**check against delivery**
JOURNALIST: You've been up at that stage and you've also presumably watched US presidents at that stage. Did that speech surprise you?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, nothing really surprises you with Donald Trump. He is one of a kind, but it was not only very long, it was very eccentric. All of the discussion about the broken escalator and the teleprompter were a bit odd, and the savage attack on global warming, on the science about global warming, the savage attack on other countries about migration. Not everything he says is wrong. Interestingly, when I spoke to the UN, I think 2016, I made some points about controlling unauthorised migration, which, I guess overlapped a bit with what Trump said. Obviously, I was much more measured, but I did make the point that if you want to maintain support for a multicultural society and in your own country, you need to be able to control your borders. And so not everything Trump says is wrong.
JOURNALIST: I stood right by him when he went onto that escalator and he looked absolutely furious because basically, he and Melania had got onto it and then it immediately got stuck and he had to walk up. And as he walked up, people were saying, oh, he's fuming about all of that.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yes, generally it's better not to make that as obvious as he did, but there you go that’s him. One of the scarcest commodities in politics is authenticity. And Trump is very authentic. He gives the impression that he's saying what he thinks, that doesn't necessarily mean he'll think the same thing from one hour or one day to the next. But he comes across as authentic, and I think that's one of his political strengths.
JOURNALIST: Even though he's often authentically bad, is it better to be authentically bad than to be inauthentically good?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, that's a very good point. I think politically, you're better off being authentic, but if you are authentically wrong and authentically bad or crazy, ultimately, people won't vote for you. But inauthenticity and these politicians that sound like they've been to politician school and they're trying to be somebody else, are ultimately, people see through that. Particularly nowadays as politicians do so much media. Trump does more media than… he's done more media this year than the last three US presidents - you know, apart from himself - probably did in their whole terms. But, in a country like Australia or indeed in the UK, where you have to answer to question time in Parliament, you're constantly doing interviews and engaging with people. If you do sound like a political stiff, then people will see through it.
JOURNALIST: I just wonder, because I mean, I talked to one of these people today and they said, well, you know, it may have sounded like a very insular speech, a very nationalistic nativistic speech, but he was addressing his crowd at home. When you're on that stage, when you are on that stage, I mean, surely you're talking to the audience in front of you, not the audience, you know, in Kentucky or Milwaukee, in your case, it would have been, I don't know, New South Wales or the Hunter Valley, you know.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: All politics is local. And so every politician has got an eye on their domestic electorate. And Trump very much so. So yes, but obviously at the UN, you're seeking to engage a global audience. And look, I think Trump was seeking to engage them. He was telling them that, particularly the Europeans, that they're absolutely wrong on migration. So he was savage in his attack there. I mean, he's very much….he and Vance both are quite shamelessly intervening in politics in Europe…. it's perfectly clear that they support the nativist political movements in Europe, whether it's Farage in the UK or Marine La Pen in France or the AFD in Germany.
JOURNALIST: Well, Orban, of course, is the Prime Minister in Hungary, although without mentioning Orban by name.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yeah, yeah, the two countries that do, Orban in Hungary and Slovakia, which both are run by populist right-wing governments that would be seen as quite Trumpian.
JOURNALIST: But just on this point that he really did go for Europe, he went for the UK, he went for London, with stuff that wasn't true. I mean, it's suggesting to an audience potentially of millions that Sharia Law is coming in in London, for example.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Suggesting to an audience of billions.
JOURNALIST: But, you know, we have seen at the White House, European leader, after European leader, come in and, I mean, I think the word sycophantic fits, yeah? They have gone out of their way to suck up to Trump. And privately, their teams tell you it's because this is how he responds positively to things. And maybe afterwards, they get their support on Russia, which we will come back to. But just does this show that's sucking up to Trump doesn't work?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: But it absolutely doesn't work. And look, unlike most of the people who write about this, I've actually dealt with Trump. And I had a very good relationship with him, but I had a good relationship with him for one reason and one reason only. That I won his respect by standing up to him and having a blazing row with him at the beginning…[it was] the circumstances that caused that to happen, but it worked out to be very good because he is, you know, Trump is a strong man, he's a bully, and when he meets, encounters somebody who he can't bend to his will, he then negotiates and accommodates.
