UNSW Centre for Ideas: You’re listening to the UNSW Centre for ideas.

Yumi Stynes: Hello, everybody. Hi Hello, you're amazing. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. My name is Yumi Stynes, and I would like to welcome you to the Sydney Writers Festival, The Great Debate, 2025

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: Yes. Can you even believe we made it out tonight? It is disgusting out there, so I would like everybody to give yourselves a round of applause for choosing to brave it and come here.

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: So I'm here as your host. I'm here as your adjudicator, and I'm here paying my respects to the original custodians of this unceded Gadigal land on which we meet tonight. And on behalf of the debaters and the Sydney Writers Festival, I am paying my respects to elders past and present, and as an individual, I bow in deep respect to all colonised people and recognise that colonisation is an ongoing and violent project still occurring today.

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: But I've got a question for you, who's been to one of these debates before? Who has come tonight for the first time to see the great debate? Okay, there's a lot of newbies here. There's something different about this event. It's not like the other ones. Okay, there's a lot of crowd participation required.

I'll tell you one of the reasons why David Marr cut his face shaving earlier today. So it's kind of going to be a running gag for the night. His stigmata. We need you to give it up for David Marr's stigmata. Apparently, the more you applaud, the more blood it will piss out. And the only way we can know if this is true is through experimentation.

The other reason why this is a real crowd participation event is because you get to decide who has won the debate. So I think we need to practice, because your applause will tell the debater that they're doing a good job, okay, and your booing will also tell the debater that they suck.

So let's practice a cheer on the count of three. Ready? 123, yay.

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: Yeah, that was fucking Excellent. Well done. So you know what you're doing here. Now, let's say somebody drops a real stinker and you hate it and it's shit, and you want to let them know, I would like to hear a really emphatic from the cervix. Boo, okay, on the count of 3.

1, 2, 3, wow.

Audience Boos

Yumi Stynes: I felt my innards just shrivelling a little bit more. That was terrifying. What are you doing? Just warming people up, because we need them to feel your fear, Rhys Nicholson.

Rhys Nicholson: What the fuck?

Yumi Stynes: So you get to decide. Let me introduce our debaters.

Rhys Nicholson, who can't keep his mouth shut.

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: Justin Rogers, in between and Annabelle Crabb, who is the team leader for the affirmative team.

And over here we've got David Mars stigmata and David Marr. Please give it up for David Marr, Jennifer Wong in between, and Matilda Bosley in red, drinking red.

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: Okay, so I have a bell.

Yumi rings bell

Yumi Stynes: Oh, you don't like the bell reminds you of recess is over. Fucking Miss stones. Fuck you. Each speaker gets seven minutes, if they're kind of cool and they're on a good roll, I'll let them go over 30 seconds, maybe a minute, if not ding a ling. Ling, see you later. Why are you here? Tell me why you're here. Someone shout something out for scabies. Stabbing.

Oh, okay, another literalist. It's so good to have you because the topic tonight is real friends stab you in the front. Now, it's too early for this to be self-promotion, but I have written a book for kids on friendship that comes out next year, right? And I've done hundreds of interviews and spoken to tonnes of researchers and sites and all kinds of experts on friendship, and I went through the manuscript earlier today and did a document word search, and not once did anybody mention stab or stabbing.

Audience Laughter

Yumi Stynes: But who here has real friends? Because how good is it to have a friend like that's pretty shit out there. If you've got a friend, one good friend, I think that you're winning at life. Okay, so just tuck that into your little heart pocket and keep it warm for the rest of the night. Maybe you can text them at the end of this.

All right. So the way it works is each team takes it in turns, one speaker at a time, seven minutes ease each at the very end, the teams can nominate one speaker to do a two-minute rebuttal, and then I will seek your audience response on who was the better team and who made the better argument. Let's get things going immediately by welcoming our first speaker for the night, Annabelle crap. She won the Walkley award for a book about Malcolm. Turnbull published a best selling book that made us long for our own Trad wife called the wife drought, and has managed to successfully navigate a career in journalism without ever smacking David littleproud in the face. Please welcome Annabelle Crabb.

Audience Applause

Annabelle Crabb:  Stand by you mean. Friends, my dear friends, friends of literary fiction, friends of chunky airport thrillers, friends of poetry, friends of memoir, fake memoir, cashier memoir, Nordic noir, solar punk, Cli-fi and poetry that rhymes. There is a place for us all here at the Sydney Writers Festival, because we're all friends, even though I'd rather do my tax return than read a work of science fiction, I'm just being honest, and friends are honest with each other, and that is what we are going to do tonight. We're going to be honest with each other. I'm going to be honest with my friends. Let me introduce them.

Justine Rogers, my second speaker,

Audience Applause

Annabelle Crabb:  A person who is a lawyer and a comedian and an academic. I loathe her. Nothing personal. Pick a lane Justine, my third speaker, Rhys Nicholson, whose current occupation, according to Wikipedia, is it tells me comedian.

Audience Applause

Annabelle Crabb:  Which is weird because his jacket is giving me house boy for elderly pansexual throuple In Potts point. Anyway, we'll be honest with each other tonight.

And with our great friend David Marr, captain of the negative team, whom we love, even though his books are too long, David, I love you. Get an editor.

David is bleeding from the face tonight. It's true. He has been bleeding from the face ever since they chose an American Pope, and I don't expect it to change.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  Actually. You know, the reason I keep coming back to this debate every year is that with David Marr, who's always my opposing captain. Front stabbing ceases to be just a solemn obligation of a decades long friendship, and it becomes an act of pleasure, a risk free pleasure, too, I assure you, because David can never hear what I'm saying from this lectern, because David is increasingly deaf, but simultaneously far too vain for a hearing aid.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  Hi. David loved the book, still on page 58.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  We'll be honest with his friends too, who, of course, by definition, are my friends and our friends, Matilda Bosley, who almost certainly forgot that tonight was even on until someone reminded her, am I right? Love You. And Jennifer Wong, who has never met a pun she considers too cheap.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  These are uncomfortable things for one friend to say of another, and yet I say them because that is what a friend does, even when such honesty feels awkward turning to Yumi, I find myself completely unwilling to take up the knife. Why? Not because I'm a coward, but simply because Yumi is flawless in every way.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  Not only the most crafty book promoter that I've ever seen in action, but. A beautiful, obviously, but also erudite, swashbuckling, funny, original and just a preposterously generous lover.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  Now I know this has been a rambling run up to the actual point, and because I'm honest to a fault, as I mentioned, I'll admit that I compose this time wasting piece of persiflage this afternoon because I left writing it until this afternoon because I thought this afternoon would be quiet. How was I to know that the National Party and the Liberal Party…

