TRIGGERnometry - Can We Solve the Migrant Crisis？ with Helen Dale

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:09.080 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:14.320 Our brilliant returning guest today is a lawyer, journalist, author. Ellen Dale, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:00:20.980 Hello, Constantine. Hello, Francis.

00:00:22.780 It's good to have you back. I've just realized...

00:00:24.660 It looks very different.

00:00:25.520 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.

00:00:32.400 Well, that's normally what we do. People normally come here at the ends of their careers after being cancelled.

00:00:39.080 And we just bury them.

00:00:40.880 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.

00:00:52.600 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.

00:01:07.400 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.

00:01:17.800 So what can we in this country learn from the experiences of Australia and what do we need to think about in that context?

00:01:24.080 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,

00:01:41.880 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.

00:02:00.340 The debate is identical.

00:02:01.800 It's really freaky and weird.

00:02:03.120 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.

00:02:16.420 And unfortunately, though, because Britain has generally lower state capacity than Australia, the arguments are not as erudite.

00:02:26.380 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.

00:02:38.140 If you look at when Scott Morrison was the Immigration Minister in Tony Abbott's government, he was the one who stopped the boats.

00:02:44.920 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,

00:02:55.220 oh, but Tony Abbott stopped the boats.

00:02:57.620 And in a headline sense, that's true.

00:03:00.220 He was the Prime Minister.

00:03:02.200 But the person who did the detailed policy work was Scott Morrison.

00:03:06.880 He was the Immigration Minister at the time.

00:03:09.040 Scott Morrison is now, of course, the Australian Prime Minister.

00:03:12.840 So Abbott was kind of getting credit for something that he didn't actually personally do.

00:03:17.780 Whereas the trade deals, that's much more the PMO, the Prime Minister's Office in Australia.

00:03:23.420 So he does deserve the credit for those because they tend to be worked up in the PMO, in Australian Parliament House in Canberra.

00:03:32.680 But more broadly, coming back to the issue, you said the arguments are the same.

00:03:36.860 So perhaps for people who haven't been paying that close attention or we have people watching the show all over the world,

00:03:42.880 we have an issue which is we have increasing numbers of people crossing the English Channel from France on boats,

00:03:52.140 some of whom are genuine refugees, some of whom are claiming to be refugees,

00:03:57.180 some of whom are quite obviously economic migrants,

00:03:59.600 and they're coming into this country illegally claiming asylum, etc.

00:04:04.260 So just give us the broad context.

00:04:07.300 What are the arguments on both sides about the issue?

00:04:09.780 Okay, what happens is in a country, pick a country at the moment, it's Britain,

00:04:14.680 people arrive and claim asylum.

00:04:19.420 And there are disputes about whether they are actually able to claim asylum,

00:04:24.640 and there's all sorts of detail there.

00:04:26.020 But what happens in the process of them turning up is that because there is a network,

00:04:31.960 a web of international treaties, supposedly, but you've got to be careful of this,

00:04:36.540 governing how refugees or people who claim refugee status, they claim asylum,

00:04:42.460 they haven't been proven to be refugees, they have to go through a process for that to happen.

00:04:46.820 They turn up in a country and they're not wanted by the local people.

00:04:50.580 That's almost inevitably the case.

00:04:53.260 And yet, it's very difficult for countries to make their nation state unattractive,

00:05:02.860 particularly if it's a developed country.

00:05:05.620 And Britain is a good example of that.

00:05:07.260 Australia was a good example of that, to make their nation state unattractive in some way,

00:05:11.140 to repel boatloads of refugees.

00:05:13.800 In this context, it's important to draw a distinction between immigration,

00:05:17.600 which is regulated everywhere.

00:05:19.600 People have different rules.

00:05:20.800 There are better and worse systems of rules, but it's all subject to a legal process.

00:05:26.080 You've been through this process.

00:05:27.480 You've been through aspects of this process with your family.

00:05:29.940 So have I in Australia and the UK.

00:05:32.780 That's one completely different area.

00:05:35.340 And it is actually much more controlled, particularly now Brexit has happened,

00:05:39.740 than people give it credit for.

00:05:41.380 Refugees, asylum seekers, totally different kettle of fish.

00:05:44.160 Now, what happened in Australia was basically we have always had the experience and the expression

00:05:50.220 that's used in Australia is boat people attempting to seek sanctuary in Australia,

00:05:55.480 because the region, not as much now, but it was historically quite unstable around Australia.

00:06:02.280 You know, lots of third world dictatorships, basically,

00:06:04.380 whereas Australia was this prosperous, orderly country that had a very high standard of living

00:06:09.240 and high GDP and all of that kind of thing.

00:06:12.680 And the other issue, and this is something that I didn't say when I talked about the immigration

00:06:18.080 issue on Mike Graham's show, but I will say here because I've got more time,

00:06:21.840 is that the journey to northern Australia, if you are an asylum seeker, is perilous.

00:06:27.620 And one of the big differences between the situation that Britain is confronted with

00:06:35.380 and what happened in Australia historically is that there is a very large difference

00:06:41.080 between the 22 miles of the English Channel and the Timor Sea.

00:06:47.380 So, and the peril in Australia is twofold.

00:06:51.100 It's not just the size and the expanse and the hostility of the ocean.

00:06:54.340 The other issue is in northern Australia, if you miss Darwin or Broome,

00:07:00.580 you finish up wandering around in very, very inhospitable country.

00:07:06.660 And you will die unless you're very, very lucky, unless you happen to pitch up near a remote

00:07:13.100 outstation or a remote Aboriginal community.

00:07:17.940 And some of the Aboriginal communities are so remote, they might see white people

00:07:22.200 or yellow people, Asian people once a year, if they're lucky.

00:07:26.640 So, all the jokes about Australia, you know, it's full of things that want to kill you.

00:07:31.620 These apply in spades in northern Australia, the home of the saltwater crocodile.

00:07:36.660 Just like crossing the channel, landing in Huddersfield.

00:07:39.640 Yeah.

00:07:40.980 Okay.

00:07:41.860 People of Huddersfield.

00:07:42.980 I'm angry at Huddersfield.

00:07:44.360 I'm going to ring you.

00:07:44.840 They've all stopped watching a long time.

00:07:46.180 All right.

00:07:46.500 Okay.

00:07:46.840 But, yeah, so basically it's full of things that will eat you, sting you, drown you,

00:07:51.460 make your life awful.

00:07:53.480 So, there is, there has always been incumbent on the Australian government a degree of protection

00:08:00.140 for people who do try to make that crossing because there is such a good chance that they

00:08:05.860 will die in the process of doing so because it's the Tmall Sea, because it's northern Australia.

00:08:12.180 What Keating did in 1992 was, because people objected to this, the electorate basically

00:08:20.940 objects to people pitching up and saying, I want to live here now.

00:08:24.540 And some of, people object to that.

00:08:26.780 Some of that is to do with a confusion with immigration.

00:08:30.020 People look at immigration and see that it's regulated, it's controlled, it's subject to

00:08:33.680 a legal process.

00:08:34.720 Then they see asylum seekers and it's not.

00:08:37.720 And they seem to be taking away.

00:08:40.000 And in some ways, there's an element of truth in this.

00:08:43.140 They seem to be taking away from legitimate immigrants and getting something illegitimately.

00:08:48.660 It does look like that.

00:08:49.760 And the Australian expression that is used, and I've heard people over here starting to

00:08:53.480 use it now, is they're queue jumping.

00:08:56.320 Now, when they say that, Australians do, it's a twofold claim.

00:09:00.840 One, they're jumping the queue and getting ahead of legitimate immigrants because of that

00:09:04.420 tendency to confuse the two.

00:09:06.140 But the other one is that they're getting ahead of legitimate refugees who have already been

00:09:11.360 assessed in third countries, whether it's in Indonesia.

00:09:16.060 Typically, in Australia, our experience is with the government of Indonesia has decided

00:09:20.400 either they are a refugee or they aren't a refugee.

00:09:24.000 And so once those decisions have been made by the government in Jakarta, Australia will always

00:09:29.660 look more favourably on those people because they've already been assessed to be refugees.

