THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP

SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY
 FEDERAL MEMBER FOR CANNING

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEW WITH TOM McILROY, THE GUARDIAN FULL STORY PODCAST

Thursday 26 March 2026

E&OE……………………………………

TOM McILROY: Andrew Hastie, welcome to the podcast.

ANDREW HASTIE: It's good to chat with you, Tom.

TOM McILROY: Thank you for making some time. You were at the National Security College here in Canberra this week – a really interesting speech. You say that Australia is seeing a geopolitical rupture, an economic rupture and an intellectual one as well. There's no hot war in Iran, but you say that the operation led by the U.S. and Israel has transitioned into the battle of Hormuz. Did Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu underestimate the challenge they've faced in the region?

ANDREW HASTIE: I didn't see the intelligence, obviously, but I do think that President Trump was overconfident. He's had success with Operation Midnight Hammer last year, he had success with Venezuela, and I think the expectation was this would be a short war. But the enemy always has a vote. Iran is using the geography at the Strait of Hormuz to their advantage, and they're using it to apply immense pressure to American allies who depend upon the importation of hydrocarbons out of the Middle East. We're feeling that because we import about 90 per cent of our liquid fuel – a lot of it from Asia. But if you trace the supply chain, a lot of it originates in the Middle East – up to 60 per cent – so we are feeling the squeeze. We're feeling the squeeze at the bowser and we're also seeing shortages emerge across the economy.

TOM McILROY: Should the U.S. have thought more about the international ramifications, and do you think we can rely on the U.S. as a trusted ally still?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, I said today that the post-cold war rules-based order is dead, and in the cemetery alongside it, is buried the peace dividend – which was the basis of our trade and our prosperity. I mentioned Iran, Russia and China as authoritarian powers who are flexing their muscles, but the U.S. itself, in their latest national security document, has said that the rules-based order was a cloud-castle abstraction. So when the very country that's meant to be underwriting the rules-based order says that it's dead, we've got to take that seriously. That's why my call today was about re-industrialisation, which gives us more control and more resilience. Control over our own future as a country – you need a level of hard power. And it also gives us resilience, so that in the event of a crisis we can pivot as a country – we have that complexity, depth and adaptability in our economy so that we can make up for shortfalls.

TOM McILROY: On the question of re-industrialising, you said that Australia had outsourced some of our military obligations, our capabilities, to the U.S. and our industrial capability to the region around us, and that that was unwise. Imagine you're the Prime Minister tomorrow, what's the first step on re-industrialisation? Where should we start?

ANDREW HASTIE: I think it's energy. I think de-carbonisation has led to de-industrialisation, and now we're building a dependency into our power grid. A lot of people don't like to hear this, but this is the truth of the matter: the vast majority of solar, wind and batteries are made in China using fossil fuels. A lot of our coal and gas goes to China, obviously – a lot of our critical minerals go to China. I'd much prefer to not be dependent upon the importation of solar, wind and batteries for our future energy grid. The President of the European Commission, yesterday in Parliament, warned us about dependency on another country. In her case, she mentioned Europe's dependency on Russia, and I fear we're doing the same thing here. For your listeners, the thing I care about most is this amazing democracy that we have in this country. I know a lot of your listeners won't agree with me, but I want to preserve a democracy that is sovereign, so that we can have these debates and work out how to live better together. That's why I'm a Liberal – because I believe that we leave our ultimate convictions at the door when we come to politics and we work out how we live peaceably with our neighbours.

TOM McILROY: The fuel disruptions – I think the kind of top line from your comments was that they should have been better anticipated. And this goes to Ursula von der Leyen yesterday – Australia is quite vulnerable, a big island nation at the bottom of the world. The challenge, though, might be that the political rhetoric on fuel disruption and shortages is making the problem worse. Do you think it's possible that that your side of politics could be part of the problem here?

ANDREW HASTIE: Look, I think both sides of politics have been asleep at the wheel over the last 40 years – and I've said that. The de-industrialisation that occurred over the last 40 years – that was a bipartisan project. It started with Hawke-Keating, continued under Howard, and then it sort of accelerated from the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd, Abbott years – and it was the Abbott Government that decided to turn off the lights with our car manufacturing. So look, there's a narrative there, but we've got to be future focused, and what are we doing about things today? Well, our job is to hold the government to account and make sure that where there are shortages in the economy, that people are not hoarding and that we're smoothing out the distribution of fuel. We also want the government to do a good job here. There's a lot at stake here. So we're doing it our job as an Opposition, but we've also got to start talking about the future and what comes next. I think if this continues – and the most optimistic assessments about the Battle of Hormuz is that it won't be finished until the end of April, best case scenario – this could go on for some time. And if that's case, then it's time to have a discussion about what sovereignty looks like in an energy context.

