedging. America still has…there’s an enormous amount of goodwill.. I think it would be impossible even for Donald Trump to torch all of the goodwill there is for the United States from its allies and friends, because - and you understand this very well as a Canadian -the pressure, the abuse, the threats that the United States has thrown at Canada is unbelievable stuff. If someone had written a political novel about an American president doing the things and saying the things about Canada that Donald Trump has said, it would have been regarded as a fantasy. But it's reality.
DAVID FRUM: And of course, if the president's going to vent his venom, Canada seems like the least plausible - it doesn't even seem like - that seems too crude a joke for a kind of cheap comedy movie, not an expensive one, you'd make them choose Venezuela or somebody more plausible. Canada - it's not interesting, but as you say, it's happened.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: It's like joking Australia declares war on New Zealand or something like that.
DAVID FRUM: But you talked about the reservoir of goodwill - Canada and Australia and Great Britain, and the countries liberated during World War II, there is a profound level of goodwill, and as you say, it's not so easily exhausted. That's not true in Vietnam, that's not true in Indonesia, that's not true in India, I don't think it's true in the Philippines, although the relationship has some warmth to it - these are much more transactional relationships. If might makes right, how mighty is the United States in 2026 compared to how mighty it was in 2015?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, certainly less mighty relative to China, that's clear, and that's because of the enormous growth in China's economic and military might so the relative position of the US and China has changed, and that would have happened whether Trump was president or not. But I think what Trump has done is unsettled so many friends and allies and of course countries that are not as close to the US as Australia and Canada and the Western Europeans have been. And with this very misguided conflict with Iran, he's demonstrated the limits of power, and of course reminded all of those allies in the Gulf that having American bases there has made them targets for Iran, rather than protecting them from Iran.
DAVID FRUM: Because when you go through the things that make the United States less mighty - Donald Trump chose this war with Iran, and I think by any measure he's lost. He did a lot of damage, I'm sure, to Iranian capabilities, but Iran has emerged from the situation as the formal and soon to be recognised owner of the Persian Gulf, recognised even by the United States; Iran is going to be tolling shipping in the Persian Gulf. Having lost this war, what does that do to American power in the Pacific?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: It clearly undermined the standing of the United States in the world. The inability of the United States to succeed in this conflict with Iran is remarkable. Who would have imagined? The Strait of Hormuz - the Iranians have threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz for years, I remember in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini took over, there was speculation and threats about this happening then, but it had remained open all those years.
But can I just say this, David - let me say something in praise of Mark Carney. The views he expressed in the speech in Davos about middle powers - and I know people are sceptical about that - are exactly the same points I've been making, and similar to points I made when I was Prime Minister. I used to talk a lot about sovereign autonomy then too, but in a different world. The reality is that we have to accept the world as it is. We all have a stake in what happens in Washington, but only the Americans have a vote.
In this environment, all countries, but particularly America's traditional allies have got to hedge. They've got to do more together, they've got to be more self-reliant. And to be frank, I think we are better allies if we are franker with the United States, if we are more self-reliant and if we are less dependent on them. I thought it was very interesting - and I've cited this in things I've written elsewhere -that J.D. Vance, last year, spoke about how much he admired Charles de Gaulle for insisting on the maintenance of French sovereignty in the 1950s and '60s, and in particular on maintaining French control of France's nuclear deterrent. Now, you can imagine, as he was saying this, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were disturbed, because de Gaulle had given them a lot of grief. But I think this is where we've got to be careful about letting emotions and resentments get in the way. Our relations with the US - Australia's, Canada's - go well beyond the personalities of one president or one prime minister, they're so deep and, I believe, enduring. But I think the message from all of this is that the sycophancy has to stop. We have to be more self-reliant, we have to be franker with the US, and we have to no longer think of the United States as the leader of the free world - it's the largest and most powerful democracy, obviously India's got a greater population - but we really have to chart our own futures, and do so recognising that our interests may not always be co-extensive with those of the US. We used to assume we had shared values and, by and large, shared interests. We're now in a situation where we cannot honestly say our political values are shared, at least by this administration entirely - and our interests very often are not, either.
