Can We Solve the Migrant Crisis？ with Helen Dale
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 13 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
8
sentences flagged
Toxicity
24
sentences flagged
Hate speech
54
sentences flagged
Summary
Ellen Dale is a lawyer, journalist and author. She is a regular contributor to the Sydney Morning Herald and the Financial Times. In this episode, she talks about the refugee crisis in Australia and what we can learn from it.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant returning guest today is a lawyer, journalist, author. Ellen Dale, welcome back to Trigonometry.
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It's good to have you back. I've just realized...
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It does indeed. And I've just realized that were it not for my cream jacket, we'd look like a pair of undertakers, all in black.
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Well, that's normally what we do. People normally come here at the ends of their careers after being cancelled.
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The last time we had you on the show, Francis jokingly quipped something about Australians, your country, being associated with racism in the minds of people in this country.
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And you made the distinction that Australia actually has very good race relations within the country, broadly speaking, but it's the treatment of refugees and the refugee problem that is the source of the jokes that people make and the source of many problems in Australia itself.
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And it seems now that we are moving in that direction in this country with the so-called migrant crisis or the refugee crisis, whatever term is more appropriate.
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So what can we in this country learn from the experiences of Australia and what do we need to think about in that context?
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Well, the first thing is, the first observation I'd make is that the debate that Britain is having now is that the same debate that Australia had initially in 1992, when Paul Keating, Labor Prime Minister, introduced mandatory detention,
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and then more intensely in 2001, during what is known as the Tampa affair, when John Howard was Prime Minister, and then in that year, what was known as the Tampa election, he then was re-elected Prime Minister, partly on the back of the Tampa election.
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I see comments being made by people in the back and forth, and it's a very odd sense of deja vu because the accents are different, but the arguments are exactly the same.
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And unfortunately, though, because Britain has generally lower state capacity than Australia, the arguments are not as erudite.
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I mean, if you go back and watch or read Keating's speeches about these issues, or John Howard's or Bob Hawke's, Bob Hawke was the Prime Minister before Paul Keating.
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If you look at when Scott Morrison was the Immigration Minister in Tony Abbott's government, he was the one who stopped the boats.
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And I did notice, I mean, in the middle of a lot of very unfair criticism of Tony Abbott during recent controversies, a lot of people were also attributing to Tony Abbott,
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But the person who did the detailed policy work was Scott Morrison.
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Scott Morrison is now, of course, the Australian Prime Minister.
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So Abbott was kind of getting credit for something that he didn't actually personally do.
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Whereas the trade deals, that's much more the PMO, the Prime Minister's Office in Australia.
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So he does deserve the credit for those because they tend to be worked up in the PMO, in Australian Parliament House in Canberra.
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But more broadly, coming back to the issue, you said the arguments are the same.
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So perhaps for people who haven't been paying that close attention or we have people watching the show all over the world,
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we have an issue which is we have increasing numbers of people crossing the English Channel from France on boats,
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some of whom are genuine refugees, some of whom are claiming to be refugees,
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some of whom are quite obviously economic migrants,
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and they're coming into this country illegally claiming asylum, etc.
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What are the arguments on both sides about the issue?
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Okay, what happens is in a country, pick a country at the moment, it's Britain,
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And there are disputes about whether they are actually able to claim asylum,
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But what happens in the process of them turning up is that because there is a network,
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a web of international treaties, supposedly, but you've got to be careful of this,
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governing how refugees or people who claim refugee status, they claim asylum,
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they haven't been proven to be refugees, they have to go through a process for that to happen.
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They turn up in a country and they're not wanted by the local people.
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And yet, it's very difficult for countries to make their nation state unattractive,
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Australia was a good example of that, to make their nation state unattractive in some way,
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In this context, it's important to draw a distinction between immigration,
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There are better and worse systems of rules, but it's all subject to a legal process.
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You've been through aspects of this process with your family.
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And it is actually much more controlled, particularly now Brexit has happened,
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Refugees, asylum seekers, totally different kettle of fish.
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Now, what happened in Australia was basically we have always had the experience and the expression
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that's used in Australia is boat people attempting to seek sanctuary in Australia,
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because the region, not as much now, but it was historically quite unstable around Australia.
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You know, lots of third world dictatorships, basically,
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whereas Australia was this prosperous, orderly country that had a very high standard of living
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And the other issue, and this is something that I didn't say when I talked about the immigration
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issue on Mike Graham's show, but I will say here because I've got more time,
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is that the journey to northern Australia, if you are an asylum seeker, is perilous.
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And one of the big differences between the situation that Britain is confronted with
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and what happened in Australia historically is that there is a very large difference
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between the 22 miles of the English Channel and the Timor Sea.
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It's not just the size and the expanse and the hostility of the ocean.
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The other issue is in northern Australia, if you miss Darwin or Broome,
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you finish up wandering around in very, very inhospitable country.
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And you will die unless you're very, very lucky, unless you happen to pitch up near a remote
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And some of the Aboriginal communities are so remote, they might see white people
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or yellow people, Asian people once a year, if they're lucky.
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So, all the jokes about Australia, you know, it's full of things that want to kill you.
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These apply in spades in northern Australia, the home of the saltwater crocodile.
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Just like crossing the channel, landing in Huddersfield.
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But, yeah, so basically it's full of things that will eat you, sting you, drown you,
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So, there is, there has always been incumbent on the Australian government a degree of protection
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for people who do try to make that crossing because there is such a good chance that they
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will die in the process of doing so because it's the Tmall Sea, because it's northern Australia.
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What Keating did in 1992 was, because people objected to this, the electorate basically
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objects to people pitching up and saying, I want to live here now.
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Some of that is to do with a confusion with immigration.
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People look at immigration and see that it's regulated, it's controlled, it's subject to
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Then they see asylum seekers and it's not.
