Dr Nick Coatsworth: COVID Mistakes, Big Government & The Future of Australia

Former Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Nick Coatsworth joins me for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, healthcare, and the future of Australia. Drawing on his experiences in humanitarian medicine, the COVID pandemic, and the health system, Dr Coatsworth shares his perspectives on public policy, economic challenges, and what Australia needs to do to build a stronger future. It’s a thoughtful discussion on resilience, responsibility, and the lessons that shape better decision-making Subscribe to the Mentored newsletter here: https://the-mentored-platform-pty-ltd.myklpages.com/l/WWJGc5 Join my exclusive Mentored+ community: https://mentored.com.au/become-a-member/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Dr Nick Coatsworth, welcome to Straight Talk, mate.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you, mate.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  You've been pretty vocal lately. Oh, not lately, forever, but lately.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, MB, I've got the opportunity from Covid to have a bit of a platform, a bit of a voice and, you know, it was, it was once when I actually learnt how to do my debating and public speaking at school that, that I actually became, you know, reasonably good at it. And I would never claim to be the best doctor in the world, but, you know, my latent talent is sort of talking. So with everything that's happening so far in the world and, and I think what's happening to the country as well, what's happening to Australia, I think it's important that people with something to say, get up and say it.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's also important too, Nick, that people with, it's called status, and I don't mean that in sort of any condescending way, or the opposite to that as a matter of fact. But people with status, I think, have an obligation to say something, if they've got an opinion. If they don't have an opinion, fair enough. But if they've got an opinion on something, I think there's an obligation to say something. Do you think, do you think you fit into that category? And would you agree with that proposition?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I definitely agree with the proposition. I think there's limitations on what people can and can't do. And I think from my point of view, I'm relatively unconstrained, you know, I'm, yes, I work with the nine network. I've, you know, very fortunate to have that sort of position. I still work as a doctor. But I think as long as you keep your opinions within a reasonable discourse, a reasonable left or right of arc, you can have strong opinions and you should express them.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  So, you know, one of the things you're, from my point of view at least, that you're best known for is the Covid period.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  How did you get go from being a medical practitioner to being someone that effectively became the federal government spokesperson nearly for Covid or during Covid? How did, how did that sort of all occur?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, some of it's always going to be right place, right time. But there were a few key steps in the career that got me there. I think the first one was probably working with Doctors Without Borders, getting a real passion for crisis medicine and humanitarian aid.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Maybe you'd explain that a little, I mean, I've heard of it, but explain a little bit about that. What does it mean? Is that like charitable, not charitable work? Is that like freebie stuff? Like you're doing, you don't get paid?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, we weren't, we weren't paid for it. And it was, it's a French organisation with a very long and, and, and deep history of going into some of the most difficult conflicts in the world.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Where were you placed?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Well, I went to, I went to the Congo. Now, there's two Congos, two Congos. There's the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the least democratic. And then there's the Republic of Congo, which is sort of the old French Congo.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  The DRC, which is the one that's playing footy at the moment.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  The DRC is playing footy and, and has got an Ebola outbreak.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  So that's not the one I was in, but we were just across the river from that. They're both next to each other, the old Belgian and the French Congos from colonial days. So it was post-conflict, Mark, but it was a long way away. Like if you, from the capital, like if you think about Sydney and, I don't know, Burke or West Dabo or something like that, that's, that's where this was relatively in that country. So there's nothing there. We're in the middle of the jungle. We're in a village of 30,000 people. We're providing the only healthcare there.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Do you have a hospital?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  MSF had built a hospital there when, when the need arose 10 years ago. And now we're sitting there going, well, what do we do with this hospital? And we ended up being the last group of MSF doctors. I was, I was the doctor, there was a nurse or a couple of other people. And we were the last ones there because, because the home base in Paris said, no need here anymore and we need to shut down. So I'd gone out thinking I was going to be, you know, save the world. There was a program back then called ER where there was a young doctor called Carter. And I used to love that program and he was out doing the similar sort of thing. And, you know, there was, I've got to be honest, there was a little bit of, you know, glamour.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Like romance?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  A bit of romance about it. But the, the truth was exactly the opposite. We were the downsizers. We were like the management consultants of MSF. We needed to close this thing. And so we ended up leaving after I'd been there for six months. And it was a hugely emotional experience, sort of leaving a town of 30,000 people with no healthcare. And, and I can remember distinctly going, because, you know, no planes going in and out. We had to go down via canoe and we're leaving on a canoe waving and everybody's in tears and like they know. That that there's going to be no free healthcare for them the day that we leave.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Is that because they are no longer going to get free healthcare or and or is because you start to build relationships with them. They build relationships with you, like it's like a small community, really.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, small community and only two things driving the economy. So MSF being there and paying people to work for us, we have a staff of about thirty.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  And they spend.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  And they spend.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  And then there's an Italian logging company. Now, this is an important story because the Italian logging company weren't paying its workers. So we were the only source of of money into this town. And when we leave, it's not just healthcare that goes, it's not just friendships that go, the economy of this place collapses. And I thought, geez, you know, for all the romance of this and for all the good that we were clearly doing for a period of time. Eventually, you've distorted the economy. You've created a problem now. The night that we left, uh, so we were on the canoe, we were out, there wasn't any mobile, no mobile phones, we were satellite phones.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  So we go down the river and get to the next stop and we get a call. And the nurse that had worked for us for longest, and he got the biggest payout because we're doing French labour laws, right? You've worked with us for ten years, we give you a stack of cash, just like you would here.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Like a redundancy payment.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Like a redundancy payment. So the coppers find out, the police, the Congolese police, they find out.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  That he got a payout.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  They they knew that everybody got a payout, they knew that he got the most. They stop him in the street, say, at the point of a gunpoint, give us your cash.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Oh, like it's a robbery.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  It's a robbery. He said, no, they shot him.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  No.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  They shot him.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  Dead.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Dead. Well, he got to the hospital, but, you know, the thirty staff are not there anymore. It's just three, three government Congolese staff, no equipment, we've taken all the equipment. And Jacques died that night and we found out about it the next day.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Why didn't he go with you?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Well, he was what we call local or national staff. So you come in with your team of five, um, usually expats, it's a bit different now with MSF, but it used to be people from overseas. You come in with your five, um, basic teams, a field coordinator, doctor, nurse, logistician and admin person. And that was us. It was core for the five person team. And then you build your local team around you. So you employ, you employ nurses and doctors.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  From, from local people.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  From, from, from the local health system and you, you provide them with jobs, training and do it. You, you're building capacity. So there's, there's, there's good stuff here, but.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  You're building a business, basically.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  You're building healthcare. I mean, obviously you're providing it for free because you're doing.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  But still, it's no revenues, but you are building a business system.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And then that money is going into the, the local economy.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Uh, and so we, we managed to successfully collapse the local economy overnight.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Wow. So corruption was a big issue.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, in those sort of, um, regions and, and it's not, it's not so different. Corruption anywhere in the world, Mark, where there's, where there's lots of money and perverse incentives.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  You know, we can talk about a, a bit of the soft corruption or hard corruption that goes on in Australia later on. But this is like hard, uh, brazen corruption on behalf of anyone with, with power given to them by the government. And in this case, it was the police.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  How, how old were you at that point?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Uh, I was twenty seven, I think.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  What do you, what'd you learn from that?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Well, I learnt that the, um, road to, uh, hell proverbially is paved with good intentions. Like no matter, you, you know, you are doing genuine good, but in the, in the course of doing that good, you can create a whole heap of, uh, you know, in economic terms, negative externalities, pretty, pretty serious negative externality for Jacques, uh, who lost his life because of it. And that just shocked us. I mean, you can imagine, uh, what that did to the, our, our core five team when we find out about that. We all knew why and we all knew it was related to us and what we'd done. But now, you know, now in Africa, this is, this is sort of added, just switching back to the sort of, the, the romance of it, I suppose. And, and it's not like this anymore around the world, but

