 Welcome. Good morning everyone. Welcome to the 2016 to see you all here, and it's not only the people in this room, we have an overflow lecture theatre and we're live streaming around the world. So welcome all. My name is Stephen Howells and I'm the Director of the Development Policy Centre here at the Crawford School. Let us begin by acknowledging the first Australians on whose lands we meet, and by paying our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. I do, as one of the conference convenes, I do have a few announcements of a logistical nature, but I'm going to postpone those until after the opening. And so now, without further ado, it's my great pleasure and honour to call on the Vice Chancellor of the ANU, Dr Brian Schmidt, to welcome you all here today on behalf of the Australian National University. Thank you. Thank you Stephen, and thank you everyone, the Ngunnawal people. The 2016 Australasian Aid Conference, as we can see, has become a huge event. And Stephen, congratulations on your stewardship. It's the third in this series, and my understanding is there are more than 400 people have registered for the conference, which is a new record, and it's great to see how many people are here, and rather sad for me to see that we cannot expect that Veronica and Stephen and people will be asking therefore for a new, larger room for next year. We'll see what we can do. As Australia's National University, ANU has established to help the government shape the nation and build its post-war identity. Today, we continue to help the government shape public policy through research, through education, and through policy engagement. And a significant amount of that is done here at the Crawford School, which has become a leading graduate public policy school, not just in Australia, but around the world. Through its various research centres, such as the Development Policy Centre, the Crawford School provides advice and expertise across a range of important policy issues, and each year the Crawford Centre School hosts many conferences like this on a range of policy issues and topics. From my perspective, this event is a great example of how the Crawford School brings together academics and policy makers and practitioners for an open exchange of views and for mutual learning. One of the abiding interests of the ANU has been to understand Australia's place in its region and to improve the lives of our neighbours by enhancing the effectiveness of Australian aid programs. Since its establishment, the Development Policy Centre at the ANU has become a preeminent research centre for aid and for development in the Asia Pacific regions. In its first five years of existence, the Centre has done some outstanding work, and I congratulate all of those who have been around to help provide support and active in the centre. In particular, I would like to thank Harold Mitchell for his very generous contributions to the Centre, stretching back now to 2012, and indeed, when I've talked to Harold, he's always pointed out that this is one of the big things that he believes in. I also want to acknowledge the co-host for this conference, the Asia Foundation, thank you Gordon, for coming all the way from San Francisco, an organisation that has a long history with the ANU. Through the support and networks of the Asia Foundation, we are able to ensure that this conference is Australasian rather than just Australian in its outlook. Indeed, there are many precipitants here, not only from throughout the region, but from the United States, Europe and other places as well. ANU and Australia needs to be international in its ambition and reach, and I also note the strong involvement of many other universities across Australia in this event. That is something I think the National University also needs to sponsor as a cooperation across the huge resources that are in Australia. Finally, I will leave the formal introduction to my colleague and Dean Veronica Taylor, but I too would like to thank Peter Vargesi, the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, for agreeing to deliver the opening address to this conference. We very much value our various partnerships with the department across a whole range of issues, and one of my big things that I want to make sure we do is to get constant dialogue and interchange between universities and the rest of the world, including foundations, departments and business. In closing, I wish you the very best for a successful conference, and I hope you to enjoy the next few days of public policy engagement. Thank you all for coming here and making what will be a great activity that I hope continues on into the future. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Vice Chancellor for those words of support and encouragement, as well as welcome. Brian mentioned the Asia Foundation co-host. I now like to call on Gordon Hine, Senior Vice President of the Asia Foundation to add his own welcome. Thank you very much Stephen, and good morning everyone. On behalf of the Asia Foundation, let me add my welcome to all of you, and let me express our thanks to Stephen Howes, the Development Policy Center, also to Vice Chancellor Schmidt, to Dean Veronica Taylor, and to say how pleased we are to again be joining with colleagues at the ANU in this important event. This has been noted, this marks the third year of the Australasia Aid Conference, and in this relatively short period of time, this event has grown significantly in size and scope. A growing number of participants has been noted throughout the region and indeed from around the world. It has emerged as a very important annual venue for serious discussion of national, regional, and global issues in international development, development cooperation, and aid effectiveness. In the same way that the research, the publications, the regular blog produced by the Development Policy Center have become must reads for anyone interested in the current state and emerging trends in international development. For those of you who may not be so familiar with the Asia Foundation, let me just say very briefly that we are a nonprofit, non-government international development and foreign affairs organization that was founded in 1954. We have our headquarters in San Francisco, where I am based, but what's most important is that we operate through a network of 18 permanent country offices throughout Asia, many of which have been in place since the 1950s, and each of which is deeply embedded in the local societies in which we work. Working with local partners, we support and implement programs in five main areas, governance, economic reform, women's empowerment, environment, and regional cooperation. Since 2004, we have benefited greatly in these efforts from the support, cooperation, and partnership with the Australian government, including for the past several years through an institutional partnership with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, for which we are very grateful. For the past six years, as Asian countries have emerged as major providers in international development cooperation, we've been implementing a program focused on what we call Asian approaches to development cooperation or AADC. This program seeks to better understand and add value to the global conversation about how Asian providers are changing the aid landscape and how these changes can foster more successful development, especially in Asia. We believe that overall aid and development effectiveness can improve when diverse actors share approaches, agree on common challenges, are transparent on the intentions and the modalities of their assistance, and collaborate where possible. So through this program, we've been able to contribute Asian perspectives to global development discourse. We've supported capacity development of Asian providers and facilitated South-South cooperation. We are, again, very grateful for the strong partnership with the Australian government in these efforts and also with our good friends at the Korea Development Institute. For this conference, we're excited to be supporting the participation of Asian participants from China and from Korea. Individuals who are deeply engaged in shaping, articulating, and improving development policy and practice in their respective countries, both of which, as we know, have become major contributors to the shifts we are seeing in the overall aid landscape. I hope you have a chance to meet and interact with them over the course of the two days. Two of them are on a plenary session this afternoon on what the SDGs will mean for Asia. So once again, we are delighted to be cooperating again with ANU Development Policy Center. This is one of many shared initiatives we have with the center and with the Australian National University more broadly, and we look forward to continuing and expanding that cooperation going forward. So in closing, let me thank you all again for coming and to thank the Development Policy Center for organizing this important gathering. I think it's going to be a very exciting couple of days and we're all going to learn a lot and I'm very much looking forward to it. Thank you. Thank you, Gordon. And now I'd like to call on our Dean, Professor Veronica Taylor, to introduce our opening speaker, Veronica. Thanks so much, Stephen and good morning, everyone. I'd like to add my welcome on behalf of the College of Asia and the Pacific to those of Brian and Gordon. As Brian mentioned, this is the third Australasian Aid Conference. The first was in 2014 and it was opened by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop. The second in 2015 was opened by the Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Development and Deputy Opposition Leader, Tanya Plibersek. It's appropriate that this, the third conference, should be opened by Peter Varguez, Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Peter took up his position as Secretary of the Department in December 2012 and prior to that appointment he was Australia's High Commissioner to India from 2009 to 2012. Between 2004 and 2009 he was Director-General of the Office of National Assessments. Peter was appointed an officer in the Order of Australia in 2010 for Distinguished Service to Public Administration. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa by the University of Queensland in July 2013 in recognition of his Distinguished Service to Diplomacy and Australian Public Service. When he took up the position of Secretary Peter probably didn't think that in less than a year he and his department would be responsible for Australia's multi-billion-dollar aid program but the decision to integrate what was then AusAID and DFAT was taken less than a year later in September 2013. So who better or indeed who more important to hear from at the 2016 Australasian Aid Conference than Dr Varguez? As will become clear Peter is also a deep thinker in his own right and he's been a great friend to us here at the ANU and a genuine intellectual partner in all that we do but particularly in this domain. So Peter thank you very much for addressing us today and also for agreeing to take questions after your opening address. We're very much looking forward to your remarks. Thank you very much Veronica for your very generous introduction. Please do excuse a slightly throaty voice. I'm actually hoping completely to lose my voice by tomorrow because I have to appear before Senate estimates. Let me let me at the outset acknowledge the Vice Chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt. I think you're early enough in your tenure Brian for me to also offer congratulations on your appointment to lead this very important national institution. In fact my wife is the co-author of the Official History of the ANU so I've been forced over the years to learn a lot more about this institution than I might otherwise enthusiastically have been interested in and it is it is not just a national asset but it plays a very unique role in the relationship between academia and government and Brian I'm sure all of us in government look forward to to your tenure. To Gordon Hain the Senior Vice President of the Asia Foundation can I thank you and your foundation for your support for this conference to Stephen Howes the Director of the Development Policy Centre Stephen you keep us on our toes you do you do very good work at the centre and I'm you know delighted to have an opportunity to participate in the 2016 Australasian Aid Conference. It's a wonderful term Australasia because it captures not just the relationship between Australia and Asia what we have and more importantly what we want but it also captures that long thread of history that sits behind Australia and Asia and even longer thread of geography so I'm delighted that it appears in the title of the conference. I want to start actually with some brief personal observations prior to the integration of AusAid and DFAT to which Veronica referred. I had been on the periphery of aid policy issues for some 35 years and like many on the periphery I had very strong views. I was a skeptic about the historical record of development assistance. Indeed I had some sympathy for the view that aid was for the most part an area of policy failure paved with the very best of intentions. Now these days I don't have the luxury of armchair pontification about aid policy much less aid delivery. The more I've been involved in aid policy as head of the department responsible for its delivery the more nuance has crept into my views. The balance sheet today for me looks much less stark. The policy challenges are genuinely complex. It is still my view that the most important ingredients of economic success for poor countries are good policies and good leadership. No aid program can compensate for their absence but well thought through aid programs certainly can contribute to their presence and today I want to focus on three things. First I want to address three conceptual issues which are central to our aid program. I want to address the link between the private sector led economic growth and poverty reduction. I want to explore the links between security and development and I want to say something about the anatomy of that difficult task of state building. Second I want to talk about how we're addressing these concepts in the very different contexts of Asia the Pacific and globally and finally I want to say something about innovation and why we want it to have a much more prominent place in our aid policy thinking. So let me start by exploring the links between private sector led economic growth and poverty alleviation. This is important because too often the debate about growth and poverty reduction turns into an either or choice between poverty and growth and of course this is a false dichotomy. Generating growth in developing countries is always a balancing act supporting overall economic development and supporting the poor to participate in that development. That's why in Australia's aid program there continues to be considerable investment in human and social development in social protection in women's empowerment and in disability inclusive development. The empirical evidence on the centrality of economic development as a driver for poverty reduction is pretty clear. I mean China is the most obvious and compelling example. More comprehensively a 2013 World Bank analysis of growth and income changes across 118 countries over four decades shows that incomes of the bottom two quintiles in the population grew at about the same rate as the average annual incomes. The report found that economic growth lifts people out of poverty and leads to shared prosperity on average. It also helps to explain how the rapid growth in the developing world in recent decades has led to such dramatic poverty reduction. What is also becoming clearer is that poverty in a country itself acts as a handbrake on growth. In an American economic review article from a few years ago Georgetown University Professor of Economics Martin Ravillon found that poorer countries experience lower rates of economic growth. In other words poor countries grow slower. Part of the solution comes with an emerging middle class. A larger middle class makes growth more poverty reducing. The handicaps faced by poor countries in their efforts to become less poor are very difficult to overcome. Part of the population is caught in a poverty trap and doesn't have the basic capabilities to respond to the opportunities that economic growth presents. And finally there is growing acceptance that countries with less inequality experience faster and more durable growth. There's a clear consensus that sustainable job growth can only be delivered by a larger private sector. There is also an emerging consensus on the importance of focusing on women's empowerment and supporting women's engagement in the economy and society. It generates more growth and what's more sustainable. Recent McKinsey analysis suggests that of every country were to advance gender equality as well as its best performing neighbor global GDP would increase by around 12 trillion dollars or 11 percent over the next decade. Indeed the very first line of the McKinsey report sets out exactly what's at stake and I quote gender inequality is not only oppressing moral and social issue but also a critical economic challenge. If women who account for half the world's population do not achieve their full economic potential the global economy will suffer end quote. Importantly supporting economic development involves much more than development assistance alone. The Howard government's decision in 2003 to remove tariffs and quotas from imports from least developed countries has seen imports from those countries grow at an average rate of 16 percent per year over the last decade. In 2015 Australia's two-way merchandise trade with countries with which Australia has an ongoing bilateral development partnership was valued at about $33 billion or more than 10 times the value of the development assistance. The government's economic diplomacy agenda recognizes that the deployment of our foreign policy trade and development instruments in an integrated manner delivers a better overall result. Aid for trade investments without focusing on stronger market access makes very little sense. The relationship between security and development has come to the fore over the last 15 years. As the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in 2005 we will not enjoy security without development. We will not enjoy development without security and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights. The issue was the focus of the World Bank's 2011 World Development Report on Conflict Development and Security which produced this rather startling finding. The average cost of a civil war is equivalent to 30 years of GDP growth for a medium-sized developing country. In our own region we have seen the costs of conflict. Fiji's economy dipped immediately following the 2006 coup. Conflict and instability that began in the Solomon Islands in the late 1990s had a devastating effect on the country's economy and it was only following the arrival of the Australian-led regional assistance mission to the Solomon's that the economy began to recover. And for investors, stability is crucial. Conflict is a significant turn-off. In the absence of security and rule of law economic development falters much of the evidence from post-conflict expenditure patterns suggests that the international community has under-invested in establishing security and rule of law particularly at the early stages of post-conflict. This under-investment has in turn reduced the effectiveness of investments in social and economic development. For me the complexity of the relationship between security and development assistance highlights the importance of an integrated response. Security, diplomatic trade and economic development interventions need to be deployed in a coordinated way. Again Ramsey in the Solomon Islands is a good example. It reduced it it rescues the Solomon Islands from economic and political collapse through a combination of security economic and governance assistance. Let me now turn to the vexed question of state building. In his 2014 tone political order and political decay Francis Fukuyama history may have ended but academia it appears always survives argues that the three components of a modern political order are a strong incapable state the state's subordination to the rule of law and the government's accountability to all citizens. But when the state is weak and unaccountable and service delivery is poor when each of these three components is missing it is far from easy to determine where exactly we should focus our attention. The international community has