 My name is Jane Madden. It's my privilege and honour to be the president of the National Foundation for Australia Women, which is an organisation which began officially in 1990. But it was enabled by a bequest from Pamela Dunoon, Pamela's family, including her husband, Donald, are here with us tonight. And every year, in the honour of Pamela, who was a leading feminist and activist for women's rights, who passed away too soon in 1988, we have this lecture. As we kick off, though, firstly, I'd like to acknowledge that we're meeting tonight on the lands of the Nunnel and Nambri people, and I'd like to pay my respects to elders past, present and emergency. I'd also like to acknowledge any other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are here with us in the audience tonight. I'd also like to note that tonight in our sell-out event, we are recording both video but also by ABC Big Ideas. And I mention that because later on, when we come to some panel discussion and there'll be opportunity for questions and answers, please be aware that you may be broadcast. It's also a great way that you can spread tonight's learnings and joys with your friends and colleagues who aren't able to be with us here in Canberra this evening. It's my great pleasure in warmly welcoming you and acknowledging many wonderful people here in the audience, too many to mention, to give a brief introduction to our lead or keynote speaker. As advertised, we're delighted to have with us Australian Ambassador for Gender Equality, Stephanie Copus Campbell AM. Stephanie, woohoo, it's great to have you. And Stephanie is just fresh from an incredible international journey that she'll be talking about and give us fresh insight on what's really happening in the Convention on Status of Women in the UN, New York in the last few days. Stephanie, as many of you know, is the Ambassador for Gender Equality, which is the lead advocate internationally for Australia's work on gender equality and the human rights of women and girls. The Ambassador engages in international advocacy, public diplomacy and outreach in support of Australian government policies and programs to promote gender equality, eradicate sexual and gender based violence, eliminate discrimination against women and girls and people of diverse gender identities, ensure better educational and health outcomes and opportunities for women and girls and enhance the participation of women in decision making and leadership, as well as implement the women, peace and security agenda. We're so delighted, Stephanie, with all those things to do that you've found time to be with us tonight. And I think Pamela would be delighted to have the knowledge that you are our keynote speaker. We'd also like to thank and later you'll hear about our keynote listeners. We've got some young people who are going to comment and respond to Stephanie's remarks. And that panel will be led by my colleague and key organizer for today, Sally Moyle, who's the Vice President of NFAW, as well as many other roles. It's a really great pleasure to be here working again with the owner and the team at ANU, the Gender Institute and NFAW have worked together hand in hand for many years. And it's a wonderful collaboration, this annual Pamela Danone lecture. I'd also like to particularly thank Synergy Group, who are our partner and sponsor of tonight. And without further ado, I'd like to just note that Stephanie has brought to the role of gender equality, incredible experience working across public, private, philanthropic and community sectors in Australia and the Indo-Pacific. So she hasn't just been a long-term public servant, and I say that as one who also had 30 years, more than 30 years as a public servant, but she has had experience as head of Australia's bilateral aid programs with Papua New Guinea, VG, Tuvalu, and she was ahead of the Pacific Regional Programs. She also worked in executive roles with Care Australia and the Oil Search Foundation and is a founding director on the Family PNG Board, which provides services to survivors of family and sexual violence and the PNG City Pharmacy Limited Board. She's also been the chair of the Southern Highlands Provincial Health Authority Board, which is the third largest province in PNG. So she brings really first-hand experience to her role and to leadership as our Australian ambassador for gender equality. It's my great pleasure to thank her and to pass the floor to you, Stephanie. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jane, for that introduction. And it's so nice to see you. And one of the great things about my role is meeting so many wonderful peoples. It's lovely to get to know you this year. Thank you, Sally, for inviting me and thank you all for attending tonight. If I could also start by recognising the traditional owners of the land on which we meet tonight, the Nana Moa Nambri people, and recognise the continued cultural, spiritual and historical connection to this beautiful Canberra region. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. I also recognise any First Nations people in the room with us here this evening, and especially First Nations women. I have had the privilege to meet so many fantastic First Nations women throughout my career. And more recently in this role, women like anti-serena, anti-violet, proud nun and more women, the amazing, wonderful June Oscar and all of the change makers who are part of the change agenda for First Nations. Justice, they remind us that for First Nations women and indeed for all women, we must flip the narrative on its head and speak to the system as the problem that needs to be fixed rather than our women. And I'll be talking a lot about that tonight. I want to especially also thank them for sharing their ways of working, which I have reflected on and taken with me internationally as well as tried to practise myself. And those ways are focused on learning, lateral love. I love that lateral love, respect and relationships, embracing all identities, deep listening, being self-reflective and aware, taking an intergent and irrational approach, do-no-harm approach, trauma-informed approaches, sharing and keeping balance and sense-making, which is engaging with all of our senses while connecting with the world around us. And these really important ways of working, well, I can tell you, they work. So again, I recognise and thank the First Nations women who have really taught me so many things. Now, there'll be a few pictures just in the background. I will somehow or another, through all of this, reference all of these pictures, but it got just a little bit too complicated to flick them. So you'll just have to have a look and see if you can match what I'm saying to the picture on the wall. Before I go any further, I'd also like to recognise Pamela Danone and say that I feel really privileged to be the keynote speaker here tonight. Pamela was, of course, a feminist and a trailblazer. And when I was reading her background and speaking to Mr. Danone here tonight, I recognise we actually have a lot in common. So Pamela spent many years in Papua New Guinea. She did her bachelor's up there, and I was speaking to Donald, who was telling me that when they lived up there, it was quite a safe place to be. That wasn't quite my experience, although there are many wonderful, wonderful things, and I'll share with you a bit in a moment some of that experience. She was also at Cambridge, and I did my master's at Cambridge, but she worked across a number of areas which I am passionate about and which I carry on in my work, advancing reproductive health services, advancing women's political participation, fighting discrimination, working towards economic inclusion, and setting a national agenda for women. So again, it's such a pleasure to be here tonight and to be at a lecture in her name. She reminds all of us that we are standing on the shoulders of the women that have come before us. Now, let me start by just answering a question that many of you may have, and that is, where is this rather strange accent from? So I'll just get that out of the way. I'm from Alaska, and that picture might have popped up by now. I met my husband while studying in England. I moved to Australia in 1993, and my husband was in the military. So after a few years of moving around and then starting a family, I finally got this great job in Canberra with the then-Ozade, and then my husband got a posting to Townsville, and I thought, I don't want to move. I don't want to leave this job. I don't want to go and sit and twiddle my thumbs in the heat while he's off to Timora and doing all these other things. So I literally looked at the map, and I thought, what's the closest country to Townsville where