 I'm going to wish you good morning. I'm Rory Medcalf, the head of the National Security College. And it's a real pleasure to welcome you all here to our conference today and tomorrow on Women in National Security. So particularly welcome to the many distinguished participants and visitors. We have a number of heads of mission from various embassies and high commissions around Canberra. We have distinguished international visitors as well. And of course, leaders of the Australian National Security community joining us at various stages. Too many to name, but we will come to all of our distinguished visitors as the day proceeds. First up, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and pay respect to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. Now, it's a real privilege for the National Security College to host this conference over the next two days because a conference on this theme, on this topic, and indeed on this scale has not been held before in Australia. And so I congratulate my colleagues, my many colleagues who've put the event together, particularly Marina Tervas, Chris Farnham, and the team for the tireless work in bringing this event together. I also want to acknowledge before we start our conference supporters, some of whose names you'll see displayed around the room, but including the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Defence Science and Technology Group, tireless, KPMG, the US Embassy, and the ACT government, as well as our media partners, Fairfax, without whose commitment and event of this caliber wouldn't be possible. Now, in a few moments, I'll be introducing the Acting Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, Professor Margaret Harding. But before I do, just a few framing thoughts about the event over the next two days. The National Security College is an institution that is quite unique, and I think that has given us particular scope to bring this event together. If this is the first that you've heard of the National Security College, I assure you it won't be the last. We've been around for about seven years now, and increasingly our work is extending beyond our very core business of executive training and education to really engagement with the policy community on key issues. So the college is at one level a specialist graduate studies school within the ANU, but we do more than this. We're unique in that the college is a partnership between ANU and the Australian Commonwealth. And so under that framework, we teach academic courses, very strong graduate studies program, we have a professional development and executive development program, aimed at improving the quality of policy and practice right across the full spectrum of national security issues, and under the third pillar of the college, we engage with policy makers and conduct, I guess, convene dialogues on thinking about long-term security futures for Australia's. In doing all of this, we seek to strengthen and rely on networks of cooperation between practitioners and non-government experts to contribute to a new generation of strategic analysts and to provide outreach to business and the wider community. And we work in this capacity really as a vanguard for the Australian National University in its broader mission of engagement with the national interest of engagement with policy. If any of you have followed the strategic vision that the Vice Chancellor, Brian Schmidt, has introduced for the university, this is really an articulation of a core mission of ANU to make a difference to Australia and the national interest. And so in conducting this work in an environment of great trust among policy makers, among academics, among the broader community and industry, because Australia has finite resources that we need to marshal for the national interest. It's really pleasing that the college can give due consideration to an agenda that often does not get sufficient attention in the mainstream in the national security community. Now this is at one level about inclusivity and about equity, values if you like, but it's also about hard national interest. It's about national security. So during this conference we'll study the advantages to government, to academia, to business, and to society of full and comprehensive female participation and leadership and the means by which together we can enhance the role and the work of women in national security decision-making and practice. And it's a perfect moment for the Minister for Defence to have joined us at the conference. Welcome, Minister. I'll share, I guess, a brief experience, a brief conversation that I recall from the consultation some years ago now for the Defence White Paper, a conversation I had as part of the advisory panel to that paper with Elizabeth Broderick, then Sex Discrimination Commissioner. And she had a very simple, very powerful, a very compelling message, which was that much greater involvement by women in decision-making and leadership in national security was not a so-called soft issue, a soft security issue. This was about really competitive advantage for Australia as a nation in a competitive international security environment. And that's a message I think we will all benefit from exploring further over the next few days. Now, of course, we should acknowledge progress when it occurs. And so it's very fitting that Australia currently has its first female Minister for Defence and its first female Minister for Foreign Affairs. And I think that the message, the signal that this sends to the region, to Australia and the world, as well as the impact on quality of policy-making is really, really quite profound. Now, of course, beyond the political level, the fact that the Australian Defence Force and other policy and security agencies are lifting their game in gender diversity is a good thing. And of course, those agencies include the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and I'm really delighted that later, the Secretary of Defense, Francis Adamson, will be joining us speaking at the conference as well. First female Secretary of DEFAT, but I'm sure you're all aware of that. But of course, within the much wider national security space, Australia's not there yet, not nearly. People too often think about the gender-related aspects of national security as an afterthought rather than part of the mainstream of policy-making. Similarly, as we will explore in this conference, much of the narrative around women, peace and security has tended to focus on women as victims. Today and tomorrow, we will also focus on women as stakeholders and as actors in national security and on increasing participation in decision-making and outcomes, the ways the ends the means. The ends the ways and the means my colleagues in strategic studies will correct me. We will hear shortly from the Defence Minister, from Senator Maurice Payne, also from Shadow Foreign Minister, Penny Wong. We have presentations from those with lived experience of the role of women in armed conflict, as well as from policy makers, from experts and from media voices. I encourage you all to stick around for the final session tomorrow. We will hear about the narrative. And of course, in this post-truth environment, narrative is more important than ever and really shaping and managing the narrative to reflect the reality of the role of women in national security is absolutely vital. I'm also pleased and honoured to be welcoming international visitors, including Dr. Surabi, the Deputy Chair to the High Peace Council of Afghanistan. Welcome to you, Dr. Surabi, Professor Valerie Hudson and others from the United States and of course, voices from the region, the South Pacific and beyond. Now, before I introduce the Acting Vice-Chancellor, Professor Harding, I'd encourage you all to please put your phones on silent. We are on the public record today. We want you to tweet frenetically, but please, please no interruptions from your phones. Ladies and gentlemen, I now have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Margaret Harding, the Acting Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University and Professor Harding will be introducing the minister. A brief word about Professor Harding, a distinguished chemist, a renowned educator, a highly respected and highly published academic with, I believe, more than 100 research articles. Professor Harding has been awarded the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, René and Biota Medals and held Australian Academy of Science Fellowships in France, the United Kingdom and the United States. And of course, among her many duties in her regular role as Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research, Professor Harding is responsible for enhancing the already first rate reputation and research output of Australia's finest university and one of the world's top 20 universities. She also leads ANU's engagement with government, with international research alliances and external partnerships. All matters that are very dear to us at the National Security College. Colleagues and friends, please join me in welcoming Professor Harding. Thank you, Professor Medcarve. Minister Payne, members of the Diplomatic Corps, ladies and gentlemen, it's my very great pleasure to warmly welcome you here today to this opening of the Women and National Security Conference. Before I begin, let me first acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today and pay my respects to the elders of the Nanawa people, past and present. It's great to see so many sectors, so many faces, so many people who have joined us here at really an incredibly important discussion that will be held over the next two days. And the ANU as the National University with a remit to lead, partner and work with government to inform and challenge what policy should be driven in a very important area like gender equity. This is absolutely aligned with our mission and a great opportunity that I challenge you to participate in actively over the next two days in defining and engaging in the debate on what we need to do regarding women in the workforce and particularly in the security workforce. The Australian National Security Community as Professor Medcarve has indicated has some fantastic role models in this area and we're delighted that Minister Payne has been able to come from clearly, I'm sure a hectic day of activities in Parliament to step down and I think that signals really the importance of this issue and we're delighted to have you here this morning. Minister Payne, as I'm sure you're all aware, entered the Senate in 1997. She has served as chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade and as chair of the Human Rights Subcommittee. In September 2013, Senator Payne was appointed as Minister for Human Services in the newly elected coalition government and in September 2015, she was promoted to cabinet as the Minister for Defence. Please join with me in welcoming Senator the Honourable Maurice Payne. Thank you Margaret and good morning ladies and gentlemen. Let me also begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Ngunnawal people and pay my respects to their elders past and present. We have very many distinguished guests here with us today and indeed the conference has a stellar