 Well, Australia and the world raising our sights. There's a lot to be said for modesty in the conduct of foreign policy, as in life itself. But modesty can be overdone. When it takes the form of excessive difference and dependence, seeking and achieving less influence than that which Australia is capable of exercising in advancing both our own interests and those of the wider international community, then I think that's a matter for regret rather than applause. There are obvious constraints limiting the exercise of Australia's diplomatic authority. We're not a great or major power, manifestly, with economic or military might to match. We're somewhat geographically isolated, although much less, I guess, than in the past. As a rusted-on US ally, at least until now, with an unbroken record for more than a century of fighting Washington's wars alongside it, we're not always seen, especially by the global south, to be quite as independently minded as we'd like to think of ourselves. Memories do linger of our past racist policies. And we have to be more careful than most about charges of double standards or hypocrisy if our immigration or other policies are either wrong-headed or misunderstood internationally. But against all this, we do have some wonderful strengths. Assets and capabilities giving real weight to our standing and reputation. Some of them inherent, very long-standing, some much more recently acquired. We are, by most measures, the 13th largest economy in the world. By any measure, we are the sixth largest land mass and with the third largest maritime zone. We're one of the most multicultural countries in the globe, with a very large pool, among others, of very fluent Asian language speakers, hundreds of thousands of Chinese Australians for start, constituting a fantastic, but so far, I think, underappreciated and underutilized resource. And we have belated, though it may have been, a strong commitment to our indigenous people, as the whole world applauded in particular with our apology to the stolen generation. We bring to the table a unique geopolitical perspective, bridging our European history and our Indo-Pacific geography. Australians working in international organizations, both official and non-governmental, and Australian peacekeepers, have won almost universally outstanding reputations. We have had a strong and long-standing commitment to a rule-based global and regional order. We've had a long record of demonstrated national commitment to the United Nations system in security, social, economic, justice, human rights dimensions. And beyond all of that, we've been seen for many decades as a creative middle power with global interests and a long, if not unbroken, record on both sides of politics of active and effective diplomacy on global and regional as well as on bilateral issues. Looking back at the course of Australian foreign policy history, it's fascinating, I think, to trace both the continuities and discontinuities in the way in which those strengths of ours have been understood and the way in which they've been applied. In identifying the extent to which, as I will, different prime ministers and foreign ministers have been active and enthusiastic international performers, punching variously above, at, or below their weight, party political and ideological divisions don't really seem to be a complete explanation of those differences of commitment and performance. Personal, psychological traits are arguably just as important, perhaps even more. So what matters most here may be whether our foreign policy leaders have been instinctively optimists or pessimists, or in many clerks' wonderful dichotomy enlarges or straighteners. While Australian political leaders were not entirely absent from the world's stages in the first decades of our nationhood, most obviously, although not very helpfully, for our reputation, I have to say, with Billy Hughes's performance at Versailles, Australian foreign policy, in the sense of a desire to pursue our interests combined with some independent capacity to do so, really only dates from the early 1940s. And the creation of any kind of systematic Australian foreign policy really only came with H. V. Ebert, whose most striking contribution was his internationalism. The part that he played in the founding of the United Nations is the stuff of which legends are made, and rightly so, especially in his fight for the rights of the smaller powers against the great powers in the respective role of the General Assembly, the Scooty Council, and in his faith in the United Nations as an agent for social and economic reform and as a protector of human rights. But there were, of course, aspects of Ebert's worldview very much shared, I have to concede by the Labor Party of the time, which were not remotely broad-minded, right up until the Whitlam era, White Australia and the prejudices which nourished it, and the perception of the world, and particularly our own region, as a dangerous place from which Australia needed to be protected were very strong strands in my party's thinking. The early support from Ebert and Chifling for Indonesia's independence struggle against the Dutch was really the closest we came to understanding the new forces at work in our region and our need to reposition ourselves accordingly. This never, however, became a sustaining or dominant theme in our foreign policy at the time and certainly did not become one in the conservative era that followed from 1949 all the way through to 1972. There wasn't much left of Ebert's cooperative internationalism by the end of the reign of Robert Gordon Menzies and his successors. It's true that with the Cold War rendering the United Nations more and more impotent, multilateral processes generally more and more