 It's my pleasure now to welcome to our conversation here at the conference Neil Greete from Collaborative Outcomes, a humanitarian engineering organisation. But Neil, you have a very extensive experience as a former Army engineer. You've worked in remote Aboriginal communities in East Timor, in PNG and in Iraq. So, welcome. We're here really to explore the role of engineers in the stabilisation and reconstruction of a community after either a disaster or a conflict. How crucial are engineers, if we're talking about reconstruction, both human and physical? Well, what a wonderful question, because the first thing I'd say as an engineer is it's always wonderful to talk about the profession and say how important it is, because I think it is, but I will preface everything I say and I understand that it's part of a very complex picture, you know. So, the engineering profession has its part to play in that continuum that you described of stabilisation. But I think somehow its importance has been lost a little and that stems a little from the way the engineering profession works. And in some ways the difficulty or the complexity of the problems that we've had recently. Look, could I raise this with you? We spoke to a senior Army person who's working in South Sudan who actually talked about roads. And why I raised this at the beginning is I'm interested in exploring the lessons you've learnt about the relationship between the human relationships, the governance and the physical engineering and reconstruction and getting that right. Because I guess the nightmare is a whole series of sealed roads that allow large white toyotas involving UN staff to go between the two points in a nation they wish to go between and then they go off and those roads aren't utilised by the local people. Now, obviously that's the exact opposite of what you want to achieve. But tell me about the lessons about how you build the right infrastructure in the right places in partnership with your local country. Well, okay, that's all about understanding the community and the community's needs. So there's a line about in a humanitarian sense that doctors saves lives but engineers save communities. So when you talk about roads and you talk about community, you talk about the marketplace, you talk about the local economy. So you're not talking about the elites, you're not talking about the state and the formation of the state and all those other issues that are very critical in stabilisation. We're talking about that layer below, which is the community. And in fact, all of us, even people who live in a secure, prosperous nation like Australia, community and our roads and our infrastructure are very important. It's about engineers communicating with the community and getting the need. Now, that's something we'll practise at understanding. Now, you talked about how you connect that to the human and social aspects. So in a country that suffered some form of distress, people are looking at to get employment but they're looking to get employment that's valued, not just for the sake of getting a few dollars but something that they did before or something they can really grow into. So in engineering in that sense gives the person the opportunity to be back in an area where they wanted to work and an opportunity to improve themselves and become part of a middle class again, not just a deprived underclass. So it's lifting society up and giving them something to strive towards. So it has a whole social impact beyond just the road. Yes, it's engineering infrastructure to enable human development. Can you give me examples from your time in East Timor or PNG or Iraq where it was done well? What has to be in place in the civil-military interface for it to work well? Right. I'll talk about East Timor 1999 and I was in the Army at that point in time and I was in charge of an Army unit, 21 Construction Squadron, that was responsible for the repair of the roads during Interfet. And during that time we worked on the road from Dili to Ailu and that was the road that Jana Gushma worked. Now on that road there were several landslips that we were repairing. At those sites there was local East Timorese and Australian soldiers working together, hand in hand, labouring, building the walls, the Gabyan walls that you see on mountain slopes to stop slips. Now it was a powerful message to Jana Gushma who would talk about it because that was Australians and East Timorese labouring together to deliver an outcome. But more importantly, it was one that people could see directly. So it was something that was very visible very early. It was a true working together because labour with your hands together really sends a powerful message. But it was also helping the community in the long term because they needed that road. There's an interpretation when you can build things in the wrong spot and assume you know what the community wants. And there's two sides to that story. Sometimes you have to build things to know what not to build if that makes sense to you. Can you give me an example? If you were to actually open up a village and put a road through or provide some means of it, you know, moving things around, you can have a temporary road or a temporary structure or temporary facilities that allow that to occur. And then once it's defined and you've got the marketplace, then the market will evolve to be most efficient. Then that road might not be needed. Now I would say you see examples like that everywhere. And there's a famous example in the United States of a university which didn't put paths down in between the buildings for years. They let the people walk wherever they walked. Then they put the paths down. And so you've got to have a bit of a... Sometimes you shape the environment, the environment then shapes you. So it's not always a negative thing to sort of make a decision to put something in the first place. But it's a very... This is the sort of complexities and thinking you do have to get into. We hear about transitions. And again, I'm thinking about this role of engineering in the context of transitions, both I guess when people come in and that we tend to talk about that getting basic road infrastructure, but also transitions for international players to leave. And I'm interested in your lessons there about how to manage that transition. Yep. And I'd say to you with that, that engineers in that transition piece are one of those connectors that connect across from whatever you might have done, let's call it the military intervention phase or call it the disaster event. And then you have that transition we've been talking about and then recovery and ongoing development. During that phase, engineers come together and they talk to each other on projects. So there's a sharing of professional knowledge as a professional respect that goes across cultural differences. And I particularly would cite my personal experience in Iraq where you could talk as an engineer even though there was a vast cultural difference. So it's funny how you can connect at that professional level in different cultures. And that assists the transition in a way that's almost, it doesn't... This sounds funny. It almost doesn't matter what the high level is doing because it's going to happen at that local level where people communicate on a professional level about their actual deliverables. And I think... Is that similar for doctors? I would say doctors are the same. So I'd say the big professions are medicine. I would say engineers. I would say education. And the rule of lawyers and police. Police talk to police. And I think it's almost like... This is why I talk about that middle ground of transition and connection that occurs which is about community and it's about people. And we're part of that. And you said you were underutilised. So what are you advocating for at this conference in terms of the role of engineers in that getting the conversations going at the community level? There is no network. There is no technique that actually employs engineers to make those connections in that horizontal sense because when we look at everything like this, we look at it in a hierarchical stovepipe breakdown because we look at the structures from top down and we look at how we will have ministries, we look at how that will be all connected. So by the time you get to this layer I'm talking about, it's become very diffuse and it's become confusing and people replicate, they compete. We get all those negative effects. So what I'm talking about now is a different methodology that doesn't look at the traditional hierarchy. Why not concentrate on these networks and exploit them? So that is my key message. Build engineers into your methodologies. We're a resource you're not utilising to the extent that we could offer you value. In that transition, using it across the different phases instead of looking at all of it from top down. My last question is this notion of humanitarian engineering. You now run a company, collaborative outcomes. What's humanitarian engineering? So humanitarian engineering is to connect engineers across the entire spectrum of humanitarian work from disaster relief work, response work and Christchurch earthquake structural engineers, the work they do there through to development, disaster risk reduction, so right through because engineers have skill sets across all humanitarian work. Again, it's that point I was making. It's often done in silos, in particular companies and it's not connected. So we don't actually learn our lessons well as a profession nor understand well what we're doing across. So the essence of humanitarian engineering is connecting the profession and I might add at this point it's good for the profession because engineers were once upon a time great leaders of social change. The bridge is not far away, we're built in the depression. It was all, it excited social change and we've lost our way with connecting to the social outcomes. So this is about connecting to social outcomes. Because that's so interesting you say that because I mean in the end, the thing that fundamentally saves lives is sewage works and bridges, build economies. That's the sort of thing you're saying. You've got to start seeing fundamental infrastructure in its social context. Yes, and that's the lens that we're looking at it. So the profession exists but we're putting a different side to the lens and we're looking at it from a different way and encouraging ourselves to be looking at it more social. And that will therefore, sorry there's great spin-offs here too for engineers is if we can communicate that we do this work we'll attract more people to the profession. Look, thank you so much, thank you. Thank you.