00:09:34.840 And so if someone just pitches up in Northern Australia, they queue jump, they get ahead of

00:09:40.480 people who have already achieved the legal status of refugee, which is different from

00:09:44.980 the claim of asylum.

00:09:46.920 They've actually ticked the various boxes that the United Nations and sometimes local governments

00:09:52.420 have extra things that the United Nations says, this person is a refugee.

00:09:57.280 They are fleeing persecution for X or Y reason.

00:10:00.660 You should let them come into your country subject to these rules.

00:10:03.560 So when Australians use the expression queue jumping, it has that twofold meaning.

00:10:09.040 The first is kind of imprecise and the second is very precise and quite accurate.

00:10:14.100 What Keating did, and then even more intensely John Howard in 2001, was got sick of people turning

00:10:23.940 up uninvited.

00:10:24.780 And because Australia, like Britain, has a cultural opposition to the use of identity

00:10:31.760 cards, you can track people much more easily.

00:10:34.140 If you're from a Roman law country that has no problem with the use of identity cards, always

00:10:40.160 remember that papers please, a piece of paper proves what you are and who you are and how

00:10:44.620 many heads you've got and so on, and your social status.

00:10:47.100 That goes back to ancient Rome because slavery to them was a piece of paper.

00:10:54.260 It wasn't a comment on your moral worth.

00:10:57.040 This is the difference between Roman civilisation and Greek civilisation.

00:11:00.820 So the Roman view of identity papers has passed into every European country based on Roman law

00:11:07.620 and then into the laws of the European Union.

00:11:10.800 Common law countries have a different history and a different tradition.

00:11:13.240 identity cards and identity papers are associated with, you know, popular and bitter from World

00:11:19.440 War II and hello, hello and Dad's Army and all of that.

00:11:23.320 And that's something those bad, the bad Bosch and bad Germans did.

00:11:26.780 You know, Jerry did that.

00:11:27.680 We don't do that.

00:11:28.900 But it does mean that it's harder to keep track of people.

00:11:32.680 Now, the Australian government under Bob Hawke tried to do what Tony Blair's government did

00:11:38.380 and introduce ID cards.

00:11:40.160 It absolutely, and it was going to be called the Australia card, it absolutely blew up all

00:11:45.800 over the Hawke-Keating government, even though it was very competent in many other respects.

00:11:49.880 It failed.

00:11:50.920 And I just, I remember graffiti on bridges.

00:11:52.820 You've already got an identity.

00:11:54.160 You don't need a card.

00:11:55.680 No to the Australia card.

00:11:57.760 So that battle was lost in Australia the same way it was lost here, which meant that once

00:12:03.860 asylum seekers got into the country and if they got away from port officials because there's

00:12:08.920 an awful lot of coastline, then they were almost impossible to trace.

00:12:13.640 Sometimes this could mean people dying in the desert, literally, or eaten by a crocodile,

00:12:17.960 but in other places they just dissipated into the population.

00:12:22.080 So Keating introduced mandatory detention.

00:12:24.440 If you pitch up in Australia, you will be locked up in a detention centre and we will assess

00:12:29.380 whether you are a refugee or not.

00:12:32.540 And it was basically Australia saying, no, we set these rules, you don't.

00:12:39.580 But it wasn't at this stage the kind of rejection of the regime that exists for refugee policy

00:12:46.220 under international law and under the Refugee Convention.

00:12:48.920 That had to wait until 2001, where Timor Sea, unseaworthy vessels coming across,

00:12:57.620 trying to get to Australia, a great big lot of Afghan, mainly Afghan and asylum seekers,

00:13:04.640 were rescued by a Norwegian flagged vessel, the MV Tampa.

00:13:08.660 And they were quite safe once they'd been rescued.

00:13:12.760 It was a maritime merchant vessel, maritime vessel.

00:13:15.880 They were quite safe, but the Norwegian sailors had nowhere to put them.

00:13:20.780 And so there were incredible aerial photos before drones, incredible aerial photographs of the deck,

00:13:29.120 the entire deck of a big shipping vessel.

00:13:31.860 And you know what these look like.

00:13:32.960 You see them here, shipping cranes and whatnot, covered with all these asylum seekers.

00:13:40.480 And they were going to finish up being deposited in Australia.

00:13:44.980 And the government actually rushed through emergency legislation,

00:13:50.480 creating what was known as it developed as the Pacific Solution.

00:13:56.260 And that's a bad name.

00:13:57.760 It's just a bad name.

00:13:58.960 It's a bad name.

00:13:59.760 It's a bad name.

00:14:00.480 It's got connotations historically.

00:14:02.060 You don't want to go there.

00:14:03.280 Yeah, but at least it has more sunshine.

00:14:05.700 Pacific Solution, yeah, the Pacific Solution.

00:14:08.480 That was what they called it.

00:14:10.480 Yeah.

00:14:11.340 This is why when people were joking about, no, Tony Abbott isn't actually a racist or a homophobe or a sexist.

00:14:18.100 He's just an Australian.

00:14:20.540 You know, all the Monty Python jokes, Bruce in charge of the sheep dip.

00:14:23.980 And no pofters.

00:14:27.600 I mean, this is just, Australians are extremely blunt.

00:14:30.720 Even wokeism has not been able to remove the bluntness of Australians, basically.

00:14:36.360 It's a very blunt culture.

00:14:38.100 So Pacific Solution, it became.

00:14:40.840 And this had a number of elements.

00:14:42.640 But one of them was just excising all the islands around northern Australia, basically,

00:14:48.480 from what is defined in the relevant legislation as the migration zone,

00:14:53.040 which meant that if you landed on one of those islands, you couldn't legitimately claim asylum

00:14:59.600 under the international legislation, under the Refugee Convention.

00:15:04.400 Now, at various times, these policies were challenged in the country's superior constitutional court,

00:15:10.360 High Court of Australia.

00:15:11.820 Yes, Australia has a written constitution like the United States.

00:15:15.300 It's, yes, it's broadly speaking, it's a liberal democracy, it's Westminster-based,

00:15:20.860 and the things you associate with a Westminster democracy are entrenched in the constitution.

00:15:26.680 It does not, however, have a Bill of Rights.

00:15:30.960 Australia is a non-rights-based policy, basically.

00:15:37.080 That doesn't mean that rights don't exist, but they just don't exist in the constitution.

00:15:42.280 So it's very difficult if you are a massive human rights booster to try to entrench the approach

00:15:50.140 to immigration or race relations or anything like that unless you get bipartisan support for it

00:15:56.460 from the Labour Party and the coalition, the coalition being a unity ticket

00:16:03.020 between the Liberals and the Nationals.

00:16:07.080 And because if you don't get support for your legislation from both of them,

00:16:12.640 the other lot, when they get elected, will just repeal it.

00:16:15.220 And that's what tends to happen.

00:16:17.200 There's lots of examples of that in Australian history.

00:16:19.300 You have to win over, you have to persuade like two-thirds of the people

00:16:23.680 and two-thirds of the politicians to support your idea.

00:16:26.840 But Helen, doesn't the Australians have a major advantage

00:16:30.280 in that you referred it to yourself as being a blunt culture?

00:16:33.700 It is.

00:16:33.820 They get to the point.

00:16:34.800 They discuss it, whereas English people are like, well, I'm sorry.

00:16:38.640 We don't seem to be able to have a rational discussion about immigration.

00:16:45.060 I'm 38 years old and I can't remember a time where we have been able to have that discussion

00:16:51.880 in this country.

00:16:53.540 Well, historically, you couldn't have it.

00:16:55.200 And this is one where the Brexiteers win this particular argument.

00:16:58.420 Historically, you couldn't have an adult conversation about immigration because of membership.

00:17:01.880 And this is just broadly immigration, not just refugees, but immigration because of your

00:17:06.500 membership of the European Union.

00:17:08.580 And I'm sorry, that's why it festered.

00:17:12.880 I mean, and all those people, regardless of their politics, who, you know, when they were

00:17:17.740 asked by people from the BBC, or why do you have a problem with immigration from the EU?

