 Well, good evening everyone. I'm John Goodlatte. I'm president of the Australian Institute for International Affairs here in Western Australia. It's a great pleasure to welcome you here to our very first webinar. And of course, we're having a webinar because we live in very strange and challenging times with the COVID-19 virus, changing our way of life. So I think you'll find tonight I'm actually at the office, a guest speaker in his home study, Ashow, who's managing events you won't see is at his place. But a lot of people have been involved in putting this together. And a lot of people have been involved in practicing to make sure it works well. So a particularly warm welcome to everyone. And it's actually sold out. We've got a few hundred people who registered for tonight. And I think that reflects the subject matter we're about to discuss. As people are aware, I hope you're all aware that the role of the Institute is to promote a deeper understanding of international issues. And the topic tonight, the politics of pandemics, COVID-19, and the international order is a very timely topic for us to discuss. And one of the things we typically do is acknowledge the Nongau Wajah people, the traditional custodians of the land. And I'd like to pay respect on behalf of all of us to their elders past, present and emerging. And one of our traditions too is actually to talk about the fact that here in Western Australia, a lot of people here in Western Australia, a lot of people aren't visiting from elsewhere and internationally as well. But we had six seasons here, not four. And this season is known as Gera in the Nongau dialect. And it's famous for the cool nights and dewy mornings and light breezes and getting ready for the deep winter that's coming. So which normally comes about an Anzac day. So we've got a little bit of decent weather going forward. Now the format for tonight is I'll introduce our guest speaker. There's time for Q&A at the end of it. Now if you have a look at your screens and look down the bottom, you'll see a Q&A button. And if you would care to submit any questions on that, I'll collate them. And we can discuss them at the end of the presentation. So there's a Q&A button there. Please use it. Please ask any questions you like. And I'll collate them and pass them on to our guest speaker. And the plan is to finish it about quarter to eight Western Australian time. So with that, I'd like to introduce our guest speaker, Professor Mark Beeson, our very own Mark Beeson, who's a professor of international relations at the University of Western Australia. He's also research chair of the Australian Institute of International Affairs nationally. And he's taught at Murdoch, Griffith, Queensland, York and Birmingham universities. He writes heaps of books. He's a prodigious writer, books, articles, all sorts of things. He's originally from Barnsley in Yorkshire, which is interesting. He's over here in Western Australia. But not only does he write books, but he posts on Facebook too. And he's just done a terrific thing on some of the famous songs of the 60s. And a little bit of synchronicity. I thought he might like the shadows. And sure enough, the first record he ever bought was Apache by the Shadows. But I thought he liked the Kinks as well. And he chose the Kinks in his top 10 from the 60s as well. But with that, I'd like to introduce Professor Mark Beeson to discuss the politics of pandemics, COVID-19 and the international order. Thanks, Mark. Thanks very much for the introduction, John. And hello to everybody. And thanks for tuning in from all over the place in Western Australia and elsewhere. And perhaps after that introduction, I should just stick to an analysis of pop music and everybody would be much happier. I don't know. But anyway, this is, if it's nothing else, this is an important issue. And the reason that we're all sitting in our front rooms and at the moment, clearly, there's nothing else to do. That's why a lot of you have tuned in, I suspect. But for whatever reason, I think we're all kind of interested, concerned about how it affects our own lives individually, but also about what the implications might be for the wider international system of which we in Australia are a small, but not entirely insignificant part. So what I thought I'd do tonight is to try and give you a few ideas about what some of the big issues are in this unfolding saga. And obviously, it's going to be very subjective. And I should say at the outset that I'm no expert on the health aspects of this particular debate. But let me just make one observation to start off and be a little bit provocative. But it's kind of interesting that everybody's wheeling out health experts to talk about things. And in some way, shifting the blame to these people, if you're going to get logged in, it's because the health experts tell us to. It's interesting and revealing, I think, that the same logic doesn't apply to climate change, for example, where lots of experts have been saying, well, we've got some serious problems here. But it's striking and illuminating that Scott Morrison et al. Don't wheel out people who are recognized expert in that field. So I just thought I'd throw that in because it's not irrelevant to what I'm going to talk about tonight. So I've got a little PowerPoint here. You'll either be thrilled or disappointed to hear. And I think if the technology works, you should be seeing that now, should you? Yes. Okay, good. Can you give me a thumbs up, John, if you're listening and that you can see? Okay, that's good. Okay, so that's a little PowerPoint. I'm going to talk to this, the politics of pandemics. I've got a few slides and I can come back to them in Q&A if there's anything that particularly takes your fancy and you want to talk about it a bit more. And I've put a few startling facts and figures on my right hand side, a piece of paper here, which I should refer to occasionally, because some of the detail is worth thinking about and quite astounding in some ways. So let's see how we go and see if I can work the technology. Turn over the page. Is it going to happen? Yes. Okay, so let me start off by saying something about the origins of the current pandemic, COVID-19, as we've come to call it. And I've got no idea exactly where it came from or how it came about or what the biological origins of this may have been, but I am interested in the kind of politics around and the discourse that's merged around it as well. And the very fact that there is a big debate about where it came from, who's responsible and what the impact of that might be is revealing and significant in itself. And there's a very good, if that's the word to describe it, well-made, sophisticated documentary that's been financed by Falun Gong, the banned religious organization from China that claims