 Well, thank you very much Tom and it's really good to be here with you tonight and with my old mate and I hope we'll have an interesting conversation. How we thought we'd organise this is that we'll chat for about half an hour and then open up to you to make contributions and ask Gareth some probing questions. I found this a very impressive book, a very detailed book and I think Gareth you've mixed the policy and the personal really well in this account so while it's a meaty, gritty sort of book at one level it's interspersed with stories and anecdotes of the experiences you've had and a lot of, perhaps not a lot but quite a few jokes at your own expense. So I was going to say that I was sure that after hearing Gareth people would want to go out and buy this book for Christmas but he seems to have undercut the market by giving you all one so maybe you can buy an extra one for the relays. Anyway let me start with a relatively small matter but one that I think is some symbolic importance. You mentioned Gareth that in your very early political career you were on a group which judged the entries for the new parliament house and you also say that you're rather appalled to see the fence that is currently being erected around that house but I wonder whether if you were the Attorney General now rather than way back when you would be ignoring the security advice to put up that fence. That job on the jury for the new parliament house, one of the most fascinating things I ever got to do during my public life actually working with I.M. Page on Andrews and one of the other international superstars. How I got there is an interesting story in its own right because there was a need for a lower house liberal and a Senate Labor guy to constitute the appropriate balance on the jury and none of the old shellbacks in the Labor Party want to have anything to do with it. I thought it was a poof-terish kind of an enterprise which could be best left to some bright-eyed bushy tailed new academic like me so I jumped at the chance and it was a wonderful educational experience but and I was the one in fact that wrote that line in the jury report about we deliberately chose a new building that was not glowering and inaccessible but one that had a genuinely democratic character that took the form of a building that kids could scramble over and people could walk over with their democratic representatives under their feet so the whole idea of those big grassy ramps and the symbolism of the building was incredibly important. Now once you block off those big grassy lamps you lose all of that and my instinct about what's been done is it's a complete overreaction. Of course you need in the current security conscious environment to put bollards across the bottom to stop vehicles driving up and doing whatever vehicles might be disposed to do. Of course you need security arrangements at the top at the entrance of the building of course you need some surveillance cameras and some sort of rapid response capability if something dramatic ever did happen but the notion of closing it off with those big ugly tall fences and completely undermining the whole concept of the building I think is a complete overreaction of the kind that we're seeing on many fronts frankly at the moment. So more generally what do you think about the present balance between security and individual rights we've had all these rafts of legislation have we got it right or have we over reacted very generally? Well my whole background is a sort of a very active civil libertarian I was acutely conscious throughout all the early years of my active public life on the need to get protections of all kinds for civil liberties on a much greater scale and was embedded in our present constitution or legislation or anything else and I've found it sort of very difficult to accept easily the many many constraints that are now there. I don't find it all that difficult to accept the constraints on privacy that are now endemic and inherent in our reaction to post-911 possible terrorist environment and the possibility of criminal conspiracies the absolute need for electronic surveillance and everything else to deal with the possibility of people getting together and doing terrible things so we've got to be prepared I think the community obviously is prepared to accept a lot more than what they were willing to do previously. I mean my background of this in the unhappy years when I was Attorney General among other things included a big attempt to get new privacy legislation embodied in the National Statute Book which led among other things to a massive reaction from your profession the Fourth Estate you saw this as a terrible intrusion on the potential you know capacity willingness and enthusiasm of the Fourth Estate for infringing everybody's privacy the maximum possible extent and the maximum number of occasions so much so that the the New South Wales Journalist Association established as I vividly remember an annual Gareth Prize, a Gareth Award for the year's biggest intrusion on free speech so I'm a bit emblazoned with this sort of anxiety about high principle and the downside political risks of that but I have to say that when I see a Daniel Andrews or somebody appearing on morning television last Sunday and just articulating the case for the most draconian intrusions open-ended detention for weeks at a time of people who are no more than suspect and doing so with complete indifference you know to the fact that there's even an argument to be made on the other side I am troubled about that and I think the I think the balance has just gone a little bit too far in the other direction though we do have to recognize that you know the environment has changed and community sentiment has changed on this and people are willing to accept many more intrusions than was the case even just a couple of decades ago. Well talking about free speech you express some concern about 18c you think that although this was done during your time in the the cabinet I think you were away overseas or whatever at the time foreign minister and didn't take a great part in that formulation but do you think it's gone too far? Yeah well God forbid that I should ever offer any solace to Andrew Bolton the rest of that crowd but I have to say that I do think 18c goes too far as it presently does by by making actionable speech or behavior which merely insults or offends without necessarily causing any other kind of harm I think it really is important to have the harm principle center front when you're dealing with anything involving free speech and harm can extend to intimidation it can extend obviously to incitement to violence but it can also extend I think to humiliation speech which is in its effect actually humiliating causing psychological harm I think there's a legitimate scope for 18c to address those sort of anxieties but but not beyond that I mean we do have to recognize that free speech is really pretty important and we have to recognize that also in the university context and in the education chapter