 I'm Michael Fully Love, the director of the Lowy Institute. Let me welcome everyone, both here at Bly Street, but also those joining us on the Lowy Institute livestream to this address by the director general of the Australian Signals Directorate, Ms. Rachel Noble PSM. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which the Institute stands, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders past and present. It's a real pleasure for me to host the DG here at Bly Street this afternoon for a speech about the history of women in ASD and also about Rachel's own personal experiences. In the past couple of years, of course, intelligence has roared back as a force in the world. We've seen the power of intelligence in the war in Ukraine. We've seen Washington and London predict with unearing accuracy, apparently, how Mr. Putin would launch his brutal and unjustified invasion. We've seen the Australian government directly attributing responsibility for cyber attacks around the world. So intelligence is more significant than ever as a force in international relations. And so it's an important topic for study and discussion at the Institute. Our country has been in the signals intelligence business for three quarters of a century. Of course, the nature of that business has changed beyond recognition. We all now walk around with these in our pockets, these little supercomputers. They're very convenient for us, but they're also listening devices. So they're very convenient for Rachel and her counterparts as well. So the nature of the job has changed. The Australian government has recently committed to significant new expenditures on our signals intelligence capabilities. But I know that human resources are just as important as financial resources, and I know that intelligence agencies need to draw on the very best people from all quarters of society. That's the right thing to do in a democracy and a meritocracy like Australia, but it's also the smart thing to do. Ladies and gentlemen, Rachel Noble is one of the most experienced Australian public servants in the national security field, having served in very senior positions in home affairs, immigration and border protection, defence and prime minister and cabinet. In 2020, she was appointed the fourth director general of ASD, the first woman to hold that position. This is Rachel's only public speech for 2022, which is the 75th anniversary of the establishment of ASD. So I'm very grateful personally that Rachel has selected the Institute for this speech. The DG will now make some remarks for about 20 minutes and then she'll take some questions from me and also from you. So Rachel, the lectern is yours. Pleasure to be here today, and you're not supposed to tell people about the listening device. Anyway, I'm joking. And in fact, that little phone that we have now is maybe 10 or 20 or 30 times more powerful than the first supercomputer that ASD ever bought. So it is a pretty powerful little device. Anyway, I'm so pleased to be here today and I am going to talk a little bit about the history of women in ASD and also weave in a little bit of my own personal journey and observations. I actually didn't become a feminist until recently and by recently I actually only mean in the last few years. So I think my mother had always been a feminist and it was something that my sister and I didn't really feel that we could relate to. But of course, as we grew older and had our own experiences, and as we learned more about the plight of Australian women and employment, we began to understand why she would sometimes become quite fierce when she talked about her own career. Born in 1941, she was probably like many young women of the 60s. She sought independence from her family through a career. She told me that her father had reacted very badly upon learning that she wanted to become a nurse and he issued her an ultimatum. If she didn't stay living at home and become a public servant, she wouldn't be welcome in his home again. For those of you who do actually know me and science tells us that the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree, you won't be surprised to hear that she walked on out that door. But in case you're worried, they did patch things up later. That story, well, the story that then followed when she joined the military as a nurse is one very familiar to women of the time. So as a new feminist and as the only woman ever to have headed a statutory intelligence agency in Australia's history, I'm hugely motivated to tell the story of women in national security roles on the occasion of the Australian Signals Directorate's 75th anniversary. As part of my newfound feminist journey, I've recently taken to reading books about the plight of women in leadership roles. And I was particularly taken by Julia Gillard and the Ghosi Okonjo-Iwi Arla's book, Women in Leadership, Real Lives, Real Lessons, published in 2020. In the opening of that book, Ms. Gillard writes about the challenges of writing about the plight of women today without sounding shrill or even worse, bitter. So I've set myself a big challenge to talk about the history of women in ASD after the current day, while also sharing with you a little bit about my own personal journey without, I hope, sounding shrill or even a bit bitter. But as a lot of women in leadership roles out there know, that's an awfully big challenge. So I want to start by telling you about the journey of women in ASD, much of which has come together thanks to our own history people in ASD and to Dr. John Fay, whose book about the history of ASD is due to be released early next year. It is through the stories of those women that I want to cover off on a few things about being a woman in national security or maybe about being a female leader in any business. And in telling you those stories, I have a few key themes. The first is that bridging the gender equity pay gap is a team sport. On this theme, my own view is one best expressed by Aitaputros who said, like it or not, liberation for women will be achieved only through the full cooperation of men. And I would add, including through the liberation of men. The second theme is that small changes we make as leaders and managers really do make a difference. The first part of my story takes us back to World War II. It is so very true when people say that change is born of necessity. This is how the first amazing women joined ASD's precursor organization known as the Central Bureau. The work of the women and men of Central Bureau