Ask Us Anything: Australia's Best & Worst PM? + Worst Ever Travel Experiences

0:00I'm Adam Schwab. I'm Adir Shifflin. And this is The Contrarians with Adam and Adir.

0:09And we're back. Episode 164, Ask Us Anything, where you ask any question you want and we will do our best to answer it. My chief question asker, over to you. Happy New Year, everyone. And welcome back to the first Q &A of 2026. Let's kick it off with a question that came in from Jack, which I think is kind of relevant to the time of year we're in in Australia. So Jack asks, Adam, you've built a business that celebrates amazing, unforgettable and positive holidays. So I want to know from both of you, what's the worst travel experience you've ever had in your life? Are you going to Talk about a business class experience when you couldn't get in first.

0:54So I haven't really had a dreadful travel experience. I've had a few scary things happen, which are pathetic because they're not really scary. Like I had a touch and go experience on a plane. You know, when they come into land and they're too far down the runway and they quickly have to take off again, that's a horrible experience. But that's just more like me not being used to it. I think the pilots were probably pretty relaxed about the whole thing. I was like an Australian airline. I don't remember which one it was. but luckily I have not had too dreadful an experience traveling. Maybe, you know, I had an experience, I don't, I mean, I really never fly Jetstar anymore, but I took a Jetstar flight back from somewhere and I was flying in their star class, pseudo business class, and it had to land in Sydney instead of Melbourne.

1:40They're going to put people on connecting flights. They basically just put me to the back of the line on a connecting flight and didn't put me on one and said, oh, you can go tomorrow if you want. And so that was pretty frustrating, right? I had a whole, I don't want to go into the whole debate that I had with him about that. I lost that debate and I had to book a flight on Virgin to get back to Melbourne that night. I don't want to jinx it, but I've been very lucky. Look, I haven't really had any terrible stories of, you know, getting stranded anywhere or, I mean, maybe the most hopeless experience I ever had on a plane was in the US when I boarded a United flight and everybody was strapped in and they couldn't get the PA system to work on the plane.

2:19And so basically they deboarded an entire plane of people because they couldn't fix the PA system. I was thinking I was in Chicago. Like finding another flight out of Chicago is not an easy thing to do when they deboard you, but I haven't had any dreadful experiences. So my answer is kind of very boring. In fact, I'll go even further and say on aggregate, I have delivered a more terrible experience to an airline than an airline has delivered to me. Because remember I told you the story of how I got banned from louder air from talking my way into too many business class upgrades when I was young and then they went broke.

2:51And as I said, I'm very proud of my contribution to that liquidation. So I think on balance, it's probably like one nil to me on battles with airlines. I think your expectations changed. When I was a kid, our holidays were always driving to Sydney or somewhere in South Australia in my dad's Volkswagen and we'd have three seats to ourselves. And I don't particularly like driving places. So this is 12, 14 hours of driving. and we'd say it like a, not a caravan park, but usually like apartments or something like that. It was great. As a kid, you didn't know any better. Now, obviously, our kids have slightly different levels of expectations.

3:25But so I think your expectation changed as you get older. We went to a place, there's places in the UK, our UK listeners all know these places. One's called Butlins, one's called Pontons. We went to a place called Butlins in, it was long, it was 2000, probably 2012, pre-kids with my extended family. And this place, pretty bad. By then, my expectations had risen a bit, but it was pretty bad. It was like a, call it a really, really sort of lower class Club Med, if you can imagine that, but like way, way worse than a Club Med. You can't compare it. Then we went to another place called Pontons, and this was in, so if you remember in 2021, we actually went to the UK.

4:01It was sort of mid-COVID. We got a special government exemption, went to the UK for six months. So Melbourne and Sydney were locked down, and UK was fine. It was open, but there were still sort of vestiges of COVID still hanging around. and my sister-in-law was going to staying in a caravan and like a quite a nice caravan park at about called near bristol about four hours from from london and my wife booked this place called pontins thinking oh this it's it wasn't a caravan park and i'm not a big caravaner so this is a place we could stay that was close close to the sort of our in-laws and it was kind of the lesser of two evils anyway we get there and it was like the world's worst refugee camp the cue to get the key it would like to get the key you know you didn't go to like a check-in desk there was just a line of like 400 people and you imagine sort of really really working class sort of england kind of people it was pretty hot you wait and you wait and get like your key from this sort of tin shed then you drive to and it was quite a lot it was like a big space imagine like a a caravan park but not caravans it has like cabins we get to our cabin and we had we had like a double cabin because we had the kids and like the beds were like a prison style bed we had the wire bed with a prison sort of thing i'm always very conscious of me needing internet and the internet didn't work and we can't stay here.

