 All right, good afternoon. And thank you all very much for coming along tonight. I want to begin by thanking the Australia Institute for agreeing to publish this report. And I'm delighted to see another think tank stepping into the space of national security and defense policy. Certainly, as my dear friend and colleague, he white was said, it's very much an area that we need extra support. We need extra ideas. And I think the Australia Institute's success over the last few years is really an example of the power of good ideas that a small, dedicated team can have a large impact if the ideas are strong and the messaging is clear. Can I also thank my dear colleague and friend Hugh White, a one-man think tank who has forced a lot of Australia's politicians to consider a lot of issues that they probably prefer to leave to other people? So tonight, I want to argue with you that Australia's politicians need to argue more. Now, I'm pausing because I'm expecting somebody who might want to walk out at this point. But you're still here. So that's what I take as a very encouraging sign. Because having arguments and being divided about the right way that our society should think about the big issues, about the big problems, as well as how to actually address them, is a very important part of a healthy and functioning democratic society. Yet many now question whether the arguments are worth it. Polling shows that only about 60% of Australia democracy is preferable to all other kinds of democratic system, of government system. And those numbers are even lower when you look at people my age or younger. When asked to think about democracy, many of us no doubt think of question time. A blustering, buffoonish show full of tribalism, forgettable zingers, and rarely concerned with the actual issues. Or you might consider Donald Trump, a man for whom every previous adjective in the previous sentence would singularly apply. But tonight, and yet the paradox is this. As a system of government, democracy has not only succeeded, but flourished. There are 123 countries which claim some form of electoral democracy around the world. And only 36% of the earth's population live in countries which do not provide at least some measure of political, economic, and personal freedom. Humans have never been better off than those of us fortunate to live in Western democratic nations. And for all the talk of challenges, the record of democratic states in the issues of peace and war is a remarkable story of the 20th century, particularly when we look at the record of countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Our own Australia has endured for 117 years as a culturally isolated country with a small population trying to maintain a fragile grasp on a vast landmass. We have just the 52nd largest population, and yet played an important role in our early years in the Treaty of Versailles after World War I in the establishment of the United Nations after World War II. We have supported Indonesia's independence and helped birth Timor-Leste. We have provided peacekeepers to Cambodia and settled non-proliferation treaties in the Hague. Yet our world is changing once again. The three C's top the list, China, culture, and climate. All three present substantial issues. And like many of you, I'm not confident that we're doing enough and responding properly to some of these challenges. Tackling problems of this size is not just a question of the right policy, but asking hard questions about how we think about debate and decide our policies. So tonight and the time I have available, I want to talk to you about how Australia should approach our changing world. And I want to argue to you that open, public, and partisan arguments are the right way and the best way for us to think about the problems we face. Arguments, not only by our elected representatives, but by, for, and from all of us, are integral to our long-term prosperity and security. I should note at the outset that I make these criticisms from a position of goodwill. I do not believe that Australia's politicians are ignorant, greedy, or corrupt. I do not believe that some of them are conspiring to bring harm to this country or too lazy to care. I have heard from too many people that when our politicians sit around the cabinet table and discuss how to send and whether to send our young men and women into harm's way, they take their responsibilities for the nation's security very seriously. My critique instead is that they have fallen under the sway of a problematic habit of bipartisanship. Well, seemingly an innocuous idea that our two major parties should seek to cooperate and agree in a spirit of unity, the reality today is far more corrosive. The desire for bipartisanship, as I hope to persuade you tonight, is a real cost to the quality, creativity, and accountability of the nation's policy. It saps public unity and ultimately harms those who wear our uniform and represent us overseas. Whatever its common sense logic, bipartisanship goes against mounting centuries of evidence and insights about how large society stink through the problems of war and peace. I therefore argue that it is urgent that our political class fulfill their responsibility to openly debate what principles this country stands for, how we will act, and what costs we are willing to pay to protect other states and ourselves. By rejecting even the potential to disagree about the right way forward in these uncertain times, the demand for bipartisanship leaves us all less secure. So what is bipartisanship? And how did it come to determine Australia's foreign and defence policies? I think one of the most remarkable features of Australia's current political environment is how little our politicians talk about defence and security issues. While they never miss an opportunity to claim that their economic principles are stronger, or that they have more effective social