Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Great Aussie Rort" with Punter's Politics

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"The Great Aussie Rort" with Punter's Politics · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and here's a dangerous idea
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for you.
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The idea is that there are a small handful of things that governments could do which would
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dramatically improve the lives of their citizens, which on both sides of politics they decline
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to do because political parties, along with corporations and media moguls, conspire to
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keep things rotten because it's in their interest.
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If all that sounds a little bit conspiratorial, a little bit doji, a little bit ilani, a
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little bit qon, a rest assured, there is a handsome and thoughtful young gentleman who has
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been producing viral videos about precisely this subject for years with millions of views
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on YouTube and Instagram.
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He goes by the Monica punters politics and reveals to Australians specifically the revolving
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door between their elected officials and lobbying positions and cushy jobs in the industries
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that they are supposed to regulate, the negligence of governments in collecting adequate revenue
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from the vast mining and natural resources and gas profits that this country spins off,
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and the kind of cozy alliance between big media, big corporations and big politics that
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emiserates regular people and could easily be reformed if only we had the will and the
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know how to do so.
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Australia is going to face a national federal election in the next few months and I thought
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we would kick off the beginning of our election programming with a fun, whimsical, freewheeling
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chat with the one, the only, the ever-charming punters politics.
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Nothing's your right because here, step one, Kamala Harris doesn't go on Joe Rogan.
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Step two, Kamala Harris loses election.
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It's Matt.
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And here in Australia, step one, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese doesn't go on your podcast.
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I mean, I don't want to drink anything.
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Question Matt.
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Question Matt.
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Did I say time on the pod?
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What would you risk it?
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What would you risk it?
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What would you?
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And my pitch is, you want to talk to regular punters.
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The unique and cool thing about Australian politics is that we have this thing of like, you're
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not better than me.
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Even if you're the bloody leader of the country, you're not better than me.
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For Australia, if you want to be Prime Minister, you have to be a man of the punters.
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You have to.
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Yeah.
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And I can offer him that.
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I can say.
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I can offer you a name of your show.
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Also.
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Yeah.
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So you're going to go soft.
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Well, that's what they say.
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Yeah.
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Actually, probably because Albo is the Prime Minister, I critique him more than anyone else.
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Right.
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Because he's in power.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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Also, I do find that then I'm guilty of this myself, because I also think of myself as
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broadly someone on the left.
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There is an instinct to be more critical of one's own side, because you don't want them
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to let you down.
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I mean, it's the narcissism of small differences in all of it.
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And you can be critical of your own, or even as you should be.
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Yeah.
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I think.
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But what I'm trying to do, maybe naively and silly way, I'm trying to break the current
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political labels and dichotomies that are set up for us.
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So the left and the right is just a nice story to be told so we battle over the cultural
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differences.
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When we all actually agree on the biggest structural stuff, you can talk to anyone,
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and say, hey, should our politicians, should they get jobs in the sector they just regulated,
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should the Northern Territory, Back Ventura, or Minister for whatever, Nicole Madison is
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the one I'm thinking of, fact checks, welcome, was in the government writing rules for impacts.
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Then she went to work for impacts, are we cool with that?
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And I'm trying to go, and so what people do is then they go to dismiss any criticism
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that may or may not be valid of their son or not, they'll then revert to these labels
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left right.
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And that's kind of the political sphere we have.
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I'm wondering if we can do it differently.
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I'm wondering, because I believe it's far more establishment, anti-establishment, established
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power, centres, anti-establish power, centres, how do we break it apart?
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That's interesting.
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But don't you think that there are establishment people who are now using the anti-establishment
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wave or badge to gain power, like Elon and Trump and things like that, as come in as
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if they're not powerful and then just to create more power to themselves?
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Yes.
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Exactly.
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Anything can be used, and I think that's my other thing I'm attempting to always try
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and point to is just go, if we vote for policies not parties in Australia where more party
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oriented, which is good, we don't have cult personality, because everyone say, no,
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no, Peter don't.
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He's going to be Trump.
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I'm like, Trump?
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That bloke's got charisma.
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He is like, there's something likable about him.
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Dutton?
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Good luck.
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He just doesn't have it.
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And I like that.
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But I'm trying to go just look at policy, look at how they vote.
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Don't get caught up in it.
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And maybe it's too simplified, but I feel like you're less likely to get fooled.
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If you know what policy you want and at that election, at that time, this one time you
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vote for that, because parties change, that the Labor Party of shortened that lost the
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previous election, it had half the policies of the Greens.
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Yeah.
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And the Greens are now standing there like, yeah, actually negative gearing and all this
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sort of stuff.
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And suddenly, I was like, are you a bloody communist?
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So I'm like, Bill Shorten, one of that.
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And I think, I don't know, I've just got this picture of politics is like, change whatever
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team, whatever, like what, know your outcomes and use the political apparatus to yank
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it your direction.
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And if you have to hop off the train, jump off, get off a team, because they're not representing
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you, do it.
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Like it.
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Who can't?
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What do you make of the evolution of the teams?
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So like there's the, there's the evolution that you just remarked upon, which is the evolution
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of the left, I suppose, from what might have been traditional bread and butter, left-wing
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issues, like issues of economic justice, right?
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Like, you know, helping people financially and expanding the welfare state.
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And then there's this, that's a very sort of blue collar traditional union understanding
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of the left.
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But then there's this other part of the left, which is quite a university educated, elite
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understanding of sort of social justice, where, you know, identity issues and race and
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gender and LGBTQIA plus issues are at the fore.
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And there's this sort of uneasy alliance between the two.
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But at the same time on the right, there's like your old school kind of economically conservative
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hawkish, like John Howard or like George H. W. Bush, like people.
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And then there's this new sort of reactionary, cultural, like Trumpy kind of populist right
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wing, which were not cut social services and would actually be kind of, you know,
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weird way more left-wing economically, but taps into anxiety that people might have
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that is also cultural about, I don't know, migration or, you know, trans, gender kids
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or whatever the cultural hot button might be, can you, where, where do I even stand in
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all this?
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It's like, I don't know who's what, Neymar.
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And I think that confusing landscape, especially since the US infiltrates into Australia and
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people like watching the US and watching Australian, I'm like, all right, I'm just, I'm,
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I, I listen to, you know, Planet America.
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Yeah.
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Chas was show.
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Love his show.
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Love what he does.
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Our listeners, if you don't know what, what we're talking about here is the, the Chas
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literature that I've been on this show just before the last US election to talk about
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politics.
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So they might remember Chas from that.
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He has a television show.
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Great show.
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Great podcast.
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Three and a half hours.
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Yeah.
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He gives the facts in the context.
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It's a three and a half hour podcast.
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Minimum.
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The fuck's he doing?
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Chas is he Joe Rogan?
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He's, he's given him a right for his money, except Chas does half of it solo.
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So good luck, Joe Rogan.
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He's just, because he's consuming everything in the firehose of US politics.
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Amazing.
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So I observe that as a hobby.
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Okay.
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But then for me, simplifying politics here, I go, well, I'm just going to do Australian
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stuff.
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I'm just going to try and understand what's going on here.
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Yeah.
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I don't know anything really about anything.
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I just listen to podcasts, I listen to you, I listen to a bunch of different people
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who are smarter than me.
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I collect them and then I go, okay, there's a reason why people aren't reading these
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news articles.
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I was boring and I don't understand.
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It's really like seeing a politician talk about what's broken in politics that go, oh,
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it's very, it's outrageous that they went to work for this organization that they wrote
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the rule for.
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Like no, but you're not, you're not outraged.
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Yeah.
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Like we need to just be honest with our feelings about this sort of stuff.
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And I think that's why people like when politicians like, kind of get angry because some of
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this stuff is to be outraged about.
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And so I go, well, I'm just trying to simplify it to what I think the common problems are
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and the biggest problems.
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And I think we're to what you're saying about the new cultural left.
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I think that is just the perfect, this perfect distraction for establishment power to pretend
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they are doing something.
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And I think this was much of the left in the US, much of the left now in Australia, which
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is the corporations can get on board with like the voice, Rio, bloody Tinto, back the voice.
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The voice was the referendum about whether or not indigenous Australians should have
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a body established in the constitution for to advise parliament about First Nations
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issues.
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Yeah.
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Exactly.
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Exactly.
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You just got to remember.
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I have a lot of Americans.
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You say the voice.
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I want to fuck.
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Oh, they'll piss them off at the tipping thing at the beginning.
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That's right.
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Tipping is great.
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No, they know.
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They know they're fucked.
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It's also better to tell them that they're fucked because of tipping than to say that
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their whole country is fucked and treated for a civil war and it's irredeemably, you
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know, doomed.
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So that would also be a bad.
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Don't tell them that.
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Keep that one under the carpet.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So, I know.
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Exactly.
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There are all of these social justice versions of the left that don't require any actual
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sacrifice from people who hold economic power.
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And that's why they do it.
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And so it's easy for us to signal to each other that we're virtuous, but you're on the
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right side of history.
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And it happens all the time.
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Donald Trump just showed the right wing virtually signal.
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It's now the Gulf of America, who bloody cares.
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Like, but.
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Well, so quick point about the Gulf of America.
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Yeah.
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Isn't it actually more America centric to call it the Gulf of Mexico because only an
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American, if you see the world through the point of view of an American, then you'd
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be like, down there, that's Mexico, like you're looking out at Mexico and you're naming
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it from the perspective of the other thing that is next to it.
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But the Gulf of America implies that you're kind of positioned outside of America looking
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at America, kind of looking at them.
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I don't know.
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I think America was the attention.
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So I think they've done it the right way because if they want America, it doesn't have
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enough of.
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It's the world's attention.
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This wilting flower of a nation.
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Exactly.
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Put more of us.
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It's trying to talk me out.
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Okay.
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More attention to Americans.
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Yes.
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This is the problem with the rest of the world.
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We've established that.
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Exactly.
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Okay.
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So, yes.
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Social justice issues, economic justice.
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Were you finishing that thought?
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Yeah.
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So, I think they, for me, they are the perfect bloody distraction, Rio Tinto, and I believe
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it was Rio Tinto factory.
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So, welcome cetaceans.
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Necessary.
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That blew up some 60,000-year-old indigenous cave somewhere for a mine.
