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Dispatches from the culture wars, with Daisy Cousens
1.3k Plays2 years ago
Daisy Cousens is one of the most insightful and entertaining voices in Australian political and social commentary. She’s mastered legacy media via contributions to Sky News, Q&A and The Spectator Australia, but it’s her burgeoning reputation as a YouTuber that has catapulted her to global attention. Over 215 thousand people now subscribe to her channel.
In this episode, Daisy and host Will Kingston go on an intrepid adventure into the culture wars and Australian and American politics.
Follow Australiana on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Subscribe to Daisy’s YouTube channel here.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction & Spectator Australia Pitch
00:00:00
Speaker
The Voice is the biggest political story of the year. If you want to understand the implications that this historic vote will have on our nation, you need to subscribe to The Spectator Australia. A digital subscription includes one month free and is just $16.99 thereafter. Vote yes to a Spectator Australia subscription that is at spectator.com.au forward slash join.
Introduction to Guest Daisy Cousins
00:00:37
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia, a series of conversations on Australian politics and life. I'm Will Kingston. My guest today is Daisy Cousins. Daisy is one of the most insightful and entertaining voices in Australian political and social commentary. She's mastered legacy media via contributions to Sky News, Q&A, The Project,
00:00:57
Speaker
The Spectator Australia, yet another reason to go out and get a subscription I might add, but it's a burgeoning reputation as a YouTuber that has catapulted her to global attention. Over 215,000 people now subscribe to her channel, and no doubt that number will double after this interview lands. Daisy, welcome to Australia, Anna. Thank you so much for having me. That was a fabulous introduction. I'm very, very flattered indeed.
Trans Debate & Dylan Mulvaney Discussion
00:01:19
Speaker
This is going to be the podcasting equivalent of a pick and mix. I've trawled through your YouTube channel. I've picked out some hot takes. Any coherent themes will be entirely coincidental. One of your, I'm not sure if you can say it's a passion area, but one of your areas of interest at the moment is the trans debate and more specifically, Dylan Mulvaney. Let's start there.
00:01:40
Speaker
This may be a bit tricky for me, but let me give my best impersonation of a Dylan supporter. He's just having fun. He's living his best life. He's not hurting anyone. Why can't you just be supportive or leave him alone, Daisy? Your response.
00:01:55
Speaker
Well, look, that's sort of live and let live argument. I've heard a lot of conservatives say this, and I agree. The left only applies that to their own things. It's like, oh, you know what? That doesn't affect you, so why are you getting so angry about it? That's not bothering you. Why do you care? When they spend their lives screaming about stuff that has absolutely no effect on them whatsoever, like everything from
00:02:23
Speaker
Open borders and refugees wanting lots and lots of people to come in when you know That's that you know got nothing to do with their little entity because they tend to be you know, rich a Lot of the time they're not the ones that is going to bother to even the of the existence of private schools For instance, they they constantly go on about stuff that doesn't affect them. But the minute conservatives go Oh hang on
00:02:45
Speaker
on a minute, you know, one principle, I actually, I don't agree with that. Then suddenly it's like, oh, why can't you just live and get lived? Like it's this typical kind of double standard hypocrisy that we see on the left all of the time. And in the case of dear Dylan Mulvaney, I sort of differ
00:03:03
Speaker
on that issue from a number of conservative commentators in the fact that I'm perfectly happy to accept that Dylan is trans. I mean, I have gone through Dylan's TikTok, so nobody else has to. I have trolled through that more times than I would like to create, you know, so I can create content. And I, from what I've gathered, I actually think Dylan is trans.
00:03:29
Speaker
These are murky waters. When you say trans, do you mean he has a good faith belief that he wants to be a woman?
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, the argument I've made, however, because a lot of people interpret that as me kind of defending Dylan and condoning Dylan's behavior, which is not the case at all. I also agree with people who have said that Dylan is opportunistic and attention seeking and fame hungry and using this transition as a way to kind of jump on the zeitgeist.
00:03:59
Speaker
and catapult themselves to fame. I just don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I think Dylan ultimately, I mean, Dylan is a performer. I come from a musical theater background, so I think I actually, in a funny sort of way, understand
00:04:14
Speaker
Dylan a lot better than a lot of conservatives do because when Dylan was a gay man like that's the type of person I used to hang out with all the time in my early 20s like I get the performative stuff I get the hyperactivity I get the kind of wanting to draw in attention
00:04:32
Speaker
So I just think that Dylan has really found themselves in the right place at the right time. That does not mean, however, that what Dylan is doing isn't incredibly misogynistic. I mean, really, even though I think Dylan is trans, I really kind of get gay boy vibes. It's like a gay man's interpretation of what female adolescence is and God knows what the womanhood interpretation is if it is even there. I think it is
00:05:01
Speaker
terrible for trans representation. Your average normie is going to look at Dylan's TikTok account and go, what the hell is that all about? I mean, Dylan just behaves like a drag queen, for goodness sake. You know, he exists the same as all trans people. And it is just relying on the most, you know, superficial stereotypes of women to create the character of Dylan Mulvaney, which
00:05:27
Speaker
Hilariously well, you know, all the all the feminists in the lefties who defend Dylan in 2016 2017 They were decrying those and beforehand they were decrying those stereotypes as misogynistic and you know bad for women, etc So the whole situation is just a giant bundle of inauthentic hyperbole
00:05:50
Speaker
I would like to meet the real Dylan Mulvaney. Perhaps the real Dylan Mulvaney is a sweet sincere person that from what I have seen of Dylan Mulvaney's whole shtick. This is a performer. This is also I think a trans person. I just don't think that opportunism and being trans are mutually exclusive.
