Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Has Australia Gone Too Far?" with Conor Friedersdorf

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"Has Australia Gone Too Far?" with Conor Friedersdorf · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Good day, humans.
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Well it is a joy being the center of a firestorm online, not and sort of, yes, no, kind
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of.
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It's been a funny few days where I've been receiving many many many many many many many
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messages on Twitter from people in various shades of red, blue, anger, hate, love,
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epiplexy, about a 25 tweet thread that I published in response to, I suppose the
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royaling debate in the United States about whether or not Australia has become a totalitarian
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dictatorship.
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I ignored this nonsense for a while as long as it was limited to Fox News where Tucker
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Carlson literally said that this is the end of Australia and Australia is a dictatorship.
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Italianism, he called it, this has been compounded by misinformation online where they've,
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you know, for example, taken images of a quarantine station, Howard Springs on the outskirts
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of Darwin where people who are brought back to Australia on repatriation flights from
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countries with high COVID numbers are housed for two weeks in quite quite considerable
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luxury with quite nice food, I have it on good authority.
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But nonetheless, you know, certainly not something that you would expect to see in a Western
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democracy in normal times, but these are not normal times, which is the point I've tried
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to make repeatedly.
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Now I have many criticisms of Australia's response to coronavirus and if you're a loyal
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listener, you will have heard me ranting on various bonus episodes of this show and
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in various intros in frustration about the slow pace of our conversation about evolving
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to the next stage of coronavirus and appreciating, you know, that we are going to have to open
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up at some stage that liberal democracies cannot go on like this indefinitely.
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I've been frustrated by the slow pace of that shift and the expectation among Australians
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that it's going to be possible to have very, very low COVID case numbers and COVID deaths
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in perpetuity.
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Nonetheless, when a foreigner comes parachuting in going, here's what you don't understand
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about why you guys are doing things wrong.
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It gets my hackles up a little bit and I do feel obliged to clarify things.
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Thus my Twitter thread and thus the response that it's gotten in the United States, which
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I must say has been mostly overwhelmingly positive and I've received lots and lots of private
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messages from lots and lots of terribly important people in the US which makes me feel good
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about the impact that we can have when we put together a cogent argument that doesn't
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just extremify things.
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That being said, I thought it would also be useful to get on to Connor.
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I had tweeted at Connor when I first saw the article come out and when it was going viral
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itself, the article is entitled Australia traded away too much liberty, how long can a democracy
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maintain emergency restrictions and still call itself a free country.
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I texted a DM to Connor on Twitter because he happened to follow me for some unknown
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reason and said, look, there are a couple of errors.
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Could you correct to this bit?
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To his credit, he did update the article and corrected something about a South Australian
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app, which I won't go into the details of because you can read about it in the Twitter
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thread.
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And then I thought, the hell with it, why don't we just talk?
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So I tracked him down.
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He's currently holidaying in Greece, such as something that you can do when you come
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from a country that has completely bungled its coronavirus response and just allows
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people to wander around infectious off he is in the Greek Isles where I would rather like
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to be, but alas, I am not permitted.
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And I got him on the blower, look, there's a pretty short, we really just scratched the
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surface of all this, but I had wanted to have Connor on this show in a proper long form
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conversation about everything because he is a reasonable person, he is a really smart
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guy.
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He has interesting and contrarian takes that don't necessarily fall on one side of the ideological
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spectrum or the other, which as you know, if you're a regular listener is what this show
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is all about.
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So we will have Connor back to talk about anything and everything that interests him on a later
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episode, but enjoy this little mini-move bush in which Connor and I try to flesh out
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our agreements and differences on when a lockdown has outlasted its welcome.
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If you haven't read Connor's piece, I highly encourage you to Google the Atlantic Australia
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trade it away too much liberty and then to go to my Twitter feed and my Twitter thread
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is pinned to the top of my Twitter page.
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If you haven't read those, I'm not sure how particularly insightful or illuminating
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this conversation will be, but if you have, it will probably be the best episode of
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anything that you've ever heard.
