Bret Speaks with Senator Alex Antic - The State of Liberty Down Under
Bret Speaks with Alex Antic about the state of liberty in Australia and Alex's experience with the government's approach to COVID.Find Alex Antic at: https://www.facebook.com/SenatorAntic*****Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon.https://www.patreon.com/bretweinsteinPlease subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channel @DarkHorse Podcast Clips for short clips of all our podcasts:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWCK...
And of course, like everybody else, and I'm sure you did as well, I listened to Joe Rogan's podcast with Dr. Robert Malone the other day, where he summarized the thing that I, I mean, I used to call it Stockholm Syndrome, but mass formation psychosis is actually a better way of looking at it.
Injecting fear into society and allowing people in numbers to run around and wail, flail their arms around like everyone's going to die is a very surefire way to, I suppose, erase the concepts of science and rational thought and liberty and freedom and democracy.
Hey, folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, and I have the honor of sitting today with Senator Alex Antic from South Australia.
Senator, welcome to Dark Horse.
Great to be here and thanks for having me.
There are a number of purposes that we might have in the podcast today, but I think my primary one is this.
As a citizen of the West, somebody who follows social patterns and politics, I have always thought that I understood Australia as a kind of fellow traveler of the United States, a similar place with decidedly different mammals.
I am less and less convinced that I understand Australia on the basis that I see things coming across media, social and otherwise that suggests a kind of draconian shift in the Australian landscape.
And at the same time, although I think I can interpret what I'm seeing and I understand it to be quite frightening, I'm told by people in Australia that I've misunderstood the evidence, that in fact things are quite normal and that I am falling prey to a distortion.
So, I was hoping that you could help me and my listeners understand what is going on in Australia relative to COVID-19.
Yeah, look, Brett, it's a really good question and there's a lot to unpack out of all of that, of course.
But I've been saying to people for the last few months, the last few years even in Australia, that if you look outside the window in Australia at the moment, you largely see the country, I think, that we had.
And we have And I'm going to say it, and your listeners won't like it, the greatest country in the world here.
But it is true.
We have a lot in common with the United States, and we have a lot of things that are terrific about this country.
Lifestyle, system of government, natural resources, beaches, you name it, friendly people, all the rest of it.
So, if you look out the window at the moment in Australia, you still see that.
But the difficulty is that what's going on In that subtle space of politics and of public discourse, and of course in our parliaments as well, gives me very very much the reason for alarm and I'll explain why.
As it stands, we're still very similar.
The United States and Australia have a similar but different path, as we know.
One of the great differences, I think, though, for Australia is that we were formed in around about the year that you were fighting the American War of Independence.
We were found, the first fleet turned up in 1788 in Australia.
It was set up as a penal colony.
The British used it effectively as a way of parking about 160,000 convicts who were brought out here for the Penis crimes of stealing loaves of bread.
But our history is not forged in war and fighting for our freedom like the United States is.
And my view is we're seeing the fruit of that now.
The United States fought against the British and fought for its freedom.
And I think indelibly that's been marked in your founding documents, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and all the things that go with it.
Here, we almost And I've heard it said by learned commentators that it's been said that Australia was a penal colony and has now come back to being a penal colony.
I think that's probably a bridge too far.
But certainly, we were always a country that lived under the spectre of the police, I think, effectively.
I mean, that's how Australia was born.
A lot of free settlers and certainly South Australia, here where I am, Was a free colony set up by private enterprise.
But ultimately, Australia's DNA is one almost of being more compliant and less libertarian, I think, than the United States.
And I think that's where the fork in the road has gone.
So, as I said, as you look out the window, it all looks normal.
But what we're seeing in terms of these protests, particularly coming out of places like Victoria, which is one of our states in the country here down in the southeastern part of the country.
It's a very artistic city, a very erudite city.
And it's a city that has long had its tradition for academic thought and all the rest of it.
And at the moment, it's the city where all of the images of strike-breaking tactics, of police cracking down on protesters, and a lot of the really, really hardcore stuff.
It's the city in the world that has had the longest run of lockdowns.
This has had 260 days of lockdowns in the last period.
Now, that means people locked in their homes.
So, I guess to answer your question, it's a bit of a mixed message there.
The things that are happening in Australia are very real.
The things that are happening, even if they're happening once, are very concerning and very frightening.
There's a whole host of them, by the way, and we'll discuss a few of them today, I suppose.
But certainly, The liberal democracy that is Australia is alive and well, but we have to make sure, I think here in this country, people like myself and other politicians that feel strongly about this, that we keep talking about the chipping away at the edges of the fabric of this nation, because it's very real and it's very alarming.
Well, I think we've been through a number of rounds of trying to assess what we're seeing in the world.
Social media and regular media has a way of putting the most alarming things on a screen, and the challenge always comes back and says you're being misled because you're seeing, you know, where the protest is happening, where the crackdown is happening.
You're not seeing all of the normalcy.
On the other hand, this bias exists Throughout history, right?
Even during wartime, most places at most times, there aren't shots being fired.
And so we can't reassure ourselves too much.
The fact is the agreement that we have in the West with each other Is based on the idea that rights are paramount and that they can only be abridged when a very high bar has been met by government.
And I think many of us, myself included, believe that the bar has not been met in this case.
And, you know, you joke about Australia being founded as a penal colony and some people suggesting that maybe you've returned there.
And on the one hand, I get that maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration.
On the other hand, I know that today I was looking at yet another Video of Michael Gunner, who I guess is in your northern territory.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
And he was declaring that for the unvaccinated only, the number of reasons that you are allowed to leave your house is now down from five to three.
You're not allowed to go more than 30 kilometers from your house.
And this strikes me as both Punitive, and I would say it is all but obvious that it is punitive.
It is a punishment designed to force people towards vaccination, and it is also extremely restrictive of liberty.
So, not exactly a penal colony, but the analogy is not that great a stretch.
Yeah, and look, you're quite right.
That's a relatively recent development, I think, in Australia, but it's consistent with a whole host of smaller ones that have followed a similar line, and they all centre around this issue about segregation, this development of a two-tier society of people who are vaccinated and people who are not.
And it should be said that 90% of Australians, or a little bit more now, have taken that offer up, have taken the vaccines up, so we're a highly vaccinated nation.
We were also told by so-called expert modelling, and one of the things I want to see in 2022 is the use of data modelling and the phrase data modelling less, because it's always You know, met with conjecture, and in this case it's true.
But we were told the country would get back to normal at 80%.
Well, we're up to 90% now, and we're seeing instances like this in the Northern Territory.
I mean, this is outrageous behaviour out there.
And Michael Gunner is, I think, he's a member of the Labor Party.
He's the Chief Minister from the Labor Party, which is a left-wing major party.
And he has made a couple of announcements over the course of The last six months in particular, the first one was the statement that it was words to the effect of, I don't care if you say you're not anti-vax, but if you are against vaccine mandates, then you're an anti-vaxxer, you know, so using that pejorative language in order to marginalise.
And then yesterday's announcement, which is as you described it, an announcement whereby The Northern Territory is effectively reinforcing that two-tiered society.
It's saying, we're going to have a lockdown.
That is, people are going to be in their houses.
But if you're vaccinated, you're allowed to go about your normal business.
