TRIGGERnometry - Can We Solve the Migrant Crisis? with Helen Dale

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

Journalist, Lawyer and Author Helen Dale joins us for a second time. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Boster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant returning guest today is a lawyer, journalist, author. Helen Dale, welcome back to Trigonometry. Hello, Constantine. Hello, Francis. It's good to have you back. I've just realized... It looks very different. It does indeed. And I've just realized that were it not for my cream jacket, we'd look like a pair of undertakers, all in black.

Well, that's normally what we do. People normally come here at the ends of their careers after being cancelled. And we just bury them. The last time we had you on the show, France is jokingly quipped that something about Australians, your country, being associated with racism in the minds of people in this country. And you made the distinction that Australia actually has very good race relations within the country, broadly speaking. But it's the treatment of refugees and the refugee problem. that is the source of the jokes that people make and the source of many problems in Australia itself. And it seems now that we are moving in that direction in this country with the so-called migrant crisis or the refugee crisis, or whatever term is more appropriate. So what can we in this country learn from the experiences of Australia

and what do we need to think about in that context? Well, the first thing is, the first observation I'd make is that the debate that Britain is having now is that the same debate that Australia had, initially in 1992, when Paul Keating, Labour Prime Minister, introduced mandatory detention, and then more intensely in 2001, during what is known as the Tampa Affair, when John Howard was Prime Minister,

and then in that year what was known as the Tampa Election, he then was re-elected Prime Minister partly on the back of the Tampa election. The debate is identical. It's really freaky and weird. I see comments being made by people and the back and forth. And it's a very odd sense of deja vu because the accents are different, but the arguments are exactly the same. And unfortunately, though, because Britain has generally lower state capacity than Australia, the arguments are not as erudite. I mean, if you go back and watch or read Keating's speeches about these issues, or John Howard's or Bob Hawks, Bob Hawke's, Bob Hawke was the Prime Minister before Paul Keating, if you look at when

Scott Morrison was the immigration minister in Tony Abbott's government, he was the one who stopped the boats. And I did notice, I mean, in the middle of a lot of very unfair criticism of Tony Abbott during recent controversies, a lot of people were also attributing to Tony Abbott, oh but Tony Abbott stopped the boats. And in a headline sense that's true, he was the Prime Minister. But the person who did the detailed policy work was Scott Morrison. He was the immigration minister at the time. Scott Morrison is now, of course, the Australian Prime Minister. So Abbott was kind of getting credit for something that he didn't actually personally do. Whereas the trade deals, that's much more the PMO, the Prime Minister's office in Australia.

So he does deserve the credit for those because they are, they tend to be worked up in the PMO in Australian Parliament House in Canberra. But more broadly, coming back to the issue, you said the arguments are the same. So perhaps for people who haven't been paying that close attention or people, we have people watching the show all over the world, we have an issue which is we have an increasing numbers of people crossing the English Channel from France on boats, who, some of whom are genuine refugees, some of whom are claiming to be refugees, some of whom are quite obviously economic migrants, and they're coming into this country illegally, claiming asylum, etc.

So just give us the broad context. What are the arguments on both sides about this? Okay, what happens is in a country, pick a country at the moment, it's Britain, people arrive and claim asylum. And there are disputes about whether they are actually. able to claim asylum and there's all sorts of detail there. But what happens in the process of them turning up is that because there is a network, a web of international treaties, supposedly, but you've got to be careful of this, governing how refugees or people who claim refugee status, they claim asylum, they haven't been proven to be refugees, they have to go through a process for that to happen. They turn up in a country and they're not wanted by the local people. That's

almost inevitably the case, and yet it's very difficult for countries to make their nation state unattractive, particularly if it's a developed country. And Britain is a good example of that. Australia was a good example of that, to make their nation state unattractive in some way to repel boatloads of refugees. In this context, it's important to draw a distinction between immigration, which is regulated everywhere. People have different rules. There are better and worse systems of rules, but it's all subject to a legal process. You've been through this process. You've been through aspects of this process with your family. So have I in Australia and the UK. That's one completely different area. And it is actually much more controlled, particularly now

Brexit has happened than people give it credit for. Refugees, asylum seekers, totally different kettle of fish. Now what happened in Australia was basically we have always had the experience and the expression that's used in Australia is boat people attempting to seek sanctuary in Australia because the region, not as much now, but it was historically quite unstable around Australia. You know, lots of third world dictatorships basically, whereas Australia was this prosperous, orderly country that had a very high standard of living and high GDP and all of that kind of thing. And the other issue, and this is something that I didn't say when I talked about the immigration issue on Mike Graham's show, but I will say here because I've got more time, is that the journey to Northern Australia, if you are an asylum seeker, is perilous. And one of the big differences between the situation that Britain is confronted with and what happened in Australia historically is that there is a very large difference between.

the 22 miles of the English Channel and the T-Maw-C. So, and the peril in Australia is twofold. It's not just the size and the expanse and the hostility of the ocean. Is in Northern Australia, if you miss Darwin or Broome, you finish up wandering around in very, very inhospitable country. And you will die unless you're very, very lucky, unless you happen to pitch up near a remote. remote outstation or a remote Aboriginal community.

And some of the Aboriginal communities are so remote, they might see white people or yellow people, Asian people, once a year, if they're lucky. So all the jokes about Australia, you know, it's full of things that want to kill you. These apply in spades in northern Australia, the home of the saltwater crocodile. Just like crossing the channel landing in Huddersfield.

Yeah, all right. People of Huddersfield. I'm angry. They've all stopped watching a long time. All right. Okay. But basically it's full of things that will eat you, sting you, drown you, make your life awful.

So there has always been incumbent on the Australian government a degree of protection for people who do try to make that crossing because there is such a good chance that they will die in the process of doing so. because it's the T-MALC, because it's Northern Australia. What Keating did in 1992 was because people objected to this, the electorate basically objects to people pitching up and saying, I want to live here now.

