Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Turning Point" Leader vs Josh

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"Turning Point" Leader vs Josh · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and dangerous ideas are a
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  plenty on the Christian nationalist right at the moment, whether it's Trump in America
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  or Nigel Farage leading in the polls, in some polls in the United Kingdom or the National
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  Rally in France or the alternative for Deutschland in Germany or Paul in Hansen's One Nation Party
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  in Australia, which is now the second most popular party in Australia, incredible since it was
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  only really the two or three percentage point game just a few years ago. I thought it was
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  time for us to understand what the new energized young nationalist right is actually all about.
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  Not the far right, not white supremacists, but people who are completely changing what
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  conservatives and means in Western liberal democracies. You'll be familiar probably with
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  Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last year.
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  Today's conversation is with the head of the Australian chapter of Turning Point, the leader of
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  Turning Point Australia. He's not your average Christian nationalist, he's a 28 year old
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  Lebanese Australian influencer, educator and activist who was tapped by Nigel Farage himself and
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  introduced to Charlie Kirk and Farage encouraged Kirk to allow Joel to set up Turning Point in
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  Australia. He originally had gained some notoriety in Australia for his online conversations about
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  Australia's COVID lockdowns and sort of championing popular stop rising against those and he now has
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  more than 600,000 followers, he has over a billion views, he has a newspaper, he has a podcast,
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  a lot of this will be news to normies in Australia because this all occurs in a political sphere
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  that is unfamiliar to the mainstream, but we have to pay attention to it and we have to understand
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  what is their thinking. This is not your grandpappy's conservative party, this is something all
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  together new. So Joel Jamal joins us to debate immigration and Brexit and Trump and the future of
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  democracy. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did the one the only Joel Jamal.
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  I love the fact that you've brought in plastic straws, this is, so I'm holding up for people who
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  aren't watching the video, this is an actual bag of 100 blue and green plastic, vendy drinking
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  straws, currently illegal. This is contraband, right? You can't sell it in New South Wales, but you
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  can gift them. Possession is all right. Precious possessions fine. Yeah. What's the penalty for
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  sale? Oh, that'd be some sort of like five thousand or five to a hundred thousand dollars fine
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  in New South Wales, thanks to one of our government ministers. So how did you acquire them? So I
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  didn't make them. No, no, no, we're in the process of making them, but that's another story.
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  You get arrested. Come at me, guys. Come at me. But no, with the, I was in the US recently for
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  the turning point USA conference and we were wrapping up and some of the young folks took me to an
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  Aussie, one of those outback steakhouse. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, that's not Australian.
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  And yeah, I know. Totally. But they felt that they wanted to give me a sending off gift and,
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  you know, we wrapped up dinner and whatever. And I said, there's just one more thing before I fly
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  out tomorrow. I need to get some plastic straws. Right. And I said this like not even as a joke,
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  I was like, I actually need to get them. And they, they thought I was joking. Right. They proceeded
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  to take me to the local store and I grabbed three thousand of these suckers. And they're great gifts
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  in summer. You know, you grab a frozen coke. Can I keep this? No, you're the yours. Yeah, absolutely.
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  If I pay you one cent for them, then we're breaking them. That's right. It'll be going
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  a little. Absolutely. That's so I mean, I just, I who what comic was it who was saying like,
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  isn't it possible? Do we not have the capacity like as a civilization? We sent men to the moon.
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  And we can't invent a straw that lasts between last longer than five minutes and shorter than 10,000
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  years. Well, there are a lot of paper straws that crumble in your mouth after five minutes.
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  These plastic straws will be upper turtles nose for the next 10,000 years. It's ridiculous. And
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  as we were saying before, it's, it's sort of embodies the problem with, with modern workism,
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  leftism, where it's sort of like, it feels good to ban it. We're, we're going hard on it. But
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  you go to some of our local stores here, like maybe Coles or Woolies, the big ones. And they,
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  everything's wrapped in plastic. It's like, that's, you know, so they come down. It is funny that
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  there's what I think things get. And I don't know how I feel about the plastic straw ban. It's not a
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  big issue for me to have to use paper straws. But it strikes me that the motivation behind it
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  is that people glommed on to a particularly iconic image. I think people are talking about,
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  there was a turtle with a striped nose. Is that what, have you heard of that? It was apparently a
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  photo with a turtle with a striped nose. Right. Which to me means don't leave your
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  park and straws in the water and don't litter. Like if there's a littering problem, I understand.
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  So don't litter. And if you want to crack down on litter, although you probably would object
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  also to people cracking down on litter, because that would be a civil libertarian infringement,
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  no, no, I absolutely think we should. I think we need clean streets. I think it's actually a part
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  of nationalism. If you're proud of your country, we should actively, you know, how many grainys do
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  you see out there on extinction day saying, let's, you know what, let's go do plan a tree day.
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  Let's go do clean up your local community day. You never see it. And I don't know. Maybe they do.
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  Look, maybe, maybe not. But I think that with the plastic straw thing is a bit of a
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  woke sort of indication of I'm a good person. I'm going to come down like a Nazi on this
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  insignificant thing. When in actuality, the majority of the vast majority of the waste going
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  out into the waterways is actually from many rivers coming from third world countries. And so
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  rather than clamp down on Australians that are actually, you know, that are proudly
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  yeah, shoving our plastic straws up the noses of every turtle. But I don't, yeah, for me,
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  it's not even a woke. If for me, it's just a technological thing. I can't engineers figure out
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  a plastic that yeah, that will dissolve then there are plant-based ones. Yeah, there are like,
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  you have one that only lasts for hours in liquid instead of yeah. I've seen a lot of grips.
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  They have these little bamboo ones. They have these. Oh, yeah. I've got metal ones at home.
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  Yeah, they've got those. I use a glass one. Yeah, yeah, at home. So, but it's just ridiculous.
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  I mean, this is the fact that we've had to start off the podcast with this when in actually
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  brought them. I mean, that's why I wasn't planning on starting to talk about plastic straws.
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  But this is kind of a motif of the larger thing going on in society. It's that we used to not
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  talk about these things. I was listening to Douglas Murray talk about this. He was like,
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  we should be talking about how we build underworld cities. We should be talking about how we can.
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  Like, why are we talking about this stuff which until yesterday wasn't a problem?
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  Well, to be fair, nobody is talking about this stuff apart from people like you.
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  Yeah, that's it. I mean, I don't know. Look, when I when I when I
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  rock up to the to the markers and I wave one of these things, all of them are like,
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  oh, can I have some too? So, I mean, I think these these things they do encroach
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  on the average people in the world. And it is kind of an annoyance in the background.
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  But again, this isn't the move, you know, economy show stuff. But I mean, it is a good,
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  it maybe is a better way into the conversation than you think it is in the sense that
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  it's evidence of what your critics would say is the motorcycle horrendous of
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  the new right, which is find some largely irrelevant little distracting way in which woke people
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  are being stupid. And then say, because they're taking our paper straws away, we should
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  overhaul liberal democracy and, you know, implement a Christian nationalist economy.
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  Or something like that. But they started it. We got it. We got it. We got to hang on.
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  It's always funny to me when we see some of these cultural Marxists, they come out and they say,
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  why are you fascinated with this? Why are you fascinated with that? It's like, you started,
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  you're literally defined as cultural Marxists. Well, what's a who defines themselves as a cultural
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  Marxist? Well, it would be a lot of university professors, a lot of revolutionaries on the streets
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  that we often see at the protests, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. But I think they wouldn't
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  define themselves as cultural Marxists with that. What do you mean by? I mean, there might be one,
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  there might be an old cardigan wearing professor in some kind of league university who still calls
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  himself a Marxist, but it's it's literally littered throughout their philosophy through their
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  language. They talk about actually pulling apart society, pulling off the old shackles.
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  I mean, this is rooted throughout feminism. This is rooted throughout, I mean,
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  Quillette often writes about this and how we've got to pull down the old, I did a video this week
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  about some of the founding feminists and out there and some of the quotes. And it's actually quite
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  genocidal and horrific when you actually read what they're talking about, we need less men,
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  we need to pull down the old shackles of society. And look, the straws is a tiny element of that,
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  but it is sort of, it's like a way to beat down Western colonial powers, including countries
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  like Australia. So you're saying it's one small piece of evidence of a bigger phenomenon.
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  And you say Marxism, why? Because what's the relevance of Marx's theory of labor to a feminist
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  who's angry about men? Yeah, well, I think Marxism, it wants to tear down the old order. So
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  let's define the exact sort of person they go after. You go after white men, they go after
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  Christians, they go after men that basically were men of competence, men that were in let's say
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  attuned with their aggressive side or their more masculine side, I think that that's an issue for
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  these people because they see it as a threat. And so they, they see that as something to neutralize.
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  That's how they see it in, I believe in society. So Marxists, they do want to tear down the old
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  order. That starts in the universities. That's interesting. So you mean revolutionary, really?
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  I mean, it's almost Maoist more. It's like a cultural revolution rather than, I mean,
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  Marx was mostly focused on economics, but you're talking, you're not accusing
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  woke social justice lefties of being, you know, sort of neo-communists. You're saying that they
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  share with Marx and maybe with Mao or Lenin or Paul Potter, whoever, like a desire to start
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  again from year zero in a more egalitarian. Yeah. Well, look at what a society or something.
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  Look, Josh, I know, I know Jordan Peterson here. I'm not going to intellectualize this word or
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  that word. The average punch on the street looks at what's happening in the world and things that
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  they used to have yesterday are up for contention today. And quite offensive could be racist, could be
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  this or that. That's where it's like, sort of people see using plastic, the idea that you're
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  killing the environment. It's like, no, I'm just using it because I've been using it since I was
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  a child. Right. And I think that's where it's starting to percolate into the real world.
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  But when you say that people look around the world and they see that things that were taken for granted
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  are now up in the air, I think that's true. When I look around the world and see things that
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  were taken for granted that are up in the air, I think about the attack on liberal democracy and
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  the civic institutions and anti-corruption and the separation of powers and not using police
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  forces as your own private militias and having humane immigration policies. And like I see
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  those things as being the most consequential things that are now up in the air, thanks to people
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  on your side of the aisle, not whether or not we can have solutions. Yeah, look, it's not my starting
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  argument. That's for sure. But I shouldn't have brought those bloody short straws. It was a gift.
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  I didn't think it'd make it into the shot. But no, I actually agree with all those things. A lot of
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  people probably would be surprised with my agreement on this stuff. I do have quite a libertarian
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  streak with this stuff. I did oppose the foreign wars. And I do think that you're right about
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  immigration. I mean, there's got to be a moral element to it as well, especially when these
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  foreign wars go hand in hand with the moral immigration policy. You're displacing people and
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  the idea that you're not going to take any in as a humanitarian. There's humanitarian
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  arguments for that. But also, I mean, we just saw this week in Australia, our intelligence agencies
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  almost threatening the ABC, our state media, which kind of brings back memories. Publicly funded
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  media. Public funded state media implies the state. They're listed on that. I think the leaders
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  have control over. Yeah, but they do, but they do receive a billion dollars. Yeah. That's right.
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  Elon, Elon, you know, called because the ABC was critical of him. He called that he changed
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  the description on X of the ABC from public, from public broadcaster, I think, to state media.