Societal Shifts & Left's Hypocrisy
00:06:10
Speaker
You mentioned the responses of some women who not so long ago would have been appalled by the idea of a biological man effectively taking the piss out of women, which a lot of people think he is doing. It makes me think about how quickly societal attitudes have changed in this area and the one which I can't believe, and maybe you can help me understand it. How have we moved so quickly from a position of believe all women in the aftermath of Me Too to watching
00:06:40
Speaker
Women like Riley Gaines like Kelly J. Kane being publicly assaulted by biological men and letting that pass I can't see how that transition has occurred in such a short space of time.
00:06:50
Speaker
Well, I think that's always been the case with the left. I think now we're just situationally in an area where we can see it playing out. I mean, as a conservative woman, I've come to realize, at least from my interpretation and experience, that people on the left don't actually think that I'm a woman. And I mean that sincerely. I've had comments from people on Twitter saying, oh, literally, if you're not an actual woman,
00:07:18
Speaker
You're not this woman, I'm like, why? I am an adult human female. That is the definition of a woman you can take right to the bank. They are so far swept up in the identity politics thing that they care more about politics
00:07:34
Speaker
than they do about people. They don't care about people at all. So if you are an adult human female, but you are a conservative, you don't take one of the women box things that they have in their head and therefore they can dismiss you, even subconsciously, as not a woman. So in the case of Kelly J and Riley, the left is perfectly happy to have them assaulted by biological men because they don't see them as part of the group's
00:08:03
Speaker
that they have taken it upon themselves to supposedly protect. I mean to them they're they're gender traitors, they're thinking like they say, oh you're thinking like a straight white man! Like it's it's so so stupid. But if you can literally unperson, not just unperson, but totally dehumanize someone based on their political beliefs, it is very very easy for them to justify you know condoning them being you know being protest to the point where they're nearly beaten up. It really
00:08:32
Speaker
You know what I've realized? You should never trust anyone who relentlessly professes how tolerant and good and compassionate they are. Generally, they are projecting. They are compensating for something. And the minute you have a woman or a black person or a gay person or a trans person who puts up their hands and says, hey, you know what? I actually don't agree with all that lefty stuff. Maybe I'm a conservative.
00:08:59
Speaker
My God, you just see that to relate that psychopathy in action. It's terrible.
00:09:05
Speaker
This is something that I've been quite taken aback by. I'm relatively new to active Twittering, and seeing the responses of many people on the woke left and the aggression and the hostility that is bound up in those responses is confronting. I was trying to work through my mind, why am I confronted by this? Because there are dickheads on the right, for sure.
00:09:31
Speaker
Separation between word and deed because one of the cool brand values of the work left here are empathy and kindness and compassion and you see this on the signs at every protest and yet when you actually hear them speak or many of them speak, it's quite the opposite. What's your reflection on that disconnect between word and deed there?
00:09:51
Speaker
Well, I think they are at a point where they feel that their cause and their values are so good and true and correct that it is absolutely essential that they are realized. There's almost a religious dimension to it.
00:10:07
Speaker
Oh, completely, yeah. I mean, human knowledge changes, human nature never does. And even though a lot of them are like, proudly atheistic, which I think is hilarious, they behave the same way that religious factions did a thousand years ago, crusading for whether it was the Caliphate or the Christian Crusades or whatever was going on, all of the stuff that was going on.
00:10:29
Speaker
back then, but they reckon that since their cause is true and correct and the world is going to end if it doesn't happen, they think they are justified in doing and saying anything they want in order to achieve it because ultimately they are right and they are good people and theirs is the only way and everything else is just immoral. And you can see why that kind of a belief system can attract so many really bad people
00:10:56
Speaker
who whether consciously or subconsciously are looking for ways to enact that immorality within them whether it's abusing people or being violent or indulging in hypocrisy but they can do it under the banner of oh we are empathetic and tolerant because we say so. I mean I've
00:11:16
Speaker
I've been observing this mindset since 2016, and it never ceases to amaze me the depth of the hypocrisy, the difference between word and deed. But interestingly enough, as I've seen former leftists recovering SJW say this, they say that
00:11:35
Speaker
hypocrisy actually isn't an insult to the left. We on the right, we think, oh, we'll call them out on their hypocrisy. They're aware a lot of the time that they are hypocritical. They just don't care about it because they think it's justified. And that is an incredibly dangerous mentality to be dealing with.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yes, the car crash interview with Nicola Sturgeon when she was trying to justify her position on the trans debate comes to mind where you can almost see her acknowledge in her mind. My position is logically inconsistent, but I've got to try and stick with it somehow. Yeah, exactly. You paint a very bleak picture of any attempt to engage with the left because there's no rationality or reason there, at least for many of them. I'm reminded of
00:12:21
Speaker
times when I lived in New York and I was having a whale of a time on various dating apps. And every fourth or fifth profile in New York would have something to the effect of, don't bother swiping right on me if you're a conservative or if you are a Trump supporter. Literally every fourth or fifth. And it got me thinking how and why have we as a society given up on not just being civil, but being civil or being friendly with people whom we have different points of view.
