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The gender balance among Order of Australia recipients was improving, he said, but the system needed to better represent women. He, of course, is part of the system in that he approves the awards - but he can only approve those names which are recommended to him in the first place.
Today, we see how much progress has been made - and how much progress remains to be made.
In this year's Queen's Birthday Honours list, women received 416 awards (44 per cent). This is the highest proportion since the the Australian honours system was introduced in 1975. The proportion of non-white people who are honoured is much harder to work out because their backgrounds aren't obvious from a scrutiny of the list.
But 44 per cent is progress. It is not the 51 per cent of the population made up of women and girls but it's moving in the right direction.
In a way, though, simply getting the honours list in balance dodges the issue. The problem is not so much that women or Indigenous people are underrepresented when it comes to awards. It is that they are underrepresented in the roles where awards are won.
The leaders of Australian universities, for example, are nearly three times more likely to be men than women.
According to an academic at Victoria University, "Of 37 public university chancellors, just 10 are women (27 per cent) and 27 (73 per cent) are men. It's exactly the same for vice-chancellors: 10 are women and 27 are men.
"Together, this means men hold 54 of the 74 top jobs in Australian higher education."
Leaders of universities are just the types of people to get gongs, so male overrepresentation there might lead to more men than women getting the prized letters after their names.
The deeper problem than the balance of the honours list is that women and Indigenous people are underrepresented at the top of society. That is the problem which really needs addressing.
Fewer white men at the top, and more women and Indigenous people there, would mean the balance of the honours list looked more like a good representation of society.
Talent, after all, is divided equally. There is no difference of innate ability by gender or skin colour. If the people at the top tend to be white men, that is a social failure - and an economic failure because it means that the full talents of women and Indigenous people are not being used.
Our economy needs all the skill it can get so a failure to promote women and Indigenous people is a failure to use all the assets we have. It's a waste.
Some argue that the underrepresentation of women at the top is because women bear children and that means a gap in careers. But men could do more.
Getting more women to the top might mean men shouldering more of the burden at home. Focusing only on the balance of the honours list might distract us from the harder question of the balance in top jobs.
There is one way in which the balance of the honours list matters. Those honoured are role models. If young Aboriginal girls were to see a top scientist they could identify with, a spark of ambition and imagination might flare to produce tomorrow's leader - and tomorrow's Companion of the Order of Australia.
The deeper problem is that women and Indigenous people are underrepresented at the top of society.