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"It doesn't matter who tells the story, it matters how it's told" - Helen Dale
1.7k Plays1 year ago
It may seem odd to describe a book that was published almost 30 years ago as highly topical. But the 1995 Miles Franklin Award winner, ‘The Hand That Signed The Paper’, is just that.
The book's author, Helen Dale, has since established herself as one of Australia's true polymaths. She has continued to produce magnificent novels, such as 'Kingdom of the Wicked', as well as casting a liberal lens over the issues of the day for Law & Liberty (where she is a Senior Writer), The Australian, Quillette and most notably of course, The Spectator Australia.
Subscribe to Helen's Substack here.
Follow Australiana on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Australiana and Helen Dale
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. It may seem odd to describe a book that was published almost 30 years ago as highly topical, but the hand that signed the paper is just that. It tells the story of a Ukrainian family who sided with the Nazis against Bolshevik Jews in World War II. It was a worthy winner of the Miles Franklin Award in 1995, the highest honour in Australian literature.
00:00:43
Speaker
But if you think it resonates today because of the re-emergence of Ukraine on the geopolitical stage, you'd only be half right. In addition, it was the controversy around the book that in hindsight was the canary in the coal mine for many of today's culture wars.
Helen Dale: A Multifaceted Career
00:00:59
Speaker
I am thrilled to be joined by the author of the book, Helen Dale. Helen has since established herself as one of Australia's true polymyths. She has continued to produce magnificent novels, such as Kingdom of the Wicked.
00:01:12
Speaker
as well as casting a small liberal lens over the issues of the day for law and liberty, where she is a senior writer, the Australian, Colette, and most notably, of course, the spectator Australia. There was also time to fit in successful legal and political advisory careers somewhere in there as well. Helen, welcome to Australia. Thank you for having me, Will. Pleasure to be here.
00:01:36
Speaker
I use the word polymyth to describe you. And in my experience, polymyths can sometimes make for tricky interview subjects because there are millions of different directions that you can go in. I know that you mentioned in your most recent article that you'd be revealing how you intend to vote on the voice in this interview. Quite a scoop for Australiana. So I want to give you plenty of time for that in the second half of the interview.
Controversy and Cancel Culture
00:02:00
Speaker
Let's start though by exploring my opening remarks in a bit more depth.
00:02:05
Speaker
to set the scene. Many people know your story, some people don't. So why was the book controversial and how has that controversy impacted your life? Well, when it won the Miles Franklin Award in 1995, which is, and I had to get a pocket calculator out for this, it was so long ago, which was 28 years ago. The controversy that happened then means that when the racial reckoning
00:02:32
Speaker
in 2020 happened over George Floyd. And when various other culture war issues before George Floyd became salient, particularly in the UK where I live now, like the transgender issue, a lot of it to me seemed like, and it felt like to me, that I had been fighting against these sorts of arguments since 1995. Because the controversy over the hand that signed the paper
00:03:00
Speaker
was initially it was just, you're a literary hoaxer. And some people thought that was very funny and clever because Australia has a tradition of literary hoaxers. And whilst my hoax was good, I don't think it tops the original earn Malley hoax, which I still think. And there are entire books that have been written about this. I still think was the best Australian literary hoax with the most far ranging effects.
00:03:23
Speaker
So the first thing was I used a pseudonym and a pseudo reality. I pretended to be Ukrainian, partly because I thought it would be easier to get the book published. I didn't expect, however, to have written a book that was so good, it would win the Miles Franklin. And all these people who criticized me afterwards and said, oh, you knew you were going to win the Miles Franklin. I was sitting there and thinking, well, if I knew that, then for my next trick, I'll pick the Lotto numbers.
00:03:53
Speaker
You can't know this. It's a game of chance. Less of a game of chance than the lottery, but about the equivalent in terms of games of chance as a game of cards, you know, think of whist or poker, or a horse race where you can follow the form.
00:04:09
Speaker
But anyone who's lost a lot of money on the Melbourne Cup every year knows that you are still dealing with a game of chance. The Miles Franklin is like that. And that's what I thought at the time. So there was that controversy. But very quickly, the hoax, ha ha, the literary community, you're all silly, kind of died away. And it became an argument between me and the Jewish lobby.
00:04:29
Speaker
about an attempt to control how a particular ethnic minority is portrayed in literature. And I should have known this was coming at the time, not necessarily from them. I have to admit at the time I expected it would come from Ukrainians. I thought I portrayed Ukrainians much more negatively in the novel than I had Jews. So I got the ethnic group
Art, Representation, and Diversity Quotas
00:04:50
Speaker
wrong.
00:04:50
Speaker
Most Ukrainians were fine with it. The response I got from Ukrainians at the time tended to be, thank you for pointing out that the Holodomor was just as bad as the Holocaust, which of course is now standard news reporting. We've all seen that since the war in Ukraine. People have become aware of the terrifying history of Russia's involvement in this country and how badly they treated the people there and treated it as a colony and wiped huge and opposite them out and that kind of thing. But at the time it was a shock to the system.
00:05:16
Speaker
even though it wasn't very hard to find information about it in the university library. So then I got into an argument with Australian Jews, and this is so long ago, you have to remember Jews were on the left then. And people were very sympathetic towards Israel and people thought that it was unfair the way
00:05:34
Speaker
and wrong the way Palestinians or some of Australia's Lebanese community were very critical of it. So Jews were on the left and they were able to play the oppression Olympics in a way that we associate now with Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, with some more recent immigrants like Sudanese and in the United States with African Americans and sometimes, although not always, with Native Americans.
00:05:58
Speaker
But it used to be the biggest players of the oppression Olympics would use. And they came from the left. The criticisms came from the left. And they were like the ones now. They were censorious. They wanted to try to get the book removed from the shelves. There were attempts to do that. They wanted to have me silenced and not published anywhere. So there was all the classic no platforming attempts and so on and so forth.
00:06:21
Speaker
And then there was attempts professionally over a number of years to get me sacked from various jobs. And in 2012, there are objections to my admission in Scotland. So all of the things that you associate with cancel culture were done to me. They failed. I mean, they turned the book into an enormous bestseller. They mostly failed. The one success that they had was preventing
00:06:49
Speaker
hand that signed the paper from being published in the United States. I've never had a US publication of that book. It doesn't matter now because everyone can just buy it off Amazon, but it did matter in the 1990s. I signed a contract with an American publisher and then the controversy blew up and the American publisher backed out. And I was annoyed about that. I thought they'd behave badly. I thought they were a material breach. So I kept the advance, which probably made me not very popular at the time, I have to say.
00:07:16
Speaker
Good on you. So I think that's a really good summary of the different strands that that controversy has taken. You also explain it very nicely in the forward to the republished version of the book. You basically said that this controversy can fall into two categories. Number one, writers should not tell other people's stories.
