 Hello, my name is Sinclair Dinnan, Deputy Director of Research in the Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs, and I'm here today to announce the 2017 Horizon Seminar Series, which will be led by my colleague Dr. Paul Kenney. And this year is on the theme of a new age of leadership, populism and politics of leadership in the Asia-Pacific and wider region. The Seminar Series is aimed to really nurture collaborative research and conversations across disciplines. We've had three to date and we're delighted that this year's is on such an important and topical theme. Paul, can you tell us a little bit about your thinking behind this devising this theme and where it comes from? I know that you've done a lot of work in the area of leadership in India in particular. Actually, I began my PhD research on this back in 2010 or so before populism was really in the news. And what my PhD thesis was concerned with was this earlier breakdown in democracy in the 1970s in India, when Indira Gandhi refashioned herself as a populist instead of this old style political leader who used patronage and goods distribution to win power. So Mrs. Gandhi's transformation into a populist eventually culminated in the authoritarian emergency of the 1970s which resulted in the suspension of democracy. And so I was trying to understand this earlier transition to authoritarian rule. Since then populism is now of course all over the news. So as I've completed this book on the former turn to populism, I've become interested in contemporary populism. When you say it's all over the news, obviously we're thinking of Mr. Trump as a very prominent exemplar. But what about in the region? What are the manifestations of populist leadership in the Asia Pacific? Even in India itself, which is the country that I know best, in the region you have of course Narendra Modi, the leader of the BJP and now Prime Minister of India who really styled himself as a populist, appealing to the people directly, trying to forge this direct bond as a charismatic yet still ordinary man of the people. And the BJP party, Narendra Modi's party won an outstanding victory in 2014 becoming the first government for really a generation to have single party rule in India. But of course not limited to India. The region's other major democracies including the Philippines and Indonesia both also have populist leaders and by some definitions so does Japan. So it's really quite prevalent across the Asia Pacific where you have these forms of charismatic populist leader who tries to establish direct relationships with voters rather than appealing through the traditional party-based mobilization that we would typically recognize here in Australia or perhaps in Western Europe. And so Mr. Trump did the same thing as a candidate where he really moved against the Republican Party establishment and tried to forge these direct links with voters. And what we see because of these direct unmediated relationships between leaders and followers that such populist leaders often have a great deal of leeway when they're in power. They tend not to be constrained by the checks and balances of a party and they even push against the checks and balances of say the judiciary, the legislature and even the free press with Mr. Trump just very recently declaring the media to be an enemy of the people and going so far as to say that he's at war with the media. So these are really characteristic of populist sentiments towards other institutions of government and towards the people. And what kind of contribution can scholars like yourself and others working in this area contribute to a better understanding of these kinds of dynamics and movements? So for myself, and I think for some of our other presenters, what we're trying to do is to understand first why populists get into power. In large part we tend to want to resist this or to constrain populists. So we want to understand why they get into power. Why are parties, normal moderate parties, failing in the face of these kind of populist appeals? So we see in Europe the rise of several populists, several very important elections coming up this year both in Holland and in France, which could have a major impact across the continent. We've seen the impact of UKIP and Nigel Farage's leadership with regard to with Brexit and we've already mentioned Donald Trump. So we want to understand why these populist movements gain traction and get into power or influence things such as events such as Brexit. We also then want to understand what happens when populists do get into power if they are victorious. So here we can study things like law and order under Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines, for instance, where you've had this really amazing just rejection of the rule of law and due process under Duterte with now it's believed several thousand people having been extrajudicially assassinated by his regime and certainly with his sanction. In India you've had journalists being repressed, several of them killed. The media then under attack and a real consolidation of the media under Modi's influence. And you can see this influence so in the judiciary, in treatment of the press, with respect to opposition parties and various other institutions in society. So we want to know what happens when populists get into power. In some of the early research in my book and in an article that I've also published, we do find that systematically it's not just in these unusual cases that populist rule is generally bad for the things that we associate with democracy, these constraints on executive power. So things that prevent this turn into authoritarianism. In current research I have going on it looks at the effect of populist rule on the media and again we find populist rule is bad for press freedom, bad for freedom of expression. And these things have serious consequences for democracy and for the people living in those societies. So these are really the two dimensions what causes it and what are the consequences. Really fascinating poll and clearly a very important topic indeed. Can you tell us finally a little bit about the actual series itself? I mean you'll be having seminars. What about the sort of outcomes that you're aiming for and what kind of shape are they likely to take? So in terms of the content of the series itself, we'll be looking to hold at least six and maybe up to eight or even ten sessions over 2017, beginning in mid-March with the visit of Professor Pipanaris of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She happens to be working on a book on populism at the moment largely on Western Europe but looking at populism more generally. So she's going to come and give us some of her insights to kick us off. We then have Dr. Takas Papas who's also scheduled to visit right at the end of the year to tie everything up and he's also working on a book manuscript on populism as well. So there'll be individual projects that are building into this series of several distinguished visiting academics and also academics from the ANU itself who are working on this issue of populism and leadership. So we'll cover really the whole sweep of the region from Japan in the Northeast down to India hopefully in South Asia and possibly across to the Pacific as well where we've seen if you like the absence of populism and other forms of leadership instead. So it'll really be quite a broad sweep. We'll also place Trump's victory in terms of what it means for the Asia and the Pacific as well. So substantively we hope to cover a lot of issues by drawing on both these visiting academics and also the academic expertise of the ANU and the Bell School in particular. So we have several books that are going to be produced as you kind of indicated coming out of this, one that I'm working on, Dr. David Enville, Professor Pippinarris and Dr. Takas Papas all have book projects that are going to come out of this but it all goes well towards the end of 2017. We may even have an additional workshop where we try to draw together some of these different research agendas and possibly publish something collaboratively together. Thanks very much Paul. It sounds like a really exciting prospect and I'd just like to encourage everyone to come along who's interested in these really important issues. As Paul says, the Horizon Seminar Series 2017 will be kicking off probably in late March of this year. There will be around six seminars. These are open to all commerce. You'll all be most welcome and we look forward to meeting you later in the year.