 Good evening, everyone. And welcome to the Australian National University. I'd like to start this evening by acknowledging and celebrating the first Australians on whose traditional lands we're meeting this evening, the land of the Nambri and Ngunnawal people and pay my respects to elders past and present. We are here in Cambry, a place named after the traditional meeting place of the indigenous custodians for literally thousands of generations. And it is a true honor to be here in such large numbers here tonight. This is like EC 1011, the largest course we have in the university. After a three-year hiatus due to COVID, we can now host the Gareth Evans oration again, which we are thrilled about. The inaugural lecture was delivered by former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, back in 2019 on the future of democracy. The oration honors our longest serving chancellor, none other than Professor the Honorable Gareth Evans for his lifelong service to the public and to ANU. Gareth, it is always a pleasure to welcome you back on campus and it's great to see you rummaging around Chancery as we found you an office up there. And we particularly appreciate that you remain actively connected today and you post your chancellorship. Gareth made enormous contributions to the university during his time here. He was instrumental in establishing the ANU Crawford Leadership Forum, a hub for Australian and international policy, business and academic leaders, to come together and address the geopolitical and economic challenges facing contemporary policymakers. The forum has evolved over time, but the foundations Gareth put in place remain strong and I have no doubt its success will continue for years to come. He also oversaw the ANU master plan, a 30 year plan to guide the shape and environment of our university to ensure we are on a sustainable, vibrant campus and continue to preserve the land First Nations people have cared about as indicated for millennia. And I can attest to the minute detail, every part of Cambry, this building and everything was put under by Gareth as the chancellor. Gareth, of course, provided a huge amount of expertise and still does on foreign affairs and public policy to colleagues, to students and to academics across campus, something that I appreciate him still being prepared to contribute to. During his time as chancellor, he was both a friend and a mentor for me, providing me with the guidance and wisdom necessary to take the university from someone who had really a big jump up from professor to vice chancellor. So I appreciate that immensely. We don't always see eye to eye on every issue but we always are able to find middle ground and it is a great pleasure to have worked with him for so long. Not only did Gareth make a lasting impact at ANU, he also held an extraordinary career in Australian politics. He served as foreign affairs minister, leader of the government and the Senate, deputy leader of the opposition in the House of Representatives and cabinet minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor Governments. Gareth was also president and CEO of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, the Independent Global Conflict Prevention and Resolution Organization. Before joining politics, Gareth was a prominent barrister and Queens council and an advocate for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights, campaigning against the white Australia policy. Gareth is a distinguished author and has written and edited over 14 books. In 2012, he was made a companion of the Order of Australia for his eminent service to international relations. So Gareth, you've had an impressive career and I'm glad ANU is able to continue honoring your legacy with this oration. And tonight, our special guest is Lord Chris Patton, Lord Patton of Barnes and he will deliver the 2023 Gareth Evans oration. Lord Patton, it is great to have you here at ANU and back in Australia and I'd also like to extend a warm welcome to Lady Lavender Patton, who is with us here tonight. I know you've both traveled a long ways from the UK and I hope you are enjoying your time here in Australia and in Canberra. Lord Patton has been a friend for the university for more than two decades and I believe a friend of Gareth for far longer than that and it is an honor to have you deliver tonight's oration and with everything happening across the globe, it's about as timely as it could be. I'd like now to invite Professor Gareth Evans to formally introduce Lord Patton. Gareth, the stage once again is yours, just like good old times. Well, thanks very much, Brian, for those exceedingly kind words. I don't get much flattering attention these days and I really am pathetically grateful when I do so thanks so much. I'm touched and amazed in equal proportions. Thanks, Brian. I'm deeply conscious that people usually only ever get significant things named after them after they've passed life's final checkout so it's a very great privilege for me to be actually here and enjoy this lecture which ANU has so graciously established in my honor and it's a particular pleasure to invite to deliver it. A very old and dear friend, Chris Patton. Chris and I were born within four months of each other more years ago than I was here now to remember. And for the last 30 years or so, our lives, both professional and personal, have been regularly intersecting. I have to say, however, that my relationship, our relationship didn't exactly have the most promising start. The year was 1992. I was visiting Hong Kong as Australia's foreign minister. Chris was in his first year as the territory's last governor. A role that he was already performing with conspicuous success, supported by a family from central casting. His wonderful wife, Lavender, with us here today, I'm delighted to say, three gorgeously photogenic daughters and also two lovable fluffy white Norfolk terriers, named with a very English flourish, whiskey and soda. The day I arrived, the story dominating the local press was that soda had gone missing. Such parties were out, but he couldn't be found anywhere. Having a drink that evening with journalists, never a risk-free enterprise. I was incautious enough to speculate as to what might have happened. China's leader, Deng Xiaoping, I said being from Sichuan, was well known to enjoy a couple of puppies each morning for breakfast. So, foreign minister says Chinese leader ate government dog. Was, of course, next day's story. Not only in Hong Kong, but back in Australia, as some of you may remember, and halfway around the world. Mercifully, soda was found before long and the patents did eventually forgive my indiscretion. Helped, I guess, by the fact that I was strongly and publicly supportive then as I remain today of Chris's Herculean efforts, superbly documented in his just published book, Hong Kong Diaries, which so many of you bought and had signed by Chris tonight. His efforts to reinforce human rights and democracy protections in Hong Kong before the 1997 handover. That support, I have to say, didn't exactly endear me to my Prime Minister, Paul Keating, who saw Chris as being just the last twitch of the British imperialist dinosaur until actually a few years later, Paul met him and discovered that this Tory grandeur was actually a fellow tyke, not only a Catholic, but one with Irish origins. So, war was thereafter much better. Before his five years in Hong Kong, Chris had a long and distinguished career in UK politics, including as Minister for Overseas Development, Secretary of State for Environment, and from 1990 as Chairman of the Conservative Party, where he successfully orchestrated John Major's rather unexpected electoral win that year, but at the cost of losing