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Come on.
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Yeah.
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They said sorry.
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It's a mining company if people don't know what Rio is or it was PHP or one of those.
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Yeah.
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One of the big ones.
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Yeah.
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And anyway.
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And so, during that conversation when I'm talking to people around me, before I had pundits
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politics, I was like, I mean, once again, they're like, oh, it's going to be too far reaching
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on my core.
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Would Rio Tinto, and all these massive list of corporations, would they be backing this?
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If it literally did anything but a virtue signal and apparently couldn't get a virtue signal
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over the line for whatever reason, but that's kind of my point.
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I'm trying to, I'm trying to ignore that stuff, trying to pull people away from that
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stuff.
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Because as much as it impacts a certain subset of people, which for them it's real and
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for them it's a struggle, for the average Aussie punter like me sitting in Newcastle,
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the thing that benefits sort of everybody are these big structural issues going corruption
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in politics.
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The fact that politicians are taking massive donations, they're afraid of Rupert Murdoch,
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they're literally up-controlled.
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Every issue we have comes back to corporate control of our government and there's endless
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examples that I keep coming across that shock me every single time where I'm like, really?
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Martin Ferguson.
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Martin Ferguson?
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I believe that's what I want to get this name right.
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If I'm going to get this name, check out a politician.
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Let's just be more vague.
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I think it's what I'm saying.
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A man whose name rhymes with Blatt and Blurbister?
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Yes.
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And fact check it, ex-resource minister for the Labor Party back in the Rudgillard Rud era,
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wrote the PRRT, or was instrumental in making it all, how to hand it at whatever, then
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went to work for British gas.
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He is now currently the head of or high up top exec of the energy producers Australia,
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which is a fancy organization that helps gas cartels not pay tax in Australia.
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Four of the five members don't pay tax, they get our gas for free blah, blah, blah.
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Like for me, I'm like, this is what Australian politics should center on.
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So why is that corrupt?
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So like, not corrupt.
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It's all out, it's totally legal, don't sue me.
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Yeah, right.
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Is it the law?
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I'm not trying to catch you.
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Why do punters think it's corrupt?
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Because I do think it's corrupt.
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I think it's corrupt, it's my opinion.
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So like, let's imagine that someone comes out of the oil and gas industry and then gets
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appointed to be the minister for resources.
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I can understand why that would look corrupt, because obviously they still have, I mean,
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they may be doing the bidding of their former colleagues, but when you flip it the other
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way around and you say a politician should never allow it to be allowed to become a lobbyist
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for the industry that they were previously representing, what's the concern exactly?
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Well, the concern is the sweet high paying gigs that they get and the apparent coincidence
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that the people who used to be the politicians and there's a conversation article, some
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professor wrote about it, showing the number of positions that move between, and it's not
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just politicians, it's staffers, it's people that work in parliament cycling through
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it.
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So it's a series of coincidences that somehow have led, so we can say, is it corrupt,
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is it not, and politicians and academics that want to have this like really robust debate
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around?
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Well, technically, is it allowed?
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The court of law, I'd be sued, I'd be screwed, because it's legal and they're like, well,
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you can't prove it.
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I don't think they would say that it's always just a coincidence that we have them to get
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jobs in the same sector.
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Wouldn't their argument be to steal manate?
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You need people who understand how policy is made in these companies.
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We obviously have expertise, we've worked at the call phase, both in the public sector
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and the private.
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Who better than us?
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I don't know, a professor who studied this stuff.
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Someone else who hasn't worked for them, we're a big world judge.
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And the thing is, they're highly paid as well.
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So you get all right money as a politician.
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So is it too much to sacrifice an even more highly paid gig?
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So the question, I guess I'm asking, what's the downside for the country in having someone
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who used to be in government working in a mining company?
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Conspiracy or coincidence?
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And you can answer this, punters can answer this.
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But I've described the scenario where this is happening in lots of sectors across.
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And let's just focus on oil and gas in Australia and our resources.
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Coincidentally, these politicians moved from government into private sector and back
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out.
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Coincidentally, Qatar, we exported more gas and Qatar.
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They made 70 billion.
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We made two.
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Norway, 133 billion, because they have a state owned tax at 78%.
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Why doesn't the strait, why and impacts, that's the thing I've got in the form of my
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mind.
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I could do about a while later.
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But impacts, Japanese owned mining gas company, part owned by the Japanese government, I believe
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fact, yes, welcome.
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They get our gas for free.
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In the last 10 years, they've gotten 40 billion dollars in income, paid zero in royalties.
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They literally get the import for their business for free.
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This is not smart business.
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This is not innovating.
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This is not anything.
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Wait, they get it.
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We give it to them.
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Well, they have the gas.
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They sold it made 40 billion dollars.
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And this is where it gets complicated.
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The PRT is a royalty resource rent.
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It's the, and the way it's set up, although pay us later for it with some other, that boring
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explanations as to why we don't have any.
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But for the everyday punter, like me, I'm not, I'm not an academic, I'm not a university
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professor.
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I'm just looking at 10 years of impacts operating in this company, country or more,
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couldn't tell you exactly, with record numbers of income and profits, didn't pay anything
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for the gas.
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Right.
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But one mechanism by which a country can make stupid decisions, like not taxing its mining
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companies or gas companies, is to look at what happened when a previous government did
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try under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, where any time a government tries to, they tried
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to introduce a super resources tax, I think they called it, like a super mining profits
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tax, where it wants mining companies in a certain, over a certain amount, they'd get
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taxed.
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And of course, it was a, you know, millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, went
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into a national scare campaign funded by the mining industry to tell everybody that
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everything is going to go get expensive, they hit the airwaves saying we're going to
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have to leave, you know, we're not going to be mining in Australia anymore, we'll move
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to Brazil or Indonesia.
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Yeah.
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Some other country stable democracy that has a resources in the ground.
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We'll just go there.
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Yeah.
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Exactly.
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Like, you know, if people aren't aware, Australia is an absolute mining behavior.
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It has like, I think it's number two on uranium, number three in the world on books.
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You look at the list.
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It produces, it just, we're going to be here in Canada, like just total, totally dominate
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on the per capita or GDP basis for how big our mining industries are, the idea that they
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would pull out and like go to, especially if they get it for free, yeah, it's crazy.
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Well, even if they didn't get it for free, right?
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But isn't that a more parsimonious explanation of what, like so basically, the government
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fell.
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Yeah.
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You know, the long story short is that the government basically collapsed in the,
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tried and gave up.
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They tried, gave up.
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It was a total national scandal and then the, and then the conservatives got in and then
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it was just never heard of again.
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Yeah.
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That dynamic can happen regardless of whether or not politicians are going into lobbying
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position.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It's all those things.
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It's everything.
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It's that, like the fact that corporations dominate our media, the fact that Rupert Murdoch
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sets the conversation to gender in our country, like every time, every issue people talk
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about generally that hits the, like the establishment of media, Murdoch's kind of like nudged it.
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Like, and so that kind of sets the conversation because he owns so much of the media apparatus
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and the Labor Party are just afraid of him.
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Of course, they're afraid of him.
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They didn't pass gambling legislation.
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They labor, wrote themselves.
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They wrote the policy themselves with a former minister and then everyone's on board with
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it except the Libs.
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This was a gambling policy to ban gambling advertising like across the board.
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Right.
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The policy punters were all cool with it.
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Like, yeah, we're not making gambling illegal, just stop it in sport when my kid's watching
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because I used to be a teacher, I'm at school, we've got a state of origin, and this guy's
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like, I put 50 bucks on, like on New South Wales and I was like, cool, he's like, you know,
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the odds are like, oh no, he's like, whoa, there it is.
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I'm like, okay.
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And this kid's like 13, 14, so I'm like, you know, that can't be great, you know, for
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their education.
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And Australia is a washing gambling Australia as a leader, whether we lose the most in
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the world or something.
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Anyway, we've got about some problem.
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It's clear there.
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It's non-controversial.
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You're not going to lose votes, like in the mining thing, whatever, once again, conspiracy
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or coincidence.
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Murdoch makes a lot of money from gambling ads, right?
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Gambling industry and sporting industry do as well.
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So there's some other vested interests.
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All of a sudden, Albo's like, oh no, we can't, we don't know, we don't, we don't
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pass it.
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Well, I will put some other things in all the experts say, if you make the, if you change
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it to have like, in this scenario or not, and you make it more specific, they slip
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through the cracks.
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It's complicated.
20:35
You make them all lose polls.
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There are.
20:37
Essentially kind of did that.
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And I just go, once again, Aussie Punta, well, geez, you were for this, you said you
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do it.
20:42
You're not, you're clearly afraid of this powerful individual named Rupert Murdoch.
20:47
And it makes sense because of the example you gave with the mining industry.
20:51
I just find, don't you find that reductive though, the idea that it's just because he's
20:54
afraid of Rupert Murdoch?
20:55
I mean, I think there are a lot of ways.
20:56
Yeah.
20:57
Yeah, but this is what I do.
20:58
This is my job.
21:00
You're right.
21:01
That's a reason.
21:02
Like, there were lots of reasons.
21:03
It's also this example recently of Tanya Plyboseko's the environment minister, I think,
21:07
and like had this big new policy that she'd been hammering out with the Greens Party for
21:12
years about a compromise on like a national environmental policy.
21:17
And then the Prime Minister just shot it in the head, took it out behind the shed and
21:21
shot it in the end.
21:22
And the WA Premier was apparently saying that was me.
21:25
Yeah.
21:26
That's a recording.
21:27
It's here.
21:28
The West Stream Premier, who's from the same party as the federal government.
21:31
And so then you look at that and you go, okay, well, is that Murdoch, is that mining
21:38
companies?
21:39
Wouldn't it just be the same vested interest?
21:40
Yeah.
21:41
So there's just so many.
21:43
There's just so many.
21:44
You look at things from a conspiratorial point of view and I look at things from like
21:48
a structural or cultural point of view.
21:50
And I think what's happening is that there's a, what you might call an old boys club,
21:56
but it's not just boys anymore of like subtle networks of people who listen to each
22:03
other.
22:04
Yeah.
22:05
I think that's sort of what you're pointing to with the revolving door between industry
22:08
and government that it's not exactly a problem per se that I think by definition that a
22:16
person in government shouldn't be able to ever work in the industry that they're regulating.
