 Ladies and gentlemen, it's been quite a year for Australia and the world. At home we've seen again catastrophic flooding up and down the coast. A new government has taken office in Canberra. Australia lost its long-serving, long-distance head of state in Queen Elizabeth II. In our region we witnessed the expansion of Chinese influence into the Pacific. Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated. The brutal regime in Myanmar continues its campaign of repression against its own citizens and also against one of our citizens, Sean Turnell, a friend of mine and a friend of many of us here at the Institute who's been convicted on false charges for supposedly violating the Official Secrets Act. In truth, as anybody who knows Sean knows, his only crime was trying to improve the lives of Myanmar's people. And at a personal level, I would like to thank those Australian journalists who've maintained a focus on Sean as well as on the other Australians detained in China and elsewhere. In Europe, of course, we've seen the unjustified and brutal invasion by Russia, a nuclear weapons power and a permanent member of the Security Council of its sovereign neighbour, Ukraine, in the largest land war in Europe since 1945. One of my highlights this year was being blacklisted by the Russian state for saying mean things about Vladimir Putin in June. My only regret was that I was only listed at number 33 on the list of the Australian blacklist. I think I looked at some of the names above me and I don't want to get into detail, but I think I deserve to be a bit higher. We hosted President Zelensky in October, and part of my agenda for trying to get Zelensky was that I thought that the Russians might retabulate the latter, and I could move up a little bit further, but so far no updating. So it's been, it has been a big year. One of the features of the media award is that each year we've invited a prominent individual to speak about these questions of Australian coverage of the world, of events, of how the media is changing. And over the years we've had some fabulous speakers including Brett Stevens of the New York Times, Susan Glasser of the New Yorker, Nick Warner, who was the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, but whose father Dennis Warner, I should say, was a storied war correspondent, as well as Malcolm Turnbull when Malcolm was communications minister. So tonight to that role of honor, I'm delighted to add my friend Gideon Rackman. Gideon is the chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, a post he's held since 2006. He joined the FT after 15 years at The Economist, which included spells as a foreign correspondent in Brussels, Washington DC, and Bangkok. He's also the author of several books including Easternization, War and Peace in the Asian Century, and this year, The Age of the Strong Man. Gideon, I don't know if you've been blacklisted by the Russian state, you have? Excellent. Gideon, what number were you? Oh, Kath, Kath is all okay. So there's a lot of comrades, a lot of fellow travelers here, here tonight. So he's been blacklisted. On top of being blacklisted and being brilliant, Gideon is also very funny. And I think all in all, he's the perfect media lecturer. So can you please join me in welcoming Gideon Rackman? So thank you very much, Michael, for the introduction, for inviting me out to Australia again. I keep turning up. And yeah, I'm slightly worried that you said I'm very funny because I actually don't think there are any jokes in here, but I'll do my best. So it's great to be at a ceremony that's, you know, rewarding foreign correspondents. It's how I started and have now moved into the slightly gentler era of commentary. But like many people in this room, I suspect I, when I first wanted to be a journalist, I actually wanted, above all, to be a foreign correspondent. It was the diamond job. It still is in many ways. And I remember sitting on the shelves of my parents' house was a book called Point of Departure, which was the memoirs of a man who was the great foreign correspondent of his day, the 1950s, James Cameron. And that book's just dust jacket referred to him as probably the most experienced and certainly the most widely traveled writer in the world. And that seemed to be something to aspire to. And by the Vietnam era, then there's a new generation of kind of glamour foreign correspondents who were a bit more kind of rock and roll than James Cameron. There was Michael Hur's Dispatchers, which placed the kind of hard living writers and photographers, I think some of them Australian, actually, covering the Vietnam War right at the center of his narrative. And there was a book that caught my imagination as a teenager and that of many other school kids dreaming of one day becoming a foreign correspondent. So by the early 1980s, I was at university and made a trip to Israel during the 1982 Lebanon War. And there I actually met some real foreign correspondents. I remember at a kind of memorable party in Jerusalem. And I had a long conversation with one of them, a guy called David Blundy from the Sunday Times, who looked like a foreign correspondent out of Central Castings, you know, tall, good looking, just back from the front line. He was also actually, though very generous in spirit, we had a long conversation. And I remember discussing Michael Hur's Dispatchers with him. And David remarking, I think correctly, that he wasn't totally comfortable with the way that her had made the journalists, the heroes of the book, the center of the book. Because we are, in the end, observers. We're writing about other people, not ourselves. So a few years later, I was lucky enough to become Blundy's colleague. He was the Washington bureau chief for a new newspaper, The Sunday Correspondent. I was working alongside him in the Washington office. But the story does not have a happy ending because David always found Washington a bit dull. And one