TRIGGERnometry - Helen Dale on the IDW, Being Right Wing and the Australian Election

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin. And this is a

00:00:10.440 show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing

00:00:15.160 about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our brilliant

00:00:21.620 guest this week is an Australian novelist and commentator, Helen Dale. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:27.280 Hello, Constantine.

00:00:28.080 How are you?

00:00:28.740 Hello, Francis.

00:00:30.140 I was going to get insulted.

00:00:31.840 I was hoping that was going to happen.

00:00:34.060 I'll try not to do that.

00:00:34.820 You will have plenty of opportunities to insult Francis

00:00:36.980 in the course of the interview.

00:00:38.380 And if you don't, I will.

00:00:39.880 And if Constantine doesn't,

00:00:41.180 the comments underneath the YouTube video,

00:00:43.800 certainly.

00:00:44.020 Are YouTube commentators?

00:00:45.760 Yes.

00:00:46.380 That is indeed my favourite part of doing the show.

00:00:48.720 Why are you so fat?

00:00:49.960 Yeah, exactly.

00:00:50.880 Basically.

00:00:51.540 Anyway.

00:00:51.940 Well, anyone who hasn't watched Trigonometry before

00:00:54.180 has now been fully briefed on how this goes which is me and you making fun of each other

00:00:59.460 but we've got a brilliant guest so let's get to you Helen before we get into the interview we

00:01:03.640 wanted to talk to you primarily about the Australian elections which is a big thing

00:01:07.900 that's happened recently but before we do that just tell everybody who are you how have you come

00:01:12.840 to the place that you're in now how do you happen to be sitting in this rather uncomfortable chair

00:01:16.280 right here in Australia my claim to fame and this does go back a few years ago now is I won

00:01:24.040 the Miles Franklin Award, which is the Australian equivalent of the Booker Prize. And I won it for,

00:01:29.960 I'll show you so I don't have to bore everybody. I won it for this book. Now, this is a new edition

00:01:37.080 that came out in 2017. It's got multiple different covers. So if you go looking for it on Amazon,

00:01:43.000 you'll see all these different covers for it. But this was 20 odd years ago now. And the Miles

00:01:50.140 Franklin Award put me on the map, but as a novelist, not as a commentator. And then in

00:01:57.680 subsequent years, I became better known as a commentator. And I've probably in the UK,

00:02:07.120 I mean, whilst people here do buy my novels, they see me as someone who writes for Standpoint

00:02:13.100 and The Spectator and The Toregraph and that kind of thing. And I did have one editor,

00:02:17.540 I won't drop him in it, take about four years to figure out that the person who wrote the novel

00:02:22.440 that he liked was actually the person who wrote in his magazine quite a lot. Oh, right, that's you.

00:02:27.800 Yes, congratulations. I've only been writing for your magazine for about six years. That kind of

00:02:32.920 thing. And you've also worked in Australian politics, haven't you? Yes, yes. I worked for

00:02:36.560 two years as chief of staff to an Australian senator, Senator David Lionhelm. He's not in

00:02:42.360 the Senate anymore. He tried to, and this is a relatively common move in Australian politics.

00:02:49.240 He tried to shift from the federal Senate and he ran for the election in the state upper house

00:02:56.160 because it's a federal system. So he tried to go from the Commonwealth of Australia, basically,

00:03:01.160 the parliament in Canberra to the state government in New South Wales, and he failed. He didn't

00:03:06.360 succeed in doing that. And he's an older chap. He's, I think, 68 years old. So he's basically

00:03:11.460 said, I think I've had enough politics now. I'm not doing it anymore. But yes, I had sort of two

00:03:17.060 years in the belly of the beast working in Canberra, working for a parliamentarian, becoming very

00:03:21.680 familiar with the Australian political system. And I saw some of the turmoil in Australia. I saw,

00:03:26.940 for example, I was actually standing in my senator's office in Parliament House when

00:03:31.440 Malcolm Turnbull spilt, that's the Australian term, spilt the leadership, spilt Tony Abbott,

00:03:36.700 who was the previous prime minister. And it was all very dramatic and sort of this ongoing

00:03:44.020 Italy with crocodiles, I call it, where Australia keeps deposing its prime ministers and replacing

00:03:49.920 them with another one, often on the basis of polls. And people are mystified by this

00:03:54.760 because the country seems fine otherwise, except we keep changing the prime minister.

00:03:58.200 guys we wanted to take a moment just to say thank you to every single one of you who has supported

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00:04:18.880 magazine the week and the week is a news filter that pulls together the best articles from over

00:04:25.100 200 different sources from publications such as The Telegraph, The FT, or for our one liberal

00:04:31.420 snowflake fan, The Guardian. Exactly. And that's what they do. They do exactly what we do on the

00:04:37.020 show, which is pull together information from different sides of the debate, the left and the

00:04:40.900 right, so you don't find yourself stuck in an echo chamber and you can make your own mind up.

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00:05:50.200 we were talking yesterday sort of prepping for the interview and you mentioned to me like you

00:05:56.760 went i'm right wing and then you explained something else and i just went oh my god

00:06:00.680 somebody has just said i'm right wing what and i think this is very very important because i hear

00:06:06.280 the term right wing used and it's always a pejorative it's always an insult it's always a

00:06:10.400 euphemism for racism and i think we need to detoxify what the term right wing actually means

00:06:16.120 What does it mean to you? And why do you feel no, why do you identify as being right wing?

00:06:24.780 The political spectrum left to right goes back to the French Revolution. And you have to accept

00:06:31.760 that people at all different points along that spectrum are going to disagree with each other

00:06:36.020 about what to do. This is why we have politics. It's why we have political parties. It's why we

00:06:40.120 have elections. In context of the conversation, though, I was talking about one of the outlets

00:06:46.560 that I write for is Quillette. And Quillette is now associated with what they call the intellectual

00:06:53.220 dark web. However, France has asked me yesterday, and I hope I'm not telling tales out of school by

00:06:58.740 saying this, do I consider myself a member of the intellectual dark web? And whilst I write for

00:07:04.900 their magazine, I don't think I do. And the reason I don't think I fit as a member of this IDW,

00:07:11.320 apart from the fact that I think it's a silly name, I do think it's a silly name. It's also

00:07:16.160 everyone else that's in it, with maybe one exception or two exceptions, they're refugees

00:07:22.540 from the political left. And they're unhappy with their own team, basically. I am not a refugee from

00:07:29.680 the political left. I've always been a mixture of conservative and classical liberal. And to me,

00:07:37.300 to get onto your definition here, there's two main streams of right-wing thought. One is the

00:07:44.360 classical liberal tradition, and one is the Burkean conservative tradition. And most right-wingers

00:07:52.140 in the UK and Australia are a blend of those two. I have more emphasis on the classical liberal

00:07:58.240 tradition, which is a comment about the relationship between the individual and the

00:08:02.660 state. You don't want the state to have too much power over you, the individual. And that goes in

00:08:08.060 both directions. You don't want the state picking your pocket. You want to be able to keep your

00:08:12.940 money and spend it. So that's the tax and welfare issue. But you also don't want the state telling

00:08:18.340 you how to live. So that can make you pro-same-sex marriage and pro-choice, but it can

00:08:24.660 also make you very opposed to banning turkey twizzlers, Jamie Oliver, sugar tax, alcohol taxes,

00:08:35.040 cigarette taxes. So that's your classical liberal. So you can look sort of left wing if you talk

00:08:40.580 about abortion or the nanny state or smoking, particularly smoking cannabis. A lot of classical

00:08:48.840 liberals are pro-weed legalisation, and I certainly am. So you can look sort of left wing

00:08:53.300 if you're dealing with choice and lifestyle issues.

00:08:57.940 But then as soon as you come back to tax and welfare policy,

00:09:03.640 you finish up looking right-wing because you'll be a fiscal conservative.

00:09:06.980 You want a small, lean government.

00:09:08.600 You don't want it with the ability to impose crushing taxes on people.

00:09:13.040 You don't care.

00:09:13.740 I don't particularly care about the existence of tax havens, that kind of thing.

00:09:18.060 So that's your sort of classical liberal tradition.