that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab and that it's all part of the German warfare program that went wrong. Now, that sounds highly unlikely. It sounds more likely that it's a case of Occam's razor and it probably did originate from a so-called wet market in Wuhan and that's the uncontroversial origin of this particular virus and it's happened before in various places at various times. So that seems the most likely explanation. But there's a big point to make about this as well I think and that's that we as a species, as human beings, are clearly having a growing impact on the natural environment, the biosphere upon which we ultimately depend. And as the human population expands, it's moving into areas and having an impact on parts of the world and the natural world, which it's never done before. And that's not only increasing our interaction with animals in a way that hasn't happened before, but it's also increasing the interaction between different species of animals, particularly when they take them to places like wet markets in Wuhan. So the chance of new diseases emerging, here's my first amazing stat for the evening, between 1960 and 2004, 335 new diseases were identified, of which 60% were estimated to have come from non-human origin. So that's a pretty amazing statistic and it kind of reminds us that our collective impact on the natural environment has potentially very, very serious consequences, not just for the natural environment and the world animals that inhabit it, but for us too. So there's a bit of blowback from the way that we're treating the natural environment that I think we need to take seriously and need to think about when we're thinking about what sustainable policies might look like in the future. That's not necessarily just sustainable environmental policies, although I personally think that's a big part of it, but just how we can survive as a species without putting ourselves at enormous risk every few years as we are instrumental in generating new forms of pathogens and viruses that directly threaten our survival perhaps. We've also of course in the way that we mass produce food, and this is not the ranting about everybody needs to be a vegetarian, although maybe that might be what it'll come down to eventually, because what we're getting at the moment I think is a snapshot of what the world might look like if it's actually constituted on a more sustainable basis and it might mean a lot less flying around, a lot less eating animals, a lot less mass production of animals in the way that we're doing at the moment in which we use antibiotics to stop the animals from getting particular diseases, but that also lowers our collective immunity to new diseases as well. The other point that was mentioning at the outset is that this problem is not a new one. The scale and the people it's affecting, that's new and different, no doubt about it, and that's why we're all concerned in a place like Australia because we've been blissfully ignorant and immune to some of these problems in the past, but now we're discovering that they're first world problems too. But the big point to emphasize I think is we've had plenty of warning about these kinds of things. We've had bird flu SARS and various other horrors like Ebola, but they haven't really affected people like us in countries like us or the US or Western Europe. So we've kind of ignored them and we haven't taken the warning signs terribly seriously, I don't think. And that's been a problem and I think a lot of people, there's a lot of blame to go around when we're thinking about why we're so badly prepared for this. So that's something to think about. Let me just see if I can get on to slide two, which I can. So in the context of the world that we live in, we've become kind of used to thinking about the world as being increasingly global and we could spend a couple of hours just talking about what we all think globalization actually means, but we won't get bogged down on that tonight. But I think the interesting thing is that we've lots of people in the west, particularly affluent people like ourselves and people with the ability to take advantage of many of the good things about globalization have had a view often that globalization, whatever you take it to mean, and it's usually about the growing interdependence economically of different countries around the world. Most people have thought that's a pretty good thing, particularly in the west. Now it hasn't always been for everywhere in the world and it's interesting, I don't know if you've all been following or something in Singapore at the moment. The rich, well-to-do middle-class population of Singapore hasn't been badly affected by the coronavirus outbreak, but the poor, people who keep the economy going and don't get paid much and live in pretty appalling conditions, they have been badly affected and that kind of illustrates in a kind of snapshot just how uneven the impact of some of these things actually is, although we know as well, that one of the things that globalization is doing is helping to ensure that even rich people in the developed world, powerful people in the developed world aren't immune from these kinds of things either and Boris Johnson and various other people are good examples of this. Now one of the other things that's become a big talking point at the moment and before I even talk about this, it's worth a road of the lining all the other day called we're all socialist now and the basic idea of that was that in a moment of crisis even free market champions and ideological sympathizers with free market economics and all the rest of it like Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg are prepared to junk all of the conventional wisdom overnight because they realize that the crisis they're facing demands that states act in particular ways in ways that only states can do in some ways. Locking cities down, compelling people to behave in certain ways, only states can really do that. So it's interesting that the problem dictates the solution to some extent and that's worth keeping in mind as a general point I think and it's interesting that the debate about the merits of globalization has rapidly changed in some ways not just because it's obvious that some people are in a much less favorable position to respond to this kind of challenge than others and you know I think about Africa, the Middle East, other places but because even in the rich world it's becoming painfully apparent that countries like the United States for example are highly dependent on other countries particularly China unfortunately to supply various sorts of personal protective equipment as we've learned to call over the last week or two. Before I say anything about that let me just run this amazing statistic past you. At the beginning of January when