BETOOTA TALKS: Jim From Jim's Mowing

Foreign.

Welcome back to the Batuta Advocates radio show. Our weekly episode known as Batuta Talks where we have a guest from, from, from public life, from Australian public life. We've got a different one each week. We've just finished a federal election where we interviewed a lot of, I guess you'd say taxpayer funded elected officials. I'm sure today's guest has a lot to say about those people. We interviewed a lot of them from all sides of the aisle and we've had a little bit of reprieve from them actually. We've obviously got state of origin and had, had some, had some rock stars in here the other day too in the shape of Spacey Jane High Flies from Perth. It's, it's great to, it's great to cast a wider net and, and today's gu. Just that you definitely know him. Whether you know him or not, you know this man.

One of the faces that many people around Australia would recognise. Face of entrepreneurialism, you could say. Clancy.

Yes. And a jack of all trades, I guess is the greatest description of today's guest. We've got Jim Penman from Jim's group. You might know him from Jim's Mowing. Jim's. I'm starting to tread weed.

Plumbing, plumbing. He's branched out. He's done a whole lot of gyms. Jim's does a lot of stuff, pest.

Control, building inspections, window cleaning, you name it. Test and tag. Electrical, plumbing, garage doors.

Yep.

But nearly 50.

Nearly 50 different trades, I guess you'd say. Thank you for joining us, Jim.

Yeah, good to be here.

Now Jim, I'd love to know. Obviously we're familiar with Jim's Mowing and as you mentioned there's 50 different franchise kind of arms, not franchise arms but different arms to the business that you franchise out and people all know that sort of stuff. But what is, what does life look like for Jim Penman now? Are you. You're still jumping on mowers, I imagine.

You'Re still cleaning gutters.

Well actually no, the weekend if I to. Well I want to have some special. I got. And dig potatoes. I got a vegetable garden, really big one. Potatoes, pumpkins, silver beet, all kinds of stuff. Planting passion fruit, fruit trees.

Jim's roots. Jim's roots.

It's fun. That's why I did it as a job because it's a fun thing to do.

Were you always a green thumb? Were you around that sort of stuff growing up or was it just a bit of a employ to make a bit of cash while you're Studying at uni.

Well, I always loved. I've been gardening, had garden jobs since I was 8 years old. I used to go into the neighbour's yard and break his back. In those days it was like 2 shillings for now's work. I wasn't paid a lot, but I just love being outside. I just do. Even today, if I don't spend time outside, I just feel something's lacking. It's good for you. It's really good for you. Smell of growing things, fresh air, sunlight. It's just good for you.

Now, Jim, where. Where would have you grown up when you were getting paid 2 shillings a backyard? Where? What part of the world was that in? And was it the type of place that you would say encouraged entrepreneurialism?

I was in Adelaide, actually, at that time. We were in Adelaide till I was about 14 and I don't know, my family wasn't particularly entrepreneurial. I'm a bit of a. I'm a bit of a throwback. There's nobody amongst my ancestors going way back or relatives that has anything to do with business actually going back in my mother's line and go back about four generations. There's people in business, but most mostly professionals. My father was an engineer. His father was a sort of business executive. His father's father was a sea captain. So you can go all the way back. I'm very strange. I'm the only one in my family. They all think I'm weird.

Most people think I'm weird, but they. They. Your. Yeah. Your. Your immediate relatives and immediate ancestors are what the Japanese would describe men?

Yeah, to a large extent. Well, my father was a consulting engineer. He used to do interesting things. He was with the university and he worked for a consultant. He was chief engineer for Carlton Yard Breweries for a while and then he was the consulting engineer. And he'd do things like solve murders. He'd come back with a carcass of a pig and stick knives into it to see. To try and solve a murder, this kind of stuff. And set fire, bonfires of plastic in our front yard, which my mother wasn't too happy about, but that work out how arson was done. So. Yeah. Interesting guy.

Yeah. I mean, that's fascinating.

Who was he working for when he was doing that sort of stuff?

He was. He was a consultant. People used to pay him. Yeah. So like for example, there was a. Just an example. There's a young man accused of reckless homicide, you know, facing years in jail because he was driving. According to police, he was drunk. He steered off the Road. He was speeding, steered off the road, crashed into a tree. His fiance was killed. So open and shut case, years in jail. But my father had a look and said he checked the skid marks. He said, no, that doesn't prove he was speeding because she could actually tell how fast he was going for the skid mark. There's no proof that he was speeding. Not only that, but why do they think he was drunk? Because they took a blood alcohol content. And he asked the lady who took the content or the person who took the content. He said, did you swab the with. With the with, with alcohol before you took it? She said, yes, of course you do. Well, that accounts for it. He just had dinner with his wife's parents. His wife's father was a Methodist minister. So, you know, this young man who had been falsely put in jail for years was completely let off.

