 Nara Marang. Mandangu Wuragawari, thank you. And Nyalin Galangbu. Nara Marang, Jumburaburamarambang. Good morning, everyone. Maranya, good morning, everyone. You and me, Paul Garawa House. My name is Paul Garawa House. Naadu Maradu Maraibirangu, Gujigangu Nhyambinurambangodara. I was born here at the center of my ancestral country at the Old Canberra Hospital. God bless it. Anyone born in the Old Canberra Hospital. Great to see some fellow alumni here this morning. Yinja Mara, Naadu Yinja Maraibala, Dr. Matilda Williams House. My respects to my mother, Dr. Matilda Williams House, because of her I can. Yilin Galangbu, Guibabangu, Wugabu, Migaibu, Derenil Bangmian, ladies and gentlemen, young men, young women, distinguished guests, Chancellor, the Honourable Julie Bishop, Chancellor, Professor Brian Smith, Vice-Chancellor, academics, students, Maraibang Malang, Ngwai Malang. It's wonderful, fabulous to be here to share with you this welcome to country, Ngwai Ambana Nurembangu welcome to country. Ngwai Ngimali Nhyambri, Guumau Walgulu Wala Baloa Nunuwal, Ngwari Gou Wala Baloa Nunuwal, Ngwari Gou Wariadri Mujigang Nyanangbu Jyandu. My respects to Nhyambri, Guumau Walgulu Wala Baloa Nunuwal, whereadry elders passed in prison. Nyaari in Jamarabu, Mujigangu, Nurembanjigu, and Nini Yiridu, in my respect, to all people and elders from all parts of the country. Nyambri, Walgulu, Wala Balao, and Nunuwa. Ma'i ingaim banya ninyuga Nurembangu Dara. Nyambri and Nunuwa people welcome you all to country. Naadu, Wurukabigi, Balabambu, Gubu, Balagibangu, Gugingulila, Dumbali now. Marwae Marambu. We listen to our old people, our ancestors. They show us the straight, the correct path. Dula Gangmuru, straight path. Gugingulila, Bilingali now. Wala Mali now, Yama Mali now. They protect us, they guide us, they nurture us, our old people. Mambu Wara Naminya Gu, Wurukabinya Wurudaraigu, Winingala Gu, Baligu, looking to see, listening to hear, and learning to understand. Hingyamara Bala, Bayaami, Wara, Mara Maldana, Wala Mara. Our respects to our creator, Bayaami, our creator and protector, Gugingulila, Umbayu, Kambraki, Baymuli, and our key totems, the crow and the eagle. Hingyamara Bala, Gidambana now, Nuru Balabu, Gura Gambira. Respect will be found in the warmth of the campfire and the possum skin cloak that shelled us all. Murubangabala, Wingana Gu, Yambuwan Bangonaranara. First to know the nature of things, Gugingulila, Wala Mwangadabu, Muranmadandabu, Bamiu, Mara Du, Gura Gambira. Respect will be found in the grinding stones and the carved trees made long ago in country. Gugingulila, Bala Bidada, Bina Bida, Yuhulawu, Nurambangu. Respect will be found in the Canberra Creek and the breeze quietly moving through country. Our welcome to countries are always made in the spirit of peace and a desire for harmony for all people of modern Australia. And our main aim is local custodians to establish an atmosphere of mutual respect through the acknowledgement of our ancestors and the recognition of our rights that declare our special place in the pre and post contact of the region. Yinja Murabala, Gujigangagumara Wala Nungayalara, Dalani Mayen. Respect will be found in the people and the government embracing and the ANU embracing voice, treaty and truth telling. The law of the land talks about Yinja Malgiju, Mayengalangbu, Yandu Mayengalangdu, Yinja Malgiju, Ninyuga, giving respect and honour to all people in all parts of the country. Widenbida, Marandugubu, Giyerugubu, Yandugubu. Respect is taking responsibility for the now, the past, the present, and the future. Muramaginya, Yinja Maramudu, Widenbida, Nurambangu, Dara. Living a respectful way of life cares for country. Just like to acknowledge my mother, as I said earlier, my mother was the first Indigenous Australian to be awarded an honorary doctorate here at the ANU in 2017. We thank the ANU for the kind support for our people and our matriarchs here on country. The name Canberra is derived from the name of our ancestral group of people, the Nyambiri. It was gazetted on the 22nd of January, 1834, under the New South Wales colonial government. The name Canberra is derived from the word Nyambiri, Canberra, Canberra, it was anglicised. Means to sleep, to camp, to lie down. When our ancestors first met Europeans here in the 1820s, they asked our old people, what do you call this place? And our old people didn't respond by saying the barbecue area. The different renditions of the word Nyambiri, Canberra, came back. And with that, Neuagui Malang, Murambangu, it's wonderful to be here. I actually work here on campus, First Nations portfolio, Office of the Vice President, Office First Nations portfolio. And I'm here on campus to share with you our connection to the country. Nainmura, Burumbar, Bida, sharing is caring. Maragaladao, Walanmayan, Mayangalong, hold fast to each other, empower the people. Walangunmala, Maramuragure, be brave, make change. Didiyawana, Murawaranao, and Bida, get up, stand up, and show up, especially the class, eh? Nianinya, Giromarangya, so respects, shapes us, and lifts up the people. I just want to play a song to open the year here, 2023, and I can acknowledge the ANU address. Welcome, everyone. Chancellor, distinguished guests, colleagues, and friends, Paul House. In this year of significance for Australia's journey towards justice for and reconciliation with the First Peoples, I'm particularly grateful for such a warm welcome to country from Paul. To the Ngunnawal-Nambri peoples, on behalf of us all, who enjoy the benefits of your thousands of years of stewardship of these lands, and to every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person here, thank you, and I offer our respect and gratitude. At the beginning of this, my eighth year as Vice Chancellor, and after three years, where the only constant has