 Boro Marambang. Good afternoon. Baladu Yaba Nyambri Waugulu Nyiyang. Speaking Nyambri Waugulu language. Minjum Balda Paul House-Girawa. My name is Paul House-Girawa. Yilin Galangbu. Giba Bangu Waugulu Migaibu. Tirunil Bang Maranya. Ladies and gentlemen, young men, young women, distinguished guests. Nyariin Jamarabu and Muji Gangu. Nrum Banjagu Niniyeru. My respects to all Elis, nor people from all parts of the country. Nyariin Jamarabu and Muji Gangu Maranya, Nrum Banjagu Niniyeru, Nyambri Waugulu Maranya dara, Injumaran Naadu Boya Nyiyang. Respecting Nyambri Waugulu, Nunuwa country, la and language. Injumara Injumanguri Injumarabu. Respect, honor, go slow. Take responsibility. Take responsibility. Mambu Wara, Naminyagu, Wujigabinya, Wuradaragu, Winangalagu, Baligul. Looking to see, listening to hear, learning to understand. Injumara, Magagiri, Biringa, Bogongu, Dhirnda. Respect is in the journey of the Bogong Mosque in the mountains. Injumara, Balawalamwangadabu, Mudanmarindabu, Bhanmuyugurangambira. Respect is in the grinding stones in the carved trees made long ago in Yambi Nunawal country. Injumara, Balabiradabu, Binabira, Wurawinya, Yambi Nunawa. Respect is in the rivers, quietly moving through Yambi Nunawal country. Mudanmuginya, Injumara, Mudanmuro, Dara, Wurambira. Living a respectful way of life cares for country. Injumara, Wurambira, Marindogobu, Giyiragobu, Yandogobu. Respect is for the now, the past, the present and the future. This welcome the country's made in the spirit of peace and the desire for all peoples of the modern ACT and surrounds. And our main aim as local custodians is to establish an atmosphere of mutual respect through the acknowledgement of our ancestors and the recognition of our rights to declare our special place in the pre and post contact of the region. We've cared for Mother Earth since the dawn of time and evidence of our occupation could be seen everywhere throughout the country. The more we look after country and waters, the more country and waters look after us. We must respect everything living and growing. Our key totems here on country are the Mulyin, Yibai Mulyin, Eagle Hawk and the Umbare Yukonbuk, the Crow. This welcome the country also talks about the law of the land. The law of the land talks about giving respect and honour to all people in all parts of the country. Being polite, being gentle, being patient. And people will respect you. Hold fast to each other and empower each other. Under our 65 year old living culture and heritage, there's a rich, powerful history which is now shared history that belongs to all of us. We all have a responsibility in looking after country and waters. With that, I'd like to say yinja mara, mara mara, yirama ninya, wooden bitadara, respect shapes us and lifts up the people. On behalf of our elders and our families, I'd like to say guru bari, welcome and waragawari, thank you. Thank you Paul and thank you for everyone coming out today. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners on whose lands and airways we meet today. Pay my respects to the elders past and present. I also acknowledge and welcome our Chancellor, the Honourable Julie Bishop who joins us today from Perth. So we have a really small audience today with us in Llewellyn Hall. Thank you for coming out and we are well socially distanced here. But we are joined from my friends and colleagues from around the world on the live stream of this event. And so welcome to everyone. Before I begin on behalf of the university, I would like to tell our friends and colleagues in Victoria and around the world who are suffering from the effects of the pandemic that our thoughts are with you. And please just reach out if we can insist in any way that is our way. For my colleagues here in Canberra, you will note that I have started wearing a mask when I'm out and about on campus and in the community. And I encourage everyone else to do so. I will say they're a little uncomfortable when you first start using them. But I think you get used to them. But this is to help prevent community transmission taking hold here in the ACT. The other things I really want everyone to remember if nothing else is keep your distance at all time, 1.5 meters. Pandemic hygiene, wash your hands, cough and sneeze into your elbows. Get tested and stay home if you are sick. And most importantly, and I know this will be hard for some of our students and some of our staff, don't travel interstate to where there is community transmission unless you absolutely have to. And this includes Sydney right now. This is life in Australia in 2020. But 74 years ago, the university was founded on this day as part of Australia's post-war national reconstruction effort. It was a bold move to build a stronger, more prosperous and fairer nation out of the catastrophe that was World War II. Our job as the new national university was to supply the knowledge, the research and train people to get the job done. We reported for duty, served and succeeded brilliantly. With Australia and the world now in another catastrophic situation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are reporting for duty again. And indeed, with our other Australian universities, we are proudly playing our part. We are leading public health policy. We are training the health workers in the frontline. We are researching vaccines. We are advising on the economic recovery and we are finding the sources of our future prosperity. And reassessing Australia's place in a rapidly changing world