policies, the issues of defence and security tend to achieve a demeaning silence. Instead of our leaders telling us how they would have stressed today's threats or why they have the superior strategy to their opponents, they stress their cooperation, their agreement. Indeed, many of our politicians even like to highlight their willingness to defer to the bureaucracy on these issues in a way they never would for any other national policy area. For example, on the morning of February 2016, the Australian government released its latest defence white paper. A few hours later, the then shadow defence minister, Stephen Conroy stepped up to a media conference to declare that although he had only just received the 186 page document, quote, labor is committed to a bipartisan approach to national security and defence matters. As such, the party would approach the issue in the spirit of bipartisanship. Whether Australia's opposition in the 44th parliament agreed with the actual content, that alone whether they had even read it by the time they were talking about it, seemed far less important to them than showing that the right spirit was being taken. Defence's judgments about our changing world and the equipment necessary to respond to it were seemingly taken at face value. Conroy's replacement as shadow minister, Richard Miles, has continued to insist on a bipartisan approach. In a major recent address, Miles stated that given the grave security challenges facing Australia, including uncertainty over US President Donald J. Trump, and bitter sovereignty disputes along our key trade routes, any partisan debate would be an indulgence. Instead, quote, politicians of all persuasions need to come together on a nonpartisan basis and try to think about this in a deep, historic and contemporary way. Even that is too much talk for some. In 2015, former Liberal MP, Andrew Nicolik, stated in parliament that politicians should effectively be silent. Quote, why partisanship must continue. The nature of our new security order is so critical as to make redundant the all too familiar and orthodox war of words. Bipartisanship is a fundamental part of how Australia approaches and develops its national security policymaking. It is not only something the politicians themselves believe in, but it is also something that those of us in academia, the media and wider commentators on national security tend to reinforce. In a major speech on future security challenges for Australia, Professor Roy Medcalf of the National Security College here at ANU argued that we need a maximum of political consensus on these issues. And he went on to celebrate that thankfully a large measure of consensus and bipartisanship exists. Peter Jennings, the head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has similarly argued that for defence to manage itself better would require politicians to maintain quote, a large measure of political bipartisanship. Such views are also common in the Australian Defence Force and in the wider defence industry. As one former ADF submarine commander told the media, playing politics with a major part of Australia's strategic defence policy should not occur, have an informed debate, but by all means keep the politics out of it. Australia's current approach to foreign and defence policy and the bipartisan nature of it can be traced to the turmoil of the 1960s and the 1970s. During those years, we saw bitter and sustained debates about how Australia would achieve its place in the world, debates between our two major political parties. The issues they were debating were much like our own today. How to engage a United States that is seemingly disinterested in our part of the world and oblivious to our moral concerns. How to relate to an Asia which has shifting power balances. How to assist regional partners who have to deal with a violent ideological insurgency that we are desperate to see not spread to our shores. In the face of these questions in the 1960s and 70s Australia's democratic system thrashed its way to a new consensus. Over the next 30 years, our major political parties held the rough same set of ideas. The alliance was reaffirmed, Asia was embraced for trade and migration and greater independence was sought for national character. Tactics may have changed at times and at elections we saw some instances of product differentiation but the substance of Australia's approach to international affairs has remained in place. This political consensus served Australia very well. Yet as the very foundation of these views has been shaken in recent years with China's rise and America's relative decline, our politics has become ever more rigid in demanding continuity. Bipartisanship on how Australia approaches the world is no longer the outcome of debate but is instead a process that shapes and preempts debate. Rather than seek consensus for the best policies, consensus itself has become the goal. Surveying the new collective wisdom that Australia should spend 2% of its gross domestic product on defense, Professor Mark Beeson has noted that, quote, perhaps the most remarkable feature of the defense debate is that there isn't one. Despite the eye-watering sums involved, there's been next to no discussion of the actual necessity or circumstances in which the planes, subs, and other assets might actually be used. What happens to politicians who might challenge this consensus? We'll take the case of Andrew Hastie, the member for Canning in Western Australia. In September 2015, Andrew Hastie ran as a Liberal candidate for office. He was a decorated former SAS officer who had served in Afghanistan. During the campaign, Hastie often drew on his defense experience and he explained in one day when criticizing the defense policy of the Labor government and drawing on his own expertise and experience in Afghanistan, he said, quote, I didn't think that Labor had our backs and he argued to the