That was a first for me; coming onto the stage with music! And I might need to insist that that happens all the time.

I want to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today. I have known Uncle Allen – for a fellow whose kids grew up in Redfern, Allen was a regular at our school, at events in the community. The first time I met him, he was a very young man, but that’s not true; he was always an old bloke. I have learnt, I think, most of his repertoire of jokes, but they sort of improve with age and there’s the occasional, you know, improvement or change. I really just want to, at one event get up before him so I can steal his jokes, but I won’t know what it is that he would do. He does a terrific job for the Metropolitan Land Council and for Aboriginal people really across Australia because, you know, I’m biased but, of course, Sydney is the gateway to Australia.

I want to acknowledge my colleague from the New South Wales Parliament, Liesl Tesch; she will be speaking with you soon. I know she is a remarkable Australian – Paralympian in two sports, basketball and sailing. She was a remarkable Australian when she came to New South Wales Parliament, and since 2017 she’s made a real contribution and now as parliamentary secretary to the minister, having a real impact on disability services and the contribution the New South Wales Government makes.

I had a terrific prepared speech that was organised by my office today which I carefully annotated this morning. I don’t think you need a prepared speech from a visiting politician today, and also it looks really awkward if you’re walking around on stage with one of these what I always think of as Tony Blair headsets.

So, I just want to say maybe a couple of things. Firstly, I want to thank Brad Hazzard for – I want to choose the right word – bullying me into coming to this event. I’m really glad. Brad couldn’t be here; he’s got an important family event on this morning. I had a long talk with him on the weekend. I’m really grateful to him for telling me about this event and making sure that I came. There are a lot of people in their post political career who go and do things that are, you know, not necessarily in the public interest, which really grates with someone like Brad really putting in and contributing to this important community.

I want to thank Remarkable for organising this event. It is, I think, really for me – I’ll just focus on me for a second – a really useful time to open up about some of these opportunities and technologies and be challenged about how it is the Commonwealth Government should engage with this work. And there is so much in my portfolio area, of course, that offers a world of possibility.

Firstly, I wanted to acknowledge and thank all the international guests who are here. I hope you really enjoy your stay in Australia and get a lot of out of it, that you learn more about what our technology community has to offer here in terms of all of this world knowledge. I want to thank elements of the disability community, parents, the medical community, entrepreneurs, innovators, the scientific community who contributed to today’s event.

We in Australia are proud of our National Disability Insurance Scheme and the National Disability Insurance Agency. It was a monumental achievement really, unimaginable 20 years ago, when the Rudd–Gillard governments introduced this incredible scheme. Of course, it is the first of its kind in the world. Many of you were engaged in struggling for it to be brought to life. It is not perfect. It is going to require constant improvement and evolution, but it is an incredible achievement and we need to foster it and build it for future generations.

This government, in this case led by the minister, Jenny McAllister, who’s a very good colleague of mine, is engaged in the hard work of making sure that this scheme is set up for the future. And you see sometimes in the financial press it’s talked of in a slightly – with the greatest respect to any economists in the room – sort of desiccated and sterile description, the growth of the care economy as if it’s a lesser kind of economy or a lesser kind of job. We should be so proud of the work that everybody in that economy does from the carers and volunteers all the way to the scientists and innovators and doctors and entrepreneurs in this sector. We have got a lot to build.

I am really glad I came a few minutes early and got to see ByStorm and Hailo and Rampey, just three examples of what Australian innovation can produce. So I would be in my portfolio area really conscious – of course, in the life sciences and medical technology, it is obvious that where we can provide technology in different parts of the care economy improves people’s lives, makes our service delivery not just more efficient but higher quality and addresses people’s real needs. That much is obvious. But what I saw this morning really made me think about what it is that we should be doing to make sure that our innovation economy, our research and development capability and our commercialisation means that we are fostering more of this kind of development, more of these kinds of products and also offering them to the world.

Of course, there’s an economic rationale. There’s jobs and investment and profit and all sorts of things that come out of that in economic terms, but actually it changes lives too and it makes lives better and more included, and those three technologies just sent a useful reminder to me that what it is that can be achieved.

I’m excited about the opportunities in artificial intelligence and we’ll have more to say at the end of the year with Australia’s National AI Plan, which will be focused on making sure we capture economic opportunities in Australia; secondly, that we spread the benefits through the community – that it’s not just big firms that are big adopters of artificial intelligence technology, but that it’s small firms and communities like the communities that you come from that benefit from these technologies. And I’m excited about what it is that we can learn together and develop together in AI technology that improves the services, the interoperability of services and the lives of all of us. And, of course, the third element of that plan will be about making sure that we protect Australians from harms.

I am so delighted that I came and honoured to have the opportunity to open this event. So, pleased to do it in this beautiful venue, the Sydney Town Hall, which I can tell you as an old Labor Party person, this is where we have the Labor Party conferences, which in the old days would go for five days. Can you imagine being bored to the back teeth for five days and the whole hall would be full, and all the galleries would be full of Labor Party delegates and union delegates from all over the state. Now it’s just the floor, so there’s 800 or 900 delegates here. It is never political. Never political and maybe it should be. I’ll have a talk with Sussex Street and see if we can organise that.

I really hope you enjoy and get as much as you can out of the next few days. You’re so welcome, so welcome here. Wish you the very best. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you.