Well thank you very much Glen it is great to be with you, Lucy and I thrilled to be here with so many friends. It’s good to see Craig Laundy here, my colleague and it’s good to see Arthur Sinodinos the Cabinet Secretary and Elizabeth and also of course to see Wayne Swan the former Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister.
This is a thoroughly bipartisan evening. I think the adulation that Ken and Jill Allen have had, a coalition appointment I might say, threw that in, to as the Consul-General to New York. Ken and Jill were the most remarkable team in New York City and Glen’s reprise, the way in which Advance was founded by Ken after 9/11. It was one of the most profound insights.
We had Serafina who has described the one million Australians around the world, our diaspora as a smart-grid of human capital and she is absolutely right. It was neglected for years. Lucy’s Dad Tom Hughes, a great barrister, often would describe an opponent’s point with distain as being a penetrating glimpse of the obvious, you know something it’s amazing how many penetrating glimpses of the obvious go unobserved until somebody actually picks up and what were we thinking not to take up the challenge of uniting, of connecting this extraordinary diaspora of one million Australians. One million adventurous, enterprising, creative, innovative, competitive Australians right around the world.
Now we are a most remarkable nation. I know every Prime Minister, every President claims their nation is exceptional; everyone has a claim to exceptionalism one kind or another. But we are without any doubt the most successful multicultural society in the world. There is no comparable country of our scale, or larger for that matter, that has such a large percentage of its population born from outside its borders. In Australian overall, about 26 or more per cent, in this city it close to one third. And it is from every corner of the world and every race, every religion, every cultural background. We have been able to achieve that with remarkable harmony.
As we’ve heard from Aunty Norma, we have in Australia the oldest continuous human cultures on earth. Not very far from here at all, you’re on your way to the airport you could drop in to La Perouse and you would see there the most extraordinary story of resilience, an Aboriginal community whose forbearers were there 40,000 years ago. They were there a few hundred years ago when the white men arrived in their ships, what a resilient story that they are still there. The remarkable achievement of our First Australians, it’s one that we should always celebrate and honour and as Norma said, walk on that path of reconciliation firmly, we’ve got a long way to go. We are as old as our Frist Australians culture and we are as young, as the baby in the arms of its immigrant mother. We are as old as that and as young as that.
That is our remarkable achievement. It’s that multiculturalism, that globalism, that internationalism that is so extraordinary. What we see with Australians is an ability to embrace the world as it is. We are, if you like, a nation made for the 21st century.
This is a century of globalism. You have heard me say it before particularly the parliamentarians – we are living at a time in human history when the pace of change is quite unprecedented in its scale and the speed, the nature of change, change that we are living with. Think of the transformation in the last generation.
Think of the transformation in technology, think of the way in which we see distance differently. I remember when I went to University in England in 1978. Lucy and I, I think maybe we had one or two telephone calls. They would have been brief they were prohibitively expensive. Faxes didn’t exist, certainly email, the internet didn’t exist and so we corresponded on aerogram. I might say the good thing about that is we have two large folders of aerograms, my aerograms to her and hers to me. So that’s the dividend and our children have ploughed through them at different times and been shocked at some of the [laughter] Daisy drew my attention to some rather romantic remarks I addressed to her mother and I said ‘well I was very lonely darling, very lonely.’ We were so far away and you’d read the English papers and the only thing you would read about Australia was a cricket score.
Then not even a generation later, when our son Alex in 2000 or 2001 in fact at the time of 9/11, Alex went to study in the United States. He could read all the Australian newspapers generally before us, because obviously they were posted not long after midnight. Email was there, telephony was so cheap it was almost free. Within less than a generation, in twenty three years in fact, it was a complete transformation in the way we saw distance.
Australians however have been naturals for this. I know many of you including Ken have worked with large global investment banks, as indeed I have, and you’ll find that all of the big banks, all of the global banks and global firms like Dow and IBM of course are represented here and great sponsors and I acknowledge your generosity with sponsoring Advance. You’ll find that global firms will generally over hire Australians and what I mean by that is that will hire more Australians then they could ever employ in Australia and the reason for that is Australians are naturally global citizens. Because we grow up in a multicultural country, because we have always been outward looking, we naturally embrace the rest of the world.
The important thing is to harness this smart grid of human capital and we are doing that. The strides that Advance has made are extraordinary. The achievements of the prize winners as you will hear them all tonight, so I won’t spoil the presentations and indeed a few surprises later in the evening. As Wayne knows and Arthur knows, Cabinet Ministers have great secrets reposed on them, as Martin Parkinson knows as the head of the Public Service, that’s probably quite unwise but none the less we will keep those secrets. We can keep them for a few minutes at least.
What you have been able to do is make that connection between Australians overseas to promote their own business, promote their own opportunities, that networking is of critical importance.
One of the other great paradoxes we have is that when the internet arrived and it was an extraordinary transformation, many people said well this will benefit the periphery at the expense of the centre because you can do all of your business sitting on an island in the middle of the ocean or a mountain top, you don’t have to be connected. Yet what has happened and Lucy, Chief Commissioner Lucy knows this better than most, as our great urbanist here – cities are more important than ever. Why are they more important than ever? Because we humans are very social animals. We are always more creative when we are connected, when we are engaging with each other. That is why networking is so important. That’s why Robert Putnam said years ago that for most of us our best asset is actually our social capital, our rolodex he said in those days. I guess it would be the contacts in your smartphone today. What we are doing, what you are doing Serafina and Glen and Ken, what you are doing with Advance is enabling all of us to benefit from that extraordinary connection with those one million Australians and all of their experience and contacts in the rest of the world.
One of the programmes that you have promoted is called elevate61. It showcases Advance’s enormous value for our innovators and entrepreneurs by matching local businesses with international advisers, customers and investors. The value of this programme was underscored just a few days ago when simPRO, an Australian cloud technology group and elevate61 company, secured US$31 million in funding to support growth in the United States and United Kingdom. That is an Australian IP taking on the world and the type of example that goes to the very heart of my Government’s National Innovation and Science Agenda.
I firmly believe that we cannot secure our prosperity without a passionate determination to promote innovation and science. We must be smarter, faster and more agile. We have to be more competitive, more open. I know that there are populist arguments abroad, people wanting to put up walls and talking about protectionism, walls metaphorical, walls real indifferent jurisdictions. But the reality is that the key to success is that engagement, that openness and that network of innovation that drives the growth of the 21st century. Remember what is the key tenure of our times, it is change at a pace and scale unprecedented in human history and that requires us to be fast, global, innovative, engaged right around the world. Advance harnesses that enormous smart grid of human capital, our diaspora.
Lucy and I are thrilled to be here with you tonight, our son Alex and his wife and his daughter of course are part of that Australian diaspora, as many of your children and many of you have been yourselves.
We are strengthened by that; we have to be more open, more global, more connected. One million Australians overseas at any time of course is an extraordinary wealth of experience which Advance is bringing together.
It was Ken, a profound insight, a historic achievement to set up Advance. You set it up at a very dark time but it will be a key element in our nation’s very bright future.
Thank you very much and congratulations.
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