 Thank you, friends and colleagues. Welcome to the Crawford School of Public Policy. My name is Tom Compass. I'm the director of the school. Indeed it's my great pleasure to welcome you here today to help celebrate this new Harold Mitchell Development Policy annual lecture. So thank you all for coming. Much appreciated. Before we begin, let me just acknowledge the first Australians, the traditional owners of the land that we meet on and pay with respects to the elders of the none of all people past and present. Obviously this lecture has been made possible today with the generous support and help of Harold Mitchell, chairman of AGIS Media Australia New Zealand. And Harold, thank you very much for coming today. Much appreciated. Your Excellencies, distinguished guests, minister, Vice Chancellor, Dean of the College of Asia and the Pacific, friends of the ANU ladies and gentlemen again, thank you for coming. My task is to introduce Harold and have him say a few words and then I'll introduce the Vice Chancellor and have him introduce our special guest speaker today. Harold is many of you will know him. Everyone in this room will know Harold is one of Australia's most successful businessmen and one of the preeminent philanthropists here in Australia. Of marvelous career I'm just going to highlight two points. In the year 2000 Harold launched the Harold Mitchell Foundation to help promote health in the arts. It's been wonderfully successful and in 2010 he's been appointed, he was appointed the companion of the Order of Australia for his service to the community in the fields of art, health, education and as a supporter of humanitarian aid and Team Releste and Indigenous communities, a wonderful, wonderful person and it's our great pleasure to have him here in the Crawford School today. Please join me in welcoming Harold Mitchell. Thank you so much Tom and to all here, distinguished guests all, it's a pleasure to be here to launch the inaugural Harold Mitchell Development Policy Lecture and how lucky we are to attract such a brilliant speaker. I must say finance minister, a great admirer of what you country do and are. I first might wonder why it's such a special feeling for East Timor. I first met Janana Gujmao in 2000. Janana, do you want to start again? I first met Janana in Melbourne in the year 2000. I was chairman of the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts and one of our executive director came to me and said that a very good way to open this would be with a poem about peace. It sounded like a good idea. And we've invited a man called Janana Gujmao here and so I sat transfixed with some 10,000 people in the Mayan Music Bowl to hear this guttural Portuguese voice read a poem of peace. Now consider where Janana and his country had been over the years. Janana had been imprisoned and he had lost through various ways physically his first family he'd lost nearly a third of his people and here was a man who was able to come and speak to us about peace and as I discovered over a period of time after that, if ever there was a modern day Nelson Mandela in our near neighbourhood it was Janana. And so that was the beginning of a journey which brought us here today which I'm so pleased about. I said to Janana, this tiny country living on a dollar a day with a birth level at the highest in the world of eight children per family with so much ahead of them how could I help? Thinking a hospital or a school I didn't even think. Picture my surprise when he said Harold, we've won 300 musical recorders the little tin whistles. What on earth would you do with that? And he said my first task is to rebuild the spirit of our people we cannot tackle any of our challenges unless our hearts are strong in that particular case music was a key. So it was the beginning of a long enduring friendship. I really went to each team on the beginning because I felt I didn't want to be a burden I didn't want anyone to be put out in any way at all they had so much to do later I realised that it was important to be there to offer to the hand of friendship which I might say minister is what we do today. Currently I'm supporting the former Victorian Premier a very great man Steve Brax and I also recognise his right hand left hand and whole person Kim McGraw who's here with us in his role as one of Janana's advisors that's been just so important and we've also helped significantly Kirstie Sword-Guzma, Janana's wife in the great great challenges the support of women and children everything that they do in East Timor Kirstie came from Melbourne and of course had a long long history of involvement and assistance to everything in East Timor so minister can I say it's a privilege that you're here and then I got to know your beautiful country which over the years we all will and should I am also pleased to support in another role as chairman of care two of its projects in East Timor and I recognise too here the role of care international Dr Robert Glasser was here and Dr Judy Newton House who is the director here in Australia East Timor is a wonderful place but let me turn to the day we're all attending a Harold Mitchell lecture why is it the answer begins with my very strong belief that Australia is a very very lucky country here we are the 12th biggest economy in the world we have 50 countries with a greater population than us Creativity our proximity to Asia just on the point of Asia just to recall this that is a developed country that we have we have more third world countries around us than any other country in the world we are in a unique and a special place but one that we have to take great care with we're very special here and that we are a lucky country indeed we've made our own luck to some extent and we've made it all work but what with these unique opportunities can we do to make the most of them professionally and on