It's interesting. Do you think maybe this, this, you know, having an old man that worked in, in, you know, engineering almost sounds like he was a somewhat of a PI in many ways too. Is that, is that what kind of encouraged you to kind of run your business the way you do? I know it's a very efficient operation what you do. Efficiency is something we're going to talk about. But this is as the gyms group at like a operational level, you every moving part is something you've put there.

Yeah, that's right. Well, I can't say my father was too impressed by it. I went to university, did a PhD in history, which from his point of view, being an engineer is just not very useful at all. I mean engineering or medicine or law, but you go out and study history for 10 years, well at least you can become an academic, go to Oxford, this kind of stuff too. I ended up blowing all that, becoming a gardening contractor. Now honestly, my father was not impressed by that career choice at all. Though towards the end of his life when I had about a thousand franchisees, I actually said to him like, that perhaps wasn't such a bad career choice. He said no, guess not.

What was the PhD thesis? What was the title of that one?

That was the reason that I was completely sunk for an academic career was a theory of history. I was trying to understand the reason for the big changes in history, why civilizations rise and fall. And it wasn't just history, it was cross cultural anthropology and psychology with a bit of biology thrown in. So it was wildly, wildly radical, encompassing all kinds of different fields. And that's why in the end I was no chance of getting ethnic poke. You look at this guy. The examiners didn't even know what to make of it. They just looked at it and said, who is this guy? Part of the match. He said this was a magnum office at the end of an industrious career. Maybe we'd listen to him, but, you know, he just. This bloke's trying to overturn everything we know about history.

Yeah. And it's almost like you're looking for the God molecule in the very start of your career.

Well, yeah, well, I'm looking for the reasoning behind it and I think it's based on a matter of character. But certainly in terms of current historians, everything that you read about, just about historical, is all wrong. You know, why did the First World War take place? As an example? All right, people give you a thousand different reasons. I'll tell you one. It's what I call a lemming cycle. It's the same thing that makes lemmings migrate. And we're doing experiments with mice now to demonstrate this is how it works. The actual physiology is an epigenetic cascade that we believe is behind it. And we're going to demonstrate that that was why the First World War took place.

Right, talk me through a lemming cycle.

Yeah, a lemming cycle. Lemmings, it's very common with these small northern animals. They go through these cycles of boom and bust. Typically takes about three to four years, others take about 10 years. And they go through when they're very timid and quiet and they spread out and then the population grows massively and clubs are going to become very bold and they migrate in mass at the peak of population growth. And that's what they become. Very bold, very aggressive. They're not afraid of predators at all. So their character changes. We do the same thing, but in a milder way. But lemmings that live, you know, multiple breed multiple times a year, they do it three to four years. We take three to 400 years. But it's the same basic phenomenon. It's an epigenetic cascade.

So this isn't the same. This isn't the same kind of theory and not the same animal that. That follows each other off cliffs, is it?

Well, they don't actually. That's complete myth.

Yeah.

What they do is they migrate. There's no such thing. There's no evidence that linens ever commit suicide. What they do is they migrate en masse and when they come to a body of water, they swim across it. Now, if there's an island on the other side, good luck to them. If not, they Go out to sea and they drown. So it looks like suicide, but they're not. They're just trying to find a Harlem, that's all.

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, but is that. Is that what you're saying? Is this the theory? Is this is a theory where they, you know, World War II is an example of all of these countries binding together and swimming into the sea.

In a sense, it's the same thing. Becoming very bold and aggressive and wanting to migrate, though it's basically the main ones involved were Russia and Germany and Austria. They all reach a people population growth just before they're in the 1890s. And so when they young, the generation born of that peak grew up to military age.

Poof.

You get these giant attacks taking place. Something happened in France earlier. France reached its own peak in the end of the 18th century. Then you get the Napoleonic War, Britain in about 1875. Then you get the bowel war. So this is pattern growth or peak of population growth. And then a generation later, this massive warfare breaks out.

Okay, where are you seeing the lemming effect taking place in modern history, in current history?

Well, there's an interesting point. If you go 90 years before the peak of population growth, you get a period of very, very personal relationships. Relationships become very personal loyalty to a man, single man, rather than to republican institutions. And what you typically get is a period of chaos, often a civil war in feudal times like the wars. Roses is a good example. What you're seeing now in America is pretty much that sort of same pattern where loyalties have become so personal towards Trump in particular, that it overrides other considerations.

Australia's. We're not shy of a bit of messianic worship here. We've had our dictators that we would follow into royal commissions at least.

