 My name is Richard Mord. I'm the director of the 2020 Forum. I'm joining you from Canberra, of course, on the traditional lands of the Nambri and Nanawal people. I want to recognize right at the beginning here that our Australian audience joined us from many different parts of the country. And so today we acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands each of us meet. And I pay my respects to elders past and present. I'm really delighted to be joined in conversation today by Gareth Evans and Julie Bishop to close out the Leadership Forum. Gareth and Julie really need little introduction. They both had incredibly distinguished careers in Australian public life. Both were Australian foreign ministers amongst other senior roles. And of course there's one more important thing they have in common. They are the current and immediate past chancellors of the Australian National University. So Julie and Gareth, welcome. Thank you. Delano. Gareth, of course, founded the ANU Crawford Leadership Forum. And so I'm very grateful that he's agreed to be part of this final session, notwithstanding his claim to me that this time he was really and truly working his way into retirement. And I'm equally grateful that Julie has continued Gareth's strong commitment to this forum. What I hope to do today is to cover some of the major issues discussed in this year's conference and also in the public panels we hosted under the Leadership Forum banner. There's an awful lot of ground to cover. I'm going to begin by asking Julie and Gareth for some thoughts on some of the domestic issues we've been discussing over the past two weeks or so. And then I'm going to move on to our rather untidy, unruly world at the moment and Australia's place in it. And just a reminder that you are able to submit questions to our panel throughout the discussion using the question and answer function in your toolbar. And if you have a look at the chat box, you'll see instructions on how to pose your question. So let's get into the substance. Julie and Gareth, I want to begin with the idea of trust. So last year's Crawford Leadership Forum had a very compelling, unifying theme and that theme was trust or to be more precise, the lack of it in Australia and globally in parliaments, in governments, in institutions, even in the idea of democracy. Now, fast forward a year and particularly at a really remarkable and incredible six months of this year. And one of the themes, really striking themes running through this Leadership Forum was that trust is back in Australia at least, in our government, in parliament, in our own ability if you like to get things done well. And you are both veterans of our very competitive if not combative political process. Do you also sense that rebound in trust? Do you think that our political systems, federal and state can take advantage of this unique moment and really get some hard things done to make Australia better and stronger for the future or will we revert to the mean? I might ask Julie to start off and then Gareth. Thanks, Richard and congratulations for continuing the Crawford Leadership Forum digitally online. I would have been very disappointed if COVID had prevented this from going ahead. So it's been a great turnout. Thank you. Look, I think that the current popularity of the government and governments around Australia is because people appreciate the leadership that has been shown and let's face it, Australia has done extraordinarily well to date. I think it's a great change in responding to this unprecedented pandemic. But we shouldn't forget that our political system is founded on a model of an opposition scrutinising and challenging the government. So it's inherently prone to conflict and it is an adversarial system and that's entrenched. There should be a contest of ideas and challenges to the status quo and orthodoxy to ensure we get the best possible outcomes for the nation. I think what has been destructive in the past decade, most of the really intense political conflict has occurred within the parties rather than between them and that's led to short-term leadership and instability that has in the past undermined public confidence in government. But today, from the national perspective, I think that national cabinet has been a breakthrough. We've seen the rise again of competitive federalism in a very competitive way. But I am pretty skeptical of any great sea change of attitudes among our elected representatives from this crisis, although I'm always happy to be surprised. Well, I agree. Look, I agree absolutely that we have seen a quite extraordinary reversion of trust. Governments, parliamentarians and the experts have all earned that trust by their performance and the people have given it. And Angus Campbell, I think, has said this nicely when he said Australians are very often at their best in circumstances of adversity. And we've seen a spirit of responsibility. We've seen a spirit of compassion. We've seen the capacity for actual effectiveness, which has been missing certainly to the last 10 years or so, as Julie just said, in terms of our national politics. Whether this can be sustained after the immediate crisis is over is, of course, a very big question. I think we've got three big tests. But an executive government level and a media test, there's going to be energy policy. The opposition has been offering in a spirit of bipartisanship to try and readdress that absolutely central fundamental issue and our policy environment. So far with not many signs of positive response, but let's keep our fingers crossed. I think another test will be in terms of parliamentary behavior. If we don't recognize once and for all that the public has fed up to the back teeth of the third-rate board of all the playground politics of parliamentary question time and the parties don't realize there's absolutely no benefit at all continuing that sort of childish adolescent sort of visible behavior, then I think we haven't learned very much that we should have learned from this crisis. And I hope some confidence is given to Tony Smith, the very first-rate speaker of the House of Reps to actually come up with a reform program for the conduct of question time and parliament more generally that will enable that adversarial tradition to continue as it must on policy issues and on competence and accountability issues, but hopefully without the playground politics that has blighted the atmosphere for so long. I think the third test as to whether trust is just a passing phenomenon or is really now going to come back into our system will be for the Federation itself. And if that national cabinet can really, as Julie said, be continued to be able to be made to work, I think that'll be a huge step forward in improving the quality of our politics and governance in this country. Coag was a bit of a bust in all sorts of ways that have just become bureaucratized and not very effective at all. We've seen a new way of doing things and developing that coherence at the leadership level across the Federation which we hadn't seen before. So fingers crossed about all of those things, but even though I'm an incorrigible optimist about most things, my optimism is tempered a little bit on all those fronts. Thanks, Gareth. Julie, can I just ask you a subset perhaps of that question? Jane Holton in one of our discussions during the week said that Australians generally were actually fairly compliant when governments were asking them to do tough things in crises. But that really struck me because I've never really thought of Australians as being particularly compliant. Do you think that we showed some sense of a real national character, I suppose, in the way we managed through the COVID crisis? I think that Australians understand when issues are explained to them what it is they need to do. And in this instance, the constant press conferences that our premiers and chief ministers and prime minister and other ministers heard to explain to people what was going on worked. Don't treat them