understandably put a lot of focus on free and fair elections. But what is the point if the public administration doesn't have the ability to implement the policies of a winning party. It could be argued that a focus on elections alone could simply lead states to engage in rent seeking behavior or a spoils of war approach especially if you are resource rich as Fukuyama argues is the case in much of Africa. Should the international community undertake service delivery through and with the national government even though this may give it a legitimacy that it doesn't warrant. What weight do we put on bolstering civil society including NGOs and other organizations that strongly support the representation accountability and transparency. Or should we undertake service delivery through a parallel process that weakens both the legitimacy and the capability of the national government. There are no easy answers to these questions. What makes our challenge all the harder is that there is an aspiration and expectation that development assistance or even a broader integrated approach across our foreign and trade policies can support the creation of a modern political order within a few years or a decade. Yet the creation of modern political orders has taken generations to create and refine. And a final point on this for much of the last 70 years we have been focused on trying to transplant traditional British or European notions of the state across the developing world. It may be that we need to start understanding better the nature of the social contract in societies in our region so that the nature of the state reflects that social contract. So what does that all mean as we allocate taxpayer funds to meet Australia's national interests. The first conclusion we can draw is that we need an approach that is deeply rooted in the local context particularly the local political context. Put simply we have learnt that the project based approach is broadly flawed and donor or multilateral development bank led approaches don't necessarily deliver sustainable results. From these experiences the international community has distilled core principles of a development effectiveness agenda that have remained broadly consistent over the past decade. Principles such as local ownership a focus on results inclusive partnerships transparency and accountability. This principles based approach is art rather than science because none of it is deterministic. The international community now has 70 years of evidence to inform these decisions. What this does do is highlight the importance of retaining and developing our expertise and capability in aid program and management. We need to be able to make these judgments and draw on external resources to help us with these judgments. The reduction in size of the aid budget required a reduction obviously in the size of the workforce to manage it but we recognize that delivering a high quality aid program requires a strong mix of generalist and specialist skills and this is why we are strengthening our workforce planning to enable us to recruit and retain development professionals and sector experts. We're taking steps to improve our knowledge capture and transfer between staff and to refine our extensive program of training and mentoring of DFAT staff. I now want to turn my attention to how these principles translate into what we actually do with our aid program. Our starting point is that the challenges in our Asian region and those facing the Pacific are quite distinct and so Australia must tailor its responses accordingly. We are also a part of a global community looking to respond to global challenges. Rapidly growing Asia has seen dramatic reductions in poverty but there are still major concentrations of poverty in middle income countries in our region. Nevertheless the expectation is that growing Asia will increasingly have the fiscal capability to meet the needs of their societies. By 2025 several major aid recipients in the region are projected to reach levels of per capita income at which Australian aid ceased in the past. The nature of economic growth is critical in growing Asia and will become more so. They are risks that countries fall into middle income traps where they're stagnate with most of the population out of poverty but not continuing to develop into a broader middle class. So the choices that these governments make about their public spending will dwarf the impact of aid spending and with urbanization likely to remain a growth driver planning and spending around infrastructure will be key. What does this mean for our development assistance and broader engagement? Well first we must recognize that the growing resources available to these countries necessitate change in how aid is delivered in order for it to remain effective. This means moving away from directly financing development activities such as service delivery towards investments aimed at systemic improvements that allow partner governments to effectively utilize the increasing level of non-ODA resources available. How quickly we can move in this direction will of course depend on country context particularly the economic growth trajectory in each country. This also means that our standing as a partner of choice will be determined by the quality of our assistance not the quantity. Here Australia is well placed to support the economic reform and development agendas in the region. Our economic and broader public policy institutions are internationally recognized. Building on the partnerships at the institutional level between our economic policy makers and regulators and those in the region is a great opportunity for Australia. In what will become an increasingly contested space they will be even more premium placed on being a reliable partner. The context in the Pacific is very different to that in Asia. Pacific Island states have specific challenges because of their size geographical dispersion remoteness from markets and higher risk of natural disasters. Outside of Papua New Guinea the growth prospects for most Pacific Islands remain modest even with positive supportive environments good economic agendas and benign external conditions. Only a handful of Pacific Island states are projected to be able to generate real capital growth rates above 2 per cent per annum in the medium term. This provides us with a very different set of challenges than in growing Asia and it means that we need to entertain different options and ways of engaging. It is in the Pacific where we clearly need to deploy our foreign policy trade economic and development tools in an integrated fashion. Australia is likely to have an ongoing role in supporting some service delivery and ensuring that the benefits of growth are broadly shared and we will continue to have a key role in the security domain. There is an increasing appetite to try things differently across aspects of regional integration. There's a growing recognition that small Pacific states do not have the fiscal capability to produce the range of services expected of a modern state and that some services could and should be provided regionally. There are examples of integration from other regions that could also be considered. The organization of eastern Caribbean states has adopted a common currency a shared central bank and a shared supreme part a crucial part but not all of the solution and the government has recently expanded the seasonal worker program and there needs to be an ongoing consideration of what more we can do in this area. While bilateral relationships are the bedrock of Australian foreign policy the development policy and development policy defends best practice as country-led and country-owned the importance of global public goods is integral to how Australia uses its aid program to contribute to a global rules-based system. Climate change mitigation infectious disease control refugee management and countering the rise of violent extremism are global challenges that require international cooperation through a mix of multilateral approaches and organizations. These tools and organizations have evolved and changed as our awareness of the challenges has changed. In some cases also as our ambition has grown witness new UN organizations and new vertical funds dedicated to ending HIV, polio and malaria and of course the previous MDGs and now the SDGs represent a core part of the 2030 agenda that spans human development, mental sustainability, peace and governance and inclusiveness. Development assistance alone will not be nearly enough to realize this ambitious vision as the Addis Ababa action agenda on financing for development makes clear private sector investment and domestic revenue will be key elements in moving from the billions to the trillions that will be needed. This breath of ambition and the associated financing needs simply reinforces the importance of an integrated response from Australia across security foreign policy trade and development assistance dimensions. I would like finally to offer some thoughts on innovation. The government's commitment to the innovation agenda is clear. We need to be finding ways to do things differently and better. We need to recognize the fiscal realities that make cost efficiency so central and we need to recognize that the business as usual approach will not meet the government's objectives and aspirations. Equally we need to recognize that both in the development assistance space and more broadly they have been examples of highly innovative practices in the past. The integrated approach adopted in the Ramsey deployment a decade ago was recognized internationally as creating best practice in post-conflict missions. Two decades ago Australia took the lead in the UN intervention in Cambodia the first time the UN had taken over a state and functioned as its interim government and more recently Australia has been recognized as a world leader in disability inclusive development co-chairing GLAD the global action on disability group. Equally importantly it's important to recognize that our role in innovation can often be best served in a supporting role because arguably the change that has made the most difference in the Pacific for example and PNG in the last 20 years has been the introduction of mobile telephony. Governments and donors had almost nothing to do with funding this but they did support or allow policy reforms that enable the private sector and consumers to make this change and banks with donor help are now driving a second wave of changes through mobile banking bringing huge numbers of people into the modern economy by giving them the opportunity to save and borrow. It isn't that we were never innovative and must start now rather it is that innovation needs to become core to our business. That's why the foreign minister announced the creation of the innovation exchange in March last year which has been a catalyst for innovation across DFAT. We know that effective states supporting inclusive economic development is the only way to make sustainable and tangible differences in the life of citizens and that this is a very long game but there is also an imperative to deliver results that make an actual difference in people's lives today. We need to think about risk in a different way and trial new approaches as we try and meet these short term and long term objectives. The short term activity led innovations are easier to trial and test. They lend themselves to using the Silicon Silicon Valley fail fast approach and we need to be doing more of these and when they succeed we need to have the architecture and the relationships in place with partner governments and the private sector so we can scale up these approaches. The innovations designed to support long-term transformational change in partner countries are of a different order. Supporting economic reforms and institutional and capability development are slow burn investments and the results do not come in a predictable fashion. The Australian aid programs support to the coalitions for change project in the Philippines contributed to the introduction of new tobacco taxation with major revenue and potential public health benefits gaining an unprecedented 58 percent increase in the health budget and approximately 644 million dollars directed to more accessible health services for about 45 million people. Success in these sorts of projects often seem to rely on luck but as Seneca says luck is where preparation meets opportunity. Identifying when these investments are failing and when they represent effective preparation that is ready to pounce on the opportunity is not straightforward. These decisions like much of foreign policy rely more on art and judgment. The ability to make the right choices in a world where there is limited evidence and much uncertainty reinforces the importance of ensuring that we have both the right internal capability and the ability to harness external capability. It's why our current focus on capability is so central. Everyone involved in the aid and development business knows that it is no science and that wishing for an automated direct relationship between a given set of inputs and a set of desired outcomes is a path to almost certain disappointment and possible ruin. Every person in this room will have tales to tell of hard lessons learned the hard way but at the same time we must remind ourselves and remind those who would force scorn on the capacity of cleverly directed and delivered aid to make a difference that we do know some things about the preconditions for successful development. If we accept that we can be confident that we can continue to learn more and build on past successes. If old ideas haven't worked or no longer work we must abandon them for new ones. That's why the foreign minister has such a deliberate focus on innovation and testing new paths for the delivery of effective and targeted aid and why she has encouraged the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to think creatively to experiment and to take some judicious and considered risks and that ladies and gentlemen represents a great opportunity for all those with deep development expertise to participate in a new type of discussion. Thank you. Peter has very kindly agreed to take questions. I know in this forum the questions come thick and fast so we will move directly to discussion. I would ask you to identify yourself and if you wish your affiliation and we'll keep track of time. I'll recognize you and we'll start with you first. Good morning. Thank you very much for the presentation. I'm Duncan McIntosh from the Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific. I'd like to ask about the role of the internet and if you see a role particularly for Australian aid in two areas around the internet's development that is the governance and regulation of the internet to ensure it remains open and free and is not over-regulated or fragmented and also in the role of internet infrastructure particularly around submarine cables, internet exchange points that allow for cheaper and more efficient internet to provide a foundation for many of the development activities that you've discussed this morning. Yeah well thank you very much. I think there is a role for governments and development assistance in both those areas. The role on governance and regulation should be a minimalist role rather than a highly interventionist role because I think those of us who value the internet as a platform and who have a commitment to fundamental values of freedom of expression are naturally skeptical about the agenda that sits behind some of the push for greater government regulation and control of the internet and I think we need to keep that firmly in mind. The internet as a platform for economic development and therefore as a platform for the poverty reduction which would flow from that is clearly important now and will become even more important and therefore I think it is very important that we do include that in our thinking about what the focus of our development assistance should be and you know there again the distinction I made between how we approach aid policy in growing Asia or rapidly growing Asia even it's going to be slowing a little bit in the medium term and the Pacific will apply in this area as well in other words what we can what we can do in terms of infrastructure contributions in Asia I think will be different to what we would want to do in the Pacific and the only other point I'd make in this area is that this whole issue of cyber security is going to become more important not less important and when we think about the role of the of the internet in broader economic development terms we obviously also need to think about what we can all do to strengthen our systems against cyber attacks and I think again there is a role for us to play particularly in in the Pacific where these systems are not at all well developed to a system. Chris Roach from the Institute for Human Security and Social Change at La Trobe University thank you for that talk I'm very pleased to hear that we're talking about an art rather than a science and just a question the sustainable development goals are meant to apply everywhere including Australia do you think that one of the innovations that DFAT could be exploring is what we could learn in Australia about how indigenous issues gender-based violence climate change mitigation citizen engagement might be improved and that in so doing helped create a beyond aid and narrative where the future is really about us learning together about how we address common problems yeah look I think I think that is a very good point and one of the things we have been thinking a lot about in the department is the way in which the indigenous experience in Australia and today the PM's dealing with the closing the gap report so it's a good time to actually acknowledge that the the way in which the indigenous experience here in Australia holds lessons for what we can do in parts of our of our aid program and you know we we also want to involve indigenous communities more in helping us understand that and then to help us with whatever linkages and networks we might want to want to create so you know one of the things we're doing is is looking at strengthening indigenous business networks which can draw on that experience and which can help people understand how common problems have been dealt with in different circumstances and I think you can apply that narrative if you like across many of the other pillars or elements of the of the SDGs. Peter thank you for your very interesting talk Julia Newtonhouse from Care Australia. I would just like to ask a question about the private sector policy in DFAT none of us disagree that a vibrant private sector is a highly desirable outcome from development and indeed helps drive development but there's some interesting new work out of the Brookings Institute on private sector growth and jobs growth in Africa suggesting that actually it is not creating the middle class that you suggested but in fact creating a large group of working poor now that historically may not have been the case in Southeast Asia but the potential with the shifts in global markets for that to emerge in the future. I wondered if you would speak about the role of DFAT's private sector policy and whether there's a concern about that issue and how you might take it into account. Thank you. Well I can't comment on the Booking Study I don't know anything about it so let me just speak a little bit about where our partnership with the private sector fits into our thinking about about aid. I mean the conceptual propositions are fairly straightforward. If focus needs to be on economic growth and development as the surest means of reducing poverty then the role of the private sector is going to be fundamental because I can't think of a of an example of long-term sustainable economic growth which has not been private sector dominated then there are examples of economic growth minus the private sector but I'm talking about a sustainable model. So I think engaging with the private sector and involving the private sector is going to be fundamental to any economic growth strategy in developing countries. So we want to work with the private sector at a number of different levels. Our innovation agenda has a large space for the private sector because when we're looking at projects that are innovative or when we're looking at new ways of approaching old problems we very much want to do so in collaboration with the private sector and to learn lessons from the way in which the private sector operates. I mean you know Julie Bishop makes this observation about distribution systems in a country like Papua New Guinea where we can often struggle effectively to distribute