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Oct. 25, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
56:25
Andrew MacLeod
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Welcome to The Deling Post with me, James Delingpole.
And this week's special guest, about whom, of course, I'm very, very excited, comes from the other side of the world.
You're in Melbourne, aren't you, Andrew?
You're locked down in Melbourne.
I am.
I'm on day 102 of lockdown.
Oh, my God.
Well, good day, mate.
Andrew McLeod is the visiting professor at King's College London.
He is the chairman of Griffin Law, which is the law firm of my old friend and podcast guest, Donal Blaney, possibly the soundest person in the world.
So I'm imagining that Andrew is pretty sound as well.
And you founded a charity called Hear Their Cries.
Now before I explain what Hear Their Cries does, actually you're going to explain what Hear Their Cries does, I just want to say how very much I support the idea of your charity because it seems to me that one of the targets of it is going to be one of the institutions that I hate most in the world and that is the UN, the United Nations.
Can't stand it.
Absolutely.
I think it's one of the most evil organisations in the world.
And I think it's rife with corruption.
Am I wrong there, mate?
Is it in fact a shining source of goodness, truth and beauty?
It's halfway between the horrible institution you've just described and the shining light of truth and beauty.
The truth is it does some good things, but it overplays the good it does.
And it underplays the enormous bad that it does or happens on its watch.
And I'll explain that by saying, Hear Their Cries is a charity that is set up to stop the child abuse in the aid industry.
You heard that right.
Child abuse in the aid industry.
Now, I need to say right from the start, James, this is not a QAnon conspiracy theorist from a whole bunch of right wing fruitcakes that want to tear down foreign aid.
You mentioned Donal before, very, very sound chap, and he does come out of the right wing of politics, but I come out of the left wing of politics.
Donal and I have known each other 25, 30 years, and we've strengthened our friendship on the basis of knowing how to disagree respectfully, which is something which is desperately needed in the world today.
And I spent many years working for the International Committee for the Red Cross, first in former Yugoslavia, then in Rwanda in the 1990s, then worked across in the UN in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Niger, Geneva, Pakistan, Philippines, most hell zones in the world, and I finally spat the dummy when I saw the UN refuse to do anything about child abuse.
So I'll say that even though many of your listeners might come from the right-wing viewpoint, and Donal certainly comes from the right-wing viewpoint, I come from the left-wing viewpoint, but as Donal Blainey said once in a classic understatement, Andrew, child abuse isn't a left-right political issue.
It's just wrong.
Let's try and do something to fix it.
So I would agree with your cynicism about the United Nations.
It does an enormous amount of marketing and not much that delivers on that marketing.
Andrew, you have no idea.
I'm extra excited now I've discovered you're on the left, because you see, a lot of my listeners are saying, why don't you reach out to the other side?
We'd love to have more opinions from left-wingers.
And I say, yeah, but the problem with left-wingers is that they spout the same lefty paddulum about redistribution, and they talk a different language from us.
So it's nice to have a bit of variety on the podcast.
So that's good.
And just to underline that, James, you know, I'm not just a shadow lefty or a light lefty or a lefty con to come on to a right wing podcast.
I ran for federal parliament in Australia in the 2001 federal election for the Australian Labor Party.
I ran in the 1992 state election in Tasmania for the Australian Labor Party.
I'm friends with Hilary Benn.
That having been said, I'm also friends with Daniel Andrews, the Labour Party Premier in Victoria, but also with Greg Hunt, the Liberal Party Health Minister federally in Australia.
So even though I come out of the left wing, I certainly respect many of the views on the right wing and I have many friends on the right wing.
And I think what we're sorely lacking in the world today is an ability to have discussions where we respectfully disagree.
Well, absolutely.
Actually, before we go on to your charity, which does sound very, very interesting.
Do you agree with my premise about the left-right divide?
That it's kind of no longer meaningful anymore.
I think that the old left, for example, is very, very different from the new left.
The culture wars being fought by the new radical left, what I would call the social justice warriors, I'll probably anathema to a lot of old school socialists, for example, you see it as an erosion of a lot of things.
Oh, I agree.
So if you frame it this way, the left actually came out of the labor movement and a lot of people forget that the left was the political voice of the union movement.
So of the working class person and many of the working class people have the same view, very conservative views on Gay marriage, immigration, and things like that.
Now, in 2013, I published an article in the major press in Australia, and you can Google it and find it, Why I Quit the Labor Party, Andrew McLeod.
It's there in all the Fairfax press, in which I said the old traditional left-right political divides no longer represents the ideological divides in the major political debates in Australia or in the United Kingdom nowadays.
For example, take gay marriage.
There are plenty on the conservative side of A small C conservative side of Labour politics that don't like gay marriage, about 50% of the Labour Party.
About 50% of the Labour Party does like gay marriage.
There are plenty of gay people within the Conservative Party in the UK, but there are plenty of people that are opposed to gay marriage.
In fact, if you look at it, roughly half the Conservative Party agree with gay marriage, roughly half don't.
Roughly half of the Labour Party agree with gay marriage, roughly half don't.
You know, there is an even split on gay marriage or close to it within the political sphere, but it doesn't go down the dividing line.
Same with immigration, same with refugees, same with globalization.
If you look at all of the major issues that are on the planet today, they don't fall neatly in the old labor versus capital divide.
They fall down more into what you could call a social libertarian versus a social conservative divide.
Yes.
So I don't think the current political parties are fit for purpose anymore.
I wondered that because I happened to listen to a very interesting podcast the other day called Trigger Normatory.
Have you ever come across Helen Dale?
