Boris Johnson delivers the 11th John Howard Lecture
Britain and Australia must stand up for the right of nations to choose their democratic destiny, says boris johnson as he delivers a passionate defence of western liberal democratic values at the 11th john howard lecture.
Watch the proceedings of the John Howard Lecture here
Our two countries, as far as I can see, are closer together than ever.
I'm proud of what I've done in my political career to bring that about. And I'm proud that - as a former rent-a-pom who struggled at the age of 18 to get the right work permit to go to a school in Mansfield in Victoria and drive tractors - I'm proud that we now have a free trade deal between the UK and Australia. A deal that makes it much easier for young Brits to come and work here and easier for talented Australians to go to the United Kingdom.
And I am glad that we have done something to repair the injustice of the early 1970s when Britain turned her back on Australian farmers and families who had fought alongside us in two world wars.
And I'm proud that free trade has been intensified, and that Marmite can compete fair and square with Vegemite, and Australian Four’n Twenty pies, filled with natural goodness of all kinds, can at last be sold at Fortnum and Mason's where they belong.
But there is so much more that we need to do and so much more that we can do, particularly in the field of services. And now that the UK has joined the CPTPP, I think the UK and Australia should be using this as a massive opportunity for us both to promote free trade and economic prosperity across the whole region.
And Scott, I'm of course proud of what we did with AUKUS. I remember the big three meeting at Carbis Bay in the summer of 2021. There was Scott Morrison and President Joe Biden. But Scott was the progenitor. It was his brainchild.
You took it to us, Scott, and I thank you and I congratulate you. Because it’s a great idea that the UK and Australia and the USA should embark on a new chapter in our long history, sharing the most sensitive of military secrets, trusting each other enough to do that, precisely because we share a community of values and ideals of freedom and democracy.
I'm delighted that this idea, born under the Liberals, has been taken up by the Labor Government. In spite of all the raucous squawkus from the anti-AUKUS caucus, and in spite of all the gilded plaster that fell off the ceiling of the Élysée Palace, the dust has thankfully settled.
We need AUKUS now more than ever. In fact, we need to go further, not just in building the new generation of submarines, the SSNRs, but developing the second pillar of AUKUS: the sharing of technology on AI, on quantum, on semiconductors.
Scott Morrison introduces Boris Johnson at the 11th John Howard Lecture
We should think how Australia and the UK can make AUKUS cohere with the UK's increased engagement with other friends and allies in the Pacific. You'll have noticed that under this government, the UK is tilting ever more towards the Indo-Pacific. Under Foreign Secretary Johnson - that was me - we opened new missions in Tonga and Samoa and Vanuatu.
We're now engaging in a big new strategic partnership with Korea, a partnership with Japan to build the new generation of future combat aircraft.
It’s an astonishing thing if you think about the historical implications of that; Mitsubishi and Rolls Royce working on the new generation of fighter planes, as well as an increased UK presence in the Pacific.
We need more AUKUS, because the threats are growing in this region. The world as a whole is becoming a darker and more dangerous place than it was 30 years ago. And that is because, as Scott has pointed out, 80 years after the end of the Second World War, an autocrat is trying to extinguish democracy in a sovereign European country, to wipe that country off the map politically, in total defiance of the wishes of its people. And we cannot allow that to happen.
This morning I met a group of Australian Ukrainians here in Sydney. And we spoke by FaceTime to some soldiers in Bakmut, which is the scene of very intense fighting right now.
I spoke to Commander Bereza to give him his call sign of the 22nd Mechanised Brigade and a couple of his officers. I could see them, hunched over the phone, at 3am Ukrainian time, awake in their dugout, freezing cold. I felt a kind of shame, embarrassment that here we were in the comfort, the ease of a Sydney hotel, and there they were, facing the horror of that Russian bombardment.
The Ukrainians have faced that horror for getting on to two years now. I thought about the awful reality of what is happening to that citizen army of patriotic fighters. The awful mutilations that they're suffering. The First World War injuries, both to body and to mind.
And yet these guys were smiling as they talked to me. They were joking, and they were beaming with pride because they were defending their country, fighting for their hearths and homes. I told them what I know and what I believe: that they will win. And that they must win, because those soldiers are fighting for all of us and for freedom everywhere.
John Howard interviews Boris Johnson at the 11th John Howard Lecture.
I want to thank the people of Australia for all the help that you've been giving. But I've got to tell you, I think there's more that can be done. And both our countries, both the UK and Australia can be giving more at this critical time. I say to Congress in the US that support for Ukraine is the most cost-effective investment you could imagine in the long-term security, not just of the Euro-Atlantic area, but of the world.
If we the collective West support our friends in Ukraine, we can help them to push Putin out of their country. After decades of being pushed around, the world's democracies will finally be sending a signal that we're willing to stand up for our values, for the cause of freedom.