00:07:37
Speaker
and number two, writers should be more representative of the population at large. You've just mentioned there as well, there was I think a third strand which was the more nasty allegation of antisemitism. I want to look at each of those in turn.
00:07:50
Speaker
So on to the first theme that writers shouldn't tell other people's stories. This, if anything, is actually more of an issue than it was when you wrote that book. Absolutely. Only the other day I saw that Bradley Cooper was being pilloried for being cast as a Jewish man in an upcoming movie, prosthetic nose and all.
00:08:12
Speaker
What do you say to people who say characters should be played by actors of the same racial group or books about a particular group of people should be written by someone from that group of people? My response tends to be a question. What is acting? And similarly with literature, what is fiction? Actors pretend to be people they are not. Novelists write from the perspective of people they are not.
00:08:41
Speaker
made up people in many cases, although sometimes, and we've all seen films, complaints about films that are supposedly based on a true story. And then the people who are involved in the true story get all very cranky about the film because it didn't represent this or it didn't do that. Or sometimes it just took a theme and just blew the rest of it up completely. I think a big part of this is it's really important to remember that cinema, especially as a completely different genre and it's doing different things from a book, from novels, you have to treat them separately.
00:09:09
Speaker
rather than getting annoyed with Peter Jackson, for example, for not portraying the Ents properly in The Lord of the Rings. I remember that really annoyed a lot of fans at the time. Obviously, he'd read the books, very, very popular author Tolkien. So the essence, think of what the essence of an art form is, whether it's acting or whether it's writing. And the key in both cases in cinema and in fiction is writing or pretending to be
00:09:38
Speaker
someone or something that you are not. And then there's a subsidiary element to that, which I also wrote about in the introduction to that 20th anniversary edition that came out a few years ago. And that subsidiary element is that we have to stop thinking about either cinema or literature or the visual arts, photography and painting, so on and so forth. We can't view them in the same way as we view politics.
00:10:08
Speaker
there is clearly a lot of importance to the quality of representativeness in electorates.
00:10:17
Speaker
I've always said that one of the reasons why Australia doesn't have an administrative law blob and tends to have governments that are much, much tied much more closely to the aspirations of what political scientists call the median voter is because of its compulsory voting. And what does compulsory voting produce? It produces those qualities of representativeness. Some of the people who have criticized the
00:10:44
Speaker
woke people, for what and for whatever word, the kind of people who told me that you are not representative of this group, so you can't write about them, or you can't pretend to be something that you're not, that makes you a bad person or a person, a profiteer. That was something that was said to me a lot because the book was a bestseller and I won a lot of monetary prizes for it. But the big thing that people who criticize that argument do
00:11:10
Speaker
is they then often criticize the entire idea of representativeness.
Authoritarian States vs. Liberal Democracies in Art
00:11:16
Speaker
And the thing is, representativeness does have its place, and Australia is a living exemplar of the importance of representativeness. It's one of the reasons why the country is much better governed than the United States, as you will have noticed since living there. Australia is very well run. It's banks' work, for example, and the American ones don't. And it's to do with representativeness. But books aren't about representation. Books are about stories.
00:11:40
Speaker
And it doesn't matter who tells the story, it matters how it's told. So they're doing a different thing, they're serving a different purpose. Don't try and turn fiction or the arts more widely and lots of other things into the Commonwealth Parliament, because they're not the same thing.
00:11:55
Speaker
The Oscars, the Academy, would disagree with you. They have recently succumbed to this. I don't know if you've seen it. They now have, coming in 2024, they will have diversity quotas in place. You will be disqualified from being considered for best picture if you are deemed not to have enough people either in the cast or the crew from the LGBTQ community or from ethnic minority groups or who are
00:12:19
Speaker
disabled. Are you troubled by this creep in now the highest echelons of the arts institutions? Troubled in the sense that it tends to produce poor quality art, as we've seen with all the reboots and what's been done to the various film franchises. And there is a danger in that. One of the greatest areas traditionally of the United States is soft power.
00:12:44
Speaker
was, and also Britain's soft power to be fair, both countries had tremendous soft power, was to do with their cultural products, their popular cultural products, everything that from comics to cinema to music to sometimes to fiction, the Brits were stronger on the writing than the Americans have ever been. I think that's a fair thing to say, that's just something that Britain excels at and still does. The best writers globally are British.
00:13:09
Speaker
and the Americans are a poor relation. But in cinema, particularly in music, the United States at least shared top billing with the UK and was sometimes ahead. Now, one of the things I've noticed and one of the fellows who writes for my sub stack is a chap called Lorenzo Warby. And he's written widely about culture because he's interested in the history of cinema and he writes quite a lot about it. And one of the things he said in one of his pieces for my sub stack was,
00:13:38
Speaker
you need to be aware that sea dramas from the People's Republic of China just knock everything from Hollywood at the moment into a cocked hat. They're beautiful, they're well produced, they're culturally confident because the Chinese have this tremendous and rich history that they can draw on to turn into cinema and they're well acted. And they're just, he said, this is soft power territory and if the Americans don't
00:14:06
Speaker
get there, find their way back to producing good quality popular culture again, the Chinese are going to eat their lunch. Are you torn by that or maybe confused by that as a classical liberal of the quality of art coming out of an authoritarian state being that high? Does that does that seem does that deal with you? That doesn't worry me because it is well known throughout human history that authoritarian states can produce both very fine art, very fine writing and also more recently in
00:14:37
Speaker
very fine science. Where did the United States get its rocket scientists from after World War II? From the Germans. Yeah, exactly. So we need to be honest about not necessarily the shortcomings, but the limitations of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is wonderful for prosperity. It's wonderful for self-expression.
00:14:59
Speaker
but we need to be very, very careful that we don't pretend it will also produce fine art, that it will also produce excellent science, that it will also produce cultural confidence. We need to be very, very wary of that. And I've had to try to find line here because I'm not trying to praise Xi Jinping thought or whatever it is. I'm just trying to point out that China is the other world civilization. And if you look at the history of global innovations,
00:15:26
Speaker
and who produce most of them. About half of them will come from Europe, but the other half will come from China and the rest of it. And to be fair, that's about 80% added together. And the remaining 20% the rest of the planet gets to fight for those scraps. It's either Europe or China, and you really do have to take the cultural confidence and achievements of that civilization and its greatness very seriously.
00:15:49
Speaker
I think that's fair. I'd separate science from art in this conversation slightly. I think they're slightly different. In terms of the arts in authoritarian regimes, a lot of the art, which is of that quality that you mentioned, comes from dissenting voices. And it is that tension between the dissenting voice and the authoritarian regime that makes it so powerful. You're a great fan of Dostoevsky, and that's a classic example. The type of art that we're talking about in this Chinese context now does not fall into that category.
