 Hello, and welcome to this Low Institute live event. This is part of what we're calling the Long Distance Low Institute, in which we communicate our content and analysis online, while we're unable to welcome you in person to our permanent home in Bly Street, Sydney. A very warm welcome to everyone joining us from Australia and to those dialing in from overseas. I'm also delighted to welcome our Low Institute board members, Penny Wensley and Joanna Hewitt, together with corporate members from Australian Super, the Office of National Intelligence and the Reserve Bank. A warm welcome as well to the members of the Diplomatic Corps in Australia. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Alex Oliver and I'm the Director of Research at the Low Institute. Joining me today is one of Australia's most influential journalists and columnist, Peter Harcher. Peter is a non-resident fellow at the Low Institute and the political and international editor of the City Morning Herald. He has been a foreign correspondent in Washington and Tokyo and recently authored the quarterly essay, Red Flag, Waking Up to China's Challenge. He also wrote one of the Institute's first Penguin Low Institute papers, The Adolescent Country, but of course we've grown up since then, haven't we, Peter? Joining Peter on our virtual panel is Natasha Kasam. Natasha is the author of the 2020 Low Institute poll and directs our Diplomacy and Public opinion program. Tash took over from me as the Director of the Low Institute poll and joined the Institute from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where she's a very experienced diplomat with postings in Beijing and Honeara. She was also on the drafting team for Australia's influential foreign policy white paper of 2017. Before I go to our guest, some quick housekeeping. At the bottom of your screens, although I'm sure you're all pretty used to Zoom events by now, you will see a Q&A button where you can submit questions to the panellists. We'll put as many of your questions as possible to the panellists later in the discussion. So please include the name of your organization and any affiliation when you send through the question. But first, I have some of my own questions for our panellists. Welcome to you both and thank you for joining us. Thank you for having us, Alex. To shamelessly appropriate a famous author other than Peter Hatcher, we need to talk about China. This year's Low Institute poll uncovered some very significant shifts in sentiment about China. We've been polling on attitudes to China for all of our 16 years of the Low Institute poll. And this year's results are some of the most striking I've seen in all my years at the Institute. So Natasha, I'm going to ask you first, can you just give us a brief overview of some of those key results on China? As always, there was a broad range of questions on China this year in the poll. Absolutely, Alex. And thank you again. As you say, there were really striking results this year. Australians trust in China has fallen to record lows. And most Australians have very low levels of confidence in China's president, Xi Jinping. So we saw only 23% of adult Australians say that they trust China to do a great deal or somewhat to act responsibly in the world. That's fallen almost 30 points in just two years. So two years ago, around half the country said that they trusted China, around half the country said they had confidence in Xi Jinping. Today, that number is less than a quarter for both. The only leader that we trust less than Xi Jinping is North Korea's Kim Jong-un. The only country that ranks similarly in terms of our trust is Russia. So that is a really interesting shift. That might seem obvious given the way in which the Australia-China relationship has shifted or deteriorated in recent years. But I think it's important to keep in mind that until 2018, Australia was actually an outlier in terms of sentiment towards China. Over the past decade, certainly in Western liberal democracies like the UK, the United States, Canada, sentiment has really soured on China. But even in our region, in the Philippines, South Korea, India, Indonesia, there's also been a lot of negativity over the last decade. But Australians remained really positive until 2018. A lot of this is because until two years ago, Australians largely saw China as an economic opportunity. What we've seen is the rise of debates about foreign interference, about Huawei, Hong Kong, economic coercion. That perception is now shifting and Australians are increasingly seeing China as more of a security threat than they have in the past. We can see that playing out in terms of Australians' anxiety about what is perceived as an overdependence on China economically. So 94% of Australians said in the poll this year that we need to look for other markets to reduce our economic dependence on China. Now, we've never had 94% of Australians agree on a single issue in the 16 years of our poll. And I think that's really striking. There are many reasons, and we can get into it later, as to why the China question has really changed in the minds of Australians. But I would briefly say that the China story has changed in Australia and awareness amongst the public of increasingly problematic behaviour from China has also changed. Just for example, I remember last year watching a breakfast TV show and hearing our education minister asked about whether Australian research might be used to oppress Uyghurs in Xinjiang. A question like that, on breakfast TV with no explanation, it really struck me as how far the conversation has really moved in Australia. I think it was last week that there was a front page story about China in the Daily Telegraph every single day for five days in a row. Compare that to six years ago when Xi Jinping was addressing our parliament. Prime Minister Abbott was declaring us to be the closest of friends. We were signing a free trade agreement, comprehensive strategic partnerships, and really public opinion has shifted in this dramatic way just as the relationship has. There's a lot to talk about, but just to finish, one thing that hasn't actually shifted over this period is that Australians have always been concerned about human rights in China and the human rights record of the Chinese Communist Party. We've been asking about this since 2008, and the vast majority of Australians have consistently said that Australia does not do enough to pressure China to improve its human rights situation. In 2020, as our parliament has been considering whether Australia should have the Magnitsky Act, eight in 10 Australians now say that we should be sanctioning Chinese officials that are associated