 First of all, welcome back home to ANU. Thank you, and thank you, Colin, for this because I wish these events had happened when I was here on campus. There are quite a few students in the audience, but it is interesting how students often don't know what is actually happening on their own campus. So those of you who are here tonight to promote to other students who may not have known about it that these are really important events to participate in as well. I wanted to start off with a few foundational sort of aspects to what we're discussing. But first I wanted to reiterate and ground ourselves in country. In a room as black as this, you can't look out and actually see the wonderful environment we are in here at ANU. But I do think it's important for all of us always to begin events to ground ourselves in country, not only because of its important and paramount reconciliation statement, but also I think as human beings in the universe in which we live and the guidance that Indigenous First Nations provide us in reminding ourselves of country and how fundamental it is and the urgent environmental issues that are pressing upon all of us all the time, no matter what issues that we're discussing, it's pretty foundational. And then perhaps more foundational to the subject matter in which we are talking, Jen. It might be worth us doing some of the things that you'd put in as disclaimers to this really wonderful, provocative and exciting book I think in terms of the opportunities that hopefully will flow from what is a rather sobering discussion. I guess one of those would be to remind people in the audience to look after themselves in terms of the subject matter. Is that something that you'd like to share first off? Well, first to also pay my respects to Indigenous leaders past, present and future and everyone who's in the room. I always think it's important to acknowledge country, but also to give you a trigger warning because I think some of the conversations and subjects that we talk about in the book and we'll be talking about tonight are very personal to many people and very real to many people in the room. And one of the most profound things about this book and doing a book tour is the people that speak to me when I do book signings and the emotional reactions I can see in the room from largely women, but not only women, but many people who I can see obviously have had personal experiences. So I want to acknowledge all of you in the room who have had personal experiences and please if you need to leave the room or you need to take a moment, please take a moment. Great. Then on to the actual subject matter and the need to make a few further notes. So in the book just before we even start you've got a note on language. Do you want to speak a little bit about that before we then continue? Well, we thought it was important that gender is an inclusive term. We talk about women in the book, but when we talk about women, we talk about an inclusive term and we recognise that there are survivors of gender-based violence and sexual and domestic violence who are both men, women and people who do not identify as either gender and we want to acknowledge that. So when I refer to women tonight, I'm using it in an inclusive way. Great. And the last thing before we move to the... ...is the disclaimers in relation to the very topic in terms of defamation and so forth. So I have to be careful in everything that I say at every single book event. This is being recorded. It will be published. It is everything I say could I could be sued for. This was a very complicated book to write because we wanted to write the book because it's so litigious. We wanted to write it because of the censorship and the self-censorship that we were seeing in our practices, advising women, domestic violence, charities, journalists, newspapers, anyone who wants to say anything about gender-based violence. The legal risks are massive and it made writing this book very difficult. It makes talking about it very difficult. And so we have a huge disclaimer section which, as we said, it would be a great irony if we were sued for writing a book about the way that... ...women were silenced but irony is no protection in law. So I could still be sued for what I say here. And what we said in the book. Yes, so we will obviously frame that and be very thoughtful as lawyers in that process but to really highlight that is really such an important, profound message of this book which we'll get back to. But the book and your co-author, tell us a little bit about her and also what prompted the two of you to collaborate on writing it. So Keena and I are in chambers at Doughty Street Chambers together. They are from Northern Ireland and we started working together. We were both working in-house at newspapers advising journalists on how to break stories, all kinds of stories but what was increasingly coming across our desk were Me Too-like stories both before the Me Too movement and after. And we shared our frustration with each other around the ways in which we were seeing stories silenced in the newsroom. So we had questions. How many women does it take to accuse this man before we can report this story because obviously we hear the stories from the editors and the journalists before they go to print. Can we print them? Why can't we print them? And we were like, well, you know, how many sources do we require before we