00:16:19
Speaker
Or if it does so, it has to be very, very careful about how it does it. Some of the C-dramas are boy love C-dramas, and the love is always completely chased.
00:16:32
Speaker
It's the soulmate's argument. It's the way homosexuality was presented in Christian and Islamic contexts, rather than in, say, classical contexts, where it was completely fine. So it's portrayed as a completely normal part of the culture in both directions, male homosexuality and female lesbianism.
00:16:50
Speaker
So you'll get a very subtle amount of pushing in C-dramas against the sort of regime views of a particular
Cultural vs. Gender Appropriation
00:16:59
Speaker
thing. But you won't get real opposition. It is, to be fair, the analogy I would draw is someone like Michelangelo did a huge amount of church commissioned art whilst being gay himself. And you can't help but look at Michelangelo's sculptures of young men and
00:17:17
Speaker
modern people can see the sculptor in the closet, basically, but he was still doing all those church commissions, and there were still marvellous papal commissions, church commissions, and not always, and only sometimes was he doing private commissions for, say, the Medici family.
00:17:39
Speaker
One more question on the theme of cultural appropriation to circle back to where we were. It's something which I've struggled with. Why is cultural appropriation seen as unacceptable in some circles, you know, pretending to be a Ukrainian to tell a Ukrainian story?
00:17:57
Speaker
But increasingly, gender appropriation is celebrated in our society today and hugely celebrated in the very same circles that we're criticising you for taking on a Ukrainian persona to tell that story. I think a lot of this is just to do with the fundamental ire
00:18:15
Speaker
underlying theoretical claims of both these schools of thought are in contradiction with each other. Queer theory is making one set of arguments. And I certainly encountered this kind of nonsense as an undergraduate. It was hard not to. It's just it was the kind of thing that got mocked in rag week. It wasn't people just thought that was weird as in the humanities and social sciences who did it.
00:18:38
Speaker
And certainly when I had to do subjects, theory subjects, they were walled off from my language subjects. Absolutely walled off. You even went to a different part of the building and there was often no overlap between them. You would be taught all this weird theory, which had only just been made compulsory about one year before I started university, maybe two years. And then there were all the subjects that had been there for a million years and were just still taught in a fairly traditional way. What has happened now is the theory has colonized everything else.
00:19:07
Speaker
and largely driven out the traditional education that people experienced in the 80s and 90s, so much so that unless you're very, very careful about which university you go to, you try to do a classics degree and you'll learn more for Foucault than you will Cicero or Aristophanes, which is really appalling. That's just awful. The cultural appropriation argument has roots ultimately in some critical race theory that Black people need to be able to tell their story, that they need to be heard,
00:19:36
Speaker
It has American roots and the argument is a relatively simple one and easy to understand. The queer theory argument about everything, all boundaries can be blurred and boundary blurring is an important and valuable thing and which is what has led to all of the enormous fights over pedophilia and the fights over describing certain, you know,
00:19:58
Speaker
drag type shows as woman face by analogy with black face, all of that kind of thing. It's because they're two different intellectual traditions and they're not really on the same team and if you sat around and pick-tapped them hard enough, and I have done this in arguments I must confess, they start fighting with each other and the classical liberal can just sort of sit there and be entertained as they fight with each other.
00:20:18
Speaker
To give you an idea of how this can work, one of the more queer theory types I knew at university, and this tells you how away with the fairies they are, a group of us were just casually talking about the problem of introduced species in Australia. And if you're a Queenslander, you cannot avoid this because of what cane toads have done to the country.
00:20:42
Speaker
I grew up in an environment where I had cane toads the size of dinner plates in my back garden and you couldn't go to the outside or anything like that because they would never mind a redback on the toilet seat. It was it was too wet for redbacks. We got cane toads instead. Horrible. And the academic who was teaching the subject sort of bustled in on our chat amongst a group of students, a lot of them from country Queensland, and was talking about this attempt. And then she then said, but this attempt to maintain
00:21:12
Speaker
native animal purity. Isn't that a fool's errand? Isn't the thing that's really going to happen, is going to be a blending of all of these things? It was the classic queer theory boundary blurring argument. Isn't trying to
00:21:28
Speaker
kill all the cane toads or kill all the feral cats, pointless. You know, we don't do that with people. Why should we do it with animals? And the thing is, I remember one of the teenagers, university students there, was a member of the Green Party in good standing. And this was in the days when the Greens actually cared more about the environment than gender woo woo. And it was the only time I've ever seen someone just explode all over an academic and tell them, you know, 30 years age difference.
00:21:56
Speaker
and tell them that they were completely full of nonsense. And it involved an enormous long retelling of what feral cats did to the bilby and to the numbat and what cane toads had done to do to kookaburras that try to eat them and all of that kind of thing. And I just watched this as a bit of bi-play. And I remember sitting there and thinking, I'm not some mad environmentalist, but I was 100% on the side of the Green Party bloke.
00:22:23
Speaker
And I was just sitting there thinking, we're being taught nonsense. This stuff is actual pseudoscientific nonsense. And they think it's real. So remembering that conversation and then seeing the men can be women, women can be men claim men and women are not at all different, so on and so forth. You can identify yourself into the sex or out of the sex.
00:22:48
Speaker
or into something like non-binary, which is kind of supposed to be in between. That does not surprise
Moral Frameworks and 'Wokery'
00:22:53
Speaker
me at all. This entire intellectual system is predicated on pseudoscience, on par with geocentrism or creationism.
00:23:02
Speaker
What I don't understand is it feels to me like these conversations around men can be women, women can be men, and you shouldn't be allowed to wear Indian headdresses at costume parties, all this other stuff. It is based on pseudoscientific nonsense and it should be confined to university lecture halls where people are talking about cane toads. It is ridiculous. How has it taken the leap?
00:23:27
Speaker
from the silly people kind of arguing about cane toads in the context of queer theory and universities to now being a dominant force in politics, in the corporate world, in the media, across all of our dominant institutions. How has that frog leap to extend on the cane toad analogy, how has that taken place? Totally. I still think the best analogy I have seen, the best argument I have seen for why this is
00:23:56
Speaker
has become so pervasive is the one that has been made by people like Tom Holland at the highest level, the historian and classicist, but very much a historian of religion in this case. As a plug to all our listeners, you can listen to the recent interview with Tom Holland on Australiana in our back catalogue. Go on. But Lorenzo Warby on my sub-stack makes it, he takes
00:24:19
Speaker
Tom Holland's headline arguments and provides a great deal of historical detail because his background is as a medievalist, so he goes very strongly into that. His argument is that
00:24:33
Speaker
We're coming to the end of a civilizational cycle and that civilizational cycle was one that began with the triumph of Christianity as the Roman Empire fell and is now ending because modern life, particularly modern life for women has become decoupled from Christianity. Women particularly, but to a degree men as well, no longer have to prove that they are good
00:24:58
Speaker
and moral by being Christian. And Lorenzo's claim, and it's not just his, Louise Perry, another very fine British commentator, makes a similar argument, and I recommend her as a future guest on Australiana as well, argues that the key pinch point came when women got unilateral control over their fertility.