00:12:51
Speaker
It's an interesting one, isn't it? Because, I mean, I've talked to baby boomers about this and they'll all tell me that when they were in their 20s and 30s, people would have different opinions about politics as they always do. And yeah, they might get into a debate.
00:13:07
Speaker
or chat or even an argument but no one would take it personally and the you know there would be no animosity and it would end when the discussion would end and then they'd all go and have dinner or go get a drink or something and I've seen like older generations marveling
00:13:39
Speaker
diabolical for all the reasons that we've just mentioned. I mean, I used to know a lot of conservatives who'd be very, very willing to engage with leftists and try to talk to them and convince them, but now they're just like, I am not going to bother because those people are crazy and they're evil and they're mean. But the left has always been like that. They're very intolerant of other people's opinions because, as I said, they think they're the moral righteous ones and everyone else is stupid and evil.
00:13:43
Speaker
at how different it
00:14:04
Speaker
I do think it's social media because it just enables people to put themselves into these echo chambers where not only are their own opinions amplified and echoed back to them, but they're able to sort of massage their own morality egos in a funny sort of way. And it gets to the point where, again, particularly leftists, they cannot tolerate
00:14:27
Speaker
that feeling that maybe they might be wrong about something. Because if you get so emotionally attached to your political views, which people on the left do, people on the right do a little bit, but it's very, very characteristic on the left, as I'm sure you can imagine. If you really identify with being a progressive, if that rug is pulled out from under
00:14:48
Speaker
you or even just there's a little chink in your belief system. Well, that feels like the worst thing in the world. So I just don't think in that particular level, I don't think people can really tolerate any more that idea of debate for those reasons.
00:15:02
Speaker
But there is a subset of the left, which is interesting to me, and that is the almost repentant left, the members of kind of the liberal left of 20 years ago, who are now willing to say, you know what? Some of the stuff that's going on is bonkers. Bill Maher is the poster child of this. Even someone like an Elon Musk, who is now a far-right extremist in many people's eyes, you know, was a Democrat, you know, was a Democrat voter at the last election. Do you think there is a possibility that that subset can try and bring some normalcy back to the debate or are we too far gone?
00:15:31
Speaker
I think we're too far gone, unfortunately. I'm quite pessimistic about the whole thing at the moment. The minute it sort of became even vaguely condoned, or at least not pushed back against in mainstream culture, that trans women can somehow have periods I really lost a lot.
00:15:47
Speaker
a lot of hope about the whole thing. But yeah, again, it's become less about left and right and more about team A and team B. So if you are a Bill Maher, and Bill Maher is so famous and so popular that he's basically uncancellable. It doesn't really matter what he says. He's got a loyal enough following that he can actually get away with saying this kind of stuff.
00:16:09
Speaker
But like you said, like Elon Musk, they just get called far right extremists. The minute you say something that's even slightly out of the condoned circle of opinions that you can have as a cultural leftist or progressive or whatever, then suddenly you're no longer on team A, you're on team B. And that's
00:16:29
Speaker
And that's sort of it. Like the ideological conformity that is required in order to be listened to by these leftists is, like you said, it is religious in its nature. It's like a religious doctrine. And if you stray from that religion, if you become an apostate or even just someone who questions, well, it's into the fiery pits of lefty hell for you,
Identity Politics & Decline of Religion
00:16:52
Speaker
I'm afraid.
00:16:52
Speaker
Talk of religion has me thinking on a tangential line, and that is, do you think that the decline in organized religion over the last 50 years in most of the West has actually contributed to the rise of some of these trends that we're now seeing?
00:17:09
Speaker
I certainly don't think it's helped. I mean, there's criticism to be made of organized religion, obviously, for all of the obvious reasons. But the thing about organized religion, when it's not abused or willfully misinterpreted, is that it provides a wonderful sense of community and purpose and
00:17:30
Speaker
shared experiences and, you know, give wonderful guidelines for sort of how to love, you know, certainly in the context of Christianity. I mean, I'm Anglican, for instance, you know, in terms of how to love one another and to treat one another. And most importantly,
00:17:45
Speaker
gives you the sense that there is something out there that is greater than yourself and that you can't really understand, but that's okay. You're not meant to understand it. There's a wonderful sense of hope and continuity and especially community that comes with organized religion that I think human beings just generally speaking crave. I think we're just hardwired to crave that kind of connection and that kind of existential meaning, which is why
00:18:13
Speaker
religions have persevered for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, right back to ancient times. And as I mentioned earlier, human knowledge might change, but human nature doesn't. So in the absence of those, of more and more people turning away from organized religion, at least in a Western context,
00:18:35
Speaker
They're always going to be looking for something to replace that, even if they don't realize it. But unfortunately, the religion they've chosen, it doesn't have the same kind of moral playbook, for instance, that Christianity does. So I think certainly it hasn't helped.
00:18:50
Speaker
I think people have tried to replace it with politics. They see politicians as this sort of gods and demigods to be worshipped. They've got a satanic figure in terms of Donald Trump, for instance. He's there, he's there, Beelzebub. But it obviously hasn't worked out very well for them, I don't think, because there's nothing good or loving or properly communal about it.
