 Ladies and gentlemen welcome, thank you very much for coming out to the National Security College today to listen to us talking about one of the hottest issues in town, Brexit. When this occurred I'm sure that it was a shock to my colleagues just as much as it was to pretty much everybody that Britain would actually vote to leave the European Union and as a result we had to perform some fairly fast footwork to ensure that we were able to to have enough people to say something about Brexit and also to ensure that we had a reasonable crowd and by goodness really reasonable crowd to help with our discussions today and that's what I want us to focus on in fact in this event. You'll find that the presentations will be relatively short and we want to open the floor to discussion as much as possible. So let me formally welcome you to the National Security College and those of you who don't know very much about the NSC I can give you a brief backgrounder. The NSC is a partnership between the Australian Government and the Australian National University and our mandate is to build bridges between the academic and the policy community. For those of you who are interested I'm sure we have our usual propaganda available on the back table. Anyone who would like to know more about the college please go and see Chris down the back and I'm sure he can help you out. But today we're building a different kind of bridge. We're building a bridge with one of our good partners at ANU, the Centre for European Studies, which does excellent excellent work on an area which in Australia I think is fair to say does not receive enough attention and it's at times like this when something dramatic happens in European politics that ANU's Centre for European Studies gets turned to and I think Anne-Marie Elijah who'll be addressing us today has been especially busy since last Friday so we're very lucky to have some of her time. So I think what I might do is give you some just preliminary observations before we get to the actual format of today's discussions. First of all it's fair to say that obviously the dust has yet to settle on what is going to be the wash up of Britain's decision to leave the EU and on the one hand those of you who have been following this in the press will have seen that there are many many gloomy predictions about ruin not just for the United Kingdom but ruin for the European Union as well. You also see those who will say that the EU will be just fine and that it's the UK that will suffer and a whole array of pundits and political scientists many of them much better than me doing what they do best and political scientists generally at this time and pundits as well tend to express either shock and horror or smugness and they say I predicted this all along and the the nails in the coffin of the European Union just starting to be hammered in and this has long been predicted. We're not here today I think to do that we're not here to engage in point scoring and we're not here to make confident long-term predictions about the wash up of the Brexit nor are we really here to give anything close to what we would say as the definitive word on what happens in the aftermath of Brexit mainly because all of us would agree I think that it's far too soon to do that and to attempt to do so would be precipitate. So what we are here to do though is to offer some fairly tentative observations but observations about a few key issues number one what are some of the political implications of Brexit for the European project in general whether it's European institutions the process of European integration the nature of democracy within the European Union these are all things that we will probably touch on in presentations and more than happy to discuss when it comes to to the group conversation. Second one of the things we'll be addressing or at least I'll be addressing is what are some of the security implications if in fact there are any and some would say there are no security implications really of Britain leaving the EU and thirdly what are some of the normative issues related to things like fear things like uncertainty that might shed some light on our own politics and politics elsewhere in the West particularly I think the United States with whether the election looming there does Brexit give us shall we take from Brexit the notion that perhaps Trump is someone who will be strengthened by this decision. So to address these questions today we have two excellent speakers and one mediocre one the two excellent speakers the first one is Dr. Anne-Marie Elijah who I did my PhD with at the same time at the University of Melbourne so it's really good to reunite with Anne-Marie she's Associate Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies previously she's worked for PM&C as a policy officer and she's taught politics at a wide array of places University of Melbourne Victoria University Wellington and also ANU and her research focuses very much on British policy and its role within the European community the role within the EU and also EU-Australian relations and in 2014 to 2015 she held the Europe Australia Business Council Fellowship here at ANU so she is very well qualified to speak about this topic today. The other excellent speaker we have is Dr. Adam Henchke my colleague from the National Security College now he focuses on ethics and norms and identity with a particular focus on applied ethics also touches in touches on cyber security just war he had received his PhD through the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt and has two master's degrees two master's degrees well three only two oh right okay I thought he was collecting more than just two two master's degrees in applied ethics one from the Norwegian University of Technology and a master of bioethics from Monash generally the well what we'll do in terms of the format is that I will invite Anne-Marie to speak first and then I'll speak by way of introduction to me hi my names Matthew Sussex and I'm the academic director here at the National Security College and I focus on general security issues but with a primary focus on Russian foreign and security policy and in the past for my sins I have also dabbled quite a bit in European security affairs so I'll ask Anne-Marie to speak for about 10 to 15 minutes or so and then I will have a go for about the same amount of time and then Dr Henshke and we will take questions after that from the floor so without any further ado let me welcome Anne-Marie to the podium Good afternoon everyone welcome Matt thank you very much for that introduction and may I begin by acknowledging the work of the National Security College and particularly Matt for bringing us together for today's conversation not yet a week after the referendum vote so very well done Matt as Matt has said this is a co-hosted event between the National Security College and the ANU Centre for European Studies which is an outfit slightly further down the road that is jointly funded by ANU and the European Union itself we're delighted to be part of this collaboration and we're delighted for European Studies to have suddenly achieved this profile although perhaps not in this fashion so it's it's my task this afternoon to provide some introductory and introductory remarks and some context for our conversation and to give some political background in the brief time that I have I want to outline some of what we know and some of what we don't know and to make three very brief points so in the referendum last Friday as you will know with a turnout of 72 percent the British public voted to leave the EU 52 to 48 percent and with a simple majority of more than a million votes the full ramifications of these events will not be clear for months and perhaps for years and as Matt has already said the dust is very much yet to settle this vote followed a highly divisive campaign and the result has left the United Kingdom more divided arguably than ever geographically economically and politically Prime Minister David Cameron promptly resigned both major political parties are now in turmoil this uncertainty perhaps we could even call it chaos since Friday's vote can in part be attributed to the way that the referendum took place and this was something largely unfamiliar to Australians I think because people in the United Kingdom were being asked to vote on one option that was clear that is to remain in the United Kingdom on the terms renegotiated by Prime Minister Cameron and announced in February of this year and on the other hand there was the possibility to vote for leaving and what that option entailed was not remotely clear so it's in that position that we now find ourselves political elites both in the United Kingdom and in the European Union clearly did not expect a leave vote and seem to regard even entertaining this idea ahead of the vote as only encouraging the Brexiteers on reflection I think this was a misjudgment of public sentiment and the latest unfortunate example of the gap that exists between the leaders of the EU institutions their member state governments and the public who cannot seem to identify with the European project in the short term this failure obviously means we have ongoing uncertainty until there is a new Prime Minister in Britain and that Prime Minister makes clear his or her intentions we are not going to know exactly what this outcome means or what the British Parliament will decide to do the geographical split makes the situation worse Scotland Northern Ireland and Gibraltar with majority votes for remain have signalled their separate intentions to remain part of the European Union within a few