TONY JONES: Good evening. Welcome to the final Q&A of 2014. I'm Tony Jones. Joining us tonight: young entrepreneur and chair of the G20 Youth Summit, Holly Ransom; the founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, Noel Pearson; celebrated actor and self-proclaimed anarchist James Cromwell, who is in Australia to play Rupert Murdoch on stage; former ambassador and Howard Government Minister Amanda Vanstone; columnist and author and host of Radio National Drive, Waleed Aly. Please welcome our panel. You can join the Twitter conversation by using the #qanda hashtag. If you've got a live question, add @qanda to help us find it. So this, as I said is the last Q&A for the year. There is a lot of talk about. Let's get straight to our first question, which is from Tony Hay.

POLITICAL LIES

TONY HAY: Thanks Tony. Do we need a new criminal offence for misleading or deceptive conduct in order to obtain public office or to form government?

TONY JONES: Holly Ransom?

HOLLY RANSOM: Throw me the opener. Good question. I mean, I think it's an interesting one. I'm assuming you are referring, obviously, to the state of broken promises, the much talked about conversation at the moment obviously brought to light by what's happened with the ABC cuts. I think it is an interesting one because, for me, it comes back down to integrity. You know, I'm a big believer in that being a fundamental value and that means, for me, you know, doing what you say and saying what you mean and I think one of the interesting things about the state of politics right now is I think there is an expectation, unfortunately, that when parties are talking to us pre an election, that we take it with a giant grain of salt and I think it's a shame. Unfortunately, as much as we, as a general public, have a little bit of allowance for the fact that you can find yourself in a different reality when you form Government and that can create some challenges to delivering on your agenda, I think certainly with the way that things have played out and frustrations, what I've been, I think, encouraged to see is the fact the Australian public are really holding governments to account and the fact, you know, that the discourse this week, the public conversation, the talk, the chatter on Twitter, everywhere, I think it's really good to see that we're stepping up the fact that it should be that you say what you mean and absolutely we will hold you to account for what's said during an election promise.

TONY JONES: You'd stop short of making it a criminal offence?

HOLLY RANSOM: Look, yeah, I think we'd stop short of that but I think it is important that we continue to bring accountability and greater levels of transparency to the public debate and it shouldn't be an accepted way of being that our politicians are able to get up in front of us and make promises that they don't follow through on.

TONY JONES: I'll quickly go to our second questioner, Nicholas White has got a slightly different solution to this problem. Nicholas?

POLITICAL LIES & REMEDIES

NICHOLAS WHITE: Thanks, Tony. Considering that just before the last election, our Prime Minister pretty much made sweeping direct promises that there would be no cuts to health, there'd be no cuts to education, no cuts to the ABC, no cuts to the SBS, it now seems to be that the Government is working against the mandate that we keep hearing about. In these situations, do you think voters should have the right to remove the representatives that they've elected and, you know, for reversing the course of what they have directly and clearly promised?

TONY JONES: Noel Pearson?

NOEL PEARSON: Well, it depends what promises we're disappointed about. The Newman Government promised to acquiesce to our five year fight against Wild River Conservation Laws that impinged on Indigenous land rights and two and a half years later they haven't acted on it. In fact, they've introduced a regime that reinforces the scheme that Labor had, so I'd like to put them in prison as well but possibly in pursuit of a cause that our audience might not support.

TONY JONES: What about more broadly, the Queensland Government's one case, the questioner mentioned the Federal Government?

NOEL PEARSON: Yes. I mean, I think that there is a great deal of disingenuousness about this. I think that it's very apparent in federal elections which promises are going to be upheld and which promises are put out there?

TONY JONES: So you mark them off, do you, the fake ones and the real ones?

NOEL PEARSON: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's, unfortunately, we go for the easy ones every time.

TONY JONES: Amanda Vanstone, do leaders have a right or even a responsibility to change their minds, to change their election problems or should, as the questioners ask, there be some penalty for doing so?

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, I think leaders have a responsibility to do what they believe is in the best interests of the nation at the time when they make the decision. That's what you elect them to do. I think there is a problem with - and not just in Australia, internationally - with a disappointment, if you like, disaffection or distance between Parliaments and the public and a good part of that is the public not believing they're being told what's actually happening. I think part of that comes back to so politicians do say things and I think I believe they believe it at the time, that that's what they're going to do and they get in there and think holy mother of ...we've got to do something different. No-one wants to be in that position of going and saying "I know I said this but now I'm going to do that". That's not - as if any politician, Liberal or Labor or any other party, thinks that's a great idea. I think part of the problem is us, reflected through the media, where what we want people to say before an election is only good things as if we imagine - and we know this, and we sit at home, that it's not true government is not about giving out stuff and always being good. It is the wrong end of job, actually. It's the wrong end of the pineapple, where you have to make really hard decisions. But when we come to the election, we only want to hear the good things and we push people into saying what we want to hear because we only want the good things and as soon as someone says "Well, I might have to look at that", it gets blown up into, well, it's going to be a disaster.

TONY JONES: Well, I mean can I just say...

AMANDA VANSTONE: So I think we're all in this together.

TONY JONES: ...Tony Abbott was pretty good at making it appear to be a disaster. He referred to the previous Government dying of shame because of its broken promises. I mean, is he in danger here of being hoist with his own petard?

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, I think at the next election, voters will decide who they want and, between largely the two major parties, they will make a decision as to in whom they have greater trust or otherwise.

TONY JONES: Waleed?

WALEED ALY: Yes, that's the definition of an election.

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, yeah.

WALEED ALY: But, yeah, but the question is really whether or not Tony Abbott's going to pay as a result? It's got to a point it's too far gone.

AMANDA VANSTONE: But that's my point. At the next election - I mean, I knew that that was the definition of election.

WALEED ALY: Yeah.

AMANDA VANSTONE: But after three years of being in government, the community will have had a chance to say, well, "This is what you said last time and we've judged you on that and this is your judgment day. "

WALEED ALY: Yeah, okay.

AMANDA VANSTONE: And they'll either give it a tick or not.

WALEED ALY: I really like one of the points Amanda just made there about how we're kind of all in this together. There is a problem in the...

TONY JONES: Team Australia.

