Transcript of AE 1234 - The Goss: The Voice. Are You Voting YES or NO?

Dad, how's it going?

Good. Pete, how are you?

Good. Giving them an overdose of Goss episodes recently.

Oh, really? An overdose of Goss. There has to be a word for that, but I'm not sure what it is.

Goss-dose.

Hang on. Sorry about- apologies in advance. There we go.

It's a Pepsi, guys. Don't worry.

Close to the microphone. Look at your cat.

Oh, is this Peaches sitting up the..

.. statue cat.

I know.

Very impressive.

So, sorry. A good story for radio, as they say. It's an entirely visual gag.

Yeah, I'm trying to find the person who requested it. Medina. So it was Medina who said "Do you reckon you could do an episode explaining the simple direct terms, explaining in simple and direct terms the referendum happening in in a month or so." So it's happening in I think ten days, right? 11 days? No.

Ten days.

Is it the 13th?

14th.

14th? Saturday? The 14th. Yeah. So the Voice referendum.

Yes.

You're much more versed in this. I haven't really been.

I can hear the bus backing up now.

I haven't been too deep into it. Besides sort of determining that I want to vote "Yes", you know, I'll put my cards on the table straight away.

Did I?

I think I kind of initially was a bit umming and aahing, but then when I did do my sort of basic level research, which was effectively looking at different news, trying to get the conservative and the, the what, having a brain fart today, what is it, the progressive side of the, the news landscape's view on things and then sort of determining my, my opinion of it.

But initially my, my first reaction was like, nah, screw that. Just based on the, the propaganda that I was hearing. Because yeah, I guess when you hear negative propaganda where they are allowed to effectively just make up whatever they want, lie, of course you freak out. But but that's the hard part of being a sort of responsible voter is trying to sift through the BS..

And unfortunately now. And look, we'll get back to describing The Voice in a few minutes. But unfortunately, now the political landscape in many Western countries is the same, and that is the media, who ideally are responsible for reporting the news. If at risk, and in many cases they do take sides. But mostly they're they're not wanting to risk the perception that they are taking sides. So they give what they claim is a balanced viewpoint. And that is, if there is anything that is controversial, they will want to have both sides of the argument expressed. And the trouble with that is that on many things, there is no other side. The controversy is simply made up by the people who don't like what is going to be proposed or happening and so on. And so you get these stories in the media where you're constantly getting his.

In the case of the The Voice referendum, here's the 'yes' version, and here's the 'no' version. But the story is about the 'yes' version, because we've got somebody saying, this is what we think are going to happen. And in order to balance it, they have some idiot making crap up on the other side and giving that equal weight where there is no equal weight!

I think that that's the most frustrating aspect to it, because, you know, when you do look into the no campaign for The Voice, there are people who are genuinely, I wouldn't say concerned but have genuine, genuine grievances based on actual facts. Right? But then it seems like with a lot of these things, whether it's about evolution or climate change, that the the against side generally, then start making up stuff in order to try and win the debate and actually aren't doing it based on proper terms, proper issues. And that's that's the part that frustrates me to no end. It's like I have no problem having the debate or discussing these things, but can we actually just talk about what is actually going on and what it really means? And instead of making up crap, that is just a waste of our time.

And when, and this is happening unlike- and you mentioned climate change or evolution, which are fairly non-controversial scientific terms in the scientific world, but people who don't want to believe them can come up, and you can have a legitimate debate about that, because people will tell you why they believe one thing and why they believe, and others will tell you why they believe something else.

But when politics are involved, as this is because this is a political thing, then typically the unless it's a very trivial thing and there's bipartisan as in both major sides of the of politics will will support it..

Because this is no reflection on our ability to get voted in in the next election.

Exactly! But as soon as there's a partisanship in it, it will fall down party lines as to where the arguments go and the trouble we have in this case. And we will talk about The Voice, and it keeps getting called The Voice. The idea of having a voice to Parliament for Indigenous people has come from indigenous people for decades. They have always said that as the first people of this country, they should have. And well, I go back a step. They've had nearly 250 years of being treated very badly and then people will go, oh no, they haven't, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know, they, they live now in a modern, wealthy Western world, so they're better off than they would have been. That's all a different argument. What they're, what they're saying is that we were the original people on this country when- they're not saying we want a voice to to everything that goes on in the country.

What they're saying is, when there are issues that involve Indigenous people, we should be asked our opinion.

Yeah.

We should be able to ask our opinion when something is important to us, or if we've got something that's important to us, we should have a voice to Parliament where we can put a submission and do those things. Now you can do that anyway. Any person in Australia can submit an idea or a question. Oh, you wrote to our local member and the Minister for energy a while ago about an issue with solar energy. So any person can do that.

But what they're saying is that the indigenous people of Australia need a single voice, rather than just disparate groups doing things. So that's the essence of what they're asking for. And that's what the referendum is. And a referendum for those people who don't understand the the way that our political system works is that our Constitution, which was originally written in the late 19th century, we became a country in 1900. Our Constitution is basically saying this is how the country operates. It contains very little detail. It's really just the framework or the concepts that the legislation, the rules and the laws in the country will work under. In order to change that constitution, you actually have to have a national vote on on it. So if you want to delete something or you want to add something, you have to have a vote on the changing the wording in the Constitution.

And that's what this is. It's the first one we've had in 25 years.

Yeah.

And and so this one is simply wanting to add those lines. To say that we recognise as a country, we recognise the indigenous people and that they should have a voice to Parliament, not a voice to the government. And that's the question that comes up. They're not telling the government what to do..

And they don't have veto power.

And they have no veto power. There's no- they don't have the 'We're going to do this. What do you think?' might be the question, but what you think might influence us. But you don't have the right to say yes or no. So it's it, it's effectively a way of giving them a literally a voice in what happens, with no power.

That's it. So the, the referendums on October the 14th, on Saturday and the law to vote on is, I think I quote, a proposed law to alter the Constitution to recognise the first peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration? Right? Yes or no is what you'll see.

Yes.

On the..

So basically you get handed a piece of paper. So typically with an election you get handed a piece of paper with the people who are running in your local electorate. And you get to the way our electoral system works is that you get to put in your order of preference one, two, three, four, five, six, down to whatever number.

This is just a single box.

This is a single question. And you write yes or no.

And so yeah, I was watching one of these sort of what would you say info videos on this stuff. And they were saying what's the voice? An independent advisory body making representations to Parliament, so not to the government on issues directly affecting First Nations people. Members would be chosen by First Nations communities from each of the states and territories and Torres Strait Islands. And so what can it do? Provide advice and guidance. What can it do? Make laws, manage funding, veto parliament decisions? That's what it cannot do.

Yes, exactly.

And so yeah, it's, the Yes campaign argues recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution would create unity and giving them a direct say on laws affecting them would lead to better outcomes in areas such as jobs, health, education and justice.

And the No campaign argues that the proposal risks legal challenges, delays and dysfunctional government, claiming it would divide the nation by race and would be a permanent change. One of the well, I guess it is. It is a permanent change.

No it's not, and that's the point. So none of those things is actually true.

Okay. And that when you break them down you..

That's what they argue.

That is their argument. And that's the problem that we have, is that when you have a social, emotional or political motivation to vote against something, but you actually have no reason to do it, then you make stuff up.

And so all of the No campaign is based around, and this is obviously a political bias that I have, because I will be voting yes, have not voted yet because we do have early voting allowed. But all of the things that the no campaign bring up fall into three categories. Either they are just outright lies. Or they are straw man arguments in a sense that they are, they're putting up another argument that might sound like it is related and arguing this. That might be true, but it's actually irrelevant to the real story, or it's political opportunism.

And there are small number of indigenous people who have been loud proponents of of voting no, but they don't come up with any reason not to.

Well, I think the best, the best one I've heard is that it's a trivial thing that's not actually going to make any difference. Which again..

No harm, no foul.

Exactly. Yeah.

This is one of these ones of- and I remember..

We should at least try.

I probably shouldn't put words into Professor Pearson's into his into his mouth. Noel Pearson, who is one of our well established indigenous leaders. He I'm sure he was the first one who said 'This is not a No vote, that they are talking about. This is a yes and, or a yes plus.'

The Yes does not negate the things that they want to do. In fact, it's a step towards them. And that's why I'm saying it's political opportunism. This is taking the opportunity of creating controversy over something that shouldn't be controversial by saying no when you really support it, but you want more. And so you're not going to get the voice, small voice, you're not going to get the, the focus of the media on you under normal circumstances when you're asking for these things.

