 I want to sort of flush out some of the general differences and similarities between two of them and also try and then zone in a bit more detail on Southeast Asia as a sub-region, first of all. I'm also where I'm kind of on the territory of two sessions in the afternoon here, one which is dedicated session on HADR, I think that's from a US perspective so I'm not going to cover what you've done, I'll allow others who've done that no more to cover that, I'm really looking at it from a regional perspective. And then as I'm based in Southeast Asia in the time remaining for questions, if any of you have any questions of a more general maritime nature, South China Sea related, I'm very happy to take those, although this is quite a broad topic as it stands. So as I say, they're not the same, but they're often kind of grouped together of sometimes rather pejoratively regarded as the low hanging fruit of defence and maritime security cooperation in the region. Four guiding questions which I hope will give a bit of focus to my talk. One, how important is Southeast Asia as a region for SAR and HADR cooperation? Secondly, how developed and relevant are regional frameworks for maritime cooperation in these fields? What is the role for external powers? And what is the wider significance? So I'd say they're unarguably both important and growing requirements. The requirements from small scale disasters to search and rescue for small vessels are often local, falling within the scope and scale of national capabilities in Southeast Asia. It doesn't always require outside assistance, an obvious point but one I want to make up front. Southeast Asia however is an extremely diverse area in terms of the size and capabilities of the countries involved. And that obviously makes for a very uneven mix depending on whose waters you happen to be passing through. And that can demand major international responses, disasters. I think many of us have heard the metric that the wider Indo-Pacific region is one of the most disaster prone and Southeast Asia exemplifies that. Regularly suffering large scale flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, severe storms and of course sea level rises are kind of a background concern affecting many of the countries whose populations and food growing areas are mainly in the littoral. Recent incidents I think underline the importance of this and have also pushed them up the profile of regional organisations. Typhoon Hai An or Ylanda in the Philippines at the tail end of 2013. The search for MH370 is still ongoing more than a year after its disappearance and more recently the successful search for air ratio flight QZ851. These of course not really search and rescue, more search and locate operations. At a basic level I'd say there are a few challenges that are in common to these activities. One, the availability of assets at the national level as I said Southeast Asia varies very widely in terms of what national capabilities there are to offer. Not all countries there are equipped to deal with natural disasters or to conduct a search operation at sea. Secondly, there's a need for internal coordination at the national level. This is a recurrent chronic problem you might say in parts of Southeast Asia. Indonesia leaps to mind having no fewer than 12 agencies with a maritime purview and getting more to cohere to a single voice remains a mission in progress. Although I think there has been recent progress on that as the air ratio search demonstrated. Thirdly, how to manage the politics of international cooperation. There are two elements to this. One's within ASEAN which is the regional grouping. There are elements of prestige involved who hosts what matters and that competition can derail cooperation within ASEAN itself. And then of course the extra regional politics where you have the much larger more capable maritime powers. India, US, Japan, China, South Korea to name a few. And then fourthly another challenge which has been actually kind of flushed out by the experience of MH370. Arrow and maritime SAR regimes at the international level are not fully aligned. That's one challenge. But both of these activities, HADR and search and rescue have in common that they're primarily civilian led activities as well. We shouldn't forget in a context where we're discussing the navy and primarily military response role. It's important and naval forces for reasons of their mobility and flexibility do feature largely in both of those in a first but largely in a first responder role. So how you coordinate between the civilian and military answers again a common basic challenge at all levels of HADR and SAR. Typhoon Hyann in November 13 highlighted the shortfalls in capacity of south east Asian states to respond collectively to large scale disasters with a man made on natural. Hyann was not the first major storm to wreck the Philippines. It won't be the last. And also it didn't cause particular damage elsewhere. It wasn't a trans boundary disaster on the scale of 2004 tsunami. Nonetheless it seems to have nudged Singapore another like minded regional