Australia: Lockdowns and Location Apps | John Anderson | EP 196

That's sort of my domain of concern, and so I'm wondering how it appears to you. Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking about it, and I offer these as thoughts only. I think it's—there's so many of them, Jordan, I hardly know where to start. But I think the first thing I'd say is that in a democracy, we do enter into a contract, if you like, a compact in which we say we'll surrender those rights, but hopefully no more than those rights which are necessary to secure the rights and freedoms of others, and that may from time to time vary. That's a logical conclusion.

So if you think of, as a friend of mine pointed out here the other day, think of the blitz during the darkest days of the Second World War in Britain. I think the social contract, if you like, was strong enough for people to accept that you had to make sure there was no light escaping from your house at night. You had to have black curtains drawn so there was no light, so the Luftwaffe pilots couldn't see London, and you and your neighbors were safe. It was accepted that the police would have the right to barge into your house and say there's a chink of light showing there; cover it up. And you had no right of conscientious objection, almost to that. That was an extreme example.

So we're talking proportionality here. It's important to note, of course, that if you follow it through to its logical extent, by well before the war technically ended, the British people said: "Right, we've been through this terrible disaster, we want our freedoms back." And they actually voted Winston Churchill out of office. I see that as a strong declaration: this crisis is over. We have made unbelievably punitive measures, restricted our freedoms, placed ourselves at great risk; it's over. We now want to normalize.

Hello everyone! I have the pleasure and privilege of talking with one of the most impressive men I've had the good fortune to meet in my travels and my investigations: the Honorable John Anderson, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. He's a respected elder statesman, a sixth-generation farmer from northwest New South Wales. He studied history at university and led the National Party, Australia's rural political party, from 1999 to 2005.

As Deputy Prime Minister, he partnered in one of the most successful governments in Australian history, overseeing enormous economic reform, tax modernization, and a string of budget surpluses, which are, in my experience, virtually unheard of—especially a string of them. These delivered an average annual GDP growth rate of 3.6 percent, restored Australia's AAA credit rating, and saw average household income increase by almost 70 percent between 1994 and 2008.

Mr. Anderson has worked on numerous community service projects following his career in politics and now hosts a video podcast which has become the preeminent one of its kind in Australia. Upon retiring from parliament, Mr. Anderson was saluted by figures on both sides of the political fence. Then-Prime Minister John Howard said of him: "I have not met a person with greater integrity in public life." And that—that's—I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Anderson in Australia when I was touring there, and that's exactly what struck me.

So I wanted to—I’ve done a couple of podcasts with John, and I thought we could concentrate on something tonight—discussing something tonight that I'm very ignorant about, like all of us perhaps, and about COVID and the response to the epidemic—the political response—and not only what the response has been, but perhaps what it should be, and what the dangers of the response are.

When I was thinking of who I would like to talk to about this, to explore it, I couldn't think of a better person than John Anderson because of his reputation—well-deserved reputation for integrity, his vast political experience, and also because, at least from the outside, it looks like the responses—the political responses to COVID in Australia have been quite extreme and caused a fair bit of trouble, justified though they perhaps may be—at least people make that argument. And so I thought we could dive into that terrible mess and see what we might conclude and bring everyone along for the ride.

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

Jordan, thank you. It's terrific to be with you. I respect you enormously for the way you make us think, for the way you encourage people who are feeling discouraged, for your forbearance and the model you set when you're under attack for not responding with fire but rather calm reason. Above all, just terrific to see you up and about again and active and looking well.

Well, thank you very much. I have been feeling substantially better, thank God, and I'm hoping that will continue. And the problem with returning fire with fire, I suppose, is that you end up burning—and I've had plenty of enough of that, I would say. So it's best to try to calm things down if you can possibly manage it, and hopefully, I'll have done that at least to some degree and might continue to do it. So we'll see.

So what have you seen happening in Australia and the West, and what have you been thinking about this?

Well, it's incredibly messy and hard to think your way through it all. The very bottom line, I don't want to sound like I'm a smug sort of has-been who knows it all and could have done it better. These are sobering times, and we've got to ask a lot of questions. I think my starting point, though, Jordan, would be to say, and this is our little mantra with my own video series, you can't get good public policy without a good debate—and there's a lot of elements to a good debate. You've got to have a decent level of understanding; you've got to ensure the debate's not truncated; you've got to ensure that everybody's involved; you've got to try and demystify and depoliticize it.

I think, on all of those fronts, there have been severe failings internationally and in Australia. Australia's response has been quite unique, partly for historical reasons, partly for geographical reasons, partly because of the unusual nature of our federation, partly because the Australian people are surprisingly comfortable with a big state—with a lot of government involvement in their lives. We are, as I understand, getting some quite even mocking press internationally at the moment for the nature of our lockdowns. They have been very severe, and longer and more severe in Victoria and in Melbourne, our second-largest city, I think, than anywhere apart from in Brazil, of all things.

I am concerned. I'm concerned about the balances that have emerged. I'm concerned about the misinformation, about the lack of ability for the Australian people to think through clearly. They started out trusting governments and medical authorities; that trust has been badly damaged. There's now an acceptance: we can't go on like this!

So I have to say, in the end, I am optimistic. I think that our institutions will survive this. The Australian people will say, "This is enough! We've got to come back to a pragmatic middle ground where the governments will give back everything they should." It's a big question, but I make this point in the context of the horrendous range of really difficult challenges that confront us.

One thing you must note about Australia, I think, internationally, and it has been noted, is that we have clearly chosen democracy and freedom in the face of an attempt by an authoritarian China to say, "Bow your knees to our authoritarian regime and way of life." So there's a cause for real optimism there that Australians understand freedom, even though we don't talk about it much in this country.

So let's talk about that example with regard to China to begin with. Can you flesh that out a little bit? What did you see? What threat did you see China imposing precisely when? And what did you see the Australian people managing in response to that?

Well, China, of course—we're one of the few countries in the world that runs a massive trade surplus with China. They suck in massive amounts of our product; around a third of our exports go to China. And even though we import a lot back from them, we do very, very well out of it. Now we have, I think, perhaps along with the rest of the world, assumed that with liberalization in trade, with rising living standards, more opportunities for a western-style life, liberalism would take over in China. We know that over the last seven or eight years, those hopes have been well and truly dashed. That is becoming a very authoritarian regime.

Australia called for a full and proper inquiry into COVID so that we could better understand it and cope with future pandemic threats more effectively. We certainly lit a little with the Chinese, I'd have to say, on that one. The reaction from China was very unfriendly indeed, and ultimately they issued a list of 14 major grievances and said that we have broken the relationship. No one will pick up the call in China at a senior level in response to our senior people. Canada has experienced a similar freezing out, but it's been very focused on Australia because we're in the region and because of that call for the COVID inquiry.