medicines to remote areas of Papua New Guinea but you can go to the furthest corner of Papua New Guinea and find kids with a can of coke. Now the example in and of itself doesn't necessarily amount to very much but it goes to this broader point about the return you could get with a closer partnership with the private sector. The other element that I think is important in terms of our own thinking about the private sector is the emphasis we're giving on aid for trade which is not giving aid and return for buying Australian exports which people sometimes confuse aid for trade for. This is the effort we put into building the capability of developing countries to more actively and more effectively engage in the global trading system on the assumption that a more active and extensive engagement the global trading system will will be good for economic growth in those countries. So we want to we want to reach a certain proportion of our aid budget going towards aid for trade and we think that's very important. It's particularly important I think at a time when the trading system itself is under so much pressure and when global demand generally is so tepid and if you're looking for ways in which to boost global demand and therefore global trade then I think trying to increase the contribution the trade is making to economic growth is going to be very important. So you know for for us this is this is quite an important part of the aid program it's not it's not a brand new part of the aid program I mean I think we've been working with the private sector for some considerable period of time but I think under under our sort of recalibrated aid program it has a particularly prominent place. Collease I'm conscious that there are many many more questions to come but in deference to the other speakers on what is the recalibrated aid program today I'm going to draw this session to close and invite you to have the conversations informally over coffee. Peter thank you very much you've given us a very comprehensive and nuanced address and I think you've been quietly provocative and you have stimulated the conversation. Please join me in thanking Peter. Please remain seated. Thank you very much to Peter Vagheese and to Veronica for chairing that session. I think the Vice Chancellor and the Dean have to go but we're very glad that you're staying Peter for our next session. So we're going as is our tradition straight into we have we've had the opening address we're now going straight to the our keynote address but I will just so you can relax intellectually for a little bit I'm going to make a few of those announcements now about the conference that I I held off from before. So first of all people often ask me well what's the theme of this conference and you know we deliberately don't have a theme. The themes of the conference are whatever the are determined by the papers that you present and that you send it's a bottom up effort and you'll see it's a diverse range but I will add two writers to that first although it's called the Australasian Aid Conference that's a shorthand it's really the Australasian Aid and International Development Conference there's too much of a mouthful and so we do go to issues of labour mobility issues of global public goods and you'll see those are featuring in several of the sessions and second qualification we do use the plenary sessions to shape to give the conference some shape and coherence and this time we have two themes running through the plenary sessions first to focus on sustainability in particular given that we've had the sustainable development goals last year in the Paris Climate Change Agreement and I think we'll kick that off with Kitty's talk shortly and second a look back at the last two years and and on the future of Australian Aid and we've already heard from the Secretary of Defense and tomorrow we'll be launching our 2015 Australian Aid Stakeholder Survey Report. So that gives you some idea of what we're after this conference. Second I just want to cover off on conference acknowledgments obviously a lot of work goes into this conference of this size and we'll be thanking the organisers at the end but I just want to at the start acknowledge my conference co-conveners so Anthea Mullicala from the Asia Foundation, Joel Negan from the University of Sydney and Camilla Burkot here at the Development Policy Center. Conference folders we've upgraded this year from simple programs to folders there's a one sheet guide to the conference program there's the actual program and then there's a book of abstracts if you want more detail. There's information on some upcoming events we're actually running an event on Friday with the Asia Foundation on their latest survey of Afghanistan and then we have the annual Harold Mitchell Development Policy Lecture on February 29th with Mark Dible, Head of the Global Fund. There's some information in these folders on the Asia Foundation on the Development Policy Center on the Aid Tracker which we've just launched and on Family PNG which is a non-government organisation in Papua New Guinea that we support and we do try to be a do tank as well as a think tank so we want to let you know about that. Finally on logistics you know we do have a packed schedule I'm sure that's clear and we have a lot of people so today there's you'll get a brief break at the end of the day we finish at 5.10 the conference dinner starts at 6.30 please do come to the conference dinner if you've registered for that nearly all of you have we have Bob McMullen who I'm sure will be an excellent after-dinner speaker if you want to drink before the dinner go to University House tomorrow morning though don't drink too much because tomorrow morning we started eight o'clock I know that's an early start but it's the only way that we could fit in all the or at least not all but many of the papers and proposals that we received so please turn up before eight tomorrow have a cup of coffee and we'll start at eight o'clock going straight to parallel sessions. Finally because we have so many people please do keep to time whether it's in terms of coffee breaks or if you're a speaker or a chair we do have for the parallel sessions a number of iPads that will be keeping time and warning cards so we have asked the chairs to please discipline the speakers but that's enough for me I think we're now ready for our next session I now have to call on Ewan McDonald a former deputy director general in Aussaid now deputy secretary in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to introduce our keynote speaker and to chair the next session please welcome Ewan. Good morning everyone and it's it's always difficult to follow the secretary of the department so I won't try an upstage Peter in any way but I do want to acknowledge both the ANU the Asia Foundation and Stephen and the Development Policy Center here as well as your comments around the University of Sydney in terms of bringing the program together I think we'd all acknowledge here that when you look at the program over the two days and the broad areas that it's covering it's very interesting and and if I didn't have to go to estimates I'd be happy to stay here but it's a broad spectrum and there's some very good speakers and we're about to about to hear from one now so congratulations to you on the program but it is my great pleasure to introduce Kitty van der Haide correct so what you'll realize is pronouncing names is not one of my strengths but I'm working on it now I'm in foreign affairs so I think Peter will pick it up in some of my development but kitty is an influential advocate for sustainable development both within our home country of the Netherlands as well as globally and as you know kitty is the director of the World Resources Institute's Europe Office in this position she has responsibility for WRI's engagement in the 2030 agenda as well as its work on the international climate regime and on private sector engagement in development prior to joining WRI kitty was the ambassador the sustainable development and director of the department of climate energy environment and water in the Netherlands ministry of foreign affairs and I also think in 2013 she was elected the third best civil servant of the Netherlands and was awarded a national ribbon of honour for her efforts to raise public awareness on the challenges and opportunity opportunities of a truly sustainable development pathway in 2014 she was elected as influencer of the year among civil servants enlisted as 20th in the top 100 most influential people in the Netherlands dealing with sustainability and in addition to leading the Netherlands delegation to the Rio plus 20 summit kitty was the Dutch representative on the SDGs open working group and that's where we got to know your expertise and contribution well and it was a group that made a large contribution to the 17 goals that we now have and in fact as constituency partners between Australia the UK and the Netherlands the SDG open working group worked very closely with us around some of the important goals that we argued for during that process and I think peace and governance was a good example of one of those goals that was hard fought kitty's experience extends beyond carpeted corridors and negotiations behind closed doors she has a lot of experience on the ground including through her work to improve the coherence of the UN through her work in the field in Vietnam and with her unique blend of economic training hands-on development experience distinguished diplomatic career and personal flair and passion for the subject she's about to talk about I'm very much looking forward to hearing from kitty and kitty's address is of particular interest to me because Australia is currently working through how we can best implement the 2030 agenda within our own policies programs and systems and this is quite a challenging task not least because of the new agenda's complexity which which peter talked about in his in his address and we're also taking the opportunity to ensure we do it well from the beginning it's a long period of time that we're dealing with so we need to spend some time in this first phase to make sure that we're getting the implementation right and and of course in one respect Australia is in a better position than some others in the sense that we have fairly good alignment between the policy agenda that we've got and the 2030 30 agenda so i'll now hand over to kitty and very much looking forward to hearing from her and then we'll finish with about 10 minutes of question so kitty welcome welcome to us make technology work technology as you can see is not my strong point done i think this works if not i'm gonna need help so thanks first of all for that introduction you made me duly embarrassed um and it's a it's a real honour and it's a true pleasure to be here i mean ozies and duchies have many characteristics in common right um one of that is that in every nook and cranny of this earth you'll find us that's why it was such a pleasure to come all the bloody way from Amsterdam to Canberra to talk about what i'm truly passionate about the other point that we really share in common um as i found out the hard way in the open working group for sustainable development goals is that we have a common DNA we are both honest to the point of being rude and i hope i will not step on anybody's toes as i'm gonna talk about what i think we need to do raise hands who in this room knows what wi is don't be embarrassed to raise your hands okay so everybody knows i'm not gonna talk about who we are i'm gonna go straight into what it is about i'm gonna do through my talk hopefully three things one is to talk about what we need to do to implement the sdgs and why it's really different than what we have had before second how we actually do that and with whom we're gonna have to deliver that agenda and why that is a remarkable transformative change from what we know of business as usual and why we have to think beyond aid why if you're serious about eradicating poverty and leaving no one behind we've got to think beyond development aid now it's sort of reflective of my career right if you think of sustainable development people always think about that green thing and when i come to talk very often i'm perceived as being shrek you know sustainable development really is about that balance between three pillars of our system it's about the economy it's about equity and it's about ecology right it's about these three things coming together i'm an economist by background and it used to go like you know first you think of the economy then if you're quite nice to the world you think about the people and then last but not least you'll think about the economy that's sort of my career i'm an economist by background then i spent years in the field trying to do the right thing from a development perspective and finally for the past eight to ten years i've been working on development on on environment issues and incorporating that in my development work looking at those three pillars well you know if you look back for the past 20 years we have made remarkable progress if you see the who's who you know who's hobnobbing with who in the rich and powerful of this world in terms of gdp you see where things are actually really changing this is no mean feat it's all boys unfortunately very few girls around there you can actually see that reflecting in how income is changing and how you see that growing middle class that peter was referring to and then you see that remarkable shift in where poverty is i mean look at just you know 2005 and where we are in 2015 no longer the largest section of poor people are in a country in asia it's likely to be in nigeria by now what a shift to look at the first pillar economy we have done a really good job and then you look at the second pillar of equity and everybody knows that as the mdgs right the the eight goals that everybody knows about how we are going to eradicate poverty in this world and there we've made some remarkable progress right we have reduced income poverty quite significantly but we've also achieved the goal on drinking water we have a remarkable reduction in maternal death we've done some pretty good stuff but you know in all honesty there's a large unfinished business agenda particularly when it comes to gender sexual and reproductive health and rights and peter was talking about how important gender is and then you look at the third pillar just as an introduction i mean boy whichever indicator you look at it's bad news it's bad news if you look at any of these hockey stick curves and this would be the value of your stock portfolio you would take your duvet over your head and start to try and sleep for the next two weeks because it's bad news all over the place so what we have done in the past 20 years actually we've grown our economies quite significantly we've not been able to distribute that in an equitable way and we've grown at the expense of our natural capital in other words i have only one conclusion if you look at it we've done actually quite remarkably well without intending to do so we have changed the properties of an entire planet atmosphere we're entering a new geological phase called the entropocene it's not about that's not a bad thing for a bunch of fur free apes in just about 25 years so what will the future hold for us well this is from the human development report and this tells you just how deep that increase has been in human development over the past few decades and look at what the opportunities are to bring people out of poverty yes there will still be massive inequalities but look at that shift that we can make but we can't get there if we do not address the environmental issues if we continue with environmental challenges such as climate change and these certification you'll see that the growth in human development will be massively reduced because of largely what we up there produce and consume and if we then add with that rampant deforestation and a few of the other environmental challenges into the mix you'll see that almost all of the potential gain will be negated just because we grow at the expense of our natural environment that is the challenge that we're dealing with if we are serious about eradicating poverty and giving people a fighting chance to live a life in dignity we've got to start taking much better care of our natural environment and that is why the SDGs matter so much and that why it was so much fun working with the Aussies it's time to accelerate it's time also to do different things than what we have done we've done a remarkably good job of development practitioners but it isn't good enough if we are really to leave no one behind so i'm going to talk about five shifts that i would like to see that i would like to see people addressing whether you are in the corporate sector you're an academic your development one thing is that the SDGs are massively more comprehensive in scope and it requires a very fundamentally different way of thinking about what you do if you look at the mdgs we had water as drinking water remember that was the only water that was there well this is a little picture from the u.s geological survey it depicts obviously mother earth this is the total available quantity of water on earth unfortunately out of all that water only two and a half percent is fresh water right so it's got us to begin with and out of this little bit only one percent is within easy reach because 77 percent is stored in ice caps and glaciers and about 22 plus percent is stored underground in foswax so water is much needed many people live without love no one lives without water but we have to start looking beyond water for drinking water so what's going to happen quickly click through this what water dimensions do we need to look at if you look at it from an integrated perspective and you want to bring people out of poverty well where is the demand coming from it's not coming so much from drinking water yes but it's going to come from manufacturing is going to come from energy and electricity so if we are to bring people out of poverty we're going to have to look at different sectors than we're used to why is that important because water is scarce to begin with but already we're having 1.2 billion people that live in absolute water scarcity absolute water scarcity means that there is so little water that it risks to impede if not reverse the development gains that you and I have worked so hard for that is how scarce it is that's going to rise quite fast in 2025 so we've got to look at this in a much more holistic way now one of the tools we have is WRI is aqueduct aqueduct based on 60 years of water runoff data that we get from NASA and data talking about private sector I'll come back to this from Coca-Cola that bottles everywhere in the world and has the best water data sets that are available this is a picture of water in a region that you know quite well and already you see that 39% of irrigated agriculture is in area of water stress where it's coloured that's where irrigated agriculture takes place where it's grey there's no irrigated agriculture of any mean 10 years from now look at what this means look at what water scarcity is going to do to food security in this region but look beyond that and what is going to mean for people across this globe where do you think that the basmati rice in this area goes to it's exported across the world one kilo of basmati rice 5000 litres of water it's not just a problem for people here what happens if the rice falls Asia doesn't have enough fresh water to cultivate what is needed through global supply chains the cotton that you wear in your clothes the food that you have on your plate a lot will come from this region so what method what what happens here matters for everybody often forgotten when it comes to water energy is a very thirsty business if you care about bringing people out of poverty start looking at energy one in five energy plants in this region is in an area of water stress blue dots indicate hydropower brown dots thermal or nuclear power plants already we have a problem let's look at where the future will bring us so these are the ways of looking at water and that's how if you want to grow an economy the fuel of your economic growth is energy but the oil in the machinery is water and in times of scarcity it is always the poor people that risk losing out so looking at it from a much more holistic perspective of why you need water you know when agriculture and energy need water they'll have the eyes and ears of the politicians they're big and they're powerful when two elephants fight the grass gets trampled it's these guys that end up at the bottom side of it so we've got to look at how our economy