can put this to print? It only takes one woman's testimony. One woman's testimony is supposedly enough in our criminal justice system to send someone to prison but why in the newsroom is one woman's testimony not enough to get this story to print on a civil standard? And then we were working together. We actually were briefed by Liberty, one of the UK's biggest civil liberty organisations. There was a very famous decision called Stalker and Stalker which we opened the book with which is incredibly frustrating. It is a case where a woman posted on social media on Facebook, for those who still use Facebook, posted on Facebook. She was basically posting on the Facebook wall of her ex-husband's new partner and warning her about his history of violence. And she said, you know, the text, I don't want to misquote it because I'll get sued as well. But you can see the text of their Facebook exchange in the opening chapter of the book but basically this woman was warning her ex-husband's new partner of the experience of violence she had about how he had broken a non-malice station order, about how he had left red marks around her throat and that the police had been called. And he, this was obviously on her public Facebook wall, her friends, the new partner's friends and family saw it and he sued her. So her ex-husband sued her for defamation and it went all the way through the courts. But in the High Court in the UK, which is the first instance for the lawyers in the room for defamation cases, the judge found even though that there was evidence of her, there was police evidence of two hours after the incident finding those red marks around her throat, she had written on this Facebook wall, he had tried to strangle me. And the definition of strangulation under British criminal law at that time was not just forcefully constricting someone's neck but doing it with the intent to kill. So if you happen not to be killed, how do you prove that they intended to kill you? The problem with the definition of strangulation. And an old white male judge, Mr. Justice Mitting, found that even though she had evidence from the police that she had red marks around her neck, that wasn't enough because she couldn't prove that he had also intended to kill her. And his direct words quoted from the judgement were, his intention was to silence her not to kill her. So it's okay to forcefully grab a woman around the throat if you just intend to silence her as long as you don't intend to kill her. And so domestic violence charities quite rightly were outraged saying this is a green light to domestic abusers. We know that strangulation is a sign of escalation to much worse violence and often leads to death. And so we intervened in that case to try to say the judge got it wrong, clearly. As amicus? Was it an amicus intervention? So we did an amicus intervention. So the Court of Appeal agreed with the High Court, which was also absurd. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And Nicholas Stocker, the woman who tried to warn the new partner of his history of violence, a documented history of violence, non-molestation order, the equivalent of an AVO in this country, she faced hundreds of thousands of pounds and damages for seven years she could not talk about it. Because of course the first thing you're advised as a woman who sued for defamation is don't speak about it because you're aggravating the damage. You'll get sued for more compensation in the end. Don't speak. So she was silenced for seven years. And it was only in the Supreme Court where we intervened and we tried to intervene to make arguments that we make in this book saying, you can't look at these cases. We must consider the importance of women to speak about their experience of gender-based violence in a society where one in three women suffers it. You can't look at these cases in isolation without considering the public interest of her right to speak, her right to be free from gender-based violence, her right to equality. And the Supreme Court refused to hear us. But she won on technical grounds about the informality of language on social media. But I'm happy to say that the arguments we made and the Supreme Court wouldn't hear have been adopted in different courts around the world and you'll read about it in the book. So that's a wonderful explanation of how you came to write this book together. Yes. Can you tell us who are angry the Supreme Court wouldn't hear it so we wrote a book about it. And many more people get to read about it. Exactly. Exactly. And we were right. For those in the room who haven't watched the Australian story about you or listened or read some of the material about you, can you perhaps say a few things about what led you to even being in this place now to be writing this book about this topic? That's a very long story. But, well, I was a law student here at the ANU, so to all the law students in the room who are here at the ANU, me too, in a different way. So I went from Berry Public School, Bombarderry High, I'm a huge advocate of public education, came to the ANU, went to Oxford and wanted to be a human rights lawyer but didn't see anybody doing it. The only person who I saw publicly doing this kind of work was Geoffrey Robertson, now KC, then QC. And I reached out to him. He was a Rhodes Scholar many years before me, so I ended up working with him in London. I was his researcher when I was at