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And in some ways, there's an element of truth in this.
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They seem to be taking away from legitimate immigrants and getting something illegitimately.
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And the Australian expression that is used, and I've heard people over here starting to
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Now, when they say that, Australians do, it's a twofold claim.
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One, they're jumping the queue and getting ahead of legitimate immigrants because of that
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But the other one is that they're getting ahead of legitimate refugees who have already been
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assessed in third countries, whether it's in Indonesia.
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Typically, in Australia, our experience is with the government of Indonesia has decided
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either they are a refugee or they aren't a refugee.
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And so once those decisions have been made by the government in Jakarta, Australia will always
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look more favourably on those people because they've already been assessed to be refugees.
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And so if someone just pitches up in Northern Australia, they queue jump, they get ahead of
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people who have already achieved the legal status of refugee, which is different from
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They've actually ticked the various boxes that the United Nations and sometimes local governments
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have extra things that the United Nations says, this person is a refugee.
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They are fleeing persecution for X or Y reason.
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You should let them come into your country subject to these rules.
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So when Australians use the expression queue jumping, it has that twofold meaning.
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The first is kind of imprecise and the second is very precise and quite accurate.
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What Keating did, and then even more intensely John Howard in 2001, was got sick of people turning
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And because Australia, like Britain, has a cultural opposition to the use of identity
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If you're from a Roman law country that has no problem with the use of identity cards, always
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remember that papers please, a piece of paper proves what you are and who you are and how
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many heads you've got and so on, and your social status.
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That goes back to ancient Rome because slavery to them was a piece of paper.
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This is the difference between Roman civilisation and Greek civilisation.
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So the Roman view of identity papers has passed into every European country based on Roman law
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Common law countries have a different history and a different tradition.
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identity cards and identity papers are associated with, you know, popular and bitter from World
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War II and hello, hello and Dad's Army and all of that.
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And that's something those bad, the bad Bosch and bad Germans did.
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But it does mean that it's harder to keep track of people.
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Now, the Australian government under Bob Hawke tried to do what Tony Blair's government did
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It absolutely, and it was going to be called the Australia card, it absolutely blew up all
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over the Hawke-Keating government, even though it was very competent in many other respects.
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So that battle was lost in Australia the same way it was lost here, which meant that once
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asylum seekers got into the country and if they got away from port officials because there's
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an awful lot of coastline, then they were almost impossible to trace.
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Sometimes this could mean people dying in the desert, literally, or eaten by a crocodile,
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but in other places they just dissipated into the population.
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If you pitch up in Australia, you will be locked up in a detention centre and we will assess
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And it was basically Australia saying, no, we set these rules, you don't.
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But it wasn't at this stage the kind of rejection of the regime that exists for refugee policy
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under international law and under the Refugee Convention.
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That had to wait until 2001, where Timor Sea, unseaworthy vessels coming across,
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trying to get to Australia, a great big lot of Afghan, mainly Afghan and asylum seekers,
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were rescued by a Norwegian flagged vessel, the MV Tampa.
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And they were quite safe once they'd been rescued.
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It was a maritime merchant vessel, maritime vessel.
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They were quite safe, but the Norwegian sailors had nowhere to put them.
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And so there were incredible aerial photos before drones, incredible aerial photographs of the deck,
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You see them here, shipping cranes and whatnot, covered with all these asylum seekers.
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And they were going to finish up being deposited in Australia.
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And the government actually rushed through emergency legislation,
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creating what was known as it developed as the Pacific Solution.
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This is why when people were joking about, no, Tony Abbott isn't actually a racist or a homophobe or a sexist.
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You know, all the Monty Python jokes, Bruce in charge of the sheep dip.
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I mean, this is just, Australians are extremely blunt.
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Even wokeism has not been able to remove the bluntness of Australians, basically.
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But one of them was just excising all the islands around northern Australia, basically,
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from what is defined in the relevant legislation as the migration zone,
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which meant that if you landed on one of those islands, you couldn't legitimately claim asylum
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under the international legislation, under the Refugee Convention.
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Now, at various times, these policies were challenged in the country's superior constitutional court,
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Yes, Australia has a written constitution like the United States.
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It's, yes, it's broadly speaking, it's a liberal democracy, it's Westminster-based,
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and the things you associate with a Westminster democracy are entrenched in the constitution.
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Australia is a non-rights-based policy, basically.
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That doesn't mean that rights don't exist, but they just don't exist in the constitution.
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So it's very difficult if you are a massive human rights booster to try to entrench the approach
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to immigration or race relations or anything like that unless you get bipartisan support for it
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from the Labour Party and the coalition, the coalition being a unity ticket
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And because if you don't get support for your legislation from both of them,
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the other lot, when they get elected, will just repeal it.
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There's lots of examples of that in Australian history.
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You have to win over, you have to persuade like two-thirds of the people
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and two-thirds of the politicians to support your idea.
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But Helen, doesn't the Australians have a major advantage
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in that you referred it to yourself as being a blunt culture?
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They discuss it, whereas English people are like, well, I'm sorry.
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We don't seem to be able to have a rational discussion about immigration.
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I'm 38 years old and I can't remember a time where we have been able to have that discussion
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And this is one where the Brexiteers win this particular argument.
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Historically, you couldn't have an adult conversation about immigration because of membership.
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And this is just broadly immigration, not just refugees, but immigration because of your
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I mean, and all those people, regardless of their politics, who, you know, when they were
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asked by people from the BBC, or why do you have a problem with immigration from the EU?
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And people who responded, well, we weren't asked.
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That's an entirely fair response because Australians get asked every three years.