media and the people of WA that it was this experience that had led him to run for office and want to join the nation's parliament to be involved in getting the policy settings right. Yet over the next few days, Hastie was subject to a wide range of criticism from the media that described him as having led an extraordinary attack and abandoning the usual bipartisan consensus on defense issues. The leader of the Labor Party didn't try to refute his arguments but rather declared that he was offended by the claims, describing them as very unwise and going on to say that when it comes up, comes to backing up our men and women in uniform, both parties have always maintained bipartisanship. Since, despite Hastie's status as former member of the Australian Defense Force who was speaking about his experience serving overseas and as a registered candidate for office, he's still faced heavy criticism for having contravened the norm of bipartisanship. Such was the strength of the response. Andrew Hastie later said he felt the experience had been an attempt to gag him. Party leaders faced similar pressure to conform. As part of developing this report, the Australia Institute was thankfully enough put polling into the field to give us a sense of how the public actually think about these issues. And the report can be found at the end of this document. Quite remarkably, we found that 69% of Australians think that the parliament works better when you have bipartisanship. And 61% believe that it is a good for foreign policy. So whether our politicians believe in bipartisanship or not, they know they're expected to believe in it. Now advocates of the current approach put forward three arguments for the requirements of bipartisanship. First, they say it creates good policy. Second, that it is necessary for national unity. And third, that it protects the troops, our men and women serving overseas. I wanna suggest to you tonight that all three of these claims are questionable. The policy argument for bipartisanship is based on an assumption that political parties always put their own interests ahead of national concerns. That policies are viewed not in terms of their capacity for problem solving, but vote winning. Advocates of bipartisanship often worry that the public is neither well informed enough or engaged enough to be able to assist in developing national policy. As the American writer Walter Littman, one of the foremost advocates of bipartisanship during the early Cold War years, once famously argued, public opinion has been, quote, destructively wrong at critical junctures. Too little, with too late, or too long, with too much. Too pacifist in peace, and too bellicose in war. Good policy creation in this view therefore requires listening to the public, but leaving the final judgments to the elites to negotiate. Yet bipartisanship, I'd argue, has its own significant costs. It impedes the central mechanism of democratic societies to produce policy, open, competitive debate, and it replaces it with a much more centralized method. It also reduces public engagement and exacerbates public ignorance of international affairs. Finally, it reduces accountability and thereby restricts the learning process. When politicians say that they will support anything which makes our country safer, we can hardly believe that rigorous scrutiny will be the order of the day. Since the start of the war on terror, we have seen repeated cycles of bills rushed through the parliament on issues such as counter-terrorism. The Howard government put up new anti-terror legislation on average about every 6.7 weeks from 2001 onwards with almost all bills passing with the strong support of the Labour Party. As one of Australia's leading legal scholars has noted, this has produced legislation that can be unnecessary and even counterproductive. He goes on to note that some of the bills are so poorly drafted and conceived as to be effectively unworkable. The inevitable result of this bipartisanship is therefore poor policy. Defense issues are similarly rushed through the parliament or sometimes not even addressed. The ADF was fighting in Afghanistan for eight years before the Australian parliament committed to regular updates and discussions. It took a minor party, the Australian Greens, to force the first major political debate about the Afghan war in 2010. The parliamentary committee system designed for the review and assessment of legislation is similarly founded or hounded by bipartisanship. As one study found, quote, consensus, rather than dissent and rigorous questioning is the normal modus operandi. As a result, difficult questions about the rights and wrongs of certain foreign policies are not always asked. Not only are the politicians not debating, but the focus on consensus limits many of our other institutions and civil society. Alan Gingel, former head of the Office of National Assessment and the Lowy Institute has noted that the Australian think tank sector has not driven policy renewal in the security portfolio in the same way that it has for social and economic policy. Part of the explanation he says is bipartisanship. These costs to good policy are increasingly obvious as well to the general public. And through the polling by the Australia Institute, we've been able to find that Australians give failing grades to many of the key issues that have bipartisan support amongst our political elites. While the government is seen as competent at responding to natural disasters and terrorism, many of the long-term challenges such as China's rise, cyber security and stability in the South Pacific are all given failing grades. The fundamental assumption behind bipartisanship is effectively that elites are better at making these decisions than the general public and that they can do so without politics interfering in their decision making. However, I don't think this stands up. We in the West no longer