been disruption, I am pleased to report that the state of our university is stronger than we could have possibly hoped at this time last year. We begin 2023 knowing more Australian students than ever, wanted to study at their national university, from every state and territory, our nation's brightest minds want to live and learn in our community. In a few short weeks, our classrooms and coffee shops will be animated again by a new generation of A&U students, full of hopes, ideas, and ambition, and here for what we will help make the best days of their lives. They will come to a campus transformed by new facilities and residences. The 731 new rooms at Ukenbrook, our newest hall, welcome their first student residence this month. Our new students will learn from an academic community as vibrant and successful as any in the university's history. Across grant rounds last year, A&U enjoyed extraordinary success. Our scholars won major national and international prizes and raised funding for their companies at an unprecedented rate. We advise policymakers and society on everything from climate change to gender equity, from national security to agricultural capacity, from the future of technology to the future of democracy. And after three years of turbulence and disruption, these are truly great achievements and the credit belongs to every member of our community. And I can honestly say that I have never been prouder to be the vice chancellor than I am now. It shows that we, the current custodians of this great university, personify the responsibility, service and integrity that are the lifeblood of A&U. So thank you all for showing up and stepping up day in and day out. And I actually want to applaud you and I want you to applaud your colleagues now for the outstanding effort of the last three years. This is the eighth time since 2016 I have addressed the university at the start of the year. When I look back over these speeches as I do each year, I was struck by three things. First, how much younger I looked when I started this job. I actually had blonde hair back in 2016, at least a bit of it. I also reflect on how much my threshold for pain has changed. Back in early 2016, we didn't know it then, but ahead of us lay the rise of populism, Brexit and Trump. Closer to home our campus would suffer hundreds of millions of dollars of damage from floods, smoke and hail. A once in a century global pandemic would change the world and now a war in Europe exacerbates a global cost of living crisis. But looking back, I was also struck that those principles of responsibility, service and integrity have been at the heart of everything we have tried to do in response to these turbulent times. Always putting our community first at work, helping Australia meet the challenges we face as a nation and cherishing our values. It is in those values of academic freedom, of respect, truth seeking, transparency, accountability, fairness and justice that our integrity exists. And as we emerge from the turbulence, and I do hope that we will have a long stretch of clear air now, it is those principles, our values and our strategy that guide where we want to go as the university. It is easy to be cynical about university strategic plans. They have a commonality, that means chat GPT can create one in a few seconds, that's pretty convincing. But our plan, the ANU by 2025 plan is distinctive because we are distinctive. ANU has a unique national mission, one that we collectively agreed to. Nowhere was our national role clear than in July when we hosted a live address to Australia by President Waldemarzylinski. In this very hall, our students questioned one of the world's great symbols of courage and resistance, leading a struggle that could define the global balance of power in the coming decades, a struggle of which the whole ANU community took a stand last March based on our values. 20 Australian universities linked in to hear the president and 88,000 viewers joined us that day. This was ANU using its unique set of connections to the world, its integrity and extending those across Australia, a service we have provided since our foundation. ANU serves as a great center of scholarship in and of our region. This extends to all of our colleges but is exemplified by our truly unique college of Asia and the Pacific. CAP includes the world's greatest concentration of scholarship on the Asia Pacific region and helps Australia successfully navigate the challenges around our region. Whereas CAP's service has led the rest of the university has joined in, helping our cross bench parliamentarians as they were inducted into the national political scene after last year's election. We listened to what they needed, provided policy briefings and gave them frank evidence based advice, a service that will help strengthen the Australian democracy. We have invested in landmark initiatives like Below Zero by 2030. Achievement of this objective in a way that is affordable and which does not compromise our academic mission is not trivial. And we have lots more work to find our way to this very important commitment. We have engaged in major national forums like the Jobs and Skills Summit which set the course for the government's domestic economic policy agenda. We can only do this by being a trusted partner of all sides of politics. And we use our unique capabilities across physics and security to work closely with the government on AUKUS, our nation's new signature strategic defense policy. We have nurtured the Australian Studies Institute which is leading the conversation about our past, present and future and bringing an Australian perspective to global issues. And I see the Treasurer has just signed up to discuss his new essay on the future of capitalism in its Democracy Sausage podcast. We've established the School