00:17:22.220 And people who responded, well, we weren't asked.

00:17:26.620 That's an entirely fair response because Australians get asked every three years.

00:17:32.800 And the reason the salience of immigration went so bonkers in 2016 was precisely because people

00:17:42.900 were being asked for the first time.

00:17:46.300 And it's ebbed away since.

00:17:49.760 And I mean, and obviously, even before COVID things had other things that ebbed away, Brexit

00:17:54.600 had become a proxy for it.

00:17:56.020 But also, the Brexit vote was, we have now brought this, we have taken back control, the old take

00:18:02.340 back control slogan from 2016.

00:18:05.800 If immigration is brought under municipal control, domestic law, at the national level, then people

00:18:16.680 are often more tolerant of immigrants than they appeared to be before that moment happened.

00:18:21.980 Because it is now in the hands of the electorate, rather than in the hands of a supranational

00:18:28.360 entity.

00:18:30.000 Now, Australia basically has abrogated the Refugee Convention.

00:18:38.460 What does abrogate mean for people who are watching?

00:18:41.180 People who aren't lawyers.

00:18:43.160 Okay.

00:18:43.960 Abrogation, in this context, it means they're signed up to the convention, but they've got so

00:18:51.180 many carve-outs and exemptions that it doesn't apply.

00:18:55.840 So the law is, it's a dead letter.

00:18:59.480 The expression that's sometimes used amongst lawyers is they talk about a piece of legislation

00:19:03.900 falling into dissuaditude, despitude or dissuaditude.

00:19:07.600 But it's been abrogated.

00:19:09.060 It's a dead letter.

00:19:10.380 Basically, Australia is formally a signatory, but it's not following the rules.

00:19:13.740 It's not following the rules.

00:19:14.560 Okay.

00:19:14.820 And because there's so little in the way of human rights legislation in Australia, and

00:19:19.120 because the immigration and refugee policy is set on a bipartisan level, it can't be

00:19:25.620 changed.

00:19:27.060 Okay.

00:19:27.500 So what happens now in Australia if a boat from X reaches mainland Australia?

00:19:33.040 Mandatory detention on shore.

00:19:34.560 And due to something that was introduced by Kevin Rudd, and I also didn't, he was a Labor

00:19:41.120 Prime Minister, I didn't mention this in my chat with Mike Graham, but one of the things

00:19:46.420 that Kevin Rudd did, he was Prime Minister twice.

00:19:49.320 And the first time he was Prime Minister, when he was elected in 2007, he thought that the

00:19:56.360 regime in Australia that had been introduced, Pacific Solution introduced by John Howard,

00:20:00.380 which was so harsh, you know, you did have genuinely have boatloads of people in unseaworthy

00:20:06.600 vessels, if the tamper wasn't there, something like that to rescue them, they drowned.

00:20:12.100 You know, we did have incidences like that, where there's a memorial in Canberra to one

00:20:16.880 lot of them, and you've got all these little headstones, and you've got a couple of hundred

00:20:22.460 people just drowned.

00:20:24.640 But the drowning, that drowning had an effect.

00:20:28.560 They stopped coming.

00:20:29.360 The boats stopped coming, because, oh my God, they're not going to let us in, and they

00:20:33.600 won't rescue us either.

00:20:35.480 It had a terror, it was a, had a terrifying effect on the people smugglers.

00:20:40.980 It's, it collapsed their business model, basically, because this government was not going to come

00:20:46.180 to their rescue.

00:20:48.180 But Kevin Rudd introduced, if you pitch up by boat, and you do get to the mainland, so you

00:20:54.340 don't finish up on one of the islands that's been excised from the migration zone.

00:20:57.960 Kevin Rudd passed, his government passed legislation, that the second time around, that you will

00:21:06.000 never, ever get, have the opportunity to be an Australian citizen.

00:21:09.000 That chance is removed from you.

00:21:12.240 And because, basically, for a whole range of historical reasons, Australia has gone down

00:21:18.880 the rights are a function of citizenship path, rather than rights are a function of residence

00:21:25.280 path.

00:21:26.040 So the rights are a function of residence path, it tends to be what's happened in the European

00:21:30.540 Union and the UK.

00:21:32.440 Rights are a function of citizenship, is what's happened in Australia, New Zealand, it exists

00:21:38.980 in Japan, it exists to a degree in the United States, although America is a very badly governed

00:21:45.040 country, so it's a bit difficult to say what they're doing at any one time.

00:21:48.380 So what that means, if you're not an Australian citizen, and can never be an Australian citizen,

00:21:54.820 there are certain things that you will never be able to do.

00:21:58.400 And the most obvious headline one is vote.

00:22:01.780 You will never be able to cast a ballot in Australia.

00:22:04.400 But there are also welfare implications and employment implications.

00:22:08.000 You can't become a police officer, you can't join the army, you can't join the civil service.

00:22:12.260 You know, it has serious implications, it makes Australia a far less attractive place to go

00:22:18.240 to.

00:22:18.940 Now, Kevin Rudd did that, because he was Prime Minister twice, and there was Julia Gillard

00:22:24.220 in the middle, this was this extraordinary period, where Australia had six Prime Ministers

00:22:28.180 in eight years.

00:22:29.500 The first time, he did try to soften the Pacific solution, he thought it was too cruel.

00:22:34.820 And Kevin Rudd was an ex-diplomat, he spoke fluent Mandarin, he was very outward looking,

00:22:41.020 very trade-oriented, he was the kind of person who you would expect to be pro both refugees

00:22:47.720 and immigration.

00:22:49.280 The effect, though, of his loosening, and I won't go into the details, but of his loosening

00:22:53.440 of the rules, was that boats started coming again, people smugglers, same as we've got in

00:22:58.680 the Channel, and the same problem of unseaworthy vessels, and people drowning.

00:23:04.100 That started to happen again.

00:23:06.060 An enormous pressure was being brought to bear within the Labor Party.

00:23:09.600 Obviously, something, you need to do something about this.

00:23:13.320 This is, you're losing electoral consent for all the legitimate immigration, because you've

00:23:18.220 got people turning up in the country again, because that's what happens, basically.

00:23:22.520 If you don't have immigration under domestic control, you lose electoral consent for it,

00:23:27.400 and you get 2016.

00:23:29.500 That's what happens.

00:23:30.200 If it's not kept under the control of people who vote in this country, it's left under the

00:23:37.740 auspices of a supranational entity, whether it's the European Union or the UN or whatever

00:23:41.520 European Union here, then you lose the electoral consent and you get hostility to all immigration.

00:23:48.380 Now, in Australia, that's very dangerous.

00:23:50.140 It's a huge country and still underpopulated relative to the amount of arable land and

00:23:56.680 livable countryside and so on and so forth.

00:24:00.160 And since 1945, Australia has had a policy of populate or perish, because it came within

00:24:07.180 a bee's dick of being overrun by the Japanese during the Second World War.

00:24:11.280 The Battle of the Coral Sea was a Japanese invasion fleet steaming towards Australia.

00:24:19.120 And this tiny country that, for all the bravery of its soldiers, legendarily brave military

00:24:26.560 personnel, I mean, it was actually said at the time in the Japanese High Command, Tojo commented,

00:24:31.620 if we conquer, invade Australia and conquer it, we will have to kill every single one of them.

00:24:37.600 So that is burnt into the cultural memory of Australia, the Battle of the Coral Sea.

00:24:45.260 And just more generally, an awareness of the Pacific War.

00:24:49.060 So we have to keep immigration legitimate in Australia.

00:24:54.500 It has to remain popular on a bipartisan level.

00:24:58.240 You cannot have the presence of a few refugees wrecking the rest of the system.

00:25:05.200 Because of this vast size of the country and its desperate need for more people.

00:25:13.860 So you can't let this little group over here, who might be being terribly persecuted, that

00:25:18.960 might be true, and that's fine, and that's dandy, ruin the chances and the popular support

00:25:24.940 for this vast group of people who were admitted every year into the country.