with human rights abuses. And so we can see that that longstanding concern about human rights policy in China is translating into public agreement that perhaps we should be considering sanctions on some of these individuals. Yeah, I don't know if it's any wrong, mate, but it must fall this morning. Peter, in your quarterly essay, you pointed out a lot of this, and there was some focus on the economic relationship. The great conundrum for Australia raised the relationship with China's sows. You said Australia and China have got rich together, and from my interpretation of Lowe Institute polling, from when I ran the poll for a few years, Australians have always focused very pragmatically on that economic relationship. And less so on the more troublesome aspects of the relationship. For example, the ones Natasha referred to with respect to China's human rights record. It seems that the High Wire Balancing Act is no longer tenable. Do you agree with that? How do you think the Australian government is managing this heightened tension in the relationship? Well, the poll results, Alex would suggest, that the public does see it as a zero-sum game that Australia either have China as your major economic partner or a security threat. Maybe the way the questions are asked, I don't know, but the responses to the questions imply that people see that as a direct trade-off, that you can't have a major security threat. That is also a major economic ally. Now, that doesn't actually sit with some of the facts. So, for example, last year, even though we were hearing a lot of noise about a supposed crisis in Australia's relationship with China, based largely on the lack of any top-level freeze that China had imposed on any top-level contact between the two countries, but total services and goods exports to China actually went up 21% last year. So that's pretty interesting definition of a crisis when you're still exported booming like that. But of course, the COVID moment has revealed very dramatically that the degree of over-reliance on the Chinese market has come home very forcefully to punish a bunch of sectors, notably obviously for most tourism or tourism everywhere is shut. Universities, they're reliant on foreign students, Chinese students in particular, now the Chinese government has issued a travel warning to its citizens against traveling to Australia on the basis that there are too many racist incidents against Asian-looking people. And of course, it doesn't help that the Chinese ambassador to Australia has specifically and publicly raised the question of Chinese sanctions on Australian products, a economic coercion as the foreign minister and prime minister have described it. So, I guess what I'm saying is that public opinion may actually be prefiguring ultimate outcomes and especially when you have, as Natasha said a moment ago, more than 90% of the country saying that Australia as an economic entity should try to diversify away from the Chinese market. Then I think you're going to see political and economic reality accelerated by the COVID problem falling into line with public opinion as on a range of vital goods, we find governments and other institutions looking for other lines of both supply for vital equipment but also exports. And I mean, it's a small beginning but already we see the federal government helping Australian barley exporters and beef exporters to diversify away from China as China imposes trade sanctions on those sectors and there'll be a lot more of that. And just following up on the sort of China's heavy-handed diplomacy which you talked about with the Australian, with the Chinese ambassador to Australia and that sort of war-for-eared diplomacy. Just yesterday, the Australian government through the Department of Foreign Affairs issued a raised travel warning for Australians going to China, warning them of the risk of arbitrary detention and breaching of China's security laws that they may not know about. You're a journalist, some of your counterparts in other countries have been the subject of that sort of hostage diplomacy that I think that the Department of Foreign Affairs and the government are worried about. Is this warning something that you would take very seriously or you think it's the right approach on the Australian government in this case? Well, if you consider the converse, which is that the Australian government says nothing about the fact that the new national security law that Beijing has imposed on Hong Kong is claiming to be extraterritorial and can apply to people of any country, anywhere in the world, who are deemed to be in breach of that act would be irresponsible of the Australian government not to let Australians know that they could be subject to arrest based on what we say now on this conversation right here, Alex, or what you might put on a Facebook post. You could be sitting anywhere from Sydney to Singapore or Seattle and whatever country you're a citizen of, the Chinese government in that law claims to be able to punish you for saying, for example, that Hong Kong should be independent. So if an Australian were to fall foul of that law and to be arrested and detained in China and the government had an issue of warning, the government would be in trouble. They'd be a stink. So it was, I think, the responsible course of action for which, of course, the Chinese government has now chastised Australia. So it's okay for the Chinese government to warn its citizens not to travel to Australia because it's unsafe because of all the racist attacks allegedly, but it's not okay for Australia to warn its citizens against travel to China. And this is the same double standard, for example, that we saw at the beginning of the COVID outbreak when the federal government in Australia shut the border to China, which brought an angry tirade from the Chinese embassy in Canberra, which not only said that the decision should be reversed, but that Chinese citizens who had been inconvenienced should be compensated by the Australian government. And then within days, shut China's border. So these threats from China are sometimes real, sometimes they're just a noise and pressure opportunity. In the current phase, what we are seeing from China, not just with Australia, but with many, many countries around the world, is that the Chinese government is looking for pressure points that it can use against other regimes, other countries whose will it wants to bend or break, and it will use any pretext to do that. And last example, last week, when the Australian government announced a bit of a defense upgrade, including the acquisition of long-range missiles, we had criticism, launched status from the Chinese