days of last week's vote Westminster was petitioned for a further referendum so we can say with certainty that Britain is divided over the EU but little else about where UK policy may go from here this brings me to my first point clearly this is not the end of the matter and I just invite people to reflect for a moment on the history that has brought us to this particular place and if we take history as our guide this cannot in fact be surprising the British were debating in and out for all of the 1960s for half of the 1970s as well the 1975 referendum on then European community membership did not settle the issue in spite of a two to one vote in favour of membership deep divisions over Europe have persisted in British political parties Friday's vote did not put an end to these or solve the question of Europe once and for all for the Brits second the vote for Brexit leaves the process of European integration exposed to domestic politics and perhaps to Euroscepticism in a new way now referenda have been used by member states in different ways in relation to the EU for some time it is not a new development for voters in EU member states to voice their concerns at the ballot box and for this to have an impact on the shape or the pace of European integration so to take one example the French no vote in 2005 stopped the probe proposed to constitutional treaty in its tracks but in the 40 odd referenda so far put to the European public at different times most of these votes have been about more or less integration so for example does a given country wish to adopt the euro does a given country wish to adopt a new treaty there is the case of Norway where the prospect of EU membership has twice been voted down at referendum but these are not the same as the 23 June British decision this was not about more or less integration this was about in or out it was not a vote in a prospective member state but a member state which has participated in the European integration process for more than 40 years now there was a good deal of controversy in the early 1990s around the proposed Treaty of Maastricht also called the Treaty on European Union and this period is often associated with what we call the end of the permissive consensus about the European project the idea being that by enlarging till then the European public had left the business of regional integration to political elites so in the early 1990s and arguably through into the early 2000s this consensus many analysts conclude has ended but the brexit vote signals signals something else entirely perhaps another phase in citizen engagement with the European project its ramifications are not yet clear but they are serious third I wanted to spend with the notion that brexit could somehow be simple article 50 of the treaty on European Union sets out very briefly as it happens the mechanism for a member state to leave the European Union there are really two tasks here the first is working out how the UK would leave and the second is sorting out the arrangements for UK EU relations afterwards as we know there are already great differences of opinion over when article 50 should be in vote the intricacies of this extraction process will start to become clear in the years of negotiation ahead but we can already see that various models are being put forward as possibilities for the UK the Norwegian model the Swiss model the Turkish model perhaps a straight bilateral trade agreement these may have some relevance but the models put forward were never based on a member state of some four decades departing the EU the likely outcome is none of the above the European Union is an advanced case of economic integration and policy coordination across 28 member states in the context of the campaign that we just witnessed it was clear that the full extent of integration was being overlooked in some quarters perhaps deliberately in some cases and in others through a lack of understanding about what the European Union actually is and does the UK extricating itself from the EU involves the UK departure from the key EU institutions the Parliament the European Council the Council of Ministers the European Court of Justice the European External Action Service I could go on and on and then there's all of the committees and processes attached to these institutions some of this movement as we've seen is already occurring Jonathan Hill the British Commissioner for financial services resigned almost immediately but this is not going to be fast or smooth and it means that across a huge range of policy areas where competences have been ceded to the EU or where they are shared between London and Brussels that British policymaking will now work differently this potentially impacts everything from the single market to climate policy development aid migration transport police cooperation you name it let's be clear that this is a major overhaul of how the British government and public policymaking works internationally the British government needs to extract itself from more than 50 bilateral trade agreements return to representing itself at the WTO and perhaps open negotiations with key partners to retain access already achieved through EU agreements the European Union's foreign policy cloud has never matched its presence in trade policy however the United Kingdom potentially loses long term institutionalised cooperation in this area too and the EU on the other hand loses a key member state earlier this week in spite of all the events of last week European Union high representative Federica Mogherini released the EU's new global strategy it's called shared vision common action a stronger Europe but nobody is under the illusion that what happened last Friday can somehow be put to one side releasing the strategy high representative Mogherini noted that it was clear we would have to rethink the way our union works from the perspective of a third country such as Australia it is quite clear that brexit will not be simple it will absorb time energy and resources in both Europe and the UK and attracting Europe's attention will be harder than ever in summary then following the brexit vote we are in uncharted territory Friday's vote is clearly not the end of the matter in British politics the vote very likely signals a new phase in the engagement of the European public with the European project and it is not clear how that will end and there is nothing straightforward about the negotiations for leaving for the UK for the EU itself and for third countries who take an interest thanks very much Amri should pick up I think on on something Amri said that was quite important about the articles for leaving the European Union article 50 of the Treaty of European Union being so brief mainly because people never really countenanced a country wanting to to leave the European Union and it was all about enlargement and getting bigger it was assumed very much that countries would continue to want membership in the EU not that they would question their membership in the first place let me rewind history a little bit so quickly talk about the origins well not the origins the formation of the European Union in 1992 ever since it emerged from the Maastricht Treaty I think it's fair to say that Europe or the EU project has faced a kind of dilemma and that dilemma is should it widen physically or should it deepen should it pay more attention to its developing integration within its own set of institutions within its membership base now I don't want to labour this point at all because of course the EU has tried to do both simultaneously but I'd also suggest that it's fair to say that in practice the EU has focused on expansion why did it do so well of course it was deemed necessary at the time to encourage former communist states after the Cold War to join and that enthusiasm for physical enlargement of the European Union also kind of created its own momentum so that beyond the initial visual grad states it then became a sort of imperative to enlarge further and further and further so you have an EU that goes from a relatively small core to a very pan European EU what did that do well it created a lot of benefits especially to people who lived in those former communist countries created benefits in trade created benefits in service delivery created obviously benefits in terms of free movement of people and that's all very well works fine when times are good but of course even when times are good something that we I don't think we've recognized enough is that it has created some degree of resentment as well whether that resentment is legitimate or not amongst particularly what we might say the more powerful EU nations what else did the choice to enlarge do well on the negative side again I think it has created a simmering perception of illegitimacy in terms of where political power in the EU is actually derived from we can understand that I think by looking at some of the popular critiques of its many institutions the European Parliament was seen for many years as a little more than a rubber rubber stamp without a real agenda and hence it's become something of and this is a cartoonish version so I hope you forgive me but hence it became a kind of dumping ground for publics to elect parties of protest a convenient way to lodge a vote against the EU was to vote for UKIP for instance in European parliamentary elections now of course those of us who focus on democratic politics and democratic theory would also say that the EU itself is a bit of an oddity it has a parliament that doesn't really legislate it has a bureaucracy that doesn't really promulgate and it's got a council that enacts and