Topher Field - Good People Break Bad Laws: Civil Disobedience in the Modern Age

Shownotes and Transcript

On this episode of Hearts of Oak Podcast, we sit down with Topher Field, a prominent Australian libertarian commentator and activist. Topher shares his experience navigating the challenging landscape of media and activism during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne. He discusses the charges he faced for advocating peaceful protests against government actions and the importance of freedom of speech in the face of oppressive measures.
The interview delves into the impact of lockdowns on mental health and relationships, which fuelled Topher's increased activism. He provides a detailed account of the progression of protests in Melbourne, highlighting the power of grassroots movements in challenging authority. The conversation also touches on leaderless movements, accountability in COVID inquiries, and the need to resist oppressive policies.
Throughout the episode, Topher encourages listeners to question authority, uphold morality, and resist unjust laws and critiques the worship of government and the compliance of churches with oppressive regulations, advocating for spiritual autonomy and the purity of faith-based practices.

Over 15 years Topher Field has accumulated over 2 Million video views, over 150,000 regular followers, 14 film awards, 2 Libertarian awards, and released his first book in 2023.
But his proudest achievement is without doubt his two criminal charges for ‘Incitement’. During the world famous Melbourne Lockdowns Topher was awarded these charges by Victoria Police for encouraging people to exercise their Human Rights during the Covid era in 2021.
Topher is a renowned public speaker, interviewer, podcaster, writer, satirist, and champion of Human Rights.

Good People Break Bad Laws: Civil Disobedience in the Modern Age in paperback and e-book from Amazon   amzn.eu/d/09MJazgR

Watch award winning 'Battleground Melbourne'   battlegroundmelbourne.com

Connect with Topher...
WEBSITE          topherfield.net
X/TWITTER       x.com/TopherField
INSTAGRAM     instagram.com/topherfield

Interview recorded  16.7.24

Connect with Hearts of Oak...
X/TWITTER        x.com/HeartsofOakUK
WEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/
PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/
SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/
SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/

Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

And I'm delighted to have someone from down under that I've seen the name quite a bit in my feeds over the last couple of years.

It's always great to talk to someone that you've watched from afar, and that's Topher Field. Topher, thank you so much for your time today.

(Topher Field)

Well, Peter, what a pleasure, and thank you for having me.

Not at all, it's great to have you on.

And obviously, people can follow you @TopherField on Twitter, and TopherField.net is your website.

And of course you're, I mean I've seen you on twitter quite a bit and whenever Sam Sobel connected us, and I thought I kind of recognized that name, because Topher is not a name that's very popular.

So, you're thinking that definitely sticks out but you're probably one of Australia's leading, I think most recognized libertarian political commentators.

And you've, it's it's your work in in the media and I know that's your background from when you were younger and now you've really made a name for yourself winning awards: libertarian awards.

Also that documentary Battleground Melbourne setting.

The madness that you faced there in Australia and author of Good People Break Bad Laws which is a fascinating topic.

I know we'll delve into that a little bit and loved, I think on your website you said that your proudest moment, proudest achievement is getting those incitements, those punishments for standing up against the COVID lockdown.

Not just punishments, criminal charges.

They chased me with criminal charges and tried to lock me away for two and a half years for the crime of encouraging people to exercise their human right to engage in peaceful political protest at a time when our government was violating human rights.

So yeah, that is honestly, that is my proudest achievement and, I hope never to have to repeat such a thing in my, in the future, but unfortunately you and I both know this fight is far from over.

Oh, absolutely.

Could I tell them, I mean, leading, leading up to that, what, you're also your, your background, I mean, you grew up with your dad being involved in media and your understanding a little bit about the business.

Some of us have been thrown into this and we've either sunk or swell or swum, but you kind of had a little bit of an understanding.

Can you tell us about your role in the media leading up to, I guess, the COVID tyranny.

What had been your primary focus in terms of putting a message out up until, I guess, up until 2020?

Well, I'm probably the world's only accidental political commentator.

I was driving a forklift in a warehouse, quite enjoying myself, making good money.

I enjoyed the manual labor, the repetition of it, and I could go home.

And I was working on a fiction novel at the time and doing a bit of acting.

And just enjoying sort of creative expression.

And my cousin came into work one day. Yes, I'm the cliche forklift driving cousin working at the same place, kind of life, very blue collar.

And my cousin comes into work and he says, Topher, you should audition for project next.

And I said, what's that?

It was a project being run by a very respected Australian journalist where he was recruiting and looking for the next generation of news producers, presenters, writers, researchers, these sorts of things.

And in order to audition, you had to submit a video.

So I went, okay, my dad taught me how to do videos.

He was involved in community television.

He was in professional radio and then in community television.

And I cut my teeth from the earliest ages that I can remember.

There was a camera in the house and I've been editing and doing audio and all that stuff. I learned the craft from him.

So, I put that to good use and I made a video as an audition.

And I was deliberately quite controversial, because I didn't want to find that I got into this show and then had my wings clipped and they were telling me what I could say or what I couldn't say.

So I was deliberately pretty provocative and I didn't get in.

Surprise, surprise.

And so then I was left with this video that I had nothing.

This is 2009.

I didn't even have a YouTube channel.

In fact, in Australia in 2009, most people didn't have internet fast enough to play YouTube videos in real time.

You had to let them buffer for a few minutes.

So, I started a brand new YouTube channel with zero subscribers.

I uploaded the video and I sent it to my mom and she must've watched that video 30,000 times because shortly afterwards, was I had 30,000 views, which is pretty extraordinary for 2009 in Australia, doing a 12 minute long political exploration of water supply issues into my home city of Melbourne.

Tell me how a video like that gets 30,000 views, even in today's market, let alone back then. So, then people began asking me to do more videos and I'm going, this is absurd.

I'm a forklift driver.

What do you think I am? I'm nothing.

And eventually someone came to me with a video.

I said no to everybody, and then someone came to me with a video that I couldn't say no to, and I said yes to that second video, and then I said yes to a third video and a fourth video, and it became a bit of a thing.

My main focus has actually been water and water supply issues, particularly to irrigation farmers in what's called the Murray Darling Basin in Australia.