I express a degree of alarm about the first signs in Australia of some of this campus enthusiasm for cracking down on speech because of its potential offense to moral or other positions that people have and when I see you know talk about of the kind that's coming from the United States about no platforming not giving people a platform to articulate unpopular views when I see language about you know creating safe spaces for people to learn in which they're not confronted by opinions or curricula that are potentially offensive to their inherent moral view of the world when I see provisions for trigger warnings and so on that before anything to be taught all sorts of anxieties potential anxieties have to be addressed I mean I do start reaching for my revolver I'm afraid I think I think all of this is dangerous dangerous dangerous stuff for the kind of universities that I hope all of us are committed to and if you can't live with in a university environment unpopular difficult unconscionable even ugly sort of points of view being thrown at you and learning how to react and how to sift what is you know credible from what is incredible to learn about the nature of evidence-based argument and so on then what the hell you're doing at a university I mean I don't think we should be insulating people from those dilemmas and difficulties we should be exposing to it it was very difficult very different environment in our day Michelle when so far from demanding that we not be offended we as a generation were doing our best to cause offense on multiple fronts and it was a fun time to be alive although in the early 60s I think as opposed to the later 60s it was all a gentler sort of offense yeah it was gentle I mean you and I were involved in and I was involved in student politics you know that's always very passive you were you were head down and tail up and you know focused inexorably what you've been doing ever since brilliantly well but um no I mean in the previous known days I mean the issues were you know as pros it was anti censorship was anti you know sort of pro-abortion law reform anti apartheid pro-indigenous rights Aboriginal rights and so on pro-education reform and these were the sort of issues that were exercising my generation of student activists the Vietnam stuff came a bit later and a lot of the more robust I suppose campus environment but well I was by that stage a tutor at my nation it was certainly robust can I take you forward though you spent time obviously as a senator and a member of the House of Representatives you spent the whole Parliament but most time in the Senate and I wonder whether you think that if you were in today's Senate as opposed to the Senate then it would be as easy to be a minister to to handle no to be very difficult and as I say somewhere in the book very difficult for someone like me whose temperament is not of the cloth from which Zen masters cut that that's said I mean for all the reputational damage I've suffered over the years for being cantankerous generally speaking I've only been cantankerous on little things on trivial things and irrelevant things on dopey things and on the big stuff I've always been very focused and sharp and whenever there's been a big and difficult negotiation of the kind that I had to deal with on multiple occasions as a leader of the government in the Senate including the native title legislation for example which was fiercely contested by the opposition and took 50 hours of committee debate and all-time record then I mean to lose your cool in that kind of context would be totally counterproductive and I don't really think I did although someone was quoted as saying the book he did say fuck a lot after midnight only only in private between consenting adults not not more than once anyway in the chamber but the Senate environment was very difficult then because you had you know the West Australian Greens in particular who observed no known commitment to any previously understood form of rational discourse I mean they were just on a they were on another planet they were idealistic they were committed to doing good things but they had no sort of concept of how to translate that into actual legislative outcomes and as so often with Greens ever since I mean the best is the enemy of the good and emissions trading scheme Malaysian solutions on refugees and so on we've seen that over and over and that was that was a problem I had with that group and then I had to rely very much on people like Brian Harideen and others who although were were difficult at least were capable and susceptible to rational argument it's more difficult now I mean the conventional cliche which I embrace of course in the book is to refer to as a kind of the bar scene in Star Wars but and it is it is difficult with that litter of very eccentric and idiosyncratic people you have at the moment more difficult than it was in my time but I think you know you just have to deal with that as best you possibly can and while rational argument and debate is not a necessary not a sufficient condition I still is a necessary condition in the Senate and that's what makes the Senate different still I think from the House of Reps where you know third-rate vaudeville is the norm and nobody gives a damn about credibility the rational argument is just not required as long as you've got the numbers. Now you do suggest that one strategy in today's world perhaps should be that oppositions while stating there that they're opposed to things don't vote as much against measures do you think that the level of partisanship has reached unmanageable proportions. I think it has in the sense that there's an obligation to oppose any damn thing at all coming from the other side because you lose your credibility you lose your base somehow unless you seem to be contesting everything down to the last vote in the last chamber I think that's a very big turnoff for most of the Australian public and the further distant I am from the day to day business of politics and the more you look at things you know from a distance and you know the disposition of ordinary non-political people to say all this is crap and they're just not interested in who's commanding you know four fifths of the day's news cycle I mean which is something that obsesses politicians and they've got a command Kevin Rudd classically every two hours they've got to have a story that's ahead of the game nobody gives a stuff out there in the wider community about that they really don't and there's a bit of a hunger for some show of decency and part of the show of decency I think is is having the courage to cooperate having the willingness to say okay you got elected to do X if we were in government we do you know X differently something like the Gonski debate as we can all recently remember but you know we will we won't oppose it in government we will do better but we're not going to stand in the way that doesn't mean of course you rush to the center ground on everything and abdicate any capacity to identify ideological difference or