Check against delivery
Thank you for your kind introduction, it is a pleasure to be here today. I bring the well wishes of Christopher Pyne who was unable to attend today.
Visiting facilities like this, and indeed visiting centres of learning, is one of the great privileges of my job. I spend a great deal of time in schools and I have the privilege, particularly around Victoria, of visiting a great number of these sorts of facilities that were opened with investments of the last few years. And whilst Steve did mention it was an announcement of the previous government, I am compelled to mention that I did call Peter Costello while I was on the way here; I’m not joking with you. Every so often when I’m opening a building that was built with the Higher Education Endowment Fund that he set up back in the days of the Howard government, I do actually call him just to point out that something’s coming to fruition. He did say it was fantastic that he was going to get another building named after him too. So, I do feel compelled to make that point.
One of the reasons in these debates about politics, and this isn’t the time for it, is that when governments have money they have the ability to make additional investments in facilities like this.
Now, I’m not a graduate of this university, indeed I’m not a graduate of anything like science or engineering; I’m an arts graduate from the University of Melbourne that basically studied economics and politics. I had trouble building a breadbox when I was in year nine and ten at school. But what I saw downstairs, you don’t have to be an expert to understand how that sort of equipment is going to change our world.
For the last hundred, the last hundred and ten years our prosperity, our employment, the things we consume, the things that we use, everything from medicines to cars has been based on an industrial model that homogenises, that was based on mass production , that was based on churning out as much as we could at the lowest possible price. And what we see downstairs is how our economic model and how our children are actually going to see the world a little bit differently.
Because whether it is medicines – and I’ve worked in the pharmaceutical sector; rest assured I wasn’t trusted with any of the actual medicines – or whether it is in medical devices, or whether it is in circuitry that we saw one of the machines making, we’re moving into an era that is going to allow a lot more bespoke manufacturing, and that’s going to allow us to do things that we haven’t done before.
One of my particular passions is in healthcare and just to think of the way that we could bespoke design and manufacture parts, not just genetically in medicines but physically, whether they be heart valves or new joints or new limbs.
But the skills that people learn at places like this and the ability to use that equipment, develop that equipment and put it to use is actually going to profoundly change our lives in as many ways as Henry Ford did when he started churning off Model T Fords in Detroit a hundred and ten years ago.
And I don’t know if we quite understand as a community how profound this change is going to be, because I think that it’s going to be an extraordinary opportunity as wellSo it’s been a real privilege to come along here and to see that at work.
Professor Byrne mentioned earlier on that one of the challenges this country has is building the linkages between research and commercialisation. Now, the way I like to explain that to people is that it’s not just about commercialisation, it’s about building the linkages between research and what they see on the supermarket shelf, or what they see and hear when they go to the doctor because commercialisation, when we think of it, is really about products that people can use.
Commercialisation is what an economist says when someone else says this particular heart valve or this particular new product has made my life easier.
Now I hasten to add that we did have a bit of an awkward moment down stairs when someone talked about working with Boeing planes and delaminating them, and those of us in politics who fly a lot didn’t want to hear about that.
I’m glad someone else acknowledged the Star Wars inspiration for what I saw also, Andrew, downstairs. It might just be men of my age, but what I think would be fantastic for all of you people who are passionate about this, who have expertise – whether you’re students or teachers, is to talk to people who don’t have that understanding; it’s to get them to understand and explain what it means when you’re learning to design something on a computer and build it in the building next door.
I did ask whether the building downstairs was originally a factory, and I think I was told that at one point it was a glass factory. And I think that is a lovely historical juxtaposition for what is going on in that place today, which is how we’re effectively going to make the factories of the future.
So to everyone involved in this I’d like to pass on my congratulations. As a member of the Commonwealth, I acknowledge the incredible work Swinburne has done; I did have relatives that came here as well because it’s always been very strong on these linkages between what people learn and how it can be put to work in the workplace, in the community, in business. Swinburne has been a leader in that, and I’m sure this facility as well will continue that record of achievement for Swinburne.
Congratulations to everyone here today and I think it’s now my opportunity to pull the cord, I’ll ask Linda and the others to come up and we’ll be able to conclude this morning’s events.
(ENDS)