But if you say no, then it's immediately controversial. And that way people keep asking you and there's 2 or 3 indigenous leaders in this country, and I use the term leadership loosely, at least loud people who are well known, who are making these outrageous statements all the time. They never get challenged by the media on whether they're factual or not. They just keep getting propped up as, oh, here's the balance, here's the no vote. And that's what irritates me is. Far as I'm concerned, the media should be out there saying, well, and I won't name any of these people when one of them comes along and says, this is this is what may happen, you know, or they're just lying, like, this is a permanent change. No it's not. We're changing the constitution now in a referendum. That's what we're voting for. At any time in the future. We could have another referendum to change it back again or to change the wording of it if it didn't work, and so on. And that's the problem is, it is nothing is permanent. And they know that and it's a lie. And the media let them get away with it.

Well, I think that's one of the most frustrating things when you know that politicians in particular, who definitely know how the Constitution works, they do.

And if they don't, they shouldn't be doing that job!

Yeah, propping up those kinds of falsehoods.

Yeah. And then..

That's where I get confused because I'm like, it's a change to it. That's, when I think permanent. I'm like, you've changed the thing. But yeah, we can vote to to effectively reverse it or add something else in in the future.

Yeah. And the other one that is driving me crazy with it is and this is the straw, the classic straw man argument that they keep coming up with is 'we need to see more detail'. And it's a straw man argument because.

.. can say that every time..

Of course, you can, of course you can. But it's a straw man argument in a sense that they know it's not correct. Because the Constitution, in its very definition, does not define how things operate. They just say, this is what should happen. This is this thing should exist. How it will actually work is up to the Parliament. And ironically, many of the politicians who are voting no are members of Parliament.

They will be the ones that get a say in how it will actually operate. They know that and yet they're going. The detail will never be in the Constitution. They know the detail will never be in there. But they're saying we can't vote yes until we know. And somebody said it the other day, here's a here's a copy of the Australian Constitution. Go and look up Prime Minister in there. It doesn't exist. You know, the details of how our Parliament operates is not written into the Constitution.

The Constitution just says there will be a parliament that will be elected by the people. And this is how the elections will happen. It doesn't say there will be a prime minister and there will be a leader of the opposition, and there'll be a minister for underwater basket weaving. It actually just says, you know, it's the big picture stuff.

And that's the irritating thing again, is that the No vote is constantly coming up with this rubbish because it's about fear and misdirection. And when you've got no reason to do something, the only thing you can fall back on is the emotions of people. So make them frightened of something that isn't going to happen, but let them believe it.

You wonder what they have to get out of it, right? Like the liberals who are effectively championing championing this. It's kind of like really, they just need to take the opposing view so that they can shore up their voter base.

Right. It's they don't want to see the Labour Party, the Labour government have a win.

Yeah. And that's, that's the side of politics in general that just irritates me when it's kind of like you're just opposed because you have to be, in order to differentiate yourself and maintain your vote. Because, yeah, if you just agree with them and say, you know what, they're doing the right thing, well then everyone's going to be like, 'Well, why would we vote for you?'.

I know, but again, there's but if if they looked a little bit deeper, and I keep saying they. If in this case Peter Dutton, who is the leader of the opposition, the head of the Liberal Party. If he and his Liberal Party cronies, who are the ones that are out mostly spouting for the No vote, and interestingly, you almost never hear him say why. He's he's he he knows that all the arguments for No are either lies, political opportunism or straw man arguments.

So he won't say them, but he keeps saying, 'I don't want this to happen.' Yeah, I'll have my own referendum to recognise indigenous people. Well, they're already recognised in the Constitution that happened in 1967. But that so the reason he does it is because he doesn't want the Labour Party to have a win. The stupid thing is that if he instantly, when this referendum had been called or spoken about, if he'd just come out and just said, 'Yep, this is bipartisan, we think it's a great idea.'

Almost everybody who is a Liberal supporter would have gone, 'Yes, thank you for saying that. We'll keep supporting you.' But it's this divisive thing of we have to divide ourselves from the Labour Party to be seen to be different. Therefore we vote for us. People don't vote for you because you're different. They vote for you because you're right. And that's...

I think that's the cynical side of it too, where they say, you know, one of those big arguments is it's going to divide the nation on race and it's like, feels much more like it's politics than it's dividing us by.

Where's all the division here? The division is coming from the people who are voting No saying 'This will divide the country!'

Yeah.

The other side yes is saying 'No, it's not, it's not going to divide the country. It will actually join us together by allowing us to listen.'.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so why add it to the Constitution? The request for a voice to be enshrined in the nation's founding document came from Indigenous Australians in the proposal, known as the Uluru Statement from the heart. And the reason that Albanese is bringing this referendum forward is because he promised to do so at the election.

He did.

So. He's respecting their wishes because that's what he said he was going to do. The no campaign says there should be recognition, but not in the Constitution. So to succeed, it needs a majority nationally, and it also needs a majority in a majority. Four of the six states. And territories don't count.

Don't count.

Suck, then ACT.

Well, they don't have enough population to count. So.

And it's compulsory to vote. So yeah.

Yes. Or at least as I as I have to technicality. Yeah. And this is the I have this argument with.

The donkey vote.

By American and British family and friends and in America and Britain and in fact, most countries in the world that don't have mandatory voting.

Does Britain not have it?

No.

Oh, wow.

And so we have mandatory voting in this country. But it essentially what it is, is compulsory turning up. So you have to get your name crossed off at a polling booth or an electoral commission office to say you turned up to vote. You can simply throw your election paper away or you can write on it. My father, who is British. He sort of objected morally to to mandatory voting, being forced to vote. Yeah. So he used to turn up and write. None of the applicants is suitable. Wow.

And so, you know, to to be transparent, I did that in the last, I think, local election just because I really had no idea about any of the applicants. And so like and again, I kind of felt like, look..

Local elections, you don't even have to turn up because they post, they post the stuff to whatever state like it was.

Maybe it was the state election then, but I showed up and just had my name ticked off and she was like, here are your papers. And I'm like, it's okay, throw them out. And just walked away. And she was like, what? But that was, you know, no fun for me.

But as long as you got your name crossed off, you're fine.

Exactly. Yeah. So anything else worth find worth mentioning?

Vote yes.

The voice? Yeah, we need to do more topics that Dad's so passionate about and gets riled up over.

Yeah, well, there aren't many.

I wonder how many negative reviews the podcast is going to get now.

Yeah, well, look. And that's fine. I'm perfectly happy for people to disagree with me even when they are wrong. And- that's a fairly big tongue in cheek. But I am passionate about this for two- three reasons. One, because I honestly believe that as a country, since European colonisation, we have treated our Indigenous people worse than we have treated other people. Whether that be badly or not as well or whatever. It doesn't matter. They have been, they have been behind the..

.. Trying to do has not been working.

No. And that's and so, and that's the point is that we have spent billions of dollars over 200 years, pounds and dollars trying to fix what we perceive as problems. And I say we as, and I'm allowed to say this as a grumpy old white man. What we perceive as being the problem, what this does is give Indigenous people an opportunity to have a say in what goes on.

The second part of it that I am really passionate about is the the way that people who oppose things are allowed to get away with just lying and making things up by the media. And that irritates me so much. And it's and we you've talked about evolution and climate change.

It's like, let's at least..

Show me the evidence!

.. facts.

Yeah, show me the evidence.

At the end of the day..

Give me justifications. Don't just make stuff up.

It's just a waste of time. If everyone's fighting over straw men on both on..

The trouble is, it's more than a waste of time because I hand over my heart. I hope this gets up, but my head is saying that the no vote probably won't win, but they won't win in enough states.

Yeah.

The overall vote, I think will..

So we'll get the majority..

The majority, but we won't. I don't believe they'll get the four out of the six states.

What do you reckon? Which states if you were to put.

Well I think Victoria and New South Wales will probably vote Yes.

Yeah.

Tasmania might.

Oh Queensland is a race.

Queensland and Western Australia probably won't. If you read between the lines in what in what's going on there? South Australia may be the key state to fall over the line.

Yeah. Don't know.

Yeah. Well place your bets guys.

Place your bets.

But yeah I mean it's one of those things I was sort of like do I really want to get into this sort of quagmire of thing?

But it's answering a question.

Yeah, 100%.

.. asks the question.

100%, it's worth talking about. I'm going to be voting yes. At the end of the day, guys, if you are voting no, you know you don't have to try and cancel the Aussie English Podcast. You're allowed to still, you're allowed to still learn with my material and use it.

I've got I've got friends that I know are know proponents and will vote no. And they're still going to be my friends. I've been, I argue with them, but they're still going to be my friends. They know I'm going to argue with them.

Anyway, thanks for hanging out. Hopefully that's helped. I'm not sure if it was simple and indirect and simple terms, but we did our best.

Well, the trouble is it is a notionally a simple idea, but it is so complex because of the way it's all been wound out.

But hopefully it's helped you, I guess, learn a bit more about.