believe in master economic planners. We recognize that there are simply too many factors in our domestic economy for one person to understand or organize. So why do we still wanna put our faith in master strategists who not only need to coordinate foreign and defense policies, but integrate economics, technology, sociology and geography as well? And if public ignorance really is the reason that we need a bipartisan approach, then bipartisanship is actually counterproductive to trying to address this. Thanks to the silence that this approach generates, security issues receive a lot less media and political and academic attention than many other policy areas. Indeed, 69% of Australian people feel that they receive too little information about the behavior of their defense force and about the fence issues in general. Indeed, even when there is plenty of goodwill as in relation to the defense force, the public often feel excluded from an understanding of those who serve in their name. I think a significant implication of this is that there is great potential for divergences to emerge from between the public and the political elites without clear mechanisms for resolving these. It's also a mistake, I'd argue, to assume the public need in depth and technical understanding in order to play a role in our international affairs. We accept that the public can shape and guide policies on taxation or healthcare without being economists or doctors. I would argue they can do the same in foreign policy. Academic studies have suggested that when brought into the democratic process, political opinion on foreign policy is best thought about like a thermostat. It helps to adjust and fine tune the policy settings. When grappling with today's big questions, how should we think about Chinese primacy in Asia? How do we enmesh with Southeast Asia? And what can we offer those suffering from climate change? It is political and moral judgments as much as anything technical which must strive our policy response. Allowing the public to say is sometimes dismissed by advocates of bipartisanship as a threat to policy continuity. But the ability of democratic societies to shift quickly to accommodate changing circumstances was recognized as far back as the 16th century. Indeed, it was Niccolò Machiavelli himself who argued that republics and democracies would have greater ability to quickly change through changes in warfare and thus likely to have greater vitality and more enduring success than authoritarian or monarchical regimes. No one decision-making can, nor can decision-making ever be free from politics. Studies of authoritarian societies have conclusively shown that even when leaders don't need to face re-election or worry about domestic polls, they still factor in domestic politics to their strategic policy decision-making. For this reason, the cause to keep politics out of it cannot be treated as either achievable or desirable. Bipartisanship does not keep politics out. It simply hides it from the public. The second argument for bipartisanship is the need for unity to implement policy. The politicians should put aside their divisions and focus on the greater good. Re-occurring Cold War fears of a fifth column embody this concern with internal disunity. While political disagreement over how to deal with health or education policies is not presumed to exacerbate the problems themselves, for some reason it is widely believed that squabbles or policy variety or variability within democracies places them in a disadvantage compared to the monolithic approaches of a Soviet Union or a modern day Russia or People's Republic of China. We sometimes hear the argument that bipartisanship is necessary so that politics will stop at the water's edge. That is, we can debate internally, but we must present a united front to outsiders. That might have been viable in 1812 when advocated by the US statesman Daniel Webster, but it makes little sense today in a world of instant global media communication. Today, governments in Moscow or Beijing now have access to the exact same news sources and social media that Australians in Melbourne and Brisbane have. The notion of politics stopping at the water's edge is therefore a relic of history at best. It is also not one that has been very faithfully advocated in many ways. As Dean Aschison, the US Secretary of State under President Truman, famously complained, quote, you cannot run this damn country under the Constitution any other way except by fixing the whole organization so it doesn't work the way it's supposed to work. Now, the way to do that is to say politics stops at the seaboard. Anyone who denies this postulate is a son of a bitch and a crook and not a true patriot. He goes on to say, now if people will swallow that, then you're off to the races. Bipartisanship will not fool the leadership of China into believing that Australia has a clear idea about how to proceed in the South China Sea. But it is already restricting the ability of our political leaders to devise, develop, and debate an approach that could sustain broad public support. Nor can we expect our political parties to compel the necessary support. While in the 20th century our major political parties were mass movements, today the combined membership of the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal Party, and the Nationals is less than 1% of the Australian population. The effect of bipartisanship's hollow promises of unity are therefore clear to see. Australia's longest military effort, Operation Slipper in Afghanistan, ran from 2001 to 2014. Despite consistent bipartisan support during this period, public opinion turned against the conflict after seven years of fighting and has remained negative. As scholars in Australia and the United States have shown, public support in wartime is tied to confidence in the strategy pursued rather than the casualties or length of the