 Good evening everyone and welcome to this celebration of the outstanding work of an esteemed ANU colleague. I am joining you from Perth in Western Australia on the lands of the Wajap people of the Noongar nation. I acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay respects to elders past and present. I am absolutely delighted to be here this evening for the ANU launch of Professor Anthea Roberts' new book, Six Faces of Globalisation, Who Wins, Who Loses and Why It Matters, co-authored with Professor Nicholas Lapp from Queen's University. The book has already been launched in the United States and is impressively already top of Amazon's new releases for foreign and international law and has been discussed by leading experts including Paul Krugman. It's a significant achievement for a book to reach a global audience and I congratulate Anthea and Nicholas on their incredible work. The issues the book raises are timely and that's why it's obviously struck a chord. In a world that is responding to a series of complex and interconnected changes and challenges, our policymakers need the support of leading intellects in their fields. The early stages of this pandemic brought into sharp focus the fragility of global supply chains. There's growing geostrategic rivalry between China and the United States, rising inequalities, undermining social cohesion in many parts of the world. We are already in the early stages of the fourth industrial revolution. That's had a profound impact on our lives and the greatest disruption is yet to come. Climate change threatens our food and water supplies while there's concern about further pandemics. There's a growing backlash against globalization from communities that feel worse off and that's being exploited by political populace. Many of these challenges are forcing a reassessment in countries around the globe about their approaches to economic globalization. After the Cold War, governments thought that they'd got many of these policy settings right including an embrace of free trade and foreign investment. There are increasing signs of economic nationalism as some nations push back against economic globalization. There are governments reassessing their approaches to free trade and foreign investment and digital connectivity. These issues are often treated in a siloed way, making it difficult to picture the impact that economic globalization will have in the future. Additionally, many of the debates are highly polarized, rising from a media and social media environment that rewards extreme views and overwhelms nuance. It is important that we have informed public debates and engage in the next generation of policymaking. We thus need frameworks for understanding the forces driving this push back against economic globalization and to understand the legitimate concerns held by many communities and individuals. But it's only by debating and discussing together these matters in a rational and informed manner that we'll be able to find a new consensus. Now, Australia is one of the world's leading economies. We're an open, export-oriented market economy, reliant on fair access to international markets for our resources, our energy, agricultural products and services. The Australian National University, as the National University, has a mandate of promoting and protecting the national and the global interest. This year, we celebrated 75 years since ANU was first founded back in 1946 in a spirit of post-war optimism, with a founding mission to support the development of national unity and identity to help Australia understand itself and our neighbours and provide our nation with research capacity amongst the best in the world. Our founding mission to serve our nation guides all our work and its contributions, like ANTIERS, in the international sphere that helps us deliver on our mission in shaping national and global debates. Now, ANTIER is a professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance and was ranked by the world's leading international law scholar in, was ranked as the world's leading international law scholar in 2019 by the League of Scholars. Now, ANTIER and NICOLAS in six phases of globalisation have been cutting through all these complex and confusing debates to provide in this book a compelling framework for academics and policy makers and business leaders to understand the pushback against economic globalisation. And this is crucial for helping to identify the sorts of alliances we might need to forge in our policies going forward. Now, ANTIER's previous book is International Law International, published with Oxford University Press in 2017, won multiple prizes, including the American Society of International Laws prize for the preeminent contribution to creative legal scholarship. It's regarded as an interdisciplinary big picture rethinking of the field of international law. She's done this again in six phases of globalisation, but this time providing a way of thinking about the pushback against economic globalisation. To have a book published by Harvard University Press and featured in international publications, including Fortune Magazine, is an exceptional achievement, and we're very proud of the international impact of our ANU scholarship. And I'm pleased to see how deeply ANTIER and her team have engaged with a range of government departments through their work, ranging from DFAT and Defence to the Office of National Intelligence and PM&C. At ANU, we believe in doing scholarship that is leading academically, but also useful for policymakers. And the ANU working group on geo-economics, led by ANTIER, has been particularly notable in this regard. It represents new generation of work at Regnet, and that continues the legacy of leading scholars, including John Braithwaite and Hillary Charlesworth, who joins us this evening. And Hillary, I congratulate you having just been elected as a judge to the International Court of Justice earlier this month, what an outstanding achievement. Deepest congratulations. We're delighted to have such brilliant academic minds at our great university. Now, we are joined by a distinguished panel this evening. I'm certainly looking forward to hearing everyone's commentaries. So it is with a great deal of pleasure that I now hand over to Professor Anthea Roberts, who will present her new book. Congratulations, Anthea, over to you. Thank you very much and thank you for those warm words of introduction and also situating this project so well. So I'm going to be representing Nicholas and my co-author tonight in doing this presentation. And we wanted to just start by saying thank you so much to the ANU and to Regnet for hosting this particular book launch. Now, as was sort of stated in that introduction, we really found ourselves looking at this pushback against economic globalization and trying to make sense of it. And we did that as two international economic lawyers who had been in this field for multiple decades. And yet what we saw, particularly with Trump's election in the United States and with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, was suddenly that it was a tremendous push back against economic globalization. But it was also one that was really confusing, the number of arguments being made about why economic globalization was suddenly bad were really hard to get your head around. There was concern that Mexican workers were stealing U.S. workers' jobs, concerns about climate change, a rise of authoritarian China inequality. And in fact, as we surveyed these different debates and tried to make sense of them, they actually reminded us of a scramble of Rubik's cube that we couldn't make sense of. And so the first point of call in this project was to really ask ourselves was there a way that we could unscramble these narratives, unscramble these debates, unscramble this Rubik's cube so that we could work out what the main narratives were that were pushing back against economic globalization and how they related to each other. And so that's what began this project. So when we unscramble our Rubik's cube, we came across what we think of as our six faces of globalization. So the first face of globalization is what we would call the establishment narrative, which was the dominant narrative about economic globalization in the post Cold War period, the 1990s and 2000s. Now you will see here, represented by the blue arrows, that the idea behind the establishment narrative is it doesn't matter whether you are a developed country or a developing country. It doesn't matter if you are rich or poor. Everybody ultimately gains from economic globalization. And that's because we were taught to think of it as a rising tide that lifts all boats or as something that grows the pie so that everybody can have a bigger slice. Now sure, that doesn't always mean that everybody won straight away or won equally. But if there was unequal rewards under economic globalization, that could be handled at the domestic level through redistribution. And if you lost your job in the short term because of economic globalization, don't worry, you could retrain. It was like technology you simply needed to adapt. Now this very positive establishment narrative, we call the establishment narrative because it was the dominant view in most governments, particularly in the western states, but also elsewhere around the world. And it was also one that was proposed by leading international organizations, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank. Now what we really saw in that period around the time of the 2016 election is that this dominant narrative became unsettled. And instead we started to see a number of different narratives come into the frame that didn't want to just look at economic globalization in terms of economic benefits in general, but particularly wanted to start to look at the issue of relative distribution and relative gains. So let me introduce that first with the left-wing populist narrative. Now the left-wing populist narrative