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  Yeah, just cheeky and wrong. But to us, we see an art. We see a headline like that that ACOs like
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  I know you're about to release part two of this documentary about the failings of the intelligence
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  agencies with the Bondi massacre that happened a month ago, but he cautioned them. And to you and me,
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  we're in the circle. We know, hey, this might mean a raid of ABC's offices because that's happened
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  before. Correct me. I was in the building when the feds rated the newsroom, actually. I don't
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  remember what that was over. I think it was about whistle, whistle, blood. Yeah, it was about Afghanistan
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  war crimes. Yeah, it must have been 2022, maybe. I think it was, yeah, reasonably recent. So
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  anyway, turning point Australia, let's just start there. What is turning point? Australia,
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  how did you come to be in charge of it? What's this relationship to the American chapter and
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  Charlie? It's a great question because I am not a politics guy. I'm a construction guy and a
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  property development guy. I lost my job due to the lockdowns in 2020. I got made redundant because
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  the lockdowns essentially tightened up, funding for projects, which never went ahead. But when it
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  comes to turning point, the mission that Charlie Kirk set out on certain years ago, at 18 years old,
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  he decided not to go to university, didn't want to go to college and get some liberal dance,
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  you know, theory lessons. He wants silly lesbian and wild hugging and tree hugging, not worth
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  the paper. It's printed on the guy. No, but he wanted to basically help people understand how
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  to breathe their values and to politics. He felt that there was a gap in the market for educating
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  people about civics. He decided to start at the universities because he felt that they were the
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  factory of bad ideas, some of the ideologies that we were throwing around before Maoist Marxist
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  culture Marxist ideas. He wanted to basically help engage young people in their democracy,
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  help them understand this actually a better way because the universities really did use to have
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  a bit more of a healthy dialogue. Now it's become quite demagoguery. That's something we got to
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  push against across all ends of the spectrum on the left and the right. He very much saw 13 years ago
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  there was a real issue. So today fast forward, he's just passed away and it does feel like there's
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  a massive hole without him in the public sphere because he was a bridge builder. He was someone that
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  had loved it, the battle of ideas, he loved to debate the issues and go to the universities and
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  have it out and have a beer after. Now the guy set up thousands, thousands of chapters across
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  America, high schools even, they started to poke lead into and universities and in Australia we
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  started four years ago. We had a different start. We didn't start in the universities. We started
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  and were born out of the COVID movement, covering the protests on the ground, helping people
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  understand who's punching them, why they're punching them. How can they punch back politically?
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  Things that they took for granted before, perhaps like the media being the guardians of democracy,
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  we're all of a sudden taking these tax breaks from the government and telling government lines on
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  vaccines which ended up being untrue, lockdowns which ended up being a negative. So when we look
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  back at the start of our organisation, I was privileged to and blessed to take it on thanks to
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  Nigel Farage. I was a part of a tour that he did to Australia and he took it here three or four
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  times and he basically made the connection to Charlie and said, hey, these are the guys that have
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  already been doing your work here, but they were dumped, so they proved themselves. If they had
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  the turning point brand, they could take it to another level. And so for four years now we've
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  accrued 600,000 followers online. Last year we just crossed the one billion view mark in October,
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  but we averaged about 220 million views last year in total. And when election time comes around,
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  we do how to vote cards. We show people who to vote for that are standing up for Christian,
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  conservative, libertarian values and really how to make governments smaller. And so that's how
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  we've really carved out our space in Australia and the responsibility isn't lost on me. I do feel
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  that there's an enormous gap with Charlie gone in the American market. I see some of the silly debates
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  going on over there right now and I'm just thinking what would Charlie say is kind of been dayified
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  at least. But that's how we can. Yeah. And so it's, would you say that it's mainly a political movement
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  in Australia in the sense of the influences to try to get people into elected office? Would turning
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  point Australia run candidates at some point in the future? No, never, never, never, never, never,
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  no, no, not at all. Why not? Why not, why not make it a political party? Well, first of the US
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  told us you're not allowed to. That's a good reason. But nor would I, nor would I. And the reason
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  for that is I had a very bad experience in political parties in my, I was, I was part of the Christian
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  Democrat party, which was Fred Miles party and that's a family values, you know, conservative party.
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  You think they conduct themselves in a Christian manner? Turns out it was very much not like that.
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  In fact, one of the early from short, you mean there could be hypocrisy among family values,
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  Christian conservatives? Yeah, well, the first time I've ever heard of such a thing. You can
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  imagine at 19 for me, you know, starry eyed, uh, rosy colored glasses. I came out thinking that, um,
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  they would be above reproach. But if this is how bad they were, and we're talking like,
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  and this is all in the past, the party's been wound up. No one could come after me legally now to be
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  clear. But I called it out when I was 19 before I was a public figure and I said, hey, you've got
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  13 discrepancies. There's hundreds of thousands of legal transfers. You've got nepotism happening.
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  You've got board members that don't understand their obligations. This is jailable stuff. And
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  when I called it out, they just came after me. And it told me that you aren't loyal to the party
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  like they are. You're loyal to your values. And so the mission for Australia's turning point just
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  like the US, you must stick to your values. You must be consistent as Charlie was. And to run
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  in a political election is not the job. The job is to muster the troops, the job is to pull the
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  existing politicians, no matter who they are. I'm a fan of Paul and Hanson, for example,
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  but we've called her out on the hate crimes amendment bill. Before the last election,
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  we're consistent about that because we're not about parties come and go, politicians come and go,
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  but our values are what we make us Australians. And for non-Australian listeners, Paul
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  and Hanson is a right-wing anti-immigrant politician who's been around for decades.
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  And I should also just add, I have no knowledge of the claims that you're making about the
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  prednal party. So I don't necessarily seem to be endorsing. Sure, John, you know, allegations of
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  illegality that as far as I'm aware that there's not, I can't say that's true. That's fine,
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  that's fine. Disclaimer. Yeah, absolutely. And am I right in understanding that COVID was quite
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  personal for you in the sense that your dad died not from COVID, but from COVID lockdowns in
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  your telling of the story. Well, his story was one of many. In my situation, when I started,
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  I got made redundant. Four of my siblings and their partners, they lost eight jobs between them,
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  some of them had two jobs. And my dad was getting cancer treatment. Just to pause on that for a second,
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  because my recollection of the way the government handled COVID was just economically speaking,
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  one of the best in the world in the sense that anyone who was on a payroll just with the company
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  was paid to keep them on the payroll. And so companies made an absolute fortune just
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  collecting money from the government and then paying their employees. Look, Josh, we government
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  money just to keep them on the books. We can look at these things in the macro, but I can tell you
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  that there are plenty of people that lost their jobs, including in my family, we lost eight.
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  And is that because I was self-employed or something? No, no, they worked for big employers,
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  and so look, when I look at what's going on, I think one of them had just reduced
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  hours, but seven of them lost their jobs. I lost my job. And what that meant was that
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  we got decimated in that sense. But even with my father, he was fighting a five-year cancer
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  battle. And unfortunately, he was getting cancer treatment in Mexico, blood transfusions,
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  which aren't legal in Australia, but it was actually working for him. He was making quite good
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  progress in 2019. And when lockdowns came in in February, March, he couldn't leave the country.
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  He couldn't get out. He couldn't do that treatment. And unfortunately, that cost him his life.
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  And I just started my show four weeks in and I'd already got 350,000 viewers from basically
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  start a stationary start with nothing but iPhones. And so there was clearly a market. And then
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  losing my dad was just fuel. It was like, all right. And look, my story's not special. There was
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  so many people that we hear this from economists like GG Foster, that this is actually the way the
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  government measured the impact of lockdowns, doesn't take into consideration people not getting
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  screened for cancer early on, where they could affect it. But also with inflation, I mean, the
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  government inflation here, we are still feeling the effects of that today. Thanks to the conservative
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  government. The liberals are under the treasury then. And unfortunately, this is a problem that
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  faced and faced many Western countries like America. Oh, I'm sorry to hear about you dad. And
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  that must have been awful. I just have to put a note of descent into what you're saying about
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  vaccines and lockdowns in the sense that the when you said the media turned out to be misreporting
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  on vaccines and on lockdowns. The main way in which the media got vaccines wrong was by not
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  being sufficiently critical of the government's procurement process here, I would say. And also
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  being too gullible about the impact that it would have on transmission. But they were right on
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  the safety of the vaccines. And they were right on the fact that the vaccines are overwhelmingly
• 22:58
  effective about preventing you from dying of comfort. And on lockdowns, I think they took too long
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  to start having a mature conversation about when lockdowns should end and when border closures
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  should be eased, especially between states and so on. But fundamentally, I mean, Australia had
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  90% fewer deaths than the United States did per capita. And we did emerge amongst one of the
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  best countries in the world. If you don't count what many regard as being the abuses of human rights
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  in terms of people not being able to protest and go to cafes if they weren't vaccinated and stuff
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  like that. And look, Josh, I appreciate that these are significant claims. And you know, I'd
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  last thing I wanted for this podcast to get a lawsuit. But I stand firmly on the having built
• 23:50
  the following at that time, I was inundated and on the front lines with a lot of these fights for
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  people with their jobs, people that fathers that got the vaccine so that his wife could stop working
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  so she didn't have to get the vaccine. And then him getting injured. In my own family, we know that
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  both the Pfizer and the AstraZeneca effects, those with the last name Jamal, because my first
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  cousin, for example, he ended up getting myocarditis, paracarditis from Pfizer. And my brother,
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  when he was driving back home from the first vaccine for AstraZeneca, he started to go blind in his
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  eyes. And so these are real stories and real people out there that can't be washed away with a
• 24:28
  lawsuit threat from some of these organizations. And it would be remiss of me to to wipe clean
• 24:36
  the medias. There was no apology. There was no nothing. And I can't tell you how the music to
• 24:42
  people's ears, when they heard, if they were to hear an apology on that stuff, these are real people
• 24:48
  that. What is the apology B? Because myocarditis, you're something like five to eight times likely to
• 24:56
  get my myocarditis from COVID than you are from the vaccine, which doesn't mean that the vaccine
• 25:02
  doesn't cause it. But there was a lot of misunderstanding and fear mongering at the time about the risk
• 25:07
  of that. I assume your brother was okay after the myocarditis. He did continue to get a bit sick after
• 25:12
  that. Yeah, I know people who got myocarditis from the vaccine, but you know, global pandemics are
• 25:18
  not fun, no matter what you do, no matter what policy settings you apply, people are going to get hurt,
• 25:24
  people are going to lose their jobs, economies are going to shrink. The idea that things would have
• 25:29
  been better if we hadn't injected money into the economy. I think they would have been better if we
• 25:33
  hadn't, you know, but I should people and to get vaccines. The problem is the real question is,
• 25:38
  what society do we want to live in? Where there are risks, there must be a choice. The
• 25:43
  federal data that was used on people's medical records should never been weaponized to enforce
• 25:49
  mandates. It should never have happened. People should have been given the option to do these things.
• 25:54
  When it news came out that this doesn't actually stop the spread, that you then straight away
• 26:00
  mandate should have gone out the window, and that's not what happened. And so when I look at where
• 26:04
  there's a risk, there must be a choice. And so with me, I got COVID. I didn't get myocarditis.
• 26:10
  I was fine. And the idea that we locked down the schools when the data showed the kids had a better
• 26:16
  chance of surviving than me. I mean, are we following the data or are we not? And I just think that
• 26:21
  this highlighted a lot of issues in Australia. And when I say apologize, do we or do we not want
• 26:26
  to live in a country where we own up to out to what's going on? Or do we want to be like Trump,
• 26:31
  where he ends up to nothing? And so I think I would like to see it in Australia where we can actually
• 26:37
  have these discussions and we can actually hold our leaders to account. That's what transparency
• 26:41
  is about. But with our politicians, we saw an interesting face, which keeps coming up. They
• 26:46
  delegated all their authority to bureaucrats that were unelected and unaccountable as a result.
• 26:53
  Again, you won't get everything right. But the cowardice of the politicians and the inability
• 26:58
  for the media to hold them to account was a huge issue. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had a following.
