George Campbell (New South Wales politician)

Transcription

-George Brenan: We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. At our final event for 2014 we farewelled Professor Michael L'Estrange so it's fitting tonight that we start this year with the inaugural presentation from our new head, Professor Rory Medcalf and, in a way, that's why we started this year a little later than usual. We wanted to start with a presentation from Rory so we thought we'd sort of give him a few weeks to settle into the job before we asked him to stand up in front of a crowd. I'd like to start by acknowledging a number of guests here this evening. There actually is the Ambassador for Argentina and dean of the diplomatic core, the head of the EU delegation to Australia, Ambassador for Morocco, together with diplomatic representatives from New Zealand, PNG, ASIO, Singapore, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Pakistan, and Brunei. Senior ANU colleagues Robin Stanton, Clive Williams, Hugh White, and Bill Tow. Commonwealth partners including Dr. Margot McCarthy, Mike Pezzullo from our advisory board, senior staff from our participating agencies including Richard Moore, Robyn Coslovich, Rod Brazier, Martin Hoffman, and Angus Campbell. And a number of NSC friends including Allan Gyngell, Angus Houston, Chris Barrie, Bob Cotton, some former staff, Mike Norris, David Connery, and some fellows, John McFarlane, and also another friend, David Irving. Before we begin, in the event of emergency, you need to head out the multiple glass doors in the foyer and head up to the main road and across into the car park. If you need the toilets, there are toilets in the corridors at either end, either end of the corridor. If you could also make sure that any mobile or related devices that you've got now are either silent or they're turned off. Our proceedings tonight will take the usual format that we use. So there will be a presentation followed by questions and answers. I'll then invite Dr. McCarthy from Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to make some brief remarks, and then we'll move to a reception in the Cadbury Spring Bank Room. That's the same venue as we used for Professor L'Estrange's farewell last year, for those of you who were here and if not there will be NSC staff to show you the way. I'm not going to introduce Rory Medcalf tonight in the normal way of talking through a lengthy biography. I think you all know he joined us from the Lowy Institute and a career in government including foreign affairs and the office of National Assessments. I don't really propose to say more than that. In a way, you know, it's the CV is what gets you the jobs and now he's here. So it's what he does now that he's here that matters and you've all come to hear what he's got to say and what he proposes to do. So I'm going to invite Rory to take the podium and make his remarks. [applause] -Rory Medcalf: Thank you very much for being here ladies and gentlemen. It's really quite humbling to have such a distinguished audience and I'm delighted that I was able to leave it to George Brenan, our Director of Strategy and Development to do the honours of listing so many of the dignitaries, senior officials, the esteemed colleagues that are in the room today, saves my breath for the business of the hour. The Australia National University, as we all know but sometimes forget, I think, was established with really an unashamed nation building ethos. The goal was a world class university in the Australian national interest with, in the wake of the Second World War, a weather eye on our national security. And just over five years ago, the National Security College was established in, I think, quite a similar spirit. So I look forward to building on its record, building on the founding achievements of my predecessor, Michael L'Estrange, Professor Michael L'Estrange, AO, and carrying forward, the work over the years ahead. My commitment to this important national institution is that it will foster effective, innovative, and inclusive approaches to national security. In my view this means helping our friends in the room, the Australian national security community, to remain informed, to remain connected, and to remain responsive in a world of change. Part of this involves challenging the security community and the wider Australian community to think and to think anew. And hence the title of today's speech. Why think anew about national securities? Some would argue Australia has hardly been more secure in a world of transnational problems, cross border problems, we have the singular geopolitical advantage of an island continent. Our region is relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful. We have vast natural resource deposits and a developed economy that has undergone decades of growth, even now. We have high per capita incomes, high per capita wealth across the society and to all appearances, a resilient multicultural society, and above all most of us have known, perpetual peace; freedom from conflicts eternal or internal, freedom from fear. Perhaps it is that we 21st century Australians are so fascinated with the centenary of ANZAC just now precisely because so few of us have direct knowledge of war. The Second World War, which scarred so many Australian families, was a lifetime ago. For many of today's Australians, the only prolonged experience with any kind of armed conflict on our soil, the warfare with, the massacres of, the first Australians is even harder to imagine still. The conflicts of recent years have really been involving only a very small minority of the Australian community and has affected only a very small proportion of our population and their families. So looking to the present, looking to the future, many of us seem to presume that whatever threats there may be, whatever challenges there may lie ahead, they will not challenge the fundamentally democratic comfortable nature of Australia, the Australia that we know. Now this is presumably because either the dangers are not our problem, they're far away, or we're sufficiently prepared to meet them. And certainly as we see assembled here today, and I would reiterate this point, Australia has a highly professional national security community. Relevant agencies and departments, not to mention the Australian Defence Force, the Federal Police, are substantially resourced. Most of them, much more so than 10 or 15 years ago. They attract good people; talented, educated, dedicated. This community is better joined up or connected and thus better managed than ever, with collaborative leadership guiding operational cooperation in real time, informed by intelligence services at home with the need to share. Recent improvements to the counter-terrorism machinery, I think, attest to this. Federal and state experience is being shared. Lessons are being learned. And nor does Australia's national security effort want for high level political attention. I need hardly