Jeff Rich 澳大利亚被美利坚玩耍 

Jeff Rich 澳大利亚揭示了美利坚帝国的什么？｜杰夫·里奇博 士

https://www.video-translations.org/transcripts/3364_Pascal_2026_10_24_cmn-CN.pdf

AUKUS（奥库斯协议）的严重不平等： 里奇指出，美国向澳大利亚出售可能“永远无法如期交付”的核潜艇，作为交换，美国却换取了在澳大利亚可以永久使用的深海潜艇港口。他讽刺地称赞华盛顿这招“玩得真漂亮”，认为该协议实际加强了外国军队对澳大利亚领土的控制，极大地限制了澳大利亚自主选择的权利。 [1]
“帝国”等级制度中的特权领地： 他认为，应当将美国所谓的盟友理解为美国帝国等级制度中拥有某种“特权”的属地（Dominions）。澳大利亚精英层打破了过去对英国的依赖，却转身全面拥抱美国，使澳大利亚成为了美国“全球普遍帝国幻想”的执行者。 [1, 2]
次帝国（Subimperial）的“跟班”心态： 他在其视频和研究中谈到，澳大利亚政治家长期有一种将自己置于大国羽翼下的“次帝国权力”心态。过去依附大英帝国，现在依附美国。一些表现出来的“跟班行为”（Lackey Behavior），其本质是为了在美式帝国主导的网络中，扮演一个类似于“副警长”或更具防御存在感的角色。 [1]
战略自主性的丧失： 里奇指出，澳大利亚只有2800万人口，领导层却误以为自己是拥有重大地缘政治权力的“中等强国”。在这种迷思以及美国的操控下，澳大利亚对中国、俄罗斯的外交政策逐渐极端化和敌对化，正在盲目跟随美国走向不符合自身利益的战车，正在失去作为一个独立主权国家的选择自主权。

美国向澳大利亚出售了一艘永远不会交付的潜艇。作为回报，美国获得了一个可以永久使用的深水潜艇港。华盛顿，这一手玩得漂亮！还是说，未必如此？ 杰夫·里奇与帕斯卡尔一起探讨澳大利亚的政治动 荡，以及它在美国权力体系中的位置。他们讨论了一国党的崛起、移民、新自由主义改革，以及人们对 国家自主权日益加深的疑虑。里奇认为，澳英美三边安全伙伴关系（AUKUS）扩大了外国军队的准入 权限，却限制了澳大利亚的选择，并提出应将美国盟友理解为帝国等级体系中享有特权的自治领。对话 还探讨了媒体影响力、精英关系网络、与亚洲的关系、对俄罗斯的敌意，以及在一个联系日益紧密的世 界中，国家认同不断变化的含义。 杰夫的链接： Substack 上的“燃烧的档案”：https://jeffrich.substack. com YouTube 上的“燃烧的档案”：https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzmI2CEnbKq0yswTpqdQfyg 中 立研究链接： 中立研究 Substack：https://pascallottaz.substack.com 支持中立研究： https://neutralitystudies.com/donate 中立研究商店：https://neutralitystudies.com/shop 时间戳 00:00 澳 大利亚的政治危机 04:21 移民与定居殖民主义 08:07 选举制度与一国党的崛起 15:44 新自由主义与市场 改革的局限 20:07 AUKUS 与澳大利亚的自主权 28:28 美国的自治领、精英与媒体权力 35:49 澳大利亚与 亚洲及俄罗斯的关系 40:00 国家认同与“燃烧的档案”

#Pascal

欢迎大家回到 Neutrality Studies。今天，我的朋友兼同事、来自 Burning Archive 的杰夫·里奇将再次做 客，为我们带来最新情况。杰夫，欢迎回来。

#https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzmI2CEnbKq0yswTpqdQfyg

 Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies:

 https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Time Stamps 00:00 Australia’s political crisis 05:20 Migration and settler colonialism 10:11 Voting systems and One Nation’s rise 20:28 Neoliberalism and the limits of market reform 26:27 AUKUS and Australia’s autonomy 37:41 US dominions, elites and media power 47:26 Australia’s relationships with Asia and Russia 52:47 National identity and the Burning Archive

#Pascal

Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. Today, we have an update with my friend and colleague, Jeff Rich from the Burning Archive. Jeff, welcome back.

#Jeff Rich

Good to see you again, Pascal, if not in person this time.