If you're not, you can't go more than 30 kilometres away from your house.
You can't leave your house unless it's in a medical emergency or to get emergency supplies.
I mean, we've been saying this.
People like myself have been saying this for years now.
Show us the evidence that that's a reasonable statement, because I don't think there is any.
I'm pretty sure you would agree that there isn't any.
And we've seen this repeated all across the country.
Our state parliaments and our territory governments have been acting on advice they won't show us.
And, you know, they have been quite prescriptive in the types of measures that have been brought in to stop people's movement, to require mask mandates, to require vaccine mandates, to lock people in their homes, all based on science that they won't show.
And that's part of the reason why I've got myself into trouble, I think, with some of our health bureaucracies, because I keep asking for it.
I say, show us the evidence.
Why is it that this is important to have one set of rules for people that have made a health choice and another set of rules for another and the silence is deafening, absolutely deafening?
Yeah, it is and I must tell you I'm a scientist and I've looked carefully at this and it's not that I don't see the noise in the data, I do, but there is nothing conclusive to support the kinds of measures that are being instituted.
And I know that as a member of the West, our relationship with rights is fundamental to our societal function.
And the idea that bureaucrats, most of them unelected, are in a position to simply look at what they think the evidence is and conclude that, ah, it is the time to suspend our rights and to behave in a way that is most decidedly not consistent with our founding values.
Is preposterous.
I know, as you've just implied, that we need to have a discussion, right?
There are circumstances in which one does override liberty, but those are the most sobering of circumstances and they require us to have an open discussion of what the evidence does imply and whether this is indeed a moment that justifies that.
And I know we didn't have that discussion here in the US.
I'm getting the sense you didn't have it in Australia either.
Which raises the question, you know, what is this really about?
Is it about protecting people from a disease?
Or is it about enforcing compliance at all costs?
Well, I think it's certainly become about coercive power and control.
And that's my strong view.
And I've said it time and time again in this country, and it does push against the narrative a little bit.
We have, I think, as I said, a similar set of circumstances in terms of our political structure, And then the US does, and the detail of that is probably too involved to go into for today's purposes.
But effectively, we have a Commonwealth government, a federal government, which has two Houses of Parliament.
You have a Senate, and so do we.
You have a House of Congress, and we have a House of Representatives.
Now, the difference from our point of view then drifts into the State Parliament.
So, we have State Parliaments all across the country, and we have one in each state and territory.
From Australia's point of view, the federal government, the government of which I'm a member, holds some of the important keys.
Basically, we deal with funding.
So, we're the main taxation body.
We deal with the military.
We deal with finance-related matters.
But the states do basically the balance of the rest.
And that's everything.
If you think about what sort of powers that encompasses, that's medical powers, healthcare, policing, I mean, we fund the schools, but you know, the control of the schools all rests with the state.
So you get this uneasy balance between the states wanting to do their own thing.
And in many cases, they're different parties.
So one will be, you know, our centre-right party, the Liberal Party, and one will be from the Labour Party.
And there's always that tension.
The states will want to set their agenda, but then they'll want the Commonwealth government to pay for it.
We've seen a bit of that in the COVID response, in that the states are really the ones driving this.
And the state parliaments all across our country have almost universally and almost systematically enacted Acts of Parliament, which basically hand the reins of power to the unelected bureaucracy.
And as you describe it, they did so on the basis that we were waiting two weeks to flatten the curve.
We never signed up for this concept that it would be two years and we would still be doubling down on these powers.
I mean, if you'd said to me two years ago that the Northern Territory would be doing these sorts of things, even a cynic like myself would have said, that's ridiculous.
There's no point in doing that.
But this is what's happened in Australia.
And we've now got the situation where Unelected bureaucrats are making calls on all sorts of health directions, whether or not there are vaccine mandates, whether there are masks, whether there are lockdowns.
And really, with no recourse to the general public, no need to show the medical evidence, no need to justify their actions.
Our chief health officers are the people in control of those departments.
They've become like celebrities here.
Almost daily, we get updates from them and people comment on the hairstyles and the makeup and the this and the that.
And in one sense, we have lost, I think, perspective on it.
You're very, very correct when you say these are extraordinary powers.
Giving away our rights are the sorts of things that were done when these acts were originally introduced.
So our Emergency Management Act in South Australia actually was designed for what we would call a bushfire, you'd call a forest fire, or a flood, or an earthquake.
Something that would require a week, not something that requires two years.
So we're finding that really, when you come two years down the track, dealing with what has now become basically an endemic situation rather than a pandemic, and you get all the arguments about where that fitted in originally, There really is no other way to look at this other than I think the bureaucrats don't want to get out of the warm bed of coercive power.
And I think it's always, always a risk.
And it was my complaint when the state parliaments kept doing this.
How do you get the power back?
How do you wrench it back from people that have set up, you know, almost effectively departments and hired and fired people based purely on setting up this little fiefdom?
It's really, really dangerous stuff.
It requires strong political will from the states in Australia.
It's a will I haven't seen yet.
But that's why it's so important that we talk about it on shows like your own, because frankly, the Australian media has become lazy and weak.
Well, I think this is becoming all the more obvious if you know where to look, and in part that's because the focus of these mandates has been these vaccines for which the argument is getting weaker by the hour, right?
Well, in the US, we've gone through this period of gaslighting.
Initially, they told us that the vaccines were going to control the pandemic if only everyone would get on board.
That obviously isn't the case.
Israel, Australia, maybe best case, Gibraltar tells us that even complete compliance doesn't result in control of the pathogen.
And so then we were told that actually the only purpose of the vaccines was ever to protect individuals from the worst consequences of the disease, hospitalization and death and the like.
And, you know, we were told that it was our imagination that anybody had ever said anything different, which was, of course, easily documented nonsense.
But if it is true that the only purpose of these vaccines is to protect individuals from the extreme consequences, Then obviously mandates are a bit preposterous, right?
You're removing people's rights to protect them from the remote chance that they will end up in a hospital at best.
And then with the spread of Omicron, It's not even clear that the vaccinated are better protected from contracting the disease than the unvaccinated.
So, you know, the rationale is evaporated.
But what I see is no change in tenor whatsoever amongst our elected leaders and our unelected bureaucrats.
The point is, The answer is still vaccines and boosters for everyone.
Don't even question it.
And I mean, it basically tells the story that you're you're hinting at here, which is that our governmental structure is at best drunk with power that they are reluctant to give up having won it in an emergency.
Yeah, I think that's a great way of putting it.
It was almost a contest won in an emergency.
And, you know, from Australia's point of view, I mean, it's particularly worrying because when you look around the world at the sorts of countries that are, you know, liberal democracies that hold these truths and that hold this importance on these powers, We, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, many of these countries, we're probably in the minority across the world.
And certainly from Australia's point of view, as a power in the region or a middle power, as we sometimes call ourselves, we are surrounded by countries that don't share our values on these views.
We've had a long history in recent times of pushing back on the Chinese Communist Party, on their incursions into Australia through the soft power, almost diplomatic means.
We were I guess leaders in the world in terms of rejecting the Huawei company build our 5G network.
And we've taken enormous steps in terms of our legislative arrangements to push that influence away by digging into influence in universities, military organizations.