everybody thought this is just a problem in China it's going to go away, Mr Trump was saying it's going to be no worse than the flu, half a dozen people will be affected etc etc. The United States the free market model of the world exported their exports of face masks and other PPE equipment increased by a thousand percent in a couple of weeks as they ramped up production to satisfy the demands of the Chinese market now that policy doesn't look quite as good as it did then perhaps it may not look too good then to some people but at the moment America is only capable of supplying about 3.5 billion face masks which is an estimated 1% of what they need to deal with this pandemic effectively in America at the moment and this shortage of preparation and the inability to provide basic equipment in the United States is a problem domestically at the best of times but it's been heightened by the dependence on supplies in other countries and it's interesting in Australia now the Australian government is now talking about the need to revitalize the manufacturing sector which they allowed to wither on the vine of course when they thought it was ideologically useful to do so now they've rediscovered the merits of having a domestic manufacturing sector that can actually do things and make things that are necessary in times of these kinds of crises so so there's been an interesting if somewhat modest debate about the nature of effective security policies in the contemporary era and one our attitudes should be to thinking about security questions as a consequence of that I mean without wanting to get bogged down in international relations theory there is an interesting kind of distinction between whether we're talking about security as it affects others individuals or whether we're thinking about the security of the state and threats from other states and clearly we've spent an awful lot of money recently and about to spend even more on protecting ourselves from some unknown threat i.e. China in the region by buying lots of planes and submarines when maybe we should have been spending a bit more money on preparing ourselves for these kinds of problems which are not going to go away in the future I don't think so maybe we need to have a really serious and thoughtful debate about what the nature of security actually is and the best ways of trying to prepare ourselves for it so this bottom point on this slide is should we have been thinking about other threats other than the kind of conventional ones that dominate the policy debates in places like Canberra, Washington and Beijing for that matter as well so do we need to have a serious rethink about some of these things if we're going to have more confidence in our ability to deal with these kinds of recurring threats and problems so the other thing that the crisis has done and this is comparative politics 101 is to throw a fairly unflattering light on many of the countries around the world for different kinds of reasons and it's putting everybody's political systems and particularly their health systems to an enormous kind of stress test and revealing the relative strengths and weaknesses of different systems as a consequence and also the importance of leadership of course as well and China initially I think everybody agrees didn't cover themselves in glory the instinctive reaction of the Chinese Communist Party was to suppress and cover up bad news anything that threatens the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party is considered to be a bad thing and is ruthlessly suppressed and it's interesting that the whistleblowers in Wuhan were penalized and forcibly shut up by the authorities initially rather than being taken seriously and their concerns being addressed so China didn't get off to a bad start and was rightly criticized by all and sundry for attempting to shut down the information about the debate however once they realized that this wasn't something that we're going to be able to cover up to their credit they acted remarkably quickly and shutting down a major city like Wuhan is no small job and clearly it helps if you're an authoritarian regime and citizens are used to being to doing what they're being told to do and there's not a great deal of pushback from civil society as it were so in some ways China was able to kind of play to its strengths whatever you think of those and authoritarian enforcement of the lockdown worked pretty successfully I think it has to be said so the contrast with other countries in western Europe and the United States is striking and instructive and it's worth remembering that China has had a bit of experience with dealing with SARS a few years ago so it recognized the potential significance of the problem in a way that the United States and western Europe I don't think did and you know Boris Johnson has been famously revealed to have not attended the first five meetings of the security group that was meant to deal with this kind of problem because he thought it wasn't likely to be a problem it was only something that really affected all those people over in the far east and I think that kind of smug complacency has been revealed as being extremely badly advised and dangerous so the the relative and different responses that countries have come up with to deal with this pandemic have been thrown in very very sharp relief and the United States has become the unfortunate benchmark I think in how not to deal with this crisis they've got the highest rates of infection now the highest death toll they've got the least preparedness to actually respond to and deal with this partly because of the political system in the United States and the kind of federal system partly because of the entrenched polarized views amongst political operatives in the United States which have been poisonous and highly polarized for years now and in a moment of crisis I don't think they are rallying around the flag in quite the way we might have expected them to under the circumstances and I think that's partly because of this the entrenched divisions but it's also partly because of the astonishing lack of coherence and credible leadership on the part of Donald Trump and if I can be permitted a short diatribe I mean if the if the Americans had searched high and low for a more incompetent less able less intellectually competent leader than Donald Trump they'd have struggled to come up what we want in my view and yet it's an indictment of the American political system that somebody like him can ascend to the most powerful position on the planet never mind in the United States because whatever the United States does for better or worse is going to affect the rest of us and if they're not capable of sorting out their own problems they may seem to blame shift to other people and if they're not capable of exercising leadership