June 29, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
13:14
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| One of the things that the Australian government did recently was that it issued some 3,000 tourist visas, would you believe, to people from the terrorist-controlled war zone in Gaza. | ||
| Now, I'm sure there are many decent people in Gaza, and we recently saw some very brave Gaza people standing up against the Amas terrorists that control the enclave. | ||
| But nevertheless, you've got to assure that if you just give 3,000 visas to people from Gaza, you will be importing trouble. | ||
| You will be bringing into your country people who are unlikely ever to go back and who don't necessarily share your values. | ||
| So this is where I think there's been a degree of negligence from a lot of Western governments in recent times. | ||
| I accept that in a sense it's our virtues that have brought on this problem because we want to be decent, we want to be fair-minded, we want to think the best of people. | ||
| They're all good things. | ||
| But in the end, if you do somehow fracture your society or make your society less cohesive, well, you're not doing yourselves any favour. | ||
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unidentified
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*music* | |
| All right, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, it's good to see you. | ||
| We were just commiserating about long trips to get here, but 30 hours for you. | ||
| You're awake? | ||
| You're awake. | ||
| What level am I getting you at right now? | ||
| Look, you're probably getting at about 9 out of 10. | ||
| Well, 9 out of 10, that's not bad. | ||
| At least it's not as bad as it used to be. | ||
| The first modern Australians came to Sydney Cove from Britain in 1788, and it took them nine months. | ||
| And something got so bad. | ||
| So 30 hours not so bad. | ||
| And something got 2 or 3% of them died on the journey. | ||
| So let's count our blessings and let's be grateful for modern advantages. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Well, as I just mentioned to you, I'm going to be in your country in October. | ||
| I'm doing a tour there. | ||
| I've been there before. | ||
| I love Australia. | ||
| I love the Australian spirit. | ||
| And one of the strange things over the last few years, particularly to the backdrop of COVID, was watching what happened in Australia. | ||
| I think particularly in Melbourne, but in several other cities as well, the draconian lockdowns and really what now seems to me, but again, I'm an outsider, so I want your take on it, what seems to be a lot of cultural strife in your country that I never saw before and much more. | ||
| So take it away. | ||
| Well, Dave, look, we suffer from the general problems of the Anglosphere, the economic stagnation, the social fracturing and the strategic peril. | ||
| I suspect our mood is better than in Britain, certainly, and perhaps also in the United States, probably because our weather is better. | ||
| Well, I'm in Florida. | ||
| Our mood and our law and order is pretty good. | ||
| Well, you might be right about New York and Cali. | ||
| But look, I think that official Australia has been letting the country down for some time. | ||
| And you talk about the pandemic. | ||
| I was amazed at how we became a nation of snitches and daubers out of fear and out of a kind of latent authoritarianism at that time. | ||
| So what do you think the psyche of that was? | ||
| Because people think of Australia, they think of Crocodile Dundee. | ||
| You guys are free. | ||
| You're out there grabbing lizards and crocodiles. | ||
| And look, it's a statement that's attributed to one of our great humorists, Clive James. | ||
| Clive allegedly said that the secret to Australia is to understand not that we are descended from anti-authoritarian convicts, but that we are descended from prison guards. | ||
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unidentified
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And certainly that got en masse during the pandemic. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So you mentioned something to me right before we started that I thought was interesting, that you guys basically had 25 years of good governance, obviously some of that under your administration. | ||
| But in some sense, that kind of leads to where I think Hungary might be at right now, where Viktor Orban has had many good years here. | ||
| They've protected their borders. | ||
| The country seems to be doing well. | ||
| But then when you roll into an election, when people are kind of used to things going okay, people, the natural reaction is people just want change for the sake of change. | ||
| Someone once said that in government friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. | ||
| And this is the difficulty with long-term governments. | ||
| Even if they're very successful, as the Howard government was in Australia, as the Auburn government obviously has been here in Hungary, invariably there are some people who for whatever reason become discontented. | ||
| I suppose in a democracy there's a boredom factor. | ||
| Just like Mercedes change their model every few years whether it needs changing or not. | ||
| They think that they've got to freshen things up. | ||
| So this is the issue and this is why at every election, and this is more important for long-term governments than for any offer, you've actually got to have a new offer. | ||
| You've got to be able to say to people, if you don't vote for me this time, something that you really want might not happen. | ||
| This challenge of renewal is incredibly important for political parties and for long-term governments. | ||
| It's a tricky messaging thing, right? | ||
| Because for Orban to basically go out there and say, hey, vote Orban again, or it could be worse, is sort of, messaging-wise, it's not that inspiring. | ||
| But people outside of the country don't seem to realise how, or people inside the country, you forget how good you have it. | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| But again, this is where good politics is a kind of a mixture of hope and fear. | ||
| There's hope for a better tomorrow if you vote one way, and there's fear for a much worse tomorrow if you don't vote the right way. | ||
| So look, that's part of the skill of politics. | ||
| And of course, you've got to do it in an honest way. | ||
| You've got to tell the truth about yourself. | ||
| You shouldn't tell lies about the other side. | ||
| In the end, as John Howard often used to say, every day in politics, it's a test of character. | ||