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  Who loudly and time consumingly decided on Tuesday to get a divorce, would suddenly decide today to maybe get dinner together and see what happens.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  Mother of God, I have had it up to pussies bow with you people. Go home, Australian politics. You're drunk. That's number one, number two, isn't it interesting. Think about it that one of the key policy disputes involved in this divorce, apart from nuclear reactors, of course, which we’ll park because I think that was always what was going to happen is that David Littleproud, the leader of the Nationals, wants to amend section 46 of the Consumer and Competition Act to enforce the divestiture of supermarkets and big box retailers who are found to be abusing their market power. He wants to break up Coles and Woollies, and he wants Sussan Ley also to break up Coles and Woollies, and to want to break up Coles and Woollies, even though if both of them wanted equally badly to break up Coles and Woollies, it doesn't give them any ground that gets them closer to actually breaking up Coles and Woollies, because even before they split, and indeed, even after they get back together, if that's what happens, they still only have 43 seats between them in a Parliament when you need 76 to do anything at all.

And today, as I watched the Nats and the Libs announced they're going to try giving things another go, what I want to know is, where are Littleproud friends?

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  Because this is not a partisan remark, it's just a friendly remark and an observation. If there was an honest one among those friends, that person would have to stand up, wouldn't they, wouldn't they, and say, put their arm around that man's shoulders and say, “Dave, buddy, mate. You know I love you. I know you want to break up woollies. I know you want it so bad, mate. And I know you want to do it for the right reasons, champ, for the farmers, I get it, but I got to be straight with you. Honestly, I hate being the one to say it, but buddy, you just tried to break up the coalition on Tuesday, and now it's Thursday, and you're already calling her, I guess what I'm saying, Pal is you're struggling to break up the coalition. Maybe breaking up Coles and Woollies might be something to have more of a long term think about. Yeah.”

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  Now I did bring this. I ran this gag by Leigh Sales on the way here, and she said, “Look Crabb, I back you to make most things funny. But I gotta tell you, I don't think Thursday night at the town hall is going to give you a lot of love for trade practices, gags.” Maybe try something else. And your face. Lee Sayles, there was a definite laugh for that.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb:  Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we are all humans, and humans need friends, yes, for laughter and bad movies and good times, but you also need our friends for protection. A good friend will protect you against many adversaries, the workplace bully, the online troll, the guy on Tinder, whose profile says “good vibes only”, but the main and most solemn prophylactic responsibility a true friend has is to protect you from yourself, from your own self.

And for modern human beings, our own selves are the most diabolical apex predator of all. Let's not get confused about the terms of this debate tonight, people, including you looking for stabbing over there, Oscar Wilde was always a bit purple with the pen. And I think it's possible that all this talk of stabbing is possibly going to elevate Mr. Marr and his friends, my friends, our friends.

To be absolutely clear, we're not talking about actual stabbing. We're talking about feedback it's uncomfortable to deliver and even more uncomfortable to receive. That's how we interpret this topic. Tonight, a fair-weather friend will fawn over you, or, even worse, let you walk out there and make the most unbelievable Dick of yourself. When they could have stopped it with one judicious blow, and that's what a true friend will do, even if they know it's going to make you angry in the moment.

And this gets more important, the more famous you are. I mean, imagine the people whose lives would be better now if they'd had one true friend to say “Puffy, I'll say this with love. Don't keep 25 bottles of baby oil, 3-31 bottles of astrogrid lubricant and a rubber duck in your cupboard. I'm not judging, but I just think there's a possibility that'll look very bad for you in the event of a police raid.”

“Andrew, I know you want to clear your name, and I'm not saying you shouldn't do the interview, but honestly, doll, you do sweat.”

“Il Papa, the American vice president, is asking to see you. Can I suggest you don't?”

Thank you so much.

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: Let's just go straight to our next speaker on the negative team is award winning social media reporter and presenter for Guardian Australia, Matilda Bosley. She speaks fluent Tiktok. She knows that you don't need a cigarette lighter to spark up a vape. She wrote the book The Year I Met My Brain and is here to make the rest of us look uncool. Give it up for Matilda Bosley.

Audience Applause

Matilda Bosley: now all I do, hope you'll forgive me, but just because Crabb’s already got it covered, I've just scratched out the five minute preamble about having a crush on David Littleproud, so we might just jump into the debate, if that's all right.

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand to you today firmly nay, proudly on the side of the negative team, for I am not a fucking sociopath, and I do not believe that true friends stab you in the front. No real friends, true friends do what generations of supportive, shady, emotionally complex people have done. They stab you in the back, and they do it with a smile, and they do it with loyalty, and they do it as a friend, and sometimes they do it with screenshots.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: But a stab in the back is a classic. It's the way it's always been done. Cain and Abel. Stab in the back, Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton. Stab in the back, Brutus and Caesar. I'll give you that one was stab in the front, but I reckon they're a little more than friends.

So let's break this down. What the kind of monsters on this side would have you do..

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: Is just - it's not honesty, it's violence, and worse, it's violence with eye contact. Imagine a true friend standing in front of you and saying, “No, I do think you peaked in 2023 and also, I do think that your transition to like longer form news explainer content won't be successful. And also, I agree with the crypto bros in your comment section, and I think that you do actually look like an overripe tomato who's going to be the last to be picked on supermarket shelves”. That was a real quote.

That isn't a friend. A real friend will wait till you leave the room, and then they'll say, “Hey. I mean, she's doing great, but, like, is she okay? She's looking a bit like tomato hued nowadays.”

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: That is a backstab delivered damage, minimal friendship preserved. And look, I am a big defender of my loved ones talking about me behind my back, genuinely, seriously, talk shit. Do it so much, because it's none of my business. Now, please, honestly, honestly, if I gave you the option right this second to have a piece of paper with everything every one of your loved ones had said about you behind your back, would you take it?

