Prof Hibbert: - His Excellency General the Hon David Hurley Governor of NSW to Come and Open up the 2017 Royal Society of NSW and for Academies for (Indistinct)
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Prof Hibbert: - his Excellency General the Hon David Hurley Governor of NSW to come and open up the 2017 Royal Society of NSW and for academies for (indistinct). The Hon David Hurley: Ladies and gentlemen, again a very warm welcome to Government House this morning and delighted to have you here for it, I think you'll be very (indistinct) an interesting day. But I acknowledge, of course, Professor Hibbert, Professor Mary O'Kane, distinguished Law Society and Academy Fellows and their representatives and the organisation presenters and members. I began these series of forums three years ago when I first became Governor and trying to work out how the Governor does his job because it was done manually at the time of the appointment. And much to my surprise I found that with the three Cs, constitutional, ceremonial and community engagements roles of the Governor, constitutional, ceremonial (indistinct) about 10 per cent of my time. 90 per cent of my time was involved with the people of New South Wales. So I did some strategic planning and came up with a business plan for the House and myself and trying to work out how do you value add in this role to the community. And one of the areas I thought about when looking at my predecessors was the role of Governor Brisbane in the establishment of the Law Society and why was that link in place? Obviously, the roles and functions, the authorities of Governors have changed since Brisbane's days. But the role of the Governor in trying to help the development of [fort] in the early community and the intellectual life of the early community and seeing the great potential that existed in Australia at the time, so could I follow in those footsteps (indistinct). And I thought one of the things I could do as Patron of the Royal Society is help with the Royal Society to provide an opportunity to have a think tank here at Government House where we could look at some of the bigger issues that are facing us today in a political sense, in a neutral academic environment and so that's the course we have undertaken. And, as I say, look at difficult issues. It's often hard to have discourse and discussion in public life these days without the divisiveness of being drawn to people's attention. If you have two views obviously there must be division and division creates conflict, conflict create news. That seems to be the way of (indistinct). We're not about that, we're about examining issues of importance to our society. The topic we'll look at today is not new, many of the discussions I had with people last night, but there are aspects of it that have changed. HL Mencken, you may have different views about him as a person but he's very rich in comments about democracy. Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. 1926 or so that was written. He has a view that, again part of a discussion last night, our right to individual speech and our right to have an opinion does not necessarily make that opinion right in itself and therefore how do we engage with the community, with people, with institutions, with policy makers when sometimes I think our ideas are (indistinct). We now have, of course, a transient fake news, alternative facts, post-truth discourse, not new perhaps different titles. Of course, post-truth was the word of the year for 2016 in the Oxford Dictionary. It has now created an industry (indistinct), many books are written on post-truth. So is it something new or old with a new title? Is it a new phenomenon that we are trying to deal with and when we are trying to deal with? Is it the result of the staggering growth in information data that's available and the social media at the present moment, which has brought it to the surface? IBM, I think I quoted this a number of years ago, IBM has estimated that the amount of data generated in 2002 for the whole year is now created every two days. Or is something more concerning in play? If we look at the history of our civilisation, primarily western civilisation, rationality has been one of the sort of fundamental stones of which we have stood upon in western society as we have developed our civilisation. A number of years ago I did a post-graduate course at Deakin University and I had to do a paper on rational decision making and a decision to have a second airport in Sydney. This was in 1993. And I came to the conclusion that we were far away from that decision because if you look at the process we were going through we were not making a rational decision about a second airport. I lay no claim to any decision that's been made recently. But what are the alternatives to rationality? Of course, objective belief, faith, selective opinions, stand on my ground. So what do they mean for science, for society, for democracies as we know it, therefore our future? Are these really threats or are they impacts that new technology, new ways of doing business have introduced to the society that we have (indistinct)? Is democracy on the decline? Is this a threat to democracy that will increase that decline or are we going through a growth spurt in democracy where it is just (indistinct) democracy has been challenged before? So why do we wring our hands instead of girding our loins? Believe in it, defend it, we promote it, we take it forward. I go back to Orwell though, a quote from a letter he wrote in 1944, "I fear the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and the prophecies of some infallible fuehrer. Already any history has in a sense ceased to exist. That is there is no such thing as a history of our own times which can be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. But if the sort of world that I'm afraid of arrives, the world of two or three great superstates, which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five, if the fuehrer wished it." 1944. I could quote from 1984, which I did last night, about the falsification of history. "I know, of course, that the past is falsified but it would never be possible for me to prove it even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind." So is this another aspect of the issue that we're talking about today? What is truth? What is post-truth? How do we deal with it as a democracy and a society? More importantly, how do we assist decision makers in performing their duties? And that's what we should be (indistinct), to assist, to enable, to take our society forward. So the plus from today I hope is bringing together four academies, which may not on a daily basis come together, that's one of the purposes of this forum, collaborate. As an aside I did ask the Vice Chancellor's Committee of all our New South Wales Universities to do a task for me a few years ago and which when I made my pitch the first question back was "Do you want us to work together?" Yes, that would be nice. Okay. But I shouldn’t go any further down that track. Today I think is a day for some very intriguing presentations. I think at the end of it hopefully we can come out of this (indistinct). My desire would be (indistinct portion). Prof Hibbert: Thank you. I'd just like to say a couple of things about the way that today will happen. The last two forums (indistinct) panel discussion and the people decided that that didn’t work all that well (indistinct) last year, so we had to put questions and comments at the presentation (indistinct). But it will be Paul Griffiths' job to try and (indistinct) the time. I'd also like to acknowledge our two overseas speakers who are running around the world, James Wilsdon and Sir Peter Gluckman. They were both going to be in Sydney and agreed to speak here today but then James Wilsdon got a senior academic position at his university and had to go home. And Sir Peter, of course, got a new New Zealand Government, which has rather serious calls on his time. But both of them very kindly have accommodated our various problems. So James Wilsdon did his very best to record his talk, failed late last night but, in fact, we have the text of his talk (indistinct) will be presented by Paul Griffiths for which we thank him for doing that at short notice. Sir Peter Gluckman was on a plane this morning coming from New Zealand and arrived (indistinct portion) and then had to fly back home. (Indistinct portion). We're formally supported by the Office of the New South Wales Chief Scientists and Engineer and in recognition of that support and indeed all the contributions made by the Chief Scientists Convention with the Royal Society of New South Wales, I should now like to introduce our other most favourite person other than His Excellency, Professor Mary O'Kane to make some opening remarks.