 We'd like to now move into our second panel, which looks at Regions and Relationships. And I'm absolutely delighted to welcome five of my very best and brightest colleagues from the Coral Bell School to talk to us about various Regions and Relationships. The first speaker will be Dr. Joanne Wallace. Joanne is with the Strategic and Defence Study Centre within the Coral Bell School. Her work has long looked at security issues in the Pacific. Second will be Dr. Nick Farrelly. Nick is with the Coral Bell School. He is coming off an ARC Early Career Researcher grant and he looks particularly at Myanmar but is a specialist across Southeast Asia as well. You already know Amy King. Amy is with the Strategic and Defence Study Centre and she will be looking at North Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan. To my left is Dr. Beena Dacosta. Beena is with our Department of International Relations and she will be looking at South Asia, an area of particular research interest for her. And on the far left, physically if not politically I would say, is Peter Deane. Pete is with our Strategic and Defence Study Centre. He's a specialist on the Australia-U.S. Alliance and he'll be talking about our relations with the United States. So without further ado, Joanne, if you could lead us off. Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands lie in close proximity to the north and east of Australia across vital air and sea approaches that link us to our trading and defence partners in North America and Northeast Asia. Reflecting this successive defence white papers have identified that a secure Papua New Guinea and Pacific Islands sits only behind a secure Australia in the hierarchy of our strategic interests. Now we have vastly more material resources than Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands and we've long viewed ourselves and been viewed by others as having a substantial and special responsibility in the region. Reflecting this perception, the Pacific Islands have been described as our patch, Australia's immediate neighbourhood, our near abroad and our backyard. So over the last 20 years the Pacific Islands have been the principal destination for Australian defence, policing and development assistance as well as the site of our largest military interventions. Australia's activism in the region has led to claims that Australia believes that it has a natural right to lead and to seek regional primacy and the 1994 ANZAC Agreement, for example, has been read as implying that Australia and New Zealand could or should have a hegemonic influence in the region. Others have claimed that Australia is effectively already a great power or regional hegemon. Now my current book project assesses how Australia has sought to exercise its influence in pursuit of its strategic interests in the region since 1975 which was the year that Papua New Guinea gained independence. And my emerging conclusion is that Australia has never been a regional hegemon and actually we find it increasingly difficult to exercise our influence in the region. Over the past year Australia has faced a number of challenges and admittedly several of these are of our own making to our role and relationships in the Pacific Islands. First, Australia faces challenges to our regional leadership from both within and outside the region. Within the region, Fiji continues to rejoin the Pacific Islands Forum which is the most significant political and security institution in the region unless Australia and New Zealand leave. Australia had led the charge to have Fiji removed from the forum in 2009 following its military coup in 2006. Now while the forum, despite Fiji's absence, remains the most important multilateral regional institution, our ability to influence its agenda is declining. And this is exemplified by the decision last year to abandon the Pacific plan for greater regional integration that Australia and New Zealand had been pushing for the last 10 years. And instead it's been replaced by a framework for Pacific regionalism and this has been produced as a result of much more consultation around the region and consequently reflects regional priorities as opposed to Australian ones. That not necessarily is a bad thing but it is an example of how influence over the agenda has changed. Challenges from outside the region come from increasingly active external powers most notably China and Russia but also including Japan, Korea, Indonesia and India. The presence of these powers has widened the region's choice of external partners and has eroded our influence further. Indeed the 2013 Defence White Paper acknowledged that, quote, attitudes to our role are changing in the region, quote, as the growing reach and influence of Asian nations opens up a wider range of external players for our neighbours to partner with. Second, reflecting Fiji's refusal to rejoin the forum, the regional order is evolving and Pacific Island states are creating or strengthening alternative regional and sub-regional institutions and organisations that explicitly exclude Australia, New Zealand and other traditional partners like the US. The most notable of these is a sub-regional Malinese spearhead group. Now while this shift has been encouraged by, was encouraged initially by the Fijian military regime and subsequently by the now democratically elected Fijian government, it has been met with enthusiasm by other Pacific Island states who increasingly feel that Australia doesn't share their goals with our approach to climate change being an obvious example here. Third, Papua New Guinea is an increasingly influential player given its disproportionately large geographic, population, economic and military size compared to other Pacific Island states. And Papua New Guinea actually continues to expand its own aid program in the region. It was 300 million kina this year which is about 150 million Australian dollars. And that's not necessarily comparable to ours but it's sizable enough to gain influence. Our ability to exert influence over Papua New Guinea has been severely undermined by our reliance on it hosting the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre. We now have much less control over how our aid program is spent and much less ability to influence the Papua New Guinea government. And this was exemplified, there are numerous examples, but the most recent one that I can think of is the decision by the Papua New Guinea government to announce last year that no more, to cancel all the contracts of Australians working as advisers in their government, that no more Australian advisers could work for their government unless they were employed directly as Papua New Guinea employees. Recently, just weeks before the Forum Trade Minister's meeting, that meeting actually happened a couple of days ago, at which the text of the PASA Plus Regional Trade Agreement that Australia has been advocating for the past five years was agreed. Papua New Guinea publicly announced that it would not participate in the PASA agreement on the grounds that it didn't offer enough benefits to Papua New Guinea and it's particularly, it was targeting its comments here at Australia. Our approach to processing and resettling asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru has also damaged our reputation in the region and internationally. Any short-term political gain that our government has got from this policy is vastly outweighed by the damage it's done to our influence in the region, particularly over Papua New Guinea. So we therefore enter the next year facing a dilemma in respect of Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. We have vital strategic interests in the region, but we have comparatively less influence with which to pursue them. Pacific Island states are increasingly unwilling to accept Australian leadership and although they are a lot smaller than us and have a lot fewer material resources, they're able to exercise weapons of the weak. They're able to engage in foot-dragging on agreements. They can expel our officials, stage demonstrations. They can sabotage agreements and they can engage in brinkmanship in order to limit our influence. So Australia's influence in the Pacific Islands appears to defy conventional predictions which would predict on a basic equation of size, relative material size that we would be the hegemon. To the extent that we can be characterised as a hegemon in the region, we are an extremely hollow one. Thanks, Michael. Good morning, everyone. It's a genuine pleasure to have the opportunity to address you all this morning on the vast topic of Southeast Asian affairs. I'd like to begin by making a special acknowledgement of our friends from the Westpac Bicentennial Foundation and particularly all of the Westpac scholars who've joined us today. Many of you won't be aware that I have the great privilege of sitting on the National Selection Panel for the Westpac Scholarship Program, which means that I get to work closely with the Westpac team. It also means that I see the very high calibre of their applicant pool. What that means in practice is that the Westpac scholars who are here of an outrageously high quality. They are a superb group of young Australians and I'd really encourage everybody in the room to seek out some of the young guns who are in our presence. They're here to do what they can to soak up some of what the Coral Bell School has to offer and we're simply delighted that you've been able to come with us on this journey today. Southeast Asia, 630 some million people, literally hundreds of languages, some scores of which are very significant languages, often spoken by tens of millions of people. Ten countries in the Association of Southeast Asia Nations. Let's rattle them off so that we appreciate the scope. We're