line-up of distinguished panellists and speakers, excluding myself of course, but I would also like to particularly acknowledge Professor Margaret Harding, the Acting Vice-Chancellor and the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research at ANU and Professor Rory Medcalf, the head of the National Security College. Excellencies, distinguished guests, one and all, the members of the ADF who are here and very many other guests are arrayed in front of me. I am very pleased to be here at ANU's National Security College today and thank both Margaret and Rory for their introductions and for their very warm welcome and the opportunity to speak. The college is indeed one of our premier defence and strategic institutions and I'm sure that this week's Women and National Security Conference has meant that reputation already strongly held. I must apologise in advance, one of the byproducts of this job is that you tend to speak and run. Usually it's to go back to Parliament, on this occasion it's to attend a cabinet meeting this morning and there are no excuses for lateness in that context. Excuse me. Yesterday I was in North Queensland dealing with some of the aftermath of a tropical cyclone Debbie, which will be familiar to many of you, only in Australia would a tropical cyclone be called Debbie. But in the context of this conference I had the very great pleasure of meeting a Lieutenant Colonel, Jen Harris, who is a civil engineer by background and by practice who was leading a particularly impressive team of men and women in their support work in the wake of tropical cyclone Debbie. Let me think in terms of today's conference that no matter where I go, no matter what I do in this job, I meet the most extraordinary women working in National Security and I'm extraordinarily grateful for the honour and the opportunity of this role enabling me to do that and extraordinarily proud of those women particularly with whom I work in the ADF. I wanted to begin with a very broad overview of Australia's current operations and our security environment. Some of you will know that President Ghani, Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan is in Australia today and that is of course one of the missions to which we are currently contributing 270 troops in a NATO-led train, advise and assist mission. But across the world we have over 2,000 personnel deployed on over 30 operations from Afghanistan to Egypt to Sudan and as I said as we speak we have more than 1,600 personnel engaged in cleanups in Queensland following cyclone Debbie. Our highest rate of operational tempo though continues to be focused across the Middle East. When I meet President Ghani this afternoon I look forward to discussing further with him Australia's role in Afghanistan as a follow-up to a visit I made to Kabul last year. Additionally in Iraq and Syria Australia continues to make one of the largest contributions to the counter-Desh campaign. Desh has now lost more than 60% of the territory it once held in Iraq and more than a third of the territory it once controlled in Syria. However the Iraqi security forces and the coalition continue to meet with very fierce resistance from Desh fighters who are determined to fight to the end in their last stronghold in Iraq. As the fighting and the complexity of the fight escalates in Mosul. We are cognisant of the threats also posed by the links between Desh in Iraq and Syria and in our region in Southeast Asia and this government is working closely with our partners in the region to address this threat including across Indonesia and Malaysia and the Philippines. Ladies and gentlemen a secure and stable Indo-Pacific underpins our economic security. In this region we have threats that we face from a number of aspects. Our stability is threatened by North Korea's continuing reckless and destabilizing behavior. The ongoing pursuit of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs is a clear breach of the UN Security Council resolutions and further threatens regional peace and stability. We have consistently called upon North Korea to cease its provocative behavior to abandon its nuclear and missile programs and to engage constructively with the international community. We do believe that with calls such as our own China also has a central role to play in contributing to the peace and stability of North Asia and the Indo-Pacific including with North Korea. It is important for regional stability that we all play our part. We, Australia, are committed to working with our international partners and allies to ensure a stable region and a rules-based global order. With this in mind, it is very important that we're able to work effectively with our partners and to ensure that we have operational effectiveness. To today's topic though, if I may, women, peace and security and in this case I wanted to speak for a few moments about the National Action Plan. For the Australian Defence Force, addressing equality is about improving both our capability and our operational effectiveness. The landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325 adopted in 2000 acknowledged that men and women experience conflict differently. It addressed the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, humanitarian response and peace building and urged all actors to increase the participation of women and incorporate gender perspectives in all peace and security efforts. Since that resolution of 2007 further, additional UN Security Council resolutions have been adopted providing effectively an international framework that underpins the women, peace and security agenda. Women, peace and security is a community, a state and a global issue. Its implementation is a whole of government priority and a whole of society undertaking. Australia is a strong and consistent advocate for the UN's women, peace and security agenda. In September of last year I moderated the session on women, peace and security at the UN Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial Meeting in London. I spoke there about the importance of increasing the number of women leading and serving in peace and security operations and supporting inclusive peace processes. We know that armed conflicts and disasters for that matter contain elements that are inherently gendered. They affect men and women, boys and girls in different ways. Differences include the vulnerability to violence and deprivation and this vulnerability impacts different sectors of the community in different ways. There are gendered differences in risks and threats and in capabilities in coping strategies and opportunities. So effective crisis responses will reflect a sound understanding of these differences in policy, plans, training and operations. The women, peace and security agenda encourages action against four pillars widely known as the four P's. Participation of women at all levels of decision making in peace operations and peace processes. The protection of women, including from sexual and gender based violence. The prevention of violence against women through the promotion of rights, accountability and law enforcement and perspective, incorporating agenda perspective into policy, planning and operations. On International Women's Day in 2012 Australia adopted a six year national action plan on women, peace and security. The plan demonstrates Australia's commitment to implementing the women, peace and security agenda. It provides a clear whole of government framework and a joined up approach to strategies and actions. Defence itself has 17 areas of responsibility under the plan. Our actions inform everything that we do. From our international engagement to exercises to developing operational capabilities of the ADF. As I said a moment ago the women, peace and security agenda is not just about equality it's about improving our capability and operational effectiveness. Recent operational experience in Afghanistan in disaster response operations and on exercises demonstrates the importance of integrating gender perspectives as part of military operations. Through the test bed of exercises such as the very large talisman sabre we have shown that female military personnel may be in a better position than their male colleagues to engage with local women to identify potential threats to conduct searches, to identify community needs. Chief of Army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell recently commented that in Afghanistan female soldiers were deployed deliberately to balance the all male military companies. There was much more engagement in the villages. He observed that there would be no engagement or the most cursory engagement otherwise. In 2015 the ADF appointed a senior gender advisor to the new security force assistance mission in Afghanistan. The role was established to ensure the safe and meaningful participation of Afghan women within the Afghan National Defence Security Forces placing women at the front line of addressing Afghanistan's security challenges. Colonel Amanda Fielding was the first of four ADF female officers to take on this role. During her tenure Colonel Fielding established the inaugural Afghan Women in Security Advisory Committee, a strategic politically engaged committee that is ensuring the longevity of current efforts for women's integration and empowerment within the security architecture. Colonel Fielding is currently responsible for integrating women, peace and security into ADF operational planning. And I know that she'll be speaking here on the subject of a practitioner's perspective from the field. This is a subject in which she is eminently well qualified. In November last year Major Tina Stelzer was deployed as the first military gender advisor to the UN mission in South Sudan. Major Stelzer is assisting local women to reduce the high levels of sexual and gender-based violence by training local forces on the effect of violence and inequality on the peace and stability of the country. The UN Global Study on the Implementation of Resolution 1325 highlighted that the principles of gender equality in humanitarian assistance are not limited to conflict affected settings but equally relevant to natural disasters. In February last year, Tropical Cyclone Winston hit Fiji it devastated many parts of that country, resulted in deaths and affected some 350,000 people. Australia was quick to participate in the assistance to Fiji in the immediate aftermath and the ADF deployed for Operation Fiji Assist. This was the first ADF operation to fully incorporate a gender perspective into operational planning and conduct. Operation Fiji Assist included two gender advisors in its personnel. Commander Jackie Swinton embarked on HMAS Canberra and provided advice to the Commander of the Joint Task Force to implement a gender perspective in all operational activities. At the same time, Major Joe Richards was on the ground in Suva representing Defence at the UN Protection and Gender-Based Violence Meetings. Major Richards identified and engaged local women's networks to coordinate and establish appropriate relief activities. Major Richards was part of the team at the UN HACS, sourced from the UN Population Fund to the women of Tavuni Island, one of the worst affected islands. Based on the valuable and critical