And people object to that. Some of that is to do with a confusion with immigration. People look at immigration and see that it's regulated, it's controlled, it's subject to a legal process. Then they see asylum seekers and it's not. and they seem to be taking away. And in some ways, there's an element of truth in this. They seem to be taking away from legitimate immigrants

and getting something illegitimately. It does look like that. And the Australian expression that is used, and I've heard people over here starting to use it now, is they're queue jumping. Now, when they say that, Australians do, it's a two-fold claim. One, they're jumping the queue and getting a hit of legitimate immigrants

because of that tendency to confuse the two. But the other one is that they're getting ahead of legitimate refugees who have already been assessed in third countries, whether it's in Indonesia, typically in Australia, our experiences with the government of Indonesia has decided either they are a refugee or they aren't a refugee. And so once those decisions have been made by the government in Jakarta, Australia will always look more favourably on those people because they've already been assessed to be refugees. And so if someone just pitches up in Northern Australia, they queue jump, they get ahead of people who have already achieved the legal status of refugee, which is different from the claim of asylum. They've actually ticked the various boxes that the United Nations and sometimes local governments have extra things, that the United Nations says this person is a refugee. They are fleeing persecution for X or Y reason.

You should let them come into your country subject to these rules. So when Australians use the expression, Q-jumping, it has that two-fold meaning. The first is kind of imprecise and the second is very precise and quite accurate. What Keating did, and then even more intensely, John Howard in 2001, was got sick of people turning up uninvited. And because Australia, like Britain, has a cultural opposition to the use of identity cards, you can track people much more easily. If you're from a Roman law country

that has no problem with the use of identity cards, always remember that papers please, a piece of paper proves what you are and who you are and how many heads you've got and so on and your social status, that goes back to ancient Rome. Because slavery to them was a piece of paper. It wasn't a comment on your moral worth. This is the difference between Roman civilization

and Greek civilization. So the Roman view of identity papers has passed into every European country based on Roman law and then into the laws of the European Union. Common law countries have a different history and a different tradition. Identity cards and identity papers are associated with, you know, Papua Pita from World War II and Alo and Dad's Army and all of that. And that's something those bad, the bad Bosch and bad Germans did. You know, Jerry did that.

We don't do that. but it does mean that it's harder to keep track of people. Now, the Australian government under Bob Hawke tried to do what Tony Blair's government did and introduce ID cards. It absolutely, and it was going to be called the Australia card. It absolutely blew up all over the Hawke Keating government, even though it was very competent in many other respects. It failed.

And I remember graffiti on bridges. You've already got an identity. You don't need a card. No to the Australia card. So that battle was lost in Australia the same way it was lost here, which meant that once asylum seekers got into the country, and if they got away from port officials, because there's an awful lot of coastline,

then they were almost impossible to trace. Sometimes this could mean people dying in the desert, literally, or eaten by a crocodile, but in other places they just dissipated into the population. So Keating introduced mandatory detention. If you pitch up in Australia, you will be locked up in a detention. Center. And we will assess whether you are a refugee or not. And it was basically Australia saying, no, we set these rules, you don't. But it wasn't at this stage the kind of rejection of the regime

that exists for refugee policy under international law and under the refugee convention. That had to wait until 2001, where Timor Sea, unseaworthy vessels coming across trying to get to Australia, a great big lot of, mainly Afghan and asylum seekers, were rescued by a Norwegian-flagged vessel, the M.V. Tampa. And they were quite safe once they'd been rescued. It was a maritime, merchant vessel, maritime vessel. They were quite safe, but the Norwegian sailors had nowhere to put them. And so there were incredible aerial photos before drones, incredible aerial photographs of the deck, the entire deck of a big shipping vessel. And you know what these look like. You see them here, shipping cranes and whatnot, covered with all these asylum seekers. And they were

going to finish up being deposited in Australia. And the government actually rushed through emergency legislation, creating what was known as it developed as the Pacific solution. It was such a bad name. It's just a bad name. It's a bad name. The connotations historically. You don't want to go there.

Yeah, but at least it has more sunshine. Pacific solution. Yeah, the Pacific solution. That was what they called it. Yeah. This is why when people were joking about, no, Tony Abbott isn't actually a racist or a homophobic. a sexist, he's just an Australian.

You know, all the Monty Python jokes, Bruce in charge of the sheep dip and, you know, and no pofters! I mean, this is just, Australians are extremely blunt. Even wokeism has not been able to remove the bluntness of Australians, basically. It's a very blunt culture. So Pacific solution it became. And this had a number of elements, but one of them was just excising all the islands around Northern Australia, basically,

from what is defined in the relevant legislation as the migration zone, which meant that if you landed on one of those islands, you couldn't legitimately claim asylum under the international legislation under the Refugee Convention. Now, at various times, these policies were challenged in the country's superior constitutional court,

a high court of Australia. Yes, Australia has a written constitution like the United States. Yes, it's broadly speaking, it's a liberal democracy, it's Westminster-based, and the things you associate with the Westminster democracy are entrenched in the Constitution. It does not, however, have a Bill of Rights. Australia is a non-rights-based policy, basically. That doesn't mean that rights don't exist, but they just don't exist in the Constitution. So it's very difficult if you are over massive human rights booster to try to entrench the approach to immigration or race relations or

anything like that unless you get bipartisan support for it from the from the labor party and the coalition the coalition being a unity ticket between the liberals and the nationals because if you don't get support for your legislation from both of them the other lot when they get elected it'll just repeal it. And that's what tends to. There's lots of examples of that in Australian history. You have to win over, you have to persuade like two-thirds of the people and two-thirds of the politicians to support your idea. But Helen, doesn't the Australians have a major advantage in that you referred it to yourself as being a blunt culture? They get to the point. They discuss it. Whereas English people are, well, I'm sorry. We don't seem to be able to have a rational discussion

about immigration. I'm 38 years old and I haven't, I can't see, I can't remember a time where we have been able to have that discussion in this country. Well, historically you couldn't have it. And this is one where the Brexiteers win this particular argument. Historically, you couldn't have an adult conversation about immigration because of membership of the, and this is just broadly immigration, not just refugees, but immigration because of your membership of the European Union. And I'm sorry, that's, that's why it festered. I mean, and all those people, regardless of their politics, who, you know, when they were asked by people from the BBC, or why do you have a problem with immigration from the EU and people who responded, well, we weren't asked. That's an entirely fair response because Australians get asked every three years. And the reason the salience of immigration went so bonkers in 2016 was precisely,

