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Aug. 12, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:13:45
Dr Peter Ridd
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And I am so excited about this week's guest.
And I know I always say this, but I really, really am.
So the first thing I want to say to my guest this week is, G'day, mate.
G'day.
You can say g'day back.
You can say g'day back, Peter.
Peter is in Australia.
Where are you actually in Australia at this very second?
Well, about an hour from the nearest shop to the northwest of Townsville in North Queensland.
I like Tansville.
I like Queensland.
I've had such happy times there.
I had the most amazing tour of Australia in 2012 and I went all over.
And the highlight was when I went to far north Queensland.
Ian Plymer took care of a lot of my entertainments.
And went up to far north Queensland, went up to, have you been to Chilligo?
Oh yes, yeah, the caves.
Yep.
Yep, so went to Chilligo.
We went, we had an amazing flight in a, with a bush helicopter pilot called Bungee.
And Bungee took my wife and myself Over the rainforest.
And the highlight of the trip was where he dive-bombed this saltwater crocodile on the river, sort of almost touching it with his skids.
It was so...
I mean, God knows what would have happened if he'd mistimed it and we'd ended up in the river with a...
You know, he was probably about 30 feet, the salting.
Anyway, Peter, tell me about yourself.
I know that you're a physicist and I know that you are probably one of the few Australian scientists who doesn't think that the Great Barrier Reef is about to keel over and die any second.
So I want you to tell me your story because it's kind of a sad story and I think it's quite emblematic of our times.
I think that What's happened to you on a microcosmic scale is what is happening to people all over the world who just want to speak the truth without fear or favour.
Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah, I agree.
I'm a North Queenslander.
I was actually a POM originally, but I'm a North Queenslander.
Ended up working at the Australian Institute of Marine Science on the Great Barrier Reef for 35 years.
And we worked on the movement of sediment, the way the water moves around the reef.
A whole lot of things.
And two years ago, after I said that there was institutionally a lack of quality assurance at most of the institutions, I got fired from my university.
So you got fired for having a point of view, basically.
Precisely.
I've been demonstrating again and again that a lot of the supposed threats to the Great Barrier Reef around climate change, but mostly from farming actually, were wrong and that you could see that this system of peer review wasn't working, that the quality assurance systems, the scientific organisations wasn't working.
And I said that and that was just too much and the university which I'd been at for, well, as an undergraduate since 1978 in fact, virtually continuously I ended up being pushed out.
I want to come to that in a minute and how it felt being deracinated from this institution which had been your home for that long.
I mean, that sounds very, very cruel.
But first of all, what I wanted to ask you was, I went to the Great Barrier Reef and I dived on it and I so recommend the experience to anyone who goes to Australia.
We almost didn't do it.
We got to Cairns and we thought, shall we do it?
I mean, is it going to be, you know, it's just going to be another of those tourist things, isn't it?
But it's not.
It's amazing, isn't it?
Well, it is.
It's just incredible.
It's 2,000 kilometres long.
Most people have no idea how big it is.
There's 3,000 reefs.
Each one of those reefs varies from about a mile to three miles in size.
It has incredibly pure water, unbelievable fish.
If you get it on a good day when there's lots of sunlight, The colours are remarkable.
Yes, it's something that everybody should do.
And when all the virus things let up, just come out and see it and don't believe what you've been told that it's half dead.
It's absolute rubbish that it's half dead.
Now, I'm going to play the devil's advocate here.
I'm going to be, imagine for a moment, I'm a true believer in the great climate god.
And I think that man is destroying the barrier reef.
Who are you, a mere physicist, to tell us that the reef is doing fine when all these expert Australian biologists with credentials and tenure and stuff like that, they all tell us that the The barrier reef is being destroyed for a number of reasons, don't they?
Why are you going against the grain?
What do you know that they don't?
Well, as a physicist, if you're looking at climate change, the way that the water heats up around the reef and makes it bleach and supposedly die, these are all physical processes.
It's the way the sunlight goes in, the turbulent mixing of the heat.
The latent heat fluxes on the surface.
These are all physical processes.
So it's not just biologists that are involved with the science of the Great Barrier Reef.
And in any case, anybody can look at the data and decide for themselves what it actually means.
And probably physicists, if anything, are a little bit better than that at most.
And they're also less likely to be emotionally attached.
I ended up working on the reef almost by accident.
So I'm a North Queenslander.
I applied for a job as a physicist working on the physical oceanography.
So I wasn't coming to it as a biologist would.
Biologists come to the reef.
They love the reef.
Ever since they've been a little, usually girl, they've been wanting to be a marine biologist and swimming around amongst the whales and dolphins and pretty fish.
Where I come from it, although from a very...
Heavy-duty environmentalist background, my family background, I didn't go into the Great Bower Roof Research because I loved it.
I did it as a job.
Yes, that's interesting.
I'm...
I've noticed that a lot of the most sceptical and rigorous thinkers in the world of science with regards to climate change are physicists like yourself.
I mean, the obvious one is Dick Lindson.
He's the sort of the preeminent climate sceptic, but there have been a few others, haven't there?
And Lindson is scathing about some of the science Yeah, I think.
Yeah, I think so.
And in fact, even more than physicists, it's the geologists who I think are the most hard-headed.
You mentioned Ian Plymouth, but also Bob Carter, who I worked with.
He started the laboratory in 1989, where I first worked as a postdoc at James Cook University.
These guys have come at it from a different angle.
Of course, the geologists look at everything in the rocks, and in this case, the coral reefs, and they see this history of changes over any scales from tens to hundreds to literally millions of years, whereas biologists will often look at anything that happens, any change, and say, well, that must be anthropogenic, whereas a geologist will look at that and say, well, you know, things change.
What are you talking about here?
That's a good point, actually.
It is partly a question of timescale, isn't it?
The geologists go back for millennia, whereas biologists, they sort of have possibly that mentality that a lot of true believers in climate change do, where they talk about how Oh, the spring flowers are flowering much earlier this year, and that's a harbinger of climate doom.
It ain't natural.
But all they're using is their own lifetime experience, which is a blink of an eye in terms of geological time.
That's right.
So if you look at the Great Barrier Reef, you know, if you go back 5,000 years in what's called the Holocene Climatic Optimum, the temperature is one or maybe two degrees hotter than it is now.
The same in the UK, in fact.
But if you look at the Great Barrier Reef, I mean, everybody knows if you want to go and see the best coral, you go to the tropics.
And in fact, although the coral on the Great Barrier Reef is pretty much the best reef, the further north you go, the faster the corals grow.
