 Chancellor, Aunty Matilda, friends, colleagues of the university, it's great to be back up here in 2019. Matilda, I really do want to thank you once again for your warm welcome to country. This welcome that we have new people here this year experiencing A&U the first time and I hope your welcome serves them well for their entire time that they are on country. I would also like to acknowledge and celebrate the traditional owners on whose lands we meet today whose cultures are among the oldest continuing in human history. Pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging on our campus. It's now been 73 years since the Australian National University was founded to bring to the national capital a national university, a university that could bring credit to Australia, advance the cause of research and learning and take its rightful place amongst the great universities of the world. Our founders imagined that we would become an intellectual powerhouse for the nation, grappling with the challenges confronting our country and the region in which we live, looking for policy, technical, scientific solutions to the wicked problems as we call them today of each generation. Now this ambition is still core to our existence in 2019, but our job has become much more complex as we witness a shift from the post World War II order into which this university was born and which each of us have lived our lives. The pace of technological change is staggering. We are accompanied by a rising social and political uncertainty experiencing new geopolitical currents and witnessing accelerating change in the environment that sustains all of us. But amongst that slightly gloomy backdrop, we are also lucky enough to live at a time of hope and progress. Global human longevity was just 48 years when ANU was founded, it's 72 years in 2019. The number of people living in extreme poverty has decreased rapidly in recent years and we are at a time when literally every human is more connected than they have ever been digitally by mass transit and by trade soon no one will be left behind. In a rapidly changing world, universities are absolutely critical institutions for finding the pathways to a prosperous and sustainable future. I want you to think about that. The world is looking to institutions like ours to find the way forward. Our research and our education underpin the capacity of humans to solve the challenges we confront and find the solutions to our most pressing problems. As the National University, ANU has a particularly important leadership role to play. That is why we are here. First, to know the nature of things. That's our motto. It's good to pause and reflect for a moment on those words. They remind us that the search for knowledge and for understanding is at the heart of everything we do. It is knowledge that we are here for. It is knowledge that we use. It is knowledge that we disseminate. As the National University, we have special responsibilities. It comes with both a unique privilege and a unique responsibility. We have a responsibility to be intellectual leaders, nurturing talented thinkers, giving voice to new ideas and challenging orthodoxy. We have a responsibility to transform lives. The ANU experience must be extraordinary, whether you're a student or an academic or a member of our professional staff, one of our alumni, a beneficiary of our research, or simply engaging with ANU ideas. We have a responsibility to ensure that this place matters for all. In all that we do, we must always be true to our values. We need to be original, inclusive, open and respectful. We need to act with integrity, to be collegiate. We need to be committed to the service of our nation and better outcomes for our community, the environment and the world. And we must be prepared to take risks in our pursuit of knowledge, stand firm on the principles of academic freedom, autonomy and integrity. We have a responsibility to engage with the wider Australian community, to share our story and our ambition with them. We need to be open to them and to be a place that is open to all. Now living up to our responsibilities is a collective effort, and it only happens when each and every one of us plays our own role. We are the sum of our parts. The effort to make our university open, engaged and understood by all Australians is an effort that I'm going to be asking you to join me in this year. We all need to do something. To transform lives, we must aim to lead the nation in gender equity and reconciliation, be willing to convene some of the difficult and uncomfortable conversations Australia needs to have if we are to move forward. To transform lives, we must solve the inequities that confront our students, and particularly the inequities that confront those for whom ANU seems out of reach. However, we should also pause and celebrate where our work has transformed lives and where our values have led us to be better and to lead the nation. So today I want to share my vision for meeting our responsibilities, and my vision I hope is just reflective, of course, of your vision. But before I do that, I actually want to sit back and thank each of you for the dedication you bring to this place. It is that dedication that makes our university one of the great universities of the world, and it is the dedication that is uniquely ANU. We have committed to play a leadership role in the reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The importance of that commitment was brought home for many of us yesterday at the opening of Cambry, where we were reminded that Indigenous Australians have called this very place