00:09:19.800 The Berkeyan conservative tradition is order is hard to gain and easy to lose.

00:09:31.040 The maintenance of order depends on unspoken rules that most of us follow without necessarily understanding why we follow them.

00:09:43.060 but we know that if we break them, you get social disorder and it's difficult to get back to where

00:09:49.980 we were. That's a terrible simplification of Burke. But what it leads to in the British tradition is

00:09:56.960 institutional conservatism. It tends to be the standard borne by the One Nation Tories.

00:10:04.920 And one of the reasons why so many One Nation Tories came out for Remain is because they're

00:10:09.720 actually making an institutional argument. They're saying, we've been in the European Union for a

00:10:13.960 really long time. Our institutions are all enmeshed with each other. If we attempt to leave,

00:10:19.640 it will be difficult to do so. That is a Birkian argument. So when One Nation Tories are making it,

00:10:25.800 they're not making it disingenuously. They have a serious case to make. But you can also have

00:10:32.260 One Nation Tories who say, this is foreign to Britain's traditions. We have never had

00:10:37.560 a supranational state over us in this way unless you go back to the Romans and unless you want to

00:10:44.240 reconceive of the European Union as the Roman Empire, and I don't think you do. This is not

00:10:48.580 part of our tradition. We have stood alone. We are an outward-looking seafaring people

00:10:52.860 as opposed to landlubbers like they are on the continent. So therefore, our traditions and our

00:11:00.300 institutions should be more focused within the United Kingdom and not paying obeisance to

00:11:07.240 the European Union. They're both one-nation Tory arguments, and they're both perfectly good

00:11:12.000 Burkean institutional conservative arguments. The third strand of conservatism doesn't really

00:11:18.020 exist in either the UK or Australia, but it does exist in the United States. It's very important

00:11:23.600 there, and that is social conservatism, opposition to abortion, opposition to same-sex marriage,

00:11:30.260 a degree of privileging of religion, a belief that the United States is a Christian country

00:11:35.580 despite the wall of separation from Jefferson and so on and so forth, that's much weaker in Australia

00:11:42.040 and the UK or New Zealand, those kind of places, much stronger in the United States. If you saw

00:11:48.580 that terrible interview where Ben Shapiro had an absolute car crash with Andrew Neil, it was those

00:11:54.320 two visions of two, but they're both conservatives. Neil is not even really a classical liberal. He's

00:11:59.680 a conservative. But Neil is a Burkean conservative. Ben Shapiro is a social conservative. And the two

00:12:07.340 of them, it's like water and oil. And that's what happened in that interview because they broke

00:12:17.220 each other's political compass. And it was especially bad for Shapiro, who was unfamiliar

00:12:21.740 with the role of the state broadcaster. I didn't know that Andrew Neil was the chairman of the

00:12:26.140 spectator, all of these kind of things. But it really broke his political compass to deal with

00:12:31.560 a person who is obviously quite conservative, but finds the American approach to the abortion

00:12:37.840 issue completely mad. That's what triggered Shapiro, wasn't it? The way that he phrased

00:12:41.960 the abortion question. Abortion and then Israel questions, because the conservatives over here

00:12:46.980 just are different. Yeah. So that's a really great layout of the conservative spectrum, by the way.

00:12:53.000 I would really appreciate that, and that's something that would be really great to have for people who want to understand what conservatism or classical liberal actually means.

00:12:59.860 Both evil, by the way.

00:13:02.400 But this is exactly where I was going to take it, because I don't think 99% of people in this country or in the United States or in Australia have any idea what you're talking about.

00:13:13.480 Because the word right wing, as Francis was saying, is just a label now that you use for people that you disagree with, the people you think are racist, the people you think are xenophobic.

00:13:22.440 It's very silly and unfortunate because it would be, it's like, you used to get a little bit of this back when the wall came down in the late 80s and early 90s, that anybody was on the left was written off as a communist and it's obviously stupid.

00:13:38.760 You know, Tony Blair, a communist, pull the other one and plays Jingle Bells, to use the Australian expression.

00:13:45.520 So, I mean, it's that in reverse, basically.

00:13:48.780 you cannot call a classical liberal a fascist. You can't call a Burkean conservative like Andrew

00:13:59.120 Neal a fascist because they are different traditions. I mean, and I'm not saying that

00:14:05.580 they don't necessarily agree on certain points, but fascism and socialism and communism can line

00:14:12.120 up on certain points as well. I mean, they all tend to be very high tax entities. They tend to

00:14:18.440 be very pro-large states and lots of state power, whereas classical liberals and Berkey

00:14:24.460 and conservatives will be on the side of, no, no, no, that state is too big and too

00:14:28.320 powerful.

00:14:28.800 We don't want a state that that's that over-mighty, otherwise it'll crush us all underfoot.

00:14:33.520 And so, yeah, I have seen this, that, oh, you're right wing and it's just used as a

00:14:38.900 term of abuse.

00:14:40.100 I'm working on the principle that it's on Twitter, that it's social media and so not

00:14:43.800 representative.

00:14:44.460 uh it's it's also creeps in into real life where people go oh that person's right when they're

00:14:50.340 just a massive racist yeah like you know how people used to make preface a racist comment

00:14:55.200 by saying i'm not racist but yeah now anyone who who talks about anything that's remotely

00:15:00.560 conservative or right wing has to preface it by saying i'm not right wing but yeah i think that's

00:15:05.500 very foolish because i have because of the the influence of classical liberalism in my intellectual

00:15:11.900 and political heritage. I mean, I have whole position, significant numbers of positions

00:15:17.400 that are actually quite left wing. And the three big ones, drugs, abortion, LGBT rights,

00:15:24.420 they're sort of three classical, where the classical liberals and the lefties will line

00:15:28.060 up. But for different reasons, classical liberals, it's because no, no, no, the government should

00:15:32.800 not be telling you how to live your life. The government should not be telling you what

00:15:36.020 to put in your mouth. The government should not be telling you how to use your body.

00:15:39.520 That's not the government's business. The government can go fly a kite. That's the classical liberal perspective. Whereas for left-wing people, it's more about personal liberation and being accepted and valued based on your identity and based on what you are. I mean, I don't see necessarily anything wrong with those arguments, but they're not ones that resonate for me for the simple reason that if you overuse those kind of identity arguments, they're not just for one side, basically.

00:16:07.060 you can get I always knew I mean I was involved in various LGBT campaigns in my youth and I always

00:16:15.400 knew I remember sitting there when we had pride marches and so on and so forth one day it's not

00:16:21.680 just going to be us wanting pride it'll be everyone likewise I remember even as a teenager

00:16:28.480 seeing sort of the beginning of the sort of the whole black power movement and I remember thinking

00:16:32.780 okay if black power is okay why isn't white power okay you really might want to think about this

00:16:40.060 this is probably not a good idea maybe in the very short term to get people to pay attention

00:16:45.560 to a particular social issue but you don't want to persist with it because to me the the left

00:16:52.460 identity politics is is not a politics as such it's a toolkit and it's a toolkit it's like you

00:16:58.920 set of sid chrome spanners, anyone can open that box of spanners and make use of what's in there

00:17:05.980 to do whatever it is they want to do. And you're starting to see, and it kind of shocks me a bit

00:17:12.800 actually, because it never used to be part of any sort of conservative tradition with which I was

00:17:16.320 familiar. You're now starting to see that kind of identity politics emerging on the right side of

00:17:21.060 the aisle. And that's very foreign to me. I never saw it. And I see it now and it's, well, it's

00:17:26.600 quite shocking. I find it quite horrible. I said, no, no, no, no, that's not how you're supposed to

00:17:29.640 do things. You're not supposed to get the state in your pocket favoring your team because of

00:17:35.340 something that you are. And what specifically are you talking about when you talk about identity

00:17:39.860 being used in that way on the right? Well, you're starting to see genuine

00:17:43.060 ethno-nationalism. I've started to see that. That had been killed. That had been absolutely

00:17:49.640 put in its box. Enoch Powell was thrown out of the Conservative Party for even getting

00:17:55.640 a tiny bit near those kind of perspectives.