00:19:14
Speaker
This is a theme which has come up a lot on this podcast of late. I've talked about this with Constant Kissen. I've talked about it with Kelly J. Keene, specifically around the vacuum for young men, particularly in a society where, to your point, we take away organized religion, I'm not particularly
00:19:31
Speaker
religious, but I can see the value of it from that communal perspective and giving a sense of shared values. You take that away. You also take away the traditional notions of masculinity that society have held onto for a long period of time, and in a relatively short space of time, things like toxic masculinity have arisen.
00:19:49
Speaker
I'm a twenty-year-old bloke I'm genuinely very confused as to what society wants me to be what my value should be and I actually think the right has questions to answer here and that I think work ideology is a bad ideology or a series of ideologies but that's giving people an alternative and it brands itself very well with the whole kind of warm and fuzzy feeling stuff.
00:20:10
Speaker
I don't think the right has done particularly well at offering an alternative vision for particularly young men, but for everyone to say this is a framework for how you live your life. Do you think that's fair?
Conservative Branding & Political Strategy
00:20:22
Speaker
I think that's fair. And that's what I find. I find that eternally frustrating. And I've always found that so frustrating that the right is so terrible and chronically terrible at branding itself.
00:20:35
Speaker
And it's all very well for, you know, people like me and conservative commentators, you know, the younger people to, you know, make an argument for why conservatism is good, you know, which we do. All the millennials, you know, we talk about obviously freedom of speech and, you know, individualism and meaning and purpose and, you know, forging ahead like these are all
00:20:55
Speaker
good ways to live your life but right-wing politicians don't do it and much as you know we we in the old media we try we try really hard we don't have the same amplification and and that's just a fact we don't have that mainstream connection i do a little bit on sky news but even then sky news is cable tv and yes we've got the youtube channel obviously but that's not
00:21:17
Speaker
really reaching the people that need to be influenced, that conservatism is in fact a good idea and a good way to live and can provide you with a framework of how to live a happy and productive life. So it just makes me so angry.
00:21:36
Speaker
You can look at this all over the Western world, but in the context of Australia, I mean, the Liberal Party, since they knifed Tony Abbott and instated, what's his face, Malcolm Turnbull, they've tried to out-left the left. And the only reason I can think that they would think that was a good idea is because they
00:21:57
Speaker
crave the approval of people on Twitter and people in the media who make up just such a small subset of the population and who are never going to like them anyway. So in Australia for nearly 10 years now we've lost so much ground with young people in terms of branding conservatism as something that they might find quite attractive because you've had these wet leaders like Turnbull and then you had Morrison who sort of
00:22:26
Speaker
We were hopeful about for a while, and then he just had no courage in the face of COVID and was all about big government. We've got Peter Dutton now, who I adore. I think he's fantastic. But even then, they're not making those points of difference. I mean, for instance, a good example, this literally made me want to smack my head against the table, was on International Women's Day this year,
00:22:50
Speaker
when the labor municipal women got up and made that big speech about the gender pay gap and oh it's so unfair and blah blah blah and we're gonna do this that and the other. Everybody with half a brain knows that the gender pay gap is an economic myth it is not influenced by gender it is influenced by individual choices it is not a comparison of like for like salaries it is an overall average of the wages earned by men and women over the course of the year it doesn't take into account hours work seniority industries like well you and I know that anyone with
00:23:19
Speaker
A shred of intelligence knows that. You know what Susan Lay did? All she did was get up and say, oh, we would like to, you know, make it clear that the government aligns itself with those comments. No, sorry, that the opposition, I'm so used to saying they're in government, so funny, that the opposition aligns themselves with the government's talking points. And I was like,
00:23:42
Speaker
You had such a good opportunity there, Susan Lee, to stand up and say, no, this is wrong for all of these reasons. Women, you don't need to feel like you're held back by your gender. You don't need to feel that the world is unfair. You don't need to feel that there's no way you can make as much money as men because you're forever handicapped by the fact you're a woman and here is why. And she didn't. The gutlessness was so infuriating and
00:24:06
Speaker
That's currently what your generation and my generation is battling against. We've lost a lot of ground. I don't know how we're going to influence, like have future politicians make these good arguments for conservatism, but it really has to happen because we are in such a mess at the moment.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with all of that with the perhaps the slight nuance that I can understand that it is incredibly hard to brand the right side of politics because of the John Howard broad church concept. And I think this conversation is probably quite a good example of that. You would call yourself a conservative. I would call myself a libertarian. That means, you know, on my end, on a lot of the social stuff,
00:24:44
Speaker
drug legalization, not wearing a seatbelt, you know, euthanasia. I'm completely happy for people to do that. I imagine, you know, your views on some of those things would be different, but we still have overarching values on the right that bind those two groups together. Things like how I'd managed to do that in Australia, we can't seem to get that Broadchurch together again. I think you're seeing the Teals are potentially a byproduct of that. How does the Broadchurch come back together in Australia?
00:25:12
Speaker
I'm not sure if it can in the same way. I think that the political divisions are so emotional now and so pronounced that that would be unbelievably tricky because as you say the sort of teal movement which is sort of half blue half green hence the fact I think teal is quite a good
00:25:31
Speaker
A good level for it, unironically, has come in and sort of slipped its way in there. I just think in Australia, the coalition needs to start making these arguments in terms of fiscal conservatism in particular to the right communities and the right areas. I mean, if you go out to, I did a little post-mortem of the election, for instance, last year, just for my own gratification, I wanted to see where the votes went and where.
