Speeches
Wednesday, 25 March 2026
Opening of the Refugee Communities Association of Australia National Conference
I am pleased to join you for the opening of the second national conference of the Refugee Communities Association of Australia.
To welcome so many delegates - including community leaders, advocates, policymakers, academics, service providers, and people with lived experience of seeking refuge - from across Australia to Adelaide is a genuine honour.
As Governor, I have had the privilege of engaging with many members of our refugee communities, and those encounters have shaped my understanding in important ways.
As Rod and I have visited schools across South Australia, we have met students who are refugees, and at some schools, in significant numbers.
To sit with a young person in an English class, carefully studying a text in a language not their own, and to hear their reflections on it – is inspiring.
It reveals the keen insight, determination and resilience possessed by so many refugee students.
Just last week, at Parafield Gardens High School, Rod and I met a number of student leaders from refugee and migrant backgrounds.
We were deeply encouraged, not only by their leadership skills, but by how seriously they were already thinking about their civic responsibilities: their opportunities to support their peers, and their broader communities.
I’ve no doubt these students are our society’s future leaders.
This is why the theme of this conference, ‘Empowering Refugees and Multicultural Communities Together’, matters so much.
It not peripheral to our national conversation, but central to it.
Australia is at a meaningful juncture in how it thinks about multiculturalism: not merely as a description of our demographics, but as an active commitment to belonging.
To full civic participation, not just arrival.
Gatherings like this conference - where lived experience meets policy, where voices that are too rarely heard are amplified - are how that ambition is tested, refined, and made real.
I believe that some of our best ideas are developed through actively listening to other people, and this conference assembles some of the most important voices in this space.
I thank the Refugee Communities Association of Australia for its unwavering pursuit of a stronger, more connected, more equitable Australia.
I thank the association for bringing to Adelaide a program of keynote speakers whose experience and insight will challenge and inspire this gathering in equal measure.
To the delegates: your presence here is itself a statement of purpose.
I am confident that the conversations you hold over the next two days will influence how we think about belonging, leadership, and what it truly means to be a welcoming nation.
It is my pleasure to declare the 2026 RCAA National Conference officially open.