you know policy difference of course it still leaves a heap of room to do just that but the notion that that everything is you know as contested has to be as contested as it has been I think it's just a misreading of what people want from the political process and there's one of the reasons why the major center left the major center right party is not only in Australia but in most of the democratic world have been dramatically losing ground to single-issue parties and to more sort of overtly idealistic parties who do want a different quality of politics now obviously a lot of your books taken up with them foreign affairs your time is foreign minister and your impressive record in that area so let's just turn to the international scene you argue for Australia to have a more independent foreign policy and perhaps that's particularly relevant in the times in which we find ourselves but can you just outline where you see that going how or how should that go well in simple terms I articulate it now as less US more Asia more self-reliance less US doesn't mean walking away completely from the alliance that would be a quite wrong-headed thing to do dig in the degree of benefit that we generate in terms of intelligence logistic support and whatever the deterrent existence of the United States capability might amount to but it sure as hell not least in the the present environment it sure as hell means not succumbing to that you know disposition to follow the US down every cul-de-sac and every rabbit hole simply because that's what we perceive the great and powerfuls to be wanting us to do I mean the situation has become more obviously pathological than has ever been with the present incumbent in the White House and I have to say one of the more implausible denials of the last generation has been Tillerson's denial that he said effing moron about Trump I mean there's lots lots more language and I've been guilty of uttering a fair bit of it myself that one could say about Trump but the truth of the matter is the United States in recent months as abdicated global leadership abdicated global moral leadership on issues like climate change has completely walked away from the kind of soft power that the United States is traditionally exercised as behaved totally erratically totally alarmingly on multiple fronts and you know whereas with of our girls there we girls might have been you know pretty good both theology and politics in more distant past that ain't very good politics at the moment the US has made some shocking mistakes within living memory in Iraq and back to Vietnam before that and obviously they're capable of making many more so the notion of succumbing to the American hubris that the Americans have got to stay number one in the global block and completely I mean even Obama for God's sake even before Trump you may remember Obama saying of the Trans-Pacific Partnership issue we make the rules China doesn't make the rules we make the rules and that kind of approach in the present environment with China exercising the muscle that it is wanting the space that it so obviously does deserving the space that it so obviously does not only strategically in the region but also in the global rule making environment they don't want to be rule takers any more they want to be participants in rulemaking to just sort of ignore all that and keep on pressing is not a world that we can be comfortable in so but at the same time think I just complete that little story I mean I do think it's not a matter of walking away completely from the United States and embracing the attractions of a globally powerful and regionally powerful and economically fantastically important China it is a matter of not being a Chinese Patsy either any more than we should be an American one and in particular I worry about the Chinese disposition to just push the envelope in many ways to unacceptable limits if there's no pushback I mean the Chinese would love to create recreate that kind of hegemonic relationship with their neighborhood that tributary relationship when everybody kowtows you know where they used to two or three hundred years ago and they will do just that we're seeing them trying to do just that in Southeast Asia in particular maybe Central Asia as well unless there's some degree of pushback so perhaps surprisingly for some people I'm an advocate of pushing back against the South China Sea stuff for example having freedom navigation operations not just in the main commercial sea lanes that's easy but within 12 nautical miles of those little reefs on which the Chinese are building military installations and against the the ground rules of the international order they have no softened flames over it and you know we we should just not let that go without protest and I think the Chinese and I know them pretty well because I've been negotiating with them for many many years and many many different topics I think they they will respect a pushback they don't want they don't want a confrontation with anybody but they will push the limits as far as they can go without getting to the stage of violence now I think I should let you quote yourself on your assessment of Mr. Trump and perhaps you can just outline where you think all that's going to go in the United States in the next year or so well I was thought to be a bit over the top when a couple of months ago at the National Press Club I described Trump as being the least informed least prepared most ethically challenged and psychologically ill-equipped person ever to occupy at the White House I have to say now two or three months later that seems like an understatement and the fact that you know so many I mean Bob Corker you you will have seen that that line of his just a couple of days ago Republican senior Republican saying the White House reminds me of an adult daycare center in which the staff have gone missing yeah well I mean I mean narcissistic vulgar I mean everything everything you can possibly say about Trump is true it's just beyond parody and it continues it continues and it gets worse the only thing you can say and what makes me an optimist and let's come back to the title of this because you know I haven't said much which perhaps justifies it but we are seeing an astonishing level of pushback already we're seeing all those checks and balances which are a central feature of the American system working in spades at the moment there's so often a frustrating feature of the American system and we and for many many years we've said parliamentary systems are better because executive governments can get on with the job without all the constraints of congressional majorities blocking them and they can sign treaties and so on but for God's sake when you see a Trump emerging in the way that he has you just pray for the continuation of those checks and balances and you applaud the kind of pushback that we're seeing both domestically and internationally so I'm reasonably optimistic that the Trump phenomenon like so many other ugly phenomena in the past will be reasonably