state-owned media, that our posture was too aggressive. This is a country whose navy has added more tonnage to its fleet in the last four years than the entire British navy possesses. This is a country that has many more long-range missiles and much longer range of missiles than Australia, including nuclear ones, and yet it's berating Australia. So some of these threats, I think our government is right to take seriously, others it's right to simply ignore. Was enthrasing three things are certain now, death, taxes and harsh rebukes from China. Natasha, I'm going to ask you about one of the other quite noticeable shifts we noticed in this year's poll, and that's the changing relationship. Australians changing calculus of the relationship with China and the relationship with the United States is a balance there between our largest trading partner and our traditional security partner. Can you describe what's going on there in the way Australians are feeling about juggling these two relationships? Yeah, you're absolutely right, Alex. And we've been asking questions about this so-called China choice in the annual Lowy Institute poll for as long as this debate has been around, really, whether Australia will need to choose one over the other, whether Australia can somehow be a bridge or a mediator between the United States and China. And for all of the years that people have said we don't need to choose or we can't be a bridge, I do think the kind of escalation that we've seen a great power computation between the United States and China is in many ways a newer challenge, and Australians are noticing and responding to it. So this is really interesting for me. If you asked in 2017, three years ago, whether the United States or China was more important to Australia as a country, we were split, literally half said the United States and half said China. And even last year, if we asked a question about which relationship we should prioritize, even at the cost of the other, we were almost divided down the middle. But we've seen that shift a little this year, and we asked this question in March, and I think that's important to keep in mind because March, when the Lowy Institute poll was in the field, was before the United States had really descended into the tragic public health crisis that we see today. But in 2020, we are leaning back towards the United States from having been divided for those for quite a few years. So now we see 55% of Australians say that our relationship with the United States is more important, and then only four in 10 Australians, 40%, say that China is the more important relationship. So I think that bears repeating. Three years ago, the two countries were inseparable, and in 2020, they're 15 points apart. However, something that's quite interesting on this particular issue is a really significant divide exists in Australia between younger and older Australians. The majority of younger Australians, 18 to 29-year-olds in particular, they actually say the relationship with China is more important. Well, only four in 10 of that age group say that the relationship with the United States is more important. So it's actually an exact opposite of those national averages. And we can see that generational shift playing out in many issues on the United States of China. Many more Australians aged 18 to 29 have confidence in Xi Jinping than those that have confidence in Donald Trump. So it's still not a high number, 30% say they have confidence in Xi, but only 18% have confidence in Trump. Similarly, I talked earlier about how much trust in China has declined in the last two years, but if you look at that youngest age group of Australians, the trust level in China is about the same as the United States, which is to say not high, but it's actually not that divide that you're used to seeing where the United States is kind of up here and China is down there. We see this on a range of other issues as well. About half of older Australians say that foreign interference in Australian politics is a critical threat. Only a quarter of 18 to 29-year-olds say that. And similarly, if we ask questions about say Chinese technology in Australia and allowing Chinese technology to be used for building critical infrastructure in Australia, older Australians are very opposed to it but when we look at younger Australians, they're much more comfortable with that idea. So given, for example, the announcement that the U.S. government is going to review TikTok, which is hugely popular in the United States and in Australia, I think this will be a really interesting space going forward the way the older and younger Australians are divided over Chinese technology. Yeah, Penny, what do you think about this generation shift? Is this, do you think an example of youthful naivety over the wisdom of years? A younger Australian's right to have what appears to be more open minds about China. It strikes me as big odds that they are highly critical of China's record on human rights abuses and untrusting of China but see the relationship with China as more important than the United States. In your work on China, have you encountered this? Do you have any explanation for it? I would never claim the wisdom of the years of the younger generation, though, Alex, and I've got five kids, so I would never make that assumption. I wouldn't survive if I did. But rather than differing levels of wisdom, I suspect, and this is just a theory, that it's differing inputs and information. The one thing that the younger generations know a great deal of when it comes to world affairs is Donald Trump. They overwhelmingly depend on their feeds, Facebook, Instagram, and other for information from the outside world. And that's dominated overwhelmingly by US sources. And what I know, if it's a small sample, I don't know if it's statistically valid, but there's five of them. They range, what's that? More statistically valid than mine. Oh, there you go. Okay, so I'll keep going. Ranging from 16 to 33, they all know a lot more about current US politics and policy than they do about Australia. And they know more, or almost all of them, and they know much more about the US and Trump than any other subject under the sun. So and being fed that information, which is broadly highly critical, of course, of Trump, I think has shaped their view where the US is a subject of derision because of the association with the Trump as a consequence of the input feed that they constantly get. So I would suggest that, that they are not getting the same information that older generations get about Australian affairs and Chinese affairs for the simple reason that they're getting different news sources and not