 Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Michael Fully Love, I'm the Executive Director of the Lowey Institute. Welcome to the media award dinner for 2017. I acknowledge that we're gathered on the land of the Gadigal people and pay my respects to their elders past and present. Let me first recognise my Chairman, Sir Frank Lowey, Board members Stephen Lowey, Jim Spiegelman, Serangus Houston and Mark Ryan, who first suggested the Institute establish a media award five years ago. Let me recognise our guest of honour, Brett Stevens from the New York Times, a couple of this year of this year's judges for the media award and our six finalists, several of whom are with us tonight. We have some former judges of the award, including Monica Attard, Anna Thunder and Max Utridge. And most importantly, let me recognise the journalists, producers and editors who help explain the world to Australians. You are the whole point of this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a crazy period for the media. The old phrase, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, comes to mind. Donald Trump is great copy. He's great talent. He sells a lot of newspapers. He cannot help himself from saying crazy things. You might have seen at the UN the other day, he called Kim Jong-un, Rocket Man, which I thought was pretty funny. And then he talked about the African country of Nambia. Now, of course, it's great that the President of the United States is talking about Africa. I really applaud that. But unfortunately, as some of you heard, Nambia is a made-up country. Like Coffifi, which Mr Trump tweeted a few months ago, Nambia does not exist. And no, in case you were wondering, Nambia is not a leading exporter of Coffifi. Ladies and gentlemen, President Trump's attacks on the media have worried some journalists. But on foreign policy, too, things are not looking too rosy. Mr Trump's statements have made allies like Australia nervous. It sounds to me like he's ready to break up with us. And I worry that he's thinking of leaving us for a younger country, perhaps one born in Eastern Europe in 1991. It's an interesting time, too, for media companies in Australia, including the national broadcaster. Pauline Hansen wants the ABC to follow the lead of the BBC and reveal the salaries of leading broadcasters as the price for supporting the government's media reform package. So again, the price for perfect timing goes to Chris Yulman, who has left for Channel 9 in the nick of time. Chris is one of our nominees tonight. And he was coming. I've been texting with him today. He was coming, but bushfires have cut off the Hume Highway. And he has sent me photos of the Hume Highway just in case I didn't believe him. But I think, actually, this is another sign that the salad days of the media are over. Because you can imagine in the old days, Channel 9 would have sent out the Channel 9 chopper to pick up the political editor. But unfortunately, budgets are too tight now. Ladies and gentlemen, I know that journalists are allergic to the idea of serving any interest other than telling a good yarn and throwing light on a subject that deserves scrutiny. But we believe that it's profoundly in Australia's national interest to have Australian journalists reporting on and analysing world events. At the Institute, we believe the world matters to Australia. And if the world matters, then we need to be informed about the world. And news reporting is an essential basis for that. The intelligence that you provide is irreplaceable. We love the New York Times. We love the BBC and the Guardian. We welcome the fact that some of these international news organisations are opening bureaus in Australia and indeed are represented here tonight. But we also need Australian journalists on the global beat. Because Australian journalists see the Australian angle in a story in a way that an American or a Brit cannot. Australian journalists bring Australian sensibilities to the craft of reporting, including pragmatism, a lack of deference to authority, and a sense of humour. So we need Australian media to cover the world. But the unavoidable truth is that Australian coverage of the world is shrinking. Australian news bureaus abroad are closing and foreign correspondents are being recalled. Media companies are finding the bachelor generates a lot more clicks than Brexit. And that's why we established this award in 2013 to recognise Australian journalists who have deepened the knowledge or shaped the discussion of international policy issues in our country. We can't alter the economics of the media industry, but we can recognise effort and reward excellence. And by doing so encourage proprietors and editors to continue to invest in foreign coverage. This award is now in its fifth year and it's among the richest in Australian journalism. Tonight we will give an award that along with the glory includes a $20,000 purse. Now I'm afraid I can't report to you that in the past year things have got better for international reporting. The Warclays got out of the business of recognising foreign news coverage. And just this month AAP closed its Jakarta Bureau after 35 years of operations. I am yet to hear a persuasive argument that Australians need less analysis on what is happening in Indonesia. In the past Australian foreign correspondence filed from foxholes and waterholes all over the world. Now the number of correspondence is small and getting smaller. There are many more stories on Buck Palace as we know than Beijing. So our media award I'm afraid is not exactly having the impact we hoped for. And yet having served as a judge for this award and having watched and read all these brilliant stories I can't help but feel optimistic. And indeed this year rather than pulling back we are doubling down. We've moved this dinner to a larger venue to accommodate a wider range of guests. And for the first time we've invited a distinguished international visitor to deliver our media lecture. Let me explain how the evening will proceed. In a moment our main courses will be served and after that the 2017 award winner will be delivered to the board. Frank Loewy Institute Media Lecture will be delivered by New York Times columnist Brett Stevens. After his lecture I'll conduct a Q&A with Brett. We'll then move to the main business of the evening with the announcement of the media award winner. But first of all let me call on my chairman, Sir Frank Loewy, to offer a welcome on behalf of the board. Frank Loewy is the institution that has benefited from the generosity of Frank and his family. In the case of the institute it's been a sustained investment over 14 years now. An investment in the power of ideas and investment in the national interest. And at the institute we like to think that we have inherited some of Frank's qualities. His knowledge of the world and his curiosity to know more about it. His instincts and his networks and his remarkable attention to detail. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Frank Loewy. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 2017 Lawn Institute Media Award dinner. It is a pleasure to see so many friends of the Lawn Institute here tonight. My own experience in the media was short lived. And anyone who reported ownership of Channel 10 was around there will remember it. I'm not exactly a media expert and this is the understatement of the year. Nevertheless you're welcome here. Of course things at Channel 10 haven't really gone smoothly since I got out of the game. This is not for reporting by the way. But I know the media is very important. Ladies and gentlemen, when we established the Lawn Institute, we wanted to project Australia, Australian voices to the world and bring important voices to Australia. In the past years, we have hosted world leaders such as Engel Merkel, Onchi, Onsenk Suu Chi, Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and King Abdullah and Queen Raya from Jordan. But to do our work, the Lawn Institute needs accurate information and analysts from around the world. The media is vital for the Institute and for Australia. That is why the Institute decided to inaugurate this media in 2013. I'm delighted that tonight winner will be announced by one of the 27 judges. Her Excellency Mina Rowlings, the UK High Commissioner to Australia. Welcome Mina. No clapping. Of course the other tradition of this night is the Lawn Institute Media Lecture. This year it will be delivered by New York Times columnist Brett Stephen. Brett is a principal man and an excellent journalist. I look forward to hearing from you, Brett. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you good evening and enjoy yourself. Thank you very much. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Every year we invite a significant figure to deliver a lecture on the state of the media. It's one of the traditions of these awards. And we've been lucky in the past four years to host Nick Warner, the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and the son of legendary Australian war correspondent Dennis Warner. We had Malcolm Turnbull, who was then communications minister, director of News Corp and last year Michelle Guthrie, the new managing director of the ABC. To date, all of our lecturers have been Australian. But given that our award is about looking out onto the world, we felt it was time to invite an international visitor to deliver the lecture. Ladies and gentlemen, Brett Stevens is one of the world's most influential voices on US foreign policy and world politics. He was raised in Mexico City educated at the University of Chicago and the LSE. He was a reporter and a columnist in Brussels. He was for a time the editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post. He spent many years at the journal where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and for 11 years the journal's foreign affairs columnist. He joined the New York Times as a columnist this year and as many of you know, he's already made a splash. He's the author of an excellent book, America in Retreat, the New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, which was published in 2014. And he's the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including two honorary doctorates and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Of course, all those awards pale in comparison to giving the Lowy Institute media award lecture. I've admired Brett's work for many years. Like all good columnists, he has views that are strong, clear, and well argued. But he's really come into his own in the past couple of years. I'd argue there's no more effective critic of President Trump in the American media than Brett. And that's partly because he comes from the right, not from the left, but it's also because his writing is consistent with his long held views. And in recent years I've watched with admiration as Brett and a few other conservative commentators have stuck to their principles often at great professional and personal cost. The Institute's announcement that Brett would give this lecture attracted some criticism from the left. That surprised me, I must admit. I didn't know the Australian debate was quite that sensorious. But here at the Lowy Institute we believe in the value of listening to people with different opinions. We believe in debate. And in 2017 I cannot imagine a better Lowy Institute media lecturer than Brett Stevens. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Brett to the lectern. So there's this wonderful scene in a film that I adore. It's a Woody Allen movie called Play It Again, Sam. So Woody and Diane Keaton are walking through the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. And they enter on this enormous gallery and Woody spots this attractive brunette on the far side of the gallery staring at this enormous canvas on the wall. So he plucks up his courage, walks over to her and says that's a beautiful Jackson Pollock. What does it say to you? And in this sultry European accented voice she says it restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous, lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste and horror and degradation forming a useless, bleak, straight jacket in a black absurd cosmos. Woody looks at her and he says, what are you doing Saturday night? She replies, I'm committing suicide. He says, oh, how about Friday night? So anyway, that's the extent of my comments about the Trump administration. Let me begin my actual address by thanking the Lowy Institute for bringing me all the way to Sydney and doing me the honor of having me here this evening. As Michael mentioned, I'm aware that there's been a controversy that has gone with my selection as your speaker. I respect the wishes of the Colvin family and join in honoring Mark Colvin's memory as a courageous foreign correspondent and an extraordinary writer and broadcaster. And I would like to extend my particular thanks to Michael for not rescinding the invitation in the face of protest. Now this has become the depressing trend on American university campuses where the roster of disinvited speakers includes former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, former Harvard University president Larry Summers, actor Alec Baldwin, human rights activist Ayan Hirsi Ali, DNA co-discoverer Dr. James Watson, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, filmmaker Michael Moore, conservative Pulitzer Prize winning columnist George Will, and liberal Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Anna Quinlan to name just a few. So illustrious is the list that on second thought, Michael, I'm beginning to regret that you didn't disinvite me after all. The title of my talk this evening is The Dying Art of Disagreement. This is a subject that is dear to me, literally dear, since disagreement is the way in which I have always earned a living. Disagreement is dear to me as well because it is the most vital ingredient in any decent society. To say the words I agree, whether it's agreeing to join an organization or submit to political authority or subscribe to a religious faith is the basis of every community. But to say I disagree, I refuse your wrong. Etiam si omnes egonon, even if all the others do, I will not, as Peter said. Those are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspective, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. Galileo and Darwin, Mandela, Havel and Lujelbo, Rosa Parks and Natan Sharansky, such are the ranks of those who disagreed. And the problem as I see it, is that we, at least we in the United States are failing at the task. Now this is a puzzle. Again, at least as far as the US is concerned, Americans have rarely disagreed more in recent decades. We disagree about racial issues, bathroom policies, health care laws, and of course the 45th president. We express our disagreements in radio and cable TV rants in ways that are increasingly virulent, street and campus protests that are increasingly violent, and personal conversations that are increasingly embittering. This is yet another age in which we judge one another morally, depending on where we stand politically. Nor is this just an impression of the moment. There is extensive survey data showing that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were 20 years ago. Democrats much more left-leaning and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation's welfare. The polarization is geographic as more people live in states and communities where their neighbors are much likelier to share their politics. The polarization is personal. 50% of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat. And nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Should be the other way around. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as the new family taboo. Finally the polarization is electronic and digital as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer have just our own opinions. We also have our separate facts often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy. In the last election fully 40% of Trump voters named Fox News as their chief source of news. Thanks for that one, Australia. It's usually the case that the more we do something the better we are at it. Instead we're like Casanovas in reverse. The more we do it the worse we're at it. Our disagreements may frequently worsen our voices but they rarely sharpen our thinking much less change our minds. And it behooves us to wonder why. 30 years ago in 1987 a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago named Alan Bloom who at the time was best known for his graceful translations of Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Emile published a learned polemic of higher education in the United States. It was called The Closing of the American Mind. The book appeared when I was in high school and I struggled to make my way through a text thick with references to Plato, Max Weber, Heidegger and Leo Strauss. But I got the gist and the gist was that I'd better enroll at the University of Chicago and read the great books and that is what I did. What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum? Certainly not conservatism in any contemporary American sense of the word. We were not taught to become American patriots or religious pietists or to worship what Roger Kipling called the gods of the marketplace and their smooth-tongued wizards. We were not instructed in the evils of Marxism or the glories of capitalism or even the superiority of western civilization. As I think about it I'm not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education in this sense wasn't a teaching with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation. To listen and understand. To question and disagree. To treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious. To be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind. That is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago. It's what used to be called a liberal education. The University of Chicago showed us something else. That every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea. Socrates quarrels with Homer. Aristotle quarrels with Plato. Locke quarrels with Hobbes and Rousseau quarrels with them both. Nietzsche quarrels with everyone. And Wittgenstein quarrels with himself. These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades and sometimes they take place over the distance of century, even millennia. Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension. From having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out. In other words, to disagree well, you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen well, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect. Give him the intellectual benefit of the doubt. Have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say. The closing of the American mind took its place in the tradition of these quarrels. Since the 1960s it has been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called dead white European males as the whems of the western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Alan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation. He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you need liberally educated people. This at least should not have been controversial. For free is to function. The idea of open-mindedness cannot simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all, when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree. That habit was no longer being exercised very much 30 years ago. And if you follow news from American campuses in recent years, things have become a great deal worse. According to a new survey that was just brought out by the Brookings institution, a plurality of college students today that is 44% do not believe the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects so-called hate speech, when of course the First Amendment absolutely protects hate speech. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students, 51%, think it is acceptable for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. And an astonishing 20% also agree that it's acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. These attitudes are being made plain nearly every week on one college campus or another. There are speakers being shouted down by organized clacks of hecklers. This was the experience of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California at Irvine. There are speakers who require hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of security in order to be able to appear safely on campus. This was the experience just the other week of conservative pundit Ben Shapiro at Berkeley. There are speakers who have been physically barred from reaching the auditorium. That's what happened to conservative scholar Heather McDonald at Claremont College in April. There are teachers who are humiliated by their students and hounded from their positions for the crime of hurting their students' feelings. This is what happened to Erica and Nicholas Christakis two professors at Yale. And there is violence. Listen to a description from Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger of what happened when she invited the libertarian scholar Charles Murray to her school to give a talk in March. This is a quote. The protesters succeeded in shutting down the lecture. We were forced to move to another site and broadcast our discussion via live stream while activists who had figured out where we were banged on the windows and set off fire alarms. Afterward, as Dr. Burry and I left the building, a mob charged us. Most of the hatred was focused on Dr. Murray. But when I took his right arm to shield him and to make sure we stayed together, the crowd turned on me. Someone pulled my hair while others were shoving me. I feared for my life. Once we got into the car, protesters climbed on it hitting the windows and rocking the vehicle whenever we stopped to avoid harming them. I am still wearing a neck brace and spent a week in a dark room to recover from a concussion caused by the whiplash. Middlebury is one of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the United States with an acceptance rate of just 16% and tuition fees approaching $50,000 a year. How does an elite institution become a factory for junior totalitarians so full of their own certitude that they could indulge their taste for bullying and violence? I don't think there's any one answer. What's clear is that the miseducation begins early. I was raised, as many of you were, with the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones, but words would never hurt me. But today there is a belief that since words can cause stress and stress can have physiological effects, therefore stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization. The miseducation continues in grade school. As the Brookings findings indicate, younger Americans seem to have no grasp of what our First Amendment or any other of the amendments say, much less of the kind of speech or acts that are constitutionally protected. This is a testimony to the collapse of civics education in the United States creating the sorts of conditions that make people uniquely susceptible to demagoguery, sometimes of the left-wing variety, but as we discovered last year, also of the right-wing variety. Then we get to college where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument is not the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, sexual, or ideological standing of the person making it. As a woman of color, I think X. As a gay man, I think Y. As a person of privilege, I apologize for Z. This is the baroque way Americans often speak these days. It is a way of replacing individual thought with all the effort that actual thinking requires with social identification with all the attitude that attitudinizing requires. In recent years, identity politics have become the moded castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our safe space, but it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind. A safe space from thought rather than a safe space for thought to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie, who knows something about safe spaces. Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn't treated as being merely wrong. Instead, it is seen as immoral and therefore unworthy of discussion or serious rebuttal. The result is that the disagreements we need to have and to have vigorously are banished from the public square before they're truly settled. People who might otherwise join a conversation to see where it might lead them would use instead to shrink from that conversation unless they say the wrong thing and be accused of some kind of political ism or phobia. For fear of causing offense, they forego the opportunity of being persuaded. Take the argument over same-sex marriage, which you are now having here in Australia. My own views in favor of same-sex marriage are well known, and I hope the yeses by a convincing margin. But if I had to wager, if I had to guess, I suspect the noes will exceed whatever they are polling now. That's because the case for same-sex marriage is too often advanced not by reasoned argument but merely by branding every opponent of it as a bigot merely because they are sticking to an opinion that was shared across the entire political spectrum, including by Barack Obama just a few years ago. Few people like outing themselves as someone's idea of a bigot or a racist, so they keep their opinions to themselves even when speaking to pollsters. That is just what happened last year in the Brexit vote and the US presidential election, and look where we are now. If you want to make a winning argument for same-sex marriage particularly against conservative leaning opponents, make it on a conservative foundation. As a matter of individual freedom and as an avenue toward moral responsibility and social respectability, the noes will have a hard time arguing with that. But if you call them morons and neanderthals, all you'll get in return is their middle finger or their clenched fist. One final point about identity politics. It's a game at which two parties can play. In the United States, the so-called alt-right justifies its white identity politics in terms that are coily borrowed from the progressive far left. One of the more dismaying features of last year's election was the extent to which, quote, white working class became a catch-all identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity, but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give much of the Trump base a moral pass that it didn't always earn for itself. So here is where we stand. Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right, namely their right to disinvite, shout down, or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person or even allowing other people to listen to that person. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities and the frayed edges of our democracies. Can we do better? This is supposed to be a lecture on the media, and I'd like to conclude this talk with a word about the role that editors, and especially publishers and proprietors, can play in ways that might improve the state of public discussion rather than just reflect and accelerate its decline. I began the talk by noting that Americans have rarely disagreed so vehemently about so much. On second thought this isn't the whole truth. Yes, we disagree constantly, but what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents or try to see things as they might or find some middle ground or even treat them as human beings worthy of our respect. Instead we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves. We take exaggerated and histrionic offense to whatever is said about us. We banish entire lines of thought and attempt to excommunicate all manner of people your humble speaker included without giving them so much as a cursory hearing. The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement namely shut up, listen up, pause, reconsider and only then speak is absent. Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well and those we do have such as the intelligent squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria show on CNN cater to a sliver of elite tastes like classical music or opera. Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest root to huge profitability, excuse me, huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high carb low protein populist pep. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test. Those of us who otherwise believe in the virtues of unfettered capitalism should bear this depressing fact in mind. I do not believe the answer at least in the U.S. lies in heavier investment in publicly sponsored television along the lines of the BBC. It too suffers from its own form of ideological conformism and journalistic group think immunized from criticism due to its relative indifference to competition. Nor do I believe the answer lies in a return to what in America used to be called the fairness doctrine mandating equal time for different points of view. Free speech must ultimately be free whether or not it's fair. But I do think there's such a thing as private ownership in the public interest and the fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens. Journalism is not just any other business like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government as France has always demonstrated. But no country, no country can have good government or a healthy and vibrant public square without high quality journalism. Journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion that understands that the purpose of opinion isn't to depart from the facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea that we call truth and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that like my beloved island of Manhattan it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs. In other words journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements. I believe it is still possible and all the more necessary for journalism to perform these functions especially as the other institutions that were meant to do so have fallen so far short at least in the United States. But that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment or help out a president or a prime minister they favor or who happens to be in some political trouble. Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting to improve the quality of that debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them. This is journalism in defense of liberalism not liberal in the left wing American sense or liberal in the right wing Australian sense but liberal in its belief that the individual is more than just an identity and that free men and women do not need to be affected from discomforting ideas and unpopular arguments more than ever they need to be exposed to them so that we may revive the arts of disagreement that are the best foundation for intelligent democratic life. The honor the Lowy Institute does to tonight's nominees is an important step in that direction. What they have uncovered for the rest of you to debate by which our democracies can remain rational reasonable and free. Thank you and good evening. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. I know you'll agree that was an important a powerful and very elegant lecture on the importance of disagreeing so thank you Brett and thank you also for giving the audience an opportunity to disagree with you in a Q&A session. Let me take the chair's privilege and ask the first couple of questions as if I may. You didn't mention the D word much the Donald. Let me ask you but of course he hangs over. He looms over a lot of the issues that you did discuss. D stands for other things. This is polite company. How has the American media treated Donald Trump do you think? The White House would say the media is irredeemably biased against the president. Hillary Johnson would say the media gave him a leg up and billions of dollars of media coverage. How would you grade your colleagues performance and how should journalists cover the news and cover this administration in the era of fake news. There's a small question. Look, by and large I think most of the members of my profession have in fact bent over backwards to treat with objectivity, seriousness and fairness an administration the likes of which the American people have simply never seen. I grew up in Latin America and as I see it the modes of analysis for understanding the Trump administration should borrow more heavily from the modes of analysis by which we understand certain Latin American regimes in terms of the relentless popular appeal and the assault on fundamental institutions of democratic life not the least of which is a free and vigorous press. When a president calls the American media the enemy of the American people in language that strikingly recalls what Vladimir Lenin might have said in 1918 or so you're dealing with something unusual. Now there are a few ways in which you might criticize the press and my main critique is not of its treatment of Mr. Trump. My main critique comes and this really applies to me as well in our failure to understand the full extent of anger and the motives by which Trump's supporters elected him to office and we too cavalierly fall prey to the idea that they are either sort of poor saps in the poor saps of hillbilly who have just been hard done by forces of globalization and we should pity them as much as we understand them or that there are these hopeless bigots who are just secretly or not so secretly haters of this group or that and in fact there are great many hopeless bigots and there are that hillbilly elegy component but I think many of my colleagues for instance didn't spend enough time thinking about what it meant in the last seven or eight years to be a member of what I call the things making economy in the United States. There are two economies in America. There's a words making economy, lawyers, consultants, journalists, academics, civil servants and we're in the business of just manufacturing words. It's wonderful. I speak, I get paid, not by you but that's alright I appreciate the honor but that's my business and it's an unregulated business thanks to the First Amendment. But we journalists should have spent a little more time talking to say businessmen who have businesses that have say 60 or 70 employees and they suddenly are laboring under the burden of arcane regulations that are not only obscure but often arbitrarily applied. I think a lot of us sort of in places like 40th and 8th Avenue or Washington don't quite understand, don't perceive that. So it wasn't the treatment of Trump. I think actually we've been good and fair and if anything too deferential. It's our effort to understand what has become of this country that sometimes we feel we barely know. Let me ask you one more question. This award is principally about foreign correspondents or at least foreign coverage of the world. You were mentioning to me earlier that you were a foreign correspondent for a couple of years in the main streets of Brussels. Gaza and other places too. But as a columnist I guess you rely on the work of foreign correspondents. What can you talk to us a little bit about the value that you've derived from the work of your colleagues in the fields over the years as a columnist and a commentator? The journalists and the general effort to poison the well against members of our profession enrages me. There's no other word for it. I was once having a very unpleasant conversation. It wasn't really a conversation. I was heckled at a speech. I was making an argument about Afghanistan and some guy stood up. He said you don't know anything about Afghanistan. My son is in the army and he was deployed to Afghanistan and I said to him, I said look, I respect your son and I'm sure he wouldn't be happy that his dad is heckling the speaker at an event. But when your son goes to Afghanistan he has an entire armored brigade that has his back. When Danny Pearl went to Karachi he went alone. When our colleagues go across the border from Turkey into Syria, when Steve Sotloff was in Syria, he went alone. When David Rode was in Afghanistan and kidnapped to Pakistan he went alone. And what we are doing at relatively low salaries is telling western audiences what in fact is going on there in as honest unfiltered and comprehensive way as is possible. And that's true of Americans, Australians, Brits you name it, who find themselves all over the world. And without this function we would simply not know what in fact is happening whether it's in East Timor or Mexico City or Gaza or Aleppo or Mosul and so on. And at any given moment there are hundreds of foreign correspondents, some of them with families back home who risk everything to nail down the story. That's it. They're just trying to