196. Australia: Lockdowns and Location Apps | John Anderson

[0] Welcome to the JBP podcast, Season 4, Episode 50.

[1] This episode features John Anderson A .O. An Australian politician who was Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and leader of the National Party from 1999 to 2005.

[2] Him and my dad discuss COVID -19 and Anderson shares what's been happening in Australia, which is crazy, and the West, in addition to the lockdowns and the threat China's imposing on Australia.

[3] It is a doozy of an episode.

[4] They also discussed the cost of safety and how social media played a big role in today's mandatory vaccinations.

[5] I hope you enjoy this episode.

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[29] use promo code jp150 at checkout again that's a hundred and fifty dollars off a blazing bowl 1500 degree grill on blazing bowl grills .com when using promo code jp150 at checkout hello everyone i have the pleasure and privilege of talking with one of the most impressive men i've had the good fortune to meet in my travels and and my investigation the Honourable John Anderson, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.

[30] He's a respected elder statesman, a sixth -generation farmer from Northwest New South Wales.

[31] He studied history at university and led the National Party, Australia's Rural Political Party, from 1999 to 2005.

[32] As Deputy Prime Minister, he partnered in one of the most successful governments in Australian history, overseeing enormous economic reform, tax modernization, and a string of budget surpluses, which are, in my experience, virtually unheard of, especially a string of them.

[33] These delivered an average annual GDP growth rate of 3 .6%, restored Australia's AAA credit rating, and saw average household income increased by almost 70 % between 1994 and 2008.

[34] Mr. Anderson has worked on numerous community service projects following his career in politics and now hosts a video podcast, which has become the preeminent one of its kind in Australia.

[35] On retiring from Parliament, Mr. Anderson was saluted by figures on both sides of the political fence.

[36] Then Prime Minister John Howard said of him, I have not met a person with greater integrity in public life.

[37] And so, and that's, I had the pleasure.

[38] of meeting Mr. Anderson in Australia when I was touring there.

[39] And that's exactly what struck me. And so I want to, I've done a couple of podcasts with John.

[40] And, and I thought we could concentrate on something tonight, discussing something tonight that I'm very ignorant about, like all of us perhaps, and about COVID and the response to the epidemic, the political response and not only what the response has been but perhaps what it should be and what the dangers of the response are and when I was thinking of who I would like to talk to about this to explore it, I couldn't think of a better person than John Anderson because of his reputation, well -deserved reputation for integrity, his vast political experience and also because at least from the outside, it looks like the responses, the political responses to COVID in Australia have been quite extreme and caused a fair bit of trouble justified, though they perhaps may be, at least people make that argument.

[41] And so I thought we could dive into that terrible mess and see what we might conclude and bring everyone along for the ride.

[42] So thank you very much for agreeing to do this.

[43] and away we go.

[44] Jordan, thank you.

[45] It's terrific to be with you.

[46] I respect you enormously for the way you make us think, for the way you encourage people who are feeling discouraged, for your forbearance and the model you set when you're under attack for not responding with fire but rather calm reason.

[47] And above all, it's just terrific to see you up and about and again and active and looking well.

[48] Well, thank you very much.

[49] I have been feeling substantially better, thank God, and I'm hoping that will continue.

[50] And the problem with returning fire with fire, I suppose, is that you end up burning.

[51] And I've had plenty of enough of that, I would say.

[52] So it's best to try to calm things down if you can possibly manage it.

[53] And hopefully I'll have done that, at least to some degree, and might continue to do it.

[54] So we'll see.

[55] So what have you seen happening in Australia in the West?

[56] and what have you been thinking about this?

[57] Well, it's incredibly messy and hard to think your way through it all.

[58] And I don't, at the very bottom line, I don't want to sound like I'm smug, sort of has been who knows it all and could have done it better.

[59] These are sobering times and we've got to ask a lot of questions.

[60] I think by a starting point, though, Jordan, would be to say, and this is our little mantra with my own video series, you can't get good public policy without a good debate.

[61] And there's a lot of elements to a good debate.

[62] You've got to have a decent level of understanding.

[63] You've got to ensure the debate's not truncated.

[64] You've got to ensure that everybody's involved.

[65] You've got to try and demystify it and depoliticise it.

[66] I think on all of those fronts, there have been severe failings internationally and in Australia.

[67] Australia's response has been quite unique, part of the historical reasons, partly for geographical reasons, hardly because of the unusual nature of our federation, partly because the Australian people are surprisingly comfortable with a big state with a lot of government involvement in their lives.

[68] We are, as I understand, getting some quite even mocking press internationally at the moment for the nature of our lockdowns.

[69] They and in Melbourne, our second largest city, I think, than anywhere apart from in Brazil, of all things.

[70] And I am concerned.

[71] I'm concerned about the balances that have emerged.

[72] I'm concerned about the misinformation about the lack of ability for the Australian people to think through clearly.

[73] They started out trusting governments and medical authorities.

[74] That trust has been badly damaged.

[75] There's now an acceptance we can't go on like this.

[76] So I have to say in the end, I am optimistic, I think, that our institutions will survive this.

[77] The Australian people will say, this is enough.

[78] We've got to come back to a pragmatic middle ground where the governments will give back everything they should.

[79] It's a big question.

[80] But I make this point in the context of the horrendous range of really difficult challenges to confront us.

[81] One thing you must note about Australia, I think internationally, it has been noted, is that we have clearly chosen the democracy and freedom in the face of of an attempt to buy an authoritarian China to say, bear your knees to our authoritarian regime and way of life.

[82] So there's a cause for real optimism there that Australians understand freedom, even though we don't talk about it much in this country.

[83] And so, well, let's talk about that example with regard to China to begin with.

[84] So can you flesh that out a little bit?

[85] What did you see, what threat did you see China imposing precisely when?

[86] And what did you see the Australian and people managing in response to that?

[87] Well, China, of course, we're one of the few countries in the world that runs a massive trade surplus with China.

[88] They suck in massive amounts of our product.

[89] Around a third of our exports go to China, and even though we import a lot back from them, we do very, very well out of it.

[90] And now, we have, I think, Perhaps, along with the rest of the world, assumed that with liberalisation in trade, with rising living standards, more opportunities for a Western -style life liberalism would take over in China.

[91] We know that over the last seven or eight years, those hopes have been well and truly dashed that is becoming a very authoritarian regime.

[92] And Australia called for a full and proper inquiry into COVID so that we could better understand it and cope with future pandemic threats.

[93] effectively, we certainly led a little with the chin, I'd have to say, on that one.

[94] The reaction from China was very unfriendly indeed, and ultimately they issued a list of 14 major grievances and so that we have broken the relationship.

[95] No one will pick up a call in China at a senior level in response to our senior people.

[96] Canada's experienced a similar freezing out, but it's been very focused on Australia because we're in the region, and because of that call for the COVID inquiry.

[97] Also, I think the other thing, and was listed in the 14 grievances, was our insistence that Harway, we were the first country that said that their telecommunications giant should not be allowed to implement itself, embed itself in our telecommunications system for security reasons.

[98] America followed Europe, the rest of the world, slowly.

[99] And I think that's been a cause of real angst.

[100] But the point is that I think that I think that China, thought we would bend quite quickly, and Australia hasn't.

[101] Notwithstanding the fact that in common with other countries, you've seen a lot of business leaders saying, oh, don't go too far, this trade is important.

[102] But as Henry Kissinger put it, a little trade lost can always be recovered.