And in fact, if you go to Papua New Guinea, just to the north of Australia, that's where the corals actually grow the fastest.
Now, there's no doubt that periodically, if you have a really, really hot year, a whole lot of coral will bleach and a very small amount of that, or maybe more than a small amount, maybe a third of it might die of the coral that bleaches.
But most of what you've been told on the bleaching on the news is wrong.
So When the reef bleaches, you might have heard numbers like, you know, 93% of the reef has bleached, which sort of implies that 93% has died.
When you actually look at not just the shallow water coral, but the deep water corals, it goes down to about 50 metres.
In those last major events, perhaps 8% died.
And that sounds like a lot.
But between 2011 and 2016, in the whole southern third of the reef, there was a 250% increase in the amount of coral.
See, the coral goes through these massive cycles where it gets wiped out by a cyclone and then it slowly grows back and then it gets hit by bleaching and it grows back.
And of course, what they always tell you about is these crashes and they never talk about the slow grow back over half a decade to a decade.
Well, I was going to ask you that.
How long does it take?
I know choral, well, received wisdom is that choral takes ages, ages to go back.
Is that wrong?
Totally wrong.
The biggest killer of coral is cyclones.
They're like a bulldozer.
They just crash the reef.
The large, what you might call a brain coral, they will usually survive.
Sometimes they get rolled over.
But all the plate coral, all the delicate stuff, total obliteration.
Within a decade, a non-expert would not know that a cyclone had gone through.
An expert would be able to tell, but a non-expert just wouldn't be able to see it.
Yeah, it does make intuitive sense that, given that we know that we've had the medieval warming period, the Roman warming period, the Minoan warming period, the Holocene optimum, that...
Throughout history, there must have been any number of bleaching events that the reefs have survived.
Yeah, yeah.
But the biologists claim that they only started in the 1980s, you know, and this is crazy.
I mean, if you've got to look at marine biology as a very, very young science, especially on the Great Barrier Reef.
So if you go back to the 1960s, there was probably maybe 10 biologists working on the whole reef.
By the beginning of the 1980s, there was hundreds.
Nowadays, there's literally thousands.
But if you go back a little bit further to the 1950s, we really didn't have outboard motors.
Scuba was very rare.
So we actually had no idea what was going on on the seabed.
There would have been a few hardy fishermen up this way who would have seen these wipeouts and regrowth, but it was never recorded.
Nobody was ever going to report it to, you know, the London Times that the reef had been obliterated by a bleaching event in 1955.
And so what we're actually discovering in 1980 is something that had been occurring again and again and again.
Sure, it wasn't recorded to science, but it certainly wasn't new.
Yes, that's a very good point.
So you've got thousands of marine biologists sort of skittering up and down the reef, fitting up and down.
What are they actually doing?
What are they looking at?
What are they studying?
Well, they study mostly fish and turtles and corals and dugongs and things like that.
A lot of them actually are involved in the farming thing.
So we're talking about the climate change thing.
But supposedly farmers are killing the reef by pesticides, mud and fertiliser going out onto the reef.
And in fact, that science makes the climate change stuff look like solid stuff.
It really is unbelievably weak.
So, a lot of them are doing that.
Most of my work was, well, originally, I was an instrument builder, so we'd build the equipment to measure sediment, mud, on fringing reefs.
We invented the instrumentation for that.
We took more measurements of that than all the other groups put together.
And that, in fact, there is no mud on the Great Barrier Reef proper, which is generally, you know, 50 to 100 kilometres offshore.
There is a little bit inshore on these tiny little fringing reefs, but, you know, we showed that, in fact, that compared with the natural re-suspension of mud off the bottom by waves, what comes down the rivers was negligible.
So there's all those things, and it's actually affecting every major industry in North Queensland.
So the sugar industry, the cattle industry, the banana industry are all now being...
It's incredibly heavily regulated to supposedly save the reef from all this horrible farm pollutant, but it's just complete rubbish, unfortunately.
I wasn't even aware of this new angle of attack on Western industrial civilization, which of course is what it's all about.
I mean, I don't know whether you've seen my book Watermelons, but I looked into why it was, you know, Supposing for a moment that global warming is a scam or has been exaggerated, what would be the motivation?
And what I found from reading all the literature of the alarmists was that Their real beef is with Western industrial civilization.
They just don't like people.
They don't like economic growth.
They don't like industry of any kind.
And I suppose that includes farming.
So is the Queensland government, is that enthralled to these eco-loons?
Is there any push?
Yes, certainly to some extent.
But you see, this is where I always come back to the scientific institutions.
In the end, you've got to blame the scientific institutions.
And for the Great Barrier Reef, they're saying farmers are killing the reef.
Now, as it happens, there's a Labour government.
It's actually quite a solid Labour government, as Labour governments go.
I actually can't blame them for introducing this draconian legislation because they're being told the reef is almost dead and we've got to save it.
The farmers are part of the problem.
Therefore, we've got to regulate it.
And how can they come up against the, you know, these prestigious scientific organizations and say, I don't believe you, you see?
So they're actually caught between a rock and a hard place.
And that's why we've got to actually tackle the real problem, which is that the scientific institutions are fundamentally untrustworthy.
And of course, that's what got me fired by saying that.
Yes.
Now, again, playing devil's advocate here, what possible reasons would scientists have to lie about the science?
They're not lying.
Well, they don't think they're lying.
So it's not a deliberate deception.
They really believe it.
My point before that they have an emotional attachment to the reef.
I think it's exquisitely beautiful, right?
But I don't have an emotional attachment in the sense I've seen marine biologists talk about, you know, little coral larvae.
When there's a lot of mud, which is never basically, if it settles, you know, they're doing these experiments where they're settling mud on these poor little corals and they smother them.
And when they describe them, they talk about coral babies.
And it's like a mother talking about a sick child, literally.
So I never actually...
Well, accuse them of, you know, deliberately lying.
They really believe it, essentially because they're emotionally attached.
And, of course, they're surrounded by other emotional biologists who are peer-reviewing their work.
And it's a little bit akin to a whole bunch of, you know, 15-year-old schoolgirls getting themselves into a tizzy and all crying.
It's literally like that in some respect.
And this is why you need these hard-headed geologists.
And I've worked with a lot of hard-headed geologists To actually bring them to heel.
Now in the 1990s there was a whole lot of geologists working on the reef, but they all got pushed aside and they ended up having to go into other fields and so now the field is totally dominated by the biologists.
Why were the geologists pushed aside in that period?
