Clive Hamilton on regret, rancour and a ‘shocking’ six years as a thorn in Beijing’s side

Clive Hamilton has been described to me as a “prickly pear”. There are numerous anecdotes in his new memoir of times he’s been too blunt or opened an irreparable rift with a friend. On page 4, he recounts that while he “warmed to the ritual of the tea trolley” in his first public service job, he has never enjoyed office banter.

So it’s with some trepidation that I head into Chairman and Yip, a fine dining pan-Asian restaurant in the heart of Canberra’s power district, to meet him.

Clive Hamilton has a reputation as a prickly character.Credit: James Brickwood

It turns out he was also nervous. Hamilton is a seasoned media performer from his decades as a public intellectual examining climate change and, more recently, the influence of China. But this is his first foray into a personally reflective interview, just as Provocateur is his first time turning the pen upon himself.

He is “a kind of book-writing machine now – I know how to do it and how to churn them out” after producing 18 works in 34 years. But after the 2020 publication of Hidden Hand, co-written with Mareike Ohlberg, he was at a loss as to what to do next.

“And I thought, you know, what’s happened to me in the last three or four years has been really tumultuous and unique … all that spooky espionage stuff and the threats and the controversy,” he says. “So I thought, maybe it’s time to write a memoir.”

Chairman and Yip is a Canberra institution of several decades but only moved to its current Barton location in 2016. Hamilton, a born and bred Canberran, gestures in the direction of the nearby sites where he sold newspapers as a young boy, launched the Australia Institute in 1993 and had offices while he worked for Charles Sturt University.

There’s a two-course set menu for lunch, with a choice of dishes all designed for sharing.

We have a discussion about what kohlrabi is (one of those strange Chinese vegetables, Hamilton thinks; my description is, something like a cross between radish and cabbage) and I then mistakenly order the kohlrabi and cucumber salad with WA rock lobster as one of our entrees.

Hamilton chooses the fried tofu with Chinese spiced salt and pepper while I opt for prawn and scallop toast with squid ink, but the staff end up bringing all three dishes.

For mains, we choose the steamed orange roughy fillets with cured olives and black bean paste and the ginger and dark vinegar glazed pork fillet. They come with broccolini and steamed rice.

Hamilton was best known as a climate advocate from the mid-1990s until about six years ago. In late 2016, completely burnt out from despair at the lack of climate action, he cast around for something different to immerse himself in.

Chairman and Yip kohlrabi and cucumber salad, WA rock lobster and sesame dressing.Credit: James Brickwood

A series of stories about large donations to political parties by Chinese-Australian businesspeople piqued his interest. The resulting book, Silent Invasion, unveiled what he saw as systematic moves by the Chinese Communist Party to influence Australian politicians, universities, think tanks and the media.

Two publishers refused to release it based on defamation concerns, sparking an international storm, before Hardie Grant agreed to publish the book. It also published the follow-up with Ohlberg and now his memoir.

In Provocateur, Hamilton writes about being watched by what he took to be CCP operatives at his work and home, people snooping on his National Library pigeonhole, finding malware in “every nook and cranny” of his computer and having to employ security at public events. There are photos of people with “sniffer” phones he believes followed him to his regular cafe with the aim of intercepting his electronic communications.

The restaurant’s the fried tofu with Chinese spiced salt and pepper.Credit: James Brickwood

Before our conversation even turns to China, there’s a glimpse of the toll the past six years have wrought.

A trio of well-dressed patrons of Chinese appearance come towards us and alarm flashes momentarily across Hamilton’s face.

“Not there,” he mutters as they look at the table directly next to us. The wait staff show them to seats further away in the near-empty restaurant.

Later, I ask if he would still have written Silent Invasion if he’d had any inkling of how his life would change.

Espionage was an abstract concept to Hamilton before he wrote Silent Invasion.

The idea of surveillance and interference and spy-drama skulduggery was all abstract when he started, he says.

“The reality was really shocking and difficult and traumatic at times. I don’t want to overstate, and I’m maybe understating how it was, but that’s how I think of it now. But it was also exciting. And important,” he says.

“It’s not often you can say you did something that was important, and I think writing that book was.”

