Australia's Immigration Just Took a Dark Turn & the World Needs to Know | Alex Antic

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0:35We think there are almost as many as 2 million new immigrants, which on a population of 27 is a significant chunk, which has been a policy of this Labor government, including recently allowing widows or brides from ISIS to return to Australia, which is a very, very dangerous and controversial thing to be doing, of course.

1:04All right, Senator Alex Antic, a pleasure, pleasure to meet you. I feel like I already interviewed you. We did a half hour where we should have just had the cameras rolling, but we're going to sit down and repeat a bunch of things that I think we just spoke about. But first I should mention, so we're here in Melbourne. How was my pronunciation there? That was good. That was pretty good. It was excellent. Can you say it? Because I'm nervous for my live show tomorrow. Melbourne is good. Melbourne. But just don't say Sydney. Definitely don't say Sydney. I should mention you are not senator of Melbourne.

1:34Correct. You are senator of Adelaide. Can you break down? I thought we'd do a little Australia 101 for the people. Because even me coming in, it's a big country. We know Crocodile Dundee. We know Bluey. That's kind of the extent. And spiders, I'm told, as well. Everyone's frightened of Australian spiders, and you should be. Yeah, well, look, and look, this is going to test me as well, because my knowledge of Australian history and politics might not be. But essentially, that's right. I'm a senator. Similar system to the US, but we sit in two chambers of the parliament, Senate and the lower house, as we call it, the House of Representatives.

2:10Senators are elected by their whole state, whereas a little bit like in the US, the lower house is just elected in districts, if you like. We call it electoral districts. So yeah, each state has 12, except for our territories. And it's a house of review. We review laws and make it sound quite boring. No, no, politics. No, we have similar systems. We have similar people. So, and I do want to talk to you a little bit about what you think it means to be Australian. Because that seems to be a debate in all Western countries right now. So we'll get to that in a sec. But why don't we first talk a little bit about just sort of what do you think the state of the country is at a moment?

2:50Before we get to the people specifically, what's the state of Australia? I think this is a very different country than the one I grew up in. I grew up in the 80s and, you know, to a certain extent, the 90s as well. The world's very different. The West is very different now than it was then. But Australia in particular is. you know we have I suppose you know you would say we are the land of opportunity in many respects resources natural resources beautiful beaches and yet for some reason there is this cloud hanging over this country at the moment and I think it's across the board I think it's all the way through the country there is a feeling of pessimism a little bit and that has changed over the years I think we've seen that more and more over the last 10 years COVID, of course, has had, I think, a long-lasting impact on the country.

3:38I think that in many respects, the country hasn't recovered from COVID. A lot of economic problems, a lot of businesses just never reopened after lockdowns, particularly in this state. Yeah. So it is an interesting question. And historically, Australians are very laid back people. As you said, the idea of Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dung Dee, that is, and to some extent is, but certainly was what Australians were like when I was growing up. They still exist, but we are seeing an urbanization of the population, which has changed that a little And I think people are perhaps a little more reserved with their behavior.

4:17So how much of that unease that you're talking about is a COVID hangover? Because one of the most shocking things, I lived in Los Angeles during COVID, which was as dystopian as you could get, except for the city we are in right now. We saw videos out of Melbourne that looked like they were coming out of China. So how much of what's going on in this country right now is that people kind of had a good, great landmass, as you said, laid back population, beautiful, everyone looks great here, have this weird authoritarian thing happen. And now the years out of that seem to be what's going on. I guess it depends.

4:51From an outsider, that's kind of the way I'm seeing it. And Americans saw that and they saw the images. We were very conscious of that at the time. And I think it was very important that they did because to me, it reflected some of the things that we don't have in this country that you do in the United States. It's things like the First Amendment. And so we went through this period during COVID where things were pretty bleak, pretty tough. And for me, that was a very strong wake-up call. That was 12 months into this job, into a parliamentary career. And for me, it showed the very frail nature of Western democracies, Western liberalism, if you like, because with a swipe of a pen, parliaments all over the country simply handed off huge blocks of power to our public service, to our bureaucrats, who started making decisions for us.

