centre and by CSIS but it has one floor and that is there's too much of it so that's going to impose unbelievable discipline on those of us who are both moderators and speakers at this gathering. We have a really distinguished group here to discuss politics and security in an emerging Asia. About 15 years ago a great Australian academic Coral Bell wrote a superb article on global developments at that point and she said this about the international political system. For the first time in recorded history we are experiencing the rise of something like 14 new powers to economic power and prosperity and the difference between the system now and previous systems lies both in the numbers that are rising but also their circumstances. The first time these sorts of powers of a risen where there has been no settlement of the disputes between them. In other words they're rising, their power is growing, they're developing a capacity to not not inwards in their national security policies but outwards and the with the capacity to develop the ability to project outwards but they have not resolved the issues between them and in the region that we're discussing here today that is now so obvious. There is not a single agreed maritime boundary between countries in the entire archipelago nor is there apparently agreed boundaries to the north of it. No agreed boundaries security issue automatically. There's been I think two developments and as a moderator I don't intend to speak at any length so I'll just say this in the last two decades that we need to play notice of. The first is the new player in the system over the last two decades in the first instance of first of those two decades is China. China's participation is a product of a geopolitically shift which occurred within a country off the border with the old Soviet Union Russia with a delimitation of military arrangements on those two borders that was the biggest movement of armed force as a result of a peace agreement in the 20th century and completely changed the character of the PLA when that occurred. It went from being essentially a ground-based operation for very heavy ground operations vis-a-vis the Soviet Union then Russia to being one which had to seriously contemplate maritime issues and to restructure itself in order to do that and it is still going through that process. The second big shift occurred with the overturning of the Nixon Doctrine. The Nixon Doctrine in 1969 effectively ruled the United States out of Southeast Asia and when they explicitly in Guam President Nixon identified that as a zone in which the United States expect its friends to in the first instance look after themselves. President Obama doctrinally turned down on his head, its head when he talked about the involvement as the pivot or the rebalance to the Asia Pacific region as a full American force structure determinant and as an area in which the United States would engage its military power in pursuit of its political objectives. Those are two sea changes in the in the politics of the region and of course they are two changes which along with the phenomenon that Coral Bell referred to basically underpin or underlie any analysis of the politics and security in an emerging Asia. We've got a fantastic panel here. Our starting speaker will be Andrew Shearer. He is a man very well experienced in affairs in this country having served at the Embassy across the way. He's senior advisor now in the office of the Prime Minister on National Security. Admiral Gary Ruffhead, former Chief of Naval Operations for the United States. Michael Green who you've already seen and Alan Gingel who is a former Director General of the Office of National Assessments. They only speak for five five or six minutes and then we may be time for questions after that. Andrew. Well thank you Kim. It's great to be back in Washington DC although it's a little colder than it was in Australia when we left. I'd like to thank you Kim for all the support the Embassy's given me for my visit and also I'd like to thank CSIS. It's great to be back here in your very impressive new building and and also the US Study Center Robert Hill and Bateskill. Thank you. I'm not your you'll be relieved to hear I'm not going to try a kind of review of the region but I am going to talk a little bit about how I think some of the some of the factors that Kim summarized very well are affecting Australia. In particular I'm struck coming back to government after six or seven years outside by the sheer pace of strategic change and how quickly that strategic change has moved closer to Australia. We used to talk in Australia of the tyranny of distance if you if you think the glass is half empty or perhaps strategic depth how far we were from from the epicenter of most world competition and conflict but my experience of just the last few months is that that as the the locus of global power shifts closer to our region Australia has become much closer to the major fault lines in in global politics and that's affecting us in material ways. Of course for for similar reasons the US has been undertaking its its rebalance to Asia and there's been some discussion discussion this morning and voting on that. I think it's interesting that the Abbott government's also doing its own rebalance if you like and the Prime Minister likes to talk about a foreign policy characterised as as more Jakarta and less Geneva. It's it's of course a simplification but it's pointing I think to more of a focus on our immediate region and some of the key bilateral relationships so we're doing our own we're on rebound our own rebalance. We've certainly had lots of Jakarta in recent weeks thanks to Mr Snowden and and also some complicated issues to do with asylum seeker policy and our determination to stop boats breaching Australian sovereignty but that I've been struck in in in the sort of immersed as I have been in the day-to-day complexity of those issues by the fact that we're dealing with an increasingly strong Indonesia whereas for decades Australia has I think dealt with challenges arising from a from a weaker and more fragile Indonesia and I think we're only going to see more of this and it's going to be it's going to be challenging for both sides despite that I think this is a relationship with huge potential the Prime Minister sees it very much in those terms and I think that we can negotiate this this difficult little period and put put the relationship back on track to be a much stronger and more broadly based strategic partnership than than what we see today. I think the other area that Kim mentioned that that's really come home to me is is the sharpness of the strategic tensions that we're seeing play out in in North Asia I mean there's nothing new to strategic competition of course in that region but the intensity of them I think has reached a new level. We made I think a reasonably mild public statement about our concerns when China announced its air defense identification zone and with that generated I thought a surprisingly robust reaction from Beijing. A series of other decisions taken by the government the reaffirmation of the previous government's decision to ban Huawei from our national broadband network some closer steps with Japan all of these things have generated in in Beijing's mind at least a sense that Australia is in some way shifting its policy on on China which is not the case but again it just reminded me that we're walking through a very sort of delicate minefield in North Asia. At the same time relations between Japan and China to of our most critical economic markets a very fraught Japan's relations with Korea another vital market for Australia are also exceptionally difficult. So you've got this brew of tensions and disputes among three of our most important economic partners in North Asia which again points I think to a much more challenging environment for Australia to to navigate. So what's our response to this. I think it lies in continuing to strengthen and deepen our relations with traditional partners. We will continue to build our strategic relationship with Japan. We want to sign a free trade agreement with Japan. We want to develop our relationship with South Korea. We have already concluded an FTA with South Korea and we want a pragmatic strong relationship with China focus very much on