Alumni win inaugural awards
Dr Riady, right, receives his award from Australia's Ambassador to Indonesia, Mr Bill Farmer.
International business leader, banker and philanthropist Dr James Riady was one of two La Trobe University alumni who took out prizes at the recent inaugural Indonesian Australian Alumni Awards held by the Australian Government in Jakarta.
Dr Riady, recipient of an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from La Trobe in September 2007, won the Australian Alumni Award for Entrepreneurship which recognises innovative and entrepreneurial business people in Indonesia.
Dr Makmur Sunusi – Director General of Social Services and Rehabilitation in the Ministry of Social Affairs and a lecturer at the Department of Social Welfare at the University of Indonesia – who holds Masters and Doctorate degrees in social work from La Trobe University received a special Inspiration Award. Dr Sunusi was recognised for his influence on social welfare development in Indonesia.
La Trobe University nominated both men for the awards, which were presented by Australian Education International, the global arm of the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The awards recognise outstanding talent, achievements and contributions made to Indonesia by the 30,000 Indonesians who have studied in Australia.
Dr James Riady is Deputy Chairman of the Lippo Group which includes twenty listed companies in Asia as well as other businesses and partnerships in America and Europe.
He is also Chairman of AIG Life, Jakarta, Deputy Head of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a former diplomat and ambassador for Indonesia, and a former non-political member of MPR (Indonesia's top Peoples' Consultative Body).
His Lippo Group employs some 35,000 people and generates more than US $2.5 billion in annual revenue from ventures which include a network of banks and financial services – the original core business set up by Dr Riady's father, Mochtar Riady, in the 1960s – and today extends into a wide range of areas from property development, department stores and insurance to IT , multi-media, healthcare, hotels and tourism development.
Dr Riady is founder and chair of a non-profit education foundation which oversees three universities and eighteen schools, a teacher training college that provides scholarships to its 400 students, and aims eventually to establish 1,000 schools in the poorest parts of Indonesia.
Dr Riady has also set up Indonesia's largest nongovernment hospital group, four hospitals and a specialist clinic with plans for nine more hospitals, part of a US $500 million expansion to create more than 4,000 new healthcare jobs in Indonesia.
He says a milestone next year, for his Group and Indonesia, will be a new comprehensive cancer centre named after his father, the first such private centre in Indonesia. It will be assisted in its work by the Mochtar Riady Institute for Nanotechnology, a cancer research institute established in 2006.
Dr Sunusi, right, accepts his award.
Dr Makmur Sunusi directs the Indonesian Government's efforts to fight poverty, protect children and people with disabilities, the elderly and those with HIV Aids and narcotic problems, in order to strengthen families and communities across the country's thirty-three provinces.
An Indonesian delegate to the UN High Commission on Human Rights, Dr Sunusi has been recognised by the President of Indonesia for his work with vulnerable children.
Indonesia has 68,532 orphanages and thirty-eight high-level institutions under the care of his Ministry. He has formulated a new child adoption policy to prevent international misuse of adoption and a program to monitor all orphanages to help stop exploitation of children.
His programs for street children have set up 'open houses' in twelve cities, funded by the Asian Development Bank. After the 2004 tsunami, Dr Sunusi issued an emergency policy to prevent trafficking of child victims and set up fiftyfour children's centres for child victims in Aceh.
At his initiative, a memorandum of understanding has been signed between La Trobe University and the Indonesian Ministry of Social Affairs, to deliver social work higher degrees and research for the Ministry and Indonesia.