 So we're going to be focusing in this order on Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, the South Pacific, South Asia, and last but not least, the United States. So our panelists have been given very strict instructions and they're going to be overviewing a number of questions in relation to their region. So these questions include what have been the key developments in your part of the world over the past year? How do these developments impact upon Australia? How has Australia responded? And what kind of score would you give for Australia, for how Australia has traveled in your part of the world over the past year? Are we hot, cold, or lukewarm? You might have your own scale there, but that's one to consider. So they're only going to take about 67 minutes each to introduce the key ideas in response to these questions to allow for plenty of time for questioning. So please do think about your questions while they're speaking. I'm going to start by introducing Dr. Matthew Davies, who is the head of Department of International Relations. He's a specialist on Southeast Asian regionalism, a key topic at the moment, and also with the 50th anniversary of ASEAN this year. So Matthew, Southeast Asia, thank you. Thank you. I'm asking an academic to do anything in five to six minutes is brave, but we'll see how this goes. We should also acknowledge that it is the 50th anniversary of ASEAN. Actually, I think the Bangkok Declaration was signed on the 8th of August, 1967. So we're spot on. Two key developments in the region that I really want to focus on, external one that is immediate and pressing, and then an internal one which is ongoing, but arguably even more important. The external challenge is obviously the rise of China with specific reference to the South China Sea issue. This has been a concern in Southeast Asia now, going back quite some years. And whilst it does appear that perhaps there is a degree of clarity emerging, some of the language in the most recent annual ministerial meeting, joint communique, is slightly more positive about a declaration than a code of conduct. It still cuts to the core of ASEAN's ability to really act as a unified body because it exposes not only the divisions between the regional members themselves, who of course have overlapping claims, but then also between ASEAN as a vehicle for sort of the protection of international law, and then China's vision of how it wants to structure and understand its own external relations. This is something that is really challenging ASEAN, and if I was trying to push the point, I think is a deep and lasting sort of criticism of ASEAN's inability to create unity and to create consensus. And of course, if you know anything about ASEAN, those words have very important symbolic meaning to the regional organization. The South China Sea often garners the majority of attention, but it's also worth focusing on the ongoing internal challenge, and that is the challenge of ASEAN community building. Ever since the financial crisis in 1997, ASEAN has been embarked on this project slow and incremental, but I think increasingly impressive of reimagining what it means to be Southeast Asia, what the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is actually for, and how it goes about conducting its business. There remains, however, here an incredible gap between the commitments on paper. ASEAN has a whole range of declarations and commissions, and what it actually is able to achieve in practice. It's starting to go through this process of trying to strengthen its secretariat in part to address this challenge. Why this is so important to ASEAN is because ASEAN finds itself in a bind. It's promised its citizens and its subjects that ASEAN is now going to be people-centric, is going to be socially responsible, and yet there remains a significant gap in delivery. And this is a gap that is publicly acknowledged, and this is a gap that, again, cuts to ASEAN's ability to develop roots and to develop ownership, to develop a sense of being a valued part of the regional order. How does this impact Australia? Well, of course you can make the immediate sort of proximate arguments that ASEAN is at our nearest neighbour, our trade with Southeast Asia is the largest block of trade of any of our trading partners, but we also want to consider a little bit the social challenge that is really embedded in this, because ASEAN's travails are really things that make us question, what is our own relationship with Southeast Asia? Are we a Southeast Asian nation? And what would that actually mean in terms of the agreements and the disagreements between Australia and its nearest neighbours? The thing that ASEAN is doing is developing a set of commitments that I think Australia does have some sort of agreement with, but also has very strong and sustained areas of disagreement, perhaps around contentious issues like human rights and democracy. And so, Australia needs to care about Southeast Asia not only for the transactional and not only for its commitment and role in regional order, but because it asks us to imagine and reimagine what it means to be a state in this geographic location. And what actually does that mean in a substantive way? Australia's response, and I'm going to combine my response and my rating sort of in a single subject, if I had to give it a rating, I think I'd give it lukewarm but trending upwards. And the reason I would do that is I think there's been an increasing sophistication in Australia's engagement with Southeast Asia. Last year, I saw the first heads of state meeting the ASEAN Australia cooperation and this sort of acts as a capstone to a whole range of functional cooperation. Of course, Australia is ASEAN's longest dialogue partner, dating back I think now 43 years. But one of the things that worries me beyond I think quite successful technocratic support of ASEAN is what is the fundamental story? What is the clarity of what Australia wants from Southeast Asia? What Southeast Asia wants from Australia? And then what is a realistic set of goals and aspirations that Australia can achieve? And I think that there are signs that we're moving towards something a little bit more positive, a little bit more inclusive. We have this joint summit in Sydney next year. But what will be really interesting to pay attention to as we move towards that time is is this going to be just another process event where we have nice photos and we stand again in front of a banner emblazoned with ASEAN in Australia? Or is there going to be some substantive meeting of the mindset? Is there going to be a story about what is this relationship going to be over the next five years but over the next 10 and 20 years? And whilst if I was giving my rating a couple of years ago I think I would be more skeptical than that. I think the form and the function need to align a lot more closely. And I think we all need to pay attention to actually what does Australia want from its engagement with Southeast Asia? And what does that mean for our relations with other areas in the world? Thank you. Okay, next we have Dr. Amy King from the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre and she's going to be speaking about Northeast Asia. Amy is a Westpac Research Fellow and she's also funded by the Australian Research Council and her area of focus is on China and Japan. Thank you Amy. Well thanks very much and it's great to be with you all today. So I'm going to focus on two issues and I'm explicitly not going to focus on the impact of Trump's election on Northeast Asia of which it is a sizable impact but I'll let Jeff deal with the US and perhaps we can come back to that in the Q&A. So the first issue I want to deal with is the one that's on the minds of just about every regional analyst at the moment and that's the North Korean nuclear threat. July saw two more test launches of an intercontinental ballistic missile by the North Koreans, one more successful than the other. And this was really a demonstration I guess that the North Koreans had achieved much more rapid progress on their ability to target the region beyond Northeast Asia and even to continental US and possibly even the northern parts of Australia. Now of course if you're in Northeast Asia