Senator Alex Antic critiques Australia's Labor government for importing nearly two million immigrants, including alleged ISIS widows, which he argues strains the economy and fuels rising crime with machetes. He contrasts the center-right Liberal Party with the current administration's shift toward European elites and the rejected "Voice to Parliament" referendum, driven by guilt rather than necessity. Antic warns that these policies exacerbate social division and housing shortages while undermining Western democracy, yet he acknowledges Australia's natural beauty and friendly culture despite its dangerous wildlife. Ultimately, the discussion suggests Australia faces a critical identity crisis as it abandons traditional values for progressive multiculturalism. [Automatically generated summary]
But certainly, in the recent two or three years, we've seen a massive influx of people.
We think there are almost as many as 2 million new immigrants, which on a population of 27 is a significant chunk, which has been a policy of this Labor government, including recently allowing the widows or brides from ISIS to return to Australia, which is a very, very dangerous and controversial thing to be doing, of course.
We did a half hour where we should have just had the cameras rolling, but we're going to sit down and repeat a bunch of things that I think we just spoke about.
But first, I should mention, so we're here in Melbourne.
And I do want to talk to you a little bit about what you think it means to be Australian because that seems to be a debate in all Western countries right now.
So we'll get to that in a sec.
But why don't we first talk a little bit about just sort of what do you think the state of the country is at a moment before we get to the people specifically?
I think this is a very different country than the one I grew up in.
I grew up in the 80s and to a certain extent the 90s as well.
The world's very different.
The West is very different now than it was then, but Australia in particular is.
We have, I suppose, you would say we are the land of opportunity in many respects, resources, natural resources, beautiful beaches.
And yet for some reason, there is this cloud hanging over this country at the moment.
And I think it's across the board.
I think it's all the way through the country.
There is a feeling of pessimism a little bit.
And that has changed over the years.
I think we've seen that more and more over the last 10 years.
COVID, of course, has had a, I think, a long-lasting impact on the country.
I think that many respects, the country hasn't recovered from COVID.
A lot of economic problems, a lot of businesses just never reopened after lockdowns, particularly in this state.
So it is an interesting question.
And historically, Australians are very laid-back people.
As you said, the idea of Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee, that is, and to some extent is, but certainly was what Australians were like when I was growing up.
They still exist, but we are seeing an urbanization of the population, which has changed that a little bit.
And I think people are perhaps a little more reserved with their behavior.
So how much of that unease that you're talking about is a COVID hangover?
Because one of the most shocking things, I lived in Los Angeles during COVID, which was as dystopian as you could get, except for the city we are in right now.
I mean, we saw videos out of Melbourne that looked like they were coming out of China.
So how much of what's going on in this country right now is that people kind of had a good great land mass, as you said, laid-back population, beautiful, everyone looks great here, have this weird authoritarian thing happen.
And now the years out of that seem to be what's going on.
And I think it was very important that they did because to me, it reflected some of the things that we don't have in this country that you do in the United States, things like the First Amendment.
And so we went through this period during COVID where things were pretty bleak, pretty tough.
And for me, that was a very strong wake-up call.
That was 12 months into this job, into a parliamentary career.
And for me, it showed the very frail nature of Western democracies, Western liberalism, if you like, because with the swipe of a pen, parliaments all over the country simply handed off huge blocks of power to our public service, to our bureaucrats, who started making decisions for us.
So many of the decisions you saw, such as the lockdowns that the city was put into, came at the behest of public servants rather than politicians, which was a very unusual scenario and almost a little unique to Australia in the way in which the country is made up of states in a federation.
I was coming back from, seems incredible now, but at the time I was coming back from parliament.
And the rules in my home state there were that you needed to get a, it's hard to say out loud, but you needed to get a visa almost, like a pass to come home to your own state, which I put in.
I gave them all the information and they said, you can't come.
And I said, all right, well, I'm coming.
And before I knew it, they said, well, you come back, but you have to do two weeks in a hotel not dissimilar to this.
Now, that hotel had a big metal fence around it in the middle of the city.