It was just that essentially it's the problem of the funding, that if you don't have a problem, you can't get funding.
So one by one they'd fall off the peg or they'd retire and never be replaced because you couldn't get funding for that sort of thing.
So we had a very, you know, under Bob Carter, Piers Larkin and various other people, we had a really solid group of people showing, you know, this sort of...
Talking about the way the sea level rise and wiped out the reef every, you know, 20,000 years or whatever, those sort of people just eventually disappeared.
It wasn't deliberate.
It just happened because of this process, this peer review process, which is essentially a method of making groupthink is what peer review actually is in terms of quality assurance system.
Yes, it's now called power review, isn't it, us cynics?
Yes, and what annoys me is that scientists will obviously say something like, you know, this work has been peer-reviewed and everybody's supposed to be impressed.
And most people actually think the peer review is when maybe a dozen scientists get around and they look at this bit of work and they pour over it for months and they do the experiments again and they say, you know, ticket's right or whatever.
But actually, it's just, I mean, I've done hundreds of peer reviews, and my work has been peer reviewed, so I know just how cursory it is.
It's often just a quick read.
You never do the experiments.
You might read it for a few hours.
You might, if you're really enthusiastic, check it for a day.
But that's it, and it might be two people.
Now, this is science.
Science, not even science, actually.
Which has now been used to, you know, really damage every single farm in North Queensland.
They're saying you can't put this much fertilizer on, you can't use the pesticides, you've got to do all this stuff to stop mud moving off the farms.
And a lot of these are good things for their own say, but it's not having any effect on the reef.
Now you mentioned that a lot of it depends on there being a problem in order to get funding.
Would you say that one of the reasons that there is such pressure to demonstrate that the reef is in peril comes from the fact that there's a whole global warming industry out there, a whole It's a self-reinforcing mechanism.
So it will always go in one direction or the other, and it's very difficult to turn around.
You know, probably if you were in the 1960s when it was more rape and pillage, it could have gone in the other direction.
But now we're going in the environmental, hyper-environmental direction.
It does that.
But you've got to be careful, though, not to claim that most of these scientists are doing it for the wrong reason.
They really believe it.
They've just got themselves in a group surrounded by similar-minded people that it will inevitably go in that particular direction.
Yes.
Isn't that known as noble cause corruption?
It is a form of...
Well, it's not corruption, actually, because they're not doing it deliberately.
There are some people who definitely, but not many, who will say to me, look, because I say, look, it's a great idea to reduce soil erosion on farms, right?
And that will fix up the creeks and rivers and the swamps and that sort of thing, but it won't have any effect on the reef.
And they'll say to me, Well, you know, if you reckon it's a good thing, what's wrong with essentially lying to people that the reef is actually being damaged by the sediment?
Because nobody cares about the creeks and rivers and swamps, but they care about the reef.
So we can get good stuff done by lying about the Great Barrier Reef.
Now, that's noble cause corruption, but it's actually quite rare, at least on this coast.
Yeah okay, so now you're a scientist, I'm a liberal arts whatever, an English literature graduate.
As a kind of arts person, I have this view of science as being a pure thing, where things are right or they're wrong, or at least that they're somewhere between and awaiting further research to prove whether it's right or wrong.
It's a process of accumulating new knowledge.
I would have thought, in my naive, innocent way, that all it would take is for rigorous scientists to look at the evidence that you've looked at and form a reasonable conclusion either that you are right or that you are wrong.
How can it be that you've been cast out into darkness without...
I mean, How can I express this?
You seem to have a reasonable basis for thinking what you do about the health of the reef.
So why is it that you can be punished for speaking the truth?
Well, I'm punished for saying there's lack of quality assurance systems in science, right?
So that's slightly different for saying, oh, there's no sediment on the reef.
I'm saying, look, those institutions, they've made mistakes on the sediment, on pesticides, on various other things, and the fundamental problem is then basically not checking it enough.
Now, they shouldn't have done that, but they did.
But if you come back to looking at the evidence, yes, I'm not sure why.
I mean, to me, in the case of the Reef, it's so blindingly obvious that the Reef is in unbelievably brilliant condition despite going through these crashes.
That it's just a wonder.
I mean, if you look at pesticides, for instance, there are no pesticides on the Great Barrier Reef.
You can barely measure them with the most unbelievably sensitive scientific equipment.
There's a tiny little bit on some of these very small inshore reef, which we finally got an admission in a big Senate inquiry that we just had a couple of weeks ago, that that's only 3% of the reef.
So you look at this fundamental data and I just can't understand how we've managed to convince not only the scientists but the whole world that what is actually, in my view, one of the best protected and preserved and pristine ecosystem in the world is just a cesspool of pollution and dead coral from climate change, which is the story that's got out.
Yes.
Do you have any fire support from anyone in Australia?
I mean, presumably the operators who take dive boats out to the reef are supporting you, but who else?
The farming organisations are starting to come around.
They tried to work with the government for 20 years, but they finally realised with the latest set of Legislation that they were never going to be able to do enough to satisfy the scientists.
So the scientists use this brilliant argument.
It's called, by death by account, a thousand cuts.
And it says, with all these other stresses, so it's not just sediment and pesticides and nutrients, it's pharmaceuticals.
You know, if you take a Panadol or a Paracetamol from a headache, it passes through your body, goes through the sewage treatment plant, out to the reef, and it kills the reef.
Sunscreens killing the reef, and all these are death by a thousand cuts.
Now, they can't actually measure any of this.
There's no actual loss of coral, but they say, but it might be the last thing that sends it over this tipping point and kills it.
But the trouble with this argument, it means that you can never reduce, say, the effect of pesticides to a low enough amount that is not one of the thousand cuts.
So you can never satisfy The argument that you need to do more until you actually close down.
It's a shocking argument and an unscientific argument to use.
Yes, it sounds quite familiar from something I read recently about the nuclear industry.
Is it the linear no-threshold?
Yep, the linear...
Yeah, the linear no-threshold hypothesis is probably one of the oldest really terrible bits of science.
I mean, it's based on this idea that...
I mean, essentially, the linear no-threshold hypothesis would mean that, for example, if you go to the blood bank and you give blood, You'll give one pint of blood, and if the linear no-threshold hypothesis for radiation worked for blood, it would mean that about 12% of people would die every time they gave a pint of blood.
Because you have eight pints of blood, you give one pint of blood, that means one-eighth of the people will die.
Now obviously that's not true.
And essentially what it's saying is a low dose of radiation essentially has no effect.