you've long known that North Korea could probably target you with a nuclear weapon and so for countries like Japan and South Korea there perhaps is a bit of an eyebrow raised. You know yes we've been dealing with this issue for quite some time. I think Australia's response so far to this issue has been just about the same as every other Western country and that of many in our region which is to outright condemn the tests by the North Koreans to call for sanctions, for tighter sanctions on North Korea and in particular to demand that China do more to use its special leverage to bring the North Koreans into heel. Unfortunately I don't think much of this will actually work. To date sanctions haven't had much of an effect at all on North Korea's ability to develop its nuclear weapons program. And China though it does have a special relationship with North Korea is not particularly interested in doing things that would actually threaten the stability of the North Korean political regime, the Kim family because of the implications that that would have on China itself and because of China's own real concerns that if you saw a collapse of the North Korean regime and perhaps some kind of reunification of the Korean Peninsula under a South Korean government, a US allied South Korean government, then you would have the potential to have US military forces right up on China's border once more and back in the 1950s that had very profoundly negative consequences for China. So we have this very difficult situation where demanding that China do more on this particular issue is perhaps not going to work in the way that we wish. My rating for Australia is perhaps a lukewarm one. I think this is a very wicked problem that really confounds policymakers. It's perhaps satisfying to yell and make demands and to condemn but actually in terms of solving that problem it will do very little. What we need to do is actually to put ourselves in the minds of the players involved in this, the North Koreans first and foremost, the South Koreans, Chinese, Japanese and to think what are their security concerns. They have legitimate security concerns. It's not particularly palatable to say that about North Korea, it's a horrible regime but they do have legitimate security concerns and developing a nuclear weapons program has been one pretty effective way of managing those security concerns. We need to get all parties back to the table to start talking again, that won't be easy but diplomacy is not about doing easy things. Actually diplomacy is not just about talking to your friends. It's about talking to the most difficult countries around you on the world stage and so I think there is great importance in bringing parties back to the table and thinking about what might need to be done to do that. So in the case of perhaps the United States, South Korea and Japan, reducing some of the military exercises that are taking place in response to North Korea. The second issue I wanna talk about is China's Belt and Road Initiative. It's a bit of a proxy for the Chinese economy and some of Chinese foreign policy initiatives more generally. This has been mentioned by both of our speakers this morning, Michael Wesley and Penny Wong, has become the issue de jour for China and for the region over the last year or so and the Belt and Road Initiative is everywhere. Every official you speak to from China is talking about it. Anyone who wants to kind of get in the good graces of President Xi Jinping is talking about it. Australia has really gone cold on this issue and my rating for Australia on this issue is a pretty cold one actually as well. I'm not suggesting that we need to thoroughly embrace the Belt and Road Initiative or China more generally but we do need to think very seriously about what it is, about what it will mean for the region and about whether there are aspects of it that actually Australia might wish to cooperate with. Over the last 12 months, particularly over the last two or three months in fact, Australia has gone very, very negative on China and we've seen much, much greater emphasis on things like Chinese political influence here in Australia, Chinese foreign donations into our electoral system, Chinese spying in Australia. These are of course things to be concerned about but I very much worry that we are drifting into a mentality where we focus only on the negative aspects of that relationship and that we don't think about what is needed to make the Australia-China relationship work better. Perhaps in the same line as my comment on North Korea, it's really, really important because our relationship with China has the potential to be very difficult that we actually get closer to China, that we develop the tools, the frameworks that we need to have the kind of sophisticated, very high level, close relationship we need to understand China, to be able to pick up the phone and talk to people in China when we need to, to have the analysts in this country, the government leaders, the students who can speak Chinese, who can understand China, who can understand where it's going. So until we do that, I think we're going to have this very unfortunately reflexive knee-jerk, perhaps quite negative response to these initiatives from China, thanks. Thanks, Amy. Now we're gonna turn to James Baitley for an overview of the South Pacific. James is a former senior Australian government official. He was previously the Australian High Commissioner to the Solomon Islands and Ambassador to East Timor. He's served as the Deputy Director-General of OSAID and also as a Deputy Secretary in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Currently he is a Distinguished Policy Fellow in the Bell School's State Society and Governance in Melanesia Program. And over to you, thank you. Thank you. So in September last year, our Prime Minister went to the annual meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum which is the regional annual summit and said that Australia would be starting or developing a new strategy towards the Pacific which would involve a step change in our relations with the region. So I'll come back to that in six and a half minutes' time. As I look back over the last 12 months in the Pacific, in some respects it's been a reasonably quiet period. There's been no major natural disasters, no coups, no huge diplomatic blow-ups. I guess if I could point to three specific things that I think will be very important for Australia's interests. One is the admission last year of New Caledonia and French Polynesia as full members of the Pacific Islands Forum, which is something that I think the consequences of which are unpredictable. It's unclear to me and I think to most observers where this is going to take the forum and indeed the regional diplomatic system has been in a bit of flux for some time but I think that's a development to watch. Secondly is the end of Ramsey after 14 years in Solomon Islands. That was at the end of June, just a couple of months ago. Ramsey was a huge event in terms of Australia's engagement with the region in terms of regional cooperation but also in terms of Solomon Islands history as an independent country and there's a range of risks now that Solomon's faces in terms of internal security, in terms of economic growth. I think there's a lot of question marks about the future of Solomon's for Australia and for the region. And finally, just recently we've seen the Papua New Guinea elections and the re-election of Peter O'Neill as Prime Minister, a major figure on the P&G political scene. Our own assessment is that those elections saw in some respects a step change in the decline in the quality of elections in Papua New Guinea and we know that over the last five years as Prime Minister, Peter O'Neill has really changed the way P&G is governed. He's centralised, administration quite considerably, reduced accountability in the system. So I think there are real issues and questions for Australia going forward in our relations with this largest country in the Pacific region. I guess there's been a continuation of longer term trends in the region and I'm talking about issues such as the rapid urbanisation of Pacific Island countries which is really posing strain on Pacific infrastructures but also on