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. In this episode, 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. They also discuss the cost of safety and how social media played a big role in today's mandatory vaccinations. This episode is brought to you by the Blazing Bull 1500 Degree Grill, which heats up to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit and is the best grill I've ever used. It's portable, easy to set up and portable, with handles on the side so you can take it anywhere you want to take it. For how professional it makes your food, check out Blazing Bull's service. They sell their patented broiler to upscale restaurants like Morton's, but you can have that kind of quality steak in your backyard. It doesn't smoke very much, and it makes high quality, steakhouse style steaks or whatever else you feel like grilling. It makes it easy to clean, and portable so you aren't as restricted as us as we are as far as us are as we feel like cooking. You can head to BlazingBullGrills.com right now and get $150 off when buying the BlazingBull 1500 Degree Grilling Grill when using promo code JP150 at checkout. Use promo code JBPodcast at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase when using JBP's JBP Provence Provenctives. JBP has partnered with BlazingBull Grill to make the best grilling grilling equipment out there is $150 or more than $150. JBP is a great! - use promo code jpj150 when you buy a Blazing Bull Grill, you ll be getting $150 in savings on your first pack of the Blazingbull 1500 Degree grilling Grill! You ll get 10% off the entire pack, plus an additional $5 off the purchase when you enter the offer starts at $99.99, and a FREE shipping discount when you use JBP Approved by Prime Minister's Provenza. . You won't want to miss it! Dr. Jordan B.B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those struggling with Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. - Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way.
00:00:01.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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00:00:51.000Welcome to the JBP Podcast, Season 4, Episode 50.
00:00:58.000This 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.
00:01:09.000Him and my dad discuss COVID-19, and Anderson shares what's been happening in Australia, which is crazy,
00:01:15.000and the West, in addition to the lockdowns and the threat China's imposing on Australia.
00:07:48.000So, what have you seen happening in Australia and the West?
00:07:54.000And what have you been thinking about this?
00:07:57.000Well, it's incredibly messy and hard to think your way through it all.
00:08:04.000And I don't, at the very bottom line, I don't want to sound like I'm smug,
00:08:09.000sort of has been who knows it all and could have done it better.
00:08:13.000So, these are sobering times and we've got to ask a lot of questions.
00:08:16.000I think my starting point, though, Jordan, would be to say, and this is our little mantra
00:08:20.000with my own video series, you can't get good public policy without a good debate.
00:08:26.000And there's a lot of elements to a good debate.
00:08:28.000You've got to have a decent level of understanding.
00:08:31.000You've got to ensure the debate's not truncated.
00:08:34.000You've got to ensure that everybody's involved.
00:08:37.000You've got to try and demystify it and depoliticise it.
00:08:40.000I think on all of those fronts, there have been severe failings internationally and in Australia.
00:08:47.000Australia'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.
00:09:08.000We are, as I understand, getting some quite even mocking press internationally at the moment for the nature of our lockdowns.
00:09:18.000They 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.
00:09:48.000There's now an acceptance we can't go on like this.
00:09:52.000So I have to say in the end, I am optimistic, I think, that our institutions will survive this.
00:09:58.000The Australian people will say, this is enough.
00:10:00.000We've got to come back to a pragmatic middle ground where the governments will give back everything they should is a big question.
00:10:06.000But I make this point in the context of the horrendous range of really difficult challenges that confront us.
00:10:13.000One 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,
00:10:25.000bow your knees to our authoritarian regime and way of life.
00:10:28.000So there's cause for real optimism there that Australians understand freedom, even though we don't talk about it much in this country.
00:10:37.000And so, well, let's talk about that example with regard to China to begin with.
00:10:42.000So can you flesh that out a little bit?
00:10:44.000What 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?
00:10:54.000Well, China, of course, we're one of the few countries in the world that runs a massive trade surplus with China.
00:11:02.000They suck in massive amounts of our product.
00:11:05.000Around a third of our exports go to China.
00:11:08.000And even though we import a lot back from them, we do very, very well out of it.
