 Professor Peter Singer, it's great to have you here at the 2017 Crawford Leadership Forum and I wanted to just ask you a few questions about your talk today around the future of democracy. So let's just get to the point, the big question. What's the future for representative democracy around the world? I think representative democracy still has a future because we haven't found a better system of government but there are lots of dangers that are threatening it. There are lots of authoritarian leaders in Hungary and Poland and Turkey and arguably possibly now in the United States as well that are trying to essentially consolidate power and remove a lot of the important elements of democracy. And if we want to preserve that the best elements of democracy what do you think is the essential ingredients? I think it's really important to preserve a lively and informed discussion of policy issues and part of the problem of course is that this discussion has been polluted you could say by social media and particular websites that pay no regard for the accuracy of what they're saying and ordinary people are finding it hard to distinguish sometimes those sources from the reputable sources. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation let's say here in the US maybe the New York Times and the Washington Post places that check their facts and do it properly and it's a threat that people are getting confused by planting of false information and stories and because of social media they see more of that that's self-selected that they don't really even get a properly balanced perspective of what else is being said. So what do you see is the future between then what I would say the traditional mass media the New York Times and social media which has now emerged very disruptively over the last 10 years? I really hope that the traditional mass media that is as I said the good ones the ones that check their facts do survive and some of them I've noticed are moving almost from a standard business model because they've lost a lot of advertising revenue to a not-for-profit model they're appealing to their readers to support them because they are important to democracy and so they're asking for charitable donations and maybe that's what we have to do maybe those of us who think that this important have to recognize that these place these media need to survive and need to be given credibility and authority. It's certainly true in 2017 I've started subscribing to to newspapers and media around the world because I craving that quality content so I think that's what you have to do and if they're going to survive more people are going to have to do that. What do you see as being the future of political parties? I don't think we're getting rid of political parties we might be getting more of them that depends partly on the voting system small parties don't have much of a future in a first-past opposed system like the United States but in Australia especially in the Senate they they do have a future possibly they can get representatives into the lower house as in the greens so I think I think political parties are still here for the foreseeable future though. Do you think the fragmentation of political parties is that good for representative democracy or does it impede it based on having our systems sort of seem to be built for parties of a couple rather than 15? Yes but I mean it's true that it makes things more difficult to function you have to build coalition sometimes but of course the Europeans have been doing that for a long time with their proportional representation in many countries it's just accepted that they have to build coalitions that no party will get a majority in its own right and and they've learned to work that so I'm not too worried about the fact that we're getting more small parties and that they're getting some share of power I do think in a way that's that's good for representing a wide range of viewpoints. What's your recommendation to the rest of the world about Australia's not quite but relatively unique system of mandatory voting? I've been telling my American friends that they could save a lot of time and energy if they could get mandatory voting because they spend so much time in just trying to get the vote out and trying to work out which sections of the public are likely to favor their candidate and then they try to get them to come to the polls and yet still you have quite low rates of voting which I think do delegitimize the system to some extent. No candidate can say a majority of Americans voted for me so I wish that more people were aware of the advantages of of mandatory voting in terms of getting a very high turnout and getting people to express their views. Thank you very much great to have you back in Canberra hope to see you here again soon. It's been good to be here.