areas of common interest particularly the economy and there too we're seeking to to conclude an FTA. The alliance though has a place in all of this I think. We see a very strong strategic convergence as the US rebalances towards our region. We think that this is going to be a long-term trend. We don't think this is a new thing under this administration and we think it will continue under future administrations. And we I think it's interesting Kim alluded to this that in recent years our deployments our military deployments under the alliance have been in the Middle East. I think we're going to see the the alliance become in a sense more regional and much more focused on maintaining the regional order and the maritime balance in the Western Pacific as it comes under growing strain and that too will will have consequences for Australia. I think the situation we're facing points to Australia and the United States working much much more closely together to strengthen regional institutions like the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Defence Minister's meeting. I think it points to us trying to bring in other regional partners to our bilateral cooperation partners like Japan and South Korea, Indonesia, India, perhaps Vietnam. I think it points to the alliance having a heavier maritime focus than it has in recent years. I think we'll see further cooperation in space and cyber and I think that you'll see us moving to expedite implementation of President Obama's initiative to rotate US forces through Northern Australia. I think we'll be looking at further phases in that as well. And then lastly for Australia I think it points to the need for us to restore a sound adequate level of defence funding. There were significant defence cuts over previous years. Our defence capability plan has not been approved by government since 2009 and we face a series of very major defence acquisition decisions on submarines, the joint strike fighter and replacement frigates and all of this of course against the backdrop of revenue declining and a very tight fiscal outlook as was underlined by the recent economic statement in Australia. So it won't be easy and we will be tackling all of these problems in a defence white paper which we have committed to deliver in the first year and a half. I'll leave it there. Thanks very much Andrew. If we could proceed straight to Gary. Well thank you very much and it's a pleasure to be here and to be able to continue the discussion with the Alliance 21. I'm not a latecomer to the US Australian Alliance and as proof of that my 14 year old Labrador Retriever Clancy is named after Clancy of the Overflow. So my Australian friends get the Americans have no idea what I'm talking about. But as Kim mentioned so much of what we're dealing with in the region really is going to be maritime and I think in terms of maritime as boundaries, flows, expansion and resources. The boundaries as you mentioned are all contested. They're going to be continued to be pressed by China. The one that to me is the most volatile is the East China Sea because the power of the nationalism on both sides is pretty extraordinary and I think that's really one to watch. The 8 is move in my view I think that was step one. I would not be surprised if there's an 8 is declaration in the South China Sea how they will play it to be determined but that is the nature of I think how these boundaries will play out. With regard to the flows, the resources coming out of the Middle East are going to be extraordinarily important to Asia and to China. China's view of a 21st century maritime Silk Road that goes through the Indian Ocean is going to be interesting to watch between India and China because as you know India thinks that that ocean is very appropriately named and so there may be some issues that arise there. The expansion of the maritime domain will take place when the new ocean is more open and that's the Arctic. More resources will be available there, zinc, copper, iron and Asia will need those resources. So what does all that mean? That means that there's going to be a demand for greater capacity and how do you cover and how do you support and work together with the allies in the region. So I think that this is what we're going to be looking at for the next decade or two. There's no question that the PRC will continue to build their maritime capabilities. I've been watching it now for a couple of decades. They are growing in capability and in capacity and we will be competing with them in a security sense but there are also opportunities for cooperation. For the past four years we've been doing daily naval operations with the PLA Navy. It's called counter piracy. They'll be joining for the first time ever the rim of the Pacific exercise. So there'll be competition but there'll also be opportunities for cooperation. If we can get that balance right I think that's extremely important for the region. With regard to U.S. capabilities it's very easy to look at our messy budget environment and say where are we going. But in Washington it's always good to be a bit pessimistic because you never met me to disappointed pessimists. They're always upbeat. But I'm actually encouraged by what's happened here recently. As the CNO went through my entire tour with no budget process that was followed. We now have about two years of relative predictable budget stability. And if you look at what is coming onto the scene right now, a new joint strike fighter, the most capable airplane in the world and it will be the best sensor in the battle space. A new maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare airplane. A new class of submarines that will have added to it the Virginia payload modules for strike for what I believe will be an increasing number of unmanned underwater systems that will be husbanded from those boats. Ballistic missile defense. New airborne early warning systems. Initiatives in cyber that will be so important as we go into the future. And of course the unmanned capabilities that are being introduced. And when you talk about this expanding maritime domain and the challenges that we will face from a security standpoint, from an environmental standpoint, from a, as you well know, the migration standpoint, that type of capability where you can have it up for hours and hours and hours is going to make a huge difference. And so these are things that are coming. These are things that are in the budget. And so we're not out of the woods. We have some systemic issues within the defense budget where we're kind of eating ourselves from within because of compensation and medical and what have you. All that has to get fixed. No question about it. But things don't look too bad. So what does that mean and how can we take a look at these together? And I would say that we should look at the capabilities and the process that we're going after building joint capabilities. Because there are no two militaries in my view who have adopted and who have perfected jointness to the level that the United States and Australia have done. So there's a natural compatibility there and a common way of looking at things. So how do we come at that together? I think there can be better coordination in that regard. More personnel interaction. We have in the U.S. a kind of anachronistic exchange program where we send one, you send one. I think we have to have a much more fluid way of having our people move in and out of each other's units, share ideas. As we both pursue advanced air defense with Aegis Weapon System, as we look at submarine warfare of the future, as we look at space and cyber, as we look at the potential for a networked set of nodes to do maritime domain awareness, I really think we need to look at how can we come together and create in respective countries centers of excellence for amphibious warfare, for example, anti-submarine warfare, where our people are assigned together where they think, where they come up with ideas and put in place plans for how our forces will work together all the time, not just sporadically during exercise periods or planning sessions, but that these actually become nodes where we are really integrated. I think those are some of the areas where we can work more closely together and take advantage of some of the technology that we'll be having delivered