 Well, thank you everyone for joining us today. We're looking forward to a really lively and informative discussion about Australia's resilience in light of the pandemic and in relation to future shocks. My name is Kate Henna and I'm the director of the A&U School of Regulation and Global Governance. And I'm delighted to serve as chair for this session. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands from where I joined you today, the Nanguwal and Nambri peoples, and to pay my respects to their elders past and present. I also want to extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues joining us on the call today. That said, before I introduce our panelists, I should go through a few housekeeping items. And for those that have participated in other sessions so far, I'm sure you've heard these before, but I'll say them again. First, we're gonna be using the Q&A box and the option to raise your hand using the Zoom icon. When your question is selected, I will identify you by name. And at that point, it'd be really helpful to ensure that your camera and microphone are enabled so that you're visible on screen and you can ask the question live. Of course, we understand if you have any issues with your camera or microphone. And if that's the case, just please type not live in front of your question so that I know that I should read it out on your behalf. I would also like to welcome the members of the media who have joined us today. And to remind you that if you'd like to join the discussion on Twitter, please use hashtag ACL forum. Though I have to say, I was just on Twitter just a little bit ago and I see some people are also using hashtag ACLF. So it may not hurt to use both. So with those points taken care of, I'd like to introduce our panel. Our first speaker today is Peter Harris who brings insights from a significant advisory experience in Australian economic policy, public service and transport related business. He served as senior private secretary for then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawk and led the public policy aspects of the establishment of the national broadband network as secretary of the department of broadband communications and the digital economy. More recently, he assisted the COVID response as CEO of the national COVID commission in 2020. Our second panelist today is Danielle Wood, the CEO of the Gratton Institute. She has published extensively on economic reform priorities budget policy and tax, generational inequality and reforming political institutions. Previously, she worked at the ACCC, Narra Economics Consulting and the Productivity Commission. Danielle is the national president of the Economic Society of Australia and co-founder and former chair of the Women in Economics Network. Our third speaker today is Melinda Salento, excuse me, the CEO of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, or CEDA. In addition to her role at CEDA, she is a non-executive director of Australian Unity and co-chair of Reconciliation Australia, as well as a member of the Parliamentary Budget Office, panel of expert advisors, the Collingwood Football Club's expert group on anti-racism and Generation 1's advisory panel Indigenous Employment Scorecard Project. Some of her previous positions include a non-executive director role of Woodside Petroleum, a commissioner of the Productivity Commission and deputy CEO and chief economist with the Business Council of Australia. And our fourth speaker today is Laura Berry. She is CEO of Supply Nation of Founding Director of the Global Supplier Diversity Alliance. She has had a career that spans stakeholder management, risk mitigation and reputation management. In recognition of her work, Laura was announced as one of Australian financial reviews top 100 women of influence in 2018. And in 2019, she represented Australia at this, oh, excuse me, OECD forum, too many acronyms in foreign pairs for the Indigenous Economic Development Summit and launch of the inaugural for Unlinking Indigenous Communities with Economic Development. Very delighted to have you all here today and to hear more. So in terms of our focus this afternoon, as we're approaching nearly two years into the global pandemic, it seems timely to reflect on what Australia's response might tell us about our resilience. Our discussion today will take stock of whether and how we've taken steps towards improving the country's resilience to global shocks. For instance, as we manage the various aspects of the pandemic, are we becoming better equipped for the next crisis? What do we still need to do? How much space is there for more reform and change? Have we done what we need to do to be more resilient when large scale challenges hit? Many more questions could be asked, but in short, we're not shying away from the big picture questions today, but we're also gonna draw on our panelists' grounded experience as well. So to kick us off, Peter, you bring a wealth of knowledge and experience in terms of large scale planning. What do you think of the state of our planning at this stage of the pandemic? What are we doing well or perhaps not so well, especially for the longer term? Thanks, Kate. And I'm on Gabby Gabby land up here in Queensland. So I'm one of the few people around the shows probably out of lockdown at the moment. So my commiserations to those who endured what I had to do in Melbourne last year. Yeah, Kate, back in July, when you asked us to contribute preliminary synopsis of what this panel might be about, I put forward the slightly contentious proposition that we should be talking about the cultural failure of governments to plan publicly for exit from quarantine and from border closures. And I know some panel members had a few doubts about that and people tuning into this will probably say, gee, you want to talk about the COVID plan? I wonder what that's got to do with resilience. I'm going to make the link, I swear. There will be a clear cut proposition at the end. You just have to endure