2014 Richard Larkins Oration
Quentin Bryce AD CVO
Richard Larkins Oration
Delivered by The Honourable Quentin Bryce AD CVO
Dr Alan Finkel, Chancellor,
Professor Ed Byrne, Vice-Chancellor,
The Hon. Marilyn Warren, Chief Justice, Victoria,
The Hon. Diana Bryant, Chief Justice, Family Court of Australia,
Distinguished guests all.
Good evening my friends, I want you to know how thrilled and delighted I am to be back in your charming, elegant, sophisticated city which I have come to know, admire and enjoy across my life.
- Family gatherings in my girlhood;
- Professional commitments, career building, networking;
- As Governor-General observing and sharing the strength of community spirit that Melbourne signifies;
- Generosity and compassion in spades;
- Qualities that stand as a source of courage, inspiration and support to people in tough times, to people with special needs, to those who live in disadvantage, sometimes despair.
And oh, the delight of joyous lovely things – your rich cultural life – music, art, dance, theatre, comedy.
This evening we gather on land of the Kulin people. I respectfully acknowledge the traditional owners, and I recall with affection, time with women elders, their daughters, nieces and aunties in November last year at Charcoal Lane – out in the courtyard in soft afternoon shade of tall trees, we sat around the table for women’s business, for storytelling, yarning, warmth, laughter.
I am ever conscious of the debt of gratitude I owe to my indigenous friends who taught me across my life what it means to be an elder. I see in them so much that I hold dear. Things that have been important and influential in my own journey.
The traditional with the contemporary, the personal with the political.
Sisterhood shining through.
I never cease to be uplifted by the vitality of women’s meetings – our bonds across every nation, every background.
They are strong and deep. They are steeped in our common top priority - the futures of our children and grandchildren.
My friends, I have spoken often of how greatly I valued the opportunity in my Canberra years, to draw attention to the exceptional acts of accomplishment, service, selflessness in our midst.
The role of Governor General is like no other in its capacity to see the spectrum of Australian life.
The very best of our society in every field.
In grand places - in quiet corners. Men and women, giving, caring, contributing and leading.
In recent days, I have been reflecting on some memorable connections I made with this much respected institution of learning, teaching and research.
Conversations with remarkable experts, leading outstanding teams, working in areas of enormous import to our shared humanity.
Allow me a couple of snap shots, if you will:
Jayashari Kulkarni, Professor of Psychiatry at Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre.
I was exhilarated by my discussions with her and her colleagues about their mental health research.
Side by side, clinical practice in a community setting.
170 staff and students
Conducting a 102 clinical trials
Developing new treatments, new pathways for people with severe mental illness
Schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, depression, autism, affecting 1 million Australians who don’t respond to current methods.
The MAPrc catchphrase “we mend minds” describes the centres capacity to translate research discoveries into the innovative, the cutting edge.
- Deep brain stimulation techniques
- Magnetic seizure therapy
- Cognitive strategies for people with schizophrenia
- Diffusion tensor imaging
GLASS (The Gender, Leadership & Social Sustainability unit) where I am proud to be Patron. Professor Margaret Alston heads inter-disciplinary research.
Members of the unit have a breadth of experience that allows them to work with effectiveness across different sectors and levels of influence from:
- a remote community in Bangladesh
- to a public hospital in country NSW
- to UN agencies in New York
- to boardrooms of our four big banks.
Dr David Buckingham, Vice-President, gave me valuable advice on my efforts to encourage women’s emerging leadership in Africa.
I came home from my time in several countries there convinced that that is the key to advancement in many aspects of political, economic and social life.
At the Monash Africa Centre, academics, government, industry experts, current students, opinion leaders research and explore present realities and future potential of the African continent. All underpinned by partnerships and collaboration
I am impressed by the centre’s commitment to contributing to the consolidation of democracy and social justice, and its dedication to nurturing scholars in Africa.
I know that in this gathering there are many who make rich and valuable contributions
to the University’s distinguished reputation as architects of change in endeavours that improve people’s lives in real ways.
I want to congratulate you on what you do.
Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Allow me to express my gratitude for the compliment paid to me on this occasion. It means a great deal to me. I offer my most sincere thanks.
- to Monash University for your invitation to deliver the Richard Larkins Oration
- and to Monash and Warwick University for bestowing upon me their first joint honorary degree.
