 Welcome to the Australian National University, to the National Security College here at ANU. I'm Rory Metcalf, the head of the National Security College and it's a real pleasure to be hosting the latest of our conversations with Australia's leading national security policy makers in this our 10th anniversary year. Before I introduce our guest Caroline Miller, who's the Deputy Secretary National Security for the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, I will as his customary acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we're having this conversation today and pay my respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past, present and emerging. So the National Security College is I think an important Australian institution I'd like to think and 10 years on we're doing significant work and really trying to bring together not only education for the national security community for all of the agencies of the Commonwealth Public Service for example, but also in contributing to the national conversation on what is security in this year of great disruption and really at the edge of this decade of great disruption. Now that sounds pretty daunting but I know that you have a far more daunting job and I want to really welcome you Caroline because this is a chance to share some thoughts with you on what are the challenges ahead for Australian national security. What are the kinds of things that in your line of work in your career you've seen governments like Australia's do to address those challenges and perhaps we might move to a little bit of career advice a bit further on. But first I want to welcome you to the studio and really ask you an opening question and that is in your career as a leading Australian policymaker as a diplomat going back into the 20th century how have you seen Australia's national security environment change? Well thank you very much Rory it's a great pleasure to be here and can I just first say though thank you for the work that you do in leading the National Security College very much in partnership with government as you mentioned and your executive development program in particular I think it's been very valuable for many of my colleagues and of course I've been very happy to to address some of your courses. But look the first thing I would say is I don't think in in my career and it's been growing for a while that there's ever been a more consequential time for an Australian official to work in international security and national security. We are living in a time of disruption as you say our strategic environment has deteriorated as as Prime Minister has said it's really the greatest strategic change since World War II and we're now in the Indo-Pacific and we find ourselves at the epicenter of a new age of strategic competition and great power competition between the US and China. It's a very different environment from the one in which I fought the early part of my career. Other things are the big factors of course are the enormous technological change than digital age. We have threat factors through cyber and other means that are challenging non-traditional parts of the of our national security environment. It's very different from from those earlier days. I think another another factor I'd point to is the sort of lack of confidence in some of the multilateral parts of our system a bit of an erosion of confidence in the rules-based order and the challenges it's facing from some countries that don't really share the purposes for which these institutions were established in the first place. So what we do in government now really matters more more consequentially than at any time that I've experienced and of course all the challenges we're facing now compounded by the global pandemic. We'll come back to a few of those issues and I particularly want towards the end of the conversation to go to really what motivates people like you to do what you do. I mean what are the incentives what are the motivations to grapple with these issues every day. Maybe before we do that it would be good to hear a few reflections on really how your own career has evolved on these issues. I mean in many ways you're playing a key convening role in national security policy making but you came at this really through diplomacy and foreign policy and international security. That's right. So I'd love to hear a few thoughts on how on your on your personal journey if you'd like. Well sure look when I first started working on national security it was back in the late 80s and of course that was a time of enormous optimism at the end of the Cold War. I was very lucky to be posted to Washington and it was a it was a very exciting era. There was that sense of triumphalism. The West has won. You know Western democracy has liberal democracy has triumphed and you'll probably remember Francis Fukuyama and his famous 1989 essay on the end of history and I should say that that was published in a journal called the national interest in Washington which was edited by an Australian Owen Harris that you may recall and I remember Owen coming to dinner one night and feeling very pleased he managed to publish such a seminal piece that had such enormous reach and influence at the time. Of course you know things have moved on but there was this very optimistic sense that we were now being able to reap a peace dividend that the UN could play the role in global security it was always there for and I can remember in Washington that that's a sense of power and excitement and it was very much the ear of the lobbyists and the power breakfast and the braces and all of that and then you know a few years later worked very closely on all the big non-proliferation and disarmament challenges. Moving into the early 1990s. Moving into the early 1990s exactly and because of the end of the Cold War we had an international security environment which made it possible for those things finally to start happening. So to be an Australian diplomat at that time was terribly exciting and we all loved it we were extremely motivated and your former Chancellor Gareth Evans who then the Foreign Minister really drove a lot of this internationally and Australia really played an outsized role and some of the big issues we worked on in those days of course were the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Mind Band Convention supporting Gareth and his role as chairman