you'll see doesn't necessarily disagree that there have been an absolute increase in economic gains, generally speaking, but what they pay attention to is the fact that there has been a disproportionate hoarding of those economic benefits by the elite, and that the elite have gained the expense of hollowing out the middle class and putting pressure on the working class. And we represent this focus on the relative gains and the relative distribution by using these arrow lines. And here you can see through candidates like AOC and Bernie Sanders, a real concern that there has not been redistribution at the domestic level. In fact, if anything, there has been distribution of welfare up to the global 1% against the 99% or the educated 10% or 20% against the rest. Now this approach to the left-wing populist narrative is quite distinct from what we saw from representatives like Trump, who we think embody what we call the right-wing populist narrative. And the right-wing populist narrative is less concerned about welfare and gains going upwards to the elite, and they're more concerned about the way that they're going sideways to other countries. What we saw in Trump with the idea that workers in Mexico and China had stolen good US jobs was a real concern that in the redistribution of work, and in particular the offshoring of manufacturing, that workers in developing countries had won at the expense of workers in developed countries. And so this creates this horizontal concern that you can see here with the red lines. The concern here is not just about individual people losing their jobs and the fact that they might be able to adjust or catch up. What Trump says is we need to bring those jobs back because they are good working-class jobs, they are the backbone of our communities in the countryside, they are the backbone of manufacturing, and they are the backbone of the country. Now this kind of horizontal concern, we see a similar horizontal concern in what we call the geo-economic narrative, but instead of focusing on particular workers or particular communities that may have been left behind, this one focuses on whole countries, and in particular on the two geostrategic rivals, the United States and China. Now under this narrative again, they wouldn't necessarily dispute that as a matter of absolute gain, both the United States and China both gain from this period of economic globalization. But what they would say is in this period, China used that period to change its relative position and to close the gap on the United States economically, technologically, and militarily. And I would say this closing of the gap is what has actually meant that China has gained under economic globalization at the expense of the US, and what we are now seeing is very strong reaction from the US to protect its position and a really strong concern about geo-strategic competition and security. And we see that concern particularly playing out in areas like AI, semiconductors, and 5G with a real concern about companies like Huawei. And here you can see one of the differences between the Trump right-wing protectionist narrative and the geo-economic narrative. The right-wing protectionist narrative is very much concerned often about jobs of yesteryear, traditional values, how do we bring back the jobs of manufacturing of the past. Whereas the geo-strategic narrative, the geo-economic narrative is strongly focused on strategic competition and technology for the future. And so it's looking at AI and semiconductors and 5Gs as the battle for technological supremacy. And when we think about technological supremacy, that should make us also think about one other argument, which is the corporate power narrative. And this is the idea that maybe instead of particular classes or communities or countries having been the winners or losers of economic liberalization, maybe we have the wrong unit of analysis entirely. And really the real winners of this transnational system are corporations, major multinational corporations that have been able to benefit from a system of trade, investment, and tax that has allowed them to offshore their production anywhere in the world to produce cheaply, to then gain global markets so they can sell at a profit, and yet to hop, skip, and jump around the world avoiding tax liability so that they ultimately repay very little of their profits to different governments around the world. On this narrative, there are many losers from economic globalization but only one winner, which is corporate power. Now here, we want to introduce a different narrative. And this narrative was one that became a much greater level of attention as we were writing this book. And this is what we think of as the global threats narrative. If you think about the narratives I've introduced today, most of them have been in various ways about money and economic resources, how to maximize them in general or how to distribute them between classes, between countries, between communities. Whereas the global threats narrative says we've got the wrong metric entirely. It's not economic gains, how you maximize them, how you distribute them. But actually, what we have done with our economies and with economic globalization is that we have put ourselves into a position of unsustainable economic growth that has put us on a collision course with our planet. We are open to global threats, all of us collectively, whether they are pandemics or climate change. And unless we seriously rethink our approach to economic globalization and try to think about how do we survive and thrive within the limits of our planet, we are going to put ourselves on a collision course. And this particular narrative we saw very much come to the fore, not just with climate change but with COVID-19. And it's often embodied in cause for greater resilience and greater sustainability. So if these are our six narratives, how do they fit on our Rubik's Cube? Well, the establishment narrative we think of as being on the top of the Rubik's Cube, because it's the win-win analysis of economic globalization that was so dominant for so long. On the four sides of the cube, these are the win-lose arguments. They say that there are winners and losers from economic globalization, but they have a different theory about who's won, who's lost and why it's mattered. Whereas if you take your cube and you turn it over to look at the underside, what we find is the lose-lose narrative that we are all at risk of losing from our current approach to economic globalization. Now, my hope is that these narratives will be familiar to you from the news. You should know the very positive establishment narrative, the left-wing populist one considering about the rich, the right-wing populist one. It's hard to miss the geo-economic one. We're increasingly seeing the corporate power one, and with COP26 last week, we're also very conscious that we might all be in the line of fire from global threats. So, my next question is, after we've actually managed to unscramble our cube in this way, is there a way that we can use this analysis to better understand policy-making and policy debates that are happening in the public sphere? So, I want to give you three examples about how we use this analysis. The first is that by unscrambling the Rubik's Cube to identify these different narratives, it's really encouraged us to look at policy issues from multiple sides. Let me give you an example. If we think about Macron's carbon tax in France, this was a carbon tax that he suggested putting on diesel and gas, and this is one that made an enormous amount of sense if you looked at it from the perspective of the sustainability narrative because it was a measure to reduce carbon emissions. It was also one that made tremendous sense if you looked at it from the establishment narrative because that favours efficient and market-based mechanisms for enacting change. But where Macron's carbon tax came undone and where it received a huge amount of pushback was because he hadn't turned the cube to look at the other narratives. And in particular, we saw through the Yellow Vest movement, there was a very strong reaction from right-wing populist narrative who were very concerned about the fact that the tax had an unequal impact on rural communities and rural workers who had to drive a lot further for their jobs than city-dwelling elites. But we also saw that there was pushback from the left-wing populist narrative that was worried that these sorts of fuel taxes have a disproportionate burden on the poor and working class. Meanwhile, your jet-setting elites were able to fly elsewhere without having to pay the carbon tax. What we also noticed once we unscramble the Rubik's cube is that it became a very helpful way for us to look for what we call strategic switching, which is when clever and powerful actors strategically shift the face of the cube to put themselves in a better light. So one example of this, I would say, was Zuckerberg being brought before the U.S. Congress where he was having to give testimony about Facebook's corporate power. Now here we very clearly have a corporate power narrative, but what we saw before he went in is that a clever reporter managed to take a photograph of his notes and on his notes it said, if they ask you about breaking up Facebook, say you can't do that because then China will win. So what we see here is that he's being hauled in front of Congress under a corporate power narrative where his company is the big bad corporate player and the U.S. government is thinking, do we step in to protect the little guy? And what he says is, no, we need to shift it because the real debate that's going on here is a debate, is a competition for technological supremacy. This is team USA against team China and in this competition you shouldn't be trying to break us up because we are all on the same team, U.S. corporations, U.S. government and you don't want to weaken us against this enemy of China, it's us against them. At this point you