00:04Thank you. I'm greatly honoured to be named as an Icons of Change ambassador in Australia
00:10in 2026 and for Goal 17 partnership for the Sustainable Development Goals.
00:19It's a fantastic privilege to be part of this growing and dynamic community.
00:25And it does reflect a set of aspirations and opportunities and experiences that I've had throughout my career
00:35which began in London and the UK, pursuing a set of questions about how we can remake society,
00:42how we adjust to changing knowledge and technology and crucially how we share responsibility
00:48for the common resources around us, our natural environment, not only to adapt successfully
00:54but also to make sure that our societies are inclusive and resilient, that we can bring people
01:00with the processes of change and that we address equality as citizens and recognise that economies
01:09that simply increase inequality will undermine the foundations of all of our lives.
01:17I've worked in institutes and think tanks. I had formative career experience very early on
01:24at a think tank called Demos, focusing on democratic solutions and the people coming together.
01:31And my career has taken me across countries to living and working in Australia with my wonderful
01:39Australian family, to working for governments and pursuing innovation and knowledge economy agendas,
01:47education reform and also social policy and social inclusion.
01:53In all of those experiences and then from there into working in universities and tertiary education,
01:59I keep coming back to the same conclusions and the same stubborn challenges which I think partnerships
02:06for the goals are all about. That is that we can't create and sustain large-scale solutions.
02:13We can't create better outcomes and also share responsibility without institutions.
02:18We can't do it with knowledge alone. We can't do it simply by redesigning a technology algorithm
02:24or a public policy rule. We have to create those institutions that live out and then sustain
02:30and structure at scale, the activities and the interactions which come with billions of people
02:37and with a global atmosphere and environment. And throughout those decades of my career,
02:45although we've seen many great lessons, great progress, great global collaboration on climate change,
02:52great innovations in networked computing and our understanding of how wealth can be generated and
02:58shared, of course, we're also seeing huge setbacks. And so many of those setbacks and conflicts that arise,
03:07from territorial competition, from the drive to take control over resources, without us being able to
03:16build, grow and renew institutions that have a common good and are trusted to deliver for the whole public
03:22and for the benefit of our wider community. And unless we are also actively working to strengthen and renew
03:29the connections of community, we're never going to be able to find or sustain sets of rules or economic
03:35activities that will remain stable, let alone remain fair and equitable and enable more people to prosper
03:44and thrive. Education, knowledge and skill are fundamental to those things. But education is also far more than an
03:51individual process. And so in working in a great university, RMIT, a technical and work focused, working people's university,
04:01in the heart of this great city of Melbourne, I've been able to collaborate and experiment with
04:06learning capabilities. How we can test and build those solutions, how our understanding of measurement
04:11of impact and our understanding and evaluation of the learning capabilities that people need can shift
04:18with the benefit of insight from time scientific research, but also from an increasingly sophisticated
04:24understanding of shared social processes and of implementation and learning in action.
04:32We need institutions, but we actually can't rely on institutions as they are. The institutions, especially
04:40those Western, some say colonial institutions, which are set up with functional separation, with ownership
04:47of formal function, with accountability that is separated from the shared experience or the community
04:53grounding and that some of the deeper cultural wellsprings of expertise and intergenerational leadership,
05:01those institutions are struggling because the solutions we need are not technical alone.
05:07What we increasingly recognise is that for climate, for child rearing and early childhood development,
05:14for water management, for health systems and wellbeing, for the distribution of work, for care and social
05:22security, we need to remake systems at a deeper level. And the system relationships that we need to
05:29identify, understand and regrow, are deeper than the functional separations or the vertically organised silos,
05:37either as corporate delivery or of traditional Western governance and administration. And so as a result,
05:45we need to keep experimenting and scaling up the participative methods and opportunities for deliberation and democratic
05:54participation that come with this more open and inclusive agenda. And we need to experiment with new
06:03institutional designs, new forms of shared investment and resource sharing that will help to grow and scale
06:09opportunities for innovation, create new enterprises and new organisational forms and then link them together
06:15into collaborative communities that can work at the scale of these modern cities with millions,
06:21sometimes tens of millions of people living and working in them. In order to do all of those things,
06:28we have to function in place. And that's why after my experiences of public policy and social policy,
06:35after my experience of working in independent cross sector institute that promote networked collaboration,
06:41I've come back to place and the partnerships associated with place through the Melbourne innovation
06:48district, for example, and the cross sector collaboration and bringing hospitals and universities
06:52and community organisations and startups and technology corporations together. Or RMIT social innovation
06:58precinct focused in on a specific block and a specific neighbourhood and really looking to understand
07:03how we can function as a living lab and bring people into every interaction between technology and society.
07:11There's a long way to go with these efforts. There's a lot of institutional capacity that we have to
07:16remake. But I'm inspired and encouraged by the efforts of people all around the world and all around
07:23our neighbourhoods. And I very much look forward to participating in and learning from
07:27the icons of change community as we go through the next chapters together. Thank you so much.