of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Bound Treaty and one in which I was very involved which was the indefinite extension of the NPT and doing a lot of work on on nuclear weapons programs of concern around the world. That was a different era in a way. I mean there was a certain optimism there in 1990. I joined Foreign Affairs myself in that phase and I think came at the retail end of that. We're moving to a different environment now so it'd be interesting to know how that journey progressed for you or for your worldview if you like as a policymaker from the that moment if you like after the Cold War through to the present day and through the grim challenges we faced. Well indeed I mean I think that that sort of era if you like came to a very rude finish with the terrible 9-11 attacks in the United States and and having just been posted in New York at that time I think when we got back and this happened just after we returned we all felt it very viscerally and you really entered then a sort of a post 9-11 decade where the whole sort of national security apparatus pivoted very largely towards counterterrorism and we had you know of course the Bali bombings in Indonesia the attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta the sort of the art offence force pivoted into an expeditionary force going to Iraq and Afghanistan working very closely with the United States and the coalition so it's a we shifted from that sort of earlier optimism if you like at the end of the Cold War and that enormous drive to finally get through all these things we thought you know the UN and the multi-lateral system was there to do and sort of peace to this very challenging time in terms of counterterrorism. And all of this was I guess in a way or I guess for Australia kind of an apprenticeship to dealing with the complexities that we deal with in the world today what I might do is is really pivot from I guess those formative phases of your career and I hope later on we can talk a little bit about what formative phases of a career look like in in security these days and it wasn't that long ago of course but but looking at the complexity of the issues that we face now so you've from a career that has principally been in international security for the past two years you've you've been in this key role in the part of Prime Minister and Cabinet and you're looking at national security in the way really I guess in a real policy sense and the way that intellectually we try to look at it here at the National Security College and that is in its complexity in its cross-cutting nature in the way in which the boundaries between what is domestic what is international what is economics what is security what is technology what is society these are all becoming so blurred it'd be great to hear a bit of how how on earth at the helm or at the the centre of policy how do you grip all of that up how is Australia doing well look um it's very challenging I think I'd be you know be sort of misleading people if I didn't say it was very challenging it's very challenging for all of us you know countries around the world are grappling with these issues in in similar ways and I don't think we've all collectively individually worked out quite how to how to handle them but but you're right it's a very different environment um you know in a way the simpler environment of mutual sure destruction you know exactly but you know at least that was very clear we're now everything is gray um in in the Prime Minister's department we set up a couple of years ago a sort of a cross-cutting economic and security process so that colleagues working on the sort of nexus where international security and international economics or national economics come together can work together to sort of make sure that we understand the different angles of the issues we're facing but you know um on your program here you've had people like Duncan Lewis talk about the sort of huge increase in SBNRs and foreign interference um countering foreign interference has been a major focus for this government as as you know um and we're dealing through with all these sort of cross-cutting challenges in sort of non-security areas like supply chains critical mingles critical infrastructure you know foreign investment in telecommunications and of course there's a vector of cyber that sort of cuts through everything enormous focus on on cyber security it's it's very evident to me talking to colleagues from across the firebys and japan and elsewhere that they're they're also finding this very hard to grapple with and i'll give you an example of how much the way we operate has changed from being as you say very much in the international international affairs diplomacy world last year i led a delegation to japan for our regular national security dialogue and and in the past it's been a very foreign policy focused looking dialogue and i was thinking you know where can we in the prime minister's department really add some value and our value is very much in our convening power bringing all these different elements together across the system and seeing how they intersect and how we can best advise government on how to how to handle them so instead of having a more traditional kind of defense and defect sort of delegation uh although they they were present with us we took people from treasury uh from their um national security area and also from home affairs dealing with countering foreign interference so that we could actually look at these cross-cutting issues and talk to our japanese counterparts about them they were really thrilled with this because they were just establishing their own economic security unit in the national security secretariat in in tokyo just sort of equivalent to the group that i run in in p m and c so we had a completely different kind of discussion from one you would have had probably even five years ago and that just gives you a sense of how much things have changed and i think the i mean that that's an interesting insight for listeners and viewers of this uh recording because of course this is a live podcast as as well a live webcast it's an interesting insight into the way in which um i guess the machinery of government is operating i mean we hear and you don't need to necessarily necessarily comment on this if you don't want to but we often hear this very simplistic view that you know foreign policy is now dominated by quote