Also, I think the other thing and was listed in the 14 grievances was our insistence that Huawei—we were the first country that said that the telecommunications giant should not be allowed to embed itself in our telecommunications system for security reasons. America followed; Europe the rest of the world slowly. I think that's been a cause of real angst. But the point is that I think the Chinese thought we would bend quite quickly, and Australia hasn’t—notwithstanding the fact that, in common with other countries, you've seen a lot of business leaders saying, "Oh, don't go too far. This trade is important." But as Henry Kissinger put it: "A little trade lost can always be recovered; freedom lost is almost impossible to get back."

Well, okay, so there are a number of conundrums that sort of emerge out of that because, you know, you're making the case that the Australians have girded their loins, so to speak, in the face of an external political and economic threat—despite the fact that there might be relatively serious economic consequences to that. And so that will to maintain freedom and that fear of external, what—not fear precisely—but wariness of external authoritarianism, we still see that as alive and well.

But we've seen throughout the West—and maybe it's exacerbated in the case of Australia—the willingness to dispense with civil liberties on the domestic front in the face of the pandemic threat. I wonder first about the legality of such moves. It seems to me that if the lockdowns and the mandatory vaccination policies are, in fact, constitutionally valid in countries like Australia, Canada, and perhaps the U.S., and of course Europe, that our civil liberties aren't very well protected at all.

Then I also wonder what would happen to us broadly speaking when the next influenza pandemic sweeps through. Like, now that we've established lockdowns as acceptable, what level of threat justifies their imposition? How serious does it have to be? And these are—so then I worry about the lockdowns and certainly about the ethics of the mandatory vaccination campaign. Now, I'm vaccinated twice, and my wife is as well, although I have family members who have refused it.

The division that you see politically and philosophically runs through my family, and I'm not claiming any moral superiority in the fact that I got vaccinated; there are a variety of reasons for it, and I won't go into them. But I'm sympathetic to those who are leery of the mandatory vaccination as policy or the vaccinations per se because they have health objections or ethical objections.

And so, well, those are— that's sort of my domain of concern. And so I'm wondering how it appears to you.

Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking about it, and I offer these as thoughts only. I think it's—and there's so many of them, Jordan, I hardly know where to start. But I think the first thing I'd say is that in a democracy, we do enter into a contract, if you like, a compact in which we say we'll surrender those rights, but hopefully no more than those rights which are necessary to secure the rights and freedoms of others, and that may from time to time vary. That's a logical conclusion.

So if you think of, as a friend of mine pointed out here the other day, think of the blitz during the darkest days of the Second World War in Britain. I think the social contract, if you like, was strong enough for people to accept that you had to make sure there was no light escaping from your house at night. You had to have black curtains drawn so there was no light so the Luftwaffe pilots couldn't see London, and you and your neighbors were safe. It was accepted that the police would have the right to barge into your house and say there's a chink of light showing there; cover it up. And you had no right of conscientious objection, almost to that. That was an extreme example.

So we're talking proportionality here. It's important to note, of course, that if you follow through to its logical extent, by—well before the war technically ended, the British people said right, we've been through this terrible disaster, we want our freedoms back. And they actually voted Winston Churchill out of office. I see that as a strong declaration: this crisis is over. We have made unbelievably punitive measures; restricted our freedoms; placed ourselves at great risk; it's over. We now want to normalize.

Then you come right back to the situation that we're now confronting.

Well, the legal implications are massive in this country. I might—I've just literally learned from my news service here in Australia that President Biden has decided that all companies in America who employ more than a hundred people must ensure that all their workforce is vaccinated. That's 80 million Americans. Compulsory—sorry, you said that that's the company's responsibility to ensure that? So does that mean that the decision about what health care is appropriate has now been ceded by the U.S. Government to corporate interests? And where the hell is that going to end precisely? I mean, COVID is a nasty illness, but it's not as bad as it could be, by any stretch of the imagination.

It's some multiple worse than a bad flu epidemic, but it's in the same general ballpark. And so these precedents are being established at an unprecedented rate, and there's a principle underneath it which is, well, you can't be too safe. And the answer to that is, the rejoinder to that is: that may be true, but don't be so sure that the policies that are put in hypothetically to ensure your safety are going to have that effect and not others.

And I know there's a professor in Canada who's—and I only know the edges of this story. She's a professor of ethics, and she has been questioning the mandatory vaccination policy on Nuremberg grounds, essentially, that it's a violation of that—that enforced medical treatment. The idea that medical treatment can be enforced by the state—in one of our provinces, there were no exceptions, no religious exceptions, no exceptions for health reasons, no exceptions, period.

It's like, okay, but where does that end? Like, what is it? I do all sorts of things that are hypothetically dangerous to other people—like drive, for example—which I suspect is far more dangerous than COVID. And yet I'm allowed to do that, you know? We're setting a very strange precedent here, and that's a hell of a law that's just been passed.

So, yeah. Well, you and I are not Americans, so we look at America and think of it as a very litigious country, I would imagine. The president has just opened up endless disputes—endless at every level—from social media meltdown right through to challenges right through to the Supreme Court. And you raise the issue of what is legal and what is not. Now that varies a bit from country to country.

I would imagine in this country, one of the keys to understanding Australia’s response has been to note that when it comes to health, the state governments—remember, Australia’s a federation—that's a young one that was created well after the United States in very different circumstances. We inherited freedom rather than have to fight for it. So maybe there was never much focus on the philosophies of freedom—the underpinning thinking around it.

Although, you know, to be fair to Australians, they've fought fiercely to defend their freedoms; they've not had to sort of design them, think through them, have those incredible arguments—think of Alexander Hamilton and the debates from the founding fathers about how to avoid mob rule, preserving the individual freedoms, getting the balance right—extraordinarily deep thinking.

It's created a democratic garden in the jungle that is the normal nature of human relations and governments down through the ages, and then indeed today. But the—you know, we're not tending the garden very well. The jungle's re-encroaching because we haven't focused much on what's necessary to keep the plants healthy, put it that way.

So the states have control here; they've approached this issue differently. It's been hard for the Commonwealth government to maintain a uniform approach. One of the big legal questions is: have the state-based lockdowns been legal at all? Can Queensland legally say to me, somebody from New South Wales, "No, you cannot come here"? And the balance at the moment would be—the courts have said, well, the emergency up until now has been such that they are within their entitled powers and so forth to do so.

That would be very interesting to test again now, and it may be in Australia that our Commonwealth government will have to test it again because, as we journey through this—and I mentioned I’m very aware of the interesting international press that Australia is getting at the moment—but the polls are showing now the Australian people are saying, "Look, we now get it! We went for de facto elimination originally; the idea was to flatten the curve so our health system can cope. It morphed into a de facto— we're so far from anywhere, we're so privileged, we're so fortunate—we can go for elimination."

