Leighton Smith Podcast #307 - October 22nd 2025 - Nick Cater - The Leighton Smith Podcast

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Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to podcast three hundred and seven for October twenty
two to twenty twenty five. A few days ago, I
was driving from A to B as you do, and
I heard a conversation on an American talk show. The
host was talking with a young, Youngish woman on events
taking place in diverse parts of the world. Now, she

(00:48):
had an international accent, but I couldn't place it, but
I did pick up some English twang. Anyway, My attention
peaked when she said Western culture is basically collapsing across Europe,
and I wouldn't be surprised if it's gone within the
next ten years. Later I tracked it down. It wasn't difficult.
Her name is k Hill, or if you like, there's

(01:09):
a smythe in the middle, not hyphenated, just Kay smythe Hill.
But obviously this was intriguing. Now it made me think
immediately of some literature that I have with regard to
what she was referring to. She was referring to, of course,
the number of people from particularly Africa and surrounding Arabian countries, etc.

(01:30):
Pouring into Europe and into Britain and into other parts
of the world, but specifically where she was nominating, and
that was Europe. The book that I grasped first of
all when I got home was A Delectable Lie by
salem Monsieur, a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism. Now, the interesting

(01:52):
thing about this book, if you haven't heard of it,
is that Salem Monsour as a professor when he wrote this. Anyway,
in twenty eleven it was published, is professor of political
science at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.
And here is an outtake on the back cover explaining
where is that. My point is that although multiculturalism once

(02:14):
seemed a very good idea, at least politicians and others
smitten with the ambition for unity, it is increasingly shown
to be a lie, a delectable lie perhaps, yet a
lie nevertheless, a lie that is destructive of the West's
liberal democratic heritage tradition and values based on individual rights

(02:36):
and freedoms. This could have been foretold. As Indeed, those
philosophers and historians of ideas who viewed freedom as immeasurably
more important than equality in the development of the West
did foretell. They admonished people against the temptation to abridge
freedom in pursuit of equality. Now, without trying to be

(03:00):
dramatic about it, if we're all honest with ourselves, we'd
admit that there are crises confronting the free world. And
those crises are made up by many elements, many of
them familiar to us, some not so much. Now in
no particular order, mass migration of the not so legal kind,

(03:20):
accompanied by the unwillingness of those charged with protecting the
populations who elected them to do so, protecting their borders,
their shipping lanes, hospital systems, education, and not to forget
the country's financial system. And of course there is so
much more. And in the words of law professor James Allen,

(03:41):
there are too many politicians who are gutless. He was
referring specifically in making that statement to the Australian Liberal Party,
but I think it's more widespread than that, and I
don't think i'd meet much disagreement from most of you
now it just so happens. That's Nick Cator, with whom
we have discussed so many topics over the years with

(04:03):
such great insight, has written an essay multiculturalisms Berlin Wall moment.
It's an extremely good piece and we shall discuss it
along with other areas of current concern right after a
short break. Liverrix is an antihistamine made in Switzerland to

(04:28):
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(04:49):
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levrix and always read the label. Takes directed and if

(05:11):
symptoms persist, see your health professional. Farmer Broker Auckland Freedom
is fragile and man's wish to be free is undermined
by ideas that mobilize the collective against the individual. In

(05:32):
our world in the early years of the twenty first century,
freedom remains more or less confined to one part of
the world, even as most people everywhere desire it. Only
in the West, that is, countries of Western Europe, the
United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. We find people
enjoy freedom as individual rights, and any curtailment of these

(05:54):
protected rights may only occur in accordance with constitutional requirements.
But since freedom is the distinguishing feature of the West,
the assault on freedom has been ferocious in the West,
as were those mounted by the twin forces of totalitarianism,
fascism or Nazism and Soviet communism in the last century.
In the new century, the West is confronted with a

(06:16):
new or third challenge of totalitarianism in the form of
Islamism and its asymmetrical assault on liberal democracy, increasingly since
the terrorist attack of September eleven, two thousand and one
against the United States. Now that's a quote from the
introduction to the book Delectable Lie that I've mentioned more

(06:38):
than once over time. Delectable Lie, a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism,
written by Salem Manser, who himself as a Muslim. When
he wrote this, and that was published in twenty eleven,
was at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.
And the reason that I've quoted you that is because
the discussion that's about to follow with Nick Kata, with

(07:01):
whom we are all familiar, is on precisely that topic.
The article he wrote for for Quadrant magazine is the
longest one I've seen for a long time, if not ever,
Multiculturalism's Berlin Wall moments. And it is with great pleasure
that I say, in Nicotas, I think it's been six months,
so it's time that we did this, and you provided

(07:22):
me with the purpose for doing it. Are you well?

Speaker 3 (07:25):
Thanks? Like, yeah, I'm well, good to be talking to you.
I think last time we talked was in the aftermath
of the election here Ansha. I was probably pretty gloomy
at the time, but yeah, times move on. We're in
a new era, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Would you say fortunately or unfortunately a new era?

Speaker 3 (07:44):
I will there's so much in Australia, as indeed in
the rest of the world that's troubling at the moment economically,
in terms of strategically, in terms of our national security,
in terms of world trade, and particularly I think in
terms of our culture, how and what effect that has
on the social fabric. You know, people seem to be

(08:05):
intensely antagonistic towards one another at the moment over certain issues,
and we've got here. I don't know how it is
in New Zealand, but every weekend there'll be demonstrations on
the streets at Melbourne and Sydney. There was one at
the weekend where there were clash between left wing so
called anti racist protesters and a group that were protesting

(08:28):
or standing up for Australian values and police had to intervene.
It was it's all pretty ugly, latent and this is
new for me in Australia. And of course there've always
been people take to the streets to say things, but
the intensity of this, the fact that we don't seem
to be able to work out our differences in other
forum at the moment, it is. Yeah, that's why I

(08:50):
think it's a new era we're entering.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
And it's worthy of the analysis that you've given and
more to follow. I would imagine I might just add
before we go on that Nick has changed the direction
in a couple of couple of areas. He is, of
course a journalist and author, a columnist. He's a senior fellow,
specifically a senior Fellow at the Menzies Research Center, and

(09:12):
he writes now copiously for Quadrant magazine, a weekly column
with The Australian, where he worked for some considerable time,
and also on substack. May I just inquire about substack
as to how that's taken off.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yeah, it's gone very well. I presume most of your
listeners would be familiar with it. It's a great platform
for writers like me. He just want to be able
to talk directly to readers. One of the things about
it is it's a great leveler, right If you don't
if people aren't subscribing to you a substack, then you
know you're not doing very well. But fortunately I've had

(09:52):
quite quite a large number of people subscribe, some who
actually you are paid subscribers. So that for me is
the endorsement I need to suggest that I'm actually doing
something useful.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
You open up with the situation in Australia and then
you move on to well pretty quickly you include Canada
and you make reference to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau,
the first introduced multiculturalism in nineteen seventy one. Yeah, and

(10:23):
the purpose was what.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
Well, the purpose was to overcome a little local difficulty
had over biculturalism. Canada had declared itself a bicultural nation,
i think in the late sixties to accommodate the fact,
of course that it's a dual language country, two traditions,
two languages coming together into one Canada. So that was

(10:47):
a big push in the late sixties early seventies they
established that. But then other groups, particularly the Native Canadians,
the people the descendants of the people who are there
from the original tribes, plus some of the other ethnic groups,
particularly Ukrainians. They had a particularly large number of Ukrainians

(11:09):
were saying, well, what about us, aren't we part of
this Canada experiment. So it was a sort of workaround
really that Pierre Trudeau came up with this idea of multiculturalism,
and he described Canada as a multicultural country and then said,
you know, we have no culture. We are multicultural. And

(11:30):
there was only one person who stood up and said
at the time, hang on, that's the problem. Surely, Yeah,
we can have people from all over the world or whatever.
That's fine, but they all have to sort of you know,
the thing they all have to unite around is being Canadian.
And the person who did that was actually somebody from Quebec,

(11:50):
you know, a French speaking Canadian who said, look, we
have a culture here and it's a combination of the
British and the French, and we've all come together and
we all know what it means and we need to
sign up for it. So, at the very birth of multiculturalism,
because the word hadn't really been used before that point,
we have this tension. Yes, we come from lots of