JOURNALIST: When you say you had a row with them, I'm trying to picture it in my mind, were you actually shouting at each other? I mean, to what level did you raise your voice?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: It was a telephone call, and the context was in January 2017, he hadn't been president for very long, I had done a deal with Barack Obama to resettle asylum seekers in the United States that we were not going to resettle in Australia. And in return, we were helping the Americans out with some asylum seeker issues in return. So it was a deal. When I say it was a deal, it was a contract, it was an agreement, signed sealed and delivered as it were. And Trump…was not going to honour that. And so we had a big row about it and I stood my ground and I said, you know, we have an agreement with the United States of America and we expect you to honour it. And he got very angry. I mean, a lot of it…I'm not revealing any secrets, you know, that most of the transcript of the call, not all of it thankfully
JOURNALIST: Which bit didn't they publish on the transcript?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: There were some classified….so, well, I shouldn't go into there was some things that were quite classified.
JOURNALIST: It' F bombers were dropped, some cuss words.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Whoever leaked it out of the White House, thankfully there were some redactions, I'm pleased to say.
JOURNALIST: I was just going to say, you say you've had a good relationship with him, but I think you've called him chaotic, rude, abusive, and erratic, and he's called you weak and ineffective. I mean, it doesn't sound like quite a great relationship.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, that's recently, but when I was in office, after that, we had a good transactional relationship. And I persuaded him not to impose tariffs on Australian steel and that aluminium, for example. Yeah, no, it was good. It was a very practical relationship. And interestingly, that post he had on Truth Social having a go at me was because he'd seen me on Bloomberg earlier this year doing an interview in which I'd been asked how China would react to the trade war. And I said they will take advantage of it. They’ll go on a charm offensive. They'll seek to be the reverse of Trump. They'll be consistent where he's erratic, they'll be respectful, where he's abusive and angry. And of course, that upset him, but in fact, it's exactly what's happened. So ,having said that, as they say the greater the truth, the greater the libel. So people are always upset when you tell them the truth.
JOURNALIST: It really struck me listening to the speech, which was more abrasive than any speech he'd ever given at the UN, and the bar for that is pretty high, to be honest. It struck me that what was once an aberration and ignited laughter in the room and smirks, you know, he is speaking to the gallery, even on the European politics, that we may have President Marine Le Pen in France based on an immigration ticket or Jordan Bardella after the next presidential election. The AFD is doing very well in Germany, much better than it did when Angela Merkel was in power. Nigel Farage in Britain, we've talked about. I mean, he is, you know, the stuff that he says today that sounds really offensive and abrasive often becomes tomorrow's reality. And do you think the world is sort of caught up with Trump's weird view of nativist view of politics?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, it's not entirely weird. I know that sounds odd. I don't want you to think I've suddenly become a Trumpist, but the bottom line, and I made this... - ,we've been of this view in Australia for a long time as you know - but the bottom line is, and I expressed this in my own address to the UN General Assembly back when I was PM, is that you have to control your own borders. Now, if you allow uncontrolled for what the public regard as uncontrolled migration, which is essentially people smugglers, asylum seekers just flooding across your borders, you fire up the populist right. It plays into the hands of a Trump. Trump would not have got elected if Biden had controlled the Southern border. For sure. It plays into the hands of Farage and Orban and the AFD and so forth. I mean, Angela Merkel is a great woman, great leader, but she made a colossal mistake in allowing a million refugees from the Syrian conflict zone to walk into Germany. A colossal mistake. I understand the empathy and the compassion, but it's a massive mistake.
JOURNALIST: I've heard you say on exactly that that perhaps that, for example, led to Brexit.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: It certainly contributed to Brexit. There's no doubt about that.