So we've got a proud history of of holding these values dear and close to our heart.
And it feels almost like within two years, using this concept as it is an emergency, which is always the excuse given.
We've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Now, that's not to say that it's not, you know, recoverable.
I think it absolutely is.
And I think, and I hope it will be.
But in the meantime, people are being conditioned for a different way of looking at things.
And, you know, we've got two years now where people have spent time, and I don't think this is the same in the United States, but here in Australia, in almost every state, as I'm aware of it, people are required to check in using a QR code wherever they go.
So if you go to fill up your car with petrol, you bring your phone and you scan the QR code and you check in and your data then gets registered in a central database that is held by the government.
And then when you leave, you walk out, you go to the next shop, you do the same thing.
So, for example, people that have been Christmas shopping might have QR code checked into 10 shops in a day and a half.
And then the idea is that, of course, if someone's COVID positive in that area, You get notified and into quarantine you go, sometimes into one of these mini hotels that we'll talk about as well.
I don't think that's a phenomenon that the United States has experienced.
But here in Australia, people are now used to it.
They look for the code and the conditioning to accept this kind of soft power totalitarianism is now firmly getting ingrained in Australia's DNA.
And I think that's really worrying.
I'm worried that people aren't more worried about it, frankly.
I mean, there are some that are.
But people like myself who make these statements get accused of being, you know, sort of conspiracy theorists or whatever you might call it.
But I think the trajectory on this, if it's not arrested, is really bad.
I worry about this sort of persuasive social credit style system that we can see coming in.
And there's a number of examples of that.
South Australia, in fact, my home state, the health bureaucracy here are the authors of the Home Quarantine App, which is, in my view, a dreadful piece of software which sits on your phone.
And the rationale for it was that instead of being quarantined somewhere else, you can buy your freedom by agreeing to sign up to this app.
And it contacts you three times a day.
It requires you to show a picture of your face or live stream your face.
It takes the GPS data from that.
It triangulates that information and sends it back to police headquarters and confirms that you're at home where you said you'd be at home.
And if you're not, then you get a knock on the door from the police.
Now, People seem to have accepted that in this country as being, oh, well, that's terrific.
That means I don't have to go into a midi hotel, which is a detainment facility here.
And it's sort of almost a way of buying your freedom back.
Well, you know, I would say to that, my freedom is not something the government gives me.
It's, you know, as it should be in the United States, and as it should be here, it's an inalienable right.
So we've become very conditioned to accepting the unacceptable over the last two years.
And I think that's Really, the difficulty we're going to face is winding that back and winding back these ideas from a bureaucracy that never has to face up to an electorate.
Nobody who came up with that idea is ever going to have to justify it in front of a ballot box.
Well, you're absolutely right that in the United States, the government is not allowed to track your every move using your phone.
Only Google has that right.
I mean, I'm joking, of course, but Google has effectively taken that right.
And we have been conditioned to just simply accept it.
And so this is, you know, another bigger step.
And I must tell you that just Hearing about the idea that oh, by the way Your phone has the ability to detect whether it's actually your face because of course your phone does have that ability and your phone knows exactly where on earth it is and that does mean that somebody who avails themselves of the privilege of knowing whether or not you are at home is in a position to check up on you and yeah, that sounds
Like a brand new high-tech kind of totalitarianism for which we do not have an exact historical precedent, but oh my God!
Here it comes, yeah.
And of course, it's been sold to the people of South Australia.
Aren't you proud?
Your local health bureaucracy has created this wonderful software.
Look at what the public service can do.
But of course, we know that that would have required You know, a separate budget line into the department.
It would have required hiring staff.
It requires that fiefdom to build and it requires then a massive, massive step to go back to a time where you didn't have those resources around you.
And what we're seeing in Australia, of course, is this drift into big government.
And I think one of our problems here is that we do think, as Australians, I think, more than we should, that government can solve our problems.
And that's probably one of the lines where we've drifted from, you know, the United States, I think, has a much different view of it.
I mean, we had a series of bushfires in this country a year and a half ago, two years ago.
And the incessant line was, why is the government fixing this?
I mean, these are natural disasters.
But the Australian idea in many ways, sadly, is that government should fix these things.
And we've become indelibly marked with the thumbprint of big government in this country.
And I think that's as concerning as anything we have.
We don't have a Bill of Rights here.
There's, as I said, an entirely different discussion for whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
But what it has done is highlighted some of the deficiencies in our system, the system of federation that's allowed the states, as we described earlier, to hold powers in their own little hand to block off their borders to travel and to do what they've done.
But then also this issue of the individuals rights.
And that's a big that's a big can of worms.
We probably aren't going to open today, but but, you know, we're starting to see the fruits of those those decisions back in 1901 in Australia.
So there are a number of differences that are becoming clear.
One, just a structural difference, is that there's an inversion in your system from the American system where your states are more powerful than your federal government.
That of course is at least part of the explanation for why some Australians are looking out their window and saying this is all made up in some sense.
I don't get it entirely because presumably every Australian has access to Michael Gunner and they can listen to him say his deranged ranting and his Punishing of the unvaccinated and they can infer that the unrest that they are seeing in Melbourne is about something.
So they should be able to put two and two together.
But nonetheless, I suppose a certain kind of sampling of the environment around you if you're in a state that isn't engaged in draconian measures at the same level might be reassuring.
Whereas, there are parts of your country in which things are apparently jaw-dropping, including the government checking on you to see whether you've gone home, even though, at some level, as has been true throughout the pandemic, these measures don't make a lot of sense epidemiologically.
Right.
It's not obvious that you, you know, going out to take a hike or a walk with your dog is a threat to anybody.
Right.
So, you know.
That's right.
That's right.
And look, even those things have been restricted in Australia over the last two years.
We've have, even in this state where we haven't had as many lockdowns as the state of Victoria has, but we've had them here where You know, there's been directives on going out and getting some exercise in the fresh air in a park with nobody around you.
And you would have seen all of those images of people in New South Wales, which is a further eastern state.
It's the state which is the capital is Sydney, where police have been telling people to move on, on Bondi Beach, sitting on a beach on their own with nobody around them.
And that is the very nature of the, you know, the draconian nature.
There is no Room for common sense in that scenario.
It just happens.
And look, there are so many other examples as well.
I mean, I talked a little bit before about this concept of the meaty hotel, and that's something which I don't think Americans have experienced, thankfully.
But this I suppose drift into quarantining and quarantining at home, quarantining in old hotels and quarantining, of course, in these quarantine camps as well, is something that Australians have become too, I suppose, familiar with in too short a period of time.
We have hotels here which have basically been repurposed for two years.
They're just standard hotels in the middle of the city here in Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia.
There are about three.
One of them's an old apartment block, but they're basically hotels that have a big metal fence around them, police walking around down the bottom, and people who've mostly come from overseas and are doing their 14 days quarantining, or seven, or depending, whatever the diktat of the day is.
And they are like little prisons.
And I mean, people in this country roll their eyes at that suggestion, those who aren't worried about what's going on.
But the reality is anytime your liberty is restricted, that's a bad thing.
It doesn't matter if you're doing it in a five-star hotel or if you're behind bars in a maximum security prison.
The reality is as soon as you can't leave your front door for fear of penalty, you are locked down and your liberty is restricted.