other people will look to step up possibly I'll say more about that in a moment but but I think one thing that the crisis has revealed is the structural weaknesses in the American health system that everybody kind of knew about but nobody really cared about very much because it only affected poor people who often didn't vote and if they did vote they voted for Donald Trump anyway and it wasn't really an issue that cut through to a lot of people in the United States because it didn't really affect them and I think now the realization that it's pretty hard to escape poor people are still being overwhelmingly badly affected more than wealthy people who are able to insulate themselves and go to their second hose in the country and all the rest of it but but even so I think that the penny or the dime or whatever it is they use in America has finally dropped and people have recognized that these kinds of health issues are they get out of hand very very easily and this picture I've included on this slide of mass burials in the New York park it's not a good look for any country particularly the so-called leader of the free world and the kind of light on the hill and the model for democracy good politics and international leadership I mean it's just not happening in the United States at either a domestic or an international level and in some ways this is the point about Trump as being a symptom as well as a cause I mean I think many of these problems existed before Trump arrived and that's part of the reason that Trump was able to win this surprise election and maybe he'll still win the next one who knows if they have it that's probably me being paranoid but but these are strange times and the idea that it's too difficult to have an election in the middle of a pandemic might be an idea we might have to think about and wrestle with in the not too distant future but anyway we will cross that bridge when we come to it but I think there's no doubt that Trump's arrival on the political scene tells you something about the the state of international politics more generally and it's not a uniquely American problem either there are plenty of populist right-wing demagogues in Eastern Europe and other places around the world and clearly for better or worse these kinds of people are able to connect with some of the people who haven't done well out of the kind of globalization process I was talking about a moment ago so there are plenty of people who are unhappy even before the coronavirus came along and anybody who says they've got a solution to this kind of problem and it only requires us to lock up the borders or to penalize foreigners or to break off trade relationship with China some people think that sounds pretty good that sounds like a reasonable kind of idea and the danger is that those people can either get themselves elected or in the in the middle of a of an unprecedented health crisis can actually use the crisis to cement their authoritarian position and make it difficult to get rid of them and I think that's what Orban in Hungary has been doing for example and so I don't know when their next election is due but it could be quite a long time the way things are going so this is a this is a widespread problem that was developing anyway but has been exacerbated by the crisis I think so let me say something about international leadership in this kind of context and I think the big point to make here is that questions about international leadership were already on the agenda even before this crisis took hold and there was already a growing competition between the People's Republic of China and the United States about who had the best economic system who had the best political system even and it's interesting that people talk favorably about the so-called China model as a way particularly for developing countries to organize not just their economies but maybe their political institutions as well and given that it's not that long ago when we had the so-called global financial crisis that had its origins in the United States and which did a great deal to undermine America's famous soft power then America's reputation was already damaged to some extent by the global financial crisis and interestingly China came to the rescue in that crisis and essentially did Keynesianism on stills and rescued the global economy certainly the East Asian economy and the Australian economy in a way that the United States was again demonstrated not to be able to do and to some extent not to be able to understand quite what was going on as well I think so the danger in this crisis is I think it would be fanciful to expect Mr Trump to come up with the sophisticated and penetrating analysis of what's going on and what the crisis means either in health terms or international politics terms but I think the the temptation to blame others for his own failings is something he's demonstrated on numerous occasions and the chance to blame China for the Wuhan virus or the China virus clearly that's where it came from originally but suggesting that it's exclusively China's problem and that we wouldn't have been exposed to these kinds of problems at some stage anyway I think is fallacious and difficult to sustain so the problem is that relations between the great powers were already bad and I think if we're to do anything about this particular crisis and many other things that we face collectively climate change being the obvious case in point but if we're to do anything about any of the big challenges that faces as a species these days then I think it's important that we think about how we can promote rather than undermine cooperative relations between countries everywhere and this might sound a bit fanciful and it probably is to be fair but that's kind of what we need to do and that's likely to bring about better kinds of international outcomes than the opposite which is blame shifting and systematically working to break down the international trade system and that's important not just because of this growing interesting economic self-reliance and things like industry policy and there there may be good arguments in actually doing some of those things but breaking down the international trade system is not a good idea I don't think and we know what the kinds of consequences of that can be because the Great Depression demonstrated what bad policy and shutting down the trade system can do and the other point to emphasize is that liberal commentators have long argued that greater economic interdependence between countries makes the prospect of war much less likely and there are plenty of people at the moment even before this coronavirus took hold people like Graham Allison in the States who's written a lot about the so-called Thucydides trap which means that there's a certain inevitability about rising powers wanting