22:21
It's just that in practice, they still know people who are in parliament house.
22:27
They still have a beer with the person who knows someone who is still, you know, in some
22:32
regulatory capacity.
22:34
They know people at Murdoch's, you know, newspapers who also know people in mining companies.
22:41
And there's this gigantic kind of subtle circle jerk that we all feel a bit lift out of.
22:47
Which we punters would call corruption.
22:49
The everyday Aussie would call corruption.
22:52
You're correct.
22:53
All like guys that have the time to sit down and analyze this power structures and how
23:00
it happens.
23:01
Because it's never overt.
23:02
It's never like, hey, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
23:05
But when I just connect the dots from the outside in looking at this political system,
23:10
what can happen in the political conversation is a little bit like you're correct.
23:15
When you sit down and you spell it out and go, well, there's this factor, this factor,
23:19
this factor that all culminate in the fact that we're getting scanned, we're the biggest
23:22
losers in the whole world, we're giving our resources away for free, we could be rich
23:25
to the Norway.
23:26
That's like the end result of all of what you're talking about.
23:30
But my whole job right now is to take people that are really disengaged.
23:37
It's not working for them.
23:39
And try and hand them some patent to pay attention to that I think is worth paying attention
23:45
to.
23:46
And though, what I then do is make things technically incorrect by saying, coincidental
23:52
conspiracy, you tell me, the things I'm pointing at I would argue is kind of still a problem,
23:58
even though you're like, oh, well, there's this network of people like somehow carry
24:02
stokes owns the media in WA and somehow when WA put in the gas reservation policy, somehow
24:10
the mind that carries stokes was invested in got an exemption, we're yet, and I can keep
24:17
naming these examples.
24:19
So I guess I'm trying to say, I don't want people to be conspiratorial and I want people
24:23
to, I want, I want to be specific about my critiques and things like that.
24:26
So you pulling me up on leaps too far, but I also want to involve people in a conversation
24:32
where they only have time for the flyover.
24:34
They only have time to go, well, here's what we should be paying attention to and what
24:37
I would say is just look at how your politician votes, are they doing what they are saying?
24:43
And can we get some reform to the point where all the stuff you're talking about, we can
24:47
slowly create a system and structures and rules that all Aussie punters would agree on,
24:53
that minimise the gamer mates that's going on and we can start with the obvious stuff.
24:58
With even if this minister had no idea that they wrote favourable rules and then got a
25:04
job in impacts and wasn't like looking at the door, winking, winking, going, well, you
25:08
know, I can go work in this sector because I have experience in it.
25:10
These are the stories we tell.
25:13
The everyday Aussie would go, yeah, but probably shouldn't hey, even if that didn't happen deliberately
25:18
and there is no quid pro quo, you represent us, you should work for us and there shouldn't
25:23
even be the appearance of conflict of interest.
25:28
So no one who works in government should be able to go and work in the same sector that
25:33
they were regulating and vice versa.
25:35
Presumably, no one should be able to become a minister or work in a minister's office
25:39
if they worked in that industry.
25:42
That would be reform number one.
25:44
Something I don't say much yet.
25:46
This is where it gets to the level of like, I'd listen to smarter people debate how it
25:50
goes.
25:51
This is why I am smarter person and there's suggesting it.
25:55
But I would also say number two would be politicians can't take gifts from industries
26:00
that they regulate.
26:01
I would have thought that is obvious, but they kind of don't, right?
26:05
They do.
26:06
Well, every minister, I mean, yeah, Peter Dutton did fly a jitter-on-hats jet somewhere
26:10
like, we're cool with that.
26:11
But also, like, I mean, I was just trying to explain to an American friend of mine why
26:17
Qantas is so shit and far behind technologically in his and to other airlines.
26:22
And I was like, this is what happens when a monopolistic company gives free upgrades
26:28
and chairman's lounge access to all ministers so that they will back protectionist anti-competitive
26:34
policies that don't benefit the Australian flying public and keep worrying millions of
26:39
dollars into a private company.
26:44
That is just a reality and a fact of the way that politicians profit from this one company
26:53
and treat it as if it wasn't like a private profit-making company.
26:56
But like some kind of national icon.
26:58
The most outrageous thing about that whole scenario is how cheap our politicians are, a chairman's
27:04
lounge membership.
27:05
That's what stops Qatar Airways coming in here.
27:08
But you know what's interesting, Joe Aston was on the show, who's the journal who wrote
27:11
the book about Qantas and Dutton Apple, who wrote all those stories and he makes a really
27:17
interesting point in that book, which is politicians are the only people in society who live the
27:24
lives of the rich and famous and aren't rich.
27:28
A politician wakes up in the morning, a limousine comes and picks them up.
27:33
It takes them to the today show where they're watched by millions of people, people listen
27:37
to them, they're ported, they go to fancy lunches.
27:41
And then they go home and they make, you know, $180,000 a year or something.
27:46
That is not bad, but like it's, you know, it's, well, it depends on the PM or something.
27:52
But the point is, it's not, I'm flying to LA so I can drop 15 grand on a business class
27:59
ticket money, right?
28:02
And that's really interesting.
28:03
So there's this sweet spot at which the only time in their lives when they have to endure
28:07
the ignominy of being a normal person is when they're going on a personal holiday.
28:13
And it'd be sort of a bit weird to see a senior government cabinet minister sitting in
28:20
seat 53 K on the flight to LA weird, but how good for their ego would have been.
28:26
And great for us as well.
28:27
Great for everybody.
28:28
Oh, I just need a ton of beans before I got on and fart next to my whole way.
28:32
Make a life as miserable as possible.
28:34
But that's our life.
28:35
Welcome.
28:36
Welcome.
28:37
Welcome to the Hoi Polo.
28:38
Welcome to being a punter.
28:39
Yes.
28:40
What's a punter to you?
28:41
You use the word a lot.
28:42
I do.
28:43
What's part of the brand?
28:44
Yeah.
28:45
No, you know this, but it's on the t-shirt.
28:47
It's a good t-shirt, I like the t-shirt.
28:49
For American friends of the show.
28:50
Yes.
28:51
And I think it works in America too.
28:53
Is it a word in America?
28:54
Yeah.
28:55
It's like the kicker of NFL.
28:56
Of course.
28:57
Yeah.
28:58
Yeah.
28:59
So they've got the punter, which is often an Aussie, by the way, comes from a sometimes
29:02
some NFL players go over to play some NFL punters in the world, or they make way more
29:06
money.
29:07
Right.
29:08
Yeah.
29:09
So there's that punter.
29:10
Right.
29:11
And then obviously there's the Aussie one where they gamblers.
29:12
So the punter is someone having a punter, gambling, which is what we do a lot of.
29:18
But it's now just become, you know, every day Aussie slaying for just the punters in
29:23
the pub.
29:24
The people just having a crack.
29:25
I don't know.
29:26
I mean, is that slaying an Aussie?
29:27
That's an Aussie term, right?
29:28
It could be.
29:29
Just so.
29:30
No.
29:31
Your entire brand.
29:32
Your entire brand is revolving around the world.
29:33
I did get stuck.
29:34
You don't know.
29:35
Is that it?
29:36
The origins for it.
29:37
Do I need the Latin part?
29:38
Yeah, no.
29:39
No, but so to an American listener, a punter, what's the best way of describing it?
29:44
It's a man in the street.
29:46
Just an average joke.
29:47
Just an average joke.
29:48
I'm average joke politics.
29:49
That's what I am.
29:50
That's what I am.
29:51
It's a punter.
29:52
Yeah.
29:53
And it's just, you know, in Australia, we say, like, does it pass the pub test?
29:57
Can you go to the pub and just sell it to the average everybody?
29:59
Which is, does it pass the smell test or the bullshit test?
30:02
Yeah.
30:03
Yeah.
30:04
Yeah.
30:05
And so that's kind of what I'm trying to do.
30:08
And what I mean, what's interesting about what you focus on and why I think it's useful
30:10
is that it is like a meta critique of the way that politics works.
30:16
In the sense that, you know, it's been a lot of time on policy.
30:20
It's been more time on, like, corruption, you know, why are we allowing this to happen?
30:26
Why are we not insisting that things function better?
30:29
And shouldn't we all be able to agree on this regardless of our political persuasion?
30:34
We've just touched on sort of the revolving door, you know, self-interest thing.
30:40
I want to talk about the media, but I also want to talk about gas and natural resources,
30:45
which we also touched on.
30:46
We mentioned in passing Norway and some other country, the task, the Qatar.
30:50
Yeah.
30:51
What do they do that we don't and what should we be doing?
30:54
Yeah.
30:55
This is where you get policy and this is where I get fuzzy.
30:57
Right.
30:58
Straighter, you're bad.
31:00
Qatar.
31:01
Great.
31:02
Hang on.
31:03
Wait a second.
31:04
So in between those two sections, that's where I sit.
31:06
Yeah.
31:07
So as far as I understand, Norway taxes, well, Norway has a stake in its own oil company.
31:11
Norse oil is part owned by the Norwegian government.
31:15
No one, it's got a stake in it, direct dividends.
31:17
So the Norwegian government owes it, the Norwegian citizens have a stake and get the dividend
31:21
from it.
31:22
And this is where I'm going to get hazy someone smarter than me and the comments can work
31:25
it out.
31:26
But the tax rate for oil and gas is at 78%.
31:28
Now, I don't know if that includes the dividend share of the owning part of the corporation,
31:33
but basically they have like a futures fund, which is a massive $3 trillion basket of cash
31:39
from their mineral.
31:41
So they've avoided the resource curse, which is this thing where if countries like us,
31:46
we have Dutch disease where you have lots of resources.
31:49
One, other countries come and take it or you become overly reliant on that money from
31:54
those resources.
31:55
You just buy people's votes every election until you run out of that resource bin as well.
32:00
And then the country kind of collapses because you haven't built a sustainable kind of
32:04
funding model for government, which Australia hasn't fully fallen into because we don't
32:10
get any money for it.
32:11
We just started to do our best to avoid Dutch disease by letting us own exon cartel come
32:17
into our country, take our gas for free and pay nothing in income taxes and nothing for
32:22
the gases.
32:23
So we're not reliant on the revenue because we barely get any.