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Enjoy my conversation with Connor, Chris Dott.
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Why you in Greece?
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I just wanted to do some travel after I was vaccinated and I started in Germany and
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various events led me to Greece, but nothing in particular no huge story I'm working on
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here or anything like that.
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I'm jealous.
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That's a great place to be.
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One of my best buddies lived in Athens as the Wall Street Journal bureau chief during
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the financial crisis.
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He was a Brit, but he was living in Germany and then when the financial crisis happened
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in Greece was going to go insolvent, he got the best plummet posting you could imagine
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which is being in Athens and slowly as the focus of the world's attention drifted away
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from Greece's defaulting, he was like, can't I please stay here?
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They were like, no, coming back to Germany, but I went and visited him many times.
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Yeah, I thought this was great so far and I was in the islands before and that was great
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too.
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Yeah, wonderful.
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I can't wait to get out of my prison aisle, Connor.
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I'm trying.
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I'm looking forward to it.
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Can you stop by telling people who might not have read your piece, what the gist of
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your thesis is?
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Yeah, I think the gist of my thesis is that Australia and also New Zealand, but I focused
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on Australia.
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The gist of my thesis is that Australia has taken a much different path than other liberal
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democracies and geography obviously has something to do with that, what was possible at the
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beginning of the pandemic for different countries obviously had something to do with it.
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But nevertheless, we're a long way into this thing now and I thought it was time to raise
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the question of how long these very extreme restrictions can be in place before we consider
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them no longer temporary, which is the justification that has been invoked from the beginning that's
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supposed to make it okay for a liberal democracy to do these things.
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It's just a temporary emergency and I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that in a temporary
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emergency, especially a pandemic disease that kills a lot of people, it does change things
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and it does justify some things that wouldn't otherwise be justified.
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But I start to worry about the potential permanence of these things as this drags on longer
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and longer and as it seems as though the coronavirus will be endemic rather than something that we
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can simply get rid of.
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And I think that so it's probably worth, it's probably worth at this point our being
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specific about the kinds of categories of things that we're worried about.
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In the sense that one criticism that I got from my Twitter thread in response to your piece
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was from a lot of Australians who were in smaller states where there are no lockdowns.
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I mean the states are, the state borders are closed and nobody can come from New South Wales
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or Victoria which are the two most popular states and for non-Australians, the whole lockdowns
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and policing and health and everything is handled at a state level in Australia.
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Australia is a federation like the United States so almost all of this stuff is a state
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responsibility.
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So in the two most popular states, New South Wales and Victoria, we're Sydney and Melbourne
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are located respectively.
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We are in lockdown facing large numbers of cases in New South Wales but I got a lot of
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emails kind of from people in WA who were saying like speak for yourselves about illiberalism.
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Here's a photo of us like in Fremantle on the beach, we're having brunch, everyone's outside,
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there are zero cases, there's always been zero cases and we're having a great time.
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The only thing we can't do is leave without knowing that we're going to have to spend two
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weeks in quarantine on the way back and that's a small price to pay for actually living a real
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practical day-to-day freedom in a way that nobody else in the world really can and it's probably
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worth keeping that distinct from images of heavy-handed police arresting people for protesting
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for their freedoms or asking for people's ID in Melbourne if they're out after 9pm because
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there's a curfew, those kinds of daily indignities and illiberal interactions between the state
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and the individual that are necessary during a lockdown.