has never been more front of mind. At this moment, when the work of universities has never been more needed, but has also perhaps never been more distrusted in certain important sectors of our community, I have this message to the people of that community, the people of our nation and the people who serve us in government. ANU and the Australians, three dozen other universities are among the most important assets Australia possesses and investing in them is one of the best long-term decisions the nation can make because we will be at the very heart of the recovery from the pandemic. ANU has had a special role in this fight against the pandemic. We have considered it a unique national responsibility that comes from our history, our geography and our funding. And today I want to assure everyone, our staff and our students, the Australian people and the Australian and our local ACT government that Australia's National University will help lead a national reconstruction effort in response to this national crisis. I want to start by reporting on a few of the things that we've been doing in these difficult times. Across ANU, every button has been working incredibly long and hard hours, responding to the nation's urgent needs. And that's not just the academic staff. We are a complex organization that requires many types of expertise and hard work to succeed. And every one of us is an equaled and valued member of the university. From the catering staff who keep us fed and caffeinated to the arborists and gardens who make our grounds a sanctuary in which to work and study. The administrators who help keep us solvent and the students who give us our very purpose. And of course the academics whose teaching and research provides our engine room. We are a community. And the efforts of every member of our community have been outstanding. Together we are so much greater than the sum of our parts. Our teaching staff deserve special mention. They've deployed extraordinary innovation to keep their courses operating and their students learning. The students too have risen to the challenge of online lectures, cracks and tutorials. But it's been a tough time. Some of you have lost your jobs or maybe has had a partner whose job. Others have lost housemates because of travel restrictions and everyone has lost the camaraderie and the sheer fun of campus life. Universities are places of enjoyment, personal growth and friendship. And on our journey to get back to normal again these will be big priorities. The response of the whole university and coming together to look after each other has been an uplifting experience. Our return to campus task force has been protecting all of us through their COVID safety planning and advice. People have respected the procedures, practiced distancing and looked out for each other. Why we're in such a great state but we must remain vigilant. Our staff and our student urgent relief funds have been embraced by staff members who have devoted cash and cashed out their annual leave entitlements to the cause. So far these funds have raised around $200,000. Thank you. I especially wanna thank Professor Matthew Collis for suggesting the idea of the staff fund and I wanna urge everyone who can do so to support these great ANU community causes. I'm sorry to say we have many more months to go. And as you know, these are tough financial times for ANU itself. The combination of last summer's bushfires, the January hail storm and the COVID-19 pandemic has dug a $220 million hole in our finances. Coping with this income loss has not been easy. Difficult decisions are being made and I've been incredibly impressed by the way our community has worked as a self-governing organization to address this challenge together. We have made our decisions together. As the decision, for example, to defer this year's 2% pay rise to save our colleagues jobs demonstrated. Everyone has made sacrifices and we are going to do our best to get things back to normal. How long this takes, unfortunately, is partially out of our control. During this crisis, universities have been among the hardest hit and thus far the least assisted of all Australian institutions. Despite this, we played and we will continue to play a huge role in the national response. There are so many examples of great things being done by our community to tackle the virus and its effects. For example, our makerspace, for example, got straight down to work and making and manufacturing thousands of sterilized personal protective devices for frontline health and pathology lab workers right at the very beginning when there weren't any. That is a great practical example but only one of many. I suspect few Australians realize just how large and direct a part ANU and other universities are playing in the fight against the pandemic. Compared to some other countries, Australia's public response to COVID-19 threat has been strong and successful. And one of the reasons that this has been has been the quality of advice our government has been receiving. It makes us all incredibly proud, for example, that the nation's three most public health officers at this time, acting Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly and his Deputy Chief Medical Officers, Dr. Nick Cotesworth and Professor Michael Kidd are all valued members of the ANU community. They become familiar faces in the media but their public appearances are just the tip of the iceberg of what they and other ANU experts have been doing. At the beginning of the