Threats to our Nationhood, and Solutions

Threats to our Nationhood, and Solutions


TRANSCRIPT: 

(This transcript is derived from an automated process.  The video recording is authoritative.)  

Gary Johns:
Thank you and Dev, that was excellent. I'm going to talk a little about immigration. So naturally I was a bit nervous that you might contradict me or more importantly I might contradict you. Don't worry, we won't.

In terms of immigration, the future of this country is pretty obvious. It will be Chinese and Indian. And whenever I see, which is pretty rarely a Chinese and an Indian couple walking down the street, I always try and have a little duck around and see what the child looks like and I don't mind, they'll all be beautiful so long as they share similar values to the ones that we believe in. What that means though is a bit tricky. So what I want to talk to you is about four threats to Australia. Two of them are direct and go to our security and two of them are more subtle.

They really threaten our tolerance. And these are the four. They're all very radical and dangerous things.

The first is radical Islam. The second is radical climate ideology. The third is radical identity politics. And the third is I'll call radical permissiveness and think of four images in the first I want to talk about radical Islam.

We have the image of burning synagogues in Australia. How do we avoid that? The second when we talk about radical climate change, ideology, think of blackouts. Blackouts will be with us in the near term because of our response to this one risk among many to the world of climate change. The third one, radical identity politics. Think of a young boy or girl who's probably in psychological distress, who's going under the knife thinking that they can change their sex and that will solve either a medical, well, a medical problem, may be psychological, it may be physical to some extent.

And the last one is just a contemplation on an observation on rough sleepers we see in the city that we didn't see 20 years ago, even though we're a more wealthy country. So I'll step through those four things, those challenges. Now, first of all, Islam is an enduring problem. Radical Islam is an enduring problem and a threat to basically a Christian Judeo society, the majority of whom no longer believe or go to church. So a vacuum is opening up and foolishly, it was a liberal governor actually who allowed in a very large number of Southern Lebanese Muslims in the seventies. And they're basically ignorant unschooled and had been at the base of most of the organised gangs and crimes in southwest Sydney for since the 1970s. And actually Concord has a brilliant book on this, which we talk about in a minute. This is not a criticism of the Muslim religion.

What I'm saying is there's a permission to be radical in the suns, particularly of Muslim migrants who are looking at the Middle East and its war mainly with Israel. So it's not a recent migrant problem, but it's a state of mind that has infected us with something we have to deal with, which is to of course secure Jewish people's safety. But our own safety, why are we having this discussion? And it's very quickly linked to immigration. Let's not have Muslim immigration for instance. Some people will make the link. That's not going to work. We simply can't have that discussion. It's too crude and not specific enough.

But nevertheless, there's something we can do Every immigrant in applying for permanent residence in Australia and then citizenship, it's at the citizenship level. When a person is asked to abide by a statement of values, basically liberty, democracy, equal rights and so on, which is something that John Howard brought in in 2007. It's never been disturbed by any other government, but it's pretty ineffectual because it's a tick the box exercise.

So I think that we had huge immigration programmes since World War II getting bigger, but there was always an assumption that people will integrate IE play by the rules even though the rules are a bit unstated. Whenever I hear anyone of any colour creed background with an Australian accent, I feel relaxed. It's just a signal that they're with us, whatever their beliefs. Dev, that's not quite true in your case, is it that accent?

It's not a serious observation, I'm just saying we all look, I think towards immigrants to know are they with us? And mostly they are, but of course there are mainly young men who really don't. And there are a lot of young non-Muslim university students who sat in campuses all around this country wanting Israel to be wiped out. And that was a disgrace in our vice. Chancellors are a disgrace for not throwing those kids off campus.

But anyway, back to the immigration thing. I think it is possible to say any person applying for permanent residence in Australia should have a values test offshore so that an Australian public servant delegate can have a fair income conversation as to whether they think that person is a good fit. Now the Dutch are doing this, in fact a lot of northern Europe are doing this. They're having discussions and making judgements about whether people will integrate, not simply allowing them in and then seeing how they go.