his own very marginal seat. Always ranked, including across the aisle as among the most civilized and competent of politicians in a party and parliament, which has all too often, like both, Chris, I think, will be forever regarded, and rightly so, as the UK Prime Minister who never was, but should have been. That, I think, was borne outamply by subsequent career, which has involved Chris leading the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, which was an absolutely crucial step in implementing the Good Friday Agreement, being European Commissioner for External Relations from 1999 to 2004, where we actually saw quite a lot of each other when I was then living in Brussels, heading the International Crisis Group, of which Chris later took the role as Chair. He was Chairman of the BBC Trust for a time, and since 2003 has, of course, been Chancellor of Oxford University, a position which, unlike here in Australia, incumbents have to be carried out feet first, not a fate which I anticipate happening anytime within the next couple of decades to our guests tonight. Through all these comings and goings, Chris and I have remained great friends, each prepared to forgive the other's wrong-headedness in joining and devoting our political lives to the parties that we did. In my case, that friendship is based not only on my own and my wife's delight in Chris and Lavender's company, not least over extremely indulgent dinners whenever we meet, but my profound respect for the principles and the values for which Chris stands, and the steadfast way in which he's articulated and advocated those values over the decades. We're certainly in total harmony in our passionate belief in what universities should stand for, not just globally leading ones like ours, but universities everywhere. Their distinctive value has never been and must never been purely vocational, even in the traditional professional disciplines of medicine, law, engineering. As Chris has written, and I've often quoted him, universities of every sort, if in different ways, should introduce students to the joy and the discipline of scholarship, to the challenge and the excitement of personal intellectual development and the social and historical context of knowledge and learning. When it comes to international affairs, we may differ a little. This may or may not come out in the course of our conversation a little later. With Chris's position on China, the way in which we address the challenge posed there, perfectly understandable in the context of Beijing's indefensible suffocation in recent years of those human rights and democracy protections in Hong Kong for which he fought so hard and for which China was committed by treaty to observe. We might also differ a little, we find in the extent to which we're prepared to nurture Washington's aspiration for global primacy in perpetuating, but we'll let some of these things come out in the course of Chris's lecture in the subsequent discussion. I have no difference at all, whatever else we might disagree about occasionally. I've no disagreement at all with Chris in his distaste for authoritarianism in any shape or form, his commitment to a civilized, rules-based global order, his belief, absolute belief in the necessity of foreign policy to have a moral dimension and above all his, just his commitment to decency in the conduct of both public affairs, both international and domestic. All of which I'm sure we'll see an abundant display in the oration which I now have the greatest pleasure in inviting him to this lecture to deliver. My Lord, over to you. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be invited back to this world-class university, among other reasons because it was the academic home of one of my intellectual heroes, the Belgian-Australian essayist and sinologist Pierre Reichman who wrote here under the name of Simon Lees. And I sometimes worry that he may be a prophet insufficiently honored in his own country. He was here for many years then went to Sydney. No one's perfect and then came back to Canberra where he died. And if my remarks this evening encourage anybody, one person to read Simon Lees who wouldn't have otherwise done so, not least perhaps his introduction to his extraordinarily good translation of the Confucius Anelects. If my lecture does that at all, it will have been a success. It's also an honor to be asked to deliver this lecture which stands in the name of the Chancellor. But in this case, the Chancellor to whom it refers is not Julie Bishop, the present holder of this office, but her predecessor as you know, Gareth Evans. My belated attendance here to deliver the lecture is the result of the global pandemic whose origins are deliberately obfuscated, we know who does that, which the pandemic which both changed and shortened so many lives from country to country and continent to continent. There's been nothing quite like it since Spanish flu more than a century ago, which produced the New York skipping song, you may remember. I had a little bird, his name was Enza. I opened the window and in flew Enza. As Donald Rumsfeld put it, stuff happens. Good stuff and bad. That's globalization for you. Gareth is one of the good things that's happened in my life. He and I have known one another as he said for about 30 years. He was one of the first international political figures to give intelligence support to my inevitably pretty limited attempts in Hong Kong to secure the future of that city as an open society after it's handover to the People's Republic of China. He and I have both spent most of our lives in public service of one sort or another and usually it's involved international affairs. We went to the same university, Oxford, though neither of us did so with silver spoons in our mouths. We've both been chancellors. We worked together after we'd retired from elective office on crisis management and conflict resolution and prevention at the International Crisis Group. I've usually, though not always, found myself in substantial agreement with Gareth, though when I've disagreed with him, I've known that it's very important to ensure that I at least appear to know what I'm talking about. Gareth in discussing issues which he believes to be of great importance doesn't take prisoners. I put the point delicately. Gareth campaigns about things that really matter like the perilous superabundance of nuclear weapons in the world and the international responsibilities that better off countries have to try to secure a global order that accommodates the interests of poorer and weaker ones. Above all, I admire him for his instinctive comprehension of the relationship between ethics and foreign policy. He knows that doing the right thing is invariably the right thing to do in foreign policy as elsewhere in life. There's one area where Gareth and I are rather different. His political memoirs are entitled, Incorrigible Optimist. No one in my family, no one who knows me, would have thought that a suitable title for my own memoirs. I imagine that Gareth's home, I'm not, of course, speaking literally, is full of glasses half full. In my home, they're usually half empty. Yet I guess that in some ways, the thrust of my remarks today reflects the case for Gareth's not my own usual view of the world. Gareth and I have something else in common, relevant certainly to what I'm going to say, and it's the real starting point of my lecture. We were both born in 1944, naturally a vintage year, but I'm his senior by four months. I was born on the day that the German army was driven out of Crimea by Ukrainian and Russian forces. My best friend at school now a distinguished orthopedic consultant in Western Australia was a Polish boy who was born in the same month