Well, not to the same extent, but we're not on the same pattern as the US We're a bit later.

Okay.

We will go through our lending cycle, will be called the trough in a few decades from now.

So with this, are they correlated? So because the US is going through this cult of personality cycle, this personal cycle. Are you saying that from what you can tell from history, in 90 years time, you think there should be a population explosion and then they lemming out.

There's another pattern called a civilization cycle. And that's. That's what you see. This declining birth rate. So declining. The birth rate's going down really, really fast. I'm actually writing a book will be coming out the end of this year called Birth Rate Crisis, which talks about why that Happens. So it's a different kind of cycle, but population dropping all over the world, or it will be soon. The birth rate's going down dramatically. Like in, in South Korea, they're having, you know, 0.7 children per woman, which is about a third of what you need to replace population. Other countries, Japan, 1.1. China, similar. We're not quite so badly off, but in all cases, our fertility is well below replacement level. This is part of a classic civilization decline collapse that we're going through. Same has happened to the Roman Empire.

So did they had a population decline, the Roman Empire?

Yes, they did. You actually find a lot of. They also had plagues and so forth too, which is.

They didn't have pornography, though, did they?

I didn't have pornography, no. That is one of the things that does cause these problems. It's wealth, things like pornography, breakdown of social norms, breakdown of religious traditions. All these sorts of things contribute to this, this decline. Now, the interesting thing from my research is that you can actually turn it around. What you've got to do is to make an epigenetic change. It's what you're working on in my research project.

So who has. Is there any examples of someone who's turned it around?

No, it's never been possible in all of human history. It's. You have something like the Emperor Augustus, for example. He was the most powerful man in the world, you know, 2,000 years ago. And he was aware of these problems and he was preaching to his people and said, you've got to have more kids. And he tried to put a tax on people who were celibate, refused to get married, for example. He just, he did everything he could to try and boost the birth rate. He couldn't because these are vast social changes. This, today is the first time in all of human history we've got the technology, which is based on neuroscience and epigenetics, where we actually could turn the whole thing around. We could stop the decline.

Can you talk to me? Can you explain for our listeners, please, epigenetics and how you'd classify that?

Okay. Basically, you know what a gene is? A gene. The way to look at a gene is it's, it's. It's a gene spits out a protein. So DNA basically is spitting out proteins. And these proteins do things. They like messenger rna, all kinds of things. They do various stuff. Now what you can actually do based on experience is you have something that actually turns off or turns on the gene. So what you do is you turn on the gene, do Something, there's a methyl group, for example, is the most common way of doing it. You actually turn off a particular gene and depending on how many places you plug it in, because there's multiple places you can do this to, the effect is greater. So what we can do is to change. So anything that happens to you in childhood. For example, if you have a very disciplined and family home with two parents and stuff, you have a certain kind of epigenetic setting and it's also inherited from parents. On the other hand, if you live a fairly dissolute sort of life and you indulge in a lot of, you know, sexual activity, or you take drugs and things, but they're very similar effects, then you have a different kind of, the opposite kind of effect. What we're doing is looking at ways of changing this directly going into the brain and changing these epigenetic settings to help people be happier and healthier.

Wouldn't you just say a bit of Catholic guilt could do the job?

Well, not as much as it used to. Yeah, Catholicism doesn't have the power it used to. Even Catholic families on the whole don't even have enough children to replace themselves. But you're right in the sense of strongly religious groups. People who have more children tend to be religious. It's just a pattern. So you get people like Latter Day Saints, Mormons or Orthodox Jews, people like that, or Amish is another example. Strongly religious communities are the ones that do tend to have more children. How could you.

Because we're talking about here the, the basically like influencing environmental factors which influence genetics and society, etc, civilization. How, what is your research or what are you trying to find from the research in terms of actually changing people's genetics without changing their environmental, I guess, influences?

Yeah, we're not changing the genes, we're changing the epigenome. We're actually taking the way the genes are expressed, turning, turning them off, turn them on again, those kinds of things. Look, basically that's what we're doing. Well, I'll give you an example. These weight loss drugs, WeGovy and the rest, they actually do have this effect to a small extent. So for example, if you take a weight loss drug like one of these things, not only are you less likely to eat so much, but you also, people tend to, to smoke less, they tend to be a bit less sociable. There's evidence that their libido drops a little bit. So there's widespread changes in behavior. We think these kinds of drugs actually do have a little bit of an effect. They act like, bit like a, a very mild food restriction.

Now I, it sounds like you've managed to straddle both your academic kind of interests and hunger, even alongside, you know, what, what many would say is one of the more visible brands in Australian history. Do you, did you ever come to a crossroads where you said, I can't do both?