(12:13):
different parts of the world with different colors, we have
different cultures, different religious et cetera, et cetera. But something
has to bind us together as Canadians or Australians or
New Zealanders, and that idea of an overall, overarching loyalty
to your country as a citizen of your country is
put at risk. It's an attention there once you have

(12:34):
this idea of multiculturalism. So that's the origin of it,
and it's not a very noble origin for multiculturalism. But
then it was adopted here in nineteen seventy three by
Gough Whitlam.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Just before you just before you pick up with Whitlam
another quote, and I'll keep it short, from the aforementioned book.
Sometime in the mid nineteen nineties, when Pierre Trudeau made
a rare visit to the Parliament in Ottawa, the Speaker
of the House of Commons arranged for a private luncheon
attended by a dozen selectively invited Liberal members. Each guest

(13:07):
was given the opporunity to pose one question to the
former Prime Minister. Chris Cobb, writing in The Ottawa Citizen
nearly a decade later, recalled the exchange between Trudeau and
the invited guests. After several relatively routine questions. Former Liberal
MP John Brydon remembered asking Trudeau about the multiculturalism policy

(13:28):
his government introduced in the early nineteen seventies. Brydon asked,
mister Trudeau, you were one of the key architects of multiculturalism,
and now we're in a situation. Keep in mind, this
was some time ago, and now we're in a situation
where many newcomers to Canada consider their ethnicity before being Canadian.

(13:49):
Is this the outcome you wanted. There was silence around
the table as the former Prime Minister thought before replying, no,
this is not what I wanted.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
The question niled it.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah, the the question is, if that's the case, why
did it continue. Do you think the manner that it has.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
Well, I think because it became bureaucratized. And this is
my central critique of multiculturalism. You know, of course we
are in one sense of multicultural country here in Australia,
as you are, and that's fine. And we had a
you know, we had a very highly racially discriminatory immigration

(14:29):
policy here up until the mid sixties and that had
to end clearly. You know, it's a different kind of
a world and based fundamentally as liberals, as human beings,
we think every human being deserves respect. We abide by
the Martin Luther King Junior idea that it's not the
color of your skin, but the content of your content

(14:52):
of your character. So yeah, so we agree with all that,
and we have a country here with people from almost
every country in the world, if not every country in
the world. In Australia it's a very as you know,
very diverse country. Now, not as diverse as some people
say it's still particularly in out of suburban and rural

(15:14):
and regional Australia, it's still very much recognizable as an
Anglo Saxon country. But in other areas, But then, how
do you deal with the tension between that. People obviously
have some attachment to their old country and their old ways,
but you want them to be first and four worst
Australian And I think that's worked pretty well up until now.

(15:37):
But they're always going to be tensions eventually, and that's
what we're seeing now between people who see themselves primarily
as Palestinian or Arabic or whatever, and as a Muslim
and secondarily as somebody who's just in Australia as a
sort of flager convenience. Is happening too in other groups.

(16:00):
I think it always was going to happen when people
arrive in such quantities that they can form separate communities,
which you couldn't really do in the seventies and early eighties.
Here you know the Greeks and Italians that were forced
to integrate, to learn the language, and just become as
busy as they could, you know, in order to get by.

(16:22):
But now you have such a large proportion of Arabic
speaking Australians and increasingly Hindu and places from the Indian
subcontinent and of course Chinese that they can almost exist
within that little sub community. And that's not a good thing.
So how do we overcome that with a bureaucratic system

(16:43):
like we've got now? Sort of state imposed harmony I
call it. It's very difficult to make that work. It
has to come from the bottom up. It has to
be ordinary decent people, as most people are willing just
to get on with their neighbors, accept them as they
find them, and just do what they have to do
to get along.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
All right, So how much can you tell us about
entry into Australia with regard to requirements for becoming a
permanent For example, it used to be that English was
a language that you had to learn, and I think
you just hinted at there a short while ago, but
I don't know that that exists anymore.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
Doesn't There still are English language requirements for things like
working visas, and I think student visas too. Rightly, so
you're coming as a student, you've got to be as
big English. But the level of that requirement is not
particularly high. I looked at the grade there's an international
grading system which gives you an idea of the proficiency.

(17:41):
And I recognize that my level of Spanish. If I
was the equivalent level of English coming into Australia, I
would be able to get in as an English speaker. Well,
you know, I can get by in Spanish. I can
talk to taxi drivers or ordered food, but I'm not.
It's hardly fluent in it, you know. So that alerted
me to the fact that we don't press that anymore.

(18:03):
There's another big problem that's happened to you. I say,
have problem, but another big change that's happened in the
last twenty years that nobody's noticed, nobody's talked about, and
that is the way in which you arrive. It used
to be. And I say this out of experience as
somebody who came to Australia in nineteen eighty nine from Britain.
I had to turn up at the Australian High Commission
in London, fill in the forms. I had to go

(18:25):
and see approved doctor and have a health checked and
do all that offshore before I came. And then with
the visa, you know, wait for the little brown envelope
to come, hoping it would be yes, I've got the
visa stamp in my passport and off we went. Nowadays,
only a minority of people who come to this country
apply offshore. Most of the people who are becoming permanent

(18:49):
citizens in this country come on temporary visas of one
sword or another, a work visa, skills visa typically or
increasingly student visas. Then they just change their luck on shore.
And that does alter the pattern of migration hugely. And
I also think attachment of the because when the old

(19:10):
pattern where you'd migrate, you'd make a conscious decision of migrate,
go to the other side of the world and pack
up all your possessions. That's a commitment from day one,
even before you formally become an Australian citizen, you are
committed to this place. I'm not sure that that same
altitude applies now, and you get a lot of people
now chance their luck on a student visa, thinking well,

(19:32):
I'll apply for a permanent visa after that, and even
if I don't get it, the bureaucratic process is so
slow that I'll probably get at least three or four
extra years in Australia working in Australia. And people are
doing that and that's what's increasing. The numbers of migrancy
is so substantially it's out of control. At this point,

(19:52):
the government really has no control on the number of
non Australian citizens in this country. It's just become totally
controlled by the bureaucracy. And I wanted to write a piece,
actually I'm working on it, which says we still have
a skilled migration policy enforced in this country, but the
principal skill that you need is navigating the system and

(20:14):
getting round all the forms in order to get here.
It's not actually a useful skill.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
So if the bureaucracy is running the business, where's democraphy.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
Well, that's right. I mean, we've had numbers here four
hundred thousand plus I think more than well over a
million net overseas arrivals since this government came to power
three years ago. And this is in the country of
We're now twenty seven million, going twenty eight. We just
can't you just physically cannot accommodate that number of people

(20:47):
in that short space of time. And it's producing real
pressure on housing prices obviously, because they've all got to
live somewhere. Our plus roads, plus schools and changing the
nature of some parts of our city quite dramatically, particularly
this influx, huge influx of students. So you know, downtown

(21:08):
Sydney on a Saturday night, you feel like you're in
Hong Kong. I'm most thanks a bad thing. But it's
a distinct change, because I love Hong Kong. But it's
a distinct change from what it was, you know. And
this is all happened suddenly. And add on top of
that the Palestinian protest movement, which is you know, a

(21:28):
combination of sort of extremist g hardist Muslims from the
radicalized mosques in some parts of Sydney and Melbourne, plus
some rat bag you know, lefties from the university. It's
been ugly, very ugly, and the sort of hate and
the attacks on the Jewish community in particular, we had

(21:50):
a mosque, sorry, a synagogue that was set fire to
in Melbourne. We've had other attacks on Jewish property and
the community feels really under threat. We're going now, that's
not the sort of soft we're all in this together
multiculturalism we thought we'd signed up for, and that's what's
causing the tension in the community. Now, this is questioning,

(22:11):
not just the numbers, not just the quantum, but the
quality of the migrants.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
And there is no way of getting rid of those
offenders who should be got rid of. Am I right.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Well, still I think they could do more, you know,
I mean I think that they they you know, up
until the point where somebody actually becomes a citizen of
this country makes that commitment, and that's I think a
four year process, now a minimum four year process. Then yeah,
you misbehave you break the law. You're not behaving as
we think we want people to behave. You're you're stirring

(22:44):
up racial hatred against against the Jewish people. No, you go,
you're out. You're out on your ear. But because we
don't enforce it like that, we don't and we should
should be much much more strict and that way, and that.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
Was that was my and that was my point. Should
be isn't doing it? Why? And how has it happened
that those people who should be aren't.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Because the people in charge, the elite, and this goes
right through the system, from politicians, bureaucrats, police, immigration department,
the courts. They tend to be of the view that, oh,
diversity is a good thing, and to be critical of
the number of migrants or the type of migrants is

(23:29):
a racist thing to do. And it's not particularly the numbers.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm not saying at all.
You know, we've got too many Indians or New Zealanders,
and New Zealanders, of course, is a growing category with
the economy in New Zealand going the way it is,
so I'm not saying that at all. There's just too
many full stops, so that surely cannot be a racist argument.