Helen Dale is one of your lot.
I mean, she's an Australian and she's very legally clued up, but she's also very good on Australian politics.
And it was a fascinating episode to do with how the How Australia has dealt with the immigration issue and the sort of the so-called refugees issue, which is much, much more robustly than ever we've managed in any of the European countries.
And it wasn't just the the the Liberal Party that dealt with it.
It was the Labour Party.
Well, wasn't it?
It was the Labour Party started offshore.
Yeah, the Labor Party started offshore processing.
And this is why I say you've got to remember the Labor Party started out of the labor movements.
And many in the union movements are opposed to migration because migration, including refugee intakes, put downward pressure on wages by bringing in a larger number of unskilled workers, which threaten the unskilled workers within the labor movement.
So the labor movement look at it from a protection of the workforce viewpoint, not from a humanitarian viewpoint.
So there are many, many, many on the left of politics that don't like migration generally, and don't like refugees particularly.
And Australia has a particular position that it takes.
Now, I should say, when I was at the UN, I spent a couple of years as head of early warning and emergency preparedness for the High Commission for refugees.
And my master's degree was in human rights law.
And I know refugee law very, very well.
And I would say the right of politics doesn't have enough sympathy and the left of politics has too much.
And the right balance is somewhere in the middle.
And what the left of politics keeps forgetting is refugee status shouldn't be a backdoor to migration and it is only temporary protection.
When you are fleeing from a well-founded fear of persecution, and you should be asserting that protection in your country of first asylum, which is the first country in which you arrive that has the ability to give you asylum and has signed the Refugee Convention.
This whole idea of trouncing across the world through half a dozen countries until you get to your chosen geography isn't in the convention anyway.
Yes, well, which very much applies to what's happening in the UK right now.
When you've got so-called refugees coming over from France, which is surely not a dangerous country.
But now let's look at it from an economic viewpoint, though.
So let's forget the humanity argument for a second.
Every economic study you ever see shows that if you let refugees into your economy and allow them to get jobs, and this is the critical thing, Allow them to get jobs and give them the support.
They add 1.1 jobs for every refugee that comes in.
So if you bring in 100 refugees and allow them access to your economy, you create 110 jobs.
It's actually a net benefit from everybody.
And it's one of these bizarre things that the public debate around refugees actually misses the facts.
If you bring refugees in, in a well-regulated way, and give the right assimilation and training to them, and I'll come back to that in just a second, it's a net economic benefit, if you give them access to the job market.
And refugees, when they get access to the job market, are far more likely than Indigenous populations to create new businesses, for example.
They're much more innovative, because if you think about it, people that have actually taken the courage to jump on a boat and flee their country, are some of the most risk-taking, innovative people on the face of the earth.
You actually want those people in your economy, so long as you can do it with security and with the assimilation.
And assimilation is a very interesting process because we have some issues in Australia with some of the Sudanese populations in Victoria, when people say, well, why don't they respect the police?
And I'm like, because we've cut funding to assimilation policies.
They come from South Sudan, where every child is taught, don't trust a person in a uniform with a gun.
Whereas every child in Australia is taught, if you get lost, go to a policeman.
Those two things are diametrically opposed.
And if you're going to bring people into your economy and you want them to be successful, you've got to put the effort into training them to reset their mindsets about how this society is different from the society from which they've come.
And I'll give you one very, very small example.
I'm a dual national between Australia and the UK.
And when I went to vote two elections ago in the UK, I wasn't in my constituency.
So I turned up to the polling station to put in an absentee ballot.
And the poll worker looked at me like I was from Mars.
What's an absentee ballot?
I assumed, like in Australia, you can turn up to any polling booth in the country and say, I come from Melbourne ports.
You put in an absentee ballot so you can vote away from home.
You can't do that in the UK.
Just on that little thing, I'd assumed the UK's culture was similar to Australia and I was wrong.
And any country you move from, one country to another one, you will make assumptions that are wrong because no one's taught you about what's right.
And back when I was running an organisation called the Committee for Melbourne, which was a business group I created with the Victorian Employers' Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a programme called Welcome to Victoria, where we took young Indian and Chinese students and gave them basically cultural awareness training because they were getting into all sorts of troubles as international students in Australia, Because no one had told them what the cultural differences between India, China, and Australia were.
And in fact, the Indian High Commissioner summed it up.
And these are her words, not mine.
So no one jumped down my throat as being a racist.
She said, I'm glad you're doing this because someone's got to tell my children to wear deodorant.
So there are so many cultural differences between countries.
And if you accept in a well-regulated way, in a careful way, refugees into your society and you give them the right assimilation training, they are an economic net benefit to your community.
Yeah, I don't want to get bogged down in this one, but surely it's very much dependent on the culture from which they come.
I mean, I think one of the other interesting points that Helen Dale made was that there are some people from kind of pretty hardcore Muslim countries who are just Completely, psychologically, culturally ill-suited to deal with the kind of culture where, for example, women lie in bikinis on beaches.
They're never going to be able to cope with that kind of thing in a neighbouring country.
Yeah, well, this is what I mean by proper assimilation training as well.
And you've got to then say to the refugee and incoming person, you've got to accept these conditions as part of coming into a new country.
So assimilation is both ways.
But it's also a question of how fixed the culture is into which the refugees or migrants are coming.
And people sometimes ask, you know, why is Canada, why is Australia far more successful as a multicultural country than, say, France or the United Kingdom?
And the answer is Canada and Australia, since the European foundations, have been countries constantly in Cultural flux there has been no fixed culture.