a philanthropic level our recent come very focused on how we as a country can prosper and it's quite simple we look after our near neighbours as well as ourselves near neighbours as well as ourselves so much depends on what we do in the region that makes the region that we will live in for this next century Australia as I said is one of the only developed nations in this unique position helping those countries to develop is not just a matter of being a good global citizen it's a matter of ensuring our own security and progress and so for this reason a strong supporter of foreign aid we'd really like to give more and that's what we're now seeing. I'd also like to commend Peter Baxter and his Ausaid team and recognise here James Batley who has joined us today and James you're most welcome and everything that you and the Ausaid people do is just so important I also recognise the Executive Director of the Harold Mitchell Foundation who has been so helpful in all this and a former Minister-Councillor of Ausaid and PNG Stephanie Capers Campbell who's with us. Ausaid is a major and significant donor in the world and that's important that should continue but of course an effective aid program has everything to do with how we spend it's not just about how much. The United Kingdom, the United States both have independent think tanks to keep their aid programs transparent and accountable and continually fed with fresh ideas. Now we do too I think that the ANU's Development Policy Centre is set to make a huge contribution to aid policy debates both at home and abroad I don't just see it as an asset to big institutions such as Ausaid that are burned for everyone in the development field in the world this includes NGOs such as CARE which I'm one of of course the Chair but others too. Of all the things we can do to support good developers in our region supporting a contestable environment is one of the most important the war against poverty starts with a battle of ideas so that's why I'm here to help today. I'm pleased to announce the grant first chance for the Australian over five years to the ANU Development Policy Centre. The grant will cover core administration costs of our very great Australian Professor Stephen Howes and his team to focus on their most important job delivering a world-class think tank. I congratulate you Professor Howes and the team for a very significant contribution to development in our region. I can't wait to watch them grow. Thank you so much. Thank you Harold. Before I ask the Vice Chancellor to come up and thank Harold and introduce our special guest. Let me just give you a sense of the running order. After the Minister's speech she's kindly agreed to have a little Q&A session and happy for you to participate in that and Andrew McIntyre the Dean of the College will facilitate that Q&A session. And then finally the now very happy director of the Development Policy Centre here in the Crawford School. Professor Stephen Howes will come up into a final thank you. Let me please welcome ANU's Vice Chancellor Ian Young. Well thank you Tom and can I begin by saying just how pleased I am to be able to accept this very generous gift from the Harold Mitchell Foundation. Harold on behalf of the University can I thank you for your vision and indeed this tremendous support. It's interesting as a Vice Chancellor when I go and speak to politicians they often say Vice Chancellors no matter how much money you have you always want more. And there's a very clear answer that and that says yes we do and the reason for that is that universities particularly research intensive universities like this have an insatiable appetite to do great things and there's the only thing that really limits us for two things. I mean there's the intellectual capacity within the institution itself and there's the resources to do those great things because there's no magic amount of money that you need to deliver a great education. The more resources you have the better the quality of the education you deliver. The more resources you have the more insightful research you can do. The greater volumes and the greater quality of research you can do. So as an institution that's what we're striving to do. We're striving to play on a world stage. We're striving to provide tremendous quality world class education to gifted students and we want to do research that really changes the world and what limits us in that are resources and we appreciate that governments irrespective of what their political persuasion only have finite resources and I think particularly in the next few years we'll see that more and more. So we need to be able to look to other sources and of course one of those which I think is emerging in Australia now perhaps behind the curve compared to other countries but one of those is large philanthropy and the way that public institutions like this can work with private donors or with foundations and trusts to build endowments to do great things and I think that Harold's contribution today is a classic example of that and so I'm delighted to announce that because the university also shares Harold's vision for this that the university will be matching the contribution which the Harold Mitchell Foundation is providing so that the so the total support to the centre over that five years will be five million dollars which I think will certainly set the centre up to do I think some really insightful and very important work over that period of time. Stephen and his team at the Development Policy Centre are indeed doing exceptional work and this funding as I've said will contribute to that important research in key issues such as aid effectiveness. In the two years since its establishment the centre has really grown quite significantly and the philanthropy of the Harold Mitchell Foundation will sustain that growth into the