Some recent interviews

Last week, I spoke with UK media personality Jim Ferguson about living through the pandemic madness here in the Hermit Kingdom. I really enjoyed the interview - our experience here in Western Australia was so unique, and it was quite cathartic to share it in this format.

Some friends of DDU get a mention, including lovely Perth local Karri Chapus, who is Covid vaccine-injured, and Matt Lawson, who was shot at close range with rubber bullets by Melbourne police. Shout out also to the many small business owners here in Perth who struggled through or went under during the ‘bleeding out’ years of restrictions and mini lockdowns.

I forgot to say this in the interview, but as well as the surprise lockdowns, businesses were subject to person-per-m2 restrictions, meaning that restaurants, theatres, exercise studios, and so on, had to run at reduced capacity.

Take a reformer pilates studio with 12 beds. They need to fill 9 beds to break even, and the extra 3 beds are profit, but with the m2 restrictions they’re only allowed to fill 8 beds. This goes for months on end, with no certainty about if or when restrictions will ease, or be ramped up again. What do you do? Shut down or struggle through? This went on for years in the golden cage.

Click here to watch the 40 minute interview on X (three-minute excerpt below)

Edit: On watching this back, I realise I used the term ‘concentration camp' to describe the Howard Springs quarantine facility in the Northern Territory. This is not quite the right use of words. Concentration camps typically describe the internment of people for political reasons. What I was trying to elucidate was something between a clinical quarantine centre and a politically motivated, overbearing official response that led to people being apprehended and confined against their will, and sometimes receiving poor treatment, mainly in the form of bullying by police and staff. Concentration camp is not quite right. If anyone has a better suggestion for how to describe the NT’s Howard Springs forced quarantine, let me know in the comments.

A couple of other interviews from last week centre around the NZ whistleblower story, which has generated some strange tangents - most surprising, as discussed on this Substack, the deletion of $200K worth of research data belonging to US scientist Kevin McKernan, at the behest of the New Zealand Ministry of Health (MOH).

I discussed this with US podcaster Shannon Joy on her podcast, which you can watch at this link on Rumble (55 mins). It was interesting to get the US perspective on the NZ news, especially as Shannon is a friend of Steve Kirsch and a keen Republican commentator. I am probably more circumspect about what the NZ data drop shows, but we had a lot of common ground to cover, especially in regards to the behaviour of the NZ MOH.

I also stopped by The Aussie Wire to discuss the way the NZ data drop was handled. I have some criticisms, as you probably know if you’ve been following along with my recent posts. Watch the interview here on YouTube (13 mins).

And finally, I joined Dean Mackin on TNT Radio to give the high level summary of the unfolding saga. Queue to 31:00 to listen (approx 10 mins interview). I had to have a little chuckle - I don’t think Dean knows I’m not a dyed in the wool ‘conservative’ ;)

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