It's always been changing We've taken over from the indigenous people Then we were principally British and the Chinese came in and then the Greeks came in then the Italians came in and then the Vietnamese came in so yeah, even just in my lifetime the 50 years the enormous cultural change that's taken place in Australia that some people find uncomfortable some people find very comfortable we that the culture of Australia is by its very definition a culture of changing culture and
Whereas when you go into France or the United Kingdom, a thousand years of history or two thousand years of history of evolution of the rule of law, of Parliament, of the Crown, of Anglo-Saxon peoples, it's very hard to change British culture compared to trying to change Australian culture.
So not only just the countries from which refugees or migrants come, it's the ability of the country into which they come to change.
Because migration does change your culture.
You just hope that it changes your culture for the better.
Yeah, you see, I mean, Andrew, I have to say, as a kind of traditionalist mighty, I mean, that notion would appall me.
You know, I like the country that I grew up with.
I like the cultural traditions.
I like our history.
I like everything about it.
The idea that we'd have to adapt ourselves to to to incomers seems to be anathema.
And that's a critical difference because, you know, I, for example, in Australia, I'm a Republican.
In the UK, I'm a monarchist.
And people say, how can you be different?
And I'm like, because the objections I have to the monarchy in Australia don't apply in the United Kingdom.
Because the monarchy is an anathema to the egalitarian nature of Australia, but it is a critical element of British culture, the class-based system.
So you can support an institution in one country, but not in another because of the differences in those cultures.
And as I said before, I understand entirely why British people would find it hard to adapt its culture.
Whereas that difficulty is not there in Australia to the same degree, because it has been a country of total change.
Like if you think about Australia, back when I was a child, it was a predominantly European country.
It is now 34% derived from an Asian ethnic heritage.
49% of Australians are either born overseas or have one parent born overseas.
It is a country by its very culture in flux.
So, you know, you could have one migration position in Australia and a totally different migration position in the United Kingdom because the countries into which those migrants are coming are fundamentally different.
Yeah, yeah.
It's really exciting having a proper actual lefty on the show because it's a bit like, you know, when you meet a doctor at a party.
My knee is sore.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, my knee or something else.
Exactly.
It's really exciting.
And I'm fascinated by, do you not, does it not bother you?
Are Australians so devoid of historical sensibility or culture that they really don't mind this stuff?
Or are you kind of the exception?
No, I'm going to say yes and no to that, because one of the things that's happened a lot in my lifetime is a growing awareness of Indigenous cultures.
We have the oldest continuing living culture on earth in Australia.
Um, and there's a growing pride in what the indigenous culture was, but also then a growing challenge on how we need to adapt to the future of Australia to give better recognition for that indigenous culture.
But if we draw a line at 1788, when the European foundation of Australia came for a moment, um, as I said, Australia has been in constant flux.
And if I go back to the 1970s, when I was a kid, a fancy night out with Samwise Chinese cafe, um, or Andrew's takeaway hamburgers.
And Andrew's hamburgers are still there.
Australia, by the way, Melbourne has the oldest China town in the world, older than San Francisco.
And just 500 metres from where I'm talking to you now is the oldest Chinese temple in Melbourne, built in 1852.
So actually, that Asian heritage has been here right from the start, pre-existing the white Australia policy and then surviving the end of the white Australia policy in the 1970s.
But there will be plenty of people like Pauline Hanson is one who doesn't like The migration in Australia.
I'm not saying Australia is a hundred percent agreed to this.
Some people are far more open to migration than I am.
And some people are far less open to migration than I am.
But what I do point out to people is throughout history, the first generation usually are the most racist, which is why you see Donald Trump's vote amongst Hispanics going up because the people who think Mexico is full of drug dealers, rapists and murderers are the people who left Mexico.
It's why they left Mexico.
and came to the United States.
Yeah.
And it's always stunning that the Democrats think that they're a winner on this one.
Mark my words right now, Donald Trump will win Florida.
I don't know about the rest of the election, but he's definitely going to win Florida.
And I can come back to that later if you like.
But when you bring that back to the Australian heritage, what we have seen traditionally is it takes a whole generation of arrivals and then a new incoming other before the previous arrivals are accepted as us.
So up until World War II, we were largely white Anglo-Saxon British, other than the Indigenous populations and the Chinese populations that dated back to the Gold Rush in the 1850s.
After World War II, We got a whole lot of Italian and Greek migrants, plus Hungarians, Czechs, and things like that, the refugees after World War II, which were all called collectively WOGs.
And I remember in the 1970s, the WOGs versus whites fights at Albert Park High School.
I was a white guy, so you know which side I was on.
But when the Vietnamese refugees started coming in, we suddenly looked at the Italians and the Greeks and went, oh, hang on, they're part of us.
So they were now part of us.
And we were objecting to the Vietnamese refugees.
Then when the Africans started coming in the late 1990s, we all look at the Vietnamese and say, hey, we like the pie.
We like the food.
You're part of us now, too.
And when the Muslim migration started coming in, then you start to say, hang on, those Africans weren't so bad either.
So they're now part of us.
And whoever comes next, you'll start to see a better assimilation of Islam.
And I spoke on a TED talk and also on a program called Q&A, which is the Australian equivalent of Question Time, a little while ago.
And I said, yeah, I said, but there's a couple of things that I don't understand about the debate about Islamic migration into Australia, particularly Muslim refugees.
Firstly, these people are not ISIS terrorists in disguise.
These people are running away from the ISIS terrorists.
They hate these people with a passion.
Now, I was in the military.
I was an army officer.
I was an intelligence officer.
