The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 196. Australia： Lockdowns and Location Apps ｜ John Anderson

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00:00:51.000 Welcome to the JBP Podcast, Season 4, Episode 50.

00:00:58.000 This episode features John Anderson AO, an Australian politician who was Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and leader of the National Party from 1999 to 2005.

00:01:09.000 Him and my dad discuss COVID-19, and Anderson shares what's been happening in Australia, which is crazy,

00:01:15.000 and the West, in addition to the lockdowns and the threat China's imposing on Australia.

00:01:21.000 It is a doozy of an episode.

00:01:23.000 They also discuss the cost of safety and how social media played a big role in today's mandatory vaccinations.

00:01:29.000 I hope you enjoy this episode.

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00:03:54.000 Hello, everyone. I have the pleasure and privilege of talking with one of the most impressive men

00:04:03.000 I've had the good fortune to meet in my travels and my investigations,

00:04:07.000 the Honorable John Anderson, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.

00:04:12.000 He's a respected elder statesman, a sixth generation farmer from northwest New South Wales.

00:04:19.000 He studied history at university and led the National Party, Australia's rural political party from 1999 to 2005.

00:04:27.000 As Deputy Prime Minister, he partnered in one of the most successful governments in Australian history,

00:04:34.000 overseeing enormous economic reform, tax modernization and a string of budget surpluses,

00:04:42.000 which are, in my experience, virtually unheard of, especially a string of them.

00:04:47.000 These delivered an average annual GDP growth rate of 3.6%, restored Australia's AAA credit rating,

00:04:55.000 and saw average household income increase by almost 70% between 1994 and 2008.

00:05:01.000 Mr. Anderson has worked on numerous community service projects following his career in politics,

00:05:08.000 and now hosts a video podcast, which has become the preeminent one of its kind in Australia.

00:05:13.000 On retiring from Parliament, Mr. Anderson was saluted by figures on both sides of the political fence.

00:05:19.000 Then Prime Minister John Howard said of him,

00:05:22.000 I have not met a person with greater integrity in public life.

00:05:26.000 And so, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Anderson in Australia when I was touring there,

00:05:34.000 and that's exactly what struck me.

00:05:37.000 And so, I've done a couple of podcasts with John, and I thought we could concentrate on something tonight,

00:05:49.000 discussing something tonight that I'm very ignorant about, like all of us perhaps,

00:05:55.000 about COVID and the response to the epidemic, the political response,

00:06:04.000 and not only what the response has been, but perhaps what it should be,

00:06:08.000 and what the dangers of the response are.

00:06:11.000 And when I was thinking of who I would like to talk to about this to explore it,

00:06:15.000 I couldn't think of a better person than John Anderson,

00:06:18.000 because of his reputation, well-deserved reputation for integrity, his vast political experience,

00:06:24.000 and also because, at least from the outside, it looks like the responses,

00:06:30.000 the political responses to COVID in Australia have been quite extreme,

00:06:34.000 and caused a fair bit of trouble, justified though they perhaps may be,

00:06:40.000 at least people make that argument.

00:06:42.000 And so, I thought we could dive into that terrible mess and see what we might conclude,

00:06:50.000 and bring everyone along for the ride.

00:06:52.000 So, thank you very much for agreeing to do this, and away we go.

00:06:58.000 Jordan, thank you. It's terrific to be with you.

00:07:02.000 I respect you enormously for the way you make us think,

00:07:05.000 for the way you encourage people who are feeling discouraged,

00:07:09.000 for your forbearance, and the model you set when you're under attack,

00:07:14.000 for not responding with fire, but rather calm reason.

00:07:18.000 And above all, just terrific to see you up and about, and again,

00:07:21.000 and active and looking well.

00:07:23.000 Well, thank you very much.

00:07:24.000 I have been feeling substantially better, thank God,

00:07:27.000 and I'm hoping that will continue.

00:07:29.000 And the problem with returning fire with fire, I suppose, is that you end up burning,

00:07:34.000 and I've had plenty of enough of that, I would say.

00:07:37.000 So, it's best to try to calm things down if you can possibly manage it.

00:07:42.000 And hopefully, I'll have done that, at least to some degree, and might continue to do it.

00:07:47.000 So, we'll see.

00:07:48.000 So, what have you seen happening in Australia and the West?

00:07:54.000 And what have you been thinking about this?

00:07:57.000 Well, it's incredibly messy and hard to think your way through it all.

00:08:04.000 And I don't, at the very bottom line, I don't want to sound like I'm smug,

00:08:09.000 sort of has been who knows it all and could have done it better.

00:08:13.000 So, these are sobering times and we've got to ask a lot of questions.

00:08:16.000 I think my starting point, though, Jordan, would be to say, and this is our little mantra

00:08:20.000 with my own video series, you can't get good public policy without a good debate.

00:08:26.000 And there's a lot of elements to a good debate.

00:08:28.000 You've got to have a decent level of understanding.

00:08:31.000 You've got to ensure the debate's not truncated.

00:08:34.000 You've got to ensure that everybody's involved.

00:08:37.000 You've got to try and demystify it and depoliticise it.

00:08:40.000 I think on all of those fronts, there have been severe failings internationally and in Australia.

00:08:47.000 Australia's response has been quite unique, partly for historical reasons, partly for geographical reasons, partly 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.

00:09:08.000 We are, as I understand, getting some quite even mocking press internationally at the moment for the nature of our lockdowns.

00:09:18.000 They have been very severe, longer and more severe in Victoria and in Melbourne, our second largest city, I think, than anywhere apart from in Brazil, of all things.

00:09:30.000 And I am concerned.

00:09:33.000 I'm concerned about the balances that have emerged.

00:09:36.000 I'm concerned about the misinformation, about the lack of ability for the Australian people to think through clearly.

00:09:42.000 They started out trusting governments and medical authorities.

00:09:46.000 That trust has been badly damaged.

00:09:48.000 There's now an acceptance we can't go on like this.

00:09:52.000 So I have to say in the end, I am optimistic, I think, that our institutions will survive this.

00:09:58.000 The Australian people will say, this is enough.

00:10:00.000 We've got to come back to a pragmatic middle ground where the governments will give back everything they should is a big question.

00:10:06.000 But I make this point in the context of the horrendous range of really difficult challenges that confront us.

00:10:13.000 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 an attempt by an authoritarian China to say,

00:10:25.000 bow your knees to our authoritarian regime and way of life.

00:10:28.000 So there's cause for real optimism there that Australians understand freedom, even though we don't talk about it much in this country.

00:10:37.000 And so, well, let's talk about that example with regard to China to begin with.

00:10:42.000 So can you flesh that out a little bit?

00:10:44.000 What did you see, what threat did you see China imposing precisely when and what did you see the Australian people managing in response to that?

00:10:54.000 Well, China, of course, we're one of the few countries in the world that runs a massive trade surplus with China. 0.66

00:11:02.000 They suck in massive amounts of our product.

00:11:05.000 Around a third of our exports go to China. 0.97

00:11:08.000 And even though we import a lot back from them, we do very, very well out of it.

00:11:15.000 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.

00:11:32.000 We know that over the last seven or eight years, those hopes have been well and truly dashed.

00:11:36.000 That is becoming a very authoritarian regime.

00:11:39.000 And Australia called for a full and proper inquiry into COVID so that we could better understand it and cope with future pandemic threats more effectively.