#Pascal

We were together in Istanbul, and it was absolutely lovely. And now we want to talk a little bit about some of your recent observations. In particular, you wrote a piece on Substack. And again, everybody, your Substack is called The Burning Archive, just like your YouTube channel, if anyone wants to check it out. And that latest piece is called “Australia, a Little Nation Lost in the Time of Monsters,” which I loved very much because I just held a conference with a similar title, “Geopolitics in the Time of Monsters.” Jeff, we actually didn't discuss Australia much at the conference, although

we did have Warwick Powell there. But Australia itself didn't feature that prominently. So can you maybe catch us up on where Australia sees itself and why you used this picture of a little boy lost in the woods? Yeah.

#Jeff Rich

Well, Australia's really going through quite a crisis at the moment. I mean, everyone's aware of the AfD in Germany and its sort of sudden surge, that sort of thing. But people may not be aware of what's happening in Australia because it doesn't get a lot of airtime, you know, either in, I guess, mainstream international news or in the alternative media. Australia is seeing a similar surge in support for a sort of new right-wing party called One Nation, which is fundamentally an anti-migrant party, and it's been around for quite a while. But over the last year or so—a little bit over a year, since the last federal election in May 2025—its voting preference share has increased from 6.5% to 28%.

So it's more than quadrupled in a little over a year. And this has led to quite a crisis because One Nation is talking about turning Australia, which is a deeply multicultural society, into a monoculture, with a lot of the same sort of rhetoric about Western civilisation and that sort of stuff that you get from the American right, and even things like remigration, but certainly reducing the level of overseas migration to Australia. So it's quite, I guess, countercultural to what has been the mainstream consensus in Australia. But it's also totally disrupted the political system because there's now, I think—let's see—One Nation, the Liberals, the Nationals, the Labor Party and the Greens.

So there are five effective parties within a political system that still tells itself it's governed by two major parties. It's sort of a bipartisan system, or a two-party system. And the whole political system is struggling to adapt to this extraordinary surge of a party that has been seen as beyond the pale for decades to almost the top position in voter preference polling. And this problem in politics is also reflected in other issues, particularly in foreign policy. There's a growing sense that Australia has chained itself to the United States and has done well out of that. But it's now no longer really in Australia's interest to maintain U.S. primacy if the U.S. is going to be very, very aggressive about it.

So across society, culture, politics, and Australia's perception of its role in the world, it's lost all of its fundamental assumptions about what it should be doing. So it's really quite a crisis. And that's why I talked about “A Little Nation Lost.” And the image that went with the article is a famous painting by one of the Heidelberg School painters, an early Impressionist painting school from the early 20th century in Australia. They painted not so far from where I live, in Heidelberg, a suburb of Melbourne. And it shows a little child lost in the bush around the city in Australia, which was a very, you know, typical traumatic experience, I guess, for late 19th- and early 20th-century urban Australia. But it's also a symbol of the innocent young nation, lost in the time of monsters.

#Pascal

This picture and the identity of Australia are quite interesting because, of course, this shows a white boy, right, in the 19th century, lost in the woods. It doesn't show an Indigenous person here. And how big is that issue today? You know, this fact that Australia, the way it exists today—political Australia, I mean, of course—is a nation of immigrants from various places around the world, and that immigration wasn't always peaceful. I mean, on the contrary, it was very violent. I think Australia did a lot of grappling with its own past, right? How it treated the Indigenous population and so on. How big is that aspect today for the political development of the continent?

#Jeff Rich

So you mean the sort of Indigenous issue and, like, settler colonialism?

#Pascal

Yes, settler colonialism. And, you know, you're saying this is an anti-immigration party, but it's made up of people who are themselves immigrants, or whose grandparents or great-grandparents were immigrants. How does that shape a nation? I mean, the United States, again, has a bit of a different history, also with slavery bringing so many people over there. But Australia had a lot of migration, including from Asia. And if I remember my discussion with Hugh White correctly, then currently, you know, the Asian share of Australia's population is growing while the white share is going down. And it seems that that also creates a lot of anxiety that's not even expressed explicitly, but seems to be simmering.

#Jeff Rich

Look, absolutely. And I think Australia is what's now called a majority-migrant nation. So more than half of the population has a parent born overseas and comes from a migrant family. And I think something like a third of the population—I'm a little bit rusty on the statistics, but roughly a third— are themselves migrants. Currently, the largest overseas-born group is from India. And if you also include Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, et cetera, you know, South Asia is by a long way the largest group. I think the next largest group might be Britain or China. But India, China and the South Asian countries are sort of overtaking Britain, which is, you know, increasingly declining as a sort of legacy source of migration.