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And the reason the salience of immigration went so bonkers in 2016 was precisely because people
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And I mean, and obviously, even before COVID things had other things that ebbed away, Brexit
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But also, the Brexit vote was, we have now brought this, we have taken back control, the old take
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If immigration is brought under municipal control, domestic law, at the national level, then people
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are often more tolerant of immigrants than they appeared to be before that moment happened.
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Because it is now in the hands of the electorate, rather than in the hands of a supranational
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Now, Australia basically has abrogated the Refugee Convention.
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What does abrogate mean for people who are watching?
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Abrogation, in this context, it means they're signed up to the convention, but they've got so
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many carve-outs and exemptions that it doesn't apply.
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The expression that's sometimes used amongst lawyers is they talk about a piece of legislation
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falling into dissuaditude, despitude or dissuaditude.
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Basically, Australia is formally a signatory, but it's not following the rules.
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And because there's so little in the way of human rights legislation in Australia, and
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because the immigration and refugee policy is set on a bipartisan level, it can't be
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So what happens now in Australia if a boat from X reaches mainland Australia?
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And due to something that was introduced by Kevin Rudd, and I also didn't, he was a Labor
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Prime Minister, I didn't mention this in my chat with Mike Graham, but one of the things
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that Kevin Rudd did, he was Prime Minister twice.
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And the first time he was Prime Minister, when he was elected in 2007, he thought that the
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regime in Australia that had been introduced, Pacific Solution introduced by John Howard,
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which was so harsh, you know, you did have genuinely have boatloads of people in unseaworthy
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vessels, if the tamper wasn't there, something like that to rescue them, they drowned.
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You know, we did have incidences like that, where there's a memorial in Canberra to one
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lot of them, and you've got all these little headstones, and you've got a couple of hundred
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The boats stopped coming, because, oh my God, they're not going to let us in, and they
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It had a terror, it was a, had a terrifying effect on the people smugglers.
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It's, it collapsed their business model, basically, because this government was not going to come
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But Kevin Rudd introduced, if you pitch up by boat, and you do get to the mainland, so you
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don't finish up on one of the islands that's been excised from the migration zone.
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Kevin Rudd passed, his government passed legislation, that the second time around, that you will
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never, ever get, have the opportunity to be an Australian citizen.
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And because, basically, for a whole range of historical reasons, Australia has gone down
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the rights are a function of citizenship path, rather than rights are a function of residence
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So the rights are a function of residence path, it tends to be what's happened in the European
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Rights are a function of citizenship, is what's happened in Australia, New Zealand, it exists
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in Japan, it exists to a degree in the United States, although America is a very badly governed
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country, so it's a bit difficult to say what they're doing at any one time.
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So what that means, if you're not an Australian citizen, and can never be an Australian citizen,
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there are certain things that you will never be able to do.
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You will never be able to cast a ballot in Australia.
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But there are also welfare implications and employment implications.
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You can't become a police officer, you can't join the army, you can't join the civil service.
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You know, it has serious implications, it makes Australia a far less attractive place to go
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Now, Kevin Rudd did that, because he was Prime Minister twice, and there was Julia Gillard
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in the middle, this was this extraordinary period, where Australia had six Prime Ministers
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The first time, he did try to soften the Pacific solution, he thought it was too cruel.
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And Kevin Rudd was an ex-diplomat, he spoke fluent Mandarin, he was very outward looking,
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very trade-oriented, he was the kind of person who you would expect to be pro both refugees
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The effect, though, of his loosening, and I won't go into the details, but of his loosening
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of the rules, was that boats started coming again, people smugglers, same as we've got in
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the Channel, and the same problem of unseaworthy vessels, and people drowning.
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An enormous pressure was being brought to bear within the Labor Party.
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Obviously, something, you need to do something about this.
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This is, you're losing electoral consent for all the legitimate immigration, because you've
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got people turning up in the country again, because that's what happens, basically.
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If you don't have immigration under domestic control, you lose electoral consent for it,
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If it's not kept under the control of people who vote in this country, it's left under the
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auspices of a supranational entity, whether it's the European Union or the UN or whatever
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European Union here, then you lose the electoral consent and you get hostility to all immigration.
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It's a huge country and still underpopulated relative to the amount of arable land and
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And since 1945, Australia has had a policy of populate or perish, because it came within
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a bee's dick of being overrun by the Japanese during the Second World War.
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The Battle of the Coral Sea was a Japanese invasion fleet steaming towards Australia.
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And this tiny country that, for all the bravery of its soldiers, legendarily brave military
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personnel, I mean, it was actually said at the time in the Japanese High Command, Tojo commented,
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if we conquer, invade Australia and conquer it, we will have to kill every single one of them.
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So that is burnt into the cultural memory of Australia, the Battle of the Coral Sea.
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And just more generally, an awareness of the Pacific War.
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So we have to keep immigration legitimate in Australia.
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It has to remain popular on a bipartisan level.
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You cannot have the presence of a few refugees wrecking the rest of the system.
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Because of this vast size of the country and its desperate need for more people.
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So you can't let this little group over here, who might be being terribly persecuted, that
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might be true, and that's fine, and that's dandy, ruin the chances and the popular support
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for this vast group of people who were admitted every year into the country.
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John Howard realised it even more intensely in 2001.
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And then Kevin Rudd, when he became Prime Minister the second time around in 2013, he realised it as well.
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So he brought the rule in that said, if you pitch up and demand asylum in Australia by boat,
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in this irregular way, rather than going through the formal channels in Indonesia or on the islands
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excluded from the migration zone, you will never be a citizen of Australia.
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And that is, in my view, that is that rule that Rudd introduced, which the country still has,
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is a clear abrogation of the Refugee Convention.
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But as is always the case with international law, there's really no one to enforce it.
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So if a country decides that it's just not going to play by those particular rules,
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What made the European Union directive so interesting and different from international law,
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and this is why EU lawyers, they will describe the architecture of the European Union.
