 As I come to work each day I walk past the photographs of the heads of the centre of this institution and each one of them had a major contribution advising government at the highest levels on the key issues of strategic and defence policy issues. And so it's a great honour in many ways to work in the building with these people to be able to talk to them about how they went and about doing their jobs to get insight and advice from them about how to develop my own research and attempt to have a similar kind of contribution. Trying to get that balance right between being an academic and doing the serious hard research that it requires and having that as our foremost goal, but then working out how to translate that, take the important parts and communicate that to the public and to the policy audience. I believe that we need a policy impact from our research if only because the issues that we look at are so important. We're looking at how a war is fought, how do you win wars? And perhaps more importantly, how do you win the peace? How do you maintain what's going on in Asia? Preserve what needs to be preserved, change what needs to be changed. How do we ensure that we don't see another cataclysmic event like World War I or World War II? We set up the centre of gravity series because we're concerned that there is this stereotype that academics just write for themselves and perhaps even that academics just don't write on the important issues that policy makers and the general public need to think about. And there's a lot of big issues that are facing this country at the moment. Our great powerful friend, the United States, is getting weaker or struggling to maintain the type of role it had. Other powers are changing and there's great debates about what the structure and form of the region is going to be and how new technologies might be changing that power balance in our region. Well, there are big questions about how our relationship with countries such as Indonesia is going and where we see ourselves as a nation is going. What kind of a role we want to have. So we created the centre of gravity series to try and get the best academic writers from not only in Australia but around the world to write on these issues, to contribute their thoughts and ideas and to do so in a way that was short and accessible. You're plugged into the Canberra community at SDSC so it's not unusual to have secretaries of defence come to events, to have prime ministers and foreign ministers here wanting to talk, wanting to try and get a better understanding of these important issues. And that gives us a real opportunity to have an impact but it also creates a responsibility on us to take our role seriously, that this is not just about study for its own sake but we're doing something important. In 2016 it's going to be 50 years of SDSC being in operation. That makes it one of the oldest centres in the southern hemisphere for looking at strategic and defence issues. The centre's future I think is going to be very bright. We've got a big opportunity teaching out at the Australian Command and Staff College that plugs us into the military. It gets us to understand how they do their jobs and try and communicate some of the information and knowledge that we've been able to develop through our time here. This has also allowed us to bring on a lot of new scholars to try and expand out our coverage of the big issues. To try and make sure that when we provide advice to government, when we talk to the general public on issues from domestic security, terrorism, regional conflicts, weapon systems, rhetoric and communication, all these factors that we have the expertise here to be able to influence these decisions.