G'Day USA

The G'day USA conference in New York during the week of Australia Day, titled ‘The New Asian Tiger’ show cased Australia’s Global Citizenship in Science. Moderated by The Hon. Richard Armitage, former US Deputy Secretary of State, the panellists included the President, CEO & Chairman of the Board of Dow Chemical, an Aussie, Mr Andrew Liveris and The Hon Alexander Downer, MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs, together with the VP of Merck, and a couple of Aussie Bankers. However, the best of the talks by far was by Prof Gaensler, (http://scienceschool.usyd.edu.au/~bmg/) who is in charge of the new mega Telescope, the US is planning to pay for and hopefully build, in Western Australia (Like the 'Dish' at Parks, but 10,000's of times bigger) – a really compelling topic and speaker.

Lunch was with the NSW DSRD representatives and I sat next to Loftus Harris, the Director General (whom I had done some work for on his ‘Red Tape’ committee and felt I deserved a free lunch) and Stephen Meller, VP of Procter & Gamble (an AusBiotech member, who is very interested in setting up Internships for Australians in the USA). The evening wine tasting was organised by Advance - Global Australian Professionals (http://www.advance.org/). With over 1 million Australians living aboard, many of whom would like to return, this is the networking organization, often acting as a match maker for Australian companies to attract returning Aussies or vice versa.