32:28
So yeah, to Norway is like the gold standard, right?
32:31
They must pay like a leasing fee or something, right?
32:35
What do they pay?
32:36
Well, you think about it like a baker or a builder has to buy their resource, back
32:41
has to buy flour, builder has to buy bricks.
32:43
For these people, they're just like, I'm going to build a house where you can have the
32:46
bricks for free, mate.
32:48
You just haven't.
32:49
So that's what we're doing for them.
32:51
Yeah, it's a mate.
32:52
And then, sorry, it gets even worse is because you had a gas shortage.
32:57
Apparently we're running out of gas because we gave it all away to another company and
33:04
they sold it overseas for heaps of money like Japan is on selling our gas because they
33:07
get it for so cheap.
33:08
So they're making money out of our gas.
33:10
We don't have enough for us driving up our energy costs because we have to buy it at
33:14
the same rate that they would sell it out in Europe because of wars and stuff.
33:19
So we're buying back our own gas that we probably gave people for free because we're running
33:22
out of it.
33:23
And then the solution from these gas cartels is to say, I see we've got to drill for more
33:27
gas.
33:28
There we go.
33:29
You look at the graph and it's like, we're giving away this much, we're burning this
33:31
much here in Australia.
33:32
They use this much of it, I'm using like a third of it, just to compress it into LNG
33:38
to then ship it.
33:39
So we use more of our gas.
33:42
You need the energy to compress the energy to put it on a boat to send it away so you can
33:45
buy it back.
33:46
Yes.
33:47
Correct.
33:48
So yeah, I mean, you're making me feel like we should just be communists, really.
33:51
We should just nationalize this sector and just keep out, keep out, why are we paying
33:57
for gas at all?
33:58
We've got shit tons of it, literally just give it, give me, give me, give me, give me,
34:05
give me, make it rain gas, baby, just a little bit.
34:07
Yeah.
34:08
So by the standards of what Australia has, we have so much natural resources.
34:15
We could give it, we could give ourselves as much as we want to for free and it would
34:19
probably not even be 10% of the total output of our natural resources.
34:23
But like you said, the gold standard is Norway.
34:25
So gas cartels could buy us off of super cheap and be like, okay, okay, okay, you're
34:29
getting upset about this.
34:30
All right, we'll give it to you for free.
34:31
And we're like, hey, you know, cheaper energy for us, great.
34:34
But then the gold standard is your energy for us free.
34:37
I don't want cheap.
34:38
I want free.
34:39
I want free.
34:40
Come back to me when we're talking about free free, especially for manufacturing sector,
34:44
like we could be manufacturing powerhouse with all this stuff.
34:46
But the ship's kind of sad on that.
34:47
The gold standards Norway where they have the fund, they still have high taxes, they're
34:52
still a high taxing nation, they're not reliant on the, on the funds that they get from
34:56
all of their oil, because they put it in a soft and well fund that when oil runs out,
35:00
the soft and well funds like a two to three trillion dollars, by the time their oil
35:03
is run out, it's probably five or six trillion dollars, they're just invested all over
35:06
the world.
35:07
They're now, they turned their oil into a massive piggy bank that keeps printing money
35:12
for them as a nation.
35:14
We have pissed away decades of our like, we're like, we remember the mining resources boom
35:21
for the coal and like, exactly like you said, we got boxed out, we got aluminium, we
35:24
got what everything and our top royalty, I think Queensland just did up their coal royalty
35:30
as to a progressive or whatever, that's between like 10 and 15%, they'd made it progressive
35:35
so when the price goes higher, it gets higher.
35:37
So Queensland actually did a really good thing, watch Queensland, they may get rid of
35:40
it because the Liberal government, who knows, but the coal in New South Wales is like our
35:45
great royalty is like between 10 and 12% sort of thing.
35:49
So that's kind of what we're talking about and so I guess what I'm doing, and you're
35:52
saying Norway is 70 to 80% right on trust, yeah, well with that's like taxes and all
35:57
the things wrapped in together, but the flyover is we could also have a sovereign wealth
36:03
fund that when our resources run out, which they will eventually, maybe not in our lifetime,
36:10
we will be set for life or we could have resources run out and we have nothing.
36:17
Why are we doing it then?
36:20
And then we go back to short term gains from politicians and media and like how scary
36:26
it becomes, it's really hard because like the public needs to be literate enough about
36:33
this stuff politically to understand that a scare campaign is just a bullshit scare campaign
36:38
and they should ignore it.
36:40
Yes.
36:41
It's very hard to do that when the information that the public gets is filtered through
36:46
the biases of corporations who are invested in this.
36:50
Yes.
36:51
So then, you know, a long come social media and goes, well, all right, now we're going
36:54
to unleash the power of the individual to sort of democratize information.
36:59
But at the same time, as you get wise geniuses like you and me, you also get a lot of shit
37:07
that further confuses and bamboozles people and all of a sudden the next time there's
37:12
a pandemic, you're going to have a lot more people thinking like vaccines and both.
37:16
Yeah.
37:17
A lot of me know which is out there.
37:18
Yeah, that's right.
37:19
Epidemiologists about how your heart's going to explode in your chest.
37:21
If you take the 5G vaccine chip that Bill Gates made, they read an abstract.
37:26
It's so what do you do with that then?
37:30
Scoot-koot.
37:31
You make more videos on you as a YouTube short.
37:34
I guess.
37:35
Honestly.
37:36
Get loose, baby.
37:37
Like, I don't know.
37:38
I think everything you point out is exactly that the good news is is that the power centers
37:45
of information disbursement is being cracked open.
37:49
People are wising up to Murdoch's propaganda machine, like they kind of like, okay, corporate
37:53
media is a bit obviously leading us astray, covering the stuff I'm not talking about.
37:57
But like you said, it's always in subtle ways.
37:59
It's not that they're lying to us, especially corporate media.
38:02
They're just not talking about it.
38:05
Right?
38:06
Like no corporate media is spoken to me yet.
38:08
ABC has recently been, I was just at ABC radio this morning, did like, you know, go,
38:15
go.
38:16
Oh, this has been interesting.
38:17
This guy's going to be following, turns out people do care about this issue.
38:20
Corporate media haven't done it.
38:21
And that's kind of what they do.
38:22
They go, let's just ignore it and hope it goes away because we've done 20 years of propaganda
38:25
against this sort of thing.
38:26
Oh, communists, if you get your own, if you take your own resources for free, whereas
38:31
I'm like, no, no, no, this is pure capitalism.
38:34
That's my shit in the ground.
38:35
That's mine.
38:36
Where the hell is my dividend?
38:37
So that's actually it's more capitalist to do it yourself as a government because we own
38:43
it, but all that being said with the media sphere.
38:46
So it's kind of splintering a little bit into different information sources.
38:50
But I think, I don't, I think we're entering a new age of illiteracy.
38:55
We're literate enough to read, we're literate enough to fool ourselves with our own biases.
38:59
We can read whatever we want.
39:00
We can read abstracts, but we, but we're too illiterate enough to know, you know, like,
39:06
let's take scientific papers like, I don't know what's a good sample size, what it should
39:10
avoid, what epidemiological studies should be included, whether this paper's been discredited
39:14
by this guy who's actually the Goldstein, I don't know.
39:17
So I can read something.
39:18
You have too much information, you know, I had a segment on my ABC radio show called
39:22
Do Your Own Research, which was basically a refutation of the idea that you should
39:26
do your own research.
39:27
I'm with you.
39:28
Bring that back.
39:29
I was like, you know, no, I'm going to get an expert so that you don't have to do your
39:32
own research because how could you possibly do your own research as well as the expert
39:36
has done their research because they devote their entire life to it?
39:39
And you know what?
39:40
You have to make pin-up out of sandwiches for your kids to take to school, actually not
39:44
pin-up out of it because that'll be enough allergies that everyone will die.
39:48
But you know what I mean?
39:49
Yeah.
39:50
Unless you're a homicidal parent, you're going to make the, the, you have vagimites
39:53
amateurs.
39:54
So the idea that you should do your own research and that the solution, I mean, I find
39:59
this personally tricky because I'm something of a free speech.
40:03
So I do think that the best solution to a bad idea is more ideas and more argumentation
40:09
and more speech.
40:11
But at the same time, I also feel like if someone is misguided and reading a whole lot of
40:19
nonsense, I'm not sure that the best thing to do is to go, he has 50 more randomly selected
40:25
books that may or may not be, you know, accurate.
40:29
And you can't tell it how or not.
40:31
Yeah, here's another.
40:32
Yeah, you keep reading more and do more research in this fire hose of information that we're
40:37
throwing at you.
40:38
So maybe we need some, I mean, well, I guess what I'm actually asking for here, I'm just
40:44
talking about something to a corner in which we need a good public broadcaster because the
40:47
point of, I don't know what I'm saying, we don't have one, but we could use the need
40:51
of a more aggressive and courageous and less risk-averse public broadcaster who filters
40:58
facts, just gives you the facts.
41:01
People trust that it doesn't have a political slant and that it's not, you know, taken
41:05
over by factions ideologically.
41:09
I think that is maybe the longer term solution, the fact that America doesn't have that is
41:14
a problem.
41:15
Well, have you read you've all Harari's nexus?
41:19
No, I haven't read it yet, but I've read the other two and you're on my bedside table.
41:24
So he gave me some interesting ideas around this free speech media and things like that
41:29
because normally I'm in your corner, I'm like, you don't want to be censoring people,
41:32
you don't want to be doing all that stuff.
41:33
But I think the conversation, the free speech conversation is a deliberate misrepresentation
41:38
of what's actually going on because it's not like anyone's ever been at threat to going
41:44
to jail for saying something, which is like, you're very rigid, free speech.
41:48
I can say what I want, Albo's not going to lock me out.
41:50
Well, that's not entirely true outside of the states, there are, like, yes, I'm talking
41:55
Australia.
41:56
No, even in Australia, like there are instances in which like free speech, in which you say
42:02
something and you can get locked up for it.
42:05
There were people arrested during COVID for, you know, that was, I was still on the
42:09
Facebook about how they wanted to go to that woman chair, and that was a plan, you
42:14
know, I take that back, so they're corrected.
42:16
So there are certain.
42:17
Yeah.
42:18
Okay.
