 Well thank you very much Margaret and it's really a great honour to be able to speak at your own very prestigious institute here in Dublin. I have never visited Ireland in my life until yesterday when I arrived and that's a bit shameful because even though I'm called Alastair Murray McLean which suggests that I have only Scottish heritage. My mother's family was Irish so I still have a fondness for both parts of these islands and I really have only very recently taken on this role as a non-president fellow of the Lowy Institute which in its 11 years of history has indeed established a very good reputation for its concentration on international issues particularly on Asia. But when I was a member of the Australian Foreign Service for 42 years from 1970 through to 2012 when I retired from active salary employment with the government I somewhat unusually I think would be the way to put it concentrated or found my career concentrated in its entirety actually on Asia and that was even the three and a half years I had in Washington DC where we have a huge embassy. My beach was Asia Pacific and Great Power Relations at the time in the mid 80s so apart from that one excursion outside Asia all my postings have been in Asia with three in China where I spent 15 years. I speak Mandarin Chinese but I ended up as ambassador for seven years in Japan as well as the other plants you mentioned so I feel very comfortable about talking about Asia. In the 1970 years Australia was already well and truly oriented to Asia but we have undergone a huge evolution our own approach to the broad Asia and that's actually what I will speak about in the context of my concentrating I suppose particularly on the current growth and expanding influence of China in the region. For Australia perhaps I can state it's a statement of the obvious but the reason that we are that I was so privileged to be able to spend so much time working on Asia consistently is that for Australia increasingly more than ever before it's our major focus in foreign policy and we our top three trading partners by miles are China which is about 25 percent of our total trade Japan which had hitherto been as much as 25 and is now about 15 to 18 percent of our total trade and South Korea are our three major trading partners not the United States. The United States is by far the biggest investor in Australia followed by the UK but then Japan is the next biggest investor again four or five times more investment in Australia than from China even though if you read the newspapers in Australia the only reports are about all of China's growing buying out of Australia's resources and all the rest well it's actually not the case the there is a lot of new investment from China in Australia but it is actually matched by new investment from Japan the same level so we as a country in Australia we have interests throughout Asia and that's I suppose the first point I want to make before getting into the real subject matter of my discussion today is that while I'm talking about focusing my remarks later on about China Australia as a country with a future set by geography and part must concentrate on Asia it is not about a relationship with one country namely China it's about having a multifaceted set of relationships with those countries where it is terribly important for us to give full value to our those relationships to broaden marriage to to give full satisfaction to our interests with these countries we have probably the broadest or comprehensive relationship amongst Asian countries with Japan of any other country because with Japan we are both we share one particular thing in common and that is well number of things in common and that is that Australia and Japan are both allies of the United States and we are also of course flourishing democracies with a lot of shared values such as exercise of rule of law and a strong interest in preservation of world regional and world peace so there are a lot of symmetries which have led towards lead us towards over the last five or six years to an increased scope of security cooperation which has was further advanced during talks between our foreign and defence ministers respectively and two plus two talks only last week I'm not going to go through each of the relationships but it's terribly important that Australia get right its relationships not only with Japan but with China with Indonesia which of course is the nearest large country of Asia to us the fourth largest by population in the world the largest is Islamic country in the world and of huge importance in Southeast Asia generally and it will take off and is beginning to take off over time so it's terribly important that that is managed very well and then of course there's India which so much so that now policy makers in Australia are talking about not so much necessarily Asia Pacific but as the Indo Pacific to ensure that India is included in the same level priorities as Japan China in Indonesia and all of the other smaller but nonetheless important countries so that's why we have such a great deal of interest in in Asia and that's really the background from where I'll address the remain of my my primary remarks as Margaret said in the introduction we were discussing over lunch some of the aspects of the current situation and which prevails currently in in East Asia I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that in the years in the 40 years since the end of the Vietnam war and the Indo-Chinese wars involving Cambodia and whatnot let's say from 1980 onwards that the current situation in East Asia is more uncertain than ever before and that is because as Margaret said there is now a constant spring of incidents and disputes that are bubbling up involving disputes over sovereignty territorial sea and involving multiple countries and that includes obviously the claims that China has to a vast part of the South China Sea which overlaps claims of several of the states literal states of of that South China Sea such as Vietnam Malaysia and the Philippines in particular and then there's also the somewhat complicated issue of the fact that Taiwan is also a factor there that may not always necessarily share precisely the same claims as China although in many senses it does so all of those are factors there that are there and then on top of that you have of course the tensions if that's not too strong a term I think it's correct to say that between China and Japan that relates primarily or is focused primarily on the island chain which the Japanese call Senkakus and the Chinese call the Daiyu Tai group the Japanese position on that is that there is no dispute that it is Japanese sovereignty under Japanese sovereignty the Chinese say at the very least there is dispute