• 27:02
  I built my following off that. No, I mean, but yes, but the me effect of building a following
• 27:08
  doesn't indicate whether or not the people who are following you are correct. Of course,
• 27:14
  I mean, people might be misguided that they may not be epidemiologists. They may not know
• 27:18
  whether or not the bad reality is better than the worse reality that that would emerge if they
• 27:24
  if we didn't have lockdowns or something. But I completely agree with you that once transmission,
• 27:29
  once it was obvious that transmission was not really aided. Although it is a it is a bit because
• 27:35
  if you've got full blown COVID and you're coughing and spluttering everywhere, then you are more
• 27:39
  contagious than someone who has been vaccinated and doesn't isn't symptomatic. But once it was
• 27:46
  obvious that it was not the dold, you know, the sort of solution that we thought that it might be
• 27:51
  then still having many, many months or years in which people had to show their vaccination papers
• 27:58
  was silly school closures were silly, although we were pretty good about that as far internationally.
• 28:05
  You've got to remember in places where people were given the choice earlier,
• 28:10
  so the parts of the states in the United States with the lowest uptake of vaccines had the
• 28:15
  highest mortality and the longest tail in terms of the way you get back to school quickly is you do
• 28:23
  what New South Wales did which is you lock down fast and hard and you eliminate the virus and then
• 28:30
  you scramble to get a vaccine and the schools can reopen in the meantime. Okay, but then to lock down
• 28:35
  the construction sites who hadn't had one registered case, when I gave my speech on town hall
• 28:40
  steps in Sydney, we were at about 33% our first vaccination in New South Wales. Glad to
• 28:47
  spiritually and came out and announced we are locking down the construction sites and closing
• 28:51
  more construction sites when in actualities. This is because there was an outbreak of Delta.
• 28:56
  There was not one registered case a tribute to any of these construction sites as at the time
• 29:02
  minister of the government pointed out. We're not construction site specifically, but just for
• 29:08
  context to the international list, I assume you're talking about probably August of 2021,
• 29:12
  something like that. Yeah, this is July actually July 21 2021. Yeah, so that would have been when we
• 29:17
  be at 33%, I would assume that was the winter here that Delta hit and upended all of the epidemiological
• 29:24
  assumptions that New South Wales's strategy had been based on and we had previously done a pretty good
• 29:30
  job of turning the dial up and down and ramping it up and down and sort of keeping it out and it
• 29:35
  was occasionally escaping from quarantine hotels as people came back into the country, but then we would
• 29:41
  have sort of, I think the New South Wales government was pretty good at titrating the level of
• 29:48
  control to the level of the threat. Delta was much, much more infectious, it escaped and then it
• 29:54
  was a question of do we all just lock ourselves inside for 100 days while we can all get vaccinated
• 30:00
  or do we not and do we endure potentially what Italy did in February of 2020 or what New York did
• 30:09
  and that was a line ball call and I could see an argument for it. And let's be fair. I mean,
• 30:14
  the first lockdowns in 2020, totally fair. I was pushing for everyone was pushing for it,
• 30:19
  but by the time we got to 2021, we actually had enough data to show from the UK at the time and from
• 30:25
  other countries like Sweden at the time that this was actually probably not the best course of action.
• 30:30
  Tony Abbott wrote the legislation in this country, former prime minister and he ended up basically
• 30:36
  saying I didn't want to mandate lockdowns into the legislation because of a virus is that bad,
• 30:42
  he trusted the individual to lock down and to do that themselves. And that is the real clash of
• 30:47
  world views here. One is an authoritarian one that enforces what they think is right without
• 30:52
  bringing the people along for the right through transparency and accountability. Another is one
• 30:57
  where Tony Abbott was putting forward, which is if you trust people, if it's really that dangerous,
• 31:03
  people will do the right thing, especially if you give them the choice. Is there anywhere where that
• 31:09
  happened in the world? Yeah, again, you're talking where people voluntarily lock down to such an
• 31:13
  extent that they eliminated the, I do believe there might have been parts of Asia, but again,
• 31:17
  you're talking the wrong guy, but the point is, I don't think that it matters when people make
• 31:23
  I with names like that, whether or not, I'll reality bears them out. I will call on the authority
• 31:28
  of Gigi Foster. She's a phenomenal guest. The point is I could have talked out of my
• 31:33
  forever about this closer to the time, where now almost four years, five years since that kicked off.
• 31:41
  So it was a little bit fresher in my mind back then. But let's proceed to see what happened when
• 31:46
  citizens did come out and did try to say, hey, I'm losing my job. I can't feed myself. I can't,
• 31:54
  the government's actually not giving me what I need for this. The town hall protest in Sydney was
• 31:59
  the last time we really saw the brutality of the police like we saw this week. That was
• 32:05
  citizens coming out by the count at the time, the police were saying 3,500. It was more like 50,000
• 32:12
  from people that were with me there. They proceeded to have crime, open crime stoppers. They started
• 32:19
  a task force. They tried to throw me in prison for six months for giving a speech that the police
• 32:24
  asked me to do. I ended up winning that and getting let off. But the idea that we our own
• 32:31
  fellow Australians were saying, I need help. Instead, they got slapped down. This is really
• 32:37
  damaging to the social fabric of our country. People may see them unlinked, but when the
• 32:43
  voice referendum came around, a lot of people voted against that not because of the proposal,
• 32:49
  but because they felt that they were hard done by for the last three years before that. And this
• 32:54
  was a way to thump the establishment and say, oh, this is your precious voice. This is something where
• 32:59
  all the unions, the banks, calls and willies and all the big institutions and the media want.
• 33:05
  Well, I'm going to, I'm not going to vote against it. And we saw a massive whopping 60 to 70
• 33:09
  percent of people not voting for this proposal. This was the proposal last year. It was the
• 33:13
  last year. I was twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty three October. Oh my goodness.
• 33:17
  October was a week after October seven. So it was. Yeah. Right.
• 33:21
  Fourteenth of October. Same days. This was the referendum to amend the Australian
• 33:25
  constitution to create a body for indigenous Australians that would advise parliament.
• 33:29
  Yeah. I mean, I'll grant you that towards the end of COVID, the level of authoritarian
• 33:35
  and sort of like bully tactics was completely disproportionate to the threat that still existed.
• 33:42
  I think Tony Abbott makes a good point in the sense that if that people will self lock down to
• 33:48
  some extent, if the virus is bad enough, the counterpoint I would make to that is that in some
• 33:54
  ways, that proves the opposite case than the one that he thinks it does because the people who
• 34:02
  the majority of epidemiologists and economists who favored harsh lockdowns, their point was
• 34:08
  if you don't eliminate it, you'll have a long, bad economic consequence which will go on for
• 34:15
  a much longer time as it did in the UK and in the US actually then it did here because people
• 34:21
  will voluntarily say no, no, no one's going to want to go out to a pub or a restaurant or a movie
• 34:27
  theater if it might land them in bed feeling with the worst flu of their life for the next two weeks.
• 34:32
  Yeah. So the economy will be stored for longer if you leave it up to people's own devices.
• 34:37
  But then if you just make everybody lock down for a short period of time,
• 34:41
  I'm not an expert, but the problem is we had pandemic plans and they went out the window at the
• 34:47
  moment this came along and unfortunately the real question we've got to ask is taxpayers that
• 34:51
  employ these bureaucrats and these politicians if the plan that you had going into this thing went
• 34:56
  out the window, what are we paying you for? But did it? It did. No, you mean the Tony Abbott?
• 35:01
  Not, yeah, that was the legislation he wrote. He made the point that we have pandemic plans and
• 35:05
  it went totally out the window. He said that. I mean Australia's response was pretty textbook
• 35:10
  pandemic plan. Like that, that was that is what you do. Look, he made us a September.
• 35:15
  Shut the borders to keep it out. Yeah. Like everybody down, you contacts Trace aggressively,
• 35:19
  you pump a lot of money into the economy, you pay employers not to fire their employees by
• 35:25
  pegging that money to their continued employment. That is what most pandemic experts
• 35:33
  sure. Look, science, science, science isn't a democracy, but the point is Tony Abbott made this
• 35:38
  point in September 2021 on a podcast that he made with the IPA and he made this point and I think
• 35:45
  that that's when he was calling for Royal Commission, which still hasn't happened. So where is
• 35:49
  the accountability? And so this goes back to the overarching theme of what I love you, what you're
• 35:53
  about with all this stuff, Josh, is that we need greater transparency as taxpayers in a government
• 35:59
  that is meant to be for us. And there is a growing distrust which we're seeing in the polls in
• 36:04
  this country between the elites on the left and the elites on the right, which is why we're seeing
• 36:09
  the major parties poll at less than half of the country when before they are used to have 90%
• 36:16
  of the country wrapped up. And so this is a really fascinating theme that keeps coming up with
• 36:21
  the voice. It's come up in recent polling. I believe we're going to see it in the next elections
• 36:26
  with minor left parties eating away at labor and minor right parties eating at our conservative
• 36:31
  parties. It's actually a really exciting time and it's a content rich environment, but COVID was
• 36:36
  a wake up call for everyone because they were forced to look at government. Yeah, that's going on.
• 36:42
  I think it was a wake up call for a lot of people. I mean, a lot of the other social justice
• 36:46
  taboos and the environment, the atmosphere of cancel culture, I think alienated a lot of people.
• 36:51
  I mean, you mentioned straws, but there were a lot of things about diversity and representation
• 36:56
  and transgender pronouns and gay pride or mardi growl, whatever. There was certainly an atmosphere
• 37:04
  at that time that you were coming up of hostility to other voices who disagreed with what the
• 37:10
  elite consensus was supposed to be. One big area of elite consensus has been on immigration,
• 37:17
  which seems to be, I think correct me if I'm wrong, would that be the main focus? I've
• 37:23
  listened to a bit of your content and it strikes me that you can break your mission up into a few
• 37:30
  chunks. Maybe immigration is one and national identity and education and pride and it might be
• 37:38
  another and then there might be the economy as another one. It strikes me that a lot flows from
• 37:44
  immigration in terms of whether or not taxpayers are getting a fair shake in terms of the
• 37:50
  amount of resources that migrants take, that burden on the NDIS, which is a disability insurance
• 37:55
  scheme, the social and cultural cohesion of the country in terms of the multicultural project.
• 38:04
  Where are you on immigration? Yeah, look, it's become a big issue, not just because of
• 38:11
  political animals and we look at this stuff, but the voters are saying this is one of our biggest
• 38:16
  issues right now as well as the economy and the cost of living and everything. Immigration to me
• 38:22
  as someone who's grandfather came in the late 60s to this country, we left our bag of goods
• 38:28
  at the door. Where did he come from? He came from Lebanon. I do believe it was a French speaking
• 38:34
  calling at the time, but Lebanon was a country that basically it's Christian, it speaks English
• 38:43
  French Arabic and it's quite compatible with Australia when you're importing those sorts of people
• 38:49
  which is why very similar to the Greeks, very similar to the Italians and that's why we tend to
• 38:54
  get on so well. When we see other people not doing that, not learning the national anthem,
• 39:01
  the language, the culture, not respecting the flag, it's insult to us because we're kind of like
• 39:09
  an adopted son and then the new adopted sons come in and he's not paying taxes to the household,
• 39:17
  he's not actually respecting the household. In some cases, they're being violent, they're getting
• 39:21
  caught up in sexual assaults. This is alarm bills to someone like us and who are the they,
• 39:28
  who are the new migrants who aren't behaving. Yeah, look, we get the Sudanese sword fighting
• 39:33
  in Victoria. We've got a lot of Middle Eastern crimes for the more recent Middle Easterners that
• 39:39
  are coming out and obviously more recently we're having to deal with radical Islamic terrorism,
• 39:44
  preachers just thinking that they can just talk the way that they talk and not get locked up,
• 39:49
  not get deported. I mean, this to us is sending alarm bells because this will threaten a backlash
• 39:56
  from Australians that are white and who do you think they're coming for? The NSN guys, the Nazis
• 40:02
  in this country, they want to deport me to Josh. Like, I'm not safe from this. And so when I see
• 40:07
  this instability, this threat to our democracy, I'm like trying to ring a bell here and say,
• 40:12
  hey, hey, hey, it's not all immigrants. But we've got is that not sort of a phenomenon that always
• 40:18
  happens that the recent migrants want to draw up the drawbridge after they get to a place and
• 40:24
  demonize the newer people because I mean, you're saying that like the Lebanese, like the Greeks
• 40:29
  and Italians have integrated well. But because the Lebanese are largely more recent,
• 40:33
  a more recent migrant population than the Greeks and the Italians in Australia, they did have
• 40:38
  two thing problems initially. I mean, 20 years ago, there were riots in Kronala where, you know, between
• 40:44
  the species of Lebanese. That's really specific. The Kronala riots were a result of Muslims going
• 40:48
  to that area. And it all, they were sexually assaulting women. And they ended up, it all amalgamated
• 40:54
  to this point where they beat up some Aussie lifeguards. And unfortunately, you know, a lot of
• 41:00
  Aussies at the time, they can't tell the difference between basically a Christian Lebanese person
• 41:06
  or a radical Muslim, Middle East person. And that's where the lack of communication can come in.