we can catch up on long weekends? It was Prophenikini, and being recently arrived in Australia, I didn't know a lot about the region, a lot about PNG, but it was close. So I applied for the posting, got it. And then all the advice started, welcome and unwelcome. The unwelcome advice were the observations and judgments. It was, me as a wife and a mother, how dare I be leaving my husband. This was the year 2000, so not that long ago, but how dare I be taking my little children off to Poppenikini. Everyone seemed to have a story, and I can tell you none of them were good. I heard about pillage and rape and rascals and robberies and attacks, and I actually started to doubt myself whether this was a good idea, taking my little kids off to PNG and whether maybe I should be going to Townsville after all. And then two bank robberies happened. The first was in Poppenikini. Five men hijacked a helicopter. They landed on the roof of a local bank in downtown Port Malsby around Nen. They were armed with rifles and pistols and hand grenades. The police arrived. The men escaped in their chopper. It was shot down as it was ascending. They scrambled out, guns blazing, battler said, heart of the city, all five shot dead. And I thought, oh, maybe it's time to cancel my posting. Then there was a second bank robbery. This one was at ANZ Bank in Monica. I was in the bank. This man walked in with an akubra hat, a sort of shotgun, and he said, everyone get on the, that's a bad language, floor. This is a bank robbery. So I get down, I'm laying on the floor, and it was just surreal. And I'm sitting here literally in my head, wait a minute, I'm in Monica. I'm in a bank robbery. And they tell me PNG is dangerous, but I'm in Monica in a bank robbery. And after that, PNG was fine. I'm going to forget it. This is going to happen anywhere. And indeed, I had the most fantastic posting up there. I fell in love with Poppenikini. I've been faithful ever since. And indeed, I'm still working up there in many different capacities. But I do want to stop and share a little bit more about Poppenikini. How many of you, maybe just hands up, have been to PNG? Okay, well, a lot of people have been there. So I won't go into too much detail, but it's where I cut my teeth. It's where I learned a lot of my trade. And of course, it's also our closest neighbor. Four kilometers separate Poppenikini from Australia. So it's important we know. I was on a plane right after the big earthquake in the Highlands. I was going up there to help. And the flight attendant turned to me and she said, what are you doing in PNG? I said, oh, I'm going to help with the earthquake. Now, this earthquake was bigger than the Christchurch earthquake a number of years ago. It killed more people. It did more damage. But the flight hostess turned and said, oh, what? There's an earthquake in Poppenikini? So this whole knowledge of PNG, our closest neighbor, leaves a bit to be desired. And if we do in Australia hear about Poppenikini, we often hear the bad stories. But here's what we don't hear. PNG has 12% of the total languages in the world and over 1,000 distinct ethnic groups. It has the largest natural rainforest in the world, only after Brazil and the Congo covering 77% of the land mass. Think about that in terms of climate change. It's an oxygen lung for the planet. It has 5% of the world's animals and plant species, two-thirds of which are only found in Poppenikini. More than 2,000 species of orchids, more than 2,000 species of ferns, 80% found nowhere else on the planet. It's the most unexplored country, both geographically and culturally in the world. Pretty amazing place. And with all those languages, there's one that binds the many different provinces and that's Tokpidzen. If you've ever practiced a bit, it is the most fantastic language. It can be a bit descriptive. I remember the first time I got an airplane in PNG, a little bit of a nervous flyer. It was an old Erinegini plane and it kind of looked like it was falling apart. And as we're taking off, the flight hostess is giving us the little spiel in pigeon. And it goes something like this. Suppose there's a ballast, this plane. Suppose if you go bugger up. You can just visualize what's happening. Suppose you've got big boule of fire and come quick time and you just visualize. So it can be very, very literal. I love the term for Prince Charles before it was King Charles. Number one, Pekingini belong, Mrs. Queen. That's great. And of course, I dealt a lot in reproductive health. So the reproductive health language was great and very literal. So you got Bell, which is kind of stomach. So Bell is also uterus. So Bell belong baby, easy cervix, neck belong bell, pretty straightforward. Scrotum was a good one. Bag belong ball. That was good. And I really loved Euretha. Rope belong piss piss. So I had a good time with some of the language. But as a development specialist, as someone working for many years up there in the private sector, it's also, I would argue, one of the hardest countries to help to realize development outcomes. It has a large percentage over a million people living in such remote parts of the country that you can't get there by plane. You have to take chopper, even walking three or four days in and out. There are issues with capacity and often with governance. So things don't often flow as smoothly as they should. The population growth in this country, our closest neighbor, is one of the highest in the region and one of the highest in the world, actually. So it's something like a new province being born every single year of that population. And the provinces where I worked, 67% of the population under the age of 18, 67% in one province and 63% in the other. And these kids had very limited opportunities. They often had lack of access to education, to healthcare, to hope, to sport. And therefore it was pretty easy at times to be angry or disempowered or indeed want to pick up a gun. In Papua New Guinea, as we know, there are very high rates of violence against women. Women do it pretty tough. Of course, we have high rates of violence against women across the world. And as a development specialist, just trying to get the data to make good decisions was also very difficult. I know that recently there was a debate on what is, for example, the population of Panjee. A lot of people were saying it's 10 million. The UN report came out with close to the maybe 20. The fact is no one's really counting. I remember how this could be really difficult when I worked in the health sector and we were trying to get basic health data. And so in these really remote clinics where there's not much, sometimes you might have a mobile fund, sometimes you might have a fax machine. You had to get this to the Provincial Health Center. At the Provincial Health Center, there had to be someone there to collect it. So the fax machine had to be on. A computer had to be working. A telephone had to be answered. From there, you had to get it to the National Department of Health. And again, someone had to be there to turn on the computer or the fax machine. There had to be paper in the fax machine. If the fax machine was broken, then you didn't get the data that day. And again, really hard to just get a good sense of what the fax and figures were to make good decision. So pretty difficult. And as a result, this country in our doorstep ranks 156 out of 189 on the UN Human Development Index, again has some of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world, has extremely high maternal mortality. By the time you go to bed tonight, there'll be one more woman on our doorstep, our closest neighbor, who will have died in childbirth. It's high. Lowest access to water, safe water in the world, 81% of the population limited access to sanitation and only about 13% have electricity. So again, it's a country on our doorstep, which is an important country, one with the shared history, and one that we all need to know a lot about. But I'm here tonight to talk to you about gender equality, as well as P&G. And I'm here as Australia's Ambassador for Gender Equality. As mentioned by Jane, I also come as someone who has worked on gender equality for most of my life, certainly all of my professional life, a career spanning 30 years with over 24 of it focused on P&G in the Pacific. And as Jane mentioned, I've worked across most sectors. That makes me feel quite old. And in fact, last year, I didn't need these glasses. There'll be a picture up there of me at CSW where I had the glasses this year. I didn't have them last year, feeling a little bit old. I was thinking, my son, when I started in AusAid, he was in Nappy's. He's now a colleague at DFAT. That makes me feel old. And I had a female friend