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: Obviously, not, because that is insane. I do not want to know what my best friend says to me about it says about me to her mum. It's none of my business. I do not I'm sure my boyfriend doesn't want to know how often I text that friend saying, “Jesus Christ. He hasn't proposed yet again”. None of his business. He is in the crowd tonight anyway.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: So genuinely though, if you were pissed off at me, rant, vent rave to someone else, and then the next day, when things have calmed down, come to me and let's talk about what's wrong these people. Would you have you come with your blood rushing and your front stabbing, knife already in hand, and it's just not productive.

Also, while we're on the topic, the other big thing, I'm a defender of the people I love are two faced-bitches. I love two-faced people. You know why? Because it means that I don't have to deal with the ugly face. No, I'm fine. I'm just talking. Don't worry about it. No, no, no, no. I'm not doing a debate. I don't have to deal with the ugly face. No, take your time.

You're a two-faced bitch, and I love you for it.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: People love to romanticise honesty as this universally, unequivocally honourable thing, and sometimes it is. But also, have you met that person who's like, “I'm just brutally honest”, and you know for a fact that it is the brutality and not the honesty that they're getting off to.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: Often, being brutally honest is more about the speaker than the listener. Like, for example, I would never go up to you know, say Rhys Nicholson and say, “Oh, your outfit makes you look like a mid level art curator going through a divorce.”

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: I would never do that now that I'm thinking about it, “I did just do that”, and it's almost like that's because you're on the other side of the team tonight, and we're enemies, and stabbing someone in the front like you just witnessed, is something only enemies would do.

Real Friends. Real Friends will lie to you just enough to keep you functional.

They don't say you're making bad life choices. They just call your mum and tell her what you're up to. They don't say “he's a dickhead and he's gonna leave you the moment someone with bigger tits looks his way”, they say, “oh my god, he sounds amazing. You should totally ask him if he wants kids right now”.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: That's constructive betrayal, and that's friendship. In conclusion, real friends don't stab you in the front. That's confrontational. It's uncivilised. And frankly, and I really do hate to accuse the affirmative team of such, but a bit Trumpian.

Audience Laughter

Yumi Stynes: Oh.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: And rumour has it, old crab here has a make America gradient statement tie tucked away in a cupboard somewhere. So please, please don't be like those fascists on that side of the stage. A front stabber wants to hurt you, but a back stabber, well, a backstabber is just a friend who's figured out a way to deal with all the bullshit that you put them through.

Thank you so much.

Yumi Stynes: Matilda Bosley, very good, very nice, very tasty, boyfriend you can propose now, if you want to just shout out, I'm here. My name's Yumi. So friendship, preserving, and Annabelle would have it be about accepting feedback.

What do you think would anybody here want that box full of every bad thing ever said about you? Would anybody you'd take it who's in the Yeah, yeah, give it to me.

Can I hear from you and who's in that?

No way. I do not want that box.

Okay, I get it. I get it. Let's go to our next speaker. Dr Justine Rogers is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law and Justice UNSW, specialising in ethics, justice and new technologies. She's funny. She's written TV shows and shows, comedy shows, a TED talk, and is here basically to make everyone else look like a blowhard podcast host. Please welcome Dr Justin.

Justine Rogers: Thank you.All right, everyone, bear with me. You just heard from media royalty, Annabell Crabb. You will soon hear from comedy genius, Rhys Nicholson, and in between, there's me, the law lecturer from UNSW, an official sponsor, so I get it.

This could feel like you're the crowd at the Australian Open waiting for the speech from the new champion, and the guy from Kia comes on.

Audience Applause

Justine Rogers: So I get it. I'm the key guy, but I got a PhD. I teach ethics, so, yeah, I'm the key guy who get a racket and smash Djokovic like soft shell crab and kids are pretty good now, good standard middle range cut. So good option for those families, mortgage drain anyway. Now Matilda has set up the side highlighting that, good friends, don't stab you in the front. They actually go behind your back. And these days, you know that's actually the best way to do it. So she's probably given us a case that we all have an intuitive sense of being true in empirical reality. But guys, this is a debate.

Just describing what is is lazy. I know you've got a very on, but that was freaking lazy Matilda.

Audience Applause

Justine Rogers: Gun regulation in the US, yes or no, but it's not tightly regulated, so we win. No. That's just literally the equivalent of opening a window saying, “look, look at reality out there. That's my argument. Take a peek.” That's not what a debate is. Ladies and gentlemen, we can't do that. These guys have paid good money for their seats. Good money. We're in a hallowed hall. We should be asking what we ought to do what good friends, true friends ought to do for us.

Yes, right now, true friends don't often stab us in the front all that much. They did warn me about this earring. I'm sorry they we don't often get front stabs from our friends, but we argue we should. We are in the normative realm. Okay, so let's be honest, ladies and gentlemen, humanity could do with the course correct.

Environmental ruin, populism, poverty, violence and with our collective genius, we chose to launch Katy Perry into space.

Audience Applause

Justine Rogers: It's time for some honest feedback, folks, even Sir David Attenborough, after decades of wistful narration, is finally calling us pieces of shit. Have you guys watched his latest movie Ocean? I mean, there's a scene in there where Attenborough releases a wild polar bear into a preschool. That guy has had enough.

Audience Applause

Justine Rogers: But no one listens to him. We need feedback from people. We actually hear from true friends and to Oscar Wilde and his excellent suggestion of front stabbing. Now, stabbing as distinct from what Matilda set up. Stabbing in this context is not simply the reverse of front stabbing, of backstabbing, rather.

So front stabbing is not simply the reverse. It's not just betrayal. It's not like, “hey, guess what? Derek, I'm emailing your boss to steal your job, but I'm doing it in front of you. I'm gonna cc you. So you know it's kosher”. That's not if you that's just being a bastard. That's not being a true friend.

If you betray someone or maliciously undermine them, whether from the front or the back, you're not a true friend. So if you enact any of that brutality that Matilda outlines, then of course, you're not a true friend. And the definition of tonight's debate takes care of it for the affirmative Wilde meant honest feedback, tough truths, carefully given on your habits, your choices, your values and even the friendship itself, it can be painful, sure. But if what you're saying is, you know, malicious or not underpinned by kindness and respect, well, you're not a true friend. As I said, you're kind of obliterated from the definition of tonight's debate, so we're stabbing as tough love as the opposite.