So we're seeing that time and time again.
We also have governments now having gone through that experience as a way of dealing with quarantining and lockdowns, expanding that out now into this concept that I know has made a lot of media in the United States of quarantine facilities.
They try not to use the word camps.
But the reality is they're large transportable units.
They're popping up over the country.
We've got the major one in the Northern Territory where Mr. Gunnar is the Chief Minister, which is called Howard Springs.
That made a bit of news a month or so ago with a young lady who was put into that facility simply for the crime of walking alongside someone who had COVID.
She was captured on a local CCTV camera.
The person, I think, was pushing a motorbike and therefore had a licence plate there, which was recognisable.
The contact tracing system identified her and then identified this lady.
She got a knock on the door from the police and off she went for two weeks in this facility, having never tested positive for COVID.
I want to ask you about that, though.
This sounds like, and I must say it's not totally unprecedented, I know that this exists in the U.S.
in a form most Americans are probably not familiar with, but it sounds to me like she was effectively convicted of a crime and sentenced to an admittedly short sentence in what is effectively a prison without a court having been involved.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And it's not too long a bow to draw.
I mean, many would say that's overstating it.
But the reality is, there is no right of review.
If you've been charged with a crime, you have appeal rights, and you have all of those here, because of the nature and the way in which these schemes have been, so you have none.
And so you are certainly, I mean, and I think, as I said, That home quarantine app that I described is a much more draconian measure than you would get for an offender who's been sentenced to home detention.
We would have a home detention bracelet here under our legal system.
There's never been a requirement to make people use biometric facial data and GPS as far as I'm aware anyway.
So I think although it does seem sometimes those Comparisons are unfair.
I think it's a very slippery slope.
And it's a question of what you become accustomed to as a society.
Australians have become, in my view, too accustomed to these restrictions on liberty.
And in fact, one of the things that's been really alarming has been the extent to which Australians have become accustomed to it.
And, you know, I think that this is why the message needs to be out there.
We know that from polling that's been done, I did a bit of polling from my own office, that in South Australia, somewhere between 30 and 40% of people We've effectively bullied hundreds of thousands of people.
We're a state of about 1.7 million.
So on those numbers, we have effectively bullied and coerced that many people into getting a medical treatment that they weren't otherwise going to want to.
So people have become very accustomed to doing what they're told.
And if that isn't alarming, then I just don't know what is.
Well, you're doing an admirable job.
You're bending over backwards not to be alarmist, right?
You keep cautioning me about the possibility of over-interpreting these things.
And my feeling is we shouldn't get too bent out of shape about the imprecision, you know?
Is it a detention camp?
Well, I don't know.
It doesn't really matter if it's a detention camp.
The question is, if it's not a detention camp, is there some other thing that we're aware of that it is more like than a detention camp?
And if the answer is not obviously, then the question is, all right, why are we playing around with something that is plausibly a detention camp, right?
Can we look back at history at the number of times that we've done this and how we felt about it afterwards and say, you know, what are we doing?
As I've said on my podcast, what are we doing in this part of the library?
Right.
Why are we looking at the Nazis and the Nuremberg trials and saying, well, how precisely, you know, applicable are these standards?
And the answer is it doesn't precision has nothing to do with it.
The fact that we're even looking at the Nuremberg Code and saying, hey, wait a minute, what are we up to here tells us we've found ourselves in territory we don't want to be in.
And, you know, it's also I keep reminding myself, It's true that we are doing this.
This isn't smallpox, right?
I have never been somebody who has minimized the danger of COVID.
In fact, I was very early on the idea that COVID was more dangerous than it appeared, that the case fatality rate did not capture the damage that the disease does, and that we should all be very cautious about it.
But that said, It is not that lethal a disease.
And for you Australians, it's even less lethal because you don't have a tremendous problem with it.
You have a much better controlled problem.
And yes, those who are in favor of these measures might argue that your excellent control of it is the result of these measures.
On the other hand, it may have to do with your proximity to the equator and therefore levels of vitamin D, your being an island, you know, there are a lot of factors that contribute.
But nonetheless, the question is, You've got these extreme measures that in some sense have no parallel other than many of the worst chapters of history.
At the same time, you have a disease that while, yes, it's not the flu, is also not so extreme that it's obvious we should turn upside down all of the hard-won rights in the West in order to control it, especially when controlling it has been something we've obviously failed at.
Yeah, I think that's a great summary.
And I like the analogy about being in the section of the library you don't really want to be in.
I mean, that's very, very true.
And I'm seeing that out in the community as I talk to people.
As I talk to people privately, I hear much more concern than I do publicly.
And one of my great frustrations is That, in essence, and I think there's probably a thesis in this for someone who will write it at some stage, but it's hard to know whether the tail's wagging the dog or the dog's wagging the tail in many respects.
The media in this country, and I'm sure this will raise their ire, but have been so complicit and so lazy and so hopeless with reporting what's going on in this country that the political class, I think, have followed that sniffing the wind.
And we now have a generation of Politicians, with a few exceptions of course along the way, who are simply waving through bureaucratic power like they were standing at a set of stoplights without recourse and with a great deal of fear about being the person that stands up and says, you know what, I'm not okay with this.
Myself, I'm not saying this for any other purpose than just to make the point.
Myself and a senator from Queensland by the name of Gerard Rennick last sitting period told the Prime Minister that he didn't have our vote until such time as we took Steps to address vaccine discrimination mandates, which is difficult because the federal government only has so many strings to pull for reasons we've discussed already.
But there are things we can do.
There are funding issues.
There are methods to fix this if we want to.
That hasn't borne fruit yet, but To take that step was almost seen as being disloyal.
And in Australia, there is a lot more party discipline, I think, than perhaps there is in the United States.
I know members of each major political party in the United States do freelance more.
But in Australia, that's a very, very unusual thing.
The two-party system is largely rock solid.
But the political class just hasn't, you know, almost universally just hasn't stood up to this.
And that's what it is going to take.
It needs people to become more vocal, to have those conversations they're having privately with people.
You know, this perception going around that, you know, does this all seem right to you?
It doesn't seem right to me.
What is this all about?
These are conversations that are being had in the House, not in the town square at the moment, for fear of derision, for fear of excommunication from political circles.
But I've said it time and time again, I'm only two years into a, you know, what may be a short or a long political career.
But in terms of where I sit, this is a hill I'm prepared to die on, because these are fundamental issues.
We've always hailed our robustness, our adaptability and our resilience in this democracy here.
But if we have fought hard to protect these institutions, then we have to continue to fight hard Not only on the international scene, as we've done with the United States in multiple wars, but also domestically.
We have to stand up for these freedoms and these rights.
And we're seeing a dangerous drift in this country.
Something like 30% of 18 to 29 year olds apparently Have a view that a non-democratic way of approaching politics is okay, is reasonable.
That is alarming and we've seen this sort of long march into the institutions that I'm sure I know has happened in the United States as well, this kind of pervasive soft totalitarian approach invading schools and universities.
My concern is that we're now going to get a generation of people that think what is happening is okay, that soft totalitarianism is going to approach and that we're going to end up with this dreadful Social credit style system that rules our lives for the benefit of who knows.