contribution these gender advisors made during Fiji Assist, the Chief of Joint Operations Ruer Admiral David Johnston within the Department of Defence has directed that at least one gender advisor must be deployed on all future humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations. In the context of the Department of Defence, Defence is now developing our first gender advisor training course which will be piloted this year. In the context of the opportunity to speak here today, ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to be able to announce the establishment of the Minister for Defence visiting fellowship in women, peace and security. The fellowship will be established at the University of New South Wales and I have agreed that to mark the 50th anniversary of the collaboration between the University and Defence by creating this fellowship is an appropriate measure and I thank him very much for this honour. I have consulted with the Secretary of the Department of Defence and the Chief of the Defence Force and together with the Rector we will advertise the application and selection processes in due course. The fellowship will be open to defence civilian and military candidates who will be visiting fellowship is to transfer practical and research knowledge of women, peace and security experiences between Defence and the academy. This is a pragmatic whole of enterprise approach. I intend for this fellowship to fast track the incorporation of Defence's learning from various deployments into the academy's civil and military education and training programs and to transfer the latest research and expertise faculty back into defence for refinements into deployable capability. The objective is to make the whole of defence approach to women, peace and security a business as usual capability enhancer. Let's be clear a women, peace and security perspective built into our operations is a capability enhancer. This is more than another important milestone. It is a sustainable progress. Building on these experiences in mid 2017 Australia will launch its first comprehensive study into the contributions of Australian uniformed and civilian female personnel in peace and security operations. This study is being undertaken by the University of Queensland in partnership with the Australian Civil Military Centre. Drawing on the operational experiences of 350 women and men from the ADF of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Defence Public Service between 1988 and 2014 the study will provide insights into how women contribute to the effectiveness of these operations and how we can better support their participation in future missions. I look forward to seeing the outcomes of that study as well. Ladies and gentlemen, Australia has taken a lead role globally in implementing the women, peace and security agenda. We have had opportunity to share the lessons we have learned and the solutions we have adopted with our regional partners as well as being able to learn from their experiences. In February of last year the Prime Minister and I launched the Defence White Paper setting out a comprehensive long-term plan for the security of the Australian people. For the first time we have prioritised and funded international engagement as a core defence function. As defence increases its investment in international engagement over the coming years prioritising the women, peace and security agenda presents a real opportunity to deepen cooperation and build stronger relationships with our international partners and we are doing this now through the Defence Cooperation Programme. In December last year Australia hosted a delegation of Indonesian TNI military officers seven out of eight of them women for a seminar and workshop on women, peace and security. These Australian and Indonesian soldiers worked side by side sharing their experiences and their unique perspectives about military deployments. The outcomes of this seminar have contributed to planning for the ASEAN Defence Ministers Plus expert working group on peacekeeping operations. As co-chair of this expert working group with Indonesia, Australia will use its leadership to ensure that women, peace and security is firmly on the agenda for ADMM+. We're also working with Papua New Guinea through our long-running and largest Defence Cooperation Programme to increase female participation. Some of those initiatives include embedding an ADF Lieutenant Colonel into the PNG Defence Force personnel branch to help develop policies to recruit and retain female soldiers. Upgrading the landing craft heavy vessel Lucky Kamu to simply include an accommodation model that enables increased participation of women on maritime patrols. And in 2017 we now have the first female Papua New Guinea Defence Force member at the Royal Military College here in Canberra. In all of our work, we also have to be careful that we don't artificially create barriers to women's participation. Let me give you an example. The government is very proud of the Naval Shipbuilding Programme. And an important element of that program is the other replacement patrol votes for 12 of our Pacific Island neighbours. The Guardian Class Patrol Boats are part of the Pacific Maritime Security Programme building both capacity and capability across the Pacific. During consultations with our Pacific Island neighbour countries on the design of the new patrol boats though, we learnt that it was difficult for some countries to send women to sea because of the negotiated accommodation and ablutions layout. The layout makes it unnecessarily difficult to integrate women into the Navy's and police maritime wings of some national cultures. By identifying this in the planning phase, Defence has been able to include the requirement for separate accommodation for men and women in the design of these Guardian Class Patrol Boats. This relatively simple redesign removed a barrier to women's participation and it will help Pacific Island nations harness the capability of the full workforce available to them. I'm pleased to know that we have national security policy makers and practitioners from Palau, from Tvalu, from Solomon Islands, from Kiribati, from Fiji, Tonga, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste with us here today. I welcome the opportunity for all participants to share experiences and to discuss how we can work with you to strengthen the participation of women in all aspects of our national security capabilities. I'll turn briefly to the culture that defines us. While the women, peace and security agenda focuses on Australia's contribution to international missions, gender equality at home is equally important. 51% of our nation's human capital is women. If we're not fully able to access that 51% of the population we're not recruiting the best possible people for the Australian Defence Force or for the Australian Defence Public Service. In March 2012, Defence set out a unified statement of cultural intent and supporting strategy in pathway to change. It was clear at the time from multiple studies and reviews and experiences that Defence did not meet consistently the high standards expected of it but we needed a clear framework to accelerate cultural change. Pathway to change acknowledged that noticeable gaps remained in the representation of women across senior leadership positions and this was not supportive of the generation and sustainment of a representative and inclusive organisation. Pathway to change acknowledged that gender equality is an issue that can impede organisational capability and reliance by not maximising the potential of female ADF members and public servants and the potential of half of the Australian labour force. I strongly believe that Defence's continued capability and success relies in large part on addressing these issues including cultivating a diverse workforce with an inclusive culture. Diversity brings tangible benefits to organisations such as attracting the best talent from the entire recruiting pool increasing our own human capital increasing resilience more accurately reflecting the community we defend and bringing a diversity of thought to decision making and practice. I am very proud to say as I indicated at the beginning of my remarks that women in Defence are making extraordinary contributions across the range of military planning policy and operations in support of our national interest. The number of women at the Australian Defence Force Academy has increased. Australian service women now comprise 16.1% of the permanent full-time ADF. At the moment, 266 women are serving overseas on ADF operations representing about 14% of the total deployed force. We have 82 women in senior officer positions colonel equivalent and above compared to 48 in February of 2012. Progress has been made but there is more to do. As of the 1st of January 2016 Defence began direct recruitment into all combat employment categories. With the removal of restrictions from combat roles, women can pursue their career in the ADF based solely on considerations of their preferences or interests, their intellect and their physical capacity. That's not just another milestone. It's a foundational reform. For the benefit of our nation to ensure that we have an ADF that is broadly representative of our society, it is crucial that we attract, retain and nurture our talent. All of the talent available to us. The result is that we are growing the future force with the broader perspectives and leadership skills that both men and women bring to our national challenges. Our Defence civilians are also an important repository of new and experienced women. Women make up over 41% of Defence public servants and more than 40% of the Defence graduate program is now female. At the senior leadership level we are also seeing real progress and I acknowledge the efforts of the senior leadership of Defence and Secretary and the CDF in large part in relation to these achievements. The recent recruitment rounds for the senior executive service 43% of the appointments were female compared to around 30% in the existing senior executive cohort. All of these women are making excellent contributions to our country and our outstanding role models for other women. We are also in the process of increasing the number of women on internal senior committees and in alignment with the coalition government's stated policy as members and is changing. The challenge is to make our success sustainable so that we can continue to build on the foundations that we have laid and continue to see female participation increase in our ADF in the APS and in senior leadership positions. On the 8th of March on International Women's Day this year the Prime Minister and I spent the morning at the Australian Defence Force Academy to acknowledge, celebrate the success of the Australian Defence Force and at the Academy. As the Prime Minister said during his speech that morning the opportunities that have opened up for women in the ADF across the recent years are extraordinary. Those young men and women currently at ADF will one day lead our Australian Defence Force. From the outset of their careers they will have a different perspective of women's role in national security from the generations that have preceded them. That's why