00:11:51.000 We certainly led a little with the chin, I'd have to say, on that one.

00:11:56.000 The reaction from China was very unfriendly indeed.

00:12:01.000 And ultimately, they issued a list of 14 major grievances and say that we have broken the relationship.

00:12:07.000 No one will pick up a call in China at a senior level in response to our senior people.

00:12:12.000 Canada has 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.

00:12:21.000 Also, I think the other thing and was listed in the 14 grievances was our insistence that Huawei, we were the first country that said that the telecommunications giant should not be allowed to implement itself, embed itself in our telecommunications system for security reasons.

00:12:40.000 America followed Europe, the rest of the world slowly. 0.67

00:12:44.000 And I think that's been a cause of real angst.

00:12:47.000 But the point is that I think the Chinese thought we would bend quite quickly and Australia hasn't. 0.53

00:12:53.000 Notwithstanding the fact that in common with other countries, you've seen a lot of business leaders saying, oh, don't go too far.

00:13:00.000 This trade is important.

00:13:01.000 But as Henry Kissinger put it, a little trade lost can always be recovered.

00:13:08.000 Freedom lost is almost impossible to get back.

00:13:12.000 Yeah, well, 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.

00:13:32.000 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.

00:13:44.000 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.

00:13:58.000 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.

00:14:20.780 And then I also wonder what would happen to us, broadly speaking, when the next influenza pandemic sweeps through, like now that we've established lockdowns as acceptable, what level of threat justifies their imposition?

00:14:41.200 How serious does it have to be like, and these are so then I worry about the lockdowns and certainly about the ethics of the mandatory vaccination campaign now I'm vaccinated twice.

00:14:53.900 And my wife is as well, although I have family members who have refused it.

00:14:58.480 And so the division that you see politically, and philosophically runs through my family, and I'm not claiming any moral superiority in the fact that I got vaccinated.

00:15:08.400 There are a variety of reasons for it, and I won't go into them, 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.

00:15:23.760 And so, well, that's sort of my domain of concern.

00:15:29.240 And so I'm wondering how it appears to you.

00:15:31.260 Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking about it, and I offer these as thoughts only.

00:15:38.980 I think it's, and there's so many of them, Jordan, I hardly know where to start, but I think the first thing I'd say is that in a democracy, we do enter into a contract, if you like, 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.

00:15:57.020 And that may, from time to time, vary, that's a logical conclusion.

00:16:02.140 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, I think the social contract, if you like, was strong enough for people to accept that you had to make sure there was no light escaping from your house at night.

00:16:22.320 You had to have black curtains drawn, so there was no light, so the Luftwaffe pilots couldn't see London, and you and your neighbours were safe.

00:16:30.880 And it was accepted that the police would have the right to barge into your house and say, there's a chink of light showing there, cover it up. 0.73

00:16:37.600 And you had no right of conscientious objection almost to that.

00:16:41.680 That was an extreme example.

00:16:43.740 So we're talking proportionality here.

00:16:45.680 It's important to note, of course, that if you follow through to its logical extent, by well before the war technically ended, the British people said, right, we've been through this terrible disaster, we want our freedoms back.

00:16:57.980 And they actually voted Winston Churchill out of office.

00:17:02.180 I see that as a strong declaration, this crisis is over.

00:17:06.300 We have accepted unbelievably punitive measures, restricted our freedoms, placed ourselves at great risk.

00:17:14.480 It's over.

00:17:15.620 We now want to normalise.

00:17:17.980 Then you come right back to the situation that we're now fronting.

00:17:22.140 Well, the legal implications are massive in this country.

00:17:25.540 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 that all their workforce is vaccinated.

00:17:41.620 That's 80 million Americans.

00:17:43.260 Compulsory.

00:17:44.260 The companies must do that.

00:17:46.660 Sorry?

00:17:47.940 You said that that's the company's responsibility to ensure that.

00:17:50.920 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?

00:17:58.140 And where the hell is that going to end precisely?

00:18:00.800 I mean, COVID is a nasty illness, but it's not as bad as it could be by any stretch of the imagination.

00:18:07.520 And it's some multiple worse than a bad flu epidemic, but it's in the same general ballpark.

00:18:13.520 And so these precedents are being established at an unprecedented rate.

00:18:18.120 And there's a principle underneath it, which is, well, you can't be too safe.

00:18:23.260 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 no others.

00:18:36.820 And so, and I know there's a professor in Canada who's, and I only know the edges of this story.

00:18:44.480 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.

00:18:56.580 The idea that medical treatment can be enforced by the state.

00:18:59.160 In one of our provinces, there were no exceptions, no religious exceptions, no exceptions for health reasons, no exceptions, period.

00:19:06.120 It's like, okay, but where does that end?

00:19:09.800 Like, what is it?

00:19:11.620 What, I do all sorts of things that are hypothetically dangerous to other people, like drive, for example.

00:19:17.760 Which I suspect is far more dangerous than COVID, and yet I'm allowed to do that.

00:19:24.460 You know, we're setting a very strange precedent here.

00:19:27.000 And that's a hell of a law that's just been passed.

00:19:30.880 So.

00:19:31.840 Yeah, well, you and I are not Americans.

00:19:34.680 So we look at America and think of it as a very litigatious country. 0.85

00:19:37.680 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.

00:19:53.720 And you raise the issue of what is legal and what is not.

00:19:57.080 Now, that varies a bit from country to country, I would imagine.

00:20:00.180 In this country, one of the keys to understanding Australia's response has been to note that when it comes to health, the state governments, remember Australia is a federation that's a young one that was created well after the United States in very different circumstances.

00:20:17.440 We inherited freedom rather than have to fight for it.

00:20:21.400 So maybe there was never much focus on the philosophies of freedom, the underpinning thinking around it.

00:20:27.100 Although, you know, to be fair to Australians, they fought freedom.

00:20:30.180 Fiercely to defend their freedoms.

00:20:33.000 They've not had to sort of design them, think through them, have those incredible arguments.

00:20:37.320 Think of Alexander Hamilton and the debates from the founding fathers about how to avoid mob rule, preserve individual freedoms, get the balance right.

00:20:46.840 Extraordinarily deep thinking.

00:20:48.340 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.

00:20:57.020 But, you know, we're not tending the garden very well.

00:21:00.840 The jungle's re-encroaching because we haven't focused much on what's necessary to keep the plants healthy, put it that way.

00:21:09.080 So the states have control here.

00:21:12.500 They've approached this issue differently.

00:21:16.680 It's been hard for the Commonwealth government to maintain a uniform approach.

00:21:20.480 And one of the big legal questions is, have the state-based lockdowns been legal at all?

00:21:27.180 Can Queensland legally say to me, as somebody from New South Wales, no, you cannot come here?

00:21:32.760 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.

00:21:42.220 To do so, that would be very interesting to test again now, 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.

00:22:00.160 But the polls are showing now that the Australian people are saying, look, we now get it.

00:22:03.720 We went for de facto elimination.

00:22:06.680 Originally, the idea was flatten the curve so our health system can cope.

00:22:11.380 It morphed into a de facto, we're so far from anywhere, we're so privileged, we're so fortunate, we can go for elimination.

00:22:17.900 I never thought that was realistic.