Oxford as a scholar and then started practicing in London. But really another of the inspirations for this book was really my grandmother, who worked in domestic violence refuges in this country. And so I, as a kid, I used to visit her in the domestic violence refuges she ran in Western Sydney. I grew up in Berry, but used to go up to visit her. And so I saw firsthand the impact that spending time with kids who were living in domestic violence refuges, I saw the impact of domestic violence. And coming home to spend time with her, and she's still alive, she's in her late 80s now, but she spoke with Lament about the statistics about violence against women in this country and that they hadn't changed. So she retired from the domestic violence refuge because she was so burnt out by seeing more women killed. Too many of her clients had been killed and it broke her. And for me, hearing her talk about that and talk about her frustrations about the statistics, it made me think, well, I said to her, well, look, you did your time. You need to relax and enjoy your time and chill out a bit. It's our time. And so what can I do? Ice, work in free speech. I'm a domestic... Sorry, I'm a defamation lawyer. I'm a human rights lawyer. What can I do? And I thought, well, I'm going to write a book about free speech and domestic violence because we can't deal with domestic violence and sexual violence in our society, any form of gender-based violence. We can't talk about it. So we might come back to your grandmother a little bit later. One of the things that you, I think, so artfully present in this book is the role of law as a tool of, I guess, power in society. And you start off with the very strong image of justice year. Would you like to share with everyone just how you critique that notion and how you think about that notion as a prompt also for what you cover in the book? Well, this chapter was not obvious, actually, when we started writing the book. Kane and I approached the book when we were like, well, we need to talk about defamation. We need to talk about non-disclosure agreements. We need to talk about freedom of speech. We need to talk about international human rights and what that says. But actually, after watching the DEPT trial in the United States, so I represented Amber Heard in the United Kingdom. We won. People forget that we won. She's a recognized victim of domestic and sexual violence in the United Kingdom. But after watching the way that trial played out and the male-centric myths that we saw play out in that trial, which resulted in the outcome that we saw in my view in my opinion, defamation risk in my opinion, is that we were like, we have to go back and look at structural issues around this. So we went back to look at, well, laws are written by men for men. Let's look at the ways in which that plays out and the way that male-centric myths about gender-based violence play out now in our legal system. But there is a great irony that our entire legal system is represented by a woman where when you go into a court, you very rarely see women. And even now, when I walk into a courtroom, I am often the only female in the room in the UK. I practice in London. So it's really, I think it's ironic that we have this lady justice balancing the scales of justice, supposedly blind to class, gender, the identity of the person before you. But we know that that is just not true and it's not the way that plays out in courts. So not only is our justice system represented by a woman, women are not properly represented in our parliaments, in our courts, in our courtrooms, or in the way that laws are written. And we have to acknowledge that that's a problem and it plays out in our courts all day every day. So that's something I think we'll also come back to at the end in terms of where to next in solving these problems. But before we get to the end, we've got a little bit of time to continue with a bit more of this content. And one of the other things that I think is so powerful about the book is the fact that it is covering the globe. So that you've got both Australia, you've got the UK, but you've also got other cases. And I guess in terms of thinking through a way of covering some of this, should we start with the Australian context and the reality that so much of this book is blacked, literally blacked out because of the very issues that we began this discussion with. Could you share a little bit more about that? So not only was this book incredibly complicated to write because of the very real legal risk of writing about any single person we wrote about in this book because they sued because they are litigious and don't want to have their cases discussed. But we wanted to show that this is not just a problem that you see in high-profile cases. It's not just a problem you see in the UK or Australia. It's a problem you see all over the world. So we ended up interviewing people and covering case studies all over the world which meant a lot of legal research, a lot of cross-jurisdictional comparative law research. So what you see in the book is a fraction of the work that we actually did to get those words to paper. But we affectionately called the third chapter in this book, which is called What Happens When Women Speak, the Australia chapter, because I was so moved and motivated by the young women who chose to speak out in Australia that led to the March for Justice protest