It's only when you take a lot of blood, you know, you take half your blood, but half the people are going to fall over.
Or if you take six pints of blood, everybody is going to fall over.
And this has been known for decades that these regulations on radiation are complete rubbish.
Yes.
I think probably we would find, will we not, that there are dozens of fields in science which have been captured by these witch doctors.
Ancel Keys, for example, the whole issue with fat.
I mean, our diets are still being decided by some junk science from the 1950s.
The nuclear industry is the same, and now we've got the Barrier Reef being protected from imaginary problems by people who are destroying the, well, they must be destroying the tourist industry by putting off potential visitors, the farming industry.
That's got to have an economic impact on the mining industry, of course.
Yeah, no.
Unfortunately, even though I'm a scientist, so I will never argue against genuine science.
You know, Newton's laws of motion.
You rely on them with your life.
But there's all this other stuff which actually isn't science.
The linear no-threshold hypothesis is not science.
It's total junk.
You know, peer-reviewed work, when they actually check peer-reviewed work, they find again and again and again that very roughly half of it is wrong, right?
So if you listen on the radio and the university of such and such researchers said, whatever, right, and it's been peer-reviewed, 50% chance that is wrong.
So we actually have this huge crisis in science.
So what I'm saying, my crusade for the rest of my life is to try to get what I'm calling an Office of Science Quality Assurance.
So we actually take the science that's going to be used for public policy.
Like the radiation regulations, like Great Bowery, and just lots of other things.
And we actually take that peer-reviewed work and subject it to genuine peer review, proper peer review, and make sure it is solid.
Because, in fact, government policy in all sorts of areas, from education to criminology to obviously the environmental things are probably the biggest things, is actually running on work where there's a huge probability that it's wrong.
Yeah.
Can I put a theory to you and you can tell me how right or wrong I am?
Is it a theory or a hypothesis?
Oh, I don't know.
You can tell me when I've come up with it and you can tell me whether it's a theory or a hypothesis.
I have this theory stroke hypothesis that you are a bit like Al Capone in that the...
JCU, James Cook University, what they really objected to about you was that you were dissing their very lucrative science, showing that the Great Barrier Reef was doomed.
And there were a lot of vested interests, a lot of money coming into the university, a lot of international prestige Telling the world that the Barrier Roof is doomed.
I mean, the newspapers love a Barrier Roof is doomed story.
I don't know how many I've read.
If it's not about coral breaching, it's about Crown of Thorns starfish, is it?
Or what are the other reasons?
Oh, of course, ocean acidification.
We haven't even done that one.
So the seas are turning acid and they're going to dissolve our fish or something like that.
You've pointed this stuff out, but they can't get you on that.
So instead, what they've done is get you on a technicality, which is that you have been speaking out of turn against, you've been dissing the institution, and that's how they're going to get you.
Is that fair?
Yes, and Al Capone was done not for being a gangster, but for dodging his tacks.
Yeah, actually, that's an interesting hypothesis.
And there is some evidence which we can use to make it into probably a decent theory.
But I think there could well be some truth in that.
I've certainly been...
Look, I had a group of, you know, five or six people working for me at the university in my little lab, right?
Getting into more and more trouble over 15 years.
In the last five years before I was fired, I was regularly saying to them, the way I will leave this university is I'm going to get fired one way or the other.
And they kept on saying, well, you know, that's never happened so far.
And this last time I said, it's going to happen this time.
And they got me.
So, yes, it was pretty clear that it was going to happen.
It happened to Bob Carter.
You know, he was pushed out from the same university.
Yep, he was an adjunct.
He wasn't employed at that time.
He actually managed to resign just before they pushed him, as it turned out, sort of like days before.
But yes, it happens, unfortunately.
I do miss Bob Carter.
He was such a great man.
I was very good friends and I always used to love...
The last time I saw him was at the Paris Climate Conference.
We went out for lunch and it never occurred to me that Bob was going to drop dead in the next few months because he didn't look like he was...
I mean he was quite robust.
Well, he should have been going to see his heart specialist rather than going to Paris, actually.
Yeah, tragedy.
A great scientist.
And of course, he worked on the Great Barrier Reef for him and his group.
I've documented this incredible history of the reef.
Well, you know, if you go back 18,000 years, the reef didn't exist.
The sea level rose so fast when it came in that the shoreline was being pushed back 50 metres per year.
That's how much soil erosion there was.
And this sort of incredible history of the reef really puts the tiny, tiny, pathetic little changes we're seeing at the moment into perspective.
I didn't realize the reef was that young, so it's less than 18,000 years old.
In its present form.
So when the sea level is high, which is very rarely, I mean, this is a very unusual period of, you know, 10,000 years where the sea level is high.
It will fall.
The reef will then become these low, flat-topped hills.
They're a few kilometres across, 50 metres high with a flat top.
It'll be covered in trees for, you know, tens of thousands of years.
And the sea level will rise and it will become a coral reef again.
And that's great.
That's really interesting.
So let's cut to the chase on the story of when it really turned nasty.
I mean, I imagine you must have had a few loyal graduate students who were disgusted about what happened to you.
I imagine there was a lot of kind of backbiting and bitchery and misery.
Tell me a bit about that.
Well, of course, they were very upset.
I had quite a few of my students and ex-students who would write to me and say how it wasn't a good thing.
I mean, ironically, because I got into trouble for saying that there was this quality assurance problem, and then I got given this envelope of a...
of these allegations.
And we fought back with legal action straight away, in fact.
And then because the university realised that they were in a bit of trouble, they decided to basically read all my emails and fish for other examples of where I'd said something wrong, you see.
And I then got given this 128-page document of all these things that I'd been wrong.
It was pretty frightening.
Because you read these 128 pages and you think, oh my goodness, what have I said in all my emails?
It was incredible, actually.
I didn't say anything that I was actually ashamed of.
But one of the things I said to one of my students was that she said, look, how terrible JCU was.
And I wrote back and said, look, JCU's no worse than the other universities.
In fact, I said, it's better than most because if I'd been in another university, I would have been fired years ago.
And by the way, I mean that, right?
And I said that the universities were Orwellian, that all universities were Orwellian, they pretended to value free speech, and they weren't.
And so the university read my email and said, you can't say Orwellian, without actually realising that, you know, the irony of this, they'd read my emails to get this piece of information and then said, I'm not allowed to say that.
Yeah.
Big Brother is telling you you can't use the word Orwellian to describe what Big Brother's doing.
Yeah, that's right.
And there was another one where there was a newspaper article about my case.
It was not a student.