So, 40% of Australia's food comes from this part of the world, and our government is destroying farmers by regulating and restricting access to irrigation water.

So, that's really what I've spent most of my time talking about.

But I did a series on climate change where I partnered with Lord Christopher Monckton in the UK, and I travelled to the US and Canada, interviewed a bunch of people.

Professor Fred Singer, before he passed away, is one of my sort of proudest achievements to have had the chance to speak to him while he was alive.

I've done work on freedom of speech.

I've done work on over-regulation, over-taxation, cost of living, and a range of other sort of topics along the way.

Basically always on the I'm a libertarian.

So, I'm always coming from that libertarian perspective, but I'm also a Christian.

So, bringing those two together and that's a pretty rare thing in Australia there really isn't a lot of a lot of people in that space in Australia and broadly on the conservative side of politics.

Oh that's fascinating.

Water management and freedom of speech.

How do those fit together?

So, I've had to ask myself the same question and the best answer I've got for you, Peter, and it's not necessarily a good answer, but it's the best one I've got, is that I struggle to walk past an injustice.

Once I see something and go, that's wrong.

That should not be the way it is.

I find it very difficult to just ignore it and pretend I didn't see.

And so water management, I kind of fell into because my very first video was about water supply into Melbourne city, which is a 4.4 and a half million person city that was on heavy water restrictions.

There was a drought at the time and they were building a desalination plant and I've said the desalination plant was a bad idea and we should instead build a dam on there's a particular river where there was a dam reservation set aside by engineers 100 years ago, but politics being what it is today they were refusing to build a dam there for greeny sort of reasons.

So, that's that was my very first video and then someone said well if you think that's bad have a look at what they're doing down irrigators up on the Murray River.

And I investigated that and boy, boy, is that is that bad and people are literally being pushed to suicide and despair and bankruptcy and everything.

And of course, it impacts food prices and has a knock-on effect to us all.

So for me, that was kind of a fight that I couldn't walk past.

But as a political commentator, freedom of speech is essential to my work.

It's a non-negotiable, and it should be a non-negotiable for us all, but it's especially a non-negotiable when that's your stock in trade, is the right and the ability to say, government, you're wrong.

You're doing the wrong thing.

And so I was already defending, I was defending freedom of speech before it was cool.

And then, of course, COVID came along and we saw censorship just escalate to an entirely new level. But those two have really been two of my biggest topics along the way.

Tell us about during the COVID tyranny.

I saw a level, and probably you did as well in Australia, a level of frustration boiling over that we haven't seen in a long time.

We saw demonstrations against the Iraq war back in Tony Blair's time, a million people on the streets. Since then, we hadn't seen anything else.

It was the pool tax rats and Margaret Thatcher's time, going back to that.

And suddenly this happens and you've got huge, huge crowds coming out and active, I guess not civil obedience, but beginning to beginning to walk towards that line.

I mean were you surprised that certainly in Britain people seem to be pushed and pushed and pushed and the the frustration boils out at the pub over a couple of drinks and that's the the level of it.

Yeah.

But something happened to push people how did you see that and view that because I wasn't in media at that point.

We had just started two months before, but you saw this through a perspective of someone in the media.

Tell us how you viewed that in your country.

Our experience was very different in Melbourne as compared to anywhere else in Australia, let alone anywhere else in the world.

So, for those that don't know, Melbourne became the most locked down city in the world and remains that to this day with the exception of China.

China then did go on to do even more extreme things, but for a long time, Melbourne was the most locked down and outside of China continues to be the most locked down city in the world.

We had de facto house arrest.

You could not leave your house unless you were leaving for less than one hour and for an approved set of conditions.

They shut down schools. They shut down all but essential workplaces.

They shut down even kids' playgrounds and things.

You could not so much as go to a beach and sit on the beach to watch a sunset.

Even in your one hour of yard time, you would be arrested if you were found to have left the house just to go and enjoy some sunshine.

So we had a curfew, an 8 p.m. curfew that was enforced very, very vigorously, very, very violently.

We had what was called a ring of steel.

This was a series of checkpoints that separated metropolitan Melbourne from the rest of rural Victoria.

And they had military manning that checkpoint and demanding that you show paperwork to prove that you had a need to travel across that artificial new border that they'd put up around the city.

And we had protests being treated as completely illegal.

So, I spoke at the very first anti-lockdown protest, and this was my first ever conscious act of civil disobedience.

It was the first time I walked out my door.

I was 38 years old or so.

I was a clean skin, ex-Army Reserve, ex-I'd done a bunch of charitable work.

I was a clean skin.

You look at my police record, It was better than spotless.

It was positive.

I'd handed in wallets that I'd found on the street and all sorts of stuff, right?

And then all of a sudden, here I am walking out my door to go and deliberately speak at a rally that had been declared to be illegal.

And that was really a turning point in my life and took me in a whole new direction, because I live streamed that event and such was the hunger.

People were desperate, but no one was yet willing to make any moves.

By the time I got home from that event, that live stream had been watched over 100,000 times.

And this is just a live stream on Facebook.

I had a Facebook page with maybe 10,000 people on it.

So, that was a pretty big deal for me at the time.

And people, you know, I had a wave of abuse pour into my inbox, into my emails and so forth.

People angry how dare you.

You're killing grandma all that sort of stuff.

Then shortly on the back of that there was a wave of support: thank you for speaking out I've been thinking the same thing, but I thought I was going crazy, now I know I'm not.

And then on the back of that was a wave of despair, people reaching out in emails and in messages into my inbox just needing to tell me their story, because by this point in time we were about we were about by then we're about eight weeks in to lockdowns, seven weeks into lockdowns.

And for anyone who was already at the margins financially, was already close to the wind, this was absolutely decimating them.

For anyone whose mental health was already borderline, this was destroying them. Anyone whose marriage was close to breaking up, this was the final straw.

And I just had people pouring their hearts out to me.

And at first, I thought, why are you talking to me?

I can't help you.

I've got nothing.

I'm in the same position as you.

I've got a kid, a pregnant wife.

My business is going down the tube, because I had I had another business separate to the political commentary at the time.

My life is as much of a mess as yours.