00:22:20.020 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,

00:22:30.400 as we get the vaccinations up, we think things should be opened up again and we'll have to live with this.

00:22:37.740 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,

00:22:45.700 particularly in Victoria, that people have said, no, the costs are so high.

00:22:50.500 And part of the problem we've had is a sensationalisation of it all by the media.

00:22:56.780 I'm sorry to say that, but remarkably little really balanced commentary.

00:23:03.400 It's been politically driven from the right and particularly from the left.

00:23:08.960 And the left and those in secure jobs, particularly with a publicly funded broadcaster, their jobs go on.

00:23:15.040 Even in a lockdown situation, they feel safe for their own families.

00:23:19.540 Now, I'm an essential worker, but I'm not as a farmer.

00:23:23.060 I can't go into complete lockdown.

00:23:26.000 Socially, I'm in lockdown, just about to come out of it now, out in rural Australia.

00:23:29.800 But in terms of my occupation and like hospitals and nurses and doctors, they've got to keep going.

00:23:36.900 There's a bit of hypocrisy in this.

00:23:38.640 Oh, no, we want to be safe in our secure jobs in whatever bureaucratic enclave or media enclave you work in.

00:23:46.680 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.

00:23:53.700 Pulling all of this together, I think it will be very difficult after this, frankly, for Australian governments to introduce lockdowns again without very sound reasons.

00:24:04.280 So there's a building awareness we're going to have to live with this.

00:24:08.100 And I think there's a building.

00:24:09.740 It's quite strong.

00:24:10.780 You can feel it.

00:24:11.680 And it's reflected in the polls.

00:24:13.440 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.

00:24:23.500 And so we've got two state governments that are holding out.

00:24:25.680 They're still effectively saying we can eliminate this, which I think is nuts.

00:24:30.380 And I think their people will ultimately realise that as well.

00:24:33.700 So a bundle of issues in there, but a rising awareness that there's been a lot of emotion and a lack of balance.

00:24:40.200 It now emerges that the mental health crisis amongst young people in Victoria is really serious and has not been given proper weighting in the debate, nor is the economic impact and the fact that we are using our children's money to prop businesses up.

00:24:57.480 No country has blown out its public debt in percentage terms as quickly, I don't think, as Australia has.

00:25:03.600 Mind you, we had a very low debt basis because of certain past governments to begin with.

00:25:09.280 And even after this, our debt to GDP ratios will be relatively manageable by international standards.

00:25:17.060 But the trend lines are not good.

00:25:18.740 And we are borrowing from our children.

00:25:20.340 This is our children's money.

00:25:22.320 Right.

00:25:22.560 Well, yes.

00:25:23.200 So we need to talk very seriously, all of us, about the cost of the safety because the cost isn't safe.

00:25:32.480 Right.

00:25:33.000 So we're taking one risk to prevent another.

00:25:36.280 And so it's always a matter of balance of risk.

00:25:38.520 There isn't a there isn't a pathway to safety through all of this.

00:25:41.800 And so I am 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.

00:25:53.660 It seems to me that it's a sign of the vaccination arguments, essentially.

00:26:02.460 So if you 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.

00:26:14.940 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.

00:26:31.340 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.

00:26:39.140 When when they have to win when 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.

00:26:56.840 And that's going to have a tremendous cost in terms of health as well.

00:27:01.540 So, I don't understand.

00:27:04.540 So and then I've been trying to think through a solution.

00:27:07.440 So in Canada, we have a fairly high percentage of people that have been dually vaccinated.

00:27:13.240 And it seems to me that the appropriate approach is something like for the governments to say very honestly and carefully to people.

00:27:22.640 Well, we've made the vaccines as available as possible to all of you.

00:27:29.180 There's nothing standing in your way, but your own choice that's preventing you from being vaccinated.

00:27:35.340 As a consequence, we are going to reopen our country radically on this date.

00:27:43.040 And then your destiny is in your hands, as it should be.

00:27:47.080 And it seems to me that hoping that the vaccination rates are going to exceed 90 percent.

00:27:53.620 I think that's a high end estimate.

00:27:55.140 And I might be wrong about that is a pipe dream.

00:27:58.040 There are too much force is going to have to be applied to people to get them to do that.

00:28:03.000 And many people will just not do it.

00:28:05.740 And then what are we going to do with those people?

00:28:08.040 Are they now pariahs?

00:28:09.340 Are they now criminals?

00:28:11.340 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?

00:28:16.360 So I see that we're in danger of exchanging the possibility of pandemic damage with the certainty of the danger of authoritarian imposition.

00:28:29.420 So.

00:28:32.540 Well, so that's I'd like you to to respond to that, I guess, and tell me what you.

00:28:38.320 So I that's that's what I think the policy should be, is that we have the vaccines that they may not be as accessible in Australia yet as they are in Canada.

00:28:47.300 We have plenty of vaccines in Canada.

00:28:49.280 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 we're not in the business of forcing them on you.

00:29:00.740 You can make that choice.

00:29:02.860 We've done what we could to provide them for you.

00:29:05.480 And now it's in your hands. 1.00

00:29:07.660 And is there is that a stupid idea? 0.99

00:29:09.700 Like, because I don't know, but I'm not impressed by this creeping authoritarianism in the name of public safety. 0.99

00:29:18.720 I just can't see that that's going to go well.

00:29:20.820 I think it's going to cause more damage than it's going to do good.

00:29:26.080 You know, I think it comes back to this initial proposition, I think, that the quality of the debate is critical to getting good outcomes.

00:29:34.060 And the quality of the debate in many ways has been very badly interrupted.

00:29:38.200 So we had an unbelievable situation in Australia where we had some quite senior people saying AstraZeneca was dangerous because of blood clots.

00:29:48.420 In fact, you know, you're infinitely less likely to get a blood clot from AstraZeneca than a girl on the pill. 1.00

00:29:54.780 So we're going to say, well, girls on the pill should come off the pill. 0.95

00:29:57.780 I mean, because there's a danger of blood clots.

00:30:00.560 We're not going to say that.

00:30:01.600 But we had some quite senior people driving that.

00:30:05.060 And yet in Britain, of course, the people, the lady co-inventor and developer of the product, a lovely lady whose name escapes me at the moment, went to Wimbledon and they gave her a standing ovation.

00:30:23.240 And people were saying, well, if she came to Australia, we'd probably send her to our equivalent of Siberia.

00:30:28.140 The different responses are extraordinary.

00:30:29.820 Who's right?

00:30:30.460 Now we have one of our leading medical experts who was one of those casting doubt on it saying that perhaps it's the best one of all.

00:30:39.060 So you're getting this confusing advice.

00:30:42.140 How are people meant to find their way through that?

00:30:46.860 And that feeds into your narrative and I think into mine.

00:30:51.040 The quality of public debate becomes very important.

00:30:54.340 I just wonder what on earth is going to happen in America now.

00:30:56.880 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.

00:31:04.780 Now, this is the land of Hacksaw Ridge.

00:31:07.640 Good luck.

00:31:09.160 That'll be another war on drugs. 0.97

00:31:11.180 Like that's not implementable as far as I can tell.

00:31:14.820 And in the U.S. in particular.

00:31:16.180 I mean, the people there who are anti-COVID vaccination, they're not doing this trivially.

00:31:24.360 Like they're committed to it.