It had police downstairs.
I wasn't allowed to leave the hotel room.
And having tested six times for negative for COVID, I was put into an area where there was actually COVID.
I can remember vividly, so the most, you know, it was a sort of a parody in a sense, but I can remember vividly going, they would serve you meals.
And on the first day, I had a knock on the door, boom, like that.
And I sort of woke up and went to the door immediately.
So, okay, so before we get to the what, who is an Australian, what does it mean to be Australian?
I have one other question for you first, which is, so you are a member of the Liberal Party here.
And as we discussed earlier, the word liberal from an American perspective has been completely mucked up because now the people who proclaim to be liberals are the least liberal people, actually.
So anytime I go to another country and someone says they're a liberal, I go, well, do they mean they're a liberal like for individual rights and laissez-faire economics and logic and reason?
Or do they mean liberal like I'm sort of a progressive authoritarian?
I think I know your answer to that, but can you explain a little bit what does it mean to be part of the liberal party in Australia?
I mean, I think we would look at it that the Liberal Party in the sort of spirit of Milne, you know, like, you know, classical liberalism.
And that's the way the party was formed.
It was really formed as a, you know, as a sort of conglomerate of centre-right parties that had a conservative and a, you know, a liberal, libertarian angle bent, if you like.
And they came together after the war, and that was the modern Liberal Party.
Quite different.
We actually wear the colour blue as the logo as well.
So it's quite, you know, you would be well understood for being mistaken for coming to Australia seeing blue and liberal and thinking you're dealing with basically the centre-left.
Right, right.
But that is not the case.
So, no, in Australia, that's what it means.
It's interesting, though, in the sense that politics in Australia doesn't quite overlay into the United States.
Probably the same in Europe as well.
Our politics tends to be probably a little more to the center on both sides, I think.
You know, our far left is probably a little closer to the centre and the same with the so your far left is what party now?
Well, we would say the Australian Greens, who are our furthest left party.
I mean, there are others, of course, there are minor parties that was on the ballot, as there are in every country.
But in terms of parliamentary representation, the Greens are they're an environmentalist party that has really drifted into sort of far-left doctrine of, you know, I would say, you know, angles that involve, you know, all sorts of things that aren't related to the environment.
It's a very difficult question to ask because I think it depends, answer.
It depends where you're going and where you are.
In the city, and I mean, if I went back to when I was growing up, I think that the demographic in the city was largely the same as in the country areas.
That's not the case anymore.
My feeling is that really to get a feel for what is in Australian, you almost need to get out to the country areas, the regional areas, where a lot of what we consider to be Australian is still alive and well.
People fly the flag out there.
You know, if you come to Australia, it's one of the very few countries that still, I think, finds it acceptable to have three different flags on a government building.
You know, I notice in the United States, despite even in places like California, where you might see the California flag, you'll still always see the American flag.
But here, you will see a myriad of Australian, you know, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags.
Well, I don't have a problem with any of those flags, but there is one flag for the country.
In the country, you'll see very much the opposite.
You'll just see the Australian flag.
Now, these days, the person living the urbanized Australian is quite different, I think.
They do tend to lean further to the left, and they are a mix.
They're very multicultural and quite different.
In the country, I think the Steve Irwin character still exists, and I think they're very real.
But overall, the Australian nature is laid back.
We are very outdoors-loving people.
We're very laid-back.
People, I think, here are very forgiving as well.
The other thing that makes Australians quite unique is they're very apolitical.
So, there just isn't the interest in politics.
In fact, I was having a conversation on the plane with some young people who had just no grasp of it.
And that's fine.
But that is a very, you know, we're not quite as engaged in the political process as which in some sense probably led to a lot of what happened during COVID because we were kind of checked out.
I think it did.
Yeah, I think it did.
And, you know, it doesn't take much for that authoritarian nature to creep out unless, you know, I think Ronald Reagan said it's freedom's only a generation away from being lost or words to that effect.
So, you know, we do have that constraint here in Australia.