WALEED ALY: Well, that's a slightly separate issue but, yes. But there is, I think, a problem in our political discourse where we expect, effectively, there to be no losers for anything that we do and so the minute a politician is in a situation where they're being asked to identify who the losers are going to be, they will back away from that because they know that any loser that's identified will suddenly make political life impossible for them and there will be a populist response from the other side of politics that will ram home the advantage. Now, Tony Abbott is in no position to complain about this, given eh was so masterful at deploying it when he was Opposition Leader. But that is, nonetheless, the dynamic of our politics. I actually don't mind it when politicians break promises, depending on what the promises are, the circumstances in which they made the promise and then the circumstances at the time. They decide to ditch the promise. It's possible, for example, that you could find that the world has changed so much from the moment that you promised something to the moment that you have to revise that decision that it is eminently justifiable. I think the difficulty with Tony Abbott's position though is that when you add up all the promises he was making before the election, they were mutually contradictory. So, it was like well, we're going to get the budget back into surplus. We're going to do that and we're going to do it without any new taxes, and we're going to get rid of a couple of taxes, including one that raises billions of dollars, and we're not going to cut anything and when you do that, I mean, that's magic pudding politics and it was always going to fall over at some stage. It was really just a question of whether or not he was going to pick something that was going to ignite enough of the electorate to turn against him and he might just have done it here. I, to this point, I never believed that we were looking at a one-term government. I still think it is unlikely, but this week is the first week I felt it's possible.

TONY JONES: Let me bring in an outsider for your perspective, Jamie. What do you think about, well, listening to this, but it's universal, isn't it, promises in politics and elections?

JAMES CROMWELL: Well, I like the idea of politicians going to jail because I think every politician should experience what it's like to be in jail and - I've got a friend. But it's interesting, we elected our President on the basis of a promise and it was quite an extraordinary promise. It was a unique opportunity to redress an issue in our country of our racism and our exploitation of people of colour and specifically black people and the hope was that that youth and that charm and that energy and that dream would be fulfilled and we sold it to ourselves. We still have an idea that there is a difference between these two parties - which is not true any longer. They are both the same party with different names - that they actually stand for something, the issues that concern us as individuals and as citizens, rather than the special interests they represent.

TONY JONES: The Republicans wouldn't say that. They'd say ObamaCare was the greatest mistake of this President and they'll overturn it at the first opportunity.

JAMES CROMWELL: Well, they've tried how many times to overturn it? But the interesting thing is they all get - and they will get - Medicare and that's a single payer system operated by the United States Government and everybody in America loves it and we - Obama did not even allow the discussion of single payer to occur during the debate on ObamaCare and ObamaCare basically is a subsidy for the insurance industry because people are required to buy the insurance and insurance, in order to cover the expenses of covering people who were uninsurable before, have reduced the amount of coverage in the individual policy so that the policies are not as good. So you see that it's just the same thing as he offered in this immigration bill. They make it sound really great and then when you read the fine print, they've managed to screw somebody. I don't know why we continue, as citizens, to believe that these promises will be fulfilled. They never have been fulfilled and we keep on going back to the same well, I thought - you know, rats are smarter. They go down the maze once or twice and when they find that there is no food at the end of it, they stop doing it but human beings will continue down that maze because they got it once and they're going to get it again.

TONY JONES: Our questioner has his hand up. Nicholas?

NICHOLAS WHITE: Thanks, Tony. I think the only thing that I would say, I completely accept that, you know, you might, before government, feel one way and say something and then you might make it to government and you might realise, well, hey, things are different and so, of course, there is going to be these situations where, you know, this is accepted by the community. I just feel with some of the promises that we've had, they're actually very direct, they're very sweeping, they're very wide, they're very measurable and they're very quantifiable and I just think that three years is a really long time to say oh, you know, that's cool. We'll get our chance in a third of a decade. It's a really long time to punish, I guess, for lies.

TONY JONES: Okay, Nicholas, we'll take that as a comment. Thank you very much. Q&A is live across Australia. It's simulcast on ABC News 24, News Radio and Australia Plus. Our next question tonight comes from Yvonne Steirn.

THE GOVERNMENT NARRATIVE

YVONNE STEIRN: Hi. My question is: Prime Minister Abbott is proposing a one cent petrol tax. In essence and reality we are going to lose more than that when the supermarkets decide to stop their promoting of the fuel bonuses and point system that they are going to do in the near future. My question is why does the Liberal Party seem to sit in the background and allow the Labor Party to discredit their policies regarding the budget?

TONY JONES: Amanda Vanstone?

AMANDA VANSTONE: Thanks! Look, I'm not a spokesman for the Liberal Party. I think my subs might be a bit out of date, but, you know, I will redo them. So, I'm a committed Liberal, that's true, but I'm not a spokesperson for the Government. I actually think we have to have, collectively, a more mature discussion about where we want our money to come from. For example, I think the Premiers should get together and agree that they want a rise in the GST because they get all that money and the States - some of the States - clearly haven't got enough money to do what they need to do. We can keep asking for more and imagine there is a magic pudding out of which it is going to come but it's not. I think we should reorganise some of the Commonwealth and State responsibilities so that we don't have, for example, an army of public servants checking on schools, both at the Federal Government and State Government level. Clean up our system of government. It's never going to be attractive, because no government will want to lose anything, but we should do that. Tax on petrol increase in that is a pretty efficient way of getting money from people who use the roads. So, my ...

TONY JONES:

AMANDA VANSTONE: Can I just say...

TONY JONES: Sure

AMANDA VANSTONE: My bottom line position is, look, if you want governments to do things, you've got to expect them to get the money from somewhere and if every time we have a discussion, as you say, of, well, who is going to lose out of this, you will have the same tax arrangements that we've got now, the same inadequate funding for the level of things that we want done.

TONY JONES: So, Amanda, I guess the heart of that question - we'll come back to you, if you like, in just a moment. The heart of that question is the notion that the Liberal Party is not selling its message properly. In The Australian over the weekend, there was a claim that the Liberal Party, the Government, does not have a narrative. Andrew Bolt, right wing commentator, says the Government must change or die. Is there a problem with the way this government is going at the moment?

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, the budget clearly they haven't got through everything they want to get through. So for anyone that's a problem because you need the money to do the things that you have committed to doing. Who's at fault in that? That's not for me to say. You know, just not for me. I'm not the arbiter of who hasn't done a good enough job or not. They haven't sold the policies well enough to get them through the Parliament and that's a problem. Clearly that's a problem.

WALEED ALY: I reckon you have a cracking opinion on who's to blame, actually.

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, bear in mind - let me speak in generalities ...

WALEED ALY: All right, now we are getting somewhere.

TONY JONES: Since you are not a party spokesman any more, could you speak in specifics?