You literally have to do almost, I'd call it a certificate for an integration to get into the Netherlands now language, reading, writing the whole bit and have a job. So because as you know, Europe has a real Islamic problem, ours is rowing. So I think it's possible, even if it's not overly practical to begin a process where no immigrant should come to Australia unless they are pre-judged that we say they're ready, ready made to be integrated. And they will be skilled migrants almost by definition. But you can ask Ablo if his daughter, maybe the conversation's taking place in the Middle East somewhere is allowed to drive a car.

And you can ask sensitive questions that pretty quickly indicate to you that the person you're interviewing will find it difficult to integrate to Australia. And I'm advised by the lawyers that if a person is knocked back by a delegate to the Minister of Immigration offshore, they can appeal to an Australian court. It's just very expensive. Well that's good. Let it be so because I do think that we should control the number of people that come to Australia and what is it and the conditions under which they come. But it has to be a conversation that's not brutal, that's not targeted, but is a broad spectrum and applies to any person who wishes to come to Australia because we've lost the presumption that people integrate and we've lost those broader rules that were basically settled in the sort of Church of England and the Catholic church and so on.

They're not applying so rugby anymore. So we can't afford for blind assumptions to run us anymore. I think we have to be positive, set the rules, have the conversations, and apply the tests offshore that will help set at Bay radical Islam. But it's only a partial solution. Second bit radical climate ideology. Alright, Trumpy is an awful bastard, but he's our awful bastard. And the one thing that he will do, and he's already written his executive order as I understand it, is to take the US out of the Paris agreement. It's actually broader than that or he said it should be broader than that. It's the United Nations framework on climate change. That's the governing document. The Paris Agreement was sort of a derivative thing from that. So if the US pulls out of that and they must, Europe is going to be very embarrassed because much of Europe, let's think of Germany especially, is going broke because they've denied themselves coal switched off nuclear and they're buying gas from the Russians, which Trump, he told them a number of years ago, was not a smart thing to do.

So had we been more mature in our response to the threat of climate change, which I don't think is particularly great one, but nevertheless, let's leave it in there. Had we been smart as a country, our contribution would've been as each coal fire power station ran down and it was about to go out of business, we would've replaced it with the high intensity lower emission, coal fired power stations. And that would've done the job and we'd be billions of dollars better off today. And we wouldn't have to be handing over our money to organisations mainly owned by Americans and British and Japanese to make aluminium in this country. We wouldn't have needed all of that because they would've had cheap electricity. Too late for that. Hopefully Australians will realise that when the lights go out, we have been made to look fools in the eyes of the world over climate change. The two other things, those are direct threats to Australia. I haven't even mentioned China because everyone will think of them as a threat. The more subtle things, radical identity politics.

I'm uncomfortable as are many Australians, that young people so distraught in trying to understand their sex and their gender that they feel as though they've been born into the wrong body. And that must be an awful thing. And as I understand it, dysphoria is a real thing, so is homosexuality, but at least you know where you stand. And we've all, the western world especially has been through a revolution the last 30 or 40 years where hopefully properly we are more open and tolerant of people who are heterosexual and homosexual. But I think it's made it more difficult for kids growing up who are then told, well there aren't two genders, there are multiple genders and you are what you think you are. But I think the best science says, no, no, no, there are just two genders, but bodies may not line up well with what we would commonly associate with the two genders.

And in the midst of if you like radical identity politics, suddenly what is probably a medical or psychological problem becomes a problem of identification. And that somehow your problems, and they're mainly physically medical as I understand it, but they may be psychological, can be solved with chemicals or surgery. Now the Brits have been through this and are further down this track of gender reassignment than we have. And they had a woman, Dr. Cass, professor Cass, report on the business of interventions, serious interventions to change young people's sex. And she has basically said, stop it. We don't know the consequences of this.

I've got a little quote. She says, clinicians are unable to determine with any certainty which children and young people will go on to have an enduring trans identity. So the Brits have stopped it. We haven't are still mucking around because there are professors and associate professors of psychology and surgery in Australia that said, I have a child who will suicide if I don't change their sex. We don't know that the child may be suicidal because they have a mental or physical condition that makes it is going to make their life very difficult. And it's very difficult for them to understand where they sit in relation to male and female sex. And I can empathise.