The opposition's really only left with two choices in tonight. They can argue one that tough feedback is never okay between friends should never happen. Or they can say it's fine, but only from your back. Now we're going to say both options are wrong. We're going to prove that, logically, biologically, sociologically, psychologically and for ethical reasons. So basically, all the reasons, and we're not going to do any empirical we're not talking about preferences. Matilda was in the right. Again, in that empirical realm, subjective preferences, or even empirical studies. I'm not going to do a debate, a survey on you. This is not a survey moment. This is a grand moment for normative get out of this. We're in a liminal state of this beautiful moment. Let's get into normative reality here.

So argument one front stabbing is key to survival. From an evolutionary perspective, we need each other's front stabbing feedback to survive. If rock brow the caveman is finger paving shitty Bison, and it's his turn on the Paleo roster to sharpen the spears. He needs to say a friend to say, “Hey, your pissy spears are bouncing off mammoth. We're going to starve to death, Rock brow, and your drawings are shit, bro. You need to invent a goddamn Paint Brush”.

Argument two, friends, true friends are best placed to stab you today, in this world of unchecked egos running wild, especially in the halls of power, as Annabelle has outlined, we need true friends to stab us more than ever. I mean, Raygun’s mates needed to read Oscar Wilde. They needed to tell her she was about to go in front of a global audience and do a wiggles impression of a kangaroo. But no. Unchecked, she went on there like someone who's never had so much as a pin prick to the front.

What about Andrew Tate? Anyone know him?

Everyone's like, I don't want to say, Well, if you don't know him, he's The Handmaid's Tale narrated by a temu Bond villain.

Audience Laughter

Justine Rogers: He needs a true friend to say, “Listen. Tatie Mctatie, alleged sex trafficking. It's not great. Presenting your podcast topless while smoking cigars? Buddy, mate, true friend, you look like a cheap male stripper someone might hire last minute for their colleagues retirement party.”

Audience Applause

Justine Rogers: Like “Fuck, no one organised anything for fucking Susan, all right, will this Lord of the Rings extra have to do?”

Sorry about that accent. British people here, but online trolls strangers, they don't register. They're glancing blows at best. What we need is a good friend, a good talking to it from a friend. Adding to the social costs of narcissists en masse. Are the harms for us as individuals. Psychologically, we are most self-actualized when truly seen, and it's real recognition we want. We want to be seen stab-worthy bits and all. Flattery and fandom have the identity nutrition of a Pot Noodle.

Argument three, friendship without truth is bad for everyone. Firstly, if you always bite your tongue, just smiling through friendship, never making things potentially weird, well, congratulations. You're not a true friend. You're a mascot.

Audience Laughter

Justine Rogers: And what's with this keeping quiet fantasy? Anyway, you might think that you're not enacting your stab, but trust me, it's being expressed. That unresolved issue that you have with your friend. It's coming out in the pas-ags size and eye rolls that you do at basically, literally anything they say. “I went on a bush walk,” “Of course you did.” “Is something wrong?” “Like, do you have something unresolved?” “You want to talk to about with me?” “No, did you see any wildlife?” “Yeah, I did, actually”. “Ah, great, yes, happy for you”.

Like, that's the stab still expressing itself, just in a very unconvincing fake moustache and glasses. And what about if you choose the other option, the only one that's available to the opposition. So if you decide to do the backstab, you know what happens? You spiral. You know how it goes. You start reality checking with mutual friends. You tell them about how that time the bestie, Caroline, like, told you your shoes look goofy at a party. But each time you tell the story, we can't help it. We like the attention. We're venting. We're Alliance building. The whole thing. The story grows the next time you say it happens. Every time I see her, she's always commenting on my clothes. Then you're chucking in a few details. Her eyes were really dilated when she said it. I think she's on the rack. Hazards back on the rack. Oh yeah, man, she's a heaven for it. And it just you keep adding it, and this unenacted Stab, it's now just flourishing in the dark. You're growing hate mushrooms, left, right and centre.

By the eighth telling, it's just too late for you to walk back that frankly insane anecdote about the time that Caroline went out and clubbed baby seals with Kevin Spacey. A single front stab could have slid this up. You could have had a chat. You could have got some mutual reality going. Could have saved the friendship and revealed in her response, if she were actually a true friend in kind, or a different level of friend, a friend of me, perhaps.

In conclusion, this isn't about constant correction. When we talk about front stabbing. True friendship isn't a series of interventions. It's earned honesty about a hard thing given occasionally by someone who cares about you, because it matters, not to shame, not in public, but in private, courageous intimacy.

Yes, it can hurt a bit, because we all want to belong. We are all attached to our idealised selves.

Yes, we are, sir, I think you have to purge something we are. It's fine. At first, stab in the front sounds brutal, but in fact, it's just Oscar Wilde these for being a grown up. It's not cruelty, it's maturity.

Be really if we just got a bit better at giving and receiving feedback, we'd be less tense about it. We'd behave better. We'd have better, stronger friendships. We probably have more friends, and we'd even make the world a better place.

Now really think about it, and I'm going to end on this final point over time through front stabs, we'd grow we'd need less tough feedback. We'd then be better role models, and we'd socially reproduce better, and in the process, eventually front stab ourselves into utopia.

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: All right, how's it going Great Debaters, 2025 Can we have some real time feedback for Dr Justine?

What did you think of Dr Justine?

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: Stab ourselves into utopia.

And on that note, I think we should go to our second speaker in the team for the negative in the debate about real friends stab you in the front.

Jennifer Wong, not to be confused with the Reddit COO. Jennifer Wong, who just sold a bunch of shares for the loose change of USD, $3.8 million No, this is a different Jennifer Wong, we're talking about Chinese Australian comedian, author, food enthusiast and TV presenter. Jennifer Wong, who loves wordplay, so watch out. But if she stabs you in the front, will it be with chopsticks or a fork?