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, I'll go back to when I was a Minister and when I had some really tough decisions to implement and I'll tell you what you generally find, this is human nature, largely, I don't think it's just in politics, I think it's in business, it's everywhere, that when you're the one that's got the tough stuff to do, don't look around and expect too many of your colleagues behind you. You will be left out like a shag on a rock.

JAMES CROMWELL: Do you have the same thing we have? The taxes are passed on to those--

TONY JONES: You mean the right to carry arms?

JAMES CROMWELL: No, no, no, no. , no.

AMANDA VANSTONE: Yeah, why don't you do something about that?

JAMES CROMWELL: That I disagree with. Why don't I do something about that? That's a politician. That's a very general question.

AMANDA VANSTONE: (Indistinct0 as an issue.

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE

TONY JONES: No, I made a little joke. We haven't got time for that discussion.

JAMES CROMWELL: Is everybody in Australia, including the corporations, paying their fair share of taxes? Because in America, our largest corporations pay very little taxes? In fact, Mr Murdoch pays, I think, 7% on the billions that he makes and that's where, if you have a shortfall, you raise the GST or you raise petrol tax and it goes to individuals. What happens to the people who can really afford it? They all say, oh, no, capitalism is the engine that drives the economy forward, that creates the jobs, you can't tax us. But, of course, if you don't, then you don't have a country.

TONY JONES: I'm going to go back to our questioner, Yvonne. You had your hand up. Do you want to get--

YVONNE STEIRN: Yeah. My issue wasn't the actual 1% tax. I mean that, to me, is a non-event because we are going to lose more in our four cents from Woolies, for example, when they take that back from us. So one cent, I don't understand why everyone has jumped up and down about a one cent tax. We pay more than that on a fluctuating weekly cycle. My point is, no matter what the Government come out with on their policies and their budgets, they put it out there, the Opposition jump on it and attack, which is what you want the Opposition to do, and then you don't hear anything back. It's like, well, Liberal Party have gone to ground. Like we don't hear rebuttal. We don't hear any justification. It just seems they are letting Labor just walk all over them.

TONY JONES: Let's hear Noel Pearson on this. Looking at the polls, what we've seen is a progressive decline, in fact a long-term decline, in the Government's polling numbers. What do you put that down to?

NOEL PEARSON: Well, I think that we've got to - the Australian people have got to create a constituency for sensible policies and the situation the Government faces, I think, is a consequence of a long history - the constituents from the left saying "Right bad," and the constituents from the right saying "Left bad," when we really should be creating a radical centre around which all Australians can see good for the nation and politicians like Abbott and Shorten can respond to that constituency. We're asking them to show - to do the right thing by us but we don't create a constituency for the right policies. Amanda Vanstone talked about raising the GST. I agree with her, actually. But when are we going to have a constituency around that? We want better services. We want the ABC properly funded but we've got raise money to do that and, unfortunately, in Australia, we're in these two tribes and the leaders are responding to those two tribes and we don't have a constituency in the Australian community that's out to support a radical combination of the left and right positions.

TONY JONES: So, Noel, doesn't that require political leadership and, of course, if you are running the government, you are the ultimate political leader of the country?

NOEL PEARSON: Yeah, but, as I say, I think we're now a long way into a situation where leaders are not really leading. They're responding to our unrealistic hopes that we can have a fully funded ABC without, say, raising the GST or raising other forms of revenue and so on, you know, and I think that the Australian people have got to create an imperative for leaders to respond to. I think that Tony Abbott will lead a second term. I think that there will not be a change in this first term but, certainly, he's got to be worried.

TONY JONES: Holly?

HOLLY RANSOM: I mean, it's interesting, as you pointed out, Yvonne, we have got this polarising state of politics back and we're pretty are accustomed to that now. That tends to be the playoff between our Government and our Opposition. I think the thing that's interesting, when you add on the state of play that we have in the Upper House right now, how much that's exacerbating really this sensationalism and lack of conversation. To go to Noel's point, you know, we're not having robust policy conversations. We are getting pulled to the margins. We're getting pulled to more of the politicking and the posturing and the power plays than we are to actually what's the policy that's going to lead the nation forward, that's going to allow us to tackle some of the really big intergenerational issues we have got right now. I think part of it, for me, is very much bottom up. I think - I fully encourage as many Australians to get their voice actively into the conversation, talk to MPs, gather in organisations, put their voices forward in whatever means available to them but I also think it's important that our leaders facilitate the opportunity for that engagement, for that conversation to be had, for those inputs to be actually generated and put into something substantive. So I think it's bottom up and top down for me.

TONY JONES: Picking up Noel and Amanda's point, I mean, you can't imagine the kind of public bottom-up movement to raise the GST, can you? And the point is they're saying, without creating a new tax base, you won't be able to pay for everything.

HOLLY RANSOM: Yep. No, I agree and I think that's where, absolutely, political leadership is necessary. I think 2015 will be really interesting for us as a country, because the Government have commissioned a lot of white papers. You know, we've got the look into federalism. We've got the discussion about what we're going to do with the Australian taxation system. Also, internationally, we have got the opportunity to lead, with our role in the Security Council, on what the post 2015 sustainable development goals look like. All of those are conversations that there will be the platform for us to have a voice in. Government will be leading it anyway and it's important we, as a population, rally around it.

TONY JONES: Over this side, brief comments from both Waleed and Amanda.

AMANDA VANSTONE: I have had the experience of the first year in Government. It's horrific, to be frank. You go from 10 or 11 years - in this case seven years of Opposition. It is a new body of people, not all of them with experience as Ministers. You work with the public service that you don't know that well because you haven't worked with them at that level. There is a lot to sort out in the first year. The Howard Government, remember, had in 1997 what they called annus horribilis and, to take Holly's point, won clearly in '98, proposing a new tax. So I think if you take the Australian people into your confidence, tell them why you think something needs to be done and have that rational conversation, you will get elected and you can get over the first-term blues.

TONY JONES: Waleed, briefly?

WALEED ALY: I think there is truth in that. We shouldn't forget, though, in '98 they lost the popular vote, so it was skin of the teeth stuff. But I think one of the points that's being made here...

AMANDA VANSTONE: You mean they didn't get re-elected and it was sort of an accident I was still a Minister. I mean they did get re-elected.

WALEED ALY: I can't comment on your Ministry but I can...

AMANDA VANSTONE: No. They got re-elected.

WALEED ALY: They got re-elected, yeah, but they lost the popular vote.

AMANDA VANSTONE: Proposing a new tax.

