One-on-one with former opposition leader and defence minister Kim 'Bomber' Beazley

QUESTION: In terms of our defence, what else do you think needs to be done to help protect our nation?

ANSWER: If I was advising the minister for defence, it would be that you actually have to move on what we immediately need if, horror of horrors, something were to break out tomorrow.

I can think of a couple of things.

We have to put ourselves on the list to get tomahawk missiles.

It's a cruise missile and we need to bring it on board in big numbers, as quickly as we can.

We have the submarines that can deliver it and we can also deliver it in other ways.

The second thing is we need to store fuel and we need to build up stocks.

The best way of building up stocks is to build up large reserves of crude, because you can keep large reserves of crude forever, but you can't keep refined petrol forever, as that needs to be used within a few months.

We need a restoration of refining capacity.

A few years ago we had four refineries - one here (in WA) and three in the east.

We are now down to two all up, and none here - so that's hopeless.

If you have big stocks of crude and get a refinery here that can process it, you're probably alright, but we are hopelessly placed on fuel reserves.

Then you think of the bases we do have and the hardening of them to make them more impenetrable.

I see they are doing stuff up at Curtin (RAAF airbase at Derby) which is quite useful in that regard.

So we need to make what we already do, safer.

Then we have to think about where we are going to have to protect and, really, if you're talking immediacy, it's the centre and north west of Western Australia.

No other areas is it really conceivable for people to mount a threat.

Q: How did your nickname 'Bomber Beazley' come about?

A: Nowadays you can't keep politicians away from photo opportunities on military bases.

The defence force must be overrun by importuning politicians around them all of the time, but that wasn't so when I was defence minister.

When I was defence minister nobody cared.

This was still the year of the hangover of the Vietnam War and people didn't want to think about that sort of thing, but I did and I was concerned.

I used to think it was wonderful whenever I could get the prime minister to come out to a base.

I really wanted to be defence minister and I knew what I wanted to do.

I was able to start to put in place the changes in the structure of our thinking that I wanted to.

I had people working for me who knew more about it than I did, who were really helpful - people such as (then defence intelligence official) Paul Dibb, who did a study for us, the orientation of which is still relevant today.

Q: What has been the best part of your term as WA governor over the past four years?

A: Everybody asks you that and I don't like answering it, because I have just had so many thrilling experiences of so many different types.

If you want to use it to advance Western Australia interests - it's quite easy to do it.

I love getting together at gatherings of folk to talk about new industries, critical minerals, health and medical research - raising resources for that, the arts and what we need to become a much more vibrant arts community and our Aboriginal people.

We are moving towards 2029 and we better get it right by then because that's going to be 200 years and is that going to be triumphalism or is it going to be genuinely the whole of the community together?

You can do things about all of that and the sorts of meetings, roundtables, receptions, dinners and visits you hold make it interesting - every moment, every day.

Then there is what Western Australians do, and that's where I found regional visits terrific.

I had quite a lot in the Wheatbelt and we tend to forget how brilliant we are as farmers.

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I've got relatives who are farmers, and I look at the way folk plan out where they're headed - it's so brilliant.

All of the things I've been talking about have been disrupted terribly by COVID but we also found we upped our work rate considerably during COVID.

We tackled it by figuring out what we could do - when it was seeing one person at a time, and then building it up to two, three, four and eventually a round table of people as the restrictions eased.

So you have to do a lot - it's not enough to just say, right, we've got a morning tea for 100 people, you can all turn up and we will have a chat about this and that - that doesn't work.

Partly as a product of this, we have done two to three times more with the house than my predecessors.

I'm not making this as a point against them, I'm just saying this is what happens when you have the circumstances we've been operating in.

The other thing of which I'm most proud of here, is not an initiative of mine at all.

My wife (Susie Annus) - she's had this 'restart the arts' program through which we've made the ballroom freely available for artists to make recordings, do transmissions etc.

We have had some WA Symphony Orchestra musicians record there too.

If you use the Concert Hall for recording it's $7500 a day - use ours for recording and it's nothing, except you have to hire your own recording equipment, of course.

The acoustics at the Concert Hall are probably the best in the country and the acoustics here are probably second to them in WA.

My wife also created the Julie Michael Garden, which is outside the base of the undercroft of the ballroom.

Susie extended the paved seating area and created a musical stage with all the bits and pieces ready to go.

She also created an orange grove, which together with a massive expansion of the rose garden, formed the Queen's Jubilee Garden that we opened up the other day.

Inside the house Susie has also been heavily involved in making the working space more efficient and effective, so she has gotten a considerable amount of joy out of the house and that's terrific.

Q: Did you enjoy the switch to your apolitical roles, including that of governor?

A: I was the ambassador to the United States for six years prior to that, so it was nothing new to me.

There is partisan politics and then there is politics, and partisan politics you simply cannot engage in and you must treat all sides fairly, so we try to do that with our invitations.

But there is also politics with a small 'p', which is the interaction of human beings progressing their capacities to govern and their interests.

The Perth Royal Show and the way in which farmers and the general public interact - that's small 'p' politics.

How you deal with the mining industry - that's small 'p' politics.

That's the sort of thing you have to engage in as governors so, in a sense, it's quite seamless, because in party politics you do a fair bit of that.

It's not as though there is that sharp divide between what you do as a governor and what you do in politics.