that his father was killed in the Battle of Monte Cassino. I remember George singing, it was a rather a dreary tune, red poppies on Monte Cassino. It became an unofficial national anthem during the Soviet communist occupation of Poland. Gareth was born precisely midway between the death during the Normandy campaign of my wife's father, a Cambridge and Olympic high hurdler, and her own later birth in September. Gareth's nativity, on Gareth's nativity, the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria, though the events were not of course related. Why do I forage in the births and deaths column like this? For a simple reason, Gareth and I are part of an extremely fortunate generation that was born in the right, the second half of the 20th century. We were even luckier than those who were born in the period of 30 or 40 years of peace which followed the Congress of Vienna in the 19th century. We were for our part, the beneficiaries of a longer period of peace which was neither inevitable nor unpredictable after the death of 40 million people in the First World War and 80 million in the second. One of the books which has had the greatest effect on me is The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, a Jewish Viennese intellectual who lived and wrote in Austria in the first decades of the 20th century. In this book, he described the European civilization of which he was a distinguished part at the beginning of the 20th century. He believed that it compared very favorably with anything that had ever gone before. And then he went on in his book to describe how the heavens darkened after the First World War in the 20s and 30s and the decency and values of Europe began to be trashed by the rise of fascism, Nazism and class warfare. In 1941, in a lecture to the American Pen Club in New York in what he called This Dark Hour, he argued, quote, never has the dignity of man been so abased as now, nor people so enslaved and maltreated, never has the divine image of the creator in all his forms been so violently defiled and martyred. His friend and fellow Austrian Jewish writer, Joseph Roth, author, of course, of the Rudetsky March, spoke of the capitulation of the European mind before what he called the mechanized orangutans of Nazism. Horrified at what was happening in Europe, Zweig had left his home with his wife for exile first in Britain and then in America. They traveled on to Brazil where he wrote the book to which I've just referred. On a particularly black day in 1942, he sent the manuscript of the book to the printers and then he and his wife promptly committed suicide. He couldn't contemplate the prospect of what was happening in Europe and what he thought would be left of its civilization after it was subjected to even more brutalities. Zweig would not, of course, have known of the One Sea Conference, which followed shortly after his death when the industrialized murder of up to 6 million Jews was planned. That same conference would presumably have further deepened his gloom if that were conceived would be possible. But how could he possibly have brought himself to believe in the rebuilding and indeed the renaissance of Europe and the rejuvenation of much of the rest of the world after 1945? Here, I suppose, is the case for incorrigible optimists. Ordinary men and women did extraordinary things, led by Americans. The wheelchair-bound President Roosevelt, the haberdasher from Missouri, Harry Truman, and Eleanor Roosevelt widely sneered at as a do-gooder. I've always thought it's better to be a do-gooder than a do-bader. These Americans and others helped to lead the efforts by liberal democracies everywhere to create a new global order and a new peace in Western Europe, capable of withstanding the aggression of Russian communism with its imperial designs. What they built was far from perfect. After all, it was made out of what Emmanuel Kant called the crooked timber of humanity. And of course, while the better off countries in the north of the globe and here in the Antipodes enjoyed a long peace and growing prosperity, not everyone was so lucky. But by and large, around the institution building at the UN and the creation of global alliances of free countries, the international community firmly rejected, once had once been the dominant message of global real politic, taken from what, according to Thucydides, the Athenians said to the inhabitants of a weaker neighbor, the island of Milos. The Athenians said, as they obliterated Milos, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Liberal democracies were sustained in part by military alliances. But surely the main reason for their survival and their success was their inherent moral strength and the lessons they gave to others, not always perfectly by any means, about the way to harness economic and political freedom in welfare democracies. In his much admired, rightly admired, long telegram, about the relationship between what we called the West and the Soviet Union, written in 1946, the distinguished American diplomat, George Kennan, argued that the Soviet Communist view of reality and that of Western open societies were his word incompatible. One aspect of that incompatibility was that in open societies, we believed in the universality of human rights, even if we did not always defend them or adhere to them adequately ourselves. Open societies were not simply democracies based on majoritarianism with elected governments. Our societies operated within a framework of rules, institutions, and often unwritten assumptions which placed limits on what the majority should be able to do. Minorities had rights too. This was at the heart of civic humanism. At our best, we also accepted that if open societies were to be healthy and strong, we needed to help those whom we called, rather brutally, the left behind. We should give them every opportunity to live a decent life and to enjoy self-respect. We had to remember the wise counsel of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the greatest political philosophers ever. We had to remember his advice wisdom, his wise counsel, that the most important of all necessities is that of not sinking in the world. There are challenges to all of us about these issues, from Washington to London to Brussels, and indeed, right across the world. We sometimes take for granted how liberties have been established and protected in the past and how they need to be preserved in the future, in parliaments, in university lecture halls, in the media, and alas, last sometimes on the battlefield. For years after the Second World War, it did not seem that we needed to be reminded about how best to preserve freedom right across Europe, across North America and here. The successes in terms of peace and prosperity were underpinned by an end to belligerent nationalism. We had not, after all, forgotten the words of the poem that W. H. Orden had written on what he called the dark cold day when W. B. Yates died, recalling what had happened to bring so much horror and misery to Western Europe. Orden had written, in the nightmare of the dark, all the dogs of Europe bark, and the living nations wait, each sequestered in its hate. Now Europe buried hate and came together, though the United Kingdom took some time to understand what was happening and to believe in it. In an astonishingly successful pooling of sovereignty, better together, indeed. By the 1970s and 80s, we witnessed what I assumed then and in later years would be the most significant developments of my lifetime. They seemed to cap the triumph of open societies in the years after the Second World War. The Soviet Union and Russia's empire in the Central and Eastern Europe collapsed under the weight of their own, often horrible