#Pascal

Hey, just a very quick note. The best way to support this channel is by signing up for my free Substack. You can also help with a paid subscription there, or you can get some of our new merch on neutralitystudies.com. Links below. See you there.

#Jeff Rich

So, you know, compared to when that painting was done, when there was still lots of migration to Australia, including actually quite a lot of Chinese migration up until the late 19th century, migration is now largely from Asia rather than Europe, and that's profoundly affected things. And the One Nation Party began in the mid-1990s, really with a lot of rhetoric about Australia being “swamped” by Asian migration. And, you know, I'm using those words in quote marks. That's not my view. And over time, that hasn't really proved to be the case.

But in recent years, there's been more agitation in the community around South Asian migration, Indian migration, a lot of which is somewhat exploitative for those South Asian migrants. But there's also a lot of tension over, I guess, access to infrastructure, access to government services. So there's a similar dynamic to what you see in Europe, I guess, with resentment from some parts of the community about, you know, the cost of living being high, blah, blah, blah, and yet we're bringing in a lot of these migrants. So there's a lot of pressure, actually, on all sides of politics to reduce the migration intake in response to that. Right.

#Pascal

Can you catch me up, though, on the political system, actually? Because, you know, when we see a two-party system in Parliament, usually the reason for that is a first-past-the-post voting system. First-past-the-post just creates that, and there's almost no way around it. Whereas if you have a proportional system where, in each district, you have several seats that can be contested, then usually what we see is a parliament made up of four or five parties, usually two around the 20% to 30% mark and the others around the 10% mark or so. That's just what the voting system produces. It's not even a preference issue. So, what's the voting system for your parliament, actually?

#Jeff Rich

So, Australia has a bicameral system, and in the lower house, it has a member-based preferential system. So, you vote for a candidate, and then you go down the list, expressing your preferences. It ends up being like there's a two-party-preferred count, so to speak. So, rather than a first-past-the- post thing, your vote doesn't get wasted. If you vote for the third most popular candidate, you can express a preference for who you want to be number one. That has a tendency to support the two- party system, but it also leads to results like, for example, in the 2025 election, when the Labor Party got roughly a third of the vote, but it got roughly, you know, 60% of the seats in the parliament.

So it sort of biases things to support a strong governing majority, I guess, in the lower house. But then in the upper house, it has a proportional representation system, with all the different states, with their different populations, being equally represented. That means, you know, I guess smaller states and regional Australia are more broadly represented in the Senate than they are more widely.

It's a pretty common sort of system. And that means the party that has controlled the lower house of parliament hasn't really controlled the upper house of parliament for a long, long, long time in Australia.

And what's also happened over the last, I don't know, 50 years, or even more than 50 years, is that there's been a reduction in the share of the vote that goes to the two major parties: the Labor Party, the sort of left party, and the Liberal National Party, which is a kind of coalition of the Liberal Party and what used to be the Country Party. Those two major parties' share of the vote has declined from over 80%, you know, in the late '60s and early 1970s, to now, by some measures, actually less than 50%. This is part of the significance of the emergence of One Nation, I guess. Yeah. So effectively, we have a kind of two-party system, but the actual voting preferences of the community are for coalition politics, if you like, because none of the parties really now get more than 30% of the vote.

#Pascal

Which, you know, is actually quite normal, in the sense that that's just how the preferences tend to fall. You rarely have a moment when more than 50% of people really vote for one party, just because not everybody is represented by them. And in most systems, what you see is rather a plurality. But then the question, of course, arises: what does that lead to? And how should we understand this One Nation party? Because in Germany and in France, the people who vote for these kinds of right-wing parties—and I don't call them extreme right, because they are just like a conservative movement, basically—on the one hand, do have this very critical attitude toward migration, all the way to racist attitudes.

But on the other hand, some of them are also just people who are very disappointed with the economic situation and with foreign policy, right? There are a lot of people in Europe who would wish for better relations with Russia, especially. And again, this is not a majority of people, but we can safely assume it's maybe around 30–35% of the people who do vote for these conservative parties who would want to have a closer relationship. And these people then either are with these right-wing conservative parties or they go to the left: in France, Mr. Mélenchon; in Germany, the BSW, for instance. So how is it with the voters of One Nation?