5:11And we just turned around and drove straight out. Like we obviously paid, we didn't get any money back. We paid and it wasn't cheap. It was like, especially for what you got, it would have been a couple of grand Australian for four nights. It was quite, for what it was, it was like the worst place. I can send you guys videos. It was like the worst place I've ever seen. It's good that you didn't fall for the sunk cost fallacy and you just got the hell out of there. Nah, it's, and credit to my wife because obviously she was on the hook for choosing it. And she got, no, we can't stay here. We ended up, we found it like a Doubletree Hilton 20 minutes away, which actually was fine.

5:38There was no one working. That's fine. Doubletree is fine. Yeah. And Doubletree in the UK is actually quite good. It's actually a really nice property, but there was just no one working. Actually, you know what I did? You might remember, our dear, our listeners won't, but we did an emergency LinkedIn COVID thing with Paul Greenberg back in COVID in 2021. That's right. And I did it. You may remember I was doing it from this random room at a hotel. That was it at the Doubletree Hilton where I'd left that first place. And we did our, we did this. It was probably our first thing we ever did together live, which was good fun.

6:08I think Double Trees is an old suites hotel, isn't it? It's fine. Oh, this wasn't suites. We had to sort of all get in the one room and there was like literally no one. If you wanted food, it took like two hours to bring it. But anyway, it was better than Ponton's, that's for sure. That was my worst experience. The worst piece of travel infrastructure I've ever experienced was the airport in Kathmandu. I don't know if you've ever been to Kathmandu. Have you been there? No. It's Nepal, right? Yeah, it's like an enormous shed with lines, lots of lines. It's very unclear what line is what or where any line goes or which line might or might not be moving.

6:44It seems largely randomized. And I think the way that you get to the front of the line is you cause a bit of a commotion. One of the people comes over and says, what's going on? You say, I'm going to miss my flight. And then the line will move. But yeah, Kathmandu is the worst piece of travel infrastructure I've ever been exposed to. But you know what? I can say it with a laugh now right luckily I haven't really like I think memorable you got to be very relaxed when you travel I think because ultimately there are lots of little things that can go wrong when you travel like there's lots of moving parts everything is connected to everything else so if one thing is slow in one place by the time it gets to your place it's all delayed you know there's you know there are economists that say if you haven't missed a flight you're getting to the airport too early I'm a bit too stressed out for stuff like that but like I get it.

7:30I think I honestly think the key to travel is just to say I'm going to try and do this as efficiently as possible but I need to accept that I'm just a leaf floating on top of a stream and I can't go against the current. And so I just have to relax and if the current is going to take me somewhere that I don't want to be, that's where the current goes and you can't get worked up about it. And if it means you miss a flight, you miss a flight. If it means, you know, I've ended up being bumped out of business class into middle seats in economy and then you have to fight about getting a refund whatever like i think you've got to roll with these things basically there's two types of things that can happen you there's either you can book your holiday badly i.e not use luxury escapes book a book a pontons whatever book somewhere that's that's just not good or you just have bad luck and like i think you're gonna ultimately you're gonna have bad luck like it's inevitable like you're gonna have like things go wrong with flights that it's mechanical you're gonna have issues with a hotel that something goes wrong.

8:25Like I think you've got to assume that there's going to be a percentage of times and hopefully it's sort of sub 10%, but it's a percentage of times where things just go wrong. And we see it obviously at Luxury Escapes because we get people who complain about random stuff. And most people are really good. But occasionally you'll get people who blame us when they get food poisoning. So it's Luxury Escapes fault. Well, you go to a country, like a developing country, you may very well get food poisoning. It's kind of almost expected at some countries. So I think it's got to be understand where it's your fault.

8:52and maybe I'll just learn from this experience. And it's just called an act of God. It's bad luck. It's going to happen. And as you say, just sort of understand that travel is not going to be perfect. It's complex. A lot of things go wrong, especially if you're flying economy, staying at sort of less expensive places. It's more likely things will go wrong because you sort of don't have the sort of control over outcomes if something goes wrong. But ultimately, I think just assume that things aren't always going to go perfectly and that's part of the experience. I totally agree. Basically, I think what you really pay for when you pay for more expensive travel, because, yeah, like the seat and the food and what you really pay for is somebody to care about your problems and fix them for you.