inadequacies, economic and political. But despite the decent and valiant efforts of Mr. Gorbachev, what emerged was not yet, was not, alas, a country rebranded with the rule of law, a reasonably regulated capitalism and a respect for civil liberties. Further afield, the success of the marriage between economic and political freedom wrote chapters of economic success and even democratic change across much of East and Southeast Asia. In the wake of Japan's economic rejuvenation came the roaring of the Asian tiger economies. First Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan began to expand at an exhilarating rate. And as they escaped from what we call the middle income trap, most of them opened up their political structures. Others followed in their wake, but the biggest story of all was the transformation of China when after the death of Mao in 1976, China rejoined the world economy under the skilful leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Back at the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe and America in the 1820s, China had represented more than 30% of global GDP. The calamities which invested the Qing dynasty, the plundering of China by imperial powers, the invasions by Japan, civil wars within China, and finally the stone age policies when Mao came to power, reduced that figure to about 3%. Some people think even lower by the 1970s. Mao's great leap forward, the famine which resulted from it and the cultural revolution led to an appallingly large number of deaths and to the crippling of China's economic prospects. The most important thing that the Chinese leadership did after Mao was to stop doing what Mao himself had done. The results were as spectacular as you would expect from a country as large as China and with such an intelligent, creative and hardworking population with a civilization behind it which was a source and still should be of much pride. From the 1980s onwards and until pretty much the beginning of this decade, China was growing at an average of just under 10% a year with its GDP doubling every eight years, helped hugely by the dismantling of so many trade barriers in the stead in the already developed economies, China became an exporting superpower. In one 15 year period, its exports to the United States increased by 1,600%. The people of China themselves benefited hugely as China's growth surged though the disparities in income not least measured by the genie coefficient and by human perception raised serious questions about whether the regime was entitled to call itself communist or even socialist. The success of a country as large as China inevitably benefited other countries as well. Though it's fair to point out that the cashing of the prospective profit, profits and benefits dangled before the eyes of outsiders was in reality only very occasionally as great as the promises made. So here we were with the political systems and the values of assumptions about world order of open societies, apparently established in an unstoppable and conceivably permanent ascendancy. It may well be that Francis Fukuyama's famous essay about the end of history did not really mean what the title suggested and was certainly not meant as a trumpet blast of hubris. Nevertheless, that was certainly what many took to be the lesson of recent events. And overall, with only a few carping at our behavior, we appeared not just to rest on our laurels but to go to sleep on them. All those comfortable assumptions have been rudely shattered in the last decade, most notably recently by the war in Ukraine. What had emerged from the wreckage of communism in Russia was not orderly and democratic capitalism but a country whose demography was one of many examples of its decline, run by past members of the KGB and the modern equivalent of Robert Barron's. And at the top of the whole seedy and dangerous edifice was a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, who had learned his trade in Dresden as the KGB's link and paymaster with the Bardemainhof gang. We had, of course, to court, Mr. Putin, the Tsar of Lies. The Germans were not the only ones, even if they were the most prominent, who believed that trade with Russia would bring change. No other European leader went perhaps quite as far as Mr. Berlusconi, who plainly thought that Mr. Putin was a fine fellow presumably a prized potential guest at a Bunga Bunga party and that the reports of him murdering people, or at least acquiescing in or ordering their murder, were fake news. Moreover, we did become hugely dependent in Europe on Russian oil and gas. I remember back in the 1990s and later, some right-wing politicians, officials, and commentators in the United States warning us in Europe that this dependency was playing with fire. I tended to think, along with many others, that they were exaggerating and recycling Cold War rhetoric. In fact, they were absolutely correct. So we cashed peace dividends in NATO and while, to be fair, the enlargement of the European Union brought greater stability to the countries just beyond Russia's borders, we were usually keen to look the other way when Mr. Putin and his colleagues were behaving badly and to imagine that, if humored, he would soon enough come to his senses, or perhaps even ours. So in London, while a disturbing number of his critics came to apparently innocent, sticky ends, a large number of the so-called oligarchs, including those embarrassingly close to Mr. Putin's activities, lived about as high on the hog as is possible under the protection and to the great benefit of so many allegedly respectable British banks and law firms. More important, most of us allowed a comfortable complacency to slip into amnesia. Perhaps there were no lessons from history to learn even in countries where previous generations had paid with their own lives because it never seemed quite right for their governments or even civil society to take a stand against or even to recognize wickedness. So Mr. Putin launched a cyber assault on Estonia in 2007. Went to war with Georgia in 2008, putting an armlock on Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Invaded Crimea in 2014 and provided, no questions asked, the military assistance in Syria, which President Assad required in order to stay in power. When chemical weapons were used there in Syria, a red line laid down by President Obama and other Western powers was plainly crossed. Something must be done, it was said. This was a wicked crime against humanity. It must never happen again. We said all that. Communicates dripped with strong nouns and adjectives and then nothing was done. Partly because certainly in the case of Washington and Westminster, our parliaments went weak at the knees. My own party's behavior at the time would not have been recognized by Winston Churchill nor would Ernie Bevin have condoned labor's behavior. What was Mr. Putin supposed to learn from all this? It would not be unreasonable for him to conclude that we were pushovers and that we wouldn't recognize a red line even when it was drawn in blood. Perhaps he thought he could set about aping Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible and reestablish the Russian Empire. So Russia invaded Ukraine over a year ago expecting a short work walk in the park. But with a large if somewhat ramshackle army, Russia has found itself facing the fierce and brave resistance of the Ukrainian people. In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Professor Timothy Gartenash, one of our Oxford professors, noted that the most popular tattoo in Ukraine today was not the national flag or the national colors, but one word, voya, which means both will or willpower and freedom. With the help of weapons and some training provided