00:18:00.080 There are quite a lot of people out there now

00:18:02.080 who sort of are quite blunt about that.

00:18:04.880 And also the use of true facts,

00:18:08.460 things that are true,

00:18:10.060 are construed in an identitarian way.

00:18:14.040 And I'll give you one from each side of the political aisle

00:18:17.340 so you can see what I mean.

00:18:20.840 White boys in Britain, particularly working class white boys, do poorly at school.

00:18:31.900 They're the bottom rung of the ladder.

00:18:32.840 They're the bottom rung of the ladder.

00:18:34.440 Instead of saying we need to address disadvantage in this country, there are now a significant number of voices saying we need specific programs for poor white boys.

00:18:43.840 in exactly the same way that if you go back 20 years,

00:18:47.020 we need specific programs for poor black kids

00:18:49.820 or we need anti-Islamophobia programs for Muslims.

00:18:55.440 As far as I'm concerned, and this is very much the classical liberal side

00:18:59.260 rather than the conservative side, this is all nonsense.

00:19:03.260 You can't do this because of the toolkit quality of it.

00:19:07.340 So you have to address disadvantage and discrimination

00:19:10.020 instead of targeting particular groups.

00:19:13.020 Because the thing is, by targeting particular groups, you finish up in a situation where you treat everybody in the group as a widget.

00:19:21.280 You know, they're all the same.

00:19:22.820 And that's fraught with danger.

00:19:24.260 It doesn't matter what group of people that you're dealing with.

00:19:28.920 Absolutely fraught with danger.

00:19:31.100 And because of the toolkit quality, anyone can use it, including really quite reprehensible people on both extremes.

00:19:37.940 So you get the white identitarianism or ethno-nationalism, using the wrong hand, you're sort of on the right hand side, but you're now also getting, you're starting to see elements of it on the political left in this country with the approach to Israel in the Labor Party.

00:20:01.260 You know, instead of just having an argument about, oh, we should recognise Palestine as a country or we should stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia, which are legitimate arguments, and Corbyn is not a fool for making both of them historically, it's become awful arguments.

00:20:15.960 You know, you say you've got people in the Labour Party tweeting Rothschild memes and, you know, and loopy conspiracy murals with loopy conspiracy theories in them.

00:20:25.000 You know, it's sort of, that's the same thing on the other side.

00:20:28.520 You just don't want to go there.

00:20:31.260 about the election let's get into it because francis and i i don't know if it's fair of me

00:20:40.640 to say on behalf of francis but it's certainly something i know nothing about and uh what i did

00:20:46.140 see however is when the the election happened a it was not predicted by people including you

00:20:51.640 yourself i didn't predict that you didn't expect it to happen the polls had predicted for i think

00:20:55.940 56 consecutive polls that predicted that it wouldn't happen that way. You have a right wing

00:21:02.380 or certainly a center right government retaining its power, which was unexpected. A lot of people

00:21:09.540 have likened it to Brexit and Trump. The thing that I saw on all over my Twitter was, oh, we're

00:21:15.260 living in this racist, sexist, xenophobic, blah, blah, exactly the same thing that happened with

00:21:19.960 Brexit, exactly the same thing that happened with Trump. So basically, a bunch of woke people

00:21:25.240 freaking out, which always makes me happy. So I looked at this and I thought, well, let's get

00:21:29.720 someone in to talk about it. So why don't you tell us what happened, why you think it happened,

00:21:35.020 and what are some of the correlations with Trump and Brexit? Is it the same thing? Is it something

00:21:40.080 different, et cetera? Okay, I'll try to work backwards through that. There is some similarity

00:21:48.160 with Trump and with Brexit, and also with the 2015 UK general election, in that it was an

00:21:56.680 unexpected victory. And Australian pollsters were humbled very badly, including the leading

00:22:05.680 polling company in Australia called News Poll, which is actually run by the newspaper that I

00:22:12.120 cover Brexit for. I write for The Australian, which is the country's main national daily.

00:22:16.620 And the Australian Owns News poll. And it had always had a very good reputation for being an extremely accurate poll. Now, there are reasons for that, which I'll get onto in a minute. But certainly, it was an unexpected win. And of course, it was a win that went to a centre-right government, where it's different from the Trump phenomenon, and particularly different from the Trump phenomenon, and also to a degree from Brexit.

00:22:46.620 but not that different, is Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, and the Liberal

00:22:52.740 National Coalition are to the left of the US Democrats.

00:22:56.900 Oh, wow.

00:22:57.400 Okay.

00:22:57.820 You need to understand the difference in politics between a orderly, prosperous, extremely

00:23:08.360 well-governed Commonwealth country and the United States.

00:23:13.180 Australians look at the United States, I'll be quite frank, and they just look at the

00:23:16.040 United States and go, that's a failed state.

00:23:19.120 Our American viewers are just...

00:23:21.460 We're called trigonometry for a reason.

00:23:24.660 Breathe, guys, breathe.

00:23:26.560 So, for example, to give you an idea, Australia has universal health care, all the things

00:23:31.640 that the Americans are always tearing themselves apart over.

00:23:34.700 And not only does it have universal health care, it has extremely good universal health

00:23:38.440 care.

00:23:39.240 It has fully funded pensions, none of this problem of the huge debt of social security

00:23:43.940 in the United States.

00:23:45.380 It has zero, almost zero gun crime.

00:23:51.620 And when Democrats want to beat the Republicans over the head in the United States about their gun laws, they always point at Australia because of the very strict gun laws that exist in Australia.

00:24:04.160 Post a big massacre.

00:24:04.940 Yeah, post a big massacre after the Port Arthur massacre.

00:24:07.700 So, for example, there are some quite conservative, individually socially conservative people, either in the Liberal National Coalition or who have been in it historically.

00:24:20.080 But because Australia has particular characteristics as an electorate, the social conservatism never really gets anywhere.

00:24:29.520 For example, historically, a man who's just lost his seat, Tony Abbott, clearly wanted to tighten up abortion laws.

00:24:37.700 John Howard, the then Prime Minister, basically got Tony Abbott, while Tony Abbott was the

00:24:42.700 Health Minister, grabbed Tony Abbott by the scruff of the neck and went, sit down and

00:24:48.800 shut up.

00:24:49.580 We want to stay electable.

00:24:51.440 So Australian politics is very centrist, and there is not a huge gap, or there hasn't historically

00:24:59.820 been a huge gap, between the coalition, the Liberal National Coalition, and Labor.

00:25:05.600 there's a reason for that and i've i tried to explain it in a little podcast of my own

00:25:12.400 but i'll do it a bit here australia has a very unusual electoral system it's like nowhere else

00:25:17.980 on the planet and the most important thing you need to understand about the australian electoral

00:25:23.000 system is that voting is compulsory so you don't have any issue in australia with getting the vote

00:25:29.580 out. And also, if you're too nutty in your policies, too far to the left or too far to the

00:25:38.200 right, whether on the left it's about identity politics or environmentalism on the right about

00:25:45.280 things like abortion or cutting welfare or that kind of thing, if you go too far in one or the

00:25:52.940 other direction because all of the people vote. You truly get a distribution that looks like that

00:26:01.420 and the great bulk of the population is in the middle of that distribution. And if you are too

00:26:06.880 weird, they will not vote for you. Sounds glorious. It just sounds like a warm bath.

00:26:13.220 So pandering to your base is actually a very bad strategy. It's a very bad strategy. Don't

00:26:18.460 pander to the base. Both parties have made mistakes doing this. Recently, it was the Labour

00:26:23.780 Party. And that's one of the reasons they lost that election. But it's also the coalition has

00:26:30.560 made the same mistake. Typically, it's state elections. They tried to pander to their social

00:26:34.980 conservative base in Victoria. And they were critical of, for example, a drug injecting room

00:26:40.880 that's available for drug users in Victoria. They were critical of education about same-sex

00:26:46.120 relationships in Victorian schools and just discovered that they did not take the Victorian

00:26:50.480 people with them at all and got creamed at the state election. So you get this centrifuge

00:26:56.520 of driving people's policies to the centre. Now, so that people don't think that either

00:27:03.020 you guys at Trigonometry or I am around to ask how the Australian political system works

00:27:09.360 and why it does, I've mentioned the compulsory voting and the effect that it has. If you

00:27:14.140 want to understand the Australian political system, read this book. I'm going to hold it

00:27:19.540 up there. For our listeners, it's from Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage. Yes, by Judith Brett.