significantly boosted the Allied Forces chances of victory in the Pacific. Central Bureau's code breakers cracked Japanese Army and Air Force codes playing a hugely important role in the battles of Midway, Milne Bay, the Coral Sea, Holandia and late. These code breakers were also involved in the crucial intercept of Yamamoto's flight plans. Yamamoto was a significant member of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the intelligence that was collected on this occasion led to his plan being shot down in his death. General MacArthur defined Central Bureau's role to be the interception and crypto analyzing of Japanese intelligence. Central Bureau has given such a name to reveal nothing to outsiders about its role. Central Bureau is located in a huge house in Ascot, Queensland, known as Narambla. At the rear of Narambla, there was a garage that housed 12 Type X machines. These were British cipher machines that had been adapted from the German enigma which were operated by women from the Australian Women's Army Service. These women became known as the garage girls. It was a label that they gave themselves. These women also literally did work in the garage out the back of the main building. When recalling the garage in 1991, Helen Kenny remembered that it smelt of paper and glue and of grease and dampness, describing it as a place of business and bafflement. These women not only did incredible, extremely challenging and gruelling work, they did it in conditions that surely would have taken a physical toll. Helen painted the work as monotonous, writing of paper tapes backed by glue, spilt from the machines, code on the left, plain language on the right, and describing how we took the incoming messages, ran the tapes over rollers which stood in water then gummed them down. Madeleine Chiggy responded to this claim of monotony, reflecting that she found nothing in 11 Australian cipher section monotonous. She wrote that streams of messages concerning shipping and aircraft movements and the strange place names like Amboina and Bayek made us feel closer to the war and part of it. The nature of the women's work was so secret that they couldn't even tell their families about it. Madeleine's inquisitive younger sister would write her letters asking her what she was doing and Madeleine remembered her sister writing that it just sounds as if you're doing letters and that you don't do anything, you just sit there and talk. In keeping with this intense secrecy, at the end of every shift, the women would carefully burn the contents of their waste paper bins in an incinerator under the watchful eye of an officer. Madeleine remembers a time when one of the girls lost her engagement ring in the fire and never got it back. Helen Keaney was involved in the intercept that led to the shooting down of Admiral Yamamoto's plane and later remembered her frustration at not knowing what happened to the messages once they handed them over. Madeleine Chigi later wrote of her experience at Central Bureau that she would never forget the night of D-Day, 6th of June 1944. The excitement in the garage was electric. The stream of traffic was incredible and every machine clattered nonstop all night. We rode wearily back to the barracks but with that wonderful feeling born of concentrated team effort. The women would be ferried between their barracks in Chermside and Narambla by bus before their shifts. Madeleine described the shift that took place between 8 a.m. and midnight as the worst shift as it was usually the busiest. We used to say that if our boyfriends could see us after the horror shift we wouldn't still care than it was real love. When the war ended the women were discharged and their life paths diverged. Helen carried out a career as a trailblazer for women in journalism writing for the women's weekly in the Sydney Morning Herald and covering landmark events such as the 1954 Royal Tour and the Petrov Affair and won awards for her work covering infant mortality in Central and Northern Australia. She also edited the Central Bureau Intelligence Corps Association's newsletters and contributed to many oral histories about her work during the war right up until her death in 2019. Madeleine worked tirelessly for the Central Bureau Intelligence Corps Association following the war serving as its publicity officer and editor in the 1980s and later as its vice president. After Madeleine's death in 2017 her daughter Margaret wrote of the way that her mother spoke of her wartime years. Writing that it was with such pride that she spoke of how her unit members were responsible for cracking the Japanese code and adding that it was believed to have shortened the war by two and a half years. Of her time in the war Madeleine had written in 1991 that there were great days and I would not have missed it for anything. I think that these women contributed more than they could have ever foreseen and imagined in terms of what they actually did for women in ASD which is what now follows. So the next part of our story takes us to the immediate post-war era. There was much debate, internal service rivalry and tricky negotiations with the US and the UK that followed the war about the merits or otherwise of Australia having its own signals intelligence capability. But if you wanna know more about that then you'll have to wait for our history to be published next year. What I will do though is share a part of that story where in an example of change-born of necessity Teddy Poulton, the first director general of ASD became the first male champion of change for women in ASD's workforce. When Teddy took up the position as director he was faced with the challenge of finding skilled people to fill the positions that he had been assigned. He was given 88 positions to fill and only 17 of those were designated as female positions. He wanted more of these positions to be filled by women because during the war as we've heard this work had been almost exclusively carried out by women like Helen. Teddy asked for permission to recruit women for up to 25% of the research officer positions, 40% for technical officer positions and an enormous 66% for specialized clerical positions. Teddy's challenges were compounded by the fact that 56% of the positions within the bureau had wages starting below the minimum basic wage in 1947. And 36% of the positions, many designated as female had an upper salary level that never reached the level of the basic wage. Teddy made his arguments up through the defense hierarchy to the secretary of the