 Well, good evening, everyone. My name is Professor Helen Sullivan. I'm the Dean of the A&U College of Asia and the Pacific, and it's my very great pleasure to welcome you all here this evening. A particularly warm welcome to our guest speaker, Mr Raphael Mariano Grossi, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Honourable Julie Bishop, our Chancellor, and the Honourable Professor Gareth Evans, and to all our esteemed guests, and of course, John G's family members, his wife and his children, who have joined us this evening for the 2022 John G Memorial Lecture. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge and celebrate the Nunawal and Nambri people of the Canberra region and to all First Nations Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and work and pay my respect to elders past and present. Like you, I am looking forward to hearing from our speaker this evening, so please join me in welcoming the Honourable Julie Bishop, Chancellor of the Australian National University, who will provide some opening remarks and introduce the speaker. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Sullivan and I too, acknowledge and celebrate the fact that we meet on the lands of the Nambri Nunawal people and pay respects to elders past and present. As Chancellor, I'm delighted to welcome you all to the Australian National University this evening. Australia's first and only national university that has been for the past 76 years providing first class research and world class teaching opportunities to generations of students from around the world and here in Australia. I'm particularly delighted to welcome the G family here this evening for we are here to honour the life and memory of John G and his wife Liv, Christina, Rebecca and Nicholas are here this evening. I acknowledge the presence of many of the diplomatic corps here in Canberra and thank you for your attendance. And of course I welcome our special guest this evening, Mr Raphael Mariano Grossi and my predecessor, Professor the Honourable Gareth Evans. Mr Grossi has had a distinguished career as a diplomat for at least 40 years focusing on the issues of nuclear policy, non-proliferation disarmament and he is currently the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He hails from Argentina, has been an ambassador for Argentina in many roles particularly international organisations based in Vienna and he's been the President of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, has presided over significant conferences such as the conference on conventions, on nuclear safety, the conference of parties to treaty on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons amongst other many important roles and his work, his insights, his experience have never been more relevant or important as they are today as the international rules based order comes under challenge not just from outliers like North Korea but also from significant nations, nuclear states that are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Russia's full scale military invasion of Ukraine is a direct challenge to that rules based order which after all came into being for the purpose of ensuring there was no third global conflict and that more powerful nations could not coerce or use military threats to impose their will on less powerful nations. President Putin doesn't concede that it's a war, he says it's a special operation but however one defines it it is the first attempt to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe in 75 or more years. The response to the horrendous loss of life and the humanitarian disaster, the devastation of towns and cities in Ukraine has been significant but NATO has stopped short of deploying forces in the defence of Ukraine and this caution comes from the fact that Russia is a significant nuclear power. It has a massive nuclear stockpile and President Putin has threatened to use it should he perceive that Russia has been under attack. Now this is unthinkable, this is the kind of issue we had to deal with back in Cold War era of that principle mutually assured destruction, mad indeed. The question that is still to be answered is why now? We do know that Russia in fact unofficially invaded Ukraine back in 2014 when Russian military masqueraded as separatists in Ukraine to start an independence movement and there was considerable loss of life in the Ukraine military at that time and we know because on the 17th of July 2014 Malaysian Airlines MH17 a commercial flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and then on to Melbourne was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian book surface to air missile that had been deployed into eastern Ukraine and skilfully deployed tragically by Russian operators and 290 people on board, the passengers and crew were all killed including 38 Australians. I was foreign minister at the time and spent a significant period in Kiev and spoke with the Ukrainian leadership at that time as they grappled with the fact that Russia was present in eastern Ukraine and was seeking to dismantle Ukrainian government at some point. But we now know that this war will be a long one. The trajectory is escalating, Russia seems to be regrouping after some early disasters and we also know that there seems to be a little room for a negotiated outcome. Weed is at end. The sanctions widespread significant are having an impact on the Russian economy, Russia's default on its international loan obligations for the first time in a century but the impact is global, rising energy