our university home for 25,000 years. In 2018, when we launched our reconciliation action plan, we set a roadmap for what we want to achieve, and we can be proud of some of our achievements. We have the highest retention of Indigenous students in the country, but we want to see many more Indigenous students realize their full potential at ANU to feel that this is their place, a place where they can make a difference. We can only achieve this if we are more open and inclusive of Indigenous people, their traditions and perspectives, and through the respect of Indigenous knowledge and wisdom. Last year, we held the First Nations Governance Forum bringing together Indigenous leaders, academics, and politicians from around the world to restart the national conversation of reconciliation. Our conversation had impact. The Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition meeting is part of the forum, and its final report endorsing the cornerstone of the statement of the heart that Australian constitutional reform should include a First Nations voice. Now, ANU must play our part in ensuring the voice brings greater reconciliation, and we must each play our part in achieving our own reconciliation action plan. We will be actively engaging more Indigenous academics across campus to give voice to their expertise and perspectives. This includes people like Dr. Virginia Marshall, our inaugural Indigenous Australian post-doctoral fellow who is examining whether Australia's frameworks, laws, and policies are robust enough to ensure Aboriginal communities can exercise cultural and economic control of their traditional waterways. Language is one of the most profound ways to understand another's perspective. 2019 is the international year of Indigenous languages, languages that are currently being lost from Australia, and ANU is contributing to ensure languages survive and indeed thrive. Kathy Bow, a PhD candidate from the College of Arts and Social Sciences, has developed a Digital Archive Indigenous Languages, and in collaboration with Charles Darwin University and the Binney-Goonwalk people is launching an online course this semester for our own students. Learning an Indigenous language is part of understanding the culture and identity of Australia's first people, and it is through this knowledge that we will be able to work towards reconciliation based on shared values and understanding. Now, ANU is a great university, but it is also a university of great privilege. Many of us have had advantages in life not afforded to others, but for ANU to meet its responsibility as the National University, our responsibility where we want to transform lives and our ambition to be an institution for all, we must be a community that is inclusive and open to all people who have talent and passion to succeed regardless of their background. And so this year we're changing the way we admit our students and the way we recruit our professional and academic staff. This is a long-term commitment to making ANU a campus that truly reflects our entire nation. And when new people join our community, we need to support them. Not just in the classroom or with research, but with the experience that makes them feel valued and part of our community. Support which is flexible and tailored to the individual. Let's take Hermelon Hunterzini who has dreamed of studying environmental science to give back to our local community in the Northern Territory. Ten years ago she came to ANU, but in the end had to defer her degree because of the challenges of life that she was confronting. But due to flexibility and support, a decade on, she has returned to ANU and will be very proud when she walks across this stage later this year as a graduate and then steps out into society to achieve great things and to change the world around her with the knowledge she's gained. As Nelson Mandela who once stood in this hall said, education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world and we are well armed. We need to give people with potential the tools they need to change the world. For too long, admission to university has been linked to who your parents are and where you live. Last year, under the energetic leadership of Professor Marnie Hughes Warrington, we began reforming our admissions based on the principle that an ANU student is more than just their ATAR score. This is just not new thinking for ANU. It is really new thinking across Australia in our approach. We will be creating a student community that reflects the Australian community in all of its diversity. ANU will not just be a place lucky enough for those to afford it and we will marry a great educational experience with an unparalleled campus experience. This is coming this year. But to do so, we need to support these students to get here, many of whom have not started with the easiest of path. Students like Jonah Hansen from Longston and Lockeston in South Australia. Like me, Jonah had a passion for astronomy and mathematics but a passion that could not be realized in the small town where he grew up. With potential and ambition, Jonah's journey to ANU, supported by a Tuckwell Scholarship, has seen him blossom in our community. So we do have a responsibility to transform lives and that means that we each have a role to play in that of support and helping connect to people. It is where the generosity of our community will really make a difference. Many of you in this room have already given your support to the students and to each of you, I do thank you on behalf of our students. But each of you can continue to help by reaching out to our students, whether