Luca Belgiorno-Nettis AM

Graduates, and your families and friends. In the beginning, eons ago, before graduation, sex and comedy, there was sound. A big bang apparently. And probably some malodorous gases. But there was no one to hear nor smell. Today we have music, talk, and Real Housewives of Sydney. In this fine country, we’ve made great advances. We’ve got a reality TV show fusing comedy and tragedy, and we don’t even know it. Australia was a special place when my parents arrived from Italy in the fifties. It still is, but there are ominous signs of decline. Just one viewing of Real Housewives reveals a creeping malaise. It’s our duty to fight back against bad makeup and fashion. I’m sure our fashion undergraduates here tonight are onto it. Also, as a sophisticated and well-travelled audience, you all appreciate the need for good design. My father loved industrial design, and as an architect I’ve got a passion for it as well. And Italy still surprises. One invention of theirs may be small, but it brings great happiness. The French have a word for it, they call it the little pony. And it’s the Italians who have universally hopped onto it. But there are very many countries, and I’m sorry to say Australia is one of them, which have been slow to mount the pony.

We think we’re living in a first world country, but let me tell you something, a few weeks ago my family and I were with my Italian father in law, my wife is here in the audience to attest. Well we all travelled to London to give him a treat for his ninetieth birthday. He’d never been to the UK before, and he was simply shocked to see how incomplete his bathroom was, his hotel bathroom was. You don’t have to be a health specialist to appreciate how convenient the bidet is over showering. Well this may appear to be a bit rambling so far, but I’m trying to cover off all our fine graduates here tonight. It’s not easy, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Seriously, what I really want to focus on in the few minutes that I have, is the question of choice. Life is as much about choices as anything. Some personal, some public. It’s our lot. We can’t escape having to make choices. In a real sense it distinguishes us as humans. We choose to do this, that or the other. One might say chance plays a role, but that’s not really up to us. Often the art is in making the right choice when the chance presents itself.

In 1951 my father, as a young engineer, had the opportunity to come to either Australia or Argentina. At the time my mother advised him that Australia would be a better choice. Italy had just come out of the military regime and it wasn’t such a good idea to go into another. So they chose to come here. It was also a fortuitous time, as Australia was embarking on its biggest ever resource infrastructure program, and my father, and the company he was about to establish, rode that pioneering wave. I was born lucky. I’ve been blessed with building a career around that successful family business. I’ve graduated as an architect, done a post-graduate in urban estate management. Now, after 30 years in the business, together with my brother, I look after the family investments as well as my own private ones. But it was in the course of doing large infrastructure projects, with government, that I started to get interested in how public choices are made, and how the political machinery worked. I was regularly approached by political parties to donate to their election campaigns. And that got me thinking, why support one party than the other? And I often saw how good projects became sidelined because of political expediency. For example, a new road project wouldn’t proceed in a particular location as it was in an opposition electorate. That wasn’t often, but I thought, that should never be part of public democratic decision making.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well I don’t know how to tell you anything tonight, or how to even pretend to give advice, without uncovering my own lived experience. And perhaps, my experience and my thinking might give you some insight. Just perhaps. When my parents settled down in Australia in the fifties, Robert Menzies was Prime Minister. He was like a good sofa. Not just part of the furniture, he was the furniture. Comfortable and reliable, longest serving Prime Minister ever. Back then we respected our politicians, now it’s completely changed. When Australians are asked today whether people in government can be trusted, barely 25 per cent agree. Correct. Only a quarter of us trust our politicians. But we’re not alone. In virtually every country, survey after survey, politicians don’t rate much higher than car salesmen. Plumbers are more respected. Doctors and nurses remain the most respected. Even though politicians are hardworking and well meaning, we still don’t trust them. Why? Because I think, in the past, politicians like Mr Menzies were more like patricians. Today it’s a continuous election contest, a never-ending Punch and Judy show, and people are tired of it. Real Housewives is better viewing. There’s so much media, so many voices, that the power has dispersed, and there is limited space for political elites. And because they’ve lost the capacity to collaborate, if they ever had, there is just so much more disillusionment around politicians. So, with a few other sick and tired friends, we set up the New Democracy Foundation. We wanted to see if democracy could be done better. And we really think it can. We think it’s the system, not the politicians, who generally are good people stuck in a fight club. It’s serendipitous that I’ve chosen this political reform path. I couldn’t have got that interested in politics if it weren’t for my career in public infrastructure, and the support of the big family business. So how do we think the system can be fixed? Democracy, when it was originally conceived, never had elections. Yes,  that’s right, elections are a recent device. The genius of democracy was that it encouraged social cohesion. Elections create divisions, they divide and conquer. I know that sounds like blasphemy, because every book on the subject of democracy has as its first chapter, ‘free and fair elections’. But the council of Athens, where it all started, was randomly selected, like a jury, from the citizens at large, rich and poor. We use it every day in our criminal courts over matters of life and death. Many European city states during the Renaissance used it to determine their governing class. But for a peculiar set of circumstances, mostly to do with concentrating power, it fell out of favour. But there is a growing sense that the jury method of selecting politicians is ripe again. The Irish used it in 2012 for their constitutional convention, where most of the delegates were randomly recruited. That convention was the one that agreed to proceed on their marriage equality referendum. And in South Australia last year, 350 randomly recruited citizens deliberated on and determined not to proceed with an international high level nuclear waste facility.

I won’t labour on for now - you can catch me later and I will – I just want to say that there are proposals in several countries to trial a third house, a citizen’s senate. Like just consider it paid national service. So that’s my career. I thought some insights might come out for you. I’m hoping that one of you clinical psychologists can counsel me after this, as well as the comms graduates - I’m sure this speech could do with some serious editing, if not a total rewrite. I’m sure my wife would probably agree with that too. What I can say by way of conclusion is this: each of you will have your own trajectory. Your own passions. I hope that you all prosper and find fulfilment. We are a lucky, lucky country, and before planet Earth dissolves into malodorous gases again, taking Australia with it; before we drown in plastic and reality TV; before we get dispirited by bad design and fashion, we have choices to make. Thank you, Chancellor.