Jonathan Liondis

Routinely overspends on books. Thinks too much about Australia's place in the world.

[Jack J @Jack_Frodo]

the zoom. the exit. it’s a perfect clip lol

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.

This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.

All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.

Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:

https://t.co/Nb2un9oNJR

[Richard Dunley @redunley]

How do AUKUS subs fit into 🇦🇺 maritime strategy?

In this piece I use the historical example of HMAS Australia I to discuss enduring aspects of 🇦🇺 maritime strategy, and how SSNs could support it.

https://t.co/SCErWtMHwi

[The Lowy Institute @LowyInstitute]

Indonesia’s aircraft carrier is an indulgence, not a strategy | Awais Feroze Hanif https://t.co/SMA0CxoUyv

[cнєєкυ⋆｡🪐˚ ⋆ @Okay_Bye___]

The inside of my brain when someone starts explaining rules of a card game

[Aaron Smith @aaronsmith]

Thank you, Dave. I appreciate you reaching out to ask what you got wrong.

The clip we’re discussing is less than 90 seconds long. What I’m about to do demonstrates Brandolini's Law: where the amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that required to produce it. Or, in this case, it takes around 600 words to correct 90 seconds of your economic fan fiction.

1⃣ Between 0 and 30 seconds

You begin by confusing government debt with the Future Fund and appear to suggest that the Future Fund can't exist along side Govt debt.

They’re different things. One can exist without the other, and in Australia they do.

Australia's Future Fund was established in 2006 with an initial govt investment of about $60B. Its first annual report, in 2008, showed assets of around $64 billion - not the $100B you suggested.

Then, at around 27 seconds, you talk about the Future Fund as though it ceased to exist (you used the word 'had' as in past tense).

It still very much exists Dave. In fact, it's grown every single year since it was created. Today it's worth around $270 billion, or over $330 billion once the other funds under management are included (eg Medical Research / Housing Australia / Drought).

So before we're even 30 seconds into the clip you've managed to confuse government debt, the Future Fund, its size, and whether it still exists.

That’s a lot of economic history to get wrong in under 30 seconds.

2⃣ Around 32 seconds

You then claim Kevin Rudd used the Future Fund to "flush money through the economy".

Again, that’s simply false. The Future Fund wasn't used to fund the stimulus. It wasn't used to build school halls. It wasn’t used for any of the things you’re describing. In your defence, you do briefly flirt with the possibility that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about. Sadly, it was a very short-lived relationship.

The GFC stimulus was funded through government borrowing.

For context, construction approvals were collapsing, more than a million Australians worked in construction, and the objective was to stop unemployment exploding during the worst global financial crisis in generations.

You're welcome to argue that was the wrong policy (but you didn't). You’re not entitled to rewrite where the money came from.

3⃣ At about 44 seconds

You say, "I might be wrong".

I concede you were correct during this part of the video.

4⃣ From 44 seconds onwards

You make a series of broad claims about the GFC response.

Yes, government debt increased. That's true.

What you omit is that Australia's stimulus largely went directly to households rather than primarily rescuing financial institutions, as happened in many other countries.

The aim was simple: keep people spending, businesses operating and Australians employed while global demand collapsed. It's known as counter-cyclical fiscal policy.

Whether you agree with it politically is your business.

The specific outcome for Australia isn't contested though - Australia was one of only two economies in the OECD to avoid recession during the Global Financial Crisis. There's no reality where that wasn’t a comparatively impressive outcome.

The money didn’t need to "trickle down". The entire point was that it started at the bottom.

5⃣ Government debt

Throughout the clip (and in life generally) you repeatedly return to the theme Labor is responsible for Australia’s debt (which btw is comparatively low).

Here are the actual numbers of net debt added by each Govt since 2007.

> Rudd/Gillard: about $190 billion over six years.
> Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison: about $366 billion over nine years, around two-thirds of which pre-dated COVID.
> Albanese: about $75 billion over four years.

Those figures don’t support the story you've been telling people. And that’s really the issue.

This isn't about getting one date wrong or misremembering one statistic. Nearly every claim in your 90-second clip turns out to be either wrong or misleading.

If you're going to publicly lecture Australians about economic history, the bare minimum expectation is that you’ve first acquainted yourself with it.

Because once the errors have been pointed out, as they have been to you multiple times, every repetition stops looking like an accident and starts looking like a strategy.

Given your very public coffee with Angus Taylor last week, perhaps people are entitled to ask what that strategy might be.