a little bit of background from me. The planning I had in mind when I put that down as a topic for this panel wasn't a matter of selecting dates about opening up borders because dates are pretty useless as we've now found. Standards and thresholds are a bit more useful. But what I really wanted to see, and I'm still waiting to see for a substantial degree, are the new measures that are going to replace the old measures that we designed last year for a COVID variant that isn't the same as Delta. And the case to the public for why not just new measures, but also new targets are going to have to be put in place. We know that Delta has a reproduction rate and an instantaneous infectiousness that's a whole new ball game. So it rise up in India and then the UK and the US. We didn't change our policies as a result of this, not in May or June, even as knowledge of the virus variants became clear in published data that I can read from public sources because I'm no longer inside the government as I was at the COVID commission last year. We thought the vaccines would save us. We fought battles about why they were too slow in arriving and leaders repeated their guarantees of zero cases as the objective, even when their experts must have known because I could see this in international data and comments, particularly from the UK in June that zero was likely to be undeliverable. Those vaccines are great, but they're not enough. Vaccine resistance is high. The Melbourne Institute amongst others has done survey work to show the two primary groups that are opposed to vaccines are going to create the kind of problem in Australia that we've seen in the US and have exposed previous exemplars like Israel to serious surges and illness and death. So accompanying a clear public explanation of how we're going to manage the vaccine gap and the new measures we need because none of the old measures like lockdowns or hotel quarantines or rings of steel are going to help us with vaccine resistance is how to step away from targets, famous double bagels in the media parlance or the eradication in truth for most states. It's now redundant and indeed probably dangerous in the case of things like hotel quarantine because of Delta's capacity to infect much faster than management and contact tracing can manage. Our leaders released a model. You saw the famous Doherty model, but the new measures and the new reality cases above zero are not going to be explained by our model. The public have no awareness nor could they be expected to have an awareness about a model. I mean, how good the model is. When it first appeared and it was attacked by expert, new expert alike, it showed the great vacuousness of our current leadership. They can't put out a model and expect it to do the work of communicating the kind of massive change that comes with shifting from objective of zero cases to an objective, frankly, of more cases and some deaths. So models, which I've had a bit of experience with, they're not policy-making tools are the best. They enable you to predict the consequences of certain actions, but policy makers need to design well-considered measures. This is an important thing, new measures in order to see the model applied to them and see whether they're going to be effective, not the other way around. The leaders should be debating measures. And the audience for the plan needed now is not the premiers, nor the various institutes, nor even Norman Swan. It's the public. We have to decide to cooperate yet again with something quite different to the now redundant from us, zero cases and zero deaths. Now, there are many new measures based on what I can examine from overseas that are yet to be heard of here in Australia and some of them will apply to us and some won't. But they include things like structural change. We have a foolish restriction in this country on nurse practitioners. We've maintained it for a long time. It's been driven by medical, by GPs really. And yet, nurse practitioners are going to be extremely important to us in maintaining a vaccine campaign in the next 12 months. We have an absence of cooperative agreements between low COVID states and high COVID states for potentially exchanging patients that aren't COVID infected, but are nevertheless going to occupy hospital beds. And we have an absence of practical recognition that things like hotel quarantine for domestic travel are probably well past their used by date. Along with this, we need to accept that some states may not move at the rate of others. As one of the advocates in Bob Hawkes office for the special premiums conferences that became Coag decades ago. And more recently, the PC is one of its greater critics. Coag's great failure was to persist in search of unanimity when its time had clearly passed. Lowest common denominator was the result. National cabinet is different. We should have this national plan with new measures that I'm talking about, but it's not done the strategy down to meet the interests of every location in the country. If the pace of change is uneven, except the perfect symmetry is a bit like zero cases, not deliverable. Worst of the shift is that unlike every other developed country that didn't and mostly couldn't rely on border closures and quarantine last year and his death rates were truly appalling as a consequence. This means advising Australian public that instead of going down as we rapidly vaccinate, our death rate will perversely probably go up. So far, this message is simply being used as an attack point in political debate rather than an honest discussion with the community. As I said at the outset, this much was obvious overseas in June and we had our Sydney outbreak should have led to a big public discussion in July. It's now September and in the last week we've seen a heartening clarity and acceptance by two states that this big trade-off about zero and zero but the double bagel is no longer viable. The common by comparison is less clear. There are too many voices and too