Nights with John Stanley

00:08 And now on 2GB Sydney, 4BC Brisbane and network stations across Australia, it's time for Nights with John Stanley. 00:17 Good evening everyone, welcome along, welcome to Thursday night. We have a lot ahead of us over the next few hours. The duck is somewhere tonight and we'll bring him in for our usual bit of fun we do between 9 and 10pm. Kel Richards with his word clinic as well after 10 o'clock. Terry Barnes will join us shortly. Terry's in the UK. I think he's at some garden party, so who knows? He might be able to hand the phone over to someone famous when we get to him to talk about some of the serious issues of the day. But I've just been listening to Money News and the detailed conversation about what's been announced today by the federal government on immigration. 00:53 I did want to highlight just two things, and James Willis is going to step in because we want to look at the politics of this. There's two things. First of all, I did notice one of the news organisations was highlighting this because when you say you are going to achieve a target, remember the $275 pledge, when you say this will happen, It's on the record. So this was Tony Burke on whether he's going to be able to meet what are now targets. They used to be forecast. 01:23 Now they're targets in the budget of numbers they are going to get to with net overseas migration. A lot of people think they're still too high, but here's some of what he had to say today. 01:33 And the times that we've had massive reductions too far in immigration have coincided with the worst economic times in Australia's history. We need to be careful with it and I'm being careful with it. 01:45 so you won't say we missed the number because we couldn't get legislation passed no absolutely not okay and i and i won't say that because that won't happen so he's not going to miss the targets for legislation or whatever he's saying it will not happen now that's going to be put up in lights if they miss the target and then he's been on the 7 30 report just in the last 40 minutes 02:08 and this was the opening question and then the answer so have a listen now this happened just about 40 minutes ago the net overseas migration number we learnt today has come down in fact it's now lower than where you thought it would be only a couple of months ago would you meet the target in two years time even if you'd done nothing today 02:32 On current projections, the answer is yes. On current projections from the information that we're getting from Treasury, we are tracking in the exact trajectory that we need to be able to have the numbers that were in the last budget for both the current financial year and the next financial year. The question, though, is it's not only about... 02:52 If I can jump in there, Minister, why do it? Why go to all this effort? Why upset all these groups, make all these folks anxious? Why do it? You're on target. 03:01 Yeah, and this is the bit that I was just saying. 03:05 He then went on to say, well, it's part of the make-up of the number as opposed to the actual number. But the budget's talking about 245 and 225, and critics have been saying, well, that's still above the long-term average. And so you're saying, well, everything that happened today, if it's a debate about just numbers... 03:25 The numbers aren't going to change. James Willis, I mean, politically. 03:28 It's a smokescreen. It's an absolute smokescreen. Now, we have to remember here, John, that what we saw today from Tony Burke was the end result of a 16-month break. 03:40 This is not a new issue. This has been probably one of the top three issues that the Albanese government has been criticised for since they came to power in 2022. This is 16 months worth of work. Tony Burke was meant to deliver this speech a number of weeks ago, but... At the last minute, he pulled out because the Labor caucus was deeply concerned about some of the dramatic steps that were about to be taken in terms of people hopping between visas, the visa protection programs. All of that was scrapped. 04:12 All of that was scrapped all in one go. And we now have this watered down version of what the initial plan was. Now, Labor obviously internally knows that this is an issue. But it adds even more fast to what we're saying, that the numbers were naturally coming down anyway. And for an hour and a half speech from Tony Burke today to concede, well, even if we'd done nothing, the numbers were naturally coming down. I mean, what was the point of this process? They clearly haven't, they're not fair dinkum about that. 04:39 Well, the point here is, and the experts, we've had them on here for two or three years. People like Abel Rizzi wrote an entire book about all the holes in the system. You didn't need to have a 16-month inquiry into problems with visa hopping, people who are extending their stay, the people on bridging visas, all of that. That's been known for literally years. 04:58 Well... And part of the problem is there are a number of senior Labor ministers that have become... They realise that in their own backyards, this is a dynamite issue if they upset the apple cart too much and they rock the boat too much. This is something that I think the Albanese government has become addicted to. It's cheap economics. But at the end of the day, John, all we are talking about here... And by the way, I thought it was so insulting for Tony Burke to be saying today that one of the key issues with the housing crisis is empty nesters, that migration isn't one of the top things. 05:28 It's the number of people living in per house, which has dropped since the Hawke government 35 years ago. 05:34 What we need here legitimately is a list of the shortages in skills that we legitimately have, and they are the top end of town, double degrees. Any other job that is a skilled job that could be filled by an Australian should be filled by an Australian first. They don't do it. 05:50 We've given up on that. People are pointing that information out all the time, and I reckon there's a sleeper here because... And this was being highlighted a couple of months ago, some of the moves that were being made, that if you then start to pull back on the processing of visas for backpackers in regional areas, what happens, and it's already been happening, people in Townsville last night saying, well, we're having trouble getting hospitality workers. Farmers tonight are complaining that there are shortages emerging in regional areas. So do you reckon if you're putting the focus on regional areas and pulling back, that the regional areas that One Nation's targeting, And people like Farley in the seat of Farrah were saying, well, actually, we do need workers here. 06:33 That's right, but that should be prioritised. But you engineer it so that in those areas, the people are going, well, there's a shortage here. We need more people. 06:40 No, but that should be prioritised. I have no issue. I have absolutely no issue with migrants wanting to live in the regions. No, no, no, but you understand what I'm saying. You know most of them want to live in Sydney and Melbourne, and that is the reality. 06:49 You understand what I'm saying. I'm saying that they've actually pulled back on the numbers going into those areas. So suddenly the people in those areas are going, we need more workers in the areas where One Nation is arguing for immigration cuts. So this whole thing is almost being manipulated to generate pro-immigration views in areas where One Nation is starting to make ground in regional areas. 07:10 And look, there's no doubt that One Nation's popularity is overwhelmingly off the back of one issue and one issue only, and that is migration levels. But look, I've seen from farmers and regional people tonight saying that Tony Burke's approach is going to impact them, and that is wrong. There should be no impact on regional areas. 07:28 But if it's a cynical approach to say, okay, let's have some holes appear in those areas where One Nation is strongest – then you're politicising the system, aren't you? 07:38 Sure, yeah, but also the key thing is they've overlooked the biggest issue, and that is they haven't done enough to fill jobs locally with Australians. And we've never been able to achieve that. We've given up on that once and for all. 07:52 We can talk about things like the pension, the work test for the pension. That's not going to make a huge number, but there are people who would work. 08:00 if the work test was eased. But every time we have this discussion, the business community says, help, the economy will be dragged to a halt if we cut off levels of migration. And in reality, there are Aussies that should be working and could be working that are not working right now. 08:14 You're going to be doing Money News again. What's tonight? Thursday? 08:16 You're on Money News tomorrow night, are you? No, so there's no Friday show. No Friday Money News. No, but that's by design. 08:21 Because we're here tomorrow night doing our show. 08:23 You're not here. Well, you could always contact me if you needed a cross at some time within business hours. That would be okay. But it's by design. Don't throw me under the bus on air. 08:34 I'm replying to this text. Craig, I think we should get... Oh, no. Okay. 08:40 He was asking me. He didn't realise there was no show tomorrow night. Well, he'll know now. I know. 08:45 He'll know now. But they also don't realise that you get in at 5 to 8, Monday to Friday. 08:49 Yep, all right. During the news sometimes. 8am, that's right. And I say good morning, Ben. 08:54 Good on you, mate. Thanks, John. Good to see you. 16 past 8. 08:57 Good evening, everyone. Here we are, 19 minutes past eight. It is, of course, our Thursday night news hour, very much dominated by the issue of immigration today. A lot of you have been commenting on it through the day. 131873 is our number. And Terry Barnes, who's our Thursday news hour guest, he's actually in the UK. We've connected up our very sophisticated technology. He's on the line. Terry, good evening. 09:22 Good morning, John. 09:23 Yeah, good morning. You're in the UK and, of course, you have been following this debate. Can I, before we get to you, because it has been alluded to and discussed for most of today, and if you listen closely, what Tony Burke was saying today was about the nature of the households in Australia, that that's had an impact on housing. But then toward the end of what he says, he says immigration has to play a part in in dealing with the housing crisis and giving some breathing room for the housing industry and housing to catch up. 09:57 Now, so I think he almost argued against himself from the start to the finish of this. So just have a listen. Here we go. 10:04 Now, I start with this. 10:06 Housing and the housing shortage we have is not caused by immigration. 10:13 But immigration needs to be part of the solution for the housing crisis. 10:19 And let me explain why. 10:21 If you go back to the Hawke government, back to the Hawke years to today, and look at, well, what's happened to housing? What's happened to number of people? You'll find these two really simple facts. The number of people in Australia has increased by 75%. 10:35 The number of homes has increased by 100%. 10:38 How on earth did we end up with a housing problem if they're the stats? And the answer's really simple. Back then, and Australians have every right to decide how many people they want to live in per household. 10:51 Back then the number of people per household was 2.9. It's now 2.5. 10:57 Every time we get a 0.1 change, a 0.1 change in the number of people per household, we have to find an additional 450,000 homes. 11:10 Now, Australians have every right to be able to decide how many people they want to have living per household. But that also means anyone who looks at the migration program and wants to somehow say it was their fault No. Australians have made a decision about how many people they want per household. Post-COVID, after we'd all lived very closely to each other, a whole lot of people decided they wanted fewer people around than had previously been there. And that may continue as a trend. 11:41 But immigration will need to be part of the solution to help provide some space for housing supply to catch up. 11:48 So that last bit there, it'll have to be part of the solution to provide some space for housing to catch up. So you need to pull the numbers back. Now, they're saying that the targets they've had in the budget, and he said it tonight, just 40 minutes ago on the 7.30 report, that the numbers that are in the budget, which have now become a target, they'd be meeting them anyway, despite the moves today. So, Terry Barnes, you've no doubt followed this debate for much of today. From the other side of the world, what are your thoughts? 12:19 Well, look, I don't know sometimes whether Tony Burke thinks he's Arthur or Martha. 12:25 But certainly, I think, as I think I heard James Willis say to you just a while ago, I mean, if really migration isn't a problem, why is he doing it? But I think there is a good reason that he's doing it, and that is simply that the politics of, well, the electoral politics of One Nation at the moment make sure that something has to be seen to be said, if not done. 12:48 And certainly when it comes to effectively blaming Australians for our housing habits, our housing culture, I just think that's absolutely wrong. I agree with what James said about that earlier. 13:01 Just on that, Terry, though... If you were going to say that, if it's a fact that you've now got more people living per home, and maybe home is a better way of saying it than house because house implies a house, whereas we have had a shift now, more people living in apartments. So if you've got a diffusion of the number of people living per home... 13:22 For whatever reason, shouldn't you then say, OK, let's do things such as, for instance, facilitate via compact with the states, get rid of stamp duty for people who are downsizing? Because that's one of the things that a lot of people say, well, I'd probably get to a smaller place from in the area where I live, but I can't afford the huge whack of stamp duty. 13:43 That's a very good point, and I think you're absolutely right. I mean, if you actually want to make sure we use the housing available to us without new bills as efficiently and effectively as we can for as many people as possible, you want to actually remove as many barriers to people either staying where they are or moving on if that's in their interest and in the interest of the market. Removing stamp duty, which is one of the things that really, I think... has kept the states afloat and state budgets afloat for far too long is something that you can do. 14:16 But when it comes to migration, I just think it's absolutely important to get the mix right. But it really comes down to not just the net overseas migration number, which seems to be the focus of all this. It's the quality of what's in that number once people come in. 14:36 The types of migrants we have, the types of skills they bring, the types of pressures they put on housing, on social security, on infrastructure generally. We're not really having those conversations. It's not the Labour, it's not the Coalition, it's not One Nation. 14:51 Yeah, and I found quite interesting when one part of the One Nation policy, which was about students who are coming to Australia, and, you know, it was during the time of the Howard government when you were working as an advisor that we saw the change, and we saw the start of the massive influx of overseas students, and it's built up and built up and built up, almost open-ended now, and I think people realise it's gone too far in terms of students. But then if students are bringing their families... 15:21 If you're going to be really, really nuanced about it, someone who's older, who's coming to Australia to study medicine or they're doing a high qualification that we need, they're likely to have a family that they'd bring with them. They're going to be a high income earner and they'll be part of our community. On the other hand, someone doing a short, as I said today, short course. You're only going to be here for a short period of time. You can be away from your family. Because those people that everyone, the whole world is looking for those high achievers to come and study here and work here. 15:52 And if we make it harder for them, they might go somewhere else. 15:57 Well, that's true. But on the other hand, if students bring their families, they start to put down roots. And if they start to do that, that's when they start to think about changing their visa status and wanting to stay permanently. 16:10 And many of those students, we might actually want that to happen, say, with the medical students or nursing or other skilled professions we've got shortages of. But I think common sense needs to apply as well. And that's something that... I think our migration policy doesn't happen enough, and I'm not criticising one side of politics or the other on this. I think it's been a problem for decades. And it's very important, I think, that, well, I think the family reunion in general is a challenge, and because of the politics of it, particularly in terms of various ethnic communities and the electoral consequences of it, it's very hard to tackle. 16:50 We really need to focus on having the skills we need where we need them and ensuring that people actually understand that they're being let into Australia. 17:03 It's a privilege. It's not a right. And it's important that they play their part in the game and if their visa expires, they go home. And that's something that our system, because of the ability for people to stay on and appeal and appeal and appeal, we really are frustrated and stymied in terms of what we can do. 17:23 Yeah, I wonder, it's good that you are actually in the UK, because there's a perspective I wanted to touch on in relation to this, but just on student and partner visas you've just alluded to, it's probably worth hearing a bit more detail of what the Minister had to say today, so people can then have a listen and make a judgment. This is Tony Burke on that issue. 17:43 The next change on who arrives is the change with respect to student visas and graduate visas. 17:52 If you're an Australian citizen and your partner is not an Australian citizen and they live overseas and you put in an application for them to come here, you have to wait quite some years. 18:05 At the moment, if you're an international student and you want to come here with your partner, you get them right from the start. 18:12 What we will be doing for international students, and I'll go through the exceptions to this because the exceptions are also important. For international students, we will no longer be allowing the attaching of family members for international students or for graduate visas. Anyone who already has their family attached to a visa and is already here, we're not going to be breaking up families onshore. The ones who are already here, that'll stay as is for the... 18:38 until at whatever point they leave Australia unless they end up being entitled to a permanent visa. But we will no longer be adding to the stock of students automatically being able to bring family members over. We have special visa conditions which will still allow it for the Pacific and for the Asia nations and for certain courses, for example PhD courses, they'll be able to bring family. You're often in a very different circumstance of life for those sorts of students than people are for undergraduate. 