to challenge declining powers which I think that's what America is with or without Trump and that he thinks war is likely as a consequence so given that kind of backdrop about people being seriously concerned with the deteriorating security environment even before the crisis took hold then the the dangers of inflamed rhetoric about who's responsible cutting off relations blaming other people that's not going to help at all it seems to me and it's going to encourage the growth of nationalism which is already a problem it's going to encourage populists like Trump and others and it's going to encourage intolerance of other countries and that would be most unfortunate particularly for those countries who've done nothing to bring this problem about and who are least able to respond to this kind of problem effectively it seems to me there's a couple of quotes here and I'll just let you read them while I have a sweep of my glass of water and that's what it is not neat gin as John might lead you to believe but uh so this is a couple of quotes I found in recent editions of foreign affairs and that's an interesting magazine it's interesting because it's the kind of premier outlet for fairly mainstream liberal views in the united states about american foreign policy but and this guy Richard Hass is the president of cancel on foreign relations and a former editor of the you may still be the editor actually of foreign affairs but he is making the point that america's attractiveness its values the american model the american way of life american leadership has been profoundly undermined by a series of domestic failures of which the health crisis is but one example and the failure of american leadership in the international system there's another guy mentioned pay I think that he pronounced his name who's a former uh chinese mainlander who's now a prominent american academic and citizen who thinks that uh americans should as they say in america double down on their uh hardline uh quasi containment strategy towards the united states because he thinks that the chinese system uh is in real trouble uh and that an authoritarian regime whose legitimacy and competence is in question is even more vulnerable to these kinds of shocks uh these kinds of losses in confidence uh about the ruling elites towards the ruling elites than than they are in the united states so that's kind of interesting uh that there are people thinking that both sides have got real problems and real difficulties in managing this particular crisis uh and so there's a lot of state for both of these countries so i thought you might find them if to enter but there are a lot of interesting debates in foreign affairs at the moment the other thing i don't know how i'm going through time i will uh i'll try and uh wrap this up i've only got a couple more slides but let me just say something briefly about multilateralism and i should put my cards on the table and say that i'm a big fan of the idea of multilateralism in principle i'm a big fan of the united nations i'm a big fan of the europe european union i don't think there is a big fan of the european union uh and uh i think in principle uh they are a good idea that's multilateral institutions the world health organization hasn't covered itself in glory uh in this particular crisis i think there's no doubt about that and there are doubts about the role of mr tedros gibrielsis if that's how you pronounce his name and his relationship to china and his difference to china and if you can see this picture prop properly on your screens at the moment but that's him uh bending the knee to pristine shijin ping and a lot of people have said that the who has been far too uh uh servile and its approach to china has been unwilling to criticize china and has been slow to respond to uh china's mishandling of the initial crisis and i think there's a good deal of merit in those kinds of uh criticisms however it's the best we've got it's the only international we've organization we've got this in a position to try to coordinate responses to these kinds of uh this kind of problem and to highlight what good practice and policy might actually look like and to encourage people to do it the united states of course led by mr trump has just decided to withdraw funding from the who to punish it for its role in supporting china as trump would see it and uh they account for 22 percent of the who's funding and this is not going to be uh an easy uh gap to fill for the who and the people who are going to suffer mainly are going to be those people in parts of the developing world where there is no other real option other than some sort of external intervention and assistance to try to address uh what are already appalling health outcomes and circumstances with or without the coronavirus epidemic and if it takes hold in some of these uh monstrous in the sense of large uh refugee camps around the world uh watch out because it's going to be horrendous so so anyway the american response has been to undermine the existing multilateral architecture because trump's not terribly impressed with it so that's a problem anyway it's particularly a problem in the european union's case because in my view the european union is the best example we've ever had of sustained international cooperation across national borders yes it's got all kinds of problems yes it's got a bloated bureaucracy and it's ineffective and uh at times and can do his job but if it disappears the symbolism symbolism alone of it disappearing will be profound because people will realists in particular will just say there you go we told you international cooperation is impossible it's every person for themselves nationalism is the only way to go and cooperation will never happen and they may well be right but if they are right the implications for the international system for north-south relations for our ability to be able to encourage people to become democrats to cooperate Russian national borders will be dealt an almighty blow from which they may never recover so for some of my colleagues who like to think of themselves as cosmopolitan's and interested in universal values and global citizenship and all of these highly worthy and desirable things it's not a happy moment at the moment and things are likely to get worse and and the people invoke this idea of the international community endlessly i've never been entirely sure what it means but i think it's going to be even more difficult to identify what the international community is as a consequence of this particular problem and the absence of american leadership in particular so yes sorry this is got this is my last but one side i'll just whiz through this because we can talk about this in q&a but the the point about this slide is just to highlight that we kind of been here before particularly in an