I know how much treasure and blood you spend to try and get spies behind the front line to understand what is the enemy thinking.
And I look at these Muslim refugees coming and I'm going, there is our next generation of intelligent services, because these people know more about how the radical Muslim terrorists think than we ever will.
And they look like them and they hate them with a passion.
If instead of being suspicious about them, we properly analyzed them, looked at their backgrounds and then recruited them.
They could be some of our greatest assets in the war against radical Islam.
If only we saw it that way, and then flick it a slightly other way.
Australia's population is about three or four percent Islamic at the moment, slightly less than the United Kingdom.
But we have enough Muslim people in our country to actually start to develop halal butcheries.
Now, we do a lot of live beef export to Indonesia at the moment, the world's largest Islamic country off our northern border.
And we do live beef exports for two reasons.
There's not great refrigeration out to the villages in Indonesia.
But secondly, they don't trust us to butcher halal.
If we actually looked at our Muslim population as a benefit and said, let's develop halal butchery, we would be able to send butchered beef to Indonesia.
Rather than live beef exports, we could do a lot more of the value add here.
So when you twist it the other way and look at these people as an asset and say, how can we turn them into a military asset?
And how can we turn them into an economic asset?
You start sounding like a conservative in terms of your business side of things.
So this is where I get frustrated, where the public debate is so polarized, either pro this or anti this, that no one's looking in the middle ground anymore.
No one's looking for the nuance to say, hang on, hang on, how can we satisfy everyone?
Bring in some refugees with the right protections in an orderly manner, but accept these people into our community, give them the right assimilation training, and then turn them into an asset, be an intelligence asset, a military asset, or an economic asset.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm enjoying the fact that this conversation is completely not at all what I was expecting.
I was expecting to talk about your charity, which I will do later on, but you've been interesting about other stuff.
So I wanted to ask you, I don't remember if a few years ago there was this awful, awful period where the government, I think it was probably Tony Blair, tried to define what Britishness was and they came up with this list and the number one I think was something like tolerance.
And I was thinking, hang on just a second, this is not what being British is about.
Maybe we are tolerant, but that's not our defining characteristic.
There are lots of things which are very distinctively British, and I don't think we need to list them now.
But I wanted to ask you, as an Australian, is there anything that Australians feel about their culture and their country that makes them feel Australian?
Because it sounds to me like If you're Australian now, you've just got to accept that you're just this melting pot, which is constantly shifting like an enormous jellyfish.
So what have you got?
You've got the arrogant, you've got the mosquitoes and saltwater crocodiles.
But we're very proud of the melting pot and the melting pot has created very, very good economic and cultural benefits.
You know, I said before, back in the 1970s, Your two choices to go for dinner with Samwise Chinese Cafe in Bridport Street or Andrew's Hamburgers.
And now, you know, people often ask me, what is Australian cuisine?
And I say, it's the way we've pinched everybody else's.
You know, we'll have a Vietnamese entree, a French main course and an American dessert.
So it's that melting pot that is part of us.
There's a lot of perceptions about Australia that are not right.
For example, we're a dry sunburned country.
Well, yes, we're the second driest continent in the world behind Antarctica, but we're the second wettest country in the world by head of, sorry, third wettest country by head of population behind only Russia and Japan.
It's just we don't harvest water right.
We're a sunburned outback country.
Rubbish.
85% of our population live within 20 kilometers of the coast.
You know, we've got a harsh climate.
I'm like, harsh compared to whom?
China gets hotter and colder.
Mongolia gets hotter and colder.
The United States get hotter and colder.
We're only harsh compared to the United Kingdom.
So actually, we need to go into a process of analysis about what it does mean to be Australian.
Part of it is egalitarian.
Part of it is fairly gender neutral.
Part of it is a can-do attitude.
You know, I used to say in the UN, you've got to put a cultural filter over every CV that you're given.
You know, a CV comes from an American and it basically says, I'm the second coming of Jesus Christ.
So you've got to filter down whatever an American says in their CV, because they love to talk themselves up.
A British person would say, look, I had a small role in this little thing to do.
They love talking themselves down.
So you inflate a British CV.
An Australian CV you take on face value because Australians are pretty blunt.
So I think Australia values its openness.
It values its camaraderie.
It values its work hard but play hard atmosphere as well, but it does also value that ability to change because most of us, not all of us, most of us look back in the 1970s and say, wow, we have fundamentally changed much, much more than Britain has changed, but we have changed for the better.
in Australia, which is slightly different from yours.
Let me get to yours for a second.
The challenge that we have in Australia is this.
Our largest military partner is the United States.
Our largest trading partner is China.
And right now, the United States and China are in a process of changing who will be the most dominant political, military and economic power for the next 50 to 100 years.
It has been the United States.
Love it or hate it, it will be China.
That is an unstoppable force.
What Australia has got to do is try and figure out how does it straddle the divide where our largest military partner is the United States, our largest cultural partner is still the United Kingdom, and our largest economic partner is China.
That's a live question that we have to start asking in Australia.
Like in the United Kingdom, and let me speak as a dual national, what Brexit now says is, okay, what is the United Kingdom When it is an island off the northwest coast of Europe, without conquest, or an empire as independent of Europe for the first time since William the Conqueror.
Because you've never actually had this scale of a challenge.
What does it mean to be British when you're not the dominant country in the world?
And someone once said to me, Brexit is taking Britain from being the smallest of the big boys to the biggest of the medium sized boys.
And that's, I think, a very good summary.
And Britain hasn't yet really wrapped its mind around what does post Brexit Britain mean independent of the United Kingdom, without colonies or an empire?
