[Introductory music is played over imagery of the arrival and official welcome of the Governor-Designate to the Parliament of Victoria until 7:55]
Fin Bird, Chief of Protocol, Department of Premier and Cabinet: Ladies and gentlemen. May I have your attention please for the arrival of The Honourable Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria. The Honourable Anne Ferguson, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Honourable Shaun Leane, President of the Legislative Council.
The Honourable Maree Edwards, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. Angela Smith, Clerk of the Executive Council. Thank you.
Please be upstanding for the arrival of the Governor-Designate and remain standing for the National Anthem.
Usher of the Black Rod: The Governor-Designate.
[The Australian National Anthem performed by the Royal Australian Navy Band]
Jonathan Burke, Official Secretary to the Governor: Please be seated. Distinguished guests, on behalf of the Premier, welcome to the Inauguration of Professor Margaret Gardner as the 30th Governor of Victoria. My name is Jonathan Burke and I am the Official Secretary to the Governor. I would like to introduce Uncle Perry Wandin, Wurundjeri Elder, for the Welcome to Country.
Uncle Perry Wandin: Wominjeka, everybody. As you heard, my name is Perry Wandin, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Elder.
Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge all my ancestors, elders both past, present and the emerging and of course, all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
I'd like to acknowledge both co-chairs of the First Assembly as well.
My story. I live in a beautiful part of Healesville and it's where my family have come off the mission at Coranderrk.
Wiliam Barak, my great-great-great uncle, would love to be here today. He would certainly love to be able to make his presence felt. So, I feel he's here with me, being able to pass on an acknowledgement and welcome the country here.
I'm sorry, those who missed out on the smoking ceremony, it is very, very special for any Aboriginal people in Victoria around Australia because any bad spirits that possibly have been bought with us today, we'd like to move them onto a better place. And with the ones that have been done just before, we feel so much better. So maybe that might be a tick on the next one. But please, I do like to thank everybody for being letting me do this today because it is really part of my family and my culture.
But be able to speak to the people of who actually look after Victoria and with our First Nations people, we really need to come along in a strong way. And there's only one way to do that and that’s work together.
As I was saying, my father was our last Ngurungaeta, James Jubie Wandin. And I'm also very proud to say he was the first Aboriginal player to play for that mighty team, St Kilda. And the way they go after Hawthorn the other week.
Look, I do really think that my father's here too, because I got his ownership from him passing. He's been gone 17 years now. So, to be part of that and as I said, Willam-Balluk as well.
So I finish off in saying wominjeka – welcome! Yearmann koondee biik Wurundjeri Willam-Balluk.
And the Willam-Balluk is our clan. We're the last clan of Wurundjeri people.
And I do thank you again for allowing me to do this. And congratulations.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Thank you, Uncle Perry. I now invite the Premier of Victoria, the Honourable Daniel Andrews, to address us.
The Hon. Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria: Ladies and gentlemen, can I begin my remarks by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet and on your behalf. I thank Uncle Perry for his Welcome to Country.
I want to make a particular acknowledgement of the co-chairs of Victoria's First Peoples’ Assembly Ngarra Murray and Rueben Berg. I welcome you here. It is significant and very pleasing to have you here with us.
Lieutenant-Governor Professor James Angus and Helen Angus.
Chief Justice the Honourable Anne Ferguson.
Former Governor General the Wright Reverend the Honourable Peter Hollingworth.
Former Governors of Victoria, the Honourable Alex Chernoff and Professor the Honourable David de Kretser.
Former Premiers Brumby, Baillieu and Kennett.
Consuls General and other international representatives that are with us today.
To the Leader of the Opposition and to my ministerial and parliamentary colleagues and the many, many other distinguished guests, too many to mention.
Ladies and gentlemen, the role of the Governor is central to our democracy and our constitution.
It's also, in many respects, unique in the way it balances the beautiful contradictions of our state, tradition and modernity, our reverence for the past and our steadfast focus on the future, our individual expression and our collective strength, our guardianship of the arts and our fanaticism about sport.
Victoria is a place where difference is celebrated for the gift that it brings, and unity is prized for the shared values it delivers us: equality and excellence, pride and fairness.
Friends, on behalf of the people of Victoria, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to our outgoing Governor, Linda Dessau, for her contribution to these shared values, for the work she did to invite Victorians into her home, to keep the doors of Government House open for everyone, creating an unbreakable sense of belonging.