talking from Vietnam to Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Brunei. That's a lot of the world. That is a lot of the world's action and it's my task to distill it in a few quick minutes to give you a bit of a sense of where I see Southeast Asia heading this year and in the years to come. It has been suggested by some smart folks who do this kind of economic analysis. That by the year 2020, some 400 million of those 600 million plus Southeast Asians will be classified as middle class. What that means is that they will have access to discretionary daily spending somewhere between $16 and $100 US. This means that Southeast Asia has changed from the kind of backwater economies that many people still have in mind. Southeast Asia is globally engaged and enmeshed and the fact that it's right on Australia's doorstep suggests to me at least that we all need to be taking it incredibly seriously. It's impossible, no doubt, to speak of a single Southeast Asia and just a quick show of hands, perhaps, who here has been to Singapore? Okay, all right. Almost everybody in the room, okay? I think we should take that as an indication of Australian connection with our Southeast Asian neighbors. Many of you will have walked around Clark Key know the posh neighborhood, lots of good restaurants, seafood, chili crab, all that action. It is tailor-made Singaporean perfection. I would suggest that Clark Key is one of the bookends of the Southeast Asian region, right? And at the other end, okay, you've got very, very different sorts of places with very, very different sorts of economies and societies and priorities. I would put the Chin Hills in Myanmar as the other bookend. So from Clark Key to the Chin Hills. Hands up if you've been to the Chin Hills. Okay, you should. And the reason you should is because Southeast Asia is a lot more than the bright lights, the big cities, the pulsating action that tends to get our attention in places like Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur and Manila and of course Singapore. There's so much more going on that we need to be getting to grips with if Australia is going to have a chance of prospering deep into the Asian century. That kind of variation is hard to keep in our heads at the same time. It really is the variation from Canberra to the Congo, right? And when you consider that ASEAN has the tasking to try and pull all of these different peoples and societies together, you can appreciate that that's never going to be straightforward. And the compromise that those who run the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have made over the generations is to avoid getting down into the nitty-gritty of each country's domestic political affairs. And of course there's a very well understood doctrine of non-interference. What this tends to mean is that the countries of ASEAN don't go poking around in each other's backyards. But of course there is a huge amount of interest when things start to go wrong. And I just want to give you quickly three of the current areas where we have major changes in trajectory in Southeast Asia. And I think these three should suggest to us at least that a lot of what we currently grapple with isn't set in stone and could certainly in the years and decades to come be shaken up in some quite profound ways. So the first of these key changes relates of course to Myanmar. And in the past year there is no bigger political story in Southeast Asia. I'd suggest perhaps almost no bigger political story in the world than the consolidation or be it tentative of Myanmar's democratic process. We know that last year on the 8th of November Dong San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy triumphed at a long awaited election. Nobody was quite sure at the time whether she and her team would be allowed to take power but it turns out that a relatively smooth handover has been possible. Of course the Myanmar armed forces are there lurking in the background waiting to strike if they perceive that their core interests are imperiled. But in the meantime, Dong San Suu Kyi has written herself a new job. She is the state councillor. This in her words means that she is above the president. That suggests to me at least that it is game on now for Myanmar very rapidly going from being one of the least democratic societies in the region and therefore on earth to being perhaps one of the great success stories. And we will have to watch very closely to see how the National League for Democracy handles these new challenges. Those challenges secondly are brought into a quite stark relief when you look at what has happened to Thailand. And a lot of that analytical effort over the past decade has focused on Bangkok based squabbling. And that's important. There's absolutely no doubt that we need to be keeping our eyes on what's going on between the generals and deposed former Prime Minister Taksin Shinawat and his lieutenants. We also need to be paying attention to various of the palace's politics. Of course because his Majesty King Bumipon Adunya Dad is now very old and unlikely to see out all that many more years on the throne. The fact that he's been on the throne since 1946 of course means that the Thais are anxious. You can understand that about what might happen next. But the big issue in Thailand for me at least isn't about that. It's about the festering civil conflict in the southernmost provinces down along the border with Malaysia for a long time. That conflict was relatively contained. It looks based on events in recent weeks that the conflict is no longer so contained. That has grave implications. Everybody needs to be paying attention to what might happen if Thailand's hot southern insurgency starts to reach out and grab people in other places. Thirdly and quickly and finally there's Malaysia. And Malaysia has been run more or less by the same crew since independence. That gives the state structure a certain resilience. Yet right now things are going to move and perhaps move quite quickly. Prime Minister Najib Razak, he's under pressure because of a corruption scandal. You all know about Southeast Asian corruption scandals. They come, they go. This one is big. Potentially a billion or more dollars. It is alleged have moved from some pockets to some other pockets in ways that can't quite be properly explained. That is going to take a lot of work on the part of Malaysia's government to handle. And this past weekend students on the streets of Kuala Lumpur are showing their displeasure. This is the kind of situation that could pretty quickly escalate. And again, that would have implications for us all. So in this context, what's Australia going to do with our Southeast Asian friends? We all appreciate the Southeast Asia of Clark Key. More of us need to be getting out to the Southeast Asia of the Chin Hills. Right now there isn't a country within the region that I would suggest is Australia's BFF, right? We have close relationships, but do we absolutely have a best friend? We probably don't. In the future, we might really want to have one. That best friend should be democratic and outward looking and well positioned to take advantage of all the opportunities of the Asian century. I'd suggest if we're in the market for a best friend, then we should look very directly to Aung San Suu Kyi and her Myanmar as they go about this historic transformation. Thank you. Well, thank you. Good to be with you again this morning. So I'm going to speak about China and Japan, the two countries that I know best, and that we can try and cover in about five minutes, but very happy in the Q&A if people have questions about Korea or Taiwan to have a chat about those two. What I wanted to do in the next five minutes is paint a little bit of a picture of Australia's relationship with China and Japan over the last 12 months. Because we've seen, I think, some interesting contradictory impulses in those two relationships. One is the Chinese side. In December of last year, trade minister Andrew Robb received an early Christmas present when Chafter, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, entered into force. This came out after nearly 10 years of negotiations by the various sides of government. It's a major trade agreement, a historic agreement, as Andrew Robb said at the time, between a country of 1.4 billion people, sorry, billion people and Australia, and this amount of opportunities for the rising middle class in China to purchase Australian services in particular. A couple of months later, fast-forward to February 2016, Australia issues its defence white paper in which we very prominently spoke about our concerns about the scale and pace of Chinese land reclamation activities in the South China Sea, and spoken in a number of places about, as Michael has said this morning, our concerns about the stability both in our region and at the global level, and paid particular concern to China in that defence white paper. The next month, it was perhaps not a surprise then to see concerns raised about a Chinese company investing in the Darwin port, at least a Chinese company in the Darwin port, and following that, the Australian government's decision to knock back investments into Kidman and Co, and most recently to the Ausgrid infrastructure investment in New South Wales. And in fact, just this weekend, I know that Prime Minister Turnbull in referring to Australia's decision on Ausgrid paraphrased, interestingly, Chairman Mao Zedong in saying, i.e. the Australian people have stood up, paraphrasing Mao Zedong's quote back in October 1949, when he said that the Chinese people had thrown off the shackles of foreign oppression and colonialism and were going to stand up for the benefit of sovereignty. This is what Malcolm Turnbull was referring to when he spoke