I never thought that was realistic, but the polls are now clearly showing that whilst the Australian people are taking a probably not unreasonable sort of insurance policy related to the vaccination, as we get the vaccinations up, we think things should be opened up again.

And we'll have to live with this! And at that point, I think there will be, in this country, tremendous resistance and reluctance to lockdown again. Because they've been so severe, particularly in Victoria, that people have said, "No, the costs are so high!"

Part of the problem we've had is a sensationalization of it all by the media. I'm sorry to say that, but remarkably little really balanced commentary. It's been politically driven from the right and particularly from the left, and the left, those in secure jobs—particularly with a publicly funded broadcaster, their jobs go on—even in a lockdown situation they feel safe for their own families.

Now, I’m an essential worker—not as a farmer—I can't go into complete lockdown socially. I'm in lockdown, just about to come out of it now, out in rural Australia. But in terms of my occupation, and like hospitals and nurses and doctors, they've got to keep going.

There's a bit of hypocrisy on this! Oh no, we want to be safe in our secure jobs, in whatever bureaucratic enclave or media enclave you work in, but those people who look after me and feed me and all the rest of it? No, no, they've got to keep going.

Pulling all of this together, I think it will be very difficult after this, frankly, for Australian governments to introduce lockdowns again without very sound reasons. So there's a building awareness: we're going to have to live with this, and I think there's building—it's quite strong; you can feel it, and it's reflected in the polls.

It will be a payout on governments, I think state governments as well as the Commonwealth, if they ignore the feeling that this has gone too far in the future. So we've got two state governments that are holding out; they're still effectively saying we can eliminate this, which I think is nuts and I think their people will ultimately realize that as well.

So a bundle of issues in there, but a rising awareness that there's been a lot of emotion and a lack of balance, and now emerges that the mental health crisis amongst young people in Victoria is really serious and has not been given proper weighting in the debate, nor is the economic impact, and the fact that we are using our children's money to prop businesses up.

No country has blown out its public debt in percentage terms as quickly, I don't think, as Australia has. Why? Mind you, we had a very low debt basis because of certain past governments to begin with, and even after this, our debt to GDP ratios will be relatively manageable by international standards. But the trend lines are not good, and we are borrowing from our children—this is our children's money.

Right, well yes, so we need to talk very seriously, all of us, about the cost of safety because the cost isn't safe, right? So we're taking one risk to prevent another, and so it's always a matter of balance of risk. There isn't a pathway to safety through all of this, and so I'm also concerned—like, to make the vaccines mandatory is going to do—and to punish people who refuse them for whatever reason they refuse them—is, it seems to me, a sign of the failure of the vaccination arguments.

Essentially, if you haven't made the arguments credible enough to convince the percentage of people that you think should be vaccinated to be vaccinated, then that's a failure of your argument. And then to move to use political force and police force, for that matter, obviously to insist, is only going to increase the distrust that's driving the resistance to the vaccines to begin with.

You know, you spoke at the beginning of people's decrease in trust in the medical establishment, so to speak, and also in the political establishment, when those systems resort to force to impose their view of what the proper pathway is to safety. That's going to produce a long-term, permanent, serious damage in the credibility of those institutions, and that's going to have a tremendous cost in terms of health as well.

So I don't understand—so—and then I've been trying to think through a solution. So in Canada, we have a fairly high percentage of people that have been dually vaccinated, and it seems to me that the appropriate approach is something like for the governments to say very honestly and carefully to people: "We've made the vaccines as available as possible to all of you; there's nothing standing in your way but your own choice that's preventing you from being vaccinated. As a consequence, we're going to reopen our country radically on this date, and then your destiny is in your hands, as it should be."

It seems to me that hoping that the vaccination rates are going to exceed 90 percent—I think that's a high-end estimate and I might be wrong about that—is a pipe dream. There is too much force that is going to have to be applied to people to get them to do that, and many people will just not do it! And then what are we going to do with those people? Are they now pariahs? Are they now criminals? And if they are, because it's going to be a big chunk of the population, how exactly are we going to deal with that?

So I see that we're in danger of exchanging the possibility of pandemic damage with the certainty of the danger of authoritarian imposition. So, well, I'd like you to respond to that, I guess, and tell me what—so that's what I think the policy should be—that we have the vaccines that may not be as accessible in Australia yet as they are in Canada. We have plenty of vaccines in Canada.

It's like I think the government and the health authorities would be much more credible if they said, "Look, we really think these vaccines work, but we're not in the business of forcing them on you; you can make that choice. We've done what we could to provide them for you, and now it's in your hands." And is there—is that a stupid idea? Like, because I don't know, but I'm not impressed by this creeping authoritarianism in the name of public safety. I just can't see that that's going to go well.

I think it comes back to this initial proposition: I think that the quality of the debate is critical to getting good outcomes, and the quality of the debate, in many ways, has been very badly interrupted. So we had an unbelievable situation in Australia where we had some quite senior people saying AstraZeneca was dangerous because of blood clots. In fact, you know, you're infinitely less likely to get a blood clot from AstraZeneca than a girl on the pill. So we're going to say, "Well, girls should—on the pills should come off the pill, all right, because there's a danger of blood clots."

We're not going to say that, but we had some quite senior people driving that, and yet in Britain, of course, the lady who co-invented and developed the product—a lovely lady whose name is—escapes me at the moment—went to Wimbledon, and they gave her a standing ovation. People were saying, "Well, she came to Australia; we would probably send her to our equivalent of Siberia." The different responses are extraordinary—who's right?

Now we have one of our leading medical experts who was one of those casting doubt on it saying that perhaps it's the best one of all. So you're getting this confusing advice; how are people meant to find their way through that? And that feeds into your narrative.

And I think in the mind, the quality of public debate becomes very important. I just wonder what on earth is going to happen in America now. It'll be very interesting to watch as we speak—if I understand the news correctly—you know that 80 million Americans are going to be told you will have a vaccination. Now, this is the land of liberty; good luck! That'll be another war on drugs! Like, that's not implementable, as far as I can tell in the U.S. in particular.

I mean the people there who are anti-COVID vaccination—they're not doing this trivially; like, they're committed to it. And the Americans can get committed to something like no one else, and so this isn't going to produce a minor backlash. And it feeds into these conspiracy narratives that are starting to undermine our society as well.

You know, that the government is fundamentally untrustworthy, and so are the health organizations. And so anybody who's vaguely conspiratorial in their outlook—that's just going to be, like, given a massive boost by this sort of political move. That's how it looks to me.