transient but this clearly 35 percent or more of the American electorate rusted onto this narcissistic Bulgarian ignoramus and they're not going to be persuaded to vote against him under any circumstance unless the Democrats and others can get their act together and come up with a credible storyteller creating telling a credible alternative story you know we might conceivably be in for yet another four years of this horror but it's and just before we move off foreign affairs to on to education you are reasonably optimistic about the North Korea situation given given all we're hearing yeah because I mean I've dealt with the North Koreans I've been involved in some of those negotiations going back from the mid 90s and again when I was running the International Crisis Group in the in the 2005 2006 period when we got very very close to deliverable deal and I've always been totally persuaded that the North Koreans are wholly about regime survival and personal survival of the leadership of that regime and while they will play the game with incredible sort of recklessness they're not under any circumstances going to be the first to fire off either a conventional weapon or let alone a nuclear weapon because they know leadership knows that to be homicidal is to be suicidal and to that extent I don't mind Trump particularly and those around him saying as I have been in recent times these guys attack anybody any of the allies in the region then you know the place will be turned into a carpark that's that's variations on the traditional deterrence theme and that's it's not a bad message to to get across but the only rational approach to dealing with this is a combination of containment sort of sanctioned strategies that have been evolving internationally now for a number of years deterrence of the kind which has been articulated in terms of just expressed but also keeping the door open for negotiations it is possible to negotiate a decent outcome of this is probably not possible now to negotiate complete denuclearization of the North Korean arsenal but I think it's certainly possible to negotiate a freeze and it's just nonsensical for the level of rhetoric to have escalated on the American side to the scale that it has in which you know the whole notion of any kind of talking to these characters has been has been ruled out I mean that is just just crazy and there are some cooler heads around Trump and I I'd sort of believe that the end of the day they will prevail but obviously reckless speech has its own potential consequences if you if you escalate the emotional environment to the point where what might otherwise be a fairly routine you know aircraft maneuver a bomber flying very close to North Korean airspace it you know it's conceivable that it would be perceived as the first wave of a nuclear attack or something which would generate a military response which then creates the escalatory spiral and we know from all too many anecdotes that emerge from the Cold War period about how even in the best managed supposedly command and control system you can get very very close to nuclear exchanges as a result of system error human error human idiocy and now compounded by the possibility of cyber sabotage and so on so the risks are real but in terms of deliberate deliberate embarking on an aggressive war I don't think it's going to happen any more on the Korean Peninsula than anywhere else in the world at the moment I think those days are past now in the last few minutes let's come to your prison job and tell us about how one is a good Chancellor and how one I choose the word maybe not carefully how one manages a vice-Chancellor you've had a few well I've had some fascinating experiences with vice-Chancellor I mean chubby was I suppose the the real test for anyone to encounter coming into the job for the first time because in chubb of some of you will know and he wore this like a badge of honour and he won't be offended at all by me now saying this chubby had an absolute contempt for governance in every shape and form he abandoned the the academic board he created all sorts of mechanisms which involve people reporting directly to him he treated the council as you know just in a way that you know makes the old mushroom club language sounds you know rather weak by comparison in chance was alright as long as they knew their place but that just hadn't been dug yet and it was a very difficult moment and you know with my sort of temperament coming up against chubby sort of feudal warlord temperament pretty obviously would have ended in tears had our relationship continued much more than the 18 months or so that it did and even then there are a few occasions which were only to be observed by consenting adults in private I think when issues of accountability transparency in the yeah so that that was that was chubby so it was a very interesting starting point but then then I had Ian young Ian the gent as he was constantly described lovely guy with a you know utterly uncharismatic but with a total commitment to good process administratively in governance terms and without generating much excitement around the campus was a first class sort of person to deal with in recreating some semblance of a governance environment now now with the with Brian Schmidt I have to say I think I've got the best of all possible worlds a charismatic you know Nobel prize winning vice chancellor with no previous administrative experience other than running a five or six man research team which led of course many people to say to me in airports and elsewhere courageous decision chancellor courageous decision but it wasn't because I'm now going to vice chancellor with an IQ and an EQ to match and a willingness also to roll up his sleeves and deal with the nuts and bolts of you know the reality of you know 80% of his time being occupied by whinging academics and you know all the rest of stuff so it's been a fascinating experience for me but look what's involved in all of this in in making the relationship work between a chancellor and a vice chancellor is an understanding a mutual of territory who's whose job is what and you've just got to get this very very clear and the corporate model is the only way to think about it the chancellor is the chairman of the board responsible of strategic direction oversight of the effectiveness of the managerial system without getting involved at all in anything remotely managerial and oversight of the financial and risk situation to ensure that there's responsible risk management that's the job of the chancellor that's the job of the council that is a few little fuzzy gray areas in the middle and when those gray areas arise you just have to talk them through work them through but if there's mutual respect and if there's mutual understanding of where those basic boundaries are I mean it should be a relatively painless process and my experiences that it has been I think I suspect that's been the experience of most of you around the room I don't think this is really astrophysics I don't think it's rocket