5:34So many of the decisions you saw, such as the lockdowns that the city was put into, came at the behest of public servants rather than politicians, which was a very unusual scenario and almost a little unique to Australia in the way in which the country is made up of states in a federation. Right. So basically the kind of managerial class. Very much. You mentioned to me when we sat down a moment ago that you were put in a quarantine for two weeks. I was. I was coming back from, it seems incredible now, but at the time I was coming back from Parliament. And the rules in my home state there were that you needed to get a, it's hard to say out loud, but you needed to get a visa almost, like a pass to come home to your own state, which I put in, I gave them all the information and they said, you can't come.

6:20And I said, all right, well, I'm coming. And before I knew it, they said, well, you come back, Maybe you have to do two weeks in a hotel, not dissimilar to this. Now, that hotel had a big metal fence around it, the middle of the city. It had police downstairs. I wasn't allowed to leave the hotel room. And having tested six times for negative for COVID, I was put into an area where there was actually COVID. I can remember vividly, it was a sort of a parody in a sense, but I can remember vividly going, they would serve you meals. And on the first day, I had a knock on the door, boom, like that. and I sort of woke up and went to the door immediately.

7:00And then I got a phone call from downstairs. It was constable, police sergeant, something. You got up and got your meal too quickly. The person hadn't cleared the room. Okay. So next time I waited two minutes. I got a phone call saying, you need to go and collect your meal. It's been left out there and that's not within the rules. So this was an extraordinarily authoritarian approach to the problem. And back to the original question, I do think that's left a mark on Australians. I think for many of us, it now feels as though the things that we never thought were possible in our country are possible.

7:35So, okay. So before we get to the who is an Australian, what does it mean to be Australian? I have one other question for you first, which is, so you are a member of the Liberal Party here. And as we discussed earlier, the word liberal from an American perspective has been completely mucked up because now the people who proclaim to be liberals are the least liberal people, actually. So anytime I go to another country and someone says they're a liberal, I go, well, do they mean they're a liberal, like for individual rights and laissez-faire economics and logic and reason? Or do they mean liberal, like I'm sort of a progressive authoritarian?

8:08I think I know your answer to that. But can you explain a little bit, what does it mean to be part of the liberal party in Australia? Well, I'm just waiting for someone to agree to being called, you know, an authoritarian. I am, I am actually, that'll be a one for the ages. But look, no, it is, it's a strange use of term. I mean, I think we would look at it, the Liberal Party in the sort of spirit of Milne, you know, like, you know, classical liberalism. And that's the way the party was formed. It was really formed as a, you know, as a sort of conglomerate of centre-right parties that had a conservative and a, you know, a liberal, libertarian angle bent, if you like.

8:45And they came together after the war and that was the modern Liberal Party. Quite different. We actually wear the colour blue as the logo as well. So it's quite, you know, you would be, you know, well understood for being mistaken to come into Australia, seeing blue and liberal and thinking you're dealing with basically the centre left. Right, right. But that is not the case. So no, in Australia, that's what it means. It's interesting though, in the sense that politics in Australia doesn't quite overlay into the United States, probably the same in Europe as well. Politics tends to be probably a little more to the centre on both sides, I think.

9:17Our far left is probably a little closer to the centre and the same with the... So your far left is what party now? Well, we would say the Australian Greens, who are our furthest left party. I mean, there are others. Of course, there are minor parties that are always on the ballot, as there are in every country. But in terms of parliamentary representation, the Greens are. They're an environmentalist party that has really drifted into, you know, sort of far left doctrine of, you know, I would say, you know, angles that involve, you know, all sorts of things that aren't related to the environment.

9:49Immigration. All of that. Yeah. So, they are certainly, and we do have further right parties than the Liberal Party. We've got a party called One Nation, which is a minor party that deals in sort of nationalist issues, if you like. So, there's a broad spectrum. I know that's the case in Europe as well. It's not quite as binary as it is in the US, but if you were overlaying, people would disagree with this, but the Liberal Party is probably closest to the Republican Party, I'd say. Right, which is funny. That's the point. In America, we basically now have a Republican party that is pretty much filled with all ex-libs, and we have a Democrat party now filled with what I would say are largely kind of crazy people, but we can leave that there.