because people were being asked for the first time. And it's ebbed away since, and I mean, and obviously even before COVID things had other things had ebbed away. Brexit had become a proxy for it, but also the Brexit vote was we have now brought this, we have taken back control, the old take back control slogan from 2016. If immigration is brought under municipal control, domestic law, at the national level, then people are often more tolerant of immigrants than they appeared to be before that moment happened, because it is now in the hands of the electorate

rather than in the hands of a supranational entity. Now, Australia basically has abrogated the refugee convention. What does abrogate mean for people who are watching? People who aren't lawyers. Okay, abrogation, in this context, it means they're signed up to the convention, but they've got so many carve-outs and exemptions that it doesn't apply. So the law is, it's a dead letter. The expression that sometimes used amongst lawyers is they talk about a piece of legislation

falling into dissuadeude, desuitude or dissuadeude. But it's been abrogated, it's a dead letter. Basically, Australia is formally a signatory, but it's not following the rules. It's not following the rules. And because there's so little in the way of human rights legislation in Australia and because the immigration and refugee policy is set on a bipartisan level, and it can't be changed.

Okay. So what happens now in Australia if a boat from X reaches mainland Australia? Mandatory detention on shore. And due to something it was introduced by Kevin Rudd, and I also didn't, he was a Labour Prime Minister, I didn't mention this in my chat with Mike Graham, but one of the things that Kevin Rudd did, he was Prime Minister twice, and the first time he was Prime Minister when he was elected in 2007,

he thought that the regime in Australia that had been introduced, the Pacific solution introduced by John Howard, which was so harsh. You did genuinely have boatloads of people in unseaworthy vessels if the Tampa wasn't there, something like that, to rescue them, they drowned. You know, we did have incidences like that. There's a memorial in Canberra to one lot of them, and you've got all these little headstones, and we've got a couple hundred people just drowned. But that drowning had an effect.

They stopped coming. The boats stopped coming because, oh my God, they're not going to let us in, and they won't rescue us either. It had a terrifying effect on the people smugglers. it collapsed their business model basically because this government was not going to come to their rescue. But Kevin Rudd introduced, if you pitch up by boat and you do get to the mainland,

so you don't finish up on one of the islands that's been excised from the migration zone, Kevin Rudd passed his government, passed legislation. The second time around, that you will never ever have the opportunity to be an Australian citizen that chance is removed from you. And because basically, for a whole range of historical reasons, Australia has gone down,

the rights are a function of citizenship path, rather than rights are a function of residence path. So the rights are a function of residence path. It tends to be what's happened in the European Union and the UK. Rights are a function of citizenship is what's happened in Australia, New Zealand. it exists in Japan, it exists to a degree in the United States, although America is a very badly governed country, so it's a bit difficult to say what they're doing at any one time.

So what that means, if you're not an Australian citizen and can never be an Australian citizen, there are certain things that you will never be able to do. And the most obvious headline one is vote. You will never be able to cast a ballot in Australia. But there are also welfare implications and employment, implications. You can't become a police officer. You can't join the army. You can't join the civil service. It has serious implications. It makes Australia a far less attractive place to go to.

Now, Kevin Rudd did that because when he, because he was prime minister twice and there was Julia Gillard in the middle, this was this extraordinary period where Australia had six prime ministers in eight years. The first time, he did try to soften the Pacific solution. He thought it was too cruel. And Kevin Rudd was an ex-diplomat. He spoke fluent Mandarin. He was very outward-looking, very trade-oriented. He was the kind of person who you would expect to be pro both refugees and immigration. The effect, though, of his loosening, and I won't go into the details, but of his loosening of the rules, was that boats started coming again, people smugglers, same as we've got in the channel, and the same problem of unseaworthy vessels and people,

drowning. That started to happen again. An enormous pressure was being brought to bear within the Labor Party. You need to do something about this. This is, you're losing electoral consent for all the legitimate immigration because you've got people turning up in the country again. Because that's what happens, basically. If you don't have immigration under domestic control, you lose electoral consent for it and you get 2016. That's what happens. If it's not kept under the control of people who vote in this country. It's left under the auspices of a supernational entity, whether it's the European Union or the UN or whatever, European Union here, then you lose the electoral consent and you get hostility to all immigration. Now, in Australia,

that's very dangerous. It's a huge country and still underpopulated relative to the amount of arable land and livable countryside and so on and so forth. And since 1945, of Australia has had a policy of populate or perish, because it came within a bees dick of being overrun by the Japanese during the Second World War. The Battle of the Coral Sea was a Japanese invasion fleet steaming towards Australia. And this tiny country that, for all the bravery of its soldiers, legendarily brave military personnel,

I mean, it was actually said at the time in the Japanese high command Tojo commented, if we conquer, invade Australia and conquer it, we will have to kill every single one of them. So that is burnt into the cultural memory of Australia, the Battle of the Coral Sea. And just more generally, an awareness of the Pacific War. So we have to keep immigration legitimate in Australia. It has to remain popular on a bipartisan level.

You cannot have the presence of a few or refugees wrecking the rest of the system because of this vast size of the country and its desperate need for more people. So you can't let this little group over here, you might be being terribly persecuted, that might be true and that's fine and that's dandy, ruin the chances and the popular support for this vast group of people who were admitted every year into the country. Paul Keating realized this in 1992. John Howard realized it even more intensely in 2001. And then Kevin Rudd, when he became Prime Minister the second time around in 2013,

he realized it as well. So he brought the rule in that said, if you pitch up and demand asylum in Australia by boat in this irregular way, rather than going through the formal channels in Indonesia or on the islands excluded from the migration zone, you will never be a citizen of Australia. That's how intense it is. And that is, in my view, that is that rule that Rudd introduced,

which the country still has, is a clear abrogation of the refugee convention. But as is always the case with international law, there's really no one to enforce it. So if a country decides that it's just not going to play by those particular rules, there is nothing that can really be done. What made the European Union directive so interesting and different from international law? This is why EU lawyers, they will describe the architecture of the European Union.