[103] Freedom lost is almost impossible to get back.

[104] Yeah, well, that, okay, so there's a number of conundrums that sort of emerge out of that, because, you know, you're making the case, that the Australians have girded their loins, so to speak, in the face of an external, political and economic threat, despite the fact that there might be relatively serious economic consequences to that.

[105] And so that will to maintain freedom and that fear of external, not fear precisely, but wariness of external authoritarianism, we still see that as alive and well.

[106] But we've seen throughout the West, and maybe it's exacerbated in the case of Australia, the willingness to dispense with civil liberties on the domestic front in the face of the pandemic threat.

[107] And I wonder, first about the legality of such moves, it seems to me that if the lockdowns and the mandatory vaccination policies are in fact constitutionally valid in countries like Australia and Canada and perhaps the US and of course Europe, that our civil liberties, aren't very well protected at all.

[108] And then I also wonder what would happen to us, what will happen to us, broadly speaking, when the next influenza pandemic sweeps through.

[109] Like now that we've established lockdowns as acceptable, what level of threat justifies their imposition?

[110] How serious does it have to be?

[111] And these are, so then I worry about the lockdowns and certainly about the ethics of the mandatory vaccination campaign.

[112] Now, I'm vaccinated twice, and my wife is as well, although I have family members who have refused it.

[113] And so the division that you see politically and philosophically runs through my family.

[114] And I'm not claiming any moral superiority in the fact that I got vaccinated.

[115] There are a variety of reasons for it, and I won't go into them.

[116] But I'm sympathetic to those who are leery of the mandatory vaccination as policy or the vaccinations per se because they have health objections or ethical objections.

[117] And so, well, that's sort of my domain of concern.

[118] And so I'm wondering how it appears to you.

[119] Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking about it.

[120] And I offer these as thoughts only.

[121] I think it's, and there's so many of them, Jordan, I hardly know where to stand and start.

[122] But I think the first thing I'd say is that in a democracy, we do enter into a contract, if you like.

[123] a compact in which we say, we'll surrender those rights, but hopefully no more than those rights, which are necessary to secure the rights and freedoms of others, and that may from time to time vary.

[124] That's a logical conclusion.

[125] So if you think of, as a friend of mine pointed out here the other day, think of the Blitz during the darkest days of the Second World War in Britain.

[126] I think the social contract, if you like, was strong enough, but people do accept that you had to make sure there was no light escaping from your house at night.

[127] You had to have black curtains drawn.

[128] So there was no light.

[129] So the Luftwaffe pilots couldn't see London and you and your neighbours were safe.

[130] And it was accepted that the police would have the right to barge into your house and say there's a chink of chinker light showing there, cover it up.

[131] And you had no right of conscientious objection almost to that.

[132] That was an extreme example.

[133] So we're talking proportionality here.

[134] It's important to note, of course, that if you follow it through to its logical extent, by well before the war technically ended, the British people said, right, we've been through this terrible to us, we want our freedoms back, and they actually voted Winston Churchill out of office.

[135] I see that as a strong declaration this crisis is over.

[136] We have made accepted, but unbelievably punitive measures, restricted our freedoms, placed ourselves at great risk.

[137] It's over.

[138] We now want to normalize.

[139] Then you come right back to this situation that we're now fronting.

[140] Well, the legal implications are massive in this country.

[141] I've just literally learnt from my news service here in Australia that President Biden has decided that all companies in America who employ more than 100 people must ensure.

[142] that all their workforce is vaccinated.

[143] That's 80 million Americans, compulsory.

[144] The companies must do that.

[145] Sorry?

[146] You said that that's the company's responsibility to ensure that.

[147] So does that mean that the decision about what health care is appropriate has now been ceded by the U .S. government to corporate interests?

[148] And where the hell is that going to end precisely?

[149] I mean, COVID is a nasty illness, but it's not as bad as it could be by any stretch of the imagination.

[150] and it's some multiple worse than a bad flu epidemic, but it's in the same general ballpark.

[151] And so these precedents are being established at an unprecedented rate.

[152] And there's a principle underneath it, which is, well, you can't be too safe.

[153] And the answer to that is, or the rejoinder to that, is that may be true, but don't be so sure that the policies that are put in hypothetically to ensure your safety are going to have that effect and to know others.

[154] And so, and I know there's a professor in Canada who's, and I only know the edges of this story.

[155] She's a professor of ethics, and she has been questioning the mandatory vaccination policy on Nuremberg grounds, essentially, that it's a violation of that enforced medical treatment, the idea that medical treatment can be enforced by the state.

[156] In one of our provinces, there were no exceptions, no religious exceptions, no exceptions for health reasons, no exceptions, period.

[157] It's like, okay, but where does that end?

[158] Like, what is it?

[159] I do all sorts of things that are hypothetically dangerous to other people, like drive, for example, which I suspect is far more dangerous than COVID.

[160] And yet I'm allowed to do that.

[161] You know, we're setting a very strange precedent here.

[162] And that's a hell of a law that's just been passed.

[163] So.

[164] Yeah.

[165] Well, you and I are not Americans.

[166] So we look at America and think of it as a very litigious country.

[167] I would imagine the president has just opened up endless disputes, endless at every level, from, you know, social media meltdown right through to challenges right through to the Supreme Court.

[168] And you raise the issue of what is legal and what is not.

[169] Now, that varies a bit from country to country, I would imagine.

[170] In this country, one of the keys to under.

[171] understanding Australia's response has been to note that when it comes to health, the state governments, remember Australia's a federation, that's a young one that was created well after the United States in very different circumstances, we inherited freedom rather than have to fight for it.

[172] So maybe there was never much focus on the philosophies of freedom, the underpinning thinking around it.

[173] Although, to be fair to Australians, they fought fiercely to defend their freedoms, They've not had to sort of design them, think through them, have those incredible arguments.

[174] Think of Alexander Hamilton and the debates from the founding fathers about how to avoid mob rule, preserve individual freedoms, get the balance right, extraordinarily deep thinking.

[175] It's created a democratic garden in the jungle that is the normal nature of human relations and governments down through the ages and then indeed today.

[176] But we're not tending the garden very well.

[177] the jungle's re -encroaching because we haven't focused much on what's necessary to keep the plants healthy, put it that way.

[178] So the states have control here.

[179] They've approached this issue differently.

[180] It's been hard for the Commonwealth government to maintain a uniform approach.

[181] And one of the big legal questions is, have the state -based lockdowns been legal at all?

[182] Can Queensland legally say to me as somebody from New South Wales?

[183] no, you cannot come here.

[184] And the balance at the moment would be the courts have said, well, the emergency up until now has been such that they are within their entitled powers and so forth to do so.

[185] That would be very interesting to test again now.

[186] And it may be in Australia that our Commonwealth government will have to test them again because as we journey through this, and I mentioned I'm very aware of the interesting international press that Australia is getting at the moment, But the polls are showing now that the Australian people are saying, look, we now get it.

[187] We went for de facto elimination.

[188] Originally, the idea was flatten the curve so our health system can cope.

[189] It morphed into a de facto.

[190] We're so far from anywhere.

[191] We're so privileged.

[192] We're so fortunate.

[193] We can go for elimination.

[194] I never thought that was realistic.

[195] But the polls are now clearly showing that whilst the Australian people are taking a probably not unreasonable sort of insurance policy, related to the vaccination.

[196] As we get the vaccinations up, we think things should be opened up again and we'll have to live with this.