DAVID FRUM: You wisely caution against letting emotion dictate policy, and you mentioned emotions of resentment and injury and insult, which are very real and from a Canadian point of view very real, for Australia too. But nostalgia is an emotion, outdated fondness is an emotion, awe and respect is an emotion. Maybe one of the things middle powers need to be less emotional about is this: the United States elected Trump twice. In between was Biden, who was more globally minded, but who was also almost as protectionist as Donald Trump, and failed the test of leadership on issues like Ukraine. Biden's approach always seemed to be: find out what the Ukrainians need, send them half, and hope that placates the friends of Ukraine without irritating the Russians too much. Under Biden, the United States' strategic position vis-à-vis China also deteriorated. Biden did not revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is a signal not just to Australia , not just to Japan, but again to those more transactional partners like Vietnam and Indonesia. So it's been ten years - worse under Trump, not so good under Biden, happened twice - any ally has to calculate: you could forgive Trump one, but Biden two, and then Trump two. This looks like a pattern, and a pattern you have to plan for.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: David, you're absolutely right. People who think that at the end of Trump's current term there will be a resumption of normal transmission overlook the fact that the new normal is more or less what we have at the moment: a much more self-interested United States, a more protectionist United States, and a United States that is not committed to the democratic values we've shared in the same way presidents of both stripes had been in years past.
DAVID FRUM: And a United States that, if it cannot beat Iran, probably cannot defend Taiwan.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: You don't have to take my word for it -Donald Trump has said more or less that himself; he gave an interview to Bloomberg, I think in 2024, in which he raised real doubts about whether it was possible. Think about a naval war in the Pacific. China has 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. In a naval war, let's say it ends up at a stalemate, or Taiwan remains autonomous and the Chinese haven't achieved their objective, but there will be a lot of warships sunk on both sides, obviously that's what happens. Which navy will be rebuilt sooner? Isn't it staggering that so much of the United States' munitions and magazine depth has been depleted so considerably from this conflict with Iran, which is not a conflict with a peer rival like China or Russia? For all the talk and confidence about American military power, it raises very real concerns, and of course you're seeing them raised in the United States. This is one of the reasons I've been a critic of the AUKUS arrangement. It's not being anti-American at all, my concern is that it's a really bad deal for Australia and we'll end up with very little out of it.
DAVID FRUM: AUKUS is an acronym for Australia, UK, US.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: It's a deal to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, naval nuclear propulsion, but all of it depends on the US industrial base, the British industrial base both of which are under enormous pressure and underperforming. It's a very foolish sacrifice of Australian sovereignty. You can be a sceptic about the middle-power thesis of Mark Carney, but what's the alternative? Is the alternative just to be a sycophantic cork bobbing along behind the United States as it weaves from one perceived act of self interest to another? The only alternative, difficult and complex and compromised though it may be, is to be more self-reliant and to work with other nations that have similar interests hence the middle-power thesis.
DAVID FRUM: Let me ask you about one last strategic question which Americans tend not to think of as a strategic question, and that's the issue of corruption we are seeing, in the second Trump administration - the first Trump administration was the most corrupt administration in American history, by far, but it was still visibility within the American tradition. We're talking millions, maybe even tens of millions of dollars, flowing where it shouldn't flow, but that's not unthinkable in the American context. What has happened in the second Trump term is nothing like anything in American history - it's nothing like the history of any democratic country. It can only be compared to a post-Soviet republic or post-colonial Africa. Australia has many very strict rules about campaign finance, it's a very clean country. As you view the United States as it is today, how does it affect your strategic thinking, to say the government of the United States seems to be auctioning itself off to secretive parties all over the world, in transactions that are not very legible but are highly suspicious, and that seem to be happening in front of all our eyes?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: All of this is a matter of real concern - obviously it's a concern to Americans. I was at a meeting recently in the States with a group of senior leaders from European companies, for the most part, and their big concern was that after the Trump administration there would be a reckoning, and that there would be people who'd engaged in corrupt activities would be brought to account. So it's something everyone has to think about.
DAVID FRUM: Were they frightened of that, or were they hoping for that?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: They were very apprehensive about that, and I thought that was a good thing, because the one part of American democracy that appears to have been reasonably resilient is the justice system. Because at the end of the day, probably the most important element in a democracy is the rule of law. A democracy that's just about the majority getting to run the government is not much of a democracy, because the majority can win the government and then bump off the minority. So the rule of law is absolutely fundamental, and I think Americans understand that, and this perceived assault on the rule of law will be the part of this era that sees, I think, the biggest reckoning when it comes to an end. Because ultimately, if you don't have the rule of law, you don't have the trust that the rule of law brings, and that trust is absolutely fundamental to the American economy, and every modern economy. You degrade that, and you're shooting yourself in the foot.Leaving aside all of the moral and ethical issues.