as fools. Tell them what's going on and what needs to be done, and the Australian people will respond. My concern now, though, is that we are making decisions, it seems, based on some arbitrary rules that don't make sense. And that's the other thing. The Australian people are very sensible. So if they're being asked to do things that don't make sense, they'll find it difficult to agree. And we're now getting to a stage in the COVID response where we must ask the Australian people to start taking personal responsibility for their own health and the risks that they now understand are associated with COVID. Because some of these things, like arbitrary rules, saying you can only have five people in a restaurant or 10 people based on nothing other than a number rather than a percentage of the maximum size of the space, that sort of thing just doesn't make sense. So I think the Australian people respond brilliantly when they understand what is being asked of them. And it does come down to a matter of communication. So far, most people have understood what is required, but now I think people should be asked to take personal responsibility for the health consequences of their actions. Okay. I agree absolutely with that, but just to have the qualification, we shouldn't overdo the orgy of self-congratulation about how well we behaved as a community and how the toilet paper wars were not very impressive. Some of the calling out of Chinese Australians and some of that resurgence of outright racist sentiment has been very depressing to see, albeit at the extreme margin, and some of the Bondi beach behavior and so on hasn't been that smart. But Julie's absolutely right. If you've got decent leadership, quality leadership, telling people a quality story that they can understand and relate to, they will behave well. Australians are really pretty good at doing this sort of stuff. And I've got a lot of basic confidence in the community. Thanks, Gareth. Look, I just want to stay for a minute with this idea of how much of a moment is COVID for breaking out of some of the log jams we have on policy in Australia. And Gareth, you mentioned energy policy as one of your three big tests. We had a really good public panel on climate change and energy and towards the end of what was a pretty agreeable conversation, Emma heard from the investor group on climate change, I think trying to keep everyone on. I said, well, look, Australians tend to agree on what we have to do. We know we have to get emissions down. That's absolutely important. And we more or less know how we can do that, but yet and yet we still don't manage to get very far on policy. And she asked rhetorically, well, why do we still have this very dysfunctional gridlock debate at the national level? So, you know, is that debate fixable? Is COVID a moment to break out of what Emma called the hard-wired politics of climate change in Australia, especially around energy? Julie? Well, look, the debate is fixable by the Australian people. Much of the polling about public attitudes towards climate change lacks a level of credibility because it is usually zero cost, whereby people are asked about various policy options while assuming there's no impact on power bills. And politicians are well aware of this as they know there's a significant price sensitivity around energy costs and they exploit those fears. There needs to be an honest conversation with the Australian public about the costs and benefits of energy and climate policy so that people can make informed decisions. And we've just been talking about how the Australian people do respond when things are clearly communicated to them. The closest that we have come to a bipartisan consensus was when Malcolm Turnbull proposed the National Energy Guarantee. That, sad to say, was sabotaged by members of the Liberal Party for political purposes. But I think that there is an opportunity for us to come to a bipartisan position again. But we have to bring the Australian people with us. And as Gareth said, we're optimists, so why not try? I think we can leverage off the COVID crisis to this extent. It enables us to tell the story that there are really some big existential threats out that the whole world faces. Pandemics are one of them. Nuclear weapons catastrophes and other obviously, climate change is the third. And it won't go away and it's actually critical that story be constantly told. And the kind of coherence and responsibility that we showed over the response to the pandemic is overdue to be shown when it comes to a rational response to climate. It's not just America getting the technology right, although that's very part of it, and getting incentives to get that right. There got to be price signals in there somewhere. There's got to be some kind of a complicated across-the-board response. Malcolm Turnbull was dead right with the NEG. It was very good policy. It was bipartisan while it lasted within your party, Julie. And we've had enough of the triumph on that issue as on so many other films. So let's just get a little bit of sanity back into this, and there is an obvious way forward, starting with a resurrection of the NEG. I agree with that. All right, well, there you go. There's bipartisanship right there. Just staying with the theme of trust, I've got a question from one of our audience, from Philip Ivanov, who is a colleague of mine at the Asia Society. He's the CEO of the Asia Society. And his question is, will the resurgence of trust in our national governments be extended to international institutions, i.e. the multilateral system? And is this a moment, perhaps, of more hope for the multilateral system and global cooperation, which is under immense pressure at the moment? We're going to kind of come to this later, but I think that's an interesting way into the question. So maybe Gareth, if I could ask you to start with that and then go on to Julie. Well, the beginning of wisdom here is to recognize that there are just so many problems, the big three existential ones I just mentioned, plus international criminal trafficking behavior, unregulated population flows, refugees, piracy, terrorism, all of these things are incapable of solution by any company, any country acting alone, or even the big guys acting on a bilateral basis. They require multilateral cooperation, otherwise they're not going to be sold. That's a shriekingly obvious thing to say, but that story just really has to be told over and over again because one possible outcome of the COVID pandemic is for there to be an acceleration of that preexisting trend towards a certain aggressive nationalism and a tendency to downplay and completely disrespect international institutions. We've got to reverse that. I'm starting with obviously the World Health Organization itself, try to recreate some confidence in the behavior of the UN at the highest level in the Security Council. There's so many other things, the World Trade Organization. I think there are big responsibilities for Australia because we've been such key players in developing a role for the G20 in policy making, economic policy making, that that's capable of extending on a wider field. There's big opportunities multilaterally in our own region of the institution which we helped to build the East Asian Summit. So really this should come center front back to Australian policy. I mean, Scott Morrison showed a lot of resistance to that with his speech a few months ago before the crisis and the pandemic about negative globalism. Since then there's been obviously some rethinking about all of that and there's much more reference in government rhetoric now to the absolute necessity to get those institutions working again. But so long as the Trump administration continues an office in America with its behavior, generating such a negative responses elsewhere, it's gonna be very hard sell, very hard call but it's absolutely critical. Julie, just like Gareth, you spend quite a lot of time in the multilateral system as foreign minister and dealt with some tough