WALEED ALY: I agree. You know, it was a magnificent feat. I'm just saying it was a lot closer than this being a formula for success. But I think there is a point that needs to be raised here and that is there is a reason that the Government is struggling at the moment and it is not as simple as the country is really polarised and there can be no accommodation so governments just fall over. It's that their narrative is not entirely clear but the narrative against them is brutally clear. The narrative against them is that in their decisions that they are making in order to fix the budget, for example, they are doing so in a way that is, for whatever this means, unfair. That it is falling disproportionately on those who can least bear the burden. That's the reason the Government came up with the idea of a debt levy, which was itself a broken promise, but is not a broken promise anyone cares about because it imposes the cost on the wealthiest people. It is, however, unfortunately the only measure about which the Government can say that and it is temporary. Yes, all the other measures that have created such a huge storm in the public have been those that fall on - that are regressive in some kind of way. They fall on low income earners. The petrol excise, the fuel excise, wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the Government could begin a conversation about how you do that in a way that's not regressive and Joe Hockey's attempt to do that was to say well, poor people don't drive cars. Well, not as much. So...

TONY JONES: Unless they live in the western suburbs of major cities and have to drive to work and back from work.

JAMES CROMWELL: Unless they work.

WALEED ALY: The GST, it's actually, I think, the GST does need to be raised and we do need to have a debate on it but you only begin to have that debate on it when you confront head on the claim that the GST is a regressive tax because poor people are hit hardest and once you acknowledge that fact, then you can begin, as John Howard did, you can begin a process of figuring out how to offset that consequence. How to, you know, you do it through tax cuts in income or whatever it might be. But because the Government...

TONY JONES: And he did it with an amalgam of social welfare groups backing his tax rise.

WALEED ALY: Right. So the problem, I don't think, is that reform is necessarily impossible or the country is hopelessly polarised or whatever it is. It's not even just that there can be no losers in our politics. I think the Australian populace understood that budget reform was probably needed at some level. What they wanted to see was that it was fair, that everybody was contributing something to it and I think that's the test that the Government has so far failed. As to whether or not they can rectify that in the space of two years, I don't know. I actually fear that the public might have made up their mind on this.

TONY JONES: Okay. We're going to move on. We've got quite a few questions to get to. Our next one is from Nick Cleary. Nick?

RUPERT - TYRANT OR GENIUS?

NICK CLEARY: Yeah, thanks, Tony. Mine is for James Cromwell actually. Just he may have already answered part of this question. With your research and study into Rupert Murdoch for your new play, obviously I was just wondering your opinion on whether Rupert Murdoch is a tyrannical political kingmaker and social dictator or more a misunderstood social commentator and business genius?

TONY JONES: Jamie?

JAMES CROMWELL: That's an either or question?

NICK CLEARY: Little bit?

AMANDA VANSTONE: Not to polarise it.

JAMES CROMWELL: He certainly is an extraordinary business man. I mean, he is incredibly successful. I always say who he is as a human being, I have no idea. The phenomenon of Rupert Murdoch is similar to many other magnates, the masters of the universe. The irreparable harm he has done to this dialogue in my country and I sort of believe in England as well and most likely here, is that his voice and his point of view dominates not only the conversation but the politics that create the conversation and that is to the detriment, because he has a narrow self-interest. As was pointed out to me today, his portfolio, his companies, are connected to the extraction industries in a very subtle but conscious way and so his opposition to renewable energy and to the phenomenon of global warming is simply the short view. I believe that that applies - I mean in my country, on practically every issue, Fox News is the determinant to a public that has no other option, that hears no other voice but his, that cannot distinguish between opinion and fact, that listens to the ranting of people who are innately racist, xenophobes, warmongers and they don't hear the attribution of the people on the panels that they are paid by the defence industry, that they are supporting wars that benefit them and the companies that they represent and all this is part of the modus operandi of the man, which I think is very very dangerous and needs to be exposed and opposed and that's what our play is about.

TONY JONES: Noel Pearson - I'll come back to you if you want to ask something. Noel, you have got a very different take on Rupert Murdoch, at least judging by your speech at the 50th anniversary of The Australian newspaper.

NOEL PEARSON: Yeah. I mean, without the support of The Australian over the last 15 years, I don't think we would have made the ground we have in Indigenous affairs. I think a reorientation in Indigenous affairs was necessary and, quite frankly, The Australian was the only national media vehicle that got behind that. I also think that in prospect, such as with constitutional reform, recognising Indigenous Australians, that quite frankly, Rupert Murdoch is probably one of, I would say, five or six people who are absolutely key to a successful referendum. I would count Paul Keating and John Howard as the other two white Australians who are key to that success, as well as Patrick Dodson and Lowitja O'Donoghue. So, I understand the whole critique of News Corporation and Murdoch and so on but when it comes to Indigenous affairs in this country, Murdoch has a history that goes back to the Stuart case for the Adelaide Advertiser in 1959, the fight against the death penalty for Max Stuart and his flagship paper, in particular, has been completely assiduous in its support of what I would say is the right set of radical centre politics. Now, that might not be beautiful music to the ears of people on the left but I would argue that the radical centre policies that we are trying to prosecute here are absolutely essential for Indigenous people.

TONY JONES: Holly Ransom, let's bring in you. Tyrannical political kingmaker and social dictator or misunderstood social commentate or and business genius? That was the question.

HOLLY RANSOM: Yeah, as you said, you know, does it have to be an either or? I mean, to some degree I think that the two comments there highlight exactly the sort of figure that Murdoch is. He is one that does draw out incredibly different opinions from people. You know, he polarises. You people love him, they hate him, they are generally not somewhere in between and I think the really interesting thing about this play, I'm intrigued for James to take on someone that he has such strong views about and to be able to encompass that man and be able to you know, play that character. I think, for me, it just highlights the point of the importance of diversity of actors within our fourth estate. You know, we need a variety of different voices. We need a variety of different people who are funding and putting forward, you know, obviously, by virtue of that, their different lens and points of view. I mean, that's critical for debate just as much as we talked earlier about that political difference of opinion is. You know, as such a huge and increasingly with this 24 hour news cycle, we are enormous consumers of information. We are look to these sources increasingly to be our source of truth, our source of fact. You know, our lens of interpretation on the issues that are going on and it is important, I think regardless of your opinion, that he is certainly not the only voice, regardless of which side of the lens you may be on on whether he is positive or negative.

TONY JONES: I'll actually throw that back to James. I mean, how do you play Rupert Murdoch if you evidently don't have a great deal of respect for him and worry obviously about his political operation?