science I mean I think it's just something that's plain common sense developing a working relationship I also have the benefit of having been after I left politics for 10 years CEO rather than chair of a significant organization the international crisis group 20 million dollar organization with a hundred and fifty highly strung contancorous personnel doing global conflict stuff and working to a very sophisticated board with very impressive chairman people like Chris Patton now chancellor of Oxford Tom Pickering very famous American diplomat so I knew coming to the job as chancellor I knew what it was like to be your CEO working to a board and very strong chairs and and that I think was a very useful experience to have you know coming to this if you have seen it from the other side but it's it's really not all that hard but I've written a lot of stuff in the chapter on education about you know my experience about this and what I think the ground rules should ought to be but that's it in a nutshell hopefully we can tease out the education issues a bit in question time just one final question you talk about the need for more diversity in our university system can you just elaborate briefly on that before we turn it over to everyone else well the interesting thing about the Dawkins revolution is that it wasn't particularly intended to create uniformity if you go back and look at what he was writing and saying at the time there's an interesting new book coming out on that edited by Stuart McIntyre and others to be published in a month or so but that's what it created it created I mean there was a rush to for everybody to embrace the same sort of disciplines for everybody to have this sort of model of both teaching and research and you know the pressures the institutional pressures generated by the new funding system the new organizational system were towards uniformity but in the in the real world we're not all we're not all good at everything I mean I'd love to think I was good at languages but I was lousy at languages and that's a you know I'd love to think I was brilliant at economics and numerous stuff but I wasn't and I found that out when I was sort of shadow you know treasure I basically hated the job and it showed and I think it's works for institutions too I mean some of us are better at doing stuff than other stuff it's not a matter of you know what's more exalted or less exalted but I do think it is important that we recognize the need for diversity in the higher education system generally but the university sector in particular and to recognize that we need certainly as a country to have a significant core of genuinely elite institutions by international standards of elitism you know research reputation and so on and that we're only going to get there if we've got a little bit more flexibility in the funding system and so on that we have at the moment so in that content I mean we you know we don't worry about elite sporting teams I don't think we should worry about having elite universities we should strive to have you know half a dozen Australian universities in the top 50 we possibly can or better than that so I was in favor in that context of FED regulation which I know is not very popular many of you around this room because I thought it would create the opportunity in an environment where governments were not going to be generous in terms of throwing money at elite institutions or potentially elite institutions and where we had not sufficiently developed a philanthropic instinct in this country of a kind which there obviously is in the United States which makes which does a huge amount to make elite institutions possible I thought the only way forward of guaranteeing that sort of financial support base was through you know the capacity to impose higher fees and let the market then work from there but of course there are huge access and equity implications of that and you can't go down that path without having the same sort of of scholarship support that there is in the United States institutions for very high paying fee paying institutions and how do you get that in an absence of a philanthropic culture is a really difficult tricky question which we haven't fully resolved so there are all these issues in play I think most of them are now you know passe for the time being nobody wants to revisit this all of us are on the same page when it comes I think to resisting the the funding cuts that the federal government is now proposing which are frankly just totally unconscionable not least in an environment where it is the case that we ranked number 30 out of 34 in the OECD in the higher education public investment as an attempt to sort of say the statistics of botched or wrong or whatever I've looked at this pretty carefully they are right we are measured as a percentage of GDP we are 30 out of 34 in the OECD in terms of the public investment in higher education but that is unsustainable for a country going into the kind of economic universe that all of us are confronting for the period ahead so we have to exercise collective muscle in this front not get too exercised by the things that divide us focus on that which unites us and I hope that by doing so we can guarantee a decent future for this sector to which all of us I think in this room are pretty passionately committed was that clarion call can I open it up to questions and people's tolerances up to it well I better keep mine I guess Michelle you'd like to take over I don't have an instant coffee answer to that it's a dilemma that all of us confronting I mean obviously particularly those universities is whole funding model has become crucially dependent on that massive cohort of international students and Chinese students in particular we're less in that position than most others but if you take a particular discipline like business and economics you know we're extraordinarily heavy not only in international but in Chinese and you not only have the risk factor that that tap will be turned off not only have the educational risk issue of sort of a ghetto in which we're not giving you know people a genuine Australian experience we're not giving the straight it was a genuine educational experience we all familiar with that and now we're becoming increasingly familiar with this other issue or the you know the sort of constraints that are being posed by an increasingly active and assertive Chinese government that makes it clear that there's various kinds of behavior they regard as tolerable and others that are not and that's spooking out a fair number of our students we've got to be very careful about what we say about all this you know publicly and I'm not at all sure what the strategies are to deal with this privately but I mean one's one approach to this of course is to diversify our international student cohort we're doing that to some extent with much more attention to South Asia and there's a huge potential market there which we're only beginning to tap on the Chinese scale but also I mean Indonesia for God's sake we just