That signal will be heard wherever an autocrat is meditating an attack on a neighbouring democracy. And that will be good news for peace around the world. It'll be good news for peace in the Straits of Taiwan. It'll be good news for peace between Venezuela and Guyana, by the way. It'll be good news for the world.
If we let Putin win, we will not only be ushering in a new and cruel and chauvinist tyranny in Ukraine, where journalists are shot as they're shot in Russia, and opposition politicians are poisoned as they are in Russia, we will be embarking on a new dark ages of geopolitics in which might is seen to be right, and the world's autocrats believe that they have the upper hand.
Putin is thrilled by the appalling events in Israel, and the inevitable distraction from Ukraine. He doesn’t admit that he’s thrilled but believe me, he relishes the distraction.
The Iranian regime rejoices at the atrocities committed by Hamas. Indeed, it's no coincidence that Iran is providing drones for Putin and providing funding and training for Hamas. Because what Western liberal democracies are up against is a great global continuum of evil. And we must prevail.
We've got to stamp out the anti Semitism that is sprouting again in Western capitals. Jewish kids once again, are afraid to take the bus to school. Middle class intellectuals tear down the posters of Jewish kids being held hostage by Hamas.
We must call that out for what it is: the emergence from beneath the collective floorboards of the ancient spore of anti Semitism, that lazy, horrible, diversionary tactic of the human race, to blame another group for your own failings. To blame Jewish people for things that are going wrong in your own state, in your own society. Instead, we should focus on the reality of what happened on October the 7th, which was that Israel suffered a disgusting and deliberate terrorist attack.
And whatever Israel's failings as a country, it is a democracy. And it is reasonable for a democracy to try to protect itself against terrorism.
We've got to stick up for these two democracies, Ukraine and Israel. Because the events of the last 20 years have reminded us what conservatives have known all along; that the Whig view of history isn't necessarily correct; it isn't a one-way ratchet towards progress. Things can go backwards and go dark again. And we're living in a time now when 70 percent of the world's population live under autocrats of one kind or another.
More than three decades after the end of the Cold War, we're wising up to the fact that democracy is far more fragile than we've realised.
Western liberal capitalist democracy is not actually appealing to everybody around the world in the way that it should. And if you go to the Middle East, as I often do, if you go to Sub Saharan Africa, you go to South Asia, you find a bizarre thing, that people are giving Putin far too much of the benefit of the doubt.
And you see crowds of young people in African countries actually waving the Russian flag, for reasons that I find absolutely unfathomable. But it's true, and they believe his propaganda about food prices, and they believe that it's somehow the fault of Ukraine rather than his invasion. And I just say to everybody in this, this great Liberal Party, we've got to fight this nonsense, this propaganda, this evil, together.
Together, the UK and Australia can help to fix the problems of the world. Many of these are exacerbated by the autocrats. We face a spike in energy prices. A lot of which has been driven by what Putin has done in Ukraine. So what do we do? We’ve got to solve it. We've got to come up with the long-term solutions.
I know that net-zero is not necessarily flavour of the month in every heart here in this room, to put it mildly. But I tell you something: I think that there are thousands, if not millions of good green jobs in those new technologies. And it's going to take sound free market principles and sound conservative management to make that happen.
We need the green solutions that will enable us to move past hydrocarbons. We’ll have gas in the transition in Australia as well as in the UK. But we need to power past coal one day. We need nuclear.
I'm proud to say the UK was the first country in the world to have a civilian nuclear reactor at Calder Hall in Cumberland. And yet we've allowed our nuclear industry to decay. And I'm afraid we've been overtaken not just by the French, which is bad enough, but by the Chinese. And that's why when I was Prime Minister, I green-lighted two big programs of investment in nuclear, not just the big-ticket reactors such as Hinkley or Sizewell but the small modular reactors.
One of the things about AUKUS is that we have the Rolls Royce power units for the submarines. They can be converted and deployed as small modular reactors.
It would be impertinent for me to comment on the debate in Australia. But since you invite me, I'll just say to all those involved in the debate on nuclear in Australia, don't be deterred by the superstitious, sandal wearing, salad eating, anti-nuclear brigade.
It's irrational. If you want a zero-carbon baseload, in the long term you're going to have to rely on something other than wind. You've got to have nuclear power as part of your mix. I think you can win that argument, and that the UK and Australia should be working on that project together.
Boris Johnson delivering the 11th John Howard Lecture.
The incredible thing about the UK and Australia is that across the spectrum, so many of the problems are ones that we have in common. The number one issue for all of us is the inability of people in their 20s and 30s to buy the homes that they need in the way that I could when I was leaving university.
Young people in the UK cannot afford to buy a place to live and, I gather, you have a housing problem even in Australia. You would have thought there was space here, but it’s a complicated thing. Frankly, I think some of the planning laws have become absolutely insane. We had a huge planning bill that I was knocking through, unfortunately some of the NIMBYs got a hold of it and took out some of the really good bits.