social structures. Economic growth remains sub-par right across the Pacific and the big countries, P&G, Solomon's, Fiji, have all been running huge deficit spending budgets over the last few years. So I think there are real vulnerabilities in all of those areas and again for Australia which likes to think of itself as and indeed is the largest provider of aid to the Pacific, there are some clearly some serious issues potentially emerging. So to come back to the Prime Minister's comments about a new strategy in the region, how has Australia handled the last 12 months? I think one of the good things I would point to is that there has been a rise in terms of visits of our political leaders getting out into the region and engaging our Prime Minister, made his first visit to Papua New Guinea, absolutely critical. It was belated but at least he made it. Julie Bishop, Conchetta Ferravanti Wells, other ministers have been pretty active. I'd also mention Peter Cosgrove, I think he's been used really very successfully in the region over the last few months. He's a real asset for Australia in the region. So that's been good. I know, we know that within government there's been a lot of thinking about where does this strategy go? What should we, what does a step change in relationships look like? I guess the most we can say is we're yet to see the fruits of that internal thinking. We know it's been happening. So I think I'm confident that over time we're going to see the fruits of that and of course assuming the Prime Minister goes to the forum this year, which is always an important part of Australia remaining engaged in the region, I guess we can expect to start to see to see some announcements. Julie Bishop will be in Fiji at the end of this week and I understand she's making a speech there as well. I guess she won't want to steal the Prime Minister's thunder but so there are opportunities coming up. So if I was asked to give a rating, I guess like previous speakers, I would probably say warmish with the prospects for getting a bit warmer. Thank you. Thank you, James. It seems it's a bit chilling in Canberra. Metaphorically, I have now the pleasure of introducing Professor Rory Medcalf who is the Head of the National Security College at the ANU. Rory was also previously the Head of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute and this morning he'll be giving an overview of developments in South Asia. Thank you. I think this works. And it's a tough act to follow, not only my three colleagues but also of course to recruit you to put us after Penny Wong. She's been giving some quite spectacular speeches recently which I think we've gone straight on to the reading lists of our students because they're very thoughtful and provide a really useful overview of a lot of the issues. But I was going to talk about South Asia but particularly South Asia in a maritime sense which I think is the way in which it connects primarily with Australian interests. So I think Penny Wong sort of questioned this idea of framing the region as the Indo-Pacific. I think it doesn't matter what you call it in a sense. One thing that I think has occupied me in the last year is thinking about how South Asia and the Indian Ocean matters to Australian interests. And one of the reasons it does is not only our relations with the countries in that region but the fact that others such as China through the One Belt One Road or as we now call it the Belt Road Initiative has clearly a very large agenda for engaging both in an economic and security sense with South Asia and the Indian Ocean as well. So in a sense it's self-answering question as to why South Asia matters to us. I think what we've seen in the last year or so in South Asia has been some of the old news, some of the, it's very easy to have depressing news about South Asia but also some interesting movement and developments as well. We continue I think to engage very heavily with India including at a people to people level. It's been one of the great changes in Australian society over the past 10 or 15 years or so the growth of an Indian diaspora in this country but also in terms of economic opportunity. So I'll focus a bit on issues about stability, peace and security, growth and regional connectivity in South Asia. There's plenty else that's happened that we can maybe come back to if there's time. I think in India which I'll focus on as I guess the major, the resident major power in South Asia we've had internally a pretty untidy picture over the year I guess for some would say the good news is that Modi's in control Prime Minister Modi is in control and others would say that the bad news is that Prime Minister Modi's in control but certainly we've seen no alternative to the Modi government. I mean there's been no emergence of a credible opposition in India over the past year and indeed smaller parties and state governments continue to cut deals with Modi and the BJP. So I think the dispensation we've got in India democratically elected is what we'll continue to see. We've seen some big experiments internally in India with the economy, the so-called demonetisation, the chaos of suddenly removing large denomination notes as an anti-corruption measure, the introduction of a GST as well. These things have great potential in the long term to be good for the Indian economy, good for the region, good for Australia but in the short term there's a hell of a lot of uncertainty even chaos around them. The big relationships in the region that I'd focus on, I'll look at India, I'll look at Pakistan, I'll touch on Sri Lanka. I'm not gonna go across every country in the region but Sri Lanka is of special importance to Australia now. We've seen I guess security problems in the region. We've seen tensions between India and Pakistan that obviously can be pretty bad for regional stability. We've seen tensions between India and China which I think is the biggest story in South Asia in recent times. Even now we still have a face-off between Chinese and Indian troops in contested territory in the mountains and the Himalayas which although it probably won't turn hot is the most intense sustained confrontation they've had since the 1960s. We've seen India begin to move a bit away from its culture of strategic restraint, the so-called surgical strikes of Indian troops against Pakistan last year. So we're beginning to see new uncertainties entering into South Asia. And then finally, the other relationship I'd like to bring into the conversation is India and Japan because just as China's become much more active and present in the Indian Ocean in the past year, so too interestingly has Japan, the probably the most consequential meeting of world leaders on the day that Trump was elected was in fact in Tokyo, Modi was in Tokyo having a very strategic bilateral with Abe about an Indian and Japanese response to China and also to, I guess, the uncertainties around the United States. So for Australia in all of this, I'd hand out a kind of a lukewarm plus response. Why is that? We've had an interest in conundrum in recent years. We don't have fundamental problems in our relationship with India anymore and therefore we're struggling in a way to find a really sustained positive agenda because it's hard to engage India when so many countries are trying to. I think we've had a bit of a disappointment in not being engaged in the four-nation naval exercises with the Indians this year, but the door is being kept open for the future. Australia is pursuing an interesting strategic agenda with Sri Lanka that doesn't get a lot of attention, but in terms of the maritime trade routes, the energy supply lines, the role of China and other great powers in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka is becoming a really hot strategic property and so it's quite good to be Australia engaged there. And then finally, I'm also pleased that Australia is not playing the old game of hyphenation of playing of India versus Pakistan. I think there's still that sense that India is the relationship that we need to focus on in South Asia. I could say more, particularly on Belton Road, but maybe if there's time, we'll come back to that. Thank you. Okay, and for our final speaker, I'm not sure if we're gonna get