JAMES CROMWELL: Well, you know, I'm playing a character called Rupert Murdoch who has this journey in the play. It's not Rupert Murdoch. I have no idea what goes on in Rupert Murdoch. I don't understand this. His voice certainly is louder than anybody else's voice. The comparison for the ABC versus commercial television, those corporations that control commercial media have a much louder voice in the discussion and so I don't - and I don't understand the concept of the radical centre, I must tell you. I think there is a polarity but I think what Rupert Murdoch puts out there is a disguised propaganda and it is confusing to people, it is not helpful to the dialogue. I don't watch his shows here, I don't watch his shows back there either, but we have guys like Hannity and the shows on Fox which are screeds for attacking anybody who disagrees with the free market system as the panacea of all possible ills. And I must say, I don't know, you know, I hate to disagree but for Indigenous issues in Australia, it may be he may be wonderful and the Stuart case happens to be in our play but in our country, our Aboriginal people are invisible. They exist. They are persecuted. They are impoverished. They are ignored. They are ripped off by the government and by the people, Anglos who surround them. There is not a mention. There's not a word. You don't see anybody. So I think if you are going to have a dialogue about some things that are important, everybody has to have a voice.

TONY JONES: Noel, do you want to briefly respond to that?

NOEL PEARSON: Well, some of our most gut-wrenching fights for the rights of our people in relation to land and the ability of our people to develop and have employment and so on have been supported by Murdoch's papers solely. Not a word from the ABC. Not a word from Fairfax. The Murdoch press has argued for our right not to live in poverty and they've supported us in the fights. They've also supported justice for deaths in custody, the Mulrunji case in Palm Island. The Australian newspaper left every other outlet for dead in advocating Mulringi's case in the death in custody at Palm Island. So, I detect in Murdoch, and I have met him a number of times, I detect basic Australian fealty to the Indigenous people. There is a human being under the mogul and I think that whatever he might do in the United States, the way in which he has influenced his outlets here in Australia, I can't be more thankful for the support they give us and our causes. People might not agree with the causes I advocate but they are causes about land rights, human rights but also about welfare reform and economic development. We've got to have both and we've got to combine those two things in an intelligent way because it can't just be that we live off a leftist prescription and abandoning the right's prescription. We have got to bring the two together.

TONY JONES: I'll just give the final word on this to Waleed Aly. You have been listening to this.

WALEED ALY: Yeah.

TONY JONES: Bring it together.

WALEED ALY: It's interesting listening to Noel speak. You know, he would have followed the coverage of Indigenous affairs in The Australian far closer than I have. I think there is - at some point there's a marriage of convenience that goes on where Noel is advocating certain positions that do generally fit with the philosophical direction of The Australian being, you know, a free market-orientated newspaper. It's not terribly fond of symbolic aspects of reconciliation, for example. Has been either in the form of its editorials or in the form of its columnists very critical of things like the apology to the Stolen Generations or whatever it might be. I take Noel's comments seriously. I also know, though, that if I wanted to find a voice in the Australian media that was going to, for example, deny that there were Stolen Generations, I'd probably only find them in the Murdoch press. So there's this sort of complicated toing and froing that goes on. And, you know, and Noel would know better than me. There are plenty of people in Indigenous Australia who are highly critical of the way that Noel approaches these things and would say that that particular agenda will never get any kind of play in the Murdoch press and it's more likely to get some kid of play in the ABC or Fairfax.

NOEL PEARSON: Yeah, I suppose the other point of view is absent in the other press, though.

WALEED ALY: Yeah, and that might be a fair criticism.

NOEL PEARSON: You can't find the kind of development, supportive voice in the ABC or Fairfax.

WALEED ALY: I suspect there are perspectives that are absent in just about any press or any outlet that you choose to...

NOEL PEARSON: Yeah.

WALEED ALY: I mean, so that observation alone, I don't think, gets us very far. I mean I take it but I don't think it gets us very far. The one final comment I would say is I think I don't have an objection to the existence of the Murdoch press or anything like that. I do have an objection to the concentration of media ownership and clearly Australia has a problem in that regard, particularly when it comes to newspapers outside Melbourne and Sydney. There is a problem there and I think anyone who is into a diversity of journalism would accept that fact. I would say, though, that I think sometimes the influence of the Murdoch press is overstated. Yeah, sure, it is influential.

TONY JONES: I'm just going to interrupt you there, just quickly to go back to our questioner.

WALEED ALY: Sure.

TONY JONES: And then we are going to - maybe you can just make a comment actually, because we need to move onto other things.

NICK CLEARY: Sorry, Tony, I just - I find it completely ironic that James is actually playing this role but also I think that - I just really, the question I wanted answered is that Murdoch controls 35% of the ownership of newspapers, yet 70% of readership is the figures I have read.

JAMES CROMWELL: That's right.

NICK CLEARY: Now, I will be open to debate on that. However, wouldn't that indicate that what they are saying is what people want to hear rather than what they are dictating to is or that he's actually dictating to people anyway. I don't understand.

TONY JONES: Okay, Jamie, a quick response because we've got to move on.

JAMES CROMWELL: I don't know who determines what people want to hear. I think people - individuals determine what they want to hear. Surely their participation, you know, is out of habit. They pick up the paper. They read the paper. They like the celebrity. They like the titillation. They are not particularly interested in delving very deeply if it doesn't affect them personally and so it's just habitual. The dialogue has got to be raised and I don't believe it is going to be raised by Mr Murdoch.

TONY JONES: Okay, we're going to move on. Our next question is from Nonie Betts.

NEXT GENERATION

NONIE BETTS: Holly, you have said that this may well be the first generation of young people who are actually worse off than the generation before. I'm wondering if the panel can have a response or reaction to that in the light of current issues such as the way higher education is now once again out of the reach or becoming out of the reach of many young people, the rising rate of young Aboriginal suicide, youth unemployment, the inequality between rich and poor that's increasing and the way that politics and ideology seem to be putting aside the national and global interest in areas such as the battle against climate change.

TONY JONES: Okay, it's going to be hard. A longish questions but we'll keep our answers relatively brief so we can get through more questions.