nail down the story. The idea that the leader of what should be the freest country in the world whose First Amendment enshrines the freedom of the press should be launching these demagogic attacks on courageous people who are in fact public servants doesn't please me to put it mildly. Alright, we've got about 15 minutes for questions so please pop up your hand if you've got a question, wait for the microphone to come to you. We've got a few microphones. I see Bonnie Blay right out on that table. So wait for the microphone to come tell us your name if I don't know you and limit yourself to one short question if you can. Thank you very much. Bonnie Blay from the Lowe Institute. Thanks Michael and thank you Brett for your eloquent and thoughtful remarks. I'd actually like to turn to Europe and ask sort of Merkel and Trump are pretty much as opposite as they come. How do you think their relationship as world leaders will evolve now that she's on course to winning a fourth term? Thank you. Well I mean, Merkel is used to handling East German Stasi agents in Vladimir Putin so I think she should have no trouble dispatching a meretricious failed New York real estate impresarios. Jeff? Yes we've walked the mean streets of Brussels together 15 years ago Brett when we both worked at the Wall Street Journal. I guess the thing that I'd like to and thank you very much for your speech which I thought was moving for us as a journalistic audience. The thing that's brought you here really and made you a mini superstar is that you walked from the Wall Street Journal, the centre of right-wing commentary in the United States to the New York Times and I just, what I don't understand is what's going on in the minds of the Wall Street Journal opinion page and the right-wing serious commentariat now who, and I guess indeed in the minds of Congress of the serious right-wing conservatives what are they thinking? How can they justify their opinions and I was wondering if you could offer a little insight into that, the state of mind of those people. Well I'm going to slightly dodge the question insofar as I think it would be in bad taste to speak of my former colleagues but let me speak broadly about the conservative movement the quote serious conservative movement as it was, as Trump emerged. You know I've always thought personally that Trump's nomination and his rise among conservatives was a great test of character not a hard test of character but an interesting test of character liberals of course were going to oppose whether it was Marco Rubio or whoever would just oppose him on ordinary policy grounds and there was a question of whether you actually had a set of principles and those principles defined your idea of being a conservative or whether you mainly just hated the left and anything that wasn't left was good for you and what I think Trump's support from people who if you had asked them a year ago would you ever support Donald Trump for president to get out of town showed how much of the conservative movement in America which supposedly had these ideas about free trade and the benefits of immigration and an internationalist foreign policy all of that was you know in the mortal words of George Costanza just yada yada yada they believed really none of it or they believed none of it with enough conviction not to vote for the guy I was fortified intellectually before the Trump's election because I had years ago read a wonderful book by a Polish dissident by the name of Czeslo Milosz I'm massacring his name but I call him Czeslo Milosz won the Nobel literature prize I think in 1980 or 81 Milosz had been a communist in the post war Polish government and then had defected and he wrote an important book which I urge all of you to read because it's very apropos this moment called The Captive Mind which was a psychological analysis of the ways in which serious Polish intellectuals accommodated themselves to a Stalinist regime that at some level they knew was hideous and all of them found highly sophisticated ways to justify repression and low intrigue and then with Trump's arrival I felt like I was looking at my colleagues and seeing the same psychological process unfold I mean one example you know Trump will say something insane right he'll say you know once we were in Iraq we should have taken the oil well what does that mean should we have just put it in our pocket and you know ambled out should we have just said you're stealing your oil Iraq go shove it this was one of these comments that was a kind of a nonsensical comment and he would say this and you would say well that's a nonsensical comment but someone would come along and say I know but you know what he really means to say and so these are people I call the Trump explainers you know and then they would provide this kind of sophisticated gloss to explain the runestones of Donald Trump's mind and you know you can always find I mean Anthony Lane in The New Yorker writes his best movie reviews about the most idiotic movies right because you always can surface something very clever about something very stupid but this became a kind of dominant mode of political analysis among American conservatives and it became a sort of a form of self-deception but a self-deception I think with a moral cost you know to me that moral cost came due at the moment that Charlottesville took place and for me Charlottesville was a turning was an inflection point because here the sort of the full hideousness was revealed that someone I mean I'm offering my views people can disagree but that someone could offer any kind of moral equivalence between Saudi left wing protestors and Nazis I thought that was extraordinary and I say this is a guy who's always been center right so it's a depressing thing to see this happen because I think every free society needs a morally serious conservative political party that is not prey to it's nativist and xenophobic instincts that are always going to be present somewhere in the conservative life just as kind of class warfare is always in the background of left wing parties and that I think that should worry us a great deal I mean especially in Australia I hope the people here who are on the liberal side are very conscious of the fact that maintaining the moral honour of an intellectually and morally serious conservative party is about as important a thing you can do in any healthy democracy. I take two more questions the lady here with the microphone. Hi my name is Cheryl Bagwell I'm from the ABC kind of the equivalent of the ABC I guess actually ABC Radio National which we used to I think we still call the Ideas Network which we celebrate at Radio National and Long May Live thank you very much for your speech it was very thought provoking I'm just wanting to get your view on Donald Trump how does this film end I mean where do you go because I think you wrote sorry if I've verbaled you but you said that the world we may not survive the Trump administration I kind of wonder what you meant by that. Well you know Harold McMillan who was Prime Minister of some country or other you know had that wonderful line what does he fear most events dear boy events and these things happen so you know one of my fears is the establishment of delicate crises by highly temperamental people who don't know their own mind from one day to the next but what I made the comment about the survivability of Trump really what was in my mind was the fact that his presidency I think is culturally corrosive you know unlike in Australia or Great Britain the office of the presidency in the United States combines the kind of the ceremonial head of state function with the practical head of government function and as much as I disliked Barack Obama on a policy level whenever you know there was there was a ceremony a Medal of Honor was being awarded and I was watching he was my president 100% I always felt good about him as a man being president I always felt that he elevated he honored the dignity of the office I think that's being systematically trashed day in day out one tweet after another by this presidency and what worries me isn't so much Trump 1.0 this guy because he in a way the saving grace is his buffoonishness kind of creates a little bit of distance but what happens when we get Trump 2.0 that is a clever more astute version of the same biologic impulses a Victor Orban type for example or a Recep type Erdogan that's what concerns me that eventually you know time moves on and we're going to get another person like this now you asked a practical question how does this end I would be very surprised if Donald Trump is impeached those of you who every now and then entered you know read the Constitution and discover this thing called the 25th amendment that's what it is it's the way by which the cabinet can remove an insane president that's not going to happen and don't be surprised if Trump wins the second term and the reason I say this is we just had a quarter with 3% growth and 3% growth forgives a great many tweets unemployment is very low the labor participation rate is rising people become accustomed to a kind of clownishness there's a sort of defining deviancy down sort of quality and if the economy is thriving it's very hard to defeat an