week, just a couple of months after the paper was launched, he decided to go down to El Salvador to cover the war there. And just a few hours after arriving, he went to report on the fighting, and he was shot and killed by a sniper. And David's death serves as a reminder, which I always kept with me, that being a foreign correspondent can also be a dangerous and a deadly business. And of course, many of the postings are not remotely dangerous. I spent five happy years in Brussels, which is not, I think, a posting that David Blundy would have particularly enjoyed, although it was one I found genuinely fascinating. So there's different forms of foreign corresponding. But it is true that some of the most dramatic and important foreign stories involve wars. And they're risky to cover. Many years after David's death, one of his close friends from his Sunday time years, Marie Colvin, was also killed covering the war in Syria. And as we meet here in Comfort in Sydney, as we were reminded, some of the people who are up for awards tonight are in Ukraine, which is obviously a risky environment. Covering wars isn't just dangerous, though. It's also expensive, certainly if you try to take the right precautions. And that brings me to a key topic, which is the future of foreign reporting. And there are two particular challenges that I'd like to discuss. The first is the near collapse of the business model of much of the Western media and the threat that they'll be unable to continue to fund foreign reporting in the way they once did. And the second is the rise of social media and what that means for how the news is being reported and the traditional authority gained or otherwise of the foreign correspondent. So as the economist Southeast Asia correspondent in 1992, which was the first time I was actually a staff correspondent rather than a freelancer, and I was astonished and delighted to inherit a penthouse flat, a cook, a driver. Admittedly, my predecessor had ideas above his station and had actually gone on to become an investment banker because I think, but he had set up arrangements that I happily inherited. And the economist's arrangements were not notably extravagant. The American newspapers seemed to have even more money. I remember the LA Times correspondent in Singapore telling me that it was actually written into his contract that he and his family would always fly everywhere first class. And he described to me the great satisfaction he had in entering first class cabins with his two tiny children and seeing the horror of the other people who'd paid for their exclusivity. But those days are gone. I don't actually think the LA Times even has a Southeast Asia correspondent now. And all those first class tickets and so on were financed by the deluge of classified ads that made papers like the New York Times and the LA Times rich. And the classifieds have all migrated to the Internet and a lot of display advertising is also moving increasingly to Google and Facebook, which offer a better targeted audience, frankly. However, there are signs that some of the traditional model is coming back. People are finding ways, mainly through subscription. The New York Times actually appears now once again to be a money machine, the FT actually, which was one of the first papers to put ourselves behind a paywall after a deep sort of gulp, whether this was the right thing to do, it's worked. So I think that the traditional media, not all of them, not quite in the same numbers, but some of them are making life pay again. So I guess if you went back to Bangkok, as I was there in 1992, there would be fewer foreign correspondents. There are certainly fewer staff foreign correspondents, but there still would be some. There are traditional media that are still making it, making it work. But as hard pressed papers look for money to save, their eyes do fall increasingly on foreign bureaus. Even if the correspondents no longer live in penthouses, foreign bureaus are still expensive to run. And worse, the ability to count clicks on stories has demonstrated to publishers that foreign stories are often just not read very much. So why would you spend money supporting the most expensive part of the operation when you know that a cat video or Kim Kardashian story will attract more attention? So the decrease in the amount of foreign coverage that traditional news outlets are willing or able to afford is becoming a common problem across the Western world. And I was looking, Michael, I think a few years ago you were making this point that Australia was more and more impacted by the world but that the ABC had at the time you were talking just cut back its foreign coverage. But the picture is not all bleak. If you look certainly at the three main employers of my career, the BBC, the Economist, the FT, and we have the editor of The Guardian out there as well, it's also true of them. It's true that money can be tighter than it once was, but all these organizations continue to maintain formidable networks of foreign correspondents. And they know that reporting the world is a crucial part of their identities and they'll do their utmost not to let that slip and are doing that. And also, even as some of the older news organizations have cut back or disappeared, others are popping up in their places. So if I think of where the FT hires from now, you know, traditionally the route would be somebody work for Reuters or one of the news agencies and then they'd move to a newspaper. But we hire people now from things that didn't exist a few years ago, things like Axios, Buzzfeed, etc. There are new forms of media coming up. And globalization has also spawned a much greater appetite for international business news. So Bloomberg, which didn't exist when I started out, is now a huge global news organization admittedly backed by a billionaire. And while they're bread and butter as business, they also cover politics, they have big foreign