in this country. And so we call it the affection of the Australia chapter because this book is not meant to be a book just for Australia, though it came out here first. This is a global book, but we wanted to write about Australia because of that time. And so I really want to pay tribute to people, the people that spoke out, Grace Tame, Brittany Higgins, Daniel Money, Chanel Contos, and the many other women who have spoken out since, but who really, I think, there was a cascading effect. And we talk about this in the newsroom, we talk about this. So when you report a story about a particular person who has been accused of rape or domestic violence, we talk about the shaking the tree effect. And what we mean by that is that often in a newsroom we'll talk about it. Well, if we've got enough credible evidence, we can publish this and we hope that it will shake the tree and the police acknowledge this too. There is public interest in the reporting because once one woman speaks out, other women see that one woman's spoken out and they will come forward to tell their story as well. In this context, what we saw was this unfolding. That's why it's so important that we protect individual women's right to speech because it can often spark a collective movement and that's exactly what we saw in Australia. But the legal risks that these women took on that are continuing to play out today through ongoing defamation cases had a really real impact and it was almost impossible to write the book. So when we were about to go to print, this book was due to come out after the Lerman trial. Because of the contempt issues that came up during the course of that trial where Brittany Higgins was the complainant, the trial was postponed, which meant our book was coming out literally as Brittany was giving evidence in court. And we were told you have to take out everything because of the contempt risk and other books did. So if you read Julia Gillard's book, Not Now, Not Ever, I remember reading through it. It's a fantastic book and I absolutely suggest you read it. It's fantastic. But I was reading through it and they did what we were told to do, which was to delete every reference to Brittany Higgins and every reference to her case. And I was reading it and they were talking about some case that changed Australia. And I took me three pages to go, oh, hang on, they're talking about the Brittany Higgins case. But there's no reference to it in the book because of the contempt risk. And we said, no, we're not doing that. We are not censoring this story. So instead we redacted it. I don't know how many of you guys that do freedom of information work in this country, but I do a lot of freedom of information work. Help this page up. And so if you apply for documents from government and they can't release you certain information, they will black it out. And so you know the information is there. You just know you're not allowed to read it. And so we decided to redact it. And the publisher, it was quite an innovative thing. No one's done this before. But I said no. And my co-author and I said, no, we will not silence her story. We kind of have to silence it because we've been told by court we have to. But let's talk, let's show people in a very immediate way how the law operates to silence women. And that is the outcome. And we are going to release what we had originally written. What was very interesting is that a lot of the research that we did for the book happened before the contempt judgment. And it was very interesting to watch the information that I had gleaned from online articles about what was happening. I didn't interview Brittany for the book because we talked about it, but I didn't want to re-traumatise her. And she was obviously in a huge amount of illegal risk and continues to be in a huge amount of legal risk. So we wrote what we wrote based on publicly available materials. But at what was interesting, to watch those publicly available materials disappear from the internet. And that to me is a very real representation of how in this context, contempt laws, silence, censor, diminish our ability to talk about what happens to women. And so we've just seen that happen again last week with the ABC pulling off from the web the YouTube National Press Club address of Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins. And this time, not because this was because of contempt laws, now we're dealing with defamation laws. And so because Lemon has sued the ABC and various other media outlets for defamation, you're seeing these takedowns. So whether it's contempt laws, and this is the point we try to make in the book, we're media lawyers. We deal with this all the time. Women who face gender-based violence in a post-MeToo world, there is a perception and I think that's a pretty general public perception or you can say whatever you want now. That is absolutely not true. The reality is the moment you suffer gender-based violence, whether you're raped, domestic violence, the law regulates what you can say, when you can say it, and to whom. And so whether it's contempt laws, whether you go to the police and report a crime, they start to investigate in the UK, the moment that a man is the subject of criminal investigation for a sexual offence, they have privacy, so the media cannot report the fact that they're the subject of a criminal investigation. Not the case in this country yet, but