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Feb. 5, 2022 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:08:05

Topher Field

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	I know I always say this about my special guests, but I'm so excited.
	another time subscribe with me i love delin pod welcome to the delin pod with me james and i know i always say this about my special guests but i'm so excited i've got topher field and very uncharacteristically i've spent part of my day actually doing some research and yeah don't People know by now that I just don't do any research.
	And I spent an hour and 40 minutes gripped and moved by your documentary.
	Oh, thank you.
	Which is really good.
	It's called, it's called Battleground Melbourne.
	And well, it's about the terrible shit that's been happening in your part of Australia in the last two years.
	I mean, it's a story that needed to be told.
	So I'm glad you were there to do it.
	Well, more than that, it's about the terrible shit that's coming your way in the UK and is beginning to unfold in Canada now.
	In Australia, we're seeing it spread out of the state of Victoria.
	We're seeing it spread federally now as a truck and car convoy has gone to Canberra, which is like Washington DC for us.
	And the federal police there are beginning to use some of the same tactics, not to the same degree yet, but the warning signs are all there.
	Melbourne laid out a playbook that I think a lot of world leaders are looking to emulate.
	That's interesting.
	That's interesting, because where I am now in the UK, we are in what I consider to be a kind of phony war stage in that everyone thinks now La la la, it's all over.
	We we didn't have the another lockdown, and it's all going to be great.
	And we're going to live happily ever after.
	And then one remembers that in places like your part of the world, that really the the the tentacles of tyranny have extended into every It's extraordinary.
	Just give us a brief rundown of what your documentary is about.
	I mean, I don't want to spoil it for people and I want to talk beyond the documentary, but just tell us what happened.
	So essentially, as of very early in 2020, myself and a small number of others were very concerned that lockdowns weren't the right response to the virus.
	We're not virus deniers, we're not anti-vaxxers, we're not any of those labels and slurs that get used against us, but we felt that a total lockdown of the whole of society for a virus that very much represents a much higher risk for a certain demographic than it does for the wider population wasn't the right tool.
	So we began to protest.
	The very first protest we had 70 people.
	Protests had been made illegal.
	Now that should be the first warning bell in any country that calls itself free.
	Protests had been made illegal.
	It didn't matter if you were outdoors, it didn't matter if you were socially distanced, it didn't matter if everyone was wearing masks.
	The minute you pulled out signs, and this was the telltale, you could be in a park and there could be a thousand people in that park, socially distanced, you know, wearing masks, etc, and you'd be left alone.
	The minute someone pulled out a sign, That's when the police start showing up.
	So, it really was all about the actual act of protest.
	So, time passed and the protests began to get a little bit bigger.
	Towards the end of 2020, we had a few thousand people showing up and this is when the police began to engage in really awful tactics that have no place in a free country.
	We would see them moving in with mounted police and trying to cut through the crowd and then chop off little sections of it and surround it and arrest everybody.
	We saw batons being used.
	We saw pepper spray being used.
	We saw tear gas being used.
	These weren't rioters.
	This wasn't, this isn't America.
	They weren't burning down courthouses and smashing in storefronts and looting.
	These were people standing in the street, holding signs and chanting slogans.
	There was no violence until the police showed up and the police would show up and bring the violence with them.
	That progressed into 2021 and the protests began to get bigger and I think the police and the government especially, and the police were just acting as a military wing for the government.
	They lost all of their separation, all of their independence from the government and We saw the government and as a result the police begin to panic because they thought that we would have gone away by now.
	They thought that they would have shut us up by now, beating us over the head a few times.
	I've been arrested, a bunch of people have been arrested, literally thousands of people over the course of these events have been arrested.
	Some of us in our homes as I was, some people at protests, plenty of people have been hospitalized as a result of police brutality and they began to realize we weren't going away.
	So they escalated to the point that in the end, and I'm not making this up, They deployed the anti-terror squad.
	Now, you remember 9-11.
	Anyone my age or above remembers 9-11.
	And we had all this national security legislation brought in all over the world that gave the government power and gave them new military units to respond to terrorist-type attacks.
	Now, we've barely needed those people in Australia since then, which is a very good thing.
	I'm very happy about that.
	But they've been there the whole time.
	And there have been a few incidents where they've been rolled out.
	But finally, They got rolled out en masse against the people of Melbourne in order to shut down protests.
	And again, I'm not making this up.
	They hit the streets of Melbourne with an armoured vehicle against people that there had literally been one window broken.
	Across all of these protests, over a year and a half, there had been one window broken.
	There had not been a single lethal weapon used or even seen, to my knowledge, amongst the crowd.
	And they rolled out an armored vehicle and a bunch of heavily armored anti-terror operators who began firing rubber bullets at anyone that they thought might have been a protester, which included people that weren't.
	I saw some footage of a guy with loads and loads of blood.
	I mean, he didn't appear in your documentary, but it was one of those really shocking pictures.
	I know who you mean.
	What was that about?
	Lying on his back on the ground.
	Yeah, so I got in touch with him.
	In an effort to obviously find out what his story was and decide whether to include that in the documentary.
	All he said to me was that the actual incident that caused that was not related to the protests and that he actually felt embarrassed about it.
	So I have to assume it was something like that.
	He was he was goofing off.
	He was doing something.
	He's fallen over and smashed his face.
	Very unfortunate for him.
	But I did speak to him directly.
	And he assured me that that was actually not related to the protests.
	That's interesting, because one of the things that that Those of us those of us who've been following this over the last two years, you're never quite sure which story you can believe which story you can't.
	Who can you trust?
	Who can you what?
	What's what's false information?
	What's disinformation?
	And you you mentioned this in the in your your documentary, the story of the when the police knocked down a woman in her 70s, and then pepper sprayed her in the face.
	And tell us what happened after that with the So that went viral and a short time later this counter narrative went viral arguing that it was actually a 34 year old man because the person who'd been thrown to the ground had a wig on and the wig came off and lay on the street and people then immediately jumped to conclusions and that went viral.
	That lie went viral.
	It was repeated by a police officer to the public at one point that was caught on camera and I'm sure was repeated many more times.
	I'm sure many police officers for a long time felt that that was actually the truth.
	They would gravitate towards that, obviously, instead of one of their colleagues assaulting a 70-year-old woman.
	I can tell you her name is Anna.
	I know people that know her.
	I didn't at the time, but I was able to find people that know her and find out about her condition.
	She was hospitalized.
	She was released, I believe, the following day or the day after.
	She had a concussion and some other relatively minor injuries, but nothing particularly serious.
	But there are people to this day Who believe that that was actually a 34-year-old man.
	And the point that I'd like to make is, imagine thinking that that's okay.
	Imagine watching a police officer smash somebody to the ground so that they hit their head and they lie there.
	Pepper spraying them in the face and then walking away like they've done nothing.
	They walked away like they just had scones and tea.
	It was like nothing to them.
	And imagine thinking, oh, but that's okay because they assaulted a 34-year-old man.
	Like what kind of a counter-argument is that?
	Yes, I'm, you see, I'm going to, I'm going to move around in this, in this, this conversation.
	I'm just going to assume that people will have watched the documentary because you, you've got it.
	I mean, that would help if you'd seen the documentary before this chat.