9:35That's really what you're paying for. And so, like, I used to travel everywhere economy and I used to stay in three-star hotels, right? Like, I wasn't the default when I was born or anything like that, right? You know, whatever the French crown prince or whatever it's called, right? So, like, I'm not that guy. I just was middle class, right? basically that is how I traveled. And I, you know, even from then, like I wanted to travel more nicely, like it very much motivated me. But I do think now I've got much bigger problems than I had when I was traveling in economy and staying in three and a half star hotels, because now I have the problem of expectation.

10:10And that is a much more likely road to disappointment. And so now I go and book something that's really nice. And I just find myself paranoid and worrying that it's not going to be as nice as I was hoping that it would be, how can anything live up to that? And so really I've just created, you know, I don't follow my own guidelines in life, but basically I've just created more potential sadness for myself by raising my expectations higher and higher and higher. And like, you know, the more you pay, the more of a sunk emotional cost is involved in that trip. And so I go and if I pay a lot of money to stay in a hotel and that hotel is really good, but it's just not the greatest thing I've ever stayed in, There's just some disappointment that creeps over me.

10:53And I think that is unfortunately one of the problems with nice travel, essentially. I remember back in even 10, 12 years ago before we used points to travel and like business class was not even remotely an option. Never would have been like, you wouldn't even think about it. You'd go, you'd turn right and assume there was no left. And I would just always be trying to get, can you get two or three seats in economy? Can you, can I dash towards the back as quickly as possible? Exactly. And if you get three seats, four seats in economy, then that's as good as business class in many ways. It was better for me because I didn't know what business class was.

11:24So that was like your expectations is completely different. The paradigm is different. Now, obviously, if you like, I want to try and use points and get business because you actually can't get four seats in economy anymore because they're all taken. So it's a different shift. But back in the day, it was how do I get the best possible economy experience? Nothing in my life of travel has ever felt as good to me as talking my way into a business class upgrade at a check-in terminal. That is the greatest travel experience of my life. And so, like, that is the classic example of, like, the journey is part of the experience, not only the destination, because that was like 20 hours of bliss, not just because of the seat, but because I, you know, I wasn't expecting to be there.

12:09So, yeah, I definitely think we should all go back to Flying Economy and staying in three-and-a-half-star hotels for one year, and then the next year we are going to feel so great about traveling again. That's great. That's my project. I mean, it's not going to happen, but if I was smart, I would do it. No, I wouldn't have thought. Maybe you can fly business a couple of times just to rough it with the rest of us. You know what? It's such a false narrative that I don't fly business. Mike, question number two. All right. Thanks for that, guys. This one comes in from Bryce. Bryce asks, You've spoken recently about Anthony Albanese's character and response to recent events, which got me thinking, who do you genuinely believe is the best and worst prime minister Australia has seen in your lifetime and why?

12:58I love this question. Do you? Okay, you go first. It's a great, it's really interesting because often, because I do, there's lots of lists on best and worst American presidents and generally you need a bit of time, really decades, to be able to properly assess. I think if I look at the best, and I wouldn't have thought he was the best at the time, but I think Bob Hawke for me now is probably the best Australian Prime Minister of our lifetimes. He was obviously a sort of centre-left on the right wing of Labor, built what in hindsight now is probably the best cabinet we've seen in Australian history.

13:29You've got people like John Barton, obviously Paul Kenning as treasurer, Richo before he sort of lost the plot a bit. So he had a really great cabinet, a really great sort of team. he was a union leader he was head of the ACTU and he was able to get business and workers together in a way that I haven't seen leaders do he was obviously a great friend of Israel which is important to us and obviously a great guy he had his personal forewals as we know as most great leaders have had but I think he was certainly with the fullness of time has now been sort of four well then 42 years since he was elected and sort of what 30 something years since he left he It was obviously Paul Keating eventually took him out after the Curabilly agreement went awry.

14:12But I think Bob Hawke for mine is my favorite. As for the worst, I think Scott Morrison has that pretty well covered. He took over from obviously from Malcolm Turnbull. He stabbed in the back. He sort of portrayed himself as a sort of a really a right wing character, but he was just more of a huge grifter. I think his absolute sort of nadir came during COVID where really the leadership he showed, He enabled the likes of Dan Andrews to destroy Victoria by providing so much effectively printed dollars to allow effectively the economy to continue based on debt. So I think Scott Morrison then obviously had the whole Hawaii holiday fire thing before that.

14:50But I don't think we've had a worse person at a worse time than Scott Morrison, regardless of the party. And historically, I'm probably more of a conservative voter than I've probably drifted a much more centrist now and probably even slightly center left. now, but Scott Morrison for mine probably had the most socialist economic policies despite being notionally a liberal prime minister. And as much as I hate to say it, I think Josh Frydenberg was, as much as I really like him, was a terrible treasurer with Scott. Like I think he could have been an incredible leader, but unfortunately he was sort of beholden to Morrison's economic debauchery.