to us and that we'll be giving to the terrific young people of both our countries to go and do the hard work that our countries ask of them. Thank you. Thank you very much, Admiral Michael. Thank you. I mentioned in the earlier panel that I didn't buy the China choice thesis that we have to fundamentally or Australia has to fundamentally rethink its interests in the Asia Pacific region and also that there was far more continuity than change in the Obama administration's rebalance to the Asia Pacific. So let me briefly contradict myself by pointing to a few areas where I think we do have some change and we do have to pick up our game. First, I would agree with Kim's historical observation that what we're doing now in Southeast Asia is, in many respects, a reversal of Nixon's 1969 Guam doctrine. Now, the Guam doctrine is about pulling substantial hundreds of thousands of US military forces out of Southeast Asia. What we're putting back in is extremely modest in comparison, but what I think new and is perhaps the most important part of the rebalance because it will be sustained is the sustained focus on Southeast Asia as a strategic region. And Ernie Bauer and his program at CSIS have been an instrumental part of that. The military dimension will be limited because almost all of these countries within ASEAN want to continue having good economic and political relations with China, but having a security blanket from the US and absolutely do not want to be forced to choose. So we'll be doing incremental things, small level engagement, the strategic dialogues. It's not going to be revolutionary, but the discipline in our engagement will be very important. And we're going to go back, hopefully, to what the US wanted to do in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, when Nixon was vice president. And that was to start having some cohesion and cooperation among Southeast Asian states, so that there are bulwark against great power intervention, communist, and now Jamiah Leslie and other terrorist influences. So we, the US and Australia have to not only pick up our game bilaterally, not only military militarily, which would be one piece of this, we need to work together with other like-minded states to help ASEAN become more cohesive and more resistant to great power intervention. Northeast Asia is much harder. I don't think that the rebalance has had a Northeast Asian flavor. I say this as a Japan and Northeast Asia guy by training. The Admiral Andrew both mentioned these trying to see in the challenges. I saw in the Japanese papers this morning that the Defense Ministry announced that so far this year, the Japan Self Defense Forces have had to scramble fighter jets 79% more times than last year, which was already up over the year before. So the velocity and the tempo of operations in that region is growing. It's almost exponential. And the physics of this are extremely worrying in spite of the enormous economic interdependence between Japan and China. We in Washington, I think, have not settled on the strategy to handle this. I think we are still uncertain as you listen around town, you talk to people in the administration. There are some who think the answer is to contain Japan and to keep Japan down because China's military rise and power is inevitable and Japan is unpredictable. The other viewpoint, which I would strongly associate myself with, is that the answer to this problem is not to distance ourselves from Japan or one might add the Philippines, but in fact to make ourselves more joint interoperable. And the reason is that increasing jointness and interoperability with our allies, in this case, particularly Japan, reassures them. It gives us more influence over decision making escalation control and adds to the dissuasion and deterrence effect against the China, which is pushing the boundaries a bit and seeing what it can do. And the corollary to that is we need to be doing this not only bilaterally but networking across alliances. So what Andrew and his colleagues are doing with Japan is critical to U.S. interests, very, very important. And we need to move beyond just defense dialogue and exercises. We need to be thinking about joint development of weapons systems, what our boss, John Hamry, calls a federated system of defense capabilities, even though we don't have collective security in a formal sense, in terms of capabilities with declining budgets, we need to be thinking in that direction, which finally leaves China. We'll spend a lot of time on China all day. Since Richard Nixon, every U.S. president, no matter what they said during the election, has tried to expand cooperation with China, and every president has basically succeeded in doing that. And that hasn't changed. And going into the future, this president and the next president will have to find the right formula to describe our interest and the region's interest in the U.S. and China cooperating more, trusting each other more, doing some of the military-to-military engagement that Gary Ruff had said. We're going to have to find the right way to frame that, though. And we've not found that formula. The administration has embraced publicly President Xi Jinping's so-called new model of great power relations with the intent of demonstrating a readiness to expand cooperation with China. But we have to be extremely careful in this town not to signal, and in this case I think accidentally the administration has, that we have some interest in a kind of dialogue with China about how to reorder the region towards more of a bipolar U.S.-China condominium. Ever since Richard Nixon opened up to China, our friends and allies, not just the Japanese, but especially the Japanese, have worried about this. And we just haven't found the right way to talk about it and formulate it. In all of this, I think, and these are big strategic decisions in the sense that we have to get it right. It's not a black-and-white decision. We have to find the right formulas and consistency which we're struggling with. I think Australia has a role in this. When I was in the NSC, Michael Fawley, Andrew Scheer, were essentially, I hope this doesn't get you in trouble, were essentially part of our process. I'd go to a colleague at DOD to make a case or a strategy, and they'd say, yeah, I already talked to Andrew. I'd go to brief the National Security Advisor that said, yeah, I already talked to Michael Fawley. At first, it worried me. I thought I'd become redundant and would lose my job. In the end, I realized it was how alliances should work. We don't always work that way, but I think that's what we need to do with Australia, and I think that's what we need to do with all our allies going forward. Thank you very much, Michael. And finally, Alan. Thanks. Could I just begin with, on a personal note, when I was on think tank training wheels trying to set up the Lowy Institute in Australia, there was no person in this business who was more generous with his time or had more practical and canny advice for me than John Hammery. He showed me what a great think tank could be, so it's really wonderful to be, after seeing the plans in John's office for many years to be in this wonderful building, which is a tribute to his leadership and to CSIS's position in Washington. Look, I thought I'd talk more about the management of the Australia-U.S. alliance in these new circumstances, where Asia becomes more central to U.S. interests and to the overall relationship. Sensibly enough, most Australians don't think very much about international policy. They'd have to, but they have three broad convictions in their mind, I think, which all governments have to have to take notice of or be punished. One is governments have to manage the U.S. alliance well. Secondly, they have to maintain effective relations with the key Asian neighbours. And third, they have to support Australia's position in a rules-based international order. Now, ordinary Australians don't think about it in those terms, of course, but they do have a very strong sense that if your Australia's size and located where you are in the world with our range of interests, you can't get what you want by throwing your weight around. You're better served by a system which is predictable and transparent, whether that's in trade or security. Now, I think you can see the proxy for