about Australia's national interest concerns with respect to the Ausgrid decision. And then just last month in July, the foreign minister with her counterparts from the United States and Japan during their trilateral strategic dialogue meeting in Laos came together and put out a joint statement in response to the arbitration decision in the South China Sea, which is somewhat more fulsome than other countries have taken by making the statement that the decision in the arbitration ruling was legally binding and that therefore China needed to abide by that legally binding decision. So some fits and starts, I think, in the Australia-China relationship over the last 12 months. The same, I think, can be said of the Australia-Japan relationship. One year ago, Tony Abbott was still in power. To quote Nick for a minute, had described Japan as Australia's BFF in Asia, describing Japan as a potential ally, as Australia's best friend, and someone who very much saw the evolution and strategic development of a closer Australia-Japan security relationship as being in Australia's national interests. He had signed the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement. It looked possible, and I think even quite likely, that had Abbott remained in power, Japanese submarine decision may have come to the fore, particularly because the number of Abbott's key advisers were very much in favour of Japan winning that bid. Of course the government changed, and what I think we saw of note in the Defence White Paper that came out in February was although Australia and Japan moving closer together in terms of their security relationship, Japan was not singled out as a country for Australia to have an important strategic partnership with. Where Japan was referred to in the Defence White Paper, it was always along with a long list of other countries, Korea, Indonesia, India and others, with whom Australia had close security partnerships with. So a sense of, yes we have moved closer in our relationship with Japan with signed number of high level agreements, but we're not willing to go out there and elevate Japan to a strategic partnership. In April of course Japan lost the submarine bid and a decision that I think was actually ultimately taken for technical, for operational, for budgetary reasons, but a decision that was interpreted very much in Japan and here in Australia as a view that Japan and Australia perhaps did not share the same fate in terms of security. In the couple of years leading up to the bidding for that process we'd seen the Japanese government and increasingly private firms and others in Japan talking very much about the submarines deal being a proxy for the strategic partnership between our two countries. So of course when the bid did not go their way that was the way in which it was interpreted. So fits and starts in both of these two relationships, these key relationships for Australia are two most important economic partners. And I think what this signifies is Australia's difficulty in muddling through relations with these two countries who have fundamentally different visions about what they want the future of Asia's strategic order to look like. Japan wants to lock in the strategic order that was created after World War II with the United States as the primary power in Asia and all of the other powers underneath that but with a small caveat. It wants Japan to play a more active strategic role in the region to escape the post-World War II constitution that put Japan in a very abnormal role but fundamentally to leave the regional order with the US as primary power. China wants to change that regional strategic order. It wants a more equal role with the United States. Some in China perhaps even advocate a primary role for China. I think that's a decision, a discussion that is still evolving within China but certainly more strategic space for China. Historically Australia has been able to manage our relationship with China and Japan on parallel tracks. They didn't really interact with one another. Things that we did in one relationship didn't really have a major impact on the relationship with the other. That is no longer possible because the relationship between these two great powers is now at a very thorny, contested, difficult point economically incredibly important to Australia but one in which both sides are watching how countries like Australia and the United States navigate those bilateral relationships. So we are at this sort of moment of fundamental transition and I think looking at the here ahead how will Australia try to manage these things? I think we'll obviously be trying to keep our good relationship with both states going forward. My sense is that the Australian government recognises that the Asian order is changing. I think that is language that came through in the defence white paper very strongly and so on this I think we actually may be closer to China than to Japan in being willing to recognise that the regional order is changing but I think like Japan we are deeply uncomfortable with where that is going. First and foremost because we're uncertain about what China will look like and how China will behave in that future strategic order. These questions are all up for debate within China and I'm very happy to discuss some specifics of that in the Q&A if people have questions but two areas I'd mention in particular. The first on the South China Sea I think it's very interesting to note that a week after the arbitration decision came down an important article by the Central Party School out of Beijing was fundamentally re-discussing reopening the debate about what the nine-dash line actually means how it's defined, what it relates to. This is a question that is not entrenched with in China it is evolving and it's something that I think Australia and others would do well to pay very very close attention to. And secondly on sort of the economic questions the infrastructure questions, things that Michael raised this morning for example about the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank this is a space where Australia can actually work with China to help evolve kind of the norms and questions and governance around how these sorts of things operate. It's something that Australia and China are already talking about for example through the Australia-China Joint Economic Report which came out last fortnight and so I think there is actually great scope for Australia to play a role in this area. Finally I think on the relationship with Japan this is a relationship that needs to be managed it will be a bell-weather for how Australia views the regional strategic order going forward but the challenge for Australia is how to pursue a closer relationship with Japan that perhaps does not sign on to completely the view of the region that the Japanese government currently has. Thank you. I want to ask how many of you watch Cricket? There you go. That's Australia's relationship with South Asia. Australia... Not going very well actually. Australia plays cricket with five of the South Asian countries which are India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan and then there are three other countries which are also part of this region which are Bhutan, the Maldives and Nepal they play cricket within the region but not necessarily so active in the international cricket scene. So Australia's relationship in South Asia is incredibly important particularly because Australia has a very strong connection with one of the key regional and international player, India but there's also a relationship is also strengthening with other South Asian countries. Now this is the region where at the moment the world's largest number of people living below the poverty line which is actually at the moment 507 million people they live here with less than US dollar 1.25 per day. So extreme poverty is one of the key issues that the region tackles with. This large and uneven differences exist across populations within the region's countries including in areas of health, education, status of women and employment and education status of young people. So development gains which continue to be offset by population growth rapid urbanization is widespread and with that also we see various kinds of inequality and human rights violations but there's also massive infrastructure deficits particularly in energy and transport sector and these are also binding constraints on growth. South Asia is also the world's least integrated region in terms of actually trade and economic connectivity. So what Australia had done is actually in Australia's focus what we often see is that Australia looks at the region's two most important long-term trans-boundary development issues. The first one is sustainable development issues through water, food and energy security and the second one is regional connectivity. So Australia promotes that through trade facilitation and infrastructure connectivity. If you look at Australian official documents you'll see that over the last five years we've also seen a significant focus in both of these areas on gender equality and human rights issues. So Australia is really keen to actually promote and work in those areas and that is often done not through government-to-government connection but actually through civil society and civil society connection. So this people-to-people emphasis is incredibly important and one area where Australia had done very well in terms of the region is education sector. So Australia is one of the most important providers of education of South Asians not only in other parts of different sectors but also in the government. So that's where Australia had provided a lot of expertise in the region. So if we go through country by country I'll just pick up a few issues which