00:31:25.820 And the Americans can get committed to something like no one else.

00:31:29.760 And so this isn't going to produce a minor backlash.

00:31:32.300 And it feeds into these conspiracy narratives that are starting to undermine our society as well.

00:31:37.240 You know, that the government is fundamentally untrustworthy and so are the health organizations.

00:31:42.380 And so anybody who's vaguely conspiratorial in their outlook, that's just going to be like, get a massive boost by this sort of political move.

00:31:52.280 That's how it looks to me.

00:31:54.240 And then you go back to the social contract that I talked about earlier, that in a democracy, we agree to surrender some of our freedoms in the broader common good.

00:32:01.920 And that we then in proportionally, in sort of ways that are proportional, agree to limit them in emergencies.

00:32:11.840 And we're often willing to do that because we will, if we're frightened, we will flee for security over freedom.

00:32:18.900 Will we then demand it back again?

00:32:20.980 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.

00:32:37.480 I think that's right.

00:32:38.860 And it's been a dismal picture.

00:32:41.500 The graph is gradually drifting away.

00:32:43.620 We're less and less trusting of governments and people in them.

00:32:49.420 Although, funnily enough, Australians, I think, are still quite sort of ideologically friendly towards government.

00:32:57.080 They're very cynical about politicians.

00:32:59.200 That's what's happened there.

00:33:00.700 There's a bit of a disconnect there.

00:33:03.200 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.

00:33:16.900 You're not getting those lifts anymore.

00:33:18.260 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 political reasons or looking after their own hide.

00:33:31.340 They're not concerned with us.

00:33:33.140 So they rolled out experts at every point, medical experts.

00:33:37.480 Now, we have wonderful medical services in this country, and I do not want to sound unnecessarily critical.

00:33:44.400 However, of course, they focused very heavily on saving lives.

00:33:49.680 That's their job.

00:33:51.580 And so they gave advice all the time that was designed to save every life possible.

00:33:55.600 I mean, it's extraordinary.

00:33:56.420 We got to the end of last year.

00:33:57.740 I think we're in a population of 25 million.

00:33:59.480 Only 810 people had died of COVID.

00:34:03.560 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?

00:34:11.180 There's nothing about the payoffs.

00:34:12.500 What will it mean for mental health?

00:34:13.800 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 higher than, as I understand it, than the number of people who'd lose their lives to COVID.

00:34:32.540 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.

00:34:48.800 In fact, an average of four amongst the people who have died, as I understand it.

00:34:53.180 And those are uncomfortable things. 0.88

00:34:55.240 That very frequently, and I may be wrong about this, I'm about perhaps as ignorant as the average person in this domain.

00:35:02.540 And that might be just right for this conversation, in some sense.

00:35:05.700 But I also, with regards to the death statistics, my...

00:35:12.540 Is it the case that no matter what the pre-existing condition was, if the person was positive for COVID and they died, the death is attributed to COVID?

00:35:24.420 And that's, like, that makes the basic statistics upon which all these decisions are being made, well, questionable.

00:35:33.560 I'm not saying that it's wrong, but it's certainly questionable.

00:35:36.860 Can we trust the death rate statistics?

00:35:39.000 Do we actually know how dangerous this illness is?

00:35:41.280 Now, people look at such markers as excess mortality over a given time period, and that seems to me to be more reliable.

00:35:48.520 But it's not unreasonable to ask these questions.

00:35:51.520 And that's partly your point about the necessity of debate.

00:35:55.300 And that opens up a broader issue, too, you know, about how those sorts of debates should be conducted.

00:36:02.680 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.

00:36:12.600 And actually talk to people.

00:36:16.180 Yeah.

00:36:16.680 That's never really possible, right?

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00:39:06.440 Hey, Mikayla here again. 1.00

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00:40:57.980 Yeah, I think that's important because part of what's happened, I don't 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 bought into the sensationalism.

00:41:12.000 But keeping in mind that their job is to present the medical side, 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.

00:41:24.160 It costs a lot of money.

00:41:25.380 What are we going to do if we can't afford those intensive care beds in the future?

00:41:30.740 That depends on a prosperous society.

00:41:32.900 Our children are going to inherit a vastly larger debt.

00:41:36.760 They will not be as prosperous.

00:41:38.620 And we know from the research that they're quite distraught about this, quite despondent.

00:41:44.140 They're wondering whether Australians are very aware that our economy has been blown off course.

00:41:48.600 It's been magnificent and it's held us in incredible stead, and that's why we've been able to spend a lot of money on insulating people.

00:41:55.140 It's an irony, isn't it?

00:41:56.020 Governments shut economies down deliberately and knowingly and then try to put the system on life support by pumping money in directly.

00:42:04.540 And Australia's been able to do a great deal of that because of its economic strength in the past.

00:42:08.860 But we're dissipating in a way at a very time when we face other huge challenges, the demand that we do more on climate, which will cost money.

00:42:17.520 The reality that Australia will have to spend more than 2% of GDP on defence.

00:42:24.140 We're going to have to.

00:42:25.560 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.

00:42:33.680 And this has been a big part of the problem.

00:42:36.360 Politicians have had to say, listen to the experts because they know they won't be trusted.

00:42:40.700 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.

00:42:50.880 So they can say, here are the real dangers of COVID that we know about.

00:42:56.400 And along comes Delta, to be fair, and that makes it even harder.

00:42:59.680 It's different and it affects more people and it's more contagious.

00:43:02.780 But here are the realities on the health side.

00:43:05.980 Here are the trade-offs in economic terms.

00:43:08.460 Here are the trade-offs in terms of the education of our children.

00:43:11.800 Here are the trade-offs in terms of depression and anxiety and self-harm.

00:43:15.760 The right way through this is such and such a road.

00:43:19.800 But that's not what's been fed to the populace.

00:43:21.620 It's save every life, every life lost.

00:43:23.600 Well, of course, it's a tragedy.

00:43:25.640 But there's another reality.

00:43:28.080 And that is that the delayed diagnoses of other illnesses as we've tried to keep our hospitals free and declogged the system and delayed operations on cancer and so forth, over time, we'll realize that there were real trade-offs within health as well.

00:43:40.820 Right, right.

00:44:10.800 And we all know how important that is to relationships in the end.

00:44:16.880 Then it's easy to default to expert advice.

00:44:21.560 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.

00:44:31.500 And to the degree that people are skeptical about political decisions, then they're going to start to become skeptical about the experts.

00:44:39.420 So the politicians are, by relying on experts, they're avoiding their responsibility.

00:44:46.220 They're shunting the risk off on people who have enough on their plates, as far as I'm concerned.

00:44:52.120 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.

00:45:01.340 I just can't see that.

00:45:02.780 I agree with you.

00:45:03.760 I agree with you.

00:45:04.820 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.

00:45:18.000 You know, into science and so forth.

00:45:20.020 Science has offered us the way through.

00:45:22.160 But then you have this serious – in this country, in my view, very serious and unwarranted undermining of confidence in AstraZeneca.

00:45:30.900 It did really worry me at the time.

00:45:32.920 And I look back on it and I think, I hope people have learned some lessons out of that.

00:45:36.700 I've had the first dose.

00:45:37.860 I'm waiting for my second.

00:45:39.120 It wasn't very pleasant as it happened.

00:45:40.820 I did get a reaction.