Was it Medina?

What's going on? What's that> Yeah, it was Medina.

Yeah. Thanks, Medina.

Good stuff. Anyway, see you later.

Bye.

Transcript of AE 1231 - The Goss: What Will Australia Look Like in 2063?

G'day, you mob. Pete here. And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news. Whether locally down under here in Australia or non-locally, overseas in other parts of the world. Okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right? If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in the Goss.

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time.

Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising. And that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird. And let's get into it.

All right, Dad, What's going on?

Hey, Pete. We're getting old.

Why is that?

Well, you know, the...

Sitting on the couch.

The Intergenerational Study of Australia just got released by the federal government with this study. Yeah, This study of what are we going to look like in 40 years time?

Well, I know what you're going to look like.

A bit skinnier and smellier, I suspect.

Well, I think the smell would have left by then. I'll be a little bit of only just ash floating around in the sea.

So, yeah, that's it. I can't. I don't even know if I'll be around in 70 years. Right. I'll be in my 70s.

I can't.

Sorry. Yeah. 40 years in my 70s.

I can't imagine I'm going to be 106, but.

Yeah, well, I don't think most people are. It's crazy. But my grandparents, mum and dad, mum's parents that are still alive. How old? Nana's 90. Right.

She turns 90 next month.

Yeah. And Grandpa's 93. 94?

93.

93. It must be. I have those moments all the time where I'm like, even now, I'm like, I could get cancer tomorrow. I could get. You have that sense of I could die at any moment now. Like when you're a child. It's kind of like all that crap so far. Like, I don't have to worry about that.

I'm bloody eternal, mate. I'm, you know, immortal. And you get to my age now. And now that I have kids and even seeing other people's kids getting things like cancer and that, you're just like, whoa, that is a massive amount of mortality. Just sort of like smacked in your face and you're like, This is not lasting forever. But I was I always think like, what did that in Grandpa. What is it like to be in your 90s where you're kind of like, well, I think I could be dead tomorrow..

But anyone could be. Your mum and I were talking about this the other day, not specifically with her parents, but you know, people in their 90s as an example of. You don't plan for the future.

Yeah, well, that's it. You don't sit down and go, you know..

Sit down and go French. Yeah. Where where's the next overseas holiday we're going to plan to do? Because firstly, because you get to be incapacitated, it's probably a bit strong, but you get to the point where it's harder to sort of travel and stuff is just much more difficult to do.

And you're also probably not going to go to places where like Indonesia, where again, no offence to any Indonesians, but but you..

.. Go to a developing country where you're much more likely to get a disease.

Yeah.

Because you know..

Or get sick.

Yeah. Well you just get sick when you're there and so on.

I can't imagine. Yeah. That you and grandpa going to Delhi in India or whatever and just walking through the slums or something, it's like, yeah, this is a pretty quick way to end it if you're 90 years old.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Want to die of dysentery, Really?

I know, But yeah, I've had those thoughts where I'm just like, I wonder what like, do they just, you know, Well, I guess I'm still alive this week, so I'll plan for next week, you know, or next month or. And is that liberating? Is it a prison? You know, do you imagine it's just a day by day, kind of just potter around..

You can plan for the short term future. It's not like, oh, I'm just I'm living in a lost world. I got nothing to do. But but there isn't that. Oh, what are we going to do in five years, ten years time? You know, where are we going to invest our finances? You know, all of that sort of stuff is, well, we're just cruising now. Let's just enjoy it.

Yeah, I wonder. It must be just so weird, too, when you get to Grandpa's age in particular. Well, it may even be weirder for Nana. In fact, it's probably weirder for Nana where Grandpa has almost been retired for my entire life.

Yeah.

Like, so, you know, for my entire life, he.. It's been, you know, 30 something years since he's had a job, a proper job. And for Nana, it's probably even longer, right? Because since she started really having kids, I think they went, she went back to work for a little while. While they were small.

They paid off the farm.

Yeah. And then, you know, she just tapped out and was a stay at home, you know, mum effectively. So she probably hasn't worked for 50 plus years. Right. And it just must be such a weird position to be in where..

Work has not been in paid employment.

Yeah. Income, I mean yeah. But yeah. So I have those thoughts all the time where I'm like, Yeah, you just always assume you're going to get to 100 or so, right? When you think of the future, Well, I'm not going to die when I'm 60, right? What about 70? No. And then you're like, Well, there are plenty of 70 year olds that die. So, you know, look at the curve of of, you know, age.

Yeah.

But yeah. So what do you think of things in that, in those sorts of, I don't know, terms. Do you, are you planning for 50 years out, 20 years out, ten years out, five years out?

Five.

A week?

Well, you plan for the rest of your life in the broad sense. Not in a specific sense.

Yeah,

That's because obviously, you know, your mum and I have just been retired now. Well, I've been retired for four years. Her for a year and a half. Two years.

Yeah.

And you sort of plan for your retirement and then when you get there you go. Okay, well what's the next plan? And it's a lot less significant, I think. So. You know, I've been working on this camper van. That was a plan for a while, and now that's nearly finished.

Yeah, I feel like I don't know what most people are like.

Projects, rather than life.

Grandpa. I don't know. Nana's probably like that to some extent. Mum's like it, where you do, you need something to be working on, or working towards or..

Project? Yeah, that's what I look at it and go, There's got to be something to do.

Yeah. So anyway, Intergenerational Report. Six charts that show what Australia could look like in 40 years.

Older, more skilled.

40 years older. Yeah, it was interesting. So I guess number one is an ageing population, right? Australians are living longer and they're having, having fewer children. Even with net migration accounted for, the Government is predicting slower population growth and lower workforce participation due to ageing. This is probably going to be seen everywhere, you know, in the Western world in particular. I think probably places in Asia and maybe Africa might not experience this.

What are they suggesting? In 40 years time Australia's population will be about 40 million.

I assume that's what it's going..

In my life. So my memory, 60 years. Australia's population has tripled.

Yeah.

In 60 years. So they're saying in the next 40 years Australia's population will probably only add about 60% to its current. So it's not even going to double.

Yeah.

So that's a significant slowdown in population growth.

Well, there's so many reasons underneath that, right? But yeah, what does it say here? What does this mean: With older Australians spending more years in good health, it's predicted they'll be- they'll- there will be rising demand for government funded services like aged and disability care. And with fewer children, it's predicted the size of the workforce relative to the dependent population will fall. Yeah, so that's, I guess, Japan's kind of ahead of the curve with that. Way ahead, right? Because they have had very few children per person for a long time.

Yes.

And I think their migration is very, very, very limited. How many people actually migrate there and integrate into the Japanese population. And they live so long. Yeah, that's the other double edged sword. I think Japanese people tend to be healthier and live much longer lives. At least that's the stereotype. You always hear about The oldest person in the world is this little Japanese woman from a tiny island where they're all vegetarians.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, and they all live with ten cats and it just keeps them calm and.. But yeah. What do you think it's going to mean for me, if I get to 70 years old? I guess that would be probably about the time I'm retiring. I imagine the age of retirement is going to push back slightly because the cost of living..

Again, retirement is a difficult one when you're self-employed like you are. That, you could keep working forever, you know. How much time and effort you put into it is different. Whereas if you're working in paid employment and somebody else pays you to do a job, then that's a sort of a much more of a cold cut off. But look, I think there's there's going to be less of that, though. I think there'll be more people working part time into their old age. Because we're just not going to be, we as a country, and individuals therefore, are simply not going to be able to afford a whole lot of things. We have the, the interesting challenge with this, that was the number one thing that came out of that intergenerational report. The consequence of that is that we just have to increase taxes now to pay for people in their retirement in 40 years time. And increasing taxes is a very unpalatable thing to do. Even if every person in Australia agrees that it is the right thing to do. 50% of the population who are more conservative in their politics will say, Oh no, we can't.

We'll just leave it up to the market. We can't increase taxes. That's just the, you know, you're just hammering people, you know, where where it hurts and know, well, you're going to hammer them later when it hurts, when there's no health care, no aged care. No.

Or you'll be hammering..

Disability care..

Hammering the working population at that point later. Right.

But but that working population will be a smaller proportion of the current population. So you're going to hit them even harder to be able to do it. So and that's one of the challenges when you do these sort of long term reports is so what what are the what is a government, not necessarily this government, but what's the next 2 or 3 governments, given that we live on a three year government cycle in federal politics. What are they going to do to respond to this? And I suspect the answer will be nothing. Because it's, anything you do is going, is likely to be unpalatable to a majority of the population. And so you don't want to be the government that comes in and says we're going to plan for 40 years time, so we're going to increase taxes because the opposition are just going to go, well, we're not. And who who's going to get the votes, you know, So.