public service board and finally by May 1948, Teddy won approval to employ more women. The battle to employ women into signals intelligence did not end there. By 1951, Ralph Thompson was the director. Ralph continued to face challenges on finding suitably qualified people to fill these highly specialized signals intelligence positions. He continued the battle with the public service board that Teddy had started with the board still finding it difficult to relate to the bureau's specialized needs. Ralph courageously finally won approval from the public service board to hire four women who were married. In the immediate post-war years, there was a defense policy of not allowing any of the wartime service women to remain enlisted in the military. Under the public service act at the time, a woman was deemed to have resigned when she married. This measure wasn't repealed until 1966. Australia was one of the last countries in the developed world to get rid of such inequitable arrangements. As a fully trained nurse in the Royal Australian Air Force, my mum, when she married my dad, was deemed resigned. It took until 1972 for women to win the right to equal pay and until 1974 to win equal minimum wage and finally in 1984, it becomes illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender, sexuality, marital status, family responsibilities or pregnancy. Teddy and Ralph fortunately didn't wait until then. Despite this wildly radical history of employing women, but in the ASD, it took until 1989 for a woman, Janet Tyler, to make it to the rank of Senior Executive Service Officer in ASD. If it weren't for Teddy's efforts, one can't help wondering how much longer it might have otherwise taken. I've only told a handful of the stories of the amazing women of ASD, all of whose careers were enabled, as Ita says, by a reliance on men to champion that change. With such a strong record of gender inclusivity over 75 years, it's not entirely surprising, and I don't think that ASD is the first of the statutory intelligence agencies to have a woman lead it. So now I turn to more present day matters. While many good things have happened to support women at work, we are far from done. Annabel Crabb in her marvelous book, Men at Work, Australia's Parent Hoodtrap, tells us that women make up 60% of university graduates and 45% middle managers, yet only 10% of executives and 6% of CEOs in the ASX200. And of course, with her fabulous sense of humour, she goes on to write in that cohort, there are more men called Andrew than there are women. Ms Crabb also tells us that a 25-year-old man embarking on an average 40-year career can expect to earn $2 million over the course of that career. If he has kids, that goes up to $2.5 million. A woman of the same age and aptitude, setting out on the same career, can expect to earn $1.9 million, but if she has kids, that goes down to $1.3 million. So where's Teddy pulled and when we need him? Ms Crabb presents compelling evidence throughout her book that it is the arrival of a child in our lives that sets men and women on the departure course. The woman will take the primary caring responsibilities and thus her pay and career aspiration and opportunity decline begins. The solution to this seems to be for men to have equal access to parental leave. For so long as the woman has more, the family economics of who takes that leave becomes pretty simple. But as importantly, we need to work to change our organisational values and expectations to allow him to take it. As Idaho and I said at the beginning, like it or not, liberation for women will be achieved only with the full cooperation of men, including through the liberation of men. That phenomenon, according to our workplace gender quality agency, combined with gender discrimination, occupational segregation and years of not working due to interruptions, such as childcare, caring for elderly family members, in turn causes the gender pay gap. Currently Australia's national gender pay gap is 13.8%, but a whopping 24.4% pay gap in professional, scientific and technical services. That means Australian women earn $255.30 per week, less than men, and the 30 cent matters when you've got to put a dollar in a supermarket trolley to get it off the rack there, I reckon, and it equates to about 60 days of work. And I think last week marked the 60 day mark where women are essentially working for free. We have wonderful male role models in ASD, men choosing to take the paternity leave available to them, choosing to be engaged fathers, and most importantly, speaking up about those choices and being supported to do so in their workplace. And I'll come back to this point of the importance of creating a workplace that consciously and methodically removes barriers for women and men. But for now, I want to turn to the more insidious and less tangible barriers women face. I think these were so beautifully and heart-wrenchingly expressed in both Julia Gillard's book, my favourite chapter of which is titled, pardon my language, Hypothesis Four, She's a Bit of a Bitch. And in Annabelle Crabb's documentary, Ms. Represented, both of which brought me some comfort to know that the micro humiliations I have experienced in a world dominated by men weren't all entirely in my imagination. I don't think there is a glass ceiling, it's actually still a concrete block. And today it's coated in advanced cloaking technology and I couldn't see it until I got senior enough to reach out and touch it. During my tenure as Director-General, I have, for example, been asked if I would mind taking a cup of coffee into a senior bloke as I headed in to join the meeting. A young woman asked me and I told her no because I'm an agency head, because I wanted her to know that a woman could get into that room, not to be the note-taker or the bringer of coffee but to sit at the table in her own right. That is an example that the small things that we do and the words that we use matter and when we get it wrong, they can suppress women. Through our choice of words, we can unintentionally belittle women who show characteristics of strength, assertiveness and courage. Words like she's a witch or worse, I won't repeat the other word. She's bossy, she's scary and so on. Characteristics where if men displayed them, they are considered to be stately or strong leaders. To quote one of my most favourite female leaders in her field, Madonna, who said, do you know what it feels like in this world for a girl when you open up your mouth to speak? Can you be a little weak? We