(23:52):
It's a sort of discussion that we had, you know,
back between the war, between the end of the war
and round about two thousand and five, we had an average,
pretty steady average of about ninety thousand migrants a year. Now,
the official quota is, I said, one hundred and eighty,
but the real total, that's all those who end up
here one way or another on temporary visas and just

(24:14):
finding one or another, is probably more like four hundred thousand.
So that's four times the level that prevailed for most
of the post war period. It is just unsustainable. But
the elite just don't recognize this, as they don't in Britain,
you know, as they don't in much of Europe. You know,
they're all trying to say, oh, it's all fine, you know,

(24:36):
we'll all get along, but we're not, and we can't
when once you start getting huge numbers of people, large
substantial numbers of people who don't actually accept Australian values
as they're over, who are principles who are culturally different indeed,
indeed cultural ism. Yeah, and it's not anti Islam as such.

(25:00):
Really it's anti Islam. It's the extreme version. And I
became very acutely aware of this recently when I've become
very good friends with a a chap who stood for
the Liberal Party in the seat of Werra were in
far western Sydney. He's a Muslim. He's a Muslim, and
I went up there and I said, well, what's the
big thing on the Muslim for the Muslim community, what's

(25:22):
the big issue now? And he looked to me as
if I were stupid and said, will cost a living,
of course, And he reminded me that the vast majority
of Muslims in this country do want to just build businesses,
bring their families up, get their kids educated. They're the
same as everybody else. But there is this small probably
ten percent fifteen percent max. Who are radical who who

(25:48):
think that they're fighting out the guards of war by
extension here in Australia that go to a small number
of mosques in places like Bankstown. That's your problem and
so it's no easy solution to it. Well, when you
should start.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
When you say that's the problem and you talk to
percentages ten maybe fifteen percent, that means the more that
come in, the greater the number, even if the statistics
say the same the percentages.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
Well, that's right, particularly when you get a soft headed
government like this current one, which actually went out and
said we're taking in two thousand Palestinian refugees and you go,
what like, how are you going to screen them? You know,
we know the indoctrination that goes on from schools onwards

(26:39):
in that part of the world, the anti Israel hatred,
that's just reinforcing of these ancient grievances. Seems to me
you'd be very lucky to get somebody coming here from
Palestine who's not in some way tainted by that. He
doesn't have that worldview. So why, I mean, it's a
mystery to me. Why the not only that, but the

(27:00):
Minister for Immigration, Tony Burke was actually photographed at Sydney
Airport welcoming these people into the country. Strangely enough, he
didn't want to publicize that. But his own electorate has
somewhere around twenty five percent of his electorate is Muslim,
so he's heavily invested in this at an electoral level too.
So it's just it's a real tension in the community

(27:28):
and none of the mains, none of the mainstream parties
are taking this seriously in my view, not the Coalition,
not the Liberal Party, at least a lot in the
Liberal Party who are and want to make this an
issue that they're being shut down by the others as say,
you know, we don't want to be interpreted as a racist,
but it's not racist to stand up for Australia or

(27:50):
Australian values, and it's not racist to say we want
people to come here, but only if they have the
opportunity to thrive and become part of the community, because
that helps Australia in the long run. You know, you
don't want them to hear if they're just going to be,
if they just think they're here just as a flag
of convenients and in their heads they're still back in Gaza.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
Well, it was Jim Allen, wasn't it who wrote a
spectator piece that there was headlined something like liberal why
Liberal MPs are gutless? Or once to that effect.

Speaker 3 (28:26):
You recall that, yes, I do as always Jim. Jim
very outspoken on these things and says things, calls a
spade a spade. It's certainly not true that all Liberal
MPs are gutless. You've had recently Andrew Hast to you.
I think many people in New Zealand would have heard
of very promising member of the Liberal Party, a man

(28:49):
a great conviction and faith. Former sas officer and he
was Home Affairs spokesman in the opposition here. He resigned
that role because he wanted to speak out on immigration
and he'd been told by the leader that that wasn't
part of his portfoilu and he had to keep quiet. Well,
he feels so strongly about it. A lot of us do.

(29:10):
But there is this elite eastern suburb mentality in Sydney
that says, oh, everything's going swimmingly and we don't want to.
You know, we'd be a better country if we were
more diverse, if we had different more restaurants, of selling
different kinds of food. It's that kind of soft headed
view that really started in the early nineteen seventies that

(29:33):
you know, remember that Coca Cola ad which I mentioned
in that article, I like to teach the world to sing.
That was the sentiment in nineteen seventy one when Multiculturalist
was born. You know that we can all be living
perfect harmony. And it was the same year John Lennin
brought out Imagine. That kind of view is very strong then.

(29:54):
But I think we realized that we actually need to
be a little bit more hard headed and recognized that
Australia is Australia and New Zealand is New Zealand because
of its traditions, because of the people who came here
and the traditions they brought with them, and they were
very good tradition, very good indeed. And it doesn't mean
to say we're going to remain just a purely white

(30:14):
Anglo Saxon country, but it does mean we need to
recognize that everybody comes here, it should recognize those basic
principles of liberty, democracy, of treating everybody with equal respect,
because that's what made our countries great and it's what
will destroy our countries if we allow it that to deteriorate.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
So, going back to your advertising with Coke, would you
say that the approach that Coke took at that point,
for whatever reason it was possibly more than one, was
a stupid decision.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
Well, and commercially I think that went very well for them.
It was screened around the world and really helped their
brand along because people. Funnily enough, you know, the Coke
Cony came up towards the end of the abb It
was all about harmony and whatever. People remember it and
it became a hit song thing that the seekers was
it was recording I don't recall, became a number one song,

(31:09):
certainly in Britain, probably here too. Yeah, I know that
hit the mood of the time because you go back
to seventy one. Well, it's the Vietnam War is playing out,
it's posts the Ted Offensive. Everybody's thinking that it was a
bit of a mistake. Soldiers are getting Americans are getting killed,
and it was a feeling that, you know, we should

(31:29):
have peace and live in harmony and that, plus the
Cold War was going on. But that moment I think
has passed. The other sentiment which comes in. Then you
see it very much at that time, the idea that we,
you know, we're citizens, we're citizens of the world. We're
not citizens of a particular country. You know, we live
in a borderless world. That kind of fantastical idea creeps

(31:53):
in and is still there very much strongly amongst some
of the left leaning progressive elite in our countries. They
think we should have open borders. Well, I think a
lot of the rest of us have realized that we
can't do that. You do need borders, you do need
sovereign borders in which the people who live in that
country can determine, as John Howard said, we determine who

(32:15):
comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
But should it be the elite or should it be
the population of the country who decides.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
Well, it should be the population, and we should have
that was a leading question, your honor, Yeah, exactly. Somebody
put up a great idea the other day when I
was talking to them. So at the moment, if you,
if you, if you, if you apply for immigration, you know,
you apply for permanent immigration on shore and you get
not back, you can appeal that in a body called

(32:49):
the Administry of Appeals Tribunal and they at the moment,
if you put in your appeal today. I know this
because a friend has put in an appeal on behalf
of somebody else, they say, well, we'll hear that maybe
twenty twenty seven, early twenty twenty eight at the latest.
It's such a bureaucratic process, and that means that that

(33:09):
person whether they're going to turn out to be permanent
citizens or not going to live and work here for
that period. But somebody suggests to be well, why don't
we actually have a citizen's jury. So if there's an appeal,
you appeal between a panel a jury panel picked pretty
much as you pick one in the court of twelve
average Australians. They hear your case, they make up your

(33:30):
mind whether you're going to make a decent contribution to
this country or whether you've been lying through your teeth
in your application form. And that's it. That to me,
would be a terrific way of deciding.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
It would be a very busy, a very busy court,
wouldn't it.

