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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Yeah, it was late 1990s.

Year 2000, yeah.

And so there was a big push around then from the Republican movement in Australia to hold a referendum.

And John Howard, in his infinite cynical wisdom,

He was our ex-Prime Minister.

Yeah, he white-handed it.

He broke it down by saying, well, the question he asked or that he should have asked is, should Australia become a republic?

But what he did was say, I'm not going to ask that question.

I'm going to ask the Republican movement to come up with a model and we'll vote on whether we accept that model or not.

And, of course, the Republican movement isn't an individual organisation.

Yeah.

And so there were two or three models that came up.

And so he set it up that no matter which one of them won, they were never going to beat the no vote.

So, and, you know, and it failed, of course, because, you know, it's sort of like, well, do you want an apple or an orange?

I'm going to choose orange.

You have to tell me which sort of apple you're going to have.

And then five different people come up with it.

And so, instead of putting up an apple against an orange, you put up an orange against three different apples.

Yeah.

And, of course, they failed.

Showing 141–160 of 851 · page 8 of 43