Malcolm Turnbull interview with Rafael Epstein ABC 774 ABC Melbourne Mornings

Malcolm Turnbull interview with Rafael Epstein ABC 774 ABC Melbourne Mornings 22/01/26 

LISTEN HERE: Turnbull says Coalition split a 'smouldering wreckage' - ABC listen

JOURNALIST: I want to bring in the former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. I want to get to Global Affairs soon. But Mr. Turnbull, good morning.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Good morning, how are you? 

JOURNALIST: Coalition break up? Response from you? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, it’s just making them more unelectable than they were before. It’s a failure of political management. Clearly, you can't unite and lead the country if you're divided internally. And it's a bad day for the Coalition I guess…well, it's no longer in existence. I'm sure it'll reform at some point. 

JOURNALIST: Oh you are? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yeah, I would think so. The bottom line is this: the Liberal Party to form government needs to have the National Party because it needs to have those regional seats. It also needs to win back seats in the city, which had been thought to be their biggest problem, but now they've lost the National Party. It's this process of fracturing on the centre right of politics - you've got fracturing to the right with the rise of Hanson, the Nats and the LNP in particular in Queensland have always been more concerned about the threat from the right than they are from the left. 

JOURNALIST: That could be the new coalition, now you could have a Nationals and One Nation coalition couldn’t you? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: The Nationals and One Nation see themselves as direct competitors. I mean anything is possible. I think that they see themselves as very direct competitors. So it's a mess. And of course then you've got what had been the most traditional safe urban Liberal seats for the most part, are now held by Teals…liberal independents. So…Raf you and I've talked about this for years, and this was something that I was always battling with when I was leader of the Liberal Party, which is there is this insurgent right wing which basically lives in that bubble of right wing media, mostly owned by Murdoch, and that has been pulling the Liberal and National parties further and further to this populist right, and egged on by people like Abbott and Credlin and so forth who every time they lose an election say it's because they weren’t right wing enough, and look what they’ve done. They’ve burnt the whole thing to the ground. 

JOURNALIST: Is it more the Liberals fault or the Nationals fault? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: It takes two to tango. You can… blame on both sides. I think a better way to manage that would have been, and I have a little bit of sympathy for Littleproud here, a better way to manage that would have been to say: let’s agree that the Nats can vote differently, particularly on guns. That's always going to be very much a regional issue. 

JOURNALIST: So a bit of mismanagement from Sussan Ley.

MALCOLM TURNBULL:  I think there is mismanagement on both sides, but I think the better way to handle it would have been for the two leaders to sit down and say: OK, our party rooms have got different perspectives, we want to be able to maintain faith with our own bases and our own supporters, but do that, but then remain united overall. Now that would be messy, but not nearly as messy as this, obviously. So, she has asserted her leadership, maybe she'll get marks for that. But I think when they survey the scene, it looks like just a smoldering wreckage, doesn't it? 

JOURNALIST: It does look like a smouldering wreckage. Malcolm Turnbull is who you are listening to. Former Liberal Prime Minister, head of a Coalition government. The Coalition has split.

Malcolm Turnbull I originally contacted you because I do think this is really worth noting that the world's elite are gathering in Davos in Switzerland. The Canadian Prime Minister, I’ll  play a little bit. He sort of had his Hugh Grant Love Actually moment. He's actually said that rules based international order is over. Things need to be done differently. I want to know what Malcolm Turnbull makes of it. Let's just hear a little bit of what Mark Carney said, the Canadian PM at Davos, he says the world order is changing for good:

“Stop invoking rules based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion”. 

Malcolm Turnbull, should we stop invoking the rules based international order? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I think Mark Carney is right. Yes, I guess we should. He also said in that excellent speech, and I'd encourage everybody to listen to it, it's on YouTube freely available, he says “nostalgia is not a strategy”. And he says we are living in a mighty is right world. I have been saying this for several years now about Trump. He does not share the values of any of his modern predecessors in the presidency. He views the world highly transactionally. And if you are integrated with the United States economically or you are dependent on the United States, Trump will use that as a vulnerability and exploit it. I hope that there aren't, but there may be some people who haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the world who'll say oh, that's terribly critical of Trump. It's not critical, it's true. And he doesn't make any bones about it. This is a guy who is at one level very, very honest. He says might is right…he who has the most gold makes the rules. That's the golden rule. And now the interesting thing though, and this is really the most important thing out of all of this Raf, is that many people, myself included, took the view, well I took the view when I was PM, to stand up to Trump and it worked very well. Bullies. The only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them. In his second term, everyone has been sucking up to him with the exception of the Chinese, and he had to back off there. With the exception of the Brazilians, he had to back off there. The Europeans rolled over on the trade and what did they get? They got threatened with military action to seize Greenland. 