still haven't got our heads around the fact but Indonesia sitting up there with 250 million people it's going to be the fourth biggest economy in the world and most projections by 2045 certainly by 2050 and we just don't get it I mean Australian business doesn't get it you've seen those suggestions or figures which is more Australian investment in New Zealand than there is in the whole of ASEAN put together and you know a lot of the rest of Asia as well and there's just but you know there's a huge cohort of potential you know students there which I think we need to be much more aggressively tapping just to sort of at least diversify the group that's causing that concern. Who's next? Yeah yep it is and it's not one that's necessarily contingent on us being perceived to do something wrong it's might be just a function of them deciding that they you know want to divert more students to the domestic institutions which are growing as you say at a dramatic rate and in an educational environment which is also changing at a dramatic rate I mean I think it's quite interesting to read some of the stuff I've been reading recently which you may have too we say you know the traditional stereotypes about Asian education and Chinese education in particular that it's not you know encouraging creativity it's you know wrote learning feeding ducks and all the rest of this is just no longer the case certainly not at the university level the major institutions that are now showing up in the you know the major rankings but it's also increasingly true the secondary sector as well so we we we just comfortably sit on those old stereotypes at our peril I think and we've just got a factor in that that risk factor I mean a lot's going to depend on how Xi Jinping approaches his his next term and I think a lot of us are watching very very closely this is Chinese you know the big political convention that's going to determine the next leadership cohort and whether it signals the consolidation of a completely sort of authoritarian model or whether it's the beginning of a having consolidated his authority whether he's going to move to a more relaxed and open sort of environment but that's an awfully big bet that this is going to continue this flood of financial support for our system it's an awfully big bet that that's going to continue on the scale that it has and anyone paying serious attention to risk factors in our internal governance structures has to be weighing that risk very very highly indeed and working out contingency plans to deal with a cutoff of that tap at almost any time for almost any reason Gareth two weeks ago we had a discussion about Kim Jong-un and Trump and I think at the time I commented that I thought that your enthusiastic optimism that's in a bit strange when you're dealing with two lunatics and with haircuts only their mothers could love but I noticed that over a period of two weeks it's now shifted to cautious optimism and I know you'll be all about the homicide that leads to suicide in terms of Kim can you give us a bit more detail about the sort of constraints that prevents Trump using the codes well if formally there's no constraint really at all if he can locate his biscuit the little plastic thing with the code on it and Clinton famously lost his for six months and then since he was in the habit of misleading his trousers is not entirely inexplicable but but this this is the thing which you know the president carries around which then feeds into the the famous football the satchel and technically and because of the principle of complete civilian supremacy over the military once that you know code is fed in you've got a very very rapid chain of response down the line and the guy sitting out there in the silo or launching the bombers you know just presses the button but I think all that said you know what I'm hearing from mostly off the record is that such is the level of anxiety in the high places in the US system the military system in particular that there's a growing sense that any order of this kind that came from Trump would generate a flurry of counter responses in the sense of seeking approval from Mattis the Secretary of Defense going to Kelly the chief of staff is this what the president really meant which would not be not be the you know the sort of expected response and thank God for that I mean it's very troubling for someone who's you know passionate about governance and and you know deeply troubled by the notion of the you know having these sorts of control mechanisms ultimately vested in military authority rather than civilian that's against every conceivable preset but these these are very peculiar times and we have not had and we've not had in American history 200 plus years of American history anyone remotely as you know ignorant and irresponsible and manifestly ill equipped for the task is this guy in an environment that is sophisticated and complex as the present one so I mean you know I think on the American side that that is the hope that notwithstanding that that system there will be internal countermeasures counter pressures counter responses which are neutralized on the on the Korean side I can't say anything more than I've said before I mean I've dealt a bit with these characters they're a little bit more sophisticated and they come across and some of the some of the caricatures with a Kim Jong-un himself is particularly sophisticated another question but I don't think there's any doubt about his commitment to you know to regime survival and the point is they already have a huge deterrent capability with that ring of fire they've got around Seoul I mean and which the South Koreans are acutely aware of because they've been living with it for decades I mean there's a because Seoul is within 30 K's of the the DMZ and the the border the China the North Koreans have been able to tunnel into the rock there multiple multiple hundreds and hundreds of tunnels with artillery weapons and rockets which can just shower down on Seoul in a matter of minutes and the expectation is that probably they could kill a hundred thousand people in South Korea within 30 minutes 45 minutes if the North Koreans you know press those buttons that's without relying on nuclear weapons or anything else so there is a deterrent capability which is already there to the extent the North Koreans are sort of seem to be passionately attached to nuclear weapons is more for psychological reasons than any other sort of rational reason and just generally I think the you know the situation is is manageable because of that you know a set of realities that nobody really is going to be wanting to you know to press the button first little you know least of all the North Korean acutely in the United States well I mean if if well if Trump was put in a straightjacket and marched off to jail that'll be a coup d'etat but if there's somebody just saying we're going to regard this order as a functional equivalent of yet another bloody tweet and and see whether you feel the same over breakfast tomorrow that's not a