seeing that information. But as I said, it's only a theory and if you've got a better one, please tell me. All right, at the moment, that's a good one. Tell me, Natasha, this question of President Trump and the Alliance is quite an interesting one. And there is a paradox in our polling, particularly in the past few years, where there's sort of a gap between a continuing strong support for the US Alliance and yet very low levels of confidence in President Trump, which Pete has just referred to. What's going on here? Yeah, it's a great question. We have seen through the 16 years of polling that support for our Alliance with the United States has been remarkably resilient to unpopular presidents. And that continues to be the case here. Support for the US Alliance has actually gone up in the last year, more than three quarters of Australians, it was 78% this year, say our Alliance relationship is important for Australia's security. And there could be a lot of things going on here. Of course, there is increasing anxiety about China as we've discussed, but another issue is that a record number of Australians report feeling unsafe in 2020. Now, this result has been really consistent over the course of our polling with 80 to 90% of Australians saying they feel safe has dropped 30 points this year with only half the country feeling safe. And so perhaps when you are feeling threatened in that way, you look to things like a security Alliance as a source of security. Having said all of that, in 2020, warmth towards the United States is low. It's at the same levels as in 2006, which was not a great time. And trust has dropped even lower than that period to record lows. Only 51% of Australians trust the United States to act responsibly in the world. And again, I would just mention that this polling was taken before things got really terrible in the United States. Sorry, this was in March before the crisis, really. That level of trust, 51%, it's more than 30 points below the trust that Australians expressed during the administration of President Obama, for example. And we can see, I think in part, that this is about President Trump, who is very unpopular with Australians of all ages, not just Peter's kids. We have seen one in three Australians have confidence in Donald Trump to do the right thing and with 30%. We can see the vast majority of Australians disapprove of his criticism of US allies and their defense spending. They disapprove of him withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and they're particularly critical of his decision to abandon the Paris Climate Agreement. So we have this strange contrast where Australians, they don't seem to like President Trump very much. They're quite against all of those America-first policies, so they're called, but they are very supportive of the alliance. And there is yet another paradox that I just thought I'd mention, which is when we asked Australians who they would prefer to be the next US president, something we ask in each US presidential election cycle, 73% said Joe Biden. And given what I'd said about Australian views towards President Trump, I think that is an unusual. But this year, 23% said that they would prefer President Trump to be the next president, which is actually 11 points higher than in 2016. So it can be seen as a boost of support, admittedly from a very low base. And I think what is going on there to some extent is that in 2016, before President Trump became president, I think Australians were glued to the media, as Peter said, watching the US politics play out. The Republican primaries had President Trump and others saying some things that were really very scary from the Australian point of view. When a lot of that did not necessarily happen, and as much as Australians don't appear to approve of a lot of US policy, there has become a predictability. Perhaps some of that anxiety has been relieved. So now that there are 23% of Australians who think it would be okay for Trump to be president, it is maybe more of a known factor rather than an increase in popularity. It's important to know that the Australia-US relationship has been under strain before. And I think we've seen some of these shifts in the past. Australians weren't happy during the war on terror, during the global financial crisis, the alliance has survived many of those rifts. So I think the jury's still out on whether some of those sentiments will bounce back. But yeah, that's a plot for the alliance. It's still there despite all of this. Interesting point we make about bouncing back. Peter, the relationship with the United States under the Trump administration is something you've written about recently and the latest drama, of course, was regarding President Trump's failure to notify America's five-eyes partners that Russia was paying Taliban bounty hunters to kill coalition troops. You raised the spectre in that article that America might be becoming a less reliable security partner for Australia. Now, John Bolton, the former national security advisor in the White House was interviewed this morning in Australia saying that this is an ephemeral thing and that when Trump was gone, we would kind of snap back to more normal relationships. Do you think this is a Trump phenomenon or is it something more enduring? I think it's both. I think that post, let's assume for the sake of the argument that Joe Biden is the next president, he has a long personal and historical professional investment in U.S. allies and alliance relationships and could reasonably be assumed from what he is, the way he has spoken but also his lived experience, could be assumed to take a much more active and positive interest in U.S. allies. But what won't change, I don't think here, Alex and what I think we need to accept as an enduring feature of U.S. affairs is two-fold. One is that what Trump did at the last election was to politicize alliances and he's continued to do that. That's a first. Until then, it had been abroad by a partisan position in the U.S. that both parties and both sets of policy elites and the general public accepted that U.S. alliances were a very positive thing. After Donald Trump started to attack allies to sort of ingratiate himself with traditional rivals such as Russia's Putin and of course to some extent Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping and attack, deride, criticise and mock allies and the whole concept of allies and to deride allies as people who are freeriding on U.S. who are profiteering from the U.S., who are exploiting the U.S. That's politicised the whole concept of alliances in the U.S. And once a subject is politicised, it's very hard to unpoliticise it. Local example, climate change. So I think that's, we have to be prepared for that to endure and the second thing I think that is going to endure and it's already endured beyond one U.S. president and that was Obama and now into Trump is a reluctance to use armed force. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush have really destroyed American public will, interestedness, support for taking armed action abroad other than at very low risk to personnel. We were just flinging a few missiles or drones. We saw under Barack Obama threats, whether it was to Syria about using chemical weapons against the Syrian people or whether it was telling the Chinese government to quote, stop using sharp elbows, unquote, in the South China Sea to appropriate disputed territory from its neighbours. We saw those threats go without any, the threats were ignored but quite blithely and without any consequences. The U.S. was shown to be a tupless tiger and Donald Trump has not changed that. Barack Obama used to say, I'm the president who ends wars and Trump says, I'm the president who brings troops home. So this is a consistent theme supported by a polling which shows there is very, very variable that American public support now the concept of armed action overseas in the pursuit of any U.S. interest. So I think if you take those two together, the politicisation of allies in the U.S. political system plus the public and political collapse in support for the concept of taking armed action, armed intervention abroad. We are, I think, as an Australian, as a U.S. ally more alone than we've been. I mean, the U.S. alliance has never been a guarantee despite what our politicians tell us, and have trained us to think over the decades. It's never been a guarantee, but I would suggest to you it might have been a 50-50 proposition like a game of two-up. Now it's more like a game of Russian roulette. And I don't think that there are odds that an Australian government could reasonably take to invest national security. You speak of this public support for armed conflict and this is something that we've pulled on in the Australian public. And in other news in this past week, the government announced, which you referred to earlier, Peter, the strategic update to the Defence White Paper with 270 billion investment over the next decade, a reorienting of Australia's defence to the Indo-Pacific region, presumably away from the Middle East, which, as you refer to, there's been a great fatigue with conflict there. And this is presumably, although I don't think it's explicitly stated in the update that this is directed at the looming threat of China's more aggressive posture in the region, former Julie Bishop advisor, John Lee, wrote in the Australian newspaper yesterday that only China's coercive turn can account for this dramatic upgrade of our martial mindset. And the Prime Minister said when he announced the strategic update was that his first priority was keeping Australians safe. But Natasha, based on your understanding of Australian's feelings of safety and their threat perceptions, you referred to Australians having been feeling less safe now than they have felt, I think, at any time in the low-institute poll history, what sort of public reaction would that sort of revise Australian posture get, do you think? Yeah, there's a lot going on there, and I think it's really interesting. I think there's three things I would say about that. The first is that as long as we've been asking the question, which is for about a decade, Australians have been broadly comfortable with where our defence spending has been. Usually about half the country will say that our defence spending is about right, and about a third of the country say that we need to increase. So the settings in that sense, I think, were already about right, and it's hard to imagine people being really against the idea of more defence spending if their government is saying that it is needed to keep us safe, especially, as you say, at a time when people feel less safe than they have before. But secondly, even though, as we already talked about, most Australians say that our alliance with the United States is important to us, there is increasing reluctance to deploy our troops overseas. Much like what Peter described in the United States, we can see that Australians were very disillusioned with the war on terror. They're not really that interested in sending Australian military far overseas. We asked this question in a range of different ways, and we can see that the defence strategic updates focused on our region would probably resonate well with Australians. So we saw in 2019 that more Australians were willing to send troops to fight violent extremism in Southeast Asia than they were to fight violent extremism in the Middle East, just as an example. And then this year, we asked about deploying troops under our alliance obligations to fight alongside the United States, and we asked about sending them to Iran if there was a conflict there, or to Taiwan if there was a conflict there. And in both cases, the majority of Australians are not supportive of doing this. They, as much as they support the alliance, they don't want to put troops out there anymore. And then the third thing I'll say is that there was a really interesting shift in the way threats were perceived in the 2020 Lowy Institute poll. It's a strange year, and I think people are responding to it. We started with the bushfires, just as we recovered, had the pandemic. And what we can see is that every year that we've asked this question, the top of the list has generally been a terrorism-related threat, a nuclear-related threat, and last year, for the first time, climate change was at the top of that list of threats. But in 2020, concern about what we might call those non-traditional security threats have eclipsed or overtaken the traditional security threats for Australians. So the top of the list this year is COVID-19 and potential epidemics, its drought and water shortages, and then really interestingly, it's a severe downturn in the global economy. So concern about a downturn in the global economy as a threat, again, a question we've been asking for some years, has gone up by 20 points in the last year. And then those traditional threats, such as international terrorism, Iran's nuclear program, they appear to have moved from the forefront of the Australian public's mind. So there has been a really interesting shift there. As much as I think Australians would generally be comfortable with that increase in defence spending, those military threats do not appear to be what Australians are most scared of, or most anxious about at this moment. I'd like to