 The social credit system historically is a continuation and a really sophisticated continuation of what was called the work file in the kind of older communist styles and your work file determined who you were, what you could do, even to the point of where you could marry, what house you lived in, where you'd work. It was complete and utter control. This has taken it to another level if you do bad things in terms of what the party deems to be bad, which obviously the worst case would be disloyalty to the party. You'll be locked out essentially of the system. You're locked out. You can't initially get your kids educated, you can't fly on a plane, you won't get any subsidies, you're just literally taken out of society and you live in a black zone which is already happening to 10 to 12 million people in China. Xi Jinping has laid down a challenge to Western liberal democracies. He's saying that basically we've lost the way, that they are faltering and putting up the communist model as the way forward for half the world and this social credit system is very much at the heart of what this new model is about and it sort of reveals what people don't really comprehend and the story did in some detailed fashion is that the lengths they go to to control, to make consensus, to basically have censorship, to control people's thoughts, to control people's behaviour towards total and utter loyalty to the one party system. This is a great example of actually making an investment and having a team inside China. You just couldn't get this story no other way. So it's critical in that early warning system that you're alerting not only our government but the world in terms of what actually is going on inside China because China obviously controls all the information that comes out of that place. It is a very tight censorship system. Some of the stories that I covered last year include the Tai cave rescue, the elections in Cambodia, the plight of the Rohingya who have fled Myanmar, the Congo, we did several stories there, the aftermath of the Kasai war and also sex slaves in the Kasai region. Also the plight of Syrian refugees, myself and Michael Bachelard went to Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey and talked to Syrian refugees about their experiences and how they're being cared for and then the fall of the caliphate. Myself and David Rowe went to Syria where we covered the aftermath of the fall of this caliphate. I think the importance of photojournalism is that we capture things that words can't. We can capture the emotion of a situation, we can bring to life a situation or an event that is so different from ours at home and we can bring empathy or evoke emotion sometimes that words just don't have a place for. They're very long days but they're full of fascinating and intriguing and sometimes heart wrenching and heartbreaking situations. You're meeting people a lot of the time on the worst day of their life and so it can be very emotional, it can be very hard sometimes but at the same time it's incredibly rewarding and I think it's very important. Foreign interference in a country's political affairs is clearly extremely serious. We've seen the ramifications of that in the United States and respect of Russia. In Australia, foreign interference, the debates really involve the Chinese government. You can't think of a more serious attack on our democratic process where a foreign power whose interests may be contrary to ours is covertly clandestinely behind the scenes seeking to infiltrate and possibly change the outcome of democracy or policy processes in Australia. We showed for the first time real evidence of the Chinese embassy interfering in a local council here in Sydney by trying to ban a Chinese media outlet which sometimes runs stories which are critical of the Chinese Communist Party. They tried to have them banned from being involved in a New Year festival and that was pressure exerted by the Chinese consulate in Sydney on our local council here so there's no doubt that we've managed to expose interference by the Chinese Communist Party in domestic life here. Our core role is to ensure that where there are attacks on our political processes or attempts to infiltrate or influence our political processes that we throw those attempts into the sunlight so the community, the public and ultimately our politicians can see what's going on and react accordingly. For some of the people who spoke on the program they face real risks for future intimidation of themselves or their families back in China. I think the bravest person in the program was the wife of detained Australian citizen Yang Hengjun who remains in detention in China. She spoke out publicly for the first time and did that interview with us from China at great risk to herself and her personal safety. Well the story came from a tip-off actually. Johnny Shapiro got a tip-off that ultimately we couldn't prove to be true. It didn't check out but what it did do was focus the minds of the team on this very sizable contract and the company that really was little known had a company registered to a beach shack in Kangaroo Island and a post office box in Singapore and they'd won this contract that was worth in the end more than half a billion dollars from the Australian government. Look I think it's really important to know about this story because here in Australia there is bipartisan support to have a border protection regime which involves offshore processing on Manus Island and in Nauru. To have that program, to have integrity you need to make sure that these contracts are administered correctly and that services are delivered. Now what we found out from our reporting is that the services were largely non-existent. There was terrible maintenance. The food was often not delivered. Bus services didn't run on time so the actual humanitarian needs of the refugees were often not taken care of despite this contract being worth more than five hundred and thirty million dollars. A very encouraging aspect of working on this story is that you can see how investigations and in-depth reporting can actually have an impact. Since we started reporting in January this contract and the company that has been awarded it is the subject of an investigation by the Auditor-General. The Home Affairs Department also ordered their own review which has since been released and from that we see significant concerns about the way the contract was awarded. You need investigative reporting to dig some of this stuff out and it's been quite encouraging to see that it's actually had an impact.