mention that. Whatever our own capacities, we also benefit from a military and intelligence alliance with what remains the world's most formidable power, the United States of America. So given all of the above, why bother thinking about Australian national security? Why should we try to think about it anew? Well the short answer is that today's and tomorrow's Australia faces an era of change, of uncertainty, and fragility. Our horizon of risk is expanding. Critically, the gap that matters most to our security is no longer the so called 'air sea' gap, that has long provided what has been seen to be a moat between Australia and the world. Instead the gap between our national interests and our ability to protect those interests. That gap is large and it's growing. And in a world of rising complexity, of interconnectedness, and above all, of uncertainty, the need for us to be prepared to make difficult decisions in order to protect those interests will likewise keep growing. Now what are those interests? For a nation of 23 million people, Australia's interests are unusually extensive. Just consider the scale of not only Australia's vast territory, but our broader land and maritime jurisdiction, which combined, makes up something like 5% of the earth's surface. Australia benefits from an exceptional degree of connectedness with the world. This brings with it a reliance on rules, on order, on the global commons, on flows of trade, finance, information, and people. These are national strengths by all means. But they bring with them vulnerabilities and interests that need to be protected. So a contemporary definition of Australia's interests must go far beyond the obvious priorities of protecting the physical security of citizens, sovereign territory, and resources. This definition of interests must also include maintaining national freedom, including independence of action, societal cohesion, and a democratic political system. Australia will need to maintain the conditions for prosperity as well including secure access to energy resources, to energy supplies, and international markets. Overarching all of these imperatives, Australia needs to work to protect and advance stable and peaceful regional and international order. Now of course, hypothetically, a future Australian government could try to diminish the way that it chooses to define national security interests. It would be a perfectly valid political choice to make. For instance, we could try to wind back our accumulated sense of responsibility for parts of our wider region such as governance, order, even disaster relief in the South Pacific. That sounds like a pretty harsh thing to say today, but I'm talking about politics in the long term. Indian Ocean search and rescue, Southern Ocean fisheries protection, activities in support of our very large Antarctic Territorial claim. Now doing these things, that is withdrawing from these responsibilities would make Australia a very different and very insular kind of country and in the long run, a less secure kind of country. So in my view, we need to guard against and discourage strongly, that kind of future politics. But we can't consider it to be impossible. So instead, in my view, our interests are likely to remain extensive and rightly so. But to protect and advance those interests, we need to place a premium on partnership with other countries. Those partnerships in turn are a reason for Australia to uphold a reputation as a secure, capable, reliable partner in the international system. What might've been called "honour" in the days of the preceding years. We need to be seen as a country that is serious about protecting its interests in the contexts of rules based order and respect for the law. Such international credibility as a partner has a very hard edge to it. It's both an asset and a national interest in itself. Now in these extensive national interests that I have listed are considered alongside the patterns of change and risk in today's world, and I won't go into great detail about those, but think of the projected global trends that you read about in reports such as those produced by the US National Intelligence Council, but the publicly available global trends report one thing becomes very, very clear and that is that the burden of security risk on Australia's interests is large and accumulating. So we need to refresh our thinking about how global trends will intersect and interact with our interests. Those trends include, very briefly, the impacts of disruptive technologies, of social media, of demographic shifts, resurgent nationalism, particularly in our region, but not only in our region, resource insecurity, environmental degradation, and climate change. More immediately, however, among this widening array of risks, the most obvious, in my view, are the following three: first the risk related to coercion, risks of miscalculation, and conflict escalation in our immediate region and our wider region in the Indo-Pacific, or Indo-Pacific Asia. This relates, frankly, to how China is using its growing power and how other nations respond to that. Strategic competition and conflict in Asia challenges directly our security and economic interests. We can't hide from that. Secondly, the gradations of aggression in other parts of the world we're seeing, notably, by Russia. Despite the horror of the shooting down of MH17, Australia cannot afford to concentrate its limited security capabilities for long on the Ukraine situation. However, at least on this issue, we are one country that can afford absolute frankness in our diplomacy and that can be wider than the international efforts to manage that situation. And thirdly, violent extremism, Jihadist terrorism globally and now at home, and I will return to this in some detail later in my remarks. To go back to the first point, Australia's region is becoming more central to global power balances and strategic tensions. Powerful economic connections are making this the era of the Indo-Pacific and I think that's becoming a widely accepted concept not only in this country, but now across Asia. These patterns include, East Asian powers' deep and growing dependence on the Indian Ocean for its sea lanes as well as on Australian resources for trade, for development, for energy. This is really about society. It's about keeping the populations of these emerging powers satisfied, their rising middle classes, and their societies stable. It's about making sure that the Asian Century remains on a positive path. But these economic and social patterns are having strategic consequences. Witness, for example, the very fast emergence in recent years, of China, as an Indian Ocean naval power with submarines in Sri Lanka and warships exercising close to Australia's Christmas Island. As the successful and simultaneous visits last year by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping spectacularly confirmed Australia's region has found us and there's no turning