go a bit off the piece here and talk a bit about leadership. And you've already raised the leadership of Donald Trump, which has been interesting. There seems to be more emphasis today on leaders' qualities and personalities. There's a rise of populism and populist politicians, such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson and Lorenzo Modi. I don't know, Chair Bolsonaro has now got COVID. It's interesting. These politicians seem to be very popular in their own countries, but Australians don't hold much confidence in them based on our results. The Donald, for example, is very unpopular here, as Natasha's outlined. And Modi and Prime Minister Johnson don't fare much better. Jacinda Ardern, on the other hand, has atmospheric ratings from Australians that 87% of Australians confident in her leadership. And Scott Morrison is also doing far better than he was earlier in the year. Do you think that this represents a rejection of populist leadership by Australians? Can you talk about a little bit about that? Well, I think it represents the rejection of ineffective leadership. So the Australian public, we see this year, is very responsive to actual events and performance, not so much political claims and rhetoric. So after the bushfire debacle in Australia, where Scott Morrison simply refused to lead, and obviously famously, infamously went on holidays in Hawaii secretly while the country was burning, the degree of public disenchantment with Morrison was intense. He became a national joke, a bit of a subject of contempt, and it was just a dismal failure on every level. And when I talked to Morrison last week, he said, the thing I've learned from people who've held this job before me is that they really repeated the same mistake twice. And so what he was saying there is I might have messed that up big time, but I'm alert to crises, and I'm prepared and willing to act now. And you see that in his response to the pandemic, where in stark contrast to the whole bushfire problem, Morrison did lead, he was decisive. The results have been that the Australian mortality count in this pandemic have been among the best in the world. And the public responds. Morrison also said that provided economic buffers are pretty decisive with the public response to performance. So I think the Australian public are responding to effective government in Australia, just as they are to effective government in New Zealand. Both Australia and New Zealand have four deaths per million population, an identical level of effectiveness. The US has more than 400 deaths per million population and the UK is even worse than that. So I think the populist governments are being rejected or marked down by the Australian public, not necessarily because they are populist in their name or nature, but because of the results that they show. And I suspect, in my view, I think that's pretty sensible position to take. And so on a personal level, a bit relieved that we seem to have a bit of common sense in the Australian public polity. And yet President Trump's opinion polling isn't too bad, considering what you refer to as this very ineffective response from a populist politician. I think it's taken a hit in the last week or so, but it's been surprising. Can I just make the suggestion, Alex, that if Natasha asked the same question now, that was the poll asked in March about Donald Trump, I suspect you'd get a harsher view, simply because of the fact on the ground in the US, it's been a debacle and I suspect public opinion would reflect that. Interesting. Now, it's time for me to take some questions from the audience. We've had some beamed in from your registrations and I'm seeing a stream of new questions coming through. We've collected quite a number. If you haven't submitted a question in, you'd like to, we are scanning the questions. I do so now by the question and answer button and we'll try and get to as many as possible. I want to start with one, which came through on the registration system and that's from Mark Bailey, our representative from the Australian representative of Sima Mala. And he asked a very big question about how, has thinking about Australia's global interest changed? And I think we've touched on some of that already today. But the interesting question of how aid is regarded in the context of Australia's global interests and that's something we haven't talked about. So Natasha, I might put that one to you because we have done a lot of polling on aid in the past. Yeah, absolutely. And for those of us that believe in foreign aid as an important part of our foreign policy, the polling is not necessarily helpful. So what I would say is from the government perspective, if you think of the three pillars, sorry, of foreign affairs being defense, diplomacy and development, you can see that especially after last announcement, the prioritization on defense, diplomacy either stagnating or being cut as lots of Alex's book work has shown us and development also being cut quite significantly. This is a really hard one in public opinion terms because Australians are not very supportive of foreign aid and this is actually common in the vast majority of donor countries. Japanese public don't support aid, Taiwanese public don't support aid, American public don't either. It's very common. It's a real challenge for governments to overcome. In our polling, we've found that the vast majority of Australians overestimate how much we spend on foreign aid. So if we say what percentage of our budget do you think is spent on aid, they'll estimate around the 14% mark. And if you say what should it be, they'll say around the 10% mark. Of course, in reality, it's less than 1%. But then even in other years, when we've said this is the percentage, it's 0.7% in that particular year, do you think that's right? They'll still say that it's too high. So it's really unpopular on every level. And if we look at a kind of specific region, it produces quite interesting results. The South Pacific has of course been a significant focus point for Australia for a long time, but has had more attention in recent years. And in our polling, we'll see that the majority of Australians want us to help the Pacific more. The majority of Australians think that we should do more to prevent China from increasing its influence in the Pacific. The majority of Australians think a Chinese military base in the Pacific would be a critical threat to Australia's interests. But at the same time, if you say should we spend more to help the Pacific, half the country says no. So this is that paradox. And it's a real challenge for, I think, the Australian government to get right when there is not that much support