00:25:28.500 Paul Keating realised this in 1992.

00:25:31.880 John Howard realised it even more intensely in 2001.

00:25:35.920 And then Kevin Rudd, when he became Prime Minister the second time around in 2013, he realised it as well.

00:25:43.440 So he brought the rule in that said, if you pitch up and demand asylum in Australia by boat,

00:25:50.980 in this irregular way, rather than going through the formal channels in Indonesia or on the islands

00:25:57.100 excluded from the migration zone, you will never be a citizen of Australia.

00:26:01.540 That's how intense it is.

00:26:03.640 And that is, in my view, that is that rule that Rudd introduced, which the country still has,

00:26:08.720 is a clear abrogation of the Refugee Convention.

00:26:12.000 But as is always the case with international law, there's really no one to enforce it.

00:26:19.120 So if a country decides that it's just not going to play by those particular rules,

00:26:25.520 there is nothing that can really be done.

00:26:28.420 What made the European Union directive so interesting and different from international law,

00:26:34.700 and this is why EU lawyers, they will describe the architecture of the European Union.

00:26:39.480 They call it sui generis, you know, of its own kind, unique, that means in Latin,

00:26:46.120 because it is a very, very distinctive legal order.

00:26:48.580 It's at once international law, but it's international law with teeth.

00:26:53.580 And that's what made the situation so desperately difficult for Britain,

00:26:58.300 and it's what led the immigration issue to explode, not just all over the UK in 2016,

00:27:03.760 but look at what happened in Germany.

00:27:05.200 You had a whole new political party that's now got lots of seats in the Bundestag,

00:27:09.960 founded over Angela Merkel's mishandling of immigrants.

00:27:14.540 Look what happened in Greece.

00:27:15.840 Look what happened in Hungary.

00:27:17.040 All of these other countries, you know, including in countries, because for years,

00:27:21.080 people always thought, oh, there will be no hard right political party in Germany ever.

00:27:27.700 The closest that they'll ever get is something that's kind of like the Tory party.

00:27:31.540 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.

00:27:39.520 And now here we are.

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00:28:10.860 Have you ever been abroad and fell out of place because you didn't speak the language?

00:28:17.780 No, because I voted Brexit, mate. Brexit means Brexit.

00:28:21.460 I know that when you go on holiday, sometimes you don't speak the language.

00:28:24.820 It can feel really awkward, a little bit like Francis talking to a woman.

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00:29:18.080 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.

00:29:46.900 Why is it in this country, we've got a conservative government, we don't seem to be having a clear system,

00:29:53.920 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

00:30:00.460 and they get taken to a hotel, which is incentivising people to cross the channel.

00:30:04.540 Yes, it is.

00:30:05.540 As every Australian and as Tony Abbott's been popping up and as every Australian will tell you,

00:30:10.140 that's exactly what will happen, yes.

00:30:11.420 Yeah, which is therefore incentivising organised crime, which is incentivising people to come over

00:30:16.600 and risk their lives.

00:30:17.740 Why is it under a conservative government, we don't seem to have a clear and workable system?

00:30:24.740 A lot of this, in fact, I'd venture to say that all of it, is to do with low state capacity.

00:30:32.100 State capacity is the ability of a state to project power over its own population.

00:30:36.200 We're not talking about foreign countries, we're talking about within population.

00:30:39.000 That means things like prosecuting criminals, ensuring things aren't corrupt, collecting taxes, securing the borders, state capacity.

00:30:50.760 It's actually very hard to do well.

00:30:53.660 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.

00:31:01.140 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,

00:31:09.120 that's a failed state.

00:31:10.100 I love the way Helen was very concerned about offending the people of Huddersfield.

00:31:13.600 Yeah.

00:31:14.320 But she has no problem calling the biggest, most powerful country in the world a failed state.

00:31:18.440 No concerns about that whatsoever.

00:31:19.960 Absolutely.

00:31:20.500 And it's not like they've got guns either.

00:31:22.260 Well, they've all got guns and they're busily shooting each other.

00:31:24.600 Oh, I see the Americans are shooting each other again.

00:31:27.460 That's their favourite trick.

00:31:28.480 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.

00:31:41.040 They were always doing that.

00:31:43.440 But partly because of reasons endogenous to the UK.

00:31:49.840 If there is one ministry that I would fire out of the solar system, it is the Home Office.

00:31:56.800 To use a very crude Australian expression, the Home Office could not run a two-door shithouse.

00:32:04.000 The Home Office could not organise a piss-up in a brewery.

00:32:07.740 The Home Office could not organise a fuck in a brothel.

00:32:11.980 In ascending levels of rudeness, I've just given you three.

00:32:15.260 You've given us the full range.

00:32:16.160 I like the fact you opened with two-door shithouse.

00:32:19.780 Having experienced the London rental market, I'm sure I've stayed in a few two-door shithouses in my time.

00:32:26.320 Couldn't afford it, isn't it?

00:32:27.120 To give you an idea of how useless the Home Office is, remember the Windrush scandal?

00:32:33.840 Yes.

00:32:34.860 Now, at the time, a lot of people were trying to claim this happened because the Home Office is racist.

00:32:41.380 Remember?

00:32:42.000 Yes.

00:32:42.600 Right.

00:32:43.800 If only it was so simple.

00:32:45.280 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.

00:32:54.240 Racists are generally fairly obvious about what they are and who they are and what they believe.

00:32:58.320 You just find all the racists and sack them and then the Home Office would be fine.

00:33:03.220 However, this would not happen because the Home Office is fucked.

00:33:05.500 The problem that you've got with the dinghies turning up from Calais is partly a function of your legal system.

00:33:21.260 We're still in the process of unwinding a lot of the EU stuff.

00:33:25.260 But most of it is just a function of sheer incompetence.

00:33:29.140 But they're confident enough to get these people onto buses and into hotels, right?

00:33:35.420 They seem confident at that.

00:33:36.740 Well, I mean, your local high school can do this and so can your local five-a-side footy club.

00:33:40.420 We're not dealing with things that are particularly difficult to organize, are we?

00:33:45.780 And cover it up.

00:33:47.180 And cover it up.

00:33:48.820 Yeah, well, they're not doing that very well either.

00:33:51.540 People finding out where they are and taking photographs and sticking them on the internet.

00:33:54.620 I mean, you've got this problem of low state capacity, lack of competence, particularly in the Home Office.

00:34:02.320 I mean, the Home Office is just notorious for this.

00:34:04.440 It just can't – the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

00:34:06.980 You know, they're just hopeless, persistently hopeless.

00:34:11.240 And I have to say, during the Leave campaign in 2016 saying we want an Australian-style points-based immigration system,

00:34:19.940 which is the best system.

00:34:20.940 It is.

00:34:21.240 It works.

00:34:21.800 Canada has one as well.

00:34:22.780 It works very well for them.

00:34:23.840 It works well for New Zealand.

00:34:25.060 You know, it is the best system.

00:34:27.140 However, you have to be actually good at governing to do one of those.

00:34:32.880 And when I first saw that promise and then it was in the manifesto again in 2019,

00:34:39.800 I just thought, I really hope you're hiring some Australians to run this because it's not as easy as it looks.

00:34:47.640 To give you an idea, there was this persistent claim.

00:34:50.420 It was always made in The Economist.

00:34:52.860 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.

00:35:00.840 And you would regularly get articles to this effect in The Economist that you can't centrally plan an immigration policy.

00:35:10.380 And every now and again, somebody in Australia, fairly senior in what's called the public service,

00:35:15.680 and occasionally a politician would go, hello, have you looked down here and noticed how we do things?

00:35:23.060 Until eventually there was public, there was international irritation over it.

00:35:27.780 And I think one, either a former primist or a sitting primist, it might have even been Rudd,

00:35:32.740 actually wrote to The Economist and said, can you please stop spreading this nonsense?

00:35:38.240 It's not true.

00:35:39.760 Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's impossible.

00:35:43.520 Australia does it.

00:35:45.980 And ever since then, the articles about, oh, you can't centrally plan an immigration policy have stopped.

00:35:51.780 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.