	I don't, I don't want to waste too much time repeating what you already Sure, I suppose.
	But the police brutality that I've seen on some of that footage is something else.
	Those policemen are really laying into unarmed protesters.
	Yeah.
	And I was just wondering, is this the local police in the state police or city police in Melbourne?
	Or are these, because I heard rumours That these were a special kind of police, like United Nations Smart Cities Police, something like that?
	Look, all that United Nations nonsense you can disregard.
	It's far worse than that.
	People looked at these guys that came out with these round shields and these round sort of helmets and like, oh, I haven't seen that before.
	This must be the UN.
	It's that same sort of conspiratorial thinking that we mentioned a moment ago.
	It's way worse than that.
	It's way worse than the UN.
	These people are your neighbours.
	That's the really terrifying reality of it.
	So it's the state police, but the police themselves, the beat cops, so to speak, weren't the worst of the problem.
	I would say a lot of them have a lot to answer for, but they weren't the worst of the problem.
	The ones that really came in with a view to starting violence and enjoying violence were what are called the Public Order Response Team, otherwise known as Daniel Andrews Gestapo.
	So Daniel Andrews is our Premier here in the state of Victoria.
	I want to talk more about him in a moment.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So these people very much became his brown shirts.
	And I don't say that for shock factor.
	Daniel Andrews has now given himself powers that the Law Institute of Victoria compared to powers the Gestapo would have liked.
	That was their language as a legal body.
	That was their language about these powers.
	I believe there was an open letter by 60 QCs that called them unlimited and unreviewable powers.
	So when he's got this supposedly independent police, Enforcing politically motivated rules down on a population coming from a leader who has executive power and is literally treating them like they are his own private army, then I'm sorry, you're not in a properly democratic country anymore.
	Yes, we have an election coming up, at least that's still functioning, but while he's in power, he's operating like a dictator and they are operating like his brown shirts.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it's interesting that the powers that created this paramilitary force were in response to 9-11.
	So the people responsible for 9-11 did their work well, didn't they?
	I mean, so much of this stuff that's happening now seems to have been made possible by things that have happened over a period of years, if not decades.
	We have a joke over here.
	Because we've seen so little terrorist activity, we say that the terrorists used to hate us for our freedom and that's why they don't hate us anymore.
	Yeah, well, it's weird.
	I've been to Melbourne and You make the point that it had a reputation as the world's most, I hate the word, livable, but it is a very lovely place to live.
	Nice people, nice climate, just like, almost like England used to be.
	Don't insult Melbourne like that, James!
	What a horrible thing to say!
	I remember going to the, you've got a lovely botanical gardens, it's just really Nice.
	And a good a good size and everything.
	So it came as a real shock to see that of all the places in the Western world, it was was Victoria State generally in Melbourne in particular, which turned itself in the blink of an eye into Communist China.
	Why did that happen?
	How did it happen?
	Look, a very unfortunate situation has arisen here in Victoria.
	I would describe us as the California of Australia.
	Politically speaking, we are a hard left state.
	We really are only a one party state and we have been for 20 plus years now.
	And what happens is, as a result, when there really is only one party that's going to have power, the political leaders of the parties no longer try and play towards the centre to win votes out of the centre.
	What happens is they don't really think about the voters because they assume that they're going to win when it comes to a general election.
	They're competing against the other people that want to climb to the top of their party.
	And that's a competition to see who can be more extreme, not who can appeal to the centre.
	You're appealing to the party base now.
	Excuse me.
	And we've seen that play out in Victoria.
	And it tends to be the more extreme personalities and the more extreme political positions that make it to the top of the party.
	And sure enough, they get elected in a general election.
	So we've had a series of extreme characters.
	And Daniel Andrews, I think, is the most extreme of all of them.
	And once everything comes out in the wash, which is going to take a number of years, it is my opinion, what I believe is that he will go down in history as the most corrupt politician Australia has ever seen.
	That's my personal opinion.
	Now, I think that was true before the coronavirus came along.
	And when you give someone of a narcissistic personality, at the very least a narcissist, again, I'm of the opinion that he's actually a psychopath.
	Yes.
	And again, I don't say that for shock value.
	If you read the definition of what a psychopath is, and you compare that to how he's behaved, I think he's a psychopath.
	And when you put someone with that kind of a personality Into a position with that much power and then give them the opportunity to play God, to save the world.
	It feeds into their own internal narrative.
	It feeds into their own psychological profile in a really destructive way.
	And you end up in a situation like what we have in Australia, where he has given himself virtually unlimited power.
	He has a sycophantic fan club that love him.
	Stockholm Syndrome should be renamed.
	We're being incredibly unfair to the city of Stockholm.
	It should be renamed as Melbourne Syndrome because that's what we're seeing unfold around us now.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's interesting that we've seen analogues of what's happened in your country around the world.
	So for example, and it's always local politicians who are the worst.
	So in Wales, we've got a guy called Mark Drakeford, who is our version of the United Kingdom's version of Dan Andrews.
	Similar measures, far more draconian than the ones in the larger country.
	Same in Scotland with Nicholas Sturgeon.
	And quite a few Australian states seem to be following the Dan Andrews playbook.
	Western Australia now is, and Northern Territories, that guy, he's trying to, he's saying to Dan Andrews, hold my beer, isn't he?
	I mean, he's locking people in concentration camps just for being, having had contact with somebody who's had So this is a massive issue that more punters need to understand because until punters and voters understand this, it's going to get worse.
	That is the issue of perverse political incentives.
	Politicians never get rewarded for doing nothing.
	They always get rewarded for doing something, even if it turns out to be the wrong thing.
	A pandemic comes along, the media goes, ah, everybody's going to die, be afraid.
	The politician that says, okay, guys, hold on.
	Let's maybe take a few precautions, but let's give it a month for a bit more data and a bit more information, a bit more knowledge is going to be faced with a relentless media campaign against them for as long as they hold that position until they capitulate.
	And we saw that in the UK, where early on in the pandemic, there was a more measured response.
	And then the modeling from Imperial College came out.
	Niall Ferguson came out and the media response to that bullied the UK government into taking more draconian measures, right?
	So even the governments that did try to be a bit more measured got bullied out of it, almost without exception.
	There were just a small number of exceptions.
	But think about what happens if they do do something, even if it's the wrong thing.
	Ah, there's a pandemic, we're all going to die.
	Okay, great.
	I'm going to do a bunch of things that don't work.
	As a politician, right?
	Because I understand the politics.
	I'm just going to do a bunch of things.
	I don't know if they work or not.
	Now, if the pandemic turns out to be really bad, I can say, well, imagine how bad it would have been if I hadn't done what I did.
	I mean, it's a good thing I did all those things, right?
	And if it turns out to not be very bad, I can say, well, look, I saved you.
	All those things that I did, they worked.
	The political incentive is to do something, even if it's the wrong thing, even if it's nonsense, right?
	They could literally have stood up on the roof of Parliament and said, I'm going to dance naked in the rain every time it rains for as long as this pandemic is going on, and that's going to save us.
	And that would have been just as good as lockdowns.
	We know that now from data coming out of the US and meta-analysis of studies that's coming out now.
	Lockdowns barely moved the needle at all.
	They may as well have danced naked in the rain, but they got to say they were doing something.