back. Here with the Indo-Pacific, we at last have a definition of our principally Asian region that automatically includes Australia. So that kind of ends at least one domestic debate. The downside is that this makes the region's tensions our problems too. This is an inevitability. It's not a choice. Regional power balances are changing with China's rise and its rapid growth year on year in military spending. Such change could encourage risk taking by some states, whether by China, as it asserts its new strength, or by others as they seek to set boundaries early in this new 'Great Game'. Yet being closer to the world's economic and strategic centre of gravity makes it impossible for us to treat these unsettling regional security dynamics such as in the South and the East China Seas, as if they were purely somebody else's business. Now in all of this we are far from helpless. The idea that our strategic weight in its broad sense in insufficient for us to have any impact on regional order, I think that idea is out dated and exaggerated. Australia can contribute to regional order and security including as part of the emerging balance of credibility or 'balance of uncertainty' that will be critical to deterrents and stability as Chinese power grows. We need to think harder about how best to make this contribution. This includes how to encourage other powers, other regional powers through our own example or through forming creative and functional 'middle player' coalitions, if I can call them that, with Asian security partners such as Japan and India. Our central Indo-Pacific geography, our advanced maritime capabilities, our interoperability with the United States, and our regional surveillance advantages all provided us with an edge here. It's false in my view, to suggest that the alliance with the United States comes at the expense of Asian partnerships or of pragmatic multilateral diplomacy. These approaches can be mutually reinforcing if we handle them smartly. The presence of US Marines in Darwin is already proving of some benefit to Australia in engaging third countries in training as confirmed, for example by a three nation exercise involving China last year, and I believe there will be more exercises with third countries in the years ahead. There's also scope for us to work much more with China as a security provider in the region as the search for the MH 370 airliner demonstrates. The need to find ways of working with China as a security partner will intensify as Beijing expands the pursuit or extends the pursuit of its Indo-Pacific economic and strategic interests through the so called maritime Silk Road, which in my view is really Chinese for Indo-Pacific. The challenge is to ensure that closer cooperation with China does not come at the expense of our US alliance or regional solidarity in upholding the right kind of regional order. That is one that recognizes China's legitimate interests while also upholding rules and discouraging coercion. In all of this we need to be realistic about the potential as well as the limits of security cooperation with China under conditions of regional mistrust and we have to assume those conditions will continue. Navigating all of these complexities will require much better resourcing of our defence engagement or what we might call our defence diplomacy and that is not a contradiction in terms. This side of our defence policy has in my view, been treated and resourced as a third order issue, as almost an afterthought in some cases for far too long. In all of these circumstances we need to work smarter, as I said, combining diplomatic and security capabilities precisely because our relative regional weight could decline as other Indo-Pacific powers increase their own through sustained economic growth. These do not just include China. They include Indonesia, as well as India. We will want to focus on partnership with these powers while maintaining a sense of proportion and national self-respect. True partnership works when others respect our interests and recognize that working closely with us is not about doing us a favour; it's in their interest too. In all of this we should see technological change as involving at least as much opportunity as risk. Disruptive technologies will alter calculations of military advantage in our region. So we need to think anew about how to be on their right side. Australia has unique opportunities, as I've said, a combination of technology, of geography, and a US alliance, to keep and sharpen its edge in areas like surveillance and intelligence. We need to be willing also to invest considerably more in emerging capability areas like space, like cyber, and autonomous or at least unmanned systems which actually suit quite well the characteristics of our geography and our small but educated population base. Australia also needs to be unsentimental and unapologetic about seeking and maintaining asymmetric security advantages in an uncertain region. After all, to reiterate where I started, our energy, information, trade, and human links with the outside world make today's Australia a vibrant prosperous place but they also make Australia vulnerable. Thus, for instance, many Australians, including our business community are becoming well aware of the ease with which cyberspace can be used for disruption and espionage by foreign entities. This should be of greater concern to the Australian public than Australia's own existing or proposed security measures such as in the area of data retention. More Australians are also becoming concerned about the vulnerabilities of our seaborne energy supply lines and our frankly frugal stockpiles of liquid fuels far below the 90-day oils stockpile obligations we've signed up to under the International Energy Agency. The need to build energy resilience is emerging as a national security priority. Hence the appeal for interesting new ideas like converting metropolitan transport fleets to Australian natural gas to reduce acute dependence on diesel imports. All of the risks and vulnerabilities mentioned so far suggest that the number and the kind of security contingencies or scenarios that could affect Australia's interests will grow in the years ahead, will be challenged to do more things in more places. As I've said, Australia's own security will therefore require a willingness to make judicious but meaningful contributions securing our lifelines to the wider world. Australia will need to protect its sovereignty in order to provide security in a troubled neighbourhood and to contribute to the security of the broader Indo-Pacific and beyond. This will sooner or later involve questions about whether Australia, alone, can always be the security provider of last and sometimes first resort in the South Pacific and Papua New Guinea. In theory, a future security crisis across PNG could overwhelm our capacity to respond. To recapitulate then, Australia's interests are large and they're growing. Our sovereign securities