any warmer. We have Professor Jeffrey Wiseman, who's the head of the Australian, sorry, the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy in the Bell School. Jeff was previously with the Department of Foreign Affairs and trade and his recent position was as professor at the University of Southern California before joining us and he has the pleasure of speaking about the United States. Thanks very much, Cecilia. I'm not sure it's a pleasure or the short straw, but the key development in the US in the past year is, we all know who is the election of Donald Trump, but in the words of David Brooks, a prominent conservative New York Times columnist, he says that America has crowned a full king. These are not my words. These are David Brooks' words. My main argument is that in the current partisan environment in the United States, I think what we're seeing on the diplomatic side is that the Trump administration is moving in the direction of a military-centric foreign policy and the diplomacy in general and the State Department in particular are being sidelined. Now, obviously this has massive consequences for Australia. The Trump presidency will I think be characterised by a highly personalised, unpredictable, and dare I say, less great future over the next three and a half years. In fact, my prediction is that in fact, that President Trump will hasten American decline and not reverse it. Now, how does Trump's election impact Australia? Well, so far, according to the 2017 Lowy Institute poll, support for the, and I'm quoting here, support for the US alliance remains firm, while trust in the United States has fallen and Donald Trump remains unpopular. Now, my key bit of advice on this conundrum, let's take the Lowy advice, let's stipulate to that, and again, it comes from another conservative op-ed columnist with the New York Times, Ross Dutert. And here is his comment just a few weeks ago. Here is a good rule of thumb for dealing with Donald Trump. Everyone who gives him the benefit of the doubt eventually regrets it. So basically, I think the position so far is the Australian government has given Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt and you can fill out the rest of the sentence. So my basic feeling is that the Australian government has reacted pragmatically, apologetically, and I think optimistically. And I think a tad obsequiously, which I'll come back to in a moment. Now, if you take, for example, the famous phone call between President Trump and Malcolm Turnbull in January of this year, I'm sure you've all read the transcript already, so I won't read the juicy bits and there are plenty of them, but the line that struck me was this one. This is Malcolm Turnbull towards the end of the conversation where Donald Trump had described the deal as disgusting and an embarrassment and so on and so forth. Turnbull says, you can count on me, I will be there again and again. Now, the original leaked documents, I think, caused a fair bit of embarrassment to the Prime Minister. I think the Battle of the Coral Sea celebrations in New York in May gave him a reprieve of some sort but I think the release of this transcript now shows Australia, at least the Prime Minister and the government, in a very poor light. Is this the basis of the alliance of the relationship that we want? The problem, of course, if you think about it analytically, is that Australia is not spreading the Trump risk. And my basic feeling is that it needs to spread the risk. He is a risk as president. Now, we don't have to buy the Paul Keating line that we basically cut the tag with the alliance and develop a completely independent foreign policy. But I do think that Keating is halfway towards a good argument. And the good argument is that the United States alliance should not be an alliance test or a loyalty test of the relationship with the United States. And that's where I think one half of, let's say the debate in Australia is headed at the moment. Part of my problem here, too, is the use of the term national interests and values. I think if you do a hardcore, realist analysis of Australian interests, we do still have, of course, a lot of interests in a narrow sense with the United States, but you also have to consider the values issue. Can we, in fact, say with confidence that we share American values as personified by the president of the United States? Now, my three-point recommendation is basically this. We have to avoid, the government has to avoid personalizing the relationship. A Trump, a Turnbull-Trump issue. We cannot do it that way, see? It doesn't work. The second thing is we have to both deepen and widen the relationship. Take an example, or look at the Canadians. The Canadians are reaching the going beyond Washington and looking at state governments, state governors to do international relations. We need to do that, we need to expand our relations and not see, place all of our eggs in the embassy in Washington, DC, expand the consular presence throughout the United States. And we can come back to this in Q&A. But basically, I think we could have predicted, we would have had a better chance of predicting a Trump victory if we had better diplomatic representation in the heartland. Whereas our diplomatic representation focused in Washington. Bad decision. We should have foreseen that and we should make up for that mistake now. Where we go in terms of deepening the relationship is in the cultural relations, people-to-people diplomacy that's been mentioned by several people today. We have to widen and deepen the relationship with the United States. As for my assessment, it is going to be a deferred one but I certainly line up, as you may have guessed, with the lukewarm consensus on this panel. Critics of Trump on the left have to learn to be measured in their criticisms of Trump because it just simply gives grist to the middle to people on the other side. Supporters on the right, I think they need to fess up to Trump's shortcomings and basically remember that he is the leader of the free world and we need to be very, very direct and frank about the president. So my basic view of Donald Trump is the broken clock theory. It is basically right twice a day. Well, we're in the wonderful position of having had five very disciplined academic speakers keeping to time. This is a historic moment. So well, thank you very much to our speakers. We will come back to thank you towards the end but we do have a very generous half hour for questions and discussion from the floor. So I would just like to ask, I can already see hands going up. So I'd like to ask you to just state your name, your affiliation and please keep your questions very clear and succinct. So we have time to get through as many as possible. We'll start with, we'll take one at a time for now. My name is Yuan from Treasury. In the past few months, there has been a lot of, I guess, border skirmish conflicts between India and China that has been reporting the international media but not so much in the Australian media, surprisingly to me. So I'm wondering, does that mean, I mean, does Australia have an interest in that kind of conflict and what should we do about it? Is your question to a specific panellist? Well, I guess across as both South Asia and North East Asia. No, you're using an answer then. No, no, go for it. All right, preemptive strike then. Okay. No, look, I mean, I think the whole world has an interest in the relationship between China and India and I think, now that you've given me a bit more time to talk about it, I'll try and put that in context. China and India have many, many things that they disagree on. In theory, they have plenty that they should have in common. They should both have that fundamental need to focus on development, the advancement of their populations and so forth. But there are serious historical differences and grievances and we often forget about this when we're looking at China and Japan or China and the United States. In fact, if you take a 20, 30 year view into the century, the China-India relationship could well be one of the most problematic in the world. And in fact, we're seeing, I think in the last few years that in a way China has lost India. It had a chance, I think, to include India in its charm