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Mark Scott

Mark Scott

Vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney

Sep 17, 2026

14:15
And that last point has sparked a warning from the University of Sydney Vice Chancellor Mark Scott, as he told Sally Sara this morning.
14:23
Well, we want to see the detail of what the minister finally announces today, but, but we are concerned that we don't send the wrong message to the global market about Australia being a wonderful place for international students.
14:38
We've been so successful at attracting students from around the world.
14:42
Uh, they have studied here.
14:43
Those that come to the University of Sydney overwhelmingly go home to have an impact in their home countries, but they remain lifelong friends of Australia.
14:52
And the great beneficiary of international students in Australia is our domestic students, our Australian students, because the funding international students bring has cross-subsidized the fees paid for domestic students, has paid for infrastructure, has helped our research capacity, and lifted the global reputation of Australian universities.
15:13
So as we wait for the detail, we just need to be very sure we're not sending any sort of message that the best international students from around the world aren't welcome in Australia, don't make a powerful contribution to Australia while they're here, and, um, and we want them to be welcome and friend, befriended in this country.
15:33
Mark, in your view, um, should the provision for international students to bring their families to Australia when they study, should that be left untouched in your view?
4:41
How do you see artificial intelligence being implemented across the University of Sydney? And what do you see as the benefits, in your view, for students and staff?
4:51
Uh, well, a, a couple of things.
4:53
I mean, I mean, AI is a reality that's going to shape the workforce, um, that our students will enter for the rest of the century.
5:01
It's a technology that brings enormous power and benefit, but I recognize risk and controversy as well.
5:09
But what we're hearing from our employers is that they have an expectation that when students arrive with them in the workplace, they'll have used AI tools, they'll understand AI tools, they'll be able to critically engage with AI tools.
5:24
What we can also see is many students, the vast majority of our students, are using AI tools already.
5:31
So we see there being benefit in, um, making AI tools available to all our students, to be able to train up our students to understand the strengths, but the limits of these AI models, for our students to be able to critically engage with them, to be able to use them in an ethical way.
6:06
I-if staff and students are going to benefit from it, why, why are they holding strikes and protests, uh, against it? What does it say about the communication over this issue?
9:07
Do you want to start by giving us a bit of an overview of the recent service changes that you've had over there at Runnymede?
9:12
Yeah, so from our perspective, we knew that our rounds were too big, basically.
9:22
anecdotally, but we never had any data or anything like that to back it up.
9:27
So prior to starting this project, anecdotally, we knew the crews were rushing and they weren't taking breaks and doing whatever they could to get the work done.
9:37
But obviously, from our perspective, that's not behaviour that we can tolerate.
9:41
So we set about this project to increase the efficiency of the rounds and to sort of flush out what's the best for us as a service.
9:51
So it's all about making those rounds as efficient as possible and And one of the things that we'd found as part of this project is we'd absorbed nearly 4,000 properties without any growth.
12:45
Did you do many resident day changes as part of the optimisation?
1:42
I'd love to, as with every episode, maybe go back to the very start and the beginning and just hear a bit about the backstory of Bella and Duke as a brand and how you got to where you are today.
1:53
Sure.
1:54
Well, thanks for having me on.
1:56
Yeah, and by the way, I have a gym in my house because then I've got no excuse not to get my ass in there and do some workout.
2:03
When you get over 40, they say lifting weights is more important than anything else.
2:07
Yeah.
2:08
So yeah, it's, it's, it's, um, yeah, it's interesting.

39 MINS LATER

41:14
Um, Just quickly on that, how do you, you mentioned men, so I'm keen to get onto that point as well, but like, how would you, if you're a founder listening to this and you've got a question in your head hearing that of like, am I the bottleneck? What are some signals that maybe you can tune into to realise that? Go away, Haldi.
31:49
You must be looking ahead down the road to the companies you're investing in and asking yourself, what ultimately happens to all these companies out there right now? What is the sort of final outcome for?
32:02
Yeah, you can definitely inside a top-down call me Mr.
32:04
Exit because that's where I spend a lot of time really concerned about the industry overall, let alone the companies, obviously, that we're investing in.
32:16
And I think it's just...
32:19
I mean, it's hard to harden, you know, five minutes or less to kind of cover the, you know, the corporate finance history of the last 30 years.
32:27
But if you really look at what's happened, you know, it's been a kind of a tried tested model.
32:34
And let's take SAS as an example.

30 MINS LATER

62:28
Looking at this from an MSP point of view, where do you see the story of platform growth, platform expansion ultimately sort of headed?
RoyHOST
16:15
How did you walk out of that meeting with a clear plan of action that give you something which was different, tangible, but workable rather than the same old plan? I
16:27
think from my perspective, certainly, it started with those operating principles and that teaming agreement, because this was a foggy project.
16:38
These guys were first.
16:41
There was a clear objective.
16:43
how we were going to achieve it we stated from the beginning we've not done this before we have the you know we have the brain power we have the ability and we certainly have the system to do it but as Paul said it wasn't architected to be split so this is something we need to look at we'd obviously gone through that we'd had a high level design and approach and we were confident that that was something we absolutely could deliver but It wasn't it wasn't like a typical new deployment where I know I could quote every step of the way.
17:15
We know how it's going to work.
17:16
We know the data migration is going to work everything.

20 MINS LATER

37:10
And there's a lot of advice being given now from soccer team and the lga so there are a lot of tools and techniques and and and playbooks and and and other resource tools that are there to help built from our built from our learning and that of others you know so um hopefully others can tap into that
6:46
They could look to hurt Bayern on the counterattack.
6:49
It certainly put Bayern on the back foot, and you imagine Vincent Kompany's game plan would have been altered by the fact that they were then two goals down on aggregate.
6:57
And certainly, the, the confidence was flowing from Paris.
6:59
I think that both, uh, head coaches probably had a few tricks up their sleeve.
7:03
Kevin touched on the fact that, uh, Stanisic and Laimer actually played on opposite flanks to where we were expecting them to, uh, to be, and that was designed to try and help out the Bayern defense that were given problems with Paris' attack in the first leg.
7:16
And Zaire-Emery, I think, you know, him playing there instead of Hakimi really impressed me the way that he operated, actually, 'cause I...
7:24
You know, if Hakimi had been available, he would have played, but they didn't miss him massively across the course of the game, and it was impressive in different ways.

17 MINS LATER

24:45
Yeah

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