many safe political messages. For discussion today about resilience, worst of all for me is that there is no expression of confidence in the institutions that would normally carry this plan forward at Commonwealth level. We see public health officers but they don't represent the institutions in Canberra that once managed major cooperative change. What we see instead is command and control structures emerging across all jurisdictions and the Commonwealth. The go-to delivery culture in the Commonwealth today is that of the military. This first probably developed with border force but now much more directly it is the army that's the institution of choice for national priority projects that once were the province of public service departments and agencies which had responsibility for the subject matter. Civil institutions at the Commonwealth level have rolled out a new tax system, built a national road and rail system, created the NDIS, constructed a national warband network all in my lifetime. Then there were the less high profile but crucial social policy cooperative schemes with the states in health and education. The civil side of the public service has had particular expertise in designing and implementing cooperative schemes. Of course no cooperative scheme ever worked without tension but the capability existed at the national level and with it came the understanding of what motivated states to make federation work. This pandemic has shown up a lack of confidence or capability in the delivery of cooperative programs that once were the province of the Commonwealth civil service. It was a skill and an important one. Today that skill seems nowhere in evidence and the plan that would normally have accompanied it is similarly nowhere to be seen. Instead the go-to culture is the military culture and an admirable and stable culture to be sure. Is this a bad thing or maybe just a sad thing? I fear it's the former because the loss of civil capability and through that the loss of awareness of what counts in cooperative project delivery must make the Commonwealth appear less capable as a partner in future high stakes cooperative efforts for the states. To make myself clear, the military culture has not failed us. This is not a dismissal of its importance or its resilience but the evident absence of a culture in the civil service, cooperative federated program delivery, stepping up to manage major change is I think a serious weakness in our future resilience to manage shocks. Great, thanks so much for kicking us off with some strong words. I think we're gonna have a very robust discussion. Danielle, I'll turn it over to you and maybe you'd like to pick up some threads of that or discuss what you think rebuilding for resilience will look like especially given your work on economic reform priorities, generational inequality and political institutions. There's lots of threads that we could pick up there. Yeah, that certainly is. And I agree with a lot of the things that Peter just touched on there. So I sort of initially started thinking about this question on how resilient we are and how we might respond to future shocks by reflecting on the lessons of this crisis as well. As well as some more recent crises like the GFC. And I think there is a bit of a pattern emerges in terms of how well we do. Sorry, my phone's just ringing. I think apologies. So where I think we've done well is in terms of bold and decisive decision making at the kind of the peak point of the crisis. So in COVID, that was shutting international borders. That was the national lockdowns that was rolling out the JobKeeper program, income supports, none of it was perfect. But I think it certainly did hold us in good stead and compared really favorably to a lot of countries that kind of went into head in the sand mode. Similarly in the GFC, I think we went big, we went hard, household supports, some of the infrastructure programs and that helped starve off recession. So when I think about what defines those periods of success, the shock was kind of big and obvious. It was there for all to see that we were kind of in a crisis situation. There was time constraints. So we saw a lot of difference to the expertise of the public service and they were handing glove in policymaking in each case, as opposed to the later stages that Peter was touching on. I think ideology was out the window to quote Josh Frydenberg when he was rolling out JobKeeper. You know, parties were able to kind of take off that ideological straight jacket that sometimes constrains their ability to act. We had workable federal state cooperation, you know, not always beautiful, but you know, broad levels of coordination, different levels of government pushing in the same direction. And we had, you know, a really high level of public buy-in. So we talked at the last forum about, you know, the extraordinary gains in trust that we saw for Commonwealth and state parliaments at the time of the kind of the first lockdowns. So there was a lot of public goodwill equally true at the time of the GFC. That was the previous high in trusting government. So it provided for governments to act big. Where I think we do less well, and this is where really the overlap with Peter's comments lie, is anything that is a bit slower burn requires some early anticipation in terms of concrete steps and requires leaders to really bring the public along with them. So in terms of this crisis, you know, I think it was the lack of urgency in that initial vaccine rollout, the failures to fix hotel quarantine when it really mattered. So for states to plug the obvious leakages for Commonwealth to look to fit for purpose facilities. I think there's still a whole lot of these right now. Hospital capacity Peter touched on, you know, we are right on the, you know, the precipice of an extremely difficult time. And again, I'm not hearing the kind of policy shifts we're going to need to manage that crisis. We have an ongoing challenge with essential workers. You