that really in the support in polling for the United Nations. I think that's really support for a rules-based order. For most of the past decades, it's been very easy for Australian governments to do this because our key Asian partners have been either allies of the United States or, in the case of China, after Nixon, generally proceeding in the same direction. And the rules-based order was one which the United States and its friends had established and supported. So keeping all three aligned was not difficult. But it's now going to be much harder, especially as China demands more from its trading partners and the norms of the rules-based order are challenged by rising powers. Similarly, during the Cold War, although the central struggle against the Soviet Union was very important to Australia, there were few areas where Australia had cross-cutting distinct national interests involved. And then as the focus of alliance activities moved to the Middle East, it was again not difficult for Australian policymakers to align themselves with US interests because independent Australian interests in the Middle East were limited. That, however, is not the case in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia, where Australia has very direct interests. You can see this most clearly in the case of Indonesia, where there's quite a lot of historical precedent. I was thinking about this. I actually can't think of an area in international policy where Australia and US policy differences have emerged over the years more clearly than over Indonesia. That's not to say they've been great in any area, but the fact that there have been some in Indonesia is remarkable. From the differences we had with President Kennedy over the Dutch East Indies through disagreements over the IMF's heavy conditionality in Indonesia after the Asian financial crisis to disagreements at the time of the East Timor intervention. Now, none of these threatened the alliance, went remotely close to threatening the alliance, but all were a source of irritation in the relationship. As Asia becomes more central, there are going to be more of those issues that will come up. Now, I don't think there's any way in which the alliance will come under pressure, despite claims from some of the commentaries in Australia, because on the Australian side, the support for the alliance rests on two absolutely fundamental pillars. One is that both sides of Australian politics claim the origin story. Labor through this curtain in the Second World War, the coalition through through Menzies and the Anzastralia, that's a terrific, terrific thing. And secondly, the alliance retains enormous deep public support, 80 to 85 percent in in successive low e-polls, different from a more volatile response you get if you ask about relations with the US. The alliance, where the insurance policy is the most powerful metaphor in Australian public policy. So very strong, but it does need to be worked at. It's understandably hard for a superpower to take account at the centre of its decision-making of the interests of small allies, lots of people in this town, many of them in this room, who know us well and to understand that. But right at the very centre, it is understandably difficult. So it will be important over the next decades for the tools of the alliance, the existing management tools of the alliance, military cooperation, diplomacy, intelligence, even think tanks to be well oiled and operating effectively. And that's one reason alone, why it's good to be at this conference. Well, that I'm sure you'll agree was exemplary, content filled, short, leaving us with about 20 minutes worth of questions before the coffee break and exemplary performance there to be open to for everybody else. So I'm going to start with a technical question to Gary, Admiral Ruffhead, and then we'll then we'll proceed to your questions. And I've got to say Alan brought to mind as I get older and older, my youth becomes more and more important. And as I can recollect when I joined the Labor Party, the struggle around the origins of the American alliance was not a fight with the Liberal Party, it was a fight internally. Whitlam against the armed neutralists. And Whitlam used to use curtain like a club against them when it came to discussing what was a proper stance for a socialist. And that was a, and so the that's where the argument went and then was translated from that into an argument with the Liberals about origins. But there we are. I disagree with both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party's views. I think the Contemporary American Alliance was founded by McNamara. But we'll give that I'll give that a run at a later stage. Gary, the question to you is this, but one of the things that struck me when I came here and I got rebreefed after years and years of not being brief, the thing that struck me was over the last decade how much further the capacity of the American Armed Forces had moved ahead in technical capabilities of where they'd been 10 years previously. The gap, whatever the expenditures or armed forces numbers, the gap between the United States and its nearest peer competitors was greater when I came here than it had been 10 years earlier. And it's not really well understood. That's not to say that the US isn't vulnerable to asymmetrical activity. I think the asymmetrical activity that they'd be vulnerable to is more close space activity in the Persian Gulf than with suicide small boat operators not testing any of your surveillance capacities than it would be necessarily in the South China Sea. But having said that, you then look at the projections on the American Defence Budget, which have about 50% of it at the moment in personnel. But if nothing happens, within the next decade it will be 75% and all those developments you talked about will be as nought. What do you think is going to happen? I believe that we're going to see some movement. We are hearing on the Hill more discussions and comments about the need to get after these systemic problems than I've ever seen before. There's no question this is very politically difficult, a difficult thing to do. But I do believe it's becoming apparent that it is unsustainable. So the next couple of years are going to be telling, but it's moving in the right direction. I think it's important that we put some options on the table that are not frightening to the young people that are contemplating being in the military. We haven't done that. We talk about the fact that it has to change. But I think we have to put some ideas out there that are appealing to the generation that's serving today. And that can be done. Thanks very much. Right. Now I'm looking for waving hands. Thanks very much. Alan, you said something I found very intriguing. You started with the example of Indonesia as a place where the United States and Australia have had a number of differences over the years. But then you said as Asia continues to emerge, and we should expect more of these sorts of differences to arise. That's very interesting. Could you maybe just speculate about where those might be? With what countries or what issues? It's a bit it's a bit hard to say, but the general point is that Australia will have a has a range of distinct national interests involved right across Asia. Asia, I think is not surprising. Asia is full of unfinished business. One of the bits of unfinished business, I think, is if you look across mainland Southeast Asia from Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Vietnam, all of them have polities which have questions which are not yet resolved. Now, I don't know how these things will change. No one no one does. But but I think we're going to be in a more volatile Southeast Asia than we've been used to over the past 10, 15 years anyway. And ranges of interests will different national interests will come out of that. And it's therefore important as I sort of ended by saying that the management tools of the of the Alliance are in well oiled and in good repair. Thanks. The former Assistant Secretary. Since I'm going to ask for speculation and I know government officials don't speculate. I've always been a supporter of the idea that Australia can have both the growing relationship with China economically and the security alliance with us. But as one of those pessimists referenced earlier, I'm starting to doubt myself. When I look at the situation in the East China Sea in particular, but also the South China Sea, I find it slightly terrifying to look at all the number of ships out there in close quarters. Look at the number of air incursions, which was referenced. And I'm starting to think there's a 50 percent chance and that's an arbitrary number actually that a significant military incident. I don't mean a full scale conflict could happen this year. And I'm wondering if that does, you know, could easily involve the United States and make it more difficult for the United States and its allies to treat China the same way that it has all along. And that could even, depending on the series of the incident, include on the economic side and who knows the congressional response, of course.  