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Welcome to Admiralty House.

Since taking on these roles almost a year ago, Simeon and I have been committed to ensuring that the Official Residences here in Sydney and Canberra are places of peace and welcome, where everyone belongs.  

Where First Nations people, migrants and refugees, people with all abilities, elders, the young, survivors, allies – all are not only invited but supported; where even Prime Minister’s dogs are unconditionally welcomed; where the team here understands these communities and their needs, and makes them feel welcome and at home.

Like Government House in Canberra, Admiralty House is a place to share stories and listen, to imagine and connect; where everyone who comes can find some part of themselves reflected in the experiences we create.

And places to celebrate the very best of our nation.

And from where we are endeavouring to reimagine the civics and institutions that underpin our great democracy.

So this is the perfect place to celebrate SBS’s 50 Years of Belonging.

To honour the truly remarkable work of SBS in shaping and reflecting modern Australia over its first half century.

Prime Minister, when you first asked me to serve, you asked me to be modern, visible and optimistic. And in my first year as Australia’s 28th Governor-General, Simeon and I have had the remarkable and privileged opportunity to experience modern Australia in all of its glorious, rich diversity and success.

We’ve also sat alongside communities when they are in recovery – from drought, floods and cyclones.

It has given us a unique and striking perspective on the story of SBS in the modern story of Australia.

So there was a beginning moment for SBS, with so many other firsts along the way.

From the unmistakeable flamboyant ties – now held in a museum in Victoria! – and clipped consonants of the then Minister of Immigration, Al Grassby, welcoming us to radio 2EA in Sydney and 3EA in Melbourne in June 1975 – an experiment in broadcasting to generously explain the intricacies of Medibank, in so many languages other than English.

An experiment that was extended and extended, until it was clear that it was answering a much bigger need: in having closed captions, in broadcasting Eurovision, launching Australia’s first dedicated Indigenous channel with the NITV’s first broadcast from Uluru in 2012, which has led to the nuanced and deep coverage being delivered daily on the global conflicts that are happening right now.

SBS has always connected us to each other and the world around us, and celebrates where we have come from, who we are, and who we hope to become. ‘Bringing the world back home,’ as you promised so early.  

2025 sees the confluence of several important anniversaries that have important relationships with SBS.

On Christmas Day last year, the Prime Minister, the Chief of Defence Force and I attended a beautiful commemoration of the impact of Cyclone Tracy in Darwin.

In the months that followed, our Australian honours system was born, celebrating many of those Australians who rebuilt Darwin and its people, but also some of our talented artists and intellectual leaders, including Joan Sullivan and Donald Horne.

In 1975, Gurindji man Vincent Lingiari was handed back his land by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, moving our country inexorably towards the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, by Malcolm Fraser’s government in 1976.

We also marked the end of the Vietnam War, and the beginning of 50 years of arrivals of Vietnamese refugees welcomed to new lives in Australia.  

I was honoured to hear some deeply personal stories from families on World Refugee Day on Friday at a celebration of that anniversary at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra.

And in November, it will be 50 years since the Governor-General dismissed a Prime Minister!

These anniversaries, and our celebration tonight and this year of SBS, are not coincidental. They speak to a turning point in cultural self-awareness in the Australia of 50 years ago.

A place that was growing in confidence – vibrant and expansive in its self-image and open-hearted in its welcome.

That is staggering to reflect upon, given at the time the country was still emerging from the long shadow of the White Australia Policy.

And yet the idea of a ‘multicultural’ nation began to take root.

I was reflecting on this last week – Refugee Week – when I had the honour of presiding at a citizenship ceremony in Hornsby.

As is the case at all these emotional ceremonies, all our new citizens are encouraged to engage with our democracy – maybe even to run for office.

I regularly have our most recently arrived citizens telling me how proud they are of voting – whether in the recent federal election, or at local and state levels.  

And, just a few months ago, Simeon and I welcomed Holocaust survivors here to Admiralty House.

With an average age of 95, they reflected on how their long lives in Australia had brought success, joy, new generations and safety.

Refugees from the Second World War, right up to those arriving this month – almost 1 million people – have all come here in search of those things: freedom, safety, and belonging.  

Just as 7.5 million migrants have joined the great Australian story.

I often speak of them as part of our third chapter – joined to our first chapter of 65,000 years of continuous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture, and our second chapter of the democratic ideals that underpin our civics and institutions established over the centuries following British colonisation.

Lately, though, I have the sense that we have entered a new and vital chapter.

