Address to mark 25 years of the Australian Financial Review’s Power Issue
Power is ephemeral, not chimerical There aren’t other occasions I can think of where a perennial silver medallist like me is asked to give the dinner speech. Imagine my delight then, and my surprise, after multiple second places, and a fifth‑placed finish in 2024 – not that that still annoys me! – to be asked to say a few words to mark this occasion. James and Matthew, I’m grateful for the invitation and for the introduction, to which I add my own acknowledgement of country and my own thanks to everyone here tonight to mark this important anniversary of the Power Issue.
I appreciate it for all the usual reasons: the chance to catch up with many of you; the opportunity to say a few words; but also on this occasion to step back and try and make sense of the big moment we’re in, a quarter century of Power Issues deep. In retrospect we can now see what a remarkable project of national historiography the Power Issue has been. Its 25 years have been bookended by war.
The first one was published just weeks after 9/11 at the very beginning of what became the War on Terror. This one comes during 2 major conflicts, in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, both dragging out and dragging on much longer than was expected when the first shots were fired. In between, a global financial crisis, a major pandemic, trade wars.
And now accelerating change: an energy transition, a technological revolution, industrial and demographic transformations, a world fragmenting as the calm of the 90s gave way to the chaos and crises of the 2000s. Each of these changes and challenges the key constituent parts of yesterday’s Intergenerational Report, covered extensively today. And in each instance tracked by the AFR and by the Magazine, mirrored in one way or another in the Power Issue each year.
The modern history of our country, of any country, is inevitably a history of power – how, why and where it’s exercised and to what end. That’s the other reason I was pleased to accept tonight’s invitation, because I’ve always been fascinated by power and its purpose. I’ve been asked to talk about this in personal terms tonight, which seems a bit indulgent, but let me give it a go en route to some other bigger, more important reflections.
My obsession begins in Logan City, in the outer suburbs to the south of Brisbane, raised in a non‑political family to believe that power always lived somewhere else. That it was exercised by others, for others. That it was imposed on you, not by you.
As Treasurer there are still days where that seems true. But back then, 2 people convinced me otherwise: one called Norbert; the other, Paul. Norbert was my teacher, he’d fled East Germany before the Wall went up, got to Australia via Papua New Guinea and found his way into the catholic school system in Brisbane.
He taught me modern history. But the most important thing he taught me was that power could be exercised by someone like me, from suburbs like mine – That it was possible to win and wield power on behalf of people and places familiar to me, not foreign to me. He planted a seed and he watered it with current affairs, with history and with biography and that’s really how I came across Paul.
You all know the story of Paul Keating discovering Winston Churchill, it’s really well‑told including at the start of James Curran’s new book. You’ve heard Paul recall as a youngster thinking ‘if that’s the game Churchill was in, it’s the game I want to be in.’ It was similar for me. I read the Gordon book first, then Kelly’s End of Certainty , both borrowed from the Springwood library.
I knew if that’s the game Paul Keating was in, it’s the game I wanted to be in. And by the time I was thinking, teaching and writing as a postgraduate student at the ANU, I chose Paul and the exercise of prime ministerial power as my subject. In fact, I began working on that just before the first Power Issue was published.
I tried for 2 years to interview the Great Man and when he finally relented, the 15 minutes I had in his diary became 3 hours. It began with him asking why I was wasting my time studying power when I could be exercising it instead. Now, as cutting as this seems now to remember it, it wasn’t as blunt as his response to the AFR’s request that he join the Power Issue selection panel in 2003.
When he said that ‘in a lifetime of lows’ he could think of nothing worse than being on the power panel! Pretty funny, but not very fair! Not fair to the panel members or to their near‑impossible task.
Trying to make a list or lists which do justice to the power structures of this country against a backdrop of the biggest shifts and the most consequential shocks. It’s a task that has occupied some of the best political minds both here and abroad, recently and not so recently as well. In fact, Churchill himself gave it a go – publishing a Power Issue of sorts almost a century ago, called Great Contemporaries It was a collection of essays focusing on the leading political and cultural figures of his day, their strengths and their weaknesses.
Churchill’s list perfectly captured the challenge that today’s panel faces too: things can change so quickly, so the rankings must change too. Within 3 years of publishing the 1939 edition of Great Contemporaries , Churchill was not a backbench historian but the Prime Minister of the UK – In subsequent editions his very complimentary essay on Trotsky had to be cut to please his new ally, Stalin – And his very critical essay on FDR also had to be cut to please his other new ally – FDR!
