 I think you've all shown extraordinary stamina and it's a real sign of the enthusiasm, the passion and the seriousness of this conference that we've... I think we had about a 13 hour day here yesterday and we're moving towards a 5.30 finish today. So this certainly isn't what you'd call gentlemen's hours. It's a really, really serious conference and I'm really, really grateful for that. So this final session is on shaping the narrative and it may seem strange at one level that we've left this session for the very end because in some ways in this post-truth era the narrative is actually more important than ever in determining real policy outcomes. But this session is about shaping the narrative on women and national security, media portrayals of women in national security and national security leadership. And of course we're defining national security broadly throughout this conference. Our three speakers, our three panellists are all very accomplished journalists, recognisable names for many of us and it's a real pleasure to have them here and particularly given the demands on working journalists and given what time of day it is probably close to deadline for some of you. We're particularly fortunate to have you here. So I'll introduce speakers further in a moment but just for those of you who maybe aren't so familiar with our speakers, we have here Rachel Olding in the centre. Rachel is a reporter with the Sydney Morning Herald and covers crime. But with a focus increasingly on terrorism and violent extremism. So there's a real national security edge to Rachel's experience and perspectives from Sydney. We have David Rowe. David is again with Fairfax as indeed are all three of our panellists and we're really grateful to Fairfax for being our media partner today. David has focused in recent years on defence, foreign affairs and national security for the age and the Sydney Morning Herald and has a long career in journalism before that. And among other things David was part of the team that won a Walkley Award in 2015 for a set of stories, series of stories on the cash for people smugglers affair. And Laura Tingle and I'm really delighted that Laura could join us at very short notice. It's particularly gracious of you Laura. Virginia house ago was to be with us but unfortunately could not be for personal reasons and Laura has very kindly stepped in. Laura is the political editor of the financial review and as I've just recalled has written among other things two quarterly essays including one on political amnesia in the Australian bureaucracy and the Australian system. I think there's one due on security amnesia Laura because some lessons are not learned easily. So with that I'm going to take a seat and invite the panellists each to speak for just a few minutes. Perhaps beginning with Rachel and then David and then Laura on some of their own perspectives on the narrative, on shaping the narrative, the role and perceptions of women in national security. And then I'm going to moderate a conversation with our three panellists and we hope to hear your perspectives as well. So I'll invite Rachel to maybe pick off. Thanks Rory. So I do a lot of kind of on the ground reporting in the national security sphere in terms of terrorism and crime and going out in Sydney and talking to a lot of extremists and terrorists and criminals and cops and that sort of thing. So I thought I might make some observations from that point of view because my feeling is that reporting on women in political and leadership positions has come a long way. We might not be there yet. You still see some sort of terrible stories about what shoes women are wearing and that kind of thing. But in the reporting that I do on the ground, I think we're still quite far behind in terms of some of the gender cliches and stereotypes that get used when we're reporting on women in the kind of less legitimate political spheres. So women involved in extremism and terrorism and fighting extremism and even in rebuilding post-conflict societies that kind of more on the ground roles that women can play. I think that our reporting of women that get involved in extremism and terrorism is still quite cliched. It's the stories of, oh, but she liked to make up and wearing her hair out. How is she now a terrorist? Or a very overused narrative is women going over to fight with ISIS or a terrorist group for the sake of love. They're going over there as a jihadi bride or because their husband's gone over there or something like that. There's still those really kind of archetypal gender portrayals in that type of reporting that I do quite a lot of. And the reality, I guess, is that females actually play quite an active role or have played quite an active role in terrorism and extremism and also in fighting extremism. There are a lot of great stories to be told that we might not be telling enough of things like the female Kurdish fighters or women's role in fighting Islamophobia because women are really leading the fight against Islamophobia in Australia, I think. And the only explanation that I can possibly come up with for why some of those more antiquated portrayals are still happening is because we're normal people like anyone else. Newsrooms aren't hermetically sealed against the prejudices that kind of lie beneath the surface in everyday life in Australia. The media plays a really important and fantastic role in breaking down some of those stereotypes, but we're just normal people that fall into those stereotypes as well. Before we go to David, I might ask you one question which goes to policy because of course a lot of our colleagues in the room here work in policy or operations on national security. And I wonder if you would have a view on the implications of what you've said for policy. I mean, there's a clear message there, but what does it mean for the effectiveness of policy? Well, it's a missed opportunity if we're not accurately or fairly or even deeply portraying why females are drawn to extremism