security hawks it sounds to me as if there's actually a very rich conversation between the different parts of government that you've got economic policy feeding into security policy and vice versa and increasingly technology social policy and so on can you absolutely correct look i think no i think that's absolutely correct um there's no doubt that we face very challenging a very challenging security environment so i make no apologies in my job for for for having a very strong national security focus but it's absolutely the case as you say that all the other different elements are coming into play so we are talking regularly with whether it's industry communications um health obviously in the context of a pandemic um but a whole bunch of other other players around town that a few years ago we wouldn't have been doing the same way so it's very cross cutting and it's not all one side of from the national security perspective as well because you know for example right now what is the major focus of the government is to get the economy moving it's it's jobs it's growth so it's very we very much have to look at these issues in an interconnected way can you touch on covid and the bushfires if you like the two crises that obviously hit us this year and i guess you know covid 19 and the response to that is the is the rolling the rolling crisis can you reflect a little bit more on how how government deals with crisis as opposed to the long-term challenges and maybe how that's reflected in your part of government well sure um you know one one of the roles that i have is an all hazards approach to crisis management as the crises occur and of course as things move on they they get dealt with by the parts of the system and we work very closely in that regard with emergency management australia in the department of home affairs but um the bushfires was a you know a very very challenging time obviously uh and one of the things we did as a result of that was an initiative of mine was to establish a cross cutting disaster preparedness and response branch in my group bringing in people from the social policy area and all sorts of other parts of the system with a kind of a small b a u sort of nucleus that could then surge in response to crises well of course we were then confronted with an almost immediate challenge in in in covid 19 and that that new area became the sort of nucleus of what became a very much bigger p m n c task force to support the prime minister at both national cabinet and the national security committee of cabinet in dealing with the crisis so that's the way in which we can sort of add value is really using that traditional p m n c convening power consultation bringing people together to sort of crunch through the issues and deliver the best coordinated advice to government that we can that's um probably a good moment for me to slightly change focus and maybe ask you a little bit more about your own role because as the deputy secretary for national security in prime minister and cabinet you you get to see all of the issues it sounds to me like you do a hell of a lot of wrangling of issues as well so it may be a little bit more clarity particularly for those who are watching this who are students who are trying to understand how government works on these issues what do you do and what does your day look like well the first thing i would say it's completely unpredictable so that my diary at the beginning of the day may not look anything like the same diary at the end because left fields happen left field things happen in the national security space all the time um it's it's it's very much a tradition we are very much now in that sort of a traditional central agency coordinating role and and you'll recall a few years ago there were big machinery of government changes with the creation of home affairs and the establishment of the office of national intelligence and our role had been a bit more expansive before then it's now become a more traditional central agency role so we do a lot of work with any emerging issue to ensure that all the key players are brought together to work out you know how we need to proceed now we that's not to micromanage other agencies because frankly if an area is very much clearly in the purview of a line agency to a large extent as long as you're pretty sure that they're getting on with it and they usually are you just let them do their job but where you have multiple um agencies multiple interests involved then we would tend to step in and try to ensure that there's a very coordinated process and that all the issues are getting a very balanced um you know uh consideration and so how and maybe you could even explain for those who who need to understand how that works with the politics of an issue how does that work with the relationship with the example of the pmo the pmo how how how do you connect with the hill as they say yeah well look the the the central sort of part of the job the most important part of the job by a country mile and it's an enormous privilege is to support the prime minister both in his international engagements and his role as as chair of the national security committee of cabinet so all our endeavor really in the prime minister's department like you would it for a line minister is to thinking how can we support the prime minister in this role to get the best advice to him in order for him to take decisions and with his cabinet colleagues so that's that's sort of overriding focus of of our role in that respect so that's um that that reminds me that a lot of these uh a lot of this architecture if you like a policymaking it evolves over time it's evolved before it will evolve again um and i think it was may have been Duncan Lewis when he was on this program was you know reflecting on the idea of whether in fact there should be a designated national security advisor with a capital in a capital s and a capital a whether there should be a national security strategy or statement by government to pull together a lot of what we're already doing i'm wondering if you can share any thoughts on either of those um those ideas well clearly it's a matter for government um so i've been a bit careful uh but look that just perhaps the advice of outlined a few considerations that that i think any any government would need to look at or would want to take into account uh with respect to a national security advisor of course uh when