proposes simultaneously this is very very unusual when it comes to to looking at democratic politics and I think it's there that we can see some of the origins of resentment of the EU now in the case of the Brexit there are of course also local factors and it's very good to see some of our colleagues and friends from European embassies and of course the British High Commission as well in the audience but there are local factors Britain has struggled with the idea of so-called European-ness for some time it styled itself very much as with but not of Europe there were numerous jokes made about the continent as opposed to Great Britain such as you know fog over channel Europe isolated very popular British British chuckle and that I think never really went away in British politics and it was also clear from the Brexit vote that that kind of view with but not of Europe went much deeper within British society and it especially resonated with blue collar workers these were people who were told that EU membership would bring a lot of benefits but when it came to the areas in which they were generally employed and that would be an industry primarily it was sometimes those areas that suffered while the UK itself thrived overall as a kind of hub for finance when you couple that to the financial crisis that the EU hasn't really recovered from I think it's quite apparent that many vote Britons who ended up voting leave did so as they saw it with not just their hearts but with their heads as well so what's Europe lost politically from Brexit and what are some of the implications well number one it has lost a major ally for forces who favor intergovernmentalism within the EU rather than federalism or a federal structure of a many many years British policy on this score was that integrate integration should be relatively light it should be between governments we don't want a European Federation and found common cause with many former communist countries in Eastern Europe on that notion and obviously of course it is lost the EU itself has lost a leading net contributor to EU finances what does the EU do well going back to the idea of widening and deepening I think it does need to reexamine the issue of enlargement as opposed to the issue of internal consolidation and I think you probably are going to see in some shape or form a shift back towards a primarily deepening agenda Europe has tried very hard to sell the idea that it is a community of shared values and it's done that I think quite well on the external level but I'm not sure really it's done that all that well internally I'm not sure that that narrative has really bitten particularly after the global financial crisis and if you don't win on the values argument you have to win on the interests argument and in the kind of rough economic seas the EU is navigating still now it means that both those arguments are hard to win so the EU I think does very much need to address notions of legitimacy needs to go back to the very basic question try and inform its publics about what is the EU for do a better job of saying why it's better to be in than out because of course you have nationalistic voices you have Marine Le Pen circling in France you have voices in Austria you have voices in Denmark you have other places ready to capitalize on that perception of weakness let me shift from politics to security have a look at that dimension because that's mainly what I get paid for what does brexit mean for European security and what does it mean for global security I think there's a very easy answer and the easy answer is not much and quite a lot simultaneously let me deal with the not much the UK itself is not physically leaving Europe it's not actually attaching an outboard motor and motoring off to the to somewhere off the coast of the United States still going to be a leading member of NATO it's still going to be a leading contributor in European security and defense efforts so on that broad level I think not a lot changes and many in Australia would make that observation I think because the UK is over there far away well it's left the EU in terms of security does it really matter our eyes are mainly focused on Asia for very good reasons well another level though I think it does change the calculation quite a great deal in terms of process of European security and defense policy in terms of the type of the threat environment and the types of institutions that can respond to particular security dangers overall I think it's quite clear it does make NATO more than ever the premier vehicle for European security affairs now there are many who would write on this topic who had high hopes that the European Union would supplant NATO as a leading defense actor but I think that the Brexit shows that that's well and truly now on hold that said of course individually you nations will continue to have their own specific areas of security interest so if for instance you are France you're going to continue to focus on the southern Mediterranean threat environment if you're a northern European state you're going to continue to focus on Arctic maritime trade routes you're going to worry also about competition over oil and gas in that area and chiefly competition over oil and gas coming from Russia and everybody of course within the EU whether it's Britain or not is going to continue to worry about the influx of refugees which is another factor that puts an enlargement agenda I think on hold for the time being for instance Turkey is not going to get in any time soon it's questionable whether Turkey even wants to get in now and I think one could probably say the same for Ukraine although the desire for membership in Ukraine is obviously higher so the overall burden of managing European security now falls very much to NATO and the EU will pay a supporting role that's why the upcoming July NATO summit in Warsaw is absolutely crucial because NATO anyway was planning to shift its strategic concept to become a little bit more muscular and now with the Brexit there will be a determination to show that the NATO alliance remains as strong as ever in other words it's no longer enough I think to NATO for NATO to be a kind of vehicle that in the old fashioned parlance keeps America in keeps Germany down and keeps Russia out now the narrative has to include that it's keeping Britain in as well so it might be at the rhetorical level that both NATO and the EU will talk about a sort of holistic security concept one of the phrases you often see used is a 360 degree security concept but in reality NATO is anyway moving back to a kind of collective defence posture some will say that it never really abandoned that collective defence posture and I have quite a bit of sympathy for that view but it will be necessary I think to take a strong line within NATO as the main instrument for regional security given that regardless of who is to blame for the various existential threats that the EU faces and NATO faces they do in fact face existential threats that they need to respond to that leads me very deeply to my only area of specialisation which is Russia it's very popular to say that Vladimir Putin is rubbing his hands with glee over Brexit and he's rubbing his hands for two main reasons one it seems to confirm the Russian narrative that the EU is economically bankrupt and that it's spiritually bankrupt as well that it's a failed supranational experiment that's doomed to collapse that's at a broad ideational level second of course the Brexit does something seemingly quite good for Russia a bit of an own goal in fact from the EU it removes a strong critic of Russian policy from the EU and Putin will doubtless believe he'll get a much better deal on sanctions and Russia's desire for a kind of buffer zone in the so-called near abroad from an EU that doesn't have the Britain in it as opposed to one that does nothing there is some truth in that without wanting to overplay the role of material factors it's hardly coincidental that the UK's tough line on Putin is facilitated by the fact that Britain only imports six to 8% of its gas from Gazprom whereas if you're Germany and you're at around 40% reliance on Gazprom you're not in such a fortunate position but I do think we shouldn't overestimate that argument with NATO very keen now to prove that while the EU may have been diminished transatlantic solidarity hasn't been diminished I think it's going to be quite hard for Vladimir Putin to do more than just seek a quicker sanctions exit as well as pushing this ideational narrative about the failure of Europe which is of course very much yet to transpire so I don't think we should be overstating the extent that Russia is the big winner out of the Brexit just yet. I'm conscious of the time so I will end I had a few more remarks but I will end with a quote from someone I think is appropriate Margaret Thatcher and I think it's particularly an appropriate way to describe either the current state of Britain's leadership the nature of the British vote or even the EU depending on your perspective and she said this it's always important in matters of high politics to know what you don't know those who think they know but are mistaken and act upon their mistakes are the most dangerous people to have in charge thank you very much folks. Thanks Matt and again thanks for everyone turning out my talk should fit quite nicely with Matt's so what I'm going to be talking about is my I guess my attempts to muddle through and understand Brexit how it happened and what it means as I think many people are also doing so I'm going to be looking at uncertainty unpredictability and what I'm kind of terming