Macquarie University Accessibility Services has completed the transcription of this audio lecture on 17th September, 2009, which was recorded for the Learning and Teaching Centre. This transcription is not for reproduction or distribution.

This is an electronic version of the transcript of a live event.

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Professor Gail Whiteford: Thank you, Tony. And thank you Ros for that extended acknowledgement of country. I learned a few things in there that I'm going to be more familiar with. But perhaps more importantly, I think what Ros has done is to remind us that in this land, we have a particular covenant here, and that surrounds having a commitment to knowledge generation and transformation, as university, as part of our social contract, and I think we need to remind ourselves about, particularly as we find ourselves in this very specific social and historical context.

It really is my delight to welcome you here today, and I mean that so sincerely, because today is an event that we had planned since, I think it was about March that we came up with the idea, so the inception was there from the very beginning, and certainly one that was central to the notion of what we might do in this diversity week. And I'll come back to that in a minute.

But I would like to acknowledge who is here today and where they've come from, and I'm really delighted to see support and respect from our colleagues, from first of all across the university sector. We have people from the University of Sydney,University of Western Sydney, UTS, UNSW,UTAS, fantastic. Canberra, Newcastle, and also University of Southern Queensland. And I would like to say that at the moment, we're working in a cross-universities collaborative forum to bring together all of our efforts in the work that we do in high schools, and it's an effort to transcend competition and collaboration in widening participation in higher education.

Now, if I was to say to you that that is proving to be easy going, I'd be lying! And just last week, we had a meeting and I would have to say that some of my male deputy vice-chancellor colleagues are finding the notion of collaboration a little challenging! But the women are working on them. So, we'll get there!

I would also like to acknowledge that we have people here from the following Government and community departments. We have people from the Catholic Schools Office at Pennant Hills, from the NSW Department of Education and Training. Again, we were working very closely with the AustralianMuseum, and also the Australian Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism.

Now, this is the diversity week. This week, you may see the slogan, and who has one of the T-shirts on? A couple of people floating around. Doing, being and knowing, and the reason we had this slogan is because it is about learning about different modes of being, different ways in which people go about doing in the world, but also an attempt to say that there are multiple knowledges. There are multiple knowledge paradigms, although in universities, you wouldn't always know that.

We also were delighted to have the launch of our social inclusion plan by Graham Innes earlier in the week and that was a highlight for me. But there has been a couple of other highlights, if I can mention briefly. As well as the launch, we had a wonderful talk on indigenous and indigeneity and I think it represents a real breakthrough.

We had an interfaith dialogue, and I can see Roy here, if you want to put your hand up, and she was the engine in putting together the dialogue focused on a discussion around the environment. And I think a breakthrough there for Macquarie and so ably put together and showing real leadership there. So thank you to you.

Today is where we get to the point where we think about a social inclusion plan not really being a plan, but about aspirations, as well as actions. So the focus today is on what we actually do differently. Because as we consider the Federal Government's targets for the sector around increasing representation of all people, although we know that disappointingly, the focus has been on low SES and indigenous students, I think we're all sorry to see there hasn't also been mention of students with disabilities. But it means that we have to do things differently. We have to consider the culture, the culture from which our students come, because at the end of the day, what we need is not percentages. We don't want to reach targets.

We want completion. We want attainment, and we know from the OECD data that it is those attainments that make a difference at a broad social level. I have to say, I was in Sweden for some time last year. Sweden runs at a 52% participation rate of people with disadvantaged backgrounds. It's a staggering figure. They've done that over a very long time, but that's what we should aspire to. So again, I would like to close my part of this morning by welcoming you all here so sincerely. I think it is going to be a very important day.

I would like to acknowledge in particular the work of Sharon Kerr. Her expertise is profound. Her knowledge of the area I continue to be informed by. But also, her staff are the most dedicated and highly professional people that I've seen, and I knew about them before I even arrived at Macquarie, and that's a testimony to the work. So thank you, I hope you have a really, I guess, instructive and valuable day. Cheers

[APPLAUSE]

Tony Dwyer: Thank you very much, Gail. I should also point out that in addition to being a Macquarie staff member, I'm a State co-ordinator for the Web Accessibility Network for Australian Universities and for any of you who have an interest in web accessibility in particular, it's the students and staff, it's non-funded, it's very informal. In order to join, all you need to do is go to the website, which is and just sign up to the mailing list, and you'll find out about forums just… you'll find out about forums like today. And very interesting discussions about new technologies are available, and so on.