00:27:25.720 She's a professor of political science at an Australian university, I think at Melbourne

00:27:29.280 University. And the Democracy Sausage refers to the fact that Australian elections, they're held

00:27:37.380 on a Saturday. So they're a carnival atmosphere. And it is customary for them to be held in places

00:27:45.640 where local community groups run by schools, by surf life saving clubs, by the police youth clubs,

00:27:52.340 by scouts, by guides, put food stalls on to raise money. So one of the experiences that

00:28:00.180 Australians have when they go to the polls, all of them, they do go to the polls, is it's a

00:28:06.420 carnival atmosphere. It's like a holiday. And so people eat food and the democracy sausage.

00:28:12.120 The Twitter hashtag, you know, AusVotes19 had a slice of bread with a sausage on it and tomato

00:28:18.680 sauce. That was the sort of classic. It's not a hot dog. It's on a slice of bread. You have to

00:28:24.140 ask, especially when you go to one of the stalls at an Australian, like they're a polling place

00:28:28.480 officially, but Australians always refer to them as polling booths. And it's so it's a very

00:28:35.480 carnival-esque kind of atmosphere. It's a very attractive sort of atmosphere. And it's a very

00:28:41.320 unusual system. And the reason this book starts, the title is from Secret Ballot, is the secret

00:28:47.800 ballot as you experience it when you walk into a little cubicle and you have a pencil there and

00:28:53.100 your ballot papers, that cubicle and the ability to hide how you're voting in its modern form.

00:28:59.920 There was a version of it in classical antiquity, but this is a separate modern invention. The

00:29:05.360 modern form is actually an Australian invention. And when it was first developed in the late 19th

00:29:10.740 century, for a long time, people in other countries in both the UK and the United States

00:29:15.300 referred to it as the Australian ballot because it was an Australian invention.

00:29:21.580 So what's the impact of that? Tell us about the impact and how that affected this election.

00:29:25.260 Well, the secret ballot, the importance of the secret ballot is that people can't be frightened

00:29:31.260 in or bribed into voting a particular way. You don't know how they're going to vote.

00:29:38.680 And that is the virtue of the secret ballot is that you find out what people really think.

00:29:45.640 In economics, economists talk about the difference between stated preferences

00:29:50.260 and revealed preferences. The secret ballot is the way that you get revealed preferences.

00:29:56.240 And it's also why most recently in Australia, although this hasn't happened before in Australia, but in many, many other countries, why the way people vote in the polling booth is different from the kind of things they may have told pollsters.

00:30:12.740 And this phenomenon has become more common on the political right because people are afraid to say what they think.

00:30:18.640 They think they'll be criticised for it, maybe legitimately, maybe not.

00:30:21.920 But people don't often like to be criticised for their political views.

00:30:25.040 So they don't say anything, but then they go into the secrecy of the polling booth and say on the ballot paper what they really think.

00:30:34.380 And that phenomenon was first identified in 1992 when John Major unexpectedly won a general election here.

00:30:42.680 And it was called, British pollsters called it the shy Tory syndrome.

00:30:46.480 It doesn't always happen. And UK pollsters, since they were embarrassed by it again in 2015, have generally become quite good at controlling when you feed all the data through polling, through your poll aggregators, have become quite good at controlling for the shy Tory syndrome, which is why, for example, in 2017, Servation did really well.

00:31:10.720 They picked the UK general election almost down to the seat, the seat numbers.

00:31:16.980 They did really, really well.

00:31:18.460 You can do that.

00:31:19.180 You can do very good, accurate polling.

00:31:21.120 It's not impossible, but you have to be really aware of all the factors that are flying around.

00:31:26.560 But in this case, they were quite lazy, weren't they?

00:31:29.320 It was a point you made to me over the phone.

00:31:30.940 Yes, yes.

00:31:31.660 Australian pollsters, because of the compulsory voting in other countries,

00:31:37.820 Pollsters have three existential issues that they have to deal with.

00:31:42.960 Is the person that I'm asking, number one, is the person that I'm asking questions of

00:31:47.720 even going to vote?

00:31:50.560 Number two, does that person form part of a representative sample?

00:31:56.720 And number three, is that person telling me the truth?

00:32:00.240 Those are three big things.

00:32:02.100 So when one of them goes wrong, number three, for example, is it shy Tories, they have to

00:32:08.800 be controlled for by the polling company.

00:32:11.000 Number one, likely or unlikely voter.

00:32:13.520 Sometimes they ask them directly, but then you've got a problem with number three again.

00:32:18.080 They might lie.

00:32:19.000 Oh, someone's asking me about whether I'm going to vote or not.

00:32:21.600 I better say yes.

00:32:23.100 So you get completely false impressions about turnout.

00:32:26.960 And number two, which is where the Australian pollsters went wrong, is they had problems with getting an accurate sample.

00:32:34.260 Some of this wasn't their fault.

00:32:36.980 There's a bank of telephone numbers called the Government Integrated Number Database that police and emergency services use in Australia.

00:32:47.720 And pollsters, polling companies like NewsPoll, the one at my own newspaper, have been pleading to be allowed access to that for many years now because they were aware that they would eventually, if you don't have access to a full bank of telephone numbers, including mobile numbers, you start getting difficulties with a representative sample.

00:33:07.260 However, in other respects, sorry, I have to cut that bit out.

00:33:13.640 In other respects, they were lazy because one third of the things that really matter

00:33:24.500 for pollsters in the United States or France or the UK, worrying about, is this person going to

00:33:32.180 vote? They didn't have to care. And that's a big, when you've got three questions you have to answer

00:33:37.160 and suddenly one of them doesn't matter, it becomes much easier to control in the other areas

00:33:43.120 and get accurate forecasts. Now, when I was working for Senator Lionhelm in 2016, we had

00:33:48.880 in-house polling that we did. We commissioned polling companies to do stuff for us and asked

00:33:52.940 the questions and came up with the frameworks and so on and so forth. I've done all of this

00:33:56.620 myself as a chief of staff to a politician, but we also used publicly available polls like NewsPoll.

00:34:05.120 And my experience of them was always that you could rely on them. Australian pollsters were

00:34:09.260 very, very good. They got very accurate throughput because of the compulsory voting.

00:34:15.880 And even, and this must be said, it even must be said the Saturday election that they got wrong

00:34:21.900 with the 56 news polls in a row indicating that Labor was ahead of the coalition. Particularly

00:34:27.680 in the last couple of weeks of the election, the gap was within the margin of error. Do you know

00:34:32.160 what that means, the margin of error? Yeah. When the gap is in the margin of error, it literally

00:34:36.500 means it could go the other way. And a huge number of pundits don't pay enough attention

00:34:42.560 to the margin of error. The only polls you really should have taken into account of those 56

00:34:49.160 were the ones where the lead to Labor was above the margin of error or outside of the margin of

00:34:56.240 error. And sometimes it was. So you clearly, in those places, you've got other issues,

00:35:00.820 sampling problems and shy Tories. But where it was in the margin of error, particularly in the

00:35:05.960 weeks, the tightening of the polls and the lead up to the election, more pundits, including

00:35:10.020 people at the Australian newspaper, and they are completely frank about this now, like

00:35:14.340 a journalist I've been interviewed by in Australia, both for The Australian and for his show

00:35:20.620 on Sky News, Chris Kenny, even he admitted, he said, yep, I have not paid enough attention

00:35:27.460 to the fact that the polls tightened before the election and that you had a situation

00:35:34.540 where it was within the margin of error

00:35:37.580 and all that means is you could literally just fall

00:35:39.560 in the opposite direction.

00:35:41.220 So you can't blame pollsters for pundits being innumerate.

00:35:45.600 So there's that.

00:35:46.960 And you also can't blame pollsters for people lying to them.