The guy, he'd worked for me, he'd become a student, then he'd gone over to France and he was over in France.
And we were talking about this other project, which we were working on.
And I just, in the email, I had the byline, for your amusement, and I attached this newspaper article.
Well...
The university managed to read that email too, and they said, you're not allowed to say for your amusement because that is satirizing the disciplinary process.
So this is what became known as the no satire directive.
It was crazy.
But so fundamentally their case, the university's case, justifying dismissing you after 35 years, did you say?
Their justification was that you had 30 years working at JCU and almost 40 years actually a JCU graduate or worker.
Before we go into the details, how did you feel when they did get rid of you like that?
I mean, you must have been gutted.
Yeah, I was.
I mean, it was pretty upsetting.
There's no doubt about it.
I mean, I've been there literally since I was 17.
I love the university.
I still do.
I still do.
And the people that are there...
You know, my wife went to the university, all my children, both my children did, my father, my brother, my sister, you name it, everybody's been there.
It's the only major university in North Queensland, and it was my life.
So, yeah, it wasn't a good period.
No.
And once they'd done that, I mean, they'd rendered you, they'd cancelled you, basically, because you weren't going to get a job anywhere else, were you?
No, not a chance.
I mean, no, I can't work in science in North Queensland or anywhere in Australia, actually, because I've been fired for serious misconduct.
You know, and not just one, 10 counts.
They charged me with many more counts.
They only fired me for about 10 of them, including saying, for your amusement and other appalling crimes.
But no, there's no chance I'll ever work at a university again.
So...
The IPA, the Institute of Public Affairs, they supported your case, the great institution, and other people, I think, what's up with that were quite helpful in raising funds.
I think I did a bit to raise awareness of it.
I remember reading, I remember reading, yes, thank you Breitbart readers for your contribution.
I read the judge's summation and the judge in the first court case you had seemed very reasonable because he found in your favour and he understood that this was a freedom of speech issue.
He waved aside the university's petty excuses.
Just remind me what was his conclusion?
Well, essentially the court case, and by the way, thank you to all your viewers and people who read your stuff for contributing, because overall we've ended up raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, over a million dollars of funds for the court case.
But the first judge essentially said the university's got what they call a code of conduct, and that means you've got to be respectful and collegial.
And the university decides whether you're respectful and collegial.
Our argument was that, well, you know, how do you say to an organisation, you fundamentally are not checking your stuff carefully enough.
You don't have the quality assurance.
How do you say that in a collegial, a way that they're not going to feel that it's uncollegial or that it's disrespectful?
You just can't, right?
You just can't do that.
Yeah.
We were arguing the opposite, that we have this right to intellectual freedom, which essentially means that you can say, provided it's somewhat to do with the university or the processes within the university or your field of expertise, provided you don't intimidate, bully, vilify or harass, more or less anything goes.
And you can be disrespectful or somebody can feel disrespected.
Now, so basically arguing over a work contract, one line says that the Code of Conduct can't detract from academic freedom.
There's another line that says JCU is committed to academic freedom, but in accordance with the Code of Conduct.
So it was a fight between these two lines.
And the first judge came down strongly and said, no, you've got to have academic freedom.
You can't always be respectful.
You might try to be, but sometimes you just can't.
And he came down on our side in that first round.
And you won damages or whatever, didn't you?
Quite significant.
I can't remember what it was.
Yes.
Yeah, $1.2 million we were awarded, but that all evaporated two weeks ago.
Yes, well this is the next bit, this is the next chapter, which is slightly depressing I must say, but not surprising.
So the university appealed, didn't they, to the...
which court did they appeal to?
Not the Supreme Court, some sort of intermediary court.
Yeah, an intermediate court called the Federal Court.
The university hired Australia's reputedly the most expensive barrister in Australia, and in front of three judges we went to Australia.
No, exactly.
You know, almost all of my money came from these $100 donations from literally thousands of people.
But they were able to employ this $20,000 or $25,000 a day barrister, and they managed to convince two out of the three judges.
Yeah.
So we went down.
Whoa.
And just briefly summarise what the argument against, the killer argument that destroys you, what did they say?
Well, it's essentially this line...
Well, they came down and said, no, the Code of Conduct overrides intellectual freedom, that you've got to have the Code of Conduct there as well.
Now, we've looked at the arguments.
My lawyers have looked at these arguments, and you've got to be very careful what you say about judges, their judgments.
But we think there are significant...
Questionable parts about it, and we're taking it to the High Court, which is the highest court in the land.
And we've got another GoFundMe campaign going along, which has got, I don't know, about half a million bucks so far.
We're going to need a little bit more, but we'll get there.
And we're going to take it to the High Court.
And actually, it doesn't matter whether we win or lose.
If we lose, it will demonstrate to the government that intellectual freedom, academic freedom of speech at universities is officially dead in Australia.
And that will be a very useful thing to know.
Because I think actually what that will do is it will mean that the federal government, which is already now, the Federal Minister of Education, is looking at this and a few other cases in Australia and saying, There's a real problem here.
If we go down in the High Court, it means that not just the JCU work agreement means that intellectual freedom is dead.
Virtually every other university has similar or even weaker agreements, and they go down too.
If we win, ironically, it will say, well, you know, if you've got half a million bucks, you can take the university to the court and you can stand these appalling legal processes, which just are so frightening.
They tell you you're not allowed to talk.
I didn't mention, James, that all this was going on.
They actually told me I wasn't allowed to talk to my wife about the charges, right?
This is seriously scary stuff, right?
So if we win it will actually demonstrate that yes we have academic freedom but not really.
That's yeah yeah yes it's a lose-lose you could argue or if you want to be glass half-full it's a win-win.
Yeah, but I look at it from James Cook University's side and say it's lose and lose for them because the publicity is appalling.
They've absolutely trashed their reputation in North Queensland.
A lot of people know about it.
Even if they win, all they've proven is that we have smashed academic freedom at our university.
Aren't we proud of that?
When you put it like that, I'm glad you're keeping your spirits up, because what are you living on, by the way?
I mean, how do you survive when you've had your job taken away from me?
Oh, my wife's superannuation.
But that's just so wrong.
I mean, I really am outraged that you're being forced.
I mean, you're about the same age as me.
How old are you?
Uh, 59.
Yeah.
So I really like...
It's not that bad.
I mean, I'm approaching retirement.
Seriously, I think that...
Look, I've known, as I said, I've known that I was ultimately going to be fired.
I probably wouldn't have said what I said when I was 40.