bureaus. And the shrinkage of the budgets of traditional news organizations also opens up opportunities for freelancers. And new technologies are making it easier to do foreign news without some of the kind of financial backing that you would have had to need in the past. So you no longer need a camera crew to film a report, you can do it on an iPhone. And of course, there's a plethora of simple ways of sending your story over by email, text, WhatsApp, whatever. This may seem hardly worth remarking on, but it's still, you know, I'm making myself sound incredibly old, but it's still remarkable to me because I remember when I started reporting from abroad, filing was a real nightmare. One of the first things that you were taught as a trainee radio correspondent at the BBC in the 1980s was how to dismantle a hotel telephone so that you could attach crocodile crypts to the mouthpiece and then file through a microphone. And as partly without the sheer plover of that was one of the things that motivated me to move to print so that I didn't have to spend my time sort of trying to fiddling around with bits of wire in hotel rooms. But even there in print, things were still amazingly primitive. So I mentioned my job with the Sunday Correspondent in Washington in 1990. And filing by computer was just coming in. But in the three months that David, Blondie and I worked together, we never actually managed to get the modem on our joint computer. We had one to work. So we had innumerable visits from some long forgotten company would fiddle with it and say, no, it's still not working. So we ended up just filing by literally dictating our copy down the phone to somebody in London with predictably farcical results. You'd get the paper like two days late and say, I didn't say that. But so yeah, the combination of technology and the financial problems of old media do provide an opening for today's freelance foreign correspondence. But there are also issues of ethics and safety involved. The Financial Times, and I know I'm sure The Guardian as well, we know there are lots of brave young journalists who risk their lives trying to report from places like Ukraine. But we have to ask whether we can morally encourage them to take those risks when they won't be able to take the safety precautions that we would insist on if they were one of our own correspondence. And social media and new technology affect not just the way that stories can be created and filed. More importantly, they affect the way that stories are consumed. Conventional newspapers like mine are increasingly finding that their stories and reporting not being followed by people who buy the paper or even come directly to the site. But they get through social media. So if people read a column of mine, for example, and we can follow all these things with kind of disconcerting precision, you can see how far people have gone into your article, never as far as you would have liked. But more than 50% of the readers who come across my pieces will have, it would have come to them via Twitter or Facebook. And that change of patterns of consumption has changed the job in important ways. So the pressures on to create stories that are easily shared, that have important keywords in the headline, when I started The Economist, that, you know, one of the great pleasures is trying to find a witty headline with a pun in it. That was the pride and joy of The Economist. But it doesn't really work online. What you want instead is something that attracts search engines. So in my world, the key words are you've got to have Trump or Putin in the headline, and, you know, people can find it. Unfortunately, knowing the popular words also means knowing the unpopular words. And they include things like Syria in Ethiopia. Because knowing more about who your audience is and knowing what it wants inevitably affects the kinds of things that journalists report on and perhaps more important that editors commission. And the threat for foreign reporters is that the rise of the internet and social media increases or could increase the pace that foreign news gets marginalized. And now that editors can count every click, they can see that maybe that very important foreign news story isn't really attracting the readers. So I know, for example, if I have on my conscience the fact that I have not written a column about the war in Ethiopia and Tigray, where, according to, you know, at least academic studies, literally hundreds of thousands of people may have died either directly in the fighting or through famine, far more than in Ukraine. But I also know that when I do write that column, it will probably get relatively few readers. These things are a bit unpredictable, but generally you kind of have a sense of what will be read. By contrast, I know that if I put Donald Trump or Putin in the headline, I'm much more likely to get that surge of readers. And in normal business, that wouldn't be a dilemma. You give the customers more of what they want and you take the unpopular items, stories about Ethiopia off the shelf. But our business is journalism, which also plays a vital role in the creation of a healthy democratic society. So it's not that simple. The media do play a civic role. We inform the public debate. And if we don't tell our readers and listeners what's going on in the world, we can hardly complain if they make uninformed choices as voters or as citizens. And the fact is that Australia and Britain as countries, as democracies, cannot afford to ignore the outside world. In recent years, we've got involved in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and we're engaged in a proxy war in Ukraine. The injunction to keep reporting on foreign news, however, even if interest levels can be low, can sound a little bit like a school teacher insisting that children must still be served their greens, even if they push them to the even if they push them to the side of the