are important. The first one is obviously India. So Australia has placed India at the forefront of its international partnerships. Now the two-way trade of goods is incredibly important. In 2014-15 it was 18 billion and both governments also recognize there is significant potential for further cooperation across a broad range of areas. So there had been a lot of high-level meetings the last one in November 2015 in Turkey during the G20 summit when the prime ministers of both countries met and talked about their strategic partnership. So that partnership had also been developed and agreed on in 2009. So Australia and India's relationship is based on at least the formal relationship is based on that strategic partnership. Now Australia's relationship with India goes back a long way even prior to India's independence. So the first Australian Indian consulate was established in Sydney in 1941. So why it's incredibly important is that there are lots of Indian migrants who live here. So if you look at last year's statistics we know that 450,000 people of Indian descent now live in Australia. And India is Australia's largest source of skilled migrants and also the second largest source of international students which last year was more than 60,000. That's 2015 data I'm providing you with. Now you would also remember a few years ago there were lots of attacks in Melbourne and Sydney on Indian students. So in Indian media what had happened is that Australia's, it was portrayed that Australia is somehow racist and the India-Australia cricket competition didn't help much in that kind of media discourse. So there's a lot of actually confidence building that had to happen in that area but we've seen high level actually visits from both sides particularly from the education ministries and the education sector and in science and technology sector there's very interesting and important collaboration that's happening. So those are some of the areas where a different kind of partnership could be built and confidence building measures. The second country is Bangladesh in South Asia which is the second important trade partner of South Asia for Australia. So last year the trade relationship between Bangladesh and Australia was 2.7 billion dollars. So it's increasing so Australia's also recognizing it as an important partner but Australia is also aware of some of the issues for example in the garment sector in Bangladesh and also in the growing inequality in the labour market. So Australia does provide a lot of actually advice and training to the industry partners in Bangladesh. And in terms of Australia's other relationship with Bangladesh is actually the counter-terrorism cooperation area. So Bangladesh signed its first memorandum of agreement with Australia in combating terrorism in 2008. And after that last year we've seen some counter-terrorism training, joint training exercises that to place both in Australia and in Bangladesh. So there's interesting and important kind of collaboration happening within the security sector. Pakistan, with Pakistan-Australian government had actually intensified its security relationship, security and strategic relationship since 2008, not before that because there were different phases of looking at the international war and how that was actually also integrating Australia's roles and relationship within Pakistan. But from 2008 the new relationship looks at economic reform, security sector reform and also democratic governance. So it's interesting and important area for Pakistan and Australia. But what we've seen also from Pakistan's civil society and also from the education sector is that there's a lot of complaints about how limited number of Pakistani students, for example, are accepted in Australian institutions. For example, in 2014 only 58 Pakistani students were given scholarships in Australian universities. In 2015 the number was even less. But what we see is that some of the scholarship to Pakistani, the members of the Pakistani armed forces and the police is increasing. For example, last year, in 2014, I'm sorry, Australia provided places for up to 120 members of Pakistani armed forces. So interesting and important kind of area but there's a lot to do in terms of how actually universities could reach out to Pakistani students in different way. One area where Australian government had been incredibly concerned with and it had raised it in Human Rights Council and also in the Asia Pacific, Human Rights Forum is Pakistan's human rights record. After the 2014 December school attack in Peshawar what happened is that Pakistan lifted the moratorium on death penalty. And as you know, Australia is incredibly committed in death penalty advocacy. So it had been working with Pakistani civil society groups and also Pakistani human rights commission in that area. Sri Lanka is the other important country of South Asia with whom Australia has very important connections in terms of people smuggling areas. In 2014, Australia provided with two vessels for Sri Lankan Navy to the Bay Class vessels to the Sri Lankan Navy to work in the Indian Ocean region for surveillance. Now what had happened after that is that from the Sri Lankan civil society sector there was a lot of actually anger and anxiety about why Australian government is connecting with the Sri Lankan government in some of those traditional security issues. So while we see that with the government with the Sri Lankan government there is significant partnership developing it's almost in many ways absent with people-to-people partnership especially after the war ended in May 2009. And Australia also did not co-sponsor the May 2014 resolution, UN resolution which was looking at the war crimes issues in Sri Lanka. But Australia did co-sponsor last year in September 2015 resolution. So there is some change in the relationship but there's a long way to go. The last country here I would like to talk about is Afghanistan and many of you would be very much aware of that that relationship is not only incredibly important but that relationship is also actually changing particularly after January 2015 when we saw that there was a handover of security responsibility from the NATO-led ISAF to the government of Afghanistan. So what we now have actually the statistics is that currently there are 270 Australian Defence personnel who are working in the Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan which are actually supporting the Australian Afghanistan security sector in various training programs and also in other areas of looking at provincial security. So there's really interesting and important connections and collaborations happening in different sectors between Australia and South Asia but there's a long way to go in terms of working on human rights dialogues and human rights conversations within the region and internationally and also actually various kinds of strategic collaboration. Thank you. Trump? I think I could probably spend a good seven minutes talking about Donald Trump and I'm sure he'd spend plenty of time talking about Donald Trump in question and answer as well but what I want to do a little bit is talk about a bit of policy and practice in the US-Australian relationship over the last 12 months or so and I think this is important because I want to follow on from the first panel this morning because we are in this era I think of uncertainty and I think this puts us in Australia strategically in the region and the United States as well in the same position of being in a certain level of strategic grey zone about what's happening given that we're both feeling our way both the United States and Australia in a region that's seeing unprecedented historic and strategic change and in terms of policy to talk about that I think I'll refer you back to the defence white paper which Amy also mentioned that came out earlier this year if you actually go through and pick out all the sections that talk about the US-Australian relationship it's interesting that despite we've got a very very close strategic partnership going on for a very long period of time that it was actually managed to ramp this up even more in the language that the white paper was using and as one particular commentator spoke about this, the white paper was about turbo-charging as the quote of the US-Australian relationship obviously from the white paper's point of view the incredibly important relationship we have around the five eyes intelligence relationship which gets deeper and broader every year we have foreign military sales we're one of the greatest beneficiaries of US foreign military sales and this technology access particularly fifth generation military technology really underpins a lot of our defence posture and our defence partnerships particularly here access to Graila electronic warfare aircraft which were the only US ally to get access to that technology so far our partnership along with the United States and many other allies with the F-35 which is I believe we've got our first RAAF personnel over training on that of course an expansion into discussions around more on cyber, cooperation and of course missile defence and of course on another policy perspective following on with the trade deals with China and other areas in Japan we're also signed up to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP so these are some pretty big significant policy announcements and I think the white paper was very clear in its signal about where it sees Australia and the relationship going forward from the strategic perspective into the future however this is offset by a few things that have happened over in the last 12 months and as Amy mentioned earlier of course one of the first things was the controversy surrounding the sale of Darwin Port to a Chinese