of Cybernetics which interrogates on behalf of our nation a technology-enabled future we are all destined to live with to make sure it benefits us all. And we've incubated the ANU Global Institute for Women's Leadership, JUUL. JUUL has come to life in the past four years. Its research and advocacy has set the national pace and transformed the national mood with concrete evidence-based recommendations and actions. And we will keep asking those pointed societal questions. Our Center for Asian-Australian Leadership in partnership with the Center for Social Research and Methods will lead a project that should allow the next census to include information about people's cultural, racial and ethnic backgrounds. It could do nothing less than transform our understanding of our national identity and hopefully allow us to make Australia a better place for all. And as we're saying here, our commitment to service, to responsibility and integrity is why our academics are trusted. We are not a think tank or a consulting firm. ANU makes sure our academics have the freedom to say what their research and expertise shows without fear, without favor. This kind of national leadership and engagement is a defining part of our identity. We are the only university with a formal mandate to contribute to our Commonwealth. That mandate is why we receive the National Institutes Grant. And thanks to your efforts and the work we have done with the government these past seven years, I am now confident that our mandate will remain as Australia's national university. But our engagement with government and wider society can and should go deeper and our impact must transcend the academic world. To help do that, and like some of our peer universities, we have broadened what it means to be an academic at ANU. More leaders, experts and practitioners from outside the norms of academia have joined our ranks, bringing their unique lived experiences to our research, teaching and translation. Most recently and perhaps most fittingly, I was honored to appoint Auntie Ann Martin here today as professor in the practice. She is someone who has used her vast life experience to transform the education of our first nation students to be an exemplar of the world. Students have been at the heart of my vision for the university from the very start. And that's why I was so delighted to learn our student satisfaction rates for last year have searched back to all-time record hives above 80%. As Grady Venville delightfully told me earlier this week, we got a high distinction. Over the last seven years, ANU has attracted some of the most capable students across Australia at scale. This brings a great responsibility for us to make their time here as empowering as possible. ANU has made a decision to not massify our academic experience. We remain the compact size of the world's great universities with excellence expected across all we research and teach. That density of excellence creates opportunities every graduate needs that just don't exist in huge institutions to explore the full spectrum of new ideas and create connections. The same human scale environment that allows an unfragmented and collegiate university community. But a great learning and research environment needs to evolve with the times, and here we still have some work to do. Our answer is the Digital Master Plan and the Associated Student First Program, which will make our digital and physical environments much more seamless. It builds on good progress, like our new and easier class-time tabling tool, which is the first of many new systems that will make life better for staff and students. These improvements matter even more when your students live on campus. ANU is the only research and residential intensive university in Australia, and since 2016, Womberin, Bruce, Wright, Fenner, and now Eucanbrook have joined our other residences to provide some 7,000 places on our campus. This helps raise the social capital of all of our students to a common level and helps create a cohesive community. But this does not mean we have yet met our goal of being accessible to every Australian with the talent to succeed at ANU. My view and our view has been clear. No Australian should feel they don't have the money, the cachet, the connections, or the right school tie to be an ANU student. And we have made a start, the more streamlined application and admissions process, our innovation in making offers to year 11 students and supporting students to find the right scholarships and write a combination several months rather than days before they have to move here. But we can't stop there. We need more scholarships to eliminate financial barriers to studying at ANU. This is one of the challenges I have set our advancement team under the new vice president, Alex Furman. And we need to work with our existing students and alumni to demystify ANU to prospective students in their home communities. Breaking down barriers perceived and real is the key to attracting a wider range of outstanding students to ANU. And of course, we will continue to support every student in a way that our size uniquely allows to ensure they succeed once they are here. We will continue to draw in the finest students from around the world too. Their cultures, their ideas and perspectives contribute so much to our university. Our community is theirs. Part of our service to Australia is to be the home away from home for the next generation of leaders and innovators around the world. The long term soft power of our international student group that is welcomed, respected and engaged here on campus is significant. In total, our outstanding student experience starts with a diverse and highly engaged student community and outstanding and flexible curriculum, excellent research led teaching, a large range of