future. Consistent with the university's focus on enhancing public policy and it's very fitting today that we're here in the Crawford School of Public Policy because this is indeed one of our major focal points I think at the present time within the university the Development Policy Centre is generating expertise, knowledge and new ideas on aid and development policy and I think Harold has clearly articulated just why that's such an important thing to do. Encouraging public discussion is also an important function of the centre so to actually take the work and take it out there to community and we're already seeing the benefits of the Harold Mitchell Foundation's support with the launch of this new lecture series here today. One of the ways to be able to engage with people and to have a real policy debate. Given Harold's long standing support for humanitarian aid in Timor-Leste it's fitting that the development experience of this country, the youngest of nations, is a subject of the inaugural Harold Mitchell Development Policy Annual Lecture. We're honoured to welcome the Finance Minister for the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, Amelia Perez, to present the lecture today. Minister Perez was evacuated to Australia in 1975 where she remained working tirelessly to secure the human rights and independence of the Timorese people until her country gained its independence in 2002. She's the founding chair of the G7 Plus, a group of fragile states whose motto is, and I think a very fitting one, Goodbye Conflict, Welcome Development. In July 2012 Minister Perez was appointed by the United Nations Secretary General Banki Moon to the high level panel of eminent persons on the post-2015 development agenda. Today she will speak on the New Deal for engagement in fragile states, a G7 Plus initiative that aims to promote peace building and state building. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in giving Minister Perez a very warm welcome. Thank you very much Vice-Chancellor. It is with great honour that I have accepted your invitation to be here. Mr. Harold Mitchell, professors, representatives of diplomatic groups, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I would like to thank Harold Mitchell for his support to my country. Harold is a very good friend as you've had of Timor Leste and a true friend to the Prime Minister, Shanna Gassbaum. I also understand and I have a great admiration for you Harold, for your extraordinary talent and resilience. I understand and know that you've also experienced poverty in your youth and now you ensure enormous wealth that we are all benefitting from. The people of Timor Leste are very fortunate that you have been a passionate support of our nation. Today, before I actually address or speak on the New Deal, I would like to briefly focus on Harold's support for governance initiatives in Timor Leste and it is actually very relevant to my broader topic and that is Timor Leste and the New Deal for Engagement in fragile states. Harold funded an innovative model of direct engagement, the Steve Brack Timor Leste governance project since its inception in 2007. You may know the Honourable Steve Brack, who was the Premier of Victoria from 1999 to July 2007 and upon his resignation he became a special advisor to my Prime Minister Shanna Gassbaum. He brought with him invaluable knowledge and experience again during his term as Premier of Victoria. Harold actually provided the funding to enable him to come to Timor Leste with his small team and they engaged some extra expert technical advice and most importantly Steve answered directly to the Prime Minister and the Government of Timor Leste. He only worked under our direction on initiatives that were identified by us as priorities and his engagement with Timor Leste I would say was an early successful example of the principles behind the New Deal for Engagement in fragile states. So Harold, thank you very much for being the early adopter in the development international field. Now before I speak about the New Deal I would like to first explain to you how it all started. I would like to take you along my journey over the last five years since I became Minister of Finance in Timor Leste in 2007 and then in 2010 when I became the Chair of the G7 Plus and now it is made up of 18 fragile or conflict affected countries and I'm also the Co-Chair of the International Dialogue on Peace Building and State Building where the New Deal was actually conceived. The Shalana Gismal Government took office in September 2007 with very high hopes. We had a very strong social and fiscal reformist agenda. What we worked into in administrative social, economic and political terms was a chaos. We inherited a highly politicized public service with very little understanding of civic duty or that a bureaucracy should exist to professionally serve the people and the policies of the government of the day. There were no handover documents no briefings on how our policies could be implemented or the status of the programs of the previous government. I had a blank computer and no internet access. There was not one qualified Timor Leste accountant in the Department of Finance. Someone did manage to brief me on the fact that in 2007 the average mathematics proficiency of the 723 staff in the Department of Finance was Grade 3. The story was the same across all the ministries and we had many other challenges. Over 150,000 internal displaced persons who had fled their homes during the last and final crisis in 2006, they were living in refugee camps mostly around the capital dealing. We had 800 rebels with weapons, a small army in the hills threatening stability. We had negative 5% economic growth and service delivery had all but stalled. A review by the government on aid to Timor Leste revealed that 8.2 billion dollars had been spent on aid