need to remain aware of these unconscious biases if we are ever actually going to address the remaining issues of pay and opportunity gaps. And we must be thoughtful about why women do things that men may not do. Women take notes in meetings and take notes to meetings, including to job interviews. It's not because we're less competent than our male counterparts. It is now well documented that women typically carry the mental load for our domestic situations, whatever they may be. We are thinking about dinner preparations, the shopping that needs to be done, the household duties that need to be done. So we make lists and we take notes because we are, after all, only human. We just have more to remember. In addition to watching our choice of words and our biases, there's much more we can do as leaders to create a workplace that is more inclusive for women. In ASD, we start the morning daily operational meeting at 9.30 so parents can make it after school drop-off. 47% of our SES are women. We're almost there. And I have asked our SES not to schedule meetings outside of business hours of nine to five unless it's operationally urgent. And in ASD, you can take a notebook to your next job interview if you want to without fear of discrimination. Women also prosper in different workplace environments to men. We are more likely to value the social and teamwork aspects of coming to work. In 2020, I said of myself that I started my career in ASD as a code breaker. I said, I didn't like that job at all. I just thought I'd share that with you. I'll tell you about that maybe in a different speech and about what we hoped we've learned from how we have historically failed to engage women in STEM. Here's my spoiler alert. Don't starve them of human contact to make them sit alone with a computer all day. Lots of people have contacted me worrying about what I meant with those words. I actually did like breaking codes and it sure made me better at crosswords. What I didn't like was how the team operated with limited human interaction. Just analysts with their computers. We've learned a lot from that in the contemporary ASD. We have tech roles where men and women work together in teams to solve problems and execute operations. At ASD, we also run a huge array of programs to support younger people to enter the workforce with the skills that they need. We've cadetships, apprenticeships, internships, work experience for years 11 and 12 and my personal favorite, the Girls Programming Network for years four to 12 to help girls get started in computer programming. We also sponsor the Australian Women and Security Network and we work with TAFES to help people qualify in tech areas. You do not need a university degree to work at ASD. I feel optimistic about what the future holds for women and all genders. Each of us can make seemingly small decisions that can make a huge difference. We are building on the effort of those who have come before in spearheading progressive change in the national security community, continuing a mission of inclusiveness, diversity and valuing human potential. I'll finish on this point with a quote from Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, I'm sure you knew that, who was born, wait for this, in 1797 and she said, I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves. Thank you, which side? Yeah, I just found the water there at the end. Right. So yeah, I didn't look down. Thanks Michael. Rachel, thank you for those thoughtful and really important remarks. Thank you for the amazing stories about the garage girls out the back of Neurambla and the role that they played in winning the war which touched a chord for me because my wife's grandmother Dorothy Stairs had some sort of role in Canadian code breaking during the Second World War. She was always very secretive about it but she was a very rare math student in her class at university and so she was recruited to work in it too. So it's really important to hear about those stories. So thank you for that. Thank you also for giving the first speech I've ever heard by a spy chief to quote Madonna. I'm such a fan, I won't lie. I wanna ask you a couple of questions about the subject of your speech and then a few questions on broader intelligence matters because it's rare to get a spy chief on the record. So I hope you won't mind if I do that. And then I'm gonna come to the audience and give everybody an opportunity or those people who put up their hands first let's put it that way to ask a question of the DG. So let me kick off. I don't imagine your counterparts in Beijing and Moscow and Tehran think much about the issues that you've spoken about today. It's often said that intelligence agencies reflect the countries that they serve. Do you think that inclusivity is a kind of superpower for ASD and for intelligence agencies in democracies? I sure do and I am, despite my remarks and my challenge to Australians to do better in this regard I am always really proud when I travel internationally because I do find that wherever I've worked not only in ASD but in the Australian government that we do pretty well. And it's a very common occurrence that we will have a mixed gender delegation and we'll have all men on the other side of the table. And so Australia does pretty well at that, I think. I'm noticing that not only are we getting more intelligence chiefs who are speaking publicly on intelligence matters but also on broader questions as well. And we saw the MI6 chief Richard Moore or C apologizing. I'm sure you saw recently for his organization's historical treatment of LGBTQI staff. How do you balance, as an intelligence chief, how do you balance your need for secrecy with your need for transparency and openness and to talk openly about some of these issues? Yeah, I have sort of a personal rule of thumb that helps guide me and I think about, it's important that we tell people what we do but not how we do it. That's really the secret part. And I really believe particularly over the decades, it's become increasingly important for intelligence agencies to openly describe what we do, what are our legislated functions, so that we can contribute to engendering trust by the Australian people in the activities of intelligence agencies and of course through our ministers and the parliament ensure that that trust is maintained. We've seen terrible moments in history and not that recently, sorry, not that distant history where when that goes wrong and that trust is eroded, it can actually remove a mandate for an