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Speaker 1: It's time for all the attitude, all the opinion, all
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Speaker 2: Welcome to podcast two hundred and sixty eight four December four,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four. Nick Cator who has made numerous podcast
Speaker 2: appearances over the last six years, and there were discussions
Speaker 2: we had on radio starting in twenty thirteen through to
Speaker 2: the end of twenty eighteen. Nick is a journalist and writer,
Speaker 2: essentially an analyst and commentator. He's a mixture of all.
Speaker 2: His life has undergone some restructuring in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: I've seen him on Sky News all around Australia. I've
Speaker 2: seen him on Sky News from Romania, from London and
Speaker 2: some other places that I failed to remember. Now to
Speaker 2: include him before the end of twenty four we had
Speaker 2: to pick a time and date that suited us both.
Speaker 2: So a few days ago, on the eve of Thanksgiving,
Speaker 2: we connected in New York and the idea from my
Speaker 2: perspective was to target Australia from different perspectives. With the
Speaker 2: underlying intent on information for would be migrants or immigrants
Speaker 2: from this country. So the discussion ranged through problems facing Australia,
Speaker 2: power supply being maybe the most important, which meant including
Speaker 2: nuclear power, politics obviously, education, housing, race relations, anti Semitism,
Speaker 2: health and hospital care, and that gets even more discussion
Speaker 2: after the interview, the ten most dangerous cities and other matters,
Speaker 2: and finally we've finished up with well having a bit
Speaker 2: of fun expense of the media. As usual, it was
Speaker 2: a relaxed and interesting conversation. But first years ago I
Speaker 2: tagged Aukland Transport as the best example New Zealand has
Speaker 2: of the administrative state, and it proved to be a
Speaker 2: correct description. The term administrative state to me means essentially
Speaker 2: unelected bureaucrats making the rules rather than elected representatives of
Speaker 2: the people. So in New Zealand that means our single
Speaker 2: chamber of Parliament and local councils, members of which can
Speaker 2: be held accountable by the voting public. Now, in one
Speaker 2: of those coincidences that I thrive on, I can provide
Speaker 2: an even better definition of the administrative state. Roger Kimball
Speaker 2: is a thinker and writer who I admire yesterday I
Speaker 2: read an article that he wrote a couple of days ago,
Speaker 2: and it was called what is the administrative State? And
Speaker 2: here is part of what he wrote. The administrative state
Speaker 2: is that quota of political power that covertly fills the
Speaker 2: vacuum left and this is very important, left by the
Speaker 2: failure of the legislative branch to discharge its obligations. Two
Speaker 2: things are critical. One is the displacement of sovereignty. No
Speaker 2: longer are the people sovereign. The bureaucracy is. The second
Speaker 2: critical thing is the covert nature of the enterprise. The
Speaker 2: question what is the administrative state can seem difficult to
Speaker 2: answer because it's not supposed to exist in the first place.
Speaker 2: You know it only by its actions. You can't look
Speaker 2: it up in the statute book, much less in the Constitution.
Speaker 2: The very fact of the administrative state violates any number
Speaker 2: of constitutional norms, not least its being a sort of
Speaker 2: fourth branch of government when the Constitution provides for only three. Well,
Speaker 2: that is restricted more to them and not so inclusive
Speaker 2: of us. However, the points are still relevant. The shadowy
Speaker 2: nature of the administrative state helps to explain why it
Speaker 2: is so hostile to free speech and by the same token,
Speaker 2: why it tends to be receptive to the deployment of
Speaker 2: censorship and police power to achieve its ends and stymy
Speaker 2: the ends of its critics. That's why the rise of
Speaker 2: the administrative state goes hand in hand with the loss
Speaker 2: of public confidence in society's guiding institutions. Talk of democracy
Speaker 2: is ever on their lips. Swat teams, prosecutor abuse and
Speaker 2: lawfare are out on the street for all to see.
Speaker 2: The bottom line, the age of the administrative state is,
Speaker 2: at the same time an age of declining legitimacy in
Speaker 2: the foundational institutions of civil society. That last sentence is
Speaker 2: applicable here as as well as anywhere. Little further on,
Speaker 2: he says, I have not yet answered the question posed
Speaker 2: in my title, what is the administrative state? A friend
Speaker 2: asked me that in the course of our conversation about
Speaker 2: my column last week. He said, isn't it possible that
Speaker 2: the administrative state, like its scarier sounding cousin deep state,
Speaker 2: is just a polysyllabic synonym for state for the complex
Speaker 2: activities of government in a complex, technologically advanced polity. Maybe
Speaker 2: the administrative state is just an invention of right wing
Speaker 2: conspiracy theorists who find goblins where there are only harmless bureaucrats. Now,
Speaker 2: Roger Kimball's response to that was, well, it can be
Speaker 2: reduced to this conspiracy theorist. And that's a phrase that
Speaker 2: is wheeled out when the aim is to end, not
Speaker 2: further the conversation. The problem is not conspiracy theories, but
Speaker 2: conspiracies in fact. It's a line we should all remember
Speaker 2: because we can use it probably frequently. The problem is
Speaker 2: not conspiracy theories, but conspiracies in fact. Now, in case
Speaker 2: you're wondering why this, here's the answer. Yesterday, Auckland Transport
Speaker 2: will be surgically changed to restore democratic control for transport
Speaker 2: issues in Auckland, according to the Transport Minister Simeon Brown.
Speaker 2: He and the Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown declared that they
Speaker 2: were taking back control of Auckland Transport by stripping the
Speaker 2: unpopular council body of its policy, strategy and planning functions
Speaker 2: and moving them to the Auckland Council. Wayne Brown said
Speaker 2: having at focused on running the buses, trains and ferries
Speaker 2: is what they should be doing, declaring it to be
Speaker 2: a very good result. Simeon Brown said the existing transport
Speaker 2: governance model in Auckland is falling short of meeting under statement,
Speaker 2: short of meeting the expectations of the government, Auckland Council
Speaker 2: and most importantly, Auckland is themselves. By returning decision making
Speaker 2: power to elected representatives, we are enabling Aucklanders to directly
Speaker 2: influence the transport policies that affect their daily lives. That
Speaker 2: is true in how should we say principle, All we
Speaker 2: have to do is get off our butts and make
Speaker 2: sure that we're heard. And I know a lot of
Speaker 2: people up till relatively recently attempted to do that and
Speaker 2: basically got nowhere. And I've mentioned stories in the past
Speaker 2: of people who've told me of presentations they made to
Speaker 2: at at public meetings only to get dumped on. Now
Speaker 2: after the mail room, I've connected a couple of different issues,
Speaker 2: three in fact, but connected issues remedical, nursing and health,
Speaker 2: and I recommend that you don't miss them now in
Speaker 2: a moment. Nick cater Leverx is an antihistamine made in
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Speaker 2: and has a unique nasal decongestant action. It's fast acting
Speaker 2: for fast relief and it works in under an hour
Speaker 2: and lasts for over twenty four hours. Leverix is a
Speaker 2: tiny tablet that unblocks the nose, deals with itchy eyes,
Speaker 2: and stops sneezing. Leveris is an antihistamine made in Switzerland
Speaker 2: to the highest quality. So next time you're in need
Speaker 2: of an effective antihistamine, call into the pharmacy and ask
Speaker 2: for Leverix l e v Rix Leverix and always read
Speaker 2: the label. Takes directed and if symptoms persist, see your
Speaker 2: health professional. Farmer broker Auckland Layton Smith Nick Cata has
Speaker 2: been on the podcast on numerous occasions over the years.
Speaker 2: He is a very good friend of the podcast and
Speaker 2: a good friend of mine. And it's great to welcome
Speaker 2: you back because we have not spoken this year and
Speaker 2: it was time to rectify it. And here we are
Speaker 2: talking to you via your phone, which of course some
Speaker 2: is locked into Sydney and you're in New York. What
Speaker 2: are you doing there?
Speaker 3: I'm here for conference by the International Democratic Union, which
Speaker 3: is an organization of conservative parties from around the world,
Speaker 3: including the National Party in New Zealand to get together
Speaker 3: and discuss conservatism and how to win these battles. So
Speaker 3: that's what I'm here for mainly, and also to visit
Speaker 3: a nuclear power plant plant in Toronto or in nearby
Speaker 3: Toronto in Ontario, which is one Australia could look at
Speaker 3: as a possible model. But I think we're going to
Speaker 3: come to that later on.
Speaker 2: We yes, we will come to that later. Very good.
Speaker 2: So how was your quote a slip?
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know whether this is too much chit
Speaker 3: chat for early in the podcast laden, but they, you know,
Speaker 3: they always think that you can tran you can change
Speaker 3: the flight in an hour and a half having arrived
Speaker 3: in America. I don't know why, because it takes you
Speaker 3: an hour and a half to get through the passport
Speaker 3: cure alone. It'll reclaim your badget anyway. All up, they
Speaker 3: gave me nine hours in Dallas Airport, which is not
Speaker 3: a bad airport, but it is an airport.
Speaker 2: Airports are airports. Yes, Indeed, what would you say was
Speaker 2: the biggest problem or if you want the biggest problems
Speaker 2: confronting Australia, because every country, it seems now has some issues.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we have plenty. It's hard to put them
Speaker 3: in order because they're all big. But I would say
Speaker 3: a top of my mind at the moment is economic
Speaker 3: management and the fact that we've been living off two
Speaker 3: decades really of mining boom and getting pretty lazy and
Speaker 3: not doing the things which we have to do to
Speaker 3: keep our economy competitive Keith. Amongst those is productivity. Productivity
Speaker 3: has gone backwards. And then on top of that you've
Speaker 3: got the rise of the green lobby, particularly the Green
Speaker 3: Tape and now Black tape, which is the indigenous legislation
Speaker 3: and is things you have to comply with, which means
Speaker 3: that it's almost impossible to start a new mine or
Speaker 3: drill for gas in Australia, and that of course is
Speaker 3: the like blood of our economy. So I really do
Speaker 3: fear for the place, particularly as this starts to kick
Speaker 3: in in the next ten years.
Speaker 2: Hasn't it already started well either.
Speaker 3: The thing about these mining investment decisions is that there
Speaker 3: are at least a decade or a decade and a
Speaker 3: half to come to fruition. So I think it is
Speaker 3: the next generation that are going to feel it. There'll
Speaker 3: be fewer opportunities for them because we don't have that
Speaker 3: pioneering quality to us anymore, and particularly the legal institutions
Speaker 3: have become very very woke, very you save the planet
Speaker 3: sort of a focus rather than looking at the law.
Speaker 3: So you know, mining deals are held up for a
Speaker 3: long long time if they get through at all. Luckily,
Speaker 3: there are still companies that are prepared to fight and
Speaker 3: go through that process and hope that perhaps we can
Speaker 3: get a government that can smooth things out and really
Speaker 3: accelerate investment in this country in the right things.
