Ian Oppermann

Thank you very much, Chancellor, Pro-Chancellor. Let me add my congratulations as well. It’s wonderful to see so many of you. It’s also wonderful to see not only engineering and technology but also health graduate in the same cohort. And I’d also like to add my congratulations to the families of the students who are graduating today. No one ever does this alone. So it was 25 years ago, almost to the day, that I sat in a similar hall to this and graduated as an engineer. It was an important day for me, just as it’s an important day for all of you.

Education is one of the most powerful and important gifts you will ever receive. We’ve long considered ourselves a country of miners and farmers. Our folklore is based on stories of jumbucks and tuckerbags. Our land abounds with nature’s gifts of beauty rich and rare. Our most iconic companies are the big miners. Australia has long considered itself an economy of dig it up and ship it, or shear it, shoot it and ship it. In practice however, our economy is dominated by services. More than 80 per cent of our gross domestic product – think banking, think insurance, health, as a service; ICT, or even government – and an overwhelming majority of us are employed in services. And more and more of those services are digital. More and more of the value creation in Australia is based and centred around information rich digital services. Digital services delivered and consumed in online environments – the internet, as described by the Pro-Chancellor – provide a means for us to overcome some of the historical barriers Australia has faced. The tyranny of distance, small markets, the challenges associated with getting physical products and physical objects to markets in Australia or overseas. Digital services also mean that they can be created and consumed anywhere. If you’re connected and have sufficiently high data rates at an affordable rate, you can create services anywhere, you can deliver services to anywhere in the world, and you can consume services anywhere. There is no longer such a thing as the middle of nowhere. The cost of delivery is close to zero, and the ability to customise services is limited only by our imagination.

It also creates a lot of data. Data about search, data about interaction with those services, and data about satisfaction with those services. But the data we create from services is only the tip of the iceberg. As never before, we can now obtain data from systems, from subtle parts of nature, from ecosystems, and even very personal data about us as individuals. We smash particles together and energy is measured in terra electron volts, to peer into the deepest heart of nature. We generate petabytes of data from the world’s largest radio telescope here in Australia – in Western Australia – to try and identify the moment of ionisation; the absolute birth of the universe. We generate and share data about our interests about our friends, about our environments, about our fitness and about our health. All of these data sources allow us to better understand, better predict, certain outcomes. It allows us to experiment and do that ‘what if’ scenario planning, or better evaluate the effectiveness of interventions of the services we create. Data is a new way of seeing the world. Science is a way of understanding the world. When you bring those two together, you develop a brand new set of tools for understanding some of the most important and complex challenges facing us not just here in Australia, but facing us globally. Whether it’s global warming, treatment for cancer, personalised medicine, domestic violence, dealing with the islands of plastic that circulate around our oceans, or even the challenge of Australia’s declining rates of international productivity, data, the systems which support them, the ability to analyse and experiment hold the key to unlocking some of the biggest challenges and providing answers to these wicked challenges.

So as I stand before you tonight, speaking to you, thinking on the important role that you will each play as you take the next stage in your careers, I cannot help but reflect on the changes that I’ve seen in the world over the last 25 years since I graduated. And then project forward to think about what the next 25 years will look like. It’s about that timeframe – about 25 years – that we expect another two billion people to live on the planet with us. The world’s current population is 7.6 billion people. By 2050, it’s projected that the world’s population will be 9.6 billion people. That’s one generation from now – slightly more than 25 years. That extra two billion people living with us will expect to be fed, educated, housed, cared for. They will expect jobs, increasing quality of life, to be entertained and to have the opportunity to live freely in an ever more crowded world with no more land, no more water, no more natural resources. We have what we have. What we’re talking about is sustainable intensification. We will need to produce more food in the coming 50 years than we have in the last 500 years. Coupled with an ageing population and a changing ratio of retired people to working people, and that population ageing accelerating in Australia and many developed countries, we face the additional challenge of what’s called a silver tsunami as more and more people move to retirement and the ratio of those in retirement to those working dramatically changes over time. That means we have, coupled with sustainable intensification, a second challenge, which is increasing productivity for those who remain in the workforce. But with changing technologies, changing business models and the pressures we’re going to face in the future, you will almost certainly have a series of mini careers over your professional lives. Once jobs for life have become increasingly illusive. You will need to retrain, reinvent, re-position yourself during the coming years.

Continuous education is going to be part of the future for many of you. And my own circumstances, I was born in very humble circumstances. No member of my family ever graduated from high school, and in some cases, did not even graduate from primary school. I personally, however, have spent 25 years in formal education in one form or another, when you consider high school, university undergraduate, university postgraduate, and courses beyond that. Each step opened new doors and created new possibilities. It’s given me the chance to see much of the word, to hold senior roles and senior management positions in both Europe and Australia, to work for Australia’s national science organisation, and finally, to be the first ever Chief Data Scientist for the NSW Government. I encourage you today to think of this step as the next step in your ever-changing career of constant education and constant engagement with formal education and formal structures. It’s the beginning of the journey or the next step of the journey, rather than the last step. Your willingness to constantly bring fresh ideas to your professional workplaces, to take advantage of innovation in science and technology, and most importantly, take advantage of data to build evidence and evidence to drive decision-making, will help you tackle some of those wicked problems that I highlighted – some of the challenges facing our economy, facing our nation, and facing our planet. To conclude, let me again congratulate all of you and your families on your achievements today and arriving at this point, your graduating ceremony. I commend you on your hard work, your willingness to solve problems, your willingness to strive to make the world a better place. Thank you very much.