• 41:14
  And so that's why I think a lot of immigrants are like looking at the last 20 years. Again,
• 41:18
  my grandfather came in the late 60s. I mean, how long do you have to be here before, you know,
• 41:22
  you could consider basically an Australian that's integrated? My dad started at the
• 41:27
  Conservative time of music. He played the saxophone, the clarinet. He helped build churches in Sydney.
• 41:32
  He, he, he, his funeral service was in one that he built in Western Sydney, some areas. And so
• 41:37
  did my grandfather, he helped build our Lady of Lebanon, the biggest Lebanese Christian church in
• 41:42
  Western Sydney. He, when he came out, they were laying the foundations. These are people that are
• 41:47
  a part of the fabric of Australia. We can't change that. So when they look at the last 20 years,
• 41:53
  it's not about not including these people. It's that we had to integrate, we had to adopt this.
• 41:59
  I don't, I don't actually speak as much Arabic as I would like, for example. It's not a problem
• 42:05
  to speak in a language, but you have to at least speak English in this country, or at least your
• 42:09
  kids be learning to speak English in this country. And I think that if, is it not the case, I mean,
• 42:15
  I genuinely don't know that it's on the most, that the children of most migrants are speaking English.
• 42:20
  I mean, they go to schools presumably where they speak English. And there are a lot of schools
• 42:24
  where they're only speaking Arabic in Australia. No, no, there's not many. But if you look at
• 42:28
  what's going on with the voting data, for example, I was pulled up on this recently,
• 42:32
  the worst voting data in Australia right now, I think it's about 25% to 30% in some
• 42:40
  electorates, especially local electorates in Western Sydney, their ballots are getting stuffed up.
• 42:44
  And it's not because they don't like the system or whatever. They actually don't know how to
• 42:48
  complete the ballots. Right. Now they haven't learned to read English, you mean? Exactly. And Josh,
• 42:52
  we're going to look at this. There are multiple languages there. Don't they have an Arabic one and
• 42:56
  it's still bad. It's still bad. But this is the problem, Josh. We've got immigrants that have come
• 43:02
  into this country. They have integrated it and they have done this. It's the rate at which it's
• 43:07
  changed. We're now 32% foreign born. We're now 52% foreign born or the children of immigrants.
• 43:12
  This is one of the highest in the world. I mean, it's too fast. It's not about the old immigrants
• 43:18
  now saying the new immigrants were going to pull up the drawbridge. It's too fast. And we see it.
• 43:22
  I mean, you go to Sydney, the QVB, you walk out and it's like a game of spot the white guy.
• 43:27
  That's a huge shopping mall in downtown Sydney, just for people that don't know what the QVB,
• 43:32
  the Queen Victoria building is. The suburban areas are very much becoming
• 43:38
  completely different. And look, it wouldn't be scary to a lot of people in Australia that are
• 43:42
  voting for some of these national parties, like one nation. If it wasn't for the fact that if
• 43:48
  you can't connect with someone, when I hear, for example, the Aussie accent, it means to me
• 43:53
  immediate trust. It means that this person, maybe they played cricket, maybe they played rugby,
• 43:58
  but we have a shared social fabric. And so I'm not saying everyone has to have the Aussie accent.
• 44:03
  No, I mean, your grandfather didn't when he got here. Absolutely.
• 44:06
  My father didn't when he got here. Absolutely not. But you look at his kids and his grandkids
• 44:09
  and you're like, oh, okay, like, well, we haven't had time to look at the grandkids of the people
• 44:13
  who arrived within the past 20 years. Right. Let's take another example. My bishop is Bishop
• 44:18
  Maramara. He was stabbed in the eye. Who did it? Who did it? It was a bunch of Muslim teens that were
• 44:24
  born here. They didn't integrate. They ended up getting radicalized. And they went and actually
• 44:30
  not only stabbed him in the eye, wanted to kill him, but they then had a whole bunch of synagogues
• 44:34
  they were going to hit up with weapons they had. This was completely undercover by the media.
• 44:39
  Now remember, and he was preaching at the time, right? He was. They were stormed into a church.
• 44:44
  Exactly. And what happened after that? The Christian Middle Easterners had an immediate trauma
• 44:49
  to what they've experienced in the Middle East. I've got relatives that have been burned in cages
• 44:53
  by ISIS in 2015, 2016. This is the immediate trauma we have. And we understand that threat.
• 45:00
  I think that the problem with a lot of Aussies is they don't recognize that if you import the
• 45:05
  third world too quickly, you'll import the problems as well. There's got to be a slow
• 45:09
  teething issue of becoming Australian. And that's the real threat. And that's why when Bondi happened,
• 45:16
  I think we were all a bit traumatized by it. First, the biggest shooting of 30 years,
• 45:22
  Muslim terrorists that were radicalized potentially by ISIS went to the Philippines.
• 45:26
  The investigation is still ongoing, obviously. But this was a huge wake-up call for this country.
• 45:32
  And I think that we've got to really wake up from it. I think you're right that secular people
• 45:37
  don't understand what they're talking about. Because I honestly think secular people don't understand
• 45:41
  what it's like to be deeply religious. And I didn't either. I think secular people think that
• 45:48
  religious people don't really believe the things that they pretend to believe because nobody
• 45:52
  could believe such silly things. No offense. No, I understand. But I think that actually,
• 45:59
  if you really believe that the creator of the universe wrote a book, that changes
• 46:05
  where your priorities are and what you're willing to do at his behest. And until we reckon with
• 46:13
  the sincerity of that mission among some new arrivals, we're going to have a blind spot
• 46:19
  about what it takes to integrate because we think that it's just going to be about playing cricket
• 46:24
  or going to the same place as to eat food. And actually, there is a deeper
• 46:31
  challenge about maintaining the fabric of a multicultural society when you add in the dose
• 46:38
  of extreme religious belief. But that, I guess, brings us to your religious belief as well.
• 46:45
  What role does Christianity play in your worldview and turning point of Australia's mission?
• 46:51
  It's entirely formative. Christianity is about being Christlike. It is about trying to emulate
• 46:58
  how he was amazing. I mean, the fruit of the spirit as a Christian is love, peace, patience,
• 47:05
  forbearance, kindness. These are values we should all be trying to emulate. And these are the
• 47:09
  founding principle of what made the West Great, what made Australia great. And these are great
• 47:15
  values to teach your kids whether you're religious or not. Anyone that is coming here and preaching
• 47:20
  in any institution or a mosque and saying anything that's incitement, anything that's demonising
• 47:28
  a specific class, it's a huge issue. And the idea that we're not going to check that by cancelling
• 47:33
  these people's visas or deporting them from the country, we're asking for it. We are absolutely
• 47:38
  asking for it. And how do you balance that with free speech? I mean, I wrestle with this myself
• 47:43
  that like I don't believe in outlawing ideas. I don't think that it should be a crime to say
• 47:49
  globalize the intifada even though I think it's a totally stupid and violent thing to say. I agree.
• 47:56
  And so I'm a bit conflicted like when you suppose you, you know, there are a few
• 48:01
  imams in Australia who are well known to AZO, our intelligence agencies and just to anyone who's
• 48:08
  plugged in to be extremely regressive, sexist, gay hating, Jew hating, anti-Western, virulently anti-American,
• 48:18
  virulently anti-Israel people who seem to take pride in recruiting young Muslims into a much
• 48:26
  more theological and theoretical world view than most Australians would be comfortable with.
• 48:32
  These people are not Australian citizens necessarily. But if you kick them out,
• 48:39
  you're just opening the door to exactly the kind of nanny state that you're objecting to with
• 48:46
  COVID. No, we have existing laws in the books. If I said anything that these men said, I would have
• 48:51
  landed in a cell straight away. That it's a simple thing. When I gave my speech on town all
• 48:56
  steps, I saw what the state could do when it wants to do something. It would stretch laws to get me,
• 49:03
  get other people. The guy behind Os versus the agenda, which is a big channel in Australia,
• 49:10
  I saw what they did to that guy. I saw how they tracked his phone with the existing laws in the books.
• 49:15
  I don't know that case. Is that another nationalist right wing? Yes. That's right. He was one of
• 49:23
  the protest organizers. I saw how efficient the state could be with him. When I look at what's going
• 49:29
  on with the bondage shooting and the aftermath and the ongoing investigation, one thing that no one
• 49:35
  in the parties are really saying except one nation, the nationalist party, is you had existing laws
• 49:43
  on the books. We passed them back when we had a previous terrorist attack in Martin place. Why
• 49:49
  didn't you use those? Why do you have to pass new laws? That's the real question because I totally
• 49:54
  agree with you. I don't think we need speech laws. I think we need more speech. I don't agree with
• 49:58
  banning the NSN if they're not inciting violence. The biggest mistake of all, these guys wanted
• 50:05
  to run in elections. They wanted to run. What are you talking about? The NSN, that's the
• 50:10
  neo-Nazi party. They wanted to run in the elections in Victoria. They wanted. They still do, I think.
• 50:16
  They will. They can't. They can't. They wrapped up their organization
• 50:21
  White Australia. That was an opportunity for people like you and I public facing figures to not
• 50:27
  only criticize their bad ideas, but also to see them run and see them lose to the democratic
• 50:33
  process that we have in this country. The moment you deny that to them, that is pushing them
• 50:39
  underground, pushing their ideas to be unopposed, and now we're in a situation where we don't know
• 50:44
  where they are. We don't know what they're doing. We don't know what they're planning next.
• 50:47
  It doesn't that argue for allowing the mum to stay here and monitor him and make sure that his
• 50:56
  congregants are not violent rather than the amount of the country and pushing the problem underground.
• 51:01
  My view is that if there's someone that's broken our existing laws in this country and they're not
• 51:07
  Australian citizens, they should be deported. It's as simple as that. I think we've gone soft.
• 51:13
  I think we really need to be serious about this because the law was very clear on some of these
• 51:19
  imams and how they've broken it. Some of these laws are being wielded against right wing as
• 51:25
  in Australia right now than did far less things. This is a real question in my mind about why we
• 51:33
  needed new laws when the laws were already there, but also the fact that they're being wielded,
• 51:38
  but not against the people perhaps that they should have been wielded on that did break the law.
• 51:43
  There's a huge accountability problem and that's why the polling recently is the way it is for
• 51:49
  this. It is interesting isn't it? The problem of consistency and the application of laws.