Speaker 2: How big is DEI in Australia Now, it's pretty big.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's quite as in say the States,
Speaker 3: but I see in the States where I am at
Speaker 3: the moment, is you say, where things are turning pretty quickly.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a big backlash. I saw Walmart only
Speaker 3: yesterday dropped a lot of their DEI policies. So companies
Speaker 3: are beginning to drop them, and I think they will
Speaker 3: in Australia. But they certainly They certainly do drive appointments
Speaker 3: in big corporations, which means you're not necessarily appointing on
Speaker 3: memic or pointing on some quality about them their gender
Speaker 3: or the color or race or something. You know, and
Speaker 3: it's big in universities, of course, so it is. It's
Speaker 3: really entrenched, and I think we somehow have to get
Speaker 3: beyond that thinking and go back to the idea we
Speaker 3: just want the best people for the jobs, or the
Speaker 3: best students going to university.
Speaker 2: What a surprise I heard a little earlier this morning,
Speaker 2: a bit of conversation with I missed. I missed a
Speaker 2: lot of it because I was getting in the shower,
Speaker 2: but a conversation with a guy whose name I seem
Speaker 2: to recall as being Jimmy Starbuck or something very similar,
Speaker 2: who has taken up the caudule, and I don't know
Speaker 2: his methodology, but has had huge success in destroying DEI
Speaker 2: in companies, and a lot of the companies that provide
Speaker 2: the DEI service are closing down. There was one in
Speaker 2: particular where the woman said, we're just we're just being
Speaker 2: wiped out. We can't I've got to close the doors.
Speaker 2: I can't. We can't get any work. And that's because
Speaker 2: of because of this guy. Now, my name for him
Speaker 2: might be slightly wrong, because I know it's it's it
Speaker 2: sounds a bit fanciful, but it is a fanciful name.
Speaker 2: I'm sure it's Starbus. I'm not sure about the Jimmy anymore,
Speaker 2: but you get you get the picture. So there is
Speaker 2: a growing success in pushback on the EI in America.
Speaker 2: Now my question then becomes, that's where it came from
Speaker 2: in the first place, so and then and then rippled
Speaker 2: out to the rest of the world, including here, of course,
Speaker 2: is it going to be automatically does it automatically follow
Speaker 2: that the collapse in our countries?
Speaker 3: Well, pretty this way late, and I'm pretty confident now
Speaker 3: we've reached peak woke. I wouldn't have said that six
Speaker 3: months ago, but I am now. And you can see
Speaker 3: it in the States with DEI, as you say, and
Speaker 3: they have been well. Two material things have happened in
Speaker 3: the States. One was the Supreme Court decision I think
Speaker 3: it was last year that overturned the preferential treatment for
Speaker 3: on the grounds of race in university admissions and positive
Speaker 3: discriminations they call it. So that was a material thing
Speaker 3: which shook up the inniverse. The other thing, of course,
Speaker 3: is Donald Trump. You know, it matters a lot who
Speaker 3: your president is and who your administration is run by,
Speaker 3: because they can pull the levers and order a whole
Speaker 3: lot of things. And there's talk of Trump defunding American
Speaker 3: universities if they carry on with their DEI policies. So
Speaker 3: that's happened here and there's definitely a feeling and people
Speaker 3: are writing about it quite confidently that this is peag woke.
Speaker 3: The SAME's true in Australia. Two things happened there. One
Speaker 3: is the Voice referendum, which happened at the very date
Speaker 3: November fourteen last year, the day of your election. Of course,
Speaker 3: we voted sixty forty against an Aboriginal voice to Parliament.
Speaker 3: And although that was a referendum on a specific constitutional proposal,
Speaker 3: people really took it really as a referendum on woke
Speaker 3: and it's had a big effect and people are being
Speaker 3: more confident to speak out about things that they might
Speaker 3: have thought, well, get them into trouble eighteen months ago.
Speaker 3: So it has been a change in the climate. And
Speaker 3: again with the Albanesi government in trouble and the Pospulity
Speaker 3: Coalition government think things are changing.
Speaker 2: Can you think of one CEO of a of a
Speaker 2: decent sized company who has taken a stand against it
Speaker 2: from the beginning.
Speaker 3: In Australia, Yeah, I'm racking my bones now. Well, I
Speaker 3: suppose somebody like Gina Reinhardt, who's the well the the
Speaker 3: owner of Hancock Search as the big mining and pastoral company.
Speaker 3: She's Australia's richest woman. She's been strongly against it from
Speaker 3: the start. But because she's she's not not a listed company.
Speaker 3: You know, I think when you have a listed company,
Speaker 3: the dynamics are different, and you know, you start having
Speaker 3: to buy by all sorts of rules from the stock
Speaker 3: market about how you should run your company and how
Speaker 3: you should report. So it'd be very few, if any publicly.
Speaker 3: I mean, I know some privately voiced concerns about it,
Speaker 3: but yeah, I think it'll come though later, because you
Speaker 3: see the backlash every time they take a woke star stance.
Speaker 3: It was a massive backlash against WARS last year when
Speaker 3: they decided they weren't going to sell any Australia Day merchandise.
Speaker 3: It was a serious drop in sales for them for
Speaker 3: a short while there and they had to basically come
Speaker 3: very contritely and say, look, we regret that decision. So
Speaker 3: there is a backlash now, and you do see it
Speaker 3: when they try too hard in the DII area.
Speaker 2: So two things. Then, going back to the only person
Speaker 2: I can think of and I did interview him a
Speaker 2: couple of years ago. It was Jerry Harvey. Oh yes,
Speaker 2: and basically Jerry said screw you, yes, as far as
Speaker 2: that was concerned. But there is a guy who is
Speaker 2: very wealthy, very successful, a mind of his own and
Speaker 2: doesn't rely on the support of anybody that matters for
Speaker 2: his company to keep being successful. So he's got the
Speaker 2: he's got the courage from from a couple of areas,
Speaker 2: but I would suggest it comes from deep down inside
Speaker 2: him where he has been successful and all sorts of
Speaker 2: things over the years. He's just yeah, and he's just
Speaker 2: confident exactly.
Speaker 3: And their chain of stores, having normand chain is very
Speaker 3: big in regional Australia. That's a big part of their
Speaker 3: market and it would resonate, you know, that sort of
Speaker 3: down to earth, no nonsense attitude resonates there. So I
Speaker 3: think it's what's good for Jerry's sense of the sense
Speaker 3: of sanity is also good for his business.
Speaker 2: Like that of sense of sanity, and of course some
Speaker 2: having Ormonds is big here too. So is there anything
Speaker 2: else that you would put on the list? Well, there
Speaker 2: must be of matters confronting Australia that are causing grief.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that, and this lies behind the DEI
Speaker 3: woke nonsense, is really a lack of conscious pride in
Speaker 3: the country anymore, an understanding of who we are and
Speaker 3: what we are. And this is manifesting itself in the
Speaker 3: dreadful Jewish hatred which has erupted and been allowed to flourish.
Speaker 3: And the government has been very weak on that and
Speaker 3: that's not helped at all. You know, we've had only
Speaker 3: last week a serious attack on a Jewish residential area
Speaker 3: in western Sydney, Eastern Sydney, sorry area you would know
Speaker 3: very well, and cars were graffited with obscene graffiti about Israel.
Speaker 3: One we set a light damage was committed to buildings
Speaker 3: and the most alban easy, the alban easy the Prime
Speaker 3: Minister could do, was to come out and say this
Speaker 3: is disturbing, like if you couldn't think of a more limp,
Speaker 3: weak adjective to describe a dreadful hate crime like that
Speaker 3: which had struck fear into the Jewish community who feel
Speaker 3: under threat. And so I think that that breakdown, what
Speaker 3: we're seeing with the anti seminism is just part of
Speaker 3: a broader breakdown of the social fabric. A lot of
Speaker 3: confidence and pride in who we are as a nation.
Speaker 3: That's very I find that very troubling and in the
Speaker 3: long term I think that's very bad for the country.
Speaker 2: Alban Easy is arguably one of your biggest problems, if
Speaker 2: not the biggest. There's been plenty of criticism, but across
Speaker 2: this side of the Tasman, of course, Luxen has been
Speaker 2: on the receiving end of some pretty vicious commentary of late.
Speaker 2: The question is the question is going to be extend
Speaker 2: that last comment of it because we have been going
Speaker 2: through just in the last few days, ever since the
Speaker 2: so called harker in Parliament, we have been going through
Speaker 2: some pretty critical times with regard to discussion and there
Speaker 2: are things that there are things that need to be
Speaker 2: said that are not really being said well enough at
Speaker 2: least to deal with the issues that are at hand.
Speaker 2: And you've got yours, We've got ours, but they are
Speaker 2: all race based. Now you can't claim, of course, that
Speaker 2: there is anything to do with immigration as far as
Speaker 2: the Mary contingent are concerned. But when it comes to
Speaker 2: the anti Semitism, there has been a substantial amount of
Speaker 2: that here. It is a case of in its time
Speaker 2: it was confronted a case of allowing the wrong people
Speaker 2: into the country. The last time that I recall that
Speaker 2: you had something like that in the eastern suburbs of
Speaker 2: Sydney was back in the let me think sixties and seventies,
Speaker 2: when Yugoslavia broke up and the immigrants that came into
Speaker 2: the country brought their problems with them, and there were
Speaker 2: buildings set on fire, there were bashings, and I think
Speaker 2: they might have even met a death or two.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and I think but much of that I
Speaker 3: think was violence and tension between ethnic groups estentially, particularly
Speaker 3: the Serbs and the Croats in that case. So now
Speaker 3: it's quite different. What you're seeing is people bringing their
Speaker 3: troubles from around the world, bringing their dated, historical grievances
Speaker 3: to this country and wanting to fight them out here.
Speaker 3: And I say, well, you don't do that, and we
Speaker 3: should have be very clear. If we just have much
Speaker 3: more clarity from our Prime Minister and other leaders, that's sorry.
Speaker 3: That part of the deal about becoming an Australian citizen,
Speaker 3: about coming to live from Australia, as you leave those
Speaker 3: things at home. We don't do historical grievances here. We
Speaker 3: just treat everybody as an equal. If you become a citizen,
Speaker 3: you have the same rights as every other citizen, whether
Speaker 3: you've been here five minutes or five thousand years in
Speaker 3: the case of originals, the longer. There's no difference, and
Speaker 3: we cannot be reltigating historical grievances here in Australia.
Speaker 2: All right, So I've got to bug out. I've got
Speaker 2: a challenge for you. Then you can say that you
Speaker 2: can even apply it to immigration and testing and what
Speaker 2: have you. But people will say whatever they want to say,
Speaker 2: whatever they think should be said to get them where
Speaker 2: they want to go. Let them settle down a little bit,
Speaker 2: and before too long there's enough of them to create
Speaker 2: the issues that we're now witnessing on your side in
Speaker 2: this case more but here as well. So what do
Speaker 2: you do with it?