42:19
Excellent point.
42:20
But when it comes to how Musk is talking about free speech on his platform and all
42:24
of these sorts of things, it's like, in all of a sudden, we all want to talk about free
42:28
speech, which we can all get on board with.
42:30
We shouldn't be like censoring people, but you've all right, brings in the other element
42:33
that's the kind of counters what you were saying, where you're like, more speech better.
42:37
He's kind of points to history and goes, truth doesn't always sift to the top.
42:42
In fact, most of the time it doesn't, he brings up like to say them, which trials and
42:46
all these things.
42:47
Well, like this pandemic of misinformation just kind of runs rampant because it's more
42:51
potent than the truth.
42:52
Like, with your saying, when you're like, well, technically, like in this scenario, it
42:56
might not have been explicit.
42:57
Like, that doesn't travel as well as me saying, God, content is that correct.
43:02
So, so truth is my problem.
43:04
I need more clickbaits.
43:05
I'll just help me out here, help a brother out.
43:08
Love me on Substack where they can listen to me for hours.
43:11
Tell me the nuance of your article.
43:13
Yeah, exactly.
43:14
But I'm not on the, I can't do a YouTube short to say my word.
43:18
I know.
43:19
It's, it's tough because you have to, and this is what might be so self-certain.
43:23
This is my, well, and that's my personal problem, which I never wanted to get into this.
43:26
Right.
43:27
Because I don't know anything.
43:28
And if you have a good air of knowledge, yeah, but it's, it's always like this and
43:32
what about that?
43:33
You know, you can drop way more stats on, on stuff.
43:35
Yeah, but I'm always equivocating about like, I know that that's good, that's what you
43:39
want.
43:40
Right, man.
43:41
You don't want to listen to me.
43:42
I'm only here because I do want to listen to you.
43:44
That's why you're in this room.
43:45
That's good.
43:46
I know, but you shouldn't because I don't know what I'm talking about.
43:49
Everybody don't listen to him.
43:50
I'm subscribed.
43:51
You got this far ahead.
43:52
We got there.
43:53
Right.
43:54
And this is just my premise for how I approach it.
43:55
Yes.
43:56
He's going, I'm an idiot.
43:58
I can be fooled on anything that I don't know anything about.
44:01
Right.
44:02
So this whole dough stuff coming out of him's like, oh, it's outrageous to spend money on
44:05
that.
44:06
I'm like, well, you didn't even know that USAID was a department before now.
44:10
And now you've been given a stat out of context without anything around it.
44:15
Of course, it sounds like a scam.
44:17
But are you in your couch, the best person with one tweet from one billionaire guy saying
44:23
that is, is that the best way to determine whether it's government waste or not?
44:26
I'm not saying it.
44:27
Hey, hit government waste.
44:28
I hate government waste, for sure.
44:31
But I can be fooled.
44:33
And that's kind of what I'm trying to enter the conversation to kind of go, okay, here
44:37
are some broad strokes.
44:39
Here's how we can get more degrees of certainty around certain things.
44:45
And here's how you collect a bunch of people smarter than you to help you sift the world.
44:51
Because like you said, there's too much information.
44:53
We are community creatures.
44:54
We need almost a centralized place where we pay people to sift through all the bullshit
44:59
and then give me a one hour podcast about why it's misinformation, why it's not.
45:03
And those people are called journalists and they have jobs.
45:06
Really?
45:07
So that's a crazy idea, right?
45:09
But then corporations bought all the journalistic outlets and then they lent on what they should
45:13
call them.
45:14
They're not public broadcasting, truth, news.
45:17
But there's still a leaning happening on to these so it starts with the corporate.
45:21
They kind of lean on it.
45:22
We're invested in that.
45:23
Don't talk about that story.
45:24
They're not lying to you.
45:25
They just don't mention it.
45:26
People aren't interested in that.
45:27
So they feed you the junk food.
45:28
And then that's what's happened with social media.
45:30
We think, oh, like it's all free speech now because of social media.
45:33
You got a billionaire that owns every single one.
45:35
And the algorithm.
45:36
And this is where you vote, Rory, at least I think lands the plane on like, don't attack
45:41
free speech, don't attack individuals.
45:42
This is where I think the left has gone off kind of losing its own fight.
45:46
Don't attack people for what they say.
45:47
People are idiots.
45:48
They're going to say dumb shit.
45:49
That's what we do.
45:50
I don't know any.
45:51
I'm probably said a few wrong things.
45:52
Now, I say that I'm just trying to grasp everything I can.
45:56
People can say what they want, but bots cannot.
45:59
And algorithms should be transparent.
46:01
And so I just kind of got the tree and go corporate influence on media organizations is a big
46:07
problem.
46:08
And now we've got corporate influence on algorithms.
46:11
All an algorithm is an automated editor.
46:14
So you were a journalist.
46:15
You worked there.
46:16
You had an editor being like, how do I cover that?
46:17
Don't cover that.
46:18
Producers saying, like working with you to say what you should do.
46:21
Now we've just outsourced it to an algorithm.
46:23
And Facebook and X and all these people just go, oh, yeah, it's just the algorithm.
46:26
But no, they're making editorial decisions every single minute of every single day.
46:29
But for some reason, AI gets a free pass.
46:32
Because if the ABC published something that was factually very incorrect and ruined someone's
46:36
reputation that'd be in trouble, same with any other legacy media organization.
46:40
But if Facebook boasts a post, makes an editorial decision that they outsource to an AI to get
46:47
clicks, they have no accountability.
46:50
And so I think.
46:51
Yeah.
46:52
And I completely agree.
46:53
Once the algorithm is in the room, then you have to be held accountable for the stuff
46:56
that you're publishing.
46:57
Because you can't hide behind the, well, this is just other people talking to each other
47:01
in a free open town square.
47:03
It's not a town square.
47:04
Because you're the one who's elevating, you know, who's giving, allowing people to stand
47:08
up or hiding them behind a partition, you know, you're the one who's giving them a loud
47:12
hail or a bullhorn or not.
47:16
That's, yes, social media regulations, like a whole other thing.
47:19
I would hope, I mean, part of what has to happen here I am to like, you know, nuance
47:24
bro you again.
47:25
I love it.
47:26
Yeah, I like this.
47:27
About the corporate.
47:28
You're too focused on the role that like Rupert Murdoch plays in the sense that all of
47:35
us have blind spots and all of us have echo chambers and we're all inside bubbles to
47:39
one degree or another.
47:40
Can't escape it.
47:41
Yeah.
47:42
And there can be echo chambers and bubbles that are completely free from corporate influence
47:47
that are just part of a mob mentality.
47:50
I mean, you know, look at the way that the public broadcaster has covered the controversy
47:55
amongst health professionals about what to do, about young people who show up with gender
48:00
dysphoria, who are, you know, 12 years old or something.
48:03
There's been a real live debate in the medical professions about how to treat that.
48:09
There's been a real live debate in, you know, athletics and stuff about what to do about
48:14
trans kids.
48:15
This is, this has become such a boring, horrible, like bitter, disgusting kind of debate
48:19
on both sides now.
48:20
But one couldn't deny that there's been, and you could extend this to Gaza or Palestine
48:27
or whatever, that there's been an intersecting set of kind of thought bubbles where there
48:31
are penalties for speaking bluntly in a bullshit free way about something and everybody is
48:36
kind of certain that they're on the right side of history.
48:39
And that can happen, that can happen without any corporate influence whatsoever.
48:45
That happens as an organic outcropping of the fact that we're tribal mammals who, you
48:50
know, are primates who kind of live in the soup that we live in.
48:54
Well, here's my, here's my theory then and you can tell me if it's worthwhile as I approach
48:59
to this because when you approach politics, there's a million different things true, not
49:04
true, whatever it is.
49:05
So we're like, what do you focus on?
49:06
And that's what I have to do now.
49:07
I'm like, okay, people are looking at my stuff.
49:09
What do I focus on?
49:10
I have to make an editorial decision, go, what do I think is most important?
49:13
Here's my theory.
49:14
And you can debunk it as it goes.
49:16
I'm sharpening my ass.
49:17
Yes, yes.
49:18
That's what I came here for.
49:19
Just get dismantled by nuance.
49:21
Okay.
49:22
So I talk about corporations because there's no data on it.
49:29
Like, I don't know how you would even measure such a thing.
49:32
But in my theory, I'd go, well, corporate influence has, it's fingers it like, let's
49:37
go.
49:38
Let's start at cost of living with year every day punter, energy is expensive, bank
49:42
loans, banks are expensive, food's getting expensive, all those things.
49:47
What are they?
49:48
They're all corporate monopolies.
49:49
Eggs.
49:50
Can we talk about the price of eggs?
49:51
I don't buy eggs.
49:52
Crying out loud.
49:53
Couldn't tell you, are you a vegan or something?
49:56
Like a lazy vegetarian.
49:59
But eggs are vegetarian.
50:00
I just don't like eggs.
50:01
They're just bred against them.
50:03
Okay.
50:04
But anyway, so they got all these things.
50:05
Okay.
50:06
What's the common denominator with every issue in our economy?
50:08
Our economy's actually.
50:09
Eggs is the common denominator.
50:10
Eggs.
50:12
You've got monopolies.
50:14
And so monopolies like corporations have worked out how to make more profit than anyone
50:19
else.
50:20
You could innovate.
50:21
I'm sure.
50:22
Employment people are at sound and pay someone more, you know, it's tricky.
50:25
Or just buy the government, right?
50:27
Make them turn a blind eye to regulatory things so you can keep price gouging up in prices
50:31
all those sorts of things.
50:32
How do you get the consent of everybody else?
50:34
Well, you buy media organizations, you're distracted with culture wars, you do all that
50:37
stuff.
50:38
It's all part of the ecosystem.
50:40
If I would argue and happy to be correct, I would argue that that is a bigger problem
50:44
for our big picture economy and the things that everyday else is struggling with, then
50:50
the one you describe with, yeah, the ABC has probably got a bit of a university-educated
50:55
little circle echo chamber going on with people that know each other and they can get
50:59
a blind spot too.
51:00
So my theory would be because I think that this issue is far bigger and far further
51:04
reaching.
51:05
And if we solved it, that would improve a lot of different outcomes.
