The Governor of Victoria Mr John Landy and Mrs Landy Lady Southey, Lieutenant Governor of Victoria The Hon Steve Bracks, Premier of Victoria, and Mrs Bracks, Bruce Hartnett – Acting Chairman of the Australia Day Committee, Mum, Dad, and my three children, Adam, Rebecca and Jake, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Afternoon.

Someone recently asked me – when do you feel most Australian? I think it’s when I’m on a plane coming back to Australia, and just before the plane is about to land, I feel so excited and so glad that I’m coming home to Australia.

But I can never, and will never take Australia for granted. And therefore, today, I want to speak to you about promises that we, as Australians, need to make and keep: Promises we need to make as business leaders. Promises we need to make in science, the arts and other fields of endeavour. Promises we need to make as a nation.

My father was 23 when he first came to Australia by ship, 59 years ago. He told me he also felt that same thrill I feel when he saw the coast of Australia. But for him, it was not a homecoming, but rather an escape.

As a child In Rumania, he had lived under occupation by the Soviet army. As a young man he and his parents were rounded up by the Nazis. They escaped, and then fled in a small boat which sank off the Turkish coast. Miraculously they survived. Not long after, his mother had to sell her wedding ring to buy food for the family.

So why did my father come to Australia? First it was to get as far away as possible from the horrors and the anti-semitism of Europe.

But more importantly, he chose Australia because for him it was a land of promise. It held out to him, as to other immigrants and refugees, the promise of Freedom, Access and Opportunity.

Freedom of expression and freedom from tyranny. Access to work, education, health care and culture. Opportunity - that with the right spirit, you can achieve anything you want here.

This is the promise that Australia made to my father, and it has kept its promise.

My mother was actually born here. Her parents had fled the pogroms and poverty in Poland and arrived in Australia in the mid 1920’s.

It was the Depression and my mother’s father, my grandfather, took whatever jobs he could get as an itinerant worker in the countryside. My grandmother, a seamstress, who spoke broken English, showed extraordinary courage for a woman at that time, by opening a small shop selling lingerie in Little Collins Street in 1939.

So little faith did her suppliers have that she would succeed, that on the night she opened the shop, one of them stood on the corner to make sure he got paid before she closed the doors.

My grandmother had to battle, but Australia gave her an opportunity she would never have had in Poland.

Her shop was called Sussan, and sixty years later, in 1989, I became Managing Director of Sussan.

I am extremely proud of my heritage and that I am a third generation retailer in Australia.

Heritage for me is about stability and a sense of belonging. It makes me feel that I have a core, fills me with pride and gives me the strength to build on the past.

But the real key to having businesses with heritage is to make them contemporary.

If I am to succeed in Australia today, I cannot do business in the same way as did my family in previous generations.

Australian businesses must strive to excel on an international level. This requires a new way of thinking. We must think of business without borders.

By this I don’t mean free trade zones. I mean measuring ourselves and being able to compete according to international standards of excellence.

For example, it would be absolutely unthinkable for Australian swimmers or athletes to be satisfied with breaking Australian records only. So why should we be satisfied with national standards in other fields?

Why can’t we benchmark our businesses by international standards? Why can’t we try to be the best in the world not only in sport, but in business, science, the arts, in any field we choose?

We need to think about the way we do business within Australia. In particular, we do need new styles of leadership. The old authoritarian, ego-massaging, hierarchy of power and dominance does not work anymore. And business leaders who focus exclusively on the bottom line are not successful, not even at improving the bottom line.

Many companies in Australia are over-managed and under-led. Leading means: strategic decisions, new ideas, new ways of doing things. Above all, it is a clarity of vision and the ability to inspire others to share your vision. It is not about implementing standards, procedures and performance.

All my energies as a leader must go into innovation and the creative process that leads to the bottom line, and not the bottom line itself. As a leader, I must constantly be asking myself:
How can we re-invigorate, re-generate, re-position our brands better in the marketplace? How can we maintain our ability to lead and succeed?

If you haven’t got a team of people who are creative and who keep reinventing your products, you won’t have a business in the long run.

So how do we as business employers attract and retain such talented people?

This is an extremely real question for me because I want to be the employer of choice in the retail market.

Retail is the largest employer of young people in Australia so I have to be able to keep people, inspire them and coach young people.

I know that it’s not just about higher wages even though we certainly need wage parity.

I am convinced that as part of the company’s employment brand, we need to promise employees a culture of trust, a culture of honesty and a culture of integrity.

As employers, we need to give our employees the support and the freedom to be creative, to be risk-takers, and to be entrepreneurs.

For the organization to work and prosper, we need to delegate power and let employees make decisions whether right or wrong

We need to stress team performance as well as to give feedback and credit.

We need to keep our commitments to provide training and development.

And perhaps most importantly, we need to mentor our employees, develop their talents and encourage young leaders.

I’ve taken great pride and pleasure in mentoring the development of 2 young women who now, in their mid-thirties, are running my two largest businesses.

Business leaders who create this culture of trust, cannot manage by dictating orders. They can best manage by conversation.

To open the lines of communication and interplay of ideas, leaders must listen to employees; they must ask questions, and they must recognize how they feel.

I go out of my way to make personal connections. These relationships are vital, and to me, count much more than structures. Structures do not build trust.

I remember how important trust was when I got my first job after finishing my Dip. Ed. I went to apply for a job working with challenged children – autistic and schizophrenic. Halfway through the job interview, I lost my confidence and thought - I can’t do this!

My prospective employer felt my fear, and he said:
– Yes, you can do it – He trusted me with the job. He gave me enormous confidence, and I had a fantastic 4 years there.