Why are you asking me for help?

And then I realized they weren't asking me for help. Not one of them asked me to help them.

What they wanted was someone to listen.

And this is the tragedy of what happened, Peter, is all of the people that were supposed to be there for them had turned their back.

The church pastors, the mental health counsellors, most of the politicians, a lot of people's families had all turned their back on them to the point that they were digging up the contact details of a YouTube political commentator and pouring their heart out to me in emails and messages.

Such was the isolation that they experienced. So in that context, you can understand that the protests remained very, very small for many, many months.

We saw violent arrests where if someone was known to have been organizing protests, the police would show up at their door at six o'clock in the morning with a battering ram, smash their way through the door, violently tackle them to the ground, hospitalizing them in some cases.

We saw extreme levels of violence that we're not used to in Australia. This is not the kind of place where these things happen.

And so that kept our numbers really small, really down in the few hundreds.

And myself and a number of other courageous people, we kept on getting out there and kept on doing it anyway, knowing the risks and getting attacked by riot squads and attacked by police on horses, and threats of arrest, and all sorts of things. And then the government made a tactical mistake.

There was a woman by the name of Zoe Bueller, and she was out of town.

She was outside of that ring of steel that I mentioned earlier. She lived in a rural town, and she said, hey, let's get together and do a protest at the local park during our one hour of yard time.

Now, the thing with her was where she was, that was actually legal.

But the police arrested her anyway.

They went into her home and her husband live streamed, or she live streamed on her phone, her arrest.

And that was her, you may be familiar with it, in her pyjamas. She's pregnant.

There's a couple of kids in the home.

And she's saying, being arrested for what?

They were arresting her for incitement, the very same charge that they later charged me with.

And that video went viral.

And that really turned the movement from just a couple of hundred hardcore people doing what our conscience required us to do against all odds and all of a sudden we were getting a couple of thousand people.

And then there was a year or so of that on and off increasing police violence ultimately leading to them shooting us with rubber bullets and then finally their conscience that they were shamed effectively, by us refusing to back down and their conscience got the better of them and the police finally said: hey we're not doing the violence anymore and then all of a sudden our numbers exploded into the hundreds of thousands it's.

That accidental leadership which I think has been intriguing and probably is at the heart of what makes the establishment afraid, because when you look at all different demonstrations they kind of come from organizations that then push that agenda, that idea, and then arrange demonstrations, arrange rallies, arrange protests but this had; I mean the people that I'm sure it's same for you, that I've met, who've come from sports, from music, from different industry, from never done as you said a protest in their life suddenly come out.

And it's been fascinating that accidental leadership that we have seen worldwide.

Yeah, and you're absolutely right this is what makes them afraid.

It's the hydra.

And this is this really came out to me and I really bring this point out in battleground Melbourne the documentary which you can watch for free at battlegroundmelbourne.com The thing that I really wanted to bring out there was this isn't my story.

I had the privilege of being the storyteller, but it's not actually my story.

I didn't write that.

That was written by the people of Melbourne, the people of Victoria, and the courage that they showed.

And what we see time and again, the theme that I really sought to bring out in that documentary was we kept on being knocked down.

And then without any structured leadership, there was no board of directors making decisions.

People just got creative.

And somehow the movement as a whole stood back up again.

It might have been different people.

It might've been in a different place and it might've been in a different form.

But every time the government thought they'd finally knocked us down, we reappeared as a movement.

We reappeared in some new form and we were continuously adapting our tactics and they were continuously adapting their tactics.

And in the end, they got to the point where they couldn't escalate any further.

And we still hadn't gone away.

We still hadn't backed down.

They literally got to the point where the only thing left for them to do was to start shooting with live ammunition.

That was their last option.

They had done everything else up to that point.

Tear gas and riot police and mounted police and home invasions and rubber bullets onto, you know, shooting people in the back, unarmed people in the back with rubber bullets at the Shrine of Remembrance, a war memorial of all places.

I mean, absolute disgrace.

And then after doing that, thinking, oh, we finally got them.

They're going to run away scared now.

Well, then along came nurses and teachers who completely transformed the whole way the movement looked.

They showed up in parks in their uniforms, wearing masks, socially distanced, with writing on their tops saying how long they'd been a teacher or how long they'd been a nurse and these sorts of things.

And they just stood silently in the park.

So, all of a sudden, now that they'd gone to the rubber bullets, et cetera, gone was the rabble rousing and the chanting and everything else.

Now, all of a sudden, they're faced with a bunch of young women, mostly incredibly courageous, standing in parks, socially distanced, wearing masks and silent.

And they show up with the rubber bullet guns and they show up with the riot police and they show up with the horses.

And I think finally, it was like a mirror looking back at them. And suddenly they saw themselves and realized what they'd become.

And it was shortly after that that they released, they leaked this letter to the public, which they'd sent to the premier saying, we're not doing this anymore.

It's time to put away the tear gas.

We're not doing the violence anymore.

It's exactly what you're talking about.

The way I paraphrase it is this.

We were ordinary people who were faced with extraordinary times.

All we did was make the decision to do what was right, even though it was our government that was wrong.

That's it.

That's it.

That's all we are.

Because there were enough of us and because we had the courage to keep coming back and to keep getting back up in spite of what we faced, in the end, we won.

And that, I think, is a massive lesson and for all of humanity with everything that we're up against, because a leaderless, decentralized, organic movement is unstoppable for as long as we don't stop.

It's up to us to just go, we're just going to keep going.

A movement with leaders can be stopped if you take out the leaders, you know, strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.

But what if there's no shepherd? What if the sheep have started to think for themselves?

And that's what we created here in Melbourne.

And I think that's a model.

That's not to take anything away from people who do step into leadership, but I think that's a model for us.

We become unstoppable if we adopt that model.

And I want to pick up one of the two things we've learned.

And I'm asking you that not just because it's a historical event that we can learn a lot from, but here in the UK, we right now have the COVID inquiry.

I think in the next day or two, it's going to release its first findings.

And the figures on the COVID inquiry here in the UK, it's thought it'll be the most expensive inquiry in British history.

It's just going to be under just under 200 million pounds for the whole inquiry.