Do you think? Like, what do you think is going to happen with aged care? Do you think more people are going to go into aged care homes, facilities, or do you think that they would remake how it works and change that?

Well, there has to be there has to be something happen. I don't know what it will look like.

Because aged care for the average person is pretty horrifying, right? Like you don't want to go to aged care.

Well, most people don't, don't see that as a, as the the goal optimal choice.

Yeah.

The optimal end of life choice. Because when you go into aged care, there's no coming back. You know, there might be a few people time. Yeah, it's sort of. Well, here we go. I'm just going to go and sit there for ten years.

And then I'll come out.

Then I'll come out and live by myself again. It's just never going to happen.

Yeah.

And I'm saying it quite flippantly, but it's, you know, it really is the the end of life sentence, not a death sentence, because you could live in aged care for 30 years. But it's the end of your life choices, I suppose.

Yeah. And giving up so many of your freedoms. Right. Because I think you can't really just walk out of..

Well, a lot of them you can, depending on the style of care you're in. If you're in a care where you are incapable of looking after yourself, then you're effectively locked down. You're not going to be allowed. I'm just going to go and walk down the street, go go for a coffee or something. But plenty of aged care places. It's, it is just a place to live that you no longer have to worry about..

Retirement living.

Yeah. Retirement living where there is, you know, low level medical care on on call or available but you're not in a hospital bed being looked after.

Yeah. Okay. Number two was a higher skilled workforce. It's no surprise, right? The ongoing digital and technological transformation is expected to continue to raise incomes and quality of life. It's also expected to increase the demand for specialised skills and to change the nature of work. In particular, employment is anticipated to grow in the service services industries, including things like health care and social assistance, education, blah blah, blah. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. I guess it'll mean that people, in order to get jobs that pay a decent amount of money and you know, there'll be more of those jobs available probably because of, you know, AI taking over all the simple ones or automation. You're going to have to go to university or, you know..

Some form of further education.

Of education. Yeah. And it seems like that's, when you look at the graph, it has like, you know, the graphs got a bunch of different lines for Certificate one and secondary education, then certificate two and three, CERT four, and then associate degree, advanced diploma or diploma and then bachelor's degree or higher. And pretty much the only one that is really skyrocketing is the bachelor's degree or higher. And that's, yeah, going from 20 to 34%. It's almost doubling.

And there's obviously this is modelled and we don't know what. I haven't read the whole report. I presume the report has the, you know, the way the modelling was done described. But I my immediate reaction to that is if you just look now, if their assumption is that people are going to want to get university degrees because I think they're going to get paid more money, that has never stood up because certainly not in my lifetime and, you know, earning more money over your life. And you're a good example. I'm a good example. You know, your mum and I, you know, we were unemployed as such until our late 20s because we were university students all that time. We were earning a bit of money along the way. But you were the same.

Well, I felt totally behind the curve.

You got three degrees.

Yeah.

But until you're..

11 years at university, almost as long as..

Until you were 30 years old..

.. In high school combined.

You weren't working full time. And and so people who went left school at 18 did not go to university. They might have gone to some form of further education, but went out and got a job or an apprenticeship or went into retail and service. You don't need a degree or a qualification to go and work in a cafe or a shop assistant and you end up going into a management stream in in retail as an example. That's a natural thing. They were earning a reasonable amount of money from the age of 18.

I think that's one of those things,

Not as much as most people who who who, when they step out of, say, a university degree, will be earning more money in their first year than somebody who 4 or 5 years before went into. But five years on, that person is going to be earning more money and they've got five years of earning behind them.

Yeah.

So and but you then throw on top of that, trades. Building trades is a good example. Your average electrician and plumber is earning much more than your average person with a degree.

Yeah.

You know, 2 or 3 years out of finishing their qualification..

It's crazy because that's not the norm in most other countries.

It's not. It's not. And you know, realistically, I'm perfectly happy with that. If I go to the bank and want financial advice, I'm perfectly happy to think I can evaluate that and judge it. If I want a plumber to come and fix my toilet. I want somebody who can fix the bloody toilet!

And do it well.

And do it well! Because I can't do it, you know? That's so.

And no amount of really Googling..

And no amount of training..

.. That you would actually become a plumber.

Training, in inverted commas, is going to help me. So I think I think there will be an element of that. And this one was clearly this graph was just clearly related to level of qualification. But that will depend on the type of qualification somebody who goes and does a cert for in childcare is never going to be earning a lot of money. Now that's a disgrace for me. But, but somebody who does a cert for a certificate level four in Electrical engineering. They're not going to get a university degree in engineering, but they're going to become an electrician, is going to be earning quite a lot of money potentially. Or plumbing or carpentry or know.

I remember that there was a guy at school called Rick. I remember a primary school, and he was the year ahead of me and I remember him. I think he left high school in year ten and became a tradie. I'm not sure exactly what if it was an electrician or a builder or a brickie or whatever, but I remember seeing him, I think, when I was like in year 11 or 12. So towards the end of high school and he was already driving around in like a brand new V8, you know, Ford or Holden. And I was just blown away at the fact that he could afford something like that. I think he bought his own house when he was still a teenager, maybe early 20s. And I remember just thinking, what the hell? Like, why are we still at school? Why are we going to uni? This guy's clearly crushing it and making, you know, a decent living and we thought he was a drop kick for leaving school at 16 or whatever in year ten.

One of my favourite stories of those is that I've told you this one before, I suspect is one of the smartest kids I ever taught. I was a high school teacher for ten years. For those who were listening and don't know, one of the smartest kids I ever taught left school after year ten. And when I was talking to her about it and just said, What are you going to do? And she said, I'm going to become a hairdresser. And I looked at her and just went, What? She said. I just like the beauty industry. And. And I bumped into her five years later. She was 21 years old. She owned two hairdressing businesses. Not just the business owned the building that one of them was in and was managing these two businesses. And I went, okay, yeah, It's like, this is a this is clearly a smart kid. And, you know, she went through and did her apprenticeship and everything else. But three years into the business, after finishing her apprenticeship and getting a job, she owned two businesses and including the building that one of them was in. Yeah. And we'll they owned the bank, owned it and allowed her to operate out of it. But.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that's so it just depends on people's motivations and what they want to do. And yeah, obviously this sort of survey, national survey and stuff is, is based on highly generic modelling, but.

Well, and the hardest thing is I think for kids at school, you know, so many of them probably want to leave because they don't like school, but there's probably only such a small fraction of those who are wanting to leave because they are genuinely like, This is a waste of my fucking time.

Yeah, generally.

I could be out there crushing it, doing other stuff.

Your cousin, good example. He became a bricklayer.

Yeah.

And then he's moved into landscape paving and doing that sort of stuff.

Yeah.

You know, I don't have no idea how much he earns, but I'm sure it's a lot more than I earned when I was, you know, certainly when I was 30 years old.

Yeah, Well, and that's it, I guess. But yeah, high school, all that sort of thing. It's sort of for the, the average, right, for the majority in terms of it's built to be able to take care of what the average avatar of you know a child.

Yeah.

In educating them is, and those outliers who could just leave and do a lot better unfortunately you know, quite often just get pushed through the system and get convinced to go to uni.

And the hard thing now is, is that, you know, I grew up in about the changeover period in the 60s and the 70s from, you know, most well when I grew up, it was men who had lifetime jobs. You know, women didn't. But you know, obviously by the time I started working, women were working and stayed working. But, you know, so my parents and grandparents, it was, you know, my father and my grandfathers and things, they went out and got their job and they had this. My father was quite unusual because he was in the military. And then, you know, he worked in. But when he came to Australia the second time, when he after he'd married my mum, he had the same job for the rest of his working career. He worked in insurance, car insurance. Very few people now are going to be going through school thinking, what do I want to do for the rest of my life? What training do I need in school? And immediately after school that is going to set me up to do this job for 40 years.

I'm going to be a scissor put-er it together-er.

Scissor put it together. Yeah, I know. And and so that just that doesn't happen now. Education now is much more around a combination of making you employable in a job that you start off in, but also giving you the skill set to be able to change jobs. And you're much better off learning how to learn than you are learning specific skills and information to do a job.

.. Focussed that so much more heavily at school that like learning how to learn well, learning how to went to a school is..

.. Never going to do that. Yeah.

But just in general, it seems like the school systems are not really set up for teaching kids how to be entrepreneurs.

Yeah, but I was. I was a science teacher and, and I remember writing a long response to the in the 1980s. Late 80s. Yeah. Late night. I was a late 80s, early 90s when the national curriculum was being developed. So in nine different curriculum areas. And I wrote a long response to the science curriculum, one that just said, There's no science in this. There's a whole lot of information in it. There's a whole lot of facts that you're expecting people to know. But it's not science. Science is a process. You need to teach people how to think what the scientific method is about evidence and and understanding, you know, experimentation and those sort of things.