If I'd been 40, the kids were at school, you know, I wouldn't have...
I knew I was always close, walking along the edge of a cliff.
I knew that.
And I knew eventually I was going to fall off.
I didn't know when...
The actual interview on a TV was what ultimately did it.
I walked out of that interview having blissfully unaware that I'd actually just fallen off a cliff.
But on the other hand, when you're in your late 50s, you can take some risks.
So I've actually got this brilliant idea.
I want to start a group called Kamikaze Academics.
And these are academics that go and do something like this and get themselves fired because it's only by demonstrating these crazy things that you can actually get something done about the universities.
And it's only older academics like me who can do that.
In fact, we actually have a duty to do these sorts of things so that the younger academics who are really not in a similar position can actually, well, have a proper academic career where they can actually say some pretty tough things or even occasionally say some pretty damn stupid things and get away with it because actually you need to occasionally be able to make mistakes and say the odd stupid thing and be forgiven.
Of course, what you're describing, what's happened to you in Australia in your particular field, is happening to all manner of academics in other fields.
I mean, I think of Noah Carl, a younger guy at Cambridge University.
All sorts of academics are being Well, academics of a certain kind who don't conform to groupthink, who want to speak uncomfortable truths, are being cancelled.
But Australia, I have to say, seems to be worse than most.
I mean, just a quick sidetrack.
Looking at what's happening in Victoria, Oh, okay.
Right.
Well, firstly, in terms of academia and general political correctness, Australia is better than most.
And the further out of the main cities you get.
So if you're in North Queensland, you know, we're not very politically correct.
There's a whole bunch of southerners that have come up that tend to be politically correct.
But North Queensland is the least political correct part of the world.
And in fact, you know, I've got to take my hat off to the union who I was a member of.
They've actually backed me.
Even though I'm a climate denier, they've actually backed me, which is pretty amazing that they've done that.
But there are some, you know, there are some crazy things going on in the city.
I mean, I think you've written about the situation in Victoria, which has got these draconian Virus restrictions, you know, you can argue about that as to whether they've overdone them and they had the, well, you've written about them.
We had the Black Lives Matter restrictions, but, well, they weren't restrictions and yet you weren't allowed to go off and play golf.
So it was a bit crazy at the same time.
I was having a conversation though the other evening with my friend Peter Hitchens and I'd just shown him the video of the chief of police in Victoria boasting, actually boasting on TV about on three or four occasions in that particular week he'd actually had to smash in the windows of cars in order to Pull out the drivers because they refused to give the necessary information about
where they were going.
Now, that is police state stuff.
That's martial law that's been effectively declared in the state of Victoria.
And it's weird to think that it's happening in 2020, rather than in some distant historical period where weird things happen.
Yes, it is.
But, I mean, people are very scared.
I mean, if you go back a year, if you'd said to me, should we lock all Victorians up in Victoria, I would have said it was a good idea.
You know, there's a lot of interstate rivalry.
But it is appalling, you know, what it's come to.
And to me, the worst part about it is, I mean, I think there is a lot of support for it, actually.
But where there's anger is the hypocrisy of it.
You're allowed to go and have a bit of a riot sometime, but as I said, you're not allowed to go and play golf.
And this actual second spike has been caused by this gross incompetence where people have flown in from the country.
They've supposedly gone into these hotels where they're supposed to be quarantined because we had no virus, effectively.
And then this government essentially let it out.
And we're getting a bit off the Great Bar Reef here, but they let it out.
They had these big demonstrations, and now, as you say, we're hauling people out of cars.
It's a very sad state of affairs.
The thing is, and as an ex-POM, you're quite good in a position to judge all this, but...
We have this idea of Australians, or we did have this idea of Australians, I suppose based on Crocodile Dundee and important works like that, that Australians are good-humoured, no-nonsense, just don't take any bullshit, you know, are not going to be pushed around by bullies from big government or whatever.
But actually, I think Australia is pretty cut, if you're familiar with that term.
I mean, it's certainly not in the outback.
I mean, if you go to Chiligo, Chiligo is real Australia.
They don't actually have corks on their hats, but they almost do.
But metropolitan Australia is as liberal left as anywhere in the world, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
I don't think it's as bad as England, I've got to say.
But, I mean, the biggest divide in Australia is between the country and the city.
The country is fair-income people who make a fair-income living doing, you know, fair-income things, whereas the city is head in the clouds.
They have no idea where their food comes from.
They have no idea where their wealth comes from, which is digging a whole lot of coal and iron ore and growing sugar and wheat and beef and wheat.
Yep, they've got no idea.
And of course, what we feel in North Queensland is that, you know, they're 80% of the population.
They determine politically what goes on in our state.
And we have, you know, we have a say at the edges.
So what you said is true.
The country Australia is very different place to city Australia.
But in my view, it's still not as completely crazy as the centre of London.
So what you're saying, among other things, is that if one were to emigrate to Australia, seeking to escape the horrors of Boris Johnson's, you know, milksop England, or God knows if Trump doesn't win, I mean, the horror of a Biden America.
If you were trying to seek a sort of An island that represented the old world that we're about to lose.
Is the only state safe to move to, Queensland, the north of Queensland?
You're safe-ish in North Queensland.
There are a lot of southerners that have come up.
But anywhere in the country, so country Victoria, no problems.
West Australia is very solid.
But, you know, we are better than the UK in so many ways.
If you look at, say, the so-called illegal immigrants, right?
We fixed that problem decades ago, right?
You're still incompetent.
You can't even stop people getting in the boat and coming across the channel.
We fixed that problem.
I'm not sure you will ever fix the problem because I don't think you guys want us to do it.
No, I think you're right.
How did you fix it?
By turning them back and making them go to that island?
Yep, pushed them back.
And if a boat comes there at the moment, they get given another boat and it gets pushed back to where it comes from.
And it stopped it.
What if they say, what if they lie about where the boats come from?
How do they find where it's come from?
Oh, well, because you can track where they're coming from.
Virtually all of them are coming from Indonesia.
They're not Indonesians.
They're people from elsewhere.
And the Indonesians have been quite, I think, constructive in this problem.
But I mean, we had problems.
They came in, we stopped them, we got a different government and it started again, then we stopped them again.
But across the political divide, apart from the crazy left wing, both Labor and the Liberal National parties don't want illegal immigration.
So it's not a contentious issue.
Whereas in your place, you can't even have either one of your major political parties that will do the right thing.
Yeah.
I'm not about to say to you, Peter, actually, you're absolutely wrong.