by her friends, Ukraine is fighting with great courage and success to turn back the Russian tide. I can't help feeling that in many respects Ukraine is fighting the battle for European values, indeed, the values of liberal democracies everywhere on our behalf. Ukraine is demonstrating the hard way its European democratic vocation in death, destruction and sacrifice. As Joseph Conrad, whom we claim as an English novelist, but he was actually born in Burdichev in Northwestern Ukraine as he wrote, the horror, the horror. Ultimately, there are no soft answers for those of us who live in open societies. We really do have to stand up for what we say we believe in. We should perhaps remember that word voya, even if we don't tattoo it on our chests or across our biceps. Apparently or so at least, President Xi tells us China is Russia's best friend in the world, though he would not want us to conclude that Beijing is in any way an accomplice to Mr. Piper Putin's crimes. Complicity, of course, comes in many different shapes and sizes. It may, of course, be that the Chinese communists were assured by Mr. Putin before the invasion of Ukraine that it would be a painless doddle and foolishly they believed him. Unable to comprehend, for example, what people are prepared to sacrifice in order to live in an open society. Let me turn to the relationship between liberal democracies and communist China. My own approach to this subject is inevitably, I guess, shaped by my experiences governing Hong Kong before its handover to China in 1997. Hong Kong taught me to distinguish between China and Chinese men and women on the one hand and the Chinese Communist Party on the other. After all, most of the people who worked for me, the last British governor, the last colonial oppressor in Hong Kong, were Chinese. Just like the overwhelming majority of the population in the city, they would have difficulty in defining their patriotism in terms of how much they loved the Communist Party. That absurdly is the litmus test set by Beijing. Most of Hong Kong's citizens, citizens after all, are themselves either refugees from Chinese communism or came from families which had been refugees. They had crawled over barbed wire. They'd stowed away like Jimmy Lai on ships. They'd swam across dangerous waters in order to escape from famine or oppression or both in search of finding a safe haven in a British colony. It was a colony whose acquisition by Britain in the 19th century, no one would seek to justify today. But whatever our failures and moral defects over the years, sometimes simply an unthinking aura of racial superiority with some of today's judgments based on what is assumed to be contemporary morality. We provided an infrastructure of values and freedoms in our colony which enabled predominantly Chinese men and women and their families to thrive and prosper with their own strong sense of citizenship and understanding the meaning of the rule of law and its difference from rule by law. So if liberal democracies have problems today with the rising power in East Asia, it's not because of the nature of China or of the Chinese people, but because of the nature of the Chinese Communist Party. Since I left Hong Kong in 1997, the party seems to have demonstrated far more strongly than before that it's by its very nature incapable of promoting fundamental economic or political reform. I find the arguments of the historian Frank Decotta from this university on this issue, particularly persuasive. For many years under the collective leadership around Deng Xiaoping, Zhang Xiumin and Hu Jintao, China seemed to be opening up politically as well as economically. No one sensibly thought it was en route to an early embrace of parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers and the rule of law. Though it's fair to say that Mr. Blair, our former prime minister, did say after China had signed its membership formers for the World Trade Organization, now the road to democracy in China is unstoppable. But it did seem that party control weighed less heavily on all aspects of society. But we were always wrong to delude ourselves that economic and technological change would inevitably tend to political change. I suppose that this was surprisingly a rather Marxist way of looking at history. Chinese communists took a very different view. Their leaders and particularly President Xi's right hand man in the early period of his largely unbridled power, Wang Qishan, were much more attentive to the lessons to be drawn, not from March, but guess what, from a Lexis de Tocqueville's book, not the one on democracy in America, but his book on the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution. The two most important lessons drawn from this book by Wang and others were that countries don't become easier to govern simply because people are getting better off. Indeed, the contrary may well be true. And secondly, that authoritarian regimes are always, always at their most vulnerable when they try to change or reform. There was among Beijing's leaders a palpable nervousness that party control was slipping away. So President Xi reasserted it, as he might say, everywhere. North, south, east and west, or as he would say, east and west, south and north. The party should be in control of everything and the party itself should be under the large thumb of the president. We should perhaps add a couple of points to this which go far to explaining much that has happened internationally. First, the party's main consideration in international affairs as elsewhere is that it should remain on top. Nothing should get in the way of this. Second, there's been a strong sense in Beijing that America and the West are in decadent decline and that the sun has indeed risen in the east. Chinese behavior internationally should increasingly reflect this, they've argued, with until recently the wolf warriors released from their diplomatic cages. The language of the cultural revolution has from time to time been unleashed in all its bizarre and childish absurdity on a rather surprised world. From Australia to Norway to South Korea to Canada to Washington and so on. We should probably laugh rather than gasp with horror. I want to make three additional points before I suggest lastly a few scatterings of policy which should in my view guide our relations with China. First, the way we treat China should not be based on exceptionalism, on the belief that China is totally unlike everywhere else and that rules which we would apply in other circumstances do not apply to the Chinese Communist Party. Secondly, while we want to find ways in which China can work with the rest of the world to save the planet and secure its peace and prosperity, we're not prepared to accept that this can only be done on China's terms, terms which China will break whenever it sees fit. Thirdly, we should be very transparent about what we're doing and should of course work together as liberal democracies in the pursuit of broadly similar aims. This is not an attempt to contain China or to begin another cold war, but it's hugely in our interest to constrain bad behavior by China and to recognize that it's China which has determined that this has to attack our own system and values and interests at every point. So it was President Xi himself who came to power telling Parsi and government carders that they had to engage in an intense struggle against every aspect of what we describe ourselves as an open society, from freedom of speech to the rule of law and it was again the all-powerful president who only recently denounced the idea that modernization had anything to do with westernization. I hope that we don't take from this that we should corrupt our own idea of the nature