00:45:42.300 And so did my wife.

00:45:44.040 But, you know, no hesitation.

00:45:45.720 We're lining up for it.

00:45:46.580 We go back for the second one.

00:45:47.560 And I'm very, very thankful.

00:45:49.100 We actually have these vaccines.

00:45:50.540 How wonderful is that?

00:45:51.900 That's a big tick to science.

00:45:54.320 But then you've had medical officers saying, no, no, no, no, this is bad.

00:45:57.400 And then they switch.

00:45:59.240 Well, that's also why we shouldn't be hitting people over the head with the necessity of those.

00:46:03.440 You should do this because it's good for you.

00:46:05.060 It's like, no, no, look.

00:46:06.200 You don't understand the history of vaccinations has been very positive.

00:46:11.160 Now, we understand that we're doing this in a bit of a rush and that you might be leery about that.

00:46:15.500 But it's our considered opinion that this is actually of great benefit to you.

00:46:19.420 And we're not going to twist your arm.

00:46:21.220 We're not going to force you.

00:46:22.220 We're not going to put in draconian measures to insist that you do this.

00:46:26.500 But I believe that that would be a much more compelling narrative and that many, many more people would, certainly fewer people would object to the vaccines that way.

00:46:35.940 And I think more people would take them.

00:46:37.500 This force and that the force as well.

00:46:40.760 This next issue.

00:46:42.000 You know, the idea that it violates the Nuremberg Conventions, that's a very interesting argument.

00:46:47.760 And I think it's possibly true.

00:46:49.800 But even more so, it's like, what are the dangers of alienating people from the health system entirely, from the scientific establishment entirely by politicizing it in this manner?

00:47:00.240 We're not thinking that through, as far as I can tell.

00:47:03.020 And part of it's just tremendous difficulty, right?

00:47:05.800 I mean, all these things you talked about, the secondary negative consequences of the health measures.

00:47:13.080 It's also taken everyone a while to see what those were.

00:47:16.980 Like COVID was an immediate threat.

00:47:18.640 It was going to happen right now.

00:47:20.260 Some of these other things that you're talking about, like the increase in suicide rates, that's sort of downstream, right?

00:47:25.760 And so no one was, that wasn't on the table when the decisions were originally being made.

00:47:35.240 No.

00:47:35.780 And to be fair to policymakers, we've always got to be fair in these things.

00:47:38.900 No one saw the nature of the second sort of round of mutant variants and there would be more of them.

00:47:44.700 And that's worrying in itself.

00:47:45.880 So we don't quite know what we're facing.

00:47:47.620 But I did want to pick up on something that I think is critically important.

00:47:50.280 Two things that you said.

00:47:51.060 So firstly, leadership here is that appeal to reason and to a sense of responsibility to yourself and your neighbour.

00:47:59.320 So I buy that completely.

00:48:02.260 And I would argue, again, that it's been undermined by this reliance on experts.

00:48:07.260 No matter how highly you think of the experts, they're not the people we elect to lead us, if you see what I'm driving at.

00:48:13.640 They should advise leaders, leaders should lead.

00:48:16.080 And that's been a problem across the West because of the breakdown of trust in our leadership.

00:48:19.500 It shot through the roof when it looked as though we could eliminate this thing in Australia.

00:48:23.900 Governments were immensely popular.

00:48:25.680 One very incompetent state government was re-elected because there was a perception that they kept their people safe.

00:48:31.840 And it didn't deserve to be re-elected by any stretch of the imagination.

00:48:36.100 And I think I'm a reasonable judge of those things.

00:48:40.160 On all the broad indicators, they had not served their state well.

00:48:43.820 But the other point that you raised that I think is so important, I'm always struck by Hacksaw Ridge, the film that Mel Gibson put together.

00:48:53.580 And that's about conscientious objection.

00:48:56.100 Now, stop and think about this for a moment.

00:48:59.200 The proportionality and the darkest days of the Second World War, when there were real doubts about whether or not democracy and freedom would survive.

00:49:09.800 In the end, and subject to some pretty tough processes, you could claim to be and be recognized as a conscientious objector.

00:49:18.120 That's what the film's about.

00:49:19.200 Now, you could say, no, I really, my conscience does not allow me to do this.

00:49:24.080 And you see, this is Frank Ferrudi's point, I think.

00:49:27.040 I don't want to verbally, I'm only a simple man.

00:49:29.440 But as I understand it, our first freedom is freedom of conscience.

00:49:33.840 Without that, every other freedom, I'm not a believer in the hierarchy of freedoms.

00:49:37.900 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.

00:49:44.980 And there's no hierarchy there.

00:49:47.220 They're a package.

00:49:48.540 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.

00:49:58.640 That is the mark in the end of freedom.

00:50:01.960 Now, it might be that during the Second World War, society says, well, there'll be some downsides for you.

00:50:07.320 We respect that.

00:50:08.060 You don't have to go to the front line.

00:50:09.940 And they may have to be here too.

00:50:11.640 I mean, I suspect that airline customers, here's an interesting fact for you, globally, airline travel has recovered to 70% of its pre-COVID levels.

00:50:22.180 Australian air travel is down at 26% still.

00:50:25.700 Quite interesting reflection on our caution and our isolation in this country.

00:50:31.560 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.

00:50:39.120 So it's an interesting reflection on where we're at in this country.

00:50:43.560 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.

00:51:00.240 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.

00:51:06.620 And the standard procedure is that you get a little test on the way to the coffee shop.

00:51:10.340 Takes a few minutes.

00:51:11.500 And if you're clear, you're right.

00:51:12.660 So it's not a question of vaccination.

00:51:14.060 It's whether you've got COVID.

00:51:15.900 Now, that's an interesting way of looking at it.

00:51:17.520 And if technology would allow for that, it might ease a lot of these things.

00:51:20.920 I was rung the other day by the minister, a very thoughtful man, from a church in my local area.

00:51:27.080 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.

00:51:36.440 He said, I'm deeply troubled by that idea.

00:51:39.120 And I thought, well, I haven't thought of that particular angle.

00:51:41.940 That's troubling to me too.

00:51:43.140 So what do you think the best rationale is for mandatory vaccination?

00:51:54.220 It's like, what is the danger that, what is actually the danger, what's the best description of the danger that's posed socially by people who refuse to be vaccinated?

00:52:04.760 I mean, is the argument that they're also a terrible danger to those who've been vaccinated?

00:52:09.720 I mean, as the vaccination rates increase, and they're fairly high in Canada, I think we're near 80%.

00:52:17.700 I hope I'm not wildly off the mark with that estimate.

00:52:22.600 I know it's much lower in Australia, or I believe it is.

00:52:27.740 I'm unclear about exactly the danger that the unvaccinated are posing. 1.00

00:52:33.260 So what's your understanding, given those vaccination rates, what's your understanding of that?

00:52:39.320 And what's the justification for their restriction of civil liberties?

00:52:43.920 I have to say that's a very good question, Jordan, and I'm as unclear as you are.

00:52:48.860 I mean, if...

00:52:50.260 Well, we shouldn't be unclear about that, right?

00:52:52.560 You'd hope that in the positions that we occupy, we wouldn't be unclear about that.

00:52:58.380 And it seems to me that if we're unclear about that, that plenty of other people are unclear about it as well.

00:53:03.240 And that's obviously not a good thing.