they be Jonah or Hermelon or any of our students who call ANU home, you're helping them. By telling our story about wanting to build a community as diverse as our nation, by sharing your story, by supporting our philanthropic efforts, by actively participating in the activities that make up campus life, you will make a difference. Yesterday we opened up Cambry, the new heart of our campus, our meeting place, the place that brings together students and staff and alumni in the wider community to share ideas, music, performance, books, and of course coffee and food. In Cambry, we have created new learning environments that are better suited to the changing needs of our students and academics with the help of new technology, we have rethought what a classroom in 2019 is going to look like, how teaching occurs, and these new spaces will transform teaching and learning. They're flexible spaces designed to keep students and teachers close and class sizes small. And I'm going to be emphasizing to our students that they need to attend class because we're going to be making the extra effort for them to get something rather than a mass-produced education, which quite frankly they could get anywhere. I love teaching, but I have to admit having walked through the new classrooms, using these new spaces is daunting. It's not just same as we've always done. And like many of you, I'm looking forward to learning how they will improve my teaching and learning how to make better use of these spaces and technology to improve our student experience. I know I'm not alone here, but we have some brave people like Peter Laundy from Classics who will be teaching his first year ancient history course in this new space. Peter's students will discuss the writings of Thucydides and Xenophon and how they can reveal facets of Athenian life and perhaps how the traps of ancient human civilizations might be realized in the present. In these discussions that give students the opportunity to explore their own ideas and challenge the perspectives of their peers, we will make a difference. Rachel Remington is going to be looking at the big questions in biology and her students are going to be able to engage in peer reviews and workshops in these new spaces. Sam Bennett from the School of Music will use the new interactive screens to integrate practice and production of music. These new teaching spaces will transform what we do and how we do it. And we will help and support you and your teaching. We don't expect you just to figure it out on your own. But I remind you that the Humboldtian ideal, the university, great teaching is informed by great research. This is the ideal we can live up to. And through programs like ILEAP, you are going to be able to work with Grady Venville and her colleagues to make teaching preparation easier. You're going to get better outcomes through innovative and interactive classrooms. You're going to be happier and your students will also learn so much more. All that we do is ultimately build up on our research and intellectual leadership. Excellence in all that we do is not just an ambition. It is our responsibility. It is the thing that will keep us the Australian National University. But as the National University, we cannot just be excellent. We also need to be distinctive and different. We must set the pace in critical research. So our 2018 Grand Challenges winner, the Zero Carbon Energy for Asia Pacific team, aims to use our world-leading research we do across campus to create a new industry for Australia, to create a new normal where solar, wind, pumped hydro and battery storage solutions combat climate change, creating low-cost zero carbon energy, to create a potential new revenue source for Australia that helps the develop of our region in a way that is globally sustainable. The urgency of this type of work cannot be understated as we face more fiercely hot summers like the one we've just sweltered through. But we are not just bemoaning the facts. We are out trying to make a difference. And our discovery is, of course, not just about solving wicked problems, but they are also about the frontier of knowledge. We celebrate here people like Professor Xu Mei Bai, who has pushed the understanding of urban sustainable science and policy to new frontiers. Or Dr. Rahan Ismail, who has reshaped the way we understand the Middle East region. One of our PhD students, Ilya Babrovsky, last year discovered evidence of the earliest animals in the geological record. And his work has been recognized as one of Science Magazine's top ten breakthrough science discoveries of 2018, which ain't bad for your PhD thesis. We shouldn't underestimate the value of telling our story, of reaching out to communities, engaging them in our work. This is how we make ANU welcoming to a diverse community of people and give Australians a reason to be proud of their national university, to want to be part of what we do. Programs like the National Youth Science Forum attract young scientists and enthusiasts from around the country to spend their summer exploring science here at ANU with all of you. It was the NYSF that first brought, for example, Lauren Booth, a student from Ipswich who had never thought of ANU, brought her here for the first time. She is now one of our outstanding PhD scholars in science. Every little thing we do makes a difference and they add up. We live in a rapidly changing world. We have a responsibility to constantly test new boundaries in all that we do, shaping education and research that Booth responds to but also creates change. And I acknowledge change makers like our Dean of