[197] And at that point, I think there will be in this country tremendous resistance and reluctance to lockdown again because they've been so severe, particularly in Victoria, that people have said, no, the costs are so high.

[198] And part of the problem we've had is a sensationalisation of it all by the media.

[199] I'm sorry to say that, but remarkably little really balanced commentary.

[200] It's been politically driven from the right and particularly from the left.

[201] The left and those in secure jobs, particularly with a publicly funded broadcaster, their jobs go on even in a lockdown situation.

[202] They feel safe for their own families.

[203] Now, I'm an essential worker, believe it, or not as a farmer.

[204] I can't go into complete lockdown.

[205] I socially I'm in lockdown just about to come out of it now out in rural Australia but in terms of my occupation and like hospitals and nurses and doctors they've got to keep going there's a bit of hypocrisy in this oh no we want to be safe in our secure jobs in whatever bureaucratic enclave or media enclave you work in but those people who look after me and feed me and all the rest of it no no no they've got to keep going um pulling all of us together I think it will be very difficult after this, frankly, for Australian governments to introduce lockdowns again without very sound reasons.

[206] So there's a building awareness we're going to have to live with this.

[207] And I think there's a building.

[208] It's quite strong.

[209] You can feel it.

[210] And that's reflected in the polls.

[211] And it will be a payout on governments, I think state governments as well as the Commonwealth if they ignore the feeling that this has gone too far in the future.

[212] And so we've got two state governments that are holding out.

[213] They're still effectively saying we can eliminate this, which I think is nuts.

[214] And I think their people will ultimately realize that as well.

[215] So a bundle of issues in there, but a rising awareness that has been a lot of emotion and a lack of balance.

[216] It now emerges that the mental health crisis amongst young people in Victoria is really serious.

[217] It has not been given proper weighting in the debate, nor is the economic impact and the fact that we are using.

[218] our children's money to prop businesses up.

[219] No country has blown out its public debt in percentage terms as quickly, I don't think, as Australia has.

[220] Mind you, we had a very low debt basis because of certain past governments to begin with.

[221] And even after this, our debt to GDP ratios will be relatively manageable by international standards.

[222] But the trend lines are not good.

[223] And we are borrowing from our children.

[224] This is our children's money.

[225] right well yes so we need to talk very seriously all of us about the cost of the safety because the cost isn't safe right so we're we're taking one risk to prevent another and so it's always a matter of balance of risk there isn't a there isn't a pathway to safety through all of this and so i'm also concerned like to make the vaccines mandatory is going to do and to punish people who refuse them for whatever reason they refuse them is it seems to me that it's a sign of the failure of the vaccination arguments essentially.

[226] If you if you haven't made the arguments credible enough to convince the percentage of people that you think should be vaccinated to be vaccinated, then that's a failure of your argument.

[227] And then to move to use political force and police force, for that matter, obviously, to insist is only going to increase the distrust that's driving the resistance to the vaccines to begin with.

[228] You know, you spoke at the beginning of people's decrease in trust in the medical establishment, so to speak, and also in the political establishment.

[229] When they have to, when those systems resort to force to impose their view of what the proper pathway is to safety, that's going to produce a long -term permanent, serious damage in the credibility of those institutions.

[230] And that's going to have a tremendous cost in terms of health as well.

[231] So I don't understand.

[232] So, and then I've been trying to think through a solution.

[233] So in Canada, we have a fairly high percentage of people that have been duly vaccinated.

[234] And it seems to me that the appropriate approach is something like for the governments to say very honestly and carefully to people, we've made the vaccines as available as possible to all of you.

[235] There's nothing standing in your way but your own choice that's preventing you from being vaccinated.

[236] As a consequence, we are going to reopen our country radically on this date.

[237] And then your destiny is in your hands, as it should be.

[238] And it seems to me that hoping that the vaccination rates are going to exceed 90%.

[239] I think that's a high -end estimate, and I might be wrong about that, is a pipe dream.

[240] Too much force is going to have to be applied to people to get them to do that.

[241] And many people will just not do it.

[242] And then what are we going to do with those people?

[243] Are they now pariahs?

[244] Are they now criminals?

[245] And if they are, because it's going to be a big chunk of the population, How exactly are we going to deal with that?

[246] So I see that we're in danger of exchanging the possibility of pandemic damage with the certainty of the danger of authoritarian imposition.

[247] So, well, so that's, I'd like you to respond to that, I guess, and tell me what you.

[248] So that's what I think the policy should be, is that we have the vaccines, that they may not be as excessive.

[249] in Australia yet as they are in Canada.

[250] We have plenty of vaccines in Canada.

[251] It's like I think the government and the health authorities would be much more credible if they said, look, we really think these vaccines work, but we're not in the business of forcing them on you.

[252] You can make that choice.

[253] We've done what we could to provide them for you.

[254] And now it's in your hands.

[255] And is that a stupid idea?

[256] Because I don't know, but I'm not impressed by this creeping authoritarianism in the name of public safety.

[257] I just can't see that that's going to go well.

[258] I think it's going to cause more damage than it's going to do good.

[259] I think it comes back to this initial proposition, I think, that the quality of the debate is critical to getting good outcomes.

[260] And the quality of the debate in many ways has been very badly interrupted.

[261] So we had an unbelievable situation in Australia where we had some quite senior people saying AstraZeneca was dangerous because of blood clots.

[262] In fact, you're infinitely less likely to get a blood clot from AstraZeneca and a girl on the pill.

[263] So are we going to say, well, girls should come off the pill?

[264] I mean, because there's a danger of blood clots.

[265] We're not going to say that.

[266] But we had some quite senior people driving them.

[267] And yet in Britain, of course, the people, the lady co -inventor and developer of the product, a lovely lady whose name is sketchy at the moment, went to Wimbledon and they gave her a standing ovation.

[268] And people were saying, well, if she came to Australia, we'd probably send her to our equivalent of Siberia.

[269] The different responses are extraordinary.

[270] Who's right?

[271] Now, we have one of our leading medical experts who was one of those casting data on it.

[272] saying that perhaps it's the best one of all.

[273] So you're getting this confusing advice.

[274] How are people meant to find their way through that?

[275] And that feeds into your narrative.

[276] And I think into mine, the quality of public debate becomes very important.

[277] I just wonder what on earth's going to happen in America now.

[278] It'll be very interesting to watch as we speak, if I understand the news correctly, you know, that 80 million Americans are going to be told you will have a vaccination.

[279] Now, this is the land of how.

[280] Good luck.

[281] Good luck with that.

[282] That'll be another war on drugs.

[283] That's not that's not implementable as far as I can tell.

[284] And in the U .S. in particular, I mean, the people there who are anti -COVID vaccination, they're not doing this trivially.

[285] Like, they're committed to it.

[286] And the Americans can get committed to something like no one else.

[287] And so this isn't going to produce a minor backlash.

[288] And it feeds into these conspiracy narratives that are starting to undermine our society.

[289] as well, you know, that the government is fundamentally untrustworthy and so are the health organizations.

[290] And so anybody who's vaguely conspiratorial in their outlook, that's just going to be, like, get of it a massive boost by this sort of political move.

[291] That's how it looks to me. And then you go back to the social contract that I talked about earlier than in a democracy, we agree to surrender some of our freedoms in the broader common good.

[292] and that we then in proportionate, in sort of ways that are proportional, agree to limit them in emergencies, and we're often willing to do that because if we're frightened, we will flee for security over freedom, will we then demand it back again?