TOM McILROY: To that end, the International Energy Agency boss, Fatih Birol, was at the Press Club this week. I thought it was an interesting question and answer session. I thought his message for Australia was quite interesting. He said that energy security is best achieved by a faster transition to renewables, more electric vehicles, more batteries – noting that they are the lower cost option. He said that could be the solution and that Australia should be building up for the next crisis. Tell me your thoughts.

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, we're on a massive continent – we have about 26 million people here – and we have the challenge of geography, which is why we've gone for diesel for the vast majority of our logistics and transport. All our Coles and Woolies, trucks run on diesel. We have flights that are longer than European flights – again, this was a point made yesterday by the President of the European Commission. And so for the for the foreseeable future, we're going to need petrol, we're going to need diesel, and we're going to need aviation fuel. I'm not opposed to electrification – I just don't want distortions in the energy market – and I think we shouldn't be subsidising one form of technology over another, especially when this pretence about it being greener is actually false. When you look at China's emissions, they're more than 30 per cent of the world's global emissions. Where does most of the solar, wind and batteries get made? They get made in China using fossil fuels.

TOM McILROY: The counterpoint might also come from his answers yesterday. He said five years ago, only five per cent of car transport was electric – 25 per cent of cars now are electric around the world, and I think the figure was in the past five years, 85 per cent of new power source has been renewable. Isn't the world moving in this direction? Why would we go in a different direction?

ANDREW HASTIE: I go to the IEA website routinely, and I look at the sources of energy for each country and when you look at the uptake of renewables in the Asia Pacific region, it's still a very small percentage. And what's driving a lot of the uptake of fossil fuels – gas, coal and investment in nuclear power – is the new technology race, driven by AI. And a generative AI search is 10 times more intensive than a Google search. So countries who are trying to get the edge in productivity, economically, they're trying to invest strategically – they're saying that there's a huge energy cost for this investment, and that's why fossil fuels is still part of the mix, and it's still delivering base load power more cheaply than renewables. Over time, that might change, but again, I come back to the fact that we're in a very competitive space globally, and I want the best for my country – just like every other country.

TOM McILROY: Yeah, let me ask you a kind of fundamental question about your political positions and how you see the world. I think some of our listeners and some of the readers of The Guardian will have really resonated with your comments about Donald Trump and about some of the forces that are at play in politics here and around the world, but then perhaps have a completely different perspective to you on something like renewables and climate change. How should we describe you? How should we understand your political philosophy?

ANDREW HASTIE: I'm a Liberal, and I believe very much in those basic democratic freedoms: freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association. But I also believe in community, and I believe in my country. I used to be a neo-con and a neo-Liberal, and then I went over to Afghanistan and that worldview – which I inherited from time in university and through my reading – was absolutely shattered. And so I came back – and to give your listeners a sense of who I read, I read Edmund Burke and Roger Scruton – and I really respect the power of geography, the power of culture and I also think government is limited and should be limited. Part of the reason why everything is so contested is that we've seen the state grow so much that a lot of questions which shouldn't be political have become political because the state is now involved in them. I'd love to see a country where we step back a little bit from politics, and we don't make every debate a zero-sum debate.

TOM McILROY: That's interesting. I mean, the system often puts us in camps and often goes zero sum very quickly, doesn't it?

ANDREW HASTIE: It does and it's really frustrating, and of course, this trend is being magnified by social media. So one of the things I try to do is just listen to my opponents more. And in fact – I'll be honest with you – for a long time, I avoided the ABC and The Guardian, but now I just feel this freedom to just tell you what I really think and have a good old chat, and I think I'm stimulated by the debate.

TOM McILROY: That's great. Well, we're glad you're keen to talk to us and talk to our listeners and readers. Okay, one of the flow-on effects of the current crisis is a question of the profits that some in the commodity sector are making – big price increases in just a few weeks. Shouldn't Australia consider a 25 per cent profit on gas? There's a push here in Parliament and perhaps even Labor are considering this at the moment.