19:08 Interesting, Terry, because I had a look at the One Nation policy last night and it is exactly the same. The PhD students there, the reference there, it's exactly the same. But there is that question and it's also complicated and you've worked in this area. It seems to have got more complicated as the years have gone on. But you come in as a student, you do your course, and then the graduate visa is given to you, and then you can stay. And you may have done a course in cooking or whatever it is. So you get the graduate visa, and a lot of those people are driving Ubers or whatever it is. 19:40 And the argument was, well, maybe you look at this, you only get a graduate visa if you've studied something that then allows you to stay here and do something that we need. 19:50 I can't see them having calibrated that in that particular way, which does make some sense. 19:56 Well, I'm still getting my head around it, but I agree with you. I don't think they have. And I think it's actually very important they do. Because, as I say, I think having a family there is a springboard to wanting to stay permanently. 20:10 Because people do put down roots. People do get comfortable, get established as a family, as a family unit. But it makes it very hard for immigration authorities partly because of the process, as I was saying, but also because it becomes a public issue. 20:32 It's very hard to, you know, lose sympathy for the family because it just doesn't happen. But my sense with all of this is that it's been a pushback against One Nation. They've been reacting to One Nation, the government. But they're also trying to keep their own backbench happy because one area that hasn't really been touched is humanitarian visas, for instance, because of the The Labour backbench, particularly the left-wing Labour MPs, just don't want to have a bar of it, which is one of the reasons, I guess, that we haven't heard from Tony Burke weeks and weeks after this press club appearance was first announced. 21:12 humanitarian one it was running at just under 14 000 they lifted it to 20 and i've looked at some some really interesting academic analyses of these from people who are big supporters of immigration who've all argued that we just haven't got the resources at the moment to deal with 20 000 humanitarian refugees who are coming from often refugee camps and if we can't If we can't give them what they need to function in our society, that extra 6,000, then we should go back to 14,000 to make sure that those people get the best possible chance and we have the best possible opportunity to have them as part of our society. 21:50 Well, that's right, but I think we still have to ask questions about the 14,000, whether that number's sustainable. And certainly, if you look at what Tony Burke was saying as a whole, you'd have to say that when it comes to Well, non-economic migration and humanitarian migration is non-economic, that our ability to sustain that, to absorb it is actually much more limited than perhaps the minister wanted us to think. 22:16 All right, let's take a break, come back in a moment at 27 to 9. Of course, Terry, you're in the UK, so I want to – well, you can give us a little tourism report. But I'm also going to ask you about the UK because the immigration issues and border issues are quite different in Europe to here, and there is a reason for that. So I want to get to that and get your thoughts at 27 minutes to 9. Okay. 24 minutes to 9, 131873. Just on the immigration increase, I noticed somebody was saying that immigration, and this is somebody who's, you could probably say, I'm just looking at social media, probably a supporter of the government and saying that immigration has slowed markedly in the 12 months to the March quarter. 22:58 It had only increased by 1.43%. So, and we're talking numbers here, 1.43%. And at the same time, I was reading a piece, an excellent piece someone sent me, I'd seen it before, There's a website called Inflection Points and a couple of people putting some really, really important arguments on this saying that we really need to get our population growth down below 1% to have it manageable in this country. So even though it's come down a bit, a fair bit actually in that year, it's still... 23:29 nearly, well, 43% higher or more than it should be. So that's that situation, Terry. You're in the UK, Europe. We've, of course, had this debate is now over legal immigration. When we had the debates in the past over the borders and boat people and overseas processing, it was about illegal arrivals. This is about our legal immigration program, apart from the 70,000-odd people who are here today. uh illegally but largely it's about the legal program and in places like the uk and certainly europe it's more about the poorest borders so it's a different conversation but it does mean that we have control over our numbers much more than many other countries in the world well it's very true john and certainly uh here in the uk there's a lot of concern about illegal immigration i mean really if you look at 24:19 The fact that the POMs have to deal with illegal migrants coming across English Channel in boats. I mean, really looking at what Australia was having to face 20 years ago, they're actually confronting that now. And they're coming up with, well, onshore solutions to deal with the migrant influx. 24:43 The hot issue here today in the UK is there's a little village in Oxfordshire in the home counties called Pinnington. 24:51 where they voted to succeed from the UK, all 300 odd of them, because the government was planning to turn a disused military installation just around the corner into a depot, an asylum seeker reception centre capable of holding a couple of thousand. And basically the government if you like, the progressive left lobbies in the home counties are actually pushing back against the progressive left government doing these sorts of things. 25:23 There's a real political tension there that the Labour government in Britain is not dealing with very well. 25:28 Yeah, so there's that, and then there's the... the change in in makeup we had this conversation i think uh well in fact the the immigration settings were actually changed by uh by philip ruddock back in the early part of this century and we started to see more people coming from sub-saharan africa places like that and and in fact uh in the early years of all of that tony abbott was out there defending for the change in our in our makeup uh He says he's changed his mind on all of that. And in the UK, I haven't been there for a long time. 25:59 You tell me you haven't been there for about nine years. What are your observations? 26:04 Well, yeah, I don't want to sort of generalise about it, but the last time I was here was in 2017. 26:10 And one thing that struck me this week is just walking down the street to central London. 26:16 And I'm not saying it's just in terms of Muslim or Islamic migration, but the prevalence of people in hijabs and burqas, just in terms of numbers, has really, it's become the new normal. You know, people mix in, people sort of get on and just do their thing, but visible minorities are very, very visible in a way that I don't think they were even 10 years ago. 26:44 And so can I ask you, sorry, jump in, because can I ask you, is it, because I've been there for a long time and I just go to the usual tourist traps, you go to Trafalgar Square, you go to, you know, Piccadilly Circus, you ride the Tube. Are these the, is that within London that you're seeing all of that? 27:00 Well, I haven't been out of London this week. Right, okay. But certainly, yeah, riding the tube, just walking the streets in several parts of London, not just central tourist London. And I don't think a lot of people I'm talking about are tourists. They're just residents going about their business, and that's great. I mean, if they're integrating into the British community and being part of it, that's fine. What I'm saying is that I think the... 27:24 the british population is considerably more diverse than it was even a decade ago in terms of its ethnicity and its religious makeup now look i i did want to ask you because i touched on it with james willis and the reason i was interested is that we have got a number of stories tonight of uh of farmers and others who are concerned about the changes that have been made today the the alterations that will affect people on these backpacker visas and It was flagged, I think it might have been two or three months ago, when they made some initial moves to slow down the processing of the backpacker visas. 28:00 And it was going to affect regional areas. And the suggestion was that there was a bit of a Machiavellian approach to this, which was that this would mean that people in regional areas would see... job shortages starting to emerge because there weren't as many people coming on these backpacker visas and other working visas to fill those jobs. Therefore, in those regional areas where One Nation's making such ground, suddenly the concern's going to be we don't have enough people here, which then undercuts One Nation's message about reducing immigration. 28:34 Could it be that Machiavellian? 28:36 If it's a choice between a cock-up and a conspiracy, I'll go for the cock-up. 28:41 No, I don't think so as such, but certainly I think the government moving to limit or put working holidaymaker visas on a ballot, I don't think that's actually very helpful. I mean, for people like One Nation's David Farley and Farrah, and of course the coalition, particularly the National Party, are making it very plain that they're worried about the effects of restricting the number of backpackers doing the type of work that they do, like fruit picking. 29:12 That's something that I think has been lost in the rush with all of this, and that's... 29:17 It goes back to what I was saying earlier. I mean, the quality of the mix is something that I don't think Tony Burke's really tackled very well in what he said today. 29:26 But I don't think either side of politics has managed to do it well for a long time, which is one of the reasons that One Nation is really resonating in the immigration space. All right. 29:37 Let's just run through quickly because you're there and I want to get your travel report shortly, but it's 17 to 9. There's a few things that have been happening this week and I know you've been keeping an eye on what's going on here. Political donations, should there be a cap? Should we be pulling back on essentially people with enough money to buying politicians and influence? What do you think? 29:58 Well, certainly, again, it's a big issue here because two crypto billionaires have donated £36 million each to Nigel Farage and his reform party. 30:09 So just like Gina Bernhardt having a relationship with One Nation and Pauline Hanson, of course, and I've While I think that people should be free to donate, individuals should be free to donate to political parties and organisations, and that includes business as well as unions. I mean, that when people can donate on that sort of scale, that's a real concern, that's buying influence. Even if they say, I don't want anything. 30:38 Money talks, and if money talks that loudly, that can really have a real dangerous effect on not just political parties, but our democracy as a whole. 30:49 Now, we've also had this debate over Pauline Hanson's comment about the Prime Minister's mother. We've had the blur with Andrew Hastie. 30:56 Any thought on all of that? Because they're the easy, almost cartoonish conversations that do generate headlines. 31:07 Well, Pauline Hanson shouldn't have picked on the Albanese mother, no question. And I thought her apology, if you want to call it that, was merely mouthed in relation to her. 31:17 But then again, Anthony Albanese has been using his house backstory forever, hasn't he? And one of the things about it that I think it's worth actually questioning is not Mrs Albanese or Albo's mother being in public housing to the end of her life. It's the fact that she was in public housing to the end of her life when her son was doing so well himself. 31:39 So I think that's a question. In terms of Hastie, in terms of Andrew Hastie, I think that Please Explain cartoon was reprehensible. 31:48 The fact that it's still up, I think, is reprehensible. 31:52 And as far as Mr Hastie goes, as a former SAS officer... uh why shouldn't he have the right to call that call out what he sees as an attack on his honor and his reputation i think every person is entitled to defend his or her reputation he is doing that and that's not and i've seen commentary that basically says oh you shouldn't pick on one nation you know andrew hasty but look his his his reputation is on the line here when when people bandy about words like traitor That goes really to the heart of a person's honour. 32:24 And I think while politically it may not necessarily be the wisest thing to go hard at Pauline Hanson from Hastie's point of view, the fact that he felt he had to do it is something that I think she was tin-eared not to understand. 32:39 14 minutes to nine. Look, just on politics before, and we'll get to the London report shortly, but just on politics, and this is one that I was thinking about today, that Allegra Spender asked some questions at the Parliament of Anthony Albanese, and he kind of fobbed them off about integrity and the Marrickville Golf Club and all of that. And she did say afterwards, she said, well, he's turning into Scott Morrison. Now, whatever you think of the Scott Morrison, the Liberal Party thing, Scott Morrison became an absolutely, almost poisonous factor in in that election that he lost. 33:10 And she was saying she thinks Anthony Albanese might be going down, almost going down that path. Thoughts on that? 33:17 Well, I don't think quite so far yet, but yes, I think she has a point. But the thing about Azna Albanesia is that when it comes to hypocrisy and double standards, I mean, the golf club grant is falling into that category. I mean, he's got a real track record of that. I mean, particularly going back to the run-up to the budget, which, you know, his basic backflipping, as he would say it, on capital gains tax and negative gearing. I mean... 33:46 It's like a denial is a denial until it can be denied no longer with him. And that's something I think that will ultimately catch up with him. 33:57 I've got one for you, Terry, and I'm glad you're with us because you're the person I can ask. And it occurred to me today, and I will say this, and a lot of people question it, Anthony Albanese has been a committed and very long-term supporter of Hawthorne in the AFL. It goes back a long way. Now, Hawthorne, I think Hawthorne probably could be favoured to go through to the grand final. My sense is that Hawthorne's won a lot of premierships. And so in Victoria, if you're not a Hawthorne supporter, you probably aren't all that keen on Hawthorne. 34:28 Is it going to be a political minus for him if he turns up on grand final day, he's got his Hawthorne scarf on? 34:36 the northern states are going to be looking and going, what the hell's that? And in Victoria, unless you follow Hawthorne, you go, what's he doing with the Hawthorne scarf? 34:44 It might not play all that well. 34:47 Well, that's right. I mean, you've got a Queensland team, you've got a Sydney team, you've got a West Australian team, you've got Hawthorne. I mean, you've got to be very careful there, don't you? I mean, I think you were talking to John Howard about Prime Minister supporting football teams, weren't you? And he basically decided not to support an AFL team because it was not his game. Yeah, yeah. 35:06 But I think he does support Hawthorne, but I don't think it'll look all that good because I think a lot of people will be going, really, why are you there? And especially if he gets up on the stage if they win, that's not going to look good at all. That's just my thought, Terry, and I'm just trying to flag that. If it turns into an issue, you heard it here first. 35:24 He's a bunny man. He's a South Sydney supporter and that's what he'll always be. Good on him for that. He's a rugby league man, not an AFL man. Just picking a team because he's a politician just doesn't sit with me. 35:36 11 to 9. Let's come back in a moment. A few things to talk about. You can tell us about the weather. We can get the trigger warning ready. You might even talk about Harry and this brewing controversy over Charles Spencer, Diana's brother, all coming up shortly. Seven minutes to nine. I did mention this yesterday. It's inflection points. It's an excellent piece on immigration. I'm just reading some of the information. And I think this was one that was actually being talked about a fair bit last week in immigration circles. 36:07 A third of all 25 to 29-year-olds in Australia, a third are on temporary visas. That's a third. 36:16 Roughly one in three living in this country on temporary visas. And those temporary visas can last for many, many years. And there's a whole lot of reasons why. 36:24 Because someone's a temporary part of our community, that's not working very well at all. I'm not sure they've really done very much about that one either today. So let's go back to Terry Barnes. He's in the UK, Terry. The weather, I'm trying to think now. It's got to be starting to cool down, is it? 36:42 The rain is lovely and warm, John. No, no, we've had a bit of drizzle this morning. That's the only sign of rain I've had the four days I've been here so far. 36:53 When I left Melbourne on Sunday, it was about 20, 25 and sunny. When I got to London on Monday, it was 25 and sunny, believe it or not. It's hard to believe that this is the London that I think we all remember. 37:06 But certainly, look, I think it's... 37:10 As I said before, I think the way that Britain, certainly London, is evolving, it's changing rapidly. 37:19 It's not the single, stable, preserved and aspic society that we sort of like to think about and remember or link to things like Agatha Christie and Praro and those types of period pieces. 37:37 It's really changed. It's really different. 37:39 You do seem to be taken aback by that, so I'm looking forward to when you come back because you're going to be spending a bit of time there talking to other people who are working in public life and writing and examining all of this. So once you've done a full account, I'll be very keen to hear from you. In the meantime, there is this story. So not long after Princess Diana died, so we're talking 30 years, close to 30 years, King Charles is alleged to have said to Diana's brother, rest assured we'll forget her soon enough. Now, there's no recording of that, so her brother's saying it in this book. 38:13 It is a he said, he said. What are people making of it? 38:17 Well, certainly the British media is making a lot of it, but I think they're coming down on the side of the king, actually. 