Thursday, 29 May 2025

Swinburne University of Technology

Jeff BOURMAN (Eastern Victoria) (10:00): Unless you are blind, you would have noticed in Queen’s Hall the Swinburne space showcase from the Swinburne University of Technology. A little while ago I went out to Swinburne to have a look at their technological stuff. Of course 99 per cent of it was over the top of my head, but from that we arranged what we see out there. In the last couple of days I have been nerding out like you would not believe. I have been talking to people far smarter than I, which is most, but one of the interesting things I have found with these very intelligent, very educated people is that they are the antithesis of what we expect from researchers, professors and things like that. They are engaging, they are personable and they have managed to even educate a dolt like me on some stuff. So far they have answered all my dumb questions without pulling faces, which is a good thing. I highly recommend that everyone does stop and have a look and have a chat. There is stuff there that is easy to understand. We have a great, big drone out there, but there is also other stuff. I was speaking to a PhD candidate on Tuesday about removing noise from radio signals from pulsars. Of course that went way over my head, but I got some of it. I would like to thank Carla Drakeford and her team and the team from Swinburne for doing this. Also I am going to give a rare shout-out to my staffer Norm Dunn, who did all the work behind the scenes. It has been really good to see, and we will have them back when we can.