51:08
And hopefully what we came up with for that solution would trickle down to the, if we
51:13
built a system that could defend against corporate interest and verification on, you know, information
51:20
and making sure that we have, you know, different, you know, like science, different inputs to
51:24
everything to make sure your accuracy is higher in percentage.
51:28
Yeah.
51:29
You can never be 100%.
51:30
No, absolutely.
51:31
Then I would hope that in your scenario, it also deals with that because that's also
51:34
a problem.
51:35
I just choose to go, I think that one's bigger and that one's more pressing.
51:37
That one touches more thing.
51:38
Yes.
51:39
But that's why I reduce everything to that.
51:41
Yeah.
51:42
And it makes sense.
51:43
And I should just be clear.
51:44
I mean, sometimes when I'm critical of thought bubbles on the social justice left, people
51:48
will say, well, why do you expend any time, you know, complaining about something that
51:53
is less important than the fact that fascists are taking over the right and there's a rise
51:58
in right-wing populism?
52:00
To which my answer is, because I think that the right-wing populism and the right-wing
52:05
takeover is only possible when the left loses sight of its economic, bread, and butter
52:10
issues.
52:11
Right?
52:12
I'm not concerned about conversation, about transgender girls in sport in and of itself.
52:19
I'm concerned about the fact that the less reasonable you sound on common sense issues,
52:25
the more vulnerable you are to culture warriors to denigrate you and try to win people over
52:31
to their bullshit positions, which then allow them to impose their corrupt right-wing view
52:38
of the world.
52:39
And that's why I listen to you, because I agree, I'll have that.
52:42
There you go.
52:43
I'm like, that's, we've got a fight against Big Tobacco, we've got a fight against Big
52:47
Chicken, with the egg prices.
52:49
Yeah.
52:50
Talk to me before we go about mullets.
52:52
Very important issue.
52:54
You should have one.
52:55
So would you say that you've got a mullet exactly?
52:57
I trimmed it into one, but then it's kind of like grown out a little bit.
53:01
It's a very stylish, it's a great hair cut.
53:02
I got it for subtle.
53:04
Yeah.
53:05
So this is a barley hair cut.
53:06
It was $4.
53:07
Yeah.
53:08
Wow.
53:09
Yeah.
53:10
I got it all as expensive for a barley hair cut.
53:11
Oh, that's pretty good.
53:12
It's fancy.
53:13
Yeah, I've been to barley in a while.
53:14
No, I haven't been to barley in a while.
53:15
I haven't been to barley since I was a teenager.
53:17
I have all paid, cost 40 cents when I was last in barley.
53:20
You can pay 15 bucks in a barley, if you don't pay 10.
53:23
Yeah, it's crazy.
53:24
Yeah.
53:25
But I was just booking a trip to Japan because that's what rich fancy people like me do.
53:30
Yeah.
53:31
Everyone's always banging on about how cheap Japan is.
53:33
It is cheap.
53:34
I was just there.
53:35
It's not cheap.
53:36
Oh, it was when I was just there.
53:37
Was it how long ago were you there?
53:39
Four days.
53:40
Really?
53:41
Yeah.
53:42
And what would a hotel, what would like a three-star normal hotel set you back?
53:45
Well, I could just tell you what I did.
53:47
I stayed in another old capsule hotel.
53:49
Yeah, big, right?
53:50
Yeah, yeah.
53:51
That was like 50 bucks a night.
53:52
Oh, really?
53:53
Yeah.
53:54
So I was just, I'm on board with this on-set thing.
53:57
You know, I'm just sitting nude with a bunch of other dudes in a tub.
54:00
It's the nerd thing.
54:01
I'm cool with them for me.
54:02
I like, I'm not a, the wool body shamed, but I was, I found it a bit unexpected because
54:08
I booked a capsule hotel in Tokyo on a stopover from New York to Sydney.
54:13
And I get, I thought, oh, this will be fun, you know, the whole capsule hotel thing.
54:17
It's fun.
54:18
And I'm checking in.
54:19
And then a couple of old Japanese guys just walk past me.
54:22
Oh, well, you tap ears.
54:23
Yeah.
54:24
Completely just little Asian dicks flopping out right in my face.
54:29
Nothing to hide.
54:30
It's a lobby.
54:31
It's a lobby.
54:32
And they're just going from one sauna to the other.
54:35
How's that a sign that said clothes beyond this point?
54:38
Oh, okay.
54:39
There may have been one of those.
54:40
No one was, no one was mindful of that.
54:42
So I just found that a little bit odd.
54:44
Like there's a time and a place for testicles, hotel lobby, in my opinion.
54:48
Onsen?
54:49
Testilver.
54:50
It's just me complaining about how expensive travelers become.
54:53
Hmm.
54:54
A lot of the, like, you know, you look for a three star hotel in Tokyo, you're talking
54:58
about three hundred, four hundred, four hundred and fifty dollars a night.
55:01
Didn't look.
55:02
I have three star.
55:03
Must be nice.
55:04
Three is not very nice.
55:06
Must.
55:07
I, I, one day.
55:08
One day, Josh, I'll let you know how it goes.
55:11
One day, you two will get to stay in an extended stay without some hotel.
55:17
Some blocks snoring through two layers of perspex next to me.
55:21
So is that all you had to say about mullets?
55:23
I thought you were going to put out a real call for in defense of the mullets.
55:27
Well, I think, I, I think the mullet is a good haircut.
55:30
I think you should have one.
55:31
I think it's a haircut of the people, right?
55:33
Haircut of the punters.
55:35
And I think, I think like I was saying before, I think it leans into the Aussie trend of
55:41
showing your confidence, whilst knowing you look silly.
55:47
But because you know you look silly, and everyone else knows that you know that you look
55:50
silly.
55:51
Confidence looks cool.
55:52
Right.
55:53
I see.
55:54
So what you're, what you're calling for is less than mullet, per se, and more than the
55:57
ironic, the knowing mullet.
55:59
I would argue every Aussie with a mullet is doing it ironically.
56:02
That's not true.
56:03
Happy to be for wrong.
56:04
That's not true.
56:05
That's not true.
56:06
That is.
56:07
I mean, it depends where you are.
56:08
In Australia.
56:09
No, it depends where you're in Australia you are.
56:11
It depends.
56:12
I mean, I don't want to be too offensive about your sociocultural nuances.
56:17
Yeah.
56:18
But I think if you're in a, do you reckon any Aussie anywhere in his country is like, yeah,
56:23
yeah, absolutely.
56:24
I'll believe what I see.
56:25
I reckon there's a, no, I reckon if you're in hips to town, right?
56:29
If you're in the kind of place where baristas charge $6.50 for a coffee and they have a
56:35
toilet moustache, then nobody is doing a mullet non-ironically.
56:40
Everyone's doing it ironically in there, right?
56:42
They know what they're doing, but you drive 50 minutes away from the coast.
56:47
You get into the heartland.
56:49
You get into the suburbs.
56:50
We're saying new castles of the heartland?
56:53
Newcastles?
56:54
I don't understand the culture of Newcastle well enough.
56:57
Mining town, footy town, yeah, tradies.
57:00
But like, it's also hip now.
57:04
Yeah, some sections.
57:05
You know, it's like...
57:06
But it's still also not.
57:09
There's like one strip in Newcastle where, you know, you're like, that's nice.
57:13
It's the only strip I've ever been to, a man of my calibre.
57:16
Yeah, three stars, hotels are only there.
57:18
I always started a four stars, because it wasn't Japanese,
57:20
but I wasn't paying him, yeah, no, we're paying him cheap Newcastle dollars.
57:24
You go one street over, mate.
57:26
Right.
57:27
Back to heart, Newcastle.
57:28
Back to like...
57:29
Bogen, footy, corridor driving.
57:31
And is it your assertion that every mullet in Newcastle is an ironic one?
57:35
I reckon you can tell when you walk past, like...
57:38
Because a lot of the punters out there listen to the podcast and watch my stuff.
57:43
They're like tradies, Newcastle blokes, like kind of my crowd.
57:47
And you walk past them and mullet, and you just give them that look you're like...
57:51
Yeah.
57:52
Nice haircut, mate.
57:53
And they're like, yeah, she's mate.
57:54
And I feel like even in, you know, on the job sites,
57:57
if you want to ask someone on a job site, if they kind of know what they're doing,
58:00
they're like...
58:01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
58:02
So I don't know, that's my theory.
58:04
I'm happy with him wrong.
58:05
Give me the data.
58:06
He's citations.
58:07
I will definitely find a peer reviewed in mullet monthly, something about that.
58:14
Do you have a mullet?
58:15
Yes.
58:16
How highly do you rate your mullet 10?
58:17
How highly do you think other people rate your mullet?
58:19
Ooh.
58:20
One.
58:21
And then we'll see what happens.
58:22
That's right.
58:23
Or just like...
58:24
Are you doing it for shits and giggles?
58:26
Like...
58:27
Yeah, I have a mullet.
58:28
Yeah, I have a mullet.
58:29
How much fun are you having with your mullet?
58:31
Exactly.
58:33
I'm telling you.
58:34
John, you should give it a crack.
58:35
I'm going to go with a shot.
58:36
A classy 80s for you.
58:38
For me.
58:39
Yeah.
58:40
Just like a little blend to the back.
58:42
A classy mullet is one that is not too short on top.
58:46
Yeah.
58:47
Not too aggressive.
58:48
Just blend it.
58:49
Whatever you do, you just end up blending it.
58:51
But it's so good, isn't it, to have like a basically fully shaven head that just all
58:55
of a sudden turns into a massive long rat's tail?
58:58
That's aggressive.
58:59
That's it.
59:00
Yeah, I'm not going to tell you how to mullet.
59:01
Yeah.
59:02
Do whatever works here.
59:03
Tell me how Australian politics works.
59:04
Should work.
59:05
Don't listen to me.
59:06
I listen to you.
59:07
All right.
59:08
Any prognostications about the election, about the upcoming Australian election?
59:13
Only hope.
59:15
I only have hope that politicians, that punters are working out, that politicians.
59:21
We all know politicians lie to us.
59:23
I'm pushing people to just pick an issue you care about.
59:26
Look at their voting record.
59:27
Peter Dunn's, well, I've got the living bowl bar, where are your votes against all the solutions
59:31
to it.