Now Carney has stood up to him, Macron has stood up to him, and just today in the last few hours, we see that Trump has backed down. And in his speech he said: I won't use force, and he's backed away from the tariffs. So the bottom line is: Carney's speech I think is on absolute point. Anthony Albanese should give the same speech because basically the message is: we will not be bullied, we will maintain our sovereignty and as a middle power, we will work with other middle powers to stand up to the bully. Because again, Carney says you do not want to be, and you can't as a middle power be, engaging in bilateral negotiations with a superpower, because they’ll overwhelm you. We've got to work together. I wrote a long piece in Foreign Affairs, the American Foreign Policy journal nearly a year ago, but making exactly this point. But this is the message…

JOURNALIST: Mr Turnbull can I go over something you said. Alot of people criticise Donald Trump, you mentioned you wrote the article, but how significant is it that a sitting Prime Minister who shares a border with America, how significant is his speech? And you also said you wanted our Prime Minister to make the same speech, I want you to tell me how significant you think Carney’s speech is and whether or not you think Albanese will say something similar? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I think Carney’s speech is one of the most important speeches made in current times, in the last few years, certainly the most important speech since Trump became President for the second time. And you're right, Canada's economy had become completely integrated with the United States and they had a Free Trade Agreement and so forth. Trump is boasting about how his tariffs, his massive tariffs he imposed on Canada, have resulted in Canadian car factories closing and the manufacturing being moved back across the US border. Because in the car industry, between Michigan and Ontario, it was essentially like between NSW and Victoria, the border was irrelevant. So there are thousands of Canadians losing jobs and Trump says: yes, that's great, America First. And if you Canadians don't like it, you can become the 51st state…

JOURNALIST: Do you think Albo will do something similar? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, Albo…we haven't had the same economic impact. So there's not the same sort of urgency, I suppose from an economic point of view. But I think the big problem that Albo faces and I don't know whether he's going to do this, but he should…he thing that he has got to confront is that because he adopted the terrible AUKUS policy of Morrison’s, and that was just trying to avoid being politically wedged, we are at the moment, as Australians in Australia, vastly more dependent on the United States than we've ever been right at the time when the United States is avowedly less dependable, less reliable and more likely to exploit dependency.

JOURNALIST: So we are more dependent on them when they are at their least reliable. 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Correct. And it's not just least reliable in the sense that maybe won't turn up when needed, but least reliable in a sense of using dependency as a lever to extract other advantages. And you've seen this again and again with Trump and again, he makes no bones about it. So… Carney's speech is absolutely the key document here, the key contribution, because he was saying you've gotta be more resilient and self-reliant. 

JOURNALIST: I want to ask about one of the central things he said, Malcolm Turnbull is with you, the former Prime Minister…The Canadian Prime Minister says it's a rupture in the global order. Malcolm Turnbull says it's the most significant speech since Trump got back in again. The Coalition's falling to pieces. I don't know where this leaves all of us. One thing I wanted to ask you Malcolm Turnbull, because Richard Marles, the Defence Minister…Penny Wong.. the Prime Minister, they all talk about the rules based order a lot. Mark Carney's basically saying it's over. If I'm sitting here in Melbourne, is that just a conversation about things politicians say, or is that something that should scare me? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Oh, I guess it depends how easily scared you are. I think you should be alert, not alarmed to quote John Howard. The reality is that after the Second World War…

JOURNALIST: Does it scare you? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, it doesn't. I'm not an easily scared person, but I am very alarmed about it, I'm very alert to it, very concerned about it. Let me just back this in a little bit. So after the Second World War, all of the institutions that were set up under American leadership, in particular the United Nations, were based on the premise - read the UN Charter, you can see that's what it is, what it says - that might is not right, and that states autonomy and sovereignty should be respected. In other words, having gone through that terrible war, we didn't want to live in a world where the strong could do whatever they wanted and the weak had to just cop it sweet and suffer as they must, as they say. And… this is when you talk about the rules based order, that's basically what you're talking about. Now, that is now over in the sense that the United States, the guarantor of it, the creator of it, basically says we are strong, we will do whatever we like. And if you look at Stephen Miller, who's the Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House and probably the single most influential intellectual contribution to the White House, Stephen Miller said exactly this. He said: we are a great power, we do what we like, no one can stand up to us. And, this is something we have been opposing when we accuse Russia or China of having these hegemonic attitudes. Trump's language about Greenland, let alone Canada, is not that different to the way Putin has spoken about Ukraine. 

Now, thankfully, Trump….sanity or reason has finally prevailed to the extent that Trump is no longer threatening military force to take Greenland. But you can see his view of the world is not that that we have, nor that which his presidential predecessors have had, in modern times. And so we're dealing with a very different America and I think a lot of people in government, perhaps all of us, have sort of a cognitive dissonance problem here on the one 1/2 of our brain is recognizing the reality. The other half is saying no, no, things are going to go back to normal, everything's OK, it's still the old, good old USA. Well, I'm afraid it isn't. And even if it does go back, hopefully it does, but we cannot rely on that. And again, quoting Carney, nostalgia is not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy. We've got to deal with the world as it is. So I've given the biggest, biggest plug for a Canadian Prime Minister's speech ever given on radio but I think everyone should read it, particularly Albo, he should watch it twice!