offensive over the past 10 to 15 years, the charm offensive that has gone hot and cold over those years. But since the real assertiveness began in China's policy regionally and globally about six years ago, seven years ago, India's been in the front line of that as much as any other country. And I think there's a clear sense of mutual disrespect. I think there's a sense that China doesn't acknowledge that India ever has the potential to be anything like an equal power, even though India, of course, sees itself as its civilizational power. So there's the context. When you go to the border itself or the disputed frontier, I mean, there are several thousand kilometers of disputed mountain territory between India and China. And generally, since the 60s, they've managed to agree to disagree about this. But in recent years, you've seen much more active, I guess, what you'd call incursions, encroachments on what are seen to be the other side's territory. And from an Indian perspective, this tends to be something China does at quite strategic moments. So for example, when a Chinese leader is visiting India or indeed when the Indian Pam was in the United States recently. What's different this time is that India is pushing back much more assertively than many expected. And it's in fact in territory that is where India is, in its view, assisting Bhutan to protect its territorial integrity against China. But due to differences over the maps, the Chinese say that it's in their territory. So it's unlikely that this is going to end in war. The rhetoric is very hot on both sides. And there was even press last week in a lot of the Chinese media implying that some kind of punishment or lesson was coming for India. So of course we have to take an interest because Australia has such a stake, I think, in both countries. And also in that principle of the non-use of force in international affairs. Thanks very much. It's a great question. One addition I guess I'd make to Rory's really astute comments is that for various reasons, partly geographical, partly Cold War politics, India has never been a part, a member of many of the institutions and the regional institutions in the Asia Pacific region, which is a bit of an oddity now. And I think it very much wants to be a member of many more of them. So that's actually something that I think Australia could be doing more to encourage. I think it was very positive that back in 2014, when China hosted APEC, China exercised the right that the host has every year to invite other countries who are not members to sit in as observers. I believe India was too disorganized to actually show up. Something happened on the capacity front there. But that's the sort of thing we should be encouraging. And so for example, the next time APEC is perhaps in China or in one of the other regional countries in the region, that's something that Australia might quietly encourage behind the scenes. Thank you. Do we have any more questions? Gentleman in the middle row. Glenn Robinson, a businessman. I have a question in relation to North Korea. My understanding is that they became the way they are as a result of a broken promise by the rest of the world in providing oil to them. Secondly, they're surrounded by all the nukes and other horrible things you could imagine, and yet nobody will go and damn well talk to them. We know that sanctions don't work. We saw that the apartheid sanctions in South Africa that were wasted. We've seen that, I don't know how long the sanctions against Cuba have gone on. We know that that's not going to work. What the hell is going to work in North Korea? It's an easy one for you, Amy. Look, I'd agree with much of what you've had to say. Sanctions haven't worked in this particular problem. We actually have one of the world's leading experts on sanctions and the Korean Peninsula in particular in the room right now, Brendan Taylor. So you might want to buttonhole him in the morning tea to talk more about that. Apologies, Brendan, if I topped you in there. I think that's right. We need to remember that Asia is the region of the world that's home to the most nuclear weapons countries, and North Korea does have this long history of very legitimate, maybe difficult for understanding, but legitimate security concerns about many of its neighbors and the way in which the Korean War ended. It's very antagonistic relationships with China and Russia and, of course, South Korea and Japan. We do need to talk again. Actually, one of the somewhat positive things that Trump expressed early on in his presidency that he would be actually willing to talk with the North Koreans. Now, that's sort of fallen to one side, I think, and I'm not sure that he would be the most effective person in the room, but it is imperative that we find a way to get back to talks. It's not palatable. It's a very, very difficult thing to sell politically at home if you're in the United States or Japan or elsewhere, and so this is a really difficult problem for countries in the regions. I'm not sure that Australia could orchestrate it. No, I don't think we have a relationship with the key players right now that would allow that to happen, but we can do things quietly behind the scenes with the countries we do have good relationships with, in particular Japan, South Korea, China and the United States to encourage more dialogue. Thank you. Okay, we'll take one from the left hand. Let's take two questions now. I think we have time. So, there's two hands just over in this left section here. Hi, my name's Naveen. I'm from Melbourne. Matthew, I thought you asked a really interesting question around when you were talking about how we actually relate with nations around us, that question of what kind of a country are we? Are we an Asian country? And I was actually curious about, and if any other panelists have thoughts as well, but what is your kind of answer or thoughts about that particular question? Okay, and should we take a second question from this section over here as well? Hey, thanks. My name's Pat Griffiths. I'm a student at the Bell School. My question was just to try and gauge the panelist's response to Senator Wong's foreign policy that she put forward there, just how likely is what you just heard from the senator likely to be effective in the regions that you've been speaking about and how much hope do you have that action will match rhetoric in that area? Thank you. Well, how about we start with Matt? You can answer both of those and then we'll run through the panel. Is Australia an Asian country? That's a big question for me to answer. I think the opportunity is there for it to be so. And what I mean by that, and of course I'm not talking here about geography or anything like that, where you can make very clear answers. It's not seen as an Asian country in Southeast Asia and I think sometimes our policy errs in the assumption that it is. We want to be a Southeast Asian country, ergo we are. That's not how it's seen in Jakarta because it does see the different history, the different values in Australia. But I think there is an opportunity, especially if government policy is gonna be credible and sustained and holistic and so encompass education and social relations and the whole gamut of activities for us to really play a role in actually redefining what it means to be an Asian country. Now part of that is gonna be a very hard conversation for us to have around sort of where are our reflex responses? If something goes wrong, do we phone Washington or do we phone Southeast Asia? Probably not London anymore. And that's gonna be a historic process. That's gonna be something that continues over time and it's gonna be something where the ending perhaps is always more aspirational than achievable. But the best chance and the best opportunity Australia have if it really wants to up its relations with ASEAN is to go down that path of actually saying, no, we are putting a lot of commitment into this and that commitment's not an elite level commitment. That commitment is a national commitment which is gonna involve public policy, it's gonna involve consultations and it's gonna involve a lot of awkward conversations as well I think around well actually what is our identity and you know, here's a dangerous