Sam Mostyn

speaker

313 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 1 Aug

Sam Mostyn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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Full Story · Governor general Sam Mostyn on the ‘growing catastrophe’ in our democracy · 1 Aug 2026 podcast

He spent quite a bit of his time in these rooms communicating on Zoom.

And when COVID finished, he got out to communities very actively to take a temperature of the nation.

I'm living through a time when certainly social media has risen dramatically.

So how people receive their information, the echo chambers of alternative facts, the world changing, the geopolitics of the world changing rapidly.

And so I find myself in a position of thinking, what would my predecessors have done in these moments?

And how do I give fidelity to that and build confidence for all Australians?

And so the way I do that is I use the same technologies that use social media to be kind, to be open and transparent and bring people in.

But I also have to reflect light and shade.

And so when I need to say, I think, like on the lack of civility question, I think that's a shade part of our community at the moment where we're too quick to jump and criticise and

Wrestle people personally and not stand back and understand why people hold certain views.

Why is their grievance taking them to a certain political outcome or an attack?

If we understood why people are feeling the way they are, cost of living, all sorts of things they're dealing with, let's be gentle and kind.

That's a perspective and a lived experience we need to understand and engage with, not attack.

And so I think the role of the Governor-General today is just as it's always been, stability, reflect light and shade, help the nation interpret itself, be open and available to help be part of the healing, but not to overstate that, that I can't, that's not my role entirely, that's working with the Australian people to want us to be better and to reflect what the rest of the world sees in us, which is one of the greatest modern stories of success

It's the combination of 65,000 years of attachment to the continent with Indigenous culture and peoples and histories that are always shared with us.

The arrival of the British and these very strong constitutional arrangements that give us absolute certainty in our parliamentary system, our democracy.

We added compulsory voting, preferential voting, independent electoral commissioner.

And then 80 or so years of the most extraordinary migration and refugee arrivals that helps us thrive and be successful, engage with the world, but stand for very distinct Australian values.

With those advantages that are always played back to me by heads of state of other nations to say, you are a shining example of what's great.

My job to reflect that light is to say to Australia, let's not give up on this great project of how we came to be modern Australia.

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