pandemic, when Australia's response required stronger direction, our leadership helped create the National COVID-19 Health Response Advisory Committee and that has provided a sharper focus on the national public health effort. And we have kept finding ways to get expert advice into the decision-making space. Some 35 members of our academic staff have been seconded to government departments to provide health-related policy advice. And at the risk of overlooking others' critical work, I want to mention especially the contribution of Associate Professor Kamalini Lakugay whose experience managing Ebola, SARS and Lassa fever outbreaks around the world has helped the nation get on top of this disease from the very beginning. She is currently advising the Victorian government on the unfortunate secondary outbreak occurring in that state. Among our other university members, Professor Imogen Mitchell has done a top-class job as clinical director running the ACT's response. Such a top-class job, that her job is actually relatively easy right now compared to most of her peers. But the modeling and sound public health advice given by our staff remains absolutely invaluable, not just in the past, the present, but also the future. I quote Professor Russell Gruen who believes that without the ANU intervention from March onwards, Australia would be in a much worse position and few other universities in the world can boast. Such a big impact on their nation's response to the disease as ANU has made. And our involvement doesn't end at the Australian border because others like Dr. Tambry-Hausen have been providing training for the contact tracers in the Pacific and helping deliver World Health Organization skill programs. After talking about these wonderful public health leaders, let me also mention those putting their research at the public's disposal. Professor Karola Vinlesa was one of the first to know about the virus through her work with Chinese counterparts in Shanghai. And along with Professor Matthew Cook, she put together a large group of academics, staff, and students who have worked tirelessly for months to develop a testing program that has helped keep our labs, our university, and the ACT community safe. And we may still have to rely on that. ANU epidemiologists, Dr. Aparna Lal and her team have been investigating using sewage to find new ways of gauging the extent of the virus' transmission, a potentially invaluable global public policy tool. And can I say, no one's ever gonna say that we're not prepared to get our hands dirty here at ANU. These efforts are being supplemented by the work of our sociologists who've been tracking the way the pandemic have been affecting how we live and work and how it is affecting our mental health, our rights, and our online security. And by our psychologists who are repeating the important work they did during last summer's bushfires, training, practicing psychologists on the consequences of long-term social isolation. To the critics of universities, I say the only culture wars underway on our Australian campuses right now are those taking place in the Petri dishes we all use. Of course, responding to a pandemic is just, isn't just about medical science. It's also about the social sciences, especially economics. And here, once again, we've maintained our role as the nation's foremost public policy university. Many of the senior bureaucrats piloting the nation's economic ship through the rocks of recession are also our graduates, often advised by experts from our major public policy schools. This is public service at its very best, engaged expertise, proudly provided by ANU. Our senior economists led by people like Professor Warwick McKibbin, Professor Rene Fry McKibbin, and Dr. Roshan Fernando have been using their modeling skills to come to grips with the scale and shape of the economic effects of the pandemic. Through the International Monetary Fund and the Australian government's Corona Expert, Coronavirus Expert Advisory Panel, as well as through their extensive informal channels, they have been ensuring that the response to the pandemic has been informed by solid evidence, sound thinking, and a belief in global coordination. They have set up a new body of world economists from 22 countries to help the world navigate its way through this crisis. This is ANU helping lead the world. Other economics professors like Bruce Chapman, Robert Bruning, Miranda Stewart, Robbie Torkey, and Rowan Pitchford have been a helping guide national thinking about the immediate and long-term economic policies with ideas to keep businesses and jobs intact while reforming the tax system. Now, once we've hopefully found a vaccine for this virus, what then? Well, how will Australia's economy, society, and democracy be reorganized to reflect the new global realities? Where will the new industries and jobs come from to build our recovery upon? And what can A&U and other universities contribute to this? We are, of course, as usual looking at the big questions from all angles, scientific, economic, social, and political. Let's just take the space race. It used to be a two-horse event between the US and the Soviet Union, with little places like countries like Australia. But now the rest of Europe, China, India, Japan, the Arab world, and companies like SpaceX have started competing. There's a lot of rocketry being thrown up in orbit and beyond depositing greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting materials where the planet needs them least. But