states to embrace a more institutionalized regional approach towards coordinating HADR efforts across southeast Asia under a single roof. And that's in the form of Singapore's fairly recent proposal to set up the RHCC, a regional humanitarian coordination center. Not say a bit more about that later on. Concerning SAR and search and locate the precedent value of MH370 is less clear than Hyann. It's such a freak event. Maybe it's it will be a unique outlier. However, the loss of air Asia QZ 851 just a few months afterwards has pushed search and rescue collaboration higher up the regional agenda. And as I say, I would take the latter as more of a qualified success at two levels. It demonstrated that Indonesia after some initial coordination problems with different data being released by different agencies and the military and the civilians also in some senses buying with each other for who could do more quickly. It did in the end after a high level intervention from the president. I think do relatively well. Secondly, we also saw Indonesia and Singapore who've had recently a rather scratchy maritime relationship be able to cooperate. And it was actually a Singaporean submarine search and rescue vessel that got the signal about the located the fuselage of the missing jet. Despite these overlapping common challenges between HADR and SAR that the operational level these missions do remain functionally distinct. Another difference at the international level concerns the international frameworks, the treaties, the conventions that govern this. I'll just say a word about SAR first of all. There is an obligation written into the relevant international treaties to cooperate across borders across sovereignities. The 1979 maritime SAR convention is the main one, not the only one. And it requires parties to establish rescue coordination centres and sub-centres and common procedures to aid cooperation. It also stipulates, and this is a quote, that parties should take measures to expedite entry into the territorial waters of rescue units from other parties. And I'll return to that as a potential sensitivity later too. For civil aviation, if an airliner goes down, the response from the initial rescue effort or recovery to the post accident investigation also is likely to straddle several nationalities. And that's all covered by the Chicago Convention and other international frameworks. One of the major lessons of the search for MH370 is that need to align the regulatory frameworks for aero and maritime search SAR. These are not currently harmonised, and that can be obstructive when the search cuts across air, surface and subsurface domains. Maritime SAR is also governed by other frameworks, including obligations written into UN CLOS, the UN Convention itself, and one of the oldest conventions, the safety of life at sea, which in its first version dates back to 1914. National search and rescue regions are defined according to the international aeronautical maritime search and rescue IAM SAR manuals, and global maritime distress and safety system. That's a global level regime, and it's quite mature. By contrast, HADR is the obligation of an affected state to cooperate with other states and NGOs offering assistance. It can be considered as more of a moral than a legal obligation. This notion has been challenged by the emergence of concepts such as R2P, responsibility to protect, which seek to internationalise international humanitarian norms. South East Asia also provides a good counter example to that. If we wind the clock back to 2008 and Myanmar, which suffered a devastating cyclone, Cyclone Nargis, when the military dominated government actually refused to accept direct military assistance from, particularly from western militaries, and it took some time and a bit of diplomatic leapfrogging in which ASEAN played a role for an indirect route of delivery to be found via Thailand. Now, you could say that the Myanmar response was an extreme one given the xenophobic nature of the military government at the time, but it does underline that HADR I think is an inherently more sensitive area for outside and especially western military involvement. Basic distinction SAR occurs mostly at sea, so it may be in your territorial waters, but it's not on land, except of urban search and rescue, which is associated with earthquakes. Whereas HADR predominantly, although the assistance has to arrive by sea and by air, the activity takes place on land and that means boots on the ground, and that can rub up still, I think, against some local sensitivities. That caution is often ascribed to boiling down to lack of trust issues or prestige or the xenophobia in the case of the Myanmar authorities. I think we also need to recognise that there's a fairly basic core meaning of sovereignty here, that a country of government needs to, if it can, grapple with an emergency through its national means, and it's a last resort really that leads to the outside being called in. I think we see a similar reluctance to seek outside help for many states, not just those that are politically non-democratic in