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Yeah, it's absolutely the case that Australia is a big country and people are having very
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different experiences of these restrictions both because of differences in the state that they
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live in and the actual restrictions themselves and also because of the circumstances of their
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own lives if you're an overworked professional with young kids at home a lockdown and working
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from home could be a stress reliever because you don't have a long commute and if you have a
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partner abroad the restriction of not leaving the country or be able to get in the country
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can be you know heart-rending and so I think as is often the case with civil liberties
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abrogations they fall very unevenly on different kinds of people and in the email mixes that I got
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as a response to the article I heard from many people who are understandably happy that they
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can move about with more freedom in some respects than people in other countries because the
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coronavirus just isn't present near them or wasn't until the rise of the Delta variant and other
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people who have had just awful circumstances because their lives or their careers were more tied
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to interest state travel or to travel abroad and the end of that partner or a parent or a funeral
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or a wedding that they missed and you know I think that class has also been a big factor as I
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understand it and how the lockdown has been enforced in different neighborhoods and kinds of housing
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in Australia definitely and I mean but I mean the you know I many of these criticisms I think are
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just a consequence of chaos and pandemonium and a pandemic the the pandemic has hit poor people in
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the states worse than it's hit rich people that is the nature of inequality it's the nature of
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policing that the police are generally more aggressive towards poor people and people of color than
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they tend to be of wealthy white people and that's probably a reality in the enforcement of the
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lockdowns as well here what I think Australians are frustrated by and what I was well there are two
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things I mean in some respects your you've become the target for Australians I are against the
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general criticism of what they regard as being a broadly successful policy with a finite time
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period massively massively fewer covert deaths even a better economy than other places that didn't
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manage the pandemic so aggressively for the obvious reason that in a place like Sydney you have a
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nine week lockdown when the pandemic starts and then you have 13 months of living normal life
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instead of having everybody hunker inside not wanting to go to a cafe and meet up with friends even
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if they're allowed to because I don't want to get really sick for two weeks but the alongside your
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piece there's been a tremendous amount of misinformation in the states that I think people feel like
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some of your piece played into the the concern that quarantine housing is going to be turned into
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concentration camps not that you said that but that that is a mean that's floating around in the
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states and the idea you know I mean Tucker Carlson literally said this is the end of Australia this
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is totalitarianism which is not only offensive it's ludicrously deranged and as a country tries to
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experiment with alternatives to the extreme lockdown that we currently have and the extreme
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border measures that are in place there are going to be trials of things like this South Australian
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app for example which you can put an all-wellian spin on it and I certainly wouldn't want to be
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forced to use an app that requires me to tell the police where I am at 15 minutes notice which is
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what this does but if if I was choosing to come into this covert free jurisdiction from a high
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covert country and my alternative was I can either quarantine for two weeks in an airport
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Marriott or I can download an app and stay at home but the Apple spy on me I mean neither is great
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but the latter is better than the former and both are probably preferable to having a runaway
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pandemic yeah so a few thoughts in response to all that one I certainly understand the feeling of
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frustration with misinformation being spread about the country and I think that as on so many
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issues Tucker Carlson has done that as have many others I also gotten a lot of responses that
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are something to the effect of well you Americans do this in that wrong to which I would say
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that's absolutely correct America has done all sorts of things wrong all sorts of things wrong
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in the realm of to relevant to the question at hand right you know in the realm of civil liberties
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in the realm of the pandemic you know this is a big earth shattering event and I think you could
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dig into any country and have important questions to raise and criticism to levy about its response
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and this perhaps ties into the app that we're talking about I of course agree that
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it is better than certain alternatives from the perspective of an individual traveler
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but when I step back and think about this as a global emergency you know my touchstone for so much
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of this is the war on terrorism and watching the way that it can act as a ratchet you know the
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kinds of airport security things that didn't happen for the first half of my life and then
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we're imposed after 9-11 there's still with us right and that I would argue are unnecessary but
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we're just put in place and never went away when it comes to surveillance there was an
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ingenious thing that they developed in Iraq when they were trying to stop insurgents from putting
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roadside bombs on the side of the road and they would fly fixed wing airplanes above all of