capabilities cannot keep pace. So there is a premium on partnerships to guide our interests in an uncertain world. New threats have not replaced old ones, but joined them on a more crowded horizon. We cannot protect our interests alone. And yet to have the best chance of building and maintaining the partnerships that we need, not only with the United States, but with the other partnerships we need, we must also have the credibility that comes with doing our best to provide for our own security. And so the concluding question I have for you is this. Are we really doing our best? It can be argued that Australia continues to fall short of its potential as an effective security actor. We're still in transition, from the Australia of the past or the Australia of the past few decades a country that relied for its security primarily on the combination of a stable regional and global environment and a not particularly demanding US ally. Perhaps it's become a bit, unquestionably it's become more demanding over the past decade. But now the strategic environment is less stable and the ally is more demanding still and yet frustratingly, it's becoming less than clear about its own strategy or its own priorities. Added to that, our own ability to set security priorities is being shaken up by worsening dangers of terror and radicalization at home and worldwide. Now of course, a national security statement focused exclusively on terrorism is a misnomer. It's incomplete. Amid entirely justified present day fears we must not lose sight of truly strategic risks. We don't want to find ourselves in a grand replay of the post 9-11 years. For at least five years after 9-11, a policy emphasis on terrorism, on Iraq and Afghanistan by America and to some extent by its allies, made it harder to anticipate or respond to the way that China's rise would affect Indo-Pacific regional stability. We can't afford to go there again. But how then to set priorities? For instance, how to prioritize the immediate security threat? And I have no question that it's an immediate security threat, of terrorism, the wider strategic priorities of the changing Indo-Pacific regional order, and dealing with longer term trends still like the security repercussions of environmental pressures and climate change. The simple answer, and it's a simplistic answer I know, is that we need a layered response; a response that deals with each problem on its own timescale. Nor should we imagine that all of these risks exist in parallel universes. They interact in ways that we are just starting to understand. A common thread is the way in which they threaten order. And improving our ability to respond to one challenge through demonstrating seriousness of purpose for a start through building national resilience and through forming security partnerships can help to some degree, in responding to others. Now in acquiring our own new security capabilities to respond to this era of uncertainty, we do need to be constantly looking for flexibility, for adaptability, for versatility. Like it or not, devoting substantial resources to national security broadly defined, will need to be an accepted part of the Australian policy landscape for as far ahead as we can see. In all, this is hardly a context in which we can afford a national security debate to become any more politicized. Whether on counter-terrorism, whether on the alliance, the rise of China, the development of major capabilities such as submarines or how to cope with a troubled neighbourhood, we need a maximum of political consensus on those issues. The good news is of course, that a large measure of consensus and bi-partisanship has long existed, for instance on the importance of the US alliance. And some of the partisan divides of the past are actually withering away. Notable among these is the increasingly artificial debate between a narrow 'Defence of Australia' concept, formerly associated with Labour, and a far-flung expeditionary approach to military force posture associated with the Coalition. I would argue that a more accurate and contemporary way of thinking about Australian grand strategy is the idea of securing our lifelines to an interconnected world. Or at least making serious contribution to the security of those lifelines, including to encourage partners. The idea of securing our lifelines in an uncertain world apart from anything else, is a nice way of calling "time" on this weary expeditionary versus DOA contests that so many of us are familiar with. But a country of our limited capacities cannot afford to be complacent about maintaining and building consensus. It needs to be renewed with each generation. And there is a hidden fragility, in my view, a potential fragmentation of public opinion and political views across much of the national security defence and foreign policy agenda, including on the best ways to respond to terrorism or the strategic change in Asia. Just because we haven't seen the full evidence of this yet doesn't mean that it's not coming. How cohesive is Australia on matters of security really? How resilient are we really? What do young Australians think about these issues? And in a country where more than one in four of us was born overseas, where our major cities, our major cities, the number of us born overseas is more than one in three, what do first and second generation migrants think about Australian national security issues? There's a growing body of research in these areas including some polling data, including at this university and at the Lowy Institute there's a need for more and for deep analysis because there are many Australians now, more Australians absolutely as contributing members of this society from more places, including from East Asia, from South Asia, from the Middle East, which means a much more complex mosaic of views about security issues than Australian governments have ever had to deal with or relate to in the past. This will make national consensus building on security issues harder. It will also make it more necessary. Now how will any of these societal shifts in attitude about security and external policy translate into political party platforms or the views and stances of Parliamentarians? After many years in which very few Australian politicians had any direct experience of the defence force or other areas of national security, their numbers have started to grow; their ranks are beginning to grow. That's a welcome development in my view. It would be simplistic though to assume that this will translate into uncritical political support to the military, and nor should it. It would also be good to have a clear sense of what different political forces such as the Greens, for example, are proposing as practical alternatives to existing national security policies. What would a comprehensive Greens national security policy look like? What we cannot afford is any further politicisation of the national security debate, not just on the part of the government