And the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson are doing a really good job, aided and abetted by his brilliant Home Secretary Priti Patel.
They're turning back the immigrant hordes because it just ain't true.
We are doing a really, really rubbish job.
OK, so you've got immigration sorted.
You've got Your coffee's better than ours.
I was struck by that.
I mean, we're quite good on coffee now, but it's hard to get a bad cup of coffee in Australia, isn't it?
Well, I'm afraid, in my view, if the place has got a really good coffee shop, you need to move further west.
I'm a bit crazy about this.
This whole coffee culture thing is indicative of everything that's bad in the world, you know.
I'm only joking.
But I'll tell you what does worry me, and I don't know whether I'm talking to the right person here, although I'd get it.
If I asked a biologist, I'd get a really shit answer, I know.
But I'll tell you what I'm worried about.
I think you've got too many bloody saltwater crocodiles in Australia.
I think they're getting out of hand.
It seems to me that they are overprotected.
And aren't they moving south?
They're in places in Queensland now that they used not to be.
This is an example where just shocking science is being used, right?
Now, in the 1970s, they've been almost shot out, but now they're...
I mean, the river that I grew up in, the town Innisfail, the most beautiful town in North Queensland, right?
And everybody should go to Innisfail.
Almost nobody does.
We used to paddle and canoe in that river.
Now you'll literally be eaten.
Somebody was eaten not so long ago.
And North Queenslanders want to control the crocodiles.
We don't want to get rid of them, but we want to control the big ones.
I mean, they pulled out a 4.8-meter crocodile from that Johnson River.
That's not a lizard.
That's a dinosaur, I can tell you.
Now, of course, the southerners who essentially own the state are saying, no, no, you can't do that.
You've got to live with them.
And they are coming south as climate change, as things get warmer.
But, of course, they've drawn a line just north of Brisbane and said they're not allowed south of that.
So we're supposed to live with these small dinosaurs, not even small dinosaurs, but the southerners don't.
So there's a little bit of, well, certainly some parties in North Queensland would like to do something about it, but it's based on bad science.
Supposedly, these are still endangered species, and they're obviously not.
Now, I love them.
I think they're great.
But in the centre of town, where people are going to be eaten, I think we do need to do more to actually, you know, reduce their numbers.
Yes.
Now, where did I go to where crocodiles were starting to become a problem?
Have they got as far as Townsville?
Do you get them in Townsville?
Oh, they're way south of Townsville.
I've got some...
Oh, two sides.
Noosa?
They may not be surprised Noosa, but they certainly go well south of Rockhampton, which is on the Tropic.
I've got some in-laws who own a cattle property there, and the crops are in the river.
And this is a long way south.
So, you know, they're a real...
They are now...
It's great.
I mean, it's fantastic that they bounce back and, you know, that they're not endangered anymore, but they are a problem.
But the southerners in the cities have this, you know, fuzzy idea about the way it should be.
But they don't live with the problem.
They don't have any skin in the game.
We literally have skin in the game.
And if it was us, we would do things differently.
I don't think there's any doubt.
Yes.
So it's the people in...
When you talk about the people in the south, you're talking about people in Brisbane who are...
Because they've got the metropolitan values of Melbourne or anywhere else.
They're just as bad, I imagine.
Yeah, and it's the same with the Great Barrier Reef.
They're the ones who believe that the reef is dead because they've been told by the untrustworthy scientific organisations.
People in North Queensland who go out to the reef think, well, it doesn't look too dead.
So there's a much greater degree of scepticism.
And also because they've got skin in the game, we have skin in the game, We look at the reef and say, are we really sure that we trust these organisations?
And a lot of us have come to the conclusion, no.
Whereas in the city, they have no skin in the game, so they don't even bother to even question whether this actually makes sense.
And they won't get out in the boat and actually go out there.
So you have these idealistic people who have been deceived by the dodgy signs, Who have no real reason to actually question it, who are essentially making the laws for us.
And that is a problem.
But in the end, the only way to solve it is to fix the scientific organisations.
I can see why you're particularly focused on the scientific organisations, but you've got other problems as well, haven't you, in Australia?
You've got a media...
Well, you've actually got the world's best and the world's worst media.
I mean, I think in the best, I would include Sky News Australia, Andrew Bolt.
You've got some really robust figures who don't take any nonsense and tell it, like Rowan Dean.
What's that show that Rowan does with...
The Outsiders.
The Outsiders, yeah.
I tell you what, there are people around the world in America and in Britain, certainly, who are looking at that show and saying, why can't we have a show like that?
So that's the best.
Presumably it's on one of those shows that you got yourself sacked, was it?
What was it that you mentioned earlier that you got in trouble on?
Yeah, I was on Sky News and I said that essentially you couldn't trust these scientific organisations due to systematic quality assurance.
I wasn't saying that they were doing it deliberately, but they basically weren't checking their stuff, so it was wrong.
So yes, I was on that.
We've got, I reckon, the best newspaper in the world, which is The Australian.
But, of course, we've got The Guardian on the other side.
Most of it is...
I think most of the media is probably a little bit of left to centre.
But there is at least some...
There's some media on all sides of politics, which I think is not too bad.
Right.
But then you've got the ABC, which is worse than the BBC. I mean, it's communist, isn't it?
No, no, no.
Look, I'm sorry about that.
I've got to say...
Look, I come...
From a family for which the BBC, you know, listening to the BBC World Service as a small child in Africa and when we came to Australia, the BBC was on a pedestal for me.
And I still read, I go to the BBC website religiously every day just to see what they're saying, but the BBC is far more woke and politically correct than the ABC. The ABC is shocking, but the BBC is completely past the pale, I'm afraid.
I might just go devastated by it.
Yeah, I'm actually going to retract that because I'm talking about my experiences with the ABC in 2012.
And I think probably in 2012, the ABC probably was worse than the BBC. But the BBC has very much been in hold my beer mode in the last few years.
I mean, it really is.
As you say, I will not I will not treat with the BBC now.
They asked me to go on their shows and I just say, oh, no, I don't I don't want to be.
Shat on by a bunch of, you know, I don't want to be there to be exposed as a kind of right-wing fascist loon, which is one's only purpose now at the BBC if you're right of Yeah well the ABC they don't tend to like to deal with me too much on the the the reef stuff but they actually have followed the case to some extent and they actually did quite a good story just after I was fired which was very well balanced it gave both sides
of the story it certainly gave my side of the story in fact in quite a sympathetic way look the ABC is is disappointing it's definitely in my view to the left of centre It definitely has taken the view that a climate denier is a pretty bad person, but I don't think it's quite as bad as the BBC has become.