prices, rising food prices, a shortage of food, a shortage of fertiliser, rising inflation and we know that this can have global consequences. In fact the UN has warned that there could be catastrophic food shortages in developing nations. We also know as history has told us that when you have these kind of shortages it leads to political and social unrest. In the meantime there's China, another nuclear state with a seat on the Security Council siding with Russia and some of us thought that sovereignty was a red line for China apparently not when it comes to Ukraine's sovereignty. We've witnessed a much more assertive, one might say aggressive Chinese foreign policy in recent years under President Xi Jinping and a number of nations have felt the brunt of that change in stance. There's open competition with the United States in trade issues and we wonder where the US, China, great power competition will end. In fact it was in September 2018 that United Nations Secretary General Gatyrus warned of the great fracture when the world was split into two with the two largest economies on earth setting up separate and competing worlds, each with their own dominant currency, each with their own trade and financial rules, each with their own internet and AI capability and their own zero sum. Geo-strategic and military strategies. So we know that the rules based order is under challenge and by that I mean the network, the framework of conventions and treaties and protocols underpinned by international law that has evolved since the Second World War designed to prevent a further conflict. Where to from here? Well hopefully our guest speaker tonight will provide some answers and I will now hand over to Professor Gareth Evans to introduce Raphael. Thank you. This is the 14th John G Lecture in the series which began in 2007 in which I've had the honour of chairing for the 10 years that I've preceded Julie as Chancellor of this great university. Reflecting the stature that this lecture has acquired, at least after the inaugural lecture about which modesty inhibits me from making any further comment, it's been delivered by an absolutely stellar cast. A former Prime Minister in Malcolm Fraser, a former head of the IAA, a Ugyr Amano, OPCW head, Achmed Ozumtu, CDBTO head, Lasina Zerbo and by a series of quite outstanding arms control and security experts both Australian and international. Michael Kelly, Joe Cirincione, Ramesh Takua, Rod Barton, Tim McCormick, Christopher Hill, Peter Varghese, Scott Sagan and Hugh White. We couldn't be more honoured and privileged to have this year's John G delivered as you've heard by the current director of the IAA, Raphael Mariano Garosi, who, as you've heard from the Chancellor's introduction, is one of the world's most experienced and respected international arms control experts. I've had the pleasure and privilege of knowing Raphael on and off the last 10 or 15 years or so and we are very privileged indeed to have the benefit of his presence here tonight. One of the reasons the John G lecture, this annual lecture command such a stellar cast of speakers, is the universal respect that's given to the man whose name it's memory honours. Dr John G made a quite extraordinary contribution to making the world a safer and saner place, in particular with the tireless and quite brilliant work he did in bringing to conclusion the chemical weapons convention and then implementing it in practice through the Office for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an institutional achievement that was recognised worldwide with the award to the OPCW of the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. It's one of the many tragedies of John G's early death that he didn't live to enjoy that recognition, which it's absolutely no exaggeration to say would not have occurred without his own remarkable work. I first became aware of John's professional work and his stature in the mid 1980s when I was foreign minister and he was the chemical and biological weapons desk officer in the disarmament division of the foreign affairs department. He was responsible almost single handedly in that role for the establishment of the Australia group founded in the wake of the use of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war with the objective of denying access by countries of proliferation concern to chemical and biological agents, precursors and dual use equipment. In the mid 1980s again John started to take a close interest in the long stalled negotiations for chemical weapons convention and working closely with the defence science and technology organisation scientists Bob Matthews and Shirley Freeman drafted the critical path for the acceleration of those negotiations, focusing particularly on the need to get industry support for an effective verification regime. That effort with which I became quite closely associated as foreign minister after 1988 ultimately bore fruit in the conclusion of the convention in 1992 which was an international achievement of which I think Australia can remain justly very proud. In 1991 John was appointed by the UN Secretary General to the UN special commission or UNSCOM which had been set up, you remember to oversee the elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction after the first Iran-Iraq war. In 1993 he was appointed director of the Verifications Division of the new OPCW, the Office for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons being set up in the Hague under the Chemical Weapons Convention charged with the complex and very