TRANSCRIPT - SPEECH- NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DRAMATIC ART GRADUATION - FRIDAY, 1 MAY 2026
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
SPEECH
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DRAMATIC ART (NIDA) GRADUATION CEREMONY
FRIDAY, 1 MAY 2026
MINISTER FOR THE ARTS, TONY BURKE: Thanks so much to Catherine West, Liz Hughes, Sigrid Thornton and Sarah Snook. Of course, I want to acknowledge more than anyone else, the beautiful Welcome to Country from Aunty Lola. I’ve come straight from the airport so I wasn’t here from the start, but I just would like to say, we go to so many events where we are welcomed, and you think of the history, and you think of all the words that can be said and there is nothing more generous than the word welcome. I certainly hope – and things always move more slowly than they should – but I certainly hope we get to a point where, as a nation we respond to those welcomes with the same level of generosity with which they’re offered.
Liz referred to my strong connection to NIDA. It’s not all good. When I was at school, I would use my paper round money to go to theatre productions. I loved them. What’s now Belvoir used to be the old Nimrod. The Sydney Theatre Company hadn’t moved into the wharf yet. A series of small production houses that were around Sydney, I’d save up my paper round money and go and see live theatre. I loved it. So, in year 11, you finally get to the careers advisor and they would say, well what do you want to do? I said, I want to be a theatre director. The careers advisor lies to me. He says, ‘oh, there’s only acting courses’. I said no, I don’t want to be an actor, I want to be a director. He says ‘no, there’s no course, but we think you’d be good at law, engineering or medicine’.
So, I went off on my merry way and through accidents in life I ended up turning up to NIDA for the first time in my life in 2013 as Australia’s Minister for the Arts. And I look on the wall and there’s a director’s course. And I said, how long have you had that going? And they said, oh, from the start. Is there anyone graduating today from the director’s course? Yeah, I’ve got issues. I’m told I will get over it, but we are not at that point yet.
I’ve found my way through directing a low-rating programme that is aired on the ABC24 channel between 2 and 3 o’clock from Parliament House on sitting days. It’s called Question Time, it’s half scripted, half improv. But when we meet down there on what you might know as the set of Total Control, we are now dealing with a time that what you’re trained to do has never been more important. Never been more important, never been more essential.
If you think of how people interact and what algorithms actually do at their base level, the whole concept of an algorithm is to return to you what you have offered up about yourself. The interactions become more and more similar and often more and more extreme versions of views or interests that you’ve already input. What that means right now is the world is losing its capacity for people to walk in someone else’s shoes. There has never been a time where the natural ways that we learn empathy fail to be served up to us automatically.
In an age of broadcasting, you’d flick the channels, all different things were being served up to you all the time. They didn’t know who you already were. Which means it is becoming increasingly common, not just in Australia, but all around the world, for people to be connected to more and more people who are similar to them and to understand less and less about experiences that are not their own. It’s a really dangerous path, but it’s global.
You look at how people are interacting in the world, and it’s part of the reason that the world is becoming angrier and less kind. There is no stronger counter to that than what you are trained in. You are trained in curiosity; you are trained in empathy. You are the literal embodiment of walking in someone else’s shoes. You’re the reason, no matter which part of the art form you’ve been trained in, whether it’s making sure that the design creates the scene, that it creates the intensity. Whether it’s the costume and clothing. Whether it immediately gives us a sense of what’s behind somebody. Whether you’re trained to bring it together and to challenge the rest of the system as a director, or whether you are, in the most literal sense, trained to inhabit someone else. We need people to understand how other people feel. We need, as a world and as a nation, for people to be presented not just with, this is what someone is like who is different to you, but this is how they feel. This is how they cry, this is how they hope, this is how they love, this is how they soar, this is how they break.
I can’t think of any policy lever that we have available to us as a government that comes close to delivering empathy the way each and every one of you can. There will be times, as happens in every career, where you hit a wall. There’ll be times where you get frustrated, there’ll be times when you wonder, times when you question, but please, never have a moment when you cease to be curious. Never have a moment where you seek to, not simply show empathy, but to teach empathy. To let people know what the person who they might not meet is like, and why the person who they might never meet, the part of Australia or the world they might never know, the emotions they themselves might never feel, to know how it is valid and how that human connection is necessary.
The arts have always been phenomenally important. The performing arts have always been a great love of mine, and their history is long and deep and exists on this country with performances that date all the way back to the stories of the first sunrise. You were built, building here in Australia, on the richest traditions there are. You have been trained at the best. Let everything that you’ve learnt there guide that gift of empathy, because the world has never needed you more than it does right now.
ENDS