Saatchi & Saatchi’s mission is to be revered as a hothouse of world-changing ideas that transform our client’s businesses, brands, and reputation.

So with an attitude like that, there was no chance that this was ever going to be a straight up presentation. Tonight I want to talk about subjects I’m passionate about, and that I believe can transform your businesses, brands, and reputations.

I want to demonstrate the importance of social cohesion in creating a stable operating environment for business, and I will judge the evening to have been a success if you leave here inspired to involve your business in a constructive, optimistic way with the communities where you operate.

So let us begin.

Up until about the time of the Reformation, the single greatest force for social cohesion was the Church. It crossed geographic, political and socio-economic boundaries, and its themes of love, death, and redemption transcended all barriers.

In the present day, its harder to identify the ties that bind us – call it social cohesion, national identity, a sense of community – however we define that set of characteristics which make us Australian, these days it seems easier to define it by what its not, rather than what it is.

And that’s a pity.

When I was a girl, we were much more certain about what tribe we belonged to. We learned to rub along together at the local public or parish school – Catholics fought with Protestants on the way home from school, and on Saturday mornings, nuns belted us across the fingers for not doing our piano practice. Mum murdered a lamb roast for Sunday lunch, and Dad listened to the cricket on the radio, and dreamed of being Don Bradman.

How simple it all seemed.

Sociologists such as Hugh Mackay have written a great deal about the loss of trust in our major institutions. The church, the media, government, the police, business –and even our best beloved institution – sport - have taken a hammering in recent years.

And as the old verities faded, new ones emerged – for business, the rise of corporate governance as a key organising principle for boards, economic rationalism, globalization, and the boom and bust of the dot com have all changed forever the way we think about business.

For too many Australians however the new verity is “Trust No-One.”

Now each of our important institutions lost trust for different reasons – the Church through a series of child-abuse scandals, cricket for match-fixing and bribery, rugby league for becoming a business instead of a game, politicians for just about everything, business because the social compact between employer and employee evaporated under the pressure of globalization, and so on and so on.

And in these days of instant communication, where everyone knows everything as it happens, the punters have connected the dots and decided that they can’t trust any of us, even those of us who thought we were behaving rather well.

And the question I want you to consider is “Does it Matter?” - should business care that Australians seem so out of kilter with each other and cross with any group that remotely resembles elites.

In my view, it matters a great deal.