 ANU was founded 75 years ago in response to a global crisis, the end of World War II, founded as a resource to the nation. Today is no different. Now, more than ever, as Australia's national university, it is up to us to help navigate disruption as we emerge from another global crisis and to continue to deliver on our critical mission. Food security is a societal problem. We've got a responsibility to have enough food for each other. It's an environmental problem. We've got to do it with the least impact on the planet, and it's actually a global security problem. By 2050, we've got to increase production by about 60 percent. How we're looking to do that is to increase the energy efficiency of plants. To deal with climate change, we need to decarbonise global energy, industrial and transport systems. That's what we address in our research. How can we decarbonise and how can we do it in a way that is economically beneficial, that aids with the renewal of our industrial systems? And how can we decarbonise in a way that benefits Australia's regional development? My research deals with religion and politics, and I look at particularly how religion and politics affect the Middle East. So the biggest challenge for Australia is managing this crowded horizon of risk that the nation faces, whether it's great power competition, whether it's COVID, climate, political violence. Our research team builds and engineers components that can be used to improve crop productivity and how crops perform in challenging environments, and we build components that can be inserted into separation technologies so you can turn waste liquids into valuable resources. If we want to transform the way that we use energy, we need to use solar, not just to produce electricity, but to produce energy for everything that we use in society. And to do this, we need to make solar energy more efficient and cheaper. So we're using new materials and nanotechnology to create world-leading efficiency solar cells. ANU Institute for Space is the front door to ANU space capability. Underneath the institute we have access to 42 research schools and all of the space infrastructure that ANU can bring to the table. So we have experts, our mission specialists in everything from bushfire mitigation to advanced communications to satellite design and to space law. So what we're really doing in this intellectual property space, with our Indigenous-led research, is that we're creating those opportunities to really navigate the space of difficult and complex systems. That's what we do well in ANU. We really are great at problem solving. We bring new technologies like virtual reality into the classroom because we want to stimulate and engage our students. We want them to be active participants in their learning journey. ANU isn't just any university, it's the national university, and that means we have a whole set of responsibilities, not just to our own scholarship and our own ideas, but to our country and to our citizens and to our region. This is the place in the national capital where ideas and research and thinking enmesh with the real world challenges of policy. In a time of uncertainty the university becomes especially important because you know our whole job is looking for truth. So we're sort of that's what we're trained for, that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to draw connections between things, we're trying to get good people together to work on problems, and we're trained to do it with a certain amount of critical distance from the day-to-day operations so we can look for truth without getting wrapped up in a lot of the problems that say politicians or other kinds of professionals might have to deal with. So what we always do, whether it's through education or research or outreach, is we bring people together. We bring people together and enable them to think differently about things. So whether we bring students together who come from different countries, different religions, different ethnic backgrounds, they learn together. They learn to engage with each other, they learn to understand the world from each other's point of view, and that's the critical thing that we do as a university and we encourage people to think for themselves, we give them the skills to think for themselves and we challenge them and that enables us and should enable us I think to help shape new futures for all of us. I mean we're living in an extraordinarily terrible awful time in many many ways but as a university we have an opportunity to shape a future in a new way and that is incredibly important and really exciting. ANU has a special mission as our country's first and only national university. We were established by an act of the federal parliament to be an intellectual powerhouse that could respond to and solve major national and international challenges. Over the past 75 years we have delivered for communities across Australia and our region and with our world-leading academics and our highly talented students we will continue to fulfill our founding mission.