38:23 because he put out a statement saying that paternal grief can distort people's memories. That's the essence of what he said. And I think he's right. But because it is a he said situation, people are sort of jumping in and forming their own conclusions. But really, I think the fact that the king or the palace put out a statement like that, I suppose recollections may vary as it's already taken. But But the fact that the King felt he had to respond and responded in that way shows that it did actually cut very personally as it was reported. 39:00 And Charles Spencer has a... 39:03 an axe to grind against the royal family has had for a long time, even before Diana died. So you've got to sort of take a little pinch of salt, I reckon. 39:10 Yeah, and look, I think even if you thought that Charles may have fought it at the time, that it's hard to imagine, given what we've seen of him in the years since, that he would have actually said it. It's hard to imagine that. Because saying it to her brother, well... 39:28 Oh, exactly right. I just can't believe that he would have done that, even if it was a prince as a member of the royal family as opposed to a human being. That's right. So he's a much more decent person than that, I think. 39:41 All right. You're heading off to a garden party, top hat the whole thing, I think, aren't you, Terry? So we might get a report on that when we see you back here. 39:48 All right, John. 39:49 Okay, and obviously you planned this trip because you knew your team wouldn't be in the finals, or would last any longer in the finals. That would have been a problem for you, wouldn't it, if they were? 39:58 Not my team, John, not your team. 39:59 All right, good on you, mate. Thank you. There he is, Terry Barnes, with our Thursday night news hour, three and a half to nine now. 40:13 Now it's back to John Stanley, right across Australia. 40:18 Good evening, everyone. Welcome along. It is seven minutes past nine here on this Thursday. Thanks for all the feedback we had during our news hour, a lot of conversation and discussion about immigration. I did mention this, and you can just go online and it's called inflection points. It's as easy as that. You just Google inflection points. And the first thing that comes up is this lengthy essay written by a couple of people. And it's really, it's very, very simply stated that And a lot of details of how you can put the whole immigration system, pull it apart and put it back together again in such a way that we're bringing people into the country on the basis of how they fit in and what we need. 40:59 It's a very good piece. And they did say that they view the necessity to get our population growth to 1%. 41:11 Now, at the moment, the net overseas migration, well, it's gone up by about close to one and a half percent. This is what's happened in the last year. Our population with net overseas migration included is close to 400,000 because we're getting over 100,000 people. That is increasing the population through births minus deaths. 41:33 And so if you can keep it at 1%, and they argue that that would include migration and the number of people who are born, so people who have births minus deaths. So we're a long way away from that. So if you want to have a look at that, it's a very, very good piece. And some of the things they talk about might be unpalatable. But for business people, particularly, it might give them a chance to really find the people they need in a much smarter way. So again, as I say, because we're moving into the next couple of hours, we're going to hopefully have a little bit more fun over the next couple of hours, but that's going to be an ongoing issue. 42:12 This isn't a great story, but it's one that we need to talk about. And there's some things, I think when there's a, what they call them now, they used to call them hit and run. 42:23 Now we talk about fails to stop. 42:26 This is a story, a man's died after what they're calling, this is the police, a fail to stop crash in the Blue Mountains. This is near Sydney, of course, west of Sydney. Happened a couple of hours ago. 42:38 Emergency services called to the westbound lanes of the Great Western Highway. 42:42 A white sedan collided with a motorcycle. 42:46 A 57-year-old man was riding the motorcycle. He died at the scene, and the white sedan drove off. Now, they're investigating this. This was in the last couple of hours. They are asking for any assistance from people who might have been in the area. The investigation is continuing, and that is why if you were interested on the Great Western Highway, which of course at the moment has that issue anyway with the blockage with that particular bridge that's going to be maybe finished or repaired next year. 43:16 But that's what's been happening there earlier this evening. 131873 is the number. 43:21 uh this is where we get into our hour with the duck should we play the duck song because a lot of people have been asking us to play the the duck song uh which we've run this is the one i know we've played we made a few songs for the duck i think this is the one that uh i think is top of the pops let's have it before we get to him in a world full of arts free tickets free trips whatever is free when it comes to this stuff we 43:48 If it's a roar, the duck will be in it If there's an angle, the duck will want it He's got a heart of gold But at the right price, even that will be sold If it's a roar, the duck is always in it He's got a heart of gold But at the right price, even that will be sold If it's a roar, the duck is always in it. The duck is always in it. 44:20 And now on Nights, it's time to duck out there somewhere with the duck. Thanks to Oz Off-Road Penrith. Four-wheel drive builds, accessory fitting and camping store. Oz Off-Road, your ultimate adventure centre. 44:34 I think the details actually say that the little one that we put together with AI, but the great man is with us. He is real. He's not AI. He's not a hologram. Duck, good evening. 44:43 Yes, good evening, John, and good evening to everybody. I'm very excited tonight, John. 44:47 Very excited. Why would that be? Because, as you know, our man Wilco isn't on tonight. And so what we had to do, we've got someone filling in for him. So what we did, we put the web out. We threw out the net. 44:58 And went with the big names. I mean, first we called a couple of obvious people that we know, Adam Harvey, country music star, Troy Casadale. Then we went further and went into the rock scene because that's Wilco. We looked for James Rain. We even called Sting. 45:14 Let me tell you, none of them were available. So tonight, we've got a superstar. 45:18 This is for our gig guide later in the hour. You've got a massive build-up to this. 45:22 Well, I can only tell you that this person has been preparing since yesterday morning. So I'm expecting, I'm telling you now, and here's a little tip for you, Wilk, I know you're listening. 45:33 In this business, you're a rooster one day and a feather duster the next, John, as you know. 45:37 All right, so, look, Dave Wilkins, who's one of Australia's leading musicians, he's fantastic. He does a wonderful job with us and contributes to the fun with the duck every Thursday night. So, Wilco, he had to go and get something done. It was not as simple as perhaps you might think. He's come through it well. He's recovering tonight, and he'll be back on deck hopefully next week. 46:01 Yeah, he's a good man now, man, Wilco. And I'm tipping he's probably having a good time now because they give you pretty good painkillers in hospital and stuff like that when you get those sorts of things done. So he's probably having a great time, John. 46:16 Right. 46:17 I remember when I was in there, I thought I was everywhere except where I actually was. Every time I closed my eyes, I thought I was in Bathurst and I thought I was in the Northern Territory. 46:26 You did go through a very serious health crisis. Yeah, mine was pretty big. And we're very glad that you're still with us. 30 minutes past nine. Now, you did travel up into the middle of Australia last week. You were at that big four-wheel drive show, of course, last week. So you were with us very, very briefly. So... Where are we right now? Because we do get politics into this because what you see on the road, you see, of course, high petrol prices. You see people who are cutting back on all sorts of things because of the cost of living crisis. 47:01 You're in my ear on it every couple of days when we talk. So thoughts? 47:06 Oh, look, there's no doubt, look, the fuel price, talking to the, and we get a bit serious here, when we talk to the leaders of the industry, and I talk to the people who run the Caravan Camping Industry Association, and their data tells them, and I would agree with it, that fuel prices don't really come into it. What the main problem was with the last fuel crisis was the fact of getting somewhere with a bit of media hype and, of course, a genuine fear that you would get somewhere and there'd be no fuel. And that was a bit of a worry, which is why this year's tourist season was off to a late start. 47:40 And everybody, and I mean everybody I've spoken to in that tourism business, whether it be the Muddy Duck Caribbean Park at Longreach or somewhere else at another campground or the roadhouses or the pubs, and I talked to all of them, that was a late start. And that was why. It was because... The people were, you know, a bit, you know, if we're going to get out here to Willow Barraback, how are we going to get home if they have no fuel? So once it was established that there was enough fuel supply and the fact that there was, you know, a little bit of a, not a campaign as such, but there was a bit of a worry or a bit of a word getting around that you don't go out and, you know, use fuel off the farmers. 48:16 It was almost like you were going to steal it. when these country regions were quite the opposite attitude, screaming for the caravaners to get out there because their businesses survive off the tourism dollar. Some of these pubs and some of these places, I mean, you've got populations of one... where there's a population of 15 people, but they do 200 lunches a day. So it's because of the caravan. And on our recent trip, we were away for, I think, six or seven weeks. 48:45 I literally saw thousands of caravans, John, thousands on the road. The other thing I noticed too was that the free camping was very popular. Places like the Georgina River at Camerwell, we had to drive two kilometres down the riverbank to get a spot. Other places we stopped at, Mary Kathleen was pretty full. We went to a place near Mount Isa called Clem Walton Park, which is a popular spot for caravaners. These are free camps and a lot of people in those free camps. 49:17 So what's happening in saying that to talking to our mate that runs the park in Longreach? 49:23 the birds will races were on the following weekend which helped him but it was booked out but the free camp spots were very very busy and and i guess what's happening um no one's told me this i just presume that if you can save yourself you know a few nights in a caravan park and out in the bush they average about 40 bucks they say you do three or four nights free camping that's all you know that's half a tank of fuel so I guess there's a bit of that going on. 49:51 Let me just jump in before you go on, Doug, because just on that with the free sites. I don't know, we do commercials for one of our sponsors, Blue Lagoon and Beach Resort, so they've got everything there on the shores of... 50:03 It's a bit of a different set-up. I know it is. They're on the Central Coast. They've got a lot of free camping there. 50:09 What I'm asking you is, so your stuff is off-grid, so you've got your bathroom, you've got everything with you there, so you can go to a free place. So someone who might just have a caravan, for instance, and they've got a... 50:25 uh if the free places that they have do they have toilets do they have facilities or is that the trade-off you have to make to you know get into the free spots that are all over the place okay some of the free spots will have that may have a toilet uh if you're lucky there may be the odd one around that also has showers i know there's a free one at a place called mitchell um which is there james turner we're very popular i couldn't believe how many people were there there's a there's a there's a taller block there as well but these days the majority was about every caravan on the road has an ensuite with you know they're self-contained so it's not and the one thing i noticed too is some of these towns in particular in queensland mount isaac long curry that that region they really cater for the rvs because you can pull up and And there's dump points, there's water, fresh drinking water that you can top your water tanks up as well. 51:20 And all, you know, you just pull into this big car park type setup and pull up and do all that and sort yourself out and then off you go again. So... 51:31 Yeah, so some of the spots do, some don't, but it doesn't seem to worry anybody, especially with vans, because as I say, they're self-contained these days really. A lot of the old, maybe the older ones aren't, but the newer vans are. 51:45 And as I said, there are thousands of vans on the road. What the downside to this is, is... 51:52 At the moment, the caravan, there was another caravan company closed its doors this week, which I had word of over the weekend. 52:02 And look, we're in the caravan. We sell caravans at Oz Offroad. I make no secret of that. We're a paid advertiser here. And I know we have a bit of fun about plugs and stuff. But Oz Offroad is a paid advertiser on the network. And I can tell you now, not just us, but everybody, we didn't have a bad show at Eastern Creek. 52:20 And to be honest, there were people who obviously listened to us here, watched the TV show, knew who we were, but certainly not the sort of sales we would have got, like, say, last year or the year before. 52:30 It's very quiet, and shows have been very hard work. And the industry, since the federal budget came out, and let's be fair dinkum, it has dropped off like you would not believe. Everybody in the industry is saying it. 52:43 The confidence is very low. Trust is gone. That's just eliminated. You cannot trust people who tell you lies, blatant lies. And look, in the fair and income department, John, that's what happened. And I know I made our back and put as much spin on it as he likes. At the end of the day, he lied to the faces of the Australian people. And it's not just this industry. Everyone we talk to, everybody. 53:08 everyone we everybody you speak to says the same thing and once trust is confidence i talk to people who run you know hospitality businesses and so if you can you know i've got you know i've got one of those nespresso coffee machines at home and so i can knock myself up a coffee i don't mind it up at the cafe i i go you know that's a that's a significant saving on on going to the local cafe and so if someone we've talked about this before someone's got an old caravan van whatever it might be they think i'll hang on to this for That's right. 53:39 And they may even have the money ready to go, but they're figuring, I'm going to hang on to this for the next year to see what's going on until they open up. They don't know what's happening with interest rates or anything. 53:49 That's a real problem. It's a huge problem. 53:53 It's a huge problem. At the moment, plenty of businesses in our industry are restructuring and adapting to the times. And look, as I said, we sell vans, but the last thing that we want to see, and myself personally, is like the one that closed its doors this week. A business that started from nothing, been going for 25 years and forced to close its doors. I mean, seriously. I mean, fair dinkum. I don't want everybody on the dole. What's the story? 54:22 Now, one of our listeners is actually saying they've seen some items about the free van parks starting to disappear. A lot of them are having charges associated with it. They're still around, aren't they? 54:36 Look, the free camp spots are everywhere, and it depends what area that listener's talking about. 54:43 The one thing I will ask for people that go and use these spots is because usually what you take in, you must take out. So take your rubbish with you because if you start leaving rubbish lying around for other people to clean up, well, it's just going to stuff it for everybody and they'll put a gate on the front of it and you won't be able to get in there. And that happens. So you've got to... And I've seen videos even this week of a camp spot on a river somewhere. I wasn't quite sure where it was, but there was someone who turned up there to camp and they spent, you know, the first two hours of being there cleaning up somebody else's mess. 55:15 They even left behind a broken fridge, like mobile car fridge. I mean, fair dinkum. I mean, so you've got to be a bit fair dinkum with all that department. Make sure you clean up after yourself. Leave it as you found it. And those spots. But all over the country, John, especially in the outback and in the regions, you do have those options. And there's also the options, too, of stopping in showgrounds. So people can adjust. And we try to encourage people, sure, there's nothing like free camping and pulling up. It's that single, it's that freedom, feeling of freedom. 55:47 It's like something that's been going on in Australia for 200 years where the swaggy can pull up and have a camp. It's a great feeling, even in a van, it's a great feeling pulling up and doing that. But on the same token, and I know it's a big ask at these times, but you've got to try and support your caravan parks and those people out in the regions because they're employing people, the people that might clean the amenities blocks, someone who serves you at the counter, the bloke who mows the lawns. 56:12 They employ people and they can't employ people as caravaners don't go in there. So it's a tough ask in tough times, it really is. 56:19 I'm going to take a break, come back in a moment. When we come back, there's a bit of TV news came out today. Channel 9, we're no longer part of the Channel 9 empire. In fact, the only link we've got with Channel 9 now is the bloke I'm talking to. Are your show still on Channel 9? 56:33 Yes, it will be. Yes, I was afraid too. I was afraid too. We're going to hear a lot about that. Oh, you will soon, John. It's on next year. Yeah. 56:40 Yeah, but, you know, I can say something. We're no longer part of it. I'm very disappointed with Channel 9 because they announced what they're doing for next year earlier today. I'll give you the reasons for that in just a moment. But at 24 past nine, of course, we have plenty of the Ducks sponsors here for this hour. They then happily have me read their commercials. 57:00 I have had people think I sound a bit like Russell Coyte, but thanks very much for that. And then Duck gives me this. If you've never listened before, Duck gives me a score. Ready to go? 57:08 Yep, I think you've got Russell quite covered. 57:10 All right. 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Now, to have the OptiVan applied to your caravan camper, RV or motorhome, visit OptiVan, O-P-T-I-V-A-N, optivan.com.au and surprise, surprise, you're quite ducked four by four, you get 50% off OptiVan. 