I am doubly honoured.
Honoured because I admire Monash’s stated mission, “to improve the human condition” through a commitment to human rights and social justice.
And honoured because, through their Alliance, Monash and Warwick are acting as universities in the most universal sense of the word
- committing themselves to equip students to be citizens of the world,
- and engaging in research that seeks to make that world a better place.
This Alliance is the kind of creative, inclusive, international enterprise that more Australian institutions (agencies, companies or universities) need to invest in, if we are to keep up with the demands of a rapidly changing world.
Remember how, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama opined that the victory of Western liberal democracy marked ‘the end of history’?
In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis – and tragedies such as the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 – we know better.
History never ends – it only changes –sometimes it accelerates. We are living in such a time now
– a time of acceleration.
- Developed and developing economies across Asia are converging – and will account for 60 per cent of the global economy’s output by 2025.
- Smart networks and smart phones are creating mountains of digital information – that will enable everything from driverless cars to software able to predict behaviour.
- Climate change is here – it will cause harsher droughts, more damaging floods, longer heat waves, bigger bushfires and higher sea levels.
- Our population is ageing and growing as Baby Boomers retire and we head towards a projected population of 62 million by the end of this century.
Where these changes take us in the future depends on the decisions we make today.
I believe that the most important way to prepare our nation for a prosperous and safe future, is for us to ensure the best education of Australian people at every stage of their lives – from early intervention to post-graduate research.
As former Vice Chancellor and President, Richard Larkins, said:
‘If we wish to be a vibrant, exciting country participating in and contributing to the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century, we have to do better than selling our commodities and being a tourist destination …Our universities must develop a vibrant research culture by going out and engaging with the world.’
Professor Larkins, whose wisdom we acknowledge this evening, is right.
We do have to do better.
We have to match our ability with our ambition.
We have to engage with the world beyond our shores.
We have to become more open, more accessible, more sustainable and more just.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me focus on some areas where I believe our national ambition should be directed in order to enhance and enrich our country, our community.
A national ambition for today and tomorrow that embraces the potential of our fellow Australians– no matter where they live, no matter what language they speak, no matter what their gender.
A national ambition that overcomes disability, disadvantage and discrimination.
A national ambition for all.
But before I talk about my ambition for Australia’s present and future, I want to tell you a story from Australia’s past.
A story of a brother and sister – children of Jewish migrants.
Their parents invested in the education of both of them –brilliant students – equally sharp minds.
The boy - dux of Scotch College – his sister dux of PLC. Equal talents, but not equal.
Both should have gone to university.
Both should have had the chance to discover their true potential.
But one was left behind.
The mother died. A tough decision was made.
The sister would stay home to raise a younger third sibling.
Her brother would continue at University.
For the sister - a full life
- travel, tutoring students,
- teaching at University High,
- translating books into braille.
But she never became a fully independent person.
Her brother, on the other hand, went from strength to strength,
- three university degrees
- a successful engineer
- worldwide fame as a general in World War One
- he set up the State Electricity Commission here
- he was seen in his time as, to be the greatest living Australian
- his state funeral attended by 300,000
- He was the first Australian to have a university named for him.
SIR JOHN MONASH.
But, my friends, how many know of his brilliant sister – Mathilde?
What might she have achieved given the same opportunities as his?
This comparison is not made to diminish the achievements in any way of Sir John – one of our country’s greatest sons.
Who, at seventeen, wrote in his diary:
‘Is it true that Ambition is a vice? Surely then it is a vice common to all mankind;
for how can a man live without ambition? … The sole thing that bears up my failing spirits is this ambition’.
Who after his death a half-century later – was spoken of by military contemporary,
Sir Brudenell White, as a man of ambition in the best possible sense.
I quote:
‘Ambition, of course, he possessed but the ambition which seeks power, authority or riches is scarcely worth the name. The only ambition for which I have any regard is that which comes from an impelling will to make a job of any task undertaken. This is the ambition he had in a marked degree.’
Ladies and gentlemen, we will never know whether Mat Monash might have become one of our country’s greatest daughters.
We will never know because, in her time, ambition was considered the domain of men; and women – whether mothers or daughters, sisters or wives – were expected to play a supporting role.
There were exceptions to the rule, including,
One of Mat’s classmates at PLC – Vida Goldstein – internationally renowned suffragist and first woman in the British Empire to stand for Parliament. The federal electorate of Goldstein is named after her.