we tend to follow the UK, so wait for it. Once they're charged, contempt kicks in and you have this problem. And so of course there are important issues around presumption of innocence. I'm not saying that we shouldn't protect presumption of innocence, but we also need to acknowledge that this is the effect. Would you like to draw from one of the UK examples as another way into discussing your proposals for change, or in terms of, or shall we just go straight into the proposals for change? Oh, so many proposals for change. I think in the UK... Well, I mean, the UK is an interesting example, so we have so much to say about the way the law ought to be interpreted. So let me start with sort of a little bit of an example and let me start with sort of a bigger, broader perspective, which is when you're... If we look at defamation, for example, but even if you look at defamation or breach of confidence, breach of confidence proceedings, so whether you're talking about there's a contract or there's some sort of form of situation that protects certain information about gender-based violence, so breach of confidence or defamation, you're always looking at a situation where where does the free speech, where are the competing interests between free speech, your ability to speak about it, or the protection of reputation if we're talking about defamation or the protection of the interests of upholding contracts in a non-disclosure contract situation, where does that balance lie? And what we say is that is looking at it in too narrow a context. You can't consider... When we think about violence against women, it is the most prolific human rights abuse in the world. One in three women suffer sexual violence. That's the UN's figure. One in four women in this country, domestic violence. I've lost count how many women have been killed in this country just this year. It is a matter of public interest that we talk about this. We can't grapple with the problem if we don't know about it. We can't even begin to grapple with it from a policy perspective. If we can't talk about it, the government can't understand it as a society. There is massive public interest in that. And so if you're looking at a woman wanting to talk about her experience of violence and a man not wanting her to talk about it, her right to reputation, we say that is a very narrow way of looking at a problem which has much broader public ramifications. And so we have to start thinking about it, not just about his right to reputation and her right to free speech, but her right to equality, her right to be free from gender-based violence, the public interest in our society being able to... Excuse me, I've got the flu. Grapple with gender-based violence. So it's too narrow a way of looking at the problem. That was the problem in the Supreme Court case that we tried to intervene in. And I'm very happy to say that in the Constitutional Court of Columbia, our arguments won the day just after we published the book. And so we're seeing more and more courts start to look at it in a much broader way. And now that might be more possible in this country now that we've got a public interest defence in the Deformation Act and the Uniform Deformation Act. But the way that the courts are interpreting nondisclosure agreements, the way the courts are still interpreting defence and qualified privilege, I think is too narrow. And as lawyers, we need to start opening that up and making arguments that create more space for women to be able to talk about this. All right, so in terms of taking those ideas into the broader sort of sphere of lawmaking, I guess that's a nice link back to, as you said, to the Julia Gillar book, Not Now, Not Ever. And thinking through another theme that's really coming through your book, is women's place in all positions of power or governance. Do you want to say a little bit about that in terms of our parliamentary frameworks, our courts? I mean, I'm curious, do you know how many women are on the Colombian court and in judges? I don't know the numbers, but I do know that the lead judgment was written by a brilliant feminist lawyer. It's obvious. Now, one of the things we write about in the book is how important it is to have women in positions so, I mean, you know more about the Australian context than I do, Kim, and thank you for your work working for more female representation. But we know, and you can see that the more women, the women's representation in parliament is so low, it still is too low. What's the percentage in Australia now? Well, we've inched up. I think we've got a few experts in the room, but I think for both houses of parliament, we're closer to the 40% mark, which is actually a great increase. I think someone in the room who can yell out if I'm incorrect there. Still not enough. What is it now, Anna? 45%. Thanks. Still not enough. I mean, it's obvious it should be a half or more than half. I mean, come on. But we are higher compared to most countries around the world, and it is reflected, and we talk about this. If you look at the history of... The example I give in the book is about women's right to practice law and women's enfranchisement. So what's interesting is that in both in Australia and the UK, the moment that women got the vote, suddenly the laws changed and allowed us to be doctors and lawyers and have professions. And that goes to show that the moment women had the right