our Institute for Space in space, as it's known, led by Anna Moore, is addressing this through research and the possibility of reusable rockets with more efficient engines and cleaner fuels. It's also developing new space-based tools to help farmers closely map soil moisture to enable better decisions about what and when to plant. Electric vehicles are obviously another important response to limit global warming. Perhaps not a surprise that I might think that. But powering cars by batteries is a lot more complex than people perhaps realize. And it's worth noting that each electric vehicle requires around 1.5 kilograms of rare earths, the same rare earths found in mobile phones and other devices. Today, these minerals come almost exclusively from a single country and are usually mined and refined in environmentally disastrous ways. Our mineralogists and mining experts are working on finding new sources here in Australia and developing cleaner ways of getting them out of the rocks and into the world market. Like space research, this is an area of potentially massive economic significance for Australia's future. A very old associate professor John Mavrogenis providing outstanding leadership in this field. Our artificial intelligent researchers are investigating big issues like the nature of machine learning and how we can advance a democratic version of AI as an alternative to the more repressive uses found elsewhere. Our climate scientists, too, have been watching what's happened to the world's greenhouse gas emissions as economic activity has plummeted and are busy outlining clean energy stimulus packages to get people back to work when the recovery begins but not increase greenhouse gases. In history, our researchers are engaging with indigenous communities to record and map the deep history of our country and culture that exists in the oral and archeological record. History may seem like an unlikely source of future progress, but if we can increase all Australians' understanding of and pride in their full history, we'll make a giant step towards the sort of unity needed to overcome the economic, the social, and political injustices that remain. As a reconciled nation, we will go faster forward together. On this, we will lead by example. I'm delighted to say that just last month, the university appointed Peter Yu to the position of Vice President First Nations to progress the nation's ambitions to advance indigenous Australians and contribute to the national dialogue around reconciliation. And our Cambry Scholarships Initiative is creating a new cohort of indigenous scholars and potential national leaders. It is our hope that they will use the considerable learnings on the First Nations issues being produced right across the university to advance this great national cause. But with indigenous Australians comprising only around 1% of our current student body and less than 1% of our staff, we have a long ways to go in this journey. The good news is we are making progress, but I am determined to accelerate this rate of change. And how can A&U play an even larger role in the national reconstruction effort and the future of our nation? And what goals should we be setting ourselves for 2025? I think most of us see the period of ahead as looking very problematic. We are walking into a future where geopolitical uncertainty is threatening to place restraints on global free trade, where relations with our biggest trading partner could likely worsen, and where the erratic policy direction of our biggest security partner could cause us added trouble. Large threats to our country's political and economic sovereignty loom on the horizon. And in the face of this, Australia will need to become more self-reliant for our security, more diverse in our economy, and more agile in our governmental responses to this rapidly changing environment. I believe A&U has a special role to play in helping our nation through this uncertain period. It is what we were founded to do back in 1946, and what, 74 years later, we remain uniquely placed to do. We are one of the world's outstanding modern universities. And we're cheap. We're the only comprehensive university in the global Top 50 with an annual budget of less than one billion US dollars. We're the only research-intensive university outside of a metropolitan area in Australia. And I guess I am a living example of what A&U allows people to do. Four out of five of Australia's university-based Nobel Prizes were won here. All in just 74 years. Our student cohort is uniquely drawn from all of our nation states and territories. And once our students leave us, they often ended up serving and running the nation too, with a good proportion becoming Australia's leading politicians and senior public servants. Our policy expertise makes us a global powerhouse for understanding the Asia-Pacific region. Our economists, for example, help shape the modern open economy we have today. And our expertise in the education of public servants, diplomats and political leaders continues to contribute to make Australia a highly influential middle power. Just look at the CVs of many of our nation's leading policymakers. This role comes from our history, our geography and our national mandate. As I mentioned at the start of my speech, our founding purpose was to reconstruct our nation in a time of global turmoil. It makes us different from other universities. It gives us special significance and value to the nation. Change is inescapable, especially in the