And I actually got a response, a written response, because I actually knew the guy who was the coordinator of the science curriculum development, and he said, Yep, I know, but here's what it is. Nobody, nobody's ever going to care. It's it's you need to know these facts and that's not science. So.

All right. Number three, hotter temperatures. So, yeah,

Well, yeah,

Climate change.

Well, and this is an interesting one because clearly this is not a predictive modelling based on human behaviours. This is just a fact of science, funnily enough.

Well, yeah. What does it say here? The government anticipates hotter temperatures basing its projections on data from the from BOM Bureau of Meteorology under a scenario where global temperatures increase by up to three degrees Celsius by 2100, Australia's national average temp is projected to increase by 1.7 Celsius. I guess that's by 2063. So, yeah, it's interesting. They've got like two heat maps of Australia.

Yeah.

Showing the sort of increase in. Yeah. You would hate to live in regionalist Central Australia or the WA Western Australia.

The consequences, the consequences of that is not just humans putting up with increased temperatures. The consequence is mostly for agriculture.

Well, and people working outside though, right? Like many of those jobs where you're outside hot places.

But yeah, human behaviour, we can we can work our way around that.

Yeah.

But in the case of agriculture, if we increase and there was some modelling done in the background to this thing of if we increase the, the average temperature in the country by two degrees Celsius in that 40 year period, I think there would be they were talking about something like a 20% decrease in productivity, agriculturally. If it goes to four degrees, effectively agriculture stops.

You wonder though, like I mean they make those sorts of predictions, but you wonder. One, how long it would take people to work out ways around that. Because you know, it's not going to happen overnight. It'll be a gradual thing and you should hope.

But we're talking about it happening in 40 years.

Yeah, but you should expect people to have enough time to work out a solution, hopefully a local one, where we work out different ways of irrigation or cooling or whatever it is. But then you also wonder how long does it take for the agriculture? Well, the different types of crops to adapt or the different types of animals that are, you know, to adapt to those hotter temperatures or for us to select for, you know, and that I guess that ties into the first bit finding a solution.

But 40 years is a, that's a pretty rapid change.

Yeah. But you look at things like the chicken, the size change in, in chicken mass. Right. How long it takes for a chicken to grow to to maturity for it to be harvest killed and harvested to be bought as a a chicken at Woollies and the size of the ones that we actually get today. And it's only been I think since like 1960. So the last 60 years the the animals have like tripled in size and that's more than halved that speed.

That's a combination of of selective pressure where where artificially selecting to increase the growth rate and the ultimate size of these animals. But it's also about, you know, what drugs can we provide to to increase that growth. Whereas when we're talking about and mostly look at crops, if we ignore animals, then looking at crops, very difficult to grow wheat and rice in places where the current wheat and rice grain simply won't grow because that's what where we currently grow them is going to look like in 40 years time.

I wonder how much that's related to the temperature affecting growth or if it's just a water related thing, in which case it's probably as long as you have water..

I'm sure the modelling is holistic, it'll be based on water and so on. But but again, with water, it's we need we've had irrigation in Australia for 150 years in our agriculture industry, certainly in south eastern Australia, and we've destroyed a whole lot of land because of salination. So we can't just keep taking water, natural water out of our water sources and dumping it onto farmland.

We need to be able..

.. To desalinate.

Yeah.

We have to desalinate ocean water and put pure water in.

That's the most sensible thing, right?

Of course it is. And that's that technology is available. But it is so expensive.

Yeah. At least currently.

Currently, yeah.

You wonder. It's like I keep thinking of AI and how that only in the last few years has kind of popped up and the way in which we were talking about AI being a threat to humanity or the kinds of impacts it was going to have only five, ten years ago is completely different from how it's actually impacting us currently. Where the real issue is things like ChatGPT, you know, this blind thing that is able to. You know, answer all these questions, but also fabricate essays and do all of these Like you can now write a novel. Spontaneously.

The problem with that is that that's not true AI.

Well, it depends on how you define..

Because it's. I know, I know. But.

It's morphed into- my point, I guess, is that it's morphed into a thing at the moment that is has all of these other repercussions and issues that we didn't see coming.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's that's something that and I can't remember whether I don't think any of these actually talks about the risks of technology and, and how we're going to overcome that. AI is a good example of that. And you know, ChatGPT is a good example of one where people call it AI, but it's not AI. It's just very good crowdsourcing of information. It's not creating information of its own.

The mimicry, yes. And in terms of things like fraud and scams and.

Oh yeah, of course.

That sort of stuff. And then also obviously that it that it undercuts a lot of jobs that otherwise employed people and require people to do a lot of training, you know and whereas now you can just outsource that to this effectively a dumb AI that's not. It's not conscious but it's able to produce these things that took humans a long time.

They did. But, but.

It's positive and negative.

You have to then have the ability to, to judge the quality of the response. And ChatGPT is, you know, this is this is the the scum on the bottom of the barrel of AI, because that one, you still look at it and go, well, it can only be as good as the input that it's got. It's not making any intellectual decisions of its own.

Not yet.

Yet, exactly.

But I guess my point in bringing that up was it's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next 40 years with climate change and the issues that it poses and the solutions that may arise for certain aspects of it, because you're kind of like what are going to be these kind of like hydrogen bomb discoveries where it just changes the world forever. Like if we can work out a cheap way of desalinating ocean water, what does that mean on a worldwide climate temperature increasing kind of..

The the irony or the irony of these things is that most of the solutions are related to the problem. Because the single problem, the one problem that we have in technology is and it doesn't matter what technology we're talking about is energy. We need energy to drive technology. And the problem that we've got ourselves into is that we've been using really bad forms of energy for technology for 250 years. And so we've got into this climate problem because of that. Now we need new technology to get out of it and what are we going to replace it with? And I was having this, you know, argument would be a. It would be probably an exaggeration, but with your grandmother the other day where she just said we should all just go nuclear, and I said, Well, what are you going to do with the waste? You can bury it in your backyard. I don't want anything to do with it. And, you know, and she sort of looked at me and went, What do you mean?

The problem is, Dad, though, she can bury it in her backyard and it's still your problem.

Well, exactly. But I was making a metaphorical point that.

Yeah.

Yeah. And if we have that knee jerk reaction to Yes, we could solve the world's energy problems tomorrow. By going nuclear across the world, it would cost us trillions of dollars. But what's the outcome of that going to be in 50 years time? We have to have a way of handling those..

It should be in the toolbox. It's one of many options, but it's just it's never that simple of just, Oh, we just do one thing.

I know, but it's but it's one of those things where we don't. And I was just using that as an example of we, we need to be able to look further down the track and predict the consequences of making the decisions that we're making, not just make those decisions under the pressure to fix the problem we currently have, because you don't want to make a bigger problem down the track, that is going to be fatal in a sense that you can't get out of it.

It's interesting, like we're getting slightly sidetracked, but I guess to finish up here, it's sort of interesting at how it seems like from my limited understanding of history, the technologies and the things that we are creating are obviously exponentially increasing in their complexity and advancement, but also the time with which you have to be able to assess the dangers and what's going to happen. And everything is becoming a shorter and shorter time frame like when we started, you know, going through the industrial Revolution and burning fossil fuels.

We've had 300 years or 200 years to sort of see the impacts of that and, you know, try and work it out. AI it's going to be like a number of years, maybe decades, to really, maybe a decade, to be able to plan ahead and not completely fuck ourselves. Right?

See, I don't think it's a decade in AI.

Yeah.

I think it's five years.

Exactly. So it's that's one of those interesting things. Are you finishing up like the last bit here- are you sort of pessimistic or optimistic with humans and their ability to overcome things like climate change? Because it seems like. The annoying thing and the frustrating thing with being a human, and looking at other humans, is that we have the ability. It's like being at university or high school and exams. There's always 1 or 2 students that do everything they're meant to do and they go home. They study every night and they they, you know, work consistently throughout the term to be able to pass the exam and get an A+. Right? 100% maybe. But the average person is like, fuck that. I'm going to cram right at the end with with a week or two to go enough. And it seems like and you get through. And that's kind of been the story of my life with things where I've never been able to consistently chip away at, say, a subject and then be like, go into the exam and be like, I didn't even need to cram. I didn't have to do any heavy study and it worked. I did everything ahead of time. I was prepared, boom. Instead I got passed and I often got good marks, or at least okay marks because I crammed.

And I feel like humans are like that with climate change in particular, where- and so I'm optimistic in the sense that I think we'll come up with solutions. But it really has to be that kind of there's no getting away and the problem has to become significantly worse before we're like, okay, now we're going to pull all our resources and do something about it. Because it's like, yeah, telling the kid there's an exam coming at the end of the semester. He's like, Well, I'm not freaking out and going home and studying tonight for it. I'll study when it gets closer and it gets closer and closer and everyone has their own threshold with like, Fuck, it's tomorrow. Okay. Probably should study. Yeah.