and peacekeeping operations between 1999 and 2006. But what has that aid delivered? Unfortunately when we came into government poverty had doubled. In some regions one out of every two Timories lived below the poverty line. It was much worse than I had feared. Our roads were impossible. Most of the country had no electricity, there were no pensions to support our most disadvantaged citizens and many of our hospitals and schools were still in ruins. And worse still our people had lost hope. At the same time even though we had only just come into government we were bombarded with reports and expert opinions. It was like a repeat. Report after report was released adding to the sum 4,000 reports that had already been written on Timor Leste since our independence in 2002. Entire thesis with contradicting statistics were being written about us. It seemed everyone else was more of an expert than we were on our own country and everyone else claimed to know more about our country than us. I kept asking our statistics department where were they getting this information? I was actually in charge of the statistics. But no one knew. So I said enough is enough. We asked for space and time. Give us the chance to take ownership as we all agreed in the Paris declaration on aid effectiveness in 2005. So we can have a country-owned and country-led transition. Australia was one of the few donors that was most sensitive to our request. This was very helpful to us because Australia was also our largest bilateral development partner. However, with 45 other donors and 302 NGOs all competing for success and relevance it was not an easy task to get everyone on the same page. It was a very painful for some donors to let go, to let us stand on our own two feet, find our own way, take small steps, set up systems, indeed make our own mistakes. We quickly learned that in post-conflict setting you actually have to act and you have to act fast to regain the trust in our society to normalize the situation so as not to return to conflict. Until we could lay the basic foundation for the state and our people we could not plan long-term. Our development partners demanded long-term plans. We could barely get through the day. We were reacting. By necessity we became experts in crisis management. When I look back from 2007 to now I think it is short of a miracle of how far we have come given the enormous challenges. I know we still have a long way to go but the key to our progress was acting and acting fast. This is not in any donor, organization or institution handbook. We resettled all of the 150,000 IDPs in two years. The United Nations told us that it would take 10 years. We negotiated to get all the armed rebels down from the mountains. We began to decentralize budgets to line up the resources to improve the service delivery. We introduced pensions for the elderly, single mothers, orphans, veterans and disabled. As many of these people had no bank accounts and many in the rural areas do not read or write, we used thumb print to acknowledge recital funds. This was achieved quickly and as a result not necessarily using the world best practices but the reality on the ground was that time was the crucial factor. You don't get dividends of peace if you make processes more important than outcomes. What matters the most is the number of lives we save and the numbers of days of stability we give our people. We created labour intensive work programs and social transfers to rebuild communities giving them ownership to shape their future. We gave practice to farmers and we bought seeds so they could accelerate production. We established youth athletic programs. We built parks, held concerts and hosted our first international meetings and sporting events. I remember the Prime Minister coming to me and wanting money to rebuild our garden in front of Hotel Timor to put the swings in, etc. and I was thinking, my God, is this our priority? But then I understood because to take people with you, you need to expose them of what life can be like. Now those children did not even know the existence of a swing so how can you kind of talk to people when they don't know an alternative? So we have to show so I started to understand that development was not just on the hard stuff and that's when like my Prime Minister was saying he wanted these things for the music to reveal the spirit. It's very important that you do both at the same time. We demolished the remnants of half-burned buildings. Backed by Ausaid and the team funded by Harold Mitchell, we established the Civil Service Commission that introduced merit-based appointments and new standards in training for our public servants. We invested in capacity building in the security sector. We set up the Anti-Corruption Commission and introduced new transparent tender arrangements for major infrastructure projects. We established the National Petroleum Authority that employs some of our best or most educated men and women to manage and regulate petroleum activities in team of investors, exclusive jurisdictional areas and in the joint petroleum development area that we share with Australia. We were the first in Asia and the third in the world to be compliant with the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, the EITI. Every dollar that comes in from petroleum revenue is publicly disclosed and matched with the records of the resource companies. We began creating a highly transparent financial system where anyone in the world eventually will be able to track the budget being executed in real time, track aid expenditure, track procurement and most importantly results. And that's only 5% of our population has higher than a secondary school degree. We invested in education and training in our people. We found time to set national priorities and each year we evaluated them and changed them according to