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a whole city like Mosul or Baghdad and then when an insurgent IED went off on the side of the road
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they would kind of wind back the high res video and they would figure out okay well who planted
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that there and let's rewind the tape and track them all the way back and what house were they
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and and they would identify insurgents that way and it saved a lot of American servicemen and
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allied servicemen perhaps Australian servicemen now that same fixed wing aircraft technology is
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being flown over American cities in a kind of or wellian attempt to assault crime and effectively
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is surveilling whole cities of people for all daylight hours right and so you could identify all
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sorts of things like where oppositors politicians are going and and just the private things people
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doing in their lives technology that's introduced in emergencies gets repurposed in other ways and
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and what when I say our wellian I'm thinking of future uses as much as I am thinking of the
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present narrow circumstance that is only as I acknowledged in the article just being tested
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right now not even you know rolled out completely I think that it's important to not be
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so defensive that we don't think about the logic and the technologies that we're introducing
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now and how it's going to play out down the road and with respect to the pandemic in particular
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if the logic is we're going to get to a realistic threshold of vaccination relatively soon
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and then we're going to end all of this that's one thing if the logic is such that another
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variant comes along that escapes the vaccine and this goes on for another two years that's quite
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another thing and I post yeah and I think I think I think that what's what's actually happening in
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part of the defensiveness that you're the you're seeing amongst Australians is the fact that
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this is a very active debate here like the the the conversation between those two polls I mean I'm
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about to go on Australian television right now and argue essentially articulate your point
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in a way because we're talking about American misinformation about Australia not specifically
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about you but about Fox News and the other stuff that's floating around it out there and the
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point that I will make is that it's incumbent upon all of Australia all Australians to make sure that
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we don't vindicate the worst fears of America's most hysterical critics by failing to you know to
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do what we've promised to do and you're right that there are elements in Australian society who
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especially in the the smaller states who I think would take every opportunity to kick the can down
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the road and to shift the goal posts and I mean these people who are sending me photos of how
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fabulous it is to be having brunch by the beach in Western Australia what incentive does any
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West Australian politician have to drag people out of that scenario and start spreading a pathogen
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around in their community simply so that the small minority of people who want to be able to travel
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abroad more than they want to be able to get brunch every weekend freely without worrying about
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getting sick get to do so and it's going to take a certain amount of spine but the resentment from
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Australia towards the criticism from America is it sounds tinny to the existence of this debate it's
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like we're not the assumption seems to be that we somehow sort of just blended into this on the
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second point on some rather your first point about the repurposing of technology my sense about that
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is as a sort of gut level fairly civil libertarian person myself there are so many egregious ways in
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which governments intrude on our lives and not to engage in what aboutism again but it's a relevant
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point to make that America is usually so bad at this I mean after 9-11 the whole liquids thing like
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when I fly domestically in Australia there is no liquids ban I don't take my shoes off I don't
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have to show my ID to go through security I can join my parents at the gateons and wave wave them
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goodbye airside at an airport in Australia and Australia is just as much of a target as other
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Western countries are it's right next to Indonesia which has a large problem with jihadism and the
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barley bombings with target at Australians like the it strikes it strikes a straight many Australians
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as weird that Americans would be uniquely concerned about us playing around with ways of trying to
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ensure that we don't face the same calamity that the rest of the world has from COVID because Americans
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are worried that we might misuse the apps that we're creating I mean apps are a dime it doesn't
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absolutely easy to create if a totalitarian dictatorship in the future wants to create an
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app that spies on us then they're going to do so I don't think they need a pandemic and if there
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was ever a good reason to temporarily be spied on by a government ensuring that you know
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teaming hoards of people aren't coming in from abroad and spreading a brand new novel virus
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into your community after you've just spent 18 months beating it back would be a pretty good
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reason to take that risk a much better reason to take that risk than everything the TSA is doing
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so so I guess one one plan I want to emphasize I would encourage people if they're on twitter to
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go and find the many responses that I've posted from different Australians who have emailed about
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my article because the people who are critical of the article often are framing their response
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in terms of well why would you and American be concerned about us in Australia you know doing