00:25:20
Speaker
the oral contraceptive, basically. They didn't have to prove by going to church and by upholding certain sets of morals that they were goodens. They didn't have to prove goodness through chastity, basically. And what Lorenzo does is he's written a few pieces for my sub-stack where he analyzes the rhetoric
00:25:39
Speaker
that even in very modern, developed liberal democracies that had started to elect female Congress people and MPs in the UK and some European and Middle Eastern countries like Israel that had female leaders or cabinet ministers quite early, is that the rhetoric before the pill still prizes chastity.
00:26:00
Speaker
And it will be written about in mainstream newspapers, even quite left leaning ones, because people forget that a lot of the British labor movement historically was as much about Methodism as it was about Marx. And then within a decade, gone.
00:26:15
Speaker
It just disappears. No one speaks about it anymore. And if they do, it's someone like Mary Whitehouse, who was just turned into a figure of fun by no none other than the national broadcaster, which at the time, the director general was Graham Greene. The novelist was Graham Greene's brother, Mr. Greene. He had a he had a picture of Mary Whitehouse in his offices at the BBC. And when he got particularly annoyed with arguing about censorship, he would go in and he would throw darts at it.
00:26:46
Speaker
This has come up as a theme several times in the conversations that I've had. The decline in organised religion has created a vacuum in society. It's created a vacuum and nature upholds the vacuum. And Lorenzo and Tom Holland and Louise Perry and Nigel Bigar. And Bigar's very interesting because unlike the others who are historians or economists or whatnot, Bigar's actually a theologian.
00:27:11
Speaker
I mean, he's written a book about colonialism that's largely based on his first degree, which was in history, but his real scholarship is in theology. So he's very, very well qualified to comment on this. And so you get, you combine all of these people, their linguists or their historians or their theologians or
00:27:30
Speaker
Perry's original training was in anthropology and you get them put their thinking caps on and all put their heads together and you start to appreciate the extent to which what is getting called Wokery is just a Christian heresy. It takes on all these Christian elements and then runs with them and the thing is our civilization has been Christian for probably over 1500 years
00:27:55
Speaker
You can't say 2000 because the Romans persecuted it initially. And it's interesting that the Romans often criticized the early Christians for things that modern people criticized the work for. The line, it's all a bunch of hysterical, emoting women about the work. You get Roman jurists saying things like that about the early Christians.
00:28:20
Speaker
And thinking that, oh goodness, victims might have something to say to us. Just because they're victims, you get Roman jurists going, really? You're trying to tell us that a bloke who was executed for starting a riot, a public order offense, which the Romans hated, hated public order offenses, might have something to tell us about religion. If you pull the other one, it plays the national anthem. Basically, that was very much the response.
00:28:47
Speaker
I posed this to John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister last week and I'm keen to ask you the same question. We can assume that
00:28:56
Speaker
The decline in organized religion has created a vacuum for organizing moral frameworks for people to live their lives. What you've just said is you think that Wokiri in some respects has been the alternative moral framework that some people have chosen to take. We can also assume, I think we both agreed, that that is not a sufficient moral framework. That is a problem. So my question to you would be,
00:29:21
Speaker
to a 20 year old kid who for whatever reason can't get him or herself to believe in a God. What are you saying to them for how, what are the organizing principles or organizing moral framework around which they live their lives in a society which doesn't have religion increasingly as that option?
Ukraine's Historical Struggles and Russian Imperialism
00:29:40
Speaker
My piece of advice has always been very, very simple.
00:29:44
Speaker
and comes from my father ultimately, is if you're presented with a framing device for how you ought to live your life, the thing you must always ask is, is it true? And I have to say, I mean, I'm an atheist myself. One of the problems that Christianity and Islam both confront is they do ask people to believe a lot of things that aren't true. You know, Muhammad did not ascend from the battlements of Jerusalem to heaven on a winged horse. People don't come back from the dead.
00:30:12
Speaker
It's asking people to believe a lot of things that aren't true, but it also encases untrue things in a lot of things that may appear to be mythological, but we've all encountered the phenomenon of something like a children's fairy story that is not literally true, but it is metaphorically true.
00:30:31
Speaker
one of the best cartoons about the trans-identifying rapist who attempted to get himself transferred to a women's prison in the United Kingdom, and it blew up Nicola Sturgeon's premiership of, she was first minister of Scotland, the equivalent of state premier. It is
00:30:49
Speaker
was the beginning of the end of the road for the Scottish National Party. One of the best cartoons I saw in one of the newspapers, and there are a lot of very funny ones, used the story of Little Red Riding Hood. And there sitting in the bed was, but I identify as the wolf. But I identify as your grandmother. We all know that the story of Little Red Riding Hood isn't true. It's not literally true, but it's metaphorically true. And so these are the good bits of organized
00:31:19
Speaker
religion, regardless of the tradition. And it doesn't have to be a monotheistic one. You can learn a hell of a lot about decent moral behavior from reading the Hindu epics or reading the Monkey King stories that are all part of the Chinese tradition. These are great ethical traditions. All of them have something to say to us, even if they asked, and I think that's the danger, asked us to believe a lot of things that aren't true, is does this, what you're being asked to believe,
00:31:48
Speaker
have any moral content in it, even if it's not literally true. And how much untruth are you being asked to believe? How much nonsense are you being asked to believe? Remember very basic things that you will know if you finished high school in Australia or the UK and got your three A levels or your five senior subjects for the HSC, for your ATAR. I think it's five, isn't it? It's three in the UK and five in Australia. Very basic things.
00:32:16
Speaker
We now have the germ theory of disease. Medicine no longer teaches miasma. You know, we don't think that there's up some extra special element to start a fire. So we don't teach phlogiston in chemistry. We don't teach geocentrism in geology. We don't teach creationism in biology. These things are just not true.
00:32:36
Speaker
How much stuff are you being asked to believe that isn't true and five minutes on the internet would tell you that they're not true? I think that's the question that a young person needs to ask. I think that's really powerful and that reflects a very similar sentiment that Peter Bicosian said to me a couple of weeks ago with the fundamental principle for your life being, that search for truth. I agree with it wholeheartedly.