• 51:55
  I mean, I was taking a piss at a year and a half and there was graffiti saying it was like
• 52:00
  die juice gum or something like that on the sort of scroll on the tile and I thought it is
• 52:04
  interesting that we live in a moment where I don't actually know if that person is far right or
• 52:10
  far left like that because I was in a pretty Bohemian like lefty part of Sydney. I was in the
• 52:17
  US and so I was like it's probably unlikely that that person is an Eonacci that person is probably
• 52:25
  you know an Islamist sympathizer or probably a non-Muslim like lefty, but if you said that thing
• 52:34
  in public and the authorities coded you as Nazi affiliated, they'd throw the book at you,
• 52:40
  but if you said that thing in public and the Nazis and sorry that's happened Nazis there's a
• 52:45
  Freudian slip and the authorities coded you as a progressive well-meaning like greens party
• 52:52
  person. It's no one can deny that the punishment would be more moderate. That's right, if at all.
• 52:59
  And that's what's astonishing. It's a shoehorn theory. The idea that the horseshoe is the two spots
• 53:07
  at the end are really close together the further you go right or left, but yeah it is radical Islam,
• 53:11
  it is the far right Nazis and it is the far left. And so yeah I appreciate sitting with you as
• 53:18
  a Jewish person and sort of trying you can see where this is going. This is not good stuff.
• 53:26
  And look whether you're Jewish or not it's irrelevant to me you're an Australian and it's not good
• 53:31
  that we have 15 people getting gunned down on Bondi. It's not good. And the idea that one of them
• 53:37
  was 23 years old still alive and he's someone that was born here tells you how long this has been
• 53:44
  coming and how long this has been baking. We have had consecutive consecutive failures by conservative
• 53:52
  governments and labor governments. We've had a consecutive failures and so this is our
• 53:57
  commandment, commandments from bad governance and we need to have a correction we need to have a
• 54:03
  turning point. Christianity though it seems to me like a bad fit for a multi-ethnic,
• 54:09
  multicultural, multi-religious, modern state. What is the nationalism in the Christian national?
• 54:15
  Well because culturally I understand the value of learning about the history on which
• 54:22
  Western civilization is based, the ethos of Jesus, just like the ethos of Moses or Muhammad or
• 54:29
  whoever. I mean these are all things that have influenced our lives and influenced our intellectual
• 54:34
  histories and it's worth being aware of. But privileging one over the other in the 21st century
• 54:41
  feels regressive, myopic, superstitious. Sure. Look where a Christian nation. Well Christianity is
• 54:51
  not a white religion. It is literally a Middle Eastern religion. But what does we are a Christian
• 54:55
  nation? I mean I don't think a majority of, I know that a majority of Australians don't go to
• 54:59
  church each week. Yeah but when it was founded the democratic principles that came about and the
• 55:04
  morals which informed them, where else were you going to get your morals from when it was founded?
• 55:09
  It was Christians that founded it. And so we, you, it was at a time when the percolating ideas of
• 55:18
  the French revolution and the American revolution were extremely secular. Like they were in opposition
• 55:26
  to religious domination of the state. They were all about separating the church and state. Now at
• 55:32
  the time Darwin hadn't, it didn't exist yet. Being an atheist wasn't viable. Yeah. So and
• 55:38
  everyone was a Christian. So obviously they were Christians who were doing it. But they weren't
• 55:42
  motivated by Christian theology when they were designing the separation of scholars. And Dr.
• 55:47
  Stephen Shavira, you've got to talk to Dr. Stephen Shavira. He's a professor in Australia. He's
• 55:51
  someone that teaches at Campion College. And he argues that actually if you look at the word
• 55:57
  secular when the Constitution was written, it doesn't mean what we mean today. Secular,
• 56:01
  that word has changed over time. Secular never meant that you keep religion out of politics.
• 56:06
  It's actually where else do you get your morals from? It's actually Christianity.
• 56:10
  I'm sure he has a fancy, a fancy theory about that. But I mean it's the first amendment of the US
• 56:16
  constitution. I mean the Bill of Rights rather, the idea that you should have freedom of speech
• 56:21
  and religion, meaning freedom from government articulation of a state religion is foundational to
• 56:27
  the American experiment and blood into the thinking of the Australian founders.
• 56:31
  Sure. Look, Josh, the Australia is changing. And so you're in a very strong position with the
• 56:35
  new demographic to argue we needed new system. However, the point still stands when you have such a
• 56:42
  diversity of people and cultures, when we used to have a dominant Australian culture and now we've
• 56:47
  got a bunch of supposedly equal sub-cultures and not every culture is equal, the system we have
• 56:53
  now is not fit. And that's why we're coming to an impasse. So I actually agree with you,
• 56:58
  the demographics have changed so much that the democratic system we have now. It's not fit for
• 57:03
  purpose. It was made for a time where we were homogenous. I mean, I don't think that. I think you
• 57:11
  probably fall further outside of you probably have more disdain for the system than I do.
• 57:18
  And I am frustrated with the system because I feel like quite recently, meaning in the last
• 57:24
  couple of decades, we have lost the ability to confidently articulate what being Australian is
• 57:30
  all about and what democracy is all about and what liberalism is all about, what pluralism should be
• 57:37
  and what multiculturalism can be. And we've become cowed because we feel like we have to never
• 57:43
  offend anybody, which means that we have no sort of ground to stand on. But I think that I believe
• 57:50
  that that ground can be found within the secular democratic process. And maybe you believe it requires
• 57:57
  theological underpinning, otherwise there's nothing to tether it to. Absolutely. It's a void.
• 58:01
  And the problem is this has come out come about due to atheism is come out about due to this
• 58:06
  secularism that you're speaking of. I believe that because this void's opened up and because we've
• 58:11
  demonized our past and what's ended up happening is it's opened up this huge void,
• 58:17
  huge void where anything can fill it. So if you want to see what our future looks like, my friend,
• 58:21
  go and look at what's going on in the UK. They don't have state governments. They have local
• 58:27
  and then they have national government. And at a local level, they are enforcing
• 58:31
  sharia law at a local level because these areas are majority Muslim. And if you want that, great.
• 58:36
  That's phenomenal. You can, you know, that's what we're going to see in Australia very soon if we
• 58:41
  don't bring immigration under control. But what we're seeing over there is these courts. We're seeing
• 58:47
  mass Pakistani rape gangs. We're seeing police that aren't going after these things. And that's
• 58:52
  not something I want, man. I'm like, well, we've got to come with our own bag of goods.
• 58:57
  I've always been a Christian. It's something in the past I might have parked more and been more
• 59:01
  private about, but I'm recognizing that, hey, if we're not more overt about it, this will fill
• 59:07
  the void. And so I love where the intellectual dark web came from. I love that mentality of being
• 59:14
  like we're progressive in that sense, but it's not going to work in my view. I respect the view
• 59:19
  and I understand it, but I just don't think it's going to work. I think it's going to destroy
• 59:22
  Australian society and everything we love. What will exactly? The void that's been created.
• 59:27
  I think that the idea of the void of values or a void of what the void of basically demonizing
• 59:34
  Christianity, the void of demonizing the values that made Australia great in the first place.
• 59:39
  I think that by demonizing these things and not replacing it with something that is amicable
• 59:45
  because they never replaced it. They only brought it down. I think that when you mass
• 59:50
  you know, immigrate people from the world, whether it's refugees or whatever, if it's too quick,
• 59:56
  these people are certain of what they believe in. In fact, they're prepared to die for it.
• 1:00:00
  That is the problem when it's too quick. And so we're not exactly, we don't exactly have
• 1:00:06
  churches set up for secularism in Australia. We're not exactly evangelical about that. In fact,
• 1:00:12
  people that are secular tend to not actually have many kids. So if you don't think it would be
• 1:00:16
  an easier task of persuasion to say to new arrivals who might be quite dogmatic in their
• 1:00:24
  religious beliefs, you don't have to, we don't have a religion that we're going to impose on you.
• 1:00:30
  All you have to do is agree with the basic principles of this country, which are that you treat
• 1:00:35
  everybody equally, that men aren't any better than women, that straight people aren't any better
• 1:00:39
  than gay people, that we live and let live, that you don't bring violence here, that you don't
• 1:00:43
  have enmity towards other ethnic and religious groups. That's right to me as an easier cell.
• 1:00:48
  Josh, I agree with you, but they're not doing that. You won't plan of like, we are a Christian nation
• 1:00:52
  and you have to convert presumably or like this. Yeah, I'm not saying that. No, look, I'm not saying
• 1:00:56
  that at all. I think that, you know, where there's risk, there must be choice with this stuff.
• 1:01:01
  I'm a libertarian with that stuff and I believe that our ideas will live out. Unfortunately,
• 1:01:05
  we're not able to do that. We are being persecuted. You've just got to talk to people that like
• 1:01:10
  Curially Smith or Lyle Sheldon, they've got like half a dozen court cases each with the work
• 1:01:15
  state going after them, the LGBT Nazis going after them. But what you're saying makes perfect sense.
• 1:01:22
  It's just a pause on that. Who's going after them for what? So stuff like, they often challenge
• 1:01:28
  and get challenged by their comments about transgender men serving and playing sports in women's
• 1:01:36
  sports, for example, transgender women, meaning biological men jumping into women's sports.
• 1:01:42
  Yeah, that sort of stuff. But also, I mean, their comments online saying that, look,
• 1:01:45
  transition can be harmful. You know, talking about these sorts of topics is a highly
• 1:01:50
  litigious issue. And those are very interesting people with stories around each one of them. And
• 1:01:56
  the courts and these groups, they're getting run through the courts in a big way. But let's
• 1:02:02
  where I was going was you've talked about properly policing our values secular or not or Christian
• 1:02:07
  or not of people coming to the country. Mate, that makes perfect sense, but that's not what's
• 1:02:11
  happening right now. And I totally agree. A quality between the sexes, a quality before the law,
• 1:02:17
  actually paying a taxes to the government. A lot of these values that you get asked when you come
• 1:02:22
  to this country, we don't do the vetting like we used to when my grandfather came out. He was
• 1:02:26
  heavily vetted heavily. How is how is his language? Did he have compatible ideology with regards to
• 1:02:32
  Australia, basic stuff, basic stuff, not it's not happening. And that's why we're ringing the bells
• 1:02:38
  on this. It's not a hatred of foreigners. I am a foreigner by genetics. It's it's it's winning
• 1:02:44
  ringing the alarm bells and saying, Hey, the guys that shot up Bondi, the father didn't actually
• 1:02:51
  back in the late 90s. He didn't actually conform with Australian values. And not only was he on
• 1:02:58
  the ACO watchlist, not only was he someone in their crosshairs, but they then didn't do anything
• 1:03:03
  on him and he was allowed to get a gun. That's where the existing rules to get multiple guns. Yeah,
• 1:03:08
  and travel to a terrorist hotspot in the southern Philippines and return without yeah, I mean,
• 1:03:13
  that's not obvious intelligence failure, which I suppose we could go into. Where do you see
• 1:03:17
  American? Do you mentioned the UK, obviously, and looks like the UK could have a, you know,
• 1:03:23
  a turning point style leader. Yeah, in your major, in your major. He's a great, he's a kind of
• 1:03:29
  say he's a great guy. Like we I spent a lot of time. I made them state of China out drinking when he
• 1:03:34
  was in Australia. He's a great guy. He looks like he's at a point or two. Yeah, yeah, he had, but
• 1:03:39
  what you honestly, what you see, he is that guy. Like he's a larger than life figure. And I'm not
• 1:03:43
  just saying that he'll never see this podcast, but that man, he's just like, there are people in
• 1:03:48
  America that genuinely don't impress me that are higher profile than Nigel. Nigel as an individual,
• 1:03:55
  as a, as someone that can articulate his issues is genuinely impressive. I really like that man,
• 1:04:01
  and he's a huge jump role model. I guess you could say. What about the states? I mean, what do you
• 1:04:07
  make of what do you make of turning point in the state at the moment? I mean, Erica Kirk,
• 1:04:12
  JD Vance, she's endorsed him. Some people are like, oh, they're having an affair.