The gift of trust gives you the confidence that if you put your heart and soul into it – you can achieve anything.

Women make up 98% of the employees of Sussan, Sportsgirl and Suzanne Grae. We offer them the opportunity to balance their work life and personal life through flexible employment.

And as part of that we recognise family as a core value within our business. As a mother of three I know that parents have to be able to take a child to a doctor, attend a parent-teacher meeting and deal with family problems as they arise, without penalty.

Employers who adhere to some concept of corporate culture which accepts no excuses for lateness, which sees the necessity of dealing with family or personal problems during work hours as a sign of weakness….

Such employers enforce a culture of concealment and lying. That is the last thing you want in any business. So trust is critical to the way you run your business.

As business people, beyond the promises we need to make to our employees and customers, we need to make promises to our community and our children. And these promises are bound up with the sort of society we want to live in and leave to our children.

I don’t want to use terms like Corporate Social Responsibility because somehow that has just become a slogan for ‘doing the right thing’.

There is a huge difference between just doing the right thing, and involving yourself wholeheartedly. Involving yourself because you don’t see a division between what you do in business and what you do in society.

We cannot step outside our business and our home and leave all our concern and compassion at the doorstep. We cannot feel that whatever happens outside these frameworks is none of our business.

I’m speaking about the need to re-define the areas that we separate into Our-Business and None- Of-Our-Business. These barriers are illusory. As members of a society, we cannot indefinitely limit our passion to our own private areas. Nor should we want to.

Australian businesses do have a tradition of philanthropy and social involvement. But more than that, we need to take the matter personally.

I believe that we have to ask ourselves, not - what we can get from society ?, but - what can we bring to society ?, to paraphrase President John Kennedy.

What skills, what knowledge, what passion can we bring? How can we involve ourselves so that we can influence the shape of our society? What can we do to satisfy ourselves that we are doing our utmost to provide our children with the sort of society we want them to inherit? We have to think how we can influence the nation’s future beyond the issues of the day.

As businesspeople we are well qualified to contribute so much more to the national good than just money.

The skills you learn as a businessperson are highly transferable to working with Not- For-Profit organizations. Many of these organizations are run by people with no business experience and they are weak on resources and structure.

One Not-for-Profit that I am now involved in, initially did not even have something as basic as employment contracts.

So all the things that you learn in business about good management, stability, and succession planning, all these things are easily applicable to not-for-profits.

It’s not only about giving money. It’s about doing. Embracing issues and giving them your all. Being generous with your passion and talents. Being big-hearted and wanting to give your best.

Each one of us must decide where to contribute, and how to contribute, but contribute we must. In addition to business, my involvement in the

community is through fashion, the arts, science and my Jewish heritage.

I became involved with the Jewish Museum of Australia because being Jewish and wanting that heritage to continue for my children and their children is extremely important to me.

The diversity of our backgrounds enriches our identity as Australians and encourages us to think globally.

Science is very far removed from my business in retailing, but I became involved because I am excited by the talents that exist in Australia. To be involved with the Howard Florey Institute is to be part of an extraordinary adventure. The Florey Institute, was named after the Australian Nobel Prize winning scientist who developed the mass production of penicillin.

Today the Institute is a world leader in its research on the brain and the mind. Scientists there are exploring diseases that affect 1 in 7 Australian’s - Parkinson’s, stroke, memory loss, and multiple sclerosis - trying to find treatments and cures.

Australian scientists are achieving world recognition.

Just last year, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. And Melbourne University was ranked as one of the top 20 universities in the world in recognition of its research work.

But our scientists need more than recognition. They need our backing and our promise of continued commitment.

And we need to do the same with our artists.

Art has had a very important influence on my life since childhood.

My parents in the fifties were friends with young Australian artists such as Fred Williams, John Olsen, Albert Tucker, Charles Blackman. They supported them and a succession of other artists when they had exhibitions in the few galleries that existed then.

My passion for art has become a major part of who I am today. Visual arts is at the core of how I “see” things in every aspect of my life.

I have been associated with many arts’ organizations, including the Australian Business Arts Foundation because of my belief in the need to involve business in the arts and art in business.

Last year I became Chair of ACCA, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. This has given me the opportunity to contribute in a very specific direction.

Our goal at ACCA is to spearhead the development of local and international contemporary art in Australia. And to position ACCA globally as the pre-eminent artspace in Australia.

To do this, we must promise Australian artists, those living here and overseas, that we will nurture and support them. We must promise them that Australia will not only inspire their art, but will also do everything in its power to advance it both nationally and internationally.

Business, science and the arts interest me and involve me passionately. I don’t see them as separate areas, cut off from each other. Instead they are all aspects of one multi-faceted Australian culture.

They all require creativity, imagination, and teamwork to thrive. They all require the freedom to take risks. And they all require leadership that creates a culture of trust, honesty and integrity.

What do I hope for the future of Australia?

Australia expects to prosper for decades from the sale of its natural resources to countries like China and India. But the value of these resources can fluctuate and the resources themselves are finite.

This is not a new idea, but it’s usually discussed when times are tough I believe it should be addressed now when the economy is booming

I believe that the future of our nation does not lie only in the wealth of our natural resources. I believe that Australia’s true wealth lies in its population.

If we cultivate the creative talents of each generation, then Australia’s resources will be infinite. This requires making promises of our continued support and commitment.

Our vibrancy as a culture, depends on our ability to keep our promises to our artists, scientists and creative thinkers.

Our success as business leaders depends on our ability to keep our promises to our employees, customers and the broader community.

Our strength as a nation depends on our ability to keep our promises of Freedom, Access and Opportunity to all our people, now and to future generations.

Thank you