00:32:59
Speaker
I want to turn to what I said at the outset was the secondary reason for why your book remains culturally. In fact, it potentially is more culturally relevant today than it was at the time. And that is the reemergence of Ukraine on the geopolitical stage in unfortunate circumstances. You are uniquely placed to look at the Russian and Ukrainian conflict in a historical context. You said in a recent interview that
00:33:29
Speaker
if there was a country on earth that deserved a chance at a better life. It was Ukraine. Why? It's well known now, but when I wrote The Hand That Signed the Paper and when people like Robert Conquest were writing books like Harvest of Sorrow, and even more recently with Timothy Snyder, the great American historian who wrote Bloodlands, which came out after The Hand That Signed the Paper but doesn't say anything that I didn't already know when I read it, all of these people was
00:34:00
Speaker
The story of what happened in Ukraine was until the terror famine of Chairman Mao in China, which came much, much later in the 50s and 60s with the Great Leap Forward, was the exemplar of the failure of communism. And it still shocks people when you explain that the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine, happened in between 1932 and 1933.
00:34:29
Speaker
And less than 10 years later, the Holocaust was happening, often in parts of the same world and parts of the same geographically. And I mean this quite directly. People have become used to the post-World War II political boundaries, forgetting that significant parts of what are now West Ukraine were actually historically part of Poland. All those countries have had their borders shifted around really dramatically.
00:34:54
Speaker
largely because of the behaviour of the Soviets, but also with the connivance of Roosevelt and Churchill as well, you can't just blame Stalin for it. And to the great immiseration and horror of many Poles and Ukrainians, people don't realise that there was actually a military insurgency in West Ukraine that persisted until the late 1950s.
00:35:18
Speaker
after the Second World War with caches of German arms and so on and so forth. And it was resolved eventually by Stalin and the Warsaw Pact countries literally putting all the Ukrainians in Ukraine, all the Poles in Poland, all the Romanians in Romania, and all the Hungarians in Hungary. And the fact that there were little pockets of populations where that didn't quite work in Romania and Hungary is still leading to problems now.
Perceptions of Putin and Media Distrust
00:35:43
Speaker
So yes, they basically, that's why Poland is so Polish. You go there, there is all,
00:35:48
Speaker
until last year, and there's heaps of Ukrainians suddenly. But until the war started, Poland was so intensely Polish because it would be the only people who lived there were Poles. That's why Crimea is a problematic area as well, isn't it? Yes. Well, once again, this is another one of these awful bits of history. The Crimean Tatas sided
00:36:08
Speaker
with the Germans during World War II and the response, the post-war response of Stalin was to deport them to various parts of Siberia, basically. And then you had when the collapse of the Soviet Union happened, you had Crimea and Tartus attempt to come back to Crimea to find that they'd been displaced largely by Russians and they were trying to claim their historic
00:36:28
Speaker
property that their ancestors had owned. So they were trying to claim something like the Palestinian right of return. That's not the first time we've heard that story in history. No, this is the thing. And then the Crimean Tatas, they are a different ethnicity. They're Mongols, their ancestors are Mongols and their religion is a mixture. Some of them are Buddhists, some of them are tribal religions, what we would call shamanism, and others are particular and idiosyncratic varieties of Islam, Muslim.
00:36:57
Speaker
It's just a mess. So yes, basically I finished up being Eddie Everywhere, all over various UK TV channels, just doing potted history of the Holodomor 101. This happened. This happened in the 1930s. The Russians had this really, really unpleasant colonial mentality. They've always considered Ukraine part of greater Russia, the Russian Imperium. And it's like China with Taiwan or Tibet.
00:37:22
Speaker
They think it is part of themselves. So in many ways, this conflict is existential, which is why you do need to pay attention to Putin's nuclear saber rattling because it's an existential conflict. And Konstantin Kisen has made the same point multiple times as well, including on BBC News Night. He was very good on that.
00:37:39
Speaker
And again, another shameless plug. He was also very good making that point on Australiana. Go check it out. I think at the start of the war, most people, almost all people, if they didn't have the same wonderful knowledge of history that you have, they instinctively understood that. They understood that what had happened to the Ukraine in the past was unjust and this war was started for unjust reasons.
00:38:03
Speaker
There is, however, I think it is small, but it is growing, a small but growing counter movement in the West that is increasingly sympathetic to Putin. By extension, it is increasingly hostile to Zelensky and the Ukrainians. And it's simplifying it, but basically it's saying that because of all the woke nonsense that's going on in the West and the problems that they see in their culture, they see that Putin is an antithesis to the moral corruption and decadence of the West.
00:38:32
Speaker
So by extension, we need to get behind him. Explain that phenomenon to me and how you feel about that counter movement that is emerging. Well, first of all, it's much commoner in the United States. It's even started to appear in presidential primaries and things like that in the US. So it's much commoner over there. And it tends to be coupled with a more legitimate argument, which is the United States needs to stop being the world's policeman.
00:38:59
Speaker
And there is, I mean, even Trump ran versions of this, we need to sort the Middle East out so we're not the world's policeman anymore. And if Trump had any real successes as president, they were foreign policy successes because it was quite, his foreign policy was really quite peaceful.
00:39:14
Speaker
So it's mainly america it's not in the uk or very seldom said in the uk and i don't think it's it's very common in australia although it's common enough and i will describe to you what i described i think it was to bbc scotland when i did an interview about this last year which was.
00:39:31
Speaker
I encountered the phenomenon of being on the Aussie left, of being somewhat persona non grata as a result of the hand that signed the paper and the various arguments that I made around it at the time. And then suddenly those arguments that I'd made historically became
00:39:45
Speaker
the acceptable facts and ones that were largely accepted by people on the progressive side of politics, particularly the stuff about the halal and all the stuff about Russia imperialism, the stuff about the way Russia treated Ukraine historically, and so on and so forth. All of those things which were when
00:40:02
Speaker
were occluded. People got very angry with me for talking about them in the 90s. They suddenly became acceptable mainstream opinion. And all these people who had me blocked on Twitter and all these people who didn't want to know me ever, suddenly that either unblocked me, unfollowed me, were willing to talk to me. I even finished up being interviewed on ABC radio and I was just sort of, and it wasn't just on the general current affairs one, which I've been on a few times talking about politics or whatever. It was the
00:40:31
Speaker
book show, which hasn't talked to me since like 1997 or something ridiculous. And it was perfectly reasonable. It wasn't bad. It wasn't some sort of awful woke nonsense. And I noticed that. And there was also the experience of a week before the war started, a week before February 24th, Booktopia was doing a promotion of a whole heap of reissued books of which the hand that signed the paper was one.