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They call it sui generis, you know, of its own kind, unique, that means in Latin,
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because it is a very, very distinctive legal order.
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It's at once international law, but it's international law with teeth.
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And that's what made the situation so desperately difficult for Britain,
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and it's what led the immigration issue to explode, not just all over the UK in 2016,
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You had a whole new political party that's now got lots of seats in the Bundestag,
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founded over Angela Merkel's mishandling of immigrants.
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All of these other countries, you know, including in countries, because for years,
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people always thought, oh, there will be no hard right political party in Germany ever.
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The closest that they'll ever get is something that's kind of like the Tory party.
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And there will never be, I mean, Matthew Goodwin used to say this before he,
00:27:36.700
you know, everyone used to say this, it will never happen in Germany.
00:27:40.860
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Maybe you find it tough or maybe you're just English.
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Right now, Babbel is offering Trigonometry fans six months completely free.
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All you've got to do is head over there, get the six-month subscription and use our special code, which is, of course, Trigger.
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Go to babbel.co.uk slash play and use the promo code Trigger on your six-month subscription.
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That's B-A-B-B-B-E-L.co.uk forward slash play and use the code Trigger.
00:29:26.040
And we're not going to explain how to spell the word Trigger because that would be patronising.
00:29:33.120
And, Helen, going back to the UK, now, so your argument seems to be that we need a clear, simple system for dealing with immigration
00:29:42.480
with penalties for people who pitch up in the manner that they've been doing.
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Why is it in this country, we've got a conservative government, we don't seem to be having a clear system,
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we don't seem to be having any form of penalties, people seem to be arriving here and then they get put on a coach
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and they get taken to a hotel, which is incentivising people to cross the channel.
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As every Australian and as Tony Abbott's been popping up and as every Australian will tell you,
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Yeah, which is therefore incentivising organised crime, which is incentivising people to come over
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Why is it under a conservative government, we don't seem to have a clear and workable system?
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A lot of this, in fact, I'd venture to say that all of it, is to do with low state capacity.
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State capacity is the ability of a state to project power over its own population.
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We're not talking about foreign countries, we're talking about within population.
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That means things like prosecuting criminals, ensuring things aren't corrupt, collecting taxes, securing the borders, state capacity.
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If you want to, I made the comment in the last time I was on trigonometry, I referred to the United States as a failed state.
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Like, it's the failure to do those kind of things at all, let alone well, is what makes Australians look at America and go,
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I love the way Helen was very concerned about offending the people of Huddersfield.
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But she has no problem calling the biggest, most powerful country in the world a failed state.
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Well, they've all got guns and they're busily shooting each other.
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Oh, I see the Americans are shooting each other again.
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So, what you've got is partly because of membership of the European Union, but only partly because it became very convenient for incompetent British governments to shoot the blame upstairs to Brussels.
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But partly because of reasons endogenous to the UK.
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If there is one ministry that I would fire out of the solar system, it is the Home Office.
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To use a very crude Australian expression, the Home Office could not run a two-door shithouse.
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The Home Office could not organise a piss-up in a brewery.
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The Home Office could not organise a fuck in a brothel.
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In ascending levels of rudeness, I've just given you three.
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I like the fact you opened with two-door shithouse.
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Having experienced the London rental market, I'm sure I've stayed in a few two-door shithouses in my time.
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To give you an idea of how useless the Home Office is, remember the Windrush scandal?
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Now, at the time, a lot of people were trying to claim this happened because the Home Office is racist.
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Life would be so much easier if it was just the fact that the Home Office were racist because you would then be able to go through and find all the racists.
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Racists are generally fairly obvious about what they are and who they are and what they believe.
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You just find all the racists and sack them and then the Home Office would be fine.
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However, this would not happen because the Home Office is fucked.
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The problem that you've got with the dinghies turning up from Calais is partly a function of your legal system.
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We're still in the process of unwinding a lot of the EU stuff.
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But most of it is just a function of sheer incompetence.
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But they're confident enough to get these people onto buses and into hotels, right?
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Well, I mean, your local high school can do this and so can your local five-a-side footy club.
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We're not dealing with things that are particularly difficult to organize, are we?
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Yeah, well, they're not doing that very well either.
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People finding out where they are and taking photographs and sticking them on the internet.
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I mean, you've got this problem of low state capacity, lack of competence, particularly in the Home Office.
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I mean, the Home Office is just notorious for this.
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It just can't – the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.
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You know, they're just hopeless, persistently hopeless.
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And I have to say, during the Leave campaign in 2016 saying we want an Australian-style points-based immigration system,
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However, you have to be actually good at governing to do one of those.
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And when I first saw that promise and then it was in the manifesto again in 2019,
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I just thought, I really hope you're hiring some Australians to run this because it's not as easy as it looks.
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To give you an idea, there was this persistent claim.
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And then, of course, The Economist basically stopped doing it because it realised it was embarrassing itself,
00:34:58.240
that you couldn't centrally plan an immigration policy.
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And you would regularly get articles to this effect in The Economist that you can't centrally plan an immigration policy.
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And every now and again, somebody in Australia, fairly senior in what's called the public service,
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and occasionally a politician would go, hello, have you looked down here and noticed how we do things?
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Until eventually there was public, there was international irritation over it.
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And I think one, either a former primist or a sitting primist, it might have even been Rudd,
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actually wrote to The Economist and said, can you please stop spreading this nonsense?
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Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's impossible.
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And ever since then, the articles about, oh, you can't centrally plan an immigration policy have stopped.
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But that was a standard, it was a standard piece of the open borders libertarian rhetoric
00:35:57.500
before they went weird and started saying that Bill Gates is causing COVID.
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If all libertarians went completely out to lunch.
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But the open borders people were always saying, well, you can't centrally plan this anyway.