issues like MH17 and lead campaigns including on the Human Rights Council. What's your sense of the future of multilateralism? Gareth mentioned the recent speeches by the foreign minister and the trade minister which are really quite determined, I think, restatements of center ground on Australian foreign policy. What did you make of those speeches? Well, Richard, as you well know, one of the central themes of the 2017 White Paper was the defense of the rules-based international order and the framework of treaties and agreements and norms and laws and institutions built up since the Second World War has the express purpose of preventing a return to global conflict and it was designed to prevent more powerful nations from imposing their will on smaller nations. And Australia along with the rest of the world has been a beneficiary of that order and our interests are absolutely aligned with its maintenance and in the absence of US global leadership, I think that Australia does have a role to build groupings of like-minded nations to advocate and defend the rules-based order. I don't think benign neglect will suffice at this time. There's no doubt, as Gareth said, that the multilateral order is under strain and this is evident in many ways. I mean, the failure of the WTO to finalise a new round of trade liberalisation, the US withdrawing from the WTO and withholding of fees from the UN and the breakdown of the UN Security Council mandated agreement with Iran and China's disregard for the independence of unclosses, ruling on South China Sea, et cetera. So it's not perfect and nations are cherry picking those parts of the international rules-based order and the multilateral organisations that suit them. And yet if these institutions and if this order didn't exist, we'd have to create it. I reckon a good start would be to reform the UN Security Council. I mean, let's say in B, where only five of the 193 member states of the UN are effectively shielded from Security Council sanctions and the so-called veto power needs to be revisited as it means no sanctions can be imposed on any of the P5. I mean, would the US have invaded Iraq? Would Russia have invaded Crimea? Would China expand its presence in the South China Sea? Had they risked action by the Security Council? Maybe it would have just given them pause for thought. Well, good luck with Julie, good luck. I spent three years of my life as Foreign Minister trying to mobilise an international constituency and build a consensus around a new model for Security Council membership. But so long as all of them hold vetoes on their own future, I think that's going to be a bit of a bust. But look, the point was made a number of times during the sessions, including most recently, I think Cori Shaker this morning. But middle powers like Australia really do have a big responsibility to step up in this environment. We do have a track record over decades now of actual leadership in building international coalitions to address these, what Kote Anani used to call, problems without passports, things that are incapable of resolution by individual countries or small groups of countries, can only be done on a bigger basis. There's the Oslo and Ottawa processes initiated by Canada and Norway and the Australian-initiated Cambodian peace process is a good example of that kind of middle power initiative. Lots and lots in the arms control area and more generally. Look, there's stucks of things you can do with a creative and energetic approach to this. And you can build up pressure, which really does make, puts the big guys on the back feet. I mean, at the end of the day, you're incredibly dependent on the US and China and so on. But you can generate momentum for an awful lot of necessary change in the global system by that active, effective, creative, middle-power diplomacy. And I think that was a theme that came right through many of the sessions that I heard and I'd certainly want to reiterate in this wrapping up. Yeah, it did. You're absolutely right, Gareth. It did come through very strongly. But I just wanted to interrogate this point a bit. I also want to go back to a memorable turn of phrase that Kevin Rudd used in the big picture panel on global order when he was talking not so much about just the multilateral system, but the global order more largely. And he talked about the pressures on it and he said, well, the rest of us could either sit back with the popcorn and watch the international order grind into nothing, or we could do something about it. And that's where his point about middle powers came in. It's where your point about middle powers comes in. And we're hearing right across the foreign policy debate at the moment about a space or an opportunity for middle powers to do more. And we're seeing some live examples of that in Australian diplomacy over the past few weeks. But the question I wanted to ask you, Gareth, and Julie, I also want to bring you in on this. I mean, what are the limits of that? Can we really, a group of middle powers, really substitute for the absence of global leadership by the United States at the moment? Are we doing anything much more than perhaps trying to hold up the wall while we wait for a change in policy approach by particularly by the United States? Well, probably you're right about that. I mean, middle powers by definition lack economic leverage. They lack military leverage. They've only got the power of persuasion, the power of coalition building, the power of pressure through numbers, if you like, through effective use of the international system with a bit of shaming along the way of laggedly behavior or irrational behavior. But if you're as immune to shame as the Trump administration currently is, that's not going to get you fantastically far. But look, we've shown, I mean, take the TPP, the Transpacific Partnership on Trade Policy, a classic multilateral trade exercise in which the abdication of engagement by the US didn't stop that proceeding. And there's lots of other things of that kind around the place you can put together and if you keep working at it. This responsibility protect thing that I was much involved in helping to create 15 years ago now internationally. There is a sense in which just staking out the moral high ground on these issues where the self evidently a case for international engagement in that case responding to genocide and mass atrocity crimes. You can create an environment where even the biggest and toughest guys do feel embarrassed, do feel awkward about articulating their obdurate positions. And bit by bit, the culture can in fact change over time. So it's often quite hard to deliver bigger international treaties unless you've got the big guys really prepared to come aboard. But there's an awful lot of other stuff you can and should be doing. Julie? I think that's right. As I said, benign neglect of the international rules based on it just doesn't suffice at this time. And I would be working to build more groupings of like-minded nations. When I say like-minded, I don't mean all Western democracy. There are plenty of issues where different political models agree on issues like the number of countries that signed up to the Paris climate agreement, for example. But we should be working with countries like the United Kingdom and Japan and South Korea and Germany and others to continue to push for the support of the rules-based order or indeed reforms to the rules-based order that will ensure that it continues in some form or another. And when it comes to, say, the United States and China, we've just got to continue our long history of pragmatic engagement with the United States as our most important investment and security partner. And China is our major trading partner. So I think Australia and other like-minded countries can be more assertive in calling out behavior from either China or the United States that we believe isn't constructive or supportive of the international order. Okay, thanks, Julie. Look, I've got to, you mentioned the security council