of a liberal education in order to accommodate party concerns about what Chinese students learn in our own universities when we welcome them as we do to study in our countries and presumably on the way to learn about our values such as freedom of intellectual inquiry. Before making a last telegrammatic comment on how liberal democracy should try to behave towards China, I offer what I hope is an unnecessary thought about American policy. It would plainly be a mistake of epic proportions, worse than Vietnam and worse than the awful policy on the Middle East. If Washington was to be drawn into the so-called Thucydides trap, feeling it necessary to slap down China, lest it should grow too big for its boots. Like it or not, China, with or without the Communist Party, has to be a part of the solution to the world's problems. Moreover, while its technological progress should make us careful about the safeguarding of intellectual property, about our security and about China's autarkic trade policies, we should neither underestimate our own strengths nor overestimate China's. China has an unbalanced economy with a huge debt burden. It faces enormous environmental challenges and an almost equally awesome demographic problem, not least a growing gender imbalance in an aging and declining population. This imbalance between males and females rises among the younger age groups. For example, it's over 16% male over female for eight to 15 to 19 year olds. It's worth thinking for a moment about the implications of this. The Chinese Communist Party likes to offer its citizens and the world enumerated lists of things to be done or things to avoid. The three this is and the six that's. So here are my five unacceptables for Chinese behavior on which we should all be able to agree and to express clearly and openly whenever necessary. No self-censorship here. We should not accept that to be explicit and transparent is diplomatically beyond the pale. First, Beijing should stop playing what the China expert Charles Parton calls the Kennel Club Games. China periodically puts this or that country, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Norway, United Kingdom and others in the doghouse for questioning China's political narrative. This infringes the spirit if not always the letter of the WTO. And as it happens, it doesn't appear to have a great overall effect on the country's economies since many of the exports which are targeted either turn out to be necessary to China's development or a fungible. Some sectors are of course unfairly hit like Australian wine. But overall exports to China on the part of the Kennel Club seem to increase whatever is being said. China's view that international economics is a win-win matter is not what they really mean at all. What they actually believe is that they can win and then decide what they allow us to have on the basis of their own requirements including political assessments. But our bottom line should be that trade and international investment have to be masses of reciprocity. We should not allow ourselves to be persuaded otherwise. Nor should we be led into thinking that Chinese investment in our countries is a reward for good behavior rather than an attempt to make a profit or to establish a foothold in an important industrial sector. We'd also strengthen our hand if country by country we were to analyze those areas where we have perhaps become over dependent on imports from China. It would be easier to manage a sensible attitude to trade like this if the US, the EU and others were themselves always careful to try not to breach the rules of the WTO. We have to do what we preach. And for the WTO to be as effective as a referee as we should all want. American should stop blocking the appointment of trade experts to adjudicate on alleged breaches of his rules. There are security arguments against free trade in particular sectors. They should be set out openly and explicitly. The second unacceptable for China is not to fudge the distinction between influence and interference in our domestic concerns. The United Front operations to which we have all been subjected and which are often abetted in our countries by the foolish and the greedy should be stopped. They are, as Malcolm Turnbull said, covert, coercive and corrupting. Of course, they often slip into espionage and cyber warfare. The Communist Party even attempts to extend its policing operations into our own sovereign states. The third unacceptable is to breach international agreements like the Joint Declaration in Hong Kong, which the Chinese have torn up less than halfway through its treaty-denominated lifespan. They are now set on vengefully and comprehensively destroying the freedoms of Hong Kong and its rule of law. Beijing seems to want Hong Kong without Hong Kongers. Their own conception of one country, two systems, originally designed for Taiwan, has been thrown overboard. I assume that Taiwan has taken the point. Thinking of the international agreements made and broken elsewhere, the jury is still out on the extent to which the blocking of attempts to ascertain the precise causes of the outbreak of coronavirus in China was in breach of the international health regulations which China signed in 2006 after the SARS epidemic. The fourth unacceptable is to breach international law. For example, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. We can't allow China to prevent freedom of passage through the South China Sea. The fifth is to commit crimes against humanity in its own country. There are legal arguments about how best to describe China's behavior in Xinjiang. But plainly the incarceration of thousands of Muslims, the forced abortions, the trade-in body parts, the slave labor and many more abuses are things which liberal democracies and others find totally unacceptable even though we can't intervene to stop them. We shouldn't persuade ourselves or be persuaded that to mention them or other human rights abuses is diplomatically suicidal. One of the great mistakes that liberal democracies have often made in dealing with authoritarian or totalitarian states is to be persuaded often though by those with economic interests that anything which might embarrass an interlocutor could only be dealt with, soto voce. This is usually stupid and often wrong, a demeaning example of the mush school of diplomacy. You only secure the prospect of change by calling things out publicly. Authoritarian and totalitarian states usually take the view that soto voce translates as we don't much care about this but we feel obliged to raise it. I think it's much better to have an openly expressed idea or maybe our own practical basis for working with China rather than to waste a lot of time deciding whether we should call China a threat or a strategic competitor or a global partner. It can and often is all these things even at the same time. The tendency of some foreign ministries and politicians is to think that a policy can be reduced to raiding the thesaurus for strong sounding nouns and adjectives and that this somehow excuses them from an equally active exploration for verbs is I fear all too prevalent. If we're serious about the sort of agenda I've suggested it's more likely that China will believe us when we say to them in this case privately that we couldn't stand by were they to launch a military attack on Taiwan. They must know that it would be a disaster and that our buildup of forces present and planned in East Asia is a reflection of our views on this. I end with a remark of Adley Stevenson's. It's often easier he once said to fight for a principle than to live up to it. And I suppose what follows from that is that if you live up to your principles you're less likely to have to fight