plate. But there are more encouraging trends. And one of them is to do with this rise of the internet and social media, which has a positive side for those of us attempting to cover the world. Because while we may know that the general audience for foreign news can be relatively small, social media also allows for the creation of small niche audiences, which when you put them together actually become quite large. So while in, you know, maybe a decade ago, a story on Sri Lanka that appeared in the FT might have got a few thousand readers in the FT, if that. Now it's likely to be shared by a social media amongst the whole community. It's of Sri Lanka watchers who might be expatriates, Sri Lankans, but also academics, business people, human rights organizations are like, and you draw together a community. And so as I say, although I think normally I have a good sense of what will be listened to or watched, I also do this podcast. Sometimes I'm surprised. So I did a podcast on Sudan and I felt like a slight duty one. I mean, it was an interesting story, but I thought this won't get much of an audience. And actually it was one of the most listened things we did. And why was that? Well, because there are a lot of Sudanese, a lot of Sudanese living outside the country who are hungry for coverage of a country and a conflict that was not really being covered in the world. So when suddenly there was like a half hour program on it, it actually drew in order in audience, although over the course of about a month, you know, it took it, it's spread by word of mouth. So I'm aware I'm slightly contradicting myself saying, you know, there are these, there's a limited appetite for foreign news, but I suspect what's happening is that if you're confining it to your country, your countryman, that audience, it can be quite small for an obscure foreign story. But in a globalized world, we're now, you know, the English language media is consumed all over the world through the internet. And you can build news forms of audience. Social media allows you to find your readers and your readers to find you. And your audience can increasingly be global. And that's already changed the business model of many British newspapers, which is why the editor of the Guardian is out here in Australia, because they built an audience here in Australia. And the rise of social media has also blurred the distinction between the consumers and the producers of news in interesting ways. So we were discussing at our table Twitter and whether it's worth it. But for me, it's very much worth it because there are certain niche issues that I follow, say the South China Sea, big issue out here, niche in Britain. It's covered pretty sporadically in the British press until a couple of years ago. If I wanted to follow it, I'd have to remind myself to log on occasionally to the Straits Times or the South China Morning Post. Before that, I would have been going down to a newspaper library and finding days old copies of the paper. Now I follow the Twitter feeds of fellow South China Sea watchers. And every day, I can see thoughts, articles, and snippets of news posted by people who might be in Sydney or Singapore or Hanoi. And they're helping to improve my work. And I hope they make it a lot easier. And I hope occasionally, you know, I'm helping to improve there. So you have this exchange of ideas with people all over the world. So I guess the story I've told is one of a foreign news business that has been transformed mainly by technology over the course of my career. But today, the nature of the job has changed enormously. Technologies transform, the audience has changed. But I think one thing about the nature of the job hasn't changed will always be a need and an appetite for world news. And traveling the world as a reporter will remain one of the most exciting and rewarding jobs in journalism, indeed, of any profession I can think of. And for all the furore about fake news, and that's a real subject, maybe Michael and I will talk about it right now, I do still believe that proper well reported stories will ultimately find a bigger bigger audience than weak or false reporting churned out by those with sometimes maligned motives. So we're gathered here tonight to celebrate the best in Australian journalism. And the best journalism is always worth celebrating. And I think we'll always find an audience. I certainly hope so. Thank you. Gideon, thank you for those remarks. Thank you for the yarns at the beginning about the legendary foreign correspondence. I've learned something about you, which is that you only moved into print because you didn't want to attach crocodile clips to a phone receiver. So remind me not to ask you for help with any issues. Your difficulty filing reminded me of a an experience I had with the foreign correspondent a few years ago where he was interviewing me on the phone. And I did hear the clink of ice in the glasses behind him and sort of chitter-chatter. And I gave him this line I was very proud of, which was that the United States, this was in the Trump era, that China was being reckless and the United States was being feckless. And when it appeared in press, he'd turned it around and it was the United States being reckless and China being feckless. So yeah, sometimes the problems with filing continue. Let me ask you about three or four, five questions. And then I want to give the audience an opportunity to ask you questions too. First of all, I agree with you about the advantage, just thinking about the economics of the media business. I agree with you about the advantage that the English language bestows on our Senate. And that applies to think tanks too, that if you can write well, if you have distinctive argument and you can write elegantly, you can find a global audience regardless of whether you're writing in Sydney or London or Bangkok. The titles that you mentioned are all global brands in a