Give it up for Jennifer Wong,

Jennifer Wong: Hello, everyone. I do not like confrontation.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: Yes, sorry, this is how much I do not like confrontation. A couple of years ago, I was on George Street and I saw my ex, and to avoid speaking with my ex, I hid behind a bin. I pressed my body right up against that bin. Clearly I was still attracted to trash.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: Speaking of trash, I am now going to rebut. I'm going to talk about two things. Annabelle mentioned that friends protect us from yourself, and friends are honest with each other, and this is important, because friends can stop us from making, quote, unquote, “unbelievable dicks of ourselves”. Now on stage here, there are at least three people who have made a career out of making unbelievable dicks of themselves.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: Some more successfully than others. I won't name names. So would you, as a true friend, want to deprive your friend from simply earning a living?

My second point is that I'm really cherry picking here, guys, but Justine mentioned that stabbing in the front, the evolutionary origins of this date back all the way to caveman days. Now I'm no expert, but I know that linguistically, things were pretty basic back then.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: In fact, one of the earliest accounts of cave men and women conversation involved a caveman and the world's oldest sarcastic woman. Where a caveman came back to the cave one day and said, “I hunted”. And the cave woman said, “I gathered”.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: So, what does it mean to be a true friend in 2025? Thank you, exactly it means sending memes and not judging each other. Everyone has their own interpretation of what friendship means. Now I know that you, in your mind, understand that probably you yourself are a true friend to at least one person. Can I get you to please raise your hand if you think that you are a true friend to at least one person,

Yeah, amazing. That's a lot of hands right now. Keep those hands up, right? Keep your hand up if you like confrontation. No, right? See hardly anyone.

And it's not just because we are all. All middle aged nerds who don't have the upper body strength to keep our arms raised, right? Don't bristle at being called a nerd, right? It is Thursday night. We are at the Sydney Writers Festival, at a debate, even though none of us are high school students with a favourite librarian and no prospect of a first kiss until their mid 20s. And no, I don't want to talk about it.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: A true friend in 2025 understands that we need to each make our own mistakes, a true friend understands that we need to keep repeating unhealthy patterns until a devastating breakdown finally breaks the cycle –

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: And then we take significant time out in order to examine the foundations of our being. I'm just speaking generally here.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: The idea that true friends will stab you in the front is that your friend will say something to your face, and what they say is supposed to improve things. The idea is that what they say to you is for your own good, or it could improve your relationship together. Well, who the hell are you to tell me what to do?

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: Does the Bible not say, “Let him who is without stone cast the first Hollywood movie?” No, it does not say that. Doesn't say that at all. Doesn't say that at all.

You want to talk about friendship, modern friendship, right? And you want to talk about stabbing in the front, right? But the thing is, my friends, we hardly even see each other anymore face to face. When is this opportunity for this stabbing to happen, right?

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: You just send you just send each other memes or articles or videos to let each other know you're alive. We don't have to tell someone to their face that they are behaving like a sociopath. We can just send them a link to a Guardian article about sociopaths with the message, “I thought this was interesting”.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: We can send a reel to someone about how there's always one friend in a friend group who always carries the group when it comes to planning things with the words “so true”. And I'm sure my friends really enjoyed watching that reel, which I sent them.

These days, do we even have time to meet in person? If you can manage it, what you do is you plan to go and do something together, right? Like an event like this. So one friend has organised this, and the other ones have just shown up for it. And then what do you do when you get there? You just sit side by side and look straight ahead.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: Frankly, Sydney, I've never seen such avoidant behaviour. We love our friends, but we never see them, right? We want the best for them, but we also know that they are on their own journey, and we will be there for them when they need us. There may have been a time when true friends did stab each other in the front. Things were different then. Let's take a look back, but not literally, because we are middle aged nerds and have mobility issues.

Oscar Wilde said that true friends stab you in the front. Now he lived between 1854 and 1900. Now, people were more forthright then because they didn't live as long as we do now.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: On average, in the 1850s people lived to be about 38 or 44 there was no time for sugar coating. There was no service journalism to teach people how to be gentle with each other. Also back then, mobile phone plans charged by the minute.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong:  So you got right to the point, right? You smell Percival. Take a bath, right? When Oscar Wilde said, The True friends stab you in the front, there are two things he was possibly referring to, the moment where Julius Caesar is stabbed by his friend Brutus for being an ass. And the second one is, the other possibility is that Oscar Wilde was referring to the play by Shakespeare where Julius Caesar is stabbed by his friend Brutus for being an ass. Third possibility is that Oscar Wilde read both the history and the play. After all, he knew the Importance of Being Earnest as a reader.

My friends, I will finish here, if you will allow me. You Me. Julius Caesar was so hell-bent on becoming the king of Rome. He was behaving so atrociously, atrociously sorry, that his friends literally stabbed him in the chest and killed him. And he was such an ass that they called it an Ass-Ass-A-Naation.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: But my friends, my true friends, as I look you in the eye today, I say any person who calls themselves a true friend and denies you the opportunity to make terrible decisions is essentially depriving you of the opportunity to live a life worth examining.

Audience Laughter

Jennifer Wong: And denying you the opportunity to have something interesting to write about. And we are all here tonight because we have a love of words, writing and stories. So what are you going to do? Are you going to go home and write about how great your day was? Who's going to publish your gratitude journal, Cheryl?

Audience Laughter and Applause

Yumi Stynes: One more time for Jennifer Wong, breathe it in, Jennifer, breathe it in. You killed that. I loved that. I also would like a collective groan, a groan for ass -ass-ination. Thank you. Thank you. I like it a lot.

All right, we've got two speakers to go and then two rebuttals to go. Presumably, they saved their hot, hard weapons for last. Can't tell, never will find out.