and I've got a question. It's actually about campaigning to get on security council and probably like me, you're not following it as closely as you once did. But the question which was from Susan Harris-Rimmer was about Canada losing its bid for a security council place this week. And Julie, whether you had any reflections on what that might mean for our own campaign before I am struggling to bring the date to mine. You know, it's not for a little while now. I think it's 2028. I mean, it's all in the timing. Who did Canada lose to? I don't know, to be honest. Well, for any one of the robust liberal democracies to lose a campaign to get on the UN Security Council can mean many things. I mean, it could depend whether they were beaten by a country that hasn't been on the Security Council before. It could be the timing, it could be their campaign. There are a whole range of reasons as to why one does or doesn't get on the Security Council. I know it can be a shattering experience for those who've worked so hard to do it and then don't get there. In Australia's case, we looked at the next possible vacancy that would enable us from Western Europe and others, because, you know, we're in that weird grouping of Western European nations. That's what we have to compete against. And we saw that the next possible opportunity where we wouldn't be sort of knocking out Canada or knocking out New Zealand or something like that was in about 2027, 28, something like that. So I know we, as an opposition, were greatly concerned about Kevin Rudd's attempt to get on the Security Council in a very short period of time. He only gave us two or three years, and we felt that it was going to cost a hell of a lot of time and money to be able to leapfrog others who'd been in the campaign mode for a lot longer. To his credit and to the credit of all involved, Australia did get on the Security Council in 2013-14. And I used our position on the Security Council for pushing the MH17 outcomes. Absolutely, unapologetically, used our position, including as president of the Security Council, to marshal the international support for entry into Ukraine to recover the bodies and the belongings of those who were killed on MH17 and to get investigations underway. Now, we could not have been able to marshal that international support, I feel, had we not been sitting around the Security Council eyeballing the Russian UN representative and all others on board. So I'd like to hear more about why Canada didn't get on the Security Council, but there'll probably be a multitude of reasons for it. I think Julie's rewriting a little bit of history when she talks about the reasons for the coalition opposing the Security Council campaign. I think that was another triumph of the trogues, but let's move on. I was there, you were there. I know what was going on inside the party at the time. Yeah, where she's manifestly not rewriting history was in the quality of the performance once we got there. And I do congratulate Julie and the Department on the way in which you were so effective in that role over two years, not only on the MH17, but humanitarian access to Syria and a whole bunch of other things. We really made our presence felt there. And it's one of the reasons why I keep talking about so often the role of middle powers and the utility of multilateral diplomacy and the absolute necessity of Australia to stay engaged. I take it from that that you would agree that it's worth Australia every now and then trying to get on the Security Council, even though... I mean, there's no doubt about that every dozen years or so. We ought to be there and our performance in the past and titles is to be there. And it's an absolute matter on which it's a real test of bipartisanship. It's another one of the tests to add to how will we behave I think in the future as a responsible nation that we can in fact unite around that issue. Anyway, I think we're in furious agreement about that. All right, I want to move on to China and America. It's really the biggest dynamic shaping global order now. We're in a period of deepening competition, if not confrontation between these two great powers. So trajectory looks ominous in terms of sharpening competition. And there are some risks in that for Australia. And increasingly, we're seeing this more competitive relationship not just between China and the United States, but between China and the West. Are we sort of inevitably heading to an extended period of very adversarial competitive relations that are political, economic, technological, ideological? Are there off-ramps? And how do you see the implications for Australia? Maybe, Gareth, you could start and then Julie afterwards. Well, I do see strategic competition continuing, obviously, between the United States and China, whatever happens with the election of the US president. But I don't think you ought to be too worried about that turning into full-scale confrontation. I think the last thing China wants in terms of its own domestic objectives is to engage in a full-scale hot war. And it's manifestly nobody else's interest to go down that particular path. I think we're going to see an awful lot of creeping attempts to exercise influence and to make ground. But I think there are limits to the extent to which China will push it, particularly if the rest of us do push back in a pretty consistent and concerted way when there is that kind of external overreach of the kind that's been, obviously, in the South China Sea and the kind we've been seeing a little bit elsewhere as well. My response to the whole China thing is basically the bex and a good lie down because I do think the Sinophobia dimension in Australian politics has accelerated beyond endurance in the last few months, perhaps been a little bit by the COVID crisis, but driven an awful lot also by messages coming from Washington, which I think we've been far too receptive to in an environment where we've got to make our own way and not just be seen to be an echo of the Washington system, particularly under the current administration. I think it's a matter of three things, really. One is recognizing the legitimacy of a lot of China's behavior in an attempt to play itself into the global environment as someone who's part of the rulemaking business, not just a real taker. That was absolutely inevitable with this growing economic strength that was going to want a greater geopolitical role. We're seeing that. So recognize it doesn't mean tolerating bad behavior, indefensible behavior, breaches of international law. Of course not. And it doesn't mean being silent in the face of any of that. But it does mean recognizing some of that reality and recognizing that tectonic plates really have shifted. And any hopes for US global primacy are really just not realistic in the present environment. And the sooner the Americans stop talking about primacy, predominance, leadership in the sense of controlling the system, the faster, the better chance we have of resuming some kind of rational normality in our relationship. I think the second thing is to be very careful about the language we use ever since Malcolm Turnbull overreached a bit a couple of years ago, which hasn't been forgotten in Beijing. There's been a disposition for the language to get ever more raucous rather than calm, moderate rational. There's plenty of ways in which you can express disagreement without going over the top of that. Words are bullets in diplomacy and you've got to be used very carefully. The third thing I think is to focus on areas that can potentially unite rather than divide. Just thinking solely in terms of China as an economic relationship, America as the security one, is an inadequate way of thinking about the world as we now find it. There's a whole bunch of these global public goods issues, regional public goods issues. We've listed them before, the existential issues, the criminal trafficking issues, the population movements issues and terrorism and all the rest of it. The whole bunch of issues in which