sterile, there wasn't much to pursue other than as a regional extension of alliance relationships. And true it is that we developed, particularly under Casey, cordial diplomatic relations with the emerging new nations of our region. True it is that Spender's Colombo Plan made a very useful contribution to our long-term relations with Asia. True it is that McEwen deserves credit for the 1957 Treaty with Japan and the optimism and the foresight that went with that. And true it is that men like Hasluck, and particularly Gorton and Holt, had quite open-minded international outlooks. But against this there has to be weighed Menzies excruciating anglophilia, the maintenance until the late 1960s of the full vigor of the White Australian policy, the stridency of our support for Ebert's South Africa, the intensity of our antagonism toward China, the totality of our dependence on the United States, the ultimate comprehensive misjudgment of our intervention in Vietnam. All this combined to reinforce the image and the reality of an Australia largely isolated and irrelevant in its own region. The Whitlam government in 1972-5 well and truly broke that mould, undaunted by cold war constraints and showing a great capacity, as Ebert had done, to match Australia and foreign policy to the mood and the needs of the time. Recognising China, bringing home our last troops from Vietnam, finally burying the White Australia policy, taking France to the world court for its nuclear tests and the Pacific, accelerating Papua New Guinea's independence. These were just some of the decisions of that tumultuous three years which set Australia on a new, confidently optimistic internationalist path. When the Fraser government, which followed it from 1975 to 83, while the Fraser government was more than happy to re-embrace cold war verities and all the east-west division of friends and enemies that went with it, I think it really is to the very considerable credit of Malcolm Fraser himself that on the issues which mattered most for Australia's long-term capacity to advance its interests, especially in this region, Whitlam's policies were not only continued but reinforced. Certainly both Fraser and his foreign minister, Andrew Peacock, both understood, as many in the coalition for a very long time did not, the absolutely critical importance of abandoning government legitimised racism in any form whatsoever, at home and abroad. Most obvious manifestation of that was their embrace of Vietnamese refugees, in fact much less reluctantly than Whitlam had done. The Hawken Keating governments that took us through the next 13 years renewed that spirit of activist optimistic adventure, which so characterised the Whitlam period, but at least as I remember it, in a more focused and systematic fashion. And we were able to achieve quite a great deal, including helping create the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, APEC, other new cooperative regional economic and security architecture, in crafting, as we did, the peace plan for Cambodia, securing the completion of the Chemical Weapons Convention and advancing some major nuclear disarmament objectives, playing a central role throughout the course of the Uruguay round trade negotiations, building with France a strong coalition to save the Antarctic from mining and oil drilling, and being a key player in crafting the financial sanctions strategy, which finally brought down apartheid in South Africa. Throughout our term we did embrace wholeheartedly the optimism and the new cooperative spirit that was abroad with the end of the Cold War. And we had a sustaining model of what kind of country we wanted to be, and to be seen to be, namely a middle power of the strong Asia Pacific orientation, pursuing confidently and actively the global, regional and bilateral levels as appropriate, not only clearly defined geopolitical and economic interests, but also what I've, for a long time, like to describe as good international citizenship interests. And this is a concept I'll come back to a little later, because I think it does lie at the heart of how we and others should conceptualise national interests and influence how we should set up foreign policy priorities in this turbulent new world of the 21st century. To complete the narrative throughout John Howard's long term, from 1996 to 2007, foreign policy was dominated by the Prime Minister himself, certainly more than I would have found comfortable had I been in the shoes of my very long-serving successor, Alexander Downer. John Howard was and remains the quintessential pessimistic realist, over-focused on hard rather than soft power, deeply comfortable in following the US Alliance lead wherever it took us, unadventurous, I have to say, in seeking global or regional policy changes, profoundly uninterested in the UN, generally inward looking. In his relationships with our Asian regional neighbours, but especially China, I do acknowledge that the wheel did turn back in the latter Howard years, and his government did make major contributions to regional stability, and played his role in leading the East Timor and Solomon Islands peacekeeping operations. But John Howard did remain manifestly uncomfortable with the whole idea of our primary relationships needing to be in our own region, and quite unaccepting of the notion that our geography now mattered more than our history. When the Labour government was returned in 2007 with Kevin Rudd, the dominant foreign policy player as Prime Minister, then Foreign Minister under Julia Gillard, and then as Prime Minister again making common cause with Bob Carr, I think it's fair enough to say that the enlargers were back again at centre stage in the conduct of international relations. That was most evident in Kevin Rudd's