00:36:02.420 If all libertarians went completely out to lunch.

00:36:05.420 But the open borders people were always saying, well, you can't centrally plan this anyway.

00:36:10.900 And basically you had 20 odd million Australians going.

00:36:14.300 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.

00:36:24.580 And it's just, but it is difficult to do.

00:36:27.820 And if you've had a windback of state capacity, as every EU country has, and the UK has,

00:36:37.020 because of the pooling of sovereignty, where immigration, the rules about immigration and refugees

00:36:42.860 were dealt with at the Brussels level.

00:36:47.060 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.

00:36:56.660 Most Europeans are totally fine with that.

00:36:59.400 The British experience was different.

00:37:02.460 But then you had all those refugees turning up in Germany, and basically the EU was useless,

00:37:07.340 because it had sort of been a gentleman's agreement of, oh, no, people won't turn up

00:37:10.880 at the borders of the European Union.

00:37:12.400 But then once they were in the European Union, because of free movement,

00:37:15.380 they just fanned out everywhere, and the whole system broke down.

00:37:18.800 But that's an example of a severe loss of state capacity in the ability to secure one's borders,

00:37:24.180 and it's what led to all the problems in German politics.

00:37:26.660 It's probably led to Brexit, and has led to all sorts of difficulties in Greek and Italian

00:37:31.700 and Hungarian and Polish politics as well.

00:37:37.320 So I looked at that promise in 2019, we will have an Australian points-based immigration system.

00:37:45.740 And I just sat there and I thought, will you?

00:37:48.860 Are you going to have to hire the entire of immigration and ethnic affairs to set it up for you?

00:37:54.460 And by the way, you need to get rid of your rotten Electoral Commission and hire the Australian

00:37:58.140 Electoral Commission, which isn't corrupt.

00:38:00.200 You know, just all of these basic state capacity issues that pretty much the whole of the European

00:38:08.260 Union has lost.

00:38:09.920 We have discovered that Germany still retains its state capacity in healthcare.

00:38:14.620 The Australian system is the same as the German system, by the way.

00:38:18.840 And to give you an idea of state capacity, Victoria, Australia's worst performing state with COVID,

00:38:26.900 is still, if you look at the different statistical metrics, better performing than Germany,

00:38:32.100 the EU's best performing state with COVID.

00:38:35.520 That's what state capacity is.

00:38:37.580 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?

00:38:50.940 But isn't there also a political issue?

00:38:54.700 Because I don't know what it was like, and I'm sure you'll tell us, but if you had a government

00:39:01.080 policy, let's say Boris Johnson is a sort of liberal Tory in power now, he already gets

00:39:05.740 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

00:39:17.520 us, of course, abhor any loss of life that would happen, but if he was to implement a policy

00:39:22.520 that would discourage immigration, and as a side product of that, people had died, he'd

00:39:28.200 never recovered in this country.

00:39:29.960 I don't actually know.

00:39:31.260 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.

00:39:44.260 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.

00:39:54.860 You know, it's no longer under the control of the voters in country A, B, C, whatever.

00:40:05.960 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

00:40:23.620 electorates, they've been made in the SCOTUS, and judges aren't elected, that's, I mean,

00:40:28.940 there is a very, very good reason why you want to depoliticise your judiciary, is because judges

00:40:33.340 aren't elected.

00:40:34.040 You don't want them to be elected.

00:40:35.620 You elect your judges.

00:40:36.820 It's a great way of completely fouling up the system, because they need to be independent

00:40:40.700 of popularity to enforce the law.

00:40:43.300 So you've, this situation where something is taken from the electorate, and they can't seem

00:40:50.860 to control it, and their government can't seem to control it, that's a recipe for 2016.

00:40:58.200 No, no, I agree with you.

00:40:59.220 My point to you is, if you remember, prior, we had someone drown in the channel a few weeks

00:41:03.820 ago.

00:41:04.220 Yep.

00:41:05.280 It turned out he was 28 rather than 16, but it's still obviously a tragedy and horrible.

00:41:09.800 But do you remember during the initial refugee stroke migration crisis, there was this boy

00:41:15.380 who drowned in the Mediterranean?

00:41:17.920 Not really anything to do with Britain, frankly, but at that point, we had newspaper stories,

00:41:24.360 front pages for days.

00:41:27.520 Now, imagine if Britain had been responsible, if the British government had done something

00:41:32.040 that had led to that sort of thing occurring, or perhaps a whole boat of people sinking.

00:41:37.740 Terrible thing to do, obviously, or to even be associated with.

00:41:41.940 But I'm just saying, I don't know what it was like for the Australian prime minister at

00:41:45.740 the time.

00:41:45.960 It was enormously polarizing.

00:41:48.520 Right.

00:41:48.680 But in this country, I think it would destroy the reputation of the prime minister.

00:41:53.140 I mean, is that...

00:41:55.540 I...

00:41:55.880 You'd be in favor of it, would you?

00:41:57.800 No, I don't actually think it would.

00:42:00.220 I think amongst the liberal media, absolutely it would.

00:42:03.460 I think amongst, you know, conservative and traditional voter bases, I don't think it would,

00:42:09.580 honestly.

00:42:09.960 But it wasn't just the Guardian that ran that story, it was the Daily Mail as well.

00:42:15.520 Oh, no.

00:42:15.940 It was covered when we had what they call sieve 10, when we had all of these people drowning

00:42:21.900 in the Timor Sea, or eaten by crocodiles, or dying in the desert, or all of the various

00:42:25.300 other things that was supposedly going on at the time.

00:42:28.800 It was covered in the same, if it bleeds, it leads way, in the Australian press.

00:42:33.780 But long history is a very good, accurate polling, the use of focus groups, the awareness that

00:42:44.280 at the back of any elected Australian government is the whole people, not just the people who

00:42:52.120 go to the polls, who choose to go to the polls.

00:42:55.720 You're always aware that you just cannot, as a government, get on a hobby horse issue,

00:43:02.380 refugee rights or that kind of thing, and then try to smoke it over the top of the Australian

00:43:07.240 people.

00:43:07.880 You will just get crucified at the next election because of compulsory voting.

00:43:12.620 You know, the country is captured by the, this is the country where median voter theory

00:43:17.740 still applies because of compulsory voting.

00:43:20.360 So you've just got that distribution and the big lump of people in the middle, and so

00:43:24.180 the median voter thing is still an issue.

00:43:28.340 So yes, it was incredibly fraught.

00:43:30.420 I remember the Tampa controversy.

00:43:32.940 It was extraordinary, absolutely, because it was becoming very clear that what Howard was

00:43:37.580 going to do was abrogate the Refugee Convention, albeit in a quiet sort of relatively

00:43:42.580 sneaky way.

00:43:43.800 But when I say relatively sneaky, you're still talking multiple instances of high court

00:43:48.500 legislation.

00:43:50.820 You know, so like this, like the proroguing parliament case here, you know, so it was

00:43:54.200 still hugely and massively reported.

00:43:56.760 So quiet, for a given value of quiet.

00:44:00.860 But he ran into that election in 2001 with the slogan, we will determine who comes here and

00:44:08.940 the circumstances in which they come.

00:44:10.980 That was used as the Tampa election tagline and was basically a one-sentence summary of

00:44:17.520 the Pacific solution that the Howard government introduced.

00:44:23.000 I don't know what would happen in Britain if Boris Johnson were more likely to be a Priti

00:44:31.840 Patel who's much more of a traditional hanging and flogging and more authoritarian kind of

00:44:36.340 conservative.

00:44:38.180 Hanging and flogging.

00:44:39.440 Well, that's the old thing.

00:44:40.340 They were the ones that wanted to bring back hanging and all of that kind of thing.

00:44:43.980 They still exist in the conservative.

00:44:45.340 Oh, National Service is the other one.

00:44:47.060 You turn up to constituency association meetings and there's always at least one person there

00:44:51.500 who wants to bring back National Service.

00:44:54.680 Tories of a certain vintage is just a thing.