DAVID FRUM: You may be giving the United States' legal system a bigger compliment than it deserves. Maybe we need to disaggregate a little - it does seem to be true that the federal courts won't convict innocent people, and when they see a blatantly unconstitutional action, like the president imposing tariffs unilaterally, without the consent of Congress, in clear violation of the text of the Constitution which awards powers over tariffs and taxes to Congress, the courts will stop that. But we're seeing something else. When I wrote about the Trump presidency at the beginning, I quoted a line I heard on a visit to Hungary - Viktor Orbán's Hungary - in 2016: the most dangerous power in a modern bureaucratic state, where there are limits on what the government can do, is not that the justice system is abused to punish the innocent, but that the justice system is used to protect the guilty. And that does seem to be happening here. It turns out - no, that's not true, the system, yes, you can't send innocent people to prison so far, although there are innocent people who've been shot dead in the streets by agents of the state, with no consequences to agents of the state. But we are seeing extraordinary things happen that most Americans would have supposed the president and his government can't do, and they do it, and the courts can't do anything, and the Department of Justice won't do anything.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, David, I'm not arguing with you…it's not a good state of affairs, that's for sure. But to my relief, and I imagine to your relief too, the courts have remained for the most part - including judges who've been appointed by Republican and Trump administrations - resistant to what they see as abuses of power. There's so much wrong with the design of American democracy - the electoral system, the gerrymandering, the politicisation of the judiciary. Americans don't want to hear foreigners telling them what's wrong with their country, but look at the electoral system, look at the way you've got a two-party system entrenched - it's virtually impossible for independents to succeed. You've got voluntary voting, you've got a political culture that seems to say, for part of the polity, that it's OK to discourage people from voting, it's not made easy for people to vote. And then you have districts gerrymandered quite deliberately, so as to ensure only one party or the other can win, and then, surprise surprise, the only contest that matters is the primary and surprise surprise, people on the Democratic side win the primary by pivoting to the left, and on the Republican side by pivoting to the right, or to Trump. So the general election doesn't really matter, other than in a handful of districts. So you end up with a Congress that is much more polarised than the country. Whereas what is the point of a parliament? The whole point of a parliament is to bring people together so that they compromise in the centre, thats the whole point. Otherwise we just elect a dictator for four years, or ten years, or something, you wouldn't bother having a parliament. The polarisation driven by the electoral system is actually defeating the very purpose of having a parliamentary system in the first place.
DAVID FRUM: When you view the world from your region, does America seem as present to you as it did ten years ago, or does the United States feel farther away, and other places feel bigger and more important? From an Australian point of view, is India closer, China closer, Vietnam closer than it was? More interesting, more exciting, more important, more inescapable?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, economically, India and China are vastly more important than they were ten or twenty years ago -certainly twenty years ago, vastly more important. However, in terms of attention, in terms of share of mind, the United States is occupying almost everything. It's almost impossible not to be talking about US politics. I think Australians pay as much, if not more, attention to US politics than to our own politics, and I can only imagine it's even more so in Canada. The globalised media - we're an example of it - has meant that the US is dominating everybody's attention, it's sucking all the oxygen out of everywhere else. And of course it creates a competitive disadvantage, because China has become a much less open society in the last decade or so, and so the one thing you know is that Chinese leaders understand a lot more about how America works than American leaders understand about how China works.
DAVID FRUM: And they can do it both by open source and by clandestine means, of which there seem to be more and more.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Everyone can use clandestine means -everyone gets up to that sort of stuff, that's hardly unique.But America is so open and that openness is a strength, I think, who are we to decry speech and openness. But what it does mean is that America dominates the world's attention much more than it did a decade, let alone two decades ago, in my view.
DAVID FRUM: As you travel around your region, do people still take at all seriously the ideals of America, or does it seem now kind of a bitter mockery? When the United States has just marked its 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, do those words that once seemed so resonant still have power - or in Vietnam, in Indonesia, even in Australia, do people say "maybe that's who you were, but it's not who you are"? Or does any of that confidence in what America used to be still linger in the America of today?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look, everybody can distinguish between America and the American president or government for the time being. America is not defined by its president. I think the American ideals are resonant because they are human ideals - freedom, equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the values of the Declaration of Independence when he declared Vietnam independent after the Second World War, and he was hardly a capitalist, to say the least. So these values have been inspiring for 250 years, let's face it - so I think they'll remain inspiring, but I think confidence in the United States to live up to them and deliver on them has been undermined. People have always been cynical, people have always said, "the Americans talk about freedom and justice and democracy, but they're really in it for themselves". Well, Donald Trump, who is in many ways refreshingly honest, makes it very clear that this is all about American self-interest. That's his slogan, America First, so he makes no bones about that. But what that does mean is that people have to hedge, they have to make their own arrangements - if they're wise. Not everyone is doing that. I don't think Australia is doing enough, frankly. But if they're wise, they should be seeking to be more independent, more self-reliant. And whether America returns to a more conventional keel , than it's on at the moment, or not, I think we are all better friends of America, writ large, if we are more independent. My sincere conviction, born not just out of observation but out of real experience, is that as a foreign leader you are a better friend to America if you tell the truth, and a worse friend if you just join the line of back-slappers and sycophants.
DAVID FRUM: Malcolm Turnbull, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Thanks, David.
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