work on climate change for all the domestic horror, the issue generated for him, in building the role of the G20 in global economic management in a wider set of policy fronts, in trying to give serious content and energy to a new global debate on nuclear disarmament, in creating, albeit again after a few diplomatic slips along the way, important new regional architecture in the expanded East Asia Summit, and in moving to claw back a seat at the table for Australia in the UN Security Council. It was also evident that approach in Australia's support by Carr and supported by Rudd in Backbench Exile, although proposed rather vigorously by Julia Gillard, for moves toward recognition of Palestinian statehood in the UN General Assembly. The two-year administration of Tony Abbott was more reminiscent, I think one has to say, of the early Howard period than anything we've seen before or since, narrower in its geographical focus and certainly narrower in its ideological embrace, with the US alliance relationship front and centre and multilateral diplomacy seen as of second or third order importance, except of course insofar as it involved the Anglo-sphere. Since 2015, Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership has proved rather more continuity, rather more continuity of his predecessor than might have been expected in foreigners and domestic policy, and I guess that's been helped by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop for staying that role, maintaining an essentially transactional approach, generally less preoccupied with high policy than with management of the Department, Consulate of Administration, the aid program and the mechanics and trade negotiation. On the positive side of the ledger, Australia under the present coalition government was generally a very constructive contributor on a number of global security issues including that two-year term 2013-14 on the Security Council, not least with our leadership on the pathbreaking issue of humanitarian access to Syria. We've also played an important leadership role in the General Assembly, including very recently, on a normative issue very close to my heart, as Brian mentioned in the intro, the responsibility to protect R2P, to protect peoples against genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. It's also the case that important bilateral trade agreements have been successfully concluded and pluralateral, ones advanced, and a serious commitment has been made to the Asian education of the next generation of Australians through the new Colombo Plan. But along the way, we have gone missing. We've gone missing on arms control. On our feet and climate commitments, we've exposed ourselves to a great deal of criticism on a number of specific fronts. Among other things being caught eavesdropping on the Indonesian president and his wife and refusing subsequently to apologise. Very recently, prosecuting whistleblowers now for exposing the equally egregious eavesdropping of Timor-Leste's Cabinet in 2004. The extreme isolation of the positions that we regularly take in Israel, Palestine, which was taken to, I have to say, my judgement, quite grotesque extremes with our vote alongside only the United States and the Human Rights Council against establishing an independent commission of inquiry to report on the Gaza massacre. There's been the international shame of some aspects, most notably the Manus and Nehru detention centres, of our asylum seekers policy. Although there, of course, I unhappily have to acknowledge a bipartisan policy. There's been our unwillingness to seriously call out or respond punitively to major human rights abuses in Cambodia, Myanmar and elsewhere in our region. And there has been the unbelievably savage slashing of our aid commitments now at their lowest level at 0.22% of GNI since our development assistance first began. The lowest level of aid is a proportioned GNI since development assistance first began. And I have to say that we're now beginning to stumble into that zero-sum game territory in managing relations with our major economic partner on the one hand and our major security ally. Unnecessarily alienating China while putting too many eggs into the United States basket, where at least under the present administration they're all too likely to be broken. Criticisms of the particular failings of particular administrations aside, my more fundamental concern is that Australian foreign policy for most of the last two decades has had an extremely ad hoc feel about it, lacking overall shape and coherence. Not founded on any obviously systematic articulation of what our national interests are and how they're best advanced and prioritised. And certainly not enabling Australia to make the positive impact on the world, on the region at which it remains capable. I've always believed in this context that while complete bipartisanship in this area is probably unachievable other than in occasional races to the bottom, as on asylum seekers, given the long history of our, given the long histories and distinctive culture of both major parties, nonetheless we have often found, and I hope I've described a number of those occasions, we have often found common cause in the past and we should try to find as much as we possibly can in the future. Not least since it's well established that foreign policy issues and what usually vote changes for most voters. I think the best way of finding common ground is to go back to basics. Focusing on what are our real national interests, our capacity to advance and protect them, and the priorities for action that follow from that. Recognising that the logical starting point is interests, it's not relationships, and that how particular relationships are managed with the United States or