conflict. And since policy is likely to be less well thought through in a bipartisan environment, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Rather than earning public unity through explaining and advocating national policy, bipartisanship as it currently operates in Australia simply takes that unity for granted. The final argument for bipartisanship is that elite cooperation is required to protect those in uniform. The folkloric image of the Vietnam War of unwilling diggers overseas and angry crowds at home has left a deep fear of division and debate in the minds of many in our political and military establishments. As Labor's shadow foreign minister in 2012 said during the debate over the Iraq War, Labor is committed to the objective of bipartisanship on Iraq. In saying that, Labor is acutely conscious of the interests of our men and women in uniform and the searing, scarring experience of the Vietnam War. Yet though the Australian Defence Force is one of the institution's most concerned about the lack of bipartisanship, I would argue it has also been one of the institution's most clearly harmed by it. As the former SAS officer, Andrew Hastie complained, the biggest thing that was missing for six years under Labor was serious intellectual engagement with the soldiers on the ground about how best to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. Now, Hastie's motive here may be partisan, but there's enough truth in the line for it to sting. Even if public support is good, good strategy requires constantly evaluating the tasks and resources provided to our forces and regular public explanations for their sacrifices. As the former Chief of Army, Peter Lay, has put it, without an informed public debate, we are unlikely to adjust the way that we are fighting the war. This is a bad strategy. Yet as another soldier has shown at length, there have been more political and public attention on commemorating wars for 100 years ago than those the ADF is currently serving in. About the only time our nation's representatives pay sustained attention to the personnel in Afghanistan was when there were deaths. 41 Australians have died in Afghanistan overall. Each one received a condolence motion in the parliament and saw the Prime Minister and other senior politicians descend on their funerals. Like the kids of old, the ADF experienced during the Afghanistan War was of being seen, main criticised for their behaviour or as casualties of war, but not heard. Bipartisanship promises steady oversight and support, but this is not eventuated either. Kevin Rudd's 2009 Defence White Paper outlined significant new resources for the Department of Defence and the Australian Defence Force. Just 10 days later, it was scrapped. The Gillard government did the reverse. It made significant multi-billion dollar cuts to the Department of Defence in its first years before being forced to the opposition to peg defence spending to 2% of gross domestic product. The coalition's record here is only a little better. Now, it promoted this 2% target for GDP spending, but it has never provided any strategic rationale or connection to the cost of military equipment for this neat round number. Australia is now on to our 11th Defence Minister since the Howard government took office in 1996. There have been just five treasurers in that time. And while the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has had greater stability in its minister, it has also had to work within a budget that has halved effectively as a share of GDP since 1998. Australia's diplomatic budget has started to recover in recent years, yet it remains among the smallest in the OECD. It's also notable that the only political leaders who get to choose their portfolio, the deputy party leaders, have all studiously avoided defence and security portfolios. Keating, Costello and Swan all served as treasurer. Gillard, Howe and Albanese stayed with domestic portfolios. Only the current deputy of the Liberal Party, Ms. Julie Bishop, has seemingly bucked this trend. Though we must remember her first choice was treasurer. Putting all this together, a troubling picture emerges. One that goes, I think, some way to explaining why, as the world has changed, Australia's politics and our foreign and defence policy seemingly have not. The widespread demand for bipartisanship is actively impeding our ability to respond. Stringent bipartisanship weakens the very mechanisms that enable democracies to understand and improve their policy choices. It keeps decisions and information hidden from the public, reducing their willingness to pay the costs that security sometimes requires. In turn, without the right tools in hand or genuine domestic support at their back, bipartisan silence can never be the foundation those in uniform need to do their jobs and risk their lives on our behalf. This would be troubling at the best of times, but like Dickens, it may be the worst of times ahead. The next decade is likely to produce some of the most difficult and demanding strategic questions Australia has ever faced. So is there another way? No, I'm not against all bipartisanship. Indeed, I'm even wearing my bipartisan tie today. But bipartisanship must be the outcome of debates, not a process that prevents and preempts them. A return to partisan arguments has its obvious cost. At times, political parties will put their own interests before the nations. Politicians will champion for defence industry to be built in their electorate. Explicit debates over the merits and failures of our allies and partners could hurt important diplomatic relationships. But I would argue we already have many of these downsides, but with none of the benefits of using our parliament to articulate genuine differences and seek accountability about policy effectiveness. Indeed, I would argue these costs are actually preferable to our current unstudied silence and the occasional