 Hugh White, we've been talking a lot about Australia's foreign policy, our international policy, but one of the things that seems to be coming through is the kind of dysfunctional nature of our politics. In your opinion, does our politics and the state of our politics at the moment in Australia support good policy making in the international system? Well, the political demands of good foreign policy depend a lot on your circumstances. When things are going well, when the international situation is working fine for you, the international law to support your security, provide you lots of economic opportunities, then foreign policy is pretty easy. You haven't got any hard choices to make and the politics kind of drains out of it. And that's really what we've lived with. I would say really for most of the post-Vietnam era, we go back and ask, well, why were politics on foreign policy so bitter in the 50s and 60s? Because we had really hard choices to make, because we faced a very difficult situation. Now, I would say now we're moving back into a more demanding situation. The remarkably stable and congenial post-Vietnam order is past us. I think there is at least passing. We have very big choices to make about the kind of role we want to play in shaping the new order in Asia and the kind of order we want to see emerge. We haven't begun to grapple with those questions effectively, and that relates to the US and China. It also relates to our relationship with Indonesia. It relates to the kind of role we play in the South Pacific. In all of these areas, a whole set of assumptions which we've been working with for 40 years are going out the door. And I think we have not yet seen the political leadership to put those challenges to the Australian public and to start the debate about how we should best respond. And I think that failure of political leadership on both sides of politics is very seriously undermining our attempts to come to terms as a country with the way our international environment is changing. And I mean to use the analogy of the 50s is partisanship emerging in Australian foreign policy? And is that a good or a bad thing? My problem is there's not enough partisanship. I mean partisanship can have a negative and a positive aspect. It's a positive aspect if the partisan divide reflects a genuine division over a core policy issue which actually needs to be debated. And that's good. That's the way the system meant to work. It's bad if it becomes a nearly a vehicle for political placemaking. Completely devoid of policy debate. Now I think to the extent that there's any debate about foreign policy in Australia at all, then it's purely partisanship of the second kind, devoid of policy content. And you can see that in some ways in a way in which the press and government has tried to make political hay out of the threat of terrorism in a way which I think has really been devoid of serious policy content. Not that terrorism is not an issue but I don't think they've been addressing the key issues in the politics. But what really strikes me is that we don't yet have a partisan debate, for example, about how we should respond to China's growing power or how we should respond to the idea of Indonesia as a much more significant international actor or how we should respond to the way India is emerging as an international player. These are core issues for Australia's future. And neither side of politics anything to say about them. They're not even disagreeing about it. I wish they would. Because it would get a better discussion and better debate going. So we're to hear from now. I mean we've got all of these challenges as you say. One of our speakers earlier said that he thought that the national security story that we've been running up till now, the threat of terrorism, is about out of leagues. Do you see with a US election coming up, rising tensions in the South China Sea, continuing squaring off between Japan and China, and a much more tense relationship with Indonesia? Does foreign policy in your mind become a bigger domestic policy issue or not? Well look, I think it will eventually. But how that happens and whether it happens soon enough and whether as it becomes a bigger foreign domestic political issue that produces a better debate and better policy outcomes, these are not so clear. Because I think we can be sure that politicians have all striped for continue to beat the terrorism drum as long as they think there's an electoral buck in it. And they will continue to be until Australians really wake up to the fact that, contrary to what the Foreign Minister said a couple of months ago, this is not the biggest security threat Australia faces. When Australians finally wake up, that the rise of China, the transformation of Indonesia, the myriad of different changes that are happening in our region pose much bigger questions for us, then that will start becoming a political question. The really interesting issue is whether that will happen by events forcing our attention to it, a crisis in the South China Sea, the Prime Minister gets a phone call at three o'clock in the morning, he has to decide whether we are going to go to war with China on behalf of the Philippines over second Thomas Reef or not. I mean that's a real, you know, I'm not saying it's a high probability, but it's a clear possibility. That would bring the issue of public attention much better if it happened if an Australian political leader stood up today, tomorrow, next week and said we as a country have to have a serious debate about where we see Asia going, what role we expect the United States to be playing, what role we expect Australia to be playing, what we can do to shape that. We don't have to wait for events to sandbag us. We can get out there and start talking about this now, but only if we can find a politician with the courage to do it. Don't hold your breath.