 Now, I would like to pass it on to our Dean of Students, Jim Nyland, who is going to welcome you today and take it away. Thank you, Anna. My thanks to everybody involved in the organization of this fabulous event to lead to the entire events and comms team. It's great to have you all here. Special thank you to our Uni SQ elder in residence, Uncle Wayne, who was a gift to this university, always interesting, always engaging, looking great for 73. I have to say, which is marvelous and gets us off to a fabulous start. So with those few thank yous in mind, let us begin. Provost, Deputy Vice Chancellor's, Pro Vice Chancellor's, Presidents and Co-presidents, Deans, Directors and Teaching Fellows, Registrar's and researchers, professors, principals, practice leads and educators, lecturers, learning advisors and librarians, chairs, co-chairs and coordinators, academics and professional staff. Most importantly are students. Can I welcome each and every one of you to this very special occasion, the 2023 student voice Australasia symposium themed exploring quiet voices for impact. And can I thank you for caring about the student voice in our cherished university sector. My name is Professor Jim Nyland and I'm the Dean of Students here at Uni SQ, who is very proud to be hosting this event. And I'm also privileged to be chair of the SBA Steering Committee. Nearly 200 participants join us today. A very special welcome to those of you who join us here at Uni SQ's Springfield campus and a warm welcome to those who joined us online across Australia and New Zealand. You reach an age in life when you think about the impact that you have on your particular sector. It's normally an age when you have less years ahead of you than you have behind you and one or two more gray hairs than you might like to admit. And as I hurriedly scour around this room and look at colleagues online, I am hopeful that I'm not the only person who falls into that particular category. But if I was to project myself 20 years ahead and look back on the next two years facing as I firmly believe that what we will achieve together through the student voice Australia will be momentous over this next two years in putting the student voice front and centre of our cherished sector. Part of the rationale for that is that much of the hard yards has been done already by way of background. SVA began as a pilot led by Professor Sally Varnum in 2019 from the research conducted from her 2016 Australian National Senior Teaching Fellowship. This research sparked the development of a national framework for student partnership in university decision making and governance, the setup principles, along with toolkits and good practice guides. And I'm pleased to say that Sally joins us online today. After being developed and piloted at the University of Technology in Sydney and spending the following three years housed at the University of Adelaide, we are proud to take over the SVA hosting duties here at UniSQ. This university was part of the original pilot project led by Professor Karen Nelson, our provost who joins us here this morning. Under her leadership UniSQ has developed our partnership framework and established a new system of student governance, including our Student Senate. So exciting times for us here at UniSQ with an A team of university leaders putting students at the heart of everything we do. And in similar fashion, we hold great aspirations for SVA in the next two years with a focus on growth, strengthening the network through engagement and continuing to bring value to all of our members. For now, it's my great honor to introduce the newest member of the SVA Steering Group, the DVC Education of Griffith University, Professor Sean Ewing to share his thoughts as we open today's proceedings but just before I do. I will share with you that I did have the honor and privilege of working at the same institution. As Sean, albeit quite a bit before his time, in fact, 20 years ago when I came over to Australia, it was to join the team at Griffith University, then led by Professor Glyn Davis, not sure what Glyn's doing now. I think it's some government job or something maybe. But they were exciting times. Glyn was only in that position as VC of Griffith for two years before he was headhunted by Melbourne University. But in that two years, it's interesting what has been developed. I came over from the UK to help run the Office of Community Partnerships that was flagged in the Griffith project, one of the key projects they wanted to put in place. It's interesting that now flourishes as the Office of Engagement. Another key project there was the Griffith Review, which this year reaches its 81st edition of Australian authors and has made great headway in that time. And it created the IR Association, the Association of Innovative Research Universities. Again, that's lastly the test of time, moving from five original members to seven that they have today. The other thing it did was to rebrand Griffith University. And in all of that, those big achievements, the student voice was paramount in those. The rebranding is an interesting one because of course we know Griffith to be read. And Glyn would say it was the student voice that really sort of made that the focus and they said in consultation that if you're going to go red go really red red. So the intensity of Griffith's red is entirely down to the student voice. It's my time there in the successive roles I've had. I've always taken that on board in terms of the student voice, whether it's creating a physical learning environment for a master planning process, whether it's creating a live curriculums part of course offerings in a university. I've always given the onus, not just the listening part, but the onus on the student partner and the student voice because you get better decisions and long lasting decisions that will last the 10th test of time. And when I look back 20 years ago now, and I think about what was achieving that two year period. It gives me great hope and belief that we can achieve marvelous things over the next two years through the student voice Australia enterprise. Back to Sean, if I may. I am personally thrilled that Sean has joined the SVA board. I have spent many years trying to attract Sean to other boards without success. So I know he is really choosing, which is why I'm so delighted. But he's joined SVA and is here with us this morning to open this symposium prior to working at Griffith, Sean held key leadership roles at the University of Melbourne and is renowned for his work in indigenous health. As he played a pivotal role in the leaders in indigenous medical education, the Lyme project, fostering collaboration among all medical schools in Australia and New Zealand. Professor Ewing is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion in higher education, believing they are fundamental prerequisites for academic excellence. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Sean. Thanks, Jim. You're very kind and really had your coffee this morning. Uncle Wayne, thank you for your welcome. And I might make a few reflections on that, which is from time to time, welcomes and acknowledgments, mostly acknowledgments actually of country really annoy me because they're not based in meaning and not connected with the purpose of the event. And in that spirit, they become an important but could be seen as tokenistic expression of recognition. Yours was very far from that and I know it was a welcome to country so thank you for welcoming me and us here. His reminiscent of the 20 years that I lived on Narm Melbourne, I need you I Murphy Wondon would always bring in Manne gum, which was specific to the region and share that with us. So thank you for grounding us and connecting us to place into where we are. And I think that's a critical to how we set the tone for the day. As Jim's mentioned, I'm one of the newest members of the I think the newest member of the steering committee of this group and it's, I wasn't going to say anything about saying no to Jim several times in the past, but he brought it up so I, I think that this group has a really important role to play and I moved to Griffith about 18 months ago from University Melbourne where I left where I was Pro Vice Chancellor place and indigenous so we led the indigenous portfolio but then started to think about what that meant for place. And a couple of things around moving to Griffith is not about me this is about institutions and student voice. There weren't many universities across Australia that I actually would have moved to I've done my time at Melbourne there's nothing anti Melbourne. I'd spend a wonderful year in 2020. We landed in London in the middle of January for a year long sabbatical which was going to be Stockholm, Singapore, Vancouver, and ended up being the kitchen, the lounge room, the balcony. And what was fascinating riffing on the theme of red was that the depths of the lockdown in 2020 in London. The buses the red buses kept going around and around the city in exactly the same pace they would go if it was full of traffic but there was no traffic and it was like a weak pulse a weak heartbeat just going and going and going. The opportunity of the COVID for us was lots of time to read and to think and to reflect on things like purpose of universities and the role of student voice. And I often reflect that on a meeting that I had at an unnamed institution where they're about half a dozen of us in the ninth floor of a building talking about the international student experience. Firstly, we were all male and I know the gender diversity at least but interesting imbalance in this room. We're all male. We all went to university last century. And we were pontificating about the student experience and we're all locals. We're pontificating about the student experience for international students and I was like guys with dinosaurs. I mean that genuinely but affectionately was possibly career limiting because we have no lived experience of living in an overpriced shoebox size apartment in reveal the institution if I say where but it might have been Carlson or Parkville. And making decisions about how we support student experience and my thought about that quite a lot when I was in London as well. So I think for most of you and I won't make a comment on Jim's hair gray or otherwise but for most of us, most of our executives that that make decisions about what we're going to do in this space did actually go to university last century. I did, but I don't look at so thank you for saying that Diana. And for me that's a really important part of all thinking through what co creation might look like and how we how we deeply engage with our students to craft an experience that is as much there as it is as it is ours and the flip side of having a voice and developing a voice is listening and I think a great skill. That we need to work at as part of the executive units is to think about how we listen to the student voice. So, it's just some kind of random thoughts the only other thing I want to reflect on from what Jim said is in is that times do change quite quickly. When we established it was in Anderson that established it but then I let it after Ian went to Canberra. It was an indigenous medical education network. One of the aspirations of that network and there's a conference in a couple of weeks back in Canberra was that we wanted to reach population parody for indigenous medical students across the country parody with domestic students not international. And we reached that surprisingly in about 2016 17. That was in some ways unheard of. In fact, when we started the network in the early 2000s. The other example was at Melbourne we established from a very generous philanthropic gift. The Melbourne Poat Center for indigenous health and one of our aspirations when we started that I think in 2015 2016 was to have 20 new indigenous PhD students by 2020. And they smashed that out of the water a couple of years before that and when we set those targets they were things we thought oh their aspiration we're not going to get there. There's a tsunami is the wrong word but there's a very big and healthy wave of indigenous students coming through our universities now at all levels undergraduate postgraduate PhD. I think there's something like not up with the latest data but 500 or so indigenous PhD candidates across the country. 10 years ago that was was unheard of and and I reflect on those comments from my area partly because change does come and it does happen. And you get there and you think, oh shit that's actually not a bad place to be. And you set those aspirations earlier so I'm looking forward to seeing what this group can do and the change that it can affect, which will come if we work hard at it will come quicker than we realize. Today is all about ensuring that all voices are given a platform to be heard and I'm really looking forward to listening to the keynote from Lucy shortly. How do we provide space for that to happen. We have been designed has been designed with students and practitioners practitioners in mind as an opportunity to dive deeper into the question of how we enable diverse representation of student voices in higher ed. I know at the time but I got just a couple of very other brief comments Jim talks about my passion for diversity and equity. You actually those things are actually a precursor and a precondition for excellence you cannot have excellence without having those things beforehand. Otherwise you have a very watered down narrow version of excellence which is probably a privileged groups version of excellence. Publications in high ranking journals which have publishers with is done in the US so the names are that they define their categories don't ask me about them. Names that came from different cultural contexts and backgrounds jointly on publications were more highly cited were better publications. And if you had people from around the world on the publication, it gets further and is read more. And is a better publication just as one tangible example of thinking about diversity and equity is a precursor to excellence. It's not a nice to have it's a precondition and we need to think about what that actually looks like. So enough from me we hope you feel empowered to engage in the discussions connect with others share your thoughts and questions as I said I'm really looking forward to the next session and hearing about different kinds of voices. And are they silenced or are they not we kind of living in a bit of a Orwellian phase as well so that will be interesting to think through my perspective what those things look like. I'll now pass the final words over to Anna who coordinates SBA and have some fabulous directions to get me here and on time which is good. And who led the uni Southern Queensland team to bring us together here today so thank you thanks for the invitation and it'll be a good day.