and terrorism groups, then you're missing an opportunity to stop that from happening. And that's even I think used as a bit of a recruitment tool for some extremist groups. They prey on the way that women are unfairly portrayed or overlooked. I think it's just a big missed opportunity to try and stop these things from happening if we're not making a good effort to understand why it's happening and portray what is happening. Thank you. I think that's really useful. David, I'll go to you and one of the observations we've had today and yesterday, of course, as you know, you've been here for much of the conferences. We probably could have a few more men in the room and a few more, I guess, not only male perspectives, but also male reflections on the issues we've discussed here. It'd be interesting to hear some thoughts from your career in journalism and your observations about the narrative. Thanks, Rory. That's ironic because I've been asking women at the conference what I should say when I get up here this afternoon. One person I was talking to earlier this morning made the observation that when we report on women in the military, invariably something has gone wrong and Elizabeth Broderick is holding an inquiry into it. And so they got me thinking, well, I can't deny that there is some truth to that. I googled my own name, which is usually almost never a good idea, but I googled my own name with defence and women. And sure enough, the first story that came up was a story I wrote about six months ago about speculating on the possibility that Catherine Campbell would become the next secretary of the defence department, which the angle of the story being that that would give women a clean sweep across defence and foreign affairs in terms of ministers and secretaries. And pretty much everything after that on the first page on Google was indeed stories about the Jedi Council, sex scandal and related abuse things. So trying never to shy away from self-reflection, I thought, well, typically we do seem to confine ourselves too much to reporting on the almost twee, I'm borrowing Rachel's word there, but almost twee success stories along the lines of here we have the first woman to do X in the military or in defence or the national security area. And then at the other extreme we have the negative, the bad stories when things are going wrong. I don't think we can ever stop doing either of those stories because, well, certainly when things are going wrong, that is primarily when journalists are of the most use. Bad news is actually the real news because if everything's fine then it doesn't need reporting on. But we can't hold back for a moment on writing the reporting on the bad news that's going on within defence and national security. And equally until we reach the day that a woman in a particular position is no longer a remarkable thing, in which case then we've solved all of our problems and it's no longer an issue to write about. It is unquestionably useful to make affirmative decisions about reporting on successes that women are having in national security and in reaching senior positions and illustrating the fact that they are holding those sort of role model positions. But all of that said, I'm hoping that there is, and this is more of a question at this stage than something I haven't answered to, but there is some space in between I think where we can report generally on the role that women are playing in national security and defence. I worry that if we're not doing that then, and this goes to what Mark Binskin was saying this morning, I think there is a risk that the general public is seeing the presence of women and the promotion of higher numbers of women in defence as being equality and diversity driven as a thing in itself rather than a capability thing. And I think defence is absolutely right to see this as a capability thing. Most people don't understand just how much the nature of war fighting has changed in the last generation or two. They still think that war fighting is primarily large numbers of men facing each other across a battlefield in whatever form that battlefield takes. Nowadays of course it's counterinsurgency, it's cyber, it's unmanned system or autonomous systems, it's electronic warfare, it's all of these things where the traditional physical size and strength is less of an issue. And I think what we can do as journalists is probably better explain to our readers why women in defence are actually a capability enhancer rather than femaleness being a sort of handicap that defence needs to overcome in order to boost the number of women serving as an end in itself. Those are my preliminary observations. I'll come back to you a bit later on as well to all of you about your own experiences as journalists I guess and maybe the experience of the way in which people reporting on these issues might be perceived or treated differently. But we'll come back to that. Laura, I wanted to go to you. Well I'm going to make a really superficial joke to start with which is about images and a reverse experience which was in January I got to interview somebody who's regarded as the world's greatest tenor. His name is Jonas Kaufman and he's also known as the world's hottest tenor. And this was not my normal beat and I was in a complete state about oh my god how do I sort of take this, this is the world's greatest tenor. So I asked him all these very serious questions about Wagner and everything. And he gave me a piece up, you know, not my normal area of expertise, got back, the editor sent back the page proofs and the headline said something about war. And there were all these references to how hot Jonas Kaufman was which I mostly scrubbed out. But it was sort of an interesting reverse of the tables where all these blokes in the Sydney newsroom had made references to the fact he was really hot. And, you know, it cut out references to the fact he could actually sing quite well. So it was sort of an interesting experience. And the serious