Yeah, I exactly agree with you.
And, you know, we have a constant problem, which is that anything that has been well addressed by our system is more or less invisible.
And so this issue of Chesterton's fence is constantly dogging us.
You know, the West is not perfect.
It's got a lot that could be improved.
But it is tremendously dynamic and productive and overwhelmingly fairer than the other alternative systems.
And so if you see its imperfections and you think, well, look at all it's doing wrong, let's get rid of it.
You have no idea how many of the things that it has actually accomplished you're about to get rid of until they're gone.
And so I think you and I are watching The gains of the West slip away and it's hard to raise people's awareness of what in fact they are playing with.
But you point to this other issue, which is what happens when you do talk candidly to other people.
And I'm here in Portland, Oregon.
Portland, Oregon.
I think is arguably the farthest left city in the country, in what might be the farthest left state, right?
We're here on the West Coast with California and Washington.
But nonetheless, in terms of mandates, we have the strongest in the country.
We're the farthest out at that end of the continuum.
When I talk to people here in Portland, there is not overwhelming agreement that this is sensible and that everybody needs to get on board.
What there is, is a tremendous amount of skepticism that this makes any sense whatsoever.
But you don't hear that if you only listen to the official discourse.
So, what you described with your media, that they are, what did you say, waving through these draconian measures like they were just passing traffic through an intersection or something?
I think that, yeah.
Words that affect, yeah.
This is really, in some sense, it's a magic trick, right?
There's an illusion that we are in, that the good people are all in agreement about these measures being necessary in order to control this pandemic because this is how we feel.
People are beginning to talk openly with each other outside of others' earshot.
But nobody, including me, has any idea what the actual balance of belief is.
There has been such a strong effort to penalize people for voicing a minority perspective on this that, you know, the minority might in fact be in the majority and we would never know it, right?
We would never know it because people are afraid to confess what they believe.
That's exactly right.
And we see that time and time again.
And I think one of the other moving parts in there has been this, what must be a deliberate attempt to continue to push genuine misinformation out there, which are facts, factoids, like the vaccines will stop transmission, you are protecting grandma if you take it.
Those bits of data, which clearly are wrong, or are largely wrong, are still, I think, influencing people's thought processes.
Armed with the proper facts, I think we'd see a quantum shift in the approach.
But at the moment, the fear is dictating the day.
And of course, like everybody else, and I'm sure you did as well, I listened to Joe Rogan's podcast with Dr. Robert Malone the other day, where he summarized I used to call it Stockholm Syndrome, but mass formation psychosis is actually a better way of looking at it.
Injecting fear into society and allowing people in numbers to run around and flail their arms around like everyone's going to die is a very surefire way to I suppose, erase the concepts of science and rational thought and liberty and freedom and democracy.
So, I mean, that is probably the most clever synopsis I've heard in recent times, and I think has done enormous favour to people who are wanting to talk about this more freely and more openly.
Frankly, we need it.
I mean, from a political point of view, my concept has always been, how do we How do we achieve this when there are only outlets like yours who are talking in genuine scientific terms about the things that are going on, people like Joe and others?
How do we get that message out there?
And how do we get business leaders, politicians and the general public to feel as though they can say, I'm worried about healthcare like you are.
I'm worried about the concept of a global pandemic, but I'm also worried about what we're doing to our freedom and our liberty.
These are things in which our democracy has been built on for years on end.
How do we make sure they don't get, you know, one doesn't snuff the other out and vice versa?
But at the moment, that conversation is just not an acceptable one for the Australian media, the Australian public.
We have to try and make it so because, you know, frankly, Australia is a critical Planking the liberal democracies of the world over and we just can't see this being thrown out with the bathwater.
Yeah, it's one of the places I would have thought that if the walls came tumbling down here in the US, that it would have been the right place to run.
And I no longer think that because you appear to be ahead of us in terms of what you have accepted in the erosion of your You're right.
I wanted to add something.
You mentioned that if people actually had a decent understanding of the facts of SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, the vaccines, etc., that they would have a very different perspective on what was reasonable.
And I wholeheartedly believe that.
I mean, your example of people being kicked off the beach Those people being kicked off the beach were presumably at essentially no risk of catching or transmitting COVID to anybody, irrespective of who had COVID, because at least so far as we know, it has not transmitted.
Maybe this has changed with Obicron, but has not transmitted well outdoors.
The other thing, though, is sitting there on a beach in Australia, they were probably making vitamin D, which turns out to be terrifically important.
Vitamin D deficiencies, which most of us here in the northern climes suffer from, are actually a key factor in the vulnerability to diseases beyond COVID-19, but very much including it.
And so, you know, here you have a government strong-arming people who are actually doing something probably useful against this very disease, strong arming them into doing something harmful, go inside, right, where the disease does transmit and where you're not making vitamin D.
So that is at least a massive error.
But the missing thing here is at the same time that our governments are mandating things that make no sense and failing to convey a proper model for this disease or the remedy that they are pushing.
They are also blocking the use of other remedies that do seem to work.
And there are many doctors who have discovered protocols that are highly effective and they are finding themselves unlicensed, fired, and they are having their prescriptions blocked at the pharmacy.
So, So, you know, not only are people not possessed of the facts, but their doctors are being robbed of the tools that would be useful.
And so really it all suggests a desire to keep people in a frightened and vulnerable state.
Which then just so happens to make an argument for draconian measures, whereas doctors who are getting smarter over the course of a pandemic of how to treat this disease and are now in a position to manage it very effectively, scientists who are getting smarter about it and who can now tell us, hey, actually, that behavior that, you know, we were forbidding, it turns out to be totally safe.
Why don't you go to the beach?
Spend as much time there as possible, right?
These things would change our approach if the purpose was to protect people from the pandemic.
If this has become, as you say, about the accumulation of power, then of course those things would be immaterial.
Yeah, that's right.
And another great example of that has been the interplay between lockdowns and exercise.
And, you know, we know that people who are fit and healthy, who are getting exercise and, you know, who are living that sort of lifestyle are better prepared for the effects of COVID.
And, of course, what's the reaction been in some states?
It's been to lock people in their homes where they're drinking more alcohol, their mental health is suffering and their fitness levels are dropping, you know, remarkably.
And we've seen demonstrable levels of mental health problems coming out of Victoria, which has had those 260 odd days in lockdown.
So, look, you're absolutely right.
And I think, look, I always have difficulty with the concept of talking about the other alternatives, treatments, because I'm not a doctor and I don't pretend to be and I don't have any background in science, as is evident.
But what I can say is that the thing that alarms me out of all of that is the fact that we have had no debate about it in this country.
Like in the United States, Therapeutic Goods Association, which is effectively our FDA, has just said at one point, I think six months ago, that alternative treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are just not available.
They just won't be used.
And we're not going to talk about it.
And when asked the question why it is, they've referred back to all of the talking points, which are, well, in a certain dose, it's very, very dangerous.
And, you know, we can't have that being run around.
And this is the official line.
And so, doctors in this country are intimidated.
They have been intimidated, threatened with loss of registration, and those sorts of things are entirely anti-science and illiberal.
They're the sort of things that you just can't imagine would happen in any other circumstance.
So, why now?