it's essential that we are consistent and persistent advocates for gender equality, for change both at home and abroad. Gender equality is a precondition for advancing development and reducing poverty which will in turn underpin regional stability and prosperity. There is an appetite for engagement on gender initiatives and many countries we work with are doing excellent work in this area. By building capacity and understanding the gender considerations in each country with which we partner we are better prepared to respond during a crisis, a disaster or an operation. But we can't expect to succeed or achieve our best as a nation without greater participation of women at all levels It's been very interesting preparing my remarks for today's presentation. In fact, I've had the opportunity to reflect on 20 years of broad involvement in the parliamentary aspects of the national security debate and policy development and to reflect on the changed world in that time. Rory Medcalf in his opening remarks referred to the purpose of this conference in enhancing the role and work of women in national security. It's an excellent aim for the conference. The women I work with across the world female defence ministers in a number of nations the women I work with in the ADF we will all work to lead the way with organisations such as the college and to make sure that the outcomes are as positive as they can be. Thank you very much. Thank you Minister for your opening remarks today. I think you would all agree the minister's overview of the barriers, the challenges but the enormous enthusiasm the optimism, the great progress we have made really sets the scene and the tone for the conference over the next two days. We are delighted to hear of the commitment of the government the progress we have been made the announcement you've made this morning of the new fellowship from the ministry for women in peace and security a really important and tangible initiative and to hear that you will work with practitioners and researchers and do the studies that will provide the evidence that will help us all in this important sector. On behalf of the Australian National University I'd like to thank you again for taking time out. We will not make you late to get back to cabinet thank you again for your ongoing commitment to the National Security College and the ANU Please join with me in thanking again Minister Payne. And just to keep things moving along because we've got a very full program today I'd like now to introduce the next part of the program which in fact is a video message from another of the senior leadership team of the Australian National University Professor Marnie Hughes Warrington the Deputy Vice-Chancellor academic at ANU Professor Hughes Warrington couldn't be here today I know that she was very very keen to be involved very supportive of what we do at the college works closely with us and indeed also with Professor Harding really in developing our research our academic engagement and outreach so please I'll clear the stage for a few moments for Professor Warrington's remarks and then we'll open the first formal discussion session of the conference thank you Hi I'm Marnie Hughes Warrington I'm Deputy Vice-Chancellor academic here at the Australian National University and it's my great pleasure to welcome you all to this inaugural Women in National Security Conference. You know it's just over a year since Rory Metcalf gave his speech called Towards a New National Security and in that speech Rory commented and commended really the quality of the national security community in Australia noting that the quality of the practitioners is extremely high and that we're increasingly seeing evidence of people joining the dots between those communities to produce a fairer and safer Australia well look Rory commented on those strengths but he also noted that we live in very fragile and uncertain times and if anything the fragility and uncertainty has increased since that speech last year in thinking about that fragility and uncertainty Rory identified a number of factors he noted that Australia for a long time has always seen participating actively in the region and beyond we're famous for being a middle power we participate in the region to seek solutions and peace and security beyond our own borders but that means that both globally and regionally we have a set of entanglements and we have to think about those relationships now more than ever but he also noted a number of domestic things that we need to think about technological disruption changing climate changes in community services consumer services the way in which we relate to one another and of course the changing demographics of Australia all of these things show us that we have to think about national security in a really comprehensive way now as a philosopher I always thought that Wittgenstein's thought that there's nothing more puzzling than actually the way we look at things as a really good guide for thinking about this the challenges of national security are really that it's so pervasive that we have to think about it from lots of different angles and that we really need to bring the best of our community to thinking about those problems hence the need for this inaugural conference focusing on women and national security if we're going to think about national security and see improvements and more safety and transparency for our community we need women to be really involved in those solutions probably much more than they have been in the past that means different ways of thinking about women participating in national security and education is a large part of that solution we need comprehensive educational solutions for a comprehensive problem think for instance of the different pathways that we could be providing women into national security practitioner roles and also leadership roles there will be women who may need retraining they may have excellent backgrounds for instance in policy and in law but may seek the technical skills that help them understand new frontiers of cyber security we need to think about how it is to encourage women into leadership positions and to speak up in those leadership positions to make sure the diversity of our ways of thinking about national security really come to the fore we need to think about reaching more of Australia in the way that we educate through national security and that means thinking about new modalities of teaching and education not just face to face teaching but taking advantage of that digital disruption that Rory talked about to achieve much more comprehensive discussion and participation in how we think about solutions all of these things really fill me with hope but it really requires all of us to bring our best and that's why I'm particularly excited to see the range of speakers at this conference I can see women from great leadership backgrounds from a variety of different sectors coming to share their ideas and of course I'm glad to see that there will be a mixed audience to make sure that those ideas are picked up and put into practice I'm extremely proud of the role that has played in supporting this conference and I wish you all the best for your discussions and I look forward to seeing what the outcomes could be as we move towards a new national security thank you it's nice to have a video message that's so compelling we actually applaud it I think that's a great sign of the enthusiasm and the seriousness with which the Australian National University approaches the content of the conference and of course not only I should add who is one of a great friend of the college and supporter of what we do but one of a number of leaders at the university including I'll note Professor Eleanor Huntington who's here with us at the college as well Dean of the conference as well Dean of Engineering and Computer Science who will take the conversation forward tomorrow but look I'll now hand over to my colleague Marina Tservas Marina is the Senior Executive Advisor for Policy Engagement at the National Security College seconded to the college from the department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and with an extensive I should say expensive but extensive career not only in PM&C and the core of the national security community but also in the department of Foreign Affairs and Trade background and international law and really wide experience and it's been a real pleasure to work with Marina for the past two years on really the national security colleges role as a partner in policy conversations and of course Marina is very much the convener of the conference today so Marina I'm going to hand to you to introduce our keynote speaker thank you Good morning I'm delighted to welcome Professor Valerie Hudson the inaugural Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the ANU as those of you who have read her bio article that was in the Sydney Morning Herald and Fairfax Press on the weekend would know Valerie is very much an expert on the subject at hand Valerie showed in the groundbreaking book that she co-authored called Sex and World Peace that the very best predictor of a state's peacefulness is not its level of wealth its level of democracy or its ethno-religious identity it is how well women are treated States with great agenda equality are more likely to be democratic, stable and prosperous and you'll hear more about that from Valerie but I wanted to digress briefly with Valerie's consent on how I track down Valerie it was actually on the 3rd of December 2015 I was watching Late Line and Gloria Steinem was being interviewed on a suite of things from progress since the 60s the television series Mad Men and women's treatment by ISIS and she made the very interesting observation that foreign policy and the women's movement tend to be treated separately and the women's issues in a silo whereas they are very much connected I thought right on that's exactly why we need this conference so I emailed Gloria Steinem and asked her to come and speak on this conference now when I tell that story I normally get one of two reactions the first is who is Gloria Steinem the second is did you really do that I did and her office very politely advised that she couldn't participate but they recommended Valerie to me who Gloria had in fact cited during her Late Line interview so as you would know is the George H.W. Bush chair in the Department of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service she is also the Program Director on Women, Peace and Security and is with the ANU for six months in the inaugural full right distinguished chair position she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the expert group on the United Nations Data 2 Initiative she was named by Foreign Policy Magazine one of the top 100 global thinkers and her book that I've just mentioned Sex and World Peace was on Gloria Steinem's Must Read List so without any further ado and just very quickly before I introduce Valerie I also wanted to thank the Embassy of the United States for their financial support towards this conference and also as sponsors of this session and after Valerie's address just to remind people that we have 10 to 15 minutes of Q&A time thank you I'm absolutely delighted to be here I'm