Bettina McMahon

Good evening everyone. I’d like to acknowledge:

• Presiding Chancellor Dr Ron Sandland
• Presiding ViceChancellor Professor William Purcell
• Presiding Dean Professors Mary Spongberg and Ian Burnett
• Staff, distinguished guests, graduates, and their families and friends.

I’m delighted to be giving the occasional address here tonight, celebrating the remarkable achievements of this group who are the future leaders of this country and the world.

Because we have applauded so many graduates here this evening it may be easy to overlook just how significant their achievements are.

So let’s put this in perspective.

Our most recent census measured the highest educational attainment of the Australian population and showed that:

• Only 1 in 8 people hold a bachelors degree as their highest level of education
• 1 in 20 hold a post graduate degree
• Only 1 in 1000 people in Australia hold a PhD

So we have here tonight a group that has truly reached the top echelon of academic achievement in this country. And I congratulate you all on your accomplishment of this high award from one of Australia’s top universities.

What strikes me tonight is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in the research and in all the people here; the variety of it and the range of it.

Research we’ve heard about tonight conducted by the people in this room includes:

• Using memoir as grief therapy
• Detecting freezing of gait in patients with Parkinson’s disease
• Removing phosphorus from municipal wastewater
• Modelling of human skin and breast tissue to detect cancer

And this thinking, this creative energy is occurring at a time when we have no idea what’s going to happen in terms of the future.

No idea how this may all play out.

Now I have an interest in education, I think we all do. We have a vested interest in it. Partly because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.

If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2081.

Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that’s been on parade here tonight, what the world will look like in 10 years’ time, and yet we’re meant to be educating those kids for it.

So the unpredictability is extraordinary.

And when those kids enter the workforce, this group here tonight will be at the peak of their careers. They will have had 20 years in the workforce after achieving their qualification and will be the movers and shakers in their organisations and communities (if they aren’t already now).

The responsibility to act as leaders in this transformation weighs heavily upon us as we do our best to equip ourselves with the skills and attitudes to shepherd our world into this new age.

In this endeavour, creativity is as important as literacy or numeracy, and as a graduate of UTS I can say that here, creativity is treated with the same status as those more traditional skills.

This is clearly evident in the range of research I noted earlier, also including:

• Imaging techniques for estimating crop growth and nutrient status
• How Nairobi’s poor are integrating the mobile phone into their everyday lives
• Zuyun Zhang’s work on preserving privacy in big data in the cloud (Chancellor’s award)

It is this creativity on demonstration tonight that will guide us through the massive changes to our world like technology and its transformational effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.

I was recently appointed CEO of my organisation and in this position I’ve seen first-hand that my power comes not from my position but from my creative capacity to understand the forces within my organisation and in our environment – the processes, constraints, people, agendas and ideas.

If we can understand these factors we can do remarkable things.

In my work in digital health, I see the potential of technology to transform medical practice by surrounding us with relevant and critical data to give us a clear view of our health and the best options for our treatment.

Imagine a world where I receive a text message to visit my GP to discuss screening for bowel cancer. When I see my GP the next week she pulls up my record and tells me that looking at my diet (based on my supermarket shopping data), my exercise (that I track through a wearable device), my family history, my genome sequence and my postcode I would be wise to screen for bowel cancer even though I’m only in my early 40s.

Now the data and technology for this scenario exists today – in fact some of you in this room probably had a hand in inventing it.

We all know that early detection of conditions like bowel cancer can mean the difference between a full recovery and a terminal illness. But despite these clear benefits, the scenario I described to you frightens the life out of many people. Connecting sensitive health information with big data holdings from my credit card purchases is a very confronting idea and one that many Australians are just not comfortable with today.

And it is here that our engineers and technologists will be relying on our colleagues from the Arts and Social Sciences faculties to direct our innovation and guide our community to strike the right balance between what is possible and what is right.

Because there are two concepts that lie at the centre of our journey into this unpredictable future; the world as it is and the world as it should be.

All too often we accept the distance between those two ideas and we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn’t reflect our values and aspirations. And while we have no idea what the world will be like in 10 years, or in 2081, we do know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like.

Tonight is a celebration of the gift of imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely.

We can do this by using our creative capacities for the richness that they are. And recognising our future leaders for the hope that they are.

Because creativity, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. It is by embracing this and engaging the best minds and creativity to devote themselves and work together that we can make the world as it is and the world as it should be, one and the same thing.

I welcome each and every one of you in joining with me in this endeavour.