And then you go back to the social contract that I talked about earlier. Then in a democracy, we agree to surrender some of our freedoms in the broader common good, and that we then, in proportion or in sort of ways that are proportional, agree to limit them in emergencies. And we're often willing to do that because we will, if we're frightened, we will flee for security over freedom. Will we then demand that back again?

But now this breakdown in trust that is common to all Western countries—it's very interesting. In Australia, the Australian National University, one of our best universities, has been tracking confidence in our Commonwealth governments, plural, since 1971, I think that's right to say. And it's been a dismal picture; the graph is gradually drifting away. We’re less and less trusting of governments and people in them.

Although, funnily enough, Australians, I think, are still quite sort of ideologically friendly towards government; they're very cynical about politicians. That's what's happened there—there's a bit of a disconnect there.

But if you look at that long-term trend, you used to get a blip when there was a change of government—a massive surge in confidence—and then they'd need to dissipate away until, as a government became unpopular, it made tough decisions or lost its way, and then there'd be a lift. You're not getting those lifts anymore.

So we went into this COVID situation with politicians knowing that they're not widely trusted, and that lots of people in the community would think, "Oh, well, they're doing that for political reasons or looking after their own hide; they're not concerned with us." So they rolled out experts at every point—medical experts. Now, we have wonderful medical services in this country, and I do not want to sound unnecessarily critical, however, of course, they focused very heavily on saving lives—that's their job.

And so they gave advice all the time that was designed to save every life possible. And then it's extraordinary—we got to the end of last year; I think we're a population of 25 million; only 810 people have died of COVID. But it meant that the Australian people—how are they meant to get adequate information when they're only getting one side of the debate?

There's nothing about the payoffs—what will it mean for mental health? The suicide unit at the University of Sydney estimated at one stage that the suicide rate would increase threefold and that that increase would be vastly higher than, as I understand it, then the number of people who'd lose their lives to COVID. Remarkably little attention paid to the realities that the people who were being badly affected were in certain age cohorts and often had co-medical problems—co-morbidities.

In fact, an average of four amongst the people who have died, as I understand it, and that very frequently—and I may be wrong about this—I’m perhaps as ignorant as the average person in this domain, and that might be just right for this conversation in some sense. But I also—regards to the death statistics—am I—is it the case that no matter what the preexisting condition was, if the person was positive for COVID and they died, the death is attributed to COVID?

And that's, like, that makes the basic statistics upon which all these decisions are being made—well, questionable. I'm not saying that it's wrong, but it's certainly questionable: can we trust the death rate statistics? Do we actually know how dangerous this illness is?

Now, people look at such markers as excess mortality over a given time period, and that seems to me to be more reliable. But it's not unreasonable to ask these questions, and that’s partly your point about the necessity of debate. And that opens up a broader issue too, you know, about how those sorts of debates should be conducted.

And I can't help but think that it's going to become incumbent upon our political leaders to use the kind of platform that you and I are using right now and actually talk to people.

Yeah, that's never really possible, right?

Yeah, I think that's important because part of what's happened—I want to sound overly critical of our health offices and what have you, many of whom I have a high regard for—some of whom I think have bought into the sensationalism. But keeping in mind that their job is to present the medical side, but then a magnificent health service of the sort that we enjoy in Australia—people have been cynical about it, but by international standards it's pretty darn good. It costs a lot of money.

What are we going to do if we can't afford those intensive care beds in the future? That depends on a prosperous society! Our children are going to inherit a vastly larger debt; they will not be as prosperous.

And we know from the research, so they’re quite distraught about this, quite despondent. They're wondering whether Australians—very aware that our economy has been blown off course. It's been magnificent, and it's held us in incredible stead, and that's why we've been able to spend a lot of money on insulating people.

It's an irony, isn't it? Governments shut economies down deliberately and knowingly and then try to put the system on life support by pumping money in directly. And Australia's been able to do a great deal of that because of its economic strength in the past, but we're dissipating it away at a very time when we face other huge challenges—the demand that we do more on climate, which will cost money.

You know the reality that Australia will have to spend more than 2 percent on GDP on defense? We’re going to have to—this whole range of other things that we're going to spend money on—that must be fed into the debate as well so that people can make informed decisions.

And this has been a big part of the problem: politicians have had to say, "Listen to the experts," because they know they won’t be trusted. Whereas, in reality, if the system was working properly, people would be saying, "We put the politicians there to balance these things and to lead us through it."

So they can say, "Here are the real dangers of COVID that we know about," and along comes Delta, to be fair, and that makes it even harder. It's different, and it affects more people when it's more contagious.

But here are the realities on the health side; here are the trade-offs in economic terms; here are the trade-offs in terms of the education of our children; here are the trade-offs in terms of depression and anxiety and self-harm.

The right way through this is such and such a road, but that's not what's been fed to the populace: "Save every life! Every life lost—" well, of course, it's a tragedy!

But then there's another reality, and that is that the delayed diagnosis of other illnesses— we've tried to keep our hospitals free and declined the system, delayed operations on cancer and so forth—over time we'll realize that there were real trade-offs within health as well. And my point is that we actually elect politicians to guide us through this on the best available information.

But when trust is broken down in the compact, it's very hard to get that right. And part of what's happened here is that politicians have had to say, "We're taking medical advice." Sometimes they don't tell us what that was, by the way—rather than, "We're balancing that with all of these other factors, and I'm putting it before you, the people I lead on behalf of the government."

Hard to do that when trust is broken down. And we all know how important that is to relationships in the end. Then it’s easy to default to expert advice, but what is happening as a consequence? What that means, in some sense, is that the medical profession starts to bear the weight of political decisions.

And to the degree that people are skeptical about political decisions, then they're going to start to become skeptical about the experts, so the politicians are, by relying on experts, avoiding their responsibility. They're shunting the risk off on people who have enough on their plates, as far as I'm concerned.

And then we have the breakdown of trust in the medical system, which I really believe is going to be tremendously exacerbated by mandatory vaccines.

I agree with you, I agree with you. This is—I think one of the greatest threats to our freedoms in the West is our own self-loathing and the breakdown of trust and confidence in one another—those sort of cultural issues.

We're now extending it into other areas, you know, into science and so forth. Science has offered us the way through but then you have the serious, in this country, in my view, very serious and unwarranted undermining of confidence in AstraZeneca. It really worried me at the time, and I look back on it, and I think, I hope people have learned some lessons out of that.

I've had the first dose; I'm waiting for my second. It wasn't very pleasant as it happened; I did get a reaction, and so did my wife. But you know, no hesitation, we're lining up for it; we go back for the second one.

I'm just very, very thankful we actually have these vaccines; how wonderful is that? That's a big tick to science. But then you've had medical officers saying, "No, no, no, this is bad," and then they switch.