00:11:15.000And 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.
00:11:32.000We know that over the last seven or eight years, those hopes have been well and truly dashed.
00:11:36.000That is becoming a very authoritarian regime.
00:11:39.000And 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.
00:11:51.000We certainly led a little with the chin, I'd have to say, on that one.
00:11:56.000The reaction from China was very unfriendly indeed.
00:12:01.000And ultimately, they issued a list of 14 major grievances and say that we have broken the relationship.
00:12:07.000No one will pick up a call in China at a senior level in response to our senior people.
00:12:12.000Canada 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.
00:12:21.000Also, 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.
00:12:40.000America followed Europe, the rest of the world slowly.
00:12:44.000And I think that's been a cause of real angst.
00:12:47.000But the point is that I think the Chinese thought we would bend quite quickly and Australia hasn't.
00:12:53.000Notwithstanding the fact that in common with other countries, you've seen a lot of business leaders saying, oh, don't go too far.
00:13:01.000But as Henry Kissinger put it, a little trade lost can always be recovered.
00:13:08.000Freedom lost is almost impossible to get back.
00:13:12.000Yeah, 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.
00:13:32.000And 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.
00:13:44.000But 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.
00:13:58.000And 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.
00:14:20.780And 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?
00:14:41.200How 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.
00:14:53.900And my wife is as well, although I have family members who have refused it.
00:14:58.480And 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.
00:15:08.400There 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.
00:15:23.760And so, well, that's sort of my domain of concern.
00:15:29.240And so I'm wondering how it appears to you.
00:15:31.260Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking about it, and I offer these as thoughts only.
00:15:38.980I 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.
00:15:57.020And that may, from time to time, vary, that's a logical conclusion.
00:16:02.140So 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.
00:16:22.320You 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.
00:16:30.880And 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.
00:16:37.600And you had no right of conscientious objection almost to that.
00:16:45.680It'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.
00:16:57.980And they actually voted Winston Churchill out of office.
00:17:02.180I see that as a strong declaration, this crisis is over.
00:17:06.300We have accepted unbelievably punitive measures, restricted our freedoms, placed ourselves at great risk.
00:17:17.980Then you come right back to the situation that we're now fronting.
00:17:22.140Well, the legal implications are massive in this country.
00:17:25.540I'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.
00:17:47.940You said that that's the company's responsibility to ensure that.
00:17:50.920So does that mean that the decision about what health care is appropriate has now been ceded by the U.S. government to corporate interests?
00:17:58.140And where the hell is that going to end precisely?
00:18:00.800I mean, COVID is a nasty illness, but it's not as bad as it could be by any stretch of the imagination.
00:18:07.520And it's some multiple worse than a bad flu epidemic, but it's in the same general ballpark.
00:18:13.520And so these precedents are being established at an unprecedented rate.
00:18:18.120And there's a principle underneath it, which is, well, you can't be too safe.
00:18:23.260And 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.
00:18:36.820And so, and I know there's a professor in Canada who's, and I only know the edges of this story.
00:18:44.480She'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.
00:18:56.580The idea that medical treatment can be enforced by the state.
00:18:59.160In one of our provinces, there were no exceptions, no religious exceptions, no exceptions for health reasons, no exceptions, period.
00:19:06.120It's like, okay, but where does that end?
00:19:31.840Yeah, well, you and I are not Americans.
00:19:34.680So we look at America and think of it as a very litigatious country.
00:19:37.680I 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.
00:19:53.720And you raise the issue of what is legal and what is not.
00:19:57.080Now, that varies a bit from country to country, I would imagine.
00:20:00.180In 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.
00:20:17.440We inherited freedom rather than have to fight for it.
00:20:21.400So maybe there was never much focus on the philosophies of freedom, the underpinning thinking around it.
00:20:27.100Although, you know, to be fair to Australians, they fought freedom.
00:20:33.000They've not had to sort of design them, think through them, have those incredible arguments.