Even in the most challenging of times, I have no doubt that the Governor-Designate Professor Margaret Gardner, will continue to bring Victorians together and bring the most formal and solemn parts of our parliamentary democracy to the people and indeed to life here in the Education State.
I can think of no better person to lead from the front than Professor Gardner.
A proud product of our public education system, a prolific contributor to academic thinking and the economy of ideas, through whose research has emerged a clearer picture of workers and workplaces, and someone who has steered some of our most iconic tertiary institutions through often uncharted waters.
When Professor Gardner was appointed Vice Chancellor and President of RMIT in 2005, she was the third person to hold that high office in five months.
Professor Gardner foresaw early that education, and tertiary education, in particular, needed to evolve and to adapt.
It had to be flexible and nimble in order to stay relevant and to continue to meet the needs of Victoria’s knowledge economy.
Under her vice chancellorship at RMIT, she oversaw a number of ambitious, now iconic building developments.
Projects that at the time, others might have said were too big, too hard, too costly, too architectural. But those projects now ensure the bold vision and design on the outside reflects the imagination and dreams of the students on the inside of her time at RMIT, Professor Gardner said, ‘if you've got a strong sense of who you are in life, there are always new places to go’. And I think that's true of RMIT. Well, I reckon that's true everywhere. Indeed, a truth to live by.
In 2014, Professor Gardner became the first woman to lead Monash University. Not to be parochial, but it is a fantastic tertiary institution. Despite my less than stellar academic career, I'm sometimes considered a favourite son. I'm deeply grateful to them for that.
During her time at Monash, Professor Gardner guided one of our state's most important and significant centres of learning, centres of knowledge and community, of educators and students.
Navigating another transformative infrastructure program, and indeed navigating a one in 100-year global pandemic.
The Governor-Designate is someone whose lifelong dedication to learning and service to education is quite remarkable.
Ladies and gentlemen, our state is smarter, stronger, more creative and better equipped to turn challenges into opportunities.
Because of her contribution to this point, and I know that I'm not alone when I say that I'm excited. We're all excited, I think, for what's to come.
Friends, I was proud to recommend her appointment to His Majesty the King, and Victorians will be proud to call her their Governor.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Thank you, Premier. The Honourable Anne Ferguson, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, will now call on the Governor-Designate to make the Affirmation of Allegiance and the Affirmation of Office. I invite the Chief Justice to administer the Affirmations.
Chief Justice: Governor-Designate, I invite you to please stand and make the Affirmation of Allegiance, followed by the Affirmation of Office.
Governor-Designate: I, Margaret Elaine Gardner, do solemnly and sincerely affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles the Third and His Majesty's heirs and successes according to law.
I, Margaret Elaine Gardner, do solemnly and sincerely affirm that I will well and truly serve His Majesty King Charles the Third, and His Majesty's heirs and successes in the office of Governor of the State of Victoria, and will do right in all manner of people after the laws and usages of the State, without fear or favour, affection or ill will.
Official Secretary to the Governor: I now invite the Clerk to place the Oath Book before the Governor-Designate.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Governor-Designate, I now invite you to sign the Oath Book.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Chief Justice, I invite you to attest the signature.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Thank you, Chief Justice, you may return to your seat. I invite the Clerk of the Executive Council to sign the Oath book.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Thank you. The Proclamation announces the assumption of the Office of Governor. I now request the Clerk of the Executive Council place the Proclamation before the Premier.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Premier, I invite you to please stand and sign the Proclamation.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Thank you, Premier. You may return to your seat. Your Excellency, I now invite you to sign the Proclamation.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Distinguished guests, Her Excellency the Governor has assumed Office.
[Applause]
Official Secretary to the Governor: Your Excellency, I now invite you to address us.
Her Excellency Professor the Honourable Margaret Gardner AC: The Honourable Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria.
Lieutenant Governor Professor James Angus AO.
The Honourable Chief Justice Anne Ferguson.
Members of the Cabinet, President of the Legislative Council and Speaker of the Legislative Assembly.
Former Governor General of Australia, former Governors of Victoria, former Premiers.
The Honourable John Pesutto, Leader of the Opposition.
Permanent heads of State Government Departments.
Senior Officers of the Australian Defence Force, members of the Consular Corps, distinguished guests, one and all.
I begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the lands on which this house stands the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung of the Eastern Kulin and pay my respects to their elders, past and present.