HOLLY RANSOM: Sure. Nonie, thank you for the question. I guess I will provide context before the panel jump back in. I had the privilege of leading the youth summit for the G20 this year and, in line with that, we have been leading the cause of youth unemployment globally. We've got a state of play right now where leaders globally, not young people, are talking about a lost generation. The fact that we've got 600 million young people right now, one in six global youth, that aren't in education, training or employment and the scary thing about that is not just the immediacy of that challenge here and now, economically, politically, socially, it's the fact that the ILO data shows that's setting up an inequality for life. So you look at the ramifications of being long-term unemployed for 12 months under the age of 24. It sets up a lifetime earning differential. So a young ten years on is going to be 23% less than his male counterpart, 16% if you're - less if you're female and that goes well into your 40s. So the challenge that we've got right now is making sure - and we were very happy with the outcome of the G20 this weekend, seeing leaders re-prioritise the issue. The proof will be in the pudding in how domestically we enact that and move to take change on it. But I think the really important thing is the impetus behind this. You know, not just the G20 commitment. It's COP 21 next year. The sustainable development goals, we are absolutely in need of action from our leaders to ensure that the forecast challenge, that situation you talked about of having a generation that, unfortunately, don't enjoy the standard of living that their parents do, doesn't become a reality.

TONY JONES: You are talking about the global picture here but, of course, you said each individual country has to deal with it.

HOLLY RANSOM: Yeah.

TONY JONES: In Australia, unemployment is highest in regional areas, it's higher still in Aboriginal communities.

HOLLY RANSOM: Absolutely.

TONY JONES: So what are the fundamental, briefly if you can, the fundamental thing that has to be done here.

HOLLY RANSOM: Well, I think the challenger here, I mean, youth unemployment isn't removed from our backyard. I mean, it's sitting at around the 20% mark now. Disturbingly, as I spoke about those figures, are the ramifications of the long-term youth unemployment. That rate has tripled for us in the last six years. That's at 18% now. So we've got enormous challenges. I mean, firstly, in providing a complete education for young people. When we were at 13% youth unemployment earlier this year, 67% of those young people hadn't made it through high school. So that's a challenge. That extra 7% we have got are people that are coming out of university with a qualification and are joining a jobless queue. So the second part we've got to deal to is the skills mismatch. The fact that we've got people coming out with qualifications that the markets needs aren't matching with. So we've got part the structural conversation around education and how we better create an education pathway that leads to a job opportunity and the second part we've got is actually in the immediate term. How do we address and provide greater incentives for businesses to create pathways for young people into work, as well as the opportunity to encourage youth entrepreneurship and so young people will be able to create their own economic opportunities.

TONY JONES: Noel, if you could address the notion this could be the first generation of young people who'll be worse off than the generation before? Does that apply equally in the Indigenous community, more so, less so?

NOEL PEARSON: Well, obviously more so. I think we don't have a progressive alternative policy. The paradigm that commands the heights at the moment does not have an alternative and progressives have never developed a compelling alternative. We don't have an alternative to the so called neo-Liberal paradigm. One thing I will say, in the 80s, voters in Australia, as across the west, voted for a set of policies that would grow the cake. We all agreed with that. We agreed with a set of policies to grow the cake. What happened, though, was the slices of the cake also changed and I think the two things have become conflated. The growing of the bigger cake through a set of neo-Liberal policies but, of course, one of the consequences has been there has been changes in the slice of cake that different sectors of our community get out of that deal and we don't--

TONY JONES: You are talking about the levels of inequality, inequity.

NOEL PEARSON: Inequity.

TONY JONES: The fact that the richest now...

NOEL PEARSON: And the fact that people do so well and some people do so poorly and particularly the young in our community and I suppose my point to progressive people who are anxious about this is that what is our alternative policy? Have we developed an alternative economic policy that agrees with the growing of the cake but tackles this fundamental problem that's arisen where the relative slices that people are getting, the winners and losers and so on, has also altered.

TONY JONES: Amanda Vanstone, is it time that a government decided that this was, in fact, a national emergency?

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well - I just lost my train of thought for a moment there. I'm not sure that it is fair to say that this is a crisis unlike any other. We all - I've got it back now. We want more. You know, when I was a kid, kids shared a room. Three or four kids would share a room or two kids would share a room. It is not considered appropriate by many kids now. Now, we've got kids who don't want to go to school because they haven't got the right brand of sneakers for God's sake. I mean we are very materialistic and we've not got bigger houses with more cars and say we are worse off because we haven't got as much income left. So I think we need to look at what we want but I think the fundamental issue - I mean, it's a galactical question and Tony says to be brief, so you raised about 20 different issues so let me just pick one. When I was the Education Minister, you go to a school, ask a kid, "What are you going to do?" and they start the answer with "Well, I probably won't go to university". We have become a nation that says you are successful or not depending on whether you go to university. People, and especially those who have been, are very dismissive of those who haven't and that has taken the focus off everybody being taught at school to do the basics and be a decent person and showing decent respect for people, not just because you've got some letters after your name, perhaps you happen to be a human being and you can look after yourself.

TONY JONES: But one of the reasons that young people strive to go to university, one of them, is that you get higher income if you have a degree. That's proven.

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, of course, when they don't want to increase fees, they argue that isn't true.

TONY JONES: No, but the Government argues it is true. That's the point.

AMANDA VANSTONE: Yes, I know. I know. But I just make the point is it still a third of school leavers that go to university? Is there anyone here who can say that that isn't true, that we have built a community that shows more respect to people with a degree than those without and I think that's a core part of the problem, because you've got a lot of kids who are never going to go to university who are trained to think that they're no hopers and it's the biggest crock of you know what that we have to deal with.

WALEED ALY: That's also partly a problem because University has been reconceived as a vocational thing. I mean, once upon a time, a university was a place of learning and that was kind of its function was to provide education.

AMANDA VANSTONE: Sure.

WALEED ALY: Not to provide vocational training. Now you can't have a conversation about a university that isn't about the job that's at the end of it and that's part of the transactional nature of our society.

AMANDA VANSTONE: Yeah, but it is still true that a very large proportion of school leavers are not going to go to university and they are not shown appropriate respect.

TONY JONES: Okay. All right. All right. I'm going to bring in Jamie here. You have been listening and, I notice, with a wry smile for quite a bit of it. I also remember a statement you made just recently, if young people don't start fighting authority, pretty soon there won't be any water to drink or enough food to eat.

JAMES CROMWELL: Yeah, I thought the question had to do with quality of life for the kids - young people coming up, their ability to have the life we've been fortunate enough to have and I don't think anybody can answer that in the affirmative right now. And so is this conscious? Is somebody responsible for this? I disagree totally that there is not an alternative. I disagree with the idea that growth is the solution to everything. That is, to me, a cancer, that we have to develop, that we must - that we have a responsibility to the generations to come in terms of the environment, in terms of their ability to have an education. In our country, what we have worked out is two things. If you happen to be white, you get to go to college but you have to borrow the money from the Federal Government to do it. By the time you get out, you owe $150,000. You have to pay that money back which, means that you can't really leave a job, you can only take specific jobs that will pay you. So, in other words, they've hooked you right into the system. If you happen to be a person of colour and you happen to be bright, pretty soon you are going to be in the jail system because the real profit made out of young black people is to put them in jail and the Government then contracts for the support of the corporation that runs the jail. So I think the system is broken. Every piece of it is broken. I think the only people who are going to be able to solve this is the young people themselves. But we are going to have to pay for it ultimately one way or another, whether it's in taxes, whether it's in the quality of our life. Nobody is going to get out of this for free and we better do something quick because--

NONIE BETTS: Can I just say that I think we should pay for it.