• 8:20Speaker 01

  we couldn't communicate with anyone were it not for a satellite. I was sending emails to my current wife who I'd, I'd, um, split up with as a girlfriend, boyfriend at the time and. And I had to send her, I was sending her emails and it would cost me most of my per DM, which was like 10 euros a day, just to send one email of like 40 words.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  So it was, it was hard to communicate.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Did she realise how much you loved her when you told her that?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Oh, she did when I took her to France afterwards.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  A day's pay. It's a day's pay. I just spent a day's pay on one, on a 40 word email to you.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  I still remind her about that.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, she'd be watching this, no doubt. So, so you went from there, then what happened? So you come back to Australia? What, what did you do?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  No, so at the, at the end of MSF missions, there's always another mission. So they said, you know, there's a measles vaccination up in Chad.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, wow.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Chad, didn't even know where it was.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  For, for the listeners, viewers, next to Sudan.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Mali, that sort of area, Sub-Saharan Africa.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Pretty hectic though.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Very, very hectic and, and at the time, probably one of the bottom three poorest places in the world. So we went there and we had to try and vaccinate. It obviously wasn't just me, there was a big team there because there was an emergency. There probably 40 internationals came in to try and vaccinate 10,000 kids in three weeks.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Is the objective sort of part of being a doctor and becoming a doctor back in your own country? I mean, or, or just, did you feel like you needed to give back?

• 9:44Speaker 01

  No, this was something I'd wanted to do for years. This was something I wanted to do before I was even a doctor.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Like I, I saw this idea of.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Wasn't a career idea though.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  It wasn't a career idea, but I, I mean, I stayed with MSF for a long time afterwards, just not going into the field. I went to the field once more and I went to, to the Darfur region of Sudan. But I then was on the board of MSF Australia for six years and did a lot of the governance work with them. And I think we, we achieved a lot. We took it from sort of $40 million a year to $70 million a year in revenue, which was pretty good. And, and, and had a lot of interactions with, you know, the global governance of it. So for me, no, it wasn't a career, but it was a pretty important part of my life. And I kind of knew that I'd wanted to do that. It was a service humanitarian thing. I'd, I'd seen, I'd seen a thing, like a profile of MSF in my French textbook when I was in year 10.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  And, and that's what planted the seed. Like I was looking at that going, oh, that, that sounds like something I'd like to do. You combine that with, you know, just the, the sort of global view that my parents had instilled in me. And, and it was always going to happen.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  But when I see something like that, and if I'm thinking then about who, I'm the prime minister and who can I trust to?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Give advice and to talk to Australian people about what COVID may or may not be going to do. And you know, it's a big drama here. I'm thinking to myself, in terms of profile, must be a practitioner, doctor, but must be able to stand on her own two feet, like actually have a conversation. But having that background would definitely go to the top of the list for me. You know, like, you know, someone's used to dealing with potentially epidemics, been in the field, measles epidemics, that sort of immediately qualifies you. Not immediately, but you're up there in the list.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  It put me on the pathway. And of course, you know, Prime Minister Morrison and Greg Hunt and Minister Hunt didn't know any of that about my background when they appointed me. I had actually been part of the National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre, which is a disaster response mob up out of Darwin. So that was set up.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  This is before COVID?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, this before COVID. So between MSF and COVID, I'm up in Darwin. My wife and I, we had two of our three kids up there. And there was a policy called developing the north at the time. And we developed the north. We had two kids, we built a house, we did all sorts of-

• 12:01Speaker 00

  You definitely contributed.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, four years up there. And I remember clearly, you know, it was a great time. Beck was, Beck was heavily pregnant with our third and, and flying in and doing remote consultations. She's a doctor as well, out in the outback community. It was, it was a good time in our lives. But for me, it was disaster response. And the architecture of disaster response in Australia is very much linked in with Foreign Affairs, Health Department, those, those names that we never knew before, but know now, CHOES, Chief Health Officers, HPPC, the Protection Committee. This was something that I'd lived and breathed for four years. So when we went from Darwin to Canberra, I was there working as an infectious disease

• 12:44Speaker 01

  doctor for five years. Then COVID hits, and I get this call about, oh, you know, late February 2020, from Professor Paul Kelly, who was one of Brendan Murphy, the Chief Medical Officer's deputies. And he said, listen, this is real.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Did you know him already?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  I did, through all this Darwin stuff. So-

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Hey guys, this is real. We'd like you to come. We've already spoken to your boss. She's released you for three months, come across from Canberra Hospital and come and work with us as one of Brendan's deputies.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  I mean, obviously remember it well, but I remember talking to David Heslop.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  And, and he was telling me about the, the powers of the Surgeon General and in Australia and, and also we're talking about Morrison and, and this whole process of basically locking the joint down. And David, who's at the University of New South Wales in Department of Medicine, one of those faculties. And so around that period, it seemed to me that Morrison was creating a cohort of people around him. Like that, that, that he could rely upon in terms of making the calls on all of this, you know. So would you consider yourself as at that point in February, when they first got the call, as someone who was enrolled or enlisted?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Let's call it by the Prime Minister?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, really it was Brendan who was advising the Prime Minister on that. And I, look, I wouldn't have couched in those terms at the time. I simply said yes, but it was the first time that I'd stopped. And I mean, usually when an opportunity like that comes in front of my lap, I'd say yes straight away.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  As a sense of duty?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  As a, as a sense of duty, as a, cause in, in these sort of careers where you sort of, you know, start to leapfrog and, and go higher and higher and higher. It's often because you say yes to the opportunity. It's not necessarily, and you say yes quickly. But on this occasion, you know, I put down the phone. I said, Paul, I'm on a ward round. I'm going to call you back. And I called my wife straight away and said, listen, this is, this is going to be big. Am I, am I in the right frame of mind to do it?

• 14:48Speaker 00

  And. You asked her that?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I asked her that.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  I, I was asking myself that question, but shit, obviously not. I'd, I'd gone through a bit of a, a troubling time in my mental health in the, in the previous six months. And, and I had to ask myself, am I the right person to do this at this time? Now, fortunately I was on.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Am I fit for purpose?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Am I fit for purpose? Am I fit to, am I fit to serve? And I think it was a really, really important reflection. I'm glad I gave myself the time to reflect.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  How much time do you give yourself?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Oh, an hour. It doesn't sound like much.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Do you walk in the bathroom at the hospital, you're working the rounds and just look at yourself in the mirror and say, okay, we've got 60 minutes. Let's talk this through.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's workshop this. No, I mean, it was a, that sounds a bit glib, but it was only an hour and I got back to Paul, but it was some serious reflection.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  It's compelling though.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Just to pause and say, stop, let's have a think. Are you, are you enough on the road to recovery? Cause you've seen, I mean, we've, we've got a lot of good examples of what happens to people in public positions. And people have been really open and frank about their mental health and particularly when it's led to the end of their careers. Now, this was on the opposite, this was really what launched where I am now. And I had to reflect about whether I was in the place to do it.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  When you think back at it, do you think you had any sense of what you're saying yes to?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't think, I don't think we knew just how enormous this was going to be, the gravity of our decisions, what it would do to the country. And I think it's done an immense amount, you know, both positive, but I have got some concerns about. You know, Mark, we talk about critical junctures in the life of our nation. And, and that's where you're on one railroad and something happens and you hop on another railroad. And I've listened to a lot of your guests on this podcast. And I do worry that we shifted quite markedly to a heavy dependence on government as a result of some of the things that we did. And, and that is something that I couldn't really have predicted in the thick of it there, or, or even reflected on.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  So let's talk about that. Would you say, sitting back here today on reflection, that governments may have taken advantage of that opportunity? That we, they knew we would become more reliant upon them. And I was saying Scott Morris, because Scott wasn't in it long enough. But other governments?