00:53:07.320 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.

00:53:19.500 And as I understand it, one of their very senior people has a conscientious objection and has left the organisation.

00:53:24.840 I think I'm right in saying that.

00:53:26.000 Now, his perspective, presumably, it's a very important one.

00:53:29.360 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.

00:53:36.980 Well, if I'm about to go through an airport, through all of the procedures involved there, and get on an aeroplane with people who are, even if it's just one person on aeroplane who's not vaccinated, if everybody else has been vaccinated and they're safe, what's the problem?

00:53:56.760 Well, yeah, precisely, exactly what's the problem and to what degree is that sufficiently problematic so that civil liberties should be importantly curtailed, right?

00:54:06.720 Because, and so I'm unclear about exactly what permission being vaccinated grants me, and I'm unclear about what precise danger the unvaccinated pose to the vaccinated.

00:54:23.420 If it's extremely high, then you think, well, then what is the use of the vaccination?

00:54:28.700 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.

00:54:41.200 But I'm still unclear about this.

00:54:43.960 Are the unvaccinated primarily posing a danger to the other unvaccinated?

00:54:48.680 And at some point, and maybe people, and maybe the worry is, well, that's going to overwhelm our health system, it's going to overwhelm our intensive care units.

00:54:58.380 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.

00:55:11.760 And we quadruple the money that we've devoted towards ICUs, and because it's not as if the lockdowns themselves aren't expensive, they're extraordinarily expensive, they're insanely expensive, and we haven't yet begun to pay for them.

00:55:25.600 So, we set a limit, we tell people, we inform people that the vaccinations are available, and then we prepare for the fact that many people won't become vaccinated.

00:55:37.340 But I still don't get the exact danger, and that could easily be my profound ignorance.

00:55:43.520 But if it's the unvaccinated or dangerous to the other unvaccinated, it's like, well, at some point, what are you going to do about that?

00:55:50.200 Force people?

00:55:53.260 That's not a good precedent.

00:55:54.560 Two thoughts come to mind.

00:55:57.280 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.

00:56:11.860 There may be dangers in there that have to be thought through.

00:56:14.200 So, 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.

00:56:25.240 But there may be some situations where, you know, you have to stay at bay.

00:56:30.280 Hypothetically, it might be to say, you know, you don't have to be vaccinated, but you can't fly.

00:56:39.800 I'm just plucking that out of the air.

00:56:41.600 So, you're absolutely free not to.

00:56:43.220 But there are some things you can't do if you're not vaccinated.

00:56:46.260 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 open to being regulated.

00:56:59.400 And a bit weak on conscientious objection, too, historically, not as strong as America and other Western countries.

00:57:08.800 And that regulation, maybe it comes from the benign way in which governments regulated so much of our lives.

00:57:16.000 As I say, we've never had the turmoil of a civil war of independence, of the agonies and intellectual exercises that went into designing the American Declaration of Independence.

00:57:26.860 We've not had those sorts of things.

00:57:30.020 Essentially, we were a series of British colonies put together by an act of the British Parliament in 1901 that federated us.

00:57:38.240 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.

00:57:50.480 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.

00:58:01.700 But my point out of all of that is that government's been relatively benign, notwithstanding, as I said earlier, Australians have been prepared to fight for freedom or to defend it.

00:58:11.680 They haven't had to fight for it in the first place.

00:58:13.060 And they've been very, we're amazingly accepting a regulation in this country.

00:58:18.780 We were the first country by, in years, by years to mandate compulsory seatbelt wearing.

00:58:26.240 There's a whole plethora, a whole raft of things where Australians have just been quite happy to accept being told what to do.

00:58:34.260 Smoking advertising was banned here before anywhere else.

00:58:38.040 I think that's right to say, and so forth.

00:58:40.980 And, you know, to take your point up, governments explain this as being done for public health reasons.

00:58:46.780 And there was a wide scale sort of acceptance of it.

00:58:49.940 So it comes back to this.

00:58:51.340 If vaccinating is important, then it ought to be positive arguments for it and leadership that people respect.

00:59:01.260 And they say, well, I don't feel threatened by this.

00:59:03.420 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.

00:59:17.940 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.

00:59:32.880 Well, I mean, perhaps to persuade people to become vaccinated for that matter.

00:59:40.780 No, I don't know what these new regulations in the U.S. are going, what kind of response they're going to produce.

00:59:47.560 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.

00:59:54.100 And that is severe enough to be somewhat destabilizing already.

00:59:59.980 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.

01:00:08.300 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.

01:00:14.760 But it just seems to me that that default to force is an admission that the argumentation has been stunningly inadequate. 1.00

01:00:26.480 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. 0.98

01:00:35.540 And so it's and in this and for the sake of everyone else's well-being, it's justifiable to force them. 0.99

01:00:43.260 That might even be OK if it was going to produce the results that are intended.

01:00:47.620 But I don't think it's going to.

01:00:49.200 I think it's going to produce a kickback that that will make things worse on the vaccination front rather than better.

01:00:55.260 And we might ask ourselves, too, is like.

01:00:57.640 You know, part of the reason the U.S. has given up on the war on drugs.

01:01:04.920 Is because.

01:01:06.900 It was unenforceable.

01:01:09.640 You had to push the state so far in a police state direction.

01:01:15.740 To stop people from using substances like marijuana.

01:01:20.560 That everyone eventually just said, look, man, it's just the cure is worse than the disease.

01:01:27.640 And.

01:01:29.780 Well, that's that's the danger that we're facing, I would say, and it's always the case with policy.

01:01:35.480 I understand that, that the cure can be worse than the disease, but it reasonable people can certainly make that argument that there's there's tremendous danger in making an active, invasive medical procedure.

01:01:49.060 You're mandatory.

01:01:49.620 There's terrible danger from a precedent perspective, you know, because what if it does turn out, for example, that one of these vaccines has unforeseen long term consequences and it's been given to.

01:02:01.560 Hundreds of millions of people.

01:02:04.700 And I understand medically that there is a distinct possibility that that precise thing will happen.

01:02:11.400 And then, you know, it's certainly not zero the possibility.

01:02:15.440 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, skeptical of government, benevolence and health and all of that.

01:02:32.160 And I don't really care.

01:02:34.640 There's, you can't eradicate the possibility that their objections guided by their conscience, let's say.

01:02:42.460 Are, and this is your point with regards to conscientious objection, objecting.

01:02:47.140 It's like, you said that even when we were 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 invalidly held.

01:03:02.880 So.

01:03:03.400 And then I'm also concerned about the precedent we're setting, 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.

01:03:18.760 Once you let the government decide what's good for you.

01:03:26.160 Where does it stop?

01:03:27.420 And like, I'm firmly convinced, maybe this is my own paranoia.

01:03:32.900 I'm firmly convinced that if the automobile had been invented today, that the average person would, would not be allowed to drive.

01:03:40.760 I don't think we would, I don't think we would allow that level of risk.

01:03:45.080 And I think that's really unfortunate.

01:03:46.840 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.

01:03:55.340 You know, you kill lots of people with your, we kill lots of people with our automobiles, yet we're allowed to do it, so to speak.

01:04:02.540 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.

01:04:10.320 So.

01:04:12.340 It's, 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, of the sort of.

01:04:22.120 The, 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.