	And politically, that's gold.
	Yeah, I sort of agree with you, but I worry slightly that you might be exculpating them slightly.
	Because, okay, you can say that the system forces them to behave in this way.
	And yet, we're talking about people who I mean, unprecedented in the West, I would say, in centuries.
	supposed to serve on an unprecedented in the West, I would say, in centuries.
	You've got examples in your documentary of, I think, two of the people you interview have lost four friends to suicides, a direct result.
	Three, actually.
	Three separate individuals.
	And to my knowledge, there is no overlap between those suicides, those friends that they lost.
	And I think there were moments in the, several moments in the documentary when I came close to tears.
	And one of them was the guy who described how, you know, He himself had been trying to commit suicide.
	And the only mistake he made, if mistake it was, was to leave his location finder on his phone.
	And so he was able to be rescued when he was lying on the train tracks.
	I mean, it was extraordinary.
	But it was a tough documentary to make because of stories like that.
	And, you know, having lived it for two years, having known people, I know people that are no longer with us.
	I didn't say that in the documentary.
	You know, another one only in the last two weeks who passed away.
	You know, not every one of these people is because of the lockdowns, but certainly none of these people have been helped by the lockdowns and the political response.
	To answer your point, though, I don't for a moment mention the political incentives in order to justify what they've done.
	Please don't misunderstand me.
	In my opinion, these people have failed so utterly in their duty of care that it ought to rise to a criminal level.
	I don't know whether legally it does, but they take a position and they accept a duty of care and I believe they have failed in that duty of care so utterly And people have died as a consequence that it ought to rise to a criminal level, whether or not it legally does, I can't comment.
	At the very least, something that I used to say before the pandemic as a joke, and now I say it rather more seriously, is that the problem with politics in Australia is that no one's been tarred, feathered and run out of town in far too long, right?
	At the very least, these people should be encouraged To depart Victoria, to depart Australia and never come back.
	That should, as a community, we ought to be able to draw a line at least that clearly and say, no, this is never going to happen again.
	And we're going to make an example out of you, not violently, but by making you so utterly unwelcome that you leave and you never come back.
	I agree with you.
	I think all this will come as a surprise to people who've never been to Australia, whose idea of Australia comes from Crocodile Dundee, which still a lot of people think of Australia as a kind of a land of ochres who take no nonsense.
	You've got hats with corks to keep the flies off.
	And, you know, Yeah, we've seen maybe, uh, what's the, what's the, the one set on Bondi beach, the beach rescue where?
	Oh, yes.
	Suck on the green whistle.
	Whenever my legs been taken off by a shark.
	Well, suck on this, the green whistle.
	I love, I love Bondi rescue, whatever it's called.
	Um, but it gives people a completely false impression of what Australia is really like that apart from, Places in the Outback.
	It is quite, urban Australia is excruciatingly woke.
	I remember going, coming to Melbourne and going on one of your ABC radio programs presented by a guy called John Fain.
	Oh, you have my sympathy.
	It was like being grilled by a kind of left wing, hard left sociology lecturer.
	It was just, I couldn't believe it.
	And somebody made the point, maybe this is one you were going to make anyway, that the problem with Australia is not that it's a land of convicts, but a land of the prison warders who came with them.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And look, I actually was, and I heard that from Helen Dale, but I believe she was quoting somebody else at the time.
	I don't recall how I came to that quote, but I think it does describe us very, very well.
	And sadly, very, very well.
	The reality is Australia is a massive continent.
	We're about the size of the United States, if you ignore Alaska.
	You know, roughly.
	We're a little bit smaller, but we're getting up there towards that size.
	With a grand total of I think it's 26, 27 million people in the entire place, the vast majority of whom live in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, right?
	We are an urban population.
	That outback Australian is in the minority by a very significant margin.
	And that's a really sad thing because the urban populations have been falling all over themselves to be as woke as possible and to try and lead the world in all sorts of weird, woke ways.
	And I think that comes from a little bit of an inferiority complex that we have on the global We're a bit smaller than most other countries.
	We punch above our weight for our size, but we're still, we feel like we should be as influential as America, as influential as the UK.
	And we're not.
	But we kind of feel like we ought to be.
	There's a bit of a chip on the shoulder there.
	And so I think there's a certain gravity that people have where they get attracted towards these sorts of virtue signaling to try and be ahead of everybody else.
	We're going to lead the world in these ways.
	And somehow that aligns us as a population more closely with their idea of who we ought to be.
	I think it's very, very toxic.
	I spent four years living in the inner city Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, and I quite like the inner urban vibe, the grunginess, the old cobblestone lanes, even the graffiti and weird people with dreadlocks wearing weird clothes.
	For me, it just adds up to this kind of vibe, this kaleidoscope of colour and noise and weirdness.
	I like it.
	I like that energy.
	But I used to describe it as living behind enemy lines because I released some years ago a project opposed to Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister at the time's carbon tax.
	called the 50 to 1 project and I think actually I owe you some gratitude because I think you helped to publicize that at the time.
	Yeah, yeah, I did.
	That was right.
	You were on the right path then.
	Yeah, and after that released, I began to get stopped in the street by people who would recognize me because they'd seen it.
	Never on my side, of course.
	And so I began to feel like I was living behind enemy lines for a little while there because, you know, I would get accosted by a guy, a skinny white male with long blonde dreadlocks who rode a tricycle that had a basket on the back from which he sold home-brewed craft beer.
	Now, you cannot get any more Fitzroy than that.
	That picture of that person describes the area to a T. And this particular individual would pull over on a semi-regular basis if he saw me walking and would want to have an argument with me.
	Never physical, never violent, but he would want to have a proper argument with me about how wrong I was.
	And so eventually I moved out of that area, but that is unfortunately representative of large sections of the urban Australian community.
	Yeah, that's really sad.
	But Topher, I mean, this is a...
	It's amazing how disappointing, I have to say, how few people stood up to this stuff.
	I mean, you, you really, I mean, I hate, I hate to mention his name because I think he's a, he's been a hero in the past, but Andrew Bolt has not been very good on Correct.
	The whole of Sky, and I think there's an inferiority complex issue there as well, the whole of Sky News jumped on the vaccine train really, really hard and really, really pushed it.
	And I think in my view, what Sky have is this complex that they're not serious media.
	They don't have the budget of the big boys.
	They're not accepted into the club the way the big boys are.
	You know, when you go to their facilities, I was on with Rita Panahi a little while ago, and she was lovely and she did a great job with the interview.
	But you look at the facilities, they are running on a shoestring, right?
	They are running on an absolute shoestring budget.
	And so I think there was a cultural recognition that here was an opportunity to be on the right side with the big boys, with the government to actually say, hey, see, we're not so crazy.
	We're not so extreme.
	And they went really hard on that.
	Now, I'm not anti-vaccine.
	I'm anti-mandatory.
	Vaccine.
	That's my issue.
	That word mandatory is crucial to it.
	I would have been perfectly happy for Andrew Bolton, Sky and everyone else to say, hey, listen, if you're older, you should really have a think about having this vaccine, right?
	If you're in that higher risk category, you should really have a think about it, but they shouldn't be mandatory for the wider population.
	That's what I would have liked to have seen.
	But unfortunately, we saw, you know, and I've had coffee with Andrew a couple of times.