the other day. She's a doctor. And I was just complaining about the fact that I just don't feel quite as smooth in my speech anymore, articulate. She said, Steph, it's menopause, don't you know? There's drugs for that. I said, oh, what are they? She said, well, it's testosterone. She said, oh, Mackey kind of a bit more articulate as you're losing a few of those words. And she said, and the other bonus, she'll have more confidence. I said, oh, OK, so what's the downside? She said, well, you'll probably just grow a lot of hair. I said, oh, OK, well, I've been faking confidence for my entire life, so I can write a whole book on him, Poster Syndrome. And you might just forgive me tonight if I forget a few words. So I'm going to trade that in. But gender equality for me, it's personal. I grew up in Alaska, as I mentioned, where we have in the United States from the highest rate male to female ratios. When I was growing up, it was one woman for every four men. And as my dear colleague, Julie Mungrant, E-Safety Commissioner likes to say that in getting a date, the odds were pretty good, but the goods were pretty odd. A picture up there as well. But growing on Alaska, I was also exposed to violence. Alaska has the highest prevalence of violence in the rest of the United States, six times the rate of child abuse in the rest of the United States, twice the rate of violence against women, 50% of women up there will experience some form of violence in their lifetime. And indeed, throughout my life, I've been no exception. I've experienced violence in terms of just living in a community with violence. I, when I went to university, one of my first jobs was with a reporter. He was a professor at the university. He was also a reporter. I should have probably been warned because he wrote the political column for Playboy. But he also was writing Jane Fonda's biography, so I thought he was pretty good. And then it turned out he wasn't. And I just one day walked out of his office, gave up a great referee, which I needed, and also a paycheck, which I needed even more. And there was nowhere to turn. And that was it as a young woman. But when I joined the public service here in Canberra, it happened again with my then director. And I was seriously sexually harassed. I remember going home and speaking to my husband about it. And this was about 1997. And he said, Steph, you just got to get yourself moved because if you go and complain about it, you're going to be the problem. And he was right at the time. And so getting myself moved and then watching this man do it to other women was something that I had to live with and reflect on for a long time. When I finally was a bit older and stopped thinking, what's wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? And when this happened again in terms of sexual harassment and popping a guinea and I decided to turn this person in, well, nothing happened to him. And everything happened to me because every time I'd go into a room, people were talking to him and kind of looking at me funny. And it was my reputation that was affected. And I can tell you many more stories. But in telling you this, I'm not alone because I suspect most of you women in this room will have stories to tell as well. Because one out of three women around the world and in Australia on average experience violence, 50% of women in Australia have experienced sexual harassment. I was reading a survey the other day that was done in the United Kingdom that said 62% of women surveyed were scared walking in multi-storey car parks. 60% were scared waiting in the train station. 60 were scared walking home from the bus stop. And it noted in another survey that 90% of women surveyed in Mexico, France, and popping a guinea had experienced either sexual harassment or sexual assault in public transport. So this is a problem around the world. It's a problem for women. It can be a problem for men, but women are disproportionately affected. And it makes gender equality from a personal, but of course it's also professional. My role as ambassador covers every aspect of our foreign policy and I have the privilege of being Australia's lead advocate for gender equality internationally. Let me define for you what I mean and what I believe our government means by gender equality. It means that every single person should have every single opportunity to meet their full potential regardless of their gender. Now, when I was in New York recently, there were a number of men walking around saying gender equality for men. I don't think they meant it in a good way. I think they're a part of a pushback I'm going to talk about in a minute. But they're right. Gender equality is for everyone. And when we shine the light on any one sector issue, we find that women and girls often, but not always, face greater barriers in reaching their full potential than men and boys. And I say often, but not always, shine the light on mental health. And you find, for example, in many countries, men may experience a greater risk of suicide. And when we shine the light on that sector, we need to remove those barriers and we need to pay attention. If we shine the light on year 12, we might find that boys need some attention in year 12 in many different countries. If we shine the light on nursing or teaching or men wanting to be home with their children and the social norms around that, we need to address gender equality for men. But in many cases, women experience greater barriers. One out of 10 women around the world experience extreme poverty. And by extreme, I mean living on less than $1.90 US a day. Now, we can look at around 400 million women living this way and you can say, okay, that's a lot. But what does that mean? Let's just take that down to one person. Let me share with you one person that I met in Malawi. I was in a small village in Malawi and this woman's house will come up at some stage. You can probably think we've labeled it. But I met her there and she was having a bad day. She lived in, she was a single mother. She lived in a shack, more or less, and she had a bucket. And this bucket, plastic bucket, had developed a hole in it. And with this hole, she couldn't haul water to cook for her children, to wash her clothes, to wash herself. She was really stuck. And this bucket was going to cost about $5 to replace. She had a $1.90 a day on average. That's what poverty means. We know and we discuss that one out of three women around the world and in some countries that's higher, experience violence. And that's disproportional, although men experience it to the rate that men are experiencing it. Women have a care burden in that 75% of unpaid care and domestic work in homes and communities is carried out by women. And again, what does that mean? Let me share another story with you from a rural village in Laos where I had the privilege a while back on when I was with Care Australia of living with the community there for a week. And the women there, every morning, we'd get up at 4 a.m. They'd start pounding rice for the day. As soon as it was light, they got their buckets and they walked a kilometer down a muddy track and started hauling water back and forth, back and forth. They got their children sorted. They got them out of bed. They got them ready for school. They cleaned the house. They cooked. They hauled more water. The kids came home. They took care of the kids. They fed them dinner. They got them to bed. They collapsed. And the next day, they started it again, hauling over again. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day. They had no time. They had no time for leisure and recreation. They had no time for education. Many had no time to learn how to read. They had no time to work and get a paid income. This is what a care burden means, maybe in the extreme. But you think about our own culture and the number of limited time a woman may have compared to a man that may then, if she has this care burden, affect her ability to learn, to develop, to take leisure time. And again, that's an issue right across the world. One out of three women worldwide lack access to safe toilets. This is a barrier. I just read recently, this equates to 97 billion hours a year where women are searching for a place that is safe for them to relieve themselves, women and girls around the world. 