JOURNALIST: And that argument, you know, I can totally see that argument. The logic of that argument, but we also have a situation where Donald Trump was basically saying how outrageous it was that the UN itself would help these illegal aliens as they're coming across the border? You talk about compassion. There seems to be like the idea that people are actually seeking asylum, fleeing persecution, fleeing conflict. It's almost like we can't even have a conversation about that anymore.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, look….the approach we've taken in Australia. And I mean, I just, you know, I understand Australia is unique, we're an island, we've got a lot of ocean between us and everywhere else. So I'm not suggesting that everything we do can be easily done elsewhere. But we have a generous humanitarian programme, but we take the view that anyone who comes here as a refugee, comes here because they have been identified and selected and approved and given a visa. Okay? And I made this point to Trump years ago in that notorious call, I said to him: our position is that if there is a people smuggler with a boat full of Nobel Prize winners, they still won't get in. And because we've just learnt over the years that the only way you stop people smugglers is to deprive them of their product. You know, there's a lot of stuff that Trump says, that is just fiction, really, but at the heart of it, this point about controlling your own borders is really critical.
JOURNALIST: But they're also different groups of people, aren't there? I mean, in Britain, as a case in point, 40,000 people on average, roughly in the last few years, come over on small boats and 750,000 people are brought in in a controlled way through the official channels, and actually by kind of muddying the waters and blurring the lines between one small group that's got a very powerful visual impact because you have this idea of a kind of reverse Dunkirk of all these boats turning up, that's what gets people upset. And then you've got the other thing, which is actually quite official and above board, but still too many people are coming in.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, you're absolutely right. And can I just just endorse the point you're making? The problem you've got is that if you are not in control of your borders, even though the number that come in illegally without a visa is very small, it undermines the public acceptance of the larger number that come in with visas.
JOURNALIST: On that interesting point, actually, I was speaking to someone who's advised Biden on this very issue, Frank Sherry, and has been a lifelong kind of pro immigration campaigner here in the US, who's been advising in the UK and making really quite a similar point to yours, which is if you want the permission to be compassionate in a way, you also have to be, you know, quite tough when it comes to particular borders and particular the visuals of people being able to come in through the back door as people see it. One thing that really struck me in today's speeches, Donald Trump says one thing, so he really, really, really laid out an extraordinary attack on the UN in the hall. And then afterwards, he sits down with Anthony Guterres and he says the US is 100% behind the UN. On Russia, he criticizises European countries for selling oil, or sorry, buying oil from Russia, but then he comes out and he takes a much tougher stance. And I just want to ask you about that. Donald Trump has gone on Truth Social to say now Ukraine should not just win this war, but win back the territory that Russia has already started to take. How do you respond to that?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: I mean, if he has woken up to the fact that Vladimir Putin is not his friend, and that the only way to deal with this war is to support the victim and help push back against the aggressor, then that's very much to be welcomed. But he has had in the past, and I I've witnessed it firsthand, he has had in the past it's sort of fascination, affection for Putin. And he owns up to it himself, look at the red carpet welcome he gave him in Anchorage.
JOURNALIST: Was that a mistake in your opinion?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Of course it was, yeah, absolutely. The way for America to assist the end of the war in Ukraine is not to bully the weaker party Ukraine, the wrong party into submission. It is to use Americans' leverage, power, both economic and military, to force the Russians to back off. That's what they've got to do. And there's been this anxiety that this will trigger a nuclear war in Europe. I think it's pretty clear that's not going to happen. And Putin is pushing the edges of the envelope all the time. These overflights into Estonia and Poland are not accidents. They're pushing the envelope. And so it's important that Trump is unequivocally on the side of NATO.
JOURNALIST: Except he goes much further than any NATO leader other than him has gone today. You know, when we ask Keir Starmer about whether or not Ukraine should get back the territory that has been lost, he would always say it's up to Ukraine what happens next. Most people privately think it's unrealistic that, you know, Ukraine is going to be able to militarily push back.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Most people do, so I was surprised to read that, and it's quite at odds with everything the Americans have been saying to date. So there'll be a few heads spinning in Washington as well, Following the twists and turns of American policy on Truth Social is exhausting. But clearly, we've got to welcome the fact that there appears now to be some greater solidarity with Ukraine and if that is followed up with action, and remember what Trump said in his own speech: peace is not achieved by strongly worded letters, which he accused the UN of writing all the time, but rather by action. Well, he's action man. Now's the opportunity for him to do it.