orientation. Some of those states with the fraylist infrastructure in the Philippines and South Pacific Islands to mind are obviously now or more or less on permanent call for outside assistance, but I think we can draw a distinction within Southeast Asia, countries like Vietnam, where in fact a legal change would have to be made before a foreign military could operate on the soil as offering, if not an obstacle, but I think a potential factor that needs to be born in mind is rather than assuming that we are all somehow gravitating towards a new paradigm. Indonesia, too, can be rather prickly in the same manner, notwithstanding the fact that in 2004 it did make that very groundbreaking decision to admit large-scale foreign military assistance to an area that we shouldn't forget either was still a zone of active conflict in Ache. So those are the kind of general differences and similarities that I see between these two fields. Now just to zone in a bit more on the questions. First of all, how important is Southeast Asia? Well, I think this is pretty easily answered. It's a very dense area for shipping. It's a centre for maritime commerce. You've got the facts, I think, that many of you already know that the Malacca Strait carries almost a comparable volume of oil to Hormuz. 50% of the world's seaborn trade passing through the South China Sea. Therefore, searching rescue is really more than a regional issue. It's linked as a core part of the economic smooth functioning of a global trading system at that point where shipping is so concentrated. That's maritime SAR. And then we also have this unique pattern really within the wider Indo-Pacific if I can introduce that term. Southeast Asia of 10 countries, 11 if we include East Timor, some of whom really cannot operate independently when it comes to even fairly small-scale disaster. And others like Singapore, which despite its small size, obviously in terms of capabilities, is at the high end and comparable to a Western country. Secondly, how developed and relevant are regional frameworks for maritime cooperation? Let's take search and rescue first of all. As I said, this is already governed by an existing quite mature international framework. But for those who don't know, search and rescue responsibility can go well outside your territorial seas, your exclusive economic zone. In the South China Sea, Singapore, again despite its small size, has over a million square kilometres of sea space over which it is responsible primarily for search and rescue. And to move the focus out to the eastern Indian Ocean, Malaysia's SRR also projects out about 450 nautical miles. That's well, well beyond its EEZ into the Andaman Sea. That said, although there is this theoretical division of labour, in practice effective search and rescue cooperation still requires political will as well as capacity. And several Southeast Asian countries have not signed the search and rescue convention, probably reflecting sovereignty concerns over territorial waters. As you'll recall that earlier quote about accepting rescue access into territorial seas. Moreover, I think the search and rescue frameworks that apply within the Malacca Strait for all its importance as a shipping thoroughfare are not yet fully affected. Among Singapore-based maritime bodies, we have a couple that I'll single out. One for anti-piracy recap. The United States is also now a contracting party to recap. It has its information sharing centre in Singapore. Why do I mention that? It's not technically related, but nonetheless the ability to leverage of that on shipping network as kind of private sector eyes on the water and to kind of crowdsource that as an asset in the search for MH370 was proved to be effective, not effective in finding the aircraft, but nonetheless in getting buy-in from the industry. And also the information fusion centre, which is another multilateral, multinational, largely naval body, which again has a broader maritime security brief, goes beyond piracy and that gives it, I think, a better remit for this kind of activity. Regional co-operation on military SAR, which I'll say a brief word about, because that's obviously an important, but sort of discrete subset of search and rescue. Although it's a running template for military exercises, multinational exercises within Southeast Asia, it's also constrained by security factors and duplication of capabilities. There have been cases in Southeast Asia where requests for military SAR have been refused between neighbours and that gets to the political frictions that still impose a glass ceiling on how far this co-operation has proceeded. But I'll highlight one, I think, notable exception to that. Singapore has concluded bilateral submarine search and rescue agreements with Indonesia and with Vietnam in 2010 and 2013. These Navy to Navy agreements reveal that I think sufficient trust has been built between like-minded Southeast Asian countries in what is, after all, a pretty sensitive area. Now the counter to that is the fact that Malaysia has chosen to go the other way and acquire its own independent