company if people can remember back to the commentary that was around that there was a lot of commentators who were very concerned about this there was also some polling done by the US Embassy around what they thought about that and of course some material that was sort of leaked or discussed with journalists that came out about how very much unhappy the United States were about this relationship concerns that they hadn't been forewarned about this was particularly happening and of course concerned about where this was going in fact one US commentator referred to it as being stunned by Australia's decision and the approach that was made there and this of course created a fair bit of debate in Australia between some people like Petty Jennings and Jeff Wade who are very opposed to this particular position and then others like Linda Jacobson and James Brown who was trying to put this in more perspective about the way the relationship has to work between our major alliance partner and our major trading partner following on from a little bit about this we see of course Malcolm Turnbull have been elected and we see Turnbull's first visit to the United States and his speech at CSIS in particular on the 18th of January earlier this year and it's a really important speech I think in that it started to slightly recalibrate the way Australia political class starts to think about the relationship. If you think about the sort of rhetoric that Julia Gillard had when she was in the US and of course then followed by the rhetoric and the sort of approach that Tony Abbott has and of course it was in the media this famous event where Tony Abbott goes in and meets Barack Obama and basically says everyone comes into this room to ask for things I'm here to just offer unqualified support what do you need us to do and it was sort of this sense that it was getting a questionable relationship with the United States where Turnbull put a little bit more nuance I would say back into this relationship and what Alan Gingel in particular pointed out was the absence of absolutes in Turnbull's speech there when he was in Washington he pressured the US to ratify unclass he also talked about a possible two-state solution in Syria and Iraq and a state for the Sunnis in Iraq and that was entering in a little bit of advocacy into the speeches that he had not seen in previous visits by Australian Prime Ministers also Amy mentioned the submarine decision that's an important piece I think in the broader relationship of course there was great criticism from a lot of people some people seeing it as a loss of opportunity to broaden the relationship between the United States, Japan and Australia and particularly this hub-to-hubs collaboration in the San Francisco system and network which one US commentator Mike Green had called the Australia-Japan relationship a sort of poster child for this hub-to-hub relationship and I certainly agree with Amy here that it seems to be a recalibration of where that's going and certainly the Japanese interpreted this as a proxy for what would be a particular type of strategic relationship along with Australia and the United States and that was very much cast as we know as an added thing, an added arbe ideal the handshake agreements the meetings that they've had and of course a special relationship that was developing out of and Abbott's of course best friend in Asia comment as well another interesting thing though if you look into some of the detail of the white paper was some of the language has started to change about the marine rotational deployment force to Darwin as well and basically there was a pushing out of the MRF-D relationship by a couple of years so the timetable of that is not progressing as fast as it was a few years ago on what the rhetoric was originally when it came about and of course this has all come down to another issue in the relationship which is about the cost of the infrastructure in Darwin and the negotiations between Australia and the United States over that infrastructure development so this is $2 billion worth of investment in terms of runways and barracks which has basically been described by some as stalled in that particular relationship and how this has led to a feeling of mutual annoyance between Australia and the United States over these issues and of course then that raises the question is there any correlation between the Darwin port sale and the Darwin infrastructure development and issues I think mainly this is hard bargaining and good hard bargaining we are friends and partners but when it comes to spending money you get down and bargain hard and of course the US like to approach a sort of cookie cutter approach to all their relationships and Australia doesn't like that we negotiate a different relationship with our intelligence facilities a sort of slightly different relationship to many of the other US allies in the region and around the world in terms of that infrastructure and development adding to this the other instrument as mentioned we signed up to the TPP which is incredibly important in particular reiterated in his speech in Washington the importance of the TPP for the future economic relationship in the region and encouraging that because what we do know is there's some concern and resistance in the US Congress to this and particularly what I'll get to in a minute at that moment who are opposed to the TPP in either its current form or opposed to the TPP full stop and that's an interesting development for where it's going with the United States there's been some recent research also come out from our colleagues at the Crawford School talking about the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement and particularly talking about how it's actually not been that beneficial to either side in fact I think the figure was and Amy knows this better than I think was $53 billion in investment from either side that could have possibly been invested elsewhere particularly in the Asia-Pacific region so there's a little bit of fits and starts going on here as well if you go back a couple of years ago there was with the Marine Rotational Deforce deployment in Darwin there was also great talk about HMAS Sterling there's also great talk about the Cocos Islands and talk about expansion in those other areas and why I don't think we're seeing any fundamental change there's been a calling off in some of this rhetoric and a calling off in some of this particular direction and this mainly comes down to what we're seeing happening in the United States and I think this is fundamentally key to what happens to the US and the region and what happens with our relationship in the United States because what we're seeing in the US is a complete fracturing of the US foreign policy consensus that has been in existence since the end of the Second World War there was close bipartisan consensus for a very long period of time from the center left and center right to the presence of the US in the world and that is fundamentally gone it certainly hangs on in the commentary it's certainly strong in areas of the bureaucracy and certainly some areas of the political class but we're seeing it attacked by both the left and the right in US politics on the right of course we're seeing the advocates of the Tea Party, the Libertarian movements and others which have fundamentally come out and rejected the sort of forward interventionist approach to the world there's isolationist amongst them there's different approaches which has fractured the very great strength that has been the Republican view of foreign policy for that very long period of time and of course now on the other side of politics we've seen through the Bernie Sanders phenomenon also a rejection of free trade of the forward presence and those types of issues on the left of US politics as well so going into this particular election period we're seeing a very different approach a fracturing of that broad based consensus about what the US's approach to the world is this means a broad questioning of what the US's global role will be it leads to an ambiguous strategic global posture for the United States into the future, it raises questions about the future of the TPP not just in Congress but within who might be the President of the United States and when you get to the Trump phenomenon it's fascinating, I mean he's come out with an America first of view of the world an America first of view of foreign policy now to me this is part deal making and Trump is a great deal maker who's not to say that a Trump in power wouldn't cut a deal with China with Russia, with any other country in the world if he feels that he's particularly interest so it's part deal making it's part narcissism, it's part populism it's part isolationist, it's a part defensive realism, it's a part interventionalist which means it's completely schizophrenic and he has advocated all those different positions on the same way and if Trump does get into power base is an inherent form of particular populism amongst the US democratic, US democracy so he's going to feed that particular political base in back in the United States and he's going to feed that in a particular way that is really unsure about where it goes into the future now if you look at all the polls and I read them very often it's going in the way that Hillary Clinton looks more and more certain every day but let's face it how many of us in the room wrote Donald Trump off in the primaries? Probably a lot of people I certainly did okay let's not yet write him off in the presidential election but even if Hillary does win we're going to see a different version of US foreign policy going I think a different version of what Hillary would have liked to put forward even 12 months ago she's had to walk back on the TPP