Speaker 3: Well, you do it by reinforcing what a normal patterner
Speaker 3: behavior is here, by having people in authority make it
Speaker 3: very clear, unambiguously, which what sort of behavior is unacceptable
Speaker 3: in this country, and having a police force and adjustive
Speaker 3: system that when things get out of hand, is prepared
Speaker 3: to come down hard. That's not been the case in
Speaker 3: this country with the anti semitism we've seen. It's not
Speaker 3: been the case with the Palestinian demonstrations which have taken
Speaker 3: the streets, and particularly in Melbourne where they've been enormously disruptive.
Speaker 3: They managed to disrupt the opening of a Christmas display
Speaker 3: at Myers. You know, kids that come along to see
Speaker 3: you know, Santa and on display in the windows of Myers,
Speaker 3: and the Palestinians that come to protest and shut that
Speaker 3: down for some ridiculous reason. That's fine, but at that
Speaker 3: point the police need to step in and say you're
Speaker 3: not authorized to do this. You're not authorized to intimidate people.
Speaker 3: If you want to demonstrate, you have to seek permission
Speaker 3: and approval. You can't just do it any place, anytime.
Speaker 3: But they're not doing that. There's a two tier police
Speaker 3: system going on here. They take a very very softly
Speaker 3: softly approach when it comes to anybody from an ethnic background.
Speaker 3: I gues the police just don't want to get into trouble,
Speaker 3: but they're not prepared to enforce the law as it stands,
Speaker 3: let alone. You know, the kind of hate laws we've
Speaker 3: got do not get enforced. So you can have Palestinians
Speaker 3: as you did here on November night last year, two
Speaker 3: days after the attacks in Israel protesting on their steps
Speaker 3: of the Opera house, saying gas the Jews, or if
Speaker 3: you listen to the police, they say no, they're actually saying,
Speaker 3: where's the Jews. I don't know that there's much difference
Speaker 3: between those two chants as to which is most going
Speaker 3: to intimidate the Jewish community in this country, indeed, anybody
Speaker 3: who thinks that it should be a haven for people
Speaker 3: who just get along, regardless to their backgrounds. But there
Speaker 3: was not enforced. I don't know. I certainly saw no
Speaker 3: arrests as a result of that. There might have been
Speaker 3: a few, but there weren't a parent and then and
Speaker 3: then most recently, well last week, you know, you had this,
Speaker 3: as I say this, terrible anti Semitic violence in the
Speaker 3: eastern suburbs and no police press conference. We didn't see
Speaker 3: the police commissioner get up and say, look, I'm going
Speaker 3: to come down on a ton of bricks and we're
Speaker 3: going to get to the bottom of this, and we're
Speaker 3: going to set up strike force whatever or whatever, none
Speaker 3: of that, which was remarkable contrast to what had happened
Speaker 3: only two or three days before, when the police held
Speaker 3: a number of pressure conferences in one day to champion,
Speaker 3: the fact that they arrested Alan Jones, the radio host,
Speaker 3: on what are relatively low order charges if they're proven.
Speaker 3: But of course he was a great name. They wanted
Speaker 3: to get him on these so called sexual abuse allegations.
Speaker 3: An eighty three year old man. They make a big
Speaker 3: fuss about that, but not about anti Semitic violence. It's
Speaker 3: just a feeling that the police force are not focused
Speaker 3: on their role in life, which has enforced the law.
Speaker 3: They're being sidetracked with other agendas.
Speaker 2: Well, we can match that we've had a very weak
Speaker 2: please force for a lengthy period of time. It starts
Speaker 2: at the top under a labor government. It was very
Speaker 2: poorly led. And we've only just recently, in the last
Speaker 2: week or so, we've only appointed a new police commissioner.
Speaker 2: And we'll see how things go new police commissioner under
Speaker 2: a new government and maybe, just maybe they'll do the
Speaker 2: job that they are supposed to do. And let me
Speaker 2: just add actually, because I think it was only yesterday,
Speaker 2: as we record, a few days before before this is released,
Speaker 2: that the police announced the commissioner announced. Let me back
Speaker 2: up here a minute. Police headquarters was in the middle
Speaker 2: of the city up until fairly recently when it moved
Speaker 2: to I don't know whether you know Pons and me,
Speaker 2: but it's just on the fringe of the CBD on
Speaker 2: the outside, really okay, And that meant that there wasn't
Speaker 2: a central city police presence. Now, they used to have
Speaker 2: a small police station done on the waterfront. They closed
Speaker 2: that down and ever since then, for a variety of reasons,
Speaker 2: we have had nothing but trouble in the city with violence, killings, robberies,
Speaker 2: et cetera. Now that go back to what I started with.
Speaker 2: They announced a new police station for the inner city.
Speaker 2: That in itself is an indication that somebody with some
Speaker 2: intelligence is now in control.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, but you've got to have a police presence.
Speaker 3: It's kind of pleasing, one oh one, isn't it. It's unlure.
Speaker 2: Just to give you an idea, a friend of mine
Speaker 2: who lives on the thirty second floor of an apartment
Speaker 2: in the city watched when try to think how long ago,
Speaker 2: but let's say at least a year ago. Last year anyway,
Speaker 2: there was a there was an assault, a murdering, a
Speaker 2: murderous assault on a building site and he just watched
Speaker 2: it from his window. Now I'm what I'm keen to
Speaker 2: do is to try and convey to New Zealanders who
Speaker 2: are leaving in their droves and will probably continue to
Speaker 2: do so to move to Australia as to whether or
Speaker 2: not they're making the right choice. Now, I could ask
Speaker 2: you straight out, is it the right thing? Is it
Speaker 2: a good thing to do? Is Australia still the place
Speaker 2: of hope promised land for others? Or would you suggest otherwise?
Speaker 3: It's relative, isn't it? But I think it definitely is
Speaker 3: a place of hope. It's a place that compared to
Speaker 3: other Western countries, I think puts a check on a
Speaker 3: lot of the extreme kind of progressive moves better than
Speaker 3: others in most countries. In most cases we've got a
Speaker 3: much stronger media, of course, and a more balanced media
Speaker 3: in the sense that we have in newspapers and television stations,
Speaker 3: at radio stations from right across the political spectrum. Really,
Speaker 3: so we are in that sense, I think strong, and
Speaker 3: we have you. The fundamentals are great. The economy is
Speaker 3: still going well. House prices of course are ridiculous and
Speaker 3: it's very hard to buy a home, and part of
Speaker 3: that is immigration, which we could come and talk about that.
Speaker 3: There's been far too many migrants been admitted to Australia
Speaker 3: in the last three years, and surprise surprise, has put
Speaker 3: a pressure on housing prices. One of the factor is
Speaker 3: driving on housing prices. So there lots of issues here,
Speaker 3: but I'd say that there's still opportunities. And if you
Speaker 3: go to regional and rural Australia, which is where I
Speaker 3: love spending more of my time than ever these days,
Speaker 3: then you do find people buying larger, normal, sensible, pragmatic,
Speaker 3: hard working people and they haven't got much time for
Speaker 3: the elites that are trying to run our lives.
Speaker 2: Where's your preference.
Speaker 3: In terms of the country Australia. I love the northern
Speaker 3: rivers of New South Wales, but I'm happy to travel anywhere,
Speaker 3: particularly it's warm. But yeah, I just find you don't
Speaker 3: have to get far out of the place and suddenly
Speaker 3: it's a different atmosphere. You know, it's a people. You
Speaker 3: know when you I was in Broken Hill, for instance,
Speaker 3: working on a story on energy when on the day
Speaker 3: of the US elections, and because we were all listening
Speaker 3: to it, and I went out in the evening and
Speaker 3: chatted to people in the pub, and you knew instinctively
Speaker 3: that they would be very comfortable with the Donald Trump victory.
Speaker 3: As in teed they were. You didn't have to tread
Speaker 3: on eggshells and say which side were you supporting. You
Speaker 3: just know that they'll take that view because you know,
Speaker 3: they're very much like Trump's people in the States. They're
Speaker 3: no nonsense, working people who want to make a living
Speaker 3: and want to make the world better for their their families,
Speaker 3: you know. So that's the sort of people who tend
Speaker 3: to go for Donald Trump. I think common sense, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: definitely common sense and the elite, which I'm increasingly just
Speaker 3: calling them the elite because that's what they are, and
Speaker 3: Trump calls them the elites in the States. A really small,
Speaker 3: sort of select group of people when you boil it down.
Speaker 3: But they're just they're very good at talking, aren't they.
Speaker 3: They're very good at fancy words and making arguments and
Speaker 3: building narratives, and they can drag you with them, or
Speaker 3: they drag some of the population along with their nonsense
Speaker 3: if you're not careful. But they're not the majority, and
Speaker 3: in the end, they talk nonsense and often, you know,
Speaker 3: because they're up there in the clouds, they're talking theory
Speaker 3: the whole time. On things like energy policy rather than
Speaker 3: the practical aspects of it, the engineering and aspects of
Speaker 3: energy policy. Know, they're talking in high fluting theoretical.
Speaker 2: Terms, and this is a good place to introduce something else. Momentarily,
Speaker 2: question which would be in and don't think about it
Speaker 2: too much, just shoot an answer. Which would be the
Speaker 2: most dangerous city in Australia, Which would be the least I.
Speaker 3: Think the most dangerous, well, if you're talking about crime,
Speaker 3: would be Alice Springs without a doubt. And then allied
Speaker 3: to that, there are a lot of towns and cities
Speaker 3: on the fringes of central Australia where there are large
Speaker 3: Aboriginal populations have equal problems, particularly youth crime. And then
Speaker 3: after that I'd say, off the Melbourne major cities Melbourne
Speaker 3: without a doubt or Brisbane actually is a very high
Speaker 3: rated crime in Queensland.
Speaker 2: All right, you're ready for a surprise, Yeah, go on.
Speaker 2: I pulled this detail off last night intentionally because no, no,
Speaker 2: not at all, just for my own interests sake, And
Speaker 2: then when I saw it, I thought, no, I'm going
Speaker 2: to include this, So I'm going to work from ten
Speaker 2: back to one. Yeah, the least, well, the least most
Speaker 2: dangerous of the ten coffs Harbor second, Darwin third, yes, third,
Speaker 2: Alice Springs. I wrote down, I wrote down some of
Speaker 2: the some of the reasons, some of the reasons that
Speaker 2: were given domestic violence in Alice Springs, substance abuse, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Next surprised me. Number seven Hobart. Then then came Sydney
Speaker 2: at six, Brisbane at five, Perth at fourth place. In
Speaker 2: fourth place third is Melbourne. Adelaide is second. Adelaide is
Speaker 2: the second most dangerous city in Australia according to this survey.