politically sensitive task of developing and implementing all the institutions and procedures that were necessary to verify compliance with the convention. When the convention entered into force in 1997 John became deputy director general for the next six years before returning to Australia in 2003 working at the Office of National Assessments here until he was struck down by the illness to which we so tragically lost him in 2007. This lecture was established on the initiative of Bob Matthews of DSTO, then of DSTO who continues to be its prime organisational mover and is here with us tonight and Rod Barth and we are very pleased to have it graced each year by the presence of John's family as has already been acknowledged to live and his wife's live and his children Christina Rebecca and Nicholas. John G was absolutely one of the best and brightest public servants Australia has ever produced and I'm delighted that we continue to have the opportunity each year to celebrate his memory through this memorial lecture. So please welcome now to the podium our eminent and wonderfully qualified and going to be extremely engaging 2022 John G memorial lecture Raphael Mariano Grosi. Raphael. Thank you very much. Thank you. Great pleasure, great honour to be here Julie, Madam Chancellor, Minister. We still remember your several achievements as Foreign Minister of this great nation and it's a great honour to have met you. Gareth, of course, we go back a few years and I will say something about the negotiations and what you personally did to give the world chemical weapons convention. And, of course, the G family, I actually really did work with John for quite a while in the Hague where I was Chief of Staff and my day started very, very early in meeting known as the Flying Meeting that had been established by John where the senior staff of the OPCW will meet every morning around a table standing up and each one of us should say what he or she was doing and he would give us a good direction. But I actually met with him before that when as a young diplomat negotiating the chemical weapons convention benefited enormously and learned enormously for this guy from the neighbouring by virtue of the alphabet, Argentina, Australia. Delegation was explaining at the second road, at the second road was explaining to the young third secretary that I was what the hell was going on with the schedules and the chemicals and all of that. And I'm saying this half jokingly but he had this art of the scientist explaining how to make policy into something workable which is quite unique and he had it. So an honour, a real honour to remember him. And Gareth, to remember you mentioned the CWC, I still remember one day this negotiation was long and very, very complicated. We had what we diplomats call a rolling text, so the text that we were trying to negotiate and for each and every article of this convention I think we had six versions with multiple brackets and square brackets, round brackets, food notes etc. It was unreadable. Until John and the Australian delegation led by the minister came and I still remember a day long session of the city I was sitting there somewhere. When you explained a path forward you brought a text which was incredibly clean and so attractively looking when Australia as always a voice for moderation, a voice for common sense put together the elements that you believed could be accepted by all. Of course it was not that easy, it was not going to be and people would not accept that day that that was the CWC but I can tell you that that was the moment where we felt we could get out of that maze of words that did not have any sense. Thank you for that and back to what I'm supposed to do here which is to give you an idea of what is going on in the area that the IAEA has a mandate which is essential for international peace and security, basically non-proliferation but much, much more. We are at a moment where by a strange convergence of geopolitical considerations and global phenomena like climate change, the appearance or reappearance of pandemics, we are again reminded of the globality of the challenges we have and how we need to work together lest these things lead to a very dark place. Non-proliferation which is basically trying to avoid that more countries than to have them now get nuclear weapons continue to be as challenging as it used to be a few years ago. In fact it was in the around at the time that you were a foreign minister around the 80s and the 1990s that some countries started to push the envelope and circumvent the norms that they were supposed to be respecting. And this led us of course among other things to the findings after the first Gulf War when to our collective dismay we discovered that the non-proliferation regime we so loved was quite limited and was not giving us the real assurances that it should be giving us. In fact the inspectors of the IAEA were diligently checking that Iraq was complying of course with the obligations set by itself in its own declaration. Of course a few blocks from the place where the inspectors were inspecting that nothing was happening. A full blown nuclear weapon program was being developed. How about that? The international community reacted to that in trying to devise a stronger regime by giving the inspections a wider scope and allowing when there is a reason to do that the inspectors to go beyond what I can do. And this was the beginning of a new process which is not fully completed because the additional protocol which is the instrument that was brought as