[Jonathan Liondis @jonathanliondis]

@michaelsrockets That’s a damn real spaceship wth

[Shocky @illogically7]

Yk at first you do the 6-7 ironically to relate to the kids...then you get addicted to it. Every time someone says those numbers in that order your arms can't help themselves. They just do it. Pope Bob is not immune to this.

[George Alderman @GeorgeAlderman_]

“What’s this?”

“Your next-generation space telescope, sir”

“No, no no, it’s not 2027 yet”

“It’s launching this summer now. We even did it under budget”

[Hunter Weiss @Hunter_Weiss]

sorry it blew up, but for explosion fanatics, this is an all-time explosion caught on camera https://t.co/nt12WgCwc3

[Eric Berger @SciGuySpace]

Remarkable video showing the extent of the fireball from New Glenn's failure on Thursday evening.

[Scott Manley @DJSnM]

Whoever setup the sound this time deserves an award

[Joe Barnard 🚀 @joebarnard]

Congratulations @SpaceX! This coverage is so incredible, each one of these streams helps inspire people to get into engineering

[Jonathan Liondis @jonathanliondis]

I cannot believe how quickly the V3 leaves the pad. It’s like “I am OUTTA here”

[Joseph Noel Walker @JosephNWalker]

Mike Pezzullo ran Australia's immigration apparatus for nearly a decade.

We discuss how Australia actually selects and integrates migrants.

This is the final episode in my immigration series.

Mike oversaw Operation Sovereign Borders from 2013-2014. He then ran the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (which became Home Affairs) from 2014 to 2023. Across these roles, he was responsible for how Australia selects migrants, screens for risk, and thinks about social cohesion.

Someone with so much institutional knowledge would rarely be both recently retired and willing to speak in great depth about how the system really works.

We discuss:
- How the broad spread of source countries among Australia's overseas-born population (a key to our success with acculturating migrants) is a happy accident, not the result of deliberate policy -- a remarkable fact about modern Australia which is not well understood.

- What the migrant selection process looks like at a concrete level, and whether AI will favour the gamers or the gatekeepers.

- Australia hasn't gotten worse at acculturating migrants. As Pezzullo puts it: "we are incredibly successful at blending together different demographies, ethnicities, religions, and cultures." (With one exception, which we discuss.)

- The two groups that Pezzullo thinks present the greatest extremist-threat.

- Australia vs France as a case study: why we've been much more successful at integrating migrants than France, and what that has to do with the history of France's style of imperialism (different to British imperialism).

- Even with today's federated digital screening and the benefit of hindsight, Pezzullo doubts the father of the Bondi attackers would have been refused a student visa in 1998.

- A never-aired constitutional fix to Australia's "permanent temporaries" problem -- which Pezzullo calls "the Pezzullo special": close off the High Court's original jurisdiction over non-citizens, and replace it with a single 30-day review.

- What a 2027 China-Taiwan blockade would mean for the Australian migration system in real time, and how Pezzullo would manage it operationally.

- The case for "populate or perish" returning as strategic policy: speaking "as a military strategist and a military defence planner," Pezzullo (who is also a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence and wrote the 2009 White Paper that reputedly displeased Beijing) wants Australia at 40 million people by 2050, rather than the projected 35 million.

- And much more.

Watch below, or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Timestamps:
(0:00:00) – Introduction.
(0:02:19) – How Australia selects migrants.
(0:37:01) – Australia's broad distribution of source countries is a happy accident.
(1:05:03) – Acculturation services.
(1:48:50) – The temporary migration dilemma.
(2:07:56) – Social cohesion and the politics of immigration.
(2:40:22) – Radical Islamism and the limits of selection.
(3:03:35) – What if China blockades Taiwan tomorrow?
(3:14:13) – Should 'populate or perish' make a comeback?

[Jonathan Liondis @jonathanliondis]

Ladies and gentlemen this is why he is the goat. Straight facts.

[Joseph Noel Walker @JosephNWalker]

People cannot think about immigration except in tribal, binary, and polarised terms

[Jonathan Liondis @jonathanliondis]

Might be tweet of the century

[Dr. Steve Cube 🇵🇸 @MildCuthbert]

This is how people with lifetime bans from Footscray Coles walk into Footscray Coles

[Joseph Noel Walker @JosephNWalker]

This week I'm running a series of three episodes on Australian immigration policy.

Immigration is one of the most important yet poorly understood areas of Australian public policy.