point about this is I suppose taking on something of what David's saying, I mean my interest in day-to-day job is obviously covering politics and the way women are covered in politics. So over 30 years I've seen that go from stories about Rose Kelly which when she became a minister, if you look at all the headlines it was Rose Kelly. I'd give up my politics for my family first, you know, it was all this stuff and interviews with her at her bedside when she gave birth to the baby and all those sorts of things. And it's been a process of normalising women in politics. And we've still got the deeply troubling examples of both Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton to sort of say that we haven't really reached it. But I suppose my observation over the years is it's about things becoming normal. And part of that is involved women not necessarily pushing back all that hard but it's just asserting in their own minds their right to be there. At the most basic level that has been watching the progress of women approaching the dispatch box in Parliament House, you know, when they go to ask a question or answer a question. You used to watch women go to the dispatch box with senior front benches on both sides and they looked like they were going to die of terror. It was just, they were so not used to being in that space. And strangely enough, Bronwyn Bishop was one of the first people who actually did it quite well and Carmen Lawrence. And gradually you've seen more and more women just go, yeah, well, of course I'm coming to the dispatch box. That's my right. That's where I belong. And I think about the images you see now of senior female police officers briefing on a national security incident without commentary. And they're in a uniform just like the blokes are, but they speak with authority. I think those moments when you can actually just do stuff where you don't, where it's not an issue, whether you're a girl or boy, are really very important. And it's still, I think, very important for the media to think about how we portray women. I mean, I think Rachel's examples are really fascinating and have a real world result. But I know that when I did a big profile of Frances Adamson last year for our Colour magazine, I went to great pains to not mention the fact that she had done all the extraordinary things she had done. And she's got four kids too. I mentioned it, but you don't go gee whiz. You've got to really find a small space for that so that it's not all about that. So I think that goes to the wider definition of national security. We're looking at you. We're interested in how leaders portrayed, how senior policy makers portrayed, how practitioners and operators and so on are portrayed. And indeed we heard from Frances yesterday and I think a few of us would like to hear a bit more from Frances next time round. So look, I might just go to each of you with one more question before I open the conversation to the room because everyone, this is your chance to question the journalists. And there are members of the public service and the national security community here who probably live in dread of occasionally being interviewed by journalists and now the tables have turned. So please don't pass up the opportunity. But my question is really to the panel and please sort of respond at will. But it would be great to hear any thoughts about whether you think that those of you who report on policy, on national security or policy more generally, or whether you're reporting from the front line, whether you're reporting, whether it's in crime or terrorism or indeed in war zones, are women treated and I guess perceived differently in the reporting role and do you have any observations on the reporting role? Laura, do you want to go first? Well, I suppose I'd start off by paying tribute to all the really fantastic female war correspondents or people who are going into conflict zones. Sally Sara has just gone back to Africa, which is like one big conflict zone. Sophie McNeil for the ABC, a range of others. And I think they're absolute exemplars of it just not mattering. They're just battering their way through and getting it done. So that is a really good starting point, I think, for just thinking about how women can just get on with it. And it doesn't have to be a huge issue. And also, if you think about the practitioners, people who come to mind when I think about this, people like Hannah Nashri who has made a huge impact in the Middle East and they just get on with it. So, Rachel, what about your own experience? Would you like to... I mean, I guess I'd say it's much of the same, just getting on with it. I know in Sydney that the majority of crime reporters across TV networks and newspapers are women at the moment. I don't know if I've ever been doubted by being a woman. Is it an advantage? Well, I was going to say I've even felt at some times when you're knocking on the door of a terrorist family that oftentimes you are seen as less threatening if it's a woman on the doorstep, not a man in a suit. So perhaps that's been an advantage. I think as Laura said, there are so many fantastic women reporters that have done this work before us that it is seen as pretty normal these days. In my university degree, it was actually 90% women. So journalism is quite a female-friendly industry. What do you think, baby? So covering defence, sadly I have no point of comparison because since I've been doing this for about the last four years, there hasn't been a regular female defence and national security writer. Certainly not in Canberra. Lisa Martin has just taken over the area for AAP, but she's the first one that has been... And obviously some people like Laura do it as part of their much grander responsibilities, but dedicated defence reporters that just haven't been any women, which is sad. I do know, I have heard from women who've done the job previously that they have talked about certainly being treated differently by military leaders that they felt