intelligence agency to operate to its full functions. And I'm thinking there, Michael, you know, Snowden leaks, for example. Let me ask you about other kinds of diversity within ASD, intellectual diversity, different kinds of personalities. How important is it that you can draw value from all sorts of different kinds of people? It's super important and we do have a really long and proud history in being an organisation that is genuinely inclusive and probably back when we didn't talk about it in that sort of language. So I'm sure many of you have seen the amazing movie The Imitation Game that tells the story about Alan Turing. The lady, Janet Tyler, that I mentioned in my speech actually joined GCHQ and was trained in her craft by people who worked with Alan Turing. So our roots do really go back to just the genius of people like Alan Turing, whose mind worked differently to many of us. And we have a lot of people like that in ASD, so clever, brilliant, whose minds work differently and therefore they see patterns that other people can't see and that's just so fundamental to our trade craft. So we love all kinds of people at ASD and we're working really hard to make sure that we create a working environment that makes it really easy for them to participate fully in work. So I'll give you a little example. Neurodiverse people can actually become very distracted by disruptions in patterns. So if you have carpet that is overly symmetrical like your carpet, but there's a seam in it that takes that pattern out of whack, it will be very distracting for that person. So even the sort of carpet that we try to put in our buildings, we'll try to help remove those barriers, if you like, for them to feel comfortable at work. What is the biggest attraction for people joining ASD? Is it the complexity of the problems they need to solve? Is it the rush of having access to secret information that the rest of us don't? Is it patriotism? Is it a desire to protect our secrets or steal the other person's secrets? What is it, what's your biggest recruiting tool? I reckon if you want to join ASD because you really want the secrets, you probably won't get in. Because that's kind of a bit of a thing. Do you know when I talk to my people, it's the mission, it's that unifying value that you go to work to do something amazing for your country and that you are doing meaningful, actual things each day to improve our national security. And it is a value or a motivator that really unites our whole workforce. I think then kind of, you know, unpacking that to other layers. We get to do stuff like hacking, Michael, that you're not supposed to do out there, that's illegal. You don't mean hacking, Michael? No, I'm not hacking, Michael. No, you're not. No, you're not interesting. No, I'm joking. You're an Australian. That's easy, oh, you need to talk. Let me ask you, we hear a lot about Five Eyes these days and we have other Five Eyes groupings even outside the intelligence world. But within the intelligence world, Five Eyes grew out of the signals intelligence world in particular, out of the work that you mentioned during the Second World War, formal agreements that were signed between the small group of countries in the aftermath of the Second World War. Tell us a bit about how signals intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes countries work together, how you work with your counterparts. How tight a connection is it between the SIG and agencies in the Five Eyes countries? Well, as I like to say, we are the original Five Eyes. And as you mentioned, the Canadian signals, military signals intelligence organization was here 80 years ago in Australia actually working with us in Queensland to help protect our country. So if you really think about just how deeply those routes go back 75 to 80 years of actually operating in partnership, it is not a cursory alliance where we might decide to come together and align ourselves on policy initiatives like you sometimes see the Five Eyes sort of banner being used in policy circles, which is wonderful in itself. But in the business of signals intelligence, we have genuinely worked together for 80 years. What that really means is that we have highly integrated capability technology networks. And to this day, the five of us will sit down and talk to each other about load sharing. So we might agree, for example, that two of us will focus on this target and be responsible for getting after intelligence in that domain while the other three might focus on something else. Thus enabling us to share and be absolute force enablers for each other. It is a truly integrated and deep alliance. Let me ask you about cyber during the invasion of Ukraine and in particular in the lead up to the invasion when the United States, as I mentioned, was communicating intelligence almost in real time. And it was very interesting and satisfying to watch because it really appeared to mess with President Putin's head. It closed off options from him. He, you know, there was a prediction that he was going to launch a false flag operation, for example, which probably made it impossible to do that. But I know that intelligence professionals are always nervous about revealing the fruits of intelligence less that they reveal sources and methods to their adversaries. So as an intelligence professional, what were your thoughts on how Washington and London was able to use intelligence in a strategic way in the lead up to the invasion? Yeah, and I've told my counterparts this about what I'm about to tell you, just absolutely awe inspiring, but and equally absolutely terrifying at the same time. And because as you say, it is, you know, a really difficult balance you want and they did, it was inspirational to watch. Make sure that Ukraine and the West, if you will, had an edge through the sharing of that intelligence which I believe absolutely galvanised the world in its approach and view about Russia's aggression. But at the same time, sometimes once you burn it, it's gone forever. And it is really hard and expensive at our business. And so those trade-offs are incredibly delicate and difficult to make. And but, you know, that said, I think Americans and the British were awe inspiring in what they did. What about during the course of the war in Ukraine? How important has cyber been? It's hard for us looking at open source information to know, but what can you tell us about cyber operations, both offensive and defensive? I feel like the Russia-Ukraine conflict almost took us from a hypothetical