Well, I came to a crossroads, but I couldn't do my research at all.

Yeah.

And that's why I launched Jim's group, basically.

Yeah.

And the whole purpose and function. Until that time, I never had any concept of making money or being rich. It doesn't interest me. I'm very non material. My clothes till they wear out the most battered cars you can imagine. I mean, seriously, I don't. I'm not interested in money for its own sake. But I knew I needed to make a whole lot of money to fund my research institute. These days I'm spending about $3 million a year and I hope to raise that shortly on a dedicated research foundation to actually do these things. That's what my business is for more than anything else.

Okay, so you're saying every time someone sees a van going around that says Jim's Mowing or Jim's Pest Services, that whole thing, aside from obviously keeping a vast number Australians in employment and, you know, and bringing home the bacon, a lot of it is just funding your research.

The fundamental reason that I launched my business was to fund my research. Yes. There was no way I could do it as an individual. It takes a lot of trained research, people who go neuroscience and epigenetics, all kinds of things. Yeah.

So it's for what drives you, what drives you to want to conduct this research. Like, you know, whether I might have changed over the years. But when you started getting going, what was it that drove you to want to conduct this research and get it done?

Because I care deeply about the state of the world and what my children are going to grow up in. And we're heading into very deep trouble if we don't stop this. If we don't reverse this and I don't know anybody else working along these lines. I have some wonderful people in my research team and we're making tremendous progress, but nobody else is doing it so far. I'm hoping to get more interest when this book comes out. I'll be promoting it very actively and going to people and saying, this is the solution. You're spending billions and billions and billions to try and bribe people to have more children. Wrong approach. Take a fraction of percent of that money and Put it into basic neuroscience, epigenetic research, and we can solve it.

Jim, you know, a lot of people, a lot of young people would say, a lot of young people, young people still get clucky. A lot of young people still see babies and they want to pinch their cheeks. A lot of young people would tell you, you know, what would make it, you know, much more favorable for me to have children would be if I could do what my grandparents and my parents didn't. Buy a house for 80, 80 grand, you know, within two suburbs of the CBD or within two suburbs of my employment. The cost of living crisis plays a big role in whether people are settling down and having kids.

Okay, I certainly agree that housing is too expensive. And that is a result of government policy. If we had the same policies as say they do in Houston, in America, where they've got really limited zoning, the typical house in place like Melbourne or Sydney would cost like half a million dollars instead of well over a million as it does now. So you're completely right. Zoning restrictions are forcing up the price of housing dramatically. And it's completely wrong and it's completely unfair. However, people may say the reason they don't have more children is because of lack of money, but it's not true. And the reason you can see it is this. As society has become wealthier since the 1950s and the standard living, the per capita income and the average incomes has risen dramatically. The birth rate has gone down dramatically. If you look at within society, the people who are wealthiest tend to have the fewest children, not the most. Governments spend billions and billions of dollars to bribe people to have more children. You know, Hungary spending 5% of its GDP on bribing people, baby bonuses, all the rest. Do you know what the effect is? 0. It does not even nudge the dial. People don't have children because they've got money. They have children because they want to have children, because they like having children. And we move into a society, a character where people don't enjoy children as much as they used to and other priorities that are more important, like career, wealth, freedom, whatever.

Pornography, video games.

Absolutely, yes. Other things are more important. That's what's going on. There's a change of character in the population.

It's not fundamentally when did this trend peak and trough in Australia? So would you say post war? Post war, all these blokes come back from World War II and they just want to shit out rugrats. Is that what. Or it started to slump before then?

Well, you can see the change taking place since the 19th century. What actually happened is it's interesting if you have a look at the baby boom, the people in the baby boom, this collapse of population, collapse of birth rate is to do with prosperity. Now the interesting thing is if you look at the people in the 50s, which is my parents generation who are having all these children, they were the ones that grew up during the depression. So they actually had a very tough time, particularly in late childhood, but also early childhood, adolescence. People have a tougher time at that part of life, tend to like children better and want to have more children. They're also more family minded, more community minded. It's a very characteristic pattern.

I want to talk about that sweet spot though. You grow up in poverty, you grow up. We look at, I mean a modern example of this is some of the young footballers you see in the AFL and the NRL grow up in complete poverty. They make, you know, they achieve financial emancipation at 19, 18 and then they go and have eight, nine kids. There's that sweet spot. And I guess what you're talking about is that the kids that, the historical version of that, the generational version of that is those kids that grew up in the depression and realized that post war kind of economic boom, but they.