	I like the guy.
	I know his son.
	You know, I've got a lot of time for him, but on this issue, unfortunately, him and the whole of Sky News were wrong.
	Well, I think the outsiders have been okay, haven't they?
	I mean, I think Rowan Dean's been good.
	Yeah, Rowan Dean.
	I've actually, I'm interviewing Ross Cameron tonight.
	So he used to be a guest on The Outsider until he got cancelled.
	And this is another thing that Sky have done a little bit of.
	They're cancelling people.
	They recently got rid of Alan Jones off their platform.
	One of the, one of the better.
	He's been a hero.
	Yeah, one of the biggest voices outright of any persuasion in Australian media.
	And they got rid of him because he was giving voice to conspiracy theories, which, of course, these days is just a spoiler alert.
	It's in approximately nine to 15 months.
	This will be accepted as true.
	But right now, we're going to we're going to kick you off for saying it.
	Yes.
	So we've seen that from Sky.
	So I'm having a chat with Ross Cameron tonight on a thing called a slow chat, which is a segment that I do.
	On Thursday nights Australian time every week.
	Giving a bit of a platform and a bit of a voice to some of the people at Sky News are actually now removing it and deplatforming it.
	It's a little bit like Fox in the US where Fox are doing okay but they're losing ground to Newsmax.
	And Newsmax in the US have basically taken over as the people that actually let people speak.
	And I'm a guest regularly on Grant Stinchfield's show on Newsmax.
	And he comes on and he's bought into every wild rumor that he's heard about Australia.
	And I have to set him straight and say, actually, look, it's not quite like that.
	It's more like this and blah, blah, blah.
	But Fox News are trying to do what Sky are trying to do.
	They're trying to be accepted among the big boys.
	And they're actually losing momentum as a result.
	Why do you think, I mean apart from the fact that as we've established, urban Australia is painfully woke and chippy at the same time, but why do you think that of all the places in the world, okay, so you look at the places which have been most authoritarian, the most CCP-like in the world and they are Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
	Why Do you think you'll be used as an experiment?
	No, I think we've had it too good for too long.
	I think we've gone soft.
	We've gone lazy.
	We are intellectually lazy.
	We do not know our history.
	We think that we, that prosperity and peace and happiness is our birthright and nothing can take that away.
	Think about it.
	So I'm 39 years of age.
	Think about what I've seen in my life.
	I've lived in Australia all my life.
	I've lived in Victoria all but two years of my life.
	I have not seen any military action on the entire continent where I live.
	I have not seen serious terror attacks or insurgencies or civil war or anything anywhere.
	You know, you had the troubles in Northern Ireland were at least somewhat close to home for you in the UK.
	Over here in Australia, I mean, that was literally on the other side of the world.
	You know, war for me was the thing I saw.
	I saw the Iraq invasion.
	It was just this green colored screen with all these lines flying up into the sky, you know, and watching grainy pictures of bombs falling with a little crosshair in the middle.
	That was what war was to me growing up.
	We've not seen any serious economic downturn.
	The dot-com bubble really didn't touch Australia.
	Our resources carried us through that.
	The Asian financial crisis, well, we're part of Asia, but it didn't touch us.
	The 2008 global financial crisis, we roared our way through that, no problem whatsoever.
	And so I think for people sort of 40 years old and younger, maybe even a little bit older, but certainly younger, there is a sense that this is just how it is.
	We are prosperous and happy and free and nothing can change that.
	And so we're lazy.
	We're intellectually lazy.
	We are morally lazy.
	I think we're seeing that very, very clearly.
	We think that it's impossible for us to go from being one of the wealthiest countries in the world to one of the poorest.
	The reason I see things differently is because I've been to Venezuela, who were in the top 10 wealthiest countries on earth after the Second World War.
	Now, they're among the very poorest, put on lists alongside North Korea and Zimbabwe, right?
	Yeah.
	That can happen, and it can happen to us.
	If you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes, and we are following in their footsteps, but most Australians cannot see it.
	It's odd, though.
	I was trying to I've been trying to raise attention, raise awareness, rather, of what's been happening in Australia.
	And I found that the interest in Australia, outside Australia, is not as great as perhaps it ought to be.
	I look at Australia and I love Australia because I've been there.
	And I think, well, you're just like us.
	You know, you're a bit more outdoorsy.
	You accuse us of whinging a lot, but I think that's pot calling the kettle black.
	So I think you're a bunch of whingers as well.
	I mean, the liberal Australians, they whine far more.
	It's been a great chat, James.
	Thank you so much.
	But now, I'm sorry, I have to go.
	But yeah, but I'll tell you what really shocked me.
	What this really, really, really shocked me.
	I think it's a terrible indictment of our political and media class that had Vladimir Putin Done to his people, what Dan Andrews inflicted on, um, are they called Melbourne?
	What do you call Melbourne?
	This would have been the front page of the Daily Mail for weeks.
	BBC would have been reporting on it and no one gave a shit.
	I mean, you had police cars driving round, checking whether people were, you were forbidden for traveling for further than what, five miles from your home?
	Yeah, five kilometers, three miles, and you had to have a lawful excuse for leaving the house anyway, and that could include up to one hour of outdoor exercise, which sounds rather like a prison sentence.
	You get one hour of yard time every day.
	It included shopping for essential goods, but only once per day.
	It included seeking medical care.
	And it included essential care for others that couldn't care for themselves.
	And if you got pulled over, and the police were just randomly pulling people over, if you got pulled over and you were found to be outside of your five kilometers, or even if you were inside the five kilometers, but you didn't have one of those excuses for why you left home, you were given fines.
	And the fines quickly escalated up into $5,000 plus, and now it's over $10,000 if you breach one of the orders under the current legislation.
	Right.
	And didn't he even try and make it 90,000 or something or other?
	Yes, he did.
	There was.
	Yeah, there was some.
	Look, he's he's like I said, a psychopath.
	And he's his grasp of reality and proportionality is completely off.
	And so, yes, he thought that was a great idea.
	So you've got a psychopath in a country which to all intents and purposes is just like America and just like England.
	And you are you're very similar in many ways.
	In many ways, yes.
	And yet When this psychopath started doing these terrible things, which are really breaches of human rights, I mean, unquestionably I'd say, was there a peep of protest from any politician in the UK, I don't think so, or in the US?
	Look, what we did have, and this was actually more encouraging than you might think, and more heartening for those of us involved in the protest movement, what we did see was in the US especially, and then it spread to other countries, protests targeting our embassies.
	And so we would see actually hundreds and sometimes thousands of people showing up out the front of the Australian Embassy, making noise, flying flags, that sort of thing.
	And we saw this, I mean, I think we saw it in Ukraine, I think was one of the countries that actually joined in, but certainly a number of Eastern European countries, along with the US and other places, which was a tremendous morale boost.
	For us to actually see that happening and made us very much feel like we weren't alone, that we had been noticed and that we weren't fighting alone.
	But by and large, I think it's very awkward for someone like the UK, again going back to politics and not to justify the behavior, but just to try and understand why it's happened.
	It's very awkward for a place like the UK to be too critical of Australia, when in many respects for a while there they were following down a similar path.