our needs. We were making progress into molesta. At around the same time we became more active internationally, thanks initially to Australia who encouraged us to participate in the third high level forum on aid effectiveness in Accra in Ghana. This was followed up by a preparatory meeting on a new forum called the International Dialogue on Peace Building and State Building in Paris. The forum brought together fragile and conflict affected countries, donors and organizations to look at how international support could be more targeted and more effective. At one session we asked if we, the recipient countries, could have a day alone. There were seven ministers of finance from seven different countries, fragile states. We were from different continents, we spoke different languages, we had different religions, cultures and traditions, but we began talking about peace building and state building and our challenges when working with the donors. We realized that we had the same experiences and so we began to share solutions to some of our similar challenges. It was astonishing. At the end of our closed door session we joked that we were the little G7 plus and so it became to be. Then in April 2010 Dili hosted the new forum, largely funded by Australia and the UK. This was the first time in history that fragile and conflict affected states had a united voice on the global stage and what had started out as a seven countries quickly became 17 and today is 18 and that's not our aim. Our aim is to become little G zero, not little. We wanted to end the monologue spoken at us and to promote a dialogue spoken with us both globally and locally. I was honored to be voted the chair of the little G7 plus. I guess I suspect my colleagues saw that I was probably the least afraid to speak my mind so they kind of picked me. I'm still the G7 plus chair. The reality that people lost their face when we gained our independence ten years ago, no one with experience running a government, this skilled public service, a population that had been traumatized and denied a decent education an almost non-existence private sector, minimal jobs growth, limited training, fragmented aid, a highly charged political environment and poor services all this was very familiar to many of my G7 plus colleagues. We in the G7 plus realized immediately that we were not going to meet the millennium development goals, the famous MDGs. In fact, no fragile country will so the big question for us to answer firstly was why and secondly how do we change the way we do business to get better results for too long the world had dictated what development priorities should be without ever asking us. We agreed however that the MDGs set out in 2000 are absolutely imperative. They captured the basic necessities for humanity and the rights and freedoms required for a successful state. But there was a vital missing link in order to achieve our development goals we needed to first stop conflict, stop crisis and build a functioning state. The G7 plus members recognized that as a development community we have largely failed to stop conflict and as a result we have largely failed to build a resilient state to address the needs of our people. In the process 1.5 billion people have been left behind that is 20% of our global population that live in conflict and fragility that is the professor Paul Collier's bottom billion. So what are the priorities and needs of people emerging from conflict and fragility? The new deal for engagement in fragile states was released on 30th of November 2011 at the fourth high level forum on aid effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. The new deal had been developed and endorsed by the G7 plus through the International Dialogue Forum. The G7 plus has now grown to 18 countries. They are Afghanistan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Cote Daivri, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leon, the Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Timoleste and Togo. When we gang up we are a formidable force. The new deal is our call to the rest of the world for a new way of engagement. It is an architecture shaped by the G7 plus to increase aid effectiveness and country ownership. We in the G7 plus advocated three independent and inter-reliant principles which makes up the new deal. They are the peace building and state building goals, there are five of them, focus an acronym for the new agreement and trust for mutual commitments. Firstly the new deal's peace building and state building goals the first one is security first, normalization second. Our people must feel safe. They must normalize a routine again where they no longer feel threatened. You cannot build schools that children are afraid to attend and you cannot combat disease if your very life of your family is under threat. Legitimate politics is the second goal and I like to say that that is the same as people's participation. This does not infringe on sovereignty it strengthens it. It establishes the necessary avenues for people to feel included in nation building. This includes a free media and a strong civil society and the socialization and education of the people about their rights and freedoms as well as their duties and responsibilities. As we saw with the Arab Spring, it is in the state's interest to embrace the voice of the people. Third, justice. This for Timor-Lester meant equity for all with a forward looking approach to implementing best practice, social justice economic justice and legislative justice. Reconciliation with Indonesia was at the heart of our success. Despite the massive trauma and pain of the past, we had to look forward. We knew the best result for us was to create a peaceful future for our people. We knew that to do that we needed strong economic foundations and good governance in terms of our resource and