00:35:50.740 I mean, they can control for it for something like shy Tories

00:35:53.900 to the best of their ability.

00:35:56.660 But in Australia, they've never had to do that before.

00:36:00.060 That's a new experience.

00:36:01.200 All right.

00:36:02.040 So that's all great.

00:36:03.140 And what were the main issues in the election?

00:36:08.020 Because you say it's a much more centrist place.

00:36:11.720 So does that mean, for example, an issue like immigration was much less of a thing than it is here?

00:36:17.960 Complete non-issue in the last election.

00:36:20.520 Really?

00:36:20.740 Immigration did not.

00:36:21.780 the two really big issues in the last Australian election that really mattered and that annoyed

00:36:28.780 people on both sides were climate change and tax. And a little bit of background here,

00:36:38.340 Australia not only has compulsory voting, it also has instant runoff or compulsory preferential

00:36:44.040 voting, which is where you number the boxes. The cover of the book does it really well with the

00:36:49.200 letters, you number them all in rank order. And the one refers to the primary vote.

00:36:58.040 And then the subsequent numbers are the preferences. It's possible much easier to

00:37:02.700 register a protest vote. And I'll use British political parties here rather than an Australian

00:37:08.280 one so that you get what I mean. If you had the Australian voting system, you're angry with the

00:37:14.680 conservatives because you don't like the way they've handled Brexit. So that means you vote

00:37:19.780 number one for a protest party for UKIP or the Brexit party, and then number two for the

00:37:25.100 conservatives. So you've given the conservative party a bop on the snoot for doing their job

00:37:30.200 badly, but you've also awarded them eventually if the number of votes that either UKIP or the

00:37:37.680 Brexit party get is less than the number of votes that the conservatives get, the preferences will

00:37:43.560 flow ultimately to the Conservatives. Now, what has happened in Australia over many decades now

00:37:51.880 is that the Labor Party's primary vote, the number of ones it gets in its boxes,

00:37:58.140 has been dropping. And whilst it's often been able to form government because it gets preferences

00:38:03.620 from other parties, the way funding works in Australia for a political party is determined

00:38:12.000 on how many number ones you get. It's based on your primary vote. And now the political party

00:38:16.980 that's been taking votes from the Australian Labor Party is the Greens. And the Greens have

00:38:23.900 run very hard on climate change issues. And they ran very hard in this last election campaign

00:38:31.360 on a coal mine that was going to be built in the Carmichael Basin, the Adani coal mine. Adani is

00:38:38.520 the name of the Indian Company, which is involved in funding and building this mine. It hasn't been

00:38:44.280 started yet. There's been all sorts of fights. There was an enormous fight over the Adani mine

00:38:48.740 in 2015 when I was working for Senator Lionhelm. So this has been a persistent,

00:38:53.280 ongoing issue. Huge climate change, huge fight over climate change.

00:38:57.640 Indian colonialists coming on to Australia, pillaging the country's resources.

00:39:04.040 And Eddie, well, yes, there are some people who literally ran that line,

00:39:07.320 which is really quite extraordinary. The Greens were running the environmentalist line and a

00:39:11.680 number of things happened with Adani. Adani is in Queensland or will be in Queensland. The

00:39:17.580 Queensland state government has just put the approvals through because it's a Labour government.

00:39:20.920 It's sort of like, oh, whoops, this appears to have lost Labour the election. We better change

00:39:25.400 our tune. So it's in Queensland. Queensland is a very resource rich state. Coal, oil, diamonds,

00:39:33.320 natural gas, uranium, it's got everything, basically. And so the mine was going to be

00:39:41.500 in Queensland. There was an enormous environmental fight over it. And Labor, angry, legitimately,

00:39:46.720 I think, at the loss of its primary vote over many decades, moved closer to the Greens,

00:39:51.760 which was opposed to the building. They were opposed to the... It's an open cut, so

00:39:57.380 opposed to the mine, basically, rather than the... Traditionally, the Labor Party would

00:40:03.300 have said, no, this is providing thousands of jobs for good jobs. The line that Donald Trump

00:40:09.520 uses about good jobs for working class people who aren't necessarily terribly skilled, but

00:40:14.860 they're hardworking. And if they're willing to work in a remote location, they finish up getting

00:40:19.360 a very high salary. And that phenomenon of working in a remote location and working for, say, two

00:40:25.480 weeks at the mine and then having four days off, going four or six days off, going back to a big

00:40:29.900 city is known as FIFO in Australia, fly in, fly out. And this is very, very common in Queensland.

00:40:35.780 And the city where I first practiced law, I first went to the criminal bar in Australia. It was a

00:40:42.300 city called Rockhampton, which is right on the periphery of one of the two big coal areas,

00:40:46.260 the Bowen Basin. So there's the Bowen Basin. And then further inland, there's the Galilee Basin,

00:40:50.780 which was where the Adani mine is going to be now. And all these people in those areas,

00:40:56.880 many of them Indigenous, many of them Pacific Islander, many of them, all of them quite often

00:41:03.860 quite disadvantaged educationally and socially and working class traditional Labour voters.

00:41:10.240 They expected the party of the worker to be in favour of good jobs for people like them.

00:41:18.480 And what happened is that Labor's primary vote in Queensland went down even further,

00:41:27.000 went down to 27%, which is just unsustainable.

00:41:31.920 So the number of people who were willing to put Labor number one on the ballot paper was only 27%.

00:41:36.180 Think in terms of first past the post.

00:41:38.600 How likely is it if you have a seat with four or five people running

00:41:41.600 that a person who only gets 27% of the vote is going to win in first past the post?

00:41:46.240 It's very difficult.

00:41:47.240 and so Labor's primary vote collapsed even further

00:41:51.100 and people, instead of preferencing a minor party like One Nation

00:41:56.440 or the United Australia Party and then going back to Labor,

00:42:00.520 they then preferenced and went to the coalition.

00:42:04.140 So there wasn't much shift at the number one level

00:42:08.280 but the preference flows were 10, 12, sometimes 15%

00:42:12.940 in favour of the coalition.

00:42:14.360 So Labor lost all of its regional seats in Queensland except one,

00:42:19.480 and it was the mine, climate change, the mine issue there.

00:42:23.560 It was the mine what did it.

00:42:24.780 Yeah, but there was another reason that I found very interesting

00:42:28.060 on your podcast listening to it.

00:42:29.620 It was because Labor prioritised the LGBTQ vote,

00:42:34.760 which alienated the Pacific Islander vote,

00:42:37.940 and it was all because of a rugby player.

00:42:40.340 Yeah, well, I mean, this is what led to the shite.

00:42:42.700 I am reasonably satisfied now having done a booth-by-booth analysis

00:42:46.320 in two of the seats that Labor lost

00:42:49.140 and one seat that it very nearly lost,

00:42:51.860 or a Queensland seat that it very nearly lost,

00:42:54.200 seats with a very significant concentration

00:42:56.980 of Pacific Islander voters.

00:42:59.500 And, I mean, you won't know what they are.

00:43:03.280 Pacific Islanders are people from, you know,

00:43:05.820 sort of Vanuatu, Cook Islands, New Zealand, Hawaii, Tonga, Fiji.

00:43:10.080 there, lots and lots and lots of them in Australia.

00:43:14.520 Going back over 100 years,

00:43:18.140 Pacific Islanders were brought often forcibly to Australia

00:43:21.660 in the 19th century to cut sugar cane,

00:43:24.020 and they were referred to,

00:43:25.200 this is quite a vulgar word in Australia now,

00:43:27.240 but it's historically accurate,

00:43:28.780 they were referred to as kanakas,

00:43:30.640 and they were a form of indentured labour.

00:43:32.400 So there is a significant going back...

00:43:34.140 See, I don't know that word,

00:43:34.920 but I am now worried that Helen has just dropped the N-bomb on our show.

00:43:39.400 No, no, no.

00:43:40.340 We're going to get demonetised forever.

00:43:42.960 Well, what you're getting now is just me getting what I used to call as a teacher SPS,

00:43:48.040 which is sweaty back syndrome.

00:43:50.520 Not sweaty bum syndrome.