for them. I hope that the last few years have taught all of us in liberal democracies that we can't go to sleep while our values are assaulted from without and even from within. I have little doubt this on my part is a rare display of optimism that liberal democracies will survive and prosper provided we recognize what is at stake and are prepared to stand up for it. Plainly given how often President Xi attacks the values of open societies he regards them as do other authoritarian leaders as an existential threat. The other side of the coin is that we should see them as an existential hope. That's certainly what President Zelensky and his brave citizens believe. It's what they're fighting for, fighting for what so many of us take for granted. And this same belief is the reason why Jimmy Lai and others who cherish freedom, democracy and the rule of law are locked up in prison in Hong Kong and elsewhere. We shouldn't ignore them. We shouldn't think that we can leave all the fighting for a decent world to them. Now, it's much easier, much more agreeable to be able to say all this in a speech in Canberra with I'm sure a good dinner to follow and with luck a glass or two of Australian wine. Then to suffer for it incarcerated in a cell in Hong Kong Stanley prison with only your Bible and prayer book and in Jimmy Lai's case your paintbrush to keep you company. Or for that matter to be eating if you're lucky a can of warmed up rations in a co-battlefield frontline under artillery bombardment in the sovereign European state of Ukraine. Others make the sacrifices today so that many of us can live in open societies. We mustn't ignore their example to think that we can get away indefinitely with keeping our heads well down below the parapet of our own good fortune. When I was in environment secretary I used to find myself very often quoting a song by Joni Mitchell. It just shows how old I am called Big Yellow Taxi. And the line that I recall applies not just to the environment but it provides, it applies as well to the values of an open society. You don't know what you've got until it's gone. Thank you. Well, Chris, thanks so much for a start for all the very kind things you said about me. Some of which, like Brian's at the outset, would I suspect make even my late mother skeptical. But above all, thanks for a really brilliant talk showing in the rigor and vigor of your analysis your very real commitment to all those values for which I've so long admired and respected you. The intention was that we would follow Chris's lecture with 10 minutes or so of conversation between me and Chris, followed by 10 or 15 minutes of audience Q and A. I'm afraid the clock has rather moved against us and we will have to wrap things up within the next 10 minutes or so, not least because Chris has some more book signing to do outside. But perhaps we can just have a couple of questions from me to you, Chris, to explore some themes in your talk. There's all sorts of things we could talk about with Orcus and everything else that's going on. But let me say this, you talked about the unwisdom of the Americans being drawn into Thucydides trap sort of environment, but the reality is that it does seem to be still unequivocally part of the American DNA to believe in their primacy globally in perpetuity. No presidential leader will use any, or other leader will use any language other than that. Wouldn't it be better for all of us if the Americans were to explicitly walk away from that primacy in perpetuity commitment and language and embrace rather the language that you've heard me quote Bill Clinton on in my presence 20 years ago when I heard Clinton say that what America really needed to do was not use its economic and military strength to try to retain status of top dog and perpetuity, but to create a world in which it would be comfortable living when it was no longer top dog. Wouldn't that be a more sensible way in all our interests to defuse some of the terrible volatility and risk that's out there, not least in our own region at the moment? Is this on? Is it all right? Okay. There are imperfections in democracies. And one obvious one in relation to United States is one of the most successful presidents in reality in the last few years is the one who was most frequently derided, Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter, who not only stood up for human rights, on the grounds that since human rights were the basis of what America wanted itself to be, they should be the basis of its foreign policy as well. While at the same time, he actually strengthened America's defense establishment far more than either of his predecessor or his successor. And the likelihood is that his defeat because the Iranians wouldn't hand back their hostages before the election was almost certainly funded in part by Republicans. He was an extraordinarily decent man and believed like, as Harry Truman said, that foreign policy is domestic policy with its hat on. And I do think it's important without openly challenging because it would just make them all cross. America's view of itself as the city on a hill, an exceptional society. We can both recognize the contribution, the extraordinary contribution that they've made, not least after a war, which, above all, had been won by them and by Russian losses. Not least at that time, by helping to create a world in which for a change, the victors in a war didn't pinch all the spoils. Some people couldn't bear it. The French always had difficulty in the 50s and 60s trying to get the balance right. Should they attack the United States for being too bossy and for leading everything? Or should they attack the United States for not giving them enough dosh? They could never decide which side they were on. But I certainly agree with you that we should encourage a degree of appropriate humility from the Americans, who are not a society in decadent decline, though parts of their political establishment are. And I think the, first of all, what's happened to the Republican Party is extremely damaging. How you can have one party which won't accept election results being taken seriously is difficult to believe. And I also believe, though I'm not on the whole in favor of attacking lawyers, that the way the Supreme Court through the extraordinary, spurious arguments about originalism has allowed itself to block legislation on things like regulation of the environment has allowed itself, a Catholic majority and I speak as a Catholic, six Catholic Supreme Court judges whose judgment on issues like capital punishment, not just talking about abortion, issues like capital punishment have been lamentable. The idea that a man for whom capital punishment meant being drowned in his own blood because of the particular cancer he had, the fact that that was allowed against all appeals because it wasn't covered as a cruel and unusual punishment because in the 18th century, cruel and unusual punishment meant drawing and quartering or burning. It's absolutely absurd as legalese. And I think that it's one of those checks and balances intended for dealing with a Habsburg King in the 18th century which doesn't work anymore. And a brave president would say so, but one of the things which I feel about my own country and about other democracies is that there's an increasing difficulty in politicians telling the truth because they don't think they'll get elected if they do. Chris, a little bit more provocatively, perhaps even than that, you have acknowledged towards the end of your talk that it's easier to do battle for human rights in Hong Kong, making a speech in Canberra than it is sitting in a jail cell, Stanley Prison. Would you be prepared to acknowledge that it's also easier to advocate going to