Ex-Socceroo Craig Foster opens up about growing up on the soccer pitch. Video by Community Industry Group
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00I believe in a multicultural society that you always have to take
00:03every opportunity for integration because when, and First Nations,
00:08we saw that with the voice referendum, for example,
00:10the less that people know personally or are in touch personally
00:18with First Nations, the less likely they are to agree with
00:23or advocate for their rights.
00:24It's like really quite simple.
00:27And so proximity is important.
00:30And I've experienced that in my life because I played
00:32in the multicultural game and I come out of Lismore,
00:34which was almost entirely people looked like me, you know,
00:36back in the 80s, in the 70s, and I left in the early 80s.
00:40And then I walked into the junior national football team
00:43and all of a sudden here was all Croatian, Serbian, Turkish, Lebanese,
00:48Australians who were my compatriots, who were my colleagues.
00:53And most of these cultural backgrounds I had never experienced.
00:56And, you know, I might have just seen them on ABC News, you know,
01:02and all of a sudden these became my friends.
01:05And all of a sudden we're playing sport together.
01:08And what that does is it just simply lowers all those barriers because it's
01:12like your cultural differences are of zero value when it's just about kicking
01:20the ball into the other net.
01:21And therefore we have to, even if language is a problem,
01:25we have to find ways to communicate in order to achieve our sporting objective.
01:31And I look at Australia in a very similar way, you know.
01:34We have to, if we codify what are our objectives,
01:38and we're talking here about the objectives,
01:40everyone just being able to have a good life,
01:42then if that's the objective, then, you know,
01:46how is it that we bring those to life?
01:49So when we see disadvantage around us,
01:51we're much more attuned to be able to understand the difference.
01:56And then it's natural to ask the question, well, how did that occur?
01:58What is the problems that occur here?
02:00Like First Nations, for example.
02:02And then we can start to dig into, well,
02:04how can we, you know, kind of, you know, change those?
02:08Um, so...