00:43:51.820 No, no, sweaty back, where you can just feel the sweat trickle down.

00:43:55.180 Let's not explore that.

00:43:56.740 It's not a pleasant image for anybody.

00:43:58.880 So you haven't dropped the N-bomb, but...

00:44:00.720 No, but that was the term that used to be used.

00:44:03.460 It's not used now.

00:44:04.380 And it's not as rude as the N-bomb, and there are certainly ruder words in Australia than that.

00:44:08.580 I can believe that.

00:44:10.820 You do have a reputation.

00:44:13.000 Which precedes you?

00:44:15.560 Australia has a significant Pacific Islander population

00:44:18.240 and the Pacific Islands, the missionaries who went there,

00:44:22.000 were almost uniquely successful compared to everywhere else in the world.

00:44:27.500 And they're a mixture of Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Methodists,

00:44:32.120 uniting, sort of all different varieties of Protestant.

00:44:34.760 They're not Catholic.

00:44:35.340 They're all varieties of Protestant.

00:44:36.380 And they're quite traditionally conservative and religious.

00:44:40.940 And they have very similar moral values to Muslims, except, as I've pointed out to a few people, except they're completely monogamous, obviously, because that's part of Christianity.

00:44:51.480 And Israel Folau, who was the rugby player in question, put up on his Instagram a homophobic – I don't do Instagram except for pictures of my cat, so I'm not really sure how it works.

00:45:05.100 A homophobic meme, basically, that, among other things, said that gay people were going to go to hell.

00:45:12.900 And, of course, he is the best rugby player in Australia.

00:45:16.900 He is a multimillionaire from being a rugby player.

00:45:19.860 He's enormously gifted.

00:45:21.400 And this caused an enormous stink because he'd violated Rugby Australia's social media policy.

00:45:28.040 And so there was this ongoing and enormous stink that just dragged on and on and on.

00:45:33.520 Because you know how these sporting bodies, they have their own internal requirements in terms of dispute resolution and so on and so forth.

00:45:42.600 And then you can go through the courts and then you can go through an employment tribunal and all of this kind of thing.

00:45:46.960 And all the different stages of this over a conservative Christian rugby player was just going on at the same time as the election campaign.

00:45:56.940 And an organisation called the Australian Christian Lobby did what I used to do for my senator when I was working for him, did private polling about the effect of the treatment of Israel Folau was having, not only among Pacific Islanders, but just among Christians more generally.

00:46:17.440 And it soon became clear that even many people who were not particularly Christian were looking

00:46:24.320 at it from the perspective of proud sports people.

00:46:27.560 Australia is a proud sporting nation, has got a sporting, significant sporting heritage.

00:46:31.920 It's taken very seriously in the country and many, many Australians are very good at sport

00:46:38.120 and the country wins numbers of Olympic medals out of all proportion to its tiny population,

00:46:43.840 every Olympics and all of this kind of thing.

00:46:45.480 So a lot of people were just looking at the Israel Folau situation and going, this is to do with his ability to play rugby. How? And why do you even care? And even a couple of other people who were either sort of ex-Wallabies and ex-Waratahs, which is his state site, New South Wales Waratahs, were saying, it's not just Israel Folau.

00:47:09.400 you'll have to get rid of every Pacific Islander in the Australian rugby team because that's what

00:47:17.080 they're all like. They just don't necessarily stick it on their Instagram. But that's what

00:47:21.600 they all think. They're conservative Christians. Are you going to get rid of all of the Pacific

00:47:24.840 Islanders out of the Australian rugby team? And if you do, isn't that a bit racist? Because

00:47:30.720 it's the same argument that you have with Islam over here. If you start picking on people for

00:47:37.420 having really, really conservative religious views, and most of those people are Muslim,

00:47:41.680 and most of those people are brown, you might mean it, but it can start to have a racial effect.

00:47:47.640 In Australia, it's Pacific Islanders. If you start chucking every Pacific Islander out of

00:47:52.020 the rugby team for having conservative religious views...

00:47:54.320 You're going to lose every game for the next 10 years.

00:47:56.020 Well, yeah, basically, you might as well say, we surrender to New Zealand,

00:48:00.060 because the all blacks are going to walk all over us. You might as well say that. But you're also,

00:48:04.940 So you're getting rid of all of the brown players in your team

00:48:08.160 and you finish up with a team of only white players.

00:48:10.820 Which some people in Australia probably would be quite a bit of interest.

00:48:14.300 And no matter how you dress that up, it's going to look bad.

00:48:19.280 So a lot of people, what you're saying is a lot of people felt

00:48:21.900 that what we might call the progressive left had gone too far

00:48:26.720 in the way that Israel was dealt with.

00:48:29.200 Yes.

00:48:29.740 And as a consequence of that.

00:48:31.160 In some electorates, it transferred.

00:48:33.680 I'm reasonably satisfied now, having done a booth-by-booth analysis, that it transferred into votes for the coalition, or at least preferences to the coalition.

00:48:43.720 They might have put number one for a protest party, and there's lots of those, but their preferences flowed to the coalition rather than to Labor.

00:48:56.020 All right, so the environment was an issue.

00:48:59.020 The kind of protection of what you might call freedom of expression or social...

00:49:03.860 Religious freedom, I would say.

00:49:04.840 Religious freedom, yeah.

00:49:06.080 That was an issue.

00:49:07.060 But the real big issue that, amazingly, you talk about is the economy.

00:49:10.600 Actually, economy hasn't affected Western elections, certainly in the UK or Britain, or in the UK or America, for quite a while, as some people would argue.

00:49:18.140 Yeah, the other one was a tax issue.

00:49:20.520 Not so much the overall economy.

00:49:23.360 Australia's economy is great.

00:49:24.680 You know, there's not been a recession in Australia for 28 years.

00:49:27.840 Wow.

00:49:28.400 The last recession was in 1991.

00:49:30.800 I'm an old lady and I barely remember it.

00:49:34.540 Okay.

00:49:35.200 I mean, I was just out of high school, to give you an idea of, I mean, it was so long ago.

00:49:41.400 And I can't sort of really remember many of the details because you can't when you're kind of 19.

00:49:46.540 Yeah, that kind of thing.

00:49:48.200 And so the Australian economy is fine.

00:49:50.480 highest minimum wage in the OECD, lowest unemployment. That's not going to be an

00:49:57.780 argument. The argument in this case, and I'm going to be very brief here because it's otherwise,

00:50:04.560 we'll just get into the weeds with corporate law and tax policy. And that's fine and entertaining

00:50:08.900 for me because I used to be a corporate lawyer, but it's not very entertaining for your listeners.

00:50:13.040 Well, it will be entertaining for the one listener that stays with it.

00:50:15.960 For the one listener that stays with it.

00:50:17.580 Very briefly, Australia doesn't have state pensions in the same way as the UK.

00:50:24.880 You don't get one automatically.

00:50:26.440 You have to be poor.

00:50:27.900 The social expectation in Australia, and it's imposed by law, is that you are meant to provide for your own retirement.

00:50:34.440 And you are meant to put money into what is called your superannuation fund, which is your pension.

00:50:41.360 Now, this is compulsory.

00:50:42.580 Everyone has to do it.

00:50:43.460 It's like the voting system.

00:50:44.360 It's been compulsory for a very long time, since 1990, and it means that the majority

00:50:50.640 of people in Australia have fully or partly funded pensions.

00:50:55.740 They don't have to hold their hand out to the government to get money when they're old.