anyone else should be a function of hard headed assessment by us of our own national interests. So what are our national interests? There's no argument about the traditional geo, traditional geo of geopolitical, strategic, physical security related interests on one hand and economic and trade prosperity related interests on the other. But I've long argued, as I've foreshadowed a little while ago, I've long argued that instead of thinking of national interests in just these two bundles, we really do need now to think in terms of every country, every country, not just us, every country having a third kind of national interest. And that's the national interest in being and being seen to be a good international citizen. What do I mean by that? Well, to me the touchstone of good international citizenship is being willing to engage in cooperative international action to advance regional or global public goods. We'll put it in another way to help resolve what Kofi Annan used to describe as problems without passports. Those which by their very nature are beyond the capacity of any one state, however great or powerful to individually solve. And we're talking here about such issues, obviously as achieving clean and safe global environment. A world free of health pandemics, of out of control, cross border population flows of international trafficking of drugs and people and of extreme poverty. A world without cross border terrorism and a world on its way to abolishing all weapons of mass destruction. There's more to all this than just disinterested altruism. In the world of today, whatever may have been the case in the past, these issues should be seen as core foreign policy business, not just optional add-ons at the periphery to be pursued if you in the business of Boy Scout good deeds, but not otherwise. My argument in this respect is that by being seriously committed to cooperative international problem solving, even in areas where some sacrifice might be involved with no immediately compensating national security or economic benefit to ourselves, does indeed generate not just a warm inner glow, but a quite hard headed practical return. First, through simple reciprocity, my help for you today in solving your terrorism problem or environment problem might reasonably lead you to be willing to help solve my refugee problem tomorrow. And secondly, through reputational benefit, the perception of being a country willing to take the principled stands for other than immediately obviously self-interested reasons does no harm at all to one's commercial, wider political agendas. As the Scandinavians, in particular, have very long well understood. One of the attractions, I guess to the theoreticians, a good international citizenship concept, is that it does bridge the traditional gap between realism and idealism by making it clear that pursuing values and interests are not necessarily completely different ways of going about things. Rather, the pursuit of values can also be the pursuit of interests. Of course, however defined, interests are not the same as influence. Opportunities for influence in pursuing national interests, broadly defined, are in the international diplomatic, political diplomatic marketplace. What's left over when a country's capacities are discounted by the constraints which inhibit it? Foreign policy priorities then define themselves as those policy areas where a major interest coincides with at least some opportunity to influence its achievement. So in the present geostrategic environment, with all its multiple challenges, what are the opportunities for Australia to raise our sights, to make a positive difference, not just for ourselves but for others, to punch not just at our weight but above our weight? There can be no argument that the present geostrategic environment is extremely challenging. Big and often quite disconcerting geopolitical shifts have been occurring. Most of them faster and going further than almost any of us would have believed possible not very long ago. In our own region, the five big ones, most demanding our attention are obviously China's rapid rise, America's relative rapid decline, India's long-awaited emergence as a major player, obviously North Korea's rapid acquisition of nuclear weapons capability, and perhaps less obviously but I think significantly, ASEAN's loss of a significant amount in recent times of its coherence and credibility at a time when both have never been more needed. But overarching all these separate issues, each of which demand our concentrated attention, is a bigger issue. A bigger issue, namely that the assumptions which have sustained and underpinned Australian security and economic policy for decades, those assumptions are in meltdown. The post-Second World War global order, an open rules-based system underpinned by a robust network of security alliances and by effective multilateral institutions in which rules could be agreed and norms reinforced, that's the only system we've known in our modern history. Its maintenance has depended more than anything else on American belief. Belief in the liberal norms laid out in the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the Bretton Woods organizations. But as the Trump Administration conspicuously abandons those norms, that order is now unraveling with remarkable speed. Other factors have of course contributed to the current uncertainty. China no longer content to just benefit from the liberal global order without trying to reshape it, is now matching its spectacular economic rise with the determination to wield major political and strategic influence regionally and indeed globally. Russia under Putin after a long period of post-Cold War quiescence is using its Security Council and its military authority