that they were being too hastily dismissed because they were women. Across journalism generally, interestingly enough, from the stories I hear, probably sport is the area where women have traditionally had the most difficulty as journalists. I mean that's obviously changed a lot because there have been trailblazing female journals who've been down there in the locker rooms, et cetera, et cetera, and gone through years and years and years of those rather gross put downs and difficulties to actually start to change their culture from within. So it's just interesting that not far from the sort of policy making area, sport seems to me probably the one where there has been that greatest disparity. So interesting that war zones were sort of a first safer than locker rooms, I didn't say that. All right, let's take some questions from the group. There's one volunteer right up front, so please, here's your chance. Thanks for a really great conversation so far. My name is Susan Hutchinson. I am with the Australian Civil Society Coalition for Women, Peace and Security. I have two questions, can I ask two questions? Yes, okay, great. So my first question, I don't really know, I'm sorry if these don't quite align with your beats, but I'm going to ask them anyway because I think they're very relevant to the conference. My first question is about the portrayal of women in conflict affected areas. So two years ago, I finally got a piece published on The Conversation which was about the constructive roles that women have in Iraq and Syria in terms of building of security, community security, building peace, negotiating ceasefires, delivering of assistance, that sort of thing. But that kind of, when you're talking about stereotypical portrayals of women, that's often quite a really hard thing to get visibility of in the press. So that's my first question is if you guys have any thoughts on that. And then the other question is both crime and defence and international and terrorism. So I'm quite curious, we have a unique situation at the moment. The rest of the conference has had a lot of emphasis on women, peace and security issues. And we know that Daesh are using sexual violence in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Iraq and Syria. And we have Australians who are perpetrating those crimes there. And most recently, there's actually been some... The Australian government has behaved in a way that supports impunity for those crimes rather than meeting our own legal obligations to investigate and prosecute. But again, it's quite tricky in terms of news cycles and what meets the interest of the day. So I guess I just wonder about some of those issues where they might sit in terms of your views of what makes the news and what doesn't make the news in the context of the conference. Thank you. Thank you. Please. You don't have to answer both. Any responses? Well, I'm happy to jump in on the first question. I mean, just the sort of... The peace building and reconstruction phase of conflict is usually at a... Well, if we're examining the sort of thesis that is the area where women play more of a role and it's given less prominence, it's considered less newsworthy. Is that what you're interested in discussing? Women's roles that aren't either victim or fighter when it requires that they are less interesting in a medium. Or are they? I wouldn't agree that they are less interesting, but they probably have been less covered. Look, we're better at asking questions than answering them. But look, in some ways it's a little hard to judge. I mean, obviously something like Afghanistan, which is the most obvious recent example, so much of the phase of the war was that the nation building, reconstruction, civil society building, governance developing phase of the conflict, while providing the security to allow that to happen, those were the two sort of major elements of what went on for basically what eight, ten years in the main phase of it. I found what Mark Binskin was saying this morning about the role that women played in a combat situation by being able to engage with local women and provide intelligence and that sort of social interaction that is so important to that type of military operation, like a counter-insurgency. So I don't think that there is less of an interest from the news media in that part of a conflict. And the fact that women play a larger role in that is really just a reflection of the fact that typically women are not currently performing in frontline combat roles. Look, granted combat is probably still going to get the most attention from journalists over those other aspects that you describe because of the acute nature of it, that's where most of the bombs are going off and the bullets are flying. So I've sort of contradicted myself a little bit there. Yeah. Laura, do you want to show me? Yeah. Save him. I thought I did all right there. You did okay for a bloke. Look, I'm not a war correspondent, never have been, and the stage of my life is never going to be, but I just make a mechanical observation about how the media reports. Let's talk about Afghanistan. It's basically a television story now. Nobody in Australia has a bureau in Afghanistan anymore. And as reflecting on what David's saying, people go there to have pictures of people with rocket repelled grenades and things going off. There's not that journalistic capacity or resource availability to really do anything other than drop in occasionally and say, so how did that all go? And do a once-off every so often of saying, oh, well, this village looks more secure or less secure. There's not that ongoing reporting. And the sort of thing that you're talking about there is something that does require that thing where you've got the capacity to form, that journalists have the capacity to form ongoing relationships in communities so that they understand who's actually running the joint. And as an example, we Fairfax closed their Middle East Bureau a year or so ago, having had a presence