disconnections in terms of why I'm here as Matt said I work in ethics and philosophy primarily things to do with military ethics and ethics of cyber security so the question is and many people have asked me Adam you're talking about Brexit what do you know about Britain or Europe or anything to do with that what I'd like to say is I feel that I'm actually in pretty good company in that any hard questions I can deflect to these two experts but more importantly perhaps if we think of an expert as someone who understands the world and understands kind of what the world is doing and where it's going I'm probably as much of an expert on Brexit as Cameron he's obviously lost his job as a result of not really understanding what was going on or making mistakes in what he thought was going to happen I'd also like to think that I'm equivalent to some of the advocates of Brexit who don't seem to have a plan about what's actually happening now they kind of won and went oh my god we won ah what do we do some of that is indicated I think by then walking back promises oh no no no we we didn't actually mean that 350 million pounds a week would go to the NHS we meant something else entirely and that was someone else who said that anyway there's also the this phenomenon of the let's call them Brexiteers and Brigrette people who voted for Brexit and then the next day went oh well I wouldn't have voted that way if I knew it was going to happen which I think is is kind of an interesting thing and I'll come to you a little bit later about maybe some of the decline of understanding what democracy is and also as many of you will probably agree the smart money was on remain and we can see this in terms of the stock market going quite crazy after Brexit seemed to occur and if we think of economics and markets supposedly being indicators of collective wisdom and knowledge of the the crowds and all these sorts of things then it seems a lot of people got it wrong similarly we can see the collapse with the English pound I think I don't know what it's at now but a few days ago to drop against the American dollar and I think also another great indicator of people not really knowing what was going to happen was the betting markets I think even a few days or maybe at least a few weeks before the vote I think it was seven to one odds if you put money down on Brexit you would have got seven dollars back for every dollar you put down so again a lot of people like myself don't or didn't really seem to understand what was happening or more importantly what was going to happen so as I said this this kind of leads to this issue or these issues of uncertain uncertainty unpredictability and disconnections so I'm going to talk a little bit more about how did people get it wrong with a bit of a focus on polls and predictability I'm going to raise a little bit of some of the issues I think that were covered throughout the campaign to do with immigration and disconnection I think a deeper issue of elites and disconnection I'm going to be looking a little bit at austerity and anger and maybe that played a bit of a role in in what happened in with Brexit then at the risk of making the mistake of making a prediction about the future when I'm talking about how hard things are to predict I'm going to look at maybe some possible outcomes that are going to occur and maybe some of the implications for Australia so in terms of polls and predictability many publicly reported polls had remained winning and winning comfortably this obviously seems to have been Cameron's belief I doubt that he would have said let's go ahead with this if he had known he was going to lose or that the remain was going to lose but to my mind it shouldn't really surprise us that the polls or at least popular reports on the polls got it wrong if you look at US election in 2012 for example many reports on the polls leading up to the election there had the election to be very very close and I don't know if any of you remember this but footage of Karl Rove refusing to accept evidence of the resounding Obama win he's like no no no but the polls are this and the polls are that so there's some problem here I think with polls and relying on polls similarly for the UK election in 2015 the polls had the election as very close knife edge we're not going to know it's going to be really close maybe there'll be another minority government etc and then the Conservatives won quite comfortably and I think maybe this could have played a role in Cameron's shock and I guess his loss that he had possibly given up on polls being accurate because in the previous election polls were okay things are really close but then it turned out to be in his favour so maybe he's going well maybe the polls are close but hey we can't trust them and I think overall this should reduce some of our trust in polls being overly authoritative particularly in their predictions and this obviously has a bit of a role for the way in which democracy is played out these days with polls playing a very very big and important role in how we do democracy turning now to immigration and disconnection I think it's possibly easy to overlook that there's probably a bunch of or there have been and probably still are a bunch of angry people in the UK some of those people not all of course have been well targeted immigrants as the cause of their problems and you can actually see you know at least there's reports of a rise in racist activities post-Brexit and I think this shouldn't overlook the fact that there's some if not many people in the UK who are facing legitimate problems or social problems economic problems etc so they've got this assumption and you know quite sound going life is hard for example I saw a thing yesterday that there's a million people in the UK on making lists for council houses so that's an indication things are hard there but then the mistake is to blame it on foreigners so there's a disconnection between current living conditions and the causes of those living conditions so confusing effect bad living conditions with causes you know immigrants are coming here stealing our jobs and women the standard kind of xenophobic fear campaign and that obviously did play a role in the actual campaigning during Brexit there's a nice quote here that I got from the paper a few days ago it's from The Guardian admittedly so maybe it's a little bit slanted but it says as a quote from a person you know average person in the street in the UK who said this is before Brexit we've been left behind a white middle-aged man told me at a bus stop as I rested in Hemel Hempstead those politicians don't care about us immigration has ruined this country and so there's to me these points of general disconnection between a bad life and the causes of the bad life my life sucks and it's that person's fault over there this then leads us to I think a probably deeper issue about elites and disconnection so again we've got a lot of angry people unhappy people in part they're not or they didn't see the benefits of EU membership only the problems and we can look at the the myths and persistence of myths about what the EU was doing as I think evidence of this so these claims about straight bananas you know the EU wanted to ban curved bananas or to ban prawn cocktail crisps crisps so the EU's going crazy with its bureaucracy and these sorts of things those claims are actually absolutely wrong but they did persist for at least a decade as far as I can tell it's other claim of 347 million pounds per week which could be better spent on the NHS again why are we giving all this money to the EU when we're broke our NHS is broken why can't we spend that money on ourselves and again this we can understand this in reference to disconnections so I believe that people's efforts such as you know putting money towards things aren't getting their just rewards and why would people think this and I think in part political elites in the UK or people thought or see or believe that political elites in the UK and Europe are disengaged and disinterested in real people and I think this represents a deep overall sentiment against political elites or political establishment and we can actually see there's some interesting events occurring now where you have these anti-establishment politicians who are breaking promises the day after Brexit and I think this confirms this disconnection between politicians saying things to get into power and getting you know pursuing their success at all other costs and then going okay well now what do I do with it ah I've got to break my promises and I think this will only fuel anger and resentment with people in in the UK there's also a second issue which a number of people have raised well maybe we can ignore this vote you know we'll just either push it out of the way or have another vote or well people were stewed and they got it wrong so you know don't worry about it and this I think is a really really dangerous thing because it ignores democracy and this would confirm the disconnection of political elites in the establishment and would I think justify a lot of anger in people if we go through these democratic processes and they're not recognised as legitimate then we really have to ask what is it that we're doing this democracy for keeping on this notion of anger and austerity there's a a bit of a line that someone said to me a few days ago which was you shouldn't let people who selected Boaty McBoatface as a name for a ship vote but I think this points to a further issue about democracy and problems of democracy so I think when we think of an issue like Boaty McBoatface which for those who are unfamiliar