00:44:57.040 And so I actually am really reluctant to say that a Prime Minister who did that would be destroyed

00:45:05.280 because I have a sneaking suspicion that the electorate would respond the way the Australian

00:45:11.420 electorate responded and that you would have howls of outrage from the media.

00:45:17.380 You did in Australia, absolute howls of outrage and from human rights lawyers

00:45:21.360 and the wider human rights industry and that kind of thing.

00:45:24.660 But if you're paying attention to the people who vote for you or who could vote for you in a country

00:45:32.840 with non-compulsory voting, then you just know that the howls of outrage are deeply

00:45:39.680 and brutally unrepresentative.

00:45:42.680 The Greens cannot crack any more than 10% of the vote in Australia.

00:45:47.440 Even without compulsory voting here, if they make 15%, the vote's so thinly spread through the population

00:45:59.240 that they're going to continue to win their one seat in Brighton and that will be it.

00:46:07.340 So one of the things people have to learn to do to do this kind of governance

00:46:13.960 is just to ignore the media class and to ignore the human rights lawyer class.

00:46:22.180 They are a tiny and unrepresentative group and you are not governing for them

00:46:30.560 if you're a Tory government.

00:46:33.980 Helen.

00:46:34.600 You're just not.

00:46:35.660 Go for it.

00:46:36.340 Yeah.

00:46:36.500 Well, see, I actually agree with you, Helen, because I think that most people,

00:46:41.580 I don't think they would be avert about this when talking to their friends or relatives

00:46:47.160 or whatever else, but I think deep down most people would be in agreement.

00:46:51.260 And at the same time, let me just ask the question there.

00:46:53.560 At the same time, is there a compassionate solution to this?

00:46:58.200 Because even the people who wouldn't feel that strongly about it, as Francis says,

00:47:03.820 and he's probably right, he's probably right.

00:47:05.460 I always am.

00:47:07.700 I don't think there's a single person in this country,

00:47:10.540 no matter how strongly they feel about immigration or refugees

00:47:14.140 or even people who claim to be refugees when actually they're economic migrants,

00:47:19.100 there isn't a single person in this country who wants those people to drown.

00:47:22.220 None of us do.

00:47:23.220 No, no.

00:47:23.620 And it's a horrible thing to me.

00:47:24.640 I will give you a story from the first iteration of Kevin Rudd

00:47:28.560 when he was trying to loosen up the system.

00:47:30.720 One of his immigration ministers at the time, there were two.

00:47:34.600 I think this was Chris Burke, who was the second one,

00:47:37.220 but I could be wrong about that.

00:47:39.220 But, I mean, I've met the man.

00:47:41.500 And one of the things he was doing was that every time they got a confirmed drowning,

00:47:46.460 he was sitting in his ministerial, in the ministerial wing of Australian Parliament House,

00:47:52.760 which is that vast Aztec temple, it looks like.

00:47:55.380 And he was over in the ministerial wing in his fancy office.

00:47:59.100 And every time there was a confirmed drowning, not just a rumoured one,

00:48:02.000 because there are disputes about how many people have drowned,

00:48:04.880 but when it was from, like, the Navy or the Coast Guard,

00:48:07.540 he knew that there'd been a death.

00:48:09.520 He would put a matchstick on his desk.

00:48:12.460 And there was a very moving newspaper article about how complicated this issue is

00:48:18.680 and the fact that there probably isn't a compassionate solution,

00:48:22.760 where a journalist turned up into the immigration minister's office

00:48:28.080 and just casually asked him as the TV crew was setting up their cameras,

00:48:32.920 oh, what do all those, minister, what do all those matchsticks mean?

00:48:37.200 Oh, each one of those matchsticks is a drowned asylum seeker.

00:48:40.360 And he did that, Labour immigration minister,

00:48:45.460 he did that to remind himself of the human cost.

00:48:50.100 And to answer, to return to your original question,

00:48:55.400 is there a compassionate solution to this?

00:48:57.960 No, there isn't.

00:48:59.860 And if I knew one, I would have, a number of times,

00:49:04.120 there have been attempts to recruit me,

00:49:05.860 because of my Australian background and experience in Canberra,

00:49:09.980 there have been attempts to recruit me to positions

00:49:13.040 in the current Conservative government.

00:49:16.540 Some of my friends have been recruited.

00:49:19.640 They just stopped tweeting.

00:49:21.900 And they like Australians.

00:49:23.260 I mean, they went and got Chloe Wesley from the Taxpayers Alliance.

00:49:26.300 And once again, one of these creatures of Canberra,

00:49:29.100 an Australian background person who's worked in the Aussie system.

00:49:35.000 But I don't think there is a compassionate solution.

00:49:37.980 If I knew one, I would have instantly responded to any of those

00:49:42.400 and said, yes, I'll come and work for you

00:49:43.780 and design this system from the top down.

00:49:45.800 So what is the most compassionate solution?

00:49:49.000 Getting you to leave.

00:49:53.940 I'll only leave if your mum comes with me back.

00:49:57.080 Done.

00:49:57.460 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

00:50:15.320 to be imposed pretty rigorously.

00:50:18.940 And that already exists.

00:50:20.460 And it's become fairly clear, for example, that one of the reasons

00:50:25.820 why people are coming across from France, which is in many ways a better place

00:50:30.700 to live than the UK.

00:50:33.860 Get out.

00:50:35.960 Yeah.

00:50:36.260 Better food and a better welfare state, more generous welfare state,

00:50:41.100 all of that kind of thing.

00:50:42.580 There's a very big, one of the reasons why is that France is still

00:50:47.680 a very intensely unitary state.

00:50:50.540 And all of the woke ideas that originally came from France

00:50:54.820 but have now gone to America, they have no influence in France at all.

00:50:58.720 So huge, huge social expectation in France that you will learn French.

00:51:04.280 That is why Parisians are rude to you if you attempt to speak

00:51:06.720 their language to them badly and they'd rather speak it English.

00:51:09.520 But it's just that huge social pressure to go to France and to want to live there

00:51:17.040 for the rest of your life is very much to become French.

00:51:22.140 And one of the reasons why the Islamists have chafed so hard in France

00:51:26.640 is a combination of laicite, the secularism that is,

00:51:30.820 and that's a bad translation of a French word, but it's secularism.

00:51:34.120 We'll have to do it because it's not quite right.

00:51:35.420 It means lots of different things.

00:51:37.340 Secularity.

00:51:37.820 It's a combination of the secularity of the French state,

00:51:41.640 but also the nationalism in a very traditional sense of the French state.

00:51:46.180 And they don't want to fit in with that.

00:51:48.520 The easy come, easy go, more relaxed approach to integration,

00:51:53.660 which I don't personally think works, that exists in Britain is far more attractive.

00:51:59.140 And then, of course, the global language is no longer French, used to be, but it's English now.

00:52:06.940 So lots and lots of those people on the dinghies will have a little bit of English.

00:52:12.160 And English and French are, in many respects, they're opposite to each other.

00:52:16.860 French, when you first start to learn it, it's like a pyramid.

00:52:19.680 And all the difficult stuff is at the beginning.

00:52:21.700 It's hard to pronounce.

00:52:22.640 It's hard to spell.

00:52:24.460 The grammar is difficult.

00:52:26.820 It's a very intellectual and erudite language.

00:52:29.680 So the people on French television, you know, they're journalists.

00:52:32.440 They don't break it down.

00:52:33.320 They don't make your life easier by using simple French.

00:52:36.140 They expect you to dive in.

00:52:40.220 But with French, it gets easier and easier and easier.

00:52:43.600 And once you've been learning it for two or three years, it's suddenly you're fluent.

00:52:46.900 Oh, gee, okay, I can speak French now.

00:52:48.680 Very hard at the beginning.

00:52:50.100 English is the opposite.

00:52:51.280 It's an upside down pyramid.

00:52:52.980 Very, very easy at the beginning.

00:52:55.420 Lots of people who speak bugger all English can make themselves understood in it

00:52:59.980 because at the beginning, English is easy.

00:53:02.800 The problem, of course, is unlike French, it gets harder and harder and harder.