extracurricular activities and the intangible feeling of students being at home on our campus. Let's never forget that our campus is a home for most of our students, where we are the immensely proud hosts to a diverse and wonderful community. Now earlier I spoke of the incredible density of great minds on our campus. They, we are all part of the legacy of the founding generation of 20th century scholars who answered Australia's post war call to service to help the nation find its place in the world. But many outside of our campus still want to know why. For what purpose are our scholars gathered here at the public expense? For me, the answer is clear. We create and curate knowledge and use that knowledge to advance humanity and education and educate its future. We're good value. Universities are key to driving societal transformation. Many of Australia's transformational ideas and disruptive innovations emerge from our campus, either directly or through our students. But the reality is we have been working in a financially constrained environment. The Australian government has slowly shrunk its support of foundational research. It has never been harder for a researcher to win a competitive grant. And when they do, we face the dilemma of how to cover the gap in funding between the dollars in the grant and the true cost of the project. Australia's future is in peril unless it ramps up its investment in research. I have and I will continue to advocate on this front. I do hope the government will listen and also help engage business and philanthropy in the cause. I like to think of research like the nation's superannuation. If you save money now by not investing, you will have a much poorer future. A&U, well, we have run a major deficit last year and we will again this year, but we are on a path to recovery. This is not the time to turn away from excellence and go down the blind alley of mediocrity. But even in these constrained times, as we will this year, we have had many notable successes. In addition to the illustrious awards and global recognition of individual academics, A&U research and the entrepreneurial spirit of some of our colleagues has created new transformational companies. Samsara raised $54 million last year for its incredible technology that breaks down plastic to its core molecules so that it can be recycled indefinitely. This is using Collin Jackson's team's foundational work in chemistry. Vi Photonics, a spin out of A&U staff members, Lyle Roberts and graduate student James Spallard's work on working in my area, looking for gravitational waves using instrumentation. Well, that company was acquired for $40 million for its amazing technology that can tell you precisely where you are without GPS. These are technologies we're all probably going to be using in the not too distant future, along with the rest of the world. In total, we had eight spin outs last year, a new record and proof that we are delivering on our goal of increasing research translation. Now, awards and spin outs catch the attention of the public, but I think each of us should be proactive in explaining what we do. The Engaged A&U program, led by Professor Lyndall Strasdans, is piloting new ways to ensure the Australian community sees our work and why it's valuable. This project is a trial to see how we can better communicate beyond our campus, because while I hope we are reemerging from the anti-intellectualism of recent years, we should never stop having a conversation with the public. And I mean all of the public. Why? Because the breakthroughs we reported last year, and for example, understanding malaria's resistance to drugs or past work on the genes that cause lupus and understand the issues on Australians' voters' minds during a hotly contested federal election and research on the economics of poverty, all of these things deserve to be shared. And the work, all of the work we do, matters. We mustn't stop. To help us, we are building our pipeline of scholars and our new A&U PhD is taking shape under the leadership of Professor Ann Evans. I was proud that last year, our senior management team collectively and unanimously agreed to uplift the HDR stipend by over $5,000, despite our financial constraints. And may I say, in place of the government support that should exist. But it was much needed and long overdue. It was the latest in a series of significant new investments in our researchers. Over the past seven years, we have awarded A&U Futures funding to many of our early career researchers. And right from the start, we were clear at least half the appointments and half of the dollars have to go to women researchers as part of our commitment to being a standard bearer for gender equity. And I'm delighted to say, we have easily met that goal and a young generation of new scholars will ensure that the research we do will continue to be at the global leading edge. Now being a standard bearer for equity and diversity means confronting a challenging legacy, where for too long, far more men than women gained continuing positions were promoted to professors or were able to take on senior leadership roles at this university. We continue to see fewer people from diverse backgrounds reach the highest levels academically or professionally. But we are making progress. We achieved Sage Athena Swan bronze accreditation and I have followed through on my commitment to make at least 50% of leadership hires across the university women. Women are now being promoted at an equal rate to their male counterparts and we have significantly improved the gender balance of our staff across the board. Where pockets of poor gender balance remain, we will insist on plans and associated actions to address it over the coming years. We have our first female chancellor, our council and our leadership group is more