depends on our natural systems we can't just grow we have to grow with respect to the healthy environment and that is an economically rational things to do it's not an add-on look at what's happening in China the equivalent of nine percent of its GDP that's what environmental degradation costs and China is coming to terms with it it's no longer just about growth it is also about the quality of growth and how you make growth sustainable why is that so important two two other examples this is Brazil and India in these countries GDP grew by 39% and here 120% fantastic normal economics would say this is a good job then you start to look at where human capital has gone Brazil clearly investing in where do people in people and in food security look at what happened in India that's a very different story and then look at how much of that growth has come from natural capital right if you then look at inclusive wealth which is looking at the balance between economic growth or infrastructure from ecosystems and human capital you come to a growth not of 39 and 120% but actually of nine percent and three percent and that is why the SDGs are such a revolution we forget just how big that revolution is when we went to Rio plus 20 nobody wanted this the Africans didn't want that because they said that environment was a luxury it was a distraction from what was really important which was education and gender and health and that is all still very important but we cannot achieve what we need to do unless we start to look at this so from one goal number seven we've gone to seven goals that deal with our global environment this is nothing short of a resume when i got appointed the ambassador for sustainable development as was just referred to you know what my colleagues in the foreign office offered their condolences and i'm not i is not kidding you and they said what have you done to deserve that fate because if you're serious about development you don't want to be caught dead in the green corner we have got to change the way we think about these things and if you see how all these goals are interlinked just as Peter said this is a mapping of how all these goals how energy how poverty how cities how water how climate change the rest they're all interlinked you know we can no longer pretend that with just health and education we are going to bring people out of poverty life as a development practitioner has just become a whole lot more complex which is why it's so good that we're having it here in a university climate action at the core i mean you don't you know hopefully what happened in paris it was to me one of the gratifying moments in my life seeing you know 189 countries coming together to finally come to grips with climate change we've achieved a lot we've got financial support transparency adaptation a long-term goal to decarbonize our economies and the wretched up mechanism every five years why is that so bloody important for poor people well under a business as usual scenario four to five degrees climate change what we have now in the paris agreement if you add up all these indies sees the intended nationally determined contributions in other words all the national climate plans we are still at catastrophic levels of climate change and this is what we have agreed we are not even halfway through where we are to be so we are going to need very smart policies to make sure we achieve this and how do we do that by working hard at achieving the sdgs because if you look at the sdgs almost all of them are climate related and we've got to start beginning the synergies look at food look at energy look at inequalities oceans infrastructures cities jobs water all of them have a bearing on energy we've got to stop this graph from moving on who in this audience is younger than 30 years old that's too few i thought i was in a university okay if you are under 30 years of age you have never had a month in your life never a month in your life the temperature was below the average of the 20th century and it's not looking good for your future in case you weren't aware of that but there's hope it's a good news bad news story who's heard of the new climate economy report that was surfaced that came out last year where we were the leading research party what does the new climate economy say you know traditionally when we talk about climate change as always when it comes to the environment mmm it's a cost you know it's costing jobs it's costing growth and we had the stern report and we said well it can be compatible with economics but then only in the long run because there will be long-term costs now there's a report that will actually tell you why it's economically rational to investing climate action right now and it looked at three different economic systems cities land use and energy and looked at resource efficiency infrastructure and innovation and as a result these are 8 000 pages so if you have a sleepless night like i had last night go and read that report there's also a two page summary for those that are but in a three minute snapshots on cities urbanization peter was talking about this this is a fundamental transformation of our society cities make 80 percent of GDP but there are also 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions so what happens in cities really matters to poverty eradication take two examples at lantha and barcelona similar population numbers similar per capita income levels and then look at how these cities are built one's urban sprawl one connected condensed cities and then look at the carbon emissions per capita what a massive difference it makes how you build the cities of the future will determine whether we lock in the right path or the wrong path another example china and the u.s of course china keeps telling the u.s come on your per capita emissions are about three times as high as mine and look at what's happening in Beijing and look at how we build the cities of the future and how we use innovation for building efficiency for public transport will determine the future of mankind on earth including poor people in africa and it's an opportunity it's an opportunity particularly in this region where urban infrastructure is going to be built at a rate never before seen in history in india 75 percent of infrastructure that will be there by 2050 isn't even built yet we can do it the right way we can build cities that are connected so poor people can have public transport to find jobs we can actually really do it if we put our minds to it energy can't miss it everybody still talks about fossil fuels and yes they are still an important part of driving our economy forward but where it's really happening where's the excitement look at the patterns worldwide all patterns in the energy sector and where the real innovation is happening it's all in the renewable atmosphere and it's for a good reason that the costs of wind and solar energy are going down so sharply between Copenhagen and Paris the costs of solar panels came down by 80 percent 80 percent in just a few years unimaginable greenpeace was right the international energy agency was wrong and look at what's happening in your own backyard look at what's happening in india wait they have now three gigawatts of solar panel in seven years time they want to be at 100 gigawatts solar power in the world in total all over the world at this moment we have 140 gigawatts of solar power that is innovation that is speeding up and it's going to lead to more jobs and it's going to lead to distributed forms of energy that poor people can have access to that is why climate action and that is why renewable energy is so important for the agenda we care about equally obviously deforestation i mean i just can't believe the statistics you know think of how many soccer fields of tropical rainforest have been chopped down as i'm here trying to talk and make sense to you it's scary but look at the opportunities that we still have to redress some of those problems and actually Australia is really a leader in this field i know and i've seen you do this in east africa but also in timor and some other places is restoring degraded lands restoring the graded lands rather than chopping forest to make space for palm oil we can use the degraded lands and put those palm oil plantations there it brings carbon sequestration benefits it brings economic benefits to the people whose land has been degraded and it brings important co-benefits in terms of culture in terms of loss of biodiversity and how we can address that this is a win win win win win if there's one tip i can give you in our's aid start looking at restoring lands it really brings also the gender dimension right up front if you're serious about poverty eradication look at a natural system last slide from the new climate economy this is actually the only slide you have to remember of my talk perhaps this is the opportunity they've mapped that in the world we are going to invest irrespective of what you and i do or think about 90 trillion us dollars in infrastructure in cities in land use and in energy 90 trillion dollars that's no small money right now you can do that the business as usual way and lock in problems or you can do that the smart way the low carbon way yes it has additional costs to the tune of four trillion that's no small money i'd love having it but if you look at the cost of doing it wrong this is totally affordable don't let anybody talk you into the fact that climate action is too expensive and we can't do it and if the aid people don't talk to the infrastructure planners and the private sector to get this right these people well who knows who this guy is okay this guy should be as famous as mark as what's his name uh george cloney not because of his looks not really right this guy is mark carney he's the governor of the bank of england and the chair of the financial stability board of the g20 he's one of the most powerful man in the financial sector that you know and finally in october he said we've got to start taking climate change seriously because if we do not address climate change it will disrupt financial stability and it will wreck our economy so it won't just wreck your planet it won't just wreck people's lives and dignities it will wreck financial stability i bet you that people are going to take an interest in dealing with climate change now well of the private sector i'm going to skip through this quite fast because peter has spoken about this quite a bit why is the private sector important i mean it's a total no-brainer it's where jobs are it's where the capital inflows come it's 60 percent of GDP right so in the negotiation rooms do you think there was a private sector present when we made those sdgs of course not you know it's still the elephant in the room we can't seem to deal with the private sector now i quite deliberately turned my back on the private sector you know my dad works for shell and my entire family works for the big private sector and i was the only idiot after having studied economics wanted to do something useful for society so i left i'd never worked in business and i worked in development corporation and i've made a complete turnaround i am totally and utterly convinced that we cannot do what we need to do unless we start to deal with the private sector the market is not perfect but they're indispensable in the fight against poverty how has dutch done that one is purely aid we have just integrated as you know and i think that's happened here as well we've got the ministry of foreign affairs and we've got in that same ministry the ministry of environment and the sorry not ministry of environment ministry of aid and the ministry of trade and one so you have your traditional aid policies then you have sustainable inclusive growth which is the aid and trade portfolio this is a hugely important portfolio for poor countries to grow out of poverty one dollar invested in aid for trade brings you eight dollars in benefits for your average developing countries and twenty dollars for an ldc why because they're compatible often at farm and factory level but then the cost rise because of bad procedures because of customs because of broken infrastructure all of that needs to be addressed if you want economies to grow out of poverty so that is a big part of what we do in the netherlands there's private sector support such as the national private sector and how we work with sms in developing countries and um yes then we have the multinational of course trade for aid is extremely important there can be no misunderstanding about it and part of that is just aid and then there's this growing portfolio at least in our case in the netherlands of public private partnerships which is an important vehicle to really engage the private sector to bring them on board but does it always work we've just done a major study with empirical evidence does it work or does it not work and it's really a mixed bag despite my best hopes um we've seen too little evidence of effectiveness on the ground we've seen that there is a huge interest in resource sharing but much less interest in risk sharing let alone revenue sharing when things take off um and we have seen that when it comes to it there's hardly really any scientific evidence of counterfactual that it really works nevertheless why am i so keen still despite all this to work with the private sector because they have seen the light of day much more so than most politicians have this is the world economic forum that is not the gray woolly socks brigade right this is the pinstriped suits the ceo's what you have here the likelihood that a risk emerges and here the impact that a risk would have from a business perspective what does this tell you how interesting in the top risks the top 10 risks climate change water crisis biodiversity loss they are seeing that this is a threat to their business continuity this not just about the birds and the bees this is they're doing this because they see that there is a business case of doing it very very differently top 10 risks wow this is on the mind map of your average politician and surely for the private sector with global supply change they see that too did you see what's here the pinstriped suits water i was talking about that climate change extreme weather events food crisis profound social instability and these things obviously only and if we don't address these will continue that's why for example in the Netherlands we have the Dutch Sustainable Growth Coalition that's eight of the largest multinational firms Unilever KLM Shell DSM AXO that actually work together to develop sustainable business models and we're trying to help them doing that if you work with the private sector directly through public private partnerships it is crucially important to work with transparency and accountability for results that's how as WRI we try to engage with the private sector one example i wanted to talk about is food loss and waste something we never talk about but one third of food produced for human consumption is lost either at the fork or at the farm most of it actually at the level of the fork that's you and me guys right what that means a loss of 940 billion each year just think how you could invest that in human prosperity if we were to address that uses a an average size more than china and all that food is just thrown away in your bins if food loss and waste were a country it would be the third largest emitter we can do something about this and the only ones that can help us are either the consumers or the producers that's why we have a goal in sustainable consumption and production in the stgs and this is critical to address if you're serious about poverty alleviation the third largest emitter in the world fragility and conflict i've got bad news for you the easy job is over not only has it all been much more complex now with the stgs but where we find the poor is actually a sea change we've dealt with the easy bits now we find poor people largely in fragile areas where they are hard to find hard to reach and hard to bring development to but what is fragile needs to be reconsidered and rejig from a different perspective it's not just politically fragile where you have lack of participation lack of accountability human rights abuses these are crucially important politically fragile but there's a much bigger center of people that actually lives in countries that are environmentally fragile and it's especially those here in the midst no less than 258 million people that live in places where there are overlapping vulnerabilities that we need to address and they're fundamental if your investment in poverty eradication are going to let me give you the example of syria it may be slightly far from your rent but it had major and global repercussions syria you know global pundits saw this as a crisis out of the blue and i don't know if there are any diplomats in here but ask my middle east colleagues and they never saw this coming but the signs of distress were already there long before the crisis erupted because from 2006 to 2011 2012 syria suffered its worst droughts in modern history what happened is that 75 percent of crop yields failed completely 80 percent of livestock died the relatively prosperous farmers up in the north here migrated to the cities why did they have to migrate because they were i would almost say with criminal policies by the Assad regime driven to an area heavily subsidized with water intensive crops such as cotton and wheat unsuitable for the area and then the droughted and they had nowhere to go so what policies you have and then what happens with climate change has a major impact then they went to the cities trying to find for jobs but of course there were Palestinians and there were refugees from the iraqi war so it wasn't easy to find a job and they relied on food aid and then what happened something even further away a drought in russia a drought in russia drove up the global wheat prices because of scarcity and what did the Assad regime do it sold off its strategic stockpiles to cash in early on the price rise and buy arms and it had no food left in its stocks to feed the hungry people that came migrating from the north one and a half million people it's never the sole explanation for war or strife within or between countries but it is becoming an increasing threat multiplier biodiversity loss desert certification climate change water scarcity it is driving people to move because they have nowhere else to go that's why for example our water analysis are being used by national intelligence agencies taking it a little closer to home here the indus river basin this is by far the area where you see the groundwater level dropping fastest by about a foot a year it's a highly food insecure region but it's also politically unstable frontier i live many years in india loving it very much but i know also just how tense that relationship is that's one side of the board go to the other side of the board here we are at the border of Bangladesh why do you think they're building this eight meter high double barbed wire wall not because they think that Bangladesh will come to war but because Bangladesh is ground zero for climate change right it's 150 million people sea level is rising so water is coming up for this end and water is coming up from that end in one big bathtub assembled this called Bangladesh because of glacier melt people have nowhere to go what's going to happen with 150 million people that are so vulnerable to flooding with communicable diseases and waterborne diseases that come with it that's why india is building this wall and that is why we have to start looking as diplomats to climate change to sea level rise and to what it takes because this is not the only country obviously where this is going to happen but it will happen particularly in your backyard same here in terms of climate change and food security and it's going to be picked up also by the business this is maple crop this is a risk analysis company they do this for commercial reasons 32 countries see an increased risk for conflicts but it includes emerging markets such as Bangladesh Ethiopia India Nigeria and the Philippines it isn't just far away small places that will have no global ripple effect now whether we like it or not this is going to be increasingly our reality perhaps not as direct as this cartoon suggests but lack of participation exclusion rising inequalities and environmental stress not only have an economic impact a real economy impact it has global political imbalances as a result last but not least universality when we embedded universality in rio plus 20 document nobody knew what it was so we had many discussions what is universality is just you know we do more of the same because we haven't