00:20:37.320Think of Alexander Hamilton and the debates from the founding fathers about how to avoid mob rule, preserve individual freedoms, get the balance right.
00:20:48.340It'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.
00:20:57.020But, you know, we're not tending the garden very well.
00:21:00.840The jungle's re-encroaching because we haven't focused much on what's necessary to keep the plants healthy, put it that way.
00:21:12.500They've approached this issue differently.
00:21:16.680It's been hard for the Commonwealth government to maintain a uniform approach.
00:21:20.480And one of the big legal questions is, have the state-based lockdowns been legal at all?
00:21:27.180Can Queensland legally say to me, as somebody from New South Wales, no, you cannot come here?
00:21:32.760And 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.
00:21:42.220To 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.
00:22:00.160But the polls are showing now that the Australian people are saying, look, we now get it.
00:22:20.020But 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,
00:22:30.400as we get the vaccinations up, we think things should be opened up again and we'll have to live with this.
00:22:37.740And at that point, I think there will be in this country tremendous resistance and reluctance to lockdown again because they've been so severe,
00:22:45.700particularly in Victoria, that people have said, no, the costs are so high.
00:22:50.500And part of the problem we've had is a sensationalisation of it all by the media.
00:22:56.780I'm sorry to say that, but remarkably little really balanced commentary.
00:23:03.400It's been politically driven from the right and particularly from the left.
00:23:08.960And the left and those in secure jobs, particularly with a publicly funded broadcaster, their jobs go on.
00:23:15.040Even in a lockdown situation, they feel safe for their own families.
00:23:19.540Now, I'm an essential worker, but I'm not as a farmer.
00:23:38.640Oh, no, we want to be safe in our secure jobs in whatever bureaucratic enclave or media enclave you work in.
00:23:46.680But those people who look after me and feed me and all the rest of it, no, no, no, they've got to keep going.
00:23:53.700Pulling 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.
00:24:04.280So there's a building awareness we're going to have to live with this.
00:24:13.440And 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.
00:24:23.500And so we've got two state governments that are holding out.
00:24:25.680They're still effectively saying we can eliminate this, which I think is nuts.
00:24:30.380And I think their people will ultimately realise that as well.
00:24:33.700So a bundle of issues in there, but a rising awareness that there's been a lot of emotion and a lack of balance.
00:24:40.200It 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.
00:24:57.480No country has blown out its public debt in percentage terms as quickly, I don't think, as Australia has.
00:25:03.600Mind you, we had a very low debt basis because of certain past governments to begin with.
00:25:09.280And even after this, our debt to GDP ratios will be relatively manageable by international standards.
00:25:33.000So we're taking one risk to prevent another.
00:25:36.280And so it's always a matter of balance of risk.
00:25:38.520There isn't a there isn't a pathway to safety through all of this.
00:25:41.800And 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.
00:25:53.660It seems to me that it's a sign of the vaccination arguments, essentially.
00:26:02.460So 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.
00:26:14.940And 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.
00:26:31.340You 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.
00:26:39.140When 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.
00:26:56.840And that's going to have a tremendous cost in terms of health as well.
00:28:11.340And if they are, because it's going to be a big chunk of the population, how exactly are we going to deal with that?
00:28:16.360So I see that we're in danger of exchanging the possibility of pandemic damage with the certainty of the danger of authoritarian imposition.
00:28:32.540Well, so that's I'd like you to to respond to that, I guess, and tell me what you.
00:28:38.320So 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.
00:28:49.280It'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.
00:29:09.700Like, because I don't know, but I'm not impressed by this creeping authoritarianism in the name of public safety.
00:29:18.720I just can't see that that's going to go well.
00:29:20.820I think it's going to cause more damage than it's going to do good.
00:29:26.080You know, I think it comes back to this initial proposition, I think, that the quality of the debate is critical to getting good outcomes.
00:29:34.060And the quality of the debate in many ways has been very badly interrupted.
00:29:38.200So we had an unbelievable situation in Australia where we had some quite senior people saying AstraZeneca was dangerous because of blood clots.
