Ian Smithson
speaker
851 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 10 May
Ian Smithson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah.
A panel of people decide, and Australian citizens can nominate people, and you might have to have a petition that said, I've got 20,000 votes to say Pat Dodson, and I have to have Pat Dodson's agreement.
And so he goes into the pile.
...we could then, you know, have a handful of those people... ...and then they go, yeah, Pat's the best person.
Because as soon as we have an elected... ...so, anybody then nominates to be president... ...and then we have an election...
What's it going to be?
That, by definition, is politics.
And then you will have people competing.
I want to be president because.
Anybody who answers that question should be automatically disqualified, as you inferred in the beginning.
So it shouldn't be a personality election.
I think it should be a sort of an independent appointment in one way or another.
Most people don't even know who the Governors-General have been in the past before they become Governor-General.
A few of them have been relatively famous people.
Often the military people are well-known because they're senior military people.
But most of the others are just good, hard-working service people for a long time, and the Prime Minister says, yeah, we think that person's the right person.
David Hurley.
David Hurley had a long history in the military, I believe.
But others haven't.
Whereas often it had been, I think the last, I'm trying to remember, the last non-Australian to be Governor General of Australia was probably Lord Casey, who was English.
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