It’s something I haven’t quite articulated yet, but it seems to me the terms we use – like multicultural, tolerant, diverse – attempt to capture something we needed to learn in the 1970s, but now we live and know and feel by heart.

I don’t quite know what to call it, but I know it when I see it and feel it.

I see it in the places I visit right across the country.

Where people care deeply about each other’s wellbeing.

Where they share life and culture and heritage with grace and kindness.

Where community activities interweave with the cultures and practices of many ancestries.

Where younger generations embrace the complex embroidery of their identities, but quite emphatically own their Australianness.

I see it in the young people who come through Government House every week.  

Some of the 25,000 school students who visit us annually.

The questions they ask me, and their ease with each other.

I see it in our democracy, where engaged and informed young citizens will shape our future.  

I see it, too, in the newly-minted Australian ambassadors and high commissioners I meet before they embark on overseas postings.  

About a third of them were not born here. They have come here as migrants and refugees themselves, and chosen careers where they represent our nation overseas.  

They represent our remarkable diversity. The fact that being Australian is more interesting and complex than the tropes about us suggest.

But where I see it most, and where we have always found modern, confident, diverse Australia, is SBS.

As we celebrate the first half century of SBS, we acknowledge that you have been sharing, describing and celebrating modern Australia throughout your 50 years.

Reflecting on Australia’s 1970’s impulse towards multiculturalism, Al Grassby said …

‘… the community was already diverse, and had always been diverse, and was even more diverse than it had been. So it was time’.

From your earliest form, SBS has generously, patiently, persistently brought modern Australia to our screens.  

Down through the decades, innovative programming and iconic presenters – like George Donikian and Mary Kostakidis, Johnny Warren and Les Murray, Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton, Lee Lin Chin, Julia Zemiro, Craig Foster, Anton Enus, Janice Peterson and Lucy Zellich, Jenny Brockie and Kumi Taguchi – have emphatically brought to us the promise inherent in your founding in 1975.

As you have said, James [SBS Managing Director].  

‘SBS has been a constant companion of multiculturalism in Australia’.

You tell the big story of us, in a thousand smaller stories.

What you share on screen and online, or broadcast on radio and in podcasts, is a glorious, optimistic and real mosaic of what it means to be modern Australia.

You have taken us on a journey.

If I look at your coverage of football (soccer not AFL!) Tracey Holmes, Steph Brantz, Liz Deep-Jones, and Mieke Buchan.

These women all reported on women’s world cups – France in 1998, Germany in 2006 – long before any other outlet took women in sport seriously.  

Opening Australia’s eyes not just to the world sport, but with an ease and naturalness in women’s knowledge and insight, while others continued to believe only men could tell those stories.

In the same way, NITV gave a self-determined platform to First Nations sport – my favourite footy show of all time – as well as drama and documentaries.  

You bring the world to us, and us to the world.

You show where we have come from, and where we are now.

And you do it in a way that is fair, factual and without bias.  

As you all know, SBS is one of the most trusted news sources in Australia.

My personal connection to SBS continues to inform my deep admiration of you today.  

As a young policy adviser on communications and broadcasting, my focus was SBS, ABC and Telecom.

I remember Brian Johns, Malcolm Ling, Robert Stokes and Head of SBS Radio Kwong Lieu – himself a Vietnamese refugee – visiting Parliament House about issues like the Budget, new programming, extending transmission towers.

They were of course backed by Chairs, like the delightful Sir Nicholas Sheadie AC OBE and Carla Zampatti AC through to George Savvides AM today.

Over the next 50 years, you will continue to evolve, with our shifting media landscape, and, importantly, with our cultural identity.

You will speak to us, in high resolution, of our complexity and beauty, the light and the shade in our story.

Above all, you will speak to us about belonging.

Belonging was the founding idea of SBS 50 years ago. Reaching out to people who were finding their way in a new country.

Creating space for difference.  

Today, belonging is even richer.

It means everyone who calls Australia home can celebrate 65,000 years of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, as well as Lunar New Year, and Eid al Fitr, and Deepavali, and Hanukkah, and Remembrance Day, and so much more.

As you deepen and amplify our belonging in the next 50 years, you will continue to help us know ourselves.

Together, we will find new words for inclusion, acceptance, and diversity.

Or we will make a world where we don’t need to say them, because when we say ‘Australian,’ that’s what we mean.  

Congratulations to everyone at SBS on this magnificent milestone.

Happy 50th birthday!

And once again, welcome to Admiralty House, where all of you belong. 

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