Weren'T all that wealthy. If you think about it like I grew up, I was born in 952, I grew up in the 50s. Now my family lived in a pretty small house. My brother and I shared a bedroom. We had no air conditioning. Things like, you know, soft drinks were for Christmas. Chicken too for that matter. Very, very simple. We had holidays in a tent. Now, by the standards of today, unemployed, we lived very poor. We were well off by the standards at the time, but in absolute economic terms, we were not well off. Not by today's standards.

Well, conservation and conservatism, not too different, those two things in many aspects. You look at a lot of the great conservative governments around the world and when I say great, I mean like most powerful. I would say Reagan and Thatcher both, you know, did a lot for national parks, did a lot for the environment. They put the conserve in conservative. You're not going to see much of that again, especially when young people don't have anything to conserve themselves, let alone, you know, starting to think about environmental impact or social impact. No one has any assets really. You know, you'd be hard pressed to find someone under the age of 30 that's ever bought a new car under the age of 40.

Yeah, but still people today still live better than my parents did in the 50s?

Yeah, absolutely. But just the political, the political kind of trends are going a completely different way.

Well, I'd say look, yeah, I'd say that the housing is a different issue. The fact of the matter is the way the government treats housing makes it almost impossible to build. Basically you've got an immigration policy that says, okay, let's bring in a half million new immigrants every year and let's have ironclad government policies making it impossible to build enough houses to put people in. What could possibly go wrong? And I know my wife's a burrito and it takes months and months and months to get the most basic planning and these restrictions and zoning limits and all kinds of stuff. It's crazy and necessary. All the government has to do is to lift the iron hand, let the market rush and housing will become avoided.

We've seen a little bit of that in certain cities. We've seen a lot of. Queensland doesn't have this problem, but Sydney certainly does. We've seen the Opal towers, we've seen the mascot towers. Do you not have grave concerns about the inherent Australian urge to cut corners?

Well, I think the great Australian urge now is to stop anything happening. Basically. We're not just NIMBY these days, not in backyards. We're bananas. Built absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.

I like that. I do like that you think about it.

You talk about the inner suburbs, you know, places like Richmond and Brunswick, that's places around there in Melbourne. I don't know the equivalent Saudi worlds. But these are close to the cbd. They have zoned rigidly for single family houses with a yard and with a must have a cast parking space. Now why is that necessary? Why can't you allow people to build what they want, like terrace houses? You can place it like London or New York. You have terrace houses which are beautiful. My grandparents in England used to live in them and there was a little house of two story, little front garden, little backyard terrace with the neighbors. Now we could do that in our Australian cities. Why not? Because the government won't allow it. Why do you need to have. If you want to buy a flat near a station and you don't want to own a car, you don't have to pay for a car parking space even if you don't want to. So it pushes up the price of the thing. Now why you need to. If you want to live near a station and you want to commute to the city, is that so evil? Why shouldn't you be allowed to do that and not have to pay for unneeded parking space which makes the whole place unaffordable. These are insane policies. They're very anti environmental too. Because what it means is that if you want to actually work in the city and you want to be able to afford a house, you have to live somewhere like travel an hour and a half to get to work every day, hour and a half home belching carbon dioxide the whole way. Why do you, why can't you let people build houses in when need them? Like just an example, I live somewhere like an hour from the city. I live on a five acre covenant. You are not allowed to divide below five acres. We are five minutes from a station, five minutes from shops, from employment, from retail, everything. Why can't you have, why can't you build 20 houses on our block for example? Can't do it. The government won't let it. It's the blackest, most anti environmental policy you can imagine and impoverishes our people, especially the young. My children. Why? I actually give them money. They want to buy a house, I give them here's a million bucks. When they want to have insured, I give them money so they can afford to. How, why should you have to have a father who's a multi millionaire to be able to afford a house? How unfair is that?

Very, very unfair. Jim, question for you. You've spoken a lot about government spending and you want to talk about basically creating efficiencies in public spending. You're talking about, you know, basically getting rid of red tape and allowing people to build and to rezone and go up. And we are seeing some of that in places like western Sydney and in western Melbourne and the outskirts of that where basically huge chunks of development are being dropped into what were formerly paddocks or farms where there's very little in terms of train lines and infrastructure and all that sort of stuff. Whose responsibility do you think it should be to make sure that these new suburbs we're creating or the new high rises that we're creating 20Ks away from a CBD are properly serviced by infrastructure and things like railroad.

Well, they shouldn't be building out there. They wouldn't be building out that far if you allowed property development of the inner suburbs where people want to live. These people don't necessarily want to commute an hour and a half to get to work, an hour and a half home. They would much rather have a really nice house in a place where they could get to the city in 15 minutes in a train. Why not allow that to happen? Why people?