And I think people, you know, it would be good to see people more conscious of their freedoms and what's being lost at the moment.
I don't think it's been lost across the entire spectrum of the Australian nation at the moment.
Yeah, look, I mean, it's been historically, I mean, it's quite interesting, you know, backlog of how Australia came to be where it is.
It's probably too long for today's conversation, but essentially we were settled by the English and the Irish and the Scottish or out of Europe.
And that continued really largely until around about the 60s or 70s when we started seeing, you know, our post-war two, of course, where we started seeing influxes from Europe.
There was, in fact, a white Australia policy for a long period of time.
And that all changed in the latter half of the 20th century when we started seeing more immigration from Asia and now in recent times from the Middle East and so on.
But you're quite right.
I mean, we had a population when I was growing up of around about just under 20 million.
It's about 28 or thereabouts now, depending on where you look.
Now, the difference with Australia is most of our arable land is on the coasts.
So there's a lot of land mass in the middle where there's minerals and a bit of farming, but not a huge amount else, although they'd probably scream at me for that.
That is the fact.
So most of the population is centered in those urban areas.
So it's sort of a little bit misleading in the sense that we do have a large mass.
The thing we do have is resources.
We have plenty of water up north.
We've got minerals everywhere.
We've got some of the largest stockpiles of uranium and coal and iron and gas.
We just don't use them because we are under the thumb of this green ideology, which is telling us to sort of self-harm by not using it and not burning it and so forth.
But certainly in the recent two or three years, we've seen a massive influx of people.
We think there are almost as many as 2 million new immigrants, which on a population of 27 is a significant chunk, which has been a policy of this Labor government, including recently allowing the widows or brides from ISIS to return to Australia, which is a very dangerous and controversial thing to be doing, of course.
So we're going to bring in 10% of the population in two years or well, the argument that would be used is that COVID, there was almost a moratorium on immigration and we need to catch up.
So that's the argument.
And the argument is also always about skilled labor and we don't have the expertise in certain areas.
The truth of the matter is that I think people are just coming in and working normal jobs.
And of course, the net effect of that in many respects has been oppress on housing, oppress on living standards.
And there are stories in Australia now of people, places like Sydney and Melbourne lining up with 200 people for a single bedroom apartment.
So the effect on the cost of living and the lifestyle in Australia has been quite dramatic in a short amount of time.
We're all very worried about that.
I'm very worried about it.
And of course, you know, this country was built on immigration.
So this is, as they say, not about patting the player.
It's about the game.
The numbers are extraordinary at the moment.
The United States had this same problem.
It was illegal immigration.
This is legal immigration.
But the effects are the same.
And, you know, you have to be in control of your borders in a country like this.
I saw a clip this week on social media of a journalist from our ABC going around and talking to people in the 50s and 60s about whether Aboriginal children should swim in a swimming pool with white children.
Now, if you believe the left, you would say that we were, they would say that we were a country based on racism and have always been.
This is black and white footage.
These people, though, responded by saying, of course they should.
Why wouldn't they?
They're our brothers and sisters and so on and so forth.
So this construct that Australia is a racist nation has been brewing for a long period of time.
It's in overdrive at the moment.
I think we're the least racist nation in the world, actually.
I think people, Australians, as I said, with that laid-back nature, are very, very warm and welcoming.
But the left have found a way to achieve their goals.
The classic example is the voice to parliament referendum, which we had now.
Referendum in Australia is a serious thing.
It's changing our constitution.
I know it happens in the US too with amendments and so forth.
But a couple of years ago, the government proposed enshrining an Aboriginal voice in parliament, which would be a sort of effectively, they would have argued, but effectively a third chamber of our government.
The Australian people shot it down, something like 65% voted no, depending on where you go.
But the rationale that was used was this rationale of guilt.
You've stepped on these people for years.
You need to give them a voice.
Of course, it was never true.
And in fact, many Aboriginal people and groups, including my friend, Senator Jacinda Nambajippa-Price, who was a leading voice against it, is Aboriginal herself and spoke against it because it's the very essence of division, effectively, giving certain people certain rights and certain categories.
