The Estonian National Museum finally has a home of its own.

With the completion of this building, our debt to those individuals who cared deeply about the preservation of Estonian culture and language and who built a foundation for our independence has been repaid.

More than 100 years ago, vision and bold ideas from people like Jakob Hurt, Oskar Kallas, Villem Reiman and Jaan Tõnisson, and Kristjan Raud and Matthias Johann Eise paved Estonia's way to statehood. Alongside them stand countless legions of Estonians whose efforts to collect artefacts and folklore, much of it on a volunteer basis, helped furnish the museum with content.

The Estonian National Museum's new home is also a debt of gratitude to those who kept Estonia alive in darker, more difficult times and nurtured our hopes. In spite of the vagaries of history and others' dark designs on Estonia, we did not forsake our ideals and our determination.

I address this assembly today for my tenth and last time. The first time I spoke here I addressed climate change and conflict, refugees, and – what was apparently a first at the General Assembly – cyber attacks as the continuation of policy by other means. So the issues are largely the same, only the urgency we sense has ratcheted up.

Estonia welcomes the unique initiative by the Secretary-General of the United Nations that for the very first time allows us, the entire international community, to discuss refugee and migration issues in a single UN-led framework.

Migration is as old as mankind. It will never stop, but we do need to manage it properly. During the last fifteen years, the number of international migrants and refugees worldwide, reaching 244 million in 2015, has grown at faster rate than the world's population.

Honourable members of the Riigikogu,

In opening your new working year I begin where I left off in this very chamber in April 2009, at the session dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the Constituent Assembly – by calling on you to bolster our parliamentarianism every single day, since there can never be such a thing as too much of a sense of responsibility or statesmanship.

Today we mark a significant event: we have been free again for a quarter of a century. Free as a people and as a state.

When we look back at the Estonian people's past, we see a prevailing undercurrent in the promotion of our self-awareness and culture.

During the last few years, all of us have probably felt that the security situation surrounding us is very different than before.

First, I would like to invite you to make a conceptual trip from Lahti across the Gulf of Finland to the southeast corner of Estonia, where the village of Obinitsa with fewer than 150 people, is located directly next to the Russian border. Yet, last year, this old seto village was the cultural capital of millions of Finno-Ugric peoples. This shows how something small can actually be something great.

When we speak of power in military and security terms in the digital world, we invariably recognize that this world itself began in the military research realm. Be it Alan Turing during the Second World War, working on decrypting Enigma or the origins of the web in DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, we recognize that like with so many technological innovations, the digital world originated in the defense establishment.