Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] I want to thank the House for the privilege of serving on the Council of the National Library of Australia for nearly five years as this chamber's representative. I have always wanted to serve on the National Library council. I regard the Library as one of Australia's truly great institutions.

I can't remember when I first visited the National Library, but I was amazed that anyone could walk in off the street and ask for access to almost anything within its vast collection and, within a few moments, be able to hold the item in their hand. What a democracy we live in, where accessing the cultural heritage of our nation is the right of everyone. With the expansion of digitisation, we are further democratising that heritage.

In 1988 I published my first article in an academic journal as a result of research from the Library's collection and the knowledgeable librarians who helped me locate materials. In 2002 I spent a week in the manuscript collection, lost in the papers of Sir Robert Menzies and Billy McMahon, among others. It was here I first met the Library's outstanding Director-General, Marie-Louise Ayres, who was then in charge of that collection.

The Library is something of which all Australians should be proud. We're more likely to think of Olympic athletes than libraries as being world beating, but the National Library is the Emma McKeon of Australia's cultural institutions. The Library is a world leader in digitisation and digital preservation. For 25 years it has been a pioneer in creating and collecting Australia's web archive, the world's first fully searchable public web archive. The Library has been the glue that has bound Australia's culture and heritage together, collaborating with and hosting the collections of nearly a thousand partners: libraries, archives, galleries, museums, historical societies and universities, from Australia's biggest cities to our smallest towns. The Library has worked with state libraries to create the national edeposit service, a single national service allowing Australian publishers to fulfil their legal obligations, keeping Australian's published heritage safe and providing access to those items.

People often think of the Library as that grand neoclassical building on Lake Burley Griffin, but most of its users will never visit that building. Through Trove, more than 30 million people around Australia and across the world use the Library's collection each year. Trove is a key part of Australia's soft-power diplomacy, displaying our vibrant, open, democratic, pluralist culture to the world. The Library is a major digital enterprise, with a digital collection of 2.6 petabytes—literally billions of files.

During my time on the council, the Library launched a campaign to raise $30 million over 10 years to digitise the most impactful parts of that collection. The fundraising is tracking ahead of schedule. Major gifts include $1 million from Jane Hemstritch to digitise Australia's entire collection of almanacs, and $1 million from the Susan and Isaac Wakil Foundation to digitising important parts of the performing arts collection, like the papers of Dame Nellie Melba.

The Library's oral history collection has 55,000 hours of analogue material now digitised, from the voices of eminent Australians to those of the stolen generations; from those pursuing disappearing occupations like mutton birders to those in disappearing industries like the car industry. Last year I visited the National Library's oral history collection of people who lived in my community during the Spanish flu. The vast physical collection laid end to end would stretch from Canberra to Sydney.

If the War Memorial is the keeper of our military flame then surely the National Library of Australia is the keeper of our civic flame. The Library has no politics. Its job is to collect Australia, warts and all—not to judge, but to collect. It's the one institution that houses the journal of Captain Cook and the papers of Eddie Mabo; the papers of Liberal prime ministers like Sir Robert Menzies and Labor prime ministers like Andrew Fisher; the papers of Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney; the papers of heroes like Sir John Monash and the papers of the perjurer Arthur Orton. The Library is us. It's a place where the great cross-section of Australia is recorded: writers, artists, statesmen, economists, jurists, soldiers, public servants, scientists, business people and activists; the famous and the not so well known. It's up to the public to use and interpret the materials as they see fit. The Library's role is merely to preserve and collect.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge the amazing and always helpful staff at the National Library, led by Marie-Louise Ayres, as well as my colleagues on the council led by Ryan Stokes and then Brett Mason. In opening the Library in 1968, John Gorton said:

"A great library contains the diary of the human race". This library … will keep that diary up to date for us to study the world's Todays, as well as its Yesterdays, and … perhaps enable us to be the more wise in seeking to shape the world's Tomorrows.

That is what the Library has always done, and long may it continue to do so.