Well, that's also why we shouldn't be hitting people over the head with the necessity of—"You should do this because it's good for you." It’s like, "No, no! Look, you don't understand—the history of vaccinations has been very positive! Now we understand that we’re doing this in a bit of a rush and that you might be leery about that, but it's our considered opinion that this is actually of great benefit to you, and we're not going to twist your arm; we're not going to force you; we're not going to put in draconian measures to insist that you do this."

But I believe that that would be a much more compelling narrative, and that many, many more people would certainly—fewer people would object to the vaccines that way. And I think more people would take them! This force—and that the force as well—this next issue, you know, the idea that it violates the Nuremberg conventions; that's a very interesting argument.

I think it's possibly true, but even more so, it's like what are the dangers of alienating people from the health system entirely, from the scientific establishment entirely, by politicizing it in this manner? We're not thinking that through, as far as I can tell, and part of it’s just tremendous difficulty, right?

I mean, all these things you talked about— the secondary negative consequences of the health measures. It's also taken everyone a while to see what those were like. COVID was an immediate threat; it was going to happen right now. Some of these other things that you're talking about, like the increase in suicide rates—that's sort of downstream, right?

And so, no one was—that wasn't on the table when the decisions were originally being made. No, and to be fair to policymakers, we've always got to be fair in these things. No one saw the nature of the second round of mutant variants, and there would be more of them, and that's worrying in itself, so we don't quite know what we're facing.

But I didn't want to pick up on something that I think is critically important: two things that you said. Firstly, leadership here is that appeal to reason and to a sense of responsibility to yourself and your neighbor. So I buy that completely, and I would argue again that it's been undermined by this reliance on experts.

No matter how highly you think of the experts, they're not the people we elect to lead us, if you see what I'm driving at. They should advise leaders; leaders should lead, and that's been a problem across the West because of the breakdown of trust in our leadership.

It shot through the roof when it looked as though we could eliminate this thing in Australia. Governments were immensely popular. One very incompetent state government was re-elected because there was a perception they’d kept their people safe. It didn't deserve to be re-elected by any stretch of the imagination.

And I—you know, I think I'm a reasonable judge of those things. On all the broad indicators, they had not served their state well. But the other point that you raised that I think is so important, I'm always struck by Hacksaw Ridge, the film that Mel Gibson put together, and that's about conscientious objection.

Now you stop and think about this for a moment: proportionality. And the darkest days of the Second World War, when there were real doubts about whether or not democracy and freedom would survive in the end, and subject to some pretty tough processes you could claim to be and be recognized as a conscientious objector. That's what the film's about!

You could say, "No, I really—my conscience does not allow me to do this," and you see this is Frank Fruity’s point, I think. I don't want to verbally—I'm only a simple man, but as I understand it, our first freedom is freedom of conscience. Without that, every other freedom.

I'm not a believer in the hierarchy of freedoms: freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to meet with people or not meet with people. There's no hierarchy there; they're a package. But in a sense, the first is freedom of conscience—to think through what do I really believe? And then to be able to act out on that conscience—that is the mark, in the end, of freedom.

Now, it might be that during the Second World War, society says, "Well, there will be some downsides for you"—respect that you don't have to go to the front line. And they may have to be here too!

I suspect that airline customers—here's an interesting fact for you: globally, airline travel's recovered to 70 percent of its pre-COVID levels. Australian air travel is down at 26. Still quite interesting reflection on our caution and our isolation in this country, and yet we're one of the most interconnected nations in the world in terms of trade and in terms of tourism, inbound and outbound.

So it's an interesting reflection on where we're at in this country. But my point in all of this is that you have to—I mean, I think it's going to be hard to be able to engage in all activities if you've not been vaccinated unless we can find a very quick way of testing.

And I might be wrong on this, but a friend of mine was telling me that her son’s in Germany, and he went out for a coffee the other day. The standard procedure is that you get a little test on the way to the coffee shop, takes a few minutes, and if you're clear, you're right.

So it's not a question of vaccination; it's whether you've got COVID. Now that's an interesting way of looking at it, and if technology would allow for that, it might ease a lot of these things.

I was run the other day by the minister—a very thoughtful man—from a church in my local area. He said, "I'm not sure what we're going to do if the state tells me that I can’t allow people to come and worship in my church if they haven't had a vaccination." He said, "I'm deeply troubled by that idea," and I thought, "Well, I haven't thought of that particular angle; that's troubling to me too."

So what do you think the best rationale is for mandatory vaccination? It's like, what is the danger that—what is actually the danger that’s posed socially by people who refuse to be vaccinated?

I mean, is the argument that they're also a terrible danger to those who've been vaccinated? I mean, as the vaccination rates increase—and they're fairly high in Canada, I think we’re near 80 percent. I hope I'm not wildly off the mark by that estimate; I know it's much lower in Australia, or I believe it is.

I'm unclear about exactly the danger that the unvaccinated are posing. I mean, so what's your understanding, given those vaccination rates? What's your understanding of that, and what's the justification for their restriction of civil liberties?

I have to say that's a very good question, Jordan, and I'm as unclear as you are. I mean—if, well, we shouldn't be unclear about that, right? You'd hope that you'd hope that in the positions that we occupy we wouldn't be unclear about that. And it seems to me that if we're unclear about that, that plenty of other people are unclear about it as well.

And that's obviously not a good thing. So to illustrate the point that you're raising: if I've got this right, now our Qantas, the Australian airline, has said that all of its staff must be vaccinated. And as I understand it, one of their very senior people has a conscientious objection and has left the organization.

I think I'm right in saying that. Now his perspective, presumably, would—I mean, it's a very important one—he would be asking a question not only about civil liberties but the practicalities which is what you're posing.

As I understand it, to tease this out if I'm about to go through an airport through all the procedures involved there and get on an airplane with people who are—even if it's just one person—like plane who's not vaccinated, if everybody else has been vaccinated and they're safe, what's the problem?

Well, it’s precisely exactly what’s the problem? And to what degree is that sufficiently problematic so that civil liberties should be importantly curtailed?

Right? Because—and so I'm unclear about exactly what permission being vaccinated grants me, and I'm unclear about what precise danger the unvaccinated posed to the vaccinated. If it's extremely high, then you think, well, then what is the use of the vaccination?

And I don't want to overplay that, obviously, because I believe the evidence suggests that the vaccinated are much less likely to suffer severe consequences from COVID and much less likely to catch it. But, but I'm still unclear about this! Are the unvaccinated primarily posing a danger to the other unvaccinated?

And at some point—and then maybe the worry is, well, that's going to overwhelm our health system; it's going to overwhelm our intensive care units. And so I guess a corollary to the policy that I thought up earlier—and I didn't mention this—was we announce a date past which once the vaccines are universally available, we announce a date past which things open, and we quadruple the money that we've devoted toward ICUs.