of the day, but by any side. Thus for instance, the acquisition of the next submarine, and for that matter, the one after that, needs to be based coldly on ensuring the best capability and our ability to sustain it as well as on cost, that includes what may be the multibillion dollar opportunity cost. The other security capabilities or social programs we would not be able to afford from a political decision to accept a massive 'made in Australia' or 'made in South Australia' price premium. Now of course politics is not the only part of the national security house that we need to get in order. Australia cannot afford for national security to be solely the interest of a professional Canberra based security caste. Many of you my friends, many of you my colleagues, many of you in the room today, which, confident in the knowledge that it is striving for the national interests, just expects the rest of the country to let it get on with the job. I hear a few sounds of recognition of that thought. The national security community needs to accept that intensive sophisticated public consultation and outreach will be a constant requirement and a priority for policy making. It's not window dressing. It's not an afterthought. It's not a box to tick. It's core business and we need to keep trying to do it better and this observation comes from my having spent the past eight years living in Sydney and engaging with business and other parts of the Australian community including multicultural Australia. Well, so be it. We have to work much harder to ensure that the security debate in Canberra is recognisable to the wider population and is recognisably in their interests. This is a necessary, but it's also an achievable task because like it or not, national security is becoming everyone's problem. That's why it must now be, in my view, a national priority to ensure that no part of the community feels like it's being treated as the problem. For instance, we should not be critical of a whole community, Muslim Australians, based on the actions of a tiny minority of misguided individuals. Those are not originally my words, but those of ASIO Director General David Irvine who's with us today and who I am pleased to announce today, will be joining the National Security College as a visiting fellow. The need to ensure that National Security policy is owned, right across Australian society, is also why government is correct to seek to connect the idea of citizenship with the idea of responsibility as well as rights. Incidentally on the eve of the Gallipoli Landings, or the centenary of the Gallipoli Landings, there's a good case for more to be done to associate Australia's ANZAC history with civic values of citizenship and responsibility rather than with heritage. And I think there is a risk in associating ANZAC too much with heritage, we're beginning to see some of that in my view. There are many in the community who seem to think that national security's not their problem or indeed who think that national security policy is the problem; it's an unwarranted affront to liberties, it's a sinister political trick, it's a diversion from other government priorities in tough fiscal times, it just keeps us in business. Now those who sincerely hold those views need to be willing to suspend their preconceptions or their posturing; suspend the conspiracy theories, and engage in a first-principles conversation. This should be an open minded conversation about how best to preserve the security and the cohesion of the society that has afforded all of us levels of political freedom, of personal opportunity and physical safety, that most of humanity has never experienced. Now as some have observed, the national conversation about security so far is not really a conversation at all. It's been a case of very different constituencies and communities talking across one another. In addition to our core work here at the National Security College in training government official and providing academic education, core work that I need to maintain and will maintain as absolute priorities of the college, the National Security College will contribute to that conversation. We proudly partner with leading research universities and much of that contribution should be through rigorous and independent research that we will commission and we will support. Our researchers hold various views and they express them and they will continue to do so. We will also be a platform, however, and a convener for constructive dialog and discussion with the national interests at heart. One way to get this national security conversation on to a more fruitful path is to recognize that Australia's security problem requires multiple responses across multiple time scales. On terrorism, for example, there's little question that counter-radicalization and showing the emptiness of the Islamic State and narrative are essential tasks. But even the best efforts on these fronts will take time and trust-building. In the meantime, it's imperative not only to minimize the number of Australians attracted to the terrorist cause at home or overseas, but to minimize the harm that they can do. Right now, the most pressing national security priority must be to prevent further atrocities of the kind that would damage social harmony in a multicultural Australia. And it's the damage that we do not yet know how we would repair. The question then becomes how to maximize the security community's chance of success in preventing terrorist violence without poisoning the nation's medium and long-term capacity to erode the appeal of terrorist propaganda. This is not a choice; both are priorities. Thus it's incumbent upon the critics of counter-terrorism measures to offer their best ideas on how to reduce the chances of further terrorist attacks. Of alternately, to acknowledge their willingness to risk those attacks and their potentially dreadful impact on Australia's core qualities of social tolerance and trust. A new and inclusive Australian security approach must extend to other risks as well. It will involve a recognition that we need to face multiple challenges at once, some that can be met or deterred by limited or limited by principally military means. But others that cannot. A new Australian security will involve a recognition of seeking to mitigate or adapt to the security implications of challenges like climate change is not an alternative strategy to ensuring that we have a leading edge military designed to guard our interests against a breakdown in uncertain regional order. Again, we need to do both. The time-scale is not the same for every threat. In fact, some threats are going to confront us more in the immediate years ahead than in the long-term. So it may be a matter of weathering the storm. That means we cannot be complacent about old fashioned threats like state-on-state coercion which are very real today. Just because we're mindful of pressures like climate change into the future. Ultimately