See, for me, there are three parts to this answer. I'm optimistic about the science that we will come up with solutions.

Yeah.

But the other two, the social and the political, I'm extremely pessimistic about.

Do you think that's because the systems and how they're set up?

Well, psychosocial. Humans by their, are in this sort of really bizarre space, socio or psychosocially. In that we are a social species we rely on living with and communicating with and cooperating with other people. But we are inherently selfish.

Yeah.

And so.

It's this game theory.

It is. We are constantly gaming everything. And you throw politics on top of that. And you look at what's happening in the United States at the moment as a good example of that.

Trump just handing himself in.

Well, yeah, but and Trump is the is the pointy end of of the the right wing religious Republicanism that has been going on for the last 30 years in the US. And it's just accelerated to the point of complete stupidity. Now where the majority of individuals that are there, I'm sure, do not actually believe the things that they are saying or the things that they are supporting.

Well, they're just wanting to stay in power.

But they want to stay in power and they want to get in power and they keep force feeding rubbish to people. It's the same as the no vote that we're getting in Australia with the with the voice to Parliament, the Indigenous voice to Parliament. There is not one argument that I have seen in the no vote that actually makes any sense. They're all either lies or misdirection, straw man arguments or just opportunistic grandstanding..

.. start from that base of we need to be against the no vote because we're conservative.

Exactly.

How do we justify it?

We justify it by- exactly. And we find a way of justifying it that even individually they know is not true. But you would rather lie than vote yes to something that the opposition that your opposition came up with.

You know, it's easy to pick on conservatives because we're not particularly conservative, but it does happen on either side. It's the same with the Labour.

Yeah, but no..

Not necessarily with the no vote and the yes vote. But in that idea of we're on this side of politics..

I was just using that as an example..

Toe the line with this and we can't be open minded to change our minds.

The broader political, the broader political pessimism that I have is that because we have this effectively binary political situation in most democracies in the world where you have a right wing, conservative and left wing, more socialist views of the world. The selfish side of that is always going to be politicians are always going to choose to get re-elected rather than do the right thing. And and so the short term decisions are never going to be the good ones. They're never going to be the ones that you go, you know. And we started this conversation up. What's the best thing we could do for Australia in 40 years time? Increase taxes. I'll lose the next election if I say that. So I'm not going to say it.

Yeah.

Therein lies the problem. And and so it's the same with climate change. The best thing we can do is to put a whole lot of time and effort and money into doing things. The only way we can get that money is to spend less money on something else. Whatever we spend less money on is going to be unpopular, so we're not going to do it. And so that's where I'm pessimistic. So I don't know whether that answers the question or confuses it even further. But.

And the last point here is slower labour productivity. This is an interesting one. So I didn't really understand it too well because they only give it like a few sentences. But effectively with all of these changes considered, the government has revised down its long term productivity projections. It moved from a 30 year productivity growth rate of 1.5% per year to a 20 year growth rate of 1.2%. And then, yeah, what does this mean? The Australian economy is projected to grow at a slower pace.

Yeah.

Over the next GDP. So gross domestic product is the productivity over all, not individuals.

Yeah, that's what I was wondering. I'm like, why would that happen? I guess climate change could be argued for that for people say..

Everything is going to be living, living in Australia is going to cost more money.

Yeah.

And so there is only so much that we can do to make money, but we're going to need to spend more. So our overall productivity.

.. be able to sell heat, heat and light.

Well we do. Yeah, I know.

How do we, how do we monetise sand, you know, or desert. Desert land.

Well, we cook the sand. Yeah.

All right, cool. Well, hopefully it wasn't too much of a rant, a negative podcast or a rant, but I wanted, I like that we covered a lot of these topics. We're using a lot of advanced English, so hopefully the people are interested in listening to this episode.

I think we swore once. Well, you might have.

I did, I swear all the time. So.

So do I. But I didn't this time.

It's one of those things you see a lot of people online, especially influencers in this kind of area. They're just like, avoid it. But I always want to try and just be authentic.

Yeah.

This is how I talk. This is the way that people talk.

But that's your..

.. come across.

Yeah. Your business is enabling people to understand how normal conversation goes in this context.

Yeah.

So if you whitewash that and say, Oh, I'm not going to swear, I'm only going to simplify things so you can understand the concepts, then you're missing the point of the conversation.

Yeah. That there's a pun in there somewhere.

Stop fucking swearing.

All right. See you guys.

Transcript of AE 1229 - The Goss: The Matilda’s Have Made Aussies Addicted to Soccer

G'day, you mob. Pete here. And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news weather locally down under here in Australia or non-locally, overseas in other parts of the world. Okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right? If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in the Goss.

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at Aussie english.com to where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising. And that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

All right. Here we are, back on the couch.

Back on the couch? Yeah. You can't use that. That's already. The title's already been used for a football show.

Is it on the couch?

Yeah.

So we are doing some more Goss episodes.

Can open.

Um, what do you want to do first, Dad? Is there a topic you want to talk about? It doesn't have to be a news story. Um.

Oh, well, it's sort of semi news now. Old news. But the Matildas.

Yeah, we can talk about the Matildas. Yeah. Sucked everyone in, huh?

Sucked everyone! Well, certainly in Australia.

That was amazing.

It was, yeah. For those who are completely unaware of women's football, we would call it soccer in Australia because we have so many football codes.

Every time anyone says that my wife Kel is like it's foot football and I'm like, 'Yeah, but it's just too confusing. No one knows what you're talking about if you say football..'

Yes.

And it's the same, I imagine, in the US. Yeah. So that's why they use soccer. And they have there football is gridiron, right?

Yeah, exactly.

But if you are in the UK, I'm not sure. Do they just say football? They they would never say soccer. No. Yeah. But they don't have any other option. Well they got rugby.

I got rugby union.. Rugby league. Yeah.

Yeah. It is weird. You look up 'footy, slang term, Australia' and it's like Australian rules football, rugby union and league and soccer and you just like God.

Yeah. Although it tends not to get used for soccer so much but yeah, but yes, for, for those of you who are being completely oblivious to the Women's World Cup, the Australian team, nicknamed the Matildas, have exceeded all expectations. Not just in performance but in coverage and popularity during the tournament. They broke all time TV records, biggest crowds ever for a women's World Cup. So it's quite amazing.

For a male World Cup as well?

Yeah. Well, not a male World Cup, but.

But in Australia..

Or we never had one. Yeah. Okay.

Because I was going to say, I don't remember ever having this kind of a kerfuffle about..

No. And I think partly it's because it was in Australia as well that obviously all the games are in Australia and New Zealand. Yeah, the majority in Australia. And with them being successful they just got on a popularity roll. And the media was just filled with it. The obsession for a 3 or 4 week period was outrageous.

What do you think? What do you think changed? Just the fact that it was here locally? Do you think if they had been playing overseas in, say, Qatar or Colombia or something anywhere?

Yeah.

Be nowhere near as sort of interesting for the Australian population?

I think it would have been, there still would have been good coverage of it and there would have been a lot of people interested. But being in Australia I think just made a difference because the Australian press were all over it.

Yeah.

Whereas the, it would have just been the specialist football sports media that would have been covering it if it was anywhere else in the world. But the general media was, independently of Australia, doing well. The general media was covering the fact that we had a World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. And then you add the layer of Australia doing really well and it just sort of went out of control.

Why do you think we just have never gotten into soccer anywhere near as much as our other sports, at least at a national level? Because the ironic thing is like, I need to obviously preface it with, soccer is the most played club sport in Australia, as far as I'm aware.

And as a junior sport.

The highest number of participating kids.

Soccer and basketball are the two most.

Yeah. And yet they just don't seem anywhere near as popular when you turn the TV on.

No, I think there are, just as there are so many alternatives. You know, we have four national football leagues of different codes of football. We've got basketball, we've got cricket. We've got a whole lot of sports that are played.

There's hockey as well.

And hockey athletics. There's all sorts of sports that that people just get interested in.

Yeah. And. I just think it's one of those things where, you know, soccer was played in Australia. For decades. For more than a century, it's been played in Australia. Australia has done reasonably well in the men's soccer- above what you would expect them to do. And then the women have just gone mad this time. They've always been good, you know, top 20 teams in the world.

Yeah.

But you know, now they're in the top ten and then having done so well, reaching the last four in this World Cup, they've played above what you would expect them to do.

Why do you think that is? Because I found that really interesting when I was doing jujitsu that. Girls. The girl side of it. They seem to have fewer competitors. And, you know, I think this is probably the case in most sort of sports, right? For a long time, they're male dominated, the ones that are like shown on..