can see scientists all around the world, absolutely in dismay because they don't want this to turn into an us versus them competition. They want to say that we as a collective all need to work together because we as a collective are suffering from global threats like COVID and like climate change and unless we all work together we are not going to be able to protect ourselves from these global threats. In addition to looking for strategic switching, we've used this in a number of, in some of our work with government departments to look for overlaps and alliances that might suggest where policymaking might be going. One area where you can see this happening at the moment is whereas in economic globalization we had highly distributed supply chains, what we're now seeing in many countries around the world, but particularly the great powers, is a real movement to re-envoking the importance of national self-reliance. At least particularly in areas like semiconductors where we've seen the recent shortages where there are arguments now in these great powers US, China and EU for reshoring semiconductor manufacturing. And this is something that we were able to predict a fair while ago from this kind of analysis because it is a policy that actually has the support of multiple narratives even though they support it for different reasons. So if you think for example of the right wing populist narrative they have a very strong interest in building domestic capacity and manufacturing generally and so they want to bring back semiconductor manufacturing along with other manufacturing as well. If you think about the global threats resilience narrative that really came to the fore after the COVID supply chain shock and the problems we had with PPE, that really made many governments around the world want to focus on ensuring supplies and capacity in essential sectors and that's not just health and food that's also in digital things for our economy like semiconductors. And finally we've seen an increased concern under the geo-economic narrative not just about building capacity in strategically important sectors like semiconductors but also about not being reliant on unreliable or potential strategic flows. And so you can see for example the US wants to build a semiconductor capacity that's not reliant on China and China wants to build it that's not reliant on the US. What we can see when we put these different narratives together is that they're likely to shift to the establishment narrative and I think they are at the moment because they all overlap in agreement on wanting greater levels of national self-reliance at least with respect to these essential strategic sectors. But we can also see that sometimes they overlap in agreement with two of them and not a third and that's because if you see the debates about semiconductors for example much of the debate is about whether we should reshore also onshore into our big economies our semiconductor manufacturing but we also see arguments that we should ally shore so we should diversify our supply binds by building up capacities for manufacturing in our allies. Now this idea of diversifying through ally shoring is something that really works for you if your concern is the global threats resilience narrative all your concern is the geo-economic narrative but it doesn't work for you at all if your concern is the right wing populist narrative because the right wing populist narratives don't want to bring back manufacturing to their friends and allies they want to bring back manufacturing to their own country. So now let me just turn to a third issue which is what kind of project is this because this is an unusual project in today's academy. So this is a kind of a project that psychologists would call one of integrative complexity so individuals tend to differ in the level of integrative complexity they have between low integrative complexity and high integrative complexity. So low integrative complexity means you tend to look at issues from one perspective only and often in very black and white ways good and evil right and wrong whereas high integrative complexity often takes two different forms the first thing that people with high integrative and complexity do is they differentiate a lock so they like to look at complex issues and they apply many different perspectives to see them from many different angles. What they do here as well though is they often try through cognitive empathy to embody the perspectives of different sides and this often leads them to instead of taking very black and white approaches to actually look at many shades of gray from the different narratives and what we would say here in the approach of Nicholas and I both founders is that we not only learnt a lot from employing cognitive empathy to try and understand these narratives from within but they actually led us to have a much greater appreciation of every narrative every narrative we ended up finding had something really valuable in it even though no narrative seemed to us to contain the whole truth but the other element of integrative complexity is what psychologists would ask is integration which is it's not enough to just find the six different narratives and differentiate in that way it's also important to find ways to integrate the perspectives back together and that's where we start first of all with the Rubik's Cube but then through various types of bend diagrams and other techniques to consider frameworks for bringing these narratives back in conversation with each other so you look for commonalities but you also look for incommensurables and one of the things that really struck us in doing this project is that many people wanted to immediately say well what are the facts what's right and what's wrong and there are facts here that you can debate but there are also underlying many of these different narratives there are different emotional and value-based commitments so for example the right-wing protectionists many people wanted to say you know this is a crazy idea you know it's racist and it's not economically efficient to bring supply chains home but part of what's underneath the right-wing protectionist narrative is a real concern about traditional values about communities about what happens to communities when good jobs are taken from those communities what it does to the family structure what it does to the community structure what it does to things like the opioid crisis and so we see a real sense that work is much more valuable than just where it can be done efficiently it's the building block of healthy individual psychology families and communities and on the global sustainability the global threats narrative you can also see there a real concern about the environment not just as economic efficiency not just as a means to an end but as an end in and of itself and so what we really started to see here with very different values coming to the fore we also think that this is a project that embodies what we would say is a desire to look at complex and evolving issues through dragonfly eyes and this is the idea that we pick up from Philip Tedlock who's a political scientist and the reason he uses the idea of dragonfly eyes is the dragonflies actually have these two major eyes but each of those eyes actually is made up of thousands of different lenses and they use these thousands of different lenses to integrate a more holistic picture of what they're seeing so that they actually develop an almost 360 degree view of reality now the reason that Tedlock focuses on this in political science is that in all of the work that has been done on what are the intellectual traits that lead to super forecasting so the better abilities to forecast and project forward what they find is that the common trait is that they are people that approach things with dragonfly eyes stitching together understandings that take on board many many different perspectives and so here I'll just say briefly that one of the things we really learned from this process was not just about the importance of taking on the different perspectives within these western debates where we were seeing this pushback against economic globalization but was also the importance of looking at the narratives beyond the west because we identified that in the western debates there were some very significant blind spots and biases and that it was really important to understand what narratives were going on outside the west and sometimes there were narratives such as a neo-colonial narrative that saw not the developing not the developed world workers as the losers of economic globalization but in fact the developing world having systematically been exploited for decades and decades in the north centuries that was a perspective that was much less played in the global debates in the west at the moment about globalization we also saw some of the narratives did appear in some of the other places around the world but told from a different perspective so for example the protectionist narrative tells about the redistribution of jobs and the decline of the working uh the manufacturing cities but this is told from the perspective of the losers a very similar narrative might be told from some of the cities in asia but this is the the tale of asia rising and it's a very positive narrative told from the perspective of those who who won from that global redistribution similarly we see in the geo-economic narrative on the u.s side it's about the rise of the authoritarian and strategic threat of china whereas in china you see the same narrative played the other way that this is a declining hegemon of the u.s trying to hold on to its its advantages and in the process it's falsely invoking all of these security concerns to hold back china's rise ultimately where does this leave us with economic globalization are we going to be able to piece it all back together so i'm not somebody who believes that we're at the end of economic globalization but i also don't believe that when