word, what is our destiny? Where is it that Australia wants to go? I leave that up to you to sort out though. Just a touch on perhaps the one thing before I pass over to my colleagues. I think it's always important to try and understand what are the values that a country wishes to promote and to have a very strong set of narratives around who we are and what we want. I think the dangers in placing that front and center in a policy is that when push comes to shove it tends to be the values that become the problem. If you have a heart, if you know to take a sort of strong realist view as my colleague was earlier, at the end of the day it's gonna come down to questions of power, questions of capacity and questions of commitment. You always wanna make sure that those things are anchored in something and I think that's where values and a sort of deep conversation about national interest is so important but it's much harder than perhaps it seems to just have an ethical foreign policy, the British tried in 1997 and that died very quickly. Not from a lack of effort perhaps but because when rubber hits the road this is a tough thing to execute. Always remember who you are and where you wanna go but how you get there, that's a policy question and that's somewhere where values play a much more sort of difficult role. They direct you but they may not be able to help you in every circumstance. On the second question, just reflecting on some of what Senator Wong said, I think in terms, she talked about having I guess a strategy or a vision and I think that is something that's been missing in the Pacific for some time and I think the current government's appreciated that as well, that's why the Prime Minister said that. So the idea of moving beyond the purely transactional in our foreign relations. I was intrigued but left wanting more by her reference to better use of the aid program. It'd be interesting to see what that might mean. Because it's not just this government that's cut the aid program. It was the previous government that really started those cuts that should be remembered. So it's being in governments hard when there are difficult budget decisions to take. I'll just jump in briefly on both questions. On the classic question of is Australia an Asian country or not, I think a few ways of looking at one is to say that we have any nation should be able to define its own geography to some extent rather than be defined by it. So that's why looking at Australia in something like the Indo-Pacific region where we, if you like, lead the definition of our geography is a useful way of transcending that question. If you define Asia broadly, then I think Australia is an Asian country. If you define Asia in a large maritime Indo-Pacific sense then it is. If you define Asia much more narrowly in a specifically East Asian sense then the question marks will remain and the debate will continue. So I think that's a useful way of trying to get beyond the debate. But of course in practical terms, in real terms of course Australia is becoming a more Asian country every day. And I think the economic connections, the security links but especially the people to people links included through immigration and making that happen. And that's a very welcome thing. The second question is a really tricky one in a way. I mean I think the speeches are great. The rhetoric is really fascinating at the moment but how much change would we actually see whether it be a change of government in foreign and security policy? I think there will be more continuity than change because the realities in the region and the world are pretty harsh these days. And I think the room for manoeuvre that another Australian government would find that it had would still be pretty limited. So I tend to say, I tend to be focusing on those lines of the speeches that are more about continuity than about change. And I noted even on the references to engaging with the Belt Road Initiative, for example, that yes, let's not be informed by negativity but at the same time, let's take a case by case approach. In other words, let's not embrace it. So I think that's actually very similar to where the government stands. The last point I'd make on that is that I do agree with Senator Wong that it was a great pity that the Asian Century White Paper was essentially removed from government websites when there was a change of government. But I'd look, again, I'd look to whether there are elements of that, of the ideas contained in that that have been enacted since, I think to some extent, the faith of engaging with Asia has been kept not only by this government, but certainly by the officials that work for it. And Jeff. Thanks, Cecilia. On both questions, I think on my reaction to Senator Wong's speech is that at times I felt myself wriggling a little bit because of the partisan nature of her speech. Labor good, coalition bad to exaggerate. But then I found myself thinking that that's actually a good thing because I think one of the problems with the debate about Australia's foreign policy is an excessive commitment to some middle ground consensus where we agree on all of the verities of Australian foreign policy. So what I'm saying a little counter-intuitively is that we must find some room for a little bit of partisanship because that's the only way we will be able to work our way through this current situation in relation to the new president of the United States. No, I want some partisanship. Not, I don't want to go the whole hog to the American model but I want a degree of partisanship because that will help frame the debate. And we heard that from Senator Wong. She told us what the labor position is on many issues and I enjoyed that. And then I'd like to hear the foreign minister say exactly her position from the other side of politics. So in other words, I want to endorse the idea of a certain amount of partisanship in foreign policy because at the moment we're stuck in, and the best example of this is this commitment to the US alliance where it is a litmus test, a loyalty test and you can't say anything about it unless you're branded as something unpatriotic. And I think that's extremely unhelpful. So that's my first point. The second point is that on the interests and values is Australia an Asian country? Of course it's not. But is it something else? And the answer to that is yes it is. Australia is in between a high context culture in Asia, East Asia and in between a low context American culture. Australia basically somewhere in between. Something between Raymond Cohen's high and low context. What I like to see is a middle context. In other words, we're a bit of both and we should embrace and endorse that. Basically, and Penny Wong personifies that by her very background and presence. And so I feel quite comfortable about being in the middle between a high context and a low context set of cultures and I think Australia can basically be a bit of both and I think we should embrace that idea. Amy wanted to jump in. Sorry I couldn't resist. I just wanted to I guess reflect on something that Jeff sort of finished up with there about Australia sort of being in the middle between sort of a US specific country and an Asian country. I think that's a very nice ideal. But the reality is choices have to be made when you have very limited resources, particularly in your diplomatic toolkit about where you can send people and what you can focus on. Right now we have a relationship that's much, much more tilted in the direction of the United States. If you look at our expertise, the number of people we send to that country, the kind of the almost the kind of the mindset, if you like, I think the word mindset has been brought up a few times. Partly because of the 70 years of history of that alliance relationship, we are much, much more comfortable dealing with our US interlocutors than we are with just about any of the countries in our region. And so I think that's something that really does need to shift. I was heartened to see so much focus on Asia in Senator Wong's speech. Of course now we need to know what the details of that are but I would be suggesting very much a tilt towards our region and that might therefore require some shutting down of resources elsewhere. Thank