00:29:48.420In fact, you know, you're infinitely less likely to get a blood clot from AstraZeneca than a girl on the pill.
00:29:54.780So we're going to say, well, girls on the pill should come off the pill.
00:29:57.780I mean, because there's a danger of blood clots.
00:30:01.600But we had some quite senior people driving that.
00:30:05.060And 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.
00:30:23.240And people were saying, well, if she came to Australia, we'd probably send her to our equivalent of Siberia.
00:30:28.140The different responses are extraordinary.
00:30:30.460Now 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.
00:30:39.060So you're getting this confusing advice.
00:30:42.140How are people meant to find their way through that?
00:30:46.860And that feeds into your narrative and I think into mine.
00:30:51.040The quality of public debate becomes very important.
00:30:54.340I just wonder what on earth is going to happen in America now.
00:30:56.880It'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.
00:31:04.780Now, this is the land of Hacksaw Ridge.
00:31:25.820And the Americans can get committed to something like no one else.
00:31:29.760And so this isn't going to produce a minor backlash.
00:31:32.300And it feeds into these conspiracy narratives that are starting to undermine our society as well.
00:31:37.240You know, that the government is fundamentally untrustworthy and so are the health organizations.
00:31:42.380And 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.
00:31:54.240And 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.
00:32:01.920And that we then in proportionally, in sort of ways that are proportional, agree to limit them in emergencies.
00:32:11.840And we're often willing to do that because we will, if we're frightened, we will flee for security over freedom.
00:32:20.980Now, 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.
00:33:03.200But 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.
00:33:16.900You're not getting those lifts anymore.
00:33:18.260So 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.
00:34:13.800The 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.
00:34:32.540Remarkably 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.
00:34:48.800In fact, an average of four amongst the people who have died, as I understand it.
00:34:55.240That very frequently, and I may be wrong about this, I'm about perhaps as ignorant as the average person in this domain.
00:35:02.540And that might be just right for this conversation, in some sense.
00:35:05.700But I also, with regards to the death statistics, my...
00:35:12.540Is 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?
00:35:24.420And that's, like, that makes the basic statistics upon which all these decisions are being made, well, questionable.
00:35:33.560I'm not saying that it's wrong, but it's certainly questionable.
00:35:36.860Can we trust the death rate statistics?
00:35:39.000Do we actually know how dangerous this illness is?
00:35:41.280Now, people look at such markers as excess mortality over a given time period, and that seems to me to be more reliable.
00:35:48.520But it's not unreasonable to ask these questions.
00:35:51.520And that's partly your point about the necessity of debate.
00:35:55.300And that opens up a broader issue, too, you know, about how those sorts of debates should be conducted.
00:36:02.680And 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.
00:36:37.800Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:36:47.300And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:36:50.480With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
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00:40:53.320That's a great deal on a groundbreaking supplement.
00:40:55.880I hope you enjoy the rest of this episode.
00:40:57.980Yeah, 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.
00:41:12.000But 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.
00:41:56.020Governments shut economies down deliberately and knowingly and then try to put the system on life support by pumping money in directly.
00:42:04.540And Australia's been able to do a great deal of that because of its economic strength in the past.
00:42:08.860But 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.
00:42:17.520The reality that Australia will have to spend more than 2% of GDP on defence.
00:42:25.560There 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.
00:42:33.680And this has been a big part of the problem.
00:42:36.360Politicians have had to say, listen to the experts because they know they won't be trusted.
00:42:40.700Whereas 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.
00:42:50.880So they can say, here are the real dangers of COVID that we know about.
00:42:56.400And along comes Delta, to be fair, and that makes it even harder.
00:42:59.680It's different and it affects more people and it's more contagious.
00:43:02.780But here are the realities on the health side.
00:43:05.980Here are the trade-offs in economic terms.
00:43:08.460Here are the trade-offs in terms of the education of our children.
00:43:11.800Here are the trade-offs in terms of depression and anxiety and self-harm.
00:43:15.760The right way through this is such and such a road.