a new and inclusive approach to Australian security requires that as a nation, we step up our efforts to engage and employ all the qualities we have. Advanced technology, strategic geography, a strong ally, promising partners, private sector increasingly conscious of security, an educated population, exceptional cultural diversity, and of course, our democratic system, our democratic values. Thus the fact that the Australian Defence Force and other policy and security agencies are lifting their game in ethnic and gender diversity is good. But it's not good enough. To match the new shape and the potential of Australia's dynamic society, patterns of recruitment and employment in the security community will need fresh attention. Cyber capabilities, for instance, could well be a natural fit for a new kind of reservist, a national cyber-security reserve, involving creative work arrangements, and flexible exchanges with private industry would transform traditional notions of what soldiering is about and what new generations with new skills can do for their country. And I hasten to add, this may be a civilian reserve. It may not be strictly a military reserve. It's something new. We haven't yet sort of imagined really, even what it could be. There's a pilot project in the UK underway at the moment that might provide some insight. So just as Australia political and social history has been about increasing inclusion, so too would I argue that inclusiveness will be the essential quality of the new Australian security. To conclude, that is inclusiveness in several ways, a wide inclusive definition of national security interests, an inclusive understanding of the means by which we need to protect and advance those security interests, and finally, an inclusive, flexible mobilization of our diverse national assets. People, the private and public sectors, geography, technology, and partnerships both within other countries or with other countries and within our own country. As we know, as we're taught, I guess, security is the first duty of government. Even so, the idea that I've proposed tonight of a new and inclusive Australian security may be open to the accusation, to use the academic term of 'securitizing' the issues rather too much and I stand accused. But such are the times that we live in and such, in my view, is the challenge ahead. Thank you. [applause] -Jeff Lazarus: My name is Jeff Lazarus and I'd like to ask you a couple of questions. With the situation which happened in Sydney in the Lindt Café, it seemed to me very obvious that Monus really was a very dangerous individual who really should have been under surveillance from ASIO. He was out loud there saying, you know, "I'm an Islamist. I'm violent. I hate government." Yet he wasn't under any proper surveillance from ASIO. What would you say to ASIO about that? And what would you say, also, to the Prime Minister Tony Abbott who started to criticise Muslim leaders for not speaking out enough against Islamist radicalisation in the context that I think they are and they've been promised a lot of money for programmes to carry out counter Islamist radicalisation programmes but the federal government hasn't actually delivered that money. So what would you say to Tony Abbott? What would you say to ASIO about those two things? -Rory Medcalf: Thanks. That's two very substantial questions. And two important questions and I think just very briefly what I'd say to the first part of that question, I mean, as you know, there's been a review. It's pretty exhaustively looked at, the history, Monis's history, leading up to this incident, and obviously this has led to a lot of hand-wringing about the kind of failure, but not, it appears, a systemic failure. It's a string of failures and of course there's now been plenty of movement to try and address those kind of, shall we call them, gaps in the system in the future. This is, there's no guarantee, of course, that another incident like this couldn't occur or that another individual like this is out there, or that he'll be stopped by these kind of methods again in the future. But I think that, as I've said, earlier, lessons were learned, state and federal and this will be pursued into the future. I wouldn't really have more to say to ASIO than that. But the second point I think is actually more important to the message about social cohesion that I was trying to convey today. Now the Prime Minister's national security statement, and I'll use that term even though it wasn't a complete national security statement, couple of weeks ago, I think was less controversial and more balanced in its substance than a lot of the media coverage would have us believe. Unfortunately, there've been, you know, plenty of instances we can name where some of our political leaders including this Prime Minister have decided to add one or two lines to their statements that they really didn't need to add and that frankly, were counterproductive to their core, their core message and you're obviously alluding to a line that they Prime Minister made like that. But I think that's got to be taken in the context of the relatively uncontroversial measures in that statement. I think the relatively wide potential for community support of some of those measures, of most of those measures, and particularly on this point about community mobilization, it's not true to say that there's no resourcing out there for that. The resourcing is less then I'd like it to be. But there are grants available. The challenge is to build trust with community organizations to take those grants up and begin putting them into practice. And that's precisely why I've made the point. I mean you just said Muslim leaders have a different view about that. Precisely why I've made the point that we need, we, the national security community, need to be a lot more constant and a lot more intensive in its engagement and consultation and interestingly, the example I've been given, is the New South Wales Police who 20 or 30 years ago, if you said these were a model of, you know, cultural sensitivity and politeness, you know, you would have been sort of laughed at. But in fact, their experience in Western Sydney in the past 20 years has been increasingly positive and community leaders have told me that that's the model, that constant contact with members of the community that needs to be followed by federal agencies. One of our problems is that we have a federal system and federal agencies haven't been regularly on the ground in some of these communities. And if they had been in more in less difficult times, people would have wondered why. So I take your points on board. (Bill Tow) I'm Bill Tow. I'm the head of the International Relations Department in the Bell School. Rory, thanks for your wonderful and, dare I say it, magisterial tour de horizon of the strategic environment and Australia's position within it. Two other rising stars in addition to yourself in the county's national security