you. We have a question just in the third row on the right-hand side. Thank you. My name is Miles Cooper. I'm a visiting fellow at the Coral Bell School and formerly had a career with the Australian Foreign Service. My question relates to ASEAN and therefore I guess logically to Matthew Davies. Thank you for your comments. I think you identified correctly a lack of effectiveness, a lack of unity and inability to get common positions within ASEAN. Do you think that's mainly because of actual differences between core interests between those countries or do you think that at least in recent times it's also a consequence of the domestic preoccupations, the domestic predicaments of quite a number of the ASEAN countries, I'm thinking particularly of Thailand and Malaysia, Indonesia to a degree, Myanmar, that inhibits that perhaps from asserting more coherent positions together. Thank you. Thank you for the question. I would come down very strongly on the former of those. I think obviously the domestic issues always make it a little bit harder to dedicate time and attention to the regional project and that's certainly the case. But if we sort of hypothesize that there was no domestic issues, would ASEAN be transformed into some efficient deliverer on its promises? No, I don't think it would. The reason for that in my assessment is that ASEAN is fundamentally the product of a very thin consensus and that thin consensus has remarkable historic endurance which is one of ASEAN's great successes but it does curtail what ASEAN can effectively do. And that consensus really is that we want to be in control of our own affairs. Now you have a post-colonial mindset and the majority of members and a post-colonial sentiment across the region and ASEAN is formed in 67 very much in that circumstance that these are weak, largely authoritarian states and they have a deep historical memory about what has gone wrong in their national sovereignty and when it was violated and that we want to do everything we can to protect and promote our freedoms. And up until really the mid-1990s that worked very well because there was economic success in the region, there was a broad sense that ASEAN was delivering on this narrow range of promises in the Bangkok Declaration, the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, all of these core documents. And then from that time because of democratization in Indonesia, because of pressures in the global system, because of the financial crisis in 97, ASEAN has kind of, the word I like to use almost is metastasized. It's grown almost unconsciously and into areas that it doesn't really want to be involved in. But because of public perception or because of path dependency, it has become a much broader organization. But the breadth of that organization doesn't denote any deep roots to it outside of its core mission. The other side of what you say, just to sort of flip it on the head, is why does it endure? Because it has these delivery problems. And I think it continues to endure because it has this really important symbolic value about what it means to be a freestanding member of a Southeast Asian community of states. And that has remained the one constant from 67 over the last 50 years. And for as long as that symbol has resonance, so ASEAN will continue to endure. As I often say, I think the most remarkable thing about ASEAN is that 10 member states continue to invest time in it, even when it's so very easy to criticize it. Thank you. Thank you. We have a few more minutes. If we have any more questions or comments in the far corner, how about we take two together? So there's the gentleman in the second row and this gentleman just near the front. Hi, my name's Terry Henderson. I have a question. I think it's probably for James Batley. In recent times, there's been an increased Chinese presence in the Pacific at the same time that the Australian foreign aid expenditures have been going down. Does this represent, what are the implications for Australia in this? Is it a threat or a benign or is it just simply something for the New Zealanders to handle? Yeah, I think that's a fairly steady trend that's been going for at least a decade or so now. I don't think Australia's really come to terms with that. I think we kind of wax and wane on whether we think that's a threat or whether we think that no, in fact, it's not a threat. We talk to the Chinese, we have a bilateral dialogue with them about the Pacific. And of course, it's means different things in different countries. There are six specific island countries that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. So that's always been one of China's key interests in the region is just that broad sense of diplomatic recognition. But I think there is a long-term trend going on of more Chinese investment, more training of Pacific Islanders in China. What does that mean for soft power? I think there are some pretty lazy assumptions about Chinese soft power in the region because there's a lot of anti-Chinese feeling. I think in particularly in the big Melanesian countries, that's a real problem for China. And I think if you look at Australian soft power, I think that's in many ways that remains very, very strong. So I'm not giving a very definitive answer to your question. It's certainly not something we're leaving to the New Zealanders. I think it is an ongoing preoccupation of the Australian government and its various agencies and one that's not gonna go away. Thank you, we have another question just here in the second. Tom Worthington from the Research School of Computer Science. I guess my question was also on soft power. In some ways, Donald Trump might be seen as a creature of the internet. And recently, Israel's moved to block Al Jazeera from its territory. In discussing happenings in the region, should we be focusing more on the role of the internet, the new forms of media, the new way education will be provided online and the implications of that for the nations of the region? Who would like to answer this? I mean, from a diplomacy point of view, I think at the core of the whole public diplomacy debate of the last five, 10 years is the hard power, soft power distinction. And I think it's worth stressing that. And every country, at least a Western country, has to make a decision, the extent to which is going to rely on one over the other. And of course it's not an either or thing. It's what is the balance between the two. And Australia certainly has to do that with the entire region. I think you asked the question, the rubric for me is the wrong one. It's not about the internet, it's about public diplomacy. Public diplomacy is the broad area. To what extent is the Australian government and major institutions willing and able to reach out to the publics of the countries of the region? And then within that broader conceptualization, to what extent does social media and the internet play a role? I'd also add that I think that it's not just soft versus hard power and a sense of something in between. And the Trump phenomenon is precisely, I think a reflection of that. I mean, we're, you know, whatever you know, think or imagine or feel about Russian involvement in the US election, this wasn't soft power. This was, there was nothing gentle about it was, it was a coercive attempt to influence another country using information in my view. So we're going to see information, the internet, other forms of information as much more, I guess, blatant tools of state influence in the region and globally. And we do have to position our country to deal with it on the receiving end, but also to exploit that. And I think that's where we, I think we have to be very mindful of the limits of so-called public diplomacy. It doesn't matter how many Twitter followers your embassy gets or how many government approved tweets you put out, people aren't going to take it very seriously. It has to be much more sophisticated than that. So I think we're going to be looking into much more advanced partnerships between government and the private sector, government and civil society, government and frankly the advertising industry if you want to have any real impact in the information debate in the region. And if you wind back 20 odd years and look