	We have seen in the UK, to branch out into some other topics, they're arresting people for Facebook posts because they're offensive, whether it's to transgenders or to Muslims or to whomever.
	We've seen the UK taking a very illiberal, a very anti-freedom path on a lot of subjects and that morally compromises them and they don't really want to be calling out Australia for doing that because, like you said before, it's the pot calling the kettle black and so instead they fall silent.
	Yeah, no, I did suspect that that was well, I mean, I know that's the reason that this is a global thing.
	And people who don't understand that this is a global thing, and this is coordinated at a supranational level, rather than a local level, are really not with the program.
	People don't realize Well, normies don't realize just how coordinated and planned this whole thing is, which is why I think we're living in a phony war at the moment in the UK.
	Tell me, what is... how long was the lockdown in... I think you had the world's longest lockdown, didn't you?
	Cumulatively.
	Cumulatively, they became... we are right now the world's most locked down city.
	I think China will re...
	No, but as in we've got the record for the most days in total.
	China is going to re-overtake us soon, I think, because they're doing lockdowns to try and stop the spread of Omicron, which is obviously the most virulent variant that we've had so far.
	And so they're going to end up having to lock down over and over again.
	So they'll probably take that crown off us and they're welcome to have it.
	But we became the world's most locked down We were locked down, if my memory serves me correctly, there was some level of restriction on us for more than one year of 2020 and 2021.
	So more than half the time of those two years, and it didn't start until March of 2020.
	So we had, to my understanding, we had a year's worth of lockdowns in the following one year and nine months.
	And how did it feel?
	I mean, what was it like?
	Initially, everyone was kind of on board with it.
	I didn't like it.
	I didn't think it was the right response.
	I released a video on March 31st of 2020 saying what I thought we should have been doing based on the data coming out of Sweden and the data from the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine.
	So, I never liked it, but I went along with it because there was a certain logic.
	We buy a little bit of time.
	We were promised that they were going to increase the emergency Emergency ICU capacity by 4,000 beds in very short order.
	They were going to retrain a bunch of people who are in allied health industries to be able to work in ICU.
	And it would only be a matter of a few weeks.
	And then we'd be able to face this pandemic head on.
	Right.
	And of course, that's not what happened.
	Now, I was OK with that strategy.
	I was OK with holding my nose and going, OK, I disagree with how you're going about this, but the strategy makes sense.
	Then the strategy was abandoned.
	And for myself and for a lot of other people, that's really when we began to become concerned.
	By April 25th, which it so happens is Australia's Anzac Day, so that's the Australian New Zealand Army Corps Day of Remembrance, basically, along with November the 11th.
	They're kind of our two days of remembrance.
	That day, someone organized the very first anti-lockdown protest and invited me to speak.
	And I went and I spoke at that, and I received an avalanche of hate.
	I've never in all of my 12 years as a political commentator dealing constantly with controversial topics, I have never received so many hateful, spiteful, angry, you know, none of them quite rose to death threats, but there was an abundance of death wishes in amongst them.
	And, you know, I had to just kind of brush that off and be like, okay, people don't get it yet, right?
	This is going to take some time.
	I developed the saying that I would mostly use to myself just as I was trying to process all of that, that it sucks to be right early.
	You know, it does.
	It's very lonely.
	It's very, very lonely.
	And when you're in month one of a two-year or three-year, who knows how long it's going to drag on for, and you've already picked it, and 98% of the rest of the population haven't, you're going to be lonely for a while.
	And I certainly was.
	And then slowly more and more people began to join.
	We ended up in a situation by late last year, the police had come out and said, we don't want to be doing this violence anymore.
	We don't want to be doing the batons and the pepper spray and everything like that.
	And so we took that as an opportunity to have some massive marches because now that the threat of police violence was gone, a lot more people were willing to join us.
	And we successfully put on the biggest political protest in Australia's history here in Melbourne, estimated by Sky News at 450,000 people.
	Well done.
	I think that's a bit generous.
	I'm going to stake my flag in a quarter of a million people.
	Right?
	Which is still pretty phenomenal when you think about it.
	We started with 70 people in April 2020.
	We had a quarter of a million people by late 2021.
	I can tell you that was a good day.
	And I've also received an enormous number of apologies now and a growing number of apologies since the release of the documentary, including from people who say, I was one of the people that got in touch with you and spewed hate at you after you spoke on Anzac Day.
	And I realized now that you were right.
	Oh, I'm so happy to hear that.
	That's good, because I think those of us who've been... it can be a very lonely place.
	Very, very.
	Tell me about these so-called friends of Dan.
	Who are they?
	Is this the hard left?
	Who are these people?
	It is a mix.
	It's made up of, yes, ideological allies who are just aligned with him, and they've nailed their flag to his mast, and if his ship goes down, they go down with him.
	But there's also an enormous number of people who haven't really been hurt all that badly by the lockdowns, and neither have their social groups.
	So, people who are employed in government roles, They tend to have a lot of friends who are employed in government roles.
	People who are on welfare tend to have a lot of friends who are on welfare.
	And so for those people, they are personally insulated from the impact.
	But then also they look around and they hear stories like what I'm telling and what I'm giving people the chance to tell in the documentary about mass suicides, about people losing their businesses, about people losing their hope, children losing all interest in school and learning and just basically giving up on life.
	And they go, well, I'm not seeing that.
	I haven't seen that happen.
	Right?
	And to me, I think to be a DanBot, as we like to call them, the only real prerequisite Is to lack empathy towards other human beings, which I think is one of the key defining characteristics of Dan himself.
	If you can watch Battleground Melbourne and see the stories that are told there and go, Oh, well, I haven't seen that happen to my friends and that hasn't happened to me.
	So I still support Dan.
	I still stand with Dan.
	Then I'm sorry, but you lack empathy as a human being.
	And you are, quite frankly, a concerning human being as far as I'm concerned, and I want to keep my distance from you if that's your response.
	When you see the suffering of others and you can dismiss it so glibly and choose to be happy regardless, then, you know, I would say there is an overwhelming lack of empathy within the people who are supporting Daniel Andrews even now.
	Well, it's the, you can't make an omelette without making, without breaking eggs attitude, which is.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it comes back to that same thing I said before about how, how politicians are rewarded for doing something, even if it's the wrong thing, because so often you'll point out the collateral damage and they'll just say, oh yes, but if you hadn't done that, more people would have died.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Which is, which is unfortunately, I fear one of the reasons why you've, you've said you don't know whether Whether Andrews has done anything which is going to see him end up in prison.
	I rather fear that he won't even though what he's done is evil.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's very unlikely.
	I mean, the reason the Nazis went to prison was because they lost a war.
	I don't think Daniel Andrews is going to start a war, so I don't think he's going to end up... you know, people over here talk about Nuremberg 2.0 and wanting to hold these people accountable, and I can certainly understand where they're coming from, but I...
	I would be very surprised to see that happening.
	I don't think the prerequisites will be there to drag these people through court.
	But in some senses, I think it's necessary, actually, in order to fend off the risk of some people taking matters into their own hands.
	When people do not see justice being done by the justice system, there is an increased risk of them going, oh, well, I guess I just have to go and do it myself.
	And that's not a situation that I want to end up in in Australia.
	I don't ever want to see that happen.
	We've not had a political assassination.