because it is Chinese sovereignty that is exercised over them and so we've had a very worrying spiralling up of tension involving incidents involving naval boats coast card boats and military aircraft around those islands so much so that there was one last week involving planes allegedly 30 meters apart only that comes on top of the visceral dislike which the Chinese have of Japan and I'd have to say is reciprocated by the Japanese I'm speaking as a non-official now of course I can say that and it isn't helped by actions sometimes taken for domestic political purposes by each of the two countries concerned so we have a situation where we've got the two by far biggest economies in the East China area the second the world's second and third largest economies who trade and invest in each other very significantly very heavily as well basically shaping up but maybe it's because I've had 42 years of being a diplomat I am convinced that neither Japan nor China wants to go beyond the state of shaping up it is totally against the interests of either side to end up with even a limited state of conflict between the two of them and of course this is where Australia again comes into it and in fact all countries of the world come into it really that trade with these two huge economies it is certainly not in the interests of either of the rest of the world that it were to deteriorate into such a state and while it's not a logical conclusion immediately to say therefore it won't I am pretty confident it won't unless there are some further developments that I can't predict and if we were to turn them to the other disputes that China has with Southeast Asia Asian countries particularly Vietnam and the Philippines but also Malaysia I think this is somewhat different story it's about the fact that for reasons that are not entirely clear and I'll explain what I mean by that in a second for reasons that aren't entirely clear that China has decided to take on really quite intrusive actions such as setting up an oil rig near the Paracel Islands or as they would call them the I forgot which one what the Chinese call them now but anyway it's the Paracel Islands are generally accepted term in English parlance and that's where we've had 136 Chinese boats protecting this rig some of probably none of them marked as such as naval boats I think but probably with naval connections and you've had 70 or so Vietnamese boats and you've had clashes and you've had reactions in Vietnam where Chinese interests such as factories and individuals being trashed or attacked or demonstrated against pretty serious stuff one of the periods I spent when I was had a period in Canberra in 1978-79 was writing analysis of the so-called Chinese counter-attack in self-defense against Vietnam which took place when China decided to punish Vietnam for border provocations alleged in their border and what we're seeing at the moment I think is probably the most serious sort of development between those two countries since then and this all comes at a time when Vietnam is obviously doing extremely well as an economy it's so terribly much smaller than China but it's a very vibrant economy it's got a significant amount of investment from outside Japan, Taiwan and also of course China so that is very disruptive as it were then you've got the Philippines, the Philippines has been through difficult times over the last decades but there's nothing like something like this to bring the nation together and very interestingly while the disputes haven't been quite of the nature of severity as the ones with Vietnam that you have a very standoff between the two and the diplomatic relationship is not very comfortable at the moment what's very interesting is that the Philippines have decided to seek arbitration over the disputed islands that they have been with China and it's too early to know whether they're even going to arbitration but I think some commentators have mentioned that the case that the Philippines have is by no means one that can be easily dismissed all of this points to a rather tense and disrupted zone or at least area and one may well ask the question why is this the case since China has said since they began their reforms in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping that they need for the next century or whatever I don't think I've mentioned the timeframe but certainly for a long time a peaceful and stable environment because that is the best assurance of their being able to concentrate on economic growth and development why then are these has this pressure been ratcheted up in such a way why are there is there so much uncertainty and tension good question is it about China simply reasserting itself now that is very confident of its position as a major world economy the second world economy perhaps very soon in some statistical ways the biggest economy is it about still trying to write what it sees as the wrongs of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century when China was heavily affected by colonial experiences from the European powers and the first 10 years of the Chinese Communist rule where they were subject subject to Soviet dominance it could be all of that it could also be about the fact that in 1945 they were one of the victors of the war in the Pacific but somehow or other in their terms they turned out to be a loser whereas Japan which was the loser of the Pacific war through the American occupation and huge American support quickly became a victor after the war these are all questions but whatever we are faced with at the moment is a situation that has conflicting interests amongst the major powers in the region we have the United States that in some people's eyes is somewhat ambivalent about its long-term future in the region although I think if you scratch the Americans they would say for sure we are committed and we've indeed cast a new pivot of activity in Asia to bolster the peace and security of the region and that is true to a certain extent but we have in we've always had in North Asia the interaction of major powers if you look back in the immediate post war decades you had the Soviet Union China Japan and the United States all all mixing it as it were their interests all intersecting in that region we're seeing that in ever more than before with rather a stronger China that of course than before a somewhat weaker Russia but are still very strong United States and are still pretty strong Japan plus the interests of South Korea and Southeast Asia and indeed Australia will be as well so that's why I open my remarks by saying it's a very uncertain time and it might make it it might be rather more difficult in the future it's not going to go away anytime soon so that's my opinion remarks thank you