Last night, we held our Leave No One Behind Australian National Dialogue at Questacon.
Here are some of the highlights from the evening…
We opened the dialogue with a couple of short videos.
Professor Graham Durant AM, Director of Questacon, opened the event by speaking about Questacon’s heavy involvement in the promotion of the Global Goals to children and families.
I then spoke about the Global Goals and the importance of the promise to Leave No One Behind. We then watched a video, telling the stories of those who felt left behind in societies around the world.
I then had the honour to launch the Leave No One Behind partnership in Australia, with a video message of support from Senator Claire Moore sent to us by the Office of Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten.
I spoke about the importance of everyone getting involved in the Leave No One Behind promise and the Global Goals. “Everyone has a skill they can contribute to the campaign. Everyone has at least 10 minutes per week up their sleeve when they can make the conscious choice to contribute to the agenda. Maybe it’s writing a post on social media; maybe it’s chatting to friends; maybe it’s sending an email to your colleagues. 1 million small actions every week towards the goals around the country begin to add up.”
We then watched another short clip on statistics on the goals.
This lead into a speech on the preliminary results of our Leave No One Behind survey.
We then watched a video interview we conducted with Senator Rachel Siewert, Greens Spokesperson for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Issues; Family Ageing, Community and Disability Services, and Mental Health.
This lead us into our panel discussion with Jessica May, Founder of Enabled Employment; Frances Crimmins, Executive Director YWCA Canberra; Hannah Gissane, Project Coordinator Equality Rights Alliance, and Douglas Amar, Human Rights Activist. During our panel discussion, we spoke about women’s empowerment, Indigenous rights, political representation of the population and the importance of the goals in achieving all of this.
The evening ended with nibbles in the Questacon foyer.
Thank you to Questacon, our political supporters at a federal and state / territory level and our panelists for such a great evening. A special thank you to our volunteers too for helping out with the event! Make sure you keep an eye out for the results of our survey in the coming weeks!
This article was originally published on the Global Goals Australia Campaign website.