I really am thinking of particular cases here, I can really empathise. But the medic's intervention at the moment is not stopping people from suicide. It's providing them, I think with false hope and that has to stop. And there are some very brave young psychiatrists in Queensland we know of who's been very brave in this regard and stood down from her work and she's fighting the good fight to say, for God's sake, just step back and be sure of what we're doing here before we think we can play God and change a person's sex.

And one little other note on that, I saw only a few days ago an application form for a commonwealth public service job, an application for a job that said, are you Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander? Are you L-G-B-T-I? Do you identify? That's a disgrace. They're really saying you might have a better job, a better prospect of getting this job if you tick one of these boxes.

Now, I've never seen that before. I've been involved just because I was in the Commonwealth Public Service for a while in surveys of public servants to say, do you identify or are you aboriginal Torres Strait Islander? But that's after they've got the job. This is before they're chosen. So keep your eye on Janet Bergson's column in the near future. I think she might write something about this, but this is just a disgrace that some would choose on the basis of identity that must be gone.

The last one couple of minutes, the radical permissiveness. This is pretty easy. If you go to Vancouver where I visit a bit, there's a little place called Feni Lane Plan words, fentanyl, people who are drugged on fentanyl. And you'll see them standing on the street and they're literally how I might be later tonight. They're bent like that. It's frightening to see.

It's as if they're frozen and apparently this is fentanyl and other drugs mixed in. Why has that happened and why is there such homelessness on the west coast of the US and increasingly through the US? And why it's coming here is because we thought that people who had mental health problems should live among us in the community. And that really meant that they lived on the street.

And until we're brave enough to say that we must reclaim institutions and that some people who cannot live among us should live cared for in the best possible way, but they'll have to be in institutions, not the old ones we closed down in the eighties, of course, but more benign institutions. No reason why a person should live on the street. Their lives there are very tough and very short and very brutal, and they're more likely to be feeders for the drugs industry.

Those are my four really dangerous threats to Australia. We do have solutions. Stick with us and we'll work on it.

Thank you.

Threats to our Nationhood, and Solutions
Watch the video


TRANSCRIPT: 

(This transcript is derived from an automated process.  The video recording is authoritative.)  

Gary Johns:
Thank you and Dev, that was excellent. I'm going to talk a little about immigration. So naturally I was a bit nervous that you might contradict me or more importantly I might contradict you. Don't worry, we won't.

In terms of immigration, the future of this country is pretty obvious. It will be Chinese and Indian. And whenever I see, which is pretty rarely a Chinese and an Indian couple walking down the street, I always try and have a little duck around and see what the child looks like and I don't mind, they'll all be beautiful so long as they share similar values to the ones that we believe in. What that means though is a bit tricky. So what I want to talk to you is about four threats to Australia. Two of them are direct and go to our security and two of them are more subtle.

They really threaten our tolerance. And these are the four. They're all very radical and dangerous things.

The first is radical Islam. The second is radical climate ideology. The third is radical identity politics. And the third is I'll call radical permissiveness and think of four images in the first I want to talk about radical Islam.

We have the image of burning synagogues in Australia. How do we avoid that? The second when we talk about radical climate change, ideology, think of blackouts. Blackouts will be with us in the near term because of our response to this one risk among many to the world of climate change. The third one, radical identity politics. Think of a young boy or girl who's probably in psychological distress, who's going under the knife thinking that they can change their sex and that will solve either a medical, well, a medical problem, may be psychological, it may be physical to some extent.

And the last one is just a contemplation on an observation on rough sleepers we see in the city that we didn't see 20 years ago, even though we're a more wealthy country. So I'll step through those four things, those challenges. Now, first of all, Islam is an enduring problem. Radical Islam is an enduring problem and a threat to basically a Christian Judeo society, the majority of whom no longer believe or go to church. So a vacuum is opening up and foolishly, it was a liberal governor actually who allowed in a very large number of Southern Lebanese Muslims in the seventies. And they're basically ignorant unschooled and had been at the base of most of the organised gangs and crimes in southwest Sydney for since the 1970s. And actually Concord has a brilliant book on this, which we talk about in a minute. This is not a criticism of the Muslim religion.