community, Nick Bisley and Andrew Phillips, recently wrote a piece for the double I double S journal of survival in which they argued that the US pivot strategy and by extension Australia's role in it is really too broad. And what they argue is that in terms of prioritization which you talked about in your address, really North East Asia is where the action is, and that to move amongst too broad of a geographic circumference would actually dilute the effectiveness of both the United States and its allies' efforts to essentially realise the long-term regional stability. I'm wondering if you might address the Bisley-Phillips argument in that context. Thank you. -Rory Medcalf: Thanks Bill. And you know, just for the record, Bill was my, I think first International Relations lecturer. I was one of his first students when he was fresh off the plane from Los Angeles sometime in the 20th century. So It's wonderful, wonderful to see you Bill. And thank you. And I feel I might not be doing what I'm doing today if it wasn't for your, for your inspiration. Look, the argument that the Indo-Pacific is too broad a region to be strategically meaningful and that we're diluting our capabilities and diluting our interests by looking at that canvas, it's superficially attractive, but it's based, I think on a very 20th century view of regional economic strategic dynamics and the behaviour and interests of the countries concerned. Now if China wasn't becoming more interested and more active in the Indian Ocean and didn't rely on the Indian Ocean for its oil imports, if Japan and South Korea didn't rely on trade routes to the Middle East and Africa for their very national survival, and if they didn't indeed rely on their relations with us, for their national survival, and of course we're as much an Indian Ocean country as an East Asian country, then I would buy that thesis. If the United States wasn't looking at Australia partly, I think, to improve its access to the Indian Ocean, now that there are question marks over the future of Diego Garcia, it's a little dot, but it's borrowed from the British for many years, again, I'd buy that. And finally, if India was not a rising power, rising military power with trading relations into East Asia and risk of tensions with China are growing, again, I'd buy that thesis. But none of those things are true. So I kind of think that that was a great essay some time ago, although Nick and Andrew are good friends and colleagues, I would have to disagree with them on that one and suggest that our government's on the right track with the Indo-Pacific concept. (Leszek Buszynski) I am Leszek Buszynski and I am a visiting fellow with the National Security College. I was very interested in one of your earlier comments. And that was that Australia requires partnerships with other countries. But unfortunately, you didn't elaborate. So I'd like to ask you, give you an opportunity to give us some background on that and which countries do you think, which countries in the region, Indo-Pacific region, do you think Australia should develop partnerships with. And I presume that you would include Indonesia on this list. And would you say that our relationship with Indonesia has been recently subject to excessive populist pressures? -Rory Medcalf: Well where do I start? Populist pressures on which side? On which side? Look, I won't focus very much on the political issues you're referring to. I don't think that's my brief here this evening, except that I'll say that of course Indonesia is one of the countries that we need to develop as a security partner. I did mention it, but I probably buried it in a pretty, a pretty confusing sentence. So I, it was there. I would rate Japan and India above Indonesia in the near term as strategic partners because these countries have really serious strategic capabilities and interests. Indonesia's still trying to figure out, in my view, what kind of power it wants to be, and indeed, whether it can exploit its very strategic geography right in the middle of the Indo-Pacific, right astride the sea lanes whether it can actually use that in an outward looking way. And I don't think it's reached that decision yet despite some of the rhetoric of the Indonesian president. So Indonesia will be one of those partners. And that's why we will need to continue to work on that security partnership with them. But as I said, keeping a sense of proportionality and self-respect, and I suspect we're about to come to one of those times where the self-respect issue is going to be pretty high on the agenda of both countries and that will require serious diplomacy on both sides. One asset we have in the relationship with Indonesia is the alumni, not yet, sad to say, students of the National Security College, but I hope that will change in the future, but the defence officials and defence officers, ADF officers, who've served in Indonesia over the years and have developed very close links at senior levels with the Indonesian security community and their counterparts here. We need all these threads of partnership to get this relationship through what will be another rocky patch. But at a strategic level we have quite convergent interests with Indonesia. This idea of loose coalitions in the region, this idea of maritime surveillance cooperation, that's got Indonesia written all over it if Indonesia's interested. -David Goen: Hello Professor Medcalf. I'm David Goen. One thing that I guess it probably depends on the timeline you're looking at for your review of security. But one issue which I think starts off being economic but immediately turns into a security issue that worries the Hell out of me, not for me but for my children or my grandchildren, is perhaps we're approaching a new industrial revolution and the disappearance of work as artificial intelligence, machines, take over virtually every job. And I just wondered if you think that is a security issue and when is the question? -Rory Medcalf: Gosh. Look, I shouldn't laugh because I know it's a serious, it's a serious question and I have kids too. I wish they would work at the moment [laughter] but that's, that's a different story. Look, looking at a fairly narrow sense, there are, sad to say, advantages for Australia in all of this, I would argue. I mean we, you know, we should, we should be embracing the unmanned or autonomous revolution in defence technology because it will actually suit us, I think much better than it will suit certain other countries in our region in the years ahead. And then the flip side of that is, of course, how do you meaningful fulfilling useful work for humans. Look I'm not going to, that's such a big area, I'm really not going to go there in any great depth. You've got me thinking about that tonight. But I think in the short term, it's seen as beneficial for security capabilities. In the longer term, of course it's got problems, particularly, not so much for us, but for countries with much larger populations, that