 I think the low-e-media award is important more so than ever because it's really the only major media award that's given for foreign reporting in Australia now. We understand the commercial pressures that are placed on news organisations. Many of them have had to cut back on their commitment to covering international affairs. And so I think if we can, in our small way, reinforce the importance of international reporting by Australians for Australia, I think then we've done a good thing, albeit a small thing, to encourage that kind of reporting into the future. Each year we only make one award, and that's a real challenge. We usually consider five or six entries, make it through to the short list, and we debate at length the merits of each of those five or six articles or stories or broadcasts or podcasts. And each of them, because they've made it to the short list, are obviously of the highest quality. With the increased instability and very fast moving international landscape, we need good journalists as never before. And I think particularly at times where we have the United States president belting up the media day after day, blaming the media, we have to actually stand up to that and show that Western democracy values good media. In a world that's dominated by, say, US politics, Chinese politics, Russian politics, Brexit, and then more importantly in our own backyard in what's happening in Indonesia, what's happening in Papua New Guinea, what's happening in the Solomons, what's happening in Fiji even, these are really important issues to be brought back with a level of objectiveness and trifle-ness that we might not otherwise get. I guess the core component of these stories was looking at the Chinese government interference or influence operations in respect of Australian politics but more pointedly in respect of Senator Sam Dastyari. So what we did was expose a real-life example of the Chinese government interference or influence operation working, where Senator was at one point repeating the Chinese government talking points on an important foreign policy issue that is the South China Sea and on another occasion actually tipping off a suspected United Front or Chinese government influence operations member that his phones may be being tapped by Australian or Western intelligence agencies. Obviously the role of the Chinese government and China in the world and in our region is vitally important. Understanding that role is vitally important for the Australian public and for our politicians. So our story was important because it showed the Chinese government's interference or influence operations, the way the Chinese government was trying to interfere with the domestic politics of Australia. It was also interesting I guess to see the Chinese government's response to these stories, the campaign of repeated denial and feigned ignorance, trying to undermine our reporting work which I think ultimately failed. Covering the United States at this point in its history is absolutely fascinating. It's one of the most polarized countries at the moment, certainly much more polarized than it was 20 years ago when I was the New York correspondent. Donald Trump is such an unusual president. He's just very maverick. He's so unconventional and I think there's probably a little bit of misunderstanding about Trump in Australia in the sense that there's a lot more shades of grey involving Trump and the administration and the way that they go about governing. And so I think it's really important to try and give Australians context for Australia at this moment in its history. It's very much caught between the rising China and the United States and the United States has rarely had, if ever, had a president as unique as Donald Trump. And so I think it's important that Australians really understand this president, his administration and what he is trying to do, the changes he's trying to bring about in America and overseas, internationally. And so anything that any small part I can do to contribute to a greater understanding in Australia of those issues I think is important. Mimmo's Killing Fields is a one hour investigative documentary which is originally based on our unique access to hundreds of videos that have been filmed by a secret network of Muslim Rohingya citizens who filmed the run up to the violence that was launched against their community by the Myanmar military in August 2017, all the way through the actual attacks on the villages and in subsequent attacks in months after that as well. What's really important about this is that we tried to get together a real picture of what had happened in August and September 2017 when the military swept through more than 350 Muslim Rohingya villages in Myanmar. How they launched attacks against men, women and children and then basically tried to drive 700 or did in fact drive 700,000 people from Myanmar into neighbouring Bangladesh. In terms of why this is important for international politics, we felt it was our job to do our best to try and really prove and pull together what actually happened. We felt this was important because the Myanmar military and the civilian government were denying that there had been any military campaign against civilians at all and in fact they kept on saying that this was simply a clearance operation targeting militant Rohingya terrorists. We're in the region, we need to better understand the Asia Pacific, we need to understand the political and social and religious dynamics that are driving some of the forces in the region today I think and I felt like it's our job to try and bring that to the Australian audiences. I mean for example the rise of Buddhist nationalism in Burma and places like Sri Lanka, I mean it could lead to further Islamist extremism. So this piece is about ExxonMobil's PNG-LNG project up in the highlands of New Guinea and it in many ways felt like the end of a 10 year journey for me in that the first story I ever did in Papa New Guinea, the first of several stories I did up there on one trip in 2007 was around the beginning of this project. Those stories come back and they go before people who have a vote and they have decisions, powerful ones about where they invest their money and I would hope that if these stories resonate with them and they have some connection to the lives and the people that are really very close to us, that some element of that story might stick and that that might inform the way they progress in terms of their votes and their investments and their demands of politicians and bureaucrats around the way that we manage our relationships in this part of the world. I'm proud that we've got a story out and I hope that it's got a fair amount of truth in it, but it's not my story. So that is really very challenging to get past so much of my own baggage to be able to tell it. The Dome is basically about how climate change is impacting the Pacific in particular the Marshall Islands and how that country's nuclear legacy is colliding head on with that climate change particularly rising sea levels. It's also a story about the impact on people in the Pacific and also the thousands of American servicemen who were tasked with going to the Marshall Islands to dispose of the nuclear waste left over from dozens of atomic tests. I think the thing about this story is it involves a part of the world that we really should focus on more and that's the Pacific we're seeing these countries affected at the front line of climate change particularly sea level rises. So from that perspective what we're seeing in the Pacific and with this story is what we could all be facing in the decades to come. The Pacific is a place to which we are tied, it's a place to which we have a long history with, but it's also a place I think as media organisations we need to show that we care about a little bit more and we need to spend a little bit more time looking at. To get to an atoll in the far flung western outreaches of the Marshall Islands which is a massive place did take a little bit of time, a little bit of effort, a hiring of charter flights using decades old former Nepalese planes of varying degrees of quality. Obviously a lot of people in this part of the world don't necessarily have mobile phone coverage so it did take two years of planning, of research and then of execution and filming and editing and producing to get this over the line. The work we've been nominated for and it's a large group of people which I coordinated and helped write was a project looking into China's Belt and Road Initiative. The Belt and Road Initiative is a trillion dollar at least spending plan by the Chinese government mainly through loans to countries that don't necessarily have much of a credit rating to build infrastructure. The infrastructure is ports, roads, rail, it's pipelines, it's industrial parks, it's fibre optic cable and while it was once true that all roads leads to Rome, in this case all roads lead to Beijing. I think this work is important because there's no bigger project historically than China's Belt and Road Initiative and it's a symbol and a very real actualization of China's increasing power, of its increasing assertiveness and its increasing economic weight around the world. I think the question of handling China is very difficult for the Australian government because on the one hand we've got our largest trading partner and the future of the region in China. On the other hand we've got our traditional security partner, the United States which is still very much holding on to power in this region. I think it's crucial for Australians to know about this because China is such a rising power in the world that to not know what their number one international policy and infrastructure and economic policy is about would be negligent of Australians not to know about and negligent of the Australian media not to try to explain in a way that people can really grapple with.