world of universities. But as things continue to change, we don't want to become a national university in a name only. We are determined to play as big and useful a role as we possibly can in Australia's evolving story. This moment of national crisis, which calls for a new era of national reconstruction, makes this the opportune time to restate the importance of the ongoing relationship between Australia and its national university. And we are determined to keep doing what we were founded to do, provide the knowledge, the research, and train people to help the nation rebuild, remain united, and to prosper. We know we can provide the education and research that the nation needs to meet its challenges. And we can do it at a standard, consistent with the world's absolute best. We can work with Commonwealth to co-design and co-fund this expertise, whether it be research, policy advice, or just determining what the nation needs for its graduates. We can work with businesses to create new companies that are able to exploit economic opportunities in a globally competitive way while meeting our sovereignty needs. And we can maintain an academic program that researches, cultivates, curates, and disseminates the broad culture, history, and values that underpin our democracy. This is also part of the National University's mandate. But to do that, we need a university that is resistant to global economic and geopolitical shocks. We need a university that is highly internationalized in its education, research, and outreach. And we need a university that can provide Australia with truly independent advice. In other words, we need an Australian national university in every sense of our title. Such a university provided an invaluable set of resources and effort to our first national reconstruction effort, and it will provide an invaluable set of resources in this hour's second. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and I'd like now to hand over to the Chancellor, the Honorable Julie Bishop. Julie? Thank you, Vice Chancellor. I acknowledge the traditional owners on whose lands we meet today. In my case, what about people on whom our land here in birth and pay my respects to their elders' past, present, and future? Australia's National University is founded at a time of great optimism and hope. And on this foundation day, it is timely that we remember our beginnings as an institution. The world had survived the unspeakable deprivations of World War II, and there was an unprecedented international effort underway to establish a new, walls-based order to prevent a recurrence of global conflict, to create a world out of chaos. Internationally, we saw the establishment of the United Nations with its powerful Security Council from Australia as its inaugural president. The foundations for many multilateral institutions were laid to provide a framework for the rule of law and international engagement. The goal was to ensure that all nations, big and small, militarily and economically weak and powerful, had rights that could be enforced in international forums. A rules-based international order was to be established that ensured more powerful nations were not able to coerce, invade, or bully others less powerful. It was during this era that ANU was founded and was mandated to contribute to Australia's post-war prosperity and that of our region. Soldiers in their thousands had returned from the battlefields of Europe and Asia and Australia welcomed migrants and nations ravaged by war. New industries and knowledge were needed to provide jobs and opportunity to this generation and to the baby boom of the world. It was a focus on research and science and engineering that gave great hope and that flowering of knowledge has continued to this day. The ANU community has nurtured many outstanding individuals from among our researchers, academics and students since that time. We've endured many challenges, including recession, the uncertainty of varying degrees of government support, the technology revolution that's still in its early phases and geopolitical developments of considerable magnitude. I don't regard it as more fervently to say that we're now facing one of our greatest challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic and the government responses worldwide. It's a time of huge disruption. Yet for every devastating development there's an uplifting event that gives us hope. This morning on my way into our new ANU office here in Perth, I was listening to ABC Radio. The first news item telling the COVID crisis worldwide after six months, which relates in the United States, are accelerating. India has suffered its worst day in terms of new cases. There's a harsh lockdown in Victoria and the city of Melbourne is under curfew. The second news item is about the SpaceX Flashdown, the first private sector crude space mission in history, a triumph of ingenuity and enterprise of human time. I thought of Charles Dickens, the opening lines of the Tale of Two Seasons. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief. It was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of light. It was the season of darkness. It was the spring of hope. It was the winter of despair. We had everything before us. We had nothing before us. Now, while he was describing the social and political upheaval of the 1700s, this quote captures in so many ways into the current pandemic at a personal and institutional level while the bounds of human endeavor continue to expand. There are dark pools of despair. There are bright rays of light. During my time as Australia's foreign minister, I had to deal with many international crises. And I was always careful to focus my energies and efforts on aspects where I had some influence to make change for the betterment of our nation in our region. To me, that is the mandate of this great international university at this critical juncture in the history of our nation. As our motto implies, first to learn the nature of things. We must identify where we aim and we can have a positive impact on the challenges that we face so that Australia emerges stronger than before. That means leveraging the work of our brilliant researchers in finding treatments and vaccines to diminish the hold that COVID-19 has over our communities. It means continuing to educate the next generation of leaders so that Australia is well-ferred into the future as a beacon of democracy, peace, ability and prosperity. Among the many important challenges of coming decades is how to pay down the debt incurred in the response to the pandemic and from the earlier global financial crisis of 2008-2009. No generation wishes to pass on to future generations with debts and so we have a responsibility to help restore integrity to the national account. Our future economists, public administrators, political leaders must be agile and creative in their thinking and it's vital that Australia emerges from the pandemic as a dynamic and growing economy as that is the only way we will be able to repay the funds borrowed through employment support programs and the various stimulus packages enacted since 2008 and greatly expanded in recent months. Australia will need a generation of people skilled in engineering, technology, science and the humanities and more to drive that growth and added challenges that will need to skillfully navigate a world of increasing great power competition. The United States in China replacing pressure in nations around the world to effectively choose their economic, technology and security partner. To date, Australia has sought to balance our interests between our largest two-way trading partner in China and our security ally and investment partner in the United States. Coming years will make that an increasingly broad proposition as they both increasingly demand that nations make a choice. That will require careful and skillful diplomacy from our national leaders as they rise to that challenge and we must play a role in providing advice through our schools and policy units to support the thinking and judgment of senior officials and leaders. In addition, we must focus on the aspects of the challenges over which we have direct influence. That is what we've been doing and working hard to ensure that all our enrolled students remain engaged for their studies at this time. Like many organisations around the world, we've used technology to bridge the challenges of the pandemic as we strive to deliver the world-class education experience which they knew is just privately renowned. And I acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of the Vice Chancellor, his executive team and all our staff who have responded magnificently. This is important, of course, at the individual, family and community level. We do need to ensure that those who engage with ANU are equipped with the knowledge and skills to navigate an increasingly complex world as they seek out opportunities to improve the standard of living and that of their families and communities. However, there is what I regard as a trial purpose that goes beyond what we provide to students in direct individual and community benefit. ANU must play a role in helping define the future of our nation. We need to think big and to challenge any orthodoxies that case limits on our ambition. The world is changing dramatically and Australia must underplace in this rapidly changing, disruptive global environment. The complexity of the challenges and opportunities demands that our best minds consider how Australia can position itself to the advantage of all our people. We're a nation of vast natural resources, energy, mineral and agricultural wealth to share with other nations. But I do believe that our greatest natural resource is our people and our greatest national asset with their capacity to think laterally and practically about the global challenges facing humanity. ANU is a key part of the international contribution to unlocking pathways to future prosperity by enabling the creative minds of our students to flourish. The ANU community has been a foundation of Australia's growth and development since World War II and our work is more important at this time than it has ever been. Stay safe and extend my best wishes to all as we celebrate Foundation Day. Thank you Chancellor and thank you once again to the whole ANU community today. We have a great amount of uncertainty facing us in the coming year but our mission has never been more important. And what life has taught me is if you focus at what you must do and do it well the future sort of takes care of itself. And so I think we should all be proud of what we have achieved under these most trying conditions and focus on our mission. Focus on doing it well. And next year our 75th anniversary we will be able to hopefully be in a much more normal time and have much to celebrate of what we have done over the past 12 months. Stay safe good luck everyone and I look forward to seeing around our campus and throughout the year. Good afternoon.