there for a long, long time and having had a fantastic female reporter there for a long, long time telling those sorts of stories. We'll go to this side of the room. I think we've had a colleague waiting over here, please. Hi, my name is Elka Larson and I'm with ANU. Traditionally, the media has been the gatekeeper of information and narrative, but now we're living in a much more fractured media landscape with blogs, social media, where everyone can publish their own opinions and ideas. So what effect does this new media environment have on shaping the narrative on women and national security? Do you find that it's reinforcing or challenging this narrative? And I'm interested in your thoughts. Thanks. You don't all have to answer each question. I'll just be bossy. So I think it has an impact like it has an impact on everything in the sense that once again there aren't resources to really be doing any of these jobs properly. I mean, the financial review no longer has a foreign affairs and defence writer. So we're not covering foreign affairs and defence let alone women and national security. The advantage of it is, or should be, that you do have with lower barriers to entry to scope to get more specialist conversations going about this, whether it's on the conversation, whether it's through LOE or ASPIR or all these sorts of forums which are much more available to people. So it's one of the great mysteries to me at a superficial level. We've now got two 24-hour political television stations, but they talk about less and less and it's all basically crap. And it's the same where you've got much greater capacity to get into these issues and have experts talk about it, but it doesn't actually translate back into the mainstream media. I think one positive that social media has had in that space is that it has made us as journalists probably a lot more connected to our audience than we might have once been, which thereby does make us a bit more democratic and accountable as journalists and as an organisation in the sense that, as I was saying before, we're normal people. We are not switched off from the normal prejudices that normal people have in normal society. Often social media acts as a bit of a check and balance for that. If we interpret something wrong, if we miss something wrong, we'll find out much quicker these days because of the connectivity we have with social media. Example is probably the Julia Gillard misogyny speech that a lot of hardened political reporters saw in a different way to that everyday person saw. And I guess you didn't have that real close feedback in the past without social media. The downside, I guess, is Facebook comments, which are just hideous. Reading Facebook comments on any article that gets put on Facebook makes you think that you've gone 10 steps backwards a lot of times. I think that's a really good point about the Julia Gillard speech. I think that's a really, really good example. It is something like what Hillary Clinton has faced. And this is really the fake news phenomenon that so many people are getting their information from these other sources that people can make up completely baseless stuff about somebody like Hillary Clinton who too many people were credulous about and too willing to believe about particular preconceptions that they had about Hillary. That's the bad side. And that's where the mainstream media can try and curate information and pierce that cloud of total rubbish. So we've got about four questions that I can see around the room. Five indeed. So we'll try and move through them and perhaps I might even take a couple of questions at a time so that you can share them among you. One more over here. My question's for David. We started with statistics. So in my 21 years, two months, 14 and three-quarter days in the Defence Force or national security community, I spent two days thinking about women's issues, so that's 0.00269%, which is not odd. Which is more than most. Correct. After that, I figured I'd solve the problem and then work out, don't be stupid. I worked out that I'd been hearing what was being said but I wasn't actually listening to what was being said. So my question, David, is what have you taken away from this conference and how will you report it? That's a very, very good question. Look, I feel like there have been, I've heard some fantastic stuff. Some of the standouts for me have been some of the international speakers and that comparison, that global comparison about the role of women in national security across different countries and different cultures is something that I'll really take away from it. I will... A lot of this stuff is... I can build on and feed into stories that I do from now on for the rest of, you know, forever. All of this kind of stuff is not immediately newsworthy. I'm not going to go away and write three different news stories tomorrow but it builds my knowledge as a national security correspondent and informs my overall thinking in a way that will simply make my stories around, not just about women in national security but anything I write about national security, you know, a much more well-informed and enhanced thing. Thanks, we'll go to the back under the bright lights. Thanks, Rory. Annette Duncliffe from PMBNC. Please correct me if I'm wrong but I'm assuming you guys would have sources or touch points within the national security community to do fact-checking and finding stories and that sort of thing. I'd be interested to know whether they're predominantly male or female and whether you think that actually impacts on some of the angles or the stories that you actually end up writing. They protect their sources, you know. What are the names of the sources? I find predominantly male because I do think that police forces and national security, the national security sphere is still to me seems to be fairly male-dominated. We have some fantastic female high-ranking police officers in New South Wales but it's still predominantly male and I