I'm trying to make some modest improvements to the place I've got, and you wouldn't believe the studies I have to commission into the possibility that newts might wish to inhabit certain portions of the area that is being dug up.
Not only have I had to commission studies into these non-existent, theoretical, abstract, hypothetical newts and what they might or might not do. I've had to build newt motels for the newts.
So that if the non-existent newts are sauntering, hypothetically, in their sort of imaginary way across the lawn they have a resting place if they want to take refuge from the builders.
The whole thing is insane. Every study into these hypothetical newts costs thousands and thousands of pounds. And it's crazy, and it's clogging up the planning system, it's clogging up development, and it's making it impossible for young people in my country, and I believe in your country, from finding somewhere to live.
There's another problem that the country is facing: mass migration. I think of immigration as something that you offer talented people a great and valuable thing. I'm a Reaganite: He took the view that America should open its arms to people of talent in the 1980s, and he didn't go far wrong with that.
But we've got a problem, which is that people who come legally to our country find their claim to sympathy and welcome being undermined by people who come illegally. And that's why the government at home is doing absolutely the right thing in pushing forward with our Rwanda policy.
I know that's right, because we have in this room a man who prevailed against all the doubters and all the legal contortionists, and who vindicated the principle, to quote John Howard: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”
I'm going to repeat that in the hope that it might be picked up by a British audience: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”
That's what we've got to do in the UK. We have a very difficult, very complicated legal situation, but we have to push on, even if it means disapplying parts of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Mass migration has been weaponised by the autocracies because they know that it's no skin off their nose.
If they foment instability somewhere around the world, and there's a mass exodus, where are those people going to go? Are they going to go to Russia? Are they going to go to China or to Iran or North Korea? No. They're going to come to the Western liberal democracies.
MRC Executive Director David Hughes (left) with the four former prime ministers who attended the 11th John Howard Lecture. L to R: John Key, John Howard, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison.
I conclude with this thought: In spite of all the difficulties that we face, all the problems in the world today, I think that the democracies will succeed. Because in the end, it's those liberal capitalist democracies that produce the great scientific breakthroughs. We produce the movies, we produce the music everybody wants to listen to.
We produce these things precisely because cities like Sydney and places like London are great bubbling cyclotrons of freedom and talented people bouncing around together, meeting each other and striking sparks off each other.
It's that freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, that is absolutely vital.
And so just one cautionary point, it's vital that we don't get into the habit of cancelling freedom of expression in the name of wokery. Why are ancient universities in my country not platforming J.K Rowling, who's taught more young people, or encouraged more young people to have a love of reading around the world than almost anybody I can think of? When all she's saying and thinking is what millions of other people are saying. Why are we bowdlerising the pages of Roald Dahl?
I talked about how we were not winning some of the arguments with the middle ground of the world. In the Middle East, in Africa, they look at this stuff, and Putin pushes it. And he says, look at what these guys say about JK Rowling. Look at what these guys say about the family. And they think we're a bit nuts, sometimes. We're losing the argument there. And we've just got to be a bit more confident about what we believe in and our values.
We should be proud of Western liberal capitalist democracy. It’s a fantastic thing. And we should be proud of our history. I don't know whether I can say this without risk of causing further diplomatic offence, but why on earth are we cancelling Australia Day in London?
Freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom of expression, academic freedom. That's the reason we have these great scientific breakthroughs.
Let me just ask you in conclusion, who in this room has had a vaccination for COVID?
Has everybody had a vaccination for COVID? You're amazing people. Okay, and I think it's a wonderful thing. How many in this thousand-strong audience had Sputnik? How many had Sinovac or Sinopharm? What did you notice about those? They came from the autocracies.
What do you notice about Pfizer or Moderna? They were made by Western pharmaceutical companies financed by Western banking systems in the liberal capitalist democracies. And what do you also notice about those vaccines? They worked. Unlike the ones produced by the autocracies.
We have, as a result of the freedoms I'm talking about, we have the high cards and we have the culture, broadly speaking. It's a massive generalisation, but broadly speaking, we have the culture that people aspire to, that they want to emulate.
And that will help us in the huge struggle that lies ahead and that is currently going on between the autocracies and the democracies.
More than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, after Fukuyama wrote his famous prophecy about the end of history, we've got to accept how fundamentally wrong that was. We are not going to be in a world where every country will want to be a democracy, will want to imitate us. We've just got to accept that isn't going to happen. And maybe in some ways it, we shouldn't try and encourage it to happen. Maybe it's not our business to try and impose our thinking on others.
But what we cannot accept at any price, is that the autocracies should have the right to prevent other free countries from choosing that democratic path. And above all, we cannot accept that they should use violence to do so.
Britain and Australia must stand up for the freedom of nations to choose their democratic destiny. And I have absolutely no doubt that together we will.
Thank you all very much for listening to me. Thank you.
This is an edited extract of the 11th John Howard Lecture delivered by former UK prime minister Boris Johnson in Sydney on December 13.