appreciation that cyber activities, both the ability to defend your nation from attacks, but also to hold another country or adversary at risk by being able to launch your own cyber attacks. It really did go from almost an academic or hypothetical possibility that that kind of cyber activity would be integrated into conflict to us then actually watching that play out in real life. And I think there's a lot to reflect on about just how quickly we went from academic sort of view about that to seeing it in real life. There are a few things that I've reflected on in ASD that perhaps we didn't really see coming. And one was that two different kind of threads that were hard to predict, but have also changed the nature of conflict. One was that very large private sector companies chose to involve themselves by taking sides and then take their own actions to enter into the conflict and in this case, particularly to provide assistance to protect Ukraine and its defences in cyberspace. That's one that I think, I mean, you're more of a historian than me, but we haven't really seen that in conflict before. The second part of this that was really striking was that cyber criminals started to take sides in the war and the count is still going up. These are serious and organized criminal gangs with deep resources who took it upon themselves to take action both on behalf of Russia and on behalf of Ukraine and involve themselves in the conflict. Now for organizations like ASD, that makes that whole environment very messy and it can be very difficult to discern whether it's a state-based actor, a criminal operating at the direction of the state-based actor, or just deriving their own intent from that state actor and then undertaking offensive action. It's really messy. Let me ask you, often we hear Western politicians calling out cyber attacks on Western institutions, but of course, agencies like yours are poachers as well as gamekeepers if you like and I think I mentioned your motto, reveal their secrets and protect our own. Are we really entitled to get on our high horse? I mean, don't we do as many offensive ops as the other guys do against us? Or is there something different about the way we do it? I'm not on my high horse, right? Or all's fair in love and war and espionage. And so therefore, a huge part of ASD's role is actually to give advice and assistance and support to help our private sector, layers of government from local, federal, state and territory, advice about actually how to uplift our own cybersecurity because of course we spy on other countries and there is an element of that which is, you know, may the best spy win. So, you know, the best way to deal with that is to have a really great cybersecurity ourselves as the nation and actually we saw that in Ukraine, really great defences went after their government, Russia went after their government services, try and undermine, you know, domestic support for the conflict because the first, you know, the first sort of thing that might happen is that the population don't think the military and the government are up to it if they can't keep, you know, basic government services running on the internet. So it is a really important part that we think about. That said, I do think that in a democracy, we are more transparent about what we do. We're held to account, I can assure you, by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, by the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security and through the Parliament more broadly and through, you know, the Senate Estimates process. Those are not mechanisms that other countries who might be communists in nature have to hold, hold their intelligence apparatus to account and therefore we make transparent the rules by which we play. You mentioned the role that ASD and other units within ASD do in helping private institutions protect themselves. If there's one thing that individuals or corporates should be doing to improve their cyber hygiene, what is it? It's the same basic sort of few things that will actually protect you from a state-based actor trying to get into your network or a criminal. And, you know, at the individual level, we encourage passphrases. So what I mean by that is, I love Michael Fully-Levitt Lowey Institute and change a couple of the letters and add some numbers rather than just, you know, your dog's name. So... That's not a passphrase. We use it the longest. Yeah, no. Yeah, you can't hack the system doing that. Passphrases, you know, when you get that push on your iPad or your phone it says, update me now and you go do it later. Don't do that. Do it now. So keeping things up to date. Know where your data is. That's really important even for small businesses and make backups. So just a few basic things like that. We reckon would actually prevent most of the cyber attacks that we see against our country. All right, let me go to the audience and give you an opportunity. The DGs talked about a whole range of issues from workplace issues, the role of women, the Five Eyes, Ukraine, cyber hygiene. So this is your opportunity. It's a rare opportunity. I see a hand down the front from Susanna Patton from the Lowey Institute, Susanna. Thank you. When one of your counterparts, Paul Simon, was here at the Institute earlier in the year, he talked about the need to focus on exquisite intelligence. I wonder, you know, given the very rapid expansion of online communications, the vast flow of what's out there, how does ASD approach that task of focusing on the insights that would be most valuable for policymakers? Yeah, that's... I'm totally with Paul on that. It is a really important challenge and reminder for all intelligence agencies. There's no point us going after information that other people, including people like Lowey, can actually obtain from open source and, you know, piece together that knowledge and turn it into insights in the public domain, and I suppose intelligence in our world. So he's absolutely right. What that means is that we have to get into networks that are really hard to get into and that aren't networks that people are operating that they mean to have made public. So it's a hard challenge. We love it. All right. I saw the lady, yes, with her hand still up next, and then the lady in the blue jacket in front of her. Thanks for a great speech, Director-General, Annalise from PWC. One of the things that you mentioned in your speech was around the Five Eyes relationship and the vital role that it plays in intelligence sharing. Do you