Would he have preferred that it was his years of climate advocacy that had had such an impact?

“Oh yeah, I wish. I really do,” he says, putting his head down into his hands as he ponders this.

He muses that it’s trite to say they’re very different issues, but he sees climate as something everyone knew about and had a view on, even those who actively dismissed it, whereas “the China issue kind of came out of nowhere” for most outside the national security establishment.

“So yeah, I wish I could have done more to shift the debate on climate change in the 2000s and 2010s.”

The sharp change in research focus has led the old-school left-wing ideologue, and former Greens candidate, to pick up a strong following among the right. This mix has him wondering who exactly will buy his memoir.

“I’m kind of straddling those constituencies, which is awkward,” he says.

One of the side effects of becoming an accidental hero of the right has been making a number of powerful friends among the national security echelons.

Coincidentally, Justin Bassi emerges from one of the restaurant’s private rooms while we eat. Bassi is now the head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and was previously foreign minister Marise Payne’s chief of staff and national security adviser to Malcolm Turnbull. He also receives mention in Provocateur for his role advising Hamilton during the Silent Invasion saga.

The former Greens candidate has picked up readers from across the political aisle thanks to his work on China.Credit: Justin McManus

“Oh! He’s my mate,” Hamilton says when I point Bassi out, before returning to his musings about why the victory of neoliberalism means we no longer see the big, world-changing ideas that prevailed in the 1980s and 90s.

His next project is a return to his leftie roots: an examination of privilege in Australia, sparked by the stories during the pandemic of the rich and famous being able to fly around freely despite the border closures. He’s working for the first time with his daughter, University of Sydney sociologist Myra Hamilton.

Asked whether he prefers the life of a “lone wolf” academic or the more collegiate environment in a think tank, Hamilton says he thinks both have been the same for him.

Chairman and Yip’s prawn and scallop toast.Credit: James Brickwood

Because he created the Australia Institute, and it had few staff during his tenure, it was largely driven by his research interests and fascinations.

For someone with a reputation as a hothead whose sharp tongue has alienated even long-time friends, Hamilton in reality appears thoughtful and seems to choose his words carefully.

He says his wife Janenne, a relationship counsellor, has always been an “extraordinarily important emotional support and sounding board” for him particularly in working through issues that involved conflict.

The bill.

Although he decided the memoir was “not going to do any score-settling”, he found the telling of his story became less rancorous over the course of three or four drafts.

“A lot of stuff has happened and that inevitably leaves some pretty hard feelings. But as I rewrote, often on the suggestions of others, readers and editors and my own re-reading, more and more of the rancour came out,” he says.

“And I noticed that taking the rancour out of the memoir took the rancour out of me.”

He speaks of regret several times but doesn’t go into detail in more than a veiled manner – similar to the way his book skates over decisions he wishes with hindsight were different, such as choices he made when establishing the now-defunct Climate Institute and the lack of recognition for his colleague and co-author Richard Dennis in the publicity for their 2005 book Affluenza that led to a falling out.

It sounds like he has a Sinatra theme song, I joke, thinking of My Way.

Hamilton visibly recoils.

“I hate Frank Sinatra,” he says.

His opposition to the crooner with mafia links comes not from some dislike of jazz, but rather on moral grounds arising from a story he once read about Sinatra siccing his goons onto a man in a bar who objected to the singer hitting on the stranger’s wife.

“How can someone who’s such a thug and mixes with gangsters be so famous and celebrated and loved by so many people? I didn’t get that.”

Does Hamilton ever wish he was a different personality? He thinks about that often, he confesses.

“But, you know, I’m kind of reconciled to who I am. I have often over my time I regretted saying certain things or writing certain things in an unnecessarily provocative or harsh way. Often.”

He recognises there’s a risk his return to the themes of inequality in his next book may alienate those who started engaging with his work because they thought he was a conservative voice on China. But he’s hopeful they’ll keep listening.

“When you realise someone is complex and they’re harder to categorise, which has happened to me, you’re more open to them,” he says. “So maybe I’ll get a bit of that.”

And with that, he picks up a trilby from under the table and disappears out the restaurant’s back door.

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