ANDREW HASTIE: I think a lot of Australians feel like the multinationals don't have a social licence – that they've had a really good run of our wealth here – so I'm sympathetic to that point of view. I just know how important those industries are to Australia, so I'd want to get it right. I guess I'm open minded about those questions. But of course, I see this every day. I mean, you open up your social media, and you hear all sorts of viewpoints and this one is quite strong and quite pronounced across the left-right spectrum.

TOM McILROY: You think that people feel that the multinationals are taking the piss, really, that we're losing the value from our commodities?

ANDREW HASTIE: Yeah, and I think a lot of people think of Norway and their sovereign wealth fund, and they think, well, why can't we do something similar? And I think that's a really good point – I'd love to see an Australian sovereign wealth fund that sets us up for generations to come.

TOM McILROY: Would you make the case internally for the Opposition to at least consider a gas tax in this current climate?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, I'm really keen to see a sovereign wealth fund. How you'd do that, I'm open minded about, but I think we need to start planning for the future. Across the political spectrum, I think we need to have a conversation about balancing budgets. All across Australia, you have families who are having to balance budgets. So my point would be, if we're expecting Australian families to make their budgets work, why shouldn't the government? Why shouldn't the Commonwealth government make the budget work? And I think that's something that isn't popular, but I think it's a conversation we need to have.

TOM McILROY: Just to make sure I understand, I mean, making the budget work – a lot of this revenue would be really helpful for our challenges, is that what you mean?

ANDREW HASTIE: Sure, well it's got to be spent wisely and that's why a sovereign wealth fund would be a good vehicle to making sure that any revenue collected is put to good purposes, rather than the whims of a government.

TOM McILROY: I'm eager to come to your portfolio in the Angus Taylor Opposition. You've got a big job. One of the great quotes from the speech at the National Security College – you say that the economy should be operating like a Swiss army knife, but actually it resembles a butter knife currently. Where should we go on things like productivity and prosperity, economic growth? Have both parties failed on that question as well?

ANDREW HASTIE: The point I was making there is we dig a lot of stuff out of the ground and we send it overseas, and I'd love to see our value chains vertically integrated. We can value add – we can dig stuff up, we can refine it, we can process it, and then we could manufacture and make things out of it. But we don't do that very often, and that's why we keep tumbling down Harvard's Index of Economic Complexity – we're 74th. Countries like Singapore, Japan, the U.S., they're all in the top 10 – I think New Zealand is at 49th. One of the things I really care about is real wage growth for Australians and advanced manufacturing is one of the ways that you drive productivity, and productivity drives real wage growth. A lot of Australians – low-to-middle income earners – have gone backwards with inflation. And when a country is more productive, it lifts everyone up, including low-skilled workers and that was the point I was making today, which is why I'm so keen on advanced manufacturing. There's the whole sovereignty piece where in a crisis, you can quickly pivot if you have an advanced manufacturing capability. I know people think I'm just barracking for cars – I do like cars – but if you have a capability, you can pivot between sectors, from defence, to space, to medicine to agriculture. Whatever it is and wherever the need is, you can shift labour and capital and get things happening.

TOM McILROY: Labor talks about advanced manufacturing a lot, and the Future Made in Australia agenda is along these lines. They're also – at least they say – quite focused on lifting productivity as well. Are they getting anything right, do you think, in that space?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, the Future Made in Australia policy – when you actually study the National Interest Framework – there's two streams: there's the Net Zero de-carbonisation stream, and then there's the economic resilience stream. And my concern is that we're just going to be funding projects that takes a lot of our industry offshore anyway. The National Interest Framework document that Treasury put out back in 2024 – it talks about the dominance that China has in manufacturing solar and wind, and that that's a real opportunity for us. Now, that sounds like we're going to support industry overseas, not industry here.

TOM McILROY: And Treasury expressed some reservations about making solar panels here.

ANDREW HASTIE: I'd love to make solar panels here, I'd love to make wind turbines here, but unfortunately, they're being made overseas. For your listeners to understand what I care about: I want to thicken our economy, I want to keep capital and jobs here, and I want to be resilient in a crisis. That's my starting point, and from there, I'm pretty pragmatic about how we do that – I just don't think we should be distorting markets by picking winners. I think we just get energy costs down, we become cost competitive as a nation, and then we start providing incentives for investment here and let's see what happens.