I also pay my respects to any other Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people present today.
I'm deeply honoured, very deeply honoured, to be the 30th Governor of Victoria.
This state is a place so ancient and yet so new.
The connection to land of those who are of the many continuing Aboriginal peoples in Victoria is different in kind from that of others, including the people who came following European colonization and those who've arrived since then from across the globe, whether migrant or refugee.
Yet I believe we all recognise the land so aptly described by Victorian born Ethel Florence Lindsay Richardson, better known by her pseudonym, Henry Handel Richardson.
‘The scanty ragged foliage, the unearthly stillness of the bush. The colours in the apparent colourlessness. The blue in the grey of the new leafage. The geranium red of young scrub. The purple depths of the shadows. To know a rank nostalgia for the scent of the aromatic foliage, the honey fragrance of the wattle, even the sting and tan of countless miles of bush ablaze’.
This the is Victoria we recognise, we know, and we wish to conserve.
We wish to better engage with the connections Victoria’s Aboriginal peoples have to this land.
And I believe the role of governor can play a part in this engagement within the constitutional fabric of this state.
Ours is a constitutional fabric that's been shaped by a democratic impulse.
A democratic impulse that has driven Victoria ever since our separation from New South Wales in 1850.
From the vantage point of 2023, we may forget that the story of Victoria is a story of people demanding to be heard.
Victorians asked to be heard when they sought self-governance.
Victorians on the Ballarat Goldfields demanded to be heard on November 11, 1854, when in their thousands they voted in support of the Ballarat Reform League Charter.
That charter, which was presented to Victoria's first Governor, Sir Charles Hotham, is the nearest Australia has to a declaration of independence.
The handwritten copy of the charter made by one of Governor Hotham's clerks is a manifesto of democratic principles and demands.
Among those demands that it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he or she is called upon to obey.
There it is again, voices demanding to be heard.
That democratic impulse was partly realised after the Eureka stockade, when Victoria cleared the way for men without property to vote.
This at a time when owning property was usually the only way to be heard in Parliaments across the world.
That democratic impulse was partly realised again in 1908 when, following a 39-year battle, women in Victoria won the right to vote.
Female suffrage only came after a momentous campaign, including the presentation of a monster petition measuring what we would now consider many meters in length - 260 - as well as 19 attempts to pass legislation through the Victorian Legislative Council.
Those Victorian suffragettes were persistent.
They did not stop until their voices were heard.
However, while the democratic advances of 1857 included all male Victorians, including Victoria's male first peoples, the right to vote at federal elections set in 1902 excluded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
And so, this franchise was not extended to all women and men in Victoria until 1962.
The First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, which is today working to ensure the voices of Aboriginal people in this state are heard, is part of a democratic Victorian tradition.
I want to acknowledge the newly elected co-chairs of this assembly, Ngarra Murray and Rueben Berg, and wish them success.
We might imagine the work of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria as a chance for our state to, after 169 years, fully realise the ambitions of the Ballarat Reform League Charter.
That charter spoke to universal rights that took many years to secure.
Victoria now embraces all its citizens, and we can see the contours of modern Victoria in the diversity of those who were at the Eureka Stockade.
Of the miners detained after the Eureka stockade battle, only three were born in the Australian colonies. The other miners, some 100 or so, were from Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Corsica, Greece, Germany, Russia, Holland - as it was known then, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, the United States, Canada and the West Indies.
The Southern Cross flag was designed by a migrant.
The first miner tried for treason and acquitted; John Joseph was an African American.
On this ancient land, there is no typical Victorian.
This state is a place of many peoples and many cultures.
In the time before colonization, Aboriginal people spoke more than 30 different languages.
Here on this land, there is ample space for the new and the ancient.
There is room for the light that comes from many voices being heard.
Victoria is a place of many people and many voices, whereby listening to the experience of those voices, we can and shall grow wiser.
That is why, as Governor, I look forward to being part of the journey with the people of Victoria as our future unfurls.
I look forward to hearing your voices and learning from your experiences and being part of the way, we ensure that democratic institutions and your democratic impulse are supported and preserved.
Thank you.
Official Secretary to the Governor: Thank you, Your Excellency. That concludes Official Proceedings. Would you please now stand for the Vice-Regal Salute, after which the Official Party will depart. Thank you.
[The Vice-Regal Salute is played by the Royal Australian Navy Band]
ENDS.
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