What is the difference with this than we would have had had we had an outbreak of tuberculosis or had we had an outbreak of, you know, smallpox even?
Who knows?
You know, something like that had escaped.
We're seeing things that just don't seem to make sense in terms of a pandemic response in some aspects.
And I find that the most concerning thing, that the shutdown in thought and the shutdown in discussion is as important an issue as any that we've had.
Because some of these things require more discussion than zero, that's for sure.
And that's about what we've got at the moment.
Yeah, there's the public discussion, there's the scientific discussion, and there's also the medical discussion.
And I think the thing that most people, most citizens don't really understand is that part of the way medicine works Is that your doctor really is supposed to be a scientist, and when confronted with some kind of new disease, they are supposed to, as frightening as this is, take their best shot at helping you.
And in so doing, they discover what works, and they talk to each other.
And the problem is, what we now have is a draconian top-down mandate that says, here are some substances you are not allowed to try.
Right?
Here are some substances that many people believe work, including many doctors who have used them.
You are not allowed to prescribe them.
And that is a fundamental inversion of the way medicine is supposed to work.
And what it does is it prevents the process in which we get better at saving people.
Right?
It blocks that process.
And so, you know, you look out your window, you don't see that anything has changed.
But that's a radical alteration in the relationship between you, your doctor, your pharmacist, and your government.
Right?
It's a major inversion, and one that has tremendous implications for your well-being, not just for COVID, but for everything else as well.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And they are the sorts of things that sort of the sanctity of that relationship with the medical practitioner has been eroded.
And I mean, I know for a fact there are many doctors out there who are frightened to talk about other ways of dealing with this and now simply don't have those tools at their disposal either.
And of course, we've also got the situation, I think, where people having these conversations themselves in between You know, their own medical outlet and feeling as though they're doing something wrong by talking about, you know, things that you've talked about, simple things, vitamin D, getting a bit of sunlight.
Well, what's the harm in that?
I mean, you can't hurt yourself.
So, nobody's ever suggesting that this is the only cure.
It's just a question of the discussion about whether or not there are other things that can be done, exercise, vitamin D. They're not being discussed in this country at the moment.
And we're seeing that time and time again with I suppose with the medical response.
I see that level because that's the game we're in, politics.
I'm not sure that people on the street see that.
People are expected and entitled to take the advice of the regulatory bodies as given because in this country they have always been outstanding.
We have some of the best medical care in the world.
We have a universal healthcare system which works really well.
Medicare here where people Nobody is out of hospital ever, really, other than extreme circumstances.
But also, we've now got a society where having had that and built that system up to, you know, one of the world's best systems, I'd say, we're now getting political leaders, heads of professional bodies like our Australian Medical Association in various places, making comments like, if you haven't taken the vaccine, perhaps you shouldn't be entitled to health care at all.
You know, completely flying in the face of our universal healthcare model.
And it sort of highlights once again what has happened here, that the sorts of things that were unthinkable two years ago are now being discussed openly.
I mean, if you'd said to someone two years ago, if you haven't had a measles injection, then you shouldn't be entitled to healthcare, you would have been laughed at, You had your medical registration pulled.
Now that seems to be an acceptable statement in public discourse.
A few of those people have been shouted down, of course, but not in the manner they should have been.
I mean, these are ridiculous statements and it's worrying that it's crept into even the medical profession.
Well, it goes to your point about mass formation, that this is not in the least unfamiliar.
It just comes from the chapters of history we least want to revisit, right?
The dehumanizing of people and the justification of the elimination of their rights because they're not fully human and they don't deserve them.
Right?
That's not new.
It's just new enough that people aren't familiar with what that sound leads towards.
And I wish they were thinking more carefully about it because, you know, again, we're in the wrong section of the library and we ought to be very frightened that this is where our analogies are coming from.
Totally.
You've again done an excellent job being very careful in your presentation, making sure not to exaggerate or use hyperbole.
But I did want to ask you, you have personally had a run-in with what maybe we're not supposed to call detention or camps or whatever.
I haven't gotten the memo that tells me what I am supposed to call it.
But what happened?
Yeah, well, look, I have.
And I mean, I use that term quite openly.
I'm pretty comfortable with it.
Detention is when you cannot leave.
So being detained is what it is.
So you won't offend me, I can assure you.
But the scenario here is, obviously, in my job, I travel a lot because, you know, I'm a member of the government and we travel to Canberra, which is effectively our Washington.
I sit in the Senate over there.
So, it's required a lot of travel.
There have been periods where we haven't, but throughout the course of the last two years, we have seen a different way of doing it every time.
Very early on, when we would leave, we would come back from the Australian Capital Territory, which is where Canberra is.
We would probably quarantine at home for two weeks and we got used to doing that.
Then, as things subsided a bit, we didn't at all.
We would just return to normal life, as I think has been the case in the United States, crossing boundaries.
As the days and weeks went on and the healthcare bureaucracies decided that they would become more prescriptive with their rules and requirements, these almost visa-like arrangements between travelling between states started to emerge.
During our last trip, which was back in November, I left the state with one set of rules and came back to a different set of rules.
What that meant was that by the time I was coming back, I was required, as were all parliamentarians, to apply for the right to return to my home through a specially crafted and I'm sure very clever system through the internet, the Entry Check System, which had been developed here.
I was denied twice the ability to come home.
And you fill in the ask the questions and so on and so forth.
And then ultimately I was told that I needed to go into a Medi hotel for 14 days with no right of review.
And I mean, that has happened before, but it hasn't happened in any of the other previous scenarios when we've been traveling.
And of course, the thing that really stuck out in my mind, the thing that started to really raise concerns about the rationale for that was the fact that after 10 minutes of being told that, I got a call from a journalist who also knew about it, who knew about all the details in the same language that the email that I'd received telling me about it.
And then I was met by photographers and media at the airport in order to document the whole thing.
And frankly, the exercise is not as bad as it looks.
I, in fact, looked for the officials to tell them.
I'm apparently told I need to go into a METI hotel, but those officials are police officers.
So the scene looked like you were being detained and dragged away, which you sort of were, but it wasn't quite as draconian as that.
But once again, the next The next day, in our local newspaper, that was splashed across the front, you know, Antic detained, you know, so on and so forth.
And I spent 14 days there, despite having had a COVID test, I think, the day before leaving.
And then, we'll count them up, six during my time in the hotel, and no ability to get out.
And I was taken to a Medi hotel, once again, metal fence around the bottom, police there.
You know, three meals brought to your door, you know, during the day with a knock on the door, like you're in a prison environment.
You can't leave to get the meal more than three minutes before it's left.
And you can't leave it out there longer than 10 minutes for the reasons of science, presumably.
Who knows why?
And, you know, checks every day on your mental health.
And I kept saying, well, I'm fine, but I'd be better if you'd let me go home.
Yeah, all this sort of stuff.
And so, it was a nice hotel in the middle of the city, not far from where I've worked before.
But if you can't leave that environment, you are in there.
So, what's the message that has been sent?
I'd spent the last six months poking around the local health bureaucracy, who are really the ones that made that decision, asking for documents, asking for information, asking them to show us the science that we're meant to trust, and then fell on the receiving end of that little trick on the way through.
And, of course, the last 24 hours here in Australia have seen the world number one tennis player, Novak Djokovic, go through a similar experience.