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Dan Enders perhaps?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  I think that at the start, there was a genuine desire from most leaders to try and do the right thing. But when I'm talking about the start, I'm really only talking about the first three months.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  February, March, April.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  February, March, April. Because after that, we had a fairly clear idea of who this was going to affect and who wasn't at risk. But we got into this and the thing that troubled me most, Mark, was that. It showed us that instead of being a hopeful larrikan nation, which is what I want, I want to be part of that nation.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  We were part of a locked up and very scared nation.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  So how did we become those people though?

• 17:49Speaker 01

  I, I, I don't know. I think it was a combination. Well, I, I can say I don't know. I actually just did a PhD on why we closed the international borders. And it was, you know, in, in those sort of academic terms, it was because the, the fear that was generated, legitimate fear, the images out in New York and Italy, which, you know, were, as all media images are partly true. Clearly those images happened, but I think the magnitude of what was going on there was probably inflated, at least in people's minds, about how that would happen here. Nonetheless, it's important. New York, Italy, combined with the advice from public health.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  And then you, you get no counterweight from anyone in the economic or business sphere. Like the only guy who's kicking up a fuss is, is old mate from Flight Centre.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, Screw, Turn.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, Screw, Screw, Screw, Graham Screw Turner.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So, sorry, Screw, I know him very well, so I should remember his name there.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  And legitimately from an economic point of view, because his business would have been just completely decimated at that point.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Because no one could travel.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  But everybody else was locking in, including Treasury.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  But why were we so compliant? What, you've done a PhD.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Well, that, that was, that was the lock-in effect of all the institutions. So the Business Council of Australia, the big, big four banks, all the banking executives, everybody was behind this.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  But what happened to that larrikan, you, you said before, what happened to that anti-authority larrikan piece that we ordinarily would have?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was, I think it was overwhelmed by, you know, what was initially a very strong and legitimate position, which was Team Australia, we're in this together. But once we headed down that path, it was very, very difficult for people to turn around and go, okay, we need to course correct here. Now we, now we've overcooked it. Now we're into 2021 and 2022. I mean, Mark McGowan still wanted to keep the WA borders closed in January of 2022. And we we got to this idea that the only thing you couldn't die of in this country was COVID-19. Now, let's look at some of the other things that we get worried about. We we closed schools again last year because there was supposed to be some asbestos in place and you remember that?

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  I don't think there was that much asbestos in the sand. And I'm pretty sure as a respiratory physician, the lifetime risk of a kid developing asbestos or mesothelioma was pretty close to zero from that. But we still closed the schools. So that sort of COVID mentality, you can see playing out in that sort of fear of asbestos. And then you move very quickly into how the whole country is completely overregulated and we're dominated by a culture of safetyism. So it ends up being that the Larrakhan Australian is a legend and a myth. And maybe we need to look hard in the mirror and go, do we want to get back to that hopeful

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Larrakhan that's built a nation from settlement to over 200 years ago? And we're one of the most successful nations in the world.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  We were.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Were, to now one of the most, you know, insular, navel gazing, overregulated, you know, and I'm not talking, you know, I'm not having a go at individual Australians here. I'm talking about, let's have a look at what sort of nation we want to be. And let's get, try and get back to that nation, which is, you know, let's have a national project, let's have some big ideas, let's be the successful nation of the 1990s, of the 2000s that was built off the back of good governments.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Do you know, in an economic sense, Australia was from 1996 through to 2020, was the most successful in economic terms, nation in the world. No other country had as many quarters of GDP growth than Australia. We've gone from being the envy of the world to being the question of the world, why is a country with so much resources, so much safety, so much beauty, struggling?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  It's a.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  It's a conundrum.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  It is a conun- well, it is a conundrum until you put it in terms that we've just discussed.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, but if I look at you, Nick, I go back to 2020. Did you feel when you, when it was all over in 2022, whenever this whole thing finished, did you think to yourself, wow, shit, what was I part of?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Yes. And I've said it on a number of occasions.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  What regrets do you have? And what would you have done differently perhaps? What could you have done?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  I think the one thing that you could do differently, if you, we ever have a pandemic again and the government brings in a rule or a regulation, it has three months to conclusively prove that that's benefiting the country or it's gotta go.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you put a time limit on it.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  You've got a time limit, these things. And that includes, you know, I think I've spoken as, as the face of the national vaccination campaign, which was underpinned by mandates and mandates that, you know, I discussed on TV, on press conferences and, and, and you know.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  We got to know you from that.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, backed in essentially government policy. Uh, I thought that that was a critical error in judgment and I think that we could have got very high.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  What do you mean? Having a national vaccination program?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  No, the national vaccination program was fine. Um, mandating people to get vaccinated was a huge problem.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  So it should have been left to our choice.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And we could have, look, if you, if you were looking at what Australians were doing and how they were behaving, um, and the team Australia approach, we, we, we could have successfully vaccinated the country with education alone. Absolutely.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Without, without the jab.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Without, you would, you would have got sufficient vaccination rates amongst the at-risk population just by recommending it, educating people that it was the right thing to do, using people like me and forgetting the idea of mandates.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  I will, I will die on that hill. I reckon we could have done it.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  And, and, and at risk meaning what, what, if you just give it that to me.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, yeah. Well, the, the risk clearly started to go up from COVID. It was, it was extraordinarily low. And then for the age of 50 and above, it made a material uptick.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  As a result of what?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Uh, well, it was just, you know, COVID was a virus that, um, the older you got, the, the worse the inflammation was in the lungs, the more likely you were, um, to have to go to ICU. And certainly for, for people who were in their seventies, living at home, you know, retired Australians enjoying their lives as grandparents. I do think there was a material risk of letting that virus into this country. You know, so, so, so the border closures, uh, before we were vaccinated. So the border closures were important. The vaccination program was important, but we overcooked the mandates. Um, COVID was a risk to healthy elderly Australians. Um, but we, but they were all going to get themselves vaccinated and they did huge, like