Because that Britain has never done before.
Yes.
So many allies we can go down, but I want to, for a moment, you to put on your military hat.
How long were you in the Army for?
Technically still am.
I'm in what's called the Inactive Reserve and I've done attachments to the British Army as well as the Australian Army, but my 6102124 is still a live serial number.
Oh, so what does the Australian Army do?
Presumably, okay, so you were in Afghanistan, were you in Iraq?
No.
Yeah, we're in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, every single UN peacekeeping force.
We do quite a bit actually.
So where did you go?
I've done a... So we had a thing called the Brighton Model where we did Full-time in the military for six months of the year, and full-time university six months of the year for five years.
From that, we got our university degrees, and then we got our graduation as an officer in our first command.
I was a platoon commander in the infantry, then went into intel.
Then we divided.
Some of us went into the more formal structure, some of us went into an informal structure.
So I've been called up every now and again and asked to do something, and I get the choice of whether I do it or not.
So it's very hard for me to answer that question.
Okay.
What I was really working my way around to was the big question is, is there going to be a war with China?
I mean, how do we avoid it?
I didn't see it not happening.
So I described the period in history that we're going through now as the sixth great human transition.
The five before this were Egyptian to Greek, Greek to Roman, Roman to Zoroastrian, Zoroastrian to Muslim, Muslim to Christian, and now we're going Christian to Chinese.
Each of the other great human transitions took 200 years.
This one's taking 20 and we're already halfway through it.
Each of the other of the great human transitions had a big war as part of it.
If we're going to do this transition and we have a big war, no one's going to win out of this war.
How do we have this transition without the war?
And if we generalize and say, what is this transition actually going to mean?
And we're very comfortable looking back as Australians and British people and saying, The Anglo-Saxon common law system of government where individualism rules over collectivism is the normal form of governance.
Well, that's actually not true.
Since the birth of Jesus Christ, that form of governance has been dominant on the globe for maybe 25% of the time.
It just so happens that it's really been the last 250 years.
If you look at Asian, rather than Chinese, but Asian cultures, they tend to be more collective rather than individualist.
And I don't mean communist and I don't mean socialist.
I mean, the family is important.
The village is important.
The region's important.
Some of the global challenges that we're being faced cannot be done from an individualist viewpoint.
Like climate change can't be done from an individualist viewpoint.
That's got to be done from a collectivist viewpoint.
So there are some things where the collectivist culture might give us some great benefits, but it's going to come at a cost that our cultures find very, very dear.
Individualism, rights to privacy, and things like this.
And take the COVID pandemic response.
We could solve COVID if we had an app that the government completely monitored, just like the Chinese did, and we welded people into the buildings, just like the Chinese did, but our cultures won't accept that.
So the cost of our privacy that we value very highly and the cost of our individualism that we value very highly is measured in health terms right now in a very, very stark way.
And I said way, way back in January when King's College started giving the data to the British government on COVID, I said, watch the Chinese.
That will be the baseline.
That will be the way to beat the virus.
But neither Australia nor the United Kingdom nor the United States will do what China does because our communities will never accept it.
And I'm not putting a value judgment on that.
I'm just saying that's how it's unfolding.
And then when you look at the degree of countries, and if you say the United States is the most libertarian individualist country within the West, and then comes the UK, and then the Australians are a little bit more off to the left compared to the UK and US, you can actually see that Australia is far more tolerant of lockdown than UK is, which is far more tolerant of lockdown than US is.
And the corresponding data is, the health impact in Australia is much lower than the health impact in the UK, which is lower than the health impact in the United States.
Yeah, I'm afraid we disagree quite strongly on COVID and climate change.
I mean, I am absolutely, I can't bear collectivism.
I didn't give my opinion on that.
I didn't give my opinion on that.
No, but some of the assumptions, I mean, that even your assumption that the environment needs collective action is anathema to me.
I mean, I can, you know, I didn't argue about this.
Let's not go down to climate change.
Rabbit.
Because we can do that on another podcast, because I think that we would have some strong disagreements and get to the end and find out we actually agreed on 98% of stuff.
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah.
Now, look, we've got about 20 minutes left.
You've been a busy man.
You've got another call.
I want to know about, first of all, the United Nations.
You said it does some good.
I'd probably question that, but tell me what you think actually the UN does that is good in the world.
So there are some parts of the UN that you don't hear of that actually do some good.
So I break the UN into four components.
Humanitarian response, that's the immediate response when a new earthquake hits or a new war starts.
development response, long-term nation-building stuff, political discussions, bringing countries together to yell at each other, and then administrative things.
So let's go through each of those one by one.
Let's start with administrative.
Administrative, I mean things like the International Telegraphic Union, International Postal Union, the things that you post a letter from here to the United States or the UK to Zimbabwe.
The mechanism by which the letters get from point A to point B and the acceptance of stamps and how that is then rectified between national postal systems is done via the UN administrative agencies, the ITU, IPO, and things like that.
So there are some administrative parts of the UN that work really well getting letters from point A to point B.
The political bit where countries get together and yell at each other, I think that works relatively well too because it lets off some steam.
But the humanitarian side, that is immediate response when a new natural disaster hits, I think it's enormously inefficient.
I think it's enormously ineffective.
It's only just worth it.
And under that umbrella, though, you get some really horrendous things done in the sexual abuse area.
And we'll come on to that in a moment.
But when you get onto international development, this is where the UN really fails.
And the international NGOs really fail.
because they fail principally because their interventions in the countries are often done for free and hinder the ability to create a strong and active small and medium enterprise micro economy in the national and subnational economies.