submarine search and rescue capability. So that shows that there are also limits on how far capability pooling has matured. HADR co-operation has become, I think, a linking theme throughout the wider Indo-Pacific, and it's centred on ASEAN. I won't spell out the whole alphabet soup of initiatives and frameworks. It would take longer than the allotted time I've got to speak. But there are no shortage of these. However, their limitation is that they are primarily oriented towards disaster prevention and a fairly weak co-ordination role. I think the real momentum that we've seen has been growing up around the side of that, both in terms of ad hoc activity between Southeast Asian states cooperating phil, actually, and at the broader level we've got the East Asia Summit, which is involved in good work on disaster preparedness. But I'll say a few more words now returning to this Singaporean initiative of the RHCC, which I think is the one to watch, particularly from the military to military element of coordinating HADR. The RHCC is hosted in Singapore. It's next to the Information Fusion Centre. They are co-located both at Changi Naval Base, and it's set up, I think, on the same template. It's staffed by liaison officers. Primarily, it's army-led within the Singapore system. Again, reflecting ultimately the fact that boots on the ground are the ones that are going to get the job done. But it is described as a joint facility, but most of the staff there, at least on my experience, are army. No foreign assets are assigned to that, so it's slow steps. But nonetheless, it has an impressive level of rollout capability already. The main initiative is a column portal, Information Sharing Database, which pulls in all-source data design to give a clear and rapid real-time, or as close to real-time picture of a disaster scene within Southeast Asia. Its operating area is also limited to Southeast Asia. It doesn't go wider than that. It arose also interestingly in the context of the US ASEAN Defence Summit, the first of its kind, in April of last year, in which Singapore essentially put up its hand and said we're prepared to run with this as our initiative. That makes it an interesting case, because it's not officially banished as an ASEAN initiative, but it deals with an ASEAN area and it's hosted by an ASEAN state. And here we get to these sensitivities again about who owns what. If we break down the level of support among other Southeast Asian countries, we actually find an uneven picture so far of those who've supported. Vietnam is on-side, Philippines is on-side, Brunei is on-side. Indonesia, however, still ambivalent, partly because it hosts a, I quote unquote use the word rival, but there is an element of that ASEAN Humanitarian Coordination Centre, the AHA Centre. And as I said, Vietnam still has to go over a legal hurdle before it could accept foreign military to operate, even in a disaster scenario. There is, and I'm aware that there's a representative from the UN Ocha office with us today, but there's also interest in coordinating with the UN through its Disaster Relief Lead Agencies. And also the external powers are progressively showing interest. I think China has declared a liaison officer already. Some of those who have a naval liaison officer in the IFC have just crossed-hatted, so it's the same person, and they are literally across the corridor from one another. I think that's intentionally part of the model. India I think will shortly follow, at least that's what I've heard, and Japan has also showed interest. But its main political challenge is the fact that other ASEAN countries will potentially see it as a rival. I mentioned Indonesia already, but Malaysia also hosts a disaster relief pre-deployment area for supplies at Subang airport just outside of Kuala Lumpur. So Malaysia has also, I think, sat on the fence largely in its attitude towards the RHCC. But it's early days. It was only set up last year, and I think my view of Singapore's approach is the capacity is put in up front and then we wait for the others to join and the mission to develop incrementally, and that seems to be the regional cultural approach. What about the role for external powers? Well, there is, I think, a clear and pressing need to help build capacity. There's a whole line of work that continues through these various ASEAN initiatives that I've largely mentioned, and of course disaster relief is just the symptomatic response. A lot of the work really that can mitigate is done up front in terms of minimising the vulnerabilities of low-lying areas, et cetera. And sometimes there will be a need to plug an unbridgeable gap in capacity. There are just limits on how far Southeast Asian countries, however they develop, will be able to handle very large-scale, severe weather events probably on an increasing likelihood in future. Among the key countries, the United States, of course, stands out in terms of capability and experience in HADR, but we also have China beginning to show more interest. I think that's one to watch. It's suffered negative publicity for its presumed poultry contribution