Mat Monash, though, played the supporting role.
When Sir John sent a four thousand word letter home, describing how he engineered the ANZAC’s bloodless evacuation from Gallipoli, it was Mat who typed up the manuscript and ensured its distribution.
When the general was made a Knight Commander of the Bath in 1917, it was Mat who
‘did a little war-dance’ to celebrate.
When her brother returned home to Australia a national hero, it was Mat Monash who counselled him to beware of false friends.
John Monash was a man worthy of his sister’s support. He was described by admiring journalist, Adam McCay as ‘the perfect brain’. 1
But what about Mat Monash’s perfect brain?
What about the generations of perfect brains lost to science, law, the arts, commerce and public life because of that lack of national ambition?
The Mat Monash story reminds me of the words of Tarja Halonen – former President of Finland – when she was visiting us a few years ago.
Finland has a population roughly the same as Victoria’s – five million people.
Halonen said that – because of its small size – Finland had to rely on quality rather than quantity, and therefore invested heavily in education.
She said:
‘If you really educate every boy and girl and use their full capacities no matter what their social backgrounds then it’s like you have ten million people.’ 2
Think about that in the Australian context. If we were to give every boy and girl the education they need to ‘use their full capacities no matter what their social backgrounds’, the impact on our society – and therefore our economy – would be profound.
A nation of 23.5 million people would have the capacity of a nation of 47 million.
Ladies and Gentlemen, having spent the past six years sitting with people in their neighbourhoods, homes, work places, communities, listening to their stories, I have to report that we are some way off that ideal.
Without doubt, notable gains have been made towards gender equality.
For instance, the next Mat Monash may well be studying or working at Monash right now – where more than 56 per cent of the students and 54 per cent of staff at are female.
She could be carrying out research at the Australian Synchrotron.
She could be studying at a Monash campus in Australia.
Or Malaysia.
Or South Africa.
Or Italy. Or India.
Or China.
Progress like this is a credit to your University and brings benefit to our nation,
but the truth is, women still do not have, nor are they acknowledged as having,
equal power and equal rights.
I must say I am dismayed by the latest figures on the pay gap, from our
Workplace Gender Equality Agency:
- It staggers me that in 2014 women earn 18.2 per cent less than men. As the Hon. Mary Gaudron, first woman to serve on our High Court, has remarked “we got equal pay once, then we got it again, and then we got it again, and now we still don’t have it”
- The salaries of our women graduates are 90 per cent of men’s,
- Average superannuation balances for women are 42 per cent less than men’s,
- 17 per cent – less than one-in-five – of directors of our top 200 companies are women.
My friends, differentials are not confined to gender equality.
A recent survey of Indigenous people in four Victorian communities found that in the previous 12 months:
- 97 per cent had experienced at least one racist incident;
- 84 per cent had been sworn at or verbally abused;
- 67 per cent spat on or something thrown at them;
- 66 per cent told that they don’t belong in Australia, that they should ‘get out’ or ‘go home’3
As the survey’s authors – the Lowitja Institute – point out, there is a direct correlation between the discrimination and abuse people face in their daily lives and their physical and mental health.
The same applies to the hundreds of thousands of Australians who live with a disability.
“Shut Out 4” – a landmark report into the experiences of people with disabilities in Australia – found that:
‘Virtually every Australian with a disability encounters human rights violations at some point in their lives and very many experience it every day.’
My point is this. Progress can be deceptive.
It should not be measured by economic numbers alone, but by everyday realities as well.
YES – Australia has had twenty-three years of uninterrupted economic growth – a bull run unprecedented among OECD members.
YES – we avoided the GFC and, on a per capita basis, became one of the wealthiest countries in the world … 5
But none of that matters if you live in a community that has been shut out of the Australian way of life.
Let me come back to the notion of ambition for all.
Journalist Sam Lipski once wrote about the first time his father saw Sir John Monash.
It was 1927, and Lipski senior had just arrived in Australia from Palestine. 6
A man who – as a Jew born in Poland – had first hand experience of anti-Semitism.
Imagine his surprise, then, when taken to the ANZAC day parade and told that the general leading the parade – the man with ‘the shiny boots and ceremonial sword’ – was a Jew.
After WWII, Lipski senior told that story to his brother – the only member of his family to have survived the Holocaust – to try and convince him to immigrate.