incumbent president particularly given the total disarray of the Democratic Party one of the ways in which Trump is most effective is that he is driven Democrats insane and the Democratic Party ought to be recovering its centrist of the Bill Clinton variety and it should be a party that is addressing the needs of middle class Americans instead it's becoming the party of Bernie Sanders and the left wing and as between Donald Trump and the Bernie Sanders wing I think Donald wins so I find myself in this weird position as someone who's voted for one Democrat in his life Mrs. Clinton of desperately hoping that the Democratic Party can recover its wit and say you know hey we can be a party that is unified and is not simply just tearing out its hair day in and day out at every tweet by the president. Final question from this gentleman here yeah thank you very much Peter Ryan from the ABC just following up on what my colleague Cheryl was saying in general how do you view Donald Trump in terms of his diplomacy we have North Korea on one hand but how is he going to be dealing with the big question of China and the growth of China is Donald Trump going to be the president who does the big deal with China and is he going to be is he going to be able to contain China if things go wrong with North Korea. Well if you were following the news today Mr. Xi is his new best friend he's never had better relations a month ago Xi was useless and you know one thing to understand about Trump is Trump has sort of impulses and instincts that are gussied up as policy and ideology so the idea that there is a kind of coherent world view that is being systematically applied as you had say in the Nixon administration that had a highly almost geometric concept of triangulation that it applied with brilliance in the early 1970s Aristotle says somewhere you should look for the level you should only look for the level of exactitude that a certain subject can sustain so people are looking for a Nixonian level of analysis or a Kissingerian level of analysis in the wrong corner so I don't know I mean I think it would be foolish of me to speculate how this plays out what worries me most of all is that Trump does not seem to understand in his bones how well the United States has been served by a system of alliances undergirded by American security guarantees but not American guarantees alone to make sure that our trade our freedoms I mean collectively our freedoms and our well-being or our security is being carried out sort of at the far frontier in Panmunjhan as opposed to the 49th parallel or whatever I don't think Trump understands that because he instinctively sees foreign policy as a series of transactions and deals and the great insight of Harry Truman and no one knows this better than Michael the great insight of Harry Truman after 1945 was the understanding that America does best when we define our interests according to our values rather than our values according to our interests. Now just take one other corner of the world in 1948 the United States undertakes this improbable campaign to relieve the broken city of West Berlin utterly surrounded by Soviet troops militarily indefensible and yet we launched this airlift against our defeated recently defeated adversary the Germans and the United States succeeds it's a great technical feat but then what happens number one we persuade Germany that the United States is not just a benign power but a benevolent power and a power to be close to and so we solve the German question right there number two we succeed in persuading the French at least for a time Italians and so on that a system of collective security with the United States will work and NATO comes into existence number three 41 years later we win the greatest geopolitical battle of the 20th century without a shot being fired or a life being lost where in West Berlin because we stood up this little outpost of capitalism and freedom in a way that East Germany East Germans couldn't look away from it so all the communist propaganda about the evils of rapacious capitalism couldn't sustain the visible evidence of West German freedom and prosperity so Truman's example of having a values based foreign policy centered around our fidelity towards smaller countries defending at least relative values of freedom and openness pays extraordinary dividends in the long time that was our secure that's been our policy in the Pacific in the western Pacific as well and I just hope that if not with Trump the next American president is going to be able to recover that foundational wisdom of what it takes to sustain an international order in which people want to follow America not because we're mighty but because we're tolerant decent and good and if we can do that we will have achieved something ladies and gentlemen Brett thanked me for not rescinding his invitation to speak but I think you can see why that was never in question not only because that would be the wrong thing to do but because it would be a stupid thing to do because I knew that he would give an absolutely cracking speech we've heard many addresses at the Lowey Institute Brett but none better than that it's really a tour de force and at a time when Australians are daily reminded of the worst aspects of the American character you've with your thoughtfulness and your principles and your knowledge of history and the argument that you've made so clearly and elegantly you've reminded us of the best qualities of the American character so ladies and gentlemen please join me in again in thanking Brett Stevens ladies and gentlemen we're now at the business end of proceedings for the evening announcement of the 2017 media award winner as I said earlier this is the fifth year of the award and we have had a formidable roll call of winners in 2013 John Garno of Fairfax took out the inaugural award for his reporting from China 2014's winner was Hayden Cooper of the ABC for his foreign correspondent report on Peter Grestor's trial and conviction 2015 the winner was Paul Maley of the Australian for his brilliant reporting on foreign fighters and last year's winner was Fairfax's Jewel Topsfield for her reporting on life in Indonesia under President Jokowi as well as the highs and lows of our bilateral relationship. This year there are six finalists for the award and to give you a sense of the very fine reporting put together by the finalists I have a video for you based on interviews with them and snippets of their work. This work was important for Australian audiences because the Islamic State group is more than just one thing Australians understandably might focus on it as an international jihadist organisation because after all its members are accused of inspiring and in some cases planning terrorist attacks in Australia but what I wanted to do was through a mix of raw combat reporting and also analytical reporting I wanted to delve more deeply into where IS came from to show in a real multifaceted way the deep roots that IS has in Iraqi society in the conflict within Iraq and in the flow on from the US-led invasion in 2003 which Australia was part of. I think it's really crucial to not just report the suicide bombings, the death toll because that's something that people become desensitised to very quickly and one of the things that I'm really proud of about the work that is nominated for this award is that we looked beyond just the body count. I really think that foreign correspondence are a crucial part of any news organisation a crucial part of any news diet and a crucial part of our Australian news environment. This story is all about the way Australia deals with one of our most important arguably our most important trading partner the rising power of China. There's obviously huge benefits that come with China's rising place in the world and in the region but there are drawbacks, dangers as well and what we found I think what we exposed is that some of those hidden lurking dangers aren't well debated or known in the Australian community. I think that Australians know the way that soft and hard power is exercised by China in Australia and if you like this is soft power in some ways, all countries do it, they try to influence people but it's soft power with a hard edge. We're talking about affecting the rights of China's Australians living here, affecting the operations of Chinese language media here and interfering or seeking to gain influence non-disclosed influence in our political system. As a result of this change to Australia's political donation laws but it will go beyond that before the end of the year because of the work that we have done we will see the government bring forward a bill to look at foreign interference in Australian politics to try and sharpen those laws to make sure that things that would be illegal in the United States become illegal in Australia. The Naru files is the largest case of leak documents ever published from inside Australia's detention centre on Naru they set out as never before an instagging detail what has taken place including serious events of self-harm of abuse and assault. The Naru files is really the view of what has taken place on Naru from the eyes of the guards and the case workers and the teachers on