59:32
Just have a look at his voting record.
59:33
You can go to David for you and it'll be like on the housing stuff.
59:39
What's he done to alleviate housing crisis?
59:41
What's he done to heal?
59:42
I don't know.
59:43
I don't want to get into like different news, headline, click.
59:45
And the guilty secret about the housing crisis is that everyone says that they want housing
59:50
to be more affordable.
59:51
Still too many people on time.
59:53
Well, I mean, everyone over, everyone who owns a home doesn't want, they want their
59:59
mythical wealth to continue.
1:00:00
Exactly.
1:00:01
They want to keep feeling rich with no income.
1:00:04
Yes.
1:00:05
But it's not totally imaginary because they could sell their house and move to Venezuela
1:00:12
and have a lot of cash.
1:00:14
A lot of cash.
1:00:15
Yeah.
1:00:16
I mean, you could do that.
1:00:18
He's complicated.
1:00:20
The housing thing.
1:00:21
In the sense that like I bought within the past five years, right?
1:00:26
And so for you, you know, $70 million for a small shack.
1:00:35
And although I don't, although I wouldn't shed any tears if people who bought in the 1970s
1:00:43
had to see the price of their house just go back to what it was in say 2015 and they
1:00:50
can bank decades and decades of massive capital growth.
1:00:54
Yeah.
1:00:55
I do think it would be unfair for people like me who spent $70 million on a shack to lose
1:01:01
20 million of that in order to reduce the, like you'd need to somehow compensate people
1:01:08
who have got only gotten into the market recently.
1:01:11
That you were going to lower the overall cost of that just depends on the solutions that
1:01:15
are on the table.
1:01:16
Like Alan Collar is the bloke that I'm, I don't know, I just listen to smarter people
1:01:19
than me and Alan Collar seems to think that you know an economist actually, he's the bloke,
1:01:24
these the ABC bloke who is the old who is the economist.
1:01:28
Yeah, he's an economics journalist here.
1:01:30
Yeah.
1:01:31
Yeah.
1:01:32
So I'd assume you have a piece of paper behind him probably should check that before I
1:01:33
believe what he said.
1:01:34
Got me.
1:01:35
What he got me.
1:01:36
And he seems to think that like there are solutions that can just level off the housing
1:01:40
increase in prices, like we've just come to expect that housing should go up in value
1:01:45
all the time.
1:01:46
Yeah.
1:01:47
And to know the Australians, Australia's property market has doubled every decade for at
1:01:52
least a half century.
1:01:53
So it just, and everyone, every decade everyone's like, well, surely this is going to end,
1:01:57
it kind of keep going up.
1:01:58
And where the generation, I'm the generation that's looking at these prices going.
1:02:01
Yeah.
1:02:02
No, there's nothing I can do to afford.
1:02:03
Absolutely nothing.
1:02:04
Like a house now.
1:02:05
Yeah.
1:02:06
So he, he has a few different solutions like he, he kind of points it because it's a
1:02:10
multi-pronged approach like people just want to blame immigrants, a lot of punters in
1:02:15
most comments on his body immigrants, like they're a factor.
1:02:17
Yes.
1:02:18
What are we doing with immigration?
1:02:19
Are we going forever?
1:02:20
What's the go?
1:02:21
We should have a conversation about that.
1:02:22
The left runs from it.
1:02:23
Have that conversation.
1:02:24
And then also should anyone anywhere in the world be able to buy a house in Australia
1:02:28
with no intention of living in it ever?
1:02:30
No, the question.
1:02:31
It doesn't.
1:02:32
But how often does that happen as well?
1:02:33
According to Alan Collar, he's kind of, he pins it on John Howard's halving of the
1:02:37
capital gains tax in conjunction with negative gearing that turns a housing market into a speculative
1:02:43
asset where people take tax breaks to get gains later, causing people like, and you can
1:02:49
look at the stats.
1:02:50
The people that own the biggest investors and properties are the people with the highest
1:02:53
on paper salaries in Australia.
1:02:55
You got to need the surgeons, principals, all the people with two, three hundred thousand
1:02:58
dollars salaries.
1:02:59
Oh, it must be nice.
1:03:00
I can't wait.
1:03:01
I hope so.
1:03:04
And so they're the people that go, okay, we want to reduce that tax because we get a
1:03:07
halving of the capital gains tax and we can negatively gear.
1:03:09
We'll just take our money and put it into a house.
1:03:11
So we're just buying lots of houses.
1:03:13
So the, as far as I understand, the financialisation of the housing sector is one of the biggest
1:03:18
properties.
1:03:19
I mean, it is totally bonkers that you can deduct the interest on a property that you don't
1:03:25
live in, but not on a property that you do live in.
1:03:28
You know, it's the opposite in America.
1:03:29
Oh, really?
1:03:30
You deduct the interest on your own home to encourage home ownership.
1:03:34
Sounds like a good idea.
1:03:35
Yeah.
1:03:36
I mean, I think it's all stupid.
1:03:37
There shouldn't be any tax reduction at all on property.
1:03:40
But like it is, or like another solution I've heard people talk about is for every tax
1:03:46
file number, which is like a social security number in Australia, you can own three properties,
1:03:52
for example.
1:03:53
But you can't buy more.
1:03:54
You can't have more than three.
1:03:56
So then in America, you go to these financial investment firms, like BlackRock and stuff,
1:04:00
just building portfolios of houses and buying, and I had rumours, so definitely fact checks
1:04:04
on this.
1:04:05
But Albo was wanting to, in one of his housing bills, open up investment from these financial
1:04:09
firms to then build affordable housing.
1:04:11
No, really?
1:04:12
So that's the other thing Alanko is talking about, which is build public housing.
1:04:16
Yes.
1:04:17
Build it directly.
1:04:18
Oh, I see.
1:04:19
I see.
1:04:20
But also just build a shit ton of stuff, because I mean, you sort of put the immigration
1:04:24
thing, but it is true that if you import it, I thought I gave it, Chris says you said
1:04:28
it was true.
1:04:29
But yeah, no, you pooped, I guess people's fixation on it.
1:04:32
Yeah, and that's maybe there's a sort of a lot of poopery on that one.
1:04:34
You do, who do fixate on it too much, but you know, any economist will tell you, if you
1:04:38
keep adding demand and you don't increase supply at the pace that the demand is increasing.
1:04:44
And we do have a very high immigration rate, which I support.
1:04:48
And at the same time, build enough fucking hospital schools and apartments for people,
1:04:53
for those people to live in, so just pour them into the country and not expect things
1:04:56
to get more expensive and scarce.
1:04:58
So then the question becomes, why are we building enough?
1:05:01
And as far as I understand it, smarter people correct me.
1:05:04
But we've got what we've done with government housing is you're just outsourced it.
1:05:09
We're building less government direct housing, which is the government just going, we will
1:05:12
build houses.
1:05:13
Because apparently if the government build a house, it's not an asset, but if a private
1:05:16
sector builds a house, ooh, then it's an asset.
1:05:18
So make up your mind.
1:05:19
Do you want the government to invest in assets?
1:05:21
Build houses.
1:05:22
Create investment, given the returns that our market's just seen.
1:05:25
So build the damn houses.
1:05:27
But then they're also like playing little tricky bugger word games that I'm trying to get
1:05:30
my head around.
1:05:31
That is, oh, affordable housing, affordable, no, no, oh, hang on.
1:05:35
I'm thinking public housing, no, no, affordable, where they give tax breaks incentives to all
1:05:39
these private property developers to build a certain amount of units.
1:05:43
And then they'll do an x percentage of those units that they build at x percent below
1:05:47
market rent.
1:05:48
Whereas if you really want to put pressure and competition into this sector, you build
1:05:54
houses cheaply rented out at cost of production.
1:05:57
The government can just go, we're just going to break even on this.
1:06:00
All of a sudden you've got competition to those expensive property developers because
1:06:04
property developers, a lot of them aren't building in cheap areas where we need the
1:06:07
housing.
1:06:08
Because guess what?
1:06:09
The returns aren't as good there because poor people don't have lots of money.
1:06:12
So they build here.
1:06:13
So there's lots of like, I think from what I've seen in my whole lifetime, private sector
1:06:18
seems to have failed it to build enough houses.
1:06:20
No one blames that we've been letting the private sector build them exclusively or as
1:06:24
close to as possible for so long.
1:06:26
Well, we also don't let the private sector build as much as it would like.
1:06:29
I mean, you would need a double pronged approach, which is lots more public housing built
1:06:33
by the government and allow private, like, we, there are incredible restrictions on what
1:06:39
can be built where in Australia.
1:06:41
Yeah, like I've high rise and I mean, the only option that we give is essentially to
1:06:47
just keep adding to urban sprawl by building more and more suburbs and the outs.
1:06:51
Yeah.
1:06:52
It's like not good.
1:06:53
There is, look at a, look at a city like Paris where the entire thing is medium density.
1:06:58
Basically, it's all, if you think of like the inner west of a city like Sydney where people
1:07:02
like living in that kind of environment, you know, it's a little bit tight.
1:07:06
It's like terraces and things, you think about, you know, I don't know, suburbs like
1:07:10
Marickville or Belmaine.
1:07:11
Yeah.
1:07:12
But it's a good standard of living and it's a lot more dense than suburbs are and you
1:07:17
don't have to have soulless skyscrapers in order to achieve it.
1:07:21
But you could, I mean, you know, there are a lot of tax incentives and development incentives
1:07:25
you could create to try to pack more people onto every hectare of land.
1:07:31
Because I feel like, and this is just my punter feelings on this, I feel like we've been
1:07:34
doing that for a long, bloody time.
1:07:36
And yes, there are still restrictions and yes, we can tighten up those things.
1:07:39
But I came across some other economist, Ken Murray, he was pointing out that someone
1:07:46
Jennings, developer Jennings, he was looking at the like the release of land, the land
1:07:50
that governments approved.
1:07:51
So property developers seem to be saying, oh, that's bloody government, red tape, we're
1:07:54
not building enough houses.
1:07:55
And then it comes out that AV Jennings has been sitting on land and sitting on staff
1:07:59
that's been a government approved is ready to go.
1:08:02
And then the speculation from economists is like, well, the less houses they are, the
1:08:06
more premium they get for what they're building.