Because it's not as if the lockdowns themselves aren't expensive—they're extraordinarily expensive, they're insanely expensive—and we haven't yet begun to pay for them. So we set a limit; we tell people, we inform people that the vaccinations are available, and then we prepare for the fact that many people won't become vaccinated.

But I still don't get the exact danger— and that could easily be my profound ignorance—but if it's the unvaccinated who are dangerous to the other and vaccinated, it's like, well at some point, what are you gonna do about that—force people? That's not a good precedent.

Two thoughts come to mind. One is that one of the things that policymakers would have to take into account, I’d imagine, is the emergence of new variants—more contagious, more dangerous, resistant to the vaccines and spreading those very quickly. There may be dangers in there that have to be thought through.

The other thing about it is there's a world of difference between saying you must be vaccinated per se and saying, "Well, if you choose not to be, that's okay, but there may be some situations where you have to stay at bay."

So hypothetically, it might be to say— you know, you don’t have to be vaccinated, but you can’t fly. That’s—I’m just plucking that out of the air! So you’re absolutely free not to, but there are some things you can’t do if you’re not vaccinated.

In fact, one of the things that we did in this country—so Australia, one of the characteristics of the country that I live in and love is that we’re amazingly open to being regulated. And it’s a bit weak on conscientious objection too historically—not as strong as America and other western countries.

And that regulation, maybe it comes from the benign way in which governments regulated so much of our lives. As I say, we’ve never had the turmoil of a civil war or of independence or of the agonies and intellectual exercises that went into designing the American Declaration of Independence.

We’ve not had those sorts of things. Essentially, we were a series of British colonies put together by an act of the British parliament in 1901 that federated us. And in the 1880s and 1990s, our best thinkers—often pretty flawed people and pretty selfish ambitions of being statesmen and so forth in their own little pond, I suppose—but they put together a constitution that reflected the very, very best of the thinking and the experiences and the learning of particularly Britain and America.

But my point out of all of that is that government’s been relatively benign. Notwithstanding, as I said earlier, Australians have been prepared to fight for freedom, or to defend it, they haven’t had to fight for it in the first place.

And they’ve been very— we’re amazingly accepting of regulation in this country. We were the first country by years to mandate compulsory seatbelt wearing. There’s a whole plethora, a whole raft of things where Australians have just been quite happy to accept being told what to do as smoking advertising was banned here before anywhere else, I think that’s right to say, and so forth.

Then, you know, to take your point up, government’s explained this is being done for public health reasons, and there was a wide-scale acceptance of it. So it comes back to this: If vaccinating is important, then it ought to be positive arguments for it and leadership that people respect—and they say, well, I don’t feel threatened by this.

I accept the arguments that for reasons a, b, and c, it makes sense, and I should be responsible. Whereas coercion would ordinarily create that resentment, that suspicion, that distrust, and the pushback that you're talking about.

So that's why the recognition of conscientious objection, I think, is so critical to the maintenance of freedom in any genuinely free society that wants to, if you like, persuade people of the value of freedom.

Well, there are some food to persuade people to become vaccinated for that matter! No!

Yeah, I don’t know what these new regulations in the U.S. are going—what kind of response they’re going to produce, but I can’t imagine that it’s going to do anything but exacerbate the tension between the left and the right that already exists in that country, and that is severe enough to be somewhat destabilizing already.

We’re going to introduce vaccine passports in my home province in Ontario, despite the fact that there’s a conservative government in power at the moment. And there won’t be as much of a reaction to that in Canada as there will be in the U.S. to similar measures.

But it just seems to me that that default to force is an admission that the argumentation has been stunningly inadequate, and instead of addressing the problem of the inadequate argumentation, the shortcut is, "Well, those people are too stupid to know what’s good for them."

And so it’s—for the sake of everyone else’s well-being, it’s justifiable to force them. That might even be okay if it was going to produce the results that are intended, but I don’t think it’s going to. I think it’s going to produce a kickback that will make things worse on the vaccination front rather than better.

And we might ask ourselves too, it’s like, you know, part of the reason the U.S. has given up on the war on drugs is because it was unenforceable. You had to push the state so far in a police state direction to stop people from using substances, like marijuana, that everyone eventually just said, "Look, man, it’s just the cure is worse than the disease!"

And well, that’s the danger that we’re facing, I would say. And it’s always the case with policy, I understand that, that the cure can be worse than the disease. But reasonable people can certainly make that argument that there’s tremendous danger in making an active invasive medical procedure mandatory. There's terrible danger from a precedent perspective!

You know, because what if it does turn out, for example, that one of these vaccines has unforeseen long-term consequences, and it’s been given to hundreds of millions of people? And I understand that—I understand medically that there is a distinct possibility that that precise thing will happen!

And then, yeah, it’s certainly not zero the possibility. And so, yeah. And the fact that a percentage of the population perhaps exaggerates that possibility because they’re more conspiratorial in their thinking or less trusting or more skeptical of government benevolence and health and all of that—I don’t really care.

There’s—you can’t eradicate the possibility that their objections, guided by their conscience, let’s say, are—and this is your point with regards to conscientious objection—objecting.

It’s like you said that even when we were fighting the Nazis, we weren’t so certain that you couldn’t say no because you had a different set of beliefs that were truly invalidly held. So—and then I’m also concerned with the precedent we’re setting.

And I suppose people who were opposed to seatbelt laws and helmet laws and that sort of thing had the same sort of notion, which is: Well, once you let the government decide what’s good for you, where does it stop?

And like I’m firmly convinced that—maybe this is my own paranoia—I’m firmly convinced that if the automobile had been invented today, the average person would not be allowed to drive! I don’t think we would!

I don’t think we would allow that level of risk, and I think that’s really unfortunate. So it’s a good thing that, you know, it came along slowly and sort of snuck in, but because driving is a very dangerous act.

And it's publicly dangerous too; you know, you kill lots of people with your—we kill lots of people with their automobiles, yet we’re allowed to do it, so to speak. And to think that we’re even—that the right way of phrasing that is that we’re allowed—that’s not a good way of thinking about it.

So it’s nah—yeah, it’s sort of, if you like, get a helicopter view of all of this. It seems to be the things we’re talking about here go to the issues of the sort of the strength and the unity because you can’t separate the two of the Western democratic model at a time when the alternatives are really starting to muscle up globally.

So this line that COVID is accelerating history strikes a chord with me. We’re dividing more than ever. And I suspect—go back to what—and I don’t want to misrepresent it; I’m only really referring to, literally, before we came on—what looks to be the news out of America, which I think is going to be very contentious.