They call it sui generis of its own kind, unique, that means in Latin, because it is a very, very distinctive legal order. It's at once international law, but it's international law with teeth. and that's what made the situation so desperately difficult for Britain and it's what led the immigration issue to explode, not just all over the UK in 2016, but look at what happened in Germany. You had a whole new political party that's now got lots of seats

in the Bundestag founded over Angela Merkel's mishandling of immigrants. Look what happened in Greece. Look what happened in Hungary. All of these other countries, including in countries, because for years, people always thought, oh, there will be no hard right political party in Germany ever. The closest that they'll ever get is something that's kind of like the Tory party. There will never be, I mean, Matthew Goodwin used to say this before he, you know, everyone used to say this.

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And we're not going to explain how to spell the word. were trigger because that would be patronising. And Helen, going back to the UK, now, so your argument seems to be that we need a clear, simple system for dealing with immigration, with penalties for people who pitch up in the manner that they've been doing. Why is it in this country, we've got a conservative government. We don't seem to be having a clear system. We don't seem to be having any form of penalties. People seem to be arriving here and then they get put on a coat. and they get taken to a hotel, which is incentivising people to cross the chance. Yes, it is.

As every Australian and as Tony Abbott's been popping up, and as every Australian will tell you, that's exactly what will happen, yes. Yeah, which is therefore incentivising organised crime, which is incentivising people to come over and risk their lives. Why is it under a Conservative government, we don't seem to have a clear and workable system? A lot of this, in fact, I'd venture to say that all of it, is to do with low state capacity.

State capacity is the ability of a state to project power over its own population. We're not talking about foreign countries, we're talking about within population. That means things like prosecuting criminals, ensuring things aren't corrupt, collecting taxes, securing the borders, state capacity. It's actually very hard to do well. If you want to, I made the comment in the last time I was on Trigger, I referred to the United States as a failed state. It's the failure to do those kind of things at all, let alone well, is what makes Australians look at

American and go, that's a failed state. I love the way Helen was very concerned about offending the people of Huddersfield, which has no problem calling the biggest, most powerful country in the world a failed state. No concerns about that whatsoever. Absolutely, and it's not like they've got guns either. Well, they all got guns and they're busily shooting each other. Oh, I see the Americans are shooting each other again. That's their favorite trick.

So what you've got is partly because of membership of the European Union, but only partly because it became very convenient for incompetent British governments to shoot the blame upstairs to Brussels. They were always doing that. But partly because of reasons endogenous to the UK, if there is one ministry that I would fire out of the solar system, it is the Home Office. To use a very crude Australian expression, the home office could not run a two-door shithouse. The home office could not organise a piss-up in a brewery.

The home office could not organise a fuck in a brothel. In ascending levels of rudeness, I've just given you three. You've given us the full range. I like the fact you weren't with two-door shit-house. Having experienced a London rental market, I'm sure I've stayed in a few two-door shit houses in my time. Couldn't afford it, isn't. To give you an idea of how useless the home office is, remember the wind rush scandal? Yes.

Now, at the time, a lot of people were trying to claim this happened because the home office is racist. Remember? Yes. If only it was so simple. Life would be so much easier if it was just the fact that the home office were racist. Because you would then be able to go through and find all the racists. Racists are generally fairly obvious about what they are and who they are and what they believe, you just find all the racists and sack them.

And then the home office would be fine. However, this would not happen because the home office is fucked. The problem that you've got with the dinghies turning up from Calais is partly a function of your legal system. We're still in the process of unwinding a lot of the EU stuff. But most of it is just a function of sheer incomprehend. But they're confident enough to get these people onto buses and into hotels, right? They seem competent at that.

Well, I mean, your local high school can do this, and so can your local Fiverside Footy Club. We're not dealing with things that are particularly difficult to organise, are we? I mean, I have... And cover it up. And cover it up. Yeah, well, they're not doing that very well either. People finding out where they are and taking photographs and sticking them on the internet. I mean, you've got this problem of low state capacity, lack of competence, particularly in the

Home Office. I mean, the Home Office is just notorious for this. It just can't, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. You know, they're just hopeless, persistently hopeless. And I have to say, during the Leave campaign in 2016 saying we want an Australian-style points-based immigration system, which is the best system. It is. It works. Canada has one as well. It works very well for them. works well for New Zealand, you know, it is the best system. However, you have to be actually good at governing to do one of those. And when I first saw that promise, and then it was in the manifesto again, in 2019, I just thought, I really hope you're hiring some Australians to run this because it's not

as easy as it looks. To give you an idea, there was this persistent claim. It was always made in the economist. And then, of course, the economist basically stopped doing it because it realized it was embarrassing itself, that you couldn't centrally plan an immigration policy. And you would regularly get articles to this effect in the economists that you can't centrally plan an immigration authority and immigration policy. And every now and again, somebody in Australia, fairly senior in what's called the public service, and occasionally a politician would go, hello, have you looked down here and noticed how, just how, how we're we do things, until eventually there was public, there was international irritation over it.

And I think one, either a former primeist or a sitting prime, it might have even been Rudd, actually wrote to the economist and said, can you please stop spreading this nonsense? It's not true. Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. Australia does it. And ever since then the articles about, oh, you can't centrally plan an immigration or policy have stopped. But that was a standard, it was a standard piece of the open borders libertarian rhetoric before they went weird and started saying that Bill Gates is causing COVID.

Well, Libertarians went completely out to lunch. But the open borders people were always saying, well, you can't centrally plan this anyway. And basically, you had 20 or million Australians going there. Is this giant unsinkable aircraft carrier, which was what Douglas MacArthur called Australia in the Southern Ocean that says you're wrong because you're wrong, Bruce. And it's just, but it is difficult to do. And if you've had a windback of state capacity as every EU country has and the UK has because of the pooling of sovereignty where immigration, the rules about immigration and refugees were dealt with at the Brussels level, and then when they were working, and they were

you did have vast numbers of refugees as opposed to immigrants because most people in the EU, it's refugees they're opposed to not free movement within the EU. Most Europeans are totally fine with that. The British experience was different. But then you had all those refugees turning up in Germany and basically the EU was useless because it had sort of been a gentleman's agreement of, oh no, people won't turn up at the borders of the European Union, but then once they were in the European Union, because of free movement, they just fanned out everywhere and the whole system broke down. But that's an example of a severe loss of state capacity in the ability to secure one's borders. And it's what led to all the problems in German politics. It probably led to Brexit.