00:43:19.800But that's not what's been fed to the populace.
00:43:21.620It's save every life, every life lost.
00:43:28.080And 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.
00:44:10.800And we all know how important that is to relationships in the end.
00:44:16.880Then it's easy to default to expert advice.
00:44:21.560But 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.
00:44:31.500And to the degree that people are skeptical about political decisions, then they're going to start to become skeptical about the experts.
00:44:39.420So the politicians are, by relying on experts, they're avoiding their responsibility.
00:44:46.220They're shunting the risk off on people who have enough on their plates, as far as I'm concerned.
00:44:52.120And then we have the breakdown of trust in the medical system, which I really believe is going to be tremendously exacerbated by mandatory vaccines.
00:45:04.820This 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.
00:46:22.220We're not going to put in draconian measures to insist that you do this.
00:46:26.500But 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.
00:46:35.940And I think more people would take them.
00:46:37.500This force and that the force as well.
00:46:49.800But 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?
00:47:00.240We're not thinking that through, as far as I can tell.
00:47:03.020And part of it's just tremendous difficulty, right?
00:47:05.800I mean, all these things you talked about, the secondary negative consequences of the health measures.
00:47:13.080It's also taken everyone a while to see what those were.
00:48:25.680One very incompetent state government was re-elected because there was a perception that they kept their people safe.
00:48:31.840And it didn't deserve to be re-elected by any stretch of the imagination.
00:48:36.100And I think I'm a reasonable judge of those things.
00:48:40.160On all the broad indicators, they had not served their state well.
00:48:43.820But 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.
00:48:53.580And that's about conscientious objection.
00:48:56.100Now, stop and think about this for a moment.
00:48:59.200The proportionality and the darkest days of the Second World War, when there were real doubts about whether or not democracy and freedom would survive.
00:49:09.800In the end, and subject to some pretty tough processes, you could claim to be and be recognized as a conscientious objector.
00:49:19.200Now, you could say, no, I really, my conscience does not allow me to do this.
00:49:24.080And you see, this is Frank Ferrudi's point, I think.
00:49:27.040I don't want to verbally, I'm only a simple man.
00:49:29.440But as I understand it, our first freedom is freedom of conscience.
00:49:33.840Without that, every other freedom, I'm not a believer in the hierarchy of freedoms.
00:49:37.900You know, freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to meet with people or not meet with people.
00:49:48.540But 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.
00:49:58.640That is the mark in the end of freedom.
00:50:01.960Now, it might be that during the Second World War, society says, well, there'll be some downsides for you.
00:50:11.640I 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.
00:50:22.180Australian air travel is down at 26% still.
00:50:25.700Quite interesting reflection on our caution and our isolation in this country.
00:50:31.560And yet we're one of the most interconnected nations in the world in terms of trade and in terms of tourism, inbound and outbound.
00:50:39.120So it's an interesting reflection on where we're at in this country.
00:50:43.560But 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.
00:51:00.240And 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.
00:51:06.620And the standard procedure is that you get a little test on the way to the coffee shop.
00:51:15.900Now, that's an interesting way of looking at it.
00:51:17.520And if technology would allow for that, it might ease a lot of these things.
00:51:20.920I was rung the other day by the minister, a very thoughtful man, from a church in my local area.
00:51:27.080And 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.
00:51:36.440He said, I'm deeply troubled by that idea.
00:51:39.120And I thought, well, I haven't thought of that particular angle.
00:51:43.140So what do you think the best rationale is for mandatory vaccination?
00:51:54.220It'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?
00:52:04.760I mean, is the argument that they're also a terrible danger to those who've been vaccinated?
00:52:09.720I mean, as the vaccination rates increase, and they're fairly high in Canada, I think we're near 80%.
00:52:17.700I hope I'm not wildly off the mark with that estimate.
00:52:22.600I know it's much lower in Australia, or I believe it is.
00:52:27.740I'm unclear about exactly the danger that the unvaccinated are posing.