• 25:09Speaker 01

  close to 95, 100% of, of healthy Australians over the age of 70 were vaccinated. And, and they weren't going to lose their job because they were mandated, but they were already retired. Um, so, so we were always going to vaccinate our, our healthy at risk population. And then we could have, um, we could have left the rest to choice. And I still think most people would have got it anyway.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Do you think those people that are over 70 would have got vaccinated, whether it was mandated or not?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  In other words, that's just a behavioral process. You know how they behave. Or is it people over 70 in Australia just compliant? What is it?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  No, no, I think though, I, I think we knew enough at that point to know that they were, they were at risk. And, and that if they didn't get the, the vaccine, I can't tell you how many, but an unacceptable number of healthy elderly Australians would have, would have lost their lives. So, so that would have driven, that behavior would have, would have driven high vaccination rates.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Because I saw some modeling right at the beginning and, um, and. Maybe not like the way you guys do modeling, but in in my world, when we do modeling, the model's pretty easy to build. It's the assumptions that are the, I can manipulate the model by assumptions.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  And if I want a certain outcome, I'll say that this is going to be the outcome.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  And then I work backwards and I'll say the model says this is going to be the outcome.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  And I'm selling you the outcome to get something else I want to get done.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  So the question is, did that happen?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Well, I asked my question to you if you don't mind, because you know, like I I saw models getting trotted out by, I don't know who, by maybe you might have been other people, governments. I'm talking about five hundred thousand people Australians are going to die.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the quote, the quote was a hundred and fifty thousand and it came out in the papers in about March and and Paul Kelly said it. Now, that was the Doherty Modeling, Doherty Institute, and I can with a hundred percent confidence say that those inputs were not, were not given to to produce a certain outcome. I cannot tell you what happened with state governments after that.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  So the modeling that was commissioned by Victoria to justify their prolonged lockdowns, I cannot tell you whether that was reverse engineered or not.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Because they didn't use the Doherty Modeling.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  They built their own modeling.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  They they use which one?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  They used a different institute.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Different institute. And did New South Wales use something different again?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Uh, New South Wales, I can't recall whether they were still using Doherty or not.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, because they were nowhere near as bigger numbers as they were getting touted down there in Victoria.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the the Victorians successfully convinced their population that this was going to be a doomsday scenario for them, and then successfully convinced their population that New South Wales was the enemy.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  It was like a state of origin for COVID.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  It was dreadful. And I I was, because in those days, it was probably the same as today, we had like fifty offices, branches in Victoria, and they weren't allowed to travel more, they weren't allowed to travel for more than five Ks from their home.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  To go to work.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  To go to the office. And most of the people's offices are outside, away from where they lived. And unless you're a central worker or something along those lines.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Um, so, and it was all based on the modeling. And I always think to myself, modeling's all bullshit. Like, I can make modeling, as you said, it's about the inputs or the assumptions that you input into the model.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  And so they must have been, somehow they managed to scare the life out of everybody, though.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  They did.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  What, did they, do you think in hindsight, just pick Victoria for a second? People were scared of getting caught and getting into trouble? Or they were actually scared of what COVID might do if they got, if they caught COVID?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  No, they were scared of what COVID might do.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Really?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  In, in, in the main, like the, yeah, I don't, I don't think, I don't think it was worry, worry really about what would happen if they got caught. There was, you know, but obviously if, if you're going to, um, if you're gonna, let's use the right word, subjugate a population for that long. They will eventually start to rebel against it. And by the fifth lockdown, they did. And you had those enormous, um, protests, which we've never seen rubber bullets used before, but they were used, uh, in, at the end of that, that fifth lockdown.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Uh, when, um, when the population started to go, well, enough of the population started to go, no, this is, this is, this is enough. We've had enough now.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  You know, the, the thing that is interesting and it gets a little bit controversial, but we remember the Black Lives Matter protests.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of those were either, they were either condoned and they were allowed to happen, or, um, people turned a blind eye when they did happen.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  In Victoria.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, around, around Australia, there were, there were several of them during COVID. Even more of them in the U S.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Um, so it's okay to protest if you're, if you're protesting against the, um, you know, the, the, the preferred issue or the presumptive good. Um, but if you're protesting for your individual freedom, no, no, we're going to shut that down. Um, and that, and that to me, you know, Mark, this was a, this was a, it was a change in my politics. I, I was, I was looking at this going, you know, we have got the philosophical balance wrong in this country. And when I say philosophical, I am talking about John Stuart Mill. The only reason that you can, uh, restrict the liberty of one person is to prevent harm to another.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Now we decided, or we were fearful or someone, you know, um, was fearful enough that so much harm was going to happen. That we wanted to restrict the individual liberties of people for two hundred and sixty five days.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  That was way too long down in Victoria. And so we exceeded that fundamental principle of individual liberty. And I guess, you know, some of the population, a significant amount of the population went along with that. So you, we go all the way back to what you asked me. Did we know that this was going to shift the way Australians think? Well, I think Australians are a lot more accepting now of government policy that restricts, impedes, um, you know, the individual and, and what they can achieve in life. And that's why, like, this is why you link COVID to capital gains tax changes.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  To negative gearing changes and people, and, and there's people who believe in the success of the individual being absolutely conducive to the success of the country. And that's people like you and me, I presume. And we think, hang on, you know, we've got to help the individual succeed here. But there are still a lot of people in Australia as a result of COVID who think the opposite. And the principles are exactly the same. They sit there and go, we want the collective to succeed. And if we have to chip away at the success of the individual to get that, then we're happy to vote for it. So there is actually, for the first time ever, um, probably in the past 30 years,

• 32:03Speaker 01

  a fundamentally different choice in politics in Australia at the moment. Like, left and right is very, very different in terms of the choice that Australians have to make at the ballot box.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  And it's something that actually bothers me, by the way, the division. It is like so nakedly obvious between left and right.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Um, and I can put it down to the, the commencement of this, I can put it down to the COVID period.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Um, you're right, um, I have never seen so many regulations in this country, state or federal, it doesn't really matter, um, that have occurred in, since COVID. And I often wondered to myself, and I don't want to be a conspirator, but I wondered to myself if governments have thought, look,

• 32:47Speaker 00

  We know Australians are basically able to be compliant. Prior to that, I would have thought Australians, they stuff you, I'm not doing that.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  The Aussie guy, woman, whatever, no way. Stick it up your whatever.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  We're gonna live our own life, don't tell me what to do. Maybe has government found out that we're so compliant, they thought, you know what? We want to build a big government. And by one of the, and we've just been rewarded. But we will build, build big government by giving people more jobs to be more regulatory against people like in private enterprise like you and me. And, uh, and no one's gonna really object. And as a result of that, um, we can take more control of the individual.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  And we, the government, are the best place to determine whether the whole community is successful. As opposed to individuals like Nick Coatsworth or Maipuru or whoever it is, those individuals by, by being individually successful will make the whole community successful.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Is that where you're at? Because that's where I'm at.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  That's where I'm at. I mean, in my mind, Mark, um, a strong individual makes for a strong family, makes for a strong country, and then government can step in to help the people that need to be helped.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  We've got a very different government at the moment, who is picking and choosing, often based on identity politics, who, who the winners and the losers should be, uh, weakening the individual, which in my view is gonna weaken the country and make us less able to help the people that need it. Now, the, the biggest trick that progressivism ever pulled was convincing people that it united a country.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  It doesn't, it doesn't, because progressivism now is tied to identitarianism. So you get this fragmentation or atomization of your community into different identity first, individual second, country distant third, uh, and suddenly a country's divided. Now, this is very different to what the, and I'll, I'll call it, what the Labour Party go around and tell everybody. Labour Party say that the right side of politics is responsible for the division. I take a completely different view. Sit there and look in those sort of terms, look at it in those sort of terms. If you put, if you, if you, success requires adhering to a list of identities

