The Joe Walker Podcast

Patrick Weller is emeritus professor of politics and public policy at Griffith University and the author or editor of some forty books. Pat wrote what was the first (and may still be the only) Westminster-system equivalent to Robert Caro's epic meditation on Lyndon Johnson: a detailed study of how Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser wielded power. First published in 1989, it's a fascinating s...

Danielle Wood is an Australian economist and the current chair of the Australian Productivity Commission. Had a lot of fun chatting with Dani about how she's making sense of AI and its implications for policy. We discuss: whether AI will be more like the internet or the Industrial Revolution, where in the AI stack the profits will ultimately flow (and why it might not be the model layer), why diff...

Part 3 of a three-part immigration series this week . Martin Parkinson (economics) available here ; Mark Cully (history) available here . Mike Pezzullo ran the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (2013-2014), then the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (2014-2017), then the Department of Home Affairs (2017-2023). For more than a decade across those three roles, he was res...

Part 2 of a three-part immigration series this week . Martin Parkinson (economics) available here ; Mike Pezzullo (acculturation, social cohesion, security) drops Friday. Mark Cully was the inaugural chief economist at the Australian Department of Immigration (2009-2012). His forthcoming book, Waves of Plenty (September 2026), is (to my knowledge) the first truly general history of immigration to...

Part 1 of a three-part immigration series this week. Mark Cully (history) drops Thursday; Mike Pezzullo (acculturation, social cohesion, security) drops Friday.  Martin Parkinson ran the Australian Treasury (2011-2014), then the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet (2015-2019). He's also thought deeply about the economics of migration policy, not just in those roles, but also in his pas...

In this special end-of-year episode, the tables are turned: I’m the guest, and I’m interviewed by Zac Gross — an Australian macroeconomist and long-time listener of the show. We reflect on what I learned on the podcast in 2025 and what I changed my mind about. We also discuss the behind-the-scenes work of running the show, and my plans for 2026. Sponsors Vanta: helps businesses a...

Glyn Davis and Terry Moran are two of the very small number of Australians who have literally sat in the Cabinet Room, week after week, watching the machinery of government operate from the inside. Both served as Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) — the most senior public servant in Australia. Terry held the role from 2008 to 2011 (including during the G...

2,500 years of strategic history, 11 books, one afternoon.  Hugh White is Australia's foremost strategic thinker: former senior adviser to Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in Defence, inaugural Director of ASPI, and principal author of the 2000 Defence White Paper. He is now Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the...

Peter Costello is the longest-serving Treasurer of Australia (1996–2007). He led the most complex overhaul of Australia's tax system in the postwar era: introducing the Goods and Services Tax (GST) — a value-added consumption tax — while abolishing a range of indirect taxes (notably wholesale sales tax) and cutting income-tax rates. I wanted to learn from Peter what it actually t...

One bacterium causes roughly 1 in 20 cancer cases worldwide. It’s the most cancer-causing pathogen we’ve found—and the main cause of peptic ulcers. Its discovery overturned an ironclad medical dogma that the stomach was sterile. Despite infecting about half of humanity, Helicobacter pylori wasn't discovered until 1979 and shown to cause gastritis and peptic ulcer disease in the e...

Stagnation! The 2010s witnessed Australia’s weakest productivity growth in six decades. How much of the slowdown is homegrown? How much reflects the broader “great stagnation” plaguing the West? How much is simply an artefact of the way “productivity” is measured? And what would a credible new growth model for Australia—with its distinctive reliance on mining ov...

Francis Fukuyama is a Stanford political scientist and the author of (among many other works) The End of History and the Last Man —arguably the most influential work in political science of the past half-century. If “History” is driven by technology, how does Fukuyama now view biotech and AI—and their potential to usher in a new, post-human history? These are difficult ques...

Laura Deming is a technologist and venture capitalist focused on anti-ageing and life extension. At 17, she founded The Longevity Fund (followed by age1), the first VC firm dedicated to longevity biotech, after being selected in the initial cohort of Thiel fellows (2011). Today she is also CEO and co-founder of Cradle, a startup pursuing human whole-body reversible cryopreservation. I speak with L...

I share the 8 biggest things I learned from my Australian policy series. The conversations totaled more than 12 hours of discussion. Grateful to my guests and to everyone who attended the live events. Was really fun to meet and hang out with you all! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode is the seventh instalment of my Australian policy series, recorded live in Sydney on April 29, 2025.  I speak with Ken Henry—former Treasury Secretary and chair of the landmark Henry Tax Review—about why Australia hasn’t achieved major economic reform since the GST, and what must change to restart it.  We discuss how AGI could reshape the public service, in...

This episode is the sixth instalment of my Australian policy series, recorded live in Sydney on February 26, 2025. I speak with Sam Roggeveen—Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program, and a former senior analyst at the Office of National Assessments—about why the United States won’t fight China for dominance in Asia, and what that means for an Austral...

This episode is the fifth instalment of my Australian policy series, recorded live in Sydney on February 12, 2025. I speak with Peter Tulip—Chief Economist at the Centre for Independent Studies, and a former senior researcher at both the Reserve Bank of Australia and the US Federal Reserve. We go deep into what's driving Australia's housing crisis, the problems with heritage rules and height...

Australia stands alone among English-speaking democracies with its compulsory, preferential voting system. But why? This episode is the fourth instalment of my Australian policy series. It was recorded in Melbourne on March 6, 2025. I speak with Judith Brett—Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and author of the canonical history of Australia's electoral system, From Secret...

This episode is the third of my live policy salons. It was recorded in Sydney on February 5, 2025. We explore the concept of state capacity—the ability of governments to achieve their policy goals—and ask why Australia outperforms almost every other country in the world in this domain. For the conversation, I'm joined by two of Australia's great public policy economists. Richard Holden...

This episode is the second of my live policy salons. It was recorded in Sydney on January 29, 2025. What is the relationship between economic equality and egalitarianism in the cultural sense? Where does Australia's egalitarian tradition come from? Are we too egalitarian? Is economic inequality increasing? What's been driving it? And does it even matter? We sit down with Andrew Leigh to discuss th...

This episode is the first of my live policy salons. It was recorded in Melbourne on January 23, 2025. In this salon, we go deep into Australia's immigration policy with Abul Rizvi, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration. Abul managed Australia’s migration program from 1995 to 2007 and played a crucial role in the 2001 policy changes that massively increased the intake of sk...

This episode is a little different: I’m the one being interviewed—and my interlocutor is Andy Matuschak , an independent applied researcher focused on "tools for thought" (ways to augment human intelligence). Andy founded and led Khan Academy’s Research and Development Lab, and prior to that, he was a senior engineer at Apple where he helped build iOS. I first discovered Andy&rsq...

Eugene Fama is a 2013 Nobel laureate in economic sciences, and is widely recognised as the "father of modern finance." He is currently the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago. Full transcript available at: https://josephnoelwalker.com/eugene-fama-156/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Richard Butler AC is a retired Australian diplomat. He served as Australia's first Ambassador for Disarmament (1983-1988), Australian Ambassador to the United Nations (1992-1997), and Chair of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) to inspect Iraq for weapons of mass destruction (1997-1999). He also served as Chair of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. Earlier i...

Larry Summers is a former US Treasury Secretary (1999-2001), Chief Economist at the World Bank (1991-1993), and Director of the National Economic Council under President Obama (2009-2010). He also served as President of Harvard University (2001-2006). Currently, he is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, and he sits on the board of directors at OpenAI, one of the fastes...