| And sometimes we fail. | ||
| What do you make of how the issues that your country's dealing with, that America's dealing with, that Hungary's dealing with, they largely are the same issues now, that partly because of the internet, the way information travels, that we're all dealing with these things, immigration, border. | ||
| I mean, you guys, you're a huge island, sort of in the middle of nowhere, and yet you have now all of this immigration stuff and cultural strife that we have in the States with a border with Mexico, and that certainly they have here because of the European Union. | ||
| Look, in the end, the government has a duty to its existing citizens to preserve the character of the country. | ||
| And an out-of-control immigration program, particularly an out-of-control immigration program where at least some of the people coming in don't necessarily naturally share your values, is a serious problem. | ||
| One of the things that the Australian government did recently was it issued some 3,000 tourist visas, would you believe, to people from the terrorist-controlled war zone in Gaza. | ||
| Now, I'm sure there are many decent people in Gaza, and we recently saw some very brave Gaza people standing up against the Amas terrorists that control the enclave. | ||
| But nevertheless, you've got to assure that if you just give 3,000 visas to people from Gaza, you will be importing trouble. | ||
| You will be bringing into your country people who are unlikely ever to go back and who don't necessarily share your values. | ||
| So this is where I think there's been a degree of negligence from a lot of Western governments in recent times. | ||
| I accept that in a sense it's our virtues that have brought on this problem because we want to be decent, we want to be fair-minded, we want to think the best of people. | ||
| They're all good things. | ||
| But in the end, if you do somehow fracture your society or make your society less cohesive, well, you're not doing yourselves any favours. | ||
| So when you talk to your more liberal colleagues or people that might be okay with bringing these people over, or when you see, I mean, I think actually one of the worst things that I saw post-October 7th was right a few days after outside Sydney Opera House, which was one of my greatest honours to ever perform there. | ||
| It was one of the best days of my professional life and to see people calling for Gas the Jews and all of those things. | ||
| When you talk to your more liberal colleagues, is it just that soft underbelly of tolerance that liberals have? | ||
| I mean, do they really think they're doing the right thing? | ||
| This whole doctrine of multi-culturalism, which has been pervasive in countries like Australia and Britain for at least a generation, has failed. | ||
| I'm all in favour of, if you like, having multi-ethnic societies. | ||
| America has been a multi-ethnic society for the best part of 150 years, but you've got to have a strong civic patriotism that underlies that. | ||
| There's got to be this official insistence that people quickly integrate and eventually assimilate. | ||
| And regrettably, that's been forgotten for far too long and it needs to be restored as quickly as possible. | ||
| Are you hopeful that it'll be restored in your country? | ||
| I mean, I know we all have separate problems. | ||
| Well, I doubt that it's going to be restored under the current government. | ||
| The current government tends to repeat vapid slogans such as, our unity is in our diversity. | ||
| Diversity is our strength. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| I mean, basically, it just means that we are becoming a nation of tribes. | ||
| That's no good for anyone. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Is your sense that the Western countries, by and large, will sort of go their different ways? | ||
| There will be certain ones like Hungary that'll protect their borders and their culture and they'll go one way. | ||
| There'll be other places like Britain that seemingly will be in an intractable situation because they've let so many people in. | ||
| Maybe Germany, United States has a different version of it, that we're all just going to have to deal with this in our own way. | ||
| Well, we are all going to have to deal with it in our own way because all of our circumstances are slightly different. | ||
| But I think there are some common elements. | ||
| And essentially, we need to get immigration numbers under much better control. | ||
| We need to have an immigration program that discriminates not on the basis of race or religion, but on the basis of values. | ||
| And then for the people who are here, there needs to be a strong emphasis on unity. | ||
| We need to stress our unity more and our diversity less. | ||
| And what does in the end make me hopeful is because everyone who comes to a country like Australia and the United States is effectively choosing Australia, choosing America, choosing Britain. | ||
| So our countries have a natural appeal. | ||
| They're free, they're fair, they're still reasonably prosperous. | ||
| And in the end, all the people who come, even those from very different backgrounds and cultures, are saying yes to us. | ||
| We need to recover the self-confidence to say yes to ourselves and politely say to people who are coming here, you're ours now. | ||
| You're Australians, you're Britons, you're Americans. | ||
| And that means, you know, by our laws, you embrace our values, but you become fully part of us. | ||
| Can't you just give them 24 hours of Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin and just lock them in a room and it's at the end, if they don't get it, if they don't get it, you can't come in? | ||
| Wouldn't that be... | ||
| It would be a test. | ||
| Do you laugh at all the right places? | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| That's not a knife. | ||
| All right, last thing for you, because they gave me the signal. | ||
| So I am coming to your country in October. | ||
| I'm really looking forward to the tour. | ||
| What should I be doing there that maybe isn't the obvious stuff besides saying hello to the koalas and the kangaroos and all that stuff? | ||
| Well, Dave, look, the thing that you're obviously very good at is being able to get a serious message across in a humorous way. | ||
| And you just keep doing that. | ||
| That's the plan. | ||
| Good idea. | ||
| If you're looking for more eye-opening and worldly conversations, make sure to dive into our international playlist. | ||
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