• 35:14Speaker 01

  or benefiting from government requires adhering to a list of identities that the government thinks are acceptable. Then you are going to split people into those identity groups and that's a problem.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Force them to take sides.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Force them to take sides and, and the, the one thing that they're not taking the side of is the country. And that's, and that's a problem. And this is why you get one nation rising up. Because people, there are enough people in the country that look at that and go, that's not the way I want to be.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  They don't really know how to articulate it though, I don't think. They just feel something's wrong.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  I know. And that, and that to me, and that to me is the great opportunity for conservative politics in Australia. You, you know, everybody's saying Liberal Party's dead, whatever. There will be a phoenix moment where someone comes along or a group of people ideally, who can articulate this and then people will go, yes, that's the way we want to live. Yes, we're Australians, we want to help our fellow Aussie. But we know that to do that, we have to be successful as an individual first. And we have to have successful individuals, families, country, and then government can come in.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Do you put it down to just a temporal course, like something that happened in time, 2020, that was the start of it? And then it was just a cascade of events? Or do you put it down to what, where we, where we are sitting right now? Do you put down what, where we are right now down to ideology, taking advantage of the situation?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the time course is much longer. I, I think, I think COVID's what accelerated it and was that critical juncture that act as a sort of path accelerator for this, you know, malaise that we've got in the country with big government and dependence on government. But this was going on in the nineties, just at the time when we were successful, as you said earlier in the pod. We were undergoing a very significant leftward shift in our institution. And, and I think, you know, there's, there's actually nowhere where you see it more than, than in medicine.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Like you look at some of the big cultural issues at the moment.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  The medical community has adopted a significantly progressive or leftward leaning position on them. And we don't need to get into the, the controversy of this because it is a very controversial topic, but.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Let us just compare COVID with gender medicine in Australia.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  What's that mean?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  So gender medicine is transgender medicine and sex changes and puberty blockers and all that kind of thing, which we don't need to get into the clinical side of the moment. But all I can say to you is that the rest of the world has shifted back to a more nuanced and precautionary position around these sort of treatments. Whereas Australia has sort of stayed in the let's go, let's charge ahead with puberty blockers and allowing young people to change their sex and that sort of thing now.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Is that, is it really?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Now, this is very similar to COVID. So the rest of the world had moved on significantly before Australia did. It took Australia a good.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  What is that?

• 38:21Speaker 01

  I, I think, I do think that it's partly because the, the medical profession is dominated by a sort of, that sort of progressive ideology. You said it was ideology. And that that started when I was a medical student, you know, this has been going on. Absolutely. This has not been something, and, and I was, you know, I was part of it. I was a, I was a card carrying member of, you know, the other side of politics at once. I should probably just ruined my chance at a political career, but you know.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  No, I think you might have enhanced it up there. And then this podcast, you definitely enhance it. But because it's funny, you know, I was thinking back to when I went to university in 1973 and started university and I was doing a commerce law degree. And I remember they told me I had to do a subject and, and it was called

• 39:10Speaker 00

  women in society. And, and I had an Irish, like a very strong minded mother, like I didn't need anyone to remind me the position of a woman in society and on the Greek side of the family, the Greek women definitely were in control of everything. And so I didn't need any reminding, but the book that we had to read.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Was written by Dr Anne Summers and it was called, she was a, an academic doctor. But her book was called Damned Whores in God's Police. And I was like seventeen, cause I studied uni at seventeen.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, same with me.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  And, and like totally immature, been in a boys' school my whole life, like played footy. I didn't know anything, you know, about women and whatever. And I remember reading this book and, and then many years later I thought about it and I thought they were trying to, when I remember the context of it, trying to push me a certain direction about feminism.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  What it had to do with what I was doing had zero to do with what I was doing. But I was at the University of South Wales, which was one of the newer universities, which was trying to be very modern. But the place was infiltrated by this system. By the way, I since met Dr Anne Summers and she's a lovely person, by the way, a really, really nice person. Lovely.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And generally, and generally people are.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  And she wasn't trying to, she wasn't trying to influence me or, or students. But that was the book she wrote about something she believed in. But the institution grabbed hold of it.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  And then she sort of pretty much jammed it in our throats because we got tested on this stuff. We had to do exams on this stuff. And you're right, so I'm only reflecting on your comment. It go, this goes right back to the nineties.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  And, and I think, I think the movement was generally, the progressive movement in the seventies, sixties, seventies and, and eighties.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  It was probably a good idea.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Was full of good ideas.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Cause I had no idea about women in society, other than what I experienced with my family.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Equality of pay, women on boardrooms, to an extent, the, the broader diversity movement. All of those, you know, basically started as good things. But when you need the pendulum to shift back into sort of conservative politics is when those things have gone too far.

• 41:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  And let me, let me give you a little example.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  I've been sticking a little bit of Hughesy, David Hughes, on my Instagram feed. A lot of it from when you guys did the interview.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  He was great.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  And I get a call from my nearest and dearest friend and she says, I think it's bad for your brand to stick that on your Instagram feed. Said, okay, uh, well, I don't think he's saying anything unusual. I mean, he's just basically saying that someone should have taken a policy to an election instead of springing it on people two years later or a year later.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  One year later, exactly one year later.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Exactly one year later. Didn't want to engage with that. Do you know what words I heard? Oh, he's privileged. Okay.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Hughesy?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Hughesy, right, privileged. Actually, that's not what is meant. It's meant that he's a bloke, he's white and he's got some coin behind him. So there was no desire to engage with the actual debate, which is, which was what I was trying to do. I said, well, you know, what, with a principle, what about, what about democracy?

• 42:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  You know, what about taking something to an election?

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  If you, if you turn around, as Jim Chalmers has said, and say, I'm introducing this policy because, you know, social media is so difficult at the moment that I couldn't possibly take this to an election, which I understand is what he said.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Because we might lose.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Because we might lose. Well, let's just, let's just forget about the ballot box.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  We'll, we'll have a dictatorship of the proletariat for the next 20 years like Victoria and we'll be, we'll be absolutely fine, you know? So I, I, I raise that because that's how people position arguments these days and, and they, they will sit there and go, okay, that you are privileged, therefore I'm not going to listen. I don't, I don't consider Hughesy privileged. I don't consider his, his views particularly outrageous and what I want to do is debate the substance of it. And when I put something up on Instagram about CGT and negative gearing, I said, actually, I can understand why they're doing it. But the problem is they're doing it and then they're not giving anything back to people in personal income tax cuts.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have said that.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Which I have.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  I, I, I responded to it. That's how, why I reached out to you because. It's funny you should say because many, many years ago, I was asked as an economic concept, what do I think about negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts? This is back in 2000. And I said, in an economic sense, it's not good policy because it can distort a market. This is back in the early 2000s because bear in mind that it was, it was, it was in 1998, I think, or 1997, 1998, the Castello actually brought in the capital gains tax discount. Before that, it was called Paul Keating's system, which was indexation, which is what we now got. And I was just asked, and this was quoted in the Finn Review, many years later, I remember