58:14 That is thousands of dollars in savings. This is a blue chip product. You also get the free deluxe wash kit, detailing spray, citrus multipurpose interior cleaner, lots of extras as well. So go to optivan.com.au or contact your local Optivan dealer. Terms, conditions, exclusions and limits apply. 58:32 Look, I think that was very uplifting, that read. John, I'm going to give you a four. 58:37 Okay. 26 past nine. 58:39 29 past nine. It is a Thursday night. And of course, Thursday nights, we're here with the Duck now. We will be on air tomorrow night because there's no rugby league. So we'll have a little special program for you tomorrow night. 58:52 Following week, of course, will be preliminary final Friday. And then we'll kick off the summer season. So this bloke, I haven't even negotiated it with him yet, but we'll be moving to Friday nights where this bloke's even looser. on a friday night so we'll have a hard hitting john hard hitting i'll be hard hitting you are hard hitting can we just be serious here because a couple of weeks ago we spoke with young morgan and this is uh this is the uh raising raising funds and this is to do with uh youth suicide and and and increasing awareness of it and huge effort wasn't it 59:26 Absolutely. Morgan Cowan, who I know well, and I know her parents well, and we did speak about what happened to her younger brother, Tommy. And so she, you know, she's dealing with a lot of grief, and she wanted to pay tribute to him, and she took part in that World Suicide Prevention Day and did that nine-kilometre walk. You might remember, I was just ridiculous how many people... 59:52 commit suicide. It's terrible. Well, look, hats off. She should be commended, Morgan. She did the walk. There was 26 of them in the end. Her and obviously 25 others joined her. Are you ready for this? They raised $32,000. Now, I'm not sure, and I have to get on to Morgan to ask her how many... 60:12 how many phone calls that is because this all goes into the support centre for Lifeline. $32,000. Well done. They raised and what an effort for just, you know, one person. 60:24 And that's her. There's other people that do it and of course that money then funds... somebody who's been trained and can answer the phone and ultimately if they fall short of a funding amount and there's one extra call that can't be handled, that person is either put on hold or can't be helped and who knows what the consequences are there. 60:45 Absolutely. So well done. I think that's a great effort. And it was very personal for Morgan. And she did very well on the radio with us. I mean, it's a terrible time for her and her family, but she aimed up. 61:00 And she was very brave, and I think what she did was outstanding. And to raise $32,000 for that effort is incredible, and I think she should be applauded for that. Well done. 61:10 Now, I've had a note from April who listens to us in Canberra. Wanted to know if you're going to the Tamworth Country Music Festival. Of course, the tickets are on sale now, so you do need to plan in advance for this. But then asking both of us about Tamworth, but also the Elvis Festival in parks. They're big events, both of those. Could we think about doing something from either of those? What are your thoughts? 61:31 Well, we could do. I mean, if there's an invoice involved, John, I mean, I'm up. I'm not sure about you. What do you charge? 61:36 Now, Channel 9 announced today their shows for next year, and there's a few things they've got. They're bringing back McLeod's Daughters. Yes, I saw that. Apparently, a few other shows they're rebooting. And then they announced that Tom Steinford and Sylvia Jeffries, they're going to host the Today Show. Now, look, they're very, very good. They're very good. But sometimes you've got to think outside the square. And I did make the point on air here that the Channel 9 football, their first hour – had unusually high ratings and they noticed it was because of the lead-in they were getting from you. 62:09 And I said it as a joke. Imagine if the duck was hosting the Today Show. You imagine him sitting with his big hat doing the Today Show. It'd be very entertaining, wouldn't it? 62:20 I wouldn't be out of the question, John. I mean, what time would you have to get up to go and do that? 62:23 You'd be getting up about $2.30, I think. 62:25 You know, fair enough. That could be a bit of a struggle. But then again, John, it all comes down to the invoice amount. But anyway, no, they'll do very well. Still good. Jeff, she goes very well. In fact, as you know, and you were hammering me when she was calling me ducky on the... 62:41 Was it Sylvia? Because you did that morning extra. That's right. And that's right. And I think that might have been the first time you appeared or whatever. So they said, we're getting the duck. But instead of calling you duck, they called you ducky. And I played it over and over again. I'm hoping I've kept it because that's one of the priceless ones you've been called ducky. 63:00 Well, Bozo used to call me that. 63:04 Now, in terms of going inland, because I guess it started to warm up again, what you saw going through, and again, we know we're being told about an El Nino, we're talking about a dangerous bushfire season, beautifully green in the inland, as you've said, but what I read is that in many areas... They've got the beautiful green canopy, but the moisture hasn't gone down far enough, and it needs a lot more rain, and it's not going to last. 63:38 That's what I'm told. 63:39 It depends which part of the country you are talking about. There are some that need, and we went through all, you could imagine, the terrain that we took from Darwin through inland Australia to get back home. So we drove through all different types of terrain, areas that I've driven through in the past that were just red. are now green and there was other areas that looked a bit dry. So it just depends on what area. But what will happen now is it will start to drop off. The outback travel, and my mate Frank, the former owner of the Walkabout Creek pub, his gauge was always pretty good, Mother's Day to Father's Day, and then it drops off. 64:19 And a lot of those garavan parks in the outback will close over summer. And that gives them an opportunity to maybe do some work around the place or just close and have a bit of a break themselves. They get some pretty big storms too in places like Longreach and that. 64:34 So basically, it'll taper off now. In saying that, there are some people who enjoy, want to experience like the wet season. I've been told so many times, even when I was up there just only weeks ago in the top end... 64:49 The amount of people who said to me, duck, you've got to get here in the wet season. You catch fish off the side of the road in the drain culverts. I went, what? 64:57 And that's fair dinkum. I mean, you can just... There was that much water up there. Obviously, the build-up's probably a bit tough with the humidity and the like, but they do say it is something special. And look, did I just mention something? 65:08 I was talking to Waddy today, and it would have been... Just so people know who Waddy is, Waddy's your fishing guy in the Northern Territory. 65:15 Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, that's exactly right. Now... 65:20 I got onto him today. Now, we recorded an interview with Wadi, and we had to do it through Facebook Messenger because he was 100 kilometres fishing on a river from the Russian border. 65:37 Oh, really? Yes, unbelievable. 65:39 Now, I think, didn't we talk to Wadi last year or the year before, and he was taking a group to Mongolia? 65:46 Yes, and that's where he was. 65:48 Now, I had never thought of it. So you open up your map and we did it. And again, if you weren't with us that night, I opened up the map. See, there's Mongolia sitting there between Russia and China. And then you do a bit of a search, a search of fishing spots in Mongolia. I'm thinking, no wonder he went. It looked amazing. 66:07 He sent me the map coordinates, which I typed in and then looked on Google Earth. 66:14 And there is remote. 66:16 And then there is where he is. It was hours, I think it was three flights, then hours, like 12 hours, 16 hour drive to where he is. And what he's doing, talk about adventure. The tour guide they've got over there that they use, they set up camp. So what happens is you then in the morning you get up, you get on a raft and drift down the river all day. Until you get to the next camp spot, which has all been set up again. And everything, the food's cooked, everything's laid out, and your tent's up and all that stuff. 66:48 And then the next day, it just goes day after day after day. He's there, I think, on this river in Mongolia for another... 66:56 11 days. Another six days on this river. 66:58 It's remote, but from what I can get, it looks pretty amazing, though, doesn't it? 67:01 Oh, look, it's incredible. And it's just the way he described it. And I'd love to get him on when he gets back. It was very difficult for us to get him on. No, Starlink. 67:13 But just the way he described it and the way of life there was just quite incredible. And as I said, he had a little bit of service, but we couldn't ring on his normal phone. So we called him through Facebook Messenger. He did ask me to ring him on WhatsApp, and I just said, what's that? What's that? 67:32 I've got no idea. Give me a call tomorrow. I'll tell you what WhatsApp is and word you up on it. 67:37 I tried to work it out, John. No, no, I'll tell you about it tomorrow. 67:40 My daughter called. And look, again, I'm glad you mentioned that because, in fact, the late Glenn A. Baker... who we only lost not long ago, he was actually also a travel writer. And I remember him waxing lyrical about Mongolia, what he has as well. And then you think, there you are in this peaceful remote place and you've got China to your south, the lunatic Putin up to the north, and you're in this haven. That's incredible. Quite amazing. And so he's leading a tour group, is he? 68:09 Yeah, he's got a couple of customers with him. 68:12 Yep. And they're up there, and he's got that, like, he's got barefoot fishing safaris in the top end, but then he has angling adventures. In Mongolia, what a... And he does these, they do these guided fishing trips. Yeah. And I did ask him the question, what happens if you get up there and they're not biting? 68:29 point but he answered that question he said at the moment the river that he's on now in a few weeks time a week two foot of ice so 60 centimetres of ice on top of this river and it's just not quite cold enough so they're not he's hoping tomorrow there's a cold front coming and they'll bite a little bit more but just unbelievable 68:48 Okay, I've got to do another of your commercials, and I could drop names as well as you because, in fact, the person that runs morning television at Channel 9 used to work on my program many years ago. 68:57 Well, how come I haven't got the gig? 68:59 Well, hang on. Hang on. 69:02 Tim Davies does the weather. G'day, Tim. And he's finishing tomorrow. That's his last broadcast, but I haven't announced a replacement yet. You'd be the person perfect. Let's go to the weather with the duckies. That would be fantastic. The duck on the weather on the Today Show. 69:17 No, I don't think so. 69:19 I don't think the weather's my go. I know nothing about it. Just make it up, mate. I think that's what's been going on for a while, actually. You ready? I think that's been going on for a while, making it up. You ready? Yeah, go on. Don't stuff it up. 69:30 Looking for an off-grid caravan to get you out there longer. Oz off-road caravans are 100% Australian built. They are ready to explore Australia. And there is that huge range from 14-foot vans right up to the 24-footers. Club lounge for the ultimate in off-road touring and comfort. Couples, family vans. And the beauty is there's the multiple internal layout designs and lots of colours, so you can check them out now. You can go to Oz Offroad headquarters at Penrith. 69:56 Then you've got Oz Offroad, there when you're there, four-wheel drive fitting centre. Qualified fitters set you up for towing, tough tracks and touring, the ball bar suspension, driving lights, winches, recovery gear, rooftop tents and awnings, canopy fit-outs and trays for the tray. Everything you need. is at OzOffRoad at Penrith in Western Sydney. So if you're in that area, you can go and have a look there, or the website, ozozoffroad.com.au, or give them a call, 1-300-760-131. 70:27 Well, I've got the script in front of me, John, believe it or not. Mate, that's a one. That is a one. 70:33 That's your lowest score. Sorry. I call it as I say it. 70:36 Hard but fair. You're 19 to 10. It's our Thursday night fun here. We have with the duck. A lot of people actually like the idea of the duck doing the weather on the Today Show. Hang on. Let me just have a look here. Text... 70:49 Oh, well, I'm glad you're listening, mate. Yeah, I'll shoot you his number straight after the show. Oh, we could be onto something here. 131873 is the number. Now, of course, let's play Wilco's intro for The Gig Guide. Here we go. 71:05 Now on Knights, The Gig Guide. 71:09 Yes, of course, Wilco's recovering. Unfortunately, he had to have a procedure done and he's resting and he's recovering. And the duck, of course, has been very, very sympathetic and sent him lots of messages. 71:21 But, duck, you've got a replacement, have you? 71:24 Look, absolutely. As I said, we threw the net out and Sting wasn't available and, you know, other big names that are around. So we've got one of the greats. 71:34 Well, he says he is. He's normally haunting houses this time of night, John. James Glendening, how are you, son? Hello, Doc. 71:41 Hello, John. How are you? And he's supposed to be your mate. 71:44 Hey, James, they tell me... Now, listen, just before... Look, you can't stuff this up tonight because, fair dinkum, you went like a bastard last time. You are under more... No, you did. No, you did go like a bastard and you're under more pressure than my Aram Williams belt. Buckle up the moment. But they tell me you've been preparing for this since yesterday morning. Is that right? 72:03 Well, Wilco rang me yesterday morning and he says, I'm going under the knife in two hours, Simon. Can you help me out tomorrow night? 72:10 No, I told him to call you. I think you've done well. Anyway. 72:13 So, look, what we do, of course, we have the gig guide. Wilco chooses a selection of really good gigs, big and small, from most of our listening areas. So, James, you've got the honour. So I'll try and get this bloke to be quiet and let you go. Yeah. 72:28 Mate, just turn his level down, if you could, for about five minutes. 72:32 Oh, radio bloke feeding him. Now, just give us what's happening. Come on, James. Tell us what's playing around this weekend, mate. 72:38 OK, up in Brisbane for our four BC listeners, the Mitchell Creek Rock and Blues festivals on this weekend, the 17th to the 20th on the Sunshine Coast. 72:48 Some of the highlights of the weekend is Tex Perkins and Matt Walker, Dallas Frasca, Ray Beadle, Mason Rack, Darren Jack in the V8 Blues Band, Collar Greens and Gravy, Queen Ashton, Corey Legg in the Legacy, Andy Cohen, and tickets are on sale through Mitchell Creek RockandBluesFest.com.au. Thursday night up there in Brisbane Way, Kingsbridge Cavern, the... 73:18 Let me have a look. The Black Sorrows tonight. They're playing at Lefty's Music Hall. That's a good show. 73:23 Yep, yep. Where are they on again? 73:25 The Black Sorrows? Yeah, Black Sorrows I was on tonight at Lefty's Music Hall, but that gig has just been told it's been sold out. 73:32 Right. 73:33 So, also, tomorrow night, Becky Cole was playing at the Hamilton Hotel from 7.30pm, and doors open around about 6 o'clock, and tickets, you can get them through AusTix. 73:46 Rick Price, who now these days is based in Nashville, is back on tour in Australia, playing a Friday night at the Zamia Theatre, which is at Tambourine Mountain on the Gold Coast. You can get them through try booking. Doors open at 7.30, and that's Rick Price, or you can get them tickets at rickprice.com. Also, Missy Higgins is playing on Sunday at the Aroma Street Parkland in Brisbane from 6pm. 74:17 And he gets through Ticketmaster for our 2GB listeners all this weekend down at Manly. is the Manly International Jazz Festival all weekend. 74:29 Wow. 74:29 Now, most of the gigs at the festival are free, so I went actually many years ago and actually it's quite a great weekend at the Manly Jazz Festival. 74:39 And for more details at manlyjazz.com.au. Also, Hayley Jensen playing at the Beer Shed at Campbelltown on Friday at 6pm. Oz Tickets are your ticket provider. 74:52 Alex Lloyd on Friday night is playing the Brass Monkey at Cronulla. Dolls over at 6.30. Oz Tickets is the provider. 75:01 Friday night, the Radiators. They're up there on the Shepard Coast playing at the Evoker Beach Theatre. 75:07 And tickets through the Evoker Beach Theatre. Friday night, the Baby Animals, supported by Sister Dolls, playing the South Juniors at Kingswood. 7.30pm. Oz Ticks is the ticket provider. And Saturday night, the PJ O'Brien band playing at the Piedmont Bridge Hotel. It's a free door, and that kicks off at 5pm. And that night, the same Shane Flew Blues band playing at the Piedmont Bridge Hotel at 9pm. 75:41 Also for our TV listeners, on Saturday night, the Baby Animals playing locally in Blue Collarville. at the Region Theatre in Richmond. That's where I'll be on Saturday night. Doors open at 7pm. Ticketmaster is a ticket provider. Mike Rudd from Spectrum is playing this Sunday. Remember the band Spectrum, John? 76:01 Yeah, sure, mate. You've got a great collection of acts here. This is fantastic. 76:05 Yeah, Mike Rudd from Spectrum is playing back out at Windsor at Tate's House Selby Sunday. It's a free gig. Is that right, James? Is that right? 76:15 Yep. Oh, mate, maybe he'll sing that big hit. I'll be gone. Yeah, I'll be gone. I'm going to go. Is that on Sunday at Tate's, is it? I'll be there. I might pop into that. 76:25 Yep. Saturday night, Coverpalooza. They're playing at Penrith Leagues Club on Saturday night at the Terrace Bar. That's free. And Matt Morrison, Ben, playing at Butcher's Brews Bar in Dullesville. 8pm. And also for our 2CC listeners, I found a couple of gigs, John. Credence and Friends, it's a tribute to John Fogarty and Credence Clearwater Revival. They're playing at the Canberra Southern Cross Club in Woden, 8pm, and Ticket Tech is the provider. 76:55 Also, the legendary Suzanne Baker. She's playing at Llewellyn Hall on Sunday, 7.30pm, and Ticket Tech are the provider. Just what I just also mentioned here, tickets were on sale today. They're announced at the Opera House. 77:10 coming up on the 28th of November, Australian Crawl and Boom Crash Opera. Oh, wow. Okay. On the Opera House Crawl Court, the tickets are on sale, and you get those tickets at sydneyoperahouse.com.au. So Australian Crawl and Boom Crash Opera. 77:29 James, we're going to be finished quick here because, honestly, I've got to play all his ads. So, James, that was outstanding. I'll give you a 10, mate. All right? Very good. Thanks, mate. I know it's up, wouldn't you? Yeah, I know. I'm giving you a 10. And, Duck, you've got something you're going to drop in because we've got to play a commercial quickly. What have you got? 77:45 Oh, just quickly, there's a – well, Brock County's got a new single out, by the way. You know them as well. They've got a new single out called Concrete Cowgirls. And just a quick camping week on the long weekend in October. 