What I'm saying is there's a permission to be radical in the suns, particularly of Muslim migrants who are looking at the Middle East and its war mainly with Israel. So it's not a recent migrant problem, but it's a state of mind that has infected us with something we have to deal with, which is to of course secure Jewish people's safety. But our own safety, why are we having this discussion? And it's very quickly linked to immigration. Let's not have Muslim immigration for instance. Some people will make the link. That's not going to work. We simply can't have that discussion. It's too crude and not specific enough.

But nevertheless, there's something we can do Every immigrant in applying for permanent residence in Australia and then citizenship, it's at the citizenship level. When a person is asked to abide by a statement of values, basically liberty, democracy, equal rights and so on, which is something that John Howard brought in in 2007. It's never been disturbed by any other government, but it's pretty ineffectual because it's a tick the box exercise.

So I think that we had huge immigration programmes since World War II getting bigger, but there was always an assumption that people will integrate IE play by the rules even though the rules are a bit unstated. Whenever I hear anyone of any colour creed background with an Australian accent, I feel relaxed. It's just a signal that they're with us, whatever their beliefs. Dev, that's not quite true in your case, is it that accent?

It's not a serious observation, I'm just saying we all look, I think towards immigrants to know are they with us? And mostly they are, but of course there are mainly young men who really don't. And there are a lot of young non-Muslim university students who sat in campuses all around this country wanting Israel to be wiped out. And that was a disgrace in our vice. Chancellors are a disgrace for not throwing those kids off campus.

But anyway, back to the immigration thing. I think it is possible to say any person applying for permanent residence in Australia should have a values test offshore so that an Australian public servant delegate can have a fair income conversation as to whether they think that person is a good fit. Now the Dutch are doing this, in fact a lot of northern Europe are doing this. They're having discussions and making judgements about whether people will integrate, not simply allowing them in and then seeing how they go.

You literally have to do almost, I'd call it a certificate for an integration to get into the Netherlands now language, reading, writing the whole bit and have a job. So because as you know, Europe has a real Islamic problem, ours is rowing. So I think it's possible, even if it's not overly practical to begin a process where no immigrant should come to Australia unless they are pre-judged that we say they're ready, ready made to be integrated. And they will be skilled migrants almost by definition. But you can ask Ablo if his daughter, maybe the conversation's taking place in the Middle East somewhere is allowed to drive a car.

And you can ask sensitive questions that pretty quickly indicate to you that the person you're interviewing will find it difficult to integrate to Australia. And I'm advised by the lawyers that if a person is knocked back by a delegate to the Minister of Immigration offshore, they can appeal to an Australian court. It's just very expensive. Well that's good. Let it be so because I do think that we should control the number of people that come to Australia and what is it and the conditions under which they come. But it has to be a conversation that's not brutal, that's not targeted, but is a broad spectrum and applies to any person who wishes to come to Australia because we've lost the presumption that people integrate and we've lost those broader rules that were basically settled in the sort of Church of England and the Catholic church and so on.

They're not applying so rugby anymore. So we can't afford for blind assumptions to run us anymore. I think we have to be positive, set the rules, have the conversations, and apply the tests offshore that will help set at Bay radical Islam. But it's only a partial solution. Second bit radical climate ideology. Alright, Trumpy is an awful bastard, but he's our awful bastard. And the one thing that he will do, and he's already written his executive order as I understand it, is to take the US out of the Paris agreement. It's actually broader than that or he said it should be broader than that. It's the United Nations framework on climate change. That's the governing document. The Paris Agreement was sort of a derivative thing from that. So if the US pulls out of that and they must, Europe is going to be very embarrassed because much of Europe, let's think of Germany especially, is going broke because they've denied themselves coal switched off nuclear and they're buying gas from the Russians, which Trump, he told them a number of years ago, was not a smart thing to do.