JAMES CROMWELL: Yeah.

NONIE BETTS: I think we should pay for it because young people coming out now, I mean graduate unemployment has never been higher. I don't agree with what you've said, Amanda there, that everyone aspires to go to university. I've been a teacher for 37 years. They don't all aspire to go to university, believe me.

AMANDA VANSTONE: But do you agree that the ones that don't are not treated with the same respect as the people that do?

NONIE BETTS: No, I don't agree with that either. Not at all. And a lot of the kids who go to university don't really want to go there. Their parents are pushing them or they feel this, you know, kudos that they have to go but it's not because their peers think better of them for going. I mean most kids just want to get out there and get a job or to have some direction that they feel motivated and inspired by and it is certainly not always university. You know, I think we do have to pay for it, James, because as a baby boomer, you know, we've had it pretty good.

JAMES CROMWELL: Yeah.

TONY JONES: Okay.

NONIE BETTS: And I'm terrified by 20 something kids won't?

TONY JONES: You're almost on the panel at this point, you're doing so well. So I'm - well done. I'll just get a quick answer from - Waleed wanted to get in on that but keep it brief, because we've got a few things.

WALEED ALY: Okay. One element we haven't really discussed is the role of employers in corporations in this. If we're talking about youth unemployment, what's actually interesting is there is quite a bit of money sloshing around multi-national corporations for hiring people.

TONY JONES: That's because they don't pay any tax.

WALEED ALY: Well, partly, yeah. Partly that's true. But they don't seem to be that eager to spend that money on a young talent and what I think has partly happened is that there is kind of the middle tier of jobs where young, educated people might slot in because they don't have the experience to go to the top tier but they're too educated to take sort of the more entry level jobs. That's sort of where they're not hiring these young people and so there's a - I don't know how you fix that. I don't know if you do that with some kind of incentive thing to do with taxation or you regulate or I really have no idea how you fix it but that seems part of the problem and they're the people actually doing the employing that we haven't spoken about in this conversation, which I find very strange.

TONY JONES: And when I say they don't pay any tax, I mean they pay a very small proportion of tax.

WALEED ALY: Yeah, that's right.

TONY JONES: Now, we've got to move on.

WALEED ALY: I think less than you pay roughly.

TONY JONES: Much less. Our next question is from James Nugent.

UNDERSTANDING TERROR

JAMES NUGENT: Thanks, Tony. My question is for the entire panel. So I strongly believe that there is no such thing as good or evil, only two opposite points of view. Given the increase in radical lone wolf terrorism, does the panel believe that the Government has done enough to understand the point of view of these people or is our reaction to ISIS simply producing ever more radicalised individuals?

TONY JONES: Once again, our time is running out but, Waleed, I'll go to you for a quick answer on this.

WALEED ALY: A quick one. All right.

TONY JONES: Yeah.

WALEED ALY: I disagree that there's no such thing as good and evil. I'm not a relativist in that way. The point that you make, though, that we don't understand where these people are coming from or how they've ended up in that position, I think that is true, partly that's because it's easier to develop a response on the basis that they're just insane or they're irredeemably evil, that there is no explanation for what this behaviour is. The behaviour is horrific. The behaviour deserves to be condemned but that doesn't mean that it is inhumane in the sense that it is not human behaviour. It is human behaviour. It is understandable with reference to psychology, with reference to sociology. There are all sorts of models of radicalisation that we don't clearly have time to go into now. They exist. But the problem is that once you come to understand them, you begin to see that terrorism is something that has social dimensions to it. There is a social dimension to the problem which requires, then, a social dimension to the solution, which becomes a very uncomfortable conversation. It is much easier to express it in military terms, which is why we are much more attracted, I think, to that sort of idea of, well, there is a problem with ISIS. What we need to do is go back into Iraq. And when, however successful that military intervention ends up being, when there is another ISIS or another group that comes along that is inspiring people via YouTube or social media or whatever it is on the other side of the world, well, we'll just bomb that too and I think there is a cycle there. It is almost - it's compelling how naive it is we think we can break that cycle by repeating it. But that seems to be what we are doing.

TONY JONES: So are you saying that they should be left alone to become a caliphate running all of Syria?

WALEED ALY: No, I'm not saying that at all.

TONY JONES: And possibly other countries alongside Syria and spreading through the Middle East over time.

WALEED ALY: No, the answer to that is no.

TONY JONES: So what should you do to stop them?

WALEED ALY: I'm not saying - but it's not an either or thing. What I'm saying is that at the moment, the way we approach terrorism is very one-dimensional. See a head, kick it. The problem is that in the process of kicking that head, other heads will pop up and go, "What was that?" and then they might - that's where the radicalisation process becomes circular. So, yeah, I think there are times where there is military intervention. My opinion on this particular one is reserved for the moment but it's not 2003, which I think was a catastrophe and always was going to be, but the idea that you could take land off ISIS, for example, and weaken them military, I think that's an achievable goal. What we should not do is assume by doing that and continuing to do that, we will somehow get rid of the problem. It's not to say it's not necessary to contain ISIS but don't think you're solving a broader problem by doing that.

TONY JONES: I'd actually quite like to hear from Noel Pearson on this. It is not a subject we often hear you talking about but it's occupied a huge amount of space in The Australian newspaper, for example, which you obviously read.

NOEL PEARSON: I can't speak directly to it. I can only speak about my thinking about assimilation. I came upon the idea that, you know, assimilation is a bad thing. It has been utterly opposed by Indigenous people. We don't want to lose our identity, religion, culture, traditions but there is one thing in which - in respect of which a process of assimilation is unavoidable and that is assimilation to the enlightenment. And I think the problem we are grappling with in Australia, as throughout the West, is that the enlightenment has been conflated with kind of western culture, white fellas. Associated with white fellas, when the enlightenment was a human achievement. It wasn't a western achievement or a British achievement or an English achievement. It's a human achievement contributed to by people from the Arab States and China and India. All over the globe have contributed to the enlightenment and I think we're on a wrong course here in Australia when we insist on Muslims assimilating on the basis of "Well, you've got to be like the white fellas of Australia" when, really, the essential - and the same goes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The only assimilation, if I might use that very untrusted word - the only assimilation that should ever be a kind of requisite of citizenship, is assimilation to the enlightenment.

