Farewell to Enterprize

Dear Enterprize Community

As most of you probably know, I finished in Enterprize on Friday 25^th May 2018. Its not my decision, I am not happy with it but it is a decision nonetheless. Its incumbent on us all (and in particular me) that I/we accept the decision so as to protect the fantastic organisation that Enterprize is.

I have been in Enterprize for approximately 16 months. In that time (and even though the University of Tasmania has been paying my salary), there has been no formal relationship established between the two organisations. My contract with the University is coming to a close at the end of September 2018.  We were unable to agree a way to allow me stay in Enterprize whilst I tried to negotiate an extension of the current arrangement. My primary difficulty is the family situation I find myself in. Its imperative that I get clarity on what happens beyond September so I can plan and manage whatever is necessary should there be no extension to my contract. We are where we are now as a result.

I am in the process of transitioning back to the University who have been very helpful in that regard.

I want to let it be known that I really enjoyed the 16 months in Enterprize. We have had some notable wins. We ran over 150 events between Hobart and Lanceston in that time. We have had expert international speakers like Prof. Paul Coyle and Andy Shannon impart their wisdom. We have supported a number of hackathons like UHack, GovHack and TasJam. We have nurtured local tech meetups like the .net group, the linuxusers group, the AWS group. We have supported technology training through companies like HP. We have hosted innovation events for Tasnetworks and HydroTas. We have engaged different programs in State Growth like the Digital Ready program and supported their efforts. We have 15 early stage startups between the two facilities getting ongoing support and networking for their ideas. 

In the LoRa initiative, we have built Australia's first open innovation IoT network in Launceston (using local hardware from Definium Technologies and a data back end data platform called senaps from CSIRO/Data61). 14 projects from 10 organisations presented their efforts using LoRa on May 9^th of this year. One of those companies, Bitwoke, has just been accepted into the Cicada super incubator (the first time a Tasmanian entity has achieved this) - an incubator considered to be one of the best in the world.

On the Social Enterprise side, we have engaged organisations like Code Club, Coder College and the wonderful Bob Elliott through his robotics work with children. Our new Family Code Club is going from strength to strength. On the professional side we have built fantastic connections to ACS (through the wonderful Marc Portlock and Tristan Richards), TasICT and AISA. We are running regular events jointly that are of benefit to everyone.

Even though we had no formal relationship with the University, huge efforts were made to cultivate a good relationship with them. Giant Margarita (as always) were a pleasure to work with. Robogals was an amazing event. The two winning UHack teams, Sarox and Control Freaks have been supported through Enterprize. I gave a number of talks for the UTas Peter Underwood centre, the University College and UHack promotional talks. I wrote a social entreprenership breadth module for the University. We even had a ‘stealth’ innovation retreat for the ICT school in the Evercreech centre. Just recently we have formally invited the Vice Chancellors Leadsership award team to have a permanent presence in Enterprize Hobart and we were about to run the first open access Entreprenership lecture series in conjunction with the University in Enterprize.

Over the next couple of weeks a number of great events are planned. The second innovation Isle event, scheduled for the 5^th June is going ahead. This is a forum where the big energy companies and the small innovative clean energy startups are coming together to discuss how to work together. The glue to all of this is Energylab, essentially a startup fund, looking to establish themselves in Tasmania. Following this, the plan is to run an Energy Hackathon the last week in June to see can we galvanise some real collaborations and investment in this crucially important domain. A domain that Tasmania has an opportunity to be a world leader in.

Myriad games are also planning a games Hackathon in the next few months and Enterprize is establishing itself as a place where the gaming industry is really supported in Tasmania.

We have submitted a number of grants to support Enterprize activity going forward. Kath was recently successful in the building the Tasmanian population submission and we should shortly know if we are successful in the Building Better Regions grant (which was submitted in December 2017).

Over the last year we managed a number of significant staff changes together with a move to a new premises in Hobart. All of this was done with very limited resources, lots of people power and immense goodwill.