to play itself back into the role of regional hegemon and global spoiler whenever and wherever it can. The European Union divided and troubled. Few other inter-governmental organizations including ASEAN in our own region are punching anything, at anything like their necessary weight. But it has to be said, it is above all the United States that's now tearing up the order that it did so much to create. With President Trump initiating trade wars, treating allies as irritating encumbrances, preferring despots to Democrats, regarding multilateral institutions with contempt, and walking away from painfully negotiated international agreements, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris climate accords. In a way which has left America's word in doubt and its soft power in real disarray. Even when this president does the right thing, as I think he unquestionably did and with the circuit-breaking Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un, it is, again, it sort of has to be said, with such manifestly superficial understanding and with such indifference to process and with such fragility of temperament, that it really is hard for anyone to be confident that the ultimate outcome that will necessarily involve protracted multilateral trust-building diplomacy will be one of triumph or disaster. It's not been unknown in the past, as I've got good cause to remember as a long-standing foreign minister and as an international conflict prevention NGO head, not been unknown for the United States to be on occasions insensitive to allies' concerns, not unknown for us to justify consorting with dictators as necessary real politic, not unknown to be keener on international law in principle than in practice and indeed to very often, not always, exhaust all available alternatives before doing the right thing. Nor is it entirely unexpected, I guess, that after all this hectic international commitment of recent decades, much of it, of course, positive, constructive and underappreciated, it's not surprising that after that commitment of so much blood and treasure, there should be a mood in the United States for a return to the kind of isolationism which prevailed in the earlier part of the last century. But what's new, what really is new and what's largely unanticipated is that America now is behaving neither as primary defender of the liberal international order which it created nor as a state really an inward-looking retreat from it but rather, as what Robert Kagan recently described in the robust terms in the Washington Post, as a rogue superpower, active, powerful but recognising no moral, political or strategic commitments and no sense of responsibility to anything beyond itself. Now, it may be that that characterisation is overdrawn or if it's not that the Trump ascendancy will prove an aberration that normality will resume in 2020 but there is, I have to say, enough truth in it and enough reason to believe that irremediable damage has been done to the world orders we've known in Australia and indeed many other countries to need to do some very hard thinking as to how we respond. So I think the four key elements of that response can be summarised as less America, more civil rights, more Asia and more global engagement. So a few words on each of those. Less America. Continued US engagement in this region is certainly highly desirable and I'm not in any way suggesting that Australia should walk away from the US alliance from which we unquestionably benefit as we have for a very long time in terms of access to intelligence, to high-end armaments and however flimsy the answers guarantees may prove to be in reality we have benefited from the national deterrent protection of America's massive military firepower. But less reflexive support for everything the US chooses to do is really very long overdue. As I've often said, with a thou ghost, there I ghost might be good theology but it's not great foreign policy for a country that values its independence and wants international respect. My own experience does strongly suggest that periodically saying no to the United States when our national interests are manifestly different makes for a much healthier and more productive relationship than one of craven dependence. Neither we nor anywhere else, anyone else in the region should be under any illusion that the United States will be there for us militarily in any circumstance where it doesn't also see its own immediate interest being under some threat. While that was almost certainly the reality under previous administrations it obviously has been thrown into much starker relief by Trump's America First approach and it shouldn't be now assumed that anything would be very different in a post-Trump era. So I think the reality is as ANU's Hugh White has repeatedly put it that we do need to prepare ourselves to live in Asia without America. So, secondly, more self-reliance. This certainly means being more of a diplomatic free agent adding to our reputation and credibility with an activist foreign policy that is creative, proactive, value-adding and unrestrained by a constant urge to look over the shoulder to Washington but more than that, more self-reliance does entail in military terms building defense capability that involves not only more bucks than we're usually comfortable spending but getting a bigger bang for each of them. It certainly means maximizing our capacity to protect our shores and our maritime environment including the Southwest Pacific from hostile intrusion. But it also means, I believe, having a capacity to engage in military operations wider afield if there is a good national interest including good international citizen interest reason for doing just that. While defense expenditure has been increasing