And has led to all sorts of difficulties in Greek, in Italian and Hungarian and Polish politics as well. So I looked at that promise in 2019. We will have an Australian points based immigration system. And I just sat there and I thought, will you? Are you going to have to hire the entire of immigration and ethnic affairs to set it up for you? And by the way, you need to get rid of your rotten electoral commission and hire the Australian Electoral Commission, which isn't corrupt. You know, just all of these basic state capacity issues that pretty much the whole of the European Union has lost. We have discovered that Germany still retains its state capacity in healthcare. The Australian system is the same as the German system, by the way.

And to give you an idea of state capacity, Victoria, Australia's worst performing state with COVID, is still, if you look at the different statistical metrics, better performing than Germany, the EU's best performing state with COVID. That's what state capacity is. Britain lacks the state capacity to do an immigration policy based on the points-based system properly. Is there, Helen, hold on.

I mean, I take your point about state capacity. Essentially, we're talking about it is competence in government. Government, right? But isn't there also a political issue? Because I don't know what it was like, and I'm sure you'll tell us, but if you had a government policy, let's say Boris Johnson is a sort of liberal Tory in power now. He already gets called a Nazi, fascist, all of this stuff, and he has been racist for years.

If he was to implement a policy that resulted in one boat, that's tragically sank. And no one, all of us, of course, abhor any loss of life that would happen. But if he was to implement a policy that would discourage immigration and as a side product of that, people had died.

He'd never recovered in this country. I don't actually know. I honestly don't know because the intensity of the salience in 2016 of immigration in the lead-up to the referendum vote, that could come back as soon as there is a perception, and this is something that is now well known amongst political

scientists, that a particular policy has run away from the electorate. It's no longer under the control of the voters in country A, B, C, whatever. And it could be to do with immigration is the obvious one, but one of the reasons why the fights are so medieval. in the United States over abortion and guns is because nearly all of the judgment calls that have been made on both abortion and guns haven't been made by electorates. They've been made in the scotus and judges aren't elected. There is a very, very good reason why you want to depoliticise your judiciary is because judges aren't elected.

You don't want them to be elected. You elect your judges. It's a great way of completely fouling up the system because they need to be independent of popularity to enforce the law. So this situation where something is taken from the electorate and they can't seem to control it and their government can't seem to control it. That's a recipe for 2016.

No, no, I agree with you. My point to you is, if you remember, prior, we had someone drowned in the channel a few weeks ago. Yeah. It turned out he was 28 rather than 16, but it's still obviously a tragedy and horrible. But do you remember during the initial refugee stroke migrable? crisis, there was this boy who drowned in the Mediterranean. Not really anything to do with

Britain, frankly, but at that point, we had newspaper stories front pages for days. Now, imagine if Britain had been responsible, if the British government had done something that had led to that sort of thing occurring or perhaps a whole boat of people sinking. Terrible thing to do, or to even be associated with. But I'm just saying, I don't know. I don't know. know what it was like for the Australian Prime Minister at the time. It was enormously polarising. Right. But in this country, I think it would destroy the reputation of the... I mean, is that... I... You'd be in favour of it, would you? No, I don't actually think it would. I think amongst a liberal media, absolutely it would. I think amongst, you know, conservative and traditional voter bases,

I don't think it would, honestly. But it wasn't just the Guardian that ran that story. It was the Daily Mail as well. I know, it was covered when we had what they call Seave 10, when we had all of these people drowning in the Timor Sea or eaten by crocodiles or dying in the desert or all of the various other things that was supposedly going on at the time. It was covered in the same, if it bleeds, it leads way in the Australian press. But long history is a very good, accurate polling, the use of focus groups. the awareness that at the back of any elected Australian government is the whole people,

not just the people who go to the polls, who choose to go to the polls. You're always aware that you just cannot as a government get on a hobby horse issue, refugee rights, or that kind of thing, and then try to smoke it over the top of the Australian people. you will just get crucified at the next election because of compulsory voting. Yeah. You know, the country is captured by the, this is the country where median voter theory still applies because of compulsory voting.

So you've just got that distribution and the big lump of people in the middle. And so the median voter thing is still an issue. So yes, it was incredibly fraught. I remember the Tampa controversy. It was extraordinary, absolutely, because it was becoming very clear that what Howard was going to do was abrogate the refugee convention, albeit in a quiet sort of relatively sneaky way. But when I say relatively sneaky, you're still talking multiple instances of high court legislation. Yeah, so like the preroguing parliament case here, you know, so it was still hugely

and massively reported. So quiet, for a given value of quiet. But he ran into that election in 2001 with the slogan, we will determine who comes here and the circumstances in which they come. That was used as the Tampa election tagline and was basically a one-sentence summary of the Pacific solution that the Howard government introduced. I don't know what would happen in Britain if Boris Johnson or more likely to be a Pretty Patel who's much more of a traditional hanging and flogging and more authoritarian kind of conservative. Hanging and flogging. Well, that's the other thing.

No one that wanted to bring back hanging and all that kind of thing. They still exist in the conservative. Oh, national service is the other one. You turn up to constituency association meetings and there's always at least one person who wants to bring back national service. Tories of a certain vintage, it's just a thing. And so I actually am really reluctant to say that a Prime Minister who did that would be destroyed because I have a sneaking suspicion that the electorate

would respond to the way the Australian electorate responded and that you would have howls of outrage from the media, you did in Australia, absolute howls of outrage and from human rights lawyers and the wider human rights industry and that kind of thing. But if you're paying attention to the people who vote for you or who could vote for you in a country with non-competition, compulsory voting, then you just know that the howls of outrage are deeply and brutally unrepresentative. The Greens cannot crack any more than 10% of the vote in Australia. Even with compulsory vote, without compulsory voting here, if they make 15%, the votes so thinly spread through the population that they're going to win, they're going to continue to win their

one seat. In Brighton. Right. And that will be it. And that will be it. So one of the things people have to learn to do in, to do this kind of governance is just to ignore the media class and to ignore the human rights lawyer class. They are a tiny and unrepresentative group.

