 I'm not going to take up too much time today. My job really is to introduce our next speaker, Professor the Honourable Gareth Evans. Thank you all, though, for coming to the APSA conference. I hope it is a very fulfilling and interesting and challenging event for everybody. And please, if you can, come to the AGM tomorrow. Professor the Honourable Gareth Evans has been Chancellor of the Australian National University since January 2010 and a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne since July 2009. He's President Emeritus of the Brisbane-based International... Sorry, Brussels-based, I beg your pardon. Brussels-based International Crisis Group, a highly influential advocacy and research international NGO working on global conflict prevention and resolution. And he led that organisation from 2000 to 2009. He previously, of course, spent 21 years in Australian politics, 13 of them as a Cabinet Minister. He's also had a significant impact on several subfields of international studies. It's rare for political leaders to advance knowledge in a single issue or subfield. And to succeed in this across at least three is really nothing short of remarkable. The fields to which he has made a really significant contribution include firstly ethics and foreign policy in which his work on good international citizenship triggered a considerable revival in research on the pursuit of an ethical foreign policy. Good international citizenship, according to Evans, is a way of mediating and moving beyond the historic tension between realism and idealism in thinking about statecraft. Secondly, the responsibility to protect doctrine. Gareth Evans co-chaired the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and then spent much of the first decade of the 21st century advancing the principle of the responsibility to protect, especially through the International Crisis Group. Apart from this, he's been pivotal in supporting the R2P research and engagement both at the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect in New York and at the Asia Pacific Responsibility to Protect Centre at the University of Queensland. His co-chair of the International Advisory Board of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. And the third area is arms and control and disarmament, including chairing a major international commission on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament from 2008 to 2010 and being a member of the BLIX Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction. He's written or edited nine books, most recently The Responsibility to Protect, Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All and he's published over 100 journal articles and chapters on foreign relations, human rights and legal and constitutional reform. In May 2010, he was awarded the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Roosevelt Stichting for Freedoms Award. We welcome Gareth Evans here today. Well, thanks very much, Catherine, for that introduction, generous to the point of being over the top, but I appreciate it nonetheless. Tony McKay with Bell, guest speaker, Don Emerson, where is he? And John Ravenhill, behalf of the organising hosts and conference participants. Welcomeing, sorry, wearing the first of the three relevant hats, I suppose, I have this morning as chancellor of this host university, ANU. I really am delighted to welcome you all to this 2011 absent conference. Tony McKay has rather stolen my thunder a bit to the extent that I thought I was supposed to be doing the PR for ANU, but she did the PR for CAS. Let me just raise it a notch and talk about ANU itself for a moment. APSA, as you all know, was founded some 60 years ago exactly at the ANU after a 1951 seminar to mark the Jubilee of Federation. With ANU political scientists Lester Webb and Finn Criss, particularly central players at the creation. And without succumbing to the, what is going on here, without succumbing to the kind of institutional chauvinism that's demanded of us all in this ever more ruthlessly competitive age, not least at Glendavis' University of Melbourne, where we are my other relevant hat, I think it is fair to say that ANU political scientists have been playing a very prominent leadership role in our discipline ever since. That's been so right across the spectrum from electoral studies with scholars originally like Don Rawson, Don Aitken, to international relations theory from Hedley Bull to Chris Rose Smith, to IR generally, Coral Bell to John Ravenhill and a legion of others in that area, including Andrew Mack and Ramesh Takur in peace studies, Bob O'Neill, Paul Dibb, Desbo, Hugh White in strategic and defence studies. But I hope it's not only our history but our future that makes ANU a particularly appropriate venue for this 60th anniversary conference. Last week, as Tony said, we published our strategic plan for the next 10 years, ANU 2020, in which we spilled out more clearly than I think has ever previously been the case in the past. Our determination as Australia's national university, based in the national capital, to really focus resources and effort, not only in maintaining our standing in research and teaching, but in developing our status as a national public policy resource. The third role that I think is clear all the world's great universities always play. At the moment, that capacity is very disaggregated, uncoordinated and underdeveloped, even with the brilliance of the role that's being played by CAS and by others in the college of age at Pacific Crawford School, in particular around the university. But I think that's going to change. I know that's going to change in the next few months in ways that I can't quite spell out yet in detail, although I'll be too happy to tell you about my enthusiasm. Of course, it's the case that in all the discipline areas that we're dealing with in the next three days, putting science, international relations, defence security studies, there by no means the be all and end all of public policy research. There's plenty of other disciplines, economics, development studies, health sciences, a host of other areas that can reasonably claim to be public policy contributors as well. And of course, it's not the case that all our own disciplines have only a policy dimension far from it and the theoretical analysis in which many of you are absorbed plays a highly relevant and important role. But the truth of the matter is that in every major school of government or every major school of public policy around the world, our disciplines and some disciplines are at the heart of the product that's delivered. And that will be the case for the ANU in the period ahead. So watch this space. The second hat that I'm wearing this morning, as is almost already mentioned by Tony, is a fellow academic political scientist, at least a purported one, as a professorial fellow at Melbourne University engaged in teaching graduate seminars on international relations and also supervising some masters and PhD thesis students. After 35 years away from the academic coal phase, and among other things, 35 years of great inflation, it's all been a bit of a shock to the system coming back. Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of the system, as it's now operating, particularly for my younger colleagues trying to lay the foundations for their careers, is the institutional pressure, even with the recent modifications to the era system, to publish in the kinds of formats that are least likely to be read other than one's immediate professional cohort and are least likely to have wider policy influence. The pressure, of course, that you all know is to publish in heavily peer-reviewed journals rather than more popular journals in the IR area like Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy, to publish in journals rather than through books, and when one does publish books to publish through academic publishers rather than more mainstream ones. I think overshadowing all of this for us, as with those in other humanities disciplines, is the reality that in just about all the international ranking systems, which every university finds some fault with, but is imprisoned by, there is a reliance on citations indicators which inherently work much less well in comparatively evaluating performance in the humanities than they do in the sciences. So I do hope that sometime at least at this conference, even if only in the corridor margins, can be spent on wrestling with this problem, which does affect us all. This context, I can't resist but bring to your attention two particular strategies that have been recommended in this respect in the wonderful and wonderfully but bizarrely named international politics blog, The Duck of Minerva, which some of you may or may not be familiar with, which has suggested at least a couple of strategies which those of you who have not yet been reduced to resorting to, but for whom desperate measures seem call for, might want to take into account. One strategy is of course to organize cetacean cartels, in which all members agree to frenetically cite each other in defiance of the operation of ordinary market mechanisms, see peace democratic. As an example, the other strategy, which particularly intrigued me, which can only work of course if one has achieved a certain threshold of professional evidence, but that's true of many of you here, is to write something so comprehensively awful that other political scientists will write innumerable articles driving up one cetacean account as a result. See Huntington index. Moving on the remaining hat that I'm wearing is I guess that of a long time political science and especially international relations practitioner who's managed to disengage pretty comprehensively from the domestic scene, but is still yielding to more temptation than one should to try to change the wider world. The proper course in these matters is for those of us of a certain age, and I'd certainly recommend this to all my former cabinet contemporaries, including those who are presently rushing into print around the box almost daily. It's a strategy or the approach which was recommended to me by the former British Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, when I, back in 1996, tried to invagle him into becoming a member of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, which we were then putting together. My dear fellow, he said to me over the telephone, I can't possibly join your commission. And a clue what on earth said I is that. You can't tell me you don't know what a clue is. Everybody knows, my dear fellow, what a clue is. Well, I confessed that my ignorance was absolutely boundless. Well then, he said, rather resignedly, if you must help me spell it out, a clue, of course, is a clapped out old fart. Well, one of the core defining characteristics of clues is that they always believed that things were better then than now. And while I'm obviously running the risk of confirming the diagnosis, looking at the quality of contemporary political discourse, which is the theme of this conference, Crisis, Uncertainty, Democracy, what a splendidly apt theme that is, I can't help but believe that that's at a lower ebb than I can ever remember, certainly in this country, certainly in the United States, and frankly in most other parts of the democratic world as well. That's not exactly a unique observation, I'm well aware, but it's one for which I, for one, have had recurring direct personal experience, including as recently as last week, when I wrote in an internationally syndicated column what was intended to be a quite serious and measured contribution to the Palestinian state to a debate focusing on what was really in Israel's own best interest, and referring only very passingly to Australia and not at all to our own Prime Minister. All that I said in that respect in the last paragraph of the article that some of you may have seen in the Australian was being on the wrong side of history, it's never a comfortable position, but that's exactly where the United States, Israel, and its closest friends, including my own country, Australia, will be if they resist the tide of international sentiment in favour of moving now to recognise Palestinian statement. Well, some of you may have seen that was reported the next day in the age as Evans lashes out at Gillard on a Palestinian issue. The same article was actually dismissed a day earlier by the foreign correspondent of the paper which ran it, the Australian's Greg Sheridan, as all that you would expect from quote an international bloviator like me. A nice phrase, like maybe not entirely unearned, but occurring in a piece riddled with the author's staple references to the insanity, derangement, moral cowardice of those with a different view. One senses of those words were actually denied, Greg Sheridan, he had struggled to complete a paragraph, and also senses that Dr Freud in his study of the phenomenon of psychological projection might have found the case of interest as well. But the trouble is, as we all know, and these are just recent examples that have impacted on me, the trouble, as we all know, has become almost impossible in the mainstream media to conduct any kind of serious public debate on any sensitive public issue. It may be that this is just some kind of worldwide cyclical downturn that we're going through, and that greater maturity will find a way of reasserting itself. But that's not something I think we can bank on. And it does make it all the more imperative that those who are capable of making a serious analytic or policy contribution to the debates that matter here in the broad have their voices heard. All of you here have that capacity in one way or another. And my profound hope is that in your daily professional lives and above all in the stimulating environment of this annual national conference, you will find ways of communicating not just with each other, but with a wider community audience which is desperately hungry for some maturity and above all some substance in the discussion of all the problems which affect directly or indirectly the quality of their lives. On the evidence of the more than 200 papers that are due to be delivered over the next three days across the spectrum from Australian politics and government to ethnicity and identity to comparative and international politics to political and social theory, this will be a stimulating event making a substantial contribution to the quality of political discourse of just that kind. So I wish you every success in this respect and every enjoyment of the social interactions which are so part and parcel of these conferences. I have pleasure accordingly in declaring the conference open.