[293] Now, this breakdown in trust that is common to all Western countries, and it's very interesting in Australia, the Australian National University, one of our best universities, has been tracking confidence in our Commonwealth governments, plural, since 1971.

[294] I think that's right.

[295] And it's been a dismal picture.

[296] The graph is gradually drifting away.

[297] We're less and less trusting of governments and people in them.

[298] Although, funnily enough, Australians, I think, are still quite sort of ideologically friendly towards government.

[299] They're very cynical about politicians.

[300] That's what's happened there.

[301] There's a bit of a disconnect there.

[302] But if you look at that long -term trend, you used to get a blip when there was a change of government, a massive surge in confidence, and they needed to dissipate away until as a government became unpopular and made tough decisions or lost its way, and then there'd be a lift.

[303] You're not getting those lifts anymore.

[304] So we went into this COVID situation with politicians knowing that they're not widely trusted and that lots of people in the community would think, oh, well, they're doing that for his, for political reasons or looking after their own high, they're not concerned with us.

[305] So they rolled out experts at every point, medical experts.

[306] Now, we have wonderful medical services in this country and I do not want to sound unnecessarily critical.

[307] However, of course, they focused very heavily on saving lives.

[308] That's their job.

[309] And so they gave advice all the time that was designed to save every life possible.

[310] I mean, it's extraordinary.

[311] We got to the end of last year.

[312] I think we're in a population 25 million, only 810 people had died of COVID.

[313] But it meant that the Australian people, how are they meant to get adequate information when they're only getting one side of the debate?

[314] There's nothing about the payoffs.

[315] What will it mean for mental health?

[316] The suicide unit at the University of Sydney estimated at one stage that the suicide rate would increase threefold and that that increase would be vastly high.

[317] higher than, as I understand it, than the number of people who'd lose their lives to COVID.

[318] Remarkably little attention paid to the realities that the people who were being badly affected were in certain age cohorts and often had medical problems, comorbidities.

[319] In fact, an average of four amongst the people who have died, as I understand it.

[320] And those are uncomfortable things.

[321] I believe that very frequently, and I may be wrong about, this.

[322] I'm about perhaps as ignorant as the average person in this domain, and that might be just right for this conversation in some sense.

[323] But I also, with regards to the death statistics, my, is it the case that no matter what the preexisting condition was, if the person was positive for COVID and they died, the death is attributed to COVID?

[324] And that's like, that makes the basic statistics upon which all these decisions are being made, well, questionable.

[325] I'm not saying that it's wrong, but it's certainly questionable.

[326] Can we trust the death rate statistics?

[327] Do we actually know how dangerous this illness is?

[328] Now, people look at such markers as excess mortality over a given time period, and that seems to me to be more reliable, but it's not unreasonable to ask these questions, and that's partly your point about the necessity of debate, and that opens up a broader issue, too.

[329] about how those sorts of debates should be conducted.

[330] And I can't help but think that it's going to become incumbent upon our political leaders to use the kind of platform that you and I are using right now and actually talk to people.

[331] Yeah.

[332] That's never really impossible, right?

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[350] slash Jordan and using the code jbpbases that's trybases .com slash Jordan promo code jbpbis for one month free that's a great deal on a groundbreaking supplement I hope you enjoy the rest of this episode yeah I think that's I think that's important because part of what's happened I want to sound overly critical of our health offices and what have you many of whom I have a high regard for some of whom I think have brought into the sensationalism but keeping in mind that their job is to present the medical side.

[351] But then a magnificent health service of the sort that we enjoy in Australia, people are cynical about it, but by international standards, it's pretty darn good.

[352] It costs a lot of money.

[353] What are we going to do if we can't afford those intensive care beds in the future?

[354] That depends on a prosperous society.

[355] Our children are going to inherit a vastly larger debt.

[356] They will not be as prosperous.

[357] And we know from the research So they're quite distraught about this, quite despondent.

[358] They're wondering whether Australians are very aware that our economy has been blown off course.

[359] It's been magnificent and it's held us in an incredible stead.

[360] And that's why we've been able to spend a lot of money on insulating people.

[361] It's an irony, isn't it?

[362] Government shut economies down deliberately and knowingly and then try to put the system on life support by pumping money indirectly.

[363] And Australia's been able to do a great deal of that because of its economic strength in the past.

[364] but we're dissipating it away at a very time when we face other huge challenges, the demand that we do more on climate, which will cost money, the reality that Australia will have to spend more than 2 % on GDP, of GDP on defence, we're going to have to.

[365] There are a whole range of other things that we're going to spend money on that must be fed into the debate as well so that people can make informed decisions.

[366] And this has been a big part of the problem.

[367] Politicians have had to say, listen to the experts because they know they won't be trusted.

[368] Whereas in reality, if the system was working properly, people would be saying, we put the politicians there to balance these things and to lead us through it.

[369] So they can say, here are the real dangers of COVID that we know about.

[370] And along comes Delta, to be fair, and that makes it even harder.

[371] It's different and it affects more people and it's more contagious.

[372] But here are the realities on the health side.

[373] Here are the trade -offs in economic terms.

[374] Here are the trade -offs in terms of the education of our children.

[375] Here are the trade -offs in terms of depression and anxiety and self -harm.

[376] The right way through this is such and such a road.

[377] But that's not what's been fed to the populace.

[378] It's save every life, every life lost.

[379] Well, of course it's a tragedy.

[380] But there's another reality, and that is that the delayed diagnoses of other illnesses as we've tried to keep our hospitals free and declawed the system and delayed operations on cancer and so forth, over time, we'll realize that there were real tradeoffs within health as well.

[381] And my point is that we actually elect politicians to guide us through this on the best available information, but when trust has broken down in the compact, it's very hard to get that right.

[382] And part of what's happened here is that politicians have had to say, we're taking medical advice.

[383] Sometimes they don't tell us what that was, by the way, rather than we're balancing that with all of these other factors and I'm putting it before you, the people I lead on behalf of the government.

[384] Hard to do that when trust is broken down and we all know how important that is to relationships in the end.

[385] Then it's easy to default to expert advice.

[386] But what is happening as a consequence, what that means in some sense is that the medical profession starts to bear the weight of political decisions.

[387] And to the degree that people are skeptical about political decisions, then they're going to start to become skeptical about the experts.

[388] So the politicians are, by relying on experts, they're avoiding their responsibility, they're shunting the risk off on people who have enough on their plates, as far as I'm concerned.

[389] And then we have the breakdown of trust in the medical system, which I really believe is going to be tremendously exacerbated by mandatory vaccines.

[390] I agree with you.

[391] I agree with you.

[392] This is, I think, one of the, if the greatest threat to our freedoms in the West is our own self -loathing and the breakdown of trust and confidence in one another, those sort of cultural issues, we're now extending it into other areas, you know, into science and so forth.

[393] Science is offered us the way through, but then you have this serious, in this country, in my view, very serious and unwarranted undermining of confidence in AstraZeneca.

[394] It did really worry me at the time, and I look back on it, and I think I hope people have learned some lessons out of that.

[395] I've had the first dose.

[396] I'm waiting for my second.

[397] It wasn't very pleasant as it happened.

[398] I did get a reaction, and so did my wife.

[399] But, you know, no hesitation.

[400] We're lining up for it.

[401] We go back for the second one.

[402] I'm just very, very thankful.

[403] We actually have these vaccines.

[404] How wonderful is that?

[405] That's a big tick to science.