Speaker 2: And first of all, you never guess it, so I'll
Speaker 2: tell you the Central Coast. Now I wouldn't call the
Speaker 2: Central Coast a city, but they've included it as such,
Speaker 2: gang violence and drugs being the most the most prominent.
Speaker 2: But the Central Coast, which is between basically between the
Speaker 2: northern Sydney, just to make it simple, up up to
Speaker 2: Gosford and a bit beyond.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, yes, actually the Central Coast doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 3: But it's got a lot of a little welfare pockets.
Speaker 3: There were a very high number of people on welfare
Speaker 3: and people are doing it tough.
Speaker 2: But yeah, So moving on, education has been a problem
Speaker 2: in both our countries. Education in Australia I think has
Speaker 2: maybe had the biggest problem because you've got states playing parts.
Speaker 2: What has happened COVID disrupted of course a great deal,
Speaker 2: but what's happened to education overall? Do you think since
Speaker 2: we got released from jail?
Speaker 3: Well, as you say this big hangover from COVID, there
Speaker 3: are all sorts of problems with mental illness to put
Speaker 3: a broad brush answer on that, and children lowest, low
Speaker 3: school attendance rate, like a lot of kids are having
Speaker 3: trouble getting back to school, so that's a problem. But
Speaker 3: we continue to see every year, every year when we
Speaker 3: get the latest scores and that plan scores and the
Speaker 3: piece of scores, you see a further decline in standards
Speaker 3: relatives to other countries. We continue to go backwards because
Speaker 3: I think New Zealand does actually and this is despite
Speaker 3: the fact that we've had massive increase in investment investment
Speaker 3: per child in schools at both private and public schools,
Speaker 3: and that's been going on really for at least fifteen
Speaker 3: or twenty years. You know, we've been a reduction in
Speaker 3: the school in the pupil to teacher ratio, so more
Speaker 3: teachers for fewer pupils, and in a great investment in
Speaker 3: school buildings right up and down the country, some of
Speaker 3: that funded by the federal government, but none of that
Speaker 3: is actually rood outcomes. So we've got to ask what's
Speaker 3: going wrong or what are we doing wrong? How do
Speaker 3: we fix that? And there's a massive continues to be
Speaker 3: hemorrhaging away from the public schools towards private schools.
Speaker 2: What would your what would your first answer be to
Speaker 2: a question of what would you do to overcome the
Speaker 2: issue that you've just arrived at.
Speaker 3: I think you're going to address teacher training, really, because
Speaker 3: they're spending in our four years I think to get
Speaker 3: it qualified as a teacher used to be only one year,
Speaker 3: and now they've made it four years. And the teachers,
Speaker 3: I think, are getting diverted with a lot of things
Speaker 3: that are not really core curriculum. You know, they're not
Speaker 3: they're not They don't come in every morning thinking what
Speaker 3: are the first three most important things I've got to
Speaker 3: do today? Obviously reading, writing, and arithmetic. They don't seem
Speaker 3: to have that clarity. So I mean teachers, my experience,
Speaker 3: most teachers are very good, very conscientious people, but they're
Speaker 3: being diverted and also by imustration as well. But we
Speaker 3: have to get them back to square one. And there's
Speaker 3: a very interesting initiute which I came across going on
Speaker 3: in one Christian based school in Newcastle where they've actually
Speaker 3: decided they're going to train their own teachers rather than
Speaker 3: see them go to university and get them back after
Speaker 3: four years, they're going to train them on the job
Speaker 3: at the school and they'll get an academic component to
Speaker 3: that provided by another college. But basically it turns it
Speaker 3: from a university academic degree into an apprenticeship, you know,
Speaker 3: like learning on the job, and that's really I think
Speaker 3: what teaching used to be. So I think taking this
Speaker 3: out of the universities and making the education for teachers
Speaker 3: more practical and focused on the basics would help. Plus
Speaker 3: changes to the curriculum are the big things. I think.
Speaker 2: What religion is the school.
Speaker 3: It's a Christian school that's I'm not really certain it's
Speaker 3: on I visited a place I'm trying to think of
Speaker 3: them that name of it, but it was very very
Speaker 3: well run and very good non denominational Christian school. It's
Speaker 3: very popular. They have a big waiting list to get
Speaker 3: into it. And it's always the sign of a good
Speaker 3: stool and waiting lists, not just from Christian families, but
Speaker 3: from others who've just heard it does a good education.
Speaker 2: I went to a religious school for a couple of
Speaker 2: years that I'm thinking I'm in high school. The teachers
Speaker 2: were trained at school. It was a combination, you know,
Speaker 2: it was an apprenticeship situation and they'd learnt And we
Speaker 2: covered this off in a previous podcast over this particular issue.
Speaker 2: They learnt on the job like an apprenticeship and with
Speaker 2: an overseeing authority that was not always there but was
Speaker 2: keeping an eye on things, and I think it turned
Speaker 2: out some well, as far as I can tell some
Speaker 2: pretty good teachers.
Speaker 3: One thing it does later is it gives them immersion
Speaker 3: in the classroom very early on in their training. So
Speaker 3: they will learn pretty quickly whether that's for them or not.
Speaker 3: You know, they will know that they've got a chance
Speaker 3: to get out of it if teaching is not quite
Speaker 3: what their cup of tea, instead of doing four years
Speaker 3: in training and then finding out. So I think that's
Speaker 3: one very good practical aspect of teaching teachers that way.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you something of interest. At that school, there
Speaker 2: was the son of a person in the media, the
Speaker 2: man trying to think of his name. He was the
Speaker 2: manager of TWGB and Sydney when it was in Phillip Street,
Speaker 2: So this is back in the sixties and he was
Speaker 2: sent there because his father knew the school's reputation. Now
Speaker 2: other matter that's causing a lot of trouble here and
Speaker 2: at both ends of the enterprise is healthcare and hospitals,
Speaker 2: or hospitals and health We have a great shortage of
Speaker 2: nurses and doctors. We were told a couple of days
Speaker 2: ago that we were getting I think fifty new doctors
Speaker 2: coming to the country. I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 2: the circumstances at this point, but we have had a
Speaker 2: short shortage and they are still leaving the country, and
Speaker 2: most of them would be going to Australia, but not all.
Speaker 3: Well, this is a problem the world over, actually late,
Speaker 3: and it's rute. The underlying problem is we don't have
Speaker 3: enough people anymore. You know that the population population growth
Speaker 3: is declining almost everywhere in the world. It's below replacement
Speaker 3: rate in almost every country in Asia, for instance, as
Speaker 3: it has been for some time in New Zealand and Australia.
Speaker 3: So you know, it just is not such a large
Speaker 3: supply of skilled migrants, or even unskilled migrants for that matter.
Speaker 3: So we're going to find it harder and harder to
Speaker 3: sort of make up for our own lack of training
Speaker 3: enough doctors and teacher and nurses by just importing them.
Speaker 3: That's going to be harder. If I remember to focus hard,
Speaker 3: if I.
Speaker 2: Remember correctly, you did a piece on that. Didn't you procreate.
Speaker 3: Or or perish? Yes, I mean, yes, it is. It
Speaker 3: is a massive change that nobody's talking about, and it's
Speaker 3: been going on for probably sixty or seventy years. You
Speaker 3: remember that that famous book, The Population Bomb in early seventies. Yeah,
Speaker 3: well it was very at the time, it was the
Speaker 3: best seller. He was concerned about how the population was
Speaker 3: going to explode and we were all going to start
Speaker 3: because it'd be too many people. Well, actually the opposite
Speaker 3: is happening. It's taken a while for that to filter
Speaker 3: through into overall population numbers because we're getting older, you know,
Speaker 3: thanks to medical science, we're living longer. But now populations
Speaker 3: in places like Japan have started to decline, have been
Speaker 3: declining for some time, in say Hungry and in Korea,
Speaker 3: which has one of the lowest birth rates in the world,
Speaker 3: and India surprisingly is below replacement rates. So all these
Speaker 3: places we thought were going to provide keep producing human
Speaker 3: beings and training them up to provide our doctors and
Speaker 3: so forth, und well, it's not going to happen. So
Speaker 3: we have to at some point to come to terms
Speaker 3: with that.
Speaker 2: Seeing that you've done the work on it. When you
Speaker 2: mentioned India not replacing the population, is that a bad thing?
Speaker 2: When you consider the number of people who live in India.
Speaker 3: It's probably not a bad thing. But you have to
Speaker 3: be able to adjust to it eventually, you see, because
Speaker 3: we still need productive people in the workforce, making things
Speaker 3: and earning money, especially as people get older and you've
Speaker 3: got a larger number of people or the higher dependency
Speaker 3: rates they can you know, the number of people out
Speaker 3: of the workforce because they've grown too old compared to
Speaker 3: the ones that are in it paying the taxes. So
Speaker 3: that if it happens too rapidly and we're not prepared,
Speaker 3: we haven't improved productivity, for instance, and learned how to
Speaker 3: make things better and smarter with fewer people, then it
Speaker 3: is going to be a problem. It'll come through in
Speaker 3: all sorts of ways, and what I understands happening in
Speaker 3: injury is they've still got a slightly higher birth rate
Speaker 3: in the south of India, so there's a big migration
Speaker 3: from the south to the north, which is where most
Speaker 3: of the industrial production is carried out.
Speaker 2: Speaking of productivity, we've had a problem with productivity for
Speaker 2: as long as I can remember on this side of
Speaker 2: the tasma is AI possibly the answer.
Speaker 3: I'll reserve my judgment on that.
Speaker 2: That's a very diplomatic answer.
Speaker 3: I just have to put my hand on the out
Speaker 3: and say I just don't know, and I can't even
Speaker 3: I can't even bluffin unswer on this one. It's too
Speaker 3: to say. It is fascinating, it's exciting in some ways,
Speaker 3: quite scary in others. But I think we're all just
Speaker 3: learning to work out what it can do. I don't
Speaker 3: think anybody really knows what its overall effect is going
Speaker 3: to be on productivity. Will it replace journalists? For example?
Speaker 3: I tend to think not, because sure I can get
Speaker 3: Ai to write an opinion piece for me. I could say,
Speaker 3: write an opinion piece from a conservative perspective on this topic,
Speaker 3: and it will spew something out, which is you've probably
Speaker 3: got fewer spelling mistakes in the device rushing it off.
Speaker 3: But it's just not something slightly not there's no humanity
Speaker 3: in it, there's nothing to surprise you, there's nothing quirky,
Speaker 3: you know, it's I don't know that I'll ever overcome that.
Speaker 3: And my example of this is the drum machine. If
Speaker 3: you remember in them, when would it be in the
Speaker 3: in the eighties when electro drummer machine started to replace
Speaker 3: real drummers and you listen to those songs and you think, no,
Speaker 3: you know, when there's an electric drummer, sine when there's
Speaker 3: a real drummer. Even now you can tell a difference.
