 Hi, I'm Dr. Ashley Shram, Deputy Director of the Menzies Center for Health Governance, located within Regnet, here at the College of Asia and the Pacific. COVID-19 has been a stark reminder of just how globally integrated our societies and economies have become. We've all witnessed the chaos and anxiety associated with uncertainties about whether those invisible supply chains will continue to keep our shelves stocked. And while the impact of COVID-19 on access to goods like toilet paper, personal protective equipment and our food supply has been front and center, increased global integration has put something much less obvious at risk. The very measures that governments have been taking to address this pandemic. In time, governments could face lawsuits from private companies for these emergency measures to the tune of billions of dollars as a result of our international trade and investment systems. Here at the Menzies Center, we research the impact of international trade and investment on human health in terms of the types of consumer goods that it delivers, as well as the way it regulates business actors, consumer environments and shapes policymaking at a national level. So how does the trade and investment system allow private companies to see compensation from states for their COVID responses? Well, many agreements provide for something called investor-state dispute settlement, which at its core protects the rights of foreign investors to earn profits on the investments they make in other countries. In the event that a government action is perceived to violate one of those rights, then the investor can use a system of private international arbitration to directly sue the government. Australia is no stranger to investor-state dispute settlement, as this was one of the forums that transnational tobacco companies used to challenge the country's tobacco plain packaging legislation in recent years. But this system has been used by investors around the world to challenge a wide array of public policy measures. And when investors are successful, it can be very costly to taxpayers. To date, as many as 46 awards have each exceeded US$100 million in compensation to private investors. When national emergencies like COVID-19 arise, governments need the autonomy to introduce policies that increase the capacity of healthcare infrastructure, as well as safeguard a range of social determinants of health, like employment, housing, finance, as well as any actions that may limit commercial activity. Yet we've seen legal experts across the globe warning us we could see hundreds of foreign investors challenging COVID-related emergency measures using the investor-state dispute system. For example, actions nationalizing private hospitals may be as open to challenge as measures to halt the spread of the virus across borders, which have resulted in revenue losses to airlines, stopping fee collection on private toll roads in order to promote the movement of goods and workers, or suspending bonuses among banking executives to help stabilize the financial sector. Well, we might like to believe that times of crisis would be exempt from such legal challenges. The aftermath of events like the global financial crisis or the Arab Spring, in fact, shows that these events often trigger disputes. Argentina, for example, in 2001, after experiencing a near total economic collapse and profound political instability, including a 50% fall in GDP and a succession of five presidents in 10 days, ultimately had to respond to as many as 50 investor-state cases regarding the range of emergency measures it took to respond to the crisis, which ended up mounting to over US$2 billion in compensation to private investors. At the same time, international organizations have estimated that we'll see a drastic decline in global foreign investment over the next year, as much as a 40% draw. The flow of finance across borders is critical to economic development in many countries and has been flagged as vital to funding the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. So the challenge is to learn how to build a balanced and fair trade and investment system, one that encourages sustainable and ethical development, while retaining government capacity to adapt and respond to national health and development priorities. COVID-19 is a time to reflect on our global governance infrastructure and ask, how do we want to emerge from this global crisis? Here at the Menzies Center for Health Governance, we are studying how to reform the trade and investment system to retain interconnectedness and global cooperation, while better supporting human and planetary health equity.