• 1:04:18
  Well, look, I look, I don't follow the ins and outs of the American politics. I genuinely am
• 1:04:23
  Australia first. I'm focused on honoring Charlie and his vision in Australia. With a lot of the
• 1:04:29
  stuff in America, it would be unwise for me to comment on, you know, the American organization
• 1:04:35
  there because frankly, it doesn't concern what we're doing here. We're still growing here. We're
• 1:04:41
  we're living out of mission. The one question that goes through my mind, though, is I don't understand
• 1:04:47
  why Erica has ensued some of these people like Candace Owens. I genuinely don't understand why
• 1:04:53
  that hasn't happened. And so she's probably smart enough that she knows it'll, if you wrestle with a
• 1:04:59
  pig, you just get, you know, you both get dirty. Sure. Sure. Because I mean, who do you think,
• 1:05:05
  who do you like politically in the States? You mentioned Farage in the context of the UK. Yeah,
• 1:05:09
  I don't know speaking on behalf of turning point now, but just as a person, you're a JDR,
• 1:05:14
  do you want to cut a run? Do you think who's the who's the air to Marga mate? I don't know.
• 1:05:21
  I think that we've got to see a lot more. The next elections, 2028 primaries will start to begin
• 1:05:27
  in 2027. I am not impressed by the current options on the table. I think that JD Vance whilst he
• 1:05:34
  has some promising things, there's some huge questions around those that got him there, the Peter
• 1:05:39
  Teals of the World, the surveillance state that's coming. I do worry about some of the anti-Semitism
• 1:05:43
  laws he's pushing over there. I don't support them here. I don't support them there. Because if that
• 1:05:48
  happens and we have the twitters of the world and other social media channels based out of there
• 1:05:54
  or in organizations, that's going to affect us. I mean, two minds. Whilst it doesn't affect us,
• 1:06:01
  it does affect us. We should have a bit of a voice our opinions on it. I'm not impressed by
• 1:06:06
  those on offer. I'm very eager to see who puts the hand up. I would like to see someone
• 1:06:12
  put the hand up. That's a bit more American first. I really don't think that. What does that mean?
• 1:06:17
  I think putting America's interests first is. Is Vance right? I don't think so. I don't think
• 1:06:23
  so to an extent. In what? Just help me understand what the daylight is between what you think
• 1:06:28
  America first is and what he does. Yeah. Look, it's on. His policy is currently the Trump policy.
• 1:06:35
  So to be clear, we're talking about the Trump administration. The anti-Semitism laws that have
• 1:06:40
  not been opposed by the Trump administration is a huge issue. Which are what? Which are basically,
• 1:06:44
  it's very similar to what we have, what they were passing here, which is you can't, you know,
• 1:06:50
  they've lumped in anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. That's... Last I checked, you're not a Zionist.
• 1:06:59
  No, I certainly don't think that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same thing. I certainly
• 1:07:03
  don't think that people should be denounced or let alone prosecute for airing criticisms of
• 1:07:09
  Israel. I never would have historically called myself a Zionist, but since October 7th and I think that
• 1:07:14
  the nature of the rhetoric, it's become a term that I think is less helpful. To define oneself
• 1:07:22
  as not a Zionist is almost as unhelpful to me as defining oneself as a Zionist. I am a Zionist
• 1:07:29
  to the extent that I think that it's inconsistent for most anti-Zionists to oppose the right of
• 1:07:35
  Jewish people to have a stage when they don't oppose the right of South Asian Muslims to have a
• 1:07:39
  state in Pakistan or Arab Muslims to have a state in Saudi Arabia or Japanese people to have a
• 1:07:43
  state in Japan. If they were universally objected to have any states having an ethnic complexion
• 1:07:53
  to them, then I'd be fine. In my ideal worldview, we wouldn't need Zionism. We would all just get
• 1:08:01
  along, but given the state of the world, I regard myself as a Zionist to the extent that I think
• 1:08:08
  that there's nothing illegitimate about Jewish people coordinating into a state.
• 1:08:11
  Let's change it up a bit. The idea that laws are being passed in America, for example, let's say
• 1:08:17
  if it was for China, you can't criticize China, significant problem. What's happened is we've
• 1:08:23
  lumped it in. I respect the fact that a lot of anti-Semites, rabid anti-Semites, they lump in
• 1:08:30
  their criticism and they hide their criticism of Jewish people by criticizing Israel. I respect
• 1:08:35
  that fact, but they've gone too far now. They've gone too far in passing these laws where you
• 1:08:40
  can't criticize this foreign country and their actions. In other words, when you say that the Trump
• 1:08:46
  vans administration is not sufficiently America first, you're saying it's not sufficiently libertarian.
• 1:08:52
  Yeah. Do they have free speech or not? Charlie Kirk was very clear about this. He opposed
• 1:08:57
  Pam Bondi. He called her out. I don't support these speech laws. He believed in basically
• 1:09:02
  hitting the pavement, going to the universities, having it out. That's how we change hearts of
• 1:09:06
  minds. He opposed these laws. The ones that were put up in Florida, he opposed them. Now,
• 1:09:11
  last I checked, I don't think JD Vance opposes that. I believe he supports these laws.
• 1:09:17
  I mean, to be honest, I don't think that JD Vance will ever be president, even if he is the
• 1:09:21
  nominee because I think there's a sprinkle of pixie dust in Trump that I don't find particularly
• 1:09:29
  appealing, but that is able to hold together quite a disparate coalition of different people with
• 1:09:35
  different concerns from, you know, laid off appellation workers to the tech bros in Silicon Valley,
• 1:09:41
  to, you know, dudes in the Midwest who are, you know, salt of the earth guys or whatever.
• 1:09:47
  And you're going to need someone to hold that coalition together. I think it will be a Tucker
• 1:09:53
  or someone like that. I think if he gets to the point at which he doesn't think that that
• 1:10:01
  Trumpism is going to survive Trump with anyone else, I could say I'm doing it because I think he's
• 1:10:07
  quite self aggrandizing and loves it. Look, we're going to be doing, we're going to be covering
• 1:10:13
  this very day. Any year from now, talking, you know, February, 2027, we're going to have a lot more
• 1:10:21
  individuals that put their hand up. I'm very excited for that debate. I think it's going to be
• 1:10:25
  one of the most robust since 2016. Yeah, I think it'll be fascinating. Yeah. I mean, this is one
• 1:10:30
  of the things that I worry about with your movement and with the sort of new right in Australia,
• 1:10:35
  which is that the UK and the US are so big in their output culturally. Obviously the US is larger,
• 1:10:46
  but we have a historical relationship with Britain that makes it larger than which has it
• 1:10:50
  punching above its weight in terms of what Australians focus on. And especially in an age of social
• 1:10:56
  media, it's a lot of our content is coming out of those markets that I wonder whether part of
• 1:11:02
  our conversations here actually get contaminated by things that are going on over there. So that a
• 1:11:07
  lot of the outrage over the excesses of wokeness are partly fueled by American wokeness,
• 1:11:15
  has been more intense, I think, than anywhere else. And part of our worries about immigration are
• 1:11:22
  partly based on what you're talking about in the UK where there has been dramatically uncontrolled
• 1:11:27
  immigration and very poor integration of some communities in a way that doesn't exist here.
• 1:11:33
  And so I wonder how much of your worldview do you think would be the same if you were
• 1:11:40
  put in an isolated chamber and only focused on Australian on the Australian context?
• 1:11:45
  Yeah. And how much of you may be swayed a little bit further outside of the mainstream than
• 1:11:51
  you would be were it not for the fact that you've got all these American and British inputs
• 1:11:56
  pinging off your brain or something. Well, I mean, you just raised a great point. Let's measure
• 1:12:00
  apples for apples here. Turning point USA supports JD Vance. They've just come out and I've just
• 1:12:05
  said to you that I've got to see more from him before I think he's the guy. So I mean, straight away,
• 1:12:09
  I've just showed you apples for apples, the head of that organization, the head of this organization,
• 1:12:14
  we don't see eye to eye on that. Now again, it's a long way off. I wouldn't, if I was in their
• 1:12:20
  shoes, I wouldn't be picking a winner and a loser this early on who knows who could come out of
• 1:12:25
  the woodworks in a country of 330 million people in the next year and a half. No, but I mean,
• 1:12:31
  you get the substance of my question. It's not I get who should be the next president. It's not
• 1:12:34
  whether or not. Yeah. You know, immigration, national values, Christian nationalism,
• 1:12:41
  the threat of jihadism, education, social justice are these things natively Australian problems to
• 1:12:54
  the extent that you like, do they warrant the extent of your focus in a purely Australian context?
• 1:13:00
  Well, we've got, we've got similar problems. Now, look, I'm loyal to my values. I'm a Christian,
• 1:13:05
  I'm a conservative. I want smaller government, less rules. And I also, you know, I look at the
• 1:13:12
  issues we face because of COVID with mass expenditure. We're going to bring that under control.
• 1:13:15
  That's also an American issue. They had a mass illegal immigration problem. We don't have that
• 1:13:20
  so much. But I think there's about 100,000 also, which we could deport that I've overstayed their
• 1:13:27
  visas, for example. That's not exactly illegal immigration that are pushing drugs and, you know,
• 1:13:32
  I hear that number. I think the number is slightly lower. I heard 60 to 70. But to be clear,
• 1:13:39
  it's a legal problem. That's my point. Yeah. And also, I mean, it is very different from the American
• 1:13:44
  scenario, because as you say, they're not people who have come here in order to who have come here
• 1:13:49
  illegally in order to work and live here illegally and then cross back and forth over a porous
• 1:13:55
  border to essentially live here in the shadow. There's people who came in here illegally and
• 1:14:00
  they stayed a few months too long on a student visa. Sure. But the point is this similar
• 1:14:05
  motifs, the idea that there's an underlying sense of draining swamp, draining the billabong in Australia's
• 1:14:11
  case. We do have one of the most bloated bureaucrats, bureaucratic groups in the world in Australia
• 1:14:19
  and government. They are disproportionately paid higher. They think completely differently. They're
• 1:14:24
  the only place that voted for the voice referendum, which really articulate that. That's interesting.
• 1:14:28
  Is that true? Is it public servants voted? Yeah. Well, in the ACT being... Oh, I see what you're saying.
• 1:14:34
  Sorry. Sorry. In the ACT. So in order to get a referendum passed, you need a majority of voters
• 1:14:43
  in a majority of states and none of the states voted majority. But the tiny territory that surrounds
• 1:14:51
  the Australian capital, which Americans can think up a bit like the District of Columbia where
• 1:14:55
  Washington DC is, that was the only state or territory that voted in favor of the Indigenous
• 1:15:01
  party. And look, America has a binary vote every four years basically. They have Democrat or Republican.
• 1:15:07
  80% of Washington DC votes for the Democrats. In Australia, in our capital territory of the ACT,
• 1:15:16
  they had 70% of the state vote for. So they're very similar like that. So we do have similar
• 1:15:21
  problems. We have a lot of wastage. The idea that we spend billions on, for example,
• 1:15:26
  Aboriginal issues, but that's not really getting to the grassroots. A lot of Aboriginal
• 1:15:31
  campaigners, they're saying, hey, you're saying you're spending this stuff, but who's going to
• 1:15:35
  bureaucrats, lawyers, planners? We're not seeing that hit the actual 20% of Aboriginal's in rural
• 1:15:41
  areas. And I think that's partly why the North and Northern territory voted against the voice too,
• 1:15:45
  which is obviously heavily Aboriginal. So Josh, there's a huge reckoning that's coming for
• 1:15:50
  accountability in this country. It is a reoccurring motif in America, but I can assure you look
• 1:15:55
  everything that guides my actions in this country. It is about being loyal to my values.