way, BBC, FT, Guardian, Economist. Are you finding in the UK that the global brands are really sort of pulling away from the other titles in the UK? Because it is always seemed to me that a title like The Guardian or The New York Times has an ability to build a global brand. But there can only be so many global media brands. Are you finding that? Well, I think that most papers have at least thought about it and tried to do it. And obviously, there's a big pot of money out there if you can make it work. I know that for example, we've been recently taken over by Nikkei, the Japanese news organization, and they definitely see more scope for expansion in America. It's a huge market. But it's also a crowded market. So, yeah, if you can make it work, it's hugely helpful. And The New York Times has done it in reverse. And you can see they have a huge office now in London, whereas before, when I would have started, it might have been four or five people, it's hundreds now. So everybody's sort of going across how many global brands we can support. I just don't know. I mean, one assumes there's a limit, but it's hard to be sure. Let me ask you about the Ukraine story and the media. The Ukrainians have proved incredibly innovative on the battlefield, but also on the information battlefield. And you probably saw that shot of President Zelensky at the liberation of her song the other day. And there were three or four camera guys moving around him getting the best possible shots. I was telling Gideon today of an anecdote that I had, which was that when we hosted President Zelensky, in his speech, he quoted a lecture that Angela Merkel had given to the Lowy Institute in 2014. Merkel came out for the Brisbane G20 meeting after the invasion of Crimea and gave a very tough speech on Russia. And Zelensky quoted this in the speech to me. And I was a bit surprised by that. And afterwards I asked my colleagues, did we send that to Kiev? And they said, no. And I asked the Ukrainian ambassador, did you send it to Kiev? And he said, no. And so somewhere in Kiev, with munitions falling around, raining down on them, there are people who have the time to be looking through the Lowy Institute website to find content that they can use in a speech that he gives to the Lowy Institute. I mean, this is a level of deafness and dexterity that you don't get from major world leaders, let alone from an embattled war leader. So what are your observations about the cleverness, the advantage that Ukraine has won for itself in the information war compared to Mr, the bloated Mr. Putin at the end of his long table? Yeah. No, I think it's very interesting because if you think before the war, we were all in a slight funk in the West about how brilliantly the Russians were doing and manipulating Western politics. I mean, you referred to the Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election and we were thinking, we're a bit kind of being caught on the back foot here and they're corrupting our political discourse and we don't know how to respond and so on. And actually RT, although now banned, I didn't watch it that much, but it wasn't like Soviet style. They had very much adopted a lot of the mannerisms in the West. That's what made it quite effective is it looked kind of familiar, but they were just introduced different narratives, so doubt, et cetera. So we thought actually the Russians are good at this and it turns out now that they are incredibly outclassed and it's partly how I ended. I do, it may be sort of clutching at straws, but I sort of think that even though fake news and pumping out different narratives and falsities, it can get you a long way. But in the end, I think it's become apparent to people that a lot of what the Russians say is allies and they've lost a lot of their credibility throughout the course of this war. And as you said, the Ukrainians have been incredibly adept. And Zelensky, as it turns out, was brilliantly cast, he's an actor, for this role. And I remember actually just before the weekend before the war broke out, there was the Munich Security Conference and I knew something was up because I was getting on the plane to Munich and in front of me were the heads of the Australian and the British intelligence services. And I was sort of making, kind of trying to make chitchat with this guy, Richard Moore, who runs our intelligence service. And I sort of said, to my embarrass in front and retrospect, what a time to have a comedian as your president. And he said to me, well, it could be worse getting in, we could have a journalist. And I thought at the time actually it was aimed at me. And then I thought actually our prime minister is a journalist. Was he making a comment about his own boss? But anyway, as it turned out, Zelensky's ability to act in the way that, say, Reagan's ability to be an actor and to play the role, as well as his undoubted courage, I mean, huge courage. So again, just out that Munich thing, I remember people were saying to me, you're really going to go back to Ukraine because we know it's about to be invaded. And he said, I had my breakfast there and I had my dinner there. It was a good line. And it could have been so different if he had done what Ashraf Ghani did in Kabul and fled. I think it might have been all over. So he is a brilliant actor, but there's an authenticity behind it, which is very important. What about reporting the China story in an era where increasingly Western foreign correspondents are being locked out of China? I think it's still true. But someone will correct me if I'm wrong that there are no Australian foreign correspondents in China reporting for Australian news organisations, although there are some reporting for other news organisations. But in general, it's much tougher to stay there to get a visa. If you're there, it's much harder to report. How does that affect your ability to reach analytical conclusions? Or how does it affect all of our ability