That completely will run across anybody. So why don't you all try with Andrew? I agree with you that I think the biggest risk is in the East China Sea in the air. I really believe that at the at the ship level, particularly the coast guards, quite frankly, I think both sides watch it very carefully. But as we've seen in the past, an air incident has the potential to really kick something off. The concern I have is that there's no mechanism for the two sides at the tactical operational and even at the national level to be able to deescalate. And so the question will be to your point, how do you walk back? I don't. I do believe there will be a walking back, but it'll be very messy and there'll be a lot of breakage and damage as a result of it, like you watch it more closely. You know, I won't be fired. In fact, I'll be promoted if I speculate wildly at this place. So I'm happy to answer. I agree with the Admiral. The coast guards are quite careful about the rules of engagement, the two navies even more so. But the air forces are a little wilder and newer to this game. I think the possibility of an accident or collision is not trivial. I wouldn't say 50 percent, but but but you know, not trivial 20 percent, something like that. I think the possibility of escalation to larger conflict is very, very low. So the key thing in terms of regional security and stability is how the U.S. and allies respond when this crisis happens. And if we split and if we clearly diverge in our answers across the alliances and partnerships we have in the region, it will send absolutely devastating signal to China in terms of our resolve and the stickiness or the sustainability of current rules of the road. I like the Ambassador. I'm a military history diplomatic history buff in 1937 38 after Japan invaded began the war with China. The Admiralty in London proposed the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy send eight battle ships jointly on a cruise through the Pacific, not to fight the Japanese, but to demonstrate that aggression would cause a coalition. And the U.S. Navy said, actually, some of the U.S. Navy wanted to do it, but the Hoover administration said no. And some Japanese historians have looked through the archives and said, had we done that, the rest of history in the Pacific might have been very different. So the key, I think, is we should be thinking through now in the U.S. government with Australia, with others, not just our military contingency plans, but but in general and some specific terms how we would handle this to make sure not only that there's no escalation, but that the right signals are sent if something happens. No, I just in 30 years agree with Michael. I think that's expressed at Admiralty will. I think there's one interesting thing with it. And that is that we actually, you know where the collision point is in the East China Sea. You know exactly where the focal point is of the contested views about where things should happen. Should be others be repeated in the nine dash line and something that Chinese really need to comprehend, understand. That will run into a whole range of military activities by other powers, not just the United States. It'll run into us. We're responsible for Malaysia's air defense and we regularly surveil with all sorts of aircraft, the South China Seas from that point. And they'll run into all the locals because that nine dash line comes up so close to the coastlines. It'd be virtually impossible to operate military aircraft off your in their normal the normal course of their training activities, let alone surveillance in a way that did not bring them across the border. And this is not this will not be focused. This will be multi-dimensional or multi-locals that these things will occur. And they'll find themselves in a situation where they'll be effectively challenging a settlement of the Asian region in 1971 when we had two important developments, the development of ASEAN, which was basically an operation to give Indonesia satisfaction about the world in which it immersed itself because Indonesia was seen as a real problem or containing or catering to their nationalistic instincts. You needed a body that would do that. And secondly, how did you get a security situation for Malaysia and Singapore where it had been challenged internally by the Malaysian Communist Party, externally by the Indonesians. And the people who were drawn out of the hat to do the job were the Australians, technically British and New Zealanders, but really the Australians. And it's really been the Australians ever since. And that's a, now that's the settlement, but the settlement has consequences and the consequences would run flush up against that nine-dash line. More questions? Bernie. And then Russell. I just wanted to ask the panel, what do you think the prospects are for, if we're sitting here 10 years from now and we're looking at the alliance, will we understand where India stands in terms of regional architecture better? Will we have, will we sort of have a less sort of mystified sense of a cohesive ASEAN? Because I think these things are very important if you think about regional architecture and its value to the discussion that we're having. If we're going to convince China to sit at the table and make the rules with the rest of us and then play by those rules, it seems to me that there's a certain genius and embedded somewhere in this regional architecture. Alliances are key to make that work. But I find myself a very frustrating state of that we're in 2014 and that we sort of can't answer these questions about India and ASEAN right now. And I just wonder if you could tell me where you think we'll be in 10 years and what we need to do to get to a good place in 10 years. Thank you. I'll throw that first to Andrew. Thanks, Ernie. I'm not an India scholar, but my hunch is that after this period of kind of, if you like, a slowdown in India's outreach, I think it will resume a greater place. My hunch, equally though, is it will always do it more slowly than we would like and in ways that will, from time to time, irritate us or frustrate us. But I think the trend is going to continue. And with regard to ASEAN, I think, despite having been perhaps a skeptic at different times, again, I'm mildly optimistic. I think there are lots of forces that are actually tightening the cohesion. Some of them are economic, and I think there has been real sort of genuine progress with economic integration at ASEAN, but then there's also the external motivation of the sort of world we've been talking about here this morning. So I'm cautiously optimistic. Anybody else want to tackle a question? And I know you asked about India and ASEAN, but I think, you know, and it's easy to focus in on those two areas. But the thing that I believe there is watching is the evolution of Pakistan and South Asia and what dynamic that creates. Pakistan is going to change dramatically. It'll have economic problems. It'll have resource problems. The nuclear issues associated in South Asia are significant. We're not talking about those. We're seeing shifts in the nuclear world, if you will, both on the civil and military side. And so the question I have is what will Pakistan spawn if the disorder continues to move? And then that will reverberate. So I think we really need to kind of step back and look at South Asia post-2014, the dynamic, and what will fall out from that. Could I just say that in response to Andrew's cautious optimism, I would be cautiously