Speaker 3 (33:45):
Well, it may be, but it can't be any more
bureaucratically complicated and slow than what we've got at the moment,
and if you have people just deciding this on their
own common sense values, you're not going to get caught
up in all of the gas legal details of you know,
can we send you back is a category here. I
don't know, I was looking at this recently. I don't

(34:07):
know whether this is still true, but we're going to
a lot of people apply from Malaysia for asylum in Australia,
and I'm thinking, well, it is that like, Malaysia is
quite a you know, it's quite a free and it
hasn't got the best the best, most democratic form of government,
but it is a democratic government on the on the
Westminster model, and it works pretty well in my views.

(34:28):
Why why would anybody be fleeing here? And it turned
out they were fleeing here because in Malaysia homosexuality is
still punishable by the death sentence in theory. Now, of
course that that's never happened in living memory. And last
time I was in Malaysia was surprised to see they
were having a pride rally in Kuala Lumpur and nobody

(34:50):
would seem to be particularly bothered by that. But they
apply on the basis that if you're going to if you.
If you in danger of facing the death penalty for
going back, then you can. We'll keep you here as
an asylum. Secret a whole lot of people sort of
suddenly deciding they were gay and applying for asylum from Malaysia.
You don't You wouldn't get that. If you had a

(35:10):
court of ordinary people, they'd sort of go, hm hmm,
well you don't look gay to me, And when was
the last hanging of a gay person in Malaysia? You
know that you get a common sense view rather than
the legalistic view. And yeah, I don't know, I'm just
floating that idea. I don't think any party has put
that forward, but maybe that's a way through to go

(35:31):
to your point, the people decide, not not the bureauc way.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
It could be. But it happened very rarely and even
more or less really, sorry, even more really, it happens
even more really in Victoria.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yeah, well, Victoria's got its own problems. We could do
a whole podcast, plus we should do one on why
Victoria has turned into such a basket case.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
Well, you and I. You and I have discussed Victoria
at its previous premiere on more than one occasion over
the years, but it's now apparently it certainly appears to
be worse than it.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
Oh, it is on every level. So there was a
report out recently that said nine out of ten new
jobs in Victoria are either government jobs or jobs that
are paid by the government, you like doctors or whatever.
The private sector is just on its knees in Victoria.

(36:31):
And there's a lot of other problems that the infrastructure
is not being built, but the big thing is crime
at the moment. I mean, crime is out of control
in Victoria, and the numbers show that, you know, and
I could go into this. This is partly, of course
related to migration to some extent, because a lot of
this is down to ethnic gangs. But it's not just that,

(36:52):
it's other things. So fifteen years ago you were probably
more likely statistically to have your car stolen in Sydney
than you were in Melbourne. Now you are twice as
likely to have your car pinched in Melbourne than city.
The mount of car theft has gone up there, it's
gone dramatically down in New South Wales and the rest

(37:14):
of the country. And that same metric will apply to
break and enters, a general assault, robbery, you know those
sort of violent offenses or theft. In all those categories,
the same has happened. Melbourne's gone from being a pretty
safe place to a place where you're very highly likely

(37:36):
to be a victim of crime. And there's got to
be reasons for that. And one reason, which I pointed
too recently, is just they don't jail people they're reluctant to,
or they have all sorts of rules that allow judges
to let people out on bail. There was another one recently.
I don't know whether you saw this, but a woman

(37:58):
just walking along I think it was Little Burk Street,
right in the middle of Melbourne.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Did see it? This is the woman, the Asian woman going.

Speaker 3 (38:05):
To work Asian women or ade work middle of the
a or at good start of the day, and another
woman runs up behind her, just stabs her and runs
on punctured a land caused all sorts of problems. Well,
the woman who stabbed it turned out to be on bail,
so there's something to be said for putting people in prison.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
You know, well she had a number of convictions, did
she not?

Speaker 3 (38:28):
She did? She did? You know? You just need to all.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
Right then, Thomas, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
Go on. I was just going to say, Thomas soul
has written about this very eloquently in the United States,
that people that commit crime are actually a pretty small cohorts.
You don't have to put a lot of them in
prison to make a difference to the crime rate.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
I was going to do we digress, Well, let's just
stay digressing just for a moment. You've got in the States,
You've got the George Soros's of this world buying prosecutors
and even judges. And you might wonder if you don't
know how on earth that could happen. Well, it does
because judges are elected, so were prosecutors in some states,

(39:10):
particularly Democrat states, And money buys advertising and convinces people
of various things. So what I was driving at really was,
how do we get in Victoria where judges and lawyers, etc.
Are prosecutors are appointed by the government. How do we

(39:33):
get courts that just turn people out in the street
when they've got more than well, when they've got multiple convictions.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
Well, you've got to need a pretty strong minded political
leader to turn that round, somebody like Jeff Kennett in
the nineties and early two thousands, he turned the place
around after a long period of labor government. There's nobody
like that at the moment on the seat. So but
what you need to come on. You need to look

(40:02):
at mandatory sentencing, You need to look at scrapping these
bail laws, but fundamentally to phase out the current lot
of judges and put in some people who are just
going to enforce community standards, not some woke idea of harm.
You know, they're confused between the victim and the criminal,

(40:27):
aren't they. They think that the person who's perpetrating the
crime because they're Aboriginal or because they come from Sudan
or whatever, that makes them the victim. No, sorry, the
victim is the person who gets injured or harmed in
some way the perpetrator. Of course, you can take into

(40:50):
account mitigating centuencetances when you come to sentence somebody, but
you don't just because somebody happens to be of a
particular race or certain background, they are not entitled to
a softer treatment than any other because they if you
start playing that game, then they react. People make rational
decisions and if they're not going to get jailed or

(41:12):
unlikely to get caught, they're going to commit more crime.
It's just just what happens.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
What are the asylums like in Australia or in Victoria specifically,
or don't they exist anymore?

Speaker 3 (41:21):
Science? What you mean? Yeah, this is a problem because
it goes back a long time. I've got some experience
of this actually at a personal level with a relative
of mine. We don't have enough places where people can
be be sent for permanent care. The encourage you know

(41:46):
that the system here still encourages people to be released
when they should be in permanent care, and that creates
a lot of these problems. We're seeing a lot of
crime problems or of homelessness is in the end you
look down to it, the real cause behind that is
mental illness and often related to drug use, because drug

(42:10):
use could trigger or worsen mental illness. And we're trying
to treat these as through the courts and through the
police system when we should actually be treating them in hospitals.
So yeah, I mean, I really think we need a
big investment in mental health in this country. What we've done,
I don't know it's sown a New Zealand, but we

(42:32):
widen the definition of mental health. So if you depress,
you know, if you're having a donner day you just
don't want to go to work. You can now claim
free psychiatric treatment, free sessions on the government or on
your employer, which is fine, but I think we need
to stop blurring the definition and recognize that it's the

(42:54):
two or three percent of people who are acutely mentally
ill that need most of the treatment, and not try
and average this out between people who are just feeling
a little bit down.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
Indeed, let me just go back though to the coke
era or post coke, because when you were writing in
this essay, are filmed on a hilltop in Italy. A
chorus of young people with conspicuously diverse racial characteristics mimed

(43:25):
the lyrics to a catchy step wise melody which shared
the harmonic backbone of a traditional chirt hymn. Their voices
enter in layers, moving from a soloist to a collective chorus,
reinforcing the theme of togetherness. You've already covered that off.
But then a few years later, along comes the jag

(43:47):
Jaguar advertisement. Now, I used to be a Jag fan.
I had one for a while. I used to be
a Jag fan. I got the first one of the
first xfs when they hit the market here, and I
only kept it for a year. But what I'm driving
at is if the Coke ad, and I asked you this,
was it a stupid decision? The jag ad was definite

(44:08):
a stupid decision, and it damaged the brand enormously. Then
you've got the beer one in the States, which I
destroyed a will almost destroyed a massive company. Light Yeah. Yeah.
And I wonder whether, just going back to John Lennon,
et cetera and the anthemu imagine which was which part

(44:29):
of the Cooke thing, whether the World Economic Forum might
have had any input into that any thought.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
Well, they've certainly been pushing this agenda, haven't they, This
woke agenda, and they're encouraging it along. And as you say,
there's a lot of philanthropic money in the United States
from Soros and others that are going towards these really nutty,

(44:56):
extreme left wing causes. So you can trace this, if
you can be bothered. You can these various left wing
donation washing organization in the States that take donations from
rich people who want to feel they want to do
good in the world, and then redistributed to various charities

(45:18):
who they think are doing good works. That's how, that's
how the whole transgender movement is being financed at the moment.
It's how the Palestinian protest movement is being financed, and
it's how the anti fossil fuel movement is being financed.
And some of that money is finding its way into

(45:39):
Australia too. At least one hundred million was traced in
a recent report that has come from those US philanthropists
being washed through various organizations and ends up funding either
local activist groups here or often law fare, you know,
taking on the mining companies in court to stop developers.