01:04:39.740 So this line that COVID's accelerating history strikes a chord with me.

01:04:47.000 We're dividing more than ever.

01:04:49.100 And I suspect to go back to what, and I don't want to misrepresent it.

01:04:52.400 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.

01:04:58.260 80 million people being told you will be vaccinated.

01:05:00.600 And these sorts of divisions, this polarization, this tribalization, this lack of confidence in ourselves and our institutions at a time when the world's looking more like the 19th century with multiple power centers, many of them very hostile to democracy, to America in particular.

01:05:18.700 That see places like Canada and Australia as sort of surrogate states of that sort of the great state in America.

01:05:29.920 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.

01:05:45.160 I say that because of where we are geographically, I suppose, in this region here, we're a long way.

01:05:53.320 Australia is a very valuable bit of real estate.

01:05:57.440 It's sparsely populated, a large landmass.

01:06:00.920 It's a long way from the other democracies, with the exception of, and the honorable exception of Indonesia. 0.99

01:06:07.480 We're in an area where there is rising authoritarianism led by one place in particular.

01:06:13.060 Do we have collective willpower to pull together and say, we're going to have to make tough decisions?

01:06:21.000 We've been very comfortable for a long time.

01:06:25.440 And the first tough decision here is the one that's now being openly spoken about in Australia.

01:06:30.160 They're actually saying it.

01:06:32.100 And as I said, I have confidence that Australians are being realistic about this.

01:06:35.480 I actually think we will come through this, but it's so important we have these debates.

01:06:39.880 We now are saying we're going to have to live with COVID and accept that people will die.

01:06:46.460 Awful thing to say, but we're all going to die.

01:06:49.720 And if we're not careful, we'll make this into such a mess that more of us will die of more causes in worse circumstances than we're ever going to be.

01:07:03.700 Under a more authoritarian system, we can get the worst to both worlds.

01:07:10.420 I mean, you've got enormous economic challenges too.

01:07:13.400 I mean, let's not kid ourselves.

01:07:14.500 A reasonable degree of prosperity is very important to having a health system and a nutrition and the educational and employment opportunities and so on that give you lives worth living, where human beings can flourish.

01:07:29.760 Right, well, and we've been able to, in some sense, devalue, I suppose, devalue our currency by distributing money extraordinarily generously during this time of crisis.

01:07:45.080 And fair enough, in some sense, but that isn't a sustainable response.

01:07:51.380 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.

01:08:04.320 How disheartening that is for people to watch the businesses that they've poured their heart and soul into take a terrible hit and to have people adjust to this new reality that may never allow them that opportunity again.

01:08:21.360 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?

01:08:35.360 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.

01:08:51.600 What do you think might be done concretely by political leaders in the West to deal with the COVID crisis more appropriately?

01:09:02.660 What do you see as a reasonable pathway forward?

01:09:05.660 This may sound a strange reaction, but it's where I really genuinely come from.

01:09:14.180 I think we need to lift people's eyes to the real threats to our future freedoms.

01:09:19.860 And I think they're economic and strategic.

01:09:22.460 And I think out of that should be the message that we really, in Western countries, within our countries and actually amongst ourselves,

01:09:29.720 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.

01:09:43.140 And that requires a 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,

01:09:53.660 you know, in the whole sort of mess of the 1940s and then coming out of it, this appealing to people to look to the broader interest,

01:10:07.680 to recognize that hope lies in putting the foundations down, securing them for our future, which is our children and our grandchildren.

01:10:15.340 In other words, break out of the fear.

01:10:19.560 We're cowering in the corner in fear.

01:10:21.600 Fear is a terrible inhibitor.

01:10:23.320 You know more about this than I do professionally, but we've become very afraid.

01:10:28.440 A lot of what's happening at the moment is being driven by fear.

01:10:32.120 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,

01:10:42.480 not talk about the fact that there are issues here other than the medical ones, those sorts of things.

01:10:47.540 And I think only then can we develop the right sort of set of perspectives.

01:10:54.220 But the subset of that one, Jordan, is that I don't think any of us yet have worked out how to handle social media with its capacity to give.

01:11:04.060 That's what I wanted to ask you about, actually, because I've been thinking about, look, I invited the leader of the opposition who's now fighting an election in our country.

01:11:15.140 So he's the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, and the liberals are in power under Justin Trudeau.

01:11:20.820 And the leader of the opposition is Aaron O'Toole.

01:11:23.440 And I invited him to come on my podcast over the last couple of weeks, and he refused.

01:11:29.580 And, you know, he might have had his reasons, and I asked him at the last minute.

01:11:33.220 But these podcasts, and I'd like to hear your experience about them.

01:11:37.700 You know, there's no reason for politicians to be using the media anymore, as far as I can tell.

01:11:44.440 They can talk directly to people, and maybe this opens up the possibility of getting deeper insight into who our potential political figures are.

01:11:53.220 Right, because for so long, a politician had to think in terms of delivering his message in a way that the media would carry.

01:12:02.700 But that's just not necessary now, because we can sit down like you and I are sitting down, and actually talk things through.

01:12:12.480 And then people can be involved and engaged in that.

01:12:16.020 And that seems to me to be a hopeful technology for the future.

01:12:23.860 And now you've been, how long have you been running your podcast?

01:12:27.140 And why did you do it?

01:12:28.180 And what do you think about that politically?

01:12:31.140 I'm very curious about that.

01:12:34.780 Well, yeah, look, there's a bunch of issues in there.

01:12:37.960 The problem with social media, the downside is it gives a megaphone to people to spread serious misinformation, conspiracy theories about AstraZeneca or whatever it happens to be.

01:12:50.100 That's the downside and the danger.

01:12:51.460 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 want to engage with ideas.

01:13:00.840 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.

01:13:14.240 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.

01:13:22.960 In fact, I launched with you.

01:13:24.860 Thank you very much.

01:13:25.760 I had several in the can ready to go with, but you were in Australia at the time 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.

01:13:42.000 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.

01:13:52.300 They're so cynical about it, they've been fed the lines by their teachers who are fed the lines out of universities often, that participation in democracy is to be cynical and to be an activist, not a participant and a contributor.

01:14:07.180 And some of our best schools are letting us down in this area, in this country, some of our very, very best schools, as well as many of the mainstream ones.

01:14:15.720 Now, there are many honourable exceptions, I want to add that, but it just seemed to me that there is this hunger and this appetite.

01:14:24.240 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.

01:14:31.860 They get it in different ways.

01:14:33.520 There's an earlier version of it that when we were in government, the Prime Minister of the time, John Howard, recognized.

01:14:39.680 To bypass mainstream media where, even in those days, the grabs were too short and the bias was all too often.

01:14:47.020 You know, there were too many people in the media seeking to campaign rather than inform.

01:14:52.240 But he recognized that talkback radio in those days was a brilliant way to reach a lot of people.

01:14:57.660 And I think that's right.

01:14:58.780 He was able to go over it.

01:15:00.200 He could talk directly.

01:15:01.540 He could find hosts who would let him get his message out, even though some of them might have interrupted a bit.

01:15:06.080 He could still connect with people.

01:15:08.220 And that was important.

01:15:08.900 How do you do that now the way you and I are doing it?

01:15:12.180 And I think that's invaluable.

01:15:13.760 And I don't pretend in this conversation to have had all the answers, but at least I think we've teased out the issues.