Male dominated sport.

Yeah, the ones that everyone follows, you know..

Football codes, cricket, basketball, those sort of things.

Yeah. And but the weird thing is, like I found in jiu jitsu that, you know, if you go to any average jiu jitsu club and, you know, get on the mat where you say when you're going to learn, you know, from a teacher there, you're getting going to a lesson or whatever, you'd probably generally have maybe five, ten, maybe 20% women, 20% would be very, very generous.

And our club in Melbourne, it was probably close, getting close to 50, sometimes like 50% because there were so many students. And a lot of the women that came and did it, they would get their friends to come and it became a cultural thing. The weird thing though was when you go to competitions. I would. I would notice that. There would be so many fewer women competing and like the sport for competition for..

So typically, typically women were doing it as a- So that participatory sport and for fitness.

Yeah.

Rather than as a competition.

But the thing that I did notice was that the girls who took it serious, dominated. And you would have like there was one, there was a few girls at our gym that were like world champions, you know, And like, it was one of these weird things where it's like we have now the resources if women decide they want to go nuts with a sport. And it seems like it's easier for them to just at least in our potential- and this, I'm just fleshing this out while I'm thinking about it, but potentially in Western countries where we have the resources and they have the spare time and they have the ability to to really go all out in these sports that seem to have not had a big history with women participating or particularly..

I think in, in minor sports, like I mean, jiu jitsu is not- I dare say there's not more than 10,000 competitive jiu jitsu people in the world.

No..

.. at a high level.

There's loads. Yeah, Yeah.

But..

Now it's getting bigger.

Yeah, at a world level, I mean, yeah. Rather than at local. So it's not something that has, has had a, a long history of participation.

No, it's exploded..

So if you get, if you get into it and it's like you and you were fencing when you're at school. Fencing is a very minor sport. So if you're a sort of half good at it, you can dominate it very quickly.

Yeah.

So I suppose there's that. But getting back to the..

The reason I bring that up is that I wonder with- Sorry to interrupt you. I wonder with say why Australia does so well at sports and punches above its weight weight especially now we see that with the women's sports, I think. Like I think they were showing the numbers or the the interest that the Socceroos had only in, you know, ten years ago or whatever it was a fraction of what it is today and they were obviously nowhere near as good as they are today.

The Socceroos is the men's team..

Sorry, yeah, the Matildas,

The Matildas, the women's team. Well they're both basically the same so.

But I reckon, is there something about them coming from a Western country where. When when they've suddenly gotten a lot of support and, you know, money thrown behind them. We, that's how we have been able to do a lot better proportionately with the female side of soccer. Because the male team, it seems to just not do very well at all.

Well, they've been they've done reasonably well. They, they make the World Cup. Certainly they've made the last, what, 6 or 7 World Cups. So on that basis for the last 30 years they've been..

Yeah. But if you were to see them come up against France or Britain or even Colombia, they're not see them again..

They're not top ten. They've been, I think the highest they've been ranked in the last 20 years is about 20th.

Yeah.

But look, it's a bit different from with the men and the women. But I think for, for soccer, it's it's funny like there's a very high participation sport at club level and a junior level. But at the elite level, almost all of our very good players as juniors end up going to Europe.

Yeah.

And so we lose that local interest at the state and national level.

Yeah.

Now the national competition, we have the A-League, the Australian League for Soccer, and then there's a women's equivalent as well. They're doing reasonably well now because a lot of players are coming back from Europe when they've finished their career to play not just Australians but other people from other countries. So there is that sort of, you know, quality of player that is coming back to play in that. But for decades we've always just lost those players. So I think that level of interest and staying in the sport when you're young, you didn't have anybody to look up to because you're the way you looked up to people was you'd watch the English Premier League or you'd watch the Italian league or the German league or the Spanish league on TV to watch the best players in the world. Whereas if you're looking at, say, cricket, rugby league, AFL football, we've got, you know, arguably some of the best players. Well, certainly AFL, obviously we've got all the best players.

Because no one else plays it!

Rugby league, we're the best rugby league team in the world most of the time. Occasionally we'll get beaten by England and very occasionally by New Zealand. Rugby union. We haven't been very good in a world stage for the last 20 years, but we're still in the top 4 or 5 teams.

Yeah.

And so there's, there's if you're a junior and you're coming up, you can, you can go down to your local park on a Saturday afternoon during the season and watch a national level player players playing. In soccer, that hasn't been the case up until the last..

.. the inspiration is also there for younger kids.

Yeah.

But I think that was the same with jiu jitsu, where it's probably way worse than soccer with trying to make an income from being a professional Brazilian jiu jitsu fighter. But everyone would just go to the US, because that's where all the competitions are.

Yeah!

Yeah. I mean, the good thing is that when you compete, it's just you're an individual, so you are your country, right? You can be Australia and Colombia, wherever you're from, really. You don't have to go. It doesn't have to be a national competition for you to be representing the your country. Yeah, but yeah, it was definitely one of those things where I think for a long time, at least in Australia, you would have all of these freak competitors, but they would just not be here. So, you know, it would be a big thing for them to come and tour the place..

And I think the other the other side of that now, though, the extension of that now in terms of our the quality of our national teams in men's and women's soccer, is that that is increased. And obviously in the Matildas, the women's case, it's increased rapidly over the last ten years, but they've reached a sort of watershed number of players now who are playing in European competitions. Almost all of the the men and women who play for Australia in in soccer are playing for European teams.

Yeah.

There's a couple that are still just playing in Australia, but there's this, there's now the number of them where they can like for instance, the Australian team, the Australian women's team trains in Europe because most of them are there. So their lead up to their World Cup was mostly done in Europe and then they came back to Australia just before the World Cup started when in the off season for the Europeans and did a couple of lead up games and then played in the tournament. But, but when you get to that point where you've got a number of players playing at that level, then you suddenly get this increase. Whereas historically, certainly when Australia started to be successful in the 70s and the 80s, we had 1 or 2 players playing in Europe.

Yeah.

And they were, you know, they were the exceptional players, but they very rarely played with the rest of the Australian players. They would come back to play in a tournament for Australia if their clubs would release them. Yeah, but obviously in a World Cup, that's the World Cup is scheduled so that nothing is clashing with that. But so, yeah, it's, it's one of those sort of weird ones where I think once you reach that sort of level, then you get the interest of players playing and it just sort of continues to spiral upwards.

So do you think the cat's out of the bag? The Pandora's box is open with soccer interest in Australia now that, you know we've had this? Or is it going to be a flash in a pan? Is it going to be something I think..

I don't think it'll be a flash in a pan. I think it'll just be sort of incremental. I don't think it's going to explode because there are still so many alternatives.

Yeah.

The you know, just keeping the conversation to the women as an example, there will be a lot more girls now who will go off and try soccer because they've been sitting watching this on TV for a month, not just watching Australia do well, but watching a lot of soccer on TV. Whereas previously they wouldn't have watched women's soccer at all. You know, it'd be very difficult to find. High class women soccer on television in Australia. Yeah, and they might watch the men, but you don't get the same motivation. I don't think if you're a little girl watching..

Well, it must be..

.. a sport.

It must be interesting. I'm trying to think of what the equivalent would be for boys growing up. It would probably be boys watching, say, female gymnasts and trying to derive motivation from that when it's just like a different sport. Yeah, you're never going to be small enough to be able to do those things. And so it's kind of like, well, you know, you can watch it and enjoy it, but you're not really going to be like, Well, now I'm motivated to go and compete. I remember being at high school and doing soccer as my winter sport, and I think when I was there they started the female soccer team, sort of. Up. Like, I think that was the when I was there, I can't remember what year it was. I definitely remember there being girl teams at senior schools. So when I was 14, 15, it's at least and I think that was just implemented at that time. But..

Part of that they did that is not of interest, that it's a matter of you need a number of other schools that are going to have teams in order to play against them.

Yeah, that was it. I think they had..

.. your school could have said, 'hey, we've got a women's, you know, girls soccer team. There's nobody for you to play. Bad luck.'.

Well, and they had that sort of thing happen where there was probably only one team's worth of girls.

Yeah.

And they wouldn't have had a game every single weekend like we did.

Yeah.

But on the other hand, they were kind of seen as this special thing because everyone was like, 'We need to foster this, get it growing and..'

Of course, yeah, it was interesting. So.

Yeah, but I think there's still a lot of alternatives for girls now that you know, because at the same time that soccer has taken off with regard to girls and women in Australia, the AFLW, the women's AFL competition has started up about 7 or 8 years ago. The NRL, the National Rugby League, has a women's tournament that's very good as well and there's realistically there's probably more money, more likelihood of earning a reasonable income. They're not- Most professional women footballers, regardless of whichever league or competition they're playing in, are not earning a full wage.