revenue management. We knew this was the pathway to preventing conflict. This was state building at its core. Building strong economic foundations, the fourth goal, is to create employment and improve livelihoods. The engine room for any government is probably finance management. It can be very challenging in developing countries that have so many other pressing equally difficult challenges. But without proper financial management, you cannot build institutions and create the economic conditions needed to serve the needs of our people. The final peace building and state building goal concerns are revenue and services. We need to manage revenue and build capacity for accountable and fair service delivery. Let's not forget many of the G7 plus countries are enormously rich in resources but they reap very little benefit. We in Timor last day, we have our best practice model where every oil receipt is put into our petroleum fund. That money is then invested wisely and then we take each year's unestimated sustainable fund. When I first became Minister of Finance, we had $1.65 billion in the petroleum fund. Today we have a little over $11 billion. We have just begun exploration of our resources. 100% onshore and 50% offshore has yet to be explored or exploited. So our horizon is bright. But we must have the human capacity to equalize the investment. Otherwise the investment is lost on our people. So these are the five peace building and state building goals. In Timor, we began meeting these challenges and have come a long way since 2007. I know we still have a long way to go but the key to our success was acting and acting fast like I've said before. These all required money to be spent and spent quickly. We took the risk and thus far the investment has paid off in peace and citizen engagement. There is no price tag you can put on this. In Timor Leicester, we never asked a donor to take a risk we ourselves would not be prepared to do. These peace building and state building goals were our own national priorities. They have been tried and tested and the results speak for themselves. We have had no crisis since 2007. We have had average double digit economic growth rates year on year. And we have had one of the top 10 to 20 fastest growing economies in the world since 2008. Our institutions are improving and our service delivery is becoming more relevant to the needs of our people. All our key human social economic indicators are also improving. But to be honest when we started I never thought we had a chance. We were building a state and its institutions from scratch. Equally important to the new deal and the peace building and state building goals were the principles of focus. Which is a new and progressive way of engaging in our state focused on engagement that supports country owned and country led pathways of fragility. And trust which is a set of mutual commitments for results. Let me first explain what focus the focus principles. F stands for fragility assessment. Fragility assessment by us. For us on our own countries. By our own people. We need to analyze and understand our own problems so that we can implement our own solutions. I think many that have worked in the development field will understand that very often everybody comes to our country and they all do this assessment. They know how fragile they have their own little ideas. Come back home, design programs and then we only know about the programs on the country. And then we cry when it fails. Because when we are there implemented we don't know why this program came because it doesn't we didn't understand the problem. We did not do the analysis. O, focus, O stands for one plan and one vision. In the case of Timor-Leste with 46 donors and 302 NGOs at a time everyone had their own plans and projects. We had fragmentation, duplication, little alignment and zero cost savings. There can be only one plan and it must be the country led and country owned. Agreed with all stakeholders for the benefit of the state and its peoples. In July 2011 after two years of national considerations the prime minister launched our first Timor-Leste strategic development plan. This was developed by us and is now being implemented by us with the support of all our development partners. C is for a compact to agree that everyone will stick to the plan. In Timor-Leste, Australia as one of our major partners was the first to align with the Timor-Leste strategic development plan. And the U is to use these same peace building and state building goals and indicators to monitor the country level progress. This is important because most of the time the programs are designed by the development partners against the framework of MDGs. And I already said it. We can't even get there. We have to do some other things to get to the MDGs. So if you design a program against MDG framework indicators and then you go there and we are doing peace PSGs well you can't measure it. The program will be rated as unsuccessful or failed. The S is to start support continual dialogue amongst ourselves and our partners. This will include support for global regional and national initiatives to build the capacity of government and civil society leaders and institutions to lead peace building and state building efforts and to ensure that our plan is on course. Now let me explain a little bit about trust principles. The T is for transparency. We need to know from the donors and from the NGOs and anybody in our country how much you are spending, where and what on. So when we do our own budget we are not duplicating. We need to harmonize efforts to implement the plan. Without full transparency you can often make mistakes. The R in trust is for risk sharing. We need to accept there are risks. If you want to go and engage in fragile states you need to take risks. It's just not business as normal. Sitting on