10:27Okay, so let me ask you, what does it mean now to be Australian? Because even being here just for a day and wandering around, it's a little hard to tell in a sense. The bluey sort of Steve Irwin thing maybe is not the perfect encapsulation. It's a very difficult question to ask because I think it depends where you're going and where you are. In the city, and I mean, if I went back to when I was growing up, I think that the demographic in the city was largely the same as in the country areas. That's not the case anymore. My feeling is that really to get a feel for what is in Australia, you almost need to get out to the country areas, the regional areas where a lot of what we consider to be Australian is still alive and well.

11:11People fly the flag out there. Australia is one of the very few countries that still, I think, finds it acceptable to have three different flags on a government building. I notice in the United States, even in places like California, where you might see the California flag, you'll still always see the American flag. But here you will see a myriad of Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags. Well, I don't have a problem with any of those flags, but there is one flag for the country. In the country, you will see very much the opposite. You will just see the Australian flag. Now, these days, the person living, the urbanised Australian is quite different, I think.

11:48They do tend to lean further to the left and they are a mix. They're very multicultural and quite different. In the country, I think the Steve Irwin character still exists, and I think they're very real. But overall, the Australian nature is laid back. We are very outdoors-loving people. We're very laid back. People, I think, here are very forgiving as well. The other thing that makes Australians quite unique is they're very apolitical. So there just isn't the interest in politics. In fact, I was having a conversation on the plane with some young people who had no grasp of it. And that's fine.

12:26But that is a very, you know, we're not quite as engaged in the political process as... Right, which in some sense probably led to a lot of what happened during COVID because people were kind of checked out. I think it did. Yeah, I think it did. And, you know, it doesn't take much for that authoritarian nature to creep out unless, you know, I think Ronald Reagan said it's freedom's only a generation away from being lost or words to that effect. So, you know, we do have that constraint here in Australia. And I think people, you know, it would be good to see people more conscious of their freedoms and what's being lost at the moment.

12:56I think it's being lost across the entire spectrum of the Australian nation at the moment. So speaking of that, where is Australia as it pertains to immigration right now? Because you guys are a freaking giant landmass that it is its own continent. Most people don't realize that. You're an island. You're a very large island. You have no borders with anyone else. It seems like this place should be a fortress, which in some sense it was kind of set up to be. And yet it seems like there's also a lot of problems on the immigration. Yeah, look, I mean, it's been historically, I mean, it's quite interesting, you know, backlog of how Australia came to be where it is.

13:31It's probably too long for today's conversation. But essentially, we were settled by the English and the Irish and the Scottish out of Europe. And that continued really largely until around about the 60s or 70s when we started seeing, you know, our post-war too, of course, where we started seeing influxes from Europe. There was, in fact, a white Australia policy for a long period of time. And that all changed in the latter half of the 20th century when we started seeing more immigration from Asia and now in recent times from the Middle East and so on. But you're quite right. I mean, we had a population when I was growing up of around about just under 20 million.

14:08It's about 28 or thereabouts now, depending on where you look. In a country that's the size of the United States. It's pretty close. 350 million. Yeah, it's pretty close. Now, the difference with Australia is most of our arable land is on the coasts. Right. So there's a lot of landmass in the middle where there's minerals and a bit of farming, but not a huge amount else, although they'd probably scream at me for that. But that is the fact. So most of the population is centred in those urban areas. So it's sort of a little bit misleading in the sense that we do have a large mass. The thing we do have is resources.