[406] But then you've had medical officers saying, no, no, no, no, no, this is bad.

[407] and then they switch.

[408] Oh, that's also why we shouldn't be hitting people over the head with the necessity of those.

[409] You should do this because it's good for you.

[410] It's like, no, no, look, that you don't understand the history of vaccinations has been very positive.

[411] Now, we understand that we're doing this in a bit of a rush and that you might be leery about that, but it's our considered opinion that this is actually of great benefit to you.

[412] And we're not going to twist your arm.

[413] We're not going to force you.

[414] We're not going to put in draconian measures to insist that you do this.

[415] But I believe that that would be a much more compelling narrative and that many, many more people would, for certainly fewer people would object to the vaccines that way.

[416] And I think more people would take them, this force and that the force as well, this next issue, you know, the idea that it violates the Nuremberg conventions, that's a very interesting argument.

[417] And I think it's possibly true.

[418] But even more so, it's like what are the dangers of alienating people from the health system entirely?

[419] from the scientific establishment entirely by politicizing it in this manner, we're not thinking that through, as far as I can tell.

[420] And part of it's just tremendous difficulty, right?

[421] I mean, all these things you talked about, the secondary negative consequences of the health measures, it's also taken everyone a while to see what those were.

[422] Like, COVID was an immediate threat.

[423] It was going to happen right now.

[424] Some of these other things that you're talking about, like the increase in suicide rates, that's sort of downstream, right?

[425] And so no one was, that wasn't on the table when the decisions were originally being made.

[426] No, and to be fair to policymakers, we've always got to be fair in these things.

[427] No one saw the nature of the second sort of round of mutant variance, and there would be more of them, and that's worrying in itself.

[428] So we don't quite know what we're facing.

[429] But I didn't want to pick up on something that I think is critically important, two things that you said.

[430] Firstly, leadership here is that appeal to reason and to a sense of responsibility to yourself and your neighbour.

[431] So I buy that completely, and I would argue again that it's been undermined by this reliance on experts.

[432] No matter how highly you think of the experts, they're not the people we elect to lead us, if you say what I'm driving at.

[433] They should advise leaders, leaders should lead.

[434] And that's been a problem across the West because of the breakdown of trust in our leadership.

[435] It shot through the roof when it looked as though we could eliminate this thing in Australia.

[436] Governments were immensely popular.

[437] One very incompetent state government was re -elected because it was a perception that they kept their people safe.

[438] And it didn't deserve to be re -elected by any stretch of the imagination.

[439] And I think I'm a reasonable judge of those things.

[440] On all the broad indicators, they had not served their state well.

[441] But the other point that you raised that I think so important.

[442] I'm always struck by Haxor Ridge, the film that Mel Gibson put together.

[443] Now, it's about conscientious objection.

[444] Now, stop and think about this for a moment, proportionality, and the darkest days of the Second World War, when there were real doubts about whether or not democracy and freedom would survive, in the end, and subject of some pretty tough processes you could claim to be and be recognized as a conscientious objector.

[445] That's what the film's about.

[446] You could say, no, I really, my conscience does not allow me to do this.

[447] And you see, this is Frank Ferruity's point, I think, I don't want to verbally, I'm only a simple man, but as I understand it, our first freedom is freedom of conscience.

[448] Without that, every other freedom, I'm not a believer in the hierarchy of freedoms, you know, freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to meet with people or not meet with people.

[449] And there's no hierarchy there.

[450] They're a package.

[451] But in a sense, the first is freedom of conscience, you know, to think through what do I really believe and then to be able to act out on that conscience.

[452] That is the mark in the end of freedom.

[453] Now, it might be that during the Second World War society says, well, there'll be some downsides for you.

[454] We'll respect that.

[455] You don't have to go to the front line.

[456] And there may have to be here, too.

[457] I mean, I suspect that airline customers, here's an interesting fact for you.

[458] Globally, airline travels recovered to 70 % of its pre -COVID levels.

[459] Australian air travel is down at 26 % still.

[460] Quite interesting reflection on our caution and our isolation in this country.

[461] And yet we're one of the most interconnected nations in the world in terms of trade and in terms of tourism, inbound and outbound.

[462] So it's an interesting reflection on where we're at in this country.

[463] But my point in all of this is that you have to, I mean, I think it's going to be hard to be able to engage in all activities if you've not been vaccinated unless we can find a very quick way of testing.

[464] And I might be wrong on this, but a friend of mine was telling me that her son's in Germany and he went out for a coffee the other day and the standard procedure is that you get a little test on the way to the coffee shop.

[465] It takes a few minutes and if you clear, you're right.

[466] So it's not a question of vaccination.

[467] It's whether you've got COVID.

[468] Now, that's an interesting way of looking at and if technology would allow for that, it might ease a lot of these things.

[469] I was rung the other day by the minister, a very thoughtful man from a church in my local area and he said, I'm not sure what we're going to do if the state tells me that I can't allow people to come and worship in my church, if they haven't had a vaccination.

[470] He said, I'm deeply troubled by that idea.

[471] And I thought, well, I haven't thought of that particular angle.

[472] That's troubling to me too.

[473] So what do you think the best rationale is for mandatory vaccination?

[474] It's like what is the danger that what is actually the danger?

[475] What's the best description of the danger that's posed socially by people who refuse to be vaccinated?

[476] I mean, is the argument that there are also a terrible danger to those who've been vaccinated?

[477] I mean, as the vaccination rates increase, and they're fairly high in Canada, I think we're near 80%.

[478] I hope I'm not wildly off the mark with that estimate.

[479] I know it's much lower in Australia, or I believe it is.

[480] I'm unclear about exactly the danger that the unvaccinated are posing.

[481] So what's your understanding given those vaccination rates?

[482] What's your understanding?

[483] of that?

[484] And what's the justification for their restriction of civil liberties?

[485] I have to say that's a very good question, Jordan.

[486] And I'm as unclear as you are.

[487] I mean, if...

[488] But we shouldn't be unclear about that, right?

[489] You'd hope that in the positions that we occupy, we wouldn't be unclear about that.

[490] And it seems to me that if we're unclear about that, that plenty of other people are unclear about it as well.

[491] And that's obviously not a good thing.

[492] So to illustrate the point that you're raising, if I've got this right now, our Qantas, the Australian airline, has said that all of its staff must be vaccinated.

[493] And as I understand it, one of their very senior people has a conscientious objection and has left the organisation.

[494] I think I'm right in saying that.

[495] Now, his perspective, presumably it's a very important one, he would be asking a question not only about civil liberties, but the practicalities, which is what you're posing, as I understand it to tease us out, if I'm about to get, go through an airport through all of the procedures involved there and get on an airplane with people who are, even if it's just one person like a plane who's not vaccinated, if everybody else has been vaccinated and they're safe, what's the problem?

[496] Well, yeah, precisely exactly what's the problem.

[497] And to what degree is that sufficiently problematic so that civil liberties should be importantly curtailed, right?

[498] Because, and so I'm unclear about exactly what permission being vaccinated grants me, and I'm unclear about what precise danger the unvaccinated posed to the vaccinated.

[499] If it's extremely high, then you think, well, then what is the use of the vaccination?

[500] And I don't want to overplay that, obviously, because I believe the evidence suggests that the vaccinated are much less likely to suffer severe consequences from COVID and much less likely to catch it.

[501] But what I'm still unclear about this, are the unvaccinated primarily posing a danger to the other unvaccinated?

