Little-known Canadian-born businessman Geoffrey Cumming has made one of the largest single philanthropic donations in Australian history, providing $250m for the creation of a global pandemic therapeutics centre in Melbourne.
The centre is designed to invest in developing treatments that can fight infectious diseases and will be named in honour of Cumming, who currently lives in Melbourne and whose donation will be used over a 20-year-period.
The vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Duncan Maskell, said the project “would be simply unthinkable” without Cumming’s support.
“This is, to be blunt, the most extraordinary act of philanthropic generosity that I have ever known,” Maskell said at the unveiling of the Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics on Wednesday.
Philanthropy Australia said the $250m gift is the largest donation to a medical research facility in Australian history and one of the largest donations by a living person in the country.
The Australian Financial Review’s annual list of top philanthropic donors has the Paul Ramsay Foundation’s $168.9m contribution for breaking cycles of disadvantage through early childhood and school learning as the biggest single donation in the nation over the past six years. Ramsay, founder of Ramsay Health Care, left billions to his charitable foundation upon his death in 2014.
In 2017, billionaire mining magnate Andrew Forrest and wife Niccola made a $400m donation to be used for a number of causes, including eliminating deadly cancers, higher education and breakthrough research and ending modern slavery.
Cumming is chairman of a private investment firm – Karori Capital – based in New Zealand, and previously held senior positions in oil companies.
Born into a medical family in Ontario before moving to New Zealand, he has made donations to medical research in both countries, including $100m to the University of Calgary in 2014.
Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, praised Cumming for the donation, noting that the 20-year investment was unparalleled in size and longevity.
On Wednesday, Cumming said he hoped his family’s investment would help “to protect the world in the next pandemic, whether in a year, a decade or further in the future, we need to increase the resiliency of the global community.
“We’re trying to find new platforms and so much of this is like the early days of the space program when we really didn’t know where it was going.”
Jack Heath, CEO of Philanthropy Australia, said Cumming’s gift was part of a wider trend in which philanthropists make “big bets” of a magnitude designed to deliver transformational impact.
The centre will aim to attract top scientific minds from across Australia and the world and is estimated to create about 200 new long-term jobs in Melbourne’s medical precinct.
Andrews said the state government has contributed $75m over a 10-year-period for the centre, which will initially be based at the Peter Doherty Institute before being relocated to the new Australian Institute for Infectious Diseases, due to open in 2027.
“This is a long-term partnership that will be of such immense benefit to all of us, and particularly those amongst us who are vulnerable or who become vulnerable because of illness,” Andrews said.
He said the Victorian government would speak to the commonwealth about also investing in the centre.