JOURNALIST: What was interesting about the Truth Social was he talks about NATO as if he wasn't part of it. He was like, I'll give the weapons to NATO, do what you want with them.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Correct. I don't know. Look, it's hard to parse and rationalise all of this, but the direction of travel seems to be in a more promising direction than it was yesterday. But who knows where it will go tomorrow?
JOURNALIST: He went further than I'd ever heard him go before on climate, and he said some pretty outrageous stuff on climate in the past. He said it's a con. He said the carbon footprint is a hoax that's put out there by pretty evil people. He obviously has an obsession about wind power. drill baby drill we've heard before. You know, when we have these debates around net zero in the UK, we can at least tell ourselves our overall emissions are not a huge part of what's going on in the world. This is the second biggest emitter in the world. How worried were you by what you heard?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yeah, it was a very full-throated denunciation of the science of global warming. But, you know, with all due respects to Donald Trump, it really doesn't matter what he thinks about global warming any more than it matters what he thinks about gravity. Physics cannot be denied.
JOURNALIST: Yeah, but it matters in as much as if he's unwinding every bit of climate progress in the US.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, it absolutely matters in the US, but the reality is that I think the global trajectory towards clean energy will continue. The cheapest form of new generation of electricity is now, in virtually every market in the world, renewables: solar, followed by wind, backed up with pump hydro or batteries. That is the cheapest solution without regard to the carbon cost. I mean, nobody in Australia, for example, and we have a lot of coal, nobody in Australia would build a new coal fired power station regardless of what, you know, the commission's policies were. So I think that the tragedy of this is that he's essentially confirming and cementing the global leadership that China has on clean energy technologies. It's the leader on solar, it's the leader in wind, it's the leader with batteries, it's the leader with electrolyzers to make green hydrogen. And that is just going to become greater and greater. If the US thinks that it's going to build its golden age on burning fossil fuels, it will be out of step with the rest of the world. But you see Trump's confidence as such that he's quite prepared to say, I'm right and everybody else is wrong. I'm right, and all of those scientists are wrong.
JOURNALIST: And it's worth saying, you do have a stake in some of this.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: I do, absolutely, I'm a renewable energy developer. I've been involved with the industry and I've started some big energy clean energy projects when I was prime minister. But what I was simply going to say was, when you see the scale of the delegations there over 500 people, big delegations from China, India, all around the world, not so many Americans, to be fair, but the move to clean tech, to renewable energy is proceeding at an enormous pace. And nowhere more so than in China.
JOURNALIST: You don't know what Donald Trump's obsession from dealing with him, you don't know what his obsession about wind is about?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: I've got…he obviously doesn't like the look of them, wind turbines, but I always say, personally. I think they're very beautiful. But, they’re certainly much more attractive than a open cut coal mine or a coal-fired power station. And they don't pollute.
JOURNALIST: We know that Trump doesn't really believe in multinational institutions and the UN is top of the list, but giving that speech today, do you think he was actually trying to kill the organisation?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, he's not a believer in it, but Trump's view of the world is might is right, okay? And he makes no bones about that. The United Nations was founded to prevent might being right. It was a reaction to the horrors of the Second World War, and it was designed to ensure its best could be done by international agreement that the great will not be able to dominate the weak and trample on smaller country’s sovereignty as they see fit. But…that’s not Trump's view of the world. He makes no bones about that. This is a guy who's threatened Canada, tried to coerce Canada into being the 51st state, said that he will get Greenland, a territory of Denmark, one way or the other. He sees the world, I think, more in a spheres of influence, where his only counterparties are his equals in power, which are firstly China and to a lesser extent, Russia, although hopefully he's falling out of love with Vladimir.
But his views and his values are quite at odds with that that inspired the foundation of the United Nations. And look, the United Nations has plenty of faults and flaws, but we're certainly better off with it than without it. Because without it, you would have no global forum of that kind, and you would simply just have the rest of us struggling to survive, with all of the decisions in the world being taken by one or other of the superpowers.
