 I'm Jeremy Fernandez. I'm a presenter at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Hello, I'm Jeremy Fernandez. Jeremy Fernandez. Good evening. I'm Jeremy Fernandez and welcome to Q&A. Welcome to Sydney Harbour. Hello, I'm Jeremy Fernandez. This is... This is... This is... This is ABC News. I remember the moment I stepped off the plane and smelt the air. It was so clean. It smelt of eucalyptus. And that's a really vivid memory of starting a new life in this beautiful, clean, sunny place. It smelt like a fresh start, quite literally. Where I've ended up in life is actually sort of quite an unlikely path I would have thought when I was a little kid. So I was born in Kuala Lumpur, but spent most of my childhood in Sabah. In Kota Kinabalu, my dad got a job there as a newspaper editor of the Daily Express. Neither of my parents had opportunities to go to university or to college when they were younger. And that's something that really stuck with my dad. It was a really important foundation of life. So when the opportunity arose, he decided that it was time to move to Australia so he could study law. The university in Perth, Curtin University, was the one that took my dad in. And so Perth was an attractive opportunity because it wouldn't feel to all of us that we were moving to the other side of the world and losing that connection to Malaysia. I've never lost my love of warm weather or a good sambal. Ironically, I'd sworn to myself I would never become a journalist because my dad was a journalist and he had to work so hard. Funnily enough, I really enjoyed my media program at high school. And so that naturally led to me pursuing media at university. I went to Curtin University, did an undergrad in English film and television and journalism. And when I finished that course, I ended up at the WA Academy of Performing Arts. It was a very prestigious course and a place where I learned so much about journalism, about how to talk to people compassionately and fairly, and then how to tell stories on camera, on radio. Underappreciated natural phenomena on the planet. It wasn't so much that the institution opened doors, but it showed me how to open my own doors. For me, the ABC is important because at the very, very core of the ABC is this obligation to act in the public's best interests, to be fair, to be impartial, to be accurate with what we do. I feel so lucky to be part of that discourse. One of the biggest similarities, I think, between Malaysia and Australia is how multicultural they are. A lot of Malaysians grow up with this natural sense of living in harmony with other people, people from other cultures, other religions. And it's very similar in Australia. In my life, the things I've done completely surpass anything I would have ever thought was possible when I was younger, living in Malaysia and living in Perth.