If you're a shopkeeper, how can you sell wheat against the free distribution of the United Nations?
You can't.
And almost everywhere the UN goes with distributions in a development or a humanitarian setting, it crushes free enterprise at the micro level.
And if you crush free enterprise at the micro level, then free enterprise at the macro level can't build.
What you need to do is look at the countries that have succeeded to get some degree of economic South Korea, India, Rwanda is a great country to look at in the economic sense.
You know, when I was there in the 1990s, without a shadow of a doubt, worst country in the world, between half a million and a million people killed in 100 days in a genocide.
Now, ninth safest country in the world.
Safer than the United States, safer than the United Kingdom, according to the World Economic Forum.
And I was back there not long ago.
And that data is right.
It is safe.
And what Rwanda did... What happened?
Well, this is really good.
So they did the four key things.
Liberated the exchange rate.
Allowed for repatriation of profits.
Zero tolerance for corruption.
And created the enforceability of contracts under local laws so you could invest with certainty.
In other words, created an investment climate where foreign capital would come in and create jobs.
What it also did was remove from public discourse and criminalize in public discourse.
Any discussion about Hutu Tutsi?
Now, some of the human rights types say this is a restriction on freedom of expression and you're putting people in brainwashing camps and stuff like that.
And to some degree, some of that is true.
But what they did by removing the Hutu Tutsi definition from public discourse is they stopped that conflict between the two ethnic groups, largely so far.
The great challenge for Rwanda is what do they do post-Paul Kagame?
And Paul Kagame has been president for quite a long time now.
I used to play billiards with him in the Rwandan army officers mess in the mid 1990s.
So what they did is instead of going the international development approach they went the private sector approach and encouraged investment.
Now I do sound like a right wing guy because you're only going to get Yeah, but this is what the left wing forget.
You can give free stuff out as long as you bloody like, but free stuff does not create jobs.
And the only way you break the cycle of poverty is by giving someone a well-regulated, well-remunerated job.
It's got to be well regulated, and it's got to be well remunerated.
And I challenge, for example, child sponsorships.
Three million people have passed through child sponsorships since 1953.
One million of them through World Vision alone.
The average sponsorship is $23 a month.
It goes for 11.3 years.
It's $3,118 per child.
Average net increase in school is 0.3 years.
Is $3,118 well spent in the developing world to get 0.3 years in school?
And my answer is no.
net increase in school is 0.3 years.
Is $3,118 well spent in the developing world to get 0.3 years in school?
My answer is no.
But my bigger challenge is that's not even the right measure.
Because the reason you do health, the reason you do education, the reason you do water for children is not to give them a cup of water and not to make them feel good.
It's to create a good human being where they can get a well-regulated, well-remunerated job.
Because the only meaningful indicator about breaking the cycle of poverty is does someone have a well-regulated, well-remunerated job.
If they do, they're not poor.
If they don't, they're poor.
So the measure has to be the outcome of all your development interventions Is has your target group got a well-regulated and well-remunerated job?
And none of the aid agencies ever measure that.
And they don't measure that because they know the answer is no.
Because here's the great irony.
The United Nations Development Program needs poor countries.
Because if they didn't have poor countries, they're not developing anybody.
Rio Tinto and BHP, the world's largest and second largest miners, A senior guy at BHP said to me once, I challenged him on their corporate social responsibility stuff.
And he said to me, Andrew, we want broad ranging economic growth around the world.
And I'm like, I don't know that I believe you.
And he said, well, let me put it this way.
What happens to the demand for iron, the demand for steel, the demand for copper and the demand for aluminium?
If you get broad ranging economic growth around the world, I said, well, demand for iron, aluminium, steel, copper will all go up.
And he said, yep.
And who owns the iron?
Who owns the copper?
Who owns the aluminium?
I'm like, you do.
I'm like, yep.
If we get broad ranging economic growth around the world, we sell more of our product.
And then here's the real come to mama moment.
The UNDP and the whole NGO movement is incentivized to failure.
The private sector is incentivised for success, but you can't let the private sector go in willy-nilly.
We've seen that with Rio Tinto blowing up 46,000-year-old Indigenous caves here in the last couple of months in Australia.
An absolute shame.
There's no way anyone can justify it by any measure at all.
It was only $100 million worth of ore for a 46,000-year-old cave.
It's ridiculous in a multi-billion-dollar asset.
So if you've got the well-regulated private sector, That is always going to get better quality long-term development than an unregulated, not-for-profit sector.
Given that you know Paul Kagame, what is it about, because I've travelled a lot in Africa, I haven't been to Rwanda, but what is it?
It's on my list now, it's maybe in the top now.
What is it about, was it Kagame's education, or was it that he was surrounded by enough like-minded people?
How could he succeed where the rest of Africa has failed?
Right, so let me tell you what he said to me.
On my last day in Rwanda in the mid-90s, I said, hey sir, what do you want to do with Rwanda?
And he said, Andrew, I want reconciliation between the Hutus and the Tutsis.
And I looked at him and I said, cut the crap, sir.
This is my last day in the country.
Give me the honest answer.
And he looked at me and he said, You keep forgetting, Andrew, there wasn't one genocide this century.
There were three.
1959, 1972, 1994.
And Kagame was a victim of the 1959 genocide and fled to Uganda.
He said, if I don't get reconciliation between the Hutus and the Tutsis, remember this, I'm Tutsi, my children are Tutsi, there'll be a fourth genocide and my children will die.
And I'm like, sold.