• 44:09Speaker 00

  the journalist, George Lakarkas, at the Finn Review, came back and said, look, the government's thinking about, 10 years later, they said they're thinking about getting rid of capital gains tax or changing their discount to getting rid of negative gearing, what do you think? I said, well, it's not a good idea. Well, he wrote that up and he grabbed my quote from 15 years earlier and said, well, Boris is, you know, contradicting himself.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Flip flopping.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  But, but my point being, my point being is, my point was, is that you can't have something that gets embedded in a system where millions of Australians are using it to build wealth and then not only not going to election with it, but making that change. It's in the middle of a high interest rate period and all the other stuff that's going on around the world. It's so structurally disruptive.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  That is too dangerous, too big a risk. And we're now seeing the, the, the results of that right now. I mean, the place is all over the shop.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  It is. And, and there's so much, there's uncertainty around it. The thing that got me more, because I, you know, I do, I very much empathize as the, as the dad of three kids and think about how they're going to own a, a house or whether they're ever going to own a house. The thing that got me was you take away these so-called exemptions. And, and by the way, the word exemption is a problem because it assumes that the government has a default right to your money, which, you know, it's not good language. We should change it completely.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  I agree with that. And can I just add, well, I do want you to finish your sentence, but I do want to add to that while I think about it. By the way, the reason you get a tax deduction, why it's called negative gearing, that's, that's a bad terminology. You get a tax deduction because you're actually losing money.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Because you're actually making a loss.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and to say, to say that that's different to running a business. If you own a property and you've got tenants and you're paying strata title and you're paying interest and you're running around trying to get the best interest rate and you're trying to do the repairs and maintenance and collect the money every week and all this, you are running a business, as far as I'm concerned. So you should get a tax deduction because you're losing money.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, correct.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  End of story.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  It's not negative gearing, it's not exemption, all these trick words that are thrown around the place, suits the moment.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  To reframe it.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Reframe the narrative.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  And, and, and, and the media does that a lot because they've, they've, they just buy into those

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Well, it's easy to write.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  It's an easy thing to write. So, you know, we've, we've suddenly got rid of these exemptions. And the biggest problem is that you're not passing that back to anyone in any sort of meaningful income tax. You're taking it in to increase government spending.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  And I think eventually what's going to happen, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later, but the broader Australian community will start to look at these areas of government spending and they will recognise it is inefficient, it's not getting to the people who need it, and it's ultimately causing problems for them as individuals and families. I recognise this this year with my mother who needed a home care package.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Oh, my dad, so hard to get.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  So hard to get, waited, uh, what, waited for six months and then she was allowed 60% of the home care package. It's like saying, what do you do? Go into surgery and so I'll give you 60% of surgery? Like what, how did?

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Oh, my mother in her passing way before she could take advantage of it.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  She had to wait so long.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  I'm sorry to hear that. That's, I bet that's the sort of thing.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  She had MND and I can't believe it. And, you know, like how devastating that is.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  And she couldn't, the application process, it was also hard and traumatic for my dad to do it and it was a joke.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  And, and so we have, we have a triangle in our care economy, the much vaunted care economy of Jim Chalmers that is supposed to, you know, somehow cause the growth of this country. I, I haven't quite worked out how it's going to do that.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  But it does need to work for families. That's true. Now, it's composed of hospitals, it's composed of aged care and it's composed of the NDIS.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  And if any one of those is out of balance, the other two are going to fall over.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  They're going to suffer.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  And what we see at the moment is the NDIS at 56 billion that no one could possibly have imagined. Now, that is just extraordinary. And you're seeing hospitals starting to fall over and you're definitely already seeing aged care fall over because of the distortion that the NDIS has created in the care economy. And that's all we need to say, but you're not hearing anyone actually say that because apparently.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  Why don't they want to say, why, why is it that they're reticent about correcting end or saying?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Because I think, I think you'll get, you'll get smashed by the disability sector for doing it.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Is there, is there, is there like a lobby group that represents that sector?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, have a look at my LinkedIn. So I made these comments on, on the AFR Health Summit this year because I was frustrated. And the New South Wales Health Minister was there, Mark Butler had done the speech and nicked off on a plane. So I couldn't, I couldn't have a go at him. So Ryan Park, I had a go at Ryan, Ryan's actually great.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  New South Wales Minister.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  The New South Wales Minister of Health. Anyway, I said, you know, why, why aren't we taking some of the NDIS funding and putting into our hospitals and putting into our education system so you don't have 2,000 people in your hospitals waiting for an aged care bed?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Which is by the way, the case in New South Wales.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  It is the case in New South Wales. And, and that got applause in the audience at the AFR Health Summit. And so huge.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  He would have agreed with you by the way.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  He did agree with me and huge play on social, social media, particularly Instagram. But on LinkedIn, I got, I got murdered and, and by, by the disability advocacy group.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  They came after you.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Came after me, just as they came after me in COVID, when I was suggesting that we should open the borders round about mid, mid 2021. So I was one of the first official voices or anyone who had had any sort of role in COVID to say, let's open the borders in 2021. The people who came after me, the worst, at worst, were disability advocates. Now, I'm not talking about the whole disability community or everyone in Australia with a disability. I'm talking about certain advocates and they're the same people that went after me when I started talking about the NDIS. And all we are asking for here is balance. This gets right back to the way that our country's structured.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  It can't be, it's got to be individual, community, country and then identity. Because if not, then we are just run by this, you know, conga line of different advocacy groups and interest groups. And you see them, the conga line turns up every time Parliament happens. And so there's no sort of, there's no national direction. And every time you try and do something to rebalance, no one wants to stop funding the NDIS. We know it's going to cost tens of billions of dollars, and it should cost tens of billions of dollars. But it can't be fifty six billion, and it can't imbalance the two other sectors.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  To the extent it distorts the other two care economies.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  To the extent that it distorts the two other care economies. That is the problem.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  And that's a good point. And I want to put something to you, and I thought about this the other day. I was trying to simplify things in my head about what is the role of government? Obviously to govern, that includes regulatory stuff and all those sorts of things. Just keep it safe and make sure there's water and there's electricity and power and all those things. But just put those, park those for a moment. I want to put this to you. Is the role of a government, I'm talking about politicians, everybody sits below them in the bureaucracy.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  Is it okay to simplify it like this? You are there to build the progress of the country, of every individual in the country. In other words, our standard of living, every individual standard of living, you're there to maintain or improve it more economically, which is the most of the country. But then there will be some people in the country who don't do as well as others. And there's a level at which you have to determine. But those people need welfare. So that's the welfare part of your role. So your role is progress, not necessarily GDP, but it involves GDP, involves all those things. But it's about the standard of living of Australians, you know, can we all afford to send our kids to daycare? Can we afford