I think people who live in nice terrace houses in the city, like living in nice terrace houses near the city. And they don't necessarily want to move out and let a apartment block go up there.

No, they probably don't actually either. And that's the point. You've got a beautiful inner city, like a rich, rich inner city area where there's got these lush green houses which are worth millions and millions of dollars each. Why are the interests of people in those houses more important than the interests of people who can't afford to buy a house? What about the. What about the homeless? We've got a massive problem with homelessness. Homelessness is a terrible evil. People are more likely to die if they don't have houses to live in, if they can't afford rent. So by making houses unaffordable, making rents unaffordable, people are thrown into the streets and they're dying of crime, they're dying of neglect, they're dying of disease. It's a terrible humanitarian disaster. You can walk around, you can see them. Did not used to be so in the past when housing was more affordable.

So you're born in 1952, you said, Jim.

Yep.

Do you realize your beliefs and your ideology that you're sharing with us today would make you a part of the extreme minority in your generation?

I don't think I'm as much a minority as that looks. Interesting. We put out a bit of a social media on this sort of stuff about possibility of going into politics and changing politics, and it was the most lopsided response we ever had. It was like 96% in favor of now. That is unprecedented. I'm a very loud, opinionated person. People get really angry at me for all kinds of things. When I was opposed to lockdown we had in Victoria, people have really against it. We have never had so much positive attitude and so little negative. I think on the whole, people most will recognize housing is too expensive. And if houses were half the price and young people could afford to buy them and the homeless could get off the street, it'd be a good thing. And most people would support us in that. You've just got a few wealthy interests who say, no, I don't want this. Well, you've got to have it. That's. I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. You've got to allow this to happen. You've got to allow the market to build what people want to live in and not put unnecessary restrictions on it.

Public housing is an interesting one. As well. Of course, Melbourne once upon a time had the template for that and they had it right. Many would say you've seen a lot of people again achieved financial emancipation from. Anthony Albanese is a prime example. Grew up in the housing commission of the inner city. He was a walk within a cathedral school and he was a walk within university. Those kids don't exist anymore. At least there's 5% of what, of what once was. Those kids now live out on these, in these outer metropolitan rural fringes that you've been talking about. They live in sprawl and there's absolutely no opportunities to transport. There's nothing to really do except steal a motorbike and commit crime.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. But the other thing, the problem with those public housing is government getting involved and putting up things people don't necessarily want. See, if you ask the people who were displaced when they, when they built those vast towers that became cesspools of crime and dysfunction, a lot of them had exactly what happened. They actually destroyed existing communities. Now instead of doing that, what they should have done is allowed people to build. So in other words, you've got a house on a block, put a few together and build a terrace or build them say just three stories. How high? I'll put something in your backyard. Just, just gradually build up is what used to happen to cities in the past. This idea that you rigidly control the way that housing is put and then you, then you clear areas and you build these vast vertical slums is not the way to cope with it. It's expensive and it's bad for people. You don't want to destroy communities. Want let communities build themselves.

Question for you, Jim. I'd love to know your opinion on this. You talking a little bit about creating an Australian style doge, which I want to kind of start talking about in a second. Obviously one particular arm of government which isn't very efficient at the moment is the subsidization of property investors in terms of negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions, which to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Where do you see those concessions fitting into the housing crisis?

And that's, and that's, and that's what I was trying to say before when I said you would be in the minority of your generation. Because we know who's benefited directly from such concessions. And it's people your age that have found themselves with an empty five bedroom house which is also a nest egg and they don't want to get, they don't want to Downsize. They don't really want to move. The only thing they want to change is that they want the pub at the end of the street to stop playing music after 8:00pm okay, look, if.

You left the zoning system as it is and basically put iron clamps to stop you building more houses and you took away negative gearing, what would actually happen is the rents would go through the stratosphere. They soar like anything. My daughter and her partner wanted to rent a house, rent a flat. They turned up 40 people competing to rent it. I actually offered to pay the first 12 months interest in advance. They still couldn't get it. Now that's with negative gearing. If you take away negative gearing and all these people can't let their houses out, so they get rid of them or they. To take them off the market, they use them Airbnb or something like that, then the rents would go through the roof. That would be horrified. Rents could double what you've got to do initially.

But then doesn't it allow people to get into the housing market? We have a million empty homes right now in Australia that are not. That people don't live in, result of land banking or whatever other reasons.

