"Has Australia Gone Too Far?" with Conor Friedersdorf

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Education, Society & Culture, Comedy, Self-improvement

4.5 • 905 Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Americans have been going craycray over Austraystray. From Fox News to social media, images of Australia's lockdowns are being presented as a descent into totalitarianism. The concern-mongering came to a head with an article in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf entitled "Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty: How long can a democracy maintain emergency restrictions and still call itself a free country?" Josh responded with a 25-tweet rebuttal which went viral. So the two men tracked each other down (one vacationing in Greece; the other, locked down in Sydney -- guess which was which?) to hash it out.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gide, humans. Well, it is a joy being the centre of a firestorm online, not, and sort of,
0:11.2	yes, no, kind of. It's been a funny few days where I've been receiving many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many messages on Twitter from people in
0:22.7	various shades of red, blue, anger, hate, love, apoplexy, about a 25 tweet thread that I
0:32.2	published in response to, I suppose, the roiling debate in the United States about whether or not Australia has become a totalitarian dictatorship, I ignored this nonsense for a while, as long as it was limited to Fox News, where Tucker Carlson literally said that this is the end of Australia, and Australia is a dictatorship, totalitarianism,
0:56.6	he called it.
0:57.7	This has been compounded by misinformation online where they've, you know, for example,
1:02.9	taken images of a quarantine station, Howard Springs on the outskirts of Darwin, where people
1:10.0	who are brought back to Australia on
1:11.7	repatriation flights from countries with high COVID numbers are housed for two weeks
1:18.1	in quite considerable luxury with quite nice food. I have it on good authority. But nonetheless,
1:24.4	you know, certainly not something that you would expect to see in a Western democracy in normal times, but these are not normal times, which is the point I've tried to make
1:33.0	repeatedly.
1:33.9	Now, I have many criticisms of Australia's response to coronavirus, and if you're a loyal listener,
1:39.7	you will have heard me ranting on various bonus episodes of this show and various
1:44.0	intros in
1:45.7	frustration about the slow pace of our conversation about evolving to the next stage of
1:53.6	coronavirus and appreciating, you know, that we are going to have to open up at some stage
1:59.5	that liberal democracies cannot go on
2:01.8	like this indefinitely. I've been frustrated by the slow pace of, of that shift and the
2:08.4	expectation among Australians that it's going to be possible to have very, very low COVID case
2:14.2	numbers and COVID deaths in perpetuity.
2:24.5	Nonetheless, when a foreigner comes parachuting in going, here's what you don't understand about why you guys are doing things wrong, it gets my hackles up a little bit, and I do
	...

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