pessimistic on both fronts. I think the magnetic pool for India is always going to be west rather than east. And Gary's point is very well made. A combination of external events on Pakistan's western border and the internal government's problems, which India has, I think, will make it a very slow player to the east. And ASEAN, for reasons I said before, I have a more pessimistic view of ASEAN's ability to get its act together because of all these unfinished issues, which I was talking about before. I was responsible for India on the NSC staff when I was there. And we, during the Bush administration, basically saw India's role, not in terms of India's ability to directly shape events in East Asia, but rather with the premise that a multipolarity within the broad Asia-Indo-Pacific region was in our interests more so than a bipolar, an emerging bipolarity between the US and China, because most of these other big polls are generally in favor of the rules of the road. We had a senior-level strategic dialogue with the Chinese counterparts who completely recognized this and told us that they assessed India's future as one that would be very frustrating for us. Check. But that US-India alignment, though slow and incremental frustrating over the long term, was an assumption Chinese planners had. Not alliance, but not a divergence for certain. And I think that's important. The other thing is Malaysia. In Southeast Asia, Thailand is wearing, but I think the future of Burma as Myanmar. I don't know what you guys are calling it today. OK, thought so. I think that's very, very important. 50 million plus really could start to shape the heart and soul of ASEAN, notwithstanding the external variables that Gary Ruffett pointed to, because what's happening in the Middle East will have also a very profound effect on the stability of ASEAN states. Time for two more very quick questions, and I hope they're directed at one person, starting with Russell and then the gentleman in the corner. Thank you. Terrific panel. Thank you all for your contributions. I had two questions, if I may. One of them, in fact, they both build on Ernie's question in a way. The first is directed to the whole panel. And that is, we've spoken about, well, you can make a choice, Chairman. I'm interested in the idea of the strategic environment we're talking about here. Now, we've gone through East Asia, Asia Pacific. Rich Amishon, early in his contribution, talked about Indo-Pacific. That term is being used more often, and I'd be interested in an A person's view, if there are maybe conflicting views on the panel, as to whether or not we should be talking about Indo-Pacific or whether we should be talking about Asia Pacific. What's the particular strategic environment here? And I wanted to press, secondly, Mike, on his proposition in relation to the possibilities of increasing cooperation and cohesion within Southeast Asia, because it strikes me that the one area where there has been some confusion and reluctance in relation to the rebalances in Southeast Asia, and it seems to me that's the prospect that it's really difficult. Well, the Indo-Pacific, Andrew can explain it, because that is the Australian government's formulation. And then, obviously, the second question goes to the person it was directed to. I'll be very brief. I mean, I think we are using the term Indo-Pacific because we see increasingly a region that has growing strategic logic. If you look at the economic ties between the Middle East and running into East Asia through the Indian Ocean and increasingly on the mainland, we think there's a logic to looking at the world that way. We're not saying that that logic applies equally strongly in every respect, but we do think it is making sense. And if you look at Australia's position, I think understanding that we are, I think, increasingly strategically prominent because of those changes, it makes sense for us to talk about the region that way. We learned at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Phnom Penh that when states within ASEAN are weak in terms of governance, legitimacy, they're more vulnerable to influence from Beijing. In that case, Cambodia, sometimes it's Laos. It could be Thailand, depending on what happens there. We're always going to have one or two ASEAN states or three or four that are vulnerable weak, divided that we have problems with over these issues that will be more open to strategic influence from China. Economic relations with China are fine. It's when Beijing uses that or uses coercion to try to divide ASEAN up and exert broader strategic influence against our interests in the South China Sea and elsewhere. So we're always going to have this problem. But I think if the core ASEAN states, most of them, are confident and talking together, we're in much better shape. And so that's why on balance, I think in strategic terms, I'm more optimistic than pessimistic about ASEAN. In terms of individual ASEAN states, we should be very worried about Thailand. Myanmar looked good. Now there are more challenges. But as a strategic proposition, we have more of a chance to do what the US really wanted to do in 1951-52, which was complement the San Francisco Treaty System Australia-Japan with a collective security or at least collective diplomatic relationship among the newly independent Southeast Asian states. We're closer to being able to do that than we've ever been, despite the challenges. Last question, gentlemen in the corner. Thanks so much, Chris Nelson and Nelson and Port. Hi, Mike, over the thing. Something you said prompted my question. I just finished reading Ari Hattos, 1941, a almost blow-by-blow account of every mistake our Japanese friends made, every mistake we made. And the lesson I drew from it, aside from smashing my forehead every second page, was that we never quite said what we really thought. They never quite said what they really think to each other in their own meetings. And the result was we never really got on the table what we were up against and what we might be able to do together. Probably is a lesson there today. And given something of a panel consensus that we're anywhere from a 25% to 50% chance of a dangerous clash out there, are there things we should be saying or ways we should be saying what we're saying about our alliance commitments to Japan and the Philippines especially? Do we need to be more explicit about the territorial claims? Do we need to be more proactive about trying to reach a solution? Or, and this is always the problem is that do we need to do more, say more, if so, what? Thank you. I have to say, Chris, the embassy lives on your newsletter. So we look forward to seeing how you reflect on all of this tonight. I'm not going to do much about that. Right, okay. Michael. Well, everyone should feel free to answer this. I earlier, due to lack of coffee, not the weaknesses in the American public education system said it was the Hoover administration. It was actually the Roosevelt administration, of course, but it's even more damning because FDR had been assistant secretary of the Navy, was a student of Mohan, reportedly on his honeymoon with his new wife Eleanor on a cruise ship would sneak over and sit next to some Japanese officers on the boat to listen to what they said. So it's all the more striking that we were not able to send these signals to Tokyo, that we were not internally cohesive. I don't think the U.S. or Australia or anyone should suddenly say we're siding with Japan or the Philippines on the territorial issues. That would, in a way, contradict our commitment to the rule of law. These things need to be settled through international norms and diplomacy. We have to be clear, though, about our views of coercion. The vulnerabilities that we had before World War II in terms of the lack of internal consensus on this in the U.S. are still there to some extent. The fact that Japanese couldn't speak clearly was because they didn't have a consensus. I think that probably would characterize Beijing today. I wouldn't overdraw the scenario. We're not going to war, but there are definitely some lessons. Well, thank you very much. I won't pass that to the rest of the panel because I think the time has come for you to have coffee and also, before you do, to thank what has been a really excellent panel and a presentation.