77:58 It is at the Drovers Camp at Brankston in the Hunter Valley. There's still some spots available, and they're up there having a big weekend with entertainment, raising money for children with cancer. All right. 78:07 Oh, yeah. 78:26 Well, I'll be going to see Mike Rudd at Tate. I think that's a good one there, right in the middle of Blue Collar. I've got to say, I think he has to polish it up on his reading skills a little bit there. I mean, he used to be a Bible salesman, James. He was actually the number one Bible salesman. And basically, the reason he sold so many, he offered to read it to the person at the door. They just bought the thing off him to get rid of him. 78:46 Yep. All right. Poor Mike Rudd's probably ringing around all the people who've got tickets. Listen, we're changing the venue, don't talk. 78:52 Oh, come on, mate. So you're going to that one. 78:54 I'll be there. Heckman Turner Overdrive, are they coming here for the very first time? 78:58 Barb says, I should look at that. Baby, you ain't seen nothing yet. That's a great song, that one. It's a fantastic song. All right. And you're... A lot of people are suggesting you could do the... 79:12 weather on the Today Show and it would be done in your style. They wouldn't have to pay you anything. It would all be raining in the north if you need a... Absolutely. Stand with a duck 4x4 umbrella. Duck 4x4 umbrellas. A lot of wind in the southern parts of Australia. Make sure you get a duck Aussie, ocky strap to tie everything down. So you just do contra deals and do the weather that way. 79:34 Absolutely. Make sure you get a duck 4x4 roof tent to give yourself some protection and an awning. I'll be mentioning all the other brands as well, like OCam. 79:43 Well, for people listening to us at Channel 9, there could be some legs in all of this, so I wouldn't be writing it off. I think it's a good idea. Hey, we'll do this again next week, mate, all right? 79:53 We will, mate. Look forward to it. And a couple of weeks are on Fridays. How good will that be? But next week we'll be back Thursday, John. 79:57 Looking forward to it. Good on you. There he is, the duck, at three and a half minutes to ten now. 80:07 Now it's back to John Stanley, right across Australia. 80:31 Good evening, everyone. Welcome along. Eight minutes past ten. It is on this Thursday night. We'll have our word clinic in just one moment. We'll have tomorrow's headlines coming up in an hour from now. Thanks for all the suggestions we've had from people telling us, I'll look up Backman Turner Overdrive. Thank you very much for that. Also, people with reviews of what they heard during the last hour. And a lot of people like the idea of the duck doing the weather on the Today Show. So that might be one that's got legs as well. 131873 is our number. Here on this Thursday, let's kick off this hour with this. 81:06 Now it's time for John Stanley's Brain Game. Call now, 131873. 81:14 Now, at nine minutes past ten, we have fantastic prices always on a Thursday from our friends at Macell, beautiful Macell price pack, which is made up of stocks and gravies and all sorts of other goodies. You get that, you get the John Stanley Mr Magoo mug, and I do, usually on a Thursday, try and find a word question, because our word spits is in the house, and so I'm using this one tonight. The most searched word on Google... 81:44 gets close to 1.4 billion searches every month. It's the most searched word on Google. 81:52 Gets close to 1.4 billion searches a month. Now, it's not an old word. In fact, it's a word that's only been around since early, well, in fact, early 2005. It's a combination of two words, four-letter word, In fact, it's a three-letter word and a four-letter word combined into one. It's a proper noun. 82:16 And it's the name of something that's been around for probably 21 years. So you can tell me what it is. 82:24 That's the most searched word on Google. You tell me what it is. That word, it's a three-letter word combined with a four-letter word to make a proper noun, and it's now in the dictionaries as a proper noun. You tell me what it is. You win the prizes tonight. Not just the Macelle pack, but also the John Stanley Mr Magoo mug. Hit the phones right now, 131873 at 10 past 10. 82:50 Lydia oh Lydia say have you met Lydia Lydia the tattooed lady she has eyes that folks adore so and a torso even more so Lydia oh Lydia that encyclopedia oh Lydia the queen of tattoo on her back is the battle of Waterloo beside it the wreck of the Hesperus too and proudly above waves the red white and blue you can lie She once swept an admiral clear off his feet. 83:31 The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat. And now the old boy's in command of the fleet. For he went and married Lydia. I said Lydia. He said Lydia. I said Lydia. He said Lydia. He said Lydia. 83:48 La la, yeah, it wouldn't be a Thursday night without a little bit of Groucho and that fantastic song. 131873 is the number. We have got a winner. Let's go to Greg. Greg, what is the most searched word on Google? Nearly 1.5 billion searches every month. What's that word? 84:06 Is it YouTube? It is YouTube, yes. Those two words combine into it. And this is one of those ones where I did a big search because I didn't want to go to the expert here and he'll go, oh, no. 84:17 It is in the dictionaries. So well done, Greg. You have got yourself that fantastic prize from our friends at Macelle. They look after us on Thursday nights with the stocks and the gravies and, of course, the premium stock. 84:28 It's a flavour bomb, the premium stock. You can find it there on the shelves. Aussie-owned, made with even more all-natural flavour. Macelle Gourmet stock is quality, you can taste. You get the John Stanley Mr Magoo mug as well for your trouble at 11 after 10. 84:54 And now on Nights, Words with Cal Richards. 84:58 Just interesting, isn't it? Because ChatGPT is the next most searched. 85:03 And so people are... And YouTube, I thought, oh, hang on, Richards is going to... But YouTube combined, it's a proper noun, and I looked it up, it's there. 85:10 Yep, yep. 85:11 Very good. Excellent. And it's used. And actually, it's interesting because you think people would actually have a direct link to YouTube, there's the app, but plainly a lot of people just go into... 85:21 Yeah, a lot of people obviously think they don't need to use it regularly. Yeah. And then suddenly they want to look something up or listen to, you know, Ronald Reagan's jokes or whatever. So suddenly they've got to type it in and ask for it. 85:34 And those of us who were around back in 2005 and, you know, I had a phone there at the time and we're all sitting there going, what's this thing with this old television in there? And there wasn't much stuff on there. You think this is never going to fly. 85:49 Oh, and hasn't it taken off? 85:51 Absolutely. It's gone through the roof. Now, of course, Mr Richards is here. His website is ozwords.com.au, ozwords.com.au. He can send you out his daily missive, including his word of the day. But what we want you to do tonight, anything you want to raise with, Kel, you can do it on 131873. You can send us a text or an email if you've got something you want to ask, if you've got a question, if you want to solve a dispute, or if you want to get into brawl. 86:19 You can do that too. We're happy to take on anyone, whatever you like. 86:24 We have fun. And we're going to have a bit of fun tonight because both Webster's and Dictionary.com have listed a whole lot of new words that have gone to the dictionary. I always find this interesting, so I want to go through some of those. 86:35 Right. 86:36 But you've got your Word of the Week. 86:39 And the reason is, remember last week we talked about labelism. Those people who, instead of debating or discussing something, just stick a label on it and pay no attention. You know, we can dismiss what older people think. They're just boomers. Put a label on it and forget about it. And I was realising this week misinformation is being used as a label. And I thought that makes it an interesting example of what we were talking about last week. Misinformation just means wrong. And if you say something is wrong, what you have to do is say it's wrong because and give your reasons and give a bit of evidence. 87:11 But if you say it's misinformation, all you have to do is censor it and it goes away. So in other words, misinformation is now being used as a label that you stamp on something you don't want to debate, you don't want to discuss, you just think it's wrong. So you just stamp it, you label it. You stick a label on saying misinformation and I'm not going to discuss it. That's the end of that. And I think it's a dreadful bit of labelism. 87:33 It is terrible. And now we've got labelism from last week and now we've got misinformation. You know how, seriously, my head starts to get into the headspace of a lot of our listeners, and I don't know why, I kept thinking about a female teacher who comes from a family and their surname is Information, and she comes in and says, Class, my name's misinformation. It would be very funny, wouldn't it? Yes, yes, yes. Anyway, I don't think that's the case. And I did hear earlier today, Michael McLaren was talking about... 88:02 There was a Sandra Bullock movie, which had a – what was the play on words in the name of that movie? 88:08 Oh, Miss Congeniality. Miss Congeniality, that's right. That's right. So, misinformation. Now, I heard Michael talking earlier today. He was saying something about – oh, actually, someone who came from a very large family said, oh, the TV must have been on the blink, which was actually very funny, except – I thought, on the blink, it's a lovely old Australian expression. Something's broken down. Oh, my radio's on the blink. Oh, my TV's on the blink. I thought, I'm going to run that past Kel. 88:32 It's not Australian, unfortunately. Oh, really? No, it appears to have been coined by a Canadian-American author who wrote under the name of Hugh McHugh. And one of his books, called John Henry, published in 1901, he used the expression on the blink for the first time. And when he used it, he didn't mean quite what we mean. We mean broken. It's busted. It doesn't work. He was describing characters becoming agitated or confused, which I suppose if you were blinking like crazy and looking confused would make sense. He used it like that and somehow the meaning over the years has changed and simply come to mean broken. 89:08 It's because you try and think these things through logically, and I thought, well, maybe something breaks and it has a little red light going or something, but it goes back to a time when... 89:17 In 1901, it was before that. That's right. It was before the electronics. On the blink. 89:21 There you go. It's a very nice expression, though, on the blink. I like that. Now, we did have also homework from last week, pony up. Oh, you pony up when you've got to, I guess, pay up or whatever it might be, but you've looked into it. 89:35 Yeah, it actually means, as you understand, money up. In other words, what you owe, pay what you owe. Money up, according to the world's leading expert on slang. He's the man I consulted. His name is Jonathan Green, and he's brilliant on slang. He says pony has meant money since the 1700s. 89:54 Sometimes, Jonathan says, it's meant a specific amount of money. At one stage in Britain, a pony was £25. Here, both in Australia and New Zealand, at one stage it meant £5. So it meant relatively small sums of money. It was never hundreds or thousands. Because it was relatively small sums of money, a pony is a small horse. Right. So it's only a small sum of money. 90:19 From the mid-1800s, it was just used to mean money in general. Wow. So pony up means money up. 90:26 From 1700s. Wow. All right. Very, very good. Now, there's a couple here before we get to it. I want to go through some of these new words. Small potatoes. It's small potatoes. It's not – is that obvious or – 90:39 It's interesting. Now, I've never looked it up, but it came up on one of my searches of one of my dictionaries this week, and I thought, oh, no, I won't need to know that. I won't look it up. So all I know is that potato was always the basic food of very poor people. The Irish lived on potatoes, and there was a study done in the north of England early in the 20th century saying, showing that the people, the workers, the miners and people like that and factory workers in the north of England live mainly on, quote, tea and potatoes. 91:14 So it was the food of poor people. And I presume if all you've got is a little potato, it's so little it doesn't matter. Now, that's what it means. 91:22 Okay, very good. And I did have this one down here, and you always wonder, because when you see some of the words pop up, you think, could this be flowing from some of the news of the week, because there's been plenty of this, the word grifter. 91:37 Grifter. Yeah. Grifter means a con man, someone who is running a scam of some sort. Grifter is American slang. Now, I did look this up once. There was a very good British crime series about grifters. About con men. Yeah, con men. What's it called now? Anyway, they think it's a variation on grafter. So if, you know, grafters, dishonest payments and so on, and they think grifter is just a variation on grafter. 92:08 Recorded from 1915. So an American variation on grafter. 92:12 Yep. All right. 131873 is the number. Tom has called in with a question. Hello, Tom. 92:19 How you going, guys? You well? Good, mate. 92:21 Good, good. What have you got? 92:23 Um... 92:24 Look, I started a gut-healthy seasoning business, and I wanted to get a really handy word onomatopoeia, and something that would be memorable, but everyone's telling me that it's not a unique word, and I don't believe it is. It's called kapow seasonings, but the word kapow, where does that come from? Does it have a literal meaning? 92:45 Let me say to you off the top of my head, I think it comes from Batman comics. 92:49 I was about to say the same thing from the old Batman, original Batman. 92:54 In fact, it doesn't come from Batman comics. It's older than that. But it is onomatopoeic. It is echoic. And it simply represents the sound of a hit, the sound of an explosion, a gunshot, a hard punch or a blow. And in extended uses, it could be used metaphorically. You know, I got this report and I was hit by it. Kapow. 93:14 First recorded, 1896. 93:19 of Batman. 93:20 Ah, very good. 1896. So what did you want to do, Tom? You want to use kapow? What was just the one word or an extension of it? 93:27 No, no, I'm just using the first word. The brand is called Kapow Seasonings, but I wanted something that really, as an onomatopoeia, was memorable, but something that had an explosion, something that talked about a explosion. 93:40 Well, Kapow says explosion, and Kapow Seasonings, I mean, if your company goes broke, don't blame me, but it sounds to me like a really good idea for a name. I like it. John and I both agree. So, you know, get it on the market. Start buying advertising on 2GB. John will advertise it. 93:57 Or, you know, give us half a percent of what you make if it's very successful. What do you think, Tom? 94:02 Well, it exists now, and I'm selling out every weekend at the market. 94:07 Oh, you're doing well. 94:09 I think Kapow Seasoning is a great name because it suggests an explosion of flavour. So, well done. Keep going. 94:15 Kapow Seasoning. So, if you're at the market and you see Kapow Seasoning, I'll give it a plug, mate. What market is it at? Is it in Sydney? 94:23 At the Shire Farmers Market. I'll be there this Saturday. Shire Farmers Market. 94:28 At the Shire Farmers Market. All right. 94:31 An explosion of flavour. Yeah. 94:34 That's great. Are the Sharks playing Saturday night? I think they are. So they'll get an explosion of flavour in the afternoon and head to the football. What about that, eh, Tom? Not bad. Not bad. 94:44 Yeah. Only in the flavour and the taste, maybe not the other end. 94:48 Okay. Good on you, mate. There you go. All right. 94:52 Kapow seasoning. I think that's good. 94:54 He's done well, hasn't he? 94:55 At the farmer's markets in the Shire. I mean, you imagine the Shire. Imagine people like Monard running around their silly Cronulla shirts and doing the old getting themselves ready to go to the football on Saturday night. Good luck to them. They're going to get to go to a final, which will be fun. So... 95:09 Let's get to some of these other words we have straight after this break. We've got Kel Richards here. It is, of course, our Thursday night clinic, our word clinic. We've got plenty more coming up shortly at 22 minutes past 10. 26 past 10. It is our word clinic here with our wordsmith, Kel Richards. We've got lots of suggestions, questions for you, Kel. But before we move on, New words. Now, the Webster's Dictionary and dictionary.com have a list of new words they're adding to their dictionaries. 95:40 In total, it is over, let's see, it's over 7,000. So we'll go through about 5,000 of them. No, we won't. But you've actually gone through and found a selection of new words that you find intriguing. 95:52 Now, they're not brand new words. A lot of them we will have heard. They're familiar. But what's happened is they've now got to the point where they've been officially accepted by the dictionary. So a word like superfood, which we've known for some time. I'm surprised at that. It hasn't been in the dictionary until now. So what it is, it's getting to that point where it crosses the line and it gets into the dictionary. And one of the things that people say to me is, Kel, how do you get a word into the dictionary? And they say, I've thought of this wonderful new word. Can I ring them up and nominate it? And I say, it doesn't work like that. 96:24 Words get into the dictionary on one basis and one basis alone, and that is usage. They have to be used a lot. So obviously, superfoods has passed the level of enough usage so that it's in the dictionary. And that's what's happened to all of these things. 96:40 Some of them are because of texting. You've got things which are like initialisms, like STBX. STBX is soon to be X. 96:49 So my soon to be X, you know, the person I'm getting rid of out of my life. And in messaging, you just put STBX. Yeah. 97:01 What's that one? 97:06 I-Y-K-Y-K. I-Y-K-Y-K. 97:12 It's, if you know, you know. 97:13 If you know, you know. 97:14 Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So these things. And some of them I like. There's an expression which I hadn't come across, which is in this new list, just added to the dictionary, which is, lost in the source. Someone who's lost in the source is really clueless, really confused, in a fog, preoccupied, disoriented, or possibly even inebriated. 