TOM McILROY: Do you anticipate a policy in your portfolio for voters at the next election that lays some of these plans out?

ANDREW HASTIE: Absolutely. I'm really keen to build a vision for re-industrialising Australia – I think low energy costs is the first thing. I think advanced robotics and AI isn't a huge threat the way people make it out to be. There are two forms of labour that AI is going to disrupt – there's cognitive labour and there's physical labour. I think one of the reasons why a lot of multinationals have gone offshore is because they've wanted to exploit cheap labour overseas in countries that have poor laws governing their labour. And I think the opportunity that AI and advanced robotics presents is that we can recover our supply chains back to Australia, and we can create jobs. Now they may not look like the jobs of the past, but I think we can actually recover a lot of the lost work that has gone overseas.

TOM McILROY: Yeah, you don't have to pay a robot in an advanced manufacturing setting, but you do have to employ engineers, scientists, technologists who can build it and operate it.

ANDREW HASTE: Exactly, and the mechanics who work on the robots. My wife, she's American, she's from a General Motors family, she grew up in a union town, and I've seen how important those jobs are to a community. And I think if we actually get the cost of production down here, we can create a whole bunch of jobs and thicken our communities again.

TOM McILROY: Some of these questions and the concerns that relate to them – economic situations, household budgets, employment prospects – are the factors that I think are fuelling some of the new forces in Australian politics. I think One Nation is an example of that – people who feel that the system isn't working for them, they feel like they've lived up to their end of the bargain. One Nation is having a big week, obviously, after the South Australia results. Tell me your thoughts on where Pauline Hanson fits into our politics and I'm interested, do you think that the Liberals and Nationals are in part to blame for the rise of One Nation?

ANDREW HASTIE: It's a really good question. I think there's a lot of unhappiness about the system and if we break down what they mean by the system: housing is a big issue – a lot of people feel like they just can't get into the housing market now. If we go all the way back to 2009 and you track the supply of M1 money, it's gone up about 300 per cent. And there was a massive credit boom – a cheap credit boom, in fact – from about 2010 to 2022 and if you were able to get a loan and buy a house then, you did well. But once interest rates started going up in April 2022 – it's a lot harder now. You've got to remember real wages didn't track with inflation either. So, a lot of people just feel locked out of the housing market, the system is rigged against them, they blame the political system and the institutions like the RBA. I think the pandemic broke a lot of social licence – really badly. I remember standing on the polling booth in 2022 and there were Alcoa workers who'd been sacked because they didn't want the vaccine and I just remember one guy – he was literally shaking with rage when he was telling me. And I thought: okay, something's happening here. There's that, and there's immigration. Any way you look at it, numbers have gone up. We've got our lowest fertility rate ever in Australian history – 1.4 births per woman. If you look at the average net overseas migration figure from 2000 to 2019 it was about 190,000, and over the last three to four years, we've had 1.3 million people added to our country – that's net overseas migration, that's not permanent migration. So there's that issue as well, and the politics on that have bolted and Pauline Hanson is giving voice to those concerns and frustrations.

TOM McILROY: Let me come back to immigration in a moment, because our listeners will want to hear from you on that. But is the poor state of the Coalition, the two parties there – the Liberals and the Nationals – the spark that is giving her the current boom? I think that the polling suggests that's the case.

ANDREW HASTIE We need to have a vision on the centre-right. This is a centre-right issue. Sure, some Labor voters are bleeding to One Nation as well, but we've got to have a strong vision for the centre-right side of politics and if we don't, someone will fill that vacuum, and I think that's what's been happening. So I'm confident. We're building a vision, we will have a vision, we will have policies – it's going to take some time.

TOM McILROY: The line from Angus Taylor – and I've heard you say it as well on immigration – is that the numbers are too high and the standards are too low. Give me a sense of where you might make changes and would you agree that a tiny majority of people who are coming here are not interested in signing up to the Australian way of life? I think it would be a small portion, wouldn't it, someone from moving across the world?