we go forward it's going to be pieced together that in exactly the same way as it was before and i think what we'll see in some of the commentators tonight from policymaking is that we are moving forward with economic globalization but in a different speed and in a different way in a more variegated way that we need to come to terms with going forward and what i would say with this is that we are moving towards wanting and needing more kaleidoscopic approaches and i'll note just in a week or two ago we had the senior representative from the european union on trade saying if you look at trade deals today and what's happening what we are seeing is and her phrase was a colorful mosaic of approaches where we're starting to see the integration of climate change the integration of workers rights the integration of strategic concerns to try and work out this more kaleidoscopic understanding of economic globalization and the way forward but also of trade policy so with that introduction i'm going to pass over to um to Helen Sullivan our dean and also to the panel i just wanted to say at the outset to our panel i'm so delighted that you were able to be here today and give comments and to everyone who's giving comments opening and closing today i'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say from policy making and from business but i did also want to just say on a personal level Hillary we are so proud of you for what's happened in your computer election and um Hillary is somebody who has been a mentor of mine since i was 20 years old and so it is just such a delight to have seen what's happened with you in the last week and to have you here today so thank you very much thank you chancellor and thank you professor robert for that introduction to to the book as professor robert said my name is helen sullivan i'm professor and dean of the college of asia and the pacific and it is my very great pleasure to be chairing this event today which principally amounts to me introducing a series of very eminent people to talk about anthea's book and first up is professor hillary charlesworth who as both the chancellor and anthea have indicated has indicated is well on her way to becoming a national treasure if she isn't already an outstanding scholar the holder of numerous awards somebody who is well known to to many scholars for her extraordinary mentoring much beyond the positions that she holds currently harrison more professor of law and melvin laureate fellow at melvin law school but also distinguished professor at the australian national university it's my great pleasure professor charlesworth to hand over to you any thanks uh hillan for that kind introduction and let me start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which i am who are the warangiri people of the cruel nation and i pay my respects to the elders past and present so i'm really delighted to participate in the panel today and my focus is going to be less on the brilliant description of the competing stories about globalization that the book offers and more on the intellectual journey of the leader of the author anthea roberts so i'm going to leave the other panelists to really talk about the book but i i see this is a very interesting step in anthea's intellectual journey so i hope you'll allow me to devote my remarks to that so i first met anthea just over two decades ago and she was then doing her undergraduate law degree at the a new and i remember very clearly our first meeting because she was uh in search of a topic and a supervisor for an honest thesis and she was very candid she said look i don't really like the idea of writing a thesis i'm really you know i know how to absolutely ace all the exams i encounter so this is a bit of a puzzle for me so she and i sat down and discussed various ideas possible topics and i was really impressed by the care with which she weighed each prospect she also she was candid she had interviewed a number of supervisors and was rigorously assessing so but when we were talking about the topics it was clear that anthea's willingness to consider complexity was quite evident and we don't always find that in law students so anthea didn't want to settle for straightforward topic and she decided in the end to investigate the thorny issue of customary international law so for a fiction nardos customary international law is that category of rules that develop from not from treaties but from the practice of states so customary international law is important in a number of fields just to mention two international environmental law and human rights law but this idea of customary international law is intensely controversial in both theory and practice because it raises the issue of how much legal weight should be attached to what states do rather than what they say or they endorse publicly in other words actual state behavior is often driven largely by self-interest but states are in multilateral fora such as the un will often take much more principal positions so over the years many scholars of international law have taken on this famously thorny issue but it's true when you look at the literature that they've really been little conceptual development of the field and rather fixed positions emerged so what anthea's thesis ended up doing was to provide a really illuminating interview overview I should say of what she called two different approaches traditional and modern approaches so she used the word traditional to refer to approaches to customary international law that focused on state action and modern to describe those approaches that emphasized what states actually said rather than what they did so then anthea after cataloging these different approaches proposed what she called a reflective interpretive approach to custom that really incorporated both the traditional and modern approaches so I have to say that anthea was a joy to supervise at that time in 2000 I was reading and these weren't particularly well known at the time I was reading the harry potter books to my children and anthea struck me as a dead ringer for the character of Hermione Granger prodigiously clever dauntingly conscientious and endearingly enthusiastic about ideas uh in the end anthea's thesis uh went on to be published by the leading journal in the discipline the american journal of international law and it also won the francis deak prize which is awarded annually to the best article published by an author under 40 it was extraordinary to win that prize in your early 20s and I should say that anthea went on to win that very same prize again uh almost a decade later for an article that she wrote on investment treaties so anthea then went on to postgraduate studies at new york university and then walked worked on wall street for a while uh before coming back to academia in both the united kingdom and the us but by next I kept in touch with anthea over years but my next chance to observe her at close quarters was when she decided to undertake a phd at the anew on the basis of research she'd been conducting for a while so this time and the chancellor's already referred to this work and you took on the question of whether international law deserved the adjective international so she challenged the traditional account that international law is a universal system of rules and principles and she really described in fantastic detail the profound variation that could be found between different countries and jurisdictions so anthea's thesis which quickly became a book published by oxford university press made the original argument that international law is not truly international it's deeply inflicted by local and regional patterns so she uncovered in her own words these are her words patterns of difference dominance dominance and disruption that belie international laws claims to universality so anthea's work posing this this basic but unasked question before has really effectively reshaped the way that scholars now study the discipline and of course this this book also went on to win the premier book prize in the field of international law that given annually by the american society of international law and now we have the latest book this subject of tonight's uh celebration six phases of globalization and you're going to hear you've heard about premier but you're going to hear about more about it shortly but i think if i can just draw some common threads in what i see as anthea's intellectual trajectory first of all uh and this is miradine all her work are her conceptual ambition and her fearlessness about orthodoxies but the second feature i see in all of her work is her capacity for really fine-grained empirical analysis she just isn't making generalization she does it on the basis of extraordinarily detailed collection of evidence and and work and thirdly uh i think it's been consistent right from that undergraduate honours thesis was her brilliance in mapping theory i think anthea has a really unusual capacity to survey a field while being attentive to all of its nuances and to identify the major threads that make up the fabric of the field i've been struck by the fact that anthea seems drawn to areas where people have really dug into their positions where there seem to be intractable views and yet she seems to be able to hone in on to patterns of thinking that no one else is picked up but anthea as as you would have heard from her presentation isn't content with the cartography of theory alone she's interested in synthesis but also in offering an original and often surprising set of observations and interventions i think anthea at her what seems to be still very young age has a track record of really shaking up a field but also transcending fields searching across them for patterns and insights also been struck by the fact i think somebody who's achieved so much in her career might be forgiven for really resting on her intellectual laurels and i think there is a human tendency to stay in a will cloud field but anthea has an unusual curiosity