because of her own left wing of her own party on her own base she's going to be hamstrung not just by Congress but a fracturing of her own party and a fracturing particularly the Republicans which she would need for some of the broad base consensus on foreign policy that we've seen in past years so this puts us into a really fascinating era if you read the defense white paper we're all hitched to the United States and it's going to get deeper and stronger the minister's introduction the phrase deeper and stronger and it's littered all the way through the defense white paper but if you look at what's happening politically in the United States and we look at what's happening in the region we're in a very big non-zone and grey zone that will affect the way that our relationship with the United States and particularly the way the United States has a relationship with our region goes forward into the future Ladies and gentlemen five incredibly rich presentations it's now your turn to engage with our speakers while you're thinking of questions and comments I'm going to ask each of our panellists to nominate for the new Australian foreign policy white paper what element of Australia's policy towards your particular regional relationship would you change and why not necessarily does anyone else want to jump in first well look I can go I think I in reference I mean I talked about the negotiations and the PASA Plus trade agreement and this real sticking point there is labour mobility which is a very important issue for the Pacific Islands they have very young populations and they're not very few they have big opportunities and job opportunities for them and a young unemployed population can become a constituency that can be involved in violence and crime so having an outlet in Australia would be very beneficial for them we already have a seasonal worker scheme that's quite limited in its scope although we have removed the cap on the number of participants but I think I would invite the Australian government to think more about labour mobility and more opening up to our Pacific neighbours on that issue Thanks Michael from my perspective most of what's going to I'd expect be in this new DFAT white paper related to South East Asia will be very good very prudent very appropriate it's based on a huge amount of Australian investment in doing South East Asia right and certainly there is a huge amount that those who've been actively involved should be proud of one area where clearly Australian needs to do better is in terms of how it is that we support assist and partner with our South East Asia nations to handle the irregular migration flows that they all deal with on a day to day week to week basis Malaysia just as one example has a couple of million people who we would consider to be illegal migrants by our terms who are working in Malaysia doing of course a great many of the jobs that Malaysians themselves no longer want to do but when there is so much carry on in the Australian body politic about relatively small numbers of people seeking to get to our shores of course we don't get a whole lot of sympathy from decision makers in Putrajaya and elsewhere Australia is going to need to work with a region where borders are much less important than they've tended to be in the recent past our border between South East Asia and Australia is going to need to be reconsidered at some stage that's politically impossible right now but deep into this century when South East Asia is a much richer place we will want to have sophisticated ties and those are going to require some very liberal movements of people so the thing I would put into the defence white paper is for Australia and Japan to spearhead the initiative to link up TPP and ASEP the regional comprehensive economic partnership ASEP doesn't currently include the United States TPP doesn't currently include China it is absolutely in our interest to make sure that the region's economic agreements don't divide down a China and US led line Australia and Japan are partied to both of these agreements it would be a nice way of celebrating the work that Australia and Japan did together back in the late 80s and early 90s in fostering the principle of open regionalism and working together in our joint economic interests to hold Asia together so Australia talks about this deeper and broader engagement in terms of closer educational culture and people to people ties in South Asia so in terms of that we would like to have more focus for example on civil society relationship between Australia and not only in terms of government to government but actually civil society partnerships strengthening that the main reason for that is actually that South Asian governments and South Asian people there's inherent distrust in many ways decades of there's a historical reason the way actually regimes have actually run the different countries because of weak governance system there's inherent distrust of people of South Asia and how they think their government actually represents their interest with other important states of the world and particularly a middle power state like Australia so this is an area and Australia and Sri Lanka for example had all these different kinds of irregular migration agreements happening Australia and Pakistan had those and Australia and Afghanistan so in some of those areas just focusing on what Joanne talked about and Nick mentioned I think irregular migration in that area and in the human rights area I think there's a lot of important connections to be made so that's what I would like to have a little bit of focus on I suppose one issue, one region I mean more broadly I think it's wise to remember I spoke a little bit about obviously the discord in the US foreign policy but I think it's wise to remember the United States does have 50 allies around the world that accounts for 75% of global trade and 70% of military spending and it is still the preeminent military power in our region and a really dominant economic power and I agree with Amy here we have to get the United States more engaged in bringing TPP and RCEP together and I think what Thomas spoken recently in terms of TPP is sort of a strategic block against China that's not in our interest and I don't think it's in the United States interest either and so we've got to work more and we can see the issues we've seen I mentioned around the US-Australia free trade agreement more about trade liberalisation and that's going to be difficult for the United States given the way Congress sits and particularly the way Trump and Bernie Sanders have spoken is actually important the one region I want to focus on is next region South East Asia we have to do more in South East Asia we want the US to do more the pivot rebalance was supposed to be all about South East Asia and it's lost a bit of its cost and a bit of its shine but most importantly we've got to get the US to stop asking us to do more in the Middle East and get the US to start asking us to do more in South East Asia and we've got to make that clear that's both in their interest you know they've got plenty of other partners in the Middle East if they really need us it's a value add for the US for us to do more in South East Asia and it's a value add for us to do it so if we can really push this notion of stop asking us to do things in the Middle East start asking us to do more in South East Asia because it's hard to say no sometimes to such a big global power and it's hard to say no when you've got such a deep relationship but I firmly believe the long-term interest in South Asia and South Asia countries is in the Indo-Pacific or Asia-Pacific region and where we can value add to that is the South Pacific where we already do a lot and the Americans expect us to look after that area and we need to manage that well but particularly South East Asia where a lot of our interest coincide and you know we have far less weight in influence in North East Asia than we do in South East Asia okay thank you okay over to you folks questions comments good afternoon my name's Robert Kidston before I put a question to the panel in particular to Peter Jean I've got to ask how many people have read the recently published book by Jane Mayer regarding US politics called Dark Money only published a couple of weeks ago and also the celebrated biographer Jean Edward Smith has written the biography on George W. Bush show of hands I've read them quite large or at least the Edward Smith book it's quite large, it's about 830 pages for Mayer books a little little lighter but having read those and preceding the reading of those reading the late Malcolm Fraser's book Dangerous Allies I'm wondering Peter get your observations on how risky is it for Australia to bind itself too close to the United States given the extraordinary level of governance dysfunction that's currently evident in the United States the book by Mayer in particular Ms Mayer is a 60 year old multi-award wedding investigative journalist for the New Yorker who spent five years looking at the money trail within the United States which is essentially thought about hyper-partisan gridlock inhibiting indeed impeding any sensible decision making within the United States government pretty well everything one reads these days suggested this is becoming a major problem for United States allies in particular Australia so Peter I'm wondering if you could make some observations about how risky it is for us to bind ourselves uncritically I think to many of the United States ventures internationally at the present time irrespective of who wins the presidential elections so there's a lot in there thanks for that I think look fundamentally there are concerns about the US political system there are concerns about our political system there are