the island. The decision to publish the primary material is about creating open journalism that members of the public can view and explore and see and understand themselves. A senate inquiry was launched into the continuing allegations of abuse and self-harm and other serious events. There were protests around the country, there was a bill put forward to introduce an independent children's advocate and there were calls from many international and domestic groups to remove the people from the detention centre on Naru and resettle them. As a western reporter I was never given a visa to enter Syria so we developed close contacts with people on the ground, civil society groups that we trusted doctors, nurses, teachers, people who were really stuck between these two warring sides and people who were increasingly terrified as the government advanced on East Aleppo. The hardest part about doing the Yemen story was just getting in, so difficult access is very restricted, we waited for months to get those visas but local authorities don't make it any easier because we were trying to show the war crimes alleged war crimes committed by both sides. On the ground I mean this is a place that's been hit by airstrikes, kidnapping is a high risk. On the roads we travelled we were 20 kilometres from a front where ISIS was. Poverty is just so incredibly overwhelming and just to meet these families whose kids are dying because they just don't have enough food to feed them but I feel that what we do is really important and we always strive to be the ones who are there bringing that story home both the audience and for the powers that be. Covering Donald Trump has been one of the most extraordinary experiences I've had in 30 years of journalism it's been an enormous challenge, it's been enormously exciting and it's been quite typical in lots of ways he's an extraordinary president, he's won out of the box, he's very very original in almost everything he does. The coverage of him though in America is very polarised. For me as a journalist coming from Australia I've tried to interpret Trump through Australian eyes, I've tried to be very fair to him, I've tried to take the issues as they come but I think he is a unique president and you've got to cover him very carefully and very comprehensively. The Summer in Leek story was a really unusual story to write even though I wrote it from Melbourne it went global very quickly because it involved the major security breach by the French and of course the French were mortified by the disclosure of this it was front page news in Le Monde in Paris and the Indians of course were more mortified because it was their submarine fleet that the secrets were relating to. It started with student protests against the incumbent government of Prime Minister Peter O'Neill at the biggest university, spread across the country and then of course it led up to the elections this year, chaotic, contentious violent and hotly contested elections that saw Mr O'Neill who has been fairly controversial ever since he seized power here in Papua New Guinea re-elected for a second term. Australian businesses have more money invested in Papua New Guinea than we have in China so its stability as our nearest neighbour is not only important politically it's also important commercially. We also know that when we report on things like the Papua New Guinea elections that there are negative consequences for reporting critical stories in Papua New Guinea that is a fact of life of operating here. It's one of the things we deal with. The government frequently says that the media is free but it's a real challenge to actually report on contentious political events in Papua New Guinea when you're under that kind of pressure, when you're being threatened with arrest and deportation and just also just getting people to talk to you on the record and to do interviews and to find that talent, the stories is also a challenge and that's an issue that we actually still face here in Papua New Guinea at the moment. Ladies and gentlemen, I know you'll agree it's an outstanding roster of reporting that's come in from all over the world from Port Moresby to Aleppo. Now that list and the final winner was decided by a judging panel. Every year the institute puts together a distinguished judging panel for the award. This year's panel comprised academic and historian Dr Janine Baker, the British High Commissioner to Australia, her Excellency Mena Rawlings, broadcaster and commentator Tom Switzer, Lowy Institute board member and father of the media award Mark Ryan and me. Thank you all very much to my fellow judges and I'm delighted that this year Mena Rawlings has agreed to announce the winner of the 2017 media award. Mena is the British High Comm to Australia she's a star of the Canberra Diplomatic Corps, she does an excellent job as Frank said of representing her country's interests here. She's also a great friend of the Lowy Institute, not least because she lent us Boris Johnson a couple of months ago for the Lowy Lecture. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mena. Good evening everybody and it's a real pleasure to be here tonight to present this award. I promise not to keep you in suspense much longer but just wanted to say a few words before I announce the winner. First of all it's been a real privilege to be on the judging panel this year for this prestigious award and I'd like to add my thanks to Michael to our fellow judges Mark, Janine, Tom and of course Michael himself. It was a real pleasure working with you and I hope we can do it again sometime. You might be wondering why is a diplomat on a judging panel looking at an award for a journalist. I just wanted to share my own view of that. First of all it gets me closer to what was a long time ago my own dream job. So when I was growing up I actually wanted to be you. I wanted to be a journalist and I'm sure we take inspiration from many places but my inspiration was Joe March from the Little Women books. I'm sure many, particularly the women here will know and she had all these adventures and she wrote a family newspaper and then went on to be a female journalist at a time of writing when I think that was quite unusual so I tried to emulate her. I had my own family newspaper called The Ryslip Times I was brought up in a place called Ryslip which is a mediocre suburb in the end of the Metropolitan Line in north-west London and so strangely enough it didn't set the world alight but undaunted I did apply for the BBC when I left university and sadly I didn't get in. But I was accepted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Very much second best but hey I've made a go of it and I'm not bitter even though my younger brother succeeded where I didn't and he now works for BBC Wales. So there you go. But it all worked out okay because as I argued in a blog on the interpreter website this week, quick plug, plug over, that journalism and diplomacy I think are actually very, very closely linked and I think particularly in the area of international affairs, journalists act working in those fields have an awful lot in common and we are all foreign correspondents in a way and as I argue in the blog second plug we are more allies than adversaries I believe in a complex world. So apart from allowing me to step back through that sliding door of my childhood aspirations being on the panel built my own understanding of some of the brilliant work that is out there in Australia by journalists, some of whom are here today. You keep Australia's eyes wide open to global issues. You remind people why they matter. As Brett Stevens put it, you nail down the story. You deepen understanding of some of the conflicts all of us are trying to grapple with thousands of miles away and in doing so you inspire people to keep speaking truth to power in whatever profession we're in. So our short list was just a small part actually of the fantastic body of work that we reviewed at the judging panel and we considered four dimensions in narrowing down the competition. Topicality, influence, originality and quality. The debate was fierce but there was consensus in the end. We felt that all of those qualities were displayed in spades by all the journalists we've just seen on that video. So I'd just like to acknowledge them once more particularly as some are in the room with us today so they are Matt Brown of the ABC who is here tonight. If anyone's here please wave your hand in the air. Matt, I know you're here somewhere. Rosie. So Matt was nominated for his coverage of the military campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and I should also acknowledge ABC cameraman Aaron Hollitt who worked with you. Four Corners Fairfax for the joint investigation into the Chinese Communist Party's political and social influence in Australia. And here tonight I think we've got Nick McKenzie and Sashka Koloff. I think that Chris Olman was defeated as we heard by the little bushfire between Canberra and Sydney but Richard Baker and Chris also deserve acknowledgement. The Guardian Australia for the narrow files and I think here tonight we've got Nick Evershed and Ben Docherty and they work with Paul Farrell, Helen Davidson and others on that story. Sophie