Shaping Australia Awards celebrate change makers in our universities

Education Minister Jason Clare says the Shaping Australia Awards celebrate the people in universities who are remaking the country.

7 year old Sophia Venditti having her eyes examined student Lauren Batchelor at La Trobe University Eye Clinic, which was a finalist in the Shaping Australia Awards. Photo: Aaron Francis

John Curtin, Australia’s great wartime Prime Minister, once said: “The great university should find its heroes in the present, its hope in the future, it should look ever forward. For it the past should be but a preparation for the greater days to be.”

That’s what great universities, at their core, are. Institutions that are forever looking to the future. Forever preparing us for the days ahead.

And it is the people inside those institutions who provide that vision, those ideas, that spark.

That is who the Shaping Australia Awards celebrate. The people in our universities who are quite literally remaking the country we live in today and reimagining our future.

To those lecturers, tutors, researchers and non-teaching staff, thank you for what you do. I want more Australians to get the opportunity that you no doubt got, and that you help provide for others.

That’s what the Australian Universities Accord is all about. Charting a course to a future where more young people get a crack at going to university. A future made in Australia, where no one is held back, and no one is left behind.

That’s what building a better and fairer education system is all about. That’s what the winners and nominees at these awards do every single day.

Jason Clare is the federal Education Minister.