(46:00):
That money is coming from that big pool of money
from the States, and it's huge. The total philanthropic factor
in the States is worth around five hundred and seventy
to five hundred and ninety billion dollars a year, which
is about the GDP of Sweden. So all that money
is going most of it some bit of courses going

(46:21):
to other causes, but a large chunk of it is
going to these progressive, woke sort of causes. And I
dare say I haven't looked at it, but I wouldn't
be surprised if some of that money even finds its
way into New Zealand too.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
I wouldn't be surprised either. We had some issues over
this last weekend. Going back to Whitlam, you're right, yet
Whitlam overrode the warning signals generated by his own capacious
brain and stuck this unexploded legislative bomb on the statute. Anyway,
why Whitlam explained, we shall be doing our best to

(46:55):
redress past injustice and build a more tolerant society. Now
your comment after that, It's not hard to make the
case for statutory regulation in areas such as banking example,
although even there we must remain vigilant for administrative overreach.
The inevitable price of going down this path is that

(47:17):
not every adjudication will be applied with the wisdom of Solomon,
since decisions will inevitably be outsourced to a commission or
some other expert body with limited opportunities for appeal through
the courts. And that's really where I was headed right
from the beginning of that little rant, because there you

(47:38):
have democracy being eaten again, destroyed even.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
Yeah, yeah, so Whitlam in the final couple of weeks
of his term in office, just coming up to fifty
years of course, fifty year anniversary of his dismissal. So
in the final term weeks of obviously sets up the
equivalent of what became the Human Rights Commission, So it
has various incarnations. So this is a body where if

(48:04):
you feel you've been discriminated against in some way because
of your race, you an appeal and a panel, a
panel of adjudicators, not a court, will make a decision
and then say you need redress. I drawing tension in
that article to various ridiculous cases that have been bored

(48:25):
over the years, including somebody who's complaining that they've had
a racist slur made at them because one of their
work colleagues said, would you like a black tea? You know,
he said, well that was racist, and you know it's
a silly thing. But that then takes up pages and

(48:45):
pages of the commissioner's judgment explaining like in the end,
she didn't think that was racist. But once you start
that bureaucratic process, as Whitlam did in nineteen seventy five,
it just grows like topsy and is then out of
your control. So the Human Rights Commission now is just
completely off with the fairies. It's it should be, of course,

(49:10):
looking at the human rights and the racial hatred against
the Jewish community. But it doesn't. It's recently the Human
Rights Commission here has said, you know, they've come out
against this push to define a man and a woman
in biological terms and insist that biological men do not

(49:33):
complete in women's sport. They're against that idea. That's against
the rights of the people who want to be transgender.
So this body is completely out of control. It has
its own processes. They're not subject to the usual rules
of law of fairness, judicial fairness, because it's done by
a committee. And that's what happens when you bureaucratize this

(49:56):
stuff instead of just as I said earlier, let people
work it out amongst themselves and do the right thing.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
What do you think Robert Menzie's approach would have been.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
Well, this would never have happened under Mensis because Mensis
resisted the idea of Australia signing up to international treaties
like the you know whatever the treaty was that led
to the Human Rights Commission, and in the Australian Constitution,
the only way that the federal government can claim the

(50:30):
power to legislate on those things across the countries by saying, well,
we've signed in international treaties, so it's a dune. Deeal
Mensis didn't like that idea. He was always troubled by
the idea of, you know, outsourcing our sovereignty to some
international body or treaty. Well he has, hasn't he. So
I suspect we wouldn't be quite in this mess if

(50:51):
Mensi's had to live for another or you know, sixty
seventy years. But yeah, it's the times, isn't it. The
expectations change, and this extension of human rights into a
misunderstanding of what universal human or rights star. So we
now get this idea that if you want to be,

(51:14):
if you want to appeal because you want to be
an Australian resident and you've been refused, oh well you've
got human rights. Well maybe in a technical sense you do.
But the rights of the people who actually live here,
the actual citizens, should be the primary rights, and that
the rights of that of some rat bag who wants
to come and live here do not trump the rights

(51:36):
of the people who actually live here. We've lost that
idea that a country can discriminate between its own citizens
and outsiders. We've got to go back to that.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
You talking of multiculturalism as we are, of course, but
as public policy. Is that exemplar of stage one thinking,
a superficially appealing proposal marred by a failure to ask
what might come next? The all too frequent answer to
that question is that the consequence will be the opposite
of the one intended. And then you go on from there.

(52:10):
And I got into a bit of a discussion only
last night with somebody, and I had to pull out
of it because it wasn't going to go anywhere terribly good.
But you refer to an era where I became aware
and interested in what was going on in the early
nineteen seventies Australia. The possibility was more than theoretical. I

(52:35):
actually better go back to the beginning of that paragraph.
By rewarding the celebration of ethnic traditions that might well
serve as totems in conflicts on other continents, might we
not run a substantial risk of importing unresolved grievances that
would weaken the social fabric and try the patients of
other Australians. And that's exactly the sort of question that

(52:58):
should be raised constantly anyway. In early nineteen seventies Australia,
the possibility was more than theoretical. The cascading civil wars
and insurgencies that ravig the Balkans for ten years after
the collapse of communism had been rehearsed in Australia for
a decade, beginning at the start of the Queensland cane
cutting season in May of nineteen sixty three, where a

(53:20):
group of mass men armed with guns and knives vandalized
the property of a Yugoslavian farmer. It was followed by
the first two attempts to fire bomb the Yugoslav consulate
in Sydney in May of nineteen sixty four, which succeeded
only in injuring the suitcase, bomber, etc.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
Etc.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
In a portent of the wave of anti Semitic violence
that began in Sydney half a century later. Or Starza
translates as uprising or insurgency, serving as the Croatian equivalent
of chi had And you go on talking about attempts,
blowing to blowing up bridges and all sorts of other things.

(54:00):
The point that I was trying to make last night,
in this dead end conversation was that you can't import
people who have such different values and a record of
violence in their home country. You can't import them and
expect them to settle in when at the same time

(54:20):
the same opposition from back there, like in Yugoslavia, is
also getting into the country. So the two groups are
just bringing their bonfight to a new venue.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
Exactly. I think you can allow people to come from
those regions, but you've got to make it very clear.
You've got to do your you've got to do your
background checks, and make it very clear to them that
whatever you think about that dispute there in the Middle East,
or in the case of the earlier one, you know,
between the Croats and the Serbs, that's not something you're
going to do here, right, you know, we live by

(54:54):
the principal love thy neighbor, right, love thy neighbor as thyself,
and that that applies to Jews if you're a Muslim,
it applies to Serbs if you're a Croatan, and vice versa.
So that's the rule, and if you transgress that rule,
then you're out. Because we don't want that here. We
have to be able to draw a line under these

(55:17):
historical grievances and imagines, historical grievances that ravage other parts
of the world, principally you know, as you say, the
Middle East now, but attentions are still there of course
in the Balkans and parts of Europe. We can see
it in Ukraine. No, sorry, you know that that's not
part of what we do here.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
But which is your problem. Your problem is that the
as you have been referring to them, the elites have
taken control. The courts are full of them and so
sore the bureaucracies, and it's either live with what you've