think just because of that fact my contacts in that space would be more often male than they would be female. I'm not sure whether that would skew the stories that I write. I'd have to think a bit harder about that. I don't know. Mine are overwhelmingly male. The sources that I never name in my stories, it is understood person. They are overwhelmingly male but it influences the way I'm reporting in the sense that they are representative of a I suppose a traditional and a male-dominated perspective but it's nothing as immediate or conscious as that that it sort of feeds through into our stories as such. It's more just that they represent this old fashion and this tradition. Listen for the national security community that we believe in transparency. It sounds like we should employ more women if we want to keep secrets. Right, I think... Yes, please. Patricia Hewitts in DFAT. Thanks for being here. My question also touches on the new media landscape that we're seeing. As Laura said, with fewer and fewer resources, with fewer sort of journalists really going into more depth, with the sort of hostility we're starting to see to the media itself as establishment, with increasing skepticism about anything that could be accused of being politically correct. The kind of issues we've been discussing at this conference have traditionally struggled for newsworthiness. What's the outlook for informing national debate? Point taken, Laura, that there are better mechanisms now for more specialised conversations among interested persons but for a more informed national debate that can affect sort of the polity, that can inform a kind of reasoned political atmosphere. Thanks. I wish I could say something really positive about it but I'm going through one of my pessimistic phases at the moment. I'm not at all optimistic at the moment. I sort of rationalised to myself that I'm not an economist but having written economics for a long time, you sort of think, oh, barriers to entry, it's got to be good if they're coming down. But I think... Fairfax has announced $30 million of cuts today. We're down to four people in the Financial Review Bureau in Canberra and we're running out of space to write stories as well. So we just don't have the resources to get into these serious issues. So I think it's very depressing and I've just written an update for my quarterly essay, which comes out on May 1, which a lot of it is focusing on the way that all of politics now is revolving around a soap opera around the Prime Minister, not about what he's doing but whether people like him or not and virtually no discussion about the underlying policy issues. So nothing good to say on this particular day, I'm afraid. The consequence of having fewer people to do work, to do more work, obviously unfortunately going to be that you end up falling back on less complex stories and less complex explanations of things that are happening. And I think despite the intense interest in terrorism in the last sort of couple of years and the fact that there has been a lot of reporting on terrorism, I think that unfortunately as a byproduct of what you're saying, a lot of it has been reporting on what has happened rather than why it's happened. There's sort of day to day arrest there, arrest there, someone dying in Syria there rather than trying to look at why this is going on. And the other thing is we have such a clear idea of who clicks on our stories now and how many people read stories that the other issue is if no one's reading a story, can we afford to be writing it? That's also another sad fact about it, I think. What is the appetite for reading really important and complex stories? It becomes harder and harder to justify doing them to your bosses if the audience is not there. I'd just like to pick up on... You mentioned, I think, a backlash against political correctness. For instance, I share with you an interest in this. I just think that at the moment there is an overblown perception out there that is stringing together a bunch of disparate events, Trump, Brexit, one nation, that follows this narrative that the ordinary people out there are sick to death of a certain kind of political elite telling them what they are and aren't allowed to do and say, and that this is what is driving a lot of these political phenomena. That was what I was getting to a little bit earlier on when I mentioned the need for people to understand that increasing the role of women in defence is not a diversity and equality thing of itself, but rather a capability thing. Unfortunately, we've seen a small number of... Unfortunately, very widely read and rather loud right-wing columnists particularly driving a backlash against the defence cultural modernisation on that and saying that this is some kind of social project run by the military chiefs who just want to get their diversity stripes. And it is total and utter horseshit, but it has an audience there and it has a constituency and that just makes it more important than ever for people like us hopefully to try and penetrate that with facts. Unfortunately, like Laura, I am not particularly optimistic at the moment about all of that. I'm sorry. Since we've got an audience and since I'm allowed to make some commercial, I guess, promotion, frankly, you get the news you pay for and the reliance on free media, that is unedited, often propagandist media is beginning to show. So if you want serious analysis, investigation and news, please pay for your newspaper subscriptions online, whether it's Fairfax or anyone else. It's interesting to see the New York Times getting a kind of a Trump bump, which is one small positive side effect from their perspective. We have one or two questions more than we have to wrap up, I think. So we'll go to the back of the room and then we'll go to the one at the front and then there was a gentleman over here as well. So thank you. Thank you. I'm Eleanor Flowers from DFAT. I'd like to first say thank you to the NSC for putting on such an informative