know, this is where the virus is spreading, partly because they can't afford to stay home when they're sick. And then we really need to fix the income support provisions. We need to get vaccinations to them because their vaccination rates are too low. So that means rolling out through those kind of essential workplaces like supermarkets and construction sites and production facilities. We need plans to get children and childcare centres back open. And so that means looking at things like free rapid antigen tests, you know, something that we can't even deliver to people at the moment without being delivered by a doctor, which just makes no sense. You know, these are being used all around the world as part of the COVID control strategy. And we need to be thinking about booster shots already, unfortunately as well. So, you know, it's difficult to put the finger on. I think, you know, why we've been so bad at this when we can look around the world and see quite a number of other countries that have done a lot better. It looks like there's a lack of willingness to engage at something until we kind of hit that crisis point. And I think, you know, sort of the reactive rather than proactive leadership seems to be particularly challenging when there are those federal state coordination issues involved that Peter was just touching on. If I can take it one step further, I think where we do really, really badly is in the very long-term crises that are played out over generations. So when I think about, you know, longer-term structural challenges, we haven't really shifted the dial at all in recent decades. So, you know, climate change is the obvious example. But we have a looming crisis in terms of workers for care sectors, aged care, child care, disability care. That's been a long time coming, but we know it will get worse over the decade. And Melinda and Cedar have done some good work on this. We have long-term structural budget issues from an ageing population into generational reports have been banging on about this for 20 years. Again, we've had little in the way of a structural response. So I think it is worth, you know, reflecting on why, why do we struggle with these slow burn issues and what can we do about it? I would like to put a plug for Gratton here, but our former CEO, John Daly, in his last report for Gratton, looked at this issue of just, you know, why have big policy reforms been few in far between over the past two decades? The report's called Gridlock, Various Policy Reform, and you can find it on our website. He found, not surprisingly, there's been a number of contributors, you know, some are difficult for governments to do anything about. So, you know, constrained resources in the media, rising media concentration, social media, but there are a lot that governments can do something about. So, you know, the weakening of the public service, the rise of ministerial advisers, the weak controls on vested interest influence, checks on political patronage. The government has levers to deal with these. So, if we want to build back better, my argument is really, yes, we need to look at economic and social policy settings, and I'm happy to talk about what they might look like, but I think institutional settings matter a lot as well. And if we want to see, you know, better policy and more flexible policy on the other side, we need to improve these. So, reversing the trend towards secrecy and lack of accountability and decision-making. So, you know, not hiding behind cabinet and confidence and commercial incompetence when those shouldn't really apply. I'd like to see tighter controls on access and influence of vested interests, for things like capping election spending, transparency on political donations, publishing ministerial diaries, proper enforcement of revolving door provisions when people move between ministerial and advisor roles and vested interest roles, better controls on misuse of public office, so proper federal integrity commission, more independent appointments, processes for statutory roles, and building long-term public service capabilities. And, you know, many on this panel probably got views on what that might look like, but certainly a good place to start might be dusting off the SODI report and putting in some of those recommendations. So, you know, I think if we want to overcome that policy inertia and be more resilient and responsive to long-term challenges, that's, you know, a very good place to start. Great, thanks so much, Danielle. And I really appreciate how you brought us into the crisis moment, talked through those immediate pressures and also linked it to those broader scale concerns over the longer term. So I'm looking forward to bringing that back up. One other thing that's happened, though, in this, you know, abrupt shift to working from home and lockdown is a massive embrace of digitization. We haven't touched on that yet. And we've seen that that can also lead to rapid change and we also know there's a long-term goal by the Australian government to become a digital nation by 2030. And I wonder if we might discuss some of those tensions or maybe how they might play out, Melinda, given some of your work and around how that might help us in terms of resilience or what we need to do in that space. Yeah, thanks, Kate. And there's probably gonna be a couple of threads that are gonna pick up from Peter's comments and Danielle's comments as well as I sort of run through, I guess some high-level issues that I just wanted to call out. It is a little bit of a look-back, look-forward in terms of what we can get out of what we've done with this rapid digitization through COVID, which of course, it's sort of been the talk of the town, hasn't it? Like we've managed to implement in weeks and months and a year what would normally have taken five years, 10 years, whatever else. So it's clearly been one of the response mechanisms if you like, particularly from business to enable workers to work from home, to provide products and