at the cuts that were made to Australia's ability to put a message out into the region back through Radio Australia, you can see that maybe that was a pretty short-sighted decision. So in a sense, there'll be old forms of media influence that we'll need to work with as well. Thank you. Do we have any final questions? Okay. I thought, oh, we actually do have two more over here. Could we just pass the microphones down this way? Hi, my name's Elise and I'm with the West Park Future Leaders Scholars Group. Both the Senator and throughout the panel has been discussing about diplomacy and planning for diplomacy and what's happening in the region. Something that I've been thinking about is one of the big disruptions that will come to the region is migration from climate change. And I was wondering if you could talk to that and what you actually think we need to plan for from the Australian perspective in our region. Who was? Perhaps the Pacific would be the... Probably the place to start. Yeah, look, I think that's certainly starting to get on the agenda of, certainly, of academic discussion and I think potentially of policy discussion in governments. I think in the Pacific, we're not necessarily talking about huge populations. You know, Tuvalu, 10,000 people, Kiribati, maybe 80,000 people. So it's not so much the absolute numbers but it's some really interesting issues of international law that start coming up. You know, does a country have a right to exist even if it doesn't have any territory? You know, what happens to a population? So I think that's an emerging issue. In fact, we're holding a workshop on this very issue next week at ANU to think through, you know, what are these issues presented by some of these small island states in future. I won't comment about Bangladesh or anywhere else. I don't know if anyone else can. I mean, yeah, just very briefly, and I think I guess there's plenty of bad news in that question. I guess the good news is that we're finally seeing climate change acknowledged as a security issue both in this country and globally. I guess one point to note in how we respond is that typically large population movements from climate change haven't tended to be across borders. They've tended to be within borders. And certainly, I mean, I think Bangladesh is going to be clearly the really critical case here. I think initially what we'll see is not only worsening tension internally in Bangladesh but also people movements in that part of the region, in South Asia and Southeast Asia. So I don't think there'll be an enormous flow on effect in the short term for Australia. The answer therefore is going to be very much about the capacity building disaster relief, humanitarian assistance we can put into the region rather than narrowly a border protection issue. I just wanted to pick up on that last point that Rory made, sort of in Southeast Asia, you are dealing with tens and maybe even hundreds of millions of people, especially if you're not looking at ocean sea levels, but you're looking at cyclones, you're looking at those sorts of events, especially in places like the Philippines. And Australia really does have an opportunity to sort of get in now in the development of capacity and also in development of policy and procedures around what is going to happen if some of these events start to occur more frequently. It's always very easy to wait until after they've happened and then come in and help, but a way that Australia could really exercise leadership perhaps in a quieter way would be on this point about how can we facilitate you? How can we enhance your capacity to deal with these things? How can we help you have these conversations now? It might not gather headlines, but it'd be very well received. Thank you. And we had one more question just in the fourth row there. Thank you. I was struck by the fact that all the panelists came to the conclusion that their judgment on how we were doing in the world was lukewarm. In no single area are we actually doing well. And I'm half wondering whether this is because we've lost the ability to prioritize and that this problem will only grow as the world becomes more multipolar. But are we really seeing the fact that we can't simultaneously do Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, South Pacific, Indo-Pacific and America, let alone the Middle East, Afghanistan and Europe? Are we just struggling to maintain the focus? Okay, so I think this would be an ideal last question to give all the panelists one opportunity to have a final response in response to this question. And yeah. Yes. I think this is a problem that's only going to continue and it is a problem that talks to not only the allocation of material resources, but perhaps something that the senator said, which I did think was particularly important, how we sort of step back and think through what it is we wish to achieve. What is the goal and what is the strategy towards achieving that goal? And the sort of tumult of events tends us towards a very reactive approach. We seem to be managing quite well, but you're constantly running to stay in the same place. So you have to ask very hard questions around prioritization and you have to ask very hard questions around where do we want to dedicate, not only our sort of diplomatic resources, but our politicians' attention as well. Rod, I think it's really a student observation and I would agree as well. I think we, in organizations and in countries, there's a bit of a sense of wanting to do everything all the time and not making that sort of opportunity cost-based choice. We can't do everything. So yes, I would agree. We need to think about what are the relationships that are the most important to us, whether that be good important or bad important, the things that will bring us most prosperity, but potentially also the most risk and focus on those. Yes, but, I mean, well, at the risk of special pleading, I'd say geography is destiny, so that our foreign policy does have to take account of our geography of who our neighbors are, who our nearest neighbors are. Certainly when it comes to the Pacific, though, I couldn't agree more. I mean, there are absolutely parts of that region that are much more important to us than other parts of the region and that should be part of our strategy to that part of the world. You look furiously agreeing with you, Rod, that we're biting off more than we can choose a nation. That's actually happening to a lot of countries at the moment. So I think at some point there are going to have to be essentially political decisions about prioritising relationships and issues, and this isn't just about geography. It's also about issues and themes and sort of common links between the problems various countries face, and that will go partly to how we organise our capabilities. And DFAT is still a very traditional organisation where you'll have people who are the desk officer for this country or the desk officer for that country and work full-time on that issue, even if it's a quiet day in that country while their colleagues sitting next door dealing with perhaps Indonesia or China is usually working 12-hour days. So I think we're going to have to be much more 20th century in the way we discipline our resources. But I guess where I'd slightly differ is that we're going to have to make that focus on powerful states, on great powers, particularly whether they're close to home or far away. Yeah, look, an excellent question. I think one of the key criteria for determining whether a country has a good or an effective foreign policy or not is the extent to which it can prioritise and the extent to which it can operate at multiple levels. Now, that all depends on the way you self-define. And the big debate in Australia not only is about are we a member, do we belong in Asia, but are we a middle power or something else? And that debate is still raging. And I think it's a good debate without stating where I stand on the issue. The point is if you define yourself as a middle power, then you have a middle power foreign policy with the resources and the diplomacy and the priorities that go with it. So I think a good conceptual argument about what kind of country Australia is will help answer your excellent question.