the name says the additional protocol to the safeguards agreement is not fully universal. But we are walking in that direction. You may see that still we have unresolved cases where we are struggling with the possibility that countries may move from latency to reality. One big collective failure was the DPRK where up until 2006 North Korea did not have nuclear weapons was approaching them and a number of initiatives including the an agreed framework that was an incentive sort of deal that would give North Korea some things including civilian nuclear reactors in exchange for them dropping their weapons program faith. And as a consequence of that 2006 the first nuclear weapon test to be followed by five more and everybody seems to be waiting for another one which could take place any day. In any case what we see is through satellite imagery is that they are preparing for that. We will see when that happens but in any case is a country that not so far away from you is developing a considerable nuclear arsenal. Iran is of course the bread and butter of what we do in Vienna and what a tragedy it's been so for the last 20 years or so because we failed to find a way about it. There have been ups and downs. There have been moments where it was believed that an arrangement on models within the would be found. A good moment or a moment of hope came when a big agreement this famous JCPOA was signed in 2015 by the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany. But this agreement was abandoned unilaterally by the United States in 2018 and Iran as a retaliation for that started leaving the obligations or not observing any more any limitation that they have until now where the JCPOA is nominally in existence but it is an empty shell. And now we have conversations, negotiations trying to revive it. The last round of that in Doha but unfortunately without decisive progress. We, the IEA is working very closely, is accompanying this negotiation because of course the role of the agency is to be the guarantor. Is to be the one that checks that whatever is agreed on paper actually is respected but we are not there yet. And the issue is extremely important not only because of the Iran's home situation but because other countries in the region are watching closely and some have even indicated. In quite the public way that they would consider themselves arming themselves nuclearly if Iran was to be seeing approaching nuclear weapons capability. So as we can see the specter of nuclear proliferation is still reality and the work of the IEA to try to avoid this situation through international inspections continues to be done. But non proliferation is not the only of course area where the work of the agency is fundamental. We can refer to issues for example like nuclear security. Nuclear security is preventing people especially non state actors from getting their hands into nuclear material for hostile purposes. This was an issue that was not paid much attention to until September of course where it became clear information intelligence coincided in indicating that it was in the thinking of many of these groups to try to get nuclear material either to make a bomb or to disseminate panic through radiation on what is called a dirty bomb. Basically not a nuclear weapon but a weapon conventional weapon that has in it elements nuclear material that can cause of course radiation and panic with it. Presidential summits took place for some years trying to reinforce the norm and the IEA is working constantly. Hardly any day passes without us getting to know and working with governments trying to avoid smuggling of nuclear material. This occurs quite frequently I would say almost daily although of course this is not in the public eye. Nuclear safety so important and when I refer to nuclear safety as opposed to nuclear security what I invite you to think is things like Chernobyl things like Fukushima accidents in the operation in the normal operation of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear safety is at the center of our activities because the IEA has normative powers is the place where you set standards on safety how nuclear power plants should be operating and this is fundamental for the viability of nuclear energy as a source of energy and I'll be saying a couple words about this in a second. Nuclear safety is so important and it's on Fukushima perhaps a useful segue for what I will be doing when I leave Australia since I will be travelling on to the Pacific to Suva since you may know that Japan after the accident accumulated important amounts of water which was used to cool down the reactors. This water is there and it has to be treated and discharged and of course there is a lot of concern even some groups here in Australia and in the islands in particular which have a very long and heavy history related to nuclear in general writ large because of the nuclear testing that used to occur in this region including in this country so for the Pacific Islanders the issue of radiological material the issue of the world nuclear does not evoke something nice so I felt it was my responsibility to come here to come to them never ever has a director general of the IEA visited them listen to them and my intention by going there is to explain what we are doing with the government of Japan to indicate to them how we are going to be working before, during and after the discharge of water which will be treated to a level that will not contain any radioisotope that could alter the environment but of course there is a lot of