[502] And at some point, and maybe people, and maybe the worry is, well, that's going to overwhelm our health system.

[503] It's going to overwhelm our intensive care units.

[504] And so I guess a corollary to the policy that I thought up earlier, and I didn't mention this, was, we announce a date past which, once the vaccines are universally available, we announce a date past which things open.

[505] And we quadruple the money that we've devoted towards ICUs.

[506] And because it's not as if the lockdowns themselves aren't expensive.

[507] They're extraordinarily expensive.

[508] They're insanely expensive.

[509] And we haven't yet begun to pay for them.

[510] So we set a limit.

[511] We tell people, we inform people that the vaccinations are available.

[512] and then we prepare for the fact that many people won't become vaccinated, but I still don't get the exact danger.

[513] And that could easily be my profound ignorance.

[514] But if it's the unvaccinated or dangerous to the other and vaccinated, it's like, well, at some point, what are you going to do about that?

[515] Force people?

[516] That's not a good precedent.

[517] Two thoughts come to mind.

[518] One is that one of the things that policymakers would have to take into account, I'd imagine is the emergence of new variants, more contagious, more dangerous, resistant to the vaccines and spreading those very quickly.

[519] There may be dangers in there that have to be thought through.

[520] The other thing about it is there's a world of difference between saying you must be vaccinated per se and saying, well, if you choose not to be, that's okay, but there may be some situations where, you know, you have to stay at bay.

[521] Hypothetically, it might be to say, you know, you don't have to be vaccinated, but you can't fly.

[522] That's, I'm just plucking that out of the air.

[523] So you're absolutely free not to, but there are some things you can't do if you're not vaccinated.

[524] In fact, one of the things that we did in this country, you see, Australia, one of the characteristics of the country that I live in and love is that we're amazingly.

[525] open to being regulated.

[526] And a bit weak on conscientious objection, too, historically, not as strong as America and other Western countries.

[527] And that regulation, maybe it comes from the benign way in which governments regulated so much of our lives.

[528] As I say, we've never had the turmoil of civil war of independence of the agonies and intellectual exercises that went into designing the American Declaration of Independence.

[529] We've not had those sorts of things.

[530] Essentially, we were a series of British colonies put together by an act of the British Parliament in 1901 that federated us.

[531] And in the 1880s and 1890s, our best thinkers, often pretty flawed people and pretty with selfish ambitions of being statesmen and so forth in their own little pond, I suppose.

[532] But they put together a constitution that reflected the very, very best of the thinking and the experiences and the learning of particularly Britain and America.

[533] But my point out of all of that is that so government's been relatively benign, notwithstanding, as I said earlier, Australians have been prepared to fight for freedom or to defend it.

[534] They haven't had to fight for it in the first place.

[535] And they've been very, we're amazingly accepting a regulation in this country.

[536] We were the first country in years, by years to mandate, impulsory seatbelt wearing.

[537] There's a whole plethora, a whole raft of things where Australians have just been quite happy to accept being told what to do.

[538] As smoking, advertising was banned here before anywhere else, I think that's right to say, and so forth.

[539] And to take your point up, governments explain this is being done for public health reasons, and there was a wide -scale sort of acceptance of it.

[540] So it comes back to this.

[541] If vaccination is important, then it ought to be positive arguments for it and leadership that people respect.

[542] And they say, well, I don't feel threatened by this.

[543] I accept the arguments that for reasons A, B, and C, it makes sense, and I should be responsible, whereas coercion would ordinarily create that resentment, that suspicion, that distrust, and the pushback that you're talking about.

[544] So that's why the recognition of conscientious objection, I think, is so critical to the maintenance of freedom in any genuinely free society that wants to, if you like, persuade people of the value of freedom.

[545] Well, perhaps to persuade people to become vaccinated for that matter.

[546] I don't know what these new regulations in the U .S. are going, what kind of response they're going to produce, but I can't imagine that it's going to do anything but exacerbate the tension between the left and the right that already exists in that country and that is severe enough to be somewhat destabilizing already.

[547] We're going to introduce vaccine passports in my home province in Ontario, despite the fact that there's a conservative government in power at the moment.

[548] And there won't be as much of a reaction to that in Canada as there will be in the U .S. to similar measures.

[549] But it just seems to me that that default to force is an advantage.

[550] mission that the argumentation has been stunningly inadequate.

[551] And instead of addressing the problem of the inadequate argumentation, the shortcut is, well, those people are too stupid to know what's good for them.

[552] And so it's, and in this, and for the sake of everyone else's well -being, it's justifiable to force them.

[553] That might even be okay if it was going to produce the results that are intended.

[554] But I don't think it's going to.

[555] I think it's going to produce a kickback that we'll make things worse on the vaccination front rather than better.

[556] And we might ask ourselves, too, it's like, you know, part of the reason the U .S. has given up on the war on drugs is because it was unenforceable.

[557] You had to push the state so far in a police state direction to stop people from using substances like marijuana, that everyone eventually just said, look, man, it's just the cure is worse than the disease.

[558] And, well, that's the danger that we're facing, I would say.

[559] And it's always the case with policy.

[560] I understand that, that the cure can be worse than the disease.

[561] But reasonable people can certainly make that argument, that there's tremendous danger in making an active invasion, medical procedure mandatory.

[562] There's terrible danger from a president perspective.

[563] You know, because what if it does turn out, for example, that one of these vaccines has unforeseen long -term consequences?

[564] And it's been given to hundreds of millions of people.

[565] And I understand medically that there is a distinct possibility that that precise thing will happen.

[566] And then it's certainly not zero the possibility.

[567] And so, and the fact that a percentage of the population perhaps exaggerates that possibility because they're more conspiratorial in their thinking or less trusting or less more skeptical of government, benevolence and health and all of that.

[568] I don't really care.

[569] There's, you can't eradicate the possibility that their objections guided by their conscience, let's say, are, and this is your point with regards to conscientious objection, objecting.

[570] It's like you said that even when we're fighting the Nazis, we weren't so certain that you couldn't say no because you had a different set of beliefs that were truly and validly held.

[571] So, and then I'm also concerned about the precedent we're setting.

[572] And I suppose people who were opposed seatbelt laws and helmet laws and that sort of thing, had the same sort of notion, which is, well, once you let the government decide what's good for you, where does it stop?

[573] And like, I'm firmly convinced, maybe this is my own paranoia.

[574] I'm firmly convinced that if the automobile had been invented today, that the average person would not be allowed to drive, I don't think we would, I don't think we would allow that level of risk.

[575] And I think that's really unfortunate.

[576] So it's a good thing that, you know, it came along slowly and sort of snuck in, but because driving is a very dangerous act and it's publicly dangerous too.

[577] You know, you kill lots of people with your, we kill lots of people with our automobiles.

[578] Yet we're allowed to do it, so to speak, and to think that we're even, that the right way of phrasing that is that we're allowed is, that's not a good way of thinking about it.

[579] So it's in, yeah, and to sort of, if you like get a helicopter view of all of this, It seems to be the things we're talking about here go to the issues of the sort of the strength and the unity because you can't separate the two of the Western democratic model at a time when the alternatives are really starting to muscle up globally.

[580] So this line that COVID's accelerating history strikes a chord with me. we're dividing more than ever, and I suspect to go back to what, and I don't want to misrepresent it, I'm only really referring to literally before we came on, what looks to be the news out of America, which I think is going to be very contentious, 80 million people being told you will be vaccinated.