economic sense and we know what a major economic downturn can do not just in terms of doubling traveling quadrupling unemployment rates in different countries that thought they were immune to such thing but in transforming politics as well i think that's one of the big dangers that if unemployment rates spike in the us even more than they have done already i shudder to think we might get even more people turning out arm to the teeth protesting about their rights to go back to work and do all kinds of other things than we've seen already so the possibility and the potential for things to go badly wrong in this kind of unprecedented in our lifetime at least problem are real and not to be overlooked i think the dangers of making the same kinds of policy mistakes that people made in the 1930s are also worth taking seriously as well and trump was already well on the way to making those kind of mistakes even before the corona virus took hold in this kind of trade war with china which was quote unquote easy to win we'll all remember turned out it wasn't quite as easy as he thought and he's trying to get imports of ppe from china because they can't produce enough in the united states so the stakes and the historical lessons are sobering and important it seems to me so i think this is definitely going to be my last slide indeed it is so this is the kind of proverbial wake-up call uh in a number of different areas i think most obviously in about the lack of preparedness from people who really ought to have known better because people like bill gates have been banging on about this for 10 years and saying it's only a question of time and lots of more informed people than bill gates have been talking about this for a long time so we really should have been better prepared than we are and just there's another amazing statistic for you uh the us let me just see if i'll find us somewhere uh the us currently spends more or what is it i don't know if they'll find it it's 3.5 oh here we go here we go uh the us spends 180 billion on anti-terrorism operations and two billion on preparing for pandemics so uh in terms of our preparedness our sense of priorities about what we ought to be thinking about what represents a real threat to humanity and to us as individuals i think that's a pretty glaring indication of where priorities still lie and hopefully uh this might do something to jog a bit of rethinking it's also worth thinking that uh one of the the welcome effects of this particular crisis is that co2 emissions have plummeted uh you can see china from the satellite or parts of it for the first time in decades uh other part you know indias delis pollution level is much better than it was and you can see people have seen uh the himalayas from i think it's is it from deli or somewhere i can't remember you're saying that from okay from uh for the first time in years and years so that's a welcome and revealing uh issue as well so i'm getting the wind up from my host so so i might leave it there but uh but i think we ought to think uh long and hard about the kind of historical lessons and issues that this crisis should be uh forcing us to think about and should be concentrating the minds of policymakers everywhere i think it's good uh and this is a little uh cautious note of praise for morrison and uh fridenberg that they ditched uh economic policies that were clearly unsuitable for the kind of crisis that they were facing and maybe we should think about that in other areas as well health and the environment being the obvious two perhaps so i'll leave it there thanks john well thank you very much mark a very good two of the horizon and um some very interesting um conclusions as well we've had a lot of questions that might draw a halt to the questions if i may because there are heaps um i might so i've been carefully curating them um apart from the obvious one which was right at the outset did the professor follow hank marvin to australia so to be enough hank marvin is the lead guitarist for the shadows but i'm not sure if that's the case um but the first set of questions relates to um the u.s action in um potentially withdrawing fund funding for the world health organization and uh how does this affect australia and how does this accelerate geopolitical shifts that's from ester power and um astin quark has added to that one saying um how should we consider um the scott morrison proposal and who should have powers if you like a forceful entry similar to the international atomic energy uh agency so what's the morrison proposal that was that um you know who can go in the world health organization can go in and investigate and has powers to do so okay and morrison saying what i missed this morrison suggesting that that's something that the world health organization can do and can help us in terms of this virus um this pandemic and potential future ones so a couple of questions relating to the world health organization and we do have a couple of questions about donald trump so we can leave trump out of okay most of those well as i say as far as the world health organization is concerned it's not brilliant no no complex multilateral organization is ever going to be a problem free wherever we're ever going to be able to do all of the things we would like it to do i mean it's full of fallible human beings who have their own interests and perhaps different agendas and uh and the guy who's leading it doesn't uh inspire complete confidence it has to be said uh but having said all of that it's the best we've got at the moment i think it would be foolish to undermine one of the few institutions that's potentially well placed to do something about this and to respond to this and to coordinate actions and to cajole people into behaving in sensible and appropriate ways under the circumstances and i think that's one of the well i won't talk about trump but but anyway i think so i think the the argument for continuing to fund the whl it seems to me is is pretty solid just because it looks mean spirited and very parochial if you don't apart from anything else i have to say i'm not familiar i'm somewhat surprised by morrison's uh attitude if he's saying the whl oh this is about the investigating where the origins of the virus was okay i'm with you now yeah okay so i think that it's kind of interesting uh that that marise pain would have made that kind of statement about having an independent investigation into where the virus originated uh i don't think it was necessary to take for australia to take quite such a high profile uh striking of attitudes uh in relation to our principal trading partner perhaps that displays a craven lack of backbone on my part but it it seemed to be the the chinese will undoubtedly see this as australia acting acting as a kind of stalking horse for the united states doing their dirty