14:41We have plenty of water up north. We've got minerals everywhere. We've got some of the largest stockpiles of uranium and coal and iron and gas. We just don't use them because we are under the thumb of this green ideology, which is telling us to sort of self-harm by not using it and not burning it and so forth. But certainly in the recent two or three years, we've seen a massive influx of people. We think there are almost as many as 2 million new immigrants, which on a population of 27 is a significant chunk, which has been a policy of this Labor government. including recently allowing the widows or brides from ISIS to return to Australia, which is a very, very dangerous and controversial thing to be doing, of course.

15:25And so the dynamics change. What is their argument? In a place that has this many resources, that is this big, what is the argument? So we're going to bring in 10 % of the population in two years or so? Well, the argument that would be used is that COVID, there was almost a moratorium on immigration and we need to catch up. So that's the argument. and the argument is also always about skilled labour and we don't have the expertise in certain areas. The truth of the matter is that I think people are just coming in and working normal jobs and of course the net effect of that in many respects has been a press on housing, a press on living standards and there are stories in Australia now of people, places like Sydney and Melbourne lining up with 200 people for a single bedroom apartment.

16:11So So the effect on the cost of living and the lifestyle in Australia has been quite dramatic in a short amount of time. We're all very worried about that. I'm very worried about it. And of course, you know, this country was built on immigration. So this is, as I say, not about hating the player. It's about the game. The numbers are extraordinary at the moment. The United States had this same problem. It was illegal immigration. This is legal immigration. But the effects are the same. And, you know, you have to be in control of your borders in a country like this. And I'm very worried about where we're headed.

16:45Where does the kind of guilt about the Aboriginal population fit into this? We obviously have a version, every Western nation in some sense has a version of it. We have a version of it in the United States. Yeah, look, it's really interesting. I saw a clip this week on social media of a journalist from our ABC going around and talking to people in the 50s and 60s about whether Aboriginal children should swim in a swimming pool with white children. Now, if you believe the left, they would say that we were a country based on racism and have always been. This is black and white footage. These people, though, responded by saying, of course they should.

17:21Why wouldn't they? They're our brothers and sisters and so on and so forth. So this construct that Australia is a racist nation has been brewing for a long period of time. It's in overdrive at the moment. I think we're the least racist nation in the world, Actually, I think people, Australians, as I said, with that laid back nature are very, very warm and welcoming. But the left have found a way to achieve their goals. The classic example is the voice to parliament referendum, which we had now. Referendum in Australia is a serious thing. It's changing our constitution. I know it happens in the US too with amendments and so forth.

17:56But a couple of years ago, the government proposed enshrining an Aboriginal voice in Parliament, which would, you know, would be a sort of effectively, they would have argued, but effectively a third chamber of our government. Right. The Australian people shot it down, something like 65 % voted no, depending on where you go. And but, you know, the rationale that was used was this rationale of guilt. You know, you've stepped on these people for years. You know, you need to give them a voice. Of course, it was never true. And in fact, many Aboriginal people and groups, including my friend, Senator Jacinda Nambajimpa-Price, who was a leading voice against it, is Aboriginal herself and spoke against it because it's the very essence of division, effectively, you know, giving certain people certain rights and certain categories.

18:46So we've had to fight with a lot of that. And I think Australians are waking up to it. But that ethos is alive and well in the left, and they want to push that division. How much of this also is now that there's an integration problem for the second generation of people that have come here? I was reading even this morning about this machete ban that just was instituted in the last six months or so here. And it sounds like most of the violence is not from illegals. It's from second generation immigrants, meaning like 15-year-olds whose parents came here and feel different somehow or other. Yeah.

19:21Look, I think that's always been a bit of a problem. When I was growing up, there were complaints about, you know, knife use from, you know, immigrant, second-generation immigrants from Southeast Asia. So I think it has always been an issue. But certainly I think it is, this is one of the real-world effects of this problem is people do take time to accustom. They do acclimatise and become accustomed to their new environments. And many are coming from very dangerous places, like, you know, some of the war-torn parts of Africa. So, you know, it's a very difficult balance to mix, particularly when you throw such large numbers at a community that's not necessarily geared up for that.