I think I read something like cost of £130,000 or £140,000 a day.

So, I'm asking you your experiences, because we are going through this charade of a COVID inquiry.

Has there been, and of course, that's not going to lead to anything. But in Australia, have there been questions?

We've seen a kind of slow change in the media on the right, but getting to say, actually, you know, we were always saying we shouldn't buy onto this.

I said, uh-uh, no, you weren't.

You had like an article every two months that might touch on another side.

But what about you in terms of reckoning for the media, in terms of reckoning for politicians on what Australians were put through?

Nowhere near enough.

We've had a couple of really good politicians, particularly a couple of really good senators who have been relentlessly pursuing this.

And they've had some small wins.

But one of the things that is just a reality that we have to be willing to accept and push our way through is that the powers that be have a lot of layers of defence.

So, they'll try and stop an inquiry from happening.

And then once they can't stop the inquiry from happening, they try and rig the inquiry by, you know, rigging the terms of reference or rigging who the commissioner is or these sorts of things.

We've just seen unfolding right now in Australia, we have a senator for the United Australia Party called Ralph Babbitt, Senator Ralph Babbitt, great guy.

He managed to get a, I don't remember the technical term for it, but it's some form of inquiry and a bunch of people made submissions to that inquiry.

And then the person running the inquiry has just announced they're not going to publish a lot of those submissions.

They're taking them as almost like comments.

Right.

And they're not actually publishing them as part of the inquiry.

It's like, well, no, you don't get to silence the Australian people like that.

And so now Senator Babet is taking up that particular fight to try and make sure that this actually gets done properly, et cetera.

So, they kind of have defence in depth, because there's a lot of tricks and tools that they get to use.

And every single one of them is a new layer that we have to battle our way through.

What I think though is is going to happen much faster than we've seen in history, so in history we saw for example the thalidomide debacle where for a very long time if you know thalidomide being dangerous was considered to be misinformation and you were uninformed and ignorant if you said that it was, or asbestos, and then all of a sudden everyone always knew that it was dangerous.

Right?

That was you know we saw that trend and we're watching that happen in some parts of the media now: oh, I've always said that we should be careful about an untested vaccine. No you didn't, you told everyone to go out and get jabbed, right?

Yeah.

So, we're seeing that revisionism is kicking in.

But it took 40 years for thalidomide to finally get apologies and compensation and these sorts of things.

But that happened before the internet.

And that happened when we weren't as able to communicate with each other as what we are now and able to dig and discern the truth.

The gatekeepers of old are no longer, they no longer hold the level of power that they used to have.

And that allows us to accelerate the timelines.

The other comment that I'll make, Peter, is people only start to pay attention to politics once it starts to hurt them.

There's a thing called rational ignorance. It doesn't make sense.

It's not rational for us to pay lots of attention to something that we can't really influence.

Influence if we don't if we can't really control it well we should spend our time and focus you know invest that into the things that we can have more control over.

So, there's a level of rational ignorance when it comes to politics.

Why would I pay attention to politics when I can't really change anything anyway.

And most Australians have that attitude until it hurts them and then all of a sudden they arc up.

And then they can't understand why they can't get help from anyone else, well because it's not hurting them.

So, the silver lining of something as tragic as what what we've seen during COVID, the silver lining is that it hurt a lot of people simultaneously.

And a lot of people at the same time all stood up and said, hey, this isn't okay.

I'm not happy with this.

And then when they looked around for support, there were actually other people out there to support them because there was a lot of people standing up at the same time.

And what's important now is that we maintain the rage, to use a tired old phrase.

We cannot let up on this.

We cannot let people take a revisionist view.

Oh, we did the best we could with what we knew at the time.

Any of that sort of, we cannot accept any of that.

And we must just continue to relentlessly pursue justice and understand that this is a long-term project.

We're not going to win this overnight.

But what's happening now is we're getting organized at a level that we've never been before.

And our pushback is getting sophisticated at a level that it never has been before.

And more and more people are willing to take risks.

And I'll use a local example to you, you, Peter.

It would have been unimaginable in the 2000s for a situation to arise in a city like London where the ULEZ cameras would have been being vandalized on a widespread scale.

That's unthinkable.

The Blade Runner phenomenon, again, an example of a leaderless organic movement that just popped up where people used the internet and our ability to communicate with each other to find these cameras, to map them, to publish those maps.

And then other people looked at those maps and made decisions about what they were going to do.

I'm not condoning anything of course but observing what's happened that was unthinkable 20 years ago and now it's an ongoing phenomenon.

So, I'm actually quite hopeful that a lot of these petty tyrants, these people who want to control and tell us how we're going to live, are going to find themselves bewildered by this array of pushback that seems to come out of nowhere.

And they will go looking for the enemy and say, who's organized this?

And the answer is no one.

And that makes it really hard for them to stop.

So, I'm actually really optimistic.

And I think it was actually in the end, a good thing that COVID would hurt so many people and not good that they were hurt but it's good now that we live in a world where ordinary people are standing up in a way that we have not seen in my lifetime before.

And that fits into your your book: Good People Break Bad Laws.

Up until this point good people follow the law, good people call the police if there is a problem, good people vote for the the party that they think is best.

Good people use the legal system for solutions to problems.

And there's a whole list of what good people, and I always looked at CND, the anti-war people, or kind of stop oil people and thought that's so disruptive.

How dare they do that? And now...

Either maybe I was dumb, maybe I didn't get it before, maybe I trust the institutions.

But I think a lot of people, certainly more on the right, trusted the institutions to a large degree.

Now that trust has completely gone.

That contract, I think, with the government has been completely broken. And we've gone from good people follow the law, even if it's not necessarily the best law, you do what you do as a citizen, to hell no. we're going to break.

That's a huge change in society, in a democratic society.

That's a massive change.

Yeah, there's a number of layers to this.

First and foremost, pretty much everybody on all sides of politics acknowledges that civil disobedience has been the right thing in various moments in history.

One of the most obvious being, of course, the civil rights movement to end segregation in the US.

That's sort of a pretty obvious contemporary example where we say, Martin Luther King and even many people, Malcolm X and a bunch of others, yes, that was the right thing for them to do.

