Interviews

Amar Singh is the founder of Turbans 4 Australia and a practising Sikh. Growing up in the same area as Matt (Campbelltown, NSW) he sat down with Discernable to discuss what it was like growing up in South West Sydney and his embrace of Sikhism and everything it represents.

TURBANS 4 AUSTRALIA
https://www.t4a.org.au

Professor Joseph Camilleri is one of Australia’s leading International Relations scholars, publishing over 15 books and contributing hundreds of chapters and refereed articles in academic journals.

He joined Discernable to explain where Australia sits in the world, and whether Australians perceive their place in the world.

We explored:

• Whether and how China would invade Australia
• Why China wants Taiwan back (and what will happen)
• Why Australians are unaware of international politics
• The influence of UK and USA anglo-centric culture
• The failure of the Academy to educate Australians
• The failure of Australian politics
• The Doomsday Clock
• The spectre of nuclear war
• Human rights in lockdowns
• Balancing the rights of the individual against the rights of the collective
• Chinese society as a cultural role model
• The values of competing societies

PROF JOSEPH CAMILLERI
https://www.josephcamilleri.org

Ryan Smith MP was the Minister for Environment and Climate Change and Minister for Youth Affairs in Victoria between 2010 and 2014. He remains a sitting member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly as the Shadow Minister for Finance, Planning & Heritage and Suburban Recovery. He will be contesting to retain the seat of Warrandyte in the November 2022 election.

He joined Discernable to face the popular accusation that the Liberal Party ‘doesn’t stand for anything’. With no time limits and no topic limits, we asked Ryan about:

• Climate change policy
• Failures of Liberal leader Matthew Guy MP
• The Coate Inquiry into Hotel Quarantine
• The health and hospital crisis in Victoria
• The Operation Watts report into corruption inside the Labor Party
• High-taxing and high-wasting
• Election swings when people get sick of arrogant, corrupt governments
• Balancing the competing demands of Victorians
• Left wing party hypocrisy
• How the Liberals would have handled lockdowns
• The obvious weakness of Daniel Andrews
• The secret of long term Liberal governments
• The future quality of politicians
• Government contracts for small businesses
• Speed camera revenue raising in Victoria
• The stacked bureaucracy in Victoria
• The biggest weakness of Daniel Andrews: ridicule

RYAN SMITH MP
https://www.ryansmith.com.au
https://www.facebook.com/RyanSmithMP
https://www.instagram.com/RyanSmithMP

Clare Pain is a medical journalist. During the first two years of the pandemic her work involved writing up scientific papers for doctors in Australia – to keep them up to date with the science.

She started to notice some strange changes to the culture of the medical profession and medical journalism in Australia and had increasing doubts about the way the pandemic was being handled by governments. She was particularly disturbed by mandates for vaccination and the TGA’s approach to ivermectin. She left her job in December 2021 which freed her to carry out the Australian Survey of Reasons for COVID-19 Vaccination – a survey of nearly 27,000 people.

Clare’s personal journey includes being laughed at in an Australian hospital in February 2020 for wearing too much PPE (masks and gloves), and anxiously awaiting Covid-19 vaccinations, to January 2022 in Sheffield, England where she tried – unvaccinated – to catch COVID-19 to acquire immunity. It was three months before she was successful.

In this interview we discussed:

• Behind the scenes of medical journalism throughout the pandemic
• The differences between UK and Australian culture
• The Australian ban on Ivermectin for COVID-19
• Pharmaceutical companies’ conflicts of interest
• The Australian Survey of Reasons for COVID-19 Vaccination

Note: The 25 minute long credits to this interview display raw statements from Clare’s survey where Australians shared why they received a C-19 vaccination. The statements on screen are uncensored and do not necessarily represent the views of Discernable or Clare Pain.

CLARITY ON HEALTH SURVEY
https://clarityonhealth.org

Scott Morrison mandate quote
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/scott-morrison-says-a-coronavirus-vaccine-would-be-as-mandatory-as-you-can-possibly-make-it/mcg55d7r1

Merck press release on ivermectin
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use-during-the-covid-19-pandemic

Merck press release on molnupirivir
https://www.merck.com/news/ridgeback-biotherapeutics-and-merck-announce-preliminary-findings-from-a-phase-2a-trial-of-investigational-covid-19-therapeutic-molnupiravir

FDA Emergency Use Authorisation rules
https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization

UK COVID inquiry
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-covid-19-inquiry-terms-of-reference

Ken Phillips is the founder and executive director of Self Employed Australia. He joined Discernable to lay out the long history of governments and powerful interests attacking the right of Australians to remain self-employed.

Ken dived deep into the basis of commercial contracts upon which self-employed Australians rely versus the encroachment of employment contracts that everyone is being pushed into.