China has shown, despite some missteps along the way, has shown a basic disposition to play a reasonably responsible international role. Australia has itself, as we've discussed already, a long track record of initiatives, engagement in those public goods areas, good international citizenship areas, if you like. I think there's lots and lots of common ground that we could be looking to establish with China, which would take some of the heat of the very intense relationship and the rather ugly relationship that has become both politically and economically. Thanks, Gareth, but Julie, before I get you to weigh in, an informed member of our audience has answered our question about who Canada lost to. So for your interest, they lost to Norway and to Ireland. So just onto China, Julie, I think I partly agree with how Gareth outlined the challenge there, but only partly because it seems to me our problem with China is not just that, like any great power, it wants to now exert itself in the international system and to have a stronger say in shaping how that system works. We also have a problem with the fact that China under sheeting pings become much more authoritarian, quite a lot more ideological. And to me, as someone who came out of the trenches, if you like, the diplomatic trenches, its foreign policy had a very increasingly zero-sum feel to it. And I think you were Foreign Minister when really we were just really having to start grapple with the implications of this for Australian foreign policy and for some of our domestic policy settings. So I think you use the word pragmatic, but how pragmatic can we be? How do you manage a pragmatic approach to a nation that is not just now very powerful but very, very different? Well, first, I think the increasingly hostile competition between the US and China, which is brewing towards confrontation isn't inevitable. I mean, blames for the misstep can be shared and China has taken a particularly belligerent stance under President Xi and China currently has open disputes and low-level conflicts in some cases with the Philippines and Vietnam and Malaysia and Indonesia and India. And there's this increasing tension with the US and with some in Europe and Australia and some other nations. So my sense is that most countries don't want any conflict or confrontation with China, but that's not often reciprocated. And China does respond to any criticism with threats of economic retaliation and placing nations in the so-called freezer and official meetings are scaled back or not held. And I think these challenges of working with China are going to be magnified as the relations between China and the US continue to deteriorate. And I'm afraid that there's been a hardening against China across the US system that will survive the Trump presidency regardless of the election result later this year. I mean, at one point, Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat, one of the Democrat candidates was promising to be tougher on China than Trump was. And I remember the words of US Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last September and in prior to the COVID insults and all of that, when he spoke of the great fracture, you know, a fracture in the US-China relationship that would result in the creation of two separate and competing worlds, each with their own dominant currency and trade and financial rules, their own internal, or their own internet, their own artificial intelligence capacities, their own zero-sum geopolitical and military strategies. So he was sort of talking about a decoupling between the United States and China. Now, a slow and managed level of decoupling would mean Australia had an opportunity to negotiate with both countries to balance our interests. But any rapid and more chaotic decoupling would pose a significant challenge to any Australian government and indeed nations around the world. In dealing with China, in my experience, it is possible to have very robust exchanges with Chinese counterparts, providing that occurs privately and face-to-face rather than through the media. And of course, we should spell out our red lines and responses to any transgressions, but directly to China's leadership. And they do appreciate the honesty even if they object to the message. Look, Richard, can I just come in on this? Yes, I agree very much with you about the increasing authoritarian and ugly character of the Xi Jinping regime. I'm neither naive nor comfortable about that and believe absolutely that we've got to make very clear where we stand on everything that China is doing that's indefensible both internally, according not to our values, but universal values in the Universal Declaration and so on, and of course, externally. I've never been backward in arguing that we should be in the context of South China Sea, for example, engage ourselves in freedom of navigation operations alongside those highly contested bits of territory, preferably not doing it with the United States because we don't want the Deputy Chair of TAG. If we could do it with Indonesia, if we could do it with Japan or South Korea or Vietnam or India, with all of whom we're very sensibly developing counterweight relationships at the moment, then we should. We should ask ourselves just, you know, it's all very well to respond in this way, but we have to live with China. In the context of even the Soviet Union, with whom we had the West had zero economic relations, but even at the worst and most ugly in the authoritarian behavior in the Soviet Union, we were still negotiating nuclear arms control agreements with them and we have to keep those agendas going because if you let these relationships slide just by tuperation beyond just competition into outright confrontation, it's not obvious where you end up except with a very serious bunch of tears. So we've got to take a deep breath and deal with these characters. Behind closed doors can be very often more effective, I totally agree, publicly on human rights stuff in particular, but we've got to hold our own on those key issues of principle, both in terms of international law and decent economic behavior, but we do need to become and measured about it and not just get ourselves into this historical mode that has become totally endemic now in the United States on both sides of politics should write about that and is becoming ever more entrenched here in Australia and that seriously worries me. But it's not a Cold War scenario and I know you agree with me on this, Gareth and I agree with you. People talk about it being a Cold War. No, it's not. It's entirely different because Russia at that time was kind of living in its own parallel universe. China is part of the global economy, a massively important part of the global economy. There are well over 100 nations that count China as their number one trading partner. So it's a different scenario and those kind of historical analogies are not helpful in this regard. And good luck with your decoupling with the United States too. I mean, they joined at the wallet because that's the reality. And it's going to be very difficult to unwind that except at the extreme margin. So get used to that reality and live with it in Australia and moderate our behavior accordingly while not abdicating our principles. Well, this is a great discussion and it goes right to the heart of well, the biggest foreign policy challenge for Australia. I do think we are headed for some kind of partial disengagement in some sectors. I think you'll see that most clearly in the technological sector. But I agree, Gareth and Julie, that it's hard to see any wholesale economic decoupling. I just don't see how that's possible. And in any event, most American companies don't want to see it. Now, I've got a couple of questions on China and it's really great that our audience is engaged. So I'm going to depart from my own still very long list of questions that we haven't got to to give you a couple more. One is from Andrew Parker and it's the equivalent of giving you a hand grenade