I will in there. I will into there, as I want to see it. Good. It's going to say, call a mess out. Ooh, you better see it now. You are going to my mate, mate! I'm not missing yet. Go on rides that! Go on son! Diolch yn fawr!


The ongoing impact of COVID-19 on informal settlements in Africa, particularly in Freetown, Sierra Leone, is being addressed through community organizations and resourcefulness to provide essential support and alleviate public health and economic risks, drawing from previous epidemic experiences. This article was authored by Asatai Emmanuel, Koroma Brema, McCarthy Joseph Mustafa, and others.


Yeah, I warmly invite you to be here and listen to our speakers. So I would like to invite Dan Hamilton to the stage, and we need his slides on the screen. So Dan will be talking about frequency of data and code sharing in medicine, final results of an individual participant data meta-analysis of meta-research studies. Welcome Dan, the floor is yours. OK, hopefully everyone can hear me OK. To apologize in advance, I've lost my voice since coming over to Australia, from Australia. You have to bear with me a little bit. So my name is Daniel Hamilton, and I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, Australia. And it's my great pleasure to be here today to present the findings, the final findings, as well as particularly the challenges of performing a systematic review and IPD meta-analysis of meta-research studies that looked at data and code sharing in the context of medicine. So just before I jump into the review, I thought I'd be a bit cheeky and prime the audience by asking a couple of questions to see what you think. And that is, let's see if this goes. So what percentage of articles, meta-research studies that empirically studied data sharing in medicine do you think shared their own data? And what percentage of these studies do you think were computationally reproducible when you got your hands on their data? So these are things I'll go through after this. So just to briefly recap what the review was about, and I'll do this briefly because we did pre-print the results. So we did a systematic review where we collected all the meta-research studies that looked at data and code sharing in medicine. And we were primarily interested in two outcome measures. The first outcome measure we were interested in was declared data sharing. And we defined this as the proportion of articles, medical articles that declared that their data or code was publicly and immediately available or available on request. And then the second outcome measure, we termed actual availability. And we defined this as the proportion of articles that were verified by the meta-researchers as having indeed shared their data and code or shared upon request. So we published a protocol. And we've also posted the findings on pre-print or meta-archive. So I'm just going to go over this quickly because I think this is less interesting. So the key things we learned were historically success rates in obtaining data and code from medical researchers have been less than 40 and 25% respectively. And this is very context dependent. So the type of data, the type of study. Unfortunately, public data and code sharing in medicine is still uncommon. However, what we did note is that the declarations of data and code data sharing, public data sharing, is increasing over time. So it's increased from roughly, we estimate about 4% in 2014 to 9% in 2020. However, what we learned or what we think is that the number of people who say their data is publicly available doesn't seem to be actually the case. There seems to be a gap between the number of people who say their data is available, but when you go to have a look, you don't necessarily going to find it. So that's the review. And I thought today, given the audience, it might be more interesting to talk about the challenges of performing such a review. It might be more informative. So I thought it might be good to go through five challenges that we experienced in performing such a systematic review of meta-research studies. So the first challenge was conducting the literature search, second was obtaining data for the review, the third was performing our data integrity checks, processing data for the review, and lastly dealing with redundant assessments across meta-research studies. So in terms of the first challenge, we worked closely with an information specialist at Cochran to design the search strategy for this. And what we noticed straight away is that the studies that we knew that would be eligible were often referring to themselves in very different ways. So for example, some were referring to themselves as meta-reviews, others meta-epidemiological studies, cross-sectional studies and so on, which complicated the design of the search. And at the time, this was in July 2021, we noticed that it didn't appear to be any obvious or reliable controlled vocabulary for us to use. So this is, for example, mesh terms in Medline or entry terms in M-Base. And so it wasn't a surprise to us that we found that about half of the articles, we found half as many articles in our gray list of searches as we did in our main database searches. So the things that we took away from this were, we wondered, is there a standard term or phrase that we could use in this space? And good meta-science as a field actually benefit from controlled vocab. And if there's any information specialists in the room that have any thoughts on this or are aware of controlled vocab, I'd really be interested to hear about it. So in terms of obtaining data, so after we did all of our article screening, we found that about 114 studies were eligible for the review. And when we looked into these 114 studies to see how many of them shared their data. So again, these are studies that looked at data or code sharing and or code sharing in medicine. We found that 70 or 61% shared all of their data publicly. So all the data we needed for the review. 18% or 20 shared some data, but not all that we needed. And when we asked for it, we were able to get nine of 20 of what we needed. And then the remaining 24 or 21% didn't share any data at all publicly. 11 of whom shared with us when we asked them for it. I should say four were not applicable, three stated up front that they couldn't share and one we couldn't source contact details for. So what we found overall is that of the 40 requests that we made, 20 were successful. And what we also found is that when we asked for data, the median time to receive the data that we wanted was seven days. However, it did range up to almost 2 thirds of a year, which is not ideal. So in terms of the third challenge, we performed a series of data integrity checks. The one I'll talk about today is just simple computational reproducibility. So we looked at the report, what percentage of they said that the articles had shared data or code. And then we tried to reproduce this number from the data set that we had our hands on. And what we found, so we had a hundred data sets of check and we found that two, there was a mismatch between the report and the data. And that was due to very simple typographical errors. Two had unclear data filtering steps, which meant we couldn't reproduce the findings. We discovered one coding error, which is due to a trailing space issue. And we weren't able to reproduce one finding due to we found out receipt of incorrect version of data. So this worked out to be 94% reproducibility rate, which was great. In terms of the fourth challenge that we experienced with this review, by far and large, the biggest challenge that we had was the only information that we had about the articles that the meta researchers studied was the title. And so this is a snippet of a data set that we included. And obviously, without any other further information, like a DIY or a journal of pagination, it's quite difficult to figure out what this means or what this paper refers to some. So we were kind of a bit stuck in some circumstances. Though it was salvageable in other circumstances we weren't going to today. The other issue we experienced