Engineering and Computer Science, Professor Eleanor Huntington, who is leading the complete reimagination of engineering, creating new areas of research and marrying the power of engineering with other disciplines. The world we lived is being shaped by engineers and I say that as a physicist, somewhat reluctantly. But here at ANU, we are shaping the future of engineering. Not just a little bit, we are leading the world in how we think about these things. Our conversations, for example, around artificial intelligence, data and robots is maturing through the 3A Institute, led by our distinguished professor Genevieve Bell. We are an intellectual leader. MIT announced a billion dollars in this area. We've already been doing it for 18 months. Genevieve has worked miracles to go from a standing start to literally leading the world in this field today. Just yesterday, we welcomed the first cohort of master's students to the 3A Institute. Some of who come from some of the top tech companies in the world. They come from around the world, around Australia, and they are going to be co-creating their master's program, helped create a new discipline of how we design with this new world to be effective around us. Our innovation institutes are all about being change makers. Under the leadership of Leslie Sevek, our cyber institute is bringing disciplines together to solve real problems by connecting cyber, commuter science, national security, anthropology, sociology, and criminology. Professor Mark Kendall and his team at Wear Optomo are developing wearable medical technologies, providing access to medical data in real time for fast and accurate diagnoses. And in space, led by Professor Anna Moore, who I can see fittingly up in the atmosphere up there, is beginning together law, economics, policy, engineering, and science to Australia's emerging space industry. These are but just a few of the thousands of programs of research taking place here. Now, not every piece of research will be a top 10 breakthrough, but trust me, you're not going to know you're making a top 10 breakthrough until after it happens. To meet our responsibility to the nation, all of our staff need to be supported and encouraged to take risks, to think outside the box, and to collaborate to do things that simply can't be done alone. That's what I need to do for you. And I remind you that every piece of research has the potential to revolutionize our understanding. And it is that revolution of understanding that is what makes a university great. And that is what makes universities uniquely able to challenge the problems and opportunities that society face. Now, I became Vice Chancellor three years ago, not because I wanted to run the university, but because I truly believe in this place. I believe in our core values of respect and collegiality of integrity and ethical behavior. And I want this university and all of us here to succeed in what I see is an absolutely important mission. But to meet our ambition to be values led and to transform the lives of staff as well as students, we have to be a great place to work. The voice survey which we ran last year told us what you think. And I begged you to fill it out and more than 66% of you did so. Thank you. And this included for the first time many of our casual and sessional staff members. It is your thoughts that empower me. And there's plenty to be proud of in the results. The results paint a picture that compared to our past and compared to other universities, we really like where we're going. And that's not surprising because our vision is our vision. It's your vision. But that does not mean everything is perfect. We as a community are less happy, for example, about where we stand on gender equity than we were in 2016. And we are less satisfied than those at other universities. And so while I do believe we are making progress, I acknowledge we are clearly not matching your expectations. And that's not good enough. ANU will only be successful when we make the most of all of the talent available in our community. Where gender, age, race, or background underpin our successes rather than being seen as barriers. So the executive leadership team and I will be reflecting on lessons learned from our SAGE initiative as we prepare our final application here in March. And I was encouraged to find along the way that there is good news. In 2018, the rate of male and female promotions across the university reached parity for the first time. I'm also very proud that ANU has an above average return work following maternity leave. And of course, we are leading the sector and the nation with our 26 week paternity leave program. On this final measure, I want you, I ask of our community, and I know this is hard, that each of you match your parental leave with your partner. That is true equality. In 2019, we will be more accountable on gender equity in the new future. I will be making available a dashboard showing ANU status and progress on gender equity at the school and service division level. We are going to own this together and we're going to make changes together. This is all because our ambition is to be values led and our responsibility is to be values led. And this means we have to confront unsettling and uncomfortable issues. The voice survey revealed that bullying remains a real concern in some parts of the university. And while it is essential that the university remains a place for the robust exchange of ideas, this can be done and must be done in a way that is collegial and respectful. This is a task for all of us and I want your honest and frank feedback about how we can