And you are not governing for them if you're a. Tory government. Helen, you're just not. Go for it. Well, see, I actually agree with you, Helen, because I think that most people, I don't think there would be avert about this when talking to their friends or relatives or whatever else, but I think deep down most people would be in agreement. And at the same time, let me just ask the question there, at the same time, is there

a compassionate solution to this? Because even the people who wouldn't feel that, you that strongly about it, as Francis says. And he's probably right. I always have. I don't think there's a single person in this country, no matter how strongly they feel about immigration or refugees, or even people who claim to be refugees when actually their economic migrants. There isn't a single person in this country who wants those people to drown.

None of us do. No, no. And it's a horrible thing to. I will give you a story from the first iteration of Kevin Rudd when he was trying to loosen up the system. one of his immigration ministers at the time, there were two, I think this was Chris Burke, who was the second one, but I could be wrong about that, but I mean, I've met the man. And one of the things he was doing was that every time they got a confirmed drowning, he was sitting in the ministerial wing of Australian Parliament House,

which is that vast Aztec temple it looks like. And he was over in the ministerial wing in his fancy office. and every time there was a confirmed drowning, not just a rumoured one because there are disputes about how many people have drowned, but when it was from like the Navy or the Coast Guard, he knew that there'd been a death, he would put a matchstick on his desk. And there's a, there was a very moving newspaper article about how complicated this issue is and the fact that there probably isn't a compassionate solution where a journalist turned up into this minister, into the immigration Minister's office and just casually asked him as the TV crew was setting up their cameras,

oh, what do all those, minister, what do all those matchsticks mean? Oh, each one of those matchsticks is a drowned asylum seeker. And he did that, Labour Immigration Minister, he did that to remind himself of the human cost. And to answer, to return to your original question, is there a compassionate solution to this? No, there isn't. and if I knew one, I would have, a number of times there have been attempts to recruit me because of my Australian background and experience in Canberra. There have been attempts to recruit me to positions in the current conservative government.

Some of my friends have been recruited. They just stopped tweeting. And they like Australians. I mean, they went and got Chloe Wesley from the Taxpayers Alliance. And once again, one of these creatures of Canberra, an Australian background person who's worked in the Aussie system. But I don't think there is a compassionate solution. If I knew one, I would have instantly responded to any of those and said,

yes, I'll come and work for you and design this system from the top down. So what is the most compassionate solution? Getting you to leave. I'll only leave if your mum comes living back. Done. Personally, I think. think the original rule in the sort of governing international law for asylum claims that you claim in the first safe country needs to be imposed pretty rigorously. And that already exists.

And it's become fairly clear, for example, that one of the reasons why people are coming across from France, which is in many ways a better place to live than the UK. Get out. Yeah, better food and a better welfare state, more generous welfare state, all of that kind of thing. There's a very big, one of the reasons why is that France is still a very intensely unitary state and all of the woke ideas that originally came from France but have now gone to America, They have no influence in France at all. So huge, huge social expectation in France that you will learn French.

That is why Parisians are rude to you if you attempt to speak their language to them badly and they'd rather speak in English. But it's just that huge social pressure in to go to France and to want to live there for the rest of your life is very much to become French. And one of the reasons why the Islamists have chafed so hard in France is combination of lecite, the secularism that is, and that's a bad translation of a French word, but it's secularism we'll have to do because it's not quite right. It means lots of different things. Secularity. It's a combination of the secularity of the French state,

but also the nationalism in a very traditional sense of the French state. And they don't want to fit in with that. The easy come, easy go, more relaxed approach to integration, which I don't personally think works that exists in Britain is far more attractive. And then, of course, the global language is no longer French, used to be. But it's English now. So lots and lots of those people on the dinghies will have a little bit of English. And English and French are in many respects they're opposite to each other. French, when you first start to learn it, it's like a pyramid. And all the difficult stuff is at the beginning. It's hard to pronounce. It's hard to spell. The grammar is difficult. It's a very intellectual and erudite language. So the people on French television,

they're journalists, they don't break it down. They don't make your life easier by using simple French. They expect you to dive in. But with French, it gets easier and easier and easier. And once you've been learning it for two or three years, it's suddenly you're fluent. Oh, gee, okay, I can speak French now. Very hard at the beginning. English is the opposite. It's an upside-down pyramid. Very, very easy. the beginning. Lots of people who speak bugger all English can make themselves understood in it because at the beginning English is easy. The problem, of course, is unlike French, it gets harder and harder and harder. So you can learn basic English and communicate, but the idea that

you might be able to one day learn enough English to hold down anything other than a job digging ditches is going to take a lot longer. So they're often under a misapprehension about how well they can, how quickly they can integrate into an English speaking country. But it's that perception of, I know English, I know some English, let's go to the English speaking country. So I think a big part of a compassionate solution is actually really strongly imposing the first safe country. and I think that this is quite important. And Faisal al-Mutah, have you had him on Trigger Pod before? He was an Iraqi refugee, and he made the point.

He said, a lot of them, these people who are Muslim, they're not violent, they're not going to go and blow up a pop concert in Manchester or anything like that, but they're going to find living in a Western secular country very, very difficult. And that process of adapting to a Western secular country, this has probably happened in France quite a bit with a lot of Muslim immigrants. They weren't radical when they got there, but they became radicalised because the country is just so different. And Faisal made the comment, he said,

you need to encourage conservative, non-violent Muslims to move to a safe but still Muslim country because the West is just such a shock to the system for them. them. And they can't integrate. Even with the best will in the world, they finish up not being able to integrate into a Western country because it's completely different. But yeah, so that would be part of a solution to a more compassionate, part of a more compassionate solution is be aware of the really, really large cultural differences that exist among various refugee groups. Understand when, for example, a Muslim minority, because they have all the same things as Christianity with all the little factions

and grouplets and God knows what, is going to really struggle in a Western country, but they're going to be able to cope in another safe Muslim country. But that does mean saying, you're probably not going to fit in in Paris or London, or if you go outside of London, if you go to a part of the country that's still full of pubs, you're just going to struggle.

You're better off staying where you are or just the country next door. So what you're saying is, we can talk about this here, and it sounds perfectly reasonable. But in reality, there's no way that we could implement that, could we? Without cries of racism? Oh, you're going to get the crime.