there was a public poll on what a particular British boat should be called and the overwhelming majority of people voted for Boaty McBoatface which I think is absolutely genius but with with these things there's there's no skin in the game it doesn't matter whether you call the boat Boaty McBoatface or the Sir Richard Attenborough or something like that it doesn't really matter and I think people might have confused this Brexit vote with something like that where it doesn't matter which way I vote you know some things I'm just expressing an anger or a confusion or a certain belief set and it doesn't it won't have any impact on me so again you have this notion of kind of regret where people say I wouldn't have voted for Brexit if I'd known it would actually occur but then again this goes to this notion of angry and unhappy people and I think one of the causes of people being angry in the UK is austerity arising from the global financial crisis and they feel betrayed by the elites and establishment you know I worked hard I played hard by the rules and I did everything right and I don't see any of the reward that I deserve another is a general shift in social norms I think this goes to part of the fear about the immigrants it's a loss of entitlement and exceptional treatment here thinking of middle and working class white males in particular feeling that their time is passing or has passed so you can blame it on whether it's immigrants women the politically correct elite etc and so we might actually see evidence of this I guess loss of a sense of entitlement in the fact that there was a generational difference in voting where the younger people generally voted to remain the really old voted to remain and then these middle-aged voters went for Brexit and I think one of the important things that we can draw from this is there's a similar set of social factors I think driving the US Trump and Sanders supporters obviously Sanders now out of the out of contention but this underlying feeling that the system hasn't worked and it's the fault of the establishment we need some people who have come in and changed the establishment and you know stick a finger in the eye of the politicians without possibly realizing what the impacts of those decisions going to be so what next is there going to be disillusioned or a stronger EU so what does all of this mean for the UK there has been so far at least the past few days the expected economic social and political costs but then there seems to be this unexpected thing at least of the notion of Scotland and Northern Ireland leaving and so what becomes of the United in the United Kingdom in terms of globally there's lots and lots of predictions about what's going to happen what will happen what is currently happening and as I said one of the hard things at the moment is these predictions a lot of people seem to be making them without any idea of what's actually happening for Europe we can have on one on one hand for example the further collapse of the EU there's obviously one of the big concerns was this would lead to a big breakup of the EU at the end of the EU etc but if we if we think of the EU as a good thing and we want to be optimistic and glass half full perhaps if people see that there's actual costs of exiting then maybe there's a stronger case for feeling of the usefulness of EU membership so I think again this notion that well there's going to be no cost to us to leave the EU if other countries see that they go actually this does have impacts to us we should probably think a bit more about whether we vote this way or not I obviously have no idea about this so I can just pontificate on possible outcomes but I think one of the most important things is this uncertainty, unpredictability and pessimism will play a big role in security and senses of insecurity so this could then you know the increase in uncertainty and unpredictability could fuel further insecurity of people at least maybe not in the traditional I guess political security sense so as a final set of comments again I think this uncertainty unpredictability and disconnection is actually a global phenomena at least in relation to what we could think of as Western democratic institutions I think that there is a persistent anger and growing anger at a disconnected political class Australia so far has been sheltered from a strong anger due to a lack of austerity and the social malaise faced by the UK and the US so I think some people have said to me at least that there's more of an apathy and general disengagement with politicians and politics in Australia than real anger but then I was thinking about this last night and I was like oh but wait a minute we've had five prime ministers since 2010 so there is something that we also share with the UK in terms of this anger and I think a disengagement with politics and an anger at the politicians being disengaged I think this disconnection so this is where my predictions again overlooking just what I said but I do have a couple of predictions that this disconnection will be expressed in an even greater vote for non-major parties in the Australian election on Saturday and I think also given the rise in racist events in the UK following Brexit there seems to be a legitimate fear about the impacts of the plebiscite on marriage equality some of the concerns about that is that it might stoke further kind of homophobia or other unpleasant outcomes I think also it's probably going to heavily shake or it should at least challenge terminals believe that the plebiscite would easily go his way and silence the social conservative element of the coalition I think he should be fairly kind of worried about that now for me a fantasy outcome of this would be some substantial shift away from focus group and poll driven politics given again that the polls and the impact that they have on our political decision making and the certainty in those things seems to be shaken I think we should really be rethinking the way in which we're doing politics and democracy more generally and it's a final comment and probably the most important prediction which I think has really really big impacts is I predict that Brexit will be word of the year so when we look back at the word of the year stuff people go aha Brexit that was 2016's word of the year so thank you very much yes sir good afternoon my name is Alex and I'm from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade at the Shangri-La dialogue the French Defense Minister said or intimated that Europe should be more involved in the Indo-Pacific and in a recent Peter Jennings article he said that the UK would probably have to step back from its commitments to the region including the five-powder fence arrangement because it would have less capability less capacity etc does anyone have any comments on implications of brexit in terms of the UK's involvement in the Indo-Pacific or the EU's involvement in the UK in the Indo-Pacific thank you yeah I might take that one that's a very good question I suppose it raises or has an assumption inside it and that is that the French were serious well not just that they were serious but they had genuine intentions of getting involved in things like phonops in the South China Sea which they certainly referred to to what extent is that a realistic goal for French power projection capabilities and also to what extent is it France acting alone or in concert perhaps with the United States naval forces Australian naval forces with Britain coming along for the ride I do think there is some truth in the notion that the UK is going to have to take a bit of a step back from Asia it's interesting that when the US pivoted or rebalanced towards the Asia-Pacific it spurred a whole bunch of secondary pivots the EU of course said that it wanted to pivot to to the Asia-Pacific but varying different countries within the EU have varying capacity to do so and a pivot of course is not just an economic pivot trade pivot political pivot military security pivot as well so I I think the jury is still out on the extent to which France will be able to come through with what it has signaled that it might do within the Asia-Pacific particularly in Southeast Asia and in some of those key maritime trade routes I think that it is probably too early to say with all due respect to Peter Jennings too early to say what the United Kingdom will do its own capacity its own naval capacity has been significantly diminished over the years and it's only been recently that it's gone back up to the two percent defense spending ceiling so that has a knock-on effect in terms of capabilities a lag time if you like it'll take a little while before the UK is able to project that type of naval power within the Asia-Pacific on a consistent basis so it may be a question not so much of intent for the United Kingdom but of capability and also I think that there is an added imperative to the UK for the UK to show that it is really committed to first and foremost European security having having taken this boat now whoever succeeds Cameron and to one suspect it's not likely to be Corbyn might be someone from within the Labor Party next time there's an election but one also sees Boris Johnson circling they are going to have to prove their credentials reprove their credentials to to European security and that means engagement primarily through NATO rather than in the Asia-Pacific NATO as an actor in the Asia-Pacific is something that is only vaguely thought about rather than actively pursued. Greg Jarosh train consulting EU has been around for decades hasn't it was there not a serious concerted attempt to monitor the