So we've had to fight with a lot of that.
And I think Australians are waking up to it.
But that ethos is alive and well in the left, and they want to push that division.
Yeah, look, I think that's always been a bit of a problem.
When I was growing up, there were complaints about knife use from immigrant second generation immigrants from Southeast Asia.
So I think it has always been an issue.
But certainly, I think it is.
This is one of the real world effects of this problem: people do take time to accustom.
They do acclimatize and become accustomed to their new environments.
And many are coming from very dangerous places like some of the war-torn parts of Africa.
So, you know, it's a very difficult balance to mix, particularly when you throw such large numbers at a community that's not necessarily geared up for that.
And as I said, I mean, Australia is a sort of a deceptively small country in a very large landmass.
Look, I mean, there certainly has been a wave of crime.
You know, the machete ban is one of them.
Look, I don't know whether it could be honestly be attributed to any one group or other.
I wouldn't say that it could be, honestly.
But, you know, I mean, this is the nature of taking people from different parts of the world.
I mean, you know, sometimes cultures don't.
Don't always mix and uh, we have to be careful of that, we really do.
Um so but look, Melbourne is going through its own problems.
It's got a a very left-leaning government has had for a very long period of time and uh, you know, if you look around, I mean it's a, it's a sort of a city that looks like it's uh, it's in trouble.
I mean there'd be parts of the Us and parts, but I go to blue cities in the U.s.
You'd be, you'll be, you'll be well acclimatized to it, i'm sure.
But I, you know, we're just not used to it.
It's always been a very trouble-free country.
You know, we and I think that's been part of the problem is we have thought that our institutions will always serve us well.
We've always thought that there will never be trouble in this country and that we don't have this sort of social cohesion problem, because we haven't.
We've had people that have mixed.
We had Greeks Italians uh, and people from other parts of Europe that came here after the war and would have been lumbered with many of the same problems um, and arguments, but have assimilated well after a generation or two.
So we're just not used to it and uh and, and that's just a a feature of having large numbers coming in at one time.
I would say so you guys have a labor majority government right now.
You're i'm not sure when we're airing this interview, but I believe on this monday, this coming monday uh, your prime minister is going to be meeting with Donalds in the States.
Oh well, I mean look, I well, what we need actually is uh, is to keep the partnership going.
I mean ultimately, that that's really what we need.
I mean we, you know we we, we think we are an island away from everything, but we have um, you know, neighbors that are not necessarily friendly all the time.
So I think the most important thing is that that we keep that going.
We have a there's this long-running debate in Australia about Uh Orkus, which is an alliance between the Uk and Australia, and you know military equipment and submarines in particular which uh, Australia is looking to buy.
So look, I hope that all goes well because we, we do need it.
What what's been interesting though, is that Australia has historically um, for reasons of the, the uh the, the past had a connection to the United Kingdom.
Um, that all sort of changed back, swung to the Us after Vietnam yeah, when the United States became our main uh ally perhaps, and certainly in terms of military equipment and transfer, that was the main thing.
We're seeing a little bit of a swing with this labor government, away from the Trump administration, I think, now back towards the sort of the, the European elites uh, who have perhaps more in common politically um, so I assume you're not happy with that.
I'm not happy with that at all.
No, I don't.
I think you know I i'm a very strong believer in the Us Australian alliance and I think we need it.
And uh uh, you know um, and I hope That continues, but I would say that that's a challenge at the moment because I think the Trump administration as they unashamedly are very America first and want to know what we can do for them as much as anything else.
So let's hope that continues.
But I don't know.
We just hope for poor old Elbow the lights don't get switched off because when the lights go off in the White House, you're in trouble.
What else should we know about this country that we don't know?
I mean, we've talked mostly about problems, actually, but it is an incredible country.
It's an incredible country.
I mentioned to you that I was supposed to come back from my first book tour, which was going to be the only international stops we were doing because I so fell in love with it when I was here in 2018.