to know what's happening in that country? Yeah, it's not good. I mean, and obviously, as well as the political crackdown, there's the pandemic. So China's essentially been closed for two years and more. So I was actually there. My last visit was as the pandemic was breaking out. But since then, I haven't been able to be back. And although, of course, if you've got contacts, you can stay in touch with by phone, by email, but it's not the same. Because I don't know about you, but I just remember more if I've been somewhere, as opposed to read about it, or had the conversation in person, as opposed to via Zoom. And it's the unexpected things that you see on the street that inform your coverage. So I do feel a bit frustrated that I can continue writing about it and hopefully say something intelligent, but I do think you lose something, definitely. And we were joking about being banned from Russia. We all seem to be banned from Russia. And yeah, you can say, rah, rah, good for me. But actually, I regret it because I always found it interesting going to Moscow. You had conversations that stayed with you and so on. And so that too was getting a bit harder. But I sometimes think that I may end up, we've been in this weird period where you could really travel the world. And I could be in the same year, be in Beijing, in Moscow, Delhi. And now I wonder whether India's actually getting harder to get visas for them. And I think you will eventually, but they don't exactly make it a pleasure. And so that the world kind of feels like it's closing up again. Right. Who would like to ask Gideon a question? We've got about 10 minutes. Andrea, my colleague, has a microphone at the back. It's a room full of journalists. So I can't imagine that the hands won't be up soon. Lenore Taylor was the first to have her hand up. If you could wait for the microphone, if you're asking a question and keep your questions concise. Thank you. Yes, I will. And it's obviously true that foreign bureaus and reporting from the front line is an incredibly expensive undertaking. But I wonder if the observations about social media as a means of conveying complex international stories might, well, it might be that those of us of a certain age, and I include myself in that category, see it one way and see news in one way. Whereas if you convey news in the way that people consuming it on social media want to consume it, it can be very successful. And I make that observation because I have a young journalist who excels at TikTok, who did a TikTok about the fall of Kabul that was viewed 4.3 million times and one on Tigray, which he mentioned, which was viewed 1.3 million times. So my question is, perhaps if you use social media in the way that consumers of social media want to consume it, you can actually convey complex international stories that way in a really successful way. Yeah, I think that's probably true. I mean, everybody has to adapt to new technologies. And in a sense, I'm lucky in that the FT audience is an audience that's, I guess, relatively old, still used to consuming its news by reading. But even I've noticed like I do a podcast, which is not the most sort of technologically sophisticated thing. But I'd assumed, I sort of regarded as like a little side thing that I did just to show I was willing, you know, and that the column was the main thing. But I've noticed increasingly the number of people who say, I listened to your podcast is at least as high as the people who listen, who read the column. So even in a kind of limited way, I can see that the way people consume news is changing. And to state the obvious that, you know, younger people are more favored social media, so they'll be much better at figuring out how to do it. Because it's just natural to them and they're the consumers of it. I mean, I've never used TikTok. But Are you think, are you TikTok curious? I'm not actually, but on the other Twitter, as I say, I use a lot. You said in your speech that you still think Twitter is worth it. Yeah, definitely. Are you, with every crazy tweet and from Elon Musk and all this sort of speculation about how it might change, are you, is that starting to affect your calculation there? Well, you think about it. I mean, I'll see if there's a mass migration from Twitter or if you feel that in some way the medium has been corrupted or has been manipulated in ways that you don't like, then we'll move, I guess. But for the moment, it is still very useful. And actually, because of the technological ineptitude that you picked up on, I actually fail to get a blue tick. So he can't charge me. Yes, Angus on the back table. And then Julia Holman on this table. Hi, Gideon. Angus Grig from the ABC. We hear a lot about in this part of the world that the Brits want to be part of the Asia Pacific. Do you think that's actually true? Depends which Brits you're talking about. I think most Brits that hasn't occurred to. But obviously, as they're seeking to find a rationale for Brexit, global Britain was the slogan that the Tories used. And behind that, there was a sort of kind of half truth, which is that if you look at where the economic expansion in the world has been in the last 30 years, where the dynamism is, whether geopolitics is becoming more and more central, it is this part of the world. Now, I don't think that necessary should lead you to the conclusion that you cut yourself off from your closest market. But nonetheless, I think as the people charge with trying to make sense of where Britain is in the world, there's nothing wrong with the idea that we should try to beef up our presence here. As I say, I think we could have done it from within the EU. But now we're out. It becomes more urgent. And you see this application to join the CPTPP. We'll see how that goes. There is also, August is the other very kind of germane example of that. And I think it's an interesting move by Britain. I mean, I think it's mainly an Australian