(55:59):
got now and where it goes, or you've got to
have a revolution to overturn it.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
Almost yeah, yeah, Now the courts are the courts are
really getting beyond themselves, aren't they in some of this
We've had these instances recently in Sydney, you no doubt
have seen that big Palestinian protest over the Harbor Bridge. Well,
the New South Wales police wanted that stopped. They didn't
want it to go ahead because it was going to

(56:25):
be dangerous. The government wanted it stopped. Most of the
community wanted it stopped. I mean, why shouldn't Why should I,
as somebody who lives north of the Harbor Bridge be
prevented from driving across the city to the fish market
on a Saturday morning or Sunday morning because these idiots
want to make a spectacle of themselves. Obviously it's a

(56:45):
ridiculous place to have a demonstration in the middle of
the main road. Essentially, so everybody agreed this was wrong thing.
But then of course the court stepped in and said,
oh no, these people have a right to process, and
it all had to go ahead. But predictably, as the
police had said, it just became really dangerous and out
of control and they had to turn the people back

(57:06):
halfway across the bridge and say, look, this is too
Angels that that goes on and on and on. Here
the courts are taking this really high minded, soft headed
view that they're doing the right thing, when in actual
fact they're just creating an increasing tension in the community
and very ugly scenes in public which shouldn't be there.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
The lessons that should have been learned through the earlier
stages with the Yugoslavs, the Serbs and what have you
can be easily transferred to the presence situation with allowing
more Palestinians into the country. Just as an example, but
there doesn't seem to be any recognition of the education

(57:54):
that should have come out of the Australia's not too
distant past.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
No, absolutely not it. There's just this complete, really libed
attitude towards managing him greation in this country and actually
making sure the best of our ability that people come
here for the right reasons and principally come here because
they love Australia. You know, that should be everybody's overriding

(58:22):
reason they turn up here, you know, not just because
they can get a good job and work here, but
because they love the place. And I think that is
still true of most migrants. I mean, I go on,
I've been along to some citizenship ceremonies recently, and you're
full of rooms full of people from more different places Philippines, India, China, whatever,

(58:46):
just really proud to stand in front of an Australian
flag and have their photo taken and be part of it.
And I kind of identify with that because I felt
exactly that when I became a citizen in well over
thirty years ago. And that's true, but not everybody does
that now. So we should be looking very carefully at people,

(59:07):
whether they be become citizens, or they're not becoming citizens,
then what are they doing here? They don't love the place,
leave it? In my view, you know, plenty of people
do love it, and they're the people that are going
to make this country stronger and better, people who actually
committed to the place. So we need to look at that.
We need to look at the way we do know

(59:29):
the various immigration rules and principles and just revise them
so that we get a lot stronger control over who
comes here, better checks, particularly on the English language. I
was in I was in Finland last year and I
got a cab from the airport and there was an
Indian driving a cab in Finland and I said to him,

(59:52):
do you speak Finnish? He said, of course, he said,
we have to. We have to learn Finish or we
don't stay here. And Finish is one of the hardest,
most difficult languages in the world right and only about
five million people speak it. But if you in assist
that that's the right of being here. I think we
get a bit lazy with English, but we should say

(01:00:13):
not just get buy in English. We actually have to
understand you, and you have to understand us at a
pretty high level if you want to stay here, that
would I think help a great deal. But also just
insisting on test of values, I guess in whatever form
you do that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
Yeah, either learn finish or you're finished.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
Exactly exactly. The same rules apply in Hungary incidentally, which
is again second only to Finish as the most difficult
language in Europe.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
Anything else that you want to touch.

Speaker 3 (01:00:49):
On, well, not really. I just would like the New
Zealand economy to lift a bit and the things that
go a bit better over there, and then perhaps that
would ease our immigration issues a bit. Not that we
don't like seeing New Zealand to see we do, of course,
but you know, going to side up, I'm trying to

(01:01:10):
stand back at the moment and think how do we
get to this point and how do we get out
of it? And I don't think the second question has
no clear answer to me. The cavalry are not coming.
We've got to do something.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
If the cavalry isn't coming. Just to stay with the context,
then the Indians are winning the Red Indians.

Speaker 3 (01:01:32):
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well indeed, yeah, there is
this sense of you know, this is this is barbarism
versus civilization. Of course, we've felt that in the Middle East,
and I mean there are lots of pluses if you
think about it. In the last couple of years, Israel
security is much more assured there now, we're much more

(01:01:54):
you know, the Palestinian cause has been pushed to the
margins of the Middle East affairs, which is where it
should be. And we're getting on with getting on with
other nations. So yeah, there are lots of things to
look at which are good. Trump course they interesting experiment
there in pushing back the universities and some of this
other warkness. Things we can learn from there. Let's see,

(01:02:18):
let's see where we go.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
All right, One last question then from out of this
is out of context a column written by Jonathan Turley,
law professor from Washington, DC on the pledge of Zoran
Mamdani to end some of the early Gifted and Talented
programs in the New York educational system. The move is

(01:02:41):
part of a national campaign against such programs as racist
and or privileged due to the high percentage of white
and Asian students who qualify. The fear is that the
Mamdani administration will return to the disastrous policies of Deblasio
in rolling back on the programs that was the introduction.

(01:03:03):
This is the column that he wrote. Mamdarmi appears to
have a plan for lib the playing field in education.
Faced with a huge number of students with comparatively dismal
scores in maths, English, and science, Mandani is going to
bulldoze higher achieving programs. It's a pledge that only a
Soviet central planner would relish. I just wonder you must

(01:03:26):
have been paying a little attention to him.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
Yeah, yeah, I'm mystified as to why he's the front runner,
but they tell me he is. I just don't understand that.
But yeah, but that is that is pushing, that's going
back on all the progress that's been made in recent
years with local school boards and incentive schemes for teachers

(01:03:52):
to actually help their current crop of students improve. You know,
they get judged to put according to the improvement their
group of students makes a year on year, not on
the overall figure. It's a failed policy. We've seen it
time and timing again that you can't you know, if

(01:04:12):
you do, if you try and positively discriminate against you know,
some pressed group or whatever, then you are negatively discriminating
against other children. And if you positively discriminate in favor
of kids who don't do very well at school, you
negatively discriminate against those who do do well. We need
to celebrate excellence and and this is yeah, it is all.

(01:04:36):
They'll go through this process, it will fail again, and
we'll go back to correct it. But I just don't
know why we don't learn those lessons once and for all.

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):
Indeed, all right, in my introduction, I as I got
round to it, I left out television. You're doing quite
a bit of television now, from both home and overseas.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
You're enjoying it, Yeah, I do. It sharpens you up
a bit, doesn't it. I mean I was fine. You know,
you can sit here pondering on an essay like the
one you've been we've been talking about in quadri, but
then you've got to go on Sky News and talk
about three hot topics of the day. It's a good
exercise in just getting your mind straight and your thoughts clear.

(01:05:20):
So I enjoy it from that point of view, and
I'm enjoying the conversation on there because you're off and
on with some really smart people like Peter Credlin, who
put up so I enjoy that, and I get the
impression of people often say they like my contributions, so
I feel like I'm doing something worthwhile.

Speaker 2 (01:05:38):
Well, you've been doing that for quite a while. It
may be unfair of me to say that. I know
that you're working on another book. It'll come out sometime
next year, hopefully early, and I'm not even going to
ask you unless you want to tell what a time.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Well, i'll give you the title. It's called Delusions, A
Short History of Bad Ideas. So that'll give you an
idea it. It explains why it's taken me so long
to write it, actually, because the more these bad ideas
you look at, the more you find.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
How long does it take once you've finished, it goes
off to proof read, be proof read or whatever. How
long does it take for publishing?

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
Well, it can take anything up to nine months with
some publishers. Depends on the publisher and how much care
they take. But yeah, it is quite a long process,
and rightly so. Because you've committed something to book form,
you can't afford to have any mistakes in there, or
any typographical errors. You've got to get the chapters and

(01:06:38):
everything really sharp. So yeah, it's an interesting process, which
I quite enjoy in a way, but you're always impatient
to get the thing out there move on to the
next one.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
Anyway, It's been great talking with you again, terrific, always
pleasure it is. Thank you, Nick, Thanks Latin. I went

(01:07:13):
to the mail room for podcast A number three hundred
and seven, and we're very, very privileged to have missus
producer put in an appearance. Welcome high later. I've got
a house full of overseas guests and it's.