diverse than ever. For most of the past two years, we have benefited from two First Nations leaders on the university executive and two on our council. One of them, Professor Peter Yu, leads our First Nations portfolio, already established as a cornerstone of the national conversation on First Nations issues. From the Mara Mara Murru First Nations Economic Development Symposium to the First Nations wealth forum and the work on the voice to parliament and treaty, these are the conversation modern Australia must have and is having now about our vast and complex history. In this year of all years, the national university's responsibility is to convene and contribute to the discussions that will help us move forward. But in addition to talking the talk, we have to walk the walk. Our Camry Scholarships Program is helping us nurture a new cohort of First Nations leaders, 53 in total now, since we launched the scheme three years ago. We have a record number of First Nations students and staff and we are well on our way to creating a First Nations academic ecosystem that will serve the nation into the future. In the College of Business and Economics, we have partnered with the Australian Public Service to deliver programs to help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants build their careers with new management skills. And indeed, I welcome that group yesterday. Well, the Sir Roland Wilson Foundation's Pat Turner Scholarships Program continues to offer First Nations public service staff the opportunity to study full-time at ANU. Now probably the single issue that troubles me most as Vice Chancellor is when the safety and well-being of our members of our community is compromised. I have been profoundly moved and distressed by the stories of people hurt by their colleagues here on our campus. It has generated anger and an anger born of trauma and frustration. But when we launched our ANU by 2025 strategic plan, we drew a line in the sand. And I quote, we will have zero tolerance for behavior that falls below our standards or contravenes our value. Zero tolerance does not mean summary justice. It means that we will act proportionately whenever we see wrongdoing and not ignore it or sweep it aside. This means identifying bad behavior when it happens, hopefully before it becomes a formal disciplinary issue. It means each of us, staff and students, facing up to our individual responsibility to call out and crack down on casual insensitivities as well as serious wrongdoing. Now the leadership's job is to help set the tone and provide the resources to help us deal with this issue and to act appropriately in every case. Your job, everyone's job, is to help create that environment day in, day out that gives meaning to zero tolerance. And we have taken action. Our Student Safety and Well-Being Plan, launched last March, has added an additional $3 million per year of investment. New staff and systems have improved reporting and investigating criminal activity or bad behavior. And we continue to work with our students and staff because this is an area where we have to pioneer best practice. It simply does not exist in Australia at this moment. By choice, we are doing this in the full spotlight of public scrutiny. We've fronted up to the National Student Survey results last March, just as we have done at each opportunity to discuss this difficult issue since the change the course report in 2017. That transparency in our continual engagement on this complex and traumatic issue reinforces our integrity and responsibility. But it is sadly a very long ways from being solved. For me, achieving a safe and equitable and inclusive campus is another way of saying this university should be the best place to work and study in Australia. We should all feel welcome here. We should all feel safe here. We should all find our place here. Where we agree, it's after critical reflection. Where we disagree, it is with respect. That's the culture that will make A&U the best it can be for our students, our scholars, and our professional staff. In fact, I see our professional staff as the unsung heroes of our campus. And I regret to say, we haven't prioritized our professional staff group enough in the past. So today I announced that we will create a new national first professional staff career path here at A&U. It will recognize that making a career in a professional role at A&U makes you a specialist. A specialist in navigating complexity and uncertainty in what is truly a unique workplace culture. In contributing to a national enterprise and in supporting societal transformation. You, our professional staff bear significant responsibility. You serve your colleagues and your community and you do it with integrity. We are thankful that you do this and the new career pathway we will co-create with you will do more to help you achieve your ambitions. Those three words, responsibility, service, integrity, they're powerful. And let's never forget that they sit at the heart of who we are as a national university and what we offer our country. They guide me personally and they led me to this job. I'll be honest, I never considered being a vice chancellor but I decided to put my hand up in 2015 to become vice chancellor because this great university that did so much for me, looked to be in danger of losing its role as Australia's national university. And I was honored to take on that responsibility and do my best for the ANU community. Vice chancellor's job at ANU is to be its chief evangelist to help harness the energy and resolve of the community to achieve its mission. It is both the most rewarding and the hardest job I have undertaken. And it is a job that requires unbridled enthusiasm and a continual look to the future. And it is the job therefore that can sit with an individual for only a limited