grateful to the National Security College for their invitation I'm grateful for Marina and her get it doneness in terms of reaching out and finding me I'm grateful also to ANU more broadly for sponsoring this full right they brought me here to Australia and may I simply say boy, advanced Australia fair in terms of women peace and security what an amazing sight to see so many people so energized to hear Minister Payne talk so forthrightly and with such passion about these issues well let me just say that as an American given what we've been through over the last few months this is amazing and so I come to you as an American who is very interested in women peace and security and yet we are coming off of an election which saw a huge change in America's attention to these issues we had a choice between a candidate who in essence was a godmother of women peace and security and it's foremost champion during her time as Secretary of State to and a candidate that I don't believe probably would recognize the term women peace and security so we Americans are struggling with this I will talk more about that in the next panel but it is also possible that with Christina Asquith of the Fuller Project we might take the charitable view and suggest in the end insiders fear not so much an anti-women agenda inside the White House but rather a lack of interest or even recognition that women's issues are important so we in the States are back to women peace and security 101 making those arguments from square one again in order that we may educate and dispel any ignorance about the importance of these issues and so my talk today is kind of women peace and security 101 all of you in this audience will be familiar with the research that I'm presenting the associations that have been found however I think it's important that we say them again if we could lose that vision in the United States so quickly it's I think incumbent upon Australia which has been a leader in women peace and security to make sure that these sort of foundational matters are well understood so let's talk about why women's issues are so important policy and national security a recent quote just last month by Ambassador Choudhury former under secretary general and high representative of the UN is a good case in point he said we should remember that without peace development is impossible without development peace is not achievable but without women neither peace nor development is possible this is not a new stance by the United Nations as you know harkening all the way back to UN SCR 1325 and before this has been recognized for example we have Kofi Annan over 10 years ago saying the world is starting to grasp that no policy is more effective in promoting development health and education than the empowerment of women and girls that was well known even a year ago but he went further and said I would venture that no policy is more important in preventing conflict or in achieving reconciliation after a conflict has ended and one of my favorite quotes is from Don Steinberg who was former deputy administrator of USAID and now president CEO of world learning who said compare those societies that respect women and those which don't who's trafficking and weapons and drugs harboring terrorists and starting pandemics whose problems require US troops on the ground there's a one to one correspondence don't tell me there's no relationship between national security and the empowerment of women so let's now go to the research literature and ask if these inspirational quotes have anything behind them or whether this is simply some sort of politically correct babble that we've all assimilated let's turn to several dimensions of security and talk about the findings there let's first look at the dimension of food security what we've discovered is that women actually produce most of the food in the world in sub-saharan Africa women perform 80% of agricultural labor 50% worldwide but worldwide in terms of arable land holdings women only own about 2% of prime farmland even though children's caloric intake is highly correlated with women's property rights the FAO calculates that if women farmers were given the same assistance as male farmers malnutrition would drop 17% globally just by that one intervention we also know that remuneration for cash crops is very gendered it's given to the men who own the land however world bank studies have shown that about 95% of a woman's earnings go to her family while only 40 to 60% of a man's earnings typically go to his family furthermore women in a sense have a triple day processing and cooking food finding fuel affordable water on top of agricultural labor as well as time spent in child care in a sense one of the greatest poverty of women in developing world is time poverty although I would suspect that many in this room would suggest that time poverty also afflicts those in the developed world another statistic that suggests that food security is gendered is that male malnourished children are female children and 70% of the world's hungry are female in many societies as you know women and girl children may be expected to eat last and then in many agricultural societies women are responsible to see that women and children do not starve men may find it deeply culturally shameful to help their wives and do not assist them even though study after study has shown to help their wives have larger harvests so we could ask the question might inequitable treatment of women make famine and malnutrition more likely for a nation state and the answer is yes let's move on to another dimension of security which would be economic prosperity and here the world bank has done just a magnificent job study after study examining the linkage between economic prosperity and women using their own gender gap measure the larger the gender gap the more subordinated and press the situation of women in society the world bank found that the larger the gender gap the lower the GDP per capita of a nation and the lower the rate of national economic growth furthermore they found that lower investment in female education is linked to lower national income which only makes sense right if you don't educate half of your population how can they contribute to your economy they also discovered in a meta analysis of 25 years of world bank projects that those projects that they had funded that had a specific gender component were far more successful in hitting their benchmarks than those that did not some of you caught wind of the 2015 study by McKinsey and company in which they looked at various scenarios of economic growth so they they said here a full potential scenario in which women participate in the economy identically to men in all of the countries of the world would add up to 28 trillion or 26% to annual global GDP by 2025 compared to the status quo this impact interestingly is roughly equivalent to the size of the combined Chinese and U.S. economies today they also analyzed an alternative best in region scenario in which all countries in a region match the progress of female participation of the best country in their region and this would add as much as 12 trillion dollars in annual 2025 GDP equivalent in size to the current GDP of Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom combined so we can ask the question might inequitable treatment of women make poverty or at least a lack of optimal economic growth likely for nation state and the answer is yes let's take another aspect of national security health and women and these findings are outstanding not just within the last 20 years but in the last 50 years these findings have been confirmed over and over and over again the smaller the gender gap between men and women within a society the lower the infant child mortality rates the lower the level of child malnutrition and the lower the share of household income spent on cigarettes and alcohol conversely the larger the gender gap the higher the AIDS rate the higher the infectious disease rate and the lower the life expectancy not just for women but for men as well so might inequitable treatment of women make disease and ill health more likely problems for the nation state absolutely now if we turn to my bailiwick which is conflict and women I've contributed to this literature and as marina pointed out earlier what we found in large and statistical analysis was the higher the level of violence against women the more likely it was that a nation state would be non-compliant with international norms and its own treaty obligations and the less peacefully overall the nation state would behave in the international system we also have more recently begun looking at male bonded groups as what we call the security provision mechanism looking at extended tribes and clans and found that our clan index pointing out societies in which females were subordinated especially in marriage was strongly and significantly correlated with higher levels of state fragility, lower political stability and a much higher incidence of terrorist acts we also discovered the higher the level of violence against women the worse a nation state's relations with its own neighbors the larger the gender gap between men and women the more likely a nation state is to be involved in inter and intra state conflict and as Mary Caprioli of the University of Minnesota has pointed out more likely to use violence first in a conflict furthermore new research coming out of Sweden has shown that in large surveys and this particular work came out of a study on Southeast Asia that individuals possessing gender unequal beliefs also proved to have significantly more hostile attitudes towards other nations and minority groups it's almost as if the hostility learned against women then cascades outward to affect those who are different in any way shape or form and my own work has also shown looking primarily at India and China that when you begin to call girls from the birth population on a massive scale such as through sex elective abortion that you create a national security problem for your country you end up as China has with a young adult male population that is 15% larger than the female population and we have shown in empirical studies that it has fueled an uptick in violent crime instability and the potential for regional conflict so overall might we say might inequitable treatment of women make conflict more likely for the state absolutely if we turn to governance this is not my own work but I admire the work done by groups such as the IPU in studies researchers have found the larger the gender gap the higher levels of perceived and actual government corruption the lower the effectiveness rating of the government and the lower the score on rule of law indices the smaller the gender gap conversely the greater the trust in government the greater the transparency perceived in government and when representation of women in the making councils is higher within a nation we find that there's more legislation on social welfare fighting corruption and improving legal protections for citizens so even the content of your laws begins to shift when you have more women in decision making and one of my own students just finished her doctorate at Yale did a study in which she found when women are represented