Speaker 3: It's got no life in it. So I don't know,
Speaker 3: that's not that's not a very comprehensive look at the
Speaker 3: whole thing of AI, but it is a way to
Speaker 3: see I think as far as we.
Speaker 2: Know well, I asked somebody once whether AI could be hijacked,
Speaker 2: because it would be very hard to tell. But if
Speaker 2: it was, what could it be? What could it be
Speaker 2: trained to do? What attitudes could it be trained to
Speaker 2: introduce without anybody really knowing? And the answer was along
Speaker 2: the lines have not never happened. And I think that
Speaker 2: was a very bad answer, because if you're going to
Speaker 2: talk about AI, it's a major it's a major breakthrough
Speaker 2: simpy in itself. Its usage can be abused like so
Speaker 2: many other aspects of development of life without question for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's right now. So well, the jury's out,
Speaker 3: I guess latent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, do you want to sit on the jury?
Speaker 2: That's the question now. You mentioned at the beginning that
Speaker 2: you were going up to see a nuclear a nuclear development.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a nuclear power plant up in Ontario, a place
Speaker 3: called Darlington, which is very interesting from an Australian point
Speaker 3: of view as a kind of technology we should be
Speaker 3: looking at. But it will be the third nuclear plant
Speaker 3: I visited this year. Actually, because the whole debate is hot,
Speaker 3: hot it up in Australia. You now have the opposition,
Speaker 3: the Coalition, going to the next election with a policy
Speaker 3: to lift the moratorium on nuclear powers. You know, we
Speaker 3: can't have nuclear power in Australia, it's illegal and the
Speaker 3: bata's really rolled on very quickly on this. Most people,
Speaker 3: I think, if they're not in favor of nuclear power,
Speaker 3: they're certainly in favor of considering it as part of
Speaker 3: our mix because they know how much trouble we're in
Speaker 3: with energy, and younger people in particular don't have the
Speaker 3: same hang ups over nuclear for instance. They're not obsessed
Speaker 3: with Three Mile Island and churnobil in the way that
Speaker 3: the baby boomers are. So yeah, it's a live debate
Speaker 3: in Australia and I've become, i suppose, quite an advocate
Speaker 3: for nuclear power. I'm now quite convinced that it is
Speaker 3: what we need to do in Australia and probably in
Speaker 3: New Zealand. Actually, to be honest, I think there's less
Speaker 3: pressing need for it there for a number of reasons.
Speaker 3: One is that you've got a lot of water and
Speaker 3: a lot of hydroelectricity.
Speaker 2: Well actually, actually you'd be surprised. A few months ago
Speaker 2: we were very close to having blackouts instituted on us
Speaker 2: and if it had got there is one private electrical
Speaker 2: engineer who has had a lot of exper in this country.
Speaker 2: Everyone knows who I'm talking about because he's been a
Speaker 2: guest on the podcast on a number of occasions. He
Speaker 2: has experienced from all over the world and he is
Speaker 2: pretty much a leader in the field, and he thinks
Speaker 2: that New Zealand's electricity supply is in very very grave
Speaker 2: danger and there's some well it's being kept alive at
Speaker 2: the moment my importing coal from Indonesia.
Speaker 3: Dammit, well, there you go. There's a problem for you.
Speaker 3: But I think, yeah, the thing about it is we
Speaker 3: also need to bear in mind that our demand for
Speaker 3: electricity is increasing and will continue to increase. We've already
Speaker 3: mentioned reason part of the reason why that is, and
Speaker 3: that's AI and computer storage, which has become massive pusher
Speaker 3: of growth for energy demand across the world because that
Speaker 3: demands such large amounts of electricity to store data and
Speaker 3: to process AI, exponentially higher than normal computing. There's a
Speaker 3: new data center actually just a few kilometers up the
Speaker 3: road from me and Sydney drive past, and it is
Speaker 3: the scale of it is massive, and right down the
Speaker 3: side of it there is big it's probably about a
Speaker 3: seven story high building you're can imagine, which is just
Speaker 3: full of computer storage with these great air conditioning pipes
Speaker 3: running on the outside because they need to be kept
Speaker 3: cool the whole time. And they have diesel generators installed
Speaker 3: as part of the thing, so that the normal electricity
Speaker 3: supply goes down, they'll kicking diesel generators. So yeah, New
Speaker 3: Zealand needs to be prepared for that because without data
Speaker 3: storage and AI facilities close to the user, you can't
Speaker 3: rely on this from overseas, you're going to be in trouble.
Speaker 3: So that's one good reason why you probably should be
Speaker 3: looking at a new solid source of power like nuclear
Speaker 3: and with the new small modulary actors which I'll be
Speaker 3: looking at in Canada, they may be a good solution
Speaker 3: for parts of New Zealand away from the big cities.
Speaker 2: Yes, I would think so, and I think more and
Speaker 2: more people are realizing how desirable it's going to be. Now,
Speaker 2: maybe we should end up with something that's near and
Speaker 2: dear to both of us, and that's the media. Let
Speaker 2: me give you a very quick brief on here on
Speaker 2: the situation here. New Zealand's media is in trouble. There
Speaker 2: have been a lot of job losses and they continue,
Speaker 2: and there are mergings and there are foldings, and it's
Speaker 2: not a good thing overall. But I've declared in different
Speaker 2: circumstances that I have little sympathy for some of them
Speaker 2: who are losing their jobs because of the stand that
Speaker 2: they've taken over a lengthy period of time now, and
Speaker 2: that is a stand of lockdown on subject matter. And
Speaker 2: if you deprive, if you deprive a very large section
Speaker 2: of the community from having their being able to read
Speaker 2: matters that concern them, that they're interested in your newspaper
Speaker 2: or on your television screen or wherever it might be,
Speaker 2: then it serves you right because this has a this
Speaker 2: has become a campaign against climate change, against COVID matters,
Speaker 2: et cetera. And you have the same in Australia, but
Speaker 2: you don't have the same restrictions.
Speaker 3: No, well, no, generally that'll be true. But it is
Speaker 3: about we have a very competitive, beautifully competitive media system,
Speaker 3: now more competitive than ever. I mean the barriers rentry
Speaker 3: are much lower, but the amount of competition is much higher.
Speaker 3: So you have to change your model. And that that's
Speaker 3: been happening in Australia. It meant some most media companies
Speaker 3: have had to slim down, become more efficient, be what
Speaker 3: they're doing, look at what they're doing, work out how
Speaker 3: they can do it better. So in that sense, that's
Speaker 3: been happening probably for twenty years, but increasingly in the
Speaker 3: last ten years. And what you've seen is that companies
Speaker 3: that do adapt are surviving and will thrive, and those
Speaker 3: who just stick by the old model, won they'll go
Speaker 3: out in the back door. So it's capitalism really, it's
Speaker 3: raw capitalism in the end, the fundamental thing you put
Speaker 3: your finger on it. Unless you provide people with something
Speaker 3: they can't get elsewhere that's really precious to them and valuable,
Speaker 3: they're not going to put their credit card across across
Speaker 3: online and pay for the content because they'll just suck
Speaker 3: up yours and other free content along the same lines
Speaker 3: quite easily. It's very easy to pick up commentary from
Speaker 3: the left for nothing but good solid conservative commentary. Well
Speaker 3: we should be we should be asking people to pay
Speaker 3: for that because it's valuable to them, and we are
Speaker 3: increasingly know The Australian now is behind a pay wall.
Speaker 3: It's very hard to yeah, and quite rightly so, I
Speaker 3: mean I write for the Australian and they do send
Speaker 3: me a small rebiddance every every month, so that's that's
Speaker 3: important you. I mean, if you're a chocolate factory saying
Speaker 3: you decided, oh, we don't want to put our chocolate
Speaker 3: behind a paywall, you'd be nuts, right. So it's the
Speaker 3: same with news, but the quality of that news has
Speaker 3: to be good and reliable and trustworthy. Otherwise you won't
Speaker 3: be able to build a business out of it. But
Speaker 3: there is there is a way out in the other side.
Speaker 3: I think New Zealand's abiding problem is the size and
Speaker 3: the size of the market. It's it's very difficult to
Speaker 3: make something work on that scale.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think there are more people who would
Speaker 2: agree with you now than I would have in the
Speaker 2: in the past. But there's a sector of the of
Speaker 2: the media that I want to raise with you, and
Speaker 2: that is journalism in the essay form. And you write
Speaker 2: for You've been flitting about quite a bit lately. Actually,
Speaker 2: you've expanded your environment. You write for The Australian. You
Speaker 2: are writing now for Quadrant magazine, which has undergone management
Speaker 2: change and an overhaul. I don't know that I've seen
Speaker 2: your name too many times in Spectator though.
Speaker 3: No, I haven't writen for Spectator for a while. It's
Speaker 3: just time, really, I'd love to. It's a great publication,
Speaker 3: but Quadrant. I should, at a matter of disclosure, say
Speaker 3: that the editor of the new editor of Quadrant is
Speaker 3: my wife, Rebecca Weiser, So my opinion of Quadrants altered
Speaker 3: by that. But it is a very it's been going
Speaker 3: since nineteen fifty six. It's a very very solid publication
Speaker 3: that's always been firmly aligned on the size of side
Speaker 3: of free. It started out the Cold War, you know,
Speaker 3: fighting the communist nonsense, and now it's fighting the woke nonsense.
Speaker 3: So but it drives debate a lot and helps influence
Speaker 3: the debate, and I'm very committed to Quadrant to see
Speaker 3: it expand and grow to a new audience. And I'm
Speaker 3: very happy to write for it because to write those
Speaker 3: longer form pieces, you know, it allows you to do
Speaker 3: more in an article than you will just in a
Speaker 3: normal newspaper column. And this is a lot of that
Speaker 3: stuff around as you know, I mean on substack also
Speaker 3: right on Substack, and that's a thriving environment now for
Speaker 3: really good journalism as well as.
Speaker 2: I've watched it expand over here too in the I've
Speaker 2: had two substect writers on the podcast in the last
Speaker 2: six months.
Speaker 3: Well that's I mean, that's the way forward, isn't it.
Speaker 3: For a country like New Zealand. You don't have the
Speaker 3: barriers for entry in that you've got to fire up
Speaker 3: a printing press, but you can reach a reasonably size
Speaker 3: audience on there and you have nobody's sensors here. Really,
Speaker 3: you know, there's nobody your sense of yourself. You're your
Speaker 3: own editor, and the readers decide whether you're you're worth
Speaker 3: reading or not, and whether they're going to pay for
Speaker 3: you or subscribe to you in some other way and
Speaker 3: keep the thing going. So Substacks, you know, Substack and
Speaker 3: other sort of similar platforms, I think a great success.
Speaker 3: And I think, you know, as we've been talking for
Speaker 3: some time, I think there is great scope to have
Speaker 3: one of the Australian digital networks like ADHTV, which I'm
Speaker 3: attached to, really start growing its market in New Zealand too.