• 1:15:59
  And the moment that splits with the US turning point or even the MAGA movement in the USA,
• 1:16:06
  I'll call it out. I mean, I can be very flexible with the political party loyalties,
• 1:16:12
  but I'm very unflexible on these values. I think they're fundamental.
• 1:16:17
  One of the worries about playing this game is that you need to have the solutions as well.
• 1:16:26
  The reason I'm conflicted about you and your movement is just that I think you talk about a
• 1:16:32
  lot of valid problems, but there is a recurring bait and switch, which happens in democracies,
• 1:16:40
  and we've seen it time and again, where people appeal to the population on the basis of problems
• 1:16:47
  that are widely felt and inadequately addressed by elites and governments, and then ride a
• 1:16:57
  populist wave of power to ultimately demonstrate that they were kind of disingenuous, and there
• 1:17:04
  aren't actually fixes that are very easy to these things. For me, Brexit is a good example.
• 1:17:10
  I'm sure you're in favor of Brexit, but Boris Johnson goes around the country saying,
• 1:17:16
  why are we spending $350 million a week on the EU sending it to Brussels when it could be
• 1:17:21
  funding the NHS? Well, that figure doesn't take into account the rebates that Brussels sends back
• 1:17:27
  to the UK, so it's actually about 30% less than what he was saying anyway, and it doesn't account
• 1:17:34
  for the fact that I actually looked up the latest on Brexit just because this was front of mine
• 1:17:40
  for another reason. The UK's GDP is 6% to 8% lower today than if they'd been saved in the EU.
• 1:17:48
  Investment has dropped by 12% to 18%, productivity is down 3% or 4%, trade volumes have fallen,
• 1:17:54
  the average household has estimated to be about £2,000 worse off, so 3 or 4 grand in dollars
• 1:18:00
  worse off, so there's been slower growth, less investment, and more barriers to trade and labour,
• 1:18:05
  so that $350 million could be going on the NHS. It just evaporates in the context of the lower
• 1:18:12
  tax receipts, now Britain is in dire economic straits, it's not been nearly as easy as they promised
• 1:18:19
  to negotiate trade agreements, they can't have free trade with the EU because I've got Northern Ireland,
• 1:18:23
  so you've got these big complicated things that pointy headed like eggheads have been working
• 1:18:29
  on for a long time, and someone comes along and says, why are they crossing you around? What about
• 1:18:38
  national sovereignty? They're little men stand up again, let's not send all our money,
• 1:18:44
  and it's an easy punch line, but then you get it done, and you realise actually, this is
• 1:18:49
  complicated, you spend years arguing over all this arcane bullshit. Trump comes in on a like
• 1:18:54
  drain the swamp, you just said drain the swamp, he's running one of the most corrupt administrations,
• 1:18:59
  it's shamelessly, he puts a tariff on Vietnam, all of a sudden the next week, the Vietnamese
• 1:19:07
  pay him a bunch of money and the tariff is lifted, he puts one on Switzerland and they give him
• 1:19:11
  a gold bar and tariff is lifted. Yeah, and purilism. Extraordinary. No, you're right at the
• 1:19:16
  start point, let's speak about Brexit. What's the end of the practical end? I totally agree,
• 1:19:22
  and Nigel Farage would agree with you too about Brexit, specifically Brexit, it was a push to actually
• 1:19:28
  be the Lord of your own sovereignty, 70% of the laws were being created in a place that was not
• 1:19:33
  the UK, in the EU, and it's a bit like a when you win the lottery, you might win the lottery,
• 1:19:40
  but are you going to hold, if we check up on you in a year, you're still going to have that money,
• 1:19:43
  what he won them was the lottery in actually taking back control. Now, the conservative government
• 1:19:48
  that was in under Boris Johnson and others, they totally botched it, they didn't use it. That's why
• 1:19:53
  Farage is back, he came out of retirement in mid 2024, he says, you know what, and I can promise
• 1:19:59
  you this, he did not want to go back into politics. This is a guy campaign for 25 years. The guy
• 1:20:05
  wanted to go, he's getting close to retirement. Oh, come on. No, he did say what you want about
• 1:20:10
  Nigel, he is a billionaire darling. I will tell you, you don't have to read Nigel Farage. There's
• 1:20:15
  a difference in the camera. Yeah, but to be a political party leader is very different to being
• 1:20:20
  on GB news, where he was happy making money. You won't know this. He'll be happy being
• 1:20:23
  prime minister. You don't know this, but happy in number 10. Nigel was this close to moving to
• 1:20:30
  Australia, he had a regular segment on sky news, he had the GB news things coming up, he wasn't
• 1:20:35
  going that direction. So in the middle of the campaign in 2024 and July, when he basically,
• 1:20:41
  I remember seeing it at the time, he made that decision, you know what, there's literally no one
• 1:20:46
  that's going to be able to do this and to actually breathe Brexit and the benefits of it. That is
• 1:20:52
  why I totally agree with you. Boris Johnson totally botched the implementation of Brexit and
• 1:20:57
  actually playing it out. They never wanted it to start with when it was voted for three quarters
• 1:21:02
  of the parliament didn't actually support Brexit. And so how can we trust them to even enact it?
• 1:21:08
  Of course they didn't. And that's why I bring up the lotto analogy, the idea that someone wins
• 1:21:13
  the lotto and then doesn't know how to use it. Of course, it's going to evaporate when you check
• 1:21:18
  up on them in a year. And so getting sovereignty also relies on having great leadership. And Brexit
• 1:21:25
  highlighted the fact that it took them 10 years to implement it. They fought against the people
• 1:21:31
  and 52% of the country voted for Brexit. They wanted it. And the government begrudgingly
• 1:21:36
  implemented it after 10 years. And they tried to because it's complicated. Look, of course it's
• 1:21:43
  complicated. But this is what people voted for. And the idea that Nigel has come back out of his
• 1:21:48
  retirement to actually do frontline politics again is him being accountable and saying, I will come
• 1:21:55
  back. I will do this. And I am very interested to have another discussion with you after the guy
• 1:22:01
  presumably becomes prime minister and say, all right, what are you going to do with it? In the next
• 1:22:06
  100 days, one year, four years, five years, he might run again. Who knows? And so what did you
• 1:22:11
  actually do with Brexit? You can't paint for 25 years to get this. You came back to frontline
• 1:22:15
  politics. What did you end up doing with it? That is the real test of this. Yeah, I mean, I agree.
• 1:22:20
  It'll be interesting to see what he delivers if he does become prime minister. But I mean, what do
• 1:22:25
  you want to do it? Like what are the main policy changes that you would make in Australia?
• 1:22:33
  Well, let's be specific. If you ask me any element of policy in Australia, the most thorough policy
• 1:22:39
  outlook and detail I've seen is from one nation, which is what I agree with. I don't agree with
• 1:22:45
  everything in it. Obviously, there's some things on economics that might be like. And what is
• 1:22:49
  that platform? Because I think most Australians just think of one nation and they've raised.
• 1:22:52
  Oh, it's a bit of a joke. It's a former fish and chip shop owner from the suburbs of Queensland
• 1:22:59
  who've started a political party because she didn't like Asian people in the 1990s. And you know,
• 1:23:04
  now it's just an anti-immigration party. But what is it that they advocate? Look, immigration
• 1:23:10
  aside, because in short, they want to reduce it down to 100,000 legal immigration. They don't
• 1:23:15
  want to see what we're seeing, which is half a million every year. Not every year, but it
• 1:23:19
  peaked at half a million. It peaked a couple of years. Because it's over low. But no, in terms of
• 1:23:24
  economics, for example, things like income splitting, the idea that a couple can income split and
• 1:23:29
  actually not get taxed at a higher rate. Why are we punishing families in starting a family together?
• 1:23:33
  And getting couples going, talking about construction, talking about how we're
• 1:23:37
  actually going to get the trades in this country that we have here, actually policing immigration
• 1:23:42
  that comes in with skills. We're not following up with people that come in under the guise of being
• 1:23:47
  construction workers. I mean, less than half a percent of the immigration that comes into this
• 1:23:51
  country is from that construction industry. The idea, the lie, we need mass immigration for that.
• 1:23:59
  Yes, we do, but that's not what's coming in. You're not properly policing that.
• 1:24:02
  Are you saying that people come in on construction visas and then go and work in another fail?
• 1:24:06
  Absolutely, absolutely. They go for, they go for other things happens in student
• 1:24:10
  visas. And I mean, there's a huge group of polls where people come in on one visa.
• 1:24:13
  Yeah, I've seen their schools. They, they come in. I've got a number of these schools or academies
• 1:24:18
  near where I work. And these guys, they come in in their fluoro vests. They've got no shame.
• 1:24:25
  They're not meant to be working on these student visas. They come in, they do their 30 minutes,
• 1:24:29
  they leave, and they go on work. You're not, one, you're not allowed to be doing that. Two,
• 1:24:33
  that's probably not being taxed the work they're doing. And three, we, they are putting a strain on
• 1:24:39
  the infrastructure. And we're, as a country, we are carrying that. And unfortunately, I agree we
• 1:24:44
  do need immigration for skills that we're short on, but it's got to be short and sharp. You're
• 1:24:49
  coming in to build this infrastructure project. We know you've got this. I want, we want to see that
• 1:24:53
  yes, you do have a contract. The employer has said this guy's employed for three years for
• 1:24:58
  this train project or whatever. And then go from there, but that's not what's happening. And so
• 1:25:04
  one nation is about accountability. They've earmarked billions of dollars to be cut, which isn't
• 1:25:09
  being efficiently spent in government expenditure so we can bring the debt down. They do have great
• 1:25:14
  economic policies with regards to taxes that help families. They have some great housing issues,
• 1:25:18
  which is a massive one. And also supporting farmers, supporting our supply chain so that we're
• 1:25:23
  comparing down the cost of food and everything. They've got a very thorough policy on their website.
• 1:25:27
  And in fact, I think they did actually set up an AI, which can actually outlay to you in a two-hour
• 1:25:33
  podcast, their full policy, which is amazing. I mean, we're going to be out of work soon. I mean,
• 1:25:39
  all the things we can do with our spare time, you can now listen to an artificial intelligence,
• 1:25:44
  summarize the one nation policy for us. I'll be spending my evening. But hey, you asked for it.
• 1:25:50
  When I get frustrated with the conservative party in Australia, the liberals that so-called
• 1:25:54
  conservatives, they're so little detail, Josh. They're so little detail on what they stand for.
• 1:25:59
  And they're meant to be the economic managers. And they try to have it every way. That's why they
• 1:26:04
  don't put as much detail. Whereas with one nation, with Nigel Farage with Trump, you know you're
• 1:26:09
  getting. They're coming in. They're bringing in this. Well, I'm not sure you do know. I don't
• 1:26:13
  tell you. I mean, maybe with one nation, but I don't think people, I don't think Americans
• 1:26:17
  knew what they were getting when they voted for Donald Trump.
• 1:26:21
  Well, I think they wanted, I don't think they were resoundingly voting for Minneapolis to happen,
• 1:26:28
  or for, you know, Greenland to happen. I'm not sure about that.
• 1:26:36
  Yeah, well, we've got to be specific. The what the guy did run on. It was government
• 1:26:39
  accountability. It was draining the swamp. It was the idea that he was going to put an end to
• 1:26:44
  the border crossings. Do you think he's he's delivered on draining the swamp?
• 1:26:48
  No, on accountability. Not at all. I mean, look at the Epstein files. I called this out in July
• 1:26:52
  last year. And this is just another example of how I'm loyal to my values. Contrary to my audience,
• 1:26:59
  I called Trump out the time because I'm a you can't get captured by your audience. You can't
• 1:27:05
  get captured by your audience. I see it happen all the time. I called him out. I said, hey,
• 1:27:09
  you're now gaslighting people and saying these files don't exist and no list exists of Epstein's
• 1:27:15
  clients. There is a list. And now we see it with the 3 million documents that came out.