ANDREW HASTIE: Yeah, it's a small portion of people. But I think fundamentally, if you come to Australia, you've got to believe in the Australian vision. We've got a set of values: a fair go, respect for your neighbours, working hard, and parliamentary democracy – we debate with each other, but we don't kill each other if we disagree. That's kind of the basic covenant, I think, is what we'll call it – not a contract, it's more than a contract. So there are people who have come over here and they're quite resistant to our culture, and we saw that expressed in really stark terms – murderous terms – last year at Bondi. I wrote a Substack subsequently in early-late January, early February – people can go read it – and it's about my upbringing in Ashfield, Sydney. Very multicultural community. My father was a faith leader – a Presbyterian minister – and he had a Chinese church, a Korean church, a Western Samoa church and an English church and so I grew up in that multicultural context. Everyone had their cultural quirks, but everyone was united around a common faith. And so, I think we can work together as a community. I want to make it very clear – race has nothing to do with it. There are people who are expressing racist views in the immigration debate – this is not about race, it's about values.

TOM McILROY: Politicians?

ANDREW HASTIE: If you go online, you'll see a lot of racism. I've come to love other cultures, other people, and I'll just say it so your listeners know: I am a Christian, and so I believe everyone is made in God's image and should be treated with respect, regardless of who they are – their sex, their gender, their sexuality, their faith – whatever it is, that's my starting point. So look, I'm optimistic we can make this work, but we do have to insist on a set of values, and we do have to insist on things like English, because we want everyone participating in our democracy.

TOM McILROY: Isn't the difficult part of that debate that we're conflating questions about the immigration program, and how it should be carefully managed, with two terrorists who killed 15 people? I see a real problem there, that people of migrant backgrounds aren't the same as aren't the same as terrorists at Bondi Beach.

ANDREW HASTIE: Absolutely. This is why it's a really tough conversation. My wife's a migrant, for a start. And I got a text from one of my former staffers who has a Hong Kong and Singaporean background, and he was telling me his son experienced racism on a work site yesterday because he's got that Chinese heritage – he was very frustrated, he was born here. We have to be really careful about these debates because there are people who want to just take it to a racist place straight away. So I take your point – I'm not going to say there's an easy solution here – but the numbers are too high, and it's important that we insist on standards, otherwise our democracy won't function.

TOM McILROY: We're nearly out of time. I just want to merge our last two topics together a little bit. How should the Liberals treat One Nation, given that they – and I think Pauline Hanson is pretty clear in her record on this – they play in some of those spaces that we've been talking about? They try and divide people for political outcomes. Should the Liberals and Nationals seek to marginalise her? Should the major parties try and keep One Nation as a minor force in politics, keep them out of the mainstream?

ANDREW HASTIE: I'll say this: I'm a Liberal, I want to win the next election, and if One Nation wants to pick a fight with us, we're going to fight hard. I don't want to make enemies where I don't have to but certainly, we have a vision for the country – we're going to build that vision – and it's a contest, so we're going to fight hard to win the next election. There are people who are currently parking their preference with One Nation – we want to win those people back. But then there's also an element of One Nation who just want to tear us down. Politics is a duel; I'm up for a wrestle.

TOM McILROY: Very good. Okay, well, our traditional last question on the pod is to ask people about their life outside of politics. You've talked a bit about your reading, which is so interesting. Tell us how you relax, how you turn off when you get home after a busy sitting fortnight back to WA.

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, a lot of the time I get home and I've got to adjust to the time zone, and my kids don't really care about that. I get home, my wife, Ruth – she basically is a single parent for half the year. I've got a 10-year-old, an eight-year-old and a four-year-old.

TOM McILROY: Hard job as a political spouse.

ANDREW HASTIE: It is, and I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Ruth, so I want to thank her and acknowledge everything that she does – she's got my back. But look, I just try and tune into my kids' world, so I've watched quite a few cartoons recently, my son goes from one sporting obsession to the next, I end up going to watch my daughter's basketball games. I just try and come back in and not disrupt the routine that my wife has established and, in the middle, I'll try and read as well.

TOM McILROY: What's on your reading list at the moment?

ANDREW HASTIE: What am I reading at the moment? To be honest, I'm chipping my way through The Two Towers, and I've just read Hal Brands' book, The Eurasian Century which is on politics. But to keep my mind supple, I try and get into the novels and broaden my knowledge of human experience.

TOM McILROY: How interesting. Well, Andrew Hastie, it's been great to have you on the pod. Thank you for answering so many interesting questions.

ANDREW HASTIE: Pleasure, Tom. Thank you.

[ENDS]