Bonus: Josh's Thoughts on The Voice
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2023
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Australians are about to vote on whether to change the constitution to create a special advisory body for Indigenous Australians. Is it an overdue forum for justice? Or a risky, undemocratic game of identity politics? It’s the listener question Josh gets the most. Here, he tries to inject some sanity into an increasingly toxic debate.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gooday, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm going to try to do this. I try to talk about something that is full of so many landmines. |
| 0:15.0 | It seems foolhardy to try and not get cancelled in doing so. |
| 0:23.6 | Australia is about to go to the polls for a referendum to change the Constitution to recognize |
| 0:28.6 | First Nations Australians and to give First Nations representatives a body, a formal chamber, |
| 0:36.6 | that would be an advisory body that would give its opinion on issues |
| 0:41.5 | that are relevant to Indigenous Australians and advise Parliament on its opinions. |
| 0:48.2 | This is a referendum to change the Constitution. These don't happen very often. It's a big |
| 0:53.2 | deal. And a lot of people have a lot of questions. A lot of people have a lot of passionate beliefs. I want to do my best to, in a cool and calm way, go through some of the issues and tease them out as best I can. Mindful of the fact that you won't agree with me on everything, |
| 1:14.8 | and that of course some things that I say will be able to be taken out of context and could doom me. |
| 1:23.4 | But when doing a call-out for Ask Me Anything questions, I got a bunch of questions about what |
| 1:29.7 | my position is on the voice. |
| 1:32.4 | One listener named James said, among other things, I have a family with three children, |
| 1:37.7 | and quite frankly I'm sick to death of hearing the same thing over and over at every |
| 1:41.2 | concert, play, small gathering, anything. |
| 1:50.0 | He's talking about welcomes to country, where white folk will tend to start every single gathering in Australia by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land. |
| 1:54.9 | And James says the constant guilt trip is nauseating. |
| 1:59.6 | He says, what about adding to the acknowledgement that no one is |
| 2:02.1 | alive that had anything to do with the grievances? An acknowledgement of the truth, perhaps, |
| 2:07.1 | he writes. An acknowledgement that no one ought to feel guilty at all. Perhaps we should just know |
| 2:12.7 | that we shouldn't feel guilty, but if that is the case, then perhaps we shouldn't have to keep |
| 2:16.1 | being reminded of these things. I don't know anyone who's ignorant of the truth of the claim that Indigenous |
... |
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