97 billion hours a year collectively. That's huge. Again, what does this mean? I was talking to a woman about this in India. She was working in a local market. She said, I try to hold it all day. And as a result, I just don't drink much water. And as a result, I get quite dehydrated and sick sometimes. And as a result, I occasionally get a bladder infection. But I don't want to risk going to the toilet because it's dangerous. That's what it means. That's what it means to face these barriers. And again, I can go on and on. Let me just tell you one more barrier and that's climate change. And women disproportionately experience climate change compared to men. I was in Malawi recently. And my colleague Kate, who's here tonight, we went into a community where they had had a succession of mudslides due to climate factors increasingly intensifying. And these mudslides came down and kilometers wiped out everything in their villages, their health centers, their homes, their families. And after that, there was food insecurity. There was housing insecurity. And the men left to go off to find work elsewhere. And the women were left behind. And the traffickers came. And they were hungry. And the traffickers offered to exchange a bit of money for their girls so these women could eat. That's what a disproportional effect of climate change is on women. And even in Australia, I was speaking to women after the bushfires here several years ago. And they were telling me of having to leave work to take care of families. They were telling me of how their children were distressed, how it was affecting their mental health, how they were putting off health checks, et cetera. So again, another barrier. And I could go on, but I won't because I want to get to the solutions. That's the bad news. But why this is so important and why I spend my life dedicated to it is women are very much part of the solution. When women can reach their full potential, when we have gender equality and everyone can reach their full potential, everything's better. Families are better. We know that when women have an income, they typically invest a higher proportion of the earnings in their family and communities. And we see when this income is in the hands of women, child nutrition improves, health improves, education improves. We know that when women and you have gender equality in a private sector, we know that businesses do better. I can tell you, I'm on the board of PNG's largest retail company. We do supermarkets, hardware stores, pharmacies. And when I joined as one of the few women on the board, there's a few more now. But we were talking about the fact we had some growing competition in our supermarkets and we needed to do something. And all the men were there saying, here's the answer, we need better meat. We needed better meat section. Maybe we did. But I said to them, when do most of our customers come and who are they? Most of them are women and they come around three or four o'clock. I said, ah, they probably come with their kids, aren't they? Yeah? I said, well, when I was a woman with little kids, when I was picking my kids up and having to do the shopping, my kids were like, mom, we want to do this store because they have better toys. Mom, I want to go to this store because they have this snack. So I said to these men on the board, I reckon instead of meat, if we focus on these women customers and what their kids might want, you might see your customers improve. Bringing my lived experience to the table on that board actually saw our supermarkets do better. So when women are involved in economies, when gender employment gaps are closed, guess what? It means trillions of dollars to the world economy. In Australia alone, $128 billion to our economy if gender employment gaps were closed. If women had the same access to agricultural resources as men did, we would reduce the number of hungry people around the globe by 20%. If women are involved again in decision-making, they bring their lived experience to the table. They bring it to the table in politics. Let's just go back to safety for a minute. I was in Melbourne recently and I wanted to go out for a run and it was around the casino I was staying. And so I asked a male colleague, hey, can I go out around six o'clock in the morning here for a run? Oh, sure, it's fine. I run every day. It's safe. Don't worry. Went out for a run. These guys coming out of the pub, bit drunk, three of them. They hassled me a bit. They chased me a bit. I was scared. I ran back for him in his version of safety and what he brings to the table, it was safe. For me, it wasn't. So when I'm thinking about safety if I'm a politician, if I'm in a business, if I'm in a community, I'm thinking about it differently. I'm representing 50% of the population that has a different experience with safety to the other 50%. It's important. And again, I was thinking the other day, I had my phone and I was trying to manage it with one hand and do something else. And my hand just didn't quite fit around my phone. It was a bigger phone so I could see it. It used to be a smaller phone. And I thought, this phone is designed for a man's hand. It's not designed for my hand. And I was thinking when I was in the resource sector in Papua New Guinea and I would go into our mining sites and the PPE they give me didn't quite fit my face. Didn't quite fit my feet. It was designed for a man. It was designed by a man. And when we look at drugs, the ones that we take, they're tested on a male body of 70 kilos, not on a female body. You might have seen in the paper today, a woman showing up with symptoms that didn't quite fit the normal symptoms of a male heart attack. And she was told to go away. She was having anxiety. She was having a heart attack because we weren't recognizing her symptoms because we study men's symptoms. And that goes on and on and on and on. And it's why, again, we need women as part of the table. When we're designing a world that's meant for everyone, we need everyone in the room. So again, I could go on and on in how women are part of the solution. And I can go on and on in how women and girls are disproportionately affected often. But despite all of this, guess what? Not one country in the world, not one, not Australia, not Iceland, not Switzerland, not Papua New Guinea. Not one country in the world is on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality by 2030. Not one, despite all of these issues. And not only that, we've seen setback after COVID. And not only that, we are seeing active pushback against gender equality. So while I was in New York a few weeks ago for CSW, I saw this firsthand. I saw how certain countries at that multilateral level are trying to pull language out of documents that protect our reproductive health rights, for example, or even basic language like gender equality. I've seen how certain non-state actors, and many of these actors are coming out of places like Western Europe, Russia and the United States, how they are attempting to undermine gender equality, not only in their own countries, but right around the world. And they're doing that with billions of dollars. They're doing that in a very organized fashion. And they're funding things like think tanks, bot factories, training programs for a gynecologist in universities all over the world. Advertisements, media, lobbying. One of these groups I stumbled on when I was in the United States, which is backed by billions of dollars. They've just written and published. It's on the web, you can pull it off. It's by the Heritage Foundation. A mandate on leadership for the next conservative presidency in the United States. And this mandate promises to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life, where family is defined as dad takes charge, mom takes care. And they have promised, promise number one, is to make all the institutions of American civil society targets for work culture, including deleting all references to diversity and inclusion, gender equality, gender equity, reproductive rights, and any other term that might suggest wokeism. They want to do this in domestic and international legislation agreements, contracts, grants, et cetera. They're backed by billions of dollars. And you can pull this off the, I mean, if you want to sleep at night, don't read it. But if you want to kind of know what's going on in this space, read it. We're seeing a growing number of young men who are being pulled into toxic masculinity by the likes of people like Andrew Tate, who had over 12 billion hits on his social media site, his Facebook last year. And these, again, young men are feeling disaffected, pushed out, and drawn into these groups. And that's part of the pushback. And the last part of the pushback that deeply worries me, and it deeply worries me because as I travel all around the world, I see it everywhere I go. And that is the fact that women and girls in public spaces are disproportionately being affected by online abuse, by tech-facilitated violence. I can tell you it happened to me when I started in this role. I, on day two, did a little video. I went into the video place at DFAT