and restlessness she has described herself actually as an intellectual nomad and i think that's very apt she's intellectually intrepid and she seems just to search out puzzles so she's already in her presentation today she's mentioned this to me before introduced us all to the idea of dragonfly thinking which involves synthesizing a huge range of points counterpoints and counter counterpoints as she herself has said and i think this style which is absolutely anthea's style is an unusual one not only in the australian academy but also more broadly and i think unfortunately the academic world has moved toward much much more silo thinking i should add that i think anthea is in the perfect location for more experimental and visionary thinking first of all at the anew which i think has supported this and very specifically at rednet which is a wonderful base for this sort of thinking so looking back over the last two decades perhaps unsurprisingly i can see some changes in anthea's scholarly persona so the wonderful article that was published two decades ago from her on a thesis was called traditional and modern approaches to international law colon a reconciliation so the article takes quite a respectful tone towards the grand figures of the discipline and seeks very politely and gently to reinterpret their positions to give them more coherence but i think 20 years later in anthea's new book a much more confident anthea appears perhaps bolder in questioning orthodoxies she's less interested in reconciling completing views and more willing to acknowledge intractable differences while also pointing to their risks so i think this this turn in her persona if i can call it that links with anthea's growing interest in visual thinking and of course we can see that strikingly in six faces in the very powerful way as she's demonstrated that she and nicolas lamp used the image of the rubik's cube well to conclude then the great joy of academic life is surely seeing what your students make of the world and how they contribute to it i think with this new book anthea and her co-author nicolas lamp offer us a really compelling framework to approach rival accounts of the phenomenon of economic globalization and also make this very bold call for integrative thinking so as a proud colleague and former supervisor i'm going to be watching with great anticipation where anthea takes us next thank you so much professor charlesworth um before we move on i'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which i'm coming from and i think richard might be too but i could be wrong about that um and uh extend my respect to elders past presence of the nunna wall and nambry peoples so next to speak as i indicate is richard moored uh who joined the asia asia society australia in in 2020 as the inaugural executive director policy and senior fellow asia society policy institute the first senior executive role in that institute outside the u.s prior to that richard served as deputy secretary of the indopacific group in the australian department of foreign affairs and trade and has a long and celebrated career uh in in that department and in government well broadly he also has a very close relationship with the a and u which is something that we're particularly keen on uh richard it's great to have you here well thanks so much ellen it's really lovely to be here uh with you and anthea and all my fellow panelists and julian brine and also lovely to follow um such a warm and and beautiful introduction uh by hillary so i just want to begin by adding my congratulations to anthea and nicolas for a terrific book um and of course i i come at this as someone who spent uh more than 30 years in foreign policy uh so the book would inevitably appeal to me because globalization has had the most profound effect on global economics on politics and geopolitics um and that's that seems to have been especially so in recent decades as anthea says so you really can't understand trump's election or joe biden's foreign policy for the middle class uh nor brexit you just can't understand that without really understanding the path of globalization uh and how people think about it and nor of course can you understand as anthea said um east asia's economic rise but um from my short remarks today i wanted to just note that the book has also has really strong explanatory power when applied to australia and indeed it's striking to me just how well the narratives in the book can be used to track australian approaches to globalization especially uh in the recent past so i was going to spend just a few minutes just running through that and i wanted to start with the 2017 foreign policy white paper a project of course that julie commissioned and oversaw when she was minister for foreign affairs and for the sake of full disclosure i was i was head of julie's task force so one of the very big unifying ideas in the foreign policy white paper was that of openness openness to trade investment school migration ideas technology and how that openness has benefited australia and so in short to apply the framework from anthea nicolas's book the dominant nearly singular narrative in the foreign policy white paper is the establishment one uh and even going back and re-reading the white paper uh as i did uh in preparation for this talk but that i'm unfamiliar with it but it is um striking um that this comes right down to the focus on consumer benefits the argument that australia should keep its economy open even if other countries apply protectionist barriers um and an optimistic take on the opportunities that new technology will bring so those arguments run through uh the narrative on openness in the white paper they're all arguments that anthea and nicolas capture uh in their establishment narrative and i've got to say that uh this view about openness which uh to which i'll admit that i still have a fairly strong intellectual and emotional attachment uh has been deeply embedded in australian thinking about globalization for many years uh it has absolutely been the orthodoxy uh in government and of course in in many parts of the economic world including in parts of the australian national university i say this was the nearly singular narrative because this was 27 after all uh donald trump had just been elected populism and nationalism were on the rise globally many of the ills of globalization of and of neoliberal economics were evident and china's challenge to some of our policy settings was also clear so the white paper does chronicle these stresses it does recognize inequality and adjustment costs that come with globalization even if in a very establishment narrative fashion it's ultimately optimistic about australia's ability to deal with those pressures white paper does also place some limits on the idea of australian openness so it does so for example in relation to borders and migration it does so in relation to foreign investment in sensitive sectors so even in 27 there were just a hint of a couple of other narratives starting to creep in but i do think that if we fast forward through four really tumultuous years uh the trump administration uh in all its chaos and madness the pandemic and the collapse of australia china relations we now clearly see a much more complex and diverse set of narratives on globalization uh in australia and we also now see modified policy settings to match it's important to note that australia hasn't really abandoned economic openness we haven't lurched to protectionism we still love a good free trade agreement we still love the idea of a rules-based trading system centered on a strong world trade organization but it's absolutely the case that openness has been modified to protect australia against future supply chain disruptions and also the security and economic risks that come with china's dominance of many uh industries i think it's really telling that you won't find the term economic sovereignty uh in the white paper at all but now of course it's repeatedly invoked in australia as a new national priority um this is anthea's point in her presentation about national self-reliance and both the opposition and the government talk of australia needing to be a nation that makes things and this is seen as having virtue in itself but also importantly both sides of politics agree that australia has to be able to either make or obtain from trusted quote unquote suppliers what we need in times of crisis or because of what the government sometimes politely calls market concentration by which of course they mean china we've seen foreign investment screening tightened again the government's looking at security of supply of both critical technologies and critical minerals and it's working of course very closely with united states on this and these are profoundly consequential shifts in uh both australian foreign and domestic policy we don't have time uh to unpack them here but importantly uh anthea's book helps you understand from from whence they come and to come back to the narratives what we now have in australia is what anthea calls an EGR profile that is we have elements of the establishment narrative the geoeconomics narrative and the resilience narratives all rolling around in australian foreign policy at the moment uh and and thea tells me she looks forward to the day when you might add an s to that list of narratives that is that the sustainability narrative will also come more into play uh in australia well uh we can only hope so i just want to conclude by saying as hillary did that the book doesn't just help us understand the past and the present but it also peers into the future uh and our future is undeniably complex we're going to be navigating a new global duality part decoupling driven by both united states and china and part ongoing interdependence of on-shoring diversification and supply chain resilience sitting alongside mega trade deals like asset which at their heart thrive on establishment concepts like specialization and comparative advantage