#Jeff Rich

Well, I think it's a little bit different in Australia. I mean, there is a base of anti-migrant sentiment within One Nation. Some people say part of the surge in the One Nation vote also followed the Bondi Beach terrorist attack in late 2025, where, during Hanukkah, a dozen or so people were shot. I can't remember how many. And there's been a lot of debate about anti-Semitism. The leader of the One Nation Party has made a point of making anti-Muslim statements for quite a long time. She dressed up in a burqa in parliament and put on all sorts of stunts like that.

So she's definitely tapped into some of that sentiment in the community. But there's also the difference between the regions and the cities in Australia. I mean, Australia is a highly urbanised society and has been since the 19th century. I think around about 80% of people live in the capital cities, much more concentrated than, say, the United States or, I guess, most European states as well. And One Nation draws a lot more votes from the regional areas where, you know, there are fewer migrants than there are in big cities like Melbourne and Sydney. And it's very integrated into the social culture. So it's a bit more like old Australia, if you like.

And then the other factor is that there have been defections from the major conservative parties to One Nation within parliament. So the former deputy prime minister—in fact, the leader of the National Party—a guy called Barnaby Joyce, who is, you know, the butt of many jokes in Australia, switched over to the One Nation Party, I think, after the last election. And that defection has pulled both members of parliament and voters over as well. And especially after the last federal election, where the Liberal Party sort of lost, there's been internal turmoil within the Liberal Party, all that sort of thing.

So there's been, to some degree, a switch of conservative voters from one party to another. And when you look at One Nation's actual policies, there's no positive foreign policy dimension to it, like people might hope for with AfD or BSW. I mean, they emulate Trumpist politics. And they use the migration issue to, you know, fuel support and resentment and that sort of thing. But a lot of their policies are, you know, anti-environmental, anti-woke, anti-business regulation. So they're tapping into that kind of “don't tell me what to do” aspect of the electorate.

And I think that's significant also because they've received significant support from, you know, one of Australia's oligarchs, a leading mining oligarch and businesswoman, Gina Rinehart, as well as the Murdoch media, which has really given a lot of free airtime to One Nation. And I think, in part, it reflects a view in some quarters that it's effectively channeling a level of community sentiment. And so, a little bit like the AfD, it has this sort of anti-migrant front door, but its actual backdoor policies are very pro-business, anti-regulation, and particularly anti-environmental regulation, which may not actually serve the interests of so many people attracted to vote for them.

#Pascal

Yeah, it's neoliberalism in its conservative gown, isn't it? Because that's what a lot of the European ones are too, you know?

#Jeff Rich

It's like a neoliberal Punch and Judy show, really, or a pantomime, you know?

#Pascal

You know, at the conference I organized last week, one of the people who presented was Radhika Desai. And she's, of course, a very committed Marxist, like a proper Marxist in the real sense of the word, as in a Marxist economist. And her analysis is quite simple: as long as liberalism reigns supreme, there won't be any kind of improvement for these disenfranchised groups of people, period. It just can't happen. So what you have with AfD, One Nation, and Rassemblement National in France is just another version of the same neoliberal ideals, which, in the end, are going to make sure that the class system remains what it is and that the people who have to go to work for those who have the capital will remain in place. What do you make of that argument, and do you think it has any bearing on Australia?

#Jeff Rich

Well, I mean, I'm not a Marxist, but I certainly respect the Marxist tradition. In fact, my PhD was in, I guess, the social history of the working class. So I'm very au fait with class analysis and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, I think there are options for change beyond liberalism. But I think part of the social crisis in Australia is that Australia, both on the left and the right, especially after 1991, really went quite deep and early into what you can call the neoliberal sort of approach to government policy. And, you know, I'm not just saying this from an academic point of view. I lived this for 30 years. It's not just the commanding heights of the economy, but also very much what I think Neil Benilla calls an orientation framework.

So the basic way in which you approach an issue, which informed, you know, both political and bureaucratic thinking and general community thinking as well, was: how do you design a market to deliver a policy outcome? And that has informed the approach to health. It's informed the approach to disability. It's informed the approach to housing. And part of the issue at the moment is that some of those social market experiments have disappointed. “Social market” might have slightly different connotations in some contexts, but I'm just using that term for, you know, designing markets for social purposes. So there's a significant issue with housing at the moment in Australia, as there is in, you know, parts of Europe: housing costs and balancing the interests of renters and owners, young people and older people.

And there have similarly been big attempts to implement market reforms in disability and ageing. Use the power of markets to deliver better choice and services to vulnerable consumers—that's the sort of thinking and the logic. And it's just encountered a whole series of practical issues. So the underpinning assumptions of how Australia goes about social and economic policy are also starting, at least in my view, to tear at the edges, and people will need to sort of come up with different ways. But that's really important because the two major parties, the Labor Party and the Liberal Party, have had their differences, but there's been a broad consensus about that.