	We've not had significant political violence in this country.
	We've had a small number of isolated incidents.
	And I really don't want to see that escalate.
	And my fear is that as we come out of the coronavirus pandemic sort of situation, as people's heads cool a little bit and more people begin to recognize, hang on, there's all this collateral damage.
	There's people dying of cancers who could have gotten an earlier diagnosis.
	There's people who missed out on all sorts of treatments.
	There's babies who died for crying out loud because states wouldn't let their parents bring them across the border to the hospital that could save their life.
	Like there have been some incredible moral crimes that have happened.
	And my fear is not only should justice be done for the sake of justice, if we call ourselves a society that has a justice system and believes in justice, not only should justice be done, but actually if we fail to carry out justice within the system, my fear is that we're going to end up with people who choose to take it into their own hands.
	And that has the potential to bring Australia and to bring Victoria into a very, very dangerous place.
	Right.
	I've got to ask you about these vaccine mandates.
	I mean, I never say I'm not anti-vax because actually everything I've learned from people like Robert Kennedy, Junior, suggests to me that actually one should be anti-vax.
	But at the very least, what we could say about these experimental gene therapies, which haven't gone through their, got past their trial phase yet, is that people are having side effects on a kind of shocking scale.
	We're talking about young people dying of myocarditis.
	I think that that's 50 times what it what it should be.
	We've got people getting blood clots and all sorts of horrors.
	How do you is it still mandated in in in Victoria that you you can't work unless you've had the death shot?
	Yeah, in fact, they're doubling down.
	So not only do you have to be double jab now, but they're about to make it mandatory.
	So the Atargi, the technical group that make recommendations, have turned around and said to the governments that they want to make it mandatory, that you have to have had one booster.
	And here in Victoria, Daniel Andrews, the Premier has already begun preparing the ground politically for a fourth shot, a second booster to be mandated as well.
	So not only are we very much mandated, but it's actually, they're doubling down at the moment.
	Now, what I will say is this.
	When they came out with these mRNA so-called vaccines, they are, they're gene therapies, you're quite right.
	They said, two jabs and you're immune for life.
	Do you remember the fear campaign that they had around whether or not you would get long-term immunity from being infected?
	Oh, we don't know whether people who have had COVID-19 will get long-term immunity.
	We don't know that for sure.
	So you're still going to have to be vaccinated.
	Once you have the vaccine, that's when you'll be right.
	Okay?
	There was this big campaign built around that.
	Now we know that they were wrong about how effective the vaccines are.
	They don't actually stop you from becoming ill.
	They're not a vaccine in the sense of a smallpox vaccine, right?
	They don't actually stop you from getting the virus.
	They were wrong about how much it would affect transmission.
	So they said that if you were vaccinated, you wouldn't you wouldn't be able to be a super spreader.
	Well, now we know that's not true.
	They were wrong about how long the vaccines would be effective for.
	We see the effectiveness dropping off over a matter of only a few months.
	And yet people are still convinced that they're right about how safe they are.
	And they get angry at you if you question how safe they are.
	Yeah, well, I mean, I always feel very awkward asking this question.
	But have you had you've had the jab?
	No, not at all.
	Excuse me.
	And there's been rumors flying around.
	I find it hilarious.
	So for a long time, I wouldn't actually confirm or deny because it's just funny watching all these people have these big arguments about whether or not you've been vaccinated.
	You know how social media is.
	The more people comment, the more it sort of feeds the algorithm.
	So, if someone wants to start a fight on my page, please come on in.
	Let me roll out the red carpet for you.
	But no, I've not had any of the vaccines, any of the, sorry, any of the COVID vaccines, right?
	I've had heaps of other vaccines.
	I was in the Army Reserve for a while.
	They stick you like a pincushion when you're in the Army, all right?
	I had absolutely everything that you've ever heard of and probably a few things that you've never heard of.
	This is the thing, I'm not anti-vax and every time I say that I do have in the back of my mind the knowledge that even with existing traditional vaccine technologies we are not aware of the full scale of the adverse reactions.
	That happened.
	And I know that from bitter personal experience.
	My younger sister very nearly passed away in a massive reaction to the triple antigen vaccine here in Australia.
	I was 13 at the time and she's much younger than me, obviously.
	And I was only rescued because my dad got up to pee and just went past the cot and checked on her and she was completely unresponsive.
	And when my dad drove like a maniac, got at a hospital, and the triage nurse, the call was a code whatever, and then she finished with the words, we've got a flat baby here.
	Yikes.
	Is she all right now?
	She is.
	So, very nearly lost my sister.
	Now, Up to that point in time, every single one of us, I'm one of seven children, up to that point in time, every single one of us had every single vaccine.
	We were on the program, we did all the things in the schedule.
	That didn't stop my parents from vaccinating.
	What stopped my parents from giving any of us any further vaccines was the response that my parents got from the medical system when they started to ask questions about what might have caused that to happen.
	Right?
	The minute they went in there and said, this has never happened.
	This is our sixth child.
	This has never happened to any of our other children.
	Can we try to understand what the cause is?
	And they were simply told, oh, it just happens sometimes.
	When they began to ask questions, could it be related to the fact that she'd had the triple antigen the morning before this unprecedented event happened?
	No, impossible.
	Now, it wasn't the case that they opened an investigation, they had a look, they found another cause and they attributed it to something else.
	They just dismissed the possibility.
	And said, this cannot be the cause.
	So what we have here is a confirmation bias situation.
	People say, oh, there's no evidence.
	Oh, there's, you know, there's, there's, there's no evidence that there's excess, you know, there's more reactions than what are being recorded.
	We're catching all the reactions.
	No, no, no.
	We're missing a huge number of reactions because the medical establishment are so confident in these vaccines because the data looks so good that they don't actually accurately report the data.
	We have this self-feeding problem.
	So, when I say I'm not anti-vaccine, I say it with that caveat well in mind, right?
	But I'm not against the principle of vaccines.
	I think they have a place.
	I would potentially have additional vaccines.
	I'll get a tetanus booster shot at some point in my life, almost certainly, right?
	If I get back to traveling, I probably will have some hepatitis booster shots, etc.
	You know, like, I'm not against them in that sense.
	And I wanted nothing more than for the mRNA gene therapies to be effective, for this to be a faster, cheaper way of helping people to survive infectious diseases.
	How brilliant would that be?
	How fantastic would that be?
	But they simply have not lived up to the promise.
	And the idea that we now have so-called free countries, mandating that their citizens cannot have basic human rights unless they've been injected with these, while they're still in the trial phase, no less, Is such an affront to any idea or concept of liberty.
	I feel like we're in Alice in Wonderland.
	I never appreciated that story when I was a kid.
	It was just too weird, too off the wall.
	I didn't like it.
	Now I realize we're somewhere in between the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and the Queen of Hearts chopping off people's heads.
	That's where we are now.
	We're somewhere in there and we're just in this weird, weird place.
	We are, we are.
	I'm glad that you haven't succumbed, but the pressure must be enormous.
	And for you, you're sort of, you're lucky in, like me, that you can make a living doing stuff like we're doing now, more or less.
	But what about people who've just got regular jobs?
	How are they coping?
	Well, this is the thing.
	One of my messages has been for the last number of months as more and more people have been mandated.