01:15:19.660 And there's a lot of food for thought in all of this.

01:15:23.640 And fundamental to it is to recognize at the end of it, our freedoms matter.

01:15:28.440 Governments should be functions of our will.

01:15:31.440 We should not be the puppets of government in the democracies.

01:15:35.340 That's incredibly important.

01:15:37.660 We've got to establish that we should respect them whilst they are there, but they are our servants at the moment.

01:15:44.720 We don't respect them, strangely enough, and yet we expect them to solve every problem.

01:15:49.520 And the system breaks down and people become cynical.

01:15:51.960 So what have I found?

01:15:53.100 Well, I've found I am constantly amazed at how often people will pull me up in the streets and say,

01:16:00.680 I heard your conversation with that person or this person or whatever.

01:16:06.200 And because I try not to feed my own opinions in too much.

01:16:09.760 Most people know what I think.

01:16:11.600 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.

01:16:18.260 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.

01:16:27.500 The 30-second grab doesn't work.

01:16:29.280 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.

01:16:38.160 It's impossible.

01:16:39.500 We're dumbing people down unwittingly because technology has, and the mainstream media, sort of led to that outcome.

01:16:49.040 We're breaking the finances of mainstream media, of course, by doing what you and I do.

01:16:54.900 And so that means that the journalistic qualities go down more and more because they don't have the resources to pay people to do really high-quality investigative stuff and what have you.

01:17:03.920 Anyway, I'm being long-winded, but I have learned a huge amount.

01:17:11.020 It's something worth considering and contemplating in detail because this is a stunningly revolutionary new technology.

01:17:19.920 I mean, YouTube was just kind of a novelty item when it first popped up.

01:17:23.620 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.

01:17:38.040 And we certainly don't understand it because the technology runs way faster than our understanding of its consequences.

01:17:45.100 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,

01:18:01.120 that that should become a standard expectation of political figures and of the general population.

01:18:09.300 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,

01:18:24.800 well, that's something that should happen.

01:18:26.500 And the fact that everything has to be condensed down, in some sense, to soundbites means that people who are good at doing that or who have a good team to do that, they get the spoils.

01:18:40.220 But it's no way to run a serious operation.

01:18:43.360 And this technology is available to anyone who cares to use it now.

01:18:49.780 So what have you seen, what do you understand, the understanding of political figures in Australia with regards to social media?

01:19:02.980 Do they understand the significance of its existence, the potential that it has?

01:19:10.120 Some do.

01:19:11.260 Some do.

01:19:11.960 Some set up massive cynical exercises to try and control social media, to participate in, you know, and set up movements, you know, come with me sort of stuff where it's all spin and it plays on the sort of hashtag type stuff.

01:19:26.740 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.

01:19:42.860 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 enjoyed your podcast.

01:19:53.480 That is gold to me.

01:19:56.440 And then to know that there are several cabinet ministers who often tap in, particularly if I talk about defence or if I talk about the sorts of things that you and I talk about.

01:20:06.480 And then one of the things that I have noticed, though, this is an interesting one, and I've not got to the bottom of it.

01:20:12.180 I don't quite understand it, is that my countrymen are more interested in listening to somebody from America or Britain than from anywhere else, including their own country.

01:20:23.980 So a couple of the most important conversations that I've done, or quite a few, quite a few, on defence with our former Prime Minister, who is now the father of the nation in many ways and was widely seen that way.

01:20:36.840 And yet there's relatively thin interest talking to, I mean, the conversations that you and I have had.

01:20:47.100 This is actually the fourth, and it's very kind of you to have me as a guest.

01:20:51.860 They have flown off the racks, so to speak, and generated huge interest.

01:20:56.060 And here's the one, I know I've said this many times, so forgive me, listeners who have heard me say this, 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.

01:21:14.500 And I've really clicked to, you know, a deep philosophical 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.

01:21:31.220 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.

01:21:41.460 So, you know, it was cheap for them, no matter how far, this is a very big country, to come to Canberra and see democracy in action.

01:21:48.840 And I always used to look forward to meeting with them.

01:21:50.740 It was always fascinating.

01:21:52.340 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.

01:22:00.260 And then I'd spring it on to them and say, now, how many of you were told before you came down here by your mums and dads and maybe even your teachers?

01:22:05.920 Oh, you're going to Canberra.

01:22:07.100 Are you that place, you know, where it's all hot air and the politicians are useless and the government's no good?

01:22:11.840 And every hand would go up. 0.92

01:22:14.420 That's Australia.

01:22:15.740 You know, we were once healthily sceptical.

01:22:19.060 We're now downright cynical, I think, about our political processes and the people in it.

01:22:22.600 But if you then said to them, OK, so if the government's making a mess, name me a country that you'd like to live in, in preference to Australia.

01:22:30.600 And occasionally somebody would say America or they'd say Canada.

01:22:33.160 They might say New Zealand.

01:22:34.100 They'd say they're all democracies.

01:22:36.580 And then we'd talk about the differences.

01:22:38.960 And of course, it had never hit them.

01:22:41.460 And once you start to unpack that stuff and 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.

01:22:52.860 That's really got me thinking.

01:22:54.060 And was it Margaret Mead who said, you know, societies, you know, have often been changed by just a small group of people getting together and thinking things through.

01:23:06.860 Indeed, that's the only way societies have ever changed.

01:23:09.420 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.

01:23:25.440 And they'll have to be people of vision and courage and insight.

01:23:29.600 And nothing struck me more than that first conversation where you had, and you were quite emotional about it.

01:23:36.180 You said that you'd been in Melbourne and you'd had some young men there who had responded positively to what you'd said.

01:23:43.260 And you just said they just need a little bit of encouragement because they're not getting it.

01:23:48.840 And they're not.

01:23:49.420 I've never forgotten that, man.

01:23:52.160 And I resolved at that point because you're so open and you make yourself vulnerable.

01:23:57.300 And that must be very costly at times that I would seek to do the same.

01:24:01.300 So I've done that several times consciously as a result of that first conversation.

01:24:05.820 I've opened up more about me in the hope that that's useful for young people.

01:24:09.600 And if others want to criticise me, if older people say, oh, we wouldn't have said that in our day, dear, or whatever.

01:24:15.520 So it doesn't matter.

01:24:16.600 If there's one person out there, and I know there's more than that because I've met them,

01:24:21.640 who have been impacted and have thought things through and put down some foundations that they otherwise wouldn't have.

01:24:26.400 Well, it's all been worth it.

01:24:30.520 That's a great place to close.

01:24:32.960 So thanks very much for agreeing to meet with me again.

01:24:35.780 I really appreciate it and to wander through this minefield.

01:24:40.040 And, you know, it's not something that anyone knows how to do properly.

01:24:46.600 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.

01:24:57.360 So I'm hoping to come to Australia next year again, perhaps to tour again, if I can manage it.

01:25:05.220 So if I do come down there, I'd sure be more than pleased to see you again and to meet.

01:25:10.400 And so I'd like that very much.

01:25:12.260 So thank you very much again for coming in.

01:25:15.380 And thank you very much.

01:25:17.060 It's an honour.

01:25:17.480 And it's terrific to see you firing on all eight again.

01:25:21.900 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 11, 2021

196. Australia： Lockdowns and Location Apps ｜ John Anderson

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