with both sides of politics now committed to maintaining it at a credible 2% or slightly more GDP given the size of our continent, our capacity to defend ourselves against any really existential threat is limited. I'm optimistic enough to believe that in today's world the costs and the risks of waging war so wildly outweigh any conceivable benefits for any player that the likelihood of a major conflict in the foreseeable future is in fact very low. But defense planning always, of course, has to be based on worst case assumptions taking into account potential adversaries' capabilities not just their known intent and in that context we are just going to have to get used to doing more. More Asia. More Asia, this to me has two dimensions on the one hand strengthening our relationships at all levels with key regional neighbors like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea as a collective counterweight to a potentially overreaching China. On the other hand, it also means to me trying to develop a more multi-dimensional relationship not just a one-dimensional economic one with China itself. As to the first, as much as I would welcome of course I would, Australia developing an even closer relationship with ASEAN as a whole as an institution with all its potential for harnessing the region's collective middle power, energy capacity as much as I'd like to see that relationship perhaps extending to some form of associate membership rather than just partnership. I suspect that for the foreseeable future internal divisions and that organizations culture of extreme caution makes that unlikely and that accordingly our efforts in Southeast Asia should be focused really on its two heaviest players Indonesia and Vietnam as well as our traditional partners Singapore and Malaysia. If some or all of we five countries, and I've just mentioned were for example to mount regular combined freedom navigation operations quite independently of the United States in the contested waters of the South China Sea I think China would have to think very long and hard about any retaliation. While China manifestly does not want to provoke violent conflict anywhere it is clearly intent on recreating as much of its historical hegemonic tributary relationship with its southern neighbors as it can get away with and the united front of middle powers might be more effective in resisting this than relying on an increasingly erratic United States. There are of course less potentially confrontational ways of giving clear messages to China that the region is not prepared to lapse into tributary state mode for example there would seem to be considerable scope for maritime cooperation on search and rescue and humanitarian and disaster relief operations including involving Australia, India and Japan and the United States for example alongside ASEAN members which would create which would promote greater interaction between armed forces without triggering so many political sensitivities. It was in that humanitarian context the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that in fact the idea of the Quad was born close military cooperation between the United States, Japan, India and Australia. This is now after a false start in that direction in 2007 being reborn as a more overtly strategic response to China's new assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific. While this hasn't yet developed further than four-way talks between each country's admirals with India actually still remaining quite reluctant to have Australia even join its annual Malabar naval exercise with the US and Japan China does paint this as having all the makings of a polarizing alliance dedicated to China's containment. While it's no bad thing again for China to get the message that overarching behavior will be met with pushback I do think it would be prudent for the quadrilateral, the quad to be seen for now and characterized by its participants not as some kind of new grand strategic alliance but rather simply as a mechanism for greater working level, foreign and security policy dialogue and military to military interaction in a nearly uncertain environment and as a mechanism for which the particular attraction for Australia is closer engagement with India and Japan not just relying on the United States. So far as China is concerned I said more Asia had two dimensions one was getting close to the other powers and the other was responding differently to China itself by the one-dimensional way we traditionally have. So far as China itself is concerned it is critical and I'm glad to see that the government's foreign policy white paper last year spelt this out quite clearly. It's critical I think to approach the relationship in a spirit of multi-dimensional engagement. We should be trying to build mutually beneficial connections at multiple levels, not just to see the country as a one-dimensional economic partner crucial for our prosperity treated warily and confrontationally on anything to do with security issues in the hope and the expectation almost certainly now misguided that the United States will do the heavy lifting for us on that front. None of what I'm saying means becoming Beijing's patsy any more than we should be Washington's. We shouldn't hold back in making clear our own commitment to democratic and human rights values and as I've already said we should be prepared to push back over riches as it manifestly has from the South China Sea. But it does mean recognizing the legitimacy of many of China's own security and national interest claims including I have to say the essential legitimacy of the scale and ambition of the Belt and Road Initiative with us being a little less anxious than we have been about its regional security implications and