And a belief that Australia actually developed a uniquely successful model of both economic and social policy reform over the last 30 years. So there are people in Australia who actually have a belief in a kind of Australian exceptionalism, strange as it may seem, and, you know, not without some

evidence of success, because Australia had 30 years of uninterrupted economic growth. It's got a well-designed superannuation system, a well-designed social security system, and various other good policy reforms. But people are, I think, getting tired of just, you know, everything being a market. And I think that's expressing itself both in real costs for people and also in the lived experience, if you like, of social life.

#Pascal

And just by the way, I mean, in my experience, every place I've lived in or been to somehow thinks that they're the most special and the most out of the ordinary. I mean, the Swiss have a word, “Sonderfall,” you know, a special case, because they're so different. And maybe that's just a Western thing. I'm not sure this also applies to Global South countries, but in my experience, everybody somehow thinks they're so different from everybody else—incomparable. But anyhow, at the end of the day, what we do in social science and political science is compare them, of course.

Everything's comparable. But then tell me a little bit about the foreign policy direction, because that is, I think, the number one topic where all the opportunities, but also the dangers, lie at the moment. So, with the political party system the way it is, where does it see Australia's relationship with the US, with China, and within Southeast Asia? I mean, I asked Hugh White how long it will take for Australia to realize that it is the southern tip of Southeast Asia. I don't think that kind of mental framework is there yet, but please give me your take. Yeah.

#Jeff Rich

Yeah, well, there are a lot of doubts about that, and a lot of it has focused on this AUKUS deal, which perhaps a lot of viewers have heard about—the nuclear submarine deal and the special arrangement between the US and Australia. But before I get into that, I should also just quickly mention, because you did raise the Indigenous issue, that I think one of the other factors at play with One Nation is that a couple of years ago, Australia had what was called a Voice referendum. It was about recognizing Indigenous people in the Constitution and establishing a particular sort of advisory council made up of Indigenous people. That referendum initially attracted high support, but then ended up being lost.

And I think there was a residue of, well, in some quarters, racist sentiment; in some quarters, resentment about having a solution imposed on people. A bit of a COVID-style, you know, “we hate the elites” sort of sentiment, which has fed into the One Nation thing. So Pauline Hanson has recently, you know, been exposed for, I think, referring to the Aboriginal civilisation, let's say, before 1788 as the most primitive society on Earth or something. You know, deeply ignorant and deeply offensive. So there is that sort of strain. I didn't want to leave that unremarked upon. But just to come back to foreign policy.

The AUKUS deal has had broad, multiparty support, but there is increasing concern that Australia has sort of sacrificed its independence, its autonomy—not even strategic autonomy, its actual autonomy. Yeah. And that's been expressed not just by, you know, critics on YouTube, but by former prime ministers, former foreign ministers, and even by a former secretary, or head, of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, a guy called Peter Varghese, who delivered a speech earlier this year called “A Bonfire of Certainties.” In it, he said that the three fundamental certainties of Australian foreign policy since 1945—multilateralism, the American alliance, and regional engagement in Asia—have been called into question by broad changes in the world. And very significantly, I thought.

I mean, this is not some, you know, sort of wildcat person like me. This is the guy who wrote Australia's first white paper on Australian foreign policy, who was head of the department for a long time and is still a very influential intellectual in the foreign policy field—a very cautious sort of person. He said that Australia's done very, very well. US primacy has been a boon for Australia. But fundamentally, US primacy is not necessarily in Australia's interest, especially if it's pursued by what he describes as thwarting or containing China rather than constraining China. So this is a fairly cautiously expressed thing, but it's a very significant thing to say.

You know, it comes from a very significant person, and it reflects growing doubts about, you know, some of the fundamentals of Australian foreign policy. But as yet, there doesn't seem to be any significant political movement, I guess. Within the major parties, they're all very locked into US arrangements. And to some degree—and I think this is a point that Nell Benila makes in relation to Europe and the US—whatever top-level political decision-making or rhetoric there might be, there's a level of operational integration between the US and Australia in a sort of defence and military capacity that has meant that, you know, we lost our autonomy long, long ago.

