I want to join with Liz [Carnabuci] in acknowledging the Traditional Owners and pay my respects to their Elders past and present.

I want to acknowledge Liz as Chair of the MTAA; Ian Burgess, their CEO; Siobhan Armson-Graham; Stuart Slater; and members of the MTAA Board.

I also just want to acknowledge the work and effort that has gone into these 27 fantastic displays of Australian medical technology and medical genius around the place. If you’re here, and you’ve got a choice between this evening’s event downstairs and these absolutely remarkable displays, get in amongst it here. I want to acknowledge you and welcome all of you to our Parliament.

I acknowledge my parliamentary colleagues. I won’t single any of them out, except of course Speaker Milton Dick, who was the inaugural chair, or secretary, or tzar, of Parliamentary Friends of Medtech, and has done so much for Queensland, and for the Parliament on advancing that particular cause.

And, if we stop talking about Brisbane for a second, Jerome Laxale and Sarah Witty from the other competing east coast capitals where there is a concentration of medtech, in and around Macquarie Park, and for Sarah, around the Melbourne medical precinct.

Those precincts – the innovation and the industry that comes out of those sectors, and those areas, is just so important for Australia.

In welcoming all of you here, I want to make a few quick comments.

The first is that we just thank you so much for all of your work. It is work – scientific research and development work, commercialisation work, production work – that changes the lives of Australians in a way that not many other sectors of the economy can point to.

It is special work. It makes a difference.

When we export these products around the world, we change people’s lives and we make them think differently about Australia’s contribution in our region and around the world.

I’ve been in the facilities of Australian medtech companies in Malaysia and in Europe, in Southeast Asia and right around the world. The jobs and production and lifechanging opportunities around the world are just as important as the lives that you change here.

I just say that to say that there is a moral dimension to your work that is just so important. You should feel satisfied in what you do for the country and what you do for science.

We are absolutely seized of the importance of the medtech sector for the future of the economy, but also because of the way that it changes lives, changes health outcomes, improves the efficiency of our health system, lifts people up and gives Australians an opportunity and a quality of life that they otherwise would not have gotten.

We have work to do as a government. We have set a course to make sure that while Australia must remain an economy and a country that has, particularly in this area, the finest researchers, the finest R&D system of any country on Earth, that we’re commercialising that R&D here in Australia. And creating more jobs, and creating more capability and more expertise. And changing more lives.

The framework that we introduced in the last term of government – the Industry Growth Program, and the National Reconstruction Fund – I am absolutely committed to continuing the focus, accelerating the progress and delivering what we can in this sector for investment in new industrial capability and new technology and new products.

So, I’m not here to say that the job is done. Far from it. I’m here to say that the job is in front of us, as a government, as a community of researchers, and as a medtech sector that I know has a very strong future in Australia.

I’m delighted to be part of this show, and I look forward to seeing you all here again next year.

Thanks very much.