Where there is a sharp divide is what you do in partisan terms - from everything to nothing.

Q: What are your plans when you finish up the role at the end of this month?

A: The University of Western Australia has been very nice to leave me an office, as I'm still a fellow at the USAsia Centre, so in terms of locating myself, I will go back there.

I guess I will get my government pension back as of July 1, because you can't have a government pension and an office of profit under the Crown's salary.

I'll be doing a bit of writing - I'm getting a couple of collaborators for a book I want to work on for the American Alliance and then I will see how it all falls in Canberra.

Q: What advice do you have for the State's police commissioner Chris Dawson, who will be taking over as the 34th governor?

A: He knows the job and is a very senior public servant.

All of the stuff that I engage in with the State government, he engages with in the State government, so this job won't hold any surprises for him either.

I'm sure he will come in with his own priorities and his priorities will change while he is here, as they always do as circumstances change.

There will be events that come to dominate what he does, and those events you can't necessarily foresee at the moment, and he will just react to them in the way his own background, philosophy and thinking directs him to react.

What I do say to him is that you're about as well qualified as you can conceivably be for the job, so you'll enjoy it.

Q: What are some of your hobbies?

A: I collect coins, some dating back to the 1700s and 1800s.

I order some in and try to keep them concealed from my wife.

It's an interesting hobby and not super expensive - some of them are worth a lot more, but generally speaking they are $100 to $150, so you don't have to be a millionaire to indulge it.

Q: What is something you haven't done yet that you would like to do?

A: Nothing really.

One of the things I have really enjoyed about the past few years is not being able to travel outside of WA.

I know the State better than I did before I got the job.

I know I'll be doing other things and I'll be travelling out of the State again, but there is no bucket list.

Q: Who is a person that inspires you professionally and why?

A: Bob Hawke.

There used to be an 18th century English theoretician who was writing about what makes a great prime minister and he said it was a man (because they were men back then) of commonplace opinions and uncommon administrative abilities - and that was Hawke.

He didn't think or see the world very differently from the average Aussie.

He was very well educated and all the rest of it, but he loved what Aussies loved and he didn't think that Aussies needed to be prodded, poked and improved, and he had very commonplace opinions.

He was an unbelievably good administrator and ran an unbelievably good government.

When I got into my first job, which was the minister for aviation, I remember him saying to me, you know the policy and you know the resources that are available to you - I just want you to get on governing and I won't interfere except in two circumstances: firstly you ask me or secondly, you have a crossover responsibility with another minister, then I will resolve the demarcation.

He said you need to be a very good minister and you need to understand, I will be a great prime minister if I have great ministers.

His office acted exactly the same way - they didn't care if you did a press conference the same day he did.

Bob used to say, 'what does it matter, if you're silly enough to do a press conference the same day I'm doing one, they aren't going to concentrate on you, they're going to concentrate on me - that's for you to worry about, so why would that bother me?'

He had that magnificent capacity to give people their head, and he was a genius at it.

Best this country has ever had in peace time anyway.

When you look at the micromanagement of prime ministers' offices since then and the humiliation of ministers, having to put up with crap from 10-year-olds sitting in the prime minister's office, you have to wonder where are we headed?

I think in Anthony Albanese you will probably find the same style as Hawke.

They have different attributes and different backgrounds, but he has that sort of collegial style and you could see it in the campaign.

He actually likes his front benchers to be out there, he likes the collegial sense and he may just have that little piece of Hawke capacity.

Q: Of what professional achievement are you most proud?

A: Defence.

I know enough about it to know that my formulas are no longer relevant, except in one aspect -- my formulas are based on the fact that you have to keep changing your formulas, as circumstances and events around you dictate.

I really felt for (Peter) Dutton when he had the job, and now for (Richard) Marles, who has the job.

You can never quite get where you need to be - that's why you have to be so profoundly focused on what you need immediately.

That is, in at least the circumstances we have, we are out of the exclusive long-term domain and we are into the immediate.

You have to comprehend this - everyone is very proud of reaching two per cent GDP in defence, but there is nothing magic in 2pc.

The 2pc realises $50 billion a year and you want to spend that well.

In our year of living dangerously, in 1942-1943, we spent 34pc of GDP on defence - that's what we had to spend when we really were defending ourselves, and that is the equivalent not of $50 billion but $500 billion.

Just imagine us, Federally spending $500 billion a year on defence - that's around the entire current budget.

But we needed every penny of it and there was no waste during that war, we had to make everything work.

We are the only country who was an ally of the United States in WWII, that under the lendlease program they put in place, where they owed us money, as opposed to us owing them.

Q: Of what personal achievement are you most proud?

A: My wife and three daughters.

Q: What advice do you have for any aspiring politicians out there?

A: Firstly, work out what you believe about the state of the world and the state of the nation.

If you go into politics without belief, all you are driven by is ambition.

You have to work out what you believe, because the aspiring politician on the whole is not going to make it, but you might, and if you do, you have to be useful to the country.

Your beliefs, in the majority, will drive you in the direction of the Labor Party or the Liberal Party.

If you aren't particularly concerned about governing but more the big causes, you may end up with the Greens or any of the other small parties.

But if you want to really be about governing and be about the country, then you'll join either the Liberal- Nationals or Labor.

My advice is to start off by working that out and then engage.

The probability is that you're not going to get there, the possibility is that you might, but you certainly won't unless you're around.