I think there are over 100 military facilities or bases in Australia that the US has, or has effective control over and access to. Yeah, there's been some study that's looked at this. There have been issues about embedding US defense and security personnel in the Australian government. And there are a couple of big bases up in northern Australia where a large number of US forces rotate through. In fact, perhaps the crucial aspect of the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal is not so much the submarines, which Australia won't get for decades and may never get, but the basing rights for both American and British nuclear submarines near Perth in Western Australia. So effectively, Australia has established an American nuclear base in the Indian Ocean.

#Pascal

I didn't catch that. I wasn't aware of this. Wait, wait. So the deal is that Australia will buy nuclear submarines from the US, and they will be delivered maybe 20 years in the future. But the right of US nuclear submarines to actually dock in Perth starts immediately, and basically, now Perth is an outpost.

#Jeff Rich

That's a really good deal for the United States, isn't it? It's a very good deal for the United States. And look, you know, at some point someone will go through all the documents about how this decision was made. But, you know, I've been speaking about this for a couple of years to a guy, Sam Roggeveen, from the Lowy Institute, who's a major and pretty mainstream, I guess, defence and foreign policy analyst who used to work in the security and intelligence world. And it's just an utterly appalling deal, and it has, you know, a large number of critics, ranging from this guy, Sam Roggeveen, to Hugh White, to Paul Keating, to Malcolm Turnbull.

So it's pretty bipartisan. There's an inquiry about it, but, yeah, it's a terrible deal for Australia. I mean, it was probably made out of frustration because, you know, there's this long, sad history of bad procurement decisions around submarines in Australia that goes back 20 or 30 years. And, you know, it looked like they might have had an opportunity to get a much more powerful, prestigious weapon, I guess. But in the course of the negotiations, I mean, you know, in dramatic terms, you could say we've helped establish a military colony in Australia. Yeah.

#Pascal

That doesn't sound very good to me because, I mean, help me out here: Australia doesn't actually have a nuclear sharing agreement with the United States, right? The US doesn't have the right to station nuclear missiles or anything like that on Australian land, but now it can park these nuclear submarines, which are nuclear-powered submarines. But if I'm correct, they can also carry nuclear- tipped missiles, right? They're part of the triad, right? And actually quite an important part.

#Jeff Rich

Yeah. And I mean, some of the arrangements are a bit shrouded in secrecy. And, you know, some people think maybe there are nuclear bombers that can sort of rotate through the north of Australia as well. You know, Australia has this cute thing of calling the U.S. bases “joint facilities,” which has been a sort of PR stunt since, I don't know, the 1980s. But they're effectively U.S. bases. And, you know, perhaps the more notorious one is Pine Gap, which is in the centre of Australia, and it's a big sort of satellite communications thing. And, you know, a lot of people think it has a role in targeting operations, including in the Iran war and that sort of thing.

#Pascal

Yeah, the thing with joint facilities is, if you want to figure out what they actually are, you just go to the entrance and try to get in. Then you see: are your documents going to be checked by an Australian guy or by a U.S. guy? And my best guess is that it's probably going to be a U.S. Marine or someone who will be standing there and checking your stuff. And if he doesn't like your face, he's going to send you away.

#Jeff Rich

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

#Pascal

But I mean, this integration with the United States—we've seen this in so many places, right? The U. S. tries to run its empire, its infrastructure, and its—some call them vassals, others allies. Call them whatever you will. But it runs them in various ways. And you already explained, you know, this kind of embedding, which is basically an infiltration operation, right, on various levels. On the other hand, you also have the think tanks. And thirdly, you, of course, have the integration of the elite class into the U.S. political and economic system and so on. How is that actually working? Because, I mean, naturally, China and Asia are a very, very important market for Australia. And the stronger Indonesia gets—and Indonesia is strong and rapidly developing right now—the more important this near abroad is going to be for Australia, because both the U.S. and the UK are the far abroad, right? Where do you see this dynamic going?

#Jeff Rich

Well, I mean, I don't like the term “vassals,” just to comment on that initially, because I think there are tiers of power within an imperial structure, if you like. And, you know, the tendency, I think, especially in US-based IR-type thinking, is that you're either the master or you're the servant; you're the top dog or you're not. And I just think that doesn't actually reflect either the historical reality or present-day circumstances, or indeed the mutual benefits of power and status that flow, right? And in a way, Australia is, within the American system, performing a role not dissimilar to what it performed in the British Empire, where countries like Australia were called Dominions. So, I mean, initially, when Australia became an independent country in 1901, it didn't have control of its foreign policy.