of a hospital ship, belatedly, to the high-end effort. But in the context of the MH370 search, we've also seen a much more proactive stance from China. I think that's certainly a track that's going to develop in future. Japan, too, I should mention, launched its largest ever overseas deployment of the self-defence forces. After the United States had completed its primary relief mission in the Philippines, there was effectively a kind of relief where the Japanese deployed a very large force, including some of their new amphibious ships. What is the widest significance then to this? And I'll conclude on this note. I think, why should we care about Southeast Asia? Do I have to sell it to you? Well, Southeast Asia is a key subregion, I think, geostrategic in the sense of its central location within the wider Indo-Pacific. Politically also, because in comparison with the other subregions, South Asia or Northeast Asia, it's the most fluid in terms of its alignment. So in terms of influence building and building government to government and defence relations, there are other potential benefits to HADR and SAR Corporation. I think in the background that has been the reality that's driven a lot of the engagement. And also, there is no natural hegemon within the subregion. Indonesia logically should fill that role, but in capacity it's still, although it's, I think, growing in confidence and growing in capability, particularly under the current new administration, even showing more signs of a kind of nationalist tone in its foreign policy. But nonetheless, I think Southeast Asia is a kind of natural centre to the Indo-Pacific in which these soft forms of military defence engagement have a wider strategic significance. And those external powers, I think they, as a result of their government to government, relations have improved. We saw that very clearly after the 2004 tsunami. It builds military to military relations on a non-confrontational basis. There are other spin-offs too in terms of, I mentioned the amphibious ships that Japan had deployed, in terms of the skill sets and capabilities involved to launch an HADR operation up to the point of delivery. There's a very large overlap with conventional operations too. So there is also that element to defence engagement. Plus, it also builds the linkages with NGOs and grassroots with the countries affected. So if those governments are not necessarily conducive to external military deployments, none the less the human connections can facilitate those. Finally, in conclusion then, in my view, and it's just a personal view, ASEAN still lacks the depth to be the primary load-bearing vehicle for maritime cooperation within its own region. I think we see this applying both to HADR and ASAR. But numerous piecemeal strands of maritime cooperation are taking place in the region and they fit within a maritime security template with, I think, positive implications for improved search and rescue responses. MH370, although it hasn't turned up the plane after more than a year, can still be a useful catalyst to harmonise aero and maritime SAR regimes at the global level. Also, the cost-sharing split agreed between Australia and Malaysia. I think it was a template for how that might be done in future. However, many millions later invested, I think there will also be an effort to multinaturalise at a more formal level in the Indian Ocean. There was recently an MOU that was agreed on the back of the Indian Ocean Region Summit. I think that's a sign of where the policy interests will probably go from the camera side in future. On HADR, finally, I think the RHCC in Singapore is the military-to-military initiative to watch, depending on its relationship as it develops with the ASEAN Aha Centre in Jakarta and by extension Singapore-Indonesia relations. That is complementary to the whole of a strain of activity through ASEAN, through the ASEAN Defence Ministers Plus Network and the East Asia Summit, which sits at the highest level, 18 powers, including all of the major externals, which also has a designated stream of work on disaster relief and response. However, I think the RHCC's main limitation is that it's a military-to-military interface and by the admission of its own staff, it's primarily concerned with the first 72 hours as a way of trying to get that coordinated ability for ASEAN to be able to move something and avoid, I think, a repetition of what happened in November 2013 when a fellow ASEAN member was left instead to make bilateral requests and it was seen to be too little, too late. But I think we're on... In answer to the question I posed at the beginning, are we on the right track? Well, it's always a half-full, half-empty type of answer when it comes to Southeast Asia and ASEAN because it is such a diverse and fragmented region. But I think it is slowly those steps are happening and in a broader strategic context, I think we do see a coming together on maritime cooperation slowly along the sort of... a gentle gradient, but it is on the right track. So I'll conclude there and happy to take any questions. Thank you.