	So the mandates didn't really kick in until about November last year.
	We had mandates targeted at healthcare workers and a few other things like that, but the widespread mandates kicked in late last year.
	And there's a lot of people, they send me messages on my Facebook page or I'll be talking with them.
	They'll say, I failed, I gave in, they beat me, they won.
	They'll use language like this around the fact that they got vaccinated.
	I had one chap I was talking to face-to-face, a restaurant owner not far from here, and he said, I'm not strong like you.
	That was the language that he used around himself being vaccinated.
	And one of the messages that I have for these people is, no, that's the completely wrong way of looking at it.
	If you met someone who was the victim of horrific abuse from their spouse, from their father, from a priest, from whomever it may be, and they used that language, you'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.
	No, no, no.
	You're a victim of abuse and you did what you had to do to survive and to get to the other side of that abuse.
	And this is exactly where we're at now.
	We are in an abusive relationship with our government.
	They manipulate.
	They gaslight.
	They bully.
	They control.
	And they push people, and especially wage earners, as you say, but also small business owners, they push people to the point where they have to make a choice.
	Do I do what the abuser wants me to do, or do I fail to feed my family?
	Right now choosing to give in to the abuser at least in so far as you have to isn't failure at that point.
	Right?
	It's actually doing the right thing by your family is what it is.
	Yeah.
	So the coercive terror is working.
	I imagine there are very few people holding out.
	They claim to be, I think, 94-95% vaccinated amongst the adult population now, or the 12 plus, but I can't remember exactly the numbers.
	There are people who don't believe those numbers, who don't think that they're true.
	I think they probably are true.
	I think the coercion has been very effective, but it has an interesting psychological effect.
	And like I said, I think we need to rename Stockholm Syndrome into Melbourne Syndrome.
	I think we've got it far worse than they ever did.
	We get some interesting things.
	So there are people that took it because they felt they had no choice, but they resented, and they haven't lost their fight, and they're still pushing back against it.
	They're showing up to protest as a vaccinated person and calling for an end to mandatory vaccines, right?
	They haven't lost their fight.
	They've done what they had to do for their families, but they're still in the fight.
	Then on the other side, you get some people, and there's not a huge number of these, but there are more than I would have hoped for, who once they get bullied into being forced to do it, It's a little bit like the chef's apprentice who gets bullied when they start working at the kitchen.
	When the new apprentice comes in, what do they want to do?
	Right?
	And we're seeing a bit of that behavior now where people who were against it got bullied into it and now actually joining the bullies and saying, well, if I had to do it, you have to do it too.
	There's this amazing, like, Melbourne, I think is going to be studied by psychologists for generations to come.
	I think what's happened here is genuinely fascinating.
	And what we're seeing play out is, yeah, is going to be the subject of research for decades.
	It's interesting that film when you describe I had a taste of it early on when with the mask mandates where I was sitting on the train and there was a man in the seat opposite me who had a mask on.
	And he wanted to pick a fight with me.
	You know, that sort of, you know, why aren't you wearing a mask?
	And I was thinking the real reason he was so cross was not that I was a threat to his health.
	It was as I was a threat to his manhood.
	He knew that he had surrendered and he was a coward and he'd been cleared by the state and he wanted everyone else to fall into line.
	Yeah, so I walk around.
	I do wear masks occasionally.
	If I'm going into a pharmacy, a doctor's surgery, these sorts of things where there are likely to be elderly people, etc.
	Just out of respect to them, because the risk is so disproportionate, I will occasionally wear a mask.
	By and large, I simply refuse.
	And so for the most part, I'm walking around with no mask on and this t-shirt on.
	And this is essentially, this is my paraphrase of an idea that's been around for a very, very long time.
	It was expressed in 1854 at the Eureka Stockade in Australia.
	When tyranny becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
	Sorry, yeah.
	When tyranny becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right?
	So it's the same idea.
	Martin Luther King expressed it in his own way, We've seen everyone from Cicero onwards expressing it in their own ways.
	This idea that the state is not perfect.
	And just because they've written a law, just because some people got together and said, oh, this thing doesn't make it right.
	And if it's wrong, we have a responsibility to disobey it.
	And it's been really interesting.
	You know, I got a message.
	Let me read you something.
	And this is probably going to choke me up a little bit because I'm one, I'm a fairly emotional sort of guy.
	In the first place, and I make no apology for that, but also because this hits me in the feels.
	And I'm getting more of this.
	This is an example of what I'm getting more and more of as time passes.
	This is from someone that I know who says, I got stuck into your doco and I found myself in tears.
	It's brutal to watch what happened to us and it makes you realize just how far from a sensible footing we've drifted.
	But that's what happens when you get boiled slowly.
	Well done on what you've put together and for all that it cost you to speak up.
	I truly admire you for doing things that utterly terrify me.
	And I'm so blessed to call you one of my dearest friends.
	You're a great man and you're truly free.
	Very few can say that.
	Oh, that's totally deserved Topher.
	Your documentary is fantastic.
	And what I like about it, one of the dangers of people, some of the people on our side, and I don't want to reject anyone on our cause, but some people sort of, they sound a bit kind of, Weird or hysterical or, and you kept it quite dry.
	You didn't, you let the people speak for themselves.
	I think that was a good, because that's going to win over the normies.
	Look, I agree.
	And one of the challenges that we had in the protests early in the movement was that we had people coming along screaming about 5G or screaming about microchips or screaming about various other things, you know.
	They were right, but nevermind.
	And all that sort of stuff.
	And it, Even if they're right, and this is a point that I made, I kind of came down hard on a lot of people and I made this a focus of a lot of my content for about a month.
	Even if you're right, because I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong because you're not going to listen to me anyway, right?
	So there's no point having that discussion.
	Even if you're right, what's happening right now in Australia is a political awakening unlike anything we've ever seen before.
	People don't pay attention to politics until it hurts them.
	Politics has just hurt millions upon millions of people and they're beginning to pay attention.
	Now if you're coming out of a bubble where politics is a thing that you ignore and you just you talk about sport and you talk about work and you talk about whatever ending the no no politics no religion right those are the those are broken If you're coming out of that bubble and for the first time you're looking around going, you know what, I think maybe I have to pay attention to politics.
	And you see these people protesting who are against mandatory vaccines and against the lockdowns and you go, maybe those are my people and you have a look.
	And there they are with, you know, the Queen is a body double and lizard people rule the world.
	You've lost that person forever, even if you're right.
	You've lost that person forever.
	They're never taking another look at you.
	You know, so no matter what's right and what's wrong, when we're doing any kind of communications designed to reach the wider public, we have to bring it down to that really, like you say, dry, factual, hard-to-argue-with level.
	And in the docker, you'll notice I open with a consensus position.
	I open by saying, you know, and having all the people that I interviewed almost universally, we're all in agreement, 14 days to flatten the curve so that we can prepare the healthcare system.
	You know what?
	Okay, fair enough.
	I don't necessarily agree with it, but I'll get behind it.
	We'll do that, and then we can all move on.
	That's the consensus position that most viewers, even the Danbots, would be like, yeah, of course, I agree with that.
	And then they watch these people change their minds and change their positions over time.