And all through this, we have a built a strong community of people (I think of Kath, Joe, James, Diana, Bruno, Tristan, Marc, Tim, Pablo, Nick, Kobi, Kevin, Peter, Paul, Kristy, Ian, Georgie, forgive me if I have forgotten anyone) who are supporting one another when it is most needed - that very early stage when entrepreneurs decide to actually bring their ideas into the real world.

And to this community, I say thank you. I count you all as my friends. I really hope we can stay in touch. I am always a phone call or an email away if I can help in any way.

I think we can collectively be very proud!

Best wishes for the future

Gary

P.S  to that end, I assume I can still use the free co-working space?

Pro-Life Pains

Its a difficult time to be pro-life in Ireland right now.

I have passed what I believe is the half way point (approximately!) of my life. I am 51 years of age. I feel very privileged to be alive and to have been born in a country where abortion was once never considered an option even in the most challenging circumstances.

We have a referendum on the 25^th of this month where Irish people will vote on whether to remove the right to life of the unborn from our constitution. In any other situation or document or decision where the right to life is enshrined, this would be considered to be a grave and truly regressive decision to make. Think of how we might feel if the death penalty was brought back in Ireland.

It is not in this case. Many people believe that abortion facilities are necessary (because they are available in other jurisdictions) and that its actually a simple matter of giving a woman a choice about whether her unborn baby lives or dies.

I disagree with this position completely and utterly.

Because of this stance I have been accused of the following (from people I once considered friends):

(1) I am now a middle aged man and so my opinion is out of date and irrelevant

(2) I am heartless and cold and lacking in empathy and compassion

(3) I am a woman hater and a misogynist perpetuating the subordination of women

(4) My scientific understanding is flawed and I make it up as I go along

I wish to respond to these accusations because many people I know, who feel the same way as I do, experience the same.

I am certainly middle aged. Of that there is no doubt. Over the 50 years or so on the planet I have come to appreciate both how wonderful life is (especially in the presence of children) but how capable humanity is of doing the most horrific acts. Over the last century genocide was committed a number of times by peoples and countries. Millions lost their lives. Human beings have designed and manufactured weapons that have been used on innocent people causing unimaginable suffering and no-one has been held accountable. Nothing however, in all of history including terrible acts of nature, has come close to the impact of abortion on humanity. Since the 1970’s over 1.2 billion children have been killed through abortion. That is approximately one fifth of the worlds current population. Or the entire population of China, or almost twice the population of Europe. Less people lived on the planet in the late 1800's. My 50 years or so on the planet coincides with this atrocity. I am thus in the lucky 4 fifths. I contend that my middle aged perspective matters.

I admit that at times I do lack compassion and empathy. That seems to go with being male. I cannot ever truly understand what it means to bear a child or have one growing inside of me. What I can say though, as a man, is that if its my child in the womb then I want a say in that child's life. I want to protect the child and the child's mum. I want to be there to help and support the mother and the child through the early stages of the child's growth. Any man that wants to abandon that responsibility or duty is not a man or has not worked out what it means to be a man. The fact that I deeply care for both the woman and the child growing inside does not mean I lack empathy or compassion. The fact that I care for both should mean something beyond an accusation like this.

I agree that women have been badly treated by men, particularly over the last century. There is no doubt that men dominated and abused their position of influence and power and this has led to deep resentment and anger from women in this current generation. However, I personally have never abused women. I might have had a few ill-judged relationships when I was younger (whilst working it all out) but by and large I have respected women and have grown in awe of them as I have got older. I am constantly amazed by my female friends with their strength of character, their compassion, their emotional intelligence and their patience with men like me. There is no doubt in my mind that the stronger sex is the female and that is why they can bear children and we can’t!