Yes.
So where are you?
What happens now?
When is your next court case and what do you need to support you?
Well, we go to the High Court.
We don't know when.
We have to seek leave to appeal.
So we get one judge who says, yeah, this is an important case.
It has to be a very important case.
We think that they probably will take it, but we could be a year.
So in the meantime, we're just raising funds.
We've got around about 500 grand.
We need another 150 or something like that.
We'll get that quite easily.
No, yeah, that's right.
And we've just got a GoFundMe appeal, which is how we've...
I mean, we've had to put in about $300,000 ourselves, Cheryl and I, but we've had about $1.4 million so far of donations, which has been just absolutely fabulous.
It's just been incredible the way that people really want to get involved because they want to beat the bastards finally, at least in one case.
Yes, well, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Will you email me the details of your GoFundMe so that I can put it up as a link for this?
And so, I mean, say you had 20 million.
I mean, could you buy a more expensive lawyer?
You've got good enough lawyers already.
You're all right with that.
We've got some very good lawyers who have given us wonderful discounts and they really believe in the cause and the case.
They've been fabulous, I've got to say.
I actually say to the lawyers, I wish the scientific institutions, because in law we have this guaranteed fight between one side and the other, right?
And yeah, I disagree with the late judgment, but they heard both sides and they came to the conclusion.
And so, OK, well, that's the process.
We've just got to go along with that.
In science, one side just grabs the, you know, it's like having a...
Somebody's up for murder, but we only have the prosecution.
We don't have the other side.
And I'm saying we need to have those systems that the legal system has developed over centuries.
We need to apply those in a similar way in science and have that other side arguing against the roof scientists, for instance.
Well, of course, it's not just the Barrier Reef, isn't it?
What was the big story in Australia in the last six months ago?
I mean, the fires.
The fires were all over.
Australia was the number one global news story.
And it was basically...
Bollocks, wasn't it?
To use a technical term.
Total rubbish.
Total rubbish.
I mean, periodically we have these appalling years.
You go back in history, you know, the 1930s, we had some really bad ones.
We also know that...
People have started now moving into the forest and what that means is you can't back burn, you can't burn those forests because you're going to burn houses.
You need to burn these forests periodically to lower the load of flammable material.
We can't do that anymore.
People have moved in.
So it's another example of very, very bad science.
And there are other environmental ones.
For instance, our biggest river system, the Murray-Darling, we've got this big lake at the bottom of it, which used to be a saltwater estuary.
We've cut it off and made it into a freshwater lake, huge freshwater lake.
And we're now taking water away from farmers to preserve this artificial freshwater lake, which should be a saltwater lake.
It's completely insane, some of the things that are going on.
And again, it's based on this appalling science.
If you go to the CSIRO, this premier scientific organisation, they're maintaining this fiction that this huge lake, massive, massive lake, is supposed to be a freshwater system when we know that we built these seven big dams to keep the saltwater out.
What are those dams there for if it wasn't to keep the saltwater out?
Yes.
Do you know what?
I hate to say this, but I almost do hope that you lose this next case because actually you need a...
It needs to become a really, really big story that honest science is dead in Australia.
I mean, I think honest science is dead around the world.
But those three examples we've got, the barrier reef, the fires and the Murray-Darling, we're destroying the environment in order to save it.
We're destroying the economy, certainly.
Yes.
Well, we certainly, especially in these country areas, I mean, what they're doing to the agricultural, this is the food bowl of Australia in many respects, the Murray-Darling.
So we're really damaging these country areas.
But, you know, there is a lot of scepticism about this.
And it's amazing when I talk to people in the cities about the Great Bowery and I give them a few facts, they come around really quickly.
You know, they're not bad people in the cities, obviously.
They just have been told a whole lot of cock and bull.
And when you tell them a little bit of these facts and they they they're facts, they're genuine facts.
They come round and I'm quite convinced, totally 100 percent convinced that I'm going to win on the Great Bowery Reef story.
And not just me, the other scientists who are with me, that we are going to get this quality assurance stuff checked and we're going to demonstrate that it's crazy and the laws will ultimately be changed.
It's going to happen.
We had a fantastic Senate inquiry just two weeks ago where we blew open a lot of this stuff.
Where we got some admissions out of these scientific organisations that, you know, at most 3% of the reef is affected by most of these farm pollutants, and even that only to a tiny, tiny amount.
These are the sorts of facts which we're finally starting to get out.
So I'm actually really hopeful.
I think we're going to fix that problem sooner or later.
Okay, so before I let you return to your sorters and your tinnies and your whatever else it is you do in the outback, can you just give me a kind of your Your elevator pitch version of what you say.
Say you met me and I'm a kind of whiny liberal and you've met me in a cafe and you don't like the coffee I'm drinking because it shows that the area is going downhill.
I think the Barrier Reef is in serious trouble and it's all our fault.
What do you say to me?
There's the same amount of coral on the Great Bower Reef since records began.
The coral growth rates, if anything, have increased over the last 400 years.
Corals grow faster in warmer water.
If anything, we should have about a 10% increase in coral growth rate if we get a decent amount of global warming, so pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to make that happen.
There are no measurable amounts of pesticides on 97% of the reef.
There is no sediment on 97% of the reef.
And it is obviously, if you go and have a look at it, one of the most pristine, purest, most beautiful ecosystem in the whole wide world.
Come and have a look at it for yourself, basically.
Oh, you've sold it to me, Peter.
I am going to come back to Australia.
This is my, I shall return, because I had such a good time last time.
And I don't think, we haven't met, have we, before?
No.
No.
Well, I think we ought to, don't you?
I mean, I think that should be part of my mission.
Because obviously I'll be coming by Townsville, or why wouldn't I? Well, I want to dive the reef again.
Yeah, I'll take you out there.
I'll take you out and we'll see it for real.
And you can go back to when things open up, you can tell all those poms over there, get over here and see it, because it really is fantastic.
And it's not just that.
The whole of North Queensland is just a fantastic place.
It's the only place to live, unfortunately, for you guys.
Right.
Thank you very much, Peter.
That was an absolute pleasure having you.
So please, everyone, donate to Peter's fund, because this is a really important case.
And also, I'm important too.
I'm lovely.
Don't forget to support me on my Patreon or on Subscribestar, and I can do more wonderful podcasts like this.
Thank you again, Peter.
It's been really fun.
And yeah, thank you for putting us straight on the reef.
Bye-bye.
My pleasure.
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