in peace negotiations participants are much more satisfied with the outcome and the agreement is significantly more durable so we might ask ourselves might inequitable treatment of women make poor governance more likely I think the research is certainly pointing in that direction demographics in women I'm a member of a brand new subfield called security demographics and duh what's happening with women affects your demographic security so when marriage is highly inequitable between men and women what will you get is unsustainably high levels of population growth because women are not controlling their own reproduction is controlled by others we also find in more developed countries that when society makes it economically irrational for women to have children by almost punishing mothers who attempt to participate in the workforce such as we've seen in nations such as Japan sub replacement birth rates often result and does Japan see sub replacement birth rates as a national security issue absolutely absolutely it's also true and it should have been on the front page of the New York Times but it never was is that over the last 20 years we've actually altered the overall global sex ratio of our planet by all rights the ratio should be about 98 men per 100 women because women typically outlive men however the overall global sex ratio now is over 101 men per 100 women now this is not because of any sort of natural disaster or plague that this is entirely man-made women no longer hold up half the sky they no longer constitute half of humanity and you might say well this problem is dying out but actually no it's not dying out when I first started studying abnormal sex ratios back in 1990 there were five countries with abnormal birth sex ratios now there are 19 and they are not confined to Asia but also include countries such as Armenia Azerbaijan Albania Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and others so might inequitable treatment of women make demographic problems more likely for your country yes so many times I am asked Professor Hudson what's happening with women is simply the canary in the coal mine a symptom of the fact that we don't have enough democracy or we have too much poverty and so forth but my quarter century of research in this field has led me to believe that women are not a canary in that coal mine male-female relations within the society are the coal mine the canaries that keel over dead are things like poverty, malnutrition mental health, explosive violence and other problems this is the conceptual difference wrought by seeing women by seeing the importance of the women peace and security agenda or as then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in 2012 the subjugation of women is a threat to the common security of our world and the national security of our country what was gratifying was Minister Payne fully accept that proposition that says a lot about Australia now as Marina pointed out we co-authored a book called Sex and World Peace back in 2012 that laid out this argument and we were originally going to call it Sex and War but then we discovered that two male authors had actually penned a book called Sex and War and then we were going to call it Sex and Peace but that sounded like a massage manual so we thought Sex and World Peace they can't possibly mess that up and in that book we make the case that there are three major wounds that need to be rectified by the world system before we can move to a different and better way of living and that is the physical insecurity of women inequitable family law favoring men lack of parity in the councils of human decision-making I won't spend very much time on these because this audience knows them all can you think of all the many forms of women's physical insecurity in the world sure you can sure you can't from sex-elective abortion to egregious maternal mortality rates to pervasive domestic violence rape, femicide sex trafficking, honor crimes lack of consent and marriage child marriage we know all about the forms of women's physical security but most of the time these are not seen as national security issues that must change inequitable family law those of you who work in this area know that on the books in many lands are still to be found laws which make women almost sort of a separate species in many countries women cannot pass on their citizenship to their children women themselves may not hold citizenship in themselves but their citizenship may derive from the citizenship of their husband or their father women in some cultures are still legal minors and much have permission to go to school or even to travel women's property rights including inheritance are broadly inequitable throughout much of the world in terms of marriage we have issues such as age of consent polygamy patrilocal marriage bride price and dowry rights to domestically discipline one's wife and so forth divorce and child custody where it may be very easy for a man to divorce but almost impossible for a woman to divorce and she may lose custody of her children in terms of actual sexual relations we know that marital rape is still considered an oxymoron in about 75 countries worldwide women may not have the right to use family planning or plan their pregnancies and of course the double standard of marital fidelity wreaks havoc especially across the AIDS belt also lack of parity in decision making is a wound that needs to be rectified worldwide right still offering just about 20% of national legislators are women and in my country we've been stuck at 20% for 20 years we've made no progress we know that the global system of accounts that calculates GNP and GDP does not include any unpaid caregiving or reproductive work performed by women even those acknowledged as work it has no value and therefore cannot influence economic policy what is invisible cannot be programmed we know that the workplace at least in my country not as much yours is designed around an archetypal male worker who is unencumbered and systematically makes mothers poorer than any other subpopulation and I don't know if that applies to Australia but applies to my country in spades where still we have no paid maternity leave supposedly that will change we will see and all of this is despite the fact that research has shown that mixed gender groups make less risky decisions are more creative and commuterian in their solutions and participants are far more likely to be satisfied with the outcome so for example one multinational survey of 6500 firms show that where women had greater representation on boards those organizations were less likely to be hit by scandals like bribery or fraud so my message to you and again I feel I'm preaching to the choir but remember I'm sort of a traumatized American is that if you want to be a realist on security policy alright then you should be looking at women because whether we're examining the national interest in terms of the durability of peace accords food security security demographics national health national wealth quality of governance interstate relations including conflict or any other dimension of security women's empowerment helps in tangible ways that's probably why you're here at this conference today is because you know this you know this now it's also true that's you know women peace and security 101 but I think that Eva if minister Payne was here she would admit that things are not quite so simple my co-author Patricia Lytle and I authored a book called the Hillary Doctrine Sex and American Foreign Policy it was the same publisher so they wanted sex back in the title and what we found at least for the time period where Hillary Clinton was secretary of state those four years from 2009 to 2013 that there were some real problems and it may be that some of these problems are American centric and would not afflict Australia in the same way but I suspect there's probably some some quandaries here listed here that would resonate in this setting so one of the first things that Hillary Clinton faced was that even though she would like to speak out against for example the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia she never did she never did and she was castigated for that but it is also true that those who are waiting in the wings to depose the Saudi monarchy are not feminists they're anything but and the Saudi royal family you know look like Maria Steinem Acolytes compared to who's waiting in the wings to take over so that's a moral quandary do you speak out about Saudi women or do you realize that the current regime is probably the best that can be had at this particular time in terms of women's issues that's tough and if you say nothing you're also overlooking the fact that the Saudi government is financing well hobby missionaries who are going out to areas of the world where Islam is not so interpreted as being so strict in terms of women's subordinations and changing minds there and not for the better for women it's also true that open support for women's organizations by the US leave women open to accusations of foreign intrigue that they're traders in fact when I visited UN women a few years ago and asked about Hillary Clinton's legacy as secretary of state several women volunteered that they thought that she had blood on her hands that is that she had encouraged Afghan women to stand up for example and that those women would be targeted and in the fall of 2015 we did see that happen when the Taliban retook Kunduz for I think about three weeks they actually came in lists of the names of women who were to be found and who were to be executed and these were women who had cooperated with US programming it's also true that the US has a problem, has a proclivity for military intervention and it's true that the women of these nations cannot say that they are safer for that intervention ask the women of Iraq whether they're safer after the American invasion than they were before that's a pretty tricky question of course from the American side we have a lot of hypocrisy we have not and who knows in my lifetime I may never see the US ratify CEDAW as I mentioned we have no paid maternity leave only stubbornly 20% of our national legislatures female and we have very very high levels of violence against women in our society so it's a little bit hypocritical to go out and talk about women's empowerment when our own house needs reordering now more to the point perhaps here for Australia is be wary of what happened during Clinton's four years gender became a pet rock what we mean by that is everybody mentioned it in their speeches right everybody mentioned it but they didn't actually take it seriously and when push came to shove women were just you know discarded as an issue so for example this pet rock phrase actually comes from a quote by a senior Obama official who when asked about what was going to happen to the women right if America drew down in Afghanistan said all those pet rocks were weighing down our rucksack all those pet rocks were weighing down our rucksack right we had to let them go it's also true that one of the failings of Clinton's four years is that she failed to set some hard targets for important outcomes so for example when we're talking about peace talks that took place during those