services to people in ways that we never thought we could. So there's been a lot of lessons learned there. What I wanted to do is really think about what are some of the big picture issues that we're gonna have to get right if we're gonna make the most of this in the future? And it's gonna be critical when we think about not just jobs and economic growth but also broader wellbeing given the ubiquity of digitalization and broader technologies and their capacity to really change the way we do things in Australia. I think the other thing just to call out is that so many people have been forced to engage with digital technologies in a way that they probably hadn't been before. But I think in some ways, we've sort of seen a demystification. And so a lot more people engaging with technology, which I think opens more doors for us but we're really gonna have to think about how we set the right structures if we're gonna get the most of it. So firstly, I think one of the things we've got to call out, it's a theme that's been picked up by Peter and Danielle already, is that we need leadership and we need really strong, clear, consistent leadership. Now, we've had the Prime Minister talk about becoming a leading digital nation by 2030. We've had the announcement of a national digital strategy which has got goals and targets. But let's call a spade a spade here. The digital economy minister is in the outer ministry. So it doesn't even have a seat at cabinet and the minister for industry and technology we've seen the seventh one in seven years. I think it's pretty hard to sort of look at that and kind of go, yep, this government's really putting this at the top of its wish list of things to do right. The importance about this is actually, I think sending a really strong can-do message. There's been lots of reports around, jobs are gonna be destroyed, the sky's falling in, this is all too much challenge for us, everyone else racing ahead, et cetera, et cetera. I think we need a really clear, consistent voice that is engaging with the community, talking about what this means and how we're gonna deal with it as a nation with confidence and capability. And if I look back to some work that Peter and I did at the Productivity Commission around data access and use, this is one of the things that we really hit on there. There were so many areas where there was tremendous benefits to using data, yet what you always kind of did was default back to the, oh, the sky's gonna fall in because of privacy or whatever else. That's not to say that these aren't legitimate concerns, but we were always considering the risks and not the benefits. We need a voice out there that's really talking about, there are benefits, we can manage risk and we can actually build the capacity to do these things well for huge national benefit. That's why we recommended the National Data Custodian, partly, and there are opportunities I think to talk about new structures in the Australian system to do the same. At CEDA, we've recommended the creation of a chief technologist to do that. It's not to say the chief scientist can't or shouldn't or isn't really, but we just think we need more profile on this issue. So I think leadership is absolutely critical. I wanted to talk also about governance and trust. If we don't build community trust in data, in digital, in technology, then we're not gonna achieve the benefits that we could broadly define. Now, that means putting community and individuals right at the core of this and understanding what it's gonna take to build their trust in technology as it's emerging tech and digital opportunities and the rest of it. If you look at the latest trust results, Edam and Trust Bromelgeau actually shows that trust in the tech sector in Australia is declining. It's been on a long kind of 10-year declining trend. That is not great news. Equally, if you went to the Edam and Trust Bromelgeau last year and asked people about the pace of technology, they'd tell you technology's moving too fast and it's moving too fast for the government to control it. This is not an environment in which we're really gonna build trust. So we really need to take a step back and think about what are the fundamental foundation piece of trust and how do we build them? And let's think about that as the character of what we're doing, which is about integrity and compassion. And let's think about it in terms of capability, which is about competence and reliability. And we're really gonna have to be putting those issues at the core of everything we do. If you look at artificial intelligence, had a lot of focus, there's been a huge amount of focus on AI ethics and AI ethics frameworks and principles. Big tick for that, but a heck of a lot less focus on how they're actually being implemented and their practical impact. I've had conversations, we've had in our forums at CEDA, people state publicly that quote unquote, it's very easy to break the law with AI in Australia, people don't know what they're doing. And this is from experts. And we've had, you know, I've especially do it from Salesforce in the US referred to AI as like being the finance of the 1980s. Now anyone who's old enough like I am to remember that, that is just genuine cowboy territory. So we've got to get beyond these frameworks and actually really start looking at how they're being implemented and the capability and capacity that organizations need to do that. And we need to get transparency about the outcomes that are actually happening in practice. Let me just talk really quickly about agility and regulation. We need a completely different way of doing regulation, completely different. It's gonna have to be agile, iterative, adaptive, collaborative. Let me just hark back to Peter's comments, looking at the COVID experience around cooperative decision-making, cooperative agreements, et cetera, et cetera. And this isn't just across levels of government. This is regulators working with business closely. This is regulators working