To be fair. To be fair in Australia, there were also the same. And there still are. I mean, once again, if you want to see an unrepresentative sample, just go on Twitter. And that applies to Australia as much as it does to any other country. Just get on hashtagospol, which is hashtagospol. dot crock pit was always the way how I'd considered it because it is just very, very fraught sometimes. But you will get plenty of people who will be absolutely convinced that everything the Australian

government, whether it's a Labour government or a coalition government, it doesn't matter because this policy is bipartisan. They're awful racist. And if the current prime minister is Scott Morrison, he's an awful racist. But if it were Tony Albanesey, Anthony Albinsey. Albanese, the Labour leader, he would be a horrible racist as well. So that's inevitable. But on the practical side of things, you mentioned people claiming asylum in the first country

in which they're right. First safe country. First safe country. And that makes sense. And you probably end up paying those countries quite a lot of money for them to do that. And then it's a sort of fair deal. Otherwise, you're not going to get that. And Australia did finish up having to do this with neighbouring countries, which is entirely,

you can't blame, particularly if they're per head of population, they're poorer than And they're developed country. And it seems like a strange question to ask now that we've been talking about it for an hour. Are we not exaggerating the scale of this issue, Helen? I take your point, which is a small number of people jumping the queue, creates a public relations impact in terms of people's attitude towards legal immigration, in terms of people's attitudes towards legal and just asylum seekers, because some people should get asylum in this country, absolutely.

it's only a few hundred people, isn't it? Well, this is the thing. It was at the beginning in Australia. It was only a few hundred people. But eventually it becomes a flood. And then you've got the underlying state capacity issue. If you can't control your borders, if you can't protect life, liberty and property,

you know, very basic, these are the basic roles of government. If you can't provide the most basic level of government, of governance and security, then that's when you start getting into the wheels falling off the developed country, not just the developing country. And it is what has, in many areas, not just immigration, because there's obviously been issues with the whole wall thing has been going on for years now, it seems, in America.

But this whole broad scale problem of just incompetent governance, finishes up just propagating through the entire administration of the state. And you cannot have that because we are now looking at what happens to a country when that happens. And that is happening in the United States right now. And they're trying to have it run an election campaign in the middle of it. And I don't know how you're supposed to do any of that. It's just disastrous. I feel dread very sorry for Americans having to live through that at the moment. Everything is is a big mess and there are no obvious or easy solutions. And some of them are stymied in the sense that you can't do something

because there's a constitutional rule or a legal judgment or a major separation of powers impediment to doing anything. I mean, it is why Obama, and Trump has not done it, weirdly, has not done it as much as Obama, but he's catching up, is this government by executive order, the constant governance by using the power of the executive, President is not supposed to do that. I mean, he's been to do it a little bit, but not to the extent that Obama and now Trump have done. But they're doing it because the system is completely paralyzed in every other respect.

I just think you need to those very, very basic state capacity, levels of governance, you have to deliver them. And because if you don't deliver them, you really are, in my view, on the road to hell. Mom, can you tell me a story? Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car. Was she brave? She was tired, mostly.

But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required. Did you have to find a dragon? Nope. She bought it 100% online, from her bed, actually. Was it scary? Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be. Did the car have a sunroof?

It did, actually. Okay, good story. Car buying you'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on... Carvada. Delivery fees may apply. And Helen, do you think that this conservative government are going to have the balls to implement a system?

They're going to have to do something because they will... It's literally a case of something or die. And the second question is, are they good, competent enough to deliver this system. Well, this is the difficulty. I don't know. Now, the fact that they're quite transparently recruiting Australians, both quietly and as I've experienced, but also publicly in the form of someone like Tony Abbott. But there are plenty of others. And I am hearing on the Bush telegraph through sort of Canberra special advisor, well, they don't call them special advisors. They call advisors or senior advisors or chiefs

staff in Australia. There is quite a lot of very active recruitment going on, but they are going to have to do some very rapid upskilling about the only thing I can say with complete confidence is with the exception of health care in Germany, so is every other European Union country and so is the European Union itself. We have become very fat and very dumb and very happy and very slack when it comes to core questions of government competence. So when something in the grand scheme of pandemics, not that bad, coronavirus, bad, but not that bad, comes along. It is just absolutely exposed governments of every stripe all over the world, except for ones with very, very significant state capacity in healthcare. Some cultures, the East Asian countries, they had an awareness

based on the experience with SARS. They had better preparation for those reasons. But Australia and New Zealand didn't have the SARS experience, but they've responded just as well as the East Asian countries. And they also don't have the masking culture either. And indeed, one of the problems that's happened in Australia is an attempt to do mask mandates just in one state in Victoria. It's not gone down very well with the Australian population there

because it is not part of Australian culture. And I could have told, or, you didn't need the nudge unit, you know, to say it was going to be difficulties with masks in Britain. I mean, the idea of covering your face has been bad in Western Europe since we have records. You know, like literally Roman writers would laugh at the Persians because the veiling of the face or covering the face for religious rituals or because you were a married woman or that kind of thing existed in Persia before Islam. Islam made it worse.

but it existed in places like Persia before then. And you would have Roman writers laughing at Persians and Jews for covering their faces and laughing at Persians and Jews for showing respect by doing this, dropping the head, whereas the Roman idea of respect, and you even see it on Roman wedding rings, is a handshake and look directly in the eye. And that has passed into modern Western cultures,

a little bit of knowledge of classical history and the civilizational roots of Western Europe could have told you that if you come up with mask mandates and try to impose them on primarily Caucasian and African populations, they are going to tell you to jump in the lake. It's just not going to work. And we've seen that, and that's why we've got all the problems with it. But Victoria and Australia too,

very high-state capacity country, very good at being quite authoritarian where necessary, be very orderly country. All of the Australian Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful. There was only COVID outbreaks as a result of one, and it wasn't actually the protests that caused it. It was because the silly billies had organized a buffet afterwards, and a whole heap of them went up and had food from the buffets.

You know, buffets, that's why cruise ships are dangerous as well. So we're very much running out of time. But just, just from saying, there was a buffet at one of them. I might have attended one. Yeah, and got COVID. Well done. Yeah. But yeah, so, I mean, you just.