He also is of Serbian extraction, so I'm not going to suggest for a minute there's some sort of Serbian, anti-Serbian conspiracy in Australia.
I would only say that in jest, but the similarities are frightening.
He's currently in a Medi hotel in Melbourne, to the best of my knowledge, with no symptoms of COVID.
And that really is the question here.
Where's the science that says, whatever it turns out to be the case, whether there's an issue with vaccination or not, or exemptions or not, where's the science that says, Allowing him in if he can test negative, even, you know, despite the fact that there are 100,000 cases of COVID floating around in our community across the country.
Where is the science that says that's a reasonable thing to do?
And what is the reality for reputational damage for our country when this sort of stuff is happening?
I mean, we just don't know the details yet.
That matters in front of the courts at the moment.
But this business of taking people and locking them up against their will, as you said earlier, quite rightly, it doesn't matter if it's in a five-star hotel and you're sitting around a pool.
If I can't leave, if you can't leave, then you're being detained.
It's as simple as that.
And that is happening too commonly in this country at the moment.
So, it sounds to me like both you and Mr. Djokovic were imprisoned to prevent you from transmitting a disease to others that neither of you apparently had.
I think that's about right.
I think that's a very apt summary, yeah.
It does not.
I mean, things may be different south of the equator, but north of the equator, that doesn't sound like it's logical to me.
It just sounds beyond preposterous, in fact.
It's hard to even know what to make of it.
And I, you know, I think, you know, you said soft totalitarianism.
I have used the term surgical totalitarianism.
There is something to the idea of We are being broken in on accepting certain things that ourselves from two or three years ago would have balked at in the strongest possible terms.
I'm not sure even what to say about it except at some level just People need to listen to the description of what has happened.
They need to hear you not leaping to conclusions about it, not saying anything beyond what actually happened, just the simple facts of it and ask themselves, are we being governed by rational people in our collective interest or is something else going on?
Because Increasingly, I don't think any of this actually squares with the idea that people who are obsessed with our medical well-being are perhaps a bit carried away.
I don't think you can explain this that way.
This looks like something is taking a kind of power that we never would have given up absent an emergency and it doesn't look like it's planning to give it back.
No, and we say that all the time here.
I mean, every day things seem to slip again.
That story about the Northern Territory yesterday is something that was unexpected because it felt as though we'd moved past all of that.
And as you say, in a temporary environment where And I think the terminology used in this state is a major emergency has been declared and has been declared for two years.
You would assume that that major emergency would evaporate.
But of course, we're not seeing that at all.
In fact, if anything, I think we're seeing it getting ratcheted up in some aspects.
So it doesn't make sense.
What it is doing, of course, and this is another entire limb, but a societal limb, is it's dividing Australians.
And the anecdotal evidence from the Christmas period is that it was a It probably was the same in the United States, a fraught period where families were fighting amongst themselves because of whether people wanted to even congregate in numbers at all.
In this state, as we speak right now, health bureaucrats have dictated that you cannot have more than 10 people in your home.
For any reason, as far as I'm aware.
And businesses can't have more than 25% of their normal customer flow.
So, throughout that New Year period, businesses were just hemorrhaging money.
Their hard costs of rent and electricity, they don't change.
Small businesses are facing this critical period.
Families are facing this critical period.
It doesn't seem to be getting any better.
We are seeing that division rolling out through this country.
Like everybody who's involved in the public sphere and the public town hall setting, I try to speak to people about it as rationally as I can.
I say, Do you think you would understand this if I was to come back to you in two, three, five years and you had an app on your phone that told you you couldn't buy another tank of petrol gas today because we're in the middle of a climate emergency?
Because in one sense, It is hard to imagine a time where this won't continue if we don't stop it now, where social credit, as we see in places like China, isn't at least more persuasive in here.
We were just told this week that in South Australia there's a meat shortage.
I'm sure there's a rational explanation for that, but You know, it also sounds a little bit like, you know, we have been hearing out of the World Economic Forum, we have to cut down on meat and these sorts of things.
You know, where does this stop?
Do we end up becoming a country that is dominated by the naughty or nice register that sits on our phone?
And are people live enough to it?
And will people, you know, when, for example, they go to the bottle shop, to buy a carton of beer and can't do it because they've already had one this week, is that enough to wake people up?
Because at the moment, I don't think that those lines of sort of thought have been joined.
But I fear they're coming and I fear we need more people to speak up.
Well, if I can say what I think I heard you just say in different terms, it seems to me that there are basically two possible systems.
You can have a system in which your bureaucracy is empowered to decide when your rights apply and when your rights don't apply based on emergencies, of which there will be many.
Yeah.
In which case, I don't know whether your climate example is sensible or not, but it's certainly no more preposterous than what we are seeing now.
So, you know, is it acceptable for our governments of the West to decide, well, the time has come to eliminate your rights over climate or racism or whatever else it's going to do?
Or are we going to have a system in which the only thing, the only tool our bureaucrats have should they wish to relieve us of our rights is persuasion, where they actually have to convince us that this in fact does merit that step?
And I think, you know, those of us who are paying attention have now seen enough of this to know that there is only one right answer to that question.
A system in which they have to persuade us to put aside those rights temporarily because something necessitates it is the only tolerable system.
One in which they are empowered to decide when we are in that situation is one that is automatically going to be abused until we change it.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think one of the things we've handing power in the manner that we have in this country to our bureaucrats is it's never, it's never taken that system into account.
It's never, it's never required any explanation to be given.
And I know there are many doctors that say, well, hang on, where's the evidence for that?
You know, where is, you know, they're saying privately, of course, you know, show us the data on this.
Show us the rationale that's been used in order to adopt this line of approach.
And there isn't any.
And as you say, the rationale given for not that is it's an emergency.
We don't have time.
Just let's get on with it.
Now, I think you're absolutely right.
If things are to continue in this manner, then people are entitled to an explanation.
You know, if it is a climate emergency, if, then explain it and give us the data.
And it needs to be a discussion, not just a selection of your favourite expert reports that favour your political narrative.
It needs to be a proper facilitated process.
I mean, even here in this country, if we had had a system whereby the decision-making process was vetted by those who were elected, so that the rules were put back through, you know, a committee or an elected body of some sort, then there would be some oversight.
there would be some skin in the game for the politicians.
Unfortunately, around the country here, I've been using the term, the politicians have effectively thrown the keys to the bureaucrats and said, all right, you take it from here.
We're just going to get out and talk the talking points.
Now, that hasn't been the case universally, but We've seen that in states like Victoria, we've seen it in states like Queensland and Western Australia here, where they have basically been selling the message of the bureaucracy.
Now, that's not the job of the politician.
The politician's job is to direct the bureaucracy.
And we have drifted from that.
And, you know, I think there'll be some interesting discussions in this country, hopefully, that come out of this period, questions about federation, things like the Bill of Rights.
I mean, that's been a discussion in Australia.
And from my side of politics, it's always something that people push back on because there is a concern that left wing judges will use that in a certain way.
But I think what we've seen now is enough to have a broad ranging conversation after this.
And because what we are doing at the moment Is not achieving everything we need it to.
Yeah, well, not only that, but now that I think about it, it's one step worse.