That was still controlled by Britain because the British Empire was still there. And it wasn't until, I think, the 1930s that Australia sort of had control of its foreign policy. But the dominions—Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia—were actually one of the core components of the British Empire. And, you know, this is very thoroughly researched by John Darwin and people like that. But in a way, I think Australia is performing a similar role within the US empire, if you like. And indeed, you could say Europe does the same thing. It has a privileged role within that tiered structure. It's not just following orders. It's actually pursuing its own objectives within a fairly open power structure.

And in a way, you know, I think, to me, the perfect example of the way in which the periphery also influences the core, or the lower power influences the upper power, is Rupert Murdoch. He was the child of a newspaper tycoon. Where I am in Australia, the Murdoch family is behind half of the

philanthropy in Melbourne. So, you know, everyone is aware of the Murdoch family's influence. And Rupert Murdoch initially grew his own newspaper, The Australian, which is still around. And then, in 1975, 1976, he left for America to establish the enormous transnational media empire that he currently has. You know, Fox News, Sky News, The Sun—the list goes on. He owns The Times.

I think he owns The New York Times. I'm not sure. And he's had a very, very significant role in the world. And there are actually quite a few Australians who do this, who sort of, you know, go off to the United States after their political careers. But, you know, arguably Rupert Murdoch's had more significant—not necessarily positive—influence on political culture over the last 30 or 40 years than anyone really in the world. I mean, you know, Fox News, cable news, the campaigns that he runs. The former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, recently said that without Rupert Murdoch's influence, Brexit wouldn't have happened, Trump wouldn't have happened, and the sort of unstitching of climate change agreements from 10 or 15 years ago wouldn't have happened.

#Pascal

In a sense, you see that feedback loop, right, within the empire, where these elite classes also have an influence on each other. I mean, Nel Bonilla, as you correctly said, works a lot on that. And it shows how this is a class, right? But on that point, actually, you know, thanks to the Iranians, we now have a new term that they've more or less been establishing: the Epstein class. I actually like that. It's not too bad. But I haven't actually heard of Australians in the Epstein papers. Have you? Are there any? I mean, there are a lot of Europeans, even members of monarchies and so on. And you can see how this is formed. Were there any cases of Australians popping up in these papers?

#Jeff Rich

Look, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I'm not so fond of the term “Epstein class.” I hate to disagree with you, Pascal, but partly because I worked on Australia's big Royal Commission on Child Sexual Abuse, you know, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago, which looked at the whole Catholic Church scandal and the sexual abuse practices in all sorts of other areas. So I kind of feel it picks up on something that is evident in those elite groups, which is actually, you know, sadly too prevalent across society and has affected other institutions as well. It tends to focus on the perverted, corrupt, sort of morally corrupt class, rather than really looking at the more institutional dynamics and culture of it. But, you know—

#Pascal

Fair enough. What I think is valuable about these scandals that came out is that they show that there is systematic blackmail. The child abuse is how it's done, but it's actually systematic blackmail at the highest levels. And that kind of network forms, with these kinds of people involved. And that

is one of the ways in which you try to get things done. We saw, of course, a lot of North American politicians in there, and North American thinkers and so on, but then also Europeans and a couple of Middle Easterners, though not that many.

And then, of course, the Israeli connection, which kind of is the central node of the whole thing. To me, it just shows how the Western system of dominance works overall. I mean, it's one of the components of it. I was more wondering because I didn't even see a single Japanese name, which to me just shows that, you know, the Japanese elites work a bit differently. They are not embedded in the same system, although Japan as a country is integrated into the wider US system of command and control, right? But not on all levels equally. That was the question, whether we saw any of that. Yeah.

#Jeff Rich

I feel that, compared to Japan, Australia's cultural independence is not so great. I mean, you know, we get all the US papers syndicated here, and the Murdoch press recycles a lot of the dynamics of American political culture here as well. I mean, look at Hollywood and a lot of Australia's former politicians. Kevin Rudd's the president of the Asia Society over there. Malcolm Turnbull's got links with banking interests over there. Julia Gillard, I think, got a role at the Brookings Institute and is connected with all the Clinton Democrats. So there's not much of an independent national culture left in Australia. But you also asked about how Australia was relating to Asia earlier on.

#Pascal

Yeah. And are you perceiving a shift toward the near abroad, you know, with people actually trying to argue that a closer relationship with ASEAN would be important, or also with Japan and China? What is the discourse there at the moment?