Duncan was in that role which he did superbly well it was a different era with a different architecture in the national security space so um it was before the creation of home affairs uh and it was before the creation of the office of national intelligence which brings together an enterprise approach to the intelligence community and home affairs of course is a negative part with many sort of agencies attached to it so um i think you'd be you'd be any national security advisor will be operating in a more contested space a more crowded space so i think that you know you'd have to look at what would be the role of of that position in today's environment what would its value add be and how could it go about it in a meaningful way so i think it's not to say you couldn't do it but i think those you'd have to look at it through a very contemporary lens and see where the value add would be in terms of a national security strategy um of course we've had them in the past in 2008 and 2013 um what i would say is this i mean in the last because of the contested environment which we're in in the last um you know four years we've had a 2016 defense white paper we've had a 2017 foreign policy white paper and this year we've had the defense strategic update all of which are set up very clearly the challenges facing Australia and how we're going to tackle them and cyber strategies and all the rest of cyber security strategy all of that also a a raft of government reforms the national security space encountering foreign interference in telecommunications um you know in in a whole raft of areas um security of critical infrastructure and of course there's some further reforms to that being progressed through the parliament now so there's been a whole range of this legislation a whole raft of white papers and policy updates so again where you need to look at where your space was what would be the right time to do something of that kind there could be value in it standing back wrapping the whole thing up but you'd have to look at when and how would be the right moment to do that i think it sounds to me that a lot of the elements are there uh it you know because if we all those documents all those changes to the way government does its business a case could be made that the elements are largely in place and you really need some sort of frame or chapeau but as you say it's it's timing it's it's it's it's what you know any government decides to do at the time yeah yeah look thank you um so what i'll do in the time remaining i want to i do want to move back a bit to um career issues particularly for people starting out in careers in policy or in national security particularly for women but not only for for women i want to come to that towards the end if that's all right a couple more other themes on a touch on i think and you've already alluded to some of this including in describing the the daily challenges in your job um what what are some of the parameters to success in national security policy making i wonder if you can either answer that now or think about that for a moment as we work through a few other things i'm just interested to understand a bit more you know what does success look like and then perhaps a little a reflection on who who does policy well around the world um what's the value of understanding history in making these are all big challenging personal stuff so look pick from that little smorgasbord first if you'd like um look what does success look like um party it's an absence of failure i think um you know uh we've for example if you look at the sort of counter terrorism work um of the challenges that we spoke about during that post 9 11 decade and then as we went through the sort of you know the early teens if you like um with with the rise of biases and al-qaeda um massive effort went into this into counter terrorism work the agency's pivoted towards that for for a long time um uh you know enormous amounts of of funding and huge and and we had in the you know since 2014 um seven terrorist attacks but 18 major CT disruption so i think it's it's putting that focus of effort to get to often it's preventive um that you know that preventing something is success and often those things don't the prevention aren't the things that are in the newspapers um ditto with cyber you know the prime minister for example called out you know a cyber attack by by a sophisticated state actor in june um that the things that are disrupted that are not successful that they go on all the time as well um that is success um have the the um security of the australian community is success the ability of the australian community to prosper is success and national security underpins a lot of them and i guess it's just one of those um characteristics of the job that not that the officials don't necessarily get to celebrate these successes in the in the public eye thanks for that what about um those other two thoughts uh you know where do you see security policy being done well and i think this is also partly i i know that australia has been on a journey in recent years like at the impression that a number of other countries look to australia i know also that you know we should sometimes be careful about holding ourselves up as the paragon of virtue and success but really um how does australia fair in the the league of countries around the world who are grappling with these new cross-cutting issues how are we tracking and maybe where can we also look to um to continue to improve look i think we're tracking reasonably well um certainly from my perspective when i've been wanting to talk to counter parts and we've talked to five eyes counter parts in japan and others it's often i've been thinking oh look they must be doing something i'll get some amazing insight magic formula magic formula and in fact what happens is it's very much a two-way street to sharing information and everyone is grappling with stuff that is really hard to do um there are areas where you'll you'll find you know some colleagues and in in another country are actually a bit ahead of you other things where they're desperate to learn from you because it's clear that you're ahead of them yeah but i think overall australia has been has been proactive it's been driving uh i think some of those big machinery of government changes i spoke about earlier have actually been a great assistance in that respect um and and i think we we've