My friends, Sir John Monash was a leader.
And as a leader who came from modest circumstances and a migrant home, he was held up as a person to aspire to – as an example of what was possible in a place like Australia.
Looking around our country, every community can identify their leaders.
For women in the corporate world, it might be Westpac’s Gail Kelly.
For indigenous Australians, it might be Noel Pearson.
For Australians with a disability, it might be Rhonda Galbally.
We need trailblazers and role models in every walk of life to soft wire the system.
As Gail Kelly explains,
‘Soft wiring, is the storytelling, the role modelling, the recognition systems, the cultural interventions, the calling out of behaviours and subtle biases.
The elephants in the room.’
One of the best ways to disarm individual ignorance and prejudice is through systemic ambition.
We must – as a nation – keep looking for ways and means to make opportunity available to everyone.
This ideal was well expressed by Sir Robert Menzies – who, like Monash, came from modest circumstances and used education as the stepping stone for his ambition.
Speaking in 1957, one year before this university was founded, Sir Robert said:
‘A university education is not, and certainly should not be, the prerequisite of the privileged few … we must become a more and more educated democracy if we are to raise our spiritual, intellectual and material standards.’
A fine example of the Menzies’ proposition is the Monash Orientation Scheme for Aboriginals, the first program of its type to create opportunities for Indigenous Australians to come and study at Monash.
That program marks its 30th anniversary this year. Looking ahead, the next 30 years are uncertain.
We need to carefully think through the ramifications before we deregulate university fees, to ensure that the right balance is struck.
Fairness and equity must remain guiding principles.
The risk we must be wary of with a de-regulatory agenda is that education does not become unaffordable for many Australians, especially those in regional and rural communities, and the rapidly expanding corridors of our metropolitan cities and for indigenous people.
We Australians and especially those of my generation are proud of our universities.
We take enormous interest in them.
We believe in them.
We watch carefully what’s going on in the Higher Ed sector.
We have about 1.4 million students in our universities now and that’s where the power of these institutions lies.
It is time for us to remind ourselves that the most important tool we have are our voices.
We must lift them to support our brilliant researchers.
It is time too, to speak up about the exciting; inspiring work they pursue day after day – long hours, highs and lows, triumphs and disappointments and too often anxiety about financial support.
I’m thinking particularly of our doctoral and post-doctoral students in our scientific workforce and our medical research.
My friends, may I conclude by drawing your attention to the murals around us.
So beautiful.
They were created in 1931 by a person with a disability.
Artist Napier Waller. An ANZAC who served in Monash’s army.
In 1917, Waller was seriously wounded on the Western Front.
His right arm amputated at the shoulder.
Waller taught himself to write and draw with his left hand. When he came home, he built a reputation as a muralist. He created numerous works– including the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Napier Waller – like Vida Goldstein – was an exception.
He overcame disability – and probably discrimination too – to realise his ambitions and become an artist of national renown.
But how many other great talents – disabled by the Great War – were lost to this country?
How much potential was lost, wasted?
Australia in the 21st century cannot afford to waste the talents of one of its citizens.
We must have a national ambition for all.
Every city. Every suburb.
Every town. Every community.
For Everyone.
Ladies and gentlemen.
This evening as we honour the contribution to Monash University made by former distinguished Vice Chancellor, Professor Richard Larkins, I think it is appropriate to pay a tribute to his successor Professor Ed Byrne as he comes to the conclusion of his term of leadership in that same office.
Leadership that has been characterised by transformational qualities in terms of teaching, learning and research.
Leadership that has demonstrated commitment to excellence throughout his career, drawing together, people from different disciplines to address global challenges, and ensuring vibrant student experience and student employability.
My friends how enormously well served Monash University has been by its leadership.
Accomplishment, service, selflessness that will bring benefit to our society for generations to come.
Thank you.
1 Journalist Adam McCay wrote, ‘the perfect brain, endowed with a boldness, not of adventure, but founded on knowledge and faultless calculation.’
2 The Australian, 12 February 2007.
3 Lowitja Institute, 2013. https://www.lowitja.org.au/sites/default/files/docs/LEAD%20Report-WEB_0.pdf
4 Shut Out, Department of Social Services, 2009. http://www.dss.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/05_2012/nds_report.pdf
5 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2013.
6 The Jews in Australia – Volume One, p366