00:50:59.620 However, an entire thicket of rules around super, super, Australians call it super, have

00:51:04.800 developed over the years and that make it easy to do this, that mean you pay less tax,

00:51:11.180 that mean that when you get money from your share investments, you pay less tax or you get a rebate

00:51:16.020 and so on and so forth. And one of the rebates that a lot of people in Australia, not just

00:51:20.820 pensioners, but a lot of people were getting was known as franking credits. And it's a way of

00:51:27.480 avoiding double taxation for the income you earn from dividends. And basically the Labour Party

00:51:34.160 was wanting to massively tighten this up and make it much harder for people to get as much

00:51:42.120 in the way of a rebate in terms of franking credits from the government. And what this

00:51:46.580 meant was that a lot of people who are self-funded retirees who don't get any money from the state

00:51:52.140 were dependent on franking credits on this particular perk that had been built into the

00:51:58.780 tax system. And I am aware of individuals, for example, who got in contact with me in the lead

00:52:05.680 up to the election, who were retired, self-funded retirees, no money from the government at all,

00:52:10.280 their pensions are fully funded, saying, I'm going to lose a third of my income

00:52:14.260 because they were getting it via this tax loophole, but not illegal. I mean, it's built

00:52:21.920 into the system to encourage people to provide for their own retirement. And that caused an

00:52:26.700 enormous stink. It meant that anybody who had investments where they were getting franking

00:52:32.660 credits as a result of dividend payments on the stocks that they owned, if you were getting a

00:52:38.040 significant sum of money, particularly amongst pensioners, then that just encouraged people to

00:52:43.420 vote against Labor, even if they were historically Labor voters, because you could literally just

00:52:48.680 get a financial calculator out and work out exactly how much less you'd have once that

00:52:54.060 legislation was passed through the Australian, the relevant legislation was passed through the

00:52:58.040 parliament. So it was a tax issue. All right. I hear you. So we've been talking for a good half

00:53:01.940 an hour now. I don't hear in what you've described why all these people think Australia is this

00:53:08.780 deeply racist, xenophobic place. And the election result is an expression of that, which is I just

00:53:15.880 saw on my, like I said, on my Twitter feed and on my Facebook, lots of Australian progressives

00:53:22.260 or whatever, just going on about what a terrible place Australia is because you voted for the

00:53:26.980 centre-right government. Australia can look racist to other countries, but not for the reason

00:53:33.220 that many Australians give you, and also not for the reasons that people in the UK or the US

00:53:39.720 give you. Australia has more immigrants per head of population than anybody else,

00:53:44.860 and it's more diverse than any other developed country. A quarter of the population is born

00:53:49.460 overseas, more than the US, more than France, more than here, all the colours of the rainbow,

00:53:55.360 so on and so forth. That's not the issue. Australians are pro-immigration. That's not

00:53:59.860 the problem. Where the country is construed as racist by people overseas is that it has enacted

00:54:06.660 a spate of legislation over decades, going right back to the early 90s, that has effectively torn

00:54:13.340 up the Refugee Convention. Australia only takes refugees that it wants. You can't just pitch up

00:54:20.320 in Australia and claim refugee status. If you do, you will be locked up. Mandatory detention.

00:54:27.920 And that goes back to a Labor government. And it was reinforced by John Howard. And you probably

00:54:34.600 heard the election slogan, we will decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they

00:54:41.100 come. It was called the Tampa election, but John Howard did that. But the original mandatory

00:54:45.240 detention policy was introduced by Paul Keating, a Labor prime minister. So when people say

00:54:51.380 Australia is a racist country, they don't mean, they shouldn't mean, because they'd just be wrong,

00:54:57.580 that it's about skin colour or ethnicity or diversity, because it's not. However, Australia

00:55:04.000 will not take poor crying people who say it's unsafe for me to live in my country. And there

00:55:10.720 were a number of incidences where boatloads of asylum seekers were simply allowed to drown

00:55:18.000 in the Timor Sea to encourage the others, to translate the French phrase.

00:55:23.860 So if they realise that they're just going to drown when they try to get to Australia,

00:55:29.260 they'll stop coming and that's precisely what happened.

00:55:32.260 And the person who most recently enforced that policy in Australia was Scott Morrison

00:55:38.760 because he was the immigration minister before he became treasurer

00:55:43.200 and now he's prime minister.

00:55:46.040 But the thing is, don't blame just Scott Morrison.

00:55:48.940 This is a policy that has heritage.

00:55:50.780 It goes back to Paul Keating.

00:55:52.660 It is baked into the Australian settlement

00:55:55.360 and the rationale for it is that the way to stop an electorate

00:56:00.680 becoming anti-immigration full stop,

00:56:04.260 which is the problem that you've got in the United States

00:56:06.840 and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom and significantly in parts of Europe is to give the

00:56:13.440 electorate complete control over intake. If you give the electorate complete control over intake,

00:56:20.000 and this is what the former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said in that big argument

00:56:24.300 with Donald Trump when they had the big argument on the telephone and Donald Trump discovered that

00:56:28.760 there was a person on the planet, of course, an Australian who could swear louder and longer

00:56:32.700 than he could because Australians, even really well-educated ones who went to

00:56:38.060 Oxford like Malcolm Turnbull, have a mastery of the blue that shocks people. And so Donald Trump

00:56:45.880 got an earful from Malcolm Turnbull. But in the middle of all the swears, Turnbull also made the

00:56:51.680 point that if you give the electorate control over immigration at the national level, then

00:56:57.660 90% of the racism and hostility to immigration just bleeds away. But the effect of giving the

00:57:05.020 electorate control over immigration is that you have to give the electorate control over refugee

00:57:11.340 intake. So what Australia has done, piece after piece after piece of legislation over many years

00:57:18.680 by governments of all stripes, is to make it harder and harder and harder to be a refugee

00:57:24.560 in Australia. It's not that Australia takes no refugees. It does. But it basically treats them

00:57:32.960 as immigrants. We'll have that one, lawyer. We'll have that one, teacher. That one, engineer,

00:57:41.520 doctor, plumber. The same logic that runs the points-based immigration system is extended to

00:57:49.880 a large degree, even though they don't use the same words, to refugees.

00:57:55.180 Comedians wouldn't make a mate.

00:57:57.620 Well, it's different from every other country.

00:58:03.300 Okay, so I hear you.

00:58:03.940 So the coalition, from what I take it, advocated pursuing this, continuing with this policy.

00:58:11.080 Oh, absolutely.

00:58:11.700 And Labour?

00:58:12.920 To be fair, the way the Australian immigration system works is bipartisan.

00:58:18.500 So why then the coalition win?

00:58:21.880 Why is it painted as a win for racism and xenophobia?

00:58:25.340 Because people on Twitter don't have very many brains.

00:58:30.340 But also the expectorating you get on Twitter from the Australian left,

00:58:35.900 the hashtag AusPol, it's one of the most contentious hashtags on Twitter,

00:58:42.120 I think is probably the best way of putting it.

00:58:43.460 a lot of the visible presence of the hashtag Auspol on Twitter is not actually from people

00:58:51.080 in the Labour Party, let alone the coalition. It's from Greens. And the Greens are the party

00:58:56.880 that are opposed to mandatory detention and believe that Australia should honour the Refugee

00:59:01.400 Convention. It's completely honest. If you go to the Greens website, you will see they set out all

00:59:06.520 the arguments. But you will also be impressed by the level of nuance involved because they are

00:59:11.620 aware that they're coming from a minority perspective and the Greens struggle to break

00:59:17.040 10% of the vote and their preferences flow to Labor or have historically flowed to Labor,

00:59:22.620 which Labor doesn't particularly like because Labor would like those primary votes for

00:59:26.340 themselves. But that doesn't mean that Labor is following the Greens on the treatment of

00:59:32.960 refugees and they haven't. And it's a very, very deliberate bipartisan policy. It's why

00:59:38.300 at the last election, centre-right government won

00:59:41.600 and the two big issues were climate change

00:59:44.340 slash Adani mine and franking credits, tax, not immigration

00:59:49.620 because the similarity between the two is the two parties,

00:59:54.360 the two big parties in Australia, they're really close.

00:59:57.460 And so we're talking about racism and people consider a racist state

01:00:01.360 and part of it, a major part of it is, of course, immigration,

01:00:04.000 it's the treatment of refugees, but it's also the treatment

01:00:06.020 of Aborigines and the native, you know.

01:00:07.840 Native Indigenous people.

01:00:09.400 If there is racism in Australia, it's not towards immigrants.

01:00:12.960 It's towards Aborigines.

01:00:14.820 And I don't know whether there's much of it left still,

01:00:17.840 but I saw horrible racism directed towards Aborigines growing up in Queensland.

01:00:23.360 Now, Queensland was the state traditionally is one of the two most conservative states.