Speaker 4 (01:07:25):
Chaotic here we do and it is chaos.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
Thank you for putting your best foot forward.

Speaker 4 (01:07:31):
Laton, You've got a wonderfully long letter from Stephen, and
Stephen forgive me. I'm going to have to edit the
hell out of it. I'm afraid because we just don't
have time. But hopefully I'll give you some of the
essence of it. He says. I found the program on
the fifteenth of October with the Israeli ambassador and George Freeman.
Very interesting. Having spent a quarter of my working life

(01:07:51):
in the Middle East in Saudi Arabia in the seventies,
I think I have a slightly different perspective on the situation.
Then he goes on to say that Arabs are highly tribal.
They're not a homogeneoust racial group as so many commentators
like to catalog them. And he says that the Palestinians
basically are despised by other Arabs that considered a problem

(01:08:14):
that won't go away, and all they do is cause trouble.
So he says, now we come to the current crisis.
Many Western countries and overtly Arab countries call for a
two state solution. All a two state solution will achieve,
he says, as a platform for rivalry. As long as
the Palestinians covert Israel, there will be trouble. And the

(01:08:36):
idea of Gaza being a Singapore of the Middle East
is absolute pie in the sky. So what of the future,
he says, I think, but few will agree with me
that what needs to happen is that Israel must annex
Gaza and the West Bank. He must must be annihilated,
and the other militias must be disarmed. The Palestinians must
be assimilated into Israeli society or given the chance to leave.

(01:09:01):
This gets rid of the Palestinian problem. For the other
Arabs and for the Jews, they will have to learn
to live with them, these Palestinians, and forgive the recent history.
In a multi ethnic society not a big ask as
Israel is composed of so many different groups. As the
ambassador said, Israel is already composed of different ethnicities, including Arabs,

(01:09:25):
and of many different religions. This is not an impossible task.
And assimilation demolishes the coveting of Israeli lands by the Palestinians. Stephen,
I hope I've done that justice, and we have both
read your very thoughtful peace, So thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):
Yes, And I don't disagree with them, well really any
of it, essentially, just a little disappointed that a few
people when when I ask the question, as I have
done once or twice of interviewees, of why the other
Arab states won't touch the Palestinians don't want them, I
know the answer. I'm really asking it to flesh out

(01:10:04):
the interview for those who who don't know it anyway.
That's just my comment. So from from Gin, whatever happened
in Australia happened in New Zealand. Two, the imbecilic Tony Burke.
Why limit it to Tony Burke. There's plenty of them there.
The imbecilic Tony Burke and the Australian High Court's decision

(01:10:27):
to ban Candace Owens from her Australian shows has caused
Candace to cancel all her New Zealand shows too. I'm
gutted have Australians lost their spines? At least Wei Kiwi
set a strong signal against immigration New Zealand to unbanned
Candace Owens. With credit to National MP Chris Penk new

(01:10:50):
Zealanders are increasingly exercising their voices against well our voices,
he says, against bureaucratic overreach and tyranny. The Free Speech
Union recently led the backlash against the BSA from expanding
its powers to regulate online media. Within a matter of days,
more than two thousand New Zealanders have emailed Media and

(01:11:11):
Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith, a good aunt Sean Plunkett, for
courageously exposing BSA's sly attempt to bully him and the platform.
I've never ever heard of anyone referred to Trump as
a manifestation of the right thing to do, Yet that
was a highly accurate description by Alan Ross. The late

(01:11:32):
Billy Graham said that quote when a brave man takes
a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened clothes.
Happy fortieth oh yes, happy fortieth z By birthday, lateon.
Keep taking a stand on truths, so our spines are stiffened,
and may we all be manifestations of the right thing

(01:11:53):
to do. I'm going to throw another comment in there.
I got a few, I got quite a few emails
regarding the platform. My thought was simply that Plunkett is
big enough to take care of himself. But in principle
I agree with you.

Speaker 4 (01:12:13):
Laydon Ross says, great podcast as usual for three six.
I love listening to George Friedman when you have him on,
and I contrast him to another line of commentary that
I regularly listen to, and that is the Duran. That's
another website. Both provide a narrative and analysis on what
is happening in global politics that are sadly missing in

(01:12:35):
the legacy New Zealand media. Both, of course, are unashamedly
attempting to critically address merits of decision making of Western
politicians and are focusing on what role Trump is currently
playing in world affairs. However, the contrast between the two
cannot be more obvious George would maintain that China is weak,

(01:12:55):
Russia is about to fail, and that US and Trump
are proceeding well in order to bring the Ukrainian conflict
to a conclusion. The Duran alternative would state the West
has essentially exhausted itself through decades of mismanagement and globalist ideology,
and might as well face up to the fact that
Russia has won. Trump should pull out and say, if

(01:13:17):
you Europeans wish to keep going, have it, but it
will be without the USA supply chain. Unfortunately, he listens
to the neocons in Washington. China meanwhile, is sitting back
watching the West exhaust itself. Our globalist politicians over the
last thirty years have destroyed industry in the West and
our ideological and cultural basis. And I'm afraid this will

(01:13:41):
take some time. I think a couple of generations at
least to reverse. And Ross goes on to say, the
next couple of weeks are going to be extremely interesting,
especially this meeting in Hungary. Trump has to listen to
Victor Orban Hungarian PM and putin as it could be
the last opportunity to finish this without a major issue happening.

(01:14:03):
Let's see what happens. Very best to you both, and
that's from Ross Ross.

Speaker 2 (01:14:07):
Very good, thank you. I am disappointed, right, Smike. I'm
disappointed that George started his answer about so called Palestine
from nineteen forty eight. He should have started way back
before them. Now, there was never a state called Palestine. Yes,
a arafat first called these Arabs Palestinians. The Arabs living

(01:14:28):
in Gaza came from Jordan because of discontent in Jordan.
They came to Gaza because they could have jobs, et cetera,
working for the very successful Jewish farmers and businesses in Israel.
I haven't read the book Son of Hamas, but I
have seen YouTube videos where he that being the sun

(01:14:49):
whose name escapes me for a minute, where he explains
the history. But you could have commented on how successful
he has become in pairing off with others rather than
with the Ghazans if you like, or the Palastine whatever. Also,
Fox News does not always obtained video of events as

(01:15:10):
they unfold. To get this type of content on Israel,
see TBNTV and tuc Tusi TV if you want to
news as it unfolds. I don't know are they on
Sky I have absolutely no idea, but maybe I shall investigate.
Kind regards, Michael, thank you, mate.

Speaker 4 (01:15:32):
Leiden Brett says, are you sure about Trump? Just saw
a handshake with Putin on TV one News on the
seventeenth of October. It's unclear when the picture was used.
The two men were seated, Trump offered his hand to Putin.
Trump's hand was fully facing up from the outset, and
Putin's hand went over the top, which is often considered

(01:15:52):
the dominant position. Body language experts would have a field
day analyzing these two together. Trump's predecessor ensured Ukraine couldn't
win the war by placing restrictions on Ukraine's use of weaponry,
among withholding other critical supports. Russia hasn't been able to
finish Ukraine off, so we have a protracted war which
will not be able to be sustained indefinitely. I'm wary

(01:16:16):
of any deal Trump would want to make regarding this conflict.
A deal is not always the best outcome for longer
term implications, and that's from Rett.

Speaker 2 (01:16:25):
Htt You've got a weight with Trump. Trump will do
something and then double down on it or back off
it or whatever. But he's he's the man now from Sally.
Subject Gaza is very very short. Subject Gaza. I listen
with great interest, good timing, latent kind regards Sally from

(01:16:49):
the first cruise on the Windsurf and Italy, which was
about when was it? It was the first cruise that
we did. It couldn't be the first cruise we did.
It was the first cruise after we did the New
Orleans to the Caribbean cruise and back again. And I
reckon that was in the late nineties.