Yeah, that's exactly right. What you also should be doing is increasing the land tax. Not on the property value, but in the land value. It's land banking. And people having Airbnb properties and that kind of stuff too, is really, really damaging. If you took tax off a lot of other things, like payroll tax, which is a really nasty tax, or stamp duty on selling properties and this kind of thing, and you actually substitute that with a land tax, that's a lot more economically sensible. Because what that does is that push property into the hands of those who can use it. So if you're sitting on a big property and you're not doing much with it, yeah, sure, flog it, have it subdivided, put 15 different dwellings on so 15 families can have a go. The land tax actually would push people in that direction. Yes, land tax, relaxed zoning, great. But if you just. If you don't do that and you just simply get rid of capital gains exemptions, then you'd have terrible problems. It might bring the housing prices down a little bit, but it would do dreadful things for the rent. And frankly, the renters are the ones I'm most worried about. People who cannot afford to live now make it worse for them. That would be so terrible.

Now, Jim, I want to talk about your book that's coming out. I want you. I want to talk about you know, this new, I guess, acronym we've all been hearing of late last 12 months, it's kind of come into prominence. D O G E Doge. Obviously made popular by the South African American, Canadian tech oligarch, Elon Musk. Having having spoken to you about, you know, the very, our very domestic kind of issues and a very domestic, you know, the conditions we find ourselves in with, you know, a domestic housing market and, and you know, our own government, I realize you're somewhat different to Elon Musk.

Thank you very much.

Yes, yes. I mean, imagine if Elon Musk dedicated his entire wealth to studying things. We'd.

Yeah, I don't think you. I also don't think you got things like $1.4 billion worth of grants from the government to build your factories when you were starting out. Jim's mowing back in the day, that'd give me anything.

Now you, but you are a big supporter of this idea of Doge. Please tell us about Jim's version of it. Jim's the Australian. Jim's Doge. What is it?

Yeah, well, for a start, what master has been absolutely chaotic. It's unbelievably bad. This is one of the smartest businessmen on the planet. And if you look at what he's done with SpaceX and Tesla, SpaceX in particular, he's worked on efficiencies, he's gone in, he's cut costs, he goes on the ascend by himself and actually checks things and says, why are you doing that? Don't do that, try it this way. Change, change to make it more efficient. So in that area, he's absolutely brilliant. Now what he's done, what you need for government spending is a scalpel. What he's done is gone with a blowtorch and he's just blown jobs apart. He's done stupid things like fire, air traffic control. I mean, for heaven's sake, if you could think of anything more essential. How could you go past an air traffic controller? He fired them and they had to hire them back and they do stupid savings like, like, like there's things that save millions of lives in Africa from gauge and stuff. There's some brilliant st, then there's basic scientific research. He's cut that, that's just terrible. But what he should do, what he should have done is gone public service and said, okay, let's look at what they need to do. First of all, do they need to do this? If they don't stop doing it to get rid of the red tape and then work out how to be efficient with the rest. Just so I do in my company every day, look at a job, say, okay, do I need to do it? If so, how can I do it more efficiently? What can you do? Can you automate? Can you do this? Now, if you did that, you could cut at least two thirds of the bureaucracy across Australia. And a very simple example that all the planning departments in all the local governments which cost billions of dollars a year, could be simply swept away. Every one of them could be let go, all these bureaucrats, because all they do is slow things down. What you do is you set up a very simple planning phase and you do what they do in Texas, they allow independent people like town planners to actually be licensed to solve it themselves. And they do it in weeks, not months or years. That's what you need to do.

Where else can you see a bit of waste? Where else could you see the need for a scalpel in Australia?

Okay, what about ndis? Now I know of NDS because we do a lot of work for them, but basically it's the most cumbersome, insanely complex, unlimited system you could possibly have. And it really lends itself to rip offs and corruption and all the rest of it. It does. It's all sorts of stories about it. If you want to help people, why don't we learn from what the Indians do? They simply target people who are poor and they put money in their bank account. No bureaucrats, nothing. Just straight to the people that need it. Let them make the decisions about their own lives. India, more money with far less cost to the taxpayer.

Would you say that Medicare is a successful Australian institution?

I'd say visits to the doctor basically shouldn't be free. I think it encourages bad medicine. One of the reasons that it's bad. I went to see my doctor this morning, now I pay extra and I sit for half an hour and go through my health. That's what I want. I want a proper consultation. When you have a Medicare standard rebate, you go in, yeah, what's your problem? Here's a script. Next script out, you've got to churn them through. Churn them through. It's really, really bad medicine. What should happen is that people should pay for basic medicine and then the society should step in when there's a bigger problem, like someone needs to go to hospital, something of that nature. Making medicine free makes poor quality medicine and it's grossly overused. They did a study in America where they actually had randomly chosen groups of people. Some were given free Medicare, like Australia, others had to pay for their basic cost. Now the people that were given it free loved it, they thought it was fantastic. But if you look at the health differences, there were none. They weren't any better off. Even though they visited the doctor twice as often and people may not want to, they might be better off going to see a naturopath because most of the reasons people go to see doctors are for chronic illnesses. Like if you wanted to have a cesarean birth, for example. Yeah, you need a really good doctor, surgical team, hospitals, sterilized and the rest. But if you're just feeling bad, if you're feeling down, a naturopath, even a homeopath would be a far better option quite often because doctors just shove pills down your throats.