to record it, and I was helpfully told with all these bright lights, try not to blink too much. I didn't blink at all. That was okay. I said to Kater, I said, I didn't blink at all. She said, don't worry. No, I won't notice that. Thanks, Kate. She was maybe trying to make me feel better. I think you probably just thought what I had to say was good. This went out onto social media within about, oh, I don't know, a few hours. It had a few thousand hits. By six hours, it had six million hits. I got retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. I ended up on the Tucker Carlson show. Not in a good way. And this became an issue for me because they were saying I look like the devil. I look like a meth head. I wanted to kill all men. And this became an issue for me, for my safety because I was working in Papua New Guinea where people were genuinely worried. I was up there during COVID, for example, where people were genuinely believing in there's still sorcery-related violence. There's worries about devils being injected and all sorts of things. So it became a safety issue for me, amongst other things. But women all over the world are experiencing this to the point it's affecting their mental health. It's affecting their physical health. It's affecting their safety at home. They're going home and their husbands are embarrassed because what was said to them online, they're being beaten up. They're having nude photos circulated. It's affecting their kids at school. It's pushing them out of public spaces. And this is a real worry because, as I said before, when you don't have women at the table, you only have men who are making decisions for all of us as a population. It ain't good. So we really need to pay attention to this and think about how we get on top of it and to stop it worldwide. So we've seen this pushback. But there's lots of solutions to this. I don't want to go on about all the bad news. I'm going to get to the good news as well. And the solutions are many. And part of it is, frankly, it's all of us working together. It's all of us being aware. And I'm encouraged because I can tell you, there's more people out there that are on our side and that want to see gender equality because it's the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. But on the smart thing to do, what we need to do is continue just to get the evidence, the evidence as I set it out. And as I go around the world, when I talk to people about gender equality, I really think hard about how I present this. I do go in and say it's the right thing to do because, of course, it is. Women and girls' rights are fundamental human rights. But as I mentioned to you before, it's incredibly the smart thing to do. And I try to think through how is gender equality in anyone I'm speaking to going to make your life better because it will. And I'm going to bring that evidence to the table. And I'm going to get you on side to fight for this as a country, as a community, as an individual. And again, we need to bring this to the table. We all need to absolutely work together to address social norms. Addressing these gender kind of social norms is part of the solution. And it first starts being aware ourselves what they are and whether we have them or not. And we do. We all have these kind of unconscious biases to do with norms. And this happens from very early on in our lives. It happens from when we're little girls and little boys. And there's been research to say that we jiggle little boys more. We shake them up more. We hold little girls more closely. When a little boy falls down or falls off the play gym or whatever, we say, you know, get up. Don't be such a girl. Man up. Little girl, we tell her, stop crying. Don't get dirty. Play nicely. Little girls, little boys kind of move into school. We're still telling little girls to play nicely. We're encouraging little boys to take more risk. Girls are not encouraged to take risk. We get into the workforce. And we expect women still to play nice. We expect women still to take care. We all do. And we expect men to take risk. We expect men to take charge. And in doing so, we have these social norms that when we mix those up, none of us are very comfortable at times. We're not comfortable when a woman leans in. We're not comfortable when she might be aggressive. We may not be comfortable when the man cries or shows his emotions. And I caught myself on an airplane the other day. I'm the ambassador for gender equality. I'm on an airplane the other day. And the pilot comes on and it's a woman. And I thought, hooray, a woman's flying this plane. Isn't that cool? And then we got a really bad turbulence. And I thought, oh, I hope she can fly this plane. I caught myself when we landed and we were safe again. We need to involve men and boys at every step of the way and make them part of the solution. And as I said, if we don't do that, we risk pushback and we risk excluding them. We need to look at violence and violence against women as a cross-cutting issue and everything that we do and tackle it because it is such an undermining, underpinning aspect. We need to work better with the private sector. The private sector has so much to offer in terms of their employees, the customers that they bring and they can engage their suppliers, their money, etc. And back to what I mentioned in the beginning as I learned from our First Nation women. We need to listen. We need to listen. We need to listen to everyone's experience. And as I think about how we engage on gender equality internationally, we need to stop taking a deficit approach to this and going in with the question, what's wrong with you? This is what you need. This is what I'm going to do to fix it. To what's right with you. What do you want? How can I work alongside you? And I'm really pleased that these principles, this deep listening, is coming out at everything that we do. You'll see it in our development policy. You'll see it in our international gender equality strategy. You'll see it in the national gender equality strategy that was just launched. So let me close by telling you, Jack, how many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is zero because glass ceilings don't have light bulbs. But I'm all about smashing glass ceilings and putting up more light bulbs. It sometimes feels the light at the end of the tunnel is burnt out, but we need to keep going. And I will say too, as I said before, there's light that so many individuals bring to this story. Let me tell you about Ruby, who's a midwife in Papua New Guinea, that I met in one of these really remote communities. Ruby was a midwife in a village health center which had no running water and no electricity. Every day, Ruby would come, and with the torch of her mobile phone that she'd pay the general man to recharge for her, she would be delivering babies in the middle of the night with this torch. And in between, and there's a picture up there somewhere, she would be in and out with this bucket of water washing the floor down for the next baby and the next baby. She did this every single day for her community without a break, and she did it with love and she did it with passion. She's one of my heroes. I met an incredible trans woman last week in Mexico, Kenya. She, from the age of nine years old, had been a street worker and had had every single challenge you can imagine thrown at her until she saw her best friend murdered and she decided enough was enough. And she single-handedly, after a life from a tiny little child as a street worker, started a safe house for trans women and others who needed it. And she single-handedly started to advocate and lobby the Mexican government to include legislation which led to things, for example, as same-sex marriage. She is a change maker in her community despite this life of hardship that many of us couldn't imagine. And let me also just tell you about Sunita in India who I met who is a tailor and came and started sewing so she could feed her family. And her job was seven days a week because if she stopped sewing one day and stopped selling her clothes, she couldn't feed her kids. But despite that at night, she opened a sewing kind of center for free for all the other women in her community so that they would have an income and they would have an opportunity in life. And these are just individual women but there are millions of people, men and women like this all over the world and individually they're powerful but when they come together they're a force in nature and that's why investing in these movements, it's the answer. It's the answer to this complex world of conflict that we're facing at the moment. It's this answer to this horrible threat of climate change that faces our