97:35 And we all know people that go through really foggy patches. And to be able to say to them, oh, forget about asking him, he's lost in the source, I think is a great expression. I like that. I hadn't come across that. 97:47 Now, see, whack-a-mole is a game, that game where you bash, you know, the whack-a-mole's are there. I've never actually played it, but I know about it. So now I've actually used it where they're trying to deal with, in fact, I might have used it in relation to immigration, where there are so many different holes in the system and they're playing whack-a-mole going, oh, and then they put a hand there, oh, and it's all over the place. So it's whack-a-mole. 98:11 And that has now made it into the dictionary for the first time. The original game is a tabletop game with holes in it and the moles pop out of the holes at unpredictable levels and you're meant to hit them as they pop up and you're flashing all over the table trying to hit them. Well, if you've got a problem which keeps producing one complication after another unpredictably all over the place, you're playing whack-a-mole. 98:34 Yeah, we might go through some more of these. We've got some great bits also that have come in from our listeners. I'm really keen to get you to run the rule over a lot of these. But Pam's got one here, which we've done. 98:46 It's an old expression. Pam, what was it again? 98:49 when someone is referred to as his nibs. 98:53 Yep. Look, as far as we can tell, and the experts tell me there's some degree of uncertainty, they think it's a variation on knob. There was a time, if you go back about 400 years, when knob was a word used of someone who was... Knob is a slang word for the head, so someone who was the head person could be called his knob, or, you know, the knob in charge of it, or someone who's got a really big head could be called a knob. Well, his nibs is a variation on that. It's just changing the vowel in the middle, and his nibs was the person in charge. 99:26 There you go. All right. The head person. Now, Carl's talking about on the wagon, because we know if you're off the wagon or you're on the wagon, it has to do with being on the drink. Is that right or am I right? 99:35 Yeah, well, the wagon, that's an abbreviation. The full expression is on the water wagon. Right. So if you're off the alcohol, you're on the water wagon. And water used to be delivered to a whole lot of places that didn't have good springs and good... Before the days of piping, before water was piped all over the place... By the Metropolitan Sewerage and Drainage Board. When we didn't have a water board, water was delivered on wagons. And so if you were getting off the alcohol, you were getting on board the water wagon. 100:07 And of course, I think we also, we used to have WC, which was the water closet, which was the toilet. Yes. So you'd refer to the WC, and often you wouldn't even remember that it was meant to be water closet, wasn't it? That's right. The toilet, the loo, all of those different expressions, which we've gone through plenty of times. I really like this one from Chris, the same old rigmarole. Now, it's a great word, the same old rigbarol. 100:31 And it's quite an old expression. It goes back hundreds of years. Originally, it was Ragman's Roll, and it was like a scroll of paper, which had all of these different fairly obscure verses on it, and you were meant to roll it out and stick your finger on it and pick one at random, and it would tell you a fortune. A bit like an I Ching or something like that, where you just, you know, randomly pick something. Or if you like, it's like a fortune cookie. You just randomly get something, which is a little saying, and you're meant to interpret it and work out what it means to you. 101:05 It was a bit of fortune-telling. It was a ragman's role, but it was a long and complicated document. So anything which is very long and complicated is now called a rigmarole from that document. 101:19 Now, when I was talking earlier about a woman who might have a surname information and she's a young school teacher and she's misinformation, Campbell says he had a teacher at school called Miss NG, which is Ng. They say pronounced Ng. So she pronounced it Miss Ng. 101:36 It's a Vietnamese name. Yeah. And you just pronounce it Ng. Miss Ng. And she's obviously Miss Ng. 101:42 He says, you can imagine she's got a fair bit of grief from the students. Not sure if she's still teaching, but hopefully she is. So she obviously made a good mark and was a good teacher. So well done, Campbell. Russ wants to know about the word albozo. I've got no idea. Can you give me some idea where that word might have come from? Russ, I've got no idea where albozo might have come from, but you're not looking it up, Kel. You know what albozo is, don't you? 102:06 Yeah, I know what albozo is. 102:07 You see whether it's there or you... 102:10 Bozo was originally a name for a clown. Bozo is such a good word, isn't it? It was a clown. So it was Bozo the Clown. And if what we've got going on in Canberra is a circus, then Albo is the clown in the circus. He is Albozo. Albozo. 102:25 It's interesting, though, the late Bob Fulton, his nickname was Bozo. And so in that context, it was different because when he was part of the continuous call team, I think he was a jester. I think he was engineering a lot of the humour. 102:42 Oh, I see. 102:42 Him and Hadley, I think. It was always very good fun, but Bozo was that nickname. 131873 is the number. A really old one, Fair Dinkum, which is that, or Dinkum or Fair Dinkum, which I'm guessing you've looked at it plenty of times. 102:57 Yeah, and we've talked about it before, and when I say this, it will all come flooding back into your memory. The word Dinkum started off as an English regional word meaning work. Mm-hmm. So, and I've mentioned that in the novel which is called Robbery Under Arms, Rolf Baldwin's narrator in that, Dick Marston, was driving cattle and he says, it took an hour's hard dinkum to get the cattle up the valley. So that was the original meaning of dinkum. Fair dinkum meant a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. So it started out with that context. 103:30 Now fair dinkum just means genuine, but meanings change over time, but that's where it started. 103:35 Okay, there you go. And let's go to John who's called in. Hello, John. 103:39 Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to know, Kel, where does the expression hoo-ha, there's a lot of hoo-ha. 103:49 Yeah, hoo-ha. A hoo-ha, yeah. Yeah, I don't... 103:53 Yeah, some sort of a hoo-ha over that. It's one of those words that just, well, Kel's having a look down. 103:59 Yeah. I mean, my memory is it was in the headlines when Goff and Margaret Whitlam flew back into Australia in 73, something like that, 73, 74. And there'd been a whole lot of fuss because the Whitlam government was a scandal-ridden government. And she complained about people making a lot of hoo-ha about it. Ah, right. And it put the word into the headline. It now means a commotion, a row, a fuss, if you like. It's only recorded from 1931, and the Oxford English Dictionary, which is the final authority in these things, really helpfully says, origin unknown. 104:38 Very good. 104:39 There is an expression that they use of not an echoic or onomatopoeic sound, but something which is verbally suggestive, where the sounds suggest what you're trying to say. And hoo-ha may be one of those. 104:55 Thank you, John. Thank you for that one. 105:16 But have you ever been hit with a hot flush out of nowhere, found yourself staring at the ceiling at 3am, you can't get back to sleep? Menopause can affect much more than your temperature. That's why you should speak to the team at Mr. Vitamins. What they do at Mr. Vitamins, the staff there, they're naturopaths, they're nutritionists, and they can actually help you. They can help you, guide you through all of the products. And often there's a specific one for you. And sometimes you need to know what you can combine. 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Yeah, okay. 106:26 Now, I heard my in-laws say, let's have a deco, have a look at what is deco, D-E-C-O. 106:31 It comes from a Hindi word, so it comes from the time when India was part of the British Raj, the British Empire, and the British Army picked up a lot of expressions which were Hindi expressions, and there is a Hindi word which is spelled something like D-E-K-A-H-O. They anglicised it into deco, meaning have a look. Okay. And so a lot of soldiers who had been in the Indian Army ended up coming to Australia, so we got it here. 106:58 Yeah. And Blackadder, contra-fibularities. Is that contra-fibularities? That's what it says here. 107:05 Yeah. I think it's what they call a jocular formation. So it's been put together as a jokey-sounding word, meaning lots of complications and lots of difficulties. Yeah. 107:15 Let's work through some of these. We got emails from listeners such as the expression in the offing. It's in the offing. 107:21 It's a nautical expression and it's recorded about the year 1600 and it means the part of the visible sea which is at a distance from the shoreline. So basically the horizon is a way off. So it's in the offing and it came out of the nautical world into our ordinary world and anything which is... 107:42 a bit a way off but approaching we talk about being in the offing all right we might have done this in the previous hour duck shoving these duck shoving was coined here in Australia and it was coined in Melbourne during the golden era of Melbourne during the gold rushes the late 1800s with cab drivers now they're obviously horse-drawn cabs so they were handsome cabs in those days and what they used to do was jostle for space at the cab rank and And their jostling for space at the cab rank came to be called duck shoving. 108:13 I presume from the observed behaviour of a row of little ducklings all pushing and shoving one another as they follow their mother over land to the water. But wherever it came from, that's where it entered our language. So when you're pushing your way in and not obeying the queue, you are duck shoving because Melbourne cab drivers did that in the late 1800s. 108:33 Wasn't the big loud bloke with a big sort of cowboy hat on pushing people out of the way? 108:38 No, it wasn't. Not him? No, no. Okay, so duck shoving. That's good. Double down, I'm assuming that's when you're gambling. You're doubling down on something you've said. 108:48 Nowadays, it's whenever you make an increased effort. You're going to commit to this further. You're going to do it harder. But it did start with the card game called pontoon or blackjack. You've been dealt your first hand of cards. You make a bet. And then before you get your last card, you double down on your bet. So doubling down always meant taking further action, further commitment, but stuff which was a bit risky. I think the risky idea has gone out of it largely, and it now means not a risky way to do things, but a more committed way to do things. 109:24 Yeah. Now, savvy. 109:27 Savvy. This is common sense. Savvy. 109:31 Yeah, it comes from French word savant, and the French word savant was used to mean a wise person, and it's been around for a long time. Turned up in English in 1785. It's actually a variation on the French savoir, as in savoir faire. Savoir-faire means knowing the correct thing to do, knowing the right thing to do. So Savoir was having knowledge, and that became corrupted or simply abbreviated in English to savvy. 110:02 Yep. All right. 131873 is the number. There's a lot of this here, like Gung Ho. Yeah, he's very Gung Ho. 110:09 Gung Ho is interesting. It came into English in the Second World War, but it started off, when it first came into English, it meant eager for battle, keen to go into battle. But now it just means anyone who's eager and enthusiastic and got lots of energy. It started off as a Chinese expression which named the industrial workers' cooperatives that were set up during the Second China-Japan War. And they were set up to support the war effort. The Chinese phrase literally means something like working together. 110:43 And it would sound a bit like kung ho. But anyway, it got... 110:48 anglicized as gung-ho, and it was adopted as an English slogan in the Second World War by an American general, a bloke by the name of Evan Carlson, for his particular battalion of Marines. And they got a really amazing reputation. So in 1940, Hollywood made a movie. 111:06 Yeah. In 1943, sorry, Hollywood made a movie about his battalion, and they called the movie Gung-Ho. So it was the title of the movie that put the expression into wide circulation. Wow. Wow, what is that? 111:18 Isn't it a great story? That is a fantastic story. I really love that one. Look, I want to take a break. We've got a lot to do here as well. But, Kel, we'd like to weave our current stories of the day into this segment. So it did occur to me, now we talk about immigration, which is people coming in. 111:35 Yes. 111:36 Immigration, which is people leaving the country and going somewhere else. Migration, I assume, covers both. 111:43 It covers any movement. Yeah. Normally, we would treat migration as being a synonym for immigration. So using it to mean immigration is a little unusual. You'd normally use migration as a shorter form of saying immigration. 111:58 Yeah, that's right. All right. So I just thought that was interesting because immigration, immigration, migration. But I think we know what they all mean when they're put into context. Yeah. You'd like a dollar for every time that word's going to get used in the next few days. 112:14 Well, we're getting towards the end of the year. Dictionaries will start voting on their word of the year, and it would be very sensible if Australia picked immigration as being the word of the year. It's been such a big word in the news. 112:24 It certainly has been, but often we find a word comes up that... Oh, yes, that no one's ever heard of, and they say we nominate that as our word of the year. Yeah, yeah. 14 to 11 now. 11 minutes to 11. We're talking words and language with Mr. Kel Richards. Gee, there's so many to get through, and I'm keen on this one. Angela says, sleep like a top, which I haven't even heard, though. I think you said sleep like a baby or... Sleep like a log. Sleep like a log. So what about sleep like a top? That implies to me. 112:52 I have heard it. And that's where it comes from. John is making a visual gesture here, which doesn't quite work on radio. 112:58 Like a spinning top. 112:58 A spinning top, that's right. Sleep like a top means very deep, still, sound sleep. It comes from 1621, and according to the Oxford, it refers to the apparent stillness of a top when it's spinning very fast. 113:15 Oh. 113:15 So if you're deeply asleep, your heart and your lungs and all the other organs are working away like crazy to keep you alive. They are spinning, but we are still in the middle of all that spinning. And that stillness is being asleep, sleeping like a top. Well, okay. Sleeping like a top. 113:31 Yeah, because I was thinking about it maybe because it's spinning. I thought maybe someone's bouncing around on the bed. But, of course, that moment where it's spinning. It looks very stationary. It does, doesn't it? 113:41 Yeah, that's a good one. Plaster of Paris, you know. Yeah, this is really interesting. Plasture of Paris is actually gypsum, powdered gypsum. 113:52 And so gypsum, the qualities of Plasture of Paris, you know, its moldability when you get it wet and so on, have been known for many, many centuries. And so mining sources of gypsum have been valuable, and they found huge amounts of gypsum in the Paris basin, particularly at Montmartre. And because so much gypsum was mined and powdered and turned into plaster from Paris, it was called Plaster of Paris. Wow. Okay. 114:20 There you go. 114:21 The song Heard It on the Grapevine. I heard it on the grapevine. Good song. It's a great song. Yep. So Hearing It on the Grapevine... 114:29 When I first saw this expression, I thought it would be because the vines resemble telephone wires or telegraph wires, but it's too early for that. It goes all the way back to 1855 before there were any telephone or telegraph wires. And it turns out it was the informal communication system that passed on information from person to person confidentially and secretly to help runaway slaves from the South reach safety in the northern states in America. 114:59 Now, recorded in 1955, remember, was just six years before the start of the American Civil War. And during that time, there were people trying to help runaway slaves. They ran something called the Underground Railroad, which was neither underground nor a railroad, but that was what they called their system for smuggling runaway slaves from one safe house to another. And passing information up and down that line, they called hearing it on the grapevine. And I presume it's because of the way grapes cluster together and are all fed by the same vine. 115:31 Yeah. 115:32 Yeah, wow. Okay. Look, there's some great expressions we're going to go through here. And again, one of the things we do here, sometimes we go back to them, but they're lovely expressions. So push comes to shove. That gets used a lot when push comes to shove. 115:46 Yep. And it just means when the going gets really hard and you've got to – pushing just won't do it. You've got to make a really hard job to get there, calling for a maximum effort. The thing that's amusing about this is the expression was coined and first used in a women's magazine, a magazine called Women's Home Circle in 1880, I think around about then. And it was an article in that magazine about how a country girl made good in the big city. And the article was called, If Push Comes to Shove. 116:17 And it had not appeared in print at any time before then. I mean, the idea that it would be coined in a women's magazine quite amuses me. But that's where it came from. That's where it first turned up in English. People saw the expression and thought, ah, that's good. I'll use that. 116:31 7 to 11, I'm loving all these tonight. The nth degree, to the nth degree, which I see as where you're doing something and you're really taking it to an extreme. I guess the question is, why is it the nth degree as opposed to the, I don't know. 116:43 It's been used for a long time. It goes back to 1756. The number N, the first letter in the word number, N has always been used to mean an unspecified number, an unknown number, for a long, long time. Now, if you indicate that a number's been squared, multiply it by itself, you put a little 2 up in the corner, it's been increased to the power of 2. If it's been cubed, you put a little 3 up to indicate it's been increased to the power of 3. 117:14 If you want to say it's been increased a lot, you put a little n in that same corner position to say it's been increased by an unknown number, but a very high number. So it's been increased to the nth power. Wow, okay, that's fantastic. 117:28 Now, stick with me here because last night we had Frank's Treasure Trave and we played another beautiful little sample of the wonderful talkback work of the late Clive Robertson. You know where I'm going here because this next word, and I see this word and I think... 117:45 Surely, surely we apply this to the late Clive Robertson, curmudgeon. 