to vote, men in parliament were like, shit, we better allow women... We have to actually look after their interests now, so let's actually pass some laws that allow them to do stuff. And that's true if you look at the history of it. I mean, the moment you have more women when we got the right to vote, you have more women in parliament, better laws are passed. When we have more women on the court, you see women's lived experience reflected in the way that judgments are written, and that's what this book is about. We wanted to write about women's lived experience of the law. It's not enough to just look at the way that laws are written. You can't presume that the way the law is written operates equally. It doesn't, and it often doesn't. And so this book was really much... We interviewed a lot of women for this book. We were going, well, what does the law say? This was written from our experience as women working in the courts, from our experience working with women who are affected by gender-based violence and who are wanting to speak about their own stories. And we interviewed journalists, lawyers, and victims and survivors, survivor advocates all over the world, however they describe themselves, and that informed the way we wrote about the book. And so as lawyers, we are used to dealing with the law and litigation. It is a stressful experience, but that's what we're trying to do. But for women who are sued, it is a horrendous experience. The way that so many women spoke to us about being sued by their alleged perpetrator or journalists who were sued by the person they had accused of gender-based violence, it is incredibly traumatic, particularly for survivors. And many of them described it as a form of the continuation of abuse. So you leave an abusive relationship, you speak about it, they then sue you. They then have access to your personal messages, court-mandated access to your personal messages, your personal medical files. They know where you're going to be on a particular date because you've got a court date. They know that they're harassing you through emails through their lawyers. The way women experience it is a lot of abuse and we have to recognise that as well. So until those things change, do you think that women reading this book will necessarily then be encouraged or discouraged in the way they move forward? Because it's a double-edged sword, isn't it? Part of this is to make people aware to give people knowledge. But what does that knowledge actually then lead to? I mean, I think one of the reviews of the book is this is incredibly depressing and yet also hopeful. And so I think that's right. So our intention in writing this book was that we wanted more people to be informed, more women than we could possibly ever advise coming into our offices of what the risks are. And so while it is a bit of a depressing message, knowledge is empowerment and that's why we wanted to write the book. But what we hope we leave people with is also the hopeful stories of women fighting back. So, you know, the law is a tool of oppression. We know that. But I spend my life trying to use it as a tool to benefit marginalised communities. So turning the law on itself, using the law as a tool to benefit those who do not have power. And I think that's the great one, I think, one of the wonderful things about being a lawyer is when you're able to do that. And so watching and hearing stories of women from around the world and sharing their stories about how they're using, as Audra Lord says, to use the master's tool to take down the master's house. So whether you see Brittany Higgins suing Linda Reynolds for defamation, for calling her a lying cow, I love that. And winning. But women around the world doing that. So when they get sued for defamation for speaking about their experience of gender-based violence, they sue back saying, well, it's defamatory to call me a liar. And women are winning these cases. And so one of the great things about doing this book is we were interviewing lawyers around the world. And as we were talking about it, because I worked on Amber Heard's case, which is so high profile and depressing in its outcome in the United States and the impact that it's had globally in terms of chilling women for speaking out. Speaking with lawyers around the world working on these kinds of cases, we've been sharing strategies. And so I remember talking to this brilliant lawyer in India and I told her about these countersuits that we were seeing women take around the world and she was like, that's a great idea. I'm going to start doing that. And so that's what I mean. There are women who are using the law to fight back. And I think also Chanel Contos's story is a really powerful one, which I love talking about because she's fellow Australian. But the way she ran that campaign and created this campaign, Teachers Consent, using anonymized stories which took it away from individual perpetrators and took it away from the narratives we have in this country of, oh, she's naming him for revenge or she's naming him to ruin his life or whatever, all nonsense as we know. But taking it away from individual perpetrators and lifting up and highlighting rape culture in a way that has changed the entire conversation. So these innovative campaigns that young women are running and Chanel did it here, Soma Sarajah in the United Kingdom which has changed our whole conversation. And