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And basically you had 20 odd million Australians going.
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There is this giant unsinkable aircraft carrier, which is what Douglas MacArthur called Australia,
00:36:18.760
in the Southern Ocean that says, you're wrong, because you're wrong, Bruce.
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And if you've had a windback of state capacity, as every EU country has, and the UK has,
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because of the pooling of sovereignty, where immigration, the rules about immigration and refugees
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And then when they were, you did have vast numbers of refugees as opposed to immigrants,
00:36:51.280
because most people in the EU, it's refugees they're opposed to, not free movement within the EU.
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But then you had all those refugees turning up in Germany, and basically the EU was useless,
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because it had sort of been a gentleman's agreement of, oh, no, people won't turn up
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But then once they were in the European Union, because of free movement,
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they just fanned out everywhere, and the whole system broke down.
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But that's an example of a severe loss of state capacity in the ability to secure one's borders,
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and it's what led to all the problems in German politics.
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It's probably led to Brexit, and has led to all sorts of difficulties in Greek and Italian
00:37:37.320
So I looked at that promise in 2019, we will have an Australian points-based immigration system.
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Are you going to have to hire the entire of immigration and ethnic affairs to set it up for you?
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And by the way, you need to get rid of your rotten Electoral Commission and hire the Australian
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You know, just all of these basic state capacity issues that pretty much the whole of the European
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We have discovered that Germany still retains its state capacity in healthcare.
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The Australian system is the same as the German system, by the way.
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And to give you an idea of state capacity, Victoria, Australia's worst performing state with COVID,
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is still, if you look at the different statistical metrics, better performing than Germany,
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Britain lacks the state capacity to do an immigration policy based on the points-based system properly.
00:38:43.080
Is there, Helen, hold on, is there, I mean, I take your point about state capacity, essentially
00:38:47.920
we're talking about is competence in government, right?
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Because I don't know what it was like, and I'm sure you'll tell us, but if you had a government
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policy, let's say Boris Johnson is a sort of liberal Tory in power now, he already gets
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called a Nazi, fascist, all of this stuff, and he has been racist for years.
00:39:09.560
If he was to implement a policy that resulted in one boat that tragically sank, and all of
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us, of course, abhor any loss of life that would happen, but if he was to implement a policy
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that would discourage immigration, and as a side product of that, people had died, he'd
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I honestly don't know, because the intensity of the salience in 2016 of immigration in the
00:39:38.440
lead-up to the referendum vote, that could come back.
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As soon as there is a perception, and this is something that is now well-known amongst political
00:39:50.800
scientists, that a particular policy has run away from the electorate.
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You know, it's no longer under the control of the voters in country A, B, C, whatever.
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And it could be to do with immigration is the obvious one, but one of the reasons why the
00:40:11.800
fights are so medieval in the United States over abortion and guns is because nearly all
00:40:18.960
of the judgment calls that have been made on both abortion and guns haven't been made by
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electorates, they've been made in the SCOTUS, and judges aren't elected, that's, I mean,
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there is a very, very good reason why you want to depoliticise your judiciary, is because judges
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It's a great way of completely fouling up the system, because they need to be independent
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So you've, this situation where something is taken from the electorate, and they can't seem
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to control it, and their government can't seem to control it, that's a recipe for 2016.
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My point to you is, if you remember, prior, we had someone drown in the channel a few weeks
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It turned out he was 28 rather than 16, but it's still obviously a tragedy and horrible.
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But do you remember during the initial refugee stroke migration crisis, there was this boy
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Not really anything to do with Britain, frankly, but at that point, we had newspaper stories,
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Now, imagine if Britain had been responsible, if the British government had done something
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that had led to that sort of thing occurring, or perhaps a whole boat of people sinking.
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Terrible thing to do, obviously, or to even be associated with.
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But I'm just saying, I don't know what it was like for the Australian prime minister at
00:41:48.680
But in this country, I think it would destroy the reputation of the prime minister.
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I think amongst the liberal media, absolutely it would.
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I think amongst, you know, conservative and traditional voter bases, I don't think it would,
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But it wasn't just the Guardian that ran that story, it was the Daily Mail as well.
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It was covered when we had what they call sieve 10, when we had all of these people drowning
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in the Timor Sea, or eaten by crocodiles, or dying in the desert, or all of the various
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other things that was supposedly going on at the time.
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It was covered in the same, if it bleeds, it leads way, in the Australian press.
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But long history is a very good, accurate polling, the use of focus groups, the awareness that
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at the back of any elected Australian government is the whole people, not just the people who
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go to the polls, who choose to go to the polls.
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You're always aware that you just cannot, as a government, get on a hobby horse issue,
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refugee rights or that kind of thing, and then try to smoke it over the top of the Australian
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You will just get crucified at the next election because of compulsory voting.
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You know, the country is captured by the, this is the country where median voter theory
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So you've just got that distribution and the big lump of people in the middle, and so
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It was extraordinary, absolutely, because it was becoming very clear that what Howard was
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going to do was abrogate the Refugee Convention, albeit in a quiet sort of relatively
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But when I say relatively sneaky, you're still talking multiple instances of high court
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You know, so like this, like the proroguing parliament case here, you know, so it was
00:44:00.860
But he ran into that election in 2001 with the slogan, we will determine who comes here and
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That was used as the Tampa election tagline and was basically a one-sentence summary of
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the Pacific solution that the Howard government introduced.
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I don't know what would happen in Britain if Boris Johnson were more likely to be a Priti
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Patel who's much more of a traditional hanging and flogging and more authoritarian kind of
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They were the ones that wanted to bring back hanging and all of that kind of thing.
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You turn up to constituency association meetings and there's always at least one person there
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And so I actually am really reluctant to say that a Prime Minister who did that would be destroyed
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because I have a sneaking suspicion that the electorate would respond the way the Australian
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electorate responded and that you would have howls of outrage from the media.