• 1:27:21
  But why did he do that in the first place? So yeah, so I totally agree. I'm loyal to my values
• 1:27:26
  on this. The idea that we've got these people running around that are above the law
• 1:27:31
  for business or for what some of the more sexual in nature things that they were doing.
• 1:27:36
  It's got to be called out and he hasn't drained the swamp if anything expenditures
• 1:27:40
  way too high over there. And just on the final, I need to wrap
• 1:27:46
  unfortunately because we started a little late and so I wish we could talk for longer but I just
• 1:27:51
  want to do a couple of final questions. Family values you mentioned had a really interesting
• 1:27:59
  chat with the former deputy prime minister, Johnny Anderson about gay marriage and family values
• 1:28:04
  and the sort of excesses of the LGBTQIA plus like movement and gender ideology and so on
• 1:28:10
  versus gay rights. Where does your Christianity and your libertarianism? What's about you there?
• 1:28:16
  Like I'm married to a guy. Does my marriage get an old under a Christian national Australia?
• 1:28:21
  Look, I got a weird view on this. I actually don't think the government should be involved in that.
• 1:28:26
  I think it's more a tax status than anything. If I had it my way, I would never be submitting it
• 1:28:31
  to the government or my marriage status. If you want to be in a union, there are some countries
• 1:28:37
  that do that. I think Israel doesn't have civil marriage. You just get married at a religious
• 1:28:44
  place and if you're not religious then you are in a defacto relationship.
• 1:28:48
  Yeah, look, it's a deeply spiritual thing with your church. That's always been my view of it.
• 1:28:53
  The government getting involved with this stuff I've never seen it as opportunistic but I am
• 1:28:57
  relatively libertarian on this stuff. I do think that there is a problem. I'm like to think
• 1:29:04
  if my bishop was sitting here, I think there is a problem with the nation coming out and saying,
• 1:29:08
  yeah, this is on the equal footing as a Christian marriage. I don't think that's right. I don't think
• 1:29:14
  I the nation didn't say it's on an equal footing as a Christian marriage. The nation just said
• 1:29:17
  it's on an equal footing as the civil marriage. But let's look at what's happened as a result of
• 1:29:23
  that. We've seen massive attacks on Christian institutions, the employment choices they make.
• 1:29:30
  We've seen, as I mentioned earlier, Lars Sheldon and Curie Smith having to fight these battles
• 1:29:36
  on these LGBT issues, which have nothing to do with you. You haven't lost your marbles and
• 1:29:43
  you're not saying that a biological man that becomes a woman should be able to beat up women
• 1:29:48
  in women's sports. You're not saying that. You haven't lost the thread. So I don't mind
• 1:29:53
  your type, but there are militants and ones out there that are using that issue as a mask,
• 1:29:59
  as a battering ram to bring down Christian institutions. Right. Just on the narrow question of
• 1:30:04
  gay marriage, is it pro-family or anti-family that I have a spouse and children and a household
• 1:30:12
  rather than the previous regime under which I wouldn't have been able to have that?
• 1:30:18
  I think you got to assess every situation specifically. I didn't know you had kids.
• 1:30:23
  I think you got to assess everything individually, but no, I feel very uncomfortable actually talking
• 1:30:28
  on that. Listen, Josh, we agree on a lot of things. I'll take that as a note. No, no, but all I can say
• 1:30:37
  is look, if my son was struggling with the gay, I would have huge issues. It would be a whole
• 1:30:46
  of family effort. Whilst he will always be loved and whilst all of those things, it's not something
• 1:30:52
  where I would say that I'm going to celebrate it. I couldn't do that. And that's just me being loyal to
• 1:30:58
  you and the G-Hartists have something in common. No, no. Well, I'm not going to throw you off a
• 1:31:02
  building if that's where you're wondering. There's a big difference there. The last thing I want
• 1:31:07
  to get a sense of is like, I think I just say one last thing on that. Let's be clear. It's not
• 1:31:13
  a hatred of you as a person at all. It is literally, it is a behavior. Homosexuality is a sin. I sin
• 1:31:20
  all the time. It's something that I work on. It's whether it's lying, murder or this or that,
• 1:31:26
  everyone sins. And so it's not about hating gay people, which it should never, that should never
• 1:31:32
  be okay. No offense, but that line is not a consolation. Sure. That line is just a line that gets used
• 1:31:40
  by, like, I don't think you will be get it about it. You're perfectly entitled to have a religious
• 1:31:45
  objection to homosexuality. Sure. But trying to split the hair and be like, it's a sin, but you
• 1:31:53
  have to love the sinner is it just lands as like clunky and dissonant. No, but it's basically if
• 1:32:00
  someone genuinely believes that there's something is not a sin and they're going to live their
• 1:32:05
  whole life as if it's not a sin, then it's not a consolation for a person to come along and say,
• 1:32:10
  I believe that you're behaving every single day in a sinful manner without completely shamelessly,
• 1:32:17
  but I don't like disrespect you for it because you sort of do and like ought to really. So I
• 1:32:25
  don't, I mean, that's just my way. Yeah, but like, I'm just saying that it's not useful.
• 1:32:30
  Yeah. Well, I look, again, as I said before, I'm loyal to my values on this. I'm not going to
• 1:32:34
  bullshit you on this. I'm just saying that if someone came to me on a totally different thing,
• 1:32:38
  said, hey, I've just cheated on my wife. I'm like, what? I think that's wrong. And that's why I'm
• 1:32:43
  giving you the respect of saying and not bullshitting you and saying, I think that's wrong. I don't
• 1:32:47
  accept it, but you won't catch me trying to destroy you trying to land best you. And I think
• 1:32:53
  there's a big difference. Well, I'm saying is that there are people out there that will do that.
• 1:32:56
  And that's why yes, that's why I'm putting my foot down. Yeah, but I mean, my case would be more
• 1:33:01
  akin to somebody saying, I cheat on my wife every day. I don't think there's anything wrong with
• 1:33:05
  people cheating on their wives. I honestly just think that it's completely fine. Like that person
• 1:33:11
  would, you would, it wouldn't be any consolation to be like, don't worry. I mean, I object to the fact
• 1:33:17
  that, you know, you do the sin, but I don't really object to you. That sort of, it sort of feels like
• 1:33:22
  splitting hairs. Sure. Australia is Australia. I think one thing that motivates you might be that
• 1:33:29
  you have a negative view of the direction that Australia has been going in in the 21st century
• 1:33:34
  across the board. I have some faith that the political system, as it exists, can remedy that if we
• 1:33:42
  have the right kinds of conversations, you might have less faith and think that we have to do it
• 1:33:48
  somewhat outside the political system. No, no, no, no, like what I think we still got our valves.
• 1:33:55
  Have things been getting better or everything's been getting worse?
• 1:33:59
  They're definitely been getting worse. I don't think we're beyond the point of not being
• 1:34:04
  able to remit it through politics, but to be clear, politics is downstream from culture,
• 1:34:09
  and that's why I think conversations like this are critical in understanding our fellow Australians.
• 1:34:13
  But when it comes to the political system, I do think we can still change things,
• 1:34:17
  and we should engage in that process. Any talking of trying to do it by some violent revolution
• 1:34:23
  is silly. In Australia's context, it doesn't make sense. That's why it's important we do protect our
• 1:34:29
  democratic institutions, whether it's your coverage of whistleblowers or speaking truth to power.
• 1:34:36
  These are critical institutions we need as correction mechanisms so that we can make sure we stay
• 1:34:40
  on the straight and narrow as a democracy. That's why it's so critical that we have conversations
• 1:34:45
  like this and build followings online so that we can have hubs where we hold each other accountable,
• 1:34:52
  but also we can better understand each other and see each other as other. He is my friend,
• 1:34:59
  he's got same-sex marriage. In my world, that wouldn't happen, that wouldn't this or that.
• 1:35:06
  However, for me being forced to sit with you and reconcile with the fact that you have kids,
• 1:35:11
  and this and that, no, I'm not going to push for a policy where your kids get confiscated.
• 1:35:16
  Now, it would be easier for me to do that if we never had these chats.
• 1:35:20
  And so, I think one of the dangers of the laws that are being passed is they are trying to make
• 1:35:25
  these conversations less possible by inserting Joel's Islamophobic, therefore he can be
• 1:35:30
  de-platformed and who doesn't help. Whereas by having more of these chats, we can see each other
• 1:35:35
  as human and actually try and work out a middle path that we can work together on.
• 1:35:39
  And that's just an example topic, but the Islamophobia ones another topic where it's like,
• 1:35:45
  we should have been able to chat for decades about Islam when does it go too far.
• 1:35:49
  It's never happened. We've never been able to do that. And that's a problem.
• 1:35:55
  Not to mention the fact, excuse me, that we're being encouraged to think about
• 1:36:02
  treating sets of ideas with the same sorts of sensitivity as we treat human beings.
• 1:36:08
  Islam is a bunch of ideas that might be right or might be wrong. So it's Christianity,
• 1:36:12
  so Judaism, so is Marxism, so is like Fukodianism or whatever. Muslims are human beings.
• 1:36:19
  It's like, and I only say this because a lot of the laws that they're proposing would not only make
• 1:36:25
  it a crime to demonize Muslims, which are more sympathetic towards hate speech laws that outlaw
• 1:36:32
  the excitement of violence towards people or the demonization of people, but would also make it a
• 1:36:38
  crime to what Islamophobia criticizes Islam, criticizing a bunch of ideas, a bunch of claims that
• 1:36:46
  guy made centuries ago in the Middle East, that is kind of crazy. We've got to go.
• 1:36:53
  I would just, let me just tell you some statistics about Australian wellbeing.
• 1:36:58
  Get me. Real household income has gone up by 17% in the past 20 years.
• 1:37:03
  Household net worth is up 35% in the past 15 years. Infant mortality is down 30% in the past 20 years.
• 1:37:09
  Australian life expectancy is up three years in the past 20 years. Year 12 completion, so finishing
• 1:37:15
  high school is up 9% in the past decade. University graduation is up 7% in the past decade.
• 1:37:23
  The homicide rates down by a third in the past 20 years. The robbery rates down by 60% over
• 1:37:28
  the past 20 years. GDP per capita has gone from 40 grand US 20 years ago to 64 grand US.
• 1:37:36
  It's not bad. There's a lot to complain about. I am more worried than you are about handing
• 1:37:44
  the reins to people who don't know what they're doing, but who talk in popular sound bites.
• 1:37:49
  So just be careful. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. Don't break my country. No, I think Australia
• 1:37:57
  is a blip in history. I think the idea that we have an amazing standard of living as you're
• 1:38:02
  pointing out is brilliant. But whilst that is the situation, even though people are completing
• 1:38:07
  high school or degrees at a higher rate, the problem is standards are going down compared to the
• 1:38:13
  rest of the world in the OECD countries. We're seeing the fact that people can't afford their
• 1:38:17
  mortgages. Businesses are going out of business. I mean construction companies, tens of thousands
• 1:38:22
  of them have gone out of business since COVID finished since COVID finished. So these are real
• 1:38:28
  things that are going on. And Pete, young people aren't able to get into the property industry at all.
• 1:38:33
  These are things we need to address because it's like that saying, how did you go broke?
• 1:38:38
  First, they're gradually then suddenly, we do live an amazing country, which is why I fight for
• 1:38:43
  the ability to have these discussions and talk about potential solutions. I'm a 28-year-old guy,
• 1:38:49
  I don't know everything. And that's why I'm really curious and high in openness about the
• 1:38:53
  solutions. But that starts with having great discussions. And as John Anderson would say,
• 1:39:00
  you can't get good policy out of a bad public debate. And that's why I really appreciate what
• 1:39:05
  you're doing here. Joel, thank you.