00:25:58
Speaker
And I found that in places like the western suburbs of Sydney and also sort of, you know, the outer suburbs of Melbourne, the right wing minor parties like the Liberal, namely the Liberal Democrats, the UAP and One Nation got very significant slabs of the vote. I mean, in the electorate of where alone, which is in, you know, what Sydney western suburbs, those three parties collect from memory collectively got 25% of the vote. Why is the Liberal Party not getting those votes?
00:26:26
Speaker
There are obviously people out there in those kind of more working class areas, you know, you trade is your immigrant heavy areas who are who are traditionally vote labor that are socially conservative and a disillusion with the Labor Party. There is I think there are enough people in that camp
00:26:42
Speaker
that if the Liberal Party started making the argument for small business, making again the argument for family values, unashamedly putting their stake in the ground, yeah, they'd get grilled by the media, but who cares? Because those people are not going to vote for them anyway. But there are votes there that are ripe for the plucking, not just from older people, but also from
00:27:03
Speaker
younger people who are, you know, maybe want to run their small businesses and who are more entrepreneurial and who aren't on board with the work stuff, but don't have anyone explaining to them, as we've said, what a good alternative is. And I reckon like this obsession with getting back the blue ribbon, you know, now teal seats, I think is just born of total conservative snobbery.
00:27:26
Speaker
I think it is the soccer mum snobbery. I think that, you know, people like Susan Lay, they like sort of having that inverted commas class of voter voting for the Liberal Party. It's, oh, we're determined to get them back, you know, it's actually the leafy green suburbs.
00:27:41
Speaker
They didn't care about blue collar workers or tradies. And we saw the similar phenomena in America, for instance, I think Mitt Romney was talking about how the Republican Party needs to get soccer moms back. And I thought to myself, well, what's so good about soccer moms? Do you not like your white working class that Trump got to vote for you? What on earth is wrong with those people? There is a snobbery there. There's a classism there. They need to get over. They need to be looking elsewhere for those votes because that broad church of John Howard, I think, is
00:28:09
Speaker
It's sadly gone, at least in the way that it was, and they just need to have the guts to find another way of doing things. Do you think the Liberal Party is dying? No, I don't. I don't think the Liberal Party is dying. I think the beating heart of it is still there, very, very much so, particularly in a number of the conservative faction branches. The people are there. The right people are in there. They just need time.
00:28:33
Speaker
I'll challenge that though. Are they? So you mentioned earlier the branding problem on the right side of politics. I look at this almost like I'd look at a sporting team and your talent pipeline starts from club level very, very early. You get the kids out of school and you put them into Colts programs and then you develop them from there.
00:28:52
Speaker
If you look at politics the same way, and you look at the university politics clubs as the breeding ground for our future politicians, and most of them are not the type of blokes and girls that you would want to be seen dead with. Apologies to anyone in the Young Liberals who is listening to this podcast, I'm sure you are one of the exceptions. But my point is, there is a branding problem. I don't think at that very early stage,
00:29:18
Speaker
We're getting, I don't think politics is cool. I don't think, I don't think the right is cool even more so. How do you change that narrative, particularly at that stage, so we get better people into the pipeline?
Cultural Shifts & Conservative Resurgence Prediction
00:29:29
Speaker
Well, God, it's hard, isn't it?
00:29:32
Speaker
You know what? You actually make very good points there. Perhaps I've only been mixing with fun people in the Liberal Party. I make it a point to stick with the fun people. I really agree with what Andrew Breitbart said about how politics is downstream from culture. If you want to influence people's politics, you influence it through cultural forces.
00:29:56
Speaker
And that is why the left is just laughing at the moment when it comes to the under 30s and even the under 35s because so much of popular culture is so woke. Conservatives really don't have a hope of cutting through.
00:30:12
Speaker
give them time like maybe like for instance the Daily Wire has started making movies and pushing cultural stuff they recognize the need to kind of fill that vacuum there. I just I think it is unfortunately going to just take a lot of time and again maybe I'm just feeling like really doomy today I'm dooming I'm doing a lot I'm a very optimistic person but I'm feeling very doomy today
00:30:35
Speaker
I think, and this is a horrible thing to say, all of this sort of net zero, this climate change extremism, these allow males and women's bathrooms policies that are coming through that young people are a fan of, they're just going to have to experience it to realize how terrible it is and how hard it's going to make their lives.
00:30:57
Speaker
They're going to have to experience what they voted for and they're going to hate it. They're going to hate how expensive it makes everything. They're going to hate how hard it makes their lives. And that's the only way I think to influence them too.
00:31:10
Speaker
vote for something else. In the meantime, conservatives in the right can do all the things that I've said, make those better political arguments to those other demographics rather than focusing on the teals. But ultimately, this is a case of, you guys voted for this, okay, let's have you experience it. Come to us in three to six years and maybe you'll want to have a chat.
00:31:30
Speaker
So, if I am inferring correctly from your answer there, do you think there will be some sort of a correction at some point from this slippery slope of locus that we seem to find ourselves on?