00:52:33.260So what's your understanding, given those vaccination rates, what's your understanding of that?
00:52:39.320And what's the justification for their restriction of civil liberties?
00:52:43.920I have to say that's a very good question, Jordan, and I'm as unclear as you are.
00:52:50.260Well, we shouldn't be unclear about that, right?
00:52:52.560You'd hope that in the positions that we occupy, we wouldn't be unclear about that.
00:52:58.380And it seems to me that if we're unclear about that, that plenty of other people are unclear about it as well.
00:53:03.240And that's obviously not a good thing.
00:53:07.320So 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.
00:53:19.500And as I understand it, one of their very senior people has a conscientious objection and has left the organisation.
00:53:26.000Now, his perspective, presumably, it's a very important one.
00:53:29.360He 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.
00:53:36.980Well, 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?
00:53:56.760Well, yeah, precisely, exactly what's the problem and to what degree is that sufficiently problematic so that civil liberties should be importantly curtailed, right?
00:54:06.720Because, 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.
00:54:23.420If it's extremely high, then you think, well, then what is the use of the vaccination?
00:54:28.700And 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.
00:54:43.960Are the unvaccinated primarily posing a danger to the other unvaccinated?
00:54:48.680And 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.
00:54:58.380And 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.
00:55:11.760And 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.
00:55:25.600So, 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.
00:55:37.340But I still don't get the exact danger, and that could easily be my profound ignorance.
00:55:43.520But 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?
00:55:57.280One 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.
00:56:11.860There may be dangers in there that have to be thought through.
00:56:14.200So, 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.
00:56:25.240But there may be some situations where, you know, you have to stay at bay.
00:56:30.280Hypothetically, it might be to say, you know, you don't have to be vaccinated, but you can't fly.
00:56:39.800I'm just plucking that out of the air.
00:56:43.220But there are some things you can't do if you're not vaccinated.
00:56:46.260In 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.
00:56:59.400And a bit weak on conscientious objection, too, historically, not as strong as America and other Western countries.
00:57:08.800And that regulation, maybe it comes from the benign way in which governments regulated so much of our lives.
00:57:16.000As 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.
00:57:30.020Essentially, we were a series of British colonies put together by an act of the British Parliament in 1901 that federated us.
00:57:38.240And 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.
00:57:50.480But 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.
00:58:01.700But 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.
00:58:11.680They haven't had to fight for it in the first place.
00:58:13.060And they've been very, we're amazingly accepting a regulation in this country.
00:58:18.780We were the first country by, in years, by years to mandate compulsory seatbelt wearing.
00:58:26.240There's a whole plethora, a whole raft of things where Australians have just been quite happy to accept being told what to do.
00:58:34.260Smoking advertising was banned here before anywhere else.
00:58:38.040I think that's right to say, and so forth.
00:58:40.980And, you know, to take your point up, governments explain this as being done for public health reasons.
00:58:46.780And there was a wide scale sort of acceptance of it.
00:58:51.340If vaccinating is important, then it ought to be positive arguments for it and leadership that people respect.
00:59:01.260And they say, well, I don't feel threatened by this.
00:59:03.420I 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.
00:59:17.940So 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.
00:59:32.880Well, I mean, perhaps to persuade people to become vaccinated for that matter.
00:59:40.780No, I don't know what these new regulations in the U.S. are going, what kind of response they're going to produce.
00:59:47.560But 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.
00:59:54.100And that is severe enough to be somewhat destabilizing already.
00:59:59.980We'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.
01:00:08.300And there won't be as much of a reaction to that in Canada as there will be in the U.S. to similar measures.
01:00:14.760But it just seems to me that that default to force is an admission that the argumentation has been stunningly inadequate.
01:00:26.480And 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.
01:00:35.540And so it's and in this and for the sake of everyone else's well-being, it's justifiable to force them.
01:00:43.260That might even be OK if it was going to produce the results that are intended.
01:01:29.780Well, that's that's the danger that we're facing, I would say, and it's always the case with policy.