two days where we have all learned so much about why gender matters, that it's not a fluffy add-on. This is actually core business. And on that point I'd like to say that this is a question for you, Rory. Sorry, panel. Sure. We've heard a lot about what our leaders can do to promote that understanding and we've heard a lot about what the media can do to promote our understanding. But what is the homework you would set for us in the audience of what we can do back in our organisations? So in a moment when we finish this panel I'm going to invite Marina to join me on the stage and we will set you your homework, we promise. Thank you. I think here in the middle, I think there was the woman in the pink. Sorry, yes, this gentleman here. You had the microphone, my apologies. In terms of the depiction of women in media there is always a reality versus the fiction. If you remember there was a story about Malala which was picked up by the media because it was a backward area of Pakistan and nobody knew what had happened. And when media got the attention of that all of a sudden she became an international icon for resistance against the dark forces. On the other hand you see scores of TV shows where you have female lead from Quantico, Homeland all the shows which depicts women in the major role but yet nothing has changed even in the United States of America in terms of women taking the lead roles in major, you know, operational units as well as lead investigators. So that's kind of, you know, does it relate to the change in mindset or what is it? Do you want to respond to that? Police. It's about police, I think. So is the question about why if in sort of popular culture women are occupying those positions why it's not translating to real life? I don't know. Would that be a question for the people that run these organizations? Or is it... Having not been at the conference I don't know whether there's been... He talked about statistics. I don't know whether we've had statistics through the course of the last two days about whether there's a change going on in police forces around the world and intelligence agencies and things like that. I've just got no idea. But that would be the question. I mean, I've watched it happen in politics. It hasn't always just been because you have quotas and things like that. It's just people just gradually moving up the ranks that you can't sort of just drop people in, particularly in areas like police forces. I mean, it's not necessarily just about gender and those things, but I don't know. We're going to have to have just an interest of time unless you've got an answer. I suppose the one reassuring thing about that is that insofar as popular culture appeals to our hopes and aspirations obviously the creators of these programs feel that the average audience member has to see women more heavily represented at the top of these organisations and that probably is a good thing. It's just that the organisations have to respond to what people would like to see. I think we probably do have scope at the next conference to talk about fact and fiction a bit because I think that's a little bit where you're getting at, but I think we might have to wrap up if that's okay. I'm going to invite Marina to join me in a moment. But before I do, I might ask the audience just to show their thanks and appreciation for the three brave journalists. So while our friends from the fourth State Department the stage, I might ask Marina to join us just for a few closing remarks and a little bit of homework as requested. Marina, perhaps I might ask you first as a convener to offer a few of your reflections on the conference and then I'll offer some thoughts on the way forward. Thank you. Before I start on those reflections I just wanted to say to our journalist colleagues in the room we heard a little bit about vulnerable people during the conference or women being described euphemistically as a vulnerable group and it's the first time I've ever thought of journalists as a vulnerable group after hearing that. So we had a lot of fantastic speakers throughout the conference. One of the key messages that resonated with me from the first day was the message that Professor Valerie Hudson shared with us about the very best predictor of the state's peacefulness being not its level of wealth, level of democracy or ethno-religious identity but how well women are treated. So we heard a lot throughout the conference about the why women and national security is important, why greater involvement, participation and leadership by women in national security is important and the interface and connection between women's equality and national security. So that correlation, that important message I think is something that we should all be aware of and awareness raising in the context of mainstream national security is important. We heard about women's capability enhancers from the Minister of Defence and from others and also from the Shadow Foreign Minister about the importance of equality, inclusiveness and disruptive changes that threaten our national security. We focused a lot today on how we can enhance women's participation and leadership and maybe this is where some of the messages or the homework for people in the room comes in. I guess one of the questions that I would ask people to take away with them is how are you going to walk the walk when you go back to your organisation? Have you developed your gender goggles? Have women thought about how they can be more confident in their roles? Have men thought about how they can promote women and their leadership potential within their organisations in an active way? There were some key messages around mentoring and sponsorship. The issue of confidence came through a lot in fact and also the issue of targets and whether they were a good thing or not. I guess you can all go away and think about what your own organisations are doing in terms of targets about perceptions of women as we had the last panel talk