see regionally moving forward that the Quad is going to be playing a more active role in signals intelligence sharing? I think... I don't know about signals intelligence specifically, but certainly ASD is really engaged in the Quad and there's heaps of really important things that we particularly want to learn from Japan and India, and I'm sure we can share with them about, you know, up in your national cyber defences, you know, really mobilising your populations to make yourself a hard target. There's such a rich array of agenda items, if you will, that we can pursue in the Quad as well as anything else. But as I said before, you know, in signals intelligence and our particular version of the Five Eyes, it's really hard to catch up 80 years of just deep integration, but we're certainly willing to give it a go with those new partners. That's an interesting comment, because you often do hear calls, for example, for Japan to be admitted into the Five Eyes, but do you think there's something about the nature of these very old relationships that makes it impossible for other countries to join the Five Eyes? I think it's just a... We've got a lot of catching up to do. I wouldn't say it's impossible, but when you've built sort of 80 years of institutional trust, because at the end of the day, information-sharing, it's not about technology and networks, it's actually about trust. And I'll give you sort of an example. In the Five Eyes, if NSA shares intelligence with us, we train our people who access that intelligence to make sure that we do so in a way that entirely complies with all the US laws that govern and control that intelligence. And so we've got... Our people get trained in five countries' laws to make sure that we are completely compliant as we share that information with each other. So it's really hard. It takes a long time and it's really founded in trust. It's not to say that it isn't worth doing and you've got to start some time. All right, yes, let in the blue jacket. Hey, Rachel, my name's Bicky and I came all the way from Melbourne to hear your speech. And thank you so much for the insight so far. My question is, how do you look after your mental well-being, including your teams as well? Yeah, thank you. It's hard and COVID's made it really hard for everyone. We've certainly really noticed that our organisation is probably just like... Everyone has really seen more people become challenged by the times in which we're living, the isolation that COVID, especially coming from Melbourne, sort of brought into our lives. We just have to be really alert to that, I think, and really at a human level be looking out for each other. And that's really the most important thing that we can do and, you know, making sure that we notice each other and if people are starting to do things that are out of character for them, that can only really happen at a local team level. So we have quite a few mechanisms in place which help people call that out in a really constructive and helpful way. And I'll give you an extreme example. And this is sort of on the insider threat sort of level, but I don't know if any of you really remember Whistler, who sadly, you know, shared information from another Defence Intelligence organisation, I don't know, about 15 or 17 years ago now. When people look back on him in hindsight, he'd started to come to work without any shoes in bare feet. And it's sort of one of those moments where, Michael, if you started to come to work in bare feet, I'm really hoping that one of your staff would ask you if you're all right, you know. And so people, that's an extreme sort of example, but people will give off signs. I personally, I like to knit and do cross stitch, which makes me feel like I might have been born in the wrong century. And now I think we call that mindfulness, where it slows your mind down and forces you to focus on something that's a bit complicated but stops your mind from thinking about other things. So whatever you need to do, I reckon. Let me ask you, you mentioned insider threats earlier, and of course the most famous is Mr Snowden. Yes. And he divides opinion, there's a lot of people out there who think that he's thrown light onto things that intelligence agencies were doing that they shouldn't have been. There's a lot of people within the system who are still very angry about what he did. How do you feel about it? I think we've got to always take lessons from those moments in our history or the history of our allies and thereby the grace of God go I in ASD. I think, you know, as I sort of reflected before, that's why it's really important that I do things like this, that we do appear in public, in parliament, and that we do explain our functions. Because I think one of the most difficult aspects of the Snowden leaks, whichever side that you're on, is that actually what was so difficult for NSA was that it was through an uncontrolled mechanism that the world or Americans started to understand what NSA functions were and what it does, all of which were lawful, but it was a surprise. And that had a far greater impact, I think, than it might have otherwise had. So, you know, NSA, like us now on the journey of getting out there publicly and talking about what we do and really trying to help people understand what we do, how it works, how we're oversight, and it's super important. Okay, let me take some more questions. Yes, this lady and then that gentleman in the corner, lady in the second row is the next hand I saw. Hi, I'm Hannah. Thank you for your remarks so far. I am an organic chemist by training and I've spent a lot of time working in state and federal ministries and now more in this defense space. So, I've often found myself as the only woman in the room and also often as the youngest person in the room. And a habit that I find myself doing quite a bit is minimizing myself and my interests, your comments about Madonna reminded me of that. I love to bake and I'm in a book club and sort of, I guess, there's more feminine things that I might lean into. I often minimize in myself and I'm wondering how we can either break that habit for ourselves but also foster an environment where we're not doing that and we're talking more about the things that we love in an environment that might not be a natural space to do that. Yeah, you do you. It just, I mean, I think all of us girls will kind of do that to ourselves. We notoriously want to be 100% confident that we're gonna get that job before we even put in a job application. We all kind of