TONY JONES: And what do you do when something - a phenomenon pops up like ISIS, which is sort of the antithesis of the enlightenment?

NOEL PEARSON: Yes, and absolutely it's got to be opposed and I think that but the way in which we deal with our own citizens who might be attracted to radical ideologies like that is not to hector them about the superiority of the white enlightenment but the human achievement of the enlightenment, which is as much a heritage of Muslims and Indigenous Australians as it is for Anglo Australians.

TONY JONES: Jamie?

JAMES CROMWELL: Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. Thomas Jefferson was a terrorist. The 9-year-old boys playing on a beach in Gaza, they're terrorists. It is a very easy definition and, of course, they always jump to ISIS?

TONY JONES: But Thomas Jefferson also helped to write the declaration of independence.

JAMES CROMWELL: No, he did not. I believe Franklin wrote...

TONY JONES: Not the declaration of independence. All right.

JAMES CROMWELL: Franklin. Franklin wrote that and if he did, he had a very good day doing it because the rest of his policies were not, as far as in my opinion...

TONY JONES: We talk about Jeffersonian democracy anyway.

JAMES CROMWELL: We do talk about Jeffersonian democracy but we don't have a democracy and they didn't develop a democracy. They wanted a republic. They created a republic for very wealthy landowners to maintain their power and they created a constitution where black people were worth two fifths of a white person and women didn't have any vote at all. They had no voice at all, even though John Adams' wife harangued him and said "What can you possibly be thinking? What do you think I am, we are?". So their point of view on many things I completely disagree with. But this idea of the terrorist as though the culmination of the frustration that people feel when they are oppressed, which finally comes out in taking very, very inappropriate actions because violence never accomplishes anything, and then you say, you see that person is a terrorist and that person should be condemned and I agree with you and they try bombing it. The solution we have, the Americans have, everything should be bombed. If you've got a problem, you just bomb it. If we have a problem with drugs, we have a war against drugs. We have a problem with poverty, we have a war against poverty. This is a very defeatist way of thinking about it and will not work ultimately. These people have aspirations. They had aspirations in Iraq. They are misguided. Their tactics are deplorable but the Arab Spring and what happened in Libya and Tunisia and in Egypt and the response to putting down those kids in the street in Tahrir Square, that is - to me that's the terrorism, the terrorism of the State.

TONY JONES: Amanda Vanstone?

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, there seems to be general agreement, thank heavens, that what ISIS are doing is pretty horrific and they shouldn't be allowed to just behave as they are and try and set up a caliphate. There seems to be agreement on that. What's happened as a consequence of that, however, I think, is just yet another ugly bout of discomfort for good and decent Australian Muslims and probably in other places around the world, where people are, quite understandably, when the proposition is that someone will be beheaded in a public place, as has happened in the United Kingdom et cetera, another round of uncertainty about welcomeness. And in most things, actually, certainly religion and probably politics, it is extremists who cause the vast majority of the problem. Perhaps coming back to Noel's suggestion that there needs to be some radical centre even. I you don't entirely get what he is saying, I get part of it. It is a terrible thing that Muslim Australians who have lived here for years can feel in any way uncertain about whether they are welcome standing next to someone. That's happened because of these radical extremists. Now, I think beheading is disgusting. Most people do.

TONY JONES: Has it been compounded by the Government response?

AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, let me just make this point. It is disgusting, I think it is terrible but I read the other day that the last beheading by guillotine by the State happened in France in my lifetime. The last putting to death of someone by the State happened in my lifetime and I don't particularly want to be critical of the United States, if you think a quick beheading is terrible, I think an execution that takes 47 minutes is a disgrace.

JAMES CROMWELL: Disgraceful.

TONY JONES: Holly Ransom.

HOLLY RANSOM: I think I really echo Amanda's points there. I think there's general agreement here that, you know, what's going on with ISIS is horrific. I mean, the behaviours there, the state of play, what's happening to civilians, you know, the activity that's been taken part of, it is hard. You turn on your TV every day and it, unfortunately, just seems to get worse at the moment. I think the point was well made though, it's a challenge that the extremism then becomes the standard by which entire communities of people are judged and that's a real shame, I think, for our multiculturalism, for the conversation for being able to deal with this in a responsible manner and to really ensure that we are taking the right step so that we are not, as Waleed said, you know jumping to a conclusion and making a kind of a default reaction as a matter of approach. You know, go in and bomb it. I mean, that's not the way that we get any sustainable solution.

TONY JONES: I'm sorry. We're just about out of time but I just want to get Waleed to - you have got 30 seconds to respond to this and maybe we could do it in this way. I mean, if a country like Iraq, as badly managed and corrupt and terribly governed as it is, actually asks for Australia's help in circumstances where they face an existential threat from this organisation, is Australia right to go in and help?

WALEED ALY: I think - well, I think there's certainly an argument that it can. To me it is not a question of right and wrong. It is a question of what you are trying to achieve?

TONY JONES: It's a question of whether you do it or not, having been asked.

WALEED ALY: Right. And but what are you trying to achieve by doing it, is my point? And if what you are trying to achieve is that you will rid the world of terrorism in the way George W Bush heroically proclaimed he could after 9/11, then, no, sorry, you are doomed to failure because that is not actually what is - you're never going to defeat the problem that way. This is a region that has been in political crisis for over a century. This is a region that is still recovering and a lot of people do not understand just how deep and significant this is. You're still recovering from the trauma of colonisation ?

TONY JONES: I am being told to wrap it up, Waleed, so sorry about that. We're going to have to do that.

WALEED ALY: That's alright. (Indistinct).

TONY JONES: That's all we have time for tonight. Please thank our panel: Holly Ransom, Noel Pearson, James Cromwell, Amanda Vanstone and Waleed Aly. Thank you and that is it for 2014. Our special thanks to the millions of Australians who are part of the Q&A audience, who asked questions or joined the Twitter conversation. Democracy is all about participation, so we are proud Q&A has had such an important opportunity for Australian citizens to join the national debate. We will finish tonight and the year with a performance from The Australian Voices conducted by Gordon Hamilton. They are performing a piece composed by Rob Davidson, based on Noel Pearson's widely celebrated speech at the Whitlam memorial. Until 2015, good night.