00:53:08.160 So you can learn basic English and communicate, but the idea that you might be able to one day

00:53:15.500 learn enough English to hold down anything other than a job digging ditches is going to take a lot longer.

00:53:23.480 So they're often under a misapprehension about how quickly they can integrate into an English-speaking country.

00:53:31.340 But it's that perception of, I know English.

00:53:33.780 I know some English.

00:53:34.880 Let's go to the English-speaking country.

00:53:36.320 So I think a big part of a compassionate solution is actually really strongly imposing the first safe country.

00:53:45.040 And I think that this is quite important.

00:53:48.480 And Faisal al-Muttar, have you had him on TriggerPod before?

00:53:54.380 He was an Iraqi refugee.

00:53:57.140 And he made the point.

00:53:59.480 He said, a lot of them, these people who are Muslim, they're not violent.

00:54:03.960 They're not going to go and blow up a pop concert in Manchester or anything like that.

00:54:08.000 But they're going to find living in a Western secular country very, very difficult.

00:54:13.680 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.

00:54:24.020 They weren't radical when they got there, but they became radicalised because the country is just so different.

00:54:29.080 And Faisal made the comment.

00:54:32.740 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.

00:54:45.340 And they can't integrate.

00:54:46.800 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.

00:54:53.280 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.

00:55:08.000 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.

00:55:19.120 But they're going to be able to cope in another safe Muslim country.

00:55:23.280 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.

00:55:34.880 You're better off staying where you are or just the country next door.

00:55:40.060 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?

00:55:51.680 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.

00:55:56.720 And they still are.

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.

00:56:07.240 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.

00:56:33.700 They're awful racists.

00:56:36.920 And if the current prime minister is Scott Morrison, he's an awful racist.

00:56:41.260 But if it were Tony Albanese, Anthony Albanese, the Labor leader, he would be a horrible racist as well.

00:56:47.800 So that's inevitable.

00:56:48.800 That's inevitable.

00:56:49.560 But on the practical side of things, you mentioned people claiming asylum in the first country in which they're right.

00:56:55.420 First safe country.

00:56:55.960 First safe country.

00:56:56.680 And that makes sense.

00:56:58.060 And you probably end up paying those countries quite a lot of money for them to do that.

00:57:02.000 And then it's a sort of fair deal.

00:57:03.680 Otherwise, you're not going to get 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.

00:57:39.340 Absolutely.

00:57:40.300 Yeah.

00:57:41.520 It's only a few hundred people, isn't it?

00:57:43.900 Well, this is the thing.

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.

00:58:00.760 These are the basic roles of government.

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,

00:58:18.040 not just the developing 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.

00:58:31.040 But this whole broad scale problem of just incompetent governance, it finishes up just propagating through the entire administration of the state.

00:58:45.300 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.

00:58:56.360 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.

00:59:01.920 It's just disastrous.

00:59:03.960 I feel very sorry for Americans having to live through that at the moment.

00:59:08.100 Everything is a big mess, and there are no obvious or easy solutions.

00:59:15.740 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.

00:59:30.940 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.

00:59:45.780 The president is not supposed to do that.

00:59:48.100 I mean, he's meant to do it a little bit, but not to the extent that Obama and now Trump have done.

00:59:55.520 But they're doing it because the system is completely paralysed in every other respect.

01:00:04.400 I just think you need to those very, very basic state capacity levels of governance.

01:00:10.540 You have to deliver them.

01:00:12.960 And because if you don't deliver them, you really are, in my view, on the road to hell.

01:00:18.680 And Helen, do you think that this conservative government are going to have the balls to implement a system?

01:00:22.800 They're going to have to do something because they will – it's literally a case of something will die.

01:00:29.300 And the second question is, are they competent enough to deliver this system?

01:00:33.100 Well, this is the difficulty.

01:00:33.740 I don't know.

01:00:35.160 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.

01:00:45.200 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.

01:00:54.640 They're called advisors or senior advisors or chiefs of staff in Australia.

01:00:58.760 There is quite a lot of very active recruitment going on, but they are going to have to do some very rapid upskilling about –

01:01:09.200 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.

01:01:20.560 We have become very fat and very dumb and very happy and very slack when it comes to core questions of government competence.

01:01:29.120 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,

01:01:45.640 except for ones with very, very significant state capacity in health care.

01:01:50.580 Some cultures, the East Asian countries, they had an awareness based on the experience with SARS.

01:01:56.580 They had better preparation for those reasons.

01:02:01.780 But Australia and New Zealand didn't have the SARS experience, but they've responded just as well as the East Asian countries.

01:02:07.920 And they also don't have the masking culture either.

01:02:10.720 And indeed, one of the problems that's happened in Australia is an attempt to do mask mandates just in one state in Victoria.

01:02:16.880 It's not gone down very well with the Australian population there because it is not part of Australian culture.

01:02:23.960 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.

01:02:32.120 I mean, the idea of covering your face has been bad in Western Europe since we have records.

01:02:40.560 You know, like literally Roman writers would laugh at the Persians because the veiling of the face or covering the face for religious rituals

01:02:47.800 or because you're a married woman or that kind of thing existed in Persia before Islam.

01:02:52.200 Islam made it worse, but it existed in places like Persia before then.

01:02:56.280 And you would have Roman writers laughing at Persians and Jews for covering their faces

01:03:01.460 and laughing at Persians and Jews for showing respect by doing this, dropping their head.

01:03:08.460 Whereas the Roman idea of respect, and you even see it on Roman wedding rings, is a handshake and look directly in the eye.

01:03:16.100 And that has passed into modern Western cultures.

01:03:19.880 A little bit of knowledge of classical history and the civilisational roots of Western Europe could have told you

01:03:26.060 that if you come up with mask mandates and try to impose them on primarily Caucasian and African populations,

01:03:34.200 they are going to tell you to jump in the lake.

01:03:36.980 It's just not going to work.

01:03:38.420 And we've seen that and that's why we've got all the problems with it.

01:03:40.760 But Victoria and Australia too, very high state capacity country, very good at being quite authoritarian where necessary,

01:03:47.620 very orderly country.

01:03:49.420 All of the Australian Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful.

01:03:53.000 There was only COVID outbreaks as a result of one, and it wasn't actually the protests that caused it.

01:03:58.660 It was because the silly billies had organised a buffet afterwards and a whole heap of them went up

01:04:02.520 and had food from the buffets.

01:04:04.380 And, you know, buffets, that's why cruise ships are dangerous as well.

01:04:08.380 So we're very much running out of time.

01:04:10.780 But just to say, if there was a buffet at one of them, I might have attended one.

01:04:14.900 Yeah, and got COVID.

01:04:16.660 Well done.

01:04:17.280 But, yeah, so you just –

01:04:20.620 But is this – actually, just on that very point, just as a final little bit of curiosity,

01:04:26.060 is this why we now see stories from Australia of a pregnant woman being arrested for a Facebook post,

01:04:31.980 a grandfather, all of this, because the other side of the state capacity coin

01:04:37.120 is a sort of elevated level of authority?

01:04:38.980 Yes, yes.

01:04:39.860 I strongly – one of the reasons why Australian governments get away with being so authoritarian

01:04:45.500 is because they're very good at what they do.

01:04:48.880 However, the danger with being very good at what you do and producing really quite a compliant population

01:04:55.300 and comparing the Black Lives Matter protests in Australia to pretty much every other developed country

01:05:01.420 is a really good way of looking at it.

01:05:03.180 Look at the ones that happened in Sydney and in Brisbane,

01:05:05.460 which were two states that don't have lockdown and are out of lockdown now.

01:05:08.920 And there were no COVID cases as a result of those protests or anything like that.

01:05:12.900 If you look at them, they're so peaceful.

01:05:14.360 They're so orderly.

01:05:15.180 The police are on either side of the street.

01:05:17.100 And they're all just walking in a very relaxed and calm way down the street,

01:05:21.200 holding their banners.

01:05:22.360 And you just look at that and you go, gee, what a good way to run a protest.

01:05:27.620 But one of the reasons why that does exist in Australia is the state – the country is authoritarian.