amount of time. And my integrity says that the end of that time is approaching for me. So that is why I am announcing today that this year will be my last as vice chancellor. And I have notified the chancellor and the council of my intention to step down at the end of December. Now I have already given you a snapshot of why I am so proud to have done this job for seven years, to lead a community of great people, to meet and learn from so many inspiring staff and students, to shamelessly take a share of the credit of everyone's achievements. But I'm also realistic about a vice chancellor's shelf life. Having arrived as an agent of change for the university's sake, I want to leave before I become just the status quo. And personally, after eight years, it will be good and I am ready to get back to my research and my teaching and may I say, a somewhat more balanced life. But my love for ANU is undue. My zest to see it improved hasn't changed. And as I always said, that when I stepped down as vice chancellor, I wanted to hand on a university I would be happy to continue to work in. I am there and I will. When I look back to my job application from 2015, almost everything I said I wanted to achieve as vice chancellor is actually well on its way. I have confidence once again in our future. Now this does not mean there's not a lot to do. And we won't let the pay slack in this year just because I'm finishing up. Because we are not following my plan. We are following our collective plan. And so here are the things I want us to think about doing over the next 12 months. The Australian government is looking to undertake once in a generation major reforms over the coming year. And we need to focus on being a great partner to bring our knowledge and expertise to bear to ensure that the changes made are the best they can be for the future of Australia. Let's work together to make sure ANU continues to have a truly outstanding culture to work and study in. It's not expensive, but it does mean each of us prioritizing collegiality and respect day in and day out in our work and interactions with each other. We also need to connect to the entire Australian public. Each of us has a chance to engage with communities with which we have a connection. To tell our stories in a way that makes sure we are accessible to all Australians. A place that can be trusted. A place that makes a positive impact to people's life. And a place for people to study into the future. And finally, something that might seem mundane. Service improvement. Every staff member is both a provider and a consumer of services. Let's focus on improving our services, providing the standard we would hope to receive so that we can all spend more time adding value rather than slowing each other down. For me, I will be working to persuade the federal government to invest in the amazing work we do for the betterment of Australia, our students and our researchers. And to see us as an opportunity rather than an expense. Beyond that, I wanna say finish by saying this. Next year, I will be proud to be sitting where you are in the audience, listening to my successor explain where they plan to leave our university. Because while it has been a great privilege and a huge responsibility to be the 12th Vice Chancellor of ANU, there is no greater privilege or larger responsibility than simply being a member of this extraordinary university. I am profoundly grateful for what you have achieved over these past seven years and for giving me the opportunity to be your Vice Chancellor. And I only hope I have served you all well. Thank you. Thank you all. And now I'd like to invite the Chancellor, Julie Bishop, who is, I think would like to address and give you some information about what's going to happen in the future as well. Julie? Good morning. Also thank Paul Haas for his gracious welcome to country. And I acknowledge that we meet on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal Nambri people and pay respects to elders past and present. And I am proud of the work undertaken here at the Australian National University as we focus on First Nations issues and seek to embed First Nations knowledge and perspectives in all that we do. Vice Chancellor, Brian, well, that is big news. And I want to thank you first for your comprehensive state of the university address outlining the challenges, the opportunities and the achievements. The news about your future career plans will have come as a surprise to some. But for those who know your love of teaching and your wish to continue to be involved in your field of expertise in astronomy, it's not so surprising. You have led this university in an exemplary fashion for the past seven years. And at the end of this year, your eighth year as Vice Chancellor, and yes, it is a skill knowing when it's time to go, we will look back at your legacy, your influence, the impact that you have had, and it will be seen as profoundly and deeply positive, a historic high in the history of this university. You are a person of immense talent, a formidable intellect and insatiable curiosity. You are so often the smartest person in the room and you command respect wherever you go. And I've witnessed this as we've traveled across Australia and around the world. But you have humility and great kindness and compassion and you're the kind of person you just want to hang out with because you're so much fun. You have made ANU your academic home for 28 years and you and Jenny have made Canberra your home. And I could not be more delighted that you intend to remain part of the ANU family, a professor of astronomy at Mount Stromlo, we hope. And there will be time over the next 12 months and beyond when we can reflect on your achievements as Vice-Chancellor. For me, in my short term as Chancellor so far, the highlights