00:41:00
Speaker
And they got all sorts of kibitzers in their mentions, having a go at why are you promoting this book and so on and so forth. And then a week after the war, they did the same tweet. They're a corporate body. I mean, obviously they just stick tweets out and they want people to buy their books, which is fine. Buy their books. Books are great. Crickets got a few retweets. I retweeted it, liked it, you know, and there was just nothing else. And what that phenomenon is, and I'm afraid it's true in both directions,
00:41:30
Speaker
A lot of people, particularly in the United States, think their entire media is just nonsense and is telling them lies, whether it's over COVID or whether it's over mostly peaceful protests that nonetheless have cities burning down behind people's heads and so on and so forth. So they've just decided that anything that comes from the US press is nonsense, including the support for Ukraine. So it's like a dissident or contrarian version of a non-player character.
00:41:59
Speaker
The same way that you get the progressive non-player character who might have wanted to defend Stalin's blushes in the 1990s, or communism's blushes at least, when criticizing me in the hand that signed the paper, but suddenly that's not the accepted view anymore. And so therefore what I said was okay. And it was safe to follow me on Twitter or interview me on the national broadcaster. And I'm not talking about the UK, the UK was fine and has always been fine here. It's got a genuinely diverse press.
00:42:29
Speaker
So what you have to avoid, and I'm going to sort of try to give a bit of advice here, is to not be the NPC, the non-player character, in any direction. Try to assess a news story on its merits. Try to learn about the background of what you are being told. And sometimes you will find that the mainstream press deserves all its criticism, like the reporting of the Black Lives Matter.
00:42:54
Speaker
protests, which was egregious, and a lot of the COVID reporting as well, but the Black Lives Matter ones in America were the worst, I thought. But by the same token, just because they're wrong a lot, don't assume that the media you consume is always right either, because it'll be wrong a lot too.
The Voice to Parliament: Political Shifts and Concerns
00:43:11
Speaker
And it sounds incredibly twee and naff to go do your own research. You know, like people type that out on Twitter with a mixture of capital and lowercase letters to have a go at people who say do your own research.
00:43:22
Speaker
But that is sadly what you have to do because the press just isn't reliable anymore. We don't have that three TV stations that all turn off just before midnight after playing the national anthem. That world is gone.
00:43:37
Speaker
That was an odd experience for me because I did have that sense that politically I had not changed, my views hadn't changed. I was staying in place politically and yet all these other people were processing around me and their political views were shifting as I watched.
00:43:54
Speaker
You're not alone there. I'm fascinated by this group of which you are a part, you know, the Bill Mars of the world, for example, who would have been on the very left 20 years ago, who say, say, look, I haven't changed my view, but for some reason, the way that the left, I think the left particularly, I think you can say both sides, but I think the left particularly. I'm not going to both sides this. It's like the fight between
00:44:18
Speaker
the gender-criticals and the feminists and the translunes, as I call them. There are a lot of things wrong with feminism, and there's a lot of pseudoscience in feminism, some of which, as Helen Joyce has argued, did lay the ground for the worst of the translunacy.
00:44:34
Speaker
But they are not behaving like the transliteratics. They're not going around threatening to punch or kill people. They're not disrupting people's events and banging on the windows or trying to punch the lights out of the speaker or that kind of thing. They're just not. They're just behaving much better. So you don't both sides this because one side is clearly more badly behaved than the other.
00:44:53
Speaker
Well, badly behaved. And I think the organizing principles of the left have changed more radically in the last 20 years, you know, and that's why you see kind of the Bill Mars, the world's moved around them. Elon Musk, the world has moved around him. I would say close to home. He used to be a greeny guy, he used to be an ecologist, a conservationist, all of that stuff. That's right. Close to home. I think Morin Mundine is a very good example of somewhere, the kind of the values of the Labour Party changed. And as a result, his political allegiances have changed despite his principles not changing.
00:45:23
Speaker
He's a real example of someone who has stayed in place, not changed and the world's processed around him actually. He's probably an even stronger example of it than me because he's older than me and he's been a public figure in Australia talking about things for decades. One thing that he's talking about and I always like a clean segue is the voice. I promised you that you would have plenty of time to talk about this and it is important to talk about it. It is the most important conversation that we are having in Australia at the moment. Helen Dale, how will you vote and why?
00:45:53
Speaker
Normally I don't disclose my votes on anything and I was very proud of the fact that when I covered Brexit for the Australian and for quite a lot of British outlets and then later for Law and Liberty, the magazine I write for, nobody could tell whether I was leave or remain.
00:46:08
Speaker
And there were times when I wrote pieces and people were accusing me of being a rabid remainer and people were then accusing me of being a rabid lever. And I would sit there very smugly and go, you can't tell. And I'm very pleased about this. But I am going to perhaps out of loyalty to growing up in Australia, even though I don't live there now, I am going to disclose my vote over the voice in advance. I'm doing so for principled and instrumental reasons. I'm voting no and I'm
00:46:38
Speaker
going to make a point of it because this means for me, unless I do quite a bit of organizing, I need to catch the train up to London. I live down in the Tory Shires. I need to catch the train up to London and go into Australia House on the Strand in order to cast my ballot. The reason I'm voting
00:46:56
Speaker
know is it's become clear to me, it wasn't clear initially, and when the idea was first mooted for a voice to Parliament, because Noel Pearson was behind it, and I've got a lot of time for Noel Pearson, I think he's very clever, I thought, okay, there might be something in this, it might work. But now you see the words, and even if you strip out all of the speculation about what that might mean, and what legislative form it will take, and so on and so forth, you finish up with a situation
00:47:26
Speaker
where a group of people defined by their ethnicity are going to have outsized influence on the development of public policy. And I'm coming from the fine tradition of liberalism and I don't think that that is proper. Can I test that? Because there is an argument amongst some in the legal fraternity, the University of Sydney lecturer, she's one of my lecturers back in the day but I've forgotten her name, she says that
00:47:53
Speaker
There is a legal reading that says that this is not about a group tied to their ethnicity. It is purely tied to the fact that they are First Nations people. Their ethnicity is technically irrelevant. It is purely because they were here first. How do you respond to that legal reading? Well, it's a legal reading based on the claim.
00:48:15
Speaker
that there is a difference, a legal difference, as opposed to a biological difference between ethnicity or ancestry and race. And the thing is, there is a biological difference between ancestry and race. So when people rebut claims from like Senator Price, for example, that this is racist, Senator Price is using language
00:48:36
Speaker
loosely. My argument here is that the biological difference that exists between ancestry and race is true. Human beings are not genetically diverse enough to have races. Now, what biologists call races in non-human animals, the expression they use is subspecies. Humans don't have subspecies. There is one race, the human race, the old saw, homo sapiens, that's it.