the sidelines can be a conduit to crisis. We need to act and act fast in the fragile and conflict affected context. And sometimes it means taking risks and not waiting for a feasibility study or a risk management plan. I remember when we were going to resettle the IDPs, the 150 IDPs that we had and we were negotiating housing allocations per family and I went to the Prime Minister thinking as a minister of finance does and said we need a control process where we can disperse money in small tranches based on giving benchmarks. The Prime Minister turned to me and said we need peace and give them the money to build a house and they will make a home. So I took a risk and I did it and he was right. I had become mentalized to my own systems and procedures first and I kind of lost the vision. The U in trust is to use our country systems. Some countries in the G7 plus have up to 65 parallel units running all doing the same thing. The usual reasons for not using country systems are that they are not up to standards. But it's like trying to fix a pipe that you never use. How in the whole world do you know where the leak is if you never use it and how can you fix it? So you have to use it. Then fix it and then it's strengthened the country systems. S is to strengthen capacity. The misconception is that the donors like the UK, EU, Australia, anybody that they give us money to fragile states and that we do with that money as we please. That is not the case in the fragile and conflict affected context. The help usually comes in in the form of technical assistance to pay people from your countries who are supposed to train our locals on how to do the job. But the job itself sometimes is so demanding that there is little capacity building. Knowledge transfer is limited by the fact that sometimes most advisors cannot speak the local languages. Lastly, T is for timely and predictable aid. We cannot plan without knowing what will or will not be supported. Recipient countries need consistency and the trajectory of what they will have to spend so any planet can take place. Timor-Leste has lived and experienced the peace building and state building goals and the trust and focus principles. They have been tried and they have been tested. However, we continue to have major challenges. One of the biggest challenges is getting baseline data so that we can do initial fragility assessments. I believe we do not have the data to measure fragile states and we have not figured out a formula to retrieve the data within this context and this we, I mean us, all international community. It took Timor-Leste many years to do a comprehensive census on one million people. We now have the data we need to plan and prioritize. Without the right data you cannot measure, you cannot plan, you cannot prioritize. It is like shooting dots blindfolded and this is why I believe we have largely unsuccessful in meeting MDGs. The new deal is a proposal for changing engagement and that change must be measured for its success or failure. It is a change in doing business, a change in procedures and a change in mind setting. The last, I believe to be the most difficult. I recall at the beginning of my mandate the failure of a major donor project to increase the institutional capacity of my ministry, the Ministry of Finance. I realized that the project was oriented towards the success of itself rather than the success of building the ministry as an institution. When I attended the meetings, the presentation would start with the project first and then at the end you would see a mention of the Ministry of Finance. The project managers used to beg me to share the meeting so that they could show to the donors that there was ownership by the Ministry. I felt like a rubber stamp. I was spending days struggling on how I was supposed to reform the ministry and I used to take long time talking intensively to my team of staff on the importance of putting the institution first, explaining the role of the institution in the building of our nation and how the whole thing would affect our lives, our children and the future generations if we didn't do the right thing. Then we would go into meetings with the donors and be shown a PowerPoint of the project that was supposed to help me reform the ministry where the first 20 slides were about the project and what international advisors would be doing and if lucky one slide would be about the ministry. It was like living in two different worlds. There was such a disconnect. The advisors were more concerned with reporting to the donors than they were to the minister. If we are not careful the same may happen with the new deal. I reacted by refusing to attend any further meetings and refusing any of the donor projects offered until I could gain some control and understanding. They needed to change completely their mind setting by placing the ministry above all. It took another 12 months for a change of behavior. It was hard. I kept reminding the project manager that I was the minister in the ministry of finance and that there was only one boss and it happened to be me. The next PowerPoint presentation started with the ministry of finance. Its aims and objectives, its weaknesses and strengths, current status. This is when I knew we were on the right track. I asked for the project implementation unit to be immediately transferred into my ministry and to be led by someone in my office. No more sitting outside the ministry and writing long reports that nobody ever reads. Country on country land. This is the local action. Ironically I am now seeing a parallel globally. Reports coming out through donor organizations you can see the donors organizations names first, then the new deal and then the country's names third. This there is still a disconnect here. It should be the country first, the new deal second and the organization that