got quite a lot to be to be proud of but it's a journey that we've really only recently embarked on and it's going to be with us for this this current environment it's going to be with us for the long haul i think it's a bit a little bit foreboding um there's been a lot of dialogue this year and that's i guess again if i'm looking for a very small silver lining to what is a really difficult time uh i'm struck by the number of times you see that it's either the p.m. or ministers or officials are having all sorts of dialogue often virtually with counterparts all over the world that's almost seems to be more dialogue now than in a non-covid year i'm just wondering wondering if you can reflect on the proliferation or the value or the creativity and diversity of the dialogues we're having now uh whether it's bilaterals or the court or others and how those are either helping Australia in its security processes or perhaps helping Australia to uh to tell its story yeah no it's a very good point i mean i think the prime minister talked about networks of of aligned countries and so on and and uh i think that's that's never been more important for a country like Australia um and you're absolutely right i mean we sort of tottered up to you for example that in in uh my group the number of bilateral uh leader level calls the prime minister has made and it's an enormous number and also plurilateral and multilateral events virtually uh so the lack of time taken to travel particularly from a country like Australia where it's a major undertaking 48 hours basically travel time there and back to many places um means in fact there's been probably more time freed up and another wise very torrid year for those interactions uh and allowed all sorts of groupings that you might not have expected us to be necessarily part of but because we've been we have done very well for example with COVID and we've had some other other areas in which we've been very successful in the national security space that countries want to talk to us and that's been much much easier for a country from the southern hemisphere with countries from the northern hemisphere when you can do it virtually so we've had video conferences we've had secure video conferences telephone calls etc and that's also been reflected at the senior officials level yeah so it's been it's been actually in in a way quite a productive time now of course what you do miss is the body language the chats in the margins uh those little assides that sort of help inform the other way you think about these challenges but it has been actually surprisingly productive and and active uh in terms of just bilateral interactions including from the prime minister and I guess it means that uh you know the day goes for 24 hours sometimes but um those relationships that are sort of trust and so forth you need to have ideally develop those previously it's it helps it helps a great deal but but but but it's not always I mean we've I think that's fair to say that in the last sort of six months or so um that that both at the ministerial level and senior officials level people have also forged some new relationships virtually so before we move to the sort of the personal story which I'd really like to end on I want to talk a little bit about history and that is I mean because I think you you know you mentioned separately that you were a student of history and I think like a lot of policymakers have a certain you know respect for the historical sensibility if you like any further observations on how I guess understanding history can help frame policy and I also want to go in particular to the era in which you began your career which many would now see as history but of course history is never over and a lot of those issues like non-proliferation and so on are still with us uh nuclear weapons haven't gone away for example so I just wondered if you had any any thoughts on that that long view well I do think it helps if you've got a sense of where you've come from that's not just yesterday um and it's interesting though your point my daughter's doing international relations here or international security actually here at the ANU and writes essays on the cold war which we find a bit disconcerting because she says that history we see it as life you know but but I do think having that perspective and particularly when things have changed so rapidly I mean growing up through the cold war then having that sort of euphoric moment at the end when so much seen possible followed by the that the sort of you know 9 11 decade as I mentioned and then moving forward to where we are today with the kind of regional environment that we did not foresee probably even 10 years ago in the way it's developed so I think having a sense of where you've come from uh and it definitely helps at the same time you know all challenges never the same twice so being informed by that but not letting that determine uh your responses I think is important I guess and busy policy makers sometimes it's it's it's reading history something you're doing a spare time I suspect so look let's go if you don't mind to um a little bit about your advice for uh people starting out in a career in security uh it strikes me certainly from where I sit at the college that a lot of the issues that we either study or analyse or discuss often in our more academic or think tank uh type environment they've become very very real and none of these security issues are purely academic anymore at the same time as you as you I think said earlier there's perhaps a little bit less of the optimism at the moment around that you experienced in the in the 90s and a lot of people in your your cohort if you like in diplomacy and policy were able to really use to drive their careers and to maintain interest and motivation so I guess I'd love to hear some thoughts of advice particularly to women starting out in a security policy career and maybe some observations on what motivates officials these days well look I think the most important thing if you're starting out in any career including in national security is that you have to be really committed to it you have to it has to matter to you um and I think one of the things that motivates us and gets us up every day and it's been the same for most of my career is because I really believe what we do matters if you don't have that feeling I think it'll be hard to keep going particularly