Civil disobedience, breaking those laws was a good thing for them to do.

And when you look in a historical context, there's almost universal agreement about that.

But there is certainly on the more conservative side of politics, a real discomfort about it in real time.

And that's simply because conservatives have been used since the end of the Second World War to being the ones in charge, which means that when someone is disobeying, they're disobeying the conservatives, right?

They're disobeying the establishment and the conservatives identify as that.

They're disobeying us.

What a bunch of rabble-rousing ratbags.

Well, there's a right way to do it and there's a wrong way to do it.

And just stop oil, et cetera.

We see them doing it in very, very destructive ways.

And my book does address that.

I talk about the right way and the wrong way to do these sorts of things.

But in principle, doing what's right is always right, even if the law is wrong, right?

And we have to accept an uncomfortable truth for a lot of conservatives.

And like I said, I'm a libertarian, so I have no issue with this, but a lot of conservatives struggle with this.

When you change the law, you do not change what is right or wrong.

What is right or wrong is already right or wrong.

And when we change a law, we're either admitting that it used to be wrong and now it's right, or maybe that it used to be right and now we've got it wrong, or maybe that it was wrong both times.

But we can't pretend that just because some people in a room stood around and approved the change of wording that we've changed the laws of nature and morality and what's right and wrong.

We haven't.

So, when we write laws, our task is not to define what's right and what's wrong.

It is to discern what's right and what's wrong and to align the law as closely as possible to that.

And that's a matter of conscience.

And I have to do what's right according to my conscience, even if the people in that room have written laws that disagree with that particular point of view.

And this is necessary.

This is essential.

People say: oh, we can't all just run around doing whatever we think is best. No, no, no. We all have to live our lives doing what we think is best.

Because guess what?

When I stand before God, I can't turn around and say: oh, but Peter made me do it.

Peter told me it was the right thing to do.

Nor can I say, oh, but a whole bunch of Peters in a house called parliament told me that it was the right thing to do.

No, I don't get to outsource my morality.

I'm accountable for my decisions, for the moral outcomes and the morality that is represented in the decisions that I make.

And that's true, no matter what the law says.

So what conservatives have to accept is that they are no longer in the majority.

Okay.

The cultural war has been lost.

That's not to say that it's permanent.

It's not permanently that way. But think about the sexual revolution and the aims of third wave feminism, the sexual revolution.

They got everything they wanted, right?

What we call conservative politics now is unrecognizable in the world of the 1950s.

What we call conservative politics now is radical, progressive Marxist ideology.

And we call that conservative now because we've completely lost track of how far we've slid.

Conservatives have already lost the culture war.

The culture war is over.

Conservatives lost.

What has happened now is that people who who believe in God. Who believe in family, who believe in what we would consider to be basic decency, basic morality, Judeo-Christian morals.

We are now the revolutionaries.

We are now the beatniks.

We are now the hippies of our age.

And we are the ones who are actually trying to bring about a revolution against an establishment that has rejected all of that morality. And we have to accept that that means that we need to adopt the tactics of the revolutionaries, the rebels.

We're the cool kids now.

That's the good news, Peter.

We get to be the cool kids for a change rather than the stayed old, you know, the pearl clutches.

The pearl clutches now are all on the left.

Oh, you used the wrong pronouns. Oh, my heart, right?

That's them now.

We get to be the cool kids. And what that means is we have to accept and we have to move on from a lot of these old mindsets.

And one of those mindsets was, oh, but it's the law.

We all need to do what the law says.

Well, that was always the wrong perspective.

But not only now is it the wrong perspective, but it's also incredibly unhelpful.

If the law is wrong, we have no obligation to obey and to do what's wrong.

And in particular, I look at Psalm 94, I think it's verse 12, where it says that crooked leaders cannot be your friends. They use the law to cause suffering. And this is one of,

I propose two tests for what a bad law is in my book, Good People Break Bad Laws. And one of them is a practical test, and one of them is a principles test.

And the practical test is based on that verse in Psalm 94. Does this law cause suffering?

Because that's the definition of a crooked ruler.

A crooked ruler is someone who uses the law to cause suffering.

And if the following or enforcing of a law causes more suffering than the breaking of that law would cause, then you are looking at a candidate for potentially a bad law.

There's more to it than that. You have to read the book.

But that becomes a candidate for this might be a bad law.

And actually, my conscience might require me to disobey this law in order to do what's right.

How, I will say I have not read the book, but I will be reading it.

I'd encourage others because we are in different times and it's fascinating.

And your comment about individual consciousness, individual responsibility, we seem to have contracted that out to a government that actually you're the ones that will decide what is good and what is bad, what's right and what's wrong.

I no longer have to and we are in a completely different generation than previous generations in that there is no accountability.

There's no right and wrong there's no accountability, and it's; yeah we have it we have to learn how to live as individuals within that new paradigm of actually people don't take personal responsibility for anything.

And we'll see that in the COVID inquiry people say: oops. And what do you mean "oops"?

How many people's lives were damaged?

Destroyed? Kill?

How many people were killed?

This is not an oops and yet that seems to be where we are that there is zero personal responsibility for anything and certainly we see that in this in the States on obesity where actually you just take a drug, because that's just not nothing to your fault. And you just take a drug or it's your genes.

No what about personal responsibility for lifestyle, but But that seems to have gone out the window completely.

Peter, it's worse than that.

So, I'm working on my second book, which will be out before the end of this year, which is titled Good Christians Break Bad Laws, Obeying God in a Fallen World.

And it's specifically on the theology of civil disobedience.

It looks at everyone from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other sort of World War II heroes right back in history and then obviously diving deep into Scripture itself, Old Testament, New Testament, the words of Christ, et cetera, on this topic of obedience to government.

Yes, I deal with Romans 13, 1 Peter 2. All of that is covered in this book.

The reality of our situation, Peter, is that we actually now worship the government. And unfortunately, I have to include the church in that statement.

What we saw during COVID, and I can't speak for where you are, but certainly where I am in the city of Melbourne, was almost every single church with a vanishingly small number of exceptions allowed the government to dictate to them whether or not they would open their doors,.