I think these are hopeful stories about the way that women are finding different ways through the law, through campaigns to fight back and to change the way that we think about this, to change the way we talk about it, to change the way we think about the law is really, I think, exciting. So this book is not just depressing. It is also gathering really exciting stories about and hopeful things about how we can change it. And perhaps with that theme of change, Colin mentioned earlier that tomorrow night as part of the In Conversation series, this book is being discussed, Women at Whitlam. And there are lots of links, I think, between your book and some of the historical material you have in the beginning of this book in terms of key drivers for both legal change and social change. There's a wonderful chapter in there that links into the themes of this book of what had been the divorce law before the Family Law Act was introduced and one of the judges commenting that a woman couldn't get a divorce because she had to show habitual cruelty for 12 months and she'd put up with it for nine months and he said if only she could have hung in there for another three months. Oh, we quote in the book. So if you look at the history of a divorce law in this country in the United Kingdom, it is horrendous. So we talk about a little bit in the book, but there are stories where basically you couldn't get a divorce. Well, as we know, once you got married that was an irrevocable contract for sex and you could not be prosecuted for rape for raping your wife. If you hit her, you could be prosecuted for grievous bodily harm but you couldn't be prosecuted for rape. And that only changed in this country in 1994. 1994. I was 13 years old when that change happened and those attitudes continue. If we look at divorce law judgments, basically there is a family law textbook that was written in the United Kingdom in the 1970s so before I was born, but not that long before I was born where he talked about a little bit of rough and tumble in a relationship as a sign of love written in a law textbook. This is not ancient history and that's why we wanted to write about this history because it's just not that long ago that these views were mandated in our legal system in the laws of this country, in the laws of the United Kingdom and the problem is that even though the law has changed attitudes around that have not changed and some of the latest surveys out of the UK and Australia where people believe it is a woman's obligation to have sex with her boyfriend, it's not but this is a hangover from this ridiculous notion in law that once you are married you are obliged to. In terms of the messages for people here in this room of what you would say following this book in terms of either the law students here in this room or those who are interested in public policy more broadly because there are a lot in Canberra who are what would be your recommendations here on the ground in the here and now of what next? That's a really big question on what but I mean some of the things we say in the book are quite general and big picture because we're not advising on any particular jurisdiction. We were talking in a global context so it's hard to. So of course we talk about we need more women in every aspect of decision making, parliament, the courts in the media, the way the media talks about this we need more women journalists. The way the media discusses gender based violence has a very real impact. We need to think about these as I explained earlier we need to think about these cases not just in terms of his right to reputation and her right to free speech but what this means is a society and our ability to grapple with gender based violence and frankly we need to better protect women's ability to speak about this as a matter of general public interest and that trumps his right to reputation and ought to. Well I think I've covered much of what I had set out to introduce everybody here to from this wonderful book that they must all go and they'll come out and get you to sign their newly purchased copies but it's an opportunity for the room to be able to ask you some questions too. So I think we've hit that point where we can invite people to come up on the side to the two microphones here. I think there's the one at the podium and then there's one just down here. We'll see if anyone's and perhaps while they're thinking of their questions I have a practical question with such a busy law practice how did you actually both write this book what sort of routine did you have to actually get it to a final stage because they're not easy things to do when you don't even have other things on your plate. Well lockdown helped so not being able to go anywhere or do anything other than work was helpful I was living in WA on a beach which also helped but I was working remotely we were actually doing full-time practice while we were doing this, but as lawyers you know you've got very little time you've got to make the best use of it all the time but we split the book together and wrote it separately and together and reviewed each other's chapters and we actually interviewed women all over Skype because we couldn't all Zoom rather because we couldn't travel around the world to interview them so it was very much a remotely written book she was, Kana was based in Madrid and I was in Western Australia so that's how we wrote it.