coup d'etat that's just rationality and I think you know there is an element of rationality that is that is there elsewhere in the US system which I just hope trust and pray will cut in but you know how many as bad as things are I mean I do think there are these counterfactors that work I mean the wider point that you know and the reason I'm an optimist and keeps on you know sort of coming through is when you look at these individual situations you look at the horror in Syria and various other parts of Middle East and Africa and when you look at the anxiety we all feel about the North Korean situation at the moment it's very easy to sort of lose a sense of historical perspective and really the world is a rather safer place now than it has been you know in decades centuries certainly past it's not only a better place in terms of poverty and stand of living and so on with a gigantic number of people taking a poverty and we're reason to be optimistic about that but also when you look at the basic trends in conflict from up there to down there when you look at the basic trends in terms of atrocity crimes genocide crimes against humanity when you look at the basic scale of human rights violations it's just easy to forget the massive numbers of people that were being killed in cross-border wars internal wars of genocidal crimes like Khmer Rouge and Cambodia or Angola or and to you know sort of forget that we have been making progress so in that context I think it's important not to get you know to carry it away but to focus on what the opportunities are for curbing the worst instincts and moving forward the better which are out there in the wider international community at the moment. Good morning. Gareth, I'm not really back to the basic front. Given that the Senate was originally established as a House of Review and Representative of the States, which this person is supposed to be built around, announced completely a single-issue organization, is there any way you can actually bring the Senate back to having some real value as a House of Review and as a Representative of the States? Not as a Representative of the States, I think those days, those days are just basically gone. I mean that the culture has changed so fundamentally that that's just not the way the world has worked for many decades before. No, it just never has. It didn't even get past the first decade of the new century before they started voting on party lines or on issue lines rather than state lines. So that's chasing a will, a whisper, I'm afraid. But in terms of getting some sanity back, I mean partly it's getting the larger story right of the major center-left and center-right parties recovering ground, recovering credibility with good storytellers, good stories and basically creating less attractions for the fringe dwellers to go off and find solace in fringe-dwelling parties. That's an important sort of core part of the strategy. I mean beyond that, I think it's not much you can do by way of changes to the system that would inherently improve things. I mean I'm in favor of fixed four-year terms of a kind that would limit the downside risks of irresponsible sort of double dissolutions and so on because actually if a government is forced to the polls then you could only see out the term of its predecessor and if you have, then there's an issue of course with your four-year terms for, if you go for four-year terms for the lower house with your four or eight for the Senate, if you have four-year terms matching the house then you increase the possibility that the composition of the Senate will match that at the house at any given time and you'll get this crazy fringe dwellers but on the other hand if the quota systems are maintained and everybody's elected at the same time then the quotas will reduce and you've got a bigger chance of rats and mice getting into the Senate than is the case if there's only half a Senate elected at times. All these complicated equations have to be talked and thought through but none of this is really going to be fixed by constitutional reform fixes not least because the difficulty of ever getting any constitutional reform through the system. I think it's just got to be fixed by a change in the political culture, the political environment and that takes us back to the responsibility of the major parties. I mean if anyone listened to Barry Jones last night on, or whenever it was this week, Phillip Adams talking about the courage party and this you know, quixotic enthusiasm for some new you know, political force that can somehow take over from the morally spent major parties. Yeah I mean that sounds nice but it's I think it's frankly totally undelivable. The hope must lie with the major parties getting their act together and that's the case in every democratic country in the world I think at the moment and that means good storytellers repeat with good stories and what counts as a good story I have to say I still think to this day some contemporary variation on what made the Hawke getting government so successful so emulated by the Blair government and others namely that combination of rigorous, disciplined, dry, competitiveness, productivity oriented economic policy because that's where we've got to be, in the contemporary world but accompanied by a very warm moist compassionate social policy, compensatory social policy so people are not left behind by that dry economic stuff and then liberal internationalist sort of foreign policy. It's a compelling combination if you can get that right and I think Macron in France did exactly that with a that'll prove sustainable with the backlash that's being generated with the union movement and so on there is an interesting question but that's the kind of thing I mean by you know some decent storytelling and narrative which appeals to you know without having to be too sophisticated out there, appeals to people's sense of justice, sense of fairness and sense that their stories are going to be listened to. If you just play the hard line economic game and don't take account of the those being left behind increasingly a bigger problem in this not because of globalization but because of digitalization and the technological revolution, if you're not paying attention to those voices and not coming up with new strategies to deal with those concerns well you deserve to be in the wilderness but I think the major parties just have to just have to be much more focused on finding that sort of common and as part of the story is where we began the conversation. I mean being much more willing to go for to accept good policy including elements of good policy which come from the other side because if you get your turn in government and you've done nothing but poor crap upon everything that's come from the other side of politics it makes it that much harder to get a free run yourself and that's the sort of bind that we've got ourselves into with this sort of race to the bottom in terms of the way politics is conducted. So that's my real solution. I don't think there are any