Interviews by Claire Lehmann

Is AI about to come alive and rise up against us? Jerry Kaplan has worked in artificial intelligence since earning one of the field’s first PhDs in 1979, and he thinks the public debate has become “a real clown show.”

Misha Saul joins Claire Lehmann to discuss his viral essay Australia Is Sick and why he believes Australia has squandered many of the advantages that made it one of the world’s most prosperous countries.

They discuss immigration, productivity, net zero, the NDIS, employment law, regulatory overreach, and the political incentives that make reform difficult. Saul argues that Australia needs to regain greater agency over its borders and economy—and explains why he remains optimistic about the potential of AI.

CHAPTERS

00:00 - Australia’s lost potential
01:20 - From Ambitious Australia to Australia Is Sick
02:13 - The tax proposals that triggered the essay
03:29 - How countries decline slowly
05:08 - Why reform is so difficult
06:04 - Net zero and Australia’s energy policy
07:01 - Universities and immigration
08:29 - Australia needs control over immigration
12:00 - The economic arguments Saul rejects
14:07 - Should Australia import labour?
16:01 - Cheap labour and productivity
18:56 - Business interests and the Liberal Party
20:51 - Why bad policies are hard to reverse
22:19 - Is Australia becoming like the UK?
24:11 - What makes the US different?
26:06 - What Australia still gets right
29:56 - One Nation and voter anger
31:48 - Can the major parties respond?
33:15 - Immigration and Australian federation
35:11 - Saul’s Australian identity
37:50 - The Brexit comparison
39:04 - Rethinking skilled migration
40:43 - What Australia could do differently
42:03 - Reforming employment law
43:17 - AI and reasons for optimism
44:22 - Where to find Misha Saul

Misha Saul — Australia Is Sick
https://www.kvetch.au/p/australia-is-sick

Misha Saul — Ambitious Australia
https://www.kvetch.au/p/ambitious-australia

Misha Saul on X
https://x.com/misha_saul

Kvetch
https://www.kvetch.au/

Quillette
https://quillette.com/

Why are increasing numbers of young men withdrawing from work—and what happens when people lose a sense of purpose, competence and belonging?

Geoff Wilson founded Wilson Asset Management in 1997 and now manages around $6 billion for 130,000 investors. He has fought three tax campaigns against Labor governments over the past decade, and he is in the middle of a fourth.

In June, Parliament legislated the biggest change to Australia's capital gains tax in a generation: the fifty per cent discount replaced with cost-base indexation, plus a thirty per cent minimum rate on gains accruing from 1 July 2027.

Wilson is blunt about his own position. His funds are high-yield, so a shift away from growth stocks benefits them. He says he is campaigning anyway, because the people who lose are the founders, the employees paid in equity, and the young investors buying ETFs to save for a deposit.

In this conversation with Quillette Editor-in-Chief Claire Lehmann, he argues that Treasury never modelled the behavioural consequences: why it is now in a company's interest to pay out all its earnings rather than reinvest, why a young investor is better off trading than holding, and why a technology founder who had offered a returning expat five per cent of his company now has to offer ten.

CHAPTERS

00:00 "Growth has become a dirty word"

01:11 Intro ends

01:20 The fixed-pie assumption

02:20 A productivity round table, then a productivity tax

03:15 The modelling Treasury didn't do

05:20 "The highest capital gains tax in the world"

07:00 Why capital flees growth for franked dividends

08:35 What it does to founders and employee equity

10:10 "Carve out all Australian businesses"

10:55 "The government has been gaslighting the Australian people"

11:50 Four extra years to a house deposit

13:10 The one-in-ten-young-people claim

14:50 Why productivity is hard to explain

16:00 The industries where productivity can't rise

17:25 Superannuation, and why nobody trusts it

20:00 The maths: why companies should stop reinvesting

21:40 Why young investors should become traders

23:40 Ideology, or incompetence?

24:35 Policy engineered backwards

26:10 Wilson benefits from this tax — and fights it anyway

28:20 Why the business community stays quiet

29:20 The case for getting on a plane

31:20 Brain drain, and the Canva CFO

32:40 The UK precedent

35:20 A tax on the family home?

36:00 Can any of this be repealed?

37:35 Could this cause a recession?

38:40 43,000 new companies, and what they're really for

39:50 The grassroots campaign

43:10 Treasury versus Keating

44:00 Closing

Chris Bradley, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, tells Claire Lehmann that Australia has had almost zero productivity growth for a decade—and that the cause isn't mysterious. We stopped investing, and nobody legislates for growth anymore. He also argues the next 75 years could still deliver universal prosperity: every country living like Switzerland does today.

Chris Bradley is a co-author of A Century of Plenty: A Story of Progress for Generations to Come (McKinsey Global Institute, 2026): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G66Z5Y4D?tag=quillette-20

0:00 Teaser

0:34 Introduction

1:00 Why McKinsey wrote it at 100

2:15 Our grandparents' century

4:30 The machine of progress: energy, capital, cities

7:00 The firm: prosperity's unsung hero

9:15 What went wrong in Australia

14:00 Giving up on growth

15:00 Luxury beliefs and 'economic measles'

19:00 Zero-sum thinking and the magic of 1 and 2 percent

27:20 Art downstream from technology

29:30 The few firms that drive productivity

33:40 Capital gains tax and talent flight

38:40 Switzerland vs Burundi

44:30 Australia in 2100: AI, energy, earning optimism

Claire Lehmann sits down with Parnell Palme McGuinness — columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and senior research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies — to unpack her landmark report, Generation Trapped, on the collapsing life satisfaction of Australians aged 18–34.

Parnell identifies six distinct "tribes" among young Australians — from disillusioned Progressive Identitarians to optimistic Strivers — and explains why a sense of control, not income, is the strongest predictor of happiness. The conversation ranges across why women are swinging toward One Nation, the East–West divide still shaping German politics, the missing men in the marriage debate, the manosphere and the collapse of dating culture, and why the government's new budget may be actively hurting the young people it claims to help.

00:00 – Teaser

Treasurer Jim Chalmers calls it tax reform. Derek Francis calls it "a complete dog's breakfast."