there's more automation coming our way including in the services sector we're going to face more challenging adjustments so how will we respond to all of that well anthea and nicolas offer us a way of thinking that really helps by comprehending the diversity of the narratives on globalization by encouraging us to walk in the shoes of others to consider the perspectives of others to appeal for foxlike thinking and also to recognize that bringing non-monetary values to the debate about globalization has value and though that is the foundations for a more informed a more tolerant but also ultimately a more liberal discussion on the future of globalization and how to fix the worst of its ills while preserving its benefits so let me conclude on that hopeful note and thank and fair for the opportunity to be here tonight richard thank you so much for bringing that analysis and for focusing on australia and how this book might help us understand what's happening in australia next up we have heather smith heather had the great good fortune to do her phd at the australian national university and it is a doctor of economics as well as having a long and celebrated career in the australian public service where she i think her last job was as secretary of the department of industry innovation and science until 2020 heather is currently a professor with the a and u appointed to the national security college where she is leading a program of work which i think aligns quite nicely with some of the thinking in in the book so heather welcome and over to you thank you howland and and it is absolutely a pleasure to be part of such an esteemed panel and to really be talking about i think what is a timely and really important book that anthea and her colleague have engaged in i do think it is a truly original contribution in the very erudite way very clever way that the six narratives have been laid out and i really like the rubik cube heuristic i think that's a really good way of highlighting the different dimensions and the interpretations of globalization that we are we are grappling with and i think how we interpret uh those narratives over time how they evolve how they morph is going to have really profound implications for humanity and i think the authors are really to be congratulated for for the contribution that they've made here so for me when reading the book there were sort of three thoughts that that i guess swirled around in my mind that i thought i'd try and share as succinctly as i can and the first of those was that it made me really reflect about the establishment narrative and the debate that is actually going on within the narrative itself secondly it also led me to reflect a bit on the influence of economists because i think despite the i despite the authors having a very agnostic approach to the narratives i did sense a certain tagging of the columnist so i think i don't see things i'd like to perhaps say there and certainly i think by the end of the book so left with that question about well what comes next you know definitely we need more foxes so how should we really approach policy making under uncertainty as we go forward so so on that sort of first reflection for me what what binds those six narratives is that central struggle of how do you actually hold and grow the middle class in an era of inequality at the same time that trust there's a loss of trust in the state's willingness and capacity to actually address inequality so so this in turn sort of raised the question for me as to whether the establishment narrative has run its course but i'd probably contend that amongst the so-called monolithic hedgehogs that there is actually a lot of debate going on as we know people like mariana massacato are really looking at you know the evolution of the paradigm itself you know should we be focusing more on a radical shift between the relationship between the public and the private sector others like adam posan who wrote in front of air sort of earlier in in this year in the context of the us would probably be a bit more dismissive that the narrative around that the u.s. has been sacrificing justice and in the name of economic efficiency and that it's time to step back from globalization i sort of see his his argument would probably be perhaps the establishment narrative is being held up as a bit of a straw man that because rather than actually globalizing the last 20 years the u.s. has probably been withdrawing from the global economy and that for most of that time u.s. dynamism economic dynamism has been falling and inequality rising so you get this debate about that connectedness between the loss of dynamism internally as distinct from external drives is for example china and the impact on the loss of jobs so his argument i've sort of find really quite dissuasive in that it's really hard to buy off the populace by trying to reinforce their nostalgic sense of status so telling voters for example that jobs are the key to restoring prosperity but failing to actually move on policies which are political decisions in the end is ultimately going to be misleading and quite counterproductive and unfortunately and i agree i agree with him and i think this is in the book this there's very little evidence that governments can actually revive communities that suffer from significant structural change over time and that what is really needed is a universal benefits approach from that really protect individuals and families for example rather than really focusing on jobs and the place of work that particular narrative i don't think is is overarchingly applicable to Australia to give it given our deep social safety nets and our tax transfer system but but for me i saw elements of each of the six narratives becoming louder in in Australia when you look at our debates over urban and regional disparity you know the discussions around industrial and energy transition how we think about the cohesiveness of the federation our relationship with china and migration and other type issues so so i'd i'd i'd probably contend though that the establishment narrative a bit like the the u.s story hasn't actually been that dominant in australia over the past 15 years if you take a broad perspective of economic policy and that that governments probably haven't done enough to actually lay the the groundwork a bit like for the for the growth that's going to be needed to expand that pie before we even get to the question of how to distribute that pie so so having said that though i actually you know really share the the author's implied pessimism that i and tell me if i'm wrong and fear that i took from the last sentence of the book in fact that economic globalization may no longer be the primary subject that divides the proponents of the narratives as new meta narratives evolve so this is because i think from whatever way you approach it inequality is hard to to address in the absence of growth because the politics of redistribution by necessity is zero sum so you know the two two other megatrends when i was reflecting on the book seemed probably unfortunately destined to reinforce this and firstly was based on the current trends it it seems unlikely that we will see a repeat of the last 20 years when you know one half billion people were able to reach middle income status in the world and secondly given the increase in disconnect between the expectations of what people expect from their governments and the ability of governments to deliver is really getting harder in a world of intergenerational budget deficits and higher public debt going forward so that sounds pretty pessimistic and gloomy but on the other hand when i was reading the the book i thought well you can't really rule out the possibility of adaptive narratives being applied to some of the foundational challenges for example the corporate power narrative i i sort of sense has probably started to evolve a bit beyond that characterization to cross over to play more of perhaps a leadership role in the sustainability narrative and in the Australian context i think it's been interesting how global financial markets and the private sector has probably forced the hand of governments to move more quickly than what otherwise would have been the case in that transition to a less carbon intensive world so my second sort of set of reflections is as i mentioned you know really challenged me to think about the role of economists and i'm a lapsed economist you know in terms of how i think about i found myself so i found myself torn between like cheering you on and really agreeing with the the authors authors while at the same time filling the urge that i needed to stand up and defend the profession so i think certainly economists could observe the world with more humility and there is much to be humble about when we think about the past in particular i don't think economists spend enough time thinking and communicating about the pathways of adjustment that come with the establishment narrative and they also don't really understand power although i think you know obviously there are ways of overcoming that and some really interesting developments in terms of how economics is being taught but i also wonder again if perhaps we're giving too much weight to the role of economists in terms of their influence because in the end decisions policy decisions obviously are made by political actors although when you look at Australia's history certainly the economics profession has been really influential in certain periods of Australian history and it's no surprise they tend to be connected to a new but think of nugget cooms and and john crawford and the period of the 1980s and 1990s but i my sense is that the story over the past 15 years is probably much less flattering to the to the profession than that earlier period and i think more recently i think economists have been largely missing in action as the geo economic narrative where national security and building national resilience has become the central