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You did in Australia, absolute howls of outrage and from human rights lawyers
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and the wider human rights industry and that kind of thing.
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But if you're paying attention to the people who vote for you or who could vote for you in a country
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with non-compulsory voting, then you just know that the howls of outrage are deeply
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The Greens cannot crack any more than 10% of the vote in Australia.
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Even without compulsory voting here, if they make 15%, the vote's so thinly spread through the population
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that they're going to continue to win their one seat in Brighton and that will be it.
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So one of the things people have to learn to do to do this kind of governance
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is just to ignore the media class and to ignore the human rights lawyer class.
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They are a tiny and unrepresentative group and you are not governing for them
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Well, see, I actually agree with you, Helen, because I think that most people,
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I don't think they would be avert about this when talking to their friends or relatives
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or whatever else, but I think deep down most people would be in agreement.
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And at the same time, let me just ask the question there.
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At the same time, is there a compassionate solution to this?
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Because even the people who wouldn't feel that strongly about it, as Francis says,
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I don't think there's a single person in this country,
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no matter how strongly they feel about immigration or refugees
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or even people who claim to be refugees when actually they're economic migrants,
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there isn't a single person in this country who wants those people to drown.
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I will give you a story from the first iteration of Kevin Rudd
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One of his immigration ministers at the time, there were two.
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I think this was Chris Burke, who was the second one,
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And one of the things he was doing was that every time they got a confirmed drowning,
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he was sitting in his ministerial, in the ministerial wing of Australian Parliament House,
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which is that vast Aztec temple, it looks like.
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And he was over in the ministerial wing in his fancy office.
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And every time there was a confirmed drowning, not just a rumoured one,
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because there are disputes about how many people have drowned,
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but when it was from, like, the Navy or the Coast Guard,
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And there was a very moving newspaper article about how complicated this issue is
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and the fact that there probably isn't a compassionate solution,
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where a journalist turned up into the immigration minister's office
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and just casually asked him as the TV crew was setting up their cameras,
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oh, what do all those, minister, what do all those matchsticks mean?
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Oh, each one of those matchsticks is a drowned asylum seeker.
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he did that to remind himself of the human cost.
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And to answer, to return to your original question,
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And if I knew one, I would have, a number of times,
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because of my Australian background and experience in Canberra,
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there have been attempts to recruit me to positions
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I mean, they went and got Chloe Wesley from the Taxpayers Alliance.
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And once again, one of these creatures of Canberra,
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an Australian background person who's worked in the Aussie system.
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But I don't think there is a compassionate solution.
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If I knew one, I would have instantly responded to any of those
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I'll only leave if your mum comes with me back.
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Personally, I think the original rule in the sort of governing international law
00:50:08.520
for asylum claims that you claim in the first safe country needs
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And it's become fairly clear, for example, that one of the reasons
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why people are coming across from France, which is in many ways a better place
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Better food and a better welfare state, more generous welfare state,
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There's a very big, one of the reasons why is that France is still
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And all of the woke ideas that originally came from France
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but have now gone to America, they have no influence in France at all.
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So huge, huge social expectation in France that you will learn French.
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That is why Parisians are rude to you if you attempt to speak
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their language to them badly and they'd rather speak it English.
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But it's just that huge social pressure to go to France and to want to live there
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for the rest of your life is very much to become French.
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And one of the reasons why the Islamists have chafed so hard in France
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is a combination of laicite, the secularism that is,
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and that's a bad translation of a French word, but it's secularism.
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We'll have to do it because it's not quite right.
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It's a combination of the secularity of the French state,
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but also the nationalism in a very traditional sense of the French state.
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The easy come, easy go, more relaxed approach to integration,
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which I don't personally think works, that exists in Britain is far more attractive.
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And then, of course, the global language is no longer French, used to be, but it's English now.
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So lots and lots of those people on the dinghies will have a little bit of English.
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And English and French are, in many respects, they're opposite to each other.
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French, when you first start to learn it, it's like a pyramid.
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And all the difficult stuff is at the beginning.
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So the people on French television, you know, they're journalists.
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They don't make your life easier by using simple French.
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But with French, it gets easier and easier and easier.
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And once you've been learning it for two or three years, it's suddenly you're fluent.
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Lots of people who speak bugger all English can make themselves understood in it
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The problem, of course, is unlike French, it gets harder and harder and harder.
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So you can learn basic English and communicate, but the idea that you might be able to one day
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learn enough English to hold down anything other than a job digging ditches is going to take a lot longer.
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So they're often under a misapprehension about how quickly they can integrate into an English-speaking country.
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So I think a big part of a compassionate solution is actually really strongly imposing the first safe country.
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And Faisal al-Muttar, have you had him on TriggerPod before?
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He said, a lot of them, these people who are Muslim, they're not violent.
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They're not going to go and blow up a pop concert in Manchester or anything like that.
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But they're going to find living in a Western secular country very, very difficult.
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And that process of living in, adapting to a Western secular country, this has probably happened in France quite a bit with a lot of Muslim immigrants.
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They weren't radical when they got there, but they became radicalised because the country is just so different.
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He said, you need to encourage conservative, non-violent Muslims to move to a safe but still Muslim country because the West is just such a shock to the system for them.
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Even with the best will in the world, they finish up not being able to integrate into a Western country because it's completely different.
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But, yeah, so that would be part of a solution to a more compassionate, part of a more compassionate solution is be aware of the really, really large cultural differences that exist among various refugee groups.
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Understand when, for example, a Muslim minority, because they have all the same things as Christianity with all the little factions and grouplets and God knows what, is going to really struggle in a Western country.
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But they're going to be able to cope in another safe Muslim country.
