'Getting a Grip' with Julian Leeser MP Julian Leeser MP

This episode is a short introduction to Julian Leeser MP's new podcast series, 'Getting a Grip', inspiring stories of resilience and recovery.The series explores the stories of people who have come through extraordinary situations: a terrorist attack, a cancer diagnosis, wartime separation from family, confronting the AIDS virus and escaping the clutches of a white supremacist group.“I wanted to demonstrate that Australians are capable of confronting challenges like Covid 19 and overcoming th...

Julian Gold was one of the leading epidemiologists who led Australia through our last major pandemic – the AIDS crisis.“I remember seeing Dr Julian Gold nightly on the TV explaining the AIDS epidemic , like we now see Professor Brendan Murphy,” says Julian Leeser. “People who lived through the beginning of the AIDS epidemic remember a time of great fear and I wondered what we might learn from that time in Australia’s history which would help us get through Covid. I wanted to talk to Juli...

Corporal Matt Williams OAM has served Australia in the military in Afghanistan but his greatest challenge came when he returned to Australia and on his 22nd birthday.“Matt ‘Willy’ Williams made such an impact on Scott Morrison that the Prime Minister spoke about him in his ANZAC Day Dawn Service address,” said Julian Leeser. Matt Williams always knew he would end up in the defence force, from the moment he could walk and talk. “Mum has a photo of me going to kindergarten dressed up in ca...

Jean is my wife’s grandmother and she has an incredible story, having been separated from her family at the age of 14 after her mother was taken prisoner of war in Hong Kong.“Come 1940, when the Japanese bombed Hawaii and the war was on the Pacific, they said ‘Out’… and I don’t think we really knew where we were going, we just knew we were going out and within 36 hours every woman and child had to go.”Jean heard little from her mother during the war years, when her mother had been taken priso...

In this episode, James Fry talks about how he was enticed into a white supremacist group as a young man, and how he found his way out.After experiencing a number of years of terrible bullying, James was searching for an identity and found himself putting his anger and confusion into drug use and being part of a sub-culture that nurtured white supremacist thinking.His ideological standpoint started to shift when his mother found a white nationalist’s newspaper under his bed.Fry explains, “I’d ...

This episode explores how a young woman responded when a holiday of a lifetime ended in disaster when she was badly injured in the 2016 Nice terror attacks.“I didn’t actually know what had happened until many, many hours after the fact but I had gone from this jovial exciting time to waking up lying on the ground. I could see some stars and I could also see a strangers face hovering over me."When asked about how her life has changed:“My life is quite different, but I am still the same person....