#Jeff Rich

Look, it's pretty thoroughly integrated into Australian foreign policy these days that we have broad relationships across Asia. My sense of things was, you know, there was perhaps an over-focus on China through the '90s and maybe the 2000s. But over the last 10 to 15 years, that has certainly been broadened out. There have been attempts for a long time to engage effectively with ASEAN. There have even been proposals for defence partnerships with Indonesia. There have been efforts to strengthen that. There's been a very major effort over the last dozen years or so to build Australia's relationship with India, diplomatically and economically as well, and that's explicitly partly a risk- balancing effort with China. So, you know, the Australian strategic assessment is that we don't want to have all our eggs in the China basket.

So it is pretty broad around there. But I think it is still too intellectually supportive of American primacy within a multipolar Asia. And, you know, I don't think it's really fully adapted to the broader

changes that we're seeing, you know, the extent to which India is engaged not only with China but with Russia. The attitudes towards Russia in Australia are extremely hostile. Yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah, extremely hostile. I don't know, we're probably one of the more Russophobic countries on Earth, maybe because we're, in some senses, a competitor in some industries, but also, you know, far away. And there's that legacy of the anti-communist left, I think, which has sort of rolled into the pro-American position in both the progressive and conservative parties.

#Pascal

I find this so interesting because, you know, the Baltic states will tell you that they're anti-Russian because they're so small and so close to Russia. And then Australians will probably tell you, yeah, because they're so big and so far away. I mean, what causes Russophobia is still quite fascinating. It's definitely a cultural thing. Yeah.

#Jeff Rich

Yeah, yeah. And Australia's had a lot of immigration from, you know, ex-Soviet states. A significant part of the Jewish community in Australia is from former Soviet states, from Hungary, etc. These communities are not insubstantial or uninfluential. I mean, I think the Premier of South Australia is a Ukrainian migrant or the son of a Ukrainian migrant. The former leader of the opposition here in Victoria was Ukrainian. And, you know, even in the '70s, the Liberal Party had quite a strong connection with immigrants from the Baltic state communities and had a long-standing position not to recognise those states, etc. So Australia's been pretty anti-Russia, anti-Soviet Union for a very, very long time.

#Pascal

Interesting.

#Jeff Rich

I mean, we had a referendum in the 1950s to ban the Communist Party, which we lost, but relatively narrowly.

#Pascal

Okay.

#Jeff Rich

So, yeah.

#Pascal

And indeed, the Labor Party...

#Jeff Rich

The sort of left-wing party split in the 1950s largely over the differences between Catholics and communists. And that still has, I think, a long-standing impact on the political culture of the Labor Party. It has made it very pro-American. Yeah, naturally.

#Pascal

It's just the switch from the UK to the United States, not only for security but for cultural intake and whatnot. But in that case, even today, in 2026, the Australian mindset is like, “We are part of the West, but we are just far away, out in the woods.”

#Jeff Rich

Well, you know, it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, how we experience national cultures, I think, is not the same as it was 50 years ago. I don't know if there's really a separate, distinctive national culture today that's not influenced by lots of others, given the people-to-people exchanges, the nature of internet communications, the diversity, and the intermixing of so many cultural elements anyhow. I just think some of that debate about distinctive national culture is actually something of a 20th- century debate these days. I think the world's sort of moved on, and our identities are a little bit more pluralistic, I guess. But there are still lots of people who want to, you know, come back to their sort of core civilizational identities and national identities, you know.

#Pascal

And that's not a settled question, but I'm very glad for people who add their analysis. And you're, of course, one of them. Again, I recommend that everybody go and subscribe to your Substack, The Burning Archive. This is just one of the articles on Substack.com. Yep, exactly. And I'm sorry, I'm not logged in. I'm, of course, subscribed to your archive, but I'm not logged in on this browser. Yeah, you publish frequently. You publish quite a lot. You add a lot of good articles. So I recommend that everybody who's listened to this point go to The Burning Archive and subscribe there. The Burning Archive is also on YouTube. Is there any other place where people should go to find you, Jeff?

#Jeff Rich

No, it's largely Substack and The Burning Archive. And, I mean, people might see there at the bottom left, there's the article on Jeremy Adelman, “The Capitalist Era: The Making and Unmaking of the Global Mind.” I did an interview with Jeremy Adelman, who's one of the world's leading global

historians, on my YouTube channel recently about his recent book. It's all about reframing the story of globalization as interdependence and how we relate to strangers. So I highly recommend people check that one out.

#Pascal

Everybody, go to The Burning Archive, have a look, have a read, and subscribe to Jeff Rich.

#Jeff Rich

Jeff, thank you so much for your time today.

#Jeff Rich

Thank you, Pascal.