117:50 And curmudgeon is a lovely word, isn't it? It's got a nice ring to it. 117:53 Yeah, and wouldn't he, he'd like that too, wouldn't he? 117:55 He'd like to be called a curmudgeon. In fact, you know, us old blokes quite like being called curmudgeons, but it's a very old word, goes back to the 1500s. 118:03 And when it was originally coined, now we think of a curmudgeon as any crusty old bloke. But when it was first coined, it meant a mean person, a miserly person. And the earliest form of the word was not curmudgeon. It was cornmudgeon. That is, an old bloke who was hoarding a whole lot of corn when there was a famine or a difficulty in finding food in a village and refused to share it. He was a cornmudgeon. So he was a rather nasty old man. 118:30 Wow, okay. Fantastic. All right, curmudgeon. I love that. Look, I did have someone ask, because I did mention earlier, we did do this jury gown news hour, if you're listening. We had a conversation about immigration, and a friend of mine sent me something that I had seen. There's a website. It's long-form essays on public policy issues. It's called Inflection Points. 118:51 And this is right the first thing you see on the website. It's a very lengthy essay, but it's got all this great detail, including, and I saw this being talked about during the week, that about a third, a third of 25 to 29-year-olds in this country, a third are on temporary visas. So they're on temporary visas. 119:12 a third of the 25 to 29-year-olds, which is extraordinary, and it's highlighting the mess in the immigration system. 119:18 The system was never meant to work like that, was it? 119:21 But the word inflection, it's a great word. That's a lovely word. Inflection points is the name of the website. 119:27 When we use inflection as linguists, we're meaning whether the sound of your voice goes up or down when you use it. That's inflection. So it's related to the word flex. So it's the idea of turning, and they're using it to mean turning points. 119:44 That's the way they're using it. Look, it's very good. I don't know whether there's a political hue to it, but this essay, a lot of people in Canberra are looking at it, and it comes up with some really interesting and provocative ideas of how to deal with this. Sounds good. Inflection points, and it's the first essay you find. It's a long one. Kel, we'll do this again next week? We will indeed. At 3.30 to 11. 120:18 Now it's back to John Stanley, right across Australia. 120:42 Good evening, everyone. Welcome along. It is... Oh, dear. Eight minutes past 11 here on this Thursday night. 131873 is the number. 120:52 We might need the consult with Dr Ross a bit later in this hour. We'll also have our cruising and travel report. We'll have tomorrow's headlines. In fact, tomorrow's headlines, just having a look at some of the headlines tomorrow. These are fascinating. And I think we'll rip straight into it because if you're looking for some good news... 121:10 Not sure I can help you. Let's do it right now at eight minutes past 11. 121:27 Now, we've just finished our word clinic with Kel Richards. I almost, I was thinking about it, asking him about the great expression, it's a crock. It's a crock. Now, we know it's a crock is a crock of, and we know it follows, but I was just going to ask him about it. But in fact, as we look at our front pages tomorrow, the Courier Mail in Brisbane, this was a story, of course, we're still... We're still six years away from the Olympics, but there's been this ongoing controversy over whether the Fitzroy River at Rockhampton would be able to stage the rowing and also the paddling events. 122:01 So the headline on the Courier Mail that says, Games Shock. 122:05 No crock. 122:07 Rocky's Big Tick, Fitzroy River cleared as fair host of the 2032 Olympics Regatta. The Premier, David Crisofulli, says Rockhampton will host the rowing and paddling events at the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games after organisers proved the regional city's Fitzroy River course can be made fair for all competitors. 122:28 First time since the 48th London Games, Olympic rowing will be contested on a river. 122:34 World rowing had not confirmed the decision, that is, as of last night, but the Premier quoted the President as saying, we now know that the Fitzroy River is capable of providing fair competition conditions. So there it is. Six years out, the Fitzroy River has got the thumbs up for staging the rowing in Brisbane, or in fact in Rockhampton, as part of the South East Queensland Olympic Games in 2032. They're also featuring on their front page the comment made by... 123:09 Tony Burke saying that we're not involved with mass migration and we don't have a mass migration problem. 123:17 And then he announced a series of measures today, which we did talk about in our news hour. I'll play you a bit of what he had to say shortly when we get to some of the other front pages on that. But that's the front page. They've also got... 123:29 They've got hero posters of the Brisbane Lions as they try to reach another AFL grand final. Of course, this weekend, the Lions will be playing Hawthorne to try and make their way in. Now, the Telegraph in Sydney, it is one of a few publications that are featuring a report from the IMF. 123:50 This is the International Monetary Fund. It comes up with periodic reports on our economy and other economies. Its report suggests that more needs to be done by the government and we've got a problem with our economy. So the headline they've got is Rain It In Jim. 124:06 So this is a triple rate rise fears as spending slammed. It says battered Aussie households are staring down the barrel of three more interest rate hikes and the possible plunge into recession. 124:18 Treasurer Jim Chalmers has received a shocking report card on government spending from the International Monetary Fund. 124:25 Money markets warn the nightmare three-hike scenario is now an 80% probability by mid-next year, with the Reserve Bank expected to hit Australians with its fourth hike this year. 124:36 At its September 29 meeting, the dark outlook would lift the RBA's cash rate from a 4.35% to above 5% and at hundreds to monthly mortgage payments. So it's interesting. This conversation's had all the time. You whack up mortgage rates so you take some money out of the economy. I just wonder what factor petrol prices have because they just keep going up. So if you want to suck money out of the economy, I would have thought people are paying higher petrol prices, and that seems to have been happening for a few days. 125:07 So anyway, that's the front page The Telegraph's got. 125:10 They've also got a picture of Ronaldo Molotalo, the shark's winger. He's posing for the camera. Underestimate us at your peril. 125:19 Sharks claim all the pressure is on Sydney, which I assume is the roosters. 125:26 So, Shark claim all pressure is on Sydney, so they've got that. I don't know what the full story is. There's Bible studies at the Roosters, because obviously in a week like this you've got to find some angles. Usually there are some players that do study the Bible, so that might be the case. 125:43 They've also got a follow-up to that story they had yesterday on their front page about the decision of the New South Wales government to step in and perhaps scratch Clovermore's fans for that big square opposite Town Hall. A glimmer of hope is the headline they have there. Now, the Sydney Morning Herald, their front page, they've got some comments from Philip Ruddock. 126:06 Now, Philip Ruddock was the Immigration Minister, of course, in the early part of the century under the Howard government. And if you've listened to our NewsHour closely, Philip Ruddock, as part of the policy changes that were made over... 126:22 Really close to 25 years ago, when the Tampa came and we had offshore processing brought in and the whole stop the boats thing began, that was under John Howard, the trade-off for that was that the people who were in the queue, in the refugee camps, they started to come in in larger numbers and the profile of our migration program changed, that is the make-up of it. 126:47 And that was part of this shift to multiculturalism over the last 25 years. But Philip Ruddock's written a book and a piece in the last few days where he's defending multiculturalism and immigration. But he's on the front page of the Herald saying, it says, Australia's longest serving immigration minister has urged the Albanese government to push international university graduates out of the country. 127:10 and force them to reapply for visas from overseas, and the proposal will send a shutter through the $53 billion sector. Because once you've finished, you then get a graduate visa. 127:23 under the present situation. So what he's saying is you finish your course as a student, then you leave the country, and then you apply for a visa to come back as a graduate, get a graduate visa, presumably, and that would have to be matched with, well, what are you going to do? What work will you be doing? 127:41 So the proposal goes beyond the crackdown on international student visas announced today by the Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, which will place new restrictions on students jumping between courses and visas for family members. Now, universities are always saying this is going to have some lasting damage on the sector, but Philip Ruddock, he says he's urged the government to go further, warning public confidence in the integrity of the immigration system was at risk as the number of temporary visa holders, including skilled workers, international students and working holidaymakers, grows past three million. 128:16 Now, look, it's very detailed. I did mention earlier in the program, this essay, it's a long essay written by a couple of academics in this website, Inflection Points, where they've talked about some quite radical and really well thought through approaches to immigration. But it was in that piece that they say that about a third of of 25 to 29-year-olds in Australia on temporary visas. So you've got a third of 25 to 29-year-olds. 128:47 They're not people who've been born overseas. They're on temporary visas. 128:53 Skilled workers, international students, working holidaymakers. The number's over 3 million. 128:58 It's quite extraordinary. Now, he says, Philip Ruddock, a migration program that can't explain who comes, why they come, and under what rules will eventually lose the confidence that the people whose support it requires. 129:09 It says more than 371,000 visas were issued to international students last year, down from a post-COVID pandemic high, 577,000. That was 2022-23, but an almost 30% jump from a decade ago. 129:26 So he was the one who was actually the minister when all of this began with international students coming in in the early 2000s. 129:34 But what's happened since then is it's a demand-driven system. So in other words, it was set up so international students could come and get these student visas and come and study at Australian universities. But there were no caps. It was demand-driven. So if they had the money, they came in. And it's just grown like topsy and become this massive industry, which both sides of politics have fostered. 130:01 And now it's got right out of control and they're trying to pull it back. So that's the story there on the front page of the Herald from Philip Ruddock. They've also got on their front page a picture of Charlie Curnow. 130:11 He's the leading goal scorer in the AFL this year. He was the big recruit for the Sydney Swans from Carlton. 130:18 Sydney's playing Fremantle tomorrow night. They will be outsiders with all their big names, apart from Errol Goulden not there, and Kurnow's obviously there as well, and a few others. But they're missing three of their really big names. Fremantle's the minor premiers, and that's at the SCG tomorrow night. We'll be on air here tomorrow night because there's no rugby league, so we'll keep in touch with what's happening at the SCG. So they've got... Charlie Curnow there on the front page, and they've got this one saying, It found that 80% of voters said they supported restricting gun licences to Australian citizens. 131:11 73% favoured the four-gun cap for individuals. 131:15 And 75% supported time limits on licences, forcing owners to reapply every few years. 131:22 And a majority, just over 50%, 53%, supported the government's buyback, which is... 131:28 obviously drawn a lot of criticism, which we've heard here. A lot of you have been part of that criticism as well. So that's the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. They do also make the point, and see, today we had the ABS and we saw our population growth. It's just under 1.5%, our population growth, and it's just under 400,000. So you've got net overseas migration running at 292 and then just over 100,000. 131:55 That's our natural increase. That's births minus deaths. So newborn numbers have dipped and our population is now 27.9 million. That's the Sydney Morning Herald. I should mention the front page of the Melbourne Age because we're now into spring. 132:12 And I'm not sure how this is reflected in other states, but this is in Victoria. They say there's a 400% spike in influenza cases across Victoria. 132:21 Expected to continue rising over the school holidays, placing pressure on emergency departments and fueling an increase in workplace absences. That's in Victoria. That's one to have a look at. The Australian newspaper, their headline on immigration is migrant war. 132:36 All the way to the ballot box, Home Affairs Minister Taney Burke says he's all in to take on Pauline Hanson in a political fight on migration numbers, despite the issue fueling the rise of her once-fringed party, leaning on a conscientious clampdown on backpacker visas to fix the blowout in population growth. 132:54 Now, the migration target would be $225,000 a year. So this is where they're going this year and next year, down to $225,000 a year, down from $292,000 in the year to March. He did admit, though, on the 7.30 report earlier, Tony Burke, that without any changes at all, none of the changes announced today, they'd still be getting down to that $225,000. He's saying the changes just mean the make-up changes. Thank you. 133:40 Working holiday visa numbers will be cut by almost 40,000 a year as part of its quest to force down immigration numbers. Outrage from tourism operators and primary producers who warn their industries will be hard hit. That's there on the front page of the Financial Review. And it is some of the stories that are going to be talked about over the next 24 hours. 134:00 21 minutes past 11 right now. 24 past 11. It's very funny how things pick up. There are people who actually set alarms, build their entire social calendar around this time every night because they want to hear this. They love it. 134:26 P-H-I-L, Phil. P-H-I-L, Phil. Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil. 134:35 40 minutes away, Philip will be on here. And in fact, I had a look. I did a quick search of Philip's or Phil's in science fiction. And Philip K. Dick, who's a great science fiction writer. And Man in the High Castle, he wrote, which is actually a fantastic series. 134:52 Don't forget, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 134:55 Exactly, exactly. 134:56 Turned into Blade Runner, one of the great films. By the way, that intro, thank you, John, is now available on Apple, Spotify, and also at Brashers. Outstanding. Yeah, and a 12-inch remix at Brashers. Brashers. 135:07 Does anyone here, can anyone know what Brashers is? Anyone? No, no, no. How old are Brashers? Brashers used to be the big music store, wasn't it? Like the JB Hi-Fi. How long ago were Brashers around? 135:17 Oh, 80s. And what came before Brashers? Because I think Sanity came up. 135:22 No, Sanity's after Brash's. What was before that? I don't know what was there before Brash's. 135:26 Please, on the text, yeah. 135:28 Yeah, so I think before Brash's, Brash's was a chain. Before that, there were the individual record bars. Remember the record bars? 135:36 Oh, absolutely. But there must have been as well a... You think? I think. An equivalent? An equivalent to Brash's, a chain. Someone on that. Exactly. All right, please let us know on the text. 135:45 Now, it's called Supernatural Thursday. That's why I mentioned Philip K. Dick. Yeah, no, Paranormal Friday. Oh, that's right. Paranormal Friday. That's right. Paranormal Friday. 135:54 It's a day behind, but a day ahead. And that's the thing about UFO. You never know where you're going to end up. For example, what about Lynn Rule? Well, she was in the middle of the Australian outback, driving along, minding her own business. Next minute, she had an encounter with a UFO and it changed her life. She wrote a book called Redirected in Five Seconds, and it is a memoir of her paranormal experience. She's our guest tonight on Paranormal Friday. 136:20 And you know what? Again, the camera, for whatever reason, the photo didn't come out. 136:27 She sent the samples from the side of her car to scientists. 136:32 That photo again. 136:33 Well, she was driving at the time. And the scientists made some incredible, incredible out-of-this-world discoveries about the samples that were on the side of her van. Wow, okay. Yeah, I know. 136:44 I thought you'd like that. 136:47 You've still got that cough, John. How long have you had that cough now? Six weeks. 136:54 Parlings. 136:56 P-A-L-I-N-G-S. I remember parlings. I think there was one in Hearstville Shopping Centre. 137:01 They sold everything music. I think they had sheet music and everything. 137:04 And when I was also in Brisbane in the 80s, they had that, and that was near where Stefan had his JoJo's Hair Salon. I can remember things like that because I'm that old. And also this morning, our peeping Tom, have you ever heard of Heather Mitchell? 137:22 I have, actually. She's one of our great actors. 137:24 That's right. She's fantastic. She's just done a really great stage play, but also she did The Castle and several others. A great Gatsby. So we're going to talk to her about, not The Castle, sorry, Miriam's, what was it called? Your terrible Miriam. Muriel's Wedding. Muriel's Wedding. 137:41 Yeah, very good. Edels also. Edels. Edels. E-D-E-L-S. Edels. 137:46 That's another one. Well done. Very good. Whoever sent that texting. 137:49 Yeah, Parlings Records. A lot of people saying Parlings. A few saying, and apparently, no, I don't think the Virgin Megastores were before Brash's were. No, they came after. 137:59 No, they came after, yeah. And I think then Saturday after that, Edels. I reckon there's still one that we have forgotten about too, by the way. Susan's not a fan of the Phil song. 138:10 Well done, Susan. I'm with you. Okay. I'll come up with something better, will I? Would you mind? And also, we have a segment called Behind the Song. Tonight we'll be talking to Davey from UMI. They're playing their 30th anniversary of their album, Hourly Daily. At the Opera House. So I've got a great little song to play about that, and also experimental brain implants and everything that you need for the weekend. John, if you want to know what's going on in the world, well, I don't know what to do, but you can listen to us after midnight. 