McNeil of the ABC who isn't here tonight for Yemen The War on Children on Foreign Correspondent and for the Siege of Aleppo and again cameraman Aaron Hollitt deserves an honourable mention. Cameron Stewart of the Australian for his coverage of the DC-NS Scorpion Leagues and for his coverage of the Australia-U.S. relationship in the time of Trump. And finally and also here tonight Eric Torchek of the ABC for PNG a bloody boycott on Foreign Correspondent and for fantastic coverage of the PNG election Eric. But of course there can only be one winner. And I'm delighted to say that the Lowy Institute Media Award for 2017 goes to Matt Brown of the ABC. And the customers I am to public speaking I'll say a few words. Well thank you High Commissioner, thanks a lot to the Lowy Institute and thanks to the Lowy family for creating an institute which is without doubt now the most consistently vibrant source of debate about foreign affairs in Australia and Australia's place in the world. That's a really great public service. When I was told I was a nominee for this award I was confronted with two very strong emotions which some of you in the room might think were unfamiliar for a journalist. They were gratitude and humility. Humility because you've only got to look at that incredible breadth and depth of coverage of the other nominees to be humbled by that work and that it's just a slice of the work that's generated every week in week out by people in this field. But the gratitude goes a bit deeper and I will say a few words about it because I think everyone knows that you don't do that kind of work without a lot of people to thank. I think the fact that we had three ABC foreign correspondents nominated tonight is a reflection of the fact that only the ABC only in Australia a public broadcaster is committed to having that level of representation out there in the world to putting that money on the table to have bureaus and have correspondents in meshed, immersed in what they're reporting day by day. And it doesn't happen by accident. We've got managers, most notably for me our international editor, Michael Carey but also Deputy Director of News, Craig McMurtry and the Director of News, Gavin Morris who have all actually, they're great advocates for this sort of reporting inside the corporation but they also themselves have been in Moscow they've been in Washington, they've been in Haiti, they've been at ground zero of 11 in fact they've even been in Mosul well before me and this work that I was nominated for tonight was arguably based around a four corners but it was also for a whole body of work over many months focusing on ISIS and Mosul and that reflects the fact that a lot of it was generated online, some of it was specifically for online some of it was reversed by me from radio material and from other TV material so the corporate line on that would be that's because the ABC is committed to reaching audiences wherever they are and on whatever platform they're using but I can tell you what it really means is that ABC editors are better at any editor anywhere in the world at squeezing more product out of a reporter for more platforms than you can imagine. You might think it was a no-brainer for us to go to the first day of the military operation to liberate Mosul, sure, but we were the only Australian media organization there doing that job and we went back we went back to give more depth, give more context by then four corners thanks to the executive producer selling neighbor was on board again putting cash on the table and in this case for a 45 minute story months down the track with no idea what we were going to get or what we were going to do we got some fantastic footage on that assignment and other assignments which is because of our middle east cameraman who's got an incredible ability it doesn't happen without him and you'll note also he went into Yemen with Sophie on a pretty difficult assignment as well he can get images capture events that are there for a fleeting few seconds but he can also get into the heart and soul of the people that we're interviewing and filming with and tap that well of empathy which I think is crucial for certainly any good television but any good journalism as well when it comes to appealing to the audience my mum and dad are here tonight and I should thank them, Romer and Bernie they were lifelong teachers and they imbued me with a love of learning and a love of inquiry and every months old they took me and my sister off to the islands of western Samoa where they were teachers on an aid project and they didn't come back till I was three, of course I've forgotten about that time really but their constant stories of that time gave me that love of wondering what's beyond the far horizon and that's something that's been pretty big in my life they lost my sister 23 years ago and every time I walk out the door they wonder if fate will take me from them as well but they've never once asked me to stay home, they've never once asked me to quit and I think that's a special type of courage and selflessness I think that you talk about identity politics, you talk about the year of fake news and probably the biggest thank you I've got to make is to people who'll never be in this room to watch YouTube videos of this sort of thing and they're the so called ordinary people of the Middle East because they are saturated with identity politics, they are surrounded by partisan media they by and large have leaders who will never be accountable in ways that we would find familiar but they don't mean to gloss over it but they haven't succumbed to the lazy cynicism anti-journalism and the anti-media sort of mindset they'll still talk to us when we show up in the most extraordinary circumstances in my brief time at the ABC I've seen bureaus in Moscow, clothes, Berlin, Brussels I've seen as thin out bureaus in Delhi in Bangkok, invest in others it must be said there's no doubt that as budgets are crunched our window on the world is shrinking but I think if you look at the stuff that was nominated tonight the work of the other nominees you'll agree that we are whether we're based abroad or whether we're doing it with the telescope of investigation and analysis there's a lot of people doing very good work to try and keep that window in as wide as possible and for as long as possible so yeah, thank you, thanks for acknowledging all of the work that was acknowledged tonight, thanks for the prize and thanks for the opportunity let me add my personal congratulations to Matt and let me also thank Matt and Matt's colleagues in particular Gavin who inspire to get Matt back for this award ceremony Matt we know that the news doesn't slow down in the Middle East just because you're here on Macquarie Street and we know that there was, I'm sure there was an instinct of yours to be in the Middle East reporting on the events in Northern Iraq at the moment but it makes an enormous difference to us that you were here and it really lifts the evening so thank you very much, let me thank a few people let me thank MENA not only for being a judge and for announcing the winner but for sharing the sad tale of the rice slip times which is great fodder for any profile writers in the room who want to do a story on the poor British High Commissioner to Australia for whom life has really not worked out well but let me just tell you something MENA, we know people at the BBC so we can talk later thank you again to Brett Stevens who as I say really paid us a compliment sometimes Brett in Sydney we get speeches from foreigners and may I say from Americans who come and give the same speech that they gave in Singapore the week before or they gave in Washington a month before but Brett didn't do that he took the hard option of thinking very seriously and giving us a very substantive speech that will be up on the Lowy Institute website soon so thank you again Brett Stevens. Congratulations again to the other finalists I won't go through them again but they all did magnificent work that was very much appreciated by all my fellow judges and finally can I thank my institute colleagues we're a thank you Matt for what you said about the institute and the contribution we make but we're not a large organization and a lot of my colleagues were have worked very hard to bring off this event we put an enormous amount of work into it from choosing a judging panel from helping the judging panel to identify pieces of work that they like to having the judge's lunch MENA was right at the discussion was fierce but it was lubricated by Italian wine which we find helps form a consensus and then putting on this dinner tonight it's quite a big effort for us so let me thank Anthony Louisa Fitzgerald, Jen Reinhart, Georgia Dillon, Charlotte Warden Allie Rutledge, Alistair Davis and in particular the three staff who were particularly involved in these awards John Gooding Andrea Pollard and Aaron Bassett actually ladies and gentlemen please join me in thanking them so that's it that concludes the formalities thank you for joining us for the 2017 award please feel free to stay around for a drink I will certainly be doing so and frankly I would think less of you of journalists if you did not thank you and good evening