with community closely. If I have a little bit of a sidebar, one of the things we've done absolutely terribly is communicate with communities that are not just like us that are on this call with the exception of Laura. We don't go into diverse communities. We don't go into communities that don't speak English as a first language and connect with them and understand how to design systems that work for them. We do it very badly. And when we come to tech, we're absolutely gonna have to do it better than we have to date. One of the things that I think is gonna have to sit at the core of better regulation is effective tech assessment and transparent tech assessments. We've seen that done in other countries. It's gonna have to be something that we pick up and do better here in Australia. I won't talk about skills, I can talk about skills and questions if you like, but I wanted to just pick up on a final theme, which again, Peter and Danielle have also sort of touched on a little bit, which is if we're gonna make the most of tech and we're gonna bring people with us, one of the things you have to do is empower individuals more to be able to use tech better. And Peter knows, I'm gonna make another nod to the data access and use report here because core to that report was the consumer data right. And that was all about empowering individuals. And we need to think about that a lot more broadly, whether it's digital, whether it's broader technology. And I don't think we do this very well. And I think there are a lot of vested interests that are working against this. Let me give you a couple of COVID examples. So we rolled out telehealth. We should have done it ages ago because the benefits are massive and the PC reports have highlighted this. We rolled it out and then three months later we changed the terms and conditions so that you couldn't get benefits paid unless you'd been to your GP in the previous 12 months for a physical sort of in-person visit. Now, I don't think that was because we had real concerns about what the outcomes were for individuals. I think that's because people realized it was impacting on their business. People being doctors who are used to getting paid in particular way. Call me cynical. But I think it's an interesting development that we should sort of reflect on. And we need to keep making sure that we're doing these things for the interest of individuals and not vested interests. And Peter knows I'm also then gonna talk about a whole bunch of other changes that you could get like how you dispense pharmaceuticals, for instance and whether you could get machine dispensing which would benefit heaps and heaps of people. Danielle talked about rapid antigen testing. I think it's another example where we don't trust individuals and we've got regulations set up to put a group of vested interests there at the center of it rather than trusting individuals and empowering individuals to control their own circumstances. Interestingly, I'm looking at the PC results which found, well, they quoted a survey that said that roughly 16% of Australian doctors don't want their own patients to have access to their own health records. So there's a whole bunch of entrenched interest here that work against us making the most out of the benefits of technology. So I could go on and on and on about a whole bunch of other things but there's some of the key things that I think when we look back at COVID and we think about what's worked well and what we haven't done well it's gonna be really critical to how we manage this big structural change which is digital. Yeah, I can't agree more and I have to admit it in our school regulations nice to hear someone say regulations important but in a critically informed way that really grounds and empowers people. So that's one of the reasons why we started a dedicated lab to justice and techno science so we could get those voices at least through the door through research but it needs to be at a much larger scale as you say if it's gonna be sustainable and contribute to wider resilience. I wanna pick up actually on your point around leadership because we haven't gotten to tease that out a bit and Laura I know you have lots of experience working across multiple different sectors wearing a leadership hat, working with other leaders and it would be great to hear your thoughts about that particularly around both the short-term and long-term challenges that we face. Yeah, look I think Peter, Danielle and Linda have covered lots of the points that I was thinking about when I was contemplating the role of leadership in resilience and in the way that we have come through this pandemic and in particular I think Peter touched on where we were a couple of or 18 months ago or even 12 months ago and how we've I guess as a country sort of dropped the ball on the opportunity to really be leaders because I think that we've been seen around the world in our initial response to the pandemic in particular as leaders in the way that we tackled the immediate challenges but since then I think complacency has got in the way and when I think about some of the words or the qualities that we associate with effective leadership and that's leadership at a corporate or a not-for-profit or even a government or political level I think about words like vision and the ability to articulate that and strength and conviction and communication and empathy and I think what I've been really seeing and particularly I guess across some of the decision-making and what we're seeing on our television screens on a day-to-day basis more recently is particularly at the political level is our leaders making decisions and saying that they're making decisions based on health advice but there's a very, very clear political undertone to those decisions and there's been very clear political point scoring going on behind some of those decisions particularly between states in more recent months and I think that it's where I felt a bit disappointed that we're the ones