include your commitment to First Nations issues, the work you've undertaken with Aunty Anne and PDU, the Canberra scholarships, the fact that you want ANU to be a university of choice for First Nations students and academics and staff, your embrace of new ideas and initiatives exemplified by the School of Cybernetics, your concern and attention on the well-being of our students and staff. And I have seen that time and time again as you place that issue at the very top of our council considerations. But probably most of all, your leadership during COVID, nobody knew what to do. It was to use the word that we so often used in relation to COVID, unprecedented. Yet you stepped up and showed leadership at the highest level. And for the gap for that, I will be eternally grateful. Over the next few months, our council will undertake the mammoth task of seeking to find a successor for Brian. And of course, it will be a global search because he has set a very high standard. I have boasted so often that we are the only university to have a Nobel Prize-winning scientist as our vice-chancellor. So he set a high bar. But in the meantime, Brian will continue his work as vice-chancellor. He set out his priorities and we will get on with it. It has been a year of extraordinary change and disruption or turmoil and turbulence, as Brian put it in his address. Who would have thought we'd see war return to Europe with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the death and the destruction and the impact on the global economy and supply chains and the affront to the international rules-based order? And so it was fitting and timely that ANU as the national university should host President Zelensky, have him beamed live into this hall with students and staff and guests and then livestream to 20 other universities around the country so that we could hear firsthand from a wartime leader, and historic event that brought home to us the suffering of the people of Ukraine. Of course, last year, we were still dealing with the aftermath of COVID and our sector and our university felt the impact of the COVID restrictions very keenly. The border closures impacted our students and our staff, but none more so than our international students. And we hope that we will see them all and more return to campus during the course of this year. But if ever we needed reminding of the importance of having an international student population here at ANU, it was because of their absence. We missed them and we missed the perspective and the diversity and the insights and the richness that they brought to our student body. We want to see them back and we really appreciate the impact that they make on our campus. For we have many United Nations here, students from 100 different nations, so you can get an international student experience right here in Canberra at ANU. So we hope to see them back as soon as possible. It was also a year where we saw a change of government and as the only university in Australia set up under federal legislation, we have a particular interest in engaging with and connecting with the federal government of the day. And I've been encouraged by Education Minister Jason Clairs enthusiasm for engaging with our university, indeed in his first week back in Parliament as Education Minister, he was hosted by the Vice-Chance from me at a dinner with our council members and the deans of our colleges. And we had a great discussion about the issues that matter to us as a university and he listened attentively and I hope that we can continue to work closely with him. I'm also encouraged by the Education Minister's focus and that of the government's focus on the Australian Research Council funding and the issue of political interference, the establishment of an Australian university's accord and the Minister's focus, as he's often said, on the availability of a first-class education regardless of background, postcode, family, history and circumstances. The Australian university's accord, according to the Minister, is designed to come up with recommendations and performance targets to improve the quality, affordability, accessibility and sustainability of the higher education sector and that is absolutely essential to underpin our national prosperity and security. Now, it's easy to be cynical about ministerial reviews, well, sceptical at the least, but there's no denying that the right review at the right time on the right issues can have a profound impact on our sector. And I think back to the Dawkins eras in the 1980s when the income contingent loan scheme was introduced, developed by our own Professor Bruce Chapman and that just transformed access to higher education in this country. So we have an opportunity to be involved in reshaping government policies through the reviews that are being undertaken so that we can have a say in the changes that will be made to the environment in which we operate. The review panel will be led by Professor Mary O'Kane and she's already indicated that there will be a focus on academic arrangements, short and fixed term contracts and the impact that they have and I'm pleased that under Brian's leadership we have already reduced the casualisation of staff significantly. And we must recognise that in order to continue to attract the best and brightest staff and academics from Australia and around the world, we have to focus on that issue of job security. The review into the Australian Research Council is also timely and as a research intensive university we will follow it keenly. The objective is to ensure that the ARC has competent leadership, that it is fit for purpose, that it's operating efficiently and effectively, that it is an institution of integrity and that the processes are open and transparent. And it's important for us to look at this issue of