aspirations the tensions the challenges the schisms that were occurring within the member state so that the Greek crisis wasn't a surprise the refugee flow wasn't a surprise it one gets the impression that it was like well just look at the good side of things we'll ignore the bad things that we can see happening and we won't have any scenario game planning we won't have any plan B CD everything's going to go according to our plan and we'll almost ignore these cracks appearing right in front of us. It's a good question EU hubris I might pass that to Emery. Thanks Matian thanks for the question I know why you ask this one I think on the back of the Brexit vote and certainly I think in a way the responses from the EU leaders could have been different in the run-up to the referendum vote the referendum vote and then all these other issues that you raise as well there is a tendency I suppose not to want to focus on those negative aspects so the referendum is an interesting case because in a lot of ways EU leaders seem to go with the notion that if if we pretended that the that the forthcoming vote wasn't taking place then it wouldn't occur in a way that was detrimental to the EU that's clearly not enough it's not enough to deal with this kind of crisis and as for the other crisis that you refer to the financial crisis migration crisis you know EU leadership is simply trying to deal with these issues in the same way that a national government would and tries to do and often the problems cross borders so the EU is an appropriate place for the things to be dealt with but that doesn't mean that the decision-making processes around those are easy and when you've got to get 28 member states on board clearly just 27 now thank you Matt about 28 you know it's decision-making is slow the institutional processes can be slow and that's a major criticism that has been leveled at the EU over many years now that's not to say it's totally ineffective in these areas but it is a different decision-making process so yeah I take your point entirely and I think unfortunately on the on the case of the British referendum the approach of simply pretending the problem wasn't there was not enough in this instance yeah look I and I'll just finish with this statement I think Cameron did indicate that the UK being in break in the European Union did allow to have input in policy decision-making but he then sort of left it at that and as if to say well yeah we have an input and I guess the next question would have been and what was the outcome was the input valuable was it taken note of was it acted on or was it simply a matter of we'll continue to provide input but the outcomes won't be what we would like to see and therefore it's a talk fest well if I could follow up look it's not a talk fest in the sense that the EU is a really interesting case of an international organisation where decisions are taken that sometimes affect member states and those member states may not have wished to sign up to that decision but the fact is that that in each case the UK was involved in the decision-making process so the whole idea that you defer blame for things to Brussels as though Brussels has imposed this upon you and you are some sort of passive consumer of policy coming from the European Union it's blatantly false because that's not how the thing works having said that I take your point about the British government not being clear about their specific role that they were going to have inside the European Union going forward and this is I know it's floating around social media at the moment this is the Sir Humphrey Appleby question about Britain and the European Union that idea that if the Brits are in the European Union that they can shape the nature and the pace of integration whereas if they're outside of European integration that they somehow then simply have to be a consumer of what happens inside the EU and yet will still be affected by that without participating in the decision-making so Sir Humphrey you'll recall from that particular episode says that the Brits had to be in the European Union so that they could make a pig's breakfast of the whole thing now the question that gets interesting about this aspect of the debate is the extent to which the UK was an active participant in reform of EU institutions now I think many analysts would agree that that needs to occur across a range of areas economically and politically and whether or not the UK was making any any headway in that is a separate question Pat Cedric Brockman National Security College asking from a public policy perspective about maintaining public consent to a social license so if you view the EU as a social license by the communities from a public policy perspective we have a tendency to say that argument has now been one let's move on to the next issue at hand and we leave behind the maintenance of public consent so how can we build public policy that maintains the public consent to a license that has been granted to government using this example of what happens when we don't maintain public consent I might let Anne Marie think about that for a little while while I offer a little bit of my own observation about the nature of consent well of course that consent in part was manufactured and in part because it wasn't really put to popular votes uh referendums are the things that that the EU has shied away from very much there's another interesting thing about that that nature of consent within British society particularly where those dissenting voices that previously could be used for external purposes now become internal problems public policy problems for the United Kingdom and I'm speaking particularly about UKIP so UKIP was very much an external something that the UK could externalize and say well here's the protest against the EU will send them off to the European Parliament they can rant and rave about Brussels as much as they like they can bring up the yes minister yes prime minister arguments about the British sausage being redesignate designated the high-fat emulsified awful tube uh and how ridiculous that is um but now that becomes an internal problem for the British polity now reactions to to to the creation of that recreating consent uh is is a problem not just for the European Union now but creating consent is a problem for the British government as to what role it takes outside the EU and how close it gets to the EU my worry is of course that UKIP having played that role in the EU now becomes a plays a similar role within British society so in other words the UKIP in a way is the ultimate spoiler party so it spoils on European Union it spoils on the vote to exit and of course those who who made the argument for exit um the more moderate ones are now saying well UKIP has now done its job thank you very much we'll now leave that but UKIP also played a sporting role in splitting the Tories it's now playing a role in splitting the left uh are we going to see those types of voices which will not consent no matter what to the types of policy constructions that come out of individual nation states or a supernational institution are we going to see that play for the spoiling or spoiling role and damaging role in the future quite possibly amary thank you and thanks Patrick for the question uh look i think that just by way of a bit of background the idea that the European Union has had a democratic deficit um has been floating around since the early 1990s and in part it's because it's a unique and uh rather peculiar set of institutions so it gains its legitimacy through two um two ways primarily one is that there's a directly electorate European parliament so to the extent that they choose to do so citizens can elect their own members of the European parliament and then the other way that democracy works through the EU of course is that national governments go and represent the interests of their electorate in in Brussels so there's kind of two sources of legitimacy there and it's I think easy for um that legitimacy to be to be somehow uh lost or underestimated and it is difficult for um Joe public to understand that um I just would return to one of the points I briefly made in my presentation which was that the EU unfortunately has not been well understood and um and as part of what you're referring to as a social contract voters need to understand what this thing is and what it does and what benefits there are and uh potentially that it may contribute to peace stability prosperity and so on and so forth now if that is lost in the debate and it clearly was lost in the campaign that we just saw um you know unfortunately it underlines the the great need for further education about the likes of the EU and some of that responsibility falls to national governments so there wasn't a lot of the UK government going around saying this that and the other has occurred as part of the European integration process which we signed up to and which we participated in the decision making for that that really wasn't heard terribly often and more could have been made of it um but I return to my plea for more education uh Adam do you want to channel Gramsci and do some coercion and consent or yeah maybe not channeling Gramsci but um for me one of the interesting things and looking at this notion of legitimacy and consent and again you know the the role of democracy um I think one of the I don't know how how this relates to me but uh there's I don't know if people have been following uh last week there was a renewed discussion in Texas where Texas leaves the US um I saw a thing today someone proposing uh either Queensland or Northern Queensland leaving