Speaker 3: Whenever we run something on New Zealand on eighty h
Speaker 3: you know, now and then I might interview somebody yourself.
Speaker 3: Even we get a huge pick up in audience, and
Speaker 3: most of that from your side of the tasmum because
Speaker 3: there is a hunger there. So there are ways around this.
Speaker 3: I mean, I doubt if you're ever going to have
Speaker 3: a competitive center right newspaper come out daily on the streets,
Speaker 3: but that's not the way people consume news. For instance, yesterday,
Speaker 3: only yesterday, when I arrived in Dallas and I had
Speaker 3: nine hours to kill at the airport. You wouldn't believe
Speaker 3: how hard it was in an airport, a major airport,
Speaker 3: to find a printed newspaper. I did find one eventually.
Speaker 2: Which one was it?
Speaker 3: Well, I got the I got the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 3: in the New York Times and the Dallastribute is at
Speaker 3: the local Dallas paper and they cost me between them,
Speaker 3: they cost me fifteen US puck. That's clearly not the
Speaker 3: way most people consume the media. Now I'm just some
Speaker 3: old fogy who likes to sit down and turn pages.
Speaker 2: Well, I joined you in that. And one of the
Speaker 2: privileges of being in Sydney at any given time is
Speaker 2: to take coffee and a cave or breakfast in a
Speaker 2: cafe where there's usually a bunch of newspapers to read
Speaker 2: for free. There's still four newspapers in Sydney.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, I mean, and the Australian. It finds its
Speaker 3: print edition is very important to its business. I mean
Speaker 3: it's costly, Sure, it's costly, but the market for it
Speaker 3: isn't going away because I think there's something there's just
Speaker 3: something different about the way you consume news from a
Speaker 3: printed newspaper from online. And one of the big things
Speaker 3: is that you come across unexpected things in the printed
Speaker 3: newspaper much more frequently that you come across anything unexpected
Speaker 3: and online where you tend to go down a channel
Speaker 3: and look at this and then a related article maybe
Speaker 3: you turn the page and you'll go, oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I didn't know that, you know. So yeah, I think
Speaker 3: they're going to be around for a fair bit longer.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't like to say how long, but they will.
Speaker 2: Be indeed, and that draws us I think to a close.
Speaker 2: It has been has been a pleasure. Well, having a chat.
Speaker 3: Exactly a joy is ever. And as I'm in the
Speaker 3: United States, I should wish you happy holidays and happy Thanksgiving.
Speaker 3: But more than that, you know, thanks again for all
Speaker 3: you do on your podcast over the years late and
Speaker 3: it's one of the ones that I've always got on
Speaker 3: my regular search when I go to listen to something
Speaker 3: at the weekend. So keep it up.
Speaker 2: It's going to run a bit longer. So there is
Speaker 2: this one more thing I wanted to clarify though you
Speaker 2: mentioned ADH. Can you just tell everybody what ADH is?
Speaker 3: Yeah, eighty h stands for Australian Digital Holdings and it's
Speaker 3: really a startup television station that began online and through
Speaker 3: and up about three years ago and is just really
Speaker 3: now beginning to take off. We've got some new studios,
Speaker 3: for instance in Sydney which used to belong to Channel
Speaker 3: nine where they used to do their cooking shows. So
Speaker 3: there's actually a whole kitchen at one end of the
Speaker 3: studio which we cover up and a sort of a
Speaker 3: smell of stale food. It's quite an unusual place, but
Speaker 3: it's a probably a quick studio, and it shows the
Speaker 3: fact that the old networks like nine are now struggling
Speaker 3: and then closing down facilities, and people like us are
Speaker 3: snapping them up because our audience is growing and we're
Speaker 3: finding ways to make them work online and we've got
Speaker 3: great plans coming up for twenty twenty five. So eighty
Speaker 3: h Television if somebody wants to check it out. My
Speaker 3: show is called Reality by Ites and it's it's online too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you.
Speaker 2: Can get it. I see that the lead personality is
Speaker 2: still the same, hasn't changed.
Speaker 3: Who's the guy? It may just be our websites out
Speaker 3: of date. Alan Jones was with it, but he had,
Speaker 3: as you know, health issues and he's he hasn't been
Speaker 3: broadcasting for p a year or so, so we've got
Speaker 3: a whole news stable of people Christmas. It does a
Speaker 3: regular show. He's a former radio presenter. Here myself, Daisy
Speaker 3: Cousins and anyway worth checking it out. I think I'd
Speaker 3: be very surprised if you didn't find something worth watching
Speaker 3: on there, even if it's not my show.
Speaker 2: I'm sure I can say comfortably. Actually I can stay comfortably.
Speaker 2: Your show is worth watching, so appreciate it, Thank you,
Speaker 2: and I wish you were merry Christmas and a much
Speaker 2: better twenty twenty five. I don't care how good this
Speaker 2: one was. I want next to you to be better. Yes,
Speaker 2: let's hope, Thanks late and all the very best, missus producer.
Speaker 2: It is one of the better days that we've had
Speaker 2: this season, so you must be feeling fantastically.
Speaker 4: Flesh Laton. I always feel fantastic, but today is the
Speaker 4: icing on top of the cake, isn't it beautiful? Let's
Speaker 4: hope there are many more of these days to come.
Speaker 2: Exactly, why don't I lead this week? Just for a change,
Speaker 2: It's no wonder to send her a durn labeled David
Speaker 2: Seymour an arrogant prick. David Seymour is a conviction politician,
Speaker 2: which makes him a great politician as he relentlessly fights
Speaker 2: for what he believes in. While a Dern believed in
Speaker 2: government controls, Seymour believed in individual freedoms. Personally, I have
Speaker 2: a love hate relationship with David Seymour. I love it
Speaker 2: when he fights for what I believe in, such as
Speaker 2: the Treaty Principles Bill. I hate it when he fights
Speaker 2: against what I believe in, such as his use in
Speaker 2: Asia Bill. He is a great ally to have, but
Speaker 2: he also makes a ruthless opponent. Despite that, I preferred
Speaker 2: David Seymour over Chris luxm because, as a conviction politician,
Speaker 2: Seymour is willing to tackle what really matters and doesn't
Speaker 2: pussy for. Like Luxan, David Seymour joins the ranks of
Speaker 2: what Ramesh the Kerr calls creative disruptors. Creative disruptors are
Speaker 2: people like Trump in the US, Maloney in Italy, Milay
Speaker 2: in Argentina, Polaver in Canada, and Farage in the UK.
Speaker 2: Creative disruptors are the only kind of leaders who can
Speaker 2: successfully wage war on woke. The Treaty Principal's Bill is
Speaker 2: to New Zealand what the First Amendment is to the
Speaker 2: United States. It's all about equal rights and freedoms for
Speaker 2: all citizens, regardless of skin color. In fact, this issue
Speaker 2: is so important to me that I will vote for
Speaker 2: the act Party if they end up being the only
Speaker 2: party willing to die on this hill. Soldier on, David Seymour,
Speaker 2: We're with you on the Treaty Principle's Bill.
Speaker 4: Leyton Tim says, thank you for your interesting and enlightening
Speaker 4: chat with David Seymour with regard to the Treaty Principal's Bill,
Speaker 4: I have to say I haven't been a fan of
Speaker 4: mister Seymour since his stance on the COVID vaccine. But
Speaker 4: not everyone is perfect, and he has redeemed himself lately
Speaker 4: with his backbone under relentless pressure from the activist class,
Speaker 4: gutless politicians, and the activist legacy media. But I repeat
Speaker 4: myself as a National Party activist for nearly forty years
Speaker 4: and now in exile, I'm extremely disappointed in the current
Speaker 4: leadership at both political and organizational levels that are too
Speaker 4: focused on not creating offense and being labor light in
Speaker 4: case they get off side with someone for a so
Speaker 4: called Christian Luxen has weak on issues that middle of
Speaker 4: the road Christians and non Christians alike are concerned about.
Speaker 4: Why Luxon and others are afraid of standing up for
Speaker 4: one standard of citizenship and for standing up to issues
Speaker 4: such as the transgender nonsense is beyond me. It was
Speaker 4: a winner for Trump. Your semi regular retired National MP
Speaker 4: corrrespondent was again on the money with his letter last week.
Speaker 4: I believe National needs to look across the Tasman and
Speaker 4: see how Peter Dutton has been differentiating the Coalition from
Speaker 4: Labor and see what happens when you stand up for something.
Speaker 4: I'm of the opinion that Dutton will be Australian Prime
Speaker 4: Minister in twenty twenty five with the Labor Party being
Speaker 4: a one term government. I could go on, but that
Speaker 4: will be a letter for another day. Please keep up
Speaker 4: your excellent work late and I wish you, missus producer
Speaker 4: and your family all the best for Christmas.
Speaker 2: Ensure your break.
Speaker 3: It's lovely.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Tim, Tim appreciate it very much, and likewise
Speaker 2: to you from Rick. It was very small print. I
Speaker 2: may stumble enjoyed your interview with David Seymour today. Last
Speaker 2: week I sent the below letter to Luxelm. I'm sure
Speaker 2: that you will like it, and I'm happy for you
Speaker 2: to read it out if you wish so, without having
Speaker 2: actually read it. Let's read it out, High Prime Minister. Oh,
Speaker 2: not formal enough. I am appalled you are tolerant of
Speaker 2: a small minority of married activists that are taking over
Speaker 2: our country. They do not represent real Marie Kiwis. What
Speaker 2: happened in Parliament was appalling and should never have been allowed.
Speaker 2: These clowns do not speak for Mary and they certainly
Speaker 2: do not speak for me. Man up. These radicals are
Speaker 2: destroying our beautiful country and you, sir, are allowing it.
Speaker 2: You are being wimpy at best. You are making and
Speaker 2: allowing these racist people to divide New Zealand, and you
Speaker 2: are making the majority of Kiwi's become unnecessarily racist. This
Speaker 2: is evil. I have been informed by a person who
Speaker 2: had to clean up the mess on a number of
Speaker 2: rail stations as a result of this protest. These activist
Speaker 2: Maris have no regard or respect for property belonging to
Speaker 2: the public or anybody but have or anybody but have
Speaker 2: trashed it with them rubbish and beer bottles. I have
Speaker 2: seen the photos just outright vandalism on the stations where
Speaker 2: they have been sleeping as well. They don't care. But
Speaker 2: what is more important is the government does not care,
Speaker 2: and the media is feeding us rubbish and not telling
Speaker 2: us the truth of what is really going down. Highways
Speaker 2: being blocked and people people's cars being poked with their flags, etc.
Speaker 2: Prime Minister, wake up, we'll remember the next election. Just as
Speaker 2: an aside, you are saying that there are two classes
Speaker 2: of Kiwi's Mary and non Mary, and the mary have
Speaker 2: special rights. That is racism, separatism apart eid.