war over Taiwan should it be invaded by China? If that indeed is what you're suggesting, then when you're sitting in London, then it is when you're living like us here in the region with a huge degree of economic dependence with none of our neighbours prepared to leap in with the same degree of enthusiasm for that enterprise. What do you say we should be doing in the event that the horror show in Taiwan did erupt? Well, the first thing that we should be doing is everything possible to prevent there being a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And it's been extraordinary over the years the way we've gone along with the Chinese argument that China is really a part of mainland China. Taiwan was annexed by the Qing Dynasty in 1670 or 80. It was given to the Japanese as part of a settlement at the end of the Japan-China war, the first one in about 1890 something. And given back because the Chinese were insisting on keeping the Laoning Peninsula, which is actually part of mainland China. So if Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, that hasn't been the view of Chinese leaders over the years. And it certainly hasn't been an inalienable part of China since 1949 when the Chinese People's Republic was established. So we've gone along with the fact, with the argument that we shouldn't challenge the Chinese arguments about Taiwan. In order to secure peace, we've gone along with strategic ambiguity about what exactly the nature of Taiwan is. And I would very much hope that if the strategic ambiguity would continue to keep a country of 24 million peaceful and would continue to leave in peace a country which is providing most of the semiconductors which make modern life possible, not least in China, if strategic ambiguity would succeed that nobody could be more delighted than me. The problem is that if you say to this Chinese government, which I think probably sees whipping up sentiment over Taiwan as a way of dealing with the fact that sentiment about the economic justification for what it's doing is declining for all sorts of reasons. If you say that, you've got to be able to carry conviction with the Chinese Communist Party that consequences are real if they hit Taiwan. So for the moment, and I don't think it's very helpful to do this publicly, at the moment, I think we should all of us say very bluntly to China, privately, that the invasion of Taiwan would be an absolute bloody disaster for them and for anybody else. And this I know is your backyard. And something which I think we underestimate, it's sort of half-challenged by the Orca Steel which I think is admirable. But foreign policy is partly a reflection of geography and inevitably our views in Britain and Europe about what's going on in the Ukraine are going to be, even if you deplore what Russia is doing, stronger than yours. Your views about Taiwan and what's happening in the South China Sea and so on are bound to be stronger than ours because this is your backyard. So I hope that things like Orcas, which is a very good example of liberal democracies working together, and I think its success is partly reflected in the way that the Philippines have tried to uncouple themselves from China, in the way that Japan have been behaving. I wish that India was easier to deal with on this, though the Indians have good reason to hate the Chinese, not least because of what's been happening in the Himalayas. I just hope that working together, we can persuade the Chinese that an invasion of Taiwan would be a disaster, but don't underestimate the extent to which they will look at what Mr. Putin is doing. Not just now, but in the past, when in Syria, in Georgia, in Estonia, in the Crimea, we made a lot of noise, but we did bugger all to use French. So I think it's a really difficult one to call, and I don't think that stamping our foot and telling the Chinese if they invade Taiwan will send in our lads. I'm not one of our lads, and it's always very easy for politicians to send too easy for politicians, even in democracies, to send young men to be killed. Well, Chris, this is a conversation we could long continue in public as we certainly will in private, but again, time is against us, so can I wrap things up by asking Janine O'Flynn, the new director of the Crawford School of Public Policy. Welcome to A&U, Janine, to wrap things up with a vote of thanks and the conclusion of the evening. Janine. Thank you so much. Yuma, to all of our guests here this evening, my name's Janine O'Flynn. I am the new director of the Crawford School and it's a return to the wonderful A&U for me. It's my pleasure tonight to be invited to give a short vote of thanks. This place, as the Vice-Chancellor mentioned, Cambry is a very important place, one where for many thousands of years, people have come together to meet. Tonight, we've been here on the beautiful lands of the Ngunnawal and Nambry, where across the millennia stories of the past and the future and the importance of stewardship, relationships and caring for place have been so central. The themes that you've explored in your aeration tonight, Lord Patton, have taken us on a very important journey. Pulling threads through time and place and reflecting on your own experiences as someone at the centre of important moments and movements in our recent history. In doing so, you've woven together a story which offers important warnings and reminders to all of us. I personally have enjoyed recently listening to your Hong Kong diaries. I shouldn't say that when you're out signing books this evening, but I have loved listening to that to hear those stories directly animated by you as the author has given so much life to that. In the book, the reader learns not only of the day-to-day of life in the role at the centre of a moment in history, but also the concerns that were front of your mind as you took that role on. To look back now and see many of these concerns you expressed having come to life has been a key part of your aeration this evening. As has been the importance of history, of not forgetting, of fighting complacency and being prepared to speak out. I'm reminded of the quote you used to open that book, history is an argument. And tonight I think we would all agree that you have brought this notion to life. On behalf of all of us here tonight, I want to thank you so much for delivering the Gareth Evans aeration for 2023 and please join me in thanking Lord Patton. I wonder if I can, at the risk of going on for another hour. I wonder if I can just make one or lift one final argument from Simon Lees. There's a wonderful essay of his which is based on a speech he gave to the New South Wales judiciary. It's a lecture about truth and how we understand truth. And he concludes with the greatest trial seen in literature, which is Pontius Pilate and Jesus. Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor who was under great trouble with Rome because there had already been two rebellions against Roman rule in Judea. Nervous about what will happen if there's another one. And facing the angry Sanhedrin, the angry priests, who were telling him that Jesus is a rebel and a con. And he asks Jesus, what are you doing? And Jesus says, I'm the truth. I'm trying to represent the truth. And Pontius Pilate says, what is truth? And Simon Lees makes the point that Pontius Pilate knows perfectly well what the truth is. But it's not expedient of him to stand up for it. It's not expedient of all of us very often not to do in domestic and foreign policy what we know is right. So I think for all democracies, what is the truth is a really important question and we shouldn't allow ourselves because of greed or nervousness or expediency to duck it all the time. But thank you very much for that.