19:58And as I said, I mean, Australia is a sort of a deceptively small country in a very large landmass. And I think we're starting to see that play out. Where does the Islamist part of this fall into place? Because when I tweeted out first that I was coming here. A lot of people said, Dave, you're going to have to watch out. Especially, well, they mostly told me about this city. Yeah. Look, I mean, there certainly has been a wave of crime. Machete band is one of them. Look, I don't know whether it could be honestly be attributed to any one group or other. I wouldn't say that it could be honestly, but you know, I mean, this is the nature of taking people from different parts of the world.

20:37I mean, And, you know, sometimes cultures don't always mix. And we have to be careful of that. We really do. But look, Melbourne is going through its own problems. It's got a very left-leaning government, has had for a very long period of time. And, you know, if you look around, I mean, it's a sort of a city that looks like it's in trouble, honestly. It's funny because I was expecting that. And I've only been in these few blocks. We happen to be in a particularly nice area. And so far, I haven't seen the trouble part. But everyone keeps telling me about it. So I believe it's there. I just haven't seen it.

21:09I don't think, I mean, I think it's all relative as well. I mean, there'd be parts of the US and parts of the US. I go to blue cities in the US. You'll be well acclimatized to it, I'm sure. But we're just not used to it. It's always been a very trouble-free country. And I think that's been part of the problem is we have thought that our institutions will always serve us well. We've always thought that there will never be trouble in this country and that we don't have this sort of social cohesion problem because we haven't. We've had people that have mixed. We had Greeks, Italians, and people from other parts of Europe that came here after the war and would have been lumbered with many of the same problems and arguments, but have assimilated well after a generation or two.

21:46So we're just not used to it. And that's just a feature of having large numbers coming in at one time, I would say. So you guys have the Labour majority government right now. I'm not sure when we're airing this interview, but I believe on this Monday, this coming Monday, your Prime Minister is going to be meeting with Donald Trump in the States. What would you like Donald Trump to say to him? Oh, well, I mean, look, well, what we need actually is to keep the partnership going. I mean, ultimately, that's really what we need. I mean, we think we are an island away from everything, but we have neighbours that are not necessarily friendly all the time.

22:23So I think the most important thing is that we keep that going. There's this long running debate in Australia about AUKUS, which is an alliance between the UK and Australia, and military equipment and submarines in particular, which Australia is looking to buy. So look, I hope that all goes well because we do need it. What's been interesting though, is that Australia has historically, for reasons of the past, had a connection to the United Kingdom. That all sort of changed back, swung to the US after Vietnam when the United States became our main ally perhaps. And certainly in terms of military equipment and transfer, that was the main thing.

23:02We're seeing a little bit of a swing with this Labor government away from the Trump administration, I think now back towards the sort of the European elites who have perhaps more in common politically. I assume you're not happy with that. I'm not happy with that at all. No, I don't. I think, you know, I'm a very strong believer in the US-Australian alliance and I think we need it. And, you know, and I hope that continues. But I would say that that's a challenge at the moment because I think the Trump administration, as they unashamedly are, are very America first and want to know what we can do for them as much as anything else.

23:37So let's hope that continues. But we just hope for poor old Albo, the lights don't get switched off because when the lights go off in the White House, you're in trouble. You're in a lot of trouble. And Trump is not above shutting the lights off. He is not above it at all. What else should we know about this country that we don't know? I mean, we've talked mostly about problems actually, but it is an incredible country. It's an incredible country. I mentioned to you that I was supposed to come back from my first book tour, which was going to be the only international stops we were doing because I so fell in love with it when I was here in 2018.

24:09So I'm so happy to be back. So give me some of the positives. Well, there's a lot. I mean, how long have you got? We'll probably take the rest of the week to tell you. But honestly, I mean, it is a great part of the world down here. You're close to Asia, so there's all of that other side of it. But certainly inside our boundaries, I mean, you can't go past the beaches. Not so much in Melbourne. It's a bit cloudy. In fact, we should be all right. But other parts of the country, you've got tropical Queensland. You've got Sydney, which has the most incredible beaches. So do Perth, some of the best metropolitan beaches you'll find anywhere in the world.