01:00:28.280 The other one is Western Australia.

01:00:30.240 And Queensland also had a long period of government when I was in school.

01:00:34.300 I remember this.

01:00:35.220 I was in all the way through primary school and nearly all of my high school as well.

01:00:39.680 We had a premier called Joe B. Ockipederson, who was actually born in New Zealand, funnily

01:00:44.560 enough.

01:00:45.100 I mean, so you'd make all the New Zealand jokes you want about it.

01:00:48.280 Very, very conservative, but not only conservative in the sense of, say, Ronald Reagan or George

01:00:54.980 Bush Sr., but that sort of corrupt Southern conservatism that Americans can tell jokes

01:01:02.760 about in the southern states. They handle snakes there. To give you an idea, they used to refer to

01:01:09.160 Queensland as the deep north based on the deep south. And some of it is stereotyping. And I mean,

01:01:15.340 I come from Queensland and even worse, North Queensland, which is supposedly where all of

01:01:19.640 these really, really racist people are. And I certainly saw growing up a terrible racist

01:01:26.400 treatment of Aboriginal people. It was never formalized, but I saw things like informal

01:01:32.240 segregation. So you'd go to country towns and there would be four pubs. Three pubs would be

01:01:40.220 for white people and they'd be quite nice. And one pub would be a total bin fire and that would

01:01:45.340 be where all the Aborigines were expected to drink. And you'd have a situation where

01:01:50.920 a middle-class Aboriginal person, perhaps they'd gone to university or done fairly well for

01:01:56.300 themselves, had gone down to Brisbane and they'd come back in a suit and a tie or a nice dress or

01:02:01.220 that kind of thing, and try to walk into one of the white pubs and get told, oh, no, no, no,

01:02:05.480 you have to go to the Blackfellas pub. I saw stuff like that. This was a real thing.

01:02:12.900 And I saw things like, my parents were farmers. I saw things like, my father had a farm manager

01:02:20.100 who was an Aborigine, and once again, a middle-class Aborigine, pretty successful, had a nice

01:02:25.120 car, had a BMW, that kind of thing. Every time he drove between Townsville and Cairns,

01:02:30.260 which is a decent three, four hour drive, he would be booked. And the only way you could

01:02:36.940 describe that was driving while black. And it has got less bad. Queensland has now had a number

01:02:45.840 of Labour governments. And until the recent focus on LGBT rights, really only in the last election,

01:02:53.580 I have to give credit to Labour and especially to Queensland Labour for being the party of

01:02:58.220 anti-racism and a huge amount of the historic racism towards Aborigines in Queensland,

01:03:03.960 especially, which I can speak about because I saw it happen, was actually dealt with. It was

01:03:09.820 gotten rid of by the Australian Labor Party in Queensland. So it's nowhere near as bad as it was.

01:03:17.240 But when you had over 100 years of terrible racist treatment, people having to live on

01:03:24.460 Aboriginal reservations. There was a period where Aboriginal people needed a pass to get off the

01:03:28.880 mission or an Aboriginal reservation. It was like South Africa. This is obviously going back before

01:03:34.120 I was born, but it was still very, very serious. There was a period before 1967, Aboriginal people

01:03:39.360 weren't counted in the census as if they weren't people, this kind of thing. You can't have all of

01:03:47.800 that without there being knock-on effects. And Aborigines in remote areas are still significantly

01:03:54.660 disadvantaged compared to not only white people in the cities, but Aborigines in the cities as

01:04:00.440 well. There's just a big gap between the two, health, welfare, education, income, all of that.

01:04:12.100 So Helen, the last question we always like to ask is what's the one thing that no one's talking

01:04:16.580 about that we should be talking about? I'm going to confine this to the UK. And having watched a

01:04:22.300 few of your shows in the past, I have thought about my answer. One of the downsides to spending

01:04:28.980 so long in the European Union was that the UK stopped paying attention to the Commonwealth.

01:04:35.580 And the best run countries in the world with the most innovative social policy and economic policies

01:04:40.780 are not in the European Union. They're in the Commonwealth. They're Canada, Australia, Singapore,

01:04:49.600 Barbados, Trinidad, and New Zealand. Extremely well-run, prosperous, educated places that have

01:04:59.300 long histories of economic success, successful immigration programs, and excellent healthcare

01:05:05.080 systems. By not paying attention to the Commonwealth, Britain has fallen in many respects behind

01:05:14.480 the countries that were once its colonies. Pay more attention to Commonwealth countries.

01:05:19.140 A lot of them are doing a lot of very good stuff.

01:05:21.980 That's a really interesting point, something that no one has ever said. And even on the

01:05:25.720 immigration thing, I mean, we talk about immigration from the EU. I mean, where better to have people

01:05:31.740 coming from to this country than countries that used to be part of the Anglosphere speak the same

01:05:36.920 language. To be fair, one of the reasons why the vote for leave was very high amongst Commonwealth

01:05:43.320 immigrants and people of Commonwealth ancestry in the UK was because there is a widespread

01:05:49.720 perception amongst people across the Commonwealth, whether it's Australia, India, Jamaica, whatever,

01:05:54.240 it does not matter, every Commonwealth country, that the joining of, as it then was, the European

01:05:59.700 and economic community was a deliberate snubbing of the Commonwealth, and all these countries

01:06:05.060 had sent soldiers to defend the old country, as it's often called, in wars, and really

01:06:11.880 bled for the United Kingdom, and making common cause, and I realise this is stereotyping,

01:06:17.480 but this is the way a lot of Commonwealth people think about it, and it's made worse

01:06:21.180 by things like the Windrush scandal, and a snubbing of the Commonwealth which bled for

01:06:26.340 the UK and turning towards people who had once been enemies. And that is one of the reasons why

01:06:32.000 the vote for leave among Commonwealth immigrants was so high. I mean, I don't know a single New

01:06:38.540 Zealander who voted Remain. They may exist, but I know a lot of New Zealanders over here,

01:06:44.800 and I haven't met one yet. And it's to do with that decision, the turning of the back on the

01:06:51.260 Commonwealth. That's fascinating. Well, Helen, thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:06:56.580 Here's your opportunity to plug your novels. Oh, right. Okay. Well, apart from the first one,

01:07:00.380 which I showed earlier, these are the latest two. And these have just been shortlisted for

01:07:10.040 the Prometheus Award. Kingdom of the Wicked. Which is a big science fiction writing prize.

01:07:15.300 I don't know when I will win it or whether I will win it. I find out in the middle of July

01:07:21.240 apparently so but it's just been short and you're on twitter as well i'm pretty active that yes

01:07:26.140 tell everybody your twitter handle it's at underscore helen dale but it's an underscore

01:07:32.700 first because otherwise i would have had finished up looking like a russian bot with all those silly

01:07:36.320 numbers and i've got a youtube channel and i'm kind of a little bit on facebook but it's mainly

01:07:43.120 my friends but yeah it's twitter and the youtube channel the youtube channel is quite new i was

01:07:47.180 talked into doing it by a friend and i went and bought an expensive microphone to do it and

01:07:51.800 i'm still learning how to do the whole youtube thing it's well we'll direct a few people your

01:07:57.140 way it's quite challenging yes it is it can be uh we know from experience we've moved to here a few

01:08:03.600 times and all kinds of stuff happen uh follow uh helen on twitter go to her youtube channel we'll

01:08:09.580 put all those links in the description of the video uh thank you very much for watching and

01:08:14.040 listening this week as always follow us at trigger pod on all the social media both francis and i

01:08:20.180 are doing shows in august francis will be here in london at the bill murray i am in edinburgh with

01:08:25.320 my show called orwell that ends well and we will see you in a week's time uh with another brilliant

01:08:30.620 episode absolutely leave us a nice itunes review guys it really really makes a difference to us

01:08:35.860 uh tell people spread the word uh go to www.angelcomedy.co.uk and that's where my show is

01:08:41.460 And yeah, like we said, we'll see you next week.

01:08:43.620 Thank you very much.

TRIGGERnometry - June 30, 2019

Helen Dale on the IDW, Being Right Wing and the Australian Election

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