in long challenging days um of course it was very exciting when it's very exciting and motivating when you feel you've got something very positive to do it's also very motivating if it's somewhat more wearing when you feel you're dealing with very serious challenges and and right now I think there are many serious challenges and it is it is very motivating to think that what we do in the national security community in Australia really matters for our long-term prosperity sovereignty and security and that that is a that is a getting out of bed every day feeling so I think you have to be it has to be something that you actually feel strongly about yourselves so what I would say to people starting out is if you're still at university do a breadth of subjects because as I've just mentioned the threats we deal with today are going to non-traditional areas so don't just study international relations or international security weave in some stem data security massive issues cyber you know AI weave in some stem some economics you know geoeconomics is just is just as important as geopolitics these days um so you know legal issues very important international legal issues broaden your degree to give yourself that breadth the other thing I'd say is when when you start off in a career if you move into an agency that deals with international security if you decide to go into government um be open minded as to what you might end up being interested in sometimes the great passion you had as it is a third-year undergraduate doesn't survive first contact with the with the practicalities of doing it and other times of course it does but be open the thing I think for me is learning from really good people you know so whether that's that's you know brilliant lecturers at university or really inspiring senior leaders in the public sector or elsewhere um and and really learn from them some of those people are going to be tough taskmasters but I feel forever grateful for people that I learned from in my career so those are some of the things I would say for women you know it's a very different environment now from the one in which I joined which was I feel was deeply misogynist I mean and it was I joined just before the the 1984 equal opportunity that the sex dissemination act was passed and it was quite legitimate in those days to to for ambassadors to say they wouldn't have all their posts for example and it happened to one of my colleagues three times but after that legislation went through that that was not possible so we don't have those major obstacles it's I think it is still can be quite challenging and I have to say one of the things that's disappointed me slightly rising to these to the position I mean now is is the the lack of there aren't as many senior women in these big jobs as I think all of us would have expected given the demography of women going into these these jobs as graduates back in the mid 80s in equal numbers to men so there are still challenges but but I will just say to all young women starting out courage just just go for your dreams do what you want and and just push through did you see yourself becoming this role model I had I had no idea I was just really interested in it and when I first started off I was posted to Hanoi in in in the mid 80s and I wasn't at all sure that I was cut out for this kind of work and I can remember getting off the plane and it was a very um it was very poor miserable place in those days very isolated it's not it's not the Vietnam of today not the thriving Vietnam of today and the moment I touched the tarmac I just absolutely loved it from day one and every day I loved the job um from day one and I think you know you have your ups and downs but but overall I've never looked back that sounds like it keeps you going and I I just want to as an aside um thank you for I think talking about breadth of study and breadth of experience and certainly that's part of the mission that we have at the college and as you know we have a really a a new version of our degree for next year where we're going to be looking very much at issues like geo economics law technology crisis management as some of the issues and subject areas that true national security professionals need yeah well congratulations on that because it's exactly what's required and I give a big plug to Rory's course so thank you for that Caroline look to finish up um still on the personal side of it as you've said your days sound long and challenging and sometimes a bit crazy um so how do you do it how do you cope with some sort of work-life balance how do you how do you keep going back to it look I think work-life balance is a bit of a myth actually um for all the reasons you've just mentioned but look it is very important to build in some time to enable you to function and some time for do things that are that you know good for yourself um the first thing for me is my family and without without them I don't think I'd I'd be able to do this at all without their support and and and all the lovely things we do together um the other true things for me are exercise and and classical music I think you spotted me on on red hill with my dog on a few occasions uh and and also I'd like to go to the gym um what I had a coach about a year ago that gave me some very good advice because I felt at a particular point that the day was so squeezed I just didn't know how to carve out any time at all and it was it was to basically even if you can come up little micro periods of time that can be extremely restorative so I have a little routine in the morning I I listen to the news radio and I scan through all the things that are coming overnight on you know all these things that are happening all over the world not always very edifying and then from the moment between my house and the office in the car I just put on some classical music on on abc classic just for eight minutes and then I come into the car park feeling quite calm and relaxed to start the busy day you just make sure they time those symphonies or concertos but they get exactly to coordinate with your drive that's what that's it look that sounds like a good recipe for for for carrying on and doing what you do really in Australia's national interests so I want to be really very upfront and thank you very much Caroline for your insights your your advice as well and best wishes for what comes next thank you thanks very much Roy okay