[581] These sorts of divisions, this polarisation, this tribalisation, this lack of confidence in ourselves and our institutions.

[582] At a time when the world's looking more like the 19th century with multiple power centres, many of them very hot.

[583] to democracy, to America in particular, that see places like Canada and Australia as sort of surrogate states of that sort of the great state in America.

[584] None of this fills me with a great deal of confidence that we will be, will even recognize the freedoms that we have now and the societies we live in in another four or five generations, another four or five decades.

[585] I say that because of where we are geographically, I suppose, in this region here, we're a long way where Australia is a very valuable bit of real estate.

[586] It's sparsely populated, a large landmass.

[587] It's a long way from the other democracies, with the exception of, and the honourable exception of Indonesia.

[588] We're in an area where there is rising authoritarianism, led by one place in particular.

[589] do we have collective willpower to pull together and say we're going to have to make tough decisions we've been very comfortable for a long time and the first tough decision here is the one that's now being openly spoken about in Australia they're actually saying it and as I said I have confidence that Australians are being realistic about this I actually think we will come through this but it's so important we have these debates we now are saying we're going to have to live with COVID and accept that people will die.

[590] Awful thing to say, but we're all going to die.

[591] And if we're not careful, we'll make this into such a mess that will die of, more of us will die of more causes in worse circumstances than we ever going to be.

[592] Right, under a more authoritarian system.

[593] And it's worse.

[594] We can get the worst to both worlds.

[595] You know, I mean, you've got enormous economic challenge.

[596] too.

[597] I mean, let's not kid ourselves.

[598] A reasonable degree of prosperity is very important to having a health system and nutrition and education or climate opportunities and travel that give you lives worth living where human beings can flourish.

[599] Right.

[600] Well, and we've been able to, in some sense, devalue, I suppose, devalue our currency by distributing money, extraordinary.

[601] generously during this time of crisis.

[602] And fair enough, in some sense, but that isn't a sustainable response.

[603] And God only knows what damage we're doing to our future economic prosperity by continuing to make it extraordinarily difficult for many people to engage in productive activity.

[604] How disheartening that is for people to watch their, the businesses that they've poured their heart and soul and to take a terrible hit and and to have people adjust to this new reality that that may never allow them that opportunity again.

[605] So okay, so practically speaking, I mean, it's easy to sit and complain and say, you know, doesn't this look grim and shouldn't we be making smarter decisions?

[606] I put forward for what it's worth, you know, my thoughts on what a reasonable policy might look like one that balances concern for health with the possibility of continued freedom.

[607] What do you think might be done concretely by political leaders in the West to deal with the COVID crisis more appropriately?

[608] What do you see as a reasonable pathway forward?

[609] This may say under strange reaction, but it's where I really genuinely, really come from, I think we need to lift people's eyes to the real threats to our future freedoms.

[610] And I think they're economic and strategic.

[611] And I think out of that should be the message that we really, in Western countries, within our countries and actually amongst ourselves, have more in common that is more durable and important and imperative to preserve and work on, if you like, more interest in common than those which divide us.

[612] and that requires the sort of leadership that we saw, you know, I keep thinking to myself, we saw so much of it out of America, Britain and America, frankly, you know, in the whole sort of mess of the 1940s and then coming out of it.

[613] There's this appealing to people to look to the broader interest, to recognize that hope lies in putting the foundations down, securing them for our future, which is our children and our grandchildren.

[614] In other words, break out of the fear.

[615] We're cowering in the corner in fear.

[616] Fear is a terrible inhibitor.

[617] You know more about this than I do professionally, but we've become very afraid.

[618] A lot of what's happening at the moment is being driven by fear.

[619] And it's fed on by those who want to sensationalize the issues and distort the numbers and not talk about the costs of a given line of action, not talk about the fact that there are issues here other than the medical ones, those sorts of things.

[620] And I think only then can we develop the right sort of set of perspectives, but the subset of that one's, Jordan, is that I don't think any of us yet have worked out how to handle social media with its capacity to give.

[621] No, that's the next thing I wanted to ask you about, actually, because I've been thinking about, look, I invited the leader of the opposition, who's now.

[622] fighting an election in our country.

[623] So he's the leader of the progressive conservative party and the liberals are in power under Justin Trudeau and the leader of the opposition is Aaron O'Toole and I invited him to come on my podcast over the last couple of weeks and he refused.

[624] And he, you know, he might have had his reasons and I asked him at the last minute.

[625] But these podcasts, and I'd like to hear your experience about them, you know, there's no reason for politicians to be using the media anymore as far as I can tell.

[626] It can talk directly to people, and maybe this opens up the possibility of getting deeper insight into who our potential political figures are, right?

[627] Because for so long, a politician had to think in terms of delivering his message in a way that the media would carry.

[628] But that's just not necessary now, because we can sit down like you and I are sitting down.

[629] and actually talk things through.

[630] And then people can be involved and engaged in that.

[631] And that seems to me to be a hopeful technology for the future.

[632] And now you've been, how long have you been running your podcast?

[633] And why did you do it?

[634] And what do you think about that politically?

[635] I'm very curious about that.

[636] Well, yeah, look, there's a bunch of issues in there.

[637] The problem with social media, the downside is it gives a megaphone to people to spread serious misinformation.

[638] Conspiracy theories about AstraZeneca or whatever it happens to be.

[639] That's the downside and the danger.

[640] The upside is you can fill the terrible vacuum in public information that's out there for people who want to know what's really going on and what are engaged with ideas.

[641] And as I've said, probably ad nauseum, I was driven by that feeling that in my country, There is a hunger for higher quality debate, better content, more information.

[642] And it struck me and a couple of my friends that one of the ways to help counter that in my country might be what we embarked upon.

[643] In fact, I launched with you.

[644] Thank you very much.

[645] I had several in the can ready to go with, but you were in Australia at the time.

[646] And what you were saying so struck me as topical and of interest that we launched with it and found an extraordinary appetite for ideas and for content.

[647] And the thing that encourages me is that while, look, to be honest, I often despair of young people's lack of understanding of their history, of the basics of their freedoms and democracy.

[648] They're so cynical about it.

[649] They've been fed the lines by their teachers who have fed the lines out of universities often.

[650] That participation in democracy is to be cynical and to be an activist, not a participant and a contributor and some of our best schools are letting us down in this area or in this country, some of our very, very best schools as well as many of the mainstream ones now.

[651] There are many honourable exceptions.

[652] I want to add that.

[653] But it just seemed to me that there is this hunger and this appetite.

[654] And as you said to me, young people don't often read so much now, but they're still hungry for content and changing technology.

[655] They get it in different ways.

[656] There's an earlier version of it that when we were in government, the Prime Minister of the time, John Howard, recognized.

[657] Bypassed mainstream media where even in those days the grabs were too short and the bias was all too often.

[658] You know, there were too many people in the media seeking to campaign rather than inform.

[659] But he recognised a talkback radio in those days was a brilliant way to reach a lot of people.

[660] And I think that's right.

[661] He was able to go over there.

[662] You could talk directly.

[663] He could find hosts who would let him.

[664] get his message out, even though some of them might have interrupted a bit.

[665] He could still connect with people, and that was important.

[666] How do you do that now, the way you and I are doing it?

[667] And I think that's invaluable.

[668] And I don't pretend in this conversation to have had all of the answers, but at least I think we've teased out the issues and recognize, there's a lot of food for thought in all of this.