narrative as you point out in the book so that again raises the question in my mind whether the you know does this mean that a paradigm shift is needed within within the economics profession itself and and we there are new paradigms emerging and the you mentioned that in the book with the role of the santa fe institute which has been incredibly important and arguably the the shift of behavioral economics sort of reflects that fact of having to really focus more on practical and and looking at behavior in a more practical sense but i'm also a big fan of danie rodrick and i like the way that he sort of stirs the profession as well um but i think if i read him correctly his view is that we wouldn't you shouldn't actually want that type of discussion to give rise to a new paradigm because like the paradigms that have gone before it if you think about k-engineism and monetarism and and other parts of paradigms paradigms tend to give rise to blind spots because they tend to be perceived as being universal and history suggests once you start to really have excessive swings in paradigms it impacts on the role of government in quite negative ways so so in the end to me economic thinking it's it's really important about helping to sift through and really prevent partial views of the world dominating it and it's all part of the mix i think that you talk about and and for those of us who have been practitioners i think public policy debates are very rife with solutions in search of problems and with bested interests really masked as national as national interest and that's been a pretty constant i think over decades of policy making so my final look coming back to my final sort of thought that was invoked by this this fabulous book is you know what are the insights here for for policy making and i know that's where you want to take you know the next stage of your of your research so i really agree wholeheartedly that we need more foxes in this complex uncertain world and someone like me as a policy maker for 20 years working across disciplines and across the domestic and international you know i've i've been saying like you for a long time that we really need integrative thinking and diverse perspectives and that is probably the only way forward that we're going to be able to to manage the interdependent challenges that we face so rather than focusing on paradigms having more inclusive organizing frameworks to deal with that complexity and take account of the polarity of views which you set out so nicely in the book is is really important the challenge as in a practical sense is how to get a balanced approach by merging those frameworks that are really designed to help shape people's lives for the better they go to role markets institutions and well-being with frameworks that shape a country and its place in the world with that go to interest values ideology and history and that is the the reconciliation that is the challenge that i don't think we've got there yet and i think this is particularly important in in your discussion around the geoeconomics narrative because for Australia this is the new reality for us and we're making decisions and trade offs in ways that we've never had to do as a country before so how to maintain that balance between national security resilience and sovereignty while pursuing growth and integration is key so when it comes i think to the geoeconomics narrative history and culture i think really matter in how countries respond to that i think in australia we'll have to fight some of our historical instincts and not fall into that populist class eye protectionist mindset as we do focus on on resilience and i think we're going to have to adopt a framework or set of organizing principles that don't see decision making just through the national security lens as we navigate that so so i think a few years ago in the in the in the context of looking at the public sector you know i made some comments that i i do think we were actually culturally aligned or structurally configured to be able to grapple with that interdependency of of the complex sets of issues that that you focus on in the book whether it's geostrategic competition or economic and ecological interdependence or the fourth industrial ocean as you mentioned and that we're going to need the more matrix interdisciplinary frameworks that you talk about along with greater collaboration across all parts of the system so in the end i think my take out from from the book is is really an important role that that you and nicole's play is really adopting those new ways of thinking and talking about and the importance of collaboration is actually an intergenerational issue that is about building capability and and this book i think along with the important role that a new place is such a significant contribution to help build this capability but also to instilling the behaviors that actually support this and what i really like about this book is that you really highlight you know that this also goes to human nature and behavior so it's in the gift of of humanity to actually address this so finally you know i just really enjoyed reading the book i love the writing style i think it's incredibly accessible incredibly important for all all parts of government to look at the only the only comment i was curious about was the term that we needed flexible pragmatists and that left me sort of curious because to me it sounds like a bit of a recipe for what passes as policy today where it's unanchored it's trying to please everybody there are no losers so it used to be the good policy was good politics i'm hoping that flexible pragmatism is not really saying or being perceived at which is not what you're saying as good politics is no policy but i congratulations on the book i think it's an outstanding achievement and i know there's going to be much more to come so thank you Heather thank you for that incredibly thoughtful assessment of of the book and also of the state of economics and i'm not entirely sure if there is such a thing as a lapsed economist but maybe maybe that's something we could talk about offline and finally we have Jason Yatsen Lee who is currently chairman of investment group Vantage Asia and managing director of the corporate advisory firm Yatsen Associates YSA specializes in complex cross-border Asia-related mergers and acquisitions and capital raising mandates Jason is pro chancellor of the University of Sydney fellow of the University of Sydney Senate and chair of the university's risk and audit committee which is no mean task at the moment and he's also currently president of the Chinese Australia forum among many other hats that that he wears and as we understand from the earlier conversation Jason and Amthya have a long-standing connection but Jason it's wonderful to have you here thank you so much Helen it's it's a real pleasure to to join you thank you for the invitation even though i feel like i'm at sydney university gatecrusher uh at a at an NYU party although maybe we are believers in the establishment narrative and at a rising tide lifts or boats as well um like everyone else can i acknowledge the traditional owners of the land from which i'm beaming in uh the Kamarago people and pay my respects of their elders past frozen um and emerging um i thought this was a terrific book um with such analytical power it's really sort of affected the way i sort of look at at the world uh now and so congratulations and you're on a on a on a wonderful piece of work i'd like to focus um i guess on putting a china lens um to to some of this not not from an intellectual or an academic perspective but um largely from you know my work at the intersection i guess of business and and politics and um and from the perspective of the chinese australian community as we grapple with um you know the some of the tensions from from a from a rising china but before i do so um i think i wanted to pick up on some of helen's comments and even take it a bit further um and and describe a an impression i had from the book um which was a rather disturbing one and and that is that these these narratives in some ways paint a picture of the of the pretty poor state of our public discourse um at the moment where very complex important public policy issues you know can be turned into narratives often by masters of spin and strategic communications and so there therefore oftentimes the narratives um and the feelings and the and the the instincts behind them become weaponized um weaponized to win or retain political power or to um or to influence political power you know you see that in in donald trump um you know you see it in in the prosecution of of of political you know campaigns um aoc in the united states and you kind of see it in in australia now you know i was reading the book on the couch with the television going and just listened to the the slogan hearing um that is happening in australian politics um at the moment um so that to me underlined i guess the the the central challenge um of the book which was in our increasingly contested and partisan and populist political environment how do we as a democracy produce a good policy how do we produce um good government how do we cut through you know the tendency of a lot of these narratives as they're presented to the public to be uh simplistic and uh weaponized so in short you know how does democracy manage our complexity well so what i've described is in a democratic context where there are elections and elections are fiercely contested um this might be a good time to sort of slip on the the china glasses and go well how do the narratives play out in a place where there are no elections um or no genuine elections you know as we know and and where the policy making process is really is really quite different um you know one would you know one would one would think um i think in general interestingly um the narratives work in china they're they're cogent um in in in china the i mean certainly the establishment