138:40 I did find something for both of us. Oh, you've got something for me? No, I found something for both of us. Okay. When you look at the glasses we're wearing, we're wearing dark-brimmed glasses, right? Yeah. 138:50 It says here, Australia's on track to introduce a world-leading ban on smart glasses at work as the government doubles its efforts on AI and digital safety. How would it work? Would you have to report to someone on your way in, you and me, and they'd take your glasses off and look closely to make sure that there was no camera in them? How would that work? 139:08 I don't know, but you know I've got big issues with those smart glasses, John, so it's probably, you know, you may as well have brought up Tottenham Hotspur with the way I feel about those smart glasses. 139:16 But what I'm saying, we could end up being through some sort of a ringer at the entrance because they'll be going, well, your glasses are smart. 139:23 Do you know when you see someone every day and you've known them for 30 odd years and then they take their glasses off and you look at them and you don't recognize them? You just took your glasses off and I almost didn't recognize you. Do you want a quick little bit of a romp down history lane? 139:36 Very quick. 139:37 Okay, going back to this day, April, sorry, September 18, 24 years ago, you rang me up on my mobile phone to offer me a job at 2UE. 139:50 Are you serious? I'm as serious as Boris. How do you remember that? I've got a really bizarre memory for things like that. You just made it up. You probably don't remember it, do you? No, I remember it very well. Do you remember then that I had to ring you back? I think that's right, actually. Do you know why? Why? I thought it was a prank call. 140:04 Yeah, that's right. And then I remember going to your farewell when you were heading off to work in Birmingham. 140:08 Yeah, that's right, yeah. Well, we got drunk that night. Everything's coming back. 140:11 Do you remember we went for a massage afterwards? No. Why do you keep mentioning this massage? 140:15 Because I know it's so weird, you just don't like the idea of it. 140:19 I don't want to go to a massage with you. 140:22 No, but we'll lie on the benches together. It's just a pressing of the flesh. 140:27 Hey, what's James look like? Are you telling me you think it's cool to go to a massage with a... See it with someone else. 140:32 Nothing bad goes on. We don't lie on the same bench. 140:34 You go with a mate and lie next to him while you both get massaged. 140:38 Yeah, what's wrong with that? Really? I don't touch you. You don't touch me. People massage luxurious oils into your dry back. I bet your back hasn't had oils in it for at least 72 years. 140:53 Is that it? I'm not going for a massage. Come on, John. What's wrong with you? No. It'll bring us closer together. No! 141:00 No. We're going to a massage with you. I'll pay. 141:05 No. 141:05 Okay. 141:08 Gentle needling hands. No. 141:10 No, we're not doing it. Luxurious oil. 141:13 Come on, Johnny, baby. 141:14 Listen to this. Come on. 141:16 No. 141:16 To you and me. 141:18 Okay. And our smart glasses. Good on you. Thank you. There you go. All right. 141:23 Dear me. I thought I knew him. I'm going on holiday too, by the way. I've got one of Duck's sponsors here, the Blue Lagoon Beach Resort, which is on the shores of Shelley Beach, New South Wales Central Coast. It's a fantastic place. Family holidays, summer memories. It's in bushland. The beach is at your doorstep. Holiday starts as soon as you step out of the car. Beautiful spot. Absolute beachfront location. Huge range of accommodation. Everything you could possibly want, studios, family cabins, garden cabins, to beachside caravan, camper and tent sites. The Blue Lagoon Beach Resort, the perfect place to switch off. 141:56 the outdoor heated pool spa complex right on the beach modern cafe you can get involved in activities or just kick back whether it's a weekend a week or even longer still processing all of that in a minute blue lagoon beach resort.com.au you've heard it but make sure you keep it in the foreground of your mind if you're anywhere near the central coast you can book your next getaway by going to 0243321447 or their website blue lagoon beach resort more than just a caravan park it is a lifestyle Yeah, one of our listeners, the massage thing is freaking me out. 142:28 Well, you're not alone. Another person must use hair oil and then do Blue Lagoon have massages? Well, I actually don't know, but I'll find out. Anyway, enough of that. At 24 minutes to 12, Dr. Ross Walker, we have a consult with him every Thursday night. 142:45 Ross, good evening. John, lovely to talk to you, mate. 142:48 Now, of course, for someone like me and probably like you, we're essentially Peter Pan. We don't age, but there are people who do age. So this is something you are having a look at. 142:57 I am. And you've got to ask, why do people like you and I at our age, we're pretty close to 70 or maybe a bit over it. Run up the stairs while someone else can hardly manage getting one foot in front of the next one. And this is what I'll be talking about on Sunday night. Why we age. Why is it that within a family you might have siblings where one seems really robust and the other is very ill. So I'll be going through all the genes involved with that. I'll be going through the fact that I always say it's your genes that loads the gun, but your environment that pulls the trigger. 143:28 And also talking about some of the synthetic chemicals we get exposed to that can also accelerate aging. And I'll talk about the five factors that actually drive aging. So it'll be a really interesting segment, that one. 143:39 All right, so for those who are ageing, then you'll be interested. And who knows, for you and me, it might kick in one day. So I'll be keen to hear what you've got to say. Now, you're talking about the way medicine is progressing and the new ways of dealing with things. So you've got stories here about stem cells and stroke therapy. 143:56 Yeah, this is interesting because 30 years ago, when someone had a stroke, there wasn't much you could do for them. A bit of rehab, but they were left paralysed and left... really significantly disabled. But over the past decade, we've developed these new clot-busting therapies and a thing called thrombectomy, where you actually pull the clot out. An interventional radiologist goes in with a catheter and pulls the clot out. But they're now talking about the potential for injecting stem cells directly into the artery involved. And there's some animal data that hasn't been done in humans yet showing a significant improvement with almost complete resolution of the stroke. 144:32 So that's my future of medicine segment, and I'll be discussing that in great detail on Sunday night. 144:38 Okay, all right. Now, the one thing, we've talked a lot about AI this week, so the one thing that AI can't replace is the jokes you find in the Reader's Digest laughter is the best medicine or the carefully crafted material we get here from Dr Ross. 144:50 Oh, absolutely. Well, John, I want to ask you, what will happen if you have a wooden car... with a wooden engine and wooden wheels, it wouldn't start. I could see that coming. Yes, I'm sure you would. And look, I went to this bookstore the other day and I saw a book titled How to Solve 50% of Your Problems, so I bought two. Okay. 145:13 Now, aggressive blood pressure management. So what are we talking about here? 145:19 Well, When I started medicine a couple of years back, people would say to us, oh, look, someone's blood pressure should be 100 plus their age. And we know what rubbish that is now. And what they're talking about is we really should be getting blood pressures down to targeted levels. So it's not good enough to have high blood pressure and be given a pill and be happy with that. This study out of rural China showed that – and this was quite a few – this was 34,000 adults over the age of 40, average age 63, and showed that those where they aimed to get the blood pressure well below 130 on 80 – as opposed to the control group where they accepted things like 140 or 90, had, to give an example, after a seven-year follow-up, 15% reduction in dementia and a 13% reduction in progression to mild cognitive impairment, which is the precursor of dementia. 146:09 So what this is saying is that treating blood pressure is not just good to reduce stroke and heart attack risk. It's also good for your brain function, for dementia, cognitive function, et cetera. 146:21 Yeah, absolutely. Now, I've been doing this for a long time. When I started doing programs like this, there were still people being wheeled out with medical qualifications by what used to be called the Tobacco Institute to argue against the dangers of passive smoking. I recall it. It was a few decades ago. Yep. 146:42 Where are we with this now? 146:44 Well, look, it's... It's not just passive smoke. It's also what I call tertiary smoking, which is where you go into a room where someone's been smoking or you can smell the smoke on their clothes. That's almost as bad for you as passive smoking. But this study from what's called the Global Burden of Diseases published in The Lancet showed that secondhand smoke, not cigarette smoke itself, which is even worse, Secondhand smoke is responsible for 1.7 million deaths around the planet. 147:15 Now, when you think about cardiovascular disease causes about 20 million deaths, 1.7 million deaths is a significant proportion of that. So I say all the time that smoking in front of any other human being is a form of physical abuse. Smoking in front of children is child abuse and even having to smell smoke on other people's clothes because the smoke changes the chemicals on the clothes or the furniture and that's toxic as well. 147:39 And at the risk of repeating this, whenever this comes up, my beautiful aunt who lived to her 90s, she was as fit as a fiddle, sharp as a tack, but her last years were spent with a little oxygen bottle next to her. She had dreadful emphysema because her husband, and they didn't know better because of the times, he was a smoker. And so she'd never smoked in her life, but she died a Pretty painful death because her lungs were damaged by emphysema. Everything else was perfect. So I've always, you know, don't talk to me about passive smoking. 148:09 Now, anemia. What are we talking about here? 148:12 Well, anemia is where you have a reduction in what's called hemoglobin, which is the protein in our red cells that carries oxygen around the body. But many people wrongly think if you're anemic, you just need more iron. And that's just the worst way of approaching this. If you're anemic, anemia is not a diagnosis. It's a sign that something's going wrong in your body and you've got to find out the cause. Now, of course, one of the major causes of anemia is blood loss. And if you have blood loss, you've got to find the cause of the blood loss and treat the cause of the blood loss. And you might need some iron as well with that. 148:44 But there are many other causes of anemia. There's a thing called pernicious anemia where your B12 disease levels are very low because you're not absorbing b12 in the body and the treatment of that is not iron the treatment is getting injection every three months of b12 as one example but there's also other causes a chronic kidney disease can cause anemia you can have bone marrow failure you can actually have a thing called hemolysis where the red cells get broken down so i'll be explaining all of this over on sunday night and also explaining the dangers to your body generally of just being anemic 149:17 All right. Another couple of one-liners for us. 149:19 John, did you hear about the bread factory burning down? They say the business is toast. 149:25 And this is the worst one. Why aren't koalas actual bears? 149:30 Because they don't meet the koalifications. 149:35 I don't know how that one crawled out of my mouth. Oh, dear. All right. 149:37 Ross, a lot more of those, of course, on Sunday night. Healthy living across the country. And we will talk again next week. Thank you. Good on you, mate. Dr. Ross Walker there at 17 to 12 now. 13 to 12 now. We have, of course, talked for quite a while about that fantastic product, Bed Easy, where you can change the sheets. It's so much easier if you're somebody who really has trouble or you know someone who has trouble, particularly as they're getting older. The average Aussie mattress weighs between 17 and 70 kilos. The Bed Easy is invented to help. 150:08 It's a fantastic DIY setup. A bladder sits between the mattress and the bed basin. When it comes time to change the sheets, the Bed Easy inflates. Mattress right up to the right height. Slip the sheets on and off. Once you're done, deflates in a few minutes. Settles the bed back into place for people who have movement issues. They're older, they might have arthritis. It's really fantastic for them, but I think just about anyone. The Bed Easy has hundreds of five-star reviews. It just works. So if you struggle changing your sheets, and you know someone who does, this is a fantastic product, an Australian invention. 150:40 All you need to do is go to the website, have a look at the video there, bed easy, B-E-D-E-Z-Y.com.au, bed easy. Have a look, an Australian invention. And once you've looked at that, if it's something you need, you'll be onto it and you won't be sorry. Bed easy at 12 to 12. 151:01 And now, cruising and travel with Richard Davey. And of course, every Thursday night we speak with Richard Davey on cruising and travel. Richard, good evening once again. Good evening, John. Okay, for our ship spotters, what have we got? 151:14 Yeah, in Brisbane, a local shipping counter has two more cruises for this month of September. She's in port tomorrow and she'll be back on Saturday week to begin the last for the month. October, things are really starting to heat up. We've got eight cruises from Brisbane, two different ships. because the Royal Caribbean ship is coming in. November has 17 calls from seven different ships. And in December, it's 23 calls from 10 ships. So it's a great season in Brisbane going all the way through to April. 151:46 And in Sydney, it's a double header tomorrow. 151:49 You've got the two different ships here. Obviously, Splenda won't go under the bridge, so she'll be at Circular Quay. She'll be sailing at 3.30, and Sister Ship Adventure is sailing from White Bay at 5.15. 152:03 You've actually got quite a lot of action coming up in Sydney, but really that happens in October when Celebrity Edge and Anthem of the Seas, two of our ships of summer, are going to be back in town. So there's a lot to look forward to. Naturally, Sydney is going to be about one ship a day in between October and April, as we forecast last week. 152:24 We do talk here at this time every year about people who are thinking, OK, let's look at whether there's a cruise available. You make, I guess, a quick decision. You think you can go. But at the moment, you're telling me they need to move quickly. 152:39 I think this is going to be one of the seasons where we do sell out and we do sell out, you know, maybe early, maybe even October the rate things are going. I don't like to say hurry when there's no need to, but definitely if you want to do a summer cruise, I recommend that you plan December now. 152:57 and you don't leave it too long for January. January is looking really good, but it won't be that way forever. It will sell out. 153:05 You know, this is the trend we're seeing. Princess do a pretty good job of selling their cruises out well in advance, and that's what we're seeing. And Royal Caribbean... tend to have very good availability about now because they don't usually organise or commit to their seasons as early as Princess do. So what you've got now is a whole lot of availability. As things go into the season, if you're in Sydney, you might want to be prepared to fly to Brisbane to get on one of their ships. Because they're all going to sell out. 153:37 I think it's going to be a great season. We're going to have some luxury ships coming as well. A really good mixed bag. Here's a good one. In January, you know, you hear a lot of people complaining about, oh, the same old cruises, you know, to Vanuatu and to New Caledonia. Here's a Princess cruise out of Sydney in January. Good availability and it's going, the cruise is 100% Fiji. So if you're sick of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, gee, some people are spoiled. What wonderful place to go. But yeah, Fiji, the great country of Fiji, a great way to see it on a Princess cruise in January. 154:12 Okay, very quickly here, we know that White Bay, the cruise terminal at White Bay, this is the one in Sydney, there have been issues with the ships continuing to operate because they're onboard power systems. They've got a power system they can plug in now, so there's something about this. They're going to use water from the bay for the cooling system? Yes. 154:29 yeah this is an interesting one i just saw this yesterday but then it does make sense doesn't it because if you if you're going to have a power unit there and they're going to be housed in um in shipping containers uh hopefully they're not going to make too much noise could because that could upset the apple cart around that part of the world but um you can imagine the massive amount of voltage and power that's going to be used by ships because ships do use a lot of power that's usually given to them by their their power train you know the the massive amounts of fuel, clean fuel these days, you know, that are on board. 155:02 And also some of the new hybrid ships have a new way. But essentially to get that energy, you've got to use fuel. And that's a lot of power. So these systems can get obviously very, very hot. So what they're doing is they're drawing water for the cooling system. They're drawing it out of White Bay, out of the Sydney Harbour basement. Right, okay. And that's interesting because they said that it's been inspired by something. I don't know if you knew this. I used to live very near the Sydney Opera House, never knew this, that the Opera House has used a cooling system of similar design for... 155:38 for the 50 years that it's been around. It's more than 50 years now. So they've been drawing water from the harbour. Could you imagine, particularly a lot of lighting in there and a lot of intense stage lights through a lot of power. There's no such thing as a low-wadded stage light, is there? So massive equipment needing a lot of cooling. So this is what's happening and a very interesting idea to cool it from the sea. 156:02 You learned something new on this show, Every night, and we just have. So, Richard, Richard's travel is your business, and we'll talk to you again next week. Thank you. Thanks, John. Richard Davey there at seven and a half minutes to 12 now. Four to 12. Glenn was at the Blue Lagoon Central Coast. Actually, Christmas 65. Tail end of a cyclone cane made a big mess. People say I found a one-pound note on the beach. That's from Glenn. Hope you've kept that one-pound note, Glenn. Now, Phil O'Neill, he's about to have a two-week break, Phil. 156:30 So you send him off on his two-week break after midnight. That conversation we had about massages before, I've fed it into my Songometer 2000 to see what song it comes up with. Let's have a listen what song it's come up with now. Here we go. What have we got here? 156:47 I've heard people say that. Oh, no, we can't have that. No, no, James. Push the button. No, no, get rid of that. Push the button again. Oh, that's a good one. Let's do it. 156:56 If you're fond of sand dunes and salt.