Whether or not they would help the poor, whether or not they would gather and worship, whether or not they would take communion, how many people were allowed to sing etcetera.

And and what they did was they turned around and said: oh no it's okay because we can we'll have a tiny skeleton crew in the building and we'll live stream church.

You can do live stream church so this isn't a violation of our christian principles this isn't a violation of you know of the exhortation not to forsake the gathering together of the saints, because you can watch a video online.

And of course when we look at the example: I'll just pull one example out, look at okay so we know that Daniel would pray multiple times a day he would open his window and he would.

We pray in full public view.

And when it was, I think, Nebuchadnezzar, I can always get mixed up between Darius and Nebuchadnezzar and all the others.

I think it was Nebuchadnezzar was convinced by his secular advisors, his pagan advisors to make a law that said people could only pray to Nebuchadnezzar.

Daniel didn't choose to keep praying in the privacy of his room and keep the door and the shutters closed. He could have done that.

And he could have said, oh, well, I'm still practicing my religion.

I'm just doing it in a way that's not going to provoke trouble.

I don't want to cause any issues here.

No, no, no.

No, he opened those shutters and prayed in the same spot in full view because to go into hiding and say, oh, I'm still practicing my religion in secret is still saying to the government, you have the right to tell me that I can't do that.

You're still conceding that ground to the government.

And that means that you're giving the government more authority over your faith walk than God has.

So, I believe that the church's biggest problem, and this is so funny because as a kid, you'd You'd read the Ten Commandments.

You're like, oh, the idolatry one's out of date.

Like, that doesn't apply anymore.

Actually, I've realized, no, I'm completely wrong.

Idolatry is the number one sin that we are facing in the church and in secular society here today.

Specifically, we've made an idol with our own hands. Look at what the children of Israel did.

They made calves with their own hands, and they fell down and worshipped them. When God designed government, God designed the system of judges.

There was enough law that they could read it in three days, the whole thing.

And they had a dispute resolution process.

They could go to a judge to have a dispute be resolved.

There was no other law and there was no other mechanism to make more law.

And during the time of Isaiah, the children of Israel decided that that wasn't enough and they wanted a king.

And they went to Isaiah and they demanded, oh, Samuel, was it?

Excuse me, in the time of Samuel, I think it was.

They demanded a king and they ended up getting Saul.

When they went to Samuel and said to give us a king, Samuel was upset because he's being rejected as a judge and his children who are ungodly were being rejected as judges.

And he takes it to God and God says to him, listen to what they're actually saying.

They're not rejecting you.

They're rejecting me as their king.

And I'll cover all of this in the book, Good Christians Break Bad Laws.

As their forefathers did in the wilderness, building golden calves and worshipping them.

That's what God says in response.

They are rejecting me as their king, as their forefathers did, building golden calves and worshipping them.

God immediately equates creating a government that is beyond what God designed with idolatry.

He immediately says, this is like worshipping a golden calf. And that's exactly where we are today.

Look at the names of God in the Old Testament. Jehovah Jireh, my provider.

Who do we look to for provision now?

You know, the very Jehovah Nissi, Jehovah Tzidkenud, all the different names of God.

They all have different meanings.

My healer, my giver of wisdom, my protector, my refuge, my provider, et cetera.

We look to the government for each and every one of those things now.

We've literally worshipped government and allowed government to usurp God in every single part of our lives.

And if it wasn't already obvious enough, it became glaringly obvious during COVID.

And I think one of the most urgent needs in the world today is for Christians to get on our knees before God and repent of idolatry and worshipping government and obeying government, even where the government is the one causing misery.

Even where the government has become crooked, like what Psalm 94 talks about. We've obeyed government instead of God.

And the most urgent thing now is repentance in the church.

I wasn't expecting us to go down this angle, but I'm enjoying this.

You mentioned about not forsaking Hebrews 10, 25. It said, not giving up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day approaching.

And how much closer are we to that day 2,000 years later?

And there's no opt-out. The Bible is full of laws, of ideals, of examples, of guidelines for us to live by because God knows best because God made us, and therefore he's the one that knows the best way to live.

There are no opt-outs. And certainly I remember being in one church, Church of England Church, and they said, oh, we need to wait until the government announce their guidelines later this week to know if we can meet and sing in the park this weekend.

I think, well, we've already been told not to forsake gathering.

What's wrong with meeting out in the open?

I mean, Jesus didn't stop going and speaking in synagogues because people had leprosy. Actually, no, he went there. And there were so few.

I think in the UK, I don't know of any church that actually, there was one church that had a legal fight, but they still shut the doors.

I know I went to a big event with a Pentecostal preacher, Rodney Howard Brown. He was the only person, I mean, the first pastor in America.

And it was interesting that the more traditional evangelical part of the church said, we need to be good citizens, and that means doing what we're told to do.

Then you have the more Pentecostal or charismatic said, no, no, no, the Bible says this, so we do this.

I was interested in seeing that division.

But certainly, I've seen hook, line, and sinker that churches across the UK accepted everything the government told us to do.

And you're saying you saw exactly the same in Australia.

And there's been no change of that.

There's been no apology.

As you said no repentance for saying we got it wrong but if this happens again we will follow god's law not man's law yeah this

Is such a crucial thing, it's such a tragedy that I actually know the names globally of most of the pastors that really did stand up.

John MacArthur in the U.S and I think he was in California.

Arthur Polowski a Polish immigrant to Canada.

Bishop Marmari in Sydney who actually since got stabbed.

He survived and thankfully he's okay, but he was one of the correct, he was a Coptic, I think, no offense if I get this wrong, Bishop, but I believe he's a Coptic or an Orthodox Christian and was really speaking up.

There was a Catholic church in Jindera that was really good in a remote Australian outback sort of town.

But these are the exceptions, right?

I shouldn't be able to name the ones that stood up and did the right thing.

When I challenged my own pastor on this, he said, Topher, I can't do what you want me to do, because the government will take away our funding for the soccer academy that we run for the migrants.

Right?

Now, I, I've read my Bible from cover to cover in a couple of different translations.

And I, I just, I've tried, but I can't remember the verse that says, go ye into all the world and run soccer academies.

I've, I'm going to have to go back and just study again and just try and find that verse because what's happened now.