01:01:35.480I 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.
01:01:49.620There'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.
01:02:04.700And I understand medically that there is a distinct possibility that that precise thing will happen.
01:02:11.400And then, you know, it's certainly not zero the possibility.
01:02:15.440And 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.
01:02:34.640There's, you can't eradicate the possibility that their objections guided by their conscience, let's say.
01:02:42.460Are, and this is your point with regards to conscientious objection, objecting.
01:02:47.140It'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.
01:03:03.400And 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.
01:03:18.760Once you let the government decide what's good for you.
01:03:27.420And like, I'm firmly convinced, maybe this is my own paranoia.
01:03:32.900I'm firmly convinced that if the automobile had been invented today, that the average person would, would not be allowed to drive.
01:03:40.760I don't think we would, I don't think we would allow that level of risk.
01:03:45.080And I think that's really unfortunate.
01:03:46.840So 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.
01:03:55.340You 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.
01:04:02.540And 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.
01:04:12.340It'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.
01:04:22.120The, 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.
01:04:39.740So this line that COVID's accelerating history strikes a chord with me.
01:04:49.100And I suspect to go back to what, and I don't want to misrepresent it.
01:04:52.400I'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.
01:04:58.26080 million people being told you will be vaccinated.
01:05:00.600And 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.
01:05:18.700That see places like Canada and Australia as sort of surrogate states of that sort of the great state in America.
01:05:29.920None 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.
01:05:45.160I say that because of where we are geographically, I suppose, in this region here, we're a long way.
01:05:53.320Australia is a very valuable bit of real estate.
01:05:57.440It's sparsely populated, a large landmass.
01:06:00.920It's a long way from the other democracies, with the exception of, and the honorable exception of Indonesia.
01:06:07.480We're in an area where there is rising authoritarianism led by one place in particular.
01:06:13.060Do we have collective willpower to pull together and say, we're going to have to make tough decisions?
01:06:21.000We've been very comfortable for a long time.
01:06:25.440And the first tough decision here is the one that's now being openly spoken about in Australia.
01:06:32.100And as I said, I have confidence that Australians are being realistic about this.
01:06:35.480I actually think we will come through this, but it's so important we have these debates.
01:06:39.880We now are saying we're going to have to live with COVID and accept that people will die.
01:06:46.460Awful thing to say, but we're all going to die.
01:06:49.720And 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.
01:07:03.700Under a more authoritarian system, we can get the worst to both worlds.
01:07:14.500A 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.
01:07:29.760Right, 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.
01:07:45.080And fair enough, in some sense, but that isn't a sustainable response.
01:07:51.380And 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.
01:08:04.320How 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.
01:08:21.360So, 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?
01:08:35.360I 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.
01:08:51.600What do you think might be done concretely by political leaders in the West to deal with the COVID crisis more appropriately?
01:09:02.660What do you see as a reasonable pathway forward?
01:09:05.660This may sound a strange reaction, but it's where I really genuinely come from.
01:09:14.180I think we need to lift people's eyes to the real threats to our future freedoms.
01:09:19.860And I think they're economic and strategic.
01:09:22.460And I think out of that should be the message that we really, in Western countries, within our countries and actually amongst ourselves,
01:09:29.720have 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.
01:09:43.140And 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,
01:09:53.660you 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,
01:10:07.680to recognize that hope lies in putting the foundations down, securing them for our future, which is our children and our grandchildren.
01:10:15.340In other words, break out of the fear.
01:10:23.320You know more about this than I do professionally, but we've become very afraid.
01:10:28.440A lot of what's happening at the moment is being driven by fear.
01:10:32.120And 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,
01:10:42.480not talk about the fact that there are issues here other than the medical ones, those sorts of things.
01:10:47.540And I think only then can we develop the right sort of set of perspectives.
01:10:54.220But 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.
01:11:04.060That'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.
01:11:15.140So he's the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, and the liberals are in power under Justin Trudeau.
01:11:20.820And the leader of the opposition is Aaron O'Toole.