for boosting foreign aid in the community. There's a really fascinating question here from David Thomas. And I'm gonna put this one to you, Peter. He asks, to what extent do we believe that the Australian media is influencing public opinion on China? So there's a question of causation here. Are we comfortable that negative media has such a direct impact on public opinion when it comes to trade with our number one trading partner? Well, firstly, do you accept that nexus between what the media says and what public opinion is? I mean, if you look at the data, for example, that came out this week from on a survey of young people and how they consume news, most of their news actually comes from their family and their friends, and then from social media. And very little of it actually comes from what we would call the traditional media. But if it is, is that something that you think the media takes responsibility for? Do you think that's a useful dynamic? Well, the media is guilty of emphasizing bad news, Alex. It's the nature of news. The essence of news is what went wrong. It's human nature, and that's why it's in, that's why it's the essence of news. You can have a perfectly pleasant day, but one thing goes badly wrong and that's the only thing we're gonna talk about. You can, a million cars will go down the highway and nobody remarks on it. The only thing they're gonna talk about is when there's a six car pile up. It's what goes wrong is news. Therefore, if something is going wrong in the Chinese relationship with Australia, the media naturally will focus on it and not on the positives because the negatives dominate. If it bleeds, it bleeds is the old rather crass and unpleasant adage, but it's true. And I would say that this is not a special treatment that has been applied to China only. Why do you think Australians have such a low opinion of Donald Trump? Why do you think they had changed their minds on whether Morrison was a good leader or not? The public responds to the news, the news responds to what's going wrong. If you don't wanna know bad news, if you don't wanna know things that are going wrong in the world, well, you better turn off your TV, close up all your international media, close all the websites, turn off your phone and play some music. Fair enough. I think that's a very good point actually about all the negative press about Donald Trump because we haven't noticed a falling off of trade with the United States. As a result of all this bad press about Donald and his ineffective leadership, so that's a very good point and I hadn't thought of it that way. I would like to have to put one of my own questions to you before we go to another question from the audience and that is Peter about intelligence agencies and that seems that the activities of intelligence agencies have come out from the shadows in the past few years. We've been hearing a lot more about what they do. Mike Burgess who's the new director of Director General of Security and the head of ASIO gave a first ever public threat assessment earlier this year and he talked about some of the ways the intelligence community works to protect Australia's interests. And we've also been hearing a lot more about the Five Eyes which is this group of five English speaking countries who share intelligence and intelligence cooperation and that's been a very shadowy grouping in the past which we've heard a little about but now it's been elevated particularly with COVID. As we've had leaders meetings, we've had foreign ministers meetings, finance ministers meetings for cooperation on the economy on issues like COVID in Hong Kong. What do you think about this idea that we cooperate more with our sort of intelligence partners? Is that sort of grouping, is that sort of grouping going to be useful, do you think? And what do you think about this and the idea of intelligence coming out of the shadows? Well, it's the big, to me, the most striking change Alexi and you touched on it was when Josh Frydenberg said we should start using the Five Eyes as an economic forum and initiated the first Five Eyes treasurers finance ministers meeting. Frydenberg says that I want to do that regularly we've agreed to do that regularly to talk about economic and trade and finance issues. This is a new emphasis on trust where economic relationships were dominated by profit, cheaper source of supply and highest place to sell to. We've discovered in this last few months on the primary level through the virus and on the second level through China's trade sanctions against Australia threatened and realized that reliability and trust is suddenly got a premium on it that it didn't have. It's no longer all about price and profit. We see the federal government, for example, setting up a COVID coordination committee run by Ned Power, the former Fordiscue Chief Executive whose primary responsibility is to help the Australian government think about ways to improve reliability of supply chains and improve self-reliance. So it's the whole concept of trust, self-reliance at least in terms of vital suppliers not everything of course is at the fore. And so you turn to the most trusted relationships and hence Five Eyes. Now that's just economic dimension but there's a greater emphasis being put on the Five Eyes relationship across the range of policy and that in turn reflects the increase, the very sudden rise in concern among the Five Eyes countries and not just the Five Eyes countries. Many democracies around the world concern about China's new aggressiveness and its repressiveness. So yes, the Five Eyes has, I mean, you could probably even today ask maybe this is a question for the poll another time but you could probably today ask most Australians whether they've heard of the Five Eyes group and what it means and probably most of them wouldn't have but I suspect many more have now than had even one year ago. Definitely put that one in the bank. We have asked questions in the past about intelligence, the intelligence activities and intelligence agencies and there's been a much higher public profile of those too Natasha with the trials of witness K and his team and the more issue the rating of news media offices, the ABC and News Corp to investigate intelligence leaks. Can you just recap for us the Australian's attitudes to intelligence agencies and what they showed this year we had some interesting questions. Yeah, absolutely. I think it is really interesting for people who have worked in or around government for decades to have Five Eyes be this kind of common vernacular, you know and as we've said spread into all these other interesting areas of cooperation. So we did ask this year about intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies in light of some of those debates and it was quite interesting the majority of Australians eight and 10 say that intelligence agencies are effective at protecting Australia's national security and then we also had a majority although a smaller majority, 59% that said that these agencies have the balance right between protecting national security and being open and transparent with the Australian people. Now this is the first time we've asked this question so we don't know if this has shifted as intelligence agencies have kind of come into the light as you say, but it is something we'll be able to test going forward and then again with the issues of raids on journalists and other high profile questions around the your right to know campaign. We asked whether law enforcement had the balance right between enforcing the law and protecting freedom of press and 59% of Australians said that they do. So, you know, people seem to be broadly comfortable with where intelligence agencies and more enforcement are at in their relationship with the public. I'm going to ask you, Peter a interesting question from Bates Gill. He raises our polling and suggests that from that Australia seems to have made its own China choice but not in the direction which we might have assumed a decade ago when the relationship with China seemed to be on a lot better footing and it became our largest trading partner and so on. And it seems that our choice has been made towards the United States regardless of how we regard its leader. He asks if we think this is a long lasting and structural trend or is it only a short-term phenomenon? What do you think, Peter? Difficult question. Well, two points. First is that Australia isn't unique in making that choice. You saw, I mean, last year, for example, there was a Pew poll of something like 20 plus countries views on trust in China, trust in, and the result there was that where the Australian public view sat was bang in the middle, bang in the medium of democratic states worldwide. So Australian opinion has shifted. We are not an outlier so much in the general trend. The general trend has been increased suspicion, alarm and hostility towards China as China itself has become more assertive, pushy and more repressive both at home and abroad. The second thing I'd add and to answer your question, Bates, is that I think the public and therefore ultimately, although it can take a long time, the politicians, will react to change circumstances rather than necessarily lingering impressions. And the evidence for that, one amazing piece of evidence for that is in the poll itself which shows that the only country which has actually been a plausible threat to invade Australia since European settlement, Japan is one of the most trusted countries in the poll. And it's leader, I think, I might have this wrong, Natasha, but I think Abe, Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan is trusted as much or maybe even more than our own Prime Minister. So that's a pretty dramatic change in sentiment. Okay, it's taken a few decades, but just to make the point that these attitudes, ideas, grudges, stereotypes aren't permanent, they change with the facts. And I suspect this will prove to be another case of that too. One thing, well, you've answered the question that came in from Barack Cook about attitudes towards Japan. And Barack, I hope that we've slightly answered that, but there are some questions about Japan in this year's poll and they have been over the 16 years. So welcome, you do go and have a look on our interactive website, which is a pretty amazing website with every single result from all 16 years of our public opinion work. And you can break it down by demographics, by gender, by age, by education level, by country versus metropolitan. It's really amazing and immense results. So I encourage you to have a look at that. But Peter, I'm going to ask you a question if you don't mind me taking the liberty. So adding you to the 3000 or so Australians who answered our poll, which we took in late April 2020 to gauge reactions to COVID and how COVID might be changing the world. And this was an interesting question. Is it in normal flying conditions? I imagine you would be a regular traveller overseas. And the question we asked in that survey of 3000 or so Australians was when the coronavirus outbreak is contained in the future, are you more or less likely to travel overseas than you were before the outbreak? So I'm not going to give you a spoiler or a look, but I'm interested in your response. Whether you would join or how would you have responded to that question if somebody had phoned you up? Well, to be just as willing to go back into travel assumes a lot of trust in foreign governments and information about the state of the pandemic in those countries. I'd be less likely to travel. In my case, Alex, it's a long-term thing. I was a lot more anxious to travel in my 20s and a lot less with each passing decade. Well, it's something else about the wisdom of age, then, isn't it? Well, you would have been in the third of Australians who answered that way in our COVID poll. 59% of Australians said that they would travel, that their enthusiasm for travel would be about the same. That was taken in late April. I wonder whether it's changed now in July. But, yes, we were fascinated, actually, that as many Australians thought that it would basically not change their attitude towards foreign travel. We've just about run out of time, so I'm going to thank you both, Peter and Natasha, for this fascinating conversation. Thank you to the audience. I hope you found it interesting as well and for your questions, which were very good. If this discussion has piqued your interest in our annual poll and all of the other polling that we've done, you can find it on our website. As I explained, you can have a look at all 16 years of our polling organised by theme. It's an invaluable resource for us. We hope it's been interesting and useful for you too. So until our next Low Institute Live event, please keep an ear open for our podcasts. I hope you've noticed them. COVIDcast and our Executive Directors Podcast, the Directors Chair, they're available where you get all of your podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple. Our next episode of COVIDcast will be released on Friday, the 17th of July and features a discussion between former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the Low Institute's Hervé Lemieux, who directs our Asian Power and Diplomacy Program. In the meantime, from everyone here at the Low Institute, thank you for joining us today and please stay safe.