MINISTER FOR THE ARTS, TONY BURKE: To Aunty Violet, first of all thank you so much for the welcome. Can we never forget what a generous word welcome is. There's never been a time until recently that anyone has heard the word welcome and used it as a cause for anger. Of all the things that could be said, it is the most generous thing and we hear it again and again. Aunty Violet, can I just say, I think on behalf of us all, we hope as a nation over time we can always learn to show the same sort of generosity you've shown to us today. Thank you Aunty Violet.

To Patrick for the phenomenal work that you do as CEO, and to Annette Shun Wah. It’s pretty special to have somebody chairing the National Film and Sound Archive Board, who is in the National Film and Sound Archive. You and your board do an absolutely phenomenal job, so thank you for that. To Angie Bell, the Shadow Minister for the Arts, to the Arts Envoy, Susan Templeman, as well as about 20 other members of Parliament who are here.

I want to start by explaining a problem that we are trying to resolve and how this is a big part to an answer that. We have two sorts of institutions in the arts portfolio. We have some that are dedicated to simply display and storytelling, and others where their job is to preserve. We've got our art galleries or our museums, where they're about presenting new work and presenting stories and telling that, and telling it in new ways. Then we also have a number of archives. We have, the National Library, we have the National Film and Sound Archive, and we have the Australian Archives.

Now, for those ones that are archives, technology has created a million wonderful opportunities. Now you can access a whole lot of the National Film and Sound Archives collection from home. You never used to be able to do that. You can now get onto Trove at the National Library. The other day I typed the name of my great, great grandparents who fled here from Ireland into the Trove search engine, and up immediately comes the newspaper local articles in Tumut when they died. The capacity to search the collection is beyond what it's ever been.

But technology has also brought us two problems, and they are that there are things we've missed. We’ve missed some of the physical and we've missed some of the digital. The physical, for example, I was in government under Kevin and Julia. So, you could sign a letter, it’d go in an envelope, it'd be sent off, and then if it went to another Minister, it would end up in the National Archives as a physical thing. What happens now, we sign, it goes to another part of the office, it's scanned and then the original is shredded. Which means, for example, for the previous Morrison government, I asked the National Archives, ‘do we have any physical things from the Morrison government’ – and we're not sure that we do. That concept of the tangible nature of history and making sure that we hang on to it, is one of the big problems we're wrestling with at the moment with our collecting institutions.

The other challenge that we've got is for things that only live in the digital world, so there's never the physical. How do we make sure we capture them? Tonight's work is just such a wonderful part of that. You used to use the TV ratings, and so the Film and Sound Archive would basically go through and randomly record news programs for different channels. They would record different episodes, so you wouldn't get every episode of a show, but you'd get a representative sample constantly being recorded. But there are more people watching a whole lot of the content creators who are represented here tonight than are watching a whole lot of the things that we automatically would be recording.

So, tonight is a wonderful attempt from the National Film and Sound Archive to wrestle with that. Because effectively what a good archive is able to do, is for people to be able to go there and work out what it felt like to live at that time. What made people laugh, what made people think, what made people reflect, what challenged people, what entertained people, what did it feel like to live now. Unless this is captured, we won’t know.

I'd read the brief and I was told coming up there would be 10 Australian YouTube creators. I've just glanced around the room and I've realised I follow some of you. Tash Sultana, I've got one of the vinyls in my office and I've been to gigs. But when did I first watch Tash Sultana perform? It was on YouTube, a video of Tash Sultana performing in their bedroom with a loop pedal. I own three loop pedals as a result of that video and to this day have still not done anything particularly constructive about it.

But every time I then went to a Tash Sultana gig, you'd realise straight away the stage was being set up as though it were that room bringing back that original memory because that was the moment where people realised we have a genius here. It was someone performing to an audience at that moment of just themselves in the room and that then being spread through YouTube and people realising the extraordinary nature of the talent that was in front of us.

I spend more time with music, lots of people in this building get into a really good exercise regime, but I've always felt better thanks to Nat Tran because as long as I have a texta I have a way to draw fake abs. I have been on the communitychannel list for a very, very long time watching really incredible humour that has come from a part of Sydney, not far from my home. I’ve also seen all of these wonderful interactions of Natalie Tran challenging Natalie Tran and the arguments back and forth of different characters, which bring out lines and concepts that are in your everyday life that you have never realised the humour or the ridiculousness of what surrounds you.

I give those as two examples because they were the first two signs that I had a look at, but just to say that the impact ricochets all around Australia and all around the world. I know from every time I hear Aunty Violet talk, there are so many stories, but a story is always in some way anchored in place. When Aunty Violet gave that Welcome to Country, it was very much I stand here, that concept of place and where the stories come from. It's easy to think of YouTube as being out in cyberspace, but every one of these stories tells a part of Australia, every one of these stories is anchored in part here. Even though there's been a significant global audience, this is still fundamentally part of the Australian story.

I couldn't be happier with the work that the National Film and Sound Archives are doing. This will be not just the beginning of something for Australia, but I think it's going to affect the way collecting institutions around the world operate. I want to thank YouTube for being so willing to be part of this. You can't have that sort of reach without being part of the story of the country, and we are tremendously lucky that YouTube and the National Film and Sound Archive have engaged in this way. We are lucky to have so many Australians who have loved to engage with the content from their own country. We are truly, truly blessed to just have such extraordinary creators on the absolute cutting edge, not picking a genre, but just picking themselves and coming out with something that never would have been created otherwise.

Thank you for what you do, thank you for what you share, and thank you for making sure it’s preserved.