00:31:41
Speaker
Well, culture always swings back and forth. You know, there are always, always cultural corrections, you know, we've seen throughout the 20th century. It's just, it's a pendulum that swings back and forth. And as they say, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I mean, Trump was a reaction to the sort of, you know, Obama kind of progressive era. And then of course the left just went insane and started saying insane things about how there was allegedly
00:32:10
Speaker
there's a nazi in the white house it's like are you on drugs like really you really believe that and then covid of course came along which was just such a massive gift to the left both you know fistic fiscally because people were desperate to you know be compensated for having to stay home and not making a living so big government became the calling card and of course what was everyone doing while they were at home they were on their phones scrolling twitter and tiktok which is so which is so so so left wing so they were absorbing um
00:32:37
Speaker
all of this kind of stuff and there was another very quick sort of pendulum. Swing but I think it is inevitable that there will be another one and again I think unfortunately and maybe I'm in it. Maybe this is me talking from a terrible position of privilege but I think they're just gonna have to experience it.
00:32:56
Speaker
And they're going to have to experience how much they hate it in order for them to realize, hang on, maybe there is another way of doing things. Let's listen to these conservative politicians who are now magically making, you know, they are magically making a better argument for another way of doing things. You open the door to American politics there by mentioning Trump. I will walk through it. Trump or DeSantis, go.
00:33:18
Speaker
oh i don't know i oh god i hate this question because i keep kind of like bumping back and forth and i like i literally change my mind weekly on this i mean i i tend to think that
00:33:32
Speaker
Trump is the easiest one to win the primary, but is most likely to lose the election, whereas DeSantis is least likely to win the primary, but more likely to win the election, the general election. And that's the very kind of difficult positions. And I say that not because I don't like Trump. You know me, I'm a Trump. He hasn't always behaved in the best possible way, but ultimately his policies initially before everything got so completely distorted for what attracted me to him
00:34:02
Speaker
Let me let me let me push on that because you're a good example of I think something that the left would argue is an inconsistency and they would say, how can someone who is of a religious persuasion basically like someone who is an immoral person? I think you can make a pretty fair argument saying many respects is an immoral person. How do you try and rationalize that?
00:34:23
Speaker
Because I think all politicians are immoral. I think it's a total, I don't look at politicians to provide any kind of moral guidance. I think if you want to be, I mean, don't get me wrong, there are some lovely politicians out there, and I know them, I think they're adorable. But in order to be a politician, you have to be like a little bit of a megalomaniac. You have to kind of enjoy power, and that can get very toxic. I don't think,
00:34:50
Speaker
If you are a saintly person, you will want to go into politics. And if you do end up in politics, you'll leave it very quickly. I think a good example of that is the former Premier of New South Wales, Mike Baird. He was literally too sweet a human being to cope. So I don't look to politicians for moral guidance. I certainly don't look to them for religious guidance or a sense of community. I look to family members. I look to community members. I look to church leaders for that kind of stuff. I like my politicians to be head kickers.
00:35:19
Speaker
For me it's not their job to be moral bastions, I want them to be head kickers, metaphorically speaking of course I do not condone violence, I am in fact a pacifist, but I want them to go in there and fight aggressively tooth and nail
00:35:34
Speaker
for the things that I want them to fight for. So that is how, you know, as someone who, yeah, I have Anglican, I have a certain belief system. I'm a bit lax in it sometimes. That's how I can support a person like Trump and also acknowledge that none of us are moral. We're all immoral in some way or another. And I just, I think people who look to politicians as, you know, oh, well, we need them to be, you know, moral, such good leaders. No, no, no, no, no. That's a massive, massive, massive mistake. So that's how I can justify it.
00:36:03
Speaker
The thing that I would add to that and the way that I think about it, which is the most obvious thing when you say it out loud, but I'm amazed how rarely it is mentioned. And that is we live in a two party system and you've got to make a choice effectively between America, two people in Australia, two parties. And so, you know, you can say, for example, yes, I completely can see that Donald Trump probably went out and shagged every second person whilst he was still married and is now involved in all sorts of legal messes as a result of it.
00:36:32
Speaker
But at the same time broken a few middle east and peace deals like what he did on the economy you know and it isis tic tic tic tic tic you know on balance policy great on immigration on balance I'll tell you what else I'm great on race relations despite the left screaming that he was like you know the worst thing since Hitler.
00:36:52
Speaker
This is what the media did not cover. In his re-election campaign in 2020, he included something called the Platinum Plan, which was a plan for black America, which involved funding in black owned businesses, focus on education, these really, really concrete steps on how to improve the lives of black communities and black small businesses. Real attention to detail. That was part of his re-election
00:37:18
Speaker
plan the media like did not touch it you had to go searching really really hard for that because it was never reported on and then of course fast forward to the democrats being declared the victors remember black lives matter after that saying oh my god the democrats have refused to meet with us they've refused to even talk to us for a month we've contacted them there was all that fuss in the run up and now they're ignoring us like so trump was good for
00:37:43
Speaker
an awful lot of things, as well as the obvious stuff much better than the Democrats. It comes back to what you said earlier around treating politics like sport these days. And I would love us to get to a point in society where we can start thinking about politics as about trade-offs and saying, you know what, on balance, this person does things well here and poorly here. This person does things well here and poorly here. On balance, this is the option that I'm going to take. But I think, sadly, that's probably too much nuance for the media and cultural environment that we live in.