So had we been more mature in our response to the threat of climate change, which I don't think is particularly great one, but nevertheless, let's leave it in there. Had we been smart as a country, our contribution would've been as each coal fire power station ran down and it was about to go out of business, we would've replaced it with the high intensity lower emission, coal fired power stations. And that would've done the job and we'd be billions of dollars better off today. And we wouldn't have to be handing over our money to organisations mainly owned by Americans and British and Japanese to make aluminium in this country. We wouldn't have needed all of that because they would've had cheap electricity. Too late for that. Hopefully Australians will realise that when the lights go out, we have been made to look fools in the eyes of the world over climate change. The two other things, those are direct threats to Australia. I haven't even mentioned China because everyone will think of them as a threat. The more subtle things, radical identity politics.

I'm uncomfortable as are many Australians, that young people so distraught in trying to understand their sex and their gender that they feel as though they've been born into the wrong body. And that must be an awful thing. And as I understand it, dysphoria is a real thing, so is homosexuality, but at least you know where you stand. And we've all, the western world especially has been through a revolution the last 30 or 40 years where hopefully properly we are more open and tolerant of people who are heterosexual and homosexual. But I think it's made it more difficult for kids growing up who are then told, well there aren't two genders, there are multiple genders and you are what you think you are. But I think the best science says, no, no, no, there are just two genders, but bodies may not line up well with what we would commonly associate with the two genders.

And in the midst of if you like radical identity politics, suddenly what is probably a medical or psychological problem becomes a problem of identification. And that somehow your problems, and they're mainly physically medical as I understand it, but they may be psychological, can be solved with chemicals or surgery. Now the Brits have been through this and are further down this track of gender reassignment than we have. And they had a woman, Dr. Cass, professor Cass, report on the business of interventions, serious interventions to change young people's sex. And she has basically said, stop it. We don't know the consequences of this.

I've got a little quote. She says, clinicians are unable to determine with any certainty which children and young people will go on to have an enduring trans identity. So the Brits have stopped it. We haven't are still mucking around because there are professors and associate professors of psychology and surgery in Australia that said, I have a child who will suicide if I don't change their sex. We don't know that the child may be suicidal because they have a mental or physical condition that makes it is going to make their life very difficult. And it's very difficult for them to understand where they sit in relation to male and female sex. And I can empathise.

I really am thinking of particular cases here, I can really empathise. But the medic's intervention at the moment is not stopping people from suicide. It's providing them, I think with false hope and that has to stop. And there are some very brave young psychiatrists in Queensland we know of who's been very brave in this regard and stood down from her work and she's fighting the good fight to say, for God's sake, just step back and be sure of what we're doing here before we think we can play God and change a person's sex.

And one little other note on that, I saw only a few days ago an application form for a commonwealth public service job, an application for a job that said, are you Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander? Are you L-G-B-T-I? Do you identify? That's a disgrace. They're really saying you might have a better job, a better prospect of getting this job if you tick one of these boxes.

Now, I've never seen that before. I've been involved just because I was in the Commonwealth Public Service for a while in surveys of public servants to say, do you identify or are you aboriginal Torres Strait Islander? But that's after they've got the job. This is before they're chosen. So keep your eye on Janet Bergson's column in the near future. I think she might write something about this, but this is just a disgrace that some would choose on the basis of identity that must be gone.

The last one couple of minutes, the radical permissiveness. This is pretty easy. If you go to Vancouver where I visit a bit, there's a little place called Feni Lane Plan words, fentanyl, people who are drugged on fentanyl. And you'll see them standing on the street and they're literally how I might be later tonight. They're bent like that. It's frightening to see.

It's as if they're frozen and apparently this is fentanyl and other drugs mixed in. Why has that happened and why is there such homelessness on the west coast of the US and increasingly through the US? And why it's coming here is because we thought that people who had mental health problems should live among us in the community. And that really meant that they lived on the street.

And until we're brave enough to say that we must reclaim institutions and that some people who cannot live among us should live cared for in the best possible way, but they'll have to be in institutions, not the old ones we closed down in the eighties, of course, but more benign institutions. No reason why a person should live on the street. Their lives there are very tough and very short and very brutal, and they're more likely to be feeders for the drugs industry.

Those are my four really dangerous threats to Australia. We do have solutions. Stick with us and we'll work on it.

Thank you.