00:49:05
Speaker
Whereas, for example, if you look at chimpanzees, there are subspecies. You can go and look at the different chimpanzees and you can see genetic trees that biologists and geneticists using technology like CRISPR have been able to assess. And it's so striking.
00:49:21
Speaker
that, for example, you can get groups of chimpanzees where they haven't mixed with each other for many, many years in different parts of Africa, where they don't share 25% of the same genetic material. The biggest gap you will get between human populations is 5%. We don't have races.
00:49:40
Speaker
what you then have to do and what has been done and this is a slight of hand and it's enough to bamboozle people but it is is that people bring across that biological truth that there is only one race and it's the human race and if you want to see subspecies look at the chimpanzees they have subspecies they have races
00:49:57
Speaker
humans don't and they are then saying this is right because race there aren't human races you don't we are not using race in order to give a group a defined group of people based on their race extra political power but the thing is as anyone who has taken a 23 and me test knows it's very very easy to work out what someone's ethnic ancestry is
00:50:23
Speaker
You can certainly use ancestry, even though we're not divided up into races, in order to confer power on people and the ability to influence politics or to spend money. You see this, for example, in the United States and in Canada with the Native American groups. And because they have got a different tradition of a lot more money and power like the casinos in
00:50:46
Speaker
the US. Recently, we saw the Payute Indians getting very angry with environmentalists at the Burning Man Festival because their particular Indian band, their tribal group, makes a lot of money out of Burning Man. So it was actually tribal police who moved all the environmental protesters away because they said, if you listen to the voices, the video,
00:51:09
Speaker
If the voice is coming out, you will hear at one point one of the Native American coppers saying, you are trespassing on tribal land. These people aren't get. And then when the greenies wouldn't get, they all got arrested. The way American coppers do put you down and put your hands behind your back and chain you up. And it all looks quite harsh to Australians.
00:51:28
Speaker
or certainly to Brits anyway. And so what you finish up with when you do get money in power and the opportunity to access money in power based on ancestry is people then want to control it. Now we've had enormous disputes in Australia, including litigation that involved Andrew Belt many, many years ago over who counts as Aboriginal. And he got really annoyed with the fact that so many of the Aborigines were what he considered to be white people. And there was no way of knowing unless they did do a DNA test.
00:51:56
Speaker
then you find out that it's like one thirty second or something like that. So what you get in the United States and in Canada is you'll get the tribal groups jealously guarding how much ancestry you have to have in order to get access to the goodies. And often it's a quarter, sometimes it's more, but a quarter is very common. And you can get an individual, for example, and those of you who follow American politics will remember what happened with Elizabeth Warren.
00:52:21
Speaker
Now, she claimed to have Native American ancestry and a lot of people were mocking her and calling her FOCA Hauntous. You know, spelling it with an F rather than a P and saying, you don't have Native American ancestry. Well, I looked into it in advance of this podcast. That's not actually true. And a lot of those criticisms were unfair. She certainly did have, does have Native American ancestry. She went and did a DNA test.
00:52:46
Speaker
But the thing is, the DNA test discloses that the Native American ancestry she has is between six and 10 generations ago. And when it is that far distant, it is so small, the percentage of her total ancestry taken globally, that you can't even tell
00:53:04
Speaker
whether that Native American ancestry is from North or South America, because the ancestors of both North and South American Native Americans all came across the Bering Strait at the same time. So my point here is that just because there aren't human races doesn't mean that you can't use ancestry, which isn't race, but is certainly easy to identify, especially if you use genetic testing to give people power
00:53:30
Speaker
and influence that they otherwise wouldn't have. I am only willing to make two predictions about the voice if it passes. One, I think, is a positive thing. Watch me make the argument for the yes case better than the yes people can. One of the great flaws with ASIC was that the voting for it wasn't compulsory. Now, Aborigines were only compelled to vote in 1984. They got the vote, but it was non-compulsory across the whole of Australia.
00:53:56
Speaker
in 1962, but it was only made compulsory in 1984. ATSEC was then founded in 1990. So they'd only had six years of compulsory voting to develop that very, very strong, clear identification with the importance of democracy and majorities and representativeness that really matters in Australia. It's now 39 years.
00:54:20
Speaker
that Aborigines have had compulsory voting. I am quite confident when I say that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders will have exactly the same software as the rest of us. So the election mechanism for the voice, I strongly suspect, I'm willing to predict this, will be compulsory. That's a good thing. Compulsory voting in Australia produces all sorts of good downstream effects. But as soon as you have compulsory voting and you base it on ancestry that can be detected in a DNA test,
00:54:47
Speaker
What does that invite? What happens in other political parties in Australia when you want to get more support for an idea or a movement in your particular political party? We all know what it's called, even though the Liberals try to pretend that they don't have it. What do you get? Branch stacking. Lots and lots of country people have a small amount of Aboriginal ancestry. There used to be an awful joke about it. They would say, oh, that person has a touch of the tar brush.
00:55:15
Speaker
What's to stop people who want a particular policy to be recommended through the voice, to go and round up all the country people that they know and talk to their tame Aboriginal community, to get those people accepted as Aboriginal and as voters under the three-part Aboriginality test. Ethnic ancestry or descent, identifying as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and accepted by a community.
00:55:40
Speaker
Now, those are the only predictions I'm willing to make, regardless of the form that the voice takes. I'm sure the voting for it will be compulsory because Aborigines now have excellent compulsory voting software just like the rest of us. And two, there will almost immediately be fights over who gets to vote for it based on ancestry and how much ancestry they have. Within 20 years, it will start to be fights like you see in Native Americans and Native Canadians.
00:56:06
Speaker
Fascinating perspective, and it's one that I haven't heard yet in the voice debate. There's part of it that I want to pick up on, and that is the possibility of testing for Indigenous or Aboriginal ancestry. Gary Johns, prominent no campaigner in Australia, has brought this up recently, and he was pilloried as a racist for the suggestion of putting forward DNA testing. And this is, I think, actually a very, very common refrain on the left. Say, if you bring this up,
00:56:36
Speaker
you are a racist, it invites ugly connotations of Nazism and all that sort of stuff. How do you think about this? Because at the moment, from what the left is saying, they seem to think that this is like a subjective thing about the fields. I feel Aboriginal, I am Aboriginal. I feel a woman, I feel a man. It's all part of the same kind of thinking, but with an Australian twist on it, because Australia does have a distinctive political culture and doesn't have the same history of one-drop rules, for example, that existed.