15:22So I think for mine, Hawke the best, Morrison the worst. I tell you why I think you love Hawke so much, which I think I agree with your assessment of the best. the worst I don't know but like the thing about Hawke that made him so good in retrospect are all of the things you said but on a personal level he made Australians feel like this guy feels like one of us even though we know he's much smarter and more capable than we are and that is kind of like the ideal person that you want running a country in Australia like American presidents are different. Like American presidents, in a sense, they're meant to feel somewhat untouchable and somewhat above the general population.

16:04Americans really want to elect kings is what they really want to elect. But Australians do not want to elect kings or queens. What they want to elect is someone that feels like them, but they know is smarter and more capable than they would be in the role. And I think Bob Hawke ticked that box better than anyone. I'm going to tell you the people I thought were most disappointing for not being prime minister or as prime ministers. That's because this is going to be my list. So I think the prime minister that had the most potential that was never realized was Julia Gillard. I think had she have come to power a different way, she would have exited a different way.

16:39And, you know, for the first female prime minister of Australia to have played out like that is really disappointing. But I also think that what she became as a leader is very different from where she started as a politician, which I'd hoped for elbow, but didn't really happen. And I think she had a lot of potential and that potential was not realized. I think that it's true for some other people as well. Like Turnbull, like what was he thinking? Like this is a highly intelligent, highly capable guy with fundamentally centrist values. And he just blew himself up trying to second guess the electorate and trying to placate his own party, which he failed to do and now he hates them, right?

17:17Well, placate the right plank. Remember, Turnbull had an approval rating of 80%, the most popular prime minister ever. And he just blew that. For mine, Turnbull, I had the highest hopes for and probably disappointed. Let me just rank. I was actually thinking about this with the whole Albo stuff last week. If I was to rank prime ministers for our – and technically Malcolm Fraser was my lifetime, but I was too young. But I'll probably say Hawk one, probably slot in Fraser two if I was around for him, but I'll ignore him for now. Hawk one, probably Keating two, Howard three, just even though I don't think Howard was amazing, but I think he had values and he stood by.

17:57I think Port Arthur was a great highlight. He certainly lost the plot towards the end, but I probably said Howard slips in three. Gillard four for mine. I think she was obviously knifed twice, but I agree with you. Had great potential. Turnbull five, had more potential, but just fritted away. Probably Rudd Six. I don't think he was great, but he probably didn't do anything horrifically badly. Then probably Elbow and then Morrison. Oh, sorry. Then Abbott, then Elbow, then Morrison. I think that list is reasonable. And I think the problem with the reason why Elbow and Morrison are so bad is they stand for nothing.

18:28They appear to have wanted the job as prime minister purely as a grift. How can Elbow, how can I get the most sort of chairman's lounge business class flights? And for Morrison, just the ultimate grifter. So I think those two, by far the worst we've had. And also the worst, as I said a couple of weeks ago, the worst we've had in troubling time. COVID was, Morrison was prime minister during COVID. We needed a strong leader during COVID. We got the weakest leader we've ever had. And then obviously during the last two years since October 7, we've had Albo, who I don't think Albo is anti-Semitic in any way.

18:54I think he's just a pandering weak leader who made wrong calls and wouldn't stand up for what was right. So I don't think Albo is a bad guy at all. I think he's a weak guy. I think Morrison probably is a bad guy. And I think you look at the high watermarks of Hawke and Keating and Howe, they really stood for something and they stood up when needed to be counted. I agree with you on that. But the thing is, by the way, Abbott also stands for something. I always say with Abbott, the highest level values you can have about society, he is an A plus on those, on all of the really important stuff. Once you dip down below that, the wheels start falling off pretty rapidly and ultimately that's why people turned against him.

19:32but if you want someone who fundamentally believes in Western liberal democratic values, like he's up there as an A+. Just on Abbott, I think before and after he was leader, especially after he's been good, I think just his time as leader was a bit dysfunctional, which is why I rate him lower. Yes, it was dysfunctional. And also, I thought he was too aggressive as an opposition leader, but I understand, like basically they just want to get elected, right? But I just thought that crossed a bit of a line as an opposition leader. I tell you, I thought Bill Shorten fell for the same problem as Turnbull, but in a different way.