concerns about a lot of democratic political systems around the world I don't think the problems in the US are unique to the US we look at the make up of our own Senate look at what's happening in some of the democratic regimes in Europe as well and democracy and liberalism and stuff is facing some severe challenges I think this goes back to what was discussed by Kieran Gilbert and the others in the panel this morning that one of the responses of what's happening in the US is the fact that their working class hasn't had a real wage rise in about two decades and many of the middle class are slipping back to the working class and the working class into the underclass so when you're getting this disparity in wages growth and income that creates some broad based problems and a lot of democratic regimes around the world in terms of Fraser's approach I think he completely miscalculated what he was writing about in that book he was projecting into the future a particular view of US foreign policy and the conservative view of US foreign policy that was prominent after September 11 which we don't see anymore and certainly the Obama doctrine is very different in its approach to trying to recalibrate that interventionalist regime the other thing when it comes to being an ally of the United States we can say no we've said no plenty of times to the United States in the past and we've raised some particular questions and issues if you go back in Asia and look at what happened around the Taiwan Straits crisis and a few things many decades ago we were absolutely very forefront with the United States of saying it's not in your best interest to do these things it's not in our best interest to do these and we won't support you just because we're aligned to the United States we'll agree with everything and certainly if a Trump president does get elected that would need to be the very strong firm stance that we take that if Trump's doing things that we don't agree with we have to make that very loud and very clear that doesn't aberrate the alliance or break the alliance you know I think one of the concerns I have is a lack of sometimes being able to be critical of the alliance and look at it with a hard edge nose I mean some there's been some interesting comments by Richard Woolochot and other people in recent times and I think it's all contributing to a very positive debate we need to have about the alliance but I notice he and others have been attacked that any question in the alliance basically means you're pro-China it seems to be this dichotomy split sometimes in our discussion of the US relationship that you're either all in or you're completely opposed there can be a happy middle ground I think in there where we look at it from our own strategic interests and it's been very strong in the past and I think it can be and I think we're seeing signs of that in the current political debate as well I'm not sure if that answers your question directly but you know I suppose the other thing to think about is what are the strategic alternatives if we don't allow ourselves with the United States? Fraser was pointing out you go armed and independent armed and independent is going to cost you two to three times what we're paying in GDP is the Australian people willing to do that in foreign policy interests do we go the way of New Zealand? do we backpedal from the alliance and take basically the approach that the Greens party is putting forward which is unarmed and neutral into the region of the world or can we find another partner in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia or somewhere else in the world to have another great and powerful friend with so these are about strategic choices we have to make I still think it's by faring our best interest to maintain our close relationship with the United States we just have to manage that in a very pragmatic way going forward Okay Terry Henderson I was interested in the juxtaposition between Amy and Nicholas's presentations particularly on the South China Sea now Amy intimated that maybe things aren't all that frozenly round in China I'm glad to hear that Global Times doesn't have the last word on these things and Nicholas talked about ASEAN about half the ASEAN countries have a direct involvement with the border on the direct China China Sea and the other half don't some of those that don't have direct borders with China one of which was Myanmar which Nicholas's intimated might become an Australian best friend is there how do you see ASEAN China interacting on this over the next few years and is there any role Australia can play other than sending or not sending ships in international waters Yeah I mean I think you're right the Global Times certainly doesn't have the last word on this and they play a role in the Chinese debate but by no means representative of official views all the time I think Australia would actually do well to listen more to what our Southeast Asian neighbours are saying on this issue they confront this issue much more palpably than we do as you said they border or share waters with China and I think it's interesting that as Nick has said Southeast Asia is not one voice and they have always tried to negotiate between the US and China on a whole range of issues and there is a spectrum of views within ASEAN on this question I think we need to sort of educate ourselves as much as possible with that spectrum and see how that spectrum might be shifting but don't demand that ASEAN come out one side or the other I don't think that's a particularly helpful response necessarily I think they have very sophisticated views on these questions and very often in the Australian debate you tend to get the sense that we think they're not strategic in their thinking or they are cowed by China they have more influence than we give them credit for they live with this issue much more palpably we would do well to learn as much as possible about different Southeast Asian perspectives on this issue I think he's right that every country in Southeast Asia has so much at stake in its relationship with China and that of course includes Vietnam and the Philippines who are currently caught in this tug of war that won't last forever and they hope to come through this current phase of disquiet and some antagonism with ever strengthened relationships with the behemoth to their north who could blame them for seeking to defend their interests while also maintaining a great deal of what has been good about the regional political equation over the last generation or three I think for Australia and Australians we do as Amy has advised need to be aware of exactly how it is that an ASEAN consensus emerges it tends to all go on behind closed doors and so if Australia wants in the years ahead to be an influential voice we need to make sure that wherever possible we are also behind those closed doors that's not going to be easy necessarily given some of the perceptions of Australian meddling when we fast forward the tape though to pick up the possibility of a different great and powerful friend certainly for Australia that is not going to be Myanmar that country will never have the heft a country like Indonesia will at some stage be a serious not only regional but global power Australians will want to be on friendly terms with that global power unless we are prepared to go about much more significant investments in terms of our defence posture and a much more aggressive foreign policy so then in 2050 say if Indonesia is one of the world's maybe top three economies we will want them to be working hand in glove with us by that stage we might only have 40 million people of our own we will be tiny and significant we will be begging them to take us on board so what could we do right now given that I've had an extra few minutes to reflect on Michael's suggestion of what could go in this new DFAT white paper if you were going to be really bold really assertive really forward thinking you would on behalf of the government make a statement of course at this stage it would be merely a statement of intent Australian school student learns Indonesian to a conversational standard I would guess I won't go the show of hands option I would guess relatively few people in this room speak Indonesian to a conversational standard we should. I'm Michael Hall one of the Westpac future leaders scholars I wonder if I can be a little greedy and actually ask two questions at once they're both very different topics which I'm really interested in one it might be a little bit hard to comment on considering it's all a bit uncertain at the moment but I'm interested about how the Brexit will influence our relationship with South Asia because there's a lot of obviously immigration from South Asia to UK and the vote from Brexit indicates that there's a bit of I think part of that Brexit campaign was around almost closing the borders down a little bit which for me if I was a South Asian would sort of make me a bit cautious about wanting to head in that direction if I was going to be leaving the area so we're interested to know what you think about how that's going to affect our relationship the other one was for Amy wanting to I guess have a bit of an update on the current climate around North Korea in that sort of region. Thanks Michael for the question very interesting question and I think the discussions as you know that are still having it in different ways so just prior to the referendum and afterwards what we've seen from the Australian government is this whole discussion and this public kind of various comments that Brexit is not going to actually impact that seriously on Australia but at the same time when I was looking at Indian newspapers and the Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi Pakistani newspapers