80 million people being told you will be vaccinated—these sorts of divisions, this polarization, this tribalization, this lack of confidence in ourselves and our institutions, at a time when we’re—the world’s looking more like the 19th century with multiple power centers, many of them very hostile to democracy—to America, in particular—that see places like Canada and Australia as surrogate states of that sort of the great satan, America.

None of this fills me with a great deal of confidence that we will be—we’ll even recognize the freedoms that we have now in the societies we live in in another four or five generations, another four or five decades.

I say that because of where we are geographically, I suppose—in this region here, we’re a long way—Australia is a very valuable bit of real estate. It’s sparsely populated, a large landmass, it's a long way from the other democracies, with the exception of—and the honorable exception of—Indonesia.

We’re in an area where there is rising authoritarianism led by one place in particular. Do we have collective willpower to pull together and say we’re going to have to make tough decisions? We’ve been very comfortable for a long time! And the first tough decision here is the one that’s now being openly spoken about in Australia.

They’re actually saying it, and as I said, I have confidence that Australians are being realistic about this. I actually think we will come through this, but it’s so important we have these debates. We now are saying we’re going to have to live with COVID and accept that people will die—awful thing to say—but we’re all going to die!

And if we’re not careful, we’ll make this into such a mess that will die of more of us will die of more causes in worse circumstances than right under a more authoritarian system, and it’s worse to both worlds.

You know, I mean, you’ve got enormous economic challenges too! I mean, let’s not kid ourselves; a reasonable degree of prosperity is very important to having a health system and nutrition and educational employment opportunities and travel that give you lives worth living where human beings can flourish!

Well, and we've been able to, in some sense, devalue, I suppose, devalue our currency by distributing money extraordinarily generously during this time of crisis. And fair enough in some sense, but that isn’t a sustainable response!

And God only knows what damage we’re doing to our future economic prosperity by continuing to make it extraordinarily difficult for many people to engage in productive activity. How disheartening that is for people to watch their—the businesses that they’ve poured their heart and soul into take a terrible hit.

And to have people adjust to this new reality that that may never allow them that opportunity again. So, okay, so practically speaking, I mean, it’s easy to sit and complain and say, you know, “Doesn’t this look grim, and shouldn’t we be making smarter decisions?”

I put forward, for what it’s worth, you know, my thoughts on what a reasonable policy might look like—one that balances concern for health with the possibility of continued freedom. What do you think might be done concretely by political leaders in the West to deal with the COVID crisis more appropriately? What do you see as a reasonable pathway forward?

This may be a strange reaction, but it’s where I really genuinely come from. I think we need to lift people’s eyes to the real threats to our future freedoms. I think they’re economic and strategic. And I think out of that should be the message that we really, in western countries within our countries and actually amongst ourselves, have more in common that is more durable and important and imperative to preserve and work on—if you like, more interesting common than those which divide us.

And that requires a sort of leadership that we saw—you know, I keep thinking to myself, we saw so much of it out of America, Britain, and America, frankly, you know, in the whole sort of mess of the 1940s, and then coming out of it.

There's this appealing to people to look to the broader interest, to recognize that hope lies in putting the foundations down, securing them for our future—which is our children and our grandchildren.

In other words, break out of the fear! We’re cowering in the corner in fear! Fear is a terrible inhibitor. You know more about this than I do professionally, but we’ve become very afraid. A lot of what’s happening at the moment is being driven by fear, and it’s fed on by those who want to sensationalize the issues and distort the numbers and not talk about the costs of a given line of action—not talk about the fact that there are issues here other than the medical ones.

Those sorts of things, and I think only then can we develop the right sort of set of perspectives. But the subset of that one, Jordan, is that I don’t think any of us yet have worked out how to handle social media with its capacity—

Next thing I wanted to ask you about, actually, because I’ve been thinking about—look, I invited the leader of the opposition, who’s now fighting an election in our country— so he’s the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and the Liberals are in power under Justin Trudeau. And the leader of the opposition is Aaron O'Toole, and I invited him to come on my podcast over the last couple of weeks, and he refused.

And you know, he might have had his reasons, and I asked him at the last minute, but these podcasts—and I would like to hear your experience about them—there’s no reason for politicians to be using the media anymore, as far as I can tell. They can talk directly to people.

And maybe this opens up the possibility of getting deeper insight into who our potential political figures are, right? Because for so long, a politician had to think in terms of delivering his message in a way that the media would carry, but that's just not necessary now because we can sit down like you and I are sitting down and actually talk things through.

And then people can be involved and engaged in that, and that seems to me to be a hopeful technology for the future. And now you’ve been—how long have you been running your podcast, and why did you do it? And what do you think about that politically?

I’m very curious about that.

Well, yeah, look, there’s a bunch of issues in there. The problem with social media—the downside—is it gives a megaphone to people to spread serious misinformation, conspiracy theories about AstraZeneca or whatever it happens to be. That’s the downside and the danger.

The upside is you can feel the terrible vacuum in public information that’s out there for people who want to know what’s really going on and want to engage with ideas. And as I’ve said probably ad nauseam, I was driven by that feeling that in my country, there is a hunger for higher quality debate, better content, more information.

And it struck me and a couple of my friends that one of the ways to help counter that in my country might be what we embarked upon. In fact, I launched with you—thank you very much—I had several in the can ready to go with, but you were in Australia at the time, and what you were saying so struck me as topical and adventurous.

That we launched with it and found an extraordinary appetite for ideas and for content, and the thing that encourages me is that while I look to be honest, I often despair of young people's lack of understanding of their history, of the basics of their freedoms and democracy—they’re so cynical about it!

They’ve been fed the lines by their teachers who have fed the lines out of universities—often—that participation in democracy is to be cynical and to be an activist, not a participant and a contributor.

And some of our best schools are letting us down in this area in this country—some of our very, very best schools, as well as many of the mainstream ones. Now, there are many honorable exceptions; I want to add that. But it just seemed to me that there is this hunger and this appetite. And, as you said to me, young people don't often read so much now but they're still hungry for content, and changing technology—they get it in different ways.

There's an earlier version of it that when we were in government, the prime minister of the time, John Howard, recognized bypass mainstream media where even in those days, the grabs were too short and the bias was all too often—there were too many people in the media seeking to campaign rather than report.

But he recognized that talkback radio in those days was a brilliant way to reach a lot of people, and I think that's right. He was able to go over it; he could talk directly; he could find hosts who would let him get his message out. Even though some of them might have interrupted a bit, he could still connect with people, and that was important.

How do you do that now, the way you and I are doing it? And I think that’s invaluable. And I don’t pretend in this conversation to have had all the answers, but at least I think we’ve teased out the issues and recognized there’s a lot of food for thought in all of this.

And fundamental to it is to recognize; our freedoms matter! Governments should be functions of our will; we should not be the puppets of government in the democracies. That's incredibly important!