He actually understood that what he needed to do was break a multi-generational cycle of violence.
Or his children would die.
That was necessary, but not sufficient.
Correct.
Correct.
And then was turning the back on the aid industry and really looking for a private sector evolution.
And that was a brutal crackdown.
And some of the human rights people are right on this.
There were some brutal crackdowns as part of this.
See, you've got to remember, freedom of expression can only work in a country when people understand what responsibility of expression is as well.
So from a libertarian viewpoint, sometimes you concentrate too much on rights, but not enough on the responsibilities that go with those rights.
You have the right to free expression, yes, but you've got a responsibility to not to use that freedom of expression to incite hatred and violence against other people.
In the United States, you've got the right to bear arms, but not in a way that threatens other people.
See, the thing about rights is you've got to maximise individual rights, but you're in a real problem when the assertion of your rights undermine somebody else's.
And how do you balance undermining rights?
Like traffic lights.
I have the right to drive my car.
Not when the right light is red.
Why?
Because the other light is green and we don't want you killing each other.
OK, I accept that.
That you have a relaxation of your rights to understand someone else needs to be able to assert theirs as well.
So where Rwanda's Gone well, where Bosnia hasn't, because I was in Bosnia as well in the mid 1990s and I've been back there as well, is there hasn't been a understanding of how you develop a free society.
And it takes a long time to develop a free society where freedom of expression and votes at elections are the last step in that.
And if you allow the expression or the vote in the election to happen too soon, What naturally comes is polarization, nationalism and ethnic tensions.
And we saw that in Bosnia, we see that in most places, whereas Rwanda is trying to beat that.
Crack down the ethnic divide, get people to think of themselves as Rwandans, partly by restricting free speech.
And then you can build a free society after that.
But that's what I mean by this is where the challenge now is.
How does Rwanda transition from a Paul Kagame presidency to somebody else and maintain that?
Like the old statement that democracy is not how government is won.
Democracy is how government is lost and how you transfer power, not how you gain power.
And we have not yet seen a democratic transfer of power in Rwanda.
And that's its biggest challenge now.
Right.
I can see you're going to have to come back onto the podcast because you know so much interesting stuff.
And actually, even though you are a lefty bastard, we have you're right.
We have so much in common the way we think about the world.
Let's talk about about your charity, because it's quite a widespread problem that you're tackling here.
Yes, it is.
Right, so the National Crime Agency in the UK, and its precursor, the National Crime Intelligence Agency, has been warning since 1999, that's 21 years, that as we crack down on predatory pedophiles in the developed world, the predators now go to the developing world.
And the moment I say that, you go, well, of course they do, because predators are not stupid people.
They're smart.
They go to where the prey is.
And, according to the National Crime Agency, chosen methodology to get access to children is to join a children's charity.
That's also quite smart.
It's disgusting, but it's entirely logical.
You go to where the prey is, and think about it this way.
If I stand outside a primary school in London wearing a trench coat, someone's going to call the police within 15 minutes.
If I stand outside a primary school in the Democratic Republic of Congo with a bag of lollies wearing a UNICEF t-shirt, within 15 minutes I'm going to have a smorgasbord of choice.
Especially if I'm in an Environment where civil society is broken down.
Law enforcement is broken down.
I can bribe my way out.
And if I wave a dollar in front of a child, I can basically get anything I want.
The predators know that.
And they've been targeting the aid industry for over 20 years.
When the Oxfam scandal came out a couple of years ago, people were surprised.
Not people in the industry.
When I first went to former Yugoslavia in the mid 1990s, we began to hear the rumors of what was called the whistleblower scandal.
Where 14 and 15 year old girls were trafficked out of Moldova into Bosnia, traffic into a war zone by UN security staff, locked up in a nightclub called Florida 2000, chained up for the exclusive use of UN staff.
So well known that is, that it's been turned into a movie starring Rachel Weisz called Whistleblower.
It's on Netflix and have a look at it.
And just remember the lawyers got to the script.
So everything that's in that movie is the mild version of what actually happened.
Then in the early 2000s, there was a thing called the Food for Sex Scandal.
Your listeners can Google this, where families were only allowed into refugee camps if they handed over one of their children for sexual favors.
Then, of course, we've got the Oxfam Scandal.
And just a couple of weeks ago, we found out that World Health Organization, International Organization for Migration Staff, We're abusing women in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo during the Ebola response.
Now just think of that for a moment.
A highly contagious virus that passes through bodily fluids.
Aid workers were still abusing women sexually.
It's absolutely astonishing.
And if people really want to get a good understanding of the basis, the International Development Committee of the House of Commons in 2018 came out with a report on sexual exploitation and abuse in the aid industry.
And this was a bipartisan committee which said as its headline, the entire industry is complacent, verging on complicit and putting the reputations of their agencies before the protection of the children.
I believe this is a scandal and a problem way bigger than the Catholic Church.
And when people question me on that, I say, well, put it this way.
There are more aid workers than there are Catholic priests in more countries than the Catholic church is present in, and controlling food, water, and shelter with unfettered access to children and powerless mothers.
I don't need to say there's a secret conspiracy of pedophiles, and I don't need to agree with QAnon, who I think are fruitcakes.
I just say, here is a huge vulnerability.
Predators know about that vulnerability, and the organizations are willfully turning a blind eye.
16 years, sorry, in 2006, 14 years ago, Kofi Annan was interviewed by Lise Doucette on the BBC, his last interview as Secretary General, in which he said, yes, we have zero tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse.
And Lise Doucette said to him, but Secretary General, you've been saying that for three years now and nothing has changed.