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these sorts of things and what about this in that in America and or I wish you would have talked
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to more Australians and I actually did talk to a friend who were of Australians before I
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published the piece but I didn't quote anyone but I think that the the threat of responses will
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show that these are positions there's certain my position is not a majority position in Australia
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there's certainly many Australians who share my concerns and position and I think that they're
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a bit overwhelmed at the moment because it seems like it's about 75 25 in the politics of this
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but nothing that I said in the piece is a concern that people in Australia haven't articulated
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so the liberty groups in Australia have raised concerns about yeah I mean the same
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so they own the technology and yeah and and your voice in this too and so you know I get that
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I'm an outsider writing a critical article about a country and there's going to be a certain
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amount of blowback that comes with that and that's fine but I think it's nevertheless important
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to grapple with these questions in a way that that validates the premise that things could go too far
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and that it would be understandable in some ways if they did because this virus is a very scary
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thing and it's going to be a very difficult thing for a country that was in the mindset of eradicating
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it completely to accept a degree of vaccine breakthrough and spread and death that has here to
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for been stopped with very harsh restrictions and when the logic changes because vaccines are
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available to everyone or passed a certain threshold you know I think it is very important
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shift policies at that point for kind of airy fairy so libertarian reasons I think that there
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are going to be a lot of people who are against it and who point to the deaths that are just
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unfortunately going to increase when it happens as reason to extend it longer and longer
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and and I sympathize no you lost the death struggle with terrible I mean
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completely I mean the only I think you I think I would have less of an issue with your criticism
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if it weren't for the fact that the the the premier of the most popular state who's like the
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governor and also the prime minister have been repeatedly adamant admittedly only over really
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the past three or four weeks so it may it may post date when you were writing the piece but
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that that 70 to 80 percent vaccination which we will get to and which will effectively mean
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that everybody who wants a vaccine has had a vaccine in New South Wales will that we will open up
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come hell or high water because everyone's so fed up with the lockdown in a weird way it's actually
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been in some ways beneficial I don't want to say this because you know people have died and
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it sounds tackless but it's been somewhat beneficial to the politics of this in New South Wales the
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biggest state in the sense that we haven't been forced to make the decision ourselves like
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COVID is here there are 1200 to 1500 new cases a day which may not sound like a lot in the American
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context but given that that completely overwhelms contact traces and then you start to get off to the
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races into an uncontrolled pandemic that's not something that we've seen before so it's a race
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against time to vaccinate and the fact that we can't put the genie back in the bottle actually
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means that we are being forced to reckon with a decision that you would have to be an enormously
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brave leader to take voluntarily in the absence of any cases I mean as you say that like who would
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choose to introduce a pathogen to a community I just want to also emphasise to American listeners
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it's important and I say this in my Twitter thread to remember that Australia never had a big
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first wave of COVID casualties so the amusement that non-Australians exhibit when they say
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how can Australians be so panicky about a mere 1500 new cases a day is because we have no natural
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immunity there is no you know nobody's caught it and then gotten better really because there've
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been so few cases we don't we're not vaccinated enough yet and our systems and our infrastructure
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and our hospitals and so on aren't set up the way that they currently are in Europe and the United
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States to have learned to accept the large numbers of coronavirus of COVID cases that have been
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coming in this is all new which the way to think about Australia then is to sort of time shift us
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15 months into the past and again I'm saying Australia I should be saying New South Wales time
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shift us 15 months into the past and if it seems like we're being extreme we're responding to
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something you know it's not like it's not like if we did open up we would just become like the US
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we wouldn't we'd become like the US was in March of 2020 yeah and of course we hope that the
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vaccines help a ton to prevent that the I guess the in turn the thing I would ask
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some of the Australian critics of the piece to think about is well I think that it's obviously a
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very powerful defense of the Australian approach that your deaths have been so much lower per capita
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so far and I really hope that they that they stay that way as things open up there are certain
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aspects of the response like the prohibition on merely leaving the country that strike me
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as not very well justified by the idea of preventing deaths because when you're
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preventing people from coming in at the same time if you're not just obvious you know automatically
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allowing everyone abroad to come back the case for restricting people from leaving as a