I have spent a long time in University (13 years in total). Although I am not a practicing medical doctor, (I am a real doctor;)), I have read (and continue to read) as much medical information as anyone else. I understand cellular biological mechanisms (biomedical engineering), central and peripheral nervous systems (neuroscience), cardiology and neurology. I have designed and built biomedical devices able to read and interpret challenging electrical signals in the body like the ECG and the EEG. I have been accused of not knowing what I am talking about when it comes to the science of life.

One of the classic pro-abortion arguments for example is that an abortion is simply the removal of some excess cells from the woman’s body - nothing more. The truth is that we are all just a bunch of cells evidenced by how our body behaves when we develop cancer for example. In every one of those cells is the blueprint (unique and distinct from the parents) of a new human being whose DNA has never been replicated in the past and will most likely never be replicated again.

Another argument for abortion is that a foetus is not viable and so cannot be considered to have the same rights as other human beings. This is probably the weakness argument on the pro-abortion side. Human beings have evolved as mammals which essentially means we nurture our young. We are also placenta based mammals so that the growing children in the womb are afforded the maximum protection in the earliest stages of their lives. There is no such thing as a viable mammalian baby once it leaves the womb. It requires nurturing or it will die. It is still as dependent on the mother (and now the father) as it was when it was growing in the womb.

In fact science tells us that there is virtually no difference between a baby in its first few weeks leaving the womb to those last few weeks in the womb. And yet somehow, people have convinced themselves that the baby can be killed before its born simply as a matter of choice.

Science is overwhelmingly on the side of pro-life. Even just the emergence of state of art 4D ultrasonic imaging systems are revealing just how developed an unborn child is a few weeks after the heart starts beating. There is simply no denying anymore that abortion means killing a human being at its most vulnerable stage of development even well inside the first trimester.

So what is this telling us?

Abortion is not a solution to anything - its not even a treatment - its a last resort medical procedure if the pregnancy endangers the mother.

A chilling historical fact is that during the Roman Empire, infanticide was acceptable when a child was less than 1 years old. One of the reasons it was allowed was because the back street methods used to abort children (poisons etc) were too dangerous for the mother. It also allowed soldiers who were often away from the home, decide whether they wanted to keep the child or not.

I think we can all agree that this original ‘abortion’ solution is barbaric.

Now consider abortion today. We now have 'safe' ways to kill the unborn child without harming the mother (most of the time). We introduce the 'service' as something you can choose. The abortion regime gripping the world today is now the modern equivalent of that of ancient Rome. 

We have created a society that believes it is OK to kill a growing child rather than take responsibility for its life.

What needs to be done is to create a society where a pregnancy is not a crisis. We need to create systems and supports which make it easy to be able to bring the baby safely into the world. We do not have that now. Abortion is seen as a necessary option rather than taking responsibility for the life of the unborn child. Essentially we have made it really difficult to face the responsibility of bringing children into the world.

This is the heart of the problem.

Just protecting the unborn is not enough. We need to collectively fight for the rights of children all the way through their lives so that women know there is support for them at every stage.

It really saddens me that the issue is so divisive. This must have been the way that the Roe-Wade case played out in the seventies in America. Since then over 60 million abortions are performed annually across the planet.

The vast majority (high 90 percentile) are abortions of children that are perfectly healthy and whose mother is perfectly healthy. They have nothing to do with rape, incest or fatal foetal abnormality. They happen because those growing babies have no rights whatsoever. That is why they need protection.

Our government wants to bring in this abortion regime into Ireland knowing full well what will happen. Abortion on demand for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Then there will be the challenging borderline cases between 12 and 13 weeks. Then there will be the sensational stories where the lack of an abortion caused pain and misery to the woman (no mention of the innocent child in these stories) and then there will be more laws etc and then the final bubble will burst - Ireland will ‘modernise’ and be like every other abortion on demand regime on the planet. Abortion numbers will steadily grow. Innocent lives will be lost. A culture of death and destruction of the most vulnerable human beings alive will prevail.

And in my opinion Ireland will lose its soul.