Rhys Nicholson is a stand up comedian who recently made Sky News headlines for sharing a selfie, which they posted and said “it looked like a lot like Pauline Hanson”, can see it. We saw them recently stealing scenes on the TV show Fisk, hosting the ARIA awards. And you all know them from the TV show, The Weekly, they're most comfortable being on stage being evil and bitchy, so please, welcome, respect,

Audience Applause

Rhys Nicholson: Hello. Let me start by saying I quite like this jacket.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: Good evening, and what a thrill it is to be back at this event where hundreds of tote bags, Gorman sack dresses and people with red wine mouth pack the town hall just to watch David Marr and Annabelle Crabb publicly act out some sort of deeply repressed, so slow burn sexual tension.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: When are you nerds just going to fuck.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: What are we here to argue tonight? The negative team would like us to believe that true friends should protect your feelings, and that if criticism must happen. It should be gentle, indirect or behind your back. They are arguing the emotional equivalent of serving a beef wellington on different coloured plates.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: Let's be honest here, most people in your life are not going to tell you the truth. And as much as it pains me to say this as someone who works in the arts, but genuine constructive criticism is important, especially from someone you love. It means they respect you enough to say it to your face, I stand before you as a millennial. I am 35 which is not old. I know I mean, the rot has begun. You hear that, that's people in their 40s.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson:  Whenever people in their 30s complain about ageing, people in their 40s like you, wait, you wait, you wait until you get into your 40s, that's when the shit really begins. And then people in their 40s complain about ageing. So people in their 50s, like you, wait, you wait until you get to your 50s, and that just keeps going and going and going until someone in their 90s is at a seance like, well, you just wait until you're dead.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: If we are to believe our opponent's argument that we should all be living in a world where our friends are soft, squishy creatures who protect us from evaluation. They are looking at the results right here. My parents are ceramicists. I -

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: I'm a millennial, a generation who was raised to avoid criticism with no tough love. We were raised to think that we can do anything, and it has led us to do almost nothing. To give you an idea, I'm at work right now.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: I started work when you saw me get up over there, and I'm almost done.

Audience Laughter and Applause

Rhys Nicholson: And how about how about this? I've always wanted to be a comedian and a writer my whole life, when I was little, this is the world I wanted to be in right now, right this very second, I'm living my dream, and I don't want to be here.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: I have five episodes of The Pit to watch. It is hard to stab your friends in the front. We're not denying that, especially because, and I'm sure you're all in the same position as me, all of my friends are psychos, every single one of them. But I'm 35 and I'm too tired to start again.

And as many of my friends and I plummet into our 30s and 40s, a lot of them are doing some stuff that might require some stabbing. I was warned about it when I turned 30 that the decade might bring with it some change in perspective. The common denominator I've noticed with my friends is there's an idea of maintenance, as if these new eras reveal life as a cosmic garden. We all are lovingly tending to, planting a few fresh saplings for a more enriching future, and taking a moment to smell the roses, which sounds lovely.

On the other heavier side of the scales were the people who tumbled into their 30s and 40s and hit the deck like a thud, instead of slight focused alterations, they had gone with something closer to a complete life explosion. Partners were left, jobs were quit. The garden was just not entirely bulldozed, but the soil had been salted and the landscaping staff forced to dig their own shallow graves, and was shot execution style, and the whole thing concreted over. And yes, the gardening metaphor has run away from me.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: But you know what I mean, some big changes were made. And as I've grown older, I've started to notice these moments of so called “Clarity” happening around me. Such behaviour can come across as a cry for help, but as a spectator, it's not always clear whether you're meant to do anything about it. The question is, when, if ever, should you interfere? Are they in trouble, or are they fine? Are they flourishing, or are they hurtling off a cliff? After all, both situations look identical to the concerned bystander.

You know, the ones that I've mean that suddenly there's no small talk with these people. It's all big chats about big things and big plans. And you find yourself thinking, why? Who I'm having an aneurysm. Down I go.

You find yourself saying, “Who? Who am I to say they're wrong? Why should I hold them back?” Some of the most successful businesses on Etsy are the result of several full blown manic episodes. Sometimes you just have to make a call. Though, in one particularly dramatic instance, a pal of mine left her long term partner and started floating the idea that she might want to move into one of those tiny homes you see on documentaries late at night, on free to air digital channels, and at that point, I had to step in.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: I had to look her in the eye and gently, almost surgically, plunge a knife into her belly, because a real friend doesn't let another human being use a compost toilet.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson:  We're not saying friends should constantly criticise you, because real friendship, the kind we're arguing for tonight, doesn't hide behind polite silence. Friendship is a knife in the gut and a hand on your shoulder. It's brutal. It's loving, it's uncomfortable eye contact and hard truth served on matching crockery.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: And yes, it might leave a scar, but at least you'll know exactly who and why it was done. So stab me with love, with courage, with the respect only a real friend would dare to show because truly, if you ask me what this whole night is about, we're arguing the virtues of the missionary position.

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: Because only someone who truly respects you puts it in from the front.

Audience Laughter and Applause

Yumi Stynes: Did that just get erotic? Hey, there was a guy called Philip Adams who used to do a show on the ABC he was there for 33 years, really deep voice. Spoke very slowly on late at night. Eventually, he had to hang up his headphones and quit. And the ABC were like, “oh my god, we're going to find somebody to replace him”.

So they polished up their DEI guidelines, because they've been criticised for lacking diversity, ethnicity and whatnot. They searched far and wide for someone to replace the old white guy who had retired, and you know who they found? An old white gay guy. Give it up please, for the very thick skinned, very lovely. David Marr.

Audience Applause

David Marr: Can I say how wonderful I think you are to come out on a rainy night like this, to see Annabelle Crabb's team crushed, and not to do it for the first time you've seen it year after year after year.

Audience Laughter

David Marr: But the bravery of the woman is what so attracts us to her, her refusal to give up, and also that wonderful sense she projects of delight at finding anybody listening to her. You've got to understand that she's from Adelaide

Audience Laughter

David Marr: And and they don't ever expect a bigger audience will ever listen to them, perhaps their family and a few close friends. But here she is rather out of her depth in the Sydney Town Hall, doing her best to argue the impossible.  About, she's made a career of that, and I am wanting you to be sympathetic to her, because she lives in a suburb. Do you remember all she went on and on about Coles and Woolworths? She only has the haziest idea of what they are.

Audience Laughter

David Marr: She lives in a boutique suburb where the best they can do is a corner shop and a tobacconist down the road. She doesn't know what Coles and Woolworths are. She's trying to project a kind of democratic feeling towards you, which only makes herself appear more ignorant than ever.