skepticism about this many people to put it in simple English don't believe that this is going to be the case so this is why we have to go we have to explain and we have to be held accountable for what we are going to do nuclear safety and security and also nuclear weapons combined in a very unique way in the tragic circumstances that Julie were evoking about Ukraine I was already in Ukraine twice and I'm trying to return after the military operations started on February 24 two things happened Russian forces occupied the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe, Zaporizhia where six nuclear reactors operate and they also occupied Chernobyl where in spite of that there is no nuclear generation activity there is a big operation led by the IEA to decommission the famous or infamous reactor number four that you know about or so in the age of the HBO series. That place is covered under a big dome and the IEA is working there on the meticulous painstaking work of taking the material out of there while protecting the environment. These places were occupied and with a lot of anxiety in the public opinion there were announcements about the possibility of contamination of a new Chernobyl as some were saying it. We were able to return to the repair work establish a good mapping of the radiation situation there and set up a campaign of assistance in that part of the country to re-establish the safety of this important emblematic site. But we still have the unresolved situation in and around Zaporizhia. We have the peculiar unique situation there that this place is under the control of the Russian forces but it's still operated by the Ukrainian operators thus creating a volatile very tense situation which goes against common sense and every conceivable principle of nuclear safety. This nuclear power plant is not being inspected as it should be. It contains roughly 30,000 kilograms of plutonium, 40,000 kilograms of enriched uranium. So we need to go back and we are trying to do that. But of course issues that for the diplomats around here will be quite interesting like the territorial integrity of Ukraine or the possible precedent that inspections under Russian occupation could signify have prevented me from going in. We're still negotiating, we're still trying and we have definitely to go back to Zaporizhia. But this fresco of problems and dilemmas that we have are not all. We are also living in times of what has been rightly been described by the head of the sister organization, the international energy agency, not atomic but energy agency as the world first energy crisis. Nuclear energy is already providing more than 25% of the world clean energy that exists today. In Europe half of the clean energy that is produced is of nuclear origin. There is some now I say this here in Australia where there is a debate about the possibility or not of having nuclear energy. But there is some debate in the world about nuclear energy being in the decline is just the opposite. We are not I would say nuclear lobbyists. We deal with science and facts countries and especially and I would say special interest for Australia particular in Asia are moving decisively into nuclear much more nuclear as we speak China is building more than 20 reactors. India is doing the same. The Philippines has decided for example to go for or to revive an old nuclear power program that they have and this year of course in Europe and in particular again harking back to this issue of the geopolitical situation especially eastern European countries and you would of course imagine what's the reason. Behind this are decisively moving to more nuclear since most of them had it already but Poland for example which didn't have nuclear is now moving into into nuclear but Romania, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary are all building more nuclear or Romania or considered France of course as you as you have heard perhaps is also multiplying this program the United Kingdom as well Belgium that had decided to face out is slowing down because what's happening with the gas prices and what are we going to do if we turn off nuclear power plants. The same is happening in other places in Latin America, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico continue and some others are looking into this. This to say as I indicated a minute ago nuclear energy is not the magic wand nuclear energy is not for all but it's clearly playing an important role in the current energy crisis. There are interesting very interesting new vistas when it comes to nuclear energy with the introduction of small and modular reactors hardly a week passes without me receiving a minister of energy from a developer country in particular African countries inquiring about small modular reactors and trying to see what is necessary and the agency of course is going to try to help them. Getting the human capacity that they need to have those if they can. So of course this is a matter as I was saying that will require extreme safety measures. The IEA is there just for that as I was saying we are not in the commercial side of this. We are looking into the conditions that have to be fulfilled for nuclear energy to fulfill this role of helping us decarbonize the global economy, which is the real challenge we have in front in front of us. So nuclear energy and its role in the current energy crisis and the efforts to decarbonize. By the way, we are now attending which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago the COPS, the conference of the parties of the