 So thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I want to start out tonight by asking for your sympathy. My job tonight is not an easy one. I'm essentially here as a gap filler to keep you entertained while the judges confer and the contestants anxiously await their fate. On a night that's a celebration of brevity, I'm the token academic waffler. I'm the verbose amongst the succinct, the long-winded contrast to the short and sweet, the tedious after the concise. In short, I'm an intermission without the champagne. But I'll do my best. So two years ago, as Inga mentioned, I was asked to do this duty before. And on that night, I started out in the spirit of the three-minute thesis with a powerful image that for me truly captures the spirit of brevity that we're celebrating tonight. And two years later, I think this is an image that still reflects the beauty and elegance of being brief. Here it is. Ladies and gentlemen, little did we know how brief it would be. Now, the events of Monday night might seem quite remote from our concerns here tonight, but that's not the case. I have it on very good report that Tony Abbott was seriously considering changing the three-minute thesis into a three-word thesis. We certainly dodged a bullet there. But we can't relax because Canberra inside a gossip has moved into overdrive and it's now reporting that Malcolm Turnbull's strong preference is for a 30-minute thesis, at least. So we've had to tentatively schedule next year's final to run well past midnight. But that's enough. That's enough of the party political jokes, Andrew. Here at the ANU, we value our neutrality. I undertake to stop the jokes and to axe the wisecracks. So let me talk about neutrality because, like that other great national institution, the ABC, we really do value it here at the ANU. And a good side of that neutrality is the great care we've taken tonight to put together a panel of judges. It's a very well-balanced bench, if I can say so myself. Now, we started out with a banker, Susan Banaghan, representing the pinnacle of capitalism in our society. Now, what better contrast to a banker than a green? Who, as we know, are committed to the destruction of the economy as we know it? We also recruited a high-profile radio personality, Genevieve Jacobs, and we balanced her perfectly with a behind-the-scenes bureaucrat, Sube Vanerjee. And Sube, that really is the biggest picture I could find of you on the internet. And we recruited a massive intellect from the Labor Party, Andrew Lee. Sorry, sorry, Professor Andrew Lee, who used to grace these very corridors. And then we ran into a bit of a problem because the only way we could genuinely balance the left-leaning brilliance of Professor Lee would be to get a not-so-bright Liberal. And we know that's not possible. Not only is the Liberal Party a very broad church, it's also a very smart church. So we had to give up on finding anyone less than clever in that team. Yesterday morning, we did get 44 last-minute suggestions emailed in from Malcolm Turnbull's office. So that's enough on the judges. What about the competition? Tonight you've seen some wonderful three-minute insights into the academic world, enormously rich and productive slices of brilliance. But I don't want you to get the idea that these three-minute triumphs are typical of the hard slog of academic life. It's one thing for these young whippersnappers to prance around here on stage with a single slide, a fancy image and a wireless mic tucked behind their ear. It's another thing altogether at the academic coal face. Now, let me give you an indication of just how tough just how tough it can be based on my own experience. This is my personal story. I've just started writing a new book. Now, as we heard before, a book like the Athesis is roughly 80,000 words. So it takes me about four years to write a book. So that's 20,000 words a year I've got to produce. Now, keeping things mathematically relatively simple for the social scientists here, 50 weeks in the year, that's about 400 words a week. Now, I'm a Monday to Friday sort of guy. 80 words a day, ladies and gentlemen. And I work nine to five. So I've got to produce 10 words an hour. Now, remember, even the social scientists will understand this, there's 23 minute segments in an hour. So the average three minutes in my academic life is not spent flamboyantly parading a fully formed thesis. A real academic three minutes is spent carefully crafting half a word. So with that background in mind, here's my late entry into the ANU final of the three minute thesis competition. Andrew Walker from the ANU College of Asia in the Pacific, my book. This is a true insight into three minutes of an academic life in real time. I'm just assured that progress is made. Three minutes later, I'd had a bit of a rethink. But then back on track. 12 minutes, real progress. 15, 18, and the next three minutes was a wobber. Unprecedented non-average productivity, which surely earned me a well-earned break. And so it goes on three minutes after three minutes. But when it's over, there's even more challenges that we academics have to face. Recently, in one of my well-deserved coffee breaks, I was alarmed to read this headline in The Guardian. It's a blog run by academics anonymous. So if this presentation has raised any difficult issues for any of my colleagues, there is support out there. And it's an article written by an anonymous academic who has bravely come out to declare that many academic books are very expensive and have only limited print runs and are bought mainly by libraries. Now, for those of us at the Cull Face, this is alarming news. I simply had no idea. Up until now, I had regularly checked in at Dimmicks, up there at Belcon and Moore. I look in the Asian Studies section. I go down to the bottom shelf, W. No books by Walker. And I assume it's been another good week. Sold out yet again. And when those royalty checks arrive from London, I wish it was Cambridge, but it's not. For seven pounds and 48 pence, I always assumed that this was a result of punitive taxation rates in the UK. Now I realise I've been hoodwinked. My books have been published in very limited print runs. My readers have been denied access to my work. The only consolation is that a few years ago, I noticed that my first book had been stolen from the ANU library. So, ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy the glamour of this evening, of this wonderful celebration of the three-minute thesis. But please don't forget the fate of academics like me who are doing it tough, carving out academic work half word by half word. And it's academic work that unscrupulous publishers then willfully withhold from our enthusiastic public. Ladies and gentlemen, the judges have returned, so it's time now to refocus on our celebration of brevity and to remember that whatever challenges before our great nation, whatever political turmoil we go through, there's no better time to be an Australian and there's no better time to be brief.