hank you for the opportunity to present this address at today’s graduation ceremony for Central Queensland University.

For graduands, your families and friends, it is a day of recognition of achievement and of great and deserved happiness.

Enjoy the occasion.

Sincere congratulations on the completion of one of the formal steps in your preparation as leading citizens of the communities of Rockhampton, of Central Queensland, of Queensland, of Australia and of the World. University qualifications, by their very name, represent an opportunity to serve society at all levels from local to international, and for those of you here today, who will consider a university education in the future, be aware that this passport to international involvement will also enhance the contribution you can make to your local, regional, state and national well-being.

It is also a distinctive privilege to join the Chancellor Mr Rennie Fritschy at his first graduation as Chancellor of the University. Chancellor, I wish you every success in guiding this University to its full potential. You take your place in the strategic leadership of Central Queensland University at a wonderfully challenging time, as do these fresh graduates, enter the community at an equally challenging time.

Globalisation has brought world events to our doorstep, and our development as a University, as a region and as a nation, will be influenced by events in other parts of the world.

Globalisation, economic deregulation, increasing number of free trade agreements and greater communication between countries using the electronic medium has created increasing awareness of what can be obtained in other countries and for those countries where they are rated at this time as developing, the comparative costs of cheap labour, mean that we can never compete in a developed country such as Australia, simply on the cost along for any product. We have to be smarter, we have to be innovative, and we have to develop methods that are holistic in looking at every path of the system and seeking to gain efficiencies and effectiveness in every step of every process.

We emerge from a remarkable 20th Century of scientific discovery, knowledge generation, and technical advances, unmatched in history.

There are several measures to justify that statement. Part of it relates to the fact that there have been more scientific papers published in the last 40 years than there were in all the years and centuries before. That has been the basis for the knowledge generation, and I leave to you the assessment of what technological changes have most influenced your lives – in the home, at work and at play, in travel, in communication, in health care, and in our social and cultural interactions.

You will have noted that I used the word “influenced” and not “benefited”, because I am not convinced that we have learned to select from the available technologies for the betterment of humanity nor for the well-being of our natural environment – that is, to move towards sustainable practices and sustainable development.

Those factors may well be the basis of the great advances of the first half of the 21st century, and the Universities of the world, and you the graduates of those Universities, must be our leaders in educating the communities of the world and in revealing how the interactions and interdependencies of our activities influence our sustainable future.

The U