technical fixes I think we've just got to improve the quality of politics and if we do that I think the rats and mice will disappear or at least be far less prominent and central to the operation of the system than they are at the moment. I'm sure there are a couple more. Well, what about over here? I can't resist asking you the question First you were a foreign minister in 1987 when you first called to the place of Fiji. What's your take now looking back on the events then and how you see what has happened in relation to the stability of our region? Well what happened in Fiji was obviously very troubling with the Ambuke coups and so on and I wanted to maintain a lot more pressure on that post-coup regime than the market would in fact bear around the South Pacific when we took strategies of that kind I remember the South Pacific Forum and elsewhere basically the strong view was this is an internal affair of Fiji as long as the situation is stabilised nobody is being executed or imprisoned but there might be an authoritarian regime there keep your cotton picking hands off at Australia because we're oversensitive about your capacity for imperial overreach and I don't think we did as much as we could to keep the pressure on pro-democracy movement in Fiji and with results that we are still playing themselves out today. I mean Papua New Guinea was a very very difficult situation I was in the middle of the Bougainville situation as that emerged and erupted that's reached a sort of motors for Vindi with a lot of help from the New Zealanders I have to say who were able to play a negotiating and mediating role which was beyond us because we were seen as having too much skin in the game I think the way in which we've handled the Solomon situation which is very much a Howard government enterprise and the Ramsey operation that was well done and it was a credible response to an internal situation which did effectively stabilise it in one degree of local support. I don't know I haven't followed events as closely as I should I'm going to be watching very interestingly the New Caledonia referendum next year to see whether which was another major issue back then and which has gone to sleep for two decades while we're waiting for the referendum process to work itself out. I have paid a lot of respect to the South Pacific island countries and deliberately sort of embraced a view which said I'm not going to start with making my first trip to Washington or New York or London or wherever I'm going to start in the South Pacific and build out from there because those relationships are fantastically important and they depend on a degree of personal respect and understanding and I think we did that sort of reasonably well when Gordon Bilney became the South Pacific affairs minister as well as the aid minister I think we did it even better than when it was just a small part of my responsibility. But it's sort of okay but it's a troubling situation I mean many of the South Pacific countries are facing existential issues obviously, climate change, cure of us and the rest of them and we haven't solved the problem of economic viability, we haven't solved the problem completely of political democracy, stability but whether Australia can do any better in that respect I'm just not sure anymore so I'd welcome your advice on that Winston Do we have one final killer question to round it off? Killer question? I'll ask a final question, I'm not sure if it's a killer question Can I bring you back into education Garrett and I was at the National Prescott listening to Jennifer West hear that, higher education and one of the contentions of the business world at the moment is that the higher education or the tertiary education system is not generating graduates that are job ready, career ready, whatever the right terminology is, do you think this is a real problem or is it not a real problem and if it is a problem how should we be responding? Well I think part of what Jennifer was saying is that in terms of giving greater respect and credibility and muscle to the net sector is unanswerable, absolutely unanswerable that being the poor relation of higher education in recent times and that overtly vocational stuff is pretty important as what business wants and what the community needs and we just got to respect that more now whether the sort of voucher system, lifetime accounts which you can move backwards and forwards to different sectors and top up and whether there should be financial limits although we can argue about all of that but at least it was a worthwhile contribution to the debate. If the debate takes the form of going down the path you say that the whole of the higher education system ought to be vocationally sort of focused or outcome focused or job readiness focused rather than playing the traditional role of educating people to understand the nature of evidence, the nature of argument, the nature of scientific discovery and process and then to be equipped to apply those intellectual skills and understanding new kinds of problems, new kinds of situations that's what to walk away from that is to be abdicating not only the traditional role of universities but what must be the continuing role of universities I mean I passionately believe in that. Getting governments to believe that, getting some of the business crowd to accept and understand that is tricky territory but we university sector have to insist on that traditional role of universities of educating for just quality understanding of life and what matters and values and certainly the skills. I mean mathematical skills and linguistic skills and humanities evidence appreciation are all part of that but the notion of being job training factories is just that's nonsensical when we all know that people are going to have maybe 10 different jobs or more in their lifetime in the future and what we need are generic skills that will equip people for that. None of this is to say that universities should retreat into a kind of ivory town which it's only the research that the most disembodied academic wants to do is evaluate. I mean I think it's totally fair to be bringing into the equation impact factors and rewards for impact, rewards for policy impact which is something that ANU is very passionate about given our status as national university working very closely with governments and a lot of issues and there are perhaps insufficient rewards in the traditional academic system for research and activity which has a strong practical real world policy focus and that's something I believe in as well but equally there's something fundamentally important about the traditional Newman sort of idea of the university which I think we really must hang on to while all the other pressures are out there as well and we have to find ways of accommodating them too. Gareth, thank you very much. It's been great hearing from you. I'm sure everyone will agree and also incredibly refreshing to hear an optimist in a time when we mostly hear pessimists so thank you again on behalf of everyone.