Asian-Australian Leadership: Introducing Penny Wong

Introducing Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Inaugural ANU Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership (CAAL) Annual Lecture, Canberra, 19 August 2024

I don’t think I’m alone – indeed I believe I speak for millions, the great majority of Australians – when I say I feel a real surge of pride whenever I see in the media pictures and stories of Penny Wong acting as Australia’s face and voice to the world.

She represents everything that most of us at least like to believe about ourselves and the country that we have become: that we are a genuinely, vibrantly multicultural society which has completely thrown off the awful racial prejudice that for so long defined us in the eyes of our region and the wider world, and joyously celebrate our diversity. We in the ANU community could not feel prouder or more privileged to have the honour of welcoming this great Asian-Australian to our stage tonight.

Penny has won the nation’s respect and affection because she so obviously has the kind of integrity, values, intellectual capacity, personal presence, and passionate commitment to this country that make her a wonderful leader and role model.

But the reality with which we are grappling in this country is that there are still far too few Asian-Australians of comparable quality actually occupying comparable leadership positions, whether it be in politics, the public service, the professions, leading educational institutions or our major listed companies.

As I noted back in 2019 in delivering that year’s Asialink Weary Dunlop Lecture, Australians of Asian heritage constituted, on the then available evidence (and I know that figure has significantly increased since) some 12 per cent of our population. But they made up just 1.6 per cent of federal government ministers, heads of federal and state government departments, university vice-chancellors and CEOs of ASX 200 companies. And even when the tape measure was dropped down to shoulder-level in all these institutions, counting not just leaders but their deputies, and not just ministers but member of parliament, the proportion of Asian-Australians was then still only 3.3 per cent.

There did indeed seem to be some ‘bamboo ceiling’ in place, and – although the numbers need updating – it is clear it still continues. We had to ask ourselves why it was that we as a nation were not making the most of the vast store of talent that existed in the multiple Asian-Australian communities that make up such a large proportion of our overall national community. And we had to ask ourselves what more we could do to ensure that the great many Asian-Australians that we know have the kind of qualities I have described in Penny Wong – which would make them great leaders of our major public and private sector institutions were they actually given the chance to play those roles.

And so it was, to try to answer those questions, that the ANU Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership (CAAL) was born, in 2020. And since its inception the Centre has been working hard to do just that, as you’ll be hearing from Geraldine Chin Moody in a little more detail before we conclude this event. With a well-constructed Strategic Plan that closely aligns with the ANU’s own. the Centre is in a strong position to take forward a number of new and continuing research, advocacy, training and outreach initiatives over the period ahead, and I am confident that over time it really will make a difference.

I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the indispensable role played in all of this by the Centre’s founding Director, and for most of its existence only employee, Jieh-Yung Lo. Jieh-Yung first joined me back in 2016 when I was ANU Chancellor, as my Executive Officer and Manager of the then ANU Melbourne Office. With a background in local government and as a freelance consultant – he negotiated, e.g., the sister-city relationship between Hobart and Xian – he was a tower of strength to me, endlessly supportive, energetic and creative. It was Jieh-Yung Lo who suggested that I make the ‘bamboo ceiling’ the subject of my Dunlop Lecture in 2019, which triggered the ANU’s agreement to create the Centre, and he was the logical choice to become its first full-time leader.

Now, more than four years later, Jieh-Yung has indicated that he wishes to pass on the baton at CAAL and try his hand as a startup founder: you can take the boy out of China but it’s hard to take that Chinese entrepreneurial instinct out of the boy! I warmly thank him for everything he has done and wish him the success he deserves in the future.

The Centre was strongly supported in its first years, not least financially, by former Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt and his excellent office team led by Chris Price and Lily Matthews, and that has continued under his successor Genevieve Bell, and her new Provost, Professor Rebekah Brown, with us here tonight, to whom we are delighted that the Centre will now be reporting.

I want also to acknowledge the tremendously supportive role played by the Centre’s Advisory Board, which I had the honour of chairing until the wonderful Geraldine Chin Moody succeeded me last year, and nearly all of whom are with us this evening. Its members are a great combination of private, academic and public sector professionals, very generous with the time, expertise and resources they have been prepared to devote to the Centre, and totally committed to its mission.

CAAL’s greatest supporter in high places has been from the outset our inaugural Annual Lecturer this evening, Senator Penny Wong. Speaking to the first Asian-Australian Leadership Summit in 2019, which shaped the agenda for the soon-to-be-established new Centre, I remember her talking eloquently (as no doubt she will again this evening) of the responsibilities of role models (‘You can’t be what you can’t see’), and other advocates for decency, if the bamboo ceiling, and other cultural barriers like it, was to really become a thing of the past:

Each time a public figure, or someone in a senior position, champions the rights of those who are marginalised, they give courage to others to do the same… If you’re given a platform, use it to help inspire those of different identities and backgrounds to reach their potential.

Since becoming our Foreign Minister in 2022, Penny Wong has done a fantastic job on multiple fronts. Neither she or I would claim to agree about everything: how could we when I’m a cantankerous geriatric long past his use-by date, and she is the face, and voice, of Australia’s future?

But I yield to no-one in my admiration for what she has achieved in re-establishing sanity and balance in our relations with China. In re-creating mutual respect in relations with our other key neighbours in the Indo-Pacific – in North East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia and the island nations of the Pacific. In giving all Australians a new sense of belief in ourselves as a genuinely decent country, in which your ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual identity or anything else that makes you what you are, as distinct from what you do, irrelevant to how society treats you. And, above all, giving Asian-Australians, our fantastic but under-recognized and under-utilised national resource, an incredible role model.

So, again, let me say that we could not be more proud or privileged to have our Foreign Minister, Senator the Honourable Penny Wong, deliver at ANU this inaugural annual Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership Lecture, and I have enormous pleasure now in inviting her to the lectern.