We discussed:

• The Albanese government forcing gig contractors and self-employed to be classified as ’employees’ and imposing all of the associated compliance measures
• The difference between earning your money through commercial contracts vs employment contracts
• The historical balance between self-employed and institution-employed
• Predictions of future power struggles for employment
• The corruption in Australian states, judiciaries and police forces
• Obvious momentums in Victoria against Daniel Andrews

SELF EMPLOYED AUSTRALIA
https://selfemployedaustralia.com.au
https://www.facebook.com/selfemployedaustralia
https://twitter.com/selfemployedau

Bhaskaran Raman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has a particular interest in data analysis and has been on a mission to ‘unscare India’ since witnessing what he describes as the ‘destroying of society for our children’.

In this interview we explored the pandemic in the Indian context. I specifically wanted to hear a first hand account of Indian lockdowns, mandates, compliance, sickness and immunity, especially in the context of the poorest who suffered disproportionately.

We also discussed the class/caste system, the politicisation of data, and the psychology of the Indian population.

BHASKARAN RAMAN
https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~br/webpage/covid19/u5india/index.html
https://twitter.com/br_cse_iitb

Edward Hore is the founder and President of Australian Cycle Alliance, an organisation that advocates for safe and inclusive riding for anyone who decides to ride a bicycle, for any reason.

We discussed:

0:41 What is the Australian Cycle Alliance?
3:06 Programs to help people start riding
6:45 How popular is riding a bike?
10:20 Drivers vs Cyclists
16:03 When your workmates abuse you when you’re cycling
18:11 Sympathetic driving
21:00 Police attitudes toward cyclists
22:06 Edward and his son attacked by an angry driver
27:07 Dehumanising cyclists
29:40 Cycling makes better drivers
30:48 Bike riding effects on mental health
37:30 The hardest part of any ride
38:30 200km rides and a custard slice
41:40 Recreational riding
47:55 Bike share
48:49 How Matt started cycling
49:28 Getting your first bike
53:10 E-bikes
57:53 Cyclists on the road and in the way?
1:00:20 Shared bike paths and feeder routes
1:06:58 NYC prioritises people over cars
1:09:47 The downsides of cycling
1:12:16 The best way to get potholes fixed
1:18:58 Advocacy for families who have lost loved ones

AUSTRALIAN CYCLE ALLIANCE
https://cycle.org.au
https://twitter.com/auscycle

EDWARD HORE
https://www.instagram.com/edhore

Jeffrey A. Tucker is a prolific author who has written many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He founded the Brownstone Institute which is the self-described ‘spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration’ where you can find a cacophony of rational voices spanning the entire political and academic spectrum. His books are widely published in multiple languages on topics of economics, technology, cryptocurrency, social philosophy, capitalism, Covid-19, government bureaucracy, and culture.

Jeffrey was responsible for the founding of the Great Barrington Declaration and, in my estimation, sits at a nexus of the world’s greatest minds who have the courage to speak truth in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Today he speaks with Discernable about how his worldview has radically changed over the last two years as we all come to realise the extraordinary lengths of time that a crowd madness can last, and the ease with which governments can manipulate their citizens for political gains.

We covered:

• How the response to Covid-19 blew up our worldviews
• The marionettes called ‘politicians’ and how real power is in the bureaucracy
• Who journalists and the media go after and who they ignore
• Gangs of people with the monopoly on violence
• Australian ‘fake science’ that the world laughs at
• Safety and gun culture in the USA
• Australians have a weird and dangerous trust of their government
• Why propaganda works
• How the religious stood firm
• Scott Morrison’s demonisation of non-compliance
• Government propaganda that invades pop culture
• The Libertarian ‘apostates’ who sold out to government
• Revisionist history
• The evolution of viruses and battle between severity and prevalence
• Australian and New Zealand delaying the inevitable
• The birth of the Great Barrington Declaration
• Regrets of the great covid panic era
• The only early voice against lockdowns
• 3 ways humanity destroyed data on the severity of Covid-19
• The perfect setup to manufacture a panic
• Imagining a super virus that would actually justify tyranny
• Hollywood imaginations of pandemics
• Trading freedom for safety
• The most dangerous threat to humans in history: naive immune systems
• Australian and New Zealand leaders are negligent
• The laptop class and the return of castes
• Isolation and self preservation is the height of immorality
• The revolution before us and the spectre of a right-wing dictatorship

JEFFREY A. TUCKER
https://brownstone.org
https://twitter.com/jeffreyatucker
https://www.amazon.com/Jeffrey-Tucker/e/B00MB6KY3E

Paul Frijters is a Professor of Wellbeing Economics at the London School of Economics: from 2016 through November 2019 at the Center for Economic Performance, thereafter at the Department of Social Policy. He writes extensively on the realities of lockdowns and the ‘why’ behind the madness of crowds.

In this interview we explored:

• The loud voices for and against lockdowns, and where those voices go after a madness dissipates
• The reaction of the crowd during a madness
• How a group madness collapses and what the crowd thinks in hindsight
• Forces that accelerate the collapse of a crowd madness
• Institutions that defend against or slow madness
• Opportunistic concentrations of power in the WHO, WEF etc
• What nationalism really is

PAUL FRIJTERS
https://brownstone.org/author/paul-frijters
https://www.amazon.com.au/Great-Covid-Panic-What-Happened/dp/1630692778
https://twitter.com/FrijtersPaul