It's not even that the bureaucrats have carte blanche to relieve us of our rights when they decide that something is important enough.
But if you look at the media environment and what has happened to those of us who have Attempted to point out that none of this fits our evidence about this disease.
None of it adds up.
We've been routinely deplatformed and stigmatized and had major PR campaigns set against us.
So, the point is, those of us with no power whatsoever except the ability to persuade people that something is amiss are facing an incredible onslaught, right?
They don't have to convince us of anything and we're not allowed to convince anyone that things are off and that is truly a frightening circumstance.
It is, and the point you make about the ability to control the narrative from the media point of view, I don't think has ever been more controlled than it is now.
We see all the arguments.
It's still an infant argument in Australia about big tech and the control of companies like that.
I've moved for that to become a feature of the discussion in our parliament.
I moved for a fairly important select committee to be established in the Senate, and it was shot down by one vote.
I don't think that message is quite rolled out through the Australian political class yet.
It doesn't matter whether you're from the left or from the right.
If there is the ability to control the discussion, that power balance can swing as soon as you like.
So, you know, the ability to be able to share this information and to be able to talk about it without being labelled in a pejorative sense, you know, an anti-vaxxer or a conspiracy theorist has almost been lost in the short term.
And the ability to be able to bring that back Is going to be a real challenge.
We used to see that in a different way.
In this country, we have for the longest time had media ownership laws, which were crafted decades ago for the purpose of making sure that one particular person, company, entity, or whatever it might be, can't get control of the narrative in order to influence politics.
Well, that seems to have been completely overridden now by this global push for big tech, which can You know, change the debate with the blink of an eye, and I think that's a massive problem, and it's one that's been really exacerbated by the pandemic, I think.
Well, you talk about a time after the pandemic.
I admit I'm not yet a believer in such a time, but I'm certainly hopeful that you're right, that it comes.
I guess my biggest concern is that this pandemic has revealed a great deal about who is susceptible to what, what sits in people's blind spots, what kinds of erosion of rights can happen under your nose without you noticing.
And my hope is that people will be honest with themselves and with each other in the aftermath of this and that we do have a reckoning across the West.
What does this imply about about the security of our rights and The ability of our system to endure a shock and to continue on Rather than to be transformed into something abhorrent I'd I guess I would have to uh I would have to bet against such a reckoning, but I certainly hope that it happens because really, this will not be the last time that government overreaches.
And if we don't learn the lesson of this pandemic, then I don't think we're going to be in a good position to resist.
No, you're right, Brett.
And I think also what we've seen, I mean, in this country particularly, is the green shoots of hope, I think.
A lot of these arise from the protests that have been coming out of places like Victoria.
We've had them here in South Australia as well.
But we have seen, they're called freedom rallies here in Australia, and they're much derided by the press.
We haven't seen crowds like this in this country, I mean, arguably ever, but certainly not since the Vietnam War.
And they are almost given no coverage at all.
They are ignored by the mainstream media here.
They are mostly derided as being tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists.
I've been to them.
I've spoken at one.
And every time I go there, I see everyday people who are worried about the fact that they've been mandated, they're losing their jobs, they've got mortgages to pay.
But the really interesting thing is this, that if you want to see Australia as it is, and at the beating heart of Australia, I keep saying to people, freedom rallies are where you'll see it.
Because, you know, we're a country of many different nations, all of those flags are there, you'll see them Croatian flags, Serbian flags, Greek, Italian, you name it, they're there.
Interestingly, a lot of people from Eastern Europe who have said to me privately that we are worried because we have seen this before.
That's certainly the story of my ancestors.
My grandma fled former communist Yugoslavia because I think effectively she was telling her son, my father, things at the dinner table that he was repeating in front of his school teachers and then started getting a bit hot.
So, people from the Balkans, people from Eastern Europe are particularly susceptible and we have large communities here in this country And they are assembling at these Freedom Rallies for the purposes of pushing this message, which is we can't be unaware of what's happening here, even if it looks okay, as we keep saying, glancing out the window.
The devil is always in the detail.
The detail is not being told by the media at the moment.
But we have to keep talking about it because the only way out is strong political leadership, making sure that people reinforce the base of politics for the right reasons.
We have a growing swamp in this country as well.
I keep saying that we need to drain the billabong in this country of the bureaucracy.
But it's true everywhere we have a growing political class that are just not paying attention or don't want to hear it at the moment.
And that is going to be a massive challenge.
So, in closing here, you raise a number of interesting points.
One, I will say I have two friends in the process of fleeing Australia.
One of them has just fled with their family, sold all of their possessions, gotten all of their family members and I believe their pets out and has actually returned to their homeland of Serbia, where they describe a much freer society.
So, I find that fascinating and strangely heartening.
But nonetheless, I think we do also have to recognize the international dimension of what is taking place.
The freedom rallies that you have, the fact that they are not being covered by your media is inexplicable.
Because even if it was tinfoil hat conspiracists, it's not, it's not un-newsworthy.
You have thousands of people gathering resisting governmental mandates that should be covered by any A proper news organization and the fact that it isn't suggests that somebody doesn't want people to realize how much resistance there is, which we also see here.
Now, Americans have been somewhat absent from the protests that have erupted around the world.
That is going to change on January 23rd when Americans gather to march on Washington against the mandates.
I think it is overdue that Americans join this international protest movement, and hopefully it will broaden the dawning of consciousness that many of us have seen glimmers of.
I hope so too.
And I think, as you say, the fact that we have to dig to find genuine news on these freedom movements.
We have got a number of independent media sources in this country that are doing a great job against the tide, I have to say.
But unfortunately, just not enough.
And that's why it's such a It's a privilege to come on your show and talk about it on the international stage because, you know, that independent media in the United States is much more developed, I think, and mature.
And it's become a very effective way.
I mean, we see that with the Joe Rogan Show.
I mean, I think what Joe did was heroic to take two people that had been largely marginalized in Peter McCulloch and Robert Malone.
And give them a mainstream platform in order to talk about issues in, and I listen to both of them, I must say, a very judicious, very sensible way, without barracking, without putting too much spice into it, I think.
Absent somebody like that, and people like yourself who are talking about this on a bigger audience scale, we don't hear about it.
And people need to hear what's going on and they need to hear about it.
Hopefully from rational individuals that aren't trying to over-egg it.
I'm certainly not trying to do that.
I said it before and I'll say it again.
Australia is the greatest country in the world, in my view, and it will continue to be that way.
Speaking about what's happening here, Cannot, and I will not allow it to be seen as being anything other than patriotic, because what I'm trying to do is remind people of what made this country great, and that is the ability to be able to discuss things in a free and frank manner.
So we really need to continue to talk about it, and I want to thank you for the opportunity.
Well, thank you.
I will say, all of that resonates with me.
We have seen a gathering of voices, all of them patriots from across the political spectrum, recognizing the jeopardy to our nations and standing up.
And as horrifying as the picture outside has become, it is very heartening to see all of those good people join together in protest.
Thank you very much for joining us.
I wish you the best of luck and hopefully your prediction of an end to this comes sooner rather than later and we can have a follow-up conversation about what it all means.
I'd love to do that.
I'd love to have a follow-up and suggest that we've come to the end of it at some stage soon.