• 52:23Speaker 00

  to send our kids to get a music lesson? You know, if I live in the West, can I afford to send my kids to swimming lessons? That type of standard of living. I'm not talking about living in palaces. I'm just about standard of living. Can I afford to buy a house and just have a roof over my head? Or if I'm renting, because I don't want to buy a house, can I afford to pay my rent? I've been too stressed out. So. Building the standard of living for Australians, all Australians, and for those who people who don't fit in there, they could be disabled. They've never had a chance to be properly educated, they could come from, they could be First Nations people who haven't had an opportunity. They need welfare, I hate the word, but it's come up with some other word.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  But, but we have to be able to look after them.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Of support.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Support.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  There are.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  The support economy.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  That you, you, you definitely, you need, you need a generous public baseline of support and we do have that in this country.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  But we can't be overdone there.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  But we've moved towards defining what level of success is acceptable. And government tells you, no, no, no, you're a bit too successful, we've got a.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  No, too successful is what we need.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  I know, but government is now telling us too successful is what we need, we need more of that.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Now we've got government saying, oh, we'll be the ones that decide when you can be successful or not.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  So therefore, Nick, you would sort of, sort of agree to some extent with, I, I know I'm maybe simplifying, but I just wonder whether the voters in Australia, we need to have a simple formula. Like at the moment, it's convoluted, it's all over the joint.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Care economies, the NDIS, there's the, you know, the older people, younger people, people who haven't got a job, apprentices. I mean, there's so many sections, you don't know where the money's being spent, you can't follow the dollars anywhere. The taxes are really high, there's some people getting taxed for capital gains tax, some people, people not getting, getting a pay rise, other people not getting a pay rise. It's just out of control. If they just said something simple, we're going to increase the standard of living of every Australian. But at the same time, we're going to make sure that there is a welfare, we're going to make sure we look after the welfare of everybody as well. So nobody's going to really get, be in too much trouble. Everyone is going to get a chance to get up and, you know, and because, and in terms of monies taxed,

• 54:33Speaker 00

  you know, the taxes we raise, we're going to try and spend less on government.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Well, there was always, I I just wanna touch on the first two things you said.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Government is there to always raise the standard of living of Australians.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Correct, or not, definitely not lose it.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  We're going backwards.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  We've got, we're going backwards.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  They have been, if you do it in proper measurement terms, we've gone backwards over the last ten years.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  That's correct. So that should, that should be a measure. Australians want Australians who are in need supported. That's another measure.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  We all want that.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  We all want that, that, we, we wanna do that together. The third one used to be a very clear measure, which was governments had a certain, you know, we don't, we didn't have a, have a debt ceiling like the US, but we had a Charter of Budget Honesty and a notional percentage of GDP that we would take into government coffers, which is, as you know, been blown out. So I would, I would suggest to you that on those three measures, we're actually failing.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Because standard of living is measurably going backwards relative to both our own standard of living and the OECD. We don't seem to be able to have government programs that adequately balance each other. And the NDIS, aged care, healthcare example is, is, is a good one.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  So one, one, one of those three should not be paying for one of the others, or two should never be paying for one.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Two, two shouldn't be paying for one. That's right. And the third one is that the, the relative proportion of government expenditure as a proportion of GDP is too high.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  It's at an all time record.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  It's an all time.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  It's never been this high.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Yep. And then, you know.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Meaning, just for people who are watching this, Nick, meaning that more money is being spent by government on government employees or projects that are put out by government. More money's been spent on that relative to the amount of total gross domestic product of the whole country than has ever been spent as a percentage in our history.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Now, what happens when we go out of balance? Cause I think we are out of balance. When you've got lots of money in big pots, whether it's private, especially when it's government, you start getting leakage, you start getting fraud. We see that with the NDIS, but the other really big one that we see at the moment is what's going on with Building Bad down in Victoria and the big build.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  What we call is bordering on corruption.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Fifteen billion dollars. And I know I'm doing a shameless plug for the Conspiracy Cabal, but we do have an episode on this where we interview Nick McKenzie from The Age, who's blown the lid on this. And it is a fascinating insight into what happens when the worlds of politics, organised crime, business intersect together in a Venn diagram that is far too overlapping. Now, in a democracy, you don't want that organised crime circle. You never want it overlapping. And we, right at the start, we talked about corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa. Well, we have the worst example of corruption in your and my living

• 57:39Speaker 01

  memory occurring down in Victoria at the moment. And we've got to find a way to let Australians know about it. And firstly, to let them know about it. And secondly, to make them care enough to turf that mob out in the election of the year.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  November.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  In November. Because it, you know, anything you read about it, whether you listen to the podcast Conspiracy Cabal, or other things that Nick McKenzie's done, this is stomach curdling sort of stuff. When you're just the bloke or the girl holding that stop sign, you can earn more in this country than a nurse can.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  What is that?

• 58:13Speaker 01

  It's a problem. That's what it is.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  I mean, but how does that ever happen?

• 58:17Speaker 01

  We have to ask ourselves, you know, we have been sitting in this steadily boiling water as the proverbial frog, getting hotter and hotter and hotter into this political boiling water of corruption that we've got at the moment. And we just haven't noticed it. And we do have to get, we do have to notice it. We need to get some balance back into our politics. And the only way you can do that is, is with your, with your vote, I think.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  But did you think, you said something interesting before, one, be aware of it. Australians be aware of it, particularly in Victoria, Victorians be aware of it. But two, care enough about it. Did you, I know so many people in Victoria, and so many times I'm in a car, driver, whatever, taxi driver, Uber, all complaining. Over the last couple of years.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  Yet they keep getting, nothing happens, nothing changes.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, the polls.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  What is that?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think partly it's apathy, but it's partly also the framing. Cause you and I talking about this, people are gonna, just like my mate did with Dave Hughes. You know, two fellas have done pretty well, waxing lyrical about this stuff, having a whinge. Okay, when we interviewed Nick McKenzie on this, one of the problems with building bad is that the CFMU could be paid out to turn a blind eye to worker exploitation by companies. So the purpose of the union movement, which is to protect workers, is the opposite. And yet that whole little corrupt sphere there has to, has bastardised what the union movement is all about. Now, again, something that'll probably blow up a conservative political career.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  I'm a member of a union. I've been a member of the Australian Salaryed Medical Offices Federation and now I'm a member of the Health Services Union. So, you know, my, my soup is with an industry fund. I know what the value of organised labour is in a country, but this is where the balance has been completely lost. And we need to, we need to overcome people's apathy, but we also need to make them realise that even if they are a labour voter, this is bad for the union movement, it's really bad, what's going on down in Victoria.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  If it gets understood properly.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  If it gets understood.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  Is it because it's complicated?

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Uh, no, it's because we haven't had a royal commission.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  And who calls that, is that Victorian government or a federal government?

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  It's gotta be a Victorian one. I think, I, I, I think from COVID days, my understanding is that

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  federal government could call one, but then it wouldn't necessarily have the powers that a state government one would. So if the problem's in the state, you, it's preferable that the Victorian state government call it.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  Would you have liked us in a COVID royal commission?

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Ultimately, yes. I think we were.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Just to examine it properly.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think there were a,

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  you know, maybe, maybe have the Royal Commission down the track, maybe, you know, big build first.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  And then, and then let's have a look at COVID now that things have settled down and we can be a bit more dispassionate and less political about it. I do understand.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  By virtue of time.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  By virtue of time, but we need, there are still lessons from COVID that, that perhaps only a Royal Commission can, can uncover.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I often wonder, I mean, look, I resisted the vaccination until the very end. And because I had to travel to my farm, the only way I could actually travel was to produce a vaccination certificate. And I got the very first one because I was over the age group, whatever it was, I couldn't, I couldn't get the mRNA.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got the AstraZeneca, same with me.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  And literally they told me they didn't do it. I got my AstraZeneca, I caught it two days later.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  Oh, I got COVID two days because it was around News Even. My sons had all been out together on News Even. They all must have mixed with all their mates and some, they got it and they come around my place. Next thing you know, I got exposed to it and I caught it. But, but AstraZeneca didn't do anything for me. And since then, AstraZeneca pulled out, like they've said it didn't work or something like, what happened there?

