The 80s Interview that Explains Australia’s Decline.

That time Mel Gibson got angry on Australian television wasn’t a meltdown.

In the late 1980s, sitting opposite Ray Martin, Gibson said the quiet part out loud. Australian foreign aid and trade policy were not acts of generosity. They were acts of self sabotage. Taxpayer money was being used to help build steel and heavy industry in Asia while our own manufacturing base was being dismantled at home.

He wasn’t warning about culture wars or personalities. He was warning about consequences. Lose your steel and you lose your backbone. Lose your backbone and everything else becomes a press release and a hope.

At the time he was mocked and dismissed. Today Australia imports what it once made, pays more for energy than nations we compete with, and talks about sovereign capability like it is a new idea rather than something we deliberately threw away.

This video revisits that moment not to worship Mel Gibson but to ask a harder question. Why did we ignore the warning and why do we still pretend this happened by accident.

History does not care how nice the policy sounded.
It only remembers who was right.