Speaker 4 (01:17:10):
Oh, don't look at me late and I've got a shop.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
I think I think this one was early two thousand.

Speaker 4 (01:17:15):
It's Sally. It's lovely to hear from you. Thank you
so much for still listening and communicating. I hope you're well.

Speaker 2 (01:17:21):
Yeah, would you be available for another one? That's the question?

Speaker 4 (01:17:24):
Anybody want to go on another one?

Speaker 2 (01:17:25):
I keep getting asked, so missus producer, that'll do? Oh
hang on, this is this is a travelogue, right, yeah,
very long. I'll give you a taste. As a long
time listener to your broadcast, I've always appreciated the clarity
and independence of thought you bring to your commentaries and interviews.

(01:17:47):
I appreciate that, truly. I've also followed Patrick Basham's appearances
with interest over the years, and I've often found his
insights into political trends both astute and thought provoking. I
must send this to Patrick. It was therefore with some
surprise that I found my own recent experiences in the
United States, particularly in the cities or the very cities

(01:18:10):
mentioned in your discussion with Patrick, to differ markedly from
the rather pessimistic tone of that interview. Over the past
sixteen months, my wife and I, both in our sixties,
have made three separate visits from New Zealand, spending a
total of six weeks exploring eight American cities, and there

(01:18:31):
I shall park it and I may include that at
the very end of the podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:18:36):
Today beautiful, thank you, thank you later.

Speaker 2 (01:18:39):
And we shall see you very soon and again next week. Now,
I thought that that was a very interesting discussion with

(01:19:02):
Nick Cator, and considering the amount of information in it,
an opinion in it, etc. I actually know what to
add to it because this will verify much of what
was what was said, particularly by Nick, but verify nevertheless
the conversation that we had. This is a commentary from
the Australian newspaper written by Merco Bargerik, who is professor

(01:19:25):
at Swinborne University and author of Australian Human Rights Law.
At its headed Culture of Rights, fuels victorious social decline.
I've been talking about Victoria's decline for some considerable time,
like years. Victorious human rights Charter a recipe for decline
and disorder. In a sure sign of a society in decline,

(01:19:47):
Victoria Police Commander Wayne Cheeseman held up a box of
rocks and glass bottles that had been thrown at police
last Sunday and declared Melbourne had had a guts fall
all things considered. His response was remarkably constrained. His members
and the long suffering Victorian community have had to endure

(01:20:07):
more than one hundred weeks of consecutive CBD disrupting protests. Still,
the erosion of social harmony and civil disobedience started well
more than one hundred weeks ago, twenty years ago, I warned,
says the author. The professor. I warned that if Victoria
became the first state to entrench a human rights charter,

(01:20:30):
it would result in increased lawlessness, moral nihilism, and civic decay.
I don't recall hearing of this professor before, but he
was saying that twenty years ago is in very good company. Now,
almost two decades after the enactment of the Charter of
Human Rights and Responsibilities Act, Victoria has the highest crime

(01:20:52):
rate on record and is the protest capital of Australia,
with newspaper reports of violent stabbings in Melbourne appearing in
international publications. Of course, it's not all bad in Melbourne.
The human rights industry and the army of well paid
public servants are flourishing little cynicism for the rest of Victoria.

(01:21:14):
The Charter was meant to enhance individual prosperity, but it
has done the exact opposite. Now where did we hear
that earlier on in the podcast? That result, the Charter
has replaced personal responsibility and the pursuit of the common
good with an obsession on individual entitlements and grievance. More

(01:21:36):
than two hundred years ago, one of the smartest political
and legal scholars in history, Jeremy Bentham, stated that rights
are nonsense on stilts. You might want to remember that.
Write it down, use it. Rights are nonsense on stilts.
Rights have no providence, no content, and no coherent limits.

(01:22:00):
Rights discourse provides no logical method for distinguishing between legitimate
individual interests and emotional appeals disguised as moral imperatives. Once codified,
rights invite competition among citizens for competition for self made victimhood.
It is intellectually, morally and politically shameful that in Victoria,

(01:22:24):
the right to protest, apparently without libert has resulted in
tangible harm and fear being inflicted on the Jewish community
for more than two years, This apparently limitless right now
has spilt over into wanton attacks against the police. It's
easy to multiply the carnage caused in Victoria by rights fanaticism.

(01:22:44):
Privacy claims, often framed as derivative of the right to
freedom from arbitrary interference, impede the ability of institutions and
police to use facial recognition technology or conduct knife searches
in public places to increase community safety. The stories of

(01:23:04):
violent criminals and their absolute right to perpetual base and
to live a jail free life take priority over victims
and the concern of parents for the safety of their children.
This gross distortion has become gross institutionalized negligence. Perhaps the

(01:23:25):
starkest demonstration of the Charter's intellectual bankruptcy came during the
COVID pandemic. Victoria endured the longest lockdown on Earth. Because
rights must always be balanced against limits, governments and disaffected
citizens are free to justify almost any action by invoking
competing rights. During the pandemic, mass movement restrictions were rationalized

(01:23:51):
on the grounds of protecting the right to life. The
machinery of ruthless control became self legitimating through the retoric
of rights, Yet there was not a peep of displeasure
from the human rights industry. Rights advocates became a partis
for state repression. The Charter has inverted this approach. It

(01:24:13):
demands fanaticism to rights claims over the operation of rules
and policies that will empirically benefit society. In Victoria, the
loudest groups, those most schooled atre training their complaints in
rights language, and those with the most spare time receive

(01:24:33):
the most attention. The public square is a theatre of
grievance where outrage, not truth or civic merit, determines outcomes.
Instead of uniting citizens through shared goals, the Charter rewards
perpetual offense and moral outrage pursuant to the Charter, Each
request for community resources and opportunities begins with the non

(01:24:56):
contested assumption that every personal preference is genuine and are
right capable of legal vindication. Police schools, hospitals, and local
governments operate in a climate where the avoidance of litigated
rights claims is prioritized above allocating resources, duties, and sanctions

(01:25:17):
in a manner that advances the common good. The casualties
of this moral inversion are ordinary Victorians, people who follow
the law, pay taxes, expect basic order and safety, and
belief that consequences are more important than words. Twenty years
on Victorious, social indicators reflect the moral drift and the

(01:25:40):
associated abdication of policy decisions based on empirical leanings about
resource allocation that best promote the common good. It's not
surprising that Victoria has the highest crime, most protests, greatest
social disharmony, and highest taxes and unemployment of any state

(01:26:02):
in the country. Policy decisions and rules directed at appeasing
a me me me culture can logically never benefit the
common good. The Charter did not create these pathologies, but
it entrenched the moral and political vocabulary that justifies them.
To restore stability in Victoria, the Charter must be repealed.

(01:26:24):
Societies thrive when the law reflects rational moral principles and
empirical understandings about the allocation of benefits and burdens that
benefit the overall community, as opposed to fashionable moral screeds.
The end Rko Bargovic, professor at Swinburne University, which is

(01:26:46):
in the heart of Melbourne, and author of Australian human
rights law. You know, there's one thing that frustrates me greatly,
and that is that there will be no repercussions for
anybody in Victoria, people who've screwed up the state, destroyed it, well,

(01:27:12):
pretty close to it. It's not far off unless something
happens dramatically and soon.

Speaker 3 (01:27:18):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):
And then you've got this country of course, and the
same principle applies here in a different way, but still
it's the same sort of principle anyway. That will take
us out for podcast number three hundred and seven. So
if you'd like to write to us Layton at Newstalks
ab dot co dot nz or Carolyn the Newstalks ab
dot co dot enz, we love your mail and keep it,

(01:27:42):
keep it flowing. And what else is there to say? Well,
it's been a very interesting podcast. I think for me anyway,
I trust for you. We shall of course be back
in a week with three to oh a week three
oh eight. Until then, as always, thank you for listening
and we'll talk soon, predict.

Speaker 3 (01:28:09):
Thank you for more from News Talk st B.

Speaker 1 (01:28:12):
Listen live on air or online, and keep our shows
with you wherever you go with our podcasts on iHeartRadio

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Leighton Smith Podcast #307 - October 22nd 2025 - Nick Cater

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Leighton Smith Podcast #307 - October 22nd 2025 - Nick Cater