I mean, there's a reason why Jesus specifically warned, warned us and said, you cannot serve God and mammon. Why did he pick mammon? You can't serve God and sex.

You can't serve God and bar.

You can't serve, you know, God and your belly. Why did he pick mammon as the thing?

Well, because that's going to be the key core temptation.

And this is what we see, particularly in the established churches, because the business of church and the property and the building and the maintenance and the tithes and everything else is such an important thing.

Governments have been very clever.

They turned around a hundred odd years ago and said, oh, instead of you being excluded from the tax code entirely, let's give you a special charitable tax exempt status that brings you into the tax code.

And then you'll be eligible for government funding for programs, for charitable stuff, right?

We're doing it to help you.

We're going to give you money and you can do more ministry, right?

And luring churches with money into compromising and contracting with government and becoming just another civil, just another corporation, really, that just has a few special perks.

Fast forward a hundred years and we get to a situation where pastors aren't willing to speak on transgenderism or abortion. Oh no, I better not talk about anything political.

Oh no, I better not stand up for our right to actually worship God during a pandemic. I better not do those thing, because I'm going to lose these special privileges that the government has given me.

Well, excuse me, who's your provider?

What does the Bible say about that? And this is why I say, and I've ruffled a lot of feathers.

I've got a lot of people's noses out of joint because I speak at the church and state conferences in Australia and elsewhere.

And I challenge pastors and I challenge church guys.

I'm not trying to cause damage to the church, but please hear me out.

If your pastor compromised during COVID and has not repented, all right, I'm all about forgiveness, all about second chances.

Is if your pastor made mistakes and then went, guys, I got that wrong. I'm so sorry.

This is what I've learned.

This is what I'm going to put in place to make sure I never do that again.

Great.

Great.

All for it.

But if your pastor still insists that shutting down was the right thing to do and turning away people who were in desperate need of help was the right thing to do right at a time when people needed the church the most.

I mean, if your instinctive reaction when there is a threat to people's temporal lives is to lock the doors of the house that has eternal salvation, if that's your instinctive reaction, then you don't understand what it is that you do as a Christian pastor.

You hold the keys to eternal life. When there is a temporal threat, when there is a pandemic, if it's the Black Death, for goodness sake, you should be throwing the doors of the church open, wheeling the speakers out onto the steps, cranking that thing up as loud as you can and saying: come one, come all, repent for your day of judgment could very well be at hand.

And if you get word from the government, there's a pandemic coming and and your reaction is to shut your doors and turn people away, I put it to you that you are probably in the wrong profession.

A hundred percent.

We have pastors who want to be liked more than they want to do the right thing.

And I'm a grew up pastor's kid.

I've been involved in huge churches.

And when you get to see behind the scenes, it is a desire to be liked and to do what you think the government.

But it's this issue of which I think is the key issue and it's an issue that we will face here in the UK in the next five years.

It's the tax exempt status. It's the charitable status, it is the money in the UK you get tax back. So, if you're a taxpayer, you give your 100 pounds to the church and then the church gets an extra 20 back.

And most churches survive on that and if that was taken away they couldn't survive and this is why I've been at churches and pastors have have apologized for suggesting that abortion may be murder.

They've apologized for saying that actually transgenderism may be wrong. I had a pastor who told me the way he combats the attack on sexuality is he has a bookmark in his Bible with man and woman in it.

And that bookmark means that he is speaking truth.

And of course, in the COVID, that's time and time again.

And I can see, certainly in the UK with the Labour government, which we have a uni party, of course, it's no different than the Tory Labour Party.

This is not on one side. It's the same thing.

But I can see churches being told, unless you sign up to these pledges, the good citizen pledges, then you will lose your charitable status.

And 99% of churches will happily sign up for the money. So you're 100% right.

And this is the tragedy.

So in Australia, we had a referendum recently around whether the government should redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, all right?

And a lot of Christians, because the result was, yes, we should redefine marriage to include same-sex couples.

And a lot of Christians said, oh, no, we lost the marriage debate.

I say, well, no, no, no, hold on.

We lost the marriage debate back in the 1950s when federal legislation was passed to create a federal marriage certificate.

Because before then, you got a marriage certificate from your church.

The government had nothing to do with marriage.

And then in the 1990s, maybe early 2000s, then Prime Minister John Howard introduced legislation to introduce into the wording of the Marriage Act, man and woman.

Because it didn't actually have it.

It was assumed in the 1950s.

They didn't have to define that in the 1950s.

And then the church in the 1990s is like, yes, yes, yes, we've won.

No, no.

What we've said, what we've done is we've taken a sacred institution, marriage, and we've put it under a secular governance now.

We've said this thing that God created can now be defined and redefined by government.

I don't care whether you like the government's definition right now or not, the minute you concede to them the power to have a definition, then you've lost.

And sure enough, 30 years later, there was a referendum and the definition was changed and all these Christians are like, oh no, we've lost the marriage debate.

No, you lost that in the 1950s.

We need to stop taking things that are sacred and putting them into the hands of secular governments.

That is idolatry.

We are worshipping government and it has to stop.

Have you always been, I mean, from the beginning focused on the church being engaged and involved in society, because I think a lot of people have seen the collapse of the church during Covid, but then you go back further and you see at separate points in history of each of our countries you see the capitulation of the church to state mandates in varying degrees.

But I've, it's you kind of, we've seen it very starkly with, we all thought, we all believed, actually, the state will not stop churches meeting.

That'll be the last, you know, they may come in on what we believe on doctrine issues, on the culture wars, but actually, we'll still be allowed to meet on Sunday, so it's all good.

And suddenly, that key right for Christians to gather together, share fellowship together, that's now taken away.

Has that been partially the the last straw in people's engagements.

I mean, how have you seen it in your involvement along that journey?

Yeah, I'm going to answer something else before I answer your actual question.

Let's stop and think for a moment what a low bar that is to set.

Oh, at least the church allows us to meet.

Well, the church in China is allowed to meet, right?

You can be a Christian in the UK and in Australia and in Canada in exactly the same way that you can be a Christian in China.

Just don't say the things that the government says you can't say.