four years there were no hard targets for American negotiators to have representation significant representation of women there were no hard targets for those who came to the table to have significant representation of women there are many other instances where the lack of a hard target right meant the difference between nobody no one at the table interested in women or someone and lastly the United States we'll talk about USAID we'll talk about USAID here for a minute USAID actually doesn't do development USAID is a contracting entity that contracts out to major contractors like shamanics that then subcontract and the subcontract out to others to actually do what USAID would like to see done in a country well this is rife with problems right what we found our research is that we had people who have been sub-subcontracted to empower women in Afghanistan who were not only visiting brothels they were running brothels it makes no sense whatsoever so the accountability for what's actually happening on the ground was not there so I warn you these are things that you should be aware of so what now I mean I hope that part of the discussion over the next two days would say so what does a foreign and security policy that takes women seriously look like and don't look to America for answers now you in Australia must keep the torch lit while the light goes out in other places so for example when you have that bilateral exercise talisman saber in 2017 okay you keep that torch lit because it's unclear that those whom you'll be working with on the American side will have any encouragement whatsoever to do that so let me give you an example in the defense department there were two count them two people that were tasked with overseeing nap implementation one on the civilian side military side that was only half their portfolio so in essence it was actually one person if you count that up the civilian has resigned there is no replacement no one even knows if there will be a replacement so we have half of a person that is in charge of overseeing nap implementation you know the defense department of the United States of America which has over a million troops that says something right there so we in America are doing the square one case again you in Australia I think can go further than we have but I hope that you'll draw upon some of the empirical research that we've been privileged to put forth to help you in that case including thought is that over the many years I've studied these issues I have become convinced that there cannot be peace between nations until there is peace between men and women furthermore I believe that the roots of many things that we value democracy human rights are to be found those roots are to be found in that first relationship that first political order that is established between men and women the two halves of humankind so my dear audience is the groundwork you probably know it all where we take it from here though will be the topic of what I believe will be thought provoking and insightful discussion over the next two days thank you very much we do have about 15 to 20 minutes for Q&A but before we go to those I've been asked to announce that our hashtag wons capital W lowercase A capital NS is now trending at number one in Australia on Twitter proof of mainstream please keep tweeting and keep it up there it's astounding I would say so questions hi my name is Christina I'm from Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade thank you so much for speaking today that was really informative and I mean like you said majority of people in this room know exactly what you're talking about and it's great to see I guess all the stats up there to sort of back up what we're feeling and what we're thinking what I wanted to ask I guess was what you think is the best way to approach speaking to those who don't believe this or don't understand this there's such a strong institution around national security in particular it can be quite difficult to break down some of those barriers and point out some of those flaws that we really need to work on and I was wondering how perhaps you have approached this in the past and what sort of advice you could give us oh that's a lovely question you're right is that I've spent you know two decades trying to get this message across and oftentimes I am asked to speak to a military audience or an audience of security specialists most recently I was at the Naval War College talking to the officers taking courses there and the reason that you see this PowerPoint arranged as it is is that I have found that empirical evidence is the only way to break through that culture to just show wave after wave after wave of findings that track the interrelatedness of this so that even if at the end you still kind of thought well okay women you still were reluctant you would still be on board in positions of hierarchy which say yeah we need to do this you know what I'm worried about of course as an American is now there is no one higher in the hierarchy who gives two figs about this issue and so whatever fires were lit over the past eight years are the only fires that will continue to burn so I worry about that but yes that's what I've found is that even the most reluctant person upon seeing those waves and waves of evidence will admit that maybe they ought to look at what's going on with women that's probably an academic's answer too right Hello yes thank you so much that was fascinating and I would have argued an argument was going in my mind that gender-based equality has to do with economic well-being but I think your last statistic from the U.S. sort of diffused that argument oh yeah I just want to tell you that I work in de-radicalization programs with young militants in Pakistan and for the last seven and a half years and we have successfully reintegrated 192 young boys who are out there doing very well with zero recidivism and my team of psychologists are all females and I think that's one of the reasons because we were empathetic and we were able to inculcate empathy and social intelligence better so fabulous I think that's interesting and I have one other piece of data that you may be interested in is in Sawat the valley where we've been working where there was an insurgency and then a counterinsurgency Fazlullah who was the leader of the Greek Taliban Pakistan who is right now across the border and he was amazing the way he encouraged women because their husbands were working in the Middle East or Malaysia or somewhere else he went through his FM radio he's called Mullah radio because he appealed through that FM radio program he was able to encourage women to give up all the gold the men had brought back so women were economically empowered they had all that gold that they had buried the bangles and the little pellets of gold and he encouraged them to give that up saying that they were securing the heaven for their men in heaven a place in heaven for their families so they gave up their gold so that was such a for me I couldn't understand that here they had their financial well-being but they gave it up for the next life not for this life while there's so much in your comment all I can say is first of all absolutely incredible work that you're doing I think many programs on CVE countering violent extremism or de-radicalization understand that there's a real gender dynamic there right that men can one up themselves right in terms of becoming more extreme and more radical how do you break that cycle exactly right I'm also kind of shocked to hear about the whole gold incident that is just fascinating I'm gonna have to ruminate about that one I'd like to follow up with you on that my name is Natalie I'm from New Zealand but I'm also here with the Australian National University Strategic Studies Department my question is that you talked a lot about men and women in a very binary kind of way and I wanted to know if there was any discussions about how non-binary people people who don't prescribe to the types of men or being a woman are framed in this conversation about national security and inequality or you know the inequitable treatment of their situation oh that's wonderful yes although most of the societies that we're working with in terms of things like terrorism and so forth very much binary constructed right it is also true that that foundational binary that is how those the you know male and female as constructed interact with one another is the template for the treatment of all others right whether we're talking about those of a different religion or those of a different ethnic group or nationality or whether we're actually talking about someone who has a different gender orientation so while we can say the concept of gender is non-binary we can also say that that first binary the treatment of that first other you know woman because she has a certain set of reproductive organs and not another set of reproductive organs because she has the physical body right of one or the other right that that foundational difference will also you know rectifying that healing that relationship I think will begin to cascade outward in all of these other realms including the non-binary gender spectrum thank you very much for your presentation I am Habiba Sarobi from Afghanistan working with high peace council and also advisor for chief executive and I appreciate all the support that Afghan women get taking from all the international community especially US but it doesn't mean that when you talk during your presentation that because of too much focusing on women issues so it's a kind of reaction for the US government and also for women in Afghanistan it doesn't mean that international community could stop supporting Afghan women because we have been suffered a lot so it not only the US but we have getting support from all international community especially we are advising during the excuse me when the aid is coming to Afghanistan it should be on the base of the gender base budget so you talked about the condos issue it was not only about the US support because Taliban is very against women's rights that's why during the history that Taliban occupied Afghanistan they were against women's rights it was mainly focused that women were not a part of the home and being presented in the public it will be a target thank you thank you for that yes a lot of those women had initially come out of the home as a result of encouragement by third parties so that's something I think third parties need to think about but you raise a larger point and I think this is a point that all of us are familiar with just war theory we are familiar with the principles of usad belim and use in bello but to me there is a lack of a third element of just war theory that you can't really see until you look at what's happening with women say in Afghanistan and that is use ex bello just as one disengaged from a conflict or from an intervention in a morally justified manner just as one would be morally justified in going war, prosecuting a war there is a whole part of war disengaging from war that concerns women just as much if not more than men that we have been silent on and one of the things that I've criticized in my writings is that there is no use ex bello set of principles guiding the