planet. It's drawing on all of our passion to live in a world that is full of respect and love and humanity, that world that we want to live for our children and future generations. And so all of you here tonight are also change makers and I'm going to say to you, think about what are you going to do? How are you going to make a difference? Who are you going to influence? How are you going to make sure your voice is heard? And I'll challenge you that if you're in this room tonight you're also privileged because you think about those millions and millions and billions of people, billions if you look at poverty more generally that can't afford a bucket to wash their clothes. So we are privileged. We've won lives. If you're in this room with your belly fed and an education and a home to go home to and running water and electricity and a hospital, you've won life's lottery. Think of the odds. So I think we all have a responsibility as well to go out and make a difference. Thank you for letting me share these reflections tonight. I'm Sally Morel. I'm the Vice President of the National Foundation for Australian Women and on the Management Committee of the Gender Institute. So this evening wearing two hats very closely aligned. And it's my pleasure to run up a short panel session with what we're calling keynote listeners and now keynote speakers. We've got two fabulous young women here to join us, both change makers also and I know very committed feminists and it's fabulous to have them here to share their thoughts and reflections on Steph's comments. So I will first of all introduce Tasha Richie. Tasha is the CEO of Accountable Futures Collective. She's a systems change initiative redefining and driving accountability to young people. She's had a young person had so much experience. I won't go through all of it, but she's been an associate at YLab, a consultant with Springpoint and a Victorian Child Care Agency at VACA. She holds qualifications in law, human rights, international relations and business administration and you describe yourself as a member of multiple communities, a writer, plant lover and adventurer. I'd also like to introduce Brianna Della-Hunty, who I know well who works with us at the National Foundation on our Social Policy Committee. She's an equality rights alliance, young women's advisory group member and she now is a policy person at Chief Executive Women. She has been a member of the YWAG since 2020 and with us on the Social Policy Committee at the National Foundation since 2023. She has a background in policy and research and in particular experience in refugee and women's rights advocacy. Really looking forward to hearing from you. I might ask you, Tasha, first to start with your thoughts and comments and any questions to Steph. Sure. Oh, it's very loud. Thank you so much for having me. I'd also like to acknowledge the nunnel and every people on whose beautiful land we are all gathered here today. So, yeah, my name is Tasha. My pronouns are she, her and I along with Bri. I'm on the Young Women's Advisory Group with the Equality Rights Alliance. Really grateful to have been asked here today, I guess as a young keynote listener. And wanted to say massive thanks, Stephanie, for like an incredible reflection on your journey, but also the journey of millions of women, women and girls around the world. I mean, I'm really struck by your reflections on the momentous scale of the global challenge that we continue and collectively continue to face. And I was particularly struck, I think, by your reflections on where and how and why women are scared. You know, you spoke about women are scared at the bus stop, scared in public transport, scared walking home, scared without safe toilets, you know, around the world and also here in Australia. And I think in my experience as a younger woman, women and gender diverse folks are also scared on the internet and in their homes and in some supposedly feminist spaces. So I've got two questions for you if I can. The first is that I guess the rapid cultural almost reversion, as you mentioned, around this rise against workism and also the rapid tech change, which is often designed by men, means that the experiences of young women around the world are increasingly different from their mothers and also from our feminist leaders. You know, how can we in our organizations, institutions, projects in our own lives, how can we honour, as you said, the contributions, the legacy of the women who've come before us but also be accountable to the experiences of young women as those experiences are currently their own? I mean, it's a great question. You're just reminding him of my own mother. I don't want to bring her to the table. She was a feminist in the 70s and really fought hard and she's quite depressed now. And I was talking to the other day. I said, you know, what's going on with you? And she said, I fought all my life for women's rights. I'm coming to the end of my life and my granddaughters have less rights than I do. That does stop me on my tracks. My granddaughters have less rights than I do. And I think, you know, again, young women today face so many more, face a lot of the challenges that we've faced and then so many more. And you're right, you know, things like online violence and the climate insecurity and new aspects of safety. I think, first of all, we need to ensure that we are giving space and time and it's back to that just deep listening and deep understanding that we're understanding everyone's journey. I often note that one of the things we don't do very well in my work is look at these issues from a life stage perspective. We tend to think of women as women, right? We don't tend to think of women as girls, women as teenagers, women in the reproductive years, women as they come through menopause, women post menopause. And as a result, we're not identifying specific risk and specific opportunities and experiences at each of those stages. Never mind just looking at women without looking at women in all their diversity. I was at a table a while back and I was me and another woman who happened to be in a wheelchair and a bunch of men. And one of the men just, it was when I was working in the resource sector, he said, Gensley looked at us, he said, and ladies, he said, just stop, we need to wait a minute before we lift our skirts. And I said, I didn't kind of just looked at her, she looked at me. And afterwards I called him out, but afterwards we were talking and I said, that was really uncomfortable. And she said, yeah, it was. And I said, I'm just sometimes sick of being the only woman or one of the few in the room. She said, me too. She said, Steph, I experience everything that you experience at this table being a woman. But you know what? I have to think about how am I going to get to this room in the first place I'm in this wheelchair? How am I going to get to the bathroom? How am I going to be perceived? Are they going to think just because my legs don't work, my brain doesn't work? And I thought, well, you're right. I'm just looking at things through my perspective as a woman and assuming that's also your story. So it's remembering that we have to honor everyone's experience wherever they are, but also understanding and respecting that there's some pretty unique experiences that young women have today as well. Thank you. Can I ask another one? Amazing. So I had the privilege last week of being on Latchi Latchi and Barkanju Country down in Mildura, exploring transformational change and sort of what it takes to get there. And I love the way that you opened tonight's address, speaking around a lateral care approach, healing, listening deeply, wisdom that First Nations people on this land and lands around Australia has been here for generations and generations. And one of the ideas that really stood out to me last week was around the fact that nothing can grow in parched soil, which is an idea that came from First Nations people at this gathering last week that has really stuck with me. They talked about this idea that for visionary ideas to be able to grow from seeds, first, the soil must be nourished with water and nutrients. And the things that we as young women have benefited, like we continue to benefit from, challenges nonwithstanding, were once seeds that I guess many in this room nourished and looked after, and women before them were looking after the soil and getting it ready for those seeds to take hold. So I guess I feel that in the active pushback on gender equality, like our soil is sort of becoming worse. My question is alongside the seeds that we are growing now and the things that we are doing right now, what are the visionary goals that you're striving for? And how might we