Audience Laughter

David Marr:  But I want to say that we're friends, aren't we? Annabelle, we're friends. Few weeks go by without her bringing to me one of her opening paragraphs. A jumble of mismatched ideas and –

Audience Laughter

David Marr:  and I do what I can to clean it up, give it some verve, and, and, and help her engage her readers’ curiosity. Because, you know, being once again from Adelaide, she doesn't really believe anybody needs to have their curiosity engaged. She believes that she is privileged to speak, and –

Audience Laughter

David Marr:  I've done the best I can for years and years to help her. Along these lines, I also help her with her makeup and costuming, but that's something –

Audience Laughter

David Marr:  That we haven't got time to deal with tonight. But just while we're on the destruction of this woman's team. Justine, I went to law school. I've heard your lectures. When I listened to you tonight, I thought, “Is it contracts or is it torts?” It's just an old law lecture with a few jokes, and I commend you, because I never had as many jokes as that in my law school when I was at law school. But it's really, really wonderful. The way that you've managed to do it. You've made law lectures a bit funny. And if I could point out, I don't want to be mean about this, but there are other people on this platform with PhDs.

Audience Laughter

David Marr:  You had to earn yours. I was given mine. But it has to be asked about Justine, whether she's left it too late to leave the law. I left it after one day. I was admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales on a Thursday, got drunk that night, came to work on the Monday, witnessed a will. David Marr, solicitor, left for Europe on Monday, never came back. I was a lawyer for one day, Justine, find the courage to leave the law.

Audience Laughter

David Marr: Well, Reese, Reese, your friends can't tell you the truth. It would be too damaging.

Audience Laughter

David Marr: I mean, I know you're tough because you've worked in circuses, and you were an acrobat in your day -

Audience Laughter

David Marr:  and you know what the taste of sawdust is in your mouth, but I don't think your friends can actually tell you what the problems are. You talk about people saying, wait till you're 30, your 50s are going to be terrific. You're going to have mastered the English language.

Audience Laughter

David Marr:  You'll know about timing on stage, yep, timing. You'll get that you know down to a and you'll no longer be worried about using compost toilets, because there are much worse things to worry about, really, than compost toilets.

Rhys Nicholson: I can't think of one thing.

David Marr: No. The young have no imagination.

Rhys Nicholson: He can't remember more.

David Marr: More than ever. Robert, you were supposed to send me some jokes. Rob, more than ever. Since I rejoined the ABC at the age of 84 I have seen the purpose of my life is to seek the middle path. And here there is one. There doesn't have to be stabbing, neither in the front nor the back. There doesn't have to be stabbing. All we ask of our true friends is that they tell us the truth, like the message I got from my friend Mary today from Leipzig, “try to exercise logic and calm in the debate, no flouncing and keep lid on whoops”.

You see, that's the kind of truthful advice that friends can give, blunt advice, as these people, rather ineptly, who once or twice tried tonight to argue, is actually the mark of true friendship. And Oscar Wilde said so. These people don't know anything about Oscar Wilde except a couple of vague quotes. You know they know nothing. Oscar Wilde also said of friendship. “What is the good of friendship? If one cannot say exactly what one means, anybody can say charming things and try to please and flatter Annabelle, but a true friend always says unpleasant things and does not mind giving pain.” I have friends in the audience tonight who promised me jokes, but they haven't come through.

Rhys Nicholson: Okay, you've gone over time.

David Marr: Mary, 40 years ago, assigned me a very difficult task, and it is something I learned a great deal from a lesson I wish to give this team, and to all of you, it can't be I haven't got into the speech yet.

Audience Laughter

David Marr:  I've got 33 seconds. Okay, we were sharing a house, my friend, our friend, Neil stank. I was given the job of telling him he had B-O. We brought him soap, and that didn't seem to do any good. So Mary said, “Will you walk talk to him?” I said I would, but I didn't, of course, because I was too scared to talk about a taboo subject like B-O, even though the Guardian these days, tell you, tells you own your Bo. I mean, it's one of the big messages of The Guardian.

Audience Laughter

David Marr:  And then one day we were one day we were in a -

Rhys Nicholson: it's counting up, it's going up.

David Marr: Does that mean I finished? Anyway, where courage I lacked the courage in a crowded car on a summer day to tell Neil he needed to do something about his B-O And Mary said, Mary said, “Neil, we think you should start wearing deodorant”, and we've been friends ever since. And that just shows that. It shows something.

Audience Laughter

Yumi Stynes: Thanks. All right, your big moment is coming up in just a few minutes. Okay, where you get to decide which team wins the great debate for 2025 Are you feeling ready for that big responsibility?

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: Yeah. So we've got two quick speeches to go. We're going to get the rebuttal. Annabelle will speak for the affirmative. Team, Matilda will speak for the negative. Are you ready to go? Take it away? Annabelle Crabb.

Annabelle Crabb: Look, tonight's been quite confronting for all of us, hasn't it, really I mean, I am accustomed to outshining David Marr of our two debate encounters. So far this year, I have won one, and you will decide who will win the second, yeah, we did one in Adelaide.

Audience Applause

Annabelle Crabb: I have the medal, but I'm too cool to wear it. One thing I'm not used to is winning in the speaking from a position of unpreparedness stakes. Tonight, that's him, as became desperately obvious from his attempts that you've just witnessed.

David Marr, what a man still bleeding from his facial wound. If I had an elastoplast kink, I would answer your, I hope, rhetorical question Rhys to why we haven't got it together yet. The accurate answer is because I haven't had the green light from his carers at any point.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb: One man rebuttal of the Alice Cooper dictum that only women bleed. Oh, Alice, check out that man's face. I'm not sure which law lectures he was going to to criticise my colleague, Justine. I assume they were in the 1800s which would roughly make sense.

I had an opportunity to check the revelation that reached my ears tonight, that David Marr has a PhD. It's true. I looked first I've heard of it. 2013 October, about two weeks after the election of the Abbott government. What could that possibly mean? I do not know.

But listen, I have nothing but goodwill towards these people, and I have sought hard truths for from them. I asked David earlier tonight if my boobs were falling out of this top, and he looked at me with the kind of wild panic of a man who really hasn't thought about boobs since he was about six months old.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb: And I I accept that that is fine. I asked Jennifer Wong, and she said, “I'm on you and I've got tape. Do you want some?” That's what I like. We have to be honest with each other, and in the interests of honesty, Matilda, I wish I'd said beforehand when we were backstage, but mate, you've got a beret on your head.

