Gahy humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and few issues are as dangerous

as charged, as emotional as government's responses to COVID. What happened during the pandemic?

The lockdowns, the economic support, the failures, the successes, uncomfortable conversations

as a show is not about

manufacturing uncomfortable conversations in the studio where I make people uncomfortable or try to,

I don't know, coerce them into situations that aren't comfortable for them. Rather, the uncomfortable

refers to the fact that we talk about topics that if you were to

raise them at an office Christmas party or at a picnic or at a barbecue or at the pub or the bar,

it would make people uncomfortable to hear someone speak stridently about these issues. So I try

to tease them out in a sane and moderate and conciliatory way so that we can have those

difficult conversations, those uncomfortable conversations in perhaps quite comfortable ways.

And within the subset of issues around COVID and government's responses there too, I would say

that Australia looms pretty large for a lot of people outside of Australia as

either a lesson in what you should do or should not do during a pandemic.

There's nothing that will get an American at Thanksgiving more riled up than mentioning

Australia's pandemic lockdowns, and you will instantly tell what side of the political spectrum

they are on by their subsequent line of questioning and their pronouncements on the issue.

So today's guest has conducted one of the first, major, complete, comprehensive, economic

and public health analyses of what happened in Australia, how it compares

to performance in other countries. He is not a blind like Australian, you know, but yes man.

He doesn't work for the Australian government. He is a former economist at the Australian

Treasury, so he started out there, but he's now an assistant professor of economics at the

...