00:57:05
Speaker
in the United States, where you didn't stop being black until you were less than one-sixteenth. Okay, that's what one-drop rules were like. It was really quite extraordinary. And that's why you had the entire phenomenon of passing and the enormous risk that people that had mixed ancestry would take if they looked white and they married a white person and they had children. But of course,
00:57:28
Speaker
Mother Nature not only likes playing games of dice, she sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen. I think that's a quote from Stephen Hawking, but it's true in biology. You get throwbacks, and I'm sure we've all seen extraordinary pictures of what looked like two white parents and a child that looks African American. I know that there hasn't been unfaithfulness or adultery on the part of the mother. It's just been one of those things that's happened. My disagreement with someone like Gary Johns is
00:57:57
Speaker
I find the idea of genetic testing to work out what someone's ancestry is to determine whether they can vote or not. I find that absolutely horrifying and horrifying for the same reason that people on the left find horrifying. It has all sorts of dreadful historical connotations.
00:58:15
Speaker
Genetic testing is wonderful when you do it for yourself. You find out if you've got vulnerability to diseases, you find out where your ancestors came from, you find out where your relatives are. You know, someone like Elizabeth Warren, who's discovered that she's got a small amount of Native American ancestry, she could use
00:58:31
Speaker
both the facilities through 23andMe or an organization like Ancestry.com to find out where her relatives are, her modern relatives are, and the ones that also have Native American ancestry, she would then be able to tell with a fair degree of probability where her native ancestors are from. Are they from South America? Does she have relatives in Chile or Brazil? Or does she have relatives in Arizona or Massachusetts or Quebec?
00:58:56
Speaker
You know, that kind of thing. That's fascinating. It's wonderful at an individual level. So my view, and this is why I'm voting no, is that you don't even want to entertain this as a possibility. You just don't
Conclusion and Further Reading
00:59:08
Speaker
want to go there. And the way to avoid going there is to vote no for this because it is an awful thought. And there's evidence of where it leads because we have the experience of indigenous people in the United States, in Canada,
00:59:22
Speaker
in even in other parts of the world, like working out who are the indigenous people of Northern Japan and that kind of thing, because it's once again tied to influence or to benefits or so on and so forth. This is just not something. And of course, the other one that is closer to home for Australians is Malaysia. And the strongest arguments I have heard articulated against
00:59:47
Speaker
the voice voting for it, even from people who are quite left leaning. I have encountered from Malays, Chinese Malays.
00:59:55
Speaker
Because often they are in Australia because they are from that haka ethnic minority. They are a market dominant minority. They are like Jews or kulaks. They have that sort of background. And they left Malaysia because of the entire system of discrimination in favor of people. Bami putra, boomi patra, I think it's called, I mean, Sons of the Soil anyway in Malay. And they go, you just don't want this in Australia. We know what it's like. We've had that experience in our own country. It's why we left.
01:00:21
Speaker
That's really, really interesting. I think the way you frame that was spot on. It's something which has been on my mind a lot when the conversation around testing comes up. I think most people would agree this is a nasty, unpleasant road to go down.
01:00:37
Speaker
but the mechanism of the voice encourages these types of conversations. And that is why I have such a deep problem with it personally as well, because I think it is just taking Australia down a very dark road for no practical benefit that I can see. And that's the final question that I'm going to ask you on. Let's say everything you've said, which had been primarily principled opposition to the voice and the branch-dacking argument was a very good practical concern, but primarily principled opposition. Let's say all that's true. What if I was to say,
01:01:04
Speaker
There are so many people in remote Indigenous communities where living standards are so atrocious. There are so many problems. We've tried everything. Absolutely nothing's worked. Why don't we just give this a crack? It may help improve the lives of Indigenous people. What do you say to people who make that argument? The most powerful argument against the Republic in 1999, in which I didn't vote, that's another one where I didn't vote, was is if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The Australian system clearly wasn't broken. It was fine.
01:01:34
Speaker
The problem with the voice, and this is indeed, in my view, the most powerful argument for the yes case, as you've alluded to, is that what we have is broken. What you then have to ask yourself is that will the voice fix it? And remembering that this is a very, very difficult problem to fix. Billions have been spent on it. The goodwill, the efforts of people on both sides of politics on, sorry, I shouldn't say both sides of politics, on all sides of politics,
01:02:04
Speaker
without exception, I don't think.
01:02:07
Speaker
they have turned their minds. And Australia is a well-governed country with a competent political class, with perhaps the exception of Victoria. It's not as though Australians are rubbish at running things. Australians are good at running things. And Australians have not been able to fix this problem. Aborigines among themselves have not been able to fix this problem with the best will in the world. There are individual patches of light in various places, perhaps, for example, where a community has become very wealthy as a result of a mining lease, dated title.
01:02:35
Speaker
But then, of course, that's potluck. It's the same principle about when you ask why Saudi Arabia is so rich, well, it happened to be sitting on all of that oil, didn't it? It's helpful if your Aboriginal community is sitting on lots of uranium or iron or coal or natural gas. What if you're not? And some of them aren't, and they're still poor as church mice. So that is the thing. We have to confront, honestly, the reality that it is broken. The Republic argument
01:03:02
Speaker
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It doesn't apply here. What we have is broken. Honesty there is important. And I think people who promote the no case and don't acknowledge that are not behaving well, to be fair. But then the next question is, will the voice fix it based on everything that we know and based on what
01:03:20
Speaker
form you may think it will take. If it takes a form, remembering, of course, that just because you have a constitutional architecture for a body doesn't mean that it always lasts forever. The famous one is sections 101 to 104 of the Constitution to set up an interstate commission. Well, it eventually, it died in the arse by 1989, it no longer exists. And there was a long period in the interwar period where it didn't exist either. So that can happen sometimes too. So and the thing is, remember, if you stick something in the Constitution and
01:03:50
Speaker
ceases to exist because it's failed. That's a terrible thing to happen. That's a terrible admission of failure. Yeah, at least the interstate commission went away because free trade v protectionism among the individual states, Australian states, ceased to be an issue. So it went away because free trade won, basically. So that would be my response to someone who says, because it is broken, we must do this. And I have always been very wary of the politicians syllogism, which is we must do something
01:04:20
Speaker
Here is something, let's do that thing. And I'm afraid that is my strong suspicion that the voice is a classic example of the politician's syllogism. Really powerful words to end on.
01:04:33
Speaker
Helen, you are one of Australia's most interesting thinkers. I highly recommend to all our listeners that they sign up to your substack. A link is in the show notes. I haven't read Kingdom of Wicked yet, I must admit. I saw the synopsis of it only this morning. It was the last thing I got to in my research for this interview, and it sounds absolutely awesome. It's already downloaded on my Kindle. I'm really looking forward to reading that.
01:04:57
Speaker
My brain is going in a million different directions after the interview. I think that was just such a wonderful conversation. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me, Will, and thank you to The Spectator as well. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.