Speaker 3: Wake up.
Speaker 2: I don't want to live in a country like this.
Speaker 2: From Rick, she'd say it as he feels.
Speaker 4: Later, Nicki says many thanks for your podcast this week
Speaker 4: with David Seymour. Great timing for those of us who
Speaker 4: intend to make a submission. First up, I disagree with
Speaker 4: David's ambivalence on our country's name. In our circle, we're
Speaker 4: off and found correcting the news media on their use
Speaker 4: of out here are New Zealand, we shout into the abyss.
Speaker 4: The second is his term fucker putiah hey fucker butanga
Speaker 4: Heyfukaputanga was the Minority Northern Chiefs Initiative which was never ratified,
Speaker 4: nor did it prevent further into tribal warfare. It was
Speaker 4: superseded by the treaty five years later. Third, the representation
Speaker 4: question MMP is in Therefore race based seats are out
Speaker 4: both act in New Zealand first or in general agreement.
Speaker 4: Perhaps National could grow a democratic spine. Lastly, David's expressed
Speaker 4: a view that the National Party has more important things
Speaker 4: to worry about, like the economy, than correcting fifty years
Speaker 4: of mistruths, which resulted in the establishment of the co
Speaker 4: Governance Partnership. Thee for cultural engagement. Is this political expediency
Speaker 4: towards the next election or satire? New Zealand's EWE already
Speaker 4: have a seventy billion dollar economy of their own. Perhaps
Speaker 4: it is time they contributed corporate bracket taxes and refunded
Speaker 4: extortionate engagement fees that would aid our economy. Aren't we
Speaker 4: all equal citizens under the treaty and not partners in
Speaker 4: our constitutional monarchy? What is it called when welfare becomes wealthfare?
Speaker 4: Interesting times? Says Nicki.
Speaker 2: It is interesting times all over. Change of subject from
Speaker 2: George editing Nuclear and New Zealand just doesn't go together.
Speaker 2: Quote unquote so says Paul Beck, New Zealand Herald at
Speaker 2: twenty eight eleven twenty four. The question of whether it
Speaker 2: was appropriate to establish a nuclear waste facility on a
Speaker 2: site without notifying neighboring property owners is valid. However, for
Speaker 2: Beck to say that we should shun anything nuclear is
Speaker 2: simply folly. Nuclear technology plays a significant role in modern medicine,
Speaker 2: including some cancer treatments and in providing scans for diagnon
Speaker 2: nosing a raft of medical conditions. The development of this
Speaker 2: technology in recent decades has saved many lives and has
Speaker 2: delivered the quality of life to countless patients which would
Speaker 2: not have been possible otherwise. Current research in nuclear technology
Speaker 2: is also providing solutions for future electricity needs as demands
Speaker 2: for more capacity grows worldwide. Some will agree that anything
Speaker 2: nuclear should be avoided at all costs. So are we
Speaker 2: to bury our heads in the sand and deny ourselves
Speaker 2: the considerable advantages of technological progress? Or shall we get
Speaker 2: over our irrational paranoia of all things nuclear? George, I
Speaker 2: think I agree with you wholeheartedly pretty much. I'll tell
Speaker 2: you what bothers me elsewhere in this podcast. I've may
Speaker 2: mention of people leaving the country going to Australia. I
Speaker 2: am concerned that the country's IQ is dropping like a
Speaker 2: rock at the moment.
Speaker 4: Leighton Stephen says, thank you for interviewing David Seymour for
Speaker 4: yesterday's podcast. I gave act my party vote because I
Speaker 4: wanted them to deal with this chaotic situation with the treaty. However,
Speaker 4: David lost more than a few points from me when
Speaker 4: he stated his ambivalence about the name of this country.
Speaker 4: It has been New Zealand since the time of Abel Tasman.
Speaker 4: It was not the British who named the place, and
Speaker 4: to even contemplate changing the name at all is not acceptable.
Speaker 4: The name of a country is the label of its soul.
Speaker 4: It is not something to be flippant about. While I
Speaker 4: have a lot of respect and regard for David, his
Speaker 4: las a fair attitude towards the name brings into question
Speaker 4: his commitment to his other policies. I enjoy your podcast,
Speaker 4: says Stephen, thank you.
Speaker 2: He lost a few points on that commentary. We got
Speaker 2: more mail on it, but we can't read it all.
Speaker 2: You know, there is a thing called bracket creep. It's
Speaker 2: usually applied to Texas. Tried to say this to him.
Speaker 2: I'm going to try and do it better now. But
Speaker 2: there is this thing called bracket creep, and if you're
Speaker 2: not aware of it, you get robbed. You know what
Speaker 2: I'm talking about, bracket creep inflation and you find yourself
Speaker 2: moving into higher tax brackets. Same principle with this, you
Speaker 2: will allow whatever creep it is. In this case it's
Speaker 2: racial creep. You're allowed to get a foothold, and before
Speaker 2: you know it, you're moving up the latter at a
Speaker 2: rate of knots. And that the longer you wait, the
Speaker 2: more difficult it is to rectify, as we are finding
Speaker 2: out now with the Treaty Principles Bill. Now from Allen. Now,
Speaker 2: this is actually written to me and separately to his
Speaker 2: own address to David Seymour. I want to congratulate Layton
Speaker 2: allowing David a lengthy, yet succinct, informative opening statement overview
Speaker 2: of salient points of New Zealand's constitutional history and podcast
Speaker 2: to sixty seven. David's comprehensive answer was both informative and apt.
Speaker 2: Unlike Layton admitted at the end of that answer, I
Speaker 2: believe all of us listening learnt at least a few
Speaker 2: facts previously likely unknown that's opening set the scene through
Speaker 2: a uniquely interesting podcast discussion, being catalyst by the introduction
Speaker 2: of the Principles of the Treaty of Whiteangi Bill twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four to the New Zealand Parliament by Coalition Partner Act.
Speaker 2: Whilst I suggest an alternative viewpoint see copy attached to
Speaker 2: my submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee hearing of submissions
Speaker 2: on the Bill. I commend you both on providing a
Speaker 2: most useful discussion session to listen to. But you get
Speaker 2: the picture. By the way, Allen's a lawyer.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 4: Knows what he's talking about.
Speaker 2: Well, not all lawyers, do you know? That's not that's
Speaker 2: a that's a whole lot of pot. I've got a
Speaker 2: reflection on Allen, but not all lawyers do.
Speaker 4: Leydon Brett, this is a lovely.
Speaker 2: So of them become judges even still don't.
Speaker 4: This is my final email and a lovely one to
Speaker 4: finish on. Brett says warm wishes to you both as
Speaker 4: you remind us another year will soon have passed in
Speaker 4: the lives of yourselves, guest contributors and listeners alike. Before
Speaker 4: I get further taken over by life's challenges and happenings
Speaker 4: that I may forget one simple task. I wish you
Speaker 4: a very merry Christmas and most happy New Year. Have
Speaker 4: a great, adventurous and rewarding year to come, a present
Speaker 4: which you get to unpack every day of your lives.
Speaker 4: You are indeed wealthy people in the journey and rich
Speaker 4: tapestry of life. Are wealth shared with those lives you
Speaker 4: touch upon and touch upon you. As I keep saying, Brett,
Speaker 4: it's nothing to do with me.
Speaker 3: I just.
Speaker 2: Sworn in every now and again. Well, I feel touched
Speaker 2: for both of us, and Brett.
Speaker 4: Says, by the grace of God, go I and us
Speaker 4: all have a wonderful break. Brett, thank you so much.
Speaker 4: It's really lovely of you. And merry Christmas and happy
Speaker 4: New Year to you too.
Speaker 2: Think you have a lovely break. We got a three
Speaker 2: months off or something? Or am I mistaken?
Speaker 4: You don't want three months off? You You'll be champing
Speaker 4: at the bit after about four weeks.
Speaker 2: You think, Okay, So we'll see you next week, Yes
Speaker 2: for the grand Final, Absolutely, yes, Tony astall look forward
Speaker 2: to that. Now. This segment comes in three different parts.
Speaker 2: We start with part one, which was a press release
Speaker 2: on Tuesday, of this week from ACT ACT is warning
Speaker 2: that new standards of competence for registered and enrolled nurses
Speaker 2: will distract from individual patient needs and make it harder
Speaker 2: to attract and retain nurses. The role of the nursing
Speaker 2: count is to protect the health and safety of the
Speaker 2: public and ensure nurses are competent and fit to practice,
Speaker 2: but new standards of competence set to be implemented on
Speaker 2: January twenty will veer the nursing profession badly off track,
Speaker 2: according to the ACT Health spokesperson Todd Stevenson. Stevenson goes further,
Speaker 2: Once upon a time, being a nurse was a matter
Speaker 2: of having the right skills and a kind heart. Now
Speaker 2: we're asking nurses to have the correct views on the
Speaker 2: Treaty of White Hangi and to make assumptions about patient's
Speaker 2: needs based on their ethnicity. The six planned pillars of
Speaker 2: competency for registered nurses are Mari health. Example, nurses must
Speaker 2: use terrao and incorporate tikangamari into practice. Number two Cultural safety.
Speaker 2: Nurses must be able to describe the impact of colonization
Speaker 2: and advocates for cultural and spiritual health. Part three A
Speaker 2: word that I can't pronounce going to get plenty of
Speaker 2: criticism from it. I haven't come across it before, but
Speaker 2: I'm going to. I'm not going to buger it up,
Speaker 2: so to speak. So it comes under the heading basically
Speaker 2: of communication. Example, nurses must use culturally appropriate communication in
Speaker 2: all interactions. Part four Evidence informed nursing practice. Nurses must
Speaker 2: support far our choice of alternative therapies, such as the
Speaker 2: use of wrongeye as herbal remedies and massage and spiritual healing.
Speaker 2: Number five. People centeredness. Nurses must integrate relational and FOCKERPAPA
Speaker 2: centered care to meet the needs of people and parno
Speaker 2: and leadership is number six. Nurses must support the constant
Speaker 2: assessment and improvement of sustainability practice or practice says so.
Speaker 2: Back to Todd Stevenson, rather than seeing patients as people
Speaker 2: with basic humanity and individual needs, nurses are being told
Speaker 2: to focus on their patient's ethnic identity. Clinical needs are
Speaker 2: sidelined in favor of a focus on the treaty, cultural safety,
Speaker 2: and even spiritual concerns. According to Stevenson, I have been
Speaker 2: contacted by nurses who are bewildered by the standards and
Speaker 2: are concerned they will be required to take extensive additional
Speaker 2: trainings when they would rather focus on improving individual nursing skills.