climate change convention. I was there in Glasgow and now the organizers of the next one in Egypt have invited us. So again a few years ago it would have been unthinkable to have the director general of the IEA addressing an environmental event. Times are changing. Perhaps finally a note on nuclear applications that we are trying to promote. This is also part of our mandate, one of the noblest perhaps when it comes to helping countries in radiotherapy, in nuclear medicine, in oncology. Last March, last February, sorry, in Africa I launched with the president of the African Union, the president of Senegal, Race of Hope, a big project intended to give countries, especially developing countries, capabilities in radiotherapy. In Africa today 70% of the population don't have any access to radiotherapy. In Africa more than 30 countries do not have a single radiotherapy unit. It is a scandal. People are dying, who should not be dying in Africa and in the rest of developing countries. And I'm very happy to say that I've been discussing with the foreign minister here about the possibility of having Australia helping us in this region also work in this area. So as you see dear friends, the IEA is an organization that does much more than push paper. It is an organization that is there to control that there are no weapons to help countries that want to decarbonise their economies and to cure when possible. What an honour to be in this time at the helm of this organization. And what a pleasure to be talking about these things here in Australia. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Mr Grosie. We do have some time for questions. We have a couple of microphones that it would be great if you could wait until a microphone arrives before you start your question. And as is conventional we would like you to keep your questions short and end with a question mark. So who would like to begin? Yes please here. In the future do you envisage any new technologies which may enable nuclear safeguards to be done differently or better than they are now? Well not in the future now. There is a lot of I would say introduction of technologies that allow us our inspectors to do a lot remotely. Of course the nature of the inspection requires physical presence in many many cases. You know it is after all an investigation in a way and you need the ability of the inspector to be there. But there are instruments for example that allow us to asserting the presence of amounts of radio nucleus and nuclear material without getting into a fuel element without getting inside a reactor which are simply amazing. So yes there is a lot of evolution in that regard. And it is needed because if it wasn't the case we would simply not be able to do the amount of inspection we have. The number, I mean the amounts of nuclear material are growing exponentially and with all these developments I mentioned with the explosion of reactors in China, in India, in all these countries we would have to grow as an international organisation apace and of course this would never be possible. Even if member states would be able to pay for that we would become a huge institution and manageable. So indeed we see a lot of progress there and it's happening. Yes thank you for the question. Other questions? I saw a video of you and Colt talking to Gillian Tett from the Economist. It was quite an interview. You saw that? Yes. It was brilliant. You handled it so gracefully. Thank you. Firstly congratulations and thank you for that. It illustrated for me the challenges in communication of facts and science within a world of sound bites and interests. So what advice would you offer to this audience of professionals and influences on the realities of nuclear energy and science based evidence within the context of the challenges we are now facing? Well thank you for the question. He's referring to something that happened to me in Glasgow. In Glasgow I was having an open debate in an auditorium. Quite big, a bit bigger than this one. Gillian Tett, an editor of the Financial Times, was questioning me and there was a question about Fukushima and I said that no one and I would think about what I'm going to say and if you know it or not. I said of course Fukushima was a big tragedy. No one is banalising this. It should have never happened. We know why it happened. But I said talking about narratives and I said in Fukushima nobody died from nuclear radiation. You know what happened? There was a big laugh. There were a few environmental activists there and they were laughing in a hostile way, in a defiant way. And I told them don't laugh, what are you laughing about? About the death? And I explained the reality. I explained the sources for the information I was giving them. Of course I'm not sure whether I convinced some at least of these people. But it goes to the heart of what you are saying. The narratives there are very strong. The image of nuclear energy is bad. You can say that the TV of the IAEA said it. There's the Simpsons. There is yes, yes. The gooey green thing. And this has shaped millions of people's mentalities and approaches on it. Of course when you have things like Chernobyl or when you have things like Fukushima then of course everything makes sense. For these people. So you have to strike the right balance. For me it is a never ending job or a never ending effort that we have with our communications team at the agency trying to establish the facts. We know that in some cases and this may include for example some of our friends in the Pacific. They will not