Yeah, I mean, I'm interested in this. I mean, I spoke before about the inherent Australian urge to cut corners and how, you know, there might be some concerns if we left undercooked property developers start building high density housing with limited checks and balances, as we have seen in Sydney. No, I spoke about the inherent urge of Australians to cut corners. But there's also this, I mean Australian, particularly amongst men, this Australian condition where we don't take our health seriously. Many would say, many would say that men do not get the checks when they should. Many say men don't get their skin checked, they don't get their prostate checked, they don't get their testicles checked, they don't get these checks that they should really start getting after a certain age. Do you think that I'm putting down, making it, you know, I guess costly to go see a GP would, would add another barrier to the great Australian stoic.

Well, they're not doing it anyway, are they? And partly it's because they don't have any particular thing, but you go to the doctor with a specific pill problem, you get a pill often, antibiotics, even when you don't need them. And then you go, they don't have time to listen. I've had cases like, for example, I had a, I found myself getting asthma one side. I'll give you an example how this works. I had a problem, something ages 65. I started getting asthma. I went to see a couple of gps. They said, okay, you need these puffer things that dampen down your immune system. And then they sent me to a specialist who said, yeah, you need two morning, two nights. Okay, very brief consultation, just. Yeah, yeah, okay, that's your problem. Pill, pill, you know, here's some medicine for it. Then I started doing some reading and I thought why does a 65 year old suddenly get ASPA? And I said, smoke. Now, just that winter, for the first time in my life, I bought a place, country place, that had an open, somewhat smoky fireplace. I got this fireplace done, I put a stove in there and my asper all but disappeared overnight. Now what? One doctor, not one specialist even asked me, me what had changed which would have taken them maybe a two minutes to go through it. Whereas my current doctor, who I, who's not like that, I go to. I had a problem with pain, with headaches, I was getting mild headaches and I said, what's the cause? He sat down with me, okay, is it this is it, this is it, this is it, this is it, this is it, this. Ah, yes, that's it. Changed that. No more headaches, no pills, nothing. Just time, listening. Doctors don't do that because the whole medical system is against it. And often the solution to these problems is not another pill or even if it's the hospital, it's just consultation about lifestyle, what you do, how you live, exercise, diet, less stress, all these kinds of things. Meditation. There's lots of different things you can do with chronic illnesses and doctors are not very good at that at all.

Is that to do with cost cutting within the health system? Like Australia ranks, I believe, top or one of the top countries in the world for its healthcare and comparatively to the United States, which you just mentioned there before, which pretty much ranks dead last in terms of wealthy countries for its health outcomes. And I understand that there's obviously, you know, for a lot of things there might be too close a relationship between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers and the ease of which you can provide medicine and pills, as you say, to people and the quick get fixes. But in terms of doctors not being able to sit down and listen, doesn't that come back to the fact that I think they have, whatever it is, seven minutes in terms of time that they can bill Medicare for, so they need to quickly race through and move. If we allowed doctors and we compensated doctors, you know, whatever to their demands, which they're asking for a little higher, and we brought more doctors into the system and we trained more doctors properly to allow them to sit down and have the times and figure out that the new fireplace in your house is causing your asthma, wouldn't that help with health outcomes even more?

Yeah, if you wanted to double our health spending and have many more GPs and allow them to spend half an hour. But where do you get the money from? At the moment we're actually running deeply into debt. We're a prosperous society with massive. And we're getting, we're getting more and more debt every year goes by. It's ballooning out of control. What are you going to cut back on? Are you going to charge higher taxes to people who are already struggling? That's a very tough. If you make anything un cost nothing, you'll get a lot of it. If we made alcohol free, you'd have massive problems with alcoholism. All I'm saying is a person should be able to pay enough as much going to see a doctor as they do buying a packet of cigarettes, for example. Why is it okay, why can you, why can you afford a packet of cigarettes but you can't afford going to see a doctor?

Jim, these are interesting points you're making and I have to say that politically you probably, if you were running a political party with these, you know, as much as I'm appreciating your perspective and you're making me think quite a lot. What you just said then was very similar to what Joe Hockey said in the 2014 razor budget where he said a visit to the GP will cost half a pack of cigarettes and the seven dollar co payment for a GP visit. Now.