work us ingratiating ourselves with the americans uh and various other things and there's a bit in that of course historically so you can understand why they might think that but uh but i don't really think that at the moment agonizing about where it came from is the most important thing doing something about it and stopping it would seem to be uh more important uh it seems to me good thanks mark and next question relates to what's happening on the international scene while we the general public uh all highly engaged and preoccupied with COVID-19 so what else is happening in the world of note that we should be focusing on you mean other than the coronavirus coronavirus well i don't know that's a good question quite a lot actually uh there is still chaos mayhem in lots of the world i mean the middle east is still as big a mess as ever it's focused people's attention on other things and and perhaps that's not been a bad thing but there's still lots of people living in refugee camps and all kinds of other problems are going on around the world uh one of the my colleague gordon flake from the us asia center might be able to say more about this and i i can but one of the interesting things is what's happening with kim jong and whether he's actually uh on the brink of expiring at the moment uh or not and my suggestion was as an expert on north korea that kim kardasian should take over his lesser known sister that hasn't sort of yet thrust herself onto the international stage but i'm not sure how well i'd like to suggest you i might just throw in there the hong kong arrests as well i think that's oh yeah yep oh yes no good point now in a series yet that's that's an excellent and serious point there's no doubt that some authoritarian leaders and regimes will take advantage of this to crack down on political opponents and people they didn't have much time for anyway and i think in some ways i don't think it's too cynical to observe that the uh chinese the sorry the leadership in hong kong might have regarded the corona virus as something of a blessing in disguise in the sense that it's put a stop to all the pro the street protests and last week they arrested some prominent pro democracy activists without too much pushback from the rest of the population uh and i think other countries will be possibly replicating similar sorts of things in places like russia and other places i fear so yes there are some serious things going on as a direct consequence of this as well um next a cluster of questions about our immediate region so what do we think of the role of australia is in regards to covet affecting our pacific neighbours how are we perceived in our region and how has it affected dynamics in the in our immediate region as well yes i think uh the our reputation with our pacific neighbours is not at an all-time high i think it's fair to say because up until recently uh the possibility of our pacific neighbours disappearing beneath the waves was their principal concern in life and our unwillingness to take climate change issues terribly seriously as a country has not gone down terribly well for understandable reasons i don't know uh if or whether uh the pacific countries have been particularly badly affected by this uh virus already but i think the experience of tonga a couple of months ago when they had a measles outbreak there that nearly brought the country to a halt is a good indication of the fact that the health systems in some of these countries aren't well prepared to deal with uh these kinds of problems if australia was able to assist in a useful and meaningful way either with equipment or personnel i think that would go down very well and to be fair uh australia has got a pretty good record of intervening in some of the pacific countries to help restore law and order democratic processes and various other things so i think there's something there to build on some of that's been undermined i think by the whole business pack climate change but this could be a this could be a way of restoring our reputation uh if it becomes a more serious problem in that part of the world the other the other big problem is going to be the countries to our north uh because there are major questions about indonesia's uh capacity to respond to this particular problem uh and the indonesian health system is not great at the best of times but uh but i was making the points that we were writing today about indonesia's also thinking about spending quite a lot of money on submarines for reasons best known to the indonesian government but given the state of their health system uh it seems a bit of a no brainer to me to think that that money would be much better invested in the health system and preparing for these kinds of challenges and it would be in a in a fleet of new submarines to to deter who knows what potential uh threat to their national sovereignty uh the philippines is also uh another country that may struggle and may resort to even more authoritarian forms of uh rule than we're seeing already because the situation there i think uh it's in the early phases but it's likely to get much much worse before we see the end of it i fear so so there are some big issues and problems in our immediate neighborhood i think so if we can do something useful that would be good we've got so many questions now sadly that that couple of things we can we can go with that perhaps weren't um were alluded to in your presentation then we better call it call a halt to it but um ellen just came in with an interesting one just following on from the region is china's recent action in the south china see an active signaling and what retaliation could we expect to see from the nations in the region that are currently concerned with trying to combat covid 19 sorry what was the first bit of the question about china um an active signaling the activity in the south china of all times and what um is it signaling is it deliberate um and what response can we expect while we're all preoccupied with covid 19 one one issue is about who the we are in this question whether it's we in australia we as the quote unquote international community american allies so that makes a big difference when you're thinking about who the we is and what we should be doing in the response of this but i think there's two points to make about china and it's playing a kind of two level game or uh or something along those lines and one one aspect of this is what's been dubbed face mask diplomacy and china's ramped up the production of face masks to a hundred million a day apparently uh and they're pumping them out to all and sundry and as long as they say nice things about china and don't criticize them too much i think that's going to go down well and so they're winning friends and influencing people in that regard through their ability to be able to