know those things that we will sort of self-censor on in terms of our own career. I'll never forget one of my female colleagues when I was pretty junior and we were sitting in a meeting, she was looking down at her nails and then she reached into her handbag and got a nail file out and I just loved her for that. I just thought, oh, good on you, you know. But I think we just have to talk about it. That's I feel like is the first thing and try to normalize it. And what I was hoping to do in my speech today is actually talk about, yeah, us ladies, we do stuff differently. And just because you bake cakes doesn't make you not a good leader. And just because you even like to bake cakes and bring them to work and share them with people doesn't mean you're the kitchen hand. And we just got to talk about that stuff. But also I think as we do hopefully in your field we'll see more women, good on you, more power to you that will normalize in and of itself. Gentleman over here, can you just wait for the microphone, sir? Rachel, thank you, it's Dean Blomson. I've got a question about leadership, if I may. We're obviously in some state of peacefulness here in Australia. How do you as a leader get the appropriate balance between, you know, that level of vigilance, I don't know whether paranoia is the right word, but I'm just thinking perhaps you're equivalent in Ukraine, a year ago would have perhaps been, you know, treading water and now they're running with an operational tempo that's extraordinary, obviously not maintainable. We may say we don't have existential threats here, you're not Mossad, but how do you get your people to operate at the level of seriousness, concern and pace without killing themselves? Yeah. How do you do that as a leader? I'm interested. Yeah, that's really, really food for thought, isn't it? And do you know I'm going to say the most boring of answers because I really believe that you can address that with great governance and very clear processes, right? And what I think that helps people do is they understand the processes in which they operate, so that if they need to do things, it's clear, it's understood and they can have decisions made quickly. And if everybody understands sort of what the processes are and the sort of rules of operating are, that then makes the more business as usual things easier to equip, which gives people then the headroom that when we actually have a crisis, that we've still got space to lift. And what I've seen in organisations where if that governance isn't clear and everyone's running around going, how do you get this decision? And they use a lot of energy to just get the business done. There is no headroom for crises. So that's really something that I think a lot about and put a lot of attention into in ASDs, really the governance and administration are the processes clear to everyone how to get stuff done. So we've got the headspace for when the bad stuff happens. Rachel, I'm going to ask you the last couple of questions. When Paul Simon was here, as Susanna mentioned a couple of months ago, I joshed him about the lack of great TV shows and movies about ASIS spies as opposed to CIA spies or MI6 spies. What kind of movies and books about the secret world do people in the secret world like to read? Yeah, cool, cool. I reckon the best movie about our business is Sneakers. I don't know if anyone's probably all too young, but anyone remembers that? I remember. Yeah, yeah. That's a great movie about NSA. But the one that all the spies are talking about at the moment, and by all the spies, I mean this is a five-eyes conversation, is Operation Mint's Meet is really great. Yeah, really great movie worth watching. I'll share with you. I did ask the director of the FBI. He probably thinks less of me now. I asked him which were the best, because there's so many American TV shows about the FBI, and I asked him which did he think were the best ones, the best representative of the FBI, and which ones didn't they like? And boy, did that start a conversation. Not to say that he's watching them all, I'm sure he's not. I noticed you're not giving us his answer. No, I won't. I won't. It was a private conversation. Very good at keeping his secrets. Finally, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about this beautiful coin that you brought today. Yeah. This is a special coin that the Mint has produced for ASD's 75th anniversary. Yeah. Rachel gave it to me very reluctantly and jealously and told me I had to give it back at the end. Yeah, I got to give it back to the Mint. They have very strict rules about coins leaving the Mint. So tell us about it. What's special about it? So it's celebrating our 75 years. You probably can't all see. It's got loads of stuff packed on both sides of the coin and it has four layers of encrypted messages on the coin and there's a challenge out there to see who can correctly break all the layers and would you believe it? Yesterday, the coin was launched at 8.45 in the morning. We put up our web form and said, hey, if you think you've got the answers, fill in the form and believe it or not, a boy 14 years old in Tasmania was the first person in just over an hour to get all four layers right. Just unbelievable. And yeah, as of, I know, can you imagine being his mum? Wow. So we're hoping to meet him soon to recruit him. And it was a collaboration with the Royal Australian Mint and I'm really sad to tell you that it's pretty much sold out already. So it's a collector's item. It's an unseculated coin. They made 50,000 of them only. So it's going to be a real keepsake, I think, from our history. Now I'm going to give you an exclusive, Michael, because we like to keep secrets. We have kept secret that there might be a fifth level. So there's a fifth level of encryption that no one has yet broken. All right. So someone tell the 14 year old in Hobart. He's got to keep on it. Yeah, over the weekend. Thank you, Michael. Ladies and gentlemen, let me just say it's been a real treat today to hear from Rachel about stories of trailblazers within ASD, to hear about the agency's efforts to be as inclusive as possible. Rachel, you've been frank and thoughtful and funny and memorable. You said in your remarks when I asked you a question, you said, may the best spy win. And let me just say that after listening to you, I'm confident that we have the best spies drawing on the broadest cross-section of Australian society. So ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking Rachel and Noble. Thank you. Thank you.