research funding for, as Brian indicated, there is now a tendency for there to be a focus on applied research at the expense of basic or curiosity-driven research. Now, all important research should be funded, but we are seeing the basic research, perhaps not being appreciated to the extent that it should. And research that enhances and knowledge of the world around us can be equally, if not more important or more valuable than applied research. Recently I represented A&U at a conference at the University of Glasgow, also a research intensive university. And the delegates there spoke of this worldwide problem of funding for basic foundational research. And it was noted, surely the case could not have been made more clearly when scientists on campuses such as ours were able to come up with a COVID vaccine in record time, only made possible because they were able to draw upon decades of discovery and research. Surely we've made the case. Blue Sky Research can, of course, bring commercial outcomes. And I was delighted that Brian mentioned Samsara Echo, and I too have had the joy of visiting Professor Colin Jackson and his team at the Research School of Chemistry and watching this plastic eating enzyme doing its work. And I kept thinking how much of a game-changer this could be in terms of reducing waste and saving our environment if we were able to infinitely recycle plastic. Think of the impact on the retail industry and fashion industry and manufacturing. This could be a global game-changer if we can scale the technology. So this is what we do as a university. We tackle the challenges that our country will face maybe not today, but one day. And we have to be advocates, public advocates for the work that we do. There's no point in us quietly going about our business just hoping that people will understand and appreciate what we do. We have to be advocates for our cause and we have to work closely with government, engage closely with government to help shape the policies that will impact on our environment. And good policy has to be robust. It has to be able to withstand the changes of government and the ministerial tenures that seem to come around so rapidly. And I often reflect on a piece of policy work that is very close to my heart and when I was education minister back in 2006 I came up with the idea of a new Colombo Plan, the reverse of the old Colombo Plan supporting Australian undergraduates to live and study and work in our region. Well, there was a small interruption. My then party lost the 2007 election. But then when we came back in 2013, I was still so keen to introduce this policy because it was a good policy. And so I did it as foreign minister and the new Colombo Plan was developed, established and it has survived successive governments. And I paid tribute to Foreign Minister Penny Wong for embracing the concept of the new Colombo Plan so that Australian undergraduate students can live and study and undertake work experience overseas to learn a second language, to immerse themselves in the culture and the society of other countries, to come back to Australia as ambassadors, to have a better understanding of Australia and our place in the world and to build networks and friendships that hopefully will last a lifetime. Not only a benefit to the student but undoubtedly to the benefit of our country. And ANU has always done exceedingly well in the new Colombo Plan rounds and in 2023 we have 11 ANU students receiving scholarships and two Indigenous students, Lucy Garner and Amy Muhammad Engelhardt who have received new Colombo Plan scholarships. So this is what we must do, be part of that policy development that survives changes of government. Now, as Brian mentioned, we are the only university with a national mandate to advance Australia and Australia's place in the world. That's our responsibility. And that means we have to be at the cutting edge of change that will impact Australia. Take the fourth industrial revolution, the technology revolution that is disrupting the way we live and work and connect. Experts tell me we're just at the beginning of it and greater disruptions are yet to come through AI and robotics and automation and quantum computing. And that's why I was so delighted to be part of a cutting edge initiative on the part of ANU and that is to launch, establish a School of Cybernetics, the research behind the intersection of technology and society. And our School of Cybernetics within the College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics is being led by distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell. It has such exciting prospects. And this is why students come to ANU because we do research in topics that are going to be of such relevance to us. So that's the challenge for the Australian National University to continue to attract the best and brightest students and academics and staff from across Australia and around the world because we have a responsibility to our nation and to the people of Australia to be among the greatest universities of the world so that we continue to provide teaching and learning and research at the very highest level of excellence. That is what we do, that is why we're here. I look forward to working with you all during 2023. I wish you all the very best and may I now hand back to my friend, Brian Schmidt. Thank you, Chancellor. So that is the end of our seventh state of the university speech, the formal part of it. But we have afternoon tea out in the afternoon. I hope you followed instructions and brought a plate. Maybe someday in the near future we can have plastic plates, which Samsara will recycle for us, but we're not quite there yet. So enjoy and look forward to seeing you all out and about in the Athenaeum and of course around campus for the coming year. Cheers and thank you.