improve. I will be working with the deans and directors and heads of school to understand and address these issues over 2019. But I also need your help. I need you to stand up and call out inappropriate behavior if you see it. As David Morris, our alum 2016 and Australian of the year said, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. I remind you that we now have a dean of staff who you can privately and informally discuss any issue. And I tell you that we will support you if you stand up for what's right. Having those difficult and honest conversations makes us a better place. And I acknowledge this partnership between students and staff last year to make our campus safer. Thanks to that effort, we now have a respectful relationships unit. And under the leadership of Sue Wevick, the unit will be developing accessible and transparent processes, running educational campaigns for both staff and students, as well as reviewing ANU policies and procedures to ensure what we do is best practice. The voice survey also said we can do better with technology at ANU. You are fairly dissatisfied with it and you will see improvements this year. The ANU has welcomed the very talented chief information security officer, Suthagar Sivaratnam, who is working with our cyber institute and ITS to not just protect us from cyber threats, but to do it in a way that makes us more productive, not less. Yes, we're going to have to change a little bit. But Suthagar has ways to do things which makes us easier to do our IT, which gives us more power in our IT, not less. And this is a place where we will be world leaders. Last year, we implemented the University Service Feedback Program, a little button you can press on everything placed in the web, which I worked on for two years to get you. More than 500 of you have already used it. Thank you. And I know that some of our policies and systems are confusing and not easy to use and we're going to be working on them one by one to make them better. Another place we're working is in budget and reporting framework. Now it's a boring way of saying how we move and put money around the University needs to change. We're going to make it easier to respond to what the University wants to do. It will be possible to get things done as a team, rather than to have our effort siloed into activities which pit one part of the University against others. That too is going to require change, but we're going to do it in a way that we hope brings everyone alone. Although it is easy to look to A&U from the inside, the day-to-day stresses and strains of the processes and organizational politics, we do need to remember that the world outside Acton sees us very differently. The Australian community makes a substantial investment in us through the Australian government and we really do need to demonstrate to them the value of that investment, engage with them on our work. We need to tell our story and over the coming year, the global engagement portfolio will lead a major project to do just that. But it needs your input. We want to rediscover what makes our University so special and we want to be able to tell that story to the nation and the world, makes them want to be part of it. We'll make it easier for our community here nationally to understand why we are of value and make it easy for us to have the impact we need to have. So I do encourage you to get involved with those discussions, share your thoughts on what makes us special and I hope that what makes A&U unique will not just be our history, but rather our future. Now I've said the world is changing and the A&U will be at the forefront of meeting the challenge of that change. And the spirit of service to the nation, which is built into the DNA of our University, is embodied by our Chancellor, Professor Gareth Evans. Gareth will have been Chancellor for a decade by the time he steps down at the end of the year. He's brought incredible energy and intellect to the Chancellor's ship as the same way that he brought to his membership of Parliament for 21 years, his 13 years as Cabinet Minister, and to his global role as President of the International Crisis Group. But in December, it will finally be time for him to hang up his golden braided bumblebee gown machete so proudly wears today. I want to say to Gareth a sincere thank you. You have been a source of great encouragement to me as Vice Chancellor. You have provided clear guidance and wise counsel. Although your counsel was sometimes colorfully expressed, I note your passion has always been directed towards what you have seen as the best interests of A&U, never for yourself. You have been a great leader of counsel, shown incredible humility, which Gareth argues with, and a generosity to our students and alumni. You've been a passionate advocate for many causes, from academic excellence to indigenous reconciliation, and ultimately one of our proudest champions of the National University. And so while he still has most of the year to go, please join me in thanking the Chancellor for his contribution over the last nine years, and of course for the year to come. I think we made a blush. Finally, as I conclude, I reflect that in this polarized world of fake news, half-truths, weaponized social media propaganda, our resolve to our core academic values will be tested again in 2019. We will need to stand firm to our values, which will allow us to speak truth to the issues of the day, and will allow us to educate the leaders of tomorrow. All of this while continuing to undertake fundamental inquiry to know the nature of things which informs all that we do. Thank you all.