as Australian citizens that tend to suffer a bit from that because some of those decisions that are being made and who's doing it better and I'm gonna try and change the way that I do it because then I can get one up on somebody else has resulted in where we are today which is when I'm speaking to family on the other side of the world they are completely and utterly gobsmacked at the situation where the laughing stock we're making the news on the other side of the world at the moment because of the way we are now handling the vaccine rollout because of the way we're handling one or two cases in certain states and really hard border lockdowns and the persistent rhetoric from some of our political leaders about the need to maintain that status quo when evidence from around the world is showing us that it doesn't actually have to be that way and so we've got this really piecemeal approach to how we're looking to come out of this pandemic and I think for anybody who watched the news this morning and saw the vision of the families at the New South Wales Queensland border trying to wish each other happy Father's Day I mean, I was in tears watching the news this morning I had to switch it off I mean, it's just, it's absolutely ridiculous so I think that with the need to come out of this we really need to see from our leaders some of those qualities that I've touched on before and I think if you think about leadership in the corporate context, for example boards are directing our leaders and some of the decisions that we've seen being made you'd lose your job in a corporate environment if you weren't contingency planning and if you weren't being ready for the next iterations of these crises that are coming out and I think what's been disappointing for me over the last six months in particular is that we saw coming through 2020 the opportunity to learn from the international experience and so by the end of 2020 we had a lot of information and data about what was happening around the world we had a plan in place for how we were going to roll out vaccines and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who were in groups 1B and 2A of that vaccine rollout we still are sitting at 20 to 30 points below non-Indigenous Australians in terms of vaccination rates and we've seen the virus get out into remote communities like Wilcania, like Burke, like Dubbo with very high Indigenous populations yet we are still not seeing as much of a rush on Indigenous Australians being vaccinated as we had when we should have all been vaccinated by now if it had been rolled out properly and if there had been strong leadership and if there had been contingency planning and I think that that's an absolute crying shame we're seeing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are already some of our most vulnerable in our country being exposed to this and it's actually highlighting other policy deficits around things like housing for example we're hearing stories out of Wilcania where Aboriginal families have got 10 and 12 people in households what are we doing as a country when we are in 2021 and we still have our first Australians living in conditions like that so when something like this hits and we've had 18 months to prepare for this we have still got our Indigenous Australian families in situations where they're now intense in the front yards of their homes trying to isolate so that the virus doesn't spread further and we have our political leaders likening attendance at funerals with no cases to parties that breach health orders so I think our leaders have a lot to answer for in that respect I think even today I'm talking to some of my Indigenous staff members a week ago in Sydney who are still struggling to find out how they get vaccinated how is this possible, how is it possible? So we do need to see our leaders step up we do need to see a more coherent response with things like contingency planning we need to understand as a nation what is the plan coming out of this and I still don't think that that has been coherently explained to us Peter mentioned that we've now got a model in the Doherty model still we're seeing as recently as last week politicians pulling out numbers from that just to boost a political point scoring point that they're making for their own particular state and so what's that done to us as Australian citizens that's left us in a place where we're really unsure about what the future looks like businesses are unsure they don't know whether they're going to open up next week they don't know whether they're gonna survive till the end of the year families don't know if they're going to see each other and there's a mental health crisis absolutely looming in this country because the continuous uncertainty and lockdowns is having a huge effect so I really think that we need to see our leaders show us that they understand what is happening and be empathetic to what's happening in our community and it's one thing to know that people are doing it tough but it's really a different thing to make sure that you're bringing the community along with you and having them understand that you understand what's going on so it has to be more about that decision-making process and the ability through the national cabinet to make decisions that are based more around what's best for the country as a whole and not based on what's best for a particular constituency based on the current polling numbers. Great, thanks Lauren that really pulls together a lot of threads one the short-term challenges the long-term challenges the different threads that we need to be attentive to policy failures more generally not just particular individualized agendas and then also the obvious question of interlocking inequalities that we still haven't gotten right so I think in terms of a broader discussion of resilience involved and just an incredible job laying the landscape in a way that's not isolated around a particular issue but the broader systemic challenges we're facing.