U.S. initiative, but Britain's attached itself to it. And I think it maybe reflects the way the Americans are thinking about the world, which is that rather than saying, do we preoccupy ourselves with Asia or do we think about the Middle East or do we do Europe? And this whole idea of pivoting to Asia, the Americans had, I think the kind of latest iteration of their thinking is that you really got to try to connect these theaters and that they are connected so that if, for example, Russia had rolled over Ukraine in a week, that would have had a very dramatic effect on geopolitics out here. It would have changed the way China was seen, the way China saw its role. And that therefore, particularly if you're thinking as Biden is in terms of democracies, autocracies, that you want to try and connect the America's alliance system in Asia with its alliance system in Europe. And that's sort of what they're doing. And I think August was definitely a part of that. But as I said, I don't think it's kind of filtered beyond the sort of foreign policy level, except that in population terms, I think it's really, it does matter, that Britain has significant populations with origins in South Asia, increasingly as well, the Philippines, East Asia. And for them, it's a very natural connection. So let's give you a personal anecdote. My wife works in the health service. All her colleagues are from the Philippines and from India. And a lot of them voted for Brexit, not out of any particular anti-European sentiment, but just because to them it seemed obvious that this was the part of the world that they felt a connection to, not actually France or Italy. Let me ask you about Brexit. Things have not gone exactly to plan. I think I'm right that opinion polls indicate that a majority of Brits now regret the decision to exit the European Union. Can you imagine what are the chances of Britain applying to rejoin the EU in the future? I wouldn't think in the next decade. I mean, things can change. Who knows if there's some global war or whatever. I did in the 1940s, Churchill proposed that Britain and France become a single country. So things can happen. But I think that under the current circumstances, nobody really wants to go over that issue again. We've also made, we've left the EU now, retracing those steps, ripping up the UK-Australia trade deal and all the others. Would it just be too much of a faff? But I think that also politically, the Labour, I mean, Keir Starmer was a pretty committed remainder, but he's even more committed to becoming Prime Minister. And I would imagine that he knows that at the moment, the Tories have done so badly, he's so far ahead in the polls, he's just got to sit tight and he'll kind of, should cruise in. But the one way he could really ignite the Tory party is by saying, I'm going to rejoin the EU. And that would give enormous emotional momentum to the old leave, Keir. So he's not going to do that. So I think what they'll try and do instead is to rebuild ties with the Europeans step by step, you know, issue by issue. But even that's not going to be that easy because the EU are very legalistic about these things and they don't want us to cherry pick and do a Switzerland, etc. So it's going to be hard. Julia. Hi, Julia Holman from Radio National Breakfast on the ABC. One of the most surprising stories this year was how Ukraine has withstood Russia's assault on their country. And you referred to it earlier, we had a night, you know, most of the world thought that Ukraine would roll over in a week and we're months in and they're not going anywhere. But Europe is about to get very, very cold and energy is going to become very, very expensive. There's a lot of support in the West now for Ukraine and opposition towards Russia. But I'm just wondering what a very cold winter might mean for the conflict and for Vladimir Putin. Well, I think you're right. It's his last throw of the dice. He's probably got a couple more up his sleeve. But it's something that he is really hoping will change the momentum. And, yeah, inflation is high and people are, I think it's 11% in Britain and, you know, talking to friends in Italy, the cost of living is the number one issue. You may even get rationing, actually, if things get really bad. So the pressure will bounce on public opinion. I think the current, but I don't think it will lead to an immediate shift in policy. I think the current set of leaders are pretty committed to Ukraine, can see this gamber coming and are going to try to see it through and somehow manage the political tension. So it would have to be like a two-stage process. They would have to become so unpopular because of the cost of living crisis that they were then replaced by a bunch of other politicians. You know, the French far right would have to do well or Salvini would have to come up in the polls in Italy or somebody in Britain would have to start making the case for rapprochement with Russia, maybe Nigel Farage, I don't know. But I, so I think it'll take a while, even if things get quite tough. I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's not going to happen like overnight. Anyone else want to try to squeeze in a question? Yes, madam. If you could just wait for the microphone. Hi, Lee Tonkin from the ABC online. Two very simple questions. What's the best foreign policy global affairs book you've read this year and who is your must read every time they print something columnist? They're not simple questions actually. I'm now thinking, Jesus, what have I read this year? So who's foreign policy book have I liked? I mean, I liked, I don't know whether it came up this year, but Ann Applebaum's book on the return of authoritarianism was, I thought, very good. She writes, she's got a very good way of kind of mixing in anecdote and analysis. I think she's excellent. I thought Philip Short's massive biography of Putin is pretty good. And I think actually the two