I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.
I’m proud to lead a government that will give all Australians the chance to vote in a referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Constitution.
Great to be here with my colleague Ged Kearney.
And thank you to Brian McNamee and to Joy Linton.
Not only for the warm welcome but for your leadership of CSL – one of Australia’s most essential and successful biotech companies.
You are a big part of why CSL is today a global leader, and why we can celebrate this world-class facility for research and development.
And it truly is world-class.
It’s a lab, a factory, a biotech start-up incubator, a multinational business, and a piece of Australian history, all in one stunning, state-of-the-art building.
Seven levels of laboratories.
Over 850 employees, working together, collaborating on cutting-edge science and research that helps ensure Australia remains a global leader in this field.
This building and the people who work here are full of potential, as is this entire precinct.
It’s also a storied institution with a long record of achievement.
CSL began life here in Melbourne in 1916.
You brought Australians the vaccines for polio, diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus.
As well as insulin, penicillin, and anti-venoms for Australia’s most deadly creatures.
More recently, the ground-breaking Gardasil vaccine against HPV, the world’s first swine flu vaccine, life-saving medicines and blood plasma derivatives.
All this steady work over more than a century underpinned our national health and wellbeing.
Then along came COVID.
CSL, along with the rest of the scientific community, rallied to the cause.
Your work on the AstraZeneca vaccine contributed to tens of millions of doses here and among our Pacific and ASEAN neighbours.
Australians remain so grateful for the work of our medical scientists and innovators over the past three years.
Grateful and more aware than ever of how vital your work is.
As we rebuild from COVID-19, we’re learning its lessons.
Lessons about how we shape our future, rather than letting the future shape us.
Lessons about how to make our economy fit for tomorrow, more productive, more adaptive, more resilient.
How to strengthen supply chains.
How to modernise our industrial base.
How to make more things here in Australia.
How to ensure our people have the skills, knowledge and training they need to take up the good jobs we will create.
And how to make sure Australia is higher up on the value chain in the global economy.
Our National Reconstruction Fund is key to all of this, and we’ve identified medical science as a key priority.
We’re targeting $1.5 billion of the NRF for medical manufacturing.
This magnificent facility will help position CSL, and indeed Australia, to compete in the global marketplace, boosting onshore research and advanced manufacturing.
The work you do here will be integral to Australia’s future economy.
And it will continue to be integral to Australians’ health and quality of life, as it has been since 1916.
There’s a lovely line from Thomas Jefferson, writing to the ‘father of immunology’ Edward Jenner, in 1806.
He wrote that Jenner’s pioneering work on the smallpox vaccine had
‘erased [it] from the calendar of human afflictions’ and earned the gratitude ‘of the whole human family.’
Here at CSL, the heart of your work is to ease human suffering, erase afflictions, and, fundamentally, to save lives.
For which you, too, deserve the gratitude of the human family.
It’s a huge pleasure to be here to launch this superb new facility.
And to bring with me the thanks and respect of Australians for what you’ve already contributed, what you do every day, and what you will do in this place in the decades ahead.
Thanks again, and congratulations.