1:08:08
So they're going to kind of constrain their own supply because if they flood the market
1:08:13
like we need, they get less money for it.
1:08:16
So once again, my bias is to look at these bludgers and solutions in all angles like
1:08:22
get government efficiency and get like some, yeah, I mean, and also like tax incentives
1:08:26
for people like why is it that our parents, for example, will be or our friends parents,
1:08:31
you know, might be sitting on houses that they bought in the 70s or 80s that they, that
1:08:36
were big enough to raise our family and kids in.
1:08:38
And then when the kids move out, they just stay in that house like it should become, I'm
1:08:44
sorry, old people, but it should, but we should start taxing the value of the property
1:08:48
or something in some way to make it, yeah, to make it financially untenable really for
1:08:55
people to just exist in huge houses.
1:08:59
And we should encourage them to subdivide it or to renovate it in such a way that 14
1:09:04
Vietnamese families can live in instead.
1:09:06
Yeah.
1:09:07
They don't even have to be Vietnamese.
1:09:08
Yeah.
1:09:09
All right.
1:09:10
Final question.
1:09:11
What do you reckon the odds are that when we're old, the things that you're focusing
1:09:16
on now have gotten addressed this next, actually, this next election may be determined
1:09:25
my answer because the trends look good.
1:09:27
The trend away from the major parties who are stiffen us in the pockets of the corporates,
1:09:32
whether it's, you know, light slap on the wrists or just opening the doors, where we're
1:09:40
getting sick of it.
1:09:41
And our political system allows us to do that.
1:09:43
The US have, you don't have the beauty of our electoral system.
1:09:46
I get to vote for who I want and then who I would rather do on a punch in the face or
1:09:51
a kick in the nuts.
1:09:52
I get to choose, but I also get to say, wait, are you talking about preferential voting
1:09:56
or the fact that we have independence who can actually get in both, because then I can
1:10:00
vote for what Americans call,
1:10:02
what are they called preferential voting, rank choice voting, yes, exactly.
1:10:05
The greatest system that could save your democracy.
1:10:07
Yeah, it's fabulous.
1:10:08
It's the best.
1:10:09
I can walk in and go, I'm going to give, I'm going to give funding to my number one.
1:10:13
So the government's going to give their money to try again next time.
1:10:15
And then I can rank them.
1:10:17
And then we're like, listen, we only got the two jerks in your electorate that your vote's
1:10:20
going to go to.
1:10:21
Who do you want?
1:10:22
Well, that guy.
1:10:23
We can do that.
1:10:24
Yeah.
1:10:25
And if Aussies understand that, because major political parties don't want you to understand
1:10:28
that, they talk about, oh, but the Greens just do preference deals.
1:10:31
They talk about, nah, you decide your preferences.
1:10:34
You do.
1:10:35
The Greens don't take my vote.
1:10:36
If I put Greens one, they don't go, oh, well, we'll give it to someone else now.
1:10:40
No, I'd decide that.
1:10:41
Well, if you have the option of only filling in one, in which case, they really indicate
1:10:45
their preferences.
1:10:46
Yeah, that's right.
1:10:47
I'm getting educated.
1:10:48
I thought you had to fill in every box.
1:10:50
No, either fill in every box or only fill in one box.
1:10:53
And if you only fill in one box, then the one that you vote for, they will determine
1:10:57
you.
1:10:58
A different state difference entirely possible.
1:11:00
Because I heard Queensland wanted to go back to that system, but they had changed from
1:11:03
that system where you had to number every box.
1:11:05
I also may be wrong in that I might be talking about only the way it works in only one
1:11:09
house.
1:11:10
It's possible that that's true, like for the upper house, but not the lower house.
1:11:14
From memory, oh, I remember, is like with the Senate and stuff, it's like number at
1:11:17
least this many.
1:11:18
That's what I remember.
1:11:19
Right.
1:11:20
And with the other one, I just, I just thought you always had to, but.
1:11:24
Welcome back to two guys who don't know anything about electoral politics talking about
1:11:29
the electoral system.
1:11:30
Yes.
1:11:31
Well, thank you so much for being here.
1:11:32
Good luck.
1:11:33
I hope everything goes okay for humanity.
1:11:35
Yes.
1:11:36
And I hope you all know Harari is proven wrong, and we're all fine.
1:11:41
And the good stuff was the top.
1:11:42
Exactly.
1:11:43
And keep an eye out for some billboards this month, please.
1:11:44
Oh, yeah.
1:11:45
That was the other thing I wanted to ask you about.
1:11:46
You got billboards going up.
1:11:47
Billboards going up.
1:11:48
Your mug on them?
1:11:49
My mug on them.
1:11:50
I put it out to like the Patreon guy that was like, so I have to like have my face on
1:11:56
it.
1:11:57
Yeah.
1:11:58
Sorry.
1:11:59
How do you get?
1:12:00
Doesn't this need a billboard expensive?
1:12:01
Yes.
1:12:02
Very expensive billboard.
1:12:03
Very expensive billboard.
1:12:04
With 2000 punters donating $5,000, $100.
1:12:07
We raised.
1:12:08
I was like, I will just get one billboard.
1:12:09
It's a bit of a gimmick.
1:12:10
Like, we're onto you gas cartels.
1:12:11
Like, we're coming for you.
1:12:12
And then it raised up to $30,000.
1:12:14
And then I was like, hey, guys, it's amazing.
1:12:16
We raised $30,000.
1:12:17
$85,000.
1:12:18
That's amazing.
1:12:19
That's right now.
1:12:20
So we'll have like 15 billboards across the country.
1:12:23
Amazing.
1:12:24
Are they in a summit?
1:12:26
It'll have a graph on it showing, and can one of them just be your asshole, just a
1:12:30
big asshole?
1:12:31
Mine?
1:12:32
Yeah.
1:12:33
I don't know what that looks like.
1:12:35
We'll put it in there.
1:12:36
I think it designs a set.
1:12:37
A minute to the board.
1:12:38
We'll put it to the conversation about it.
1:12:40
I'll ask the punters.
1:12:42
But the main ones, the main ones me like doing this is why so small.
1:12:47
And then you're putting your hand up with the little.
1:12:49
And it's got a graph that's like Norway's resource take.
1:12:54
Australia's resource taken.
1:12:55
I'm like, wow, so small.
1:12:56
Right.
1:12:57
Yeah, I feel like I was these might like the little dick joke in there.
1:12:59
Yeah, that's good.
1:13:00
So I'm just trying to.
1:13:01
So that's about the gas tax.
1:13:04
Yeah.
1:13:05
Any other ideas?
1:13:06
Other ones.
1:13:07
I've heard you can call out companies directly.
1:13:10
Just don't use your logo.
1:13:12
You can't defame a company.
1:13:14
Yeah.
1:13:15
If it has more than like, I don't know, 10 employees.
1:13:17
10 employees.
1:13:18
So we might be trading a line somewhere.
1:13:21
Why?
1:13:22
You're going to go after some tiny.
1:13:23
Oh, not tiny.
1:13:24
Mum, pop.
1:13:25
No, if it's a big company.
1:13:26
You can.
1:13:27
You can.
1:13:28
Oh, great.
1:13:29
Well, it's like it's on Santos in the tax.
1:13:31
These guys.
1:13:32
Yeah.
1:13:33
I may or may not, depending on billboard companies that they allow it or not.
1:13:35
But essentially just show the tax rates of some of these.
1:13:37
Yeah.
1:13:38
So that's all I'm just showing you would.
1:13:39
I like it.
1:13:40
I looked at the ATO data.
1:13:41
The number said zero.
1:13:42
Yeah.
1:13:43
I'm just putting it up there.
1:13:44
And there's the goal here in addition to your own personal self-aggrandizement.
1:13:47
And self-promotion using other people's money.
1:13:50
To pressure both parties into taking those issues seriously.
1:13:53
Yeah.
1:13:54
And here's my pitch to Albo.
1:13:56
Okay.
1:13:57
You know what it was like to be in a party.
1:13:59
Albo, I know you're watching.
1:14:00
You know what it's like to be in a party.
1:14:02
That took something bold to the election.
1:14:05
Both in 2013 with the mining tax and then in 2000 with Bill Shorten,
1:14:10
where he said, oh, we're going to like attack negative gearing and some of this stuff we were talking about.
1:14:14
You know what it's like for the public to not understand.
1:14:17
And for fear campaigns to take root.
1:14:20
I am Albo's best friend.
1:14:22
Because what I'm trying to do is make the everyday punter aware of the difference between a royalty and a tax.
1:14:28
Because what the cartels do is they go, royalty resource tax, resource tax, tax, tax, tax.
1:14:32
Oh, the taxing you and punters go, oh, bloody taxes.
1:14:35
No.
1:14:36
And then the fear campaign wins.
1:14:37
But over the last year, I've shown that when people understand this difference
1:14:41
and really are coming to understand it, they really want to charge money for our own resources.
1:14:45
So if anything, Albo, I'm doing your bloody work that you should be doing for you.
1:14:50
You should be standing up and saying, no, no, I'm going to take on the mining industry.
1:14:54
Because this is a joke.
1:14:55
You've been too afraid to do that.
1:14:57
So with 2000 punters and more behind me on this issue,
1:15:00
we've got Bill Boards explaining to the everyday punter that we want this.
1:15:04
Everyone wants this to happen.
1:15:07
Now you can just put the policy there.
1:15:09
And when the mining cartels run their fear campaign,
1:15:13
I've hopefully done a lot of the work for you.
1:15:15
That's the hope.
1:15:16
There you go.
1:15:17
So come on the podcast.
1:15:18
Fine.
1:15:19
Sealed.
1:15:20
Delivered.
1:15:21
He's going to be on the next podcast.
1:15:22
Next podcast episode.
1:15:23
You probably know.
1:15:24
All that.
1:15:25
Oh, I pulled some strings.
1:15:26
Yeah.
1:15:27
Maybe you do a duo.
1:15:28
You and me.
1:15:29
Never.
1:15:30
Never.
1:15:31
All right.
1:15:32
Let's try to where it's literally near the coast.
1:15:34
Thanks for stopping by.
1:15:35
I love that it's all changed.
1:15:36
Excellent.
1:15:37
Thanks for having me.
1:15:42
You