finished our business yet or is it the mdgs but they're not having poverty but going to 100% poverty eradication this was what most people thought we should do and it took a long while before we started to see universality as a shared destiny as really looking at what it takes not just having seven goals for the south like the mdgs were health education gender all the things that the south needed to do and one goal for the rich which is funding all the seven goals in the south this is really about how the north and the south are interdependent and we need actions by the north by the developed economies to benefit the south and we need actions by all benefiting all actions by the north for example one of these addressing food loss and waste collective change clearly climate change one of these interlinked challenges in isolation you can do all the work on health that you want and still not solve poverty you can do all the excellent education that you want and still not solve poverty because it is looking at things as you know islands of well-being in a sea of misery so policy coherence for sustainable development is equally important to achieve the s2g is all the other things that I mentioned and maybe this is the one I'm most passionate about because it's the most difficult one to achieve it means that we have homework in the developed economies too one is to look at you know how these synergies across economic social and environmental policies areas are in our home to address cross sectoral synergies and reconcile domestic policy with internationally agreed objectives that's not as easy as you think it is development cooperation is as important to it sorry making sure that you've done your homework is as important to alleviate poverty as being a development practitioner this is the Netherlands I never mind talking about my own country when the news is not so good I decided not to take Australia as an example you may wonder why I've done that but gender equality you thought that the Netherlands were so good on this like most people do well gender wage gap this is the Netherlands and it's mapped around all the targets that developed economies really still have to deal with where it's green we've largely achieved it where it's yellow we have a job to do where it's red we're really doing a bad job the Bertelsmann Foundation has done this for all the OECD economy I reckon that you should read that report is really interesting reading the Netherlands gender wage gap huge challenge we have homework to do in my country you have no idea air pollution major issue in the Netherlands energy we have four and a half percent renewables in the mix we are the shame of Europe we're in the top three of worst performance when it comes to climate you wouldn't think that of the Netherlands so from a development cooperation perspective I care a lot about my own politicians about what my ministry of trade is doing what my fiscal incentives are and that's why I talk so much about all of these issues because in the end if I do not get my own house in order as developed economies we cannot lift people out of poverty and then of course there's this huge inequality in how we are sharing the natural well this is partly due to climate change I think Australia has 28 tons CO2 emissions per capita which I think is fairly high the Netherlands is no better no worry but we've got to start thinking about all these issues about the balance between economy equity and ecology in a balanced way and we are literally in this boat together it's the way the developing economies are seeing it it is the way the world really is we are so much more integrated and interdependent now whether that's through terrorism and trade whether that's through communicable diseases whether it's Zika bubonic plague sars avian flu whether it's social media foreign direct investment and global supply chains we are completely linked to each other including through climate change and that means we are going to have to address the footprint that we have as western economies if we care about lifting people out of poverty and leaving no one behind we cannot sustain this going forward we're going to have to look at our lifestyle we're going to have to look at the way we produce and the way we consume and sustainable consumption and production is not something that most development practitioners look at but it is absolutely vital to make sure that we have a planet where we can all survive so this is not if you hadn't gotten the message yet a southern development agenda where they do the jobs and they change their policies and somewhere in the north we dole out some money and get the thing fixed this is a global political economy challenge that requires all of us to act requires all of us to look at the political economy of how decisions are made at the global scale at the national scale and at the local scale whether these decisions are transparent who is participating in these decisions and is their accountability for action so we're going to have to see something very different from developing countries reporting to the financier to how we're in this together and how our policy coherence for development is actually going to change we're going to all have to report on this by the way because this is not something that I thought of this is embedded in the SDGs with a separate target under goal 17 we're all going to have to report on policy coherence for development in conclusion I think I think we know what we need to do I think we'll have fairly steep learning curves again which I don't think we have all the answers I think we know what we need to do very often I find we don't want to really do it we're going to have to look at finishing the unfinished business understanding the economic challenges working with the private sector addressing climate change restoring ecosystems changing inequalities dealing with the rising tensions as if we were diplomats and work at a governance systems that will hold us too accountable this is not a socialist agenda by the way this is just a world agenda that all of us have to work in irrespective of whether you're in the corporate sector you're a consumer you're an individual citizen you're a policymaker you're a development practitioner in an NGO or anywhere else this has got to involve everybody and if you think that you're too small to make a difference start to sleep in a room with a mosquito all of you have something to do and something to contribute and you owe it to your children to actually get a job done thank you so much one up the back for doc and can you let us know where you're from as well if you don't mind please questions from Ozzy honest to the point of view rude thank you that was just a beautiful presentation thank you so much my name is Joe Hall I'm a PhD student at the ANU I wanted to ask what your thoughts are please about how this is all going to get monitored and measured and what's going to change in the way that like you were talking about how are we going to measure policy coherence so what are your thoughts about how that is going to be given the complexity of this agenda look it's a million dollar question you know I I think it's not going to happen unless we have a good accountability system are the SDGs fit for purpose in that sense no I'll be very honest if you look at the targets many of them either have no deadline or they have no quantifiable goal so we're going to have to make that we don't have the metrics yet I mean we're working now at developing the metrics for how do you measure policy coherence what is your baseline and how can you start tracking progress I do think that developing countries will push very much for this certainly when it comes to policy coherence for development if you want buy-in from the G77 to do what is right and in the end as I said we're going to be impacted if the SDGs do not get implemented they will demand universality to become real and tangible so we have now a compact of a number of developed economies that are have some skin in the game Sweden Finland France Switzerland is considering will all report to the first meeting of the high-level political forum in July of this year with a voluntary report how they're implementing this agenda domestically and how they're looking at the transboundary implications of their domestic policies so that's we are helping them to prepare that to develop the metrics not easy but it's getting there I would hope in a year from now someone else will stand here and say that we've made measurable progress if not we'll do it please as civil society academics and whatever all you are help keep your own government and the UN accountable Hi I'm Jenny Goldie from various NGOs that are dealing with population energy and climate change thank you for an excellent speech I agreed with everything you said but there were a couple of emissions and I'm wondering if you could comment on it climate change is said to has the potential to negate all the development gains that we've had in the last decades a few decades but what about population growth we're anticipating another 2.3 billion people by mid-century and the other question is with climate change where if we are to mitigate and keep within the safe levels of climate increase of temperature increase we have to keep perhaps four-fifths of fossil fuels in the ground now agriculture is heavily dependent on oil what are the implications of keeping four-fifths of oil in the ground thanks beautiful not easy questions population growth look certainly when you're more people when you're nine billion it's going to be more of a challenge to do it in the right way but frankly speaking from my perspective I would never enter any of these issues from a population growth perspective why because for me fundamentally this is about sexual and reproductive health and rights of women that's where it has to start every woman in this world should have the right to choose with whom when and how many children they have still we have 250 million women dying because they have the ability to give birth I think that is unacceptable and we know what we can do about it it's not so much about having more people it's about how we distribute the wealth my footprint is much higher than probably 250 Africans right so I am keen to address population growth but not from the perspective that we should start controlling growth because that's very often now coming from poor economies where there is little choice for women to make it's got to start with giving women the right to have a dignified life and to exercise the rights over their own bodies in their lives and then yes through that you'll see a remarkable reduction in population growth on on stranded assets look it's very very clear if we want to address climate change we are going to have to keep a large part of the fossil fuels that are now on the balance sheets of the oil and gas companies in the ground it's as simple as it is is that going to be easy no is it going to be damn painful yes let's not forget that these are major employers that a large part of the stability in the stock exchange is because of the oil companies so you need a transition will that have repercussion for agriculture but also for the energy sector for transport yes of course but as peter was talking about innovation as you saw in the patterns where is change happening where's innovation happening it's not in the brown and in the gray economy it's in the green economy we will find those solutions with agriculture you can do a lot with distributed energy such as solar energy can we do it everywhere at a scale that is needed no not i'll be honest right will we be still using fossil fuels yes should we phase out as fast as possible yes it's not going to be tenable we do it now thank you so much for a challenging inspiring and really pleasurable presentation to listen to i can't wait to have it up on the website and send it to my kids college so their science teacher can present it to all of them my name is pariah short i come from a small natural capital consulting company in new zealand called terra moana we take as we are building work in the ocean seafood and fisheries sector we try to take this economic equity and ecology triangle as our foundation for approach one of the things we've been looking at over the last year or so with the development and confirmation of the sdgs is i guess to use a kiwi expression what's the sweet spot what what is in that in the sdgs or 17 of them what does it look like for the implementation of them such that you get economy equity and ecology together in a way that doesn't keep the economic development for poverty alleviation going to the extent that it's just economy the whole way and the other two um through all sorts of reasons get left behind it's very important in in the fragile countries we work in particularly in oceans and seafood and fisheries thank you look what's the sweet spot i i wish i knew you know i i would give my life for it and there just isn't an easy answer i think it starts very much was really raising the awareness i think we still work from a from an old-fashioned i would almost say fossilized mindset we're all still very siloed whether we are development practitioners or diplomats or private sector we don't connect the dots very well so for me it's very much about bringing that analytical framework together raising the awareness learning how to best do it we're going to have to take risks we don't know what the best solutions always are so learning to live with risks sticking your butt out sometimes doing it wrong but then trying to get it right and very importantly looking at co-benefits it's a narrative where i think there's so much to do if you look at restoration we have framed that for the longest time as i remember as environmental conservation i would almost say right this is about the birds and the bees but conservation isn't the only angle if you look at restoration this brings economic benefits very often in communal lands owns also carbon benefits so trying to find entry points where you really can work on the three different strands of sustainable development and when you look at it when you open your mind in your mindset there are actually many of those sweets well we're mapping them out i'm happy to go through that with you if you're interested because there's so much more out there than sweet spots it would give me a tummy ache if i ate them all okay so um can i on behalf of everyone here um thank kitty very much i think um the rousing reception you got at the conclusion of your presentation the warning i got about your passion and your very provocative approaches to presentations we're all brought through very clearly in the in the presentation i think there's a lot of food for thought that you've actually put out there um i'm very pleased you made the long trip to Australia and like you like working with the Aussies but we like working with the Dutch as well so we'll keep that happening and it's nice to have you at WRI as we go through this climate climate challenge that we've all got ahead of us so thank you very much and can i thank you very much to both kitty and ewan thank you ewan and time for morning tea we're a little bit late we will resume at 11 30 with five whichever one of the five parallel sessions takes your fancies coffee and tea downstairs co-convener of the conference we hope everyone enjoyed their lunch we have to apologize that i know some people did not enjoy their lunch because we did run out of food there is more food downstairs so hopefully that will be waiting for you after after the panel you can run down and grab something extra to eat so apologies about that a couple of housekeeping things before we start just this is the last plan a recession so just to remind you that dinner tonight is at 6 30 it's in university house um we hope everyone will turn out and join us we have speaker and it's usually a very nice evening and tomorrow morning we start at 8 am so very early there will be coffee at 7 30 if you'd like to come a little bit early and wake up please join us so we decided steven and i over the weekend decided to rearrange this session a little bit to try to make it a little bit more engaging and and interesting for the audience from a typical panel discussion and thankfully we had very receptive and inflexible speaker so what we've decided to do is run it more like a q and a a little bit like an informal interview format so we'll get a variety of responses on different questions and then we'll have time for q and a from the audience so i'm going to be moderating or chairing and julia kindly has agreed to be one of one of the speakers so i'll just introduce briefly our three panelists and i'll ask them to come up and take a seat at the front and then i'll join you so first um we have professor unmi kim and she is dean and professor at the graduate school of international studies and director of the institute of development and human security at awa women's university in korea her fields of interest include international development cooperation foreign aid the political economy of globalization of development globalization and multiculturalism she served as a civilian member on the committee for international development cooperation under the prime minister's office the policy advisory committee in the ministry of foreign affairs and trade and the policy advisory committee in the minister of gender equality and family in 2012 dr kim received a service merit medal from the republic of korea for her contributions to the fourth high-level forum on aid effectiveness and she's been with us in australia a couple of times definitely this is her second appearance at the australian aid conference dr kim our second speakers from china dr yae jung who is director of the institute for global governance studies shanghai institute for international studies he received his m a in history and east china normal university in 1987 and his phd in law at budan university he's the director of the institute for global governance studies as i said and he's also a professor and phd supervisor at the school of international and public public affairs shanghai jiao tong university he's concurrently vice chairman of the chinese association of world ethno nations vice chairman of the shanghai institute of european studies and council member of the shanghai association of international relations since 2003 he has been the chief expert in the study of the un post 2015 development agenda at his institute and has co-edited a collection of articles uh one with thomas fuse entitled the united nations post 2015 agenda for global development perspectives from china and europe he's also the author of many monographs and many articles and we're really delighted to have him here today our third panelist will be dr julia newton house uh ceo of care australia uh julia has been ceo of care australia since 2007 uh we learned last night over dinner that she started her career in science as a scientist and found her way somewhat circuitously into the development field but uh during her career in development she's focused on ensuring that gender equality and women's empowerment are central to care's program um growing care's revenue and ensuring effective management on australia day in 2014 she became a member of the general division of the order of australia in recognition of her significant service to the international community through executive roles with eight organizations and two women and in 2013 she was named telstra act business woman of the year and won the global category in the 2013 financial review west pack 100 women of influence awards she's on the board of care um vice president of the australian council for international development acvid and is a strong advocate for effective aid she also has previous experience in vietnam and also with the world bank julia we'd like to invite all of you to take a seat as we're getting set off can everyone hear me so this panel is on the sdg's so we're gonna have perspectives from asia as well as perspectives from australia we had an excellent introduction to the sdgs particularly around environmental concerns this morning um a really illuminating presentation really showing us some of the stark reality of what's to come and 2015 was a pivotal year as we transitioned from the mdgs to the sdgs there are lots of criticisms of both sets of um goals fans of the mdgs love them because you know there was only a few they were measurable and they really focused attention and resources on critical issues however there were a lot of critics and critics argued including mark malik brown argued that you know the mdgs were written by a very small group of duct owners in the basement of the un and that