supports that. So it's just again like I said it's all to do with mind setting. But when you do that you can see a huge big behavior change. Slowly and slowly in the last there was a major shift across donors in behavioral change. It was very painful but as it will be with the new deal, but if it is done properly it will be good. I also reject the notion that it takes 20 to 40 years for basic government transformations. I believe it can be done much quicker if we keep our eyes solidly on the end game which is to build the state. But at the same time we do not underestimate fragility. Even in our international dialogue our partners are talking about concepts and indicators that are sometimes so complicated that those on the ground do not understand them. Now how can they implement something they don't understand? I often tell the donors let's go back to the basics. The implementation of the new deal will take time and if it is not truly country owned it will fail. If we give the pilot countries the time, the space and the support to broaden local and global consensus we have a chance to get it right. Just like we did it in Timor-Leste, we have a chance to get some things right. It cannot be in your time frame but it must be in ours. I know how frustrating that must be trust me but it is the only way. Australia has been a remarkable donor in supporting the new deal and a strong G7 Plus supporter. This will help ensure the implementation of the new deal and I believe we will have a positive impact on the development of many countries. Finally I would like to say again thank you to Mr. Harold Mitchell and to the Development Policy Centre at the Crawford School of Public Policy for hosting me and this event. I would like to close with the words of my counterpart Minister Kosti from South Sudan. He coined a phrase that we have to do with all the G7 Plus members. Nothing about us without us. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone and as Tom said it is a very happy day for me today and this is a particularly happy part of it just to offer a vote of thanks to everyone who has made today possible. So first of all I want to be in with you Harold and Stephanie your Chief Executive of the World Foundation I want to thank you for your generosity in making this gift to us and also in your recognition of the importance of the aid and development issues that are our focus. Your gift has turned what so far has been an experiment. I think a successful experiment but still an experiment into something which is more like a viable proposition. The importance for us for our centre of having long term funding from an independent source can't be overestimated. So thank you for your willingness to take a bet on us and we'll certainly do our best to live up to your very high expectations and ambitions which I want to assure you that we completely share. If I can turn to my ANU colleagues or actually my bosses, the Director, Dean and Vice-Chancellor thank you for all your support, financial and moral. The fact that all three of you are here today I think really speaks for itself and I don't need to say anything more but I will and that is that I couldn't think of a better place to set up this centre than within the Crawford School which is the best place to do public policy and within the College of Asia and Pacific which is the best place to work on our region and within the ANU which is Australia's best university. I want to thank my colleagues at Crawford School and at the Development Policy Centre and also those of you, the network that we have it's very important to us that extends beyond this university. Thank you all for your support, for your initiative, for your hard work in the last two years in getting us to where we are today while we've come a long way in the last two years we've got a much further distance to travel and I look forward to working with you in the coming months and years to get there. Thank you all for coming, let's not forget, this is not the end of term it's we finished the exam period, everyone is thinking about Christmas parties and the fact that we could get such a good turnout here today not only says something about our lecturer I'll come to you in a minute and we'll get to the importance of team or for Australia but also tells us that the sort of issues that we work on are issues that are of great interest and that's very encouraging for us so thank you all for coming here today and finally to Minister thank you so much for coming all this way to Canberra to deliver such an inspiring lecturer, as Andrew said, as the author of the first Harold Mitchell Development Policy Lecture you have set the bar very high for future lecturers and I'm very grateful to you for that it's been very appropriate to have you as the person to kick off this lecture series not only because of Harold's links to team or not only because of the importance of team or to Australia, not only because you've informed us about this G7 Plus initiative which frankly I think we haven't really kept up with and you've performed a big service for us in that regard but also I think just having you here really embodies what we're on about at the centre and I'm sure the ANU more broadly, you know we want to promote policy dialogue, we of course we want to advise policy makers but we also want to listen to policy makers we want to talk with them, not at them and when we talk about policy makers we mean not only policy makers in Australia but those in key policy makers from a critical part of the countries such as yourself and team or and I think the lecture today and all we've learned from it just demonstrates the value of that approach and so ladies and gentlemen it's my honour now to bring today's proceedings to a close and can I ask you to join me in thanking our two main guests Harold Mitchell and Amelia Parris