is data was often over processed. And by this, I mean, important outcome measures that we were interested in were often dichotomized into yes, no. So, you know, the number of studies that said that their data was publicly available and the number that were available on request were dichotomized into a yes, which wasn't what we wanted. And to a much lesser extent, some other issues we dealt with was data being divided across several spreadsheets. In one instance, up to 20 data being corrupted or stored in proprietary formats. And some instances of data being color coded, which was a lot of fun to figure out how to deal with that. So overall, some lessons that we learned were if you're studying published research, if that's your research subject interest, ideally you want to, it would be good to include a permanent unique identifier or at least a unique identifier. So a DOI or an ID from some of these databases that you use to search for these articles like PubMed IDs or Scopus IDs. And to consider your processing level when you're storing your data, consolidate your data and store it in a non-property format. And so the last challenge I'll talk about today, which is probably the most interesting to me and the biggest surprise is that we noticed that of the 114 studies that were eligible for the review, many of them sampled the same articles and some of them overlapped by 100%. So some studies looked at the exact same sample of articles. So just as an example, there was a preprint by Summoner et al. It looked at COVID studies and 100% of their studies were subsequently looked at by Stritch. And then both of their studies were looked at by McGinnis and Shepard. And then all of their studies were looked at by Collins. And then the text minus came in and looked at everybody's studies. So then it raised a really important question to us, which was if five meta-research studies are looking at the same article, whose assessment do we use or who do we trust? And something we had to think about. It also raised some interesting thoughts about this is yet another important reason why meta-research is, I should ideally share their data. It's also important factor I think to consider when performing reviews of meta-research studies as well. So just to round it all up and just conclude, just some concluding thoughts on this front. So obviously performing a systematic review on IPD minerals in this space, it was disappointing to see that many of these studies did not share their data. I didn't speak about in this talk because I didn't have time, but many of the studies that did share the data publicly were also not fair compliant or at least compliant with basic fair principles. So it'd be good to see us lead in this space. I'll set a good example for other fields. However, in contrast, it was really encouraging to see that a minority of studies were irreproducible. And I can say that the interactions that I had with the meta-researchers on this front was fantastic, barring a few edge cases. People were really good to work with, really humble. It was really great. And then the last two things that I'm thinking about is just more generally when planning and reporting and archiving your research products to consider about some secondary users using those products as well. And then for anyone in the room who is actually considering doing something similar, which a review of meta-researchers studies to think about potential overlap. So I was reading a paper the other day about looking at trial and non-publication. And so they were including all these studies that looked at some non-publication rates in clinicaltrials.gov. But they didn't actually look at potential overlap between all of those studies. And they were looking at similar studies at similar time frames in the clinical trials.gov. So it's probably something, it could be something important to think about moving forward. So I'll leave it there. I think I've come out of time, which is great. Here's my contact details. I've posted a link to the pre-print and the protocol if you're interested. And thank you very much for your attention. We have four minutes left for Q&A. So please use the microphones that are on both sides of the hall and ask your questions. Hi, Mitchell Tillman from Stevens Institute of Technology. What do you think, a great talk, by the way. What do you think are the biggest obstacles to data and code sharing? The very low rates were quite surprising. What do you think is the reason for that? Is that specifically in a meta-research context or a medical context? So I'm in the life sciences, so I guess in the life sciences context. Okay. Well, in terms of the meta-research context, I honestly believe people maybe just didn't think about it. And I'm guilty of this too. So a lot of the people, when you contacted them to ask them, oh, sorry, I didn't even think about it. It was a lot of time. It was the kind of response that we get. In terms of at the next level down, in terms of at a medical level, obviously there's heaps. It has been super well studied about sort of barriers to sharing. And in the context of medicine, part of that is navigating confidentiality when you're working with human participants. You know, lack of incentives to share and considerable fears around people, basically lots of academic productivity, like it's gonna affect your publications and your grants and things like that are some of the common ones that get thrown out there. But that tends to be the reason. In terms of the meta-research, honestly I think it was people just didn't think about it or maybe they didn't think it was useful to others. So yeah, it was a bit of a strange irony, but I don't think it was intentionally withheld. I think the issue with not being able to source data from the people who didn't share a lot of the time it was because I didn't get a response or most of the time it was just I didn't get a response. It wasn't some people intentionally trying to withhold, I think, for the most part. Thank you. Hi, and I'm John King from National Student Aging, NIH. I have a really long title I'll admit. Really interesting stuff. One thing I wanted to point out that I'm hope, well, NIH I guess, is hoping that a recent introduction of new data management and sharing plans in the grants themselves will at least place some of the, what you point out is I think you can nailed it. People didn't even realize, of course, despite the fact that they're in the field, that somebody else would look at that data set. And what we found preliminarily, looking back at whether people, whether people's data management plans would have been appropriate given our new rules is almost none of them were. And some of them included some very simple oversights, like you're generating some vast amount of data.  And this is at the outset. They know they're gonna collect the vast amount of data and they didn't even put that down. So this is sort of the kind of, I mean, it's sort of surprising that if you don't, unless you're forced to check the box, in some cases you don't even remember that there's a box there. But anyway, people have interest in NIH data management sharing any of that kind of stuff and I've got nothing else better to do where I am. But thanks so much. It was interesting I was reading the NIH policy and obviously a lot of funders now require data management plans, but less funders will check compliance with it. I do notice I'm pretty sure in the NIH update that they say they are going to and there is a risk that if you don't comply with the data management plan that you may have your funding pulled or it may affect future grants. And it's the same with Horizon Europe says they did that too. We'll need to have a data management sharing plan that we approve at the outset and then it's going to be a checklist item on each annual renewal. So yeah, it's gonna be a bloodbath the first two years so then we hope that it will resolve into something better. Thank you very much for excellent questions. I encourage you to continue during a lunch break and we need to move on with our next speaker. Which is Kevin Astelis.