they avoided discussion of human rights and that they really only applied to develop developing countries and not really to all countries so now we have the sdgs and advocates of them love that they're inclusive they're rights-based and they really involved a global participatory process to develop critics say they're immeasurable they're utopian and to quote uh william easterly who's particularly skating he said the sdgs are a mushy collection of platitudes that will fail on every dimension they make me feel quite nostalgic for the mdgs so my first set of questions for our panel do you think the sdgs are better or worse than the mdgs from your perspective you know what are their strengths and weaknesses and how influential with the will the sdgs be compared to the mdgs and me would you like to start why not yes um are they better or worse i think they're different i think they're different and some of the things that you said were the strengths of mdgs or flip side or sdg weaknesses and vice versa so md sdgs talk about new issues that are not as significant when mdgs were announced like climate change terrorism peace issues and so on so i think there are definite strengths that it includes some of the newer issues that have become very very critical in this century also um the mdgs were criticized for dealing only with social development or human development and not enough once you educate people once you uh cure of their illnesses they need a place to go to work but the mdgs did not do enough in terms of economic growth or economic development so they were educated but no place to go to work so the sdgs i think made a very important jump in including uh economic development issues so i think that's uh that's an improvement um a very difficult topic peace uh was not going to be at the table for a long time but i i believe that the insistence of secretary general bangimun peace was included because although it's very difficult to untangle the difficult relationship between poverty and peace or war and conflict we must deal with that issue and we must at least deal with how uh getting rid of poverty can also be a remedy or a small help toward improving the security of a region or countries as we see uh boats and boats filled with refugees from from various countries we know that uh conflict internal strife like this have a critical um impact on poverty and we need to deal with this and so for those reasons i think the sdgs are clearly an improvement um my students and i say this is not going to be easy for us to memorize in korea and in china our education is based on wrote memory memorization and it's going to be a hard hard sell for our students like we already talked about easy ways to memorize the 17 but it's not easy we do talk about the five p's the people planet and so on that makes it a little bit easier to see the groupings but at the end of the day i think we must recognize this was the voice of people from around the world i was part of the process at rio plus 20 and it was really quite amazing sitting in a tent with about 2000 people we had these little buttons that we were saying oh we we think that's an important goal we must include that and we had a poll going on uh around the world for a couple of years trying to gather all the voices as much as they were willing to be heard so even though it's messy that's the state of the affairs and if we at least identify these as critical issues that we must work for together i think it's it's it's very meaningful thank you so more on the positive okay more on the positive from the korean perspective and your personal perspective yes um yang what do you what do you think from the chinese perspective do you share chinese perspective or at least from my personal perspective i think sdgs is better than mdgs because you know sdgs we know it's universal it's comprehensive and also it's integrated and it's transformative that's quite important for us because you know we can just compare mdgs and sdgs during the period when we formulated mdgs according to some uh indian practitioners he said uh mdgs was just like more than 10 commandments that means the north from the heaven this point at the north we should do this do that do that but sdgs actually we know we experienced the long time from uh 2010 uh the united nations initiated the not only negotiation there the civil societies and not only the north but of course the south so for example chinese government issued two government papers uh to clarify to uh mention that the chinese government support in new post-2015 agenda although we have maybe have different views but that means the chinese government involved in formulating the sdgs that's one thing and the second thing that's of course we all know that china completed completed quite well in poverty reduction but during that period actually we mainly focus on poverty regression itself now because the integrated the economic growth uh social development as well as environment protection so nowadays in this period when we talk about poverty elimination we have to think about at the same time so we call the the the green growth and also we will think about how can we uh feel the the gap between the rich and the poor because also in the sdgs we call to reduce the uh the inequality within and between countries so so it's a comprehensive one so i i do think it's better than the previous one but of course on the other hand there's some weakness in mdgs uh of course first for chinese students it's difficult to memorize all these 17s and then 169 targets and then how many indicators it's difficult even as a professor i don't think i can memorize all those indicators that's also difficult because it's quite difficult for us to create those indicators and even for those 17 goals one of it for example i think it's a goal a 12 that calls uh uh ensure the sustainable consumption and production patterns how can imagine how can we implement such kind of goal i think it's quite difficult so so it's difficult for us to focus so that's why i think chinese government at this moment we think we try to translate all these 17s into chinese national policy but we should pick up some thing as the initiate as the priority in implementing sdgs that's my my personal view i once again i cannot represent my government i can just explain our government's policy to all of you thank you thank you julia do you want to comment from the australian side sure but i won't even you know i'm not representing the australian government in any way these were in my personal views and i'm not sure i can explain the government policy but i do know confidently that australian students won't even try and memorize the 17s but if they at least know what they are and how to google them i would be happy you know undoubtedly like my fellow panelists have said i think the sdgs are a big improvement on the millennium development goal the sdgs were important but we knew from the very beginning that they were only a very partial view of development and so to go to this much broader view i think is being very exciting and i think you know i think many of us are very skeptical about the complex process whereby the sdgs were developed and really would the uan be able to bring this all together at the end of just starting all these consultations and and they did and i'm still quite amazed i'm quite amazed at the things the whole world pretty much agreed to because it's a really you know it's a very encouraging agenda so i think it's a much better agenda it's much more difficult to accomplish though so i think we you know we need to think about the fact that you know we're less likely to succeed than we were with the mdgs and clearly we didn't succeed everywhere with the mdgs you know i would also say really strongly that the huge expansion of environmental goals and this morning did a terrific job but talking about that is a really really important aspect of the sdgs but also from a from the perspective of someone who lives in a developed country the fact that the sdgs are universal and you know it's actually a huge kind of culture shift and i think a good expression of the fact that you know our problems are interconnected your problems are our problems our problems are your problems and we need to fix them together so i'm a fan of the sdgs okay so i think we have three thumbs up a thumbs down for William Easterly perhaps on his view but definitely hard to memorize and a challenge perhaps to implement julie i'd like to stay with you for just a second you you mentioned something about how the the sdgs really are universal and they've been seen as a catalyst for wealthier countries to be more introspective about their own challenges and also to examine their impact on the world world around them so is australia being introspective about about the sdgs and what are they doing about that so i understand that just before the the u n meeting in september that was a whole day cabinet meeting on the sdgs and now this is the unit being set up in p m and c and you know the australian bureau of statistics is right at the heart of grappling with what the indicators are going to look like and you know we've got a group there really focused on the sdgs well i made all that up um so um so no i am at the weekend when i knew i was going to have to speak on the side google sdg on defense website and the only thing that comes up is a little description but there are two paragraphs and on the australian bureau of statistics there's nothing yet about the sdgs that i could find on their search engine so um but you know you know my excuse for this is you know it is early days and i think the mdgs you know it actually took a little bit of time to um really get behind the mdgs to integrate them into our thinking and and so forth but there is a risk it won't happen so you know feel free to write your interviews write to the prime minister tell them how important the sdgs are and how you're looking forward to a cabinet meeting today i'm going to stay with you for one more second so i want to push you because yesterday you were saying how you really felt that the sdgs you know they put they provide some leverage for how australia and china we'll talk about china in a minute can really address domestic issues domestic inequalities and i wanted you to talk a bit about thank you because you know today the prime minister um uh delivered the closing gap statement in in our parliament house and the non- australians this is the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous um uh people within australia and you know this has been a team effort and we're failing on most of the indicators so you know that that has to be uh you know and and really um you know when you look at our you know the you look at our environment for record and things there are a whole range of areas in which australia is not not leading despite our enormous wealth so i do think you know and i will i will believe my government is taking the sdgs seriously when i see them really considering them in the domestic policy sphere it's not okay that this remains de facto gender it really does need to be something that we internalize much more jen i want to talk about china a little bit because we know that china has one of the highest rates of inequality and uh trying to deal with that kind of rural urban divide in china is a pressing challenge for the government and how do the sdgs bring some momentum to the domestic programs first of all uh maybe you have already know actually our president president ccp he attended the last september summit and not only just attended the uh post 2015 sdgs summit but also he attended south south's cooperation event as well as the we call the women's summit and so on so forth that we call the serious events that means he paid a great attention to the development issue very much and after that with the sdgs in in our mind we can see uh not long ago in the the fifth fifth plenary of the cpc's uh committee essential committee in this planning meeting we issued a very important document and once again focused on the uh elimination of poverty as well as to promote the environment protection policy as well as coping with the climate change and so on so forth and also uh the particular bureau also issued very important uh documents that means to 20 20 china will eliminate according to china's standard the poverty uh uh extreme poverty and i think in 2030 china will try our best that's our priority that's our policy that's eliminating all the uh extreme poverty according to the world bank standard and this time it's quite important for us that's not only we just like implemented the mdgs to half the the the the the poverty extreme poverty but also we want to eliminate and also we try to integrate the the poverty elimination into the three dimensions that means environment protection social development as well as the economic growth and we now change our policy to promote economic growth from the traditional one to we call the the green growth that's quite important for for china and also uh when we talk about sdgs the sdgs go to not only said that we should try to end hungry but try to achieve the uh food security and in china i think during the period of mdgs although we eliminate more than 500 million uh uh less than but more than 400 million uh poor population extreme poor poor population but on the other hand we sacrifice the food security for example this morning kitty said the austrian people and the dutch people uh has lots of uh have lots of the similarity for chinese people you are the same why because the baby formula is so well known all over the world but in chinese people that's very important because uh you you know uh i'm so sad to say that lots of those chinese tourists when they travel to europe specifically to uh netherland they purchase lots of those those baby formula as well as they purchase a lot of things in australia and of course it even to some extent we cause some trouble between chinese people and dutch people and chinese people and australian people i think maybe in 20 20 or 2030 people in china because we are paying more attention about the sdg2 to achieve the food security then we not only eliminate our poverty but also we try to protect our people with the food security so in the future maybe you won't be so lucky to sell all those baby formula in australia and the chinese people can consume our own baby formula that's also i think part of the uh implementing for us for implementing the sdgs and then also very important thing that's during the period of mdgs china is a uh recipient in the international development cooperation but nowadays i think china has already become a uh assistant donor or uh aid the developing countries but the thing is that how can we balance the domestic development as well as international development cooperation is quite important even that's the issue in australian indigenous people and then not in indigenous people you have the gap and in china we have a very big gap between the rich and the poor and when those poor said when you cannot even up to now we have almost 200 million extreme poverty people and then why we should support the other people they have less poor population than us so how can we keep the balance between these two it's also our duty our government how can we persuade our people public opinion to know that china have to be more responsible in the international in the arena of international development cooperation so that's also the challenging so i think sdgs that our domestic uh development becomes more integrated more comprehensive and to some extent even more transformative and at the same time it also challenged chinese government as well as chinese people how can we accept those new challenges like from the recipient to a donor country so we have still have a long way to go and at the same time so we need to learn our neighbor uh South Korea because you have already become a member of the OECD you know the experience how to provide uh aid when you still not very that rich during that period thank you very much that's that's a perfect segue into my my next question so uh we looked a little bit at internal policies in the application of the stg so when you raise the issue of china becoming a provider country or being a much more prominent provider country and the mdgs they they evolved at a time when the the traditional donor world paid very little attention to the decades of south south and development cooperation that's been implemented and executed by asian countries like china like korea like india for example whereas the sdgs have emerged in a new era where as you say korea has joined the DAC and china if you measure it in oda like terms is now the sixth largest donor in the world and as you said at the un development summit the chinese president committed two billion with the promises of up to 12 billion u.s dollars in support of developing countries implementation of the 2030 development agenda and as well the republic of korea has announced a 200 million dollar program better life for girls initiative which will support vulnerable girls in developing countries over the the next five years so i'd like to ask unmi first are the sdgs are they playing a role in in korea's development cooperation strategies and how um maybe with your permission uh switch the x and the y variable around the question because when i received looked at that question i thought maybe i will start with how the development experience of south korea china in japan have colored our own experiences as a donor um professor barba starlings from brown university in the united states and i have conducted research we first started out um in about 2008 when korea was about to join the oacd DAC and so on trying to understand the traditional versus emerging donors such as south korea india brazil and so on um the more we did field research we realized that the demarcation was not between traditional and so-called emerging different groups of emerging donors but it was really the western donors australia is sort of on the western side um the uk the northern european donors versus asian donors including japan japan was very different from the other traditional western donors so to try to lump traditional and include japan just didn't make any sense so once we started once we gave up that idea and said who are the ones in this other side who look different and those were japan korea china we were very similar there are some ways that we were similar but different but definitely very different from the traditional western donors our research interviewing various practitioners in development cooperation government officials in the three countries and some of our development partner countries recognize that japan korea china were using their own development experience and how we used aid as a way to understand how we may provide aid and i have those in slides number nine and ten maybe we can look at those slides as well first of all we understood that it wasn't really about poverty alleviation or social development alone but it was really intertwined with economic development for example when korea was a recipient a large recipient of us aid the current government officials had very interesting negotiations with us aid officials us aid officials first wanted to just give food aid so that we could alleviate poverty first but the current government officials were arguing and saying that okay we need food aid to eliminate to deal with poverty but we also need the funds to go on for long-term economic development projects so they had discussions going back and forth and finally the u.s. government after about a year's negotiation decided to let us use part of the aid for our economic industrial planning economic development via industrial policies so in such a way our use of aid has been different we use aid not just for poverty alleviation but for economic development long-term development second we talked about a different mix of development assistance development cooperation when china or south korea or japan go to developing countries trying to assist we think more broadly with oda or official development assistance as only one component we often think with foreign fdi foreign direct investment via companies export lessons for trade and so on as a complimentary larger package of economic support so we tend to think much broadly about the comprehensive package of economic assistance let me go to and and and so uh japan at first was criticized heavily for doing too much for economic infrastructure that western donors have have have stopped doing china is very heavy on infrastructure korea somewhere in between but we we do about have about half in our infrastructure half through concessional loans