Lucas Heights NSW
E&OA

Check against delivery

Thank you very, very much, Andrew [Deputy Chair, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation]. Thank you for that Acknowledgement of Country too, and I join with you in that as well. I'm really looking forward to engaging with you and Mike and the board of this really important organisation.

I just want to take this opportunity to say a couple of things. I also want to acknowledge Shaun Jenkinson, the CEO, who I think I've known for many, many years, and David Moncrieff who's just been elected to the Federal Parliament in this last election, and I know that he's, as a long term – the seat's called Hughes, the boundaries of these things keep changing, but I think ANSTO's always been in Hughes. David is a Hughes dude; he's been around for a long time. He's, I think, come here on school excursions originally, and he's really looking forward to, you know, part of representing this electorate in the Federal Parliament is this important national industrial and health asset, this real jewel in the crown for Australia, you know, that is one of the things that he's looking forward to getting to know you all, and to represent you.

It wasn't necessarily in the plan to come here so early, but when I discovered that I was going to be driving past on the way to Port Kembla, I thought I couldn't drive past without coming in, and I'm grateful for Shaun, for you and the team, Andrew for organising this. I'm aware that we're here in what looks like a very – like a university lecture theatre, there are people in Clayton, there are people around the facility watching on. I hope you weren't promised too much in terms of entertainment value.

My association with ANSTO goes back actually a very long time. My first role really in the labour movement was as a trade union official with the AMWU. And that originally, working in country New South Wales, being a real bloody nuisance probably, around all sorts of places, but looking after manufacturing workers, maintenance workers from the food sector right across to high-tech advanced manufacturing. Then when I came back here to Sydney to work in the airline industry, aerospace, defence technology, of course I started to engage with the work that you do here at ANSTO, and from the very first moment that I started to work with union delegates and union members who work here, AMWU, CPSU, there's probably a few others I've forgotten, but what I was impressed with was, yes, of course, the management's commitment to the work that you do, to the value of the work that you do for Australia, for the health of Australians are for our research capability, for our industry, for all sorts of other purposes, but the commitment of everybody in the process, from the young apprentices, of whom you – I'm not sure how many are engaged here now, but there were dozens and dozens and dozens of young apprentices directly employed here as part of the network of, you know, as part of ANSTO's commitment to apprentice training, engineering cadets, young sort of management trainees through to the union delegates who represent people in collective bargaining and all of the sort of hustle and bustle that goes on, as the sort of distributional challenges of how much it is that people are paid and what the daily arrangements around work and rostering, all those sorts of issues – as I was saying to Ayres before, underneath that sat this sense of real common purpose about what it is that you contribute.

Work is not just about distributional challenge, it's also about the purpose that animates what it is that we do, and I have been privileged to be part of that. I think very unwisely a previous Minister appointed me to be part of a sort of safety review of the ANSTO facility. I'm like, there were people there who were on that panel who were real experts. I hope I brought something useful to that, I'm not sure. But it did mean that I got to know the organisation really well, the workforce and skills challenges, the commitment and purpose of every single person who works here, the capital challenges in terms of how to maintain this vital piece of national infrastructure and to build the future facilities and the future focus facilities that Australia is going to need.

So, I got to know the facility well. That means I'm acutely aware of my responsibility to you and to Australia to keep advocating for the work that you do here, to support Shaun and Mike, and Andrew and, you know, the board and the management, to achieve the outcomes that the Commonwealth Government needs you to achieve for Australia, to work with everybody here, and advocate for everybody here, the unions, everybody from the youngest apprentice through to all of the technicians – I know I use the wrong words to describe what it is that some of you do, so I won't try, but I understand that responsibility, I accept it really proudly, and you know, we have got a mountain of work in front of us in what is going to be a consequential decade for ANSTO, and a consequential decade for Australia.

So, this is really – thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy days to come and engage with me and have a bit of a listen. I look forward to being back here, bringing my colleagues back here, listening to David telling me about all the additional things, of course, that I should be doing on behalf of the residents and workers who work here, but mostly what I wanted to say was thank you to each and every one of you for the work that you do, for the service that you provide to Australia, for the ingenuity and your own talents and genius that you bring to bear in this it important work, and I can't wait to get cracking with the job. Thank you very much.