 Well, it's my pleasure now to welcome Tony Murnie, who's recently retired from the Australian Federal Police, where he was involved with the International Deployment Group. He's an expert on reform in the security area, and in a few weeks time going to work in Afghanistan. Welcome to this conversation at the conference. You're on a panel about sustaining post-conflict recovery, and particularly looking at the role of policing assistance, and I guess some criticism of a failure to fully utilise the value of policing in that transition towards stability. Explain to me why are police so important in this equation as we talk about transition in the civil military context? Sure, thanks Julie. Over the past 10 years, the importance of policing has increasingly recognised in security sector reform and nation building because the missing bit in the traditional security and development space has been governance, governance in state formation. So police in fact become the underpinnings for governance and rule of law. Without governance or rule of law, the only application you have in state to maintain order is military force, and we see what happens commonly in emerging states and post-conflict states where military forces are allowed to dominate that environment. The importance of police is that it allows you to transition away from that and start to build a civil society. And civil society is where the future of these nations will be. It's not as military dominated nations. The problem we have in the aid end of the business where we provide humanitarian support and other development is that in the absence of governance and rule of law, the aid can't be anywhere near as effective as it would normally be. So the issue with policing is that it becomes the precursor to political, social and economic development because it provides the orderly framework necessary for that to occur. What is the rule of law and what is civil society and why are they so critical if military and leaving for it to be okay once they're gone? Yeah, the concept of rule of law is multifarious. There are so many definitions. We actually had a review done when I was with the Australian Federal Police and these guys looked at the problem and they could fill a volume just on trying to define it. But when Coffey Ann Arne was Secretary-General of the United Nations, he produced a definition that basically specified what rule of law was and the advantage of his definition is that it was the definition that applied to the world community. It was being announced by the head of a world community body. So the definition that he talked about was establishing a set of principles and conditions that applied to everybody in the society in an equal way, in an appropriate way, based on rules that were established by the society and that satisfied a range of international standards in terms, for example, of human rights and gender and so forth, so that you didn't find the kind of apartheid where you might have a system that is discriminatory towards one gender or other and you segregate power in that way. So that was the definition that Coffey Ann Arne... Because fundamental to the rule of law is that everyone's equal. Everyone's equal before the law. Yes. Not an easy thing in Afghanistan. It's not an easy thing anywhere because in reality in Australia, not everyone is equal before the law. And the reason for that is that it costs a lot of money to go to court, for example, if you want to pursue a matter legally or if you want to defend yourself against allegations. There's a range of people you can have do that for you. The British Court case in Australia about two years ago was costing $110,000 per person. Most people can't pay that sort of money. I guess another key factor in the rule of law though would be an independent judiciary who are fairly dealing with the facts before them in making a decision. In other words, free of corruption or links to government. Now again, that's a hard thing in a country like Afghanistan. Yes. What's interesting about the rule of law is if you break the world up, the 194 odd states that are currently members of the United Nations, there's some fairly good quantitative measures of what rule of law looks like across the world. There are probably out of the 190 odd nations that are recognised under that definition of what a sort of nation-like state thing is, or entity is, that there'd be 30 perhaps countries in the world that come close to being in an orderly, structured system run based on rule of law. And even those have a hell of a lot more to do before rule of law becomes, for example, equal. So they're the countries that are in fact the world donor countries. Well Tony, that's such a challenging thing to say because here at this conference on lessons learned and particularly lessons learned about transitions after disasters or humanitarian crises or conflict, over and over again people have said one of the signs of a good transition is the establishment of the rule of law. So we're setting ourselves a goal that's hard to achieve. Can you give me some insights into the sort of practical things you'll be doing in Afghanistan to promote an effective police force because you clearly believe that's a critical transitional step. My role or the ability to influence something on the scale of the rule of law effort in Afghanistan is going to be very limited. For years I've sat on that side. Well, I've done a lot of conceptual work in the AFP about how this stuff should work and how we applied in the field. Yes, the Australian Federal Police. Yes, but when we now look at what happens in these sort of broader environments, the influence you have is really fairly limited. The sort of principles