Jon Hutchison AM

Presiding Chancellor, presiding Vice Chancellor, presiding Director, members of the Academic Board, members of the University Council, presiding Dean of the Faculty, senior university executives and members of the staff. It gives me great pleasure to warmly congratulate all graduating students. You can be justifiably proud of reaching a high point – not an end, but a beginning. I also welcome and congratulate your parents, relatives and friends, many of whom have been by your side all the way. Before proceeding, it’s important to acknowledge and affirm my respect for the traditional owners of this ancient land, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, their ancestors and descendants.

I consider that I am seriously undeserving but immensely honoured to be awarded Fellow of the University. And I thank the Chancellor, the members of the University Council and all of those who contributed to the decision, and I particularly thank my wife and my family for tolerating my many absences and transgressions. They’re here today. 

Now, you already know that I graduated from Melbourne University, but I don’t think I worked as hard as you have worked. You look as if you’ve really got into it and done a great job. But I certainly hope that you had a bit of fun on the way, because I had a lot of fun on the way. I was a naïve kid coming from an all-boys grammars school, and the university was a door to a fascinating and amazing new world, mainly freedom and adventure. To a point, I followed Albert Einstein’s lead when he said, ‘Play is the highest form of research’, and the university in those days was very forgiving. Once graduating, it was quite easy to find a job, a little unlike today. 

Graduates were rare in business, and companies were curious, and they didn’t pay much for us, so that was okay. But I was in for a bit of a shock, because there was not much new thinking in many Australian businesses back then, and the big tectonic shifts of the last 40 years, the beginning of the youth uprising which happened just after I graduated in the late 60s – globalisation, the tech revolution and others – they had not yet emerged. And when I joined Ansett Airlines, my first boss, and I say this seriously, was a brigadier general, and many in management were World War II veterans. So, you would expect that the management style was rigid, strict and hierarchical. All new young employees, degrees or not, were considered apprentices, to be closely supervised for several years before being let loose on the business. But aviation is a dynamic and exciting industry. I spent more than a decade with my family, living and working in very interesting places, starting Melbourne, Tasmania, New York, North Queensland, Canberra and Sydney. 

It taught me a great deal about business, independence, other cultures, new ideas, and of course, aviation management. My first – the rewards came in my aviation career, and the management style changed when Rupert Murdoch, whom you’d know of, and Sir Peter Abeles, who’s no longer with us, acquired Ansett in 1979. The skies of Australia were liberated, and I was given an airline to run and to build into a much more competitive entity. I not only savoured this relative freedom and responsibility, but the value of a long learning curve became very evident. I’d done the hard yards and could not have assumed such a responsibility any other way. 

My first contact with UTS was during my time as Managing Director of Tourism Australia. The UTS School of Tourism wanted a closer relationship with global tourism and global tourism industry, and I was interested in what I could learn from the Business School. Our job was to establish Australia as an unmissable destination for international travellers, but I wasn’t a hotshot marketer. I didn’t have a degree in marketing. I needed to learn a great deal in a hurry about this new world of international tourism. So, I set about once again acquiring skills. So, reflecting on my career then and beyond that point, in various jobs, it’s clear that having an open mind, being always willing to learn, coupled with a dogged persistence and an unwillingness to throw in the towel will, in most cases, lead to success. 

It can be hard, but I recommend it to anyone, in any endeavour: know where you’re going, learn all you need to know, and be unfailingly persistent in getting there. Bill Bradley, a former US senator, once said, ‘Ambition is the path to success; persistence is the vehicle that will get you there. And if in the process you fail, you’ll learn invaluable lessons, providing you get up.’ From my 20 years’ relationship with UTS, I’ve become convinced that lifetime learning has to be everyone’s commitment, and the university doesn’t have a used-by date. Maintain a link with the university, and it’s likely to be of more value throughout your career than you may think. To reinforce that point, Bob Joss, the former Chief Executive of Westpac and former Dean of Stanford University, which is, you probably know, located near Silicon Valley, stated that the secret recipe that makes Silicon Valley work is its relationship with the university – the connection between commerce and academia, the cultural connection, sharing ideas and linkages between the two to commercialise those ideas. Let me give you another example of collaboration between universities and the commercial world. 

After tourism, I joined a public/private joint venture as Managing Director, and it was in another field – more learning, of course. And I worked with a team of talented young graduates, and our job was to identify and pursue many large international business and professional events from all over the world through a long, intensive and often complex bid process, and I really enjoyed that stage where I was involved with strategies and tactics around high-stakes bidding. But the global industry had a problem. It was a significant problem: bid success depended on having the most modern and appropriate convention and exhibition events infrastructure, which is a very expensive investment for any government, which was usually the job for governments to deliver. Yet governments significantly undervalued the sector, confusing it with leisure tourism, so we needed some professional help. In 2011, I commissioned UTS to research and report on the non-tourism benefits of conventions and exhibitions. Until then, no one, anywhere in the world, had successfully identified and quantified the true value of that sector. The UTS study findings were presented by me to the international industry in Frankfurt in 2011, and they were ground-breaking and convincing. 

They proved conclusively that such events were capable of building long-term economic and cultural legacies in the host countries. Without this evidence, it’s unlikely that the recently completed multi-billion-dollar events infrastructure in Sydney, it’s unlikely that it would have been supported by government. And there was more to learn from this research. The remarkable power of face-to-face communication, which sits at the core of all business and professional events – that was clearly evident in the research. Bill Gates said once, ‘Although technology has reduced the physical gap, it will not replace the impact of human communication, interaction and subsequent relationships’, and Harvard studies have endorsed this. So, my advice to you is live and grow with communications technology, because it’s going to grow anyway, and it’s essential to your success. But I ask you, where possible, to consider building your vital relationships by meeting and talking face-to-face as often as you can. I think the results will surprise you. 

Now, a final word on leadership. The good news is you’re already leaders – you’re in the top five per cent of the population. You now have an opportunity to cement your place with what you do and how you do it. High on your list, I think, should be the courage to make difficult decisions, which has already been mentioned; follow your moral compass; see yourself leaving a legacy for future generations – think ahead, think of the world ahead of you. These are ingredients on which your reputation will be based. The higher you go, the more visible you will be, and I feel strongly about you protecting your reputation. It’s your greatest asset, and it will serve you well for life, but damage it and recovery will be very difficult. I repeat my congratulations and best wishes to all graduates, families and friends. You’ve achieved significant things, and I sincerely hope that in your career, or the several careers that you will have, that they are as exciting and rewarding as you wish them to be. But don’t be a dull workaholic – life is for living. Enjoy that journey as well, and I hope you enjoyed the last one. Thank you.