And that was 14 years ago.
And still nothing has changed.
It is abysmal.
So what we're doing is we're not lobbying anymore.
We're not going into the media because we all know that's a waste of time.
What we've done is we've developed a new DNA technology.
We're going to where women have been abused.
We're taking the DNA out of the child and we're using a new process called genetic genealogy where you map the child's DNA against the publicly available databases like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, finding the child's extended family, looking on the paternal side and tracking it back to the father.
We did six test cases with women in the sex industry in Philippines, north of Manila.
Out of those six women and their children, we found five fathers.
We know this technology works and we're now challenging the UN to take this technology and adapt it.
And if they don't, we're going to do it and steamroll them with it.
Because we're going to find a lot of fathers to a lot of mixed race children.
There are 265 children that have already been identified in Haiti as children of UN peacekeeping soldiers that have since been abandoned by the UN.
This scandal is massive and it's based on science and data and it's provable.
It sounds brilliant.
So, number one, obviously, you're going to make fathers responsible for their offspring, which is a good thing, and certain prime ministers of this country might learn the lesson from that.
Maybe you could use your methodology to track a few of his far-flung offspring down.
So, A, the children are finally going to be given proper support, presumably, and B, those that have been, like, abusive, paedophilic relationships.
They go to jail.
They've got to be brought to justice, is that right?
Yeah.
Section 72 of the Sexual Offences Act in the United Kingdom makes it unlawful to have sex with a child under the age of 16 anywhere in the world.
So if I rape a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there's nothing you can do to me in the UK courts.
But if I have sex with a child under the age of 16, because I'm a British national, you can charge me under Section 72 of the Sexual Offences Act Now, grand total number of aid workers that have been charged under Section 72 of the Sexual Offences Act in the UK, or its equivalent in France, Belgium, Germany, US and Australia combined, is zero.
And this is what Donal's Law Firm and I are going to do.
What Griffin Law are going to do.
When we find the first father, because every mother we've tested so far, they were over 16 at the time of procreation, but we're now identifying ones who are under the age of 16.
We find a British father, we will take a private criminal prosecution and we will create the precedent.
And then we will put the pressure through the media to make the agencies take responsibility.
That's really exciting.
A worthy cause, I think.
And actually really kind of aggressively proactive.
You're not kind of one of those charities that just kind of makes airy statements.
You're going out and getting the bad guys.
Yeah, and we're all self-funding at this stage.
This is the other critical thing.
We're not putting a hand out to governments or anyone like that.
We want to prove the precedence.
We'll fund it out of our back pockets.
Then we'll put prices on everything.
This is how much it costs to find a father.
This is how much it costs to get a criminal conviction.
This is how much it costs to get a passport for the child.
This is how much it costs to get a child support order.
And then we'll go to philanthropy and people and say, right, we can now measure direct and meaningful outcomes to the dollar.
I've got another call to join in a couple of minutes.
This has been too much fun.
We've got to do another one.
Andrew, I was going to say exactly that.
I love it when conversations just go in all sorts of directions.
You're obviously super bright.
Can I finish with one thing though?
Let me give you one stat and one piece of analysis that comes from that stat.
So on the 30th of July, Victoria had 723 COVID cases that day.
The UK had 846 COVID cases that day, more or less the same.
Today, Victoria has two.
And the UK has, what is it, 18,000 today?
Yeah, we've got a hard immunity, mate.
Yeah.
Well, so this is something that we've all got to figure out.
If I can say that Australia and New Zealand are at one extreme of the Anglo-Saxon world, and the US and the UK are at the other.
New Zealand and Australia are going, let's crush this virus.
And yes, we're putting some lockdowns in place.
And the health and economic impact so far have been quite good, compared to the UK and US.
The last quarter, UK's GDP dropped 20%, US GDP dropped 10%, Australian GDP dropped 7%.
The case is now in single figures.
One of the things that surprised me about this is the countries that have locked down the hardest have had the lower economic impact.
That's counterintuitive.
But somehow we've got to figure out where we balance.
And I know the libertarian feeling is, well, well, let's release.
To which I say there's an old expression I like, which is, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Do you swap a four-week lockdown now instead of doing a three-month lockdown later?
Yes, because there's no lockdown option until a vaccine comes, and a vaccine might not come.
What we've also proved in New Zealand and Australia, average age of coronavirus death in Australia is 85, average life expectancy is 80.
If you keep the virus within the capacity of your health system, only old people die.
But what the US, France, Spain, Italy and the UK are now showing is if you let the virus exceed the capacity of your health system, then young people start dying too.
And if that gets out of control, then people will involuntarily withdraw themselves from the economic marketplace without the government-led subsidies to keep the market up.
JobKeeper in Australia, the furlough system in the UK, etc.
And we do need the government intervention if we are going to have the health impact, because we don't have this choice that some people think there is, of letting the market run free and everything will be fine while only old people die.
That's actually not an option because it'll leak into the young people and then people will withdraw from economic activity in an uncontrolled way and that'll be an absolute disaster.
There is a line somewhere between the New Zealand approach and the UK approach, but we don't know where that line is and we've got to figure it out.
We're going to have to argue that another time.
And we'll have data to back it.
And yeah.
Andrew, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
And I'm definitely going to get you back.
I like an argument with an intelligent person.
And thank you very much for appearing on the podcast.
And good luck with your charity, Hear Their Cries.
And with the lockdown.
Yes, indeed.
Let's swap emails and let's schedule another one for the next week or so while I'm still in lockdown.
Alright, mate.
Bye-bye.
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