and half in grante so our aid modality looks very different from western aid we you can look at the bottom line that says close relationship between public and private sector so when we provide assistance to developing countries we're often looking and seeking public private partnership government working with the private sector of our donor countries to assist developing countries some of these points have been criticized heavily within the oacd doc and i've criticized some of these points myself for focusing too much on infrastructure and so on but the fact is these are some of the common characteristics and the three countries at least find very important when we decide to help other countries so the experiences of our own development tend to have colored our experience as a donor and and finally let me go to the previous slide and i might i must also say that i talked about stage approach to development and also the role of government unlike the western donors that tend to not tend to shy away from government led development the three countries have had a lot of experience and have successful experience with government led development at least in the early stage of development so we think that in the cases where the private sector is not yet fully mature enough or not capable yet that government leadership is is is critical at times so we do talk about the institutions in particular about the developmental state and how to assist the state to do proper uh industrial planning and so on so these come from our own experience of development and our own experience of using it so this has been a very important characteristics of of the three donors in in asia so i just wanted to point that out and some some some of us have argued that our formula for our own development was against the wash the consensus that didn't really bring about uh poverty alleviation of growth in sub-saharan africa in particular so we think this is an alternative modus operandi for development also perhaps for development cooperation so i start with that and then maybe later i'll talk about the better life for girls and the new rural development scheme okay i'll come right back to you then i'm going to ask yang to to reflect a little bit on you know how the sdgs are really shaping china's development cooperation south-south cooperation which is long-standing but has it has this has the strategies changed have changed as a result of the sdgs yes i i i think actually sdgs has already to some extent they change china's china's policy towards the policy of the international cooperation and of course there's something has already changed and some not changed because we still think that china's although just now i mentioned from a recipient to a donor country and but we still think that china tried to help the other developing country we threw the we called the channel of south-south cooperation and we still think that north-south cooperation should the main channel in terms of international development cooperation but actually because the situation has already changed a lot and china has already become the the second largest economy in the world so it's our responsibility to help the other developing country and also we think that with the sdg in our mind we need when we talk about the aid assistance usually it's also something to do with the national interest why you aid the others because it fits your national interest so interest and for other things it's justice you just help people for for helping and nowadays we think that when we talk about international development cooperation when we try to aid the others we also know that there's something we call the national interest but we think we should put the justice before interest it doesn't mean there's no interest at all for us to help the others but the the most important thing is that we have to let the world to be justice to let the people have a better life in the future that's our the first change and also just just now you mentioned that presidency he also initiated the two billion u.s. dollars to help developing country to implement the sdgs but at the same time also we have diversified our health for example we will establish an international development knowledge center that's something to do just like we try to share our experience to our developing countries to the other developing countries and also we will raise the investment to least the developing countries until 2030 there will be 12 billion years dollar directly invest to least the developing country to help them to to lift the poverty as well as according to China saying that through the investment through the investment not only we just give them fish but let them to know how to fish so that's why we think the investment is so important to those least in developing country and also because of the sdgs and China has its commitment to implementing sdgs so we think that we should try to integrate our aid to the development country into the three dimensions so a presidency issued the we called the 6100 initiatives and that's 6100 initiatives includes the poverty reduction program the aid and trade program environmental and climate change coping with environmental and and climate change program as well as 100 program for setting up clinic and hospital and 100 schools so and 100 agriculture projects in developing country mainly in african country so now you see previously maybe we we won't support the developing country in terms of coping with climate change but now we think it's quite important we have to support them through the 100 project in terms of coping with climate change as well as environmental protection that's the also the change and the third one just now you mentioned the security issue and peace and security of course i don't think that chinese government don't think that we need to set a goal we call peace and security but we agree with that inclusive the goal sdg goal 16 peace peaceful and not security inclusive and peaceful society and we support this but we do not think that we have to interfere the other countries in the affairs but we can try to support peace and security through the international organizations or regional organizations like a you like a united nations so that's why actually china will stress on the importance of peace and development in implementing goal 16 for example china uh i i just give you some examples to 20 20 china will train 2000 peacekeepers from other countries mainly from african countries and also china will provide 100 million dollars to the african union and will provide free military aid through the 2100 million to the african union and also china will build a peacekeeping uh standby force of 8 000 troops and actually up to now china is the largest country provide a peacekeeping uh troops in the permanent five but not in all those members states of the united nations so that's why we link peace and security with the development issue so that that's why i think china has already changed a lot our international uh development cooperation strategy because of the sdgs thank you that's very interesting actually to hear about that shift which seems quite quite substantial as a result of the fdgs both in terms of kind of philosophy and also in terms of of the projects it's a real diversification from the past i think for for china and me if you wouldn't mind i'd like to introduce the audience a little bit to the better life for for girls initiative we're having a bit of problem with graphics there so oh yeah do you need the graphic can you do it without i can do without okay i'm not sure how to fix it yeah uh there uh president parkenet was very proud to be at the un uh uh leading last year september 2015 uh there she went through quite a few panels and was an important figure in giving um one session the korean government organized a new world development paradigm so there were two programs among many that she introduced that were very significant one is the new role development paradigm but the other one was the better life for girls initiative and maybe i i will start with the better life for girls initiative because this is something that i had been working on and providing the research findings from my uh for my research i was very happy when the president took the initiative wow she she took this and i was really flabbergasted very pleasantly surprised um the better life for girls initiative started with a grant that i received from the bill and melinda gates foundation asking us to find something that the korean government can do in global public health because our uh you know development cooperation isn't very big and we weren't really doing much spending quite a bit of our odf funds in public health issues but not really you know didn't have any specific distinct or important initiative so they asked us if we can do something about it after looking at what korea had done well in our public health uh like we is we're probably number one in the world in terms of family planning and we did so well they were now below replacement and one of the most rapidly aging societies in the world where when we do something we do quicker than anybody else so we did development in one generation eliminated poverty in one generation but we also you know our babies are not coming so uh and we're the fastest um aging population in the world um so we looked through various things that we were doing and then we looked through what korea was doing in the global public health area the most of the the the largest amount of money we were spending was building hospitals and and health centers health clinics um we were doing wash projects in in sub-saharan africa and so on but nothing really that stood out nothing that really reflected our own experience and whatnot and then we started looking at through the mgd's report to see what was missing in the global public health field and among the eight goals goal number four infant mortality and goal number five maternal health were uh the most problematic in terms of reaching their goals throughout the eight goals they were all very problematic in sub-saharan africa and south asia but four and five were universally pretty uh much in jeopardy so we started looking at that and when we did more research about how to improve maternal and child's health we realized that the intervention uh from the united nations and all the donor countries were happening too late there were uh young girls at the age of nine who are getting pregnant and giving birth and it's horrible that these young uh children are giving birth and there are a lot of repercussions on these young girls who are so uh become mothers at such a young age for their own health as well as the health of the infant and the babies and and the reasons why these young girls were getting pregnant as you know is not just for medical for for their own consent it could sometimes be by religion culture social norms poverty is a big role to play sexual violence and so on so we looked at this mix of packages affecting young girls whose needs were not being addressed so we decided to look into what are the health risks for young girls and what can we do to help remedy those young girls from getting pregnant at such a young age and having all these health risks uh but as well as social and educational risks so at the end we decided to focus on young girls from the age of nine this is a WHO guideline uh from nine to before 18 as a critical vulnerable years for young girls in developing countries and in order to assist them with their comprehensive health issues it was really about education as well as health so that's why the Better Life for Girls initiatives talks about educating these girls so they know more about their rights and responsibilities but can really protect themselves and perhaps become a major actor in changing their own lives as well and some research in Sub-Saharan Africa showed that for young boys to reduce HIV-AIDS infection is by providing them with condoms and good sex education but for girls in high gender gap societies that doesn't work so for girls it's just sending them to secondary schools was the best remedy to help with HIV-AIDS so the more research we're doing we're finding that education in and of itself can be a cure for illnesses as well as for empowering them so the Better Life for Girls initiative became a very comprehensive initiative to assist young girls who are sort of becoming a lacuna in terms of development assistance in mch in particular so the Better Life for Girls initiative was born and we presented to the government but really wasn't thinking that the government really actually take the note of our research we were flabbergasted I mean very pleasantly mind you but we were very pleased when the government announced that they were going to put 200 million from 2016 to 2020 for this initiative and now it's 15 countries that we see that they were going to be target countries for this age so this is a new initiative and along with the Better Life for Girls they've created a much more comprehensive Better Life for all initiatives of the various sectors we have the Better Life initiative and I look forward to working with my government to do the right thing on this and hoping that many other governments countries will join in this initiative so Julia I don't know if you want to add anything from the Australia perspective I'm going to segue into the last question so you can have a double barrel question and answer both together if you like reflect a bit on Australia and what the what the SDGs will mean in terms of Australia's development cooperation but then also will will they provide opportunities for countries like Australia to work more with China and Korea and the non-traditional providers often people say there's a lack of convergence between the non-traditional providers and the traditional providers when we struggle to find areas of convergence will the SDGs provide a platform for more convergence and working together yeah well you know what what might the SDGs mean for Australia's development cooperation program you know that our development cooperation program has just been through these massive wrenching changes you know unprecedented levels of cuts and the entire bureaucracy which administered the aid program was abolished and it's being taken over by DFAT so I think it's not surprising that it's difficult to see you know you know at the first point of that you know as the aid went into DFAT was a whole process of developing aid investment plans and then the second round of cuts came and so you know I think I think that's had an impact on the ability of the official aid program to really respond to the to the SDGs but you know I would say it's still very early days in those 50 years and it sounds you know from the rhetoric from the department and from the minister that there is the intention that this this you know this does influence the directions of the aid program I have sort of listened to a few podcasts from people from USAID and so forth and you know and there's sort of there is the sense of which I would think you're doing relates to the SDGs so it's okay but I hope that particularly as the indicators get agreed in March this year that that will give a sort of some impetus and as we start to gather data globally on those indications some impetus to think about which areas we want to see most changes but I would also say that for Australia this is a particular challenge because you know the minister has been very clear that the area of critical importance for Australia and the Pacific and this is the area you know the Pacific has done very badly in terms of achievements against the SDGs so you know I think high levels of Australian aid have not actually resulted in Pacific Island countries meeting the NDG targets and I think you know there has been a big rethinking of our aid program clearly and so how will that set it up to be able to deliver the SDGs you know I do think it's interesting when you say and is this a platform for greater cooperation you know for decades Australia has dabbled with trilateral cooperation with Korea with China and I don't not sure any of it's been terribly big or terribly successful but these global platforms do offer that opportunity but I would also point that some OECD donors rhetoric on aid has actually become much more aligned with the Korean and Chinese rhetoric I was interested I'm pretty sure it was the Dutch government saying you know our aid program is going to help and then everyone's economy from now on you know that was the most recent government and I think you know Julie Dishook's commitment to economic diplomacy is clearly about Australia's economy as part of the region so I actually think that that's an interesting shift in terms of changing global relations and development cooperation but you know that we all have fairly complex bureaucracies with particular cultures and it's one thing to bring two of those bureaucracies together in a bilateral relationship when you make it a trilateral relationship you have to start you know I mean there can be bigger overheads in that it is worth having fora like the DAC which enable us and other fora to really exchange views and ideas and I think it's a terrific idea to explore but we do run the risk of making things even more complicated than they are thanks Jiang what do you think do you think China with the SGGs will see more triangular cooperation that has meaning or will we see China participate more in global policy fora yes I can just give you an example last year our Prime Minister of the Premier, Li Keqiang visited OECD DAC and deliver a speech over there and and another story that's in 2014 in a international symposium organized by South-South cooperation in Washington DC organized by the United Nations we have a panel and with some scholars from India and when I delivered that I said that China should try to how to say cooperate with OECD and we we should try to promote the triangle cooperation so on so forth and the India scholar directly asked me do you think China's government will at last try to bid for the membership of OECD my response is that no it will never ever be member of OECD not like Korea but but it's quite important we need to cooperate and we have a dialogue and then the next year that means last year in 2015 our Premier visited OECD and delivered a speech so I don't think that during the period from the 2015 to 2030 China's position in the international development cooperation that's my personal view we can play the role as a bridge between the group SM7 and maybe group 34 the OECD country and of course that's that's one thing and why because I think China has already China still a largest developing country in the world but at the same time so we have to be very responsible in the international development cooperation and the China can play this role as a bridge but not as a member of the so-called the richest countries club that's my personal view towards this that's the first thing and the second is that China still think that's not only in the climate change in environmental protection as well as in international development cooperation we should try to still abide by this principle we call CVDR common but differentiated responsibility China is a developing country so we can provide our help to our development country through the South South cooperation all to some extent the triangle cooperation but we still think that the Western country the North country they should try to commit it to the point seven of gni in the ODA and on the other hand China is also very responsible in terms of the development aid according to our white paper issued by our government in 2014 if I have not memorized the wrong according to my memorize that from 2010 to 2012 the increase rate of the China's foreign aid the rate is 50 percent and according to my personal calculate up to now we provide maybe 0.07 percentage of our gni in the foreign aid and according to this increased rate I think to 2030 maybe China's foreign aid official foreign aid to their own countries through the South South cooperation I think maybe we'll reach to 0.1 but not 0.7 we never ever committed to that number but even 0.1 this number you just keep in mind according to here is this morning's presentation maybe China's GDP will surpass the UN GDP then just imagine how huge the foreign aid from China will be and the third thing that because China has already been a donor's country but China still have 200 million extreme poverty population how can we persuade people to understand that the first thing first is that we have to eliminate our domestic extreme poverty and to achieve food security and provide health for all in our own country so I think while we try to help the