will have to deal with social dissatisfaction, that will have to deal with unfulfilled expectations. I think the bigger problem is much shorter term. It's the next, in the next 20 years, it's whether the not middle classes but the emerging classes in India, in China, in Indonesia can find any kind of work and any kind of education and I think that, to me, will determine whether we have a stable regional order and I think we can worry a bit about the future of work more generally beyond that point. But I'm going to think about that one. -male: Hi Professor Medcalf. I'm just wondering, do you think we're reaching a point in the domestic terrorist threat where the so-called lone wolf attacks really, there's an element of impossibility in disrupting and confronting these attacks and whether the measures to confront them might have unacceptable implications to privacy, etc. -Rory Medcalf: Yeah. Now look, that's sort of the core question that I think needs to be properly debated by the critics of counter-terrorism measures as well as by the supporters of counter-terrorism measures. And I think we just don't know yet what the social implications of a much, a significantly larger scale incident then what occurred in Martin Place would be in this society. There was fantastic mobilization of community cohesion in showing solidarity, particularly with Muslim Australians around the incident. That was a great thing. But that was one incident. It was one man. It's quite conceivable that there could be bigger and worse incidents and more of them. Just because it's extremely difficult to prevent those incidents doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. And I think no government would survive not attempting to prevent the next terrorist incident or the one after it. The last think you want is any kind of vigilantism which I guess is the alternative to government action. But it's a debate worth having. I have my own view, having read the review of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on intelligence, their review on metadata, you know. I accept their recommendations. I think they're on the right track and I even get the impression that journalists are going to begin to accept what comes out at the other end as well. But this will be a continual debate and if we can have it on first principles then I'm all for it. -Ruth Pearce: Hello. Thank you very much. I'm Ruth Pearce. I wanted to ask about your partners' partners, multilateral... -Rory Medcalf: Yeah. (Ruth Pearce) diplomacy. Where does that fit in your context of National Security. It just seems that, you know, internationally, regionally, you know, there's ad hocery now, G20, etc. Where is multilateral -- well, security, heading? -Rory Medcalf: You're lucky Gareth Evans is not here because he would've beaten you to that question. [laughter] And we wouldn't have been able to say no. Now look, I think I use very sparingly the term "pragmatic multilateralism" at one point when I was referring to partnerships and I think the ideal outcome, of course, is one where we combine strong bilateralism, the alliance, in my view, minilateralism, small coalitions, very functional coalitions, with multilateralism. I hate to say it, but most of the security problems I can see in this survey are not going to be solved by the United Nations. You know that. We all know that. We can't somehow take the UN out of that equation. We wouldn't want to. I think the mobilization of our UN seat last year after MH17 was pretty serendipitous. I think the government inherited something that it didn't particularly feel the need for and suddenly made very good use of it. There will be more opportunities like that, I am sure, in the future. But I just don't think UN global multilateralism is going to make much difference in the regional security tensions I'm talking about. And then how many times have we heard the UN Security Council talk about the South China Sea or the East China Sea in the past 5 years when they've been moving in the direction of flash points? So I think we just need to use that for norm building. We need to build regional multilateral institutions. I would put more priority there and use that as a way of setting informal rules for rising powers like China. But we just can't rely on these alone. And the credibility I talked about; building our own capabilities, building our bilateral partnerships and maybe minilateral arrangements for things like disaster relief will help us, I think, to then mobilize blocks and caucuses within those multilateral organizations when the time comes. So that's my, that's what little joy I can offer you on multilateralism. But it's important. -Dr. Margot McCarthy: Well thank you Rory. And thanks to members of the audience for drawing Rory out on some of the themes of his address including the future of work. It was only a few months ago that in this auditorium I was thanking Rory's predecessor for his efforts in starting up the National Security College and we were delighted that someone with Rory's very distinguished background in policy development, analysis, and advocacy was selected to build on Michael's achievements. And Rory's address tonight and the discussion it's generated has really only reinforced our optimism about the value that's generated by the partnership between the Commonwealth and the College. When the idea of the college was first promoted it was to enhance the capacity of officials across the national security community and by that I don't think we just mean the Commonwealth, but many of the people in this room, to achieve whole of government outcomes and to lead cultural change in their own areas. And what I particularly liked about Rory's remarks tonight was that while giving us a reasonable mark on the whole of government front, he was frank about how very much more we have to do in the area of cultural change. Because if you live and breathe National Security, it can be, and you can understand, to pluck an example out if the air, why the expenditure of your committee of cabinet might not want to fund your good idea, it can be usefully confronting to have someone ask, "Why do we even bother talking about national security at all?" It's even better to be forced to step back from today's particular problem and to reflect instead on the wider national interests that our labours are either protecting or advancing. And best of all, Rory's coining of the phrase, "Canberra-based security caste" and there are many high priests and priestesses with us tonight, encapsulates the dangers to the very interests that we're striving to protect of insularity and complacency. And that is the case whether we're working on maximising Australia's trade and investment interests or reviewing our cyber-security policy, or, and perhaps particularly, countering violent extremism. So thank you again, Rory. And I know I say on behalf of many people here tonight, how much we're looking forward to working with you. [applause]