	And that, I think, is what makes it quite powerful at changing people's perceptions of what happened, is they identify themselves with someone in the doco early on that is saying things that they agree with, and they can remember thinking themselves.
	And then slowly over time, they watch that change.
	Yeah.
	Topher, I would love to talk to you for another hour, but unfortunately, I've got these fish cakes that my wife is making and she said, I'm going to cook these fish cakes at a particular time.
	And if you don't, if you don't finish, then the venue is going to be cold.
	But there's a couple of things I wanted to ask you before we go.
	First of all, ScoMo.
	I mean, the fact that you give, we give these politicians affectionate nicknames and actually they're complete Tossed tards, aren't they?
	I mean, Scott Morrison, what a disappointment.
	Yeah, absolutely a complete disappointment.
	He continues the legacy of our so-called Liberal Party.
	So in this country, liberal is used in the more conservative sense, in the more historical usage of the word liberal, where it was meant to stand for freedom and individual choice, etc.
	We have a long legacy now.
	Where the party has completely lost touch with its roots, has completely lost touch with any concept of freedom, and Scott Morrison continues that legacy in quite a disgraceful way.
	Imagine thinking that it's okay to lock Australian citizens with Australian passports out of Australia.
	Talk me through how that becomes the decision that you walk out of the room with.
	I mean, he has trashed the Australian brand, he has trashed the value of Australian citizenship, he has trashed our reputation around the world, and has been utterly illiberal as a Prime Minister.
	But also, I saw a clip of him the other day where somebody was was pointing out to him about vaccine injuries and was there going to be any liability?
	And he said, no, we believe in personal responsibility in Australia and you're responsible for medical.
	What a cop out!
	Yeah, so he's always trying to have it both ways.
	So he has said, for example, that the federal government is not going to mandate vaccines, but he's been wink, wink, nudge, nudge, encouraging state governments and employers to do exactly the same thing.
	He was the one that brought in the very first vaccine mandates in Australia when he was health minister some years ago.
	And these were vaccine mandates for children if they wanted to go to state funded childcare centers.
	It was referred to as no jab, no play.
	That was done on his watch as Health Minister.
	Now, when the vaccines were first developed for COVID-19 and people were asking him, are you going to make these mandatory?
	What he said was, I was the author of No Jab, No Play, so you understand what my position is, but the federal government doesn't have the power to do that.
	That'll be up to the state governments.
	Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
	Come on, boys, let's get it done.
	He's been trying to have a foot in each camp the whole way through.
	Right, right.
	And just finally, your media.
	I was watching some of the kind of your TV presenters, you know, at Sunrise, etc, talking about what was happening in Victoria, in Melbourne.
	And they were talking about it as if, oh, this is curious and interesting, but there was no kind of Outrage!
	Yeah, because they're not affected.
	Understand Daniel Andrews was very clever.
	He made sure that the media were exempt from the lockdowns.
	They were allowed to leave their house and work, etc.
	He made sure that obviously government employees, for the most part, were considered essential so they could leave home.
	They got to go out, go to work, go shopping on the way home, see their friends at work.
	He made sure that the people that mattered in terms of influencing public opinion were as unaffected as possible.
	And it was only the others, those annoying blue collar workers, which by the way, his party is supposed to represent.
	He's from what we call our Labour Party, which is the workers party in Australia.
	And he's supposed to be representing these people, but these people were utterly worthless to him.
	And he was happy to lock them down, destroy their small businesses, destroy their jobs, destroy their lives in many cases.
	And they were completely unseen by him because media was still happy.
	Police was still happy.
	Government employees, politicians, etc.
	They were all exempt.
	I reckon that you see what you're describing there.
	It sounds like they've got behavioral scientists in the background.
	They've got people telling them how to how to Well, we know for a fact that that happens around the world.
	And there is a nudge unit in Victoria.
	To what degree they're involved in these decisions, I'm not explicitly sure.
	I'm not specifically sure.
	But there is a nudge unit here in Victoria, and they are certainly paying out a lot of money in consultants fees to people to advise on these sorts of things.
	Yeah, your tax dollar at work.
	That's correct.
	Topher, I just say again, Battleground Melbourne is a fantastic piece of work.
	Well done.
	I recommend everyone to watch it.
	Where can people find it?
	So, battlegroundmelbourne.com.
	It's embedded on the homepage there.
	Or you can follow my work, Topher Field, on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Twitter, and I think there's a few others as well.
	I've lost track.
	You're fighting a great, great fight, Topher.
	Thank you.
	Listen, let's have another conversation at some stage.
	Yeah, look, I'd love to.
	There's so much more to talk about with everything from the Great Reset to the resurgence in global warming propaganda.
	There's a lot going on.
	We're about to have to fight tooth and nail against price controls, rationing, and a bunch of stuff like that in relation to the inflation that's coming our way.
	No doubt there is a lot more that we could talk about, so any time, I would love to.
	Yeah, you're right, we're on the same page there.
	So I just thank you dear wonderful viewers for watching this or listeners for listening.
	I'm sort of branching out into as many platforms as I can and I hope you can support me in one way or another on Locals, on Substack, on On Patreon, on Subscribestar, yeah and probably other places too.
	Oh yeah and there's that buy me a coffee button which is always good as well.
	Well we're in the same boat aren't we Toph?
	We have to, you know, live by our wits.
	100%.
	And look, I'm actually going backwards at the moment and have been for some time.
	So the first 11 years of my time as a political commentator, I would fundraise for projects once every few years, but I had no way for people to support me in an ongoing fashion.
	And I realized that that was actually a mistake.
	I thought I was doing it altruistically.
	I thought I was doing the right thing by not taking people's money.
	And when COVID came along, I realized that if I'd actually taken it more seriously and allowed people to financially support me, I would have had 10 times the influence.
	I could have had 10 times the impact when it mattered the most.
	That's the thing.
	People, by supporting us, it's not like they're buying us sort of mink-lined Rolls Royces to go next to our Ferrari.
	The point is that they are.
	That would be nice.
	They are giving us the armor.
	They're providing us with the armor and the weapons that make it possible for us to go out into battle.
	Yeah, so I have four people that work for me part-time doing different things.
	And I began to put them in place about five months ago when I made a decision.
	I'm going to turn this into a business.
	I'm going to try and get to the point where I can earn a living out of it.
	And that involves getting a team on board that can make up for my shortcomings.
	I'm very good at certain things and very lousy at other things.
	And so I need the right people around me so that we can move forward without getting held up by my own shortcomings.
	So it all costs money.
	And right now I'm spending considerably more every month.
	And I have an amazing and beautiful wife Who self-employed, runs her own business and is very much on board.
	If anything, she's more extreme than me.
	So she's very much on board the mission of what I'm trying to do.
	So I'm essentially being subsidized by her for the time being.
	Now that can't go on forever, but we can sustain it for a little while longer while I try and build up the audience and the amount of people supporting, etc.
	You've been a trooper for decades now, and well deserving of people's financial support.
	You've been calling out things for longer than I was ever interested in politics for, and I would commend you to my audience, who also watch this, to please follow James.
	Thank you.
	And to support him, follow his work.
	He has been one of the good guys for a very long time.
	Thanks, mate.
	I hear my fish cakes calling, so I'll see you.
	Thanks a lot.
	Thank you.
	Okay, bye-bye, mate.

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