WATCH: Ex-Socceroo Craig Foster on Community Matters podcast. Video: Community Industry Group | The Senior | May 2025 - video Dailymotion

Ex-Socceroo Craig Foster opens up about growing up on the soccer pitch. Video by Community Industry Group

Transcript

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...