with the pin pulled out and I'm going to ask it anyway. And if you don't want to answer the question specifically about the specific instance that it perhaps goes to this challenging this challenge that you've already begun to talk about which is how Australia manages a very difficult relationship. Anyway, the question is, was there a different way for Australia to handle the call for a COVID inquiry? Did Australia have to do it in the way we did? Julie, why don't you start? Thank you. Thank you, Andrew Parker, for that question. Look, clearly it is logical for there to be some kind of inquiry investigation study into how this pandemic came about. I mean, let's face it, the World Health Organization has spent decades preparing for a global pandemic and when it occurred, I think everybody was left wanting. So there are some serious lessons that have to be learned because one thing we know, COVID's not going away anytime soon unless we find a vaccine that covers whatever form COVID can mutate into or there are antiviral therapies or there's this magical herd immunity which isn't going to happen either. So we're going to have to live with this looming risk for some time. Inevitably, logically, there has to be an inquiry. However, I would ask for what I could achieve rather than demand what I couldn't get and there was no way that we could ever demand weapons inspector level investigations without the backing of the Security Council. I mean, I'm going to use the phrase weapons inspectors. So that means marching into a country and demanding to see their laboratories, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you can't get that mandate unless the Security Council gives it to you. China's on the Security Council. You weren't going to get it. And there's no way Russia would have agreed with that, you know, ideologically. So ask for what you can get. And I would have called for an investigation. Absolutely. I would have had like-minded countries backing it if I felt it was something that Australia had to lead. I would have had, you know, all the Europeans and Japanese and South Koreans. And let's face it, Australia's performance in the COVID space has been pretty good. We've got lessons to share. So we're in a good space to talk about it. But if you wanted to actually achieve an investigation that enabled you to go into China and visit the Wuhan laboratories or anything else, you have to do it with China's cooperation. And the only way you're going to get that is talking to China behind the scenes. And what we've ended up with is an investigation that, of course, involves the WHO, whereas the Prime Minister had called for an investigation that was independent of the WHO. One of the great joys about the former Foreign Minister's Club is that you find yourself very often in furious agreement with someone who's been on the other side of politics. And I'm in furious agreement with Julie about that. Of course, there was a case for lessons learned exercise, not only as to the initial outbreak, but to the subsequent management of it by many countries, not least the United States. And of course, it's perfectly sensible for Australia to have been a voice calling for some kind of investigation inquiry of that kind, lessons learned inquiry. But this one had zero operational planning and zero diplomatic planning. And it was a complete bust in terms of the actual delivery because what was delivered, as Julie just said, was something very different from that which was talked about by Australia. In fact, it was delivered by the EU with Australian support rather than the other way around. So despite Joe Hockey's triumphalism in the session this morning about this is a great achievement of Australian diplomacy, think again, Joe, this was a very badly handled, very silly addition to the list of provocations which we've given gratuitously to China in an environment where we're not very sensible to do just that. All right. Well, you took the hand grenade without the pin. I want to turn to America now. I've got a question from Doug Keane, which I think is a great question, but I'm going to ask a question of my own about America and then I'll come to Doug's question. So we've talked a lot about China and how can we manage that relationship and how can we influence China? I wanted to ask a similar question about the United States. We had a really good panel discussion on the US this morning and in that discussion, I said it seemed to me that at one level the relationship was as warm as ever and that at least from my point of view, our alliance is perhaps more important than it's ever been as a hedge against uncertainty and especially against the risk of a more nationalist China. Yet on many policy issues, the gap between Canberra and Washington has widened and we're often polite about that, but it's undeniable that the list of policy disagreements we have, whether it's on trade or climate change, has broadened. So China's hard to influence, but America is also hard to influence and if you were back in the foreign minister's seat, how would you view our relationship in the United States and how should we manage that? Maybe Julie and then Gareth. Julie? I think I said earlier that we need to continue our pragmatic engagement with the United States. They are and will continue to be our most important investment in security and intelligence partner and our history is long and productive and I don't need to restate the obvious that whomever is in the White House and whomever is in the Lodge, the relationship will continue to be deep and strong. I think the United States is in a world of pain at present it's a very fractured country. You have the so-called elites as it's been put in metropolitan centres of New York and Washington and San Francisco and LA and maybe elsewhere and then the rural and regional areas in the United States who feel marginalised and they feel that they've been left out of the benefits of globalisation and then there's this chronic partisanship in the US political system that's not helping anything. We've seen the tensions over the race protests, the Black Lives Matter protests and that has become a platform for a whole range of grievances not just entrenched racism but you're seeing people with grievances about the growing inequality in the United States, the unemployment numbers and I think the United States is going to have a very honest conversation with their political leaders and their communities about the kind of country they want to be so deeply fractured. I mean, no political leader has all of the answers in terms of balancing interests but the US electoral cycle I think is adding to an atmosphere of a bitterly divided country so Australia has a role to play in offering support, offering advice. I never shied away from letting my US counterpart know what I thought of some of their ideas and some of the things that Australia thought would be helpful so I'm concerned about what's happening in the United States at present and the acrimonious exchanges in their politics is something new for the US and it's a great country, it will come through it but I'm not sure that this actual presidential election is going to provide any answers in the short term so whomever wins so I think Australia has got to continue with honest and pragmatic advice and engagement with the US administration. If I were back in the chair I'd certainly be seeking to maintain the alliance not walking away from it because it unquestionably has in the past and will continue in the future to generate benefits for us in terms of defence logistics, in terms of intelligence and in terms of having a great player notionally at least at one side if we ever run into serious, serious, serious trouble in our part of the world but I'd be doing that without any great confidence that the Americans, even with a change of administration are going to be there in the future for us should we really need them. I think we've overstated the benefits of that alliance in the past in terms of capacity