believe it. They will think that whatever we say is not true or it's part of a conspiracy. Well in front of that the only thing we can do is as the saying goes keep cool, keep calm and continue. Because at the end of the day policy makers will take the right decisions on the basis of the facts. And those who do not in the end we see that are in a minority and I'm not taking in this I say it with a lot of respect and without taking a you know a beauty contest approach after Fukushima of all the countries that decide that we're talking about facing out nuclear energy. There's only one that has really done it seriously. This is Germany. But apart from that some said it and they are not actually doing it or putting some footnotes into it so they can delay as much as they can. Right. I mean it's politics and we have distinguished politicians here in the room and there are parliamentary majorities and elections to be to be won or lost. So it is one of the most important things. And I think it may occur as well because I believe and I say this to industrialists, nuclear industrialists often and also to the IEA itself that has been the nuclear world has been opaque, a bit arrogant on the edge and it has to open and offer itself to the debate and you know confront the laughter with fact. Thank you. They have time for one more question. Yes. Thank goodness a woman asking a question. Director General, thank you very much for your tour of the world and the challenge. Thank you. Thank you. I'm very lucky to work with Australian safeguards and non-proliferation officers. Yes, I do. I wanted to capture one issue that you raised, an issue of human capacity and also evidence-based. In terms of the initiatives that you've put forward and I know is a priority for you, in terms of gender equity in the nuclear industry. Can you tell us, all of us who are here today, that includes obviously people from the Australian Government but also our primary representatives, what have you seen worse the best in terms of encouraging greater gender equity in the nuclear industry? I should say this is one of the most important things that we have in front of us in terms of the structural outlook of the industry and even academia when it comes to let alone nuclear stem. The statistics continue to be dismaying and only a fraction of nuclear engineers are women every year and it is not because there is no female talent out there. There have to be an important number of changes that still need to occur. When I started as Director General, the workforce of the IAEA was 28% women and the rest men. I have it at 40 now. I promised I would get to 50% by 2025 and I told my head of human resources to get ready to have it by 2023. Why? Because it is an issue that has to do not with appointing people because of their gender. It has to do with the way we recruit. It has to do with the way we operate. It has to do also with the opportunities that women have. And this is the other side. One can say for a bureaucrat it's not that difficult to appoint more women although I can tell you it is. There is a lot of pushback when you try to do that. A lot of pushback. Even lawsuits that occur is amazing but it happens. But what we need to do at the same time is to look at what we are really doing. The area of gender balance is an area where there is so much blah blah. And it's very irritating because I'm invited to events where people talk about this and what are we really doing. So I established something that is of relative if anything impact but we are trying. We established a fellowship just for women. It is not very original here. It's called the Marie-Grie fellowship but it's a person that inspires me. A woman that was winning Nobel prizes when she was not even able perhaps to sit at the same table than her husband. Who was quite a good guy in the end. When you look at Lisa Mitner, an Austrian who actually was the one to get nuclear fission. It is Otto Hahn who was working with her and got the best ideas from her that got the prize, not even invited her to the ceremony. So this is why I say Pierre Curie was a better guy. But still we needed to recognize that and we created this fellowship. Australia is also helping. I'm having 100 fellows per year so women that have an opportunity to pursue high degree careers in nuclear are joining. I'm sure that you would have ideas about that. So we have to continue in this effort reaching out. I'm working a lot with women in nuclear, women in nuclear global and the chapters of women in nuclear nationally. But this is a problem that goes beyond, as we know, goes beyond. And I've seen it. I'm a father of a good number of young women, seven. I say it because they are in the professional world and I've seen first hand the problems that they met. Going to school, then going to college, then joining the workforce. So the task is huge but I think that we are in the right direction, not at the speed I would love and I would like, but moving in the right direction. And by the way women make the best inspectors. Well Mr Gorosie, thank you so much for that tour de force of policy making, governance, politics versus well everything really. And of course gender. I think this has been an absolutely fitting tribute to John G and his own excellence. And we really, really appreciate you coming and both sharing your wisdom with us, but also participating so generously in the questions. There are refreshments outside for those of you who are able to stay. But before we get to that, please join me again in thanking Director General G.