But is this, Actually, just on that very point, just as a final little bit of curiosity, is this why we now see stories from Australia of a pregnant woman being arrested for a Facebook post, a grandfather, all of this? Because the other side of the state capacity coin is a sort of elevated level of authoritarian. Yes, yes. I strongly, one of the reasons why Australian governments get away with being so authoritarian is because they're very good at what they do.

However, the danger with being very good at what you do and producing really quite a compliant population and comparing the Black Lives Matter protests in Australia to pretty much every other developed country is a really good way of looking at it. Look at the ones that happened in Sydney and in Brisbane, which were two states that don't have lockdown and are out of lockdown now. There were no COVID cases as a result of those protests or anything like that. If you look at them, they're so peaceful, they're so orderly, the police are on either side of the street and they're all just walking in a very relaxed and calm way down the street, holding their banners, and you just look at that and you go, gee, what a good way to run a protest.

But one of the reasons why that does exist in Australia is the state, the country is authoritarian. The reason I live here, as much as I admire Australians and Australia for its ability to govern so very well, the side effect of it, the state capacity, is. this authoritarianism. And it does overstep the line. So now you've got the pregnant lady getting arrested in her pyjamas just before she's about to have an ultrasound, which for those of you who are familiar with pregnant ladies means that she's full of wee, which is why she's somewhat desperate in the video. It's, that's what happens when you get a government that is used to getting its own way, that is good at getting its own way, that generally runs things

well, and then suddenly there's been a stuff up, and there has been a stuff up with the hotel quarantine situation in Victoria. And then, oh, well, we're just going to boss you then. And that's how that happens. That's how you get situations like that emerge. And it is alarming. You know, how much authoritarianism is each saved life worth? And that doesn't mean to say, I approve of the terrible violence that has happened at various protests in the United States, legitimate or not. Let's say some of them are legitimate, some of the protests both by pro-Trump people and by pro-anteferral Black Lives Matter people.

Let's just assume, give them their case at its highest and assume that it's legitimate. You just can't have that level of violence and can't. to make your point. And it just encourages in a country like Australia where you do have the high state capacity, it just says, no, we're not going to be like them. It doesn't matter how good your point is, and we're just going to do this. And that is the great risk of the high state capacity country that is still nonetheless a liberal democracy. And in a sense, Australia and New Zealand, and to a lesser extent Canada, but certainly Australia and New Zealand, you can get that great governance and still be a democracy, but you need to look at those two countries,

because that is your future if you get that great governance and want to keep your democracy. The alternative is you can have great governance and have no democracy, and then you need to move quite a lot further north of the equator and go to China, and I don't think anybody wants to live there. But that is the great risk that this has exposed, the coronavirus. How much authoritarianism is each save life worth? And do you want to do you want to? I want Australia and New Zealand to be your future. I mean, I moved back, because I'm a dual national, I moved back over here precisely

because I didn't want that aspect of Australia to be my future. But does that mean that you get freer countries are struggling with COVID? And compared to Australia, Germany is struggling with COVID because of the difference in state capacity even there. Precisely because they're freer. And as we've been talking about for the last hour, it's not just COVID that free a country struggle with. Yeah.

Other issues. It's other issues as well. But we've run out of time, Helen, and we've got one more question for you. Which is what is the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? Well, we've been talking about it quite a lot here, but I'll say it again. And I'll recommend a book. Persecution and Toleration is the book by Mark Koyama and Noel Johnson. And it is basically a history of the development, an economic history, because this is an economic

phenomenon, of the development of state capacity across Western Europe. And then to a lesser extent, the United States and Australia, but the focus is on Western Europe. And one of the little questions that they do in the course of the book is, if you were able to go back in time and be the king or queen of England in 1500 and you wanted to set up compulsory primary school education and the NHS. You wanted to do that. You had the knowledge and the technology. You weren't able to take that back in time with you. It would be impossible for you to do so.

And it would be impossible because you lack the state capacity to do it. It's completely separate question from technology. You lack the state capacity. That's what we're not talking. talking about. We've forgotten that governance is hard, that you can't just do it by soundbite, that there are no wins, only trade-offs, and that sometimes there is no good answer to a really complicated policy question. I believe immigration is one of those areas. There's not that many. Pensions is probably another one. There's no easy answer to that. You know, paying back the

COVID debt is probably going to be the end of the triple. lock, pensions triple lock, there are no, that's not going to make anybody very happy. There are no good ways out for complicated policy conundrums. And to even have a chance of dealing with complicated policy issues, you need improvement in state capacity, investment in state capacity. And it's not just Britain, it's the whole of the European Union. and then even worse again is the United States, God knows what they're going to do over there.

I would hate to be Biden, because I think he's probably going to win the election. I would hate to be Joe Biden and his advisors because they're just going to... It's a much worse version of what happened when Gordon Brown was voted out. I'm very sorry, there is no money. But worse than that,

because it's not just no money. There's lots and lots of other things that there isn't anything on either. So state capacity. We need to talk about... Governance is hard. We need to work on it. You need to get better at it and stop pretending that you can just do it by sound bite.

Helen, thank you so much for coming on the show. I realise you've alienated every single one of our American viewers. And they give us all the money. So we're never having you back again. But if people want to find you on Twitter, I'm at underscore Helen Dale on Twitter. And I'm at Helen Dale on Parlay or Parlor. I don't know.

Americans seem to want to call it. If they want to read some of your fabulous award-winning books. Well, these are all the various books. This is the one that is the publishing industry one. There is actually an essay in the beginning of that one that explains the publishing issue that I wanted, would have liked to have talked about, but immigration took it all up. And that was the one that won the prizes and caused the big stink. And there was an attempt to get me cancelled, but all it did was turn it into a bestseller.

And that's my second and third novel, which is imagine what would happen if the Romans had had an industrial revolution. And it's interestingly, that was very much writing about a high state capacity authoritarian regime, because that's what those books are about. And the thing that really shocked me about Kingdom of the Wicked was the number of people who wrote to me and it was very clear that they'd quite like to live in the world that I'd created. And that was a bit alarming. Do you really want to go and live in China? Do you like social credit?

Do you think that that's a good idea? Some people apparently do. Helen, thank you so much for coming back. And thank you guys for watching. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode or a live stream. And they always go out Tuesday to Sunday at 7pm UK time. Take care, guys, and see you soon.