“What's Become of the Left?” with Prof. Clive Hamilton

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Education, Society & Culture, Comedy, Self-improvement

4.5 • 905 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2024

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Does being "left-wing" mean giving everyone equal opportunities? Or does it mean elevating historically excluded groups like gays, trans folks and people of colour? Professor Clive Hamilton is a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University. He was active in the civil rights movements of the 1970s and he founded the country's most important left-wing think tank, the Australia Institute, thirty years ago.

In additon to his many books about the threat from China and from climate change, he penned an article: "Wake up, lefties, and reject wokeness".

This episode is part of Permission to Think, a collaboration with the University of Technology, Sydney, where Josh is a visiting fellow. Thanks to the university’s dean of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Alan Davison, for making it possible.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gahy humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a doozy for you. What is the left?
0:08.9	What should the left be? What has the left become? What is the battle between perhaps an old school
0:14.4	definition of left-wing politics, which was very agitated by class and inequality and economic justice and the left we see today,
0:24.8	which is more agitated by identitarian politics and social justice issues.
0:29.3	Today's guest is one of the most important and influential left-wing thinkers in Australia
0:34.2	and perhaps the English-speaking world, if I were to be so bold as to make such a
0:39.3	claim.
0:40.0	He founded a think tank called the Australia Institute in the early 1990s, which became an important
0:45.0	left-wing think tank and academic institution in its own right.
0:49.6	He's a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University.
0:53.2	He's written a swag of books about climate change, about the influence of China.
0:57.7	Spoiler alert, he thinks it's mostly nefarious on Australian politics and Western politics and spying, shall we say.
1:06.7	But today's conversation is really about his thoughts about what justice means in the context of modern left and right.
1:15.1	He has been a visiting academic at Yale at the University of Oxford at University College London at a bunch of different places.
1:23.1	He recently published articles entitled things like blaming baby boomers for your money woes is unfair
1:30.3	lazy and wrong and wake up lefties and reject wokeness there's so much that i could talk to
1:37.6	clive about we only scratch the surface but i found it absolutely fascinating he's a truly
1:42.8	fascinating gentleman i I hope you
1:44.1	enjoy this as much as I did, the one and only, Clive Hamilton.
1:50.2	Well, thanks for being here. Lovely to have you. Should we start by talking about the left,
1:57.3	what's happening to the left and what has happened to the left in Australia?
2:01.8	Where do you survey the state of things?
	...

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