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But that does mean saying you're probably not going to fit in in Paris or London or if you go outside of London, if you go to a part of a country that's still full of pubs, you know, you're just going to struggle.
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You're better off staying where you are or just the country next door.
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So what you're saying is we can talk about this here and it sounds perfectly reasonable, but in reality there's no way that we could implement that, could we, without cries of racism?
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Oh, you're going to get discrimination, all the rest of it.
00:55:54.860
To be fair, in Australia they were also the same.
00:55:57.860
I mean, once again, if you want to see an unrepresentative sample, just go on Twitter.
00:56:03.700
And that applies to Australia as much as it does to any other country.
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Just get on hashtag AusPol, which is hashtag AusPol.Crockpit, was always the way I considered it,
00:56:15.280
because it is just very, very fraught sometimes.
00:56:22.540
But you will get plenty of people who will be absolutely convinced that everything the Australian government, whether it's a Labor government or a coalition government,
00:56:30.580
doesn't matter because this policy is bipartisan.
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And if the current prime minister is Scott Morrison, he's an awful racist.
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But if it were Tony Albanese, Anthony Albanese, the Labor leader, he would be a horrible racist as well.
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But on the practical side of things, you mentioned people claiming asylum in the first country in which they're right.
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And you probably end up paying those countries quite a lot of money for them to do that.
00:57:04.600
And Australia did finish up having to do this with neighbouring countries, which is entirely, you can't blame,
00:57:09.960
particularly if they're per head of population, they're poorer than the developed country.
00:57:14.660
And it seems like a strange question to ask now that we've been talking about it for an hour.
00:57:19.780
Are we not exaggerating the scale of this issue, Helen?
00:57:22.180
I take your point, which is a small number of people jumping the queue creates a public relations impact
00:57:28.860
in terms of people's attitude towards legal immigration, in terms of people's attitudes towards legal and just asylum seekers,
00:57:36.480
because some people should get asylum in this country.
00:57:44.940
It was at the beginning in Australia, it was only a few hundred people, but eventually it becomes a flood.
00:57:48.700
And then you've got the underlying state capacity issue.
00:57:53.820
If you can't control your borders, if you can't protect life, liberty and property, you know, very basic.
00:58:03.300
If you can't provide the most basic level of governance and security, then that's when you start getting into the wheels falling off the developed country,
00:58:20.480
And it is what has, and in many areas, not just immigration, because there's obviously been issues with the whole thing that's been going on for years now, it seems, in America.
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But this whole broad scale problem of just incompetent governance, it finishes up just propagating through the entire administration of the state.
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And you cannot have that, because we are now looking at what happens to a country when that happens, and that is happening in the United States right now.
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And they're trying to run an election campaign in the middle of it, and I don't know how you're supposed to do any of that.
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I feel very sorry for Americans having to live through that at the moment.
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Everything is a big mess, and there are no obvious or easy solutions.
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And some of them are stymied in the sense that you can't do something because there's a constitutional rule or a legal judgment or a major separation of powers impediment to doing anything.
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I mean, it is why Obama, and Trump has not done it, weirdly has not done it as much as Obama, but he's catching up, is this government by executive order, the constant governance by using the power of the executive.
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I mean, he's meant to do it a little bit, but not to the extent that Obama and now Trump have done.
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But they're doing it because the system is completely paralysed in every other respect.
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I just think you need to those very, very basic state capacity levels of governance.
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And because if you don't deliver them, you really are, in my view, on the road to hell.
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And Helen, do you think that this conservative government are going to have the balls to implement a system?
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They're going to have to do something because they will – it's literally a case of something will die.
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And the second question is, are they competent enough to deliver this system?
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Now, the fact that they're quite transparently recruiting Australians, both quietly, as I've experienced, but also publicly in the form of someone like Tony Abbott.
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But there are plenty of others, and I am hearing on the Bush Telegraph through sort of Canberra special advisor – well, they don't call them special advisors.
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They're called advisors or senior advisors or chiefs of staff in Australia.
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There is quite a lot of very active recruitment going on, but they are going to have to do some very rapid upskilling about –
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the only thing I can say with complete confidence is, with the exception of health care in Germany, so is every other European Union country, and so is the European Union itself.
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We have become very fat and very dumb and very happy and very slack when it comes to core questions of government competence.
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So when something, in the grand scheme of pandemics, not that bad, coronavirus, bad, but not that bad, comes along, it is just absolutely exposed governments of every stripe all over the world,
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except for ones with very, very significant state capacity in health care.
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Some cultures, the East Asian countries, they had an awareness based on the experience with SARS.
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But Australia and New Zealand didn't have the SARS experience, but they've responded just as well as the East Asian countries.
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And they also don't have the masking culture either.
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And indeed, one of the problems that's happened in Australia is an attempt to do mask mandates just in one state in Victoria.
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It's not gone down very well with the Australian population there because it is not part of Australian culture.
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And I could have told all, you didn't need the nudge unit, you know, to say there was going to be difficulties with masks in Britain.
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I mean, the idea of covering your face has been bad in Western Europe since we have records.
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You know, like literally Roman writers would laugh at the Persians because the veiling of the face or covering the face for religious rituals
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or because you're a married woman or that kind of thing existed in Persia before Islam.
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Islam made it worse, but it existed in places like Persia before then.
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And you would have Roman writers laughing at Persians and Jews for covering their faces
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and laughing at Persians and Jews for showing respect by doing this, dropping their head.
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Whereas the Roman idea of respect, and you even see it on Roman wedding rings, is a handshake and look directly in the eye.
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And that has passed into modern Western cultures.
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A little bit of knowledge of classical history and the civilisational roots of Western Europe could have told you
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that if you come up with mask mandates and try to impose them on primarily Caucasian and African populations,
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they are going to tell you to jump in the lake.