and will to come to our support in the case of a really existential threat emerging I don't think Americans are going to be in that business they manifestly perceive it to be in their own interest to do that which may or may not be the case it's some unspecified contingency in the future I think we have to position ourselves much more than we have to live as Hugh White has often said to live in Asia without America being the serious presence the serious counterweight that it has been I'd be placing much more emphasis on building our relations as the present government is sensibly with India with Vietnam as well as obviously Indonesia and the traditional allies like the Republic of Korea and Japan and trying to develop our confidence in maintaining some stability and balance in the region on the basis of those relationships much more than relying to the extent that we have on the United States I found even in a much gentler time in terms of the alliance relationship when we had a president in my time that we could trust across all the parties we didn't have this association with the Menagerie of Uglies which Donald Trump has made his modus operandi it was much easier then to deal effectively with the United States who were very professional and very effective diplomatically but I found that we did best when we asserted our own independence and made it absolutely clear that we weren't there as reflexively supportive of every alleyway the Americans wanted to take us down I remember issues like most favoured nation relationship with China technical issue, long forgotten but we adopted a position which was very very hostile to that which the Americans wanted to us to adopt and very soon after that I had a phone call from James Baker the then secretary of state saying well you guys have demonstrated that you're not going to jump to our tune can you take the lead on the chemical weapons convention issue because we're too buggy and ugly to do it and you're now seen by your behaviour as sufficiently independent from us to be able to carry the water on this which you please do say that's just one little example of how much more effective I think we were in the bilateral relationship and broader a field when we maintain a fierce sense of independence rather than being excessively differential in a way I have to say I think the whole national security intelligence community is being excessively differential to the United States at the moment and I wish I would like to see a little bit of pulling back from that Richard I wish you were still around in your previous role because when you wrote that white paper for the government in 2017 I think there was quite a flavour of less reliance on America in there which I thought was very salutary whether or not Julie you wanted to convey that impression that message I don't know but you certainly did to me and I thought it was very very sensible politics well Richard and I take joint credit for that white paper yes he was the author and the person who gathered the information but like any fine public servant he didn't do it without a direction from his minister anyway white paper was a report of government not from the department I wouldn't yield any ground on that either I would really like to debate a number of the points that you made but I'm not going to do that because that would be indulgent as a chair and we're running out of time we'll do that on another occasion I did just want to go quickly to this question by Doug Keane Doug Keane a thoughtful question from one of our most thoughtful strategists I've just lost her for a minute here we go Joe Hockey said this morning that the US would defeat China because of its values how much do values count relative to power or to put it another way is it important to be liked relative to being feared in Asia Gareth do you want to start and then maybe Julie Values are important but I wish to God we would stop talking about our values about western values and talk rather about the universal values that are enshrined in the UN Charter in the universal declaration when we talk about our values it's in itself cultural values different emphasis I don't know if I overstate it but there is a commuterian character about the East Asian cultures which we don't share in the western liberal democracies and if we keep talking about our values being the guiding principle then we're just going to further generate the backlash where you can stick your values where you like we're going to pursue ours so I really do think talking about universal values talking about that concept of good international citizenship and finding ground because this foreign policy international relations are about much more than simple geopolitical strategic security interests on the one hand and economic interests on the other we do have common interests in all that litany of global and regional public goods issues climate change pandemics and so on that we spoke about before and it is a kind of moral issue of values issue if you like to take those issues seriously want to do something about them and want to find cooperative strategies with others by all means call out breaches of universal values criminal justice systems that are manifestly unjust in the way in which they operate discrimination against minorities of the kind we've seen with the Uighurs in Xinjiang call out the continuing mistreatment of Tibetans and their culture by all means do that do it in ways that are productive or at least not counterproductive by all means but do it on the basis of these are global standards we're talking about not just us wanting to assert our values to make ourselves feel better and I think you know I'm sorry Julie but with your side of politics and increasingly with my side of politics I know Penny Wong's on the stick too I hear values values values all the time but what I hear very often is just an assertion of important principles in a way that's bound to get up people's noses rather than actually help the people that we're trying to insist so I'd be pretty careful about using that language I think we debated this long into the night Richard when we were putting together the white paper I mean our values reflect who we are as a nation but I'm not talking about our values as anything but Australian characteristics that's why I find it much easier to talk about the international rules based order because that sets up how nations should behave and towards each other encompassing all of the issues that you spoke about I think something that Australia could do very effectively against the backdrop of increasing US-China competition which I don't accept leads to confrontation but you know a level of decoupling and the like I think Australia can continue to engage and work closely with and urge support the rules based order with our partners in the Indian Ocean Asia Pacific region our part of the world because their interests and our interests are all closely aligned with that now some of our neighbours feel pressure in that they're geographically close to China they're anxious about China's long-term objectives but they don't want to invite China's economic coercion for example by too closely aligning with the United States so it's challenging for many nations but I continue to argue that the principles of the rules based order are where we can find balance in this scenario in any scenario Alright thanks Julie my answer to your question is that I don't think America can win in Asia on values alone now we have inevitably run out of time there were a number of other questions and actually this is the session at least that I've been involved in participation and interaction so I really appreciate that so clearly you've sparked debate I'm just going to mention these questions but I'm not going to ask you to reply to them because we're going to have to wrap up soon Ken Baldwin from the ANU asked whether the social contract created by COVID-19 in some countries can be harnessed to accelerate global action on another existential