00:38:12
Speaker
Is America an empire in decline? Oh, yeah. Yeah, and I think that's really sad.
00:38:20
Speaker
You know what I think, Will, whenever, and this is just sort of a small example of it, but I think a poignant one, you've got to remember whenever there is a viral clip of Joe Biden fumbling over a word salad or falling upstairs or not able to get off a stage or having to have Jill lead him off the stage by the wrist and all of that, you've got to remember that the people watching that include Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
00:38:50
Speaker
Like, they are, I guarantee you, sitting there, you know, on the toilet or at the dinner table, on their phones, shrieking with laughter at this kind of stuff. Whenever you see, you know, videos go viral of completely, like, so ideologically possessed lefties talking about how many people are living in their heads and how many genders they are and, you know, demonizing of men and stuff. All these foreign dictators are watching this stuff. They don't take the West.
00:39:18
Speaker
seriously anymore. I mean COVID certainly has not helped America but that whole kind of image of America is sort of the the American experiment as they say as sort of a beacon of you know truth and strength and freedom and patriotism and you know anyone can have anything if you go there and work hard like I'm sorry but they've really really really screwed it up.
00:39:42
Speaker
And I shudder to think what will happen if slash when the empire does finally fall.
Australia's COVID Response & Cultural Reflection
00:39:49
Speaker
Again, I'm very, I'm very doomy today. I'm really dooming today for some reason. I hate to add to your doming gloom, but I will because I will quote you perhaps out of context, but in one of your more recent videos, you did say Australia is going to hell in a hand basket. What should Australians be worried about?
00:40:06
Speaker
Oh, China. Definitely. Rising cost of living. Let's take it one at a time because this is something which frustrates me. No end. Why are we too scared to talk about what I see as a very obvious and very, very real threat from China?
00:40:20
Speaker
You know what I reckon? I reckon it's that whole thing people don't want to be called racist. I've been saying this for years. Whenever there is a discussion of China and you see the left particularly trying to kind of, you know, smooth it out. Paul Keating's a fabulous example of that. Smooth it out. I think, I mean, the right is happy to bash on about China. Like we do it all the time. Generally speaking, we can all agree on the China threat and we can all verbally bludgeon the Chinese Communist Party.
00:40:50
Speaker
I think the left is softer on it for two reasons. One is the sort of, oh my God, we don't want to be called racist ones. We're not talking about the Chinese people. This has nothing to do with the Chinese people. This is China, the nation state. This is the Chinese Communist Party. So they're a little bit too PC about it. But also, you know what?
00:41:10
Speaker
I think they don't really mind what the Chinese government does to its people or how it runs the country. Because remember, they like big government. They might not necessarily agree with a one-party system, but they get it. They're like, oh yeah, people just have to be
00:41:32
Speaker
They have to be governed. I'll give you a great example of this. Early 2021, I believe it was, I was on a panel on Sky News with Joel Fitzgibbon, who was the former member for Hunter. And he is billed as this sensible labor guy. I was on this panel with him, and we were having a discussion about China. And I did my thing of saying China should be treated as a hostile foreign power. All of these things are wrong with it. We need to be very worried. And Joel Fitzgibbon replied with, he said,
00:42:01
Speaker
I think it makes no sense to treat China as a hostile foreign force. And then he started talking about trade and it's like, oh, with this much trade. But then he literally said, I kid you not, we need to respect China as the next emerging global superpower.
00:42:16
Speaker
And it was this and he was he was in the like he was the member at that exact point in time. And it was the first time, well, I think in my entire life on television where I have been rendered completely speechless. I had nothing to say. I was like, right. Well, Joel, you can't
00:42:34
Speaker
unring that bell so i think that's the attitude one it's like no we're a bit pc but two i just think they don't really oppose it that much because ideologically they don't find it that reprehensible
00:42:48
Speaker
I'd add a third, and I think that is that they made a very bad bet on China in the 1990s. This was led by the Clintons, by the blares of this world, by the keytings of this world to say economic liberalisation will lead to democracy and to a more open political system. That has proven to be a spectacularly bad bet because you've had a very canny leader in Xi Jinping
00:43:14
Speaker
who has basically been able to take the advantages of economic liberalisation whilst then adding his own perverse, brutal sense of repression in the mix as well. So I think there's almost like a sunk cost fallacy there as well when it comes to China. The death of Barry Humphreys recently. Barry Humphreys, a wonderful supporter of the spectator Australia and a keen subscriber I might add.
00:43:44
Speaker
If you are, if you want to follow in Barry's footsteps, please go and get a spectator Australia subscription. Normally something I try and plug around halfway through the show, but in a conversation with Daisy, it's very easy to lose track of time and space. Go get your spectator Australia subscription at spectator.com.au forward slash join.
00:44:01
Speaker
Back to Barry, I'm not saying these were the same in terms of their significance, but I had a similar feeling. I think there is some analogy to be drawn with the death of the Queen in that when the Queen died in the UK, people felt that some values departed with her duty, stoicism, quiet dignity.
00:44:22
Speaker
And I can't help but feel in Australia that maybe some people felt that Barry Humphrey's died, but perhaps some of the values that he embodied went with him. Larianism, irreverence, anti-authoritarianism. Do you think of that kind of, I guess, that Australian stereotype, do you think it's still there? Do you think we've lost that? Do you think there's any chance we can get it back?