Audience Laughter

Annabelle Crabb: Yeah, sorry. I should have said and the only reason I've been that unkind to Matilda's headwear is that she called us fascists and Trumpian, and the Matilda and Jennifer approach to the world is, and I quote, because I couldn't believe it when I heard it. Jennifer Wong, “friendship is sending meams and not hating on each other”. Matilda, “real friends will lie to you just enough to keep you functional” before accusing us of being a bit Trumpy.

So and that made the red mist descend for me people. Because I don't know if you've seen that footage of the Trump cabinet meeting where they go around every single person, and one by one, every secretary says something like, “I don't know if it's because you're so handsome or because it's you're so courageous, but either way, I've never seen a leader like you before”. And the next one says, “I love you to the sky and back”. And the next one says “I'm crying because I can't decide you a saint or a genius? I'm stumped”. And the last one says, “I personally think that you would be crazy not to take that pimp force one plane”.

Ladies and gentlemen, being good to your friends and lying to them just enough to keep them functional or welcoming fascist forces into power by telling them that they're infallible. I know how to win debates ladies and jelly spoons, and you win them with George Orwell quotes. And here's one of them, “Fascists are friendly people, and the animals outside looked from pig to man and man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which”.

You know what to do. Good night.

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: How's it going? Did that make any sense? Pig to man, let’s welcome the final rebuttal for the night. One last speaker, Matilda.

Matilda Bosley: Thank you all. If you don't mind, I'll skip the five minute preamble about how much I have a crush on David Marr and I do apologise that I'm doing the rebuttal, obviously suffering from blood loss. And look, I would love to say a bunch of stuff. I actually did just get word that because of Justine's talk, Raygun is suing us, and we do have to stop.

Now, the affirmative team seems to have a kind of loose understanding of what a stab is, if you ask them, it was sort of anything from a nuclear personality, sort of assassination, to vaguely disagreeing, you know, “Oh, do you like this shirt? Oh, I like the other one better. Oh, my God,” they don't know the difference between a stab and a gentle stroke. And while I'm partial to both, they do have a time and place, and there is a difference a 16 year old me would have you very aware of.

Now, Annabelle here comes and talks about the importance of honesty, the importance of being frank, the honesty, honestly, a woman who wore a peach tie to election coverage, cowardly. We see your glasses. We know you were jacking it to the idea of a minority government.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: Also didn't even giggle at Mr. Pre polls once during the night, I'd say, pretty fucking duplicitous. Also apparently, on the payroll of Coles and Woollies. Oh, don't break them up. And you know, the most egregious thing was when you tried to sabotage my speech by dropping a pen and then wanting me to pick it up, as if I wouldn't be displaying full menorah if I did. Have you looked at this skirt?

So moving on from that last thing to say, oh, Leigh Sales was correct about that topic and not bringing it up.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: So Justine, you talked a lot about tough truths, kindly given. So here's some. You talked about the need for this to be a proper debate lecture, as if we weren't vaping on stage. Five minutes earlier.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley:  You sang again, literally, everything is a stab. An eye roll is a stab. Oh no, the eye rolled to the chest. So, so attacking David Attenborough. You talk about, Oh, David Attenborough calls us a piece of shit. That's a true friend. When did you meet him? That's interesting. And, you know, I did. I did expect. I got a little bit lost in the middle there. But then we came back and you talked about normative relativity, normative reality.

And I was really interested, like, what, whether that was like an indica or a sativa, which way that was going, and front stabs will let us grow into a utopia, pretty fucking Trumpian. So Rhys at first I'd like to say the jury is still out on the mushroom trial, you bastard, innocent until proven guilty. Legally, that is all I can say.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: Now you're talking a lot about gardens and everything. I was searching for a point. The main point I got is like, we get it. You're a rich and famous comedian, you have a home and a garden, okay?

Audience Laughter

Rhys Nicholson: I work at the ABC. I am not rich. Why do you think I fucking hear for an honorarium.

Matilda Bosley: Really wouldn't be bragging about that babe as a guardian employee. But look, you know it was, it was, I have to admit, difficult to find the point you were trying to make in between the sort of recycled joke from whatever Paramount plus special that was from.

Audience Laughter

Matilda Bosley: But I do have to say, I do love the jacket. I did write that joke before hand, and then Annabelle fucking stole it before. So it just felt like bullying. To finish up, I would like to say we have to be honest, sure, but realistic. We want to live in a functional society, not the society those would have you believe.

And to close it all up, I would just like to say in a totally unbiased way. Yumi, you do look like a sexy vampire. As you said beforehand, you're really beautiful. And also, to take a page out of your book, I have a book coming out at the end of the year. I am now just realising my publishers are in the audience. I don't know if I was meant to announce that yet. Pre. Order, baby. Thank you so much!

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: All right, you guys have been great. You guys have been great, and you guys have been great. I love you all, but this is the moment where you get to decide, is friendship really going to survive a stab in the front, as these people would argue, or is true friendship doing it a different way and giving feedback without the knives, as this group would argue.

You get to decide by making a shit tonne of noise.

So I might go back and forth twice per side who thinks that the affirmative side should win? Could we please hear if you

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: Wow, that was that felt very resounding, but we haven't heard what you think about the negative side. Do you think these guys could win?

Audience Applause

Yumi Stynes: Look, I don't want to bring it down to a sculling wine competition between Matilda and Rhys. Please do not

Rhys Nicholson: David hadn't written a speech.

Yumi Stynes: All right. I actually have done this three times in a row, and it's usually pretty clear who is the winner, but I can't tell tonight that look pretty even. So we are going to go one more time the affirmative team yes or no.

Okay. Okay, okay, you're gonna have to really lean in if you believe then negative team should win. I'm getting it. I'm paying it. David Marr, Jennifer Wong, Matilda Bosely, you have won our great debate. For 2025.

Please thank our amazing speakers, Rhys Nicholson, Dr Justine and Annabelle Crabb and thank you all for coming. My name is Yumi Stynes, thanks for coming. Have a great Sydney Writer’s Festival.

UNSW Centre for Ideas: Thanks for listening. This event was presented by the Sydney Writers Festival and supported by UNSW Sydney. For more information, visit UNSW Centre for ideas.com and don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.