all be nourishing the soil? That those ideas might not be ready, we're not ready for them yet. But how might we be nourishing the soil so that one day like those ideas will become reality for women and girls in Australia, in PNG, and in Malawi? Just go back to the social norms that I talked about. I think we need to just start to challenge ourselves at every single stage. Again, starting from when we're babies to how children are experiencing what it is to be their gender, to what they're seeing in their textbooks, to what they're experiencing at school, to how we take that through our lives, and to really shake that up and challenge that. And those gender norms, they are right across the world. I made 33 country visits last year and I'm well on my way to that this year. And I can tell you that is a common experience in every single country of how we're raising boys, how we're raising girls, what we as society might expect of men, what we expect of women. And those kind of really gender norms that undermine every single aspect of gender equality, and which the anti-rights movement is really tapping into as well. So I think we collectively need to shake that up. Another thing that was really interesting to me that is part of those norms, and I was reflecting on this, I was in Chile and Mexico last week. And in both countries, women were commenting to me on this confidence issue, and that women really lacked confidence. And we were talking about it. And again, we were realizing that in all of our countries, again, we are socialized to lack confidence. There's nothing about how we're born or what they make. We are socialized to lack confidence. Again, boys are socialized to take more risk. We're socialized to go and play nicely. And we start to doubt ourselves as well. And it was just really interesting. I was speaking to someone else earlier today, and we were reflecting that again in your honor, this, when a woman, when there's a job advert, women, if they don't meet 100% of the criteria, want to apply, and men when they meet two or three of the criteria decide that the best person for the job were socialized into that. So I think in planting those seeds, we have to really deeply think about how we're thinking about these things, which are norms. They're not who we are. They're not how we're born. They're not how our brains work. They're not just because I'm a woman on this way and just because I'm on this way. It's how we are socialized. And that is so cross cultural. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us here today. We really appreciate it. So lovely to be here with you. When you were speaking, I was really struck by how pervasive gender inequality is in every aspect of your life from your most inner self to everyone's most inner self to our justice and our criminal law systems to our to our parliament and just every system. And I think I was reflecting on kind of the feminist adage of the personal being political. And I feel like that really defines maybe your career journey because you have been working on some of the most deeply personal issues specifically for women with reproductive rights and violence. And you're working in institutions that weren't necessarily built with women in mind or marginalized communities in mind. And you have experienced kind of that impact yourself. And when you were at CSW last two weeks ago, I was when I was looking at the angry conclusions, I noted that a lot of the countries that you mentioned were weaponizing language that is meant to be human rights and equal, including, you know, gender equality when it is appropriate, who gets to decide that, or, you know, the weaponization of the idea of the family and things like that. And so when these institutions that you are trying so hard to change and to make more equal and more accessible for everyone, when they are being weaponized against the women and the communities that they're meant to protect, how do you even begin to address that? And again, I think we have to just go back a few things. It's tough. It's really tough. And someone said to me the other day that when you look at that anti-rights movement, they will disagree on 98% of the agenda. And I was thinking about this. I grew up, you know, I'm telling my age here, I grew up during those Cold War days where it was the Soviet Union and America. And if you had a conservative group in the United States working with anyone of the Soviet Union, they'd be thrown into jail as being communists like it just wouldn't happen. So they still, a lot of these groups will disagree on 98% of the agenda. The 2% they agree on, right? The 2%, they're organized, they're well funded, and they're coordinated, and they're really making all this havoc, right? We, on the like-minded side, will agree on 98% of the agenda. The 2% we disagree on, we just can't get ourselves organized around it, you know? Do we kind of, how are we looking at trans women, what's feminism, what's, you know, do we use the word, don't we? Do we, we just aren't quite coordinated on that 2%. So we all need to do better in terms of our coordination. We need to figure out this is a big threat. We need to think about how we're going to, and we slowly are. I mean, people are just kind of thinking, well, this is scary, this is dangerous. We need to get the, the other thing is, as I said before, we have to have the evidence. We can't go forward now saying, this is the right thing to do, and just rely on that. We have to convince people that this is the smart thing to do, and it's in their interest. And we have to make compromises sometimes. So I'm a feminist, but sometimes I don't use the word feminism, because if I do, I close doors automatically, I don't open them. And the other side is using our own language against us. So they will go to middle-grown countries that aren't firmly like-minded. And they'll say, okay, these negotiations are going to start, and Western countries are going to walk in, and they're going to tell you, you have to have this feminist language, and they don't care about the fact that you have huge financing gaps, or your poverty levels, or all they want you to do is have this language, and they're going to try to drive your vase. We walk into the room and say, okay, but we need some feminist language in here, right? And it undermines what we're trying to do. So we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We have to play the long game, right? We have to play the long game. And sometimes that means just being clever about the language we use, how we use it, and who the audience is. And so I think that's, it's kind of that combination. It's hard. We have to get organized. We have to be clever. We have to get evidence. And then sometimes it's who's also offering that evidence. So it might be, I was just in South America, because sometimes it's much better if Chile or Mexico's in the room making these arguments, as opposed to the United States or Australia, others who might already be branded with this, you know, disinformation that we are driving a Western agenda, which is not right, but it's unfortunately used against us. Thank you. Thank you to our two keynote listeners. Unfortunately, time is really tight now. And so we haven't got time for questions, unfortunately. So I might now ask Donald DeNoon to come up and give some thoughts to us. Thank you. Really daunting to follow that address, especially as much of what I have to say is much, much more earlier in the feminist movement and might seem trivial. Most of you in this room are too young to have known Pamela. I'm sorry about that. But I'd like to, a few minutes to introduce Pamela. I was born into a very conservative Queensland farming family, but we met as Colonials in Cambridge, both trying to pretend that we belonged and were not outside us. The particular moment when we met was we were at a wine testing evening, and we're testing a remarkable wine called Kangarooge, which as you can imagine came from the very early days of Australian exporting wine. And we were able to agree that it was dreadful wine, but a good joke, and that Australia better abandoned the idea of producing wine for export. And that led to a lot of other discussions, trivial, but we found we agreed on an awful lot, so we went home together and stayed together thereafter. At that time, Pamela was working as a lab technician in the MRC laboratory in Cambridge, where people had claimed or possibly pretended to have discovered double headaches and certainly won the prizes for it, and she was working enthusiastically and well in that context. We stayed together long enough that a year later we married and immediately flew to jobs in Macquarie University, Uganda, which had the terrific