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necessary part of fighting COVID becomes much weaker and I would point to that as one example that
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is a very extreme restriction that as I point out in the piece we usually associate with pretty
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terrible regimes and it seems to me that it was not necessary to have the success that Australia had
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against COVID and that although not that many people were affected by the abrogation on low
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liberties those who were affected it was a very severe restriction and a very harsh thing and
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in some of the people's lives who were affected I should also just clarify it Connor there is a bit
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of a mythology around that rule in the sense that you can leave with an ex now of course it's
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nasty to have to apply to the government for something that should be universal human right but
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you can leave with an exemption and the easiest way to get an exemption is to promise that you'll
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stay away from all the 90 days and if you're going to stay away from all the 90 days then the
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government gives you an exemption quite readily and I know many people who've traveled for less than
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90 days if they can prove a compelling business reason to go and so on so exemptions are being
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granted people are coming and going it's just that the they're not going to give you an exemption
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the purpose is to so that people won't go on a holiday to New Zealand and then come back one week
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later and take up a valuable spot in hotel quarantine that could have been given to sit to an
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Australian who's who wants to be repatriated from abroad permanently so I understand the rationale
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I also hate that policy because it's a pain in the ass to me specifically I'm married to an American
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I have American dual citizen kids I want to be able to travel as soon as we can but to be honest we
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would probably get an exemption touchwood the problem for us would be the hotel quarantine coming
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back and the real human rights calamity from my point of view is the fact that the government has
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never bothered to find an orderly way to bring Australians home like they've poured so much money
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into essentially welfare to keep us all chugging along during lockdowns and they haven't
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diverted any of that to a systematic way to allow the tens of thousands of Australians to to come
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back without having to be without being gouged tens of thousands of dollars by airlines who are
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only allowed to bring back in I mean at the moment the cap is so low that I think it's fewer than
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500 people a day or allowed into the country a country of 25 million people and fewer than 500
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people a day are allowed back that's just heartbreaking yeah but then this brings us also
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but I think I mean I'm torn between like that strictness is what had allowed us to be so free
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in terms of our daily lives like there are two different columns of concern here one is the
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the daily limitations on freedom that come with a lockdown but the lockdown gets prevented by
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the draconian border closures right you know what I mean like that's almost a trade-off worth
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making in my book well it's certainly baked into the policy I think that the critique that I'm
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not persuaded by that some Americans have put forth is the one you mentioned earlier about well you
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only have this small number of cases and so why are you locking down the whole logic of the
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policy is that you can only prevent the spread if you lock down with very few cases and the rest
30:56
of the world has shown in just about every other country that that's the case right exactly I
31:02
think that that don't work once you've got lots of cases right yeah so I think that that assumption
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of the Australian government is validated I think that the yeah I think the actual failing and this
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is a failure of every western country in my book by the way with the possible exception of
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Israel is that there just wasn't enough urgency on the part of every wealthy government to spend
31:27
more to get vaccine options faster and this is probably the place where the united states perform
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best by securing you know supplies of multiple vaccines it seems to me that if other western
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governments would have put a correct price on the value of the liberty of their citizens they
31:47
would have both made bets on more vaccine candidates early not knowing which one was going to work out
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and also would have just invested more in getting those doses out quickly to me that's when
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the militaries of these countries should have been rolled out to be getting shots into arms
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just literally like 24 hours a day as fast as possible do you think there's put a
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limit on to Australia's to the way that people think about Australia in America no I think that
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depends entirely on what happens going forward I think that if this ends on the schedule on the
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optimistic schedule that you've been talking about then no I don't think that there will be
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an enduring sense that Australia has changed and that's the outcome that I hope for maybe even
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that I would bet on despite the concerns that I have talked about you know I
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um there are people that I love it Australia I've excited to visit them and I won't worry that
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I'm coming to a police state once I'm allowed back in or I wouldn't come I hope not I hope not
32:55
Connor thanks for thanks for speaking with us I'll get you on the podcast properly in a few months
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and we can talk about all kinds of things that I'm interested in but I just wanted to to
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pick your brain about this while it's going going viral it's good to good to talk to you
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enjoy Greece and enjoy being able to travel I look forward to to that day hopefully soon
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around the light yes and thanks for having me on I appreciated I appreciate the engagement on
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Twitter and yeah I look forward to going on the podcast