Australia um which possibly doesn't seem such a bad thing no um I don't mean that at all um but the point there about this this sense I think this goes back to the sense of disconnection and uh the idea ab whether it's flawed whether it's um accurate or not is kind of beside the point but the idea that a lot of people have that there is this elite bunch of people who are making a whole bunch of decisions about me that impact me negatively and I have no say in it whatsoever so the sense of um illegitimacy comes from this sense of alienation um that I think many people do feel about politics in general and uh but something along the lines of a professional class of uh politicians rather than them actually being people they've been politicians their entire lives they don't know what it's like to be a person etc um how to respond to that I think um part of it is the education actually showing no no no wait this is good for us this is good for you here are the good things that we're doing here are the good outcomes of that one of the really hard things about that is if a government is sitting there telling you how awesome things are it's kind of like a um a parent telling a child uh but look you know everything's cool eat your greens and they'll be awesome um you're going to be very skeptical about that and maybe a little bit I'm sure whether the government's just propagandizing to you or not so I think it's a really hard thing to demonstrate the utility and usefulness of these cooperative enterprises um but I don't know there's something about this this connection that I think is I don't know if it's a novel thing but it does seem to be playing a big role in politics and I guess senses of legitimacy these days David Goyne uh I work at the Department of Defense but I guess my questions really reflect my own views not theirs uh if I have a view uh okay look I think some of the points that Adam just raised uh part of the cause of disillusionment what I suspect the root cause of it is the disappearance of working class jobs and I don't see that being anything but a runaway train in fact it's probably going to reach into middle class jobs very soon so as work disappears under an onslaught of automation machine intelligence whatever we've probably seen a very mild form of protest at that what is the future for this for internal security of states as this comes to play out and not just in Britain not just in Europe but globally yep um so at the risk of exposing myself as a dirty stinking lefty um one of the things that has often bothered and frustrated me about discussions of new technologies is oh we've got these great new technologies and these are fantastic and everything will be safer because we won't have as many people working on these things and um it'll be better and cheaper because you don't have people working is it overlooks okay this is going to cause unemployment and then this leads to insecurity and stability and these sorts of things so I think if we're like one of the fantasy or uh let's say desirable elements that has to go hand in hand with these sorts of disruptions is having some form of uh social safety net etc etc so that people who either lose their jobs or have downgrades in the amount of time that they're employed and the the following money that comes from that that there is support for them in that regard um and it is quite a I think it is going to be uh an increasingly problematic issue as we see the rise of automation robots and these sorts of things and even beyond uh the standard challenges to what we consider kind of blue collar jobs or working class jobs there's now a whole bunch of robots or computer bots that can write newspaper articles uh can probably write academic papers as good if not better than we can do um so this challenge isn't going to be something that's simply faced by you know what we consider standard industrial type jobs um how we face that as a society generally I think we we do need to do something about that the hard part is their slow um almost kind of generational issues that need to be solved in our current kind of democratic politics is geared at election cycles on our prime minister cycles where you know might be two years before you actually are held accountable for what you're doing um and this I think creates a real big problem because we're going to have these long-standing big generational issues that aren't going to be probably dealt with effectively by the way which we're doing democrats and politics uh democracy and politics at the moment thank you I won't comment on the implications for internal security of states but just to add a comment there I think the brexit vote that we saw on Friday is in some ways symptomatic of a gap that we're now seeing between what governments seek to do in terms of economic integration and free trade agreements for example for for their states and then what people think their political borders ought to be so another area that is increasingly politicized recently is in relation to the big trade agreements mega regionals for example the likes of the proposed free trade agreement between the united states and the european union we're seeing those areas increasingly politicized increasingly controversial we're seeing political protest on trade issues which you know even 20 years ago people probably wouldn't have bothered um but what we're seeing is where governments seek economic integration of a certain kind that goes well beyond borders and starts to impact on things like regulatory politics citizens are suddenly getting much more animated about that stuff now the EU is as we know the most advanced case of economic integration around the place and I think that we're seeing something interesting there in terms of you know a backlash against that but it's not limited to the european union of course this goes well beyond that and the big free trade agreements are somewhere else that you could look to as an example of exactly the kind of thing you're referring to disenfranchisement of working class perhaps and then a response from voters that is negative about those economic arrangements so I think governments have to think very carefully now about how they're going to start to market some of that stuff internally if they're going to handle the politics of it Benjamin Baker from the Royal Norwegian Embassy I have a question for all three of you I'd like to perhaps go a little bit to the hypothetical you know as you've seen there's been a lot of talk of Indref too the Scottish second Scottish independence vote I would like you to if you can speculate a bit how you think that that would affect the future of the United Kingdom if that actually came to pass both from a political perspective how it could affect the EU further and also what the security implications strategic implications could be for the United Kingdom which would no longer be the United Kingdom that's it well let me take the security implications or immediately immediate strategic implications if that happened then the UK has to find a new home for its so nuclear submarines because of course they're based in Fastlane in Scotland and more than that it actually has to become more than simply a maritime defence actor because it will see itself shifting to a much more maritime defence posture as a result of the brexit it will need to within NATO and Britain would have to have a northern border and that regardless of how friendly the Scots were there'll be no assumption that they'd be coming over the hill waving axes but but nonetheless that takes state resources even having a border has resources takes resources so it's another impostor another cost were you to hold a referendum now with the amount of resentment and the amount of outrage that Scottish feel about what's been done to them by the British or the English yeah by the English then you probably would have a vote in favour I wouldn't necessarily speculate want to speculate that those numbers would hold up however because it is a very big call Scotland only just recently voted very narrowly to stay in and at a time when seas will much calmer with seas rougher I think that there it would be hard to mount an outcase because it would take 6 to 12 well take 12 months 12 to 18 months frankly to gear up and there would be an awful lot of pressure and an awful lot of inducements put on the Scots to remain in but I'm not an expert so much on Scottish politics so I'll defer to to Anne-Marie another of my mat but I've loads of Scottish ancestry so I'll keep my views about Scottish independence to myself just to add really that as I said previously the the extent to which the UK is now disunited is a serious problem for the for the government and it adds to our uncertainty about the whole scenario because if there is for example to be a further Scottish referendum again this takes time and while all of this plays out the UK and the EU are not then involved in the negotiations that need to take place in order to arrive at satisfactory post-Brexit arrangements and you know if I'm too selfishly I suppose but take the Australian view it would be better for third countries if those negotiations were swift and smooth and if whatever arrangements are to be in place can please be put in place so that we can all get on with it so I'm by no stretch an expert on internal UK politics but we're looking at a very seriously divided country economically geographically politically and the major parties pulling themselves to pieces so it's not pretty I'm conscious of the time folks so what we might do is now run three questions together so we will take George we'll take this gentleman