about. We tried to focus in this conference on women as actors and enablers in the national security space and as agents of change, although reflecting also upon the scope for regression on women's rights and some of the atrocities that have historically been perpetrated during armed conflict and that are again being perpetrated. So that's also about being aware that progress is not necessarily linear and that we need to be vigilant whilst we're progressing in the interest of our own national security and national security capability, the greater involvement of women as participants and as leaders, we also need to be aware of the possibility for backsliding. I think Valerie Hudson laid down or passed on the baton to Australia to take the lead on women's peace and security globally in light of what is happening in the United States at the moment. So really they're probably all of the reflections I wanted to make. Thank you, Rory. Thank you, Marina. Look, it remains for me to say maybe a few closing words on where we go from here. I mean, I would share all of those reflections that Marina has provided. Look, this has been a long conference. These conferences don't usually go for two very full days, but there's been an extraordinary level of energy, I think, that we've all experienced and participation and in fact, I think many of us would be quite sad to see this conference come to an end and you can't say that about every conference that you go to. But look, the energy, the candor, the frankness that we heard from our speakers, you know, pretty much the whole conference was on the record and we had a number of speakers who were very forthright in what they said so I think we should all be really appreciative of that, whether it's Francis Adamson yesterday, whether it's not only the minister, but also Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs last night, whether it's also the Defence Minister, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, whether it's the Chief of Defence Force or the many individuals, particularly our international speakers, who I think gave such candid remarks. I would say that if I was to talk a little bit about some lessons learned from us, the conference organisers or the conveners and hosts, we will take a few thoughts back to really work on how we can continue to improve what we deliver to help the national security community to develop its thinking in this space. We will reflect on the deep focus on capability that came through the conference. I think the theme that this is about national security and capability just as much as it's about values of inclusiveness, diversity and opportunity. The theme of culture, the message I think one of the real killer lines of the conference was about our culture essentially eats strategy for breakfast. You can have a great strategy but you need that cultural change and that begins with people and it ends with people. The idea that simply by holding this conference and by having such active participation and very strong social media engagement as well, the conference in itself is part of the change that we want to see. And I don't know how many of you encountered a few trolls out there on the social media coverage of the conference but there were a few but I think pretty sad and lonesome and I think the attention internationally that the conference has had through social media is a message we can all take forward. For the National Security College, of course our core business is education and training. It's developing the Australian national security community to the best it can and so we'll take some lessons from here on the training courses that we can offer and develop in the executive development and potentially in the academic space as well so please watch this space. For next time and we'll come to the homework in a moment to reinforce Marina's point really about walking the walk, we certainly encourage more industry involvement. We applaud Chris Jenkins of TALUS and the commitment of TALUS in particular but I'm sure that there will be others who will watch and learn and listen. We want more men to come to these events so I think we should particularly acknowledge and thank the men in the room for really being here today and yesterday because I'm sure they will go forth to speak with colleagues and be role models based on really the learning that we've had over the past two days and more international engagement. I think we particularly appreciated the contributions from those who've travelled from afar to be with us whether it's from Afghanistan, from Pakistan, from many countries of the South Pacific and the region or indeed the embassies that are represented here today and our friends from the United States as well. That message about Australia carrying the torch will be heard loud and clear. So as far as homework is concerned I think Marina's really passed on the message and that is go back to your workplaces make sure that you try to persuade at least one colleague, a supervisor, perhaps someone who reports to you to really engage on this issue and perhaps to come to the next conference we hold, the next training course we hold or the next opportunity really that anyone provides to develop their thinking and perspective in this space. That's really the key homework that I would suggest. I want to thank you all and really to conclude just to say that the National Security College will hold this conference again next year so I can confirm this will be the first but certainly not the last Women in National Security conference held by the National Security College. I want to finally ask you to join me in thanking not only all the speakers but also the organisers, Marina and Chris and Sharon and many others at the National Security College who put this event together and our friends from conference logistics as well who will be putting out a survey that we very much hope that you participate in. So thank you colleagues, I think we've drawn things to a close.