Hi, Greg Canavan here. I hope you’re enjoying some downtime somewhere. It’s exactly what I’ve advised my fellow editors to do…rest and relax. It’s been a long year, especially for those of us who had to endure Victoria’s lockdown and curfew rules. So a good unwind is required before we get back into it in 2021.
So for the next week, you’ll get something different from us here at The Rum Rebellion. You’re probably familiar with the work of Dan Denning, who is a regular contributor to this publication. Dan works closely with Bill Bonner and writes for The Bonner-Denning Letter, with which you might also be familiar.
Bill is one of the founders of Agora, which is the parent company of Port Phillip Publishing, the publisher of The Rum Rebellion. Bill has quite the network to draw upon. One of the recent projects they’ve been working on is the Bonner Private Research Podcast, hosted by Aussie expat Joel Bowman.
Over to you, Joel…
***
‘The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts,’ wrote the late, great, Australian-born literary critic, Clive James, ‘but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.’
The world watched with mixed reaction this year as Australia, in its quest to scrub the land Down Under of COVID-19, once again turned itself into a kind of penal colony. With the possible exception of Wuhan, China, the Australian government implemented the strictest lockdown measures on the planet, with particularly harsh measures enacted in Melbourne, Victoria.
In this episode, I spoke with long-time friend and colleague Dan Denning, who spent a decade living in Melbourne while heading up Agora’s Australian operations. We wondered whether Australia was really a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the world…and what the worrisome precedents set there might portend for individual rights and civil liberties elsewhere.
Listen to our conversation here.
Regards,
Joel Bowman,
Contributor, The Rum Rebellion