being prepared with appropriate commercial caution to be an active participant in that enterprise. And it certainly means recognizing the legitimacy of China's demand to be now not just a rule taker but a participant in global rule making. In that context one of the one of the most productive ways of building content into Australia's relationship with China maybe to work more closely with it on the whole range of global and regional public goods issues like change to arms control terrorism to health pandemics, peacekeeping responding to mass atrocity crimes on which as China, on which China I have to say with a few exceptions has in recent times been playing a much more interested and constructive role than has been generally recognized including for example being a major contributor in UN peacekeeping operations much more so than any of the other permanent five countries. Which brings me finally in terms of the set of responses to the proposition that more global engagement generally should come back into focus as a sustaining theme of Australian foreign policy. Picking up the idea that being and being seen to be a good international citizen really is itself a core national interest sitting alongside the traditional duo of security and economic interests. Looking back over the course of the diplomatic history that I summarized earlier I do think it's hard to argue with the proposition that Australia has been at its best and our standing in the world has been at its highest when we play to the national strengths that I described at the outset and when we projected ourselves effectively onto the world stage as a country deeply committed to our common humanity and determined to do everything we can to make the world safer, saner more prosperous, more just. In the contemporary world, every state's security, prosperity and quality of life really is best advanced by cooperation rather than confrontation. And Australia should be a relentless campaigner for just that. There are many global public goods issues in which we could make a positive difference using our own strengths as a capable, credible middle power and the strategies of international coalition building that are the essence of effective middle power diplomacy. To take just one quick example nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament where Australia has played a major role in global agenda setting in the past with the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons initiated by Paul Keating, 1996 and the Australia-Japan Commission initiated by Kevin Rudd, 2010 which I had the privilege of co-chairing. But we badly dropped the ball toward the end of President Obama's term when we did have the opportunity to make a practical difference. Had we then, along with South Korea and Japan who could have been persuaded had we then supported Obama's move towards a no-first use doctrinal commitment on nuclear weapons the world might have taken a significant step forward towards reducing the salience and legitimacy of these most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever invented and now the most immediate risk to life on this planet as we know it. There is in particular in this nuclear disarmament area a need to bridge the obviously widening gulf between those in the nuclear arms states you want to do nothing at all about disarmament and those in the wider community who clamour I fear rather hopelessly impractically for Global Zero now or Global Zero always tomorrow. And I think Australia is genuinely capable of playing a global leadership role in mapping out a workable, credible, practical middle ground approach to bridging that gap. Opinion polls, let me end on this note Opinion polls sometimes suggest like the Lowy Institutes in 2016 that Australians are more or less evenly divided when confronted with the general question as to whether we should seek to play a more influential role in the world or just mind our own business. But when questions are put more specifically for example whether our participation in the UN Security Council and the G20 was worth the effort and the cost other Lowy findings in 2013, 2015 showed very strong support, two thirds of more support in the wider Australian community. My own strong belief is that Australians just don't accept that we are another also ran and that any government which adopts a posture which concentrates just on our immediate neighbourhood, just on our more obvious bilateral relationship remains myopic about what is capable of being achieved if we engage in a whole variety of multilateral forums with the skill and the stamina which has served us so well in the past. It will be a government that does that which will simply in my judgment not be playing the confident external projection role which most Australians wanted to. Our track record over many decades overwhelmingly shows that Australia and individual Australians are decent and committed international citizens independently minded and of course with a real cultural egalitarian streak something which plays well with a great many other countries with our strong record particularly in the context of peacekeeping but also in other diplomatic forums of neither sucking up to the powerful nor kicking down at the powers playing to that instinct of decency focusing on cooperative problem solving using all the energy and creativity that has traditionally been associated with Australian middle power diplomacy at its best will I believe be far and away the best way of ensuring that in the years decades ahead in a region and a world in which the tectonic plates are shifting and every possible kind of uncertainty of bounds it will be far and the best way of ensuring that this great country of ours not only survives but thrives. Thank you.