Your doctrine just has to to be the government approved doctrine.

And then you can be a Christian.

You can show up to church, you can wear a cross, you can call yourself a pastor, as long as you only preach the things that the government has approved.

Look at how low we've already set the bar and what a terrible compromise that is.

To your question, I was raised as a, I'm a pastor's kid.

I'm actually, I'm a pastor's grandkid on both my mom and my dad's side.

Both of them were pastors.

My dad was a pastor, was raised in the church, of course, went through my phase of rebellion and trying to figure out what I actually believe, blah, blah, blah.

And then I tried to prove that God didn't exist and I failed miserably.

So, I've had to accept that he actually is real. And that the best thing I can do with my life is to pursue him.

And as imperfect as I am and as flawed as I am and as a million different ways that I stumble, that's my life mission now.

But I considered myself a political commentator.

And then over time, I began to realize you can't, there's so many problems in politics that you can't fix without reference to faith, without reference to the underlying values, that inform political policy.

So, I started to call myself a political commentator who's a Christian or, you know, a Christian political commentator. And I'm starting to realize, actually, I just need to drop the word political.

And I think I'm actually, I actually just need to say, no, I'm a Christian commentator. And because that faith, what you believe about God informs what you believe about everything else.

It involves culture.

It involves politics.

It involves commerce and employment and healthcare and anything you might want to commentate on is downstream of your belief in God.

And so all I am is a guy to drive forklifts, who made a video, who somehow people found my work and said, hey, you keep talking.

And now as I've pursued that, I've come to realize the most important thing that I can talk about, the most valuable thing that I can be talking about is faith and God and how best we live in a fallen world.

And that's essentially the mission that I've set out to do. So that's why Good People Break Bad Laws is my first book is becoming Good Christians Break Bad Laws as my second book is the realization that I have to talk about the faith side of this, not to the exclusion of the politics.

The politics does matter.

The culture stuff does matter.

But it's all informed by what you believe about God.

And that's ultimately where the truth lies. And that's what we need to be talking about.

Last question is in terms of you kind of don't think of Australia as being a out-and-out Christian country.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. Never been down under, so I could be 100% wrong.

But are we moving towards a church that is that is underground, a church that actually needs to separate itself from the state in a way that we haven't seen?

I mean we have a we have a state church in the UK: church of England.

And that's meant that the state have had 100 control and we now have 24 bishops in the lords that are wetter than any pathetic liberal you'll come across and are more concerned about environmental issues and plastic bags than they are actually about God and his position in society.

Do you think in Australia you're moving towards actually the church will have to be underground and fairly separate?

I think we were headed that way, but I think God is on the move.

And I'm going to shamelessly name drop for a moment. Tucker Carlson was in Melbourne recently, and he met with me backstage.

My wife and I chatted with him for about 25 minutes.

Lovely, gracious man.

I was very generous with his time.

And we talked mostly about God.

That was the number one thing that he and I, that we discussed.

And he commented on how dark Melbourne felt spiritually compared to the rest of Australia.

And he's absolutely right.

Melbourne is a broken city, and there's a spiritual oppression, a spiritual aspect to it.

But he also said, do you feel like God's doing something?

I said, yes, thank you.

We're not the only ones.

And all over the place, I'm seeing what gives me huge encouragement is all over the place, including in my own personal faith walk, I'm seeing God calling people to prayer in a new and a fresh and a more powerful way than has been the case since probably the charismatic renewal.

And prayer almost always precedes revival.

Find me a revival that didn't have an enormous amount of prayer invested into it before it happened.

I don't think there is one.

And I believe that we're in a phase now where God is calling people to prayer and faithful people, the genuine Christians, the ones who aren't compromising, are coming to prayer.

And yes, a lot of the church is falling into apostasy.

A lot of the church is walking away from the basic fundamental tenets of the Christian faith and becoming more concerned about social justice and all this sort of stuff.

And there will be a split.

There will be a bifurcation.

But I actually think there's going to be an enormous renewal and an enormous number of people who are just seeking the truth, seeking meaning, recognizing the meaninglessness of third wave feminism, culture war and politics and so much of this stuff, sport, money, all the rest of it.

The meaninglessness is becoming really clear for a lot of people now.

I think we're actually about to see an enormous revival where an enormous number of people are going to have a come to Jesus moment in the most real and literal sense.

Yeah, 100%.

I agree with you.

And when it gets dark, it's time for the light of Christ to shine brightly.

So, we are in that moment, certainly. Topher, really appreciate you coming on all the way over from down under.

Thank you so much for your time, sharing a little bit about your story and fascinating how you see the church getting engaged, involved, and where that...

Your book, you can obviously get as an e-book, you can get as a paperback. It's available here in the UK.

As it will be down under.

I'm sure it's available in the US. And Battleground Melbourne, what's the website again?

So, the website for the book is goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

You can order it from Australia along with shirts and hoodies and things like that.

Or you can go to Amazon and get it, and it'll just get printed in your local market, and you'll receive it that way.

Or you can get an e-book, like you said. You can go to battlegroundmelbourne.com. Now, Battleground Melbourne is my multi-award winning documentary.

It's an hour and 40 minutes long.

It's a feature-length documentary. It's very high quality.

It's won 14 awards around the world, and it tells the story of what happened in Melbourne at the most locked down city in the world.

You can watch it for free.

I don't need your money

I don't even need your email address. Just go to battlegroundmelbourne.com.

It's there. You can watch it.

I highly recommend everyone do that.

You will be shocked.

Even people that lived through it in Melbourne but didn't step outside of their homes, they just did what they were told, they watch it and they're shocked at what happened on the streets of their own city on the other side of that door.

And for people in London or around the world, the US, etcetera, I think it's worth seeing because this isn't unique to Australia.

This is something that our governments all over the world, including in the US, would have loved to have done if they thought they could get away with it.

And it's up to us to make sure that they know that they can't.

100 percent.

Topher, thank you for joining us.

And all the links for those are in the description.

However, you're watching or listening to the podcasting apps.

It will be all there in description, just click on and you can get the book, you can watch the film and everything is there.

So don't for thanks for your time.

Such a pleasure Peter.

Thank you.