We've got to establish that. We should respect them whilst they are there, but they are our servants. At the moment, we don’t respect them, strangely enough, and yet we expect them to solve every problem. And the system breaks down; people become cynical.

So what have I found? Well, I found—I am constantly amazed at how often people will pull me up in the streets and say, "I heard your conversation with that person or this person or whatever."

And because I try not to feed my own opinions in too much—most people know what I think—but most of the time I’m trying to provide a conduit for people to listen and to hear what others have got to say, when partly because of bias and positioning a lot of views are hard to get out, and partly because it’s such an instant world.

The 30-second grab doesn’t work. If you want to draw the great lessons out of the Gulag Archipelago, you and I did in our first conversation; you can’t do that in a 30-second grab.

It’s impossible! We’re dumbing people down unwittingly because technology has, in the mainstream media, sort of led to that outcome. We’re breaking the finances of mainstream media, of course, by doing what you and I do, and so that means that the journalistic qualities go down more and more because they don’t have the resources to pay people to do really high-quality investigative stuff and what have you.

Anyway, I’m being long-winded, but I’ve learned a huge amount; it’s something worth considering and contemplating in detail because this is a stunningly revolutionary new technology.

I mean, YouTube was just kind of a novelty item when it first popped up, but the fact that everyone is now a video producer and a video and a sophisticated video consumer—it changes the world in ways that have only barely begun to manifest themselves.

And we certainly don’t understand it because the technology runs way faster than our understanding of its consequences. But it seems to me that it should become increasingly incumbent on people who have political ambitions to engage directly with the public in this manner. That should become a standard expectation of political figures and of the general population.

Because if you can’t handle yourself in a 90-minute conversation, if your ideas aren’t well enough developed or if you don’t have the character or you reveal your hand in some manner, well, that’s something that should happen.

And the fact that everything has to be condensed down in some sense to sound bites means that people who are good at doing that or who have a good team to do that, they get the spoils! But it’s no way to run a serious operation.

And this technology is available to anyone who cares to use it now, so what have you seen? What do you understand, the understanding of political figures in Australia with regards to social media? Like, do they understand the significance of its existence, the potential that it has?

Some do, some do. Some set up massive, cynical exercises to try and control social media, to participate and, you know, set up movements, you know, "Come with me" sort of stuff where it’s all spin and it plays on the sort of hashtag type stuff, but then at the other extreme, I have been delighted and amazed at the number of people right up the political scale who listen to the conversations that I’ve held.

And to go to the Parliament House and have a senior person from the other side of politics to the one that I was involved with—and it’s happened several times—come up and say, “Gee, I enjoyed your podcast.” That is gold to me!

And then to know that there are several cabinet ministers who often tap in, particularly if I talk about defense or if I talk about the sorts of things that you and I talk about. And then one of the things that I have noticed, though—this is an interesting one, and I’ve not got to the bottom of it.

I don't quite understand it—is that my countrymen are more interested in listening to somebody from America or Britain than from anywhere else, including their own country. So a couple of the most important conversations that I’ve done, or quite a few—quite a few on defense—with our former prime minister, who is now the father of the nation in many ways and was widely seen that way.

And yet there’s relatively thin interest talking to—I mean the ones—the talks—the conversations that you and I have had, this is actually the fourth, and it’s very kind of you to have me as a guest. They have flown off the racks so to speak and generated huge interest.

And here’s the one—I know I’ve said this many times, so, you know, forgive me listeners who have heard me say this, but nothing drives me on more than when I meet young men and women, however, who are seeing through the paucity and the superficiality of what they’ve been fed as young Australians and have really clicked to a deep philosophical and meaningful understanding.

Your point indeed—that the sort of things can only be learned through long-form discussions about why our country’s different. You know, when I was in Parliament, one of the few— you know, I’m reasonably economically dry—one of the few subsidy arrangements that I agreed with was that we subsidized kids' schools from around Australia so, yeah, it was cheap for them no matter how far—this is a very big country—to come to Canberra and see democracy in action.

And I always used to look forward to meeting with them; it was always fascinating. So we’d have a discussion about the Parliament House and its endless corridors and the chambers and the prime minister and all of these sorts of things, and then I’d spring it on to them and say, “Now how many of you were told before you came down here by your moms and dads and maybe even your teachers, ‘Are you going to Canberra? Are you that place? You know, it’s all hot here and the politicians are useless and the government’s no good?’” And every hand would go up! That’s Australia!

You know, we were once helpfully skeptical and downright cynical, I think, about our political processes and the people in them. But if you then said to them, “Okay, so if the government’s making a mess of it, you name me a country that you’d like to live in in preference to Australia,” and occasionally somebody would say America or they’d say Canada; they might say New Zealand— they’d say they’re all democracies.

And then we talk about the differences because it never hit them! And once you start to unpack that stuff and the sort of conversations that you and I so enjoy—because I enjoy them enormously—there’s a lot of people that tap into it and say, “Gee, that’s interesting! That’s really got me thinking.”

And was it Margaret Mead who said, “Societies have often been changed by just a small group of people getting together and thinking things through”? Indeed! That’s the only way societies have ever changed!

And so what drives me on is the hope that whether they agree with me or disagree with me—even if they come out in a different place—if these conversations that we have help raise up tomorrow’s leaders, well boy, we’re going to need them! And they’ll have to be people of vision, courage, and insight, and nothing struck me more than that first conversation where you had.

And you were quite emotional about it; you said that you’d been in Melbourne and you’d had some young men there who had responded positively to what you’d said. You just said they just need a little bit of encouragement because they're not getting it!

I’ve never forgotten that, man! And I resolve at that point, because you’re so open and you make yourself vulnerable—that must be very costly at times—that I would seek to do the same. So I’ve done that several times consciously as a result of that first conversation. I’ve opened up more about me, and the hope of that’s useful for young people.

And if others want to criticize me, if older people say, “Oh, we wouldn’t have said that in our day, dear,” or whatever—it doesn’t matter! If there’s one person out there—and I know there’s more than that, because I’ve met them—who have been impacted and have thought things through, put down some foundations that they otherwise wouldn’t have— well it’s all been worth it.

That’s a great place to close! So thanks very much for agreeing to meet with me again; I really appreciate it, and to wander through this minefield.

And you know, it’s not something that anyone knows how to do properly, but you know we can all hope and strive to do it right and hope that we don’t do too much damage while we're trying to figure it out!

So I’m hoping to come to Australia next year again, perhaps, to tour again if I can manage it. So if I do come down there, I’d sure be more than pleased to see you again and to meet.

And so I’d like that very much! So thank you very much again for coming in, did—and thank you very much! It’s an honor, and it’s terrific to see you firing on all eight again.