I was thinking that there's a lot of anxiety about what was going to happen to all these people who leave not only the labour migrants who live in the UK but also actually educated migrant community who live in the UK what's going to happen to them so that is still there as far as I understand and soon after the referendum what we've seen the increasing cases of attacks actually migrant communities there that affected East London for example where a lot of Indian community people they live in that area so we've seen that and at the same time we've also seen that some of the funding from the research grants of people who are working on issues of South Asia have been immediately cut down can give you examples of issues of environmental displacement programs which were offered actually European funding prior to Brexit announcements and the result but even article 50 wasn't activated what we've seen is that though have been cut down various institutions in India have received letters saying that they're cutting down all those kind of funding so the impact we don't know yet how far it's going to be felt within the region but we see of the migrant community which lives in the UK there's a lot of anxiety and because of that we've also seen a little bit maybe a slight increase of applications to migrations in different migration schemes in Australia but I can't tell you in detail about that these are just newspaper reports but Australia have also been traditionally quite conservative in terms of how many migrants they could take educated migrants skilled migrants from South Asia so with all of that at the moment I think it's actually quite vague but you're right you've mentioned at the beginning that there's a lot of questions and anxiety regarding Brexit on North Korea the first thing I'd say is the real expert on this is Brendan Taylor who's sitting at the back of the room so I suggest you chase him down in the lunch break to get his views on this as well but yeah I mean the North Korean issue continues to be a problematic one not least with the missile test just recently into waters very close to Japan I think interestingly it's become an issue that actually might be uniting South Korea Japan and China their foreign ministers met recently and made a joint statement which is something that's often very hard for those three countries to do so possibly an area for cooperation but I think fundamentally the platform that used to be used for dealing with this issue, the six party talks has broken down because of very different views about what the underlying security question is, is it about ridding the peninsula of nuclear weapons which is the US-Japanese view is it about North Korea's security and its view of the security of its regime is it about China's view about which powers get to play a role on the Korean Peninsula close to its borders and until we can sort of get some resolution on what the fundamental core security issue is North Korea will continue to be able to play off these powers in the way that it has done Hi everyone, thanks for those really interesting little snippets so I'm an engineer and I can sense here that there's a lot of excitement about the opportunities that more free of trade can offer but in my industry there's actually a lot of fear because we're subject to really strict regulations and things about safety and environmental, you know, wages superannuation, all that sort of thing and people are really frightened that the businesses they work for aren't going to be able to compete with imports where rightly or wrongly the regulations might not be so strict so I mean, I guess a really poignant example at the moment is the steel industry and the struggles that they're having what would you say to someone who is, yeah, freaking out that their business isn't going to be sustainable with all of the free trade Yeah, I mean, I think you're right and I think we had this first generation of free trade and opening up in the region was just breaking down high tariff levels and that was great, that achieves a lot the now the much trickier part of freeing up trade is dealing with harmonisation of standards and things like this and that's where particularly South East Asia China are at a different level with regards to some of the older players in the region Japan, Australia, the United States so I think it's very incumbent upon the Australian government to be working with through things like RCEP to try and harmonise some of those standards because as you say without some sort of certainty business is very unlikely to invest or do the sorts of things that you want to achieve these opportunities that we've been talking about Anyone else? Just quickly, so late last year while most people were celebrating the Christmas New Year shutdown the ASEAN 10 came together as the ASEAN economic community sounds very big and brash and important in practice though it's still very underdone when it comes to all of these issues of harmonisation and there's nobody within policy circles in South East Asia who seriously believes that in this coming generation we will get Clark Key and the Chin Hills harmonised to any extent and that's the internal ASEAN conversation it will be painstaking and frustrating and very difficult of course people in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand they have similar concerns about being flooded by cheap knock-offs or labour that will work for a fraction of the ordinary market rate so those sorts of issues are going to be handled across a region like South East Asia as well so Australia needs to play it smart we do what we possibly can to get everybody working well together while appreciating that that won't happen quickly or easily one thing think about it in terms of opportunities as well you've got an amazing skills benefit you're probably educated where do you do your engineering degree Brisbane, UK one of the best leading universities in the country and in the world those are transferable skills domestically, nationally, regionally as well so you're thinking about you're starting at an advantage compared to the people in those other countries in a huge advantageous position so think more broadly about that try and value add to that particular skills advantage you got and do the best you can to drive that forward and that may be working in the region might be working in South East Asia working in projects and communities to increase the standard of living and increase the economic development of those countries I'd like to get more of that parody when we have these discussions around trade I think the younger engineers do see it a bit more that way but it's more the old school we live in a globalised economy in a globalised world from a strategic point of view geography is really important we've had the revenge of geography with the rise of great power politics but overlaying that is the digital economy and the global economy that's not gone away and you have amazing transferable skills and opportunities that you've got to think in that mindset think in that global and interconnected world mindset in some of the areas actually in South Asia for example in India Bangladesh and Sri Lanka what we've seen and where Australians have contributed is in science and technology and many engineers for example from the A&E from the engineering school there's a big group of students and academics they've gone to in rural areas in India and they have worked with the rural community in terms of working on the solar power and that actually also received a national award from India it was incredibly positively actually it was publicised so in Indian media four or five years ago so I think through that kind of connection and then through Australian different programs there was the youth ambassadors program volunteers program many engineers actually connected through with the region so in science and technology we see more and more Australian and South Asians for example connecting with each other so I see your question and I understand that there's different kinds of anxiety how free trade could actually also open up some of those questions about inequality within the systems but also this opportunities that could be developed that's what I wanted to just mention okay Joanne did you have any last thoughts I would just say don't mistake me for saying free trade is a good thing I probably I mean for the Pacific Islands I mean I was talking about the PASA Plus I don't necessarily think the Pacific Islands should sign up to a free trade agreement with Australia on the terms that have been offered without labour mobility because we need to remember free trade is often negotiated with the terms of the wealthy country themselves who use trade barriers to build their economies and now they're imposing quite liberal trade regimes on countries that don't have that benefit I think the important thing with free trade is it can be very beneficial to an economy and you know it probably should be promoted but it needs to come with assistance to meet the requirement you were talking about the very strict requirements we have in Australian standards that's a huge imposition on a Pacific Island I mean I've done a lot of work on Tonga and their accession to the World Trade Organization and it's somewhat ironic that you're standing in a very small Pacific Island and they're developing incredibly sophisticated sanitary and phytosanitary requirements and standards within their government yet education, health electricity, basic things that we take for granted are a struggle so please don't mistake us all as necessarily advocating free trade it has to be free trade on more equitable terms than we often see okay can you join me in thanking our five wonderful panellists for a very rich discussion