just behind George and we'll take Kyle so mine's going closer to home I mean it's been very nice to talk about Europe but maybe we should come back a little bit to what does it mean for us so and a few takes on that I mean the next couple of years and perhaps three given the delay and actually pulling a trigger obviously going to me locally focused but the world doesn't stop for us the challenges maritime trade and other don't stop for us so I guess the question is thinking of the diplomatic efforts the recently announced European Australian leadership dialogue and the challenges of life generally what might we be doing during that period when the last thing Europe and the UK might want to be doing really is focusing on the Asia Pacific and the Indo-Pacific thank you for your presentation my name is Vipur I'm a master student at Cap school so the narrow margin of the break exit referendum does it offer lessons for policy makers that the future referendums on such important subject which have far reaching implications should be decided by a two-third majority or 50 more than 51 percent majority so that it constitute our decisive mandate thanks Matt um well just a very brief comment you you said that it was popular to see Putin is rubbing his hands I would put it to you there's good reason for it to be popular a whole series of Russian politicians have expressed jubilation the Kremlin's business ombudsman I'll just quote him said that Brexit will separate Europe from the Anglo-Saxons that is from the United States this is not the independence of Britain and Europe but of Europe from the United States we are not far from a united Eurasia in 10 years and only two years ago Celigate Karavokanov in Sweden predicted the end of Europe within 10 years so there are grounds for seeing it as popular but the the point I wanted to make is that of course this has implications and you might wish to comment on United Nations where a much reduced England can hardly be expected to retain its UN Security Council seat and certain Russian diplomats have already put the case that in Moscow's view Germany has a much stronger claim to be a member of the UN Security Council than Great Britain has so you may wish to comment excellent shall we start with what does it mean for Australia hammering yes thanks George for the question one of the immediate practical implications for Australia is that we have a prospective EU Australia trade agreement that has is being looked at in Brussels and Canberra it is the case that everybody has come out saying that this will not be interrupted by the possible Brexit but the truth is that instead of Australian negotiating with the EU 28 EU 27 and the UK will now be negotiating with each other so we will be reverting to Australia's usual position in proceedings which is trying to get everybody's attention this is difficult for Australia and and it's not a great development so it's at best a delay at worst it's a serious disruption you know Brexit is a nuisance from the point of view of Australian policymakers I would have thought so so if it is to be then then it would be better if they got on with it as to do me to go through the questions Matt what we do with Australian implications in full good okay I'll stop there right well we'll do do Adam on what is legitimate so I was thinking about this this question this morning actually not that I have foresight and you're going to ask it but this issue of okay it's 52 percent we're in favour 48 percent we're against it and to me my brain is going that's not much of a majority that's a pretty tiny amount but then I think the actual numbers were a million voting in a million more voting in favour of leaving them remaining so in that sense when you look at the actual numbers a million people is a pretty substantial majority in that regard in terms of whether people should be thinking about referendums having something like two-thirds majority or 60 percent or these sorts of things some part of that seems to make sense because if you're in theory if you're having a referendum it should be something about something quite serious it should be something that we take quite seriously and involve ourselves in quite seriously one of the counter arguments against having like a higher majority necessary for for any referendum to be successful is it maintains the status quo it's a you know it's a structural incentive to maintain the things the way that they are I think in Australia we've had three successful referendum from there and was it like someone maybe I think it's like 57 in total maybe I'm getting that figure wrong but the vast majority of Australian referenda have been to maintain the status quo but in part because of this majority issue so when we look at the case of Brexit and for those of us who seem to think it was a pretty silly idea for so many people to vote to leave then the inclination is well maybe they should have had a higher majority needed etc etc etc but then you know if you have a say plebiscite on marriage equality or if we would have a referendum on marriage equality and we would have say a 60% majority or 66% majority majority of states or voting in favour then that would be much harder referendum to win and so some part of it would think well that's actually a bad way of doing it we want it so that actually gets through so I I don't think that there's any good answer to that but the yeah it it's complicated in terms of maintaining status quo versus change yes and Russia well look let me deal with the UN and and Britain seat in the UN Security Council look I don't mean to be flippant but just you try and take Britain seat away from it I mean it has to voluntarily give it up that's not going to happen in terms of broader Russian narratives and Karl knows this better from me because better than me because he's just returned from a mission to Moscow so he knows the the mood on the ground in Russia but on Putin's jubilation I've been fairly upbeat so far in in this presentation at least about the future of European security let me now be downbeat with with Adam having outed himself as a rabid lefty I'll out the self as a realist and yesterday I wrote something for the lowey interpreter on Russian propaganda in which I referred to an American political scientist called Randall Schweller who made a very interesting published a very interesting article about eight years or so ago in which he talked about global on new e as a result of the different sources of information that spread around the world now immediately after the Cold War there was one narrative in town and that was western democratic universalism and woe betide anyone who argued against that now there are new narratives lots of new narratives and one of those narratives is about the failure of the liberal project and the end of the liberal order the end of the rules based order that we are used to and brexit as proof of that is this the case well I think it's precipitate to say that it is the end of the liberal order but there are some discouraging signs and and brexit is certainly one of those more than that it's not just the Russians that see this it is increasingly the Americans that are starting to think about a lack of European unity or a diminishment in European capacity to be to be a well frankly to be able in the first instance to burden share with the United States because that's what the United States wants first and foremost burden sharing from traditional allies but more than that is a long-term security global security actor going forward the US worry is that the EU or various European States will be less able or more importantly less willing due to the reimposition of national agendas on foreign security policy and moving away from some of those hard and fast values principles that the EU has espoused more towards an interest based approach less able to to try and solve some of the world's problems as a global security concern whereas there was much enthusiasm for this within the EU about three or four years ago as recently as that so it's not just the Russians that that foresee weakness it's the Americans too what does that mean what are the implications well I like this notion of global onuit because it means that the marketplace for ideas is very very crowded now and navigating that marketplace is going to be difficult and it is something that cuts across national boundaries it's not just states that are responding to different narratives out there at Publix and Publix see that there are different points of view whether they are truthful whether they are partially truthful or that whether they are fundamentally out and out lies as you know many of the leave campaign said and put forward in the in the referendum but more globally as well there are these various cornucopia of ideas circulating and that makes people mistrustful and it makes people apathetic and I don't think it does reinforce this sense of onnui and the sense of onnui will affect afflict the West first and before it spreads to others so that's my gloomy conclusion just for you Kyle and on that very happy note we are we are out of time by a couple of minutes so look let me thank you very much for all your questions and for coming we hope it's been illuminating for you and enlightening we would like to perhaps follow up with similar events if there's enough desire for it and certainly I know we'd like to communicate to cooperate more with with the Center for European Studies I think this is the first step towards doing doing a few more things let me thank Anne-Marie very much and also Adam and thank you for your attendance many thanks and enjoy your afternoon