20:05Both of them fundamentally are highly intelligent centrists who ended up selling out their souls and their core beliefs for various reasons. God knows who was telling Shorten what, but that was what the words that were coming out of his mouth were completely inconsistent with his fundamental beliefs about economics, for example. And I think, I just don't understand this. If you are going to, No one knows what the electorate thinks. Like people poll nonstop, focus groups. Every prime minister that loses in a landslide, they also had polling and they also had focus groups. Nobody knows really how to play to an electorate perfectly.

20:42That's why people try populism. So if you're going to go and get your legs knocked off by the electorate, you might as well get them knocked off trying to stand up for what you believe in, not on your knees begging for votes. So I think Shorten failed that test. That's a great point on Shorten. I think if you look at people post their political career or post that leadership, Shorten for mine has been incredible. He was, remember during COVID, he was amazing. He was very much, how do we open these borders? How do we, he was, he was the leader I wished we had during COVID. He was actually amazing for the travel industry as well.

21:14Like he was a big advocate for the travel industry as I'm a bit biased there. And if you look at sort of the last two years vis-a-vis anti-Semitism, Shorten's been amazing as well. So I think he's the labor leader I wished we would have had. I think the policy on capital gains was pretty stupid he had. take that aside. But it's not him, but that's not his beliefs, right? That's the thing that I'm saying. Like that was, I think the other disappointing leader that never became PM was Kim Beasley. Like I think Kim Beasley had the potential to almost be another hawk as in he's a hawk, but a Bob hawk.

21:45But the thing is, we can just be blunt about this in the time where he was opposition leader, I think very overweight people in Australia struggled to get voted in as prime minister and like I think appearance really played against him and like if you said that today you'd be slaughtered but I think that is part of what happened that guy is hyper intelligent very well spoken was on the right of the Labor Party like Hawke it was is really like you know had very positive characteristics I think it's a shame that he didn't become the prime minister as well I think more about the people I wish were PMs well the white thing that that still holds today there's been no fat presidents and no fat prime ministers so i think to say there's not although chris christie is the is was the governor of new jersey and he's a big man right yeah but he didn't but yeah we had a governorship but he never won he never got never got through a primary so sort of case in point that's true you know people people like to say it's not fair to judge by appearance which is obviously true it's not fair to judge by appearance and there's a whole you know generation considers it totally unacceptable to even talk about appearance and yet over and over and over again what ends up being elected is very tall men that is basically what gets elected in the u.s very tall and so i think you know whatever the evolutionary programming is of human beings some of it is difficult to overcome frankly and just on beasley he actually won the election in 1998, I think it was, in terms of he had more votes.

23:15As in you mean got the popular vote. He won easily, just unlucky in terms of how the votes laid. And that doesn't happen very – I think – and in 2001 was obviously the Tampa, the Children Overboard Tampa, September 11 election. So he was on track to win that as well. And Howard came back from the dead basically, Lazarus with a quadruple bypass. So Beasley is probably the most unlucky leader ever. He really could have won, easily should have won two elections and didn't. So that was a really good point you make. Most leaders get remembered for nothing. Like they don't get remembered. Historically, most leaders don't get remembered.

23:51And the ones that do it, they typically get remembered for one thing. There's one thing that happens in their term. Like John Howard gets remembered for the gun reform and the negative he gets remembered for obviously is like the children overboard people talk about. But the work choices, which is effectively what brought him down, I think that's faded into like nobody remembers the details of that. It's forgotten about, right? And I think that for Albo, he's going to be remembered for this. And at the moment, he's not going to be remembered well for this at all. And I think that that is generally how it plays out.

24:23You get remembered for one thing if you're lucky. Yeah, I think Morrison's remembered for the I don't carry a hose, even though by far his worst, his biggest failing was over COVID, but he's remembered for the hose, ironically. I think my guess is that in 30 years' time, Morrison will be remembered because he was the Prime Minister during the COVID pandemic and he'll be remembered as an ineffective Prime Minister during the COVID pandemic. That's my guess of the way he'll be remembered. I think you're being very kind. But you don't think that's the way he's going to be remembered? I think he's going to be remembered as the most incompetent leader I've ever had.

24:55I don't think so. I don't think people don't have that degree of animosity. You know, Billy Hughes, like people said very terrible things about him at the time that he was Prime Minister and for a long time afterwards. But now, Mike, do you even know that Billy Hughes was the Prime Minister of Australia? I have never heard that name in my life. It was 100 years ago in fairness. He defected from the Labor Party to some – he created his own party, didn't he? I think he got booted out. It was a crazy time. You know, like no one remembers him. And that's largely the fate of leaders, that they don't get remembered.