really excellent books on U.S. politics just out now, I haven't actually read Maggie Harbourman's book on Trump, but I'm really looking forward to reading it. Susan Glasser, who you mentioned her and her husband, Peter Baker, I've just written an excellent book on the first Trump presidency, which is astonishing. Even though one kind of knows the details, just reading them, it still makes you blink as to what actually happened. So I guess those would be the ones I think of right now. As to who I read, I mean, I tend to, I mean, I read other columnists out of curiosity to see what they're up to. Jealousy as well? No, actually. The ones I feel jealous of or not jealous of, the ones I really admire tend to be the ones doing something a bit different for me. Like I could never do what Marina High does for The Guardian. She's brilliant, but I'm not in competition with her. I always enjoy reading her. But I mainly read other particular foreign correspondents, people who cover countries particularly well. Like right now, I mean, we were talking about the thinning out of China coverage. So the economists have a brilliant guy in Beijing called David Ranney, who his Chag One column is like a must read for me. So they're particular people covering particular countries I read as much as columnists do. You mentioned Susan Glasser and I had Susan on my podcast the other week. Oh, so did I. There you go. And I asked her what would be the character of a second Trump presidency if he were elected president. She said that a high White House official who served Trump gave her an arresting image, and that is of the first Jurassic Park movie where the velociraptor's claw comes around the door because the velociraptor, the door is locked, but the velociraptor has learned to open the door. And she said that's what it would be. That's what it would be like. I'm going to ask the last question because there was another book, another brilliant book on international affairs published this year. You didn't mention the age of the strong man. And you wrote about these authoritarian figures emerging and defining our era. But as the years gone on, it hasn't gone that well necessarily for all of them. And we saw Trump's red wave sort of dash against the rocks and Putin looks much weakened. I mean, could it possibly be a bad time to be a strong man? Yeah, you know, I actually feel more hopeful this week than I have for a long time because of, I mean, the Trump setback. I was maybe I don't know, I've become sort of congenitally gloomy. I actually went back over all my columns to see, you know, what my record was like. And I worked out that the ones that were wrong were always the optimistic ones. It was the ones where I said Trump could win, right, we're going to vote for Brexit, correct. And when I say, oh, it'll be all right, wrong. That's certainly been the case lately. But I do think that this pretty what I call this strong man phenomenon, which is the rise of politicians both in democracies and in autocracies who are devotees of very personalized style of government have a culture personality, kind of thing that Xi Jinping is doing in China, but that in a different way Trump was doing in America, Bolsonaro in Brazil, it's not been a great year for them. I mean, if Putin had rolled over Ukraine in a week, I think he was actually the archetype for a lot of these people that really explicitly admired him. Then I think that that style of government would have really got a huge boost. But actually, you know, Joe Biden, who's meant to be for the sort of strong man style people, the epistomy of a weak to what what a weak democracy produces this old guy, you know, who's hemmed in by a Congress he doesn't even control, et cetera, et cetera, as opposed to the match of Putin. In fact, Biden's had a much better year than Putin. So that is good. Not all of these strong men have gone down to defeat. Orban did all right. Won quite easily. But Bolsonaro lost and interestingly didn't challenge the elections. We all thought he'd do a Trump. He actually Brazilian institutions proved to be really pretty robust. The next one I'd like to see loses Erdogan in Turkey and that could happen next year. Xi, on the other hand, has just dug himself in and may be there for life. But I think it's becoming increasingly clear that he's not a very good governor of of his country. The economy is in trouble. The private sector is in trouble. He's antagonized large numbers of his neighbors. And I think that strong man style government is actually very bad. I mean, some stating the obvious in a democratic country, but it is a bad way of running a country because it over centralizes authority and somebody who and the longer they stay on the more power crazy they become and the more they lose touch with reality. So eventually it's a system that's likely to fail. But I wondered it might be decades. Maybe we're in luck and it's beginning to to run its course even now. And I do think that the Trump thing is incredibly important because you could point to, you know, Hungary, Brazil, but in the end, what sets the political tone in the world is still what happens in the United States. And if Trump were to come back, you know, forget about talking about the end of the age of the strong man would, as Susan Glasser pointed out, it would be an even more dangerous era. So a lot still rides on that. I'm not prepared to say it's over. He's finished. I don't think that. But I do think he's looking a lot weaker than he did a week ago, which is why the United States will probably be the biggest story in the next year. Ladies and gentlemen, I think you've had a sense today of why Gideon is such a fabulous columnist because of the quickness of his mind and the breadth of his knowledge. And also despite his disavowal in the introduction, his his self effacing humor. So I really enjoyed your lecture, Gideon. And I'd like everybody to join me in thanking Gideon Rackman.