others our government will think about how can we try to solve our own problem first and then we have the solid base to help the others so I think these two the international development cooperation as well as domestic development in the terms of the three dimensions integrated the environment society social and as well as economic growth together then we can provide help to the world first if China at last to 2030 can really eliminate 200 million extreme poverty in our country then that's the most important contribution to the to implementing SDG in the world at the same times if we can provide maybe 0.1 percentage of our GNI in the foreign aid then it will also be a great contribution and I'm looking forward to 2030 maybe at that time I don't know where I will be but I hope it will become the truth it will become the truth thank you very much thank you I'm going to end with that comment because it offers a lot of optimism I think and and really shows us where I think there's speed is optimal both in the Korea and the Chinese case in terms of executing developing plans and executing them with commitment and also coherence which I think it's very applicable to the universality of the SDGs and what we're seeing in Asia I'd like to thank our three speakers first and then we will turn it over to questions thank you very much okay we have 20 minutes for questions I'm going to take them three at a time and there should be some mics please try to please identify yourself and keep your questions short and identify who you'd like to respond one over in the far corner two and then I'll take one from over here anyone yep three in the front yeah go ahead thank oh my name's Helen Hill from Victoria University in Melbourne and also the National University of Timor-Laura-Sai in Delhi um I'd like to thank the speakers I mean I'm very interested in the argument about the experience of development of those new donors influencing the the way that their aid program operates but it seems to me both China and Korea are huge countries they followed an export-led model of industrialization most of the country is still in the aid program with the exception of Africa I realize Africa is different but they're mostly small island states in the pacific now which are never going to adopt an export-led model of industrialization in fact you know when I used to teach this to my students the Pacific oh no no we're never going to be able to do that and I'd just like to make a quick example there's another non-traditional donor which has been active in the pacific and that is Cuba and ironically Cuba received aid from Australia under the Howard government the Cubans asked Australia to fund a permaculture project and that was extraordinarily successful when the Cubans were facing an agricultural crisis and just a few a months ago the Cubans have brought that agriculture they learned from Australia to Timor-lesht and it's being implemented in a kusi because Australia would never put permaculture in the aid program to Timor for some reason but put industrial agriculture in the program to Timor so I'm just sort of wanting to point out the sort of the different types of experience of development that different countries have thank you um I was Nolina Bolivo from diverse voices in action for equality and dawn from Fiji um my question I was in all of the open working group meetings around the SDGs and thank you it was a really useful session um one of the questions that I have is in that whole process where we did have so much civil society and government engagement trying to move to what is quite a complex set of SDGs the the I'd like to hear your thoughts about the fact that while we have this you know focus on accountability and how we are accountable in terms of the social contract um between states and their citizens but also states and states the question also is how do we reconcile that with the fact of things like the Trans-Pacific um partnership agreement and the Tefter agreement that's on so as you get a widening of free trade um agreements how are we going to reconcile that with human rights within states and between states thank you thank you here it's just a really quick question for the whole panel but potentially most particularly for Mr Jiang I'm wondering how you see the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as sort of feeding into these SDGs in Asia is this something that potentially represents that new model or is these for the time being something a little bit off to the side thank you thank you thank you for those questions so first let's look at the the relevance of China career development model with small island states I like to take that let me let me start with that question I mean if you see Korea now we seem like such um fairly affluent nation that it's not our lessons are not applicable and we're such an unusual case but let me point take you back to the early 1960s when we began our development experience um our GMP per capita at the time was 81 dollars so poor then many of the sub-Saharan poorest countries in the world we just uh were coming out of war that has officially not ended so it's a war-torn country we had no natural resources or gas or any other sort of mineral resources that we could really count on we are very low levels of technology so we didn't have any of the ingredients that was necessary for development capital technology land or whatever um our land is the size of Minnesota our population is now about 50 million so it's not a very big big country that you might think of so the the obstacles or challenges that we face as an impoverished country is not very different from the developing or the least developing least developed countries face poverty extreme poverty war and conflict lack of democracy all those things packaged into a nice bundle or south korea the world bank officials were saying that we were a basket case so and now I you know jim kim the korean national born is now the head of the world bank's iron anyway so the the point that i want to make is korea's lessons should be valid and uh when i was at the un last year at the 70th anniversary it really struck me and others that korea was one of the very few countries that made from extreme poverty and prosperity within a generation so developing countries still come to us to ask us so what did you do what did you do that was different what did you do that you didn't listen to your donors and so on and my listen my story is not about explore oriented industrialization that was the strategy that we could use at the time the strategy for us was uh we had a government uh that was able to bring all of the talent in the country to work on a development strategy that was best suited for us at the time we wouldn't say that export is the only way i don't think that's the only way these days it's not a good way because the the market is is too crowded but when korea without resources without capital the only thing we had going was a lot of people were fairly well educated so our level of education was much higher than countries at our level of poverty so that's what we had smart relatively smart people who were educated not you know smarter but well educated people so what we did is um we couldn't just focus on our domestic economy because we are so little so the only way that we thought we could earn money is through exporting light manufactured products so in the throughout the 60s the most uh the high on our uh export items were wigs we were the the global capital of wigs because our dark hair we we didn't have money to have perms and stuff like that so it was untreated coarse hair that was could be made into very good wigs so we were the wick capital of the world we were the capital of of stuffed toys before china so we were the the global capital of cheap clothing textiles so that's where we started because that's the only thing that we could do so the lesson from korea is not exports it's really about uh working through the government having government leadership and and channeling all the the resources into what we could do given our challenges and given what we had so i wouldn't say export is the answer but i would really say uh working with the sound government so i think the formula would be different but but the fact that we struggle through a war toward economy um political strife and poverty these are issues that are not very different from developing countries uh who struggle these days there are of course some lessons that we hope countries would not follow us uh we had a long um authoritarian rule we would not say oh go ahead go ahead go get a military dictator too i wouldn't i would not recommend that i would i would say to the contrary these are things that you should not try to replicate that's why uh we we are very much into being transparent about both our successes but also our trials and errors so that other countries will not repeat some of the mistakes that we we had done but we hope that we can provide an alternative to what the washtar consensus says and so that's that's the message uh that's the lesson that i would rather like to share thank you john could you comment on the the relevance of the china model and then maybe also jump straight into the link between the ai b and the sdgs first of all i i i don't think i will promote the also terrarium uh government in all days in south korea but i will say that actually if we really want to promote uh development and the lift to poverty i think the strong government is very important not only me but also fuguyama also says so without the strong government how can you really do something to help people to lift their poverty at all so of course according to china's uh a former leader deng xiaoping's saying that no matter it's a white cat or black one if you can catch the mice it will be the good one so no matter what kind of government if those government is accountable one if this those government can help people to lift the poverty then we just follow this maybe i i cannot say china model china people always say Beijing consensus or China model but according to my personal experience actually i don't think china can be a so-called Washington consensus as a Beijing consensus but one thing is quite important every country has their own situation they have to select their own road to their own development and up till now i can say through the 30 more than 30 years opening up and the reformation in china we have found a right away for china to develop from a very uh how to say even we can say least development country or less development country to a we call the middle income country and even in the future and from recipient to a donor country so through this way i think maybe that's if we can say china's model that means you should try to find the the best way for your own country maybe that's the answer for your your question and for AIIB and in SDGs we know the SDGs said that built resilient infrastructures so you can find the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank so that means infrastructure is so important than the just now we mentioned and even in the morning talked about china's aid to Africa we ate a lot in those infrastructure construction and in China saying if you want your country i mean the countryside the rich the first way is try to construct a road towards your village and your village will be rich the infrastructure is so important but in the asia pacific region of course we have word bank we have the asia development bank but they have no enough phone and the china has no phone and then we have the capability to do that and why not that's why we initiate the asia infrastructure investment bank AIIB that's the first reason and the second i don't think that this bank is very open towards the world australian government joined this and also uk except i'm so sorry united states and japan our good neighbor in japan but anyway i think in the future maybe i'm not sure but this bank is still very open and the thirdly i do think that AIIB it is a mechanism by the international development cooperation mechanism it is the mechanism to implement the traditional word like word bank like asia development bank i don't think that that's china or even like australian government will think that we joined and we want to replace issue development bank or or word bank so that's why i think all the world should support AIIB let it be successful and help the international cooperation in the future especially specifically to complete the goal nine built resilient infrastructure thank you very much thank you yes question number two on julia do you want to tackle that one on and then i'll turn and we'd like to say something as well accessibility accountability human rights and the tpp well you know i think the sdgs have a you know important aspirations towards good government good governance and participation but there's there are some unfortunate trends in the world even you know within our own government where we see freedom of information requests are you know becoming more difficult and not always the level of transparency one desires i think citizens will need to demand transparency and need to keep arguing for it it's not something that governments will automatically provide but again things like the sdg provide another lever another way in which we need to claim the rights we have as citizens i think you raise a very important issue about accountability and rights-based approach to these topics i think in each of our governments there is some balance and there's some attention between development cooperation and our and our practices of free trade and so on within the korean government the ministry of strategy of finance is very much interested in promoting further trade and for further economic growth of korea and the other hand the minister of foreign affairs want to do more in terms of providing more granted in line with sdgs and so on ministry of finance and strategy although they're the one providing the funds not always short so you can see in the real day-to-day life that there is this this tension between different ministries and their different mandates and broadly speaking the global arena tension between these goals i hope because the sdgs were to be inclusive and we were supposed to look at not just to assist developing countries but to find pockets of poverty and develop developed countries to assist that maybe developed countries will find a way to incorporate the principles of rights-based approach to development cooperation in their other policy areas such as free trade and tpp and whatnot so i hope sdgs can be that conduit for for that but realistically speaking i'm not that optimistic i'll take two short questions one and two as a question for the whole panel alongside all of the stakeholder consultation globally around the sdgs has also been hearing yeah being the conversation about reform of the un and reform of the un agencies and so i just been sitting in the panel's comments on how you see the effect of the sdgs on the reform of the you know one of the key global systems for actually implementing them and whether that reform process will whether you see it actually happening and carrying on thank you okay thank you next question yeah i'm simon pollock working for the department environment but this is very much my own question just when talking about a alternative to the washington consensus in providing aid and focusing on infrastructure could that then be seen as a way of furthering tide aid in a way that is favoring maybe advantages for your own countries infrastructure providers and providing in a way unfair leg up for national industrial companies to get gains in developing countries okay who'd like to take the un reform question no one sorry think about it start with the second question uh the alternative to the washington consensus doesn't mean just about giving more aid for infrastructure i think that's one of the things but i was stressed that it's really about government leadership rather than letting the private sector lead the the process of development in a country especially in an early stage of development when the other institutions are not well developed i think it's really critical for a sound government to have good policies for its nation's development so i would say the when i mentioned alternatives to washington consensus i was more focused on the government versus the market divide rather than the infrastructure um tide aid no i don't think that's a good idea i think looking at how aid projects are being provided in developing countries from the korean government sometimes it's much more economical to use vendors from neighboring countries than to use korean companies or korean products and we have certainly done that so untied aid i think is not really the the tide aid is not the answer that i would say is part of the alternative to the washington consensus so but i thank you for that question to give me a chance to to um to clarify reform of un agencies i think that has been a very important uh goal for the pangiman secretary general from his first and his second the only the the one thing that i noticed is is minor but maybe not minor but he has been rather successful in bringing more women to the leadership and i think that's making some changes not that all men are bad but he is of course a man but he has really included more women in the leadership and i think that's making some changes within uh creating un women as a comprehensive women's initiative uh agency within the un i think is a step in that direction but i i i don't know uh to what extent the reform within the un has been successful um i know there has been a lot of effort and trying to reform but i don't know how far they've gone and whether they've been really successful we'll talk about the washington consensus but actually mdg based on post-washington consensus so that means uh now maybe we are experienced the period of post post washington but it doesn't mean that we return to washington consensus and at this moment i think the most important thing that the whole world because sdg is a universal one it's a comprehensive one and it's also a transformative one that means uh according to china's experience that we are reaching the stage that we have to transform our economic structures and so on so forth i i think even in uh at world large in in this world we are now experiencing how can we transform the traditional economic growth to the three dimensions that means we promote economic growth sustainably sustained and but also we should protect the environment and uh to promote social development and then it will be not only beyond the washington consensus but also beyond the post uh washington consensus then we can really implement uh the sdgs in 15 years but i doubt we can really fully implement all those because just now i mentioned there's too many targets and then indicators in March i can really difficult to imagine how many indicators it's difficult and for us my personal job maybe we try to to to suggest maybe every country should try to find some something which we can really implement quite well and then we can uh at the same time try to implement all of those goals and so on so forth and targets and so on so forth about the un reform i can just uh maybe use china's experience just now i mentioned why china can develop so fast because we experienced the more than 30 years reformation as well as opening up the world so for us reformation or reform it's a continuous process that means even in the the largest international organization i do think that it should experience a long long time reformation that means first we need to reform the structure we need to reform the mechanism and all those uh uh uh systems in united nations but the second just like china uh chinese experience we cannot change the system overnight we have to be very patient maybe just because of chinese history so long so we are very patient and american history and maybe austrian history is so short you always want to change everything up uh overnight so i think the best way is try to go to the middle we can try to find the third way try to reform it at the same time be patient thank you that brings us to the close of the session thank you for excellent questions i'm sorry for those of you didn't get to answer ask your questions um i'd just like to sum up saying i think we can see from the session that the sggs really have been a catalyst for change in the realm of development cooperation both for northern and southern providers or asian or western providers um both as a catalyst for change and as an area of potential convergence both in the present and and going forward so i think get some hope for the future thank you very much and please your