advantage that it was a long way from our families, but it turned out to be a wonderful place to live in anyway. Fun and not having our families a birth, we created our own family with three splendid children, two of whom I'm happy to see here tonight, and I'm always happy to see them. I don't want them to be doubt about that. And that was a wonderful six years of learning and teaching and enjoying ourselves, and that lasted until General Eddie Aminton thought it was a terrific idea for all foreigners to be thrown out. That probably was a good idea anyway, I mean a lot shouldn't have been there, but so we left and were very fortunate to find ourselves in the University of Papua New Guinea at a favorable time in that country's history. Independence was about to arrive, and although rather few things changed, everything seemed to be up for ferocious debate, and so for academics it was heaven. Lots of anxious debate with no real consequences following from them. That was a terrific period to be there. Pamela worked in medical laboratories using her scientific skills, but she also registered in a course in sociology, and sociology at that time included women's studies, which were taught by a terrifically enthusiastic Kiwi bloke. The students in that course were so enthusiastic that they found a book about consciousness raising and met every week to practice it, and that was terrific for everybody. And Pamela's grasp of the whole theory of gender relations was consolidated by a year when we had leave in the School of Oriental and African Studies from which she returned an enthusiastic and committed and well-versed feminist. Joined the National Planning Office, where one of her main responsibilities was crocodile farming. Now you might think this is not really a feminist issue, but actually it is, because when a village had a, was encouraged to have a crocodile farm, they obviously put it a long way away from the village, and they needed to choose someone to stain it with the crocodiles and make sure the fence didn't break and the crocodiles didn't break out. So you can imagine who was the likeliest person to compete for that job. I don't know how that was resolved, but it was one of the many interesting issues that cropped up in the National Planning Office. Because we're in a virtually colonial situation, it was inhibiting for feminist women, Australian feminist women, to take the initiative because they could so easily be shouted down. So it was not until we moved to Australia that Pamela was able to express and enjoy and practice the feminism that she'd been nurturing for the past few years. In Canberra, she joined the abortion counseling clinic, a bank service, and joined Well, which at that time, the 1980s, was developing ambitious and successful campaigns to consolidate women's rights across Australia. She had a great time doing that and was enjoying that hugely and investing all her energy and intelligence in it. I confess that that puzzled me. I mean, feminism didn't, but to spend your life on feminist issues seemed a bit odd, because as academics all knew in the 1980s, the big issues were colonialism, post-colonialism, imperialism, race, and so on. And although clearly there were feminist issues and gender issues to be addressed, it didn't seem to be quite as important as Pamela agreed there were. She didn't argue actually. I don't remember her ever arguing about this. She simply did her work and kept bringing home mountains of evidence that supported with her view that gender was a central issue in everybody's life, not only that, but that it could be addressed successfully. So before very long, the whole family had been converted to this view without actually knowing that we had an argument about it. You'll be glad to know that in this slide, I can't read my notes, so this will be a shorter address than you were perhaps fearing. At that point, leukemia intervened, and that made a difference. Made a hell of a difference actually. And rather surprisingly to me, a huge number of women came, turned up in the house every day, almost every day, who were her feminist friends and even some non-feminist friends and participated in making the household work. And even people came from Queensland to help, which was a mixed blessing but that's another issue. Mary Mortimer and some other people came from Sydney by bus to make sure that as I was cooking for people I didn't poison them. That was very successful. Anyway, there was a lot of laughter in the house in those weeks and clearly a lot of love. The sorrow came later. No, that's an interesting little story because I'm an academic I need to point the moral and I apologize for doing this but that's what I do. Nothing in Pamela's background and nothing in her early work experience suggested a predisposition towards feminist ideas. And yet when she was exposed to feminist ideas and especially to feminist practices, she was transformed. Almost a different woman, given purpose, given energy and given commitment. And that's what persuaded the rest of the family that there was something here that was valuable. The moral of the story is and I think every story has to have a moral. It suggests that nobody really is immune to feminist ideas. If you persevere enough and give the people opportunity, there is no way of protecting yourself against feminist interpretations. Thank you. Well, I get the honor of concluding this wonderful evening and I first want to thank you, Donald, for sharing that amazing story of a life. And I've never actually heard the sort of story of why Pamela was so wonderful and just inspired so many people and gave rise to this incredible series that we've enjoyed for many years at ANU. And I just want to thank you for sharing those memories. That was incredible. Let me just say a couple of words about the gender institute before I conclude with a vote of thanks. Gender Institute was set up 13 years ago now to link our gender and sexuality researchers across the ANU campus. And I think it's created an extraordinary powerful network that extends into not just our academic world, but into government and civil society. And those links are just so important for who we are. We also have a very strong commitment to gender equality, whether that's in our own backyard at ANU or nationally in Australia, internationally, a lot of our work leads into those directions. And as we've heard this evening, there remains very much to do. A great deal has changed in the last 13 years and yet we always risk that chance of going backwards has been so vividly described. And it's just so important to keep our spirits up and keep our sense of moving forward. And I think that's just been beautifully reflected in this evening's discussions. Let me thank the family of Pamela Danoon for this incredible event, which brings us together every year. And it really is such a highlight of all of the incredible smorgasbord of events we now have for International Women's Day. This is always a very special evening. So we thank you for that sponsorship. Let me thank our speaker, Ambassador Stephanie Cobes Campbell. And what an extraordinary advocate you are. I've heard you speak before, but I've never heard you tell so many wonderful stories. And again, this sense of embedding our principles in our stories of lives and your life intersecting in incredible ways with the women and girls you've had a chance to talk with around the world. And I don't envy you that all the travel. I think that must be a lot. But I do think you're doing an incredible work in this space. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom on that. To these wonderful respondents that we had speak, you both spoke so well. And it is a huge reminder that we need not to speak about women, but we need to speak about young women and girls. And we need to have a range of voices at the table. And thank you for sharing your thoughts this evening. I want to thank the National Foundation for Australian Women for collaborating with us once again. Thank you, Jane, for your words as welcome as president. Thank you, Sally, who's there just for wearing lots of hats and being amazing. Thank you so much. And then of course, the people in the background who've made this evening's blows so smoothly. Laura Jane Robinson, our administrator at the Gender Institute, Kate Groves, executive officer to the ambassador. The team from ABC who are recording this evening for big ideas and the team from A&U here in Canberra who helped move all the chairs at the last minute because I didn't like the setup. And finally, of course, thank you to all of you who've come out this evening. It's wonderful to see you all here. And I hope to see you all again next year. Big thanks to everybody.