JOURNALIST: Malcolm, I can see why you want to make middle powers great again, because you represent one, but we have no idea who's going to be running these middle powers in a few years' time, and whether their interest will be aligned with Donald Trump and might is right or not. Farage in the UK, possible, La Pen or Bardella in France. So, the middle power thing may have a very short shelf like.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: But you see, the problem is - let's assume you have a Marine La Pen or Jordan Bardella becomes president of France after Emmanuel Macron. Let's hope that somebody more centrist like Édouard Philippe. But let's say you do have a populist, they're still going to run into the same problem. They run into exactly the same problem. Because, Trump is not spreading an ideology. It's not an ideology that purports to be universal, like communism was, or indeed, liberalism, economic liberalism purports to be. This is his message: America First. And so whether you are the right wing or the left wing or the centrist president of France, you're still going to have a problem if the United States is run by somebody, whether it's Trump or a successor, whose view is that they will use whatever strength they have and whatever leverage they have over smaller countries to extract advantage from them to the benefit of the United States. In other words, if dependence becomes a vulnerability to be exploited, as opposed to something to be respected, then you're in trouble as a middle power, a smaller country, no matter the politics of your leader.
JOURNALIST: Just on what you were talking about there, and what France has been doing. Obviously, Emmanuel Macron has taken a huge lead here on recognizising Palestinian statehood. That has been quite eye opening to watch so many countries stand up to the US on that point. But one thing Donald Trump said, which it was not a nice thing to say, but I did wonder if there was some truth to it, was he was critical of the UN because essentially it's a talking shop. He basically said they write a strongly worded letter and that's as much as they could do. And Palestinian statehood being one example of it, isn't there some truth to the fact that it is a bit of a toothless organisation if it can't actually take action to change things in conflicts like that one?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, I think that there's quite a lot of truth in it. Firstly, it is a talking shop, but so is Parliament, so is the US Congress, so is a board of directors.
JOURNALIST: Fair enough, yeah, good point.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: But so what? I mean, the problem is that it does not have an army. It does not have the kinetic authority to enforce its decisions and the Security Council, which is the executive wing of the UN… the General Assembly is really only the advisory. The Security Council which can mobilise global action can only do so with the concurrence of all the permanent members. So any one of the five permanent members can veto action and in terms of any action that would be seen as adverse to Israel's interests, the United States has been a reliable veto there. And, they had the same problem in the Cold War. So there are plenty of flaws in the UN’s system of governance, but if the major powers are not prepared to work together, then it does, yes, its effect is very diminished.
JOURNALIST: What I don't get, Malcolm, is that he's so isolated now in his position on Israel, as is Israel itself, and he really, really wants that Nobel Peace Prize. All he has to do is rein in the Israeli Prime Minister. Tell him to stop doing what he's doing in Gaza. And he's the only one who can do that. Why on earth do you think he's not doing it?
MALCOLM TRUNBULL: There is a very strong political body / lobby of support in America for Israel.
JOURNALIST: It's divided. The so-called Jewish lobby is not a monolith. The people that are much more united in their attitudes towards Israel and what it's doing in Gaza are the Christian evangelicals.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: I agree, but nonetheless, there remains a lot of support, particularly on the right wing side of politics in America. But, Netanyahu who I know well, I think… the majority of Israelis now take this view, and certainly most of his military leadership apparently all take this view, that the continuation of this war in Gaza is not achieving any military objective and is doing untold damage at a huge level of human suffering to the people of Gaza, to the Palestinian people. I mean, it's the killing, the devastation, the starvation, it's horrific. And if you want to look at it from Israel's own point of view, Israel is more isolated, has fewer friends now than it did before. And there was a massive sympathy for Israel after October 7, but that has now been largely dissipated, and a very good old friend of mine in the United States, Dick Armitage, said this to me - he died recently sadly - but about a year or so ago Dick said…he said that his generation in America were solidly supportive of Israel. He said he didn't think his children's generation were, but he said he's absolutely convinced that his grandchildren's generation were not. And so if support from the United States is a key factor for Israel, which it always has been, if they have lost and are losing younger generations, then that is building up a huge problem for them, politically and strategically in the years to come. And I think that's where… Netanyahu's had some extraordinary triumphs, the action against Hezbollah, that various exploits have been considerable. I mean, they’re offset by the utter failure of October 7, of course, which at some point there'll be an inquiry into. But if in the long run you lose the support of American public opinion, then Israel would be very, very much diminished in terms of its ability to withstand its critics and opponents, both internationally and regionally.
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