[669] And fundamental to it is to recognize at the end of it, our freedoms matter.

[670] Governments should be functions of our will.

[671] We should not be the puppets of government in the democracies.

[672] That's incredibly important.

[673] We've got to establish that we should respect them whilst they are there, but they are our servants.

[674] At the moment, we don't respect them, strange enough, and yet we expect them to solve every problem.

[675] And the system breaks down and people become cynical.

[676] So what have I found?

[677] Well, I'm constantly amazed at how often people will pull me up in the streets.

[678] And so I heard your conversation with that person or this person or whatever.

[679] Because I try not to feed my own opinions in too much.

[680] Most people know what I think.

[681] But most of the time, I'm trying to provide a conduit for people to listen and to hear what others have got to say when partly because of bias and positioning, a lot of views are hard to get out and partly because it's such an instant world.

[682] The 30 -second grab doesn't work.

[683] If you want to draw the great lessons out of the Gulag Archipelago, as you and I did in our first conversation, you can't do that in a 30 -second grab.

[684] It's impossible.

[685] We're dumbing people down unwittingly because technology has, and the mainstream media sort of led to that outcome.

[686] We're breaking the finances of mainstream media, of course, by doing what you and I do.

[687] And so that means that the journalistic qualities go down more and more because they don't have them resources to pay people who do really high quality investigative stuff and what have you.

[688] Anyway, I'm being long -winded, but I've learned a huge amount.

[689] It's something worth considering and contemplating in detail because this is a stunningly revolutionary new technology.

[690] I mean, YouTube was just kind of a novelty item when it first popped up.

[691] But the fact that everyone is now a video producer and a sophisticated video consumer, it changes the world in ways that have only barely begun to manifest themselves.

[692] And we certainly don't understand it because the technology runs way faster than our understanding of its consequences.

[693] But it seems to me that it should become increasingly incumbent on people who have political ambitions to engage directly with the public in this manner, that that should become a standard expectation of political figures and of the general population.

[694] Because if you can't handle yourself in a 90 -minute conversation, if your ideas aren't well enough developed, or if you don't have the character or you reveal your hand in some manner, well, that's something that should happen.

[695] And the fact that everything has to be condensed down in some sense to sound bites means that people who are good at doing that or who have a good team to do that, they get the spoils.

[696] But it's no way to run a serious operation.

[697] And this technology is available to anyone who cares to use it now.

[698] So what have you seen?

[699] What do you understand?

[700] understand the understanding of political figures in Australia with regards to social media.

[701] Do they understand the significance of its existence, the potential that it has?

[702] Some do.

[703] Some do.

[704] Some set up massive cynical exercises to try and control social media to participate and set up movements, you know, come with me sort of stuff where it's all spin.

[705] and it plays on the sort of hashtag type stuff.

[706] But then at the other extreme, I have been delighted and amazed at the number of people right up the political scale who listen to the conversations that I've held.

[707] And to go to the Parliament House and have a senior person from the other side of politics to the one that I was involved with, and it's happened several times, come up and say, gee, I enjoy to your podcasts.

[708] That is gold to me. And then to know that there are several cabinet ministers who often tap in, particularly if I talk about defense or if I talk about the sorts of things that you and I talk about.

[709] And then one of the things that I have noticed, though, this is an interesting one.

[710] And I've not got to the bottom of it.

[711] I don't quite understand it.

[712] Is that my countrymen are more interested in listening to somebody from America or Britain than from anywhere else, including their own country.

[713] So a couple of the most important conversations that I've done, or quite a few, quite a few.

[714] On defence, with our former Prime Minister, who is now the father of the nation in many ways and was widely seen that way.

[715] And yet there's relatively thin interest talking to, I mean, the conversations that you and I have had, this is actually the fourth, and it's very kind of you to have me as a guest.

[716] they have flown off the racks, so to speak, and generated huge interest.

[717] And here's the one, I know I've said this many times, so, you know, forgive me listeners who have heard me say this.

[718] But nothing drives me on more than when I meet young men and women who are seeing through the paucity and the superficiality of what they've been fed as young Australians.

[719] And I really clicked to, you know, a deep philosophical.

[720] And meaningful understanding, your point indeed, that the sort of things can only be learned through long -form discussions about why our country's different.

[721] You know, when I was in Parliament, one of the few, you know, I'm reasonably economically dry, one of the few subsidy arrangements that I agreed with was that we subsidised kids' schools from around Australia.

[722] So, you know, it was cheap for them no matter how, this is a very big country, to come the counter and see democracy in action.

[723] And I always used to look forward to meeting.

[724] with them was always fascinating.

[725] So we'd have a discussion about the Parliament House and its endless corridors and the chambers and the Prime Minister and all of these sorts of things.

[726] And then I'd spring it on and I'd say, now, how many of you were told before you came down here by your mums and dads and maybe even your teachers, oh, you're going to Canberra?

[727] Are you that place, you know, where it's all hot air and the politicians are used and the government's no good.

[728] And every hand would go up.

[729] That's Australia.

[730] You know, we were once healthfully skeptical.

[731] We're now down right cynical, I think, about our political processes and the people in them.

[732] But if you then said them, okay, so if the government's making a mess with, you name me a country that you'd like to live in in preference to Australia.

[733] And occasionally, someone would say America, or they'd say Canada, they might say New Zealand, they'd say they're all democracies.

[734] And then we'd talk about the differences.

[735] And because it had never hit them.

[736] And once you start to unpack that stuff in the sort of conversations that you and I so enjoy, because I enjoy them enormously, There's a lot of people who tap into it and say, gee, that's interesting.

[737] That's really got me thinking.

[738] And was it Margaret Mead who said, you know, societies have often been changed by just a small group of people getting together and thinking things through.

[739] Indeed, that's the only way societies have ever changed.

[740] And so what drives me on is the hope that whether they agree with me or disagree with me, even if they come out in a different place, If these conversations that we have help raise up tomorrow's leaders, well, boy, we're going to need them.

[741] And they'll have to be people of vision and encourage and of insight.

[742] And nothing struck me more than that first conversation where you had, and you were quite emotional about it, he said that you'd been in Melbourne and you'd had some young men there who had responded positively what you'd said.

[743] And you just said, they just need a little bit of encouragement, because they're they're not getting it.

[744] And they're not.

[745] I've never forgotten that moment.

[746] And I resolved at that point because you're so open and you make yourself vulnerable.

[747] And that must be very costly at times that I would seek to do the same.

[748] So I've done that several times consciously.

[749] As a result of that first conversation, I've opened up more about me and the hope that that's useful for young people.

[750] And if others want to criticize me, if older people say, oh, we wouldn't have said that in our day, dear, or whatever so it doesn't matter if there's one person out there and I know there's more than that because I've met them who have been impacted and have thought things through and put down some foundations that they otherwise wouldn't have well it's all being worth it that's a great place to close so thanks very much for agreeing to meet with me again I really appreciate it and to wander through this minefield and you know it's it's it's not something that anyone knows how to do properly.

[751] But, you know, we can all hope and strive to do it right and hope that we don't do too much damage while we're trying to figure it out.

[752] So I'm hoping to come to Australia next year again, to perhaps to tour again, if I can manage it.

[753] So if I do come down there, I'd sure be more than pleased to see you again and to meet.

[754] And so I'd like that very much.

[755] So thank you very much again for coming in.

[756] Did so.

[757] And thank you very much.

[758] It's an honour.

[759] And it's terrific to see you firing on all eight again.