that we don't adopt are one, recognising that people will do things their way in their time. You can't make people do anything. If their society doesn't reflect values that underpin our society, that's not their fault. That's a problem we're going to have to look at and examine. Observing what people do and then finding ways of talking to them about what they're looking for in their future and where they see that taking them in the longer term is what this stuff is really all about. There's a rush whenever we engage in a mission to start performing tasks. Let's build courthouses. Let's build jails. We'll buy the police cars. We'll do all that sort of stuff. That doesn't make police services. It doesn't make courts. The situation in Cambodia is a really interesting one in terms of what was attempted in terms of paying judges a living wage to reduce elements of corruption in that environment. But judges who were taking money were earning far more than a living wage in Cambodia. So it had no effect on their behaviour. So what are you saying? What does have an effect? What lesson have you learned about how to genuinely lay foundations for the rule of law? There's two elements of the way the world approaches police reform problems and rule of law. The first way is the way that we all think about so easily and it's basically programmatic development or project-based development. And project-based development only ever does three things. Trains people, provides equipment, and it provides infrastructure. That works if those things are the real problems. So if rule of law, for example, in an emergent or post-conflict state isn't functioning because the police don't know how to be police, don't have the skills, that's the only obstacle. Then training will work, same with equipment, same with infrastructure. However, they're not commonly the source of all the problems. You need to do that, but if you do that alone nothing will change. The other end of that spectrum is about the reform of nations, the reform of practices and codes. That's actually about practice, police practice, police behaviour and their relationships with the community and the various elements of the community. It's about values. Yeah, exactly. If you don't work on those problems all of this, in fact, is quite dangerous because you could actually take what we call criminalised police service and give them great tools. Give them great tools, say give them cars. What you've actually done is provided them with greater access to an exploitable population. That's a very dangerous thing to do. In one of the presentations here at this conference someone said one way of measuring the success you've done in your work with a police service is to say, would you advise the children in that society if they're in trouble to go and ask a policeman for help? I thought that was a really interesting cut through question. That's not a bad index. There's a whole series of possible indices that you could use. But in most, the basic definition of policing situations that I use is liberal democratic police at one extreme, followed by what I refer to as socio-economic enforcement policing. So you're working on behalf of socio-economic elites in the nation and then there's criminalised enforcement policing. We are actually working for criminal entities that run and control countries. In those two situations, the vast majority of people are better off never going near the police. It's actually dangerous and in many countries can be a life-threatening thing to do. Stay away from that. Tony, our time is up for this conversation but could I just ask one last question and that is when you're speaking to this audience today, a mixed audience of international Defence Force personnel, non-government organisations working in international aid and development and government representatives, what's the single most important thing you want them to remember about your message about policing and its role in transitions? The most important thing that we can do in this space is look closely at what is there, see what is there, not what we want to see or what we're trained to assume or see and then work with that and work with the people who are going to live in that space. Forget our own values and forget our own styles and techniques. These guys actually do some really good stuff and a lot of the systems they have in place, they're far from perfect but they're capable of providing order and structure that then lets them move into other forms of development. But that's a hard thing what you've just said because I'm sure I've heard another presenter here I think from the Australian Federal Police say something to you the effect that in a country like Afghanistan as we work for that transition as our military are pulling out and asking civil society to take over responsibility for safety and security of the population, one of the challenges will be what are we prepared to accept as legitimate practice and I took it to imply well not imply to say clearly some of the practices may be of a more intrusive or violent nature than we would accept as lawful within the Australian context. Absolutely, the situation it won't matter what we would accept when we withdraw it will be what the people of the country are prepared to accept and it's going to depend on the level of force and intimidation that's applied to them at one extreme and the level of commitment or desire for change at another. That's the space that's going to exist so our influence over that space will diminish as we withdraw and I'm not sure in some ways it's going to be a bad thing because our influence in the space hasn't yet been particularly positive. Thank you so much for talking to us.