threat which is climate change that was one question Michael Wadley in Shanghai said on China and possible areas of cooperation why not develop an on-shoring strategy on our own but also mutually beneficial terms and David Olson made the point that Julie and Gareth Bost emphasised the need to talk to China behind the scenes but right now China is not answering the phone so how can we break this deadlock is this time for enhanced collaborative efforts by business and government one of the things that we were going to get to before I sidetracked you all with excellent questions from the audience was talking a bit about business and government but we're going to have to wrap up very shortly so what what I just wanted to do Gareth and Julie is perhaps just as a final word from you before I close is there anything that we haven't talked about or any issue that we are not paying attention to that you're most worried about in your external environment is there something out there that you think can really have the potential to bite us that we have to pay attention to Julie perhaps you first and then Gareth well I am worried about a number of crises which by definition tend to be unpredictable mitigate against predictable events and at the moment I'm concerned about a global banking crisis reminiscent of 2008-9 which would add to the misery of the pandemic recession severe economic crises a catalyst for social unrest and that can lead to some pretty unpredictable outcomes in many nations regionally I'm concerned about the number of places where tensions are rising simultaneously in North Korea Japan-China India-China, South China Sea Libya with interventions by Turkey and Egypt threatening it so I'm concerned about the risks of miscalculation seem to be increasing in a number of places and that's deeply worrying Gareth well I'm worried about the accelerated tendency towards economic inequality that is obviously contributing to and was the subject of a number of contributions during the weeks excellent online discussions in geopolitical strategic terms I'm obviously worried about so many of the tensions that are around the place and the unwillingness of people in the United States in particular to do other than encourage them rather than diminish them but my biggest worry of all is one issue we haven't really addressed at all except in half a phrase here and there is the possibility that one of those three existential issues I talked about and that's a catastrophic nuclear exchange we've seen in the last week or so the India-Pakistan issue brewing up again to the point of over conflict the capacity there if not the outright intent to launch a nuclear war the capacity for miscalculation misjudgment human error system error is just huge and with 13,500 nuclear weapons worldwide still to move away from sensible arms control that we're seeing from the United States and Russia this is really really worrying and we need to be talking about it much more than we do it is one of those issues finally on which I think we could find some common ground with China even though China is now showing signs of joining a sort of mini nuclear arms races doing so with only about 300 weapons at the moment as compared to over 6,000 in the case of both the United States and Russia and it has adopted a traditional position of minimal deterrence of no first use and so on I think there's an awful lot to talk about in nuclear weapons space with China and if we were serious about engaging them rather than just finding more and more reasons to disengage now then I think that would be pretty much top of the pops but I would say that would know because I've been banging on about this for about the last 30 years and nobody is any more likely I'm afraid to take notice now than in the past but this is one that's going to creep up on us and if there is a nuclear holocaust then it's going to make the virus look pretty minimal in its impact by comparison well thank you very much Gareth I've once again failed miserably at being a good chair because we're about 8 minutes over so I am going to wrap this conversation up and this conversation also wraps the ANU Crawford Leadership Forum up for this year I couldn't think of a better way to end with that conversation we've had with Gareth and Julie because as much as one can manage in an online version that was a real conversation even dare I say a debate at times of course there's much that we didn't cover and some of those are big conversations but I really enjoyed it so thank you Julie and Gareth look moving to an online format was a very big change to our normal in person event in the comfortable digs at the Crawford School at the University I really hope we can get back there next year but we did learn a lot as we went today and I'm very glad that we were able to fly the leadership foreign flag in this most disruptive years and so I want to finish with some thank yous first of all to the policy hub team Sean, Lauren, Olivia, Jody and Greta I really cannot tell you how hard the small conference team worked to deliver this series of events totally unreasonable hours under quite a lot of pressure and they have my immense gratitude and admiration I also want to thank the many colleagues in the university's communications and public affairs team who were also incredibly helpful lent their hands at many points and were essential partners in this endeavour. Thank you to colleagues in the Vice Chancellor's office who helped get us things done and of course thank you to both the Vice Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor and finally a big thank you to the many other A&U staff right across the university's various colleges who are generous in helping to develop, shape and deliver our program not least our many brilliant university chairs and moderators so with a final thank you to Julie and to Gareth I really appreciate you being with us thanks to the audience for being with us I've got the last word I've got the last word I'm going to have the last word whatever you say as the notional founding father of the corporate forum I'm acutely conscious of just how much work goes into this enterprise and gathering up the stellar cast of participants you did in a really very rich series of conversations was an heroic achievement the best of times and the worst of times with the virus and everything else that A&U has been suffering this year plague and pestle and so on it was a really fantastic achievement so I'd like to congratulate you personally Richard on your role as the director of the forum I hope to God we can get back into real-time interaction next year it's okay it's okay on the screen but there's nothing like being able to follow up these conversations with Doug Keen and others over coffee over lunch and to have a more extended discussion about those little meeting rooms where we have conducted the forum in the past so don't let's think of this as a substitute don't let the digital revolution take complete hold but congratulations on what you've achieved with those constraints and it's been a really proud moment for me to look back at what's been achieved with this and I'm delighted that this year has been as successful as it manifestly has been Julie you are going to have the last word the last word first Gareth congratulations on the Crawford Leadership Forum and the fact that it has survived a global pandemic and will no doubt emerge stronger than ever before Richard you've been given authorship of the white paper which I'll begrudgingly acknowledge you had a role to play now you have delivered the Crawford Leadership Forum in extraordinarily difficult times so congratulations to you and the team and we at ANU are delighted with the outcome thank you Richard and everybody for taking part in the 2020 Crawford Leadership Forum and let's look forward to a bigger, brighter, stronger Leadership Forum in 2021 in the meantime everybody keep safe well I will drink to that and I probably will quite shortly so thank you all and goodbye and good luck