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And we've seen that and that's why we've got all the problems with it.
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But Victoria and Australia too, very high state capacity country, very good at being quite authoritarian where necessary,
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All of the Australian Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful.
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There was only COVID outbreaks as a result of one, and it wasn't actually the protests that caused it.
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It was because the silly billies had organised a buffet afterwards and a whole heap of them went up
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And, you know, buffets, that's why cruise ships are dangerous as well.
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But just to say, if there was a buffet at one of them, I might have attended one.
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But is this – actually, just on that very point, just as a final little bit of curiosity,
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is this why we now see stories from Australia of a pregnant woman being arrested for a Facebook post,
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a grandfather, all of this, because the other side of the state capacity coin
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I strongly – one of the reasons why Australian governments get away with being so authoritarian
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However, the danger with being very good at what you do and producing really quite a compliant population
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and comparing the Black Lives Matter protests in Australia to pretty much every other developed country
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Look at the ones that happened in Sydney and in Brisbane,
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which were two states that don't have lockdown and are out of lockdown now.
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And there were no COVID cases as a result of those protests or anything like that.
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And they're all just walking in a very relaxed and calm way down the street,
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And you just look at that and you go, gee, what a good way to run a protest.
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But one of the reasons why that does exist in Australia is the state – the country is authoritarian.
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The reason I live here, as much as I admire Australians and Australia for its ability to govern so very well,
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the side effect of it, the state capacity, is this authoritarianism.
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So now you've got the pregnant lady getting arrested in her pyjamas just before she's about to have an ultrasound,
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which for those of you who are familiar with pregnant ladies means that she's full of wee,
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which is why she's somewhat desperate in the video.
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That's what happens when you get a government that is used to getting its own way,
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that is good at getting its own way, that generally runs things well,
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and then suddenly there's been a stuff up and there has been a stuff up with the hotel quarantine situation in Victoria.
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And then, oh, well, we're just going to boss you then.
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That's how you get situations like that emerge.
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You know, how much authoritarianism is each saved life worth?
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And that doesn't mean to say I approve of the terrible violence that has happened at various protests in the United States,
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Let's say some of them are legitimate, some of the protests both by pro-Trump people
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and by pro-Antifa or Black Lives Matter people.
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Let's just assume, give them their case at its highest and assume that it's legitimate.
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You just can't have that level of violence and continue to make your point.
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And it just encourages, in a country like Australia, where you do have the high state capacity,
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it just says, no, we're not going to be like them.
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It doesn't matter how good your point is and we're just going to do this.
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And that is the great risk of the high state capacity country that is still nonetheless a liberal democracy
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and, in a sense, Australia and New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, Canada,
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You can get that great governance and still be a democracy,
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but you need to look at those two countries because that is your future
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if you get that great governance and want to keep your democracy.
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The alternative is you can have great governance and have no democracy
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and then you need to move quite a lot further north of the equator and go to China
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But that is the great risk that this has exposed, the coronavirus.
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How much authoritarianism is each save life worth?
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And do you want Australia and New Zealand to be your future?
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I mean, I moved back because I'm a dual national.
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I moved back over here precisely because I didn't want that aspect of Australia
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But does that mean that you get freer countries are struggling with COVID
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and compared to Australia, Germany is struggling with COVID
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because of the difference in state capacity even there,
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And as we've been talking about for the last hour,
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it's not just COVID that freer countries struggle with.
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But we've run out of time, Helen, and we've got one more question for you.
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Which is, what is the one thing we're not talking about but we really should be?
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Well, we've been talking about it quite a lot here, but I'll say it again.
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Persecution and Toleration is the book by Mark Koyama and Noel Johnson.
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And it is basically a history of the development, an economic history
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because this is an economic phenomenon, of the development of state capacity
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across Western Europe and then to a lesser extent the United States
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And one of the little questions that they do in the course of the book is,
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if you were able to go back in time and be the king or queen of England in 1500
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and you wanted to set up compulsory primary school education
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and the NHS, you wanted to do that, you know, you had the knowledge
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and the technology, you've been able to take that back in time with you,
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And it would be impossible because you lack the state capacity to do it.
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It's completely separate question from technology.
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We've forgotten that governance is hard, that you can't just do it
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by soundbite, that there are no wins, only trade-offs,
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and that sometimes there is no good answer to a really complicated policy question.
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You know, paying back the COVID debt is probably going to be the end
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There are no – that's not going to make anybody very happy.
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You know, there are no good ways out for complicated policy conundrums.
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And to even have a chance of dealing with complicated policy issues,
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you need improvement in state capacity, investment in state capacity.
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And then even worse again is the United States.
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I would hate to be Biden because I think he's probably going to win the election.
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I would hate to be Joe Biden and his advisers because they're just going to –
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it's a much worse version of what happened when Gordon Brown was voted out.
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But worse than that because it's not just no money.
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There's lots and lots of other things that there isn't anything on either.
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We need to get better at it and stop pretending that you can just do it by soundbite.
01:11:37.500
Helen, thank you so much for coming on the show.
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I realise you've alienated every single one of our American viewers.
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If they want to read some of your fabulous award-winning books.
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This is the one that is the publishing industry one.
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There is actually an essay in the beginning of that one that explains the publishing issue that I would have liked to have talked about.
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And that was the one that won the prizes and caused a big stink.
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And that's my second and third novel, which is what imagine what would happen if the Romans had had an industrial revolution.
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And it's interestingly, that was very much writing about a high state capacity authoritarian regime, because that's what those books are about.
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And the thing that really shocked me about Kingdom of the Wicked was the number of people who wrote to me.
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And it was very clear that they'd quite like to live in the world that I'd created.
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We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode or a live stream.
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And they always go out Tuesday to Sunday at 7pm UK time.