really crank up the uh the industrial base in china in a way that hardly anybody else in the world can do uh in the scale and speed so that's pretty impressive and it is winning friends on the other hand of course china seems to be uh ramping up the pressure on hong kong to crack down on dissent which seems to be sending some fairly unpleasant signals to taiwan because taiwan's come out of this looking pretty good because uh they're the kind of benchmark for a good response to the health crisis which will irritate uh beijing no end but some people fear that uh while america is distracted by its own internal problems that china might seem to take look to take advantage of this uh by expanding its influence in the south china sea and against taiwan in particular and there's some evidence certainly in the south china sea that china might actually be doing this having said that america and i think we have been doing freedom of navigation uh patrols uh in response so some of the some of the kind of usual uh responses and actions are being unrolled by both sides by china and the countries that are seeking to influence its behavior in different ways so in some ways uh it's kind of business as usual but that business has often been about asserting national rights and trying to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves to promote national rights and transnational interests unfortunately well mark we've got a lot of questions but time for one more which you might enjoy but um for those people who put in questions there are 28 questions there uh there is room for us to write answers as well and they're all very good questions have been alluded to in already covered in your presentation or um we might like to um to spend some more time answering those but the last one i think uh is of interest it's really um will coronavirus lead to a softer or harder brexit and uh can boros johnson mask the adverse economic consequences of brexit for the uk using this one that's from derrick so no brexit something dear to your heart so you might want to comment on what's happening in europe i don't know whether you or derrick are trying to wind me up john but uh but it doesn't take much doing on the brexit subject so i i'm a fan of the european union i think brexit is completely bonkers and i think you know it's going to be interesting to see what johnson does i mean this is his chance to actually be a half decent prime minister because the whole country i think was barricing for him when he's in hospital and hope that he wouldn't expire but his attitude to the job before before this happened he's going around shaking hands at all on sundry and say nothing to worry about nothing to see here and then he's struck down with it so there's a bit of poetic justice there and the fact that he didn't turn up to these meetings of the organization it was charged with making sure that britain was ready for this despite numerous warnings about what was going to happen i think i tell you something about johnson's attitude to the job uh to the fate of the nation and many other things and i mean i won't bore everybody with my views about brexit but i think it's one of the greatest diplomatic own goals in history of the world person which they all come to root in the forms of time but but hopefully there might be a least be able to cooperate a bit on the health fund and that will be something to salvage from the wreckage perhaps well there are so many questions of course that one leads to the future of the european union full stop and all that sort of thing so i think mark i'd like to just call call a stop to the broadcast dimension of that and thank you so much for being our very first presenter on our very first webinar in the institute here in western australia thank you have you here we're very fortunate to have you here so thank you very much and if we can answer those questions that's a really question from elizabeth brandon at the end talking about pappu and yugini etc those sorts of questions that would be good to to um formally answer with that so i'd like to thank you formally mark and look forward to when we do catch up sharing sharing a a bottle of something as a gift to you which can't hand you at the moment but um i'd like to thank everyone for participating tonight um and there's a number of participants and as usual an excellent range of questions i'm only sorry we couldn't answer them all but we've got them all recorded um a lot of work has gone into preparing this event to make sure that people could you know which we tried various forms of webinar and we like some and we didn't like others and we we liked it on this one but i particularly like to thank some of your board colleagues ash molly grogna and amy and did the whole committee for the excellent work they've put into developing a webinar so we can continue our important role of um being a forum for discussion and debate on international issues particularly in the current climate and we're harnessing technology to do that so thank you and and mark's been part of that every step of the way so i hope you enjoyed the trial tonight it just remains to point out that there are plenty of these webinars on and you can refer to them on our national website i draw your attention to one on the 30th of april which is melissa connelly tyler the former CEO of the institute and she's really talking about reasons to be positive reasons to be cheerful for those of who remember the ear and brewery and the blockheads song but um that's her fellow's address and that's been broadcast and um i'll certainly be watching that because she's quite a quite a thinker on international relations i think it'd be a very interesting talk our next event next webinar will be on the 27th of may so please watch your emails and watch our website and for a few of us watch our letterboxes to find out what's going on there we are planning to have we've all enjoyed as a committee having zoom discussions so we're going to try and harness for our members only a zoom discussion on on on international affairs and you know in some ways how we're weathering the the current term the current set of issues so please watch watch this space for that and finally if you're not a member of the institute obviously i hope you enjoyed tonight we're a membership driven organization i encourage you to join and participate be active be involved particularly at this at this stage of of our international life i think it's all the more important that we're engaged involved and and we educate ourselves and each other about what's going on around us so with that um almost perfectly timed i'll draw tonight to a close once again thank you mark thank you everyone for attending and um thanks for all the organizers we'll keep in touch all the best stay happy stay healthy stay healthy thanks cheers