Speaker 2: You have to wonder how we're meant to attract overseas
Speaker 2: trained nurses when our bespoke local standards send the message
Speaker 2: that their skills and experience are not valued. Here on Monday,
Speaker 2: I wrote to the Minister of Health asking that he
Speaker 2: assess the impact of the proposed competencies. In fact, during
Speaker 2: the election campaign, Act propose giving the Health Ministry power
Speaker 2: to override decisions of regulatory authorities like the Nursing Council
Speaker 2: if the Minister believes those decisions go beyond what is
Speaker 2: necessary to protect public health and safety. Now that's the
Speaker 2: end of the Act release, and so do Part two.
Speaker 2: Now this was and by somebody I know quite well,
Speaker 2: a friend of mine in fact, and it was published
Speaker 2: a couple of days ago prior to the Act release.
Speaker 2: And it is entertaining in and of itself. And so
Speaker 2: it begins. The first week in November promised a lot.
Speaker 2: On the Tuesday, the liberal women of America were going
Speaker 2: to show men that they would reclaim the right to
Speaker 2: abort their babies at any time and place they wished.
Speaker 2: And the educated elites on campus and in the media
Speaker 2: were set to prove that lies told often enough constitute
Speaker 2: the truth, so long as they are told by the
Speaker 2: right people. By Wednesday, according to smart people, Donald Trump
Speaker 2: would be holed up at marri Lago with his idiot
Speaker 2: savant newby Elon Musk, licking his wounds and sharing hamburgers
Speaker 2: with RFK Junior. On Wednesday, my grandson would turn two
Speaker 2: and receive a bright red fire engine to add to
Speaker 2: his collection of trucks. It was going to be quite
Speaker 2: a week. Unfortunately I missed it. On Monday night, Nature
Speaker 2: sent its silent assassin to visit me. Sepsus arrives invisibly
Speaker 2: and without warning. By Tuesday, I vomited fourteen times, to
Speaker 2: the point that water came back out of my mouth
Speaker 2: as quickly as I tried to sip it, and nausey
Speaker 2: appeals couldn't get past my pharynx. Being a male, I
Speaker 2: lay down to let it pass. It didn't. On Wednesday,
Speaker 2: I crawled to the room where my cell phone sat
Speaker 2: on its charger and tried to alert a political junkie
Speaker 2: friend that I couldn't keep our date. To pore over
Speaker 2: the entrails of the election as planned. The text read,
Speaker 2: have hav she waited for more? There wasn't any more.
Speaker 2: The cell phone lay on the floor, and so did I.
Speaker 2: When the building valet staff, concierge, and ambulance crew arrived,
Speaker 2: they spread me out like a starfish and bared my
Speaker 2: chest for the cardio version machine, as if none of
Speaker 2: this had anything to do with me. I collected snippets
Speaker 2: of conversation for clues as to the scene taking place.
Speaker 2: Let's get the catamine in quick. Tell any one who
Speaker 2: needs to know we may not make it in time.
Speaker 2: Ain't going to die on our watchman, one of the
Speaker 2: ambulance bros said, reassuringly, No way, bro, not no way,
Speaker 2: no how. His fellow bro replies, they write rap lyrics
Speaker 2: in their spare time. I thought, then the good part.
Speaker 2: I'm looking down at this person who looks a lot
Speaker 2: like me, who was lying prone on a Stanley Kubrick
Speaker 2: or George Lucas spaceship set while I give increasingly frustrated directions,
Speaker 2: as if being the actor, a cameraman and director is
Speaker 2: too much of one person to handle. The set is great, though,
Speaker 2: and the transition to the next scene is seamless. Now
Speaker 2: I'm looking down at myself, traveling at the speed of
Speaker 2: a sushi train through dry white mist, illuminated by a
Speaker 2: strong light. My face is serene to the point of
Speaker 2: being dopey. I'm never serene. I have a moment of anxiety,
Speaker 2: wondering if it's true that finger nails and toenails continue
Speaker 2: to grow after you who cuts them. The light goes out.
Speaker 2: When I woke, my best friend was holding my hand.
Speaker 2: She looked at me as though this time I'd gone
Speaker 2: too far. I peered through a forest of catheters and
Speaker 2: tubes coming out of my neck, my arms, and my chest.
Speaker 2: Beeping monitors competed with each other for attention. Apparently, the
Speaker 2: first words I said were that ketamine baby. My daughter
Speaker 2: arrived from Australia, my son from Nelson. My grandson loved
Speaker 2: his fire truck, but the siren was driving them mad.
Speaker 2: Removed the battery. I suggested you were dead on arrival.
Speaker 2: She replied, don't do that again. The cliches are all true.
Speaker 2: Then we get into the parth that's relative. The cliches
Speaker 2: are all true. Nurses are angels. They come from the Philippines, India,
Speaker 2: Asia and the Pacific Islands with ready made smiles on
Speaker 2: their faces. We pay them nothing. The young doctors travel
Speaker 2: in threes, visiting every four hours to read the charts
Speaker 2: and hypothesize about the meds and their dosage levels. I
Speaker 2: doubt if one of them is over thirty, working fourteen
Speaker 2: hour shifts, carrying the weight of hundreds of sick and
Speaker 2: dying people on their shoulders. The administrative bureaucracy, of course,
Speaker 2: lets send down. I could write a list. So that
Speaker 2: was my November. In Michele Wellmeck's latest novel, Annihilation, the
Speaker 2: French health bureaucracy separates health from humanity until end of
Speaker 2: life care becomes a punishment subservient to systems. This inspires
Speaker 2: the establishment of a volunteer group called CLASH, the Committee
Speaker 2: for Liberation from Assassination in hospitals. They rescue people in
Speaker 2: the dead of night and return them to the people
Speaker 2: who love them after a week in recovery, listening to
Speaker 2: the fog horn snoring and the obsessive recounting of a
Speaker 2: dying man's life as he searched for a version of
Speaker 2: himself that he could accept. At the last I was
Speaker 2: lying in bed, desperately seeking a snatch of sleep, when
Speaker 2: a marry woman visitor to the ward decided to conduct
Speaker 2: a telephone conversation in terreo at full volume, as if
Speaker 2: she were in a shopping ball. It lasted an hour
Speaker 2: and a half, barely two meters from my curtained bed.
Speaker 2: On his next ward rounds, I told my brilliant young
Speaker 2: Chinese doctor about clash recovery. I mused, relies equally on
Speaker 2: the spirit as it does to the body. In order
Speaker 2: to preserve my spirit, I intended escaping. He nodded his
Speaker 2: head and smiled. I'll need an hour or so at
Speaker 2: the end of my rounds to write you a discharge
Speaker 2: and arrange a meds. Back home and feather bedded comfort
Speaker 2: fussed over like a visiting celebrity. I feeled at a
Speaker 2: call from a friend in Sydney. What's it like on
Speaker 2: the other side, he asked. I assured him that it
Speaker 2: is painless and peaceful. The pain is on this side.
Speaker 2: My political junkie friend brought me up to date with
Speaker 2: a presidential election. A mass sociogenic hysteria had broken out
Speaker 2: among liberal women, causing them to cut off their hair
Speaker 2: and gather in lakeside mobs to howl hysterically at the moon.
Speaker 2: Four year cruise packages were being offered to Democrats, allowing
Speaker 2: them to stay away from America until the madness had passed.
Speaker 2: Mark Zuckerberg, who had banned Donald Trump from his social
Speaker 2: platforms in twenty twenty and fed his sights with false
Speaker 2: information from the state intelligence community, had gone down to
Speaker 2: mare Lago to kiss the new monarch's ring. It had
Speaker 2: been a clean sweep. The pain is on this side,
Speaker 2: as I said, but for the woke allergic majority, the
Speaker 2: pain has eased a little a I Faber. If you
Speaker 2: want to copy it for yourself and share it round,
Speaker 2: it's worth it, I reckon Ai Fabler, substack, help yourself.
Speaker 2: It's free, and it's a true story, and it covers
Speaker 2: more bases than he intended to in the first place.
Speaker 2: If you go back to I haven't finished yet. But
Speaker 2: if you go back to the list of the pillars
Speaker 2: that they're installing as of January twenty, you can see
Speaker 2: that at least fifty percent of them. Well, I'll let
Speaker 2: this follower tell the story. Because I sent that release,
Speaker 2: the act release, to Ai Fabler, I said, would you
Speaker 2: care to comment on it?
Speaker 3: Please?
Speaker 2: I didn't know what he'd say, but I suspected this
Speaker 2: is late in my experience during an extended period in
Speaker 2: ice you followed by recovery in a four patient ward
Speaker 2: was that the majority of nurses were from the Philippines, India,
Speaker 2: Asia and Pacific Islands. Without exception, their competence and devotion
Speaker 2: to patients was exemplary. Shortness of staffing, particularly at night,
Speaker 2: meant that nurses had an informal agreement to cover for
Speaker 2: each other in neighboring ICEEU rooms, and sometimes Philippine staff
Speaker 2: or Indian staff would call to each other in their
Speaker 2: own language to attract attention under urgency, but would always
Speaker 2: advise the patient in English as to what was happening.
Speaker 2: I was never conscious of my ethnicity being a factor
Speaker 2: in any treatment, no matter how sensitive that treatment. There
Speaker 2: may have been reference to my ethnicity in the record
Speaker 2: of my NHI number, but never on any records of treatment.
Speaker 2: During my period of stay. I never encountered a Mari
Speaker 2: nurse or doctor, but did observe the treatment and expectations
Speaker 2: of married patients and visitors, which I would rather not
Speaker 2: comment upon. The Nursing Council list of expectations has no
Speaker 2: relevance add all to the health, safety, or cultural well
Speaker 2: being of eighty five percent of patients who have no
Speaker 2: desire to be addressed in terraea or to be treated
Speaker 2: with reference to so called Marii custom. And he finalizes
Speaker 2: with this sentence, which is most important. Further, it would
Speaker 2: be a burden on dedicated staff of other ethnicities who
Speaker 2: have been trained in Western medicine and put their faith
Speaker 2: in itslutely regards. Make of it what you will. It's
Speaker 2: just another example of this country going inch by inch,
Speaker 2: step by step in an undesirable direction. At least that's
Speaker 2: my take. And that will take us out for Podcast
Speaker 2: two hundred and sixty eight. We shall return in a
Speaker 2: few days with podcasts to sixty nine, the last for
Speaker 2: the year, and it's got to be a great discussion
Speaker 2: with Tony Astral from Antoine's Restaurant. As it was that
Speaker 2: is no longer so in the meantime, the only thing
Speaker 2: left to say is if you'd like to, if you'd
Speaker 2: like to contact us Latent at newstalksb dot co dot
Speaker 2: nz or Carolyn with Y at newstalksb dot co dot
Speaker 2: NZ as I say back in a few days. Until then,
Speaker 2: thank you for listening and we'll talk soon.
Speaker 1: Thank you for more from NEWSTALKSB listen live on air
Speaker 1: or online, and keep our shows with you wherever you
Speaker 1: go with our podcasts on iHeartRadio