00:44:43
Speaker
I think probably COVID revealed that that Australian kind of irreverent larrikinism has been gone for a very long time. I mean, the fact that I really hate to criticize my fellow countrymen, but the fact that people were just so compliant and happy to be parented by their government
00:45:01
Speaker
revealed that Australians, you know, because we live in a welfare state, have a really, really, really toxic relationship with authority and with politicians as we see them, that we've been fooled into believing that it's up to politicians to give out and take away rights rather than everyone being born with inherent inviolable rights that politicians can only maintain or violate. And I think the rest of the world was really surprised by that, that Australians just sort of
00:45:29
Speaker
went along with it i think barry hunk freeze i mean i'm so i'm so sad that he's passed that is that is jamie he was remember he was meant to be at that wonderful spectator luncheon we were at a couple of weeks ago but unfortunately it wasn't well and i was i keep thinking about that going oh my god how how terribly sad
00:45:48
Speaker
I, you know what, on a more optimistic note, perhaps his passing will actually remind people of those, you know, those old values of Aussie larrikinism and anti-authoritarianism and irreverence that he stood for. Maybe that will inspire people in a funny sort of way to remember that and maintain that because he was such a great man and such an incredible
00:46:13
Speaker
global influence on culture and society and Australians as well. So I'm going to think optimistically about that. I think it might inspire people rather than have people feel that those values are gone for good.
00:46:27
Speaker
I hope so. I hope so because I think it is something Australia needs to come to terms with. I think we are a country that is suffering from an identity crisis to an extent because a lot of those values seem as incompatible with some of the sort of woke agenda and some of the more toxic trends that now pervade a lot of Western culture. And I think it's a real concern. I promised that I would try and get us back onto a positive agenda to finish.
00:46:54
Speaker
If you were to improve Australia Daisy, and let's hope for one day you actually do have the reins of the country, but let's bring that forward. What would be one thing that you would do if you had free rein to improve Australia?
Advocacy for Lower Taxes & Personal Financial Freedom
00:47:06
Speaker
Oh, I'd lower everyone's taxes.
00:47:10
Speaker
That would be my first port of call. I would slash people's taxes and actually find proper ways to spend the tax. I mean, we're talking in great grandiose generalization, of course, and actually find good ways to spend the tax dollars that the government does reap. I mean, I'm a sole trader, so I pay tax every quarter. I'm very on top of my tax.
00:47:37
Speaker
We pay so much tax in this country. And I think in this cost of living crisis, can you imagine how much happier people would be if they got to keep just a little bit more of their money every week? Even just a little bit more. 100 bucks more every week, for goodness sake, would make at least some of the difference with a family trying to buy groceries for their children. Just a bit more. If you could just keep a bit more of your own income. I think that would have the most, like,
00:48:06
Speaker
vastly improving effect on so many Australians' lives. There is my inner libertarian for you, Will, slash everyone's taxes, and that is the first step to a better, more prosperous nation.
00:48:20
Speaker
I said, I said that would be the last question, but I have to follow up on that because it frustrates me because I think this is a problem across the Western world that no government can sell conservative right wing economics anymore, you know, low tax, low spend economics anymore. It seems like everyone's just given up. Is it possible to still sell that agenda or do we now just have to keep spending money and spending money until there is some crash at some point down the line?
00:48:46
Speaker
Well, I think it's very possible to sell that agenda because it's a really attractive agenda if it's sold properly. I mean, who doesn't want to keep more of their own money? You know, who doesn't want to have a larger pay packet at the end of the week? Not because they've had to work more, but because the government takes less.
00:49:03
Speaker
I mean, I actually think it's a very easy message to sell. And it's a shame in Australia that the words personal responsibility sort of have a dirty ring to them, which I find so completely embarrassing. You go to America, personal responsibility is a really empowering message. But here it's like, no, I mean, the government wants to abandon us. Boo hoo hoo. There's a better way of selling it, I'm sure, than personal responsibility. And that's, hey, wouldn't you like to keep more of your own money?
00:49:29
Speaker
So I just think if you have the right words and maybe steer clear of the personal responsibility thing, it's not hard to sell at all. But again, you need the right people in place to actually do the selling.
00:49:41
Speaker
I agree with that. Your cell reminds me of my favorite line from my favorite libertarian, P.J. O'Rourke, who said that libertarian is really wanting to get high and have sex while saving money, and really, who doesn't? I will leave our listeners with that little morsel to ponder. I think everyone who has listened to this will be very keen to hear more from you, Daisy. How can they hear more?
00:50:08
Speaker
Oh, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. I would love it if you all did that. Just type my name into YouTube. It is cousins with an E as I'm sure all of you are aware. Just type me that my channel will pop up. Please just click that link.
00:50:23
Speaker
click that subscribe button, click all of my videos and watch them, and please click on all the ads. That would really help me out during this cost of living crisis, if you really, really like me. But honestly, I would love to have you on my YouTube channel. We have a great time. I release content. I do live streams as well. We always have so much fun in a Daisy live stream. Please join me there. I would absolutely love to have you. We will make it even easier for our guests. The link to Daisy's YouTube channel is in the show notes. Daisy Cousins, thank you very much for coming on Australiana.
00:50:52
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me, Will. This was great, great fun. 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.