narrative has been the dominant narrative over the last four years um you know one of the genuine achievements of the ccp you know lifting um some hundreds of millions of people um out of poverty but i also think going back to the comments of some of the previous um panelists the the transition of that establishment narrative to a resilience narrative now with the dual dual circulation sort of policies is an extremely strong trend um in china similarly you see um the left wing narratives because of the rising um inequality um and so the chinese government sort of cracked down on ostentatious wealth and the billionaires you see bits of the right wing populist narrative in respect of rising nationalism um an anti-foreigner sentiment you see the corporate power narrative as well um with with a tweak though um in the sense that corporations can't really bully the government um over there the masters of the universe in china aren't the investment banks or the mnc's the masters of the universe are the regulators um over there uh well well and truly and certainly you see the geo economic uh narrative um but it's flipped right as anthea said the villain the villain is is not china the villain is the united states that this seeks to contain sort of china um um and stop china from displacing it as the dominant power in asia um and thus underpins the the resilience narrative shoring up um the silicon chip um supply um making sure that um it is the technological leader in that in that battle so i asked myself two sort of questions when thinking about the narratives in china the first was well where does australia sit within the geo economic narrative and it was kind of interesting in the sense that um the australia china conflict is not primarily an economic conflict because we're not losers from china's economic rise china hasn't stolen any of our industries hasn't made our work in fact it's the opposite we're we're net beneficiaries of china's uh rise nor are we in a geo strategic competition with china or a technological competition because but quite frankly we're not a superpower and so the the the australia china conflict isn't so much an economic conflict it's something else something else sits there and it's really a conflict about um ideology um about sovereignty um about um this this values-based fear that the ccp or the prc um as it becomes even more powerful is going to um displace our way of life is a threat um to to our democracy um and that's what really underpins the um i guess the the tension between australia and china and the debate that we're having now the second thought um that i had uh about the narratives in china was could they because china is not a democracy could in some ways the narratives be even more instrumental to good policy because there isn't this electoral fight going on um or not not openly and even though there aren't elections it doesn't mean that there's no policy debate there is robust policy debate um in china it's just not from politicians shouting at each other um you know on television but it happens through think tanks um the policy community the academic community through largely through very thoughtful and well researched pieces expressed in conservative language so that nobody gets into trouble and so i wondered whether in a china context the narratives have the edges the sharp edges taken off them um such that they can be even more instructive to good policy because they aren't sort of adulterated uh or weaponized um for political i don't know the answer to that hypothesis except to say look under the who's in town all the the juns are in era um policy was made largely by the state council that was comprised you know a lot of technocrats professionals etc now what's happening as as many of you will know in china is um there's an increasing centralization of power towards away from the state council away from the technocrats towards the party machinery you can see that through the rise of what's called the small leading groups um and interestingly even the um the ccdi the um the central commission for discipline and inspection um that that sort of increasingly powerful piece of party um apparatus that had you know it was specifically mentioned in the recent sixth uh plenum and is is sort of everywhere now and so interestingly i think what's happening in china also is the increasing politicization of policy making um and the policy discourse it's it's interesting when you think about it the thing about china is not how different it is to us but you know how how similar it is and so you know i think in some ways we we've come sort of full circle um you know with the narratives and and with the book and so i'd say again whilst i think that the narratives are an immensely powerful analytical tool um to understand it sort of the mess um of the world they don't in themselves um solve but in fact they lie at the heart of the problem of how democracies on the one hand um with fiercely contested elections or autocracies on the other hand with highly centralized power how they deliver good policy and how they deliver um good good government and to use you know going back to helen's comments earlier on this this matrix interdisciplinary you know approach to policy making in government does that really fit how do we achieve that in our electoral democracy as it is now you know is it really made is it really made for foxes um is is a is a question that that i was left with and look finally i really like the way the book ended in that it presented these two new meta narratives right there was the climate change sort of narrative which was all about what makes us the same and how we had to cooperate and then there was the the geostrategic war with china narrative which emphasized how we're different and how we might you know fight each other and all i can say is i i really hope that the first that the first meta narrative wins um jason thank you that that was that was fabulous it was it's really great to get a perspective that challenges the the idea of of of what kind of governance makes good policy and i think we're all in in need of thinking again about how we make good policy and maybe just to to also acknowledge that um uh what i think what a really terrific book that's come out of the university of sydney this last year is david brody's book on china and australia uh where he gets to a point that i think that you are making too about you know one of the things that australia might need to do is to think a bit more about how it um supports and and um works on its own democracy uh rather than positioning uh some of the the challenges that elsewhere so um thank you so much for that and um it's now my happy task to to hand over to uh the vice chancellor professor brian smith who is going to give the vote of thanks uh thank you helen and thank you everyone uh it has been an exhilarating evening for me because i have learned a lot and a good day is a day when i learn a lot uh so i'm coming to you from none of wilnambry territory just outside of canberra and when i look back a annu was found founded 75 years ago and it was founded to help australia realize its potential and um anthea you are helping with this work australia realize its potential because we are embedded in our region embedded in a globe and it is important for us to be able to think and understand how to allow australia to successfully make its way with the rest of the world in a constructive way so i have found that your book is bringing order to the chaos of which geopolitics looks like to a physicist which is used to rules that are normally followed and obeyed uh and i really appreciate the rubik's cube analogy as someone who was challenged once to a rubik's cube contest to who could solve it the quickly and i want it but i want it using a screwdriver and taking it apart on the school bus because i've always been kind of a brute force type of guy and surprisingly poor at solving rubik's cubes uh to our panel uh jason heather richard and hillary uh an outstanding set of reflections that were uh amongst the highest level i have heard in this space from any venue i've been around truly um truly insightful and things that i feel as though i have i have really come along with a much better understanding of how the problem's working uh as jason said very hard to uh uh come up with an instantaneous solution but anthia i'm hoping that um the the knowledge and ways of thinking can help us translate which is of course knowledge translating to things is one of the things universities are really important about doing helping us translate to figure out a solution and i know jason said it doesn't provide the solution but it provides a framework to to optimize and to think about how to find things that might work and as richard i think mentioned i see a lot of things within our own internal policymaking that can have a look at through this lens because it's the same basic six faces going on reflected into australian policy and so in that sense i hope everyone finds it as a useful way to think things through and i encourage all of us to use this framework and other developing other frameworks and ways of thinking to look for solutions uh because that's ultimately what we're here for so anthia uh it's been wonderful to watch uh this work develop um this was uh i know made possible in part by a grant we gave you to go out and do whatever you wanted uh when you started in your job at regnet and it is really wonderful to see you take that grant and turn it into something uh so interesting not just here in australia but on the world state so congratulations once and all chancellor thank you so much uh for your insights as always it is a pleasure to do business and i hope that you are proud on uh the stage that a and u can play in these areas of your own particular interests so thank you all and uh i wish you the best of luck and uh enjoy your uh uh rest of your evening and uh let's try to sort out the world thank you very much thanks everyone bye