Churchill’s power list had to be rewritten under circumstances slightly more dramatic than the AFR editors scrambling to redo not one but 2 editions in 2015 and 2018 after spills upended both lists, just before publication. So, I was flicking back through a few old hard copies in the study at home, and here are some of the conclusions I’d draw. When the Power Issue began, you could point to power, you could point to the cabinet rooms, boardrooms, peak groups and editorial suites where it lived.
But now, more than in 2001, it also lives in the places we cannot see. In the server clouds and algorithms – And especially right now, in global bond markets. In the last few years, we have seen rising long‑term yields steadily push up the cost of new debt – including the cost of refinancing the pile of debt which doubled before the pandemic, while rates were much lower.
The causes are mostly well known. Higher global inflation following COVID and hawkish central banks spurred the early rises. Our own yields are also beholden to US bonds.
After a small dip earlier this year, Treasury yields are on the rise again off the back of geopolitical volatility and concerns over global debt levels. Last week, yields on 10‑year US Treasury bonds reached their highest peak since 2007. Since American debt recently surpassed $40 trillion USD, we’ve seen more pressure on long‑term US yields.
Foreign policy decisions and rising global inflation coming out of the Middle East are only compounding these pressures. So is the competition for capital coming from the hyperscalers. As the global benchmark, we’ve seen those rising yields translate here.
It’s true that we’re in a much better position compared to our peers. Our debt interest payments as a per cent of GDP are a fraction of what they are in the US. They have 12 times more people than us but 40 times the debt, in nominal terms.
Even if you combine the Commonwealth with the states, our debt‑to‑GDP is still less than half the US, the UK or Canada. We’ve made good progress on getting debt as a share of GDP down each year since 2022 – saving us $70 billion in interest costs so far. And while our 10‑year yield is up around 65 basis points since the beginning of the Iran conflict, it’s up over 100 in the US and UK.
We are not entirely powerless in the face of all this. We have advantages, we are better placed and better prepared and we have a better plan than other countries. But the point remains that something as consequential as the world’s ability to finance its budgets is, to some degree, hostage to decisions taken in Washington and on Wall Street.
Which brings me to my main point tonight: Power is not suddenly chimerical, but I think it has become more ephemeral. Chimerical means an illusion, it’s not that. Ephemeral means to fade quickly, that gets us closer.
Power is not imaginary, but it is more temporary. And it’s asymmetrical. Because power is much more effective right now in the distorting and blocking than the building or reforming.
I imagine that’s what Andrew Cornell means in this year’s magazine when he writes about the disruptive politics of grievance. So, it’s not that power has disappeared entirely, but perhaps that it dissipates more quickly. It shifts faster and splinters more easily.
It isn’t more constant or predictable in the way we once imagined it. Consider the way the key themes have evolved in the magazine. Whether it’s Howard consolidating power after Tampa, his dominance of the early and mid‑2000s up until he lost his own seat.
The rise and then fall of the Rudd‑Gillard‑Swan triumvirate, and I acknowledge Wayne here tonight. Then there was the dominance of the premiers during COVID; the rise of the teals in 2022; the paradigm shift of AI in 2023; and the obliteration of the Coalition in 2025. Power is temporal, and increasingly so.
There’s no reliable place to store power or political capital; no safe place to hoard it. Longevity and legacy are both important to each other, but they’re not the same. Power dissipates over time, whether you use it or not.
The English poet Shelley’s captured this 2 hundred years ago. Even the King of Kings was reduced to ruin in an empty desert. Just a cursory glance through 25 Power Issues reminds us of this truth as well.
It’s why this government and this Prime Minister are investing our political capital, not just trying to hoard it. You see that in our reforms to tax and housing. Yes, power is more temporary, but it can still be turned into progress.
Because as hard as change is for governments – and trust me, right now, I know – the status quo is harder for people. So, in this very uncertain world of churn and change – It’s not for me to tell you how to deploy your influence, in business or the media. But I can tell you how I’ll be using mine, for however long and in whatever capacity I have and hold it.
And the hint is in yesterday’s IGR. The power that resides in the Treasury portfolio is still more substantial than I could have imagined growing up. And I will deploy all of it in an effort to turn the people of our country, whether they’re from Browns Plains or Bellevue Hill – Into beneficiaries, not victims, of the accelerating change in our economy and society, which is intensifying the pressures on people and societies and politics, but still making our economic opportunities more plentiful and more consequential.
However immensely the world has changed in the last 25 years, the IGR makes it clear it will change more quickly in the decades to come. And with it the power structures you have tracked in intriguing and insightful ways, in the Power Issue we celebrate tonight and in the perspectives we await so eagerly each year. Congratulations, and thanks again for the chance to help celebrate the anniversary edition.