Yeah.

But you can earn a bit of money playing AFL or NRL much more easily than leaving the country and going to Europe and struggling to get in a team because I doubt whether the Australian women's soccer players in Australia are earning enough money to make a living. They're effectively amateurs that are making a bit of money. I'd have to investigate to see what they're what they're being paid, but..

Well, and they're probably getting a lot from sponsorships. I think we saw that during and post the World Cup. It's like, 'Oh my God, they're endorsing everything.' The banks and, you know, sports equipment, all that sort of stuff. You just like, oh, I'll milk it while you can.

Well, of course you do. Of course you do. And that's the realistically that's where some of the, you know, athletes and swimmers, for example, the swimming, there's almost no money in swimming. You know, there's no prize money for swimming. But if you're famous enough, you get pretty big endorsements. Oh, so.

Yeah, pretty much. Right. But yeah. Anything else you want to cover with the Matildas? No, I just hope that they, the interest, continues. And, you know, the sad thing will be is if this generation, because there are some senior players who were still playing- well, senior in experience, women in their 30s. If they say now look at it and go well I'm not going to play for another four years to make the next World Cup. If they drop out and then we don't have enough young players coming through. Although we had 3 or 4 of our best players in this tournament were 19, 20, 21. So..

It was crazy, right? Fowler. And you just like, she's 20.

Mary Fowler.

Jesus Christ. How did she get so good, so quick?

Cooney-Cross. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cortnee Vine. Who scored the winning penalty in the the famous penalty shootout against France?

Oh, God. That was a nail biter.

Yeah, they were. Yeah. They're kids who'll be playing for another ten years for Australia. So, like, the only other thing I suppose that would be worth mentioning is the fact that we had probably the most famous player in the world not playing for most of the tournament to avoid her getting injured. Well, she was injured to start with, and then when she sort of came back, she they sort of just kept her on as a substitute for a couple of games. But..

We should have a whinge about the problem with soccer. Because we were bringing-

The problem?

The problems-.

There are, there are two. Yeah.

You can, you can cover it. Well there's diving and everybody knows about that. The, well, diving as in if you look like you have been fouled you you hit the ground writhing and screaming and carrying on firstly to get attention and hopefully get an advantage by it, which is just cheating. Secondly, it's time wasting. Yeah. And, and time wasting in a sense that, in two senses. One is that because now in professional soccer there is a separate time keeper. It's not the referee who is who is keeping time. So you don't get an advantage in a sense of wasting time, but you get an advantage in the sense of allowing your own team members to have a rest and and get set up and so on. And the other one is the deliberate time wasting the one..

Kicking the ball away?

The kicking the ball away or picking the ball up or standing. When you, if you, if a team gets a free kick from a foul. The rules say that the opposition can't be closer than ten yards, nine and a bit metres away. So the number of times though that a player will just stand directly in front of them so that they can't take the free kick quickly. Now that can be stopped immediately, just as soon as the referee sees that, just give him a yellow card for time wasting! Two yellow cards and you're off and you can't play. And..

Well the next annoying thing is you wonder how-

They let them get away with it.

You wonder how much the game intentionally allows that stuff because it riles up the fans and you're always like villainizing the other team for doing that sort of stuff and you're glad your team does it because yeah, the diving stuff. The fact that people pretend to get injured to try and get an advantage, it seems like that was one of the things that always really pissed me off about soccer was kind of like the lack of honour. You don't play fairly like. And it seemed even in the World Cup, you could see times when Australia was playing, I think it was England, and they were intentionally tackling the crap out of Sam Kerr.

Yeah.

Fouling her. And you're just like, You guys are just trying-

He was the player we were talking about.

Yeah, you're just trying to-.

.. inch forward in the world.

And that's clearly a strategy that you've gone in where I would imagine again, I don't know, but I would imagine the coaches said, 'Look, we can afford to get a few yellow cards if you guys chase down their best players'..

And not not necessarily trying to deliberately injure her, but just put her off a game.

Yeah, that that side of things, like I understand why you would do it you want any advantage that is technically within the rules and although getting a yellow card is obviously you're breaking the rules to do that, it's you get a red card straight away. So. So they're there for a reason, right? And the people are going to be like, well, use up your chances if it's going to give us an advantage. And kicking the ball away? Just douchery like that? I never did that when playing soccer and I don't remember ever being encouraged to do that. But it seems like at the higher levels, I don't think..

I don't think any team, I don't think any coach will go out at that level and tell their players 'Every time you get the chance, waste time'. It's just so ingrained. The kicking the ball away, the that the interfering with players so they can't play on quickly, that just irritates the hell out of me. Because it is it is so unsportsmanlike.

Is that done in cricket or footy? Because I don't remember ever seeing that..

Well in football.

Where they would just throw the..

In Australian football, that's an immediate 50 metre penalty.

Yeah.

And so those who don't follow AFL football are 50 metre penalty is if somebody has got the ball a free kick or a mark and you have been seen to deliberately waste the waste time or interfere with their ability to play, they get to move 50m down the field, which is about a third of the length of the field, just under a third of the length of most fields. So it's a huge advantage to the team that you are giving away. So it almost never happens. Whereas it happens 50 times in a game in soccer. I it drives me nuts..

I wonder if that's a barrier to it growing as a big sport in Australia for spectators as well. Because I think people who are really into rugby or football and cricket and these other sports that aren't used to seeing that kind of duplicity or poor sportsmanship and arguing with the referee, you know, I'm not..

The arguing with the referee, so I grew up playing an AFL football, Australian football and rugby union and AFL football. It used to be the thing all the time where players would be arguing with the umpires and so on. The AFL in the last two years have brought in this dissent rule. That is, if you are even seen to be dissenting a decision not even arguing with the umpire, the umpire will pay a free kick or a 50 metre penalty.

'Oh fuck this guy.'.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And and so it's almost wiped it out. In rugby union, only the captain is allowed to speak to the referee and they call him or her sir or madam. It's not. There is no way that you would ever turn around and argue with a referee's decision in rugby union. You'd just be sent off.

I don't understand that either. When was the last time a soccer player bitched to the referee? And the referee was like..

In any sport..

.. Change my mind.

Did any umpire or referee in any level of any sport ever change their mind?

.. save face?

No.

And be like, 'Well, double screw you!'..

That's just frustration. And we understand that. But that sort of frustration can be shut off immediately by if a player is standing there arguing often in the face of the referee, yelling at them. Just bring out a yellow card. I don't know why they don't do it and just say, 'You shut up or you get a yellow card.' Walk away now and it would stop.

Yeah, I don't know. But I think, yeah, there's some of my biggest gripes with the sport as well. It just has this kind of, I don't know, sly, cheeky kind of vibe to it at times that seems to be just accepted. Anyway.

Yeah. Nice note to finish on.

Yeah, that's it. But yeah, I think it was really cool to see how proud everyone was of the Matildas and especially the Aussie English listeners and followers and supporters. They were all behind Australia as well. And Kel was going for Brazil originally and then switched when Brazil got knocked out, she was going for Australia. The funny thing I noticed was that when- who are we watching? We watching Colombia? Was it Colombia versus Great Britain, that were the- the final? Who was the..?

Spain.

Spain versus Great Britain. Yeah, that's right. Sorry. I remember watching that and originally being like, 'Fuck Britain!' You know, like 'Go Spain!' And Kel was supporting for Spain as well. And it was funny because Kel is like 'Your dad said, he's supporting Britain. Is that just like a standard thing here? Like any white Australians just go for Britain?' And I'm like, 'No, fuck Britain.' I'm like, No, no, not necessarily. I mean, I'm effectively all British as..

They beat Australia and played well. I just thought they would win.

But it was funny..

Spain played too well.

I noticed how much more I sort of enjoyed it when I didn't necessarily care if either team won because at the end I found myself switching. I think I was originally going for Spain with Kel, and then I was like, Spain kicked a goal and was ahead. Right?

Oh, get England! Catch up!

Yeah, I was like, 'C'mon England!' Get another goal so that it goes to penalty, or so that there's more tension.

Yeah.

And then when Spain, I think they scored another one right, and it was just the final nail.

One nil.

That- was it? I thought they got two?

No, they had one disallowed. Ah no, it was a penalty saved.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. But yeah, there was that. I was just like, 'Oh damn.' But it was really funny because I was like, I'm so much less emotional in this game.

Yeah, exactly.

I just want to see a good game. Yeah. I go to any go to any sport where you don't actually care who wins. You can be a lot more disengaged emotionally, but you can still be just as engaged in the entertainment value, but you don't care who wins. It's a different level of entertainment.

Yeah. Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the game and yeah, we'll leave it there I guess.

Go, Tilly's!

See ya!