01:05:33.740 The reason I live here, as much as I admire Australians and Australia for its ability to govern so very well,

01:05:42.800 the side effect of it, the state capacity, is this authoritarianism.

01:05:48.980 And it does overstep the line.

01:05:51.340 So now you've got the pregnant lady getting arrested in her pyjamas just before she's about to have an ultrasound,

01:05:57.160 which for those of you who are familiar with pregnant ladies means that she's full of wee,

01:06:03.340 which is why she's somewhat desperate in the video.

01:06:09.360 That's what happens when you get a government that is used to getting its own way,

01:06:14.760 that is good at getting its own way, that generally runs things well,

01:06:19.160 and then suddenly there's been a stuff up and there has been a stuff up with the hotel quarantine situation in Victoria.

01:06:25.440 And then, oh, well, we're just going to boss you then.

01:06:28.800 And that's how that happens.

01:06:30.380 That's how you get situations like that emerge.

01:06:33.220 And it is alarming.

01:06:35.260 You know, how much authoritarianism is each saved life worth?

01:06:40.240 And that doesn't mean to say I approve of the terrible violence that has happened at various protests in the United States,

01:06:49.140 legitimate or not.

01:06:50.380 Let's say some of them are legitimate, some of the protests both by pro-Trump people

01:06:54.820 and by pro-Antifa or Black Lives Matter people.

01:06:58.040 Let's just assume, give them their case at its highest and assume that it's legitimate.

01:07:03.460 You just can't have that level of violence and continue to make your point.

01:07:14.180 And it just encourages, in a country like Australia, where you do have the high state capacity,

01:07:20.260 it just says, no, we're not going to be like them.

01:07:22.120 It doesn't matter how good your point is and we're just going to do this.

01:07:24.420 And that is the great risk of the high state capacity country that is still nonetheless a liberal democracy

01:07:33.920 and, in a sense, Australia and New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, Canada,

01:07:38.320 but certainly Australia and New Zealand.

01:07:40.780 You can get that great governance and still be a democracy,

01:07:44.180 but you need to look at those two countries because that is your future

01:07:48.300 if you get that great governance and want to keep your democracy.

01:07:51.660 The alternative is you can have great governance and have no democracy

01:07:55.660 and then you need to move quite a lot further north of the equator and go to China

01:07:59.160 and I don't think anybody wants to live there.

01:08:01.960 But that is the great risk that this has exposed, the coronavirus.

01:08:06.560 How much authoritarianism is each save life worth?

01:08:10.980 And do you want Australia and New Zealand to be your future?

01:08:14.400 I mean, I moved back because I'm a dual national.

01:08:16.260 I moved back over here precisely because I didn't want that aspect of Australia

01:08:20.940 to be my future.

01:08:21.940 But does that mean that you get freer countries are struggling with COVID

01:08:29.700 and compared to Australia, Germany is struggling with COVID

01:08:34.620 because of the difference in state capacity even there,

01:08:38.980 precisely because they're freer.

01:08:41.380 And as we've been talking about for the last hour,

01:08:43.420 it's not just COVID that freer countries struggle with.

01:08:45.740 Yeah.

01:08:45.920 Other issues.

01:08:46.640 It's other issues as well.

01:08:47.780 But we've run out of time, Helen, and we've got one more question for you.

01:08:51.100 Which is, what is the one thing we're not talking about but we really should be?

01:08:55.960 Well, we've been talking about it quite a lot here, but I'll say it again.

01:09:01.280 And I'll recommend a book.

01:09:03.280 Persecution and Toleration is the book by Mark Koyama and Noel Johnson.

01:09:09.760 And it is basically a history of the development, an economic history

01:09:15.700 because this is an economic phenomenon, of the development of state capacity

01:09:19.740 across Western Europe and then to a lesser extent the United States

01:09:23.780 and Australia.

01:09:24.760 But the focus is on Western Europe.

01:09:27.440 And one of the little questions that they do in the course of the book is,

01:09:31.600 if you were able to go back in time and be the king or queen of England in 1500

01:09:36.140 and you wanted to set up compulsory primary school education

01:09:42.260 and the NHS, you wanted to do that, you know, you had the knowledge

01:09:46.780 and the technology, you've been able to take that back in time with you,

01:09:50.340 it would be impossible for you to do so.

01:09:52.780 And it would be impossible because you lack the state capacity to do it.

01:09:56.920 It's completely separate question from technology.

01:10:00.840 You lack the state capacity.

01:10:02.220 That's what we're not talking about.

01:10:05.940 We've forgotten that governance is hard, that you can't just do it

01:10:10.440 by soundbite, that there are no wins, only trade-offs,

01:10:14.420 and that sometimes there is no good answer to a really complicated policy question.

01:10:23.760 I believe immigration is one of those areas.

01:10:25.760 There's not that many.

01:10:27.600 Pensions is probably another one.

01:10:29.560 There's no easy answer to that.

01:10:31.300 You know, paying back the COVID debt is probably going to be the end

01:10:34.620 of the triple lock, pensions triple lock.

01:10:37.520 There are no – that's not going to make anybody very happy.

01:10:40.900 You know, there are no good ways out for complicated policy conundrums.

01:10:47.080 And to even have a chance of dealing with complicated policy issues,

01:10:52.500 you need improvement in state capacity, investment in state capacity.

01:10:58.240 And it's not just Britain.

01:11:01.340 It's the whole of the European Union.

01:11:03.660 And then even worse again is the United States.

01:11:06.020 God knows what they're going to do over there.

01:11:08.140 I would hate to be Biden because I think he's probably going to win the election.

01:11:12.220 I would hate to be Joe Biden and his advisers because they're just going to –

01:11:15.780 it's a much worse version of what happened when Gordon Brown was voted out.

01:11:20.720 But I'm very sorry, there is no money.

01:11:23.280 But worse than that because it's not just no money.

01:11:25.460 There's lots and lots of other things that there isn't anything on either.

01:11:28.140 So state capacity.

01:11:29.180 We need to talk about – governance is hard.

01:11:31.720 We need to work on it.

01:11:32.860 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.

01:11:39.700 I realise you've alienated every single one of our American viewers.

01:11:43.280 And they give us all the money.

01:11:44.540 Yeah.

01:11:44.820 So we're never having you back again.

01:11:46.660 Yeah.

01:11:47.300 But if people want to find you on Twitter.

01:11:51.380 I'm at underscore Helen Dale on Twitter.

01:11:56.580 And I'm at Helen Dale on Parlay or Parler.

01:12:01.020 I don't know.

01:12:01.300 Americans seem to want to call it Parler.

01:12:02.740 If they want to read some of your fabulous award-winning books.

01:12:08.220 Well, these are all the various books.

01:12:10.500 This is the one that is the publishing industry one.

01:12:12.660 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.

01:12:19.480 But immigration took it all up.

01:12:21.600 And that was the one that won the prizes and caused a big stink.

01:12:24.740 And there was an attempt to get me cancelled.

01:12:26.200 But all it did was turn it into a bestseller.

01:12:27.860 And that's my second and third novel, which is what imagine what would happen if the Romans had had an industrial revolution.

01:12:38.560 And it's interestingly, that was very much writing about a high state capacity authoritarian regime, because that's what those books are about.

01:12:47.720 And the thing that really shocked me about Kingdom of the Wicked was the number of people who wrote to me.

01:12:53.940 And it was very clear that they'd quite like to live in the world that I'd created.

01:12:58.320 And that was a bit alarming.

01:13:02.420 Do you really want to go and live in China?

01:13:04.900 Do you like social credit?

01:13:06.520 Do you think that that's a good idea?

01:13:08.640 Some people apparently do.

01:13:10.380 Helen, thank you so much for coming back.

01:13:12.060 And thank you guys for watching.

01:13:13.500 We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode or a live stream.

01:13:17.140 And they always go out Tuesday to Sunday at 7pm UK time.

01:13:21.620 Take care guys and see you soon.

TRIGGERnometry - October 04, 2020

Can We Solve the Migrant Crisis？ with Helen Dale

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