I learned this first-hand last year, after I did an interview with Abul Rizvi, a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration. The quality of responses to that interview by otherwise smart people showed me there's a real absence of knowledge about how the system actually works. People are starved of good information here in a way they aren't for other policy areas.

Part of the reason for this is simply that most Australians don't have direct experience with the immigration system because they're not themselves immigrants. In contrast, people have more contact with, for example, the housing system, because they're either homeowners or renters, and so their opinions about housing are somewhat more informed than their opinions about immigration.

But the other reason is that there seems to be a dearth of good intellectual content on immigration policy. In comparison, take defence and foreign policy: it feels like every couple of years in Australia we produce and then debate a really good new book in that field.

Who is our Hugh White for immigration policy?

There's been some excellent work on immigration policy over the last few decades, some of which we discuss in this series. But it feels less frequent or less prominent than in other fields.

Recently I've been puzzling over why high-quality analysis on immigration seems relatively scarce. I don't have a complete answer, but I suspect at least part of it is that immigration policy feels intellectually low-status. Or to put it differently: it just doesn't excite people's intellectual curiosity (as distinct from their tribal passions) as much as topics like housing, AI, or foreign affairs. People who could write about it, and people who would read about it, don't fully realise how interesting it can be. (I was one of these people until a couple of years ago.)

Immigration policy appears boring possibly because it feels like something that we have both no control over and complete control over -- like some combination of "the weather" and "accounting". On the one hand, it's always there in the background, and feels like it just happens to us. On the other hand, it's this clockwork system of categories and lists, points and quotas. Both framings lead to the same outcome: intellectually checking out.

But checking out is a mistake because immigration is no longer (if it ever was) merely a task for technocrats. We've arrived at a moment, as we have at only a few other times in our history, where immigration policy requires momentous choices. Immigration literally built Australia. And whether we get it right or wrong over the next few years could shape our national fortune as powerfully as assisted passage did in the 19th century, or the postwar migration program in the 20th century.

To provide people with as much high-quality information as possible, I decided to do a series on Australian immigration policy. In constructing the series, I wanted to boil immigration down to three (more or less) mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive interviews:

1. The economics of immigration policy.
2. The history of immigration to Australia.
3. The social cohesion, cultural, and security dimensions of immigration policy.

Then I went out to find the best guest to speak to each of those topics. As luck would have it, I was able to wrangle each guest.

For economics, it was Martin Parkinson. Martin ran Treasury, then PM&C, then chaired the Australian government's 2023 Migration Review -- the most substantial review of our migration system in more than three decades.

For history, it was Mark Cully. Mark was chief economist at the Department of Immigration from 2009 to 2012. He has just written what will really be the first general history of immigration to Australia, all the way from assisted passage in the 1830s to the present day. The book, Waves of Plenty, is out in September. (That Australia hasn't had a general history of its immigration until 2026 is further proof of the strange undersupply of immigration content.)

And third was Mike Pezzullo. Mike ran Australia's immigration and border protection apparatus for almost a decade. He oversaw Operation Sovereign Borders, the policy that stopped the boats. Then he was appointed Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection from 2014, leading it through its transition into the mega-department of Home Affairs, until his departure in 2023. Few officials with his depth of recent experience are out of the department and able to share what they know about how the system actually works.

Getting immigration policy right is more important now than at any point in my lifetime. And yet the quality of the debate seems to be as poor as it's ever been.

We're not asking good questions, by which I mean we're not asking specific enough questions. The debate so far has occurred at a very low level of resolution.

So I hope these interviews help people understand how the system actually works, the trade-offs involved, what we can reasonably expect of our immigration system in 2026 and beyond. And some questions we should be asking to improve it.

[名無しの政治将校 @bandainokairai1]

岡部いさく先生の、オーストラリア海軍改もがみ型護衛艦命名予想(？)

[Jonathan Liondis @jonathanliondis]

LFG 🚀

Kudos to the whole design team behind @build_aus 🙌 Killed it!

[Gearside @gearside]

australia has grown fat and comfortable over the last 30 years – we have stopped valuing the hard stuff.

so i'm putting energy behind something called build australia. join us.

it's designed to drive the cultural shift we need, get australia building again. to move the overton window and force real change.

launching today, it’s a visible platform for ideas and software projects - essays, data visualisation and dashboards that paint an optimistic future.

if you believe in building things in this country, whether that's houses, companies, products, films, anything... join us… website in comments