product differentiation that we get at election time. While partisan debate about defence policy is rare, two examples show that it can actually lead to better policy outcomes. In 2012-13, the Liberal Party made criticisms of cuts to the defence budget, complete with hyperbolic comparisons to the eve of World War II. Yet this led to the first real discussions that we had seen for defence spending in more than a decade, and a commitment by both parties to increase the overall levels of defence spending. In 2014-15, similarly, partisan arguments by the Labor Party and demands to build a future submarine fleet here in Australia, actually enabled a short public debate about the costs we were willing to pay and the benefits or costs of offshore purchases and what kind of submarines Australia actually needed. Indeed, even internal pressure by marginal seat holders within the coalition has led to an improved tender process for these submarines, one that gave Australia the leverage and forced international bidders to compete and offer better value for money. Now, not every partisan debate helps, but I think these examples show that it does not automatically make policy worse. If they did, democracies would not have survived as long or as successfully as they have. Yet the history of the 20th century is inexplicable, unless we shift from thinking of democratic debate as being an impediment to national security and recognising it as a necessity. The divided, argumentative nature of democracies tests policy ideas for their weaknesses before they are implemented. Similarly, when mistakes are inevitably made, partisan debate helps to identify these errors and hold accountable and seek change. Leaders who don't adjust can be removed and replace the elections rather than continuing ineffective strategies. Democracies can therefore weed out unfounded, mendacious or self-serving foreign policy arguments in ways that insular or restrictive systems struggle to. In the absence of political debate, the Australian national security community has even been forced to create its own mechanisms to test and debate ideas. In 2001, the Howard government set up the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in order to provide contestable advice and another dialogue partner in the defence field. In 2015, the Department of Defence agreed to the recommendation of the first principle review to set up a contestability unit. There is also a growing use of war games, scenarios, simulations and red teaming by the military and public service in recognition of the need to corroborate and test advice to government. This satisfaction with how Australia pursues its security in the 21st century has led to numerous suggestions for major structural reform to our system of government. These include giving parliament authorization over the use of force, creating vast new security bureaucracies, national security legislation monitors and greater judicial oversight for intelligence operations. All of these ideas have some logic to them but before we take potentially radical steps to overhaul how and reform how our system works, I think it is worthwhile first allowing our adversarial and democratic structures to operate as they were designed to. Indeed, many of these proposals, such as giving parliament more power, simply won't work while the requirements for bipartisanship enforce discipline. Rather than having officials with a formal title of leader of the opposition declare that keeping our people safe is above politics, it is precisely more politics that we need. In conclusion, Australia's world changed on 11, 9, 2001. It may have changed again on 9, 11, 2016. The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States threatens many longstanding assumptions about American leadership, values and reliability. While I think there are strong arguments for retaining the alliance, this is precisely the moment for Australia's leaders to publicly discuss why and how the alliance matters and to persuade the public to their case. There is a pressing need for us to think through exactly what kind of alliance is valuable to us and what ways Australia is valuable to the United States and what alternatives we could turn to if part or all of the alliance framework is changed. Closer to home and along with a growing list of challenges from territorial disputes to unstable states and terrorism, the strategic and political order of our region is shifting. Finding an enduring and secure place for Australia will require laying out and testing our core assumptions about how we achieve the nation's security and influence. It also requires rebuilding the foundations of public unity around the role that we as a country can and should play in Asia's new order. Reflexive, unquestioning bipartisanship cannot do this. Only agreement as an outcome of genuine national debate can provide the mix of firmness and flexibility that we need in the future. Ironically, therefore, the hardest step for Australia's security may be to encourage what seems most natural to our politicians. Let them argue, let them debate. Let them take sides and differ. Make them test their assumptions and engage the public. We in the media, the public, and academia have a responsibility, too, to accept disagreement as natural and, indeed, helpful for dealing with these uncertain times. Only through a return to a fundamentally democratic approach to our security can we have the confidence that we as a country have the best possible ideas and practices for navigating the challenges and changes of this turbulent century. As T.B. Miller, the founder of the Strategic and Defense Study Center, concluded in his 1965 classic work, Australia's Defense, let us not be frightened to have a public discussion on defense. It is the public, after all, that needs to be defended. So, I'm here for an argument, and I hope you now are, too. Thank you very much.