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  They had to pull out because it had a very rare complication, but a fatal, ultimately a fatal one.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  About one in 250,000 people got it. Now, ordinarily, one in 250,000 is not a big risk in medicine. That's probably the risk you have of dying under a general anesthetic and plenty of people go and have surgery. But because we were giving everyone the vaccine at once, you were going to get deaths.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  As a result of it. And, and there was one particularly tragic one, Katie Lee's, you can read my comments about that in, in the media, but that really shifted my view as well. This was a young woman who, who got the AstraZeneca vaccine, was, was doing it because, you know, Team Australia, that was genuinely her view. I've spoken to her folks about it. And, and died and lost her life and.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Didn't get adequately compensated for it. The family got a paltry amount of money. So once again, you know, people would have tolerated all this if we'd got the balance of the settings right. And, you know, even the ABC, I think, has now done a done a radio national background briefing on the forgotten people who were vaccine injured. Now, I'm not of the view that that number is in the tens or hundreds of thousands. That's what you'll see online on Facebook and that's what, you know, One Nation senators will say and, and, and others. I'm not of that view at all.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  In terms of numbers?

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  In terms of numbers. But I am of the view that we undercounted it and I've said that publicly. And so again.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Do you think they should be compensated?

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  I think the compensation, I was the guy up there, honestly, Mark, I was the guy up there telling people, it's going to be okay. We've got a functioning compensation scheme, but we didn't have a functioning compensation scheme. We didn't. I think it's accepted that our, our compensation scheme was suboptimal. So this is the sort of thing.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  You mean suboptimal in the.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  The, the, the quantity of money that was given out for people. It was only $70,000 for Katie Lees's family who lost her life. Seventy thousand. It's an insult. They might as well not have paid anything.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  But, but, but how do they calculate that? Like.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Oh, the Royal Commission.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Royal Commission.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's what, that's why you need it. So you, you can, you can sit there and ask those sort of questions.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  But was it not enough money in the fund, the compensation fund, to pay out the number of people that you, because nobody expected this many people to be affected? Or was it the rules and regulations that sit around how much people get paid out per event?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  I suspect it was, you know, the, the rules around who qualified, number one. So it was too narrow cast. And number two, the, the quantum that was available. And, and so there, you know, but these are things that I think people will accept. You know, let me give you just quickly the example of open disclosure in, in hospital settings. When you get something wrong, the worst thing you can do to a patient is not admit it straight away. You'll get in more, more legal trouble every single time if you don't admit it straight away. And yet there have been very, very few public figures who have, have sat down and reflected on COVID and said, okay, we could have done this better, or in some cases, we did things that were, that were wrong.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  What would you say? You're Nick Coatsworth. I mean, what, what sort of things would you like to say that perhaps you could have got, you could have done better, or you might have, you may have got glaringly wrong?

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  I think.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  I think the mandates were wrong. I've already said that.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  The mandates to get back.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  The mandates to get back. So I think forcing people to get a medical treatment, it'll be astonishingly difficult. If we would have to have the most devastating pandemic ever, I mean, it's possible, but it would have to be devastating to bring that policy back in.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  That's that's one of you. Number two, stopping people crossing state borders in their own country. That was a major problem.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  I I've heard of people in New South Wales who want to go visit their dying parent in Queensland, who couldn't get there.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Palashay wouldn't let them in.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep. So that that that's that's really got to go. It's got to be a Team Australia approach. And and I think if we got, you know, if we got those two things right and then brought in the third one, which was, you know, if you're going to bring in any sort of policy, review its evidence, have it time bound and and genuinely think about whether you need to continue it. Then if we did those three things, then I think we'd be in a better position. We'd we'd certainly have more trust. We lost we lost trust amongst a good portion of the population.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  Do you think that trust in government has disappeared?

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Oh, I think, you know, you you spoke earlier, Mark, about polarization and and how we're further apart than we were before. That's the problem. It's it's not, we we have lost the middle, we've lost the balance. And some of those people were driven further towards what we would term the political right as a result of COVID, no doubt. And, you know, the people who sort of believed in what we were doing for COVID are moving more to the left. So we're in desperate need of, you know, something in the middle that can come back and and and reinvigorate the centre and and give us a that, give us a national project to work towards.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  But what happened to that Aussie who used to say, at least when I was younger, when you were younger, don't tell me what to fucking do. Like. I'm a good person. I work hard, pay my taxes. Don't tell me how to lead my life. Whatever happened to that Aussie? That's a very Aussie trait.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the, to me, that's the national project. Let's get that back.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, but what do you think happened to it there?

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Maybe life got a bit easy for us, bit complacent.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  We did too well.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, who knows? I mean, you know, again, spoke right at the start of the challenges my old man had losing his job in the eighties. Losing your job in the eighties as a late thirties, early forties bloke was, that was a big deal.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  My dad lost his job in the same period and I-

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Fifteen to seventeen percent interest rates.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  You know, struggling, I don't know how much debt that my mum and dad were into our school. By the time my brother and I finished, but they were paying it off for a long time afterwards. And they believed it. They believed in sending us to a private school. They worked hard to do it. Dad worked himself into the grave to do it. No doubt got early dementia because of it. And, and, and, and, and they had to work really hard.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Did your father die with dementia or from dementia?

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  He died from dementia and he got it. He probably started getting it in his sort of mid to late fifties.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Awful, awful type of dementia, frontotemporal dementia. And, you know, we just thought he had really, really bad dad jokes because they didn't make any sense. But that was the dementia starting.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  And it was nasty. It was like that, anyone who knows anyone with FTD, which has a little bit of an overlap with motor neuron disease, I might add. Is, you know, aggression, violence, you lose your inhibitions. And ultimately he lost the ability to speak. So that was a, that was a sort of devastating thing. But, you know, he was, he was a man who never stopped working for his family.

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, we're sort of sitting here painting not a great picture about Australia, but it doesn't take much to pick up from where we left off a long time ago, before all this stuff happened. It doesn't take that much, but it does take a bit of courage. Political courage.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  Just finally, I'm not seeking you to take sides here because we've just talked about that, but do you think that One Nation might be showing us the courage that a lot of Australians who used to sit in the middle of all this, who want to see Australia pulled back towards the middle, do you think that One Nation is appealing to them, not through policy, just by, just by examples of courage or interpretation that what they're doing, what One Nation are doing is courageous, do you think that?

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  I think there's a difference between anger and courage and that sometimes that they can be confused and in the absence of courage, people are going to go towards anger.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  And, and so we, we lack anyone who's really bold and courageous in Australian politics in terms of a party at the moment. And I think it's generally accepted that the Liberal Party had nine years of steadily declining courage when they were in power. I don't think the Labor Party is courageous at all. I don't, I don't see any positive national.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  There's no pork eating there.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  I don't see any positive national vision from them. And I think, I don't see a positive national vision from One Nation, but I do see justifiable anger. And I think that if you can take that anger and move it into, into the courageous space, then you've got, you've got something that Australians can work towards.

• 1:11:07Speaker 00

  Do you think Nick Coates will ever stand for parliament?

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  It's a pretty hard environment to sit on the sidelines, mate.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  It really is.

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  Well, I take that as a positive outcome. If I got anything out of this interview, that's my number one takeaway.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Well, maybe if I ever decide to stand, I'll come back and announce on Straight Talk.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  Give me a call. Good to see you, Nick.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Thanks, mate.