US in its eventual disengagement from Afghanistan what do we owe the women of Afghanistan in that period and I don't think anyone's thinking about it at all certainly not in the current administration no one is asking that question and that's the difference that a women peace and security perspective I think brings thank you you gave us a wonderful presentation I'm Minda Cruz from the Philippines there's one point I'd like to pick up from what you had presented and paid work that does not find itself reflected in the GMP of countries this has been a long standing narrative of women I remember this as early as the 1990s it seems that there has been that advocacy continuing however we haven't seen anything that had progressed it over a period of time how do you think should we be able to push this into the consciousness of people who may decide on where to input this particular aspect of value for women remember we all know when there is a disaster it's always the women who takes the immediate brand of all when there is poverty it's always the women who is always in the front line I was thinking we are here we have the academics around here could it be that governments find it difficult to pick up because there is no some sort of a framework by which this could be indexed into the whole of the economic development of a country this is just a question I am trying to actually those are brilliant questions those are amazing questions whenever I teach a class I call it women and nations and we talk about this particular issue that the New Zealander Marilyn Waring where is my New Zealander Marilyn Waring whom you should be very proud of I think first brought to the international consciousness and how many years ago was that I think she wrote in like the 1980s you are right this issue is still with us but I always show my students this funny Monty Python sketch I am sure you have seen it it's a Monty Python sketch about childbirth where the poor woman who is laboring in the room but people are forgetting she is even there it's all about the machines going you remember that sketch if you don't know that sketch Google it on YouTube and they laugh and laugh through that sketch and I say do you realize that every doctor and nurse and assistant in that room what they were doing in that room shows up in the GDP what that woman was doing in giving birth is absolutely excluded from GDP calculations she actually produced that child a future laborer and she did nothing in that room I also joke and I say you know if you got up in the morning and came over and took care of my kids and I got up in the morning and took care of your kids we both appear in the GDP but if I get up in the morning take care of my kids and you get up in the morning take care of your kids so how insane is that now it is true that there are some Nordic economists who have created a new measure of GDP that does take into account women's labor I have not seen this picked up by Nordic governments why I have not seen this picked up by any other governments outside of the region why one of the things that I actually hope for is in addition to having more women in the ranks of say foreign and security policy is that we have more women in the ranks of economists and economic planners right and I think until we get a critical mass I don't think we're going to see a change but you're right it is a critical pivotal foundational change because if you cannot see literally cannot see what women do in an economic sense how effective and efficient is your economic policy going to be that's nuts I mean we've been told by the UN that what women do in terms of it constitutes about 40% of GDP in any country can you imagine excluding 40% of GDP off the table completely when trying to decide what to do next in economic terms it's crazy I agree with you it's got to change anybody wanting to get a PhD in economics who also has also a female that would be very helpful national security policy is often made in a reactive way in response to a crisis how when that happens can you create a situation where some of the things that you've been talking to are embedded in the psyche of the people who happen to find themselves in the decision making room so that it becomes almost like a second nature to consider these issues when they're making decisions about a policy or implementation of a policy in the national security context well part of it is training and the reason I say this Marina is because Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State when we entered that R2P action in Libya and from what I can tell I've talked to everyone I possibly could the word women was not mentioned once in Oval Office discussions about what to do in Libya even Hillary Clinton herself when placed in the reactive oh we've got a deadline what do we do now was not thinking about women and what would happen to women I mean not that the Qaddafi government was good but anarchy right is not especially good for women at all and so I think it's got to be another generation that's been trained from the get go what did your minister say a business as usual approach to women peace and security it still isn't business as usual is it and until we make it that by training our young people from their very first day as what would be called an America Foreign Service Officer or as a development planner or even as an officer then I don't think it will be business as usual we're not there yet we certainly weren't there even when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State Hello and thank you very much for the presentation I have a question my question is I've heard it in several presentation that it's a cycle so are there any existing gender programs that for students at very young age from grade say grade zero kindergarten all the way to high school in terms of women peace and security I know of nothing in my own country certainly in public school that talks about those things at all we have a growing network of women peace and security programs at universities for both undergraduates and graduates in fact later in April actually the first ever meeting of the directors of programs on women peace and security will take place hosted by Columbia University so I think we're moving in the direction of that being you know something that would be a standard part of any sort of national security college type you know education and certainly here at the national security college I think that's present so it's I think it's slowly going but nothing in public education that I'm aware of no thank you professor Hudson Alan Ryan from the Australian Civil Military Center and I fear the sole baritone asking you a question today my husband's a baritone I love that sound keep talking I wonder if you could give me an idea of what it is that I working in government should do to promote men in terms of there being agents for change here yes somehow we've neglected to mention that these changes cannot occur without men without men seeing right the realism of this approach as well as feeling very deeply that it's morally right that you hear from half of the population right that how can one be effective or capable without understanding the concerns and the priorities and the perspectives and the insights of the other half of the population when I speak to my my male students and you're certainly not a student of mine you know you're a peer and but let me just say that when I talk to my male students I say there's things you should do some of them are negative and some are positive and what I mean is simply the withholding of approbation for things that are common in the culture that you know are not helping this cause so when I say to my students when you're in a group of men and somebody tells a dirty joke or a dumb blonde joke you don't have to speak up and say now now fellows don't talk like that right but what you can do is fail to laugh fail to laugh is actually much more eloquent you withhold your approval from those things right so and there's many things you can do besides not laughing at jokes right refuse right to engage in those things that are considered culturally unremarkable make them remarkable by your silence right and that will be such a model for your fellow men absolutely the second thing is to be proactive one of the most important things that you can do is so small and so simple but I hope you will remember it is when you're at a meeting and there's men and women there one of the things that women know is that they are less likely to be heard by other men and I think probably every female in the room can probably testify to that right when a woman raises a good point I want you to say did you just hear what Rebecca said I think that's an important point let's talk about what she said right in the presence of your fellow males call her by name say that she has said something worth hearing and I guarantee you that the men in the room will start to pay attention to her and may actually recognize that she has a name what better way to invite the voice of women than by actually making those voices welcome and appreciated okay but there's many other positive things that you could do don't be afraid to be a mentor to a woman many men are they feel that there will be some sort of hanky-panky attributed to them but if there are no male mentors for women and given that at least in the United States there are so few senior women how will young women ever get a chance right and be proactive studies that have been done at my university have shown that when a professor needs research assistance the men all volunteer the women who may have better grades than the men are waiting to be asked they've been socialized not to put themselves forward so somebody else is going to have to put them forward and that's got to be you right is to go out and seek for female talent rather than the male approach which is the talent is going to show up in my face at some point so I think there's still these issues these small and simple things and inter-person relationships within a policy making or academic setting that totally changes the atmosphere from one of slight chill or very chilly to warmth to feeling that you belong there and that what you say will be heard and appreciated and the guys aren't in the back room afterwards at afternoon tea making jokes right I don't know if that's profound but you know what it changes lives thank you for your broad ranging stimulating and informative presentation Valerie for taking so many questions you've also given me a very nice segue to thank Professor Rory Medcalf for having the vision and supporting this women and national security conference in terms of amplifying the voice and picking up the message and sending the message that this is an important and mainstream issue and I can certainly say that some of those behaviours you've been talking about are certainly modelled down at the national security college so thank you Rory for that now after this session we will break for morning tea and we will go back into parallel sessions at 11am they are self-selecting sessions unless you're a speaker or a chair so choose which one you want to participate in but please join me before we break in thanking Professor Valerie Hudson for her outstanding address