01:11:23.440And I invited him to come on my podcast over the last couple of weeks, and he refused.
01:11:29.580And, you know, he might have had his reasons, and I asked him at the last minute.
01:11:33.220But these podcasts, and I'd like to hear your experience about them.
01:11:37.700You know, there's no reason for politicians to be using the media anymore, as far as I can tell.
01:11:44.440They can talk directly to people, and maybe this opens up the possibility of getting deeper insight into who our potential political figures are.
01:11:53.220Right, because for so long, a politician had to think in terms of delivering his message in a way that the media would carry.
01:12:02.700But that's just not necessary now, because we can sit down like you and I are sitting down, and actually talk things through.
01:12:12.480And then people can be involved and engaged in that.
01:12:16.020And that seems to me to be a hopeful technology for the future.
01:12:23.860And now you've been, how long have you been running your podcast?
01:12:34.780Well, yeah, look, there's a bunch of issues in there.
01:12:37.960The 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.
01:12:51.460The 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.
01:13:00.840And 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.
01:13:14.240And 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.
01:13:25.760I 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.
01:13:42.000And 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.
01:13:52.300They'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.
01:14:07.180And 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.
01:14:15.720Now, there are many honourable exceptions, I want to add that, but it just seemed to me that there is this hunger and this appetite.
01:14:24.240And as you said to me, young people don't often read so much now, but they're still hungry for content and changing technology.
01:16:29.280If 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.
01:16:39.500We're dumbing people down unwittingly because technology has, and the mainstream media, sort of led to that outcome.
01:16:49.040We're breaking the finances of mainstream media, of course, by doing what you and I do.
01:16:54.900And 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.
01:17:03.920Anyway, I'm being long-winded, but I have learned a huge amount.
01:17:11.020It's something worth considering and contemplating in detail because this is a stunningly revolutionary new technology.
01:17:19.920I mean, YouTube was just kind of a novelty item when it first popped up.
01:17:23.620But 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.
01:17:38.040And we certainly don't understand it because the technology runs way faster than our understanding of its consequences.
01:17:45.100But 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,
01:18:01.120that that should become a standard expectation of political figures and of the general population.
01:18:09.300Because 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,
01:18:24.800well, that's something that should happen.
01:18:26.500And 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.
01:18:40.220But it's no way to run a serious operation.
01:18:43.360And this technology is available to anyone who cares to use it now.
01:18:49.780So what have you seen, what do you understand, the understanding of political figures in Australia with regards to social media?
01:19:02.980Do they understand the significance of its existence, the potential that it has?
01:19:11.960Some 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.
01:19:26.740But 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.
01:19:42.860And 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.
01:19:56.440And 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.
01:20:06.480And 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.
01:20:12.180I 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.
01:20:23.980So 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.
01:20:36.840And yet there's relatively thin interest talking to, I mean, the conversations that you and I have had.
01:20:47.100This is actually the fourth, and it's very kind of you to have me as a guest.
01:20:51.860They have flown off the racks, so to speak, and generated huge interest.
01:20:56.060And 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.
01:21:14.500And 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.
01:21:31.220You 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.
01:21:41.460So, 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.
01:21:48.840And I always used to look forward to meeting with them.
01:21:52.340So 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.
01:22:00.260And 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?
01:22:15.740You know, we were once healthily sceptical.
01:22:19.060We're now downright cynical, I think, about our political processes and the people in it.
01:22:22.600But 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.
01:22:30.600And occasionally somebody would say America or they'd say Canada.
01:22:41.460And 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.
01:22:54.060And 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.
01:23:06.860Indeed, that's the only way societies have ever changed.
01:23:09.420And 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.
01:23:25.440And they'll have to be people of vision and courage and insight.
01:23:29.600And nothing struck me more than that first conversation where you had, and you were quite emotional about it.
01:23:36.180You said that you'd been in Melbourne and you'd had some young men there who had responded positively to what you'd said.
01:23:43.260And you just said they just need a little bit of encouragement because they're not getting it.